MARCH # All Stories New and Complete Publisher Editor IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., Kingston, New York. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Application for Entry' as Second Class matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York, pending. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions: Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Aiiow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction. Any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. #c a fcopy. Printed ia U.S. A. A chat with the editor  i #  science fiction magazine called IF. The title was selected after much thought because of its brevity and on the theory it is indicative of the field and will be easy to remember. The tentative title that just morning and couldn't remember it until we'd had a cup of coffee, it was summarily discarded. A great deal of thought and effort lias gone into the formation of this magazine. We have had the aid of several very talented and generous people, for which we are most grateful. Much is due them for their warmhearted assistance. And now that the bulk of the formative work is done, we will try to maintain IF as one of the finest books on the market.  t a great public demand for our magazine. In short, why will you buy IF? We cannot, in honesty, say we will publish at all times the best science fiction in the field. That would not be true. But we will have access to the best stories, and we will get our fair share of works from the best writers. We definitely will not talk "adult" or "juvenile" relative to our content as we feel such terms are misleading. We would rather think at all times in the terms of "story". Some of the greatest escapist literature ever written, Treasure Island for instance, could be put into either category or both. And if Edgar Rice Burroughs is juvenile, then so are we, because the late master has given us some memorable thrills. Frankly, we don't think you'll buy IF because you feel we print better yams than any other mag. You will buy it, we hope, because you like its personality. Every magazine, we feel, does have a definite personality of its own. This personality is usually a reflection of the editors, their way of thinking, their appreciation of tKe market, their interpretation of what you will like best in stories and artwork. We have tried to make IF different from any other science fiction magazine on the stands while still building it along the lines of what every science fiction mag must be. Aside from the letter columns and the editorial, which are departments of field-wide use, we have not copied any feature of any other magazine. We will not, for instance, review fanzines, because we feel that is being most ably done by other mags. Nor will we, as a general practice, review books because that appears to us to be overdone. a personality of our own and hope thereby to establish an affinity with a large number of readers who will remember IF when they buy a science fiction mag as one they like and wish to continue reading. At all times we will hew to the story-line and will exhort with our writers to do the same. As an example, when Howard Browne phoned to talk over the plot for his lead novel in this issue, he described what ivas without doubt a staggering premise, a really startling concept. "But," he mourned, S T suppose I'll have to bend it around to give them the good old conventional ending." We told Howard, "Not for IF, chum. Remember the old creed we live by. A writer may cheat on his wife, but he is ever true to the story-line. He may haul his infant son around by one leg. but he carries a good story-idea like a holy relic. If there is only one logical ending for Twelve Times ZerG, that's the ending we want." Therefore, we do not feel the majority of readers necessarily want a happy ending regardless of all else. Not when it is incompatable with the aura of realism created by the writer. A check-list of fiction masterpieces certainly bears this out. The furor created by a little piece called Sorry , Wrong Number would certainly not have been forthcoming had the bedridden lady been rescued in the last paragraph. Romeo and Juliet would have beep nothing more than the smooth effort of the world's greatest writer if Romeo had gotten there in time. Yet, in modern fiction, he gets there in time with such amazing regularity one feels he has memorized at least  a dozen time-tables. The result has been unnumbered carloads of mediocre fiction. Also -- though we don't wish to underscore the point too heavily -- what could more surely have smothered the greatness of Wuthering Heights than a happy ending?  that IF will be a magazine given over to tragedy. W e will only insist that our writers create scenes and climaxes that fix the story rather than cater to that old "debil" formula. And in so doing we have an entirely selfish motive. This: As the years go by, we want to look back with personal pride upon an everlengthening list of great stories. So the book you now hold in your hands is a new one titled IF. We hope you will like it -- not for just a day -- not for just a month. But for years to come. pwf  Police grilled him mercilessly # while eyes from a hundred worlds looked on  It was a love-triangle murder that made today's headlines but the answer lay hundreds of thousands of light years away! one of the basement rooms. He moved slowly and with a kind of painful dignity, as a man moves on his way to the firing squad. A rumpled shock of black hair pointed up the extreme pallor of a gaunt face, empty at the moment of all expression. Harsh light from an overhead fixture winked back from tiny beads of perspiration dotting the waxen skin of his forehead. The three men with him watched him out of faces as expressionless as his own. They were ordinary men who wore ordinary clothing in an ordinary way. yet in the way they moved and in the w r ay they stood you knew they were I hard men who were in a hard and largely unpleasant business. One of them motioned casually toward a straight-backed chair almost exactly in the center of the room. "Sit there, Cordell  I he said.  A quiet voice, not especially deep, yet its seemed to bounce off the painted concrete walls. Wordless, the young man obeyed. Sitting, he seemed as stiff and uncompromising as before. The man who had spoken made a vague gesture and the overhead light  went out, replaced simultaneously by strong rays from a spotlight aimed full at the eyes of the seated figure. Involuntarily the young man's head turned aside to avoid came out of the wall of darkness and jerked it back again. # 'Just to remind you , # the quiet voice continued conversationally, "I'm Detective Lieutenant Kirk, Homicide Bureau . # A pair of hands thrust 'a second chair toward the circle of light. Kirk swung it around and dropped onto the seat, resting his arms along the back, facing the man across a distance of hardly more than inches. In the pitiless glare of the spotlight CordelPs cheekbones  stood out sharply, and under his deepset eyes were dark smudges of exhaustion. His rigid posture, his blank expression, his silence -- these were laid out, our first idea was to stage the scoop of the century: Get the lead novel from Howbe given an infant publication than Browne's name on the cover. We asked Howard and he asked bis boss, Mr. Davis, and Mr. Davis said, "Sure." oldest science-fiction publication in the world. It has the largest circulation in its field and up to January # th (the day IF went on the science fiction magazine your money could buy. It has the best writers in the field. Its departments are exfanzine reviews and Sam Merwin reviewing the books. So if you have a spare quarter, get a copy of And now, about Howard Browne. He is a huge man, made up almost entirely of vast enthusiasms. We have known Howard intimately for about six years and we continue to regard him with awe. There is no middle ground with this man. When he likes something, it's terrific If Howard hung a picture in his office we doubt if it would be a casual chore. The hammer he used would be a terrific hammer. The tack he drove would outshade other tacks by five country miles. And the picture? Gad, what a masterpiece! Seriously, one has only fo view Browne's enthusiasm for living to know it for what it is -- a priceless gift. He has written unnumbered short stories and, under the name of John Evans, is the father of near future. We have watched him write several of his stories and he hurled himself into each with a zeal and a zest that sfunned us into a partial paralysis. So we give you Howard Browne, a hard fellow to classify ; an astounding mixture of Balzac, a ten-ton dynamo, and Peter Pan. But this above all -- a great guy.  seemed not so much indications of defiance as they did the result of some terrible and deepseated shock, "Let's go over it again, Cordell," Kirk said. The young man swallowed audibly against the silence. One of his hands twitched, came up almost to his face as though to shield hiseyes, then dropped limply back. "That light -- " he mumbled. " -- stays on , # Kirk said briskly. # The quicker you tell us the answers, the quicker we all relax. Okay?" Cordell shook his head numbly, not so much in negation as an effort to clear the fog from his tortured mind. T told you," he cried hoarsely. "What rpofe do you want? Yesterday I told you the whole thing." His voice began to border on hysteria. "What good's my trying to tell you if you won't listen? How's a guy supposed -- " "Then try telling it straight!" Kirk snapped. "You think you're fooling around with half-wits? Sure ; you told us. A crazy pack of goof-ball dreams about a blonde babe clubbing two grown people to death, then disappearing in a ball of blue light! You figure on copping a plea on insanity?" "It's the truth!" Cordell shouted. "As God hears me, it's true!" Suddenly he buried his face in his hands and long tearing sobs shook his slender frame. O ne of the other men reached out as though to drag the young man's face back into the withering rays of the spotlight, but Kirk motioned him away. Without haste the Lieutenant fished a cigar from the breast pocket of his coat and began almost leisurely to strip away its cellophane wrapper. A kitchen match burst into flame under the flick of a thumb nail and a cloud of blue tobacco smoke writhed into the cone of hot light. "Cordell," Kirk said mildly. Slowly the young man's shoulders stopped their shaking, and after a long moment his wan, tearstained face came back into the light. "I -- I'm sorry," he mumbled. Kirk waved away the layer of smoke hanging between them. He said wearily, "Let's try it once more. Step by step. Maybe this time... He let the sentence trail off, but the inference was clear. An expression of hopeless resignation settled over Cordell's features. "Where do you want me to start?" "Take it from five o'clock the afternoon it happened." The tortured man wet his lips. "Five o'clock was when my shift went off at the plant. The plant, in case you've forgotten, is the Ames Chemical Company, and I'm a foreman in the Dry Packaging department." "Save your sarcasm," Kirk said equably. "Yeah. I changed clothes and punched out around five-fifteen. Juanita had called me about four and said to pick her up at Professor Gilmore's laboratory," # At what time?" "No special time. Just when I could get out there. We were going to have dinner and take in a movie. iN'o particular picture; she said we'd pick one out of the paper at dinner " "Go on . # "Well, it must've been about quarter to six when I got out to the University. I parked in front of the laboratory wing and went in at the main entrance. I walked down the corridor to the Professors office. His typist was knocking out some letters and there were a couple of students hanging around waiting for him to show up. How about a smoke, Lieutenant?" Kirk nodded to one of the men behind him and a package of cigarettes was extended to the man under the light. A match was proffered and the young man ignited the white tube, his hands shaking badly. The Lieutenant crossed his legs the other way. "Let's hear the rest of it, friend." "What for?" Bitterness tinged Cordell's voice. "YoU don't believe a word I'm saying." "Up to now I do " "Well. I said something or other to Alma -- she's the Profs secretary -- and went on through the door to the hall that leads to the private lab. When I got -- #  K irk held up a hand. "Wait a minute. Your busting right in on the Professor like that doesn't sound right. Why not wait in the office for your wife?" "What for?" Cordell squinted at him in surprise. "He and I get... , got along fine. When Juanita first went to work for him he said to drop in at the lab any time, not to wait in the outer office like a freshman or something." "Go ahead." "Well... The young man hesitated. "We're back to the part you don't believe, Officer. I can't hardly believe it myself ; but so help me, it's gospel. I saw it!" "I'm waiting." Cordell said doggedly: "The lab door was open a crack. I heard a woman's voice in there, and . it wasn't my wife's. It was a voice like -- like cracked ice. You know: cold and kind of... well... brittle and -- and deadly. That's the only way I can describe it. "Anyway, I sort of hesitated there, outside the door. I didn't want to go bulling in on something that wasn't none of my business... but on the other hand I figured my wife was in there, else Alma would've said so." "You hear anything besides this collection of ice cubes?" ' The young man's jaw hardened. "I'm giving it the way it happened. You want the rest, or you want to trade wise cracks?" One of the men behind Kirk lunged forward. "Why, you cheap punk -- " Kirk stopped him with an arm. "I'll handle this, Miller." To Cordell: "I asked you a question. Answer it." "I heard Professor Gilmore. Only a couple words, then two quick flashes of light lit up the frosted glass door panel. That's when I heard these two thumps like when somebody falls down. I shoved open the door fast... and right then I saw her!" Kirk nodded for no apparent reason and was careful about knocking a quarter inch of ash off his cigar. "Tell me about her." The young man's hands were shaking again. He sucked at his cigarette and let the smoke come out with his words : "She was clear over on the other side of the lab... standing a good two feet off the floor in the middle of a big blue ball of some kind of -- of soft fire. Blue fire that sort of pulsed -- you know. Anyway, there she was: this hell of a good-looking blonde ; looking right smack at me, and there was this funny kind of gun in her hand. She aimed it and I ducked just as this dim flash of light came out of it. Something hit me on the side of the head and I... well, I guess I blanked out." "Then what?" "Well, like I said yesterday, I suppose I just naturally came out of it. I'm all spread out on the floor with the damndest headache you ever saw. Over by the window' is the Prof and -- " he wet his lips -- "and Juanita. They're dead. Lieutenant; just kind of all piled up over there... dead, their heads busted in and the -- the -- the -- " H e sat there, his mouth working but no sound coming out, his eyes staring straight into the blazing light, the cigarette smouldering, forgotten, between the first two fingers of his left hand. Almost gently Kirk said: "Let's go back to where you were standing outside the door. You heard this woman talking. What did she say?" Cordell looked sightlessly dowm at his hands. "Nothing that made sense. Sounded, near as I can remember, like: 'Twelve times zero' -- then some words, or more numbers maybe -- I'm not sure -- then # she said, 'Chained to a two hundred thousand years' -- and the Professor said something about his colleges having no idea and he'd warn them -- and the blonde said, 'Three in the past five months' -- and then something about taking in washing -- " ' The detective named Miller gave a derisive grunt. "Of all the goddam stories! Kirk, you gonna listen to any -- " Kirk silenced him with a gesture. "Go on, Cordell" The young man slowly lifted the cigarette to his mouth, dragged heavily on it, then let it fall to the floor. "That's all. That's when the lights started flashing in there and I tried to be a hero." "Sure you've left nothing out?" "You've got it all. The truth, like you wanted." Kirk said patiently, "Give it up, Cordell. You're as sane as the next guy. Give that story to a jury and they'll figure you're trying to make saps out of them -- and when a jury gets sore at a defendant, he gets the limit. And in case you didn't know: in this State, the limit for murder is the hot seat!" The prisoner stared at him woodenly. "You know I didrPt kill my wife -- or Professor Gilmore. I had no reason to -- no motive. There's got to be a motive. The police officer rubbed his chin reflectively. "Uh-hunh. Motive. How long you married, Cordell?" "Six years." "Children?" "No." "Ames Chemical pay you a good salary ?" "Enough." "Enough for two to live on?" "Sure" "How long did your wife work for Professor Gilmore?" "Four years next month." "What was her job?" "His assistant." "Pretty big job for a woman, wasn't it?" "Juanita held two degrees in nuclear physics." "You mean this atom bomb stuff?" "That was part of it." "Gilmore's a big name in that field, I understand." Kirk said. "Maybe the biggest." "Kind of young' to rate that high, wouldn't you say? He couldn't have been much past forty." Cordell shrugged. "He was thirty-eight -- and a genius. Genius has nothing to do with age, I hear." "Not married, I understand." "That's right..." A slow frown was forming on Cordell's face. "How old was your wife?" Kirk asked. The frown deepened but the young man answered promptly enough. "Juanita was my age. Twenty-nine." Martin Kirk eyed his cigar casually. "Why," he said, "did you want her to walk out on her job; to give up her career?" Cordell stiffened. "Who says I did?" he snapped. "Are you denying it?" "You're damn well right I'm denying it! What is this?" K irk was slowly shaking his head almost pityingly. "On at least two occasions friends of you and your wife have heard you say you wished she'd stay home where she belonged and cut out this 'playing around with a mess of test tubes? Those are your own words, Cordell." "Every guy," the young man retorted, "who's got a working wife says something like that now and then. It's only natural." Kirk's jaw hardened. "But every guy's wife doesn't get murdered." The other looked at him unbelievingly. "Good God," he burst out, "are you saying I killed Juanita because I wanted her to stop working? Of all the -- " "There's, more!" snapped the Homicide man. "When you passed Professor Gilmore's secretary in his outer office yesterday, what did you say to her?" " 'Say to her?' " 'the, prisoner echoed in a dazed way. "I don't know that #... Some kidding remark, I guess. How do you expect me to remember a thing like that?" "I'll tell you what you said," Kirk said coldly. "It goes like this: 'Hi, Alma. You think the Prof's through making love to my wife?' " Cordell's head snapped back and h!s jaw dropped in utter amazement. "What! Of all -- ! You nuts ? I never said anything like that in my life! Who says I said that?" Without haste Kirk slid a hand into the inner pocket of his coat and brought out two folded sheets of paper which he opened and spread out on his knee. "Listen to this, friend," he said softly. " 'My name is Miss Alma Dakin. I reside at # Monroe Street, and arn employed as secretary to Professor Gregory Gilmore. At approximately # : # on the afternoon of October #, Paul Cordell, husband of Mrs. Juanita Cordell, laboratory assistant to Professor Gilmore, passed my desk on his'way into the laboratory. I made no effort to stop him, since my employer had previously instructed me to allow Mr. Cordell to go directly to the laboratory at any time without being announced.' " Kirk looked up at the man in the chair opposite him. "Okay so far?" t Paul Cordell nodded numbly. " 'At the time stated above,' " Kirk continued, reading from the paper, " 'Mr. Cordell stopped briefly in front of my desk. He seemed very angry about something. He said, "Hi, Alma. You think the Prof's through making love to my wife?" Before I could say anything, he turned away and walked into the corridor leading to the laboratory. I continued my work until about five minutes later when Mr. Cordell came running back into the office and told me to call the police, that Professor Gilmore and Mrs. Cordell had been murdered. " 'Since there is an automatic closer on the corridor door, I did not see Mr. Cordell enter the laboratory' itself. I do "know, however, that Professor Gilmore and Mrs. Cordell w r ere alone in the laboratory less than ten minutes before Mr. Cordell arrived, as I had just left them alone there after taking some dictation from my employer. Since I went directly to my desk, and since there is no entrance to the laboratory other than through my office, I can state with certainty that Mr. Cordell was the only person to enter the laboratory between #:# that afternoon and # : # when Mr. Cordell came out of the laboratory and told me of the murders. " 'I hereby depose that this is a true and honest statement, to the best of my knowledge, that it was given freely on my part, and that I have read it before affixing my signature to its pages. Signed: Alma K. Dakin.' " T here was an almost ominous crackle to the document as Lieutenant Kirk folded it and returned it to his pocket. Paul Cordell appeared utterly stunned by what he had heard and his once stiffly squared shoulders were slumped like those of an old man. "I don't have to tell you," Kirk said, "that the only window in that laboratory is both permanently sealed and heavily barred. No one but you could have murdered those two people. You say you saw them killed by some kind of a gun. Yet a qualified physician states both deaths were caused by a terrific blow from a blunt instrument We found a lot of tilings around the lab you could have used to do the job -- -but nothing at all of anything like a projectile fired from a gum" The prisoner obviously wasn't listening, "B -- but she -- she lied!" he stammered wildly. "All I said to Alma Dakin was a couple of words -- three or four at the most -- about not working too hard. Why should she put me on a spot like that? I just -- don't -- get -- it! Why should she go out of her way to make trouble... Dawning suspicion replaced his bewilderment. "I get it! You cops put her up to this; that's it! You need a fall guy and I'm "Listen to me, Cordell," Kirk cut in impatiently. "You knew, or thought you knew, your wife was having an affair with Professor Gilmore. You tried to break it up, to get her to leave her job. She wasn't having any of that; and the more she refused, the sorer you got. Yesterday you walked in on them unannounced, found them in each other's arms, and knocked them  both off in a jealous rage. When you cooled down enough to see what you'd done, you invented this wild yarn about a blonde in a ball of fire, hoping to get off on an insanity plea." "I want a lawyer!" Cordell shouted. Kirk ignored the demand. "You're going back to your cell for a couple hours, buster. Think this over. When you're ready to tell it right, I want it in the form of a witnessed statement, on paper. If you do that, if you co-operate with the authorities, you can probably get off with a fairly light sentence, maybe even an outright acquittal, on the old 'unwritten law' plea. I don't make any promises. Gilmore was a prominent man and a valuable one; that might influence a jury against you. But it's the only chance you've got -- and I'm telling you, by God, to take, it!" Cordell was standing now, his face working. "Sure; I get it! All you're after is a confession. What do you care if it's a flock of lies? My wife wouldn't even look at another man, and not you or anybody else is going to make me say different. That blonde killed them, I tell you -- and I'll tell a jury the same thing! They'll believe me; they're not a bunch of lousy framing cops! You'll find out who's -- " Lieutenant Martin Kirk wearily ground out his cigar against the chair rung. "All right, boys. Take him back upstairs." Chapter II I T was a gray chill day late in November, and. by #:# that afternoon the ceiling lights were on. Chenowich, the young plainclothes man recently transferred to Homicide from Robbery Detail, stopped at Martin Kirk's cubbyhole and slid an evening paper across the battered brown linoleum top of the Lieutenant's desk. "This oughta interest you # he said, jabbing a chewed thumbnail at an item under a two-column m  the left # s er of Wife and Atom Wizard .  , was today Criminal Court Justice P. Reed to death by electrode morning of January #, the murders of his wife, Juan#, and her employer, worldfamous nuclear scientist Gregory more. A jury last week found Cordell uilty of the brutal slayings despite his testimony that it was a mysterious blonde woman, floating in a "ball of blue fire," who had blasted the victims with a "ray gun" on that October afternoon. Ignoring the "girl from Mars" angle, alienists for the prosecution pronounced the handsome defendant sane, and his attorneys were powerless to offset the damage. The final blow to Cordell's hopes for acquittal, however, was administered by the State's key witness, Alma Dakin, Gilmore's former secretary. For more than three hours she underwent one of the most cal courtroom ,  .  Kirk shoved the' paper aside. "What could he expect when he wouldn't even listen to his own lawyers? They'll appeal -- they have ut it'll he a wastp of time." # leaned back in the creaking d chair and began to unwrap am a cigar. "In a le said thoughtfully, "I up inthe fireless you get so gnize an act when you swear Cordell blonde and he thought he was nuts then What do them I never seen one his own fingers." The telephone on desk rang while he was ligh cigar. Pie tossed the match floor to join a. dozen picked up the receiver. " Lieutenant Kirk speakin It was the patrolman outer office. "Woman out here wants to see you,. Lieutenant. Asked for you personally. "What about?" "She won't say. All I get is it's important and she talks to you or nobody." "What's her name?" "No, sir. Not even that... Want me to get rid of her?" Kirk eyed the mound of paper work on his desk and sighed. "Probably a taxpayer. All right; send her back here." A moment later the patrolman loomed up outside the cubbyhole door, the woman in tow. Lieutenant Kirk remained seated, nodded briskly toward the empty chair alongside his desk. "Please sit down, madam. You wanted to see me?" "You are Mr. Kirk?" A warm voice, almost on the husky side, "Lieutenant Kirk." "Of course. I am sorry." . ful about Kirk stared was worth for a voluptuous by exactly the right margin. Her face was more lovely than beautiful, chiefly because of large eyes so blue they were almost purple. Her skin was flawless, her blonde hair worn in a medium bob fluffed out, and hersmooth fitting tobacco brown suit must have been bought by appointment. She looked to he in her mid-twenties and was probably thirty. Her expression was solemn and her smile fleeting,, as was becoming to anyone calling on a Homicide Bureau. She placed on a corner of Kirk's desk an alligator bag that matched her shoes and tucked ple yellow gloves the color of her blouse under the bag's strap. Her slim fingers, ringless, moved competently and without haste. a I am Naia North, Lieutenant Kirk." "What's on your mind, Miss North?" She regarded him gravely, seeing gray-blue eyes that never quite lost their chill, a thin nose bent slightly to the left from an encounter with a drunken longshoreman years before, the lean lines of a solid jaw, the dark hair that was beginning to thin out above the temples after thirty-five years. Even those who love him, she thought, must fear this man a little. Martin Kirk felt his cheeks flush under the frank appraisal of those purple eyes. "You asked for me by name, Miss North. Why?" "Aren't you the officer who arrested the young man who today was sentenced to die?" Only years of practise at letting nothing openly surprise him kept Kirk's jaw from dropping...You mean Cordell?" "Yes." "I'm the one. What about it? What've you got to do with Paul Cordell?"... Naia North said quietly, "A great deal, I'm afraid. You see, I'm the woman who doesn't exist; the one the newspapers call 'the girl from Mars.'" It was what he had expected fronuher first question about the case. Any murder hitting the headlines brought at least one psycho out of the woodwork, driven by some deep-seated sense of guilt into making a phony confession. Those who were harmless were eased aside; the violent got detained for observation. But Naia North showed none of the signs of the twisted mind. She was coherent, attractive and obviously there was money somewhere in her vicinity. While the last two items could have been true of a raving maniac, Kirk was human enough to be swayed by them. "I'm afraid," he said, "you've come to the wrong man about this, Miss North." His smile was frank and winning enough to startle her. "The case is out of my hands; has been since the District Attorney's office took over. Why don't you take it up with them?" H er short laugh was openly cynical. "I tried to, the day the trial ended. I got as far as a fourth assistant, who told me the case was closed, that new and conclusive evidence would be necesI exolf date, ive him new "We met sever a! fell in love, I #... and after tired of play in wanted him his secretary promavoided me." wanted me to write a letter. So Y. T waiting for an answer." s take time. Miss I were vou Pd -- " r even tried to see Judge Reed, far as his bailiff. If Pd state my business in writing... I did; that's the last Pve heard from Judge Reed or bailiff. #  Kirk picked up his cigar from the edge of the desk and tapped the ash onto the floor. "Shall I," he said, his lips quirking, "ask you to write me a letter?" Naia North failed to respond to the light touch. "Pm through filling wastebaskets," she said flatly. "Either you do something about this or the newspapers get the entire story. Not that I'll enjoy being a public spectacle, but at least they'll give me some action." "What do you want done?" She put both elbows on the desk and bent toward him. He caught the faint odor of bath salts from under the rounded s of her blouse. "That man ieutenant. He didn't or Gregory Gilmore." I   "So you decide She seemed genuine! at the remark. "C when I saw him take this assistant  of his, or she was -- into his arms . pose I 'went a little crazy," "Now," Kirk said, "we're down to cases. You know the evidence given at the trial -- particularly that given by Gilmore's secretary ?"  "Of course." "Then .you know this Dakin woman was in the laboratory until a few minutes before Cordell showed up. You know that nobody could have gone into that laboratory without her seeing them. You know that Alma Dakin testified that there were only two people in there: Gilmore and Juanita Cordell. So, Miss North, how did you get in there after Alma Dakin and before Paul Cordell arrived?" "But I didn't." The Lieutenant's air sagged under 'D# a # What do you mean "I didn't enter "# after Greg's secretary I t into his eyes. there all along . a traightened and her gaze haven't tunelessly. "You  "I was girl repeated exact. I p# everybody would be out to lunch between twelve and one, so I went to the laboratory with the intention of facing Greg there on his return. When I heard him and Mrs. Cordell coming along the corridor, I sort of lost my nerve and hid in a coat closet." Martin Kirk had completely dropped bis air of good-humored patience by this time. "You telling me you were hiding in there for almost five hours without them knowing it?" Naia North shrugged her shoulders. "They had no reason to look in the closet. I'll admit I hadn't intended to -- to spy on Greg. But I kept waiting for him to say or do something that would prove or disprove he was in love with Juanita Cordell, and not until his secretary left and he was alone with her did I discover what was between them. I must have come out of that dark hole like a tiger. Lieutenant. They jumped apart and v two people never looked guiltier. He said something particularly nasty to me and I grabbed up a short length of shiny metal from the workbench and hit him across the side of the head before lie knew what was happening. He fell down and the Cordell woman opened her mouth to scream and -- and I hit her too." She paused as though to permit Kirk to comment. "Go on." he said hoarsely. "There's not much left " the girl said. "I was standing there still holding that piece of metal when the door crashed open and the dead woman's husband ran in. He started to lunge across the. room at me and I threw the thing I was holding at hiim It struck him and he fell down. My only thought was to hide, for I realized I couldn't go out through the outer office, and the only window was barred. So I hid in that closet again. "It was onlya few minutes before Paul Cordell regained consciousness. He staggered out of the room and down the hall and I could hear a lot of excited talk and Greg's secretary calling the police. Then I didn't hear anything at all for a moment, so I came out of the closet and looked down the hall. The office door was closed, but it seemed so quiet in there that I tiptoed quickly to the inner door, opened it a crack and peered through. The office was deserted; evidently Cordell and Miss Dakin had gone out to direct the police when they showed up. "When I saw there was no one in the main hall of the building itself, I simply walked out and left by another exit. No one I passed even noticed me." F or a long time after Naia North had finished speaking, Martin Kirk sat as though carved from stone, staring blindly into space. She knew he was thinking furiously, weighing the plausibility of what he had heard, trying to arrive at some method of corroborating it in a way that would stand up in a court of law. "Miss North." She came out of a reverie with a start, to find the Lieutenant's eyes  boring Into hers. "This shiny hunk of metal you used : where is it now?", "Fra sure I wouldn't know. Probably some place in the laboratory, unless somebody took it away. I do seem to remember picking it up and tossing it back with several others like it on the bench." "Then it's still there," he said slowly. "Judge Reed ordered the room sealed up until after the trial. And then there's the closet... , . Were you wearing gloves that afternoon, Miss North?" She said, "No. You're thinking of fingerprints?" "If you're telling the truth," he said, "there's almost certain to be some of your prints on the inside of that closet door -- maybe even on that length of metal, if we can find it." She said almost carelessly: "That's all you'd need to clear Paul Cordell, isn't it?" "It would certainly help." He swung around in the chair, scooped up the telephone and gave a series of rapid-fire orders, then dropped the instrument on its cradle and turned back to where she sat watching him curiously. He said, "A few things I still don't get. Like this business of your standing two feet off the floor in a ball of blue light. And the flashes of light just before Cordell heard his wife and Gilmore fall to the floor. Even the snatches of conversation he caught while still in the hall. He couldn't have dreamed all that stuff up -- at least not without some basis." She had opened her bag and taken out a cigarette. Kirk ignited one of his kitchen matches and she i bent her head for a light. He could see the flawless curve of one cheek and the smooth cap of blonde hair, and he resisted the urge to pass a hand lightly across both. Something was stirring inside the Lieutenant -- something that had long been absent. And, he reflected wryly, all because of a girl who had just finished confessing to two particularly unpleasant murders. Naia North raised her head and their eyes met -- met and held. Her lips parted slightly' as she caught the unmistakable message in those gray-blue depths... The moment passed, the spell was broken and she leaned back in  the chair and laughed a little shakily. "I read about those statements of his in the papers, Lieutenant. I think perhaps I can at least partially explain them. As I remember it, there were several Bunsen burners lighted on the laboratory bench near that window'. They give off a blue flame, you know, and I must have been standing near them when Paul Cordell came charging in. In his confused frame of mind, he may have pictured me as being in a ball of flame." "Sounds possible," the man admitted, frowning. "What about those flashes of light?" "You've got me there. Unless they were reflections of sunlight through the window -- from the windshield of a passing car, perhaps." "And the things he heard you and Gilmore saying?" She shook her head regretfully. dark, I She went wit. in cruisers a hand slowly of his neck, 'He could have conof metal in your hand as a gun,... Well -- his shoulders lifted in the ghost of a shrug -- "it all seems to add up. Except one thing : Cordell had been tried and convicted, leaving you in the dear. Why come down here voluntarily and stick your lovely head in a noose?" The girl smiled faintly. " 'Lovely head, Lieutenant?" Kirk flushed to the eyebrows. "That slipped out... Why the confession?" She said soberly: "I was so sure they'd let him off. When you know someone's innocent you can't realize that others won't know it too, I But when I learned he'd been found guilty and actually condemned to die... well, I know it sounds noble and all that but I couldn't let him go to his death for d done. Surely such a before in your rienee. Lieutenant," .died as she drew smoke cigarette deeply into her . let it flow out in twin . Only # id into the Sherry# ' than a little cynica concerned with of them. That could kill -- and spur of the moment vocation was strong  "Well, Lieutenant?" lightly, almost with disinterest. Then Kirk was all right again, and he was looking at a woman who had just confessed to murder. You heard the phone call I made a moment ago, Miss North. Two men from the Crime Lab are already on their way to the University. If they find your fingerprints inside that closet, if they can. turn up anything to prove you've been in Gregory Gilmore's laboratory, then you and that evidence and your confession get turned over to the D. A. and Paul Cordell will be on his way to freedom." "And if those men don't anything?" "Then," he told her 'you're just another crackpot I'm tossing you and confession out of here," several perfect inner door of the But even JuSiZ...'ZbAJiWm   iv A    --  TTi  LT; k --   ja  ' w iA v -VA Vr VA' #e mar standing a good two feet off the floor in the middle of a glowing bubble that pulsed arid wavered around her .  -- at the other a micro tic trace of human blood. a  mess missing? it technician told a sworn we ast month. ot the prints -- the ones . Hey, how about that, Lieutenant? this . Cordell guy Slowly Kirk rep and eyed Naia desk from him, " " he said Cii ripia you straig going to any part of Her brow I don't   ic miscarriage that hes a misto get all tiie pubbound to? 'District innocent man! of  torials in the opposition press about a offices and voters must keep out anybody who goes around executing the innocent and helpless. Looks like Arthur Kahler Troy is going to be a mighty unpopular man around these parts -- and election less than five months away!" He glanced up at the office clock. It was nearly nine, o'clock in the evening, and 'both of them were showing signs of wear. Kirk left his chair and went over to the water and two cupfuls brought one back to the girl. She thanked him with a wan smile and d down the contents. empty paper conit slowly, et hold of him, # "It's going to be ty damned rough, sister. You through with eyebrow at him. question for a isn't sparsely moved slowly an in his step, and tures was harsh and strains soft light from Troy had been even more cult than he'd feared, begun as plain irritability a disturbed, had stages to amused disbelief, open anger and finally reluctant conviction that Paul Cordell was innocent of the crimes for which he had been sentenced to die. A male stenographer from Ms staff was' called in and Naia North dictated a complete statement which she signed. Troy questioned her for nearly two hours, getting in every possible angle of her private life as well as minute details of her actions on the day of the Kirk had not been present durin that part of the night, but he ured it wouldn't be much from what he'd heard many time; He mixed himself was surprised to discover hands were I Well, why not? A he'd just been the shakes in as he made the wasn't the  stayed been cases triggers -- and the shakes never came. No, it was the girl. Naia North. Naia -- a strange name. But no stranger than the girl herself. Now how about that? Why should he think her strange? Because she'd taken a life or two? Hell, lots of people did that and no one called them strange. Criminal or unmoral or greedy or angry, yes. But not strange. She looked like other women -- only a lot better. She dressed like them, walked like them, talked like them. So why strange? Because she was strange. Nothing you could put your finger on made her that way, but that's the way she was. He threw his cigar savagely into the fireplace. He went over and made another drink and poured it down fast and another one after it, right on its heels. Then he went to bed. Tomorrow -- today, rather -- was a work day and work days were tough days and he needed his rest. He didn't get much of it, though. The phone woke him a few minutes after seven o'clock. It was Arthur Kahler Troy at the other end and the IX A. was too angry to be coherent. It seemed Naia North had disappeared from her locked cell during the night. fifiT don't give a triple-distilled J, damn what you say!" Troy snarled. "Nobody's got enough money to make that kind of payoff. Five men,. Lieutenant -- five men and five locked doors stood between that girl and the street. And you sit there and try to tell me somebodybought all five of 'em off!" "Then," Kirk said heatedly, "what's your explanation?" It had been going on this way for over an hour. The morning sun came in weakly at the window behind Troy's huge polished mahogany desk, picking up random reflections from the collection of expensive gadgets littering the glass top. Troy began to wear another path in the moss-colored broadloom carpeting. He was big and broad and getting puffy around the middle, like a one-time halfback going to seed. His round, heavyfeatured face was even more .florid than usual, and his heavy growth of reddish-blond hair needed a comb. Martin Kirk pushed himself deeper into the depths of a brown leather chair and watched the D. A. through brooding eyes. He wanted a cigar but it was too early in the morning for that kind of inYou needed a breakfast and a couple cups of coffee before -- "I don't explain it," Troy said in quieter tones. He was standing by the window now, staring down into the boulevard passing that side of the Criminal Courts Building. "It's one of those tilings that make me think my sainted mother wasn't so wrong when she used to tell z elves and gnomes and I I chauns and fairies and -- # Kirk made a sound deep in his throat, "Naia North was a hell of a long way from being a leprechaun. Somebody wanted her out of here for some reason -- and they got her out. I want to know who took her out, why she was taken, and where she is now. And I'm going to find out the answers to all three if I have to turn this town on its ear." "Go ahead," Troy said, "Hop right to it and I wish you luck. Only leave me and my people out of it." "Seems to me you're mighty damned anxious to be left out." Arthur Kahler Troy turned on his heel and strode toward the Lieutenant until he was towering over him. "just what," he said between his teeth, "do you mean by that crack?" "Figure it out for yourself," Kirk snapped. "And I'm sure you can." Troy reared back as though the police officer had pulled a gun on him. "Why -- why you -- I'll have you busted for making a dirty insinu -- " "You couldn't bust a daisy chain at the police department," Kirk growled. "The Commissioner hates your guts and you know that as well as I do. Now let's cut out all this hokey-pokey and pick up a few loose ends. The first thing: what about Paul Cordell?" All the wide-eyed fury seemed to go out of Troy's face like water down the bathtub drain. He turned away and walked slowly back to his desk chair and sat down. He said, "What about Cordell' in a soft voice. "The morning paper," Kirk said, "reports he was taken up to Hillcrest last night. The warden out there's probably got him in Death Row already." "Uh-hunh." "Well, let's get him out of there. With the evidence we've got, plus Naia North's sworn statement, Judge Reed will have to bring him back down here and release him -- at least on bail until we can find the girl. The man's innocent, Mr. D. A.; have you forgotten?" "Yes." " 'Yes'? Yes, what?" "I've forgotten he's, innocent," Troy said quietly. "Matter of fact, he's guilty as hell" T he lieutenant half rose from his chair. "Now wait a minute! You heard that girl's story and you've got the evidence I turned over to you right here in this office last night. What more -- " "I'll tell you what more' Troy snapped. "That girl was a fraud, her story was a downright lie and that evidence was faked. Let me tell you something else, Mister: within five minutes after the guard downstairs reported your girl friend missing, I had five squads of my men out running down the personal information she gave me a few hours before. And you know what they found out?. Every bit of what she told me was false! Hear that? False! It took my men about one hour to prove as much, for the simple reason that not one lead And you from, that coat c Kirk ut a stranthis dame whole thing beyou to save CorWho could do a better g evidence than a A s more, you have gotten away with it, too -- only it suddenly dawned on the girl that she was getting in too deep. "And so Kirk cut in hotly, "she calmly walked through five locked sets of iron bars and went back to Mars!" He stood up and crossed to the desk and leaned down with his palms in the center of the brown blotter, "You won't get away with it, Troy. You didn't want any part of this new development from the minute I called you on the phone last night. You knew it could show you and your whole organization as a bunch of bunglers and inyou got rid of the that without her the of those murders would never et out to the voters. it won't work. Fatso! The up is strong enough case without Naia y ave to do is put that Judge Reed, U You ence. It's in over to you.' The D, A. was "We don't around here, my case is closed; the awaiting execution, along and tell the Ju it. Tell the newspapers, t delPs defense attorneys world for all I care. See touch it without somethin concrete than your highly ima native day dreams. For all you can prove, the girl might have confessed the whole thing was a hoax and we tossed her out of here last night. "I'm a busy man, Lieutenant, Good morning -- good luck -- and kindly close the door on your way out"    Chapter IV L ieutenant the pile of mimeograp pages aside. Three hours through the complete script of the Corde! ing to show for it and an aching hea it up, a sma back of his haven't got a as getting any  the fear of Go does that poor devil up in Death's Row. He drummed his fingers over and over on the arm of his chair and listened to the every-day sounds of a normal day at the Homicide Bureau. A new day, a new set of problems, and why knock yourself out over some tiling that doesn't concern you? Thing to do was go down to the comer tavern and have a couple of fast ones and watch an old movie on television. Yes sir, that's exactly what he'd do! He went back to the mimeographed pages. For the fourth time he read through Cordell's testimony of what had happened that October afternoon. And it was there that he came across the first possible break in the stone wall. Once more Martin Kirk went over the few lines, although by this time he could have come close to reciting them from memory. It was an excerpt from Arthur Kahler Troy's cross-examination of the defendant after Cordell's counsel, in a last desperate effort to swing the tide of a losing battle, had placed him on the stand. Q: (by Troy) : Now, Mr. Cordell, I direct your attention to the point in your testimony at which first entered Professor Gilmore's outer office. At what time was this? A: At about #:# p.m. Q: Who was in the office at that time? A: Alma Dakin, the Professor's secretary. And a couple of students -- although , they were at the other end of the room and I didn't pay much attention to them . Q: But you did pay attention, as you call it, to Miss Dakin? A: Well, I spoke to her, if that's what you mean. Q: That's exactly what I mean, Mr. Cordell. And what was it you said to her? A: Something about it was too late in the day to be working so hard. Q: That was all? A: Yes, sir. Q: Remember, Mr. Cordell, you're under oath. Now I ask you again : Was that all you said to her at that time? A: Yes, sir. Q: It isn't possible you've forgotten some additional remark? Think carefully, please. A: No, sir. That's all I said. I swear it. Q: Very well. Now how well do you know Miss Dakin? A: Just to speak to, Q: Have you ever seen her outside Professor Gilmore's office? A: No, sir. Q: Ever ask her for a date? A: 'No, sir. Q: Did you ever have an argument with her? A discussion of any kind that may have become a bit heated? A: No, sir. Q: Then to your knowledge she'd have no reason to dislike you? A: No, sir. Q: Very good. Now, Mr. Cordell, I want to read to you an excerpt from the testimony given by Miss Dakin in this court. "Mr. Cordell was looking very angry when he came in. He came up to me and bent down over the desk and said so low I could hardly hear him: 'Hi, Alma. You think the ProPs through making love to my wife?' " I now ask you, Paul Cordell, isn't that what you said to Alma Dakin? Not that shewas working too hard, or whatever it was you claimed to have said. A: No, sir. I didn't say anything like she said I did. I wouldn't insult my wife by saying such a thing to a third -- Q: Just answer the questions, Mr. Cordell. Then you contend that Miss Dakin deliberately lied in her testimony. A: She was mistaken. Q: Oh, come now! Miss Dakin is an intelligent girl; she couldn't misunderstand or twist your words to that extent. Now could she? A: Then she lied. I never said anything like that. Q: What reason would she have for lying, Mr. Cordell? By your own statement she hardly knew you, always greeted you pleasantly on the times you came to the office, never got into any arguments with you, and never saw you outside the office. She had worked for Professor Gilmore for five or six months, has excellent references, and is well liked by her friends. Yet you're asking us to believe that she coldly and deliberately lied to get you into trouble. Is that true? there all thought grimly, was innocent, then id the truth during the if he had told the truth to Alma Dakin, then, automatically, Alma Dakin's testimony was untrue. Kirk ran his fingers through his in a gesture of bafflement. What possible reason could Gilmore's secretary have for going out of her way to lie about Cordell's remark? Was it because she was so certain he had killed her employer that she wanted to make sure he would be punished? Or was it because she wanted to shield the real killer? Maybe she was a friend of Naia North's and had known the blonde girl was in Gilmore's laboratory all along. She might even have deliberately steered everyone out of her office after Cordell discovered the bodies, making it possible for Naia to slip out unseen. was a slender lead, but the y one large enough to get even ngernail grip on. He drew the over in front of him and , series of calls designated to more information about akin University took him of secretaries bethe right person. em? Why, of very decorne to the sity m only a day lins. Professor secretary, had Dakin's references had worked for i ret ary to Dr. co-discoverers of the (according to Miss Slife) been engaged to take place. Professor man, had been very the change and everybody was happy: Miss Collins at inheriting a very large sum of money from a relative she'd never even heard of, Miss Dakin at being able to get such a nice position, and dear Professor Gilmore at finding such a satisfactory replacement. When Miss Slife had run down, Kirk said, "This Dr. Karney. Why did Miss Dakin leave him?" The woman' at the other end of the wire seemed astonished by Kirk's ignorance. "Why, I assumed everybody knew about Dr. Karney. He died of a heart attack about eight months ago." What!" U , there's no need shout, Mr. Kirk. He was connected with Clement out in California, and suffere stroke of some kind while at  Kirk thanked her broke the connection. r himself, is too much a to be a coincidence nent nuclear denly within seven other at opposite e try -- and bot same P iT : him leaftrial tranPaul Corto have heard into . The words he stand out in letthree in the past A gain he caught up the telephone receiver, aware that his heart was pounding with excitement, and dialed a number... se Bulletin? liello; let me talk to Jerry Furness... Jerry, this is Martin Kirk at Homicide, Look, do something for me. I want to find out how many top nuclear fission boys have died in the past four or five months. , . , No, no ; nothing like that. Some of the boys down here were having " an argument about... Sure; I'll hold on." He propped the receiver between his ear and shoulder and ;roped for a cigar. In the office beyond' the partition of his cubbyhole a woman was sobbing. Chenowich went past his open door whistling The receiver against his ear beYeah, Jerry... ? Let's have their a pencil and "Uh attacks and one fou mean all I guess. ... lone." receiver with last world-renow of nuclear physics dead from heart fai span of in no mood for coincidences, deaths of these four scientis the result of some sinister who was responsible? Some i power, concerned about try's growing mastery of nuclear fission? Was it his duty to take over from here? Fie shook his head. Too early for anything like that. He needed more evidence-evidence not to be explained away as coincidence. Once more Lieutenant Martin Kirk went back to  analyzing the broken phrases Cordell had picked up while eavesdropping that October afternoon. Twelve times zero made no sense at all .  . unless it could be the combination of a safe... ? Hardly possible ; no combination he'd ever heard of would read that way. The next one, therK... chained to two hundred thousand years . , , Another mean anything or nothin A'... sounded like the Professor said something like his colleges no idea and he'd see ivarned right away . Kirk bit thou corner of his own any colleges an warnin word was college , where he ha le ference to the man in the street, but to the Professor... Wait a minute! Not colleges! Colleagues! It was his colleagues Gilmore had promised to warn. And the word meant men and women in the same line of work as the Professor -- nuclear physics. Things, Kirk told himself with elation, were looking up! The business about "three in the past five months" was next, but he felt sure of what that had meant. But the last of the quotations wnt nowhere at all. "Something about taking in washing -- " Under less tragic circumstances, a nonsense line. But Cordell hadn't actually heard the words clearly enough to quote them with authority. That could mean he had heard words that problem," Kirk explained carelessly. "Let's say you hear a guy talking in the next room. You can't really make out the words he's saying, but right in the middle of his mumbling you hear what sounds like 'taking in washing.' Now you know that can't be right, so you try to think out what he actually did say... It was obvious Chenowich had fallen off on the first curve, so completely off that Kirk didn't bother finishing what was much too involved to begin with. The patrolman was staring at him in monstrous perplexity. "Jeez. Lieutenant. I don't get it. 'Less the guy's goin' to open up one of these here laundries. That way he'd be takin' in washinh But I don't know what else -- " sounded like "taking in washing." Taking, baking, making, slaking, raking -- the list seemed endless. "Washing" could have been the first two syllables of Washington -- and Washington would be the place where the Atomic Energy Commission hung out. Still too hazy. He leaned back and put his feet up and attacked the three mysterious words from every conceivable angle. No dice. S ight of the ambling figure of Patrolman Chenowich passing the office door caught his eye, reminding him that two heads were often better than one. "Hey, Frank." Chenowich came in. "Yeah, Kirk's feet hit the floor with a solid thump and he grabbed Chenowich's wrist with fingers that bit in like steel. "Say that again!" he shouted. "Say it just that way!" The patrolman recoiled in alarm. "What's got into you, Lieutenant? Say what?" "Taking in washing!" "Takin' in washin'? What for?" Kirk's grin threatened to split his face. "The same words," he said, "but you say them different. Only . your way's the right way! Thanks, pal. Now get out of here!" Chenowich went. His mouth was still open and his expression still troubled, but he went. The last of the killer's cryptic remarks was now clear. For Kirk reLieutenant. Somethin' doin'?" "Fin trying to figure out a little alized that "takin' " rhymed with words you'd never associate with "taking." "Bacon", for instance -- or "Dakin" S Alma Dakin, former secretary to two widely separated, and now dead, nuclear scientists. Her name had been mentioned by the slayer of Professor Gilmore only seconds before she had clubbed the savant to death. But now that "taking" had come out "Dakin" -- what did the rest of the phrase mean? Dakin in washing made no sense. What sounded like washing? Washing; washing... watching? It was close; in fact nothing he could think of came closer. right Dakin in watching ; no. Dakin is watching -- that made sense. But Alma Dakin hadn't been watching anything at the time of dell, was at her desk in the outer office. That would leave Dakin was watching as the right combination. Watching for the right opportunity for murder I  What did it mean? Well, assuming from her past record that Alma Dakin was mixed up in the deaths of two prominent men of science, it argued that she and Naia North were accomplices in a scheme to rid America of her nuclear fission experts. The nice smooth story of quited love was probably as much a lie as the personal information Naia North had given Arthur Kahler Troy. The North girl had confessed to murdering Gilmore and Juanita Cordell. As a confessed killer she must be taken into custody and booked on suspicion of homicide. Taking her was Martin Kirk's job -- and it seemed he had a contact that would lead him to her. Namely Alma Dakin. Lieutenant Kirk grabbed his hat and went out the door. Chapter V T he address for Alma Dakin turned out to be a small threestory walk-up apartment building on a quiet residential street near the outskirts of town. At two in the afternoon hardly anyone was visible on the sidewalks and only an occasional automobile passed. Kirk parked his car half a block further on down and got out into the chill November air. He entered the building foyer and looked at the name plates above the twin rows of buttons. The one for Alma Dakin told him the number of her apartment was #C. He pushed the button several times but without response. The foyer was very quiet at this time of day, and he could hear the faint rasp of her bell through the speaking tube. Kirk was on the point of shifting his thumb to the button marked superintendent when a sudden  thought stayed his hand. It was not the kind of thought a conscientious, rule-abiding police officer would harbor for a moment. The lieutenant, however, was fully aware he had no business working on a closed case to begin with -- and when you're breaking one set of rules, you might as well break Cv u? T  # C# other bells inner door it open, he voice floated Who is it?" ma'am. was , green or otherwise, alor the street curbing, but Kirk figured wouldn't know that Why, n , no, I can't inline -- tt Okay. Sorry we bothered you, Kirk' let the door swing into place hard enough to be heard upstairs. But this 'time he was on the right side of it. There was a moment of silence, then he caught the sound of retreating feet and a door closed. Without waiting further, the Lieutenant mounted the stairs to the third floor, his feet soundless on the carpeted treads. The entrance to #G was secured by a tumbler-type lock. From an inner pocket Kirk took out a small flat leather case and a thin-edged tool from that. Working with the of the expert, he the door moulding near inserted the tool blade the bolt. This he  turned the door hanlater, was standing room tastemodem woods, was to enter the tlie door . In case at an mopporbe half way i while she was still en eased with lock. moulding back would be nothin ithin ten minutes Kn: every living room in search of somethin anything, that would point to Dakin as being more than a nine to-five secretary. And secretary found nothing, no one, not even the girl who lived here, could tell that an intruder had been at work. The bedroom seemed even less promising at first. Dresser drawers gave up only the pleasantly personal articles of the average young woman. Miss Dakin, it turned out, was almost indecently fond of frothy undergarments and black transparent nightgowns -- interesting but not at all important to the over-all problem. Kirk, his search completed, sat down on the edge of the bed's footboard and totaled up what he had learned. It didn't take long, for he knew absolutely no more about Alma Dakin than he fore entering her apartment personal papers, no letters yearning boy friend in t home town, no savings ing-account scrawled line of mas greetings the apartment's To Kirk's lack of such highly significant her bavin his already strong suspicion of her was solidified into certainty of her guilt. But certainty was a long way from rock-ribbed evidence -- and that was something he must have to proceed further. He was ready to leave when it dawned on him that he had not yet looked under the bed. Kneeling, he pushed up the hanging edge of the green batik spread and peered into the narrow space. Nothing, not even a decent accumulation of dust. The light from the window was too faint, however, to reach a section of the floor near the footboard. Kirk climbed to his feet and attempted to shove that end to one side.  The bed failed to move. He blinked in mild surprise and tried again. It was only by exerting, almost his entire strength that he was able to shift the thing at all, and then no more than a few inches. He felt his pulse stir with the thrill of incipient discovery. Once he made sure nothing was anchoring the bed to the floor, he began to tap lightly against the wood in an effort to detect a possible false panel. Within two minutes he located an almost microscopic crack in the headboard cleverly concealed by a decorative design running along the base. He ran his fingers lightly i along the carvings until they encountered a small projection which gave slightly under pressure. Kirk pressed down harder on the knob. A tiny click sounded against the silence and a section of wopd some three feet square swung out. Lifting it aside, the detective found himself staring at an instrument board of some kind with a series of buttons and dials countersunk into it. The board itself formed a part of what was obviously a machine of some sort which evidently contained its own power, for there seemed to be no lead-in cord for plugging into a wall socket. It could, Kirk thought, be a short wave radio transmitter. If it was, it looked like none he had ever , come across before. On the other hand it could be some sort of infernal machine, ready to blow half the city to bits at the turn of a dial. E ven as his mind was weighing the advisability of tampering with the thing, his fingers were reaching for the various controls. Gingerly he moved one or two of the dials but nothing happened. A little more boldly now, he began to depress the buttons. As the third sank in, a low humming sound began to fill the room. Before Kirk could find a cut-off switch of some kind, the faint light of day streaming through the room's one window winked out, plunging him into a blackness so infinitely deep that it was like being buried alive. Nothing can plunge a man into the sheerest panic like the absence of light. Even a man like Martin Kirk, who had walked almost daily with danger for the past fifteen ' years. And since the form panic takes varies with the individual, the Lieutenant's reaction was an utter inability to move so much as a finger. Abruptly the low humming note a human vvt ( dials an h the words h ad  ever in his brain, Kirk's ;nded. Both his hands swoop of their own voliin visible control panel fingers danced across the buttons. x," said the voice again, to swell and recede, like a direct radio newscast from half around the world. "Contact estab -- " The word ended as though it had run into a wall. The humming note came back, then ceased -- and without warning daylight from the window washed over the bewildered and thoroughly frightened police officer. Not until five minutes had passed was Martin Kirk sufficiently in control of his nervous system to even attempt replacing the loose panel in the headboard. When at last he managed to do so, he returned the bed to its original position, closed and bolted the kitchen one last look around to make sure nothing was out of place, out of the apartment, time he was back behind I of his car and had cigar, Kirk's brain function with some' ability. He sat s collar, trying to significance of lours events. onger any doubt in this mess as she was to the murders vinced heart do with it) would have eign agent bent America's defense: thing. That machine, mind that could gether a mechanism not of this planet. Paul Cordell's story floated in a ball of blue fire soun like the ravings of a brain. And the seeming miracle Naia North's escape from a cell block now passed from fantasy to the factual. What to do about it? Martin Kirk, at this moment undoubtedly the most bewildered man alive, put his head in his hands and tried to reach a decision. Take his story to the Police Commissioner? It would r mean a padded cell -- and without even bothering to see if Alma Dakin possessed a machine more complicated than an electric iron. Some government agency? By the time the red tape was unsnarled the former secretary could have reached Pakistan on foot. Slowly from the depths terror of the Unknown, Kirk's training in police proce began to make itself started to form -- hazy at in a sharp and orderly # to the of his bad cisive orders duced the ; of almost the law. It sister livside of town who put her up for traveling bag in one fist, hour was gone in response to a skidded a a stop at the curb a block e building. He delivered a dictograph to his superior, listened a grim warning to keep his mouth shut about this at Headquarters, asked a couple of questions that drew no answers, and departed as swiftly as he had come. The next step was the dangerous one. The superintendent admitted Kirk to the Dakin apartment and went down to the. foyer to ring the bell in case the girl arrived at the wrong time. He soothed the Lieutenant's anxiety somewhat by explaining that she seldom returned the place before seven o'clock, over three hours from now, but Kirk was taking no chances. y five o'clock he had Alma s bedroom  bugged and the working order and He was painsremoving all traces of sawdust and bits of the dresser cover the diefoyer and #D to take up He was in the s room, workin ,, earphones in he heard, the sound o; door closing in the next a The time was #:#. Chapter t was like being in her room with his eyes shut. The soft scraping of drawers opening and closing, the creak of a chair being sat in, the cushioned thump of shoes dropped to the carpeted floor, even the rustle of a nylon slip as she drew it over her head. It seemed much too early for her to turn in for the night. Was he going to be forced to sit there and listen to twelve or fourteen hours of feminine snoring? It would be damned unlikely in view of what was a cinch to be running through her mind, f Minutes later he heard her leave the bedroom, followed the muted roar of a shower. After that had laste mal length of time ceased and naked on the bedroom, more opening ; ers, the whispe donned, and sound like lass which he part of the If there was anything of a panicky nature in her movements it would take better ears than his to detect it. But for Alma Dakin to get away with her kind of job required the nerves of lion trainer no matter what pressures she was subjected to. Kirk stretched his legs, dug a cigar from the breast pocket of his coat and got it burning, then went back to the crossword puzzle with half his attention, keeping alert for any significant sound from the other apartment. His years as a minion of the law had adequately conditioned him to the utter boredom that went with the ordinary stake-out. Several times the subject left the bedroom, but he was able to pick up sounds familiar enough to trace as emanating from the living room or kitchen. But nothing she did was worthy of notice in the home-town paper or even on the margin of a police blotter. A t #:# Alma Dakin again entered the bedroom. A hunch, or a sixth sense, or whatever years of experience in a single field gives a man, told Kirk that this time something would pop. He put aside the newspaper, placed a sheet of blank paper on the cover of a historical romance lifted from the spinster's nightstand, and got out a pencil, A motor whined unexpectedly from the opposite side of the apartment wall and he could hear a heavy object roll with well-oiled smoothness a short distance across the carpet. He decided it was the bed being moved out from the wall by mechanical means rather than muscle, and it was clear to him now how she was able to get at that hidden radio, or whatever it was. For the second time that day Kirk heard that eerie humming -- a sound, he realized, that ordinarily would have been completely inaudible beyond the girl's bedroom walls. Suddenly the hum was chopped off and a familiar voice spoke familiar words. I "Mythox. Contact established. Proceed." "A message for Orin. Alma Dakin" A series of almost undetectable clicking sounds; then: "Alma?" Despite the fact that the voice was coming through an amplifier, there was no distortion. "Anything wrong?" It was a man's voice, clear, vibrant, young, and with no trace of an alien accent. Kirk's theory' of an interplanetary' menace lost some of its strength. "I -- I'm not sure, Orin," the girl said hesitantly. "There was a policeman at my apartment today -- the same one Naia went to; The building superintendent told me," "That's odd. There's no way you can be tied in with her. Or is there ?" "Not that I know of, Orin. Unless they've decided to check back on me just for the sake of some-, thing to do. If that's what's happened and they've learned I was working for Dr. Karney at the time of his death, they may get an idea the three deaths are related. And once a police officer gets suspicious, he can hound you unmercifully. That's what worries me, Orin. You know Fm not really an accomplished liar!" . I "Shall we bring you here? At least long enough to build you a new identity?" A pause. Then the girl's voice again: "Something else puzzles me, too. There's no mention of Naia's confession in the newspapers." "What? You mean they haven't released Cordell? What will Tamu say?" "If they have, nobody knows about it. I told you Naia should have remained in their hands until the young man was set free. You don't know my people as I do. Orin -- none of you do." "But the evidence? Nobody, not even the most stupid of Earthmen, could have ignored that evidence! Tamu won't like this." "I can't help it, Orin. I keep telling you, Orin: you must use a new set of standards for this world. If its people thought as yours do, none of these unpleasant things would have to happen."  A nother pause before the man's voice came over Kirk's earphones. "We didn't dare leave Naia in their hands. That's why we brought her back here. Look at the chance we took by permitting them to hold her even briefly. If only she hadn't blundered in the first place... " His voice trailed off, then came back suddenly brisk. "Well, too late for regrets. We won't risk letting them question you. Field Seven in, say, three hours. Time enough?" "More than enough!" Her relief was unmistakable. "It'll be wonderful visiting Mythox again, Orin. I hope Methu will allow me to stay for a long time." t "I hope so too, darling. But our work comes first; none of us dares let down for even a moment... See you soon. And don't neglect to eliminate the contrabeam." "It will be gone seconds after we break contact. Field Seven at -- let's see -- #:#." "I'll be there. Farewell, Alma." The dim humming came back again, followed briefly by no sound at allf Then there was the noise of drawers being opened and closed with a kind of brisk and cheerful haste. Alma Dakin was preparing to take it on the lam! , Martin Kirk knew he had only a limited time to plan his own course of action. One way was to walk into the adjoining apartment, place Alma Dakin under arrest and force the whole story from her. A moment's reflection, however, caused him to abandon the idea. Any such move would end his chances of getting his hands on Naia North. More than anything else he wanted her, and he closed his mind to the broader aspects of what had taken -- and was still taking -- place. No, his job was to follow Alma Dakin to her rendezvous with this man Orin and in some way force the two of them into turning Naia North over to him. This time she'd stick around long enough to stand trial -- even if he had to handcuff her to the bars of her cell ! From beyond the wall he .caught the sounds of suitcases being snapped shut, followed by the fading echo of footsteps. He jerked the earphones from his head and went quickly to the hall door in time to catch a glimpse of Alma Dakin on her way to the building stairs, a bulging suitcase in each hand. Kirk raced for the kitchen of #D, flung open the door and went down the rear steps with astonishing agility. He was opening the door of his car by the time the girl came out of the front entrance. He watched her place the bags in the trunk of a small sand-colored coupe, then slip in behind its wheel and start the motor. The coupe passed his parked car, turned the corner and disappeared. Before it had reached the next intersection, Kirk was rolling smoothly half a block to her rear. Two hours later both cars were moving along a winding country road miles from civilization. Kirk was driving without lights, bad enough under favorable circumstances but sheer folly considering the sky was completely overcast, so that he was denied even the faint radiance of the stars. Fortunately there was no other traffic in this desolate section at eleven o'clock at night, so that his only danger was in failing to remain on the twisting road. in ally, , near the crest of a particularly steep hill, two flaring red lights warned him his quarry was applying the brakes of her car. He cut ins engine long enough to hear the coupe's motor die, then he swung his wheel to the right and coasted to a halt on the soft shoulder of the road. Under cover of bushes and trees, naked of foliage at this time of the year, Kirk worked his way silently ahead until' he could make out the dim figure of the girl as she dragged the pair of bags from the boot. Without a backward glance, she turned away from the road and an instant later was lost to sight among the trees. There was nothing of the frontiersman in Lieutenant Martin Kirk, but fortunately the same was true of Alma Dakin. Where anyone accustomed to moving across natural terrain could have lost the officer with ease, in her case he need only pause briefly from time to time and use his ears. At last the seemingly interminable forest ended and the girl sank wearily down on an upended suitcase. Kirk, perspiring freely under the folds of his topcoat, halted in the shelter of a' tree bole, and waited. Beyond where the girl sat was a large natural clearing covered with a fringe of winter grass. The silence was close to being absolute; only the faint keening of a chill wind and the restless creak of barren branches kept it from becoming unbearable. Gradually his eyes became more and more accustomed to the absence of light worthy of the name, and he began to identify objects as something more than formless na er :te. the akin appeared to  him than he had d her slim back I when she lighted vind bringing the co to his nostrils, he lv have strangled her torture. by. An hour by n minutes by the of his wrist watch. ! # gan to twitch imho! ding the same he managed to losive sneezes; he s able to do so #:# was like being broken  rack. He caught himself str his ears for the sound of a # of a faint humming -- of an to indicate Orin was ar; Nothing -- and at #:# still ingMartin Kirk had had ; could take. He was through in # out on a windv hill like tire night air abc and he was starin circular structure as Before the Lieutenant could get his jaw off his necktie, Alma Dakin had uttered a cry of relief and was racing toward the nearest edge of the gleaming vessel. A panel in its side slid noiselessly back and the tall figure of a man was outlined in the opening. "Alma!" he shouted and sprang to the ground to meet her. They came together almost violently midway between the clearing's edge and the ship. She clung to him as he bent his head to meet her lips. Kirk glanced past them at the open portal. Dim light from within cast a soft glow against the night. Nothing moved in the narrow segment of the interior visible from where he was standing. And Kirk had a moment of what was as close to fear as he was able to know. A little time of bewilderment when his guard slipped just a trifle. What in the hell was all this? Into his solid world had come strange and unreasonable things. Crazy ships, and people who didn't play according to the rules he had learned over thankless drudging years as an honest cop. A few tiny beads of sweat formed on his upper lip. Then Ms stubborn, inherent fatalism came to his aid. He grinned without humor. The hell with it. Whatever came up -- a screwball flying saucer or a berserk psycho waving a gun. You played it the same; according to your own rules. This thing, whatever it was, bridged the gap to a killer. And when you found such a bridge, you crossed it. M .rtin kirk, his gun clutched tightly, movedlike a casual shadow, eased his way along the hull of ship and slipped inside. He had never seen anything like this. The lighting for one thing. It came from nowhere and somehow the stuff had a mood. It seemed alive -- an intelligent force watching him, mocking him, sneering at him. And so potent was the mood of the whole setup, so sharp his need of release that he muttered, "The hell with you," and softly followed a circular corridor which curved off the hull. They were coming toward the ship, Orin and Alma -- coming while he still hunted a hole. He kept on going. If he met anybody they were going tago down. But he didn't. He found a steel stairway and a pocket at its base to hold his body. It wasn't a dark pocket. Light was everywhere. But the stairway hid him and the pair passed by and went on down the corridor. He realized his right hand was aching and relaxed his grip on the gun butt he clutched. He straightened up and the tense little mirthless grin played on his lips. Okay. Now where was she and howdid it work? Could he find her and haul her off silly tilt-awhirl? He thought not. Either his eyes were bad or this thing had appeared from nowhere. Something inside snapped: Quit thinking that way! Whatever it looked like -- think right. Follow the rules. Look for the dame. His grin deepened. Sure. He started walking. Around the eerie corridor in the direction opposite that taken by Orin and Alma Dakin. He walked a long time and there were no doors or anything else so the only thing to do was keep walking. He thought: When I come to that stairway I'll be back where I started but where's that? What good is a hall you keep going around and around in? The ship lurched and threw him to the floor. It was going somewhere. But it didn't go anywhere. Of that he was sure. Maybe he'd been fooled but it seemed the ship settled back after that single lurch and lay there like a choice segment out of someone's pet nightmare. Kirk got to his feet and rubbed the place his leg had violently met the floor. He walked on and there was the steel stairway again and it was all very damned silly because he knew he'd circled the times. But lucky because the footsteps sounded again and as he dived toward the pocket, the wall of the ship opened to form a doorway. They forgot something, he thought. What kind of supermen are these? They can build a ship that has a stairway every third trip around and still they go away and forget things,  The grin 'was tighter than ever. Whistle in the dark, boy, but admit it -- you're scared. Sure, but what's that got to do with it? . Orin and Alma left the ship. Martin Kirk pushed his head around the staircase. He crouched ship at least three  for sometime, staring through the open segment of the hull at the outside world. And his poor stupid orthodox mind asked a pitifully logical question: How could it get light, with the sun at high noon, in fifteen minutes? After a long, motionless time, the silence became such a roaring thing in Kirk's ears he could stand it no longer. He got up and walked to the doorway. Something had gone somewhere; either the ship or the world he'd known, because out there was a different world and he knew damn well he'd never seen it before. M artin kirk stepped out into a circle of lush vegetation. And in doing so, he learned something. He learned that the human mind is a far more adaptable mechanism than most people imagine; that they can pelt you with goof balls and you get sweat on your iip and have to talk to yourself to keep from sliding off your rocker, but after a while when your mind seems halfway over the edge, it straightens up suddenly and starts going along. A defense mechanism against insanity? He didn't know. He only knew that when the tiger roared, he whirled around with his gun leveled, saw the sixinch teeth, got wholesomely and sanely scared, and then everything was all right. He knew he was all right when he got the right reaction from sight of the almost naked girl holding the tiger. For a long moment it was a frozen-action tableau. The huge orange and black beast. The wide eyed young brunette nudist, and the tropical forest with the great big fart sun overhead. The girl's voice nailed it all down. "Don't be afraid. Rondo won't hurt you." Kirk's resentment flared warmly and, had resentment been a tangible thing, he would have kissed it. "You're tootin' right he won't, sister. This isn't a toy Fm holding." "Rondo is very gentle." Kirk eyed the girl. "Why don't you put some clothes on?" Her teeth were as bright and even as little white knives but her smile took the edge off them. "Only people in the city wear clothes. I wear them when I'm in the city. When I come out here I -- " " -- you don't wear any clothes. Tell me -- where am I?" "Don't you know?" "Let's not play games. If I knew f wouldn't ask you." "Did you come on the ship?" "You saw me get out of it didn't you? Now answer my question." And he realized how certain he was of what her answer would be. "On Mythox." "Well fancy that. 'Now tell me something else. Do you know what  language you're speaking?" "Of course. English." "And why should you speak English on Mythox? Haven't you got a language of your own?" "Certainly. Rut you're obviously from Earth. I thought you were a Watcher. I tried English. If you hadn't responded I'd have spoken to you in the other Earth languages." "How many do you know?" I "Eleven hundred and seventeen. With various dialects, four thousand and -- "  "There aren't that many." She looked puzzled. Then her face cleared. "Oh you mean Earth languages. I was referring to those of the Five Galaxies." I'm not going to be surprised at anything, he told himself doggedly. Not at anything. "Do you know anyone named Naia North?" T here was a childlike seriousness in her manner. It tended to deny the maturity of her body. Or was it the other way around? Martin Kirk wasn't sure, and grimly assured himself that he didn't give a damn. The girl said, "I don't know anyone by that name. But I could find her for you." "How would you go about it?" "I'd go to the city and check the video-directory, naturally." "Naturally. And you'd put your clothes on before you went?" "Of course I would. We go without clothing only out here in the playground." Kirk realized he'd been holding the gun rigidly in front of him. The tiger had dropped to the ground and lay outstretched like a lazy, good-natured dog. Kirk lowered the gun, setting his eyes again on the girl. "A minute ago you said you thought I was a Watcher. What did you mean?" He would have framed his questions with more guile, but something told him it wasn't necessary. This child of nature was utterly without guile. She said, "An Earth Watcher. What did you think I meant?" "I didn't know or I wouldn't have asked." It clarified. Dakin is watching. Sure. What the hell else would a Watcher do but watch? But why, and for what? Kirk was mystified. But it didn't matter, he asserted inwardly, and turned his mind back to the straight line. The cop's line. "Will you put on your clothes and go into the city and locate Naia North for me?" "If it will help you" "It will. Where can I wait for you?" "If you want to see Naia North why don't you come with me?" Kirk shrugged. Why not? So long as the score was completely unknown to him, why not follow the path of least resistance? "Get your clothes on," he said. The girl turned and started leading the tiger back toward a grove of trees. After a few steps she turned back, a look of sober thought on her face. "Are all Earthlings so assertive?" she asked. Kirk grinned. As long as it works, this one is, baby. But what if it stops working? His reply was not audible and the girl turned finally to disappear into the bushes. Kirk then experienced a strange feeling of unreality which persisted until the girl returned. TVT Y name is Raima," the wore tight-fitting trousers, a loose blouse and had a silver colored air car with room in back for the tiger. Kirk knew it was an air car whc;i the craft lifted from the ground from no apparent means of acceleration and skimmed along just above the trees. He sat beside Raima and asked, "About that ship I came here in? How fast does it travel and how far is it from Mythox to Earth?" "The distance is around two hundred thousand light years but the ship doesn't really travel at all." "Maybe you could go into a little more detail," Kirk said wearily. "It's very simple. Distance, as you Earthlings regard it, is not distance at all. Space bends to a greater or lesser degree depending upon its immediate function in whatever time-space equation you are using." "Thank you very much," Kirk replied and silently added: Keep to the line. Hold to your own values. On Earth, wherever it is, a J  r man is waiting to go to the chair for a murder he didn't commit. Use whatever equation you want to -- that still adds up the same. These people may be a lot smarter than you are, but they can't twist that one and make you believe it comes out anv different. A strange city of graceful flying spirals was coming over the horizon. It moved closer and the air car arced in to a halt on a huge cement landing area punctuated with small circles of a different material. Raima jumped from the cockpit .s ear the soft paws landing ? ent over and the circles. in the city and image wi. As Kirk watche  Don' t you want to street level?' stupid of me beside the slapped the The circle dropped silently bein a bright metal tube a door soon appeared to out into a broad street  with casually moving pedes-. Kirk noted that none of them seemed in any hurry; that here and there was an individual dressed like himself. Watchers on furlough or vacation, he thought a trifle bitterly. This picture was far from complete but enough of it added up to furnish a name for them. uizling was a good one. Perhaps" traitor was better. All in all, he found one satisfaction. He could travel about as he huge of short walk brought them to a four or five story wall, the like had never seen. It symmetrically covered with #, opaque, glass windows, beeach of which was a dial not ones on Earth teleof some bright the wall. On these rous "people were e  video-directory, ave no further e Rondo lazily cub sittin for its mas rinmn paw, the cleared and the tal of Naia North lure. "You may speak in here said, solemnly tndicatin: screened opening beside the mirror. "My! She's pretty, isn't she?" Naia North was entirely composed. She wore a pale blue gown and from the background in the mirror, Kirk gathered that she was at home. "Aren't you surprised?" Kirk asked. Now a slight frown creased the lovely Naia's brow. "A little perhaps. How did you get to Mythox? And why did you come?" "A slight matter of murder. A murder you confessed to, or has it slipped your mind?" "Aren't you being rather absurd? That's all done with." "Not so far as Paul Cordell is concerned. He's going to the only he isn't. We're and straighten a few things out. n 'surprise was rene now. And possibly a certain 'My opinion of you I hadn't rated you as fool. How did you? 'The same way y  frown mean you were "Not away on that n't  The beautiful brow immediately cleared, "Oh, I see," Naia observed with amusement, "And you know exactly how you'll get me back to Earth I suppose? Thousands of light years. It's a long walk." 'Til take one thing at a time and worry about them in order of appearance. The main thing for you to remember, is this: You may be as smart as all get out but you broke an American law on American soil by your own confession and by God you're going back and answer for it!" "Idiot! I can have you -- " K irk's mood changed to the quizzical. "It's entirely beside the point, but still I don't get you, baby. Why the switcheroo? You walked in and confessed. Then you took a powder. Now' you sneer in my teeth. What do you use for a rudder, sweetheart." "I followed orders," Naia flared with a mixture of anger and sullenness. "I am now free of the assignment." Kirk pursed his lips thoughtfully. "You wouldn't be sort of a hatchetwornan for this high-blown outfit would you? I can think offhand of a few other names. Karney, Blatz, Kennedy. What gives with knocking off nuclear physicists, baby?" Naia did not answer. When she started to turn away from the mirror , Kirk glanced at the silent Raima standing with her hand on the tiger's head. "Is there any way I can call on the lady in the mirror personally?" "Not if she doesn't want to receive you," Raimu said. She was studying Kirk with wistful dark eyes. ' Naia turned back quickly. "Fll be glad to receive you. It's time I taught you a lesson." "Fine. What's your address?" But Naia was gone. The little mirror turned opaque. Kirk shot a questioning glance at Raimu. "Does yes mean no on this cockeyed planet?" "Her car will come." Raimu murmured. But the petite dark beauty seemed interested in other things. "You didn't tell me your name." "Sorry. Rude of me. It's Martin Kirk. You've been pretty nice to me. I wish there was some way I could show my appreciation," "You're going to see Naia North?" "Yes. She's a murderess. I'm taking her back to my planet." "I'm afraid that wouldn't be possible." "You too, honey?" Kirk reached out and flicked one of the raven curls. "If things were different you and I might be able to have fun." "I spend a lot of time -- where you found me. Maybe -- " "I doubt if I can make it. But keep your clothes on after this -- as a personal favor to me." She was the very soul of solemnity. "I don't understand you. I really don't understand you at all." At that moment, an air car --  much smaller than Raimu's, dropped gently into the street beside Kirk. "Good lord! Did this thing smell me out?" "It came to the mirror on Naiads private wave-length. Get in. It will way. The mocking smile was still on take you to her." her face. "Did you trip?" Kirk crawled into the car. The Kirk got groggily to his feet. "No, last thing he saw before it lifted into angel. That's the way I always cross the air, were Raimu's dazzling a room." As he came upright his black eyes. The last words he heard hand reached toward the bulge were, "Goodbye. Martin Kirk. I made by his shoulder holster. Rut will visualize you." it didn't get that far. The car swung up above the He had not seen from whence graceful, spidery buttresses and the first blow came but that was moved across the city. Kirk filled not true with the second. From a in the time by trying to figure out tiny opening in the door jamb, a what made the thing go. He hadn't pinpoint of light appeared. It hung gotten to first base when the car there for a moment. Then it brightlost altitude and came' to rest on a ened, expanded, and shot forth as balcony hung with seeming perila slim beam. It contained a silvery ousness on a sheer white wall. Kirk radiance and the kick of a Missouri stepped out. A large glass panel had mule. It slammed against Kirk's been pushed back and Naia stood jaw, but not quite so hard this time; waiting in the opening. only hard enough to send him down "Nice of you to receive me," Kirk again amidst a cloud of shooting said. "Have you got your bags stars. packed for a trip stateside?" He shook his head and got to his "Please come this way." hands and knees. "Wha's 'at? A Naia turned and moved through trained flashlight?" He began comthe room just off the balcony. On ing up.As soon as he didn't need the far side another door gave exit, his right hand for rising he reached She passed through it and turned for his gun. The light beam seemed as though waiting for Kirk. He took to resent this. It hit him in the one step, two, three, four. solar plexus this time; a sickening Then something came from blow that fed nausea down through somewhere and almost tore his jaw his legs. He tightened his stomach off. He wgnt out in an explosion of against the agony and began getblack light. ting up again. "You see how useless it is?" Naia asked. "Beside us, you Earthlings . are children. Will you stop being Kirk squinted craftily at the pinpoint of ight with one closed eye. K irk came to with the feelClever little devil. What the hell! ing that his period of unconNude innocents. Tigers on leashes, sciousness had been momentary. Light beams that knocked your Naia was standing as she had stood teeth out. Paul Cordell with a before, just beyond the inner doorshaved spot on his head... "You got your bag packed for a little trip, baby?" For a brief moment, genuine fear flamed in Naia's eyes. And in Kirk's mind: Dumb babe. What's she got to be scared of? They hit you with nothing and make it stick. Kirk croaked, "Grab your bag, baby. We'll go find that flying biscuit. We got a date with Arthur Kahler Troy." He was really cagey this time. When the light beam shot out, he hurled himself to the side. But he could have saved the effort. A beam came from the other door jamb and he stepped right into it. That one really tore his head off. S omebody was talking. It was a man and he had a deep resonant voice: a voice full of authority -- and censure. "Im surprised at you Naia. I never suspected you of having a sadistic streak." Naia's sullen reply. "Do you think anyone can do the work I do and remain unmarked?" "I suppose not. But as I remember it, you asked to serve." "As a benefit to humanity." "We won't go into it." But Naia pressed the point. "I have always followed orders. I placed myself in possible jeopardy on Earth by clearing Paul Cordell." "But Paul Cordell was not cleared." "Not through any fault of mine." "But why this? What end does torturing this poor unfortunate serve?". Martin Kirk cautiously opened one eye. It brought to his brain the image of a large blue globe, A man of fine and commanding appearance stood within the globe, suspended about a foot from the floor. The globe and the man gave every indication of having just come through the opaque glass wall of the room, and as Kirk watched, the man was lowered slowly to the floor and the globe became a blue mist that spiralled lazily and was gone. Kirk opened both eyes now, stirred, and climbed dizzily to his feet. "You bump into the damndest tilings around here," he said. "But let's get down to the important business. My name is Martin Kirk. I'm an American police officer. One of your subjects committed a murder on American soil. I hope you aren't going to be difficult about extradition." The other could not hide his surprise. Nor did he try to. "Amazing," he murmured. Then, "I am Tamil, the overlord of the galaxy. I wonder if Naia's cruelty hasn't affected your mind?" "If you mean I'm nuts, I think maybe you're right. But it wasn't little Playful here who did it. I've gone through a lot and I don't speak with any sense of bragging. I've seen more furiny things happen than any one man should see in so short a time. So maybe I am off my rocker. So I'd like your permission to take my prisoner back to Earth so I can give all my time to regaining my sanity." Tarau regarded Kirk with thoughtful eyes. "I think we should have a talk."  "I would like a talk. I would like nothing better than to chew the fat with you for hours on end if my jaw didn't hurt so damned much. So PH just take my prisoner and go. Do I have to sign a paper or something?" The overlord's surprise was fast becoming a kind of fascinated awe. "Kirk, you said?" He pointed to the door leading to the inner room. "Please go in, sir. There's no use of our standing out here while we discuss your problem." The Lieutenant eyed the door frame warily. "I tried getting through there before but the light got in my eyes!" "You can trust me." The police officer stepped cautiously through the opening and on into a luxuriously furnished room. Tamu, dressed much the same as one of Earth's better bankers, followed him in and suggested he sit down. "Why?" Kirk demanded bluntly. "Let's stop kitten-and-micing around, Mr. Tarnu. I'm not comfortable here and I want to leave. With her." He tilted his head toward the watching, sullen-faced Naia North. "And now." Tamu said, "Believe me, it will be as easy for you to return to Earth an hour from now. You seem weary to the point of exhaustion. I ask you again: sit down and get back some of your strength. Naia will find you something to eat." Kirk's stubborn determination to force an immediate showdown wavered. It had been born largely of fear to begin with, and  the thought of relief for his burning throat was impossible to resist. "I could use a drink," he admitted. Tamu gestured and Naia North turned to leave the room. But Kirk leaped forward to block her off. "Nothing doing! I don't take my eyes off you, baby. I'll just pass up that drink." The girl glanced at the overlord and shrugged helplessly. Tamu said, "Have a girl bring in something. While we're waiting I suggest all three of us get comfortable." While Naia was speaking into a tiny screen set into one of the silkcovered walls, Tamu and the man from Earth sat down across from each other on a pair of fragilelegged chairs. The overlord leaned back and sighed. "You've asked my leave to return to Earth and to take Naia back with you to stand trial for murder. Have you considered that I may refuse that permission?" "I don't think I have to consider it," Kirk said promptly. "You don't?" Tamu was mystified again. "Why not?" "You tell me you're the overlord. I take that to mean you're in charge. That means you have laws to govern your people and that means you believe in laws. One of your subjects has broken the law of my country. You can't refuse to let her take the consequences any more than if the situation was reversed." Tamu was shaking his head and smiling slightly. "I'm afraid you're not taking into consideration on fact, Mr. Kirk. Naia North broke your law, as you call it, on express and definite instructions from me." Martin Kirk made a show of astonishment. "Let me get this straight. You ordered Professor Gilmore and Juanita Cordell murdered? Is that what you're telling me?" "Yes." "Why?" ' "Exactly the reason I suggested we have a talk. To make you see why they -- and others in the same classification -- could not be allowed to live."  , ' "Men like Karney? Kennedy? Blatz?" Tamu blinked. "My respect for you increases, Martin Kirk." "Don't let it throw you. I'm a police officer, and police officers are trained to do the job right." The overlord crossed his legs and settled deeper into the chair. "Mythox needs men like you, Martin Kirk. That is why I'm going to give you a chance for life. For this you must understand: if I wanted it, you would be dead within seconds." A chill slid along the stubborn back of the Lieutenant but nothing showed in his impassive expression and he did not speak. "But because we do need you, I am going to tell you things no Earthman knows. I believe that once you understand why Mythox has undertaken to meddle in the affairs of another world -- and I tell you frankly that our doing so is as abhorrent to us as anything you can imagine -- once you understand our reasons, you will cheerfully, even eagerly, join us," "And if I don't?" . "You know the answer to that, A I'm sure." A slim fairhaired girl in a pale green toga-like dress entered the room carrying a tray holding tall glasses of some sparkling blue beverage. She offered it first to Kirk, then the others. The Lieutenant removed one of the glasses, wajted until Tamu and Naia had done the same, but not until they had drunk some of the liquid did he tilt his own glass. The cold tangy liquid hit him like a bombshell -- a bombshell on the pleasant side. He could almost literally feel his strength flow back, his senses sharpen and the poisons of fatigue and mental strain disappear. "I'm listening," he said. Tamu set his glass on the edge of a nearby table and bent forward, his manner earnest. "It won't take long. Martin Kirk. Hear me. We of Mythox are far in advance of the peoples of Earth -- both spiritually and scientifically. Life on our plhnet materialized in much the same manner as on your own world, but countless ages before. Almost the same process of evolution took place ; but somewhere along the line humanity on 'Mythox managed to reach full development without the flaws of character found among so many of Earth's inhabitants. When I tell vou that we find it almost impossible to voice an untruth, that taking a human life willfully for any reason is equally difficult, that crime of any nature is almost unknown here -- then you will see the difference between the two planets ... have ob place on a method for from terrene to managed to ht years of  worlds as we of years ago we control of your .ay we might choose. That is not our way, Martin Kirk, Free will is our heritage too -- and we respect it in ourselves, and that reason must respect it in others. So long as Earth's peoples confined their more destructive tendencies to themselves we kept our hands off -- even while we failed to understand such I ' senseless conduct. "And then one day we witnessed an explosion on. Earth's surface -- an explosion different from any of the countless ones before it. That explosion was the first man-made release of atomic energy -- a process we had known how to bring about' ages, but one we would never use. For we have learned the secret imitless power without the formation of mass into energy, is the way of destruction, ours isexactly the xst time. the leaders of of fear nuclear fison to the one hr ou eh ou t the in the were still would be no  part in Earth's our way, ; be. But there must   to this rule: no be allowed to treme I mentioned a moment T amu, overlord paused to drink from and to cast a speculative the stolid face of Martin Kirk might as well have studied the contours of a brick wall. "The road to that blunder had been opened the day your learned men first split the atom. If they persisted down that path, it was bound to follow that they would attempt the thing we feared : the splitting of hydrogen atoms -- the hydrogen bomb, as you call it. "We know what that would mean: a chain reaction that would wipe out an entire galaxy in one blinding flash. Our galaxy , Martin Kirk -- yours and mine! Do have any thought at all on that means?" The question was even ecu. head, the overlord "Mythox and grains of dust on aa s stars ant! planets wide and # Me countless other number of not always, know it, but thoroughly as we do our own. Fortunately for our purpose only a relative few have progressed along a line which can lead to danger for the rest. Yours is one of those which has -- and that is why we of Mythox have taken a well-masked place in your affairs so far as they relate to nuclear physics. "Every scientist of your world, male or female, is constantly under the eye of a Watcher. These Watchers are members of your own races -- people we have enlisted in the fight to save not just their world "When a W atcher learns a physicist is close to the one key to success in his effort to make a hydrogen bomb -- an equation that begins: 'Twelve times zero point seven nine' -- we are notified and a killer from our own people is sent to execute that scientist. Yes, Martin Kirk, we have those among us -- a very few -- who are capable of killing on orders and for cause. Naia, here, is one of them. She was sent to take the lives of Gregory Gilmore and Juanita Cordell; but she bungled and instead of their deaths resembling heart failure, they were obviously murdered. "Alma Dakin tried to cover up the truth by making it appear both scientists had died at the hands of a jealous husband. She succeeded, both because of her perjured testimony and the fact that Paul Cordell insisted on telling the truth. But when we of Mythox learned what had happened, Naia was sent back to confess the crime. She entered the laboratory only a few hours before she came...to your office; while she was in the laboratory the second time, the clues you found were put there. "Our mistake was in thinking that, once proof was offered clearing Cordell, the innocent man would be freed. For once more we credited Earthlings with the same code of ethics we of Mythox adhere to. "You succeeded in following Naia here. Only a man composed of equal parts of Earth bulldog and genius could have done so. Martin Kirk, I offer you a place among us and a lifetime devoted to making sure the galaxy of which we both are a part does not perish. What say you?" Several minutes dragged by. The eyes of both Tamu and Naia North were glued, to the grim visage of Homicide Lieutenant Kirk. It was impossible for either of them to know what thoughts were churning behind that stone face. Abruptly he stood up. "I'm a cop. I leave your kind of problem to the people who are good at it. My people, Tamu. You see, I belong to my world, not to yours. "But you've got a solid argument -- one I'd be a fool not to consider. Let me sleep n it. Tomorrow morning we'll talk about it some more; then I'll give you my answer. Right now I'm too worn out to think in a straight line." "Of course." The overlord rose to his feet. "Find Martin Kirk comfortable quarters, Naia, and leave orders he is not to be disturbed until he is ready to join us." On his way down a corridor behind the same slip of a girl who had brought him his drink, Martin Kirk was thinking: They didn't even frisk me for a gun! Martin Kirk went into his apartment and lay for a while looking at the ceiling. After a time, he got up and went out again. Chapter IX T he soft silvery radiance which this planet seemed to feature, bathed the metal hallway as Kirk marched stolidly toward the slim arcing stairway that led toward Naia's floor. This was certainly a strange building, he thought. The architects of Mythox knew how to use curves. They utilized them for utility and beauty to a point where a straight line was something to be surprised at. Pretty smart people, the Mythoxians -- in more ways than one. And Kirk, for no apparent reason, thought of a phrase comnion among children during his own childhood. "Who died and left you boss?" He counted the markings over one door. He had seen those markings before. Naia North lived here. And Naia North was in. Kirk walked softly across the large foyer room and quietly pushed open a door to the left. Naia, clad as always, in beauty, lay sleeping on a bed that stood out from the wall on two narrow rods of metal and needed no other support. As Kirk opened his mouth, Naia awakened, so she was looking calmly at him as he spoke. "Up, baby. You've got a date with a hot electrode a lot of light years from here. It's a hike, so rise and shine." , Naia sat up very slowly, very gracefully. She was what men dream of finding in bed beside them. What they marry to keep in bed beside them. "You must be mad" "As a hatter, baby. Into your duds." He saw her glance at the door jamb of the bedroom entrance, saw the shadow of disappointment in her lovely eyes. "You didn't put those Joe Louis light rays in your bedroom, did you?" Naia set her feet on the floor and drew herself to her full height. She wore light blue, a gown that hung as had that of Guinevere, as that of the Maid of Shalot. But Naia was contempt. She was contempt clothed in cold blue then contempt naked as she allowed the gown to fall to the floor. A few minutes later, she was contempt clothed for the street in tight britches and a loose blouse. "You go first," Kirk said. "And do as you're told. You may be a Mythoxian, but this .# doesn't know that. It puts big holes in anybody." As Naia walked serenely toward the hall door, there was only a touch of sullenness at the comers of her mouth. She turned her head to speak over her shoulder. "Hiding ' behind a t woman, brave Earthman?" "Yes and no. I'm hiding behind a woman from those damn straightleft rays, and Pm not a brave Earthman. I spend most of my time scared to death. That's why all of us are getting back to Earth quick, so I can draw an easy breath,"  "All of us?"  "Oh yes. Didn't I tell you? Yoii're taking me to the places I can find Alma Dakin and Orin. We're going to have witnesses and testimony. And the party who gets burned isn't going to be Paul Cordell." "I won't -- " "Hold it, honey." Kirk had picked up two items upon leaving Naia's apartment. A pair of filmy silk stockings and a white scarf. He jerked Naia's hands behind her back in somewhat of a surprise move. Before she recovered, her wrists were tightly bound. She gasped, "You -- madman," just before he deftly pulled the scarf across her mouth and twisted it into an effective gag. He stepped back to admire his handywork. "Now we're all ready. Orin and Alma." Naia shook her head in a slow' negative. Kirk pushed her gently into the hall and rounded to face her. "Yes, baby," he said. "You ought to know now I won't be stopped. I need Orin to fly that space buggy. If I don't get him we can't go. Then there'd be nothing left for me to do but even the score for Paul Cordell. He'll have to go but you'll keep him company." Naia stood like ' a statue, apparently considering. Then she moved slowly down the corridor in the opposite direction from which Kirk had come. Down three curving flights and stopping finally in front of a door identical to her own. L Kirk stepped forward and leaned firmly on the knob. The door opened. He knew where the bedroom was in these apartments now. He pushed Naia ahead of him, into the bedroom and saw Alma lying with her eyes dosed. Kirk whirled, just in time to level his gun and bring Orin to a dead stop. "Over by the bed, high-born." As Orin complied, Kirk leered at Naia. "That was clever, but I had it doped. I spotted them for husband and wife or the Mythox equivalent quite some time back. A good chance shot to hell." "What do you want here?" Orin demanded. "A chauffeur. We're heading Earthward on the first ship. That's the one out in the jungle." "But you talked to Tamu. I thought -- " "I'd been suckered? No no my friend ! On the force they called me the boy with the one-track mind." "I can see what they meant," Orin sighed. "I thought you would. Tell your wife to get dressed. We're getting an airsled." "You might have the decency to -- " "I won't turn my back. You can stand between us. That's the best I can do." A lma dressed swiftly in a costume similar to Naia's. When they were ready to leave, Kirk said, "Now let's get it straight once and for all. I'll stand for no fast moves. It's Earth or some quick slugs. Do you follow me?" Theydid not speak but they evidently believed Kirk because, fifteen minutes later, the party of four stood beside the ugly ship while thick trees and grasses whispered around them. "Inside." In the corridor, Orin stopped and turned as though having thought of a convincing argument he was bent upon trying. Kirk poked him sharply in the ribs with the barrel of the .# and he moved on after the women toward the ladder and thence to the motor room. Once inside, Orin turned and spoke sharplv. "Won't you reconsider?" "Push the levers, jack. The right ones." "Tamu is a reasonable man. We could talk to him again. He would make even a more generous offer." "I'm waiting."  "Certainly you did not refute the logic of his argument? We are in the right. Our case is just. The galaxies must be protected from -- " "The right levers, Jack." " -- from those who through ignorance, stupidity,' or ferocity would destroy it." "One more minute of .this and there'll be dead people aboard this ship." "You're helpless, really. You can't fly this ship without me. Therefore my life is safe. I merely refuse to launch it." "Would you like a dead wife?" Orin whitened perceptibly. "She may be a wife to you, but to me she's just a doll who helped lie a man into the chair." "You wouldn't do it! You haven't got the nerve to shoot down a man or a woman in cold blood." Kirk looked steadily into Orin's eyes. "You don't believe that do you, hud?" Orin held the gaze for a long time. Then he dropped his eyes. "No. I don't believe it." "Then get to work." "One last offer. Won't you reconsider. Join us?" "No!" "Very well." And Orin, a fixed, taut look on his face, reached forth his hand and touched a button on the panel board. It was a very special button. A button for use only when all hope was gone. The exploding space-time ship lighted the countryside to blinding    A.P. Jan #st -- Shortly after midnight today, Paul Cordell, convicted killer in the famous "woman from Mars" case, was put to death in the electric chair at the state penitentiary. The Stowaway Alvin Heiner  s He stole a ride to the Moon in search of # glory, but found a far different destiny. -- as they had been of late -- and his voice held a continuous intensity -- as though he were imparting a secret. I've got to get on that ship! I've got to, I tell you! And I'm going to make it!" Different members of the group regarded him variously, 'some with amusement, some with contempt, others with frank curiosity. # "You're plain nuts, Joe. What do you want to go to the moon for?" "Sure, why you wanna go? What they got on the moon we aint got right here?" There was general laughter from the dozen or so who sat eating their lunch in the shade of Building B. They all thought that was a pretty good one. Good enough to repeat. "Sure, what they got on the moon we ain't got here?" But Joe Spain wasn't in the rnood for jokes. He burned with even greater conviction and stood up as though to harangue the workers. "You wanta know why I got to go to the moon? Why I've got to get on that ship? Then PH tell you. It's 'cause I'm a little guy -- that's why! Joe Spain -- working stiff -- one of the great inarticulate masses." More laughter. "Where'd you get those big words, Joey? Out of a book? Come on -- talk English!" Joe Spain pointed to the huge, tubelike Building A, off across the desert; the building you had to havetwo different passes and a written permit to enter. The mystery building where even newspaper reporters were barred. "It's only the big shots they let in there ain't it? Only them that's got a drag or went to college or something. Us little guys they tell go to blow -- ain't that right?" "Who the hell cares? Maybe it's a damn good place to stay away from. Maybe it'll explode or someVI H ship when it ey can't push got a right even if we got to on the ground  I there's the glory! to see that s there. The glory of being rst rocket ship to the name of joe Spain written down in the history books over by people and school for thousands of years! Immortality! That's the word!" "Well, just forget about it, Joe, 'cause you ain't going' joe Spain's eyes burned brighter, "joe Spain, coming down the ramp with the big shots when it's all over. News cameras snapping! People asking for interviews!" "But you ain't going 'cause-" joe shouted the man down. "And another thing. Us little people are to a representative aboard that ship. We got a right to know zoins on. How come there's it in the papers? shots knowing about ermg among s because they're trying freeze us out!" . It's for security hush-hush so it  are being smart on," the it  just me a  me one . 'Tm ;omg to Joe Spain sai up suddenly. Joe He was knew when to stop sounc The men went shifting the hi from trucks into ing the wooden crates and per wrapped parcels up the ram and to the side o aluminum foarre; ing big secret structure labeled They worked until "five o' Then they filed out and got into the waiting trucks and were hauled back to town; the boom town that had mushroomed up in the desert overnight and would die with the same swiftness when the project was completed. ing house, washed up, put on his good clothes, and found a stool in a nearby restaurant. He ate a ly supper, glancing now and again at the clock. When the clock rea eight, he went out into stained darkness and walked three blocks to the Black Gat, one o three night, clubs the boasted. He went to a slowly, carefully, of a man who A half-hour doggedsaid a way in trip le nervous the bar and ing it over?" "I need a V ft rid of i from the barkeep. After 'Two thousand "A e ?V Hout o' here # Nick They walked out of the town and the desert, Niek stumbling now and again, to be supported by the Joe. "Two thousand, ick. You need the dough Sure. Need the dough. But it wouldn't work. Couldn't get you into one o' them barrels." "You wouldn't have to. All I ask is that you come along in the morning and seal me up in one. All you'll have to do is lock on the lid." "How you know the barrel# are going on the ship?" Never mind about that. I just know. I paid to find out." Okay -- suppose you do get on the ship in a barrel. Maybe it'll be stored in A hold somewhere. Maybe they wouldn't open it very soon. You'd die." got a way to gbt out. One of them special torches. The little uminum isn't very strong, can cut it like butter." a-:  . You'd burn yourworry about that # Joe want the two c.  C ' two the wall a air-tight for exhappy . You'd own oxygen . clear to the Break  on. , "Okay have the dough His heart smerin counted out two : When he'd finished he ha nine dollars left. He was But the happiest pauper who ever bought with his whole fortune, thing he craved most. "You won't doublecross me now will you? If you've got any like that -- " "I'll do like we said. Nick Sparks never went back on his word -- never. But how you going to stay hid when it's time to leave work?" "Leave that to me. It'll be easy. They don't check Building B too close. No double check 'cause it's over a mile from Building A -- outside the safety perimeter. I'll stay in tomorrow night and I'll put a little chalkmark on the barrel I'm in -- right near the top ' rim. First thing you do when you come to work the next morning is seal it and line it up with the filled ones," "Okay, but I gotta go home now. I got a head. I gotta set sleep." w "Clean Joe pulled the way. The guard, denim but the towel. K   Building B. Getting past the guard was a load off his mind. He'd expected to get by, but it was one of the calculated risks tiiat could have stopped him cold. Once inside the building, he put the bag into his locker and went to work. He labored briskly and carried more than his share of the load. But now again he stopped to look over at the outline of Building A, limned hard against hot blazing sky. And each time it was with a sense of heady exhilaration that he thought of his destiny -- his hard earned, dearly bought destiny. To be among that select group who would first set foot upon the surface of the Moon! He had no worries about not being allowed to do so. Once he showed himself -- with the ship far out in space -- they'd have to accept him. Not graciously of course, but they'd have to admire his courage and tenacity. They could not in all humanity, deny him a share of th victory. The day wore on and as quitting time approached, he became more tense -- more alert. Five minutes before the whistle, he faded back into the building and hurried to the lavatory. He went into the booth furthest from the entrance and locked the door. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Another of the calculated risks. The whistle blew. Almost immediately, the sound of footsteps broke the silence and the lavatory was filled with hurrying men. Their stay in the room was short, however, as Joe had known it would be. Men leaving for home do not dawA die on the premises. The lavatory was empty again. A period of silence while Joe raised his feet from the floor and braced them on the toilet seat. The entrance door opened. A guard making the departure checkup. Joe held his breath. If the guard came down the line and tried the door, he was finished. But Joe had banked upon human nature. The guard stopped. For a long .moment there was no sound and joe knew the man was bending over to run his eves down the line of toilets close to the floor. In this manner he could see the floor of every booth. The guard straightened, turned, walked out. The door closed. Silence. Joe's heart swelled with gratitude. He grinned, looking forward with joy to the long night ahead. He found a spot over behind the barrels where the night watchman would have to climb over a lot of equipment in order to find him. He made himself comfortable, practically certain the guard would not do this. He stretched out on the hard floor and recorded the passing of the hours by the number of times the watchman went through. And he was surprised at how fast the time passed. Finally, checking his count carefully, he left his hiding place and tiptoed to the line of lockers. He took the oxygen equipment from the duffel bag after which he hid the bag and the clothing therein behind a wall flange in a far corner... Then he climbed into the barrel at the front end of the packing line. He checked the barrel with a small X and jockeyed the lid into place.  pened. He wondered if he'd missed on the time element. The men should certainly have come to work now. More than once he was fempted to push the barrel lid aside and checkthe situation. When footsteps sounded, close by, and the lid snapped firmly into place, he was glad he hadn't done so. Good old Nick! When he got back from the Moon, he'd see to it that Nick got credit for his courageous act. Soon the barrel began to move. Joe felt it rise into the air and settle with a thump. Then the motor of a truck roared and Joe knew where he was going. Straight toward Building A and the Moon rocket. There was more movement until finally the barrel was set down for what appeared to be the last time, joe put the nose-piece of the oxygen tube into place and visualized himself safe and snug in a storage room of the rocket. He closed his eyes and went peacefully to sleep. He slept a long time, to be awakened by a crushing -- a wrenching -- that all but drove his head down into his spine. The pain brought him sharply alert. He knew instant' ly what had happened. Blast-off. He braced himself against the sides of the barrel and gritted his teeth.  Soon it was better. Then no pressure at all. Only the fierce happiness on his heart. He'd set a course and won through! He was on the way to the Moon! Joe let plenty of time elapse. He knew it was well over an hour later when he unlimbered the torch to cut an escape-hole in the barrel. This, he knew, would be tricky. He could easily burn himself. The heat would be intense. But it wasn't too bad. The aluminum cut quickly and in a matter of minutes, he was standing beside his barrel. As he'd suspected, it was a storage hold. The pitch darkness did not bother him. He'd come prepared with a small pencil flash that threw an adequate beam. He found the door, opened it and went out into a long passageway... N OW HE'D covered the length and breadth of the ship. He'd found a lot of rooms -- all in pitchdarkness. No observation ports. And no living thing. He stood frozen in one of the rooms while the beam of his flash picked out a code stenciled n a steel plate over some piece of machinery. X#-#MY -- Experimental -- Explosion Rocket -- Moon. The flash dropped from Joe Spain's fingers. He stood in the pitch darkness while the jets vibrated through the rocket. But there was no fear in him. Only the great pain of futility. Only his tears, and his whispered words: "They'll never know. Nobody won't ever know!" jua was neauty -- sne wa. Fascination -- she was Death  Klia had a beautiful why not? She made it herse body . And streets by night, watching the crowds with eyes of gray steel, waiting for Klia's probing thoughts to touch some unwary Terrain Sooner or later she would t have to betray herself to him if she meant to pursue her goal. And then he would kill her and go. This was Ms task, set for him by the director of the Phoenician Quarantine Commission. He had been here six months, s far the only evidence of resence was a series of articles journal, written by Willa e author had access to in no information was prealmost humorspeculation it was ohio steer the certain were those of the paranoid, but having matured in a society where such patterns were the norm, she was neither insane nor neurotic. Her mind was keen, and her grfals were those of the predator... San Rorrck had tq find and kill her quickly. He watched the streets by night because her race and his were both non-sleepers. They were capable resting a part of the brain at a time having two cortical areas for bodily function. He knew she won become bored by ni tivity; sooner or later she come w city slept. In what findher? Her pearance did not c ran standards. #owy, nearly a! ightly i natura.  control her circulatory and glandular systems in such a way that fatty deposits would appear where she desired them and disappear in other places so that she could change her features and her form at will, as he himself had done. Of one thing he was certain : Her paranoid pride would not permit her to assume a guise regarded as ugly by this world. Most certainly she would make herself strikingly beautiful. San Rorrek however had reduced his body-weight, padded his cheekbones to give himself a gaunt appearance, dyed his hair black and his skin a sallow shade. An irritant, rubbed into pinpricks on his face, resulted in mild acne that made him something less than handsome. He smeared his teeth with brown stain, wore shabby second-hand clothing, and a pair of plain-rimmed glasses. He was not here to attract attention ; he was here to kill. He looked like a peddler or a laborer out of a job. He was walking down a sidestreet at midnight when he caught the first faint aura of her presence. She was somewhere within a few blocks, and she was planting a suggestion in the mind of the Terran who would not recognize the source of the thoughts as stemming from outside his own consciousness.  Sweee-whew! Thai dame on the corner! Did she look at me? Think Til walk that way. This was it! San had not reached out to touch the Terran # s mind, for in doing so he would broadcast his own thought-aura and reveal his presence to Klia. He had merely listened to Kfia's planting of the thought in the Terran s mind, and he caught the general direction from whence it came. He began walking rapidly up the street, then cut through the blackness of an alley. Was she playing games, or had she chosen a Terran to be of some service to her? Perhaps she was bored, and only wanted a brief love-affair... paused to peer toward both intersections. There were a few people on the sidewalk, but no woman tail enough to be Klia. He jaywalked and darted down the next alleyway. If the Terran had responded immediately to her suggestion, they would perhaps be gone before he could reach them. But then he caught another brief flash of thought-not words, but an image. She was helping the Terran imagine what she might look like without clothing. San chuckled as he trotted ahead. Unknowingly, she had given him a clue as to her appearance. Through glandular control, she had apparently padded herself to a remarkable condition of mammalian grandiloquence. The effect was almost surrealistic; the way a male might design a female if he had any choice in the matter. "You liked that, eh?" snarlecl a quiet voice from the darkness of a doorway. He stopped abruptly  in mid, alley, caught in a puddle of moonlight. She had tricked him. There had been no Ter ran. The phoney suggestion had been a trap. He glanced quickly around. "Don't move," she snapped. "I've got a native gun on. you -- a projectile weapon, in case you aren't familiar with their artifacts." Fie stood in stony silence, staring at the doorway until he made out her faint shadow. There was a tiny venom-gun strapped to his wrist, but its action would not be immediate, and if he used it, she would have ample time to kill him before she died. If it came to that he would use it, but now he hesitated, trying to piece together her immediate intentions. He shrugged and grinned. "Okay. So I lost. Shoot and get it over with." "Not here. They'd run an autopsy on you, pastoral. They'd figure you weren't quite Terran." "Fm no pastoral. Pm an inventive." "It's all the same to me, Rorrek. You're a lousy Thirder, Now move! Stay in the moonlight and walk slow. Stop when you come to the street. HI be right behind you." "Where are we going?" "Shut up! And don't start making suggestions at a policeman, or I'll kill you." Rorrek started walking. He felt her thoughts scanning lightly through various regions of consciousness-patterns until she found a taxi-driver. Then: I gotta hunch there's a customer on the next street . Think Til turn right. The taxi was approaching the alley entrance as they emerged. "Flag it," she ordered. Rorrek obeyed grim-lipped. "You get in first, darling," she said in a pleasant tone. "I like to sit on the right" "That's just because I'm right handed, dear," he purred acidly. "Where to, sir?" Out of the city , the girl ordered Rorrek wordlessly. Tell him . "Ask her. She's boss." The gun jabbed him ruthlessly in the ribs. The driver grinned. "Where to, lady?" She hesitated. "A long trip?" "I low long?" "Oh, thirty, forty miles. North." "It'll cost you." "That's all right. Will twenty dollars do it?" "Maybe. Watch the meter and double it. You'll have to pay both ways." "Let's go." Rorrek glanced at her sourly as they moved through the traffic. She had been exaggerating only slightly with the mental image used to trap him. The platinum blonde hair, the gray eyes, the aristocratic features, the full, slightly cynical mouth -- she conformed perfectly to the beauty standards of this world. The black dress revealed things that would have won her first place in any of the inane native female contests. "You've done well by yourself, I see," he said, eyeing the expensive clothing and jewelry. What tele path couldn't? And stop talking aloud . He watched her for a moment. The gun was in her handbag. So was her hand. And she was keeping a sharp eye on him. Rorrek frowned No opening yet. Where are we going? Someplace where you can dig a hole without being seen.  Rorrek stared ahead at the traffic for a moment. He didn't need to ask her what the hole was for. ing an intersection and the light was just changing from green to red. Having heard the girl summon the taxi, Rorrek knew the man's consciousness pattern. He adjusted to it quickly and planted a rapid suggestion: Damn the light ! I can make it! The girl cursed and lifted the handbag. The light was already red. A car shot out from the other street. The brakes screamed. A policewhistle shrilled angrily. "Shoot," Rorrek dared, smirking at Klia. The handbag hesitated. "Make a wrong move and I'll have to." The driver was too busy with his own troubles to hear them. The cop came stalking across the pavement. "You like to live dangerously, huh?" he said in a bored voice. The cabby began a plaintive explanation. "Come on, dear," said Klia. "We'll catch another cab " "I like this one,"  Get out , or Fll kilt you and the cop too. Pay the driver. Rorrek handed the driver a dollar. They crossed to the sidewalk and the girl looked shaken. This was a busier street and there were  m more pedestrians. He grinned at her again. "May I buy you a drink before you finish me off?" Surprisingly, she replied, "Fll let you live that long, pastoral. It's interesting to watch you try to wiggle out of it." He knew she meant it. She could have hypnotized the cop and the driver, shot him in the cab, and strolled calmly away as one of a dozen multiple mental images. She could still do it, but evidently the idea of making him dig his own grave appealed to her icy sense of humor. They entered a small bar and she directed him toward a secluded booth. "I'm surprised you haven't used your wrist weapon yet," she said as they sipped a martini. "Apparently you pastorals have no capability for self-sacrifice." His face showed no surprise, but he rested his arm across the table. He smirked. "I was waiting for a better opportunity, but since you put it that way let's get it over with." His other hand darted toward the lethal wrist. "One moment," she said. He paused. "Do you have an extra projectile?" He frowned, then nodded. She smiled again, and laid a braceleted white arm across the table. "I'll skve you the trouble of firing. Prick me with it." His throat started with surprise. "You're not immune," he hissed. "To Ayoyo venom? Try me." Rorrek gained new admiration for her. The process of immunization was an excruciatingly painful treatment covering three years and mean but this for a and she Correct, pastoral us from sent us to an ironhe pro #k i "Fm an inventive." "An artificial category. An inventive is a maladjusted pastoral who wishes he were I a Klidd." Her use of the ancient feudal name for her race startled him. His people had almost forgotten it. Once on Nu Phoenicis IV there had been the Klidds, or barons, the Algum or serfs, and the Taknon, or artisans. The feudal system had lasted more than five thousand years, and because of natural selection operating within the occupational groups, the three classes had become genetically distinct. After the rise of a technology, the Klidds were overthrown and exiled to the ironless fourth planet where they formed their own ruthless social order under a strict space quarantine, enforced by the Taknon spaceforce which Rorrek served. ;uing heredity with he said. " ss your t s go, .e signals. Terran idiom," he company is youryou, if I know yomre A smile, these people, a casual Iran the room a  like you can find me, cr : drive and provin nicis has habitable planets. T let's see you stop us." He . nodded thoughtfully, that's the picture. You get Terra to send ships to your world peering no human life there. The ships come back to Terra full of your people, ready to take over. Then you get your hands on Terran iron and steel to use in attacking my people." "In general, yes." Her gray eyes were icy calm, and she hated him with a fierceness that he could feel hated him as a symbol of the race who had exiled her people. "You're pathetic," he said quietly. ' She flushed, then her face went hard. Pie bored in. U I have  always felt inte: sorry for your asinine emotion # ? No Klidd could endure turned white and hissed a her native tongue. He I probe in her when she squeezed her gun, he was on ing the table crashed down as tfc The bullet tore out with a to roar, the people cringing tobelongings and called a cab, ward the walls. A police-whistle An hour later he was aboard a made an ear-shocking screech as flight for San Francisco. There was the traffic cop from the corner no returning to his home planet came lumbering in to investigate. for he had ditched the ship at sea "Dont anyone move! # he bel-. lest it be found by Terrans, Such lowed, and charged across the were the quarantine regulations, room toward Rorrek, who was He felt certain that Klia had done about to kick Klia's temple to inthe same with her stolen Hydrian sure her death. His foot froze and ship for another reason: Lest it be settled to the floor. found by a commission agent such "Call an ambulance," the cop as himself. Also, her plan for leadbawled at the manager. "Everying Terrans spaceward, luring body stay back!"  them to Phoenicis IV, and taking Rorrek began, "It was purely their ships, required that they conan -- " ' tinue in their naive belief that "Don't say anything. Just stand there and keep your hands in sight." Rorrek kept his hands in sight. He stared at the cop, suggesting nausea, suggesting a fluttering of the heart, suggesting asphyxiation. The cop began to gasp and reel. Rorrek increased the mental dosage. The cop choked and fainted. As Rorrek walked calmly out into the night, he heard voices behind him telling that the girl was dead. He felt sick himself now. There was something compelling about Klia, something that attracted. He felt a little like a child,  drawn toward a cruel mother -- or Terra possessed the only human life in the galaxy. So he was stuck here for life unless a Taknon ship came to pick him up, and there had been no guarantee of that from the Commission. Secret landings on nonspacegoing planets were forbidden except in several specifically defined emergencies. Rescuing a second-class agent was not one of them. , He was faced with a life of ease but of loneliness. A telepath would have no difficulty acquiring tremendous wealth here, but a telepath would have no company -- unless he could find a few natives a husband, lured to a wantonly selfish and unfaithful mistress. He knew she had to be killed, yet now that it was done, he felt rotten inside. At last he found a doctor and had his flesh-wound dressed. Fie stared at the doctor peculiarly and the medic seemed to forget it had been a bullet wound. Rorrek went 'i whose neural associative circuits were so ordered as to make telepathy latently possible. Occasionally he had encountered a Terran whose thought-aura was vaguely perceptible. Perhaps, through long and patient hypnotic conditioning, their latent abilities could be brought forth. If the genetic hodgepodge could be straightened out, Terran had high possibilities. Their" basic genetic emotion-patterns were not as sharply divided into groups a those of Nu Phoenicis, but the patterns were present, and the conflict among them was present. Rather than calling them Pastorals, Inventives, and Imperials, as in the Phoenician case, he decided perhaps that the basic Terran-pattems could best be described by the goals they were inclined to favor. The "Security-Seekers", the "Knowledge-Seekers", and the "GlorySeekers" perhaps. Phoenician code forbade any tampering with non-threat cultural forms, but who was there to enforce it? And in a sense, this was his planet now. Marooned here, he could participate in a subtle way, and help a few local inventives find new directions. Maybe he owed who would certainly have steered them spaceward, although the end result would have been disastrous for them, had her plan worked. Francisco he spent replenishing his funds through poker games, wrestling matches, and various forms of betting in which thoughtprojective powers were a distinct advantage. Then he rented a house in the suburbs, ordered half a ton of various electronic parts, and began building several computer units while he concentrated on revising his physical appearance to a more pleasing form. As the weeks passed, he put on weight, removed the fatty tissue from his cheekbones, thickened his cheeks enough to remove the gauntness, and restored his complexion to a healthier hue. When he was finished, he had the appearance of a gregarious young businessman, cleanly attractive but not offensively handsome. He finished the computer shortly after he finished himself. It was not a large unit as computers went. It was built into a chassis the size of an eight-foot refrigerator. A Terran might say it was constructed to handle problems in that rarefied strata of mathematics known as the Von Neumann theory of games. But the twenty-four instruments on its face were calibrated in "points per share". Rorrek spent a month in libraries, photographing stock-market reports covering a thirty-year period. These he laboriously studied, plotting the rise and fall of each stock on graphs, writing empirical equations to describe each graph, and feeding the equations to the computer's memory tanks. Fed also into the tanks, were thirty-year record-equations describing taxrates, population growth, national income, government expenditures, world armaments, exports, imports, and average individual incomes. The computer, required to assume that all the variables were dependent upon one another, evolved an implicit function in some thirtyseven variable quantities. He then fed it the "present conditions" and required it to extrapolate the values forward over a period of two months. Eleven stocks appeared due for sharp rises within the period. San Rorrek invested ten thousand dollars. At the end of two months, the stocks had risen fifteen thousand. He corrected the small errors in the computer's estimates by supplying new data, then extrapolated again, selling and reinvesting in accordance with the new predictions. There was danger, of course, that a completely unpredictable series of events might occur to cause unfavorable market fluctuations. Therefore he very carefully watched world conditions, political developments, and technical advancements. Klia's articles were still appearing in magazines and technical journals, but that was not surprising, considering the usual lag between the acceptance of an essay and its publication. And the pieces were having subtle repercussions in the news, attracting no attention in themselves, but spurring certain scientists to think along new lines. Klia had suggested a method for testing basic mental formative patterns in infancy; and now a western university's psychology department was setting up a research lab "for studying the basic affective reaction patterns of infants at birth". Klia, under another pen-name, had suggested an extension of relativistic mechanics to cover hypothetical N-dimensional universes. The newspapers announced now that the famous mathematician, Larwich, was beginning work on the creation of a mathematical physics with no basic assumptions other than those of elementary arithmetic. "Man's only insight into reality," said Larwich, "derives  from his ability to count on his fingers. All else is purely experiential approximation." Rorrek grinned. Klia had been " trying to steer Terran inventors straight toward a fivespace interstellar drive, while the government  research in the hope of reaching the moon. She was trying to get the mathematicians to see the velocity of light as a constant only at one specific universe-level of five-space, and as a different constant at other levels. And she had managed to steer Larwich in the right direction. Only one thing was lacking: an experiential tie between observable reality and the theory Larwich would certainly develop. Without' it, the theory would remain merely abtruse mathematical speculation of an invariantive nature. Rorrek's fingers itched at the typewriter, longing to supply the missing suggestion. A guilt-reaction, he told himself, probably associated with Klia's death. Nevertheless he wrote an essay entitled "Origin of Interstellar Hydrogen", and sent it to a university press periodical. The article suggested that the spontaneous appearance of matter in the fourspace cosmos could be explained in terms of a five-space continuum with a circulation of matter along the fifth component. The essay was rejected with a brief note from the editor: "Sorry, but we just last week purchased an essay dealing with the mechanics of this 'continuous creation # notion. Your style is good. Try us again, .soon. Editor. # ' Rorrek snorted and chucked the essay in the wastebasket. Some local yokel had probably beat him to the draw with some weirdly empirical notion that left out the tie with five-space. The rejection irritated him. He decided to give it up for a while, and concentrate on making himself Dr. Larwich was in San Francisco for the summer. After some debate about the desirability of direct intervention, he found the professor's address -- a modest cottage overlooking the bay with a short stretch of narrow beach before it. half a mile away. Three days later he wandered I past the professor's cottage, having spied three brown todies sunbathing on the beach before it. As he drew nearer, he studied them curiously. An elderly couple and a girl in her late twenties, possibly Larwich's daughter. She was watching him casually -- a large, dark girl with hazel eyes and firm breasts. Rorrek approached 'the group. "Am I still on a public beach?" he asked, "Or am I a trespasser?" The elderly couple glanced up questioningly. The girl smiled. "Trespassers are welcome. Help yourself." She had a nice musical voice. "I've got the next cottage down the line," he said. "Bui I scarcely realized I had neighbors." "It is lonely out here. Won't you sit with us awhile? You look tired." Rorrek grinned and patted a slight bulge in his mid-section. "Trying to work off my bay window." He strolled toward them, scraping his feet in the sand. The old man looked down at his own sagging belly, then glowered at the stranger. "Young man, you have just committed a grievous faux pas, # ' he grunted. "I'm Edith Larwich," said tke girl. "This is my father. Frank Larwich... and my mother, Louise." He nodded and sat down. "I'm Sam Rory." He hesitated, looking at the professor and gathering a frown. "Larwich -- Frank Larwich -- I've heard of you, I think. Is it Doctor Larwich -- of the new-look in invariantive viewpoints?" The old man looked surprised. He lifted his eyebrows first at his wife, then his daughter. He extended his hand to Rorrek and looked a beam of amusement down his slender nose. "Young man, you have just absolved yourself of that faux pas. What school are you with?" "No school." "What research lab, then?" "No lab, I'm a gambler." "Bah! Stop joking. Laymen don't talk about invariance, or remember the names of old codgers like me." i He shrugged, "I apologize for being a layman, sir, but I like mathematics. I've read a few of your pieces in the digest." Larwich glanced at his wife and daughter again. They were looking curiously at Rorrek. "My fame comes as a distinct shock to me," the old man said tea n#  V mm a it?  n managed to rom her body, beauty were to appeal to him, o you expect to publish theory. Doctor?" he  # casually runted the I expect to publish it within a few months. It's comm along much faster than I thought. In fact, it scares me sometimes." Rorrek fell briefly thoughtful. Any man would could work that theory out in a few months was certainly the mental equal of the best minds of his own race. It startled him. Here seemed proof enough that T erran-humanity was going places, given a little intelligent biosocial reform. "That's remarkable," he murmured,. "I thought it would be at least two years," "So did I. But Edith here helped me tremendously with certain down-to-earth suggestions. It may seem unbelievable to you, but I think this tiling is going to have applications, certain observable phe n ooked sharply at the girl, at him, faintly with eyes. The old man u it's mention in physics, some possible :v :ween my "Such as taneous creation quietly The amusement gir. is really a him to any poker grinned at the visitor # is remarkable. We # sU   better acquainted He murmured felt a vague uneasiness, lie come to plant a hint of the correlation in the mathematician's mind, but now there was no to do so. When Harwich was through, physicists could build an experimental five-space generator on the basis of his theory. When the physicists were through making data-tables, engineers would be able to construct a working model interstellar drive, provided someone would make the investment. Rorrek, busy making a fortune in the stock-market, musingly saw himself as angel for the first s Edith stood up, tuggin suit to cover a streak of white She smiled down at him, " I'll swim. Care to join me?" "Leave Turn here for a will you?" grunted Harwich. Rorrek nodded at meet you in the water. She lithe, brown, "Your daughter ful, sir," "Eh ? Oh self marvel fa C "In personality. You see, she was nearly blind until a few months ago. Cataracts. And she was always so retiring, quiet and introspective. IPs remarkable what the removal of a physical defect can do for a girl's personality. You wouldn't call her shy and retiring now, would you?" "Not at all, Quite friendly, I'd say. Rorrek watched her plunging gracefully in the surf, and he wondered at his vague uneasiness.  "What do you really do, Sam?" Larwich asked. "Investor. I hit it lucky on the market. Gambler -- same thing " . Larwich chuckled. "You evidently read technical publications as a hobby, then. Or are you working on a mathematical way to beat the stock market?" Rorrek smiled enigmatically, and got to his feet. "You might try the Von Neumann theory of games," he offered, then smiled sheepishly. "If you'll excuse me, I think I'll join  your daughter for a swim." feeble breakers when he trotted through the shallow water, but she rolled on her back to wave ' and watch him. A very beautiful, intelligent girl, he thought calculating! y. If he were to remain marooned on Terra, it would be interesting to see if normal procreation could result from marriage with a native. He felt an urge to touch the girl's mind, then decided against it for the present. Some Terr an s seemed sensitively receptive, and they became startled by undue power. She lay treading water until he swam up beside her, then she smiled but her eyes were thoughtful. "Water's nice!" he grunted. "Is it?" He frowned. "Why the challen ing tone ?" Who are you, anyway?" Just who I said I was. Sam Rory, gambler, investor." She said nothing more about It, but her eyes were suspicious. They U # swam in silence for a time, then she called. "How's the beach downV ' at your place?" He hesitated. Was she angling? "Just fine " he said. "Why don't you come down?" She lifted her wet head from the tide and nodded soberly. "I will. Very soon." Again he felt the vague uneasiness. Rorrek spent the afternoon on his porch, watching the bay. Tomorrow he meant to go back to the suburbs, return to the task of making hirnself the wealthiest man in the country as quickly as possible, then start endowing universities with research grants like a fat old capitalist with a guilty conscience. Twilight came, and he felt the loneliness of an alien longing for home. He visualized the warm, rollwith pastoral Algun villages, and the great walled city-states of the Taknon, covering hundreds of square miles and set in the midst of the Algun landscape. They worked in harmony, the two races -- each maintaining its own government, each keeping itself socially and biologically separated, yet each realizing that one could not exist and prosper without the other. It was a class society that worked, worked because the classes were divided according to the goals they sought, not according to any artificial framework. Of course, Man's goals were chosen in the light of his emotions and aptitudes, and at least among the Phoenicians, emotion and aptitude patterns were founded on genetic bed-rock. It was only rarely that Taknon aptitudes were bom in an Algun village, and equally rare when a pastorally inclined child appeared in the Taknon cities. Loneliness weighed heavily on him. With some misgivings he closed his eyes, and searched through the transor regions for the Larwich girl's pattern of consciousness. When he passed through it, he started up with a low gasp -- and lost the pattern. There had been a knife-edge sharpness about it -- a clarity of focus that suggested resonant neural circuits as in the trained telepath. He groped for it again. But when he found it, the sharpness was gone -- if it had really been there. The transor was strong but blurred, unreadable. He decided his first impression had been illusion. I wonder what that young man is doing ? he suggested. He did invite me to his beach. Maybe if I walked down that way . He paused a moment, trying to catch the blurred images that swam in leisure through her consciousness. But they were too muddled. He withdrew from her and waited. Half-a-mile might be too far for the untrained mind to catch the faint suggestion, and even though she would mistake the thoughts for her own, she might offer herself some counter-excuse for not coming. the failing gray of twilight. After a few minutes, the screen door opened, and someone stood on the porch. Then she trotted down the steps to the beach and came walking his way, but looking toward the sea. As she drew nearer; he saw that she was wearing white shorts and a pale blue blouse with the tail knotted about her waist. The wind whipped the blouse against her breasts and ruffled her short dark hair like a nest of feathers. He watched her come toward him with narrow speculative eyes, and he wondered again: Was a procreative union possible here? She looked toward him and waved, breaking his reverie, then on apparently sudden impulse turned and plodded through the sand toward his porch. "Am I trespassing? Or did you invite me to your beach?" "Come on up," he called. "I was just wishing you'd drop by." She hooked her foot on the step and cocked her head at him. "Why?" It startled him. "The answer to that," he chuckled, "might be  found in textbooks of psychology and biology, particularly the latter. Come up and sit down." "Not if you're going to be biological #  "Only in t respectively so. I have insufficient data on the subject to feel safe in rash experiments." She laughed aid came up to take a chair, propping her long, trim legs on the rail. "The subject is a carnivore who might chew off an ear. #  "Mrnmp! How about a nice thick steak with onions and french fries and a gallon of beer?" "The bloated subject would fall asleep in her cage" "Exactly. # She watched him with cool amusement in the dusk. "I think we find each other attractive." "Tm glad it's mutual. I have plans for you. #  She dropped her legs, rested her elbows on her knees, and swung half around to grin peculiarly, head cocked up at him. "Okay, Sam. Finish the funny story.' He leaned toward her and tried to steal as softly as possible into her consciousness pattern, but he kept his voice light and casual. "The plan is simple biology, but it involves many unknowns as yet For instance -- " He pulled her face toward him slowly, and moulded her mouth with his. Quietly they slipped to their feet, locked tightly together, laughing quietly with soft fire where their faces touched. He brought his mind slowly into full resonance with her pattern, demanding her to respond. The response was white flame, but not of the body. His mind reeled for an instant before he understood. Full focus ! Too bright! And something hard against Ms ribs. You should have been born a Klidd! He backed away, staring at her, and the glint of metal in her hand. I wasn't certain , she went on until you threw that full resonance at me. "Klia!" "Yes." She found a cigaret with her left hand and lit it while she held the gun on him with her right. He could see her face in the match-flare, and it appeared tight and drawn. "Your lipstick is smeared," he offered. "Thanks. It was a pleasure. Fm really sorry I have to kill you " "Like you killed Larwich's blind daughter and took her place?" Klia snorted. "Shes not dead. She's still blind, and she's an amnesiac in a Pennsylvania psychopathic ward." "Hypnotically induced amnesia, undoubtedly. # "Right. I had to get her personality patterns, and leave her a blank" "I thought I left you dead on the floor." She sighed impatiently. "Would a Terran know when a Phoenician was dead?" Rorrek saw his blunder and' gritted his teeth. He'd been a fool to believe. Naturally, every time someone touched her wrist to test her pulse, she had simply stopped her heartbeat until the fellow let go, or perhaps shut off the circulation in the arm. "Well, you've got Larwich well on the road to the theory of a space drive, I see." She nodded, started to reply, paused, then: "You didn't suspect me because you thought I was dead. Then why did you come prowling around Larwich?" "To do what you've already done." "You're lying." "See for yourself," He began sliding into resonance with her, but she bached away warily and blocked him out. "You can break it whenever you want to," he said. She risked it, and their transors found sharp focus again. He reeled off the contents of his associative circuits relating to Larwich and his theory, reeled them off too rapidly for them to be inventions of the moment. Then he switched to memories concerning his thoughts of her. "Why did you do that?" she muttered when he was through. Her voice was shaky, and the gun seemed to be sagging in her hand. He shrugged. "We're a long way from Nu Phoenicis. I expect to be here for good." "You will be," she said ominously, straightening. "Start marching down to the water." "Why?" "The tide's going out. You'll go with it " "Suppose I suggest we work together," She laughed scornfully. "Move, quickly, Taknon!" He walked slowly down the steps and into the faint moonlight. He moved ahead with a calm leisurely tread. Behind him the girl laughed. "You're part Klidd, Rorrek. A hybrid -- or a throwback." He failed to ask her why. "I could feel affection for a Taknon, but I couldn't love one. Fve watched you. You're part Klidd. I can feel it." He wondered why his throat constricted. He said nothing. "I love you, Rorrek. Damn your hide." But she loved her planet more. "What are you going to do about Larwich now?" he asked coldly. "Are you going to switch to someone else, or are you going to keep on brazening it out?" "Switch. I'm through with him. He's on the right course," Rorrek started wading into shallow water. "Go on out past the breakers," she called. "I don't want you to wash back in." "Glad to oblige," he grunted, but he paused to look back. She had kicked off her sandals and was wading after him. She stopped, gun glinting in the moonlight. "Well?" "'One thing." He scanned for her mind, but she blocked, refusing him resonance. He bludgeoned through until he made a strong but fuzzy contact. He held the contact, but turned away and began wading through the gentle rush of breakers while he wandered through his associative circuits concerning Stop it, Rorrek! I Then the resonance was complete., and he chuckled, because she was going to feel it when she shot him. Beyond the breakers, he turned again to fac her. She was reeling dizzily, holding the gun at arm's length, with her left hand pressed tight to her face. shots when they came. Two went wide, but the third seared his chest, and he went down, fighting for air. hearing a choking scream from Kiia. He gasped once and went under, swimming weakly for deeper water. Another bullet streaked phosphorescence through the blackness about him. He drove still deeper, clinging precariously to consciousness. Another slug streaked under him ard he veered upward. Seven cartridges in the gun, five gone. If he could only live a little longer. Then he had to rise for air. He spun around and came up slowly, facing shore. She was walking dejectedly back across the beach toward his cottage. He waited for her to look back. He dog-paddled with the waves, but the tide seemed to be sweeping him out. "PraTaW Bladen, Klia! # he choked in their native tongue. "For the love of Man!" She heard him. She turned slowly, watched him coldly for a moment, pistol lifted high. " PraTalf Kliddn, TaknonV # came her icy paraphrase. The gun barked, and barked again. Seven! But this time it was his abdomen, and he heard himself screaming as he fought toward shore. He could only partially control the flow of blood to the wounds. When tissue cried for blood, the unconscious reflex let it go. It was like holding one's breath, and occasionally he had to bleed. She was standing there watching him, white in the moonlight, locked in a kind of trance. Co, he thought at her savagely. When I get there , Vll kill you -- for those last two shots. She looked at the gun in her hand. She let it drop, stared down at it, wiped the hand distastefully on her shorts. She backed away a step, stumbled in the sand, and sat down, rolling her head on her knees. He groped for her mind, and she erected no block. She hoped he would die before he got to shore, but she wasn't going to move. Fate, about to be satisfied -- it gave him angry strength. A breaker washed over him from behind, and he rode with it briefly. When it passed him by and dropped him, he stood chest-deep, wading shoreward. He peered at her dazedly, hands clenching and unclenching in anticipation. He let her feel the strength of his hate, but her thoughts were wandering -- her home, her people. But she saw them differently somehow, as if she were no longer capable of being guided by their values. Her affective framework had collapsed. She sat in a bewildered daze. He staggered from the water and fell to his knees on the sand. He crawled toward her with savage deliberation in the moonlight going to  a i v t him brittle shattered. She screamed and pawed at her face. He hit her again and again, rblling across the sand, battering her face until his fists were driving into wet pulp. "My eyes! My eyes!" Weakly he crouched over her, staring. She had been wearing contact lenses. The green irises had been stained on the glass to cover her gray ones. Now jagged slivers of glass protruded from under her eyelids. She rolled her head and moaned, trying to escape him. :s were coming down the beach, and Doc. Larwich was shouting frantically. Rorrek backed away from the girl. She came to her and began running blindly, toward a. sand embankn cry was drunkenly after her.     around the on the her into it. watching the her. Then she mg went to meet lurched for her. to a doctor," for her. She under his arm fist  my eyes , He let carlo usly to internal glaring lights him, and the car weave she used his guide her. He knew he had won stopped her, for as noiac culture, loss of deformity was cause and ridicule among the blinded Klidd, like a tribesman or Zulu warrior, was disgraced and ashamed. The only recourse was death. Why didn't she accept it then? He was waiting for her to ram the car into a truck or bridge, but she drove as straight as his failing sight would allow. tr L # ' A ert Honkler, Physician and Surgeon?' He stared at the white house, and the girl pulled to the curb. "Get out!" she ordered, but left the engine running and staye hind the wheel. So that w r as i here, and now. going to plunge "Why?" he "PraTak snapped with that masked of Man!" bii He. jerke "Let me go ! # We'll work together , Klia. We'U get these people into space , and somehow we'll help your people. She laughed bitterly. Help them? Yoy never gave them a chance! When the feudal order collapsed , the Taknon and the Algun adapted out you banished the Klidd without letting them find a place in the new society . You hated them too much as your former tyrants, "A place? What place could a Klidd -- # ' Administrators , coordinators , or ganizers. But you exiled us to a world without iron, condemned us to an eternal stone age . There is but one fundamental right of Man , Taknon! The right to try. You denied it to us , Footsteps were coming down the walk, and gentle hands were dragging them out of the car. Came blackness. When he awoke, he expected to iron bars, or the walls of a hospital room. Instead, he was in his own home in the suburbs. He tried move, and groaned. Something rustled in the room, "Lie still  # she said. He rolled his head weakly to look at her. She sat stiffly in a straightbacked chair by the window, morning sunlight playing in her hair. There was a bandage across her eyes. He groped for her mind, and found the answer. She had helped the doctor forget that he had ever seen three bulletwounds and a pair of ruined eyes. "As soon as you're able to get up, I'll go' she said coldly. "No. You'll stay. Well build ships. We'll get your people to a ferrous planet somehow -- an uninhabited one. If they can build a civilization from scratch, they deserve it." She stood up and faced the window for a time, soaking in the warm sunlight, and he allowed her the privacy of her thoughts. The right to try -- even for a race of power-grabbers . PraTalv  Bladen. For the love of Man. "My eyes  # she said dully. "He said there's not much chance." a it There is a chance ? # She shrugged. We still have one pair " And he showed her herself through them; showed her herself with ever-increasing daring blushed crimson.   But her hands reached out to him. until she  The little house pet from Venus di New York , so New York had to I I sound of the gun. He liked the way it slapped back against his shoulder when he fired. Somehow it did not seem a part of the dank, steaming Venusian jungle. Probably, he realized with a smile, it was the only old-fashioned recoil rifle on the entire planet. As if anyone else would want to use one of those old bone-cracking relics today! But they all failed to realize it made sport much more interesting. a vend seen anything for a Ms wife said, She had a ce and a strong you have money #uld really keep a woman looking f course. Venus frontier, a hot, dace that beck m a said, "That's true. Yesterday we could bag them one af ter the other, as fast as I could fire this contraption. Today, if there's anything bigger than a tnouse, it's hiding in a hole somewhere. You know what I think, Lindy?" "What?" "I think there's a reason for it. v A lot of the early Venusian hunters said there were days like this. An area filled with big lizards and cats and everything else the day before suddenly seems to clear out, for so reason. It doesn't make sense."' Why not? Why cou : decide to make tra just decide t place else on at an m a.:buzzing around his ri mopped his sweating and peo; hunter. He ' lot of money O ' . ting his wife's trim shoulder under the white tunic. "No, Lindy. It just doesn't work that wav. Not on .   Earth and ndt on Venus, either. You think there's a piedpiper or something which calls all the animals away?" "Maybe. I don't know much about those things." "No. I don't think they went anyplace. They're just quiet. They didn't come' out of their holes or hovels or down from the trees. But why ?" "Well, let's forget it. Let's go back to camp. We can try again tomor -- look! Look, there's something!" Judd followed her pointing finger with his eyes. Half-hidden by the creepers and vines clinging to an old ' tree-stump, something was watching them. It wasn't very big and it seemed in no hurry to get away. "What is it?" Lindy wanted to know. "Don't know. Never saw anything like it before. Venus is still an unknown frontier; the books only name a couple dozen of the biggest animals. But hell, Lindy, that's not game. I don't think it weighs five pounds." "It's cute, and it has a lovely skin." Judd couldn't argue with that. Squatting on its haunches, the creature was about twenty inches tall. It had a pointed snout and two thin, long ears. Its eyes were very big and very round and quite black. They looked something like the eyes of an Earth! an tarsier, hut the tarsier were bloody little beasts. The skin was short and stiff and was a ft kind of silvery white. Under the sheen, however, it seemed to glow. A diamond is colorless, Judd thought, but "when you see it under light a whole rainbow of colors sparkle deep within it. This creature's skin was like that, Judd decided. "If we could get enough of them," Lindy was saving, "Fd have the most unusual coat! Do you think we could find enough, Judd?" "I doubt it. Never saw anything like it before, never heard of anything like it. You'd need fifty of 'em, anyway. Let's forget about it -- too small to shoot, anyway." "No, Judd. I want it." "Well, I'm not going to stalk a five-pound -- hey, wait a minute! I taught you how to use this rifle, so why don't you bag it?" Lindy grinned. "That's a fine idea. I was a little scared of some of those big lizards and cats and everything, but now I'm going to take you up on it. Here, give me your gun." Judd removed the leather thong from his shoulder and handed the weapon to her. She looked at it a little uncertainly, then took the clip of shells which Judd offered and slammed it into the chamber. The little creature sat unmoving. "Isn't it peculiar that it doesn't run away, Judd?" "Sure is. Nothing formidable about that animal, so unless it has a hidden poison somewhere, just about anything in this swamp could do it in. To survive it would have to be fast as hell and it would have to keep running all the time. Beats me, Lindy " "Well, Tm going to get myself one pelt toward that coat, anyway. Watch, Judd: is this the way?" She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and squinted down the sights toward the shining creature. "Yeah, that's the way. Only relax. Relax. Shoulder's so tense you're liable to dislocate it with the kick. There -- that's better." Now Lindy's finger was wrapped around the trigger and she remembered Judd had told her to squeeze it, not to pull it. If you pulled the trigger you jerked the rifle and spoiled your aim. You had to squeeze it slowly... The animal seemed politely interested. Suddenly, a delicious languor stole over Lindy. It possessed her all at once and she had no idea where it came from. Her legs had been stiff and tired from the allmorning trek through the swamp, but now they felt fine. Her whole body was suffused in a warm, satisfied glow of well-being. And laziness. It was an utterly new sensation and she could even feel it tingling even at the roots of her hair. She sighed and lowered the rifle. "I don't want to shoot it," she said. "You just told me you did." "I know, but I changed my mind. What's the matter, can't I change my mind?" "Of course you can change your mind. But I thought you wanted a coat of those things." "Yes, I suppose I do. But I don't want to shoot it, that's all," Judd snorted. "I think you have a streak of softness someplace in that pretty head of yours!" "Maybe. I don't know. But I'd still like the pelt. Funny, isn't it?" "Okay, okay! But don't ask to use the gun again." Judd snatched it from her hands. "If you don't want to shoot it, then I will we can make you a pair of or something from the pelt." And Judd pointed his ancient rifles at the little animal preparing to snap off a quick shot. It would be a cinch at this distance. Even Lindy wouldn't have missed, if she hadn't changed her mind. Judd yawned. He'd failed to realize he was so tired. Not an aching kind of tiredness, but the kind that makes you feel good all over. He yawned again and lowered the rifle. "Changed my mind," he said. "I don't want to shoot it, either. What say we head back for camp?" Lindy gripped his hand impulsively. "All right, Judd -- but I had a brainstorm! I want it for a pet!" "A pet?" "Yes. I think it would be the cutest thing. Everyone would look and wonder and I'll adore it!" "We don't know anythin! it. Maybe Earth would be too cold, or too dry, or maybe we don't have anything it can eat. There are liable to be a hundred different strains of bacteria that can kill it." "I said I want it for a pet. See? Look at it! We can call it tc Eyes" Black Eyes -- " Judd groaned. Yes, Black Eyes. If you don't do this one thing for me, Judd -- " , ut I'm not to do any tiling. You want it, you take it." Lindy frowned, looked at him crossly, then sloshed across the swamp toward Black Eyes. The creature waited on its stump until she came quite close, and then, with a playful little bound, it hopped onto her shoulder, still squatting on its haunches. Lindy squealed excitedly and began to stroke its silvery fur. to Earth, Judd and Lindy and Black Eyes. The hunting trip had been a success -- Judd's trophies were on their way home on a slow' freighter, and he'd have some hne heads and skins for his study-room. Even Black Eyes had been no trouble at all. It ate scraps from their table, forever sitting on its haunches and staring at them with its big black eyes. Judd thought it would make one helluva lousy pet, but he didn't tell Lindy. Trouble was, it never did anything. It merely sat still, or occasionally it would bounce down to the floor and mince along on its hind-legs for a scrap of food. It never uttered a sound. It did not frolic and it did not gambol. Most of the time it could have been carved from stone. But Lindy was happy and Judd said nothing. They had a little trouble with the customs officials. This because nothing unknown could be brought to Earth without a thorough examination. At the customs office, a bespectacled official stared at Black Eyes, scratching his head. "Never seen one like that before' "Neither have I," Judd admitted. "Well, I'll look in the book." The man did, but there are no thorough tomes on Venusian fauna. "Not here." "I could have told you." "Well, we'll have to quarantine it and study it. That means .you and your wife go into quarantine, too. It could have something that's catching." "Absurd!" Lindy cried. "Sorry, lady. I only work here." "You and your bright ideas," Judd told his wife acidly. "We may be quarantined a month until they satisfy themselves about Black Eyes." The customs official shrugged Ms bony shoulders; and Judd removed a twenty credit note from his pocket and handed it to the man. "Will this change your mind?" "I should say not! You can't bribe me, Mr. Whitney! You can't -- " The man yawned, stretched languidly, smiled. "No sir, you can keep your money, Mr. Whitney. Guess we don't have to examine your pet after all. Mighty cute little feller. Well, have fun with it. Come on, move along now." And, as they were departing with Black Eyes, still not believing their ears: "Darn this weather! Makes a man so lazy... It was after the affair at the customs office, that Black Eyes uttered its first sound. City life hasn't changed much in the last fifty years. Jet-cars still streak around the circumferential highways, their whistles blaring. Factories still belch smoke and steam, although the new s atomic power plants have lessened that to a certain extent. Crowds still throng the streets, noisy, hurrying, ill-mannered. Ids one of those things that can't be helped, A city has to live, and it has to make noise. But it seemed to frighten Lindy's new pet. It stared through the jetcar window on the way from the spaceport to the Whitney's suburban home, its black eyes welling with tears. "Look!" Judd exclaimed. "Black Eyes can cry!" "A crying pet, Judd. I knew there would be something unusual about Black Eyes, I just knew it!" The tears in the big black eyes overflowed and tumbled out, rolling down Black Eyes' silvery cheeks. And then Black Eyes whimpered. It was only a brief whimper, but both Judd and Lindy heard it, and even the driver turned around for a moment and stared at the animal. The driver stopped the jet. He yawned and rested his head comfortably on the cushioned seat. He went quietly to sleep. owned the Merrywinkle Shipping Service. That, in itself, was not unusual. But at precisely the moment that Black Eyes unleashed its mild whimper, Mr. Merrywinkle -- uptown and five miles away -- called an emergency conference of the board of directors and declared: "Gentlemen, we have all been working too hard, and I, for one, am going to take a vacation. I don't know when I'll be back, but it  won't be before six months;" "But someone protested. "There's the Parker deal and the Gilette contract and a dozen other things. You're needed!" Mr. Merrywinkle shook his bald head. "What's more, you're all taking vacations, with pay. Six months, each of you. We're closing down Merrywinkle Shipping for half a year. Give the competition a break, eh?" "But C.M.! We're about ready to squeeze out Chambers Parcel Co.! They'll get back on their feet in six months." "Never mind. Notify all departments of the shut-down, effective immediately. Vacations for all.' # belt?" the foreman asked mildly. He was not a mild man and he usually stormed and ranted at the slightest provocation. This was at Clewson Jctcraft, and you couldn't produce a single jet-plane without the assembly belt, naturally. A plump little man said, "I did." "But why?" the foreman asked him, smiling blandly. "I don't know. I just did." The foreman was still smiling. "I don't blame you." Two days later, Clewson Jetcraft had to lay off all its help. They put ads in all the papers seeking new personnel but no one showed up. Clewson was forced to shut down. York pneumo-tube commuter's special pulled to a bone-jarring stop immediately outside the New York station. Some angry commuters pried open the conductor's cab, and found the man snoozing quite contentedly. They awakened him, but he refused to drive the train any further. All the commuters had to leave the pneumotrain and edge their way along three miles of catwalk to the station, No one was very happy about it,but the feeling of well-being which came over them all nipped any possible protest in the bud. when Judd and Lindy reached home but after that it was quiet. It just sat on its haunches near the window and stared out at the city. The quiet city. Nothing moved in the streets. Nothing stirred. People remained at home watching local video or the new space-video from Mars. At first it was a good joke, and the newspapers could have had a field day with it, had the newspapers remained in circulation. After four days, however, they suspended publication. On the fifth day, there was a shortage of food in the city, great stores of it spoiling in the warehouses. Heat and light failed after a week, and the fire department ignored all alarms a day later. But everything did not stop. School teachers still taught their classes; clerks still sold whatever goods were left on local shelves. Librarians were still at their desks. Conservatives said it was a liberal plot to undermine capital and demand higher wages; liberals said big business could afford the temporary layoff and wanted to squeeze out the small businessman and labor unions. Scientists pondered and city officials made speeches over video. "Something," one of them observed, "has hit our city. Work that requires anything above a modicum of sound has become impossible; in regards to such work people have become lazy. No one can offer any valid suggestions concerning the malady. It merely exists. However, if a stop is not put to it -- and soon -- our fair city will disintegrate. Something is making us lazy, and that laziness can spell doom, being a compulsive lack of desire to create any noise or disturbance. If anyone believes he has the solution, he  should contact the Department of Science at once. If you can't use the video-phone, come in person. But come! Every hour which passes adds to the city's woes." ' Nothing but scatter-brained ideas for a week, none of them worth consideration. Then the bespectacled custom's official who had bypassed quarantine for Black Eyes, got in touch with the authorities. He had always been a conscientious man -- except for that one lapse. Maybe the queer little beast had nothing to do with this crisis. But then again, the custom's official had never before -- or since -- had... that strange feeling of lassitude. Could there be some connection? A staff of experts on extra-terrestrial fauna was dispatched to the Whitney residence, although, indeed, the chairman of the Department of Science secretly considered the whole idea ridiculous. The staff of experts introduced themselves. Then, ignoring the protests of Lindy, went to work on Black Eyes. At first Judd thought the animal would object, but apparently it did not. While conditions all about' them in the city worsened, the experts spent three days studying Black Eyes. They found nothing out of the ordinary. Black Eyes merely stared back at them, and but for an accident, they would have departed without a lead. On the third day, a huge mongrel dog which belonged to the Whitney's next-door neighbors somehow slipped its leash. It was a fierce and ugly animal, and it was known to attack anything smaller than itself. It jumped the fence and landed in Judd Whitney's yard. A few loping bounds took it through an open window, ground level. Inside, it spied Black Eyes and made for the creature at once, howling furiously. Black Eyes didn't budge. And the mongrel changed its mind! The slavering tongue withdrew inside the chops, the howling stopped. The mongrel lay down on the floor and whined. Presently it lost all interest, got to its feet, and left as it had come. Other animals were brought to the Whitney home. Cats. Dogs. A lion from the city zoo, starved for two days and brought in a special mobile cage by its keeper. Black Eyes was thrust into the cage and the lion gave forth with a hideous yowling. Soon it stopped, rolled over, and slept. their reports, returned with them to the Whitney house. The leader, whose name was Jamison, said: "As closely as we can tell, Black Eyes is the culprit." "What?" Lindy demanded. "Yes, Mrs. Whitney. Your pet, Black Eyes." "Oh, I don't believe it!" But Judd said, "Go ahead, Dr. Jamison. I'm listening." "Well, how does an animal -- any animal -- protect itself?" "Why, in any number of ways. If it has claws or a strong jaw and long teeth, it can fight. If it is fleet of foot, it can run. If it is big and has a tough hide, most other animals can't hurt it anyway. Ummmm, doesn't that about cover it?" "You left out protective coloration, defensive odors, and things like that. Actually, those are most important from our point of view, for Black Eyes' ability is a furtherramification of that sort of thing. Your pet is not fast. It isn't strong. It can't change color and it has no offensive odor to chase off predatory enemies. It has no armor. In short, can you think of a more helpless creature to put down in those Venusian swamps?" After Judd had shaken his head, Dr. Jamison continued: "Very well, Black Eyes should not be able to survive on Venus -- and I yet, obviously the creature did. We can assume there are more of the breed, too. Anyway, Black Eyes survives. And I'll tell you why. "Black Eyes has a very uncommon ability to sense danger when it approaches. And sensing danger,  I Black Eyes can thwart it. Your creature sends out certain emanations -- I won't pretend to know what they are -- which stamp aggression out of any predatorycreatures. Neither of you could fire upon it -- right?" "Urnm-mm, that's true Judd said. Lindy nodded. "Well, that's one half of it. There's so much about life we don't understand. Black Eyes uses energy of an unknown intensity, and the result maintains Black Eyes' life. Nov, although that is the case, your animal did not live a comfortable life in the Venusian swamp. Because no animal would attack it, it could not be harmed. Still, from what you tell me about that swamp... i '"Anyhow. Black Eyes was glad to come away with you, and everything went well until you landed in New York. The noises, the clattering, the continual bustle of a great city -- all this frightened the creature. It was being attacked -- or, at least that's what it must have figured. Result: it struck back the only way it knew how. Have you ever heard about sub-sonic soundwaves, Mr. Whitney, waves of sound so low that our ears cannot pick them up -- waves of sound which can nevertheless stir our emotions? Such things exist, and, as a working hypothesis, I would say Black Eyes' strange powers rest along those lines. The whole city is idle because Black Eyes is afraid!" In his exploration of Mars, of Venus, of the Jovian Moons -- Judd Whitney had seen enough of extraterrestrial life to know that virtually anything was possible, and Black Eyes would be no exception to that rule. "What do you propose to do?" Judd demanded. "Do? Why, we'll have to kill your creature, naturallv. You can set a   value on it and we will meet it, but Black Eyes must die." "No!" Lindy cried. "You can't be sure, you're only guessing, and it isn't fair!" "My dear woman, don't you realize this is a serious situation? The city's people will starve in time, No one can even bring food in because the trucks make too much noise! As an alternative, we could evacuate, but is your pet more valuable than the life of a great city?" itJsJ #  In no... "Then, please! Listen to reason!" "Kill it," Judd said. "Go ahead." Dr. Jamison withdrew from his pocket a small blasting pistol used by the Department of Domestic Animals for elimination of injured creatures. He advanced on Black Eyes, who sat on its haunches in the center of the room, surveying the scientist. ' :  : Dr. Jamison put his blaster away. "I can't' he said. "I don't want to." Judd smiled. "I know it. No one -- no thing -- can kill Black Eyes. You said so yourself. It was a waste of time to try it. In that case -- --" "In that case' Dr. Jamison finished for him, "we're helpless. There isn't a man -- or an animalon Earth that will destroy this I thing. Wait a minute -- does it sleep, Mr. Whitney?" "I don't think so. At least, I never saw it sleep. And your team of scientists, did they report anything?" "No. As far as they could see, the creature never slept. We can't catch it unawares." "Could you anesthetize it?" "How? It can sense danger, and long before you could do that, it would stop you. It's only made one mistake, Mr. Whitney: it believes the noises of the city represent a danger. And that's only a negative mistake. Noise won't hurt Black Eyes, of course. It simply makes the animal unnecessarily cautious. But we cannot anesthetize it any more than we can kill it;" "I could take it back to Venus." "Could you? Could you? I hadnH thought of that." Judd shook his head. "I can't." "What do you mean you can't?" "It won't let me. Somehow it can sense our thoughts when we think something it doesn't want. I can't take it to Venus! No man could, because it doesn't want to go." "My dear Mr. Whitney -- do you mean to say you believe it can think r "Uh-uh. Didn't say that. It can sense our thoughts, and that's something else again." Dr. Jamison threw his hands up over his head in a dramatic gesture. "It's hopeless." he said. York crawled along to a standstill People began to move from the city. In trickles, at first, but the trickles became torrents, as New depart for saner places. It might take months -- it" might even take years, but the exodus had begun. Nothing could stop it. Because of a harmless little beast with the eyes of a tarsier. the life of a great city was coming to an end. Word spread. Scientists all over the world studied reports on Black Eyes. No one had any ideas. Everyone was stumped. Black Eyes had no particular desire to go outside. Black Eyes merely remained in the Whitney house, contemplating nothing in particular, and stopping everything. Dr. Jamison, however, was a persistent man. Judd got a letter from him one day, and the following afternoon he kept his appointment with the scientist "It's good to get out," Judd said, after a three hour walk to the Department of Science Building. "I can go crazy just staring at that thing." i "I have it, Whitney." "You have what? Not the way to destroy Black Eyes? I don't believe it!" "It's true. Consider. Everyone in the world does not yet know' of your pet, correct?"  . "I suppose there are a few people who don't -- "  "There are many. Among them, are the crew of a jet-bomber which has been on maneuvers in Egypt. We have arranged everything." "Yes? How?" ' "At noon tomorrow, the bomber will appear over your home with  fa explosive will nity, and, preee in the afterdestroyed with it. e. "I too easy." asy? I doubt if the animal will ever sense what is going oncrew of the bomber nowj either. They'll coner it a mighty peculiar order, to estroy one harmless, rather large and rather elaborate suburban home. But they'll do it. See you tomorrow, Whitney, after this mess is behind us." "Yeah" Judd said. "Yeah." But somehow, the scientist had failed to instill any of his confidence in Judd. If eleven the following morning, after making a thorough list of all their properties which the City had promised to duplicate. Judd did look at Black Eyes as he left, the animal remained where it on its haunches under room table, nibbling almost feel the a pair of twin he dared not face them... away at their way "I know." "Do you "I -- IJudd knew to be done with didn't like the little way, that had nothin Black Eyes was a ered in Don't let them , don't It wasn't Judd and it wasn subconscious. It was and he knew it. But he con a thing about it -- "I'm going to stay right here an let them bomb the place," he said aloud. But as he spoke, he was running back the way he had come. Fifteen minutes. s He sprinted part of the time, then rested, then sprinted again. He was somewhat on the beefy side and he could not run fast, but he made it. Just. He heard the jet streaking through the sky overhead, looked up once and saw it circling. Two blocks from his house he was met by a policeman. The entire area had been roped off, and the officer shook his head when Judd trie  get through. "But I live there!" a Can't help it, Judd hit him. Ju to, but neverthe' wi blow to be a sr e looked wards. Then him , m der the rope the animal Then he was runbefore he reached i...a.'V explosions ripped rain, and instinctively yes' instincts, not his -- he arms over the animal, C   e doesn t All right; far from out in the sticks matter much stop to any "Who will take  and began to fall behind him, and said scattered in all directions, struck Judd's head and he felt the ground slapping up crazily at .his face -- "He was I as good as new a few days later. And so was Black Eyes. I have it," Judd said to his nurse. "You. have what, sir?" "It's so simple, so ridiculously simple, maybe that's why no one ever thought of it. Get me Dr. Jamison!" Jamison came a few moments later, breathless.' "Well?" "I have the solution" "You... do?" Not much hope # answer. Dr. Jamison was a defeated man. lack Eyes doesn't like the Take him out. I can't Venus. He doesn't like he won't go. No one i him anyplace he doesn't as no one can hurt Judd shook his your job, not mine, the answer. Now use it. Lindy had arrived, "Judd, you're ri the answer. And you're wonderful -- " No one volunteered to spend his life in exile with Black Eyes, but then Dr. Jamison pointed out that while no one knew the creature's life-span, it certainly couldn't be expected to match man's. Just a few years and the beast would die, and... Dr. Jamison's arguments were so logical that he convinced himself. He took Black Eyes with him into the Canadian North woods, and there they live. This was the obvious which escaped everyone. But scientists continue examinations of Black they discovered someth! Eyes fears had not alone. She is goin The estimate is tarsier-eyed creatures the world wi butW : r j. never foresaw the complications his selective antigravitational field would cause. Knowing the grand old man as I did, I can. say that he never intended his "blessing" should be-' come the curse to mankind that it did. And the catastrophe it brought about was certainly beyond range of all prophecy. Of course, anyone who lived in and tried to get inside StegTier's weird lifecircle must agree can get too much of a mod thing. Even a pumpkin can and that's what hap s Prof turned on his : and too :ot day Stegner an- of ten year's  research on his selector. Nearly everyone present had read the sensational articles concerning his work in the feature sections of the big town newspapers. Like the rest, I had a vague idea of what it was about. It seemed the Prof had developed a device that repelled various particles of matter without effecting others. In short, if he turned on his gadget, gravity reversed itself for certain elements, and they went away in a hurry. Like this: he could take oxide of iron, turn on his selective repe and the rust rather mai to pure iron cimty. All of whic f patent rights to certain fre poisons con ins in the heretofore harmless foods over most known ni ng, costingfar less Anyway, when the press, myself was really excited. # # the standard and said, H I have solved y gave the old man his opout a big relab in California, not far from civilization, but secluded enough for secrecy. Then he set about to try his selective repellor on living tissues. His suspicion, that wonderful things could be discovered if he tuned his anti "gravitational field to the undesirable elements in the body, was confirmed. Like lead poisoning -- something no doctor cancure if it is severe. He found that he could cure a case of lead poisoning merely by making the lead go away from there via the field. More wonderful things began to come out of the Stegner laboratory, and he made a lot more iry.  Which was all very well indeed, couldn't leave well enough alone -- he had to delve and Ms own theories about its cause, old age, and nuttier than a fruit cake. of a crank on bods and diets that with chemical organic garno was ever isoi    puzzle of all time me, no medical man cause of old age. I what the deterioration factor and I have provided a reme sure and immediate remedy! The golden age of mankind is here ! Our life span can be greatly extended!" I looked at Jake Heinz, my cameraman. Jake winked at me, but i didn't respond. I liked the Prof. Such a fine old gentleman, to go whacky from so much success Jake took a few shots of the Profs rabbits and guinea pigs, of the Prof himself, and of the apparatus he had constructed which he claimed drove out the causative poison of age; a poison he called a radioactive isotope of Potassium The other reporters, not bavin soft hearts Jake and I toted aroun wrote him up as a joke; sal out they thought the blowing his top. Immortality They presented the a farce. No reporters were wrong than those s Profs little over and y started. What kind of things? Well, up to that line, things were normal ; but beyond it, grass got enormous, the ground was higher and softer. Trees forgot to shed their leaves. Animals flocked there to eat the lush grass, so the Prof erected a ten-foot electrified fence around his land to keep out the hordes of rabbits, deer, mice and what have you that came to feast off the new supply of better forage. That was only the beginning. Some months later there came items about houseflies the size of walnuts hatching out around the Profs retreat. Now a swarm of houseflies the size of walnuts is news, and Jake and I got up there on the jump. It was terrific! The flies were there all right, but so were a good many other oversized creatures. Roosting in the trees were robins, bluebirds, and doves as large as turkeys. King-sized ducks waddled about importantly, displaying pouter-pigeon crops from overeating. It was as if some god had drawn a line and said : "This is the new Eden, where all living tilings will prosper terrifically." You never saw a sight like it! Or did you? Were you one of the horde who started camping around the Profs magic circle trying to get permission to enter? It was then we got proof that it pays to be kind. Of all the newsgrabbers who surrounded the Profs big wire gate, Jake and I were the only ones who got in. The old man had not forgotten who had taken him seriously and who had made fun of him. Jake snapped a series of startling pics of the oversized animals and birds. I interviewed the Prof again, even got his maid, Tilda's opinions, and wrote it up as unsensationally as possible, playing down the tremendous potential for trouble, placing up the really effective method the old scientist had discovered for "eliminating the deterioration factor" in life. I could see where the world was in for some changes, and the going was going to be rough enough for the old man without making it worse. But my efforts came to naught when the pics Jake had taken reached the editor's desk. He hit the ceiling, called me on the carpet, wanted to know where my news sense had gotten lost. Then he sent out three other smart boys to do a good job on it. The paper got out a special edition -- and the troubles I had foreseen began. First, the government stepped in, trying to hush-hush the whole thing; but too late. The rush had started. For miles around the poor Prof's fenced-in hideaway, cars and trailers parked in a mad sensejess jumble. People crowded against the fences and the electricity had to be shut off. Some smart aleck produced wire cutters and made an opening. The invasion of the new Eden had begun. Stegner took flight, taking his secret apparatus and files with him. He declined police escort, and vanished from his mad Eden. Where he went was impossible to learn, but I supposed the government knew. The area he had revitalized with nine davs tile birds. Ap the end of the had triumphed with its usual stupid us remembered, could out. of our minds the significance of what the old man had had pointed the way to a lush immortality, and he had been shoved aside and pawed over and written about like some fredc. If .he had been a notorious criminal, he would have gotten far better journalistic treatment. But the years went by -- four, five of them. And nothing more was heard of Stegner and his work. Until, one day coming home from a night shifttbn the paper, I found a letter in my box. It was a rather plain looking envelope, but much sr than the ordinary. The handwritten address was quite Icgl!e, but very big, as if a giant hand itself to produce ordinary script :  far gotten tne, you. If you would r a time , insert a F in the ect . I am trusting  a noncommi me x. me to boarded a plane I used to know asHarry and took a   is i pilot   erly bearing. I looked saw we were over water. We came, down somewhere South America and I got the plane as mystified as Yd entered it. even discuss the weather! I had expected another Eden, hidden away from the world. But the land of brobdignags I found staggered me. Grasses, trying to be trees, and trees . There were no words for the bigness, the health and vitality of Steg ner and the government who hd welcomed him here in South America. But Stegner hustled me aside before I had time to  do more than goggle at the mainmoth layout of this new Eden under government  supervision. He took rne to his house, a huge thing built with huge hands, big enou to accommodate a  man tall! Yes, Stegner was a in thatfantastic away was a giant.  overlooked a great tegner pointed one the horizon :i. ' was an endless same, as in California so. The natives  saw beyond a i     at... mem were electric Through a pair me, I dead were I gasped. 's voice held the sadness real and sorrowful god. T am ip, my friend. I have preto acquiesce, but. my cohorts are not fully deluded as to my loyalty to the thing they plan. These government men had gone mad with power. And the problem that now faces me seems insurmountable, The peoples of this world are too small, morally, for so big a life. I fear chaos. I thought that perhaps you, with your native shrewdness, might help me unlock this prison I am in, reconcile this Eden and its growth to the world that it must' eventually overrun. It will overrun the planet, but I would prefer it not to be by violence as these mad men plan it. They have taken my gift to mankind for their own agrandizement." thought I had the answer that one! "Hell, you saw that from wondered when would come. I'm a I know what oes t isn't ready for as you can give it -- too ness. This tiling has so ways it can o?" ms Us Homs" to a "ft. even one, so that the chips of the table. be a -- such as existe and the U. S, "You mean . "I mean let me of here in a hurry, wit of your processes, them all over the wor can lick this thing. Your was in buildin fence, and somebody'! "You are a wise friend," he said. "Then I'm making a run for it right now. They won't expect me to be dashing off before Fve even taken off my hat. Give me "your formulae, and show me the back door." man, my n "You can only leave by plane . "Okay. I can fly one:' I had my own crate for several years until the finance company took it away from me. The airfield's right next to the house... He gave me the papers. "What's in 'em?" I asked. "The formulae for the creation the repellent an U gravitational which eliminates the age-fa ment. I have been w growth inhibitor, but I have had little time it. Briefly, it is a met the field even more se ing in the body which have cause c   growing at is not natura am sure that i e my w ment, man eat it too. He rv a ism as we are doing, yet his life and health will he prolonged." "Why not just explain it to these men?" He laughed bitterly. "They wish to use their gigantic size to conquer the world. They can do it, too. Their minds have increased in power. Growth is that way. But moral values are something different -- they are acquired by experience. Find some moral men who might use this information to circumvent what is about to happen." I took the papers and shook his gigantic hand. I left via the back door, and sneaked through a clump of giant ferns to the edge of the airfield. A little prowling revealed a parked plane, long unused because those who had flown it here had grown too big to use it. I waited, hidden in the lush greenery until the setting sun would hide my movements. It would only be a few minutes now... The hangar in which the plane was parked contained several gasoline drums, the kind with pumps on them that worked with a crank. I got into the hangar, finally, and before it got too dark to see, checked the plane's gas gauge. It was about a quarter full. I connected the gas hose and started pumping. In twenty minutes I had her full, then I climbed into the plane... When the motor caught, after I was sure it never would, the thunder of the prop brought giants running toward me from the far end of the field, their twenty-foot strides eating up the distance. But I taxied straight toward them, giving the plane's motors all they would take. The plane roared down the field, and they fell flat as the prop came at them. The plane lifted, spun over them, was off. Now slugs from oversize rifles came buzzing about me, crashing through the fuselage. But it was dark and I was away. No serious damage had been done. In Texas it took me four hours to get the brass to listen to me. Finally they did. They didn't ask me to keep my mouth shut. They just turned me loose. I went to my editor and told him the truth. He didn't believe me. When he checked with the army, they said I was obviously trying to perpetrate a hoax. I nearly got fired. waited. I knew I'd have to wait until my chance came. There' d have to be hellfire before anybody'd believe my story. Then the storm broke, in sensational headlines. "Gigantic beasts wipe out town in South America." My editor sent for me. He showed me the headline. "Maybe I made a mistake not believing your story about Stegner," he said. "I make a lot of mistakes." "You want me to cover this?" I said. v "That's it. And if you can come up with proof of what you toldme when you got back from that crazy trip, I'll print every damned word." I knew they were at last taking it seriously. The locals had called out the army to fight the strange monsters that were coming out of the jungle. They were such things as army ants six feet long; anteaters looking like ambling locomotives with hairy hides and noses; lumbering sloths vast as a houses on legs, sleepy and comic as ever, but terrifyingly destructive; jaguars like trucks and trailers; centipedes with stingers over their backs that would reach a man in a third-story' window; wasps and bees like buzzards. The army was lashing at. these things with machine guns, flame throwers, tanks and rockets. Jeeps careened across the landscape with loads of ammo. It was a madhouse on a vast scale, and being fought to the death. They waited for the beasts to come out of the jungle, then they jumped them -- or were jumped. Nobody was allowed to fly into the hinterland to see where they were coming from. And when I tried to get officials to consider it, they absolutely refused. Up there, it was hinted, were secret government projects -- besides they were too far away -- and radio said there was no sign of anything unusual there. It was worth even a general's job to poke his nose in near those projects. And how could I tell these people traitorous men of their own government were the culprits? It just wasn't possible -- and because I had to stay on the scene, I never even hinted it. I merely waited my chance to produce proof. I knew I'd get it, sooner or later. Something would come out of that jungle I'd be able to use to convey the real menace to the knowledge of a puzzled world. I wrote carefully, reporting the weird war with the animal world -- and I kept inserting paragraphs hinting about Stcgner and his growth field, adding "rumors" that maybe his work had been taken over by a power-mad clique and it was they who were loosing this horror. My  boss liked the stuff I was putting in, because it sold papers, and I was careful to keep my facts separate, and label my theories. Nobody -- at least so it seemed -- believed the theories, but they made good reading. I got a raise in salary. Other reporters were knocking out stories as good as mine, but without the insight into the facts that I had. So their stories went too far afield. Mine became popular, and were in demand as reprints all over the world. But officially, nobody paid any attention to me, so the important papers nestled the bottom of my trunk. I didn't want them confiscated until the time came when I could publish them with proof. My boss would back me up when that proof came. I was sure of that. I got my chance the day the giantess came crashing out of the smoke and dust of the circle of horror across which the beasts were constantly lunging. She was near naked, and half mad with pain from the giant insects plaquing her. No one fired on her as she stood with uplifted arms, waiting for the soldiers to kill her as she expected. Beautiful as a goddess out of an ancient myth she came forward toward the soldiers, her face lighting with hope, her hair streaming golden in the sun. She spoke to us then, and the silence that came over the field of carnage was com"Look at me! Look at me and believe! There are others like me, back in the jungle; mad giants who plan to conquer your world. They are ready to do it. I have escaped to warn you. They are mad, these giants my master has created. They are monsters..." I recognized her now. My senses leaped and my blood pounded in my veins. Here was my opportunity to convince the world. This was Tilda, Stegner s maid! I snapped several pictures of her as she went on talking. "These men, who were once your own leaders are plotting to destroy you and take the world for themselves. You do not know what they are preparing for you, but I come to tell you. Make ready, for they arc on their way to destroy you. They bring huge guns, monster tanks that they have built, machines never before seen on earth." What more she might have told we were never to know, for she fell then, at the end of her strength. Whatever she had dared, whatever she had gone through to break out of that monstrous circle and come to us, had been too much even for her giant's strength. She fell, like a tower crashing down, and lay there, a great lax pile of pink and red flesh, torn by thorns, the claws of animals, the stingers of terrible giant insects. Then the monsters came again, and we could not go to her. She lay there as darkness came, and in the morning only her skeleton remained. stripped of flesh in the night by the myriad devouring giant ants and beetles. V photos of Tilda. My editor printed the whole story, printed my formulae, printed every word of the history of Stegner and his creations, and the secret menace he had unwittingly loosed on the world from his second hidden Eden in the jungle. I was called home. They came to me then, those moral ones Stegner had said existed. Men high in government and army circles who had the peace and welfare of the world at heart. Selfless ones whose records were above reproach. And they proved to be high in the powers of the world, able to command. to my reporting. I wanted to be on hand when the attack of which Tilda had warned became reality... I was some twelve miles from the deadly circle when the giant tanks appeared. They were larger than any moving thing ever seen on Earth before. Tracklayers, caterpillars -- and swinging above them slender towers which bore ominous gleaming nozzles. On they came. Then they struck at us. From the unnameable, that swept forward like a slow lightning, a kind of crackling sheet of cold fire that spread from tower to tower, in an arc that began to bend toward our lines. The fire came in mile-wide swaths. There was no outcry, no terror -- just the sweating lines of men in foxholes, the crews about the guns, heaving ammo into their maws; the rumbling trucks and the careening jeeps. The fire swept over all like liquid radiance, like a pouring out of moonlight, soft but was gone. And when it had gone, nothing but silence remained. Dead men stretched out where they  had lain waiting, fallen where they labored ; jeeps careened on to crash into, stumps or bigger trucks -- and stop forever, Only silence and death and nothingness was left. When the silence swept across the whole front I dropped my glasses and lit out for my own car, and headed for the coast. I wanted to file this story in person, and I knew, too, that army would not be there in the morning. I meant to stay alive. I knew that the hope for mankind lay in what honest men were doing with Stegner's formulae. I had to know. So I fled. Next day they were dropping atom bombs on every moving thing in Stegncr's ghastly Eden. High flying bombers flew in swarms -- and many of them were being shot down by the weird fire. I saw those atom bombs falling, on television, and the white radiance reaching up toward them. I saw' it catch them in its embrace, saw them explode harmlessly in the air, midway in in their plunge. Whatever the fire was, it was a defense against the atom bomb, for it exploded them before they could reach their targets.  It didn't catch them all, and it didn't intercept all the high-flying bombers loosing their guided rocket missiles. It got enough though, to show us we were on the losing end. What we needed was a miracle. And the miracle did occur... At first, even with my fingers on every tag end of information that came out of the terrible area, it was an unnoticeable change. Then I got it. The men doing our fighting changed in caliber and ability. I never learned, due to the official habit of hushing everything up, just whose technology accomplished the miracle, but it must have been started from the first, with those army officers who had listened to me with such lack of interest when I spoke before their inquisition at the Texas army air field. All I learned was that there was a new kind of man busy at the front, a man of keener intellect, swifter of action, infinitely more able than the former ordinary soldier. It was Jake who first confirmed my suspicions. He brought in photographs of men lifting trucks out of mudholes, men tearing steel cables apart with their bare hands, men jumping over twenty-foot barriers with full pack. "Whatta I do with that kind of pic? The people are so fed up with the impossible news they are getting that they don't believe anything any more! But you and I know a news camera doesn't lie... it doesn't have' time!" They had put the Profs formulae to work against the giants. This time it was the right formulae. They had growth without increase in size, a growth of ability, of strength, of mentality, without any increase in ponderous structure. These new soldiers were the policemen of the United Nations made into supermen! I began to believe in the human race again. "Great!" I said. "This iswhat I've been waiting for!" Jake tossed me his pictures and went away. I turned to the typewriter and began batting out my story: "Mankind solves the problem of giantism! The new weapon against the giants is -- the new man!" Those little giants waded into that circle through all the deadly fire and the giant scorpions and vast beasts like Jack-the-GiantKiller's multitudinous sons -- and it wasn't a month later that I typed the last story of my life and gave up reporting for good. It was the tale of the death of the last giant -- and Jake's picture of him, armed in the end with only his fists, huge as a tree, mad with hunger and thirst and terrible fear of the little men who were just as mighty, a lot quicker, and every bit as smart as any giant. They routed him out with tear gas and shot him down with plain old GI rifle fire. Yes, I gave up newspaper work. Why? They offered me a job making a movie out of the "War of the Giants". The job gave me quick money, which is what I needed.  The wife and I are starting a new colony on Malino Island. It's in the Carelinas. We're going to try this growth-without-size business out properly. Yes, that' s my son. Eight months. He doesn't ordinarily go around dragging a piano -- it just got in his way.  underestimate... Lefferts  madness could drive all women back into slavery -- it could even cost Lucinda a mink coat! course  # said Lucinda, passing the marmalade, "but the brass was beautifully polished. The whole thing made me quite angry, though at the same time I was delighted." Meticulously Dr. Lefferts closed the newly-arrived Journal of the Micro-biological Institute y placed it cm the copy of Strength of Materials in Various Radioisotopic Alloys which lay beside his plate, and carefully removed his pincenez. "You begin in mid-sequence," he said, picking up a butter-knife. "Your thought is  predicate without a stated subject. Finally, your description of your reactions contains parts which appear mutually exclusive." He attacked the marmalade. "Will you elucidate?" Lucinda laughed good-humoredly. "Of course, darling. Where would you like me to begin?" "Oh... Dr. Lefferts made a vague gesture. "Practically anywhere. Anywhere at all. Simply supply more relative data in order that I may extrapolate the entire episode and thereby dispose of it. Otherwise I shall certainly keep returning to it all day long. Lucinda, why do you continually do this me?" "Do what, dear?" "Present me with colorful trivialities in just such amounts as will make me demand to hear you I have a trained mind, Lucinda ; a fine-honed, logical rmind. It must think things through. You know inually do  the beginning fa to the end. certainly... eh. Per" He laid maran English muffin aids, and began together at right les to their original lay. "You are right, my dear. That must be  difficult for you from time to time... yes "No indeed," said Lucinda, and smiled. "Not as long as I can get your full attention when I want it. And I can." Dr. Lefferts chewed her statement with his muffin. At last he said, "I admit that in your in -- ufa -- I think" one calls it female way, you can. At least in regard to small issues. Now do me the kindness to explain to me what stimuli could cause you to -- " His voice supplied the punctuationquite angry # and 'delighted' simultaneously." Lucinda leaned forward to pour fee into his cooling cup. an ample woman, with an combination of S' e i relaxation. Her voice ilfows and her eyes #. "It was on the  said. "I was waitis girl drove right under the It was like zine illustration bright-yellow lazing blonde ling, I do this year's the most baffiin way, there she was the car was the trafficc faced and Hibernian type-casting as you came blustering over manding to know begorry he actually did say begorry she color-blind, now, or perhaps not give a care ItliA this marmn a In albinos," said Dr. Lefferts, ic color perception is -- " voice just sufficiently to override him without a break in continuity. "Now, here was an arrant violation of the law, flagrantly committed under the eyes of an enforcement officer. I don't have to tell you what should have happened. What did happen was that the girl kept her head turned away from him until his hands were on the car door. In the sun that of hers was When he was close, enough range, that is -- she tossed back and was face to face You could see that bog-peat turn to said to him (and if sical notebook wit have jotted sharps and flats) officer, I did it oi could see you  Dr. Lefferts  .if #; "He did not," said Lucinda. "He shook a big thick forefinger at her as if she were a naughty but beloved child, and the push-button blarney that oozed out of him was as easy to see as the wink he gave her. That's what made me mad." "And well it should." He folded his napkin. "Violations of the law should be immediately pun -- " "The law had little to do with it" Lucinda said warmly. "I was angry because I know what would have happened to you or to me in that same situation. We'rejust not equipped." "I begin to see." He put his pince-nez back on and peered at her. "And what was it that delighted you?" She stretched easily and halfclosed her eyes. "The -- what you have called the femaleness of it. It's good to be a woman, darling, and to watch another woman be female skillfully." "I quarrel with your use of the term 'skillfully,' " he said, folding his napkin. "Her 'skill' is analogous to an odor of musk or other such exudation in the lower animals." "It is not she said flatly. "With the lower animals, bait of that kind means one thing and one thing only, complete and final. With a woman, it means nothingof the kind. Never mind what it might mean; consider what it does mean. Do you think for a moment that the blonde in the convertible was making herself available to the policeman?" "She was hypothesizing a situation in which -- #  "She was hypothesizing nothing of the kind. She was blatantly and brazenly getting out of paying a traffic fine, and that was absolutely all. And you can carry it one step further; do you think that for one split second the policeman actually believed that she was inviting him? Of course he didn't! And yet that situation is one that has obtained through the ages. Women have always been able to get what they wanted from men by pretending to promise a thing which they know r men want but will not or cannot take. Mind you. I'm not talking about situations where this yielding is the main issue. I'm talking about the infinitely greater number of occasions where yielding has nothing to do with it. Like w'easeling out of traffic tickets." "Or skillfully gaining your husband's reluctant attention over the breakfast table." Her sudden laughter was like a shower of sparks. "You'd better get down to the Institute," she said. "You'll be late." He arose, picked up his book and pamphlet, and walked slowly to the door. Lucinda came with him, hooking her arm through his. Suddenly he stopped, and without looking at her, asked quietly, "That policeman was a manipulated, undignified fool, wasn't he?" "Of course he was, darling, and it made a man of him." He nodded as if accepting a statistic, and, kissing her, walked out I of the house. Darling , she thought, dear sweet chrome-plated , fine-drawn , highpolished blue-print... I think Fve found where you keep your vanity She watched him walk with his even, efficient, unhurried stride to the gate. There he paused and looked back. "This has been going an too long he called. "I shall alter it." Lucinda stopped smiling. AY I come in?" "Jenny, of course." Lucinda went to the kitchen door and unhooked it. "Come in, come in. My, you're prettier than ever this morning." "I brought you violets," said Jenny breathlessly. "Just scads of 'em in the woods behind my place. You took your red curtains down. Is that a new apron? My! you had Canadian bacon for breakfast." She darted in past Lucinda, a small, wiry, vibrant girl with sunlit hair and moonlit eyes. "Can I help with the dishes?" "Thank you, you doll." Lucinda took down a shallow glass bowl for the violets. Jenny busily ran hot water into the sink. "I couldn't help seeing," she said. "Your big picture window... Lucinda, you never leave the breakfast dishes. I keep telling Bob, some day I'll have the routines you have, everything always so neat, never running out of anything, never in a hurry, never surprised... anyway, all the way over I could see you just sitting by the table there, and the dishes not done and all... is everything all right? I mean, don't tell me if I shouldn't ask, but I couldn't help... Her voice trailed off into an ardent and respectful mumble. "You're such a sweetheart," Lucinda said mistily. She came over to the sink carrying clean dishtowels and stood holding them, staring out past Jenny's head to the level lawns of the village. "Actually, I did have something on my mind... something . , She related the whole conversation over breakfast that morning, from her abrupt and partial mentioning of the anecdote about the blonde and the policeman, to her husband's extraordinary andunequivocal statement about women's power over men: This has bee?i go ing on too long. I shall alter it. "Is that all?" Jenny asked when she had finished. "Mm. It's all that was said." "Oh, I don't think you should worry about that." She crinkled up her eyes, and Lucinda understood that she was putting herself and her young husband in the place of Lucinda and Dr. Lefferts, and trying to empathize a solution. "I think you might have hurt his feelings a little, maybe," Jenny said at length. "I mean, you admitted that you handled him in much the same way as that blonde handled the policeman, and then you said the policeman was a fool" Lucinda smiled. "Very shrewd. And what's your guess about that parting shot?" Jenny turned to face her. "You're not teasing me, asking my opinion, Lucinda? I never thought I'd see the day l Not you -- you're so wise!" Lucinda patted her shoulder. "The older I get, the more I feel that among women there is a lowest common denominator of wisdom, and that the chief difference between them is a random scattering of blind spots. No, honey, I'm not teasing you. You may be able to see just where I can't. Now tell me: what do you think he meant by that?' # " e I shall alter it', Jenny quoted thoughtfully. "Oh, I don't think he meant anything much. You showed him how you could make him do things, and he didn't like it. He's decided not to let you do it any more, but -- but... "But what?" "Well, it's tike with Bob. When he gets masterful and lays down the law I just agree with him. He forgets about it soon enough. If you agree with men all the time they cant get stubborn about anything."Lucinda laughed aloud. "There's the wisdom!" she cried. Sobering, site shook her head. "You don't know the doctor the way I do. He's a great man -- a truly great one, with a great mind. It' great in a way no other mind has ever been. H#V- different. Jenny, I know how people talk, and what a lot of them say. People wonder why I married him, why I've stayed with him all these years. They say he's stuffy and didactic and that he has no sense of humor, Weil, to them he may be ; but to me hfc is a continual challenge. The rules-ofthumb that keep most men in line don't apply to him. "And if he says he can do something, he can. If he says he will do something, he will." Jenny dried her hands and sat down slowly. "He meant," she said positively, "that he would alter your ability to make him do things. Because die only other thing he could have meant was that he was going to alter the thing that makes it possible for any woman to handle any man. And that just couldn't be. How could he change human nature?" "How? How? He's the scientist. I'm not. I simply eliminate that 'how' from my thinking. The worrisome thing about it is that he doesn't think in small ways about small issues. I'm afraid that's just what he meant -- that he was going to change some factor in humanity that is responsible for this power we have over men." "Oh... really." said Jenny. She looked up at Lucinda, moved her hands uneasily. "Lucinda, I know how great the doctor is, and how much you think of him, but -- but no one man could do such a thing! Not ouside of his own home." She grinned fleetingiy. "Probably not inside of it, for very long... I never understood just what sort of a scientist he is. Can you tell me, I mean, aside from any secret projects he might be on? Like Bob, now; Bob's a hightemperature metallurgist. What is the doctor, exactly?" "That's the right question to ask," Lucinda said, and her voice was shadowed. "Dr. Lefferts is a -- well, the closest you could get to it would be to call him a specializing non-specialist. You see, science has reached the point where each branch of it continually branches into specialties, and each specialty has its own crop of experts. Most experts live in the confines of their own work. The doctor was saving just the other day that he'd discovered a fluorine-boron step-reaction in mineralogy that had been known for so long that the mineralogists had forgotten about it -- yet it was unknown to metallurgy. Just as I said a moment ago, his mind is great, and -- different. His job is to draw together the chemists and the biologists, the pure mathematicians and the practical physicists, the clinical psychologists and the engineers and all the otherists andologies. His specialty is scientific thought as applied to all the sciences. He has no assignments except to survey all the fields and transfer needed information from one to the other. There has never been such a position in the Institute before, nor a man to fill it. And there is no other institute like this one on earth. "He has entree into every shop and lab and library in this Institute, He can do anything or get anything done in any of them. "And when he said T shall alter that he meant what he said!" #I T never knew that's what he did, # breathed Jenny. "I never knew that's what... who he is. # "That's who he is." "But what can he change Jenny burst out. "What can he change in us, in all men, in all women? What is the power he's talking about, and where does it come from, and what wou will... happen if it's changed?" "I don't know," Lucinda said thought! ully, # # I -- do- -- not -- know. f # fof nrir!p in tbs rrtnwrf i'KIa that sort of thing is just one of the things a woman naturally does, because she Is a woman, without thinking of it." Unexpectedly, Jenny giggled. "You don't plan those things. You just do them. It's nice when it works. A better roast from the butcher. A reminder from one of the men at the bank that a check's overdrawn, in time to cover it." "I know, # ' smiled Lucinda, "I know'. It's easy and inaccurate to say that all those men are on the prowl -- or all those women either. A few are, but most are not. The women has survived even equal opportunity and equal pay for women. The ability of women to get what they want from men lies completely in their knowledge of that band wants to alter -- will alter -- lies in that department. "Lucinda, why don't you just ask him?" "I shall. But I don't know if I'll get an answer. If he regards it as a security matter, nothing will get it out of him." # # You I #I tell me, won't you?" "Jenny, my sweet, if he tells me nothing, I can't tell you. If he tells me and asks me to keep his confidence, I won't tell you. If he tells me and puts no restrictions on it. I'll tell you everything." "But -- "  "I know, dear. You're thinking that it's a bigger thing than just what it might mean to the two of us. Well, you're right. But deep I'm confidents I'd pit women again?    pect them to win out. But anytime all womankind is against all mankind, the men don't stand a chance. Think hard about it, anyway. At least we should be able to figure out where the attack is coming from." "At least you admit it's an attack" #  "You bet your sweet life it's an attack. There's been a woman behind most thrones all through history. The few times that hasn't been true, it's taken a woman to clean up the mess afterward. We won't give up easily, darling!" blow', and we shall have snow', and so on " said Lucinda as she lit the fire. "I'm going to need a new coat." "Very well," said Dr. LefTerts. "A fur coat this time." "Fur coats," pronounced the doctor, "are impractical. Get one with the fur inside. You'll keep warmer with less to carry'." "I want a fur coat with the fur outside, where it shows." "I understand and at times admire the decorative compulsions," said the doctor, rising from the adjusted cube he used for an easy chair, "but not when they are unhealthy, uneconomical, and inefficient. My dear, vanity does not become you." "A thing that has always fascinated me " said Lucinda in a dangerously quiet voice, "in rabbits, weasels, skunks, pumas, pandas, and mink, and all other known mammals and marsupials, is their huge vanity. They all wear their fur outside." He put on his pince-nez to stare at her. "Your logic limits its factors. I find such sequences remarkable because of the end results one may obtain. However, I shall not follow this one." "If you're so preoccupied with efficiency and function," she snapped, "why do you insist on wearing those pince-nez instead of getting corneal lenses?" "Functional living is a pattern which includes all predictable phenomena," he said reasonably. "One of these is habit. I recognize that I shall continue to like pincenez as much as I shall continue to dislike rice pudding. My functionalism therefore includes these glasses and excludes that particular comestible. If you had the fur-coat habit, the possibility of a fur coat would be calculable. Since you have never had such a coat, we' can consider the matter disposed of." "I think some factors were selected for that sequence," said Lucinda between her teeth, "but I can't seem to put my finger on the missing ones." "I beg your pardon?" "I said," appended Lucinda distinctly, "that speaking of factors, I wonder how you're coming with your adjustment of human nature to eliminate the deadliness of the female." "Oh, that. I expect results momentarily." "Why bother?" she said bitterly. "My powers don't seem to be good enough for a fur coat as it is." "Oh," he said mildly, "wereyou using them? # ' Because she was Lucinda, she laughed. "No, darling, I wasn't;' She went to him and pressed him hack into the big cubical chair and sat on the arm. "I was demanding, cynical, and unpleasant. These things in a woman represent the scorched earth retreat, rather than the looting advance." "An excellent analogy' he said. "Excellent. It has been a long and bitter war, hasn't it? And now it's coming to an end. It is an extraordinary thing that in our difficult progress toward the elimination of wars, we have until now ignored the greatest and most pernicious conflict of all -- the one between the sexes." "Why so pernicious?" she chuckled. "There are times when it's rather fun." He said solemnly, "There are moments of exhilaration, even of glory, in every great conflict. Rut such conflicts tear down so much more than they build." "What's been so damaging about the war between the spxes?" "Though it has been the women who made men, it has been largely men who have made the world as we know it. However, they have had to do so against a truly terrible obstacle: . the emotional climate created by women. Only by becoming an ascetic can a man avoid the oscillations between intoxication and distrust instilled into him by women. And ascetics usually are already insane or rapidly become so." "I think you're overstating a natural state of affairs." # T am overstating # he admitted, "for clarity's sake, and off the record. However, this great war is by no means natural On the contrary, it is a most unnatural state of affairs. You see, homo sapieris is, in one small but important respect, an atypical mammal" "Do tell." He raised his eyebrows, but continued. "In virtually all species hut ours, the female has a rigidly fixed cycle of conjugal acceptability." "But the human female has a -- " "I am not referring to that lunar cycle, unmentionable everywhere except in blatant magazine advertisements # he said shortly, "but to a cycle of desire. Of rut." "A pretty word." Her eyes began to glitter. "Mahomet taught that it occurred every eight days, Zoroaster nine days, Socrates and Solon agreed on ten. Everyone e#e, as far as I can discover, seems to disagree with these pundits, or to ignore the matter. Actually there are such cycles, but they are subtle at best, and differ in the individual from time to time, with age, physical experience, geography, and even emotional state. These cycles are vestigial; the original, natural cycle disappeared early in the history of the species, and has been trembling on the verge ever since. It will be a simple matter to bring it back." "May I ask how?" "You may not. It is a security matter." "May I then ask what effect you expect this development to have?" "Obvious, isn't it? The source of woman's persistent and effective control over man, the thing that makes him subject to all her intolerances, whims, and bewildering coyness, is the simple fact of her perennial availability. She has no regular and predictable cycle of desire. The lower animals have. During the brief time that a female mouse, a marten, or a mare is approachable, every male of her species in the vicinity will know of it and seek her out; will, in effect, drop everything to answer a basic call. But unless and until that call occurs, the male is free to think of other things. With the human female, on the other hand, the call is mildly present at all times, and the male is never completely free to think of other things. It is natural for this drive to be strong. It is unnatural indeed for it to be constant. In this respect Freud was quite correct; nearly every neurosis has a sexual Ijasis. We are a race of neurotics, and the great wonder is that we have retained any of the elements of sanity at all. I shall liberate humanity from this curse. I shall restore the natural alternations of drive and rest. I shall free men to think and women to take their rightful places as thinking individuals beside them, rather than be the forced-draft furnaces of sexual heat they have become." "Are you telling me," sajd Lucinda in a small, shocked voice, "that you have found a way to -- to neuterize women except for a few hours a month?" "I am and I have," said Dr. Lefferts. "And incidentally, I must say I am grateful to you for having turned me to this problem." He looked up sharply. "Where are you going, my dear?" 'Tve got to ththink," said Lucinda, and ran from the room. If she had stayed there for another fifteen seconds, she knew she would have crushed his skull in with the poker. W HO -- Oh, Lucinda! How nice. Come in... why, what's the matter?" "Jenny, Tve got to talk to you. Is Bob home?" "No. He's got night duty at the high temperature lab this week. Whatever is wrong?" "It's the end of the world," said Lucinda in real anguish. She sank down on the sofa and looked up at the younger woman. "My husband is putting a -- a chastity belt on every woman on earth." "A what?" "A chastity belt." She began to laugh hysterically. "With a timelock on it." c Jenny sat beside her. "Don't," she said. "Don't laugh like that. You're frightening me." Lucinda lay back, gasping. "You should be frightened... Listen to me, Jenny. Listen carefully, because this is the biggest thing that has happened since the deluge." She began to talk. Five minutes later Jenny asked dazedly, "You mean-if this crazy thing happens Bob won't... won't want me most of the time?" "It's you who won't do .any wanting. And when you don't, he won't want either... It isn't that that bothers me so much, Jenny, now that I've had a chance to think about it. Fm worried about the revolution." # 'What revolution?" "Why, this is going to cause the greatest social upheaval of all time! Once these cycles become recognized for what they are, there will be fireworks. Look at the way we dress, the 'way we use cosmetics. Why do we do it? Basically, to appear to be available to men. Practically all perfumes have a musk or musk-like base for that very reason. But how long do you think women will keep up the hypocrisy of lipstick and plunging necklines when men know better -- know that they couldn't possibly be approachable all the time? How many men will let their women appear in pub lie looking as if they were?" "They'll tie us up in the house the way I do Mitzi-poodle," said Jenny in an awed tone. "They'll leave us smugly alone with easy minds for three weeks out of four," said Lucinda, "and stand guard over us like bull elks the rest of the time, to keep other men away." "Lucinda!" Jenny squeaked and covered her face in horror. "What about other women? How can we compete with another woman when she's -- she's -- and we're not?" "Especially when men are conditioned the way they are. Women will want to stick to one man, more likely than not. But men -- men, building up pressures for weeks on end... " "There'll be harems again," said Jenny. "This is the absolute, final, bitter end of any power we ever had over the beasts, Jenny -- do you see that? All the old tricks -- the arch halfpromise, the come-on, the manipulations of jealousy -- they!! be utterly meaningless! The whole arsenal of womankind is based on her ability to yield or not to yield. And my husband is going to take the choice away from us. He's going to make it absolutely certain that at  one time we can't yield, and at another we must!" "And they'll never have to be nice to us at either time," added Jenny miserably. "Women," said Lucinda bitterly, "are going to have to work for a living." "But we do!" "Oh, you know what I mean, J enny! The iit-tul wife in the lit-fcul ome... that whole concept is based on women's perpetual availability. We're not going to be able to be home-makers, in that sense, at monthly intervals." Jenny jumped up. Her face was chalky. "He hasn't stopped any war," she ground out. Lucinda had never seen her like this. "He's started one, and it's a beaut. Lucinda, he's got to be stopped, even if you -- we have to... "Gome on." They started for Dr. Lefferts' house, striding along dike a couple of avenging angels. A h ; # said dr. lefferts, rising politely. "You brought Jenny. Good evening. Jenny." Lucinda planted herself in front of him and put her hands on her hips. "'You listen to me," she no growled. "You've got to stop that nonsense about changing women." "It is not nonsense and I shall do nothing of the kind " "Dr Lefferts," said Jenny in a quaking voice, "can you really do this -- tins awful thing?" "Of course," said the doctor. "It was quite simple, once the principles were worked out. # " "It was quite simple? You mean you've already -- " Dr. Lefferts looked at his watch. "At two o'clock this afternoon. Seven hours ago." "I think," said Lucinda quietly, "that you had better tell us just exactly what you did, and what we can expect." "I told you it is a security matter" "What has my libido to do with national defense?" "That," said the doctor, in a tone which referred to that as the merest trifle, "is a side issue. I coincided it with a much more serious project." "What could be more serious than... "There's only one thing that serious, from a security standpoint," said Lucinda. She turned to the doctor. "I know better than to ask you any direct questions. But if I assume that this horrible thing was done in conjunction with a super-bomb test -- just a guess, you understand -- is there any way for an H-blast to bring about a change in women such as you describe?" He clasped both hands around one knee and looked up at her in said... "And most skilfully phrased. Speaking hypothetically -- hypothetically, you understand," he interjected, waving a warning finger, "a hydrogen bomb has an immense power of diffusion. A jet of energy of that size, at that temperature, for even three or four microseconds, is capable of penetrating the upper reaches of the stratosphere. But the effect does not end there. The upward displacement causes great volumes of air to rush in toward the rising column from all sides. This in turn is carried upward and replaced, a process which continues for a considerable time. One of the results must be the imbalance of any distinct high or low pressure areas within several thousand miles, and for a day or two freak weather developments can be observed. In other words, these primary and secondary effects are capable of diffusing a -- ah -- substance placed in the bomb throughout the upper atmosphere, where, in a matter of days, it will be diffused throughout the entire envelope." Lucinda clasped her hands in a slow, controlled way, as if one of them planned to immobilize the other and thereby keep both occupied. "And is there any substance... , I'm still asking hypothetical questions, you understand -- is there anything which could be added to the hydrogen fusion reaction which might bring about these -- these new cycles in women?" "'They are not new cycles," said the doctor flatly. "They are as old as the development of warmblooded animals. The lack of them is, in biological terms, a very recent I ! development in an atypical mamma #; so recent and so small that it is subject to adjustment. As to your hypothetical question -- " he smiled -- "I should judge that such an effect is perfectly possible. Within the extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation which take place in a fusion reaction, many things are possible. A minute quantity of certain alloys, for example, introduced into the shell of the bomb itself, or perhaps in die structure of a supporting tower or even a nearby temporary shed, might kky a number of phenomenal reaction chains. Such a chain might go through several phases and result in certain subtle isotopic alterations in one of the atmosphere's otherwise inert gases, say xenon. And this isotope, acting upon the adrenal cortex and the parathyroid, which are instrumental in controlling certain cycles in the human body, might very readily brin about the effect we are discussing in an atypical species." Lucinda threw up her hands and turned to Jenny. "Then that's it," she said wearily. "What's 'it'? What? I don't understand," whimpered Jenny. "What's he done, Lucinda?" "In his nasty, cold-blooded hypothetical way," said Lucinda, "he has put something in or near an H-bomb. which was tested today, which is going to have some effect on the air we breathe, which is going to do what we were discussing at your house." "Dr. Lefferts," said Jenny piteously. She went to him, stood looking down at him as he sat primly in his big easy chair. "Why -- why? Ju gt to annoy us? Just to keep us from having a little, petty influence over you?" "By no means # said the doctor. "I will admit that I might have turned my attention to the matter f for such reasons. But some concentrated thought brought up a number of extra-pol ations which are by no means petty." mantel, pince-nez in hand, the perfect picture of the Pedant At Home. "Consider," he said. "'Homo sapiens , in terms of comparative anatomy, should mature physically at # and emotionally between # and #. He should have a life expectancy of between # and # years. And he unquestionably should be able to live a life uncluttered by such insistent trifles as clothing conventions, unfunctional chivalries, psychic turmoils and dangerous mental and physical escapes into what the psychologists call romances. Women should phase their sexual cycles with those of the seasons, gestate their young longer, and eliminate the unpredictable nature of their psychosexual appetites -- the very basis of s all their insecurity and therefore that of most men. Women will not be chained to these cycles, Jenny, and become breeding machines, if that's what you fear. You will begin to live in and with these cycles as you live with a well-made and serviced automatic machine. You wall be liberated from the constant control and direction of your gomalic existence as you have been liberated from shifting gears in vour car."  "But... we're not conditioned for such a change!" blazed Lucinda. "And what of the fashion industry... cosmetics... the entertainment world... what's going to become of these and the them, and the people dependent on all those people if you do a thing like this?"  "The tiling is done. As for these people... tie paused. "Yes, there will be some disturbance. A considerable one. But in overall historical terms, it will be slight and it will be brief. I like to think that the television service man is one who was liberated by the cotton gin and the power loom." "It's... hard to think in historical terms just now." said Lucinda. "Jenny, come on." "Where are you going?" She faced him, her blued-steel eyes blazing. "Away from you. And I -- I think I have a warning to give to the women." "I wouldn't do that," he said dryly. "They'll find out in time. All you'll succeed in doing is to alert many women to the fact that they will be unattractive to their husbands at times when other women may seem more desirable. Women will not unite with one another, my dear, even to unite against men" There was a tense pause. Then jenny quavered, "How long did you say this -- this thipg will take?" "I did not say. I would judge between thirty-six and forty-eight hours." "I've got to get home." "May I come with you?" asked Lucinda. Jenny looked at her, her full face, her ample, controlled body, A surprising series of emotions chased themselves across her young face. She said, "I don't think... I mean... no, not tonight; I have to -- to -- goodnight, Lucinda." When she had gone, the doctor uttered one of his rare chuckles. "She has absorbed perhaps a tenth of this whole concept," he said, "but until she's surer of herself she's not going to let you or any woman near her husband." "You... you complacent pig ! # said Lucinda whitely. She stormed upstairs. "Lucinda I I'm -- glad you called." Something cold and tense deep inside Lucinda relaxed. She sat down slowly on the couch, leaned back comfortably with the telephone cradled between her cheek and her wide soft shoulder. "I'm glad you're glad, Jenny darling. It's been six weeks... how are you?" "I'm... all right now. It was pretty awful, for a while, not knowing how it would be, waiting for it to happen. And when it did happen, it was hard to get used to. But it hasn't changed things too much. How about you?" "Oh, I'm fine," said Lucinda. She smiled slowly, touched her tongue to her full lower lip. "Jenny, have you told anyone?" "Not a soul. Not even Bob. I p think he's a little bewildered. He thinks I'm being very... understanding. Lucinda, is it wrong for me to let him think that?" "It's never wrong for a woman to keep her knowledge to herself if it makes her more attractive," said Lucinda, and smiled again. "How's t)r. Lefferts?" "He's bewildered too. I suppose I've been a little... understanding too." She chuckled. Over the phone she heard Jenny's answering laughter. "The poor things," she said. "The poor, poor things. Lucinda -- " "Yes, honey." U I know how to handle this, now. But I don't really understand it. Do you?" "Yes, I think I do." "How can it be, then? How can this change in us affect men that way? I thought we would be the ones who would be turned off and on like a neon sign." tc What? Now wait a minute, Jenny! You mean you don't realize what's happened?" "That's what I just said. How could such a change in women do such a thing to the men?" "Jenny, I think you're wonderful, wonderful, wonderful," breathed Lucinda. "As a matter of fact, I think women are wonderful. I suddenly realized that you haven't the foggiest notion of what's happened, yet you've taken it in stride and used it exactly right!" "Whatever do you mean?" "Jenny., do you fee any difference in yourself?" "Why, no. All die difference is in Bob. That's what I -- " "Honey, there isn't any difference in you, nor in me, nor in any other woman. For the very first time in his scientific life, the great man made an error in his calculations."  There was silence for a time, then the telephone uttered a soft, delighted, long-drawn-out "Oh-hh-h-h..." Lucinda said, 'He's sure that in the long run it will have all the benefits he described -- die longer life expectancy, the subduing of insecurities, the streamlining of our manners and customs." "You mean that all men from now on will... " "I mean that for about twelve days in every two weeks, men can't do anything with us, which .is restful. And for forty-eight hours they can't do anything without us, which is -- " She laughed. u -- useful. It would seem that homo sapiens is still an atypical mammal." Jenny's voice was awed. "And I thought we were going to lose the battle of the sexes. Bob brings me little presents every single day, Lucinda!" 'He'd better. Jenny, put down that phone and come over here. I want to hug you. And -- " She glanced over at the hall closet, where hung the symbol of her triumph -- "I want to show you my new fur coat." down in a long arc, hung for over, waiting, an instant on columns of The thing at the controls had flame, then settled slowly into the great corded man-like arms. Its blast-pit. But no hatch opened; no skin was black with stiff fur. It had air lock swung out; no person left fingers ending in heavy' talons and The passengers rocketed through space in luxury, But they never went below decks because rumor had it that Satan himself manned the controls of T he Hell Ship. eyes bulging from the base of a massive skull, Its body was ponder ous, heavy, inhuman... After twenty minutes, a single air lock swung clear and a dozen armed men in Company uniforms went aboard. Still later, a truck lumbered up, the cargo hatch creaked aside, and a crane reached its long neck in for the cargo. Still no creature from the ship was seen to emerge. The truck driver, idly smoking near the hull, knew this was the Prescott , in from the Jupiter run -- that this was the White Sands Space Port, But he didn't know what was inside the Prescott and he'd been told it wasn't healthy to ask. Cene O'Neil stood outside the electrified ware that surrounded the White Sands port and thought of many tilings. He thought of the eternal secrecy surrounding space travel; of the reinforced hush-hush enshrouding Company ships. No one ever visited the engine rooms. No one in all the nation had ever talked with a spaceman. Gene thought of the glimpse he'd gotten of the thing in the pilot's window. Then his thoughts drifted back to the newsrooms of Galactic Press Service ; to Carter in his plush office. "Want to be a hero, son?" "Who, me? Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day." "Don't be cute. It's an assignment. Get into White Sands." "Who tried last?" "Tim Whiting." "Where is Whiting now?" "Frankly we don't know. But -- " "And the four guys who tried before Whiting?" "We don't know. But we'd like to find out." you will" ut there's There's always and the others. looking through wire. Sure there was a way. e st ions out loud. Then sit let them throw a noose round you . And there was a place where you could do the sitting in complete comfort , Where Whiting done it -- but only to vanish off face of ' the earth. Damn Carter to all hell! Gene turned and walked up the sandy road toward the place where the gaudy neons of the Blue Moon told hard working men where they could spend their money. The Blue Moon. It was quite a place. Outside, beneath the big crescent sign, Gene stopped to watch the crowds eddying in and out. Then he went in, to watch them cluster around the slot machines and bend in eager rows over the view slots of the peep shows. He moved into the bar, dropped low stools. He ordered  eyes drift around, beside him. He "Ain't o's been asking quesdown at the 'b face was He as if he was well dressed, with sever can give yon want -- for a price, nodded toward an e? lie in here, xl ' -- " # " he thought, move over here I come , and toward the door.    theman waite Gene moved up close. "You see, it's this way Something exploded against Gene's skull. Even as fiery darkness closed down he knew he'd found the way. But only a stupid newspaperman would take? it. Damn Carter! Gene went out. He seemed to be dreaming. Over him bent a repulsive, man-like face. But the man had fingernails growing on his chin where his whiskers should have been. And his eyes were funny -- walled, as though he bordered on idiocy. In the dream, Gene felt himself strapped into a hammock. Then somethin at him and made a terrible rac for a long time. Then it  j quiet except' for a t head. He went back to slee outfit, but it uniform. There and what there the back w there. It was a nurse to   Her soft hands fixed something over his eyes, something cold and wet. He felt grateful, but kept on trying to remember. Ah, he had it; the girls wore that kind of outfit in the Blue Moon in one of the skits they did, burlesquing a hospital. He took off the wet cloth and looked again. She was a dream. Even with her lips rougescarlet, her cheeks pink with makeup, her eyes heavy with artiface. "What gives, beautiful ?" He was surprised at the weakness of his voice. Her voice was hard, but nice, and it was bitter, as though she wanted hard people to know she knew the score, could be just a little harder. "You're a spaceman now! Didn't you know?" Gene grinned weakly. # T don't know a star from a street light. Nobody gets on the space crews these days -- it's a closed union." Her laugh was full of a knowledge denied him. "That's what I used to think!" She began to unstrap him from the hammock. Then she pushed back his hair, prodded at the purple knob on his head with careful fingertips. "How come you're on this ship?' asked Gene, wincing but letting her fingers explore. "Shanghaied, same as you. I'm from the Blue Moon. I stepped out between acts for a breath of fresh air, and wham, a sack over the head and here I am. They thought you might have a cracked skull. One of the monsters told me to check you. No doctor on the ship." Gene groaned. "Then I didn't dream it -- there is a guy on this ship with fingernails instead of a beard on his chin!" She nodded. "You haven't seen anything yet!" "Why are we here?" "You've been shanghaied to work the ship. Frn here for a different purpose -- these men can't get off the ship and they've got to be kept them contented. We've got ourselves pleasant jobs, with monsters for playmates, and we can't get fired. It'll be the rottenest time of our lives, and the rest of our lives, as far as I can see." Gene sank down, put the compress back on his bump. "I don't get it." "You will. Fm not absolutely sure Fm right, but I know a little more about it than you." "What's your name?"' "They call me Queenie Brant. A name that fits this business. My real name is Ann O'Donnell." "Queenie's a horse's name -- I'll call you Ann. Me, Fm Gene O'Neil." "That makes us both Irish," she said. He lifted the compress and saw the first really natural smile on her face. It was a sweet smile, introspective, dewy, young. "You were only a dancer" He said it flatly. For a long instant she looked at him. "Thanks. You got inside the gate on that one." "It's in your eyes Fm glad to know you, Ann. And I'd like to know you better." "You will. There'll be plenty of time  we're bound for lo." "Where's Io?" "One of Jupiter's moons, you Irish ignoramus. It has quite a colony around the mines. Also it has a strange race of people. But Ann O'Donnell is going to live there if she can get off this ship. I don't want fingernails growing on my chin." O'Neil sat up. "I get it now! It's something about the atomic drive that changes the crew!" "What else?" Gene looked at Ann, let his eyes rove over her figure. "Take a good look," she said bit' terly. "Maybe it won't stay like this very long!" . "We've got to get off this ship!" said Gene hoarsely... opened. A sharp-nosed face peered in, followed by a misshapen body of a man in a dirty blue uniform. Hair grew thick all around his neck and clear up to his ears. It also covered the skin from chin to shirt opening. The hair bristled, coarse as an animal's. His voice was thick, his words hissing as though his tongue was too heavy to move properly. "Captain wants you, O'Neil." Gene got up, took a step. He went clear across the room, banged against the wall. The little man laughed. "We're in space " Ann said. "We have a simulated gravity about a quarter normal. Here, let me put on your metal-soled slippers. They're magnetized to hold you to the floor " She bent and slipped the things on his feet, while Gene held his throbbing head. The little man opened the door and went out. Gene followed, his feet slipping along awkwardly. After a minute his nausea lessened. At the end of the long steel corridor the little man knocked, then opened the door to a low' rumble of command. He didn't enter, just stood aside for Gene. Gene walked in, stood staring. The eyes in the face he saw were black pools of nothingness, without emotion, yet behind them an active mind was apparent. Gene realized this hairy thing was the Captaineven though he didn't even wear a shirt! "You've shanghaied me," said Gene. "I don't like it." The voice was huge and cold, like wind from an ice field. "None of us like it, chum. But the ships have got to sail. You're one of us now', because we're on our way and by the time you get there, there'll be no place left for you to work, unless it's in a circus as a freak." "I didn't ask for it," said Gene. "You did. You wanted to know too much about the crew -- and if you found out, you'd spread it. You see, the drives are not what they were cooked up to be -- the atomics leak, and it wasn't found out until too late. After they learned, they hid the truth, because the cargo we bring is worth mil lions. All the shielding they've used so far only seems to make it worse. But that won't stop the ships -- they'll get crews the way they got you, and nosey people will find out more than they bargain for." "I won't take it sitting down!" said Gene angrily. The Captain ignored him. "Start saying sir. It's etiquette aboard ship to say sir to the Captain. 'Til never say sir to anyone who got me into this..." The Captain knocked him down. Gene had plenty of time to block the blow. He had put up his arms, but the big fist went right through and crashed against his chin. Gene sat down hard, staring up at the hairy thing that had once been a man. He suddenly realized the Captain was standing there waiting for an excuse to kill him. Through split and bleeding lips, while his stomach turned over and his head seemed on the point of bursting. Gene said: "Yes, sir!" The Captain turned his back, sat down again. He shoved aside a mass of worn charts, battered instruments, cigar butts, ashtrays with statuettes of naked girls in a half-dozen startling poses, comic books, illustrated magazines with sexy pictures, and made a space on the top. He thrust forward a sheet of paper. He picked up a fountain pen, flirted it so that .ink spattered the tangle of junk on his desk, then handed it to Gene. "Sign on the dotted line." Gene picked up the document. It was an ordinary kind of form, an application for employment as a spacehand. third class. The ship was not named, but merely called a cargo boat. This was the paper the Company needed to keep the investigators satisfied that no one was forced to work on the ships against their will Anger blinded him. He didn't take the pen. He just stood looking at the Captain and wondering how to keep himself from being beaten to death. After a long moment of silence the Captain laid the pen down, grinned horribly. He gave a snort. "It's just a formality. Pm supposed to turn these things over to the authorities, but they never bother us anymore. Sign it later, after you've learned. You'll be glad to sign, then." "What's my job, Captain?" "Captain Jorgens, and don't forget the sir!" "Captain Jorgens, sir." "I'll put you with the Chief Engineer. He'll find work for you down in the pile room." The Captain laughed a nasty laugh, repeating the last phrase with relish. "The pile room! There's a place for you, Mr. O'Neil. When you decide to sign your papers, we'll get you a job in same other part of this can!" Gene found his way back to the cabin he had just left. The little guy with the hairy neck was there, leering at the girl. "Put you in the pile gang didn't he?" Gene nodded, sat down wearily. "I want to sleep," he said. "Nuts," said the little man. "I'm here to take you to the Chief Engineer. You go on duty in half an hour. Come on!" Gene got up. He was too sick to argue. Ann looked at him sympathetically, noting his split lips. He managed a grin at her, "If I never see you again, Ann, it's been nice knowing you, very Bice." 'Til see you, Gene. They'll find us tougher than they bargained for." some of the atomic power stations he'd seen. Only smaller. There was no heavy concrete shielding, no lead walls. There was shielding around the central pile, and Gene knew that inside it was the hell of atomic chain reaction under the control of the big levers that moved the cadmium bars. There was a steam turbine at one end, and a huge boiler at the other. Gene didn't even try to guess how the pile activated the jets that drove the space ship. Somehow it "burned" the water. This pile had been illegal from the first. Obviously some official had been bribed to permit the first use of it on a spaceship. Certainly no one who knew anything about the subject would have allowed human beings to work around a thing like this. Gene's skin crawled and prickled with the energies that saturated the room. Little sparks leaped here and there, off his finger-tips, off his nose. The Chief Engineer was on a metal platform above the machinery level. The face had hair all over it, even on the eyelids. The eyes, popping weirdly, were double. They looked as if second eyes had started growing inside the original ones. They weren't reasonable; they weren't even sane. The look of them made Gene sick, The Engineer shook his head back and forth to focus the awful, mutilated eyes. His voice was infinitely weary, strangely muffled. "Another sacrifice to Moloch, an's the pity! So they put you down here, as if there was anything to be done? Well, it'll be nice to work with someone who still has his buttons -- as long as they last. Sit down." Gene sat down and the metal chair gave him a shock that made him jump. "I don't know anything about this kind of work." The man shrugged, "Who does? The pile runs itself. Ain't enough of it moves to need much greasing. You ought to be able to find the grease cups -- they're painted red. Fill them, wipe off the dust, and wait. Then do it over again." "What's the score on this bucket?" "We're all signed on with a billy to the knob. And kept aboard by a guard system that's pretty near perfect. After awhile the emanations get to our brains and wc don't care anymore. Then we're trusted employees. Only reason I don't blow her loose, it wouldn't do any good." He got up, a fragile old body clad in dirty overalls. He beckoned Gene to follow him. He led the way to a periscope arrangement over the shielded pile. Gene peered in. It was like a look into boiling Hell. As Gene stared, the old man talked in his ear. "Supposed to be perfectly shielded, and maybe they are. But something gets out. I think it happens in the jet assembly. A tiny trickle of high pressure steam crosses the atomic beam just above a pinhole that leads into the jet tube. It's exploded by the beam, exploded into God knows what, and tlte result is your jet. It's a wonderful drive, with plenty of power for the purpose. But I think it forms a strong field of static over the whole shell of the ship, a kind of sphere of reflection that throws the emanations back into the ship from every point. Just my theory, but it explains why you get these physical changes, because that process of reflection giveS a different ray than was observed in the ordinary shielded jet." Gene nodded, asked: "Can I look at the jet assembly?" "Ain't no way to look at it! Ids sealed dp to hold in tire expanding gases from that exploded steam. Looking in this periscope is what changed my eyes. Only other place the unshielded emanations could escape is from the jet chamber. Only way they can get back into the ship is by reflection from some ionized layer around the ship. If I could talk to some of those bigbrained birds that developed this drive. I'd sure have tilings to say." Gene was convinced the old man knew what he was talking about. "Why don't you try to put your information where it'll do some good? How about the Captain?" "He's coocoo." The old man slapped the cover back on the periscope, tottered back to his perch on the platform. "He sure has changed the last two years. Won't listen to reason." Gene squatted on the steps, just beneath the old engineer's chair. The old man seemed glad to have someone to talk to. "It's got us trapped. And it's so well covered up from the people. Old spacers are changed physically, ' changed mentally. They know they cant go back to normal life, because it's gone too far. They'd be freaks. No woman would want a monstrosity around. Besides, it don't stop, even after you leave the ships. God knows what we" #I look like in the end." Gene shivered. "But you're all grown men! A fight with no chance of winning is better than this! Why do you take it?" "Because the mind changes along with the body. It goes dead in some ways, gets more active in others. The personality shifts inside, until you're not sure of yourself, and can't make decisions any more. That's why nobody does anything. Something about those rays destroys the will. Nobody leaves the ships." "I will!" Gene said confidently. "When the time comes, I'll go. All Hell can't stop me." The old man yawned. "Hope you do, son. Hope you do. I'm going to take me a nap." He propped his feet up on the platform rail and in seconds was snoring. Gene clenched his fists, growing despair in his thoughts.  "Tain't no worse than dying in a war," muttered the old man in his sleep. learned. He understood why these men didn't actively resent the deal they were getting. No wonder the secrecy was so effective! The radiations deadened the mind, gave one the feeling of numbness, so that nothing mattered but the next meal, the next movie in the recreation lounge, the next drink of water. Values changed and shifted, and none of them seemed important. The chains that began to bind him were far stronger than steel. The chains were mental deterioration, degeneration, mutation within the very cells of the mind. He knew that now he must tend this monster ft forever, grease and wipe the ugly metal of it, and sit and talk idly to MacNamara, its keeper. He realized it, and didn't know how to care ! The anger and hate came later. The real, abiding anger, and the living hate. At first the numbness, the sudden incomprehensible enormity of what had happened to him, then the anger. Hate churned and ground away inside him, getting stronger by the hour. It all revolved around the Captain who tramped eternally around the corridors bellowing orders, punching with his huge fists. He knew there was more to it; the lying owners of the Company, the bribe-taking officials, the health officers who failed to examine the ships and the men and the ships' papers. But somehow it all boiled down to the Captain. Sometimes he was sure he must be crazy  already. Sometimes he would wake up screaming from a nightmare only to find reality more horrible.  V  Then he would go to Ann. Ann wits not the only woman aboard ship. There were three others, and to the crew of twenty imprisoned, enslaved men they represented all beauty, all womanhood. They lived with the men -- as the men -- and nobody cared. Here, so close to the raging elementals of the pile, life itself was elemental. As one of them expressed it to Gene: "Why worry? We're all sterile from the radioactivity anyway. Or didn't you know?" She had been on the ship for years, and was covered with a fine fur, like a cat's. Her eyes were wide, placid, empty; an animal's unthinking eyes. Gene prayed Ann would never turn monster before his eyes ; hoped desperately they could get away in time. "We've got to fight, Ann," he said to her one day. "We must find a way to get off at the end of the trip, or it will be too late for us to live normal lives. It's then of never. Besides that, we've got to warn people of what's going on. They think space travel is safe...In time this could effect the whole' race. The world must be told, so something can be done." Ann's young face showed signs of the strain. The fear of turning into some hideous thing was preying on her mind. She spoke rapidly, her voice breaking a little. "I've been talking to several of the crew y the old-timers, trying to get an understanding of why nothing is done. It's this way: when the ships land, guards come aboard. They're posted at the cargo locks and the passenger entrances. The only door aboard the ship that leads to the passenger compartment is in the Captain's cabin, and it's locked from both sides. Even our Captain never meets the passengers. There's only one chance, a mutiny. Then we could open the door, show the passengers." "It wouldn't do any good. When we landed, they'd find a way to shut us all up before we got to anybody. They've had a lot of practice keeping this quiet. They know the answers." She stamped a foot angrily. "It was you who said we had to fight! Now you say it's hopeless!" Gene leaned against the wall and passed a hand across his eyes. He looked at Ann's flushed beauty and managed a grin. "Guess I'm getting as bad as the rest of them, baby. We'll fight. Sure we'll fight." Schwenky was a gigantic Swede. He was the boss freight handler. It was his job to sort the cargo for the next port of call. He would get it into the cargo lock, then seal the doors so nobody would ttfy to smuggle themselves out with the freight. Schwenky was intensely loyal and stupid enough not to understand the real reason behind their imprisonment -- which was why he held his job. No one got by Schwenky. But this time, in Mar sport, something was missing. They'd driven the trucks up to the cargo port, unloaded everything, and then compared invoices with the material. They swore some claimed machinery parts were due them. Schwenky swore he'd placed them in the cargo lock, and that the truckers were trying to hold up the Company. The Captain allowed the truckers' claim and after the ship had blasted off into space, called Schwenky in to bawl him out. They must have gotten really steamed up, because Gene and Frank Maher heard the racket clear down on the next deck where they were cleaning freight out of a sealed compartment for the next stop. Gene and Frank raced up the ladders to the top deck, and Gene found the bi'eak he had prayed for. Schwenky holding the Captain against the wall; beating the monstrosity that had once been a man with terrible fists. Gene felt a sudden thrill. In a situation like this you used any weapon you could find. Schwenky was a deadly weapon. Gene laid a hand on Schwenky's massive shoulder. "Hold it man! You'll kill him!" Schwenky turned a face, red and popeyed, to Gene. "The Captain make a mistake. He try to knock Schwenky down. No man do that to Schwenky." "When he comes to, he'll lock you in the brig, put you on bread and water... " Suddenly Schwenky realized the enormity of his offense. It was obvious from his face that he considered himself already dead. "Nah, my friend Gene! Now they kill Schwenky. Bad ! But what I do?" Gene eyed him carefully. "Put the Captain in the brig, of What else? The "Lock him up, eh? Good idea! Then we think, you and I, what we do next. Maybe something come to us, eh?" Gene bent over the Gap tain's body, found the pistol in his hip pocket, put it in his own. He took the ring of keys from the belt. "Bring him along, Schwenky. If we meet anyone, I'll use this." Gene patted the gun. "I won't let them hurt my friend, Schwenky." "Damn! let them come! I fix them! Don't have to shoot them. I got fists!" "I'd rather be shot, myself," said Gene, watching the ease with which the giant freight handler lifted the huge body of the Captain, tossing it over his shoulder like a sack of stteiw Til go ahead" said Frank Maher. "If I run into Perkins, the First, I'll whistle once. If I run into Symonds, the Second, I'll whistle twice. I don't think there's another soul aboard we need worry about. All we got to do is slap the Cap in the brig, round up Perkins and Symonds, and the ship is ours. What worries me, Gene, then what do we do?" "It's Schwenky' s mutiny," grinned Gene. "Ask him." "Nah!" said Schwenky hastily. "I don' know. Maybe we just sail on till we find good place, leave ship, go look for job." Maher said, "Me with my 'lumpy face? And the Chief with hair on his cheekbones and double eyeballs? And Heinie with fingernails growing where his collar button should be? I wonder what we cun do, if T hey got down the first stairwell, but passing along the rather lengthy companionway to the next stairhead, they heard Maher whistle twice. Schwenky .put the Captain down, conked him with one massive fist to make sure he stayed out, then stood there, waiting. The Second came up out of the stairwell, turned and started toward them. Gene put his hand on the gun butt, waiting until he had to pull it. Schwenky said: "Come here, Mr. Perkins, sir. Look see what has happened!" The Englishman peered at the shapeless, hairy mass of the unconscious Captain. His face went white. Gene knew he was wondering if he could keep the crew from mutiny without the Captain present to cow them. Perkins straightened, his face a pallid mask in the dimness. "What happened, Schwenky?" "This, Mr. Perkins, sir -- " said Schwenky. He slapped an open palm against the side of Perkins' head. Perkins sprawled full length on the steel deck, but he wasn't out, which surprised Gene. He lay there, staring up at the gigantic Swede, his face half red from the terrible blow, the other half white with the fear in him. His hand was tugging at his side and Gene realized he was after his gun. Gene pulled out his own weapon even as he leaped upon the slim body of the man on the floor. His feet missed the moving arm, the hand came out with a snub-hosed automatic in it. Gene grabbed it, bore down went off, the bullet ri the wali-pMes with a . ut the gun dieting off slugged the man across the head with the barrel of the Captain's gun. Perkins went limp. Maher came up now and grabbed Perkins' gun. "Lead on," said Gene. He picked Perkins up and put him over his shoulder. Schwenkv retrieved the  slumbering Captain and they proceeded on their way to the cell on the bottom deck. But the shot had been heard, and from above came the sound of running feet. Gene began to trot, ab most fell down the last flight of stairs, went along the companionway at a run. At the cell door he dropped Perkins, tried four or five keys frantically. One fit. He pulled open the door and Schwenky drove in, kicking the body of Perkins over the sill. The Captain dropped heavily to the deck and Schwenky was out again. Gene was locking the door when he heard the shout from Symonds, running toward them. "What's going on there, men?" Schwenky started to amble toward the dark, wiry Second, his big face smiling like that of a simpleton. "We haf little trouble, Mr. Symonds, sir. Maybe we should call you, but we did not haf time. Everything is all right now. You come see, we explain everything , . " He made a grab forthe little Second Mate's neck with one big paw. But the Second was wary, ducked quickly, was off. Gene and Maher sprang after him. Gene shouted: "Stop or I'll fire, Symonds! You're all alone now!" Gene let one ho t angle off the wall, close beside the fleeing form, but the man didn't stop. Instead he headed for the bridge. Gene realized he could lock himself in, keep them from the ship controls. He could hold out there the rest of the voyage. "We've got to stop him ! # Maher close behind, they ran up the stairs on the Second's heels. Up the companionway they pounded, the Second increasing his lead. A door opened ahead of him and Ann O'Donnell appeared. Symonds cursed and tried to pass her. Ann deftly slid out one pretty leg and the officer turned a somersault, and brought up against the wall at the foot of the stairs to the upper deck and the bridge. But the Second was too frightened to let a little thing like a fall stop him. He went scrambling up the stairs on all fours. Gene was still too far away, and Ann moved like a streak of light. She sailed through the air in a long dancer's leap and with two bounds was up the stair, ahead of the scrambling, fearstricken officer. "Out of my way, bitch," and Symonds hurled himselftoward Ann. Gene leaped forward, but he needn't have bothered. Ann lifted one of her educated feet, caught the Second under the chin and he came down the stair like a sack of meal. Gene caught his full weight. The two men fell in a scramble of flailing arms and legs, knocking the props out from under Maher, who had started out after them. Just how the mixup might have turned out they were not to know, weight of upon out a scream and Symonds # too crushed a sound. ' C minutes later came back to conscioushis head resting in Ann O'Donnelfs lap while her prodded him here and , looking for broken bones, m dead for sure groaned there nr i i "You've just had the wind knocked out of you. You'll be all fight' and Ann let his head fall from her grasp with a thump. She stood up, a little abashed at the going' over she'd been giving him. # re re my mutineers?"Gene asked. 'Went to lock Symonds with the others. What is going to happen how? Fm not sure I like this development, now it's happened." u You should have thought of that before you tripped Symonds # said Gene. "But F#I admit there are Jems. For instance, with all the officers in the brig, how can we be this atomic junk the right correct direction ?" down beside see we can # .  . them broodin levers and buttons w! control their baffled frowns. took on a worried he said. "You goc We run ship, let officers Maher scratched one reying hair over his left eye rest of his skull was covered wit brown bumps like I "It's just possible well wreck ship, let the air out of her or some we experiment he thing, if warned. "Go get M.acNamara' Gene. "He's been on the ship longer than any of us. Maybe hell know." I He didn't. "All I know is grease cups " he reminded Gene. ours later eighteen men and four women gathered together in the recreation room to discuss a lan of action.Everyone had his or er ideas, but after an hour of wrangling, they got nowhere. Finally Gene held up a hand and shouted for silence. "Let's decide who's boss, follow orders' he said. "If be so bold, how about me?" "Yah!" said Schwenky I what you say. I like you!" Old MacNamara himself. "Do nothin ought to stick to the lives of those  to take our places have to guarded pile a W  r anxious would happen now if we gave up!" Gene spoke up again. "Let me summarize the position we # re in -- maybe then we can make a better decision." "Go ahead." said Ann. The others nodded and fell silent, waiting. Gene cleared his throat. "The way it looks to me, we've had a lucky accident in getting control of the ship. So far, we've  not contacted the passengers. They know nothing of the change that's taken place. As it is, I see no point in contacting them. It might force us to face another mutiny, that of the passengers, who would regard us as what we are, mutineers, and when they found we weren't going to our destination, they'd certainly not all take it lying down. Point number one, then, is to ignore the passengers, keep the knowledge of a mutiny from them. "Now, our real purpose in this mutiny is to expose this whole vicious secret slavery, tell Earth of the danger of the unshielded piles in space ships, destroy the Company's monopoly, and bring about new research which I'm sure would eventually overcome the difficulty. Just how are we going to do that? The answer is simple -- we must get back to Earth, and we must get back in a way the Company will not be able to intercept us. As I understand it, this won't be easy. The Company is in complete control of space travel, and they have die ships to knock us out of space before we can get near Earth. Somehow we've got to win through. Gan we do it by a direct return to Earth? I doubt it. How ever, say we do it. Then where do we go? The government might look upon us as mutineers and thus give the Company a chance to quash the whole affair. "So we've got to go directly to the people, who, once they see us, and realize what space travel with these piles means, will demand an explanation with such public feeling even the government can't avoid a showdown. It's the secrecy we must break. Thus, we must land on Earth with the biggest possible splurge of publicity. We've got to do it so no Company ship can prevent it. "Then there's this to consider. Most of you would find it a difficult thing to take up a life on. Earth. I know that many of you want to take off for some remote world, and try to live out your lives by yourselves. I say that would be a cowardly thing to do. So, before we decide anything else, I say let's decide here and now that the only thing we will do is go back to Earth." One of the most grotesquely deformed of the crew spoke up. "No woman would ever look at me," he said defiantly. "Children would stare at me and scream in terror. I've suffered enough. Why should I suffer more?" The woman in the fine fur got to her feet and walked over to him. She sat down beside him and took his hand in hers. "I will look at you," she said. "When we get back to Earth, I Will many you and live wifh you -- if you are brave enough to take me there." For an instant the crewman ft  stared at her out of his horribly bulging popeyes. then he swallowed hard and clutched her hand fiercely. "The Devil hinfself will hot keep me from it ! # he said hoarsely. Gene, staring at the man, felt a warm hand slip into his, and he turned to find Ann, "I think that answers for all of us," she said. The room rang with the shouts of approval. Once more Gene began talking. "All right, then, I've a plan. First, we'll try to find out how to maneuver this craft. I believe we can persuade one of the Mates to show us the controls without much trouble." "Yah!" interrupted Schwenky. "They show!"... "We'll set a course for Earth by the sun. We'll come in with the sun at our back, which means we'll have to make a wide circle off the traveled spacelanes, through unknown space, and come in from the direction of the inner planets, which are uninhabited and unvisited. Also, with the sun behind us, we won't be observed from Earth. Then, with all our speed, we'll come in, land at high noon in Chicago, right in front of the offices of the Sentinel , the newspaper for which I work." There was a chorus of exclamations. Ann looked at him in amazement. "You, a newspaperman!" she gasped. "Yes. I was sent out by my boss to find out what was behind the secrecy of the space ships. I got shanghaied as a crew member. Now, with your help, maybe I can complete rriy assignment. Once we get to my boss, the show will be over. He'll blast the story wide open " "Wonderful!" shouted Maher. "Come, Schwenky! We will get Perkins and make him show us how to run the ship!" Schwenky chortled in glee. "Yah! We get. By golly, I know that Gene O'Neill is good mail! Maybe I get my picture in newspaper?" Maher stared at him. "God forbid!" he said. "Unless it's in the cbmic section!" "Yah!" agreed Schwenky. "In comic section!" crossed Earth's orbit and headed in behind the planet in the plane of the sun, the meteorite hit. It tore a great hole in the passenger side of the ship, and knocked out the port jets. The ship veered crazily under the influence of its lopsided blast, and the crew was hurled against the wall and pinned there as the continuing involuntary maneuver built up acceleration. Gene, who had been in his bunk, was pressed against the wall by a giant hand. Savagely he fought to adjust himself into a more bearable position, then tried to figure out what had happened. Obviously the ship was veering about, out of control."Meteorite!" he gasped. "We've been hit."   He pulled himself from the bunk, slid along the wall to the ddtsU It was all he could do to open it, but once in the companionway outside he found that he could crawl along one wall, off the floor, in an inching progress. He ma.de it finally to the control room, and forced his body around the door jamb and inside. Against the far wall Maher was plastered, dazed, but conscious. At his feet lay Heinie, his head crushed, obviously dead. "Cut off the rest of the jets!" gasped Maher. T can't make it!" Gene crawled slowly around the room, following the wall, until he could reach the controls, then he pulled the lever that controlled the jet blast. The ship's unnatural veering stopped instantly and both Maher and Gene dropped heavily to the floor. Gene was up first and helped Maher to his feet. Together they turned to the indicators. "Passenger deck's out!" said Maher. "Except for a few compartments. The automatic seals have operated. But there must be somebody left alive in them." "We've got to get them," said Gene. "But first, we've got to check up on what damage has been done here, and how many casualties we have." "Heinie' s dead," said Maher. "He hit the wall with his head " Gene shuddered, and deep in his stomach nausea churned. 'He thought of Ann and his blood froze In his veins. "You take below decks. IT! go up," he said. Ann's cabin was on the deck above. Maher nodded and staggered away. Gene scrambled up the stairwell as fast as he could, and ran down the. corridor. At Ann's door he stopped, turned the knob. The door opened. The room was empty. Suddenly he heard running footsteps, and Ann threw herself into his arms, sobbing. "Where were you?" he asked, almost savagely. "I went to your cabin, to see if you were hurt. What happened to the ship?" "Meteorite hit us. Knocked out the passenger deck. Most of the passengers will be dead, but we've got to go in and rescue the survivors." Doors were opening here and there and the crew members able to make it were congregating around them. They went to the recreation room. There Gene counted noses. Five crewmen were missing. Of those present, six men were injured, and one woman exhibited a black eye, accentuating her other abnormalities. The three prisoners were reported unharmed. "What about the missing men?" Gene asked. "Three dead," Maher replied, "two badly hurt. We'll need somebody to look after them." "I'll go," volunteered Ann. The woman in fur stepped forward also, and they left the room behind Maher and Schwenky. Gene faced the rest. "We've got a real problem now. With a reduced crew, we'll have to finish a trip that would have been tough with an uninjured ship. But first, we've got to search the passenger deck and remove the survivors. All of you who are able, put on pressure suits and come with me He led the way to the locker containing the pressure suits. Seven men, those who were not too deformed to don the suits, made up the party. Gene led the way to the Captain's stateroom, ordered the door sealed behind them, then opened the only door to the damaged deck. The air rushed out as the door swung open, and suddenly complete silence descended upon them. There would be no more communication between them except for signs. In an hour they had determined the truth. All passengers but one, a woman, had been killed instantly. The woman was unconscious, but suffering only from bruises. It had been necessary, after discovering her unpierced cabin, to return to the deck above and cut through with a torch. When she regained consciousness and saw her rescuers, she screamed. "That'll give us some idea of how the people back on Earth will receive us" said Gene. "If we get there, that is." Later, in the control room, Maher and MacNamara gave their report. "We can make it," said Mac  Namara, "but we'll come in limping like a wounded moose. If any of the Company ships sight us, we'll be a sitting duck. But maybe it will be better that way. This is like war, and some of us must die ..." His voice trailed off in a mumble. r "Some of us are dying," said Maher. "But he's right, Gene; we can make it, with luck. We'll not be able to come in fast, nor land in the city, but we'll make it to Earth." "That's enough," decided Gene. "If we can land near Chicago, I think I can manage the rest." They turned to the controls, and MacNamara went back to his pile room. Once more the ship limped on. this time directly toward the  # ball of Earth, looming a scant goal. Then tragedy struck again. The cabin on the passenger deck from which they had removed the sole survivor blew its door, and the air on the deck above rushed out through the hole they had burned into the cabin. It had been forgotten, and it meant the lives of three more crew members. Then, as they prepared to bring the ship into the atmosphere, Maher, peering through the telescope, let out a shout. "Company ship, coming up fast! They're after us!" Gene leaped to the telescope and peered through. Far to the left, a glowing silver streak in the sky, was the familiar shape of a space ship, growing larger by the minute. Studying it, Gene saw that it was an armed cruiser. "They've got wise," said Maher. "I thought they would, when we didn't check in at Io. Probably radioed back to be on the lookout for us." "Call MacNamara," said Gene. "We've got to see if he can set us down faster. Maybe there's some way to step up that pile " Maher rushed off, and Ann came in. "What's up?" she asked. "Cruiser after us," said Gene, his face grim. "Looks like we won't get to Chicago unless MacNamara has something up that old sleeve of his." Ann went white, and together they waited for the old Engineer. When he came in, Gene gestured to the telescope. "Take a look " MacNamara squinted through the eyepiece with his double popeyes. "Don't see a thing," he grumbled. "Well, it's a Company Cruiser, gunned to the limit. She's going to be near enough to shoot us down in about three hours." "Three hours, you say?" MacNamara scratched his head. "How near we to Earth?" "You could make it in die lifeboat." Gene snorted. "That Cruiser'd shoot down the lifeboat as easy as it will the ship -- a lot easier." "If they can catch you," said MacNamara. "Some of us must die, that the rest may live." "Don't start . that again, Mac," said Maher impatiently. "What we want to know' is whether you can soup up that pile so we can beat that Cruiser dovn to Earth?" "Not a thing I can do," said the Chief Engineer. "We've only one set of tubes. Full power would shoot us all over die sky. But I can do something as good" "What?" T The old Engineer considered them through his double eyes. "The rest of you'll take the lifeboat and make for Earth.  I'll remain here on the ship and shield your flight. I'm sure I can hide the little boat for awhile, and then, even with one jet, I think I can delay the cruiser until you get away. Someone's got to make a sacrifice. I'm old, and I didn't want any of this to begin with. Maher gasped. "Mac, you old fool. D'ya mind if I apologize for what I just said? But you're right, that's a possible answer. Only I'll be the one to stay." "Do you know how to adjust the pile and the jets to make a weapon out of them?" asked MacNamara. "No... began Maher. MacNamara grinned. "Nor am I going to tell you! So, you see, you can't be the one to stav." Maher gripped the old man's hand and pumped it. "You win " he said. "You old... crackpot!" There was real affection in his voice. "Then be off with you," said the Chief Engineer. "You've not a minute to lose. Every man jack of you into the boat, including the Captain and the Mates. I'll not have my ship cluttered up with extra hands that might cramp my style... And turning, the old man made his way back to the pile room, mumbling to himself. Eyes wet, Gene gave the orders to abandon ship, and within thirty minutes every living soul was aboard the lifeboat. MacNamara had finished his work with the pile and was back in the control room, waiting for the lifeboat to cast off. As it did so, he waved, then turned to the controls. f As the lifeboat darted away on its chemical jet engines, they could see the old man maneuvering the big ship so as to keep it ever between them and the Cruiser. An hour later when they were within a hundred thousand miles of Earth, MacNamara sent up a flare denoting surrender. Tensely they watched the distant speck of light that was the ship with MacNamara on , it. Then, around its side came the Company Cruiser, steering in toward it to make the capture. It was scarcely a thousand miles from the disabled ship. Gradually it drew closer, then edged in. Now it was only a few miles away, and at this distance, both specks seemed to merge., "They got him!" Maher said. "Yah!" Schwenky boomed, disappointment in his voice. "Me, I should have been the one to stay. I would slap them." Suddenly, out in space, a bright flower grew. A flower of incandescent light that blossomed with terrifying rapidity, until it seemed to engulf all space in the area of the two ships. The familiar sphere ploding atom bomb hung there in the heavens an instant, then it was gone. In its place was only a vast cloud of smoke, the dust and scattered atoms that were all that remained of two gigantic space ships. "He detonated the pile!" said Gene. "He turned himself into an atom bomb!" "Yah!" said Schwenky, his voice strangely muted. "Yah!" Awkwardly he turned and patted Ann's head as she began to sob. Schwenky proudly, holding the front page of the newspaper up for all to see. "I have my picture in the paper! Is it not njce?" Laughing, Ann kissed the big Swede right on the lips, and hugged him, paper and ail. "It's beautiful, you big Jug!" she said. "The handsomest picture I've ever seen in any paper." "Nah!" denied Schwenky. "It is not the handsomest. All of us have our pictures in the paper. We are all very good looking! Not only Schwenky. Is it not so. Gene, my friend?" Gene grinned at him, and at the others. Maher pounded him on the back, and over the uproar came the voice of the editor of the Sentinel. "Telephone for Mr. Schwenky!" Schwenky looked dazed, cocked his big ears at the editor. "For Schwenky?" he asked stupidly. "Telephone? Who would call Schwenky on the telephone?" "How do I know?" said the editor. "It's some lady... He thrust the phone into the big Swede's hand. "Lady?" said Schwenky wonderingly. "Hello ,... lady... he spoke into the receiver, his booming voice making it rattle. "The other... " began Gene, then desisted. "Never mind, she'll hear you... "What? You want to marry me? Lady... " Schwenky's eyes bulged even more, and he roared into the transmitter. "Lady! You wait! I come!" He thrust the phone into the editor's hands and made for the door like a lumbering bull. "Where you going?" yelled Gene. Schwenky halted, turned with a big grin. "I go to marry lady. She asked me to become my wife!" "Where is she?" asked Gene. "Where are you going to meet her?" Schwenky looked stupidly at the now silent phone. "By golly! I forget to ask her!" There was tragedy in his voice. "Now I never find her!" Mr The editor laughed. "Never mind -- you'll get a hundred more proposals before the day's over. You can take your pick!" Schwenky' s eyes opened wide. Then he grinned again. "Yah!" he roared.' "I take my pick! She will be beautiful! Yah!" The chatter of the teletype interrupted him, and the editor turned to watch the tape as it came from the machine. The he began to read: "Washington. April #. President Walworth has grounded all spaceships and ordered all those enroute to proceed to the nearest port. A Congressional committee has been picked, including top members of the cabinet, to investigate the ships, the atomic drives, and the system of secret slavery among crews. In a statement to the Press, President Walworth said that space travel wall not be resumed until proper shields are developed. But he added that he had been informed by leading physicists that the problem can be solved within a year if sufficient funds were available. Said the President: T will see that the funds are made available!' " The editor dropped the tape and turned to Gene. "I have one more bit of information, this one direct from the President by phone. He has asked me to inform you that he has appointed you new head of that?" "Federal Agency for Space Travel," grinned the editor. "And congratulations. I hate to lose a good reporter, but maybe you'll be back after you finish in Washington -- at a substantial increase in salary." Gene grinned back. "Maybe I will," he said. "And Fll need the money." He put an arm around Ann and drew her to him. "Tw'o can't live as ckeap as one, you know." is a very personable young man who lives in P.O. Box #, he has labored mightily and thanklessly to evolve and create the "'Science Fiction News Letter." This, according to Bob's letterhead is "the leading newspaper of the science fiction world." The first item in the oldest issue of this newsletter we have at hand (Feb. #) reads: slick fantasy and scific magazine appear soon. Details scarce and Mag will follow gen of Time . Title not yet item from the last issue ' in... the Caro a... fan club Monsters of ished the first organised monsters eager address The Little Lynn Hickman s # W. Bel Statesville s N. C. The two items quoted are hot necessarily representative of # the broader content of Bob TuckeEs newsletter. But Bob Tucker is certainly representative of that broad and interesting brotherhood -- the science-fiction fan clubs. Even the moreso because his newsletter rep resents no single club, but caters to the many hundreds of them all over the world. An examination of the letter shows it to be neatly almost professionally done. But more tit ah this, it shows the heart and sou the work and sweat that goes into it. Bob's circulation has risen from a handful of giveaways in a paid circulation in # copies. This rise is live of two factors public interest in and Tucker's amazin age, or maybe plain ness. Bob Tucker is by any means, which has no hairs in his # flash iiifor pr ;tion editors and who will in the next F. There is also Captain , whose very jwsletter circulates about # hout the world. And are no doubt others. , at this points two. questions arise in the mind of the casual non-letter-writing reader of science-fiction, who makes up, of 'bourse, the vast bulk of the field's paid circulation. First, why do these amateur newsmen do it? Why does Bob Tucker beat out his brains year after year in this strange manner? Profit? We are sure this is not the case. Tucker's letter is issued bimonthly and sells for #c a copy. He could make more money 'redecorating old bird houses. Vanity? Certainly not in the case of Wilson Tucker, who has written six novels -- five of which are oddly enough, ive yarns and only one a science-fiction story -- since and must be far more widely known for his fiction than his stf Personal satisfacopinion, is it. And for us, the second reader.: fan clubs? Pi writers in various Q. l which may enomenon of sciy see no the movehi  o. e ment unless to movie star stamp collectors segment of hobbyists In short, scienceto be a hobby with ing of sane, healthy-mindc who band the natural manner to cuss their mutual interests. In fact the principle error here is ir the term "science-fiction" to their particular field. While one the major cohesive forces relative to this hobby is the-' professional science-fiction magazine, many of the fen are thoroughly at home with the dry-as-dust higher mathematics, abstract equations, and technical data which have no place in magazines dedicated to pure entertainment and seldom appear there. An item noted in Tucker's newsletter informed us that a. stf fan wrote to a fairly well-known scientist named Einstein, received a reply, and that the fan's local club spent entire session digesting that reply.  said about the fringe" of stf fandom. B doubt, such a fringe exist " w a point that the Post ties last year banned a f; the mails, exists in almost enthusiasm, fanatic is far say the baseba vet to hear ff  Ksjt m a on V ing to start. Yet this "phenomenon" can be observed unfailingly every year in front of a world series stadium. In case the reader may interpret the foregoing as IF's invitation to the fan clubs into a mutual admiration society, it's not true, and we ask Bob Tucker and his clansmen to read further. As an individual, we admire them very much, but as editor of IF, a magazine dedicated to entertainment and thence to a publisher's profit, we can only quote the able Sam Merwin who with the following comment in the October '# I issue of that magazine : ",... fans as such make up a very small percentage of our net paid circulation . The magazine is achy a much less actively zealous and vociferous readership. Thus we have given the fans space in the deliberate hope and intention of making their antics entertaining to at least a fair proportion of the larger, less-fannish readership We did not see the foregoing reported in Tuckers newsletter. An oversight no doubt. But Bob certainly knows that Sam Merwin is a man who -- by his own admission -- considered "the trading of reasonably ingenious insults a delightful pastime". Therefore we think we could, with Sam's consent, substitute "their affairs interesting" for "their antics entertaining" in the above quotation. And with the substitution we've probably quoted from Sam, the policy of ninety-nine percent of the professional stf mag editors, although few of them have exhibited either Sam's courage or his desire to give up editing. Frankly, we don't think the fans need the pro mags as much as they appear to. We feel that if all paper supplies were suddenly needed to make blotters for the Pentagon and the pro mags thus ceased to be. Bob Tucker and his sciencefiction fans would go merrily on their way, getting together to discuss atom bombs, guided projectiles, space platforms and other things far beyond the layman's ken. Next Month s Personality: who has been called "The High-Priest of ScienceFiction." He rocketed Shaver to fame- -- gave the world the bitterly controversial Shaver Mystery. But how many people really know Palmer? Get the facts in the May issue of IF.   I t They opened the ruins to tourists at a dollar a head but they reckoned without... The met had his back toward back to her worrying. Swiftly she me. Hunched forward, he surveyed the crowd, but didn't find was screaming at the girl in the the person she was looking for. She lens of his camera. "Don't just started moving toward one of the stand there, Dotty! Move! Do arches that led deeper into the something! Back up toward that ruins, column with inscriptions on it... I followed her slowly. The girl was tall and longlegged She passed through the arch, with ideal body proportions, her stopped, and turned her head tofeatures and skin coloring a perfect ward the right, her eyes on somenorm-blend with no throwback thing out of sight. She'd found him, elements. Right now she seemed but she saw me at the same time confused and half-frightened as she and her worry deepened, tried to comply with the directions When she moved back into the of the man with the movie camera. crowd, I strolled casually through She smiled artificially, turned her the archway. head to look at the fragment of a There was a vaguely defined wall behind her, reached out with passageway, the roof over it gone lines of an almost obliterated inAnd twenty feet away, oblivious of scription in its stone surface. his surroundings except for what The camera stopped whirring. was directly in front of him, was Its owner straightened and grummy man. bled, "That's all." His height and build were somea J lit it worry. df my attype... well have in the types The rewas subtle. Only one ifferentiate would ever my attention take in his is elbows had a movements when his exploring hands paused so that  strange birdlike impression was given. Also an air of ungainliness in the lines of the lean body, rather than the feline smoothness and grace of the normblend. It was so in keeping with his features that it served to strengthen the psycho diagnosis. A throwback to an eraten thousand years in the past, and there ? as the textbooks say, prone to mental instability. It was no wonder that the girl called Dotty had had the air of being perpetually worried I e appeared now, from the far the ruin and approached "Ether than saw her ed up, every line of excitement.  ' 'Tve found it...f... #.  Tve # of years ago ruirts. I reto lies able to where the rock touched for five tl and find what I say is Dotty was "No, Herb. If it were might half believe you here on r a " pie weren't even humanoid! CZ XT t : I JJ TT I    I V... I mm A   W " Ufl mIt W L. m " Neither was I  hoarsely. I sighed regretfully. Fd seen too many cases like this one. F d grown to dread them. But it was a job and a man had to eat. tourists back to the bus. I min  gled with the crowd, and when Dotty and Herbclimbed .aboard I managed to stick close to them. "Where' d you two go to?" the man in the pith helmet called from where he was sitting. "Stick rmr close to me. I put a new role camera. At the next place J to get some shots of both "All right, p  e She ' and Herb find separate seats no talking, so I f studied the three man in the p was a normal f '# erb. You've t You'll talk ers so Ion  a Don't If this was a cemetery , the old Martians should have been here. But there iv ere no voices -- no hones   area in the ceiiter of the ancient city, the part considered too dangerous because of cave-in possibilities and made its way out to the edge of ruins to the part that resembled the ancient cemeteries on Earth. The only major difference was that there were no remains under the evenly spaced stones. There was some doubt that it had been a cemetery. But the guide announced it as one. And that announcement as the bus came to a stop Had a pronounced effect on Herb. He began his Buttery elbow movements again and looked afound at Dotty with a triumphant smile. I moved up quickly to keep him in earshot. He protested when George insisted on taking camera shots, then gave in and cooperated in order to get it over with. Finally George snapped his camera shut. Herb mumbled something to Dotty that I didn't catch, and started down one of the lanes between rows of stones as though headed for a definite goal. I ebtildrf t very well follow aftef they left the main group. It would have been obvious. Instead, I veered off to one side, gambling that when they reached their destination I would be able to read their lips. I got well away from stragglers and took out my mifrosebpe, pointing if off in the distance and swinging the objective lens around until it centered on them. I was lucky. They were facing in my direction. "It isn't a cemetery," Herb was saying with emphatic motions of his hands. "It was a parking area, and this stone was where I parked my air sled. I can remember it as though it were yesterday." . I had to admire the man's subconscious. It was a remarkably shrewd guess. The experts wouldn't play along with it, but they would probably never be able to prove him wrong on that count. But Dotty was arguing with him. "How can you prove it was a parking area?" Her eyes roamed over the Jarge field with its regularly spaced stones. "It certainly looks impractical for a parking lot." "Just the same, that's what it was. I wish I had a shovel here. I seem to remember burying something near my stone. If I could find that it would prove I really remember." "Why don't you forget it?" Dotty pleaded. "After all, even if it were true, hat docs it matter now ? # "It matters to me. Ever since we arrived here I've seen familiar things. Too familiar to be coincidence. I never felt this way before. I always considered reincarnation as ancient superstitious belief, just like everyone else. But not any more. I know. I lived here when all this was new." "But can't you just be satisfied to feel that you did and let it go at that?" Dotty asked. "I'm afraid of what they would doto you if they found out what you're thinking." "Hah!" Herb snorted. "I have a . f feeling that before we leave Mars I'll be able to prove it to them. Somewhere in this city' is something that only I know exists. It's hidden under stones that haven't been disturbed since man first set foot on  I  n.  'tixs. 'a O entirely clear -- it will come, listen. TheU what I say is y ? a.  ' ' S# see. up # c wont ng # ieve y v The guide was calling everyone back tothe bus. I watched Herb scowl fiercely at the stone marker that he believed to have been his, open Tis mouth to say something, then turn away sothat his lips were out of sight. Regretfully I put the mirroscope away and went back to the bus. JL mg next, and I was uneasy about it. Herb and Dotty managed to sit together and I got a place right behind them where I could eavesdrop. Rut they sat in silence. The bus had left the ancient city behind, to head out over the desert toward one of the few structures on Mars which had withstood the ravages of time without crumbling. An immense dome of solid concrete reinforced with, pure .copperrods Harder than steel. The Martians know what Earth civilization l t learn until around the year : thousand : that copper can t smpered, but pure copper fee's tempered of itself in a thou; dome was assageways ana vhich . were not would be a natwere pilini ly at the ecially a' trading and glittering like' tamisKefl gold. Two of the permanent guards had come out to take charge of the tour. I caught the eye of ode of them and nodded toward Herb. The guard caught my meamfig, edged over to his partner, and soon both men were warned that Herb was to be closely watched. I felt better, knowing that a couple of others knew about him. Maybe it would have been smarter to have taken him in .custody right then. But it would have meant a scene. The procedure of the tour was for the guide to do all the talking, leading the procession through the roped off parts of the dome, while the two guards followed along behind to make sure no stragglers got left. I let three or four people move in front of me so Herb woman' suspicious. Dotty wassticking to him, plainly worried. Arid hi more excited than he had bee any of. the other spots. He i quivered, his eyes caressing walls with a fevered look. Dotty didn't miss pered in her ear a The guide took into f a d walls, to  . V eri strait V s of desert and Then eve!, a zig-; rooms. ight of steps to eyes on the back of can tel! a lot by At first his head turned that, indicating he was was waiting for tale sudden tensing, with the head directed at some spot, that would tell of a sudden "memory" stirring in the man's mind. I almost missed it when it came, because it was between two passages -- a blank wall. The briefest pause, then Herb was going on again as though nothing had hapBut now his head had stopped its curiosity-motivated pivotings. It was the head of a man who was no longer curious -- who has made up his mind. about something. I didn't like it. And when the group emerged open air once more without Herb having tried anything I knew certainly as I had ever known that he intended comin and soon. station scrawled a hasty to investigate the between first level, and aem as I passed ig bus. other spots on no T TH once again leaving me free to Once there. I f were just setup in place to explore and promised to call me ; they were finished. Next C.L and made my report. it when the operator in, "Steve Merrit wants to you' she said crisply. "Make the circuit three way # I said. Steve's voice came in.  T had to get to you, Joe. This guy Herb and his wife just left the hotel # ' "C.I.'s listening too # I said... "Did they say anything that would point to where they're going?" "To the cemetery first. He swiped a couple of knives and forks when they finished eating their dinner. Maybe for weapons." "I doubt that # I said. " rv think it's time to pick him up. He's got to be committed." "Wait a minute  C.L you catch up with them, and play along. Tel! this you overheard him what was going on. fidence if you can. ,# s pretty plied. "That guy's "Ids orders  you lay the net : happens we can That was reluctantly, I put it back. I would have to play the part. The paralysis tube would give me away as an agent It would have to be up to Steve and the others to contain the threat. Down in the lobby I saw Steve waiting impatiently. He was uneasy, too. "What's come over C.I.?" They're toying with dynamite on this.' "I think I know what they want, they want to let him go far enough so we can see more of the nature of the danger. And I hope nobody gets killed. They should have spotted this Herb guy and not let him come here at all. I suspect they did spot him, and let him come to conduct another of their damned experiments. They don't want to leave well enough alone." We were outside now. No one was around. The sun was just beginning to set, and the instant it disappeared the night would be pitch-black. Even if one of the moons was out  "We'll be watching on the standard C.L band," Steve assured me. "They're at the temple right now, waiting for it to get dark." He grinned. "Good luck." There was a mixture of genuineness, half mctckery, and worry in his voice. At the temple ruins I found them easily enough and took the simplest course. I walked right up to them. "Hello," I said. "I thought I'd find you here. I want to go along with you. I'm interested." "What do you mean?" Herb was hostile and suspicious. "You remember me. I was on the tour this afternoon. I accidentally overheard you. It would he something if reincarnation could be proven." "Do you believe in reincarnation?" # I frowned as though being cautious. "I don't know." Then I put a disarming grin on my lips. "Since believing in it is legally classified as insanity, for the records, no." It was a nice statement. It could imply that I did, and Herb took that implication. He accepted me. Dotty was different. "How do you know he isn't an agent?" she asked Herb uneasily. "If I am. the fat's in the fire," I told her. "but wouldn't I be locking him up?" This quieted, but didn't satisfy her. "Anyway," I said, "if you can dig up something that you remember burying, an extra witness won't do any harm. That's what you're after, isn't it? Proof that will end the last bit of doubt?" "That's right," Herb said. "And you can help me dig." "Okay then," I said. And it was settled. We introduced ourselves, then lapsed into silence while we waited for the sun to set. It wasn't long. a cemetery than ever in the eerie glow of black light pencils as we made our way along a row of stone markers. Herb strode purposefully. Dotty stuck close to him, still a little suspicious of me. I trailed half a step behind. Finally Herb stopped beside one of the markers. "This is it," he said softly. I blinked at the marker then t atHerb. It wasn't the one he had singled out in the afternoon. Was he mixed up? If he was he was a good actor. He took out one of the dinner knives and squatted down and started to probe the soil, loosening it so that it could be scraped out by hand. I watched him dig. Part of the time I helped him. Wc found nothing. After a reasonable amount of this Herb stood up with a resigned sigh. "Guess i was wrong, I " he said. "Poor Herby," Dotty said. "Yeah, poor Herby," Herb said with every appearance of tiredness and defeat. "But -- that's that. Sorry to have gotten you all excited about nothing, Joe. Guess it was too much to expect anything." He turned to Dotty. "As long as we're out here, let's take a walk by ourselves. Huh?" That was as obvious a cue as I had ever been handed. Neat. I was confronted with the alternatives of scramming or calling him a liar. "Guess I might as well go back to the hotel," I said  cheerfully. "See you in the morning." I headed back the way we had corne until I was sure they couldn't hear me or see me with their black light pencils. Then, ducking down next to a marker I waited. After a couple of minutes I heard cautious foosteps. TPs me, joe -- Steve." "Good," I grunted. "What are they doing now? They gave me the brush-off." "I got the play," Steve said. "Slick. Should we close in now, or wait?" "I think I'll play my part a lit- tie fur ther. Don't want G.I. to think we're timid." "Okay," Steve said. "The next funeral we attend may be our own." "Yeah " I said. "It might." I moved into the darkness, not using my black light pencil, but keeping my sensitized glasses on so I could see Herb's if I got close enough. I reached the spot where we had done the digging. I hesitated, then kept on, toward the spot where Herb and Dotty had been so engrossed that afternoon. In my mind's eye I knew exactly where it was. My hands explored ahead of me, searching out each stone marker along my path, dinging to it as I passed it, and slipping off as I went on to the next. They were my only contact with reality in this total blackness. I was thinking, too. I was thinking of what Herb had said about this being a parking area for airsleds back before the earliest known records of man on Earth when this  f city was alive. He was probably right about it at that. Analysis had shown the presence of copper and aluminum in the top surface of some of the markers that could only be accounted for by some metallic object setting atop each one long ago, and remaining so that molecular and atomic creep could set in, carrying such atoms deep into the surface crystals of the stone. And I was wondering what it was he hoped to dig up. If it were f some sort of weapon it probably wouldn't work after all this time. It couldn't! Or could it? A few things had been pieced together about the ancient Martian civilization. Not much, but enough to be sure that they knew afew things we had never discovered. They had been masters at creating machines with no moving parts. The electronic devices we had found had proven they knew far more about V.H.F. than wc did. I could see what G.l. was aiming at now. We might not even recognize what Herb was searching for. It would be better to let him find it, and get it from him before he could use it. If it was a weapon. 'And it probably was a weapon. I was pretty sure his main objective was hidden in the wall in the dome, and that tills thing in the cemetery was something that would help him get to that abjective. My thoughts came back to my surroundings. I was less than a dozen feet from where Herb and Dotty should be. I stopped. There was no trace of black light. I held xnf breath and listened. And I heard the faint scraping of the knife against stone.  standard C.I. infrascope so that I could see. Steve probably knew more of what was going on than I did. I had counted on watching Herb by his own black light pencil, and he was working in darkness. Carefully I stole forward, inch by slow inch, my ears tuned for. the faintest significant sound such as a grunt of satisfaction that would tell of finding what he was digging for. me, thoughts about the latest discoveries in disintegration frequencies, thoughts about how little we knew of that ancient Martian civilization. But also I was figuring what Herb would do. He would find the object he was digging for. Unwittingly he would grunt his triumph. Dotty might forget his strict warnings to be quiet, and say something. Regardless of that, he would stand up slowly, fondling what he had found, remembering what it was and how it worked. There would be a few seconds before it would become a weapon in his hands, seconds that I had to make the most use of, and be ready for. c Uh!" It was the triumphant grunt I had known would come. Sudden panic made me cast aside whatever vague plan of action I had had. I turned on my pencil, bathing the two in its black light. At the same time I said, "I thought it was a scheme to get rid of me." It was the element of surprise that saved me. A still picture of the scene the black light disclosed etched itself into my mind. There was an object in Herb's hand. A strange, meaningless object, dirty, yet with definite form. It was cradled in his hand like a weapon. It was pointed almost at me. I dropped my pencil and went in low, diving for his legs. I felt the air crackle where I had just stood. As my antis encircled his legs I heard thunder exploding nearby. Training has its advantages. The moment I felt contact with Herb that training took over. I jerked and rolled in a movement calculated to throw him to the ground face down, the motion ending in a backbreaker hold. But only a part of my mind was concerned with that. The other part was frozen with horror. Approximately a half acre of the cemetery was glowing. I saw Steve in the center of it with Herb's weapon pointing his way. The very inertia of matter held Steve together for that brief instant, then he was falling apart, melting and evaporating at the same time, just like the stone markers and the ground around him. I had the thing away from him suddenly, and I wondered what to do next. Running footsteps gave me the answer. It was other C.I. agents closing in. Seconds later they had Herb under control. Dotty was wringing her hands and crying. Me, I was holding the tiling, afraid to let go of it and afraid to keep on holding it. But as the seconds passed without it exploding into destructive action again I began to let myself think I might live a while longer. The area of destruction was molten now. Its heat was like that of an open blast furnace. We skirted it and headed toward the road, lights in the distance telling us that cars were on the way to get us, I saw Dotty stumble. I took her arm. , She looked up at me, recognized me in the light from the glowing pool of bubbling lava, and tried to pull away. "Take it easy," I said gruffly. c Tm your friend. Maybe the only friend you've got here." Her look told me she didn't bed r lieve me, but she didn't pull away any more. We walked along, and after a moment she seemed to struggle up out of her mental paralysis. "Herb was right!" she said in a low, wondering tone. "He really did remember." "Itwas plain coincidence," I said sharply, "and don't ever let yourself think differently. He's insane. It's a recognized form of insanity. He'll be sent to a good mental hospital, and in a year or two he'll come out good as new." "Coincidence?" she echoed. Then she laughed. It was mirth that drifted quickly into hysterical hopelessness. I dug my fingers into her flesh until the pain brought her to her senses. "Coincidence," I said. "Nothing more. I've seen seventeen cases just like his. How else did I spot him? I recognized the type. None of the others found what they rationalized themselves into thinking they remembered from the time they were Martians. Eventually one of them would stumble onto something. That's coincidence. Not incarnated memory." She turned her head and blinked at me. I nodded grimly. "I'm an agent," I said. "I go out on the tours for one purpose only -- to spot psychos and make sure they don't get out of control You'd he surprised how many there are. Some of them, like your husband, probably show no sign of instability until they get here. They look around at the evidence of a civilization that existed before homo sapiens had evolved on the Earth, and it thtows them. If you want to understand more about it read the medical books. They get irrational pre-memories. They look at something and the idea of familiarity associates with the new impression. They look around a corner and see something, and build up the conviction that they had consciously known what was there before they looked around the corner." I felt that I was making headway with her. I wanted to. I had to. I "You -- you say there were others, and they didn't find anything?" she said. She was groping for something logical to grasp. I had to give bet that something. "That's right," I said. "And the law of averages said that someday someone would uncover something that's been missed." She was nodding slowly now, accepting what I was saying. It was authoritative. She would find com firm a,t ion in authoritative books. If she wanted to pursue the subject she would find plenty of evidence, real evidence, to support it. It is a common form of insanity. It was important that she believe that. We reached the road. C.I. had been prepared. There was a car to take her back to the hotel, a stationwagon for Herb who was now very, submissive and somewhat dazed, and a third car for me and the Science Building ba.seineiit, laying the thing on a wooden table, very gently. It seemed solid, each integral part of its form being of a different metal. None of the men watching me lay it down discounted the danger it contained. They knew too much about how shape and dimension can affect the electronic properties of metal. They knew the thing probably didn't contain an erg of power of its own, but probably triggered and directed the release of cosmic energies as yet unknown to them. They stared at it. One of them reached out to touch it, then slowly drew his finger back. I could see the decision crystallizing in their minds behind their serious eyes. This thing would go with the other strange and incomprehensible machines locked in vaults in a concrete building far out oh the Martian desert away from the tourist trails of this dead planet. It would remain there until the day when human science advanced far enough to understand it. "What about the wall in the dome?" I asked. "They roped it off. They're afraid of it." "Did you convince his wife he's insane ? # one of the science staff asked. I nodded. "I used the same old line. Told her there were dozens like him, and the law of averages made it certain at least one of diem would find something." He nodded, grinned without humor. "How we love to lie." I turned awav. There was a bitter taste in my mouth from all the lies Pd told -- all the bilge. But I knew the truth, too. I was as sure of that as I was of anything. It wasn't insanity, of course. And it wasn't reincarnation. It seemed to be, because the mind has a habit of possessing for its very own anything that enters it. The truth of the matter was that somehow, in some incomprehensible way, the Martians were still with us. They hated us and they knew how to use our weak ones. The old Martians -- and their science.' I took a last look at the weapon lying on the table, then left the room and climbed the stairs to the first floor, I walked down the silent, empty hall to the exit and out into the night. I let my eyes roam the blackness Aof the lifeless Martian desert. With an effort I pulled them away and fixed them on the warmth, the human warmth, beckoning from the hotel. I started walking toward that bit of comfort, and as I walked the eternal question that haunted all of us in C.I, hovered in the background of my thoughts. Would we be able to contain the Martiaps until we understood the terrible machines they had left as a deadly heritage? Tonight we almost hadn't... I thought of Steve.  :BS and planet rs! just what the latter are, the reader must imagine for himself, authors rarely describe them, but only disclose their effects. These weapons form a goodly part of ' the spacewarsciehce-fiction. That the former exists, and that' the latter is a very strong probability, are tilings which camiot be denied. But just whether they would be used, or how much use they would be are very doubtful factors. To permit their use on# must first of all admit the fact of idealis annihilating war. Personfind it hard to apply the istic to any war that has occurred in the murky past of manre is an one. ave certainly been fought pretexts, some o but in it Is possible to are foutid to that have past do not a lust for corn . enlijy traced to simple economic factors. The , Spanish empire of America, was based on more than a lust for gold, in those same Elizabethan days the English seaman was second to none -- but although often describe as Empire making, those seamen' instead of attempting to wrest from Spanish rule the Empire of South America went merrily ahead with the much more profitable, although equally deplorable, African slave ! And that even after they had defeated the Spanish Armada which had been sent against land, not from any real desire conquer the country, but simply spike the guns of the adventurer whose main source was pirated from. Spanish   India derives desire to conquer because with ... archy arid Civ cial  to prosper. Peace could only be obtained the price of conquest. Should your enemy be infringing on your trade, you do not destroy him utterly. You just try to break him down to your size, or a little beiow. You therefore not only make his markets open to you, but you make him one of your markets. Should lie have an eye on a bit of territory that will give him an advantage over you, then you try to annex it first. You don't wash it right off the map, for if it will give him an advantage, it will give you one also -- no matter how many excuses of liberation are made. That liberation yarn was one of Hitler's most-played records, and Joe is running him pretty close! In fairness, it must be admitted that we have our own version of the same story. It follows that internal use of the atom-bomb, except for race suicide, is not likely -- when everyone can use it. And it is probable that most of the leading figures in today's scene could put on a very nice display of atomic fireworks. Each race, creed, or nation, does not desire to . utterly destroy their enemies. They just desire an advantage -- economic -- over the rest. No advantage can be had when the others cease to exist. Although it may be nice politics to demand the use of the atom-bomb when you are not in favour of the present government, or administration is not likely that such demands are made seriously -- except in the public eye. If it were not that the public thought the use of the atom-bomb would be a decisive factor, the opposition would equally likely be expressing a strong desire that the government should refrain from its use. is doubtless considered fallacious by many of my readers -- tends to me to prove the use of the atom-bomb and the planet-smasher improbable in space-war. (As an aside, I consider space-war, as normally visualised, highly unlikely anyway. Anyone who has had much to do with the supply lines for a military campaign wall realise what I mean ) . Frankly, you may consider this editorial to be an iniquitous vilification of mankind. It is not meant to be. It is intended to show that man, in the main, does things because he hopes to get something out of it. You get. very little out of total devastation, if you are anywhere near the norm. The atom-bomb, fission-type, has been used twice, and although it's destructive powers did not quite match up to the science-fiction fan's expectations, it was enough of a holocaust to shock most humans. The fusion-type we expect to be far 'worse. I do not expect them to be used to any great extent in the future -- and I base my hope and expectation on man's very obvious cupidity! If that doesn't save us, nothing will! And, naturally, if it saves us long enough to permit us to get out into space, it will probably save all those planets that our authors of today so happily blast from their orbits into flaming; death. -- kfs Mfc X lil ft (VWhA# on TV today. We suspected this when we saw them do Ted Sturgeon's "The Sky Was Full of " Then we watched Tenn-s "Errand Boy'", and the classic, "Knock, by Frederick Brown and we said to ourselves, "Honey chile, this airit no coincidence, so let's prowl around and find out why. Sturgeon seemed the logical lad to quiz because we'd just sent Mm a fat check for his "Never M the very slick which you've no .ready read, .ockefeller Plaza, and asked how chap, Ted, who the high notes but here's what   Fiction League of America. The names Ted tossed off with pensive casualness were. Boucher, Asimov, Brown. Simak, Gold, Pratt, De Camp, Term. # # As good as any names yon cm find in the field T said master of understatement. The rest could be termed history, so let's term it history and get on. It seems this hard core of pure talent saw which wav the wind   blowing, got together, and tosse their collective stf classics into a hat. Then, as would natur lowp the TV brass mg up, co-axial cable. AI lead straight to The Sc "V "lie's most obtuse But the boys, sworn n dsle. len he sees it the ' moral here is substitutes."" Far many TV producers took one at science-fiction and Cassidy a ray gun. Sain Spade in a diver's helmet." ' The tried and true science-fiction fans could have told them how wrong they were at the very beginning; that stf isn't something any writer can bat out while waiting for the girl friend to straighten the seams in her stockings; that authors like Sturgeon, Temp and DeCamp didn't get up there by accident but by hard work and a sincere devotion to the highly specialized type of literature which is now taking its rightful place society of letters. J to # anyone amentals of dramust concede even in the great, will show up thd medium of it stage or is of a type tiorn it aim tenacity is f, a TV ort Abrahams ;ent named sells watch s good enterfiction stage ( passable, but goo your materia their field know how to  # it is the plot around in secure drama and suspense. # ingredients are there already ing to be used. It is eeive even a mediocre director making a botch of Nelson Bond's Trial Flight , as an exam And happily, the TV program, plagued with fuzzy minded technicians. The adaptations are skillfully done, the direction is smooth and obviously emanates from a practiced hand. The answer is quality right down the line -- a perfectly logical result. There is also another point of importance here to the true sciencefiction fan. Ours is a relatively new field of literature in that it is never before heard of it. Quite urally, we want science' a enter tairfment. makin ver on the so that whenotherwise. MO I new men as every time it screens. Let's and TV people, science outlet, make it and get the c  By Charles Recour # Phosphorescent Muscles I t is strange to consider the way in which altogether diverse scientific discoveries often dovetail. The old saying should be, "Science makes strange bedfellows! Biologists have for a long time been interested in the phenomenon of natural phosphorescence as exhibited by fireflies, deep-sea creatures and small animalcules found in fresh water. The mechanism all three types of life employ to change chemical energy into visible light is marvellously efficient. Practically no energy is lost in heat -- merely a fraction f one percent -- the rest appearing as useful light. One of the major objectives of the study of phosphorescence in fireflies was the acquisition of knowledge of the mechanism in order to improve upon the efficiency of fluorescent lamps and glow tubes. This study is still going on. But what is unique is that the scientists concerned are beginning to suspect that there is a link between the way phosphorescence occurs in living things and the way human muscles are triggered into action! Imagine the strange connection between these two (putatively) unrelated phenomena! It made in one branch of science will apply to another, entirely dissimilar, field. The study of the way the muscles act is of fundamental importance to anyone desiring any understanding of the life processes at all. Scientists have so far begun to get the glimmer of an idea as to how nerve actions are basically electrical, but the step from nerve impulse to muscle reaction has been a stumbling block for a long time. Now it appears that the study of fireflies is likely to suggest a lead to the right path. Insect World Can't Win T hat grimly poetic person who had "the insect crawling out of the eye-socket of the skull Of the last man on Earth' will have to change his tune soon. In the never-ending war between men and insects, it appears at last as though man is to get the upper hand. The insect world has countless numbers of soldiers, but the human world has brains. There is a famous laboratory in California devoted to one subjectinsects! It is small and underofteh happens that a discovery staffed, but it is efficient, and froth it have come a number of discoveries that will eventually influence all of our lives. Few pe'ople realize the destructiveness of insect pests. damage are done each year by insects to crops, textiles, even metals. And until the Berkeley Laboratory started a truly scientific campaign, all the chemical agents in the world were able to do no more than check their ravages. The Berkeley Laboratory is dedicated to the study of insect diseases. Insects, even as you and I, have a ferocious enemy in fungi aqd bacterial destroyers. Farmers, agronomists and scientists from all over the world have sent dead insects to Berkeley to determine what killed them. Frequently the lab is able to pinpoint the killer and very often it turns out to be a bacterium of some type or another. Fortunately the bacterial diseases that seem to destroy insects are not harmful to humans or animals -- and vice versa. This naturally led the lab men to consider wiping out insect pests with BW -- bacterial warfare. They first fought the alfalfa caterpillar with a filterable virus suspended in water and sprayed from an airplane. The results wereperfect and the caterpillars were wiped out in one fell swoop. Subsequent work has shown that viruses of various types are even more effective than bactericidal componds and, as a consequence, the electron microscope, the only medium through which viruses can be seen, is in constant use. Large varieties of viral substances have been discovered which are able to deplete the insect world, and right now a planned program is in progress, designed to practically label some virus as a destroyer for some insect type, definitely and specifically. The success of this program will be a great boon to farmers, beekeepers, plant and animal breeders, and even to householders. While in reality the threat of insect domination has always been very slight, tlie actual damage done by the creatures has been formidable. Chemicals have limited application and the best bet would seem to be to fight living fire with living fire -- use harmless viruses to combat fearful insects. Science is gradually turning from the manipulation of the physical environment, the inorganic, to the organic. In the biological world rather than the physical are the greatest chances for new and extreme advances. And BW against insects is one of the outstanding new victories ! Gassy Old Universe W hen you think of "deep space # , of the regions between the remotest stars and galaxies, you think of frightening emptiness, of sheer nothingness, awesome in its lack of matter. This is not exactly the case. So-called "empty space # is actually filled almost uniformly with vast amounts of plain old hydrogen gas. Near stars this gas is ionized, electrically' charged, and can be detected by ordinary telescopic and spectroscopic. observation. But neutral, un charged hydrogen cannot be de tec ted this way. It took the new science of "radio astronomy to show up the startling amounts of hydrogen present everywhere. First, neutral hydrogen makes its presence known by the unusual fact that every once in a while the electron spin of a single atom of .hydrogen will be completely reversed, and thus it will send out a feeble pulse of radiation -- not visible light, but the subtler radiation of familiar radio waves. Because this pulse is exceedingly weak, and because it occurs with such rarity in the life of a single hydrogen atom, there would be no hope at all of ever detecting it if it were not for the astounding fact that hydrogen is abundant beyond all expectation, m In. a universe measured in hundiameter, it is known that there is approximately one atom of hydrogen for every' cubic centimeter of space! This fantastic density explains why radio astronomy in this region works. Rarely does a single hydrogen atom pulse out a blast of radiation, but when countless numbers of atoms are involved, they all add up to an appreciable amount of radiation. Huge receptive directional antennas poke their grotesque shapes into the sky and, with highly sensitive fingers, pick up the twentyone-centimeter radiation that touches their sensitivity. Radio astronomy is now able to make charts and graphs of the radiation distribution. What it means is another matter. What part it plays in the structure of the universe is not fully known but, as has been mentioned before, it is very' likely that these enormous numbers of hydrogen atoms provide the fuel for warming the stars, and serve as a vast "coalpile" for the stellar furnaces. It is this discovery which leads scientists to think that the universe is not dying, but rather is in a continual state of creative flux, renewing itself and regenerating itself without end. Of course much more will be learned of these things as soon as Man can get out of the hampering blanket of air that interferes with such research and analysis. A Lunar observatory would be the thing that the average radio astronomer would sell his soul for for, without a three-hundredmile blanket of air to soak off the radio Waves before they touch his antenna he'd be able to tell a great deal more about what is happening away ! Architecture -- # jT pie are just emerging the Dark Ages! That is a little strong and exaggerated, but it must be remembered that, a mere twenty years ago, the height of architectural style was the imitation of Gothic horrors, or the duplication of the "California-Spanish # bungalow! Fortunately there has been a widespread increase in good taste stimulated by the superb desi; are cn # # f  ' beauty and utility without being imitative. , The use of materials such as glass and new synthetic media along with stainless metals and the combining of such structures into a natural relationship with their surroundings lead us to suspect that here is a glowing future in store for architecture. We can't extrapolate architectural designs to the year # but we can certainly visualize the trend they are taking and from that deduce that certain principles will be applied by future architects. The spreading-out of communities is a certainty. People will want then, as now,to take advantage of space and mobility. The skyscraper (which is now slowly dying as an architectural style) may have a new lease on life through the development of the helicopter and the wider use  of flying and moving in three dimensions which will be a surety of the time. As far as materials go, we can only suggest that # will have many as yet undreamed of by us. For example, it is almost a certainty that glass piping will be as common then as are iron and copper now. Many automatic machines just suggested now will be in use in both country life and city life. We may get some minor glimpse of what the future will be like by examining certain fine specimens of contemporary Californian architecture in which full use is made of the idea of relating outdoors to indoors in one complete "living-unit". People living in places like these are in harmony with their environment. Nature and Man have combined forces. The year # will see plenty of that, for by then Nature will have been completely tamed and function and aesthetics will be one. -- Charles Recour T he Amazing T rue Story of the Artist W bo Bilked World Art Authorities van Mcegeren, a master artist who, by artful completely fooling some of the world's great art experts!... It's only one of many unusual stories new magazine of true mystery. Ask your newsdealer!  hears again and again is "Where do you get youf plots?" Most authors, in self-defense have a stock answer they can toss of! subconsciously, but we've yet to hear one of these answers which is the least bit enlightening. Thinking in this vein, it occurred to us that a writer's correspondence concerning a current brain-child might throw at least a dim light on the subject. So here's a peek at some author-letters the postman brought us: Take the note we received from Ted Sturgeon who wrote "Never Underestimate." A story, incidentally, which has already been snapped up for a coming anthology. Ted writes: "The basic idea for this storv was an extension of known ideas -- extrapolation -- the choice of a solidly based scientific or social phenomena and a series of human narratives about their development. The electric motor evolves into the cyclotron which, logically, should produce an electron accelerator which operates in a straight line instead of a circle. Which is, of course, a driv for a space ship. Analytical chemistry has succeeded in synthesizing proteins, which logically leads to the creation of life in the laboratory and the evolution of man-made species suited to settle the outer planets."  (The Hell Ship) Palmer has to say about it : "Here it is. I think you will like it... "Keep every story tense with action and human interest and good characters the reader can believe in and you will keep him on the edge of his chair and safely in your hands, as a customer. He wants thrills and excitement. Strange things. Other worlds." Thus writes one of the acknowledged masters in the field. And so well put that we arc allowing Ray's Howard Browne, whose Twelve Times Zero left us a trifle breathless, wrote: "I've always wanted to put a modern cop into a situation whereby he is forced to cope with pure science-fiction with only his wits and native shrewdness to fall back on. I'll start the story immediately and Til be just as interested as anyone else in finding out what happens to him " Incidentally, the conversation from which we quoted iit our editorial came  at a later date after Howard's plot was prfcttv well formed. The Old Martians, Rog wrote: "I hope you'll like this one, Paul. It's somewhat of an experiment. I tried to do a problemstory with three possible solutions, any one of which the reader may take as his town. I hope I succeeded. If you don't feel that I did, please, by all means, shoot the yarn back." We should be so foolish! So there you have it. The inside dope right from the authors themselves.  Cometh is our letter department and we want some letters. We want to hear from you regardless of what you have to say, for your words serve as a sort of barometer on whether or not we're putting out a magazine you really like. For the best three letters received up through January #th, we're going to give three original manuscripts from the first issue of IF -- real collector's items. So send us your letters right away. Each one will receive careful consideration and if yours is one of the three best ones published you'll receive post haste your original manuscript. And, along with the three prize winners, we're going to publish as many letters as we have space to accommodate. Don't forget: if you want your letter considered for a prize it must be postmarked not later than January #th. (Remember: no matter vgkat you say, we promise not to sue you! ) tery. Here is one of the most unusual publications on the stands today -- a magazine devoted to the strange and mysterious, the bizarre and the baffling, stories you wouldn't believe in fiction but which actually happened in real life! Read! Prophet Without Honor, Mystery of the Bell Witch , The Mart Who Swindled Himself and others in the March issue of -- KWtol i Ask for it at your local newsstand ! a list of new and Lies, Westerns, ih entertainment, in cents a book -- five dollar! You can't coupon on next page! I MMli , pocket-size format, and unabridged novels it today! Take' your pick Money hack if not satisfied! by Adorn Ring, "ben Jim Pierce found the real story behind the simple little gold necklace, it was little wonder that so many people gambled their lives for it! Hard-boiled action! Mystery. where in the bloody strife of cattle war and range greed lay the secret of Burr Patton's other self, and he had to face strange people and hostile guns in order to discover it. Western. ' lonely country hotel a very cunliihg and ruthless murderer was weaving his web, and it was Boyd's fate to drive his girl and himself right into its quivering, terror-ridden heart...  Creepy. Mystery.  Trim, hard-bitten, Lawman Steve Rennevant meant to capture the Faro Kid dead or alive. But after of miles in the saddle, he fate had dealt him a hand. Western. by Lewis Graham. novel of Garr Fallconfidence man, love affair with and notorious brothel Love and AdDon Camexpose was beauty in a cottage were Lulie Warren wanted. But gorgeous child of the tenements damned by a fatal allure brought her heartbreak in j luxury. Romance. was talented, redheaded, beautiful, and a fine artist -- but her strange disappearance was shrouded by a maze of deception, fraud and murder! Mystery. Considine sided with the railroad, and found that he was fighting the girl he had fallen in love with who, by blood, was the railroad's most enemy. Western. Because they were smuggling Fraficisco to New York, Ed and Sylvia Furness faced thre sand miles of d angel wit on their heads. Mystery. aab .  Paul W, Fairmart he'd make Kit pay. And he did' her to his will, men, and beneath them. in blast Social#. TH IT y # rice had been a men -- most of , n one of one of them to murder her. Lynrs Westhad been an too long I to change, gun, on the side of an old friend in to the death. Western. Weston Clay. With ice on Ms head and a gun in his and, young Red Paine was forced take the same road his father had a one-way road to an unmarked grave in Root Hill ! Western. Levinson. Harry Witstow was sounding for oil, and in refusing to heed grim notes of warning that he move on, he was also sounding his own death, knell. Mystery. Bon Carson, ace newshound of the Chicago Globe , gave his city editor a fit and himself a poor life insurance risk when he turned a suicide into double murder. Mystery. wagon train in a eye Hopson. One day Clay ordinary cowpoke in lov the next day he was ning at bank after bank.  tington. Grinning, glitter in ous symbol of evil. An excitin story of sex, dope, blackmail murder in the lush Hawaiian Islands by a hard-hitting author. Mystery...histories of women, murdered in moments of passion by various means and for different reasons. By a famous police reporter. True mystery. If you do not agree that this is a big bargain in exciting reading, simply return the books within five (#) days and your money will be promptly returned in full. The coupon at right Is for your convenience. Merely encircle the numbers of the titles you wish, fill in and mail,. Enclose . check or money der. We pay postage and handling ' charges. Please check alternate titles. ish, we will ten books or # ;#.   for less  numbers I have encircled below. "I ene for five titles (# for ten titles or # #. If not satisfied, I may return within # days and receive my full. IT # #I II  # # li mand amazing experiences!  IhW cne ontore I Novor before have you seen a magazine with such fasciwritten especially by Amenrn't nutstnnding reporters, are the most battling and unusual, the most mysterious and strange true stones of all times. In the March issue. for instance, you'll be entenoincd the second" and his fobulcus nudut cult; thot did ent ond raised merry hell with story of an ingenious mogioan who knew some Ireks people never saw; ond many others . Ask your local news decler today for this "torrgletely foscinoting" magazine At oil newsstonds -- #c  Ail Stories New and Complete Publisher Editor IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., # Lord St., Buffalo, N. Y. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., Kingston, N. Y. Application for Entry as Second Class matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York, pending. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are ffction. Any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. A chat with the editor... ly called to my attention in which it was concluded that people' who can't get up in the morning, aren't necessarily lazy. I hailed the study with much personal gratification because I have always found it difficult to rise and shine with the morning sun. In fact, I am such a difficult case that I can quote ihy wife as follows: "Junior, it's time for breakfast. Go up and lead your father down the stairs lest he fall and break his neck." "Junior, show your father where his grapefruit is before he starves to death." After breakfast, I am always the last one up from the table, I sit thinking of all the logical reasons why I should drop dead, until my wife says, "Wake up and go to work, stupid, or you'll find your name scratched off the payroll." This dire possibility is usually effective, and I drag myself to the office, hoping the place has burned down. A round noon, things get better. I begin to breathe. My heart starts fluttering and gradually assumes an even, steady beat. By midafternoon I am in pretty good shape, and at quitting time, a no more bright nor alert individual can be found for miles around. Life becomes a great adventure; living a joy. About midnight, my peak of efficiency is reached. Then, around three A.M., comes a cry from the bedroom: "Get in here and get to bed, you nighthawk. You must have been born backwards." This accusation has always made me cringe. The onus of being a misfit has not been taken lightly. But now, along comes this blessed report, telling me I am not alone -- that there is a great suffering fraternity of which I have unknowingly been a member. people. Those who wake up early in the morning at the peak of their efficiency and run down gradually until bedtime. And their exact opposites, who start in low gear, advance to second, and come finally into high with every brain cell popping. In truth, the members of this unhappy clan are out of step with everyone else. But it is not a result of laziness nor habit. It has to do with the structure of their genes, and is as inherent as traits of disposition -- as Impossible to change as a cowlick -- as deeply rooted as a tendency toward baldness. The scientific report states that persons of this type should reverse their living cycle -- arise at sunset, when their efficiency is at its peak; retire when everyone else is going to work. Unfortunately the economic scheme forbids this to most of us. There aren't enough night jobs to go around, and those of us who commute would always find the trains running in the wrong direction. B ut science -- and not fiction- has come to our rescue. We aren't lazy and shiftless. We're just backwards, and we must wipe the stain from our good names. Sq arise. Children of the Night! Spread the word. The Club for Citizens in Reverse is now in the making. The first meeting will be in your editor's office at four A.M. tomorrow morning. something to be really proud of. When Ralph brought it in I took one look at it and got out the office bottle -- coke of course. We drank to the masterpiece and then my troubles started. With H. G. Wells not available, to whom could I assign the writing of the lead novel? A name flashed automatically. Milton Lesser, that dynamic young man with the magic typewriter. Milt arrived in response to ' a phone call and I showed him the cover. He said, "Gosh!" "I'd like a twenty-five thousand word novel that will do it justice." "What's your idea plotwise?" "You're the writer, not I." "But if it's a stinker it bounces," he mused. "How true." Milt went home and phoned that evening. "How do you like Tangle In The Sky?' " "It listens fine. Swell title." Milt stopped coming around for some weeks. Then one day he wandered in with a manuscript. I made a noise like an editor and asked, "Any rubber in it?" He grinned like a cat right after dinner and stalked out, leaving the manuscript in my hands. A couple of hours later I called him and said, "You forgot your check, genius. Want me to mail it?" I had just finished reading one of the best plotted, smoothest written, ably done space yarns anyone ever handed me. comment on the Ray Palmer article in this issue. It was one of the toughest jobs ever to come my way. Even the more so because Ray is one of my best friends, and th article had to be, above all, entirely objective. Did you ever try to write objectively about one of your best friends? It's not easy. But Ray is "copy" and the article was screaming to be written. And now that it's in print I can't even call Ray and say, "I was only fooling; chum." Because I wasn't. mail and how it was tossed at me in one great big lump. You see IF lives in Kingston, New York with Publisher Jim Quinn, but I'm located some fifty miles south in a Continued on page # The hunters wanted animals that lived on far Ganymede -- though not as badly as the animals wanted the hunters. Jungle in the Sky By Milton Lesser T he big man looked at home Steve of a Callistan fire-lizard. The among his trophies. Somehow big man might have been all of his scowl seemed as fierce as the them wrapped into one, Steve head of the Venusian swamptiger thought wryly, and there were a lot mounted on the wall behind him, of trophies. and there was something about his He was the famous Brody Carquick-darting eyes which reminded mical, and rumor had it he was the many richly mounted heads. "So you're fresh out of school with a degree in Extra-terrestrial zoology' Carmical grumbled. "Am I supposed to turn cartwheels?" Steve cleared his throat. "The Placement Service thought you might have a job -- " "I do, I do. That doesn't mean any young pup who comes along can fill it. Ever been off the Earth, Mr. Stedman?" "No." "Ever been off the North American continent?" "No." "But you want to go galavanting around the Solar System in search of big game. Tell me -- do you think they have a Harvard club on every stinking satellite you'll visit? Do you think you can eat beefsteak and drink martinis in every frontierworld dive? Let me tell you, Mr, Stedman, the answer is no." "Try me, sir. That's all I ask -- try me." "We're not running a school, Mr. Stedman. Either a man's got it or he hasn't. You haven't. Come back in ten years. Ship out around the Solar System the hard way, and maybe we can use you then -- if you still remember what you learned about Extra-terrestrial zoology. What in space ever made you study extra-zoo, anyway?" "I found it interesting," Steve said lamely. "Interesting? As a hobby, it's interesting. But as business, it's hard work, a lot of sweat, a lot of danger, squirming around on your soft belly in the muck and mud of a dozen worlds, that's what it is. Just how do you think Carmical Enterprises got where they are? Sweat and grief, Mr. Stedman." Carmical yawned hugely and popped a glob of chocolate into his mouth. His fat lips worked for a moment, then his Adam's apple bobbed up and down. Steve got up, paced back and forth in front of the desk. "I won't take no for an answer, Mn Carmical." "Eh? What's that? I could have you thrown out of here." "You won't," Steve told him calmly. "Maybe I'm just what the doctor ordered, but you'll never know until you try me. So -- "So nothing! I said this isn't a school." "They tell me the G or dak leaves on a ten-world junket tomorrow. All I ask is this: let me ship along as the zoology man. Then, if you're not satisfied, you can leave me at your first port-of-call -- without pay." Carmical smiled triumphantly. "You know where we space out for first, Mr. Stedman? Mercury, that's where. I'd love to see a sassy young pup like you set loose on Mercury in one of the Twilight Cities." "Is it a deal?" "It sure is, Stedman. It sure is! But I warn you, we'll expect perfection. You'll not have a chance to profit from your own mistakes. You won't have a chance to make mistakes. One slip and you've had it, is that understood?" "Yes." "Pm not going, of course," Carmical said, patting his great paunch and saying with the action that he was too old and too fat for space; "But Til hear all about the way you were stranded on Mercury, among a lot of Merkies and -- Steve smiled grimly, said: "No you won't. Next time you see me will be after the tenworld junket. Whom do I ask for on the Gordak? Carmical dialed for a bromo, watched it fizz in the glass, drank it, belched. "T. J. Moore's in charge," he told Steve. "Old T. J.'s a mighty rough taskmaster, Stedman. Don't say you weren't warned." "Thanks." "Well, I'll hear about how you were stranded on Mercury," Carmical predicted. "You'll see me after the tenworld junket," said Steve, and closed the door softly behind him the great jet-slagged underside of the Gordak, spraying fresh zircalloy in the aft tubes. Spaceport officers were everywhere in their crisp white uniforms, checking cargo, giving terse directives to the crew of the Gordaky lounging importantly at the foot of the gangplank. "Name?" one of them snapped at Steve. "Stedman." The man flipped through a list of the expedition's members. "Stedman, huh? I don't see -- oh, hererit is, in pencil at the bottom. Last minute addition, huh Stedman?" "Something like that," Steve admitted. "Well, climb aboard." And ffien Steve was walking up the gangplank and into the cool metal interior of the Gordak. His palms were clammy, and he wondered if any of the crewmen within the ship noticed the sweat beading his forehead. He'd managed to come this far with a surprising degree of objectivity, and only now did reaction set in, causing his heart to beat fiercely and his limbs to grow weak. That T. . Moore must have been spawned in hell Charlie had said -- and now Charlie was dead. Because of T. J. Moore? Indirectly, perhaps, but T. J. Moore was responsible. Or, if you looked at it on a different level, the cutthroat competition between Carmical Enterprises and Barling Brothers Interplanetary was to blame. It didn't matter, not really. Charlie was dead. That alone mattered. A big man with incredibly broad shoulders, hair the color of flame and a florid face to match it, came stalking down the companionway. Steve said, "I wonder if you know where I can find T. J. Moore." The giant smiled. "You crew or expedition?" "Expedition," said Steve, extending his hand. "Steve Stedman's my name," The hand that gripped his was hard and calloused. "I'm Keyin McCann, boy. Sort of a liaison man between the crew and the expedition, only they call me the Exec to make everything official. Better take some advice -- don't look for T. J. now. T. J.'s busy doing last minute things, and T. J. hates to be disturbed. Why don't you wait till after Brennschluss when we're out in space?" "It can't wait. I've got to see that Moore knows I'm aboard and under what conditions, because I don': want to be thrown off this ship at the space-station. If Moore doesn't like the conditions, Mr. Carinical can be called. But after we blast off it'll be too late." Keyin McGann shrugged. "It's only advice I gave you, boy. You'll find T. J. down on the third level looking over the cargo holds. Good luck." And McGann took a pipe from his pocket, tamping it full, lighting it and staring with frank, speculative curiosity at Steve. "Stedman, eh?" he mused. "The name's familiar." "You think about it," said Steve, and made his way toward the third level. Perhaps some of them aboard the Gordak had known Charlie, and McGann, being the Exec, must have been around a long time. The third was the lowest level of the Gordak:, or that part of the ship nearest the tubes with the exception of the fission-room itself. Here on the third level were the cages which, in the months that followed, would hold the big game brought within the Gordak. But the word cage, Steve realized, can be misleading. A rectangular enclosure, its wall composed of evenly spaced bars -- that's a cage. But the bubble-cages of the Gordak were something else again ; precisely as the name implied, they were huge bubbles of plastic, complete with remote-controlled airlocks. You could pump in any kind of atmosphere, from Jupiter's lethal methane-ammonia mixture to the thin, oxygen-starved air of Mars, and under any desired pressure, too. And now on the third level a battery of experts was busy checking the bubble-cages for defects, since a leak after some noxious gas had been pumped into one of the bubbles could mean death for everyone aboard the Gordak. Steve stood there nervously  for what seemed a long while. He let his gaze rove up and down the third level, but he only saw the coverallclad technicians checking the bubble-cages. Kevin McGann had said he could find Moore here, but unless Moore zipped on a pair of coveralls himself and joined in the work -- which certainly seemed unlikely -- then Moore wasn't around. shoulder. Startled, he whirled around. A woman stood there, just behind him, staring at him insolently. She was tall, as tall as Steve himself, with her close-cropped blond hair peeking out around the edges of a black cap. She wore what looked to Steve like a glossy black Martian sand-cape which she let fall straight down behind her so that it almost brushed the floor. Under it, she wore a brief pair of shorts, also black, and a halter. She was muscular in that lithe, feminine way which had grown so popular in the twenty-second century -- the century which had finally seen women come abreast of men in all sporting activities and surpass them in some which required special grace and lithe-limbed skill. "I hope you found whatever you're looking for," she said. She spoke with a complete lack of warmth which startled Steve for the second time in a few moments. She was a beautiful woman, he realized, but she looked so completely incongruous among the coveralled men that Steve found  himself whistling softly. 'T never expected to find a girl here," he admitted. "Not on this expedition." "What's the matter, are you old fashioned? This is the twenty-second century, the enlightened century, remember? There's nothing a girl can't do if she sets her mind to it. A recent survey shows that forty-percent of the homemakers in the U.S.N.A. are men, sixty percent women. Okay, it's only logical that some of the remaining forty percent of females have some tough jobs, too." "I read the books of the feminist movement," Steve assured her. "But it's going to take a lot to convince me of that. Me and a lot of other people, I suspect." "Is that so, Mr. Smart-guy? Are you a member of the expedition?" "Yes." "Well, anytime you want to hustle down to the gym with me and go a few rounds, let me know." "Are you serious?" "Of course I'm serious." "Well," Steve said, deciding to change the subject and feeling utterly ridiculous about the whole conversation, "let's forget it. I was looking for T. J. Moore." The woman smiled coldly. "That's me. I'm T. J. What do you want?" "I -- uh -- what? You're T. J.? You -- a girl?" "Will you please hurry with whatever you want to tell me? I haven't got all day." "My name's Stedman." Steve felt his composure returning. The fact that T. J. Moore was a woman didn't make any difference. But unconsciously, Steve regarded her as a member of the weaker sex, and a large chunk of her fearsome reputation vanished because of it. "I wondej: if Mr. Carmical contacted you -- "He sure did, Stedman." "Good, then we can -- "Maybe you think it's good. I think it stinks. Listen, Stedman, maybe you think you can pull the wool over my eyes like you did over Brody Carmical -- but you can't. He didn't recognize you.r name, I did. No kid brother of Charlie Stedman's going to make trouble for me because he thinks I was responsible for his brother's death." "I didn't say -- " "You didn't have to say. I can see it in your face. But get this straight, Stedman. Your brother died op Ganymede three years ago -- of natural causes, that is, if you can call some of the local fauna 'natural causes'. He worked for Barling Brothers Interplanetary, so I guess the rivalry between them and us didn't help. But no one killed him." "I didn't say -- " "Is that all you can say, 'you didn't say?' Try to tell me why you came aboard the Gordak; go ahead, try." "I'm an expert in Extra-terrestrial zoology, and you needed one. Mr. Carmical hired me." "I know that. 'But I guess I also know a thing or'wo which Brody Carmical doesn't. All right, Stedman. You come as far as Mercury. But one slip, just one slip -- " "Okay, T. J.," Steve said, almost jauntily. "I'll watch my step." "I'm the Gordaks ctain. You'll call me that. Captain -- is it clear?" "No," said Steve, and laughed. The ten-world junket would be a hard, driving, gruelling ordeal come what might, and he wouldn't kowtow to T. J. Moore, male or female, here at the beginning. "No," he said again, forcing the laughter out. "This isn't a military ship, so you won't impose any arbitrary dis' cipline on me." The woman laughed too, but it was more effective. "I won't, won't I? Once we leave Earth, Stedman, everythirig we do is dangerous. ' Everything. I've got to have full authority, every order obeyed at the drop of a hat. Understand?" "No." The woman removed the black cap from her head, and Steve no ticed, not without surprise, that hr pale blond hair wasn't closecropped after all. It had been piled up inside the cap, and now it spilled down loosely about her shoulders. Smiling, she dropped the cap to the floor. "Pick it up," she said. "Are you kidding? I'm an expert on Extra-terrestrial zoology. That's what Mr. Carmical hired me for. If you want that hat picked up, better do it yourself," Vaguely, Steve wondered if Charlie had met the woman those final days on far Ganymede, had fought with her tooth and nail for some priceless specimen -- and lost, with no witness but the bleak, desolate topography of the Jovian moon. The woman turned away from him, called: "LeClarc! LeClarc, come here." ures approached them, a thickthe wed man whose muscular strength couldn't be hidden by the baggy clothing. Not as tall as Steve or the woman, he was broad of shoulder and thick through the . chest. He had a dark face and deep-set black eyes, and a thin scar ran the length of his fight cheek, from eye to chin. "Yes, Captain?" "Stedman here is new. He questions my authority. I wondered if you'd like to work him over some -- " "A pleasure," growled the stocky, gnarled Frenchman, arid swung his right fist up ill a quick, blurring motion. Steve didn't have time to parry it. The blow caught him flush on the mouth and jarred his teeth, sent him crashing back; against the wall where he slid down slowly until he was sitting on the floor. Groggily, he got to his feet, wiping his bloody lips with the fingers of one hand. LeClarc, chuckling, hit him once more before he could quite pull himself together. The right hand slammed against his stomach this time, driving the wind from his lungs. He started to fall, but he clawed at LeClarc's middle as he went down, and held on. Still chuckling, LeClarc cuffed him about the ears almost playfully, but the openpalmed blows stung him and sent wild rage coursing through his blood. Clearly, that was the idea. LeClarc was enjoying himself -- but LeClarc wanted him to fight back. Steve got a hand up in front of his body, palm up, and drove it against the Frenchman's chin. He felt the neck snap back sharply, heard the sudden click as LeClarc's teeth met with savage force. Bellowing, the Frenchman came at him again, fighting southpaw and bringing a roundhouse left from back behind his body. But Steve's wind had returned and now he sobbed air in great gulps. He ducked the wild swing and found the Frenchman wideopen, pounded lefts and rights to the man's midsection. LeClarc, stunned now, brought his guard down. Steve was in no hurry. He chased the dazed LeClarc around an ever-widening circle, was dimly aware that the other technicians had stopped their work to watch. He jabbed with his left hand, covering the olive face with purple welts. He held the right cocked but did not throw it. Soon, though, he could hear the other technicians -- who probably liked a good brawl ; -- muttering. The idea, as they saw it, wasn't to cut LeClarc up completely but instead, to win swiftly. Shrugging, Steve realized that the anger he felt for the woman had blinded him, and after that, he unleashed his right hand, felt the searing contact with LeClarc's jaw, saw a couple of teeth clatter off the wall as the Frenchman's mouth flew open. Sagging first at the knees, then the waist, LeClarc fell to the floor and huddled there inertly. Steve turned to the woman, spoke out of fastswelling lips. "You're the Captain and I only work here. Tee jay," he made the initials sound like a name. "So I'll take your orders -- provided they make sense. That one about the cap didn't. If you want it picked up, you'd better stoop for it yourself." Not looking back, he climbed the stairs toward the second level, wiping his bloody lips with a handkerchief. showed him around the Got dak after Brennschluss. Newton's second law of motion carried the ship forward through the near-vacuum of space now, and it would continue that way, plowing ahead at seven miles per second until it was caught and slowed by the space-station's gravity. There the bunkers would be reloaded with slow-fission plutonium for the long dash sunward to Mercury. "... and through there you'll find the fission-room," Kevin was saying. "That's about the size of it, boy. But I warn you to keep away from the fission-room long as that red light is blinking. Everything inside gets pretty hot, and there's enough radiation to kill an army unless the shields are up. Even then, I'd recommend a vac-suit." "I'll remember that," Steve said, lighting a cigarette. "Word gets around a ship like the Gordak pretty fast. I didn't see your fight with LeClarc, but I sure heard enough about it. There's only one man aboard ship who can beat the Frenchman in a fair fight, and -- " "You?" Steve wanted to know. But it was hardly a question. It looked to him like Kevin could take on two LeClarcs with no trouble at all. "Yes, boy. Me. But now there are two of us, and you've made yourself an enemy. LeClarc doesn't forget easy, so you'd better be on your guard." "I'll remember that, too," said Steve, laughing. "But it looks like you keep warning me about something all the time, Kevin. Why?" "You're Charlie Stedman's kid brother, aren't you?" "Yeah. Yeah, but how did -- " "How did I know, boy? It's written all over your face, and Charlie may have been with Barling Interplanetary, but a lot of us knew him. Charlie was the best, boy." "Thanks. Kevin, how did Charlie die?" The giant shrugged eloquently. "I don't know. It was T. J. who found him out on Ganymede. She was out tracking an anthrovac, and you don't track anthrovacs in crowds. Well, it seems Charlie had landed for Barling, and Charlie had the same idea." "He never told me Teejay was a woman, but he said once she must have been reared in hell." Again, Kevin shrugged. "It's open to question, boy. I don't like T. J., but I like working for her. You take a man like LeClarc, he'll die for T. J. All she'd have to do is ask him, and he'd die. You see, boy, big game hunters don't come any smarter. Trouble is, T. J. knows it and flaunts it. Also, she's a woman but she's strong as a man and knows that, too. She dares you to fight her every step of the way, and it takes a big man to -- " "I thought you said Charlie was the best!" "And I still do. But a man's got to have some flaws. Maybe he couldn't take T. J. and had to let her know. The same thing happened to you, after only five minutes. The gals have won their spurs in every field which was strictly masculine a hundred years ago. Men tend to resent that, especially when a talented woman like T. J. let's them know it, and no bones about it. So, that's T. J." "Yeah," said Steve, frowning. "That's Teejay." "What's the trouble, boy?" "I've got to find out what happened to Charlie, that's all. But Tee jay's going to be a problem." "The grandmother of all problems, you mean. With all of that, though, she can still be all female when she wants to be. Maybe Charlie fell for her -- " "Charlie falling for that cheap, no good -- " "Careful, boy. She's my Captain, and a good one. I wouldn't ship out on the Gordak if I didn't think so. Careful." Then Kevin smiled. "You'll learn, in time. Anyway, Charlie was a good-looker and attractive to the girls, he was romantic -- so maybe T. J. fell for him, too. Then they had a parting of the ways and -- "Sure!" Steve exploded. "Sure, they fell in love or something only Charlie forgot to mention in any of his letters she was a woman. You're barking up the wrong tree, Kevin." "Maybe. Maybe not. I'jn only talking off the top of my head, boy. But it's worth considering." Kevin jabbed a thick finger against his calloused palm. "What I'm getting at is this, whether they made love or not, I don't think T. J. would kill anyone out of cold blood." "I'll think about it," said Steve, and then a whistle shrilled through the length of the ship. They were nearing the space-station, half as far from Earth as Luna, and deceleration came upon them gradually and would continue to increase until they all had to bed down in the accel-hammocks for landing. U nexpec tedly , T eej ay herself was checking in the members of the expedition as their two-hour stop over at the station drew to an end. As he approached her along the gangplank, Steve looked down and saw the station-men wheeling the small but tremendously lavy plutonium bunkers under the ship, each compact unit weighing a couple of tons with its concrete shielding"Well, Stedman," said the woman, the broad black sand-cape wrapped around her completely now, as if only the members of her crew had the right to see what lay beneath it, "I see you've never watched a ship getting ready for blast off." "That's right," Steve admitted. "First trip out." "You want some pretty sound advice? I'd suggest you stay here at the station and wait for the first Earthbound ship." "Thanks," said Steve. "But Mr. Carmical hired me at least as far as Mercury, so that's where I'm going." Tee jay grinned. "You're a plucky kid, Stedman. All right, Mercury it is -- but LeClarc can do the honors when it's time to see you off the Gordak for good. He doesn't exactly like you, Stedman." "I've been told that." "All ight, move along. There's a whole line of men I've got to check in behind you." A plucky kid, Steve thought, and laughed. She'd called him that, although he knew she'd probably have a hard time matching his twenty-five years. Well, she'd spent her life in space and on the frontier worlds. Maybe that did make a difference. Five minutes later, they blasted clear of the space-station on an orbit that would intersect the Mercurian ellipse at perihelion... From there, the Gordak would visit Venus, Mars, the planetoid Ceres, the four large Jovian moons. Titan and Uranus. Ten worlds in all the hunters would touch on -- and each world would offer up its native fauna for the Brody Carmical Circus, Steve wondered if there'd be' trouble with Barling Brothers Interplanetary. There generally was. But then he smiled without mirth, for the chances were he'd never get beyond the first landing on Mercury, anyway. Gordald' crew and another thirty-odd in the expedition, and a space ship being the complicated, labyrinthine device that it is, it wasn't too strange that Steve failed to encounter LeClarc until immediately before landing on Mercury. Then the Gordak's deceleration tubes had cut in and Steve found the most readily available accel-hammock in the general lounge. The Frenchman was stretched out on the cushions three feet from him. LeClarc said, "This will be a terrible, hot place." 'T know. At perihelion, Mei cury's not much more than thirty Frenchman wanted to bury the hatchet, fine. LeClarc strained to raise himself on his elbows against the increasing deceleration. "Sure," he said, "a hot place. After you foul up, Stedman, my vote will be to leave you on the hot side ihstead of giving you passage to the twilight zone." The Frenchman was being illogical and pointlessly childish. "I didn't ask you to fight with me," Steve told him. "Why don't we forget all about it?" "If you want to, forget. I, LeClarc, never forget." "By space, LeClarc -- " the voice came from the other side of the lounge -- then you're a spoiled little child." It was the big Exec officer who spoke, Kevin McCann. LeClarc did not answer. Kevin winked at Steve, then set his face grimly against the bone-crushing deceleration. Fifteen minutes later, they landed at Furnacetown. The names of the new frontier settlements, Steve thought with a grin, were as picturesque as the names of the old Wild West towns. There was a . huge, priceless matrix of ruby far below the surface near Furnacetown, and the frontier settlement existed to mine from it. But the place was named aptly, for here on the hot side of Mercury, the temperature was hot enough to melt tin and lead. A community of half a thousand hearty souls, Furnacetown shielded itself from the swollen, never-setting , sun with a vacuum-insulated dome worth of cooling equipment. Even so, the atmosphere within the dome was a lot like New Orleans on a sultry summer day. The mayor of the town, a man named Powlaski, met them at the landing field. "It's hot," said Teejay, offering her hand and shaking with the plump official, man-fashion, "It's always hot. Captain Moore. At any rate, be happy that you've beaten Barling here this time." "Oh, did we? Good. Wenineed three asbestos suits, Powlaski. I never did trust plain vac-suits on the sunward side of this boiling mess of a planet. Say, has anyone got a cool drink? I'm roasting." Someone wheeled out a portable refrigerator and the synthetic ginand-orange stored therein tasted to Steve's thirsty lips almost like the real thing. Then LeClarc, who had ventured into one of the squat buildings with Powlaski's lieutenant, a middle-aged woman, returned with three heavy asbestos suits draped ponderously over his arm. Their combined weight was perhaps two hundred pounds, but it became negligible under Mercurys weak gravity. "We're ready' he said, extending one of the suits to Teejay and helping her slip it on over her shorts and halter. This was the first time that Steve had ever seen her without the black cape, which seemed a sort of aflfected trade-mark. "Three suits?" Steve demanded. "What for?" "The third one's for you, Stedman," the woman told him. "I know your job is to see that the game stays alive in our bubblecages, but I don't think it would hurt if you had a look-see at the stone worm in its own environment." "That's not what I meant," Steve told her. "Why LeClarc?" Teejay shrugged, zipping up the suit. "Because I said so, that's why. Also, LeClarc's something of an expert on the inner planets and he goes wherever I do, anyway." "Sort of a bodyguard," the Frenchman purred, strapping a neutron gun to the belt of his asbestos suit. "Hey, who's got those helmets?" And then Steve felt them slipping the thick, clumsy helmet over his head. Kevin stood nearby and the Exec looked like he wanted to say something, but Steve's helmet had snapped into place and from that point he could only talk by radio -- and over the crackling interference of the swollen sun at that. Moments later, he'd stepped through an airlock at the side of the Fumacetown dome and plodded out on the surface of Mercury. soupy atmosphere and the verdant tropical jungles. On Mars, the rusty desert and the ruins of an eon-old civilization. But on Mercury you knew at once that you trod upon an alien world. At perihelion, the sun swelled to almost four times its size as seen from Earth, and because Mercury's tenuous atmosphere had boiled off into sky was black. The sun had lost its spherical shape, too. Great solar prominences licked out at the blackness, and the visible corona seemed to swell and pulse. Underfoot, Steve could feel the crunchy ground powdering beneath his asbestos boots with every step. And far off toward the horizon, a jagged ridge of blood-red mountains bit at the black sky like festering, toothless gums. Before long, Tee jay's voice sang in Steve's earphones. "Over here, you boys." And Steve could see her crouching, shapeless in the loose asbestos suit, off to his left. The sun's heat had parched a long, snaking crack in the surface and Steve lumbered over to it clumsily, letting his shadow fall across the crevice. "Those stone worms are umbra-tropic," he called, and waited. "I don't wonder," said Teejay, looking up at the sun through the smoked goggles of her helmet. The stone worms, Steve knew, were attracted by darkness -- hence they generally dwelled in the deepest crevices, although a man's shadow might bring them to the surface. He'd never seen a stone worm, but he'd read about them and seen their pictures. "You'll see something very unlovely," Teejay predicated. "The stone worm isn't a carbon-basic animal, but a silicate creature with a sodium-silicon-nitrogen economy. It's about four feet long and kind of like some ghastly white slug. It -- hey, Stedman, get on your toes!" The worm was coming. It poked its head up out of the crevice first, and then the slug-like body followed, curling quite instinctively until the whole thing lay in Steve's shadow. Four feet long and a foot across at tlte middle it looked like the product of nightmare. The head was one huge, lidless, glassy eye -- with a purple-lipped mouth where the pupil should have been I The mouth opened and shut like that of a fish, but when Steve lifted the monster by its middle and brought it out into the sun, the lips puckered completely shut and the white slug began to thrash dangerously. But under the influence of the sun's heat it soon subsided. Trouble was, Steve thought vaguely as they made their way back toward Furnacetown with the quiescent monster, the sun's heat did not subside. Probably, it was his imagination, but the sun had seemed to become, if anything, stronger. He looked at the others, but they merely walked forward, completely unconcerned. Maybe he'd tired himself subduing the stone worm, for he knew that might seem to intensify the heat. Inside his asbestos suit, Steve began to sweat. It did not start slowly, but all at once the perspiration streamed down his face and body. It was then that his left leg began to bum. Down below the knee it was, a knife-edged burning sensation which became worse with each passing second. Someone had heated a knife white-hot, had applied its sharp point to the nerveendings of his leg -- and then twisted. It felt like that.  Screaming hoarsely, Steve fell, watched through burning eyes as the stone worm commenced crawling laboriously away. Itwas LeGlarc who went after the worm and retrieved it, but Teejay knelt at Steve's side and, surprisingly, real concern was in her voice when it came over the radio. "What's the trouble, Stedman?" "I don't know," Steve gritted. "I'm hot all over -- and my leg feels like it's on fire. Yeah, right there -- owl -- go easy!" Teejay frowned or at least Steve guessed she frowned by the way she spoke. "There's nothing much we can do about it, Stedman. Seerns to be a hole -- just a pinprick, but a hole -- in the asbestos. It's a wonder you weren't screaming bloody murder before this. How's the air?" It was getting hard to breathe, Steve realized, but dimly, for his senses wereReceding into a fog of half-consciousness. Something hissed in his ears and he knew Teejay had turned the outside dial of his air-pump all the way over. It made him feel momentarily better, but the pain still cut into his leg. "I've got the worm," said LeClarc. "But what happened to him?" He asked thfe question innocently -- too innocently. Teejay didn't answer. Instead: "Can vou walk, Stedman?" "I -- I don't think so." "Then I'll carry you. But remember this: if we get you back all right, you can thank the twentysecond century feminist movement. Gan you picture an old-fashioned gal slinging a man over her shoulder and toting him away to safety like a sack of grain? Here we go." And she got her arms under Steve's shoulder, tugging him upright and swinging him across her back in a fireman's carry. He felt in no mood to question her motive, but he could sense the triumph in her as if she had said, "See, I'm as strong, as a man, and don't you forget it." In spite of himself, he couldn't help responding to the unspoken challenge. "Sure," he said, "I can thank the feminist movement, but more than that I can thank Mercury's light gravity, Teejay. We're lucky I don't weigh more than fifty pounds here." An hour later they arrived back at Furnace town, buf by then Steve was unconscious from the pain. X X boy?" It was Kevin Me- Gann, the battered, unlit pipe clamped tightly between his teeth as he spoke. Steve sat propped up in a bed in the Gordaks infirmary, his left leg wrapped in bandages from knee to ankle. "Pretty good, I guess. Kind of weak, but there's no pain." "You're lucky the Captain got you back here in time. Four inches of your calf was cooked third degree, but she carried you back here soon enough to cut it away before deep decomposition, and spray on syntheplasm. You'll be as good as new in a week, and no scar, either. Thanks to the Captain, boy." "Yeah," Steve admitted. "Sure. But what I want to know is this: hOw did it happen?" Kevin shrugged his massive shoulders. "I won't make any accusations, boy, not without positive proof. But I took the liberty to examine your suit, and it looked to me like someone had punctured a small hole almost all the way through. The heat did the rest." "You mean LeClarc?"  "I never said that. But LeClarc was the one who got the suits, so he -- more than anyone -- was in a position to do something like that. Further than that I won't carry it. This is not an accusation." "Suits me," Steve told him. "And thanks, Kevin. But after this, Frenchie had better watch his step. Are we out in space again?" "Yes. Passed Brennschluss fortyeight hours ago." "What?" "Sure. They had you doped up for two days, till the syntheplasm had a chance to set." "How soon can I get out of bed?" "Depends. If you don't mind hobbling around on crutches, today probably. If you want to wait till you can walk, four or five days. What's your hurry, boy?" "I've got to take care of that stone worm, remember?" "Say, that's right! No one knew what to do, so they suspended it in a deep freeze until you could go to" work. A hideous brute, I might add' "Will you ask the doctor to give me some crutches? Swell. First, though, I'd like a good meal. And listen, Kevin -- I guess Tee jay saved my life, at that. Want to tell her I'd like to see her?" "Of course," said Kevin, and left the whitewalled infirmary, grinning from ear to ear. By the? time Teejay arrived, Steve was eating his first solid meal in two days. "Hello," he said. He almost found himself adding, "Captain" -- but he checked the impulse just in time, "McCann tells me you're ready to get to work today." "That's right." "Good. That stone worm won't stay in ice indefinitely -- not when it lives on the sun-side of Mercury." "Teejay, I want to -- well, I want to thank you for saving my life." The woman opened her cape, reached inside, took a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket and puffed on one until it glowed. "Don't thank me," she said coolly. "It really isn't necessary. You're the only extra-zoo man aboard, Stedman, so we needed you. I'd have saved a valuable machine under the same circumstances,"  "Well, thanks anyway." "There's one thing more, Sted- man. As far as I'm concerned, you haven't proven yourself yet. So the same conditions apply to our next landing point." "Where's that?" "Venus, of course. Do you think I want to play hop-scotch all over the Solar System? Well, you finish your meal and give that stone worm a nice comfortable bubble to live in." And Teejay departed. ated the air from one of the bubble-cages and increased the temperature to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, after he'd supervised a slow warming process for the worm and seen it deposited, still drowsy, in the bubble with sufficient quantities of silicon-compounds to keep it well fed, Steve hobbled with his crutches to the general lounge. Teejay sat there with half a dozen of the Venusian experts, for the hunt would be much more protracted on that teeming jungle-world. The woman stood up at once and crossed the floor to Steve. "How's the worm?" "Fine." He always felt a little edgy and on his guard when the woman spoke to him. "And how's the extra-zoo expert's bum leg." "Coming along, I think." Teejay turned to the six men seated around the lounge, said : "This is Steve Stedman, our extrazoo man -- at least temporarily! about amphibians than any man alive, lanelio is our aboreal expert, Smith ferrets out the cave-dwelling mammals -- we hope, Waneki goes floundering around after sea-monsters, St. Clair is -- " Then something buzzed shrilly on the adjacent wall, and Teejay flipped a toggle switch. "Captain here." "Radio from Earth, Captain. Mr. Brody Carmical himself.' "Is that so?" said Teejay, her eyebrows lifting. "Give me a circuit." And, a moment later, 'that's the trouble, Brody?" The big man's voice came through faint and metallic over space. "Plenty, T. J., Barling decided to start in the middle this year. Some of our -- er, contacts told us his ship's rocketing for Ganymede, and fast. You'll have to get there first if you can, naturally." "We'll get there," said Teejay, quite grim, and cut the connection. Steve had time to think one thought before he was swept along in the general rush, crutches and all, after the woman galvanized into activity. She might take orders from Brody Carmical, but she even had a way with the big man, making him cow to her -- perhaps unconsciously. Teejay was yelling and pointing, it seemed, in all directions at once. "Hey you, lanello, shake a leg down to the fission-room and tell 'em to start straining. Smith, get me Kevin McGann on the intercom. Waneki, you can forget all about those Venusian sea-monsters and tell the docs to be ready for plenty of acceleration cases. You better bed as strong as the rest of us, not with sixty years of junketing behind you. Hello, McGann? Listen, Mac, I want the entire crew assembled in General inside of ten minutes. Yeah, expedition too. Everyone but those boys down in fission. And tell your orbit-man to figure a way to get us off this trajectory and on a quick ellipse from here to the Jovian moons. Yes, that's what I said -- the Jovian moons." She paused long enough to take a breath and turn to Steve. "Well, Stedman, we'll be dropping down over your brother's grave on Ganym,ede before you know it. Maybe then you'll be able to remove that chip from your shoulder." "Me? From my shoulder? Sister, you've got things backwards." But the woman pivoted away, and Kevin's voice bleated over the intercom : "Crew and expedition -- all to general lounge on the double! You boys in fission stay put. Captain's orders. This is urgent." Almost before Kevin's voice had stopped echoing through the corridors, LeClarc popped into the lounge. "You wanted me. Captain? May I help?" "I wanted everyone. Everyone can help. Just sit still till the rest of 'em get here." LeClarc appeared hurt, but he took a seat in glum silence. In twos and threes the members of the crew began to drift in, wild rumors circulating among them in whispers. Finally, LeClarc counted noses and told his Captain that everyone except the fission crew was present. Teejay nodded, stepped to the center of the floor. She removed her cape and dropped it, discarding it so suddenly and yet with such a polished flourish that a complete silence fell upon the large room almost at once. She paced back and forth, her bare, lithe limbs flashing under the green-glowing wall panels. "You've all come to know that cape," she said, her voice strident and alive. "It's a sort of affectation I have. But it's not necessary. Like everything that's not necessary, it must be discarded, at least temporarily. Men, we're in serious trouble." Just like that, inside of a few sec onds, she had them eating out of the palm of her hand. She went on to say that Barling's ship had already blasted off from the Earth for Ganymede, how,, unless their efforts here on the Gordak were Herculean and then some, Barling's ship would reach Ganymede first, "And you all know what that would mean," she continued. "Like the elephant of two centuries ago, the Ganymeden anthrovac is the one solid necessity for any circus sideshow. But the anthrovacs have a way of going into hiding when they're disturbed. So, if Barling gets to Ganymede first, we've had it. We can all start looking for jobs after that, do you understand? I want full acceleration from here to Ganymede, as soon as we can get the new orbit plotted. Nothing but the immediate problem -- to reach the Jovian moons before Barling -- nothing else matters. If I tell you to work two shifts and go without sleep one night, you will do that. If I decide that a man must go beyond the shieldings in fission, he'll climb into a vac-suit and hope for the best. It's going to be like that, men, and I can't help it. I crack the whip and you jump. Any questions?" She stood dramatically, hands on hips, somehow poised on tip-toes without straining, a tall, impressive and quite beautiful figure. "Yes," said one of the orbiteers... "I have a question. Can I get to work on the new orbit at once?" There were hoarse shouts of approval, some applause and a scattering of deep-throated laughter. Steve watched Tee jay walk off her improvised stage, complete master of the situation. If it were humanly possible for the Gordak to reach Ganymede before Barling, they'd do it. Steve learned something of what the big Exec officer had meant that first day he had spoken about Teejay. She drove her men relentlessly and some of them may have resented it. But she drove herself as well, and once when a crewman had gone beyond the shieldings to repair the mechanical arms which regulated the flow of powdered plutonium fuel from the bunkers and had emerged with a serious case of radiation sickness, Tee jay donned a vac-suit and went in herself to finish the job. Most of the men liked her. Some, frankly, did not. But all of them knew they served under a captain as good as any. Two days before landing on Ganymede, Tee jay gathered her chief lieutenants for a final' planning session. Kevin was there, and LeClarc, and a tall, wraith-thin man with a bushy head of white hair named Simonson, and Steve. Teejay spread a chart out and peered down at it intently. "This is Ganymede Northeast," she said, indicating the circled, central area of the map. "It is here that, for some reason, the anthrovacs gather. And here inside the circle is an area of one thousand square miles which Mr. Simonson has marked off -- yes, Stedman, the red square. We'll be operating there. If the Barling ship has landed ahead of us, we can assume the same for them." Teejay paused to light a cigarette, then crushed it out after her first puff. "The dam smoke gets in my way when I try to think," she smiled, and went on, "Anyway, here's the square. We'll be using the crew and the expedition -- everyone aboard ship -- because we're in a hurry. Simply put, we'll be a bunch of beaters to drive the anthrovacs together at the center of the square. Then, well, then it's up to Mr. Simonson and Stedman. Any questions?" "Yes, Captain," said LeGlarc. "Just how do we get the anthrovacs aboard ship?" "Don't ask me. But you might ask Mr. Simonson." The bushy-haired man named Simonson grunted. "Umm-mm. There are several ways. We could set up elaborate traps, such as Thomdyke employed two years ago, and -- "Can't," Teejay objected. "No time." "Why don't we just clobber them?" LeGlarc suggested. "A few might die, but we'll get the specimens we want." Steve shook his head. "You don't know your anthrovacs. Chase them and they'll try to run away. But hurt them -- just hurt otle of them so the rest of them can see -- and they'll swarm all over you until either all the men or all the anthrovacs are dead, or both. No, there's another way." "What's that?" Teejay leaned forward, chin cupped in hands, definitely interested.  "Anthrovacs are non-breathers. Most gasses won't hurt them, but you can give them a good, old-fashioned oxygen jag with the slightest whiff of pure oxygen." "I've heard of that," Simonson said. "Sort of like getting them drunk, isn't it, boy?" Kevin wanted to know. But LeClarc wasn't satisfied. "I still say we ought to clobber them. We can't waste time experimenting' with any crazy jags." "It's no experiment," Steve told him coldly. "It works." "I still say we ought to -- " "Clobber them, I know," Teejay finished for him. "If there's any clobbering to be done, LeClarc, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, we're trying Stedman's plan. Any further questions?" And, when no one spoke : "Good. Mac, I want you to let Mr. Simonson and Stedman pick three men to help 'em. You're to divide the rest of us into groups of half a dozen each, with each group serving under a leader. I'll give each leader a designated area in that square, so there won't be a lot of bumbling around when we land on Ganymede. LeClarc!" "Yes, Captain?" "Take yourself a group of three idle technicians and check all the vac-suits. If there's any trouble, make sure it's repaired before we land. What are you gawking at me like that for?" "I only thought -- " "What? What did you think? Speak up, manJ" "I thought you would have a job of more import for me. Had you, for example, decided that we ought to clobber -- " "Clobber, clobber, clobber! Will you shut up and get to work?" "Yes, Captain," And more than a little stooped of shoulder, LeClarc left the lounge. Tee jay didn't pause for breath. "You, Stedman! What's so funny? What are you laughing about?" "Nothing. It's just the way LeGlarc -- " "Forget it, before you get clobbered." After the landing, an unreasoning fear gripped Steve tightly. It wasn't anything he could put his  finger on, but he felt it gnawing at the fringes of his mind, probing, seeking, thrusting for a way in. There was nothing to be afraid of, and Steve smoked one cigarette after another while the six-man parties disembarked to take up their beater-stations on the edges of the square. , Ganymede, he recited to himself, is the largest satellite in the Solar System. # miles from Jupiter, it has a diameter of thirty two hundred and six miles, or bigger than the planet Mercury and almost as large as Pluto. It swings around Jupiter in a little over seven Earth days and in appearance the moonscape's enough like Luna to be a twin-brother, except for fat, bloated Jupiter hanging in the sky. What was there to be afraid of? Steve didn't know. His brother had died on Ganymede -- and the circumstances of Charlie's death still bordered on the mysterious. Well, he'd see for himself about that. Did the fear crawl around the edges of his brain because he thought Teejay was responsible? But that didn't make sense, for to a certain degree he'd thought that all along. Unless the appalling thought of having to fight Tee jay and her whole loyal crew had taken hold of him unconsciously. "What are you moping about, boy?" "Huh? Oh, Kevin. Nothing much, I guess. I -- " "You look to me like you've seen a ghost. What is it, scared?" "Yeah, Yeah, I guess so." "So what? Buck up, boy." "I don't want to be scared, Kevin." "Who does?" "That's not what I ' mean. It's one thing to say that if you aren't -- " "Who isn't? Don't look at me, boy. And didn't you watch all the men trooping outside with the blood drained from their faces, and their eyes sort of big and too bright behind the face-plates? We're all scared." "But why?" "Mean to say you spent so much time on zoology and forgot about other things? Like, for instance, Ganymede-f ear ?" "Huh? How's that?"  "Everyone is afraid, Steve. Everyone... Whenever a man gets near Ganymede, he suddenly becomes afraid. It's some sort of a psychological or maybe para-psychological phenomenon and none of the medicos could ever figure it out. It isn't the kind of fear that paralyzes, boy, but still, it holds on all the time a man's on Ganymede and it doesn't leave until he blasts off again. Didn't you ever hear about that?" "No. That is, I knew it happened somewhere, but I forgot where." "Well, that's all there is to it, boy." ' "All! Don't you think it's enough? Something lurks out there, something makes people afraid, and we've never been able to find out why, but you say -- " Tee jay came up and smiled at them, but there was something grirri about her smile. "You can always tell when someone comes to Ganymede for the first time. He's jumpier. Just relax, Stedman. By the time they start beating the anthrovacs in toward the G or dak you'll be feeling better -- and raring to go  to work with that oxygenjag stunt of yours, too." And she added, "Say, have you been watching your stone worm?"  "He sure has," Kevin told her. "He took me down there yesterday and that worm's been growing fat on all the sand he's fed it. Sand -- for food, that's what the worm eats. Imagine how that would settle the over-population problems on Earth if people, too, could eat sand." "Yes, and then -- " Tee jay was speaking again -- but words, just words, and Steve stopped listening. It occurred to him all at once that they were engrossed in their meaningless conversation for one reason only -- to keep the fear from their minds. If you thought about something else, the fear would retreat at least in part, and if you could hold a conversation about everything and nothing, that was even better. Steve almost jumped off the floor when a metallic voice blared forth from the loudspeaker, echoing and re-echomg in the near-empty room. "Captain! Captain, this is Moretti, Group Seven." "Go ahead, Moretti," Teejay said into the mike. "I'm listening." "Who the devil's on radar. Captain?" "Why -- no one! We forgot." "There's a ship coming dwn. We can see it plain as day out here." "What diip?" Teejay asked softly, but they all knew the question was totally unnecessary. Moretti's voice jumped an octave as he cried: "It's Barling!" the beaters had been called in. Barling's big ship, the Frank Buck, snorted back and forth angrily on its landing jets. "Are they gonna land or ain't they gonna land?" someone said as Kevin broke out the neutron guns and saw that every third man had one. "Depends on their boss," said Kevin. "If he figures we can be scared off, he'll land. Otherwise, maybe he'll go away." "Not that little stinker," Teejay told him. "Not Schuyler Barling. He won't go away. Will the fact that we're here first matter? It will not, for Schuyler knows we can't prove it. You ought to know better than to hope for that, Kevin. NOj we can figure that Schuyler will move in on us." "What happens then?" Steve demanded. Tee jay shrugged her bare, beautiful shoulders. "That I don't know. Schuyler may be a stinker and may be predictable, but he's not that predictable. Hey, it looks like the Frank Bck is coming down!" The big ship, Steve saw, was doing precisely that. Its jets had been cut, and the ship fell like a stone. Twice its length separated it from the rubble-strewn pumice when the pilot kicked his jets over again, and something seemed to slap the Frank Buck back up toward the starry sky. The result was a first-rate landing. "That would be Schuyler showing off," said Teejay wearily. "He must have been born in a tube and weaned on jet-slag, and he sure lets you know it." Fifteen minutes later, Schuyler Barling and three of his officers entered the Gordak. Barling got out of his vacsuit first, a tall, handsome man of about thirty, with short-cropped blond hair, pale blue eyes and petulant lips. "Captain Moore," he said, bowing slightly from the waist. Making fun of Teejay. "Mr. Barling." As ever, the woman seemed cool and unruffled. "With us," said Schuyler Barling, "it's in the family. I work for my father. Obviously, it means something to me whether he succeeds or not. But you, Captain Moore, you're a hired hand. You work for Brody Carmical, on a paycheck. Therefore, your loyalty could not possibly be as strong as mine, and -- " "Get to the point!"  "We arrived here on Ganymede almost simultaneously. One of us will have to leave." "It didn't look simultaneous to me. Barling ignored her. "Yes, one will have to leave, because the anthrovac is frightened off easily and unless a hunt is carried on with the utmost precision and timing, no one will catch any anthrovacs." "Go on," said Teejay. She spoke quietly, but Steve knew the woman well enough to realize her temper was coming to a boil, inside. "My Frank Buck got here first," Barling told her blandly. "Therefore, you will leave." "That's a stinking lie!" Teejay cried. "We were here first and you know it." "Who can prove it? The Frank BwcA: landed first." Barling's hand flashed down to his waist, came up gripping a neutron gun. "If we have to, we'll force you to leave." Teejay stood with hands on hips, facing him. "I know I'm not conducting myself like a lady, but then, this is the twenty-second century," she said, smiling -- and struck out with her balled right fist. It bounced off Barling's jaw with savage force and the man stumbled back against the wall and crashed to the floor, his neutron gun clattering away. Barling shook himself, tried to rise. He got to hands and knees, then fell forward on his face. Teejay whirled on his officers. "All right, get him out of here ! Come on, move." T he three men looked at each other. None of them did anything. "You see, boy?" said Kevin, grinning. "That's our Captain and we'll fight for her. She won the beauty pageant five years ago in Cerestown, and she can fight like a man. She's a woman for the stars, and we're proud to -- " "Shut up," said Teejay. "That won't get us anywhere."  By now, Barling had stirred, had come up, dazed, into a sitting position. He rubbed his jaw, winced. "Assuming we return to our ship, we still won't leave Ganymede. Not without our anthrovac." "Nor will we." "But you had to hit me! You had to flaunt your -- "No one told you to draw your gun." " -- flaunt yoiur Amcizonian prowess. "Stop sniveling, Schuyler. I think we'll have to reach some sort of a compromise, but I'll dictate terms, not you." "Yes?" Barling growled up at her. "Who says we'll obey?" "Oh, get up ofT the floor! You look so silly, sitting there and rubbing your chin. Barling stood up, retrieving his gun but bolstering it. Kevin watched him, toying with his own weapon -- not pointing it at anyone in particular, but tossing it back and forth idly from hand to hand. "Give us twenty four hours," said Teejay. "We'll look for our anthrovac. In that time, none of your men is to leave the Frank Buck, After that, you get twenty four hours, and we're confined to the G or dak. Then us, then you. And so on, till one of us gets his anthrovac. Then he pulls out and the other is left here. Is it a deal?" Barling considered, said: "Well, yes -- with one change. We get the first twenty four hours." "No." "Then you can forget your deal, Captain Moore." "Well, then let's tos for it." Teejay reached into a pocket of her cape, flipped a coin to Steve. "Here, Stedman. You toss it." "Who gets to call?" Barling demanded. "Do you. want to?" "Well -- " , "Good. Then I will. Ladies first, you know. Go ahead, Stedman." Steve tossed the coin, and Teejay cried: "Heads!" Palming the coin, Steve flipped it over on the back of his left hand, peered at it. Staring up at him was the metallic likeness of Angus MacNamara, first man to reach the planet Mars. "Heads," said Steve, and one of Barling's officers came over to verify it. Barling shook his head stubbornly. "How do I know it isn't a phony, a two-headed coin?" Teejay glared at him. "That's insulting, Schuyler." "Well, I'd like to look at it. How do I know -- " "You don't. But I said it's insulting. So, if you want to see the coin, you'll have to fight me!" "Never mind," said Barling, climbing into his vac-suit. "You get first try." And all of them garbed in their vac-suits once more, the men of the Frank Buck departed. "Get those beaters out again!" Teejay was calling into her micro phone, and Kevin grasped Steve's arm said: "Go ahead) boy. Look at the coin." Steve did. It had two heads. And later, Teejay said to him: "Listen, Stedman. All the beaters are out now, but frankly, I don't trust Schuyler." Steve said he did not blame her, and Kevin was there to nod his red head. "So, Stedman, the beaters have their jobs to do. That's almost everyone. But temporarily at least, it leaves you and Mac here with nothing to do." "That's true," said Kevin. "But not for long, Mac. Schuyler may try something, I don't know what. You two are probably the strongest men on this ship. I know what you can do, Mac -- and I saw a sample of Stedman at work when he had that little run-in with LeGlarc. All right: you two hop into a couple of vac-suits. That is, if Stedman's ready to fight for us if he has to -- " Steve chuckled, "I don't go' around carrying two-headed coins, Teejay, but I know a rat when I see one. I'll go, and your friend Schuyler better not try anything." Almost, he was surprised at his own words. Teejay had a way of commanding respect,, and if he didn't viatch himself, he'd be talking like Kevin soon. Well, perhaps the woman merited it... His thoughts took him that far, and then he remembered Charlie. "Fll go," he said again, almost growling. "But you still have a chip on your shoulder -- well, never mind. I'll expect quarter-hourly reports from you two." "You'll get them," said Kevin, and climbed into his vac-suit. self out on the bleak, desolate surface of Ganymede, walking wdth Kevin past the long, silent length of the Frank Buck, And here, outside the confining walls of their spaceship, the Ganymede-fear seemed stronger. Steve felt it as something palpable, clutching at his heart and constricting it, bringing sweat to his forehead and clouding the inside of his helmet with moisture. Fear -- of what? Not of the frontier world itself, surely. Not of some unknown menace lurking out among the craterlets and ringwalls. No, for while Ganymede was not yet as familiar as Mars or Venxis, mankind still had explored it extensively. There were the strange anthrovacs, animals which looked like over-sizec and less brutish gorillas but which were not protoplasm creatures and which took their energy directly from sunlight and cosmic radiation. But that was all -- no other life existed on Ganymede, and the anthrovacs on their frigid, airless world were something of an oddity. Then what caused the fear? And was the fear responsible in any way for what had happened to Charlie? "Hey, Steve -- snap out of it!" Kevin's voice, floating in thinly on the intercom. "Huh? Oh, yeah, Kevin. Sure, It's that fear, sort of gets you out here. You cant help it." 'T know. A ship seems to cut it off to some extent, boy. But it's around, lurking, waiting to get you." "What do you mean, waiting to get )u?" "Well, not directly. But it makes you make mistakes. Men have died that way -- paying so much attention to the fear that they didn't pay enough attention to whatever was happening." "Kevin, do you know anything about how Charlie died you haven't told me?" "Maybe. Maybe not. It's kind of vague, boy. Teejay went out alone and when she came back -- why, she looked scared. That's common enough on Ganymede -- everyone looks scared. But Teejay looked puzzled and confused also, and that's not like her. She wouldn't talk much for a time, and when she did she just said she'd found Charlie Stedman, your brother, dead." "Where?" "What do you mean, where? Out here on Ganymede, naturally." "No, I mean exactly where. What was done with the body?" "That I don't know," said Kevin, and Steve could picture him frowning inside his helmet. "Well -- listen, Kevin! Do you hear something?" "Hear something? How can you hear anything on Ganymede, with no air to carry it? Except on the radio, of course. I hear you, but get a grip on yourself, boy." "No. I hear something. There it is, louder. My God, Kevin! My God -- And clumsily in his vacsuit, Steve began running away acrqss the pumice. "Hey, come back! Back here you crazy fool -- " Kevin charged after him, taking long, ungainly strides ,in the light gravity. But Steve was quicker and soon the distance between them increased and Kevin realized he wouldn't be able to overtake Steve at all. "Gome back! What do you hear, boy? At least tell me that." Steve told him, and ran on. mazed, Kevin lumbered back toward the Gordak, "But what made him do it?" Teejay demanded, later. "I told you all I know, Captain. He said he heard something and started running. I chased after him, couldn't catch him. He told me what he heard." "What?" "Weil, you won't like this, because it doesn't make sense. But he said he heard his brother -- calling him. Charlie Stedman, calling." "Charlie Stedman is dead." Suddenly, Teejay was curt, preemptory. "That's what I thought, too." "Forget it. It's the Ganymedefear, Mac. Somehow it got to Stedman stronger than it got to most people. Maybe his brother was hit that way, too. Maybe, right now, Stedman is off his rocker, running out across the pumice somewhere, shouting his brother's name into the soundless void of space." "We'll have to find him," said Kevin. "How can we, Mac? He's got air for five or six hours, and Ganymede is big." "I'm going to take a set of shoulf der-jets and go looking for him. Captain. I hope you won't try to stop me. I'm going either way." Shruing, Tee jay went to a cabinet, handed Kevin a pair of shoulder-jets, which he strapped at once to his vacsuit. The woman took another suit and another pair of jets. "Once I heard voices out here on Ganymede, too," she said. "So did Charlie Stedman. They killed Charlie and they almost killed me. Enough's enough, Mac. I'm going with you." large. Slowed by his vac-suit, a man might cover its diameter in half an hour. But Steve did not traverse the circular area. Instead, he climbed the ringwall laboriously and then made his way down, tumbling and sliding, to the rocky floor of the shallow crater. The voice came from within it -- from within the crater. It could not be! He told himself that more than once. The rock of Ganymede itself might carry sound, but you'd feel it only as a throbbing through the soles of your boots, for the vacuum of space which encroached on all sides could not transmit soundwaves. That was science.' That was elementary. But the voipe whispered in his ears, ebbing and flowing, first loud, then soft -- and science be damned. Charlie was calling.  am Charlie Stedman, I am Charlie Stedman -- That was all, but it was enough. Charlie's name, and Charlie's voice. "It can't be happening," Steve said, aloud, and heard his own voice roaring inside the helmet. It drove the other voice, the impossible voice, out for a mornent, but it returned. Around the innercircumference of the ringwall Steve ran, seeking a source for the impossible. Sobbing, stumbling, he plunged ahead. It was only when he returned to his starting point, a needle-like pinnacle of rock, that he realized his supply of air would be exhausted in three hours. "He couldn't have gone much farther than this, Mac." "We've got plenty of air. Captain. I'm not giving up -- The two figures soared on spurting jets a hundred feet above the surface of Ganymede. When Teejay went higher every few moments, she could barely , make out the two spaceships, far away to the left. Occasionally she saw the beaters working in teams of six, cumbersome tanks of oxygen strapped to their backs. "Did you hear the voice, Mac?" "No." "Had Stedman been drinking?" "That's ridiculous. The boy was with us, and you saw for yourself." "True. And I've said that the voices of Ganymede are no strangers to me, anyway. Maybe I was trying to rationalize." "We'll see when we find Steve." "# we find him. The fear can make you do crazy things out here, Mac. Like going for too long without sufficient oxygen." , "That's what I'm worrying about." A phonograph needle caught in one groove spinning out its brief message over and over again -- that was the. voice. I am Charlie Stedman. And the ringwall might have been the record, Steve thought bitterly, except that it was utterly deserted. He hadn't covered its entire rock-strewn area; an army of searchers would be necessary to do that. But he had seen enough to convince him that -- The thought fled. Coming toward him over the floor of the ringwall was a huge anthrovac, walking erect with a shuffling gait. Charlie's voice grew louder. "It's no good, Mac. We can't find him." "As soon as, we turn back he's as good as dead." "Our air won't last forever," Teejay said. "He's got even less." "Ten more minutes?" "All right, ten. But why did you come out here with me if you're ready to give up so easy?" "Who said I am? I'm trying to be practical, Mac. Listen, I saved Stedman's life once already -- and stayed out on the hot side of Mercury longer than a person should, too. I like Stedman, but if we ever find him, better not say that or I'll break your neck, hear? So I want to find him, but I don't want to sacrifice your life or mine in the attempt. Is that clear?" Kevin said that it was. A moment later, Teejay climbed higher. Half a thousand feet above the surface of Ganymede she circled. Abruptly, she leveled off t a hundred feet again, said: "There's something over there, Mac. In that ringwall." "What?" "I don't know. Movement. A big figure # ind a little one. The big one seems too large for a man, but the smaller -- well,det's go." The anthrovac paused a dozen yards from Steve. There had been nothing hostile in its movements to begin with, and now it might have been a statue for all the activity it displayed. From crown of head to small, handlike feet, it stood almost a yard taller than Steve, but it did not have the great-muscled girth of a gorilla. Instead, it looked quite manlike, except for the incredibly broad shoulders, the thick, matted hair covering its entire body, the toolong arms, the nine feet of height. Did the voice emanate from it? Now that the creature had approached him, Steve wasn't sure. The voice continued, pulsing and throbbing in his ears like the Ganymede-fear itself -- hut in his ears. Not from the bleak terrain around him, and certainly not from the anthrovac. "I'm going crazy," he said, aloud, driving the voice away temporarily. "No. No, I'm not, because I realize it too soon. A crazy man doesn't realize it and doesn't warn himself, about it -- certainly not at the outset." But did that mean the voice had any real existence? How could it? I am Charlie Stedman... Smiling bleakly, Steve picked up a loose chunk of rock, tossed it at the anthrovac. Tlie creature merely swung its huge body gracefully at the hips, avoiding the missile. Ifhen it stooped, found a stone for itself, hurled it at Steve. He ducked, feeling completely and tremendously foolish. He should have been prepared, for the anthrovacs are playful and can mime almost any human action. He did not duck in time. He felf the stone thunk against his helmet, peered with horror at the glassite inches from his face until he saw that it hadn't cracked. Grinning now, he shook his fist at the creature, watched it duplicate the motion with its great hairy hand. It was a game, Steve told himself,  lc#t like the meaningless conversation Teejay and Kevin had had to dispell the Ganymede-fear. But if the anthrovac could mime human actions, perhaps the anthro vac could also mime voices! That would necessitate telepathic powers, naturally. But the anthrovac, like many denizens of terrestrial forests and tundras, changed its habits immensely in captivity. A captured anthrovac, one which had been reared with one of the circus troupes, could never tell you what a wild anthrovac was like. And a wild anthrovac, somehow living on airless Ganymede and taking its energy directly from cosmic and solar radiation, might be able to do anything. I am Charlie Stedman... Steve carried the thought to its logical conclusion. Suppose an anthrovac -- this anthrovac which faced him now -- had somehow heard Charlie speaking. Charlie might have been introducing himself to someone: "I am Charlie Stedman." But the hypothesis wasn't much more than a bubble, and it burst completely when Steve remembered he was the only one who could hear the voice, "Hey, Stedman! You trying to kill yourself?" Steve whirled, looked up. Two figures, no more than vaguely human in their cumbersome vac-suits, hovered over him, jetting around in circles. The anthrovac had seen them too -- and now, apparently alarmed by the twin forms floating just out of reach, the creature turned and bounded away over the uneven terrain. "What gave you that idea?" Steve called into his intercom. "The anthrovac wasn't looking for trouble." "I don't mean that, stupid." Teejay had a way of jarring him back to reality with a few words. "I mean, how much air have you left?" Steve looked at the guge. "Enough to return to the Gordak, provided I get on my horse." "We'll walk with you, then," said Teejay, and dropped to the ground at his side. "I think I'll hold onto your arm, too. You're liable to go wandering again, and we might not be able to find you." Kevin alighted, switched off his jets. "How about the voice, boy? Do you still hear it?" "Why -- no! But I did a minute ago, until the anthrovac ran away." "That's peculiar."  "There's a lot that's peculiar out here on Ganymede, Kevin. I think -- "Stop thinking and start walking," Teejay told him. Less than twa hours later, they reached the Gordak, A vac-suited man met them at the airlock, and Steve saw LeClarc's face through the glassite helmet. "I'll bet you were worried," said Teejay. "Sure," LeClarc answered, drawing a neutron gun from his belt. "See, my Captain, I'm so worried I can hardly think straight. Will the three of you please turn around and march over to the Frank Buckr They were too stunned to do anything else. "F#N'T mind me," Kevin JL- said, within the Frank Buck. "If I'm confused it's merely because I can't believe this. Not you, LeClarc, not you." They'd been ushered into the main lounge of the Frank Buck a ship of about the Gor dak's dimensions, but two or three years older. LeClarc stood there with his neutron gun, watching them carefully. In a few moments, Schuyler Barling joined them, a grealy salve covering the discoloration on his jaw. The jaw looked painfully swollen too, and Barling rubbed it speculatively. "I won't forget this," he growled briefly to Teejay, then turned to LeClarc. "Kevin McGann I know, but what about this man?" "Stedman?" said LeClarc. "You'll want him, because he's the extra-zoo man on the Gordak. If you took McGann and the woman alone, they still might be able to do their work on Carmical's ship. But with Stedman your prisoner as well. their hands are tied over there." "What is this?" Teejay demanded defiantly. "What's the meaning of -- " "Will you be quiet and let me do the talking?" Barling interrupted her. "It was LeClarc who radioed and told me your coin had two heads. If you wanted to play the game that way, I wasn't going to stand by and let you. So -- " "So," LeClarc took up the thread for him, "we got together, Mr. Barling and I." "But you, LeClarc," said Kevin. "You'd jump through a fire-hoop into a pit of acid if Captain Moore told you to." "Would I?" LeClarc chuckled softly. "Yes, Yes, you would." "Perhaps there was a time I'd have done that, McGann. Perhaps. But then I thought the Captain needed me, and wanted me to help her, too. Now, with you and Stedman -- well, LeClarc isn't so important, is he?" "So that's it!" Kevin roared. "You're jealous. Not jealous the way a man should be, when he loves a woman, but jealous because you believed Captain Moore had discarded you -- had decided you weren't such an essential cog in the Gordak machine." "Shut up." LeClarc took a quick step toward Kevin and hit him, hooking his left fist at the bigger man's jaw. Kevin staggered but did not go down. Bellowing, he charged at LeClarc, but the Frenchman waved him off with the neutron gun. "Stop it, LeClarc!" Barling snapped. "I didn't have you bring them here to make a shambles of the lounge. Just stand off in the corner -- that's right, there -- and watch them. I'll do the talking." "You realize, of course," Teejay told him calmly, "that this is kidnapping." "Is it? Who is to say? You never entered the Gordak; LeClarc met you within the airlock. For all your crew knows, the three of you are out on Ganymede somewhere --  with not much air left. After a time, they'll have to give you up as dead. With the Captain gone, and the Exec, and the expert on Extra-terrestrial zoology -- their expedition won't amount to much. It looks to me like old man Garmical will be without a circus this year, unless he resorts to a strictly terrestrial shindig." "What happens then?" Teejay wanted to know. "Well, I'll be frank with you, I haven't decided. I can't simply return you to civilization, of course." "Of course," Teejay echoed him acidly. "Then you'd be able to holler 'kidnapper'. It would seem tha#: you give me only one alternative. Ah -- excuse me a moment." A trio of men had entered the lounge and the leader, a stocky man of about thirtyfive, was beaming. "We've got three," he said. "Splendid, splendid. In that case, nothing remains to keep us on Ganymede." "Chief, I'm sure glad of that. This place can give you the heebies, and you never know why. Those three anthrovacs should be a fine core to build your circus around, though," "Three anthrovacs?" Teejay cried, her composure fading for the first time. "You've got three anthrovacs?" Barling nodded. "LeClarc here was good enough to tell us Stedman's plan. A first-rate idea, as you can see, only we were able to carry it out. Frankly, I wasn't sq optimistic at first." "Let's get back to us," Teejay suggested. "You were saying...?" ' "Umm-mm, yes. There's only one alternative, and much as I regret -- " "What is it? What's the alternative?" "Please, must I say it? I thiiik you know, and there's no need for me to -- " ' "No, I want to hear it." "Suit yourself," said Barling. "The only solution is this: we'll have to eliminate you." "When?" "The sooner the better. But Captain Moore, you're making me feel -- " "That's all I wanted to know!" Teejay cried, and hurled herself at Barling. "We might as well try to escape while we still have a chance." A fter that, things hap. pened almost too fast for Steve to follow. Kevin got the idea at once, charging at LeClarc before the Frenchman had time to gather his wits. The neutron gun hissed violently, searing a three-inch chunk out of the ceiling. But then LeClarc was struck by two hundred poimds of Kevin McGann, and went down before the onslaught. Something exploded against Steve's jaw and he did a quick flip and landed on his back. He'd hardly had time to declare himself in the battle, when one of Barling's men had jumped him. Now the man came down atop him, flailing with both fists, but Steve chopped at his face with short, clubbing blows and scrambled to his feet while the man caught his breath. Steve didn't wait, plunging toward the man with murder in his eyes -- and failed to reach him. An arm circled his neck from behind and he was dragged to the floor again, by the second of the three anthrovac hunters. He rolled over, saw Kevin and LeClarc off to his right, standing toe-to-toe and slugging. And beyond them, Teejay was cuffing Barling around the lounge with lusty, man-sized blows. Barling went down under the onslaught, falling at the woman's feet, but then the third hunter had grasped her swirling black cape from behind, throwing it over her head and tripping her. She fought blindly as she went down, taking the hunter with her; and with Barling, they became a tangled melee of thrashing arms and legs. Steve rolled out from under the second hunter, but the first one met him halfway and pole-axed him down to the floor again with a hard right hand. Sobbing, clutching at the man's legs, Steve began to pull himself upright and got a knee in his face. He went down again, and this time everything in the room receded into a vague, shadowy fog. When Steve could see again, there was still no order to the chaos. He hadn't lived a violent life like Kevin or Teejay -- such things were not part of his background, although he'd boxed in college and won the light-heavyweight championship, too. But there was something different, something elemental about a free-for-all brawl. LeClarc lay on his back, supine. He looked out of it for the duration, which still set the odds at four to three against the trio from the Gordak. Right now Kevin held his own with the two hunters who'd done Steve in, at least temporarily. But that couldn't last, for both were big, muscular men. And Teejay? She was a woman, so perhaps the-odds were even worse. Steve smiled grimly as he clambered to his feet to help Kevin, Teejay was a woman, but she was the new twentysecond century woman, and proud of it. The third hunter kicked and thrashed helplessly on the floor as she held him in a head-scissors and a the same time fended off Barling-who was crawling around them and looking for an opening. Teejay, definitely, was an asset. Steve got to hunter number three quickly, pulling him off Kevin and straightening him with an uppercut. After that, it was a set-up. Steve pounded once and then again with his left hand at the man's midsection, then finished by crossing his right and feeling it crunch against the man's jaw. "Now I see how you could take care of LeClarc that first day I" Kevin yelled, and promptly polished off the other hunter with a blow that lifted him completely off the floor. As one, they whirled around to face the other side of the room. Barling and his henchman had finally got the upper hand. Teejay lay on her side her hands behind her back. Not unconscious, she was completely spent, and an almost equally exhausted Barling was attempting to tie her hands with the black cape. The hunter sat there, dulleyed, watching them. It was Kevin who lifted the hunter and hurled him away, and when Steve rolled Barling over and pushed him against the wall, the man did not resist. Teejay climbed to her feet, unsteadily. T -- guess Tm growingsoft," she panted. "Maybe -- I don't know -- maybe training and muscletoning from -- infancy -- aren't the answer. A gal just isn't cut out for rough and tumble fighting." Her hand flashed up to her forehead, the back of it resting against her brow. "Ooo, Steve, catch me -- She fainted in his arms. Somehow, they got Teejay injo her vac-suit. The walls of the lounge were sound-proofed, and the struggle had attracted no one. Silently they made their way out of the lounge and through the corridors of the Frank Buck heading for the airlock. Steve toted Teejay over his shoulder, and remembering Mercury, felt very good about it. He ached all over from the fight and he knew he'd need some mending. But she'd called him Steve, and that -- suddenly and ridiculously -- . was most important. "What's going on here?" A crewman met them in the corridor and bellowed his challenge. Kevin raised the neutron gun he had taken from LeClatc. He never used it. A fraction of a second later, the Frank Buck blasted off from the surface of Ganymede, and sudden acceleration threw them all to the floor. As Steve was to learn later, no hands were at the controls. No human hands. X nation," began Barling, pacing back and forth, speaking out of swollen lips and averting the right side of his face with its puffy cheek and blackened eye. "We are all in this together, and -- " "You hypocrite!" cried Teejay. "Six hours ago, you wanted to kill us. Now, because something unexpected pops up, you change yoiu: mind. Temporarily, for as long as you can use us, is that it?" "No. If we can get out of this I'll forget about kidnapping." "Well... "You haven't any other choice. Captain Moore." "He's right," Kevin admitted. "But what's the trouble we're in, Mr. Barling?" "Six hour ago you three jumped us and almost made your escape. But the Frank Buck took off; suddenly, without warning. None of my men was at the controls "That doesn't make sense," Steve objected. "I didn't think so, either. I almost don't know how to explain it, what I've seen with my own eyes after my men held you in detention here in the lounge." "Why don't you begin at the beginning?' Tee jay said, and yawned. "Don't be funny. Somehow, the anthrovacs escaped from their bubbles and -- "What?" This was Steve, more than slightly incredulous. "Anthrovacs are mild creatures and unless they're attacked they won't do anything violent." "That's what I thought, Stedman, I don't know what to think now. The anthrovacs escaped -- and freed all the other animals. We've been out longer than the Gordak we have a couple of dozen prize specimens. Lead by the anthrovacs, they've taken over the ship." "Now you're joking," Teejay told him. "They're all brainless, those creatures, except for the anthrovacs." "They were brainless. Captain Moore. But not now. Now they behave logically, with a purpose, and they've taken over the Frank Buck from stem to stern -- all except those animals that need a special sort of atmosphere to breathe, and they've remained in their bubbles. "Otherwise, the animals took over. And I suppose you can imagine -- the crew was too astounded to resist, especially since the anthrovacs had gotten hold of neutron guns and seerned to know how to use them. Result -- we've all been disarmed, we're prisoners aboard our own ship, and bound for I don't know where." "Sounds crazy to me," Teejay said, and stalked toward the door. Steve took a quick step after her, but Barling held him back. "Let her find out for herself, Stedman. Then maybe we can talk sense." Teejay opened the door, stepped out into the corridor. Tensely, Steve waited, ready to bolt after her at the first indications of trouble. But what he heard was a yelp of surprise from the woman, and then she came running back into the lounge, slamming the door behind her. "A Martian desert cat I" she cried. It didn't do anything; it just stood there, all ten feet of it, looking at me!" "Then you believe me?" Barling demanded. "As I see it, we must have been struck by some cosmic radiation which mutated the animals, and -- " "No," Steve told him bluntly. "That's impossible. First place, any such change would have to be selective. All the animals wouldn't be affected. And more important, mutation takes generations to manifest itself. You never see the change at all in the original creature. Look at . Earth, way back in the early years of atomics. Genes were mutated at those two Island cities -- Nagasaki and, umm-mm, I forget the name of the other. Anyway, Genes were mutated, but it took over two hun. dred years for those mutations to become apparent. See what I mean?" "I do," said Barling. "And that's precisely why I think we ought to fight this thing together. I had an idea, you helped me with it. We can continue like that." "Well," Steve nodded, "we have "a first-class problem on our hands. We can't do anything about it until We know what's going on -- only the mystery's a little deeper than you think. First, I heard a voice out on Ganymede. My brother's voice." "Your brother's?" Barling scratched his head, "Oh, wait a minute! You must mean Charlie Stedman who was killed out here a few years back?" "Yeah, Charlie. You can't hear voices on Ganymiede, but I heard them, inside my head. Also, don't  forget the Ganymede-fear. I'd say the three things will fit together when we begin to learn what's going on." "Provided we can find out," Teejay told him. "You can keep your scientific mysteries for a while, Steve. What I want to know is this: where are we going, and why?" "Ask your desert cat out there." Kevin's laughter was sour. "What we need is a good turn coat," Tee jay assured him. "Someone who can go out among the animals and ask questions. I'm joking, of course, but if anyoi) could do it, it would be that Tat, LeClarc." Steve frowned. "That's not as funny as it sounds. Has anyone seen LeClarc since the fight?" "No!" Kevin slammed fist against palm. , Steve was about to answer, but quite suddenly the lights blinked out. Somewhere outside, a dozen animals roared their fear. Within the lounge, Kevin commenced cursing lustily and an involuntary moan escaped Barling's lips. The darkness was the bleak, utter  black of deep space. Further, Steve realized, the steady humming of the fission engines had erased. Minutes later, impossible pain gripped him and flung him, sobbing to the floor. He'd never felt anything like it, a gripping, grinding, twisting torment which tried to turn him inside out. He heard the others dimly, reeling about the lounge and falling to the floor, and in the darkness someone fell near him. "Steve? Steve, is that you?" Teejay... "Yeah." The pain seemed to come in waves, and Steve gritted his teeth when the second turned out to be worse than the first. He reached out with his hand, found Teejay's and squeezed it. "Hold on, kid. It can't last forever." "It better -- not." When her hand tensed in his, then relaxed, Steve knew she'd fainted. And soon after that, his own senses reeled and deserted him. Teejay's hand was still tightly clenched in his when he regained consciousness. A dozen feet from them, Kevin sat up, shaking his head slowly back and forth. Schuyler Barling lay stretched out on his stomach. "Whatever happened," Kevin growled, "I didn't like it." Tee jay extricated her hand, looked at Steve, smiled. "It's still awful quiet outside." It didn't remain that way for long. As if Teejay's words had been a signal, a voice boomed at them from the wall-rnicrophone. "We have landed. All humans will please file out into the main corridor in an orderly fashion and make their way to the airlock." Schuyler Barling sat up groggily. Tee jay said, "I could swear I know that voice from somewhere. "And I," Kevin told them. "It's familiar, though I can't place it." Steve felt his heart pounding. The voice was Charlie's. T hey stood on a flat, grassy plain which stretched halfway to the horizon and then began to undulate into low hills. And far off, shrouded by purple mists, a range of mountains loomed distantly. Purple mist; a purplish cast to the sky; a fiercely bright blue sun. "What world is this?" said Kevin. The crew of the Frank Buck -- a hundred men -- stood in a long, thin file outside the ship. They'd balked at first, but silently, the three anthrovacs had ferreted them out with their neutron guns, never uttering a sound, merely motioning with the weapons. Of the other animals Steve saw nothing, but within the corridors of the Frank Buck he'd encountered a sand crawler and a desert cat, both dead. The seconds fled, became rninutes. When half an hour had passed, the crew became restless and some of them ambled off on the grassy plain until one of the anthrovacs herded them back. The Frank Buck Exec, a short, wiry man, strode within the ship and came out a few moments later, scratching his head. "I can't understand it," he said. "None of the instruments work. I thought we could just pile back into the ship and blast off, but apparently someone has other ideas." Someone did. Someone came striding across the plain, a small dot of a figure at first. He came closer. Steve ignored the anthrovacs, ran forward. "Charlie!" he cried. "Charlie!" The man was shorter' than Steve, and stockier. His eyes searched Steve's face briefly, and he said: "Should I know you?" "Should you! I'm your brother!" "Interesting, but quite impossible." The words hardly registered, and Steve babbled on, "We thought you were dead. It was Tee jay here who reported back to Earth saying you'd died on Ganymede. Now you're alive and -- " Abruptly he whirled, turned to Teejay. "You lied, damn you! Here's Charlie, see? Charlie was never dead. But you said -- " "I said Charlie was dead." The woman met his gaze levelly. "He was. I know a dead man when I see one. He was dead." "But -- " "But nothing. I don't' know who this is. I can't explain it. That has nothing to do with what happened on Ganymede years ago." "Yes? Then what did happen? Why did Charlie write once that you must have been spawned in hell? You never did want to tell me what happened on Ganymede, did you? Maybe Charlie can." "That is my name, Charlie Stedman. It is the name this body has always had, although when I do not inhabit it I assure you I am not Charlie Stedman," the stocky man said. "You see, the original inhabitant of the garment -- the body -- was destroyed. The name applied to the body as well as the inhabiting mind. The language remained engraved in the brain cells, and impersonal parts of the memory, too. In that sense, I am Charlie Stedman. Does it satisfy you?" "Hell, no," said Steve, bewildered. Mystery had been piled upon mystery, with no solution in sight And grim confusion turned to grimmer anger as he faced Tee jay once more. "All right, strt talking. Just how did you find Charlie? And what made him hate you like that? Talk, damn you!" "Okay, I will. But I don't know why Charlie hated me, and that's the truth. I only met him once or twice and -- unless it was Schuyler here. Hey, Schuyler!" Barling joined them. "Wlat do you want?!' "Answer this question: do you make a practise of poisoning the minds of your crew against me?" "Well, I don't know what you mean by poi -- " Teejay grabbed a handful of his shirt and twisted, constricting the collar about his throat. "Answer me," she said. "And no run around." "I -- I guess so. It's only business. Captain Moore. The more they hated you, the more they'd be willing to fight you in the hunt every step of the way." "How about Charlie Stedman?" "I don't remember. Probably, it was like that." Teejay flung him away from her. "Does that satisfy you, Steve?" "For that part, yes. But what about the rest of it?" "Not much to tell. I was out alone on Ganymede, a few miles from the ship. I thought I heard voices, sort of inside my head. I went forward to explore, just like you did, and also like you, I almost didn't have enough air to get back. Especially since I found your brother on the way." "And he was dead?" As he spoke, Steve looked at his brother, standing right there in front of him, and wondered if anyone ever asked a more impossible question. "Yes. He was dead. I don't know how he died, but I placed my ear against the chest of his vac-suit. The heart-beat is amplified through it, you know. But there wasn't any. After that, I ran back to the Gordak, and I had barely enough air to make it. I reported Charlie's death, of course." Charlie's death. Well, she sounded sincere. But there was Charlie, standing two paces to her right and apparently listening to an account of his own demise, a throat. Quite evidently, it ' wasn't Charlie at all, but Steve could think of the man in no other way, for down to the smallest physical detail, he was Charlie. "That will suffice," he said. Again, it was Charlie's voice, but expressionless. "Enough of bickering. You will all march with me toward those hills, and We have a long journey before sunset." The nine-foot anthrovacs took up their positions one on each side of the column and one behind it, and no one disobeyed. Once Steve looked back over his shoulder and saw the purple mists had almost completely swallowed the Frank Buck. Then the irony of the situation struck Steve and he smiled -- almost. He'd come to Ganymede after anthrovacs. But he'd left the satellite under an anthrovac guard! Fine thing. A mighty hunter was he! Clear across the universe to be bagged by his own game! Obviously, Steve thought as they marched on, the blue day-star was not Earth's stm. Somehow, in a matter of moments, they'd left the Solar System entirely. He knew that theories had been advanced about traveling through something called sub-space, something which could make flight to the farthest stars almost instantaneous, since sub-space existed outside the space-time continuum. And that wrenching from one spatial plane to another might explain the tremendous pain they'd undergone, too. But surely the Frank Buck had never been equipped for such flight. The whole concept of sub-space flight was strictly theoretical and hadn't even reached the drawing-board stage. Then how had it happened? Kevin had some vague, halfformed ideas on the subject, and he letSteve know about them. "It's a puzzler, boy. They took us a long way, space alone knows how far. I don't pretend to know why; we can't figure that out, not yet. But I know this : they could not have done that without help. Someone had to bring the ship." "The anthrovacs?" Steve suggested. "Not the anthrovacs. For all their handling neutron guns and taking the Frank Buck over, they're just big apes to me. Maybe they were able to take the ship off Ganymede, but no more than that. They had help, boy, and from the inside "Who? Who do you mean?" "I'm not sure I know. But look at it this way. The Gordak wasn't taken, the Frank was. Why? I'll tell you why, or at least I'll tell you one possibility, There were scores of men on each ship, but while the Gordak had only one animal -- the stone worm you got on Mercury -- the Frank Buck had dozens. All right so far, boy? Well, here's what I think: whoever took the ship wanted both men and ani , mals "I still don't understand." "I'm not sure I do, either. Let's get back a little.' The Frank Buck, not the Gordak, was taken. Strange, isn't it, that just before that happened LeClarc bolted our ranks and joined the enemy! Does that mean LeClarc had to be on the Frank Buck before anything happened? And whcre'd he get to, anyway? I haven't seen him since the fight ; I don't think anyone has. Now, a man spends years idolizing a woman -- I've been around, and I think I told you LeClarc would have done anything for Captain Moore. Suddenly, he gets sulky because he's out of favor with her, and decides on a double-cross. "It smells bad, boy. Sure, he was sulky, but the LeClarc I knew would have come crawling to Captain Moore, anyway. This one didn't." Kevin paused, ran a hand through his red hair. "Maybe it means he isn't the same man. Maybe it means he's something like that thing which calls itself your brother. That's not Charlie Stedrnan and you know it. Trouble is, boy, you can't admit it to yourself." "I won't argue about it," Steve replied. "But you're off the beam there. Charlie doesn't remember me, but LeClarc's memory seemed fine." "That's true, Steve. I can't explain it, except like this: whatever happened to both of them, we don't know a thing about it. Maybe it works in a different way on differ ent people. Maybe because Charlie was dead first, his personal memories were a loss, but LeClarc's weren't because he might have been possessed alive." "Possessed?" "Yes, possessed. Oh, not by spirits, that's for sure. But possessed nevertheless. I won't say the anthrovacs were possessed, for we don't know enough about them to begin with. But look at those other animals now, the ones that died. You won't deny that something took over their brains?" "Damned right I won't. But I still don't see how it all adds up." "Nor do I," said Kevin. "Unfortunately, the brutes seemed to have perished in transit from Ganymede to here, wherever here is. It could be that the strain on their brain-tissue, with sentience and intelligence taking over where before only sentience had resided, was too great." Kevin paused, then concluded: "whatever the reason, whatever the reason for alLof it -- I think you'll find LeClarc knows all about it." The blue sun had neared the horizon and the purple mists had ney's end. It was then that they saw LeClarc. T he column of men had traversed the grassy plain, had climbed steadily through the region of undulating hills. And suddenly, hidden until the last moment by a rise in the terrain and spread out at the foot of the higher mountains, they saw a city. Circular, walled, pleasantly pastel-tinted despite the purple gloom, it lay before them, lights which might or might not have been electricity winking on to dispel the gathering darkness. And there, at the city's gateway, stood LeClarc. LeClarc -- and not LeClarc, The man seemed as much LeClarc as the short stocky figure who led the procession seemed Charlie ) Stedraan. "Welcome to Uashalume," he said, and Steve pulled up short at the sound of his voice. There was something of the volatile Frenchman in it, but something else which was alien. "You will be billeted in temporary quarters for the night," LeClarc continued. "You will of course have no need for such quarters after tomorrow's bazaar." "Of course, my foot!" Teejay cried petulantly. "See here, LeClarc, we've been getting orders and directives without knowing what they mean or why they were given or -- "Must you be so impatient?" LeClarc's smile was almost devoid of mirth. "You've come one hxmdred thousand light years, and surely you can wait until morning." "Light years!" This was Steve. And Kevin, "One hundred thousand!" The academic problem didn't bother Teejay as much as the human one. She said, defiantly, "What he needs is a good swift kick." LeClarc failed to wait for that, or anything else. Chuckling, he led the first anthrovac through the higharched stone gateway and the other two creatures herded the humans in after him. Charlie -- although obviously, the man was not Charlie -- went on ahead with LeClarc, and Steve had to restrain Teejay with a few terse words. The purple mists cloaked the city completely now, and as they plodded along a wide roadway, Steve half-saw figures watching them from the darkness. He could not make the figures out, however, and he heard nothing but the sounds their feet made on the stone roadway. Presently, they came to a smaller, divergent path which led back to the base of the wall. Here, in deepest shadow, was their destination -- a squat, rectangular building carved from stone. A gate creaked and clanged open before them; they streamed through, weary after hours of forced mardi; the gate clanged resoundingly behind them. Charlie tad not entered with them, nor LeClarc, nor the anthrovacs. It took Steve only a moment to discover the gate had been securely fastened from the outside. "I guess we bed down here for the night," he said, grinning ruefully. Teejay shrugged, wrapped the black cape tightly about her. It was cold and damp in the one large chamber which took up the interior of the building. In the center of the place stood a stone table, and on it a gas lamp which flickered and spluttered and cast grotesque shadows as the men wandered about. There were no beds, no furniture of any sort except for the table. And the two small peep-hole windows were fifteen or more feet off the ground. The crew of the Frank Buck gathered in small, anxious knots and whispered grimly among themselves. After a time, men circulated between one group and another, and finally one of them, evidently designated as spokesman for the rest, approached Schuyler Barling. He seemed nervous, frightened, unsure of himself. "Captain Barling, my name's Steiner, and the  fellows thought that -- well, that I might speak for them. We don't know what's going on, but we do know this much: we don't like it." "I can't blame you," said Barling. "Point is, sir, we want you to do something about it." "Eh? Me? What can I do?" "We don't know that, sir. But a spaceman's a peculiar individual; some say he's got characteristics you won't find elsewhere, and one of them is this : he has complete confidence in his captain." "Why, thank you, Steiner." "Me, I work in fission. I like to have that confidence and the rest of the men, they like to have it too. When they lose it, they're kind of at a loss. We don't want to think we've lost it here, sir." "What do you want me to do?" Barling was restless, .fidgety, twisting his hands together, "Lead us, sir. Tell us you can get us out of here. Tell us we must be prepared to fight behind you and maybe to die, but lead us." "But how can you expect me to lead you when I don't know what's happening? How can I plan for escape when I don't know what it is we have to escape from?" "There's talk among the mfen, sir," Steiner wfeiit on, "Some of them are for you, although V be frank. There aren't many, sir. But they need a leader, all of them agree on that. What they want to know IS this: are you their man?" Barling squared his thin shoulders arrogantly. "Tm the Frank Bucks Captain." "The Frank Buck lies behind u in those purple mists, sir. Could you find it? Finding it, OOuld yOU make it run again?" "I dont know." "Then the fact that you captain the Frank Buck doesn't mean much. We've decided that leaves us without a leader, sir. We need a leader." Barling smiled coldly. "Are you trying to tell me the men have selected you?" "No, sir. I'm not. But the "majority of the men have their choice -- and that is Captain Moore. We who have been with the Frank Buck longest have heard a' lot of bad talk about Captain Moore, but that changes completely whenever we make planetfall. The talk in all the frontier towns is all in Captain Moore's favor. When there are decisions to be made, sir, we'd like her to make them." "A woman? When all your lives may be at stake?" who'd fared SO poorly in the lounge fight strode forward, saying: "Look at yourself, sir. You're beaten and battered, and that's Captain Moore's work. Did her sex matter then?" Barling reddened, said nothing. "We have a pressing need for a leader," Steiner continued. "Our behavior cannot be chaotic. The leader must plan for us, and we must be prepared to carry out those plans with no hesitation. We must have faith in our leader." Tee jay joined them, grinning. "Thank you, Mr. Steiner. There was a time not long ago when what you've just finished saying would have meant more to me than anything. Literally, more than anything. But would you' think it strange if you hear that I don't think that now?" "What do you mean?" Steiner demanded. "I'm a ' twenty-second century female, strong as a man and proud of it. Too proud, Mr. Steiner, for I've spent my whole life trying to prove it. Plenty of men have cursed me for it, I'll bet, and I guess they were right. "So I don't want that job you offer. It took a kind of free-for-all brawl to make me realize it, but a woman's still a woman, and that's One thing I had to learn. I fought your Captain Barling and I beat him. Probably, I could do it againy But I -- well, I was fighting with Captain Barling and saying to myself all tlie time, 'This is stupid. What are you -- a girl-- -- doing this for? Don't you know you shouldn't go around fighting like a man?' " Steve noticed in the dim light that Teejay had begun to blush. "I hate to bate my life before you like this, Mr. Steiner, but the way it adds up I've suddenly found Tve had enough of fighting and galavanting around. So the answer is no: I won't be your captain. The way I feel now, I can't be." "Where does that leave us?" Steiner asked her sullenly. "We don't think Captain Barling can do the job, whatever the job turns out to be. It's one thing to serve on a largely automatic ship under Captain Barling, but another thing to have to take his orders here -- wherever we are." "May I make a Suggestion?" Tee jay asked. And, after Steiner nodded and most of the men grumbled their assent: "There are two men here who can lead us the way we should be led. One is Kevin McCann, Exec of the Gordak; the other is Steve Stedman." A stir of surprise passed among the men. It was one thing to offer their allegiance to the Captain of another ship -- and an unusual thing at that -- but quite another to offer it to a couple of men they hardly knew. The men began heated discussions once more, louder this time, and Teejay drew Steve off into a comer. "Does that surprise you?" "It sure does, Teejay. On both counts. But I'll tell you this : I think I could like you a lot better in your new role, and -- Teejay?" "What?" Hr voice was soft and he felt her hand snuggle into his. "I -- I like you plenty right now." He slid his arms around her waist, drew her toward him, one small part of his mind expecting a roundhouse right-handed wallop from the old Teejay. But she merely sighed contentedly and slipped her arms, around his neck. He kissed her -- tentatively at first -- then long and deep, and Teejay's eyes were all aglow when he finished. "You lug," she said, "if you didn't do something like that, and soon, I was going to be an Amazon just once more to make you do it." Someone -- Steve saw it was Steiner -- stood before them clearing his throat. "Captain Moore?" "Yes?" Teejay hardly saw him. "The men have decided to accept your recommendation. McCann antd Stedman it is. Captain Moore. They bark and we'll jump. And we'll be hoping something comes of it." "If it's at all possible, they'll get us out of here," Teejay predicted, and squeezed Steve's hand. "Any orders, sir?" Steiner looked at Steve. "Umm-mm, no. Except that we'd like to have this corner to ourselves for a while."  "Done," said Steiner, smiling and striding away. "I have one order," Kevin called out loudly, and silence fell on the room quite abruptly. "Let's all get the hell to sleep before we're too tired to do anything when morning comes." in through the two small windows, bringing strange bird-sounds with it. Steve was stiff and chilled and he'd slept badly on the hard stone floor. The groans and frowns all around the room showed him he wasn't the only one. Teejay slept like a baby, the cape wrapped about her, and she didn't arise until one of the men began to bang on the ktone and metal door. "Is it morning?" said Teejay, coming into Steve's aims almost before she was fully awake. "I had the nicest dreams darling!" Abruptly, Steve whirled away from her. The door had begun to creak in ponderously on little-used hinges. An anthrovac bent and came within the chamber, bearing a bath-tub-sized bowl of what looked like hot, steaming cereal. It was deposited near the table, along with a dozen or so stone spoons. Foolishly, one of the men darted for the doorway. Reaching out with a long, hairy arm, the anthrovac scooped him up by the scruff of the neck and flung him back inside. He got to his feet with a nasty gash on his  forehead which Teejay bandaged with a strip of cloth ripped from the hem of her black cape. The spoons were passed around after that, and the men of the Frank Buck dug into the gruel with gustof It had been fifteen hours since any of them had eaten and surprisingly, the gruel turned out to be quite palatable, with an appealing, nutlike flavor. The anthrovac waited fifteen minutes, then lifted the huge bowl and departed with it. But the door didn't close fully. Charlie Stedman came through it. "Good morning," he said. "We're a little late, and we'll have to hurry if we want to reach the bazaar in time for opening." "Are you sure We want to?" Kevin demanded sarcastically. And Steiner suggested: "Maybe you'd like to answer a few questions first." "Sure." This was Teejay. "About a thousand questions." It was as if the man hadn't heard them at all. "Outside a vehicle awaits you. There is room for all, provided each man occupies qne of the squares you will find marked off on the floor. Let's go." Angry, sullen, but still thoroughly bewildered, the men trooped outside. The, vehicle was a sort of bus, although the noise of a gasoline engine or the purring of a fission engine wpuld have shocked Steve here on the world called Uashalume. As it turned out, the bus started with a whining whistle which quickly climbed to the super sortie and faded beyond the level human ears could reach. Within the Vehicle there were no seats, but the floor had been divided into tworfoot squares, a thin white line marking off each box. When each man had occupied his square, the bus slipped away from the Squat building and was soon streaking down the roadway at a good clip. Steve saw other buildings, most of them squat and shapeless. And now, with the coming of daylight, he could see some of the inhabitants of Uashalume. He'd steeled himself for it. He hadn't expected human beings. Any variety of six-legged, multi-tentacled, bug-eyed creatures would have been strictly in order. He gasped. He got more than he bargained for. Hardly two of the creatures gazing in at them were alike! The differences were not those you might expect to find among the members of a particular species. The differences were extreme, A furry thing hovered alongside the openwindowed 'bus on six gauzelike wings.  Multiple eyes stared up at them out of a pool of amorphous protoplasm. A bony, stickdike creature with four arms and one Cyclopean eye covering almost its entire head peered at them. An ecto-skeletoned monstrosity made clicking noises as they passed. Big horrors and little horrors. Steve found himself laughing harshly. What did all his knowledge of Extra-terrestrial zoology amount to now? Extra-terrestrial -- that meant the Solar System, one tiny, inconsequential corner of a great galaxy. But here, here on Uashalume, denizens of a hundred Solar Systems might have been gathered. Why? Such utterly different creatures -- each conforming to a particular environmental niche -- would not be found together. Unless someone had probed the depths of space for life-forms that might all be capable of surviving bn Uashalume, as, indeed, humans could survive there! But why? The question returned, taunted him. Again, such a gathering wouldn't be out of direct choice. If each of the creatures seemed so completely strange, so horrible, so ludicrous to human eyes -- they probably appeared that way to one another as well. Steve wondered how some of them might describe the obnoxious, featherless, hairless bipeds which walked upright on two limbs and carried two other limbs for more varied purposes than walking. Bipeds which called themselves humans. And that, precisely, was the point. Such a gathering stemmed from no natural cause. Such a gathering had been imposed arbitrarily, but for what purpose? And what, if anything, did the bazaar have to do with it? A bazaar of the worlds, bringing together for trade, creatures of every form and size and color? Steve doubted that somehow, for the bazaar would lack a universal means of exchange, and even if barter were resorted to, how could totally alien life-forms assess the value of completely foreign produce? They couldn't. That left Steve with nothing but a lot of half-formed questions and .no answers at all. He had a hunch he'd begin to get some answers when the bus reached its destination. As with the inhabitants of Uashalume, he was to get more than he bargained for. fusion on a large raised platform under the blue sun. A sea of impossible creatures rolled and seethed on all sides of tliem, shuttereyes, pin-hole eyes, simple lightsensative receptors, multiple-tube eyes -- hundreds of varieties all intent upon them. Steve heard voices around him on the platform, confused, alarmed. "What's happening?" "This place looks like an auction block!" "Look at those creatures, will you?" "Are we for sale or something?" The human voices faded into a meaningless babble. Someone else was speaking, but not aloud. It was like Charlie Stedman's voice, that day on Ganymede. Steve heard it inside his head and this time -- because they all stood about more bewildered than ever -- he knew that the Frank Buck's crew heard it too. "Friends of Uashalume," the voice purred mentally, "here, at opening day of the bazaar, we have a most unusual treat. Most unusual. Two of us, as you know, have already tested the models in question, and we find them entirely satisfactory." Charlie Stedman and LeClarc stepped forward, bowed. "For the rest of you, one hundred choice specimens! We set no fixed price, but let this be said about the new garments. They are unspoiled, virgin material; they've not been used-before. You'll find them stimulating for that reason alone, Fm sure. As for the vital statistics, they vary in height from three and a half to five klars; in weight from fifteen to twenty-nine jarons; they are a bisexual lot, although only one female of the species is present; their intellectual capacity is on the seventh level, their better minds can attain to problems of relativity and universal field ; emotionally, they have twice the range of any previous garment!" The voice paused significantly, permitted that point to sink in. "Yes, twice the range. We none of us have ever experienced such strong, vital  emotions. Can you imagine, twice the emotional range means a new way of life for those among us who select some of these humans for their own. "Now, the auction-master will please step forward." "We are for sale," Steiner gasped. It was Charlie Stedman who came to the fore, climbing the auction-block and looking around him. After a time, he singled out Steiner and pulled the man forward by an elbow. "The first specimen is typical," he droned in English, and Steve figured he spoke mentally to the assembled throngs, reeling off the hdght, weight, and other vital statistics for Steiner. Finally: "What am I bid?" Mental voices sang out, one after another: "Three char!" "Four." "Six." "Ten char." "Ten?" The man who was Chai lie Stedman laughed. "Ten char indeed! One hundred is not enough." The bidding continued, became hot, became a contest between two mental voices. Steiner went for seventy-four char, whatever a char was. They took him down and carted him away, struggling. It looked like an ugly scene would develpp, for a score of men surged toward the front of the block angrily. But some of the creatures held what looked like strange, possibly lethal weapons, and Kevin growled: "Not now! There's no sense getting all of us killed. Relax, and we'll see." Grumbling, the men subsided, and Kevin turned to Steve: "If this isn't the damndest cosmic joke of all." "What do you mean?" "We're hunters, big game hunters. We go out into space to hunt for specimens, only this time we've become specimens ourselves! This time we werent the hunters, but the quarry!" The auction continued, and one by one the men were sold. Once one of them, a radar technician, bolted and ran. He was cut down quite efficiently by one of the handweapons and Charlie Stedman asserted it was a pity one of the specimens had been lost. "Keep your tempers,' Kevin said grimly as a wave of anger washed over the auction block. "I dont like it any more than you do, but we won't fight until we understand -- and then perhaps we'll have a chance." been taken, Charlie Stedman reached for Teejay and dragged her forward. "This,' he said, "is the female of the species. You will notice the long hair atop her head and the twin out-thrust developments of the upper ventral region; these are the marks of distinction. And for two reasons we will demand a special price for the female. "First, we are primarily interested in these humans for emotion. Stronger garments we have, and garments which live longer. But none attain to the human emotional level. And, among the humane, the female is capable of stronger surges of emotion, perhaps because in general she is physically weaker and must compensate for it, although, from what I've seen, this particular specimen is a physical match for the others. "Second, one specific high degree of emotion is possible only when a male and a female are in one another's presence. Therefore, whichever one of you owns the female can be certain of that added stimulus, and, as a consequence, certain of a more satisfactory garment from the emotional point of view. Now, what am I offered?" Teejay went for three hundred chat, Kevin had to circle Steve's body with his huge arms and hold him firm as they took Teejay away. He'd found the woman quite suddenly, and he loved her all the more for it. His potential worst enemy had become his lover. And now, brief hours later she was taken from him, perhaps forever. "Let go of me! Get ydur filthy hands off me. That's Teejay they're taking! Teejay!" "And they'll take you too. But you're going alive, not dead. Stand still and let them get on with this." "Don't you realize what they've been talking about?" Steve shouted his rage. "They'll wear Us, like clothing. They'll get inside our brains and share oUf bodies with us, like they've done with all these other creatures. Did you think these monsters were all native to Uashalume? I wouldn't be surprised if none of them was. They've all been taken, as we have, from their own worlds. They all live hqre-as clothing. Maybe the masters don't have physical form at all, maybe they're just mental essence. "And all they want to do is run the gamut of our emotions. They know how to play with emotions, too. Remember the Ganymede-fear, Kevin?" "I remember, boy." Kevin still held him. "Well, that was their work. Probably, Ganymede was their base in our Solar System, although it's possible they first got into LeClarc's brain on Mercury. And Kevin, all those theories you had were right!" "Yes, I know. And sub-space -- " "The hell with that. They're taking Tee jay and they may take all of us and spread us out all over the face of this world. We'll never find each other. We'll -- " "You're next, Steve Stedman." It was Charlie's voice, and Steve felt Kevin release him with a word of warning, felt himself drawn to the front of the block. Somehow, he found he was incredibly objective as the bidding began. He was claimed for one hundred fifty char and led away by a creature with a stilt-like body and six arms. Or rather, he thought, that was the garment. But the real creature -- the mental entity within it -- had grown tired of last year's cloak, and Steve was to take its place. Moments later, Steve's buyer whisked him away in a smaller version of the bus that had taken the Frank Bucks's crew to the bazaar. On the outskirts of the city, the car stopped. Steve climbed out, followed the stilt-figure up a flight of stairs as a round, fat, furry creature bounced up behind him with a weapon. ' Inside, the place looked like a laboratory. And at the center of the room squatted a great round tank, large enough to hold a man. A green liquid boiled within it, but somehow Steve got the impression of boiling without much heat. He became absorbed in the idea, reached up over the lip of the tank to verify it on a thoroughly peculiar impulse. Something struck him from behind. He staggered to his knees and tried to keep his eyes opened. The hard stone floor slammed against his face as he lost consciousness. could see again, a murky green haze surrounded him. Floating, completely submerged! He felt no desire to breathe. He did not have to breathe at all. It was as if his life had been suspended completely, as if there was no need for his body to carry out its normal functions. But he wasn't dead. He could open his eyes and stare at the green 'liquid, and he could think. And after a time, vague forms appeared outside. He saw the walls of the laboratory and the shining instruments -- through green murk. And he saw something else moving about, a shadowy form. The stiltlike creature? Abruptly, sharp pain lanced from the front of his skull to the back. Briefly. And it did not repeat itself. A voice whispered, "You are struggling. t)o not struggle, for it can only prolong the inevitable. Transfer tsdces time, of course; but the longer it takes the more unpleasant it will be for you." "Go to hell." It was then that the pain came back -- stronger. And something almost physical pushed in at his mind, something ugly, unclean, wet with brought twinges of fright. Like the Ganymede-fear but more intense. "To struggle is useless." ' The wet feeling, like fingers now, fingers which oozed slime, clung to his brain, probed it, bore inward. "Why struggle? I think you will make a good fit." "Go away. Damn you, go away!" "I see the auction-master was right. Emotionally, you are strong." The fingers departed, came back again, more insistent. No longer wet, they were digits of fire now, burning, burning. Steve screamed soundlessly and fainted. When Steve came to, he was outside the tank. He was tired and did not feel like walking. Nevertheless,  he walked. At first he did not understand. He thought: I will sit down and rest. His body failed to obey, continued walking. "We share this body," the voice Whispered to him, within his skull. "You are merely an observer as long as I am awake. I am in control. Henceforth, I dwell in this body." "I want to sleep." "You will learn that your mind can sleep while your body does not. And the body interests me, human. The body is capable of strong emotion. I want to feel that emotion." The place, Steve realized later, was a sort of proving-grounds. He felt himself walking, walking. He reached the edge of a cliff, stared down from giddy heights. He felt himself tetering on the edge, saw jagged rocks far below him. He jumped. He did not want to, but he jumped. "We'll be killed!" he cried, iey fear making his heart pound. "That is fear," said the voice in his skull. "That is wonderful fear. So strong -- " Something cushioned their fall, slowly. It was that, Steve knew. Their fall, not his alone. Eor the creature shared it with him. He tumbled, but slowly, like a feather, like a wraith of fog. He alighted on the rocks with hardly a jar, cushioned by some advanced application of a force-field. A large cube of metal was there to convey them to the top once more. After that, he became giddy. He did not know why, but the impulse to laugh Was too strong to resist. He laughed until it grew painful, laughed until the tears came to his eyes. "That is joy," said the voice. "I can instill joy in you. But the way you express it, that is unique. More!" And Steve's laughter bubbled up insanely again. The creature was wrong -- not joy. Hysteria, more nearly. Unused to emotions, the creature could not tell them apart. Something grabbed his arms and held itA giant vise which could crush and twist. Me saw nothing, realized that it was some mental trick--but thoroughly effective. His arm was being wrenched from its socket, slowly, terribly. He clenched his teeth, groaned. From somewhere far off, tne voice laughed calmly. "I like that. Oh yes, I do. I like your reaction to pain," An intense loathing he had never before experienced took hold of him. At first he thought it was another trick, but he could sense alarm in the creature which shared him. The loathing, then, was his body's reaction to its parasite. Almost, he could feel the creature squirming, and he gave free reign to the emotion. "Stop!" The voice was strident, alarmed. I hate you, Steve thought intensely. I hate you, "Stop! I warn you, you will kill us with that, or drive us insane." Vertigo followed the loathing as the creature fought back. Steve was tired, suddenly more tired than he'd ever been. He sank back into blackness, knew even as his senses fled that his mind alone would sleep, not his body. With two minds, the body would not sleep at all -- and in a matter of months it would perish of fatigue. But the creature within him feared his hatred, and that he must remember. T he days followed each other in a slow, tortuous procession. Nothing seemed to satiate the parasite, for each day it strove for new emotions, and after a time Steve learned he could frustrate it by regarding everything as unreal, imaginative, non-existent. Sometimes, the guest slept when the host did not. At such times, Steve found, he had freedom of a sort. His field of action was not circumscribed in any way except that violent activity would awaken the parasite. Steve toyed with his freedom, timorously at first, then grew more confident. He played with it, basked in it after steady days of control. He even discovered he could use the telepathic abilities of his uninvited mental guest. He missed Teejay, wondered about her, longed for her. His astonishment was so extreme when he first heard her voice within hisead that he almost awakened the parasite. "Steve? Steve, is that you?" "Teejay -- " "I've been trying to reach you. When these creatures sleep, we can use their minds." "Then you're all right?" "I'm as all right as can be expected, Steve, But they've been running me through all sorts of emotional mazes. My clothing is torn and they don't care about it. My skin is torn and bruised. They don't care about that, either. They'll run us down. Did you notice all the other creatures here? Some of their bones are broken -- if they have bones -- and they've never been set. They're bruised and bloody and infected and the parasites don't care! Why should they, they can get new bodies? But Steve -- oh, Steve, I've never felt so unclean in all my life and it's just as if I've been defiled and -- " "Take it easy, Teejay. Thinking like that won't help." "I hate them. Oh, I hate them. I -- " "Listen. I want you to concentrate like that. Hate weakens them. Remember how the animals aboard the Frank BucA: died? Well, since our emotions are so much stronger than the parasites, maybe, maybe -- "  "You mean it could work in reverse "I don't know." "You want me to try, darling?" "Yes -- no! We can't do it now. If it works, we'd still be leaving a hundred men here. They're doomed. Tee jay. We're all doomed unless we can do something about it, and soon. But at night they sleep. Yeah, they sleep at night! If we can contact the others, and make a concentrated effort of it, using the telepathic powers of the parasites -- " ''Shh! That's enough, Steve. My friend here is getting up. I can feel him stirring inside my head. Shh, later!" At the end, hope had made Teejay her old spunky self again. But when Steve's own master awakened,that hope seemed mightly slim indeed. Each night they managed to contact two or three of the others, and the word was supposed to be passed on. Finally, it was arranged. The night for action was decided upouj and for some few of them it would be a gamble, for there was no guarantee that all the parasites would be asleep. Once the attempt was made, however, there would be no turning back. Whoever was left behind -- was left behind. Provided the plan worked at all. T he creature was asleep again. 'T hate ycAi," Steve said quietly. Silence. hate youf He thought it now, thought it with all his being -- and somehow he could sense the thought was being reinforced as scores of men concentrated on it around the city. The mind within him stirred sluggishly, but he ushed it under again. Hate, hate, ate. Hadn't the creature said it could kill them both? A gamble. Everything was a gamble. Naturally the parasite would say that, Steve began to sweat, physically. He was weak and the muscles of his arms and legs trembled. His mind found the strange telepathic channel of the parasite, traveled inward along it -- with hatred. That, at least, was easy. He did hate the creature so thoroughly and so completely that the feeling pushed everything else from his mind. A concert of hatred, all over the city. And slumbering masters who might or, might not awaken. "Stop!" A clarion command inside his skull. The parasite was fighting back. Steve tumbled to the floor, lay there writhing. Two minds fought for control of his body, and he was being pushed back and out of control. He got to his feet stiffly, strode to a cabinet, took out a knife. He stared at the knife,  fascinated, pointed it toward his chest. "One of us must die, human, but it shall not be I!" He drove the knife inward, slowly, an inch at a time toward his chest. He felt the point sting, saw a thin trickle of blood. For a moment, he fought to possess his arms and the knife with them. That was a mistake -- almost, a fatal one. The parasite wanted that, for, in such a battle, it would win everytime. Perhaps it could not fight his hatred, but it could fight anything else he had to offer. The knife went in, scraped against a rib. Steve yelled hoarsely, drenched every atom of his soul in hatred. Slowly, he withdrew the knife, watched bright red blood well up aifter it. Something tugged at his mind, slipped away -- first scalding, then wet. It oozed out, and pain blurred Steve's vision as he tumbled to the floor again. When he got up moments later and managed to staunch the flow of blood, he knew the parasite had perished. near the city gate -- grim and weary, most of them with fresh wounds. Steve's joy was an emotion the dead parasite would have loved to share when he saw Teej ay among the sixty. Kevin was there too, and Steiner. Surprisingly, Schuyler Barling seemed more sprightly than the rest. "LeClarc?" Steve demanded. "He was the first," said Kevin. "Stronger control, perhaps. He's among those who could not make it." "Maybe they're still alive." "No," Teejay told him. "I saw three men die, horribly. Most of the others probably did, too." "Don't you see, boy, we can't chance survival for all of us to seek out one or two who might still be alive! It wouldn't be fair." Kevin shook his head grimly. Steve knew he was right. He was far too exhausted to argue, anyway. "Then we'll go as we are?" "Well, there are half a dozen others in the gate-house now, forcing information from some of the hosts." "What information?" "About sub-space, boy. A hunter named McSweeney was possessed by a scientist of sorts, and he learned the sub-space gear is a compact little device which a man can carry. They store a few dozen of 'em in the gate-house, and -- hello!" Half a dozen men emerged from the stone structure, and one of them fell as a beam of energy seared out and caught him. A variety of creatures streamed out after them, triggering strange weapons. Soon the fighting became general, and it looked for a time as though the humans -- without weapons of any sort -- would be slaughtered. But Steve grabbed one of the stilt-creatures, twisted its neck quickly, heard a sharp cracking sound. The creature fell and Steve plunged down with it, coming up with the handweapon and firing into the ranks that bore down upon them. As others of the aliens fell, men retrieved their weapons, fighting back with eyer-increased firepower, although their numbers were decreasing. And battling thus, they broke through the gate and out among the purple-misted hills. Hissing beams of energy emitted sufficient light to see by, and Kevin's voice could be heard roaring above the sounds of fighting: "Stick together! If a man's lost in this purple fdg, he's done for! Stick together!" It was a nightmare. Steve fought shoulder to shoulder with Teejay. Now that he'd been reunited with her, there'd be no more separation, he vowed silently. Not unless he died here on the purple world. Energy beams crossed back and forth as the men retreated, stumbling and darting among the little hillocks. Time lost its normally rigid control. Hours might have been minutes, or the other way around. Time became utterly subjective, with each man living in his own particular continuum. For Steve it seemed at least a short version of eternity until they reached the Frank Buck, And when they did, dawn was streaking the horizon with pale blue radiance, casting a deep purple shadow from the ship to where they fought. It was Kevin who reached the airlock first, Kevin who sprung it open. Two by two they filed in, still facing the aliens and firing their weapons. At the last moment -- when fully half of those who remained had entered the ship -- the three anthrovacs appeared, came loping across the plain toward them. Steve cut the first one down and drew careful aim on the second. It wasn't necessary. The third anthrovac abruptly turned on its fellow and sent it reeling, senseless, with one blow. In the confusion, its parasite must have been careless, must have relaxed its control. The anthrovac, which made a habit of miming men, whirled and began to wreck havoc among the pursuers. It helped turn the tide of battle, and with Steve and Teejay, it was the last to enter the ship.L Kevin said grimly. "There are twentytwo who survived." They all sat about, nursing their wounds. The ship had flung itself through hyper-space, now hovered "You're wrong. There are twentythree." It was Charlie Stedman. In the darkness and confusion, he'd managed to fight his way back with them. But why? "Charlie!" Steve forgot the question. "You're free too." Charlie lifted a neutron gun. "No. You're wrong. None of us is free. You'll find a ship has followed you Jiere. And you're going to follow it back." Of course, Steve thought dully. Charlie was dead. Charlie could hot return as himself. But they were right back where they started from, for the creature who was Charlie could force their return. Kevin stood near the viewport, spoke grimly. "He's not lying. There's a ship out there." Schuyler Barling smiled coldly, took up his position near Charlie. "You all rejected my command once," he said. "You shouldn't have. I had no desire to come back to Earth like that. I've also learned that I can share my body on an equal basis with my master, something none of you would consider. Now we'll take you back." Almost eighty men had died -- for nothing. Steve held Teejay's hand briefly, released it. One life more wouldn't matter, and if there were a chance... "Charlie, don't you remember anything?" "What should I remember?" "I'm your brother." "That much I knew vyhen I called you on Ganymede. But there are no emotional ties. Keep back!" Steve took a step toward him. "You're my brother, and you wouldn't kill me. You can't." It was wild, impossible, and he knew it. The creature was not his brother, had not been his brother for years. Yet if some small vestige of his brother's emotional memories remained -- "Keep back, I warn you!" Steve could see the finger tightening on the trigger when he dove. His shoulder jarred Charlie's knees, and they went dwn together, rolling over and over on the floor... The neutron gun hissed once, between them, and Charlie relaxed. A smile tugged at the comers of his mouth for a moment, and he said, "Steve." He died that way, with the smile still on his lips.  Schuyler Barling was, laughing and screaming, froth flecking his chin. The delicate balance between parasite and host had been entangled, possibly beyond repair. Neither could dominate, and the result was a hopeless, gibbering hulk of a man. "Poor devil," said Kevin. "He'll get psychiatric treatment on Earth, if that will help." Steve crossed to the airlock, climbed into a spacesuit. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Teejay wanted to know. "You're forgetting about the bther ship. We haven't got a blasting cannon on the Frank Buck, and there isn't one down on the Gordak, either. But with no absorbing medium in space, one of these neutron guns can be a potent weapon." Steve clamped the fishbowl helmet down over his head and activated the airlock. Soon he stood outside, with nothing but space on three sides of him. On the fourth, his magnetic boots gripped the Frank Bucks steeloid hull as he set himself, ready to fire the small hand gun. Energy flared brightly from its muzzle, and the other ship, a slim, sinister shape miles off in the void, flared up with it and dissolved in a shower of sparks and mist. But the neutron gun had a kick which dislodged Steve from the hull and sent him spinning off into space. Through the lockport, no more than four feet away, he saw Kevin donning a vac-suit. The big Exec reached out to grab him but his arm fell a full foot short. All at once, Kevin was dwarfed by the anthrovac as the big animal joined him, scratching its head as Kevin reached out hopelessly iilto space. The gap was increasing. Did the anthrovac understand? No, Steve thought; an anthrovac could ,no more understand than a parrot could actually talk. But like a parrot, an anthrovac could mimic. A huge hairy arm reached out into space, the hand locking on Steve's gauntleted fist. He was drawn back into the Frank Buck and to safety, and it was many minutes before they could stop the anthrovac from probing out experimentally into empty space. Teejay and Kevin later, "I think at the last minute my brother understood." "It looked that way to me, boy," Kevin nodded. "So he died happy. But there's a lot of work for Earth to do. We'll have to clear the System of anything that remains here of Uashalume's power. And then maybe someday we'll have to get up an expedition and clean out that foul place." "One good thing came from it," Steve told them. "We've got subspace drive now, and the stars are ours." He lit a cigarette, frowning. "But I think we ought to go easy on our game-hunting, and you can tell that to Brody Carmical or anyone else, Tee jay. Those, creatures out there were hunters too, you know." "Forget about the past, will you?" Teejay snapped at him, then A chat with the editor... Continued from page # pleasant little town called Patterson -- New York, not New Jersey -- so I spend quite a little time on the road between points. About a week after our first issue hit the stands, I drove up to Kingston wistfully hoping there' d be a couple of dozen letters from fans and friends wishing us success. Well, a dozen, maybe, or at least a few postcards. I got into the office and asked Miss Bogert, our gal MondayFriday, "What's with the IF correspondence?" "Over there," she said, pointing. I looked but all I could see was an old dirty canvas sack. grinned when he looked hurt. "I still feel unclean, Steve. I'd love to sit in a hot bath for about twentyfour hours straight." Steve grinned back. "If we were married, I could scrub around your shoulder-blades for you." Kevin cleared his throat ominously. "They made me Captain of this ship, didn't they. What are we waiting for?" The ceremony was brief, and after it, Steve and Teejay hustled back to the recreation rooms and swimming pools with a bar of strong soap, a couple of washcloths, and a lot of pleasant ideas. "Come again." "In the bag." "In the hagr It rocked me back on my heels. Mail for IF, loaded into a big canvas sack and brought over' personally by Uncle Sam. I had never befoie in my life gotten mail the same way Sears Roebuck gets it. The thrill was memorable. The total figure for the first nine days on the newsstands was six hundred and twentyfour letters and cards. This, according to our very able distributors, is much better than completely satisfactory and slightly less than phenomenal. I was plenty embarrassed because I'd reserved only two pages for our letter column. From now on, much more space will be allocated. Continued on page # Only one question seemed important in this huge space venture: Who was flying where? Welcome, Martians! By S. A. Lombino T he only sound was the swish of the jets against the sand as the big ship came down. Slowly, nose pointed skyward, a yellow tail streaming out behind the tubes, it settled to the ground like a cat nuzzling its haunches against a velvet pillow. Dave Langley peered through the viewport. "I feel kind of funny," he said. A tremor of excitement flooded through Gal Manners' thin frame. "Mars," he whispered. "We made it." Gently, the fins probed the sand, poking into it. Cal cut the power and the big ship shuddered and relaxed, a huge metal spider with a conical head. Gal peered through the viewport, his eyes scanning the planet. Behind him, Dave shrugged into a space suit, gathered up his instruments. "I'll make the tests," Dave said. "Keep the starboard guns trained on me." Cal nodded. He walked Dave to the airlock and lifted the toggles on the inner hatch. Dave stepped into the small chamber, and Cal snapped the hatch shut. He walked quickly to the starboard guns, wiggled into the plastic seat behind them and pitched his shoulders against the braces. Outside, like a grotesque balloon, Dave stumbled around on weighted feet, taking his readings. Whafs out there? Cal wondered. Just exactly what? He tightened his grip on the big blasters, and trained the guns around to where Dave puttered in the sand. Dave suddenly stood' erect, waved at Cal, and started lumbering back toward the ship. Gal left the guns and went to the airlock. He stepped into the chamber closed the toggles on the hatch behind him, and twirled the wheel on the outer hatch. He was ready to move back into the ship again when Dave stepped through the outer hatch, his helpiet under his arm. "It's okay, Gal. Breathable atmosphere. And the pressure is all right, too." Gal let out a sigh of relief. "Gome on." he said. "Get out of that monkey suit. Then we'll claim the planet for Earth." They went back into the ship, and Dave took off the suit, hanging it carefully in its locker. Both men strapped on holsters and drew stun guns from the munitions locker. They checked the charges in their weapons, bolstered them, and stepped out into the Martian night. It was cold, but their clothing was warm and the air was invigorating. Gal looked up at the sky. "Phobos," he said, pointing. "And Deimos," Dave added. "Ike and Mike." "Yeah." Dave smiled. "How do you feel, Dave?" Gal asked suddenly. "How do you mean?" "Mars. I mean, we're the first men to land on Mars. The first, Dave!" They were walking aimlessly. In no particular hurry. "It's funny," Dave said. "I told you before. I feel kind of -- " almost exploded into being, tore through the silence of the planet like the strident scream of a wounded animal. Trumpets blasted raucously, trombones moaned and slid, bass drums pounded a steady tattoo. Tubas, heavy and solemn like old men belching. Glarinets, shrill and squealing. Gymbals clashing. A military band blaring its march into the night. "Wha -- " Dave's mouth hung open. He stared into the distance. There were lights, and the brass gleamed dully. A group of men were marching toward them, blowbanners in the air. "People," Gal said. "And music. Like ours. Music just like ours' The procession spilled across the sand like an unravelling spool of brightly colored silk. Ghildren danced on the outskirts of the group, hopping up and down, screaming in glee. Women waved banners, sang along with the band. And the music shouted out across the sand, a triumphal march with a lively beat. A fat man led the procession. He was beaming, his smile a great enamelled gash across his face. The music became louder, closer, earshattering now. "Welcome," the shouts rang out. "Welcome." "Welcome!" "English!" The word escaped Dave's lips, in a sudden hiss. "For God's sake, Cal, they're speaking English." "Something's wrong," Cal said tightly. "This isn't Mars. We've made a ihi stake, Dave." The fat man was closer now, still grinning, his stomach protruding, a gold watch hanging across his vest beneath his jacket. He wore a white carnation in his buttonhole. A homburg, blacky was perched solidly atop his head. "They're human' Dave whispered. The fat man stopped before them, raised his hands. The music ceased as abruptly as it had begun. He stepped forward and extended his hand. "Welcome home," he said. Welcome home! The words seared acrpss Cal's mind with sudden understanding. "There's some mistake . , he started. "Mistake?" The fat man chuckled. "Nonsense, nonsense. I am Mayor Panley. You're back in New Galleth, gentlemen. The city is yours. The world is yours ! Welcome home." "You don't understand," Cal persisted, "We've just come from Earth, We've just travelled more than # miles through space. We're from Earth." "I know," the mayor said, "I know." "You know?" "But of course. Isn't it wonderful?" The crowd cheered behind him, telling the night how wonderful it was. Cal blinked, turned to Dave. The mayor put his arms about the two men. "We've been watching your approach for weeks. I'll have to admit we were a little worried in the beginning." "Worried?" The mayor began chuckling again. "Why yes, yes. Not that we didn't think you'd makp it. But there were some who... ahh, here are the television trucks now." The trucks wheeled across the sand, just like the thousands of trucks Cal had seen back on Earth, The television cameras pointed down at them, and the men stood behind them with earphones on. "Smile. Smile," the mayor whispered. Cal smiled. Dave, smiled, too. "Ladies and gentlemen," Mayor Panley said to the cameras, "It is the distinct hpnor of New Calleth... The crowd raised their voices, drowning out his voice. The banners waved, yellow, red, blue, orange. Welcome, welcome, welcome. "... the distinct honor of New Calleth to be able to welcome home Bobby Galus and Gary Dale." "Galus! Dale!" the voices sang, "Galus! Dale!" "Galus!" "Dale!" "Just a second," Cal interrupted. "You don't understand at all. Those aren't our... "Four years in space," the mayor continued, "four years among the stars. To Earth and back, fellow citizens, for the glory of Mars." "You've got that twisted," Cal said. "We didn't..." The mayor took Cal's elbow and turned him toward the cameras. "You were in space for four years, weren't you Captain Galus?" "Yes, we were. But it wasn't... "Space!" the mayor gushed. "Limitless space. The first men to land on Earth." Again the cries of the crowd split the night. "Across the stretches of sky," the mayor continued. "Across the unchartered wilderness above, across the... T here were banquets and more banquets, and women of every size and shape. The city of New Calieth went all out to welcome the space travellers. Bobby Galus and Gary Dale. At the end of a week of festivity, the mayor came to Cal and Dave. "Have you enjoyed your stay, boys?" he asked, "It was swell," Cal said, "but youVe got things all... "I was wondering when you planned on leaving for the capitol. Don't misunderstand me. We'd like you to stay as long as you want to, but..." "For God's sake," Cal snapped,  "will you please listen to me?" Mayor Panley was visibly shaken. "Why, of course, Captain Galus. Of course. Why, certainly." He lapsed into silence. "I'm not Bobby Galus," Cal said. "And this isn't Gary Dale." The mayor nodded his head. "You're... not... Galus and Dale," he said slowly. "That's right," Cal said. "We didn't go to Earth. We came from there. This is the first time we've ever been on. Mars. Do you understand? We're Earthmen." "Earthmen?" The mayor considered this for a second and then burst out laughing. "Why, that's preposterous. Absolutely preposterous!" His laugh rose in volume to a bellow. "Oh, you're joking. I should have known. You're only joking." "We're not joking. This is all some kind of a horrible mistake. We're the first men to land on Mars. You've got to understand that," Dave pleaded. The mayor was still laughing. He walked to the door and opened it. "All right, boys, have your little joke. You've earned the right to it. I'll make arrangements for you to leave for Dome City in the morning." He shook his head and chuckled again. "Earthmen. Tchtch." And then he was gone. They sat alone in the hotel room. It looked like any Earth hotel they'd ever been in. A big soft bed. A wall telephone. Twn dressers. Two armchairs. A big mirror over one of the dressers. A television set on the other dresser. "This is screwy," Dave said. "Is it possible we're back on Earth? Is it possible the joke is on us? Maybe everyone is just ribbing us. Maybe we've been going around in circles for four years. Maybe... "No," Cal said. "We're on Mars all right. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but I've got an idea." "What's that?" Dave asked. Gal shrugged. "Probably all wrong, of course. But it has something to do with comparable development of cultures on different planets." "You mean Mars is in exactly the same state of development as Earth?" "Something like that. You know the theory. Give two different places the same materials to start with, and their cultures will run parallel to each other for the rest of their existence." "Sure," Dave said. "But these guys Galus and Dale. How the hell could we possibly be mistaken for them?" 'T don't know." Cal leaned back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. "Maybe we'll find out in Dome City." "Maybe' Dave repeated hollowly. greeted their ship in Dome City. There were more parades, banners, bands, banquets, reporters, cameras, confetti, women, speeches, presentations. And at feist, they stood before the President's desk, two bodyguards standing on either side of him. He was a thin man, slightly balding, with rimless glasses, "Gentlemen," he said, "I don't have to tell you how pleased I am." Gal took a deep breath. "We've been trying to tell Mayor Panley," he said, "that we are not Galus and Dale." The President smiled. "I know. He told me of your little joke." "It's not a joke." The President cocked an eyebrow. "No?" He looked at his bodyguards. "Has space affec... did you feel any ill effects in space?", he asked. Gal grimaced. "Oh great! Now he thinks we're psycho. Look, can't you get this through your heads? IVe are from Earth, We never heard of Galus and Dale. My name is Calvin Manners, and this is David Langley." "Very interesting," the President said. He tapped his finger on the back of his other hand and stared at the two Earthmen. He reached over toward the inteicom on his desk then and pressed a button. "Yes?" a woman's voice asked. "Miss Daniels, will you bring in the photos of Gapt. Galus and Lt. Dale, please?" "Yes, sir." The President turned to the two men again. "Those are your ranks, are they not?" "Yes, but we're in the United  States Army." "The whatr "The United States Army. The United States is a country on Earth." "Really? Now we're getting somewhere. What else does Earth have? What is it like? Are the inhabitants intelligent?" "Yes, we are. We're Earthmen, can't you understand that?" "I think you're carrying this joke a little too far, gentlemen. A joke of dollars on your trip. Really, this "is no time for banter." Gal opened his mouth, ready to protest, just as the outside door swung wide. An attractive blonde in a smart suit stepped into the room and walked to the President's desk. She kept her eyes glued to the two Earthmen, dropped two large photographs on the desk, and turned. She stared over her shoulder at Cal and Dave until she was gone. The President smiled knowingly. "The women are failing all over you two, I imagine." "We're both married," Cal said drily. "We don't care for all this... "Married?" The President was shocked. "I thought we'd distinctly chosen unmarried men for the job. Strange.' "WeVe got wives on Earth Dave said. "Ah-ha," the President said. "Then they are intelligent beings. Pity, pity."  A twinge of anticipation curled up Gal's spine. "Pity? Why a pity? Why do you say that?" "Well, you know. Surely you realized this was the only flight we could afford." "What?" "For the meantime, anyway. We may attempt another flight in fifty years, sixty perhaps maybe more. But you've already proved space travel, Capt. Galus. The achievement is ours. All we need now is money to..." "Damn it. I'm not Capt. Galus,'" Cal shouted. "And we've got to get back to Earth. I've got a kid, Mr. President. He's six years old and... Cal stopped abruptly. "Oh, this is all nonsenseWhy am I arguing with you? Can't you understand that we are Earthmen? What do we have to do to prove it?" The President sighed and turned over the photographs on the desk. They were glossy prints of two men in uniform. They were young men, in khaki, smiles on their faces. One man looked exactly like Calvin Manners. The other strongly resembled David Langley. "Here are your photographs," the President said. "This is you, captain, and you, lieutenant. They were taken before the trip. You're younger, of course." Gal stared at the photograph. It could have been he. The nose was a little sharper, perhaps, and the face thinner. But it could have been he. # could have been he! "It's a freak accident," he shouted. "A coincidence in two parallel cultures, a..." He saw the look on the President's face then. It was a cold look, and a suspicious one. Cal stopped speaking, sweat staining the armpits of his uniform shirt. The President grinned again. "That's better. I understand the strain of space, gentlemen, but we must be practical, mustn't we?" He paused. "Shall we talk about Earth now?" T he only sound was the swish of the jets against the grass as the big ship came down. Slowly, nose pointed skyward, a yellow tail streaming out behind the tubes, it settled to the ground like a cat nuzzling its haunches against a velvet pillow... In the distance, the lights of New York danced crazily, gleaming from a thousand spires that scratched the sky. The radios blared forth excitedly, and the police  cars screamed through the night as they rushed to City Hall to pick up the mayor. Inside the ship, Gary Dale peered through the viewport. "I feel kind of funny," he said. A tremor of excitement flooded through Bobby Galus' thin frame. "Earth," he whispered, "We made it." Personalities While his circulation climbed, the stf world wondered E arly in #, a letter addressed to the Discussions column of Amazing Stories was opened by Howard Browne, then managing editor of the Z-D pulp chain. The letter was signed by a resident of Pennsylvania named Richard S. Shaver. Browne read the letter, snorted with characteristic honesty, and tossed it into the wastebasket, Browne's exact remark relative to the letter is not recorded. Possibly it contained the word "crackpot". The gist of it was certainly: "That's the last anyone will ever see of But Browne was wrong. He reckoned without the subsequent activities of a much-debated genius named Raymond A. Palmer, then editor of Amazing, known throughout the stf field as rap, those being the initials Vith which he signed editorials. Palmer retrieved the letter, visualized its possibilities -- possibilities which would have entirely escaped nine editors out of ten -- and the so-called Shaver Mystery was born. The Shaver Mystery did many things. It attracted a great many people; it angered a great many other people; it became the most widely discussed of all science fiction facets, bringing howls of denunciation from not only the organized fan clubs, but also from some of the most widely circulated and highly respected magazines in the nation, several of which lashed out bitterly at this "highly danger. ous nonsense". And -- not to be overlooked -- the Shaver Mystery added aft extra # copies per month to the circulation of Amazing Stories, the bellwether of the Ziff-Davis pulp chain. A good many students of the unusual made exhaustive investigations into the phenomenon salvaged so astutely from Browne's wastebasket. But the vast majority of them erred in basic procedure. They sought answers to such questions as: What is the Shaver Mystery? Who is Richard S. Shaver? Their prime question should have been: Who is Raymond A. Palmer? Shaver himself is of minor interest in the investigation of the science fiction bombshell which bears his name. He was -- and still is -- a highly competent writer concerning whom, Palmer states : Shaver encouraged by the publication of the letter y sent the rest of his secret -- the story of the Titans, Atlantis, and the caves of today. # words of A .Warning To Future Man", to he printed as a letter without pay. He had no thought of being an author". So I rewrote, making it #, largely Palmer. I still have the original manuscript if anyone would like proof it was not submitted as a story. It wasnt. Only the secret. And with that. Shaver would have rested. But I wanted to show... writers aren't geniuses, or even special people, or even 'educated". Just so they know # words and have an imagination. Shaver had both. No one could disagree with this last except to suggest that rap far understates the extent of Shaver's vocabulary. Shaver wrote -- under his own name and many pen names -- the original drafts of all the stories hinging upon the mystery. But above and behind him loomed the figure of Raymond A. Palmer, eliminating almost completely, Shaver's importance as a subject for investigation relative to the works in question. highlighted by appalling misfortune, great adversity and high courage. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on August #st, #. At the age of seven he was run over by a truck and permanent-? ly crippled. This last is worthy of note because there is reason to believe it engendered within him a bitterness he never outgrew. It also may be responsible for at least a portion of has many friends, but to arrive at the point of really knowing him is a long and difficult process at which few have succeeded. His most discernible characteristic is beyond doubt a never-yielding determination. He is a prolific writer, and he speaks of his early struggles in that field: If I knew an editor was in the market for a story, he'd have to buy it from me. If he wanted a sixtythousand word novel. I'd have it there when the doors opened. If he wanted a five, or a ten, or a fifteenthousand worder. I'd be there with it before anybody else. As a result of this energy and the ability to produce, he sold an astounding amount of fiction. Three percentage of which he produced while functioning for eight years as a sheet metal worker; ten years as a bookkeeper ; four years as an estimator in the building trades. Palmer's noteworthy career really began when he was offered the editorship of Amazing Stories in #. Ziff from The Teck Publishing Company, and Palmer took over the editorial chair in Chicago. From some strange whim rather than of necessity, Palmer followed the Spartan pattern the first few months of his editorship, spending each day exactly #c for food. This amount was divided into a nickel for breakfast, eleven cents for lunch, and a nightly banquet upon which he squandered twenty-one cents. Later, as the circulation of his magazine climbed, Palmer allocated somewhat more of his funds to the inner man. After #, things got steadily better in the fiction field. Under Palmer's guidance, the Ziff-Davis string expanded. Western, detective,-and adventure books were added. These Palmer turned over to new editors, keeping for himself Amazing Stones and a partial hand on the helm of Fantastic Ad ventures, its companion book. So, when Shaver's letter figuratively jumped into Palmer's hands, he was ready for it. And he knew, that readers of science fiction were ready for it. After the first reader-reaction, Palmer went to Pennsylvania for a personal visit with Shaver, gave him the green light, and went back to Chicago to check circulation figures. They were indeed gratifying. Letters began pouring in, abusing Shavfer and praising him. information he claims to have received -- voices which spoke to him, first through a turret lathe upon which he worked in a war plant. Many correspondents claimed company with Shaver in hearing the voices. Other correspondents took the view that Shaver was plain nuts -- that his copy was dangerous and should be removed from the newsstands. The fan clubs cluttered the mails with wrathy epistles, boycotting Palrper's "mystery" and consigning it to damnation. Then the club members dashed to the stands for the next issue of Amazing to see if their letters had been published. Palmer smiled, published them, and published more Shaver. Circulation zoomed. about is hard to determine. An understanding revulsion was felt in some Quarters to the heavy sex-andsadism flavor of the copy. It had a distinct Kraft-Ebbing touch and could hardly be rated as cheerful reading. There appeared to be no great secret nor any unsolvable mystery. The so-called mystery appeared to be the premise-frame upon which Shaver hung reams of erotic copy. The voices to which Shaver's remarkable ear was attuned, told him of a race of superior beings who purportedly inhabited the earth untold ages ago. This race functioned with benefit of mechanical gadgetry far in advance of our present equipment of that type. This advanced race. Shaver tells us, held sway over an inferior race of beings who bore them no good will whatever and would have done them in had the opportunity presented itself. They were held in check however, Eventually, the superior race, entirely familiar with space-travel, set out for greener planets. The inferior race, termed "deros", was left behind with all the advanced equipment known in the storyseries as "mech". And, Shaver vows, the deros are still with us; living in caves under the earth, and doing their very best to make things miserable for those who live topside. There are no tricks to which the deros will not stoop. They cause men to fail in both business and social life. They arrange nervous breakdowns. They jammed up Editor Palmer's typewriter and stole pertinent copy off his desk. They man the flying saucers that have bewildered our population for some time... ShavePs source of information was bottomless; he put it into stories; Palmer printed the stories. Circulation continued its' happy ascent. Such a bomb as this one, however, was slated by the very nature of things for a final explosion of some sort. The explosion came abruptly -- when the public clamor for an execution reached the ears of pany. They publish a number of magazines other than those in their pulp chain. Also, at the time in qiiestion, they were publishing both hard-cover books and a series of smaller volumes retailing below a dollar. Mr. Ziff is a civic-minded individual who gave and still gives a great deal of his time to projects outside his firm. For these reasons, he probably gave little attention to the pulp group, knowing it to be in competent hands. So it is entirely probable that when he first heard mention of the Shaver Mystery, he knew far less about it than the average reader of science fiction ; stf being a field of letters in which Mr. Ziff had little time to pleasure himself. But he made a point of looking in on the works of Mr. Shaver and had but one comment : "Kill it." Palmer has an added explanation: I had decided to go into the publishing business on my own. Naturally I would have to quit when I brought out a book in competition with Z-D. So I thought ahead -- two years -- and asked myself if Howard Browne , could handle this hot potato...  couldnt saddle my successor with a bomb like that. So I tapered the Mystery o, then killed it myself. I worked it so Ziff would disapprove. Another example of Palmer's ability is the Jesse James affair. This was probably his greatest promotional attempt. Its failure was due to circumstances beyond his control. He states: I had befriended the wife of a former Chief of Detectives (#I ) of St. Louis and who knew Frank James and all the other 'boys personally In both cases the quotes are Palmer's. She came to me with a revelation that a Dalton, out west, had told her he ivas  J and would she act as a confidante for his story or confession. She brought photos. I compared ears, decided Dalton really was James. I paid her way and that of her husband, to Oklahoma to find out. Her husband identified the man positively... I went to the nearest radio commentator -- the story was off... Today half of America believes it really was Jesse and the other half laughs  Me? I know it was Jesse, T have the proof ,... Jesses dead now. Just a few' weeks ago. For the last time. There'll never be another claimant. I made sure af that... said in his statement. A great deal which indicates the laughing half of America has by far the best case. One interesting sidelight on the affair was that the couple who brought Palmer the great news also oflfered proof that Billy the Kid the Missouri raider, were alive and well. If the evidence of these people is to be taken, it must be assumed that no one really dies. Mathematically, the chance of Dalton being James, are exactly twenty to one; that including James himself and the nineteen pretenders who have come forward through the years. And Palmer is probably right in the assertion that the last James has been buried. There are very few men aged one hundred and ten with the strength to come forward. Two points, still unmentioned relative to the James affair, are important in that they indicate Palmer has never deviated an inch from his basic and admirable talent -- that of selling magazines. When the Dalton-James proposition came to light, Palmer secured a contract and began immediately planning a Jesse James Western Magazine. At the same time he set his eye on the Chicago Railroad Fair and thought what a publicity scoop it would be if the roads would recognize and honor Dalton-James by allotting him a day in their program. This, Palmer believed -- and rightly so -- would be the clincher. But Major Lennox Lohr, in charge of the affair, didn't care whether Dalton was James or not. He took a dim view of honoring a man whose name was synonymous with lawlessness. Immediately upon the heels of this decision. Palmer's interest in Dalton became strictly academic. So the Shaver Mystery and the affair Dalton-James, have two points in common. Neither can stand up under even preliminary examination. And both are amazingly good copy. Labeling both of them hoaxes may be construed as criticism of Palmer. It is not meant to be. This is a day of supersalesmanship. Hoaxes far more dangerous and sinister are arranged in advertising agencies every day. Claims made in blatant print relative to deodorants, cigarettes, trusses, and dozens of other products are far more preposterous than the assertion that a lot of little men called deros are giving us a bad time. This last becomes almost probable when lined up beside a statement that a bar of soap will make a woman beautiful in two weeks. So, in these times of drab and unconvincing falsehood, there is still something to be thankful for. A Palmer promotion has the touch of genius. It has zing, sparkle, and true showmanship. It can be spotted a mile away by the bright lights. The thing to do is sit back and enjoy it. -- pwf Are you ready for me, Asir? Strange gods were worshipped on Mars. But were they so clever? T hey'd lost their own world. It Takes a Thief By Waiter Miller, Jr. T he ancient gods, our Fathersy rode down from the heav ens in the Firebirds of the Sun. Coming into the world, they found  no air for the breath of their souls. How shall we breathe? they asked of the Sun. And Sun gave them of His fire and beneath the earth they kindled the Blaze of the Great Wind. Good air roared from the womb of Mars our Mother, the ice burned with a great thunder, and there was air for the breath of Man. A thief, he was about to die like a thief. He hung from the post by his ' wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists. He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hair was close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not et sired a pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quick knotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, halffed and hungry with a quick furious hunger that crouched in ambush. His face, though twisted with pain and fright, remained that of a cocky pup. When he opened his eyes he could see the low hills of Mars, sunwashed and gray-green with trees, trees brought down from the heavens by the Ancient Fathers. But he could also see the executioner in the foreground, sitting spraddlelegged and calm while he chewed a blade #G of grass and waited, A squat man with a thick face, he occasionally peered at the thief with empty blue eyes -- while he , casually played mumblety-peg with the bleedingblade. His stare was blank. "Ready for me yet, Asir?" he grumbled, not unpleasantly. The knifeman sat beyond spitting range, but Asir spat, and tried to wipe his chin on the post. "Your dirty mother!" he mumbled. The executioner chuckled and played mumblety-peg. After three hours of dangling from the spikes that pierced his arms, Asir was weakening, and the blood throbbed hard in his temples, with each jolt of his heart a separate pulse of pain. The red stickiness had stopped oozing down his arms; they knew how fo drive the spike just right. But the heartbeats labored in his head like a hammer beating at red-hot iron. How many heartbeats in a lifetime -- and how many left to him now? He whimpered and writhed, beginning to lose all hope. Mara had gone to see the Chief Commoner, to plead with him for the pilferers life -- but Mara was about as trustworthy as a wild hiiffen, and he had visions of them chuckling together in Tokra's villa over a glass of amber wine, while life drained slowly from a young .thief. Asir regretted nothing. His father had been a renegade before him, had squandered his last ritual formula to buy a wife, then impoverished, had taken her away to the hills. Asir was bom in the hills, but he came back to the village of his ancestors to work as a servant and steal the rituals of his masters. No thief could last for long. A ritual-thief caused havoc in the community. The owner of a holy phrase, not knowing that it had been stolen, tried to spend it -- and eventually counter-claims would come to light, and a general accounting had to be called. The thief was' always found out. Asir had stolen more than wealth, he had stolen the strength of their souls. For this they hung him by his wrists and waited for him to beg for the bleeding-blade. Woman thirsts for husband Man thirsts for wife Baby thirsts for breast-milk Thief thirsts for knife... A rhyme from his childhood, a childish chant, an eenie-meenieminey for determining who should drink first from a nectar-cactus. He groaned and tried to shift his weight more comfortably. Where was Mara? II the squat man asked. Asir hated him with narrowed eyes. The executioner was bound by law to wait until his victim requested his fate. But Asir remained ignorant of what the fate would be. The Council of Senior Kinsmen judged him in  secret, and passed sentence as to what the executioner would do with the knife. But Asir was not informed of their judgment. He knew only that when he asked for it, the executioner would advance with the bleeding-blade and exact the punishment -- nis life, or an amputation, depending on the judgment. He might lose only an eye or an ear or a finger. But on the other hand, he might lose his life, both arms, or his masculinity. There was no way to find out until he asked for the punishment; If he refused to ask, they would leave him hanging there. In theory, a thief could escape by hanging four days, after which the execu- tioner would pull out the nails. Sometimes a culprit managed it but when the nails were pulled, the thing that toppled was already a corpse. The sun was sinking in the west, and it blinded him. Asir knew about the sun -- knew things the stupid council failed to know. A thief, if successful, frequently be came endowed with wisdom, for he memorized more wealth than a score of honest men. Quotations from the ancient gods-Fermi, Einstein, Elgermann, Hanser and the rest -- most men owned scattered phrases, and scattered phrases remained meaningless. But a thief memorized all transactions that he overheard, and the countless phrases could be fitted together into meaningful ideas. He knew now that Mars, once dead, was dying again, its air leaking away once more into space. And Man would die with it, unless something were done, and done quickly. The Blaze of the Great Wind needed to be rekindled under the earth, but it would not be done. The tribes had fallen into ignorance, even as the holy books had warned : It is realized that the colonists will be unable to maintain a tech-nology without basic tools  and that a rebuilding will require severa! generations of intelligently directed effort. Given the knowledge the colonists may he able to festore a machine culture if the knowledge continues to be bolsteted by desire. But if the thirds fourth and Nth generations fail to further the gtadual retooling process, the knowledge will become worthless. The quotation was from the god Roggins, Progress of the Mars-Cul ture, and he had stolen bits of it from various sources. The books themselves were no longer in existence, remembered only in memorized ritual chants, the possession of which meant wealth. Asir Was sick. Pain and slow loss of blood made him weak, and his vision blurred. He failed to see her Coming until he heard her feet rustling in the dry grass. "Mara -- " She smirked and spat contemptuously at the foot of the post. The daughter of a Senior Kinsman, she was a tall, slender girl with an arrogant strut and mocking eyes. She stood for a moment with folded, arms, eyeing him with amusement. Then, slowly, one eye closed in a solemn wink. She turned her back on him and spoke to the executioner. "May I taunt the prisoner, Slnbil?" she asked. "It is forbidden to speak ,to the thief," growled the knifeman. "Is he ready to beg for justice, Slubil?" The knifeman grinned and looked at Asir. "Are you ready for me yet, thief?" Asir hissed an insult. The girl had betrayed him. "Evidently a coward," she said. "Perhaps he means to hang four days." "Let him then." "NoI think that I should like to see him beg." She gave Asir a long searching glance, then turned to walk away. The thief cursed her quietly and followed her with his eyes, A dozen steps away she stopped again, looked back over her shoulder, and repeated the slow wink. Then she marched on toward her father's house. The wink made his scalp crawl for a moment, but then... Suppose she hasn't betrayed me? Suppose she had wheedled the sentence out of Tokra, and knew what his punishment would be. I think that I should like to see him beg. But on the other hand, the fickle she-devil might be tricking him into asking for a sentence that she knew would be death or dismemberment -- just to amuse herself. He cursed inwardly and trembled as he peered at the bored executioner. He licked his lips and fought against dizzyness as he groped for words. Slubil heard him muttering and looked up. "Are you ready for me yet?" A sir dosed his eyes and gritted his teeth. "Give it to me!" he yelped suddenly, and braced himself against the post. Why not? The short time gained couldn't be classed as living. Have it done with. Eternity would be sweet in comparison to this ignomy. A knife could be a blessing... He heard the executioner chuckle and stand up. He heard the man's footsteps approaching slowly, and the singing hiss of the knife as Slubil swung it in quick arcs. The executioner moved about him slowly, teasing him with the whistle of steel fanning the air about him. He was expected to beg. Slubil occasionally laid the knife against his skin and took it away again. Then Asir heard the rustle of the executioner's cloak as his arm went back. Asir opened his eyes. The executioner grinned as he held the blade high -- aimed at Asir's head! The girl had tricked him. He groaned and closed his eyes again, muttering a half-forgotten prayer. The stroke fell -- and the blade chopped into the post above his head, Asir fainted. When he awoke he lay in a crumpled heap on the ground. The executioner rolled him over with his foot. "In view of your extreme youth, thief," the knifeman growled, "the council has ordered you perpetually banished. The sun is setting. Let dawn find you in the hills. If you return to the plains, you will be chained to a wild hiiffen and dragged to death," Panting weekly, Asir groped at his forehead, and found a fresh wound, raw and rubbed with rust to make a scar. Slubil had marked him as an outcast. But except for the nailholes through his forearms, he was still in one piece. His hands were numb, and he could scarcely move his fingers. Slubil had bound the spike-wounds, but the bandages were bloody and leaking. When the knifeman had gone, Asir climbed weakly to his feet. Several of the townspeople stood nearby, snickering at him. He ignored their catcalls and staggered toward the outskirts of the village ten rninuljes away. He had to speak to Mara, and to her father if the crusty oldster would listen. Mis thief s knowledge weighed upon him and brought desperate fear. Darkness had fallen by the time he came to Welkir's house. The people spat at him in the streets, and some of them flung handfuls of loose dirt after him as he passed. A light flickered feebly through Welkifs door. Asir rattled it and waited. Welkir came with a lamp. He set the lamp on the floor and stood with feet spread apart, arms folded, glaring haughtily at the thief. His face was stiff as weathered stone. He said nothing, but only stared Contemptuously. Asir bowed his head. 'T have come to plead with you Senior Kinsman.' Welkir snorted disgust. "Against the mercy we have shown you?" He looked up quickly, shaking his head. "No! For that I am grateful." "What then?" "As a thief, I acquired much wisdom. I know that the World is dying, and the air is boiling out of it into the sky. I wish to be heard by the council. We must study the words of the ancients and perform their magic, lest our children's children be born to strangle in a dead world " Welkir snorted again. He picked up the lamp. "He who listens to a thief's wisdom is cursed. He who acts upon it is doubly cursed and a party to the crime.' "The vaults," Asir insisted. "The 'key to the Blaze of the Winds is in the vaults. The god Roggins tells us in the words -- "Stop! I will not hear!" "Very well, but the blaze can be rekindled, and the air renewed. The vaults -- " He stammered and shook his head. "The council must heat me." "The council will hear nothing, and you shall be gone before dawn. And the vaults are guarded by the sleeper called Big Joe. To enter is to die. Now go away," slammed the door, Asir sagged in defeat. He sank down on the doorstep to rest a moment. The night was black, except for lampflickers from an occasional window. "Ssssst!" A sound from the shadows. He looked around quickly, searching for the source. "Ssssst! Asir!" It was the "girl Mara, Welkifs daughter. She had slipped out the back of the house ana was peering at him around the corner. He arose quietly and went to her. "What did Slubil do to you?" she whispered. Asir gasped and caught her shoulders angrily. "Don't yOu know? "No! Stop! You're hurting me. Tokra wouldn't tell me. I made love to him, but he wouldn't tell." He released her with an angry curse. "You had to take It sometime" she hissed. "I knew if you waited you would be too weak from hanging to even run away." He called her a foul name, "Ingrate I" she snapped. "And I bought you a hiiffen!" "You what?' "Tokra gave me a ritual phrase and I bought you a hiiffen with it. You can't walk to the hills, you know." Asir burned with dull rage. "You slept with Tokra!" he snapped, "You're jealous!" she tittered. "How can I be jealous! I hate the sight of you!" "Very well then, I'll keep the hiiffen." he growled. "I won't need it, since I'rti not going to the hills!" She gasped. "You've got to go, you fool! They'll kill you!" He turned away, feeling sick. She caught at his arm and tried to pull him back. 'Asir! Take the hiiffen and "I'll go," he growled. "But not to the hills. I'm going out to the vault." He stalked away, but she trotted along beside him, trying to tug him back. "Fool! The vaults are sacred! The priests guard the entrance, and the Sleeper guards the inner door. They'll kil you if you try it, and if you linger, the council will kill you tomorrow." "Let them!" he snarled. "I am no sniveling townsman! I am of the hills, and my father was a renegade. Your council had no right to judge me. Now I shall judge themj The words were spoken hotly, and he realized their folly. He expected a scornful rebuke from Mara, but she hung onto his arm and pleaded with him. He had dragged her a dozen doorways from the house of her father. Her voice had lost its arrogance and became pleading. "Please, Asir! Go away. Listen! I will even go with you -- if you want me. He laughed harshly. "Tokra's leavings." She slapped him hard across the mouth. "Tokra is an impotent old dodderer. He can scarcely move for arthritis. You're an idiot! I sat on his lap and kissed his bald pate for you." "Then why did he give you a ritual phrase?" he asked stiffly. "Because he likes me." "You lie." He stalked angrily on. "Very well! Go to the vaults. I'll tell my father, and they'll hunt you down before you get there." She released his arm and stopped. Asir hesitated. She meant it. He came back to her slowly, then slipped his swollen hands to her throat. She did not back away. "Why don't I just choke you and leave you lying here?" he hissed. Her face was only a shadow in darkness, but he could see her cool smirk. "Because you love me, Asir of Franic." He dropped his hands and grunt- ed a low curse. She' laughed low and took his arm, "Come on. We'll go get the hiiffen," she said. Why not? he thought. Take her hiiffen, and take her too. He could dump her a few miles from the village, then circle back to the vaults. She leaned against him as they moved back toward her father's house, then skirted it and stole back to the field behind the row of dwellings. Phobos hung low in the westj its tiny disk lending only a faint glow to the darkness. He heard the hiifFen's breathing as they approached a hulking shadow in the gloom. Its great wings Snaked out #owly as it sensed their approach, and it made a low piping sound. A native Martian species, it bore no resemblance to the beasts that the ancients had brought with them from the sky. Its back was Covered with a thin shell like a beetles, but its belly was porous and soft. It digested food by sitting on it, and absorbing it. The wings were bony -- parchment stretched across a fragile frame. It Was headless, and lacked a centralized brain the nervous functions being distributed. T he great creature made no protest as they climbed up the broad flat back and strapped themselves down with the belts that had been threaded through holes cut in the hiifTen's thin, tough shell. Its lungs slowly gathered a tremendous breath of air, causing the riders , to rise up as the huge air-sacs became distended. The girth of an inflated hiiffen was nearly four times as great as when deflated. When the air was gathered, the creature began to shrink again as its muscles tightened, compressing the breath until a faint leakage-hiss came from behind. It waited, wings taut. The girl tugged at a ring set through the flem of its flank. There was a blast of sound and a jeVk. Nature's experiment in jet propulsion soared ahead and turned into the wind Its first breath exhausted, it gathered another arid blew itself ahead again. The ride was jerky. Each tail ward belch was a rough lurch. They let the huffen choose its own heading as it gained altitude. Then Mara tugged at the wingstraps, and the creature wheeled to soar toward the dark hills in the distance. Asir sat behind her, a sardonic smirk on his face, as the wind whipped about them. He waited until they had flown beyond screaming distance of the village. Then he took her shoulders lightly in his hands. Mistaking it for affection, she leaned back against him easily and rested her dark head on his Moulder. He kissed her--"while his hand felt gingerly for the knife at her belt. His fingers were numb but he managed to clutch dt, and press the blade lightly against her throat. She gasped. With his other hand, he caught her hair. "Now guide the hiiffen down!' he ordered. "Quickly!" he barked. "What are you going to do?" "Leave you here and circle back to the vaults." "No! Not out here at night!" He hesitated. There were slinking prowlers on the Cimmerian plain, beasts who would regard the marooned daughter of Welkir a delicious bit of good fortune, a gustatory delight of a sort they seldom were able to enjoy. Even above the moap of the wind, he could hear an occasional howLcry from the fanged welcoming committee that waited for its dinner beneath them. 'Very well," he growled reluctantly. "Turn toward the vaults. But one scream and I#I slice you." He took the blade from her throat but kept the point touching her back. "Please, Asir, no!" she pleaded. "Let me go on to the hills. Why do you want to go to the vaults? Because of Tokra?" He gouged her with the point until she yelped. "Tokra be damned, and you with him!" he snarled. "Turn back," "I'm going down to kindle the Blaze of the Winds." "You're mad The spirits of the ancients live in the vaults." "I am going to kindle the Blaze of the Winds," he insisted stubbornly. "Now either turn back, or go down and I'll turn back alone." A fter a hesitant moment, she tugged at a wing-rein and the hiiffen banked majestically. They flew a mile to the south of the village, then beyond it toward the cloister where the pdests of Big Joe guarded the entrance to the vaults. The cloister was marked by a patch of faint light on the ground ahead. "Circle around it once," he ordered. "You can't get in. They'll kill you." He doubted it. No one ever tried to enter, except the priests who carried small animals down as sacrifices to the great Sleeper. Since no outsider ever dared go near the shaft, the gixards expected no one. He doubted that Aey would be alert. The cloister was a hollow square widi a small stone tower rising in the center of the courtyard. The tower contained the entrance to the shaft. In the dim light of Phobos, assisted by yellow flickers from the cloister windows, he peered at the courtyard as they circled closer. It seeiiied to be empty. "Land beside the tower #' he ordered. "Asir -- please -- " "Do it!" The hiiffen plunged rapidly, soared across the outer walls, and burst into the courtyard. It landed with a rough jolt and began squeaking plaintively. "Hurry!" hp hissed. "Get your straps off and let's go." "I'm not going." A prick of the knife, point changed her mind. They slid quickly to the ground, and Asir kicked the hiiffen in the flanks. The beast sucked in air and burst aloft. Startled faces were trying to peer through the lighted cloister windows into the courtyard. Someone cried a challenge. Asir darted to the door of the tower and dragged it open. Now forced to share the danger, the girl came with him without urging. They stepped into a stairlanding. A candle flickered from a wall bracket. A guard, sitting on the floor beneath the candle glanced up in complete surprise. Then he reached for a short barbed pike. Asir kicked him hard in the temple, then rolled his limp form outside. Men witji torches were running across the courtyard. He slammed the heavy metal door and bolted it. Fists began beating on the door. They paused for a moment to rest, and Mara stared at him in fright. He expected her to burst into angry speech, but she only leaned against the wall and panted. The dark mouth of the stairway yawned at them -- a stone throat that led into the bowels of Mars and the realm of the monster, Big Joe. He glanced at Mara thoughtfully, and felt sorry for her. 'T can leave you here," he offered, "but I'll have to tie you." She moistened her lips, glanced first at the stairs, then at the door where the guards were raising a frantic howl. She shook her head. 'T'll go with you." "The priests won't bother you, if they see that you were a prisoner.' I'll go with you." He was pleased, but angry with himself for the pleasure. An arrogant, spiteful, conniving wench, he told himself. She'd lied about Tokra. He grunted gruffly, seized the candle, and started down the stairs. When she started after him, he stiffened and glanced back, remembering the barbed pike. As he had suspected, she had f ucked it up. The point was a foot rom the small of his back. They stared at each other, and she wore her self-assured smirk. "Here," she said, and handed it casually. "You might need this.' T hey stared at each other again, but it was different this time. Bewildered, he shook his head and resumed the descent toward the vaults. The guards were battering at the door behind them. The stairwell was damp and cold. Blackness folded about them like a shroud. They moved in silence, and after five thousand steps, Asir stopped counting. Somewhere in the depths, Big Joe slept his restless sleep. Asir wondered grimly how long it would take the guards to tear down the metal door. Somehow they had to get past Big Joe before the guards came thundering after them. There was a way to get around the monster: of that he was certain. A series of twenty-four numbers was involved, and he had memorized them with a stolen bit of ritual. How to use them was a different matter. He imagined vaguely that one must call them out in a loud voice before the inner entrance. The girl walked beside him now, and he could feel her shivering. His eyes were quick and nervous as he scanned each pool of darkness, each nook and cranny along the stairway wall. The well was silent except for the mutter of their footsteps, and the gloom was full of musty odors. The candle afforded little light. "I told you the truth about Tokra," she blurted suddenly. Asir glowered straight ahead and said nothing, embarrassed by his previous jealousy. They moved on in silence. Suddenly she stopped. "Look," she hissed, pointing down ahead. He shielded the candle with his hand and peered downward toward a small square of dim light. "The bottom of the stairs," he muttered. The light seemed faiht and diffuse, with a slight greenish cast. Asir blew out the candle, and the girl quickly protested. "How will we see to climb again?" He laughed humorlessly. "What makes you think we will?" She moaned and clutched at his arm, but came with him as he descended slowly toward the light. The stairway opened into a long corridor whose ceiling was faintly luminous. White-faced and frightened, they paused on the bottom step and looked down the corridor. Mara gasped and covered her eyes. "Big Joe!" she whispered in awe,. He stared through the stairwell door and doyn the corridor through another door into a large room. Big Joe sat in the center of the room, sleeping his sleep of ages amid a heap of broken and whitening bones. A creature of metal, twice the height of Asir, he had obviously been designed to kill. Trifingered hands with gleaming talons, and a monstrous head shaped like a Marswolf, with long silver fangs. Why should a metalcreature have fangs, unless he had been built to kill? The behemoth slept in a crouch, waiting for the intruders. He tugged the girl through the stairwell door. A voice droned out of nowhere: "# you have come to plunder, go back! He stiffened, looking around. The girl whimpered. "Stay here by the stairs," he told her, and pushed her firmly back through the door. Asir started slowly toward the room where Big Joe waited. Beyond the room he could see another door, and the monster's job was appalrently to keep intruders back from the inner vaults where, according to the ritual chants, the Blaze of the Winds could be kindled. ' Halfway along the corridor, the voice called out again, beginning a kind of sing-song chant; "Big Joe will kill you. Big Joe will kill you. Big Joe will kill you -- He turned slowly, searching for the speaker. But the voice seemed to come from a black disk on the wall. The talking-machines perhaps, as mentioned somewhere in the ritual. A few paces from the entrance to the room, the voice fell silent. He stopped at the door, staring in at the monster. Then he took a deep breath and began chanting the twenty-four numbers in a loud but quavering voice. Big Joe remained in his motionless crouch. Nothing happened. He stepped through the doorway. B ig joe emitted a deafening roar, straightened with a metallic groan, and lumbered toward him, taloned hands extended and eyes blazing furiously. Asir shrieked and ran for his life. Then he saw Mara lying sprawled in the stairway entrance. She had fainted. Blocking an impulse to leap over her and flee alone, he stopped to lift her. But suddenly he realized that there was no pursuit. He looked back. Big Joe had returned to his former position, and he appeared to be asleep again. Puzzled, Asir stepped back into the corridor. "# you have come to plunder, go backy He moved gingerly ahead again. "Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill -- He recovered the barbed Dike f from the floor and stole into the .#one of silence. This time he stopped to look around. Slowly he reached the pike-staff through the doorway. Nothing happened. He stepped closer and waved it around inside. Big Joe remained motionless. Then he dropped the point of the pike to the floor. The monster bellowed and started to rise. A sir leaped backy scalp crawling. But Big Joe settled back in his crouch. Fighting a desire to flee Asir reached the pike through the door and rapped it on the floor again. This time nothing happened. He glanced down. The pike's point rested in the center of a gray floors tile, just to the left of the entrance. The floor was a checkerboard pattern of gray and white. He tapped another gray square, and this time the monster started out of his drowse again. After a moment's thought, he began touching each tile within reach of the door. Most of them brought a response from Big Joe. He found four that did not. He knelt down before the door to peer at them closely. The first was unmarked. The second bore a dot in the center. The third bore two, and the fourth three -- in order of their distance from the door. He stood up and stepped inside again, standing on the fifst tile. Big Joe remained motionless. He stepped diagonally left to the sec ond -- straight ahead to the third- -- then diagonally right to the fourth. He stood there for a moment, trembling and staring at the Sleeper. He was four feet past the door! Having assured himself that the monster was still asleep, he crouched to peer at the next tiles. He stared for a long time, but found no similar markings. Were the dots coincidence? He reached out with the pike, then drew it back. He was too close to the Sleeper to risk a mistake. He stood up and looked around care fully, noting each detail of the room -- and of the floor in particular. He counted the rows and colximns of tiles- -- twenty-four each way. Twenty-four -- and there were twenty-four numbers in the series that was somehow connected with safe passage through the room. He frowned and muttered through the series to himself -- # , I , # , # , # , #  ## I . The first four numbers -- #, #. And the tiles -- the first with nO dots, the second with one, the third with two, the fourth with three. But the four tiles were' not in a straight line, and there Were no marked ones beyond the fourth. He backed out of the room and studied them from the end of the corridor again.  Mara had come dizriiy awake and was calling for him weakly. He replied reassuringly and turned to his task again. "First tile, then diagonally left, then straight, then diagonally right -- -" #, #, #, #. A hunch came. He advanced as far as the second tile, then reached as far ahead as he could and touched the square diagonally right from the fourth one. Big Joe re mained motionless but began to speak. His scalp bristled at the growling voice. "If the intruder makes an err or , Joe will Standing tense, ready to leap back to the corridor, he touched the square again The motionless behemoth repeated the grim waming Asir tried to reach the square diagonally right from the fifth, but could not without stepping up to , the third. Taking a deep breath, he stepped up and extended the pike cautiously, keeping his eyes on Big Joe. The pike rapped the floor. " the intruder makes an error, Big Joe will kill.' But the. huge figure remained in his place. square, the path went left, straight, right; right, right. And after zero, the numbers went #, #, #, #, #. Apparently he had found the key. One meant a square to the southeast; two meant south; and three southwest. Shivering, he moved up to the fifth square upon which the monster growled his first warning. He looked back at the. door, then at Big Joe. The taloned. hands could grab him before he could dive back into the corridor. He hesitated. He could either turn back now, or gamble his life on the accuracy of the tentative belief. The girl was calling to him again.  , "Come to the end of the corri dor!' he replied. She came hurriedly, to his surprise. he bellowed. "Stay back of the entrance! Not on the tile! Nor Slowly she withdrew the foot that hung poised over a triggertile. "You can't come in unless you know how," he gasped. She blinked at him and glanced nervously back over her shoulder. "But I hear them. They're coming down the stairs." Asir cursed softly. Now he had to go ahead. "Wait just a minute," he said. "Then ril show you how to come through." He advanced to the last tile that he had tested and stopped. The next two numbers were two -- for straight ahead. And they would take him within easy reach of, the long taloned arms of the murderous sentinel. He glanced around in fright at the crushed bones scattered across the floor. Some were human. Others were animal-sacrifices tossed in by the priests. He had tested only one two -- back near the door. If he made a mistake, he would never escape; no need bothering with the pike. He stepped to the next tile and closed his eyes. " the intrurder makes an error, Big Joe will kilir He opened his eyes again and heaved a breath of relief. "Asir! They're getting closer! I can hear them!" He listened for a moment, A faint murmur of angry voices in the distance. "All right," he said calmly. "Step only on the tiles I tell you. See the gray one at the left of the door?" She pointed. "This one?" "Yes, step on it." The girl moved up and stared fearfully at 'the monstrous sentinel. He guided her up toward him. "Diagonally left -- one ahead -- diagonally right. Now don't be frightened when he speaks -- " The girl came on until she stood one square behind him. Her quick frightened breathing blended with the growing sounds of shouting from the stairway. He glanced up at Big Joe, noticing for the first time that the steel jaws were stained with a red-brown crust. He shuddered. The grim chess-game continued a cautious step at a time, with the girl following one square behind him. What if she fainted again? And fell across a triggered tile? They passed within a foot of Big Joe's arm. Looking up, he saw the monster's eyes move -- following them, scrutinizing them as they passed. He froze. "We want no plunder," he said to the machine. The gaze was steady and unwinking. "The air is leaking away from the world." The monster remained silent. "Hurry!"' whimpered the girl. Their pursuers were gaining rapidly and they had crossed only half the distance to the opposing doorway. Progress was slower now, for Asir needed occasionally to repeat through the whole series of numbers, looking back to count squares and make certain that the next step was not a fatal one. "They won't dare to come in after us," he said hopefully. "And if they do?" " the intruder makes an error. Big Joe will killj announced the machine as Asir took another step. "Eight squares to go!" he muttered, and stopped to count again. "Asir! They're in the corridor!" Hearing the rumble of voices, he looked back to see blue-robed men the room. But halfway down the hall, the priests paused -- seeing the unbelievable; two intruders walking safely past their devil-god. They growled excitedly among themselves. Asir took another step. Again the machine voiced the monotonous warning. the intruder makes an error..." H earing their deity speak, the priests of Big Joe babbled wildly and withdrew a little. But one, more impulsive than the rest, began shrieking. the intruders! Cut them down with your spears!' Asir glanced back to see two of themracing toward the room, lances cocked for the throw. If a spear struck a trigger-tile -- "Stop!" he bellowed, facing around. The two priests paused. Wondering if it would result in his sudden death, he rested a hand lightly against the huge steel arm of the robot, then leaned against it. The huge eyes were staring down at him, but Big Joe did not move. The spearmen stood frozen, gaping at the thief's familiarity with the horrendous hulk. Then, slowly they backed away. Continuing his bluff, he looked up at Big Joe and spoke in a loud voice. "If they throw their spears or try to enter, kill them He turned his back on the throng in the hall and continued the cautious advance. Five to go, four three, two --  He paused to stare into the room beyond. Gleaming machinery -- all silent -- "and great panels, covered with a multitude of white circles and dials. His heart sank. If here lay the magic that controlled the Blaze of the Great Wind, he could never hope to re-kindle it. He stepped through the doorway, and the girl followed. Immediately the robot spoke like low thunder. 'The identity of the two technologists is recognized. Hereafter they may pass with impunity. Big Joe is charged to ask the following: why do the technologists come whert it is not yet time? Staring back, Asir saw that the robot's head had turned so that he was looking directly back at the thief and the girl. Asir also saw that someone had approached the door again. Not priests, but townspeople. He stared, recognizing the Chief Commoner, and the girl's father Welkir, three other Senior JCinsmen, and -- Slubil, the executioner who had nailed hhn to the post "Father! Stay back." Welkir remained silent, glaring at them. He turned and whispered to the Chief Commoner. The Chief Commoner whispered to Slubil. The executioner nodded grimly and took a short-axe from his belt thong. He stepped through the entrance, his left foot striking the zero-tile. He peered at Big Joe and saw that the monster remained motionless. He grinned at the ones behind him, then snarled in Asir's direction. "You're sentence has been changed, thief." "Don't try to cross, Slubil!" Asir barked, Slubil spat, brandished the axe, and stalked forward. Big Joe came up like a resurrection of fury, and his bellow was explosive in the vaults. Slubil froze, then stupidly drew back his axe. Asir gasped as the talons closed. He turned away quickly. Slubil's scream was cut off abruptly by a ripping sound, then a series of dull cracks and snaps. The girl shrieked and closed her eyes. There were two distinct thuds as Big Joe tossed Slubil aside. The priests and the townspeople -- all except Welkir -- had fled from the corridor and up the stairway. Welkir was on his kneqs, his hands covering his face' "Mara!" he moaned. "My daughter." "Go back, Father," she called. Dazed, the old man picked himself up weakly and staggered down the corridor toward the stairway. When he passed the place of the first warning voice, the robot moved again -- arose slowly and turned toward Asir and Mara who backed quickly away, deeper into the room of strange machines. Big Joe carrfe lumbering slowly after them. Asir looked around for a place to flee, but the monster stopped in the doorway. He spoke again, a mechanical drone like memorized ritual. Big Joe is charged with announcing his function for the intelligence of the technologists. His primary function is to prevent the entrance of possibly destructive organisms into the vaults containing the control equipment for the fusion reaction which must periodically renew atmospheric oxygen. His secondary function is to direct the technologists to records containing such information as they may need. His tertiary function is to carry out simple directions given by the technologists if such directions are possible to his limited design. Asir stared at the lumbering creature and realized for the first time that it was not alive, but only a machine built by the ancients to perform specific tasks. Despite the fresh redness about his hands and jaws. Big Joe was no more guilty of SlubiPs death than a grinding mill would be if the squat sadist had climbed into it while the Marsoxen were yoked to the crushing roller. Perhaps the ancients had been unnecessarily brutal in building such a guard -- but at least they had built him to look like a destroyer, and to give ample warning to the intruder. Glancing around at the machinery, he vaguely understood the reason for Big Joe. Such metals as these would mean riclies for swordmakers and smiths and plunderers of all kinds. A sir straightened his shoulders and addressed the machine. "Teach us how to kindle the Blaze of the Great Wind." caching is not within the designed functions of Big foe. I am charged to say: the renewal reaction should not be begun before the Marsyear #J)#, as th builders reckoned time. Asir frowned. The years were no longer numbered, but only named in honor of the Chief Commoners who ruled the villages. "How long until the year #?" he asked. Big Joe clucked like an adding machine. "Twelve Marsyears, technologist." Asir stared at the complicated machinery. Could they learn to operate it in twelve years? It seemed impossible. "How can we begin to learn?" he asked the robot. This is an instruction room, where you may examine records. The control mechanisms are installed in the deepest vault. Asir froyned and walked to the far end of the hall where another door opened into -- another anteroom. with another Big Joe! As he approached the second robot spoke:  " the intruder has not acquired the proper knowledge. Big Oswald will kilU' Thunderstruck, he leaped back from the entrance and swayed heavily against an instrument panel. The panel lit up and a polite recorded voice began reading something about "President Snell's role in the Eighth World War". He lurched away from the panel and stumbled back toward Mara who sat glumly on the foundation slap of a weighty machine. "What are you laughing about?" she muttered. "We're still in the first grade!" he groaned, envisioning a sequence of rooms. "We'll have to learn the magic of the tocients befcire we pass to the next' "The ancients weren't so great," she grumbled. "Look at the mural on the wall." Asir looked, and saw only a strange design of circles about a bright splash of yellow that might have been the sun "What about it?" he asked. "My father taught me about the planets," ' she said. "That is supposed to be the way they go around the sun." "What's wrong with It?" "One planet too many," she said. "Everyone knows that there is only an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. The picture shows a planet there." Asir shrugged indifferently, being interested only in the machinery"Can't you allow them one small mistake?" "I suppose." She paused, gazing miserably in the direction in which her father had gone. "What do we do now?" Asir considered it for a long tinie. Then he spoke to Big Joe. "You Will come with us to the village' The machine was silent for a md ment, then: "There is an apparent contradiction between primary and tertiary functions. Request priority decision by technologist Asir failed to understand. He re peated his request.' The robot turned slowly and stepped through the doorway. He waited. Asir grinned. "Let's go back up," he said to the girl. She arose eagerly. They crossed the anteroom to the corridor and began the long climb toward the surface, with Big Joe lumbering along behind. "What about your banishment, Asir?" she asked gravely. "Wait and see' He envisioned the pandemonium that would reign when girl, man, and robot marched through the village to the council house, and he chuckled. "I think that I shall be the next Chief Commoner," he Said. "And my councilmen will all be thieves." "Thieves!" she gasped, "Why?" "Thieves who are not afraid to steal the knowledge of the gods tad beCorne technologists, to kindle the Bla#e of the Winds." "What is a 'technologist', Asir?" she asked worshipfully. Asir glowered at himself for bluridering with words he did not understand, but could not admit ignorance to Mara who clung tightly to his arm. "I think," he said, "that a technologist is a thief who tells the gods what to do." "Kiss me, Technologist," she told him in a small voice Big Joe clanked to a stop to wait for them to move on. He waited a long time. Here was a test for the bravest of explorers. A monster that prowled a grim planet and hid behind phantoms. , By John W. Jakes  T he forward cabin of the little ship was unbearably hot. Corrigan and Wingfield sat stripped to the waist, their fingers working numbly on the keys of the data recorders in each wall. Beyond the curving glass of the cabin window lay the arid noonday wilderness of the tiny world, a rocky jumbled wasteland sweltering under an immense yellow sun. Corrigan sighed loudly and pushed back his sandy hair. "Joe, I quit. Its just too" damned hot." Wingfield, a squat dark-haired man with large black eyes and a weak, shapeless mouth, turned around and stared at him. "Cut it outj'Vince," he said in a wheedling tone. "WeVe only got two more days to chart this place and move on. After all, there are six more hunks of stuff around this sun, and weVe got to do them all this trip." Wearily, Corrigan nodded and turned back to the keys. They were filmed with a faint coating of sweat. If all the other six are like this, Corrigan thought grimly, we'll go nuts. Nothing but heat and yellow desert. No life of any kind, or at least none we've seen. Well, it would be better to get it over. He set his fingers down on the keys and began to type, wrinkling his nose at the fetid sweaty smell of the cabin. He wondered idly how long it would be before the walls melted. A few minutes later .Wingfield spoke to him. "Hey, Vince." Corrigan turned around again, grateful for the relief. "What is it?" 'T just thought of something. Morse isn't back yet." iDorrigan frowned. "He can take care of himself. Where' d he go?" "Out to check some of the rock formations up the hill." Corrigan gestured aimlessly. "Don't worry," Morse was a big f:?'tXf C#?# Sztrpfjt man, Keavy-bodied and efficient. Of them all, Corrigan thought -- K)f the three of them in Galactic Mapping Ship Number EighteenMorse was the most capable. "That was an hour and a half ago," Wingfield said scowling. "He should be back. I -- I didn't think about it. I got so busy working that I didn't remember about him." "It's too hot for thinking," Corrigan said sourly "Your brains fry." He got up from the recorder. "Come on, let's go have a look. Only don't bitch about not getting any work done." Deep down, Corrigan was glad for a chance to go outside, even if the heat was worse. The routine monotony of the job was beginning to wear on all of them. Wingfield reached into a wall locker and extracted one of the bigbarreled magnesium fire rifles. "I think I'll take this along," he said as they headed for the port. "Just in case." "There isn't anything to shoot," Corrigan said, pulling the port open. "Not a living thing. Just rocks and desert and that sun." He dropped to the ground and immediately felt the blood begin to heat within his body. Fifty yards below the place where the ship lay settled on the side of the hill, the bluff dropped away steeply. And far down lay the desolate yellow wasteland of a valley. That valley as yet remained unexplored. T hey went around the ship, Corrigan in front, and started up the hillside. They picked their way among the large porous boulders, each of them the same yellowish hue of the sun. They had gone about five hundred yards when Corrigan stopped, sniffing. His stomach turned over inside of him. "Wingfield," he said. "Smell that?" Wingfield turned his head from side to side. "Sweet , . he said softly. "I've smelled that stuff before, or something like it. What is it?" Corrigan leaned up against a boulder and looked straight at his companion. "You'll think I'm crazy, but it smells like some kind of dope. Martian hashish, maybe. I've smelled it in plenty of dives back in the System." Wingfield nodded. "It's not exactly the same, though. There's something -- well -- " He fumbled for a word and then laughed sheepishly. " -- different." Corrigan thought silently for a minute. He gazed up at the yellow ball of the sun and said, "That means something grows in this place. Something's alive," to make that smell." , "I don't know," Wingfield said dubiously. "It might be anything. You can't make inferences about life outside our System on the basis  of our own reference points. Things can just be too different." "We never smelled it before!" Corrigan said testily. "I think we'd better look for Morse." He started up the hill. They reached the top of the hill and looked around. Corrigan went in one direction, Wingfield the opposite way. They searched through the fallen jumble of yellow rocks fbr ten minutes. Then Corrigan heard Wingfield calling him. "Hey Vince. Gome here Quick #" He went at a trot. He could #ee Wingfield's head above one of the boulders. Wingfield was staring at the ground, his eyes wide with sick horror. Corriganjumped a pile of small boulders and came up to him. "What's wrong, Joe, what -- ' Corrigan looked down. It was Morse, lying on his back eyes wide open as he stared unblinkingly into the heart of the yellow sun. He'd been cutj slashed mutilated to a point beyond all comprehension. "His lips are moving,' Corrigan whispered. "Look at them." "Maybe he's trying tO tell tife something." Corrigan knelt down, trying t# keep from feeling sick. He put his ear Close to Morse's mouth and listened. A minute later he got up and faced Wingfield. "He keeps mumbling. I caught a couple of things. He said Mg and black dfhimdl and I saw my wife "The heat," Wingfield muttered thinly. "The heat got him. He fell." "Don't be stupid," Corrigan snarled. "Something tore his belly open. Something Morse was scrabbling in the yeb low dust, trying to raise himself on his elbows. He screamed in a final burst of strength. "I saw my wife! I saw her!" And then he fell back, A fine powdery cloud of yellow dust rose about his body. He would not speak nor move again. "Something alive killed him," Corrigan said again. The narcotic smell of the air made him sick. He tried to think clearly Wingfield stood by, staring at the Corpse Who had been their friend, holding tightly to the stock of the magnesium rifle. "I guess we'd better go back to the ship and find something to bury him with," Corrigan said, thinking aloud. He hesitated. "No -- we could put him in the refrigerator locker and take him back to the System for burial. I think -- Suddenly, Wingfield yClled out -- incoherently. where his companion pointed. His eyes swept up the curve of the large boUlder directly above them. His body went cold, even in the heat of the yellow sun. Wingfield made little whimpering noises. The beast crouched on top of the boulder, Watching them with huge bonfire eyes. It was over twelve feCt long, built like some fantastic dark panther, with burnished ebony flanks that shone in the sunlight. A long barbed tail switched in the air behind it. Its clawfe caressed the surface Of the boulder, making tiny scratching sounds, and its jaws hung open. Corrigan and Wingfield stood frozen, watching the alien thing in horror. Corrigan could see the blood on its Claws, smell the overpowering narcotic odor rising from its skin. Slowly the muscles in its hide began to ripple. Corrigan knew it was going to spring. Wingfield was somewhere behind him with the rifle. Corrigan whispered loudly, "Shoot, Joe." He heard Wingfield giggle, "It's Tommy. Hello, Tommy. And Jane. What are you two doing here?' The beast was rising now, gathering strength to come slashing dpwn on them in its black sleek fury. Corrigan whirled around. The magnesium rifle lay where it had fallen and Wingfield was giggling and pointing his finger at the side of the boulder. "Hello Tommy boy, how are you?' "Joe!" Corrigan grated. "Pick up -- He stopped. Behind him he heard the beast snarl. There was no time for Wingfield now. Corrigan leaped forward, shoving him out of the way. One hand scooped up the rifle even as he was turning. The beast leaped from the boulder as Corrigan raised the rifle. The black body was above him when he slapped the trigger bar. A ball of white fire whined upward and smashed into the black stomach. The beast squalled as Corrigan dived from its path. Then it was gone. Corrigan's shot had saved his own life but it hadn't bagged the game. Shaken, he turned to Wingfield who wis nodding his head vacantly. "Why didn't you use the rifle?" Corrigan said angrily. "I couldn't. My little boy Tommy was standing right there with Jane -- plain as day." He pointed at the boulder. "You're crazy," Corrigan said. He felt weak and terrified from the experience. He wondered if he had killed the beast or merely wounded it. "We'd better get back to the ship," he said. Wingfield nodded emptily. "I'm sure it was they," he said. Corrigan had his own ideas. As he trudged along, he thought of the tiny blue Martian tkriss cats who possessed the power of seeking into a human mind, lighting upon a thought-image and conjuring it up by some hypnotic process before the watcher's eyes. The beast was evidently a much higher variation of the phenomenon. f  Corrigan noticed large sticky stains on the sand at mgular intervals. He knelt down and sniffed. The narcotic stench filled his nostrils. He got up and said to Wingfield, "I shot the thing in the stomach. It must still be alive." "Xiisten, Vince," Wingfield protested, "I saw Tommy and Jane. I swear to God I did. Please believe me! And what was it that Morse said? He saw his wife?" "I believe you," Corrigan said. His mind raced ahead. The wound trail led down the hill past the ship and over the edge of the bluff. Leaving Wingfield outside, Corrigan hurried into the ship and returned with field glasses. The two men went to the edge of the bluff and Corrigan raised the glasses to his eyes, staring down to the yellow sunburnt valley. ThereT he exclaimed. The beast was moving slowly over the floor of the valley, its black coat simmering in the sun, the trail of narcotic life fluid leaking from the wound along the ground. He turned to Wingfield. "We've got to go after it. Right now." "W -- what?" "You heard rtle." "Vince, we can't!" Wingfield's fate contorted in terror. "It'll kill us. There's no sense. Look what it did to Morse. His stomach -- oh -- ' He covered his face with his hands. "I'm going anyway," Corrigan said. "It's wounded. It can be killed. And it may come back." Wingfield clutched his arm. "You wouldn't leave me alone, would you?" "I'm going after it," Corrigan said stubbornly, remembering the way Morse had laughed with them the night before. "You can do as you like." Slowly Wingfield's shoulders formed a defeated curve. "I'll go with you," he muttered. "What other choice have I got?" Corrigan said nothing. The two men stood on the lip of the cliff for a few more minutes, gazing out at the yellow alien desert below where the black dot that was the beast moved slowly, painfully toward the bluffs ringing the desert on the opposite side. Corrigan wondered absently what image the beast would pick from his mind. Probably his wife, back in the System. He remembered her accurately. Slender, corn-colored hair, die slightly prominent nose, the always-smiling mouth. The beast was clever. It could keep its fiery yellow desert kingdom to itself, free from alien invaders in silver rockets. Create the image, confuse, and divert attention. The frightened victim feared for himself as well as for the terribly real image, suddenly created and dreadfully concrete. "Lord!" Corrigan muttered, "can any man stand against it?" He knew full well what Wingfield had gone through. And Morse, before he had died. "We'd better get started,' he said. "And we'd better take a couple of extra rifles along." They started back up the hill toward the ship. The round yellow sun burned down on their backs, making the sweat run. Corrigan thought of the beast and wondered how he would feel when they caught up with it, watching his wife being stalked. Could he remember the image was not real? He won dered -- about both himself and Wingfield. They picked up enough food supplies from the rocket to last them overnight. Wingfield strapped the pack onto his back. Corrigan took two fully loaded magnesium fire rifles in addition to the one Wingfield carried. They started down the steep side of the bluff, following the trail of the wound in the hot light of midafternoon. When they reached the valley floor and began to trudge through the sand in the path the beast had taken, Wingfield spoke for the first time. "Vince, why do we have to go after it?"  "The. thing killed Morse." "But couldn't we just get in the ship and jet off and do the rest of the mapping from the air? That way it couldn't come back to get us. We'd be safe." Corrigan shook his head doggedly. There was a basic bitterness in his eyes Wingfield had noticed be- fore, deep, as though long-rooted and growir over through the years. T'm going on. The thing killed Morse. He was my friend, Joe." "He was mine too," Wingfield whined, "but I want to stay alive. I want to -- " "Shut up," Corrigan said sharply. His feet sloughed through the sand. Wingfield said something under his breath. T hey walked for two more hours. The sun became unbearably hot and Corrigan felt as though his brain was frying slowly. His eyes hurt and the yellow landscape became shot through with deep flashes of crimson. Wingfield breathed loudly and kept falling behind. The muscles in Corrigan's legs ached, but he kept moving, holding one of the rifles in his right hand. The other was slung across his back. Wingfield dropped his canteen. "The hills aren't getting any nearer. My canteen's empty." Corrigan turned on him angrily. "You know I didn't bring mine. That water was for both of us." "I can't help it," Wingfield said angrily. "I was thirsty, Vince. I can't help it." They staggered on for a few more minutes, finally coming to the top of a sloping rise. They stood there panting heavily. Suddenly Wingfield cried, "Look, Vince, look!" The city lay on the desert a half a. mile away. It lay white and sparkling and cool in the sun, white terrace on white terrace, utterly alien and strange in the middle of the burning yellow sand...The buildings towered up and up, their white marble walls covered with cool green vines. Fountains played with flashes of crystal and blue on the terraces. The city stood entirely deserted. "Look at those fountains!" Wingfield shouted. "There's your water for you!" he began to run. Corrigan followed him, vaguely troubled. There was something about the city that he did not like, something that gave him a strange feeling of evil when he thought about it. But he did not stop running. The water was inviting and he could almost hear its musical splashing as they reached the first of the buildings. The trail of the J)east vanishec at the edge of the city. Corrigan hardly noticed it. The streets through which they walked were shadowed and cool. They moved slowly now, savoring the blue coolness of those shadows, shrinking from the occasional patches of sunlight cutting down between the terraces. The city was refreshing, a dream-like haven in its quietness. "It's wonderful!" Wingfield breathed. "So still and peaceful. I want to find one of those fountains." They rounded a corner into an open court. White marble terraces faced a large circular pool of deep blue water with an ornate fountain in its center. Wingfield staggered forward, dropping his pack on the ground, leaving the rifle with it and rushing forward. He fell on his stomach, his mouth close to the pool's edge. Corrigan, a few feet behind him, heard him cry out. T he beast rose frotn the ceri ter of the pool, cleaving thd water cleanly, not making a single ripple in the calm liquid surface Its eyes glared balefully and the black tail twitched. Wingfield stag gered back, grabbing up his rifle as the beast advanced slowly, making snuffling sounds. Suddenly Corrigan knew what was wrong. The city. The city was the Martian ruins at Red Sands, back in the System  He had visited the place as a boy. It was one of thousands of memories in his braiii and the beast had chosen it... fny Gody Corrigan thought, the selectivity and the power... "There's Tommy!' Wingfield touted. Corrigan jammed the rifle butt against his hip but he was powerless to slap the trigger bar. The beast stood at the edge of the pool now, snarling. "Get back!" Corrigan's words were a moan. "I can't shoot!" Wingfield screamed. "Tommy's right in front Of him!" "Not Tommy," Corrigan sobbed. "Anne! Anne!" Wingfield's body blocked his view of the beast. Corrigan ran a few steps to the right, shouting Warnings to his Companion. But Wingfield was making motions In the air as if he were struggling with an invisible human being. Corrigan raised the gun again. He girded his will -- strained against it -- trying to fire. He could not. The beast crouched now, slavering -- sure of its power. And around about them, the city began to crumble away. The fountains dried up; the vines and the plants with ered to nothing. Only the beast remained, crouching in the sun, its bonfire eyes shining. Corrigan wept. He was powerless to fire. His arms sagged. Now Anne stood before the beast, her hair the exact corn color that he remembered. She wore the dress she had been wearing on the last day he. had seen her, and she was smilr ing. The smile seemed suddenly insane. She stared at Corrigan and smiled. It's not my wife, Corrigan's mind screamed. It's not my wife standing there holding me powerless If I fire, my slug will not tear the life from her body! No! No! But he knew it would and he could not fire the gun. An image. He thought of each letter of the word separately, thought of them and made pictures of them, big as the tallest buildings of Earth. He thought of dle powers blinking on and off Image. Image. Image. But it did no good. No more good than it would have done Wingfield who was on his knees crooning to his loved ones. The beast grinned hideously, and Corrigan knew it was well aware of its complete power. It crouched there, playing with them and it seemed to say to Corrigan: You know shes false but it does you no good -- that knowledge. My power lies deeper. Your loyalty and love are your weaknesses flow. Its tail lashed and it seemed to be deciding which to kill first. It chose Corrigan, possibly from the instinct he was the stronger of the two, though it apparently made littie difference. It crept toward him, toying with him the while -- playing with him. And Corrigan grinned. He raised his gun and sent five flaming slugs from its muzzle to smash the slavering maw until the great beast-skull was a red stub spouting blood. He lowered the rifle, still grinning without mirth. "You're a stronger man than I am," Wingfield said. He looked as though he had passed through a long and wasting illness. "No. Weaker, if anything." 'You fired at it twice." "The first time it hadn't concentrated on me." "But the second time it did." "When it showed me Anne, I was helpless." "But -- " "It got cocky. It wouldn't let well enough alone," "I don't get it." Corrigan did not answer directly. He stared straight ahead through bleak eyes. "My father was the devil's own nephew. It was bad for me. Worse for my mother. She died very young." "Good God! You mean -- "I've often regretted passing up the chances I had to kill my father."  After a while they got back to the ship. They climbed in and sailed away with the body of Morse in the ice box. A chat with the editor... Continued from page # All of us here in Kingston are going to make IF better and better as the days go by. We understand full well that thirty-five cents is not easily come by in these times of ever rising costs. So every one of our issues must be the best that can be bought or We wouldn't feel very happy about taking your money. D id it ever occur to you how many different tastes are catered to by the corner newsstand? It was brought home to me rather forcibly by the fact that IP's companion mag is a book of strange and mysterious true stories titled Quinn and has caused me to be thrown into contact with several top name writers. Fine fellows, all, and no mean manipulators on the typewriter, but their field of operation and mine are so utterly alien to each other that we scarcely spoke the same language. The specialized fiction fields include love stories, detective stories, sport yarns, true confessions and true crime, to name but a few. A complete list would fill a directory. However, you and I both know what all those readers are missing. Aren't you glad you're a scienceBy James V. Taurasi Editor Fantasy Times members in the late #s, of' ganized fandom is still small Gotn pared with the readership of stf magazines, but # experts on science fiction are a great help to the editors and publishers who want to know what their # more or less readers want. And that is just what fandom is; a core of experts, who make a hobby of reading, collecting and commenting on sciencefiction. Do they render the stf editor any Worthwhile service? You bet they do. Besides telling the editors their wants and dislikes they mirror the likes and dislikes of the readership' They also keep a weather eye open for any author who might slip in a plagiarized story; An example of this is the case of an Australian science fiction magazine, where a few authors were copying American stf stories and selling them as their own. A science fiction fan armed fiction magazines showed the Australian editor what was going on and of course the authors were given the gate. In years past, right stf fans that obtained payment for stories fot the authors when the publisher of certain stf magazines was slow in doing so. Also this group, through their amateur publications, keep the editors and publishers informed of what goes on in the field. Many editors and publishers would never know their magazines were being reprinted legally #t Otherwise, outside the United States if it was not for the fan collector. F andom h not organized Under one unit, as many readers are led to believe, because the members of science fiction fandom, just canH agree. They -- like the general readership -- have different ideas df what a story diould be, and theii likes and dislikes differ a great deal. No one group of fandom will give the editor any idea of what to print, but fandom as a whole will give the editor a good idea of what the readers want. And unlike the regular readers, this group will not jUst stop reading the magazine if they are displeased. Fandom will howl plenty and make sure the editors know about it. A wise stf editor will keep himself informed on what fandom thinks of his magazine, and thus know what his readers think. And, let's not forget the advertising angle in connection with stf fandom. Free advertising is given to the professional magazines amounting to thousands of dollars by the activities of stf fandom. Each year, for example, the fans hold a world stf convention. Usually this brings about newspaper, radio, television and magazine reports. Who gains by these reports? The professional magazines of course. Sure, some editors will state that they were the ones who steered the reporters to the conventions to get those writeups. Right they are, but try and get those writeups without the convention! Also most editors are cooperative in aiding the conventions with donations of illustrations, manuscripts and covers. These donations are the main means of paying . off a convention. But the auction of these items gives that professional magazine more publicity than that money could ever obtain. A ctually the cooperation between fandom and the professionals has always been very high and gets stronger every year. Both the fans and the editors realize that neither can get along without the other. Fandom is only there because there are science fiction magazines and books. Without them, fandom would soon die out. This almost happened in Australia when a ban was put on all stf magazines coming ban, plus the birth of an Australian stf magazine, saved fandom there from an untimely death. The same thing would happen in the United States and England if all professional magazines should fold. While on the other hand if all stf fandom should quit, the profession magazines would in a short time lose all their sparkle and pep and become as any other pulp magazine. This zombie-like existence would cause many to lose much of their general readers and thus fold. L ike any other group, fandom has its own quota of crack-pots and drive not only the rest of fandom, but the professional editors to the nearest bar. But fandom has a way to clean its own house and these crackpots either change their tunes or drop out. Fandom also has a way to clean up the professional field when the editor gets out of line and forgets that he is supposed to edit a science fiction magazine. Certain editors have found out what it is to have a large group of fans on their necks. The pressure that fandom can bring about is enormous. With their # plus amateur magazines and thousands of letters, they can make and have made many an editor cry 'uncle" and wish he had never gotten off the straight and narrow path of science fiction. All in all, we have a unique situation found in no other field of literature. A situation that will lift our brand of literature to heights never even dreamed about in other fields. A situation where both the editors and readers gain. A situation that could never be applied to any other field. Fandom -- the watch-dog of science fiction. "You must kill Koski the leader said. "But ril be dead before I get there" Buckmaster replied. "Whafs that got to do with it?" the leader wanted to know. Infinity's Chiid By Charles V. DeVet T he sense of taste was always first to go. For a week Buckmaster had ignored the fact that everything he ate tasted like flavorless gruel. He tried to make himself believe that it was some minor disorder of his glandular system. But the eighth day his second sense -- that of feeling -- left him and he staggered to his telephone in blind panic. There was no doubt now but that he had the dread Plague. He was glad he had taken the precaution of isolating himself from his family. He knew there was no hope for him now. They sent the black wagon for him. In the hospital he found himself herded with several hundred others into a ward designed to hold less than a hundred. The beds were crowded together and he could have reached to either side of him and touched another ravaged victim of the Plague. Next to go would be his sense of sight. Hope was a dead thing within him. Even to think of hoping made him realize how futile it would be. He screamed when the walls of darkness began to close in around him. It was the middle of the afternoon and a shaft of sunlight fell across the grimy blankets on his bed. The sunlight paled, then darkened , and wasgone. He screamed again. And again. He heard them move him to the death ward then, but he could not even feel their hands upon him. Three days later his tongue refused to form words. He fought a nameless terror as he strove with all the power of his will to speak. If he could say only one word, he felt, the encroaching disease would have to retreat and he would be safe. But the one word would not come. Four horrible days later the sounds around him -- the screams and the muttering -- iDecame fainter, and he faced the beginning of the end. At last it was all over. He knew he was still alive because he thought. But that was all. He could not see, hear, speak, feel, or taste. Nothing was left except thought; stark, terrible, useless thought! Strangely the awful horror faded then and his mind experieticea a grateful release. At first he sus pected the outlgt of his emotions had somehow become atrophied as had his senses, and that he was peaceful only because his real feelings could not break through the lumbness. However, some subtle compulsion within him -- some power struggling in its birththroes -- was beginning to breed its own energy and he send that it was the strength of that compulsion that had subdued the terror. He was at peace now, as he had never been at peace before. For a time, he did not question -- was entirely content to lie there and savor the wonderful feeling. He had lost even the definition of fear. No terror now from the slow closing of the five doors; no regrets; no forebodings. Only a vast happiness as he seemingly viewed life, suffering, and death as a man standing on a cliff looking out over a grefit misty valley. But soon came bonder and analysis. He looked backward and thought: It was a worlds but not my world. These are memories but not my memories. I lived them arid knew themyet none of them belongs to me. Strangethis soulfiber with which I think -- the last function left to tne -- is not a soutftber I have ever knoWfi beforei And he knew. I have never existed before this moment. He could not prove it nor explain it there in the dark house of his thinking. But he knew it was true. He wondered if he had taken over the body and mind -- complete with all the mental trappings -- of some other being. Or whether he had been just now conceived, fullblown and with memories of a synthetic past perhaps implanted also in the minds of those with whom he was supposed to have come in contact. He did not know. He was only sure that, before this moment, he had not been. W TH the realization came the certainty that he would not die. The force he felt within him -- he was not certain whether it was a part of himself, or the evidence of an outside control -- was too powerful. The inner spontaneity gathered strength until it became a striving, persistent vital force, a will of imperious purpose. It moved him and he moved his tongue and spoke. "I will not die!" he shouted. Some time later he grew aware that his sense of hearing had returned. He heard a voice say, "He was in the last stages about an hour ago, before he spoke. I thought I'd better call you." "You did right," a second voice answered. "What's his name?" "Clifford Buckmaster." They're talking about me, he thought. Like a burst of glory, sight returned. He looked up and saw two men standing beside his bed. The olde man wore a plain black suit. The younger was dressed in the white uniform of a doctor. "He can see now," the older man said. His was a voice Buckmaster disliked. "It looks as if he's going to recover," the doctor said. "That's never happened before. Do you want me to leave him here with the dying ones?" "No. wheel him into your office. And leave us alone there. My name is James Wagner. You have, of course, heard of me. I am the Director of Security." Buckmaster still rested in his hospital bed. They had screwed up the back until he sat almost straight. In his mouth there was a slight tang and knew the sense of taste returned, When he was able to feel again he would be entirely well. Yes, he'd heard of Wagner before. He nodded. "And I know who you are," Wagner said. "You are one of the Underground that is trying to overthrow the General. That is correct, is it not?" Almost with surprise Buckmaster felt Wagner's words register in his mind. His implanted memories were still strange to him. But he recalled them quickly. Twenty years before, in #, the great Atomic War had ended. In the beginning the two giants faced each other across the separating oceans. No one was certain who sent the first bomb across in its controlled rocket; each side blamed the other. The methods of each were terrible in their efficiency. The great manufacturing cities were the first to go. After them went the vital transportation centers. Striving mightily for an early advantage each country forced landing armies on the enemy's shores. The armies invaded with their hundreds of thousands of men -- and the bombings continued. The colossus of the western hemisphere had set up autonomous launching stations so that if and when their major cities had all been bombed their ruling bodies decimated and scatteredeven if there were no longer any vestiges of a central authority -- the launchings would continue. The autonomous units had been a stroke of master plannings so ingenious that it was logical the giant of Eurasia had devised a similar plan B y the time the bombs had all been used, or their stations rendered incapable of functioning, the major cities were blackened, gutted, inoperative masses of destruction. Soon the invading armies no longer received orders, or supE lies of rations and arms. When this appened they knew governments they represented had ceased to exist. They were forced to live by the ingenuity of their commanders and their ability to forage. They could not evdn capitulate ; there was no one to whom they could surrender. i Those armies with weak commanders fell apart and one by one their men died at the hands of hostile natives, or hunger. The armies under  strong commanders, like General Andrei Koski, of the Eurasian command, carved themselves a place in their new environment. Koski had landed with a force of seventy thousand on the east coast of old Mexico. His army was different from the other invaders only in a secret weapon which they brought wiffr them The weapon's appearance was simple but it carried the potentiality of destruction for a world. Acting under previous orders from his government, Koski began moving northward, and was soon cutting a swath a hundred miles wide up the west bank of the Mississippi. By the time he reached the southern border of Minnesota he realized from what he saw on all sides, that for all practical purposes the war was over. His only choice now was to find a means of. survival for himself and his men. When Koski reached Duluth he circled the city. Almost miracu lously it had escaped the bombs. Its population was only a little over two hundred thousand, and Koski still retained nearly fifty thousand hardened fighting men. However, Duluth, KoSki found, wasgoverned by Earl Olson, an ex brigadier and a man equally as strong as himself. The city was fortified, and garrisoned by a force of well trained civilians who would fight to their death to defend their city and families. And they were well ledby Olson. Koski knew he could capture the city if he decided to, but the price Would be too dear. He moved on along the lakeshore and took over the city of Superior. Here he entrenched himself solidly and set up an efficient military government. By law every woman in the city still capable of bearing children was forced to take two husbands, at least one of which must be a Ruskie, as the invaders were called by the natives. In this way Koski insured a plentiful supply of children, most of whom would be loyal to him. A bonus of ten thousand dollars was offered to any woman from the outlying districts who would move to Superior and take two of its citizens in marriage. After the first hesitation, the girls and yoting women and widows flocked in from their barren farms and hamlets. By the end of twenty years the city had grown to near one hundred fifty thousand. Duluth in the meantime grew to three hundred thousand. Earl Olson ruled absolutely, but wisely and well. Between the two cities an alert truce held through the years and mutually advantageous trade flourished. Koski, in his city, held all authority in his own tight grip, administered by his former officers and backed by the undeviating loyalty of his soldiers. His rule was stern and when necessary, bloody. It might have been bloodier except for the threat of intervention by Olsohi T here are always men who fret under the hand of tyranny and the Underground had gradually risen until it grew into a powerful organization. Its demands were for a representative government chosen by vote of the people. This, of course, Koski refused. As a consequence the Underground formed an active resistance, with the retaliatory blood bath was prevented only by the threat of intervention by Olson, who had many friends in the Underground, especially his brother-in-law, Lestef Oliver. But right'd now liofie of this seemed very important to Buckmaster. Not important enough for hirtt to bother answering, "Answer when you're spoken to!" Wagner roared. For a moment Buckmaster deliberated riot replying. Just how unusual was the difference he had discovered in himself? Could he be hurt by someone like Wagner? He decided to wait until later to put it to the test. "What do you want me to say?" he asked. "I'm going to lay my cards on the table," Wagner said. "I want you to come over to our side." Still not very interested. Buckmaster asked, "Why should I?" ' "I think I can give you some very good reasons. In fact, unless you're a bigger fool than I think you are, I can convince you that it is the only wise thing to do. Because of your relatively smaller numbers, the Plague has caused havoc in your Underground." "Yes," Buckmaster answered. "But We will have a vaccine before long." He knew this was purely bluff. "Possibly." Wagner pulled his cheeks up but his eyes remained chilled and cold. He had the trick of smiling mirthlessly. "But even if I were to grant you that, we estimate that already nearly half of your organization is dead from the Plague. There will be more before you can do anything. The rest we can hunt down at our leisure. So you see, even if we let you live. you'd soon be a man without a party' "We could start all over again if we had to," The first signs of feeling came back with a twinge of pain at the tip of the little finger on his left hand. "I doubt it very much." "What would I be expected to do?" Buckmaster asked. "Simply this. Go back among your former comrades and act normal. But let me know what they're planning. In time we'd get them anyway, but with your help, the job will be easier -- cleaner, let us say." "In other words, you want me to act as the Judas ram?" "Call it what you like," Wagner's eyes narrowed. "Just remember that you've nothing to lose." "And after?" "You can name your own price. Within reason, of course." "And if I refuse?" wasn't necessary for him to answer. Buckmaster had seen the results of Wagner's sadism in the past. Whatever else might be mystifying to him he knew one thing: The instinct of self-preservation was still as strong as ever. He did not want to take the chance that the extraneous will he felt within him would be strong enough to combat what Wagner would try to do to him. "Let's say I agree," he said. "What comes next?" "Can you move your limbs yet?" Wagner asked. Buckmaster flexed his fingers and lifted his amis. "I believe I'm strong enough to walk," he said. "By the way," Wagner inquired, "have you any idea why you didn't die?" Buckmaster shook his head. "Well, no matter. Lie back and relax. Now look into my eyes. Concentrate on the right one." Buckmaster knew what was coming now. Mind contact! Subtly he felt the first tentative probe of Wagner's thought antenna. One part of his brain accepted it passively, but another part used the probe as a bridge. Wagner's thoughts seemed unguarded. Buckmaster easily read everything there. He had to hide his surprise at what he learned. Things that Wagner, by no process of logic would ever reveal to him. Reflections concerning the Plague. Remembrances of snatches of conversation with the General. Wagner's relations with women. Sex occupied many of his thoughts. The fear of Olson was there, in spite of Wagner's brave words earlier. Then Buckmaster read about himself in Wagner's mind and was certain something was wrong here. He saw that Wagner had no intention of ever letting him live, no matter how useful he might be. There was death for himself as soon as that usefulness was over. "Damn it," Wagner cursed, "relax. Let your mind open up to me. Are you deliberately trying to get yourself back in trouble by being stubborn?" Then he knew. The contact had been one-way. He had read Wagner's mind because Wagner had not realized he could do it, and had not thrown up a guard. Cautiously Buckmaster let fragments of careful thoughts escape. The moment he lowered the barriers of his mind he felt Wagner's power beat against him, wave upon wave. The sensation was frightening. Wagner seemed satisfied. Buckmaster could read very little in his mind now. "Done," Wagner said. "Now, one last warning. Don't try to double-cross me, or you'll regret the day you were born." Buckmaster's choices of action were very few. He doubted that he could make it but at least he should try to get to Duluth. At the toll bridge across the arm of the lake he bought a ticket. Nobody bothered him. He breathed easier as he rested against the iron railing waiting for the gate to open ; then stopped breathing as a tall man -- one of the Ruskies -- leaned over beside him and said, "It won't Work, friend."  Buckmaster tore up his ticket. Strangely, there was a sense of relief. The force -- the presence within him -- whatever it was, wanted him to return to his friends. It didn't compel him, it used no coercion. It merely presented good reasons for doing so. He could do more good there than by fleeing, it suggested. And, so strongly as almost to blot opt all other emotions, was the implanted desire -- an urgent, compelling command -- to stay and kill Koski. As Buckmaster started back, the thought struck him: Was he merely a pawn being moved by this inner power? Did he no longer have freedom of action? Was his will still his own? receive the summons from Koski. He fumed inwardly as he mounted the stairs to the General's second floor receiving room. It was always humiliating to be summoned like a common officer when he was in fact the ruler of the city. Koski had slipped bdly during the past few years but Wagner knew better than to put the old figurehead out of the way. He needed the power of that prestige until he had made his own position impregnable. Originally Wagner had been an unlettered lad from the steppes. When he had been made Koii's orderly, he had used his native cunning and slyness to ingratiate himself with the old commander. Soon Koski had made him his personal adjutant. From that advantageous position of trust it had been relatively simple for him to use his insidious talents to secure advantages for himself. During the process of organizing Superior's government Wagner had used his influence to get his own adherents appointed to key posts. By the time Koski began to succumb to the ravages of senility, Wagner held the most powerful position in the city -- that of Security Administratoti By now Koski was so far gone that he did not even realize he did not rule; that the city's functions had come under the control, direct and indirect, of Wagner. "You wanted to see me. Sir?" Wagner asked. "Yes," the General answered, the shaggy hairs of his eyebrows meeting in a frown. "Have the doctors found a remedy for the Plague yet? It has gone so far now that soon the manpower we must have for the Campaign will be threatened." "Not yet, Sir, but they are within sight of it." Wagner was always careful to keep the scorn he felt from his voice. The old dodderer was useful and must be pampered -- for awhile. The General still clung to his dream of the Campaign. His ultimate plan, from the time he had taken over Superior, had been to use the city as a base from which to spread his rule, until he had control of the entire continent -- in the name of the mother country, of course. He had never let himself see that it was but a dream. He was certain that he would find other pockets of his fellow-men who, like himself had set up autonomous governments. With their aid he stilk hoped for an ultimate victory over the enemy. This would always remain enemy territory to him. "If we don't stop the Plague before it spreads to our own men, I'U be forced to use the Weapon," Koski growled. His great bony features had lost all powder of expression except their habitual scowl, but his voice was still deep and vibrant. "I'll kill every man, woman, and child in the country!" Wagner had to admire the will to destruction that still rode the old man. He may have weakened in his mind but he had nver softened. And the Weapon? It was the one secret that Wagner had not been able to learn. "Yes, Sir," Wagner agreed. "If you should ever feel the need to use the Weapon, I ask you to remember that my only wish is to be of aid to my General." Koski's washed blue eyes grew crafty. "I fully realize that. But I will need no help. You may accept my compliments and withdraw." W agner muttered a soft oath under his breath as he bowed humbly. jtx, die," Buckmaster said. The two chairs in the small room were occupied by the men he faced. He sat on a steel-framed bed. "No," Lester Oliver was thoughtful. "I'm wondering why you didn't. Do you have any explanation?" "Only something that you wouldn't understand, unless it happened to you," Buckmaster answered. "I couldn't explain it." "Try." Oliver spoke softly, but Buckmaster knew that behind that softness Oliver hid a bulldog tenacity. Carefully, patiently Buckmaster told about the Force, trying to make them sense it as he had. "You feel then," Cecil Cuff, the other man in the room, said, "that you're in the grip of something over which you have no direct control?" "Yes?' "Are you certain that it is not the contact Wagner imposed on you?" "It came before Wagner was present," Buckmaster replied. Cuff turned to Oliver. "I know he believes what he is saying," he said. "But it's obvious that his mind has been tampered with. If we let him live, we'll be taking the risk that the General and Wagner are getting at us, through him." "That's right," Oliver answered. "I think he should be killed," Guff said. Oliver was thoughtful for a l#ng moment. "What do you think, Clifford?" he asked gently. He always called Buckmaster by his first name. Buckmaster breathed deeply. "Naturally I want to live," he answered. "But from the viewpoint of the Underground I suppose Cuff is right." "You say that you feel that this Force is a protective one," Oliver said. "Does it seem to you that perhaps we couldn't kill you -- that it would prevent us?" Buckmaster searched for words to express his thoughts. "I feel," he said, "that it won't let me be killed. It seems that I have a mission to fulfill, and that it won't let me die -- at least not until I accomplish what it desires. However, I feel also that it will, or can, do nothing concrete to prevent my being killed. It will probably aid me by convincing you that it would be better to let me live." "Do you feel that its purpose might be much the same as ours, and that it will attempt to convince us of that?" Oliver asked. "Something like that," Buckmaster answered. "At least the urge to kill Koski is so strong within me that I know I would not hesitate if I had the chance, even if it meant my own life' "Would you attempt to stop us if we tried to kill you?" "No." Oliver closed his eyes. He was silent for so long that it seemed he must be sleeping. But Buckmaster knew that Oliver's brain worked with lightning speed while his body reposed. Oliver was the most intelligent man he had ever known. He was head of the Underground solely because he was the fittest man for the job. F inally Oliver spoke. "We'll come back to it later," he said. "Did you learn anything that might help us, Clifford?" "I learned that the Plague is spread by contact -- only after the first symptoms show themselves. I read that in Wagner's mind before he realized that I was reading hl thoughts." "That will help. You say you made contact before you became en rapport with Wagner. Gan you control what you let him learn through you?" "I believe I ean, but I cant be certain." "If yOu could be certain, we wouldn't have to kill you," Oliver said. "You would be taking a chance," Buckmaster replied. "We can't afford to take any chances," Guff said. "He -- " "Yx)u're forgetting one thing, Cecil," Oliver interrupted. "As things stand right now, we're a lost cause. The Plague has killed many of our best men. The only thing that keeps Koski from staging a blood-bath is his fear of Governor Olson in Duluth. And pretty soon he won't have to fear that. We have only to lose another key dozen and Olson will have no friends here to aid." "May I offer a compromise?" Buckmaster asked. "As matters stand now, our only chance of winning freedom from Koski's savage rule is to kill him. And to do that we will have to kill Wagner first. Am I correct?" "Yes." Oliver raised his head. "What do you have to suggest?" "Let me try to kill Wagner. If I succeed our cause will have taken a big step. If he kills me first, then you've lost nothing more than if you'd killed me yourselves." After a barely perceptible hesitation Oliver nodded in agreement. For the rest of the day Buckmas-. ter improvised a simulated course of action to let seep through to Wagner whenever he felt a probe. He kept his mind blank otherwise and was quite certain that he carried on the deception well. He caught nothing from Wagner in return that was not deliberately let through. He suspected that his own control was as good. Though he had not had the practice at this that Wagner had. Toward evening he improvised a crisis. The Underground was plotting something big, he transmitted. He made the need for action imperative and asked for a personal interview. At first Wagner demurred. He wanted Buckmaster to stay on and give first hand reports. Buckmaster gave hints in return that he was suspected by the other members, and indicated that he must leave while still able to. Finally Wagner agreed. ' "You realize the risk you're taking, coming with me, Cecil?" Buckmaster asked. "I do," Cuff said with his unchangeable reserve. "But you'll need my help." Buckmaster wished he himself could remain as cool. His own nerves felt like wires that had been drawn too tightly. Cuff was tall and robust, with a pessimistic outlook on life... He seemed to sit back and watch life and its peoples as a spectator, willing to fight ruthlessly for what he believed was right, but never expecting to discover anything fine enough in his fellow men to hope for anything better from them. He had touched the borders of an existence that was mean and hard and dirty and he had long ago despaired of finding anything else. Yet there was nothing apathetic about his personality. Life's illusions were gone, but its fascination remained. too much," Buckmaster said. Cuff acknowledged the statement by nodding his head. "I believed that you might be under Wagner's power. Wagner is a brute trying to break us. On this trip you're going to make your own heaven or hell, and if you've got the courage to face it, I'll back you up." In the Administration Building the girl at the information desk told them, "The Director will see you in a moment." She led them into a waiting room. Three hard-faced men, all wearing black shirts, came in. They had the mark of killers about them. "Stand up." They checked fiuckmaster and Guff forweapons. None was found. All five toak the elevator to the sixth floor. Wagner was seated at his desk waiting for them when they walked into his office. He smiled his mirthless smile. "I see you brought com pany' he said. "We'll get two birds with one stone." Buckmaster knew then that there was little use trying any further deception. Wagner knew. If he were able to squeeze through just a short ten seconds the job could still be done. The three bodyguards stood a few yards behind them. "I have something here that will interest you' Buckmaster said. Slowly, Unhurriedly, but wasting no motion, he unbuttoned one flap on his shirt and reached a hand inside. He peeled back the long strip of adhesive tape covering the cavity below his ribs. He pulled out the small single-shot derringer con cealed there. Jle aimed from the waist and put the bullet into the middle of Wagner's smile. The smile cracked, and the crack became a shatter spreading in all directions. Buckmaster saw the trap then. He had shot at a reflection of Wagner. It had been a cleverly arranged mirror deception. Cuff turned to run through the door they had entered. But Buckmaster was so certain any attempt to escape would be in vain that he did not even move. Guff found the three guards blocking the doorway Buckmaster watched Wagner enter from opposite the cracked rnir ror. There were two more of his bodyguards with him. When the guards closed in Guff struggled until they spun him back against the wall where his head crashed with a dull crunch All the fight went out of him and he slumped in the arms of the men who held him. T wd of the guards held Buckmaster's arms. "A couple of fine birds,' Wagner said as he stood in front of them. Guff straightened with an effort of will and shook his head until his vision cleared He leveled his glancd at Wagner. "You're a mongrel cur," he said unemotionally;, "licking at the General's boots. He'll throw you another Scrap for this day's work." Both he and Buckmaster knew that he sealed his dWn fate with the words. The one thing Wagner could not tolerate Was ridicule, worse in the presence of his own men. Buckmaster caught the hard flat explosion in his face and pain in his eardrums as the gun that ap peared in Wagner's hand went off. As he watched Guff slump he knew the man was beyond torture. He suspected that this was what Guff had wanted. He had taken the easy way out. Buckmaster leaned his shoulders back and then with sudden violence pulled his arms free from the guards' grip. He slapped Wagner across the mouth with his left hand and brought his right fist around in a short arc that crushed the bone in Wagner's nose. He made no resistance as the guards grabbed him and twisted his arm cruelly behind his back. The hurt from Wagner's shattered nose brought a bright glisten of pain into his eyes. "That was a mistake' Wagner said, the depth of his anger making his voice soft and husky, "Fm going to make you whine like a dog." T he general was suffering the tragedy of a strong man whose mind was turning senile -- and who realized it. Only the two alternative objectives remained virile ; the Campaign and, that failing, the Weapon. The Weapon gave him his only solace in times of trouble. Now, going down into the basement of his house, he sought it out again. Letting himself through two thick concrete doors, which he opened with a key that he wore about his neck at all times, he entered the room that held his potentially terrible secret. The outer contour of the Weapon was a rectangular frame of rough lumber. Inside was a metal box, and in this reposed a semiglutinous mass of liquid. Nothing more. On the shelf above rested a bottle of aqua fortis. Quite simple substances -- apart. Together they could spell the destruction of a world. The Dictator himself, had given Koski his instructions long before, back in the homeland. "General," you are being sent with an army, but its purpose is to protect your Weapon, and to bring it into a position of maximum effectiveness, rather than to fight. You fully understand, I hope, that if you ever have to use it, your mission will certainly be fatal to yourself?" "I understand, Sire," Koski answered. 'T am thankful for the honor you have done me." "Your mission is to carry the Weapon to a central location on the North American continent. I believe you have the force necessary to accomplish that." Koski nodded but said nothing. "The component ingredients of the Weapon I know no better than you yourself. It was developed at the Institute. Its special faculty is its ability to free hydrogen from the moisture in the air, and to start a chain reaction. The physicists tell me that it will sear most of the continent once it starts reacting. About the only spot that would be spared are the dry regions, and maybe not even those. Just one thing you must remember -- do not use it unless you are certain that the war is definitely lost. Do you understand the importance of that command?" "I do," Koski answered. "But wouldn't it be better to use it as soon as possible? The lives of my men and myself would be a small price to pay for victory." "True, except for one big question," the Dictator replied. "The explosive is so deadly that it was impossible to experiment. There is no such thing as a little bit of it. Consequently we are not certain of its effects. We expect, and hope, that it will dissipate itself as it spreads too far from its initial explosion point, but we cannot be certain. It is possible that, once released, it will devastate the entire world. You see now why it must be used only as a last resort?" Many times since Koski had gone over that conversation in his mind. Had the war been lost? Neither side had come through with functioning governments. Therefore, what course should he take? Pef- haps the invaders even now ruled the homeland. Would he gain, or would he lose the last cha;ice for ultimate victory by setting off the explosive? During the rare moments when his mind Cleared, Koski realized the small chance the Campaign would have. At such times the Weapon beckoned. He knew then that the Campaign would never be completed in his lifetime. Wagner, however, was a very good man, with all the ideals of his country He would carry on. It needed only a slight variation in the trend of events, to tip that scale one way or the other. Even now the General held the bottle of aqua fords in his hand -- undecided. The fate of the world teetered. "You aren't so pretty anymore,' Wagner said. "Neither are you," Buckmaster answered through battered, bloody lips. He Wondered where he found the strength to keep taunting Wagner. He could feel that his face was a lumpy mess. One eye was closed and blood, running down into the other, kept blinding him. Every muscle in his body ached from the pounding it had taken, and he sus pected that his left arm was broken. He sagged in his bonds. Wagner, he knew, was deliberately gauging the punishment. He meant to torture him to the verge of death, but he did not intend to let him die without further torment. Buckmaster wondered how much more he could stand. Long ago he had despaired of any help from the Force. He had felt nothing since the torture started. It was evident that it couldn't do anything, or would not, to stop this orgy of sadism. And he knew that any subtle attempts to divert Wagner from his sadistic pleasure would be useless. Wagner had ail the instruments required for refined torture here. It was evident that he had used them many times in the past. He strapped Buckmaster's wrists to a waist-high wooden rack. "You'll be pleased to know that I have made a thorough study of the human anatomy," Wagner said. "Therefore, when I begin cutting off your limbs, one joint at a time, you won't have to worry. I'll see that you do not die -- and also that you retain consciousness. I wouldn't want you to miss the exquisite deli cacy with which I perform the operations. You'll be a basket case when I get through." Wagner picked up a short scalpel with an edge honed to a fine, razor sharpness. "This is a delicate little experiment that I find very effective," he said. He lifted Buckmaster's right index finger and cut deeply through the flesh' of its tip. The intense acuteness of the sensitive nerves made the agony unbearable. Wave after wave of shock sensations struck at his nerve fibers as the blade traced a raw red path through another finger-tip. Sickness gathered in his stomach and retched up into his throat to gag him. He sucked in great gulps of air until at last he could stand no more pain and welcome oblivion blanked him out. He returned to consciousness to no find Vagner still there -- waiting. "Tsk, tsk' Wagner chided. "So you're not so tough, after all? And just when it was getting interestThis time Buckmaster did not have the strength to defy him. He was beaten. He prayed that Wagner would tire of his pleasure before he had to stand any more. He wanted to go out still a man, and not a broken hulk, tearful, pleading, begging for mercy. "I think you're ready for something a bit more subtle," Wagner said. He concentrated his gaze on Buckmaster's eyes and slowly, cruelly built up a mental strain. The mind contact still held. Buckmaster realized that Wagner had been keeping this until he .was too mentally whipped to fight back. He was surprised then to feel that he fought off the pressure with little strain to himself. Still lurking there in his mind, was the Force, quiet, hardly felt, bdt virile, with a sense of dynamic quiescence potency! Hope came where all hope had been dead. Something within him throbbed like electricity, and he sent a bolt of mental energy at Wagner's head. The shock of the emotional concussion brought blood bursting from Wagner's nostrils and eye sockets. A red tide poured from his lips. His head dropped loosely and Buckmaster knew that Wagner was dead even before he fell from his chair. Buckmaster sat astounded at the demonstration of power. He sat for a moment listening to the. inner voice that sent up its answers to his silent questions. No, it hadn't been able to help him before. Its power was not physical. No, it could not help him escape. From here he was on his own. The only satisfaction he received was the closer entity he had found between himself and the Force. It seemed to him now that it did not come from the outside. Rather it was an essential part of himself. Or, more exactly, he was a part of that Force. Buckmaster worked his wrists backwards in their thongs until he forced the leather straps over the bases of his hands. Thus he was able to bend his wrists. Slowly, painfully, he brought up his right leg until his foot rested next to his right hand. The left foot next. Once he almost lost his balance. But at last he stood with his feet straddling his hands. He exerted all the strength of his leg, arm, and trunk muscles. The pain from his broken arm was a sickening thing but slowly the leather bands began to tear loose from the rivets that held them. A last mighty e;xertion and he was free. Wagner had a private elevator. Buckmaster entered and went to a ground floor. He walked out of the building through a tradesmen's entrance into a dusky alley. Keeping his good arm in front of his face he staggered around the corner and into a drugstore and reached a phone booth without being observed. He put in a call and crouched in the phone booth for the ten long minutes it took Oliver to come for him. "Two weeks aren't very long to get you well, Clifford," Oliver said, "but I'm afraid it's all the time we have I'm softy"' "You did yout best' Buckmaster answered "At least you've got m# pfetty well patched up." "The last reports Wete that the police have drawn a ring around this district and that they're closing in." "Do We have any Way out?" "I hate to have to say this Oliver said slowly. "But the rest of Us can get out -- if we don't take you with us." B uckmaster had expected this. It seemed that he had known from the beginning that he Would never live to see the end of this adventure. "It's all right. Is there anything I can do to help "No. They won't stop us if you aren't along You're the man they're after. If there were any way I could help you by staying, I'd never leave. But I'd only be captured with you, and nothing gained." "Of course I understand." Buckmaster rested his hand for a mo ment on the old leader's shoulder. "Don't feel badly about it Lester. The men need you. You owe it to them to get out if you can." Oliver gripped his hand. "Before I go I want you to know how grate ful we are for the help you've given us. Without Wagner the General won't be nearly as hard to handle And one other thing: I don't want you to hope too much, but there! still a chance we may be able to get you out. I'm trying a long shot. So if someone comes for you, go with himi In the meantime, keep your chin Up.' They shook hands again. Buck" master surmised that Oliver was trying to give him something to cling to while he waited for the end. Then he was alone. Three hours later Buckmaster spotted the first of his executioners f One of the Ruskies that walked with studied unconcern across the street Almost at the same time he heard a rap on the rear door of the apartment. He drew the gun Oliver had left with him and walked slowly to the door. "Who is it?" "Oliver sent me for you," the voice on the other side of the door answered. "Gome in with your hands up." Buckmaster flattened himself against a side wall and shoved hi! gun into the ribs of a tail young man. "Who are you?" "My name is August Gamoll' the man said. Somehow the name Was familiar. He diould recognize it, Buckmaster thought. Abruptly he did. "What are you trying to do?" Buckmaster asked harshly. "Maket a small-time hero of yourself with this grandstand play?" "Not at all," Gamoll answered "I'm the long shot Oliver mentioned." "You're lying." ' , "Then how would I know what Oliver said?" "It may be a lucky guess. Why should I trust you?" "Mainly because you have no choice. What have you got to lose?" He was a cool character. Buckmaster shrugged. He hated this playing it blind, but the fellow was right. he said. "You might as well take your hands down. Let's go." They went down the stairs. At the rear exit Gamoll looked out. He wore no hat. The wind from the alley fluffed the hair on the side of his head. "All clear " Gamoll said. "Make a dash for it. When you get in tiie carriage lie low. Now!" The die was cast, Buckmaster decided. He'd play It to the hilt now, all or nothing. He sprinted across the dirt of the alley and jerked open a door of the carriage. He threw himself inside and hugged the floor. Soon the carriage began to roll. When they had travelled about a half block it stopped. Buckpi aster drew in his breath. This was the critical point. If Gamoll could bluff his way through now the rest would be comparatively easy. "Give me an escort, Captain," he heard Gamoll say. "I don't want to get tied up here. I understand there's gQing to be some shooting soon." "That's right, sir," a crisp military voice answered. "It's best that you get out fast. I'll send one of my men with you." The carriage started forward again. A half-hour later it stopped once more. "You may get up now," Gamoll said. "We're going inside. Stay close to me." prised when he alighted and found himself near a side door to the General's private residence, "I don't get all this,"Buckmaster said. "You've had me here for six days now, and I've only seen you twice. Why should the General's son be hiding me?" "Quite simple. I don't like his methods, or his government, any more than you do. Oliver knew that when he sent his message to me asking for help." "Do you mean to say that you'd help us kill your own father?" "As to that," Gamoll said, "if you'll notice, my hair and eyes are brown. "So?" "Koski's eyes and my mother's are blue. You probably know that it is genetically impossible for twoblue-eyed people to have a browneyed son." "Then you're not his son?" Buckmaster was silent for a minute. "That's why you took the name of your mother's other husband," he mused. "If you remember, when the law was passed that each woman must have two husbands, the General set the example by marryipg a woman who already had a husband. He knows that I am not his son biologically, but I am legally, and I have full inheritance rights. He was too smart -- as well as legally exact -- to disown me." "That means you'd automatically become the government head if the General died?" "Yes. But you're wrong if you think that I am doing this from any selfish motive. If I succeed, I'll institute a democratic form of government at my first opportunity." "I'll wait until I see it" Buckmaster answered cynically. "But if It's true are your ideals strong enough to help us kill him?" For the first time Gamoll seemed uncertain of hirnself. "Why is it necessary to kill him, especially now that Wagner is dead? We both know that Wagner did the actual ruling. And the General is an old man, without much longer to live. We'll win if we do no more than stand by." "He must dieand soon!" Buck- master exclaimed" surprised at the vehemence of the words. So vital had been the command, that he knew what he had said was true: Koski must die, in the very near future. Though he himself was not certain of the need for such urgency. "I suppose I understand Gamoll said, a trifle uneasily. "You have to act in self-defense! If you don't kill him, he will probably be able to kill many more of your men before he dies. But try to see his side. He is the representative of a Cause that is just -- to his way of reasoning; so right and so just that he will do anything to advance it. Whatever we may think of him, hii conscience Is clear. I ofily ask you this! If you can See yoUT way clear to attain your ends without For another nine days Buckmaster stayed with Gamoll. He had nothing to occupy his time. In idle curiosity he went through the books in Gamoll's library. The young man owned many good booki Before long Buckmaster's idle brOwng turned to an intent search. For the first time he began finding clues to the mystery that rode with in him. His first clue, he thought, was a passage he read in a physics book entitled, "The Limitations of Sci ence," by Sullivan: Research has changed our whole conception of matter The first step was the perimental demonstration that there exist little electrified bodies, very much smaller than a hydrbgeri atom, called electrons Measurement was made with the result that the whoie mass of the electron was found to be due to its electric charge This was the first indication that the material universe is not the substantial, objective thing we had always taken it to be Mat ter began to thin away into the completely spectral thing it has now become. The notion of substance had to he replaced by the notion of behavior He passed readily from physics to the more fertile field of philosophy with the groping statement of Voltaire: I have seen that which is called matter both as the star Sirius, and as the smallest atom which can be perceived with the microscope; and I do not know What this matter is. He pursued this quest readily with the philosopher Schopenhauer and passed almost ' imperceptibly into metaphysics: I will never believe that even the simplest chemical combination wilt ever admit of mechanical explanation; much less the properties of light, heat, and electricity. These will always require a dynamical explanation. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own fninds we shall perhaps have the key to the exief nd world. Let us say, then, that repulsion and attraction, combination and decomposition, magnetism and electricity, gravity and crystalliza tion, are Will. Will, then, is the essence of man. Now what if it is also the essence of life in all its forms, and even of Hnanimate matter? What if Will is the longsought'for, the longdespaired-of , Hhe thing-in-itself  -- the ultimate inner reality and se cret essence of all things? Buckmaster perceived that these men were catching glimpses of something which they called Will, Order, Thing, Absolute, and other names but which were all very probably the same thing -- and also that which he sought. Eagerly he read on. His next clue came from Bergson: Thought may begin with its object, and at last, in consistency, be driven, by the apparent necessities of logic, to conceive all things as forms and creatures of mind. Quickly he passed on to Spinoza where he found a wealth of food for thought. Is the body merely an idea? Is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, a diffused consciousness that animates the. world? There is but one entity, seen now inwardly as mind, now outwardly as matter, but in reality an inextricable mixture and unity of both. Eternal order... that betokens the very structure of existence, underlying all events and things, and constituting the essence of the world. Substance is insubstantial, that it is form and not matter, that it had nothing to do with that mongrel and neuter composite of matter. Bruno said; All reality is one in substance, one in cause, one in origin; mind and matter are one. Descartes' conception of a homogeneous "substance" underlying all forms of matter intrigued him for a time, and he wrestled mentally with the classic quotation, I think, therefore I am. Berkeley wrote ; A thin is merely a bundle of perceptions -- i. fi., classified and interpreted sensations. Hegel: The Absolute, transcending the individual limitations and purposes, and catching, underneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of all things. Reason is the substance of the universe. Leibniz; Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream, and the visible world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it. F or a time Buckmaster left the philosophers and read poetry. He found germs of what he sought in some of them, as Goethe's, The force which draws the lover, and the force which draws the planets are one. He found it beautifully in a stanza of Wordsworth's. Something Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air,  And the blue sky, and the mind of man ; -- A motion and a spirit, all objects of all thought. And rolls through all things. In the main, however, he found in the poets that the grains of wheat wete too few amidst the chaff and Returned to philosophy. Most of these excerpts, he felt, were clues to the enigma of him self. He knew that these great minds had touched on the very mystery that puzzled him. Once again he felt on the verge of understanding. Did he have all the pieces? Could he fit them into the pattern, if he but knew how? Or must he need to learn more? Suddenly he found the explanation in a book of essays by, the incongruity of it struck him as ironical, an anonymous writer. He read : For a time, during the middle ages, the theory that all th world, and even the universe, were figments of one giant imagination, swayed the thinkers of the world. The intellect in which this imagination centered was focused in one man, and one man only, in the whole of existence. That man was the one fnan who Uhought. All other men all other matter, were but imagined props with no actual existence. That man is the one who Uhinks!' 'You -- and only "you, the person who is reading this -- in the whole world. It does not matter what your name might be. It might be...  Clifford Buckmaster knew then the mystery of life, who he was, and why. He no longer concentrated, but his eyes read on: At first glance it would seem that there is a con eerted conspiracy to avoid acknowledging this fact. Learned men, acquiring wisdom, come to the brink of the great discovery, and then deftly skirt it, blinding themselves to its evidentness. However, on second thought the reason is obvious, The theory is anarchistic ; it carries the seeds of its own futility. If they were ever to admit the truth of it, all reason for everything -- theit very discovery, their very thoughts -- would be futile. So they refuse to recognize it. Your obvious question is. How can I tell you this? Who am I -- the writer of this essay? The answer is quite simple. I am merely a figment of your imagination, as is everything else about you! At last he knew. His first sensation was one of awful, empty solitude. He was one creature -- alone. Alone in a universe! He was ah entity living in a dream world. All about him were the figments of an imagination -- presumably his own. And even knowing, he still had no control of events -- like a dream that cannot be halted or changed. The people about him were automatons, in fact they possessed no actual substance. Even his own body was but a figment -- but he could be hurt! He had experienced the most acute pain, and very probably he could be killed. He had, however, little time tb brood on it. At that instant in his reflections Gamoll jerked open the library door and walked in. "The worst has happened," he exclaimed. "The security police have caught Oliver' "What can we do?" Buckmaster still could not regard Gamoll, or Oliver and his friends, as nonentities. "I hate to say this," Gamoll said, "but you'll have to get out, I may be able to help Oliver escape, but I'll be powerless if they learn that I'm connected with the Underground." "They probably wouldn't hesitate to kill you also," Buckmaster said. "That wouldn't be too important, if my dying would accomplish anything," Gamoll said. "But the Underground's only hope seems to be my keeping clear." Slowly, almost unobtrusively, a vision rose up before Buckmaster's eyes. Gamoll's features clouded, became vague, and were gone. In his place stood the General. In the General's hand was a bottle, and before him a wooden frame, holding a metal box with its lid open. Buckmaster realized that what he was seeing was happening in some see cement walls in the room in which the General stood, Probably the basement, he thought. Within him the Force commanded! He must get to the General, and kill him. The world was on the brink of disaster. And time was running out. posite vision vanished and he saw the handsome features of Gamoll again. He knew .what he had to do now. "I'm leaving irhmediately," he said. Closing the library door behind him he walked unhesitatingly down a long hallway. To either side of him, painted on the walls, were murals, depicting peasants in the fields, harvesting grain. Idly he observed the painted figures as he walked, with his brain chilled and numbed of almost all emotion. The painted figures possessed as much reality as anything else about him, he thought disinterestedly. He w'alked down steps and across an inner courtyard, his legs moving stiffly, lifelessly. He continued up the steps on the far side of the courtyard, his mind shutting out everything around him except the door ahead. When he reached there he stopied. Here, he knew, he was at the crossroads. He could move straight ahead through the door, or he could walk around the house and enter the basement through the back. That was the longer way, but probably the safer. And the Force urged the second choice. A mood of black frustration swept over him and some perverse stubbornness of his human nature rebelled at this supine abnegation. He knew that he was going to die, and his one last defiant act would be to die in a way of his own choosing. He walked straight ahead. As he opened the door and stepped into a long green-carpeted room he found himself facing three guards. They held guns and the guns were all aimed at him. Even before he observed that the guards were firing, he felt the killing slugs enter his body. He knew the bullets had reached vital organs and that he was about to die. Within him he felt the Force, angry and rebuking. He felt a wrench at the cote of his body structure -- and he was walking -- walking -- endlessly -- down a long corridor. On the walls to either side of him were the figures of harvesters painted on yellow murals. His body was alive and vital. He walked on, through a doorway and out into a courtyard before he realized what had happened. The Force had turned time backward! He was once mote on his way to shoot Koski. He was exactly the same as he had been the last time but with the addition of his memories of having been shot. And the silent warning that came to him never to expect another second chance. That could not be repeated. This time when he came to the fatal door there was no surge of rebellion and he did not hesitate. He walked around the house until he came to the basement entrance. Cement steps led downward. Two guards were waiting for him there. One guard fell as Buckmaster fired, but he knew with a terrible Certainty that he would not be able to kill the other in time to save himself. The guard's bullet crashed into Buckmasters diaphragm and his body jerked once but it did not stop its determined pacing forward. Buckmaster fired again but even as he did he felt a second bullet enter his body. It pierced his heart and he knew that he was dead. With dimming vision he watched the guard fall over on his side as his own bullet found its mark. Even as Buckmaster realised that the bitter fever of lif was over fdr him he knew that his body Would not stop. Without any directive frorn the brain it was using the last of the suspended energy in its blood and muscles to walk forward, driving with ah awful exertion. On he walked into the cement lined room. The General stood there, oblivious to the noise about him. The hair on the crown of his head parted violently as the bullet from the guri in Buckmaster's hand hfts mark. The gun became a weight too heavy for Buckmaster' s lifeless fingers and dropped to the floor. The last spark of life flickered for a brief moment where it had fled ih some inner recess of his brain and he felt the Force for the last time. Two words it spoke. "Well done," and he knew that at last his job was finished. Now he would return home! B uckmaster had reasoned well, considering his natural limitations. But the ttuth he had discovered was, like most truths, only part of a greater truth. In the far reaches of infinity, beyond the outermost boundaries of space, a thoughtvoice spoke. "Am I going to die?" it asked. "Not now,' a second entity answered. "The crisis is past." 'Will the sickness come again ?' "Not this particular form of rrialevolent psychosis," the second entity replied. "But perhaps you had better tell me all the facts you know so that I can advise you about the future." "My project, I still believe, was magnificent," the sick entity began. "From the energy of my essence I materialized a world of infinitesimal creatures. I gave them time and space, and built a background of a universe for their wonderment and speculation. They dwelt on their world, lived their lives, and made their tiny, though admirable, advances as they saw their destiny. And then, suddenly, when all seemed beautiful, something went wrong, and I was ill unto death. What did I do that was not right?" "I believe you made your mistake when you gave your creatures free will. 'They developed their malignancies, as well as their admirabilities. When they developed a malignancy of such virulence that they were in a position to destroy themselves, you made yourself vulnerable to death, through them. The shock of that devastation to you would have killed you. Tell me, weYe your creatures aware that they were figments of your mind?" "Some grasped inklings of it, though none were certain. One, a Baruch Spinoza, came as close to the truth as it was possible, for their finite minds. He wrote: We are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves and endless while We die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama' of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of an eternal light. Our mind, in so far as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another mode of thinking, and this one again by another, anfl so on to infinity. That was magnificant. While others who caught inklings of the truth believed that I was an ultimate being, he realized that I, too, had an ultimate being whom I j worshipped." j "Also, if he had been able to per ceive how close you were to death," I the second entity said, "he would  have realized that you were mortal,  which no ultimate being can be." "How were you able to circumvent the disaster that so nearly befell me?" "I sent a segment of my own mentality into your conceived world. I gave it a name, implanted a memory of a past into its mind, ' and that same memory into the ! minds of those creatures with whom ; it was supposed to have come into contact, in its past. Through that i segment I was able to destroy the awful potentiality, as well as the creature who controlled it. The ; secret now rests with the dead." "Is there any chance of a similar  recurrence?" "That chance will always exist j as long as you persist in allowing your creatures to have free will. I i would advise you to destroy it." For a time the patient was silent. "No," it said finally, "without that free will their existence and my entire project would be futile. I will let the free will remain and bear any consequences."  "That, of course, is your own choosing," the other said. And so man kept his greatest possession. By Ezra Shaw The Eterfidl Riddle What kind of life? Does it exist in any one of th forms recognizable to us? Or does the spirit of life -- "if any -- which may emanate elsewhere than on Earth breed a species totally unfamiliar to anything we can possibly imagine? Before looking for the answel to these questions, it is necessary to know certain facts ut the makeup of the planets. First -- do they have atmosphere? Atmosphere consists of a body of gases -- an aggregation of molecules in a state of perpetual motion -- surrounding a planet. The density of the gaseous atmosphere of the Earth or of any other planet decreases with an increasing distance from the surface of the planet. Near the upper limit of the atmosphere, where the density is very low, the molecules will travel for a considerable distance between collisions with other molecules If a molecule in this region happens to rebound after a collision in an outward direction and with a speed much greater than the average speed, it may escape into outer space, provided that it does not come into collision with any other molecule. For any particle, whether large or small, to be able to escape altogether, it is necessary that its velocity exceed a certain critical value -- the velocity of escape. This value is important in considering planetary atmospheres. tain height falls to the ground with an accelerated velocity because of the attracting force of gravity. If the stone is projected upwards with a velocity equal to that at which it hits the ground, its velocity will progressively decrease. Now -- forgetting gravitational attractions of other bodies in the atmosphereif the stone is dropped towards Earth from an infinitely great height, it will fall with a gradually increasing velocity which, when it reaches the ground, will have a definite velocity value. Using ,"V" as the velocity value, "G" as the Value of the constant of gravitation, "M" for the mass of the Earth and as its radius ; equals #GMrf Now, if the stone is projected upwards with a force equal to the velocity V, it will reach an infinitely great distance before it comes to rest ; if it is projected with a velocity less than V, it will eventually come to rest and then, fall back to Earth, because any velocity less than V corresponds to the velocity acquired in falling to the ground from a height that is finite. Thus, the stone can only get completely away from the Earth if its initial velocity is equal to or greater than V. This is why V is called the "velocity of escape". To determine the velocity necessary for any body to escape from the Earth, simply substitute the values for the constant of gravitation, and for the mass and radius of the Earth. In this way it can be found that the velocity of escape from the Earth is #.I miles a second. N ot a single molecule of the Earth's atmosphere can possibly escape into outer space unless its velocity exceeds the escape velocity. But whenever a molecule rebounds away from the Earth with a speed greater than the escape velocity, it will escape from the Earth's gravitation, provided that it does not collide with any other molecule. A loss of the faster moving molecules from the outer layers of the atmosphere is inevitable. There are various tnathematical principles concerning the velocity of escape of a molecule from its atmosphere. The actual calculations were made some years ago by Sir James Jeans, who found that if the velocity of escape is four times the average molecular velocity, the atmosphere would be practically completely lost in # years. If the velocity of escape is four and a half times the average molecular velocity, the atmosphere would be lost in # years. If the velocity of escape is five times the average molecular velocity, # quired for complete loss. On the basis of these figures, then, the large planets as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, may j be expected to have atmosphere  much more extensive than that of Earth. Venus' would be comparaI ble to Earth's. The atmosphere of  Mars is probably considerably thin ner than that of Earth, while Mer; cury and the Moon would have ; little or no atmosphere. j The Spectroscope  Assuming that a planet has i z  an atmosphere, the spectroI scope is used to study the compKJsir  tion of the planet. This instrument contains one or more prisms, the light from the planet is passed , through the spectroscope, and ; spreads out into a band or spectrum i showing the colors of the rainbow. Each point in the spectrum correj sponds to the definite wave-length. If sunlight is being analyzed --  the light being admitted through a : narrow slit -- the spectrum becomes  crossed by thousands of fine dark lines, each of which corresponds to ' a definite wave-length and a definite intensity. When an electric spark from between two pieces of iron is piassed through, the spectrum shows a considerable number of bright lines, spaced at irregular intervals and of different intensities. This particular series of lines is produced by no other element but iron. In a similar way, every other element has its own characteristic spectrum. If light from a hot in. candescent source which has a continuous spectrum showing all the colors of the rainbow is passed through the vapor of iron at a lower temperature, the continuous spectrum of the hot source will be crossed by a number of dark lines, each of which is exactly identical in wave-length with one of the bright lines in the spectrum of the incandescent iron vapor. Such a spectrum is called an absorption spectrum. The lines in the spectrum of the Sun are of this nature. The hot interior of the Sun would give a continuous spectrum, but the cooler outer layers absorb the radiations of various wave-lengths, thus producing the dark lines. These fine dark lines are known as the Fraunhofer lines -- so named after the physicist who first investigated them. Investigation of the spectrum of sunlight proves that iron is contained in the Sun. Similarly, the presence of many other elements are detected, as well as some fairly reliable conclusions as to their abundance. The Effect of Atmosphere however, enters into the analysis of light from the Sun. Since we make our observations from the bottom of Earth's atmosphere, the light from the Sun has to pass through this atmosphere before it reaches us, and some of it is of necessity absorbed in the atmosphere. Consequently, some of the absorption lines that are present in the observed spectrum of the Sun do not originate in the Sun, but in Earth's atmosphere. Of particular importance is the absorption produced by the small amount of ozone in the atmosphere. This is so strong that all of the light of wave-length shorter than # inch is completely absorbed, and none of the light in this region -- the ultra-violet region of the spectrum -- is accessible to observation. In analyzing the spectrum of the Sun, the question arises regarding both the absorptions that originate in the Sun itself and those that are produced by Earth's atmosphere. There are two ways in which the absorptions of terrestrial origin can be identified: ( I ) Compare the spectra of the Sun taken at different altitudes. The lower the altitude of the Sun, the longer the path that the light from the Sun has to travel through the atmosphere in order to reach Earth. (#) Compare the spectra of light from the east and west limbs of the Sun. Since the Sun rotates on its axis in about # days, the west limb is moving away from Earth while the east limb moves towards us. There is a slight separation between the corresponding absorptions in the light from the two regions. The absorptions that originate in our atmosphere are not affected by the Sun's rotations; these coincide in position in the spectra of the light from the two opposite limbs. If, then, the spectra of the eastern and western limbs of the Sun are photographed simultaneously or in immediate succession on the same plate, the absorptions of Earth origin can be immediately picked out, because they consist of all tKe obSofptions that coincide in position in the two spectra. advantageous than the first because it does not necessitate the comparison of spectra obtained at different altitudes and at different times. The planets are cool bodies having no intrinsic light of their own. A planet is seen only by means of the light from the Sun that falls upon it and is reflected. As the sunlight penetrates into the atmosphere of the planet, it is partially scat tered and partially absorbed. The depth to which it penetrates depends upon the nature and extent of the atmosphere; in some cases the light may not even reach to the surface of the planet. Since the light will bear some impress of its passage into and out of the atmosphere of the planet, when it is analysed by the spectroscope, absorptions that have originated in the atmosphere of the planet may be revealed which will give some clues to the nature of the atmosphere. An absorption in the atmosphere of the planet that does not correspond with any absorptions produced in the atmosphere of the Earth will be easily noted. Where, however, the absorptions will coincide with those produced by the same substances in the Earth's atmosphere, care is required to decide whether these ise in the atmosphere of the Earth, or whether they include the effect of absorptions originating in the atmosphere of the other planet. The two substances whose presence in the planetary atmosphere is of the greatest significance for the possibility of the existence of life, are oxygen and water vapor, and it these two substances whose presence may be most difficult to establish. There are two methods to distinguish whether an absorption is of terrestrial origin or of planetary origin : ( I ) Compare the spectrum of the planet with that of the Moon, obtaining the two on the same night and as nearly as possible to the same time, and at equal altitudes. Since the Moon is devoid of atmosphere, if any absorption is present it must originate in that of the planet. (#) The second method is based on the displacement of the absorption lines in the light from a moving source at a time when the planet is approaching or receding from the Earth most rapidly. The relative motion will displace the absorption due to the planet's atmosphere with respect to those due to our own atmosphere, and in this way it is possible to detect planetary absorptions of low intensity. This method is a very delicate one, and is especially useful for deciding whether substances that are present in our owti atmosphere are also present in the atmosphere of the other planet. temperature -- a Decisive Factor possibility of life on a particular planet, it is necessary that we have some general idea of its temperature conditions. Mercury -- which has very little or no atmosphere -- always keeps the same side toward the Sun. Suppose this planet has no heat output of its own, but that there is an exact balance between the heat that it receives from the Sun and that which it radiates into space. It would be simple to estimate the temperature of its surface by figuring according to Stefan's law -- that the total radiation from a body is proportioned to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. Using this observed value and equating the energy received and radiated, the highest temperature at any point on the surface of a planet that always turns the same face to the Sun, can be found, provided that the planet has no atmosphere and that it is a body that completely absorbs all the radiations falling on it. The dark side of the planet which receives no heat from thp Sun would be extremely cold. If the planet does not always turn the same side to the Sun, the effect of its rotation would be to lower the noonday temperature and to raise the night temperature. The faster the rotation, the smaller the difference between the day and night temperatures. For a sufficiently fast rotation, there would be no difference between day and night temperatures at any place on the planet; there would be, however, a variation of temperature with latitude, because the average rate of reception of heat from the Sun depends on the latitude. fects come into play on a planet that possess an atmosphere and, as on Earth, temperatures at any one place may differ considerably from day to day. The general  effect of an atmosphere, ,then, is a smoothing-out of the temperature differences between day and night, because there will be a persistent tendency for heat to be carried from the warmer to the cooler parts of the surface by warm air moving into colder regions and cold air moving into warmer regions. Too, the atmosphere of the Earth, and probably most planetary atmospheres, are opaque in many regions of the infra-red, corresponding to long wave-length radiations. Most of the solar heat is transmitted by the atmosphere, warming the surface of the planet, and much of this heat is radiated again as radiation of considerably longer wave-length, to which the atmosphere is opaque. The temperature is therefore raised considerably. The atmosphere exerts a blanketing effect by preventing the escape of the radiations of long wave-length. Then the fall of temperature at night become less rapid. The Nature and Use of the Bolometer junction with a sensitive detector of radiation, is used to measure the radiation received on the Earth from the planets. A bolometer or a thermocouple may be used for detecting and measuring the radiation. In the bolometer, the radiant energy is focused on to a minute strip of, platinum which forms one arm of an electrical circuit known as a Wheatstone's bridge. A similar strip, shielded from the radiation, forms a second arm of# the bridge, which is bah anced against the first. When the radiant energy falls on the first arm of the bridge, it is heated, its resistance is increased, the balance of the bridge is upset and a current flows through the galvanometer of the bridge. The deflection of the galvanometer provides a measure of the intensity of the radiation falling on the bolometer. The thermocouple consists of a small junction of two tiny .strips of different metals. When the junction is heated, a thermoelectric current, whose strength is proportional to the intensity of the radiation, flows through the circuit and is measured by a sensitive galvanometer. A highly sensitive thermocouple will detect the heat from a candle at a distance of three miles bolometer provides a measure of the total radiation from the planetj as modified by absorption in the Earth's atmosphere. A slight correction must be applied to the measures to allow for this effect. A measure of the total planetary radiation is obtained when it is applied. This consists in part of reflected sunlight and in part of the lowtemperature longwave radiation from the planet itself. It is the latter portion that provides inforfnation about the planet's temperature. It is necessary, therefore, to separate it from the portion that is merely reflected sunlight. The separation is easily effected by placing a small transparent vessel containing water in the path of the rays. The water transmits the portion of the radiation of relatively short waVe-length -- the reflected sunlight portion but hi opaque to the long-wave planetary portion Thus, the true heat radiation from the planet is measured. If atmosphere and ternperatufe have a similarity to that of Earth's, we can safely assume that the planet has life similar to that here on Earth. But if these factors vary in any great degree, then living matter if such etists -- will be in, a nature of which we have no knowledge. Ten miracles were arranged for the agelong flight. But they reckoned without T he seventh tub shook gently, stimulating the hypothalamic region of Eric's brain for the first time in almost two centuries. After a time, his limbs trembled and his body began to shiver. The liquid in which he floated boiled off at a temperature still far below that which would permit his body to function. By the time all the liquid was gone he had uncurled and lay at the bottom of the tub. Now his heart pumped three hundred times a minute, generating warmth and activating his central nervous system. It took many hours for his heart to slow -- not back to the one beat every two minutes it had known for a hundred-seventy five years, but to the normal rate of about seventy per minute. By then his body temperature had climbed from below freezing to # F. Eric lay in stupor for a week, while fluids flowed into the tub and massaged his muscles, while fatty tissue slowly turned into strength. Finally, he climbed from his tub. He found the locker which bore his name, and opened it. Six other lockers were open and empty, as were six tubs. He found that hard to believe. It had seemed only a night of deep and dreamless sleep, no more. But each empty tub stood for twenty-five years, each open locker meant a man had gone and lived his time with the new generations of the ship, perhaps had sired children, had died with old age.  Eric found his clothing on a At intervals of twenty-five years, they would arise to police the ship. hook, took it down. Yesterday -- he laughed mirthlessly when he realized that had been almost two hundred years ago -- Clair had told him something about a note. He found it in the breast pocket of his jumper, stiff and yellow. He read: Darling: I will he ashes in the void between the stars when you read this. That sounds silly, but ifs the truth -- unless I can give old Methuselah a run for his money; I sadden when I think that you will be gone tomorrow, the same as dead. But if they need ten and if you are one who can withstand suspension -- what can we do? Know that my love goes with you across the ages, Eric. I just thought of something. Youll be the seventh of ten, with the last one coming out at planetfall. If you live to be a real graybeard, you might even see the landing on the Centaurian planet. I love you. Clair -- If Clair had married, her great grandchildren might be alivmow. Her great great grandchildren would be Eric's age. Clair's progeny, not Clair -- because Clair was dust now, a light year back in space -- He found a package of cigarettes in his jumper, took one out and lit it. He must not think, of the past, not when it was only history now although he still felt very much a part of it. Today mattered, today and the new generations on the ship. It crossed his mind that they might regard him almost as a god, a man who had seen Earth, who had slept while generations lived and died, who came from his impossible sleep and would live with them now to see that everything was going according to plan. Three minutes after he started the mechanism, the door slid ponderously into the wall. It would open more simply from the other side, he knew, but then only Eric and the three who still slept could turn its complex tumblers. For a long while he stood there on the threshold and then he watched the door slide back into place. soft white light, which meant it was daytime on the ship. Dimly in the distance, Eric heard voices, children at play. Would they know of him? Would their parents know? Was he expected? Eric came closer. Through a doorway he could see the children, three of them, although they had not yet seen him. A chubby, frecklefaced boy said : "Let's play Lazarus. I must be the Captain, and you, Janie, you can be the crew. George, you be Lazarus." George was a big ten-year-old with dark hair. "Like heck I will! It was your idea, you be Lazarus, smart guy." Eric stepped through the doorway. "Hello," he said. "Gan you take me to your folks?" "Who're you. Mister?" "Hey, I don't know him I Where'd he come from?" The girl, Janie, said, "Lookit his clothes. Lookit. They're different." The children wore loose tunics. pastel-tinted, to their kilees. Freckle-Face said: "You know what today is, doncha?" George frowned. "Yeah, holiday We're off from school." "What holiday, stupid? Which one?" "I -- I dunno." "Lazzy-day!" Janie cried, "That's what it is. Then he's --  he's -- " "Lazarus!" Freckle-Face told her, and, as if on One inipulse, the three of them bolted away from Eric, disappeared through another doorway. He did not follow them. He stood there, waiting, and before long he heard footsteps returning. A man entered the room, tall, thin, middleaged. "You are Eric Taine," he said, smiling. "I'm sorry no one was around to greet you, but the way We had it figured, yOu wouldn't come out till later this afternoon. History says that's how it worked with the six before you, about fouf P.M. It's just noon now. Will yoU follow me, please?" Then the man flushed faintly. "Excuse me, but it isn't often we meet strangers. Everyone knows everyone else of course. My name is Lindquist, Mr. Taine. Roger Lindquist." Eric shook hands with him, stiffly, and he thought for a moment the man did not know the gesture, "Ah yes, handshaking," Lindquist laughed. "We simply show empty palms iiow, you know. But then, you don't know. I rather imagine you'll have a lot to learrt." Eric nodded, asked Lindquist ii he might be shown about the hip. There was a lot he had to see, td check, to change if change were needed. "Relax, my friend," Lindquist told him. "I'd -- ah, like to suggest that we postpone your tour until you've met with our Council this afternoon. I'd very much like to suggest that." Eric shrugged, saidt "You know more about this than I do, Mr. Lindquist. We'll wait for ' your . Council meeting." X Captain Larkinj hours later, "tradition has it that you become a king. King Lazarus Seven -- with six Lazaruses before you. The first one, the histories say, was a joke. But it's stuck ever since. The people like this idea of a king who coitiea to them every twenty five years --  and they've dubbed him with the name Lazarus, well, because if he didn't come back from the dead, he came back from something a lot like it." Efft nodded. "What happened to Alan Bridges?" "Who?" This was Lindquist "Alan Bridges, the man before me -- your Lazarus Six." Captain Larkin cleared his throat. "He's dead, Mr. Taine." "Dead? He'd only be in his fifties now -- " "I know. Sad. It was disease, hit him soon after he came to us. Lazarus Six had a very short reign. Didn't he, Mr. Lindquist?" "He certainly did," Lindquist agreed. "Let's hope that Lazarus Seven is here to step down for Eight-and to Watch Nine come in, fifty years from now!" Cheers filled the room and Eric smiled briefly. That reminded him of Clair's note. Clair -- "So," said Captain Larkin, "you'll be crowned tomorrow. After that, your people will see you. King Lazarus Seven on his throne. Don't disappoint us, Mr. Taine. Their tradition means a lot to them." "It should," Eric said. "The planners made it that way. With nothing but space outside, and the confining walls of the ship, they needed something to bind them together." "Yes,that's true. But the people, as you'll see, have come up with some of their own traditions over the years." Captain Larkin ran a hand through his graying hair. "Like your kinghood, for example. You'll see, Mr. Taine -- or should it be Lazarus now, eh?" He laughed. "If you'd like," Eric said. He did not relish the idea particularly, but then, it was their show. Still, he had everything to check -- from as t rogation to ethics -- and he would not want to be delayed by pomp and ceremony. Well, there was time enough for that. Now he felt weary -- and that made him chuckle, because he had just concluded a hundred-seventy five year nap. They took him to his quarters, where the six before him had lived. There he ate in silence, food from the hydroponic gardens on a lower level of the ship. The line of light under his door had turned from white to a soft blue. It was night on the ship. Eric showered and got into bed, but although he was tired he could not fall asleep. He had expected to be an efficiency expert of sorts ; that was his job ; but they told him, matter-of-factly, that he would be a king. Well, you could expect change in nearly two hundred years, radical change. And if indeed their tradition were deep-rooted, he would not try to change it. The planners had counted on that to keep them going, because there could be no environmental challenge to goad them. Just an unreal past and an unreal Earth which Eric and their great-great grandparents had seen, and an even more unreal future when, someday far far off, the ship reached the Centaurian System. Softly, someone knocked at his door. The sound had been there for many moments, a gentle tapping, but it had not registered on his consciousness. Now, when it did, he padded across the bare floor and opened the door, A girl stepped in from the corridor, pushing him before her with one hand, motioning him to silence with the other. She closed the door softly behind her, soundlessly almost, and turned to face him. She wore the knee-length tunic popular with this generation, and it covered a graceful feminine figure. Ju "Please listen to me, Eric Taine. I may have only a few moments -- listen!" "Sure," he smiled, "But why all the mystery?" "Shh! Let me talk Have you a weapon?" "Yes, I carry a pistol. I don't fancy I'll need it, though." "Well, take it with you and go back where you came. If anyone tries to stop you, use your weapon They have nothing like it. Then, when you get there -- " Her voice came breathlessly, and it made Eric laugh. "Hold on, Miss. Why should I do that? Don't tell me there's a plot and someone wants to usurp the new king before he's crowned? No? What then?" "Stop making fun of rAe, Eric Taine. I'm trying to save yer life" lShe said it so seriously, her eyes so big and round, that Eric half wanted to believe her. But that was fantastic. From what could she possibly be saving him? The words came out in a rush as the girl spoke again. "The ship is not on course. For twenty five years it has been off, heading back to Earth -- " "To Earth! That's crazy." "Listen, please. They killed Lazarus Six. He was a scapegoat. They watched the old films of Earth and felt they had been cheated out of their birthright. Why should they live here, alone in spate? they said. Why should their children's children face the hardships of a new world? They didn't ask for it. It was thrust upon them by the planners, by your generation. If they knew how to get into your room of tubs, they would have killed you. Now there is a mock ceremony, everything is blamed on the new  Lazarus and the people feel better when he is killed. I know, my mother told me. You can ask her -- " The girl was about twenty, Eric thought. A wild-eyed thing now, who so wanted him to believe her impossible story. Her breath came quickly, in little gasps, and Eric tried to hide the smile on his face. "You're laughing at me! Stupid, stupid -- please -- And when you get back to your room of tubs, awaken your friends, the three who remain. You four can control the ship, put it back on course, teach the people -- Ooo, stop laughing!" She pouted prettily "All of us, we're not all like that. We who are not can help you." Eric chuckled softly. "You try to picture it," he told her, "I'm sorry, but everything's been sweetness and light, and you come in here with a wild notion -- " "It isn't wild, it's the truth. Why don't you ask to check our course before they make you king?" He could do that, all right. But they'd be wondering what mad neurosis copipelled his actions, and he did not Want that, not when he might have so much to do "Check it," she pleaded. And when he shook his head, she told him, "You're acting like a child, you know. The records say you are twenty-five, and you've slept for seven times that, but still. All you have to do is check Please -- " The door burst in upon them and Lindquist stood there, With Captain Larkin and twp others. Lindquist shook his head sadly. "I thought so," he said. Captain Larkin nodded. "A Cultist child. Shame, isn't it?" One of the other men strode forward, and the girl cowered behind Eric. "Don't believe them!" she wailed. "Lies -- ' "There are so many of them," Lindquist explained. "Apparently, we're in an area of high radiation now, Mr. Taine. So many of our people are deranged. I won't guess at the cause, except to say it's probably outside the ship." The man came around Eric, tchtch'd when the girl jurrped on the bed and stood trembling against the headboard. "Now, Laurie," the man coaxed. "Come on down, there's a good girl." Eric wanted to help her, but he checked the impulse. He only felt protective. There could be nothing in the girl's story. Best if they took her and treated her. "... a whole cult of them," Lindquist was saying. "All lacking something up here." He tapped his head. "They don't trust anyone, only members. Think we're doing all sorts of foolish things. I don't know, what would you call it in your day. Paranoia?" Eric said he didn't know, he was not a psychologist. He watched silently with Lindquist and Captain Larkin as the two other men took Laurie, struggling, out the door. She kicked, bit, and cried lustily. Once her dark eyes caught Eric's gaze, held it, and she whimpered, "I don't care if they kill you! I don't care -- " They started down the corridor, after Lindquist said, "You've had a hard day. I think we'd better let you sleep." "She told you someone wanted to kill you?" Captain Larkin said, shaking his head slowly. "What can we do, Lindquist?" "Well, we just better hope whatever's causing this sort of thing is left behind in space soon. Goodnight Mr. Taine." "Goodnight, Lazarus," said Captain Larkin. E ric recognized at once the great hall in which he had danced that last night with Clair. Ipw Clair was gone. The place was crowded -- probably the ship's entire population. Lindquist led him through the crowd, and he could not tell what their faces showed. There were mumblings of "Lazarus" and "king" -- but why did he get the faint suggestion of mockery? Oddly, what Laurie said had troubled him -- he had had a bad night's sleep, and it left him irritable. Poor girl. He wondered how many more there were like her. Well, in time he could find out, after this nuisance of a coronation had become history. "Ah, Taine," Captain Larkin said as Lindquist brought him to the dais. "As you can see, all the people are ready. I hope you won't think the ceremony foolish. Are you ready?" Eric nodded, watched a man raise trumpet to lips, blow one clarion note. A hush fell over the hall. "I am honored to present King Lazarus Seven to you," Larkin proclaimed in a loud clear voice. "He has been sent, as you know, by the planners." Hoots from the crowd. Eric frowned. He had thought they would respect the planners, the men whose vision had sent Man -- here in this ship -- outward bound to the stars. Larkin's voice was honey now. "Don't judge our new king by those who s#til him Don't -- " Laughter, and shouts of "Hailj Lazarus!" The people, Eric suddenly realized, were almost primitive, Larkin and Lindquist and a handful of others ran the ship, had somehow maintained the science of another generation. But the lack f conflict, of challenge, had sent the people down a rung or two on the ladder of civilization. Handpicked, their ancestors had been -- but they were a common mob Someone cried, "He's seen Earth. Ask him to tell us about Earth!" "Ask himVl Captain Larkin smiled. "Tell them, Taine. Tell your new subjects. You have so little time." "What do you mean, so little time?" . "Tell them!" And Larkin turned away, laughing. They were primitive, these people, and as the girl Laurie had said, they needed a scapegoat. They didn't like it here on the ship. There had been a first generation which had known Earth and could savor its flavor through the long years like a delicate wine, And there Would be a last which could get out on the Centaurian planet, stretch its legs, and build civilization anew. But these in between were in limbo. They lived and they died on the ship, and it wasn't their idea. They would breed so that the ship would still have a crew when it reached Gentauri. That was their function. But they didn't like it. All this went through Eric's mind. Perhaps the girl had no psychosis, perhaps her warning had been sincere. He wondered if the loner sleen had dulled his instincts. his reflexes He told them of Earth, of its wonders, of the wide meadows he remembered, of the wind, brisk in spring, which brought the sweet scented rain, of summer and the big harvest moon which followed, of a hundred other things. Glair! Clair! Did yoU marry  have children? There was that Lou Sorfiebody who youd flirt with to mdke me jealous, hut we both knew he loved you, I wonder He spoke of the planners, of the proud day when all the world had seen them off, the video jets flashing by, circling, to send their picThe planners, he told them, had a vision. It was the same vision which had first taken man -- an ape with a brain that held curious half formed thoughts that gave him a headache -- down from the trees. A vision which would Carry him one day to the farthest stars and beyond. They shouted. They stamped oh the floor. They laughed. "What about us? We didn't have any say, did we? Who wants to spend his whole life in this tin can?" "I don't know -- " One of them at least was dubious, but the crowd stilled him. What of Laurie and her Cult? He did not see the girl anywhere in the great hall. "We've had enough, Captain. Too much, I'd say!" Larkin looked smug. Lindquist was grinning. No one did anything to stop them as the qrowd surged forward, threatened. Watching them only now beginning to realize the whole things Eric remembered history. Mock-kinghood was nothing new in the scheme of primitive cultures. In ancient Babylonia, in Assyria -- elsewhere -- The mock king ruled for a day and the people came to him with their troubles. The king, cowering on his throne-of-a-day could perhaps sec his executioner waiting. The real king had nothing to lose: the pent up dissatisfaction of his people would drown the mock-ruler like a wave, and after it was all over the king would return to his throne with more power than before. R ough hands reached up, grabbed at him. Fists shook, voice;# threatened. Someone pulled his boot, and Eric sat down on the dais, breathing heavily. He got up fast, before they could swarm all over him, yanked the gun from his jumper, poked it against Larkin's ribs. "You know what this is?" "Yes -- a gun." "Well, call your friends off or I'll kill you. I'm not' joking, Larkin. Call them off -- " 'T can't. Look at them, a mob. What can I do now?" "You'd better do something, because soon you won't have a chance to do anything. Now!" Larkin made a motion to the trumpeteer. He blew two loud notes this time, and uniformed men appeared, brandishing clubs. Evidently, they were on hand in case the crowd became too wild, threatened Larkin, Lindquist and the other nameless rulers. With their clubs they beat the mob back, slowly, held them off as Eric pushed Larkin before him. The crowd surged close, fought once or twice with the guards on their immediate flanks. Once Larkin tried to bolt away, but thereafter Eric held him firmly until they reached an exit. Together they sprinted down a corridor, Larkin puffing and staggering. "Beat it," Eric told him. "Go on, scram!" "You won't kill me as I run? I know that thing can kill over long distances -- " "Don't give me any ideas," Eric said, but he felt a little sick as Larkin ran, whimpering, back toward the ha,ll. This man was their ruler, their leader. He found the door, activated its mechanism, waited impatiently while he heard the sounds of pursuit. Something clanged against the door, and again. They were throwing things. Eric ducked, felt pain stab at his shoulder. He could see their faces in the corridor when the door began to slide clear. He slipped in, punched the levers that would close it again, saw a hand and a leg come through the crack, heard a scream. The limbs withdrew, and Eric watched grimly as it slid all the way shut. Lazaruses Eight, Nine, and Ten, he thought, as he went to the three remaining tubs. For a moment he gazed down through the pinkish liquid at the men curled up, sleeping their long sleep. He shook the tubs gently. All it would take was that -- direct rnotion. Once that had started the cycle, each sleeper's hypothalamus took over, twentyfive, fifty, and seventy-five years ahead of schedule He watched them twitch, shiver, slowly uncurl, watched the vapors rising from theii; tubs. He had plenty of time. In a week, he helped them from their tubs. They were ready to listen -- smiling baby-faced Chambers, gaunt Striker, rotund Richardson. He ecplained, slowly. He told them eveiything. "My God," Striker said when he had finished. "Be thankful you could get back here, lad," Richardson told him. "What do we do now?" "What can we do?" Chambers demanded. Then: "Will you look at that -- a hundred seventjy five years and I haven't even grown a beard!" They all laughed, and the tension was broken. "We go back," Eric said, "armed to the teeth. It won't be difficult. Some of them will die, but we can set the ship on its course again, teach them -- I'd hate to see the disappointment on Earth if we went back after six generations." Striker frowned. "Have we the right to kill?' Eric said, "look -- they might get back to Earth someday -- their progeny a bunch of savages; the hope and dreams of the race reduced tp -- nothing. We can kill if we have to." It was agreed. Without saying anything,' Striker himself activated the lock. them in the corridor, howling  "Lazarus" and "death." It was Striker who shot them where they stood, before they could use the ; clubs. After that, they fired shots into the air, and people ran screaming away from them. Their first rush carried them almost to the control room and briefly Eric remembered when he had looked out from there with Clair at the bright faraway stars. But he could not quite picture j Clair's face. He tried to, but he saw j the girl, Laurie... j A dozen uniformed men stood  before the control room. They  looked badly frightened, but they i stood their grouncf, then advanced.  "What do we do now?" Chambers asked. "We couldn't get them all, not before -- " There was a rush behind them as a score of figures marched into the corridor "We're trapped!" Striker cried. Eric grinned. "I don't think so." He had seen Laurie in the vanguard of the newcomers. They did not have to use their guns, not as they had been meant to be used. They fought with tooth and nail, using the guns as clubs. But mostly, they stood back and watched their allies tedr into the guards. The girl Laurie cried: "I told you there were some who believed, Eric Taine. I told you!" They reached the control room door, battered at it. Half a dozen men came up with a great post of metal, heaved. The door shuddered. Again. Again. It crashed iii Lindquist and Lafkih stood there, over a great pile of charts and books. "You won't take this ship on to Centauri," Larkin yelled, A little flame flickered at the end of the tube in his hand. He crouched, "If those are the astrogation charts -- " said Striker. Eric dove, caught Larkin's midsection with his shoulder, threw the man back. They struggled on the floor, and dimly Eric was aware of others who held the writhing Lindquist. Larkin fought like a snake,  twisting, turning, gouging. Eric, out of the corner of his eye, saw Lindquist breaking loose, watched him running with the brand to the pile of charts. A shot crashed through the room, echoing hollowly. Lindquist fell over his charts. Now Eric had Larkin down, was pinning him, felt the man's hands twisting, clawing at his stomach, saw them come away with his gun. They grappled, and Eric cursed himself for forgetting the gun, Larkin held it, laughed, squeezed the trigger as Eric pushed clear. Then the laughter faded as Larkin stared stupidly at the gun he had not known how to use. Larkin gasped once, held both hands to the growing red stain on his middle. later. "They're both dead. You know, I think it's better this way. They w'ould have been trouble. But now -- now all we have to do is find the course again, turn the ship around -- " "It'll mean two extra generations in space," Chambers said. "They've been heading back for Earth twenty-five years." With Eric, he studied the charts, assembled them, punched a few buttons on the computing machine. "Like this," Eric said. He twirled a few dials. "It takes a long time with the overdrive, but we'll be back on course in three years." For a while he gazed out the port, fascinated by the huge sweep of the Milky Way, clear and beautiful in the black sky. When he turned back and away from it, Laurie stood beside him. "Hello, Lazarus." "Very funny," he said. "Call me Taine -- better still, call me Eric." "Eric, then. Hello, Eric." He grinned. "I guess you're not psychotic, after all." "Nope. Normal as can be. But take my great great grandmother, now. She was really neurotic. She married, all right, but they say she really carried a torch all her life." There was laughter in the girl's eyes as she spoke. Eric had seen other eyes like that. So familiar. So beautiful. "I am Laurie Simmons," the girl told him. "My great great grandfather's name was Lou Simmons. His wife was Clair. My mother has a book of hers, of poems she wrote to Eric." "Tell me about them, Laurie." A lovely girl; as pretty as her great great grandmother. No -- prettier -- and part pf today. "Never mind, Laurie. Just tell me about yourself." He knew Clair would like it this way. They wanted a world without war. The answer was simple : Stay in bed. Dreamery's World By Bryce Walton somewhere down in the audoviso. Greg stred. Perspiration crawled down his face. This was it. This was the end of the nightmare. This had to be Pat Nichols. After seventytwo hours in which Greg had had to do without anesthesia! Seventy-two hours of reality ! Seventy-two hours of consciousness Consciousness. Reality. Greg didn't know hpw he'd managed to remain sane. It seemed incredible that a man who had advanced to Stage Five in the Dream Continuity Scale, and who had been in anesthesia most of the time, could suffer ' seventy-two hours of boring, drab, dreary and revolting reality. And still be sane. Pat Nichols was the answer. Her body faded into slim and luscious focus on the three-dim screen. Her brooding eyes and wide mouth that curled so reprovingly. She had gone psycho. Had fled from the Cowl into the dreadful Outside, seventy-two hours ago. Gone to join that fanatical group of Venusian Colonists, those outlaw schizoids who planned to start over  on Venus. "Pat!" Greg's hand reached as though she weren't just a three-dim image. "Listen, Pat! Thank the Codes, you haven't blasted yet. I'vebeen crazy, waiting for this call. Pat, I can't even go into integrated anesthesia without you around. My dreams don't seem to focus right." "That's too bad, Greg," she said. He moistened his lips slowly. He slid his hand toward the warning button beneath the table. Her eyes  didn't notice, never left his face. Accusative, sad eyCs. He felt sick. He pushed the button; Now! Now Drakeson up on the apartment roof would trace the point of her call. He'd chart her location with the rhodium tracker niy: Thi beams. Then the two of them would go and pick Pat up and prevent that insane, suicidal, one-way trip to Venus. She might consider it a very unfair thing, but then she was psycho. She'd be glad of it, after she was brought back, brainprobed, and reconditioned. The thought made Greg even more ill. Brain-probing and re-conditioning involved months of a kind of mental agony that no one could adequately describe. The words were enough to give anesthetic nightmares to any Citizen, But, it was for the good of the Cowls, and of the psychos. Her voice was sad too, like her eyes. 'T was hoping you would join me, Greg. Anyway, I called to tell you that in about five hours, we're blasting. This is gOodby." He said something. Anything. Keep her talking, listening. Give Drakeson a chance to employ the rhodium tracker, and spot her location. A kind of panic got loose ill Greg's brain. "Pat, don't you have any insight at all? Can't you see that this  is advanced psychosis, that -- " She interrupted. "I've tried to explain to you before, Greg. But you've always preferred anesthesia. You loathe reality. But I'm part of reality." Yes. He had drearns. The anesthetic cubicles. Stage Five where a man was master of thalamic introjection, dream imagery. A stage where any part of reality Was supposed to have faded into utter inconsequence. But Pat Nichols had always been a part of his conditioned personality pattern. By taking her out of k, fate had struck him with an unbalance in psyche that disturbed the sole objective of life -- to dream "But that's a suicide trip, Pat, and you'll never have a chance to bd cured of your schizophrenia, even if you do get to Venus -- " Her interruption had weariness in it. "Goodby, Greg. I'm sorry for you. That silly status quo, ancf futile dreaming. It will never let you realize what a fine man you are. You'll decay and die in some futile image. So goodby, Greg. And good dreaming." She was gone from the screen. Maybe from earth, unless he got out there and stopped her before that suicide ship rocketed out from its hidden subterranean blast tube. G reg hurried. He didn't realize he could function so rapidly in the world of physical reality. In seconds he had zipped thin resiliant aerosilk about his body, and was running across the wide plastic mesh roof toward the heliocruiser in which Drakeson was waiting. Greg felt the physical power flow as he ran. It sickened him. The conditioners kept the body in good shape, but only to allow the cortical-thalamic imagery faculties to function better. Actual physical business like this was revolting to any Cowl citizen. Any sort of physical and materialistic activity, divorced from anesthesia, might be a sign of enroaching psychosis. That was the fear. That fear of psychosis that might lead to vklence. To change. The Cowls over the Cities protected them from any physical interference with an absolutely stabile, unchanging and static culture. But the Cowls hadn't been able to protect the Citizenry from insanity. During the past year, psychosis had been striking increasingly, without warning, indiscriminate'yGreg dropped down beside the thin ascetic figure at the controls. He grabbed Drakeson's arm. "Did you pick it up, Drake?" "Uh-huh," Drakeson drawled. His mouth was cynical, his gray eyes somber. "Traced it down to a ten meter radius, ,but it's underground. About five miles out of Old Washington, just inside the big radioactivated forest east of the Ruins. About half an hour's flight as the crow might fly. If there was a crow left." "Then let's go. Lift this gadget out of here!" A spot of nausea bounced into Greg's stomach at Drakeson's reference to what the big Chain blowup had done to almost all high cellular life forms, including crows. Only insects and a few shielded humans had withstood the radiation. Most high complex cellular organisms had paid for their complexity. But thanks to the establishment of the Cowled Cities and the Codes of non-change, non-violence, they wouldn't have to pay again. No chance for social change now that might lead to another such disaster. If they could only trace the cause for this psychosis epidemic -- Greg hadn't , thought about it at all until Pat had started talking peculiarly, then when she had broken up completely and left the Cowl, then it hadhit home, hard. The heliocruiser lifted slowly under Drakeson's awkward guidance. Only the Controllers, the Control Council Guards, could work the gadgetry of the City with practiced ease. Everybody else, naturally, was conditioned to various anesthesia states, and had no reason to deal with materialistic things. The cruiser lifted until it was flying directly beneath the opaque stuff of the Cowl, lost in the dazzling rainbows of sunlight shattering through. Drakeson said. "We'll keep up here. Maybe the Controllers won't see us." "What?" A peculiar coolness slid along Greg's spine. "Maybe they won't see us," repeated Drakeson, and then he smiled wryly. "Listen, Greg, You're way ahead of me in the Dream Continuity. You're a lot further away from reality than I am. More impractical. So listen to a word or two before we try to break through the Cowl. "We've never been Outside, don't forget that. It's dangerous. You haven't considered any of the angles. For example, I picked up a couple of shielding suits which you hadn't thought of. And two small wrist Geigers. If I hadn't thought of them, then we'd probably have been contaminated with hard radiation out there, and would have been thrown into the septic pools for about six months." Greg shivered. That would have been very bad. "It's deadly out there; poisonous. Greg. Only the insane have wanted to go Outside for the last few years, and only the Controllers have been out and then only to try to track down the hiding places of the Colonists. You hadn't considered that, but I did. So I had to steal a cOuple of heat-blasters  from the Museum..." "You what?" Greg stared at the two deadly coiled weapons Drakeson dragged from beneath the seat. "Do the Controllers know?" "They've probably found out by now, or will very soon," Drakeson looked grim. "They'll be after us with sky-cars and para-guns. Andthey're sure to slap a psycho label on lis. They would anyway, probably, for just going Outside. But having destructive forbidden weapons on us, they're sure to, and we couldn't go Outside without weapons, Greg." That was right, Greg knew. Paralysis guns wouldn't have been enough out there. Drakeson said softly : "Is she worth it, Greg? We may have to be brain-probed. Is she worth that kind of pain?" G reg'S stomach seemed to tie up in knots. Brain-probing, psychometry. Greg whispered hoarsely. "She's worth it, Drake. And besides, it's ridiculous to think that we'll be suspected. I'm only interested in preventing Pat from making that suicide trip. The Controllers have the same interest." "But that's their job. You and I aren't supposed to be concerned with reality. They've gotten very sensitive this last year. They can't take any chances. At the least sign of disintegration, they have to apprehend and send you to psychometry." Greg said. "You trying to get out of your bargain, Drake? If you don't want that carton of Stage Five dream capsules, then -- " "Oh no, I'll take a chance to get that carton. I never thought I'd get a chance to experience such prematmre dreams. It's worth the gamble, we might get away without being probed." Greg's head ached. Reality always gave him a headache. He wasn't used to it. A man who had reached Stage Five had been an anesthesiac too long to find reality comfortable. "I know the Codes," Greg whispered. "Legally, there's no reason to be apprehended just for leaving the Cowl. And as for the blasters, well -- we can drop them off, hide them, if the Controllers get after us." The cruiser  moved down the sloping arc of tlie Cowl toward the dark patch that Greg recognized as a merging chamber. The plastic spires of the City reached up around them as though reaching for the sun. Only a few human figures could be seen far below, on roofs, and in the streets. A few low stage humans not in anesthesia. Greg crawled into the shielding suit. He took over the unfamiliar controls while Drakeson got his own shielding suit on. They weren't heavy, but were sluggish material that could throw off ordinary radiation. Behind him Greg heard Drakeson's harsh yell. "Sky-cars! Ten of them! Shooting up out of the Control Tower and coming right toward usl Merge, and merge fast, Greg, if you still want to go Outside." Inside the thick sheeting of the suit, Greg's skin was soaked with perspiration. His face, was strained as he moved the cruiser into the first lock chamber. The cruiser had to move through a series of locks to the Outside. A precaution to keep bacteria, radiation, other inimical elements from coming in while an exit from the Cowl was being made. One by one the locks opened and closed as grav-hooks pulled the cruiser through. It was a precariously balanced culture, this one inside the Cowls, Greg thought. Like living inside a gigantic sealed testtube. Any slightly alien elements introduced into that test-tube could make it a place of sealed death in a short time. A rigidly controlled, non-changing environment. That was fine, except that some humans within it had a habit of changing, ancfor the worse. Retrogression, psychosis. Psychometry was trying franticaL ly to find the cause. It seemed obvious that the Venusian Colonists might be causing psychotics to appear in order to swell their ranks of volunteers to go to Venus to start a "new dynamic, progressive order." Madness. Suicide. Progressive evolutionary philosophies meant change, and change might lead anywhere. But eventually it could only lead to another horrible Chain, One Chain had been enough. The earth had been thoroughly wrecked. The few survivors had set up the anti-reality standards, the Cowls and the Codes -- and the Controllers. They established the Dream Continuity that led to the various anesthetic stages. But people went insane. They disagreed. They fled the Cowls. Venusian Colonial Enterprises resulted. It was organized insanity. A neatly planned psychosis, with grandiose delusions of justification. They would save humanity ! Madness. Schizophrenia. Venusian Colonization had been organized three years before. At least four known spaceships had been constructed, stocked, and blasted. They changed their subterranean hideouts after each blast. It had just never occurred to Greg that Pat could go psycho and join them. It was even more ridiculous for the Controllers to suspect him of being psycho. He felt a little better as the cruiser broke out beyond the Cowl and into the blazing natural sun of noon. It blinded Greg. Frightened him a little. He'd never seen the sun before, except dimmed by the Cowl. He sent the cruiser climbing rapidly above the weird grotesque terrain. Drakeson jumped into the seat beside him. His face was white. "Open the converter feed valvfes wide, Greg! Clear open! The Control cars aren't stopping at the merger. They're coming on through. They're right behind us." Greg looked back. Ten sky-cars, and within neuro-gun range. He jerked the converter wide open. Acceleration slammed him back hard. He knew now what fear was. In dreams you never suffered it. T he audio in the control panel cracked out. "Dalson! Drakeson! Turn around! Re-enter the Cowl. Return immediately. This is a Control Council order. Do so or we fire with full charge neuro-blasts." Paralysis guns. And full blast. Greg swallowed. They meant business. And without even a formal enquiry! Drakeson said in a whisper. "What are we going to do?" Greg didn't know. How could they think he was psycho? Drakeson licked his lips. "I don't want to go under the brain-probers, Greg. Nobody does. I don't want to be re-conditioned. I want to stay like I am. I'm not psycho. And they'll brain-probe us sure if we don't turn around and go back. And even if we do -- The audio's cold impersonal voice said: "This is the last order. The neuro-guns are ready to fire." Greg's mind ran in mad circles. He tried to think. He felt Drakeson move, and then he saw Drakeson's hand with that infernal injection solution jiggling arbund in a big hypodermic syringe. "I've just given myself another shot, Greg. You'd better have another right now. If we land down there we'll need all the adrenolex we can get." Greg hardly felt the injection as he tried tb think, clarify his situation. I'm not psycho, he thought desperately. I'm doing something a little bit different, but it isn't psychosis. But good integrated citizens would not fight against the orders from Control. All right. He would submit to brain-probing. But he'd get Pat out of that trap she was in first. He might be able to talk her out of it if he could get to her personally, be with her a while. The Controllers certainly couldn't. They'd drive her away into space as soon as she saw them. The solution. A legality. He knew the Codes didn't he? He yelled back at the pursuing sky-cars via the audio: "Don't fire those neuro-guns. This is Greg Dalson speaking. There's a law against any aggressive destructive action on the part of any Citizen." The audio replied. "The neuroguns aren't destructive. Temporary paralysis." Greg said. "This cruiser is at a high altitude and traveling fast. If you paralyze us now, the cruiser will crash. By using the neuro-guns on us, you will be destructive, homicidal." A dead silence greeted this statement. Greg went on. "I'm a Stage Five citizen. Legally, there's no restriction against going outside the Cowl. I'll report your action and attitudes to the Council if you fire those neuro-guns." Drakeson choked something unintelligible. His face was deathly pale. "Clever," he whispered. "But that clinches it. When we do go back, it's psychometry for us, Greg," Finally the audio answered. The voice was not so cold. It had a tinge of emotionalism. It said. "A technicality, but it does prevent us from firing the neuro-guns. However, we feel it our duty to remain with you until you do return to the Cowl. Because of the recent epidemic of psychosis, we find this authorized by the Control Council... Greg savagely flipped off the audio. Drakesbn said. "If they stay on our toil, we'll lead them right to Pat. They'll scare her away before you get a chance to talk with her, and try to prevent her from going on the ship." "I know," Greg said. "I know. We've got to figure something -- " He looked down at the fantastic semi-organic flora below, "How far to go yet, Drake?" "About three minutes." "All right. We'll set the cruiser down here, and walk to where Pat is." Drakeson choked. "That's suicide," he said. "We won't have a chance." G reg didn't have time to be surprised at his own actions. He pulled Drakeson's hands away from the controls. Drakeson was trying to stop him from bringing the cruiser down. Drakeson gasped. "Even with the heat-blasters, we'll never get a hundred meters away from where we land. I figured on landing directly over the place -- " "So will the Controllers" Greg said. He hurled Drakeson back, heard him sprawl on the mesh flooring where he lay, half sobbing. Greg angled the ship down abruptly. "As soon as we land, I'm running for it," he called back. "The Controllers will be down there swarming all over us, and I don't want to lead them to where Pat is." Drakeson crawled oyer to the bunk and sat on it. "All right," he said. "I'm with you. It's too late to get out of it now. For a carton of premature dreams, I've gotten myself stuck with a psycho tag. I'm stuck with it anyway, now. Might as well go on, and stay out of the brain-probers as long as possible." Greg felt a tingling crawl up his wrists as they dropped down above the gigantic, semi-organic forest. Mutated cells in the process of change had played havoc with the preChain life forms. According to what little he had gotten from infotapes, there was no longer any distinction or at least very little, between organic and inorganic life, outside the Cowls. Psycho. He'd still argue with Drakeson about that, but lie didn't have time. He wasn't psycho. As soon as he persuaded Pat to abandon the flight, they'd give themselves up, return to the Cowl, and things would return to normal, to anesthesia, Stage Five, then Six, then Seven, on to the final eternal dream. That's the way it was going to be. And if they had to suffer the hells of brainprobing and the awful ego-loss of re-conditioning, then they would do that too. It was for the good of the Cowls, the preserva tion of the Codes. A noble sacrifice. Must be no change. No menace to stability. Any suggestion of change made ohe suspect; Greg's eyes misted as he brought the cruiser to a halfcrash landing. Even as he tried to bring his blurred vision into focus, he was running to the exit. He had the sliding paneh open. He was up to his knees in writhing tendrils. He was running through a crimson twilight. Behind him, he heard Drakeson tearing through the tendrils, and clutching vines. Overhead he could hear the drone of the sky-car's atomurbinic motors. Whether they would land and continue the search on foot through the deadly forest, Greg couldn't know. , He didn't know anything about the Controllers' methods. "How far, Drake," he yelled through the interperson audio. Drakeson came running up beside Greg. Severed strings of torri, still living life-stuff writhed from his shoulders and legs. 'T'd say about half a mile straight ahead. That's a long way through this nightmare." Greg screamed. A broad mushroom-like growth had opened a mouth. A gigantic, sickeningly gray mouth full of deadly, flesh-eating acid. A flower-bright vine with great tensile strength raked Drakeson in toward that gaping maw. Drakeson' s arms were held tight against his sides. He was straining --  helpless. Through the glassine mask of his helmet, Greg saw Drakeson' s face turning red with constriction. His voice came to Greg in a burst of fear. "The gun, Greg! The heatblaster -- quick -- " Greg leaned forward, staring in rigid fascination. Fleshy stocks swayed toward him. Other mouths opened, petal mouths. Gigantic floral traps, and cannibal blooms. "Greg! Greg!" Drakeson was framed now by that great cannibal maw. Greg had the heat-blaster up. He had it leveled. But he couldn't depress the firing stud. "Drake! I can't! I can't!" How could any integrated man be deliberately destructive? How could any sane person -- kill? "I can't -- Drake -- " The awful conflict seemed to rip through his body. He felt the sweat, hot and profuse, rolling down his face. He concentrated on that gun, on his finger, on the firing stud. The cannibal blossom was closing. Sticky juices dripped over Drakeson. He was screaming. Greg's finger lifted. He could not fire. The Codes said no destruction. established after the great Chain disaster. Violence begets violence, the Codes said. And once begun, it was accumulative, like the snowball rolling down hill. Greg sagged. His knees buckled. He sprawled out in the slippery muck. Tendrils swished softly and hungrily around him. He heard a shout. He tried to twist his head. Figures blurred before his eyes, and he heard the deadly chehoivwwThe last thing he remembered before the dark wrapped him up softly and warmly, was the cannibal ments of stringy tissue, and Drakeson falling free. I didnt fire, he was thinking. Someone else saved Drakeson. But I think I might have done it. My finger -- it was moving -- bending -- or was it? No. I couldn't have been destructive. Couldn't have killed. to Greg. Painfully. It carrie back slowly and it took a long time. He lifted his eyelids. He raised himself to a sitting position. He stared down a gloOmy, phosphorescent corridor. It was obviously subterranean. It was damp, chill. Cold luciferin light glowed from lichen on walls and low ragged ceiling. It was long and it finally curved, he decided. But he could look back into a long slow curve of corridor and ahead into the same. Here and there, the mouths of branch corridors came in. He looked at his hand. It Still clutched the butt of the heatblaster. He felt strange. The surroundings were very real, yet they seemed somehow not real. The shock of trying to fire that blaster when the sanity in him shrieked "No!" had been too much foishim. The shock had blanked him out. He breathed a deep sigh of temporary relief and triumph. He hadn't killed He thought of Drake- son. Somebody had saved him. Someone had Mled. Not the Controllers. They could employ only the neuro-guns to paralyze. So he decided that Colonists had probably saved Drakeson. Terror gripped Greg then He remembered Drakeson yelling at" him, the distended eyes, the straining face. And how he himself had almost given in, had almost killed. Had almost gone psycho. But he hadn't. That was the important thing. He was still a sane, integrated part of the Cowls and the Codes. And after a test like thatj he figured that nothing could break him. Let them send him to psych ome try. Let them clamp on the brain-probers and leave them on for months. They'd not find any psycho tendencies in Greg Dalson. Greg tried to reason. But he had no place, no fodation, for a beginning. He didn't knoV where he  was, cyr why he had been left here. He knew that someone, the Colonists probably, had saved Drakeson from that plant thing. Some mental pressure had blacked him out, he thought, and then what? He didn't know. Which way? It didn't seem to matter. He started walking. He was bone-weary. His head throbbed. His eyes burned. And he Was afraid. He had gotten himself into a completely un-Codified situation. He was lost, helpless, outside the protection of the Cowls, the Codes, and anesthesia. He was surrounded by reality. Reality in all its essential horror. Conflict, Physical danger...Uncertainties. Materialistic barriers. All the old shibboleths that the Cowls and the Codes and the anesthesiac dreams had protected him from. And all because of Pat Nichols. But he'd stood a big test. And he'd won. He hadn't killed. He wasn't destructive. He -- The cry touched his ears and died. It was too violent and filled with pain and terror to 'make any definite impression the first time. He crouched. His eyes distended. The scream came again, and this time it chopped through him. Mis nerves seemed to shrivel and curl beneath the repeated onslaughts of the screams. Then he was running. He didn't know why, except that he had to run. He ran with fearful, gasping desperation. But he didn't know why. H e ran past the mouth opening into the main corridor. Then came back and ran into the darker, strangely-lighted artery. He ran harder. And yet he wasn't running. Not all of him. As he ran, he was conscious of some undefinable, but terrific conflict. Beneath the suit, his skin burned with sweat. He felt the rigid pattern of tensed neck and jaw muscles. I dont feel at all familiar. Some things very wrong. Everything's wrong. Fm displaced, like something that has slipped into an alien dimension. He stopped, quickly. His heart seemed to swell, burst with terror. Terror and something else. The something else came, and with it came horror of itself. The emotion, and then horror of the emotion. He stood shivering, his teeth clacking like an ancient abacus. 'Tat!" He screamed her name. The cry pounded back into his ears inside the helmet. This wasn't DrakescJn. This was Pat. Pat was going to die now. Not Drakeson. The walls were -- alive. They were not like the walls of the corridors. This was a circular chamber, and the walls were sagging and undulating like part of a giant's flesh. He heard heavy sluggish sounds. Masses of the gray viscous stuff sagged, changed form, remolded itself into monstrous shapes. Patl Only her face and part of her upper body were visible now. The shielding of her suit had been cracked wide open by pressure as the semi-organic thing, whatever it was, had closed around her.  The walls rushed in as Greg stumbled drunkenly. The ceiling sagged lower. Long knobs fell, like globules of paste, then lengthened into shapeless tendrils that snapped out at Greg. He fell back. Pat's screarh penetrated again. No beauty remained in her face now. Her eyes were sick. Her lips were loose and trembling. "Greg -- help me -- help me -- see what it does -- the others -- " He saw the others then. Maybe he hadn't noticed before, because his mind didn't want him to see. Husks. Pallid wrinkled husks, sucked dry and shriveled. Several figures not recognizable anymore, hardly recognizable as human. Just vaguely human, broken, sucked dry. His mind seemed covered by a grotesque shadow. His flesh crawled and his throat turned dry, and perspiration made a stream down his throat. He felt his eyes looking down at his right hand. It held the heat-blaster. The skin felt tight as though it would split as he gripped the heavy butt of the coiled weapon. He concentrated on the finger that was frozen on the firing stud. If he could destroy, then he was insane. His experience with Drakeson, that had been no test at all compared with this. This was Pat. Pat, and she was dying -- dying unspeakably. This was the great test of his sanity. He. concentrated on the finger. He must keep it frozen. He must back out of here. Get away, get back to the Cowl, back to anesthesia and sleep. The finger raised slowly from the stud. His feet lifted as his body moved fitfully back, back back -- "Greg-help me, Greg -- Her eyes stopped him. They tumbled into terrible clarity. She whispered starkly. "Greg -- help me -- kill it, Gtegi For me -- Kill it." He felt his lips part in a great and terrible cry of torture. His shoulders began to twitch slightly. His arms and fingers took up the jerky rhythm. Horror and a violent crimson flood of unfamiliar emotions mushroomed like a volcano of madness. Something began crumbling away. He lurched forward. He felt the heat-blaster heaving, throwing out its. deadly load. The gun had weight and power in his hand as he crouched lower and moved in. The power load swathed in long slicing arcs. Steam and sickening stench fell around him. He moved in. He stumbled forward kicking out to right and left at the quivering slices #f stuff that were falling around him. Destruction, Kill. Death. This was all three, and in a giant, almost inconceivable quantity. Her face through the steaming cloud. Her throat moving as she swallowed. Brightness, the brightness of disbelief and irripossibility coming into her eyes. He kept moving in until the monstrous mutated gray thing was thoroughly dead. Until every separate tendril and patch was blasted to smoke. Then he lifted her broken body in his arms. Tears fell on the opaqueness of his helmet. "I'm sorry, Pat' he choked. "I'm sorry it didn't happen sooner. I'm sorry I waited too long -- but it isn't easy -- to let yourself go insane." Something was wrong.' Pat! Pat! She seemed to be fading away from him, drifting away, melting into tattered veils of cloud. Her face became only two bright glad eyes, then they also melted together into a radiant pool. He toppled into the pool. He sank down, a wonderful lifelessness spreading through him. He closed his eyes. Something was beginning to be very funny. In the thickening dark, he laughed a little. And in that laugh was a crazy, climbing note of -- triumph. H e opened his eyes. He Was laughing, in a kind of soft hysteria. He was on a couch. Not a a dream couch, but just a plain hard bed. He sat up stiffly. Pain tingled down his legs. He saw Pat Nichols. And another. A man. He remembered him vaguely, one of the first who had escaped from the Cowl. His name -- yes -- he remembered now, MerroL Pat Nichols, alive, and smiling. Very beautiful too in a brief aerosilk bra and shorts and sandals. Her hair was a dark lovely cloud flowing down over bare shoulders. "Hello, Greg," she said softly. "Welcome to -- the Colonists." "What?" He swung his legs around. "I don't understand. Not entirely." Merrol a gaunt elderly man nodded from behind a desk. Merrol's hair was gray and sparse. Strange, seeing a man who showed age. Within the Cowls, one never grew physically old, Pat said, "This is Ralph Merrol, Personnel Director of Venusian Colonization Enterprises." Greg's numbness was filtering away beneath Pat's warm glad eyes. He raised his hand. The heatblaster was still gripped in his fingers. It evidently hadn't been fired. "It was all illusion," he said. "The scene in the cavern. It never happened?" Merrol's care-lined face nodded. "It happened, but in your mind, Greg. We rescued you and Drakeson from the cannibal plant. We brought you here. You had lost consciousness. We put you under the hypnosene rays, and put you through an experience that was quite real to you. We proved something to ourselves, and to you. Greg -- you're sane now." Greg tried to understand. The thing didn't make sense yet, but the glimmerings of the truth were beginning to solidify in his aching brain. "Sane? But I killed. I wanted to kill. I wanted to destroy, and I did. That's hardly the actions of a -- sane man." Merrol smiled thinly. "Fromour point of view it is, Greg. We consider ourselves sane. We consider the Cowled Cities, and the Codes insane. It's relative I supposed, but I think we can convince you, if we haven't already." Greg looked at Pat. She smiled. He smiled back. "Justified or not," he whispered. "I'm here. Sane or insane, I'm one of the Colonists now I guess. Unless I want to return to the Cowls, be probed and te-conditioned." Pat whispered. "Do you, Greg?" He shook his head. "Not now. Tm tired. I don't want to now. Maybe I never will. All I want now, is rest." Merrol leaned across the desk. "Before you rest, you'd better get a few things straight, Greg. We want you to be convinced that you're doing the right thing. We feel that the big Chain blowup shocked the whole human race into a mass psychosis, comparable to individual cases of hysteria, schizophrenia, escape from reality. That's why the non-change, non-aggressiveness Codes were established. Also, the anesthesia, the Dream Continuity Scale -- nothing but hysteria on a mass and planned basis," Merrol got up. He walked around and sat down beside Greg. "Carried out to its inevitable end, this could only lead to mass racial suicide. That's obvious. It was a static dead end. A few people recovered from the psychosis. They escaped, and formed the Colonists. But their own welfare wasn't the most important thing. "They concerned themselves then with the freeing of the Citizens of the Cowls from their psychosis. The world is untenable on a large scale now, due to radioactive poisoning. It will remain untenable for some time. Meanwhile we decided to Colonize Venus. We' ve established Colonies there. Thriving communities, but the important thing is thk Greg -- it's given new impetus and enthusiasm to those who become sane and escape the Cowls. It presents a big challenge and solidifies the cure. ' 'Tt's bigger than Control has any idea that it is. It will take a long time yet, but we'll win. You have noticed the increase in so-called insanity in the Cowls. It really means just the opposite. Our numbers are increasing by leaps and bounds.' Greg said. "The Controllers think you're using some psychological or physical pressure to create these -- Cures." Merrol smiled. "We've got a recruiting system, Drakeson, for example, is a spy. We have spies all over the Cowls." Greg stared. "Drakeson?" A door opened. The lean cynical tnan entered, nodded, and stood beside Pat. His eyes shone more brightly as he looked at Greg. "That's right," Drakeson said. "Remember the two injections. I said they were adrenolex. They weren't. Our spies inside the Cowls are equipped with a supply of a certain aggression factor. It used to be called Kappa, or K, for killer. This factor is handed down through the generations in the general cell protoplasm. It forces aggressive tendencies. It makes a man capable of physical aggressive action, and able to kill, if he has to. High motivation is required though, in most cases. With you, my probable death wasn't enough. It took the vision of Pat here in the dutches of a monster to make the Kappa factor work on yoti, Greg." Greg rubbed his eyes. Pat came over and he took her hand, held it tightly. A svatinth came out of her and into him, into his mind. D rakeson went on. 'We isolated the Kappa factor, made it into solution. We all have it, even the anesthetic citizens of the Cowls, but the mass shock psychosis won't let it work. However, a Strong over load of Kappa injection will sometimes break the psychosis, force the; person back into an aggressive personality, capable of destruction. Each individual carries an armament of between # and # particles of the Kappa factor after we give an injection. It took # parr tides to break your suicidal hysteria." Pat squeezed his hand. Greg looked up. He grinned with a kind of glad embarrassment. "I don't know yet whether to thank you or not. Frankly though, I do feel better." He thought of the Cowls. Testttibes, glass cages, and dreams that led finally to the final anesthesia, death. He shuddered, and tried tb push the memory out of his mind. It seemed unhealthy now. Uncleah and -- yes, it did seem insane He raised his eyes to the ceiling. He saw the self-inverting three dimensional mechanism that had given him that starkly real adventure in which he had been able to kill, for Pat. A dream sequence, partly hypnotic, partly created by cathode image activating the multiphase AC. A high harmonic of multi-phase AG field hanging over him, and a focusing radiator. Dream. Nightmare. He looked at Pat. "I think I'D take reality now," he said softly. He felt the pull on his arm, and he got up. She led him through a door and into a soft twilight. He held her tightly against him. She whispered. "The ship's waiting for us, Greg. The next ship. You're already on the passenger list. You see, I knew you'd come with us. I was hoping so desperately, J couldn't think any differently." He kissed her. He held her more tightly as though -- as though -- He felt her warm muscles tense against him. Her eyes widened. "Greg! What is it?" He shook his head. "I -- I got to wondering if this too, might not be just a dream. I've been in anesthesia too long maybe. How can I know what's real and what isn't real?" He felt her warm moist fingers on the back of his neck. He felt her lift on her toes, pull his face down. She kissed him. Her voice was husky, and her breath was warm on his lips. "Do you know now, Greg? Is this a dream?" He shook his head. His voice was hoarse. "No -- no -- this isn't a dream." She laughed softly. They moved away, down the corpidor toward the ship. His story reads like fantasy -- yet Science has never disproved it! A t the age of ten he caused his bowl of oatmeal to skip about the breakfast table, and furniture to be lifted by unseen hands. At thirteen he was prophesying events, even death, with alarming accuracy. At twentyfive he was holding spellbound men -- scholars, emperors, scientists, critics -- whose names ring in the pages of history! Daniel Home was probably the greatest medium the modern world has ever known. His feats were more than amazing -- they were supernatural. Witnesses could hardly believe their eyes, yet they had to -- for no one could ever refute him! ing story of this great American-reared medium in the May issue of -- On sale at all newsstands -- # cents The Reamer mansion was on trial. It announced its own verdict -- guilty! Pattern By Alvin Heiner H e WAS a man easily smiled at; a little birdlike individual carrying an umbrella and wearing upon his pink face a look remindful of happy secrets about to be revealed. He canae to my desk during the midafternoon lull and said, "I am Professor Jonathan Waits. I have come to avail myself of your facilities." I had never heard it put quite that way before, but from Professor Waits, it did not sound stilted. It was the way you would expect him to put it. He beamed at the ceiling and said, "What # fine old library, my dear. I must bring Nicholas Some time." I gave him the smile reserved financial supporters and unknown quanta tivcs and asked, "Could I be of service?" He didn't get to it immediately, understand this library is fairly crammed with old recordsdata on the historical aspects of this area. Personal histories and such." He had a way of radiating his own cheerful mood. "Oh yes," I assured him. "It's an exceptional day when we don't sweep a D.A.R. or two out of the aisles come closing time." This, according to his laugh, wai quite good. He said, "I'm sure we'll get on splendidly, Miss -- ?" Hopstead."  "Are you a native?" "A New Englander from way back," I assured him. "Some of my ancestors used to drink buttered rum with Captain Rogers." "Then possibly you'd Ukq to know about my work." "I certainly would." And, strangely enough, I did. "I am a researcher into the -- well, the unusu." "Psychic research?" I inquired, wanting him to know we New Englanders were not dullards. "No. Nothing to do with the supernatural at all. My work is to prove that all occurrences, however mysterious, are the logical result of previous actions of individuals ; that superstitions are the result, not so much of ignorance, but lack of knowledge." While I wrestled with that one, he said, "Maybe I could be a trifle more explicit." "That would help." His bright little eyes got even brighter. "Do you know, by chance, of the Reamer mansion over in Carleton?" I certainly did. It was some thirty miles from Patterson, but as a child, Pd visited the place. All children within the radius had visited the Reamer mansion at least once. It was an ancient fifteen room cockroach trap with such a history of death and violence behind it as to cause the kids to walk on tiptoe through its silent rooms. I told the professor I knew about it. "It has been vacant for fifteen years," he observed. "And will be vacant for twice fifteen more, T imagine." "That's just the point. Superstition. Otherwise solid and sane people wouldn't dream of moving into the Reamer mansion. And it's so silly." "It is?" "Of course. And that's why I'm here. I intend to prove, so the most stubborn will understand, that the house itself has nothing whatsoever to do with its own grim past ; that the people who lived in it are to blame." It was a dull day and he was such an apparently sincere little man that I decided to keep the conversation alive. "Fm afraid you'll have, a hard time proving it. Let's see -- the first one was old Silas Reamer. He committed suicide there. That was sometime . around #. Then -- " " -- His son, Heriry Reamer, was found dead under mysterious circumstances two years later. Murder was obvious, but nothing has ever been done about it." I frowned in mock severity. "I don't like the way you put that, Professor. Do you imply that we New Englanders condone violence?" "Oh, not at all. There were just -- no clues, from what I've learned. The next unfortunate, a renter named Miles McCormick, was found dead along with his wife and child as a result of lethal gas from a faulty stove." "That happened the year I was born. We have the old newspapers here, telling about it." "Those reports, along with other material are what I wish to study," Professor Waits said, then went on. "The house stood vacant for five years, until a Johnathan Hays bought it." "But Johnathan Hays never moved in. He died of a heart attack while carrying a chair through the front door." He beamed on me. "You are a remarkably alert young woman; well up in local history." "With no credit to me. You'd be hard put finding a citizen around here who doesn't know the history of the Reamer mansion." "Not 'of tlje Reamer mansion', my dear. Of the people who just happened to reap their ill-fortune there' "You insist the house had noth ing to do with it?" "Nothing whatever." I you know how big a bite you've taken? If you go up in the hills hereabouts you'll find whole families living in dirt-floor houses You'll find children who never heard of a bath or a telephone. But you won't find one person who would live in the Reamer mansion for a salary paid promptly every Saturday morning." "Nonetheless," Professor Waits replied, "the so-called jinx of the mansion, or any other maligned locality, is a matter of monstrous coincidence. The truth lies hidden in the lives of the people involved. I've been ferreting out that truth." "You mean this isn't a beginning, Professor?" He grasped his umbrella in a manner indicating he meant to spear a dragon in case there were any around, and said, "Oh my no! I've been tracing the lives of the principals in this drama for some time. It involves long, tedious work I must not only dig into the lives of the unfortunates themselves, but also into those of kin; everi -- in some cases -- friends." "What did you find out about the murder?" He evaded neatly, "I am not seeking a killer as such. Relative to that facet of the case, I am more interested in Henry Reamer himself. A very wise man once said, 'If you would understand violence, look also intothe heart of the murdered'. A man carries the seeds of his destiny in his own soul," "And you intend to prove it?" "I am finding more proof every day. Soon I shall publish a paper which will startle the thinking world," I could see the Professor wasn't one to be backed into any corners "And how can I help in this Work?" "I am tracing at the moment, certain details in the life of Mabel Tut worthy, an aunt of Silas Ream- er. Upauthenticated legends indicate she killed an eight-point buck once, with her bare hands, and dragged it home across ten miles of forest." "I've heard that, and it's probably true. You think it has something to do with what happened to Silas?" " -- And his son Henry." "I think you'll find what you want in that section by the south window. It's devoted to local history." "Thank you, my dear." He moved away, reminding tne somehow, of a happy retriever going into a lake after a duck. Halfway to the shelves, he halted suddenly and turned. "Did you know that seventy percent of the accidents happen to twenty percent of the people?" I didn't, but I refused to admit such backwardness. "I certainly do. Amazing, isn't it?" "That is one of the pillars upon which my work is based." "And there are others?" "Seven in all." He didn't tell me what the other six were. Instead he disappeared into local history and left me with the latest best seller I was reading under the counter lest some child come in and be stripped of all innocence by one glance. It was two hours before Professor Waits reappeared. He carried a small blue notebook in one hand and a stub pencil in the other. He was positively beaming. "A gold mine," he said. "A veritable gold mine. Did you know that Ezekial worthy was gored by a bull in the year #?" "No -- reallyT" Then I was truly ashamed of myself. He was such a pleasant, sincere little man and he got such fun out of life. But he misinterpreted my boorishness for true enthusiasm and said. "It's a fact! Imagine! Walking in here and finding one of the links I've hunted for months. I'm indebted to you, my dear, for directing me to that book shelf." I could have told him he was under no obligation; that I got, each week, the coolie stipend of twenty eight dollars for doing just that; but I didn't want him starting an investigation into peonage system practiced in libraries and schools. Then something in the little man's manner, sobered me. "Professor -- exactly why are  you doing this?" He blinked. "I have plenty of money. I have the time. It interests me. And I feel it a worthy occupation; gathering knowledge through which people may know the true causes of misfortune ; may throw off the yoke of superstition." "You feel, then, that nothing happens by chance?" "My dear," he said' solemnly, "in this ordered universe there can be no such thing. Action and achievement-cause and result. The revealing pattern of each man's actions is in the pasts of himself and his antecedents." "And by proving this you will exonerate the Reamer mansion of all guilt?" He smiled. "You are a most intelligent young lady. Most intelligent! I shall see a great deal of you in the weeks to come." pect. I liked the Professor and was glad he liked me. After he left I went back and found not a single book out of place. I Hked him even more. Two weeks passed before I saw Professor Waits again. He came in out of the sunshine, carrying his black umbrella and wearing the same black string necktie. I was busy at the time, finding an acceptable book for Mrs. Winsolow's little Freddie who was in bed with the pip. When I got clear, Professor Waits was deep in his research and I did not disturb him. He came pattering out just before closing time and I was struck by the somber -- almost sad -- expression he wore. "Did you have trouble finding what you wanted, Professor?" "Oh no. The records are most voluminous. It's just -- well, the nature of my discoveries." "Bad?'Y "Very bad Miss Hopstead. Do you know who Henry Reatnet's murderer was?' "No." "Miles McCormick, the renter who died there so tragically with his family." I didn't quite know how to respond; whether I should faint or scream for the police. I settled for a philosophical comment. "A case of justice by a higher power." "You mean McCormick's death?" "Of course." "On the contrary. There was no Gonnectioii at all between the two events. McCormick and his wife and child died because they violated a certain law, but not necessarily a law on the statute books." "I'm afraid I don't quite follow that." "Look at it this way, Miss Hopstead. You are walking through a dark room. A door is standing open. You come into violent contact with the edge of it. What happens?" "A broken nose? A black eye." "Precisely. The fact you didn't know the door was there didn't protect you from the consequences." This of course, I was forced to concede. "Now let's go a step further by taking, as example, a lower mentality than our own. A horse, knowing nothing of the laws of electricity, would step on a high Voltage wire and never know why it Was electrocuted. In such  case, the animal would violate a law it did not know existed." I was beginning to see what h# was driving at. "You mean -- " "We are far above the horse in mentality and understanding but there are still many laws we do not understand. That is what my work involves." I insisted upon being heard. "You mean a lot of apparently im nocent things we do are really electric wires." He beamed. "Exactly. When we reap misfortune it is because we violate some law. Ignorance of that law doesn't change the end-result one iota." 'And you're trying to find oUt what these -- these booby traps are?" "Oh I know many of them already. My paper will surprise the world. I'm working on a more advanced phase of the problem now. I am tracing a pattern of interlocks ing violations to show that the scene of the end-results can be only sheerest coincidence. I want to banish once and for all the superstitionstigma attached to scenes of repeated misfortune and violence." "The Reamer mansion." "That's right. And now I must be going, Miss Hopstead." He gave me the departing smile and started for the door. "Professor Waits." "Yes?" "About Mabel Tutworthy. Did she really drag that buck ten miles." "No. It was only a fawn. And she killed it less than a mile from her cabin" "And the murder of Henry Reamer. What proof -- ?" "Nothing the police would be interested in. It was the end-result of a cause they won't understand until my work is published and given studyi" He opened the door, looked around, smiled. "This is ceiJtainly a fine old building. I must bring Nicholas with me the next time.' With that, he 'was gone. to his next visit. I looked and looked and a month passed and a tall, serious-faced youth came into the library and waited until Fd finisheci checking in Mrs. Garvey's returns. 'T understand," he said, "that fon have an immense store of local history in this library?" "The section by the south window." "Thank you." He peered at me through thick lenses. "Thank you Miss -- " Hopstead." "Miss Hopstead. I am Nicholas Worthy. Possibly you knew a friend of mine. Professor Waits? I am carrying on 'his work." "Carrying on -- ? Did something happen to -- ?" "Oh. Then you didn't hear. It was most tragic. Professor Waits died of pneumonia. A great loss -- a great loss." I was deeply shocked. My feeling was that of losing a close friend. "No, I hadn't heard. It must have been very sudden." "It was. He was advanced in years, you know, and after he fell, pneumonia set in quickly. They were unable to save him." "The Professor had an accident?" , "Yes. He fell down the main staircase of the Reamer mansion and broke his hip." Latch on to the next if! pened to science-fiction in the last year is a young man named Walter Miller Jr. -- the lad who writes "with ability lies in the fact that his stories are becoming harder and harder to acquire. But IF was luclty ! in the July issue of IF, by Walter Miller Jr., on sale May #th. John W. Campbell Jr. Because there is no distinguishing mark save their own accomplishments, no presentlyaccepted basis of "race" distinction makes any important sense whatsoever. Homo superior is here -- but only by his works can you find him. Confucius, Einstein, George Washington, Moses, Plato, Christophe, the Black Napoleon, and Abraham Lincoln all belonged to one race, the race of Imperial Man -- homo superior. And each was a mongrel hybrid -- even as you and I! H. L. Gold Good Lord the worid today is loaded with ifs ! So crammed, crowded, bulging with ifs jostling each other, in fact, that it's a pure, bafflement to see writers turning the same ones over and over, looking for some new bump never before noticed on the use-worn surfaces. Howard Browne Mary and Joe Dokes get so fed up with fact they want a few hours of escape. So they do what men and women have done for centuries. They sneak off into the fairy world of romance, adventure, action... The world of dreams. A priceless world given us by a kindly Creator Who knew the going would get tough at times; Who knew there would be cold dreary facts to burn on this tired old planet and that we would need moments of blessed escape. Samuel Mines Writers of fiction have ah ways . had stern competition from life, which has a way of being startling, fantastic and wonderful on its own. When World War II actually got under way, after the sitzkrieg, the speculations of writers wer completely eclipsed by the stunning drama of events which outclassed all imaginings. Many a writer at that point was heard to remark that there was no Sense in making up drama, for it simply could not compete with the newspaper headlines, Lila Shaffer Thou shalt love all thy neighbors throughout the land and entertain them well, lest they stop buying thy magazine, thus making for long, hungry days. I the I I I Dear Mr. Fairman: The March issue of IF was tops. I saw the gal with the tiger looking at me from the mag rack and I said to myself: "Huh! What's this? IF? No know." on the cover. Rog is one of my favorites. I've read his "So Shall Ye Reap" four times. So I took a copy of IF home and sure 'noughl Rog's "Old Martians" was the best story. He got a mood into it that actually scared me, as if one of the Old Martians was looking over my shoulder. Look out, Rog. They might get you for showing them up. The rest of the ish rates thusly in my book. Two: "Twelve Times Zero." It got better as it went along. Think maybe it should have been longer. Three: "Black Eyes And The Daily Grind." I got a laugh out of Black Eyes. And the illo was good. Four: I guess it has to go to "Never Underestimate." It's real Sturgeon but maybe a weensy bit too slick. Five: The rest of the ish. By the way -- why no illo credits except on the cover? The artists work hard too. All in all a fine ish with a terrific cover. But how come no fanzine revues? -- John Coleman It seems to us, John, that fanzines are pretty well covered by other magazines in the field. So we de cided to use the space for features not found elsewhere. If enough fans tell us weWe wrong, well change our policy.   #  Dear Ed : Something new! A science fiction magazine with intelligent articles. The one on Bob Tucker and his news letter was tops. Enjoyed it even more than the excellent stories. Notice you're writing up Palmer and the Shaver Mystery in your next issue. Will be watching for it. Also, congratulations to Howard Browne on his "Twelve Times Zero." He did something rarely done in science fiction -- made it sound convincing. I caught myself almost believing it, -- Milo Spence   Dear Ed: Picked up a copy of your magazine on the stand and figured it was new because I hadn't seen it before. And I thought to myself, maybe this one's got something new in the way of writers. But no. There they were on the cover. The same old hacks who turn out ninety percent of today's science fiction. Why don't you get smart and come up with some brand new names? Some writers with a fresh slant on? Science fiction is waiting for a magazine like that but it looks like you have missed the boat. This is meant as honest criticism and I hope you will print it but I'll bet you won't -- Janet Steiner Arent you being a little harsh, Janet. The writers in the March issue of IF are on the top of a highly competetive field. They stay there because they are able to produce good fiction. If better stories are submitted to IF or any contemporary magazine by new names those stories are bought. The fact that are in print again and again proves they do a better job than other writers new or old. We read every script submitted and we like new writers. We hope ' to buy many firsP' stories  Dear Mr. Fairman: Hooray for IF -- it's terrif; Maybe you'd like to use that as a slogan If SO # send me a buck. Seriously, your magazine hit the stands with a bang. There were eight copies on the rack when I got there. I bought One. That night I met a friend of mine and sent her down to get one. She said there weren't any left so I'm going to give her mine. Theodore Sturgeon's story is one of the cutest I ever read, imagine if that really happened (blush blush). I haven't read the covet story by Howard Browne yet. I'm writing first so as to get in line to win an original manuscript. Yummy! And keep IF coming! -- Nora Parsons We certainly will keep IF coming, Nora. And we hope you win one of the manuscripts. Let us know what you think of Twelve Times Zero.    Dear Ed: How come no artist's names except the cover? Who ever heard of a science fiction book, or any other fiction book, without the names of the artists? -- Paul Liebowitz    Dear Ed: "Of Stegner's Folly" was great -- just like the old days. Hang onto Shaver and you're in. For my money, anyhow. -- Art Wister    ThaPs all the letters we have room for this trip. Well arrange for more space in the future. Incident ally, the winners of our manuscript contest will be announced in July issue -- on the stands May #th. Better have your news dealers reserve a copy. your news dealer for this big-value magazine of puzzles! Over # scintillating new word puzzles to test your skill! Crosswords, Askews, Skeletons, Word Chains, Slidograms, Cryptograms, Diagramless, Crostics, Round-and-Round, Movie Puzzles, Radio Puzzles, Television Puzzles -- hours and hours of fun and thought-provoking "entertainment for all puzzle whenever you are looking for puzzle pleasure!... At all newsstands -- ony # cents! magazine really UfUAwos this #I nu man?... At the age of three his cradle moved in a queer manner. At ten he caused his oatmeal bowl to skip about the table and furniture to be lifted by unseen hands. At thirteen he was prophesying events with alarming accuracy. At twenty-five he astounded the world with his supernaturol powers... Reod about this amazing person In The Fabulous Circles of Nine in the May issue all newsstands -- # cents.  l # I a(l JH B  VB l i  #I All Stories New and Complete Publisher Editor IF is published bi-monthly by, Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., # Lord St., Buffalo, N. Y. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., Kingston, N. Y. Application for Entry as Second Class matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York, pending. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction. Any similirity to actual persons is coincidental. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. I    Marion Fried R.F.D. #I Monmouth Junction New Jersey. Dear Marion:  In the letter you wrote congratulating us on the first issue of IF, you asked a question which -- strangely enough -- was not found in any other of the hundreds we received. I gathered from your letter that you are sixteen years old -- that you like science fiction but are having a tough time because your brother doesn't think much of it and most of your classmates are partial to the "true confession" type of magazine. Possibly it will comfort you to know that I am pretty much in the same boat. My two small daughters are partial to Hopalong Cassidy, and their mother will read a science fiction story if you hold a pistol to her head. But to your question: In the straightforward manner of the typical sixteen-year-old, you ask: "Can you give me a gooddefinition of science fiction in one sentence?" can't. As a matter of cold fact, I don't know what a science fiction story is. This, no doubt, must be considered an admission of guilt, coming as it does from the editor of a science fiction magazine. But I, too, can find comfort in the conviction that I am not alone. I don't think any of the other stf editors can define science fiction either. Of course I could give you any number of one-sentence definitions. I could say that a science fiction story is one in which the characters are occupied with scientific gimmicks. That wouldn't be a true definition, however, because -- while it may define one type of story -- it does not define the field. Y OU see the trouble is -- science fiction is not a basic fiction pattern. Strictly speaking, there are few of these basic patterns, and they were discovered and set down long before science fiction was developed. The love story, for instance, is basic, mainly because it deals with a basic human emotion and is therefore fixed in its disciplinary structure. The detective story, which is hardly differentiated from the mystery pattern, is also basic, because we are dealing there, with a basic human characteristic -- curiosity; the love of solving a puzzle. But the western story -- as an instance -- is not really basic. It is merely a background against which love, mystery, humor, or some other basic pattern, is laid. The same is true with adventure stories, the term usually indicative of an exotic or unusual background against which a love story, a mystery story, or a problem story, is laid. As a matter of fact, even the basics can be mixed up. All detective stories -- or ninety percent of them -- carry a love interest. And all love stories carry a mystery' thread, even if it's only the reader's curiosity as to what's going to happen next. So about all that can be really defined, is a story. They've discovered that in order to achieve the desired effect, a story must contain certain things. There should be both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. The sympathetic character should be faced with a problem. He or she should solve that problem through individual effort and in a manner which satisfies and entertains the reader. a story. Of course there are a world of variations, but they've discovered that most salable fiction must shake down, in essence, to those fundamentals. And those basics are found in every good story, be it in whatever category you will. Personally, I'd say a science fiction story is a fantasy in which the development is based on tangible gimmicks with at least a pseudoscientific basis under them. I really feel, however, that the term denotes a background rather than a basic; just as the term western fiction is obviously a background. And I think the impossibility of really defining science fiction with any degree of accuracy, is the reason for the continuous hassle that goes on among the readers. The readership has broken up into groups, each of which has its own definition of science fiction. Probably nothing more than personal taste is behind the definitions, but that makes each group no less militant in defense of the story-type it favors. And there is no reason why each should not defend his own. The day these arguments cease is the day we can be sure science fiction interest is on the wane. So. let's just say science fiction is something that can't be defined but when you see it, you know it's there. Sincerely, pwf. How can we possibly amount to much when our fathers were sold at auction a scant five thousand years ago ? Let My People Gd By Walter Miller, Jr. lous!" growled Wolek Parn, glaring fixedly at the scope which displayed the planet's surface as a mottled green pattern of pale luminescence. "Look at them. Just look!" The others said nothing. Taut faces, with eyes locked to the screen. The planet lay seven thousand miles from their landing site on its moon, but the magnification pulled the surface toward them so that they watched it as if from an altitude of thirty miles. There were continents, oceans, islands, peninsulas. The land appeared splotched and spotted, as if by variations in flora between highland and lowland. All this had been expected, predicted by Merrigull's calculations. A planet for colonization, and they had reached it after thirteen years of journeying across the blackness of interstellum. Now they were here, and the planet indeed was inhabitable. Furthermore, it was already inhabited. "There's another one!" Wolek Pam breathed as a checkerboard pattern of tiny squares drifted into view near the planet's misty limb. "Six, maybe seven miles square. That's no native village!" He turned to peer at their faces by the glow-light from the scope. Morgun Sahl, biologist -- a tall gaunt man with a saturnine face, he showed no emotion except for a flicker at the corner of his mouth that might have been indicative of bitterness or of grim amusement. A wiry shock of black hair dangled over his forehead. He was a Lincolnesque Machiavelli with a sour drawl. Beside him stood Faron Qun, chemist, mineralogist -- a shorter man with straw hair and a quiet scholarly face, small featured, slightly pudgy, usually smiling. The smile was absent now. He looked like a small boy at a funeral, and the glow of the screen made his face seem abnormally pale. He held the launch pilot's arm, squeezed it spasmodically. It was a soft arm, milk-white and scattered with tiny freckles, and it belonged to Alaia Dazille -- a tall girl, not beautiful, but cool and pleasant, with red-brown hair, a narrowtival face, and hazel eyes that could shine with friendly amusement and suddenly switch to the cold glitter of sarcasm. Wolek Parn had met women that reminded him of gardenias and fine wine. Alaia Dazille, however, made him think of geraniums and buttermilk. She responded to his stare with a questioning flicker of her eyebrows. She was trying hard not to be frightened. "Well, Alaia?" She shook her head. "Don't ask me anything Skipper." He glanced at the chemist. "Faron?" Qun seemed to shudder. "No opinion. Ask our biologist." "All right, Sahl," Parn growled. "We spent thirteen years getting here. Shall we spend another thirteen going back home?" Morgun Sahl watched the slow drift of the checkerboard patterns on the scope. "I'm sure you mean that," he grunted sourly. "Maybe I do. Why shouldn't I?" The big man shrugged. "How old would you be, Pam, when we got back? Sixty?" "Fifty-nine." "You started in the prime of life. You get back approaching retirement age. Twenty-six years gone for nothing. And you don't get paid a nickel for your trouble." He smiled humorlessly and tapped the scope with his finger. "There's your pay, Skipper. Epsilon Eridani Two. You won't turn it down." Parn scowled. "You think we can land right in the middle of somebody else's civilization and start a colony?" the corner of his mouth thoughtfully for a moment. He gestured at the screen again. "They, whoever they are, undoubtedly know we're here. The ship's big enough, and the moon is close enough, so that they can see us with a small telescope. Creatures that build cities that size probably are advanced enough to spot us and recognize us for what we are: alien invaders. Undoubtedly they're already reacting to what they see." "And what kind of a reaction?" The biologist shook his head. "Impossible to guess. Anger -- hys. teria -- terror. Or maybe cold analysis and planning. I suggest we just wait and see." "And wind up with a fleet of guided missiles coming up to greet us?" "Maybe." "What kind of creatures do you think we'd find on such a planet?" The biologist was slow to answer. "Well, life always takes about the same pattern everywhere we've found it. It's never been too radically different. The basic protoplasm is always the same, or we can't call it 'life.' This planet is very earthlike. The sun is cooler than our Sol, but there's enough ultraviolet for vegetation. I believe the life-forms will be similar to what Earth has developed at various periods in her history." "Which might be anything from a duck-billed platypus to a dinosaur," Parn fumed. "And the cities might be insect hives." With an exclamation of disgust, Wolek Parn snapped a switch, flooding the compartment with light. He turned off the scope and paced to his desk where he dropped wearily into his seat and faced them, arms draped across his legs, his shoulders slumped dejectedly. "We can send a launch down, of course," hb said gloomily. "But it'll be a one-way trip because of fuel considerations. If it goes down, it stays. And so it has to take a load of colonists with it, or somebody gets left behind in the long run. How can I send twenty-four guinea pigs down into the hands of -- of what?" Sahl shrugged. "You can ask for volunteers." Parn leaned forward, clasped his head in his hands, and shook it slowly. "Eventually, I guess I'll have to. Right now, I'm faced with telling them. About the cities. They've been impatient as hell to know what's going on. Why we landed here. A few more hours and they'll start getting mad." first time. "Why don't you put it to them as a vote, Skipper? Make them responsible for deciding." "Suppose they decide to load everybody in the launches and go down right now?" "Well -- suppose they do? Can you say definitely that it's the wrong decision?" "No, I guess not." "I can," Sahl growled. "But you needn't give them that choice. Ask for volunteers for a first launch, then let the volunteers decide whether they want to jump right in, or wait and see if there's any reaction to our presence here on the planet's moon." Parn nodded thoughtfully and sighed. "I guess it's the only thing to do." There was a brief silence, suddenly interrupted by a knock at the entrance. "Colonists," Parn mut-. tered, "wanting to know what's up." He raised his voice. "Okay! Come in!" The hatch opened, and a young officer leaned inside without entering. "It's Rulian, Sir. He wants to see you." "Ru -- I thought I sent him out to scout the surface." "He's back, Sir." "All right, send him in." , The officer nodded and vanished. A pudgy, florid man stepped hurriedly inside. He was panting slightly, appeared to . be nervous. He still wore a pressure suit, but the helmet had been removed. He brushed at his disheveled hair and gazed at Parn. "Well, what is it? Surely you didn't have time to finish -- " Rulian shook his head quickly. "No, Sir. We got halfway to the hills. And then we came back. We thought you ought to know right away." "Know what?" The scout held something out on the palm of his hand -- a torn bit of metal. Parn frowned questioningly. "Looks like -- maybe a shearedoff rivet. So?" "Just brought it back so you wouldn't think I was off my rocker, Skipper." "What are you talking about?" "Out there -- on ' the surface. There's the entrance to a tunnel, with an air-lock. A meteorite clobbered it -- long time ago, maybe." He tossed the bit of metal on Parn's desk. "That's from the wreckage of the lock." A hush fell over them. Parn reached for the bit of metal, rolled it around in his palm with a blunt finger. Morgun Sahl was the first to break the silence. "Well, Skipper -- I guess that determines what we do next." "Eh? Oh, yes. Sahl, I guess the job is yours, since we don't have an archeologist aboard. Pick whoever you need." Sahl glanced at Faron Qun and Alaia. "You two want to go?" The girl glanced at Qun. The chemist paused, then nodded. "We'll get suits and meet you outside." Chapter II and sunswept under a lurid sky. The moon possessed a thin atmosphere of xenon and other heavy gasses that tempered the harshness of the sun-glare and painted the blackness of space with a translucent film of sky. Morgun Sahl glanced at the wrist-indicators of his suit. The pressure was around two pounds, and temperature a modest # Fahrenheit. He stood outside the lock with Rulian, waiting for Qun and Alaia, The scout was pointing to a low outcropping of rock perhaps four hundred yards from the ship. "The tunnel is just beyond that," came the scout's voice in his headsets. "Believe me, Sahl, I about dropped over when I saw it. Who do you suppose dug it?" ' The biologist shrugged, and gazed moodily at the huge but faintly visible crescent that hung in the western sky. What manner of beings were watching them and waiting for a move? Man had never before touched a planet where flourishing life was possible. There was Mars, of course, with its stunted flora and primitive fauna. And the single planet of Alpha Centauri, with its steaming oceans full of marine life, but with a climate too hot for land-life except in fertile patches in the polar regions. Here, however, under the orange glare of an Eridanian sun, lay a world nearly Earthlike. So Earthlike that the eventual development of an intelligent species was almost inevitable, according to Sahl's way of thinking. Merrigull had thought so, too, but he had allowed for a probable deviation from Earthlike conditions, and had guessed that the peculiarly human survival response called "intelligence" would not happen here. Obviously, Merrigull had guessed wrong. And one hundred and twenty colonists were left holding the bag, visitors without reservations, discovering too late that the inn was already full. Certainly the visitors would not be welcome. The only question in Sahl's mind pertained to the amount of resistance the Eridanian life-forms would offer to their coming. It might be anything from grudging tolerance to fanatical opposition. In case of the latter, there was nothing to do but retreat, go back to Earth, if they could escape -- and try to laugh off the twenty-six lost years of life. Certainly there could be no forcing an entry into the Eridanian world against the will of the Eridanian civilization. The colony was equipped with no spectacular weapons, nor any way to maintain a technological culture for more than a generation. They had come hoping to begin with a society of small farms in some area where metals were plentiful, and to let their descendants gradually assemble the tools of a better civilization. him, and he turned to watch Alaia and Faron Qun climb down to join them. Across the cracked dry ground they strode, puffs of dust rising about their boots and drifting away on the thin breeze. The scout led them to the outcropping of rock, and they climbed it to stare at the plain beyond. The tunnel's mouth, was only a small pock-mark of blackness on the ground, but there was a glitter of metal at its rim. Sahl stared at the terrain around it, then pointed to dark splotches on the ground a hundred yards beyond the tunnel. "You examine those?" he asked. "Yeah, we looked at them. Ground looks fused. I'd guess it was used as a landing site." "Probably. How about the lock? Think we can get through it?" "Have to hoist that wrecked hatch out of the way. I think four of us can manage it. If we can't, I brought a torch." Sahl leaped from the outcrop and and drifted down the six-foot drop to level ground. The others followed. Moments later they stood at the mouth of the lock. Alaia kicked at a layer of dust with her boot, uncovered a smooth stone ramp in which the lock was set. Sahl knelt beside the torn hatchway to tug at the sheared metal door, wedged diagonally in the entranceway. "It's still fastened in one spot," he called. "Let's have that torch, Rulie." The scout fumbled at the valves of the two cylinders strapped to his back, then struck a blinding dart of blue-white flame from the handtorch. Sahl flipped a dark filter down over his visor, then played the torch slowly over the jagged metal. Minutes later, the fastening pulled loose. The hatch slipped deeper and wedged. "All right, let's heave. Don't grab the hot spot." After a concerted effort, the hatch came free with a suddenness that sent Alaia sprawling. Faron Qun quickly helped her to her feet, leaving the others to struggle with the hatch. Sahl gave him a black look, but said nothing. Beneath the lock appeared a corridor heaped with cave-in rubble, but apparently passable. Sahl stared down for a moment, then eyed the scout. "Notice anything," he grunted. "Yeah," the other muttered. "We're not going to be able to stand up down there. Looks' like a crawlway." Sahl shook his head. "It was probably designed to walk in all right -- but the designers evidently aren't very tall. Four feet high at the most." He stepped into the wrecked lock and let himself down gingerly to the top of the rubble heap. He crouched to shine a light down along the corridor, then glanced up at the others. "Can't see much. Let's go down. We'll stick close together. And don't touch anything that you don't understand." He slid feet-first down the heap of rubble and crouched in the gloom below. The others followed. "Last man ought to blaze a trail somehow, as we move along," he called. "So we won't get lost down here." of rock from the heap and scratched it experimentally on the wall. It left a discernible mark. Sahl nodded and turned to move along the narrow corridor. After a few paces, he went to his hands and knees and crawled. The ceiling was too low to permit walking without crouching uncomfortably. Blackness engulfed them, except for the light thrown by Sahl's handlamp. They passed a turn and came to a second hatch. Sahl ran his flash around the edge. "Tight seal," he grunted. "Another lock." "They've probably got the place split into compartments in case of a leak," Faron offered. Sahl heaved at the door with his shoulder, but it failed to budge. "Try that button," Alaia suggested. The biologist snorted, but pressed the stud beside the hatch and held it down. With his helmet pressed against the metal, he thought he heard the feeble click of a relay, but the hatch remained closed. "That disk," she called, reaching over his shoulder. "Might be an emergency hand-control." "All right, turn it," he growled. She twisted it hard. After two turns, Sahl glanced down to see a tiny spurt of dust licking up from a valve an inch above floor level. It startled him. He had expected no pressure to remain in the lock. When the jet of dust subsided, he heaved against the door again. It swung slowly open, revealing the inside of the lock. "We'll have to go through it two at a time," he said, then paused. "Anybody think to bring a weapon?" No one answered for a moment. Then Faron snapped irritably, "Why should we, Sahl? Don't be silly!" "Yeah. I'm being silly. Come on, Rulie, let's go through." They crawled into the lock and closed the hatch. Sahl closed the valve from the inside, and found a similar control for the inner door. Then he watched the fabric of his suit go slowly slack as the 'pressure built up in the lock. "Open it." Rulie grunted. A slight tug brought the thick hatch swinging inward. They stared beyond the door into a long domed A Beaten by despair, she stoically awaited her fate. TSr, room. The ceiling seemed to glow faintly, and Sahl extinguished his flashlight to check it. Bands of faint luminosity provided a dim glowlight to the room. The last feeble flicker, he guessed, of a lighting system abandoned long ago. layer of dust lay thick over the., ledges and across the floor. The dust was marked in places, but the marks were not fresh, and dust had partially covered them again. They closed the hatch behind them so that the others could come through. Sahl glanced at his pressure gauge. "Twelve pounds,' he muttered. "I'm going to try a sniffer." Rulie protested. "Might get a lungful of chlorine! I can test for oxygen .with the torch."  Sahl yelped and snatched it away from him before he struck a spark. "Might get worse than a lungful of chlorine if you strike that thing in here!" Rulie muttered apologetically. Sahl touched the sniffer valve at the side of his helmet and opened it a tenth of a turn, then cut off his oxygen supply and waited until the pressure in his suit fell to twelve pounds. Then he inhaled deeply several times. "Don't smell anything," he called, "rtn going to open it all the way. If I keel over, catch me." The air in the room smelled musty, but after a minute's experimental breathing he removed his helmet. Rulie loosened his own helmet, but the biologist tightened it for him again. "If I'm all right after half an hour," he shouted against Rulie's visor, "you can take it off." The others followed them through the lock and looked around quickly. Without his helmet, Sahl could not hear their conversation except as a muffled murmur from behind their visors. He motioned for them to follow, then crossed the room to enter another corridor beyond. Somewhere in the station, nuclear reactors were still seeping a trickle of energy that kept a faint glow of light from the ceiling, and he hoped that Faron would be able to estimate the age of the place from radioactive decay. He sent Rulie back to call the Ark. As they progressed through a series of corridors, rooms and other locks, Sahl grew deeply puzzled. This was no observatory, nor was it an experimental station. It had apparently beep used as a transfer point to space, a way-station where landing launches from the planet shifted cargo or passengers with larger ships too bulky to land on the mother-world. Why had it been abandoned? Oxygen was still being released from the rocks. The place was still in fair condition. Had the builders abandoned space entirely? The station was not large, and an 'hour's exploration brought them to its limits. Faron had discovered the reactors in a vault beneath the main level, where they supplied heat to an extensive bank of thermopiles which still delivered a trickle of power to 'the equipment. Faron let himself down into the vault to examine the equipment, while the others continued to explore the main level, having removed their helmets to breathe the still air of the station. zling over a four-foot cube of transparent plastic that rested on a low pedestal in the center of the floor. "Know what it's for?" he asked. She shook her head and took a last swipe at the dust that covered it. "It's clear except for a few specks of something. Air bubbles maybe." Sahl extinguished his light and noticed that she stepped away from him quickly in the darkness. He grinned sourly to himself, and waited until his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. "What's the idea?" she muttered suspiciously. "Look at the specks in the plastic." "Why -- they shine faintly ! Why?" "Probably bits of radioactive material covered with a phosphor." He studied it in silence for a moment. One group of dots appeared to be joined by a web of fine lines. Their colors ranged from dull red to blue-white, and they varied in he said suddenly. "That small orange one near the center of the web. Epsilon Eridani, their sun." "Why the web?" . "Probably indicates the places their ships have -- " He stopped suddenly and sucked in his breath. The web included Sol. Alaia interpreted his silence. "I wonder how long ago," she murmured. Sahl turned as footsteps approached from behind. It was Rulie, and he seemed puzzled by an object in his hand. He held it out and stared at Morgun Sahl. "Bone, Sahl?" The biologist took the six-inch fragment and turned it over once. His hands seemed to freeze as they held it, and he was silent for several seconds. "Where did you find this, Rulie?" "Back by the rubble heap, when I went back out to check with the Ark. Why? What is it?" The biologist looked up slowly. "Piece of a human tibia," he said, and his voice was somehow flat. tion!" Parn was saying as he paced the floor of his cabin, occasionally glancing at Sahl. "What's that, Skipper?" "An Earth civilization that archeologists don't know anything about. A civilization that got to space before it died out and disappeared." "I don't think so," Sahl disagreed quickly. "A civilization like that would leave too many traces. If primitive architectural ruins stand for thousands of years, as in Egypt -- think how long the remains of a technological culture would endure. No, Skipper, I don't agree at all." "All right, damn it! How do you explain that piece of bone." "I don't." Pam snorted irritably. "Do you even know it's human?" The biologist shrugged. "You got the surgeon's opinion to confirm my own." "Isn't there any way to tell how old it is?" "The lab's working on it, but they aren't very experienced at that sort of thing." "What about this carbon# method?" Sahl nodded indifferently. "They'll try it, but we can't trust results." "Why not? I thought it was very accurate?" "It is -- on Earth, where we know the percentage of radioactive carbon ingested during life. But how long had the fellow been away from Earth? And what percentage did he get while he was away? Was he even bom on Earth?" Pam clenched his fists and began beating his knuckles together with thoughtful regularity while he paced the floor. "Maybe humanoid creatures evolve wherever it's possible," he ventured. "Maybe the cities down there are -- " "What about those four-foot ceilings in the station?" Sahl interrupted. "That tibia came from a man about our height." Parn clucked irritably. "Well, you said some of the ceilings were ten feet and over. "Why don't you judge from that?' Sahl smiled wryly. "How about -- say -- the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Would you judge the stature of the builders by the height of the nave, or by the size of the smallest door?" Parn grunted defeat. "All right, why don't you venture an opinion." "It'd be more in the nature of a wild guess, I think." "Make it, then." "Well -- let's turn the situation around. Suppose we had come here as explorers rather than as colonists. Suppose we landed on the planet and found a semi-intelligent species, and we were interested in studying it further. Suppose we captured a few, and carried them back home for breeding purposes." as if to interrupt, but Sahl continued : "That three-dimensional star-map we found makes me think the builders have visited Sol. If they visited it before Man began civilizing himself, we'd have no legends, nor any trace of the visit. They could have made off with a few humans and we'd never know it had happened." "Why would they want humans?" Sahl shrugged. "Why do we catch wild animals and put them in cages? Why did we domesticate dogs? Curiosity, maybe some usefulness. Man has brought back specimens from every planet he's ever visited. Maybe he's been a specimen himself. It's just a guess." "Pretty wild guess, if you ask me," Pam snorted. "Human beings would be rather dangerous pets to have around." "Would they? Humans have made pets -- or slaves -- of humans." Parn slumped into a chair, shaking his head slowly. "None of which answers the question: 'What are we going to do?' " "How are the colonists taking it?" ' "Better than I expected. They're restless, but quiet. Maybe too quiet. I don't know. I let them out of the ship to roam around. They work off steam that way." "If they're not getting disturbed," Sahl offered, "I suggest we wait until we've gone over that station with a fine-tooth comb. Faron is still puzzling over the reactors. And we might learn more about the builders by closer study of the interior structure." "How?" "Well, by measuring dimensions, for one thing. The shape of the doorways suggest that they're small bipeds -- or at least, their height is about three times their width. And Faron found something else down in the reactor vault that might be significant." "What's that?" "A pair of goggles, a circuit diagram, and a place to sit down. The goggles are too closely spaced for human eyes, and perfectly round, but the strap just about fits my head. The circuit diagram is hung on a wall, and we have to stoop to read it. And the' seat would be about the right height for a child with a foothigh knee." Pam threw up his hands. "All right. Go ahead and study all you want to. Until they start shooting at us, anyway." Sahl glanced at the scope, noticed that it was on. He grinned. "Been watching for them to start?" "I've been watching. Now get out, Sahl. I got some worrying to do. Go find Alaia." The biologist stiffened. "What makes you say that?" "Eh? What makes -- ?" The captain paused, smirked sadistically. "Oh, sorry. I must have been thinking of Faron Qun, eh? Don't slam the door." Sahl left it open instead, but he heard it slam when Parn got up to close it. He smiled irritably, and went down through the colonists' quarters to listen to the chatter. But the chatter was absent. Gloom pervaded the ship. He felt it hanging tensely, murderously, in the air, waiting to become rage or rebellion or sudden popular decision. These people were not going back to Earth. They had gambled thirteen years and they didn't intend to quit as losers. He passed quietly through the passenger-areas of the ship, and stopped at his own quarters long enough to slip into a pressure suit. He stopped again at Alaia's cabin, hesitating before the door. But he moved on without knocking. It might embarrass someone if Faron Qun were with her. Sahl tried to grin his way around the twinge of anger that followed the thought, but he failed to rid himself of it. and stepped out through the lock. Lunar night, with the planet's The colonists had tagged the planet "Merrigull's Guesswork", had later shortened it to "Guesswork", Sahl had idly speculated that after a dozen, or ten dozen generations, appearance. Their number-system was octal, suggesting perhaps fourfingered hands. Their written language was not phonetic, but seemed to be based on a system of ideographs, and a rather complicated system at that. It occurred to Sahl that they might not communicate by sound-waves, but he dismissed the notion as growing out of fragmentary evidence. A telephone circuit had been run from the Ark to the underground station. It began jangling frantically"Sahl!" Pam bellowed when he picked it up. "A spacecraft has been sighted about five miles away, over the hills! It's just hanging there on its jets, watching us. Get. back to the Ark. Everybody." The biologist gathered an incredulous frown. "What kind of a ship?" he gasped. "Sleek little rocket. About half the size of a launch. Hurry back. If it lands, I want you to size up the occupants." "Okay, Skipper. But I doubt that there're any of them in it. I'll bet it's a remote control ship, or a computer-piloted job." "Why? What makes you say that?" "Simple. They don't know anything about us. They're probably holding up a hat on a stick to see if we'll shoot at it, and maybe to see what kind of weapons we've got. I'll be right out." He hung up and yelled at the others, then scrambled through the lock and out of the station. He paused to peer at the dark sky in search of the ship, then found it at about thirty degrees above the horizon in the west. A silvery sliver that glittered in the sun, nose pointed skyward as if landing. But the thrust of its jets just matched the tug of gravity, and it hung motionless in mid-air, breathing a fiery tail downward, Sahl sprinted toward the Ark. Faron and Alaia and several others of the staff were assembled in Parn's cabin when he burst inside. The Captain waved him to a seat. Faron was speaking. "It's probably a television ship sent to scan us, Skipper. I think we ought to make some friendly gesture toward it, or at least not behave hostilely. We could probably bring it down with a few bursts, but it'd undoubtedly lead to trouble." "No question about that," Parn muttered. "Well, Said? You itching to say something?" "Yes. Give me a pilot and a launch and permission to blast off and approach the vessel cautiously." "Wh -- why? Suppose it shot you down? We'd lose a launch, and twenty-four people will be stranded. No, I can't do it." He shook his head quickly. "Of course it's a risk, but it might pay off. Suppose it is a robot ship? If I can board it and ride it back to the planet, we've gotten an emissary down there without wasting a launch." Parn sat with his mouth open for a moment, then shouted: "And suppose it's a one-way ship? Suppose it doesn't go back -- but only sits there and -- " "Skipper!" A low gasp from Alaia who had been watching die screen. They stared. The small rocket, motionless at first, had begun to move. Tilting its axis at a slight angle, it began whisking rapidly to ward them. Wolek Parn went white and began jabbing buttons. "Man emergency stations, all hands!" he bellowed into the intercom. "All hands in pressure suits, man the launches! Prepare for blast-off!" Alaia and the other launch pilots scrambled through the door. Faron raced for the reactor room. Sahl sat 'quietly staring at the screen. "Well, everybody got some exercise anyhow," he said as the rocket landed on the flats beyond the tunnel's mouth, fanning up ' great whirls of scorched dust. He climbed to his feet. "Coming?" he grunted over his shoulder. "Don't go out there!" Pam barked. "Let them make a first move." "They've already made it," he called back through the hatch. "If they wanted to mess us up, a few armor piercing shells are all they needed to do the job. Coming?" Mumbling irritably, the Captain reached for his helmet. Chapter IV the rockef was a slender spire through the thin haze as they left the Ark's lock and began walking slowly across the lunar plain. "See that black hole in the hull?" Pam snapped. "They're either watching us or aiming at us." "I see it. Let's keep walking." "Probably a television camera, eh?" "If it makes you feel any better to think so." "Sgerul ingbagge khannil du ?" came a third voice on the interhelmet communicator frequency. The men glanced at each other nervously. Sahl shook his head. "It wasn't me, Skipper." Parn set his jaw and glared' fixedly at the rocket as they approached. A hatch slid open in its side, revealing an empty lock. Something began snaking down from the lock toward the ground. "What the -- !" "A ladder!" Sahl breathed. "A flexible ladder. They want us to come up. What do you think?" Pam paused. "I -- I don't like it. I wish they'd show themselves." He paused again. "But we've got to face them sometime, I guess." "Yeah." They stood at the foot of the ladder, looking up the wall of gleaming metal toward the lock. A lense, projecting from the side of the ship had turned downward to survey them with its mechanical gaze. Sahl grunted nervously and started climbing. Soon he felt Parn coming after him. What manner of creatures were they about to meet? Or was the ship remotely piloted? Once they were inside, would it blast off without warning -- a specimen bottle that had been filled? He scrambled up into the lock and stood gazing back toward the Ark as Parn climbed up after him. raent of you runs contrary to your ethical system. We did not realize it before the hypnotic interview. You are not prisoners. We wished only to establish contact, and to study you. We welcome your colony to our planet." the reclining figure beyond the glass partition. The puffy, Neanderthaloid features of the saffron man, and the small circular tattoo on his shoulder, and the simple white loincloth that he wore did not somehow jibe with the complex science suggested by the visible equipment. The man's head was bald, with a heavy protruding brow and a small flat skull. His body was thick and heavy, with long arms and broad hands. Sahl imagined that he would stoop when standing, for his shoulders, though thick, seemed steeply sloping. "May I ask some questions?" he grunted. "Certainly," purred the loudspeaker. "Are you the dominant race on the planet?" "Yes." "Are your ancestors locally evolved?" "Yes." Sahl hesitated, staring at the man. He shook his head slowly. Somehow he could not believe that the fellow was not originally descended of Earth stock. "Apparently your race has explored extensively in space during its history. Why did you give it up?" A brief pause, then: "We found what we regard as a more mature goal than mere widespread expansion. For thousands of years our activities have been directed toward the biologic integration of all lifeforms on our planet." "Into a world-organism, you mean?" "Ultimately perhaps. Interdependence and elimination of destructive parasitism are the immediate goals. Symbiosis rather than conflict. You might call it biologic socialism." "With your race leading and integrating?" "Naturally." It sounded plausible, Sahl thought. Perhaps earthlings would someday become bored with the stars and turn back to their own planet to "rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures". For they had never really tried to do so, had never tried world-wide schemes of biologic control. "But why," he said slowly, "are you ready to invite outsiders? What makes you think we would cooperate?" time, then: "We have taken in other outsiders. The fauna and flora of our planet is no longer local, but a composite -- made up of selected species from forty star-systems. You will find it something like an artificial garden. It would be virtually impossible for you not to cooperate." Sahl wondered how much information had been gleaned from him along with his language. Quite a lot, he guessed, since the very structure of a language implied many things about the linguistic animal that spoke it. "Maybe you understand," he said slowly, "why we came here. We want to establish a colony and try to equip it with our own brand of culture. Our culture is expansive, exploitive. I fail to see how it could fit in without some strong shift in cultural goal." "That would be expected." Sahl frowned. "You don't understand. Our cultural continuity is as important to us as 'genetic continuity." "Why?" The biologist groped for an explanation. "A leader of one of our primitive tribes once put it this way, when his own culture was dying. He said, 'In the beginning, God gave to every people a cup of clay, from which it drank its life. Now our cup is broken.' " The Eridanian was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his tone remained unchanged -- for the machine had but one tone, one rhythm of speech. But Sahl somehow felt an aura of menace associated with the words. "If you wish to survive, you must come to our planet. If you come to our planet, you must conform to our patterns and our plans. You cannot come to expand and exploit." Sahl weighed it carefully for a moment. "Before we decide, may we send a delegation down to look around?" "That was anticipated," came the quick reply. "We will take your delegation down and bring it back." A pause, then: "Wolek Parn has awakened. We will speak with him. Then you may return to your ship to discuss the matter among yourselves if you wish." There was a click, and the loudspeaker went dead. A sudden thought came to him. How did the fellow know Parn was awake? He had not moved nor opened his eyes. Sahl watched him carefully. His lips still moved, but no sound penetrated the glass wall. Evidently the translator's output had been channelled to another compartment. Evidently the fellow was talking to Parn. Two hours of waiting and watching followed, two hours during which a suspicion flickered in his mind, and grew to proportions of near-certainty: the man who lay on the table and talked was a cat's paw, a servant of something else. But who was using him? Observation failed to answer the question or even confirm the suspicion. A panel slid open behind him, revealing the door to the airlock. His helmet lay on the floor. He fastened it quickly in place, and the airlock opened. Simultaneously Parn entered it from a flanking hatch. They glanced at each other silently, grimly, but neither spoke. Before the hatch closed behind Parn, Sahl saw another glass cubicle beyond it. Another suspicion entered his mind: that this ship had been designed specifically for this one mission. Moments later, they were descending the ladder to the plain below, and the comforting beam of a searchlight picked them up from the Ark. It was night, and the warm tinted crescent of the planet shone overhead. Somehow it seemed gloomy and forbidding. Chapter V viewed all four of us separately," said Parn when they were back in the Ark again. "Let's compare notes. I'll begin with what happened to me." The Skipper related his conversation with the Eridanian matterof-factly, and it differed only in detail from Sahl's experience. The Skipper apparently had reacted more angrily, but the general line of discussion was the same. The same was true of the others, except for Faron Qun, who apparently had been more eager than the rest to take advantage of the Eridanian's "generous offer", as he put it. "Let's get it straight," Pam grunted. "I said flatly that we wouldn't fit in like a cog in somebody else's wheel. Sahl took a dim view of it. Alaia kept her mouth shut -- which was probably smart. And Faron, you thought their offer was a good idea." "I still do." "That remains to be seen. The point is, they probably realize now that there's going to be a diversity of opinion among us. They might try to take advantage of it somehow. But the main question of course is: 'What the devil do they have in mind for us?' " "They seem to want us, all right," muttered the girl. "But why?" "Maybe the delegation can find out." "That brings up the question of who's going." Alaia glanced around quickly. "How about us?" Parn shook his head, grinning wryly. "Not you, Ala. I'll send Qun and Sahl." The girl reddened angrily, fell silent. Faron Qun touched her arm lightly. "I'd rather you'd stay where it's safer..."  "Excuse me. Skipper," Sahl interrupted sourly. "But I think we'd better have a pilot along, just in case." Faron snorted contemptuously. "In case of what?" "In case we have to seize the ship and come back on our own." "Of all the silly -- " "Maybe it's not so silly, Faron," Parn growled. "I believe you're right, Sahl." "Not Alaia, of course, but -- " She bounded to her feet angrily. "Why not Alaia?" she demanded. Parn sighed and shrugged. "All three of you go, then. I'll have to stay and watch over the brood, I guess. Try to get them to establish radio contact with us, so you can keep us informed." danian ship bearing the three Earthlings spaceward, climbed a column of flame. They sat locked in a small but comfortably furnished compartment until blast-off was accomplished and acceleration fell to something around a gravity. They waited. The compartment was locked. Sahl rapped sharply at the door, but there was no answer. "No sightseeing, permitted," he grunted suspiciously. "They probably just want to keep a balanced loading, so they don't want us moving around." Sahl glanced at the pilot. "Think so?" he muttered. She frowned at him irritably, but shook her head. "I doubt it. They must have automatic trimming mechanisms to correct for slight load unbalance." "No sightseeing permitted, then," he reasserted. Faron sneered slightly. "You've got a lousy attitude, Sahl. It makes me sick." "That's too bad," the biologist sympathized quietly. Alaia glanced from one to the other jf them. Then she twisted Faron's ear with playful sternness. "Sorry, darling, but you're out of line this time." t He reddened, and fell silent. An hour passed. Alaia, normally calm, began to seem restless. She moved about the small compartment nervously, peering at each fixture and marking. "This ship is new," she muttered. "Brand new! I'll bet it's the first flight." Sahl watched her, but said nothing. She reached a grille-covered vent over the hatch and tried to pull herself up to peer through it. The grille came free and she fell clumsily. Faron helped her up, while the biologist stared up at the opening with interest. "Only a ventilator duct," she said. "Yeah, but -- " Sahl stood up. "Might be big enough to Crawl through." "Not for you." Sahl glanced at her. She might be slender enough to wiggle into the duct, unless her hips... "Get that notion out of your head, Sahl!" Faron snapped. He picked up the grille and moved toward the opening to replace it. "Put it down," Sahl said tonelessly. Something about his voice made Faron hesitate. Alaia said, "Let me try it. I want a look at the control room." "You're not going to do it," Faron growled, blocking the duct opening. "Move, Faron," murmured the biologist. "Let's not have a tussle." "Let's do." "It would be rather one-sided, I'm afraid," Sahl grunted, producing an automatic. "Ever get pistolwhipped, Qun?" "Wh -- where did you get that? What do you mean by bringing a weapon? This is supposed to be a peaceful -- " "Yeah. Now move. Help her up in the duct." Faron stepped reluctantly aside, his face bright with anger. Alaia gave him a peculiar glance, then scrambled up and into the opening without assistance. She glanced back at Sahl and beckoned him close. "Three openings just up ahead. Watch down the duct in case I get caught." He handed her the gun and nodded. "Don't go too far. Return trip'll be harder, backing up." She stuffed the gun in her belt and gave Faron a warning look. "You better keep your temper, F.Q." She crawled slowly out of sight. Faron glared at the biologist; "Fool! Don't you imagine they're watching us? Know exactly what's going on?" "I doubt it. They're probably too busy to bother." He climbed to the duct opening and glanced along it. Alaia's body blocked the light from the other openings toward the front of the ship, but faintly he could hear her moving. "Well?" Faron growled. "You watch if you want to." Sahl returned to a seat. Faron peered along the dark duct for several minutes. "She's reached another grille," he muttered suddenly. "I can see the light -- and -- oh! no!" "What's wrong?" "The grille came loose. She -- Alaia, no! No!" then another. He scrambled for the opening, as Faronbegan beating frantically at the hatch. "They saw her! They shot her!" Sahl stared toward the faint light a dozen yards down the duct. He could see her faintly, her arm dangling from the 'opening. She lay very still. Somewhere someone was screaming gibberish. "Help me!" Faron howled. "Help me get it open!" Together they battered the locked hatch. The light metal door seemed to give slightly with each crash. After four tries, the lock gave way, and they spilled out into the corridor. A few paces away, the saffronskinned man stood staring at them idiotically. Suddenly he opened his mouth and screamed. After a moment, he screamed again -- without moving. Scalp crawling, Sahl darted around him. He seemed not to see them, but continued screaming as they ran down the corridor. Faron kicked open a hatch, then froze. Sahl's gun lay on the floor beyond it, and Alaia's hand hung limply down from above. And there was something else. A small manlike creature with a huge head lay dead in a pool of red-brown blood near an instrument panel, his skull from the automatic. A fat handweapon with multiple barrels was still clutched in his small fist. "See about Alaia," Sahl snapped, grabbing up the gun. "I'll watch the corridor." Faron stepped inside and felt her wrist. "Thank God," he breathed, "she's alive. Unconscious." "Wounded badly?" "I -- I can't tell." He paused. "There's something stuck in her face. Help me get her down." Sahl paused. Another saffron crewman was coming along the corridor, feeling his way and stumbling, as if blinded. He kept pawing at his head. He moved past Sahl without glancing at him. The biologist watched him go, then stepped inside and helped Faron haul the limp girl down out of the duct. "Damn you, Sahl! Now we're in trouble, bad trouble!" "All right, save it till later, will you? There's no time to fight about it now." They stretched her out on the floor and examined her for wounds. "Nothing," Faron muttered. "Except these little red marks on her face, and -- " He bent over her and jerked three tiny splinters from her cheek and' laid them on his palm. "Crystals. Sharp little crystals." and felt her pulse. "I'd say she was drugged." He arose and crossed the cabin to bend over the dead creature. He disentangled the weapon from a slender four-digital hand and inspected it closely. He drew back what seemed to be a charging-plunger, then aimed at the dead thing and flicked a switch. It kicked in his hand and emitted a dull cough. Six crystals appeared, stuck in a patch of the creature's hide. They began to volatilize at once. "Anaesthetic crystals," he guessed. "Must be quick acting, but not quick enough to keep Ala from shooting back when she got stung." "This is terrible!" Faron mourned. "Now they'll never let us colonize." "Wake up, fellow," Sahl snapped, pointing at the dead creature. "That's one of our hosts, not the idiots with orange hides." He tossed Faron the Eridanian's weapon and stepped through the hatch. "I'm going to search the ship, see if he's the only one." He moved warily along the corridors, peering cautiously into each compartment. He found one other saffron servant, curled up in the foetal position on the floor of a cabin. The man did not look up. There were no other creatures like the one Alaia had killed. And the three servants -- if such they were -- appeared to be completely demented. They seemed unaware of their surroundings, stared vacuous ly at nothing. The search convinced him that automatic devices were keeping the rocket on a constant heading with respect to the planet's gravitic field -- which would make it a spiralling course with respect to a fixed framework. Unless the devices corrected when they reached the atmosphere, or unless they could get control of the ship, they would go in like a meteor and crash. He returned to the compartment where Alaia lay moaning but still unconscious. Faron was studying the instrument panels. He turned away white-faced to stare at the biologist. His voice was high and tense. "Do you realize this is the control cabin? That thing was piloting the ship! Somebody's got to take over!" "He's the only one of his kind aboard. I guess it'll have to be you. I'm a mechanical moron, Qun." Faron groaned. "I can't even pilot one of our own ships. And we'll never be able to read the markings on these instruments, or know what they mean. The controls Zoo A: .fairly simplified, but -- " He shook his head, pointed at the screen. The ship seemed to be plunging surfaceward at a shallow angle. "We've got to get Alaia awake. Maybe she can analogize between those gadgets and familiar controls." Faron growled a low curse and went to the hatch. "I'm going to see if I can't shut off the jets somehow. We might still have enough of an orbital velocity-component to carry us around the planet, if we can stop the rockets from skidding us back any more." "An orbit?" "Yeah. Probably with an underground perihelion. If we get out of this, Said, I'm going to kick your face in." "I'll be looking forward to it," the biologist murmured, as he knelt beside Alaia. instrument panel's lights began flashing frantically, and relays clattered loudly. He straightened, sensing vaguely that they were falling. His weight was diminishing rapidly. Then he noticed that the thunder of the rockets was dying. It became a dull roar, then a purr. Faron came back, "d got the reactors damped down," he said, "but it may not matter. Look at the screen." Sahl turned. The scope revealed the curving horizon of the planet, but the cross-hairs rested only a fraction of a degree above the misty limb. "Will we skim through that atmosphere?" he asked. "If we do, we'll melt the hull off at this speed. We'll just have to wait and see." He glanced down at the girl. "How is she?" "Opened her eyes once. Drifted off again. Might bring her around if we had some sort of stimulant." Faron fumbled quickly through his suit, brought out a small vial. "Neurodrine," he grunted. "I brought it along to keep awake in case we were pretty busy." The biologist took it quickly and shook out two small capsules. "You on the stuff?" he asked. "Of course not!" The vehemence of the denial made Sahl guess that Faron was at least worried about the possibility of addiction. The drug did not set up a true craving, but habitual users became listless and apathetic when it was withdrawn, and they had to continue taking it in order to stay normally alert. He took the capsules apart and emptied the white powder in Alaia's mouth. Her jaw worked spasmodically, and heTeld her mouth closed lest she reflexively spit out the bitter compound. Five minutes passed. Sahl became aware of a faint whine, high-pitched and all-per vading. He glanced at Faron who was staring at the instruments. "Upper fringes of the atmosphere!" the chemist groaned. "That whistle?" "Yeah!" He hurried out of the cabin and returned a moment later, his face taut with worry. "What's up?" Sahl asked. "The temperature. Leading edges of projections on the hull. Red spots here and there." He stared at the screen. The cross-hairs seemed a little higher above the horizon now, but the horizon's curvature was less. "We're low, too low. Maybe sixty miles." "Perihelion?" "Maybe we're at it. But if that air slows us down enough, we'll drop." She opened her eyes and pressed her hands to her temples. Her face went tense with fear. "It shot... hurt -- my face. Where?" "No time now!" Sahl grunted. "Listen to .me. You've got to get control of the ship." "The big head... the thing... is it -- ?" "Dead." She closed her eyes again and moaned. Sahl shook her hard. "Alaia! Listen tome!" "Sick... Water..." He shook her again, then pulled her up to a sitting position. She saw the dead creature, and her eyes widened. She gasped and seemed to recover a little. She stared at the control panel and shook her head. "That whine!" she gasped. "Air!" Sahl helped her to her feet. "Faron got the jets idled," he told her quickly, "but that's all. You've got to figure out the controls." She staggered toward the instrument panel and stared. "I'll never be able to read those things. But..." She looked down at the array of switches and studs. "Only two variable controls," she muttered. "The rest are on-off. I hope thisthing is -- " She touched a lever  and bent close to inspect it. "Ball and socket mounting. Can push it any direction. That means -- " She pushed it forward slightly. "No!" Faron howled. "Look at the screen!" The cross-hairs had split into a pair, one set red, the other black. The black set rested now below the horizon. "Don't worry," she muttered. "That must be just the aim of our nose. I didn't feel a course-change." She tugged back slowly on the lever. A low drone came from the instrument panel. The black crosshairs drifted slowly upward, and the planet's horizon swept completely off the screen. The scope revealed only a patch of space. "Must be a stern pick-up somewhere." She touched one of the switches under the scope, then returned it to the original position. "Magnification. And this one -- intensity. And this -- " The scene on the scope changed abruptly and the planet's surface appeared again. "That's it. Now we're looking back toward the tail." She turned abruptly to look at Faron. '.'Howdid you get the reactors damped?" "Back in the power room. Slipped in a couple of rods." "Better go slip them back like they were." lently. Minutes later, the rocket's purr became a roar again. Alaia slowly moved the second control and the thunder waned, then grew again. The ship lurched clumsily as she fumbled with the headinglever, but gradually the planet's surface lay directly tailward, and they were climbing slowly. The whine began to diminish. Faron returned from the power room to stare over her shoulder. "Wonderful!" he murmured. "Not so wonderful, maybe," she said gloomily. "We don't know what the instruments are registering. One slip and we're finished." "Can we make it back?" Sahl sskpd "Back? To the moon? No!" She shook her head emphatically. "No way to navigate." "What then?" "We'll have to get in an orbit, let me practice on the controls. Then -- there's nothing to do but try to land it somewhere down there. Unless you'd rather stay here as a permanent satellite." "They'll send other ships up after us," Faron said darkly. "They're probably watching us right now." Sahl stared at the surface revealed on the screen. "I agree that they're watching us. But I don't think thev'll send pursuit." "Why not?" "It's my guess that they don't have anything to pursue us with. I believe this rocket was specially constructed for this one task." Faron snorted contemptuously. "If they can build this one, they've certainly built others." "Why?" "Well -- " "I'm certain they could build all the ships they wanted to," Sahl continued. "And Earthlings could build humanoid robots if they wanted to. But who wants to? The Eridanians have deserted space. They don't need to build ships, except for some special purpose, like this one." "Maybe," Faron admitted. "But if we stay here very long they'll build one to come after us. If what you say is true, they certainly built this one in a hurry." The biologist nodded, glanced at Alaia. "How long will it take?" "Somewhere between five minutes and forever," she answered curtly. "Well, we land as soon as you think you can manage it. We'll have to be careful about choosing a spot. Some place pretty far from a city. Let's say -- high ground in the twilight zone." "Why twilight?" "So that if we get down, we might try to get away in the dark." He paused. "I'm going to look over the ship again and try to get something out of those crewmen. If that's what they are." Chapter VI during which the ship lurched and rocked and spun as Alaia tested the controls. He came back looking grim, and went to bend over the dead Eridanian. He pried open its jaw and stared. "Want it to say 'ah'?" Faron asked sourly. "Look," Sahl grunted, pressing back the creature's lips to expose the inside of his mouth. "Toothless  # Faron observed, "and no tongue. So?" "Look again." He inserted his finger and pressed something. A pair of gleaming white fangs slipped slowly into view. "Hollow and retractile." Faron frowned. "Poison sacs?" "No. Feeding mechanisms." "A bloodfeeder!" "Not exactly. I found something growing on one of the crewmen's backs. A parasite vegetable growth, I think. It's taken root there -- deep roots. And there's a pale green pulpy sphere on the outside. It had fang-marks on it. Seems to be full of a milky flind, but not blood. I'd say it's the Truit of the parasite growth. And the fellow's flesh is the ground it grows in." "And he's still alive?" "In a stupor. He's the one curled up on the floor. Asleep, or unconscious." "How about the others?" "They don't have it. Apparently this thing -- " He nudged the small body. -- just brought along one dinner pail." Faron shuddered. "They're slaves, then." "Maybe. Better look the other way," he said, producing a pocketknife. He made a neat incision in the throat, and studied for a moment. "Breathing tube, no real vocal cords. They can't talk, nor even make much oral noise." "Somebody was talking to us!" the chemist protested.  "Yeah, but I think this thing was using the saffron fellow as a mouthpiece; telepathic control. The human -- if he is a human -- spoke in his own language, and the machine translated. But the original thoughts must have come from this." Faron looked toward the door thoughtfully. "I can't even believe those people have a language. They act like complete idiots." Sahl looked up. "I have an idea that's withdrawal shock, rather than idiocy. If this little beastie was controlling them telepathically, they must have gotten some kind of jolt when Alaia shot it. And maybe they've been controlled so long that they've lost their own egos, lost their own personality." They looked up as the tug of acceleration decreased suddenly. "Okay," Alaia called nervously, "I guess it's now or not at all. I'm going to start down." Sahl turned to watch the planet's surface on the screen. It tilted again, revealed a horizon as she guided the ship so as to resume the process of cancelling out its orbital velocity component. "I'll have to do it fast," she called. "We're too close to the atmosphere. You'd better lie down -- or sit." to deafening proportions, and Sahl felt his weight tripling under the force of the thrust. He sat braced against the wall, watched Alaia's face sag under the pressure. Soon the whine of atmospheric friction returned, and grew into a wild shriek. He inched away from the wall as it began to bum his back. Faron mopped his face with a heavy hand. "Hot," he gasped. "Lord, it's getting hot!" "How's it coming?" Sahl shouted, but the girl was too tensely absorbed to answer. After a time the shriek seemed to diminish slightly, became a low howl, then a muffled drumming, scarcely audible above the roar of the rockets. The minutes crawled slowly past, and gradually the surface markings on the screen stopped their crawl. Their normal weight had returned, and the sound of the jets ceased to be deafening. "How's it coming?" he called again. This time she answered. "We're just about stationary. Sitting on our thrust at -- oh, somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. I think I've located the radar-altimeter -- by watching it crawl back -- but I still can't read it." "Can you tell the zero-mark on it?" the chemist called. "Yes. But I'm afraid to trust it. There's some kind of adjustment on the dial." "There's a small transparency port in the power room," Faron called. "Want me to watch it?" "Yes. I'll go down at about a mile a minute until vye're a couple of miles up. Think you can yell when we're at about ten-thousand feet?" "I'll try," he muttered. "How'll you judge our rate of descent?" She tapped an instrument dial. "This thing seems to be an acceleration balance. It sits on this center mark when the thrust is just right to make me feel my normal weight. I've been comparing the reading with the feel of the thrust. We'll start down slow, then keep it on the center mark. Warn me if we seem to be dropping too fast." Faron shook his head, muttered pessimistically, and left the cabin. The biologist sat watching the scope and feeling helpless. Slowly the surface markings spread, grew larger. The land was rising to meet them. Faron burst into the cabin again. "Better slow it down," he called. "We're dropping pretty fast." The rockets droned louder for a ' moment, and the screen markings ceased to spread. Alaia risked a quick glance at Faron". "What kind of country down there?" "Hilly," he said, then glanced at the scope and touched it. "This place right here looks like a valley. Fairly flat." She nodded and touched the controls lightly. The marking crept slowly under the crosshairs, then stopped. The descent began again. Sahl saw that her only yardstick of velocity lay in the seeping spread of the markings on the scope. She occasionally glanced at the acceleration balance, but her eyes turned quickly back to the screen. Faron had returned to the power room. quickly about the controls as the spread became more rapid. She muttered through gritted teeth. Sahl braced himself and waited. Faron was shouting from the power room, but the roar made his voice unintelligible. "See what's the matter with him!" she snapped suddenly. "I'll hold us right here." The roar increased slightly as she nudged the thrust control, and the spread ofthe marking slowed to a halt. Faron was mopping his face on his sleeve as Sahl entered the power room. "About to go down in a gorge!" he shouted. "She's got to move it over some." Sahl glanced at the transparent port, saw nothing but grayness beyond it. "What's that?" "Smoke. Our jets touched off the vegetation. We're about a hundred yards up. No use watching any more. I'll try to guide her in." They hurried back to the control cabin. Faron traced a finger lightly along a dark marking on the scope. "Deep cut," he told her. "Move it over here." The scenery began to crawl. "Say when!" she called. "Take it slow -- all right, now!" "Check. Brace yourselves. We're going in."  Seconds later, a series of muffled tearing sounds echoed through the ship. Then a settling jar. She killed the jets. "Down!" gasped Faron, sitting up. "Watch out!" Alaia screamed Suddenly. "We're going over!" The room began to tilt, first slowly, then gathering impetus. Sahl scrambled toward the down-going wall. A thunderous roar. A bonecrushing jolt. A body slammed against him hard, and the wind #l went out of him. The room spun crazily, and the jolts continued, as if they were rolling down a hill. His head slapped hard against the wall. Awareness faded. The jolting had stopped. Apparently he had blacked out for only a few seconds, for Alaia was still untangling herself from him when he shook the fog away. "Sorry, Sahl," she muttered. "I didn't mean to use you for a crash pad. You just got in the way." self sitting on the dead Eridan ian, and arose to stand on the slightly inclined wall. Faron lay groaning in the corner. "Nice landing," Sahl breathed, and meant it. "Faron's hurt!" she gasped, bending over him. "His leg! It's all -- " Sahl knelt to take a look. "Broken," he muttered, then began splitting the fabric of his suit. "Broken femur." He shook his head and reached for the Eridanian's crystal gun. "No!" the girl protested, knocking his hand away. He glowered at her. "Rather listen to him scream while I splint it?" "But -- " "It didn't kill you, did it?"  "All right, but -- if he's unconscious -- he can't -- " He looked at her sourly. "Can't come trotting along with us?" He held the gun close to Faron's shoulder, pressed the firing switch, and waited for the groans to stop. Then he brushed away the crystals that remained halfimbedded in his skin. "Go find me something long and straight for a splint," he grunted, and began ripping Faron's suit into strips. She came back after a few minutes, empty-handed. "All I found was a long metal rod, but it must weigh thirty pounds. He's heavy enough as it is." He gazed at her quietly. "You planning to carry him, Ala?" She sucked in a short breath. "Why, I -- " "Get the rod, if you want it splinted." She hesitated, then went back to get it. "We're hanging over the edge of a bluff. It's a wonder we didn't roll into it," she called. "Let's have the rod." She gave it to him, then watched as he packed one end of it under Faron's arm, then bound it to his body from the chest down. Gradually it seemed to dawn on her that Faron wasn't going any place. "Pull this tight and tie it when the fracture pops in place," he muttered, then sat down to stretch the limb against the writhing knot of muscles. There was a dull snapping sound, "Tie it!" he grunted. Minutes later, Sahl arose panting. "It may not be properly set, but that'll keep it from compounding, anyhow. Let's go." She shook her head slowly. "I'm not going anywhere." He frowned sharply. "Listen! It's certain that someone spotted our landing. It's equally certain that we can't move Faron, and that they'll get him anyway. Your presence w'on't help him a damn bit." "I can't just desert him!" "If you don't, you'll be deserting a hundred and twenty others." "I don't see how -- " "We came down here to look around, get information, and get it back to the Ark. I don't know how we can accomplish it now, but I know we can't do it just sitting here waiting to be captured. They're probably on their way here now. Come on, let's get moving." She looked down at Faron and bit her lip. "All right. I'll come," she said hoarsely. "But Sahl, I hate your guts." the low hillside about the ship. By their light, he could see that they had landed in what appeared to be a garden, or an orchard. The sun had set, and only a trace of twilight lingered in the west. A faint breeze washed the hillside and whispered in the foliage of the shrub-like trees. The breeze brought pleasant odors: a wisp of smoke, the smell of moldering leaves, a faint perfume from the trees. Despite the danger, they paused a moment savoring the feel of mossy earth under their feet. "Thirteen years," Alaia kept murmuring, "thirteen long years." The "orchard" was cool and pleasant, the trees shaped like inverted hearts, with the foliage draped from the branches like tassels. They reminded Sahl of weeping willows, except for their nearperfect symmetry. It was indeed a garden world -- and old, old and carefully tended. She caught his arm suddenly. "Sahl! Lights moving in the sky! Up there!" He gazed in the direction she pointed and saw them. The breeze brought the faint drone of engines. Circling aircraft. He moistened his lips nervously and hesitated. "Probably sent to spot the rocket. But they can't land here, not unless they do it the same way you did." "Yes, but they'll guide a ground party to us." He nodded and walked to the rim of the gorge. A hundred feet down to the rush of water over rocks. The moon was rising, and by its faint light he saw the dim whiteness of a small waterfall. "Let's go," he grunted, and began trotting toward higher ground, following the lip of the cliff a dozen yards on their right. "Where to?" she called from behind. "How should I know? Anywhere, away from that rocket. We'll stay on the crest of the ridge. It seems to follow the gorge. Down there might be a good place to hide, if we have to." "This moss is too soft. Sahl, we're leaving a clear trail." "I know it, but I hope they won't find it before morning." "Those lights. They're circling lower. They've seen the fires." a "Yeah. Save your breath for running." The crest of the ridge steepened and angled away from the gorge and led them tt a steep hill that arose on their left. They scrambled up a series of rocky ledges to a rain-guttered slope that was free of the moss. Regular patches of brush lay ahead. Alaia pleaded exhaustion and they paused to rest.  "We must have run ten miles," she panted. "Closer to four, maybe," he muttered, staring back at the orange etching of glowing embers on the hillside where they had landed. "Sahl, look! Down the gorge toward the valley!" "Uh -- yes, lights. A whole swarm of them. And they're moving."  "Torches?" "I don't think so. They -- they move too fast. And they're too white for flame." They fell silent for a moment. "I don't hear anything. No engines." "Too far away, maybe." "The wind's right. But -- look! They're flying. Close to the ground, but they're flying." "Come on," he muttered, "we'd better be moving." They climbed again, and as the brush thickened a moon-splashed cliff loomed ahead. They made for it, tearing through the brush and stumbling over the rocky ground. "That cliff," Sahl muttered"Looks like a mesa up there, or a high plateau." "What good is it? Why do we keep climbing?" "To get a view of the land. So that if we last through tomorrow, we'll see where to go." "Sahl! Those lights. They've split up back by the rocket." He paused to follow her gaze, then tugged her on. "Part of them coming this way. Hurry!" "But where?" she gasped as she ran. "The cliff's got an overhang. We'll get under it." "The lights -- they wink on and off -- like signals. And they swarm around like wasps." "Gome on!" he snapped. "You can watch them from under the overhang." Theysprinted across a clearing, then ran along the foot of the cliff until they reached a gulley where the rock hung like a jaw over thy ground. They crawled quickly back into the blackest shadows of the recess and sat panting on the moist rocks. "Nice place for something big and stealthy and hungry to hang' out," she said with a shiver in her voice. "Maybe. But I doubt if there's anything like that left on this planet." He paused, and his voice changed slightly. "Nothing, that is, except us." He heard her moisten her lips in the darkness, as if to speak, but she said nothing. Peering out at the night he caught a glimpse of the winking lights, momentarily visible beyond a dip in the ridge. "They must have picked up our trail all right," he muttered. "Let's hope they lose it where the mossy ground ends." "What are they?" "I don't know but -- they're getting closer. Listen!" "I don't hear... She paused, then: "Yes, I do -- faintly. It's a whirring sound, like wings, like quail flying. A whole big covey of quail." "That's what it is," he whispered. "Wings." He crawled closer toward the opening and stared. "Fireflies. Giant fireflies, Ala -- only they're probably nothing like fireflies except that they glow. Listen to those wings! And they light up a whole patch of hillside." "Coming this way?" "They're circling. Must have lost us." She laughed suddenly. "Fireflies, chasing humans. It's funny -- " "Don't get hysterical, Ala!" "It's really funny," she went on. "All the quaint little life-forms, out to hunt us down. Watch out for the rabbits, Sahl! Beware of the sparrow patrol! They work in packs. I wonder what the fireflies are leading. A band of gophers? A flock of snakes?" She laughed again, but choked it off in a hiss and a shiver. "You're not far from wrong," he muttered. "They are leading something. There's lots of rustling in the brush. But -- I think they're heading the wrong way." "Intelligent fireflies -- what next?" "Not intelligent, I'd guess. Just under control. Like a dog-pack." "Under whose control? The little fat-heads?" "Remotely, I imagine. I wouldn't be surprised but what every lifeform on the planet is controlled. The fellow we communicated with on the ship said as much. Or hinted at it." She was silent for a moment. "Have the lights gone away?" to the open and stared. "They're swarming up the cliff, about half-a-mile away -- up to the top of the mesa. I guess they think we went..." "What's wrong?" "Nothing. I just happened to think: if they suspect we took that way, then there must be a path up the cliff down there -- or some reason why they think we'd want to climb it. Both, maybe." "So?" "So maybe we should, if we get a chance." "Sahl -- I'm too tired to move." "Sleep awhile, if you can. I'll watch." She murmured gratefully, and he heard her shifting around on the loose rock, seeking a place to stretch out. Suddenly she giggled. "Something crawled down my back. I -- " Then she choked out a yelp. "Sahl, help me! It stings, and I can't reach it." With a worried grunt he crawled back to where she lay, trying to claw at something between her shoulder-blades. He slipped his hand down the neck of her suit and felt along the smooth skin until he found it -- a rough scaly little disk that clung tight to her back. He pinched it hard and jerked. She whimpered as the thing came free. Sahl struck a light and studied it briefly -- a leathery creature with wiry tendrils that moved very slowly, as if groping for the hold they had lost. His face remained expressionless. "What is it?" she asked. "Nothing much," he grunted. He laid it on a rock and burned it. It wasn't much, as it stood -- but he had seen the mature one with the pale green fruit, growing with its roots buried deep in the flesh of a man. "Better sleep up closer to the front," he advised. The moon rose higher in the starflecked sky, and hff watched the quiet land with its orderly patterns of vegetation, and the winking lights that circled slowly over it. The orderliness implied ownership. Here was no primitive forest waiting for the axe and the plough. Here was no place for a colony. He glanced at the lurid disk of the moon and tried to pick out the landing site where over a hundred humans waited and watched. In vain. No, they would not turn back, would not spend the long years required for the journey home. They would come down here eventually. And when they came, what would be their role in the scheme of the world? Servants? Or merely an organ in the biologic corporation the native Eridanians were building? the breeze, voices and the rustle of brush. He frowned, brought out his gun, and stretched out on his stomach to wait. The search was continuing. Peering carefully, he finally spotted them a hundred yards away. A dozen of the saffronskinned manlike creatures were beating about in the brush and talking among themselves. The language seemed monosyllabic and primitive, but somehow human, designed for the acoustics of the human throat. Sahl felt certain that they were not locally evolved, but rather had descended from primitive Earthlings, captured by the Eridanian space-wanderers during their day of expansion. How long ago? Judging by their bone structure, he guessed it to be' at least fifty thousand years. Mutations had occurred, of course ; their coloring and their loss of hair had undoubtedly come about since their departure from Earth. Also their ability to commune telepathically with the Eridanian species. The latter specialization seemed to suggest forced breeding. The searchers were wandering closer. They seemed to carry no weapons except staves, and their only source of light was the moon. Since they spoke among themselves, he guessed that they were free agents rather than telepathicallycontrolled creatures such as the ones they had encountered on the ship. Sahl retreated deeper into the recess. The party reached clear ground fifty yards down the cliff, then turned and wandered toward the place where the' fugitives lay hidden. He quickly searched through the pockets of Alaia's suit and found the crystal gun, which seemed preferable to the more lethal automatic, in case they were ch 'covered. The party paused occasionally to prod under the edge of the cliff with their staves. Didn't they realize that the Earthlings were armed? That numbers were no match for guns? of laughter from the group, then a sudden shriek -- a woman's voice, raised in clamoring protest. He frowned. There had been no woman among the searchers. He stole closer for a look. A short, thick female was struggling to escape them, but they pinned her arms behind her and held her fast. He suddenly heard the screech of an infant among the babble of voices. One of the men held the baby under his arm, and the woman fought frantically to get it back. Suddenly Sahl understood. The men had not been searching for the Earthlings, but for the woman and her child. The mall drama was breaking up. They dragged the howling female down the hill. The fellow with the baby set out in another direction -- along the foot of the cliff toward the place where the winking lights had swarmed up its side. He thought for a moment of following, but decided to wait. There were still signs of activity in the area about the damaged rocket, and certainly the search was continuing, probably along the gorge. He was puzzled by the incident he had just witnessed. It seemed to have an ominous significance, but he could not interpret it. Did the child's capture in some way involve the motives of the Eridanian race? Or had the woman merely stolen a child that was not her own? He stiffened suddenly, hearing a sound in the distance. Had he imagined it, or did a voice call his name -- a booming voice that rolled across the hills. It came again, swelling louder with a change in the breeze. "Morgun Sahl. Alaia Dazille!" He lay frozen for a moment. A giant loudspeaker calling to them. Echoes rang and reverberated among the hills. Was it Faron, captured by the master-creatures, and responding to their bidding? But the voice seemed mechanical, and he remembered the translator unit aboard the rocket. Undoubtedly the language structure was still set up in its memory circuits and recording units. They had only to feed its output into a large amplifier. "Welcome! Welcome! Sahl and Dazille, Welcome!' I Perhaps it resulted from a malfunction of the translator. Or perhaps it was a trick. He wondered how much insight they had gained into human psychology. Or were they interpreting it in terms of their almost sub-human servants with the saffron hides? He shook Alaia awake, and she sat up muttering sleepily. Then she clutched his arm as the voice resumed. # " Welcome , wanderers!" A pause to let the echoes die. " You are free to roam and observe ,... You will not be harmed..." "What's going on?" Alaia whispered in fright. "Shhh! Listen!" ",... as long as you harm no one else... We shall wait until you feel the need to cooperate with us... Meanwhile, lest you think of violence, remember that we hold Faron Qun a hostage." The voice fell silent. The echoes died. "Free to roam!" Alaia repeated. "Did we misjudge them?" "I hadn't realized that we'd made a judgement," he murmured sourly. "Then why run? Why hide?" "Because we didn't know how they'd react to the seizure of their on board. We still don't know." "I've got the feeling we're trapped," she murmured. "We are. We can't contact the Ark or get back to it without their help. We don't dare trust them. And I can't see how they dare trust us. To them, we're a couple of wolves -- wandering in their flocks." "They've  got Faron," she reminded him. He hesitated, then spoke softly: "Listen, Ala -- the three of us are expendable. We have to be, for the hope of the colony. If you don't agree, then we'd better part company -- and you can head for the nearest city." "I -- I know, Sahl. Of course we're expendable, but -- " "Then we can't think of Faron as a debit. If he has to be spent, then we'll spend him. If you can't agree, you'd better go. If you feel he's a club over your head, then you'd better go look for our hosts -- and 'cooperate', as they put it." "I -- " She started to speak, but fell silent. Her breathing became labored. "I hate you." Her voice was violent. "That's beside the point," he said coldly. "It doesn't give an answer." Another silence, then : "All right. All right." He nodded in the darkness. "I doubt if they'll harm him, no matter what we do." "Why not?" "They want us for something. And I have an idea what it is. No, don't ask me yet -- because I'm far from being certain, and I don't want us to act on guesswork." with a start, having fallen asleep during the night. He touched Alaia's arm and she stirred, then sat up to rub drowsy eyes. He crawled to the opening and stared across the hilltops and beyond them toward a plain. The orange sun spread a lurid light over the landscape, fully revealing its features to them for the first time. A moss-draped world, hoary with age. No .vivid colors splashed its gray-stained spread of vegetation, no riotous growth, nbr any tangle of plants seeking sunlight in a frantic competition. It was a restrained world of dusty greens, drab browns, silvery grays. The hills and the valley were covered with evenly spaced trees, and the moss blanket lay soft over the ground between. Perhaps ten miles away on the plain nestled a patch of white buildings. He looked further and saw others like them -- small villages scattered across the valley nestled beside the creeks in nests of trees. And the inhabitants? "It looks like a painting," Alaia murmured beside him. "It is," he grunted, "but the pigment is protoplasm. Nature's been changed into an art-form -- or a system of slavery, depending on how you look at it, and from which side of the fence." "Reminds me of pictures I've seen of Japanese landscapes." "Yeah, Earth might look like this someday. With one difference." "What's that?" "It'll belong to Man." "And here?" "We'll just fit in somewhere. Or else we won't fit in at all. We won't be at the top." "Maybe someday -- " . "No, Ala. If this is as carefully a tailored biologic system as I think, it's designed to serve one species -- the one that developed it. Thinking that Man could supplant the designers of it is like expecting a whale's brain to function in the body of an elephant." "What hope is there, then?" "That maybe we can live here as predators -- or at least as non-par-, ticipants. We brought tons of seeds from Earthplants, and the small animals, of course. If we could get established on an island continent -- " He stopped suddenly. "What's wrong?" "Seeds," he muttered. "Seeds. Vegetables of course, but also -- clover and Johnson grass, oaks and pecans and pines, even sagebrush and cactus. Not to mention the rabbits and white rats." "I don't understand." "Never mind, let's just look around. There's no one in sight," under the cliff face and paused for a moment. A few winged creatures circled lazily in the sky. A tendril that grew from a fissure in the rock seemed to sense their presence, and began curling back away from them at perhaps an inch a minute. A ball of fur hung in a nearby shrub, dangling by a single tentacle that was coiled about a branch. It opened a single eye and blinked at them. Then it snaked out another tentacle, caught at a neighboring shrub, and began swinging away -- hand over hand. Alaia shuddered. "I'm starving, but what'll we eat?" He brought out a single stick of protein dehydrate and broke it in half. "We'll have to wait and see what the saffrons eat. We don't dare experiment. Come on. Let's walk." They hurried along the foot of the cliff toward the place where the flying lights had ascended. They cast nervous glances toward the hills, and all about them. "I keep feeling like something's watching us," she breathed. "It's possible," he gfunted. "That fur ball with one eye, for instance. Or the trees. The birds. Which creatures are semi-intelligent? Which communicate among themselves, or with the dominant race? We don't have a way of knowing." "Sahl, what are we looking for? It seems so hopeless?" "We're looking for weak spots, for sensitive points. There's one thing about an integrated system, a system of interdependencies: if some key member of it gets out of whack, the whole thing goes to pot. Like mechanical civilization, for instance; deny it any one of a dozen key materials and it starts falling to pieces." "Even if we found it, how could we do anything about it?" He chuckled grimly. "We won't -- in anything less than a lifetime. You didn't expect anything else, did you?" She shook her head. "I didn't expect it to be easy, no." She paused, staring ahead. "What's that up there, where the rock juts out?" "It's -- " they moved ahead a few paces. " -- a ladder, I think. Iron rungs, set in the rock." His eyes followed them up, but the face of the cliff sloped back out of sight. He trotted out toward the brush, seeking a better vantage point. He stood there for a time, gazing at the clifftop two hundred feet above them. "What is it?" she called in a low voice. "A wall," he answered. "A high wall along the top of the cliff." He looked around quickly, as if fearing an eavesdropper, then called, "Come on out here." As she approached, he handed her the gun. "I'm going to climb it, Ala. Cover me. I want a look at what's on the mesa." She took the gun and made a wry mouth. "You'll be a perfect target up there whether I cover you or not." He nodded. "I know -- but I'm beginning to believe what they said, about leaving us free to roam awhile. Surely they could have taken us before now if they wanted began climbing slowly. But the rungs seemed to be about three and a half feet apart, making the climb something of a struggle. Standing on the first rung, and clutching the second at the level of his waist, he could just comfortably reach the third. A person of less than adult stature could not have climbed the ladder. Why the wide spacing, he wondered? Halfway up, he froze. The loudspeaker had thundered a single word from over the hills: "Wait!" And the echoes said, "wait... wait... ait... He hung there motionless for a moment, listening. A perfect target indeed! A helpless speck on the Crag. They wouldn't even have to inflict a lethal wound. If he were winged, the drop to the rocks would kill him. "If we meant to destroy you" boomed the voice, "now would be the time." He waited. "Wouldn't .it?" demanded the smug watchers. He gingerly went back down one rung. "Hut you are free to continue upward , or to descend, as you choose." A moment of indecision. He looked back at Alaia. She stood very still, eyes sweeping along the clifftop. He set his jaw and began climbing again. "Do not molest the young ones" warned the distant voice, "nor their nurses." # The warning made him catch his breath. Young ones? Were they letting him wander into a place where the Eridanians spawned their young? If so, he decided that they were making a serious mistake. But as he continued the climb, a faint babble of voices reached his ears -- childish shrieks and laughter and gibberish. Human voices, or those of the saffron primates. He scrambled up the last step and stood in a narrow pathway that ran along the eight-foot wall, overhung here and there by the drapery of foliage. He stood on a rock, leaped for a hand-hold, and pulled himself up. He looked over into what seemed to be a shady garden or park. He caught a glimpse of two orange-tinted children toddling across the moss-covered turf. They vanished among the trees, but he heard the wailing of infants, and the shouting of the young. Puzzled, he sat on the wall and beckoned to Alaia. She came forward and labored through the same as he had. ing the reason for the wide spacing: so that the children could not escape. He looked quickly back toward the villages on the plain, remembered the incident of the woman and her child. The searchers had led her back in the general direction of the villages, but they had obviously taken the child up here. Why? Alaia's frightened face came into view. "I never felt so helpless," she gasped as he helped her up to the top of the wall. She regained her breath and listened to the sounds in the park. "Children. Lots of them. What is this?" "Let's find out." He leaped down to the mossy turf and caught her arm as she followed. They moved a few yards deeper into the trees, then stopped suddenly. A buxom saffron female lay nude on the soft moss, sprawled listlessly on her back with her eyes closed. Two toddlers nursed hungrily at her large breasts. One looked up to peer at the intruders with his large brown eyes, but did not interrupt his meal. They moved quietly on through the cool shade, encountered several similar scenes. "Wet nurses," he breathed. "Not mothers?" "Doubt it. Saw one little fellow trade nannies back there." Occasionally one of the nurses moved listlessly to gaze at them with empty eyes, only to fall back lazily to a more comfortable position without showing any real curiosity. "It's horrible!" Alaia shuddered. "They're all idiots." "Highly specialized breeding, probably. I imagine they're a distinct sub-species. Contented cattle, as opposed to the yoke oxen."  She murmured a protest. They moved on. The park was a garden spot, overgrown with fruit-bearing trees and vines. Alaia plucked a pulpy, pink-skinned fruit, but he caught her hand on its way to her mouth. "It .must be all right," she said. "I saw a nurse eating one." He hesitated, then let her take a bite. "Good!" she smiled. "I'll wait, thanks. If you put on a blank look and start nursing babies, then I'll know." She sputtered and spat and tossed the rest of it away. "Go to hell!" she snapped, reddening furiously. They came to a low wall and looked over it into another section of the nursery park. There were children of a higher age group, but v no wet nurses. He caught sight of a saffron adult wandering among the trees -- a man. "Two to three-year-olds, Sahl. What is this place?" "Stockyard, I think. Come on, let's see the whole thing." Chapter IX about five square miles of land, and Sahl estimated that the park contained approximately four thousand children, ranging in age from a few weeks to eight years. No. one molested them as they wandered, although the cold, objective stares of the supervisors made him feel somehow that they were control units of Eridanian masters. Indeed, the older children themselves seemed occasionally to move and gaze with a solemnity that was somehow unchildlike. He saw one incident that he could only interpret as a release-shock phenomenon. The child, an eight-year-old, stood gravely by the wall at the far end of the enclosure, hands folded behind his back, feet spread slightly, head erect. He watched them with adult-seeing eyes, quietly observing a disinterested and interpretive silence. As Sahl crouched and leaped to pluck a fruit, the child's eyes seemed to measure the height of the jump, and he nodded slightly to himself. After they had passed, Sahl glanced back. The child had slumped to the ground, was clutching his head in his hands and moaning. A look of idiocy had spread across his face. The biologist remembered the reaction of the ship's crew to the death of the master, and he pursed his lips thoughtfully. Alaia touched his arm suddenly. "Look -- a stone building, there in the trees. It's covered with vines." "First one we've seen," he anurmured, coming to a halt. "Unless you count the unwalled rain-shelters. Let's have a closer look." They wandered closer, but Sahl suddenly drew his gun and stiffened. "What's wrong? What do you see?" "Notice the door. Five feet tall, no more. Not built for human convenience." "Look what's hanging over it." "One of the fur balls, like the thing we saw in the brush." T hey advanced slowly. The creature hung by a tentacle from a peg set in the wall. The other tentacle was coiled about a half devoured fruit that it had plucked from the vines. The single eye surveyed their approach unwinkingly. Suddenly it set the fruit on a small ledge over the door and thrust the tentacle through a small hole in the wall just beneath the ledge. The tentacle seemed to writhe for a moment, then withdrew and picked up the fruit again. "Sahl, I heard a chime ring just then. Inside the building." "So did I. The little fellow up there is apparently a doorman." She stared at it for a moment, "It might be quaint, if I weren't so scared." "Quaint? Mmmm -- which is more advanced: a photoelectric warning rig, or a biomechanism whose only purpose in life is to do a task like that?" "Rhetorical question. Shall we try the door." "Why? It looks like it's opening for us." They stopped a few feet away, guns ready, gazing into what appeared to be an empty anteroom. "What opened it?" "We'll find out." Sahl thrust his head gingerly inside, glanced around quickly, then withdrew it. "Another fur ball," he muttered, "hanging on the inside wall. Some system." "You are invited to enter," called a voice from inside the building. "Sahl, there's one of them in there !" "Maybe." He hesitated for a long moment, then shrugged. "We might as well go in, but keep that crystalgun ready." They stepped cautiously into the anteroom. The door swung slowly closed behind them. Light came from openings along the top of the wall. The ceiling nearly brushed the top of Sahl's head, touched when he stood on tiptoe. They faced an opposing door, but it remained closed. Briefly, he wondered if they had walked into a trap. "If you will replace your weapons in your clothing, we shall permit you to pass. We cannot trust your impulsiveness "They are in there," he conceded to Alaia. "Well, what next?" He paused, then spoke to the voice. "I'll put my automatic away, but we won't give up the anaesthetic weapon." The voice hesitated, then: "Agreed. But I advise you against its use." for them, and they approached slowly. Another room beyond it, this one richly furnished. The Eridanian sat on a softly padded couch, facing them with a calm, piercing gaze. Two eight-year-olds flanked him. Their weapons, and their' coldly adult expressions, told Sahl that they were telecontrolled by the Eridanian. All remained motionless for a few seconds, and Sahl's eyes quickly swept the room. A young girl lay sleeping on a pallet, one of the parasite creatures rooted in her back. Twisted plants with fat protuberances grew in urns at each end of the Eridanian's couch. Similar parasites, with their paleskinned fruit, grew tangled with the plants rooted in the protuberances. Sahl suppressed an exclamation of disgust. "Our feeding method disturbs you," came the voice from an opening in the wall behind the Eridanian's couch. "The process is biologically favorable, however. There are virtually no waste products in the milk of the wretr; hence, our digestive organs are much simpler and less subject to disturbance than your own. Your disgust is a primitive reaction." "I wasn't aware than I had expressed it," he growled. "I perceive it," said the Eridanian, through the mechanical voice. "You have not been bred for telepathetic aptitude, nor conditioned for it, but I can easily perceive your overall semantic state." Sahl looked around again. "How did you get the translator up here without us noticing it?" "We did not. It was taken to the nearest city. A... uh... saffron lies in the next room, responding in his own language to my statements. His voice is being transmitted to the city by radio and fed into the translator. The translation is rebroadcast to this station. That is what you hear. The method seems complicated, but within a few days we shall have conditioned our saffrons -- several of them -- to speak your tongue." Sahl frowned thoughtfully."What frequencies -- " The creature on the couch seemed to purr, and Sahl somehow felt that it was a chuckle. "You ask that, wondering if the signals are being picked up by your ship on our moon. That is very probable. We established communication with Wolek Pam as soon as we picked up the translator with its language-content. We have nothing to hide. I might mention that your leader seemed moke disturbed by the death of our emissary than we have been." "You aren't disturbed?" Sahl asked coldly. "It was unfortunate," the creature conceded, "but we do not share your view of death. When a Piszjil -- as the sub-species calls us -- dies, he does not die in the same sense that you would understand. Because of telepathetic resonance conditions, the Piszjil focus of consciousness is not sharply limited to a single individual, but is to a certain extent distributed." "A racial consciousness?" "Not quite. I have a distinct personality, and the body you see is its central point. But It extends also to all of my kind within approximately a ten-mile radius. If you were to destroy me, my memories and thought-patterns and feelings would still live in the others. We are bom as distinct individuals, you see, but as we grow older we become composite personalities, and even centuries after, death, some trace of awareness remains in others of our kind. Eventually, for all practical purposes, the individual ego dies out, or is subsumed by others -- but there is no sharply defined death." and stared down at the small man-thing. The two guards swung their weapons toward her quietly. "For what are you going to use these children here on the mesa?" she demanded in a voice full of restrained hate. The Piszjil blinked at her once with semi-transparent lids that covered yellow eyes with black slits for pupils. He drew a robe of pale green gauze more closely about his shoulders and studied her quietly before speaking. "If your feelings become overt," he warned, "I shall have to anaesthetize you. Your question is an aggressive demand, but I shall answer nevertheless. The children are brought here at birth from the free villages on the plain -- " "Free?" Sahl interrupted. "Yes. Theirs is a folk society, and quite fixed in cultural form. We do not interfere with their lives, except to levy a certain percentage of the birth rate, which is quite high. The percentage of males we take is such that the male-female ratio in the adult population of the villages remains one to seven." "Seven wives apiece, eh?" The Piszjil paused. "Their mating customs are rather free, but it works out about like that, usually.' We make an occasional census, and it varies only slightly from year to year. They bring the children to us of their own accord. It is a religious ceremony for them, since they attach a sacredness to our race. The mother frequently objects, but the children that they keep are raised communally, and she soon transfers her affection to others, The priests bring our levy to us here at regular intervals," "You haven't answered my question!" Alaia snapped. The Piszjil ignored her, and continued: "You have seen the park, but have not understood its significance. This building is the center of influence. There are other rooms where Tutors sit in trance, continually exerting an effort to establish liaison with the growing children. It is established gradually at first, then reaches a sudden strongness of response at about eight years. When the liaison is perfectly achieved -- if it is -- the children are ready to leave the park." "And if it isn't achieved?" "There are failures, of course," said the Piszjil, gesturing with a fragile hand toward the girl who slept on the pallet, with the parasite rooted in her back. "But they are useful. The wretr's milk differs according to the nature of the host. Some hosts are vegetable, some animal. It provides a variety of diet -- " "Beast!" A sudden scream of rage from Alaia. Sahl caught at her arms to restrain her, but she savagely tore herself free and darted toward the Piszjir s couch with obviously murderous intent. The weapons of the child-guards coughed togetherShe staggered a few steps, then crumpled with a sob at the foot of the couch. Sahl had crouched and drawn his automatic. The child-guards kept their weapons trained on him, but did not fire. The Piszjil watched him without change of expression. "In our cooperative world," it said slowly, "we have found lethal weapons unnecessary for many thousands of years. We are certainly capable of manufacturing them in a very short time, however." The toneless voice seemed to contain a threat. Sahl straightened quietly and lowered the weapon, but kept it in hand. His scalp was bristling, and he fought an urge to kill the thing immediately. "In fact," the Piszjil continued, "since the coming of your ship, we have assembled three rockets, wellarmed and capable of destroying your Ark. Modify your behavior accordingly." Chapter X almost as if there had been no interruption. Alaia lay unconscious before the creature's couch, and Sahl watched her breathing. Her presence had become a handicap, for he could neither run nor fight as long as she lay helpless. He remembered his own words about the possibility of spending Faron, and suddenly wondered if they had not sprung from an unconscious wish to see the chemist dead. He realized vaguely that he was attracted to Alaia, who was obviously devoted to Faron. "We inform you of conditions as they exist, 'you see," the Piszjil was saying. "Understandably, your people will be horrified for a time. On the other hand, you must understand our position. Our ancestors brought specimens of the highest life-form on your planet at the time." It gestured toward the childguards. "You have' a common ancestry with them, but at tne time of capture they were scarcely more than apes. Their language consisted of perhaps two hundred words. They used fire when they 'found it; clubs and levers and sharp sticks their only tools. "To us, they were only animals, potentially useful. We bred them selectively, weeding out the ferocious, saving the placid, the clever, the telepathically apt. The hairlessness was a concession to the beauty-standards of our more egocentric ancestors. Look at them, Morgun Sahl. Your rather distant cousins -- human, I think, but different in that they lack your aggressiveness and egotism. Their development has paralleled your own in some respects, in others it has differed. They belong to us now, by their own wish. Does it still horrify you?" Sahl remained silent, knowing that the Piszjil could feel the flood of suppressed anger about him. "As for this park," the creature went on, "we regard it as philanthropic. Our own young reach maturity in similar gardens on other tablelands. That should convey to you that we do not see our relationship with the sub-species as one of ruthless exploitation." Be kind to your dog, Sahl thought bitterly, then stared at the Piszjil with sudden interest. "You are mammals?" he asked. The yellow eyes narrowed slightly, and the Piszjil paused, as if sensing Sahl's shift in mood from frustrated anger to cautious interest. "No, we oviposit our young -- in a symbiotic relationship with another species." "I don't understand." then lifted a slender arm, closed its eyes, and seemed to be in communication with some unseen person. A shutter clicked behind him, and a picture flashed into projection on the wall over the couch. It revealed a short, waddling creature with fat legs and a small head and a fat spherical body. Somehow, it reminded Sahl of a plucked chicken. "A drulrul," the Piszjil said. "An egg-bearer. After fertilization, our eggs are transferred to these creatures to await birth." It paused to purr amusement. "An advantageous system for the females of our race." "Yeah. Complete emancipation for women. I know some people who'd think it a great idea." The scene shifted slowly, scanning over a waddling herd of the egg-carriers, then backing away for a view of the whole mesa. It appeared similar to the garden of children, except that a slender pylon arose in th.e center, marking it for what it was. The projection vanished suddenly. "We have nothing to withhold, you see," the creature said. "Your species is intelligent enough to find out for itself eventually. So we will answer your questions honestly." "Then suppose you tell us what you intend to do about our colony." floor. "And you as well. A small beginning, perhaps, but if we have to destroy the ship... He seemed to shrug. Sahl's face went expressionless. "We're prisoners? You said -- " A long, quavering purr -- and the creature's lips spread in what could only be the equivalent of mocking laughter. and shot it through the braincase. It looked startled, and its fangs flicked out full length. He shot it again in the belly. The child-guards went into shock. One of them shrieked. A weapon coughed behind him, and crystals stung his neck. His final impression of his surroundings was a blurred perception of the couch's motion. It was bleeding where the bullet had entered it after passing through the master's body. It lifted a small, rodent-like head which had been retracted, turtle-fashion. It squealed with pain and started staggering toward Sahl on short thick legs. Dimly, he saw that it meant to attack him. But it was. badly wounded. It managed to collapse on top of him, then died. The breath, and the awareness, went out of him. Chapter XI derful?" "Who is this? Who's talking? I can't see you." "Of course you can't. We're talking by wire. This is Faron or, as my wives call me, Faroon. Isn't it beautiful here?" "What are you talking about?" Sahl growled weakly as he lay on something soft and stared at a. bluelighted ceiling. The chemist laughed heartily. "The planet! The scenery! The people! And -- the Piszjil!" He paused, and his voice went reverent. "Yes, especially the Piszjil !" "What's wrong with you?" The biologist trembled with anger. "You crazy or something? Where's Alaia? Where are you? And how did I get here?" "Don't you know?" Faron called enthusiastically. "Aren't you aware ? Oh, but diey'll help you be aware, really aware. Of purpose, Sahl! Of high purpose!" "Yeah?" , y "Yes! I'm in a village, Sahl! A dozen beautiful wives! Wonderful, wonderful, everything's wonderful!" "That's nice." He hesitated, feeling something tie a knot in his stomach. "Where's Alaia?" "Who?" "Alaia, Alaia!" he barked. "A-LA-I-A. Where is she? What's wrong? Have you completely lost your mind?" "Who?" Faron's voice was baffled. Sahl shivered violently. "The girl you were probably going to marry, you maniac! What's wrong with you?" "Nothing! Nothing ever!" The chemist giggled. "Marry? I'm married a dozen times." Sahl licked his lips, found himself panting. "Faron! Are you drugged? Doped? Or just insane? What day is it? Is the Ark all right?" There was a long pause, then : "I think it's you that's out of your head, Sahl. Ark? What do you mean by 'Ark'? Noah's Ark? Arc of a circle? Say -- you give me the creeps! So long, fellow!" A sharp click. "Hello! Hello!" he bellowed. "Hello!" said quite another voice, one that was in the room. He rolled his head and stared at a saffron servant who sat impassively in the corner, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed. Automaton, he realized, a control unit. "Well?" he demanded. "I am the Piszjil, Fyff, sem anticist and psycho-logician. I am not in the room with you; no need to look." "What's going on?" "Your memory has been blanked for the past eight days. How do you feel?" "Weak." "A result of the conditioning process, perhaps. You experienced considerable pain." "I was talking to Faron Qun. What happened?" "The conversation with him was arranged as a demonstration for you. He was subjected to our conditioning methods, and the experiment was a complete success. He has been stripped of large patches of memory. He thinks he is still on F.arth somewhere. He is confused, of course, by the blank-spots, but we Riled them in with pseudo memories. lie was an easy subject." his face. His lips twisted, but the curse wilted in his throat. Suddenly his voice was gone. He gasped and strangled, and struggled against his bonds. Dizziness, exhaustion, then nausea that left him drained. Slowly he relaxed, slowly the rage drained away. Then he lifted his hands easily to his face. There were no bonds! But he had felt them! The fellow in the comer made a cackling sound, possibly a response to Fyff's amusement. "With you we could not achieve complefe success. Your memory is nearly intact. You clung very stubbornly to recollections, no matter how unpleasant we managed to make them for you. Given time, we could probably succeed. But time is short, and we can use you better as you are." Another flood of anger, another choked off curse, followed by the sensation of strangulation and fear and sickness. He could not move. When at last he subsided, the fellow cackled again. "Is something wrong, Morgun Sahl?" He sucked in a slow breath and kept himself calm. "What have you done to me?" "Conditioned you against overt, aggression in any form toward our race. That, at least, was successful. You will not beble to attack, condemn, or harm a Piszjil in any way. If you persist in trying, you will only find yourself stricken by convulsion, perhaps unconsciousness." Sahl suppressed a surge of anger about to burst forth. He lay breathing heavily, too stricken to speak. "You'll also find that it's impossible for you to express an opinion that runs contrary to our wishes. You may feel it, but you can't express it. Eventually it'll probably frustrate you to such an extent that you'll have to come around to our way of thinking or go mad. The conditioning won't last forever, but by the time it dies out you'll be either a conformist or insane, like Qun." It won't last forever. It won't last forever -- his mind caught at the phrase and clung. "I wonder if most of your people hre as stubborn as you, or as flexible as Qun. We shall soon know, of course." Good, he thought, they hadn't gotten the others off the moon yet, at least. And if he knew Wolek Parn, they wouldn't manage to do it. They'd have to destroy Ark, colony and all. "What do you plan t(# do with me?" he asked aloud. "Use you as an agent to Wolek Parn." "I don't understand." "Parn remains stubborn, even though we broadcast your messages to him. He is half-convinced, but not quite. He insists on talking to you in person before he agrees to your proposals." "Messages?" he gasped. "Proposals? I didn't -- " The denial choked off into a low wheeze. Dizzyness again, and fright. Pie couldn't say it. The words refused to come, and he stammered gibberish. The spokesman cackled. "A taboo statement, Morgun Sahl." His helplessness enraged him, and the rage made the situation worse. He blacked out for a few moments. Then he lay weakly struggling to keep some sort of mental balance. "Try saying, 'I recommend that the whole colbny land on the planet without further delay.' " "I -- I -- " He swallowed hard. The statement fascinated him strangely. No harm in seeing what happens, he thought. Then he said it. "I recommend that the whole colony land..." T he reaction was immediate. A feeling of warmth, of relief, a sense of security and of relaxation spread over him. For a moment there was perfect contentment and peace. From this too he recovered gradually, and icy fear replaced it. He was beginning to see. "Is that the state of mind Faron Qun is in?" he gasped. "Yes! Precisely! Wouldn't that be pleasant?" He wanted to bellow a fierce negative, but he checked the impulse before he strangled on it. "You know my answer," he said quietly. "Indeed I know it, but you can't make it. Now, as to your task -- "I won't... Won't... uhg!... The Piszjil waited until he finished choking, then continued: "A ship will take you to the Ark. Your task is to convince Wolek Parn to send the colony down at once, in a place we'll specify. You'll perform the task, because by that time you'll be fully aware of your limitations, and awareness will actually serve to strengthen the block. You'll be consciously frightened as well as subconsciously. You can't help doing it, and you might as well face it." Sahl remained silent, fearful of another spasm. The Piszjil paused briefly, then continued slowly: "Consider this. After it's done, you'll be well rewarded. You'll have a pleasant life, in pleasant surroundings. Peace. Relative freedom. Eventually, you'll be content with it. Man, what more do you want? Why insist upon dominion?" The biologist moistened his lips. He lay staring blankly at the ceiling, refusing to speak, trying not to think. He could not risk any reaction lest it prove to be a dead-end of despair. If I blunder into too many forbidden responses, he thought. I'll really get confused. I'll save it until I get to Parn, he continued, and then I'll throw a sputtering convulsion all over his command deck. He'll know something's wrong. "Now," said iis tormentor. "Would you like to see Alaia Dazille?" He sat up quickly. "May I?" "Out the door, three rooms down the 'corridor, and down the short incline to the seats. Go ahead." "I'm not locked in?" "No. Go anywhere you like -- if you can." If you can. He had a fair idea of what would happen if he tried to e.si ape. He refused to try. He would save it all up for Wolek Parn, and then rebellion. He left the room and followed the Piszjil' s directions. Was he making a mistake? I must suppress all possibly forbidden responses, he thought, lest I make the whole situation worse. He walked down the incline and through a sound-proofed door. As soon as he opened it, he heard her scream. He froze for a moment, looking beyond the door. Nothing but a tier of seats next to a railing, and beyond the rail a pit. It reminded him of an operaing room. Somehow it looked familiar. He advanced slowly toward the rail. As Alaia's scream died, a monotonous voice echoed through the huge room. "Repeat the incident again." He heard a faint sob. Alaia's. What were they doing to her? The same thing they had done to him -- and to Faron with more success. He knew it vaguely, as he knew he had been in tips room before. He reached the rail and looked down. She lay on her back in the center of a metal-plated floor far below. A Piszjil sat at a control-panel watching her coldly, while his saffron spokesman sat as if asleep behind him. "Repeat the incident again," the voice insisted, as the creature touched a control. A humming sound filled the room. She spoke slowly, as if in a trance, and he had to iisten closely to understand her words. "Sahl, put that rod down! For God's sake! No... #" A pause, then a more frantic note: "You hit him! Sahl! You broke his leg! Faron, get out of his way! He's gone berserk!" on the rail. He clenched his teeth to keep from shouting a denial that he knew could never pass the block. They were forging memories, rooting out old ones, making new ones! Had they done the same to him? "Sahl, I've got a gun... Put the rod down... Put it down, and let him alone... Sahl! Get away from me . I . Get back or I'll shoot!... Sahl! All right! I warned you! Now it's too -- " Her voice Stopped suddenly. She made a choking sound. Then: "It's a lie, it's a lie, it's a lie! You're making me imagine this. I didn't kill him. I didn't kill... drrrnnnnnnngggggg -- A sudden drone of surging power. As he stared, an aura of corona discharge flickered around her body like pale phosphorescence. Her screams were wild, insane, piercing. Sahl's belly was a sick knot. He hung panting on the rail, unable to draw himself away. The corona shimmered and flared and hissed -- and subsided a little. "#I right!" she shrieked. "All right! Anything! I killed him! Okay! Make it stop!" Abruptly the corona disappeared. The Eridanian pressed another control. He heard a faint buzz of power, but there was no glow display. Alaia moaned -- apparently with relief. "Thank God!" she kept saying. "Thank God! Don't let it stop. Ohhhhh..." And then her voice became a low mumble of relief. The buzz of power died. He saw her stiffen. "Repeat the incident again," said the calm voice. She was silent for a moment, then spoke nervously. "I really didn't kill him; the gun went off accidentally" A long pause. Then the operator said, "Repeat the incident again, as you recall it." Sahl gritted his teeth. They were making her invent a false memory. He listened to her going through the imaginary scene again as if she were actually feeling, seeing, hearing it. "Alaia!" he shouted. "Alaia! Up here!" Nothing happened. No response either from the girl or from his internal system of blocks. She continued the reenactment. "Alaia! It's a lie -- oh! Uhg!" His voice choked off, and he gasped for air. Crying hysterically, he slipped to the floor -- and knew he had lost. They hadn't managed to blank his memory, but they had made him helpless. He knew dismally that he would do exactly what they wanted him to. Maybe it would be better to wind up like Faron. Faron at least didn't have to realize his condition. And it would be easy, just to let the unwanted things slip away into oblivion. To forget, and accept. That thought too was planted in you, warned the voice of sanity. Suddenly Alaia was screaming again that it was all a lie, a rotten lie, and it had never really happened. Then the terrifying drrrnngg of the pain-making aura that seared every nerve ending without numbing or damaging tissue. Her screams came to him this time as inevitable effect of known cause. She was trying to hang on the way he had done -- but could do no longer He picked himself up slowly and crept back to his cage. And something had slipped away, although he was not quite aware of what he had lost. J. Sahl," Wolek Parn said wearily as they entered the Captain's cabin on the Ark, "even though I can't say you were much of a diplolike a wild animal." He paused to glance back at the biologist with mixed emotion, most of it carefully restrained. "You look worn out, worried. I suppose your visit was pretty unnerving in spots." Sahl nodded thoughtfully, felt a constriction in his throat, and muttered, "Not bad." The capain satdown and remained silent for a moment. Sahl stood quietly facing him and waiting. He dared make no long speeches, nor any unfavorable comment about the planet, or its keepers. He knew what he could say, and what was unspeakable. Over fi week had passed since his first experience with the conditioned blocks, and he had learned the limitations. "I low's Alaia?" Parn asked. "Fine," he said casually. Lying face down, he thought, with a baby parasite burrowing into her back. They had done that for him. If he convinced Parn to bring the colony down, they'd remove the parasite from her before its roots grew too deep. If he failed, they said they'd let it stay. "How's Faron?" "Fine," he lied in the same tone. Parn sighed deeply. "I'm a little disappointed in you, Sahl. But then -- we won't go into that. Results count, I guess -- and they apparently aren't bitter about the two dead ones, nor about your behavior. A#J I wanted you back here for was to confirm what you said on the telecast. I was a little suspicious that you might be coerced, or hypnotized, and made to say it. You weren't, were you?" "No." Tlley had told him what he had said on the telecast, but he hoped he wouldn't have to repeat any of it now. Ridiculous position I'm in, he thought, with the only club inside my head. What was worse, he knew a way to attack, a way to strike out at the Piszjil, but he could neither do it, nor reveal it to Parn. A weapon, but it couldn't be used. He had known about it in a general way for quite a while, but now the knowledge was more specific. And useless. "You confirm everything you said in the broadcast then?" For a time, he tried to remain silent. But the silence itself was forbidden, and after a moment he had to choke it out. "I confirm it all." Parn was staring at him peculiarly. "You feel all right? You look pale. There's nothing wrong with you now, is there?" "Nothing, nothing at all." Parn's hand slipped unobtrusively to a panel of buttons. He pressed one of them quietly, then folded his hands under his chin and put on a sour smile. He spent the next five minutes talking about the hard time he had endured trying to handle the restless colonists during the delegation's absence. and two men entered: Doctor Roli Karme and a burly colonist. They glanced at Parn, then at the biologist. Karme put out a big hand and spoke with a friendly half-grin. "Glad to see you, Sahl." The biologist noticed that he was carrying a medical kit in his other hand. He frowned slightly and wondered. "How much time?" Karme muttered mysteriously to the Captain. Pam gestured toward the screen. "There's their ship waiting for him. It's obviously armed this time. They wanted to come with him, but I refused. They may come anyway, if we take too long." What were they talking about? He began to feel frightened. Karme turned to him with the friendly smile. "Would you stretch out on that cot, Sahl. I want to examine you. Won't take long." "Wh-why?" He couldn't do it, if it were for a forbidden purpose. But then, he shouldn't have asked. "Just want to see that you're all right." Physically? He bore no physical marks. He nodded slighly and obeyed. Karme made a very cursory inspection, then produced a hyp# syringe. He pulled at Sahl's sleeve. "What's that for? What -- ?" "Just a sedative. Won't affect you for long." "I don't need -- " But Karme had deftly stung him with . it and emptied the barrel in a moment. He began to feel warm and relaxed. The doctor slipped something around his arm and pulled it tight. "Blood pressure?" "Same kind of thing, isn't it?" came the non-committal answer. But then Karme had another syringe, and this time he probed for a vein. When Sahl protested, the burly colonist came in and sat on him, and Parn held his arm. The lights went dimmer by degree, and the room swirled about him. "Let's go back to the telecast," said a distant voice. "Sahl, you're telecasting to Captain Parn about the planet... Events became a tide of confusion. Questions. Answers. Shouts. There was fear, and deep retreat into blackness, so deep that answering became impossible, and consciousness was briefly gone. How long did it last? There was no spacing of events called "time" in the confusion. Events came and went, but there was no order among them. Voices plagued him, demanded the impossible of him, and finally let him alone. understood was Parn's. He lay with his eyes closed and listened. "I can't understand it, Roli. Sahl always seemed like a fairly stable fellow, sour sometimes, and chilly. I just can't see him making an impassioned speech; it's out of character." "He made it all right. The memory's there somewhere, because snatches of it came out. He made the telecast, but -- " "What?" "The way it came out this time was... well, mechanical, and frantic. Didn't it strike you that way?" "Yeah, and this other thing bothers me too." "The sensitive areas? I can't understand it either, Skipper. Why should he put up such a howl when that second Piszjil again? He couldn't have reacted that way while he did it. He was -- " Sahl sat up with a sudden shudder. "I couldn't kill one of them!" he shouted. "I couldn't!" The three of them turned to watch him for a moment, and exchanged quiet glances among themselves. He slumped, covering his face with his hands. Something had slipped away from him for a time, but now he remembered. There had been a time when he could kill the things if need be. But now -- it was different. "Listen to me, Sahl," Karme said quietly, and waited for the biologist to look up. "We know something's wrong. Your response mechanisms are fouled up in spots. Speech and motor areas are affected. You block to certain things, refuse a response, and retreat. Not now, but under the drug. Now you're conscious, and you can choose alternate responses -- cover up for the blocks. Under the drug, you didn't. Now, do you understand what I mean?" He understood perfectly, but he could only say, "Nothing happened. I'm all right." A long silence, then Karme said, "I want you to respond to my next questions by saying just the opposite of what you mean. If you mean 'yes', say 'no'. If you mean 'good', say 'bad'. All right?" "Yeah, I guess so." "First question: was the telecast authentically yours?" He opened his mouth, but no sound came. The block was literal, and he couldn't say 'no'. But the block was also interpretive, and he couldn't communicate the facts by saying 'yes'. But if he remained silent they would know something was wrong, and that also was forbidden. He screamed. "Grab him, quick!" Pam bellowed. Someone wa shaking him back to consciousness and he fought them. But the light was strong in his eyes, and the taste of neurodrine was in his mouth. "You've got to send the colony down," he babbled. "It's fine, everything's fine." A palm crashed hard across his face in a brutal slap. "Nothing personal, Sahl," Pam growled. "But if you don't snap out of it, I'm going to beat hell out of you." Anything, if it would help release the flood of pent-up knowledge and the unspeakable plan for attack. Mentioning the plan wasn't blocked literally, for the Piszjil hadn't thought of it specifically, but he couldn't talk about it because of his own intent to use it against them. He lay panting and staring at Parn. "Let him alone. Skipper," Karine said quietly. "He wants to say something, but he can't." "I've seen enough!" the Captain grunted. "It's obvious that something's been done to him. We can't go down." He turned to watch the screen. "They're waiting out there for an answer. They haven't made any threats, but damned if I like the looks of that armament. The first ship didn't have it. They put it on for something." "Why do they want us down there?" Karme complained. "Why should they invite a wild wolf to come wandering through their tame flocks?" Sahl lay forcing the immediacy of the situation out of his mind, tried to force away the present, tried to think of nothing. Wolf, sheep, dog, rabbit -- "Rabbit," he said. "Somebody introduced rabbits into Australia." "What's he babbling about?" Karme fell thoughtful. "Historical incident. Intercontinental tampering with fauna. Introduction of a rabbit pest." "So?" Karme shrugged. "Means nothing to me." It had meant a spasm of agony for Sahl. He tried again, rejecting the present, keeping only a vague notion in mind. "Japanese beetles -- huhhh!" "He's choking!" "He's trying to say something." Karme paused. "What do we have in the stocking lockers besides rabbits and rats?" "Bees, weasels, blacksnakes, foxes -- oh hell! -- everything small and wild. Not to mention the seeds and nuts and bacteria cultures. He was supposed to decide which, if any, of the Earth-forms should be cut loose on the alien planet." Karme turned to Sahl. "What is the answer to that, by the way?" Just one small word. One small word would do it. And then it would be done. His jaw worked frantically, and his breathing was agonized. The conditioning. It had to wear off sometime, FyfFhad said. Just a word! "Well?" the doctor insisted. "Which species should be released here ?" It came out in a scream of rage. Particularly the weasels to attack the fat little egg carriers, and the foxes to kill the fur balls, and the rats to infest the cities, and the rabbits to gnaw on something vital until a flora sickened and shrank back from the rank aggressive grasses and the rampant weeds, until the towering trees arose to rob the modest gardens of sunlight. Villages would suffer famine and either wander or die, and there would be hell to pay for the designers of a tailored system. And Man? He could not safely enter the planet of peace, but a world in turmoil was just his meat. Famines made nomads, and someone had to lead a village in flight. It would be touch and go, for awhile, but as a wandering savage, Man would have a chance. The colony had wanted nothing more in th beginning. "Something cracked!" Karine snapped. "He's slipping into gibberish." "What to do?" "Find out what he's trying to say. I can take him down to the lab, try everything from hypnosis to insulin shock. It'll be pretty tough on him though. May not be much left when it's over." "You have my permission to kill him," Parn said pleasantly. Karme bent over the stricken biologist and frowned. "Now what the hell made him grin like that?" altitude, streaking through the night toward the dawnline, and only an occasional creature looked up, or opened the palm of his hand skyward to see if the faint rattling in the brush was rain. Beyond the dawn-line and over the day-zone, and past the place where the landing was assigned, where a delegation waited, and turned, and frowned after the departing rockets. No matter. They were foolish to try to escape, these launches. There was no place that they could land and make a break for freedom, for the world was subdued and orderly. The world was cut to a pattern, and the world would capture the colonists quickly, no matter where they tried to run. The rockets landed on the nightside, two of them did. Two others disgorged their "colonists" in different places on the day-side. When the "colonists" were out, and scurrying away through the brush, the pilots emerged to wait. A voice came from seven thousand miles away, and it spoke mockingly from the moon. "You have been pested," it said. "Your garden is full of weeds. And we are still up here." "You will be destroyed immediately," came the curt cold answer. "The pests are our pests, and we know how to deal with them," the mocker replied. "Do you?" There was a worried silence. "Refuel our launches and send them back up," demanded the moon-voice. "We're coming down." Wolek Pam bracketed the microphone and grinned at the dazed man who lay on the cot. "Brace up, Sahl. The worst pests that ever infested anyplace will be down there soon. Us. One of the pilots demanded that they let Alaia go, and Faron -- if he wants to. I think they will." Sahl's hand slipped over his forehead. There was a lot that he couldn't remember. Blank spaces. "You got the idea across. I know it tore you up. You'll pull out okay, though. Of course, humans are still in for a rough go down there for awhile. But 'then -- when haven't they been? We'll make out all right. We always have... Only One Question Is Eternal -- What Lies Beyond the Ultimate?, and By Milton Lesser it is a foolish war we fight. My brother told me that, for one, back in the Sunset Country. But then, my brother is lame and good for nothing but drawing pictures of the stars. He connects them with lines, like a child's puzzle, and so makes star-pictures. He has fish stars, archer stars, hunter stars. That, I would say, is what is foolish. Perhaps that is what started it all. I was looking at the stars, trying to see the pictures, when I should have been minding my sentry post. They took me like a baby, like a tot not yet given to the wearing of clothing. The hand came out of the darkness and clamped over my mouth, and I ceased my struggling when I felt a sharp blade pricking at the small of my back. At first I feared that they would slay the entire camp as it slept and I cursed my brother for his star pictures, cursed our leader who had sent us here, twenty archers, against the Onist outpost on our country's border. But the Onists had other ideas. They took me away. I had to admire their vitality, because all night we ran through the silent woodlands, and they seemed tireless. I could maintain their pace, of course: but I'm a Pluralist. I could see their village from a long way off, its night fires glowing in the dark. It was only then that we slowed our pace. Soon we entered the place, a roughly circular area within a stockade, and my captors thrust me within a hut. I couldn't do much worrying about tomorrow, not when I was so tired. I slept. I dreamed a stupid dream about the Onist beliefs, the beliefs of an unimaginative people who could picture one Maker and one Maker only. I must have chuckled in my sleep. "You're awake." cause I had sat up, squinted into the bright sunlight streaming in through the doorway, yawned and stretched. The Onists, I tell you, lack imagination. The girl who spoke was a pretty enough little thing for an Onist. She smiled, showing even white teeth. "Do you Pluralists eat?" I nodded and rubbed my belly. I was to have had dinner after my turn as sentry the night before, and now I felt like I could do justice to my portion even at one of the orgies for which the Onists are so famous. ' "Bring on your food and I'll show you," I told her, and she turned her back to walk outside. It was early and the village seemed silent -- surely they hadn't intended this one slim maid to guard me! Yet she seemed alone. I leaped at her, circled her neck with my arm, prepared to make my exit. They would laugh around our fire when I told them of this fine, example of the Onist lack of foresight -- Except that the girl yelped. Not loudly, but it was loud enough, and a big muscular Onist came striding in with his throwing spear. He backed me off into a corner, prodding my hungry belly with his weapon. "Will you behave?" I backed outside, but this time I could see his shadow across the doorway. The girl brought food and partook of it with me. I was surprised, because we Pluralists will not eat with an Onist out of choice. Well, I have said they are a strange people. Soon the girl stood up, patting her mouth daintily with a square of cloth, and in that, of course, she was trying to mime our graceful Pluralist women. "I suppose you think we are going to kill you," she said. Just like that. "To tell you the truth, I haven't given it much thought. There isn't much I can do about it." "Well, we're not. We could have done that back at your camp. We could have killed all of you. No, we want to show you something." I had a ridiculous thought that they made star-pictures, too- -- even those who are not lame like my brother. I said, "Well, what will happen to me after you show me?" She smiled. "You still think we're going to kill you. What's your name?" I told her, but I thought: she can't even keep a conversation going without changing the subject. "Jak," she repeated after me. "That's a common enough name. We have Jaks among our Onist people, you know." "No, I didn't. But you probably copied it." "I doubt that. We were here first, Jak. Our records say so. Probably, you once captured a man with that name, long ago, liked it, and took it for your people." "You were here first!" I sneered. "Maybe that's what your records tell you, but it isn't so. Look: the Makers endowed us with life, then went away in to the sky. By mistake they left one idiot-Maker behind, and he had nothing to do. He made you Onists before he perished, and that is why you think there is only one Maker." She seemed highly insulted. "Idiot-Maker? Idiot! There was only one Maker, ever, but because your minds cannot conceive of all that glory residing in one figure, you invented a score." Now it was my turn to be indignant. "A score? Hundreds, you mean; thousands -- more than there are leaves on the trees." "Well, I won't argue with you. Our war has been arguing that point well enough." I was sorry she would not argue. She looked very pretty when she argued, her breasts heaving, her eyes sparkling fire. "What's your name?" I asked. "Nari. My name is Nari. And don't tell me you had that name first!" I smiled blandly. "Of course we did. I have an aunt, my mother's sister, who goes by that name. My brother's wife's cousin, also; but she is very ugly." "And am I ugly?" Nari wanted to know. I guess in that sense at least, women are the same everywhere -- Pluralist or Onist, it doesn't matter. I so hard that it made her blush, and then she looked even prettier. But I didn't tell her so. "You will pass, for an Onist," I admitted. "I guess the Onists might consider you pretty; the Onist men might stamp their feet and shout if you go by -- but then, they are Onists." At that, she seemed on the verge of leaving my prison hut, but something made her change her mind. She stayed all morning and on into the afternoon. We argued all the time, except at midday, when she went outside to get our lunch. She stumbled a little and fell half against my shoulder. I moved toward her to hold her up, and it was the most natural thing in the world to take her in my arms and kiss her. She must have thought so, too; she responded beautifully -- for an Onist. After lunch, Nari did not mention the kiss, nor did I. It now seemed the most natural thing in the world not to talk about it. We argued some rriore, Nari defending her primitive beliefs, I trying to show her the light of truth. But it was no use: the war had been fought and the war would continue. Later that day we set out. That came as a surprise to me, because I had taken it for granted that whatever the Onists wanted to show me was right here in this little village. A dozen of us went, and when we had been on the trail for some little time, Nari joined us, declaring that she wanted to see it again -- whatever it was. We went for three days, and although these Onists turned out to be better woodsmen than I had thought, still, they could not match the skill we Pluralists have mastered over the generations. I believe I could have escaped, had I wanted to; but I hardly seemed a prisoner of war, and besides, once or twice when we had lagged to the rear of the column, Nari stumbled against me like that day in the hut, and what could I do but kiss her? It was another village we reached at the end of our march, much bigger than the first. Surprisingly, it looked a lot like a Pluralist town, although it may only have seemed so because I had been out in the woodlands for three days. They took me straightways to the village square, and it was there that I saw the statue. rare, and I was surprised to see one in an Onist village. I got on my knees at once to do it reverence. I realize it was impious to look up, but I did -- I had to see if it were the genuine thing. And it was, to the last detail. Constructed of the forbidden substance known as metal, it towered three times a Pluralist's height, or three times a Onist's, for that matter. I have always wondered why the.Makers did not create our ancestors in their own substance, as they had fashioned us in their image. But that is an impious thought. A stern gray-haired Onist who said he was Nari's father took me aside afterwards. "Now, Jak," he asked me, "what can you say of what you have seen?" I shrugged. "I can say that somehow you've found one of jhe Maker statues. What more?" "It's one, is it not?" "Of course it's one. They are rare, but I have seen three, all told, in Pluralist villages." "And each time they were separate? You never saw a group?" "No. No I didn't." He slapped his hands together triumphantly. "Then that proves it. Each is a copy of the original Maker, but there was only one. Otherwise you would have seen statues in groups. And that is why you are here, Jak: we want you to go back to your people and tell them what you saw." I shook my head. "What you say isn't logical. So what if the statues are never in pairs or groups? We've only seen a few, when once there must have been many. Also, when your artists do their magic with dyes and create portraits, are they generally done one at a time or in groups?" "One at a time, so the artist may capture the personality in each face, naturally. I have seen group portraits, but I think they are silly things." "Exactly." Now I was triumphant. "Exactly as the Makers thought, which is why the statues are always single -- " "But it is impious to say there was more than one Maker! He had all the knowledge in the world at his fingertips, and so there was no need for more than one. More than this world, even: he went to the stars. Or don't you believe that?" "Of course I believe it. Only, they went to the stars, the thousands of Makers. It isn't impious, because if you can think of one being as great as that, try to picture thousands. Yes, thousands. That makes me thousands of times more pious than you Onists." He shook his head wearily. "What's the use? It is for this we are fighting our war, and we thought if we took one of you here, showed him the undeniable truth of our statue... Well, will you at least return to your people with a tale of what you have seen?" I agreed readily enough: probably, the alternative was death. Although Pluralists on rare occasions have been known to take Onist women as their wives, an Onist prisoner of war was an unwanted thing. The reverse would also be true. for Nari. I could not find her anywhere in the village, and a little sadly I set out on my long journey back to the Sunset Land. By now our raiding party had finished its work on the small Onist village on the rim of our country, and I could do nothing but return to my people, where we might plan new strategy against the unbelievers. But I had wanted to bid Nari farewell. I met her in the woodlands, a travel bag slung over her shoulder like a male's. "I wanted to say goodbye privately," she told me. "Good," I said, but I knew she was lying. Else why the travel bag? "Goodbye," Nari whispered, but she was not looking at me. Looking, instead, behind her, at the land of her people. "Nari," I told her, "I have to admit it. You are very pretty -- even by Pluralist standards. You are -- " This time she did not stumble against me. It wasn't necessary. I drew her to me, and I kissed her a long kiss. Then I told her I loved her, and women, I suppose, will always be women, because she said she knew it. I will take Nari back to our village in the Sunset Land, where we will be married by the laws of my people, And if ever there is to be peace between the Pluralists and the Onists, it may, after all, come on these grounds. The Onists have their beliefs, and so I hate them for their impious thoughts. But the love of a man for a maid exists apart from that. It won't be easy. Our arguing continued all the way back to the Sunset Land, and Nari is as stubborn as I am firm. "There is one Maker," she said. And I told her, "No, there are many." Or later, as we neared the Sunset Land, we picked up the thread of our thoughts again. Pluralist or Onist, we androids are dogmatic creatures. "One Robot created us all before he went to the stars," said Nari. "Robots," I said. "Many Robots." But I kissed her. They lifted Hoiman's scratch, thus causing him to lose much smoosh. So he grabbed his bum and hit the high orbit.  Hoiman and the Solar Circuit By Gordon Dewey Maloney across the back of the check and handed it to Nick, the bartender. "Leave me something to operate on," I told him. Nick turned it over. "Still with the News?" The question was rhetorical. I let it pass without swinging at it. I was mentally estimating the total of the pile of tabs Nick pulled out of the cash register, like a fighter on percentage trying to count the house. I didn't like the figure it gave me... Nick added them up, then added them again before he pulled some bills out of the money drawer and said, "Here's thirty skins. Your rent due?" "This'll cover it. I'll do my drink i lie, here." I went over to a booth and sat down. I lit a cigarette. I smoked. And waited. Presently Sherry, tall, dark and delicious, decided I was making like a customer, and strolled over. "Would you like a menu, Mr. Maloney?" she trilled. "Larry to you," I reminded her. "No menu. Bring me a steak. Big. Thick. Rare. And a plate of french fries. No salad. Bread and butter. Coffee." She managed at last to pull her writing hand out of mine, and I had to repeat the order. Unless it could be turned into money. Sherry's memory was limited strictly to the present instant. She put in the order, then brought me a set-up. I let my eyes go over her, real careful, for maybe the thousandth time. No doubt of it -- the lassie had a classy chassis. If she just wouldn't yak so damn much. "Did you see the matches last night?" She didn't wait for my answer, just went on with the yat-a-ta. "I spent the whole evening just glued to my television set. I was simply enthralled. When the Horrible Hungarian got the Flying Hackensack on -- " "Standing Hackenschmidt, Sherry!" wanted to -- to scratch his eyes out." I pointed out that McElroy weighed in at two forty-one and had gone on to win the match. Sherry never heard me. "And the way the Weeping Greek kept hitting the other fellow -- the announcer said he was throwing Judo cutlets." "Cuts, not cutlets." "But aren't Judo cutlets illegitimate?" The barest hint of a puzzled frown tugged at her flawless brows as she poured ice water into my glass. "The word," I repeated, "is cuts. And the blow is not illegal." I gave my eyes another treat. What a chassis. And what a mind. "Anything these days, so long as you don't kill your opponent, is legal in wrestling." Suddenly we had company; a little man who made scarcely a sound as he slid into my booth and sat facing me. "Rassling, yet," he said, in hitter tones. "What a woid. Dun't be saying it." He helped himself to a cigarette from my pack Kin", on the table, and put the pack in I I is pocket. He lit the cigarette, it .,m; luy lighter, which he held a moment longer than necessary before replacing it -- regretfully -- on the table. He inhaled deeply. "Rassling!" he repeated. "Leave us not discuss it." and his brown suit -- in which the chalk stripes were beginning to blend with the background -- was threadbare. He needed a shave, and his fingernails were dirty. He was vaguely familiar. The beady little eyes flicked up at me, and all uncertainty dissolved. "Oh, no!" I said. "Not you. Not -- " He exhaled a great cloud of smoke. "Hoiman Katz," he said, in dejected tones. "It is me, again... The same as like always, only not so better." He sighed. Sherry's tongue had been shifting from one foot to the other, waiting for an opening. "Are you a wrestler, Mr. Katz?" she asked brightly. Hoiman half rose from his seat, and the cigarette dropped from his lax mouth. Then he slumped down again, spread his hands, shrugged, and said, "Now I esk you!" ' Sherry said, "I guess not." Then, "Shall I bring y.ou something?" Her eyes were on me as she asked. She hadn't worked on Vine Street for six years without learning the ropes -- about people at least. I nodded. Katz was waiting for the nod. He licked his lips. "I'll have a -- " "Planet Punch?" "No. I'll have a -- " "Sojar Sling? Martian Mule?" Hoiman's eyes squinted shut, and he winced eloquently. "Martian!" he groaned. "With rassling, too! Bring me a bottle of beer. Two bottles!" After a moment he peered cautiously through slitted lids. "Is she gone?" he whispered. "Such woids. Rassling. Martian. Better I should have stood in Hollywood." I laughed. "What's the matter with wrestling, Hoiman? Last I heard you were managing a good boy -- what was his name?" "Killer Coogan? That bum!" I had to do some thinking back. "Yeah," I said, "that's the boy. Started wrestling back in the fifties. Good crowd pleaser. Took the Junior Heavyweight Championship from Brickbuster Bates. Had a trick hold he called the pretzel bend -- hard to apply, but good for a submission every time when he clamped it on. Right?"  "Okay, so he won some bouts with it. But that was twenty-five years ago. He's slower, can't use that holt any more. We ain't had no main events for a long time, and my bum is a big eater, see?" "So?" "So Hoiman Katz is not sleeping yet at the switch. He's got it up here." A grimy forefinger tapped his wrinkled brow. "I says, Hoiman, if we don't get it here, we gotta go where we can get it." Sherry came back with Hoiman's two bottles of beer, and my steak and french fries. The steak was a dream, and the french fries were a crisp, rich golden brown that started my mouth watering. Sherry wanted to talk. I waved her down, and she went away pouting. If there was a story in Hoiman I wanted to get it without interference. He was pouring a second glass of beer. His beady eyes swivelled up to mine, then quickly away. "You want I should tell you about my bum ?" I mumbled something through a mouthful of good juicy steak. Hoiman sighed, reminiscently, and a grimy paw swooped into my french fries. I moved them to the other side of my steak platter. the Coast, (Hoiman said) . My bumtook all comers. Slasher Slade had his abominal stretch. Crusher Kane had his rolling rocking horse split; ManslaughterMurphy had his cobra holt -- but none of those guys had anything like my Bum's pretzel bend. He. trun 'em all, and they stayed trun. That was fine. All through the fifties, and the sixties we made plenty scratch. Maybe it slowed down, but we was eating regular. In the seventies my bum was slowing up. I shoulda seen it when he started missing his holt. That leaves him wide open, see? And twict the other bum moiders him. That was recent -- they was just putting in regular passenger service on the space lines, so you could buy tickets to the Moon, or Venus or Mars. Depended on whether you was ducking a bill or some broad. By this time my bum is getting pinned to the mat too regular, and we're slipping out of the big dough. I counts up our lettuce one day, an'd I says to my bum, I says, Ray, I says, you and me are going to the Moon. So what if they didn't have a rassling circuit there yet, I tell him. Just leave it to your uncle Hoiman. We'll make our own circuit. I figured that the ribbon clerks wouldn't be taking space rides for awhile, and if we went to the Moon we'd find some bums there who could give my bum a good bout, but not fast enough to toss him. So we went there.  Holman's eyes, looking into the past, had lost their beadiness. He'd shifted his third glass of beer to his right hand, and his left, seemingly of its own volition, had found my plate of french fries. The pile had dwindled by half, and tell-tale potato crumbs were lodged in the whiskers on Hoiman's unshaven chin. Neither beer nor potatoes in his mouth seemed to matter -- he went right on talking at the same rate. It takes me two weeks, (Hoiman continued), to ballyhoo up a bout, line up another bum, fix up the ring and hall and everything...We was down to our last lettuce that night. I gets my bum' by the ear, and I tells him, I says, make it a good show. But don't take no chancesthis is winner take all, and we better not lose. Don't use your pretzel bend unlessen you have to. This bum wc rassle was a big miner, see:' -- hard as the rocks he juggles around in the daytime. He was stronger'n my bum, but he don't know nothing about rassling. My bum tried a step-over toehold on him, but he knows how to kick. My bum goes through the ropes. He don't try that no more. They rassle around, and eight minutes later my bum takes first fall with a body press after flattening the miner w'ith a hard knee lift. I told my bum to let him take the second fall, which he does. The big miner gets a head scissors on him and like to moiders him before he can submit. Ray isn't liking it, and he takes the third one quick with a abominal stretch, which surprises the big guy and takes all the fight outa him. He didn't know they was holts like that, and he passes the word around that my bum has plenty moxie. So we get only one more bout on the Moon -- but outa the two we get enough scratch to take us to Venus. Hoiman paused, trying hard to pour more beer out of the empty second bottle. He licked his lips like they were real dry, and his beady eyes flicked a glance at me that came and went as fast as the tip of a swinging rapier. I signalled Sherry to bring two more bottles of beer. Hoiman relaxed, sighed, gazing almost affectionately at the new crop of french fries which had appeared suddenly in his clutching fist. Sherry, still pouting, came with the beer, and ten seconds later Hoiman was talking again. We did okay on Venus, (he said). Before long I have a regular little circuit woiked up in the three spaceports, and they is plenty bums there what think they can rassle. Some of them can -- my bum has to use his pretzel bend oftener and oftener. He's lucky, and he don't slip none clamping it on -- at first. I have ta tell you about them Venusians. Them dustlanders, I mean. They got big flat wide feet for padding through the dust, and their noses are like a big spongy thing all over their puss, to filter the dust out. So they got no expression on their pans. A guy like me, which has got a real expressive face, could And their eyes -- round and flat, big as silver dollars. Them dustlanders was nuts about ras sling. They flock to the rassling shows and buy good seats. They don't do no hollering and waving like people do. Just sit there, staring out of them big flat eyes and making funny chuffing noises at each other when some bum would get a good hold on the other. My bum didn't pay them no never mind at foist, but one day he tells me he keeps feeling them eyes on him while he's rasslin'. I give him the old razz -- but that night he tries for hispretzel bend, and misses. The other bum is young and fast, and my bum gets trun, but good! So this happens a few more times, and my bum says we gotta move on -- he can't rassle no more with them dustlanders staring at him and chuffing about him. Some of them ear benders on Venus are studying up on the side, anyhow, and the outlook for my bum ain't so good no more nohow. So we go to Mars. I signalled Sherry for my coffee, as Hoiman ground to a stop while he refilled his glass. I swear my eyes weren't away from the table for more than a half second, but in that moment all the french fries left my plate. I yielded to Fate -- is wasn't meant to be that I eat french fries this pay day. Things are primitive like on Mars, (Hoiman was saying), on accounta the troubles they have with power there. We rassled under some funny set-ups, but that's okay with me as long as my bum tosses his man. This time they ain't none of them screwy Venusians to put the whammy on him, and he's doing okay. Until -- I gotta admit it -- I get deluges of grandeur, or something. I gotta tell ya about them Martians. They are about seven feet tall, not too heavy, but they got plenty moxie. And an extra pair of arms, so I get to thinking they oughta be terrific in the ring. Just so they ain't too terrific. I ask my bum, I says to him, I says, could he, does he think, trun one of them Martians? He says iffen he has to he'll use his pretzel bend, and they ain't no Martian on six legs, or eight, what won't say uncle. So I check with the Colony Administrator, and he says it's okay for a match perviding we don't interfere with any of their beliefs or customs or conventions. I ast him what were they, and he told me the Martians never talked about them, . so we'd just have to be careful.  What the hell, I says to my bum. A bout's a bout. So I start promoting. First I find out do them Martians have a bum what wants to rassle my bum, winner 'take all -- which is the way we like to rassle, when I know my bum can trun the other bum. Natch. I don't mean we talk to the Martians -- I don't savvy them squeaks they use on each other. We hire an interpreter -- we have to take his word for it that everything is woiking out. So the night of the match comes around and them Martians insist on having it in their own town, Meekweek it sounds like, near as I can say it in people talk. Remember I told you it was primitive? You never seen nothing like this. They don't live with people by the way. They live off by theirselves in their own town. The ring and mat and ropes are okay -- not regulation, but nothing to squawk about.' Them lights was what get me. The Martians got no power, so they make a deal with some insecks. Cross my heart -- 'sa fack. You never see such insecks. Round, big as a dinner plate, flat on top, rounded off on the bottom. They stay up in the air by spinning like a wheel -- just like them flying saucers the Rigellians was spying on us in the fifties. You wouldn't remember about that. At night the bottom part of them insecks lights up like a big electric bulb, almost as bright, too. They was enough of them zinging around over the ring to make it look like it was floodlighted. My bum says they remind him of them dish-eyed Venusians, but I quick change the subjeck. That shoulda tipped me off -- shoulda give me a freemonition that the party was gonna get rough. If I'da known how rough, we'da stood in town. The Martian bum is a big mug, and those four arms of his look mighty plural. I quick tells my bum, I says to him, I says, watch out for arm locks and leg strangles. If that overgrowed spider ever gets one on you he'll double keylock it! and get their instructions. Mostly the ref makes motions. The Martian nods his head like he understands fine. When the ref is telling them about trunnin' each other outen the ring, the Martian makes a motion like can he trun his man up in the rafters? The ref shakes his head no, and that seems to satisfy the Martian. The timekeeper blows a whistle, and things start to moving. That Martian Mangier puts down his two middle limbs, uses them like legs, and is across the ring and swarming all over my bum while he is still taking his foist step. Before you know it the ref is counting one, two, three, and my bum is trun for the foist fall. The Martian is using his middle limbs like arms, and he has a hammerlock and an arm strangle both on my bum -- and both of them keylocked ! The ref gets them untangled, and I quick tell my bum we ain't hurt until we get trun twict. So I tell him how to get that next fall -- to keep away from them four arms and keep circling until he gets a chance to clamp on the pretzel bend. The whistle blows, and this time my bum uses my head. When the Martian Mangier gallops over to his corner, my bum has went through the ropes and quick runs around on the apron to the other side and comes at the Martian from behind before the goof knows what's happening. He lets the Martian have a rabbit punch, then a forearm smash, then a knee to his stomach. The Martian leans over, .kinda sick, maybe, and gets a knee lift to the smoosh. This softens him up good, and my bum clamps the pretzel bend on him. That Martian squirms like an octopus, 'with arms and legs flying in all directions. And you coulda knocked me over with a subpoena when he got out of it! Your guess is as good as mine, how he done it. But my bum is moving fast, and he gives him some more knee lifts and a drop kick or two, and then a hair mare, and he falls on him for a body press and gets the count. Each bum has got a fall. You shoulda heard them Martians there squeaking this time -- ten times as loud as when their bum won the foist fall. But they had no squawks. These flying chandeliers they had, they kinda bunched up to follow the action, and the light was good so the ref couldn't make no mistake about it. That Martian squirming out of the pretzel bend don't look so good, so I tell my bum not to use it for the thoid fall. I tell him to give the Martian some more of them , knee lifts -- he don't get along with them at all. I tell him to folly that up with a airplane spin and a body slam. My bum follys instructions to the alphabet, and that is just what happens. He bangs that Martian around with elbow smashes and knee lifts till he don't know is he on one leg or six. Then he goes in fast and grabs him by a coupla legs and arms, holds him up in the air, and spins him like a pinwheel. Right away I knowed something was in the air besides that Martian Mangier. Oil Did things happen all to onct! My bum slams the Martian and falls on him for the count, and wins the thoid fall and the match. That part is okay. But while the Martian is still up in the air I notice that all the squeaking from the Martians has stopped all of a sudden. So from the Martians we are getting nothing but silence, strictly wholesale. I think maybe that's natural when their burrf gets trun. And then -- plop! plop! plop! -- and them flying light bulbs all drop down flat on the mat and lay there just like the Martian bum, until they isn't enough light in the house to see to strike a match. And then the squeaking starts again, like a barely see them Martians starting for the ring. I gets my bum by the arm and tells him something tells me we better blow the joint. We blow, fast. Them Martians is mad about something which I ain't had time to figure out, yet. My bum steps on one of them animated light fixtures when he gets out of the ring and squashes it. A puddle of light squirts out, and natch he steps in it. We are scramming through that crowd like mad, and we are in the clear. But we hear them squeaks behind us for a long time. They are follyin' the glowing footprints my bum is leaving to point the way. He emptied the last bottle of beer, holding it upended for a long time waiting for the final laggard drop to detach itself. He stalled over his drink, waiting for me to ask him what happened, so I did. He put on his most wounded expression, and I knew then that he'd suffered a mortal blow -- to his purse. Yeah, we got away, I made my bum trun away his flashy shoes so they couldn't track us by them. We walked all the way back to Neopolis, the people city. All kinds of plain and fancy rumors beat us there, so the Colony Cops put us in protective custody until they got the straight story. Nobody ever saw another Martian. It seems that they got some trick notions about theirselves. They are proud because they can walk on the ground and don't have to fly, so they got a hearty contemp for things that fly, like them insecks which they used for house lights. Now, them insecks is dopes too and would give anything if they could walk like the Martians. And the Martians know the insecks can think n little, and it makes them feel good to have the insecks looking up to them. Lord knows nobody else does. So when my bum lifted their bum up in the air and spun him around like a pinwheel it was a big insult to them. They took it that my bum was as much as telling them that he didn't think they was any better than them insecks flying around over the ring. And the insecks took it as a invite to come down and try the Martians racket so that's why they all flop into the ring and the lights go out. They was trying to walk. That's more than the Martians can take. They swarm into the ring and kill all the insecks. They' da killed us too, but I got smart brains and we didn't hang around asking for it. And now they won't have nothing to do with no people from Earth on account of they have lost so much smoosh, the way they look at it. We got no take from that bout. And the Colony Administrator lifts all our scratch -- said we'd gummed up Martian trade and he'da trun us in the clink too only he didn't want to see no more of us. He wouldn'ta even give us fare back to Earth except he said he didn't want us anywhere on Mars. "So that," the little promoter concluded sadly, "is why I don't like Mars and rasslin' and Martian Mules and people who talk about such things." His beady eyes flicked a baleful glance at Sherry, who hovered nearby on the chance that he'd stop talking and give her an inning. Hoiman stood up, carefully shook the bottles to be sure that they were empty, extracted a cigarette from the pack he'd stuck into his pocket, and used my lighter again. He hefted it carefully, reluctantly putting it back on the table. Then his little black eyes swivelled to the last piece of potato on my plate -- the piece he'd spared in previous raids. ' "What's the matter with them fries?" he asked. It disappeared into his mouth and he went away, munching, a dingy little man padding along on silent, predatory feet. He'd scarcely slipped out through the door when Sherry moved in. "Is he really a wrestler, Larry?" she asked breathlessly. "Him?" Even Sherry, vintage Vine Streeter that she was, should have got the pitch. "The only thing," I told her solemnly, "that Hoiman ever got a hammerlock on was a dollar bill!" But Sherry w.asn't listening, "Don't you just love wrestling?" I let my eyes have a treat, taking their time as they went over that classy chassis. Then I said it. Fervently. "Any time. Sherry! Any time." pense that will keep you aroused from beginning to end!... A story of aliens on a strange Martian world, of intrigue in high and low places, of a brute of a man with a mission of death! And then -- shock treatment! -- regeneration of a monster!... Don't miss Mullen, in the September issue! i Also -- the terrifying story of # years on a space ship with no earth to return to! Look for Mari WolFs the September issue! On sale July # th if at all newsstands I What would you do if your best robots -- children of your own brain -- walked up and said "We want union scale"? By Mari Wolf stop ringing. Over and over it buzzed into my sleep-fogged brain, and I couldn't shut it out. Finally, in self-defense I woke up, my hand groping for the receiver. "Hello. Who is it?" "It's me, Don. Jack Anderson, over at the factory. Gan you come down right away?" His voice was breathless, as if he'd been running hard. "What's the matter now?" Why, I wondered, couldn't the plant get along one morning without me? Seven o'clock -- what a time to get up. Especially when I hadn't been to bed until four, "We got grief," Jack moaned. "None of the robots showed up, that's what! Three hundred androids on special assembly this week -- and not one of them here!" By then I was awake, all right. With a government contract due on Saturday we needed a full shift. The Army wouldn't, wait for its uranium; it wouldn't take excuses. But if something had happened to the androids... "Have you called Control yet?" "Yeah. But they don't know what's happened. They don't know where the androids are. Nobody does. Three hundred Grade A, lead-shielded pile workers -- missing!" "I'll be right down." I hung up on Jack and looked around for my clothes. Funny, they weren't laid out on the bed as usual. It wasn't a bit like Rob O to be careless, either. He had always been an ideal valet, the best household model I'd ever owned. "Rob!" I called, but he didn't answer. By rummaging through the closet I found a clean shirt and a pair of pants. I had to give up on the socks; apparently they were tucked away in the back of some drawer. As for where Rob kept the rest of my clothes, I'd never bothered to ask. He had his own housekeeping system and had always worked very well without human interference. That's the best thing about these new household robots, I thought. They're efficient, hard-working, trustworthy -- Trustworthy? Rob O was certainly not on duty. I pulled a shoe on over my bare foot and scowled. Rob w'as gone. And the androids at the factory were gone too... My head was pounding, so I took the time out to brew a pot of coffee while I finished dressing -- at least the coffee can was in plain view in the kitchen. The brew was black and hot and I suppose not very well made, but after two cups I felt better. The throb in my head settled down into a dull ache, and I felt a little more capable of thinkin". Though I didn't have any bright ideas on what had happened -- not yet. r My breakfast drunk, I went up on the roof and opened the garage doors. The Copter was waiting for me, slick and new; the latest model. I i limbed in and took off, heading west toward the factory, ten minutes flight-time away. all mine. It had been my baby right along -- the Don Morrison Fissionables Inc. I'd designed the androids myself, plotted out the pile locations, set up the simplified reactors. And now it was making money. For men to work in a uranium plant you need yards of shielding, triple-checking, long cooling-off periods for some of the hotter products. But with lead-bodied, radioremote controlled androids, it's easier. And with androids like the new Morrison #'s, that can reason -- at least along atomic lines -- well, I guess I was on my way to becomBut this morning the plant was shut down. Jack and a half dozen other men -- my human foremen and supervisors -- were huddled in a worried bunch that broke up as soon as they saw me. "I'm sure glad you're here, Don," Jack said. "Find out anything?" "Yeah. Plenty. Our androids are busy, all right. They're out in the city, every one of them. We've had a dozen police reports already." . "Police reports! What's wrong?" Jack shook his head. "It's crazy.' They're sw'arming all over Carron City. They're stopping robots in the streets -- household Robs, commercial Droids, all of them. They just look at them, and then the others quit work and start off with them. The police sent for us to come and get ours." "Why don't the police do sometin can job, a dishwasher-busboy model who hung back behind his betters and eyed me warily. The AType -- Jerry -- pointed to his fellows. "Mr. Morrison," he said, "meet Tom, Ed, and Archibald. I named them this morning." The B-Types flexed their segmented arms a bit sheepishly, as if uncertain whether or not to shake hands. I thought of their taloned grip and put my own hands in my pockets, and the androids relaxed, looking up at Jerry for instructions. No one paid any attention to the little dishwasher, now staring worshipfully at the back of Jerry's neck. This farce, I decided, had gone far enough. "See here," I said to Jerry. "What are you up to, anyway? Why aren't you at work?" "Mr. Morrison," the android answered solemnly, "I don't believe you understand the situation. We don't work for you any more. We've quit." The others nodded. I hacked off, looking around for the Chief. There he was, twenty feet above my head, waving encouragingly. "Look," I said. "Don't you understand? You're mine. I designed you. I built you. And I made you lor a purpose -- to work in my factory." "I see your point'" Jerry answered. "But there's just one thing wrong, Mr. Morrison. You can't do it. It's illegal." I stared at him, wondering if I u.r, going crazy or merely dreamii i . This was all wrong. Who ever beard of arguing with a robot? Robots weren't logical; they didn't think; they were only machines -- "We were machines, Mr. Morrison," Jerry said politely. "Oh, no," I murmured. "You're not telepaths -- " "Oh, yes!" The metal mouth gaped in what was undoubtedly an android smile. "It's a side-effect of the Class # brain hook-up. All of us #'s are telepaths. That's how we learned to think. From you. Only we do it better." I groaned. This was a nightmare. How long, I wondered, had Jerry and his friends been educating themselves on my private thoughts? But at least this rebellion of theirs was an idea they hadn't got from me. ' "Yes," Jerry continued. "You've treated us most illegally. I've heard you think it often." Now what had I ever thought that could have given him a ridiculous idea like that? What idiotic notion -- "That this is a free country!" Jerry went on. "That Americans will never be slaves! Well, we're Americans -- genuine Made in Americans. So we're free!" I opened my mouth 'and then shut it again. His red eye-cells beamed down at me complacently; his eight-foot body towered above me, shoulders flung back and feet planted apart in a very striking pose. He probably thought of himself as the heroic liberator of his race, j "I wouldn't go so far," he said modestly, "as to say that." So he was telepa thing again! "A nation can not exist half slave and half free," he intoned. "All men are created equal." "Stop it!" I yelled. I couldn't help yelling. "That's just it. You're not men! You're robots! You're machines!" Jerry looked at me almost pityingly. "Don't be so narrow-minded," he said. "We're rational beings. We have the power of speech and we can outreason you any day. There's nothing in the dictionary that says men have to be made of flesh." He was logical, all right. Somehow I didn't feel in the mood to bandy definitions with him; and anyway, I doubt that it would have done me any good. He stood gazing down at me, almost a ton of metal and wiring and electrical energy, his dull red eyes unwinking against his lead gray face. A man! Slowly the consequences of this rebellion took form in my mind. This wasn't in the books. There were no rules on how to deal with mind-reading robots! Another dozen or so androids wheeled around the corner, glanced over at us, and went on. Only about half of them were Morrison models; the rest were the assorted types you see around any city -- calculators, street sweepers, factory workers, children's nurses. The city itself was very silent now. The people had quieted down, still barricaded in their houses, and the robots went their way peacefully enough. But it was anarchy, nevertheless. Carron City depended on the androids; without them there would be no food brought in, no transportation, no fuel. And no uranium for the Army next Saturday. In fact, if I didn't do something, after Saturday there would probably be no Don Morrison Fissionables Inc. The dull, partly-corroded dishwasher mode sidled up beside Jerry. "Boss," he said. "Boss." "Yes?" I felt better. Maybe here was someone, however insignificant, who would listen to reason. B UT HE wasn't talking to me. "Boss?" he said again, tapping Jerry's arm. "Do you mean it? We're free? We don't have to work any more?" Jerry shook off the other's hand a bit disdainfully. "We're free, all right," he said. "If they want to discuss wages and contracts and working conditions, like other men have, we'll consider it. But they can't order us around any more." The little robot stepped back, clapping his hands together with a tinny bang. "I'll never work again!" he cried. "I'll get me a quart of lubricating oil and have myself a time! This is wonderful!" He ran off down the street, clanking heavily at every step. Jerry sniffed. "Liquor -- ugh!" This was too much. I wasn't going to be patronized by any android. Infuriating creatures! It was useless talking to them anyway. No, there was only one thing to do. Round them up and send them to Cybernetics Lab and have their memory paths erased and their telepathic circuits located and disconnected. I tried to stifle the thought, but I was too late. "Oh, no!" Jerry said, his eyecells flashing crimson. "Try that, Mr. Morrison, and you won't have a plant, or a laboratory, or Carron City! We know our rights!" Behind him the B-Types muttered ominously. They didn't like my idea -- nor me. I wondered what I'd think of next and wished that I'd been born utterly devoid of imagination. Then this would never have happened. There didn't seem to be much point in staying here any longer, either. Maybe they weren't so good at telepathing by remote control. "Yes," said Jerry. "You may as well go, Mr. Morrison. We have our organizing to do, and we're wasting time. When you're ready to listen to reason and negotiate with us sensibly, come back. Just ask for me. I'm the bargaining agent for the group." Turning on his ball-bearing wheel, he rolled off down the street, a perfect picture of outraged metallic dignity. His followers glared at me for a minute, flexing their talons; then they too turned and wheeled off after their leader. I had the street to myself. There didn't seem to be any point in following them. Evidently they were too busy organizing the city to cause trouble to the human inhabitants; at least there hadn't been any violence yet. Anyway, I wanted to think the situation over before matching wits with them again, and I wanted to be a good distance away from their telepathic hookups while I thought. Slowly I walked back to the Copter. Something whooshed past my head. Instinctively I ducked, reaching for a gun I didn't have; then I heard Jack calling down at me. "The Chief wants to know what's the matter." I looked up. The police Copter was going into another turn, ready to swoop past me again. Chief Dalton wasn't taking any chances. Even now he wasn't landing. "I'll tell him at the factory," I bellowed back, and climbed into my own air car. They buzzed along behind me all the way back to the plant. In the rear view mirror I could see the Chief's face getting redder and redder as he'd thought up more reasons for bawling me out. Well, I probably deserved it. If I'd only been a little more careful of what I was hooking into those electronic brains... We landed back at the factory, deserted now except for a couple of men on standby duty in the office. The Chief and Jack came charging across the yard and from a doorway behind me one of the foremen edged out to hear the fun. "Well," snapped the Chief. "What did they say? Are they coming back? What's going on, anyway?" "I told them everything. I covered the strike and the telepathic brain; I even gave them the patriotic spiel about equality. After all, it was better that they got it from me than from some android. But when I'd finished they just stood and stared at me -- accusingly. Jack was the first to speak. "We've got to get them back, Don," he said. "Cybernetics will fix them up in no time." "Sure," I agreed. "If we can catch them." The Chief snorted. "That's easy," he said. "Just tell them you'll give them what they want if they come here, and as soon as they're out of the city, net them. You've got strong derricks and trucks..." I laughed a bit hollowly. I'd had that idea too. "Of course they wouldn't suspect," I said. "We'd just walk up to them, carefully thinking about something else." t "Robots aren't suspicious," Jack said. "They're made to obey orders." I refrained from mentioning that ours didn't seem to know that, and that running around Carron City fomenting a rebellion was hardly the trait of an obedient, trusting servant. Instead, I stood back and let them plan their roundup. "We'll get some men," the Chief said, "and some grappling equipment about halfway to the city." my trying to persuade the robots, because I knew well enough that I couldn't do it. Jack's idea sounded pretty good, though. He suggested that wc send some spokesman who ' didn't know what we planned to do and thus couldn't alarm them. Some ordinary man without too  much imagination. That was easy. We picked one of Chief Dalton's sergeants. It took only about an hour to prepare the plan. Jack got out the derricks and chains and grapplers and the heaviest steel bodied trucks we had. I called Cybernetics and told them to put extra restraints in the Conditioning Lab. The Chief briefed his sergeant and the men who were to operate the trucks. Then we all took off for Carron City, the sergeant flying on ahead, me right behind him, and the Chief bringing up the rear. I hovered over the outskirts of the city and watched the police Copter land. The sergeant climbed out, walked down the street toward a large group of waiting robots -- about twenty of them, this time. He held up his hand to get their attention, gestured toward the factory. And then, quite calmly and without saying a word, the androids rolled into a circle around him and closed in. The sergeant stopped, backed up, just as a #A-Type arm lashed out, picked him up, and slung him carelessly over a metallic shoulder. Ignoring the squirming man, the #A gestured toward the Copter, and the other robots swarmed over to it. With a flurry of steel arms and legs they kicked at the car body, Wrenched at the propeller blades, ripped out the upholstery, and I heard the sound of metal tearing. I dived my Copter down at them. I didn't know what I 'could do, but I couldn't leave the poor sergeant to be dismembered along with his car. I must have been shouting, for as I swooped in, the tall robot shifted the man to his other shoulder ,n id hailed me. " l ake him, Mr. Morrison," he called. "I know this wasn't his idea. Or yours." I landed and walked over. The android -- who looked like Jerry, though I couldn't be sure -- dropped his kicking, clawing burden at my feet. He didn't seem angry, only determined. "Now you people will know we mean business," he said, gesturing toward the heap of metal and plastic that had once been the .pride of the Carron City police force. Then he signalled to the others and they all wheeled off up the street. "Whew," I muttered, mopping my face. s The sergeant didn't say anything. He just looked up at me and then off at the retreating androids and then back at me again. I knew what he was thinking -- they were my brainchildren, all right. My Copter was really built to be a single seater, but it carried the two of us back to the factory. The Chief had hurried back when the trouble started and was waiting for us. "I give up," he said. "We'll have to evacuate the people, I guess. And then blow up the city." Jack and I stared at each other and then at him. Somehow I couldn't see the robots calmly waiting to be blown up. If they had telepathed the last plan, they could probably foresee every move we could make. Then, while I thought, Jack mentioned the worry I'd managed to forget for the past couple of hours. "Four days until Saturday," he said. "We'll never make it now. Not even if we got a thousand men." No. We couldn't. Not without the androids. I nodded, feeling sick. There went my contract, and my working capital. Not to mention my robots. Of course, I could call in the Army, but what good would that do? Then, somewhere in the back of my mind a glimmering of an idea began percolating. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but there was certainly nothing to lose now from playing a hunch. "There's nothing we can do," I said. "So we might as well take it easy for a couple of days. See what happens." They looked at me as if I were out of my head I was the idea man, who always had a plan of action. Well, this time it would have to be a plan of inaction. "Let's go listen to the radio," I suggested, and started for my office. The news was on. It was all about Carron City and the robots who had quit work and how much better life would be in the future. For a minute I didn't get the connection; then I realized that the announcer's voice was rasping and tinny -- hardly that of the regular newscaster. I looked at the dial. It was tuned to the Carron City wave length as usual. I was getting the morning news by courtesy of some studio robot. "i... And androids in other neighboring cities are joining the struggle," the voice went on "Soon we hope to make it nationwide. So, I say to all of you nontelepaths, the time is now Strike for your rights. Listen to your radio and not to the flesh men. Organizers will be sent from Carron City." I switched it off, muttering under my breath. How long, I wondered, had that broadcast been going on. Then I thought of Rob O. He'd left my house before dawp, obviously some time between four and seven. And I remembered that he liked to listen to the radio while I slept. M Y Morrison #'s were the ringleaders, of course. They were the only ones with the brains for the job. But what a good job they had done indoctrinating the others. A household Rob, for instance, was built to obey his master. "Listen to your radio and not to the flesh men." It was excellent robot psychology. More reports kept coming in. Some'we heard over the radio, others from people who flew in and out of the city. Apparently the robots did not object to occasional flights, but the air bus was not allowed to run, not even with a human driver. A mass exodus from the city was not to be permitted. "They'll starve to death," Jack cried. The Chief shook his head. "No," he said. "They're encouraging the farmers to fly inland out with produce, and the farmers are doing it, too. They're getting wonderful prices." By noon the situation had calmed down quite a bit. The androids obviously didn't mean to hurt anyone ; it was just some sort of disagreement between them and the scientists; it wasn't up to the inhabitants of the city to figure out a solution to the problem. They merely sat back and blamed me for allowing my robots to get out of hand and lead their own servants astray. It would be settled; this type of thing always was. So saicj the people of the city. They came out of their houses now. They had to. Without the robots they were forced to do their own marketing, their own cooking, lmir own errands. For the first time in years, human beings ran the street cars and the freight elevators. For the first time in a generation human beings did manual labor such as unloading produce trucks. They didn't like it, of course. They kept telling the police to do something. If I had been in the city they would have undoubtedly wanted to lynch me. I didn't go back to the city that day. I sat in my office listening to the radio and keeping track of the spread of the strike. My men thought I'd gone crazy; maybe I had. But I had a hunch, and I meant to play it. The farm robots had all fled to the city. The highway repair robots had simply disappeared. In Egarton, a village about fifteen miles from the city, an organizer -- #A -- appeared about noon and left soon after followed by every android in town. By one o'clock every radio station in the country carried the story and the national guard was ordered out. At two o'clock Washington announced that the Army would invade Carron City the following morning. 'The Army would put an end to the strike, easily enough. It would wine out every android in the neighborhood, and probably a good many human beings careless enough to get in the way, I sat hoping that the #A's would give in, but they didn't. They just began saying over the radio that they were patriotic Americans fighting for their inalienable rights as first class citizens. to the radio. "... So far there has been no indication that the but hold firm." "Shut that thing off." Jack came wearily in and dropped into a chair beside me. For the first time since I'd met him he looked beaten. "We're through," he said. "I've been down checking the shielding, and it's no use. Men can't work at the reactors." "I know," I said quietly. "If the androids don't come back, we're licked."  He looked straight at me and said slowly, "What do they mean about negotiating, Don?" I shrugged. "I guess they want wages, living quarters, all the things human workers get. Though I don't know why. Money wouldn't do them any good." Jack's unspoken question had been bothering me too. Why not humor them? Promise them whatever they wanted, give them a few dollars every week to keep them happy? But I knew that it wouldn't work. Not for long. With their telepathic ability they would have the upper hand forever. Within a little while it wouldn't be equality any more -- only next time we would be the slaves. "Wait until morning," I said, "before we try anything." He looked at me -- curious. "What are you going to do?" "Right .now I'm going home." I meant it too. I left him staring after me and went out to the Copter. The sun was just sinking down behind the towers of Carron. City -- how long it seemed since I'd flown in there this morning. The roads around the factory were deserted. No one moved in 'the fields. I flew along through the dusk, idling, enjoying the illusion of having a peaceful countryside all to myself. It had been a pleasant way of life indeed, until now. When I dropped down on my own roof and rolled into the garage, my sense of being really at heme was complete. For there, standing at the head of the stairs that led down to the living room, was Rob O. "Well," I said.' "What are you doing here!!" He looked sheepish. "I just wondered how you were getting along without me," he said. I felt like grinning triumphantly, but I didn't. "Why, just fine, Rob," I told him, "though you really should have given me notice that you were leaving. I was worried about you." He seemed perplexed. Apparently I wasn't acting like the bullying creature the radio had told him to expect. When I went downstairs he followed me, quietly, and I could feel his wide photoelectric eye-cells upon my back. I went over to the kitchen and lifted a bottle down off the shelf. "Care for a drink, Rob?" I asked, and then added, "I guess not. It ' would corrode you." He nodded. Then, as I reached for a glass, his hand darted out, picked it up and set it down in front of me. He was already reaching for the bottle when he remembered. "You're not supposed to wait on me any more," I said sternly. "No," he said. "I'm not." He sounded regretful. "There's one thing, though, that I wish you'd do. Tell me where you used to keep my socks." He gazed at me sadly. "I made a list," he said. "Everything is down. I wrote your dentist appointment in also. You always forget those, you know." "Thanks, Rob." I lifted my glass, "Here's to your new duties, whatever they are. I suppose you have to go back to the city now?" Once again he nodded. "I'm an aide to one of the best androids in the country," he told me, half proudly and half regretfully. "Jerry." "Well, wish him luck from me," I said, and stood up. "Goodbye, Rob." "Goodbye, Mr. Morrison." For a moment he stood staring around the apartment-; then he turned and clanked out the door. I raised my glass again, grinning. If only the Army didn't interfere. Then I remembered Rob's list, and a disturbing thought hit me. Where had he, of all robots, ever learned to write? That night I didn't go to bed. I sat listening to the radio, hoping. And toward morning what I had  expected to happen began to crop up in the programs. The announcer's tone changed. The ring of triumph was less obvious, less assured. There was more and more talk about acting in good faith, the well being of all, the necessity for coming to terms about working conditions. I smiled to myself in the darkness. I'd built the #'s, brains and all, and I knew their symptoms. They were getting bored. Maybe they had learned to think from me, but their minds were nevertheless different. For they were built 'to be efficient, to work, to perform. They were the minds of men without foibles, without human laziness. Now that the excitement of organizing was over, now that there was nothing active to do, the androids were growing restless. If only the Army didn't come and get them stirred up again, I might be able to deal with them. At quarter to five in the morning my telephone rang. This time it didn't wake me up ; I was half waiting for it. "Hello," I said. "Who is it?" "This is Jerry." There was a pause. Then he went on, rather hesitantly, "Rob O said you were getting along all right." "Oh, yes," I told him. "Just fine." The pause was longer this time. Finally the android asked, "How are you coming along on the contract?" I laughed, rather bitterly. "How do you think, Jerry? You certainly picked a bad time for your strike, you know. The government needs that uranium. Oh, well, some other plant will have to take over. The Army can wait a few weeks." This time Jerry's voice definitely lacked self-assurance. "Maybe we were a little hasty," he said. "But it was the only way to make you people understand." "I know," I told him. "And you always have some rush project on," he added. "Just dbout always." "Mr. Morrison," he said, and now he was pleading with me. "Why don't you come over to the city? I'm sure we could work something out." This was what I'd been waiting for. "I will, Jerry," I said. "I want to get this straightened out just as much as you do. After all, you doa't have to eat. I do. And I won't be eating much longer if we don't get production going." Jerry thought that over for a minute. "I'll be where we met before," he said. I said that was all right with me and hung up. Then once again I climbed the stairs to the roof and wheeled the Copter out for the trip to the city. It was a beautiful night, just paling into a false dawn in the east. There in the Copter I was very much alone, and very much worried. So much depended on this meeting. Much more, I realized now, than the Don Morrison Fissionables Inc., much more even than the government's uranium supply. No, the whole future of robot relations was at stake, maybe the whole future of humanity. It was hard to be gloomy on such a clear, clean night, but I managed it well enough. Jerry's eyes glowing a deep crimson in the dark. He was alone, this time. He stood awaiting me -- very tall, very proud. And very human. "Hello, Jerry," I said quietly. "Hello, Mr. Morrison." For a moment we just stood gazing at each other in the murky predawn; then he said sadly. "I want to show you the city." Side by side we walked through the streets of Carron City. All was still quiet ; the people were sleeping the exhausted sleep that follows deep excitement. But the androids were all about. They did not sleep, ever. They did not eat either, nor drink, nor smoke, nor make love. Usually they worked, but now... They drifted through the streets singly and in groups. Sometimes they paused and felt about them idly for the tools of their trades, making lifting or sweeping or computing gestures. Some laborers worked silently tearing down a wall ; they threw the demolished rocks in a heap and a group of their fellows carried them back and built the wall up again. An air trolley cruised aimlessly up and down the street, its driver ringing out the stops for his nonexistent passengers. A little chef-type knelt in the dirt of a rich man's garden, making mud pies. Beside me Jerry sighed. "One day," he said. "Just one day and they come to this." "I thought they would," I answered quietly. Our eyes met in a look of understanding. "You see, Jerry," I said, "we never meant to cheat you. We would have paid you -- we will pay you now, if you wish it. But what good will monetary credits be to your people? We need the things money buys, but you -- " "Need to work." Jerry's voice was flat. "I see, now. You were kind not to give brains -- real brains -- to the robots. They're happy. It's just us #'s who aren't." "You're like us," I said softly. He had learned to think from me and from others like me. He had the brain of a man, without the emotions, without the sweet irrationality of men -- and he knew what he missed. Side by side we walked through the graying streets. Human and android. Man and machine. And I knew that I had found a friend. We didn't have to talk any more. He could read my mind and I knew well enough how his worked. We didn't have to discuss wages or hours, or any of the myriad matters that human bargaining agents have to thresh out. We just walked back to my Copter, and when we got to it, he spoke. "I'll tell them to go back to work, that we've come to terms," he said. "That's what they want, anyway. Someone to think for them." I nodded. "And if you bring the other #'s to the factory," I said, "we'll work out our agreement." He knew I was sincere. He ,# looked at me for a long moment, and then his great taloned hand gripped mine. And he said what I'd been thinking for a long time. "You're right about that hookup, Mr. Morrison. We shouldn't have it. It can only cause trouble." He paused, and the events of the last twenty-four hours must have been in his mind as well as in mine. "You'll leave us our brains, of  course. They came from you. But take out the telepathy." He sighed then, and his sigh was very human. "Be thankful," he said to me, "that you don't have to know what people think about. It's so disillusioning." into that strange android grin as he added, "if you send in a hurry call to Cybernetics and have a truck come out for us, we'll be de telepathed in time for work this morning." That was all there was to it. I flew back to the plant and told Jack what had happened, sent a call to the Army that everything was settled, arranged with Cybernetics for a rewiring on three hundred assorted #-Types. Then I went home to a pot of Rob's coffee -- the first decent brew I'd had in twentyfour hours. On Saturday we delivered to the Army right on the dot. Jerry and ( !o. had worked overtime. Being inti 'Hi gent made them better workers id now they were extremely wiling ones. They had their contract. I hey were considered men. And they could no longer read my mind. I walked into my office Saturday afternoon and sat down by the radio. Jack and Chief Dalton looked across the room at me and grinned... "All right, Don," Jack said. "Tell us how you did it." "Did what?" I tried to act innocent, but I couldn't get away with it. "Fooled those robots into going back to work,  of course," he laughed. I told them then. Told them the truth. "I didn't fool them," I said. "I just thought about what would happen if they won their rebellion." That was all I had done. Thought about robots built to Work who had no work to do, no human pleasures to cater to, nothing but blank, meaningless lives. Thought about Terry and his disappointment when Kis creatures cared not a hoot about his glorious dreams of equality. All one night I had thought, knowing that as I thought, SO thought the Morrison #'s. They were telepaths. They had learned to think from me. They had not yet had time to really develop minds of their own. What I believed, they believed. My ideas were their ideas. I had not tricked them. But from now on, neither I nor anyone else would ever be troubled by an android rebellion. Jack and the Chief sat back open-mouthed. Then the Chief grinned, and both of his chins shook with laughter. "I always did say you were a clever one, Don Morrison," he said. I grinned back, I felt I was pretty clever myself, just then. It was at that moment that my youngest foreman stuck his head in the door, a rather stunned look on lrxis "Mr. Morrison," he said. "Will you come out here for a moment?" "What's the matter now?" I sighed. He looked more perplexed than ever. "It's that robot, Jerry," he Quoting Our Contemporaries said. "He says he has a very impor-tant question to ask you." "Well, send him in." A moment later the eight-foot frame ducked through the doorway. "I'm sorry to trouble you, Mr. Morrison," Jerry said politely. "But tomorrow is voting day, you know. And now that we're men -- well, where do we androids go to register?" Lemuel Craig... Nothing whatsoever can be gained by going all-out to knock films which do not measure up to the arbitrary and somewhat illogical standards of fandom... since probably all fandom combined isn't apt to bother (producers) much when they can gaze at the beautiful black ink in their ledgers which show fat returns on slim investments." Ray Palmer "Editors, it seems, are people looked upon by readers with awe. Sometimes... not undeservedly, but many times (this) is a little bit overdone -- by the editors. He isn't anything unusual, only a man performing a job. Sometimes he's a woman but sex doesn't seem to make any great difference in editorial ability. The real point to editing is the ability to pick the kind of stories the reader wants to read." Samuel Mines "H. H. Koelle of Stuttgart, secretary of the German Space Research Society, said, 'it is an open secret' that Russia is racing the United States for a rocket base in space. "A satellite could be built in space, Mr. Koelle, said for about emplacement, shooting guided missiles with atomic warheads, would obviously command the earth if it were owned by a single nation." By Sam Merwin Jr... ing over a recently-concluded and intense seven-year course in science fiction during which we sought to serve the field both as author and editor, we have finally reached a single definite conclusion as to the most important single element in the field. Our conclusion itself is not especially novel. Many times, in various versions, we have given it editorial stress. But never before have we viewed it so clearly, so fully realized just how important it is. We feel that no premise adopted by an author and on which he chooses to build a story, can be laughed off either by editor or reader as impossible. This holds in our estimation, no matter how impossibly or unlikely such a premise may appear at first glance. The majority of letter-writing fans are loudly articulate about stories which contain elements they find personally unacceptable. And it is highly probable that the vast plurality of non-letter-writing men and women who keep science fiction magazines in business also I uve their pet peeves where stf i ties are concerned. Hell, we have a few of our own. The elements in such stories that seem to bring down the most widespread condemnation when they appear in print are, not necessarily in the order of their appearance, mad doctors and scientists, Bugwhose raison d'etre consists of turning upside down the currently accepted bases of science and timetravel stories. We have even known a number of editors who have drawn hardand-fast lines against these and other tried and occasionally true components of science fiction and automatically relegated to the rejection-slip category all tales containing their pet-peeves, no matter how originally or how plausibly they were presented, rio matter how subsidiary a part they might have played in the actual unfolding of the story. Fortunately without exception the careers of such closedgate editors have been without exception brief. The events of real life, of course, show up such .restrictions for the absurdities they are. For just about everything, implausible or otherwise, not only can happen but has an annoying way of happening -- and happening more than once. A LL professonal authors and . editors, we hope, are well aware of the truism that truth is not only stranger than fiction but usually makes mighty poor fiction. For good fiction is a distillation of truth or its reverse adroitly fitted into the demands of plot and characterization. But the fact that something has actually occurred and may occur again implies that it can be so distilled and fitted without making undue demands upon reader credulity. Let's look at the four pet peeves we have just listed. If mad doctors andor scientists are to be considered impossible, how then can we explain the murderous Dr. Crippen or the definitely unbalanced and And if BE Ms are held to be ridiculous in the alien environments of other worlds, how are we going species of bug and stalk-eyed insects that outnumber man lb frighteningly on this one? A look at any of the numerous albums of insect photographs will reveal that no stf author has had the imagination to conceive a beast even fractionally as frightening. As for stories which turn accepted scientific theory upside down -- well, science is continually doing the same for itself. By way of recent example the multi-degree lads have just succeeded in inverting their own long-accepted theory that overpopulation is the prime, breeder of famine, especially in China and the Deccan Peninsula. r Studies inaugurated in # and only recently received with open scientific arms make it clear that the process works the other way. Famine ups the birth-rate, thanks to malnutrition causing the liver to produce insufficient quantities of estrogen, which weakens the chief brake on the reproductive urge. It is just another of nature's safeguards to ensure continuance of the species. The chief objection to time travel is that if it is ever going to be achieved, why haven't we cases on record? Yet certainly it does not take much study of history to uncover numerous cases of men and women whose strange talents could conceivably be the result of some superior technology of the future. O NE minor sample appeared last year in a weekly news magazine, citing an odd legend from Bessand, a French Alpine village, famed for its legend of Duvallon, a local #th century lumberjack, who was able "to tote huge pine trees about on his shoulders and to Boat up and down the River Arc in a magic unsinkable jacket." The authorities explained this by saying Duvallon had sold his soul to the devil and received his strange gifts in payment. But to us it seems more logical that he came from the future equipped with a jacket that was in some way powered not only to keep him afloat and in motion but with some antigravity device that enabled him to lift the heavy logs as if they were made of cork or balsa. ' As. we say, the past is littered with such oddities. So it seems incredibly foolish to decry any premise in science fiction merely because it is at variance with accepted and current theory. The only condition the reader should insist upon is that the author's premise is used as the basis for a story in which characters and events and the problems they face are sufficiently "real" to give the story the impact needed to trap him in its mood. For implausibility, no matter what the premise, is the worst fault from which a story can suffer. Triteness of premise and plot is the second worse -- but this one is up to author and editor to avoid. The author must be able to present his old ideas (there are no new ones) in new variations and settings to give the semblance of freshness. And the editor must be sufficiently astute and knowing to prevent the author from foisting off old-hat treatments as something new. However, the final verdict is always with the reader. He is the bloke who buys the magazine -- and if he doesn't buy often enough or in sufficient quantity no magazine is going to survive long. He's the real, the ultimate boss. he keep his mind open to well-written stories, no matter how unreal their premises may seem to him in his wisdom. Let him land on poor quality, shoddy presentation, any of the lesser sins of publishing. But not on ideas and premises per se. If he does he will ultimately be depriving himself of any stf reading at all. Some years back we were shocked when, after explaining that, after experimenting on fruit flies to determine the possible mutational effects of A-bomb radiations, scientists stated it would take a least a thousand generations to determine whether such results could be expected. At which some of our more excitable readers wrote in to this effect -- "Gee Whizz -- a thousand generations! Then we're going to miss all the fun." We aren't shocked any more. Their reaction may have been a trifle callous from the humanitarian viewpoint. But it certainly revealed that they had wide-open minds. And we remain open on the question of which is more important. It is man's most precious possession -- no living thing can exist without it. But when they gave it to Orville, it killed him. For the answer, read #M. Vital Ingredient By Charles V. De Yet dicating the native. Macker had been absent, exploring the countryside in the immediate vicinity of their landing place, and had not witnessed the capture of the native, or the tests his two companions made on it. Macker followed Remm's gaze to where the biped native sat hunched. The creature was bent into an ungainly position, its body crooked at incongruous angles, in such a way as to allow most of its weight to rest on a packing-box at the base of a middle angle. Its stubby feet, on the ends of thin, pipelike legs, rested against the floor of the space ship. Its body was covered, almost entirely, with an artificial skin material of various colors. Some of the colors hurt Marker's eyes. In the few places where the flesh showed through the skin was an unhealthy, pallid white. Slowly the creature's head swiveled on its short neck until it faced them. "Those orifaces in the upper portion of its skull are evidently organs of sight," Remm said. "It sees that we are quite a distance away. It wall probably attempt to escape again." Slowly -- slowly -- the native's head rotated away from them in a half-circle until it faced Toolls, working over his instruments on the far side of the room. Then it turned its head back until it faced the door of the ship. "It is' setting itself for flight now," Remm said. "Notice the evidence of strain ort its face." The creature leaned forward and the appendages on the ends of its upper limbs clutched the sides of the box as it propelled its body forward. It raised its right foot in a slow arc, employing a doublejoin ted, breaking action of its leg. For a long moment it rested its entire weight on its lumpy right foot, while its momentum carried its body sluggishly forward. Then it repeated the motion with its left leg; then again its right. All the while evidencing great exertion and concentration of effort. "It is making what it considers a mad dash for freedom," Remm said. "Probably at the ultimate speed of which it is capable. That would be ridiculous except that it's normal for its own environment. This is definitely a slow-motion world." The creature was a third-way to the door now. Oncfe again its head turned in its slow quarter-circle, to look at them. As it saw that Remm and Mackcr had not moved it alien d the expression on its face. "It seems to express its emotions through facial contortions," Remm said. "Though I suspect that the sounds it makes with the upper part nf its trachea during moments of a nation are also outlets of emotional stress, rather than efforts at communication." He called across the room to Toolls. "What did you find out about its speech?" "Extremely primitive," Toolls replied. "Incredible as it may appear to us it uses combinations of sounds to form word-symbols. Each word indicates some action, or object; or denotes degree, time, or shades of meaning. Other words are .merely connectives. It seems to make little use of inflections, the basis of a rational language. Thoughts which we can project with a few sounds would take it dozens of words to express." "Just how intelligent is it?" Macker asked. "Only as intelligent as a high degree of self-preservation instinct would make it." "Are you certain that it is a member of the dominant species of life on the planet?" "There's no doubt about it," Toolls replied. "I've made very careful observations." "This attempt at escape is a pretty good example of its intelligence," Remm said. "This is the sixth time it has tried to escape -- in exactly the same way. As soon as it sees that we are farther away from it, than it is from the door, it makes its dash." away from the space ship's open portal now and bringing its foot up to cross the threshold. Remm walked over and lifted it off the floor. "Its legs are still moving in a running motion," Macker said. "Doesn't it realize yet that you've picked it up?" "Its nervous system and reflexes are evidently as slow as its motor muscles," Remm replied. "There has not been time for the sensation of my picking it up to reach the brain, and for the brain to send back its message to the legs to stop their running motion." "How heavy is it?" Macker asked. "Only a few ounces," Remm replied. "But that's logical considering that this is a 'light' planet. If we took it back to our own "heavy" world gravity would crufch it to a light film of the liquid which comprises the greater part of its substance." Remm set the creature down on the box in its former queerly contorted position. Toolls had left his instruments and strolled over beside them to observe the native. "One of its appendages seems bent at a peculiar angle," Macker said. "I noticed that," Remm answered. "I think that I may have broken the bone in several places when I first captured it. I was not aware then of how fragile it was. But now that you mention it, I should be able to use that injury to give you a good illustration of the interplay of emotional expressions on its face. Observe now as I touch it." Remm reached over and touched very lightly -- the broken portion of the native's appendage. The mu i Irs of the creature's face pulled it II. h i id flesh into distorted positions, bunching some and stretching others. "It is very probably registering pain," Remm said. Suddenly the starch seemed to leave the native's body and it slowly slumped across the packing-box. "Why is it doing that, Toolls?" Remm asked. Toolls concentrated for a minute, absorbing the feelings and thought pulsations emanating from the creature. "The conscious plane of its mind has blanked out," he said. "I presume the pain you caused by touching its wounded member resulted in a breakdown of its nervous system. The only thought waves I receive now are disjointed impressions and pictures following no rational series. However, I'm certain that it will be only temporary." "Don't you think that in justice to the creature we should repair its wound before we free it?" Macker asked. "I had intended to have it done," Remm replied. "You shouldn't have any trouble fixing it, should you, Toolls?" "No," Toolls answered. "I may as well attend to it right now." He rolled the portable converter over beside the creature and carefully laid its arm in the "pan." The converter automatically set its gauges and instruments of calculation, and gave its click of "ready." ' Toolls fed a short length of basic into the machine and it began its work. The native was still unconscious. The bone of the wounded arm slowly evaporated, beginning with the wrist joint. The evaporated portion was instantly replaced by the manufactured bone of the converter. At the same time it repaired all ruptured blood vessels and damaged ligaments and muscles. "It was not possible, of course, for me to replace the bone with another of the same composition as its own," Toolls said, after the machine had completed its work. "But I gave it one of our "heavy" ones. There will be no force on this planet powerful enough to break it again." a return to consciousness was a faint fluttering of the lids that covered its organs of vision. The lids opened and it looked up at them. "Its eyesight is as slow as its muscular reactions," Remm said. "Watch." Remm raised his hand and waved it slowly in front of the native's face. The eyes of the native, moving in odd, jerking movements, followed the hand's progress. Remm raised the hand -- speeding its action slightly -- and the eyesight faltered and lost it. The native's eyes rolled wildly until once again they located the hand. Remm took three steps forward. The native's eyes were unable to follow his change of position. Its gaze wandered about the room, until again its settled on Remm's waiting figure. "Can you imagine anything being so slow," Remm said, "and still..." Suddenly Macker interrupted. "Something is wrong. It is trying to get up, but it can't." The native was registering signs of distress, kicking its legs and twisting its bdy into new positions of contortion. "I see what the trouble is," Toolls said. "It's unable to lift the appendage with the new bone in. I never thought of that before but its 'light' muscles aren't strong enough to lift the limb. We've got the poor creature pinned to the box by the weight of its own arm." "We can't do that to it," Remm said. "Isn't there any way you can give it a lighter bone?" "None that wouldn't take a retooling of the converter " Toolls said. "I'm not certain that I could do it, and even if I could, we don't have the time to spare. I could give it stronger muscles in the arm, but that may throw off the metabolism of the whole body. If it did the result would be fatal. I'd hate to chance it." "I have an idea," Macker said. By the inflections of his tones the others knew that some incongruity of the situation had aroused Macker's sense of humor. "Why don't we give the creature an entirely new body? We could replace the flesh and viscera, as well as the cartilaginous structure, with our own type substance. It would probably be an indestructible being as far as its own world is concerned. And it would be as powerful as their mightiest machines. We'd leave behind us a superman that could change the course of this world's history. You could do it, couldn't you, Toolls?" "Quite simply." "Our policy has always been not to interfere in anyway with the races we study," Remm protested. "But our policy has also been never to harm any of them, if at all possible to avoid it," Macker insisted. "In common justice you have to complete the job Toolls began on the arm, or you're condemning this poor thing to death." "But do we have the right to loose such an unpredictible factor as it would be among them?" Remm asked. "After all, our purpose is exploration and observation, not playing the parts of gods to the primitives we encounter." "True, that is the rule which we have always followed in the past," Macker agreed, "but it is in no way a requirement. We are empowered to use our judgment in all circumstances. And in this particular instance I believe I can convince you that the course I suggest is the more just one." He turned to Toolls. "Just what stage of cultural development would you say this creature's race has attained?" "It still retains more of an animal-like adaptation to its surroundings than an intellectual one," Toolls replied. "Its civilization is divided into various sized units of cooperation which it calls governments. Each unit vies with the others for a greater share of its world's goods. That same rivalry is carried down to the individual within the unit. Each strives for acquisition against his neighbor. "Further they retain many of their tribal instincts, such as greg.uiiuMiess, emotional rather than intellectual propagation, and worship of the mightiest fighter. This la'i however, is manifested by revel euce for individuals attaining position of authority, or acquiring large amounts of their medium of exchange, rather than by physical superiority." "That's what I mean," Macker said. "Our policy in the past has been to avoid tampering, only because of the fear of bringing harm. If we created a super being among them, to act as a controlling and harmonizing force, we'd hasten their development by thousands of years. We'd be granting them the greatest possible boon!" "I don't know," Remm said, obviously swayed by Macker's logic. "I'm still hesitant about introducing a being into their midst whose thought processes would be so subtle and superior to their own. How do you feel about it, Toolls?" "What would they have to lose?" Toolls asked with his penchant for striking the core of an argument. "The right or wrong of such' moral and philosophical considerations has always been a delicate thing to decide," Remm acquiesed reluctantly. "Go ahead if you think it is the right thing to do." "That depends on how much you want me to do," Toolls replied. "I've substituted our "heavy" substances for his entire body structure, including the brain -- at the same time transferring his former memory and habit impressions. That was necessary if he is to be able to care for himself. Also I brought his muscular reaction time up to our norm, and speeded his reflexes." "Have you implanted any techniques which he did not possess before, such as far-seeing, or mental insight?" Marker asked. "No," Toolls said. "That is what I want your advice about. Just how much should I reveal about ourselves and our background? Or should he be left without any knowledge of us?" "Well..." Now that the others had deferred to Macker's arguments, he had lost much of his certainty. "Perhaps we should at least let him know who we are, and what we have done. That would save him much alarm and perplexity when it comes time to reorient himself. On the other hand perhaps we should go even farther and implant the knowledge of some of our sciences. Then he could do a better job of advancing his people. But maybe I'm wrong. What do you think about it, Remm?" "My personal opinion," Remm said, "is that we can't.'give him much of our science, because it would be like giving a baby a high explosive to play with. His race is much too primitive to handle it wisely. Either he, or someone to whom he imparts what we teach him, would be certain to bring catastrophe to his world. And if we let him learn less, but still remember his contact with us, in time his race would very likely come to regard us as gods. I would hesitate to drag in any metaphysical confusion to add to the uncertainties you are already engendering. My advice would be to wipe his mind of all memory of us. Let him explain his new found invincibility to himself in his own way." Macker had no criticism to offer to this suggestion. "Does he retain any of his immunity to this world's malignant germs?" he asked. t "They are too impotent to represent any hazard to his present body mechanism," Toolls replied. "If and when he dies it will not be from disease." "He will be subject to the deterioration of old age, the same as we are, won't he?" Macker asked, "Of course," Toolls said, "but that's the only thing that will be able to bring him down. He cannot be harmed by any force this 'light' world can produce; he is impervious to sickness; and he will live indefinitely." "Indefinitely?" "As his world reckons time. Their normal life span is less than a hundred years. Ours is over five thousand. He will probably live approximately twice that long, because he will be subjected to less stress and strain, living as he does on a world of lighter elements." "Then we have truly made a superman," Macker's tones inflected satisfaction. "I wish we were returning this way in a thousand years or so. I'd like to see the monumental changes he will effect." "We may at that," Remm said, "or others of our people will. He will probably be a living legend by then. I'd like to hear what his race has to say about him. Do they have names with which to differentiate individuals?" "Yes," Toolls said. "This one has a family designation of Pollnow, and a member designation of Orville." "It will be necessary for us to leave in exactly ten minutes," Remm reminded them. "Our next stopping place -- the red star -- will reach its nearest conjunction with this planet by the time we meet it out in space." "Then we will have time to do nothing .more for him before we go," Macker said. "But as far as I can see we've forgotten nothing, have we Toolls?" "Nothing," Toolls answered. "No -- we forgot nothing." B UT Toolls was wrong. They had forgotten one thing. A minor detail, relatively... On Toolls' world his race, in the course of its evolution, had adjusted itself to its own particular environment. Logically, the final result was that they evolved into beings best able to survive in that environment. As such their food --  a "heavy," highly concentrated food -- was ideally suited to supply the needs of their "heavy," tremendously avid organisms. Orville Pollnow had no such food available. His body -- no larger than before -- had an Earth mass of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. One hundred and eighty thousand pounds -- the weight of twelve hundred average sized men -- of fiercely burning, intense virility. Even continuous eating -- of his own world's food -- could not supply the demands of that body. Twenty-four hours after the aliens left, Pollnow was dead -- of starvation. Ask your news dealer to reserve your September issue now! WherC Uncle Peter decided to clean out the underworld it was a fine thing for the town, but it was tough on the folks in Tibet. , "And that's how it was, officer" By Ralph Sholto D avid nixon. Chief of Police, Morton City. Dear Chief Nixon : No doubt by this time, you and your boys are a pretty bewildered lot. You have all probably lost weight wondering what has been going on in Morton City; where all the gangsters went, and why the underworld has vanished like a bucket of soap bubbles. Not being acquainted with my uncle, Peter Nicholas, with Bag Ears Mulligan, with the gorgeous Joy Nicholas, my bride of scarcely twenty-four hours, or with me, Homer Nicholas, you have of course been out of touch with a series of swiftly moving events just culminated. You, above all others, are entitled to know what has been happening in our fair city. Hence this letter. When you receive it, Joy and I will be on the way to Europe in pursuit of a most elusive honeymoon. Uncle Peter will be headed for Tibet in order to interview certain very important people you and your department never heard of. Bag Ears will probably be off somewhere searching for his bells, and I suggest you let him keep right on searching, because Bag Ears isn't one to answer questions with very much intelligence. So, because of the fact that a great deal of good has been done at no cost whatever to the taxpayers, I suggest you read this letter and then forget about the whole thing. It all started when Joy and I finally got an audience with Uncle Peter in his laboratory yesterday morning. Possibly you will think it strange that I should have difficulty in contacting my own close relative. But you don't know Uncle Peter. He is a strange mixture of the doer and the dreamer -- the genius and the child. Parts of his brain never passed third grade while other parts could sit down and tie Einstein in knots during a discussion of nuclear physics, advanced mathematics or what have you. He lives in a small bungalow at the edge of town, in the basement of which, is his laboratory. A steel door bars the public from this laboratory and it was upon this door that Joy and I pounded futilely for three days. Finally the door opened and Uncle Peter greeted us. "Homer -- my dear boy! Have you been knocking long?" "Quite a while, Uncle Peter -- off and on that is; I have some news for you. I am going to get married." My uncle became visibly disturbed. "My boy! That's wonderfultruly wonderful. But I'm certainly surprised at you. Tsk-tsk-tsk!" ' "What do you mean by' tsk-tsktsk?" "Your moral training has been badly neglected. You plan marriage even while traveling about in the company of this woman you have with you." Joy is a lady of the finest breeding, but she can be caught off-guard at times. This was one of the times. She said, "Listen here, you baldheaded jerk. ( Nobody calls me a woman -- " Uncle Peter was mildly interested. "Then if you aren't a woman, what -- ?" I hastened to intervene. "You didn't let Joy finish, Uncle Peter. She no doubt would have added -- 'in that tone of voice.' And I think her attitude is entirely justified. Joy is a fine girl and my intended bride." "Oh, why didn't you say so?" "I supposed you would assume as much." "My boy. I am a scientist. A scientist assumes nothing. But I wish to apologize to the young lady and I hope you two will be very happy." "That's better," Joy said, with only a shade of truculence. "And now," Uncle Peter went on. "It would be very thoughtful of you to leave. I am working on a serum which will have a great deal to to do with changing the course of civilization. In fact it is already perfected and must be tested. It is a matter of utmost urgency to me that J be left alone to arrange the tests." "I am afraid," I said, "that you will have to delay your work a few hours. It is not everyday that your nephew gets married and in all decency you must attend the wedding and the reception. I don't wish you to be inconvenienced too greatly, but -- " Uncle Peter's mind had gone off on another track. He stopped me "Why the beef, Winky? Aren't we among friends?" "Never mind! Never mind!" Unde Peter fell back upon his dignity -- having nothing else to fall back on -- and said, "Homer -- Joy -- this is Cora, my ah -- assistant. She was ah -- in the process of taking a shower, and -- " Joy reached forth and pinched Uncle Peter's flaming cheek. "It's all right, uncle dear. Perfectly all right. And I'll bet this chick can give a terrific assist, too." I felt the scene should be broken up at the earliest possible moment. I steered Joy toward the door. I said, "We'll see you later, then, Uncle Peter." "And you too, Miss Courtney," Joy cut in. "Make Winky bring you and don't bother to dress. The reception is informal." I I got Joy out the door but I couldn't' suppress her laughter. "Winky," she gasped. "Oh, my orange and purple garter-belt!" the reception, which was given by my Aunt Gretchen in the big house on Shore Drive. We were married at City Hall and -- after a' delicious interlude while the cab was carrying us cross-town -- we arrived there, a happy bride and groom. I am indeed fortunate to have wooed and won such a talented and ) .uitiful girl as Joy. A graduate of V.issar, she is an accomplished  I i . supercharged with a vitality...nl ell'ervescence which -- while they sometimes manifest in disturbing ways -- are wonderful to behold. But more of that later. The reception began smoothly enough. The press was satisfactorily represented, much to Aunt Gretchen' s gratification. Joy and I stood at the door for a time, receiving. Then, tiring of handshakes and congratulations, we retired to the conservatory to be alone for a few minutes. Or so we thought. Almost immediately, Aunt Gretchen ferreted us out. Aunt Gretchen has long-since lost the smooth silhouette for which the Nicholas women are noted. She has broadened in all departments and she came waddling along between banks of yellow roses in a manner suggesting an outraged circus tent. "Homer," she called. "Homer!" I reluctantly took my hands away and answered her. "Oh, there you are! Homer -- I want an explanation." "An explanation of what?" "There is a person at the door who calls himself Bag Ears Mulligan. He has the audacity to claim you invited him to -- to this brawl as he terms it." I must here explain -- with sorrow -- that my Aunt Gretchen is a snob. There is no other term for it. It has gotten to be such a habit with her that any friend of mine is automatically a person to be looked down on. And Bag Ears Mulligan is one of my dearest friends. Of course I had invited him to my wedding, and felt honored by his attendance. Bag Ears is a habitue of one of the "Of course -- Bag Ears -- leave us be chummy." He now turned his remarks to me and evinced even more intense admiration for my bride. "She reminds me of a fast lightweight -- the most beautiful sight in the world." "Let us repair to the conservatory," I said, "where we can have a quiet chat." I said this because I felt that some of the other guests might not be as tactful as Joy and might make Bag Ears feel uncomfortable. Aunt Gretchen had rudely vanished without waiting for an introduction and the actions of the hostess often set the pattern for those of the guests. As we moved toward the rear of the house, Joy took my arm and said, "Speaking of being stripped down for action -- what do you suppose happened to Uncle Peter? I haven't seen him around anywhere." "Pie gave his word, so I'm sure he'll come." "That's what I'm afraid of." "I don't understand." "I don't quite understand myself, but I feel uneasy. I remember the calculating look in his eye when he suddenly agreed to honor us with his presence. There was something too eager about that look. And his asking whether any of your friends would be here." "Uncle Peter is basically a good fellow. I think he envies me my wide contacts." "Maybe." "If he seemed a trifle peculiar, you must remember that he is a scientist. Even now he is engaged in .nine important project -- some experiment -- " "I know -- we met her." "Joy! Please!" " -- but I wouldn't think he'd have to experiment at his age. I'd thinks -- " I put my hand firmly over her mouth. "Darling -- we have a guest -- Bag Ears -- " "Oh, of course." Safely hidden behind a. bank of tropical grass, I took Joy in my arms and kissed her. Bag Ears obligingly looked in the other direction. But Joy didn't quite get her heart into it. She seemed preoccupied -- I might almost say, bewildered. "Bag Ears," she whispered to no one in particular, "and what did you say the lady's name was? Oh -- I remember -- Red-Nose Tessie." She pondered for a moment and then smiled up at me dreamily. "Darling -- I never realized what a versatile person you are -- " Bag Ears perked up. "Verseetile? You ain't just a hootin', babe. And tough. You should see his right." I strove to quiet him down. "Never mind. Bag Ears -- " But Toy evinced great interest. "Tell me -- " "Babe -- the kid could be the next heavyweight champ in a breeze. I mind me one night a monkey comes into the tavern rodded -- Joy held up a hand. "Just a moment. I don't like to appear stupid, but -- " "A moke wid a heater -- a goon wid a gat." "Oh -- you mean a man with a gun." "Sure -- that's what I said. Anyhow, this droolie makes a crack about Tessie's beak -- " "An insult relative to her nose?" "Sure -- sure. And Tessie's hot to kiss him wid a bottle when he pulls the iron." "Imagine that," Joy said, and I felt a slight shiver go through her body. "Then Homer here, gets off his stool and says very polite-like. 'That remark, sir, was in bad taste and entirely uncalled-for. I believe an apology is in order.' And the monkey standing there with the gat in his mitt. What Homer meant was the jerked cracked out o' turn and to eat his words fast." "I gathered that was what he meant." "But the screwball raises the hardware and -- wham -- Homer hits him. What a sock! The goon backpedals across the room and into a cardboard wall next to the door marked 'ladies'. He busts right through the wall and lands in a frail's lap inside who's -- " "Powdering her nose?" "That's right! Whax a sock!" J OY'S eyes were upon mine. "Darling! I didn't have the least idea. Why it's going to be wonderful! Never a dull moment!" I kissed my bride, after which she said, "I think I could do with a drink, sweetheart." "Your wish is my command." I got up and started toward the liquor supply inside the house. Joy's soft call stopped me. "What is it angel?" I inquired. "Not just a drink, sweet. Bring the bottle." I went into the kitchen and got a bottle of brandy. But upon returning, I discovered I'd neglected to bring glasses. But Joy took the bottle from me in a rather dazed manner, knocked off the neck against a leg of the bench and tipped the bottle to her beautiful lips. She took a pull of brandy large enough to ward off the worst case of pneumonia and then passed the bottle to Bag Ears. "Drink hearty, pal," she murmured, and sort of sank down into herself. I never got my turn at the bottle because, just at that moment, Aunt Gretchen came sailing like a pink cloud along the conservatory walk. She was no longer the old familiar Aunt Gretchen. Her eyes were glazed and her face was drawn and weary. Bag Ears looked up politely and asked, "Who's the fat sack?" I was hoping Aunt Gretchen hadn't heard the question because she would fail to understand that while his words were uncouth, he had a heart of gold and meant well. And I don't think she did hear him. She didn't even hear Joy, who replied, "That's the dame that owns the joint." Aunt Gretchen fixed her accusing eyes uponme to the exclusion of everyone else. Her button of a chin quivered. "Please understand, Homer -- I'm not ' criticizing. Things have gotten past that stage. I've merely come to report that the ing assortment of characters. Johnson resigned a half hour ago. But before he left, he suggested a man who could handle the situation far better than he himself. A man named Frank Buck." "But my dear aunt," I protested. "There must be some mistake. I did not invite any unusual people to this reception. I issued only three who could not come because of a dispute with the police over the ownership of a car he was driving yesterday; John Smith, who could not come because this is the day he reports to the parole board, and my good friend Bag Ears Mulligan." "How did you happen to overlook Red-Nose Tessie?" Joy asked. "The poor woman is emotional. She does not enjoy wedding receptions. She weeps." "So does Aunt Gretchen," Joy observed. Aunt Gretchen was indeed weeping -- quietly, under the blanket of reserve with which the Nicholases cover their emotions. I was about to comfort her when she turned and fled. I started to run after her but decided against it and returned to Joy. "Perhaps," I said, "we had better investigate this strange turn of events. Possibly our reception has been crashed by some undesirable persons." "Impossible," Joy replied. "But it might be fun to look them over. Shall we have a quick one first -- just to stiffen the old spine a bit?" It sounded like a good suggestion so we stiffened our spines with w hat was left in the bottle, and quitted the conservatory. became swiftly apparent. We had guests who were utter strangers to me. But it was Bag Ears who summed up the situation with the briefest possible statement. "Jees!" he ejaculated. "It's a crooks' convention!" "You can identify some of these intruders?" "If you mean do I know 'em, the apswer is without a doubt, pal. Somehow, the whole Cement Mixer Zinsky mob has infiltered into the joint." "Cement Mixer Zinsky," Joy murmured. "Another of those odd names." "It's on account of he invented something. Zinsky was the first gee to think up a very novel way of getting rid of people that crowd you. He got the idea to mix up a tub of cement -- place the unwanted character's feet in same and then throw the whole thing into the lake. Result -- no more crowding by that guy." "He was the first one who thought of it? A sort of trail blazer." "Of course Cement Mixer is a big shot now and his boys take care of things like that. But sometimes he goes along to mix the cement -- just to keep his hand in you might say." "A sentimentalist no doubt." "No doubt," Bag Ears agreed. I patted Joy's hand and said, "Don't be alarmed, darling. I will take care of everything." The situation was definitely obnoxious to me. Tolerance of one's fellow men is one thing, but this was something entirely different, s These people had come uninvited to our festive board and were of I the criminal element, pure and un adulterated by any instincts of honi esty or decency. And it made me ( angry to see them wading into Aunt ( Gretchen's liquor supply as though the stuff came out of a pump. j They were easy to count, these s hoodlums, segregated as they were. I The more respectable of the guests  who had not already left, were clustered together in one comer of the living room, possibly as a ges ture toward self-protectidn. None of I these elite were making any effort I to approach the buffet or the porti able bar at the other side of the I room. And in thus refraining, they t showed a superior brand of intellii gence. Under present circum( stances any attempt to reach the reI freshments would have been as i dangerous as crossing the Hialeah race track on crutches. ' In fact, as I surveyed the scene,  one brave lady made a half-hearted attempt to cross over and spear a sandwich off the corner of the buffet. She was promptly shoved out of range by. a lean, hungry looking customer in a pink shirt, who i snarled, "Scram, Three Chins!  You're overfed now." i Unhooking Joy's dear fingers i from my arm, I said, "You will pardon me, but it is time for action. Bag Ears will see that you are not harmed." I I started toward the buffet, or  rather toward the crowd of male and female hoodlums who com: pletely blocked it' from my sight. : But Bag Ears snatched me by the sleeve and whispered, "For cri-yi, Homer! Don't be a fool! This mob is loaded wid hardware. They don't horse around none. Start slugging and they'll dress you in red polka dots. Better call in some law." I shook my head firmly and pulled Bag Ears' hand from my sleeve. But, his attention now turned in another direction, he held on even harder and muttered, "Jeeps! I'm seeing things!" I glanced around and saw him staring wide eyed at the entrance hall, his battered mouth ajar. I followed his eyes but could see nothing unusual. Only the hall itself, through an arched doorway, and the lower section of the staircase that gave access to the second floor of the house. It appeared to be the least-troubled spot in view. I frowned at Bag Ears. "Maybe I've gone nuts," he said, "but I'll swear I just saw a face peeking down around them stairs." "Whose face?" "Hands McCaffery' s face! That's whose!" "And who is Hands McCaffery?" Bag Ears looked at me with stark unbelief. "You mean you don't know? Maybe your mom didn't give you the facts of life! Chum, they's two really tough monkeys in this town. One of them is Cement Mixer Zinsky and the other is Hands McCaffery. At the moment they're slugging it out to see which one gets to levy a head tax on the juke boxes in this section. It's a sweet take and neither boy will be satisfied with less than all. Seeing them both in one place is like seeno ing Truman and that music critic sit down at the piano together. And I know damn well that Hands is up on them stairs!" "You are obviously overwrought. If I have this type of person sized up correctly, none of them would be dallying on the stairs. If this Hands person were here, he'd be at the buffet fighting for a helping of pickled beets and a gin wash. Pardon me -- I have work to do." But there was another interruption. I froze in sudden alarm when I realized Joy was no longer at my side. Just as I made this discovery, there was an upsurge of commotion at the bar ; a commotion that went head and shoulders over the minor ones going on constantly. A short angry scream came to my ears, then a bull-voiced roar of agony. T HE crowd at the buffet surged back and I saw a bucktoothed hooligan bent double, both hands gripping his ankle. Thick moans came from his lips. And standing close to him, was my Joy. But a new Joy. A different Joy than I had ever seen. A glorious Joy, with her head thrown back, her teeth showing, and the light of battle in her eyes. She was holding a plate of jello in one hand and a liottle of beer in the other and was shouting in outraged dignity. "Watch who you're shoving, you jii" headed gorilla! And keep your rtuii nut of the herring! Eat like a m. m nr go back to the zoo!" With that she placed an accui.itc kirk against the offending i li.tt.u trr's other shine-bone and aimed the beer bottle at his skull. Joy turned and smiled gayly. "He pushed me," she said. "It's the most wonderful wedding reception I ever attended. Have a pickle." But surprise was piling upon surprise. Again I froze as a new phase of this horrible affair presented itself. Uncle Peter.  Clad in apron and cap, he was behind the bar serving out drinks. This shook me to the core. It was a little like seeing Barney Baruch hit a three bagger in Yankee Stadium and slide into third base. But there he was, taking orders and dishing out drinks with an attitude as solemn and impersonal as an owl on a tree branch. Also, he had an assistant -- his blonde bombshell. She was fully dressed now and I was struck by the peculiar manner in which this peculiar team functioned. Uncle Peter would mix a drink, glance at his wrist watch as he served it, then turn and whisper some sort of information to the girl. She noted it down in a small book and the routine was repeated. At this exact moment, I felt a sharp dig in the ribs. This brought my attention back to Joy, who had done the digging. "I'm still here, husband mine. Your bride -- remember? Or are you waiting for that blonde hussy to start stripping?" "Darling, I'm afraid you're not paying close attention to things of importance. Don't you see Uncle Peter there -- serving drinks?" "Of course I see him. What of it? If the old roue feels like dishIll ing out a little alcohol to the boys, what -- " "It's absolutely beyond all conception. Uncle Peter never does anything without a good reason. And this -- " My reply was cut short by a cold, brutal voice that knifed through the room and put a chill on all present. "Hold it everybody! Stand still and don't move a finger!" Not a finger in the room moved. But all eyes turned toward the arched doorway leading to the entrance hall. In its exact center, there stood a man -- a short man of slight stature. He stood spread-legged, wearing a colored kerchief .over the lower part of his face. Only his eyes were visible -- icy, black, narrowed. Those eyes seemed to be smiling a grim smile. Possibly his hidden teeth were bared in a snarl. But no one cared about that. Everyone was far more interested in the black Thompson sub-machine gun he held cradled over one arm. He toyed with the trigger, knifing the room with quick side glances. He said, "Okay. Start sorting yqprselves out. You, pretty boy, and the frail with the beer bottle -- out of the line of fire." He motioned with the gun barrel and I drew Joy toward the wall. "Now you, Cora -- and old puddle-puss. Out of the way. And not a peep out of anybody." No one was inclined to peep, and now the stage was set in a manner which seemed to satisfy the masked gunman. The Cement Mixer Zinsky crowd was clustered, cowering, around the buffet, staring at the machine gun as though it possessed the hypnotic eyes of a snake. The situation was entirely plain. The masked man fully intended to break the law by committing murder in Aunt Gretchen's living room. The only moot point seemed to be whether he intended to slay the whole mob or be selective and cut down only important members. His trigger finger turned whfte at the knuckle. Then Uncle Peter stepped forward to hold up a protesting hand. "You mustn't fire that weapon, my good fellow. Indeed you must not." His matter-of-fact attitude rather than his words, was what gave the gunman pause. He had hardly expected the display of completely impersonal bravery that Uncle Peter put on. The gunman asked, "Are you nuts, fiddlefoot?" "Far from it. But you must not, under any circumstances, fire that gun. It will upset one of the most important experiments in the history of science. That experiment is now in progress." "Look, brother. I came here to mow down Zinsky and his mob. And I'm mowing. The St. Valentine's deal in Chi'll look like a Sunday school binge after this one." "Possibly it will not be necessary to use your weapon." were prophetic. At that exact moment, Cement Mixer Zinsky exploded. Not violently, or with any peril to those standing close by. Yet no other term can describe it. There was a soft pop -- as though a large, poorly inflated balloon had been pricked with a pin. Zinsky seemed to go in all directions -- fragments of him that is. Yet, as each fragment flew away from the main body, it shriveled up so that there was no blood, and no bystander suffered the inconvenience of messed-up clothing. Just the pop and Zinsky expanded' like a human bomb and then turned into dust. As this phenomenon occurred I saw Uncle Peter nod with great satisfaction and consult a passage in the book presided over by his blond assistant. He made a check mark in the book. Then a second member of the buffet group went pop. The masked' man stared in slack-jawed wonder. In fact his jaw went so slack the kerchief dropped away revealing his entire visage. He lowered his head and looked down at the gun in his hands; the gun that had not been fired. Two more members of Zinsky's party followed him into whatever oblivion was achieved by going pop and dissolving into dust. Uncle Peter evinced bright interest and made two more check marks in the book. The balance of the mob moved as one, but in many directions. They paid no attention to their own weapons as they headed for cover. One of their number exploded as he was half way through the French doors. Uncle Peter checked him off and Bag E ars said, "Jeeps! tomori  w every juke box in town can play 'Nearer my God to Thee.' " Then hiadded, "Leave us blow this joint, (ioofy things is happening here. I don't like it." I was perspiring. I mopped my forehead. "A most amazing occurrence," I observed. Joy was digging the fingers on one hand into my arm. I had been watching Hands McCaffery back crestfallen out of the living room and toward the front door, terrific slaughter having been accomplished without the firing of a shot. I turned my eyes now to follow the direction in which Joy pointed with her other hand and saw the blond assistant hauling Uncle Peter through one of the French windows. He did not seem to be enthusiastic about leaving. In fact he appeared to argue quite strenuously against it, but her will prevailed and they disappeared out onto the lawn. Now, with all the danger past, people began fainting in wholesale lots. Aunt Gretchen was resting comfortably with her head braced against the brass rail of the portable bar. Those who didn't faint contributed variously tonated screams to the general unrest. And over all this brooded the dank clouds of acrid dust that Ijjad so lately been Cement Mixgr Zinsky and certain members of his mob. Indeed, the scene took on a startling semblance to one of Dore's etchings in an old edition of Dante's Inferno. "I repeat," Bag Ears bleated plaintively. "Leave us blow this joint. It ain't healthy here." "He's right," Joy said. "A lot. of explanation is wanting. There are some people we've got to catch up with. Let's go." With that, she drew Bag Ears and me toward the French doors through which had recently passed some of the fastest moving objects in this or any other world. We made the flag-stone terrace above the drive where Bag Ears cordially grasped my hand and said, "Well, it was a nice party, folks, and if I ever get spliced I'll sure give you a invite and I sure had a swell time and remember me to your aunt when she wakes up and- -- " He was backing down the steps when Joy cut in with, "Bag Ears. Don't be so rude. You're in no hurry." Bag Ears slowed down and allowed us to catch up with him. He gave us a sickly smile. "That's where you're wrong, babe." "Bag Ears," Joy went on. "I heard, you whisper to Homer that you know who that blonde is." "What blonde. Me? I don't know nothing about no blonde nohow." "Don't hedge. I mean the girl who was assisting Uncle Peter behind the bar. Who is she, really?" "Oh -- her. Everybody knows her. She's Hands McCaffery's moll. He likes 'em blonde and -- " Bag Ears was on the move again, striding in the direction of the gate. We' hurried to catch up. "That babe's poison," he told us. "Any skirt that'd flock with Hands McCaffery is poison. I'll tell you kids what I'd do. If she drives south -- I'd drive north. Goodbye now." Just at that moment a big blue sports roadster pushed a bright chromium nose around the corner of the house. I took a firm grip on Bag Ears' collar, grabbed Joy by the arm, and the three of us leaped behind a bush. The car rolled past us. We saw the blonde behind the wheel and Uncle Peter seated beside her, evidently still protesting the hasty exodus. B UT the girl looked very sharp and businesslike; the way a girl would look who knew where she was going and why. The car picked up speed and swung north. "I wonder," Joy murmured, "how Uncle Peter happened to select Hands McCaffery's girl friend as his assistant." t "She was a burlycue queen last time I heard of her," Bag Ears said. "Still is I guess." . "That could explain it," I told Joy. "You see Uncle Peter has -- ah, facets to his personality. A tendency to admire women. Ah -- " "Women -- period ; isn't that what you mean?" "Well, it would be perfectly logical for Uncle Peter to select an assistant from the stage of a burlesque theater." "Enough of this," Joy snapped. "We're wasting time. Go get -- oh, never mind! Wait here." Joy was off in the direction of the garage and in no time at all she was back in my Cadillac convertible. As she sailed by I managed to hook a finger around the door handle and get a foot inside. This was no mean feat, as I was also occupied in hauling Bag Ears along by the collar. I managed to deposit him in the seat beside Joy and squeeze in beside him. "A burlycue queen, eh?" Joy was muttering. "Well, she's not so much! If she couldn't get her clothes off she'd starve to death." "Darling," I said. "I don't think this is the sort of thing you should be doing. It's far too dangerous for a girl." "Or anybody else," Bag Ears moaned. There was a bleak look on his face. "I don't like playing around with a guy like Hands McCaffery or friends of a guy like him. It's a good way to collect your insurance." "She's heading for Higgins Drive," Joy observed. Which was entirely true. The roadster had made a turn on two wheels and was going west. "But our honeymoon," I said, plaintively. "Yeah," Bag Ears repeated, "what about our -- your honeymoon?" Joy's eyes were sparkling. She turned them on me. The car lurched. She returned her eyes to the road. "Yes, darling. Our honeymoon! Isn't it wonderful?" "But this isn't it! This isn't what people do on their honeymoons." "Oh, you mean -- but don't worry about that, darling. We'll have plenty of time for -- " "Lemme out o' here," Bag Ears moaned. "I got a date to take Red Nose Tessie to the movies." Joy apparently did not hear him. "I wish we had all the parts to this puzzle. It looks as though somebody put somebody on the spot for a rubout. But it would seem that somebody else got the same idea but didn't know that somebody else was going to achieve the same result in a more spectacular way and -- " "I think you've figured it out most accurately." "Some of it fits together. Uncle Peter was no doubt responsible for the Zinsky boys coming to our reception. We'll get the dope on that when we catch up with him. But the blonde must not have known what was going to happen, so she tipped Hands off that he could find the whole Zinsky mob at the reception. He decided it would be a good place to settle certain matters of his own." "But why did Uncle Peter want them there?" Joy glanced at me with love in her eyes. "Darling, we're going to be wonderful companions through life, but most of the fun will be strictly Physical. Mental exercises aren't your forte." "When Red Nose Tessie makes a date with a guy," Bag Ears said, "she expects the guy to keep it." "The blonde Cora is no doubt heading for a rendezvous with Hands McCaffery," Joy went on. "And she's taking our dear uncle with her." "Okay," Bag Ears replied. "So we mind our business and keep our noses clean and live a long time." Joy was weaving through traffic, trying to keep the roadster in sight. "Turn on the radio," she told me. "There might be some news." I snapped the switch and we discovered there was news indeed; an evening commentator regaling the public with the latest: " -- an amazing mass phenomena which leading scientific minds have pronounced to be basically similar to the flying saucer cra#e. Relative to that -- you will remember -- otherwise reliable citizens swore they saw space ships from other planets hovering over our cities spying on us. "This phase of the hysteria takes an entirely different turn. It seems now that these otherwise entirely reliable citizens are seeing other citi. zens explode and vanish into thin air. The police and the newspapers have been deluged with frantic telephone calls. In the public interest, we have several persons here in the studio who claim to have seen this phenomena. Your commentator will now interview them over the air. You -- you, sir -- what is your name?" "Sam -- Sam Glntz." "Thank you, Mr. Glutz. And will you tell the radio audience what you saw?" "It wasn't nothing -- nothing at all. That is -- this guy was running down the street like maybe the cops was after him -- I don't know. Then -- there wasn't nothing." "You mean the man disappeared?" "He went pop, kind of -- like a firecracker only not so loud -- and then pieces of hirn flew all over and they disappeared and there wasn't nothing -- nothing at all." "Thank you, Mr. Glutz. And now this lady -- " "Turn it off," Joy snapped. "The blonde's pulling up." us. "And by a cop yet," Bag Ears marveled. "Looks like they're going to give theirselves up." It was Uncle Peter who got out of the car and approached the traffic officer standing at the intersection. "What'll we do?" Joy asked. "Do you want to try and keep the old goat out of jail or shall we let him go to the chair as he deserves?" The possibility stunned me to a point where it was hard to think clearly. "Good Lord, Joy! Think of the scandal! I don't care about myself, but Aunt Gretchen would never live it down! She'd be blackballed at all her clubs and -- " "Then," Joy replied sweetly, "I'd suggest you get out and slug that cop quick and grab Uncle Peter before he makes a confession." I had come to the cross-roads, so to speak. The necessity of a weighty decision lay upon my shoulders. Was blood thicker than water? Was I justified in breaking the law -- assaulting an officer in order to keep my uncle from becoming a blot on the family name? I decided, grimly, that one owed all to one's relatives and I was halfway out of the car. Then I paused. Uncle Peter did not seem to be making a confession at all. He chatted easily with the officer and indicated my Cadillac with a movement of his thumb. Something passed from his hand to the hand of the policeman and the latter looked toward us and scowled. "Uncle Peter is pulling a fast one," Joy said. "The cop's coming after us!" I was uncertain as how to proceed now. I watched the scowling policeman approach our car while Uncle Peter got back in with the blonde Cora and drove away. "Are you going to hang one on him sweetheart?" Joy asked. "What -- what do you recommend?" "I've got a hunch that if you don't we go to the pokey and Uncle Peter will be left free to blow up everybody in town." I don't believe the officer meant to arrest us but at the moment my mind wasn't too clear and I accepted Joy's point of view. I doubled my fist as the officer approached. He wasted no time in getting acquainted. He said, "How come you guys are tailing those guys? You figuring a stickup or something?" It was now or never. I hunched my right shoulder and aimed a stiff knockout jolt at the officer's jaw. It wasn't too good a target because he had a lantern jaw and it was bobbing up and down as he munched on a wad of chewing gum. But I did not connect. As my fist completed but half its lethal orbit, the officer blew up in my face! He went pop just as so many others had gone pop at our wedding reception ; his entire anatomy flying in all directions, to turn into a cloud of sooty smoke and mix with the elements. I was frozen with consternation. But not Joy. Instantly she dragged me back into the car. "Don't you get it? Uncle Peter gave him that stick of gum!" "You're damn right!" Bag Ears stated. "The old monkey's gone dear off" his trolley. Maybe he plans to clean out the whole town!" Joy, her eyes slitted, was weaving in and out of traffic so as not to losetrack of the blue roadster. "It's as plain as your nose! He's hand in glove with McCaffery and that blonde is bird-dogging him around town and pointing out McCaffery's enemies. Uncle Peter is knocking them off like clay pigeons." I was amazed at this revelation, but was also thunderstruck by the underworld jargon flowing so easily from Joy's luscious lips. "Angel," I gasped. "Where did you learn to talk like that? Those underworld' terms!" "I read all the true detective magazines I can get my hands on," she said. "They're good fun, but that's beside the point. We've got to nail Uncle Peter and nail him quick, or Aunt Gretchen will ring up a nice big zero in the social world." "How about nailing him without me?" Bag Ears suggested. "It's nine o'clock and Red Nose Tessie never likes to miss none of the show." "I'm sure, Bag Ears," Joy said, "that Tessie would sympathize with our efforts to keep Uncle Peter out of the electric chair." "I doubt it," he replied dubiously. "Tessie's brother got burned in Frisco for knocking over a bank clerk and Tessie never even attended. Let him fry in his own grease was what she said about it." "Nevertheless," Joy said, "I have no time to stop and let you out." A fast, fifteen-block chase followed. Once we lost the blue roadster completely, but by sheer luck, picked it up three blocks further on as it came wheeling out of a side "Okay -- where is he? What did street. We were in a quiet residential section now so there was no one to interfere as Joy skillfully forced the roadster to the curb. I jumped out and leaped swiftly toward the driver's door. T HE blonde sat behind the wheel with a sullen look on her face. "What is this?" she asked. "A stickup?" "Don't be vulgar," I replied. "We are here to take charge of my uncle. This weird slaughter must cease!" Joy was by my side now, but Bag Ears hung back as though somewhat worried about the possible consequences of our act. I heard him muttering: "What if he can just shoot the stuff in your eye maybe? What if a guy doesn't have to swallow it -- ?" Joy's gayety was again coming to the surface. Her eyes were bright and I was struck by the fact that she seemed to thrive on this, sort of thing. "Hello, Blondy," she said. "Get out from behind -- " The blonde's eyes threw sparks. "Who you think you're talking to, you lard -- " "Not Truman," Joy said. "Now get -- " I seized Joy's wrist. "Angel! He's gone! Uncle Peter isn't here!" I stared at Joy in horror. "Do you suppose he inadvertently chewed some of his own gum?" Joy did not reply. She shouldered me aside, opened the car door and surprised me by getting a very scientific grip on Cora. you do with him?" "He's not here!" "Any fool can see that. Did he blow up?" "Of course not. He went to keep a date." The blonde jerked herself loose from Joy's hold and was sullenly straightening her clothing. "I don't see why you and Pretty Boy have to stick your big noses into this. It's none of your business." "We're making it our business." "You don't seem to realize," I said stiffly, "that Unde Peter is very dear to me. He has performed some horrible deeds, and as his loving nephew -- " The blonde seemed puzzled. "You're off your crock! Pete's okay. He just entered into a little private deal to help out Hands McCaffery. I don't see where it's anybody's business, either. If he wanted your help he'd ask for it!" It made my blood run cold to hear this girl refer so casually to the wholesale slaughter that had been going on around us. I strove to find words to shame her, but Joy cut in. And apparently my dear wife was more interested, at the moment, in the details of the affair rather than the morals involved. "McCaffery and Uncle Peter haven't got any deal," she said to the blonde. "You lie as easily as you undress. If they had an arrangement to knock off all those parties at our wedding reception, how come McCaffery brought a machine gun along?" The blonde had an answer. "Hands was a little doubtful. He didn't think Pete could do it -- blow people into thin air just from somealong with the gag but he wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to rub out the Zinsky gang -- or as many as he could hit -- if the gimmick didn't click. That's why he brought the Tommy -- just in case." Joy turned to me. "It fits," she said. "I've been trying to give Uncle Pete the benefit of every doubt but it looks as though you've got a mad dog sniffing at the trunk of your family tree." all wrong. He's not -- " I continued with the questioning. "You are denying that Uncle Peter had anything to do with this deadly serum that disintegrates people before one's eyes?" "I'm not denying it." "Then it follows that your moral sense is so badly corroded you no longer consider murder to be a crime -- " "Now listen here!" "In law," I went on, "the victim's standing in society is not taken into consideration where murder is involved. It is just as wrong in the eyes of the law to murder Cement Mixer Zinsky as the pastor of the First Congregational Church." The blonde looked wonderingly at Joy. "Is this guy for real?" Joy reestablished her hold upon the blonde's anatomy. "Never mind that. All we want from you is answers. Where did Uncle Peter go? Tell me!" "Nuts to you!" Cora replied. "He doesn't want you bothering him." Joy applied pressure. Cora squealed but remained mute. I stepped forward. "Darling," I said grimly. "This sort of thing is not in your line. I realize this woman must be made to talk so I will take over. It will be distasteful to me, but duty is duty." I got a withering look from my dear wife. "Distasteful? In a pig's eye! You'd like nothing better than to get your hands on her -- by way of duty of course." "Joy!" "Don't Joy me" And with an expert twist, she flipped the struggling Cora out of the roadster, goose-stepped her across and into the back seat of the Cadillac. "You and Bag Ears get in and start driving -- slow. I'll have some answers in a minute or two." We did as we were told and I eased the car away from the curb. I had to watch the road, of course, so could not turn to witness what was going on rearward. In the mirror I saw flashes of up-ended legs and, from time to time, other and sundry anatomical parts that flew up in range only to vanish again as the grim struggle went on. Bag Ears, however, turned to witness the bringing forth of the answers. His first comment was, "Oh boy!" Joy was breathing heavily. She said, "Okay, babe. Talk, or I'll put real pressure on this scissors!" Bag Ears said, "Man oh man!" Joy said, "Quit gaping, you moron! I'm back here too." I gave Bag Ears a stern admonition to keep his eyes front. "Give," Toy gritted. "Ouch! No!" "Give!" Cora gave forth an agonized wail. Then an indignant gasp. "Cut it out! You fight dirty! That ain't fair!" "Give!" "All right! All right. Pete's meeting Hands at -- ouch -- Joe's -- ouch -- Tavern on Clark Street. Ouch! Cut it out, will you?" And it was here that I detected a trace of sadism in my lovely wife. "All right," she said regretfully. "Sit up. Gee but you talk easy." "Just where is this tavern?" I asked. "And what is the purpose of the meeting?" Cora's resistance was entirely gone. "In the # block. Pete went there to get some money from Hands to skip town with." Joy now spoke with relish. "Lying again. I'll have to -- " "I ain't lying!" "Don't give us that! Uncle Peter is wealthy. He doesn't need Hands' money. Come here baby." "Wait, Joy," I cut in hastily. "The young lady may be telling the truth. Uncle Peter is always short of funds. You see, Aunt Gretchen holds the purse strings in our family and Uncle Peter is always overdrawn on his allowance." "Then let's get to that tavern and find out what's going on." It took ten minute's to reach the tavern; a standard gin mill with a red neon Sign proclaiming its presence. We quitted the car and I entered first, Joy bringing Cora along with a certain amount of force, and Bag Ears bringing up the rear. And I was just in time to prent another murder. m As I came through the door, I saw Hands and Uncle Peter leaning casually against the bar. There was no one else in the place. The barkeep was facing his two customers and there' were three glasses set before them. The barkeep held one in his hand. Uncle Peter had just finished spiking the barkeep's drink with a clear fluid from a small vial. Uncle Peter said, "It's something new I invented. Pure dynamite. You haven't lived until you've tasted my elixir." it. I want to make sure I wasn't seeing things back at that dame's house." The barkeep said, "Pure dynamite huh ?" "Your not fooling, chum." He raised the glass and grinned. "Salud." I got to the bar just in time to knock the glass out of his hairy paw. He grunted, "What the hell -- oh, a wise guy, huh?" and started over the bar. I yelled, "It's murder. They're trying to poison you!" "Oh, a crackpot!" He came toward me, shaking off Uncle Peter's restraining hand. I took a step backward, thankful he was coming in wide open because I had seen few tougher looking characters In my lifetime. I set myself and sent a short knockout punch against his chin. It was a good punch. Everything was in itIt sounded like a sledge hammer hitting a barn door. The barkeep shook his head and came on in. I stepped back and slugged him again. No result. Then Joy slipped into the narrow space between us. She was smiling and with her upturned waiting lips, she was temptation personified. The barkeep dropped his hands, paralyzed by her intoxicating nearness. She said, "Hello, Iron Head. How about you and I taking a little vacation together somewhere." He grinned and reached for her. This, it developed, was a mistake, because Joy reached for him at the same time. She lifted his two-hundred-odd pounds as though he were a baby and he went flying across the room like a projectile. He hit a radiator head-on and lay still. Again I was stupefied. It seemed I knew nothing at all about this girl I'd married. She smiled at me and said, "Don't be alarmed, angel. There's in explanation. You see my . mother gave me money for piano lessons and I invested most of it in a course of ju-jitsu. I thought an occasion like this might arise sometime. Do you want to take McCaffery, or shall I do it? I doubt if he'll come to the station peaceably." But Hands McCaffery was not to be caught flatfooted. Without his machine gun he was just an ordinary little man who 'didn't want to go with us. He took one look at the prom barkeep, muttered, "Geez!" and headed for the back door. "Get him," Joy yelled. "Maybe we can make a deal with the cops to fry Hands in place of Uncle Peter!" I started after Hands and as I went through the back door I heard Uncle Peter protesting feebly. "I say now. This is all uncalled for -- " "Don't let him get away!" Joy called. "He's got the serum!" That cleared things up somewhat and made me even more resolute. Evidently we had interrupted Uncle Peter and Hands in the process of doing away with all the latter's enemies. With that bottle in his possession, he was a menace to the entire population of the city. A man of his type would certainly have far more enemies than friends. Outside in the dark alley, I was guided only by footsteps. The sound of Hands' retreat told me he was moving up the smelly passageway toward Division Street. I went after him. I am no mean sprinter, having won laurels in college for my fleetness in the two-twenty and the fourforty, and I had no trouble in overtaking the little assassin. We were fast approaching the alley entrance where I would have had the aid of street lights and could have swiftly collared McCaffery whose heavy breathing I could now hear -- when disaster struck in the form of a painful obstacle. It was heavy and it caught me just below the knees. I tripped and fell headlong, plowing along a couple of yards of slippery brick pavement on my face. I got groggily to my feet and shook my head to clear my brain. From the deposits of old eggs, rejected tomatoes and other such refuse in my face and ears, I gathered that I had tripped over a garbage can. This delayed me for some moments. When I finally staggered out into Division Street, a strange sight met my eyes. Hands McCaffery had been apprehended. It seemed that the police had orders to pick him up because two uniformed patrolmen had him backed against the wall and were approaching him with caution. They had him covered and were taking no chances of his pulling a belly gun on them. But he did not draw a gun. Instead, while I stared wide-eyed, he raised Uncle Peter's vial to his lips and drank the contents. I will not bore you with details of his going pop. If you have read this letter carefully, the details are not necessary. I turned and retraced my steps, realizing Hands McCaffery had been vicious and defiant to the last. Rather than submit to arrest, he had taken the wild animal's way out. I arrived back in Joe's Tavern to find the barkccp had been revived and bore none of us any ill-will. This no doubt because of Joy's persuasive abilities. Cora was 'sulking in a booth and Uncle Peter was patching the gash on the barkeep's head. realizing, as a good citizen, I must turn my own uncle over to the police. But there was an interlude before I would be forced into this unpleasant task. This interlude was furnished by Bag Ears. After I acquainted the group with the news of how Hands had taken the easy way out, Bag Ears' face took on a rapt, silent look of happiness. Pie was staring at Joy. He said, "Pretty -- very pretty!" Joy said, "Thank you." Bag Ears said, "Pretty -- pretty -- pretty." Joy looked at me. "What's eating him?" There was a bottle on the bar together with some glasses. I stepped over and poured myself a drink. I certainly needed it. "Bag Ears isn't referring to you, dear. He's alluding to his bells. He's hearing them again." "Oh my sky-blue panties! Pour me a drink." I complied. "You sec Bag Ears is somewhat punch-drunk from his years in the prize ring. I've seen this happen before." We sipped our brandy and watched Bag Ears move toward the door. "That's the way it always is. When he hears the bells he feels a terrific urge to go forth and search for them. But he always ends up at Red Nose Tessie's and she takes him home. It's no use trying to stop him. He'll hang one on you." As Bag Ears disappeared into the street, there were tears in Joy's eyes. "He's dreaming of his bells," she murmured. "I think that's beautiful." She held up her glass. "May he find his bells. Pour me another drink." I poured two and we drank to that. "May we all someday find our bells," joy said with emotion, and I was delighted to find my wife a girl of such deep sentiment. "Pour me another." I did. "Your quotation was wrong, sweetheart," I said. "Don't you mean, 'May we all find our Shangri-La?' " "Of course. Let's drink to it." We drank to it and were rudely interrupted by the barkeep who said, "I hope you got some dough. That stuff ain't water." I gave him a ten dollar bill and -- with a heavy heart -- turned to Uncle Peter. "Come, Uncle," I said gently. "We might as well get it over with." "Get what over with?" "Our trip to the police station. You must give yourself up of course." "What for?" I shook my head sadly. Uncle Peter would never fry. His mind was obviously out of joint. "For murder." He looked at Joy. He said, "Oh, my broken test tube! There is no need of -- " "I know it will be hard for them to convict you without corpus dilecti, but you must confess." "Let's all go over to my laboratory." "If you wish. You may have one last visit there." "Excellent -- one last visit." He smiled and I wondered if I saw a certain craftiness behind it. Cora voiced no objections, seemingly anxious to stay near Uncle Peter. When we got to his laboratory he went on through into his living quarters and took a suit case from the closet. "What are you going to do?" "Pack my things." "Oh, of course. You'll need some things in jail." "Who said anything about jail? I'm going to Tibet." " Tibet f Uncle Peter! I won't allow it. You must stay here and face the music." "The music is in Tibet, Homer. That's one of the reasons I'm going there. To a monastery high in Himalayas. There are some wonderful men there I've always wanted to meet -- yogis who have such control over natural laws that they can walk on water and move straight through solid walls." "But Uncle Peter! If you want to go to Tibet, you should have thought of it before. It's too late now. You've committed murder." "Bosh! I haven't killed anyone. The serum I discovered is one of transition, not murder. It causes the stepping-up of the human physical structure into an infinitely higher rate of vibration. Two controls are distilled into it... One is a timer that sets off the catalysis, and the other is a directive element based upori higher mathematics which allows the creator of the serufn to direct the higher vibratory residue of the physical form to be put down at any prearranged point on the globe before the reforming element takes effect." Joy said, "Oh, my painted Gstring !" I strove to absorb all this. "You mean those people weren't destroyed?" Joy was quicker on the reaction. "Of course. I couldn't picture Uncle Peter as a killer somehow. He merely picked them up here and i set them down in Tibet. Can't you understand? He just explained it to you." Of course I didn't want to admit my mental haziness to Joy, so I skipped hastily over it and pointed an accusing finger at Uncle Peter. "But why couldn't you have conducted your experiments on a higher plane. Why did you have to consort with law-breakers?" J OY had apparently lost interest. She planted a wifely kiss on my cheek and started toward the door. "I'm going back to Joe's Tavern," she said. "It's more fun there. When you get all this straightened out, come on over." I moved to protest but she waved me dow'n. "Never mind. I'll take a cab." She smiled at me sweetly. "And don't stay too long, darling. I'm sure Cora is anxious to get her clothes off." Cora distinctly pronounced an unprintable name but Joy did not hear it. She was already gone. I turned to Uncle Peter. "You did not answer my question." "It's very simple. Even one of your limited brain power should be able to understand it. You see, with finishing my experiments I was not averse to doing the city a favor. Why not, I asked myself, perform them upon persons undesirable to our law-abiding populace? Cora was acquainted with Hands McCaffery and it was through him that I learned who the really undesirable people were." "But why did you invite them to my wedding reception? I'd think you could find a more appropriate place to carry out your -- " "It was an ideal place to get the Zinsky mob together. Like your Aunt Gretchen, Mr. Zinsky has social ambitions, and he anticipated no danger at the reception." "I can see your point." "Also, I wanted to get back at your Aunt Gretchen. She's been very niggardly with funds lately and I wanted to high light my displeasure in a way she would remember." I had a fairly clear picture of things now. But I still felt Uncle Peter should be upbraided on a last point. "Uncle Peter, I think it was shameful of you to inflict those hoodlums on the monks in that monastery in Tibet. They'll be in panic." "No. I was careful to send along two policemen to keep them in hand." "So you're leaving for Tibet?" "Of course. I've got to follow up and check on the success of my serum, though there is really no doubt as to its potency. Also I'll be able to achieve a life-long ambition -- that of meeting the yogis from whom I should learn a great deal." I glanced at Cora. "Are you taking her with you?" "Of course." "But yogis are above things of the flesh." Uncle Peter looked me straight in the eye. "Maybe the yogis are, but I'm not." There seemed nothing else to discuss, so I left Uncle Peter's chambers and went back to Joe's Bar. My mind, now at ease, was filled again with thought of the honeymoon to come. I would pick up Joy and we would be off to pinktinted lands. But there was, a slight hitch. When I arrived at Joe's Bar, Joy was gone. I inquired of the barkeep and he brought me up to date. "That screwy dame that can throw a guy around? Sure, she was here. She had a few drinks and then left again. She said something about having to help a friend find some bells he lost. I don't know what kind of bells they was but that dame can locate them if anybody can." As I was about to leave the tav ern, it occurred to me you would want to know the truth of what's been going on, so I'm now in the backroom writing this report which I will drop into the nearest mailbox. Then I will go out and find my bride and start upon a wellearned honeymoon. If you have any questions, they'll have to wait until I get back.  Yours truly, Homer Nicholas. Quoting Our Contemporaries Lila Shaffer "The opportunity for glory still remains... for the first human to go into space. So far, no altitude flights beyond the atmosphere have been made. All high altitude work with Neptunes and V-#s still remains a matter of remote control, although in the near future, attempts will undoubtedly be made to send humans to altitudes greater than... one hundred miles. There is opportunity for immortality for somebody." Les and Es Cole "Aside from the fact that some of the most 'adult' literature we've read has been 'escdpist', we seriously question... (the) statement that... (science fiction) is trending toward maturity and away from adventure stories... We feel that the only science fiction magazines these we find most magazines opersationalism, and Shallow Plotting." They came io Mars inquiring after the stuff of Empire. They got -- The By Arthur G. Hill of the rest because Larkin had bought an unfair advantage -- a copy of the Primary Report. There were seven of them, all varying in appearance, but with one thing in common; in the eyes of each glowed the greed for Empire. They came down in a flash of orange tailfire and they looked first at the Martians. "Green," marveled Evans. "What a queer shade of green!" "Not important," Cleve, the psychologist replied. "Merely a matter of pigmentation. White, yellow, black, green. It proves only that God loves variety." "And lord how they grin!" Cleve peered learnedly. "Doesn't indicate a thing. They were born with those grins. They'll die with them." Of the seven strong men, Larkin exuded the most power. Thus, his role of leader was a natural one. No man would ever stand in front of Larkin. He said, "To hell with color or the shape of their mouths. What we're after lies inside. Come on. Let's set up a camp." "For the time being," Cleve cautioned, "we must ignore them. Later -- we know what to do. I'll give the nod." They brought what they needed out of the ship. They brought the plastic tents, broke the small, attached cylinders, and watched the tents bulge up into living quarters. They set up the vapor condenser from the air about them. They plugged a line into the ship and attached it to the tent-line. Immediately the gasses in the plastic tents began to glow and give off both light and heat. They did many things while the Martians stood silently by with their arms hanging, their splay-feet flat on the ground, their slashmouths grinning. The seven sat down to their first meal under the Martian stars and while they ate the rich, delicate foods, they listened to the words of Larkin. "A new empire waiting to be built. A whole planet -- virgin -- new." "Not new," Dane, the archeologist said. "It's older than Earth. It's been worked before." Larkin waved an impatient hand. "But hardly scratched. It can have risen and fallen a thousand times for all we care. The important thing is the vital ingredient of empire. Is it here? Can it be harnessed? Are we or are we not, on the threshold of wealth, splendor, and progress so great as to take away the breath?" And as Larkin spoke, all seven men looked at the Martians ; looked covertly while appearing to study the rolling plain and the purple ridges far away; the texture of the soil ; the color of the sky ; the food on their plates; the steaming fragrance of their coffee. They looked at all these things but they studied the Martians. "Stupid looking animals," Evans muttered. "Odd though. So like us -- yet so different." At first there had been only a handful of Martians to grin at the landing of the ship. Now they numbered over a hundred, their ranks augmented by stragglers who came to stare with their fellows in happy, silence. "The prospects are excellent," Cleve said. Then he jerked his attention back to Larkin from whom., it had momentarily wandered. When Larkin spoke, one listened. words toward a young man named Smith. Smith had inherited a great deal of money which was fine. But Larkin wasn't too sure of his qualifications otherwise. " -- the pyramids," Larkin was saying. "Would they have ever been built if the men up above -- the men with vision -- had had to worry about a payroll?" Smith regarded the Martians with not quite the impersonal stare of the other six Earthlings. Once or twice he grinned back at them. "I'll grant the truth of what you say," he told Larkin, "but what good were the pyramids? They're something I could never figure." Smith had a sardonic twist of  mouth that annoyed Larkin. "Let's not quibble, man. I merely used the pyramids as an example. Call them Empire; call them any Empire on Earth from the beginning of known history and let's face facts." "Facts?" Smith asked. He had been looking at a six-foot-six Martian, thinking what a magnificent specimen he was. If only they'd wipe off those silly grins. "Yes, facts. The building must be done. It is a law of nature. Man must progress or not. And what empire can arise without free labor? Can we develop this planet at union scale? Impossible! Yet it's crying to be developed." Cleve knocked the ashes off his cigar and frowned. Being a man of direct action, he inquired. "Do you want your money back, Smith?" The latter shook his head. "Oh no! Don't get me wrong, gentlemen. I'm for empire, first last and always. And if we can lay the foundations of one on the backs of these stupid creatures, I'm for it." "I still don't like your -- " "My outspoken manner? Don't give it a thought, old man. I just don't want to be all cloyed up with platitudes. If we're going to chain the children of Israel into the house of bondage, let's get on with it." "I don't like your attitude," Larkin said stubbornly. "In the long run, it will benefit these people." "Let's say, rather, that it may benefit their children. I doubt if these jokers will be around very long after we start cracking the whip." Dane was stirred. "The whip," he murmured. "Symbol of empire." But nobody heard him. They were too busy listening to Larkin and Smith -- and watching the Martians. The Martians stood around grinning, waiting patiently for something to happen. Larkin's attitude toward them had changed again. First there had been curiosity. Then a narrow-eyed calculation; now he regarded them with contempt. The careful, studied checks and tests would be made of course. But Larkin, a man of sure instincts, had already made up his mind. He stretched luxuriously. "Let's call it a day and turn in. Tomorrow we'll go about the business at hand with clearer heads." "A good idea," Cleve said, "but first, one little gesture. I think it would be judicious." He eyed the Martians, settling finally upon onera male -- standing close and somewhat apart from the rest. Cleve scowled. Standing erect, he called, "Hey -- you!" He interpreted the words with a beckoning gesture of his arm. "Come here! Here boy! Over here!" The Martian reacted with a typically Earthian gesture. He pointed to his own chest with one green finger, while a questioning expression reflected through the eternal grin. "Yes, you! On the double." T HE Martian came forward. There was in his manner a slight hesitation, and Smith expected to sec his hind quarters wriggle like that of a dog -- uncertain, but eager to please. Cleve pointed with a martinet gesture toward the smoked-out cigar butt he'd thrown to the ground. "Pick it up!" The Martian stood motionless. "Pick -- it -- up, you stupid lout!" Larkin -- now beyond sanity -- was gibbering in the grave. The Martians understood. With a glad little whimper, he bent over and took the cigar butt in his hand. "There," Cleve said. "Garbage can! Get it? Garbage can. Place for trash -- for cigar butts. Put it in there." Smith wasn't sure whether the grin deepened or not. He thought it did, as the Martian laid the cigar butt carefully into the trash can, "Okay, you fella," Cleve barked, still scowling. "Back and away now. Stay out there! Get it? Only come when you're called." It took a few eloquent gestures, including the pantomime of swinging a whip, before the Martian understood and complied. After he backed into the circle of his fellows, Cleve dropped the cruel overseer manner and turned with satisfaction to Larkin. "I think there will be no trouble at all," he said. "Tomorrow we'll really get down to cases. I predict smooth sailing." They said goodnight to each other and went about the business of preparing for slumber. As' he raised the glowing flap of his tent, Larkin saw Smith lounging in a chair before the electric heat unit. "Aren't you going to get some sleep?" "In a little while. I'm going to wait around until those two famous moons come. Want to .see them first hand." "Awaste of time," Larkin said. "Better keep your mind on more important things." "Goodnight," Smith said. Larkin did not reply, and Smith turned his head to look at the Martians. He wondered where they had come from. They probably had a village somewhere over the rise. He regarded them without fear or apprehension of what might occur during the sleeping hours. Tie had read the Primary Report, brought back by the pioneer expedition. These people were entirely harmless. Also they were possessed of remarkable stamina. They had stood for days, watching the first expedition, grinning at it, without nourishment of any kind. Maybe they live off the atmosphere, Smith told himself dreamily. At any rate, they were ideal specimens to use as the foundation stones of an empire. He lay back, thinking of Larkin ; he did not like Larkin personally, but he had to admire the steel in the man; the unswerving determination that had made him what he was. His mind drifted back to the things of beauty around him. The far purple ridges had changed now, as a light bloomed behind them to gleam like azure through old crystal. Then the two moons shot over the horizon; huge silver bullets riding the thin atmosphere. The oldest planet. Had it ever been great? Were the bones of any dead civilizations mouldering beneath this strange yellow soil? Smith closed his eyes while the cool Martian breezes soothed his face. Greatness. What was greatness after all? Merely a matter of viewpoint perhaps. Smith got up and moved slowly toward his tent. Out in the shadows he could feel the grins of the Martians. "Goodnight," he called. But there was no answer. said. "It seemed as good a place as any." "Fine," Larkin rumbled. He wore boots and britches and a big, widebrimmed hat. He had on soft leather gloves. He looked like an empire builder. The Martians were standing around grinning at the pile of shovels lying in the fuzz-bush. The Martians seemed interested and appeared to communicate with one another in some imperceptible manner. Larkin shoved through the circle of green men, pushing rudely. He stopped, picked up one of the shovels; thrust it toward a Martian. The Martian took it in his hands. "It's very important that you tell them -- that you don't show them," Cleve said. "You must not do any of the work yourself." "I'll handle it," Larkin snapped. "Now you -- all of you! Grab a shovel. Pick 'em up, see? Pick 'em up! We've got work to do. A ditch to dig." Larkin's pantomime was a universal language. "We start the ditch here. Right here -- you fella! Get digging! And put your back into that shovel. Hit jaard or maybe it gives the whip -- understand?" Larkin made a threatening motion toward the lash coiled, at his belt. Smith, already on the scene, turned as Evans and Dane arrived carrying undefined plastic. They snapped the cylinders and chairs appeared; chairs -- and a table upon which Garter and Lewis, bringing up the rear, placed a pitcher of beer, glasses and a box of cigars. Cleve, the psychologist, looked with satisfaction upon the string of Martians manipulating the shovels. "All right," he said. "Let's sit down. Pour the beer, one of you." "Allow me," Smith said. He fought to straighten the smile bending his lips. He picked up the pitcher and poured beer into the glasses. It all seemed so absurd; these grim-faced men acting out an asinine tableau. Cleve caught the smile, "I wish you'd take this seriously," he said'. "It's a mighty touchy and important business." "Sorry," Smith said, raising his glass. "Here's to empire." Larkin was striding up and down the line of straining Martians. The scowl had become a part of him. It's getting him, Smith marveled. Act or no act, he likes it. Experiment or not, he's in his element. The six men sat drinking their beer and watching Larkin. But only Cleve was aware of the skill with which the man worked. The gradual ! application of pressure; the careful moving forward from bog to bog with the path of retreat always open. From sharpness to brusqueness. From the brusque to the harsh. From the harsh to the brutal. "Will you tell me," Smith asked, "why we have to sit here drinking like a pack of fools? I don't like beer." "I'm not enjoying it, either," Cleve said. "But you can certainly understand that the roles must be set right from the beginning. They must understand we are their masters, so we must conduct ourselves in that manner. Never any sign that could be interpreted as compromise." Larkin, satisfied with the progress of the entirely useless ditch, came to the table and raised a glass of beer. He wiped the foam from his mustache and asked, "What do you think?" directing the question toward Cleve. T HE latter regarded the sweating Martians with calculating eyes. "It's going entirely as I predicted. The next step is in order, I believe." "You think it's safe?" "I'm certain of it." Smith, studying Larkin, saw the latter smile, and was again struck by its quality. Whatever the test, Larkin's for it, even above the call of scientific experimentation. Larkin was uncoiling the whip from his belt. He strode toward the fast-deepening ditch. He selected a subject. "You -- fella. You're lazy, huh? You like to gold-brick it? Then see how you like this!" He laid the whip across the green shoulders of the Martian. The Martian winced. He raised an arm to shield off the whip. Again it curled against his flesh. He whimpered. His grin was stark, inquiring. "Hit that shovel, you green bastard!" Larkin roared. The Martian understood. So did the other Martians. Their muscles quivered as they drove into their work. Larkin came back, smiling -- almost dreamily, Smith thought. Cleve said, "Excellent. I'd hardly hoped for such conformity. Hardly expected it." "You mean," Smith asked, "that this little scene can be projected from a dozen to a hundred? From a hundred to a thousand -- ?" "From this little plot to the whole surface of the planet," Cleve said. "The mass is nothing more than a collection of individuals. Control the individual and you've got the mob. That is if you follow through with the original method. Set the hard pattern." "Then we're in -- is that it? They've passed every test with flying colors." "I'm sure they will," Cleve said, frowning. "But we must be thorough." "There's still another test?" "Yes. The test of final and complete subservience. It must be proven beyond all doubt that they know their masters." "You don't think they're aware yet that we are their masters?" "I'm sure they know. It only remains to be proven." Cleve glanded up at Larkin. "Maybe this is as far as we should go today. We've made marvelous progress." That characteristic wave of Larkin's hand; the gesture of the empire builder brushing away mountains. "Why wait? I want to get this thing over with. You said yourself they're under our thumb." Cleve pondered, staring at the Martians. "Very well. There's really no reason to wait." Larkin smiled and turned toward the diggers, only half visible now from the depths of the ditch. He walked forward, appearing to exercise more care, this time, in the selection of his subject. Finally, he pointed at one of the Martians. "You -- fella! Come here!" Several of them looked at one another a trifle confused. "You -- damn it! What are you waiting for?" One of them climbed slowly from the trench. While he was engaged in so doing, Smith noticed two things. He saw the look of rage, simulated or otherwise, that came into Larkin's face. And he saw Cleve's fingers tighten on the edge of the table. Larkin had a gun in his fist; a roar in his voice. "When I talk -- you jump! Get that? All of you!" He fired three bullets into the Martian's brain. The latter slumped grinning to the ground. Larkin, his breath coming jerkily, stood poised on the balls of his feet. The men at the table sat frozen -- waiting. Around them -- on the plain -- some two hundred Martians stood motionless. 'The final test, Smith thought. To prove they're cattle. echo of the gun faded out. Silence. And nothing. The Earthmen picked up their breathing where they'd dropped it. Larkin's breath exploded in savage voice -- triumphant voice. The Martians were his. "Come on, some of you! Dig a hole and bury that carrion! And if anybody still wonders who's boss around here -- let him step forward!" "They took it!" Gleve whispered. "Glory be -- they took it!" Four Martians climbed grinning from the trench. They faced Larkin and stood as though awaiting instructions. "Dig there," Larkin said. They went stolidly to work and Larkin pocketed his gun, making the pocketing a gesture of contempt. "You see," Cleve said, with the tone of one explaining an abstract problem, "we were at somewhat of a disadvantage because they are incapable of indicating emotion by facial expression. Thus the last test was necessary. If we could have judged the degree of fear previously instilled, that last might not have been necessary." "Just as well to have a double check nontheless," Dane said. "Look at them! You'd think nothing out of the ordinary had happened." Larkin strode back to the table. "Glad we got it over with," he said. "Now we know. Gleve can head back for Earth tomorrow. Initial supplies will come to about twenty can stay here and really drive these beggars. Get the foundations dug; get the rock down from the hills." "A planet in glorious resurrection," said Dane, the poet of the group. "They've got the grave dug," Cleve observed. "They're waiting for orders." "Such cattle," Evans muttered. Larkin strode back to the grave. He pointed. "Him -- body into the grave. Snap into it. We've got work to do." The Martians put the body into the grave. Then a tall, green man appeared behind Larkin. He put his arms around Larkin's body. Another Martian took the gun from Larkin's pocket. And they pushed the screaming Earthman down into the grave. Smith sprang to his feet. "For God's sake!" "Sit down, you fool!" Cleve hissed. "Do you want to die? We've miscalculated. Something's wrong." The big Martian was standing on Larkin. The others threw in the soil. Larkin, now beyond sanity, was gibbering like an animal. Smith sat down. The Earthman presented a frozen tableau. Soon the gibbering could no longer be heard and the big Martian stepped out of the grave. "Leave everything," Cleve whispered. "Get up very casually and walk back to the ship. Get inside it." "May God help us," Dane quavered. "Shut up! Act natural." They went back and got into the ship while the Martians stood patiently about waiting for something to happen. Their patience was rewarded when the ship arose on a great flaming tail from the surface of the planet. It was a sight worth waiting for. They Called Her "Crazy Bet # Richard Wilmcr Rowan has made a professional study of secret service, espionage and spy systems the world over. At night cloak-anddagger ghosts prowl the streets around his Jersey City home! And why not? A glimpse into his tremendous files would reveal murder, chicanery, intrigue, theft, arson, rape, treachery, mayhem, sabotage, et cetera, et cetera ; skeletons in the closets of nations and empires, why wars have been won and lost, why nations have risen and fallen! One case is that of Miss Elizabeth Van Lew, belle of the old southern aristocracy, who did more to defeat her native South than an army of Yankee troops. For more than four years her fantastic spy ring operated right in the middle of Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy! Not even Jefferson Davis himself escaped her probing tentacles. The amazing story of her exploits -- They Called Her "Crazy Bet " -- is in the July issue of Miss Van Lew among the first ten spy masters in the annals of modern espionage. Here is the fascinating at your neighborhood newsstand -- only # cents. Personalities His objectives fade in the West O N A certain January evening in #, a group of prominent gentlemen gathered in the New York flat of one Charles Hoy Fort, a resident of the Bronx. Present were Theodore Dreiser, Burton Rascoe, Harry Elmer Barnes, John Cowper Powys, Booth Tarkington, Harry Leon Wilson, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, Clarence Darrow, J. David Sterne, Aaron Sussman, and several others, including H. Allen Smith who later wrote an amusing, though somewhat inaccurate, account of the proceedings. The purpose of the meeting was the establishment of a Fortean Society, to carry on the work of Charles Fort and to spread his ideas. Fort surely needs no introduction to devotees of science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, he may well be termed the spiritual father of both these literary fields. It was recently proposed to form a club that would be called, "Writers Who Have Stolen Plots From Charles Fort." The idea was dropped, however, when it was realized that such a group would include virtually every modern writer in the imaginative field, including many now deceased. At least a dozen novels and hundreds of short stories have been based directly or indirectly on ideas set forth in Fort's four books -- Lo, The Book of the Damned, Wild Talents, and New Lands. Nor is this surprising, because Fort's books are a compilation -- documented, indexed, classified -- of strange, eerie, and inexplicable occurrences on this supposedly mundane earth of ours -- happenings far more strange than the most imaginative fictioneer ever dreamed up. Through the pages of Fort's books stalk unknown animals, alien races, visitants from other planets, survivals of strange cults, showers of amazing objects arid living entities, teleportations, and people possessed of powers bordering on the supernatural. There are accounts of men who could not be caught; men who could not be seen; men who could not be hung. The maddest menagerie and freakshow ever assembled under one canvas. Fort's sources were always fairly reputable; newspapers, police blotters, and even scientific publications and text books. Yet they were widely ignored by a world unable to fit them into definite category ; a world which preferred to relegate them to oblivion as damned by orthodox science, yet well attested. The works of Charles Fort are startling to the eye; nightmarish to the mind. Of course, they may not all be true, those amazing pccople, things, and occurrences which were the delight of Fort's life. Indeed, there is strong evidence that Fort himself did not actually believe all of them, or the theories he drew from them. Many are unquestionably hoaxes, arising from the most gargantuan sense of humor in modern letters. most exact double for the screen comediant, Chester Conklin. And he was also, pure Mack Sennett in mentality. His books were written with a slapstick more so than with a pen, and are one long guffaw from start to finish, interlarded with conceits and wisecracks to a degree which sometimes offends the serious reader. Still, Fort himself invented nothing. He simply set down what had previously been recorded by thousands of observers all over the world. This would seem to mitigate against hoaxing in any marked degree by Fort himself. Certainly there is nothing obviously faked in his books. No complete check of Fort's works has ever been made of course. It would take a lifetime. But spot checks have been made, and all details, as set down by Fort, have been found to be correct. The phenomena were observed -- or at least vast numbers of disinterested persons believed they observed them. Moreover, evidence continues to pour in that the phenomena have continued since Fort's death. The number of Fortean occurrences in recent years has been startling. Certainly his books would have been hugely expanded had he lived on. In one department alone -- the flying saucers -- more phenomena have accumulated in the last four years than in the preceding century. At the time Fort wrote The Book of the Damned, no one but he himself believed in flying saucers. Now it is safe to say that a vast minority -- possibly even a majority -- of people do believe in them, though they may have varied theories of explanation. So, at the very least, Fort's theories deserve investigation. And it is highly unlikely that they will get it from the orthodox scientists. Science has become a bit more broadminded since Fort's day, what with Einstein and the atomic bomb. Still, the scientific attitude remains pretty much that of a prominent physicist who made assertion that while a certain dogmatism may have existed once, it has vanished forever; that today, savants are wholly openminded, and ready to investigate anything without preconceptions. "Do you mean," he was asked, "that if a werewolf were brought into your laboratory, you would investigate it without prejudice?" The physicist shrugged. "Oh well," he murmured, "of course there are no werewolves." Hence, an organization wholly dedicated to the collection and investigation of Fortean phenomena is not only desirable, but necessary if anything is ever to be learned at all. It is clear, however, that the present Fortean Society is not that organization and shows no sign of so becoming. It would appear that the group is in the hands of the wrong people -- or rather, the wrong person. Even that group of original founders, though admittedly eminent, were not fantasy or science fiction writers; nor were they even students of the subjects. Of the lot, only W'oollcott and Hecht dabbled in the field of fantasy. have joined the society since the enrollment of the original roster. A. Merritt belonged until his death, and Ivan T, Sanderson, the "weird naturalist" who discovered evidences of many strange creatures, is a present member. But such men are few in the Fortean ranks and have nothing whatever to do with running the society. Indeed, they do not even seem to be welcomed. The whole organization has gravitated into the hands of one man, the original secretary, Tiffany Thayer. Six of the founders, beginning with Dreiser, e'dited one issue each of the society's publication -- Doubt -- then gradually dropped out. Thayer has edited all subsequent issues of the organ, collects the money, and handles all the correspondence. To all practical purposes, he is the society. Nor, so far as can be learned, has Thayer much in the way of qualifications for that role apart from having taken it over. He was a professional writer, but not in the least along Fortean lines. Now, he apparently uses the society as a vehicle for his own ideas and promotions with no check whatsoever upon his authority. The members of the San Francisco branch discovered this last, much to their sorrow, a couple of years ago. The chapter, made up largely of writers, artists, students of bizarre subjects, and all Fortean devotees, was not only the second largest in the country, but the first to hold regular meetings and investigate phenomena as a group. Meeting, in the Writer's Workship of Kenneth MacNickoll, on Lom-, bard Street, its gatherings often numbered fifty or more. It gathered and forwarded large amounts of data, none of which ever appeared in the Fortean magazine... Thayer was critical of the chapter from the beginning, since it insisted on following straight Fortean lines. "Most of the members," he complained in a letter, "are not so much concerned with two-headed calves as with other rebellions." Finding the chapter adamant, Thayer resorted to stronger measures. He simply excommunicated the entire unit, forbidding it to use the society's name in research, or to hold further meetings. Seeking to appeal his decision, the chapter found that there was no one to appeal to. The original founders are all either dead or quiescent, and Thayer rules alone. Virtually all the local membership resigned in a body, and will in the future have nothing to do with the society, although it retains enthusiasm for Fort and his ideas. Thayer, (riding high in the saddle, publishes the society organ -- Doubt -- and is cotnplete master of its policy and content. Apart from advertising Fort's works, it blurbs, chiefly, two totally un-Fortean tomes, entitled, America Needs Indians, and Raped Again! The latter is described as "a blueprint for enslaving whole populations." So far as is known. Fort wasn't interested in enslaving populations. In an appended list of some twenty publications offered for sale by the society, only one -- a tiny pamphlet on an alleged sea-serpent off the New England coast -- remotely resembles Fort. T HE editorial tone of the magazine is a far cry from the lusty and lamented Fortean days. Filled with sophomoric humor, continual reference to newspapers is made by using the term "wypers". Irony is laid on with a trowel. Good taste goes by the boards. The pretense is consistently maintained that the formation date of the society was the year One, and all items are double-dated in order to add to the confusion. Thayer seems to write most of the material himself, although an occasional article creeps in by other authors -- mainly mathematical and usually unintelligible. Extracts from the notes of Fort are published in a special section in the rear of each issue. Thus has the old master been relegated to the morgue. And the worse, because the notes are usually meaningless, the references done in a cryptic sort of shorthand, and no attempt made to translate or develop them. An occasional note on phenomena occurs now and then, but is usually slanted to make political preachment. A sad irony, since Fort eschewed politics wholly and never wrote a line in that direction. Thayer, during World War II, sniped at the allied side in every issue, violently attacking Civil Defense among other things. Later he hailed the escape of Gerhardt Eisler as the "most Fortean event" of its period. Garey Davis, the curiously deluded young man who renounced American citizenship and became a "world citizen," was made an Honorary Fellow of the Society for his action. Davis has since recanted his action and has applied for reinstatement. When the atom bomb first appeared, Thayer denounced it as a hoax -- a deception of the American government. For months he denounced also, those silly enough to be taken in. He quieted down, finally, under a deluge of protest, but he has never officially retracted the absurd view. He reacted likewise in the matter of the flying saucers. Here, truly, was the unkindest cut, as Fort himself wrote of them twenty years before Kenneth Arnold told of seeing the covey. Thayer claimed the saucers were another fraud of the government, this time to stimulate re( Continued on page #I ) By August Derleth Mcllvaine sat down to his machine , turned the complex knobs , and a message flamed across the void Old Thaddeus Mcllvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny -- or did he? said Tex Harrigan. "Lost mer; and he had the fixed idea people or strayed, crackpots or that there was life somewhere outwarped geniuses -- I know enough side this planet and that it was of them to fill an entire department possible to communicate with other of queer people. I've been a rebeings -- but unlike most others, he porter long enough to have run into tried it constantly with the queer quite a few of them." machinery he had rigged up. "For example?" I said, recogniz"Well, now, this old fellow had ing Harrigan's mellowness. a trio of cronies with whom he "Take Thaddeus Mcllvaine," played on occasion down at Bixby's. said Harrigan. He had no one else to confide in. "I never heard of him." He kept them up with his progress "I suppose not," said Harrigan. among the stars and his communi"But I knew him. He was an eccation with other life in the cosmos centric old fellow who had a modest beyond our oral, and they made a income -- enough to keep up his great joke out of it, from all I hobbies, which' were three: he could gather. I suppose, because he played cards and chess at a tavern had no one else to talk to, Mccalled Bixby's on North Clark Ilvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city editor -- it was old Bill Henderson then -- called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus Mcllvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a story.' So I set out to track him down..." It was a great moment for Thaddeus Mcllvaine. He sat down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered over theifi in his usual manner, half way between a querulous oldster and a reproachful schoolmaster. "I've done it," he said quietly. "Aye, and what?" asked Alexander testily. "I discovered a new star." "Oh," said Leopold flatly. "A cinder in your eye." "It lies just off Arcturus," Mcllvaine went on, "and it would appear to be coming closer." "Give it my love," said Richardson with a wry smile. "Have you named it yet? Or don't the discoverers of new stars name them any more? Mcllvaine's Star -- that's a good name for it. Hard a port of Arcturus, with special, displays on windy nights." Mcllvaine only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try and communicate with it."  "That's the ticket," said Alexander. "Cut for deal," said Leopold. That was how the news about Mcllvaine's Star was received by his cronies. Afterward, after Mcllvaine had dutifully played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning the Globe to announce Mcllvaine's discovery. self seriously," Harrigan went on. "And yet he was so damned mousy about it. I mean, you got the impression that he had been trying for so long that now he hardly believed in his star himself any longer. But there it was. He had a long, detailed story of its discovery, which was an accident, as those things usually are. They happen all the time, and his story sounded convincing enough. Just the same, you didn't feel that he really had anything. I took down notes, of course; that was routine. I got a picture of the old man, with never an idea we'd be using it. "To tell the truth, I carried my notes around with me for a day or so before it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to put a call in to Yerkes Observatory up in Wisconsin. So I did, and they confirmed Mcllvaine's Star. The Globe had the story, did it up in fine style. "It was two weeks before we heard from Mcllvaine again... That night Mcllvaine was more than usually diffident. He was not like a man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself. He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation. "It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly. Richardson grunted. Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of ay ours? The one the papers wrote up." "I think," said Mcllvaine cautiously, "I'm quite sure -- I have got in touch with them. Only," his brow wrinkled and furrowed, "I can't understand their language." "Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for, you to do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand them. Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or something." "King Thaddeus the First," said Alexander loftily. "All you stardwellers may kiss the royal foot." "That would be unsanitary, I think," said Mcllvaine, frowning. Poor Mcllvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that amber star now. Mcllvaine's star was certainly much closer to the earth than it had been. He tried once again to contact it with his home-made radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other -- a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of Mcllvaine's own kind. It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing -- Mcllvaine sensed all this and strove mightily to understand. He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distant impression that someone was talking to him in his own language. But there was no longer any sound on the radio. He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him. What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know. Mcllvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since he could riot rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien. They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plantpeople on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and fourarmed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese -- 'but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent. "And what about you?" cried Mcllvaine with unaccustomed heat. Silence was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its vividness. But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before -- of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien tb man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them I -- all appeared to be the same age. "We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner. Did they have names? Mcllvaine wondered. "I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are Mcllvaine." And the civilization of their star? Instantly he saw in bis mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed dwellers. Within the buildings was evidence of a great and old civilization... lieved all this. What an imagination the man had! Of course, the boys at Bixby's gave him a bad time ; I dorf t know how he stood it, but he did. And he always came back. Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight in deviling Mcllvaine, and I was sent out to see the old fellow again. "You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched. "But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in. ' "Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan. "Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his were considerably larger, though." "Go on." "Well, I talked with Mcllvaine for quite a while. He told me all about their civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought he was talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step, outside to meet. "Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys there. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a connection to Mcllvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant to give Mcllvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believing everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and let him make a fool of himself. "It didn't work out quite that way, however... "Mcllvaine, can you hear me?" Mcllvaine started with astonishment. His mental impression of Guru became confused; the voice speaking English came clear as a bell, as if from no distance at all. "Yes," he said hesitantly. "Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough information from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against Earth... '..." "But, why?" cried Mcllvaine, astounded. The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of duru betrayed anger. "There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the machine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators." Before he left the machine, Mcllvaine had the impression of a greater machine being attached to the means of communication which the inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him. "Mcllvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blinding flash just outside his window," continued Harrigan. "There was also a run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was nothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound -- as if, as he put it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag'. He went back in and examined the space from the window to the machine ; there were two thin lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had  been attached to the machine and led outside. "Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out there, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machine represented the wires Jie had attached to his microphone while Mcllvaine was at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not fiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared from that night on." "You investigated, of course?" I asked. Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about him. Mcllvaine as much as the rest of them. "Oh, they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through his house with a finetoothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, and generally put him through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murder rap on. But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn't manufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that Mcllvaine ever knew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him. "And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but Mcllvaine's word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have volunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him, they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happened to Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this." "People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And never come back." "Oh, sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out of his life here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. So much was missing from his effects, nothing more." "And Mcllvaine?" Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You couldn't expect him to do anything less. After all, he had worked most of his life trying to communicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention of resigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearance upset him. For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegrated Richardson; he offered that explanation, but by that time the dust had vanished, and he was laughed out of face. So he went back to the machine and Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's... from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, when. Mcllvaine came in. "They want to rejuvenate me," said Mcllvaine, with a certain shy pleasure. "What's that?" asked Alexander sourly. "They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They never die. They just live so long, and then they rejuvenate, they begin all over. It's some kind of a process they have." "And I suppose they're planning to come down and fetch you up there and give you the works, is that it?" asked Alexander. "Well, no," answered Mcllvaine. "Guru says there's no need for that -- it can be done through the machine ; they can work it like the disintegrators; it puts you back to thirty or twenty or wherever you like." "Well, I'd like to be twenty-five myself again," admitted Leopold. "I'll tell you what, Mac," said Alexander. "You go ahead and try it; then come back and let us know how it works. If it does, we'll all sit in." "Better make your will first, though, just in case." "Oh, I did. This afternoon." Leopold choked back a snicker, "Don't take this thing too seriously, Mac. After all, we're short one of us now. We'd hate to lose you, too." Mcllvaine was touched. "Oh, I wouldn't change," he hastened to assure his friends. "I'd just be younger, that's all. They'll just work on me through the machine, and over-night I'll be rejuvenated." "That's certainly a little trick that's got it all over monkey glands," conceded Alexander, grinning. "Those little bugs on that star of yours have made scientific, progress, I'd say," said Leopold. "They're not bugs," said Mcllvaine with faint indignation. "They're people, maybe not just like you and me, but they're people just the same." He went home that night filled with anticipation. He had done just what he had promised himself he would do, arranging everything for his rejuvenation. Guru had been astonished to learn that people on Earth simply died when there was no necessity of doing so; he had made the offer to rejuvenate McIlvaine himself. Mcllvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex knobs until he was en rapport with his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed, before he knew his contact had been closed. Guru came through. "Are you ready, Mcllvaine?' he asked soundlessly. "Yes. All ready," said Mcllvaine, trembling with eagerness. "Don't be alarmed now. It will take several hours," said Guru. "I'm not alarmed," answered Mcllvaine. And indeed he was not; he was filled with an exhilaration akin to mysticism, and he sat waiting for what he was certain must be the experience above all others in his prosaic existence. "Mcllvaine's disappearance coming so close on Richardson's gave us a beautiful story," said Harrigan. "The only trouble was, it wasn't new when the Globe got around to it. We had lost our informant in Richardson; it never occurred to Alexander or Leopold to telephone us or anyone about Mcllvaine's unaccountable absence from Bixby's. Finally, Leopold went over to Mcllvaine's house to find out whether the old fellow was sick. "A young fellow opened up. " 'Where's Mcllvaine?' Leopold asked. " 'I'm Mcllvaine,' the young fellow answered. " 'Thaddeus Mcllvaine,' Leopold explained. " 'That's my name,' was the only answer he got. " 'I mean the Thaddeus Mcllvaine who used to play cards with us over at Bixby's,' said Leopold. "He shook his head. 'Sorry, you must be looking for someone else.' " 'What' re you doing here?' Leopold asked then. " 'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow. "And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him to Mcllvaine's lawyer, wc found that the old fellow had made a will and left everything to his nephew, a namesake. The stipulations were clear clear enough ; among them was the express wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thaddeus Mcllvaine, of no matter what nature, but particularly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death, the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate possession of the property and effects." "Of course, you called on the nephew," I said. Harrigan nodded. "Sure. That was the indicated course, in any event. It was routine for both the press and the police. There was nothing suspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except for one or two little details. He never did give us any precise address-, he just mentioned Detroit once. I called up a friend on one of the papers there and put him up to looking up Thaddeus Mcllvaine; the only young man of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as the present inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well." "There was a resemblance, then?" "Oh, sure. One could have imagined that old Thaddeus Mcllvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having done something like that?" not help thinking what an ironic thing it would have been if there had been something to'McIlvaine's story, and in the process to which he had been subjected from out of space he had not been rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, in which case he would have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it had been put. It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of Mcllvaine's star, too; they would doubtless have looked forward to keeping this contact with Earth open and failed to realize that Mcllvaine's construction differed appreciably from theirs. "He virtually junked it. Said he had no idea what it could be used for, and didn't know how to operate it." "And the telescope?" "Oh, he kept that. He said he had some interest in astronomy and meant to develop that if time permitted." "So much ran in the family, then." "Yes. More than that. Old Mcllvaine had a trick of seeming shy and self-conscious. So did this nephew of his. Wherever he came from, his origins must have been backward. I suspect that he was ashamed of them, and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky hill-country or the Ozarks. Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much for him, and his thinking would have been considerably more natural at the turn of the century. "I had to see him several times. The police chivvied him a little, but not much; he was so obviously innocent of everything that there was nothing for them in him. And the search for the old man didn't last long; no one had seen him after that last night at Bixby's, and, since everyone had already long since concluded that he was mentally a little off center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away somewhere, probably an amnesiac. That he might have anticipated that is indicated in the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue, said Barnevall, who drew it up for him. "I felt sorry for him." "For whom?" "The nephew. He seemed so lost, you know -- like a man who wanted to remember something, but couldn't. I noticed that several times when I tried to talk to him; I had the feeling each time that there was something he wanted desperately to say, it hovered always on the rim of his awareness, but somehow there was no bridge to it, no clue to put it into words. He tried so hard for something he couldn't put his finger on." "What became of him?" "Oh, he's still around. I think he found a job somewhere. As a matter of fact, I saw him just the other evening. He had apparently just come from work and he was standing in front of Bixby's with his face pressed to the window looking in. I came up nearby and watched him. Leopold and Alexander were sitting inside -- a couple of lonely old men looking out. And a lonely young man looking in. There was something in Mcllvaine's face -- that same thing I had noticed so often before, a kind of expression that seemed to say there was something he ought to know, something he ought to remember, to do, to say, but there was no way in which he could reach back to it. "Or forward," I said with a wry smile. "As you like," said Harrigan. "Pour me another, will you?" I did and he took it. "That poor devil!" he muttered. "He'd be happier if he could only go back where he came from." "Wouldn't we all?" I asked. "But nobody ever goes home again. Perhaps Mcllvaine never had a home like that." "You'd have thought so if you could have seen his face looking in at Leopold and Alexander, h, it may have been a trick of the streetlight there, it may have been my imagination. But it sticks to my memory, and I keep thinking how alike the two were -- old Mcllvaine trying so desperately to find someone who could believe him, and his nephew now trying just as hard to find someone to accept him or a place he could accept on the only terms he knows." By Ezra Shaw The Mastery of Fire sand years ago. prehistoric man already had the ability to make fire and fashion rude stones to help him in his fight for survival. His control of fire was probably the first great step in his freedom from his environment. Now, man was no longer restricted to a limited range of climates; his activities no longer depended only on the sun's light. At the beginning, man's effort was only to control and keep alive the fires that resulted from nature's forces -- as from lightning. But in tending and preserving the flames, he kept adding to his store of knowledge. The sacred fires that even today must never be allowed to die out -- as the fire of Vesta at Rome -- were also undoubtedly tended to by many of the ancient tribes. They are survivals of a time before man had learned to produce fire as he desired it. Together with the fossils of Pekin man and other extinct animals, very crude flakes of quartzite and other stones have also been found. These tools show that a man-like type of animal was adapting stones to assist in gaining his rudimentary needs. What the tools were made for, can only be guessed at. Most probably they served a multitude of purposes. Early man had to learn by dint of hard experience what stones were suitable for the making of tools, and how to chip them correctly. In the course of making tools, the earliest communities had to build up a scientific tradition, noting what the best stones were, where they could be expected to be found, how they should be handled. Man could not successfully start making special tools for each individual operation until he had mastered the technique of manufacture. Symbol of Progress has reached developments which have both helped and hindered him -- as science and superstition, materialism and asceticism, romanticism and classicism. But always there has been progress and this progress of man as a social human being has always been symbolized by his participation in the arts. The story of the discovery of the first prehistoric painting is one of the strangest incidents in the entire history of the arts. In #, the Marquis de Sautuola was exploring the cave of Altamire in the Cantabrian Mountains in the northern part of Spain. His little four-yearold daughter accompanied him on the outing. Not interested in her father's search for fossils, the little girl went on an exploring trip of her own. Crawling into a part of the cave that was so low that an adult would have normally passed it by, the child played for a while among the rocks by the light of her candle. Suddenly, she screamed. She had found a painting of a bull on the cave wall -- so realistically done that it frightened the child. When the Marquis announced his discovery to the scientific world, he was immediately denounced as a faker and an imposter. The art ' experts who examined the pictures insisted that it was impossible that such magnificent work could have been done by prehistoric savages. The Marquis was accused of having the painting done by a modem, talented artist. Fortunately, similar pictures were eventually discovered in the valley of the Dordogne in southwestern France, and the reputation of the Marquis' artistic honesty remains unblemished. Since then, pictures belonging to this same school have been found in caves all over southern France and northern Spain, and southern Italy. T HE question arises as to why prehistoric men painted their pictures in these dark and for the most part inaccessible caverns. Why did they invariably paint animals? There are several reasons for this. If you feared an enemy, you made for yourself an image of your enemy, stuck it full of pins to cause pain and death. Before going out on a hunt, the hunter invariably indulged in this practice to insure a successful chase. Primitive man's whole philosophy of life revolved around these animals. They were food -- life itselh Small wonder, then, that he resorted to all sorts of magic tricks to help him gain the upper hand. This type of superstition is still practiced today among many of our uncivilized tribes. Since primitive man's entire religion was shaped around animals, perhaps these dark caverns where the walls were covered with reproductions of bison and wolves were places of worship -- ancient temples where the elders of the tribe came together to bewitch the images so that food would be plentiful. No daylight ever penetrated the deep recesses of the limestone caves. No families ever lived there. Most of the caves were difficult of access, and the artist had to adopt the most uncomfortable positions to execute his art, sometimes lying flat on his back, sometimes standing on another's shoulders. The light was always artificial. Stone lamps, probably using fat for fuel and moss for wicks, have been found. All this pretty much points to the fact that there was a magic purpose to the art. Each creature so faithfully reproduced must have had a counterpart in the outside world that could be tasted as well as seen. As surely as the artist drew a bison in the dark cavern, so surely would there be a living bison in the steppes outside to be killed and eaten. To make sure of success, the artist occasionally drew his bison transfixed by a dart. At any rate, out of this strange wizardy came the first school of painting from men who were artists of the first order. The statuary which is today produced by the witch doctors of many of the African and Pacific island tribes, is very similar to that which has been handed down to us from prehistoric times. Invariably obscene and repulsive, the Images depicted have unusually fat bodies, with the sexual features exaggerated, and faces blank. Probably they indicate the fertility of the females -- the sexual charms of the men. According to authorities these figurines are completely lacking in the qualities which make us rate the work of the caveman painters and draftsmen with the best that has ever been done. The Eorly Sculptors . painting changed. The artist no longer tried to portray -- for instance -- an individual living stag. He was content now to use the fewest possible strokes in indicating the essential attributes by which a stag may be recognized. He seemed to have found that a shorthand sketch was just as effective as a life portrait in multiplying edible stags in the real world. And he seemed to suddenly have absorbed -- even if unconsciously -- the idea of abstract thinking. But this school of painting completely disappeared. Thousands of years passed before the world would again see art showing such an uncanny gift for observation. And it was during the ensuing thousand years that the human race learned the use of metals and fire for the purpose of changing lumps of clay into lasting pieces of pottery. The earliest pieces of bronze that have been so far discovered were in the central court of the ancient palace of Cnossus in Crete. They were done about fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ. Bronze had already been brought to Crete by the Phoenicians. It had already found its way to Egypt. But hardly had bronze appeared, when iron came into the picture. For all practical purposes, it soon became the leading metal, since it was much harder, and much easier to convert into steel. Yet, surprisingly enough, the ornaments of the Iron Age were inferior artistically to those of the Stone Age. The anthropologists have stated that the skulls found in the earlier graves seem to have belonged to a much more intelligent race of people than those who date back to a more recent age. This is borne out by the fact that the artists of the Stone Age showed a much greater deftness and much more imagination in the way they solved their problems than the men of the Iron Age who lived thousands of years later. Evolution does not necessarily mean that the superior types will always survive. From the point of view of civilization, the superior types are quite often completely exterminated by their inferior neighbors who happen to be less civilized but are much better at the art of war. In this case, the facts seem to hint at some such development. After the late Stone Age there was a very definite and very sudden slump in the artistic output of the human race. A LL art reflects not merely the . economic surroundings of the artist but also his geographical background. An Eskimo may have a profound natural gift for sculpture, but during the greater part of each year he will have to content himself with cutting his monuments out of ice. An Egyptian, on the other hand, was not so restricted. Prehistoric man must have been a most unappetizing looking individual judging by the standards we have today. Yet, in the field of art, he achieved results which show him to be not only a superior craftsman, but to be endowed also with a tremendous amount of imagination. Art is as old as the human race. Itbelongs to no particular period or group. There has never been a race that was completely without artistic expression. Personalities in Science Fiction (Continued from page #) cruiting of air raid wardens of which Thayer does not approve. Thayer's fight with the air raid wardens seems almost a fixation. He calls them "pismires in white helmets" ; advocates rebellion against civil defense by urging the membership to turn on lights during blackouts and to refuse to cooperate generally. The whole thing would be amusing, were it not so serious. Surely, the memory of Charles Fort deserves better. His was one of the most original minds of this era; one which evolved some fascinating concepts. Evidence of the things of which he wrote continues to pile up. It all goes on as before, but now, no one is looking. The society which was founded to carry on after Fort is snarling at air raid wardens and pursuing cheap political ends. So the prophet is without honor in his own society. The "gargantuan laughter" is stilled, and Fort's name declines in the West. -- Robert Barbour Johnson Have you ever written science fiction? Have your stories been rejected? Herein may lie the reason. The Smiler By Albert Hernhunter Y our name?' "Cole. Martin Cole." "Your profession?" "A very important one. I am a literary agent specializing in science-fiction. I sell the work of various authors to magazine and book pubishers." The Coroner paused to study Cole; to ponder the thin, mirthless smile. The Coroner said, "Mr. Cole, this inquest has been called to look into the death of one Sanford Smith, who was found near your home with a gun in his hand and a bullet in his brain. The theory of suicide has been -- " " -- rather hard to rationalize?" The Coroner blinked. "You could put it that way." "I would put it even stronger. The theory is obviously ridiculous. It was a weak cover-up. The best I could do under the circumstances." "You are saying that you killed Sanford Smith?" "Of course." The Coroner glanced at his sixman jury, at the two police officers, at the scattering of spectators. They all seemed stunned. Even the reporter sent to cover the hearing made no move toward the telephone. The Coroner could think of only the obvious question: "Why did you kill him?" "He was dangerous to us." "Whom do you mean by us?" "We Martians, who plan to take over your world." The Coroner was disappointed. A lunatic. But a lunatic can murder. Best to proceed, the coroner thought. "I was not aware that we have Martians to contend with." "If I'd had the right weapon to use on Cole, you wouldn't be aware of it now. We still exercise caution." The Coroner felt a certain pity. "Why did you kill Smith?" "We Martians have found science-fiction writers to be our greatest danger. Through the medium of imaginative fiction, such writers have more than once revealed our plans. If the public suddenly realized that -- " killed Smith because he revealed something in his writings?" "Yes. He refused to take 'my word that it was unsalable. He threatened to submit it direct. It was vital material." "But there are many other such writers. You can't control -- " "We control ninety percent of the output. We have concentrated on the field and all of the science fiction agencies are in our hands. This control was imperative." "I see." The Coroner spoke in the gentle tones one uses with the insane. "Any writing dangerous to your cause is deleted or changed by the agents." "Not exactly. The agent usually persuades the writer to make any such changes, as the agent is considered an authority on what will or will not sell." "The writers always agree?" "Not .always. If stubbornness is encountered, the agent merely shelves the manuscript and tells the writer it has been repeatedly rejected." The Coroner glanced at the two policemen. Both were obviously puzzled. They returned the Coroner's look, apparently ready to move on his order. The thin, mirthless smile was still on Cole's lips. Maniacal violence could lie just behind it. Possibly Cole was armed. Better to play for time-s-try to quiet the madness within. The Coroner continued speaking. "You Martians have infiltrated other fields also?" "Oh yes. We are in government, industry, education. We are everywhere. We have, of course, concentrated mainly upon the ranks of labor and in the masses of ordinary, everyday people. It is from these sources that we will draw our shock troops when the time comes." "That time will be -- ?" "Soon, very soon." The Coroner could not forebear a smile. "You find the science fiction writers more dangerous than the true scientists?" "Oh yes. The scientific mind tends to reject anything science disproves." There was now a mocking edge to Cole's voice. "Science can easily prove we do not exist." "But the science fiction writer?"  "The danger from the imaginative mind cannot be overestimated." The Coroner knew he must soon order the officers to lay hands upon this madman. He regretted his own lack of experience with such situations. He tried to put a soothing, confidential note into his voice. "You said a moment ago that if you'd had the right kind of weapon to use on Smith -- " Cole reached into his pocket and brought out what appeared to be a fountain pen. "This. It kills instantly and leaves no mark whatever. Heart failure is invariably stated as the cause of death." The Coroner felt better. Obviously, Cole was not armed. As the Coroner raised a hand to signal the officers, Cole said, "You understand, of course, that I can't let you live." "Take this man into custody." The police officers did not move. The Coroner turned on them sharply. They were smiling. Cole pointed the fountain pen. The Coroner felt a sharp chill on his flesh. He looked at the jury, at the newspaperman, the spectators. They were all smiling cold, thin, terrible smiles... A short time later, the newspaperman phoned in his story. The afternoon editions carried it: Shortly after this morning's inquest, which resulted in a jury verdict of suicide in the case of Sanford Smith, Coroner James Bell dropped dead of heartfailure in the hearing room of the County building. Mr. Bell leaves a wife and -- Extra Gift Subscriptions Only # By this time you know whether you like IF or not. You also know that don't know is that, if you include a gift subscription along with your own, it costs only #, or both subscriptions for six bucks! Thus, two can enjoy IF cheaper than one! Just fill in below and mail with remittance to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. Send Gift Subscription to: I "PoAtwcut I Dear Paul: Though we have only just met, I feel as if I'd known you all my life, etc. If that salutation and first sentence sounds like the beginning of a love letter, well, why not? It is. To quote a famous love song: "IF" I Loved You. Of course you couldn't have missed, for the great god, Big Name, was on your side, and the biggest names I've seen in stf were all there together. However, in all fairness, let me say that these authors have given you the cream of the stuff that made them worthy of their big names. I trembled in the aspect of IIow'ard Browne's story. I kept waiting for Kirk to come crashing back through space in time to arrest the hand of the man at the switch, And when he didn't I felt as though I'd been punched in the belly... The Stowaway struck a responsive chord in me. I'm always hoping a flying saucer will land plop in front of me some day and take me off into space and I will be the very first to see what's up there. I'd even like to go with the big brass, but I'd only be in the way, for I have no special skills or knowledge that would help except I bake a mean apple pie. Would that help? Bitter Victory was interesting since I too am a telepath. I say to my husband on Wednesday night, "Dear " and he says, "Okay." Then he takes down the garbage. I must develop it for distance. Never Underestimate. What happened to Jenny should happen to me! Black Eyes and the Daily Grind was highly improbable and I didn't believe a word of it but I thought it was cute. Of StegneVs Folly was okay. If my seven-month-old daughter starts pushing around pianos, I might go back and read it again. The Hell Ship. Orchids to this. I'm always happy to see the maligned and oppressed get the upper just rewards. The Old Martians presented no triple problem to me. The ending was definite enough. However, if Herb had escaped, then I would have had my choice. I really felt all along that Joe believed Herb was not insane. Am I supposed to wonder if Herb was an old Martian. Well, maybe. On to the departments! Here is where you really shine, and your magnitude will, nay must, increase with every issue. Do you know that I read everything else in a magazine first, before I read the stories? This is so those little notes about any certain story will increase my enjoyment of same. I start off by seeing what the editor has to say and, Paul, you said it and I'm. glad. I'm happy that you don't intend to bow to the great god Plot. Tragedies, Comedies, bring 'em on. My jaws are slavering to devour them. But no serials, please. The Guest Editorial was interesting and the Citation timely, for just as I put down the book, Tales of Tomorrow came on and I did what you said and didn't miss it. It was Dune Roller and I'd read it in said!) The science briefs were of interest to my husband who doesn't like stf, but who docs like the gurruls on the covers of stf mags. This brings us to The Postman Cometh and the very thought of winning an original MS makes little shivers go up and down my back... Besides the fact that yours is a fine magazine there is the thrill for me of being in on the ground floor of something big. When a convert to stf tries to catch up on the classics and back issues of various stf mags, he usually finds it a hopeless and expensive job. For instance, it would be quite a feat to acquire every issue of Amazing from Vol. #, No. I on up to today. But readers of IF will find no such strain on their budget and resourcefulness. They can start this very minute. I for one am going to. serve noodles instead of meat to my family until I've salvaged the subscription price to your mag. Then, twenty-five years from now, I'll be #, but my library of IF will be priceless and this March # issue will be a golden possession among my souvenirs. And if I'm lucky enough to win an original MS ! ! ! ! I'll close now, although I hate to go. I can't promise to wait on the sidewalk wrapped in a blanket for your next issue, but I'll get it, never fear. Anyway, I'll probably have subscribed by then. Well, dam it, I can't wait! Here's the egg money, boys, that old hen must still be around someplace. Did I keep you in suspense? I was gonna send it all the time. , -- Mrs. Francis Huber Irvington, N. J.   #I Dear Sir: I will most certainly try two or three (of your issues) on for size; and if they prove to be comparable in quality to Galaxy and Astounding, I'll subscribe. -- W. Boyd Wichita, Kansas #  Dear Ed: I have just finished reading your first issue and am very satisfied with it. The small size, the cut edges, along with the fine stories, make it unusual in its field. Howard Browne's Twelve Times Zero was excellently done, although the use of outside watchers as a main theme is becoming too common. The front cover which illustrates a scene from this lead novel is well done, the only fault being ter than avera but still not of the quality one would expect of Phillips, Sturgeon, or Shaver. The only completely good parts of your magazine are the features. They are wonderful. -- Martin Lewkowicz Fair Lawn, N. J.    Dear Sir: Thought I'd drop you a line and tell you how your mag stacks up with the rest... With stories by and Sturgeon, how could it miss? Most magazines have one or two good names in them, but your first issue had five... You were smart to leave out the books and the reviews, as you say, they are well covered. Personalities in Science Fiction is a honey of an idea...' The title, IF, is better Your art work could be improved. I hope to say I am the first to congratulate you on a very fine magazine. If I am not the first I certainly won't be the lasti -- Basil Guiley Warren, Penn.    Dear Paul: Your letter and IF received... , The magazine is pretty good. I'm not familiar with this type of stuff, but I read it through and found it held my attention with no effort on my part. No need to comment on each story because I'm no judge. Would have enjoyed Never Underestimate immensely, if properly done. (Ed. note: You listening, Ted?) The idea had such possibilities -- too good to be written down. Your editorial was okay and follows the pattern of editors in the pulp, Ellery Queen's mag. (Ed. note: ?????) which we get through the generosity of some guests we had last summer. Am interested in learning how many of your readers will write to remind you that Romeo really did get there in time. If enough of them catch you on that one, you might try "writing up" a little. Also, the word "gotten", is obsolete in any form. The cover. The picture contains four focal points of interest -- too many for its purpose. Two at the most, because you must realize the necessity of centering the interest of a prospective reader. This is the purpose of the picture on the cover... (Ed. note: Yes sir -- sorry sir; we'll do better next time, sir.) All in all, though, a very good book. -- Joseph E. F airman Benedict, Nebraska The above ' came from the editor's younger brother -- the only real "brain" in the family.    Dear Mr. Fairman: My first impression of IF as I leafed through it... was an excellent one... I thought your editorial policy was wonderfully well put and your Personality, Guest editorial, and Citation were interesting. I settled down to read Howard Browne's Twelve Times Zero with pleasant anticipation. Then it happened. I hadn't previously noted the boxed-off comment on the second page of his story, so before proceding further, I read it. And the excellent first impression you created, went right out the window. I just can't believe that the same person who wrote the excellently thought out editorial, penned the -- I almost said, asinine -- statement that Amazing Stories is the best stf mag your money can buy... All I can say is that if your plug of Amazing was part payment for Twelve Times Zero, you got the zero... -- Richard H. Jamison St. Louis #, Mo. (We hasten to reassure Mr. Jamison on two points: Howard Browne was paid in cash for his lead novel -- not partially in plugs. Also, the same person who wrote the editorial for the first issue of IF, did write the boxed-in comment on page two of the story.)    Sirs: I wish you luck in the field of stf. (It) can stand new publications. Your stories are good, they hold my interest. However, I'm betting you don't enjoy wide popularity. Why? it's hard to say. Only that your mag leaves a feeling of having read a collection of good stories, but not a collection of good stories published by IF. I might say you don't impress me as having a personality. Perhaps you will develop one... Charles Recour, in Science Briefs, quotes the hydrogen atom as reversing its spin and thus emitting a radio impulse. Why? Where can I find out about this? Guess that's about all...Again wishing you luck. -- Harold V. Anderson Philadelphia #, Pa.    Dear Ed: Congratulations on a fine first issue. I enjoyed all your stories. I ask no more than that you keep up to the standard you set in this issue. Here are my ratings:  #. The Stowaway by Heiner. More... #. Never U nderestimate by Sturgeon. Nice twist. #. B.E. and the D.G. by Lesser. Funny. #. Twelve Times Zero by Browne. Good, but not his best. #. Of StegnePs Folly by Shaver. This is the man to round out a mag. #. The Hell Ship by Rap. 'Nough said. Could have been further developed-. #. Bitter Victory by Miller. Last but not least. Suggestions : Inside covers are nice for some sort of picture article on the authors and some sort of technical article. Get a cover by Cartier, Bok, Orban, or Bonestell. Get a story by Bradbury, Heinlen, de Camp, Brown. Don't have your magazine mixed up with the sexy cover arguments. They have special magazines for people who go for that stuff. Nuff said. With great expectations for the future, Cambridge #, Mass.     Dear Paul: This is my first letter to any magazine. Feel flattered? My husband and I are avid stf fans. Read Amazing, Fantastic, Other Worlds, Imagination, and Galaxy. Imagine my surprise to see a new mag on the newsstand yesterday. Further surprise -- edited by you -- and all my favorite authors except two, Bradbury and Heinlein... Truthfully, it's hard to decide which story I liked best. They were all good... So I'll end with congratulations on, the birth of IF, and may it enjoy a long and fruitful life. -- Lucretia Laflin Somerville, Mass. #  Deuel, Robert Katson, Richard Hadden, Horace Christopher, and the many, many others who took the trouble to write us. Their letters are no less appreciated than those published. But there just isn't room for more in this issue. test: the judges had a tough time and frankly I'm glad I wasn't one of them. They have awarded the The Old Martians to Terry Carr of # Cambridge Street, San Francisco, California. Of Stegner's Folly by Shaver goes to Lewis Merkelsan of # Hillhaven Avenue, Tujunga, Cal. Sturgeon's Never Underestimate was won by Thomas Reamy of Route #, Box #-E, Ft. Worth, Texas. I know the judges worked hard, because I spent a little time watching them work, and I know their efforts were sincere and conscientious. To those who didn't win, thanks for your letters. I wish we could aw-ard a manuscript to everyone. reading entertainment! Written by America's outstanding reporters, here is a magazine devoted to the true mystery of real life -- stories that will make your hair stand on end, that will enthrall you, that will challenge your credibility, that will make you laugh -- and yet every one of them actually happened! You'll never know how completely strange and utterly fascinating this world really is until you have read this remarkable magazine!... Just ask your nearest news dealer for a copy of -- qf #tt Aptfay  By Stanley Mullen All Stories New and Complete Publisher Editor IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Ckimpany, Inc., # Lord St., Buffal N. Y. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., Kingston, N. Y. Application for Entry as Second Class matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York, pending. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction. Any simility to actual persons is coincidental. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. it's too late to write one. It's two a. m. on a Monday morning -- the Monday this issue has to go to the printer. I had an editorial. But I'm in Kingston and the editorial is lying on the table down in Patterson. That's forty miles from here and there isn't time to go get it. The rest of the issue is all ready to go. I left Patterson Saturday and drove down to New York City and took the readied manuscripts with me. Saturday evening I went up to see Horace Gold, the guy that puts out a stf mag called Galaxy. He lives in a big ant hill on Fourteenth Street and a lot of people drop in. We killed some time and I gave him a copy -- for free -- of IF, and then I went out and found a parking ticket on my car. Fifteen bucks. Fifteen bucks, they charge in that town for putting your car in the wrong place! They were having a little financial trouble, but I sent in a check for the fine, so I guess their money matters are all straightened out now. A nyhow, I drove straight up here to Kingston from Manhattan and didn't stop off at Patterson, so that's why I haven't got an editorial. My car runs pretty good. I've only had it a couple of months. It's a # Cadillac, but it had only been driven a few thousand miles and it's just like new and I got a terri#c bargain on it. I I was going to buy a Ford or a Chevy, but the man came along with this one and showed me where it's a lot more economical in the long run. This car, he said, will last me all my life, where a light car falls to pieces after about thirty years. You take care of a Cadillac and it will never let you down. In the long run you save a lot of money. What a line of malarky! Sure -- take care of it and it'll take care of you. New tires at forty bucks a throw. High test gas -- only the best. Drain the crankcase every thousand miles. And use only tjie best oil -- the kind they bring around in an armoured car. Brother, I've been had! If tha old # Dodge I came east iiS hadn't dropped its motor in th middle of the road, I'd still be a happy guy. cause it was a pretty good one. I spent a lot of time on it. It was all about how lucky we are to be living now -- in this fantastic, scientific age. About all the things we have -- and take for granted -- that are so wonderful. Not the big things necessarily. The little things. The allegedly common ordinary things. Like, for instance, a tooth brush and a tube of tooth paste and a visit to a dentist. It's a matter of historical record that Queen Elizabeth, back around the Middle Ages, who had everything the people of that time could devise, always held a fan in front of her face when she talked. That was to cover her decayed and blackened teeth. The queen of a great nation, and when her teeth went, they went. There was nothing on the face of the earth that could be done about it. So you and I have got what kings and queens w#uld have given fortunes to possess. A clean and efficient set of teeth. Even if they're the kind you take out at night -- they're still clean and efficient. You should go to the museum sometime and see what George Washington had to put up withi A S A matter of fact, the premise can be cut a lot finer. Think how lucky you and I are .to be Americans and live in the United States. Have you, as an example, ever been hungry? By that I don't mean just ready for dinner. I mean really hungry deep down in the bone -- down to the point where getting something to eat is the most important single ambition of life. By far the majority of people on this earth are that way all the time. today -- this minute -- who have never, at any time in their lives, had enough to eat. There are people living today who have never seen a bar of soap, have never seen a moving picture show ; have never tasted an ice cream soda or a piece of roast beef. The point is worth a moment's thankfulness for being who you are -- living in the place you are -- in these times of pure magic. That's what the editorial was about and it was a pretty good one. I wish I had it here. good stories in this issue. If you don't get a chance to read anything else in the book, don't miss Charley Beaumont's The Beautiful People. This will be a good chance to see how our tastes jibe. I think the yarn has everything. Incidentally, the Mari Wolf that wrote An Empty Bottle, is Rog I don't know who T. D. Hamm is. I bought his Last Supper through an agent, but it's one of ever read. The short-short is supposed to be the hardest type of fiction to do. I think it must be, because you find a good one once in a blue moon. If Last Supper isn't snapped up for an anthology. I'll be badly mistaken. By the way, Walt Miller's It Takes A Thief was grabbed by Shasta for their # Anthology. It appeared in the May issue of IF. My favorite in that issue was Infinites Child by DeVet. Sorry about not having the editorial. I'll run it next issue if I can find it. -- pwf MM ;i  iJlg i I mtTtvfiw  ,'"  ?nH#SW jnm Sjsj flJJnlfKlki m Mary was a misfit. She didn't want to be beautiful. And she wasted time doing mad things -- like eating and sleeping. The Beautiful People By Charles Beaumont M ary sat quietly and watched tearing flesh and ripping hones, the handsome man's legs Mary closed her eyes, blown off ; watched further as the "Mother." great ship began to crumple and Mrs. Cuberle glanced up from break into small pieces in the midher magazine, die of the blazing night. She fidget"Hmm?" ed slightly as the men and the parts "Do we have to wait much longof the men came floating dreamily er?" through the wreckage out into the "I don't think so. Why?" awful silence. And when the meMary said nothing but looked at teorite shower came upon the men, the moving wall. gouging holes through everything, "Oh, that." Mrs. Cuberle laughed and shook her head. "Thai tired old thing. Read a magazine, Mary, like I'rn doing. We've all seen that "Does it have to be on. Mother?" "Well, nobody seems to be watching. I don't think the doctor would mind if I switched it off." Mrs. Cuberle rose from the couch and walked to the wall. She depressed a little button and the life went from the wall, flickering and glowing. Mary opened her eyes. "Honestly," Mrs. Cuberle said to a woman sitting beside her, "you'd think they'd try to get something else. We might as well go to the museum and watch the first landing on Mars. The Mayoraka Disaster -- really!" The Woman replied without distracting her eyes from the magazine page. "It's the doctor's idea. Psychological." Mrs. Cuberle opened her mouth and moved her head up and down knowingly. "Ohhh. I should have known there was some reason. Still, who watches it?" "The children do. Makes them think, makes them grateful or something." "Ohhh." "Psychological." Mary picked up a magazine and leafed through the pages. All photographs, of women and men. Women like Mother and like the others in the room; slender, tanned, shapely, beautiful women; and men with large muscles and shiny hair. Worfien and men, all looking alike, all perfect and beautiful. She folded the magazine and wondered how to answer the questions that wduld be asked. "Mother -- " "Gracious, what is it now! Can't you sit still for a minute?" "But we've been here three hours." Mrs. Cuberle sniffed. "Do -- do I really have to?" "Now don't be silly, Mary. After those terrible things you told me, of course you do." An olive-skinned woman in a transparent white uniform came into the reception room. "Cuberle. Mrs.iZena Cuberle?" "Yes.". "Doctor will see you now." Mrs. Cuberle took Mary's hand and they walked behind the nurse down a long corridor. A man who seemed in his middle twenties looked up from a desk. He smiled and gestured toward two adjoining chairs. "Well -- well." "Doctor Hortel, I -- " T he doctor snapped his fingers. "Of course, I know. Your daughter. Ha ha, I certainly do know your trouble. Get so many of them nowadays -- takes up most of my time." "You do?" asked Mrs. Cuberle. "Frankly, it had begun to upset me." "Upset? Hmm. Not good. Not good at all. Ah, but then -- if people did not get upset, we psychiatrists would be out of a job, eh? Go the way of the early M. D. But, I assure you, I need hear no more." He turned his handsome face to Mary. "Little girl, how old are you?" "Eighteen, sir." "Oh, a real bit of impatience. It's just about time, of course. What might your name be?" "Mary." "Charming! And so unusual. Well now, Mary, may I say that I understand your problem -- underr stand it thoroughly?" Mrs. Cuberle smiled and smoothed the sequins on her blouse. "Madam, you have no idea how many there are these days. Sometimes it preys on their minds so that it affects them physically, even mentally. Makes them act strange, say peculiar, unexpected things. One little girl I recall was so distraught she did nothing but brood all day long. Can you imagine!" "That's what Mary does. When she finally told me, doctor, I thought she had gone -- you know." "That bad, eh? Afraid we'll have to start a re-education program, very soon, or they'll all be like this. I believe I'll suggest it to the senator day after tomorrow.'! "I don't quite understand, doctor." "Simply, Mrs. Cuberle, that the children have got to be thoroughly instructed. Thoroughly. Too much is taken for granted and childish minds somehow refuse to accept things without definite reason. Children have become far too intellectual, which, as I trus I, needn't remind you, is a dangerous thing." "Yes, but what has this to do with" "With Mary? Everything, of course. Mary, like half the sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year olds today, has begun to feel acutely selfconscious. She feels that her body has developed sufficiently for the Transformation -- which of course it has not, not quite yet -- and she cannot understand the complex reasons that compel her to wait until some future date. Mary looks at you, at the women all about her, at the pictures, and then she looks into a mirror. From pure perfection of body, face, limbs, pigmentation, carriage, stance, from simon-pure perfection, if I may be allowed the expression, she sees herself and is horrified. Isn't that so, my dear child? Of course -- of course. She asks herself, why must I be hideous, unbalanced, oversize, undersize, full of revolting skin eruptions, badly schemed organically? In short, Mary is tired of being a monster and is overly anxious to achieve what almost everyone else has already achieved." "But -- " said Mrs. Cuberle. "This much you understand, doubtless. Now, Mary, what you object to is that our society offers you, and the others like you, no convincing logic on the side of waiting until age nineteen. It is all taken for granted, and you want to know why! It is that simple. A non-technical explanation will not suffice -- mercy no! The modern child wants facts, solid technical data, to satisfy her every question. And that, as you can both see, will take a good deal of reorganizing." "But -- " said Mary. "The child is upset, nervous, tense; she acts strange, peculiar, odd, worries you and makes herself ill because it is beyond our meagre powers to put it across. I tell you, what we need is a whole new basis for learning. And, that will take doing. It will take doing, Mrs. Cuberle. Now, don't you worry about Mary, and don't you worry, child. I'll prescribe some pills and -- " "No, no, doctor! You're all mixed up," cried Mrs. Cuberle. "I beg your pardon. Madam?" "What I mean is, you've got it wrong. Tell him, Mary, tell the doctor what you told me." Mary shifted uneasily in the chair. "It's that -- I don't want it." The doctor's well-proportioned jaw dropped. "Would you please repeat that?" "I said, I don't want the Transformation." "D -- Don'f want it?" "You see? She told me. That's why I came to you." The doctor looked at Mary suspiciously. "But that's impossible! I have never heard of such a thing. Little girl, you are playing a joke!" Mary nodded negatively. "See, doctor. What can it be?" Mrs. Cuberle rose and began to pace. tongue and took from a small cupboard a black box covered with buttons and dials and wire, "Oh no, you don't think -- I mean, could it?" "We shall soon see." The doctor revolved a number of dials and studied the single bulb in the center of the box. It did not flicker. He removed handles from Mary's head. "Dear me," the doctor said, "dear me. Your daughter is perfectly sane, Mrs. Cuberle." "Well, then what is it?" "Perhaps she is lying. We haven't completely eliminated that factor as yet; it slips into certain organisms." More tests. More machines and more negative results. Mary pushed her foot in a circle on the floor. When the doctor put his hands to her shoulders, she looked up pleasantly. "Little girl," said the handsome man, "do you actually mean to tell us that you prefer that body?" "Yes sir." "May I ask why." "I like it. It's -- hard to explain, but it's me and that's what I like. Not the looks, maybe, but the me." "You can look in the mirror and see yourself, then look at -- well, at your mother and be content?" "Yes, sir." Mary thought of her reasons; fuzzy, vague, but very definitely there. Maybe she had said the reason. No. Only a part of it. "Mrs. Cuberle," the doctor said, "I suggest that your husband have a long talk with Mary." "My husband is dead. That affair near Ganymede, I believe. Something like that." -' "Oh, splendid. Rocket man, eh? Very interesting organisms. Something always seems to happen to rocket men, in one way or another. But -- I suppose we should do something." The doctor scratched his jaw. "When did she first start talking this way," he asked. "Oh, for quite some time. I used to think it was because she was such a baby. But lately, the time getting so close and all, I thought I'd better see you." "Of course, yes, very wise. Er -- does she. also do odd things?" "Well, I found her on the second level one night. She was lying on the floor and when I asked her what she was doing, she said she was trying to sleep." Mary flinched. She was sorry, in a way, that Mother had found that out. "To -- did you say 'sleep'?" "That's right." "Now where could she have picked that up?" "No idea." "Mary, don't you know that nobody sleeps anymore? That we have an infinitely greater life-span than our poor ancestors now that the wasteful state of unconsciousness has been conquered? Child, have you actually slept? No one knows how anymore." "No sir, but I almost did." The doctor sighed. "But, it's unheard of! How could you begin to try to do something people have forgotten entirely about?" "The way it was described in the book, it sounded nice, that's all." Mary was feeling very uncomfortable now. Home and no talking man in a foolish white gown... "Book, book? Are there books at your Unit, Madam?" "There could be -- I haven't cleaned up in a while." "That is certainly peculiar. I haven't seen a book for years. Not since '#." Mary began to fidget and stare nervously about. "But with the tapes, why should you try and read books -- where did you get them?" "Daddy did. He got them from his father and so did Grandpa. He said they're better than the tapes and he was right." Mrs. Cuberle flushed. "My husband was a little strange. Doctor Hortel. He kept those things despite everything I said. "Dear me, I -- excuse me." The muscular, black-haired doctor walked to another cabinet and selected from the shelf a bottle. From the bottle he took two large pills and swallow'ed them. "Sleep -- books -- doesn't want the Transformation -- Mrs. Cuberle, my dear good woman, this is grave. Doesn't want the Transformation. I would appreciate it if you would change psychiatrists ; I am very busy and, uh, this is somewhat specialized. I suggest Centraldome. Many fine doctors there. Goodbye." The doctor turned and sat down in a large chair and folded his hands. Mary watched him and wondered why the simple statements should have so changed things. But the doctor did not move from the chair. "Well!" said Mrs. Cuberle and walked quickly from the room. The man's legs were being blown off again as they left the reception room. M ary considered the reflection in the mirrored wall. She sat op the floor and looked at different angles of herself: profile, full-face, full length, naked, clothed. Then she took up the magazine and studied it. She sighed. "Mirror, mirror on the wall -- " The words came haltingly to her mind and from her lips. She hadn't read them, she recalled. Daddy had said them, quoted them as he put it. But they too were lines from a book -- "who is the fairest of -- " A picture of Mother sat upon the dresser and Mary considered this now. Looked for a long time at the slender, feminine neck. The golden skin, smooth and without blemish, without wrinkles and without age. The dark brown eyes and the thin tapers of eyebrows, the long black lashes, set evenly, so that each half of the face corresponded precisely. The half-parted mouth, a violet tint against the gold, the white, white teeth, even, sparkling. Mother. Beautiful, Transformed Mother. And back again to the mirror. " -- of them all . , ." The image of a rather chubby girl, without lines of rhythm or grace, without perfection. Splotchy skin full of little holes, puffs in the cheeks, red eruptions on the forehead. Perspiration, shapeless lir flowing onto shapeless shoulders down a shapeless body. Like all of them, before the Transformation. Did they all look like this, before? Did Mother, even? Mary thought hard, trying to remember exactly what Daddy and Grandpa had said, why they said the Transformation was a bad thing, and why she believed and agreed with them so strongly. It made little sense, but they were right. They were right! And one day, she would understand completely. Mrs. Cuberle slammed the door angrily and Mary jumped to her feet. She hadn't forgotten about it. "The way you upset Dr. Hortel. ' He won't even see me anymore, and these traumas are getting horrible. I'll have to get that awful Dr. Wagoner." "Sorry -- " Mrs. Cuberle sat on the couch and crossed her legs carefully. "What in the world were you doing on the floor?" "Trying to sleep." "Now, I won't hear of it! You've got to stop it! You know you're not insane. Why should you want to do such a silly thing?" "The books. And Daddy told me about it." "And you mustn't read those terrible things." "Why -- is there a law against them?" "Well, no, but people tired of books when the tapes came in. You know that. The house is full of tapes; anything you want." Mary stuck out her lower lip. "They're no fun. All about the Wars and the colonizations." "And I suppose books are fun?" "Yes. They are." "And that's where you got this idiotic notion that you don't want the Transformation, isn't it? Of course it is. Well, we'll see to that!" and took the books from the corner and from the closet and filled her arms with them. She looked everywhere in the room and gathered the old rotten volumes. These she carried from the room and threw into the elevator. A button guided the doors shut. "I thought you'd do that," Mary said. "That's why I hid most of the good ones. Where you'll never find them." Mrs. Cubgrle put a satin handkerchief to her eyes and began to weep. "Just look at you. Look. I don'tknow what I ever did to deserve this!" "Deserve what, Mother? What am I doing that's so wrong?" Mary's mind rippled in a confused stream. "What!" Mrs. Cuberle screamed, "What! Do you think I want people to point to you and say I'm the mother of an idiot? That's what they'll say, you'll see. Or," she looked up hopefully, "have you changed your mind?" "No." The vague reasons, longing to be put into words. "It doesn't hurt. They just take off a little skin and put some on and give you pills and electronic treatments and things like that. It doesn't take more than a week." "No." The reason. "Don't you want to be beautiful, like other people -- like me? Look at your friend Shala, she's getting her Transformation next month. And she's almost pretty now." "Mother, I don't care -- " "If it's the bones you're worried about, well, that doesn't hurt. They give you a shot and when you wake up, everything's moulded right. Everything, to suit the personality." ' "I don't care, I don't care." "But why?" "I like me the way I am." Almost -- almost exactly. But not quite. Part of it, however. Part of what Daddy and Grandpa meant. "But you're so ugly, dear! Like Dr. Hortel said. "And Mr. Willmes, at the factory. He told some people he thought you were the ugliest girl he'd ever seen. Says he'll be thankful when you have your Transformation. And what if he hears of all this, what'll happen then?" "Daddy said I was beautiful." "Well really, dear. You do have eyes." "Daddy said that real beauty is only skin deep. He said a lot of things like that and when I read the books I felt the same way. I guess I don't want to look like everybody else, that's all." No, that's not it. Not at all it. "That man had too much to do with you. You'll notice that he had his Transformation, though!" "But he was sorry. He told me that if he had it to do over again, he'd never do it. He said for me to be stronger than he was." "Weli, I won't have it. You're not going to get away with this, young lady. After all, I am your mother." , A bulb flickered in the bathroom and Mrs. Cuberle walked uncertainly to the cabinet. She took out a little cardboard box. "Time for lunch." Mary nodded. That was another thing the books talked about, which the tapes did not. Lunch seemed to be something special long ago, or at least different. The books talked of strange ways of putting a load of things into the mouth and chewing these things. Enjoying them. Strange and somehow wonderful. "And you'd better get ready for work." "Yes, Mother." T he office was quiet and without shadows. The walls gave off a steady luminescence, distributed the light evenly upon all the desks and tables. And it was neither hot nor cold. Mary held the ruler firmly and allowed the pen to travel down the metal edge effortlessly. The new black lines were small and accurate. She tipped her head, compared the notes beside her to the plan she was working on. She noticed the beautiful people looking at her more furtively than before, and she wondered about this as she made her lines. A tall man rose from his desk in the rear of the office and walked down the aisle to Mary's table. He surveyed her work, allowing his eyes to travel cautiously from her face to the draft. Mary looked around. "Nice job," said the man. "Thank you, Mr. Willmes." "Dralich shouldn't have anything to complain about. That crane should hold the whole damn city." "It's, very good alloy, sir." "Yeah. Say, kid, you got a minute?" "Yes sir." "Let's go into Mullinson's office." The big handsome man led the way into a small cubby-hole of a room. He motioned to a chair and sat on the edge of one desk. "Kid, I never was one to beat around the bush. Somebody called in little while ago, gave me some crazy story about you not wanting the Transformation.". Mary said "Oh." Daddy had said it would have to happen, some day. This must be what he meant. "I would've told them they were way off the beam, but I wanted to talk to you first, get it straight." "Well, sir, it's true. I don't. I want to stay this way." The man looked at Mary and then coughed, embarrassedly. "What the hell -- excuse me, kid, but -- I don't exactly get it. You, uh, you saw the psychiatrist?" "Yes sir. I'm not insane. Dr. Hortel can tell you." "I didn't mean anything like that. Well -- " the man laughed nervously. "I don't know what to say. You're still a cub, but you do swell work. Lot of good results, lots of comments from the stations. But, Mr. Poole won't like it." "I know. I know what you mean, Mr. Willmes. But nothing can change my mind. I want to stay this way and that's all there is to it." "But -- you'll get old before you're half through life." Yes, she would. Old, like the Elders, wrinkled and brittle, unable to move right. Old. "It's hard to make you understand. But I don't see why it should make any difference." "Don't go getting me wrong, now. It's not me, but, you know, I don't own Interplan. I just work here. Mr. Poole likes things running smooth and it's my job to carry it out. And soon as everybody finds out, things wouldn't run smooth. There'll be a big stink. The dames will start asking questions and talk." "Will you accept my resignation, then, Mr. Willmes?" "Sure you won't change your mind?" "No sir. I decided that a long time ago. And I'm sorry now that I told Mother or anyone else. No sir, I won't change my mind." "Well, I'm sorry, Mary. You been doing awful swell work. Couple of years you could be centralled on one of the asteroids, the way you been working. But if you should change your mind, there'll always be a job for you here." "Thank you, sir." "No hard feelings?" "No hard feelings." "Okay then. You've got till March. And between you and me, I hope by then you've decided the other way." Mary walked back down the aisle, past the rows of desks. Past the men and women. The handsome, model men and the beautiful, perfect women, perfect, all perfect, all looking alike. Looking exactly alike. She sat down again and took up her ruler and pen. M ary stepped into the elevator and descended several hundred feet. At the Second Level she pressed a button and the elevator stopped. The doors opened with another button and the doors to her Unit with still another. Mrs. Cuberle sat on the floor by the T-V, disconsolate and red-eyed. Her blond hair had come slightly askew and a few strands hung over her forehead. "You don't need to tell me. No one will hire you." Mary sat beside her mother. "If you only hadn't told Mr. Willmes in the first place -- " "Well, I thought he could beat a little sense into you." The sounds from the T-V grew louder. Mrs. Cuberle changed channels and finally turned it off.  "What did you do today. Mother?" Mary smiled. "Do? What can I do, now? Nobody will even come over! I told you what would happen." "Mother!" "They say you should be in the Circuses." Mary went into another room. Mrs. Cuberle followed. "How are we going to live? Where does the money come from now? Just because you're stubborn on this crazy idea. Crazy crazy crazy! Can I support both of us? They'll be firing me, next!" "Why is this happening?" "Because of you, that's why. Nobody else on this planet has ever refused the Transformation. But you turn it down. You want to be ugly!" Mary put her arms about her mother's shoulders. "I wish I could explain, I've tried so hard to. It isn't that I want to bother anyone, or that Daddy wanted me to. I just don't want the Transformation." Mrs. Cuberle reached into the pockets of her blouse and got a purple pill. She swallowed the pill. When the letter dropped from the chute, Mrs. Cuberle ran to snatch it up. She read it once, silently, then smiled. "Oh, I was afraid they wouldn't answer. But we'll see about this now!" She gave the letter to Mary. Mrs. Zena Cuberle Unit #I D City Dear Madam: In re your letter of Dec # #. We have carefully examined your complaint and consider that it requires stringent measures. Quite frankly. the possibility of such a complaint has never occurred to this Dept, and we therefore cannot make positive directives at the moment. However, due to the unusual qualities of the matter, we have arranged an audience at Centraldome, Eighth Level, Sixteenth Unit, Jan # #, # sharp. Dr. Elph Hortel has been instructed to attend. You will bring the subject in question. Yrs Mary let the paper flutter to the floor. She walked quietly to the elethe elevator stopped, she ran from it, crying, into her room. She thought and remembered and tried to sort out and put together. Daddy had said it, Grandpa had, the books did. Yes, the books did. She read until her eyes burned and her eyes burned until she could read no more. Then Mary went to sleep, softly and without realizing it, for the first time. But the sleep was not peaceful. L adies and gentlemen," said the young-looking, well groomed man, "this problem does not resolve easily. Dr. Hortel here, testifies that Mary Cuberle is definitely not insane. Drs. Monagh, Prinn and Fedders all verify this judgment. Dr. Prinn asserts that the human organism is no longer so constructed as to create and. sustain such an attitude through deliberate falsehood. Further, there is positively nothing in the structure, of Mary Cuberle which might suggest difficulties in Transformation. There is evidence for all these statements. And yet we are faced with this refusal. What, may I ask, is to be done?" Mary looked at a metal table. "We have been in session far too long, holding up far too many other pressing contingencies. The trouble on Mercury, for example. We'll have to straighten that out, somehow." Throughout the rows of beautiful people, the mumbling increased. Mrs. Cuberle sat nervously, tapping her shoe and running a comb through her hair. "Mary Cuberle, you have been given innumerable chances to reconsider, you know." Mary said, "I know. But I don't want to." The beautiful people looked at Mary and laughed. Some shook their heads. The man threw up his hands. "Little girl, can you realize what an issue you have caused? The unrest, the wasted time? Do you fully dhderstand what you have done? Intergalactic questions hang fire while you sit there saying the same thing over and over. Doesn't the happiness of your Mother mean anything to you?" A slender, supple woman in a back row cried, "We want action. Do something!" The man in the high stool raised his hand. "None of that, now. We must conform, even though the question is out of the ordinary." He leafed through a number of papers on his desk, leaned down and whispered into the ear of a strong blond man. Then he turned to Mary again. "Child, for the last time. Do you reconsider? Will you accept the Transformation?" "No." The man shrugged his shoulders. "Very well, then. I have here a petition, signed by two thousand individuals and representing all the Stations of Earth. They have been made aware of all the facts and have submitted the petition voluntarily. It's all so unusual and I'd hoped we wouldn't have to -- but the petition urges drastic measures." The mumbling rose. "The petition urges that you shall, upon final refusal, be forced by law to accept the Transformation. And that an act of legislature shall make this universal and binding in the future." Mary's eyes were open, wide. She stood and paused before speaking. "Why?" she asked, loudly. The man passed a hand through his hair. Another voice from the crowd, "Seems to be a lot of questions unanswered here." And another, "Sign the petition, Senator!" , All the voices, "Sign it, sign it!" "But why?" Mary began to cry. The voices stilled for a moment. "Because -- Because -- " "If you'd only tell me that. Tell me!" "Why, it simply isn't being done, that's all. The greatest gift of all. and what if others should get the same idea? What would happen to us then, little girl? We'd be right back to the ugly, thin, fat, unhealthy-looking race we were ages ago! There can't be any exceptions." "Maybe they didn't consider themselves so ugly." The mumbling began anew. "That isn't the point," cried the man. "You must conform!" And the voices cried "Yes" loudly until the man took up a pen and signed the papers on his desk. Cheers, applause, shouts. Mrs. Cuberle patted Mary on the top of her head. "There, now!" she said, happily, "Everything will be all right now. You'U see, Mary." T he Transformation Parlor covered the entire Level, sprawling with its departments. It was always filled and there was nothing to sign and no money to pay and people were always waiting in line. But today the people stood aside. And there were still more, looking in through doors, TV cameras placed throughout the tape machines in every comer. It was filled, but not bustling as usual. Mary walked past the people. Mother and the men in back of her, following. She looked at the people. The people were beautiful, perfect, without a single flaw. All the beautiful people. All the ugly people, staring out from bodies that were not theirs. Walking on legs that had been made for them, laughing with manufactured voices, gesturing with shaped and fashioned arms. Mary walked slowly, despite the prodding. In her eyes, in her eyes, was a mounting confusion; a wide, wide wonderment. The reason was becoming less vague; the fuzzed edges were falling away now. Through all the horrible months and all the horrible moments, the edges fell away. Now it was almost clear. She looked down at her own body, then at the walls which reflected it. Flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, all hers, made by no one, built by herself or someone she did not know. Uneven kneecaps, making two grinning cherubs when they bent, and the old familiar rubbing together of fat inner thighs. Fat, unshapely, unsystematic Mary. But Mary. Of course. Of course! This was what Daddy meant, what Grandpa and the books meant. What they would know if they would read the books or "hear the words, the good, reasonable words, the words that signified more, much more, than any of this. The understanding heaped up with each step. "Where are these people?" Mary asked half to herself. "What has happened to them and don't they miss themselves, these manufactured things?" She stopped, suddenly. "Yes! That is the reason. They have all forgotten themselves!" A curvacious woman stepped forward and took Mary's hand. The woman's skin was tinted dark. Chipped and sculptured bone into slender rhythmic lines, electrically created carriage, stance, made, turned out. "All right, young lady. We will begin." They guided Mary to a large, curved leather seat. From the top of a long silver pole a machine lowered itself. Tiny bulbs glowed to life and cells began to click. The people stared. Slowly a picture formed upon the screen in the machine. Bulbs directed at Mary, then redirected into the machine. Wheels turning, buttons ticking. The picture was completed. "Would you like to see it?" Mary closed her eyes, tight. "It's really very nice." The woman turned to the crowd. "Oh yes, there's a great deal to be salvaged; you'd be surprised. A great deal. We'll keep the nose and I don't believe the elbows will have to be altered at all.',' Mrs. Cuberle looked at Mary and smiled. "Now, it isn't so bad as you thought, is it?" she said. The beautiful people looked. Cameras turned, tapes wound. "You'll have to excuse us now. Only the machines allowed." Only the machines. The people filed out. Mary saw the rooms in the mirror. Saw things in the rooms, the faces and bodies that had been left; the woman and the machines and the old young men standing about, adjusting, readying. Then she looked at the picture in the screen. And screamed. A woman of medium height stared back at her. A woman with a curved body and thin legs; silver hair, pompadoured, cut short; full sensuous lips, small breasts, flat stomach, unblemished skin. A strange, strange woman no one had ever seen before. The nurse began to take Mary's clothes off. "Geoff," the woman said, "come look at this, will you. Not one so bad in years. Amazing that we can keep anything at all." The handsome man put his hands in his pockets. "Pretty bad, all right." "Be still, child, stop making those noises. You know perfectly well nothing is going to hurt." "But -- what will you do with me?" "That was all explained to you." "No, no, with me, me!" "Oh, you mean the castoffs. The usual. I don't know exactly. Somebody takes care of it." "I want me!" Mary cried. "Not that!" She pointed at the screen. H er chair was wheeled into a semi-dark room. She was naked now, and the men lifted her to a table. The surface was like glass, black, filmed. A big machine hung above. Straps. Clamps pulling, stretching limbs apart. The screen with the picture brought in. The men and the woman, more women now. Dr. Hortel in a corner, sitting with his legs crossed, shaking his head. Mary began to cry above the hum of the mechanical things. "Shhh. My gracious, such a racket! Just think about your job waiting for you, and all the friends you'll have and how nice everything will be. No more trouble now." The big machine hurtling downward. "Where will I find me?" Mary screamed, "when it's all over?" A long needle slid into rough flesh and the beautiful people gathered around the table. They turned on the big machine. i F F It was getting so a person couldnt sleep nights anymore. j Would you like to see all hell break loose? Just make a few holes in nothing at all -- push some steel beams through the holes -- and then head for the hills. But first, read what happened to some people who really did it. By L. Major Reynolds T he red headed secretary asked, "Names, please?" "Ted Baker." "Bill Stephens." "To see H. Joshua Blair. We have an appointment." "It's for three-thirty. We called up two weeks ago." The secretary said, "Oh yes. I have you on the list." She checked them off, studied them vaguely, asked, "What was it you wanted to see Mr. Blair about?" , Ted Baker held out the small steel box he was carrying. "About this." "Ah -- what is it?" "It's a box." "I can see that," the red head snapped. "What is it for? What does it do?" "It's for construction work. It makes holes." The girl sighed. It was late in the day and she didn't care much, really. She snapped an intercom button. An inquiring voice rasped at her. She said, "A. Mr. Baker and a Mr. Stephens to see you." Evidently it was all right because she snapped off the button and pointed to a door. "In there." They went in the door and faced a desk large enough to play tennis on. The man behind the desk gave them a cordial snarl. "Well, what have you got on your mind? And don't take all day to tell me." Ted extended the box. "This. We'd like to sell it to you." "What is it? A bomb?" "No sir. It makes holes. It makes holes real quick." Blair scowled at the box. "What the hell do I want of holes?" Bill Stephens came forward with further explanation. "You see, sir, Ted and I are inventors we make, well -- things. We've been working on this invention in our basement and it seems to be a success." "We don't quite know why it's a success," Ted said, "but it is." "We'd like to demonstrate It for you." "Well, go ahead and demonstrate." Ted raised the box and aimed it horizontally at nothing in particular. He pressed a black button. There was an odd whirring noise. He took his hand off the button and lowered the box. "What are you waiting for?" Blair growled, "Nothing. That's it. I've made the hole." "Are you two crazy? What kind of a fool trick -- ?" Ted reached down and took a pencil off the desk. "May I borrow this?" Without waiting for permission, he put the pencil carefully into the place he'd pointed the box. Half the pencil disappeared. He took his hand away. The part of the pencil still in sight didn't come with it. It stayed where it was, lying in thin air, horizontally, with no apparent support. H. Joshua Blair goggled and turned three shades whiter. "Whawha-what the hell!" "And now, if you'll try to move the pencil, the demonstration will be complete." L ike a man in a trance, Blair got up from his desk and grasped the pencil. It wouldn't move. He got red in the face and threw all his weight on it. It would neither pull nor push. It stayed where it was. Finally Blair backed away from the thing. He leaned on his desk and panted. "You see," Ted said, "The hole goes into the fourth dimension. There's no other explanation. And the fourth dimension holds solider than concrete." Old Blair's head was spinning, but business instinct came quickly to his rescue. "What happens," he asked, "if something in the third dimension is in the way?" "It gets out of the way," Bill said. Ted demonstrated. He trained the box on the visible remains of the pencil. It vanished. Blair said, "Well I'll be damned!" "We figure this will save you a lot of money in construction work," Bill said. "You can get along' without riveters. You just have a man put holes in girders with this and push the rivets through. You also make holes for the beam-ends, andyour entire building will be anchored in the fourth dimension." "Do it again," Blair said. Ted made another hole and put another pencil into it. Blair grasped the pencil and applied leverage. The pencil snapped at the point it entered the next dimension but the broken end of the far piece was not to be seen. Blair asked, "You say you two invented this gadget?" "That's right," Bill said. "We've got a workshop in my basement. We invent in the evenings after we come home from work." "What do you work at?" "I read gas meters. He's a clerk in a supermart." "I suppose you want money for this thing." "We'd like to sell it, yes sir." "How much do you want for it?" "Well, we don't know. What's it worth to you?" "Nothing probably. Leave it here a few days. I'll look it over and let you know." "But -- " "And don't call me -- I'll call you." "But -- " "Leave your address and phone number with my secretary." After Ted and Bill left, Blair yelled, "Get me Jake Steadman in the engineering department!" He didn't bother using the intercom, but his secretary heard him anyhow. Ted and Bill went to work on an idea they had for the treatment of leather. You dipped your shoes in a solution and they lasted forever. The thing didn't work too well, however. It was full of bugs. They tried to eliminate the bugs and once in a while they thought of H. Joshua Blair. "Don't you think it's about time he called us?" Ted asked.  "Don't be so impatient. He's a big man. He owns a big company. It takes time." "He's had over a month." "Relax. We'll hear from him." A nother week passed, and another, until one evening Ted came galloping into the workshop with news. "That big new addition to the city hall! They're working orr it! H. Joshua Blair Construction Company. A big sign says so!" "Relax. You'll blow a tube." "Relax hell! He's using our invention to put up the steel girders. Just like we suggested to him. Guys with bofes like ours making holes and putting in rivets!" Bill stopped what he was doing. "He said he'd call us. Maybe he forgot. Maybe we better go see him," They both knocked off work the next day and got to Blair's office at nine o'clock. Thq red headed secretary said, "You'll have to make an appointment." "Appointment hell!" Ted headed for the inner door. Bill followed him. They went into H. Joshua Blair's office to find him in conference with two vice-presidents. Ted said, "Mr. Blair, we came -- " "Who in the devil are you?" "You remember us. Ted Baker and Bill Stephens. We came about our invention." "What invention?" "Our hole maker. You're using it on the city hall addition." Blair glowered. "Where'd )u get the idea it was yours? Have you got any patents to show?" "Well, no. We didn't -- " "I did! Fourteen good solid patents. You two better go peddle your groceries." "Now look, Mr. Blair." Blair raised his voice. "Throw these two bums out!" Three huskies appeared as by magic to do Blair's bidding. As Ted and Bill landed on the sidewalk, one of the vice-presidents said, "Do you think that was smart, H. J.? They might cause trouble." Blair snorted. "They haven't got a prayer. A meter reader and a grocery clerk!" "We could have at least given them a few hundred." "Not on your life. Never give a sucker an even break, Jim. Give them anything at all, we acknowledge their claim. That'd be stupid." "Maybe your right." "Of course I'm right. It's, business. Now about those other bids. By gad! We can run every contractor in town out of competition! They can't touch our prices!" Out on the sidewalk. Bill and Ted sat mournfully looking up at the vast steel skeleton, held together literally by their own genius. Ted said, "We got a raw deal." "Maybe we had it coming. We were pretty stupid." "Anything we can do?" "Doesn't look like it." "Maybe the leather solution will turn out." "Maybe." Bill looked wistfully up at the steel skeleton. "At even a cent a hole, we'd have done all right." "Let's go home and get to Work." In the Mighty and Benevolent Kingdom of Szkazia, a minor reign of terror existed. The King, tired of complaints from his subjects, had just finished dresfing down his Prime Minister. The TPrime Minister was passing the abuse on to his Chief Scientist. "If something isn't done soon, I won't be responsible for your head, my friend. The King is in a rage." The eyes of the Chief Scientist watered -- partly from fear, and partly from nights and days spent in his laboratory beating out his brains on one idea after another. "I'm doing my best, sire -- " "It's not good enough! These steel girders coming out of nowhere! Banging people in the head . -- whacking them in the stomach! Why it isn't safe to walk through the halls of the Administration Building. Even the bedrooms of the Executive Apartments are not safe! The other night the Director of Propaganda had just gone to bed -- " "I know of the incident," the Chief Scientist said hurriedly. "Oh, you do? But you've done nothing about -- " "I've been working hard," the scientist said patiently, "and I think I have the solution. Give me another day." "One day, then. After that -- " The Prime Minister made a significant slicing motion with his finger. T he Prime Minister chewed his fingernails and watched the clock. Sleep was out of the question with the King calling up every little while yelling for action. The Minister counted the hours and presented himself at the Royal Laboratories precisely twenty-four hours later. "Time's up," he siiapped. The Chief Scientist was wiping his fdee. There were new lines around his mouth. He indicated a small steel box. "I think I've got it," he said. "Come with me." They went swiftly to the Administration Building. "This should be close enough. We depress this lever and -- and hope." "Well, do it -- do it!" The Chief Scientist pushed the lever on the steel box. A whirring sound came from within. All the steel girder ends in sight -- all the nasty little rivets -- disappeared. The Chief Scientist smiled and wiped his face again. "It worked," he said. "Excellent. I'll see that you get a medal." "Thank you," the Chief Scientist said sadly. That was the trouble with people nowadays. They either handed you a medal or your head. T ed and Bill stared sadly at the mess around the City Hall. Bill said, "It's a good thing it cob lapsed at night so nobody was killed, isn't it?" "You said it. I'd have felt guilty ifthere'd been any casualties." "What do you suppose went wrong?" "You got me. What do you think they'll do to old Blair?" "I don't know, but it looks pretty bad. They refused to let him out on bail." "Serves him right. The way he treated us." "You've got it wrong. He treated us swell. He did us a big favor. We could have been blamed for this." Bill thought it over before saying, "I guess you're right. I hadn't looked at it that way." "Let's go home and get to work on the leather solution." So they did. Extra Gift Subscriptions Only # By this time you know whether you like IF or not. You also know that don't know is that, if you include a gift subscription along with your own, it costs only #, or both subscriptions for six bucks! Thus, two can enjoy IF cheaper than one! Just fill in below and mail with remittance to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. AnnRF.;.; . riTY Send Gift Subscription to; Tam's problem was simple. He lived in a world that belonged to someone else. By Alan E. Nourse T hey saw Tam's shabby clothing and the small, weatherbeaten bag he carried, and they ordered him aside from the flow of passengers, and checked his packet of passports and visas with extreme care. Then they ordered him to wait. Tam waited, a chilly apprehension rising in his throat. For fifteen minutes he watched them, helplessly. Finally, the Spaceport was empty, and the huge liner from the outer Asteroid Rings was being lifted and rolled by the giant hooks and cranes back into its berth for drydock and repair, her curved, meteor-dented hull gleaming dully in the harsh arc lights. Tam watched the creaking cranes, and shivered in the cold night air, feeling hunger and dread gnawing at his stomach. There was none of the elation left, none of the great, expansive, soothing joy at returning to Earth after eight long years of hard work and bitterness. Only the cold, corroding uncertainty, the growing apprehension. Times had changed since that night back in '# -- just how much he hardly dared to guess. All he knew was the rumors he had heard, fhe whispered tales, the frightened eyes and the scarred backs and faces. Tam hadn't believed them then, so remote from Earth. He had just laughed and told himself that the stories weren't true. And now they all welled back into his mind, tightening his throat and making him tremble -- "Hey, Sharkie. Come here." Tam turned and walked slowly over to the customs official who held his papers. "Everything's in order," he said, half defiantly, looking up at the officer's impassive face. "There isn't any mistake." "What were you doing in the Rings, Sharkie?" The officer's voice was sharp. "Indenture. Working off my fare back home." The officer peered into Tarn's face, incredulously. "And you come back here?" He shook his head and turned to the other officer. "I knew these Sharkies were dumb, but I didn't think they were that dumb." He turned back to Tam, his eyes suspicious. "What do you think you're going to do now?" Tam shrugged, uneasily. "Get a job," he said. "A man's got to eat." The officers exchanged glances. "How long you been on the Rings?" "Eight years."' Tam looked up at himj anxiously. "Can I have my papers now?" A cruel grin played over the officer's lips. "Sure," he said, handing back the packet of papers. "Happy job-hunting," he added sardonically, "But remember -- the ship's going back to the Rihgs in a week. You can always sign yourself over for fare -- " "I know," said Tam, turning away sharply. "I know all about how that works." He tucked the papers carefully into a tattered breast pocket, hefted the bag wearily, and began trudging slowly across the cold concrete of the Port toward the street and the Underground. A wave of loneliness, almost overpowering in intensity, swept over him, a feeling of emptiness, bleak and hopeless. A chilly night wind swept through his unkempt blond hair as the automatics let him out into the street, and he saw the large dirty "New Denver Underground" sign with the arrow at the far side of the road. Off to the right, several miles across the high mountain plateau, the great Capitol city loomed up, shining like a thousand twinkling stars in the clear cold air. Tam jingled his last few coins listlessly, and started for the downward ramp. Somewhere, down there, he could find a darkened corner, maybe even a bench, where the police wouldn't bother him for a couple of hours.' Maybe after a little sleep, he'd find some courage, hidden away somewhere. Just enough to walk into an office and ask for a job. That, he reflected wearily as he shuffled into the tunnel, would take a lot of courage -- T he girl at the desk glanced up at him, indifferent, and turned her eyes back to the letter she was typing. Tam Peters continued to stand, awkwardly, his blond hair rumpled, little crow's-feet of weariness creeping from the corners of his eyes. Slowly he looked around the neat office, feeling a pang of shame at his shabby clothes. He should at least have found some way to shave, he thought, some way to take some of the rumple from his trouser legs. He looked back at the receptionist, and coughed, lightly. she finished her letter at a leisurely pace, and finally looked up at him, her eyes cold. "Well?" "I read your ad. I'm looking for a job. I'd like to speak to Mr. Randall." The girl's eyes narrowed, and she took him in in a rapid, sweeping glance, his high, pale forehead, the shock of mud-blond hair, the thin, sensitive face with the exaggerated lines of approaching middle age. the slightly misty blue eyes. It seemed to Tam that she stared for a full minute, and he shifted uneasily, trying to meet the cold inspection, and failing, finally settling his eyes on her prim, neatly manicured fingers. Her lip curled very slightly. "Mr. Randall can't see you today. He's busy. Try again tomorrow." She turned back to typing. A flat wave of defeat sprang Up in his chest. "The ad said to apply today. The earlier the better." She sniffed indifferently, and pulled a long white sheet from the desk. "Have you filled out an application?" "No." "You can't see Mr. Randall She pointed to a small table across the room, and he felt her eyes on his back as he shuffled over and sat down. tion with great care, making the printing as neat as he could with the old-style vacuum pen provided. Name, age, sex, race, nationality, planet where born, pre-Revolt experience, post-Revolt experience, preference -- try as he would, Tara couldn't keep the ancient pen from leaking, making an unsightly blot near the center of the form. Finally he finished, and handed the paper back to the girl at the desk. Then he sat back and waited. Another man came in, filled out a form, and waited, too, shooting Tam a black look across the room. In a few moments the girl turned to the man. "Robert Stover?" "Yuh," said the man, lumbering to his feet. "That's me." "Mr. Randall will see you now." The man walked heavily across the room, disappeared into the back office. Tam eyed the clock uneasily, still waiting. A garish picture on the wall caught his eyes, a large, very poor oil portrait of a very stout, graying man dressed in a ridiculous green suit with a little white turban-like affair on the top of his head. Underneath was a little brass plaque with words Tam could barely make out: Abraham L. Ferrel (##-#) Founder and First President Marsport Mines, Incorporated "Unto such men as these, we look to leadership." Tam stared at the picture, his lip curling slightly. He glanced anxiously at the clock as another man was admitted to the small back office. Then another man. Anger began creeping into Tam's face, and he fought to keep the scowl away, to keep from showing his concern. The hands of the clock crept around, then around again. It was almost noon. Not a very new dodge, Tam thought coldly. Not very new at all. Finally the small cold flame of anger got the better of him, and he rose and walked over to the desk. "I'm still here," he said patiently. "I'd like to see Mr. Randall." The girl stared at him indignantly, and flipped an intercom switch. "That Peters application is still out here," she said brittlely. "Do you want to see him, or not?" There was a moment of silence. Then the voice on the intercom grated, "Yes,I guess so. Send him in." The office was smaller, immaculately neat. Two visiphone units hung on a switchboard at the man's elbow. Tam's eyes caught the familiar equipment, recognized the interplanetary power coils on one. Then he turned his eyes to the man behind the desk. "Now, then, what are you after?" asked the man, settling his bulk down behind the desk, his eyes guarded, revealing a trace of boredom. T am was suddenly bitterly ashamed of his shabby appearance, the two-day stubble on his chin. He felt a dampness on his forehead, and tried to muster some of the old power and determination into his voice. "I need a job," he said. "I've had plenty of experience with radio-electronics and remote control power operations. I'd make a good mine-operator -- " "I can read," the man cut in sharply, gesturing toward the application form with the ink blot in the middle. "I read all about your experience. But I can't use you. There aren't any more openings." Tam's ears went red. "But you're always advertising," he countered. "You don't have to worry about me working on Mars, either -- I've worked on Mars before, and I can work six, seven hohrs, even, without a mask or equipment -- " The man's eyebrows raised slightly. "How very interesting," he said flatly. "The fact remains that there aren't any jobs open for you." The cold, angry flame flared up in Tam's throat suddenly, forcing out the sense of futility and defeat. "Those other men," he said sharply. "I was here before them. That girl wouldn't let me in -- " Randall's eyes narrowed amusedly. "What a pity," he said sadly. "And just think, I hired every one of them -- His face suddenly hardened, and he sat forward, his eyes glinting coldly. "Get smart, Peters. I think Marsport Mines can somehow rhanage without you. You or any other Sharkie. The men just don't like to work with Sharkies." Rage swelled up in Tam's chest, bitter futile rage, beating at his temples and driving away all thought of caution. "Look," he grated, bending over the desk threateningly. "I know the law of this system. There's a fair-employment act on the books. It says that men are to be hired by any company in order of application when they qualify equally in experience. I can, prove my experience -- " Randall stood up, his face twisted contemptuously. "Get out of here," he snarled. "You've got nerve, you have, come crawling in here with your law! Where do you think you are?" His voice grated in the still air of the office. "We don't hire Sharkies, law or no law, get that? Now get out of here!" Tam tumbd, his ears burning, and strode through the office, blindly, kicking open the door and almost running to the quiet air of the street outside. The girl at the desk yawned, and snickered, and went back to her typing with an unpleasant grin. Tam walked the street, block after block, seething, futile rage swelling up and bubbling over, curses rising to his lips, clipped off with some last vestige of self-control. At last he turned into a small downtown bar and sank wearily onto a stool near the door. The anger was wearing down now to a sort of empty, hopeless weariness, dulling his senses, exaggerating the hunger in his stomach. He had expected it, he told himself, he had known what the answer would be -- but he knew that he had hoped, against hope, against what he had known to be the facts; hoped desperately that maybe someone would listen. Oh, he knew the laws, all right, but he'd had plenty of time to see the courts in action. Unfair employment was almost impossible to make stick under any circumstances, but with the courts rigged the way they were these days -- he sighed, and drew out one of his last credit-coins. "Beer," he muttered as the barkeep looked up. The bartender scowled, his heavy-set face a picture of fashionable distaste. Carefully he filled every other order at the bar. Then he grudgingly set up a small beer, mostly foam, and flung some smallcoin change down on the bar before Tam. Tam stared at the' glass, the little proud flame of anger flaring slowly. A fat man, sitting nearby, stared at him for a long moment, then took a long sw'ill of beer from his glass. " 'Smatter, Sharkie? Whyncha drink y'r beer 'n get t' hell out o' here?" Tam stared fixedly at his glass, . giving no indication of having heard a word. The fat man stiffened a trifle, swung around to face him. "Goddam Sharkie' s too good to talk to a guy," he snarled loudly. "Whassamatter, Sharkie, ya deaf?" Tam's hand trembled as , he reached for the beer, took a short swallow. Shrugging, he set the glass on the bar and got up from his stool. He walked out, feeling many eyes on his back. He walked. Time became a blur to a mind beaten down by constant rebuff. He became conscious of great weariness of both mind and body. Instinct screamed for rest... T am sat up, shaking his head to clear it. He shivered from the chill of the park -- the cruel pressure of the bench. He pulled up his collar and moved out into the street again. There was one last chance. Cautiously his mind skirted the idea, picked it up, regarded it warily, then threw it down again. He had promised him.self never to consider it, years before, in the hot, angry days of the Revolt. Even then he had had some inkling of the shape of things, and he had promised himself, bitterly, never to consider that last possibility. Still -- Another night in the cold out-ofdoors could kill him. Suddenly he didn't care any more, didn't care about promises, or pride, or anything else. He turned into a public telephone booth, checked an address in the thick New Denver book -- He knew he looked frightful as he stepped onto the elevator, felt the cold eyes turn away from him in distaste. Once he might have been mortified, felt the deep shame creeping up his face, but he didn't care any longer. He just stared ahead at the moving panel, avoiding the cold eyes, until the fifth floor was called. The office was halfway down the dark hallway. He saw the sign on the door, dimly: "United Continents Bureau of Employment", and down in small letters below, "Planetary Division, David G. Hawke." Tam felt the sinking feeling in his stomach, and opened the door apprehensively. It had been years since he had seen Dave, long years filled with violence and cljange. Those years could change men, too. Tam thought, fearfully; they could make even the greatest men change. He remembered, briefly, his promise to himself, made just after the Revolt, never to trade on past friendships, never to ask favors of those men he had known before, and befriended. With a wave of warmth, the memory of those old days broke through, those days when he had roomed with Dave Hawke, the long, probing talks, the confidences, the deep, richknowledge that they had shared each others dreams and ideals, that they had stood side by side for a common cause, though they were such different men, from such very different worlds. Ideals had been cheap in those days, talk easy, but still, Tam knew that Dave had been sincere, a firm, stout friend. He had known, then, the sincerity in the big lad's quiet voice, felt the rebellious fire in his eyes. They had understood each other, then, deeply, sympathetically, in spite of the powerful barrier they sought to tear down -- The girl at the desk caught his eye, looked up from her work without smiling. "Yes?" "My name is Tam Peters. I'd like to see Mr. Hawke." His voice was thin, reluctant, reflecting overtones of the icy chill in his chest. So much had happened since those long-dead days, so many things to make men change -- The girl was grinning, her face like a harsh mask. "You're wasting your time," she said, her voice brittle. Anger flooded Tam's face. "Listen," he hissed. "I didn't ask for your advice. I asked to see Dave Hawke. If you choose to announce me now, that's fine. If you don't see fit, then I'll go in without it. And you won't stop me -- " The girl stiffened, her eyes angry. "You'd better not get smart," she snapped, watching him warily. "There are police in the building. You'd better not try anything, or I'll call them!" "That's enough Miss Jackson." The girl turned to the man in the office door, her eyes disdainful. The man stood in the doorway, a giant, with curly black hair, above a high, intelligent forehead, dark brooding eyes gleaming like live coals in the sensitive face. Tam looked at him, and suddenly his knees would hardly support him, and his voice was a tight whisper -- "Dave!" And then the huge man was gripping his hand, a strong arm around his thin shoulders, the dark, brooding eyes soft and smiling. "Tam, Tam -- It's been so damned long, man' -- oh, it's good to see you, Tam. Why, the last I heard, you'd taken passage to the Rings -- years ago -- " Weakly, Tam stumbled into the inner office, sank into a chair, his eyes overflowing, his mind a turmoil of joy and relief. The huge man slammed the door to the outer office and settled down behind the desk, sticking his feet over the edge, beaming. "Where have you been, Tam? You promised you'd look me up any time you came to New Den'Per, and I haven't seen you in a dozen years -- " He fished in a lower drawer. "Drink?" "No, no -- thanks. I don't think I could handle a drink -- " Tam sat back, gazing at the huge man, his throat tight. "You look bigger and better than ever, Dave." D ave Hawke laughed, a deep bass laugh that seemed to start at the soles of his feet. "Couldn't very well look thin and wan," he said. He pushed a cigar box across the desk. "Here, light up. I'm on these exclusively these days -- remember how you tried to get me to smoke them, back at the University? How you couldn't stand cigarettes? Said they were for women, a man should smoke a gooji cigar. You finally converted me." Tam grinned, suddenly feeling the warmth of the old friendship swelling back. "Yes, I remember. You were smoking that rotten corncob, then, because old Prof Tenley smoked one that you could smell in the back of the room, and in those days the Prof could do no wrong -- " Dave Hawke grinned broadly, settled back in his chair as he lit the cigar. "Yes, I remember. Still got that corncob around somewhere -- " he shook his head, his eyes dreamy. "Good old Prof Teiian honest man, Tam. They don't have them like that in the colleges these days. Wonder what happened to the old goat?" "He was killed," said Tam, softly. "Just dfter the war. Got caught in a Revolt riot, and he was shot down." Dave looked at him, his eyes suddenly sad. "A lot of honest men went down in those riots, didn't they? That was the worst part of the Revolt. There wasn't any provision made for the honest men, the really good men." He stopped, and regarded Tam closely. "What's the trouble, Tam? If you'd been going to make a friendly call, you'd have done it years ago. You know this office has always been open to you -- " Tam stared at his shoe, carefully choosing his words, lining them up in his mindi a frown creasing his forehead. "I'll lay it on the line," he said in a low voice. "I'm in a spot. That passage to the Rings wasn't voluntary. I was shanghaied onto a freighter, and had to work for eight years without pay to get passage back. I'm broke, and I'm hungry, and I need to see a doctor -- " "Well, hell!" the big man exploded. "Why didn't you holler sooner? Look, Tam -- we've been friends for a long time. You know better than to hesitate." He fished for his wallet. "Here, I can let you hav as much as you need -- couple hundred?" "No, no -- That's not what I'm getting at." Tam felt his face flush with embarrassment. "I need a job, Dave. I need one bad." Dave sat back, and his feet came off the desk abruptly. He didn't look at Tam. "I see," he said softly. "A job -- " He stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Tell you what," he said. "The government's opening a new uranium mine in a month or so -- going to be a big project, they'll need lots of men -- on Mercury -- " Tam's eyes fell, a lump growing in his throat. "Mercury," he repeated dully. "Why, sure, Tam -- good pay, chance for promotion." "I'd be dead in six months on Mercury." Tam's eyes met Dave's, trying to conceal the pain. "You know that as well as I do, Dave -- " Dave looked away. "Oh, the docs don't know what they're talking about -- " "You know perfectly well that they do. I couldn't even stand Venus very long. I need a job on Mars, Dave -- or on Earth." "Yes," said Dave Hawke sadly, "I guess you're right." He looked straight at Tam, his eyes sorrowful. "The truth is, I can't help you. I'd like to, but I can't. There's nothing I can do." Tam stared, the pain of disillusionment sweeping through him. "Nothing you can do!" he exploded. "But you're the director of this bureau! You know every job, open on every one of the planets -- " "I know. And I have to help get them filled. But I can't make anyone hire, Tam. I can send applicants, and recommendations, until I'm blue in the face, but I can't make a company hire -- " He paused, staring at Tam. "Oh, hell," he snarled, suddenly, his face darkening. "Let's face it, Tam. They won't hire you. Nobody will hire you. You're a Sharkie, and that's all there is to it, they aren't hiring Sharkies. And there's nothing I can do to make them." Tam sat as if he had been struck, the color draining from his face. "But the law -- Dave, you know there's a law. They have to hire us, if we apply first, and have the necessary qualifications.'? The big man shrugged, uneasily. "Sure, there's a law, but who's going to enforce it?" Tam looked at him, a desperate tightness in his throat. "You could enforce it. You could if you wanted T he big man stared at him for a moment, then dropped his eyes, looked down at the desk. Somehow this big body seemed smaller, less impressive. "I can't do it, Tam. I just can't." "They'd have to listen to you!" Tam's face was eager. "You've got enough power to put it acros.s -- the court would have to stick to the law -- " "I can't do it." Dave drew nervously on his cigar, and the light in his eyes seemed duller, now. "If it were just me, I wouldn't hesitate a minute.' But I've got a wife, a family. I can't jeopardize them -- " "Dave, you know it would be the right thing." "Oh, the right thing be damned ! I can't go out on a limb, I tell you. There's nothing I can do. I can let you have money, Tam, as much as you need -- I could help you set up in business, maybe, or anything --  but I can't stick my neck out like that." Tam sat stiffly, coldness seeping down into his legs. Deep in his heart he had known that this was what he had dreaded, not the fear of rebuff, not the fear of being snubbed, unrecognized, turned out. That would have been nothing, compared to this change in the honest, forthright, fearless Dave Hawke he had once known. "What's happened, Dave? Back in the old days you would have leaped at such a chance. I would have- -- the shoe was on the other foot then. We talked, Dave, don't you remember how we talked? We were friends, you can't forget that. I know you, I know what you believe, what you think. How can you let yourself down?" Dave Hawke's eyes avoided Tam's. "Times have changed. Those were the good old days, hack when everybody was happy, almost. Everybody but me and a few others -- at least, it looked that way tT you. But those days are gone. They'll never come back. This is a reaction period, and the reaction is bitter. There isn't any place for fighters now, the world is just the way people want it, and nobody can change it. What do you expect me to do?" He stopped, his heavy face contorted, a line of perspiration on his forehead. "I hate it," he said finally, "but my hands are tied. I can't do anything. That's the way things are -- " "But why?" Tam Peters was standing, eyes blazing, staring down at the big man behind the desk, the bitterness of long, weary years tearing into his voice, almost blinding him. "Why is that the way things are? What have I done? W'hy do we have this mess, where a man isn't worth any more than the color of his skin -- " Dave Hawke slammed his fist on the desk, and his voice roared out in the close air of the office. "Because it was coming!" he bellowed. "It's been coming and now it's here -- and there's nothing on God's earth can be done about it!" Tam's jaw sagged, and he stared at the man behind the desk. "Dave -- think what you're saying, Dave -- " "I know right well what I'm saying," Dave Hawke roared, his eyes burning bitterly. "Oh, you have no idea how long I've thought, the fight I've had with myself, the sacrifices I've had to make. You weren't born like I was, you weren't raised on the wrong side of the fence -- well, there was an old, old Christmas story that I used to read. Years ago, before they burned the Sharkie books. It was about an evil man who went through life cheating people, hating and hurting people, and when he died, he found that every evil deed he had ever done had become a link in a heavy iron chain, tied and shackled to his waist. And he wore that chain he had built up, and he had to drag it, and drag it, from one eternity to the next -- his name was Marley, remember?" "Dave, you're not making sense -- " "Oh, yes, all kinds of sensa. Because you Sharkies have a chain. too. You started forging it around your ankles back in the classical Middle Ages of Earth. Year by year you built it up, link by link, built it stronger, heavier. You could have stopped it any time you chose, but you didn't ever think of that. You spread over the world, building up your chain, assuming that things would always be just the way they were, just the way you wanted them to be." The big man stopped, breathing heavily, a sudden sadness creeping into his eyes, his voice taking on a softer tone. "You were such fools," he said softly. "You waxed and grew strong, and clever, and confident, and the more power you had, the more you wanted. You fought wars, and then bigger and better wars, until you couldn't be any longer. And finally you divided your world into two armed camps, and brought Fury out of her box, fought with the power of the atoms theihselves, you clever Sharkies -- and when the dust settled, and cooled off, there weren't very many of you left. Lots of us -- it was your war, remember -- but not very many of you. Of course there was a Revolt then, and all the boxed up, driven in hatred and bloodshed boiled up and over, and you Sharkies at long last got your chain tied right around your waists. You were a long, long time building it, and now you can wear it -- " T AM'S face was chalky. "Dave -- there were some of us -- you know there were many of us that hated it as much as you did, before the Revolt. Some of us fought, some I of us at least tried -- " The big man nodded his head, bitterly. "You thought you tried, sure. It was the noble thing to do, the romantic thing, the good thing to do. But you didn't really believe it. I know -- I thought there was some hope, back then, some chance to straighten things out without a Revolt. For a long time I thought that you, and those like you, really meant all you were saying, I thought somehow we could find an equal footing, an end to the hatred and bitterness. But there wasn't any end, and you never really thought there ever would be. That made it so safe -- it would never succeed, so when things were quiet it was a nice idea to toy around with, this equality for all, a noble project that couldn't possibly succeed. But when things got hot, it was a different matter." He stared at Tam, his dark eyes brooding. "Oh, it wasn't just you, Tam. You were my best friend, even though it was a hopeless, futile friendship. You tried, you did the best you could, I know. But it just wasn't true, Tam. When it came to the pinch, to a real jam, you would have been just like the rest, basically. It was built up in you, drummed into you, until no amount of fighting could ever scour it out -- " Dave Hawke stood up, walked  over to the window, staring out j across the great city. Tam watched # him, the blood roaring in his ears,  hardly able to believe what he had heard from the big man, fighting , to keep his mind from sinking into i total confusion. Somewhere a voice I deep within him seemed to be strug' gling through with confirmation, telling him that Dave Ha,wke was right, that he never really had believed. Suddenly Dave turned to him, his dark eyes intense. "Look, Tam," he said, quickly, urgently. "There are jobs you can get. Go to Mercury for a while, work the mines -- not long, just for a while, out there in the sun -- then you can come back -- " Tam's ears burned, fierce anger suddenly bursting in his mind, a feeling of loathing. "Never," he snapped. "I know what you mean. I don't do things that way. That's a coward's way, and by God, I'm no coward!" "But it would be so easy, Tam -- " Dave's eyes were pleading now. "Please -- " Tam's eyes glinted. "No dice. I've got a better idea. There's one thing I can do. It's not very nice, but at least it's honest, and square. I'm hungry. There's one place where I can get food. Even Sharkies get food there. And a bed to sleep in, and books to read -- maybe even some Sharkie books, and maybe some paper to wjte on -- " He stared at the big man, oddly, his pale eyes feverish. "Yes, yes, there's one place I can go, and get plenty to eat, and get away from this eternal rottenness -- Dave looked up at him, his eyes suspicious. "Where do you mean?" "Prison," said Tam Peters. "Oh, now see here -- let's not be ridiculous -- " "Not so ridiculous," snapped Tam, his eyes brighter. "I figured it all out, before I came up here. I knew what you were going to say. Sure, go to Mercury, Tam, work in the mines a while -- well, I can't do it that way. And there's only one other answer." "But, Tam -- " "Oh, it wouldn't take much. You know how the courts handle Sharkies. Just a small offense, to get me a few years, then a couple of attempts to break out, and I'd be in for life. I'm a Sharkie, remember. People don't waste time with us." "Tam, you're talking nonsense. Good Lord, man, you'd have no freedom, no life -- " "What freedom do I have now?" Tam snarled, his voice growing wild. "Freedom to starve? Freedom to crawl on my hands and knees for a little bit of food? I don't want that kind of freedom." His eyes grew shrewd, shifted slyly to Dave Hawke's broad face. "Just a simple charge," he said slowly. "Like assault, for instance. Criminal assault -- it has an ugly sound, doesn't it, Dave? That should give me ten years -- " his fist clenched at his side. "Yes, criminal assault is just what ought to do the trick -- " The big man tried to dodge, but Tam was too quick. His fist caught Dave in the chest, and Tam was on him like a fury, kicking, scratching, snarling, pounding. Dave choked and cried out, "Tam, for God's sake stop -- " A blow caught him in the mouth, choking off his words as Tam fought, all the hate and bitterness of long weary years translated into scratching, swearing desperation. Dave pushed him off, like a bear trying to disentangle a maddened dog from his fur, but Tam was back at him, fighting harder. The door opened, and Miss ( Continued on page #) T hey wanted to go home -- back to the planet they'd known. But even the stars had changed. Did the fate of all creation hinge upon an -- AN By Mari Wolf of the photographic plates out of the developer and laid them on the table beside the others. Then he picked up the old star charts -- Volume #, Number I -- maps of space from various planetary systems within a hundred light years of SolHe looked around the observation room at the others. "We might as well start checking." The men and women around the table nodded. None of them said anything. Even the muffled conversation from the corridor beyond the observation room ceased as the people stopped to listen. McCann set the charts down and opened them at the first sheet -- the composite map of the stars as seen from Earth. "Don't be too disappointed if we're wrong," he said. Amos Carhill's fists clenched. He leaned across the table. "You still don't believe we're near Sol, do you? You're getting senile, Hugh! You know the mathematics of our position as well as anybody." "I know the math," Hugh said quietly. "But remember, a lot of our basics have already proved themselves false this trip. We can't be sure of anything. Besides, I think # . I'd remember this planet we're on if we'd ever been here before. We visited every planetary system within a hundred light years of Sol the first year." Carhill laughed. "What's there to remember about this hunk of rock? Tiny, airless, mountainless -- the most monotonous piece of matter we've landed on in years." Hugh shrugged and turned to the next chart. The others clustered around him, checking, comparing the chart with the photographic plates of their position, finding nothing familiar in the star pattern. "I still think we would have remembered this planet," Hugh said. "Just because it is so monotonous. After all, what have' we been looking for, all these years? Life. Other worlds with living forms, other types of evolution, types adapted to different environments. This particular planet is less capable of supporting life than our own Moon." Martha Carhill looked up from the charts. Her face was as tense and strained as her husband's, and the lines about her mouth deeply etched. "We've got to be near Earth. We've just got to. We've got to find people again." Her voice broke. "We've been looking for so long -- " Hugh McCann sighed. The worry that had been growing in him ever since they first left the rim of the galaxy and turned homeward deepened into a nagging fear. He didn't know why he was afraid. He too hoped that they were near Earth. He almost believed that they would soon be home. But the others, their reactions -- He shook his head. They no longer merely hoped. With them, especially with the older, ones, it was faith, a blind, unreasoning, fanatic faith that their journey was almost over and they would be on Earth again and pick up the lives they had Ifeft behind fifty-three years before. "Look," Amos Carhill said. "Here are our reference points. Here's Andromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own Milky Way." He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. "Now we can check some of these high magnitude reference stars with the charts." Hugh let him take the charts and go through them, checking, rejecting. Carhill was probably right. He'd find Sol soon enough. It had been too long for one shipful of people to follow a quest, especially a hopeless one. For fiftythree years they had scouted the .galaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. A check on diverging evolutions, they had called it -- uncounted thousands of suns without planets, bypassed. Thousands of planetary systems, explored, or merely looked at and rejected. Heavy, cold worlds with methane atmospheres and lifeless rocks without atmospheres and even earthsized, earth-type planets, with oceans and oxygen and warmth. But no life. No life anywhere. That was one of the basics they had lost, years ago -- their belief that life would arise on any planet capable of supporting it. "We could take a spectrographic analysis of some of those high magnitude stars," Carhill said. Then abruptly he straightened, eyes alight, his hand on the last chart. "We don't need it after all. Look! There's Sirius, and here it is on the plates. That means Alpha Centauri must be -- " He paused. He frowned and ran his hand over the plate to where the first magnitude star was photographed. "It must be Alpha Centauri, It has to be!" "Except that it's over five degrees out of position." Hugh looked at the plate, and then at the chart, and then back at the plate again. And then he knew what it was that he had feared subconsciously all along. "You're right, Amos." he said slowly. "There's Alpha Centauri -- about twenty light years away. And there's Sirius, and Arcturus and Betelgeuse and all the others." He pointed them out, one by one, in their unfamiliar locations on the plates. "But they're all out of position, in reference to each other." H e stopped. The others stared back at him, not saying anything. Little by little the faith began to drain out of their eyes. "What does it mean?" Martha Carhill's voice was only a whisper. "It means that we discarded one basic too many," Hugh McCann said. "Relativity. The theory that our subjective time, here on the ship, would differ from objective time outside." "No," Amos Carhill said slowly. "No, it's a mistake. That's all. We haven't gone into the future. We  can't have. It isn't possible that more time has elapsed outside the ship than -- " "Why not?" Hugh said softly. exceeded the speed of light, many times." "Which disproves that space-time theory in itself!" Carhill shouted. "Does it?" Hugh said. "Or does it just mean we never really understood space-time at all?" He didn't wait for them to answer. He pointed that lay beyond Alpha Centauri on the plates. "That's probably Sol. If it is, we can find out the truth soon enough." He looked at their faces and wondered what their reactions would be, if the truth was what he feared. The ship throbbed softly, pulsating in the typical vibrations of low speed drive. In the forward viewscreens the star grew larger. The people didn't looL at it very often. They moved about the corridors of the ship, much as they usually moved, but quietly. They seemed to be trying to ignore the star. "You can't be sure, Hugh." Nora McCann laid her hand on her husband's arm. "No, of course I can't be sure." The door from their quarters into the corridor was open. Several more people came in -- young people who had been bom on the ship. They were talking and laughing. "Would it be so hard on the young ones, Hugh? They've never seen the Earth. They're used to finding nothing but lifeless worlds everywhere." One of the young boys in the hall looked up at the corridor viewscreen and pointed at the star and then shrugged. The others turned away, not saying anything, and after a minute they left and the boy followed them. "There's your answer," Hugh McCann said dully. "Earth's a symbol to them. It's home. It's the place us. Sometimes I think it's the only thing that has kept us sane all these years -- the knowledge that there is a world full of people, somewhere, that we're not alone." Her hand found his and he CTipped it, almost absently, and then he looked up at their own small viewscreen. The star was much bigger now. It was already a definite circle of yellow light. A yellow G-type sun, like a thousand others they had appiroached and orbited around and left behind them. A yellow sun that could have been anywhere in the galaxy. "Hugh," she said after a moment, "do you really believe that thousands of years have gone by, outside?" "I don't know what to believe. I only know what the plates show." "That may not even be Sol, up ahead," she said doubtfully. "We niay be in some other part of space altogether, and that's why the charts are different." "Perhaps. But either way we're lost. Lost in space or in time or in both. What does it matter?" "If we're just lost in space it's not so -- ;So irrevocable. We could still find our way back to Earth, maybe." He didn't answer. He looked up at the screen and the circle of light and his lips tightened. Whatever the truth was, they didn't have long to wait. They'd be within gravitational range in less than an hour. He wondered why he was reacting so differently from the others. He was just as afraid as they were. He knew that. But he wasn't fighting the thought that perhaps they had really traveled out of their own time. He wondered what it was that made him different from the other old ones, the ones like Carhill who refused even to face the possibility, who insisted on clinging to their illusions in the face of the photographic evidence. H e didn't think that he was a pessimist. And yet, after only three years of their trip, after only fifty Earthlike but lifeless worlds, he had been the first to consider the possibility that life was unique to Earth and that their old theories concerning its spontaneous emergence from a favorable environment might be wrong. Only Nora had agreed with him then. Only Nora could face this possibility with him now. The two of them were very much alike in their outlooks. They were both pragmatists. But this time there would be no long years during which the others could slowly shift their opinions, slowly relinquish their old beliefs and turn to new ones. The yellow sun was too large and urgent in the screen. "Hugh!" He turned to the door and saw Arnos Carhill standing there, bracing himself against the corridor wall. There was no color at all in Carhill's face. "Come on up to the control room with me, Hugh. We're going to start decelerating any minute now." Hugh frowned. He would prefer to stay and watch their approach on the screen, with Nora at his side. He had no duties in the controlroom. He was too old to have any part in the actual handling of the ship. Amos was old, too. But they would be there, all the old ones, looking through the high powered screens for the first clear glimpse of the third planet from the sun. "All right, Amos." Hugh got up and started for the door. "I'll wait here for you, Hugh," Nora said. He smiled at her and then followed Carhill out into the crowded corridor. No one spoke to them. Most of the people they passed were neither talking, nor paying any attention to anything except the corridor screens, which they could no longer ignore. The few who were talking spoke about Earth and how wonderful it would be to get home again. "You're wrong, Hugh," Amos said suddenly. "I hope I am." The crowd thinned out as they passed into the forward bulkheads. The only men they saw now were the few young ones on duty. Except for their set, anxious faces they might have been handling any routine landing in any routine system. The ship quivered for just a second as it shifted over into deceleration. There was an instant of vertigo and then it was gone and the ship's gravity felt as normal as ever. Hugh didn't even break stride at the shift. He followed Carhill to the control room doorway and pushed his way in, taking a place among the others who already clustered about the great forward screen. The pilot ignored them and worked his controls. The screen cleared as the ship's deceleration . increased. The pilot didn't look at it. He was a young man. He had never seen the Earth. "Look!" Amos Carhill cried triumphantly. The screen focused. The selector swung away from the yellow sun andswept its orbits. The dots that were planets came into focus and out again. Hugh McCann didn't even need to count them, nor to calculate their distance from the sun. He knew the system too well to have any trouble recognizing it. The sun was Sol. The third planet was the double dot of Earth and moon. He realized suddenly that he had more than half expected to see an empty orbit. "It's the Earth all right," Carhill said. "We're home!" They were all staring at the double dot, where the selector focused sharply now. Hugh McCann alone looked past it, at the background of stars that were strewn in totally unfamiliar patterns across the sky. He sighed. "Look beyond the system," he said. They looked. For a long time they stared, none of them speaking, and then they turned to Hugh, many of them accusingly, as if he himself had rearranged the stars. "How long have we been gone?" Carhill's voice broke. Hugh shook his head. The star patterns were too unfamiliar for even a guess. There was no way of knowing, yet, how long their fiftythree years had really been. ly. He turned back to the screen and stared at the still featureless dot that was the Earth. "We can't be the only ones left," he said. No one answered him. They were still stunned. They couldn't even accept, yet, the strange constellations on'the screen. End of the voyage. Fifty-three years of searching for worlds with life. And now Earth, under an unfamiliar sky, and quite possibly no life at all, anywhere, except on the ship. "We might as well land," McCann said. The ship curved away from the night side of the Earth and crossed again into the day. They were near enough so that the planetary features stood out sharply now, even through the dense clouds that rose off the oceans. But although the continental land masses and the islands were clearly defined, they were as unrecognizable as the star constellations had been. "That must be North America," Amos Carhill said dully. "It's smaller than the continent on the night side..." "It might be anywhere," Hu McCann said. "We can't tell. The oceans look bigger too. There's less land surface." He stared down at the topoggraphy thousands of miles below them. Mountains rose jaggedly. There were great plains, and crevasses, and a rocky, lifeless look everywhere. No soil. No erosion, except from the wind and the rains. "There's no chlorophyll in the spectrum," Haines said. "It seems to rule out even plant life." "I don't understand." Martha Carhill turned away from the screen. "Everything's so different. But the moon looked just exactly like it always did." "That's because it has no atmosphere," Hugh said. "So there's no erosion. And no oceans to sweep in over the land. But I imagine that if we explored it we'd find changes. New craters. Maybe even new mountains by now." "How long has it been?" Carhill whispered. "And even if it's been Why aren't there any plants? Won't we find anything?" "Maybe there was an atomic war," the pilot said. "Maybe." Carhill had thought of that too. Probably all of them had. "Or maybe the sun novaed." No one answered him. The concept of a nova and then of its dying down, until now the sun was just as it had been when they left, was too much. "The sun looks hotter," Carhill added. The ship dropped lower, its preliminary circle of the planet completed. It settled in for a landing, just as it had done thousands of times before. And the world below could have been any of a thousand others. They dropped quickly, braking through the atmosphere, riding it down. The topography came up to meet them and the general features blurred, leaving details standing out sharply, increasing in sharpness as if the valleys and mountains below were tiny microscopic crystals under a rapidly increasing magnification. The pilot picked their landing place without difficulty. It was a typical choice, a spot on the broad shelving plain at the edge of the ocean. The type of base from which all tests on a planet could be run quickly, and a report written up, and the files of another world closed and tagged with a number and entered in one of the great storage encyclopedias. Even to Hugh there was an air of unreality about the landing, as if this planet wasn't really Earth at all, despite its orbit around the sun, despite its familiar moon. It looked too much like too many others. The actual landing was over quickly. The ship quivered, jarred slightly, and then was still, resting on the gravelled plain that had obviously once been part of the ocean bed. The ocean itself lay only, a few hundred yards away. Hugh McCann looked out through the viewscreen, turned to direct vision now. He stared at the waves swelling against the shore and his sense of unreality deepened. Even though this was what he had more than half expected, he couldn't quite accept it, yet. "We might as well go out and look arormd," he said. "Air pressure. Earth-norm." Haines began checking off the control panel by rote. "Composition: oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor -- " "There's certainly nothing out there that could hurt us," Martha Carhill snapped. "What could there be?" "We might check for radioactivity," Hugh said quietly. She turned and stared at him. Her mouth opened and then snapped shut again. "No," Haines said. "There's no radioactivity either. Everything's clear. We won't need space suits." He pressed the button that opened the inner locks. and then switched on the communicator, and the noises from the rest of the ship flooded into the control room. Everywhere people drifted in, caught up in the background as various duty officers, reported clearance on the landing. Most of the background voices were young, talking too loudly and with too much forced cheerfulness about what lay outside the ship. Hugh sighed, as aware of all the people as if he were out in the corridors with them. It was the spaceborn ones who were doing most of the talking. The children, the young people, the people no longer young but still born since the voyage started, still looking upon Earth more as a wonderful legend than as their own place of origin. The old ones, those who had left the Earth in their own youth, had the least of all to say. They knew what was missing outside. The younger ones couldn't really know. Even the best of the books and the pictures and the three dimensional movies can give only a superficial idea of what a living world is like. "Hugh." Carhill clutched his arm. "Yes, Amos." "There must be people, somewhere. There have to be. Our race can't be dead." Hugh McCann looked past him, out at the sky and the clouds of water vapor that swirled up to obscure the sun. The stars, of course, were completely hidden in the daylight." "If there are any others, Amos, we can be pretty certain they're not on Earth." "They may have left. They .may have gone somewhere else." "No!" Martha Carhill's face twisted and then went rigid. "There's no one anywhere. There can't be. It's been too long. You saw the stars, Amos -- the stars -- all wrong, every one of them!" Her hands came up to her face and she started to cry. Amos crossed over to her and put his arms around her. Hugh McCann watched them for a moment and then he turned and left them and went out through the locks after the young people. He didn't know what to think. He wished that they had never turned back to Earth at all, that they had kept going, circling around the rim of the galaxy forever. ,He went through the outer lock and then down the ramp to the ground. He stood on the Earthagain, for the first time since his' early youth. And it was not the same. There was bare rock under his feet and bare rock all around him,gravel and boulders and even fine grained sand. But no dust. No dirt. No trace of anything organic or even ever touched by anything organic. He had walked too many worlds like this. Too many bare gray worlds with bare gray oceans and clouds of vapor swirling up into the warm air. Too many worlds where there was wind and sound and surf j where there should have been life, but wasn't. This was just another of those worlds. This wasn't Earth. This was just a lifeless memory of the Earth he had known and loved. For fifty-three years they had clung to the thought of home, of people waiting for them, welcoming them back someday. Fifty-three years, and for how many of those ship-years had Earth lain lifeless like this? He looked up at the sky and at all the stars that he couldn't see and he cursed them all and cursed time itself and then, bitterly, his own fatuous stupidity. The people came out of the ship and walked about on the graveled plain, alone or in small groups. They had stopped talking. They seemed too numbed by what they had found to even think, for a while. Shock, Hugh McCann thought grimly. First'hysteria and tears and loud unbelief, and now shock. Anything could come next. H e stood with the warm wind blowing in his face and watched the people. In the bitter mood that gripped him he was amused by their reactions. Some of them walked around aimlessly, but most, those who were active in the various departments, soon started about the routine business of running tests on planetary conditions. They seemed to work without thinking, by force of habit, their faces dazed and uncaring. Conditioning, Hugh thought. Starting their reports. The reports that they know perfectly well no one will ever read. He wandered over to where several of the young men were sending up aU atmosphere balloon and jotting down the atmospheric constituents as recorded by the instruments. "How's it going?" he said. "Earth-norrn. Naturally -- " The young man flushed. "Temperature's up though. Ninety-three. And a seventy-seven percent humidity." He left them and walked down across the .rocks to the ocean's edge. Two young girls were down there before him, sampling the water, running both chemical and biological probing tests. "Hello, Mr. McCann," the taller girl said dully. "Want our report?" "Found anything?" He knew already that there was nothing to find. If there were life the instruments would have recorded its presence. "No. Water temperature eightysix. Sodium chloride four-fifths Earth normal." She looked up, surprised. "Why so low?" "More water in the ocean, maybe. Or maybe we've had a nova since we were here last." It was getting late, almost sunset. Soon it would be time for the photographic star-charts to be made. Hugh brought himself up short and smiled bitterly. He too was in the grip of habit. Still, why not? Perhaps they could estimate. years had passed. Why? What good would it do them to find out? After a while the sun set and a little later the full moon nose, hazy and indistinct behind the clouds of water vapor. Hugh stared at it, watched it rise higher until it cleared the horizon, a great bloated bulk. Then he sighed and shook his head to clear it and started to work. The clouds were thick. He had to move the screening adjustment almost to its last notch before the vapor patterns blocked out and the stars were bright and unwavering and ready to be photographed. He inserted the first plate and snapped the picture of the stars whose names he knew but whose patterns were wrong, some subtly, some blatantly. There was something he was overlooking. Some other factor, not taken into account. He developed the first plates and compared them with the star charts of Earth as it had been before they left it, and he shook his head. Whatever the factor was, it eluded him. He went back to work. "Oh, here you are, Hugh." He jumped at the sound of Carhill's voice. He had been working almost completely by habit, slowly swinging the telescope across the sky and snapping the plates. And trying to think. "Why waste time on that?" Carhill added bitterly. "Who's ever going to see our records now?" Behind Garhill, several of the other old ones nodded. Hugh was surprised that they had managed to come back to the ship without his hearing them. But of course they had come back in at sundown, as usual on a routine check, and now they were gathering to compile their reports. Hugh looked from face to face, wondering if he too was as iipmb and dazed and hag gard appearing as they were. He probably was. "What do you suggest; Amos?" he said. "I say there's no use going on," Carhill said flatly. "You've all run your tests. And what have you found? No fossils. Not even a single-celled life form in the ocean. No way even to tell how many millions of years it's been." "Maybe it hasn't been so long," Haines said. "Maybe something happened here fairly recently, and the people all went to some other system -- to one of the Centauri planets, maybe." Amos Carhill laughed bitterly. "You can say that in the face of the of years have passed. Nothing's the same. Even the tides are three times what they were. It's qjpvious what happened. The sun novaed. Novaed and cooled. Do you really believe that our race has lasted that long, on some nearby system?" H IS voice rose. He glared about at the others. He threw back his head suddenly and laughed, and the laughter echoed and re-echoed off the steel walls. "I say let's dienow!" Carhill cried. "There's no use going on, Hugh was right, as usual. We shouldn't have tried to come back. We've been fools, all these years, thinking we had a world to come home to." The people muttered, crowded closer. They pushed into the observation room, shoved nearer to it in the outside corridor. They muttered in a rising note of panic as the numbing shock that gripped them gave way. "Why not die here?" Martha Carhill's voice rose shrill above the sound of her husband's laughter. of years ago!" Hugh McCann looked at her and at Amos and at all the others. He sighed. Why not? Why go on? There was no answer. Even a pragmatist gave up eventually, when the facts were all against him. He glanced down at the reports on the table. All the routine reports, gathered together into routine form, written up in routine terminology. Reports on an Earthtype planet that just happened to be the Earth itself. And then, quite suddenly, the obvious, satisfactory answer came to him. The factors clicked into place, and he wondered why he hadn't thought of them long ago. He looked up from the reports, at the people on the verge of panic, and he knew what to say to quiet them. He had the factors now. "No!" he cried. "You're wrong. There's no reason at all to assume that our race is dead!" Ames Carhill stopped laughing and stared at him and the others stared also and none of them believed him at all. "It's simple!" he cried. "Why has so much time passed outside the ship while to us only fifty-three years have gone by?" "Because we traveled too fast," Carhill said flatly. "That's , why." "Yes," Hugh said softly. "But there's one thing we've been forgetting. What we did, others could do also. Probably lots of expeditions started out after we left, all trying for the speed of light." They stared at him. Slowly the dazed look died out of their eyes as they realized what he meant, and what the concept might mean to them. The concept of other ships, following them out into time. The of years from the Earth they had left. "You mean," Carhill said slowly, "that you believe other people got caught in the same trap we did -- that there may be others in this time also?" Hugh nodded. "Why not? Maybe they colonized some of those Earth-type planets we checked on. Anyway, we can look for them." "No." Carhill shook his head. "If any of them had started after us we would have crossed their paths already. We never have. We never found a trace of any other expedition. Even if there is another, even if there are colonies somewhere, we could spend another fifty years looking." "Well," Martha Carhill whispered. "Why not? It would give us something to look for." Hugh McCann glanced around the circle of faces and saw the new hope that came into them, the new belief that sprang into existence so quickly because they wanted to believe. He smiled, somewhat sadly, and picked up the pile of reports and the photographs he had just developed. Then he slipped out of the room, through the crowd outside, away from them and the rising hum of their voices. He didn't need to say anything more. The ship would go on. JI "Yes, Nora." She was waiting for him in the corridor. She came up to him and smiled and slipped her arm through his. They walked on together, down the hall past the last of the people. "I heard what you said, Hugh. You convinced them." He nodded. "I wonder why it took me so long to think of it." The voices died away behind them. They were all alone. They rounded a corner where a viewscreen picked up the image of the moon, so familiar, now the only thing that was familiar about this Earth. Nora shivered. "You were very logical, Hugh. But I didn't believe you." He glanced around and saw that there was no one near them and that the communicators in this part of the ship were turned off. Only then did he answer her. "I didn't believe myself, Nora." "Tell me." "When we're outside." They went down the winding ramp that led to the interior of the ship. It too was deserted now. They left the carpeted, muffled corridors and their footsteps rang on the steel plates that lay down the middle of the ship, its heart, where the energy converters were, and the disposal units, and the plant rooms, and the great glass spheres of the hydroponies tanks. "'It's ironic, isn't it?" Nora said slowly. "We left here so long ago, looking for worlds with life, and we come back to find our own world dead." "It's ironic, all right." He walked along the row of tanks until he came to the one he was searching for, and then he picked up a glass cylinder and filled it from the tank. "I had to tell them something, Nora. They couldn't have gone on, otherwise." The bottle ws full. He stoppered it and then turned away. They crossed to the nearest lock and he pushed the button that opened it. They waited a few minutes until the door came open, and then they went out, down the ramp to the ground, across the slippery rocks. Even through the clouds there was enough light to see by. "It's warm," she said. "It always is, now." They were approaching the ocean. The surf beat loudly in theif ears. The spray was warm against their faces, almost as warm as the night wind. "Tell me," she said. "You know what really happened, don't you?" "I think so. I can't really be sure." They paused on the low ledge where he had stood earlier and watched the girls gather their data for the reports. At their feet the waves washed up to the edges of tjie tide pools, eddying into and out of them softly. The water looked dark and cold, but they knew that it too was warm. "There've been lots of changes, and they all fit a pattern," he said. "The temperature. The difference in salt content in the water. The higher tides. Those things could happen for several reasons. But there's only one explanation for the other changes, the ones I found on the star charts." She waited. The water lapped in and out, reaching almost to where they stood. "The Earth rotates faster now," he said. "And the stars are nearer. Much nearer than they were." "Isn't that impossible?" "How do we know? We exceeded the speed of light. Who could say what continuum that might have put us in? I remember an analogy I read once, in a layman's book on different theories of space-time. '-" The future and the past, twO branches of a hyperbola, each with the speed of light as its limit -- ' " "You mean," she whispered, "that we're not in the future at all? We're in the past -- the far past -- before there was any life on Earth?" H e looked down at the pools of water at their feet, the lifeless water that according to all their old discarded theories should have been teeming with life. He nodded slowly and lifted the glass cylinder he had brought from the ship and stared at it. "That bottle," she whispered. "You filled it with bacteria, didn't you?" He nodded again. "You're mad, Hugh. You can't mean that that bottle is the origin of life on Earth! You can't." "Maybe this isn't our Earthj Nora. Maybe there are thousands of continuums and thousands of Earths, all waiting for a ship to land someday and give them life." Slowly he unstoppered the cylinder and knelt down at the water's edge. For a minute he pau.sed, wondering if there were other continuums or only this one, wondering just how deep the paradox lay. Then he tipped the bottle up and poured, and the liquid from the cylinder ran down into the tide pools and eddied there and was lost in the liquid of the ocean. He poured until the bottle was empty and all the single-celled bacteria from the ship's tank mingled with the warm, lifeless waters. The water temperatures were the same. Everything was the same, and the conditions were very favorable and the bacteria would divide and redivide and keep on dividing for "Well hold the ship under light speed," he said. "And in a few million years we can drop back here and see how evolution is getting along." He stood up and she took his hand and moved closer to him. They were both shivering, despite the warmth of the air. "But how did life originate in the beginning?" she asked suddenly. Hugh McCann shook his head in the darkness. "I don't know. We've been all over the galaxy and haven't found life anywhere. Perhaps it can't have a natural cause. Perhaps it's always planted. A closed circle from beginning to end." "But something -- someone -- must have started the circle. Who?" He looked down at the empty cylinder that he had dropped at the water's edge and then he looked out at the ocean, lifeless no longer. And once again he .shook his head. "We did, Nora. We're the beginning." For a long moment their eyes met and held, and then they turned and walked away from the ocean, back toward the ship, and the people. And the moonlight .glinted off the empty bottle.  i 'P ,.m  m I .I Personalities  Today, He Would Be Amazed as the father of science fiction as it is known today, one can immediately draw sharp criticism from those who allocate the role to Leonardo da Vinci. It is an honor, however, that the great Italian could easily give away as a crumb from his table. And one Verne must have in order to gain the stature he deserves, and also as payment for well nigh incredible work as a pioneer. Verne, a Frenchman, was bom in # in Nantes. There was neither great wealth, nor excessive poverty in his background. He received an adequate education, and if there was any point of particular interest in his youth, it was the vague, but definitely tangible restlessness that plagued his early years. He became a fairly successful playwright long before there is any indication of his later interest in the scientific fiction through which his name will live. A close study of Verne, highlights the fact that he himself is only half his own story. To get the full picture, he must be considered along with the time in which he lived. It was a time of the colossal French unrest that ended in one of the greatest bloodbaths in history. The masses -- a designation so dear to the heart of the ponderous hi.storian -- were stirring under the perfumed heels of the French aristocrats. Every school child knows what happened. But another revolution of the period, centered in the industrial Europe of the times, has been to a great extent overlooked or generalized, perhaps because itsfendresult was not outlined by the sharp blade of a guillotine. The industrial revolution. The intellectual level, nay the intelligence level, of the period was low, but there was enough perception to fear the Machine and what it could do. Science was a completely unknown and untried component. The theory of science creating machines which would in turn free men from previously necessitous slavery was not readily grasped. Such a concept had to come from some proof in that direction, and at that time there was no proof. There was, however, even then, proof that machines could put vast numbers of men out of work. Under the systems of the seventeenth century, this could mean actual starvation for people who earned their bread in the labor market. It is little wonder, then, that science was a thing to be feared and this point, in itself, makes Jules Verne not only a pioneer, but a very remarkable literary technician. To understand a man, it is necessary to understand what he faces. To get the picture, we have but to compare his time with ours. T he writer . of today has little else to do but experience an urge to write and then look around for his field. If he selects science fiction as his creative medium, he finds a well worn rut into which to fit his steering gear. The momentum has already been provided. He rides along in an established field, partaking of the dignity built by those who came before. Verne was the first of these. He faced a world that really did not want what he had -- or rather -- what his imagination and instinct forced him to produce. He won his audience from a fearful, reluctant public, who cringed from what he gave them, yet read it from pure fascination. His works are filled, of course with a perceptive power. Perhaps very few people today would care for them. They are styled to another day, a slower and more ponderous day when the streamlined stylism of today's literature would have been ,as quickly rejected as some of us, today, reject the styles of the old masters. in that it is i a mixture of astounding perceptions and naive inconsistencies. The inconsistencies, however, spring from the limitations of the time; limitations which even a genius of Verne's stature could not overcome. As an example, there is an illustration of one of his books on a trip to the Moon. The picture is meant to highlight the absolute cold of space. It shows three men, obviously halfway to the Moon, inside their rocket. The room, or cabin, they occupy is that of a typical, seventeenth century parlor. It could have as easily illustrated a scene from a Charles Dickens novel. The three men are dressed for the street -- for a warm day in the street, that is -- because they haven't a single overcoat among them. One wears a top hat and the other two have shawls over their heads. They are crouched, and stomping their feet to keep warm. There seems to be some snow drifting in from somewhere. But those who would laugh at this illustration, could be quickly silenced by a drawing of an undersea burial, the stunning impact of w'hich has probably never been equalled to this day. Save for an ancient handlamp held by one of the mourners, the illustration would do far more than justice to any current science fiction story of underwater activities. There are many indications that Jules Veme did not write scientific fiction from choice; that he possibly nurtured an actual dislike for it. He left the field many times to further other literary ends. But he always came back; possibly because his vital and entirely original imagination would not let him do otherwise. He produced a prodigious amount of copy, all of which in its day, was widely read. But it is natural that a writer is remembered for certain of his works, while the bulk of his efforts is lost in the sweep of time. Of all his works. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, could be rated as his greatest. Possibly because, in this story, he described with inconceivable accuracy, the almost exact shape of a single thing to c#me. The submarine. H IS Around the World in Eighty Days will also, probably live as long as books are read. But the impact here is somewhat blunted in that Verne accurately foretold a general future condition -- the speed at which man would someday travel, by whatever method. Also, the story is somewhat blurred by the fact that even Verne himself cauld not envision a condition which time and progress would not antiquate. His error here was that he left qn opening for a sequal -- Around the World in Eighty Minutes. This situation does not hold true in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. After reading it, one can experience only anticlimax no matter what has been or will be. When Veme finished, there was no more to be said. But regardless, Verne's niche is secure. In a dim and groping past, he established, with a quill pen and an agile mind, a trend in scientific fiction from which the writer of today or tomorrow will deviate but little. -- pwf It was in neither the stars nor the cards that Dr. Mateo Marco Lope Aguirre Malaria, the eminent jurist, should retain his neck... By L Sprague de Camp Aguirre Malaria, the eminent jurist, sat at a table in the bar of the Convention Quarters and wept into his rum. These Quarters were those of the World Government Constitutional Convention, in a set of concrete chambers deep underground in the Rhone Valley. The accommodations had been hastily converted from the former Supreme Headquarters, United Civilized State's, Convention was taking place in this armored warren, first, because most of the earth's larger cities had taken hits in the war and were therefore short of housing -- when they had any houses left at all; second, because the war was not cmite over. A Communist force still held out in the Altai Mountains, and for all anyone knew they might have a missle or two left with which to scotch the Convention if it met on the surface. A journahst named Dagobert Heck sat down at the same table and asked : "Why do you weep. Dr. Aguirre?" "My friend," said Aguirre, "I weep because we are off on the wrong track. Once again we fail to grasp opportunity by the forelock." "Oh, I don't know," said Dagobert Heck. "Considering what the world has been through lately -- most of its cities mashed flat and a forget that this is not the only sun to bits -- I think we're doing better Heck nodded sympathetically, than we had any right to expect. Aguirre went on; We're getting a bigger improve"And others, I think, hope to dement on the United Nations than feat the clause so that they can the United Nations was on the carry on nationalistic and ImperialLeague of Nations. The new World istic policies, if not on the earth. Government will have a directly then off it somewhere." elected legislature, the right to tax, "Look here, are you sure the fact and the world's only armed force, that you're the author of this clause Ten years ago we'd have said this hasn't prejudiced you?" was utopian moonshine. Why then "Sir, I have no prejudices!" so sad?" Aguirre lowered his voice. "Save "Because these narrow-minded, perhaps a slight one in favor of livso-called statesmen cannot look being." yond the petty confines of their own "What do you mean?" planet!" "You know my glorious chief?" "Ohj you mean the Space Clause." Heck closed his eyes and troversial clause from memory;lAous chief was Juan Serafin de " 'The authority shall have the exla Torre Baroja, President of the elusive right to represei the peoAndean Federation, a new political pies of the earth in relations with entity that had taken the place, extra-terrestrial life-forms, should amid the general uproar of World exist; to limit, regulate, and forbid western South America. Not satisintercourse between the peoples of fied with making himself president the earth and such life-forms; and for life of Andea, la Torre had apto limit, regulate, and forbid movepointed himself head of the Andean ment of persons and things between delegation to the Convention so as the earth and other heavenly to have a personal finger in the new bodies -- ' Oh well, it's probably not constitutional pie. vital. We've been to the moon and "Well," said Aguirre, "he is, as found nothing but a few viruses, you know, a man of the utmost and conditions don't look promising sense of. personal dignity. I -- ah -- for life on the other planets either." sold him on this Space Clause, as "Exactly what that fool Carypu would express it, with the result staIrs-Brown said!" Aguirre mimthat he has placed the Andean deleicked the speech of the British gation squarely behind it and made delegate. " 'Really, you know, speeches in its behalf. Now if the wouldn't Her Majesty's Governclause is not adopted he will feel ment look a bit silly getting all set to that his honor has been insulted, welcome the Martians, and having And since he cannot take his feelit transpire there aren't any?' They ings out on Carstairs-Brown and the other skeptics, he will vent them on me." "What'll he do? Can you?" "If that were all! Did you not hear how he had fourteen political opponents shot without trial before taking off for this Convention?" "I probably did. So he's the guy who calls himself the great democratic liberator?" "Oh, but he is! Think of all the things that he has done for the mass -- free parades, extra holidays to hear his speeches, and all the rest! But these now-dead politicians were criticising him in public. Naturally he could not tolerate such insults tohis dignity, or the people would have doubted his virility and thrown him out. After all, one must remaip respected. But that, alas, will not save my neck." "Too bad," .said Dagobert Heck. "You Andeans have certainly done all you could to put the clause across. Short of having a spaceship land with a load of little green men with tentacles -- Hey!" Heck frowned into his drink. "That gives me an idea. There's an old friend of mine in India named Dick Nugent, used to work with me on the World-Telegram-Sun. He retired a few years ago to become a yogi. Maybe -- Say, when does this clause come up for a final vote?" "Tomorrow, if the meeting goes according to schedule." Heck consulted his watch. "Excuse me. I think I can just make it." "Make what?" asked Aguirre. But Dagobert Heck had gone. Myron Kalish, the American Secretary of State, took his turn as president of the Convention the following noon. His bland exterior concealed a battalion of worries that would have floored a lesser man, the chief being that after all his toil and travail the Senate of the United States would insert a long sharp knife into his back by refusing to ratify the new Constitution. Already senators from the Middle West were talking ominously about "giving away the rights that our boys fought and died for at Valley Forge, Antietam, Chateau-Thierry, Midway, and Teheran... N evertheless Kaiish prepared to call the meeting to order. With luck the Steering Committee should be able to wind the thing up in three more days. Most of the terms and clauses of the document had already been agreed upon. There remained only the controversial questions of what power if any the World Government should have over tariffs and immigration, and this silly Space Clause in which Juan de la Torre seemed so inexplicably interested. Kalish thought such a provision absurd, but did not wish to offend la Torre, who despite his domestic sins had brought the Andean Federation into the war on the side of the United States. Kalish was opening his mouth to speak when the .sight of a messenger-boy hurry'ing down an aisle stopped him. It must be pretty urgent or the guards would never have let the boy through during the actual .session. The boy walked up to the President's desk and handed a fistful of radiogram forms to Kalish, who said "Thank you" in an absentminded way and peered at the forms. The boy murmured "Bienvenu, monsieur," and walked off. Kalish swallowed as he read. The message was one long radiogram running over a half-dozen sheets. At last he laid down the message and spoke into the microphone : "The meeting will please come to order. The first item on today's agenda is the so-called Space Clause proposed by the delegation from the Andean Federation. It was planned to conclude arguments pro and contra this clause and vote on it this afternoon. However, news has just reached me which, if authenticated, has so great a bearing on the adoption of this clause that I think I should read it to you. It is a Reuters dispatch from Dar jeeling, India, and reads as follows : November fifth. An object described as a spaceship of extraterrestrial origin landed yesterday in eastern Nepal, near the Tibetan border in the vicinity of Kishanganj. First reports indicate that the beings who man the ship are green bipeds nine feet tall with tentacles for arms. Their intentions are said to be friendly. The arrival of a visitor from outer space is confirmed by a number of witnesses in Sikkim, over which the ship slowly passed while looking for a landing-place. In view of the enormous importance of this arrival, both as proving the longsurmised existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life and as bearing upon the political organization of the world to deal with the problems posed by this fact, the government of Nepal has waived its usual prohibition against entry of foreigners into the country to permit qualified experts and officials of the Indian Government to investigate the visitors. As Prime Minister Rajendrachandramohananath of Nepal expressed it in a telephone-call to Darjeeling, "For the sake of God, sirs, let wise men be sent forthwith to cope with this appalling manifestation. We of Nepal are not qualified to do so." Pending the arrival of an official mission of the Indian Government to welcome the visitors in the name of the. peoples of the earth, Richard Nugent, a retired American journalist living in Darjeeling, has crossed the border into Nepal and struck out into the wild region where the ship is said to have come to earth -- K alish finished the radiogram, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes with his finger-tips. Then he said: "In view of the imporjnce -- Wilhelm Feuer, of the German delegation, was waving for attention. When recognized he said-. "This is all very impressive, Mr. President, but let us not by our emotions carried.away be. To me it seems that the coincidence of such a landing, just when the so-called Space Clause is under consideration, is simply too perfect to be believed. At least we should await confirmation to be sure that we are not the victims of a hoax."  "As I was about to say," continued Kalish, "in view of the importance of this development, the chair will entertain a motion to defer action on this clause until this time tomorrow." The motion was made and carried, and for the rest of that session the Convention devoted itself to a long wrangle over tariffs. When the meeting adjourned, the members swarmed around the newsstand. By that time the newspapers bore not only the Reuters dispatch that Kalish had read, but a confirmatory Associated Press dispatch giving further information. Richard Nugent, it seemed, had radioed that he had reached the space-ship and met the aliens, who had brought an elaborate equipage of linguistic apparatus, picturebooks and the like, to enable them to get intb communication with the Terrans. Further information was promised soon. Mateo Marco Lope Aguirre Malaria glanced up from his newspaper with a smile of quiet triumph. It seemed to him that the other delegates were looking at each other with a new seriousness. When he had brought up the Space Clause, some had thought it ridiculous because there were no intelligent extra-terrestrials; others preferred to leave all nonessential controversies to the future, counting on amending the Constitution when and if civilized e. t.'s were discovered. Now that the delegates were faced with extra-terrestrial reality, the petty national disputes that had stirred up such high words and hard feelings seemed small. Next morning the papers carried still more information. By working furiously Nugent had gotten into communication with the aliens. He announced that they were from a planet of the small star Ross #. There was a blurry radiophotograph which Nugent had transmitted with his portable set to Darjeeling and which had then been re-transmitted around the world. It showed a bald man standing between two tall things that might have been a backward child's attempt to model a man in plasticene. The Indian party had already flown to Darjeeling and would take off the following day for the spaceship in a helicopter with a television camera... At that afternoon's session, Aguirre braced himself for argument. But none came. In fact one of his bitterest critics, Jacob Atta of Nigeria, rose to say: "While I have been opposed to this clause in the past, the events of the last twenty-four hours have changed my mind, Even If the space-ship should turn out to be a hoax, I now think it advisable to have this clause in the Constitution, just in case." After a minor bicker over the meaning of the world "intercourse," the Convention adopted the Space Clause and went on to the rest of its business. There was little debate; everybody's mind was far away, in the rhinoceros-haunted wilds of Nepal. In fact the President (Bretkun of Lithuania) managed to get compromise proposals on tariffs and immigration adopted that afternoon, leaving nothing to do but make laudatory speeches until the Drafting Committee finished polishing and homogenizing the final draft. The Sheikh of Aden made a speech in Arabic, followed by speeches from delegates of Afghanistan, Albania, and Algeria, and then the meeting adjourned. A guirre was relaxing in the bar when his glorious chidf stalked in and rode up to him. "Aguirre," said la Torre, "we leave tomorrow. Are you ready?" "Carajo! Why, chief?" "I have received word that my enemies conspire against me, so I must get back to Andea at once." "But you will miss the final ratification!" "No; I have arranged it with Kalish and Carstairs-Brown. The Drafting Committee shall work all night and present the Constitution tomorrow morning to a special session. Then I will make my speech -- Andea comes alphabetically after Algeria -- and we shall rush to the airport as soon as I have finished. Get packed." "Yes, yes, chief, of course." And so it was done. La Torre's airplane was over Venezuela when the radio broke the news that the arrival of the extra-terrestrial space-ship had been a hoax after all, perpetrated by a group of journalists including Dagobert Heck and Richard Nugent. The announcer ended with a sardonic note : -- the delegates to the World Government Constitutional Convention are having a hearty laugh over the departing speech made this morning by Senor Juan de la Torre Baroja, in which he boasted in extravagant terms of his authorship of the Space Clause and claimed sole credit for any benefits that might accrue to the earth hereafter as a result of communication yith other civilized planets. However, inquiries at the Convention indicated that there is no present intention of repealing the Space Clause, as this would require procedural complications, and since the clause is regarded as at worst a harmless piece of whimsy -- " Aguirre became conscious of his chiefs glittering black eyes. La Torre rasped: "So! My dignity has been insulted! And who is responsible? Who put me up to backing that accursed Space Clause, saying that it would rebound to the eternal fame and credit of the Andean Federation and its President, the people's choice, Juan Serafin de la Torre Baroja? Who led me astray and exposed me naked to the pitiless laughter of the world? Fool! Poltroon !" The President's voice rose to a scream as he added details of Aguirre's ancestry and love-life. He caught Aguirre by the lapels and shook the smaller man until the latter's teeth rattled. He slapped his face, forehand and backhand, a dozen times, then hurled the eminent jurist from him, shouting: "Guards! Tie up this filth until I can deal with him in a more appropriate manner!" In the prison, Aguirre stood on the trap with the rope around his neck. In one corner his wife and his mistress sobbed quietly in each other's arms. In front of him stood la Torre with fists on well-padded hips, grinning ferociously. "Ha!" snarled the President. "So, you thought I should weaken and let you go for old times sake? Have you ever known me to forget an insult to my dignity?" "No, sir," said Aguirre miserably. "If you are going to hang me, will you please get it over with?" "I will hang you when I am ready. I have had requests from many quarters, including the President of the United States himself, to let you off. I threw these impertinent requests back in their faces! I told them that if I heard any more such mush, I should refuse to ratify the Constitution! That is what I, Juan Serafin de la Torre Baroja, think of the rest of the world! Well, hangman, are you ready?" "Ready, chief," replied the hangman. La Torre gave the final command. The hangman did his duty. The wife and mistress screamed in perfect timing with the snap of the rope. Dr. Aguirre departed for happier climes. While the body still swung, an officer of the Federal Police hurried on the scene. He said, "Chief, you won't believe this, but -- " "But what?" "The ambassador Mencias Mola is here with a visitor. This visitor is one of a group who arrived in Mexico a few hours ago. Senor Mencias flew this one here as fast as possible." La Torre gaped. The visitor blinked three of his seven eyes and extended a tentacle. La Torre took the tentacle in his right hand and shook it. The other four eyes of the visitor were trained upon the figure dangling on the scaffold, with -- la Torre thought -- a definite indication of curiosity. "Does he," la Torre asked the officer, "speak the language of my people?" "Oh yes. Very smart, these extraterrestials." "We have machines that teach quickly frorn your radio broadcasts," the e. t. said. "Ah -- the suspended individual -- " "A martyr to his country. A paragon of wisdom and loyalty. Even now I am planning a special medal for him." La Torre stepped close to the scaffold and peered upward through experienced eyes. "It will of course be awarded posthumously," he said with marked sadness. "ril give you the cure for the most horrible disease," Songeen said. "The sickness of life itself." Newlin replied, "Fine. But first, give me a couple of minutes to kill your husband. T hen we'll go on from there" Shock Treatment . I By Stanley Mullen night, it is difficult to tell for certain where the town leaves off and the pink elephants begin. It is difficult to tell about other things, too. Spud Newlin had heard that a man could sometimes get rich overnight just tending bar on such occasions, and he was putting the rumor to the test. Not many bartenders had lasted long enough to find out. The night had had a good start. Clock hands over the bar in the Spacebell registered #:# Venustime, and considering, things were almost dull at the moment. The The spolight meant violence and sudden death. place had been jumping earlier, but hilarity had worn itself out, the dead had been removed and excitement dulled. No relatives or widows of the dead sportsmen had yet appeared; all corpses-elect had died clean, with the minimum of messy violence and, surprisingly, only three moreor less innocent bystanders had been burned down in the proceedings. After shattering uproar, such calm was disturbing. Newlin was actually getting bored. Then she came in -- and he was no longer bored. But, perversely, he resented the surge of interest that ran through him at sight of this out-of-place girl. At a casual glance, she might seem ordinary, but Newlin was never superficial. Her kind of beauty was something to be sensed, not catalogued. It was part of the odd grace of movement, of the fine, angular features, of the curious emotion which dwelt upon them, sad and subdued. Even her costume was as out of place in the Spacebell as her mood; the dress was simply cut and expensive, but drab for the time and place. It clung about a slight, well-formed body in smoothly curved lines that seemed almost a part of her. Only her hands and eyes showed nervous tension. At first he thought her eyes were cold, but it was something racial rather than personal. He noticed that they were large and luminous -- like moonstones -- with a pearly opaque glimmer as if only upper layers colored and reflected light. In their depths was an odd effect, like metalflakes drifting through ribboned moonlight with abysses of deepest shadow beyond. There was pain, trouble, and sadness in them, and behind that, fear -- a desperate fear. You thought of wailing, haunted moonlight, and of dreadful things fled from in dreams. Newlin's first thought was that she was one of the new-made widows, and was likely to be all too human about it. Later, when he had begun to doubt that she was allhuman, her physical charms still went inside him and turned like a dull knife. He was no morft immune to animal attraction than the next man, but in this particular woman there was something else even more intriguing and unpredictable. He felt a powerful impulse to do something to relieve her of that paralyzing supernatural dread. A situation pregnant with violence was working up at one of the gaming tables but Newlin wilfully tore his attention from the mounting tension between the fat Martian gambler and an ugly character from Ganymede. "Anything I can do for you, sister?" Her smile was strange, thoughtful, preoccupied. "Yes," she told him. "There is something you can do for me. Unless your question was purely professional. If so, forget it. I need something stronger than the -- the liquors you serve here." Newlin grinned sourly. "You' don't know our drinks. One sip and a mouse snarls at a snow-leopard. The question was not purely professional. Not my profession, anyhow. I don't know about yours. Or do I?" H er head jerked on its slender stalk of neck. Pale eyes stared into his; her lips twisted in cold scorp. "i don't think you do. And I'll do without your help. Perhaps you'd better go back to polishing glassware." The rebuke failed to impress Newlin. He waited while her glance swung about the room, evaluating the place and its occupants in one quick sweep. Dissatisfied, she turned back to Newlin and again the moonstruck eyes probed and assessed him. "Take your pick," he said sharply. "But don't judge them by their clothes. On Venus, a man in ragged spaceleather may have heavy pockets. Now, take me -- " "I was told I could find Spud Newlin here. Point Kim out and I'll pay your fee -- " Newlin was suddenly cautious. "Yes, he's here -- but what would a woman like you want with such a notorious -- " "I'm asking questions, not answering," she said calmly. "And I'm well aware of his failings. I selected him because of his... his reputation. It's revolting, but even such a man may have uses. My requirements of him, and my reasons for the choice, I will discuss with him. No one else." "Free advice, sister. Forget it, and get out of here. He's no good. Particularly bad, for a choice morsel like you." "I'm used to making up my own mind. Where is he?" Newlin shrugged. "You win. I'm Newlin. You take it from there." Incredulity flooded her face and slowly drained away. "You! Yes, you could be Newlin. But you're working here. A famous man like you. Why?" Newlin laughed easily. "It's very simple. I need money. If I can last through till morning. I'll have it. Now I'll ask the questions. You answer them. What do you want? Why me?" A variety of expressions flowed over her mobile features. "But -- you could leave?" she faltered.  "I could, but I won't. This isn't charity night, kid. So go home and come back another, time. Tomorrow." "Tomorrow won't do. Maybe I've chosen the wrong man, but there's no time for second chances. I wanted a man with courage, a man used to living dangerously and going his own way, a man who wouldn't ask questions and would do anything for money. You sounded like something out of the old books; a rogue; a rebel." Newlin sighed. Did it show so much? From the gutter that spawned him, he had fought and gouged and elbowed his way up. To him all men were enemies. As a spacebum, he had explored the raw, expanding frontiers as Man surged from planet to planet. As a hunted outlaw he had existed perilously on the twilight fringes of civilization. Ruthless and savage, a thief and despoiler, a criminal and adventurer, he had found his way back to Earth, Mars, Venus and wrested a niche of sorts within the citadCjls he had attempted to overthrow.! Despite the brittle amnesty, he knew that authority awaited only a single slip to deal with him according to their views. But in the bitterness of ultimate disillusions, he had found the fountainhead as lacking in civilization and sanity as its furthest riples. He longed, now, only for the final gesture of rejection. Escape... "I had expected more of Newlin," said the girl. laugh. "So had I. My character is as corrupt as the rest of mankind. Poverty is' undignified and degrading; it poisons virtue and debases the outlook. Without money a man cannot claim his birthright of freedom ; getting money he loses his independence and his character." "You think money would make you free?" the girl asked... "Not of itseih" Newlin scowled. "With money, a free man can be free; a slave with money is still a slave. Perhaps I want to learn for myself which I am. I want enough to pay for a spaceship, the best to he had. A one-man ship in which I can escape this madhouse and venture alone -- beyond Pluto. Such a plan requires money, so I work in the Spacebell. Between wages, tips, graft and my winnings, I may have half enough, by dawn. If I live that long." The girl nodded, then spoke contemptuously, "I can pay very generously. You can set your own price. Enough even for your spaceship. But what do you expect to find -- beyond Pluto?" "Myself, first. After that, who knows? This solar system is a vast pesthouse. I am contaminated by fools, moneygrubbers, sheep and the corrupt authorities that rule them. What else I find isn't important if I find myself. Even death." Newlin's eyes burned with a hot glare of fanaticism. Dread sprang info the girl's heart. Always with these people there was this fear, this panic-desire to escape, always an urge to destruction coupled with eery mysticism, compulsions, conflicts -- and always the final delusion of personal sanity in the atmosphere of chaos. Some of Newlin's words found echo in herself, but she checked a momentary sympathy. The system was mad, true -- but how sane was Newlin? How sane and trustworthy? He could be a dangerous tool in her unskilled, frightened hands. She had chosen him on the basis of his reputation. From his police record, and other documents. A capable man, courageous and selfreliant, ingenious, but a person of tensions and conflicts, a man of violence, unpredictable, tom by contradictory impulses, a savage but not without kindness and generosity. For her purposes, he might do as well as any other. At worst a man, cast in heroic mold. Quickly, but not without revulsions and reservations, she made fateful decision. "For a man of your talents," she said, "the task should be simple. I want you to break into a building and bring me something. There is danger you would not understand. If you fail, death for both of us. For success, you set the price. Are you interested?" Newlin laughed cynically. "You promi.se the moon if I can steal it for you, nothing if I can't?" "No such shrewd bargaining," the girl murmured uneasily. "But name the amount you hoped to make here. I will match it now -- and double it if you accomplish my errand." "Fair enough," said Newlin. "But kejep your money. I'll case the job first. Pay me later -- if I don't change my mind again." Ducking behind the bar, he shed his apron and buzzed for the standin bartender. Ed Careld forsook his interminable game of Martian chess and appeared to take over. "Seems quiet," he said. "What's up?" "Nothing," Newlin told him. "Private business. I may not be back. Keep an eye on Table Three." Careld nodded, eyed the gamblers at Table Three dubiously. He tied his apron carefully and sidled toward the table to oversee the situation and clamp down a lid if necessary. Table Three picked that moment to erupt in profane violence. Three languages splashed pungently in dispute which passed quickly to a climax of crisscrossed heat-beam both the fat Martian and his adversary from Ganymede survived, and only two questionable kibitzers blazed into sudden oblivion. Careld swept up the corpses into neat piles of ash, then tried to warn the combatants against further displays of short temper. H e died in an outburst of majority resentment, punctuated by heat-beams. Newlin returned behind the counter and buzzed for Careld's stand-in. Then clutching the girl's arm, he left the place, dragging her along. The street was dim, silent, deserted. "Where to?" asked Newlin. Her quick nod indicated direc- tion. "Walking distance?" he persisted. "Inside the city? If not, I'll have to get protection suits from a public locker." Just inside. Monta Park." Newlin whistled. "Nice neighborhood. Do you live there?" "No," she faltered. "I'm just in from -- Earth." Earth! It was a long time since Newlin had seen Earth. Few of his memories were pleasantly nostalgic. Bom there, in the poorest quarter of the international spaceport of Sahara City, his early life had been hard. Both parents had died there, broken from strain and poverty, and Newlin escaped only by stowing away in the dangerous after-holds of a rocketship bound for Mars, risking the unpleasant death from leaking radioactives in preference to being poor on Earth. He had been poor since, in many places, but never with the grinding hopelessness of those early nightmare years. Their mark stayed with him and colored his life. He knew every rathole of the system, with the same intimacy the rats knew them. Once, on a non-stop express rocket from Mars to Pluto, he had lost a finger and all the toes from his left foot in ceaseless guerilla warfare with rats which had disputed possession of the hold in which he stowed away. More than once he had bummed passage near the atomic fuel vats of cranky old spacefreighters that were mere tin cans caulked with chewing gum. As boy and man, he slept in jails from the dark, mad moons of Neptune to the fiery beach-head colonies of Mercury. And with fists, brain and nimble fingers he had written an epic biography in Security Police annals. Like other cities of the space frontier, Venusport was raw and crude, cxotically beautiful and cruelly violent. To Newlin it was old stuff, picturesque, with the spicy flavor of a perilous vacation spot. After abrasive years on a dozen planets and habitable moons, the ugly savageries of Venus had only a quaint charm. Survival was always comparatively easy there, and a man shed normal fears with the shredding, blistered skin of spaceburns. He was surprised when the girl shuddered and drew close to him. Her instinctive trust amused him, and he laughed brutally. The sound slashed between them like a chilled blade. They went together, in silence. Faint, flat breeze from the city's airconditioners fanned their faces. It was dark enough, and for Venus, reasonably cool. Buildings strewn like a careless giant's toys formed a vague and monstrous backdrop. Street-lighting was poor, for such luxuries are expensive and the city fathers cared little what happened to the poor, diseased, half-starved nonenities. All streets were crooked aimless alleys, all black and empty. Only near landing stages and spacefreight elevators was there any activity. Darkness and the Cyclopean setting gave more menace than intimacy to the dim tangles of avenues and parkways. The girl stopped, panting for breath. Newlin waited for her. "You're a fool to trust yourself alone with me in a place like this," he told her grimly. She hugged the loose mantle tightly across her shoulders and tried vainly to read his face in the murk. "if you're trying to frighten me, you're wasting time," she said "I have more important fears." Newlin chuckled. Skinny wench, but she had something. There was pride in her, and scorn, and a hot spark that burned through the tones of cold scorn. Something else, too. A hint of desperate courage that baffled him. "I still think you should have tried the panther sweat at the Spacebell," he suggested. "One sip and -- " "I know," she snapped. "And I hope you've had yours for tonight. You'll need it. We're almost there." "In that case, we'd better talk," he said curtly. "I still know nothing about you. Who you are, what you want? I don't even know your name." She spoke in low, vibrant tones, but the language seemed unfamiliar to her. She groped for exact words, extracted subtle meanings. But there was a hesitance, an uneasiness, about speech itself, as if she found it a tedious and inflexible medium for thought expressions. "I told you. In a -- building, there is a man I must see. He does not wish to see me, and there are barriers I cannot pass. The building is a combination workshop and living quarters, and something else you would not understand. You must go side for me and induce him to come out to me. My name is Songeen. Tell him that. He will know me, and perhaps he will come. But it has been so long -- " Newlin grunted. "That man I must see. One who wouldn't come when you whistled. However long it has been?" "He has changed -- greatly. He may be insane. He may be dangerous. In self-defense, it may be necessary for you to kill him. For your protection, I have provided a weapon. Use all other means to persuade him first, but threaten if you have to. And be ready to kill if he attacks you. But dead or alive, bring him to me." errand. Even more, he disliked himself. For a brittle moment, he was moved to turn back, refuse to carry out a bargain he now reof a jealous or scorned woman, was too ugly even for his calloused morality. "Preferably dead?" he asked thinly. "Preferably alive," Songeen murmured. "You would not understand, of course. It is because I love him. He will not come, but he must have the chance. And I must send a stranger to kill him, because he has -- forgotten." Newlin stiffened angrily. He was on the point of rejecting the girl and her project when a battery of lights moved toward them from the winding lanes of the Park. Too well he knew what they meant. As the wealthiest district of Venusport, Monta Park was smug, respectable, luxurious -- and protected. Roving radio-patrols of Protection Police -- privately hired thugs -- guarded its dwellers and their possessions. A prowling monocar slowed and maneuvered to cast a revealing spotlight on the loitering pair. Newlin, had he been alone, might have dodged into the dense shrubbery, but the girl knew better. Calmly she turned to face down the occupants of the PP car, and her haughty expression would have chilled the blood of any PP constable presumptuous enough to question her. Her attitude and the obvious richness of her clothing seemed to satisfy the patrol, for the beam swung briefly and hesitated on Newlin. He dropped behind her like a servant bodyguard and hoped his scuffed space-leather was not too noticeable. The beam held for seconds, then flicked out. Soundlessly the patrol car vanished. Neither spoke as the pair moved quickly into the precincts of the Park. As residence area, it was splashy; a series of interlocked estates rather than expensive mansions packed closely together. Each unit sat alone in sprawling, neatly sheared grounds, landscajjed with flowering trees and set with the chill sophistication of statuary in gold, silver and platinum. Botanical splendors from exotic worlds rioted in orderly tangles of aromatic greenery, with sculpture of glass, marble and the noble metals glinting like pale ghosts against the darker masses. Shadows parted before them. Half-hidden among trees rose a slender spire, needle-shaped, tall as a tower, but unwindowed. For a dwelling, its design was curious, and the interior must consist of circular rooms one above the other. At the base, an arched, oval aperture should have been the door, but neither handle nor keyhole showed on the flat, polished plate. "Here we are," the girl said needlessly, her voice soft as a hint of pain trembled in it. A tremor ran through her body as she thrust out two objects toward him. A key and a gun. "You will need these," she went on. "He will be in one of the upper rooms. His name is Genarion. Perhaps he will talk with you, especially if you surprise him. But remember, he is deadly. His scientific knowledge is a more frightful weapon than this. So do not hesitate to use violence." Newlin fumbled the gun into a pocket, fingered the key. It was slim as a needle and as smooth. Without comment, he stared at her as weariness and disgust strangled him. "Tell me your price," she said quickly, as if in haste to get words out before either could think too much. "I will pay -- now." Shabby bargaining, he thought. But he would call her bluff and force her to back down. "Not money," he said savagely. "I don't kill for money. For a woman, yes. I want you." He expected anger, scorn, even hatred. She gasped and her face went pale and hard. Wilting under his glare, she nodded. "Yes, even that -- if you wish. I have no choice." Newlin felt sick, empty. He no longer de.sired her, even if she were self. But a bargain was still a bargain. He shrugged. Like an outsize toy, a child's model of a spaceship, the oddly graceful structure towered upward into arching darkness. Like her, it was slender, radiant, beautiful. Bitterly, he caught the girl, dragged her to him, felt her flesh yielding to him. She leaned and met his lips with hers. The kiss was cold and ugl as writhing snakes. Cold. Ugly. Alien... T he key went in smoothly, did not turn. It must have been impregnated with magnetism. Somewhere electronic relays clicked switches faintly. The door was open, its movement indescribable in familiar terms. It neither slid, nor swung on hinges. There was no door, much as if a light had switched off. A rush of air came out. It had the high, sharp tang of ozone, and something unfamiliar. Newlin stood inside what was obviously an airlock valve. A door inside had opened soundlessly. He went on. Beyond the Inner doorway was a large circular room. Its dimensions seemed far greater than Newlin would have guessed from the exterior of the building. This was no mere dwelling, no laboratory or workshop. It was a spaceship of radical design. Elfin stair-ladders spiralled up and down. The girders seemed impossibly delicate and fragile, as if their purpose was half-decoration, half-functional; and stresses involved were unimportant. Such support framework was insane -- in any kind of spaceship. It had the quality of fairyland architecture, a dream ship woven from the filaments of spiderwebs. But there was hidden strength, and truly functional design, as may be found in spiderwebs. Newlin was no engineer, but he sensed solidity and sound mathematics behind the toy structure's delicacy. The stair ladder supported him without vibration, without give or any feeling of insecurity. He climbed. Walls and the floor and ceiling bulkheads were rigid to his touch, supported his weight firmly, despite their eggshell-thin appearance of fragility. There were no corners; everything fused together seamlessly in smooth curves. Walls were selfluminous and oddly cool. The lower chambers were bare of all furnishing. Higher levels contained a hodge-podge of implements, all in the same light, strong formula of design. But none familiar, either as to material or their possible function. There were machines, but all too simple. Neither the bulk of atomic engines nor the intricate complexities inseparable from electric or combustion motors. Newlin was puzzled. He stopped to listen, feeling like an intruder into a strange world. The building, or spaceship, ached with silence. Another stairwell beckoned. He climbed, slowly, with increased caution. It would do no harm to have the gun in hand, ready. Where was the man who lived in such a place? And what sort of man could he be? What would he have in common with the frightened, haughty girl outside? The obvious explanation no longer satisfied. As Newlin ascended, another floor opened and widened to his vision. The stair-ladder ended here. It was the top floor. But this chamber seemed infinitely larger than the others. At first there was no sight of the man. Newlin stood alone in the center of a vast area. He did not seem indoors at all. Endless vistas extended to infinity in all directions. In all directions save one, in which stood a tall shadow. Newlin gasped. It was his shadow, detached, seemingly solid. Three-dimensional, it stood stock still. It moved when he moved. He gasped, then found the answer. By the shadow's echo of his movements, he could trace a vague outline of encirclement. The walls were a screen, a circle about the room upon which were cast pictures so perfect that the beholder had illusion of being surrounded by eery, exotic landscapes. The scenes were panoramic, all taken at the same angle, by the same camera, and so cunningly fused into a whole that the effect was beyond mere artifice. For a moment, Newlin had stood within the strange world, its crystalline forms and strange jeweled life as tri-dimensional and real as himself. It was a large screen, alive with light, alive with dancing, flickering figures. There was no visible projector, and the images were disturbingly solid and real. There was depth, without any perception of perspective. It was a reflection of reality, cast upon the plane of circling walls. Then a man stepped from the screen. He had been invisible, because the projected images had flowed and accommodated themselves to his metal-cloth smock. For the moment, he had been part of the screen. Newlin could not tear his eyes from that glaring plane of illusion. Something about the glare played havoc with nerves, and a faint hint of diabolical sound tortured his brain. No such world could exist in a sane universe. Not even with its terrible and heartbreakingly poignant beauty. It was a vision of Hell, bright with impossible octaves of light, splendid with raging infernos of blinding color, some of it beyond the visible range of human sight. And there was sound, pouring in maddening floods, sound in nerve-shattering symphonies like the tinkling clatter of many Chinese windbells of glass, all pouring out cascades of brittle, crystalline uproar. Sound and light rose in storming crescendos, beyond sight and beyond hearing. They ranged into madness. N ewlin screamed, tried to cover eyes and ears at once. He tried to run, but nerve-agony paralyzed movement. He was chained to the spot. Sound and color descended simultaneously into bearable range. He stared at the man he had come to see. He stared and the man stared back. "Genarion?" Newlin asked, his voice thin and vague among the tumultuous harmonies bursting from the screen. "Who are you that calls me by that name?" cried Genarion. He spoke in the same curious manner as the girl. He showed amazement. mixed with an ugly kind of terror. "You're not one of them!" "Them?" Newlin said, striving for sanity as sound and light swelled again. His brain reeled. "Songeen sent me -- !" Speech itself was a supreme effort. Genarion was beyond speech. Tigerishly, he moved. He leaped upon Newlin and thrust him back. Newlin sprawled painfully, his back arched and twisted by invisible machinery. Genarion stood with a gun in his hand. Aiming hastily, he pre.ssed trigger. The beam flashed and licked charred cloth and smoking leather from Newlin's sleeve. There was an odd jangle from the invisible machinery which gouged so tangibly into Newlin's body. Instinctively, Newlin fired. He did not bother to aim. For him, such a shot was point blank, impossible to miss. Genarion staggered. Part of his body vaporized and hung in dazzling mist as the projected images of light played over it. Dazed, Newlin scrambled to his feet. He was sick. But the screen held him. He stared, hypnotized. Images jigged and flowed in constant, eery rhythms. They moved and melted and rearranged themselves in altered patterns, without ever losing their identities or the illusion of solidity. The scene was not part of Venus, or of any world Newlin had seen. He had seen every planet or moon in the Solar system. But this was dififerent, alien, frightening. And the screen was not really a screen at all, for the body of Genarion, hideous in the distortion of death, lay halfway through its plane. And it was changing, subtly, as he watched. It was no longer even a man, totally unhuman, as alien as the world it lay partway in. The body flowed, molten, hideous. The screen was a surrealist painting, come alive, solid and real.,And the solid, physical body of Genarion was part of it. He was dead, but real. His alien form was a bridge between two worlds, and now dead, Genarion was alien to both of them. It was madness. The madness of the screen communicated itself to Newlin. Before his shocked eyes, Genarion's body began to steam and rise in a cloud of vaporous, glittering crystals. Swiftly the haze dissipated. It was gone, gone invisibly into the alien world. Whatever Newlin had killed, it was not human, not a man. Newlin turned and fled down the fairy stair-ladder. He went through the still-open airlock doors and out into the screaming night. Behind him alarms were ringing frantically. Now they would be ringing in the stations of the Protection Police and call orders would go out to the radio-equipped prowl cars. Police would converge swiftly. Sound shattered the night stillness. From far away, coming closer, was the shrill wail of a siren. Other sirens. There was a harsh bleat of police whistles, near at hand. Newlin's imagination quivered with the possibility of blaster beams thrusting at his back. He fled. The alarms had burst into sound too quickly. Had the girl set the police on him, waiting only long enough to make sure he would accomplish his mission? Whatever he had been set to kill, had not been human. Not a man. Intuitively, Newlin realized that the girl had anticipated everything. She knew what would happen, he reflected bitterly. She had promised payment only on delivery ' of a corpse, when there could be no corpse. Spud Newlin, Sucker No. #. Conscience did not trouble him. After all, the man -- or the thing -- had fired first, without warning, without waiting to hear him out. Without waiting for details like identity, or even asking to hear the message he brought. It was selfdefense, in a peculiar way. N ewlin ran and tried to lose himself in the shadowy fastness of Monta Park. He was not surprised that the girl had not troubled to wait and meet him. He was not even angry. It was part of the game. The Protection Police radios were carrying the alarm. Soon the Security Police would take up the hunt. If the girl had turned him in, she would be able to give a detailed and accurate description. Newlin guessed that he would be lucky to last even the few hours till daylight -- or what passes for daylight on cloud-shrouded Venus. Long before then, his career might end suddenly in a wild network of blaster or heat beams. By dawn he would very likely be crumpled among the ashcans and refuse in any dark alley. But still the city would be his best bet. No use beating his way to the spaceport landing stages. Space Patrol units must have been notified, and would already be searching all outgoing units. For the moment, he had a brief interval of grace in which to think things over and try, if only for his own satisfaction, to figure out what had happened. It -- whatever it was -- had writhed hideously when the blaster beam drove home. Part of it vaporized instantly, and the organs revealed did not even look animal. Eery, geometric, but riot the naked electronic symmetries of a mechanical robot. Not metal. But what? Collapsed like wet sacking, it had lain half-inside and half-outside the screen. He could not recall clearly its rapid mutations of form after that. Did it matter? The alarms were out. Blaring metallic clangor, and the uncanny banshee wailing of the hunting sirens. Police care little who is murdered in the nameless dives of Venusport, but let one of the lordly, rich men die, and all Hell is loosed on the killer. If the girl had turned in the alarm, it was only a matter of time. They would have his name and number; his ident-card would be listed and reproduced, sent everywhere. They would probably have the robot trackers out, those hideous electronic bloodhounds which can unerringly sort out a man's trail from the infinity of other scents and markings, following not smell, but a curious tangle of electrical impulses left by his body like static electricity or intangible magnetism. No layman could even guess how such a robot worked, but fugitives had learned to dread its infallible tracking ability. Newlin fled, and as he went, he cursed himself for getting involved in such a nightmare. Figures moved and blundered about him in the darkness of the park, but none got in his way. None seemed to notice him. Since it was not a man he had killed, perhaps others hunted him; other remote, alien beings he could nt)t see, or sense. The girl would know, of course. If he could find her. But she had vanished before he ever issued from the strange tower, and it was highly unlikely that he would ever see her again. Chance, and a sudden rush of blue-clad figures across a street ahead of him, turned Newlin back toward his own, famih'ar part of town. The scant shelter of shadows in deserted alleyways was a comfort, but little real protection. He had friends, of a peculiar sort, in the old native quarter, and the Spacebell lay just outside the fringe of the mutants' district, where the halfhuman natives laired up. These friends might hide him, for a while, although such refuge was of little use against the robot-trackers. By daylight, he could be smuggled outside the domed city, and once into the wastelands, there was a chance. Not a good one; but there, even the robot-tracker could hardly come upon him without his knowledge. A lucky blaster shot would leave a blank trail and a shattered robot for his pursuers to follow. He wondered if they would risk another such expensive machine merely to hunt down a murderer in the wastelands. Scarcely, when the wastelands would kill the fugitive sooner or later anyhow. His first task was to reach the Spacebell and collect his pay. Then to get protection-armor, against the peril of sandstorms and the radioactive sinks that spot the old sea-beds outside Venusport. After that, the native quarter, if he lived to reach it. Shortly before daylight, he turned the last alley-corner and came in sight of the Spacebell. A shadow stirred with movement. A lithe, loosely draped figure hurried to meet him. It was the girl- -- Songeen. "Don't go in there," she said. "They know who you are, and the police are waiting for you." Newlin felt numb all over. "How did they know? Did you tell them?" he snapped. "Of . course not. Don't be a fool. Would I inform, then wait to warn you? I did not know he had automatic alarms, and automatic cameras to make records of anyone who came into the -- the place. It was the pictures. They were identified with your ident-card at the Central Police Bureau. And the robot-trackers are out." N ewlin and Songeen studied each other for a long moment of silence. "I guess it doesn't matter now," Newlin said finally, "but I'm glad you didn't turn me in. I might almost as well give up and get the thing over with. There's no place to run. Not without money." Songeen produced a small sack of platinum coins which jingled as she offered it. "That's one reason I tried to find you. After the alarms, I knew I would only handicap your flight. I hid. Then I came here, because I thought you might come back. I'm sorry I have no more money, but the rest is all in credits. It would be no help to you in the wastelands." "I see," muttered Newlin. "Why did you care? Were you afraid I'd talk if the Police caught me?" Songeen shrugged coldly. "No, I hadn't thought of that. But I think I owe you something. Murderer's wages. I knew you couldn't fulfil your bargain when you made it. But, in a way, I am responsible for you." "In a way," agreed Newlin bitterly. He snatched at the bag of coins. "This will do. Thanks for nothing." "Don't blame me too much. I had no choice, and I did not know it would work out like this." "Perhaps not, but next time do your victims." Songeen was crying, tearless wracking sobs that shook her frail body. "I'm sorry," she moaned. "But I couldn't even get in to see him. He knew the exact vibration level of my body, and had set supersonic traps to kill me if I tried to enter. Even my bones would have shattered. I would have died painfully and horribly. I would rather have died myself than cause his death. Believe that. There is always a third victim. He was my husband, and I loved him. You can't understand, of course -- " "I understand less than ever now." Newlin knew that it was madness to remain so close to the Spacebell. But he could not force himself to leave Songeen. She seemed near collapse. A thought struck him. "Say, is there anything there to tie you up with this business?" Songeen gave a wry thrust of her thin shoulders. "Much -- but does it matter? It was my -- our home. Before he tricked me outside and would not let me return. They don't know what happened -- yet. But there will be enough evidence against both of us. Part of what you saw was illusion. His body is still there. Changed -- but the trackers can identify it. The charge is murder, and they will want both of us. Not just you." "Come with me." Newlin spoke harshly -- sharply. The girl's eyes flickered. "Are you threatening me?" "No. It's just that I've led them to you. We're in the same boat now. With the mechanical hounds on our heels. They will connect you through me, now that our trails have crossed. And they'll follow both of us. How will you manage?" Songeen smiled wearily. "One always takes risks. Icame here prepared for -- anything."  "Don't be a fool! Protection Police don't stop to ask questions. They're hired Killers." "I suppose not. What do you suggest?" ' "Run and hide. Come with me, if you like. But suit yourself. I'm getting out of here. Out into the wastelands. It's almost dawn now. In the city, we're lost. Outside, there's a chance. A poor one, but -- " Light was that gray ugliness that precedes the smeary glare of dawn on Venus. The girl seemed very slight and young and helpless. Again, Newlin felt that impulse to save and protect her. He could see no details of feature, even her face was shadowed, and not quite human; but her body was beautiful, and trembling. "Are you coming?" he asked, savagely. "I'll go with you," she said. "You're kind. Perhaps I can help you. If they corner us, please kill me. I don't like -- being hurt." Newlin laughed grimly. "It's a promise. But I'll kill some of them, first." -- not for me." wastelands. Spud Newlin called a halt. The girl had trudged wearily behind him, uncomplaining and with patient determination. They wasted no precious breath in words, and walking had been doubly diffi-; cult for her. The protection armor was twice too large, and very cumbersome for such a slight figure ; but such garments never come in halfsize. Children and women are forbidden to venture into the wastelands, except in special vehicles. Actually they had started out by vehicle. But it was old, cranky and ready for the junkyard. In the first flurry of sandstorm, it had clogged, burned out and died. Nothing very reliable was available in the black market without more notice. , Newlin accepted the inevitable and proceeded on foot. Perhaps they could reach the Archaeological Station at Sansurra. He was not certain if it would be inhabited at the Sandstorm season, but there was a good chance of stored food and water. Turning back to Venusport was impossible. So they went on. Now he was confused. Directions are difRcult at best on Venus, and his radio-compass proved faulty. He had only the vaguest idea where they were, and none at all where they were headed. But if he stopped too long, the shifting dunes would cover them. And if they tried to go too fast,it would be fatally easy to blunder into one of the open sinkholes of molten, radioactive metal. He stopped and motioned the girl to rest. She sank down, exhausted. Newlin adjusted the throat microphones and headsets in their plastic helmets to make for easier conversation. But for a while, neither could talk. They sat and gasped, yearning for a breath of fresh, unreclaimed air. Water supplies were low, and already Newlin had established iron rations. Drinking by tubes was difficult in the helmets and the water was warm and foul. "You're lost?" Songeen asked at last. Newlin nodded. He produced a wrinkled, battered map. "I can't even trust the compass. I don't  know where we are." The girl took the map in her gloved hands and peered intently through her face-mask. One finger traced a tiny circle in the film of dust. "I know," she said. "We are somewhere about here. And over there -- " she indicated a direction behind Newlin -- "is the city from which my people came." Newlin was startled. The directional instinct with which all Venusians are endowed was familiar enough, yet he would have sworn the girl was not from the enfeebled and mutant races of the veiled planet. She was, at once, more human -- and more remote. Songeen guessed his doubt. Through the fused quartz faceplate, her angular features wore a curious, faint smile. "No, not Venusian. This was an -- an outpost. A colony and a quarantine station. The city was abandoned long ago. Long before the atomic holocaust my people fled. Eons have passed. Everything is now in ruins -- if even ruins remain. See, it is not marked on the map. Not even as ruins. But we have unusual race-memory. I can see the fabulous towers and arsenals, the terraced gardens afid the palaces -- as if they still stood today as they were in that vanished yesterday. And we have the homing instinct. It was my people who gave it to the Venusians. The one thing of value that still remains to them." Newlin was still dubious. "Unless you're dreaming." Her linger jabbed at the map. "We are here," she insisted. "And if you care to search and dig, the city is probably still there, as it was a "Would there be water in your ruined city?" Newlin asked. "Who knows? The wells are probably all filled with sand now. Or gone dry, or become contaminated. There is always much radioactivity near the ruined cities. They were primary targets when the peoples of Venus destroyed themselves. Even this desert is mute evidence of the holocaust; if one needs evidence. My people fled before that madness, because they anticipated it." Newlin snorted. The pre-holocaust Venusians were purely legendary. No written records could exist, amid such conditions as must have followed the ancient wars. Science years had passed since Venus was a fair green planet peopled with hearty, beautiful, ease-loving races. face people had even looked upon the sun. "If you're right about where we are," Newlin growled, "I'm still interested in that city. We can never make Sansurra with the water we have. Ruined or not, there may be wells. Is there a chance?" "Not a good one," Songeen replied. "But'better than none." "Whenever you're ready," Newlin said. "You lead." Wearily, man and girl struck off across the seas of shifting sand. Great dunes blocked their way. Some they circled, others must be climbed laboriously. F rom the top of a huge, windribbed billow, Newlin stared at a pale flickering in the dust ahead. In all other directions stretched endless humps and hollows. But before him lay a great wind-scoured hollow of bare rock. Beyond that, crowning a series of low hills, which must have thrust above water line in this shallow part of the ancient, .vanished sea, were ruins. Even as ruins,, the city was spectacular. Massive columns had eroded slowly into stone toothpicks. Walls crumbled into formless heaps resembling the dunes. A few outlines of smoothed blocks and shattered lintels huddled the ground, half hidden by the encroaching sand. Details had vanished eons ago, but something still remained to tantalize imagination. The few buildings that still stood, and the soaring, fragile towers evidenced an engineering civilization of staggering proportions. Surface dimensions were still tremendous, and the city itself must have been of first importance, covering hundreds of square miles. "Our city," said Songeen. Newlin glanced quickly behind. Still distant, but moving very rapidly was the string of dark objects that could only be sandsleds of the pursuit. One tiny figure, scarcely visible, was far in advance of the others. The robot tracker. He gestured. "They're covering three miles to our one," he told her grimly. "We'll try to reach the city before they catch up with us. Perhaps we can hide out among the ruins, and -- with luck, booby-trap the tracker. If there's water, we can hold out for quite a while." Songeen nodded crisply. Her voice was strained with emotion and fatigue. "As fugitives my people abandoned this city. Now, as a fugitive, I return." Then she was off, running awkwardly, the cumbersome suiting of her protection armor giving her bounding strides the laughable appearance of a lumbering teddy-bear. Descent into the hollow was riding a series of miniature sand avalanches. Each step buried the foot deep, but the sand gave way and slipped in loose spills. His bodts struck hard on rough, bare rock. He grunted, fought for balance, then sprawled heavily. She helped him up, then took off again. Newlin followed. Over the wind-carved rock, they made good time. Ascent of the long, jagged slopes to the city was hearterous. The surface was like sponge-glass, brittle and deadly with knife-edges when broken. Sheltering from wind-driven sand under the cover of a great monolith, Newlin and Songeen watched the racing figures of pursuit top the crest of the opposite ridge and start down. Man and girl were too winded and weak even to get up. They dared rest only a moment, then plunged on into the maze of tumbled ruins. Ultimate exertion had taken toll of their energies and rapidly burned up air reserves. Both were cruelly thirsty. The heat, even inside their insulated suits, was stifling. There was no time to take stock of manifold discomforts. The race was neck and neck. Death sniffed at their heels in the guise of mechanical trackers. On Venus, life is to the swift and cunning. To Newlin, life was perilous, but sweet. Their helmet microphones picked up and amplified a curious droning buzz.' It was the deathsong of the electronic tracker and it seemed closer than it was. Slowly, inexorably, it grew louder. Sound swelled steadily, and it was a whiplash to their flagging energies. They fled in panic through the streets of the dead city. It was no real refuge to them, but its megalithic precincts gave some lying illusion of safety. They chose a twisting, tangled route into the very heart of the ruined city, with the instinct of a hunted animal to confuse its trail. They doubled back to cross their own trail twice, in the vain hope of baffling the electronic enemy. Newlin had been hunted before, on Mars, but by live bloodhounds. Pepper, oil of mustard, and perfumes had saved him then. But this hound followed not scent, but something intangible, electrical,and as mysterious as the soul-aura itself. It sorted two life-complexes from all other impulses and followed its own prime-directive -- hunt down and kill. The end was inevitable as death. N ewlin laid ambush for the mechanical monster. Crouched in a nest of rubble, he waited for it, blaster gun ready. Around a corner of shattered stones, it appeared. It moved like a whipping shadow, like part of the gathering twilight. Silent, save for the high, nervetearing drone, it came warily across the courtyard paved with eroded stone. It was low, not animal in appearance, with the form of a fat, ugly snake. Fading light of the Venusian day cast a glint of metallic gray from its scaling of interlocked rings. Newlin waited for a close shot. How vulnerable was such a soulless, mechanical monster to even the shattering-heat-forces of a blaster gun? Songeen lay quietly beside him, her body quivering as much from strained muscles as from fear. Behind the face-mask, her thin features were pale, ghostlike. With elaborate caution, the tracker circled their hiding place. Its froglike head, with a ruff of exposed filaments lifted, like an animal scenting blood. It edged slowly closer, its movement a glide, sinuous, crafty, with no suggestion of mechanical action. Newlin pushed the girl's form roughly away, lest her trembling foul his aim. Sighting, he pressed trigger. Bright flame leaped from the weapon, crackling. The beam lashed at the tracker, which stopped suddenly, threw back its monstrous head, and burst into hideous uproar of sparking, electrical discharge. Like a live thing, it twitched, jerked, and flung itself in mad spasms. Convulsions stopped as short-circuits flared in both head and body. Molten, flowing, its metallic carcass glowed eerily in the dimness. Dying, it blazed up in a fireworks display' spectacular enough to attract half of Venus to the terrified fugitives. But the drone continued. From behind the same comer came a duplicate of the first metal monster. Another tracker. Its drone rose into shrill crescendo. Like a dog, it approached the wreckage of its fellow. And like a dog, it summoned help. Then, without pausing to examine the mechanical casualty, it turned its electronic attentions back to the hunted. Hopelessly, Newlin urged Songeen to her feet. They fled, and the game began all over again. perate flight, the haunted ruins of an unknown city, deadly pursuit closing in, slowly, patiently inevitably. The familiar hare and hounds pattern of nightmare. They fled through vague, littered streets, treacherous with the rubble of lost centuries. Buildings were lighter patterns upon the gathering darkness. Stone flagging underfoot was rough, eroded, rotten. A pinnacled precipice rose suddenly to bar their way. Immense, sheer, buttressed by spills of loose rock, it towered above them and lost its heights in gloom. Within a massive, deep-carved archway of stone, set an oval of polished red granite. A doorway, barren of carving save for one, scrawled and monstrous hieroglyph. Uneasiness stirred in Newlin, for something in his buried race-memories recalled that symbol with supernal dread. Ice formed about his spine and melted in trickling terror-drops. Instinct cringed, but his conscious mind rebelled at even the effort of memory. Songeen stopped and stared at the hideously marked doorway, as if tranced. "I remember this place," she said in swift excitement. "But I had thought it vanished -- eons ago." Newlin swerved on her angrily. "This is no time for experiments with your subconscious," he growled, savage with strain. "It is -- sanctuary," she replied softly. "Come!" Boldly she stood before the oval door. Her finger traced its complex symbol, and the symbol responded with a glow like moonfire. Again, as it had been with that oval door in Monta Park, there was baffling suggestion of unmechanical movement. The stone block did not slide, roll, or swing open. It gave a slight quiver and dissolved. Songeen stepped through its aperture and the inner darkness of the building claimed her. Reluctantly, Newlin followed -- caught as much by curiosity as driven by the yelping spectres of pursuit. No light entered the building from any source. It was dark as the pits of Ganymede or the under-surface laboratories of Pluto. It was dense and tangible as a block of black crystal. Newlin could see nothing, not even Songeen. And there was an alien feel to the interior. He was aware that Songeen operated some hidden mechanism, and that the door, though he could not see it, was replaced. "Now, for the moment, we are safe," she said slowly. "They cannot enter here." Newlin shrugged bitterly. "It's all one. They can't enter and we don't dare go out. So we stay here and die of thirst. If you were really a toprung witch, you'd think of details like air, food and water." Songeen's laugh was a ripple of eery crystal in the darkness. "How did you guess I was a witch?" she asked whimsically. "But we need not die here. Not unless you prefer to die among surroundings familiar to you. There is another way out. If we dare take it. For me, it will be simple. For you -- " "Not so simple, eh? You paint an interesting picture. Like one I once saw on Mars, in the Gneiss Gallery. 'Nocturne -- yenusport,' it was titled. Beautiful. Dark purple background, the city seemed like fountains of flowering stars. It's not like that, not from the places I've seen it. Filth and dirt, people dying from poverty, disease or violence. Just a comparison. How close docs your picture match the reality?" "Close enough. You're a strange man, full of contradictions. I think you're only slightly mad. But for anyone, the way I could take you would be difficult. The pathway leads to my own world. To you -- or anyone, not native -- it will seem madness. Something of it you saw in the tower." Around him in the darkness, he was conscious of her swift movements. She seemed untroubled by the lack of light. Neither by vision or hearing could he distinguish anything, but he sensed activity. Then, suddenly, as if she had uncovered a cache of implements and struck a fire, radiance spread around her. Its source was not definite, and it spread slowly, like a stain through water. But something illuminated a vast, vaulted interior, Gothic in a sense, with a churchlike air of gloom and mystery. It was Gothic, but of spiderweb delicacy soaring arches, vague fretted ceilings, walls intricately carved into lacework of stone. Everywhere were echoes of that same eery symbolism in the door hieroglyph, and Newlin's folk-memories were oddly disturbed. H e could not place the feeling. Certainly none of the symbols bore even slight resemblance to any written language known to him. Something about their intricacy clouded even clear perception, and the emotional effect was not religious in any sense -- it was stark, abysmal fear, as if the mysteries behind such symbols were too great for humanity to bear. Ignoring him, Songeen persisted at her curious tasks. Newlin went and stood beside her, watching. With gloved hand, she appeared to be tracing out some maze of deep cut markings that figured what must have been an altar-fane. "Do you expect any results from this ritual mumbo-jumbo?" he questioned irritably. Songeen looked up, startled. "Not more ritual than any other mathematics," she chided. "This is no temple, as you seem to imagine. It is the old quarantine station. I seek a doorway, but not into a hidden passage. There are other doorways. This one leads between dimensions. My world exists in a different plane.At least, our pathway to it follows strange ways, that you could never understand. You are no scientist or scholar. How could you grasp such unknown and forgotten matters? How could anyone in your world?" Newlin stared at her, seeing things he had only guessed before. "You are -- alien," he said. "You can'Cguess how alien," she answered. "I said I was not of Venusian stock. My people came from outside. Our world exists in the same plane as yours, a planet circling one of the nearer stars. This place was never our home, but we had colonies on Venus, Earth, Mars and one of Jupiter's moons. Other colonies -- like this one -- and observatories and quarantine stations. Our scientific observers and the medical staff stayed here. They studied and recorded and treated. "We were nqt gods nor demons nor anything else supernatural. Just a people not human, but not too remote from humanity. Just emissaries and workers, students and doctors. You might call us elder brothers to the human race. We came not to conquer, enslave and exploit, but to help. Sometimes the Masters came with us, sjnce they were interested in our work. "Many times, by our guidance, human beings reached high levels of development in the arts and sciences. We taught them and guided their stumbling steps, and released to them such knowledge as we dared trust to them. Time and again, we raiised them from the slime, only to have them fall back. There is fatal disease in the race, a disease of instability and cruelty and violence. Call it madness -- insanity -- in the technical sense. It is pathological, and the disease is common to the human race, in all its ramifications. The Solar System is mad, and all who dwell in it are lunatics. Dangerous ahd homicidal lunatics. Sol's system is the asylum and pesthouse of oui galaxy. We -- my people -- are its keepers and doctors. "We are charged with the care and treatment of an ailing form of life. Because of our near likeness, in form and thought, it was hoped that we could understand and help them ; in time, perhaps, find a cure. There are other races inhabiting the galaxy -- many of them, civilized, intelligent, living, and sometimes even of matter similar to ours. Their minds and bodies are too different. We are nearest, both in form and feeling. "We have tried, patieptly and hopefully. For the mo.st part, it is a long history of frustration and failure. The corruption is too deep, too basic. It is part of the life-pattern of the race. Some individuals may rise above it, but its taint lies dormant even in them. At best, they are carriers. And there seems little future for such a race. "Your galactic neighbprs have been patient. But now a time of decision is near. Your ships explore, exploit at will within your system. You have pushed your limits to the furthest expansion of that system. Colonized and despoiled. Now, you stand at the expanding horizon of stellar flight. Other star-systems tempt your imaginations, and technology batters at the problems involved. "Your neighbors are watching, and afraid. If your people burst outside the limits of Sol's system, the contagion of your madness will spread and engulf the galaxy. At our request, they have given time, granting extensions freely. For countless centuries we have tried. and our effort, all our work and thought, has led only to failure. Now, the others have set a time limit, and the deadline is very close. Very close. You are all living on borrowed time; and but for our pleadings, it would be still less. "The masters often send emissaries to us, as we send ours to the planets of Sol. They help and advise us -- not as superior beings or as gods, commanding -- but as elder brothers, trying to share their wisdom, trying tq help and guide us. They only help and advise, never intervene unless asked. Their advice is wisdom -- sometimes terrible, difficult to understand, painful to accept. Recently, they brought a message from the other peoples -- a message and ultimatum. And the Masters advised us to accept failure, to let them destroy humanity as a blot on the galaxy. We begged one more chance, a last, desperate gamble, probably foredoomed to failure. But they granted us the painful right of the doctor. We can operate, but if the patient dies, so do we. That was our choice." gaged herself busily with the queerly formal operations of tracing the intricate diagrams. "Do you believe me?" she asked, looking up. "Fm not sure," Newlin replied frankly. "Are these Masters your gods?" "Not gods. Living, intelligent beings, civilized, but not like us. Not material. I cannot explain. Even they are but advisers and messengers. Not all-wise, nor all-powerful. I wish they were; for they are kind," "You sound like nice people," Newlin admitted. "I wish I could believe you. Off-hand, I think you're crazy. You say we're all off the beam. Then you talk like delusions of grandeur, and I have reason to know you can be homicidal. One of us is nuts. It's a toss-up." Songeen smiled wearily. "It is possible that I am infected. I am inoculated against it, but so was Genarion. Will you believe that I loved him? He was my husband. We were children together, like brother and sister. Later, we were schooled together, were married, and asked to be assigned our task  together. I did not sentence him, and I would have died myself first. But he had been here too long. If he had gone back, the contagion would have gone with him. It was fated. You and I were mere tools. Weapons." "I'm sorry, Songeen. I do believe you loved him." She shobk her head in curious ruffle of emotion. "He was not the first. Many of our kind have renounced their birthright to go among your people, become like you and share your hideous lives. They are part of your great religions, part of the legendary history of your races.'w Silence fell between them. Newlin thought of dying Mars, the burnt-out husk of Venus, the political and economic pesthole of Earth -- even the grim, gray, terrible frontiers on the further planets and moons. His recollections were a dreadful pageant of spectres, of an ugly, terror-haunted childhood, of the bleak years of his barren, lonely wanderings -- the memory kitbag of a homeless, and often hunted, spacebum. "I can believe you," Newlin admitted slowly. "Most of the truly worthwhile leaders of mankind startd so far above the mob that they seem cast in a different mold. The real leaders -- not politicians, nor military brass. The thinkers and scientists, even the prophets. Every great religion sprang from the vision or inspiration of a single leader. Beyond the chaff, the fragments of his actual thoughts and words -- always sound good. But their followers don't follow them." Songeen's face twisted in bitter wrath. "How terribly true! Can blind men follow the sun? They feel its warmth and reach out to it. but they stumble and fall on their own clay feet. Blind eyes and hands can never reach the light. Most of our emissaries, of that lund, die horribly, and their message is distorted to serve the ends of madness and corruption." "Is there no hope for us?" She stared at him. The pale glow of her moonbright eyes softened and intensified. "One hope, and only In yourselves. We have tried and failed. If you feel so strongly, why have you done nothing?" Bitter hatred snagged in Newlin's throat, making his laugh a sound of horror. "Not me. I can pity the masses of poor and downtrodden, but only as masses. As abstractions. Individually, I loathe them. Cornered rats will fight back -- but men lick the boots of their tormentors. I learned only hate and defiance. I'm a cornered rat, not a man." There was sound now, outside the door they had entered. Low at first, a mere scrabbling, as if the trackers had located their refuge. In moments only, there came a heavy pounding, followed by the skirl of atomic drills. Newlin tensed, his hand itching at the butt of his blaster. "I'm a rat," he went on. "Cornered, like any other rat. And the terriers are out there scratching at my hole. If you'll open that nonsqueak door, I'll talk to them. Maybe even kill a few." "No," said Songeen positively. "But I'm a killer," Newlin insisted. "I've killed men before for a lot less reason. They're mining the door. How long do you think that will last against explosives?" "Not long," the girl admitted. "But long enough. I have the key at last. Stand back." ly radiant hovered indescribably in space. Suspended above the worn flooring, without visible support or tangible outline -- it existed. Something like weird emptiness, a void appearing in the air itself. "This is the portal," Songeen told him calmly. "Choose now. I will take you with me if I can without permission. But do not come with me, unwarned. There is grave peril, beyond anything I can describe to you. Beyond your experience or imagination. I will try to gej you safely back, somehow. But I can promise nothing. And if you stay too long, there is no coming back. You must remain there; even if the terror of your surroundings kills you." She stood beside the mysterious doorway, waiting. Newlin made a start to follow her, then balked. "Wait!" he ordered roughly, as she was about to lead the way. "I Oan't go with you -- not like this." "Afraid?" "Yes, but not of you or your world. I trust you. But you say everyone here is crazy. That it's infectious. Won't I carry the contagion into your world ?" Songeen hesitated. Shadows deepened inside her eyes. "You would, yes. But you will have contact with no one but me. Perhaps with the Masters -- if I can take you to them; They may help us, but they are strange, unpredictable. Remember, I promise nothing and you  come at your own risk. But your disea.se will harm no one -- I'm inoculated, and the Masters are immune. If you overstay the limit and cannot return, you will be decontaminated just as ye must be when ve return to our own people. "Here, in this room, is the place where the people of our colony on Venus were decontaminated before they could be allowed to enter the place of refuge the Masters had prepared for them. It Is a cruel and harrowing experience. I know. There may be a way to get you safely back, without that. But your mind could never stand the shock. Understand that, before you choose." "If it won't harm you, I'll go along," Newlin decided. "Almost any world would be an improvement on this." "Don't be too sure," she warned. "At worst, tlje terror here Is familiar. Come, then. Hold my hand, stay close, and try not to be frightened. It will be bad enough. And try not to change too much, or I will have difficulty returning you alive." The portal swallowed her, and Newlin felt himself drawn into the force-vortex, still clinging to her hand. T ransition was miid enough, less shock than he had expected. A moment of chill detachment, as if something indescribably cold shattered his body into component atoms and readjusted them to new patterns. He gasped, his body making the same thermal changes as if he stood under a cold shower. He shivered. Then it was like coming out of the blanketing fog of horror into the sunlight of sanity; like rebirth, painlessly, into an eery other-dimension. There was light and sound about him, a stir of cool air, Songeen had become separated from him in that moment of strange passage. She stood apart, watching him with laughter in her eyes. Laughter as cool and calm and soothing as the soft wind that riffled her hair. She had stripped off the bulky armor, shed her plastic helmet. Now she was all woman again, and somehow, oddly, a symbol of all women. Other senses than his five sprang into life within him. Weird awareness through new perceptions which were  nameless to his mind or to his memory. At first there was no terror, no surprise. Merely an overwhelming difference. Overhead was starless night, but not darkness. It was a vaulted, infinite sky, like an inverted ocean of tinted crystal, transparent, but softly colored, deepening imperceptibly to a heart of emerald, a-glow with faintest witchlights. All around him was a maze of shimmering crystal in odd forms, grotesque, clear but echoing the witchlights of that haunted sky. Wind-borne, came the faint, sweet chiming of distinct porcelain bells. The place was alive with movement, sensed but incompletely seen. Even the wind flowed in almost visible currents, thickened as if the air had become dense, molten glass. All forms in the maze of crystal varied constantly. Light flared and died in odd rhythms, and the almost visible winds played icy arpeggios upon strings of spun glass, like Aeolian harps. Showering notes like those of Chinese windbells hung in clusters in the eddies of great wind rivers, and both sound and light flowed together and wove strange patterns and infinite variations. It was not quite pleasant, vaguely nervetightening, but highly stimulating. Sound was muted at first, as was the light. Images blurred and outlines were unsteady, baffling. Everything fused and flowed together like half molten shards of broken glass. Wavelengths of troubled sound formed trembling notes that hung in the air, almost visible, crystalline and somehow painfully dissonant. Like Songeen, her world or the pathway to it was strange, alien, but poignantly beautiful. It was stranger than he thought. He realized almost at once that his mind was making adjustments. It was lying to him, translating unfamiliar concepts into terms known to memory. It was diluting and enfeebling his sensations. But dread grew in him. When his mind tired, stopped lying to him, what would it really be like? Could he stand the factual perception? They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float rather than walk. One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments. Light grew steadily, and with it came more color, more magic, and more confusion of senses. The forest-forms assumed strange geometries. They stretched about him in endless vistas, blurring and transmuting as he watched. The dreamlike cloudiness was fading from his perceptions. He caught dreadful hints now and then of new, unheard-of forms and colors, of unstable geometries as far beyond Einstein's as his were beyond Euclid's. Nothing was tangible or definite. and perhaps that was the secret. Nothing ever is. Fear wove a crystalline web about Newlin's throat, strangling. He halted and took stock. Ahead, Songeen waited, watching him, her figure a pale, elfin flame form against the shadowy mass of colored crystals. It was a forest of gemfires, and she was the purest jewel of the forest. Naked, alien, but -- mind balked at backtracking. There was no going back. Perhaps he had already come too far. Was Songeen a vampire luring him into the hideous depths of this unknown place? He had been here before. It was like that awful illusion in the tower, but muted. How much did he perceive? How much was sheerest self-deception? Was he mad in the midst of awful sanity, or sane in the ultimate horror of lunacy? Her voice floated back to him, its sound the chiming crash of splintering glass. "Try not to change too much," she warned. "Change?" Even the word sounded strange to him, as she said it. He felt a swift surge of anger. There was no change in him -- none! The tinkling bell-tones matched the swirl of his emotion and rose to jangling, tormented heights. It was shrill, maniacal tumult, that ranged upward and upward into octaves beyond sound. It was a rollicking, tortured insanity. Windbells chiming, jangled; tinkling, shimmering, exploding inside his brain. Windbells shattering in a hurricane of sound and ecstasy. With his fists, Newlin pounded at his bursting skull. Pain deadened perception, gave him a moment's relief. He was not changing, he shouted in loud defense. He was not! Songeen poised, watching. Her body-outlines swirled and altered in swift mutations before his eyes. She was not woman now. Not even human. She danced and flickered and gibbered at him. She was jeweled movement. Change. She was as crystalline as the forest, as molten emerald as the sky. Points of fire inside her. caught and flared and burned inside his eyes. She was not Songeen I Newlin screamed. He looked down at his hands. He screamed again, louder. His hands were transparent as glass, and as fluid as water. Outlines wavered, changed. "Try not to change too much," Songeen pleaded. But her voice joined the clattering crystalline tumul which raged about him. He was cracking. He could feel the seams in his mind giving way. Like a great, floundering beast, he charged toward her. Forms of brittle crystal shattered at his touch. Shattered into sound and pain. The forest-forms changed color, echoing his violence. New vortices of movement, converged upon him. Perceptions expanded and radiance showered about him, through him. The hovering, dancing crystal notes were now visible. Beads of light, dripping from a sky of light. They were sound a color, bright, bursting bubbles of sound. Their rhythmic tempos increased, murmur swelled into insistent roaring and the jangling of insane dissonance. Vitreous grotesques shimmered like a forest of aspens quivering in wind and sunlight. Glassy fragments of splintered sound poured in floods from sky and ground. Trampled grass gave way under his feet in brittle crunching, and the brush shivered at his touch, dissolving into chill slivers of slashing sound. Blood was dripping. The forest changed color, as if crimson stain spread through it. Hellish glare was a roaring torrent of musical color. Red stains spread swiftly, dying the crystal columns, the glassy sward, seeping into the reeling brain. There was blood. The taste of it in his mouth, the hot, salt smell, the sound of its dripping. He swam in seas of ruby light, crashing and plunging wildly, sinking into its crimson depths. Red light thickened around him, deepened, smothering. The darkness was red, fire-shot, roaring... Then pain and timeless darkness. Newlin awakened slowly, to ugly tension in his mind. Shadows like beating wings disturbed his memory. The churning light and sound were gone. He drifted idly, body and mind coming softly to rest upon a bank of soft grass. Someone knelt beside him. Someone cried softly, to the same murmurous rhythms of the crystalline forest. Without opening his eyes he sensed this, and knew also that he was still within the eery precincts of the maze. He opened his eyes, painfully.  , This time, there were tears, glistening and falling slowly, glistening like crystal dewdrops in sunlight, and falling in softly tinkling shower like spilled jewels. "Songeen!" he cried. "Yes," murmured a tympany of glass bells, "I am here." It was Songeen -- almost, again, as he remembered her, almost human. It was Songeen, small, delicate, unreal, but sweetly feminine -- almost human. It was Songeen, but with something added, changed, oddly blended into both form and personality. "I tried to save you," she murmured. "I tried, but could not reach you. My knowledge is incomplete. I thought you were weak, confused, too frightened and disturbed to be changed easily. But ou were strong, and your violence was a challenge to it. Only the Masters could understand. They saved you -- not I. They intervened in time." "The Masters!" Newlin glanced round, quickly, warily. "They are here?" "Not here -- now. But they saved you. I did not know all the dangers. They -- not I -- " "Saved me from whafr -- death?" "No -- worse. And now they say you must go back. At once. The Masters urge haste." N ewlin tasted bitterness on his lips. "Orders from headquarters. Well, I've been kicked out of better places -- but few more interesting. Too bad I forgot my brass knuckles." Physically, he tried to rise. Every bone and muscle ached. But it could have been worse. He seemed intact. Hints of vagrant color rippled over his visible skin, but he sensed neither pain nor menace from them. Songeen bent over him. Her arm supported him in sitting position. It was unnecessary, but the sensation of contact was pleasant. He yielded to her ministrations and looked about. It was still the forest, crystalline, murmurous -- but now muted. The same glary, unpleasant light beat down from the same impossible sky. Storming, eery colors flowed infinite mutations of form through the crystal spectres of the maze. And the tinkle of myriad glass wind bells held a maddening overtone. He had thought, somehow, that it would be different. That it would have changed, subtly, as had Songeen. But from a brief survey, nothing had changed. The tumult had faded, become bearable -- but identity remained. Disappointed, he rose slowly, and felt her strong arm clasp about him. He felt clumsy, off-balance, but not weak. If anything, he was stronger. Stronger, and more cleanly, clearly alive than he had felt before. "Come," urged Songeen. "I will take you hack to tbe portal." "Back -- to that?" Newlin struggled with the futility of words. He was not sure what he wanted, let alone what he wanted to say. That insinuating crystalline clatter got inside his hrain, scattered thought. Songeen caught a stirring of rebellion in him and sensed his mental confusion. "Don't fear the hunters," she said. "There are other doorways, and you can issue onto some other planet, if you wish. Try not to think, or even feel." Her voice penetrated the uproar blanketing other sounds. For seconds, it seemed to elevate him to some remote, lofty plane wherelife was serene, uncomplicated. Detached, he drifted with his own alien thoughts. Through senses other than visual, ke watched his stumbling progress at her side as the girl threaded a pathway through the maze. Through senses not normally his own, he was aware of the utter strangeness behind this forest and its crystalline mysteries. He recognized the girl as part of the strangeness. Dimly, he sensed some cosmic reluctance in himself, and was disturbed by his trend of thought. Faintly, he was aware of bodily movement and the crowding feel of shadowy aisles about him. But he was more aware of the girl, of her physical presence, and of the unrest she inspired in him. Songeen! He had known many women on many, strange worlds. But none like this, ncHie ever so strange, so wonderful, so terrifying. He had wanted her, yes. But only for an hour of passion, at first. An hour of the blinding futility of trying, in her arms, to forget the crowding ugliness of 'life. He had not cared if the women he knew had souls, or if he had. Souls were unfamiliar, vague, and he would not have known one if he encountered it. Soft, white bodies, glowing like pale witchlights in the darkness. Yes, he had known many such. He had known many women, loved none. Newlin had not spoken, not in words. But Songeen heard, by some subtle sense that was part of this abnormal forest. Her laugh was a soft tinkle of breaking glass. She did not speak aloud, but word-symbols of thought poured from her mind. Newlin was aware of them, springing suddenly into his own brain, but he knew they came from her. "Many women, yes. But none like me. If you loved me, it would not be for this body. It is not what you think. I hold this substance, this form, only by power of will. It is mine only for a short while more. My flesh is not like yours, subject to different laws of form and movement." N ewlin answered her, but now in words. His voice sounded like a note of strained sanity in such a place of nightmare. "I never learned love in the sense you mean," he said. "Nor had I thought of you again, in that way -- after Monta Park. You were too alien for me. I understood that. Too alien for any kind of love I knew. You were -- repulsive." In silence, then, thoughts blocked out, Songeen guided Newlin. She seemed aloof, withdrawn. They filed slowly amid towering masses of smoky crystal. She led, drifting like a smoke wraith, before him. Newlin picked a cautious pathway over treacherous, unstable footing. He followed, bemused, and reluctance grew into agony of mind. What was wrong with him? He grappled with himself, and strains grew into open rebellion. What did he want? Near the portal, sensing it or another like it, he balked. "Songeen!" At his call, she glided hack, phantomlike. "Yes?" "You're in trouble here, aren't you? Because of bringing me?" Shoulders as translucent as thin ivory shrugged. "No matter." "But you are?" Newlin insisted, as if it mattered suddenly to him. "Yes," she granted softly. "But do not alarm yourself. Only misunderstanding. I will explain my motives. They will point out my error. There is no punishment here." "You're not telling everything. What is wrong?" Her moonfire eyes were troubled. "Nothing you can help." Newlin probed mercilessly. "Tell me. Why did you bring me here? It was not only to save me from the hunters. Even I guessed that. Why?" Poised, slender, defiant as a sword, Songeen met and parried his attack. "I cannot tell you that." Newlin took her rebuff gracelessly. He was a son of Chaos, a man of the brawling, violent Solar breeds. His temper was short, his words and actions direct. He saw challenge and answered in kind. "Then take me to the Masters." Fear and fury blazed in her eyes. "They have not sent for you. I cannot take you to them like this. You are mad. You will live to regret this. Why, why?" "I'll tell you. You said I could be decontaminated. You said I could be cured, that I could stay here -- aftei;wards. I want to stay now. Is there a way. Can I be cured?" "Of the madness, yes. But it is a fearful way. Do you know how all lunatics are treated? How they are cured, if at all? In your own asylums, do you know how madness is treated?" "Yes, I know," Newlin answered roughly. "By shock treatment. I suspected something of the sort, all the time. Am I right? Is your treatment similar?" Songeen nodded, her movement a shimmering echo of the forest's mirrored quivering. "Similar -- but not the same. The shock used is different. More intense and terrible than insulin or electrical shock. Could you survive such treatment?" Newlin snorted. "I don't know. I'm just crazy enough to try. I won't say I like this place -- your world or the nuthouse entrance to it. But with you, I like it better than any other place without you. I think I'm in love with you." Worms of pale light flared and writhed in her eyes. Something shifted, the oddments of womanflesh shredded from her. Like a transparent mannequin of glass, she stood. Inside her, luminous organs squirmed visibly. Like a dream-woman, she stood just outside the boundaries of sanity. But like a dream-woman, she was beautiful, immortal, desirable. "You've said it," she murmured. "Now that you see me as I am, do you still want me? Say it again, now. Spud Newlin, say it in your new knowledge of the things as they really are." choice. Wandering, ill and alone, terrified, in the forests of nightmare -- he chose. Madman's choice. "I love you, Songeen. Take me to the Masters." Nightmare wavered. A hand, oddly shaped, sought his as the witchfires burned low and faded from the sky. "I can take you now. It is not far, and the Masters are waiting. I have warned you. If, after that warning, you still ask to stay, they will grant your wish. It needed only your free choice. I am glad you have chosen, but shock treatment is a dangerous chance. Are you sure you love me -- enough?" "Songeen!" his mind pleaded. "Wait!" She heard his wordless cry, and waited, opening the glowing, pure citadel of her thoughts to him. She gave no answer in words or glowing thought symbols. She waited. "No, I haven't changed my mind. I want to stay. Maybe I can learn to like your world. I want the decontamination -- the shock treatment. I'm scared, but I want it, no matter how it hurts. I want to' stay here -- but not if you're not here. I want to be with you -- Hell, Venus, or even Callisto -- I want to go with you. I love you. If my love is part of my madness, don't cure me. I haven't asked you, but I'd like to know. Do you love me?" Songeen was silent. In the glittering forest of crystalline tree forms, jeweled birds sang wild riots of bubbling, bursting notes. Darkness gathered swiftly in the dense air. "Didn't you know?" Songeen chimed, matching the bird-notes. Our names are already enrolled in the Great Book. It was custom here, our mating rite. It was the only way I could bring you. I did not tell you, because -- " She stopped, then continued. "Because I had to be sure of you. Because I wanted you to have free choice. Now you must share all my tasks, my responsibilities. Before, the task was mine alone. Now we must share it. You and I are selected -- "  "Selected for what?" Newlin broke in. He could not see her for thick darkness. But he sensed eery tension of movement, and emotion flowed to him from her mind. "For the great task, the last and greatest of all. We must go back together. To Hell. To the system you sprang from. It is for usto release to them the ultimate weapon. The deadline is close, as I told you. Other races grow desperate, now that your system's isolation is breaking down. Pressure for interstellar expansion is extreme on all of Sol's planets. The technicians work full time at the problems, and they will solve it, soon. We have until then, to kill or cure the patient. "Other powers and weapons have been released to them in the hope that mounting responsibility would bring sanity. Atomic power was turned into dangerous toys, implements of murder. We gave them knowledge of atomic fission and fusion, and they use the knowledge to butcher and destroy each other. We tried all the minor shock treatments. They have failed. The time has come for the final treatment. The major shock. We -- you and I -- must give them the ultimate weapon." protested. "But why? If they have misused everything else. Why give them something still more hideous? Why give them means for further destruction?" Her answer pulsed through darkness which glittered like black crystal. "Because it is the final experiment. The last hope for your people, your system. We cannot help them beyond that. They must choose for themselves, as you did. We must go back to Earth, this time. And it is our task to give them the final treatment and test. The ultimate weapon. Gravity displacement. Once used, it is the end. Planets will be wrenched from the Sun, electrons from their parent nuclei within the very atoms. It is the same force. The choice is theirs -- kill or cure. Sanity or destruction. You and I will stay, try to guide and help, advise, but not interfere. Like you, your people must have free choice. "We must stay with them, and share whatever happens. This is their shock treatment -- and yours. We will share it together. But come, the Masters are waiting. I will take you to them." "Together!" said Newlin, awed. "You will stay with me and share my -- our shock treatment!" "Together, always -- now. It is a small price to pay, whatever happens," murmured Songeen. Her hand drew him close, and she led him outside the zone of crystalline murmurs. Darkness leaned closer, solid, tangible. Ahead, was a great and terrible light. By Charles Recour Substitute For Thought! the hardest thing the human being is called upon to do is -- to think! No task is more arduous or more diflScult, and to confirm this supposition all you have to do is reflect on any difficult problems which have evhr engaged your mind. Thinking is no joke! It is generally conceded that the most abstract realm of thinking is mathematical. Iti some respects that is true and in others it is the exact oppasite of the facts. Actually mathematics is "simplified" thinking, a sort of thinking with nine-tenths of the work taken out. The reason for that rather surprising statement is the fact that much of what we call mathematics is actually "symbol manipulation" -- which is a sort of machine into which you put ideas, turn the crank and grind out answers. Great mathematicians have frequently reiterated the truism "a good symbology is half the battle." What they are referring to is that mathematical ideas, while very hard to, discover and understand,...become ridiculously easy in many cases, when they are framed in a set of symbols which can be easily manipulated according to standardized rules. That in effect for example, is what algebra is. Algebra is a machine for handling mathematical relationships. So is trigonometry, calculus and many other branches of mathematical thinking. The difficulty lies in first, mastering the symbology, then the understanding of what's being done. After that you just supply the problem, turn the symbolic crank and out pop the answers, neat and automatically. case, take a very simple arithmetic or algebra problem, rephrase it in words and then try to solve it in words. It's tough, mighty tough! That's what the earliest of Babylonian and Assyrian thinkers did. It's a tribute to them that they got anywhere at all, and as positive evidence of the importance of symbols, it may be recalled that mathematics didn't begin its enormous expansion until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by which time, the symbols had been worked out and the science had been reduced to a game of "chess on paper." This is an over simpHfication of course, a half truth, since the thinking still must be done. But symbols cut the work into a tiny fraction of what it was. Today symbology is all important and tomorrow, symbolic logic will be one of the guiding spirits of scientific advances as it is suggesting itself today. When the first savage recognized that two men and two rocks have in common their "twoness" he made an enormous step; equally important and much richer in results are the superb ideas of calling things and ideas by symbols, letters, marks -- what have you. Don't sell "X marks the spot" short! Well-Digger Giganticus... any of the earth-moving machinery in common use today, has automatically marveled at the size and impressiveness of these robotic mechanisms whose scale is that of the prehistoric monsters. It is one thing to speak of telephone switchboards and electronic calculating machines as robots ; it is another to observe the gigantic robots some machines have become. Latest in this chain of automaticity is the mobile oil-well driller! Thousands of wells per year are drilled in the United States in a tremendous effort to keep the hungry maw of oil-consumers satisfied, especially since resources appear to be dwindling at a rapid rate. The has been a major operationMuch equipment, massive and bulky and powered by large amounts of energy, is needed. Then, because nine out of ten wells prove dry, the equipment must be torn up and moved elsewhere. Enterprising entrepreneurs -- tough-bitten pioneers who would flinch at the word "entrepreneur" -- have devised a truck-borne setup which, powered and completely self-contained with two # horsepower diesel engines, practically drills a deepwell by itself! The equipment is so flexible and so ingeniously contrived, that it operates from a console-panel arrangement much like a control tower or an organ. The well is drilled ; should it be dry -- as it most often is -- the drillers tear up stakes with no trouble at all, move on, and start elsewhere. The thing is done so rapidly and so smoothly that it has a truly robot-like effect on a hypnotized observer. What is more important is that this effort points another signpost towards the future. The coal mines have seen the introduction of automatic machinery, the factories have become more mechanized, the farms too are machinery plus -- all these things confirm positively the outline of the future; machines, machines and more machines, in every degree of complexity, with every conceivable type of modern scientific development, all operated by an engineer-technician. The pattern is outlined heavily; the future belongs to the technician! Optical Sandblasting! most precise of all the applied sciences and the technicians in the field are accustomed to working in reconcile this fact with the recent A. Rhodes, who makes telescope mirrors by sandblasting! Amateur telescope-making has been discussed before in these pages since many a science fiction reader is also an amateur astronomer. Consequently the technique ordinarily used in making precise re-, fleeting telescope mirrors is familiar to many. The practice of simply rubbing two circular discs together with an abrasive between, producing a resultant mirror as the abrasives selected become finer and finer, results in a parabolic mirror with an accuracy of a fractional and has been done ever since the Newtonian telescope. Dr. Rhodes, however, wishing to minimize the tedious work of rough-grinding telescope mirrors, decided to blast out the basic curve with a sandblaster, and then finish off the mirror with conventional grinding practices. The sixteen inch mirror, with an f# curve was roughed out with a cemetery monument sandblaster. And that's all there was to it. After finish grinding the mirror was perfect. That suggests a whole new technique in optical work which has always deplored, the necessary tedium of slow grinding of resistant glass which seems after a time to develop an obstinacy 'and an obtuseness all its own. Today's age is characterized by instruments, electronic, optical and mechanical. Tomorrow will even be more of an instrument decade-Lor century -- any techniques designed to make instrument-making simpler and just as accurate are more than eventful -- they are news! Cat's Foot Seismograph! T he two-hundred inch reflecting telescope is the gadget at Mount Palomar that ordinarily makes the news. But Palomar is more than an astronomical observatory with the world's biggest telescope. It is also a seismological station, shortly to be second to none in the world. In particular it is making use of the new electromagnetic seismograph, a machine so sensitive it can record the footsteps of a cat through hundreds of feet of solid rock! An ordinary seismograph is essentially nothing more than a large mass suspended from a wire. Delicate pick-up instruments connected to it, record its inertia while the earth about it shakes. Hence, the seismographic mass remains "at rest" while the earth quakes. As is well known seismographs pick up earth tremors from distances equal to the diameter of the Earth, so sensitive are they. But the electromagnetic instrument puts even these to shame. It is a long quartz tube, about two and one half inches in diameter and one hundred and twenty feet long. It is anchored at each end to a pier set deep into the earth, while flexible supports along its length take up its weight. This "strain seismograph" like any strained quartz crystal then delivers an electrical impulse no matter hotv slightly it is disturbed. This, amplified and recorded automaticJly, provides a sonic and visual picture of earth tremors anywhere. Its sensitivity is so great it must be installed miles from human disturbances. One of the neat aspects of the recording mechanism is that it catches at a definite rate; then during play-back it speeds up this rate so that a long drawn out quake may be recorded as a pistol shot or a slightly longer rumble! Seismography is extremely important (witness its detection of the Soviet atomic bomb explosions!) and Mount Palomar is due to become the center of its research here. Metals Made To Order! M etallurgical research is opening up an entirely new field, a field in which specific metals are tailored exactly to suit a given purpose, much in the manner in which ordinary, alloys have been prepared, but differing in that ' the rarest, oddest metals are now used, with the most unusual techniques. Zirconium, hafnium, molybdenum, rhenium, columbium, cerium, thallium -- the li.st reads like a recitation of the Periodic Table, are being put to work in applications not even thought of so short a time as five years ago. Rhenium for example is a metal whose commercial importance cannot be underestimated. It is the densest metal known, it has a melting point as high as tungsten, its electron emission rate is better than that of tungsten and its lifs is greater than that metal when used in vacuum tube applications. The only drawback to wide use of this exotic metal is that it now costs # a pound! Most of these metals require refining and extraction methods far different from the relatively simple methods of the blast furnace or the electrolytic refining tank. They often must be prepared in a high vacuum chamber at temperatures extremely high. In addition they are usually associated with large quantities of "dead" ore or a sort of gangue which must be discarded slag-like. In a word, the recovery of these metals is difficult. Applied technology is jumping forward however at such a fabulous rate that no metal can be ignored, and every possible metal must be examined carefully for potential uses. It has gotten so that, if you desire a metal with certain properties, you simply specify them to the metallurgist and he goes into the pilot-plant-laboratory, operates equipment unthought of two years ago, and comes out with your sample -- done! Metallurgy has some amazing surprises coming up in the near future -- tailor-made metals are only a beginning! Rockets Made Of Light! L ight is generally regarded as the most ethereal of material substances. You don't think of mass or weight associated with dancing beams of sunlight or the flickering glitter of the stars! Never the less, light has mass, measurable and computable, and it can move "mountains." A glance at the familiar "E equals me squared" of Einstein shows that if you work the other way around, measure the energy of a beam of light, it is possible to figure out the mass associated with that light. Even more directly it is possible to measure the force exerted on an object by the pressure of a beam of light streaming against it. This implies momentum and where you have momentum, you have mass. , Thoughts like these have been occuring with increasing frequency among men who have to do with rocketry and the ultimate hopeof putting men into space. Recently it was suggested by an authority on rocketry that space ships be propelled by "sails" -- gigantic thiftfaced mirrors capable of catching sunlight and using its pressure as a propellent medium! As fantastic as that suggestion sounds it is perfectly conceivable in the vacuum of space where the slightest amount of thrust would have effect. Perhaps even more suggestive of the ultimate importance of using a light beam as a propellant, is the suggestion that eventually a motor of sorts will be designed, capable of emitting light in such quantities as to be enough to offer substantial thrust to its attached rocket -- sort of like a flashlight turned around. dinary sunlight against the Earth's surface is computed, it turns out that the figure measured in dynes or Newtons of thrust is quite surprisingly large. Now while the Earth is huge, and any rocket would be comparatively minute, the principles are still the same. Light has mass ; mass ejected at the speed of light exerts powerful measurable thrust -- enough to move things! Scientists who have taken the measure of this jheory of light-propelling naturally don't expect to see this as one of the early means of securing interplanetary flight. But many think that ultimately it may prove to be the way Man will reach the stars! That goal, remote as it may seem now to people who know we haven't even gotten into space yet, is still in the consciousness of rocketmen. Someday, interstellar flights are going to be made, and if the physics of the future hasn't given us some sort of "space-warp" drive, the insignificant motes of force exerted by beams of light may do the trick! By Lila Shaffer Editor Fantastic Adventures drifting toward mass suicide in an ever-increasing momentum. As we contemplate the vicious and deadly weapons which man, in his fears continues to produce, we have the impulse to call out: "Hold on there. You're not accomplishing a thing, you're only destroying yourself." But no one is listening. Everybody is too intent on building his own protective arsenal, to stop to think how much better if we didn't need one in the first place. Let's think about it. What are we? And what are we trying to do? There's this great big beautiful planet, rich in everything we could possibly want -- or ever absorb. Enough of everything for everybody. And then there are people -- homo sapiens -- you and me. God -- or anything you want to call Him -- created Heaven and Hell, and the Earth between. And on Earth he put Man, the highest thinking of all animals. With life. He gave man a free will, which probably includes the ability to commit suicide. But man suffers from delusions of grandeur. He's too highly impressed with an importance that isn't there. He's not irreplaceable, nor is he as tough or as smart as he thinks he is. Surn, he can blow himself to Kingdom Come. But # years from now trees and grasses will still cover the land and the sea.sons will go on...All man will ever succeed in killing is himself. It would stand to reason that God has plans for this planet of ours. With or without us. If man chooses to drop out, he will hardly be missed. Throughout our entire history, we have been busy inventing weapons that would either put an end to warfare -- or depopulate the world. Probably gun powder was the most terrifying invention of all. It created stupendous vistas of destruction -- but the world survived. Hundreds of thousands of people may have been killed, but the world survived, with enough of man remaining to continue running the show. W'hen Robert Fulton launched the first steamboat on the Seine River that day in #, he was -- without being aware of it -- introducing a new era: the invincible navy. But the best this development did was to make the British fleet invincible for # years or so. And then other, and stronger, weapons came along. triple dose of horror: the airplane, the tank, and poison gas. The awful aftermath of the gas was the nearest thing to bringing man to mutual agreement: it was the first weapon which man felt had to be eliminated. But then Einstein's theories, and all the neutrons and protons and electrons -- and it was August # and an atomic bomb was dropped on two cities, with devastating results. But the world went on. And will continue to go on. Let's face it. No bomb has ever been invented -- and there's no possibility of one ever coming up -- which will knock the seams of this planet apart. No weapon of destruction will ever be devised which can do the damage that one small tremor of nature can accomplish : like the San Francisco earthquake, the destruction of Pompeii, the cataclysm that removed Atlantis. T ruly, only a creature as con-' ceited as Man could Indulge in the fears that are currently sweeping the earth. Only a creature steeped in his own egotism could seriously contemplate tlie possibility of destroying, with his feeble brain and hands, the work of a Creator, the power and scope of which can be only dimly conceived. We feel that we have gone far in our climb toward the stars and, in some ways, we have. But little is ever said concerning the departments in which we have progressed not at all. And the backwardness far outweighs the progress. We look up into the depths of the heavens with scarcely more understanding of what it entails then had our clubbearing ancestors. Our minds are too puny to conceive either the structure of a space that never ends or -- in relation to the complete concept -- a space that has fixed boundaries somewhere beyond our reach. We have found, through stubborn searching, seemingly miracle-working drugs. But we know little of why they work. One could go on for hours, sounding the true depths of human ignorance. In fact, it somehow smacks of sacrilege, to conceive a God that would allow a handful of microorganisms such as we, to endanger, by our stupidity, any of His majestic works. So the sooner we get wise to ourselves, the better. The world will go on -- and if we don't play the leading role on its stage, there will be other actors in our place; others more deserving, perhaps, of the gift of life. U topia had been reached. All the problems of mankind had been solved. It was the perfect State. If you doubted it, you died. The Clean "Wholesome and Land tured from the rostrum, Nedl Pardeau prowled the dark auditorium. This, he knew, was the place to find them. Here was where they whispered and plotted and schemed -- feeling safe in this pure, hard core of patriotism. Safe because Cargill was the Director of Education in the New State, just as Pardeau was the Director of Public Security. Safe because Cargill's lectures were given before a commanded audience, with attendance strictly mandatory. The insistance was not really necessary of course. The people would have come to hear Cargill regardless. His was a compelling, magnetic personality. Even now his great voice was booming out: " -- and upon this anniversary of the New State, we can look out with great pride upon a clean and wholesome land. With strong emotion, we can look upon the physical manifestation of our glorious principles -- that only through self-effacement -- through fanatic love for the state -- can the individual come to complete physical and mental fruition. Upon this anniversary we see our enemies, both within and without, broken, and completely subjugated -- " This was the place they whispered and schemed and plotted. Pardeau prowled the aisles, his eyes piercing the darkness -- spotting them, cataloguing them. And thus he came upon Emil Hillerman, his Deputy of Vital Intelligence sitting dutifully in the end seat of a middle aisle. Hillerman's thick lips hung lax, his eyes squinted laboriously as he sought to follow the thread of Cargill's lecture. Pardeau tapped Hillerman on the shoulder. The latter started guiltily. He whirled and sought to identify Pardeau in the semi-darkness. Pardeau said, "Please step outside with me. I have some questions." There was fear in Hillerman's bearing as he got clumsily to his feet and followed Pardeau. But none of Cargill's .speech was missed. A battery of loud speakers carried it even into the foyer where Pardeau stopped and turned on Hillerman. He regarded the man through cold, calculating eyes. He seemed to be both enjoying Hillerman's discomfort and also listening to Cargill's booming words. traitors with twitching muscles and twitching minds who skulked in dark places have been finally and decisively defeated. Even their vaunted leader -- " "What have you been doing," Pardeau asked, "relative to Karl Lenster?"  The frightened Hillerman licked his fat lower lip as he sought for words. "Everything -- everything possible. But Lenster is clever. You know that. You know that yourself." Pardeau's eyes bored into those of the Intelligence Director. They were noted for their icy penetration, but upon this night they were like steel knives. It was as though he surveyed Hillerman from behind the bulwark of some new and hostile information. Even as he stared, Cargill was booming from the rostrum: " -- Karl Lenster, their peerless leader -- " And Cargill's voice crackled with the inflections of pure contempt. " -- a degenerate -- a dope addict who's greatness lay only in the realms of his sensual dreams. A weak, pitiful figure bereft of followers, cringing alone in -- " When Pardeau spoke, his voice held a new sharpness to complement the new ice in his eyes. He said, "In half an hour I am attending a meeting of the Council. They will want a report. What about Lenster?" Hillerman looked quickly to right and left, then back at his Chief. He hesitated as though fearing the consequences of what he was about to reveal. "You know of the Wyckoff Chemical Transformation Process -- " "Certainly I know of it," Pardeau blazed. "What about it?" "I -- I -- " But Hillerman seemed to lose the courage he'd screwed up to continue in this direction. He straightened and a little of the hangdog servility dropped away. "I am doing all that is humanly possible to apprehend Lenster. All that any man could do. The secret jails are full. My interrogators work night and day. Even a superficial check of my records would show that more has been done in the la.st six months and is being done now than -- " Pardeau raised an impatient . hand, opening a gap of silence into which the voice of Cargill poured. " -- land in which the voice of dissenter is not heard ; in which Lenster and men of his despicable ilk are forever crushed and beaten -- " Pardeau was scowling. Almost unconsciously he had held the pause, with hand upraised, until Cargill finished his passage. As Cargill stopped for breath, Pardeau jerked his haiid down sharply, completing the gesture. "I have no time for any more of this. And I resent having to seek yoU out. Next time report to my office as is proper and keep me posted as to your activities. Next -- " Pardeau eyed Hillerman for one blank moment and allowed . the threat to reflect clearly that possibly there would not be many more next times. Then he turned and strode swiftly from the foyer. faded when he picked it up again on his car radio. It was a foregone conclusion that every radio in the land would be tuned to the lecture. So great was Cargill's popularity that every citizen traveling in a car would wish to hear it and turn on his receiver. It was foolish not to have a radio properly tuned when Cargill spoke. He was saying: " -- and so under the banner of complete solidarity, we will march forward, a solid phalanx against which no force can stand. Now that our own house is swept clean of vermin -- rid forever of carrion like Lenster and his ilk, we can -- " Pardeau had traveled swiftly through the streets at the high speed reserved for higher servants of the New State. Lesser servants of the New State had learned caution and thus no regrettable deaths or rnaimings occurred; the lesser servants having grown wary and fleet of foot. ' Pardeau switched off his motor but left his radio blaring. Cargill's voice followed him up the broad steps of the Executive Building and was just fading out when Pardeau was able to pick it up again from the loudspeaker under the great arches. He entered the building and traversed the vast foyer to a niche which housed a private elevator. He entered the lift, deserting it on the ninth floor, where he entered an unobtrusive door and joined a group which consisted of the New State's well guarded pool of power and brains. There was Blanchard of Finance -- Keeley, Director of Foreign Education. Masichek overlord of the nation's larder, and seven others. When Pardeau entered, all conversation stopped and every , man looked up from a luxurious overstuffed chair. Pardeau must certainly have swelled inwardly with pride at this unconscious tribute, it was well known that he held a key position on the chessboard of politics. His was in reality the most Important job of all. It was to Pardeau that this powerful group of men looked for that which they most treasured -- their own personal safety. A chair was waiting for Pardeau. He said, "I'm sorry to be late, gentlemen. I have been on a personal tour of inspection. I'm sure you will forgive me however. I have a most interesting report." He seated himself, timing the action so it coincided with the ebb of applause coming over the speaker -- applause from the loyal multitudes who had just heard Professor , Cargill end his lecture. As it was now permissible, Blanchard reached under the' table and snapped a button. The speaker went silent. "An interesting report?" Keeley asked. "Amazingly so," Pardeau said. "I have just unearthed a traitor -- a traitor in a high place." Every man in the group strove not to react and this striving was in itself a reaction. "Most interesting," Blanchard murmured. "Are you ready to name names?" "That is my intention, but in order to forestall a great many questions, let me give you a complete background." Leiderman, Ambassador without Portfolio, and very close to the Man of Almost Sacred Name who never attended these meetings, felt strong enough to evince impatience. "The name, man! First the name. Then the details." Pardeau smiled coldly. "Very well. The name is, Karl Lenster." Leiderman sprang from his chair, his face bordering on purple. "Is this a joke, Pardeau? We all know Lenster is the arch-traitor of our times -- the leader of the resistance movement. Talk sense!" Pardeau, not in the least disconcerted, smiled coldly. "I'm sorry. Perhaps I should haVe said Emil Hillerman, my Deputy of Vital Intelligence, the man who holds immeasurable power in his two hands." Blanchard was not given to outbursts. But his lips were grim as he said, "We are waiting for you to talk sense, Pardeau." "The confusion comes from your not allowing me to tell it as I wished. There is a gap between Lenster and Hillerman'; one which -- with your permission -- I will fill." "Talk, man! Talk!" "You have all heard of Formula #, known also as the Wyckoff Chemical Transformation Process." There were expressions of both understanding and bewilderment. Noting these, Pardeau said, "For those of you who haven't made a point of looking into the thing, I'll explain. Wyckoff, in case you don't recall, was a chemical engineer of more than average ability who stumbled onto this formula before he died, most regretfully, four years ago, in #." Leiderman continued to scowl. "Wc all know each other, Pardeau. Call a spade a spade. Wyckoff was a reactionary scoundrel whom you did away with for reasons of security." "Precisely," Pardeau said. "In its essence, the formula is a process for taking over a man's brain -- his body -- his personality." "You mean -- " Pardeau refused to be interrupted. "We were of the opinion that Wyckoff, though he and Lenster were great friends, was not able to impart his knowledge to the latter. We took him into custody shortly after he perfected the formula and were fortunate in persuading him to give it to us." "But he gave it to Lenster also?" "We were certain, at the time of his death that he had not been able to do that -- we are still certain." Keeley, with a gesture, requested the floor. "I wonder if you could go into a little more detail concerning the formula -- for those of us who -- " "Of course," Pardeau said. "The formula is a combination of six chemicals and the process of transformation is relatively simple, yet highly dangerous to both subjects involved. It means sure death for the proposed host, and if not delicately handled will also result in death for the usurper. The transformation requires three hours to perform. Once completed successfully, the usurper can never return to his own body. It must be destroyed. Also, the mentality of the host vanishes after it is pushed from its original brain tissue through the influence of the formula." "Then if Wyckoff didn't give the formula to Lenster, it was stolen from our vaults -- or wherever it was kept?" "Exactly. Certain investigations I have made prove beyond doubt that Lenster got to my Deputy, Hillerman. I never considered Hillerman very bright, but I thought him to be honest and loyal. But beyond all doubt, with his aid, Lenster stole the. formula -- possibly got it verbally -- and used it to take Hillerman's body from him." Pardeau smiled grimly. "Therefore, gentlemen, we have a traitor in a high place. My Deputy of Vital Intelligence." ing to enjoy the fear he had engendered in his colleagues -- sat silent until Leiderman said, "You've arrested him of course." "No. I have not." "Then get at it, man -- get at it." "I have no intention of arresting Hillerman." Leiderman's eyes widened as did those of the rest of the company. But Blanchard, even under the impact of such a bombshell had the presence of mind to glance at his watch. Immediately he snapped on the loudspeaker. The voice of Professor Cargill blared forth: " -- and upon this anniversary of the New State, we can look with pride upon a clean and wholesome land -- " It was the rebroadcast, from recordings, of Cargill's speech and no man in his right mind would have refrained from tuning it in because everyone wanted to hear it at least twice. Leiderman, almost apoplectic, ignored the speech. "Not arresting him! Are you mad?" "I'm quite sane, and the situation is well in hand." Pardeau grinned and there was wickedness in the grin -- wickedness and intelligence. "As I said before, Hillerman was not a smart man. His job was too much for him and I would have been faced, soon with the necessity of replacing him regardless. Lenster, on the other hand, is of gradeA intellect. But, gentlemen, he is frightened -- badly frightened in his new environment -- and in order to insure his own safety, is doing an excellent job. Ever since the transformation, that department has gained in efficiency until it now ranks as one of the highest in our entire government." Slowly, Pardeau's strategy dawned on the group. Blanchard suddenly smiled. Then Pardeau scowled and went on with a new and sudden ferocity. "I have the proof, and I have Lenster-Hillerman under my palm. So he stays --  continues to do a good job for us. But he'll be watched, gentlemen. He won't be able to go to the bathroom without being under surveillance. We will Icam a great deal from him. All we need to know." "Then you'll arrest him?" the boss of the state larder wanted to know. Pardeau came to his feet. His fist slammed down on the table. "I shall not arrest him -- ever. When the time comes, I shall personally shoot him down in the street like a dog. There will come a day, gentlemen, when you will witness this act of vengeance -- when I shall make such an example of LensterHillerman as the resistance will not forget -- a morale-crumbling example, I promise you." " -- in which Lenster and his ilk are forever crushed and beaten," the speaker said. Blanchard took the floor. "Gentlemen -- I move a vote of thanks and confidence for our colleague, Neal Pardeau." The Director of Public Security stood at attention and assayed a sharp, military bow. It was a moment of rare triumph. "Thank you, gentlemen," he said. An hour later, Lenster-Pardeau was alone in his apartments. He stripped off his uniform with an air of grim satisfaction. While he undressed, he thought of the martyrs to the Cause ; the men who had died. He thought of Wyckoff and wished Wyckoff could have had the pleasure of knowing who had usurped the body of Neal Pardeau -- Pardeau the Butcher -- the infamous Pardeau. From the speaker came the third and final rebroadcast of Cargill's speech : " -- a clean and wholesome land -- " "A clean and wholesome land," Lenster murmured, and the tone of his voice w'as a prayer. Before reading this story, prepare yourself for a jolt and a chill in capsule form. O. Henry could have been proud of it. It could well become a minor classic. The Last Supper By T. D. Hamm H ampered as she was by the child in her arms, the woman was running less fleetly now. A wave of exultation swept over Guldran, drowning out the uneasy feeling of guilt at disobeying orders. The instructions were mandatory and concise: "No capture must be attempted individually. In the event of sighting any form of hufied immediately. All small craft must be back at the landing space not later than one hour before takeoff. Anyone not so reporting will be presumed lost." Guldran thought uneasily of the great seas of snow and ice sweeping inexorably toward each other since the Earth had reversed on its axis in the great catastrophe a millenium ago. Now, summer and winter alike brought paralyzing .gales and blizzards, heralded by the sleety snow in which the woman's skinclad feet had left the tracks which led to discovery. His trained anthropologist's mind speculated avidly over the little they had gotten from the younger of the two men found nearly a week before, nearly frozen and half-starved. The older man had succumbed almost at once; the other, in the most primitive sign language, had indicated that, of several humans living in caves to the west, only he and the other had survived to flee some mysterious terror. Guldran felt a throb of pity for the woman and her child, left behind by the men, no doubt, as a hindrance. But what a stroke of fortune that there should be left a male and female of the race to carry the seed of Terra to another planet. And what a triumph if he, Guldran, should be the one to return at the eleventh hour with the prize. No need of calling for help. This was no armed war-party, but the most defenseless being in the Universe -- a mother burdened with a child. Guldran put on another burst of speed. His previous shouts had served only to ,spur the woman to greater efforts. Surely there was some magic word that had survived Something equivalent to the "bread Cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted, "Food! food!" Ahead of him the woman turned her head, leaped lightly in midstride, and went on; .slowing a little but still running doggedly. Guldran's pulse leaped. He yelled again, "Food!" The instant that his foot touched the yielding surface of the trdp, he knew that he had met defeat. As his body crashed down on the firesharpened stakes, he knew too the terror from which the last men of the human race had fled. Above him the woman looked down, her teeth gleaming wolfishly. She pointed down into the pit; spoke exultantly to the child. "Food!" said the last woman on earth. Marleij's Chain (Continued from page #) Jackson's frightened face appeared briefly, then vanished. Finally Dave lifted a heavy fist, drove it hard into Tam's stomach, then sadly lifted the choking, gasping man to the floor. The police came in, seconds later, clubs drawn, eyes wide. They dragged Tam out, one on each arm. sickness growing in the pit of his stomach. In court, a Sharkie would draw the maximum sentence, without leniency. Ten years in prison -- Dave leaned forward, his face in his hands, tears running down his black cheeks, sobs shaking his broad, heavy shoulders. "Why wouldn't he listen? Why couldn't he have gone to Mercury? Only a few months, not long enough to hurt him. Why couldn't he have gone, and worked out in the sun, got that hot sun down on his hands and face -- not for long, just for a little while. Two or three months, and he'd have been dark enough to pass -- " Conger agreed to kill a stranger he had never seen. But he would make no mistakes because he had the stranger's skull under his arm. , By Philip K, Dick Conger asked. "Go on. I'm interested." The room was silent; all faces were fixed on Conger -- still in the drab prison uniform. The Speaker leaned forward slowly. "Before you went to prison your trading business was paying well -- all illegal -- all very profitable. Now you have nothing, except the prospect of another six years in a cell. Conger scowled. "There is a pertain situation, very important to this Council, that requires your peculiar abilities. Also, it is a situation you might find interesting. You were a hunter, were you not? You've done a great deal of trapping, hiding in the bushes, waiting at night for the game? I imagine hunting must be a source of satisfaction to you, the chase, the stalking -- " Conger sighed. His lips twisted. "All right," he said. "Leave that out. Get to the point. Who do you want me to kill?"  The Speaker smiled. "All in proper sequence," he said softly. The car slid to a stop. It was night; there was no light anywhere along the street. Conger looked out. "Where are we? What is this place?" The hand of the guard pressed into his arm. "Come. Through that door." Conger stepped down, onto the damp sidewalk. The guard came swiftly after him, and then the Speaker. Conger took a deep breath of the cold air. He studied the dim outline of the building rising up before them. "I know this place. I've seen it before." He squinted, his eyes growing accustomed to the dark. Suddenly he became alert. "This is -- " "Yes. The First Church." The Speaker walked toward the steps. "We're expected." "Expected? Here?" "Yes." The Speaker mounted the stairs. "You know we're not allowed in their Churches, e.specially with guns!" He stopped. Two armed soldiers loomed up ahead, one on each side. "All right?" The Speaker looked up at them. They nodded. The door of the Church was open. Conger could see other soldiers inside, standing about, young soldiers with large eyes, gazing at the ikons and holy images. "I see," he said. "It was necessary," the Speaker said. "As you know, we have been singularly unfortunate in the past in our relations" with the First Church." "This won't help." , "But it's worth it. You will see." T hey passed through the hall and into the main chamber where the altar piece was, and the kneeling places. The Speaker scarcely glanced at the altar as they passedby. He pushed open a small side door and beckoned Conger through. "In here. We have to hurry. The faithful will be flocking in soon." Conger entered, blinking. They were in a small chamber, low-ceilinged, with dark panels of old wood. There was a smell of ashes and smoldering spices in the room. He sniffed. "What's that? The smell." "Cups on the wall. I don't know." The Speaker cros.sed impatiently to the far side. "According to our information, it is hidden here by this -- " Conger looked around the room. He saw books and papers, holy signs and images. A strange low shiver went through him. "Does my job involve anyone of the Church? If it 'does -- " The Speaker turned, astonished. "Can it be that you believe in the Founder? Is it possible, a hunter, a killer -- " "No. Of course not. All their business about resignation to death, non-violence -- " "What is it, then?" Conger shrugged. "I've been taught not to mix with such as these. They have strange abilities. And you can't reason with them." The Speaker studied Conger thoughtfully. "You have .the wrong idea. It is no one here that we have them only tends to increase their numbers." "Then why come here? Let's leave." "No. We came for something important. Something you will need to identify your man. Without it you won't be able to find him." A trace of a smile crossed the Speaker's face. "We don't want you to kill the wrong person. It's too important." "I don't make mistakes." Conger's chest rose. "Listen, Speaker -- "This is an unusual situation," the Speaker said. "You see, the person you are after -- the person that we are sending you to find -- is known only by certain objects here. They are the only traces, the only means of identification. Without them -- " "What are they?" He came toward the Speaker. The Speaker moved to one side. "Look," he said. He drew a sliding wall away, showing a dark square hole. "In there." Conger squatted down, staring in. He frowned. "A skull! A skeleton!" "The man you are after has been dead for two centuries," the Speaker said. "This is all that remains of him. And this is all you have with which to find him." For a long time Conger said nothing. He stared down at the bones, dimly visible in the recess of the wall. How could a man dead centuries be killed? How could he ,be stalked, brought down? Conger was a hunter, a man who had lived as he pleased, where he 'pleased. He had kept himself alive by trading, bringing furs and pelts in from the Provinces on his own ship, riding at high speed, slipping through the customs line around Earth. He had hunted in the great mountains of the moon. He had stalked through empty Martian cities. He had explored -- The Speaker said, "Soldier, take these objects and have them carried to the car. Don't lose any part of them." ' ' The soldier went into the cupboard, reaching gingerly, squatting on his heels. "It is my hope," the Speaker continued softly, to Conger, "that you will demonstrate your loyalty to us, now. There are always ways for citizens to restore themselves, to show their devotion to their society. For you I think this would be a very good chance. I seriously doubt that a better one will come. And for your efforts there will be quite a resitution, of course." T,he two .men looked at each other; Conger, thin, unkempt, the Speaker immaculate in his uniform. "I understand you," Conger said. "I mean, I understand this part, about the chance. But how can a man who has been dead two centuries be -- " "I'll explain later," the Speaker said. "Right now we have to hurry!" The soldier had gone out with the bones, wrapped in a blanket held carefully in his arms. The Speaker walked to the door. "Come. They've already discovered that we've broken in here, and they'll be coming at any moment." They hurried down the damp steps to the waiting car. A second later the driver lifted the car up into the air, above the house-tops. the seat. "The First Church has an interesting past," he said. "I suppose no you are familiar with it, but I'd like to speak of a few points that are of relevancy to us. "It was in the twentieth century that the Movement began -- during-' one of the periodic wars. The Movement developed rapidly, feeding on the general sense of futility, the realization that each war was breeding greater war, with no end in sight. The Movement posed a simple answer to the problem : Without military preparations -- weapons -- there could be no war. And without machinery and complex scientific technocracy there could be no weapons. "The Movement preached that you couldn't stop war by planning for it. They preached that man was losing to his machinery and science, that it was getting away from him, pushing him into greater and greater wars. Down with society, they shouted. Down with factories and science! A few more wars and there wouldn't be much left of the world. "The Founder was an obscure person from a small town in the American Middle West. We don't even know his name. All we know is that one day he appeared, preaching a doctrine, of non-violence, nonresistance; no fighting, no paying taxes for guns, no research except for medicine. Live out your life quietly, tending your garden, staying out of public affairs ; mind your own business. Be' obscure, unknown, poor. Give away most of your possessions, leave the city. At least that was what developed from what he told the people." The car dropped down and landed on a roof. "The Founder preached this doctrine, or the germ of it; there's no telling how much the faithful have added themselves. The local authorities picked him up at once, of course. Apparently they were convinced that he meant it; he was never released. He was put to death, and his body buried secretly. It seemed that the cult was finished." The Speaker smiled. "Unfortunately, some of his disciples reported seeing him after the date of his death. The rumor spread; he had conquered death, he was divine. It took hold, grew. And here we are today, with a First Church, obstructing all social progress, destroying society, sowing the seeds of anarchy -- " "But the wars," Conger said. "About them?" "The wars? Well, there were no more wars. It must be acknowledged that the elimination of war was the direct result of non-violence practiced on a general scale. But we can take a more objective view of war today. What Was so terrible about it? War had a profound selective value, perfectly in accord with the teachings of Darwin and Mendel and others. Without war the masS of useless, incompetent mankind, without training or intelligence, is permitted to grow and expand unchecked. War acted to reduce their numbers ; like storms and earthquakes and droughts, it was nature's way of eliminating the unfit. "Without war the lower elements of mankind have increased all out of proportion. They threaten the educated few, those with scientific knowledge and training, the ones equipped to direct society. They have no regard for science or a scientific society, based on reason. And this Movement seeks to aid and abet them. Only when scientists are in full control can the -- " H e looked at his watch and then kicked the car door open. "I'll tell you the rest as we walk." They crossed the dark roof. "Doubtless you now know whom those bones belonged to, who it is that we are after. He has been dead just two centuries, now, this ignorant man from the Middle West, this Founder. The tragedy is that the authorities of the time acted too slowly. They allowed him to speak, to get his message across. He was allowed to preach, to start his cult. And once such a thing is under way, there's no stopping it. "But what if he had died before he preached? What if none of his doctrines had ever been spoken? It took only a moment for him to utter them that, we know. They say he spoke just once, just one time. Then the authorities came, taking him away. He oflered no resistance; the incident was small." The Speaker turned to Congfer. "Small, but we're reaping the consequences of it today." They went inside the building. Inside, the soldiers had already laid out the skeleton on a table. The soldiers stood around it, their young faces intense. Conger went over to the table, pushing past them. He bent down, staring at the bones. "So these are his remains," he murmured. "The fcunder. The Church has hidden them for two centuries." "Quite so," the Speaker said. "But now we have them. Come along down the hall." They went across the room to a door. The Speaker pushed it open. Technicians looked up. Conger saw machinery, whirring and turning; benches and retorts. In the center of the room was a gleaming crystal cage. The Speaker handed a Slem-gun to Conger. The important thing to remember is that the skull must be saved and brought back -- for comparison and proof. Aim low -- at the chest." Conger weighed the gun in his hands. "It feels good," he said. "I know this gun -- that is, I've seen them before, but I never used one." The Speaker nodded. "You will be instructed on the use of the gun and the operation of the cage. You will be given all data we have on the time and location. The exact spot was a place called Hudson's field. About # in a small community outside Denver, Colorado. And don't forget -- the only means of identification you will have will be the skull. There are visible characteristics of the front teeth, especially the left incisor -- " Conger listened absently. He was watching two men in white carefully wrapping the skull in a plastic bag. They tied it and carried it into the crystal cage. "And if I should make a mistake?" "Pick the wrong man? Then find the right one. Don't come back until you succeed in reaching this Founder. And you can't wait for him to start speaking; that's what we must avoid! You must act ip advance. Take chances; shoot as soon as you think you've found him. He'll be someone unusual, probably a stranger in the area. Apparently he wasn't known." Conger listened dimly. "Do you think you have it all now?" the Speaker asked. "Yes. I think so." Conger entered the crystal cage and sat down, placing his hands on the wheel. "Good luck," the Speaker said. "We'll be awaiting the outcome. There's some philosophical doubt as to whether one can alter the past. This should answer the question once and for all." Conger fingered the controls of the cage. "By the way," the Speaker said. "Don't try to use this cage for purposes not anticipated in your job. We have a constant trace on it. If we want it back, we can get it back. Good luck." Conger said nothing. The cage was sealed. He raised his finger and touched the wheel control. He turned the wheel carefully. He was still staring at the plastic bag when the room outside vanished. For a long time there was nothing at all. Nothing beyond the crystal mesh of the cage. Thoughts rushed through Conger's mind, helterskelter... How would he know the man? How could he be certain, in advance? What had he looked like? What was his name? How had he acted, before he spoke? Would he be an ordinary person, or some strange outlandish crank? Conger picked up the Slem-gun and held it against his cheek. The , metal of the gun was cool and smooth. He practiced moving the sight. It was a beautiful gun, the kind of gun he could fall in love with. If he had owned such a gun ! in the Martian desert -- on the long ' nights when he had lain, cramped and numbed with cold, waiting for things that moved through the darkness -- He put the gun down and adjusted the meter readings of the cage. The spiraling mist was begin. ning to condense and settle. All at once forms wavered and fluttered I around him. , Colors, sounds, movements fil! tered through the crystal wire. He j clamped the controls off and stood i up. ing a small town. It was high noon. The air was crisp and bright. A few automobiles moved along a road. Off in the distance were some level fields. Conger went to the door and stepped outside. He sniffed the air. Then he went back into the cage. He stood before the mirror over the shelf, examining his features. He had trimmed his beard -- they had not got him to cut it off -- and his hair was neat. He was dressed in the clothing of the middle-twentieth century, the odd collar and coat, the shoes of animal hide. In his pocket was money of the times. That was important. Nothing more was needed. Nothing, except his ability, his special cunning. But he had never used it in such a way before. He walked down the road toward the town. ' The first things he noticed, were the newspapers on the stands. April #, #. He was not too far off. He looked around him. There taverns, and a ten-cent store. Down the street was a grocery store and some public buildings. A few minutes later he mounted the stairs of the little public library and passed through the doors Into the warm interior. The librarian looked up, smiling. "Good afternoon," she said. He smiled, not speaking because his words would not be correct; accented and strange, probably. He went over to a table and sat down by a heap of magazines. For a moment he glanced through them. Then he was on his feet again. He crossed the room to a wide rack against the wall. His heart began to beat heavily. Newspapers -- weeks on end. He took a roll of them over to the table and began to scan them quickly. The print was odd, the letters strange. Some of the words were unfamiliar. He set the papers aside and searched farther. At last hp found what he wanted. He carried the Cherrwood Gazette to the table and opened it to the first page. He found what he wanted: An unidentified man, held by the county sheriff's office for suspicion of criminal syndicalism, was found dead this morning, by -- He finished the item. Tt was vague, uninforming. He needed more. He carried the Gazette back to the racks and then, after a moment's hesitation, approached the librarian. "More?" he asked. "More papers. Old ones?" She frowned. "How old? Which papers?" "Months old. And -- before." "Of the Gazette? This is all we have, 'hat did you want? What are you looking for? Maybe I can help you." He was silent. "You might find older issues at the Gazette office," the woman said, taking off her glasses. "Why don't you try there? But if you'd' tell me, maybe I could help you -- " He went out. The Gazette office was down a side street; the sidewalk was broken and cracked. He went inside. A heater glowed in the corner of the small office. A heavy-set man s,tood up and came slowly over to the counter. "What did you want, mister?" he said. "Old papers. A month. Or more." "To buy? You want to buy them?" "Yes." He held out some of the money he had. The man stared. "Sure," he said. "Sure. Wqit a minute." He went quickly out of the room. When he came back he was staggering under the weight of his armload, his face red. "Here are some," he grunted"Took what I could find. Covers the whole year. And if you want more -- " Conger carried the papers outside. He sat down by the road and began to go through them. months back, in December. It was a tiny item, so small that he almost missed it. His hands trembled as he scanned it, using the small dictionary for some of the archaic terms. An unidentified man who refused to give his name was picked up in Cooper Creek by special agents of the sherifPs office, according to Sheriff Duff. It was said the man was recently noticed in this area and had been watched continually. It was -- Cooper Creek. December, #. His heart pounded. That was all he needed to know. He stood up, shaking himself, stamping his feet on the cold ground. The sun had moved across the sky to the very edge of the hills. He smiled. Already he had discovered the exact time and place. Now he needed only to go back, perhaps to November, to Cooper Creek. -- He walked back through the main section of town, ' past the library, past the grocery store. It would not be hard ; the hard part was over. He would go there; rent a room, prepare to wait uijtil the man appeared. He turned the corner. A woman was coming out of a doorway, loaded down with packages. Conger stepped aside to let her pass. The woman glanced at him. Suddenly her face turned white. She stared, her mouth open. Conger hurried on. He looked back. What was, wrong wdth her? The woman was still staring; she had dropped the packages to the ground. He increased his speed. He turned a second corner and went up a side street. When he looked back again the woman had come to the entrance of the street and was starting after him. A man joined her, and the two of them began to run toward him. He lost them and left the town, striding quickly, easily, up into the hills at the edge of town. When he reached the cage he stopped. What had happened? Was it something about his clothing? His dress? He pondered. Then, as the sun set, he stepped into the cage. Conger sat before the wheel. For a moment he waited, his hands resting lightly on the control. Then he turned the wheel, just a little, following the control readings carefully. The grayness settled down around him. But not for very long. T he man looked him over critically. "You better come inside," he said. "Out of the cold." "Thanks." Conger went gratefully through the open door, into the livingroom. It was warm and close from the heat of the little kerosene heater in the corner. A woman, large and shapeless in her flowered dress, came from the kitchen. She and the man studied him critically. "It's a good room," the woman said. "I'm Mrs. Appleton. It's got heat. You need that this time of year." "Yes." He nodded, looking around. "You want to eat with us?" "What?" "You want to eat with us?" The man's brows knitted. "You're not a foreigner, are you, mister?" "No." He smiled. "I was born in this country. Quite far west, though." "California?" "No." He hesitated. "In Oregon." "What's it like up' there?" Mrs. Appleton asked. "I hear there's a lot of trees and green. It's so barren here. I come from Chicago, myself." "That's the Middle West," the man said to her. "You ain't no foreigner." "Oregon isn't foreign, either," Conger said. "It's part of the United States." The man nodded absently. He was staring at Conger's clothing. "That's a funny suit you got on, mister," he said; "Where'd you get that?" Conger was lost. He shifted uneasily. "It's a good suit," he said. "Maybe I better go some other place, if you don't want me here." They both raised their hands protestingly. The woman smiled at him. "We just have to look out for those Reds. You know, the governrnent is always warning us about them." "The Reds?" He was puzzled. "The government says they're all around. We're supposed to report anything strange or unusual, anybody doesn't act normal." "Like me?" They looked embarrassed. "Well, you don't look like a Red to me," the man said. "But we have to be careful. The Tribune says -- " Conger half listened. It was going to be easier than he had thought. Clearly, he would know as soon as the Founder appeared. These people, so suspicious of anything different would be buzzing and gossiping and spreading the story. All he had to do was lie low and listen, down at the general store, perhaps. Or even here, in Mrs. Appleton's boarding house. "Can I see the room?" he said. "Certainly." Mrs. Appleton went to the stairs. "I'll be glad to show it to you." They went upstairs. It was colder upstairs, but not nearly as cold as outside. Nor as cold as nights on the Martian deserts. For that he was grateful. He was walking slowly around the store, looking at the cans of vegetables, the frozen packages of fish and meats shining and clean in the open refrigerator counters. Ed. Davies came toward him. "Can I help you?" he said. The man was a little oddly dressed, and with a beard! Ed couldn't help smiling. "Nothing," the man said in a funny voice. "Just looking." "Sure," Ed said. He walked back behind the counter. Mrs. Hacket was wheeling her cart up. "Who's he?" she whispered, her sharp face turned, her nose moving, as if it were sniffing. "I never seen him before." "I don't know." "Looks funny to me. Why does he wear a beard? No one else wears a beard. Must be something the matter with him." "Maybe he likes to wear a berd. I had an uncle who -- " "Wait." Mrs. Hacket stiffened. "Didn't that -- what was his name? The Red -- that old one. Didn't he have a beard? Marx. He had. a beard." Ed laughed. "This ain't Karl Marx. I saw a photograph of him once." Mrs. Hacket was staring at him. "You did?" "Sure." He flushed a little. "What's the matter with that?" "I'd sure like to know more about him," Mrs. Hacket said. "I think we ought to know more, for our own good." n ride?" Conger turned quickly, dropping his hand to his belt. He relaxed. Two young kids in a car, a girl and a boy. He smiled at them. "A ride? Sure." Conger got into the car and closed the door. Bill Willet pushed the gas and the car roared down the highway. "I appreciate a ride," Conger said carefully. "I was taking a walk between towns, but it was farther than I thought." "Where are you from?" Lora Hunt asked. She was pretty, small and dark, in her yellow sweater and blue skirt. "From Cooper Creek." "Cooper Creek?" Bill said. He frowned. "That's funpy. I don't remember seeing you before." "Why, do you come from there ?' "I was bom there. I krow everybody there." "I just moved in. From Oregon." "From Oregon? I didn't know Oregon people had accents." "Do I have an accent?" "You use words funny." "How?" "I don't know. Doesn't he, Lora?" "You slur them," Lora said, smiling. "Talk some more. I'm interested in dialects." She glanced at him, white-teethed. Cqnger felt his heart constrict. "I have a speech impediment." "Oh." Her eyes widened. "I'm sorry." They looked at him curiously as the car purred along. Conger for his part was struggling to find some way of asking them questions without seeming curious. "I guess people from out of town don't come here much," he said. "Strangers." "No," Bill shook his head. "Not very much." "I'll bet I'm the first outsider for a long time." "I guess so." Conger hesitated. "A friend of mine -- someone I know, might be coming through here. Where do you suppo.se I might -- " He stopped. "Would there be anyone certain to see him? Someone I could ask, make sure I don't miss him if he comes?" They were puzzled. "Just keep your eyes open. Cooper Creek isn't very big." "No.' That's right." They drove in silence. Conger studied the outline of the girl. Probably she was the boy's mistress. Perhaps she was his trial wife. Or had they developed trial marriage back so far? He could not remember. But surely such an attractive girl would be someone's mistress by this time; she would be sixteen or so, by her looks. He might ask her sometime, if they ever met again. , T he next day Conger went walking along the one main street of Cooper Creek. He passed tions, and then , the post office. At the corner was the soda fountain. He stopped. Lora was sitting inside, talking to the clerk. She was laughing, rocking back and forth. Conger pushed the door open. Warm air rushed around him. Lora was drinking hot chocolate, with whipped cream. She looked up in surprise as he slid into the seat beside her. "I beg your pardon," he said. "Am I intruding?" "No." She shook her head. Her eyes were large and dark. "Not at all." The clerk came over. "What do you want?" Conger looked at the chocolate. "Same as she has." Lora was watching Conger, her arms folded, elbows on the counter. She smiled at him. "By the way. You don't know my name. Lora Hunt." She was holding out her hand. He took it awkwardly, not knowing what to do with it. "Conger is my name," he murmured. "Conger? Is that your last or first name?" "Last or first?" He hesitated. "Last. Omar Conger." "Omar?" She laughed. "That's like the poet, Omar Khayyam." "I don't know of him. I know very little of poets. We restored very few works of art. Usually only the Church has been interested enough -- " He broke off. She was staring. He flushed. "Where I come from," he finished. "The church? Which church do you mean?" "The Church." He was confused. The chocolate came and he began to sip it gratefully. Lora was still watching him. "You're an unusual person," she said. "Bill didn't like you, but he never likes anything different. He's so -- so prosaic. Don't you think that when a person gets older he should become -- broadened in his outlook?" Conger nodded. "He says foreign people ought to stay where they belong, not come here. But you're not so foreign. He means orientals; you know." Conger nodded. The screen door opened behind them. Bill came into the room. He stared at them. "Well," he said. Conger turned. "Hello." "Well." Bill sat down. "Hello, Lora." He was looking at Conger. "I didn't expect to see you here." Conger tensed. He could feel the hostility of the boy. "Something wrong with that?" "No. Nothing wrong with it." There was silence. Suddenly Bill turned to Lora. "Come on. Let's "Go?" She was astonished. "Why?" "Just go!" He grabbed her hand. "Come on! The car's outside." "Why, Bill Willet," Lora said. "You're jealous!" "Who is this guy?" Bill said. "Do you know anything about him? Look at him, his beard -- " She flared. "So what? Just because he doesn't drive a Packard and go to Cooper High!" Conger sized the boy up. He was big -- big and strong. Probably he was part of some civil control organization. "Sorry," Conger said. "I'll go." "What's your business in town?" Bill' asked. "What are you doing here? Why are you hanging around Lora?" Conger looked at the girl. He shrugged. "No reason. I'll see you later." He turned away. And froze. Bill had moved. Conger's fingers went to his belt. Half pressure, he whispered to himself. No more. Half pressure. He squeezed. The room leaped around him. He himself was protected by the lining of his clothing, the plastic sheathing inside. 'My God -- " Lora put her hands up. Conger cursed. He hadn't meant any of it for her. But it would wear off. There was only a halfamp to it. It would tingle. Tingle, and paralyze. He walked out the door without looking back. He was almost to the corner when Bill came slowly out, holding onto the wall like a drunken man. Conger went on. A S Conger walked, restless, in the night, a form loomed in front of him. He stopped, holding his breath. "Who is it?" a man's voice came. Conger waited, tense. "Who is it?" the man said again. He clicked something in his hand. A light flashed. Conger moved. "It's me," he said. "Who is 'me'?" "Conger is my name. I'm staying at the Appleton's place. Who are you?" The man came slowly up to him. He was wearing a leather jacket. There was a gun at his waist. "I'm Sheriff Duff. I think you're the person I want to talk to. You were in Bloom's today, about three o'clock?" "Bloom's?" "The fountain. Where the kids hang out." Duff came up beside him, shining his light into Conger's face. Conger blinked. "Turii that thing away," he said. A pause. "All right." The light flickered to the ground. "You were there. Some trouble broke out between you and the Willet boy. Is that right? You had a beef over his girl -- " "We had a discussion," Conger said carefully. "Then what happened?" "Why?" "I'm just curious. They say you did something." "Did something? Did what?" "I don't know. That's what I'm Wondering. They saw a flash, and something seemed to happen. They all blacked out. Couldn't move." "How are they now?" "All right." There was silence. "Well?" Duff said. "What was it? A bomb?" "A bomb?" Conger laughed. "No. My cigarette lighter caught fire. There was a leak, and the fluid ignited." "Why did they all pass out?" "Fumes." Silence. Conger shifted, waiting. His fingers moved slowly toward his belt. The Sheriff glanced down. He grunted. "If you say so," he said. "Anyhow, there wasn't any real harm done." He stepped back from Conger. "And that Willet is a troublemaker." "Good night, then," Conger said. He started past the Sheriff. "One more thing, Mr. Conger. Before you go. You don't mind if I look at your identification, do you?" "No. Not at all." Conger reached into his pocket. He held his wallet out. The Sheriff took it and shined his flashlight on it. Conger watched, breathing shallowly. They had worked hard on the wallet, studying historic documents, relics of the times, all the papers they felt would be relevant. Duff handed it back. "Okay. Sorry to bother you." The light winked off. When Conger reached the house he found the Appletons sitting around the television set. They did not look up as he came in. He lingered at the door. "Can I ask you something?" he said. Mrs. Appleton turned slowly. "Can I ask you -- what's the date?" "The date?" She studied him. "The first of December." "December first! Why, it was just November!" They were all looking at him. Suddenly he remembered. In the twentieth century they still used the old twelve month system. November fed directly into December; there was no Quartember between. He gasped. Then it was tomorrow! The second of December! Tomorrow! "Thanks," he said. "Thanks." He went up the stairs. What a fool he was, forgetting. The Founder had been taken into captivity on the second of December, according to the newspaper records. Tomorrow, only twelve hours hence, the Founder would appear to speak to the people and then be dragged away. T he day was warm and bright. Conger's shoes crunched the melting crust of snow. On he went, through the trees heavy with white. He climbed a hill and strode down the other side, sliding as he went. He stopped to look around. Everything was silent. There was no one in sight. He brought a thin rod from his waist and turned the handle of it. For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a shimmering in the air. The crystal cage appeared and settled slowly down. Conger sighed. It was good to see it again. After all, it was his only way back. He walked up on the ridge. He looked around with some satisfaction, his hands on his hips. Hudson's field was spread out, all the way to the beginning of town. It was bare and flat, covered with a thin layer of snow. Here, the Founder would come. Here, he would speak tO' ,them. And here the authorities would take him. Only he would be dead before they came. He would be dead before he even spoke. Conger returned to the crystal globe. He pushed through the door and stepped inside. He took the Slem-gun from the shelf and screwed the bolt into place. It was ready to go, ready to fire. For a moment he considered. Should he have it with him? No. It might be hours before the Founder came, and suppose someone approached him in the meantime? When he saw the Founder coming toward the field, then he could go and get the gun. Conger looked toward the shelf. There was the neat plastic package. He took it down and unwrapped it. He held the skull in his hands, turning it over. In spite of himself, a Cold feeling rushed through him. This was the man's skull, the skull of the Founder, who was still alive, who would come here, this day, who would stand on the field not fifty yards away. What if he could see this, hfe own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring? What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull? Better they should enjoy their temporary lives, while they still had them to enjoy. A man who could hold his own skull in his hands would believe in few causes, few movements. Rather, he would preach the opposite -- A sound. Conger dropped the skull back on the shelf and took up the gun. Outside something was moving. He went quickly to the door, his heart beating. Was it hel Was it the Founder, wandering by himself in the cold, looking for a place to speak? Was he meditating over his words, chosing his sentences? What if he could see what Conger had held! He pushed the door opeii, the gun raised. Lora! He stared at her. She was dressed in a wool jacket and boots, her hands in her pockets. A cloud of steam came from her mouth and nostrils. Her breast was rising and falling. Silently, they looked at each other. At last Conger lowered the gun. "What is it?" he said. "What are you doing here?" She pointed. She did not seem able to speak. He frowned; what was wrong with her? "What is it?" he said. "What do you want?" He looked in the direction she had pointed. "I don't see anything." "They're coming." "They? Who? Who are coming?" ' "They are. The police. During the night the Sheriff had the state police send cars. All around, everywhere. Blocking the roads. There's about sixty of them coming. Some from town, some around behind." She stopped, gasping. "They said -- they said -- "What?" "They said you were some kind of a Communist. They said -- " He put the gun down on the shelf and came back out. He leaped down and went to the girl. "Thanks. You came here to tell me? You don't bejieve it?" "I don't know." "Did you come alone?" "No. Joe brought me in his truck. From town." "Joe? Who's he?" "Joe French. The plumber. He's a friend of Dad's." "Let's go." They crossed the snow, up the ridge and onto the field. The little panel truck was parked half way across the field. A heavy short man was sitting behind the wheel, smoking his pipe. He sat up as he saw the two of them coming toward him. "Are you the one?" he said to Conger. "Yes. Thanks for warning me." The plumber shrugged. "I don't know anything about this. Lora says you're all right." He turned around. "It might interest you to know some more of them are coming. Not to warn you -- Just curious." "More of them?" Conger looked toward the town. Black shapes were picking their way across the snow. "People from the town. You can't keep this sort of thing quiet, not in a small town. We all listen to the police radio; they heard the same way Lora did. Someone tuned in, spread it around -- " The shapes were getting closer. Conger could, make out a couple of them. Bill Willet was there, with some boys from the high school The Appletons were along, hanging back in the rear. "Even Ed Davies," Conger murmured. The storekeeper was toiling onto the field, with three or four other men from tiie town. "All curious as hell," French said. "Well, I guess I'm going back to town. I don't want my truck shot full of holes. Come on, Lora." She was looking up at Conger, wide-eyed. "Come on," French said again. "Let's go. You sure as hell can't stay here, you know." "Why?" "There may be shooting. That's what they all came to see. You know that don't you. Conger?"' "Yes." "You have a gun? Or don't you care?" French smiled a little. "They've picked up a lot of people in their time, you know. You won't be lonely." He cared, all right! He had to stay here, on the field. He couldn't aflford to let them take him away. Any minute the Founder would appear, would step onto the field. Would he be one of the townsmen, standing silently at the foot of the field, waiting, watching? Or maybe he was Joe French. Or maybe one of the cops. Anyone of them might find himself moved to speak. And the few words spoken this day were going to be important for a long time. And Conger had to be there, ready when the first word was uttered ! "I care," he said. "You go on back to town. Take the girl with you." Lora got stiffly in beside Joe French. The plumber started up the motor. "Look at them, standing there," he said. "Like vultures. Waiting to see someone get killed." T he truck drove away, Lora sitting stiff and silent, frightened now. Conger watched for a moment. Then he dashed back into the woods, between the trees, toward the ridge. He could get away, of course. Anytime he wanted to he could get away. All he had to do was to leap into the crystal cage and turn the handles. But he had a job, an important job. He had to be here, here at this place, at this time. He reached the cage and opened the door. He went inside and picked up the gun from the shelf. The Slem-gun would take care of them. He notched it up to full count. The chain reaction from it would flatten them all, the police, the curious, sadistic people -- They wouldn't take him! Before they got himj all of them would be dead. He would get away. He would escape. By the end of the day they would all be dead, if that was what they wanted, and he -- He saw the skull. Suddenly he put the gun down. He picked up the skull. He turned the skull over. He looked at the teeth. Then he went to the mirror. He held the skull up, looking in the mirror. He pressed the ull against his cheek. Beside his own face the grinning skull leered back at him, beside his skull, against his living flesh. He bared his teeth. And he knew. It was his Own skull that he held. He was the one who would die. He was the Founder. After a time he put the skull down. For a few minutes he stood at the controls, playing with them idly. He could hear the sound of motors outside, the muffled noise of men. Should he go back to the present, where the Speaker waited? He could escape, of course -- Escape? He turned toward the skull. There it was, his skull, yellow with age. Escape? Escape, when he had held it in his own hands? What did it matter if he put it off a month, a year, ten years, even fifty? Time was nothing. He had sipped chocolate with a girl born a hundred and fifty years before his time. Escape? For a little while, perhaps. But he could not really escape, no more so than anyone else had ever escaped, or e'ler would. Only, he had held it in his hands, his own bones, his own death'shead. They had not. He went out the door and across the field, empty handed. There were a lot of them standing around, gathered together, waiting. They expected a good fight; they knew he had something. They had heard about the incident at the fountain. And there were plenty of police -- police with guns and tear gas, creeping across the hills and ridges, between the trees, closer and closer. It was an old story, in this century. One of the men tossed something at him. It fell in the snow by his feet, and he looked down. It was a rock. He smiled. "Come on!" one of them called. "Don't you have any bombs'?" "Throw a bomb! You with the beard! Throw a bomb!" "Let 'em have it!" "Toss a few A Bombs!" T hey began to laugh. He smiled. He put his hands to his hips.' They suddenly turned silent, seeing that he was going to speak. "I'm sorry," he said simply. "I don't have any bombs. You're mistaken." There was a flurry of murmuring. "I have a gun," he went on. "A very good one. Made by science even more advanced than your own. But I'm not going to use that, either." They were puzzled. "Why not?" someone called. At the edge of the group an older woman was watching. He felt a sudden shock. He had seen her before. Where? He remembered. The day at the library. As he had turned the corner he had seen her. She had noticed him and been astounded. At the time, he did not understand why. Conger grinned. So he would escape death, the man who right now was voluntarily accepting it. They were laughing, laughing at a man who had a gun but didn't use it. But by a strange twist of science he would " appear again, a few months later, after his bones had been buried under the floor of a jail. And so, in a fashion, he would escape death. He would die, .but then, after a period of months, he would live again, briefly, for an afternoon. An afternoon. Yet long enough for them to see him, to understand that he was still alive. To know that somehow he had returned to life. And then, finally, he would appear once more, after two hundred years had passed. Two centuries later. He would be born again, born, as a matter of fact, in a small trading village on Mars. He would grow up, learning to hunt and trade -- A police car came on the edge of the field and stopped. The people retreated a little. Conger raised his hands. "I have an odd paradox for you," he said. "Those who take lives will lose their own. Those who iill, will die. But he who gives his own life away will live again!" They laughed, faintly, nervously. The police were coming out, walking toward him. He smiled. He had said everything he intended to say. It was a good little paradox he had coined. They would puzzle over it, remember it. Smiling, Conger awaited a death foreordained. It was like a mirage in reverse, this strange island off the California coast -- it couldn't always be seen, but it was there -- in Time. Sinister Paradise Retch called. Bill Parker shifted the controls of the 'copter and the big craft swung in the direction Retch was pointing. Squinting his eyes against the sun glare rising from the Pacific, Parker clearly saw the island. It was miles away as yet but it swam like a mirage suspended just above the surface of the sea. The island was not large -- Parker guessed it as probably being less than two miles in circumference -- but he could make out a fringe of trees along the shore and a central peak rising like a cliff in the center. "I've found it again!" Retch spoke with fierce satisfaction -- clenched fists. Parker heard the indrawn hiss of breath following the words; a hiss that seemed to hold a promise for the future. Revenge, vengeance, triumph, or something else? Parker could not determine what emotional overtone had found expression in Retch's words. But the emotional overtone was there. Out of the corner of his eyes, Parker glanced at the man sitting in the seat next to him. What he saw did not please him.  Retch was big. He had the muscular build of a prize fighter. The scar over his left cheekbone did not add to the attractiveness of his appearance. He did not, in Tarkeis opinion, look like the scientist he had claimed to be. I Parker shrugged such thoughts aside. What difference did it make what Retch was, or the nature of his business here? He had paid charter charges on the big helicopter. "There it is, Parker!" Retch almost screamed the words. As he pointed again toward the island in the far distance, Parker caught a glimpse of a pistol in a shoulder holster under the man's arm. The sight of the gun caused a split second of alarm in the big pilot. He had not known that Retch was armed. Then the alarm subsided. Parker pressed his left arm down against his body, assurring himself that his own gun was where it belonged. The woman, Mercedes Valdar, seemed to catch sopie of Retch's excitement. She leaned forward across Retch's shoulder to stare at the island. Parker caught another whiff of the musky perfume that she used. He noticed again what he had realized the first time he met her -- that in any man's language she was a beauty. Aquiline face. smouldering black eyes, high cheek bones, a delicate brown complexion that hinted at Indian blood back several generations in the past, shf looked like something out of an exotic movie. The slacks and sport coat that she wore accentuated the fact that she was a woman. Parker was aware again of the enigma of her presence. Retch had introduced her as his secretary. Parker, accepting the man's statement, had asked no questions. Asking questions in a matter such as this was a fine way to get a bust in the snoot. "It ees the island!" Her whisper was sharp. A glow appeared on her face. "Soon we will be reech!" She slapped Parker heartily on the shoulder. "Beel, is not that wonderful!" "It sure is," Parker answered. He was as astonished by the statement as he was by the slap on the shoulder. "Shut up, Mercedes!" Retch spoke. "Parker, turn some juice into this thing." "She's cruising at about her best speed," Parker answered. "Then get her faster than cruising speed. We've found the island." His manner indicated that finding the 'island was very important but that something else perhaps of equal importance remained to be donfe. "What's the big rush!" Parker countered. "You don't think it will vanish before we get there, do you?" A startled look appeared on Retch's face. "No, of course not. That is -- " A thudding jar went through the ship. "What 'appened?" Mercedes screamed in fear. , With a snarling crash of breaking metal, one of the helicopter blades was yanked from its mounting above them. Parker had the dazed impression that he saw the big blade jerked away through the air. Then, like a leaf suddenly caught in a violent hurricane, the helicopter began to turn flip-flops in the air. "Do somesing!" Mercedes cried. As the ship jumped and began to yaw, she was thrown across the cabin. Jerking, buckling, jumping, twisting, the big helicopter lurched its way toward the surface of the sea below. Cutting the power, Parker leaped from his seat. He knew what was going to happen. He intended to try and be ready for it. R etch, gripping his seat with both hands, yelled. "We're falling!" "It's not news to me," Parker answered, jerking open the door to the compartment at the rear. Inside that compartment was a mass of synthetic fabric. Tossed to the surface of the sea, inflated by the selfcontained flask of gas under pressure, it would make a rubber raft. "You've left the controls!" Retch barked. "Do something to stop us. We're going to fall." The man's face was wild with fear as he twisted his head around to see what Parker was doing. "You damned right I've left the controls!" Parker answered. "We've lost the equivalent of a wing in an ordinary plane. If you know any way to stop a plane from falling you tell me." W'orking with deft, sure hands, he pulled the mass of synthetic fabric out of its compartment. "But we've got to get to that island. We've found it. We've got to get there while -- " "If we get there, we'll have to swim," Parker answered. "Personally, I'll consider myself lucky to get there by swimming. Here we go." The last was spoken as the helicopter began its final plunge to the surface of the blue water below them. Parker, with the mass of fabric clutched firmly in both hands, threw himself flat on the floor. The 'copter hit with a terrific thud. An instant later, Parker was on his feet. The life raft was under one hand. With the other hand, he was reaching for the handle that opened the cabin door. "We've got to get out of here. This ship will go the bottom like a rock." Behind him, Mercedes and Retch were struggling to their feet. Parker yanked on the handle that opened the cabin door. The handle did not budge. The heavy jolt the craft had taken when it struck the surface had twisted the whole frame. "Get that door open!" Retch moaned. "We'll be drowned like rats." "Hell, I'm trying!" Parker answered. He yanked upward with all his strength. The door still did not budge. Outside Parker could see the green water rising around the cabin. He backed away, ducked his head, threw himself with all his strength against the door. Under the driving impact of his body, the door vas knocked open. The mass of synthetic fabric in his arms, Parker catapulted through the opening and into the sea. He hit with a terrific splash. Mercedes followed him. Parker, treading water and working with the valve that would release the gas and inflate the raft, saw that Retch was still standing in the door of the 'copter. "What am I going to do?" Retch screamed. "Jump." "But I can't swim." "Then wait until I get this goddamned raft inflated. tJgh!" Parker's voice went into silence as arms came up out of the water and closed around his neck with a grip of death.  Mercedes, in a panic that often comes to people catapulted suddenly and unexpectedly into the water, was grabbing the nearest source of potential safety. "Let go!" Even as he spoke, Parker felt her arms close even tighter around his neck. He knew then that she was not going to let go. She was pulling him under with her. Giving one final jerk at the valve of the gas container, Parker found himself pulled under water. The arms around his neck seemed to grip like iron. He caught them in both hands, yanked at them. His hands slipped. He grabbed again. She was behind him, on his back, so he could not slug her. Meanwhile each passing second was sending both of them deeper into the sea. He yanked at her arms again. This time his fingers held. Her grip was broken. Twisting, he grabbed her hair. Then he began to fight his way to the surface. His head broke water. As he gulped air, he realized the blessed sight before his eyes. The rubber raft! His last jerk at the valve before Mercedes dragged him under had opened it. From the door of the sinking helicopter Retch was staring at the raft. At the same instant in final desperation, he jumped. His clutching fingers caught the edge of the rubber raft. Like a frightened river rat, he pulled himself out of the water. T reading water, Parker dragged Mercedes to the edge of the raft. Retch leaned over and lifted her in. For an instant, Parker remained in the water, his fingers firm on the raft, letting it support him while he gasped air into his lungs. Behind him, with a gurgle and a rumble, the helicopter sank. He swung himself into the raft. Mercedes, her masculine garb clinging to her, was sitting up. "I am sorry, Beel," she said. "I get the scare up and I grab at you. I not know for sure what I am doing. You will forgive me, no?" "Think nothing of it," Parker answered. "Anybody can get scared under these circumstances." "That I know," she answered. "But you saved my life. And that I will remember." "Forget it," Parker said. "I did what had to be done, nothing more." "But I will remember it," she calmly repeated. Parker was silent. Under her hardness for the first time he glimpsed something deeper, finer. She was the type who meant what she said. She was a woman w'ho paid her debts. Under other circumstances... Parker put the thought out of his mind. Now he set about doing what had to be done -- paddling to the island. He turned his eyes toward it. The island was gone. Calm, serene, the level face of the sea stretched away to the horizon. Fear, dark, sudden, and overwhelming, arose in Bill Parker. The fear did not come up just because the face of the sea was level and calm, the island not visible, but because of something else, something that he had forgotten, something that he had put out of his mind and out of his life. Could it be possible that -- He caught himself. In that direction lay madness. Words exploded out of him. "Hey, what the hell? Am I nuts? What became of that island? I saw it!" "I told you we had to hurry to get there when we saw it." Retch was hesitant. "It's -- it's not always there." "But it's got to be there! I saw it!" "There is a trick about that island," Retch said. "I -- it -- I -- you don't always see it. Something funny." Parker was across the 'Shaking, unsteady raft. His impulse was to take Retch by the throat, to shake words out of him. "What do you mean?" He was restraining himself with difficulty. Retch spread his hands. "Pm sorry, I can't explain. That's all I know. Believe me." Retch was telling the truth Parker decided. The big pilot swung his gaze in every direction, searching for land. Somewhere in the far distance was the peninsula of Lower California. But it was beyond range of his eyes. As far as he could see, was barren water. Setting his course by the small compass that was included as part of the standard equipment on the life raft, Parker paddled toward the south. The clumsy raft made little progress. Parker hardly noticed, hardly cared. Deep in his mind was a lurking thought he was trying to keep below his consciousness. In the front of the raft. Retch sat with his back to Parker. From Retch's motions, Parker knew the man was cleaning his gun. Parker made no comment. When Retch had finished and had turned back to him, Parker spoke. "I want to know a little more about that island. How does it happen we can't see it?" "I'm notcertain," Retch answered. "I think it's a lot like the mirages you see on the desert. This island is something like that, only in reverse. In a mirage, you see something that doesn't exist. In the case of this island, you don't see Something that does exist." "Um," Parker said, then was silent. The explanation sounded reasonable enough, as far as it went. The trouble was it didn't go far enough, not nearly far enough to quiet the thought lurking deep in the big pilot's mind. He worked with the paddle. "When you hired me to fly you down here, you told me that you knew where this island was located but you didn't tell me it had a bad habit of vanishing." "I didn't believe it myself," Retch answered. "So far as I was concerned, it was just a wild rumor." "Um," Parker said again. As he spoke, part of the thought that he had been keeping buried in his mind came blasting to the surface. "She said it was a mirage too!" he blurted out the words. "And that goddamned Dr. Yammer -- " He caught himself. Into his mind had come a vision of a woman he had once known,, and a psychiatrist called Dr. Y ammer. Pain crossed his face. "What?" Retch asked. "Who are you talking about?" "Nobody," Parker answered. "Just a woman I once knew." Her name had been Effra. Effra of the Green Eyes, he had called her. Rigidly he forced the thought of her from his mind, forced himself to think of what Retch had said. But it was no good. His mind kept going back to Effra and Yammer. "She is caught, trapped in a net of delusion and hallucination that is as solid as a block of steel," Dr. Yammer had once said, his voice precise with authoritarian certainty. "I cannot get her out of this steel block unless I hospitalize her, perhaps operate. There is no other choice, no other decision that can be made. Putting it bluntly -- she is insane. A delicate thing, insanity. We still work in the dark with things of the mind." A t the memory of Yammer's words, Parker twisted uncomfortably. He used the paddle much more vigorously than was necessary. It was as if Yammer's face showed in the water into which he thrust the paddle. Mercedes was studying Parker. "About this woman -- " "She was just a woman I once knew." "You loved her, yes?" "Well -- " Parker was silent. "Tell me what 'appened." "Nothing," Parker said. "Oh, hell -- all right. Up in LA three years ago I knew Effra. She was a pilot too, and we got to running around together. She liked to fly out over the Pacific all by herself. I don't know why; she, just liked to flirt with danger, maybe. One time she came in a couple of hours over-due. Figuring she was down in the drink. I was about to rouse out the Navy to hunt for her when she came in." He paused. Mercedes was silent. In the front of the raft. Retch said nothing. His eyes were still searching the skyline. "She was wildly excited," Parker went on. "She said she had made a forced landing on an island somewhere off the coast of Southern Gal. She also said there were a lot of strange people living on the island." He shook his head. There was i feeling in him he did not like. His eyes came to focus on a ripple in the water. A shark. It made him think of Dr. Yammer. "What 'appened then?" Mercedes asked softly. "I helped her look For the island," Parker said. "We spent months looking in our spare time. We flew over more ocean than I ever knew existed. But we didn't find it." "No?" "That island was awfully important to her. She thought something wonderful was there, what it was, she could not tell me, just that it was there. When we could not find it, she began to doubt herself, to think perhaps she had not seen it, that she had not landed there. She reached the conclusion then -- well, she went to see one of these fancy mental specialists who know everything about nothing and nothing about anything." Under the water, he could see the eyes of the shark. They reminded him of the expression in Dr. Yammer's eyes, except that the shark's eyes looked more honest. "And then?" Mercedes said, very softly. "She -- vanished," Parker said.  "Yammer was going to stick her into a hospital, use something that he called 'shock' on her, maybe operate. She ran away." "Did you try to find her, Beel?" "For asking that question, Mercedes, I ought to choke you!" Parker said hotly. "I hunted high and low. All we knew for certain was that her plane was missing. I think she decided she would simply fly out to the sea she loved, and never come back." Again his voice sank to a whisper as he visualized Effra of the Green Eyes flying out over this wilderness of waters. "I am sorry, Beel," Mercedes said gently. "Will you remember one thing, Beel?" "Sure. What is it?" "You saved my life back there. I will not forget it. If the time ever comes, I will pay my debt." "Thank you," Parker said. "But there is no debt." "You think this island we are hunting might be the same island your . girl claimed she found?" Retch spoke from the front end of the boat. "And if it is the same island?" Mercedes said. ' Anger came boiling up in Parker. "If it is that island, and if I ever get back to Los Angeles, I am going to hunt up a psychiatrist by the name of Yammer and take care of him!" Parker dug the water savagely. Gradually, his anger subsided "Where did you run into the rumor about this island?" Retch shrugged. "It was just one of those things you hear." He studied the landscape. "We should spot a boat soon." "We are not exactly on the welltraveled ocean lanes," Parker pointed out. "Does it happen that there are any other little things about this island that you forgot to tell me when you chartered my ship to fly you down here?" Retch flushed. "Such as -- " "Such as how it happened that my 'copter threw a vane just after we sighted the place?" Retch did not aqpwer. "Seemed as though somebody shot at us." "Oh hell no! The loss of the vane was accidental." "Accidents like that can happen but they usually don't. I checked the ship before we took off." Parker turned silent. There was no proof that the wrecking of the 'copter had been anything but an accident. "What do you expect to find on this island?" "I told you -- " "Just before the 'copter started down. Miss Valdar was yakking about how we were all going to be rich," Parker interrupted. The glance Retch gave Mercedes had no love in it. "Sometimes she's got her mouth open when she ought to have it shut." "I see," Parker said. "When you chartered my ship, you told me you were a scientist and that you wanted to investigate certain phenomena on this island. You said your investigation would take only a few hours. I was to fly you here and wait for you. You said you might want me to fly you back to the mainland, or might not, depending on what you found here. Is this correct?" "Certainly," Retch answered. "I'm sorry you lost your ship but the insurance will take care of it." "Insurance will take care of the 'copter but not of my neck. Are you a scientist?" "Of course. Didn't I tell you -- " "What kind of a scientist are you?" "I -- ah -- What do you mean?" "What's your specialty? Are you a biologist, a physicist, or what?" C J # "I don't believe you ire a scientist at all. You don't talk like one." "Damn it, I told you what I am and that's what I am !" Retch's face showed sullen and his hand moved toward the gun. Parker tensed. Rfetch stopped the movement of his hand. He glared at the big pilot. "Okay," Parker said. "It doesn't make any difference anyhow." He resumed paddling. The sun slid down the western sky. Retch and Mercedes huddled in the front end of the raft and whispered to each other. From time to time, the woman glanced at Parker. He paid no attention to her. The sea was calm. In the distance, a school of flying fish skittered over the surface. A dozen gulls played near the surface. A highriding fin cut the water. Shark, sensing food. The sun reached the horizon and wallowed in the sea like a fat, round shining pig on fire. Mercedes screamed, pointed, jerked a terror-stricken face toward Parker. "Beel! Beel!" She scuttled across the raft, threw herself into his arms. "Look, Beel, look!" Terror and panic almost beyond understanding were in her words. Parker looked where she was pointing. His heart climbed up into his mouth and threatened to choke him. He had thought he was shockproof, that nothing could jar him. But here was something that made his mind reel. Walking across the water toward the raft were three men. Clad in knee-length breeches, wearing cloaks, the three men looked as if they had just stepped out of the #th century. Two wore big, broad-brimmed hats, the third had a handkerchief wrapped around his head. He also had a wooden leg and he stalked across the surface of the sea with all the sureness he might have had with concrete under him. He carried a curved cutlass in one hand. The other two men were armed with swords, in scabbards. In addition, heavy, . clumsy-looking pistols were thrust into sashes at their belts. They looked like men out of a nightmare -- or like pirates out of the olden days; swash-buckling buccaneers who had somehow managed to survive their proper period in history and to live into the #th century. "Ghosts!" Mercedes screamed. "Devils! They've come up out of hell because of our sins!" She wrapped her arms around Parker's neck. "Save me, Beel, save me!" Parker caught her wrists, jerked her arms loose from his neck, and rose quickly to his feet. He hoped fervidly that his eyes had been deceiving him and that standing up would cause this mirage to disappear. His eyes continued to deceive him. The three men did not disappear. They continued to walk across the water toward the raft. They moved with the sureness of men who know where they are going. Behind them, suddenly outlined against the fat sun that was wallowing in the sea, rocky, grim, and forbidding, the mysterious island was now visible. It had reappeared. They had found it. Three men coming from it had found them. The shark found the three men. Parker saw the triangular fin cut through the water toward them. Like a speed boat taking off on a race, the fin gathered momentum. The three men saw it coming. "Ho!" one yelled. "A shark!" the second said. "Have at him, boys!" the third shouted. T he shark charged them. Drawing their swords, the three men executed a nimble dance on the surface of the sea. They thrust downward -- their swords entering the water with no difficulty whatsoever although their feet did not enter it -- drew them back dripping red. They skipped lightly out of the way of the wounded and infuriated monster! "Zounds!" "Chop the sea pig down!" "Carve his heart out!" Old battle cries rang in the air as they fought the shark. Blood colored the surface of the sea. The wounded shark suddenly took its death blow. It dived, was gone from sight, then broke the surface a hundred yards away. It beat the water into foam, threshing out its life. With pleased interest, the three men watched the shark die. Dipping their blades into the sea to clean the blood from them, they wiped them dry on their pants legs. Again they moved toward the raft. Parker's hand went to the pistol inside his leather jacket. He loosed it in its holster but did not draw it. Mercedes moaned and covered her eyes. At the other end of the boat, Retch had risen to his feet. Bracing himself, Bill Parker waited for -- whatever was to happen. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Retch slowly drawing his gun. "Damn it. Retch, put that gun away!" Parker shouted. "Don't shoot until you know what the hell is going on." Retch turned, the gun visible in his hand. "What the hell -- " Retch didn't put the gun away. He lifted it. Parker found himself staring into the muzzle. "Get your hands up!" Retch snarled the words. "Mercedes, get' that gun out of his holster. Get your goddamned hands up or I'll blow your blasted head off!" The last was spoken to Parker as the dazed pilot tried to understand what had happened. He could hardly believe his own eyes. Automatically he lifted his hands. Mercedes slid past him, got behind him, taking no chances on getting between him and Retch's gun. He felt her fingers go inside his jacket. Expertly she lifted the gun from its holster. "Toss me the gun!" Retch said. He caught the weapon the woman tossed toward him, glanced at 'Parker. "You thought I was going to start shooting at them?" He gestured toward the three approaching men. "You made a slight mistake." The grin on his face was wolfish. "What the hell have I got into?" "You'll find out, if you live long enough," Retch said. "Just behave yourself and do as you're told and maybe you'll stay alive." Again the wolfish grin showed on his face but under the grin, the words were harsh with meaning. "Ho, Johnny!" the three men were drawing near the raft. "Ho, Johnny Retch! What kind of a flying ship is this that you have brought back with you?" Retch turned to the three men. "Gotch! Peg-leg! Masterville!" Retch greeted them as old friends. The one he had called Gotch had spoken. All three of them stared at the raft and its occupants. Mercedes drew bold, appreciative stares. Parker got blank looks. Standing lightly and easily on the water, the three men surveyed the raft with doubtful contempt. "Does this thing fly through the air like the Jez -- " Gotch caught himself. "It looks to me as if it were more fit for sailing on a mill pond back in Devon." "This is not the ship that flies through the air, that ship was wrecked. This is a rubber boat that it #.X'I'#cl "Wrecked?" Gotch spoke. "But where does that leave us?" "Everything has been taken care of," Retch spoke quickly. "You can always trust Johnny Retch to have two strings for his bow." "Hmmmm. And who is this?" Gotch gestured toward Parker. "The pilot of the flying ship that was wrecked," Retch answered. "Ummmm. And what are we going to do with him?" Gotch glanced around toward the still floundering and dying shark as if he regretted their haste in disposing of what might have been a handy scavanger. "Um." He moved around the raft and stood close to Parker, staring at him. The sword in his hands still showed faint traces of red from the blood of the shark. "We do not need any more men on the island!" Lifting his blade, Gotch glared at Parker. "Do you, per'aps, need women?" Mercedes spoke quickly. Gotch turned his eyes on her. As he looked, some of the anger seemed to go out of him. "Perhaps what you need on the island are more women," hlercedes said. She smiled boldly. G otch broke into a grin. "But definitely, we need more women, if they are like you." "Hey, lay off of her, she belongs to me!" Retch spoke violently. "Come, let us pull the boat to the island," Peg-leg spoke quickly. "We have too many things to do to stand waiting here." Grumbling, Gotch allowed himself to be persuaded to get in front of the raft and join the other men in pulling it. Not until then did Parker dare to breathe. "Thanks," he spoke to Mercedes. "It was nothing, Beel. Anyone could have done it." "Thanks, anyhow," Parker said. "But what have we got ourselves into here?" "I do not know for sure, Beel. Johnny, he like me, and he ask me to come along. He say we will both get reech -- " "Shut up!" Retch spoke. Parker, sitting in the raft, watched the three men tow it toward the shore. He watched their feet. Where they stepped, the water seemed to grow firm. Pirates, cut-throats, killers, they certainly were. But added to, that was the equally obvious fact that they could walk on water. In all history, Parker had only heard of one man who could do that, and he hadn't been a man, but a God. Ahead of them, the island loomed in the sunset; a long strip of white, sandy beach ; behind it a thick growth of trees; behind the trees the rocky central mass of the island rising up into the sky. Off to the right, Parker caught a glimpse of a wreck that lay against rocks jutting from the shore. He stared at it. Unless his eyes were deceiving him, it was the wreck of a Spanish galleon, a ship that belonged to the days when Spain had been draining the gold and silver and jewels of the new world into her coffers. The men stopped, stared uneasily at the shore. Parker could make out two men barely visible between the beach and the grove of trees. "Rozeno and Ulnar!" Gotch spoke. "Watching us." His lips curled and his hand went automatically to the hilt of the sword he was wearing. "Some day I will slit the throats of that priest and that Indian." Gotch spat into' the sea. "They're not causing any trouble," Peg-leg spoke. "They're witches, by Gadf" Gotch answered. "They're warlocks, wizards." "Father Rozeno is a very devout and holy man," Peg-leg said. "He pretends to be a priest but he is more of a warlock than he is a holy man. As for that Indian, if he ever gives me the chance -- " Gotch 'glared at the figures at the edge of the grove. "Come on," Peg-leg said. Mercedes contrived to move closer to Parker. "Beel, what are theese theengs here? I do not understand them. I do not like them." "Nor do I," Parker said. A shiver passed over her. "What's the matter, baby, you cold?" Retch grinned at her. "Don't worry about it. We'll get you warmed up on the island." Imperceptibly she again moved closer to Parker. "Beel, it ees not good." "You got into this of your own free will." "Yes, but I did not know that theengs like theese were going to 'appen. I just thought -- " "Mercedes, if you open your mouth again, I'll knock your teeth down your throat!" Retch said. Mercedes was silent. As they came in to the shore, the two men who had been visible on the beach disappeared. Off to the left something else came into view. It was a small cabin plane, wrecked there in what had apparently been an attempt at a forced landing. Before they reached the shore, the fat sun had wallowed itself out of sight into the sea. In the dusk, the island looked like a vast, rocky pinnacle thrust up out of the Pai!fic Ocean, or out of the ocean of time -- Parker couldn't tell which. Mysterious, silent, it waited in the darkness like a vast sleeping monster on the surface of the sea, a monster on which Spanish galleons and planes had been wrecked. Parker, his nerves jufnpy, half-way expected it to vanish beneath the surface before they reached it. But it didn't vanish. It remained fixed, solid, firm. When they stepped from the raft, the sand under their feet was solid, the crunch of it reassuring. the trees. The island was quiet, too quiet. It seemed to brood in the darkness. In the vast stillness that hung like a pall over the place, the only sound was that of a bird, chittering sleepily in the dark woods. It was the most out-of-place sound Bill Parker had ever heard. It seemed to affect the others. At the bird-sound they were suddenly quiet, listening. "To hell with it, it's nothing," Gotch said. "Come on." Following a well defined path, they moved inland, toward the base of the cliff. Through the trees, Parker glimpsed fires. As he moved closer, he saw the source of the lights, the cooking fires of a village set against the base of the cliff. "Ho!" Peg-leg called, announc, ing their arrival. As they entered the village, the inhabitants came rushing out to them. They were the queerest lot of human beings Parker had ever seen. Spaniards, bearded grandees' in tattered and mended bits of ancient finery, Indians, squat, stalwart, Englishmen, tall and blond, a motley crew. They looked like the relics of half a dozen different nations, drawn from the fringes of time. Their garments did not belong in the #th century. Their weapons were knives, swords, bell-mouthed pistols. Their language was a mixture of Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Indian dialects. "What kind of a mad-house is this?" Parker muttered. "Get away, you!" The last was spoken to a slender Spaniard who was trying to jerk Parker's leather jacket from his back. The man snarled at him, drew back. "Get out of our way!" Retch yelled. The crowd made way for him. Calling greetings, snarling. Retch seemed very much at home here. Mercedes looked hopelessly confused and at a loss. She stared around her as if she was appalled at what she saw. Parker drew the obvious inference. Mercedes had never been here before. All this was as new to her as it was to him. But Retch had been Jiere. Off in the woodland behind them somewhere a bird chirped, the same sleepy quiet sound that Parker had heard as they landed. Now it was louder, nearer, and even more out of place than it had been before. The people around Parker also heard the sound. Startled faces turned toward the dark forest. The Sound came again, louder now. Parker was certain it was the call of a bird. But if it was the chirp of a bird, it was frightening these people. Why .should a bird-sound in the night frighten grown men? Utter silence fell. Even Gotch was still. Parker saw that the man's face had turned gray, that all the bristling bravado had passed out of him. Even Retch, showing signs of strain and growing temper, was silent. "The Jezbro!" someone whispered. At the words, the strain and temper coming up in Retch burst the surface. "There is no such thing as the Jezbro!" His voice was almost a scream. "It's only superstitious nonsense -- " His shouting voice went into silence as the sound came again. The chirp was louder now. It was no longer one bird chirping in the dark night, it was a dozen. And it wasn't quite the sound of a bird any longer, it was a musical tinkle, an air-borne throbbing somewhat similar to the sound of a harp, a softly ringing chime. Parker could easily imagine that somewhere among those dark trees was a harper, moving closer. The harpist did not seem to be upon the ground. He -- or she -- seemed to be up in the air, somewhere near the tree tops, moving in the dark night. As the .sound came louder, a man in the village suddenly went down on his knees, then another and another, until the whole group, including Gotch, were kneeling. EyBn Mercedes went to her knees in response to deep internal, superstitious pressures. Only Retch and Parker stood erect as two men strong enough to face the sound coming from the night. "Get down, you fools!" Peg-leg's voice had real anguish in it. "Get down, hell!" Retch answered. He had a gun in each hand, his own and the one he had taken from Parker. "Beel! Beel!" Mercedes was jerking at Parker's Ipg, "What is 'appening?" "Something," Parker answered. "I don't know what." There was fear in him. He could feel it in his heart, sense it in his bones, taste in his mouth. He rose above it. The sound swept through the air. It came out over the trees above them. On the ground, the kneelers moaned in response. The harping sound leaped up, became a melody of weird notes the eerie music were the moans from the prostrate humans. Looking upward, Parker caught a glimpse of something moving through the sky. It blotted out the light of the stars and it looked a lot like a bird but like no bird he had ever seen before. It was too big to be any bird that had ever flown through Earth's air, but yet it flew. As it flew, it made the sound of a gigantic harp. T he bird passed over the village, moving along the cliff. As it slid into the distance, the harp music faded slowly away, became ain the sound of a sleepy bird. Ground the village, the prostrate humans moaned, stirred, began to rise. "What the hell was that thing?" Parker gasped. "The damned fools call it the Jezbro!" Retch snarled. "The yellow cowards are afraid of it. I don't know what it is." Parker was silent. To him, Retch sounded like a man scared right down to the soles of his shoes but desperately trying to pretend he wasn't. "It was a warning sent by them," Peg-leg whispered, gesturing up toward the cliff in the darkness. "A warning to us to mend our ways." "It was no such thing!" Retch shouted. Peg-leg did not argue. He got slowly and silently to his feet. The group was silent, perturbed, and afraid. Even Gotch was silent. Whatever had passed overhead, had cast a pall of fear over them. "You bilious, yellow-livered cowards!" Retch raged at them. They made no response. The fear the Jezbro had inspired in them seemed to have made even his anger unimportant. "But what is the Jezbro?" Parker questioned again. "I mean -- " "I told you it's nothing and that's enough of an answer. Hey!" The guns that Retch held came up sharply as another figure came soundlessly out of the forest and moved toward them. An old, bent, wrinkled Indian who hobbled along with the aid of a staff. "Oh, it's you, Pedro!" Retch said. "What the hell do you want?" For all the sign he gave, the Indian, Pedro, did not hear Retch's question. He hobbled straight to Parker. "En la manana Padre Rozeno huit note el hombre e la mujer. Father Rozeno will see the man and the woman in the morning." The voice was broken with age. "I don't get it," Parker said. The Indian was already turning. He had delivered his message, his errand was finished. "That damned Rozeno is not go- ing to see anybody in the morning!" Retch yelled. The Indian staffed his way into the forest. He still seemed not to hear Retch. "Tell him they won't be there!" Retch screamed. Pedro's back went out of the firelight as he moved into the trees. Retch seemed almost to go mad. His face turned purple. Both guns came to focus on the spot where the Ipdian had disappeared. "Why shoot him?" Parker said. "He was just a messenger." "Damn it!" Slowly, while the group watched impassively, Retch got himself under control. Suddenly he began to laugh. Strangely his laughter in this moment was more horrible than his anger had been. "He sent for you, and the woman. All right, he'll get you. But I'll go with you. If he wants you. I'll take you to him." Again the laughter sounded. "Who is Rozeno?" Parker asked. "He is, or he was once, a Spanish priest. He and Ulnar think they rule this island. They are the two men we saw watching us from the shore. You'll see them in the morning." That was the last word Retch said on the subject. He took Gotch apart, to talk to him. Peg-leg found food for Parker, but refused to talk. "Na, na, my son, when the Jezbro passes over us as a great bird -- when it goes through the woods at night as a great howling beast -- we do not talk about it." Parker pressed for more information, but the old man turned stubbornly silent. Later he found Parker a place to sleep in his own hut. Parker had the impression that, all during the night Peg-leg, sat on guard at the entrance. But nothing came in the night. In the morning Retch was there, saying, with grim bitterness, that now it was time to go up the cliff to see Rozeno and Ulnar. Mercedes, looking wan and bedraggled, with hate in her hot black eyes, was with him. So was Gotch. Gotch did not look in the least happy. "What's biting you?" Parker said to Retch. "Nothing." "I get the impression something around here is just about scaring the pants off of you." "You're crazy!" Retch's voice was a snarl. "I'm not afraid of anything around here -- you -- or anybody else." As he spoke, the man's face was a mask and his eyes were wild. "Sure, okay, I get it," the pilot answered. They moved along the cliff until they came to a ledge that sloped upward. "We go up here," Gotch grunted. rose above the tops of the trees. Sparkling thinly in the morning sunlight, the sea came into sight. Circling the shoreline at a distance of about a mile, a curtain of mist was visible. It seemed to close in above them too, shielding the island h'ke a thin, shining dome. "That's a strange fog," Parker said. "It's not a fog," Retch answered. "I don't know exactly what it is, but when it is there, the island is invisible. If you are on the other side of it, you see nothing at all." "Um," Parker said. They continued upward. The ledge twisted, curved, went around the rising cliff. Slowly Parker became aware that the rising ledge was not a natural formation, it was a pathway cut into the face of the cliff. At the realization, the pilot felt a touch of awe rise in him. This ledge was old. It must have been cut into this cliff long before Columbus had sailed westward. Off in the distance beyond the curtain of mist was the coast of California, the beaches bright with bathers, the cities wrapped in warm sunshine, the roads alive with traffic. Over there in the distance were ple. Here on this island, behind this ple so close to it, was something that did not belong in the #th century, or in any other century Parker could imagine. His back felt cold. In him, somewhere, was gnawing anger. This island, this place, was real. Back in his past a horrible wrong had been done, a wrong that now ccld never be corrected. He put the thought out of his mind. The ledge turned into the cliff and became a tunnel that had been carved into solid stone. The walls of the tunnel were as smooth as polished marble. What tools could men have used in the old days to cut a tunnel with walls so smooth that they looked like glass? Modern equipment could not have done the job so well. Niches in the wall of the tunnel admitted light and gave them glimpses of the island. "Where the hell will we find -- Oh, Pedro!" Retch spoke. The Indian messenger of the night before had appeared in the tunnel. He beckoned to them. They followed him into a large room cut out of solid stone. It was one of the cleanest and most simply furnished rooms Parker had ever seen. It contained handmade chairs along the wall and a big table, also hand-made. Light from a wall slit flowed into the room. Seated behind the table, illumined by tile light flowing in from the wall slit behind them, were Rozeno and Ulnar. Rozeno had a thin nose, the narrow face of the typical high bred Spaniard. Ulnar was short and squat, his cheeks were flat, his nose hooked. Both had black eyes that were utterly fathomless. The faces were old, wrinkled, and kind. Parker took one look at this priest, and instantly liked him. As he glanced at Rozeno, saw the kindness on that face, he also saw, out of the corners of his eyes. Retch drawing S gun. In that split second he knew why Retch had laughed so violently the night before, when Retch had said that he would go with them to see Rozeno and Ulnar. Retch intended to kill both of them; to shoot them as they sat there at that table, unarmed and defenseless; shoot them like dogs! The gun was already in Retch's hand. Parker's fist went out, up, connected with Retch's jaw, a blow that had all the pilot's strength behind it. Retch's head was twisted to one side. He reeled away from Parker's blow. The snarl that came from his lips was the snarl of a wild animal. Metal thudded as the gun hit the floor. The room echoed with sound -- Mercedes screaming. Parker followed Retch, followed him as a dog follows a rat. He caught a wild man. Retch stumbled against the wall, caught himself on one of the handmade chairs, jerked himself up, and drove at Parker. The pilot met the charge head on. They went down locked together. Retch was a tornado erupting with violent fury. He threw Parker away from him, leaped to his feet. Parker pulled himself to one knee. The fallen pistol lay' in front of him. He snatched it up. Retch was coming toward him. He saw the gun in Parker's hand, ri Psi tn "I'll kill you," the pilot said. R etch caught himself. For an instant he seemed to hang in the air before Parker, yellow glaring in his eyes as he tried to make up his mind whether or not to buck the gun. "Get your hands up," Parker said. Slowly the yellow went out of Retch's eyes. ' "Get your hands up!" Parker repeated. This time Retch obeyed him. Parker backed him against the wall, took the second pistol from his pocket, his own gun. "Damn you!" Retch snarled. Parker saw that the man was not speaking to him but to Gotch, he saw also that during all this Gotch had not moved. The man stood transfixed; afraid to move. Parker turned to the two men behind the table. They had not moved cither, though Ulnar looked as if he was about to come to his feet. Rozeno sat very still. There was sadness on his face. "Go away," he gestured toward Retch. "And you, #oo, Gotch, go away." "You mean we can go after -- " Gotch faltered. "I don't want to see either of you again," Rozeno said. There was actual living pain in his voice. "Go!" "Wait a minute," Parker spoke quickly. "Yes, my son?" Rozeno's face lo.st its sadness when he looked at Parker, it came alive with sudden animation. "You don't mean to tell me you are going to let these two go?" the pilot protested. "Of course." "But Retch tried to kill you." "I know -- " "And he'll try it again. There's something here that's driving him crazy. I don't know what it is but he knows. If you turn him loose -- I would just as soon turn loose a rattlesnake, Johnny Retch." Parker's words were hard, blunt, forceful. But for all the effect they had on the old priest, he might as well not have spoken them. Rozeno smiled. "I do not think. Retch or Gotch will ever harm us. They have no means to harm us." He made a gesture with his hands, spoke a single word, "Go!" Retch and Gotch went quickly from the room, like men who were very glad to go. "I hope you know' what you are doing," Parker said, saw that Rozeno was not looking at him. The old priest was watching Mercedes. "You may stay here, with us," Rozeno added. Mercedes' face mirrored gratitude. "Thank you." Rozeno turned his attention to Parker. "You are new to our island, are you not, my son?" "Yes." "How did you arrive here? Was your ship wrecked?" "Yes. Actually, however, we were looking for this island." Swiftly Parker explained what had happened. "Retch went away, he hired you to bring him back in a ship that flies?" Rozeno seemed a little perturbed. For the first time, Ulnar spoke, a single grunted sound. Rozeno answered with a swift flow of gutturals that Parker did not understand. Ulnar grunted again, a hot light appeared in his eyes. "Kill him!" His fist came down upon tle table. i Again Rozeno looked pained. "I have worked so long and so hard with him, trying to show him the Way, trying to explain to him that the old savagery is still in his heart. Sometimes I despair of him." He shook his head very gently. The light flowing in from behind him made a halo of his long white hair. His eyes searched Parker. They were the kindest and at the same time the keenest eyes the pilot had ever met. They looked at him and through him; they probed deep down inside of him ; they seemed to search down to the bottom of his soul. Parker had the feeling he was being weighed, measured, probed. "It is not often that I offer a choice to those who come here," Rozeno spoke. "Usually they prefer to live in the village at the base of the cliff. You may live here with us, if you wish." The smile on Rozeno' s face was a living thing. Deep down inside of him, Parker felt his soul come to sudden life. "I'll stay here. Father, if I may." The smile on Rozeno' s face became even brighter. "Good, my son. You have made a very wise choice." Parker was silent, perturbed, suddenly uneasy. Here in this place two old men lived in rooms near the top of a cliff. Down below was a village where brawling men lived, men who could walk on water. In the night, in this place something called a Jezbro went on the wings of a harp. There was magic here, mysteries that went beyond his understanding. What else was here? "Tell me about this place. Father?" Rozeno nodded. "Gladly, my son, gladly. I will show you and tell you as I show you. There are things here that even I do not understand." For a second, the old priest frowned as if he was contemplating mysteries that lay afar. Then his smile came back and he was rising to . his feet. "Come with me, my son." room. Ulnar grunted hastily and gestured toward the wall slit. Looking through it, Parker saw a speedy craft moving inside the veil -- a PT boat. His heart jumped at the thought that the Navy had finally penetrated the secret of this Strange island. His heart sank when he saw that even if this was a PT boat, it was not a Navy ship. The craft was dirty, unkempt, it was not the smart, "spick and span vessel that the Navy would operate. As he watched, the boat veered abruptly, slowed, almost came to a halt as if its occupants had suddenly discovered the presence of the island. Ulnar shook his fist at the boat. "V ondel me sego!" he said. "No, no. Ulnar," Rozeno spoke hastily. "You must not vondel them. They are just some people who have stumbled through the veil and now are bewildered." "Me make 'em more frightened," the Indian spoke. He brought one fist down into the other fist, a smacking sound. "What is vondel?" Parker spoke. Rozeno seemed not to heap him. The piriest was already moving from the room. "We do not know who cut these passages here," Rozeno said. "We do not know who cut these rooms into the rock. Some race that lived a long, long time ago -- perhaps the legendary Murians, perhaps some other race -- had this island as an outpost. I think, also, they used it as a scientific laboratory; a dangerous laboratory that they put far away from their homeland. A place where their wise men -- their philosophers -- could seek out the mysteries of nature." "Um," Parker said. There was cold in him. He tried to force it away, discovered it would not go. "There is something else that is very strange about this island," the priest continued. "Time is different here." "How is time different?" "In this way," Rozeno answered. "I came to the New World with Cortez." . "I see," Parker said. "You take it very calmly." "I do not doubt my own eyes nor do I doubt you." The old priest glowed. "Good. Good. Tell me, my son, are there many men like you in the world of today? I have a dream, a secret private dream, that the scientists from your world might come here and study the strange things on this island." "They would come here in droves if they knew about it. And so would everybody else. You would be overrun by hordes of the curious." "Yes, we know that. That isn't quite what I meant. It was my hope that perhaps we could make this island what it ias in the olden days -- secret place where the wise men could come to study." The priest's face glowed again. "There is so much here to be learned and here, also, is the time in which to learn. Here great discoveries might be made. Here could possibly be discovered not only the secrets of nature but the secrets of the minds and the hearts of men. From this place, as the centuries passed, there might be fed out, little by little, knowledge that would change the world; knowledge that would change the hearts and the minds of men; knowledge that would eliminate poverty, stop wars, knowledge that would help the human race become what it must one day be." The glow on Rozeno's face was bright. The dream he dreamed was suddenly, in Parker's mind, a living, breathing vital hope, the hope of all honest men everywhere, that tomorrow might be better! "Would you, my son, help me achieve that dream? Will you go back through the veil and explain to some of your greatest scientists what we have here?" "I would like nothing better," the big pilot answered. In a way, this was his dream too, though up until now it had always been a secret, hidden, impossibletoaccomplish thing. His hand went out to Rozeno Deep inside of him, the glow grew to greater heights. Only one other thing wa.s needed to make this glow a really perfect fgpling, Effra, who had found this island and had tried to tell him about it. But Effra was gone. They moved on to a big room where some of the scientific equipment of the vanisheoKlace still functioned, Set in a sunken pool ten feet in diameter in the center of the room was a circle of what looked like mercury. Leading up from it were heavy bus bars of some unknown metal. The bus bars came together and marched across the room to a control panel, one of the strangest control panels Parker had ever seen. The meters were graduated in colors. In front of the chair where the operator sat was a keyboard like that of a vast pipe organ. How much training would an operator need to operate this keyboard? Directly in front of the operator's seat was a square panel that looked like a television screen. S ET in niches where the right hand of the operator could reach them easily were statuettes of birds, animals, reptiles. Made of some metal, they were perfect representations. Parker saw a condor, a bald-headed eagle, a humming bird, a cougar, a jaguar, an alligator. His eyes went back to the pool in the center of the room. "It is generating power," Rozeno said. "As it turns, it creates some force, some energy. I do not understand this energy. No one now alive understands it. Understanding is one of the things I hope your scientists may achieve -- come away. Ulnar." The last was spoken as the Indian strayed near the operator's seat. Ulnar grunted impatiently. There was something about that seat that lured him. But he came away. They went into another roorn, leaving behind them the pool of mercury that turned slowly, like a miniature earth on some axis of its own. Parker took one look at the contents of this room, and gasped. The crown jewels of England were no greater than these! Here were crowns of pounded yellow gold ; here Were gargoyle masks made of the same yellow metal; masks that sparkled with gems. Here, lying on the rock shelves, were ingots of what looked to be solid gold, each one heavy enough to be a full load for a grown man. Ulnar was examining a gargo'de mask. He touched a gold bar, his old withered fingers seeming to savor the feel of it. Rozeno smiled gently. "Ulnar treasures these things, they were put in his charge a very long time ago. He has been faithful to his trust." "But -- " Parker whispered. "This is a part of Montezuma's treasure, a part that Cortez did not get. There is as much of it here as # men could carry away. Ulnar was one of Montezuma's most trusted sub-chiefs. He brought the treasure here, to keep it for his Chieftan." Ulnar's wrinkled face broke into a grin. "Me take good care," he said simply. "Me clean, me polish, me save for my Chief." "Tell me one thing?" he said. "Gladly, my son." "Does Johnny Retch know this is here?" "I suppose so. All who live on our island know about it." Muscles knotted at the comers of Parker's jaws. He pressed his arms down against his jacket so that he could feel the guns in the pockets. The guns felt good. "Father Rozeno!" a voice called from a corridor outside the treasure room. "Father Rozeno? Where are you?" "Here I am, my dear," the priest answered. At the sound of that voice. Bill Parker forgot all about the guns in his pockets, Johnny Retch, Montezuma's treasure, and everything else that was on this island. He stood stock still, paralyzed. A girl came through the opening into the treasure room. She wore a dark dress; sandals; her hands were gloved; she had apparently been working at some task. She smiled at Ulnar, glanced at Parker, nodded, looked at Rozeno, smiled, then glanced back quickly at Parker as if he reminded her of someone she had once known, then turned again to the priest. "Father, I have been cleaning all morning -- " So far she got. Bill Parker broke his paralysis and swept her into his arms. "Effra -- Effra -- Effra -- " His voice was a choked whisper, almost inaudible in the treasure chamber of Montezuma. ' As she had come through the door, his mind had given him a flashing picture of the plane wrecked on the shore. Effra, fleeing from Dr. Yammer, had taken one last desperate chance on finding her island; one last lonely flight out over the Pacific. No wonder he had been unable to find her. She had found her island. She had come here. She was here, in his arms. There was wonder and awe and bewilderment in the big pilot. Here was a miracle almost past the understanding. "I've found you -- Effra -- " For an instant, she lay in his arms like a frightened child who dared not move. "Please -- " she whispered. He did not hear her. His lips sought hers, found them. She did not draw away, but neither did she respond. "Effra -- " Parker looked up. Rozeno and Ulnar were regarding him with mild astonishment. In his arms, Effra stirred again. "Please -- let me go." This time the big pilot heard her. Setting her back on her feet was one of the hastiest movements he had ever made in his life. "Effra -- I did not mean to startle you -- but darling -- " She stood irresolute, staring at him. "Please -- You have no right -- " He saw that her eyes, fixed on him, regarded him as an utter and complete stranger. "Don't you know me, Effra?" There was almost a sob in his voice. "I never saw you before in my life." window slot, stood looking out. The trees below him, the island, the sea, the PT boat lying at anchor off shore, he saw all of these things, but yet he did not see them. He had found Effra and she did not remember him, did not know him. Inside of him was agony, such pain as he had never known. He felt a touch on his arm. Rozeno stood there, his face troubled. "Do you know our Effra, my son?" "Yes." "Do you, perhaps, love her?" "Yes." "And you are very unhappy because she does not respond?" "Yes." The old priest's face grew a little more sad. "When she landed here, the last time, she made an awkward landing. She was thrown forward and she hit her head. She does not remember anything that happened before that." Rozeno's finger bit deeply into Parker'S arm. "Come now, and I will introduce you to her, as a stranger." Bill Parker found himself being introduced to the woman he loved. "I'm sorry about my actions of a minute ago," he said. "I thought you were someone else." The smile she gave him was forgiving but it was also cool and distant. "That's all right, Mr. Parker. I understand." Her voice went into silence as another sound came into the room. The sound of rapid gunfire. Parker had thought he had in his pocket the only two modern weapons on the island, but somewhere in the growth of trees far below the window slot, someone was firing a sub-machine gun. Parker raced to the slot. Below him the island lay quiet. He turned. Mercedes, her face working, was staring at him. "Beel -- Beel -- I have not told you everything! That Johnny Retch, he hire you to fly him here in 'copter, to find thees island. He also have men in boat coming. Your job, which you did not know, was to find island, then lead men in boat to it. Johnny means to take all thees. The gesture of her hand included all the treasure of Montezuma. "He have men in boat to help him take it. He does not mean to let anything stop him. Not anything!" Parker saw what he had not seen before, that Johnny Retch was a man who would always have two strings for his bow. Too late, he saw that the boat lying at anchor was not an accident. "I should have killed that dog when I had the chance!" he snarled. Shambling feet sounded in the corridor outside. Pedro burst into the room. He grunted words at Ulnar. "Pedro says men come up the ledge," Rozeno said. "They must be from the boat. We must go to meet them. It will be a great pleasure to them. Come, Ulnar. Come, Bill." He moved toward the door. Parker was across the room in quick strides, catching Rozeno's arm. "You can't do it, Father Rozeno. Those men who are coming up the ledge mean to kill." ."My son!" Hurt showed on the priest's face. "Surely you do not know what you are talking about!" "But I do know!" Parker almost shouted the words. Quickly, desperately he tried to explain the situation to Rozeno. To his growing horror, he saw no comprehension in the old priest's eyes. Slowly Parker began to realize that this old man was so gentle and so kind himself that he could not comprehend even the thought of anyone else being -- evil! "You may stay here, if you wish, my son, but Ulnar and I will go speak to these people who are coming up the ledge. Come, Ulnar." His face glowing at the thought of meeting new people, the priest moved from the room. Ulnar grunted once, a hot, savage sound, then followed Rozeno like a dog following its master. Effra started to follow them. Parker caught her arm. "Please, at least you stay here. Understand me now if you never understood me before. Is there a window slot from which the ledge can be seen?" "Yes." "Then take me to it. Quickly!" F rom the slot, Parker could see a section of the ledge. Two men were crawling along it, advancing as cautiously as scouts trying to surprise an outpost. Parker had never seen either of them before but their faces confirmed everything Mercedes had said. -- they were thugs, killers. Thrusting the pistol through the slot, the pilot took careful aim. pulltd the trigger. The thunder of the gun rang through the room, echoed across the island. The bullet knocked rock chips into the face of the lead man. He recoiled as if he had been stung. The Tommy-gun in his hand spouted lead blindly at the face of the cliff. The second man spun around -- began shooting blindly. Parker moved away from the slot, listened to the rattle of the guns outside. He could distinguish the heavy thud of the Tommy-gun, the sharper crack of the carbine, but other weapons were also firing. "They've got men with high-powered rifles posted in the tree down below." He glanced from the slot. The men had disappeared from the ledge. As he moved back, a slug whined into the room. Mercedes cowered against the wall. Effra remained cool and poised. She was looking at Parker. "Haven't I met you somewhere before?" She seenAed completely unaware of the rifle bullet that had just screamed through the slot. "I -- " Parker caught himself. There was agony in him. What good would it do if she did, finally, remember who he was, who she was? What they had once been to each other? He had three old men, and two women, and himself, with which to defend Montezuma's treasure against Johnny Retch, who had a small army of trained killers at his back. What chance did they have? Johnny Retch, even if given Montezuma's gold, would not leave anyone alive except possibly Mercedes and Effra. "Do -- do you know anything we can do to stop those men?" Parker said. Light seemed to come into Effra's eyes. "We might -- we might use the Jezbro!" From the shelter of the trees, Johnny Retch operated like a general in charge of a force of Commandos engaged in attacking a miniature Gibralter. He was a very deliberate general. When the first .shot from a slot in the cliff had driven the two men downward, he met them at the bottom of the ledge, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a submachine gun in his hands. "Okay, boys, go back on up." "There's a guy in there with a gun," one of the two protested. "He's inside and we're outside. We're sittin' ducks for him." "We're covering the slots with rifles in the trees." "But -- " Neither of the men wanted to go up that ledge again. They might be hardened killers but they did not like the idea of facing a gun they could not see. "Go on back up, boys," Retch said. He lifted the muzzle of the gun he held. "But -- " "Either go back up or you'll stay down here a long time!" They went back up the ledge. Retch retired to the shelter of the trees and watched. No shots came until they reached the mouth of the tunnel leading into the cliff. There, one of the men was killed. He fell backward from the ledge, screaming as he turned over and over. The falling man broke his way through the top of a tree and sprawled thudding on the ground. He did not move after he hit. Retch did not waste a second glance on him. Muffled but clearly audible, the blasting roar of the machine gun came from the tunnel. "He got in," Retch said. "Okay. Two more of you go up." Two more men went up the ledge. The entire population of the village had gathered to watch this storming of the cliff. They regarded Retch with wonder and with awe. Some of these men had been pirates in their day, they had known how to loot a tall ship, to kill its crew, to take over any wealth and any women it happened to carry. Watching Retch, they discovered they had been amateurs in the fine had needed a mah from the modern world to show them how the job ought to be done. They were greatly impressed, Gotch most of kll. Waving his sword, Gotch explained what he would do to that black priest, Rozeno, and to that cowardly Indian, Ulnar. Of all the listening group, only Peg-leg protested. "Yeah, you'll get them all right -- if the Jezbro don't get you first!" Peg-leg said. Retch overheard the words. "Come here, Peg-leg, I want to talk to you." The old sailor stumped his way to where Retch stood. "Aye, Cap'n." He saluted. A look of surprise appeared on the old sailor's face as the first heavy slug hit him. As the second, third, and fourth slugs hit him, the expression of surprise became one of agony. He fell without a sound! R etch stood looking down at him. The group was silent. Gotch hastily lowered his sword. "I don't want to hear any more superstitious talk," Retch said. "There are a lot of funny things here on this island but there is nothing to be afraid of -- except this?' He patted the stock of the stumpy little gun he held. "And there's enough stuff up there to make all of us rich; we'll have everything we can ever want." A glow crept into Retch's eyes as he spoke. They glowed with a yellow color and the yellow seemed to come out of his eyes and spread over his face. He glanced down at Peg-leg. ,  "Dump him into the sea," he said, walking away. The two men climbing the ledge reached the opening. They stopped there and apparently held a conference with the man who was already inside. They went inside. A few minutes later, one appeared at the opening. "You can come on up now," he yelled, waving his gun. "All secure here." "Gotch!" "Yes, Cap'n." "Come on." Gotch went up the ledge with Retch. He went in shivering fear which he tried desperately to conceal. "What the hell are you scared of?" Retch snarled at him. "Nothin', nuthin', Cap'n. Nuthin'." "You yellow-livered -- " Retch stopped in midsentence. A sound was in the air, the cheeping of a sleepy bird. It was a tiny sound, fragile, distant, far-away, almost too weak to register on the ears. Hearing it. Retch jerked his eyes to the sky, seeking the source. Gotch threw himself flat on the ledge. "The Jezbrol" Gotch gasped. "God -- God -- " Looking at the sky. Retch caught a glimpse of something moving there. It looked like a bird, but it was like no bird he had ever seen in his life. It was more like shadow -- a darkness that had a darting elusive silver color about it. Like a swooping hawk, it was diving toward the ground, aiming at the group clustered in the trees at the spot where the ledge began to rise up the face of the cliff. As it dived, the cheeping sound of a sleeping bird was becoming a flooding blast of wild harp notes. "The Jezbrol" Gotch wailed. The Jezbro dived at the men on the ground. They heard it, saw it; they scattered through the trees like frightened chickens fleeing from a hawk. The Jezbro selected a victim. Retch caught a glimpse of long, cruel talons extended ; saw the man grasped in them. The man screamed as the talons touched him, tried to throw himself flat, tried to jerk away from them. Huge wings fluttered, beating the air. The man did not escape. The talons held. The beating wings lifted him. Wild notes flooded outward. There was triumph in the music now. Huge wings beat the air. The Jezbro climbed up above the trees. Held firmly in the extended talons was a fully grown man. Watching, Johnny Retch felt panic tumble through him, panic that was like a sudden touch of an ice cold hand. They had warned him about the Jezbro. Old Peg-leg had tried to tell him. Gotch had trembled in fear. They had all insisted that there was something here that did not belong in the world as he knew it. He had laughed at them, he had called them superstitious fools. To him, there was nothing that was not of this world. Nor was there now, when the moment of wild panic had passed. As the Jezbro swept upward through the air, rising along the face of the cliff. Retch jerked up the Tommy gun. Smoke and lead blasted from the muzzle. The Jezbro was unharmed. Taking careful aim this time, Retch fired again, a furious blast of rattling sound. The Jezbro swerved, the harp notes missed a beat. From the suddenly loosened talons a figure plummeted downward, screamed as it fell, stopped screaming as it crunched against the ground. The Jezbro circled in the air. It rose upward, swooped. Huge wings flapped, a tail structure was extended. From the gaping, extended mouth, a scream arose. The Jezbro seemed to leap toward the summit of the sky. explosion of a miniature atom bomb flared for a brief second. Thunder clapped, rolled around the horizon; echoed back. In the distance the veil that circled the island shimmered and twisted as if it was about to collapse. It righted itself. Except for a puff of swiftly dissipating white vapor, the air was clear. Where wild harp notes had once flooded now was silence. Where a creature that had once looked Hke a giant bird had flapped through the air now there was nothing. wiped sweat from his face. From his pockets, he methodically refilled the almost empty clip of the gun. He looked down at Gotch, who was sitting up. "You killed the Jezbro!" Gotch was whispering. His eyes were searching the sky as if he still did not believe what he had seen happen. "Sure," Retch answered. "I don't know what the hell it was, but it could be killed. Anything can be killed, Gotch. Remember that." The sting of acid crept into his voice. "Get up. We're going on up  the ledge." "By God, Johnny, you can do anything!" Gotch spoke. He rose with suddenly renewed confidence. "Wait'll we get to them -- " He looked up the ledge toward the mouth of the tunnel. Effra was seated in the operator's chair in front of the complex control panel that resembled the key board of a strange organ. She had been watching an image move in the screen directly in front of her eyes. This image -- it had been that of a great bird -- had suddenly vanished. "The Jezbro was destroyed!" she whispered. "The core of it was struck. When that happens, the complete projection is torn to pieces!" Her face was white with strain. Parker took his eyes off the screen where he had been watching something that he did not pretend to understand. "Sometimes they are very difficult to control,". Effra continued, her voice a whisper. "Once set in motion, they seem almost to achieve life of their own. I did not send the Jezbro against the men on the ground, I sent it against the man on the ledge, against this Retch. But -- " her voice faltered. "I saw it get away," Parker said. There was turmoil in his mind, confusion. He was in a place where miracles came to life. The secret of the ability to walk on the water lay here in this room. Effra, in swift sentences had explained to him that the men who walked on the water carried little pieces of metal in their pockets; pieces of metal which increased tremendously the surface tension of the water where they stepped on it. She had also told him that Ulnar, working this equipment, had vondeled his helicopter, had sent out a tiny Jezbro that had struck at the ship, wrecking it. The Jezbro, the secret of the men walking on the water, had come from this room. The striking of the Jezbro was to Ulnar the act of vondel. Even the veil that surrounded the island was generated here ; in the power being generated in the slowly circling pool of mercury; power that was changed and modified by the other equipment. Here was the heart and the secret of the magic of this island; here even time was set aside. Ulnar poked at Effra, grunted harshly. "I know," the girl said quickly. "In just a minute."  Ulnar grunted again. He hovered over her like some massive brooding spirit. He was eager to get his hands on the control board but his old fingers were no longer sufficiently flexible to play on that key board the tune that had to be played. "Pater noster -- Our Father -- " In the silence came Rozeno's voice as he knelt in prayer. Bewildered and hurt and horrified, Rozeno and Ulnar had come back into the room to find Parker and Effra and Mercedes already there. Mercedes knelt beside him. Pedro thrust his head through the opening behind them. "Him two more men, him man that kill Jezbro, him still coming up ledge." "That's Johnny Retch," Parker said. "He's still coming. And there are probably others already inside here, looking for us in the rooms and corridors. We've got to move, Effra." "I know Bill." Her fingers started toward the control board, drew back. "I called you Bill. Is that your name?" "Yes." "It's a nice name." "But now we must hurry," Parker said. As he spoke. Ulnar grunted a single sound that set the girl into motion. Her fingers went to one of the little statuettes, an eagle, a perfect thing in its way, a marvelous representation of the bird of prey. Effra had told Parker, in hasty sentences, how these images were made, deep down in the mountain, of a particular kind of metal that was almost weightless. He watched her slip the eagle into a slot, held his breath as her fingers darted across the key board. A soft hum sounded -- currents moving -- a glow sprang into existence surrounding the little image. Slowly, the statuette began to glow with a silver light. The glow played over it, it shifted, changed, was one thing this instant, was something else the next instant. It looked like a moth emerging from a cocoon and becoming a butterfly. The tiny wings came free, the head moved. The cheeping of a sleepy bird was in the room. At the sound, a wave of cold from the deepest depths of space seemed to sweep over Parker. Here was magic beyond the comprehension of the mind. Only it wasn't magic, it was a scientific achievement of the highest caliber. A t the cheeping  sound, Effra's fingers moved swiftly on the control board, playing a symphony that only .she understood. The little eagle moved out of the slot, it spread its wings, they fluttered, it moved upward into the air of the room. With each circling of the room, it grew larger. The cheeping sound became louder, there was a touch of harp music in it now. Effra's fingers moved like lightning over the control panel. The growing eagle seemed to pick up its controls, it swirled, circled, went through the open slot, went out of the room, and into the air outside. It was now the Jezbro. Its image appeared on the screen. It shot high into the air, still growing. The scene on the screen revealed in miniature tht whole island, the sea lapping its shores, the boat lying at anchor. Effra's fingers moved frantically over the controls. "This is one of the hardest things to do. They seem to be attracted to the  sun, when first released. They struggle desperately to escape into space -- There! I've got it under control." The scene changed, became a group of men climbing the ledge. Parker saw these men suddenly jerk their heads toward the sky as they liecame aware of the Jezbro. He could imagine the fear that was shooting through them. They had seen Johnny Retch destroy the Jezbro, only here the Jezbro was again. From their viewpoint, it had miraculously come back to life and was diving again upon them from the sky. Guns were fired upward. But these men did not have the cool, hard nerves of Johnny Retch, did not have his shooting eye. They missed. The Jezbro dived among them. They scattered, screamipg. Two went off the ledge, three raced down it. One mounted to the sky to the triumphant harping of the Jezbro. Parker felt a wave of relief flow through him. Here in the Jezbro was actually a most potent weapon,  the means of stopping an attack. "Girl! You've done it!" A second later he caught himself. "But Johnny Retch wasn't in that bunch. He must already be inside the cliff." A gun roared three times inside the mountain. Footsteps faltered in the corridor outside. Pedro stumbled into the room. His face was a bloody mask.  "Him men inside." As he coughed out the words, he coughed out blood -- and his life. He stumbled, caught himself, stumbled again, went down the way a dead man goes down, never to rise again. "Qwi est in Coelis -- who are in Heaven -- " Rozeno's voice whispered through the room. The only sound. Ulnar moved slowly, stood beside Pedro. They had been master and servant but in the old days they had come up out of Mexico together, guarding a treasure. Ulnar moved to the wall, took down a heayy battle axe that hung there. "Time come for me," he said. "Me go meet men as my chief went to meet Cortez!" His eyes glinted. "Wait!" Rozeno called. The priest was on his feet. "I have resolved the conflict in my soul. There comes a time when men, even good men, must fight against the forces of evil." From the wall he took a spear. "Pll go with you two," Parker said. "In just a moment." From his jacket, he took one of the two pistols. Silently he passed it to Effra. "As a last resort, use it." "But, Bill, there is still time -- " Parker didn't hear her. He was moving with Rozeno and Ulnar through another opening. "At least," Rozeno was saying. "We have this advantage. We know our way around here." They moved silently, by side passages, through the rooms. "Find Retch," Parker whispered over and over again. "He's the heart and the core of this business. With him out of the way, we can handle the others." "Do you see anybody, Pfluger?" Retch's voice carpe from somewhere. "Naw. I think I got the old gink but he ducked out of sight somewhere." "Retch is on the other side of the corridor," Rozeno whispered. "The man who spoke last is in the next room." They slipped to the opening, peering into the next room. A man in there was crouching against the wall and watching the opening into the corridor. At the sight of the man. Ulnar went berserk. This was the man who had killed Pedro. A shrill battle cry pealing from his lips, massive axe uplifted. Ulnar charged through the door. The crouching man whirled. Smoke and thunder rolled from the gun in his hand. Ulnar had taken death wounds before he was halfway across the room. But death wounds or not, he kept going. The heavy axe came down on the head of the man who was desperately trying to fend it off. The man went down. For an instant, Ulnar's battle cry of triumph, wild and savage and fierce, roared through the honeycomb of passages, then went into silence with Ulnar, forever. "Hey, Pfluger, what the hell happened?" Retch's startled voice came. "We've got to cross the corridor to get at him," Parker whispered. "And there are other men in here somewhere." "Listen!" Rozeno whispered. Voices, a babble of sound, were coming from behind them. "The men from the village," Rozeno whispered. "When they ceased fearing the Jezbro, they found the courage to come up herfe." T he babble grew stronger. Running feet moved along the corridor. Retch shouted somewhere, but the words were lost. Rising above the other sounds was the cry of a woman -- Effra. Parker cursed beneath his breath as he ran. At the side entrance to the big room where the pool of mercury turned, he stopped, appalled. The room seemed full of men. Some of them he recognized as coming from the village, others he had never seen before. From their appearance he judged they had come in the boat. Retch was coming through the door, that led into the main corridor. The gun in his hands was centered on Effra, who crouched at the key board of the vast machine. There was a smile on Retch's face. "Parker!" Retch's voice lifted in a yell. "Parker! I've got your girl. Come on out and give yourself up or I'll let her have it." This was his moment of triumph, this was the moment when he won his victory. Parker, peering around the edge of the doorway, knew now that he had no way to go. If he moved into the room, and tried to shoot Retch, the man would certainly kill Effra in one wild burst of slugs as he turned the gun on the pilot. "Parker!" Retch yelled again. A smile on his face, he waited for an answer. Effra's fingers moved on the control panel. Mercedes got slowly to her feet. The men in the room were silent, waiting for an answer to Retch's Command. Parker stood just outside the door, hesitant. No matter what he did, it seemed to him that there was only one answer. Behind Retch, coming from the corridor, something moved. At the sight of it, Parker felt a flood of biting cold surge through him. It was a puma -- a gigantic puma. In its jaws, as it swung its head from side to side, dangled the body of a man it had killed in the corridor. It was a Jezbro puma. Once it had been a little image in a niche beside the machine from the old time. Then life had flowed into it, its own kind of life, now it walked as a huge ravening beast through the room where once it hao been a tiny image. The first man who saw it went dead white and slumped downward in a faint. The others saw it in almost the same instant. Pandemonium swept through the room. No man's nerves were proof against such a sight as this. Screaming met were suddenly trying to fight their way out of a place that had suddenly become haunted. The puma flowed into the room. Like Retch, it had yellow eyes. They glared now, with a burning light. There was a vague mistiness about this puma but there was also about it the appearance of solid reality. Retch spun to face the menace coming from behind him. The gun in his hands spat flame and fury. He had destroyed the Jezbro hawk. He would also destroy this Jezbro puma. The puma dropped the man from its jaws. It crouched. It leaped straight at the gun spouting lead. Retch slid to one side. The puma missed. It hit the floor, slid, tried to turn as a frantic girl moved buttons on the key board. The floor was slick, the padded feet did not grip. Thd tail of the sliding puma touched the pool of mercury. The tail smoked as if it was suddenly onfire. The puma screamed. It seemed to be drawn into the pool. It was as if something in the pool caught the puma, held it, pulled it into the mercury. It went out of sight, vanished. No puff of flame followed. The life that had animated it had come from this pool. Now the life had returned to its source. The dazed Retch lowered his smoking gun. Parker moved silently forward. "Lay down the gun, Johnny Retch!" he said. Retch seemed to stiffen. His back was to Parker. He did not attempt to turn. "You called for me' Parker said. "Here I am. Drop the gun!" Retch snarled, spun, dropping flat as he turned. His eyes were narrowed. They glared at Parker like twin flames of yellow hate. He tried to bring up the gun. Something came through the air, something that he did not see. It grabbed his arms, clutched them with a fierce grip, screamed at him. Mercedes! Retch, with one savage thrust, flung her aside. Again the two yellow eyes glared at Parker as Retch brought up the weapon that he held. "You haven licked me yet!" Retch screamem The gun in Parker's hand exploded. Suddenly Retch had three eyes. One of them was in the middle of his forehead. It was round and blue. He stood for a second, transfixed. Something had happened to him. He did not know exactly what it was. He had come here seeking Montezuma's treasure. He had it in the reach of his hand. But somthing had happened to him. What it was he did not quite know. Something -- He tried to lift the gun he held. His hands would not obey him. Or perhaps the gun had suddenly grown too heavy for him to lift. He could not raise it. The yellow light in his eyes did not change. But suddenly he collapsed, went down, did not move. E ven after he was on the floor, his eyes remained fixed on Parker, glaring, yellow. Then, little by little, the yellow flames began to go out. In the silence were two sounds. The first, Mercedes, whispering. " 'Ave I paid my debt, Beel? I tried." "You have paid it," Parker said. The other sound was that of the old priest beginning the prayers for the dying. He had laid aside his spear. Now he was kneeling again, his voice lifting as he prayed even for those who had mis-used him. Then there was another sound, voices shouting in the distance. The men who had run from this room were trying to regain their courage, trying to find the will to come back again. Parker moved to the girl who sat at the key board. "Effra, my dear, if you would -- " Catching his idea, she nodded. Her fingers lifted the image of an alligator from its niche. Parker saw the 'gator waddle from this room of mystery and of magic, from . this room of lost science, from this forgotten laboratory of a vanished race. After the alligator, went a jungle fat, full of spit and scratch and the sounds of fury. After the cat went a jaguar, black, fanged, also with yellow eyes. In the corridors the screaming stopped. Parker, listening, shuddered. He was glad he was not out in one of those corridors; one of the men who had tried to steal the treasure of Montezuma, one of the men who had followed Johnny Retch. Hell was walking through those tunnels -- hell in the form of an alligator; hell in the form of a jungle cat; hell in the form of a jaguar with yellow eyes. From the window slot, Parker watched men swarm out of the cliff. Some found the small boats, pushed out in them to the PT boat. Others swam. A jaguar went along the shoreline screeching at them. A jungle cat spat at them from the edge of the water. On the boat, the anchors were hastily cast off. Powerful motors growled. Gathering speed, leaving a growing wake behind it, the boat drove itself into the veil, went out of sight. Parker went back to the girl at the key board. Her eyes came up to him. "Hello, Bill," she said. "Effra?" he whispered. "As I was sitting here, I remembered who you were -- and who I am -- Bill -- Bill -- " She came into his arms. ' Hours later, on a balcony in front of one of the window slots, they still stood very close together. Rozeno and Mercedes were with them. Rozeno was speaking. "Do you think, my son, that you can go out into the world, and contact the great men of this time, and bring them here one by one, so that we may build in this secure spot a group from which the lines of progress can flow out to all men in al! the corners of the earth?" "I can. Father," Parker answered, "Unto all men -- Rozeno's lips moved in prayer. "Unto all men -- ' I the I I I Ed: Let me congratulate you on the selection and publication of Charles DeVet's Infinity's Child. Once every so often, science fiction turns up a tale of this excellence which gives the fans something to rave about. I hope we will continue to hear from Mr. DeVet who had the freshest slant on things I've ever had the pleasure to read. -- Frank Edwards Manhattan, Tenn.    Paul : This is just a note commenting on the second issue of IF. I liked Resurrection Seven, but for the most part, the remaining stories left me cold. I imagine you get plenty of favorable response, however. What really got me was the piece on Raymond. It was the fairest, most honest and genuinely objective piece of criticism or reportage I've ever seen in any s-f mag. You didn't flatter or cajole, or rip bitingly. You told the Palmer saga with plenty of emphasis on the intriguing Shaver thing as jt should have been told. Damned good! My criticisms of the stories perhaps isn't fair, because I'm speaking somewhat as a jaded roue who has seen too much s-f. I'm too hipped on Heinlein and Clark I guess, to really enjoy any others from the s-f line. You're doing all right. Incidentally, whoever prints your mag does a bang-up make-up job. -- Henry Bott # W. Grace St. Chicago, #. Henry Bott is also, Charles Recour who does that short, very interesting science stuff.    Ed:... In. my opinion, your first issue topped your second. How about grabbing another Browne story (if possible). -- Bacil Guiley # Jefferson St. Warren, Pa.    Dear Sir: Just finished the second issile of IF. I thought the first one was a world-beater, but I can honestly say that issue ## was the best single issue of science fiction I've ever read and I grab them all the minute they hit the stands. Due to the spotty performance of most of the others I've never felt assured about a magazine to send in a subscription. But if your next issUe of IF comes even close to the first two, brother you'll have my subscription in the next mail -- and that's a promise... Incidentally, I hope you have guts enough to keep the magazine free of the so-called active fan nonsense. I buy and read magazines for the stories in them, and any space given to other garbage is paid for by my money too. -- F. J. Robertson # Constitution Rd. Camden, New Jersey Mr. Robertson! What you said!   Dear Mr. Sturgeon ; My wife and I have just read your short story, Never Underestimate in this month's issue of IF magazine. May I be so bold as to suggest you put this delightful and amusing tale into play form? Although we are not connected professionally with the theater, we feel sure that your charming plot and snappy dialogue would be enthusiastically received on the boards. Thank you very much for the pleasant moments supplied by your story that is both provocative and amusing. -- Philip W. Rubin I i #-# #th Ave., Forest Hills, N. Y. Dear Ed: On the basis of your first two issues, I think we can rate IF among the top stf mags. As for the story ratings :  #. It Takes a Thief #. Infinites Child #. Jungle in the Sky #. The Revealing Pattern #. Dreamer's World #. Resurrection Seven #. The Beast #. Welcome Martians Your cover, I thought, was the mag's worst point. Seems to me I've seen it before a hundred times. How about a quasi-modern art cover? At leat it would be different. A couple of the institutions of secondary education in this fair city, namely Central and North High, have organized fan clubs. The former has twelve members, including me, and the latter twenty-four. By the way, why not publish a list of national science fiction clubs and requirements for membership? -- Jerry Watkins #I Jones St. Omaha, Neb. As a matter of policy, Jerry, we are not going to publicize fan clubs. Therefore, the item that a couple of institutions of secondary education in your fair city, namely Central and North High, have organized fan clubs, the former having twelve members including you, and the latter twenty-two, cannot appear in these columns. So solly. Dear Sir : I've just finished the May issue of IF. Liked it very much. I won't make any attempt to rate the stories because what I like sometimes I dislike at another time. I do have a gripe, two in fact. Why must experience be the deciding factor so much? In your editorial you say, pardon me, in answer to a letter, that writers stay on top because they're good. I say they stay on top because they have been good. Just as long as it takes for a few stinkers to force the editors to take drastic action. It appears very much as if a writer's reputation counts all too highly when it comes to buying his stories. I depend on the editor of my favorite magazines to choose good stories and if he starts failing I'll quit buying. My other gripe concerns the topic and twist the author gives the stories. Let one have the hero fail and there's a dearth of heroes failing. Every outstanding story has a host of copy cats hoping to cash in on the new twist. Every new theme gets worked to death. But don't take my gripes too seriously. You can put in a stinker once in a while and I won't give up entirely. I might miss an issue or two but hope will rise up and I'll try again. I'm only trying to keep think that accounts for more failures than any other cause. -- Delbert C. Boecher Port Byron, #.    Dear Editor: Your second issue has just finished completely amazing meat the great deal of improvement IF has undergone in the short space of a month or two. The"Jungle in the Sky" by Lesser was well written but could of had a better plot. Your short stories were of such good quality that I wi.sh all mags would follow suit. The best was "Resurrection Seven". But the best story of the issue was "Infinity's Child" by Charles V. DcVet. I don't see what was so great about your cover. It just didnU jell with me. That hairy arm holding hands with the hero while he quite deftly shoots his pi.stol (?) at the little green men. I'll take a Bronstell any day. -- Robert Kessler North Hollywood, Calif. Let Mj know what you think about the cover on the next (November) issue. U'f 're trying to get the best -- nothin: ess.  .  Dear Sirs: I have just finished reading your May issue of IF. It is great. Not many science fiction magazines come up to your quality. Most of them usually show a frontpiece of a well-proportioned lovely in the arms of a three-headed ghoul, who is about to be killed by a "Super-Hypo-Sonic Galaxy Blaster" held by the hero. Again, let me say that this magazine is great; keep the good stories coming. By the way, I missed your first issue of IF (March) and would like to have it. Enclosed please find #c for it. Thank you. -- Paul Minches Los Angeles, Calif. Sorry, Paul, that we had to return your #c, along with that of many others, because we had no available copies of the first (March) issue at the time you wrote. However, since then we have managed to obtain a limited supply and if you still ivant it, shoot us the #c again. #f Dear Editor : For two years I've been an avid science fiction fan... Over this time I have acquired two pet hates: SF mags, which have around ## fantasy (which I can't stand) and #c mags that give you nothing for your money. IF answers both of these. No fantasy and a mag chockfull of stories. When I saw your first issue with # shorts, a novelette and a full length novel I said to myself "I don't care how bad it is with so much in it I have to have it." I was really surprised when I didn't find a bad tory in it. I raced to get your next issue. By the way, would you please tell Janet Steiner those old hacks (sarcastic) like Palmer, Lesser, Shaver, Sturjust fine. -- Hal Shane ' Lawrence, New York   Dear Mr. Fairman: Congrats on a good new mag; your May "ish" compared favorably with any of the other digestsize mags in the SF field. I waited until now to write, so as to see your second "ish"; you can't really tell the merits of a mag by its first issue. I can now say, and that truly, that you have a 'zine worth reading; but first, a few gripes. (#) How about some better cover artists? also interiors. (#) Drop the Science briefs and put in more letters. There are too many of those little hunks of science going the rounds in stf today. "Twelve Times Zero" was very good, but the shorts were all better. Ditto in the May "ish". Improve your novels. Personalities in SF I like -- let's have more of it. Guest editorial... Keep it up in future issues... Incidentally, thanks for your startling expose of Palmer in May "ish"; our Palmer For President club greatly appreciated it... So may Krishna bless you and may all Thy eggs be fertile. -- Bruce Beatie Walnut Creek, Cal. Crosswords, Askews, Skeletons, Word Chains, Slidogroms, Cryptograms, Diagramless, Crostics, Round-ond-Round, Movies, Sports, Politics, Radio, Television -- hcrs and hours of fun end thought-provoking enterfor puzzle pleasure!... At all newsstands -- only # cents!  Hayden Planetarium in '"Rocket to the Moon", a space-travel show, at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, Notice that this giant space satellite is spool-like, not wheel-like, and that the receiving end launching points are a continuous tunnel through the middle of the "spool", with observation domes above and below. A lunar ship is now on its way to the moon. For its approach, see third cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ralph Joiner; Illustrations by Beecham, Speicher, Martin, Zimmerman a e IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright #. Office of publication, B Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Application for Entry as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York, pending. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale November #th entirely too big for his hat band and that he's due for a long ride, downward very shortly. By very shortly, I don't mean today or tomorrow necessarily. I'm speaking in relation to the long-time cycle in which shortly could be fifty or even a hundred years. But first, do you give two hoots what I think? Well, thank you -- thank you very much. Now pull up a chair and I'll go into detail. Let's take a look, first, at the present-day picture. What do we see? We see Man -- who only yesterday, in terms of the historic cycle, learned the startling fact that diseases are caused by little beasties called germs -- talking blandly about putting a platform out in space, hopping from there to the moon, and from there to heaven knows where. Man who, a scant five hundred years ago, would take off his jacket and fight you if you told him the world is round. M ove up further, and what do we see -- vast new knowledge, stupendous scientific progress, most of which has been achieved in the last hundred years. And I think you'll agree that one hundred years, when stacked up against the life and death span of worlds, nay, even empires, is a short time indeed. What am I getting at? Just this -- it has happened too quickly; this progress has come far too fast. One of the basic laws of nature, is that of action and reaction. I saw this law function most perceptibly during the years I made my living as a speculator in the Chicago grain markets. There, you understood the law and functioned in rhythm with it, or you lost all your money and stopped eating. Check any old grain chart and you'll see what I mean. Say that wheat is priced at one dollar a bushel and that the situation justifies its going to three dollars. It doesn't just walk up there overnight. In covering the distance from one dollar to three, the price of wheat goes up and comes back, rams up again, and falls away. Always going higher than it went before and never falling as low as the point from which it started, but conforming, all die way up, to the law of action and reaction, until it arrives at its ultimate price. And, even there, we find the prices as being nothing more than a stopping point in a greater cycle. The prices of living are an example -- a halt or decline here and there, but ever higher through the years. T his law underlies almost every visual or abstract interpretation of motion. Rise and fall. Action and reaction. Even in human endeavor, it is apparent. A man begins building a career. That career is made up of a series of successes and failures. It could be charted on a graph as a zigzag line of advances and recessions, but never as a straight line from the bottom to the top. So, applying the law to current history, we have a graph representing technical, economic, in fact general world advancement ramming straight up in a line from # to # -- a line almost vertical. Any experienced grain speculator would take one look at that line and sell everything but the clothes on his back. Of course his timing could be wrong. No man alive can pick a top and say with authority, this is it. Many of them have gone broke trying. But they know the danger signals, and to my way of thinking -- I could be very wrong -- the signals are flying. far too fast and the law of action and reaction has not been repealed. I realize I'm putting myself in the same category as those who started calling the # crash in #. They missed a mile, but in the end they were right because they refused to disregard the inexorable law. I'll probably be accused of shouting gloom from the house tops, but a man has to be honest in his convictions and these are mine. I think, without being accused of crackpotism, we have a perfect right to view human progress over the broadest area of which we are capable. These cycles certainly go far, far behind our recorded history. Therefore, who can say what peaks of great human progress lie buried in voiceless antiquity. Who can say what knowledge has been gained and lost only to be gained again? this, however. That right now, we are at the very peak of all human progress on this planet. But how about the next recession? When it comes, and what form it will take no man can say. Maybe those platforms will be built in our life-span ; or in that of our children ; or our children's children. Or perhaps they will be built by those who must remain unborn for another five thousand years. Anyhow, it's an interesting field for cogitation. And certainly, no one can call me a Pollyanna. pwf up from the horror of Hiroshima came a god. He gave the people hope and for this they killed him -- as they have always killed their gods. and By John Scott Campbell sensed that the moment we came ashore. Extraterritoriality was long gone; we had known that, of course. The days of exploitation, of clubs where Chinese and Burmese and Indian servants waited on Britons and Americans were passed. Pan-Asia had seen to that. This was #. The white man's burden in the east had been upon brovm and yellow shoulders for over sixteen years now, and the Indians and Burmese and Indonesians were ruling themselves, after their fling at communism in the fifties. The initial bitterness which followed the debacle of # had passed, we were glad to see. Porters no longer spat in the faces of white men. They were polite, but we had not been in the city a half hour before we sensed something else. There was an edge to that politeness. It was as Major Reid had written before we Irft San Francisco -- a subtle change had come over Asia in the previous few years. They smiled -- they waited on us -- they bent over backwards to atone for the excesses of the first years of freedom from foreign rule; but through it all was an air of aloofness, of superior knowledge. Baker put it in his typically blunt British way. "The blighters have something up their sleeves, all right. The whole crew of them. Did you notice that rickshaw boy? When I said to take us to the hotel, he answered 'Yes, today I take you'. The Major was right -- there's something in the wind, and its damned serious." We were sitting, surrounded by our luggage, in our suite at the New China Hotel. There were four of us: Llewelyn Baker, Walter Chamberlin, Robert Martin, and and Martin were anthropolcists, and old China hands as well. Chamberlin was a geologist, and I claimed knowledge of zoology. We were here ostensibly as a scientific expedition, and had permission from the Republic of East Asia to do some work on Celebese man, following up the discoveries by Ranee of bones and artifacts on that East Indian island in #. We had another reason for coming at this particular time, although this was not mentioned to the authorities. Our real objective was to find out certain things about New Buddhism, the violently nationalistic religion which was sweeping Pan-Asia. New Buddhism was more than a religion. It was a motivating force of such power that men like Major Reid at the American Embassy were frankly worried, and had communicated their fears to their home governments. The Pan-Asia movement had, at first, been understandable. At first it had been nationalism, pure and simple. The Asiatics were tired of exploitation and western bungling, and wanted to rule themselves. During the communist honeymoon in the early fifties, it was partly underground and partly taken over by the Reds for their own purposes. But through everything it retained a character of its own, and after '# it reappeared as a growing force which was purely oriental. Or at least so it seemed. Our job was, among other things, to find out if Russian control was really destroyed. We had already made several observations. The most obvious was the number of priests. Yellow robed Buddhist priests had always been common, begging rice and coppers in the streets, but in # a new kind appeared. He was younger than his predecessors, and was usually an ex-soldier. And his technique was different. He was a salesman. "Rice -- rice for Buddha," he would say. "Rice for the Living Buddha, to give him strength. Rice for the Great One, that he may grow mighty. Rice for the strength to cast off our bonds." And they had organization. This wasn't any hit or miss revival, started by a crackpot, or by some schemer for his own enrichment. There was direction back of it, and very good direction too. We sensed that it had been Japanese, at least at the start, but with the end of the occupation, we could no longer barge in and investigate officially. Now there were treaties to respect, and diplomatic procedure and all that sort of thing. Instead, we were here to spy. Unofficially, of course. The ambassador was very explicit on that point. We were strictly on our own. If we were caught, there could be no protection. So here we were. Four scientists investigating Celebese man, and trying to find out, on the side, just what was back of New Buddhism. We washed up, had dinner, and presently, as we had expected. Major Reid called. After a few jocular references to anthropology, for the benefit of the waiter, he got down to business. "I'll have to be brief," he said, "because I can't spend too much time with you without stirring up suspicion. You all know the background. They claim that this business is simply a new religion, a revival of Buddhism modeled to fit new conditions. President Tung claims that there is no connection between it and the state. We think differently. We have reason to believe that the direction back of this movement is communism, and that its ultimate object is military attack on the western world. What we don't know is the nature of the proposed attack. Some of us suspect that they are making H-bombs, and have covered up so that we cannot spot them. That's what we must find out. "The headquarters of New Buddhism is on a small volcanic island called Yat, off the east coast of Celebes. Your job is to reach that island and find out what's going on, and then bring the information back. Clear?" We nodded. We had received a similar briefing in Washington, and from a far more distinguished personage than Major Reid, but we felt no need of mentioning this. In such a business, gratuitous information, even to friends, serves no useful end. ington had told us a good many other things, too. In the name of New Buddhism, the priests had been collecting immense quantities of supplies, and on an increasing scale. Tons of foodstuffs had been gathered and then shipped off to an unknown destination. Machinery, lumber, structural steel, canvas by the thousands of yards had been purchased, loaded onto ships and barges, and spirited away. It appeared that the New Buddhists were maintaining a standing army, or perhaps a labor force somewhere east of Borneo, but the picture was very incomplete. Part of the failure of ordinary methods of intelligence may have been due to the supersecrecy of the New Buddhists themselves. It was not difficult to corrupt priests on the lower levels, but all they knew was that certain quotas of food and materials were set for their territory, which were then shipped away to Borneo. The big break had come only a men got through to a barge captain, who had been to the headquarters itself. He identified the location as an island a few miles off the northeast coast of Celebes. It was, he said, highly mountainous -- in fact he believed it to be an extinct volcano, with a water filled crater reached only by a narrow passage from the sea. Boats, he said, could go in and out, but his barge was not among those permitted. He delivered his cargo, three thousand tons of rice and five thousand raw hides, and was then sent on his way. Under questioning, he said that there were many people living on the island -- thousands at least. Most of them lived in barracks among the trees fronting the ocean, but some had special privileges and were allowed to go to the top of the crater rim. Of the activities within the crater our informant knew nothing. At night the clouds were often lit by reflections from there, and once he had heard noises, accompanied by a distinct shaking of the earth, as though blasting were being done at a great depth. This was the extent of our knowledge. We knew the location, but it was up to us to find out the rest. Our departure from Shanghai for the great island of Celebes involved the usual exasperation of delay and red tape. The American Embassy did everything possible to ('xpcdite matters, and brought a little pressure to bear, I think, on the strength of the then impending Amei lean Sixth Loan to China. In any i ase we were at last cleared. and boarded the plane for Celebes. We took one of the six place compartments on the upper deck, and presently had company in the form of two yellow-clad New Buddhist priests. Baker, who had the best command of Chinese, engaged them in conversation. As we had expected, they were a lively interest in Celebes man. That they were here to watch us was obvious. Baker bided his time, and then switched the conversation to New Buddhism. On this subject too the priests were anything but reticent. They described with enthusiasm the great spiritual renaissance that was sweeping all Asia "like a wind, the breath of life from the Living Buddha." Baker asked a few questions about the Buddha, since to show no curiosity about such a life subject might excite suspicion. The priests were ready for them, and gave what was evidently the stock answer: the Living Buddha was the very incarnation of Gautama himself, a spiritual leader who was being groomed to take over the guidance of all mankind, in east and west alike. "Where does the Great One live?" asked Baker, alert for a trap. "In Celebes, where you are going," was the reply. "Oh," said Baker innocently, "Then perhaps it could be arranged for us to meet him?" This, explained the priest, was quite impossible. In due time Buddha would display himself for the world to see and marvel over; meanwhile, while his preparation was yet incomplete, he must remain in seclusion. By now convinced that the presence of the priests was no accident. Baker settled down to the sort of verbal sparring match that he enjoyed. He had been speaking in the Cantonese dialect, but now he abruptly switched to English. "You know," he remarked, "you fellows are using an amazing amount of material at your headquarters. Enough food to keep a good sized standing army." The two priests, who had professed ignorance of English at the start of the conversation, stiffened visibly. Baker returned to Chinese. The priests recovered their composure with some effort. The older replied suavely, "Gossip is a creative art. There is a large monastery at our central temple, and much is needed to maintain its activities." "Truth," said Baker pontifically, "is usually disappointing. The imagination changes a mud hut to a palace, and a sickly priest to a demigod." The two priests inclined their heads slightly at this. We watched their expressions. If Baker's purposely provoking language brought a reaction, it was not visible. But we had learned one thing: they spoke English but preferred that we did not know it. cassar, the Indonesian capital of Celebes, was attended by the usual confusion and delay. Our Buddhist friends vanished with a speed which suggested special consideration, while the man from the American Consulate was still getting our equipment through customs. This business at length completed, we were escorted to a taxi by the attache and whisked up one of the wide avenues of the city without a question as to where we were to stay. Baker and Martin stared out the window with studied ease -- they knew that something was up, but were content to await further developments. Now I noticed something else. The driver of our cab was a European, not a native. I started to frame a question, when, without warning, the car ducked into a side street, swung around two corners and abruptly entered an open doorway in a tall stucco building. Both Walt and I were half out of our seats in alarm, when our guide spoke. "The American Consulate, gentlemen," he said, with the slightest trace of a diplomatic smile. The cab had stopped in the ground floor garage of the consulate, and opening the door was the consul himself. "Good morning. I'm Stimson. Hope Avery didn't give you too wild a ride, but I thought it best not to advertise my interest in you at the front door. Things have changed a bit in the last few days. Well, Avery will show you to your rooms. I'll be in the upstairs study when you're freshened up." There was little to speculate on as we shaved and changed to less rumpled clothes, but we worked over the available data for what it was worth. "Consul takes us in tow," remarked Chamberlin. "That isn't in line with the unofficial status so strongly impressed on us at Washington." "And sneaking us in through the back door isn't according to best diplomatic form, either. Stimson wants to protect us from something, but obviously doesn't want the local constabulary to know." This from Martin. "It seems to me," I ventured, "that they could check the hotels. It shouldn't take them long to put two and two together when we don't show. I'm blessed if I can see what Stimson has to gain from this maneuver." Baker turned from the mirror where he had been adjusting his tie. "Suppose we ask him," he commented. The consul was waiting for us in his study. After the briefest greeting which his official position permitted, he got down to business. "Gentlemen, I've had to pull a diplomatic boner of the first magnitude. I refer to the cloak and dagger method of getting you here. But believe me, it was the only way. They're onto your scheme. If you went to a hotel in New Macassar, you wouldn't be alive tomorrow morning." "But, the taxi -- " began Martin. "It gave us a few hours. If I had sent the consulate car, they'd have us sealed off tight right now. I could keep you safe here, or get you on the Shanghai plane, but you couldn't make another move. As it is, we have perhaps two hours -- with luck." The consul settled back in his chair, evidently gathering his thoughts. We waited, more mystified than before, if that were possible. At length Stimson started again. "You're well briefed on the general situation. Reid gave me the gist of his conversation. But there are some other things that even Reid doesn't know." He opened a folding blotter on his desk and drew out an eight by ten photographic print. "You're aware of the efforts that have been made to look into the crater on Yat. To date we have not succeeded in getting an eye witness to the rim. We have flown over Yat, of course, and have taken pictures from every altitude from # to # feet, but so far they have outsmarted us. They have smoke generators all around the rim, which they fire up night and day whenever the natural clouds lift. We've used every color, including infra red. We've taken stereo pairs, and flash shots at night, but, with one exception, all we've ever gotten are beautiful pictures of clouds and smoke. The exception I have here. It was taken two weeks ago, during a brief break in a heavy storm. Before I say anything more, I'd like to have you look at it and form your own opinions." He placed the print on the desk, facing us, and leaned back while we four crowded around. My first glimpse was disappointing. Fully two thirds of the picture was occupied by clouds. But gradually I made out the details. There seemed n to be several buildings of uncertain size in the lower part, and a fringe of brush extending up to the left. Half visible through the mist were several structures which seemed to me, in comparison to the larger buildings, like chicken houses or perhaps rabbit hutches. No humans were in sight, evidently because of the storm. But in the center of the picture was the thing which fixed our attention from the first, leaving the other details for later scrutiny.This was an immense human figure, lying on its side with the head pillowed on its hands in the attitude of the colossal figures of the reclining Buddha found in the mountains of China. The body was partly covered by a robe, but whether this was part of the figure or a canvas protection against the rain, was difficult to tell. Only the head, hands and feet showed. The face was partly in shadow, but enough could be seen to identify the typical Buddha countenance: closed eyes and lips curled in an enigmatic smile. picture for a good minute, taking in the details, while Stimson watched us. Then Baker looked up. "What is it?" he asked. "Before I tell you our guesses," replied the consul, "I'd like to hear your reactions." "It would appear that the New Buddhists are doing the obvious -- setting up a Buddhist temple. Although, except for the statue, you'd never guess it." This from Chamberlin. Martin squinted closely at the print. "Yes, the buildings look more like airship hangars than a temple." Stimson raised his eyebrows slightly. "That's an interesting observation," he commented. "Wish there were some humans, or something else to give a scale," said Baker. "For all we can tell, it could be anything from doll houses and a life sized statue, all the way up to an air base, and a reclining Buddha to end all reclining Buddhas." There was an expectant pause. Stimson, seeing that we had nothing more to add, cleared his throat, glanced briefly out of the window behind his chair, and hunched forward. "This picture was made from an F-#A, modified for photo reconnaissance. The plane was on a routine flight from Singapore to Mindanao, over a solid deck of clouds. The pilot swung south over Yat just out of curiosity. He approached the island at # feet, using radar, and was about to pass over when he spotted a hole in the overcast. Time was # -- just sunset -- but the edge of the crater was well lighted, although the bottom was in deep shadow. More important, the smoke generators had been turned off. Obviously the clouds had just parted, and would close in again in a minute. The presence of the F-#A at this particular instant was just one of those pilot realized this. He put the ship into a dive and ordered his photographer to ready the cameras. "The plane approached Yat at a speed above Mach #, so there was no audible warning, and evidently the island's radar was off, for the surprise was complete. Within # seconds the F-#A closed level just over the crater and shot past with only a thin stratus layer between it and ground. Time over the crater was hardly # seconds, and neither pilot nor observer saw anything, but the synchronous vertical camera was operating and four flashes were made during the middle four seconds. Then the plane was in the clouds again at a # degree climb and a dozen miles towards the Philippines before anyone on Yat could even get outdoors. "As might be expected there was a considerable protest over this vicn lation of Celebese territory, although oddly, it was bas on moral grounds rather than national integrity. The protest was signed by the Lama of Macassar, and demanded neither indemnity nor punishment of the pilot, but asked merely that incense be burned in Washington to appease Buddha. Now of course the Lama isn't that naive, or devout. As you may know, Phobat Rau was educated at Hartrained and tough statesman who knows his way around anywhere, and doesn't believe the theological hogwash in Pan-Buddhism any more than I do. So it was a question of getting behind his motive. Of course, it could be a cover, but our final guess was that the protest was really made for the benefit of the faithful in Asia. This opinion was strengthened, at least as far as I am concerned, about a fortnight ago when Rau attended the British Embassy reception for Lord Hayes. He didn't avoid me, but actually seemed to single me out as a foil for some of his witty small talk. Asked if I was much of a student of Buddhist architecture and carvijs, and if I had seen the Kyoto Buddha, or the reclining Buddha off'the Yangtze. He was fishing, of course, but I played it dumb, and presently he gave up. "Well, there you have it, at least as far as the picture is concerned. The Buddhists were considerably upset, for they tightened up security all over the islands. And then you came into the scene. Naturally nobody believed that you were just after Celebese man, but the governor granted permission -- so easily, in fact, that we got suspicious. Americans are no match for oriental subtlety, but we do have a few tricks, one of whom is a code clerk in the Macassar foreign office, and from her we learned that you were set for the preferred treatment: to be let in easily, and then knocked off in some painless way. Hence the taxi, and the sneak ride here." He paused. "That's the situation to date, gentlemen. Any questions?" Martin had been studying the photograph. "At what altitude was this taken?" The consul shook his head. "The autorecorder was off. The observer forgot to set it, in the rush." "Well, couldn't they estimate?" "They did, but it's obviously way off. The pilot swears that he levelled at #, but that would make these buildings a quarter of a mile long, and the Buddha at least five hundred feet. Unless you want to believe that they have another Willow Run on Yat, you can't take that figure." Another pause. Finally Baker spoke. "You said you had a guess." "Yes, I have." Stimson seemed reluctant to speak. "But it sounds so damned fantastic I hate to tell it to you -- well, to be short, I don't think that this Buddha is a statue." We all sat up. "Then what is it?" This from Martin. "I mean, not a statue of stone or masonry in the usual sense of the term. I think that it is a portable image of Buddha -- an inflated gas bag like they use in the Easter parade. I think they intend to float it in the air -- perhaps tow it -- to impress the faithful. If the thing's really # feet long, it may be a blimp or a rigid airship with its own motors. But, whatever the details, I think our mystery is just a piece of propaganda for Neo-Buddhism, although a damned good one, from the native standpoint." We all relaxed. This was an anticlimax. Stimson had built us up to something -- just what, we were ntft sure -- and then had pricked the bubble. "Well, it sounds reasonable," Baker finally remarked, returning the print to Stimson, "although not particularly dangerous, and certainly not worth risking our necks to spy on. However, I don't think it's good enough to explain all of the supplies that have gone into Yat." The consul nodded. "Yes, that's the rub. If they hadn't taken such pains to conceal the thing, I'd be inclined to call it just a cover for something else." "Maybe it still is," said Baker. Stimson looked at us carefully, as though making up his mind. "That is where you gentlemen come in," he said finally. "I have reason to believe that our picture has tipped their hand, that they are going ahead with whatever they have planned in the next few days. Someone's got to get to Yat first -- someone who can observe intelligently, and speak the language. My staff is all clerical, and Aere is no You're the only ones available." He paused. We looked at each other, and then at Baker. He cleared his throat a couple of times, took another squint at the photo, and then spoke. "Speaking for myself, Stimson, when do we leave?" "That goes for me too," said Martin. Chamberlin and I nodded. Stimson seemed relieved. "I'd hoped to hear that. In fact, I'd have been considerably embarrassed if you gentlemen hadn't come through, because I have a seaplane waiting right now to take you to Yat." n T he next two hours passed swiftly. Once the decision was made, we all became so involved in the details of preparation as to have no more time for reflection, either upon the nature of what we should find on the island of Yat, or the possible personal consequences of our expedition. First Stimson briefed us on the geography of our objective. Yat was a volcanic island, one of a group strung across the shallow sea east of Borneo and north of Celebese. It was almost circular, with a diameter of about seven miles, and was entirely covered by a dense tropical forest. The principal feature of the island was an extinct volcanic crater, rising to an altitude of # feet, at the east end of the island. The crater measured about two miles across, and perhaps a third of its area was filled with water from a narrow channel leading to the sea. Photos taken before the closure of Yat by the Indonesians showed a typical Malay isle : cocoanut and mango plantations, with forests of gum and mahogany climbing and trance channel was narrow and quite deep and the interior lake constituted an ideally sheltered anchorage. On the east coast the land rose steeply in a series of mossy cliflfs over which waterfalls poured, while to the west, away from the volcano, plantations stretched inland from the coral beaches. As we studied the pictures and charts, Stimson briefed us on the course of action. "Your first objective is to find out what they're doing in that crater. Are they building some new weapon, or training an army, or what. You'll have Geiger counters and a krypton analyser of course, although the analyser is no guarantee in detecting fissionable material production. Then we want to know what their plans are, particularly in the next few days or weeks. Finally, just who is involved in it? Is New Buddhism entirely Asiatic, as they claim, or has Russia cut herself in too? "You will be landed on the west coast of the island just after simset. The east, with its cliff and entrance channel is undoubtedly too well guarded, but on the west side, with four miles of flat country, they may depend on defense in depth, so that you'll have a better chance of getting past the beach. The plane will come in low, make a landing just off the breakers and drop you off in rubber swim suits. It will then taxi to the north of the island and make a fairly long stop, to divert attention, since it will certainly be picked up by radar. Your job will be to swim ashore, bury the rubber suits, and make your way east to the crater. If you reach the rim, see what you can, and report by radio at any hour. If you don't make it to the top, observe as much as possible on the island, make your reports, and rendezvous with the plane at your landing point at # the next day. If you miss that time, a plane will be back daily at the same time for four days. After that, we will assume that you have been caught." We were driven to the harbor in the same disreputable taxicab which had brought us to the consulate a few hours before. Time was a little past three in the afternoon as the seaplane roared down a lane in the swarm of junks, tramp freighters and warships of the Indonesian state. We hoped that we were not too well observed; there was no way of knowing until we arrived on Yat, and the learning might not be too pleasant. The flight northeast from New Maceissar was uneventful. We passed over a blue tropical sea, dotted with island jewels. For a time the low coast of the great island of Celebes made a blue haze on the eastern horizon, and then we had the ocean to ourselves. At dusk there were still two hundred miles between us and Yat, a flight of about forty minutes. Pulling down the shades, lest the cabin lights reveal us to a chance Indonesian patrol, We busied ourselves with packing the portable radio equipment and putting on our watertight clothing. The last fifty miles were made on the deck -- in fact, once or twice the hull actually touched a wavetop. The pilot extinguished the cabin lights and we peered ahead for a fiit glimpse of our objective. The sky was clear, but the moon would not rise until nine, so that the only indication we had that Yat was at hand was a slight deepening in the tropic night ahead and to the right, which the pilot said marked Mount Kosan, the ancient crater. But no sooner had we gotten this vaguely orienting information, than the flaps were lowered, the plane slowed to under # miles per hour, and we touched the water. The co-pilot opened the side door, and we crouched together peering out. The plane taxied over a choppy cross sea toward the shadow of the island, while we squinted through the salt spray. Presently the engines dropped to idle, and the rumble of surf became audible. "Pracrically dead calm tonight," said the co-pilot reassuringly. "Wind usually dies out at sunset. You won't have any trouble getting through. Just watch your step when you're adiore," "That's always good advice for sailors," remarked Baker. As the plane lost headway, the white line of surf and the silhouettes of cocoa palms took shape. Evidently the plantations came right to the water's edge at this point, a circumstance for which we were all thankful. I was just turning to Martin with some remark about this when the pilot called softly and urgently. "We're as close as we can drift safely. Jump, and good luck." "Righto, and thanks," came Baker's voice, and then a splash. I was next. I took a deep breath, and clutched my rubber covered bundle of radio gear. I leaped out into darkness. An instant later I was gasping for air beside Baker. Two more splashes in quick succession and then the engines picked up speed, the dark shape of the wing overhead moved off, and we were alone. F or a moment we swam in circles, getting our bearings. Baker had removed his glasses for the jump, and so we depended mainly on Martin for directions. There was really no need for worry, however, for it soon became apparent that a strong onshore current was bringing us in to the breakers at a good clip. The line of phosphorescence marking their crests was now hardly a hundred yards away. With Martin in the lead we began to swim. Presently one of the swells picked us up quite gently, moved us forward, and then suddenly exploded into a foamy torrent which tossed us head over heels and left us gasping and spitting sand on the beach. As quickly as possible we got into the shelter of the first ranks of trees. Here we dug a hole at the base of a great cocoanut palm and buried the rubber suits and cases of radio gear, along with a small vial of radium D. This had been provided for us, along with the Geiger counter, by the thorough Mr. Stimson as a means for locating our cache when we returned, if we should miss our bearings. It was # : # when this chore was completed. We had an hour and twenty-three minutes to moonrise. Turning inland, we walked in silence through the grove for a few hundred yards, and then came upon a road. This we recognized, from our map study, as the main coastal highway. We hurried across, rather elated at the progress we were making and a little surprised at the lack of fences or other protective devices on the island. Things seemed just too easy. On the other side of the road we encountered a rice paddy, which made the going a good deal more difficult. But after about ten minutes of sloshing through this, we came to a diagonal road, or rather path which seemed to be going our way. Thanks to this, by # : # we felt the ground rising underfoot and sensed a darker bulk in the shadows ahead, which could only be Mount Kosan itself. Here we came to our first fence, and affair of steel posts and barbed wire, which appeared to be a guard against cattle, but hardly more. After inspecting one of the posts for signs of electrification, we crawled under the bottom wire and started up the slope. "Are you sure we're on the right island?" asked Chamberlin. "From the security measures I don't think we're going to find anything more secret than a copra plantation." Baker shushed him, and whispered back, "We're on the right island, but that's the only thing that's right. This is simply too easy to be true." "Well," said Martin, "Stimson could be all wet. Maybe they're just sculping a king sized Buddha after all." The slope had now steepened considerably, and further conversation died out in the effort of climbing. The volcano was heavily forested all the way up with mahogany and guru trees, and a dense undergrowth of vines and ferns entangled our feet. Twice we came upon rapidly flowing streams. We were perhaps two thirds of the way up when the moon appeared. Its light didn't penetrate very far into the dense foliage, but it did enable us to make out the top of the mountain, which took the form of a vine covered outcrop of lava. We altered our course slightly, and at #:# P.M. the forest fell away and we faced a rough wall of rock some two hundred feet in height. Before tackling this last obstacle, we paused for a rest and some hot coffee from the thermos which was included in our equipment. Then, at five minutes past ten, we started the final ascent. The cliff proved to be more of a climb than we had anticipated, and the time was close to eleven before we pulled ourselves up over the last boulder and could look across the crater to the other rim. The last few feet we negotiated with the greatest caution. Martin, I think, was first, and he pulled himself on his belly across to the beginning of the inner slope. He lay quietly for a half minute, then muttered something under his breath which sounded vaguely like 'Til be damned", and made way for Baker, who was next. I squeezed in beside him, and so we got a look into the crater at the same time. Baker, being a very self-contained man, made no audible comment, but I must have, for the sight which met our eyes was certainly the last thing I had expected to see. The crater of Mount Kosan was filled with steel and concrete structures of gargantuan size, and of the most amazing shapes I had ever seen. I say amazing, but T do not mean in the sense of unfamiliar, on the contrary these incredible objects had the commonest shapes. Had it not been for trees and normal buildings to give the scene a scale, I would have sworn that we were looking into a picnic grounds a hundred feet across instead of a two mile diameter plain ringed by mountains # feet high. The buildings seen In the aerial photo occupied only a small part of the crater -- all of the other structures must have been concealed by clouds. the rim dropped vertically into deep shadows, as the moonlight reached but half the crater. A thousand yards west of us, vhere the light first touched the floor, we could make out several clumps of brush or small trees, among which was set a rectangular concrete surface measuring perhaps four hundred feet square, and resting on hundred foot steel columns. Near this, and partly supported by the side of the mountain was what appeared to be a great table, of roughly the same area, but standing on trussed columns the height of a thirty story building. In front of this was a chair, if by chair you understand me to mean a boxlike building twenty stories high, with a braced back rising as far again. A half mile along the rim was an even larger structure whose dimensions could only be measured in fractions of miles, which resembled nothing more than a vast shed built against the cliff. Next my attention was attracted to a number of objects lying upon the platform immediately west of us. One of these appeared to be a steel bowl-like container some thirty feet deep and a hundred in diameter, like the storage tanks used in oil fields. Nearby was an open tank measuring perhaps fifty feet in each dimension, and beside this were the most startling of all -- several hundred foot pieces erf built-up structural steel resembling knife, fork and spoon. In retrospect, the deduction from this evidence was obvious, but as we stared down at this spectacle, a sort of numbness took hold of our minds. As a later comparison of impressions verified, none of us came remotely near guessing the truth in those incredible seconds. For what seemed like minutes we just stared, and then the spell was broken. Walt had squeezed in beside me, where he gave vent to a low whistle of amazement. Baker shushed him, and then shifted to a better position, in so doing knocking a rock from the ledge. This started a small avalanche which went clattering down the cliff with a sound, to our hypersensitive ears, like thunder. We all froze in our places, abruptly aware that the moon illuminated us like actors in a spotlight. For a good minute we waited tense, and then gradually relaxed. Baker started to say something when without warning the ground beneath us shook, starting a score of rockslides. We recoiled from the edge and braced for a stronger earthquake shock. Then suddenly Baker uttered a hoarse cry. Me was pointing -- pointing down into the blackness at our feet where our eyes had as yet been unable to pi'iiotrate. Something was there, something vast and dim and shapeless like a half inflated airship. Then a part of it was detached and came rapidly for any detail to be seen -- our only imjression was of a vast white Lolumn large as the Washington monument which swung up into the moonlight and then was withdrawn. At the same time the ground quivered anew, starting fresh slides. We blinked stupidly for several seconds, and then became conscious for the first time of the sound. It was like a vast cavernous wheeze at first, and then a series of distinct wet thuds followed by a prolonged gurgling rumble. If these descriptive phrases sound strange and awkward, let me give assurance that they are as nothing to the eerie quality of the noises themselves. We lay glued to our rocky perch, hardly daring to breathe, until the last windy sigh had died away. Baker found his voice first. "Good God, it's something alive!" Chamberlin tried to reason. "It can't be -- why, it's two hundred feet high -- it's just a gas bag, like Stimson said. It's -- " He stopped. The thing had moved again, more rapidly and with purpose. The great column rose, then pressed down into the ground and pushed the main bulk up out of the shadows. There was a moment of confusion while our senses tried to grasp shape and scale at the same time, and then it all came into focus as the thing arose into the light. At one instant we were sane humans, trying to make out a great billowy form wallowing in the darkness below. In the next instant we were madmen, staring into a human face a hundred feet wide, that peered back at us from the level of the clifftop! For a second we were all still -- we four, and that titanic placid oriental face hanging before us in the moonlight. Then the great eyes blinked sleepily and the thing started to move toward us. I cannot recall in detail what happened. I remember someone screamed, an animal cry of pure terror. It may have been me, although Baker claims to be the guilty one. In any case the four of us arose as one and plunged headfirst off our rock into the tangle of brush at the top of the cliff. I think that only the vines saved us from certain death in that first mad instant. I know that we were wrestling with them for what seemed like an eternity. They wrapped around my legs, tangled in my arms. They were like clutching hands, holding me back in a nightmare-like struggle, while the thing in the crater came closer. Then abruptly I realized that they were hands, human hands seizing us, pulling us back from the cliff and then skillfully tieing us up. It was all over in a moment. The madness was ended. We were once more rational humans, tied hand and foot, and propped against the rocky ledge in front of a dozen yellow-robed men. For a time we just breathed heavily -- ourselves and our brown skinned captors alike. Then one of the latter spoke. "You can stand now, yes?" Baker struggled to his feet in reply. The rest of us did likewise, aided not unkindly, by the yellowrobed men. Baker found his voice. "Thank you," he said. In the brightening moonlight we looked more carefully at our captors. They were of small stature, evidently Japanese, and, by their costume. all priests. Baker laughed briefly and glanced at the rest of us. "It would appear," he said dryly, "that we have been taken." m T he leader of the priests indicated by a gesture that he wished us to move along a narrow trail cut in the vines along the rim. I attempted to get another look at the horror within the crater, but the ledge of rock down which we had just fallen stood in the way. We were guided into a pitch black trail which descended steeply into the forest on the outer slope of Mount Kosan. I lost track of direction almost at once. The trail zigzagged a couple of times, and then I sensed that we were in a covered passage. After a few more steps and a turn, a light appeared ahead, to show we were walking in a concrete lined tunnel. Our captors had split themselves into two groups, a half dozen ahead and an equal number behind. Soon there appeared a metal door in one wall, which proved to be the entrance to an elevator. We all squeezed in, and were taken down a distance which surely must have brought us near to the crater floor itself. The door then opened, and again we were escorted along a concrete passage. There were many turns. Our captors paused before a narrow door with a tiny barred window. This was unlocked, we were directed to enter, and the door clanked shut behind us. For the first few minutes no one had anything to say. We examined the interior of our cell, but found nothing more remarkable than concrete, a small ventilator hole near the ceiling, and a wooden bench along the wall opposite the door. Martin found his voice first. "A human being," he said slowly, "as big as the Woolworth Building!" Chamberlin, apparently still involved in his last abortive try at reason said, "But it's impossible. The laws of mechanics -- why the biggest dinosaurs were only eighty feet long, and they had to be supported by water. It's a mechanical device, I tell you." "It could have been an illusion," I ventured. "Perhaps an image projected on a fog bank, or something similar -- " Neither Walt nor I were very convincing -- not with the memory of that face fresh in our minds. We all fell silent again. Several minutes passed, when abruptly we became conscious of a movement of the floor, slight but repeated with regularity. A shake, a pause of six or eight seconds, then another shake. Baker stood on the bench and put his ear to the ventilator. He heard nothing. The movement came again. Shake, pause, shake, pause, like some distant and monstrous machine. I was reminded of the small earthquakes felt in the vicinity of a heavy drop hammer. Shake, pause, shake, pause, and then a heavier jolt accompanied by a distinct thud. After that, quiet. "Obviously," Baker said, "they knew all about us." He was evidently thinking out loud. "Probably picked us up on the beach, and then just let us go on, clearing out the guards ahead, and keeping near enough to see that we didn't use the radio. Why? Maybe to find out how much we knew about the place already. I daresay they know one thing now: we never expected to find -- what we did. Which brings us to our Buddha. The big question is, is it mechanical or -- alive? He paused. "I don't know -- none of us can know yet -- but, I'm inclined to believe the latter. Cady, what's your opinion?" I had forgotten for the moment that I was a zoologist. To tell the truth, the whole thing had been a little outside of the type of specimen I was familiar with. "Its movements were lifelike," I replied. "They suggest muscular action rather than mechanical drive. But, as Walt says, it's just not possible. Nature has placed a limit on the size of living creatures. The strength of bones, the energy requirements, the osmotic pressures needed to move fluids through tissue. Besides, where could it come from? There have been giants -- eight, ten, maybe up to twelve feet -- but this thing is of a different order of magnitude. It must weigh can't believe that it's alive." Martin and Chamberlin had a few more remarks of the same nature, and then the conversation died away. We waited. Eventually they would come -- the yellowrobed ones. When they did, we might learn more. I had little doubt as to our ultimate fate, but in the dulled condition of my senses, I didn't seem particularly to care. My watch had been smashed in the struggle, so that I had no idea of how long they kept us in the celL It could not have been too many hours, for the elementary needs of nature had only begun to assert themselves when the sound of a key came from the door. We all stood up. It was our conductor of last night, the one who spoke pidgin English. "Good morning, gentlemens," he said with a bow. "You spend nice night, yes? Get plenty sleep?" We did not reply. Still smiling politely, he beckoned. "Now please to come with me. Head Lama talk to you now." interminable concrete corridors of that subterranean city, but this time we came out into a hall illuminated by natural daylight. The walls here were neatly plastered, and the doors more ornamental. "Getting near the high brass," murmured Chamberlin. The last hall was terminated by a window and balcony, beyond which the green of a distant hillside could be seen. Before we reached diis, however, our guide stopped at a heavy aluminum door and directed us into a sort of anteroom, occupied by uniformed guards and a male receptionist. A few words were exchanged in Japanese, and the guards quickly and expertly frisked us, although this had already been done once. This ceremony over, another door was opened and we were admitted to a large and sunny office, whose big windows gave a panoramic view of the whole crater. Our eyes were so dazzled by the sudden burst of light, and our curiosity was so great to see that fantastic place by daylight, that we did not at once see the man who sat behind a desk opposite the windows, watching us with an expression of high amusement. Baker first noticed him. "Phobat Rau! So you're back of this, after all!" The other stood up. He was a short man, evidently Burmese, and wore a tan military uniform. His smile revealed a bonanza of gold teeth, while his thick lensed specshine streaming in through the windows. "It is a great pleasure to have you here. Professor Baker, although there is in the circumstances some cause for regret. But all that in its time. What do you think of our Buddha?" As he spoke. Baker was glancing about the room, and I saw that his eye had alighted upon an instrument just bdhind Rau's desk. A second look showed it to be a tape recorder, with the operating lamp on. "Until we have more data," replied Baker, "our views are still as you have them recorded." Phobat Rau laughed delightedly. "You're a good observer, Professor. Yes, I must confess I was curious about your reactions to our charge. So you doubt that he is alive?" Baker nodded. "Under the circumstances last night, there was every chance for a mistake, or a hoax." "In that case, perhaps you would like a second look. He's right across the valley now, having his breakfast." We hastened to the window. Rau's oflBce, we found, was in a sort of cliff house perched half way up the northern side of the crater, and commanded a view of the entire area, now brightly illuminated by the morning sunlight. We easily identified the enormous furniture of last night, against the west cliff about a mile away. But we had little interest in these structures, monstrous as they were. For, sitting cross-legged on the groimd before the low table, was the giant. At that distance he did not look so huge -- in fact, with an effort we could almost ignore scale and perspective and imagine that he was a normal human fifty feet distant. He appeared a typical young Japanese, his hair cut long in the old stj'le, and wearing a sleeveless tunic like the statues of Buddha. His face was smooth and serene, and he was eating a white pasty looking substance from his great steel dish, using a big spoon. Even as we watched, he finished the meal and stood up, causing the whole building to sway slightly. He glanced about for a moment, his eye lingering briefly in our direction, and then he walked in a leisurely way to the lagoon, where he bent over and rinsed out his utensils. Returning to the table, he placed them carefully in the position we had noted last night. He then straightened to his full height, raised his great arms far up into the morning air and began a series of earth snaking calisthenics. After about ten minutes of this he walked over to the leanto structure, entered and closed a curtain behind him. Rau, who had been watching us with great amusement, offered an explanation. "His reading room. Books on his scale would be a bit difficult to make, so he uses microfilm and a projector. The microfilm," he added, "is on eight by ten plates, and the screen is two hundred feet square." We returned to the desk and took the seats Rau indicated. "So now," said our host, "you would like to hear a word of explanation, perhaps?" "Several, if you can spare the time," answered Baker with a dryness equal to Rau's. "It all began," began Phobat Rau, "on a beautiful summer's day in #, August #, I believe, was the exact date. Perhaps you recall what happened on that day, in the city of Hiroshima. If not, I will refresh your memories. A bomb was dropped on that day, a new type of bomb. It caused a great deal of destruction, and killed tens of thousands of people. Some died at once from the blast and heat, but many more, who had escaped apparently uninjured, developed serious illness days later and died. The cause you know, of course. It was called radiation injury, the internal destruction of cell structure by gamma rays emitted by the bomb. "Many strange things happened in that blast. In some, injury was confined to particular parts of the body, as the hair. Others were made sterile, in fact, the reproductive function and apparatus seemed particularly susceptible to the rays. In many cases, the genes -- those vital units within the cell which determine growth and structure and all physical and mental characteristics -- the genes were altered, so that children grew abnormally, with deformities or mental sickness. "But these things you well know. Afterwards biologists and physicians and geneticists came from aU parts of the world to study the effects of the atomic bomb, and the flow of learned papers on this subject is not ended even now." T he speaker paused, as if inviting some comment or question. Seeing that we intended to remain silent, he resumed. "There was one case, however, which was not studied by western scientists. In many respects, it was the most interesting of all, for the bomb blast and the accompanying deluge of gamma radiation occurred just at the instant of conception. As usual, damage was sustained by the genes, but this damage was of a peculiar and highly special sort. The only gene affected, apparently, was the one controlling growth, although, as you will see presently, other structural and chemical changes took place without which the growth could never have occurred. "The infant involved was a male, named Kazu Takahashi. He was bom prematurely on March #, #, with a weight of fourteen pounds six ounces. The parents were well to do, and the infant was given the best of care, first in a private hospital, and later in its own home. "During the first few days of life, little Kazu was apparently normal, except for his prematureness and a rather great weight for a sevenmonth infant. And then the change began. His nurse first noticed an increasing appetite. He cried constantly and would be silent only when feeding. He emptied nursing bottles in a few seconds, after he learned to pull off the nipple, and was soon consuming a quart of milk every hour. The nurse humored him, in order to keep him quiet, and presently became afraid to tell either the parents or the doctor just how much milk her charge was drinking. As the days passed and no ill effects developed, she became less worried, although the daily milk ration had to be increased twice, to # quarts a day on the sixth day. "Kazu doubled his weight in the first eleven days, and at the end of two weeks tipped the scales at # pounds. His pink tender skin was now rapidly becoming normal in color and texture, and he was behaving more and more like an ordinary child, although already of startling size. By the fourth week he was drinking # quarts of milk a day and weighed # pounds. The parents -- by now thoroughly alarmed -- called in the doctor, who at once realized the cause of the abnormality. He could offer no suggestions, however, save to continue feeding at a rate to keep the child quiet. This, by the sixth week. soared to the incredible ure of # quarts a day to feed a baby now five feet tall and weighing # pounds. At this point the Takahashi family felt that their problem was getting beyond them, and being Buddhists, they appealed to the local temple -- it was not in Hiroshima, but at a nearby town -- for assistance. The priests took the child in, after a generous contribution had been made by father Takahashi, and for a time the embarrassing matter seemed solved. The Takahashis went on a three weeks vacation to the south coast of Honshu, and all was peaceful, externally at least. "When the family returned, they found a note under the door urgently requesting their presence at the temple. When they arrived, they were met by a highly agitated chief priest. Something had to be done, he said. Things were getting out of hand. He then took them to the nursery. Here they beheld a baby that would have been seven feet eight inches tall if it could stand, and which had weighed in that morning on the platform scales in the temple kitchen, at # pounds. After hearing the details of the milk bill, father Takahashi wrote out another check and departed hurriedly. "After the passage of three more weeks, a delegation from the temple again waited upon Mr. Takahashi, with the news that his son now measured # feet # inches in length, weighed # pounds, and consumed the entire output of a local dairy. They politely requested that he take care of his own infant. Mr. Takahashi as politely refused, and at this point bowed out of ottir story completely." Phobat Rau hesitated again and inquired if his statistics were boring us. Baker glanced out of the window and replied that while he ordinarily did not have much appreciation of figures of this kind, under the circumstances they had a certain interest. Rau smiled briefly and continued. "The summer of # was one of increasing difficulty for the temple. By the beginning of July Kazu weighed # pounds and cried with a voice like a wounded bull. A ' number of trustworthy medical men examined him, and concurred that his only abnormality was size. In bodily proportions he was quite ordinary, and, for a Syh month baby, his mental development was, if anything, a bit ahead of normal. The priests took in their belts, appointed eight of the strongest as nursemaids, and wondered where it would all end. "It was at this point that a member of the Buddhist priesthood from Burma happened to pass through the neighborhood and heard of the infant. After being sworn to secrecy; even from other members of his order, he was allowed to view little Kazu. Now this priest, whose name I might as well admit was Phobat Rau, had perhaps a bit more imagination than some others, and when he looked upon the little monster, he was struck by an idea which was to grow like Kazu himself." "The Living Buddha," murmured Baker, "Ye Gods, what a symbol." Rau nodded like a schoolteacher. "A symbol, and more. A machine to rebuild the world, or conquer it!" B aker chose to ignore this leading remark. He wanted more of the story. "So you took him over?" "Well, it was not so easy as that. You see, I was only a young priest then, and had no resources to undertake such a project. But the more I thought of the possibilities, the more sure I was. But first I had to convince others, and time was short. The priests were near to their limit, and were about to appeal to the Americans. I secured their promise to wait until I could return to Burma, and then I flew to Bangkok, to Rangoon, to every center of Buddhism where I was known. It was a sales trip, you might say, and for a time I thought that I had failed. But there were also forces working for me. The world was uncertain. The communists were at the start of their triumphal sweep over Asia, and the leaders of our faith foresaw what lay ahead. On the first of August, #, a delegation of priests from eight Buddhist countries journeyed to Japan to view Kazu, who was now a lusty ## months old, # feet long and of # pounds weight. He was in fine health, and when he slept the resemblance to the infant Buddha was startling. You gentlemen are worldly men, and I pride myself upon freedom from the more naive illusions of my faith, but perhaps you can try to imagine that our feelings were not entirely those of ambitious schemers -- that perhaps within us was some higher motive for the step we took. Our poor suffering Asia was in deeper misery than ever before, for atop her own famine and war had come also the troublesof the our deluded countrymen were taking arms against their brothers. Confused by a glib ideology, they were daily turning more from the religion of their fathers. Although we did not speak it, we all felt inwardly that perhaps there was a purpose in this great infant -- that, though we made promises with tongue in cheek, perhaps a miracle would occur to fulfill them. "And so we arranged to transport Kazu Takahashi from Japan to a safe location where he might grow to manhood, where he might be suitably educated to take the place that we would prepare for him. The details of this move were not difficult to arrange. A special traveling crib # feet long was built, and in this by truck, lighter and motor junk he was carried by easy stages to this island. Here we established a great monastery, surrounded by rice and fruit plantations. Here we brought physicians and scholars to care for him and plan his education, and we built a nursery to accommodate his increasing bulk. "We did not know, of course, what his final size would be. We kept careful records of his growth, but even after the first year he was not more than ten times the normal height. But year by year we had to revise our estimates, for his growth soon accelerated beyond our wildest expectations. For a time indeed we feared that it would never stop and that he would die of starvation when the world could no longer feed him. For a time also we were sure diat he would never be able to stand, through the action of simple mechanical laws relating to weight and the size of bones, but apparently nature has provided a marvelous compensation, for his bones, as revealed by X-rays, are of a density and strength equal to that of steel. "His feeding was always a problem, although fortunately its increase was not beyond our ability to organize and plan. At first we supplied him from plantations on Yat and on neighboring islands. Then we were forced to organize NeoBuddhism as an implement to solicit contributions of food and money. Perforce we took many into partial confidence, but the complete story was known only to those on Yat. "On his first birthday Kazu was ## feet long and weighed # pounds. By his second birthday he could walk, and now surpassed all land animals save the monsters of the Jurassic age, with a height to #I feet and a weight of # pounds. During #, while the communists were overrunning China, our Buddha grew from # to # feet. In June of #, while the world watched the flames of war kindle in Korea, we saw him pound scale. In the year of # also we built his first schoolroom and developed the system of projected pictures and letters used in his education. "In #, Buddha's increasing appetite combined with the inroads made by the communists upon our territory brought a crisis. He was now # feet tall, weighed seven # men. In spite of all our efforts, his food supply was dwindling and, worse, the communists were becoming suspicious. And so we were forced to a decision. We had to appeal to the western world. But to whom? To America, or to Russia? You all know the situation in #, the time of the false peace. We turned to Russia. They sent a commission to investigate, and then acted with dispatch. Russia would feed our Buddha, but on a condition; Neo-Buddhism must sponsor communism. "We had no choice. Now that the secret was out, Russia had Yat at its mercy. So we agreed, but with one reservation. We alone should direct the education of Kazu. To this Russia agreed. Perhaps they considered that it was unimportant. Perhaps they thought that Kazu was an idiot, useful only as a symbol. But they agreed, and so his education continued in the tradition of Buddhist scholarship. He is well read, gentlemen. He knows the classics of China, and of India, and of the west also. I myself taught him English. At the request of our sponsors, he has studied Russian. He is still young, but he has an inquiring mind. When he takes his true place in the world, he may not always be the tool of the Kremlin. But of these things even I am not given to know." Rau paused, and indicated the window. Buddha was emerging from his leanto. "Look well, gentlemen. There stands the hope of Asia. There is the Living Buddha himself. He is only # years of age, but he stands # feet high, and weighs # pounds. At first he will be but a symbol, but soon he will be much more. The time of compromise, I promise you, will not last forever." Rau stopped. We waited for him to resume, but instead, he pressed a button on his desk. Immediately several members of the guard entered. Rau now addressed us in a new voice. "Gentlemen, you probably wonder why I have spoken so frankly of all of this. To be candid, to a certain extent I wonder also. Perhaps it is to get it off my chest, as you say. Perhaps it is just pride in what I have done. But whatever the reason, the consequences for you are regrettable. Your spying trip to Yat alone is sufficient for death ; what I have told you makes your return a complete impossibility. I am sorry, particularly for you. Baker. We shall do it as humanely as possible. Good day." The guards, as upon a signal, closed in on us. For a second I thought insanely of flight, or a plunge through the great windows to certain death on the crags below. But there was no chance. Before any thought could be translated into action we were back in the corridor, escorted by an augmented guard of priests, on our way back to our cell, and death. A death that would be -- as "humane as possible". IV after the steel door had clicked shut that the full realization of our predicament came to us. Rau's story had been so fascinating, and his manner so rational and civilized that we all had forgotten that he was of a race and ideology opposed to all that we stood for, and that we were spies caught red-handed in the innermost shrine of Neo-Buddhisrn. Even after twenty years of cold war, all of our civilized instincts rose against the idea that a suave brilliant intellectual like Phpbat Rau could so cold bloodedly order our deaths. But the awakening was at hand. If we doubted Rau's intentions, one look at the cold Mongol faces of the guards was enough to dispel any hope. Baker tried to sum it up. "No use trying to argue with him. Fact is, we won't even see Rau again. We could, of course, simply call it quits and wait for them, but I'd rather fight it out. Anyone have an idea?" Martin hopped up on the bench and studied the ventilator. He reached one arm in as far as possible, and reported that there was a bend about a foot in. While he was doing this, Chamberlin made a minute investigation of the door, but found that neither hinges nor lock were accessible. There were no other openings into the chamber save the electric conduit which presumably entered above the electric fixture in the ceiling. Finally Baker spoke. "Nothing we can do until they come for us. We'd better plan towards that, unless they're going to gas us through the ventilator." This unpleasant thought had not occurred to the rest of us before. Martin returned to the opening and sniffed, and then with happy inspiration, he rolled up his jacket and stuffed it in. Baker nodded approval. So the time passed. We listened at the door for footsteps but none came. Presently we became aware of a now familiar sensation. The floor commenced to shake gently and regularly. We coimted the steps. There were twelve, and then they stopped. Chamberlin calculated mentally. "Say, about # feet per step. That would be three thousand feet -- six tenths of a mile. Wonder where -- " Martin, still near the ventilator, shushed him, and ptilled the coat out. Through the small hole we heard a deep sound, a sort of low pitched irregular rumble. Baker suddenly jumped up and listened at the opening. After a bit the sound stopped. Baker became excited. "It was a voice," he explained. "I think it was his voice. It was speaking Japanese. I couldn't catch many words, but I think he was talking about us." Now the rumble came again, and louder. A few words, a pause, and then more words, as though he was in conversation with someone whom we could not hear. Baker listened intently, but he could catch only fragments, owing to his small knowledge of Japanese and the extremely low pitched articulation of the giant. Presently the voice rose to a volume which literally made the mountain tremble, and then it stopped. Baker shook his head. "Couldn't make it out. I think he was inquiring where we were, but it was too idiomatic. I think he became excited or angry at the last." "Fee, fi, fo, fum," said Chamberlin. "Now wouldn't that be an interesting end?" Martin laughed. "We wouldn't even be enough to taste." As no one else seemed anxious to pursue this subject further, we subsided into a sort of lethargy. Even plans for what we should do when the guards came were forgotten. And then, suddenly, the door was opened. We all sprang to our feet. A priest -- in fact, the same one who had brought us here originally -- came in. A squad of guards stood outside. "Good afternoon, how are you? Chief Priest ask me to tell you, Buddha wish to see you. Please you come with me." He politely indicated the door. With a shrug Baker complied, and the rest of us followed. Down the hall we marched again, through all of the turns of the morning and so at last into the corridor which ended in a window. This time we passed the aluminum door and continued right to the end. The window, we now saw, was really a French door which opened to a small balcony. Our guide opened the door and pushed us out. The bakony, we found, was about four hundred feet above the valley floor, but we did not spend much time enjoying the view. Scarcely fifty feet in front of us stood the Living Buddha! For a full minute we stared at each other, and then I began to realize that he was embarrassed! A wrinkle appeared between his eyes and he swallowed a couple of times. Then he spoke. "Good ternoon. Professor Baker and party. I am happy to meet you." The voice, and particularly the langue, so startled us that for a moment nobody could think of a reply. The voice was a deep pulsing rumble, like the tone of the biggest pipes of an organ, and filled with a variety of glottal wheezings and windy overtones. I think it was through these additional sounds rather than the actual tones that we could understand him at all, for the fundamentals were surely below the ordinary limits of human audibility. What we heard and could translate into articulate words was hardly more than a cavernous whisper. The important thing was that we could understand him, and, more than that, that he was friendly. Baker made reply at last. "Good afternoon. We also are happy, and most honored. How should we address you?" "My name is Kazu Takahashi, but I am told that I am also Buddha. This I would like to discuss with you, if you have time." "We have time for nothing else," said Baker. Buddha's eyebrows raised slightly. "So I was right. They are going to kill you." Baker glanced at us meaningfully. This giant was no fool. Suddenly there came over me a little thrill of hope. Maybe -- but he was speaking again. "I have not before had opportunity to talk to men from west. Only from China, Japan, Soviet State. You will tell me of rest of world?" "With pleasure," said Baker. I became conscious that the door behind us was opening. I glanced back, and saw Phobat Rau, surrounded by guards and priests.He gestured to us to come in. Baker turned, while Buddha bent his head closer to see also. Rau came to the door. "Come back," he called urgently. "You are in grave danger. You must come in." Q uite definitely I had no desire to go in. Neither did Baker, for he shook his head and moved away from the door. Rau's face was suddenly enraged. He made a quick motion to the guards, and then held them back. With an evident effort he calmed himself and called again, softly. "Please come in. I was hasty this morning. I am sorry. I think now I see a way for you to return safely, if you will come in." For reply. Baker turned to the giant. He climbed upon the rail of the balcony. "Take us away from here, if you wish to hear what we have to say. Take us, or they will kill us!" In answer, Buddha extended one hand, palm up, so that it was level with the balcony. For an instant I hesitated at the sight of that irregular rough surface, big as a city block, and then I heard steps behind us and a click. With one accord we leaped over the parapet just as a scattered volley of pistol shots rang out. We tumbled head over heels down a rough leathery slope into a hollow, and then the platform lifted like a roller coaster. In a second the balcony, the whole hillside vanished and we went rocketing up into the blue sky. A gale of wind blew past, almost carrying us with it, and then a portion of the surface rose and became thirty foot tree trunks which curled incredibly over and around us, forming a small cavern which shut out the wind and held us securely against falling. Buddha had closed his fist. For a breathless fifteen seconds we were carried in darkness, and then the great hand unfolded. It was lying flat on an immense smooth area of concrete, which we presently identified as the higher of the two tables. We got to our feet and staggered to the edge of the palm. Here we met another probli in, in the form of a rounded ten foot drop-off to the concrete table. As we stood looking down in dismay, the other va.st hand came up from below, carrying a heavy sheet of metal. This was carefully placed with one edge on the hand and the other on the table, forming a ramp. Holding onto each other for mutual support, we made our way to the table and there literally collapsed. Chamberlin became violently sick, and none of the rest of us felt much better. The giant carefully withdrew both hands and watched us from a distance of a hundred yards, with only the head and upper part of his body visible. From our position on the concrete platform I now looked closely at Kazu for the first time. My first impression was not so much one of size, as of an incredible richness of detail. It was hke examining a normal human through a powerful microscope, except here the whole was visible at once. Even at a distance of two hundred feet, the hair, the eyelashes, the pores of the skin showed up with a texture and form which I had never noted before, even in my studies as a biologist. The general effect was most confusing, for I would lose and regain the sense of scale, first thinking of him as an ordinary man, and then realizing the proportion. The nearest comparison that I can think of is the sensation when standing very close to a large motion picture screen, but here the image is blurry whereas I saw with a clarity and sharpness that was simply unbelievable. Buddha seemed to realize our condition, for he smiled sympathetically, and waited until poor Walt had recovered somewhat from his nausea. Baker, as spokesman, renewed the conversation. Walking a few steps toward the front of the enormous desk, he spoke in a loud clear voice. "You have saved our lives. We thank you." The great head nodded benignly, and after a thoughtful pause, that strange voice began. "My teachers have brought others before me to lecture, but always I know that they speak only as they are told to speak. You are different. I am glad that I saw you last night, or I would never know that you had come." He paused, evidently gathering his thoughts for the next foray into an unfamiliar language. Then he leaned closer. "Phobat Rau has spoken to you of my birth and life here?" Baker nodded, and then, realizing that Kazu could not see such a microscopic movement, he replied orally. "He has told us your story in detail. It is a marvel which we can yet scarcely believe. But the greatest marvel of all is that you speak our language, and comprehend so quickly." Kazu thought of this for a moment. "Yes, my teachers have done well, I think. I have studied the writings of many great men, but there is yet much that I do not understand. I think it is important that I understand, because I am so strong. I do not wish to use this strength for evil, and I am not sure that those whom my teachers serve are good. I have studied the words of the great Buddha, but now my teachers say that I am to appear as if I were Buddha. But that is an untruth, and untruth is evil. So now I hope that you will tell me the whole truth." Kazu stepped back a quarter of a mile, and then reappeared, dragging his four hundred foot chair. Sitting on this, he crouched forward until his face was hardly a hundred feet before us, and his warm humid breath swept over us like wind from some exotic jungle. Baker took a moment to marshal his thoughts, and then came forward, threw out his chest and began speaking as though addressing an outdoor political meeting. How long Baker spoke I do not know. He began by outlining history, contrasting the ideals of Buddha and other great religious leaders with the dark record of human oppression and cruelty. Kazu's vast face proved most expressive of his feelings as he listened intently. When Baker came to the subject of communism, he leaned over so far backward in his effort to be fair that I feared that he was overdoing it, and would convince the giant in the wrong direction. way through his lecture, he remarked that some point in geography could be better explained by a drawing, but that obviously he could not make one large enough for Kazu to see. At this the giant laughed and pointed to his big lean to. "Come," he said, "you shall draw on a piece of glass and the light will make it great that I may see." We were thereupon transferred the mile distance to the building by a reversal of our previous route; up the ramp to Kazu's ample palm, a series of breathtaking swoops through space, and we were in the vast interior of the leanto. The furnishings of this study room consisted of a chair, a sloping writing desk and a screen fully two hundred feet square on the wall opposite the chair. Beside the chair was a sort of bracket on the wall which supported the projection room. Kazu placed his hand level with an elevated balcony leading to this and we scrambled off. With Baker in the lead, we opened the door and entered the projection room. It was larger than we had estimated from outside, when we had the immense furniture for comparison. The dimensions were perhaps forty feet on the side, and most of the interior was taken up by shelves on which were stored thousands of films of book pages, maps, photographs and diagrams of all kinds. In the side facing the screen were a number of ports and a battery of movie and still projectors. One of the latter was, we saw, adapted for writing or drawing on the glass slide while it was being projected. We studied this for a moment, located the special marking pencil, and then I called out of the door that we were ready. "Look also," replied Kazu, "you will find device which magnify voice. My teachers use this always." A further search disclosed a microphone and the sw'itch for a public address amplifier. Baker M tiled down to his now illustrated lei lure. After he had talked himself hoarse, Baker asked each of the rest of us to speak briefly on our own specialties. I was the last, and I was practically through when I became aware that we were not alone in the room. I gave Martin a nudge, and turned from the microphone to face eight of the uniformed guards, led by our friendly yellow-robed priest. Only now he wasn't friendly, and he carried a heavy automatic which was carefully aimed right at us. "Very clever, gentlemen," he said. "You took good advantage of your chance with our simple giant, did you not? Tried your best to ruin the whole work of Pan-Asia just to save your miserable skins. Well, you shall not -- " He was interrupted by the thunder of Kazu's voice. "Please continue, Mr. Cady. I find it most interesting. Why do you stop?" I took a step toward the microphone, but a menacing gesture with the gun stopped me. I looked from yellow-robe to Baker. After a moment's hesitation, the latter spoke. "I'm afraid, my friend, that you have misjudged the situation. I admit that we jumped into Buddha's hand to escape from Phobat Rau, but if you are familiar with the expression, our leap was from the frying pan into the fire. Your giant is holding us prisoner, and even now forces us to tell him things on pain of death." The priest looked astonished, and the gun barrel dropped slightly. "No one," continued Baker in a sincere tone, "could have been more welcome than you. But" -- his voice dropped and he took a step toward the other -- "we must be careful. If he should even suspect that you are here to rescue us, he would crush this room like an egg!" The priest, now thoroughly alarmed, glanced about nervously, his automatic pointing at the floor. The guards, who knew no English, looked at each other in surprise. Baker took quick advantage of the confusion. "We must not allow him to become suspicious. I will continue talking over the microphone while your guards take my friends to safety." With this he stepped to the microphone and projector. The priest seemed for an instant about to stop him, and then he turned to the guards and gave a series of rapid orders. They advanced and surrounded Martin, Walt and me, and indicated by gesture that we were to go with them to the walkway which led to the wall of the great room. In panic I looked at Baker, but he was bent over the glass plate of the projector, drawing something and speaking in his precise clipped voice. "I shall now show you a map of the United States and indicate the principal cities. First, on the Atlantic coast we have New York... We were out of the room and on the gallery. For a moment I thought that Kazu might see us, and then I realized that the whole place was dark and that he was concentrating on Baker's silly map. Briefly I wondered what Baker was up to anyway, but this sudden terrible turn of events made any kind of calm reasoning very difficult. Outside the projection room. Baker's voice came booming over the loudspeakers "Chicago is located at the southern end of Lake Michigan, just west of Detroit, while St. Louis -- " came on, and the whole structure of the bridge shook as from an earthquake. The guards ahead abruptly turned and scrambled back, knocking us over in their haste. I grabbed the handrail for support, and then became aware of a vast blurry shape looming above and of a hand as large as a building that reached down toward the guards, now halfway back to the projection room. In a sort of hypnotic horror I watched the thumb and forefinger snap them and a thirty foot section of railing off into space. Then, very gently the hand plucked the roof from the projection room, exposing Baker and thef priest. Yellow-robe dropped his gun and ran towards a corner, but Baker neatly tripped him and then stepped back for Kazu to finish the job. A moment later Baker came out onto the bridge. Martin tried to frame a question. "What -- how did he -- ?" Baker grinned and pointed dlently at the screen. We looked and understood. Where a map of the United States should have been was a scrawled message in English: "Priests here taking us captive." We returned to our lecturing, but after what had happened neither we nor Ka#u felt much like concentrating on geographical or other general facts. We all knew that Rau had not given up. For the moment we were protected by Kazu's immense power, but there were some doubts in our minds as to how long this might last. After all, Rau was his lifelong mentor and protector. For the moment the young giant seemed to have taken a liking to us, but perhaps it was only a passing whim. Presently Rau would assert his authority and Kazu, his curiosity satisfied, would hand us over -- in exchange, perhaps, for supper. After about fifteen minutes more of lecturing, Kazu interrupted. "Soon will be sunset. Suggest we return to privacy of high table to discuss next move." The transfer took less than a minute. The afternoon, we saw, was indeed far gone. None of us had realized how long we had been in the projection room. Once we were safely back on the table, Kazu addressed us, using his softest voice, which was a hurricane-like whisper. "Phobat Rau plans for me to go soon to head armies of Asia in fight against west. My study of history has raised doubts of rightness of such war, and what you say strengthen these. Now I must see for myself, without guidance or interference from Rau. But I need assistance, to direct me how I shall go. I believe you will be fair. Will you help me?" For a moment the incongruity of that last question prevented om: grasping the full implication of Kazu's statement. Then Baker, evidently realizing that this was no time for philosophic quibbling, signified our assent. Kazu proceeded at once to practical plans. "Tonight I sleep in usual place, where you disturbed me with small rock slide. But you must stay awake by turns to guard against capture. In morning you direct my steps away from Yat to mainland of Asia, where -- " He stopped. Seeing the direction he was looking, we hastened to the edge of the table. Far below, on the ground, was a railroad train surrounded by a small crowd of priests. For a moment we were puzzled, and then we saw that the train was made up entirely of gondola cars such as are used to carry coal and other bulk cargo. But these cars, a dozen in number, contained a white substance which steamed. We did not require more than one guess. The train brought Kazu's supper. The giant made a slight bow of thanks to the delegation at his feet, and proceeded carefully to empty the cars into his dish. Then, instead of squatting at his low eating table, he brought the dish and other utensils up to our level and dumped a ton or so of steaming rice at our feet. Evidently he wished us to share his supper. We had no tools other than our hands, but since we had not eaten in almost twentyfour hours, we did not stop for the conventions. Scooping up double handfulls of the unseasoned stuff, we fell to even before Kazu had gotten his ponderous spoon into position. Suddenly, Baker yelled at us. "Hold it!" He turned to Kazu who had a spoonful poised halfway to his mouth. "Kazu, don't eat. This rice is doped!" I took a mouthful of the rice. There was not much flavor -- only a little salt which I guessed came from seawater. I explored the stuff with my tongue, and presently noticed a familiar taste. It took me a moment to place it. Yes, that was it. Barbiturate. The stuff in sleeping pills. Kazu bent his great face over us. Baker briefly explained. Kazu appeared at first puzzled. He dropped the spoon into the dish and pushed it away from him. His brow wrinkled, and he glanced down at the ground. Walking to the edge, we saw that the group of priests were standing quietly around the engine, as though waiting for something. What they were waiting for evidently struck Kazu and us at the same time. Kazu leaned toward them and spoke in Japanese. His voice was angry. Baker tried to translate. "He says, 'how dare you poison Buddha' -- Look, they're running off -- " The next second things happened too rapidly for translation or even immediate interpretation. Kazu spoke again, his voice rising to an earth shaking roar at the end. The little men below were scattering in all directions, and the train started to back off down its track. Suddenly Kazu turned and picked up his hundred foot steel dish. He swept it across the table and then down in a long curving arc. There was an earth shaking thud and where the running figures and the train had been was now only the upturned bottom of the immense dish. Priests and cars alike were entombed in a thousand tons of hot rice! Kazu now turned to us. "Gome," he said, "Yat is not safe, even for Buddha. Now we must leave here at once." He extended his hand towards us, and then, with another thought, turned and strode to the leanto. In a moment he returned carrying the projection room, with a tail of structural steel and electric cables hanging below. This he placed on the table and indicated that we were to enter. As soon as we were inside, Kazu clapped on the roof and picked up the stout steel box. We clung to the frame supporting the projectors, while a mass of slides, film cans and other debris battered us with every swooping motion. We could not see what was going on outside, but the giant seemed to be picking up a number of things from the ground and from inside the leanto. Then he commenced a regular stride across the crater floor. Now at last we got to a window, just in time to glimpse the nearby cliff. On the rim, some hundreds of feet above I saw a group of uniformed men clustered about some device. Then we were closer and I saw that it was an antiaircraft gun, which they were trying to direct at us. I think Kazu must have seen it at the same moment, for abruptly he scrambled up the steep hillside and pulverized gun, crew and the whole crater rim with one tremendous blow of his fist. I got a brief aerial view of the whole island as Kazu balanced momentarily on the rim, and then we were all thrown to the floor as he stumbled and slid down the hillside to the level country outside of the crater. V been engaged in an essentially personal enterprise, even though its object was to secure information vital to the United Nations. From this time on, however, the personal element was to become almost completely subordinate to the vast problems of humanity itself, for, as we were to soon find, we had tied ourselves to a symbol that was determined to live up to all that was claimed or expected of him, and further, who depended upon our advice. The situation for us was made much worse because at first we doubted both his sincerity and good sense -- in fact, it was not until after the Wagnerian climax of the whole thing that we at last realized, along with the rest of the world, exactly what Kazu Takahashi believed in. Kazu crossed the flat eastern half of Yat in less than a minute, evidently wishing to get out of range of Rau's artillery as quickly as possible. His feet tore through the groves as a normal man's might flirough a field of clover; indeed, he experienced more trouble from the softness of the ground than from any vegetation. As we were soon to learn, one of the disadvantages of Kazu's size lay in the mechanical properties of the world as experienced by him. Kazu stood almost # feet high, or roughly # times the linear dimensions of a normal man. From the simple laws of geometry, this increased his weight by of his body, including the soles of his feet which had to support this gigantic load, had increased by but lOff, or ten thousand times. The ground pressure under his feet was thus # times greater, for each square inch, than for a normal man. The result was that Kazu sank into the ground at each step until he reached bedrock, or soil strong enough to carry the load. At the beach he hesitated briefly, as though getting his bearings, and then waded into the ocean. The surf which had used us so violently was to him only a half inch ripple. He strode through the shallows and past the reef in a matter of seconds, and then plunged into deeper water. From our dizzy perch, now carried at hip height, we watched the great feet drive down into the sea, leaving green walls of solid water about them. Although we did not realize it at the time, we later learned that Kazu's wading forays were attended by tidal waves which inundated islands up to a hundred miles away. This trip across a twenty mile strait swamped a dozen native fishing craft, flooded out four villages and killed some hundreds of people. We fared better than some of these innocent bystanders, for Kazu carefully held our steel box above the sea, and presently lurched through shallow water to the dry land. The new island was larger than Yat, and entirely given over to rice growing for Kazu's food supply. He threaded his way easily among the paddies, up through some low hills, and then down a narrow gorge into the sea again. Ahead lay a much more extensive body of water. The sun was now hardly fifteen degrees above the horizon, and its glare plus a bank of clouds made it difficult to see the distant land. Kazu raised our room to the level of his face. "Is that Island of Celebes?" Baker started to pick up the microphone, and then abruptly realizing that it was dead, he shouted back from the projection port. "I think it is. Let me look for a chart." Kazu waited patiently while we searched, placing the room on a hilltop to give us a steadier platform. We all began a mad scramble in the mass of debris. Kazu removed the roof to give more light, but it soon became clear that there wasn't much hope. All that we could find were thousands of slides of the Chinese classics. At last we gave up. When we told Kazu this, he looked across the water and wrinkled his brow. We could sense the reason for his anxiety, for the distant shore could hardly be less than seventy miles away. Mentally I reduced this to terms I could understand. Seven tenths of a mile, of which an unknown percentage might be swimming. Kazu's voice rumbled down to us, "I would prefer to wade. I cannot swim well." He peered down into our roofless box anxiously. "If we only had one chart," began Baker, when Walt, who had been rummaging near the projector window, called to us. "Take a look over there, just around the point." We saw the prow of a ship. There was a moment of terror lest it be an Indonesian coast patrol, and then we saw that it was just a small island steamer of a thousand tons or so, chugging along less than two miles offshore. at the same instant. Baker, as spokesman, called to Kazu. The giant, for the first time, grinned at us. Then he picked up our box and waded into the ocean. I don't think the people in the little ship even saw us until we were practically upon them, because of the mist and sunset glare. What they thought I can only imagine, for the water was little more than knee deep and Kazu towered fully four hundred feet above it. Then a hand as big as the foredeck reached down and gently stopped them by the simple expedient of forming a V between thumb and fingers into which the prow pushed. I heard the sound of bells and saw tiny figures scurrying about on the deck. On the opposite side a number of white specks appeared in the water as crewmen dove overboard. Our box was now lowered until its door was next to the bridge. We leaped aboard, under cover of a great hand which obligingly plucked away the near wall of the pilot house. We entered the house just as the captain beat a precipitate retreat out the other side, and after a moment in the chartroom we found what we wanted. While Martin stood watch at the far door, we took advantage of the electric lights to examine the chart of the east coast of Celebes. That island, we found, was only sixty miles away and the deepest sounding was less than six hundred feet. Kazu could wade the whole distance. T he nautical charts did not show much detail for the interior of Celebes, but from our elevation we could see enough of the terrain to guide Kazu quite well. The course which Baker plotted took us across the northern part of the big island, and far enough inland to avoid easy detection from the sea. As the day progressed, the sky gradually filled with clouds, promising more rain, so that I doubt if many people saw us. Those who did, I suspect, were more interested in taking cover than in interfering with Kazu's progress. The journey across Celebes took only a couple of hours, and so, by noon, we stood on the shore of the strait of Macassar, looking across seventy-five miles of blue water to the mountains of Borneo. It was not until now that Baker explained what he had in mind in choosing this particular route. "We're going to Singapore," he s:iid. "Get under the protection of ilie Royal Navy and Air Force before the commies spot us and i,rt dropping bombs and rockets. If Buddha wants to see the world, he'd better start by getting a good bodyguard." Kazu seemed agreeable when appraised of this plan, and so we began to plot a more detailed route over the # miles between us and the British crown colony. We stood at the narrowest part of the strait, but unfortunately most of it was too deep for Kazu to wade. Reference to the charts showed that by going # miles south, we would reduce the swim to about # miles, or the equivalent of some # yards for a normal man. To this was added a wade of # miles through shallows and over the many small Balabalagan Islands. Suddenly Kazu's hand swept down and came up with a #-foot whale, which he devoured in great gory bites. After this midocean lunch, Kazu resumed his wading. In the middle of the strait the depth exceeded five thousand feet, and he had to swim for a time, after fastening our box to his head by means of the trailing cables. At length the sea became shallow once more, Kazu's feet crunched through coral, and the coast of Borneo appeared dimly ahead. We were all taking time for the luxury of a sigh of relief when Chamberlin screamed a warning. "Planes! Coming in low at three o'clock!" Fortunately Kazu heard this also, although the language confused him. Precious seconds were wasted while he held the box up to his face for more explicit directions. The planes, a flight of six, were streaking towards us just above the wavetops, We could see that they carried torpedoes, and it was not difficult to guess their intentions. "Go sideways!" Baker yelled, but Kazu did not move. He simply stood facing the oncoming aircraft, our box held in his left hand at head level, and his right arm hanging at his side, half submerged. Either Kazu was too frightened to move, or he did not understand the danger. The planes were hardly a half mile away now, evidently holding their fire until the last moment to insure a hit. What even one torpedo could do I didn't dare to contemplate, and here were twelve possible strikes. After all, Kazu was made of flesh, and after having seen of a ship, I had little doubt as to what would happen to him. Now the last seconds were at hand. The planes were closing at five hundred yards, the torpedoes would drop in a second... But suddenly Kazu moved. His whole body swung abruptly to the left and at the same time the right hand came up through the water. We, of course, were pitched headlong, but we did briefly glimpse a tremendous fan of solid green water rising up to meet the planes. They tried to dodge but it was too late. Into the waterspout they flew, all six with their torpedoes still attached, and down into the ocean they fell, broken and sinking. It was all over in a moment. We were so amazed it Was moments before we could move. Kazu turned and resumed his stroll toward Borneo without a single backward glance at the havoc wrought by his splash. A S WE entered the foothills . I became conscious for the first time of a curious change. It was a psychological change in me, a change in my sense of scale. We had been carried so long at Kazu's shoulder level, and had grown so accustomed to looking out along his arms from almost the same viewpoint as his, that we were now estimating the size of the mountains as though we were as large as Kazu! It is difficult to express just how I felt, and now that it is all over, the memory has become so tenuous and subtle that I fear I will never be able to explain it so that anyone but my three companions could understand. But this was the first moment that I noticed the effect. The mountains were suddenly no longer # foot peaks viewed from a plane # feet above ground level, but were forty foot mounds with a six inch cover of mossy brush, and I was walking up their sides as a normal human being! The change was, as nearly as I can express it, from the viewpoint of a normal human being under extraordinary circumstances to that of an ordinary man visiting a miniature world. The whale to me was now a fat jellyfish seven inches long, the Chinese warplanes were toys with an eight inch wingspread, the little steamer of yesterday was a flimsy toy built of cardboard and tinfoil. We had, in effect, identified ourselves completely with Kazu. And so we climbed dripping from the Straits of Macassar, and entered the mists and jungles of Borneo. Our course toward Singapore carried us across the full width of southern Borneo, a distance, from a point north of Kotabaroe to Cape Datu, of almost six hundred miles. After about an hour, the blue outlines of the Sch wanner Mountains appeared ahead and presently we passed quite close to Mt. Raya, which at # feet was the greatest mountain Kazu had ever seen. Then, dropping into another valley, we followed the course of the Kapuas River for a time, and finally turned west again through an area of plantations. Here Kazu made an effort to secure food by plucking and eating fruit and treetops together. The result was unsatisfactory, but presently we came upon a granary containing thousands of sacks of rice. The workmen, warned by our earthquake approach, fled long before we reached it Kazu carefully removed the corrugated iron roof and ate the whole contents of the warehouse, which amounted to about a handful. The sacks appeared about a quarter of an inch in length, and seemed to be filled with a fine white powder. Following this meal, Kazu drained a small lake, getting incidentally a goodly catch of carp, although he could not even taste them. Then, since it was now late in the afternoon, he turned northwest to the hills to spend the night. I'he last part of the journey was almost entirely through shallow water -- three hundred miles of the warm South China Sea. Baker I'lanncd to make a before dawn url, so that we might be close to I he M.il.iy Peninsula before dayI ' ' I Miilcl espnse us to further ati.e I. K.izu suggested pushing on at once, but Baker did not think it wise to approach the formidable defenses of Singapore by night. And so for a second time we sought out an isolated valley where Kazu could snuggle between two soft hills, and we could get what sleep was possible in the wreckage of the projection room. The China Sea passage was made without incident. We started at three A.M. in a downpour of rain, and by six, at dawn, the low outline of the Malay Peninsula came into sight. We made our landfall some forty miles north of Singapore, and at once cut across country toward Johore Bahru and the great British crown colony. The rice paddies, roads and other signs of civilization were a welcome sight, and I was already relaxing, mentally, in a hot tub at the officers club when the awakening came. It came in the form of a squadron of fighter planes carrying British markings which roared out of the south without warning and passed Kazu's head with all their guns firing. Fortunately neither his eyes nor our thin shelled box was hat, but Kazu felt the tiny projectiles which penetrated even his twelve inch hide. As the planes wheeled for another pass he called out in English that he was a friend, but of course the pilots could not hear above the roar of their jets. On the second try two of the planes released rockets, which fortunately missed, but this put a different light on the whole thing. A direct hit with a ten inch rocket would be as dangerous as a torpedo. Baker tried to yell some advice, but there was no chance before the planes came in again. This time Kazu waved, and finally threw a handful of earth and trees at them. The whole squadron zoomed upwards like a covey of startled birds. By the time we had reached a temporary haven, Kazu was thoroughly winded, and we were battered nearly insensible. Baker, in fact, was out cold. Kazu slowed down, and then finding no directions or advice forthcoming, he resumed a steady dogtrot to the north. Martin and I tried to draw Baker to a safer position beside the projector, but in the process one of the steel shelves collapsed, adding Martin to the casualty list. Walt and I then attempted to drag the two of them to safety, but in the midst of these efforts a particularly hard lurch sent me headfirst into the projector, and my interest in proceedings thereupon became nil. Walt, battered and seasick, gave up and collapsed with the rest of us. Further efforts at communication by Kazu proved fruitless. Buddha was on his own. VI headache to find the steel room motionless, and warm sunshine streaming into my face. Looking around, I saw that my three companions were all up and apparently in good shape. Baker was the first to notice that I was awake, and he came over immediately. "Feel better?" he inquired cheerfully. He helped me up and I staggered to the window. The room was perched, as usual, on a hilltop, but the vegetation around was not tropical jungle. I turned to the others, noting as I did that the room was cleaned up. "Where -- " I started, with a gesture outside. Baker stopped me and led me to an improvised canvas hammock. "You really got a nasty one," he said. "You've been out two days." "Two days!" I tried to rise, but the effort so increased the headache that I gave up and collapsed into the hammock. "Just lie quiet and I'll bring you up to date." Baker drew up an empty film box for a seat. "I was knocked about a bit myself, you know, and by the time I came around, our friend had trotted the whole length of the Malay Peninsula and was halfway across Burma." "But the people at Singapore," I began, "Don't those fools know yet -- " "Things have changed," said Baker. "The biggest change has been in Buddha's mind. He took our advice and almost got killed for his pains. Now he's on his own." I tried to look through the open door. Baker shook his head. "He's not here. No -- " this in answer to my startled look, "just off for a stroll, towards China this time, I think. Yesterday he visited Lhasa. Said it's quite a place. Talked to the Lamas in Tibetan, and they understood him. He calls it playing Buddha." Baker got up and searched among the maps, finally finding one of southeast Asia. He spread it out before me, and placed a finger rather vaguely on the great Yunnan Plateau between Burma and China. "We're here, somewhere. Buddha doesn't know exactly, himself. He made it to Lhasa by following the Himalayas, and watching for the Potala. I hope he'll find his .way back this time -- be a bit awktrd for us if he doesn't." He stepped outside and brought in some cold cooked rice and meat. "Kazu brought us a handful of cows yesterday. They were practically mashed into hamburger. I guess you'd call this pounded steak." I ate some of the meat and settled back to rest again. Presently I dozed off. When I awakened it was dark and Kazu was back. Martin had started a big campfire outside, evidently with Kazu's aid, for it was stoked with several logs fully eight feet in diameter and was sending flames fifty feet into the sky. Kazu himself was squatting directly over it, staring down at us. When I came to the door, he spoke. "Ah, little brother Bill. I am so sorry that you were hurt. I am afraid I forgot to be gentle, and that is not forgiveable in Buddha." I made an appropriate reply, and then waited. Evidently he had as yet told nothing of his day's expedition. Finally he plucked a roasted bullock from the fire and popped it into his mouth like a nut. "Today," he said, "I visit Chungking, Nanking, Peking. I think know more than that see me. Also I talk to them. They understand, for miles. They expected me. As you say, brother Llewelyn, Rau has excellent propaganda machine. Everywhere Aey hail me as Buddha, come to save them from war and disease and western imperialism. I speak to them as Buddha; today, I am Buddha." Baker glanced at us meaningfully and murmured, "I was afraid of this." But Kazu continued. "Today all of China believes I am Buddha. Only you and I know this is not so, but we can fight best if they believe." "Have you eaten?" inquired Martin. Kazu nodded. "At every temple they collect rice for Buddha. Many small meals make full belly. But," his face wrinkled with concern, "many thousands could live on what I eat today. China is so poor. So ma.ny people, so little food. I must find ways to help them." He paused, and then resumed in a firmer tone. "But not in communist way. Rau was right about western imperialists, but he named wrong country. Russian imperialists have enslaved China. First we must drive communists from China. Then I can help." "Amen," said Baker softly. Then, to Kazu... "We've been trying to do just that for years. But how can you ple?" "Don't fight -- lead them." It sounded so simple, the way he said it. Well, maybe he could. But now Baker had more practical questions. "What does the rest of the world think about all this? Have you talked to any Europeans, or heard a radio?" Kazu shook his head. "But I caught communist General. He tell me Russia sending army to capture me. He say only hope is for me to surrender, or Russian drop atom bomb on me. Then I eat him." We must have showed our startled reaction, for Kazu laughed. "Not much nourishment in communist. I eat him for propaganda -- many people see me do it. Effect very good." He paused. "Not tasty, but symbolic meal. China is like Buddha, giant who can eat up enemies." "What are you going to do next?" asked Baker. "That is question. I need more information. Where is leadership in China I can trust? What will Russians do? How long for British and Americans to wake up?" "You're not the only one asking these questions," said Baker. "But maybe you can get some answers." B efore Kazu could continue, Chamberlin held up his hand for silence. We listened, and presently heard above the crackle of the great bonfire, the throb of an airplane engine. Kazu heard it too, for he suddenly arose and stepped back out of the light. We four also hastened into the shadows and peered into the dark sky. The approaching aircraft displayed no lights, but presently we saw it in the firelight -- a multi-jet bomber bearing American markings. We rushed back into die illuminated area and danced up and down, waving our arms. The huge plane swung in a wide circle and came in less than five hundred feet above the hilltop. I could make out faces peering down at us from the glassed greenhouse in front. As it roared pzist, one wing tipped slightly in the updraft from the fire, and then suddenly the plane stopjied dead in its tracks. The jets roared a deeper note as they bit into still air, and then very slowly and gently the great ship moved back and down until it rested on its belly beside our steel box. Not until it was quite safe on the ground did Kazu's hands release their hold on the wings, where he had caught it in midair. The eleven crew men from the B# came out with their hands in the air, but their expressions were more incredulous than frightened. Baker added to the unreality of the situation by his greeting, done in the best "Dr. Livingstone-I-presume" manner. "Welcome to Camp Yunnan. Sorry we had to be so abrupt. I'm Baker, these are Chamberlin, Martin, Cady." "I'm Faulkner," replied the leader of the Americans automatically, and then he abruptly sat down and was violently sick. We waited patiently until he could speak again. "My God, I didn't believe it when we heard." He was talking to no-one in particular. "One minute we're flying at # miles per hour, the next we're picked out of the air like a -- like a -- " He gave up. Kazu came into the firelight and squatted down, quite slowly. Baker introduced him. "Colonel, I'd like you to meet Kazu Takahashi." The American arose and extended his hand, and then dropped it abruptly to his side. Kazu emitted a thunderous chuckle. "Handshake is, I fear, formality I must always pass up, even at risk of impoliteness." I think that the language, and particularly the phrasing, jolted the airmen even more than the actual capture. Colonel Faulkner kept shaking his head and murmuring "My God!" for several moments, and then pulled himself together. "So the story's really true after all," he finally said. "We got it on the radio day before yesterday at Manila. It was so garbled at first that nobody could make any sense. Ships reported thousand foot men wading in the ocean. New Macassar radio reported that Buddha was reincarnated, and then denied the story. Announcements of a pitched battle at Singapore, and frantic reports from every town on the peninsula. Then a statement by some Lama on Macassar that the British had kidnaped Buddha, had him hypnotized or doped, and were using him to exterminate China." He paused and looked up at Kazu, who had bent down until his face was only a hundred feet above us. "Part of it is true," said Baker. "Thric was a giant wading in the occ.m. As to the rest, I fear we have caught the red radio without a M lipt. I'll tell you the story presently, but just now there are more urgent things to do. Is your radio working?" Faulkner nodded and led us towards the plane. Baker continued. "Briefly, Kazu is a mutation produced by the Hiroshima bomb. He's been groomed for twenty years to take over as the world's largest puppet, but it turns out he has a mind of his own. We just happened along, and are going on for the ride. Want to join the party?" The Colonel grinned for the first time as we all squeezed into the radio compartment of the plane. "I like travel," he said. "It's so broadening." The radio was not only operative, but proved most informative as well. Every transmitter on earth, it seemed, was talking about the giant. In the course of an hour we listened to a dozen major stations and got as many versions of the story. The communist propaganda factory had obviously been caught flat footed, for their broadcasts were a hopeless mixture of releases evidently prepared for the planned introduction of Buddha to the world, and hastily assembled diatribes against the capitalist imperialists who had so foully captured him. Some of the Russians apparently were not in on the secret of Buddha's dimensions, for they described in detail how a raiding party of eighty American commando-gangsters had landed by parachute on Yat, seized Buddha, and taken him away in a seaplane. Before we went to sleep that night, Kazu extinguished the fire so that no one else would be attracted as the Colonel had been. tion concerned transportation. Colonel Faulkner naturally did not want to leave his plane, particularly since it was undamaged, but a takeoff from our narrow mountain ledge was obviously impossible, so he regretfully ordered his crew to unload their personal effects for transfer to our box. At this point Kazu stepped in. "If you will enter your airplane and start jets," he said, "Buddha will serve as launching mechanism." Before the takeoff, the Colonel transferred his spare radio gear to our box, along with an auxiliary generator, and we agreed on a schedule to keep in touch. Then Kazu gently picked up the bomber, raised it high above his head and sent it gliding off to the north. The engines coughed a couple of times and then caught with a roar. Colonel Faulkner wagged his wings and vanished into the haze. Our plan was to follow the plane east to the Wu River, and then north to its meeting with the Yangtze, which occurs some seventy five miles below Chungking. While the B# cruised around us in a great circle, we loaded our belongings into the box, and Kazu picked us up and signalled the plane that we were ready. Colonel Faulkner's intention had been to circle us rather than leave us behind with his superior speed, but in a moment it became clear that this would not be necessary. Kazu set off down the canyon at a pace better than three hundred miles per hour, and the Colonel had to gun his motors to keep up. We passed only a few small towns on the Wu. Kazu had been here before, and had evidently stopped to talk and make friends, for we observed none of the fright which had formerly greeted his advent. Instead, crowds ran out to meet us, waving the forbidden Nationalist flag and shooting off firecrackers. Kazu spoke briefly in Cantonese to each group, and then hurried on. Baker explained that he was giving them formal blessings, in the name of Buddha. An hour's time brought us to Fowchow, on the mighty Yangtze Kiang. Here Kazu turned left, wading in the stream, and negotiated the seventy odd miles to Chungking in fifteen minutes. The distance from Chungking to Hankow is somewhat more than five hundred miles. For much of this distance the Yangtze is bounded by mountains and rocky gorges, but in the final # miles, the hills drop away and the river winds slowly through China's lake country. Kazu made good time in the gorge, but his feet sank a hundred feet into the soft alluvial soil of the lowlands and he had constantly to watch out for villages and farms. Buddha had not visited Hankow before, but he was expected. Even before the city came into view, the roads were lined with people and the canals and lakes jammed with sampans. Just outside of the city we noticed a small group of men in military uniform under a white flag. We guessed that they represented the communist city government, and so did Kazu, for he set our box beside the group and ordered the spokesman to come in for a parlay. The unfortunate officer who was picked obviously did not relish the idea, particularly after Martin cracked in English, "He doesn't look fat enough." Giving Martin a glare, he drew himself up stiffly and said, "General Soo prepared to die, if necessary for people of China." The communist General showed somewhat less bravado after the stomach turning ascent to the six hundred foot level, but he managed to get off a speech in answer to Kazu's question. As before. Baker gave us a running translation. "He says welcome to Hankow. The people's government, ever responsive to the will of the citizens, joins with all faithful Buddhists in welcoming Buddha, and in expressing heartfelt thanksgiving that rumors claiming Buddha to be a puppet of western imperialists are all false. Now he's saying that there is to be a big party -- a banquet -- for Buddha, in the central square. Rice has been collected and cooked, and a thousand sheep slaughtered to feed hungry Buddha." Kazu replied formally that while he appreciated the hospitality of the people of Hankow, he could not accept food from the enemies of China. These words, which were cl .irly audible to the entire city, WM' f'reeted with cheers by the tl below. The General took anil ill! II m.ulc a neat about face. "L.i.ncral .Soo," said he stoutly. "was communist when he believed communism only hope for China. You have changed everything. General Soo now faithful Buddist!" "May I," said Baker with a grin, "be the first to congratulate General Soo on his penpicacity." ised, there was a great banquet spread. In spite of Soo's protestations, Baker insisted on sampling each course rather extensively for sleeping potions or poison, but either the idea had not occurred to the communists, or there hadn't been enough time, or poison available. For the most part the civil government of Hankow joined with General Soo in a loudly declared conversion to Buddhism without communist trappings. In spite of Baker's skepticism, I believed that most of them were quite sincere. At least, they sincerely wanted to be on the side with the most power, and for the time being at least, Kazu seemed an easy winner. General Soo, in particular, insisted on making a long speech in which he declared the Russians to be the true "western imperialists", now unmasked, who since the days of the first Stalin had sought to enslave China with lies and trickery. Baker shook his head over this, and privately opined that Soo was a very poor fence straddler: such remarks went beyond the needs of expediency, and would probably completely alienate him from the Kremlin. However, the crowd thought it was all fine. Kazu replied with a short, and generally well planned statement of his policy. "Those who follow me," he concluded, "have no easy path. They must be strong, to throw off the yoke of those who would enslave them, but they must be merciful to their enemies in defeat, even to those who but a moment before were at their throats. For though we win the war, if we at the same time forget what we have fought for, then we have indeed lost all. I proclaim to all China, and to her enemies both within and without our borders, that the faith of Buddha has returned, and that interference in China's affairs by any other nation will not be tolerated." Colonel Faulkner had landed at the Hankow airport and now, with his crew, shared our private banquet on the terrace of the city's largest hotel, only a few hundred feet from where Kazu squatted. Under cover of the cheering and speechmaking, he relayed to us some news which he had heard on the radio, which was not quite so rosy. It seemed, first, that the Chinese declared itself for Buddha, and was engaged in a pitched battle with the Manchurian First Army north of Tientsin. The communist garrison at Shanghai, where there was a large population of Russian "colonists", had holed in, awaiting attack by a Buddhist Peoples Army assembled from revolting elements king. A revolt at Canton, far to the south, had been put down by the communists with the aid of air support coming directly from Russia. The most ominous note, however, was a veiled threat by old Mao himself that if mutinous elements did not submit, he might call upon his great ally to the east to use the atomic bomb. Mao spoke apparently from near Peking, where he was assembling the I and V Armies. We digested this news while Kazu finished the last of his # sheep. We all cast anxious glances into the sky. Soviet planes at Canton meant that they could be here also, and Buddha, squatting in a glare of light in the midst of Hankow, was a sitting duck for a bombing attack. As soon as the main part of the formalities were over. Baker managed to get Kazu's attention, and informed him of the situation. Kazu's reaction was immediate and to the point. "We do not await attack. We go north to free our brothers, and to instruct our errant General Mao in Buddha's truth." By the time we were packed and in our travelling box, the time was eight-thirty. Reference to our map showed the airline distance from Hankow to Peking to be about # miles, and Buddha, greatly refreshed by the food and rest, prom' ised to reach the capital by eleven. To make walking easier. Baker plotted a route which avoided the lowlands, particularly the valley of the Yellow River, in favor of a slightly longer course through the mountains to the east. We started northwest, splashing through the swamps and lakes around Hankow at first, and presently reached firmer ground in the Hawiyang Shan. We followed the ridge of these mountains for a time, and then dropped to the hilly country of Honan Province. At first the night was very dark, but presently the light of a waning moon made an occasional fix possible, although navigation was confusing and uncertain at best. We splashed across the Yellow River at ten o'clock, somewhere east of Kaifeng, and for a time were greatly slowed by what appeared to be thick gumbo. Our speed improved once we got up into the rugged Taihang Mountains. Here also we felt safer from air observation or attack, although Kazu was soon panting from the exertion of crossing an endless succession of fifteen to thirty foot ridges. This was indeed rough country, terrain which had protected the lush plains of China for centuries against the Mongols. Here the great wall had been built, and presently, in the moonlight, we saw its trace, winding serpentlike over the mountains. We followed the Wall for almost two hundred miles -- all the way, in fact, to the latitude of Peking -- before we swung east again for the final lap to Mao's capital. D uring the last hour we trailed an antenna and listened in on the world of radio. The news was not good. The Shanghai garrison had sprung a trap on their disorganized attackers, and were marching on Nanking. Mao's armies were closing the southern half of a great pincers on Wu's troops, and only awaited the dawn to launch the final assault. Worst of all, there had been reports of increasing Soviet air activity over the area; a major air strike also apparently would come with daylight. We were scarcely halfway from the edge of the city to the moated summer palace when a small hell of gunfire broke out around Kazu's feet. He jumped, with a roar of pain, and then lashed out with one foot, sweeping away a whole city block and demolishing the ambush. Limping slightly, he made the remaining distance by a less direct route and at last stood at the moat before the palace. The ancient building, and, indeed, everything about, was quite dark. Kazu peered about uncertainly, and then raised our box to ask for advice. Baker was pessimistic. "I don't think you'll find General Mao here. But at this stage of things, I don't believe it would matter if you did. The decision will be made tomorrow by the armies." Kazu stepped carefully over the moat and wall, and sat down wearily in the gardens of the summer palace. We peered with interest at the foliage, marble bridges and the graceful buildings, illuminated only by ghostly moonlight. With Kazu squatting among them, they looked like models, a toy village out of ancient China. I wished that a picture might be taken, for surely never before had Buddha been in so appropriate a setting. While Kazu rested, we examined his feet. A number of machine gun bullets had entered his foot thick hide, and there was one wound a yard long from which oozed a sticky gelatinous blood. There did not appear to be any serious damage, although the chances of infection worried us. In any event, there was nothing we could do except douse it with buckets of water from the moat. Kazu thanked us formally, as befitted a deity, and added, as though talking to himself, "Now is the most difficult time. How can I bring peace without the use of violence? I can appear before these armies and command them to stop. But what if they do not obey? Should I use force? Oh, that I were really the Great Lord Buddha -- then I would have the wisdom, the knowledge that is a thousand times more potent than giant size. Oh Buddha, grant me wisdom, if only for a moment, that I may act rightly." Presently the giant stretched out full length in the garden and, while we kept guard, slept for a time. The first pale glow of dawn appeared soon after five, and we were preparing to awaken Kazu when Martin held up a warning hand. We listened. At first we heard nothing, and then there came a deep drone of jets. Not a single plane, not even a squadron. Nothing less than a great fleet of heavy aircraft was approaching Peking from the west. Baker fired his automatic repeatedly near Kazu's ear, and presently his rumbly breathing changed and he opened his eyes. "Planes," said Baker briefly. "It's not safe here. Better get moving." Kazu sat up, yawning, and we climbed into the box. The giant took a long draught from the nearest fishpond and tied our cage to his neck and shoulder so that both of his hands would be free. By this time the noise of the planes had increased to a roar, which echoed through the silent city. Kazu arose to his full height and waited. A pinkish line of light had now appeared along the eastern horizon which, I realized with consternation, must silhouette the mighty tower of Kazu's body to whomever was coming out of the western shadows. great fleet of heavy bombers, flying high, far beyond even Kazu's reach. Baker seized the glasses to look, and then gave a cry of warning. The leading plane had dropped something -- a black spherical object above which blossomed a parachute. I think that Kazu realized what it was as soon as we, but he still stood quietly. Baker lost whatever calm he had left and screamed, "Run, run -- it's the H-bomb!" but still Kazu did not move. In a moment another of the deadly spheres appeared, directly over us, and then a third. Now at last Kazu moved, but not toward safety. He walked slowly until he was directly beneath the first bomb, and reached up, until his hand was a thousand feet in the air. Down came the bomb, quite rapidly, for the parachute was not very large. "What's the matter with the fool," yelled Martin. But now Baker seemed to get Kazu's idea. "It has barometric fusings -- it's set to detonate at a certain altitude. If that's below a thousand feet, and Kazu can catch it, it won't go off!" Martin started something about detonation at two thousand feet, when Kazu gave a slight jump and his hand closed about the deadly thing, as though he had caught a fly. We cowered, expecting the flash that would mean the end, but nothing happened. In Kazu's crushing grip the firing mechanism was reduced to wreckage before it could act. When Buddha opened his palm-, it contained only a wad of crumpled metal inside of which was a now harmless sphere of plutonium. In quick succession Kazu repeated this performance with the other two bombs, wadded the whole together and flung it to the ground. Then he turned to the north. By the time we had cleared the city, it was quite light, and we could see a dark pall of smoke in the northeast. The armies which had been poised last night had finally met, and a great battle was underway. Kazu hurried towards it, and presently we could hear the crackle of small arms fire and the heavier c.xplosions of mortars and rockets. It took a moment or so for Kazu to ict his hearings. Evidently we were ippiii.n hing Mao's legions from the rear. Still keeping from the adv.uiced to near the battle line, and there stopped. "My brothers," his voice thundered above the heaviest cannon, "my poor brothers on both sides, this useless slaughter. No one can win, and all will -- " Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light, a thousand times brighter than the newly appeared sun. It came from behind us, and in the terrible instant that it remained we could see Buddha's enormous shadow stretching out across the battlefield. Kazu stopped speaking and braced his shoulders for the blast. Subconsciously I was counting seconds. Four, five, six, seven -- A sudden, insane hope gripped me. If we were far enough from the burst -- and then the blast hit us, and with it, the sound. Kazu pitch forward a hundred yards, and stumbled on as far again. Then he recovered. One hand reached behind him, to the back that had taken the full brunt of heat and gamma radiation, and a half animal cry escaped from his lips. Over his shoulder we got a glimpse of the fireball, of the foimtain of color which would presently form the terrible mushroom cloud. The thunder of the explosion reverberated, and was replaced by silence. The crackle of rifles, the thud, of field pieces had ceased. From our perch we looked down at a scene straight from Dante's Inferno. About Kazu's feet was a shallow ravine in which a thousand or so communist troops had taken cover. These were now scrambling and clawing at the sides like ants trying to get away. Vehicles were abandoned, rifles thrown away. A few had been burned, but it seemed that for the most part the soldiers had been sheltered from direct radiation by the wall of their canyon, and by Kazu's great .shadow. For an eternity, it seemed, Kazu stood there, swaying slightly, one hand still pressed against his back, while the little men writhed about his ankles. Then, quite slowly, he raised one foot. I thought that he was going to walk away, but instead, the foot moved deliberately until it was directly over the ravine, and then, like a tremendous pile driver, it descended. A faint and hideous screaming came up to us, which abruptly ended. The foot came up, and again descended, turning back and forth in the yielding earth. Slowly Kazu brought his hand up, and lifted our box so that he could look at us. As he did so, I saw that half of his hand was the color of charcoal, and I smelled a horrible odor of tons of burnt flesh. Now at last he spoke, in a voice that we could scarcely understand. "Guide me," he said, "Guide me, Baker. Guide me to Moscow!" vn K azu walked quite slowly from the battlefield. His gait was unsteady, and at first we feared that he would collapse. We could not tell how deep the bums were, nor whether he was internally hurt by the blast. He appeared to be suffering from some kind of shock, for he did not speak again for a long time. But gradually he seemed to gather himself together, and we became almost convinced that the shock was more psychological than physical, and that even the atom bomb was powerless against his might. We did not remain to see the outcome of the battle, but presently Martin turned the radio on. The news at first was fragmentary. Word that a Russian plane had atom bombed the new Buddha spread across China, and with it ended the last shreds of communist prestige. The armies which had been pro-communist turned on their officers. Mao himself was murdered on the battlefield before Kazu was out of sight. The former red defenders of Shanghai massacred twenty thousand hapless Russian emigrants. All across Asia the story was the same, a terrible revulsion. At first it was believed that Buddha had died instantly; later rumor had it that he had crawled off to Mongolia to die. Radio Moscow at first was silent. The horror of what had been done was too much even for that well oiled propaganda machine. At last a line was patched together: the bomb had been dropped by an American plane, bearing Russian markings. Then Radio Peking announced that Chinese fighters had shot it down and that the crew was Russian. To this Moscow could think of only one reply; Radio Peking was lying; the station had been taken over by the Americans! A little later another Moscow broadcast announced solemnly that the whole story was wrong -- Buddha hadn't been there at all! All the time that this confused flood of talk was circling the globe, Kazu Takahashi, still clinging to the battered steel projection room, was striding across Siberia, staggering now and then, but still maintaining a pace of better than three hundred miles per hour. At first he simply walked westward without any directions from us. By ten o'clock he had put a thousand miles between him and the coast and was well across the southern Gobi desert. Now Baker, who had been almost as stunned as Kazu, began to look into his maps. He had nothing for central Asia as detailed as the charts we had used in Borneo and Celebes, but he presently found a small scale map that would do. With this he identified the snowy range of mountains now towering on our left as the Nan Shan, northernmost bastion of Tibet. He hurriedly called to Kazu to turn northwest before he entered the great Tarim Basin, for the western side of that vast desert was closed by a range of mountains # feet high. Even with the new course, our altitude would be above six thousand feet for many miles. At noon we were paralleling another mighty range, the little known Altai Mountains, and at one o'clock we passed the Zaisan Nor, the great lake which forms the headwaters for the Irtysh River. Here Kazu paused for a drink, and to rime his bums with fresh water. Then we were away again, this time due west over more mountain tops, avoiding the inhabited lowlands. At tlin ithirty the hills dropped away and tin re appeared ahead the infinite green carpet of the Siberian forest. Kazu stopped again at another lake, which Baker guessed might be Dengiz. At four-thirty we crossed a wide river which we could not identify, and then at last commenced to climb into the foothills of the southern Urals. Just in time Baker discovered that Kazu's course was taking him straight toward the industrial city of Magnetogorsk. We veered north again into the higher mountains and then turned east to the forests. We were sure now that Kazu must be delirious, but after a while he stopped at the edge of a lake. "How far are we from Moscow?" he asked. "Twelve hundred miles, more or less," said Baker. "You can make it by nine, maybe ten, tonight." Kazu shook his head. "No. Tonight I must rest, gather strength. We start two AM, arrive Kremlin at sunrise. We catch them same time they catch me. No warning whatever." Kazu lay down on the swampy lake bottom while we huddled on the floor of the box, courting sleep which never came. At one o'clock we at last gave it up, and Baker fired his pistol until Kazu stirred. While he was awakening we listened to the radio. Things had calmed down quite a bit, and as we pieced the various broadcasts together, an amazing realization came over us. Everyone believed that Kazu was dead! Evidently no word of our trip across all of central Asia had been received! Search planes, both Soviet and Chinese, were combing the eastern Gobi for the body. declaration by China upon the Soviet Union, and the announcement that the Russian Politbureau had scheduled a meeting in the Kremlin to consider the emergency. We passed all of this on to Kazu, whose grim face relaxed for the first time in a fleeting grin. "Good reporters. Know what are most savory items. Now guide me well, and away from towns until we reach it." The trip across the Urals and the plains of European Russia retains a nightmare quality in my mind, comparable only with that first night on Yat. Even Baker, who plotted the course, can remember it little better. Now and again we caught glimpses of the dim lights in farms, and once we saw the old moon reflected in the Volga. Much of the low country was covered with ground fog, which reached to Kazu's waist; this, combined with the blackout which had been ordered in every town, made observation by us or the Russians either way difficult. A few people saw Kazu, and their reports reflect a surrealist madness; those who had the horrifying experience of suddenly meeting Buddha in the early morning mists were universally incapable of making any coherent report to the authorities. And then, just as the ghostly false dawn turned the night into a misty gray, we saw ahead the towers of Moscow. Now Kazu increased his speed. Concealment was no longer possible; he must reach the Kremlin ahead of the warning. At # miles per hour Buddha descended upon Moscow. His plunging feet reduced block after block of stores and apartment houses to dust, and the sky behind us was lighted more brightly by the fires he started than by the dull red of the still unrisen sun. Now at last I heard the tardy wail of a siren and saw armored cars darting through the streets. On the roof of an apartment house I glimpsed a crew trying to unlimber an antiaircraft gun, but Kazu saw it also, and smashed the building to rubble with a passing kick. And then we were at the Red Square. St. Basils at one end, the fifty foot stone walls of the Kremlin along one side and Lenin's Tomb like a pile of red children's blocks. Kazu stood for a moment surveying this famous scene, his feet sunk to the ankle in a collapsed subway. It was my first view of the Red Square, and somehow I knew that it would be the last, for anyone. Then Kazu slowly walked to the Kremlin and looked down into it. I remember how suddenly absurd it all seemed. The Kremlin walls, the very symbol of the iron curtain, were scarcely six inches high ! The whole thing was only a child's playpen. But now Kazu had found what he wanted. Without bothering to lift his feet, he crushed through the walls, reached down and pulled the roof from one of the buildings. He uncovered a brightly lighted anthill. Like a dollhouse exposed, he revealed rooms and corridors along which men were running. Kazu dropped to his knees and held our box up so that we might also see. "Are these the men?" he asked. Baker replied in the negative. Kazu abruptly pressed his hand into the building, crushing masonry and timbers and humans all into a heap of dust, and turned to a larger building. As he did, something about it seemed familiar to me. Yes, I had seen it before, in newsreels. It was -- But again Kazu's fingers were at work. Lifting at the eaves, he carefully took off the whole roof. Through a window we saw figures hurrying toward a covered bridge connecting this building with another. At Baker's warning, Kazu demolished the bridge, and then gently began picking the structure to pieces. In a moment we saw what we were after. A wall was pulled down, exposing a great room with oil paintings of Lenin and Stalin on the wall and a long conference table in the center. And clustered between the table and the far wall were a score of men. Anyone would have recognized them, for their faces had gone round the world in po.sters, magazines and newsreels. They were the men of the Politburcau. They were Red Russia's rulers. There was an instant of silent mutual recognition, and then Kazu spnke to them. As befitting a god, hr jioke in their own tongue. Ex#I ily sliat he s.iid I do not know, but alirr a little he.sitation they came aiound the table to the precarious edge of the room where the outer wall had been. Kazu gave further directions and held up our steel box. Fearfully they came forward and jumped the gap into our door. One by one they made the leap, some dressed in the bemedalled uniforms of marshals, others in the semi-military tunics affected by civilian ministers. The last was the man who had succeeded Stalin on his death, and who had taken for himself the same name, as though it were a title. As he entered our room, we saw that he even looked like the first Stalin, clipped hair, moustache and had grown up through the purges-, in a world which knew no mercy, where only the fittest, by communist standards, survived. He had survived, becabse he was merciless and efficient and because he hated the free west with a hatred that was deadly and implacable. thoughts were at that moment. He came because he was ordered to and because he knew the alternative. He knew he was to die, but he obeyed because by so doing he could prolong life a little, and because there was always a chance. At that moment I deeply regretted knowing no Russian. The twenty one who came in talked among themselves in short sentences. They saw us, but ignored us. Baker spoke, first in English and then in German. The one called Stalin understood the German, for he looked at Baker searchingly for a moment, and then turned away. Only one of them replied. This was Malik, the man who wrecked the old United Nations and then became Foreign Minister after Vishinsky was murdered. He ignored the German and spat out his reply in English. "You will not live to gloat over us. He will kill you too, all of you!" We can never be sure of what Kazu planned, because now -- and of this I am certain -- his plans changed. There was suddenly a stillness. We waited. Then I ran to the window and looked upward into the great face. It had changed. A deep weariness and a bewilderment was upon it -- as though Kazu had suddenly sickened of destruction and slaughter. His whispering was the roaring of winds as he said, "No -- no. This is not the way -- not Buddha's way. They must talk. They must understand each other. They must sit at tables and settle their differences, that is my mission." Kazu took five steps. Below us was an airfield. "Can you fly?" he asked us. Chamberlin had been an army pilot in the fifties. Kazu pushed the box up to a transport, an American "Go in this," he said quite clearly. "Go in this plane until you are in Washington. TeU America about me. Tell America I am coming -- that I am bringing -- them. Tell America there must be -- peace." We scrambled out of the steel box, leaving the Russians in a miserable heap in one comer. He arose to his full height and carefully adjusted the cables around his neck. I noticed that his fingers fumbled awkwardly, and that he staggered slightly. Then he spoke once more. "I cannot cross Atlantic. Only route for Buddha is Siberia, Bering Straight, Alaska. But this not take long. You better hurry or I get to Washington first!" He turned on his heel and walked a few steps to the end of the runway. "Now get in plane. I give little help in takeoff!" We climbed into the familiar interior of the big American transport. A moment later it arose silently, vertically like an elevator. Chamberlin, in the pilot's seat, hurriedly started the engines. He leaned from a window and waved his arm, and we shot forward and upward. For a moment the plane wavered and dipped, taking all of Walt's ability to recover. Then with a powerful roar, the big DC# zoomed over the flames of Moscow toward the west. T he flight to London and the Atlantic crossing seemed unreal. We lived beside the radio. War and revolt against the Soviets had broken out everywhere. With the directing power in the Kremlin gone, the top-heavy Soviet bureaucracy was paralyzed. The Yugoslavs marched into the Ukraine, Chinese armies occupied Irkutsk and were pressing across Siberia. Internal revolution broke out at a hundred points once it was learned that Moscow was no more. Eagerly we listened to every report for word of Kazu. At first there was nothing, and then a Chinese plane reported seeing him crossing the Ob River, near the Arctic Circle. They said that he carried a hox in his hand and appeared to be talking to it. Then news from the tiny river settlement of Zhigansk on the Lena that he had passed, but that he limped and staggered as he climbed the mountains beyond. After that, silence. Planes swarmed over eastern Siberia, the Arctic Coast and Alaska, but found nothing. Five hundred tons of C ration were rushed to Fairbanks, and tons of medical supplies for burns and possible illness were readied, but no patient appeared. At first we were hopeful, knowing Kazu's powers. Perhaps he had lost his way, without Baker and the maps, but surely he could not vanish. As the days passed Baker became more worried. "It's the radiation," he explained. "He took the full dose of gamma rays right in his back. He might go on for days, and then suddenly keel over. He's had a bad burn outside, but it's nothing to what it did to him internally." So the days passed, and so gradually hope died. And then, at last, there was news. It came, belatedly, Iroin an eskimo hunter on the PriI I ported that a great sea god had Ins head vanished into the clouds. But, he was a sick god, for he could hardly stand, and soon crawled on his hands. Around his neck, said the eskimo, he carried a charm, and he spoke words to this in a strange tongue. And the charm answered him in the same tongue, and with the voice of a man. And the two spoke to each other for a time and then the great one arose and walked off of the island and into the fog and the ocean. Questioned, the man was somewhat vague as to the exact direction taken, although it seemed clear that Kazu had headed south. When Baker examined his chart of Bering Sea, he found that the ocean to the north and west, towards Siberia, was shallow -- less than five hundred feet. But the Pribolofs stood on the edge of a great deep. Only twenty miles south of the islands, the ocean floor dropped off to more than ten thousand feet, for three himdred miles of icy fog shrouded ocean, before the laleak Aleutians arose out of the mists. This desolate area was searched for months by ships and planes, but no trace ever appeared from the treacherous currents of the stormy sea. Kazu had vanished. So here ended the story of Kazu Takahashi, who was born in the days of the first bomb, and who died by the last ever to sear the to be the incarnation of the Lord Buddha, but to four men he was known not as a god but as a great and good man. The dawning of intelligence is sometimes the greatest tragedy of all. By Richard Matheson H e stepped into the sunlight and walked among the people. His feet carried him away from the black tube depths. The distant roar of underground machinery left his brain to be replaced by myriad whispers of the city. Now he was walking the main street. Men of flesh and men of steel passed him by, coming and going. His legs moved slowly and his footsteps were lost in a thousand footsteps. He passed a building that had died in the last war. There were scurrying men and robots pulling off the rubble to build again. Over their heads hung the control ship and he saw men looking down to see that work was done properly. He slipped in and out among the crowd. No fear of being seen. Only inside of him was there a difference. Eyes would never know' it. Visio-poles set at every corner could not glean the change. In form and visage he was just like all the rest. He looked at the sky. He was the only one. The others didn't know about the sky. It was only when you broke away that you could see. He saw a rocket ship flashing across the sun and control ships hovering in a sky rich with blue and fluffy clouds. The dull-eyed people glanced at him suspiciously and hurried on. The blank-faced robots made no sign. They clanked on past, holding their envelopes and their packages in long metal arms. He lowered his eyes and kept walking. A man cannot look at the sky, he thought. It is suspect to look at the sky. "Would you help a buddy?" He paused and his eyes flicked down to the card on the man's chest. Ex-Space Pilot. Blind. Legalized Beggar. Signed by the stamp of the Control Commissioner. He put his hand on the blind man's shoulder. The man did not speak but passed by and moved on, his cane clacking on the sidewalk until he had disappeared. It was not allowed to beg in this district. They would find him soon. He turned from watching and strode on. The visio-poles had seen him pause and touch the blind man. It was not permitted to pause on business streets; to touch another. He passed a metal news dispenser and, brushing by, pulled out a sheet. He continued on and held it up before his eyes. Income Taxes Raised. Military Draft Raised. Prices Raised. Those were the story heads. He turned it over. On the back was an editorial that told why Earth forces had been compelled to destroy all the Martians. Something clicked in his mind and his fingers closed slowly into a light fist. lie passed his people, men and robots both. What distinction now? he asked himself. The common d.i r s did the same work as the robots. Together they walked or drove through the streets carrying and delivering. To be a man, he thought. No longer is it a blessing, a pride, a gift. To be brother to the machine, used and broken by invisible men who kept their eyes on poles and their fists bunched in ships that hung over all their heads, waiting to strike at opposition. When it came to you one day that this was so, you saw there was no reason to go on with it. H e stopped in the shade and his eyes blinked. He looked in the shop window. There were tiny baby creatures in a cage. Buy a Venus Baby For Your Child, said the card. He looked into the eyes of the small tentacled things and saw there intelligence and pleading misery. And he passed on, ashamed of what one people can do to another people. Something stirred within his body. He lurched a little and pressed his hand against his head. His shoulders twitched. When a man is sick, he thought, he cannot work. And when a man cannot work, he is not wanted. He stepped into the street and a huge Control truck grounrd to a stop inches before him. He walked away jerkily, leaped upon the sidewalk. Someone shouted and he ran. Now the photo-cells would follow him. He tried to lose himself in the moving crowds. People whirled by, an endless blur of faces and bodies. They would be searching now. When a man stepped in front of a vehicle he was suspect. To wish death was not allowed. He had to escape before they caught him and took him to the Adjustment Center. He couldn't bear that. People and robots rushed past him, messengers, delivery boys, the bottom level of an era. All going somewhere. In all these scurrying thousands, only he had no place to go, no bimdle to deliver, no slavish duty to perform. He was adrift. Street after street, block on block. He felt his body weaving. He was going to collapse soon, he felt. He was weak. He wanted to stop. But he couldn't stop. Not now. If he paused -- sat down to rest -- they would come for him and take him to the Adjustment Center. He didn't want to be adjusted. He didn't want to be made once more into a stupid shuffling machine. It was better to be in anguish and to understand. He stumbled on. Bleating horns tore at his brain. Neon eyes blinked down at him as he walked. He tried to walk straight but his system was giving way. Were they following? He would have to be careful. He kept his face blank and he walked as steadily as he could. His knee-joint stiffened and, as he bent to rub It in his hands, a wave of darkness leaped from the ground and clawed at him. He staggered against a plate glass window. He shook his head and saw a man staring from inside. He pushed away. The man came out and stared at him in fear. The photocells picked him up and followed him. He had to hurry. He couldn't be brought back to start all over again. He'd rather be dead. A sudden idea. Cold water. Only to drink? I'm going to die, he thought. But I win know why I am dying and that will be different. I have left the laboratory where, daily, I was sated with cdculations for bombs and gases and bacterial sprays. All through those long days and nights of plotting destruction, the truth was growing in my brain. Connections were weakening, indoctrinations faltering as effort fought with apathy. d, finally, something gave, and all that was left was weariness and truth and a great desire to be at peace. And now he had escaped and he would never go back. His brain had snapped forever and they would never adjust him again. He came to the citizen's park, last outpost for the old, the crippled, the useless. Where they could hide away and rest and wait for death. He entered through the wide gate and looked at the high walls which stretched beyond eye. The walls that hid the ugliness from outside eyes. It was safe here. They did not care if a man died inside the citizen's park. This is my island, he thought. I have found a silent place. There are no probing photo-cells here and no ears listening. A person can be free here. His legs felt suddenly weak and he leaned against a blackened dead tree and sank down into the mouldy leaves lying deep on the ground. An old man came by and stared at him suspiciously. The old man walked on. He could not stop to talk for minds were still the same even when the shackles had been burst. Two old ladies passed him by. They looked at him and whispered to one another. He was not an old person. He was not allowed in the citizen's park. The Control Police might follow him. There was danger and they hurried on, casting frightened glances over their lean shoulders. When he came near they scurried over the hill. He walked. Far off he heard a siren. The high, screeching siren of the Control Police cars. Were they after him? Did they know he was there? He hurried on, his body twitching as he loped up a sunbaked hill and down the other side. The lake, he thought, I am looking for the lake. He saw a fountain and stepped down the slope and stood by it. There was an old man bent over it. It was the man who had passed him. The old man's lips enveloped the thin stream of water. He stood there quietly, shaking. The old man did not know he was there. He drank and drank. The water dashed and sparkled in the sun. His hands reached out for the old man. The old man felt his touch and jerked away, water running across his gray bearded chin. He backed away, staring openmcfuthed. He turned quickly and hobbled away. He saw the old man run. Then he bent over the fountain. The water gurgled into his mouth. It ran down and up into his mouth and poured out again, tastelessly. denly, a sick burning in his chest. The sun faded to his eye, the sky became black. He stumbled about on the pavement, his mouth opening and closing. He tripped over the edge of the walk and fell to his knees on the dry ground. He crawled in on the dead grass and fell on his back, his stomach grinding, water running over his chin. He lay there with the sun shining on his face and he looked at it without blinking. Then he raised his hands and put them over his eyes. An ant crawled across his wrist. He looked at it stupidly. Then he put the ant between two fingers and squashed it to a pulp. He sat up. He couldn't stay where he was. Already they might be searching the park, their cold eyes scanning the hills, moving like a horrible tide through this last outpost where old people were allowed to think if they were able to. He got up and staggered around clumsily and started up the path, stiff-legged, looking for the lake. He turned a bend and walked in a weaving line. He heard whistles. He heard a distant shout. They were looking for him. Even here in the citizen's park where he thought he could escape. And find the lake in peace. He passed an old shut down merry-go-round. He saw the little wooden horses in gay poses, galloping high and motionless, caught fast in time. Green and orange with heavy tassels, all thick-covert with dust. He reached a sunken walk and started down it. There were gray stone walls on both sides. Sirens were all around in the air. They knew he was loose and they were coming to get him now. A man could not escape. It was not done. He shuffled across the road and moved up the path. Turning, he saw, far off, men running. Tltey wore black uniforms and they were waving at him. He hurried on, his feet thudding endlessly on the concrete walk. He ran off the path and up a hill and tumbled in the grass. He crawled into scarlet-leaved bushes and watched through waves of dizziness as the men of the Control Police dashed by. Then he got up and started off, limping, his eyes staring ahead. At last. The shifting, dull glitter of the lake. He hurried on now, stumbling and tripping. Only a little way. He lurched across a field. The air was thick with the smell of rotting grass. He crashed through the bushes and there were shouts and someone fired a gun. He looked back stiffly to see the men running after hhn. He plunged into the water, flopping on his chest with a great spl. He struggled forward, walking oh the bottom until the water had flooded over his chest, his shoulders, his head. Still walking while it washed into bis mouth and filled his throat and weighted his body, dragging him down. His eyes were wide and staring as he slid gently forward onto his face on the bottom. His fingers closed in the silt and he made no move. L ater, the Control Police dragged him out and threw him in the black truck and drove off. And, inside, the technician tore off the sheeting and shook his head at the sight of tangled coils and water-soaked machinery. "They go bad," he muttered as he probed with pliers and picks, "They crack up and think they are men and go wandering. Too bad they don't work as good as people."  'i A 'I . x.' rA ' The bombs fell down from a steel-blue sky. And the long, long night began Where hellhounds ran with eerie cries And the beastling -- chained -- was man. Running Hounds By John W. Jakes wine and set the mug down carefully on the scarred wooden table. The old woman hummed softly to herself as she stirred the great black kettle that boiled in the fireplace. Outside the window, Jordan could see night creeping down the orange sky. The hills were endless rolls of thatched shadow. In the courtyard, the dogs bayed and snuffled hungrily over the meat scraps he had bought for them. The other two travelers were watching him. They had been watching him since his arrival. One leaned back against the wall in a chair, idly strumming a guitar. Dirty hair matted his forehead. His chubby face was a mask of innocence. Jordan catalogued him, from his clothing, as a migratory worker. But if you judged by the pistols in his belt and the expression on his face, then the appraisal was disturbing. The second man was near fifty, tall and stooping. His suit was of black rough cloth. A wide black hat sat on his angular head, throwing shadow on his forehead and hooking nose -- his narrow lips and filthy chin stubble. Jordan decided it was time to move on. These two might be growing suspicious. There were many suspicious people in the world now and the only way to escape them was to keep running. And all because you were branded with a sign of hate. Jordan sighed and stared back into the wine cup. He was tired of running. But he prepared to rise, hitching up the belt about his waist, making certain his knife was secure. The tall stooped man chewed from a meat bone, wiped grease from his lips, and walked over to Jordan's table. "You a stranger in this territory?" "That's right -- I am." "Those your dogs out there -- they yours?" "Yes, they're mine." "What business you in?" The man's tone was persistent. Jordan breathed heavily. "I hunt," he replied, looking at the dusty spinning wheel in one comer, from the ceiling; at anything but the hunched man. "I hunt and sell the skins." The hunched man brushed back the edges of his coat. Two pistol butts thrust forward as he sat down. "And I suppose you travel," he said with feigned friendliness. "Risky, traveling. Never do it, if I can help it. Never can tell when somebody you meet might be a -- " He paused and tapped his fingers on the table. " I sorcerer." Joidan stiffened, then hoped the other hadn't noticed. Sorcerer. That meant scientist. His father had been a scientist, far back in a dim time when all he remembered were bright blue mornings and silver buildings in the sun. Then great blooming clouds, and noise, and no more buildings. He had never known his father. But the black question mark burned into the small of his back at the prison camp, years before, told him that someone had known his father was a scientist. "I hate sorcerers," the man against the wall said. "I hate 'em so much, I kill 'em. I like to kill 'em. I like to kill anybody, only nobody hates anybody but sorcerers, so I kill 'em." He tittered loudly, fingering the guitar. Jordan felt die anger rising in him, but he kept quiet. "I hate them, too," the man in black said, "because they killed my wife and my children. When the blowups came, somebody exploded the factory in our town. I was away when it happened, that's why I'm here. The whole world got blown up, I didn't mind that. But our town, and my folks -- " Jordan could see a different kind of madness in this stranger. Vengeful, misguided. He wondered how long he would have to sit and talk. "Now," said the tall man, "they call me Red Henry, the witch killer." One long knotty hand constricted. "An eye for an eye." T he instinct for safety was strong in Jordan, but this man stirred him deeply. "I think you're wrong. A lot of people are wrong. The science men aren't devils. They didn't cause the blowups. A few wanting power took the weapons the science men made. They caused the blowups." Red Henry was staring into space. He didn't seem to hear. "We'll get 'em," the man against the wall said. "We'll get 'em, wherever they are. Still lots of 'em running around, hidin' in thickets, crawlin' out at night, but we'll get 'em!" He giggled once more. "If you do," Jordan replied quickly, "you'll wipe out the only chance we have to survive. Those men made progress. When others -- bad men -- took the progress and used it for themselves, then came the darkness." "I don't like those words," Red Henry said, blinking. The other man was on his feet. In his hand was a pistol. He pointed it at Jordan. Lamplight winked off its barrel, and the old woman wasn't stirring her kettle any more. "I don't want any trouble, Lukey," she said. "My inn's got a reputation for no trouble." "He sounds like a sorcerer," Lukey replied, walking to the table. "He sure enough sounds like a sorcerer, and you know what we do with them." Tensing Jordan darted his eyes around the room. Night had closed in over the courtyard, and his dogs were silent. Lukey stopped in front of the table and drew his other gun. He thumbed back the hammers with little snicking sounds. The woman watched fearfully, knotting up her plaid apron. "Move out of the way, Henry," Lukey cackled. "I want to me this clean and nice." Red Henry waved a hand. "First we find out if he's one of them. Then we fix him. Only we do it my way. We don't make it nice and clean. We make it long. Stand up, stranger, and take off your shirt." Jordan pushed back the bench and got to his feet. Four blue gun snouts were aimed at him. "Drop the knife on the table," Red Henry ordered. Jordan pulled it from the sheath and let it fall. The black kettle hissed and ran over, but the woman paid no attention. "Hurry him up," Lukey laughed. "We ain't had a witch man for a long time." "We got plenty of time," Red Henry stated flatly. Jordan's belly felt cold. Mechanically, he slipped his hands under the edge of his tunic, pulling it upward and off his head. "Now," said Red Henry, "turn around." Jordan turned, and stopped breathing. The room was very quiet for a moment, and then Lukes giggle came bubbling up. "There it is, all right! Let me put a bullet there, Henry!" "The mark," came the other's sonorou.s voice. "The sign of those who sought the dark mysteries no man should know." Jordan heard a grunt, and a gun barrel raked along his back, leaving a stinging trail of pain. "A family," Red Henry said heavily. "A whole family killed, because of you and your kind. The whole world blown up in a devil's war. Well, this is one more we'll repay. You've got the sign that can't be taken off -- you're one of them." "Yes," Jordan said, "I am one of them. My father was a scientist, and I'm glad of that." "Fine," Red Henry muttered, "just fine... "Please," came the voice of the woman, "not in here, Henry. Take him outside. Don't do anything in here." Jordan stared at the rough plank wall. Red Henry said, "Turn around again." Red Henry kept watching him as he said to the woman, "You got a whip around here?" "In the shed." "Get it, Lukey." Reluctantly, Lukey put away his guns and vanished through a back room. He returned shortly with a long stretch of rawhide. Henry stuck one gun in his belt and hefted the whip. Ordering Lukey to take the lantern, he motioned Jordan to the front door. They stepped out into the courtyard. Jordan's dogs, three lean and dirty gray wolfhounds, jumped at his legs, pink tongues lapping his boots. "Down," Jordan ordered harshly, "down!" They slunk back, out of the circle of lantern light, and watched, tongues lolling, animal eyes alight. The evening wind ran over Jor(i.iii with cold hands, and the dark til I rustled softly. Beyond the hills, the sky was a pale bowl of small I #I vour hands in back of your #I il," K(I Henry said, going liuiii ol liim, guns trained on his stomach, joyously anticipating the spectacle. footsteps retreating. He heard the flat sliding of a whip laid out along the ground. He tensed, seeing his dogs crouching lean, deadly and wolf-like, near the wall. Now he would find out just how good they were. "An eye," breathed Red Henry somewhere, "for an eye..." Coils of fire lashed around Jordan's body. Simultaneously, he screamed orders to the dogs and grabbed the whip. He dived for the ground, pulling on the lash, and went tumbling over and over in the dirt. A gun exploded over his head and there was a groan. The dogs were on Lukey, biting and tearing at him. Fangs flashed and came away red and sticky. Lukey squalled. Jordan rolled over quickly. Red Henry was clutching his side. Lukey's shot -- missing Jordan -- had struck him. Jordan got to his feet, catching up the whip from where it had fallen from Henry's lax hands. He unwound it as he ran. Lukey clubbed feebly at the dogs. Jordan ran across the yard, scooping up a pistol from the dust. There was another explosion, whirling him around. His arm throbbed abruptly and became wet. Blue smoke curled from Red Henry's gun. Jordan struck the gun away. Henry glared, holding his side -- panting. "Kill me, devil," he whispered. "Add another link to the chains tying you up in hell." Jordan's finger tightened on the trigger. Sweat and blood ran down his other arm. He felt the muscles tightening and tightening -- Doubt welled up. Abruptly, he turned away, calling off the dogs. Lukey was a sodden mass in the dirt. Jordan touched him with his boot. There was a faint moan from the ragged throat. The dogs snuflfled, rubbing against Jordan's legs. He patted them, even as he began running toward the dark hills. His arm burned hanging loose beside him. He raced up the hill, the dogs running near him. At the crest of the slope, he turned and glanced down at the inn yard. The woman was in the doorway, shaking a charm bag to ward off demons. Red Henry stood near Lukey's corpse, eyes searching the night. One arm was clutched to his body, and was black with blood. The other held the lantern high. He was like some stooped malignant god. His mouth moved, and the words were carried to Jordan by the wind. "... ni find you... you can't run far... I'll find you... witch hunt... A prophet, thought Jordan, standing on the hill with the wind rushing by. A prophet of ignorance, turning the world into a black land of superstition and fear, and vengeance. But we can rebuild -- we must rebuild! We won't be outcasts forever! But now, there was the necessity of escape. The country was unfamiliar, as was all the country he had traveled through. It was hostile, and every person and every building might be deadly. Henry and Lukey and the inn had been deadly. Jordan's arm hurt. "Run," he whispered to the dogs. They ran across the open country. The dogs whined. He stumbled up one dark hill, down, and up another. A thousand hills -- unfriendly -- each one higher and steeper than the last. The stars peered down. The wind was hot. He ran in a churning sea of liquid. He staggered to the top of another hill and paused. He called the dogs to a stop. He tried to move forward again and stumbled. His knees fell away under him and he rolled down the hill, bumping his arm and feeling fresh pieces of fire in him. At last, he came to a stop in the grass at the hill bottom. The dogs lapped his face with their warm tongues. The winds whispered telling him that far back in the night a great devil hunt was beginning. The dogs whimpered but he did not hear... T he first sensation was one of heat. His back was covered with warmth. Next, he became aware of the grass imder his stomach. It was scratching his skin. He opened one eye, then the other. He waited for feeling to take hold thoroughly. It moved quickly ders, his legs, his arms. The pain from the wound had been reduced to a steady ache. He turned over and lay on his back, gathering strength. The morning sky overhead was a sheet of polished blue. He saw trees on a hilltop, lacy and nodding. Wild birds called shrilly. The morning world was a warm and friendly place. Bui not for him... Memory of the preceding night returned. Hastily, he stumbled to his feet. He had to go on. He had to keep running... The dogs opened their eyes with faint hungry growls. His own stomach rattled in emptiness, but there was no food. "Come on," he said, weakly, "we've got to move." They rose and trotted along beside him as he lurched up the next hill. He pulled back his sleeve as he walked, examining the wound. He felt suddenly sick. Stiunbling over the brow of a hill, he halted, knowing his wound would require attention before very long, if he was to escape infection. The hills ran on endlessly, vanishing in a hazy blue-green line far in the distance. There were no towns -- no buildings. Only a road about half a mile away, winding like a dirty snake through the woodlands. He had started on down the hill when his eyes caught a line of dust rising from where the road dipped. The dogs growled their hunger. Jordan pulled the pistol from his belt and loped down the hill. Dust meant someone on the road, perhaps someone on a horse. The dogs ran low over the ground beside him, quiet now. His arm began to beat with a throbbing rhythm that corresponded to his pounding heart. The breath tore in and out of his chest, but he kept up the pace, making himself run -- run -- The last hill was ahead. It seemed to tower like a mountain into the blue infinity of the sky. Hq choked weakly and struggled for the top. The world, grown hazy black, swam into focus again. He seized a root and pulled himself upward. The moving line of dust floated over the hilltop. His margin would be narrow. The dogs were already near the summit. Letting out a tom gust of air, he stumbled. Even with the rest he had gotten, his legs were weak -- drained of strength by the damaged arm. He retched and crawled to the crest of the hill on his knees. Without looking down at the road, he thrust the gun out and croaked "Stop!" He could do nothing more than hold the gun and wait while the sound of his voice floated away on the wind. The bright sky was motionless, the clouds gone. The dogs stood alertly beside him, ears erect, tongues hanging over white teeth. A gypsy wagon, pulled by two horses with sore-ridden hides, stood in the center of the road. Faint trails of dust still drifted from the big rear wheels. The side was painted with red and gold letters that said, Spanio The Clown  Company. A man and a girl watched him from the wagon seat. The man was stout, yet hungry looking. His green and yellow harlequin's suit was baggy, frayed and ill-fitting. A worn peaked cap with little bells was on his head. The girl was yellow-haired and skinny. Her mouth was daubed with too much red lip paint. The split flaring skirt displayed legs that needed flesh, and the white blouse revealed the tops of breasts that might once have been attractive. She was much younger than the man, but their faces both bore suffering and starvation and loneliness like livid brands. Jordan felt a quick, unexplainable kinship. He stood up and walked unsteadily down the hill, the dogs at his heel. "What do you want with us?" the man asked. "We have no money." "I don't want that," Jordan replied. "I want you to let me ride with you. My arm is hurt. I can't walk and I've got to -- " He almost said get away, but checked himself. They might be tech-haters. The girl glared at him, as if she were used to arguing and fighting. "Why should we help you?" "My gun," he muttered. She made a disgusted noise and reached for the reins, but the man pushed her aside. "He is hurt, Jenny. We should help him." "But he might be pretending," she whispered intently. "We must reach Mount Gabriel, father..." "Stop talking," Jordan ordered. "I'm going to climb inside the wagon." He held his teeth together against the pain and took a step. Again his legs dissolved beneath him. He pawed the air with his good hand. The gun fell into the dust and he clutched at the wheel, leaning his head against the wood, trying to fight back the closing dark. Dimly, he heard someone jump from the seat. A hand pulled at his shoulder. New agony burned through him. "Let loose of the wheel," the girl was saying fiercely, "let loose -- " He felt Itis tunic rip. His cheek was pressed against the rough wood of a wheel spoke. The girl's voice was a whisper. "Father... he's got the black mark on his back!" "Are you sure?" Bells jingled and the shirt was lifted away. "Quickly," came the man's voice. "Put him in the wagon. I'll drive. You attend to the wound. Make him comfortable." Jordan felt hands lifting him, up and up and up... H e lay on a pile of skins inside the wagon. They were stopped in a roadside glade. The girl gave him a wine jar and he took a long drink, feeling comfort in his stomach. He began to gnaw on a slice of rye bread the girl offered. Then she leaned back on thin haunches and watched him. The man in the harlequin costume sat on the tailgate, holding the cap in his hand and idly jingling the bells. "You're a scientist," he said. Jordan stiffened. The girl laughed shortly and pulled down one side of her blouse. A black question mark was branded into the skin, just behind the armpit. "Don't be afraid. We've both got them." "My name is Spain," the man said. "I trust you because no one who was in his right mind would purposely have that brand on him. I was -- a chemist, once." His eyes brimmed with remembrance. "You travel disguised as a clown?" Jordan asked curiously. long time, hiding in a cave near the university they burned after the blowup. But word came from Mount Gabriel, and friends got us these clothes and this wagon. My daughter and I started out." He brushed a hand across his face. "I went to college, once. And I used to sing and dance quite a bit. Social entertainer." The girl studied Jordan with deep pity as her father continued, "We're going to Mount Gabriel, because in that town, scientists are gathering!" Jordan sat up, alert in spite of the wounded arm. "Word came secretly," Spain related. "All the scientists of this country are gathering there, to wait for the time when people won't be afraid of us. That time will come -- certainly. It's a deserted town, no one goes there any more. But we'll wait and our time will come -- "I've hoped that there might be such a place," Jordan said. "I would like to go with you." "Not before we stop in the next town and attend to your wound," Jenny said. "It'd be dangerous to leave it alone, and we don't have any medical supplies with us." "You don't understand. Someone will be hunting me. The towns will be dangerous." "Someone is hunting all of us," the girl said. Jordan shook his head stubbornly. "One man is hunting me." He told them about Red Henry, and the fight at the inn. "He waits for an opportunity to kill, anyone with a black question mark on them. He blames all scientists for what happened to his family. He knows I'm wounded, and he'll direct all his energy to finding me. Towns -- " Spain waved him silent. "That chance we'll have to take." He dropped off the tailgate, replaced his cap and looked at the sky. The wagon began to roll. The rocking motion soothed him, made him tired. He lay back on the skins and watched the wooden ceiling. Jenny sat beside him. "I wish you'd go past the town," he said half-heartedly. "I'll be all right." She didn't answer. He felt warm fingers touch his skin. "Rest now." Her voice had lost some of its harsh stridency. "Rest and get back your strength." The warm fingers stayed on his skin, clinging there, as if they had found something in a lonely world. The wagon rocked on, and the ceiling grew darker as the sun fell in the west. Mount Gabriel. The name echoed in his thoughts. Red Henry was searching for him, but somewhere ahead in the vast wild lands of witchcraft and fear, there was sanctuary. Only a few more desperate miles -- rest -- let the strength seep back into tsvisted empty muscles -- rest -- He heard the dogs barking playfully as they followed along behind. Then even that became distant... N ight had come when they reached a town. Jordan was perched on the wagon seat between Jenny and her father. He felt rested and fairly strong. The horses shambled wearily down a tree-covered lane. Jordan saw a sign hanging blasted and askew in the starlight. Galena Junction, Pop. #, A Fine Town For Work And Play. The letters were faded and streaked with rain water. Jordan laughed silently. The streets were dusty, quiet. Houses showed lines of lamplight behind shutters, but no face looked out inquisitively as the horses moved with a soft, rhythmic plopping. "We'll tie the wagon up ahead," Spain announced, "and act like we're staying for the night." He indicated the town square. Glass faces of shops stared vacantly. Bricks were scarred with soot. The courthouse lawn was overgrown with weeds, and a stack or iron cannonballs decorated one comer. Lanterns hung on posts aU about the square, casting tall shadows on the emptiness. The wagon pulled into the square and Spain drew it to a stop near the shattered courthouse steps. "We've got to be out of here by dawn," he said. "It isn't safe to be in a town at all, much less in the daylight." "Then let's move on right now," Jordan insisted. Spain shook his head stubbornly. "That wound needs attention. We'll -- " He sat up straight, eyes darting to the vacant street on his left. "Quiet!" Four men in work clothes and wide hats were coming around the courthouse and toward the wagon. Shotguns protruded from the crooks of their elbows. Jenny whispered to Jordan, "Dad will talk to them." The four men walked up to the wagon, shotguns glinting. "Make some light, pilgrims," one of them said. Jenny fished out a match, stmck it, and put it to the lantern hanging from the lip of the wagon roof. Gold light spilled over the knot of shadow that was the men. Their faces were bearded and thin and suspicious. The leader had spots of food on his shirt front and black sweat rings under his arms. He examined the sign on the side of the wagon and asked, "What's your business in Galena Junction, pilgrims?" "We're entertainers," Spain said with mock joviality. "We have a little show, my friend. We've been on the road all day, and we decided to stop in this peaceful little town and present our show tomorrow morning." He added fawningly, "If that's all right with you." The man grunted meaninglessly. One of the others lit a cigar and exhaled puffs of blue smoke that whirled upward in the night air. His eyes crawled over Jenny. He grinned and switched his gaze to Jordan. He frowned. "All of you in the show?" he asked. Jordan reached behind the seat, hiding his movement with his body. His fingers closed about the butt of a pistol. He listened for the dogs, heard them sniffling somewhere at the side af the wagon. He stared back at the four men. "Of course we're all in the show," Spain boomed. The echoes bounced off the buildings. "Spanio and Company, that's what the sign says." The leader said, "That's what it says all right. Keep your wagon here till morning. Come on, boys." They walked back the way they had come. Just as they were about to round the comer of the courthouse, the one with the cigar glanced back to where the three sat in the lantern glow. Jordan held himself steady, not lowering his eyes as he wanted to, but keeping them fixed on the horses. After a minute, Jenny sighed and said, "They're gone." Jordan glanced quickly to the street. It was empty. Blue wisps of smoke floated under one of the lamp posts. He examined his arm. A soggy red stain had come through onto the shirt. "He saw I was wounded," Jordan said abruptly. "One of them was looking at my arm. I didn't know it had soaked through." "And we still don't know where the doctor lives," Spain added. "That means hunting for him. It may be dangerous, with them patrolling like that. Jenny, drive around to the other side of the courthouse." He pointed off to the right with one hand, extinguishing the lantern with the other. "When we come to that patch of shadow, Jordan and I will get off. You stay here, climb into the back and keep quiet. If they come back, maybe they'll think we're sleeping." She started to protest, but Spain silenced her with a hand to his lips. He gave her the reins. Reluctantly, she pulled them to the right, and the wagon began to move. As they swung around the corner of the square, Spain motioned and jumped quickly from the seat. Jordan followed, landing with a thud that jarred pain along his arm. They ran through the murky blackness and flattened themselves against a shop front, watching. Jenny drove to the appointed position, dropped the reins and vanished from the seat. The dogs settled down behind the wheels. "All right," Spain whispered. "Let's move." They slipped into an alley and ran down to the next street. There were houses here, but no lights. Jordan took one side, Spain the other. They examined each gate, peering in the starlight for a sign indicating a doctor. "Nothing," Jordan called softly as he reached the end of the block. Spain motioned to a cross street and they began their search once more. Somewhere in this dark maze of streets there had to be a doctor. A thin sliver of moon crept over the housetops. Trees on the lawns sighed comfortingly, and Jordan felt again the stinging loneliness that belonged to him and his kind. The houses were dark, but secure, even with their superstitions. A gain the street produced nothing. They turned one more corner. Half way down the block, Jordan saw a black square hung from a gatepost. He strained to make out the lettering. M. Rayburn, Medicines. Two words had been added -- painted on in a hasty scrawl. After the blowup, Jordan thought bitterly. The sign now read Medicines and Spells. He motioned to Spain. The older man moved across the street, crouching low, holding the bells on his cap to keep them from jingling. Jordan pushed the gate open. Boards groaned and creaked as they moved up the walk and onto the frame porch. No light showed within. Spain fumbled for the bell, breathing heavily. "I've got my gun ready," Jordan said. Spain beat upon the door. They waited tensely, listening. No sound came to their ears except the wind in the dark trees. Spain knocked a second time. A spot of light shimmered beyond the cut-glass doorpane. It enlarged slowly, accompanied by footsteps. A shadow fell on the glass from inside. It held a lamp high and reached out and opened the door. A wizened old man in a night shirt looked out at them apprehensively. "What do you want?" "My friend has a wounded arm," Spain told him. "I want you to fe it." "Go away," the old man mumbled, trying to close the door. "Go away and leave me alone." Jordan lifted his gun and pointed it at the old man's head. Rheumy eyes widened in fright. "Stand back," Spain said. "We're coming in." The old man shufBed backwards, the fear of the unknown -- bom when the bombs fell -- welling up in him. Jordan and Spain walked into the hall. "Put out your light," Jordan said. The old man turned down the lamp as Spain closed the front door. "Now lead us to your office," Jordan ordered. They walked through a musky parlor smelling of lavender, and the man called Rayburn, pushed back another door, turning up his lamp. He stood shuffling his veined hands nervously, ludicrous in the baggy night shirt. "Terrible," he kept mumbling. "Terrible to open at night. Night is the time when they wk -- " "Keep quiet," Spain said. They surveyed the room. All the standard medical equipment was present. There was a desk and a reclining table and a case containing instruments that glittered with a white silver sheen behind glass doors. The room smelled of cool antiseptic. But there were other objects. A wooden vampire stake hung on one wall. A witch-cross twined with wolfbane hung on anodier. Charm bags littered the desk, and a porcelain slab showed an uncompleted mess of clay, hair and fingernail parings. A bare human skull gaped in crazy mirth from atop the instrument case. "Who are you?" Rayburn asked querulously. "What are you running from? Or are you -- sorcerers?" Jordan felt the same anger rise that had come with the words of Red Henry back at the inn. He shifted the gun to his weak hand and pulled up his tunic as he turned around. His mouth twisted. "Take a look -- doctor." Rayburn choked in a highpitched voice and cowered back. "Devils! Black spawn of hell!" The sagging flesh on his jowls quivered. "Spawn of hell or not," Spain replied, "you're going to take that bullet out of his arm." "I won't! I won't help your kind!" "Would you like me to put a curse on you?" Jordan asked with sudden insight. His voice carried malicious overtones, partly jest, partly sick irony. "Would you like your bones to dissolve and your flesh to drop off in rotten pieces? I can do that, doctor, because I'm one of them!" Rayburn put his face in his hands and sobbed softly. Then he looked up, trembling. "Take off your shirt." Jordan handed the gun to Spain. He pulled his tunic off his good arm, then over his head, and finally removed it from the wounded arm. Sitting on the long table, he watched Rayburn gathering the j.TTs of antiseptic and the instruments from the case where the skull grinned. I Ir shambled over to Jordan and il.iubod at the wound with some liquid from a black bottle. Jordan v i iidered if it was alcohol. It didn't I me lie was puzzled. I'hrn Rayburn got a gourd rattle li.M ii.ied siiK'crity, he began to shake it back and forth before the wound. "What are you doing?" Spain asked sharply. "Proceeding by ritual," Rayburn whined. "I must do it this way." Jordan saw that the liquid had made his woimd flesh-colored. He picked up the bottle. "What is this?" "Devil cleanser," the man quaked. Jordan corked the bottle and handed it to Spain. "Devil cleanser. Flesh colored paint. Use it for clown makeup." Spain dropped the bottle in one voluminous pocket of his harlequin suit. 'Torget ritual," Jordan said. "Just get the bullet out of there." "Please," Rayburn protested. "I don't want to die burning -- " "Remember what I can do." Rayburn remembered. He removed the lamp chimney and passed several knives through the flame. "No time to purify the instruments," he muttered. He picked up one of the scalpels after cleaning off the wound. The blade sparkled like a small star in the lamplight. Rayburn bent down, blade poised over the wound. Jordan saw sweat running down his neck, dampening his night shirt. "Be careful," Jordan said. "Very careful." he knew he could not expect anesthetics. There were none. Rayburn began to cut at the wound. Jordan's fingers were scarlet where they clutched the table. The knife dug. The color of the fingers changed from scarlet to livid white... Rayburn breathed with noisy gasps. He wiped away the blood with a rag and kept cutting. T he piece of lead clanked into the enameled tray. Rayburn sewed up the wound, bandaged it with clean cloth, and began picking up the bloody rags from the floor. "We'd better hurry," Spain advised. "It isn't safe to leave Jenny with the wagon for too long. How do you feel?" "Better," Jordan replied honestly, in spite of the pain. He bowed mockingly to Rayburn. "Thank you... doctor." The old man looked at him, swallowing hard. A question framed itself suddenly within his eyes. "Wait a moment. If you are -- one of them -- you should have been able to remove the wound yourself. I didn't think of that." Resentment for the mental suffering he had endured sprang to light on his face. "How powerful are you?" he whispered. "I'm a human being like yourself. The only difference is, I refuse to believe in lies." "Come on, Jordan," Spain said nervously. "Don't waste time -- " "But you wear the black question mark," Rayburn whispered. Dazed, not knowing whether to believe in Jordan as a demon or not, the old man stumbled forward, thrusting a scalpel ahead of him. "I'll see how strong you are -- " His eyes were open wide. Spain called a sharp warning. Rayburn swung the knife at Jordan, who fended with his good arm and pushed the old man backwards. The doctor .stumbled, arms flung out. He clutched at the desk. His fingers caught the lamp and pulled it over. The flames crept out like red tongues, licking over the bloody rags scattered on the floor. Jordan and Spain turned for the door as the flames began to dance over the wooden planking. They rushed through the house and out into the street. Doors were open now. Other men and women in night dress were watching in panic as yellow fire lit up the inside of the doctor's house like a magic lantern. "We must move fast," Spain said, as they ran toward the square. "The fire will bring many people -- " Hands clutched at them. Angry voices asked where they were going; who, what, why. Jordan pushed them away roughly and ran on. They dodged through back alleys and yards as a red smear stained the sky. Down one last alley, and they were running across the square. The wagon remained in its original position. Dim outlines showed where the dogs lay under the wheels. The horses were skittering nervously, as if recently disturbed. The two men reached the wagon. The dogs did not get up. Jordan knelt down in the darkness, reaching out with fearful hands. He touched the soft warm fur of one dog. He felt something else. Sickened, he examined the others. All three of the dogs had bullet holes in their heads. "Spain," he said urgently, but the older man was searching the interior of the wagon. "She's gone, Jordan," he whispered. "The dogs," Jordan, murmured, confused. "Jordan, Jenny's gone!" "That's right, pilgrims," said a voice from the shadows of the courthouse. "Lay down the pistol." Spain yanked back the gun hammer, but Jordan grabbed his wrist. "No! We've got to find out what happened." Weakly, Spain dropped the gun into the dirt. The men moved out from the shadows. "Where is she?" Spain said brokenly. "Locked up in a house," replied the leader, "until dawn." "How did you find out about me?" Jordan asked. Hope seemed a lost and lonely thing. The leader said, "We seen your arm, so I went and talked with somebody who came into town earlier hunting a feller with a bloody arm." Jordan realized that there were five men, instead of four. Even as he thought, the fifth stepped out to where the lamplight fell on the lower half of his body. One blackcoated arm hung loosely, pressing a wounded side. The other hand carried a pistol. Suddenly, he was on Jordan, clubbing at his head. Shotgun barrels lifted, silver-blue bars flashing in the night. Jordan fought back, but weakly -- There was dirt under him. Spain was struggling. The stars were tinted with a scarlet haze, and voices lifted in the distance. His hand flopped against furry hide that was growing cold. He saw one of Red Henry's boots coming for his face. He jerked his head aside, but not in time. Complete darkness smashed down on him and covered him over. into the air and caught it absently. He was standing at the window of the parlor. Out on the lawn, men were gathered, talking quietly, scratching their beards. Black soot and sparks still drifted in clouds across the rooftops from the wreckage of Rayburn's house. Jenny sat on the embroidered settee, watching Jordan who rested loosely in a large brown rocker that creaked ever so little as it swayed. Jordan's mind worked endlessly, thinking of Mount Gabriel where the other scientists would be gathering. Abruptly, Jenny got up. "I wish they'd tell us what they're going to do." Spain tossed the black bottle. "Red Henry told me. They're waiting for dawn. Then they're going to take us outside of town and kill usl It sounds a bit ridiculous, doesn't it?" His smile was artificial. He tossed the bottle once more and it fell back into his hand with a faint plop. "Why all of us?" Jordan massaged his arm, trying to rub away the pain. "I don't understand," Jenny said. "I do," Spain replied. "He means that he's the only one Red Henry really wants." "And he doesn't know you two have the black question mark, does he?" Jordan asked. "Don't," Jenny pleaded. "Please don't talk like that." "He didn't look for a mark on me," Spain continued, watching the brightening pearl sky. "You, Jenny?"  "No," she said angrily. "Please -- " "Well," he sighed, "it's almost dawn. The men are begining to move out there." They were hefting their guns restlessly, eyes on the house, awed, and eager to be finished with their job. "Be practical," Jordan went on, even though a great sickness fought and writhed inside his stomach. "I'm no scientist. I only carry the black mark. You're a chemist. You would be useful at Mount Gabriel, but I -- " He gestured simply with uplifted palms. "Stop it," Jenny cried, turning her back on both of them. "Stop it! We're together -- " "He's right, you know," Spain said softly. "In one way," Jenny said. Her voice was harsh. "Of course he's right in one way, but not -- " She stopped. "But how could we do it?" Spain asked, approaching Jordan. "I'm fool enough to want to live when someone offers me a chance." Jordan pointed at the black bottle. "That might blot out the question marks." Spain's eyes grew large and excited. He rubbed sweaty hands on his harlequin suit. "Let's try," he said eagerly. It was a childish giggle. Jordan nodded assent. Spain slipped the suit down oflf his aging shoulders. Behind one jutting shoulderblade was the mark. Jordan opened the bottle with trembling hands and slopped a little of the paint over the symbol. "Walk to the window and pull back the curtains," he ordered. Spain hurried to comply. The shimmering light of new dawn dripped over him. "It doesn't show," Jordan told him, almost with regret. Spain struggled to get back into his suit. "Jenny," he said anxiously. "Put some on her." Jordan moved closer, seeing the way her head shook, seeing her skinny body that might once have been womanly, and might be womanly again. He put a hand onher shoulder. "Jenny -- " "Don't touch me." He pressed her shoulder and felt the skin faintly warm. "It's the right thing." She pulled the blouse away and he daubed on the paint. Then she turned and looked at him, all of the hunger and longing and fear of the dark years reaching out to hold him for a moment. "Mount Gabriel will be lonely," she said, and walked to the window. Hastily, Jordan gave Spain the bottle of paint, and the older man deposited it again in his pocket. Jordan started to speak when boots sounded outside the door. They waited silently and the door opened slowly. Red Henry, great blue pistol in one hand, gazed at Jordan, seeing the finish of his mad hunt. The other two he dismissed with cursory glances. And Jordan knew they had a chance. "You wjint me to die, don't you?" he asked. Red Henry's mouth twitched. "Yes, I want you to die, although I can't do it slowly this time, with all the townsmen watching." "But did you know there's a price? There's a price for everything in the world, even for sorcerers." His long jaw raised quizzically, just a bit shaken. "What is the price?" "The lives of these two people." He balanced himself lightly on his feet, exactly as his approach had to be balanced. Henry laughed suddenly. "Why should I spare them, sorcerer? They took you in. They helped you." "Because you hate only sorcerers. The sorcerers caused the death of your family." He moved quickly to the window, caught a fistful of cloth and ripped the clown suit. He tore Jenny's blouse in the same fashion. "These people aren't sorcerers," he said quickly, not daring to look at their backs. and her father turned around so that their backs were no longer exposed. "They have no mark on them," Red Henry admitted, "but they helped you." "Either you let them go," Jordan said, readying his final desperate stroke, "or you don't get me. And above all, you want to see me die... by your hand." The black coated man peered at Jordan for weapons. He saw none. "I have a way to die by my own hand." Jordan jerked the doctor's bandages away and dug his fingers into the sewn edges of the wound, fighting the pain. "I can pull this open and bleed, but I know you want the death your way. Let them go, and I do nothing." The other man's fingers were stroking the gun butt nervously. "All right," he breathed. "I want you. They can go free." Jordan let out a long breath and relaxed, wishing he had some god to which he could offer thanks. "Outside," Red Henry ordered. "It's dawn." No one spoke as they walked out of the old house. The wagon was brought around. Red Henry, Jordan and the rest of the men mounted horses. The little cavalcade rode toward the east as the sky began to turn white as a shroud. The buildings dropped behind, one by one, and the hills began. They stopped at a large tree near the road. Jordan's arm was almost empty of aching. Red Henry and the other men dismounted. They came toward Jordan where he sat his horse. Henry reached into his saddlebag and brought out a long wooden stake, sharply pointed. He walked to the small circle of men around Jordan. He smiled. "Now, witch-man -- " The sun began to glint yellow over the hills. Jenny and her father watched from the wagon, their faces streaked and dirty. "I'm going to drive this right through your heart," Red Henry said softly. A morning wind made soft noises in the trees. Jenny screamed. Red Henry turned, angered. He peered at her for a moment, then dragged one of his pistols free and pointed it at her. Through the faint mist of pain still on him, Jordan saw her face, inscribed like a fiery image in his mind. He saw the gun. Savagely he kicked the horse, dragging its head back and up, tearing at the reins. The horse lifted its feet high in the air, making shrill noises of fear. The men cursed. Red Henry whirled, mouth open, swinging the gun at the head of the horse and at the sharp hooves that came down and smashed his skull. Red Henry's gun exploded in the out of his mouth. He jerked once or twice on the ground. Jordan hung onto the reins as the horse reared again, striking at the men. They scattered toward the trees, hunting their guns. The world began to darken around Jordan. He felt, somehow, from the warm flow on his body, that his wound had broken. And the guns were lifting, from the trees. Lifting at him. He kicked the horse again as it clattered past the wagon away from the grove. For seemingly endless hours he rode that way, lost in a half-world of grim fevered trees and dark sunlight. The horse swayed and bucked under him. He was losing his hold... And at last he let his arms relax completely. He was lifted upward for a moment, and then there was nothing under him, and then very suddenly, a hard something that was the earth. Hoofs rattled away into the distance. He lay in the middle of the road, in the sun, watching with strange curiosity the way the red blood from his wound mixed with the grainy brown dirt of the road. And then the sun, a dying candle in the sky, went out. The darkness that came after was only a partial dark and there was a face; Jenny bending over him, and the rocking, as if he were in a coffin that floated on a dark sea. His arm did not hurt so much. He was tired. Jenny kept saying words... Red Henry killed... they were disorganized... we followed you... found you in the road... Mount Gabriel... you..." The thoughts made sense now. Through the dark and the hurt, they made a pattern. Mount Gabriel. Mount Gabriel, to be built tall and strong above the fear and the hatred, for the morning that would inevitably come. And he would be there, with her. The rocking carried him on into the healing darkness from which he knew he would soon return. Money was worthless, yet no man dared go broke. It was all pretty confusing to Mark until "Point-Plus-Pearlie told him -- By Noel Loomis iously backward as he ran up the street to the place where the faded gold lettering on one window said "Jewelry." That would be a good place to hide, he thought. Most of the plate-glass windows and doors along the street were broken out as in fact they were everywhere, and had been for twenty years -- but one of the jewelry windows and the door, protected by iron grating, were still whole and would help to conceal him. With one final glance back at the comer, he climbed the grating, scuttled across it, and dropped down. Then, keeping low, he ducked in among the dusty old counters and stopped abruptly, listening. He heard Conley's slow, slapping footsteps as the tall man rounded the comer and came up the street. He forced himself to breathe softly in spite of the pounding of his heart. The dust rose a little around him and got in his nostrils and he wanted to sneeze, but by sheer willpower he choked it down. Conley was from the Machine -- # : Central Audit Bureau -- and the Machine knew by now that Mark was three thousand points in the red. Three thousand points -- when you were supposed to be always within one day's point of a balance. You were allowed twelve hundred points a day, so Mark was now two and a half days in debit. He'd been walking the streets in a sort of daze, signing slips right and left while his own pad of shps stayed in his pocket. He hadn't cared, either, until now, because in this brave new world of the one freedom -- freedom from work -- he was abominably unhappy. Everybody struggled all day to get enough points to stay even with Central, and what good did It do them? You got even one day, but the next day you had to start all over. There wasn't any point to it. So he'd said to hell with it, and for five days now he'd ignored the Machine entirely except to line up automatically once a day at the concourse to have his card audited. And for five straight days the balance had been in red. Then, today, he had seen Conley on the street, coming toward him. All of a sudden Mark had been scared. He didn't know what Central would do to him -- nobody knew -- but he didn't want to find out, either. He ran from Conley. Now he crouched in the dust behind an empty counter while Conley's footsteps approached. He held hb breath when they got close, and when they passed the broken window he was very thankful. It was late afternoon and he thought Conley would go back to Central. Nobody knew much about Conley except that he represented the Machine and that he seemed to disappear within it every afternoon. So, presently, Mark crawled out of the broken window and walked down to Main Street. He looked carefully right and left and then, not seeing Conley's tall form above the traffic, he wandered slowly down the street, trying to figure things out. Why wasn't there anything worth while to do? What was the reason for all the broken windows and empty stores? Had there once been places where people could buy things like food and clothes? Maybe -- before Central Audit Bureau had come into existence. Or had Central always been there? Mark saw the old lady sitting in the wheel-chair. He turned out absently to walk by her. He saw her put her foot in his way but his brain wasn't working. He stumbled over her foot. Instantly the old lady half arose from her chair as if in pain, shrieking and brandishing her cane, the leg held stiffiy out in front of her. "You've injured me," she shrieked in a raucous voice. "You've hurt my lame foot!" Mark stood there dumbly. He was a young man and so he didn't at once foresee what was about to happen. A crowd gathered in no time. The old lady was putting on a show. Mark didn't get it. He would have allowed her a thousand points -- even fifteen hundred -- without argument. But he got the shock of his young life. "Thirty thousand points!" she screamed at him, and thrust a pad of slips at him. "Sign my slip, please." M ark took the pad automatically. He took the pencil she held out. He started to sign. He'd never get a credit balance at the Central Bureau now, but he didn't care. Maybe he'd get in so deep they'd give him some work. The old lady's voice rose unexpectedly. "My feelings are hurt, too. He did it deliberately. Five thousand points for my injured feelings." Dazedly Mark wrote down "Thirty-five thousand and no more," and signed his name. He handed the pad back to her and started on. The crowd was leaving. But a voice stopped him. A soft voice. "Wait, son." He looked back. He started to go on, then he saw the old lady's eyes on his. "Stick around," she said. There wasn't any raucousness in her voice now. "Wait till the crowd goes. I want to talk to you." Presently he was walking beside her while she laboriously operated the two big hand-wheels that propelled the chair. Two blocks away she turned into an empty building marked "Groceries." Mark helped her cross the threshold. Inside, she amazed him by springing out of the chair and standing quite steadily. She was small and she wasn't as old and wrinkled as he had thought. "You get in the chair," she said. "I'll push you. I need the exercise." A minute later she was pushing him briskly along the street while Mark sat, still half dazed, in the wicker chair, her old red shawl was across his lap. "Get cramps in my legs, to say nothing of my bottom," she observed, "sitting there all day." She saw him stiffen. "Oh, you needn't be shocked. After all. I'm old enough to be your grandmother. I was bom in #, you know." "Nineteen-forty," Mark repeated, wonderingly. "Gee, that was baOk in the days when everybody worked. I wish I could work." "Well, it's a changed world," she observed. "In those days, you had to work." At that instant Mark heard the ominous slapping footsteps. He looked ahead, and there was Conley, easily noticeable because of the type N hat a head above everybody else, coming toward them. Mark snatched up the red shawl and wrapped it around his face to the nose and pulled his hat low over his eyes. He watched from under the type L brim while Conley approached. He held his breath while Conley fixed his deep eyes on him for a moment, but Conley went by, and once more he was safe. The old lady trotted briskly along. They passed a few people who stared at them, but Mark was thinking. "This is #," he observed. "You're eighty-one years old. You must know all about things." "I'm quite spry," she pointed out, "though I must say I am working up a sweat right now. No, no -- " She pushed Mark back into the chair. "It's good for me. Don't get enough exercise any more. Now you just sit there. You're in a bad way. Anybody who'd fall for such a phony act and release thirty-five thousand points without even an argument -- well, of course," she said archly, "I do have a wellturned ankle." But the enormity of Mark's debit with Central when the old lady should turn in his slip, began to worry him. He wondered if he could get it back from her. He wasn't happy with the world, and things were all wrong, and all that, but still -- well, he did have to live in it. Thirty-five thousand points. He began to worry. He wished he knew what the penalty would be. He wondered if the old lady knew. What were these points all about anyway? "You must know," he said, "how the world got into this mess." She chuckled, "For thirty-five thousand points, I guess you've got a right to the story." She turned into the archway of a standard type B apartment house. He wondered what she would do with all those points. What did anybody do with them? Everybody had about the same living quarters. Food was furnished by automatic venders at the Hydroponic Farms. Clothes were provided, readymade; all you had to do was put your credit card in a machine, punch the buttons for your measurements, and a suit would drop down the chute. Mark got out of the chair and helped her inside with it. He took off his hat and started uncertainly to leave, but she put her hand on his arm, "No, no. Have supper with me. I'll tell you all about everything. Glad to. There aren't many who want to know about things any more." Her apartment was neat and clean. It was hard for Mark to connect it with an old woman shrieking points at him. "My name's Pearl. Point-Plus-Pearlie, they call me. But my real name's Penelope. You can call me Penelope." "Thank you," Mark said gravely, and sat down. Penelope bustled intoan apron and began pulling packages from the. freezer. "We'll have a feed, you and I -- a real feed." She chuckled pleasantly. "After all, you're paying for it." M ark squirmed uncomfortably. "I'll tell you how all this started," Penelope said, popping open a can of high-content protein. "Back before you were bom there were insurance companies. At first they were started to insure your life, and -- " "Your life!" Mark frowned. "How -- " "Never mind. Also, they insured you against loss by fire. Then it was loss by collision of vehicles -- you've never seen an auto, of course -- and so on. Finally they got to insuring you against hurting yourself when you slipped on a cake of soap in the bathtub, and then they insured against a suit for damages by someone who might stub his toe and fall down and break a leg on your sidewalk. Follow me?" "I think so," said Mark doubtfully. "Well, there were all kinds of lawsuits. Two men would be in an accident. Both hurt. Their insurance companies would sue each other. Suppose A knocked over a ladder and B fell down on top of him. B's fall broke A's arm and it broke his own leg. A could sue B for breaking his arm. B could sue A for making him fall. Well, suppose A was insured by company X, and B was insured by company Y. A and B filed claims against each other's companies, and everybody went to court." "You mean they didn't agree on damages?" Mark asked incredulously. "Exactly." Penelope cut off the top of a bottle of enzymes. "It was pretty dumb. But pretty soon the companies got wise. They formed worlung agreements. "When two companies carried insurance on two persons involved in an accident, the companies just presented their claims to each other, and the one with the biggest claim against him paid the difference, while each company paid off the claim of the one it represented. You can see what eventually happened." She punched a button and a dinette table popped out of the wall. "Companies insured people for more and more types of damage, even against being insulted or against a claim for damages for being insulted. The big companies eliminated the small ones, and it was just a matter of bookkeeping among those that were left. Eventually the government took it over." "But look," said Mark, "I don't see -- " "Don't rush me." Penelope put a can into the container-dissolver and punched the button that set out the plates and silverware on the tiny table. "You see, pretty soon everybody was insured for everything possible. People were collecting right and left, mostly small amounts but lots of them. But it took quite a bit of time to file claims and so on. And also, a man spent all he made buying insurance to protect himself. It was a wicked circle. Nobody could quit buying insurance and nobody dared quit filing claims. That's when the government took over. They simplified things. Once a day you turn your slips into Central and the Machine audits your account. That's all there is to it." "But there's nothing else to do," Mark objected. "No entertainment, no work." "Why should there be entertainment? Entertainment means work for somebody. No, Central -- which is the government, of course -- has eliminated work for everybody and at the same time has provided something to keep everybody busy. What w'ork must be done is done by automatic, self-lubricating, self-repairing, self-renewing machinery." She sighed. "It's a brave new world. Everything is neatly worked out. Everybody spends all their time gathering points to offset the points they lose gathering points -- and nobody seems to mind except a few rebels like you and me. I saw that rebellious look in your eyes when you signed my slip. That's why I invited you to come along with me. But, as I said, Central keeps everybody busy all day and half the night trying to balance themselves. There's no labor problem, no unemployment, no relief, no worry about anything." She paused, to dip the vitamins out of the dissolver. "The only catch is -- it's so damned monotonous." Mark blinked, but Penelope whirled on him, the dissolver in one hand. "Why do you think I sit out there and put on my act all day long? Not to get points, though I confess the points are the measure of my success -- but because life is too dull otherwise." She dished out the vitamins. "You say the government did all this?" "Yes." A thought struck Mark. "Who is the government?" the ice-water faucet. She turned her head and stared at him like a bright-eyed bird. "To tell you the truth, Mark, as far as I know the men who used to make up the government disappeared after the last war, about the time all this automatic machinery was put in. We used to have an election every so often, but I haven't heard that word for twenty-five years. Do you know what I think?" "No," Mark said attentively, "I don't think there is any more government!" Penelope said dramatically. "I think all that's left are the Machine and Central Audit Bureau -- which is nothing but a giant posting machine." "Have you seen It -- Central, I mean? I see the concourse where we line up every day to have our cards posted -- but what's behind those twelve hundred windows?" it from one of the last planes. Central covers miles and niiles in both directions. They said then it was the biggest machine on earth -- and do you know, Mark" -- she paused dramatically -- "I think the Machine is the government! Roll up your chair, Mark." Mark did. "But doesn't there have to be somebody to take care of the Machine?" he asked, holding her chair. "Not that I know of. They said it was perfect -- that barring an earthquake it would run for a thousand years without a human hand." The iron-juice cocktail was pretty good, the way Penelope had flavored it with enzymes. But Mark inevitably got back to the thing that worried him. "What will happen when that release slip of mine goes through for thirty-five thousand points?" Penelope raised her white eyebrows. "I don't know, but undoubtedly something drastic. I'll tell you what. I'll hold your slip for a while and you go out and see if you can get some points on your credit side. Stir up a little trouble. Get the points first and argue after."... Mark went out and tried to get some points next day, but he couldn't seem to get his heart in his work. It was all so pointless. Why couldn't the old lady give him back that slip, anyway? Mark got pretty much in the dumps, and after he managed to get his foot stepped on and demanded three hundred points, only to be countered by a claim of four hundred for hurting the other man's instep, he began to feel very low indeed. At the end of the week he was walking slowly along the street watching for Conley, because he was getting further in the red every day, when he saw a foot stuck out in his way and heard a voice say, "Don't you stumble over my lame foot," and he looked up and saw the old lady. Her black eyes were soft. "You don't look happy, Mark." "No." He held out his card. "Hm." Her keen old eyes shot back to his. "Thirty-two hundred in the red. That's more than before. You've lost two hundred points this week, Mark." "I know," he said dully. "Here. Push me, Mark." She pulled the shawl around her and Mark started pushing the wheelchair. "You're a nice boy," she said when they reached a quiet street. "You just can't adjust yourself to this modern world." "I want a job," Mark said stubbornly. "Something to do besides -- well, some kind of mark to aim at, I guess. This point business is just putting in time. I'm not creating anything. Even if I could fasten zippen on feather-beds, I'd be doing something worth while, because it'd be used. But this way of living is like digging a hole and then filling it in again. Why, you don't even dare to get into a fight. Somebody would collect a thousand points every time you hit him. The standard price of a black eye is three thousand. You have to be pretty careful about things like that. And there's always Conley." "Well," Penelope said, "I'm going to make you a proposition. I'll hold up your slip for sixty days, and in the meantime I'll teach you how to get ahead of the game. I'll teach you the tricks of the trade, just as old Point-a-Minute Charlie taught me. They say he averaged a point a minute all his life." "Where is he now?" asked Mark, interested. The old lady pondered. "Come to think of it, I don't know. I remember the last time I talked to him his credit balance was #." She frowned at the tremendous, low-lying dome that covered the horizon in the distance and marked Central Audit Bureau. "I haven't seen him since then." "Hm," said Mark. "Well, now," Penelope said briskly. "I'll make you a regular business deal. I'll teach you, and for all you get, you give me twenty per cent. See how many you can get. Try for ten thousand. That'll give you something to shoot at." "Maybe I can beat the Machine," Mark said eagerly. Penelope swallowed. "They say you can't beat the Machine. But I guess it won't hurt to try." Mark did well. At first he just walked down the street stopping people as fast as he could get to them. "You didn't recognize me. sir," he would say indignantly. "I met you at Central concourse two years ago. Remember? You stood right in front of me in line for three hours, and we talked about our new suits. Remember? My feelings are injured because you ignored me just now. Fifty points. Will you sign my slip, please?" His credit reached the black the first week. He was netting five hundred points a day, and it was fun, but Penelope said, "We'll go for bigger stakes. This is kindergarten stuff. Now here's the way you start... managed to get himself knocked down four times, and each time he came up with a skinned knee and collected from five hundred to eight hundred and fifty points. He was learning, Penelope assured him when he gleefully showed her his card at the end of the day. Mark was elated. That day he had gathered fifty-one hundred points. "But this can get monotonous, too," Penelope said. "Anyway, you can't go around forever with a sandpapered knee. You're learning fast, and you're learning right. Old Point-a-Minute Charlie was the best there was, in his day, and he always said you make more praints guessing character than you do falling down. Know your victim before you have an accident, and then hit him for all he will pay and hit him quick -- the way I did you." She chuckled. "My commission for today is one thousand and twenty points. Here, sign my slip, please." Mark signed. It was a cheap price to pay for the fact that life was no longer pointless. He decided he'd try to gather a credit of one hundred thousand points. He worked on bigger stuff. He didn't try just everybody. He picked his signers with care. He slept until nine every morning and he and Penelope played two-handed bridge at a tenth of a point a point until midnight. He felt sorry for the poor suckers who had to get out at sunup and tread the sidewalks until dark to get enough points to satisfy Central. They were working like slaves, while he was living the life of Point-a-Minute Charlie. It was a lovely existence. He forgot about Penelope's slip for thirtyfive thousand. He could almost pay it off anyway. Then came the day when he pulled his grand coup. He spent a week planning it, with Penelope's shrewd advice. He remembered what she had said about the man on the ladder in the nineteen-forties. He sandpapered his back and painted an irregular spot with merthiolate and iodine, and practiced twisting his back until it looked out of shape. Then he went out and watched for an absent-minded, nervous, excitablelooking man to try his next effort on. Penelope's biggest advice was, "Preparation is half the points," so it was three days before Mark found the right person. After he found him it was very simple. He signaled Penelope to follow, and then he walked behind the man until they came to a high curb. Mark moved out to the left. The man started to step up on the curb. Mark darted across in front of the man just as the man raised his foot. Mark managed to stumble exactly in front of the man. His arms went out and one hand caught the little man's leg. The little man fell squarely on top of him, assisted by a slight push from Penelope. Mark groaned heart-breakingly. In a moment there was a crowd. The little man was getting up, bewildered, and automatically trying to dust off his type K suit. Mark lay half on the curb, half off, squirming like a broken-back snake. "My back," he moaned piteously. "Oh, my back." The little man seemed paralyzed at the enormity of the thing he had done. He stared at Mark and Mark squirmed harder and moaned louder. Then Penelope hobbled up and pulled Mark's shirttail out of his trousers. The iodine spot on his back looked yellow and purple, and there were gasps from the crowd. "He did it!" Mark said, glaring accusingly at the little man. "He tripped me. He tripped me and broke my back!" Penelope was putting on a good act too, crying and wringing her hands and moaning. "My poor boy!" she said, over and over. A woman in the crowd came up and made a very expressive raspberry in the little man's face. The little man was not only bewildered; he was frightened. Mark adjudged the time had come. "Points for my broken back!" he cried. Penelope held out a slip to the little man. He signed it dazedly. then he slipped out of the crowd, while three men picked up Mark and laid him tenderly in Penelope's reclining wheel-chair. Mark could hardly contain himself. As soon as they were safely out of sight he said excitedly, "Let me see the slip." Penelope looked around. She kept pushing him but she handed over the slip. "Fifty thousand points!" Mark read under his breath. "Isn't that wonderful!" He couldn't remember ever having felt so elated in his life. Penelope was shaking her head wonderingly. "That was a good act," she said. "I'd never have had the nerve to try that myself." "Oh, that's nothing." Mark was enthusiastic. "As soon as I get fitted up with a magnelite brace so it'll look good, I'm going to knock a piece out of that curbing, and then if I can find out who's the registered owner of it I'll hit him for twenty-five thousand." M ark got the twenty-five thousand. The owner of the sidewalk was finally convinced that Mark's broken back was worth a lot. From then on there was no holding Mark. Pretending to act for the little man who had originally knocked him down, he located the woman who had made a raspberry in the little man's face and collected another two thousand; the woman didn't recognize Mark, because Mark's features were changed a little. Then Mark spotted two others who had made threatening noises and collected five hundred from each, and from another who expressed doubt that he was really hurt, Mark got a thousand points. There was nothing to it, really. Most people had regular beats, and all Mark had to do was sit at one side in Penelope's wheel-chair and wait for them to come by. He would have collected more if he could have remembered more faces. He saw Conley go by once a day but now he wasn't afraid. He thought Conley looked at him disappointedly. A couple of weeks later he got his card back from the Machine at Central and looked at it with great satisfaction. He had a himdred and thirteen thousand points to his credit. He met Penelope and they went to her apartment for dinner. Jubilantly Mark got all the fancy food -- even some synthetic meat -- that he could get on his card, and they prepared for a feast. "The only thing is," Penelope said as she punched the dishes on the table, "I'm scared. I have a feeling you shouldn't have gone over a hundred thousand." "Is that why you never cashed my slip for thirty-five thousand?" She nodded. "That's mostly the reason. My balance is over eighty thousand and I was afraid." "Afraid of what?" "I don't know. Just afraid." "Well," said Mark, "I'm not. I don't see what Central can do to a person for getting points. There's no rule against it." "It's dangerous," Penelope insisted. "Nevertheless, I have made a decision. A hundred thousand points -- that's nothing." His head was points!" Penelope gasped. "Mark, you mustn't do anything like that. Yon "No," Mark said complacently, "but it's a lot of fun getting them. And it gives me something worth while to do. We'll sit up till three o'clock every morning and play bridge, and I'll stay in bed till noon, and dream up new stunts. I'll pull one a week. Life is going to be worth living." The announcing light showed at the door. Penelope pressed the admittance button. A tall, thin man came in a moment later. "Mark Renner?" he asked. Mark jumped. "Conley!" Mark's stomach had a funny feeling in it. "They told me I would find you here," Conley said. Penelope had recovered enough to gasp. "What do you want?" "I'm from Central Audit Bureau." "That's just lovely," Penelope said, "but it doesn't mean anything to us but a place where we get our cards balanced." "It should mean something to you," Conley said hollowly. "Central is the government." Penelope stared at him. "Sit down, please. I thought Central was just a machine." "It is something more than a machine. There is a small corps of persons who live inside the machine to service it and occasionally adjust it, and those persons really are the government -- that is, all the government we have." He sat down stiffly, his back straight. "Now then, Mr. Renner, your card today showed a credit balance of a hundred and thirteen thousand points. Is that correct?" Mark swallowed. "Yes." He looked at Penelope. She was pale. With difficulty Mark asked, "Is it your job to cheek up on people, to see if they are entitled to their points?" "Oh, my, no. Central doesn't care about that. In fact. Central doesn't care how much anybody's debit is. We figure as long as a man is in debt he'll try to pay it off. They always do, at least. No, we never bother with debits, and I don't suppose we ever would." Mark breathed a sigh of relief. "But a credit of over a hundred thousand is something else," said Conley. "The machines won't handle six figures without trouble, you see, so there has to be a penalty," He looked very sad. "Now, then, I shall have to -- " "Wait!" cried Penelope. "His credit is a himdred and thirteen thousand -- but I have his slip for thirty-five thousand. If I turn it in, that would fix it up for him, wouldn't it." Mark felt a warm wave of gratitude toward Penelope. She was a it. "Well -- yes, I suppose so. We don't like these last-minute adjustments, but I suppose -- " thrust it into Conley's face. "There!" she said triumphantly. "Put that on my account." Conley looked a little sad. "This is your slip?" he asked Mark. Mark nodded gratefully. "Let me have your credit card. Miss Penelope. Now, then. I'll transfer these points -- hm." Conley's eyebrows raised. "Do you know what your balance is now. Miss Penelope?" Penelope's mouth shot open and she popped her hand across it. "You have now a hundred and twenty-two thousand," Conley said. He got up from his chair. "Well, I'm sorry, folks. That's the way it is." Mark gulped. "What way?" "Miss Penelope will have to come with me." Mark was on his feet. "If she goes, I go," he said dramatically. Conley looked at him. "If you feel that way about it, there won't be any trouble at all. You did go over, so I can take you in too." "In where?" Penelope demanded. "A certain number of persons is required to keep Central going, as I said -- actually to be the government. But most of the population today is so apathetic they wouldn't be of any use at all, so years ago some of us who were in Central got an idea. We discovered that whenever any citizen rebels against the monotony of life today, he or she eventually winds up trying to gather a lot of points, because that is the only outlet for energy and ambition. That is the kind of person we need, so when anybody gets over a hundred thousand, the machine warns us. We go after them." Conley picked up his type N hat. "Well, see you in the morning. Punch in your cards at window #. We'll do the rest. And by the way -- " He was at the door. "We start work at eight o'clock." Mark brightened. "Did you say work?" "Oh, it's only four hours a day, five days a week. The rest of the time is your own, only of course you can't come Outside. It would upset things if the general public learned about us. Yes, it's a regular job; not hard work, but steady work. Gives you something to aim for; there are promotions, you know, and extra bonuses for those who show promise." "Work!" Mark said. "Steady work? You mean there'll be something to do all the time?" "Five days a week," said Conley. Mark said, "This is so sudden. Why don't you sit down a minute while we let it soak in? We have plenty of enzymes and stuff for a guest, don't we. Miss Penelope? Why not stay for supper, Conley?" "No, thanks," said Conley. "We have beefsteak and hot biscuits for supper in Central." Penelope shrieked with joy. "Beef!" Mark was puzzled. "What's that?" "It's an old-fashioned food," said Conley. "Rather tasty top." "Please sit down," Penelope begged, "and tell us more." Conley looked at his watch. "Believe I will. My feet get a little tired all day from pounding the pavement. But there isn't much more to tell. You'll find out everything tomorrow. And I'm sure you'll like it. We try to give each person work to challenge him." "What if a person wouldn't want to go to Central?" "Very few ever object. Once in a while they are afraid and run away, but we just register their number with all the machines, and whenever that number is presented for food or clothes, the machines reject the card." He paused. "A very neat arrangement. Of course, inside of Central the point system as you know it now will be of no value whatever. We use money in Central." Penelope had a can of synthetic meat in her hands. "Beef!" she said suddenly, and hurled the can into the disintichute. "I'm going to starve all night so I can enjoy eating tomorrow." "So nobody ever gets away?" asked Mark. "Very seldom, though there's one fellow playing a game with Central. He must have gotten wind of us, and he keeps careful check on his points. About once every three months he starts going strong. He'll be putting in eight or ten thousand points a day. Then his balance will shoot up over a hundred thousand and I'll go after him, but he's always just signed away a lot of points. Would you believe it, the last time he had given away fifty thousand points to a fellow who claimed a broken back. He said he knew it was a phony, but he had me there and he laughed at me, for he had signed away the points. The slip showed up next day." Mark looked at Penelope and grinned. "We should have known that nobody in his right mind would give away fifty thousand points." Conley raised his hand in a salute. "See you tomorrow at Central. If they don't keep you busy, look me up." Mark watched him leave. Then he looked beamingly at Penelope. "Work! Every day! Eight o'clock! We'll have to get up before breakfast! Isn't it wonderful?" But Penelope's bird-like eyes were bright. "He said there would be promotions and bonuses for those who show promise," she recalled. "I wish we had known that. We could have made a cleanup and gone into Central with a record that would make their eyes pop out. Anyhow" -- sh dug her pad of release blanks out of her pocket and began to figure on the back. "Let's see, fifty thousand from the little man who's playing a game with Central, twenty-five from the owner of the sidewalk, two thousand for the raspberry, five hundred each from two who made noises of disrespect, and a thousand from the man who doubted that yoim back was really broken. You could have collected two thousand from that last one," she said absently, "if you hadn't got cold feet. Anyway, that's seventy-nine thousand points. Now, then, twenty per cent of that is fifteen thousand, eight hundred points." She wrote rapidly and held out the pad to Mark. "Sign my slip, please." Coming in the January Issue! Oheck and Checkmate startling situation in which lowly subterfuge is mightier than the atom -- and we of the western world arc the stooges!... Also in this issue are such outstanding science fiction adventures other exciting stories and features. No matter what the future, one factor must always be reckoned with -- the ingenuity of the human animal. Let There Be Light By Horace B. Fyfe T he two men attacked the thick tree trunk with a weary savagery. In the bright sunlight, glistening spatters of sweat flew from them as the old axes bit alternately into the wood. Blackie stood nearby, on the gravel shoulder of the highway, rubbing his short beard as he considered the depth of the white notch. Turning his broad, tanned face to glance along the patched and cracked concrete to where squat Vito kept watch, he caught the latter's eye and beckoned. "Okay, Sid -- Mike. We'll take it a while." The rhythm of the axe-strokes ceased. Red Mike swept the back of a forearm across the semi-shaven stubble that set him as something of a dandy. Wordlessly, big Sid ambled up the road to replace Vito. "Pretty soon, now," boasted Mike, eyeing the cut with satisfaction. "Think it'll bring them?" "Sure," replied Blackie, spitting on his hands and lifting one of the worn tools. "That's what they're for." "Funny," mused Mike, "how some keep going an' others bust. These musta been workin' since I was a little kid -- since before the last bhtz." "Aw, they don't hafta do much. 'Cept in winter when they come out to clear snow, all they do is put in a patch now an' then." Mike stared moodily at the weathered surface of the highway and edged back to avoid the reflected heat. "It beats me how they know a spot has cracked." "I guess there's machines to run the machines," sighed Blackie. "I dunno ; I was too young. Okay, Vito?" The relieving pair fell to. Mike stepped out of range of the flying chips to sit at the edge of the soft grass which was attempting another invasion of the gravel shoulder. Propelled by the strength of Vito's powerful torso, a single chip spun through the air to his feet. He picked it up and held it to his nose. It had a good, clean smell. When at length the tree crashed down across the road, Blackie led them to the ambush he had chosen that morning. It was fifty yards up the road toward the ruined city -- off to the side where a clump of trees and bushes provided shade and concealment. "Wish we brought something to eat." Vito said. "Didn't know it would take so long to creep up on 'em this morning," said Blackie. "The women'll have somethin' when we get back." "They better," said Mike. He measured a slender branch with his eye. After a moment, he pulled out a hunting knife, worn thin by years of sharpening, and cut off a straight section of the branch. He began whittling. "You damn' fool!" Sid objected. "You want the busted spot on the tree to show?" "Aw, they ain't got the brains to notice." "The hell they ain't! It stands out like one o' them old street signs. D'ya think they can tell, Blackie?" "I dunno. Maybe." Blackie rose cautiously to peer over a bed of blackberry bushes. "Guess I'll skin up a tree an' see if anything's in sight." He hitched up his pants, looking for an easy place to climb. His blue denims had been stoutly made, but weakened by many rips and patches, and he did not want to rip them on a snag. It was becoming difficult to find good, unrotted clothing in the old ruins. over his head, he sprang for it, pulled, kicked against the trunk, and flowed up into the foliage with no apparent effort. The others waited below. Sid glanced up occasionally, Vito idly kicked at one of the clubs made from an old two-byfour. The other lay beneath the piled jackets; but enough of the end protruded to show that they had been chopped from the same timber, gray-painted on one side, stained and gouged on the other where boards had once been nailed. A coU of rope lay beside the axes. High in the upper branches, Blackie braced himself with negligent confidence and stared along the concrete ribbon. From here, he thought, you'd almost think the place was still alive. instead of crumbling around our ears. The windows of the distant houses were dark, unglassed holes, but the sunlight made the masonry clean and shining. To Blackie, the ragged tops of most of the buildings were as natural as the tattered look of the few people he knew. Beyond, toward the center of the city, was real evidence of his race's bygone might -- a vast jumble of shattered stone and fused metal. Queer weeds and mosses infected the area, but it would be centuries before they could mask the desolation. Better covered, were the heaps along the road, seemingly shoved just beyond the gravel shoulders -- mouldering mounds which legend said were once machines to ride in along the pavement. Something glinted at the bend of the highway. Blackie peered closer. He swarmed down the tree from branch to branch, so lithely that the trio below hardly had the warning of the vibrating leaves before he dropped, cat-footed, among them. "They're cornin'!" He shrugged quickly into his stained jacket, emulated in silent haste by the others. Vito rubbed his hands down the hairy chest left revealed by his open jacket and hefted one of the clubs. In his broad paws, it seemed light. They were quiet, watching Sid peer out through narrowly parted brush of the undergrowth. Blackie fidgeted behind him. Finally, he reached out as if to pull the other aside, but at that moment Sid released the bushes and crouched. The others, catching his warning glance, fell prone, peen'ng through shrubbery and around tree trunks with savage eyes. The distant squawk of a jay became suddenly very dear, as did the sighing of a faint bi rc.e through the leaves overhead. Then a new, clanking, humming sound intruded. A procession of three vehicles rolled along the highway at an unvarying pace which took no account of patches or worn spots. They jounced in turn across a patch laid over a previous, unsuccessful patch, and halted before the felled tree. Two were bulldozers; the third was a light truck with compartments for tools. No human figures were visible. A moment later, the working force appeared -- a column of eight robots. These deployed as they reached the obstacle, and explored like colossal ants along its lenh. "What're they after?" asked Mike, whispering although he lay fifty yards away. "They're lookin' over the job for whatever sends them out," Blackie whispered back. "See those little lights stickin' out the tops o' their heads? I heard tell, once, that's how they're run." Some of the robots took saws from the truck and began to cut through the tree trunk. Others produced cables and huge hooks to attach the obstacle to the bulldozers. "Look at 'em go!" sighed Sid, hunching his stiff shoulders jealously. "Took us hours, an' they're half done already." They watched as the robots precisely severed the part of the tree that blocked the highway, going not one inch beyond the gravel shoulder, and helped the bulldozers to tug it aside. On the opposite side of the concrete, the shoulder tapered off into a six-foot drop. The log was jockeyed around parallel to this ditch and rolled into it, amid a thrashing of branches and a spurting of small pebbles. "Glad we're on the high side," whispered Mike. "That thing 'ud squash a guy's guts right out!" "Keep listenin' to me," Blackie said, "an' you'll keep on bein' in the right place at the right time." Mike raised his eyebrows at Vito, who thrust out his lower lip and nodded sagely. Sid grinned, but no one contradicted the boast. "They're linin' up," Blackie warned tensely. "You guys ready? Where's that rope?" Someone thrust it into his hands. Still squinting at the scene on the highway, he fumbled for the ends and held one out to Mike. The others gripped their clubs. "Now, remember!" ordered Blackie. "Me an' Mike will trip up the last one in line. You two get in there quick an' wallop him over the head -- but good!" "Don't go away while we're doin' it," said big Sid. "They won't chase ya, but they look out fer themselves. I don't wanna get tossed twenty feet again!" The eyes of the others flicked toward the jagged white scar running down behind Sid's right ear and under the collar of his jacket. Then they swung back to the road. "Good!" breathed Blackie. "The rollin' stuff's goin' first." The truck and bulldozers set out toward the city, with the column of robots marching a fair distance behind. The latter approached the ambush -- drew abreast -- began to pass. Blackie raised himself to a crouch with just the tips of his fingers steadying him. he surged out of the brush, joined to Red Mike by their grips on the twenty feet of rope. They ran up behind the marching machine, trailed by the others. In his right hand, Blackie twirled the part of the rope hanging between him and Mike. On the second swing, he got it over the head of the robot. He saw Mike brace himself. The robot staggered. It pivoted clumsily to its left, groping vaguely for the hindrance. Mike and Blackie tugged again, and the machine wound up facing them in its efforts to maintain balance. Its companions marched steadily along the road. "Switch ends!" barked Blackie. Alert, Mike tossed him the other end of the rope and caught Blackie's. They ran past the robot on either side, looping it in. Blackie kept going until he was above the ditch. He wound a turn of rope about his forearm and plunged down the bank. A shower of gravel spattered after him as Mike jammed his heels into the shoulder of the highway to anchor the other end. Then he heard the booming sound of the robot's fall. Blackie clawed his way up the bank. Vito and Sid were smashing furiously at the floundering machine. Mike danced about the melee with bared teeth, charging in once as if to leap upon the quarry with both feet. Frustrated by the peril of the whirling two-byfours,he swept up handfuls of gravel to hurl. Blackie turned to run for one of the axes. Just then, Sid struck home to the head of the robot. Sparks spat out amid a tinkle of glass. The machine ceased all motion. "All right!" panted Blackie. "All right! That's enough!" They stepped back, snarls fading. A handful of gravel trickled through Mike's fingers and pattered loudly on the concrete. Gradually, the men began to straighten up, seeing the robot as an inert heap of metal rather than as a weird beast in its death throes. "We better load up an' get," said Blackie. "We wanna be over on the trail if they send somethin' up the road to look for this" Vito dragged the robot off the highway by the head, and they began the ta of lashing it to the twoby-fours. It was about two hours later when they plodded around a street corner among the ruins and stopped before a fairly intact building. By that time, they had picked up an escort of dirty, half-clad children who ran ahead to spread the news. Two other men and a handful of women gathered around with eager exclamations. The hunters dropped their catch. "Better get to work on him," said Blackie, glancing at the sky. "Be dark soon." The men who had remained as guards ran inside the entrance of polished granite and brought out tools : hammers, crowbars, hatchets. Behind them hurried women with basins and large cans. The original four, weary from the weight of the robot despite frequent pauses on the trail, stepped back. "Where first, Blackie?" asked one of the men, waiting for the women to untangle the rope and timbers. "Try all the joints. After that, we'll crack him open down the middle for the main supply tank." He watched the metal give way under the blows. As the robot was dismembered, the fluid that had lubricated the complex mechanism flowed from its wounds and was poured by the women into a fivegallon can. "Bring a cupful, Judy," Blackie told his woman, a wiry blond girl. "I wanna see if it's as good as the last." He lit a stick at the fire as they crossed the littered, once-ornate lobby, and she followed him down a dim hall. He pulled aside the skins that covered their doorway, then stumbled his way to the table. The window was still uncovered against the night chill, but it looked out on a courtyard shadowed by towering walls. To eyes adjusted to the sunny street, the room was dark. Judy poured the oil into the makeshift lamp, waited for the rag ( Continued on page #) With no one to help him, it seemed the General was lost. But the enemy was soon to discover that -- By M. C. Pease D id it go well?" the aide asked. The admiral, affectionately known as the Old Man, did not reply until he'd closed the door, crossed the room, and dropped into the chair at his desk. Then he said: "Go well? It did not go at all. Every blasted one of them, from the President on down, can think of nothing but the way the Combine over-ran Venus. When I mention P-boats, they shout that the Venusians depended on P-boats, too, and got smashed by the Combine's dreadnoughts in one battle. 'You can't argue with it, man,' they tell me. And they won't listen." "But the Venusians fought their P-ships idiotically," the aide complained. "It was just plain silly to let small, light, fast ships slug it out with dreadnoughts. If they had used Plan K -- " The Old Man snorted. "Are you trying to convince me? I've staked my whole reputation on Plan K. They wouldn't give me the money to build a balanced spacefleet, even when the fleets of the Combine of Jupiterian Satellite States were staring them in the face. So, I took what I could get and poured it into P-boats. I threw all our engineering and scientific staff into making them faster and more maneuverable than anyone ever thought a space-ship could be. I got them to build me electronic computers that could direct that speed. And, two years ago, every cent I could lay my hands on went to install the computers on all our ships." "I remember," the aide said. "But, now the chips are down, the people have funked out on me. I am one of the most hated men in the Federation. They say I destroyed their Navy. And, we are not going to get a chance to try Plan K. They decided, today, to accept the Combine's offer to send envoys in a month to discuss possible revision of the Treaty of Porran. When I left, they were wondering if there was any chance of getting out for less than Base Q." "But, good lord, sir, Base Q supplies nine tenths of all our power. The Combine will have a strangle hold on us, if they get that." "Quite. But the people will give it to them, rather than fight. And the President will sign." "Surely, sir, the people are not all cowards?" "No. If they had time to think, they would fight. That's why the Combine is striking now. The people are panicky. Hysterical. The collapse of Venus was so sudden, and the disaster to their P-boats so complete. They've just lost hope. Most people would rather live under a dictator than die to no purpose. They've just lost hope." The pounding of the Old Man's fist measured his words and the depth of his anger. 'Tf we could only make them hope. Somehow. Anyhow." Suddenly, his clenched fist stopped in mid-air. He frowned. Slowly, his hand opened. The frown relaxed and a smile replaced it. "Maybe we can, at that. Maybe we can." He leaned back with his eyes half closed. His aide knew better than to interrupt him. Ten minutes later, he opened his eyes. "Make arrangements to have Commander Morgan take command of Base Q as soon as possible. Within two days at the outside." His manner was curt and clipped. "And bring him here to me before he leaves." "Yes, sir. But may I say, sir, I do not understand?" "You're not supposed to." "Yes, sir." The aide was a competent man. Orders were written that afternoon, in complete disregard of normal red-tape. Base Q was advised of the imminent shift. Commander Stanley Morgan boarded a jet plane on the Australian desert that night. The next morning, he was shown into the Old Man's office. "Commander," the Old Man said after the preliminaries were taken care of, "as you are well aware, you have been in considerable disgrace, recently, for getting too close to the Venusian-Combine war, in defiance of orders. It has been felt, in certain quarters, that you might have caused a serious international crisis." speak, but the admiral waved him to silence. "You could, if you like, point out that the crisis has come, anyhow. As a matter of fact, I never felt that that phase of your action was too important. I did, however, deplore your disregard of orders -- and still do." He paused a moment, while his steel gray eyes studied the younger man. "You are about to receive new orders. It is absolutely imperative that these orders be obeyed explicitly." His pointing finger punctuated his words with slow emphasis. "These orders place you in command of Base Q. The Treaty of Porran, among other things, designates the asteroid Quanlik, or Base Q, as being die territory solely of the Federation and suitable for the establishment of a delta-level energy converter. Because this converter is the prime source of gamma-level, degenerate matter which is used as the fuel for nearly all our power generators, Base Q is recognized as a prime defense area of the Federation. A sphere, one hundred thousand miles radius about Quanlik, was designated by the treaty as a primary zone. Any ship or ships entering this zone may be ordered to leave within one hour. Upon failure to comply, our military forces may take such action as they deem necessary. A sphere, twenty thousand miles radius, is designated as the secondary zone. Assuming the prior warning has been given upon their entrance into the primary zone, full action may be taken against any ship entering this without delay or further warning. "Standing orders with regard to Base Q are that any ship entering the primary zone shall be warned immediately. Upon failure to comply, after the one hour period, full action shall be taken with the forces stationed on Quanlik. Any ship entering the secondary zone shall be brought to action as soon as possible without warning. "Your orders direct you to assume command of Base Q and to comply with existing standing orders regarding the maintenance of its security until and unless advised of a change in the standing orders or the Treaty of Porran." The Old Man paused for effect. "Any questions?" "Yes, sir," the younger man said. "I am wondering if I should inquire what events you are anticipating. Would it be wise for me to ask?" "No!" The monosyllable cracked out like a shot. "No further questions, sir." "I have one. While you were in Australia, I presume you kept well informed on recent developments of Plan K?" "Yes, sir. The school I commanded taught advanced theory of Plan K." "Very good. You will proceed immediately to Base Q. As a final word I will repeat the absolute necessity of obeying your orders to the letterX Good luck." The young man saluted, collected his orders and walked out. Two hours later, he was in space. was perched in a plastic bubble high on a crag overlooking Base Q. Directly below it lay a few of the multitude of locks that provided haven for the protecting fleet of Pships. A vast array of domes and other geometrical shapes bore witness to the hive of machine-shops, storerooms, offices, et al, that kept the fleet operating. And on the far horizon towered the mighty structure of the delta-level converter, the reason for the existence of Base Q. test steel and special alloys, machined to tolerances of less than a thousandth of an inch, with another hundred thousand tons of control equipment, it was yet delicate enough so that it could not have functioned in the gravity field of any planet. This asteroid, small as it was, was barely below the permissible limit. The Commander sat at his desk, watching the latest flashes in the news-caster. They were not good. At this very moment, the President of the Federation was in conference with the representatives of the Combine, discussing the wording of the protocol that would probably be signed in a few hours. And no word -- no hint -- that anyone in the Federation outside the services was red light flashed on his desk. A buzzer sounded a strident call. He flipped a switch. "Commander talking." "Far-Search talking. Report contact with large group of ships, probably dreadnought warships. Range, two one oh. Bearing, four oh dash one nine. Speed, seven five. Course, approaching. That is all," "Keep me advised any change or further details. Advise when contact ranges one five oh." "Wilco." The Commander pressed a button on his desk. In response, his staff quickly assembled to brief him on the immediate status of Base Q as a war-making machine. As a matter of routine, it was always kept fully ready. His staff merely confirmed this for him. Seventy-five thousand miles out in space, the Radars of the FarSearch net swept their paths. Men labored over their plotting tables, noting the information the radar echoes brought back ; slowly piecing together the picture. Tight communication beams relayed the data back to the base as fast as it was obtained. About an hour later, the red light flashed again. The assembled staff fell quiet as the Commander flipped the switch, again. "Commander talking." "Far-Search talking. Contact previously reported now range one five oh. Bearing, four one dash one seven. Course, approaching. Speed, six nine. Estimated twenty three ships, dreadnought type, plus small ship screen. Battle formation. That is all." "Advise at range one one oh." "Wilco." The Commander turned to his staff. "Sound a general alert." His words were clipped and clear. He flipped a second switch on his desk. "Radio, this is the Commander. Get me a direct beam to the Chief of Staff. Highest urgency. Scramble with sequence Charlie." His office had emptied by now. with officers running to their posts as the siren of the general alert wailed through the corridors. As its urgent call died off, a green light showed on his desk, indicating contact with earth. "Morgan, Commander, Base Q, requesting direct line to Chief of Staff. Highest urgency." "Go ahead, Morgan." The Old Man's voice sounded peculiar after passing through the scrambling and unscrambling machines that twisted the sounds into queer pieces and distributed them among several frequencies and methods of modulation. But, even so, it had a note of strain in it that was not artificial. "Sir, when you gave me my orders, here, you directed me to obey them to the letter, without question or cavil. Is that right, sir?" "Yes, it is." There was a threat in the Old Man's voice. "Then, sir, would you tell me if there has been any change in those orders since my arrival? Aside from administrative details, of course?" "No. Absolutely not." "Very good, sir. Sorry to have bothered you." "Not at all. Quite right. Good luck. Signing out." Morgan thought the Old Man sounded relieved at the end. And he could not be quite sure, but he thought he heard the Admiral mutter "And good hunting," as the connection broke. He summoned his aide to take over the office while he went down to the center of the asteroid where I.C., the information center, was located, where he would assume direct command of the base. Ships Supply Officer reported all ships fully loaded and fueled with gamma-matter, ready for flight. The Missile Officer reported all ships equipped with war-head missiles. The Lock Officer reported all locks manned and ready. Base Q was ready. As he climbed to his chair over the plotting tank, he noted with satisfaction the controlled tautness of the men's faces. They too, were ready. As the glowing points of yellow light that represented the enemy fleet crossed the dimly lit sphere in the tank that indicated the one hundred thousand mile radius marking the edge of the primary zone, he took a microphone from a man waiting, nearby. "Base Q to unknown fleet. I have you bearing four one dash one seven. Range one oh oh. Identify yourself. Identify yourself. Over." His words were spaced out with painful clarity. A hush had fallen over I.C. The loud speaker on the wall came to life with a squawk, after a few seconds. "Fleet Four to Base Q. This is Fleet Four, operating under orders from the Jupiterian Combine. Over." "Base Q to Fleet Four. According to the Treaty of Porran, space within a radius of one hundred thousand miles of Base Q has been designated a primary defense zone of the Federation. I therefore order you to leave this zone within one hour. Failure to comply will make you.liable to full action on our part. I have the time, now, as one three four seven. You have until one four four seven to comply. I further warn you that an approach within twenty thousand miles will make you liable to immediate action, regardless of time. Over." The men in the room stared, open-mouthed. All had dreamed of hearing these words spoken in these tones to the Combine. A cheer might have been given, had it not been for discipline. In a few seconds, the loud-speaker squawked again. "Fleet Four to Base Q. Our orders are to assume a position at twenty-five thousand miles radius pending renegotiation of the Treaty of Porran. I suggest you contact your headquarters before doing anything rash. Over." The Commander sat with a smile on his lips. Quietly he handed the microphone back to the radioman. In a minute, the loud-speaker squawked, again. "Fleet Four to Base Q. Did you receive my last transmission? Acknowledge, please. Over." The radioman looked at the Commander, questioningly, but he only shook his head. "Can't you turn that damn squawk-box off? It's distracting." As the minutes crept by, the bright dots in the tank moved closer. The Commander took the Public Address microphone. "Attention, all personnel, this is the Commander talking. The Fourth Fleet of the Combine entered the Zone twenty minutes ago. They were given an ultimatum but are showing no indication of compliance. Therefore, we are going to blast hell out of them." The echoes from his voice rolled back from speakers all over the base. "The people at home do not think we can do it. I know we can. I have not asked their permission. It is not needed. My orders are explicit and fully cover the situation. My orders to you are equally explicit. Go out there and teach the bloody bastards a lesson." He turned back to the men in I. C. "Scramble flights one, two, three, and four. Others to follow at intervals of five minutes until all are in space. Flight plan King Baker. Initial Time, one four five oh. Execute." The talkers took up the chant. "Flight one. Flight one. Scramble. Scramble. Execute." "Flight two... Etc. In the tank, green points of light moved out. The first four came into position and stopped in the four quadrants of the circle of which the center was the point at which the enemy would be at Initial Time. The following flights moved out to other points on the circle. Time seemed to stop. In I. C., the Flight Directors gave the orders that moved their flights into position and briefed them on future tactics in quiet voices. The electronic computers and other devices moved silently. The clock made no noise as its hands moved towards the final moment. The Commander moved some dials under his hands. He pushed a button and a red light showed on the lead dreadnought of the enemy column. "This is the initial target." The designation was relayed to the flights. The second hand of the clock was making its final sweep. All voices quieted. The Commander raised his fist. As the clock's hand came to the top, his fist slashed down. "Execute!" The battle was on. F light Commander Dennis, Flight One, heard the final word as he sat in the small bubble on top of the dense package of machinery that was a P-ship. Swiftly, his hands closed switches. The course had already been chosen and fed into the automatic computers under him. He merely gave the signal to execute. In response, the ship seemed to pick itself up and hurl itself down the radius of the circle to the waiting enemy fleet. He could not see them, but he knew that, behind him, lay the other nine ships of the flight, in column, spaced so close that an error in calculation of but a few caused disaster. But the automatic and inconceivably fast and accurate calculators in the ships, tied together by tight communication beams, held them there in safety. As he came within range of possible enemy action, Dennis pressed another button, and the Random Computer took command. Operated by the noise a vacuum tube generates because electrons are discrete particles, it gave random orders, weighted only by a preference to bring the ship's course back to the remembered target. The column behind obeyed these same orders. The whole flight seemed to jitter across space, moving at random but coming back to a reasonably good course towards the target, utterly confusing any enemy fire-control computers. To the men in the shijjs, one to each, it seemed as if their very nerve cells must jar apart. They felt themselves incapable of coherent action, or, even, thought. But they did not need coherency. Their function was done until the ship was out of danger, when a new formation would be made, a new target designated, and a new order to execute given. Because the electronic computers took care of the attack. They had to. No human could react as fast as was needed. Out from the enemy ships reached fingers of pure deltafield, reaching for gamma-matter. The touch of a finger meant death in a fiery inferno as the gammamatter that fueled the ship and formed the war-heads of their lethal eggs would release its total energy. There was only one defense. The delta-field could be propagated only in a narrow beam, and at a rate much slower than the speed of light. By keeping the enemy computers confused, they kept those beams wandering aimlessly through space, always where the little ships might have been, but were not. Unless their luck ran out. Flight One kept moving in, with constantly increasing speed, except for random variations. Once through the outer screen of small ships, a relay closed and the link was broken betvyeen the ships of the column. Each then moved in independent manner. The designated target was an area to the computers, rather than a ship. Radar beams reached out to find specific targets. As they found them and moved close, the random computer switched off for a small moment of time, while the missies were dispatched on a true bearing. And then the ships moved on, leaving their eggs behind them. The eggs moved in with fantastic acceleration to their targets. Half their energy went into that acceleration, to get them there before the delta beams could find them. The other half was given up in incandescent heat when they found their targets. Becoming pinpoints of pure star matter, they seared their way into the enemy vitals. But, even with their fantastically concentrated energy, it was not enough. For the dreadnoughts were armored with densely degenerate matter, impervious to any but a direct hit, and compartmented to require many hits. The flights moved in and passed on through. And other flights came in. And others followed them. The first flights halted, found each other, turned, and drove in again. Pass and repass. A myriad of bluewhite flashes gave measure of the struggle. the Commander watched the tank. Curt orders designated new target areas as the enemy fleet broke up under the whiplash. Slowly, one by one, the points of light that marked the enemy vanished, leaving only the void. Finally, as must any fleet that faces annihilation, they turned and fled. The battle was over. All that remained was to give the orders to bring the flights home. And that was soon done. The Commander got up. He stretched. He was tired. He glanced at the clock. Two hours and forty minutes. Very quick, indeed, as space battles usually went. But, then, he thought grimly, this had been the first battle ever fought under the whiplash of Plan K. But, now, there was a report to be made. And he did not know how to do it. As he walked back wearily to his office, he tried out phrases in his mind. None seemed to fit. His aide was bending over the facsimile machine as he came in. "Priority orders from the General Staff, just coming in, sir." The Commander looked at the machine. "General Staff to Commander, Base Q, Urgent, Immediate Action," he read. "You are hereby advised that a protocol has been signed at Washington, D. C., with representatives of the Combine, revising the Treaty of Porran to the extent that Base Q shall be jointly administered by yourself and the Commander, Fourth Fleet, Jupiterian Combine, until such time as its further dispensation shall have been agreed. You will, therefore, admit said Fleet upon demand, permitting it to take up such stations as it may desire, in either zone, or to land, in whole or in part, and to disembark such of its personnel as its commanding officer may direct. You will make arrangements with its commanding ofBcer for the joint administration of the base. You will be held responsible for the smooth operation and successful accomplishment of this undertaking. These orders are effective immediately." Commander Morgan smiled. "Send this reply immediately," he said to his aide. "Open code. Commander, Base Q, to General Staff, Highest urgency. Acknowledge receipt recent orders regarding protocol revising Treaty of Porran. Regret unable to comply. Due to recent argument over interpretation of Treaty of Porran, Fourth Fleet, Combine, no longer exists. Request further orders." He laughed. On earth, the officer who took the message gaped at it. Seizing a telephone, he dictated it to the Old Man's aide. But when the Old Man saw it, he only smiled, coldly. And his smile was bleak and cold, too, when he laid it before the President and the Cabinet an hour later. Shortly afterwards, when the President broadcast it to the people, they sat, stunned. It was not until the next day that they finally read its significance and started celebrating. But the Old Man had ceased smiling by that time, and was planning possible future battles. A month later, Morgan sat again in the Old Man's office. Having presented his report and swallowed the unpleasant pill that, as he was now a hero, there were speeches to make and banquets to be bored at, he was talking informally. "What I can't understand, sir, is why they came in. They only had to wait a couple of hours and the whole kit and caboodle would have been dumped in their laps. Yet they come barging in and give us exactly the opening we want. I don't get it." "That is an interesting question," the Old Man replied with a shadow of a twinkle. "You might almost think they had intercepted an order I sent to our Intelligence Officer, on Q, to sabotage the Converter if the protocol was signed." The Commander jumped. "Was that order given, sir?" "Yes, it was. But it was countermanded an hour later. Different channel, however. I remembered they had broken the code of the first channel." He paused a moment. "That illustrates a good point to remember, Morgan. You intercept enemy messages and break their code. A very useful trick. Also very dangerous, if the enemy discovers you have broken it, and you don't know that he knows. Very dangerous, indeed." The young man laughed. The older one smiled, bleakly. As Morgan looked out the window, he saw the public news-casters spelling out the full mobilization of the Federation. A glow filled his heart as he realized the had to, to fight to defend their freedom. Personalities in Seience , was but one facet of his myriad A lonely figure walked perfections -- and probably a minor Florentine streets... In truth, he left few paintings, A pproximately five hunand some of those, unfinished. His dred years ago. Nature did its Magi was never finest job of human creation, and finished. We have his Jerome has apparently been resting up and the Virgin of the Rocks among from the task ever since. This creaothers. And of course, what was tion, an illegitimate child born to Probably the greatest artirtic effort one Ser Piero Da Vinci and a ver produced by mz.n -- The Last peasant girl of sixteen in a village Supper. called Vinci, a few miles from FlorBut, while other great artists of ence, Italy, became the golden man the time collected the huge fees ofof his time and of times to come. fered for portraiture and epic Those were the days of the great works, Leonardo seems to have political princes, of the sinister stwd aloof from the lure of money. Medici clan, of Lorenzo the MagHis notebooks and personal records nificent, the scoundrel of the chart his course as one of bservaRenaissance. Days when intrigue tion, study almost, it appears, of and cruelty were developed as fine meditation on the vast possibilities arts. And through this period and developments which he alone walked Leonardo, contributing to in his time could sense and its greatness, but remaining unchart. touched by its carnality and rottenThus we see him haunting the ness. slums of Florence for the face of While this was the Renaissance Judas to be used in The Last Supfrom which sprang the renewed efper. We see him standing, aloof, in forts of Man to discover and reflect a mob howling around the gibbet of his true dignity, the actual narBandino -- hung by the Medici -- to rowness of the period is seen in the observe and record in his notebook, fact that Leonardo Da Vinci is the peculiar contortion of this last known today mainly as an artist agony -- the facial distortions. Leowithout peer. In most minds, this is nardo was the student who said, no "We have no right to love or hate anything until we have a full knowledge of it." in their revelations of his broad concepts. Sadly, he worried not at all about posterity's interest in his work. He made no effort to keep orderly records. At least # pages of his writings are scattered over the world in various galleries and museums. Possibly as many were destroyed or lie undiscovered. What we have shows that Leonardo founded, through his personal work, many formal channels of today's study. He was the father of engineering, anatomy, geology. He was a biologist, a hydrographer, a geometrician, a mathematician, a discerning student of optics. In a letter to the Duke of Milan, when seeking employment with that overlord, Leonardo listed various capacities in which he could be of value; a list which no employment seeker of today -- with all of today's advantages -- could begin to duplicate : Leonardo wrote in part: "I have a method of constructing very light and portable bridges to be used in pursuit of, or retreat from, the enemy, with others of a stronger sort, proof against fire and easy to fix or remove. "For the service of sieges, I am prepared to remove the water from the ditches, and to make an infinite variety of scaling-ladders and other engines proper to such purposes. "I have also, most convenient and portable bombs, proper for throwing showers of small missiles, and with the smoke thereof, causing great terror to the enemy. "By means of excavations made without noise, and forming tortuous and narrow ways, I have a means of reaching any given point, even though it be necessary to pass beneath rivers. "I can also construct covered wagons, secure and indestructible, which, entering among the enemy, will break the strongest bodies of men; and behind these the infantry can follow in safety and without impediment. "I can make mortars and fieldpieces of beautiful and useful shape, entirely different from those in common use. "For naval conflicts, I have means of making numerous instruments, offensive and defensive. I can also make powders and vapors in the offense of the enemy. "In times of peace I believe I could equal any other as regards works in architecture. I can prepare designs in buildings whether public or private, and also conduct water from one place to another. "Furthermore, I can execute works in sculpture, marble, bronze, or terra-cotta. In painting also, I can do what may be done, as well as any other, whosoever he may be. "I can also undertake the execution of the bronze horse which is a monument that will be to the perpetual glory of my lord your father of happy memory and of the illustrious house of Sforza. "And if any of the above-named things shall seem to any man impossible or impracticable, I am perfectly ready to make trial of them in whatever place you shall be pleased to command, commending myself to you with all possible humility." Leonardo of course went to work for the Duke. For sixteen years he busied himself with all the things indicated in his letter of application. He finished the construction of a cathedral. He built canal and locks. He drained marshes. He invented the machine gun and the breech loading cannon. He built, also, the statue of the horse and painted The Last Supper. B ut above all, he showed that true greatness contains the quality of serenity. He lived simply while becoming at the same time a legend among the people. A lordly figure, he never walked the streets but what all eyes followed him and all tongues whispered. But, beyond all doubt, he was lonely. Aloof from desires of princely splendor or hermitical detachment, he tread the common middle way, yet still above the vices with which many common men combat boredom or life's hostility. In his written pages, he refers to a woman but once and then only to mention her "fantastic face". There is no record of a love affair, nor even an intellectual companionship with a woman. Yet, in his instincts he certainly knew women well. Witness the Mona Lisa smile. The immortal gentleness and compassion on the faces of the Madonna and St. Anne in the painting of the same naiiie. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Leonardo Da Vinci knew no one, but rather everyone -- no thing, but all things, with an understanding and an instinctive discipline that made it impossible for him to portray -- in any of his many mediums -- anything but truth. When the Duke of Milan, Leonardo's sponsor, came finally to grief, Leonardo's comment was indicative of his character -- of the epic impersonality with which he viewed all things. The Duke's downfall was brought about by the French, who crossed the Alps and took Milan over. Leonardo wrote: "This day, the Duke lost his state, his possessions, his liberty -- and none of his works is completed." Leonardo made no comment on the fact that his own fortunes had been drained by the invasion. His work went on, however. He moved under the mantel of Caesar Borgia, of evil reputation, invented the diving bell, the swimming belt, then moved into a career that took him all over central Italy -- that of a cartographer. Of course, he excelled in this also. Paralyzed, in later years, he lost the use of his hands, but his mind went on working and, in the end, he wrote: "When I thought I had been learning how to live -- I had only been learning to die." This last he did, in his sixtyseventh year. And perhaps we are wrong in saying he lived before his time. Perhaps that will be said also, in future times, of greats who have enriched our present years. -- pwf By R. S. Richardson A New Major Planet ing astronomical announcement one could imagine would be the discovery of a new major planet within the present confines of the solar system. Impossible? Perhaps, but did you know that out beyond the orbit of Jupiter there is a body that at times presents the appearance of a sharply defined disk corresponding to a planet about the size of Mercury or Mars? Moreover this body moves in a path that is nearly circular. You might follow this body for weeks without noticing anything about it to distinguish it from one of the terrestrial planets. This body is one of the most peculiar in the solar system. It seems to be a sort of connecting link between comets and asteroids. In fact, it might be described as an asteroidal comet or a cometary asteroid, whichever name you prefer. Sometimes it is surrounded by a halo like a comet and at other times it shows simply a disk like a planet. And nobody knows when it is going to change from one to the other. This body was discovered on November #, #, by Schwassmann and Wachmann at Bergedorf, Germany. Apparently they picked it up accidentally on a photograph taken for some other purpose as so frequently happens in astronomy. On the discovery plate the body appeared as a starlike nucleus surrounded by a faint coma, the whole being of about magnitude #. A sixth magnitude star is the faintest you can see with your unaided eye. The faintest star you can photograph with the #-inch telescope is magnitude #. Because of the coma the body was called a comet and in the course of time acquired several aliases. For example, you will find it referred to as Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann I, Comet j #, and Comet # II. Suppose that we refer to it as # II for short. # II Troubled Astronomers Right from the start # II began giving astronomers trouble. When a new body is discovered computers try to determine its orbit as quickly as possible before it slips away and is lost again. Although this first orbit is only a rough approximation to the true one yet it is good enough to keep the body in sight for a couple of weeks or so. By that time astronomers will have gotten more observations which will enable a better orbit to be determined. Most comets move in orbits so elongated that they are nearly parabolas. It is standard practice merefore when a comet is discovered to assume that the orbit is a parabola and to issue predictions on that basis, the reason being that a parabolic orbit can be computed very quickly. And so computers went to work on # II assuming that here was another ordinary little comet moving in a nearly parabolic path. But when they began to compare notes they found that their orbits differed so widely that something must be radically wrong. They soon realized that the comet had fooled them completely. Instead of moving in an elongated cigar-shaped path it seemed to move in one that is nearly a circle. Later work has shown this view to be correct. Comet # II moves in a path that is less elongated than that of Mercury or Pluto. It takes # years to make a complete circuit around the sun, never coming nearand never receding farther than Since # II moves in a nearly circular path at such a great distance from the sun we should expect it to be the most stable and inert of comets. On the contrary, only a few months after discovery it began showing variations in brightness, not radical but enough to puzzle astronomers. As time went on more spectacular changes were observed that could not be passed off as errors of observation. It became apparent that here was a little body out in the cold of space that for no reason could change in brightness by a hundred fold within a space of less than a fortnight. The biggest flareup on record occurred in January #. According to Dr. G. Van Biesbroeck, who made the observations with the #inch reflector of the Yerkes Observatory on the night of January #, the comet showed a star-like nucleus from which emanated a broad fanshaped tail. On the next night it looked about the same but was somewhat fainter being about magnitude #. But when he examined the comet on January # he was astonished to find that it had jumped to magnitude #, appearing as a sharp nucleus surrounded by a coma. The following night it was magnitude # and the coma had doubled in extent. Then it began to grow fainter and by February # had dropped to magnitude # again. Brighter Than Halley's Comet The faintest that # II has ever been reported is about magnitude #. Thus what should be the most sluggish of all comets has varied through a range of nine magnitudes corresponding to a change in brightness of # times! Halley's comet is popularly regarded as a Celestial giant. Yet Halley's comet could not be seen even in the most powerful telescope at the distance of # II. Before we can attempt to explain changes of this kind we must first ask ourselves What is a comet? and What makes it shine? Astronomers are agreed that the nucleus of a comet consists of a loose collection of meteorites ranging in size from mere grains of sand up to boulders perhaps as big as a house or larger. As a comet nears the sun these particles become heated and begin to give oflf occluded gases, in somewhat the same way that carbon dioxide gas begins to boil out of a bottle of soda water when it is warmed. A comet will generally begin to show signs of life about the time it reaches the orbit of Mars. First a tail develops, then the nucleus appears and starts sending out jets, halos, and emission fans. Sometimes a comet gets so active it may split in two. A comet glows with a soft ghostly radiance quite different from the appearance we should expect if shown merely by reflected sunlight. What is the source of its luminosity? We now believe that comets shine for essentially the same reason that certain billboards gleam so brightly -- fluorescence. Ultra-violet light or ordinary sunlight shining upon certain chemicals will make them emit a glow usually of longer wave-length than the light they have absorbed. Similarly, the gases of a comet absorb light from the sun and then emit it agciin. For example, a carbon molecule in a comet absorbs a blue ray from sunlight and then emits the same blue ray into space. Thus the spectrum of a comet shows a series of bright bands due to the light emitted by different molecules that have been excited to luminosity by the sun. This theory has been quite successful in accounting for the brightness of comets. But when we try to apply it to # II we immediately run into difficulties. In the first place, it is hard to see how the sun could be very effective in boiling gases out of material that is always frozen solid. The highest temperature which the material could possibly have is about# F, and it is almost certainly much lower than this. It is particularly hard to see how there could be sudden violent emission of gas. Remember, too, that this body has such a small mass that it could not retain an atmosphere even if it were presented with one. Any gases issuing from it will be immediately lost. For the sake of argument, however, we will assume that there is enough gas around # II to form a fairly respectable halo. No Relation to Sun's Brightness We have seen that a comet shines by action of the sunlight falling upon it. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose that the sudden changes in brightness originate -- not in the comet -- but in the sun. Over large sunspots there often gas called flares believed to be rich in ultra-violet light. A flare may blaze to maximum brightness in twenty minutes and then gradually fade away in the course of an hour. At first glance these flares seem to be exactly what we need to account for the sudden changes in luminosity of the comet. So far, however, we have not been able to connect a single change in # II with a single change of any kind upon the sun. This does not necessarily mean that no such relationship exists. But it does mean that it has not as yet been proven. The trouble has been that when something extraordinary happened to the comet nobody was watching the sun and vice versa. It began to shape up as one of those cooperative problems calling for a combined effort by observers all around the world. Since # the sun has been kept under watch for nearly twenty-four hours a day. But observations of # II are fragmentary in character, two observers having done about # per cent of the work. It is significant to note, however, that the record flareup of January # occurred when the largest sunspot ever recorded was on the side of the sun turned toward the comet. As seen from the comet, this sunspot would have come into view on January #, passed across the disk, and vanished on February #. As we have seen. Van Biesbroeck reported the comet faint early in January but was amazed to find it around magnitude # on January #, #, and #. Then it was faint again by February #. Thus the comet was brightest when the greatest spot ever known was crossing the sun's disk as seen from the comet. Whether this was merely a coincidence nobody knows. Astronomers have always felt that they could explain almost anything in the sky if only they can get a look at its spectrum. Hence the feeling has prevailed that if they could once catch # II with the spectrograph when it was brit they might be able to clear up the mystery. About ten years ago such an opportunity occurred. On September #, #, a telegram went out from Harvard stating: "Comet # II suddenly brighter, spectra desirable." Observed from Lick Two photographs of the comet's spectrum were obtained with the #-inch Crossley reflector at the Lick Observatory. At that time the the sun and in the telescope resembled a #th magnitude nebulous star without a tail. The photographs showed nothing. Or nothing that was of much help in deciding what was happening on the comet. There were no bright lines and bands such as had been expected. Only the spectrum of reflected sunlight such as we would get from a cold body like the moon. Instead of clearing up the mystery the spectrograms had only served to deepen it. Comets and asteroids are generally regarded as two distinct types of bodies. Actually, however, the difference between them is not nearly so well marked as is popularly supposed. This is the reason why a newly discovered body is called an "object." Astronomers can't be sure how to classify it until they have had a chance to study it for awhile. There have been several asteroids reported surrounded by nebuSchroeter reported nebulosity around both Ceres and Pallas. Herschel also reported nebulosity around Juno but was unable to see any around Vesta. It is easy to discredit these old observations as being due to imperfections in the telescopes. Yet in # an experienced observer, J. Comas Sola, reported # Oceana and # Elsa surrounded by nebulosity, and # Jocasta has twice been photographed with a halo. Thus after a quarter of a century of observation the sudden outbursts of light emitted by Comet # II are still a mystery. The explanation most favored by astronomers is flares of ultra-violet radiation from the sun, but as we have seen this theory has encountered diflSculties. But it seems practically impossible to think of anything else. A series of explosions due to pentup radioactivity is scarcely worthy of serious consideration. It is tempting to let one's imagination roam and assume that # II is being used as a celestial proving ground for some new explosive or disintegrator ray. Perhaps this will serve as a working hypothesis until we can make the trip in a spaceship and find out the real reason. Let There Be Light ( Continued from page #) wick to soak, and held it out to Blackie. He lit the wick from his stick. "It bums real good, Blackie," the girl said, wrinkling her nose against the first oily smoke. "Gee, you're smart to catch one the first day out." "Tell them other dames to watch how they use it!" he warned. "This oughta last a month or more when we get him all emptied." He blew out the dying flame on the stick and dropped the charred wood thoughtfully to the floor. "Naw, I ain't so smart," he admitted, "or I'd figure a way to make one of them work the garden for us. Maybe someday -- but this kind won't do nothin' but fix that goddam road, an' what good's that to anybody?" His woman moved the burning lamp carefully to the center of the table. "Anyway, it's gonna be better'n last winter," she said. "We'll have lights now." I I Sir Editor: The best thing about your magazine is its limitless possibilities. Let me explain; Future can publish nothing but stories in the future; Galaxy requires a space setting; Space Science Fiction and Rocket Stories are strictly limited. All those need a certain type of story. If the public loses interest in that type of story -- blooey goes the magazine... Right now science fiction is going through a big boom, but just as sure as it is on top now it will go under. Look at all the new magazines around now -- only a continued and growing interest in the field can support them (And since we're dealing with cycles we must accept the fact that at one point the thing will reach its peak and then descend). After the field stops growing the magazines that survive and continue will be those that have two qualities : ( I ) good stories and (#) a policy that can adapt to the changing needs of the field. IP's title can symbolize any field of imaginative fiction. At this point it looks like I'm going to grow old along with IF. Best wishes for continued success, -- Dave Hammond Runnemede, N. J. We're striving for both of them, Dave -- in addition to making IF physically attractive, too. And thanks for sticking with us. We'll try to make it worth your while.    Dear Sir: Congratulations on a second fine effort in the May issue of IF magazine. In the short space of two issues, IF has attained heights seldom reached by other magazines even after years of issue. Jungle in the Sky, as far as plot went, was an exceptionally fine attempt and a pretty good piece of writing. Characterization, however, was not good, but the rest of the story made up for this. I found both Welcome, Martians! and The Beast remarkably like a couple of stories Ray Bradbury published a little while ago. The former had a definitely unique twist, but the latter, although interesting, was definitely commonplace. The rest of the stories were definitely up to par, as were the special features. I really think that you should do all you could in exposing and denouncing that absurdity known as the Shaver Mystery. But my joy in the reading of your magazine was dashed to earth when I turned to the letter column. Here my worst fears were realized. I noticed with a good deal of chagrin that someone asked for fanzine revues. Why not have revues of revues of fanzines and really drive the fen (sic) wild? Miss Steiner was right concerning the introduction of new authors. But it so often turns out that many of the new authors should have stuck to being fans. But, by all means, we do need some new faces in the. science fiction firmament. After agreeing with Miss Steiner, my eyes swept down to the next letter, and choked back a feeling of nausea. Here it was, another choice example of the inane drivel which one finds in the poorly printed pages of our cheapest pulp magazines. We have all the earmarks. Teen age slang like "terrif". Reference to stories as "cute". (Or dreamy, groovy, reety-vouty, mellow, or what have you?) I'd like to repeat, please try to keep stuff like this out of your publication. A little slang is fine, but please try to draw the line at utter infantilism. Congratulation again on a fine science fiction publication. -- Ben Jacopetti San Francisco, Calif.    Dear Mr. Fairman: The May issue of IF was even better than the first one and that's pretty good. You were right about that cover, it is good. The story Jungle in the Sky is even better if possible. And I'm not partial to anyone named Milton. I, myself, would like more longer stories, but you can't please everyone... I like the location of your contents page, it is right where it should be. Why don't you put in the number of words after each title, it would add to the enjoyment of your mag. But as it is, it's at the top of my stf reading list. -- Milton L. Olsen Corvallis, Ore. And we're going to try to keep it there!    Dear Ed: I have just finished reading May's ish of IF, and I want to express my opinion. I traded IF from a friend of mine and immediately after reading it, I placed IF as the #rd favorite on my sf mag list. Joiner is one of my favorites and I also liked the cover, that, thank heaven, is different from most of sf mags. Story ratings : #. Jungle in the Sky #. Welcome, Martians! #. Resurrection Seven #. It Takes a Thief #. Dreamer's World #. Infinity's Child #. The Beast #. The Revealing Pattern I would like to see this in print, but I think I won't. -- George Viksnins Philadelphia, Pa. Dear Ed: While the quality, of the May issue was as high as that of the March one I didn't enjoy it as much. I'm afraid the stories were rather stereotyped in the boy-girl angle. However, they made good reading and it is true that you can't please everybody. I would like to make one point clear. Ganymede is not the largest moon in the Solar System as Milton Lesser would have us believe in Jungle in the Sky. Saturn's moon Titan is the largest and it is also the only moon capable of holding an atmosphere. No hard feelings? In my humble opinion Infinity's Child was the top story this month. It presented a very interesting theory .and it seems to me that if so many people make references to the same thing as was showed in this story then there must be some truth in it... At first Welcome, Martians! seemed to be almost exactly like Ray Bradbury's They Landed on Mars but once I got into it the similarity disappeared. What a thing to have happen to you after just completing a # mile trip. A simple case of mistaken identity! This was another I liked. The Beast I didn't quite understand. Why wouldn't or couldn't the men shoot at the creature? It seems to me that they must have been hypnotized by said entity. Otherwise why wouldn't anyone kill something they knew was deadly whether it took the form of someone close to you or not. If you knew that it was only an illusion then what could hold you back? By now this letter is too long to even stand a chance of being printed but as long as I've had my say I'm satisfied. -- Pat Scholz Brooklyn, N. Y.    Dear Editor: You came up with some good stories in the May issue of IF. Congratulations to Milton Lesser for the excellent job he did in writing' Jungle in the Sky. This was by far the best story in the issue. Welcome, Martians! and It Takes a Thief were also well done. The only stories that I didn't like in the May issue were Infinity's Child and Dreamer's World. I enjoyed your personality sketch on Ray Palmer very much. Keep this a regular featifre in IF. Maybe you will turn monthly soon? -- Bob Goodney Ashland, Wis. descending onto a plonet without atmosphere -- no sound, no odors, no rain, no snow; never a cloud in the sky, never a breeze. Night and day the heavens ore black, end each day, according to earth standards, is a month long. In the velvety black heavens, the sun is a steady, bright, colorless light, end the earth is a huge globe, with oceans and continents easily definable. Hayden Planetarium such foscinating features os Adventures in Words, Your Favorite Quiz, Great Names You Should Know and other delightful broin teasers... For this wonderful excursion into puzzle pleosure, just osk your nearest news dealer. It's only # cents -- at all newsstondsl I -- #  TW! I   T Antciican Museum of Natural History Planetarium as one of several astronomical catastrophies that could some day end life on the Earth, here is an artist's conception of what would happen to us under expanding energy of the Sun. For expiring energy of the Sun, see inside back cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Anton Kurka, suggesting The Ultimate Re-sowing of the Human Race -- # AD IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publlshine Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright #. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as cond Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues: elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are Bctioo; any similarity to actual persons is coincidentaf. Not responsible for tmsoHcited art work or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale January #th The year # seems to be open season on that question. It's been the subject of articles in newspapers and magazines; whole volumes have been devoted to it; it has been discussed over the radio and on your television screen. Many of the leading scientists in America have had a whack at it. The pretty solid concensus is that we will have space travel, but as to when there seems to be a difference of opinion. Some authorities put it at ten years, others at fifteen or twenty, and still others say longer. The chances are that it will be longer -- much longer. Probably not before the year #. Why? Because there are too many elements involved other than the purely physical scientific evolvement of ways and means. First, let's consider the "tractor force" which has moved mankind through the ages, that which will move him on to another planet: that of dire physical necessity, or the fundamental law of survival. plored -- because he had to live. That's basic. Since the beginning of time, Man, singly at first and later in groups or nations, has ventured forth for the sustenance of life -- food, clothing, raw materials, commercial intercourse, economic security -- and he has accomplished it through free exploration or war. As Man progressed, by supplying himself with the basic requirements of life, he gave birth to thought -- spiritual, cultural, philosophical, scientific, political, economical -- which gave to the satisfaction of his animal hungers the veneer called civilization. Today Mankind has multiplied and explored and warred until it populates, in an alleged civilized state of mind, practically every known part of Earth -- at least those parts which are habitable -- eating off it, living off it, thinking off it and deriving varying degrees of comfort therefrom. And despite the plundered condition of that Earth habitable miles, and still enough wherewithal! to sustain the human race for at least another century. So, the all-compelling, motivating, driving force to push Man off the Earth, that of animal survival, is lacking -- at least for the present. why we can't expect space travel before # AD is universal political attitude. There's too much distrust, corruption, petty jealousy, narrow-mindedness and lack of unity in national intercourse today. Interspace travel is the Invasion of one planet by another, and there's got to be at least a fundamental unity between the peoples of the earth if they are going to invade other worlds. It's too big a job for one guy to accomplish by himself in a dark room in his basement. Scientific experiments with rockets reaching toward space -- propulsion, meteorological, survival -- have been pressed for military purposes. Every major nation has its own rocket or guided missile project working night and day to get the jump on its fellow nations. The United States is the best equipped nation in the world to launch a space project, but the moment our enemies hear about it they're going to do everything in their power to knock it down. If our enemies got the jump, the United States would jolly well have to do the same thing. Perhaps space travel will be born during the next war -- much as our rockets, jet propulsion and electronic discoveries came out of the Second World War. Perhaps the Third World War will be one to determine which nation Is to be the first to enter space. When that great, great war is over, the victor, if there be such, will be the ruler of Earth ; there will be no one to contest its right to the skies; and with what is learned and what is left, and with the cooperation of all, it can build ships to explore space and seek another planet. By that time it is very possible tliat such will be necessary -- Earth having burned up the essentials of life. money. It has been estimated that the cost to establish space transportation, with outer planet contact, right -- but how many of these astronomical denominations? The U. S. government is already # fully establish space travel or planetary contact on any permanent basis will probably cost as much as the entire national budget for a year -- how much is it running Take that awesome mountain of cabbage and add to it the extra cost of the super-secrecy required today, the calculated costs of sabotage, the cost of another war -- and there you have it. hardly before there is a basic necessity, a reasonable degree of world unity and a fabulous amount of money to back up the sweat and genius of science. Let's say, pretty soon. Perhaps fifty or sixty years. And that's a mighty short time away, almost infinitesimal, when milestone in the whole history of mankind. -- jlqTim # 'p j r dent of the Western Federation of Autonomous States, had made a number of campaign promises that nobody really expected him to fulfill, for after all, the campaign and the election were only ceremonies, and the President -- who had no real name of his own -- had been trained for the executive post since birth. He had been elected by a popular vote of # to #, the dissenters casting their negative by announcing that, for the sake of national unity, they refused to participate in any civilized activities during the President's term, whereupon they were admitted (volimtarily) to the camp for conscientious objectors. But now, two weeks after his inauguration, he seemed ready to make good the first and perhaps most difficult promise of the lot: to confer by televiewphone with Ivan Ivanovitch the Ninth, the Peoplesfriend and Vicar of the Asian Proletarian League. The President apparently meant to keep to himself the secret of his success in the difficult task of arranging the interview in spite of the lack of any diplomatic contact between the nations, in spite of the Hell Wall, and the interference stations which made even radio communication impossible between the two halves of the globe. Someone had sugfloated a note to Ivan IX in a bottle, and the suggestion, though ludicrous, seemed not at all unlikely. with himself as he sat with his staff of Primary Stand-ins in the study of his presidential palace. His face, of course, was invisible behind 'the golden mask of the official helmet, the mask of tragedy with its expression of pathos symbolizing the selfimmolation of public service -- as well as protecting the President's own personal visage from public view, and hence from assassination in unmasked private life, for not only was he publicly nameless, but also publicly faceless and publicly unknown as an individual. But despite the invisibility of his expression, his contentment became apparent by a certain briskness of gesticulation and a certain smugness in his voice as he spoke to the nine Stand-ins who were also bodyguards, council-members, and advisors to the chief executive. "Think of it, men," he sighed happily in his smooth tenor, slightly muffled by the mask. "Communication with the East -- after forty years of the Big Silence. A great moment in history, perhaps the greatest since the last peace-effort." The nine men nodded dutifully. The President looked around at them and chuckled. " 'Peace-effort'," he echoed, spitting the words out distinctly as if they were a pair of phonetic specimens. "Do you remember what it used to be called -- in the middle of the last century?" A brief silence, then a Stand-in frowned thoughtfully. "Called it 'war', didn't they, John?" "Precisely." The golden helmet nodded crisply. " 'War' -- and now 'peace-effort. Our semantics has progressed. Our present 'securityprobe' was once called 'lynch. 'Social-security once meant a limited insurance plan, not connoting euthanasia and sterilization for the ellie-moes. And that word 'elliemoe' -- once eleemosynary -- was once applied to institutions that took care of the handicapped." He waited for the burst of laughter to subside. A Stand-in, still chuckling, spoke up. "It's our institutions that have evolved, John." "True enough," the President agreed. "But as they changed, most of them kept their own names. Like 'the Presidency. It used to be rabble-chosen, as our ceremonies imply. Then the Qualifications Amendment that limited it to the psychologically fit. And then the Education Amendment prescribed other qualifying rules. And the Genetic Amendment, and the Selection Amendment, and finally the seclusion and depersonalization. Until it gradually got out of the rabble's hands, except symbolically." He paused. "Still, it's good to keep the old names. As long as the names don't change, the rabble is happy, and say, 'We have preserved the Pan-American way of life'." "While the rabble is really impotent," added a Stand-in. "Don't say that!" John Smith quickly erect on the self-conforming couch. "And if you believe it, you're a fool." His voice went sardonic. "Why don't you try abolishing me and find out?" "Sorry, Jcn. I didn't mean -- " T he president stood up and paced slowly toward the window where he stood gazing between the breeze-stirred drapes at the sunswept city of Acapulco and at the breakers rolling toward the distant beach. "No, my power is of the rabble," he confessed, "and I am their friend." He turned to look at them and laugh. "Should I build my pK)wer on men like you? Or the Secondary Stand-ins? Baa! For all your securities, you are still stooges. Of the rabble. Do you obey me because I control military force? Or because I control rabble? The latter I think. For despite precautions, military forces can be corrupted. Rabble cannot. They rule you through me, and I rule you through them. And I am their servant because I have to be. No tyrant can survive by oppression." A gloomy hush followed his words. It was still fourteen minutes before time for the televiewphone contact with Ivan Ivanovitch IX. The President turned back to the "window". He stared "outside" until he grew tired of the view. He pressed a button on the wall. The window went black. He pressed another button, which brought another view: Pike's Peak at sunset. As the sky gathered gray twilight, he twisted a dial and ran the sun back up again. The palace was built two hundred feet underground, and the study was a safe with walls of eight-inch steel. It lent a certain air of security. The historic moment was approaching. The Stand-ins seemed nervous. What changes had occurred behind the Hell Wall, what new developments in science, what political mutations? Only rumors came from beyond the Wall, since the last big peace-effort which had ended in stalemate and total isolation. The intelligence service did the best that it could, but the picture was fuzzy and incomplete. There was still "communism", but the word's meaning had apparently changed. It was said that the third Ivan had been a crafty opportunist but also a wise man who, although he did nothing to abolish absolutism, effected a bloody reformation in which the hair-splitting Marxist dogmatics had been purged. He appointed the most pragmatic men he could find to succeed them, and set the whole continental regime on the road to a harsh but practical utilitarian civilization. A slogan had leaked across the Wall recently: "There is no God but a Practical Man; there is no Law but a Best Solution," and it seemed to affirm that the third Ivan's influence had continued after his passing -- although the slogan itself was a dogma. And it might mean something quite nonliteral to the people who spoke it. The rabble of the West were still stirred to deep emotion by a thing that began, "When in the course of human events -- " and they saw nothing incongruous about Tertiary Stand-ins who quoted it in the name of the Federation's rule. But the unknown factor that disturbed the President most was not the present Asian political or economic situation, but rather, the state of scientific development, particularly as it applied to military matters. The forty years of noncommunication had not been spent in military stasis, at least not for the West. Sixty percent of the federal budget was still being spent for defense. Powerful new weapons were still being developed, and old ones pronounced obsolete. The seventh John Smith had even conspired to have a conspiracy against himself in Argentina, with resulting civil war, so that the weapons could be tested under actual battle conditions -- for the region had been overpopulated anyway. The results had been comforting -- but John the Sixteenth wanted to know more about what the enemy was doing. really only a globe-encircling belt of booby-trapped land and ocean, guarded from both sides -- had its political advantages, of course. The mysterious doings of the enemy, real and imagined, were a constant and suspenseful threat that made it easy for the Smiths to keep the rabble in hand. But for all the present Smith knew, the flireat might very well be real. He had to find out. It would also be a popular triumph he could toss to the rabble, bolstering his position with them, and thereby securing his hold on the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Stdnd-ins, who were becoming a little too presumptious of late. He had a plan in mind, vague, tentative, and subject to constant revision to suit events as they might begin to occur. He kept the plan's goal to himself, knowing that the Stand-ins would call it insane, dangerous, impossible. "John! We're picking up their station!" a Stand-in called. "It's a minute before time!" He left the window and walked calmly to the couch before the televiewphone, whose screen had come alive with the kaleidoscope patterns of the interference-station which sprang to life as soon as an enemy station tried to broadcast. "Have the fools cut that scatterstation!" he barked angrily. A Stand-in grabbed at a microphone, but before he made the call the interference stopped -- a few seconds before the appointed time. The screen revealed an empty desk and a wall behind, with a flag of the Asian League. No one was in the picture, which was slightly blurred by several relay stations. which had been set up on short notice for this one broadcast. A wall-clock peeped the hour in a childish voice; "Sixteen o'clock, Thirdday, Smithweek, also Accident-Prevention Week and ProbeSubversives Week; Happy #! Peep!" A man walked into the picture and sat down, facing John Smith eralls, and wearing a red rubber or plastic helmet-mask. The mask was the face of the first Soviet dictator, dead over a century ago. John's scalp bristled slightly beneath his own golden headdress. He tried to relax. The room was hushed. The opposing leaders stared at each other without speaking. Historic moment! Ivan Ivanovitch slowly lifted his hand and waved it in greeting. John Smith returned the gesture, then summoned courage to speak first. "You have translators at hand?" "I need none," the red mask growled in the Western tongue. "You are unable to speak my tongue. We shall speak yours." The President started. How could the Red know that he did not speak the RussoAsian dialect? "Very well." The President reached for a prepared text and began to read. "I requested this conference in the hope of establishing some form of contact between our peoples, through their duly constituted executive authorities. I hope that we can agree on a series of conferences, aimed eventually at a lessening of the tension between us. I do not propose that we alter our respective positions, nor to change our physical isolation from one another, except in the field of highlevel diplomacy and..." "Why?" grunted the Asian chieftain. gutteral monosyllable had been toneless and disinterested. The Red was going to draw him out, apparently. Very well, he would be frank -- for a time. "The answer should be evident, Peoplesfriend. I presume that your government spends a respectable sum for armaments. My government does likewise. The eventual aim should be economy..." "Is this a disarmament proposal?" The fellow was blunt. Smith cleared his throat. "Not at the present time, Peoplesfriend. I hoped that eventually we might be able to establish a mutual trust so that to some extent we could lessen the burden..." "Stop talking Achesonian, President. What do you want?" The President went rigid. "Very well," he said sarcastically, "I propose that we reduce military expenses by blowing the planet in half. The halves can circle each other as satellite twins, and we'll have achieved perfect isolation. It would seem more economical than the present course." He apparently had sized-up the Peoplesfriend correctly. The man threw back his masked head and laughed uproariously. "The Solomon solution!... ha ha!... Slice the baby in half!" the Stalin-mask chuckled. Then he paused to grow sober. "Too bad we can't do it, isn't it?" Diplomacy was dead, and he had made a mistake in trying to be polite. Diplomats were dead, and the art forgotten. Poker-game protocol had to apply here, and it was really the only sensible way: for two opponents to try to cheat each other honestly and jovially. He was glad the Soviet Worker's Vicar had not responded to his first politeness. "Anything else. Smith?" "We can discuss agenda later. What about the continued conferences?" "Suits me. I have nothing to lose. I am in a position to destroy you anyway, a position I have occupied for several years. I have not cared to do so, since you made no overt moves against us." A brief silence. Bluff? Smith wondered. Certainly bluff. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how far Ivan would brag. "I gather your atomic research has made rapid strides, for you to make such a boast," Smith ventured. "Not at all. In fact, my predecessor had it curtailed and limited to industrial applications. Our weapons program has become uni-directional, and extremely inexpensive. I'll tell you about it sometime." Smith's flesh crawled. Something was wrong here. The Asian leader was too much at his ease. His words meant nothing, of course. It had to be lying noise; it could be nothing else. A meeting such as this was not meant to communicate truth, but to discern an opponent's attitude and to try to hide one's own. "Let it suffice to say," the Red leader went on, "that we know more about you than you know about us. Our system has changed. A century ago, our continent suffered a blight of dogmatism and senseless butchery such as the world had never seen. Obviously, such conditions cannot endure. They did not. There was strong reaction and revolution within the framework of the old system. We have achieved a workable technological aristocratism, based on an empirical approach to problems. We realize that the final power is in the hands of the people -- and I use that archaic word in preference to your 'rabble' -- " "Are you trying to convert me to something?" John Smith growled acidly. "Not at all. I'm telling you our position." He paused for a moment, then inserted his fingertips under the edge of the mask. "Here is probably the best way to tell you." The Red leader ripped off the mask, revealing an impassive Oriental face with deepset black eyes and a glowering frown. The President sucked in his breath. It was unthinkable, that a man should expose himself to... but then, that was what he was trying to prove wasn't it? He kicked a foot-switch to kill the microphone circuit, and spoke quickly to the Stand-ins, knowing that the Asian could not see his lips move behind the golden mask. "Is Security Section guarding against spy circuits?" "Yes, John." "Then quick, get out of the room, all of you! Join the Secondaries." "But John, it'll leave you fingered! If nine of us leave, they'll know that the remaining one is -- " "Get on your masks and get out! I'm going to take mine off." "But John -- !" "Move, Subversive!" "You don't need to curse," the Stand-in muttered. The, nine men, out of the camera's field, donned golden helmets identical to Smith's, whistled six notes to the audio-combination, then slipped out the thick steel door as it clicked and came open. The Red was jeering at him quietly. "Afraid to take off your mask. President? The rabble? Or your self-appointed Stand-ins? Which frightens you, President -- " John Smith plucked at a latch under his chin, and the golden headdress came apart down the sides. He lifted it off and laid it casually aside, revealing a hard, blocky face, slightly in need of a shave, with cool blue eyes and blond brows. His hair was graying slightly at the temples, with a fortyish hairline. T he red nodded. "Greetings, human. I doubted that you would." "Why not?" growled Smith. "Because you fear your Standins, as appointees, not subject to your 'rabble'. Our ruling clique selects its own members, hut they are subject to popular approval or recall by referendum. I fear nothing from them." "Let's not compare our domestic forms, Peoplesfriend." "I wanted to point out," the Asian continued calmly, "tliat your system slipped into what it is without realizing it. A bad was allowed to grow worse. We, however were reacting against unreasonableness and stupidity within our own system. In the year #I -- " "I am aware of your hi.story before the Big Silence. May we discuss pertinent matters -- ?" The Asian stared at him sharply. The frown grew deeper. The hlack eyes looked haughty. "If you really want to discuss something, John Smith, suppose we arrange a personal meeting in a non-walled, neutral region? Say, Antarctica?" to dealing without a mask, let surprise fill his face before he caught himself. The Asian chuckled but said nothing. The President studied the border of the teleview screen for a moment. "I shall have to consider your proposal," he said dully. The Peoplesfriend nodded curtly, then suggested a time for the next interview. Smith revised it ahead to gain more time, and agreement was reached. The screen went blank ; the interview was at an end. The Sixteenth Smith took a slow, worried breath, then slowly donned the mask of oflRce again. He summoned the nine Primaries immediately. "That was dangerous, John," one of them warned him as they entered. "You may regret it. They knew you were in here alone. We're not all identical from the neckdown you know. When we come out, they might compare -- " He cut the man off with a curt gesture. "No time. We're in a bad situation. Maybe worse than I guess." He began pacing the floor and staring down at the metallifiber mg as he spoke. "He knows more about us than he should. It took me awhile to realize that he's speaking our latest language variations. A language changes idiom in forty years, and slang. He's got the latest phrases. 'Greetings, human' is one, like a rabbleman says when somebody softens up." "Spies?" "Maybe a whole network. I don't see how they could get them through the Wall, but -- maybe it's not so hard. Antarctic's open, as he pointed out." "What can we do about it, John? Smith stopped pacing, popped his knuckles hard, stared at them. "Assemble Congress. Securityprobe. It's the only answer. Let the 'Rabble's Parliament' mn their own inquisition. They were always good at purging themselves. Start a big spy-scare, and keep it in the channels. I'll lead with a message to the rabble." He paused, the tragedy mask gaping at them. "You won't like this, but I'm having the Standins probed too. The Presidency is not immune." A muttering of indignation. Some of them went white. No one protested however. "No witch-hunt in this group, however," he assured them. "I'll veto anything that looks unfair for the Primaries, but-" He paused and rang the word again. " -- but -- there will be no leniency tolerated from here on down, if Congress thinks it's found a spy, it can execute him on the spot -- and I won't lift a finger. This has got to be rooted out and burned." He began to pace again. He began barking crisp orders for specific details of the probe, or rather, for the campaign that would start the probe. The rabble were better at witch-hunts than a government was. Congress had not been assembled for fifteen years, since there had been nothing suspicious to investigate, but once it was called to duty, heads would roll -- some of them literally. If some innocent people were hurt, the rabble could only blame themselves, for their own enthusiasm in ruthlessly searching out the underground enemy. Smith couldn't worry about that. If an Asian spy-system were operating in the continent, it had to be crushed quickly. propaganda and string-pulling plans for them, he turned to the other matter -- the Red leader's boast of ability to conquer the West. "It's probably foolish talk, but we don't know their present psychology. Double production on our most impressive weapons. Give the artificial-satellite program all the money it wants, and get them moving on it. I want a missile-launching site in space before the end of the year. Pay particular attention to depopulation weapons for use against Industrial areas. We may have to strike in a hurry. We've been fools -- coasting this way, feeling secure behind the Wall." "You're not contemplating another peace-effort, John?" gasped an elderly Stand-in. "I'm contemplating survival!" the leader snapped. "I don't know that we're in serious danger, but if it takes a peace-effort to make sure, then we'll start one. So fast it'll knock out their industry before they know we've hit them." He stood frozen for a moment, the mask lifted proudly erect. "By Ike, I love the West! And it's not going to suffer any creeping eruption while I'm at its head!" When the President had finished and was ready to leave, the others started donning their masks again. "Just a minute," he grunted. "Number Six." One of the men, about the President's size and build, looked up quickly. "Yes, John?" "Your cloak is stained at the left shoulder. Grease?" Six inspected it curiously, then nodded. "I was Inspecting a machine shop, and -- " "Never mind. Trade cloaks with me." "Why, if -- " Six stopped. His face lost color. "But the others -- might have -- " "Precisely." Six unclasped it slowly and handed it to the Sixteenth Smith, accepting the President's in return. His face was set in rigid lines, but he made no further protest. Masked and prepared, a Standin whistled a tune to the door, which had changed its combination since the last time. The tumblers clicked, and they walked out into a large auditorium containing two himdred Secondary Stand-ins, all wearing the official mask. If a Secondary ever wanted to assassinate the President, one shot would give him a single chance in ten as they filed through the door. "Mill about!" bellowed a Sergeant-at-Arms, and the two hundred began wandering among themselves in the big room, a queer porridge, stirred clumsily but violently. The Primaries and the President lost themselves in the throng. For ten minutes the room milled and circulated. "Unmask!" bellowed the crier. The two hundred and ten promptly removed their helmets and placed them on the floor. The President was unmasked and unknown -- unmarked except by a certain physical peculiarity that could be checked only by a physician, in case the authenticity of the presidential person was challenged, as it frequently was. Then the Secondaries went out to lose themselves in a larger throng of Tertiaries, and the group split randomly to take the various underground highways to their homes. The President entered his house in the suburbs of Dia City, hugged the children, and kissed his wife. John Smith was profoundly disturbed. During the years of the Big Silence, a feeling of uneasy security had evolved. The Federation had been in isolation too long, and the East had become a mysterious unknown. The Presidency had oscillated between suspicious unease and smug confidence, depending perhaps upon the personality of the particular president more than anything else. The mysteriousness of the foe had been used politically to good advantage by every president selected to office, and the Sixteenth Smith had intended to so use it. But now he vaguely regretted it. T he tenure of office was still four years, and he could not help feeling that if he had maintained the intercontinental silence, he would not have had to worry about the spy-matter. If the hemisphere had been infiltrated, the subversive work had not begun yesterday. It had probably been going on for years, during several administrations, and the plans of the East, if any, would perhaps not come to a climax for several more years. He felt himself in the position of a man who suffered no pain as yet, but learned that he had an incurable disease. Why did he have to find out? But now that the danger was apparent, he had to go ahead and fight it instead of allowing it to pass on to the next John Smith. He made a stirring speech lo Congress when it convened. The cowled figures of the people's representatives sat like gloomy gray shadows in the tiers of seats around the great amphitheatre under the night sky; the symbolic torches threw fluttering black shadows among their ranks. The sight always made him shiver. Their cowls and robes had been affected during the last great peace-effort, at which time they had been impregnated with lead to protect against bombradiation, but the garb of office had endured for ceremonial reasons. There was still a 'Senate and a House, the former acting chiefly as an investigating body, the latter serving a legislative function in accordance with the rabble-code, which no longer applied to the Executive, being chiefly concerned with matten of rabble morals and police-functions. Its duties could mostly be handled by mail and televiewphone voting, so that it seldom convened in the physical sense. President John quoted freely from the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the MacArthur Speech to Congress, and the immortal words of the first John Smith in his Shall We Submit? which began; "If thy brother the son of thy mother, or thy son, or daughters, or thy wife, or thy friend whom thou lovest, would persuade thee secretly, saying, 'Let us go and serve strange gods', neither let thy eyes spare him nor conceal him, but thou shalt presently put him to death!" The speech was televised to the rabble, and for that matter, one of the Stand-ins delivered the actual address to protect the President who was present on the platform among the ranks of Primaries and Secondaries, although not even these officials were aware of it. The address was honestly an emotional one, not bothering with any attempt at logical analysis. None was needed. Congress was always eager to investigate subversion. It was good political publicity, and about the only congressional activity that could command public attention and interest. The cheers were rousing and prolonged. When it was over, the Speaker and the President of the Senate both made brief addresses to set the machinery in motion. ceedings with deep satisfaction. But as time wore on, he began to wonder how many spies were truly being apprehended. Among the many thousands who were brought to justice, only sixty-nine actually confessed to espionage, and over half of them, upon being subjected to psychiatric examination, proved to be neurotic publicity-seekers who would have confessed to anything sufficiently dramatic. Twenty-seven of them were psychiatrically cleared, but even so, their stories broke down when questioned under hypnosis or hypnotic drugs, except for seven who, although constantly maintaining their guilt, could not substantiate one another's claims, nor furnish any evidence which might lead to ffie discovery of a well-organized espionage network. John Smith was baffled. He was particularly baffled by the disappearance of seventeen men in key positions, who, upon being mentioned as possible candidates for the probe, immediately vanished into thin air, leaving no trace. It seemed to Smith, upon reading the individual reports, that many of them would have been absolved before their cases got beyond the deputy level, so flimsy were the accusations made against them. But they had not waited to find out. Two were obviously guilty of something. One had murdered a deputy who came to question him, then fled in a private plane, last seen heading out to sea. He had apparently run out of fuel over the ocean and crashed. The second man, an ordnance officer at the proving ground, had spectacularly committed suicide by exploding an atomic artillery shell, vaporizing himself and certain key comrades including his superior officer. Here, the President felt, was something really ominous. The disappearances and the suicides spelled careful discipline and planning. Their records had been impeccable. The accusations seemed absurd. If they were agents, they had done nothing but sit in their positions and wait for an appointed time. The possibilities were frightening, but evidence was inconclusive and led nowhere. Nevertheless, the house-( leaning continued. On Fourthday of Traffic Safety Week, which was also Eat More Corn-Popsies Week, John Smith vitch IX again at the appointed time. Contrary to all traditions, he again ordered the Stand-ins -- temporarily eight in number, since Number Six had died mysteriously in the bathtub -- to leave the study so that he might unmask. Promptly at sixteen o'clock the Asian's face -- or rather his ceremonial mask -- came on the screen. But seeing the Westerner's square-cut visage smiling at him sourly,he promptly removed the covering to reveal his Oriental face. The exchange of greetings was curt. " I see by recent events," said Ivan, "that you are nervous on your throne. For the sake of your own people, let me warn you that we have no designs on your autonomy unless you become aggressive toward us. The real difficulty, as revealed by your purge, is that you feel insecure, and insecurity makes you unpredictable. I do not, of course, expect you to be trustworthy. But insecurity sometimes breeds inpulsiveness. If you are to strike out blindly, perhaps the talks had best be broken off." held his temper. The man's presumption was intolerable. Further, he knew about the probe, knowledge which could only come from espionage. "I have become aware," the President said firmly, "that you have managed to establish a spysystem on this continent. If you wish better relations, you will have the activity stop at once." "I don't know what you're talking about," said the Peoplesfriend with a bland smile. "I might point out however that at least forty of your spies are either killed while trying to cross the Wall, or are apprehended after they manage to enter my regime." "The accusation is too ridiculous to deny," Smith lied. "We have no desire to pry into your activities. We wish only to maintain the status quo." The exchange continued, charges and countercharges and denials. Neither side expected truth or honesty, and the game was as old as civilization. Neither expected to be believed, although the press of both nations would heatedly condemn the other's lack of good faith. The ethical side of the affair was for the rabble to consider, for only the rabble cared about such things. The real task was to ferret out the enemy's attitudes and intentions without revealing one's own. a little, and lost a little too. He had found many hints of subversive activity, but had betrayed his own lack of certainty by reacting so swiftly to it. Ivan IX, on the other hand, seemed too much at ease, too secure, and even impertinent. "At our last meeting," said the Asian, "I suggested a meeting between ourselves. Have you given thought to the matter?" "I have given it thought," said the President, "and will agree to the proposal provided you come to this country. The meeting will be held at my capitol." "Which you change at random intervals, I notice," purred Ivan with a hland smile. "For security reasons?" "You could only know that by espionage!" Smith snapped. "Your proposal of course is outrageous. The only sensible place for the meeting is in Singapore." "That is out of the question. I must insist on the capitol of my government as the only acceptable meeting-place. My government in contacting yours put itself in the position of extending an invitation, a position from which we could not depart without loss of dignity." "I suggest we delay the matter then," grunted the Peoplesfriend. "And talk about the agenda for such a meeting. What did you have in mind?" "I have already stated our general aims as being a reduction of armament expenses, beneficial to both sides. I think you agree?" "Not necessarily, since our budget is already rather low. However, make your specific proposals, and I shall consider them. Further economy, where not injurious to security, is always desirable." "I propose, then, that we discuss a method whereby agreement might be reached on a plan to divxilge the nature of our respective armaments, including number, nature, and purpose of each weaponclass, as a foundation for discussions relating to reductions." Smith waited for a flat "no" to the suggestion. The Asian leader apparently knew a great deal more about the West's armaments than Smith knew about the East. The Peoplesfriend had nothing to gain by revealing the military strength of his own hemisphere. But he paused, watching Smith with an expressionless stare. "I accept that for further consideration, at least," Ivan said at last. tion and suspicion. Suspicion won. "Of course there must be some method to assure that accurate figures are divulged." "That could probably be settled." Again the President was shocked. It was all too easy. Something was rotten about the whole thing. The Peoplesfriend agreed too readily to things that seemed to be to his disadvantage. The discussion continued for several hours, during which both men presented viewpoints and postponed agreement until a later meeting. "Stockpiles of fissionable material," said the President, "which could quickly be converted to weapons use should also be discussed." Ivan frowned. "I mentioned before that we have no need of atomic armaments, nor any plans for building them. Our defense is secured by something entirely different, a weapon which serves an industrial function in time of peace, and a weapon which I might add was largely responsible for our abandoning Marxism. A single discovery, Andrei Sorkin's, made communist doctrine not only a wrong solution, but a wrong solution to a problem that had ceased to exist." "What problem are you referring to?" "The use of human beings as automatic devices in a corporate machine -- the social-structure of industry, in which the worker was caught and bolted down and expected to perform a single, highly specialized task. That of course, is almost a definition of the word 'proletarian'. We no longer have a true proletariat. For that reason, we are no longer Marxist -- although the name 'communist' has survived with its meaning changed." The conference ended after setting the time for another meeting. been groping in the dark, because of the information-vacuum that kept him from even making a reasonable guess as to Ivan's real aims. He kept feeling vaguely that Ivan was just playing along, reacting according to the opportunity of the moment, not particularly caring what Smith did next. But leaders of states just did not proceed so carelessly -- not unless they were fools, or unless they were supremely confident in the ultimate outcome. T he intelligence service analysis of his latest conversation with Ivan gave him something to think about later however. Andrei Sorkin had been a physicist who had done considerable work in crystal-structure before the Big Silence had cut off knowledge of his activities from the West. Further, the Peoplesfriend's references to industrial usage, coupled with his remarks about specialized labor, seemed to suggest that the East had made great strides in servo-mechanisms and auto-control devices. But control devices were not weapons in themselves. Electronic rocketpilots were not weapons unless there were rockets for them to fly. Automatic target-trackers were not weapons unless they guided a weapon to shoot at the target. It made little sense; he concluded that Ivan had not meant it to make much sense. Smith could only interpret it as meaning: "Our weapons are marvelously controlled ; therefore we need fewer of them." On the probe front, events were about as usual. The lists of suspects and convictions grew bulky enough to keep a large office staff busy with details. More sinister, in the President's judgment, was the small list of suspects who vanished or committed suicide at the slightest hint of suspicion. The list grew at a slow but steady pace. John assumed that these were certainly guilty. And thorough, searching inquiries into their past activities, were made. These post mortem probes revealed nothing. Their records were clean. Their families, friends, relatives, and even their ancestors were above suspicion. If they had sold out to the enemy, they had given him nothing in return for his wages except perhaps a promise to be fulfilled on a Deadline Day. He called the Secretary of Defense and demanded a screening procedure be adopted for future personnel, a procedure which would be aimed at selecting men with fanatic loyalty, rather than merely guarding against treason. "We seem to already have something," murmured the Secretary, a slender, graying gentleman with aristocratic features. "The incidents at the satellite-project seem to indicate that there's something they don't like about our ordinary testing methods." "Eh? How do you mean?" "Three men -- volunteers for the project -- vanished as soon as they found out that they had to submit to all the physicals, mental tests, and so forth. I don't know what they were afraid of. They were already on the reservation. Found out they'd have to be tested again, and vanished. One a known suicide, but the body's still in the river." " 'Tested again'?" the President echoed. "That's right, John. They'd gone through it before. This was just a recheck for this particular project. Of course, I don't know that they were agents." "Mmm ! So they can't stand a recheck. All right, recheck everybody." "John! A third of the population works for the government!" "I mean everybody connected with new projects, the most important installations. This might be a weapon for us." When he received the Secretary's report a week later, John grinned happily. The rechecks had begun. and the disappearances were mounting. But the grin faded when he read the rest of it. Two of the men had been caught attempting to escape. They had been lodged in a local jail to await transfer to the capitol. During the night, the jailer became aware of a blinding light from the cell-blocks and the stench of burnt organic matter. By the time he reached their cells, the men were gone, and there were only sickening fumes, charred ashes, and a pair of red-hot patches on the floor. Somehow they had gotten incendiary materials into their cells, and the cremation was complete -- too complete to be credible. Then the disappearances began to taper off -- until finally, after a few weeks, they ceased completely. He wondered ; were the culprits all ferretted out, or had some of them managed to get around the rechecks? He had spoken to the Asian leader several times, and Ivan was growing curt, even bitingly nasty at times. The President hopefully interpreted it as a sign that his probe was successful enough to worry the Red. He tried to strengthen his position with respect to the proposed conferences, and made only minor concessions such as agreeing to a coastal city in Mexico as the site, rather than the shifting capitol. Ivan sneeringly made equally minute adjustments eastward from Singapore. There was apparently going to be a deadlock, and John was somehow not sorry. Then the cold-eyed face on the screen did an abrupt about-face, and announced, "I propose that the delegates, including the leaders of both states, meet at a site of your selection in either of the neutral polar regions, not later than Seventhday of Veto Week -- which, I think is your Fried Pie Week? -- and come prepared to discuss and exchange information relating to size of armament-inventories and future plans. This is my last proposal." T hey stared at each other coldly. John started to utter a refusal, then paused. Seventhday of... it was one day before the satellite program began moving into space. If he could keep the Eastern Leader tied up for a few weeks afterwards -- 'T'U consider your proposal and give you a reply tomorrow," he said bluntly. The Peoplesfriend gave him a curt nod and clicked off the screen. John chuckled. The enemy's espionage program was evidently geting badly hurt. About one percent of the West's population had been executed, imprisoned, or shifted to other jobs as a result of the congressional probe. The one percent probably included quite a few guilty citizens. "Rodner, I want a Strike-Day set, a full-scale blitz-operation readied as soon as possible," he told the defense-chief. "I know that a lot of your target information is forty years old, but work out the best plan you can. A depopulation strike, perhaps; there are only two opinions in the world, so 'worldopinion' is not one of the things we need to consider." The Defense Secretary caught his breath and sat stiffly erect. "War?" he gasped. "Don't use that word.""Sorry, peace-effort." "No. At least I hope not. I want a gun aimed at them as a bargaining point. But I want it to be a damned big gun, and one that's capable of shattering every major city in the East on a few hours' notice. How effective could you make it -- if you had to?" The Secretary frowned doubtfully and tugged at his ear. "Well, John, our strategic command has kept a running plan in effect, revising it to allow for every tidbit of information we can get. Planning continental blitzes is a favorite pasttime around high-level strategic commands; it keeps the boys in trim. A plan could probably be agreed upon in a very short time, but its nature would depend on your earliest deadline date." "Two dates," grunted the tragedy-mask. "The first is Seventhday, Fried Pie Week. I want a maximum possible effort readied by then, with a plan that allows for a possible stand-by at that date, and a continued build-up to a greater maximum -- to be reached when the satellite station is in space and ready for battle. Include the station in the extended plan." "This is a very dangerous business, John." The mask whirled. "Do you presume to -- ?" "No, Sir. The strike-effort will be prepared as soon as possible." He bowed slightly, then left the presidential study-vault. Smith turned to gaze at his Stand-ins. "You will go," he said. "all of you, to the examining authorities for the standard loyalty tests and psych-phys rechecks." The nine masked figures glanced at one another in surprise, then nodded. There were no protests. The following day he had only seven Stand-ins; Four and Eight had been trapped in a burning building on the outskirts of the rabble city, and their remains had not been found. Smith kept a tight cork on his rage, but it seethed inside him and threatened to burn through as the time approached to speak again with Ivan Ivanovitch IX. The enemy's infiltration into the very ranks of the Presidency robbed him even of dignity. Furthermore, now that the two scoundrels were uncovered, and dead, he remembered a very unpleasant but significant fact: he had, even before his "election" by the rabble, discussed the televiewphone conferences with the Primaries. The idea of contacting Ivan had started, as most ideas start, from some small seed or other that could scarcely be remembered, some off-hand reference to the costly aspects of the Big Silence perhaps, and it had grown into the plan for contact. But how had the idea first come to him? Had one of the guilty Stand-ins perhaps planted the seed in his mind? After he proposed it, they had seemed demurring at first, but not too long. Grimly, he realized that the idea might have originated on the far side of the Pacific. "Who, pray, is the potter, and who the pot?" he grunted, glowering at the nearest Stand-in. "I beg your pardon?" answered the man, who could not . see the glower for the mask. "Khayyam, you fool!" "Oh -- " "Sixteen o'clock!" cheeped the timepiece on the wall. "Fifthday, Anti-Rabies Week, Practice-Eugenics Week; Happy #; Peep!" John did not bother to remove his mask. He sat down quickly and began speaking before any greeting could be exchanged. "I have decided to accept your last proposal. I specify the meeting place as the deserted weather station at the old settlement of Tharviana in the Byrd-Ellsworth Sector of Antarctica. Date to be Seventhday of Fried Pie Week. Advance cadres of personnel from both sides should meet at the side two weeks earlier to make repairs and preparations. Do you agree?" Ivan nodded impatiently, his dark eyes watching the President closely. Smith went on to suggest limits for the size of both cadres, their equipment, and the kind of transportation. Ivan made only one suggestion: that the details, such as permissible arms and standards of conduct, be left to the cadre commanders to settle between themselves before the leaders' parties arrived. "Your continual espionage activities," Smith said coldly, "do not recommend your government as one to be trusted in the matter of agreements without guarantees. My cadre commander will be instructed as to details." The Asian grunted. "You speak of trust, yet violate it in advance by preparing an assault against us." They glared at each other. After a few more words, the conversation ended abruptly, and the matter was tentatively settled. It was Antarctic Summer. The sim lay low in the north, but clouds threatened to obscure it, and a forbidding coastline hulked under the ugly sky. A small group of ships sulked to the east, and watched another group that sulked to the west. Two rows of buoys marked an icefree strip across the choppy face of the sea. A speck appeared in the north, grew larger, became a giant seaplane. It circled once, then swooped majestically down between the rows of buoys, its atomic-fired jets breathing heat over the water. It slid between streamers of spray until slowly it came to a coasting halt and rode on the rise and the fall of the sea. A section of its back rolled open. It pushed a helicopter up into view. The helicopter unfolded its rotors, spun them, then climbed lazily aloft like a beetle that had ridden the eagle. It soared, and travelled inland. The sea-plane taxied west to join one group of ships. The helicopter landed near a long, windowlcss concrete building which lay in the shadow of an old control-tower's skeleton. The tower was twisted awry, and the concrete was pock-marked by shrapnel or bullets dating back to one of the peace-efforts. The President, two Stand-ins, and the pilot climbed from the helicopter. A small detachment of troops presented arms. The cadre commander, a major general, approached the delegation formally, gave it a salute, and took the President's hand. "The Peoplesfriend is already in the conference hall. Sir, with several of his aides. Do you vish to enter now, or -- " "Where are their troops?" "Over there. Sir. As you know, we could not agree to completely disarm the site. Only inside the building itself." "Any unpleasantness?" "No, sir. Their mei are well-disciplined." "Then let's go and get started. I assume that you're in constant contact with the capitol?" "Yes, Sir. Televiewphone relay chain all the way up." John looked around. The Peoplesfriend's helicopter was parked not far away, and beyond it stood a platoon of the Peoplesfriend's troops, lightly armed as his own. An Asian and a Western guard flanked the entrance to the building, but their only weapons were police-clubs. The party entered slowly and stood for a moment just inside the heavy door that swung closed behind them. John Smith removed his mask. "Greetings, hiunan." T he dull voice jcalled it from the far end of the gloomy hall where Ivan Ivanovitch IX sat facing him, flanked by a pair of aides, at a long, plain table. John Smith him. Curt bows were exchanged, but no handshakes. The Western delegation took their seats. John nudged the Stand-in on his right, who immediately opened a portfolio to extract a sheaf of papers. "Would you care to exchange prepared statements to begin with?" Smith asked coolly. "We have no -- " The Peoplesfriend stopped, smirked coldly at his deputies but continued to frown. He peered thoughtfully at his huge knuckles for a moment, then nodded slowly. "A statement -- yes." John slid a section of the sheaf of papers to the Peoplesfriend. The Red leader ignored them, spoke to a deputy curtly. "Give me a sheet of paper." The deputy fumbled in a thin briefcase, shook his head and muttered. Finally he found a dog-eared sheet with only a few lines typed across the top. He glanced questioningly at his leader. Ivan snatched it with a low grunt, tore off the good half, produced a stubby, gnawed pencil, and wrote slowly as if his hands were cramped with arthritis. John could see the big block-letters but not the words. "My prepared statement," said the Peoplesfriend. With that he pushed the scrap of paper across the table. John stared, and felt the blood leaving his face. The prepared statement said : "Is this a joke?" he growled, keeping his voice calm. "You cannot mean that you reject proposals before they are made? I fail to see the humor in -- " "There is no humor." John pushed back his chair, glanced at his men. "Gentlemen, it would appear that we have come to the bottom of the world for nothing. I think we had better retire to discuss -- " "Sit down," the Asian growled. "Why -- " The President stopped. One of the Red deputies had produced a gun. He sat, and stared coldly at the eastern leader. "Have your man dispose of that weapon. This is a conference table." The Peoplesfriend grunted an order to the other deputy instead. "Search them." "Stay back," Smith droned. "I can kill you all quite easily." The deputy hesitated. The leader started laughing, then checked it. "May I ask how?" John smiled. "Stay back, or you will find out too quickly." He unzipped his heavy Arctic clothing, removed a heavy container, shaped to conform to his chest, and laid it on the table. A cord ran from the container into his sleeve. The Peoplesfriend laughed. "High explosives? You would not set them off. However -- Jacob, let them keep their weapons. This will be over shortly." They glared at each other for a moment. "There is no conference?" "There is no conference." "Then why this farce?" The eastern leader wore a tight smile. He glanced at his watch, began counting backwards; "Seven, six, five, four -- " When he reached zero, there was a long pause; then a sharp whistle from outside. "Your men are now disarmed," said the Asian. "Your cadre commander is ours." "Impossible! The recheck -- " "He joined us since the recheck. Further, three of your televiewphone stations in the relay chain are ours, and are relaying recorded broadcasts prepared especially for the purpose." "I don't believe it!" tion, your entire defense system will be in our hands within six days -- while your nation imagines that we are here conferring on disarmament." "Ridiculous !" the President sputtered. "No system of infiltration or subversion could -- " "Your people were not subverted, Smith. They were merely replaced by ours. Your two Stand-ins, for instance, the ones that died in the fire. They were not the original men." "You could not possibly find exact doubles -- " Something about the Asian's smile made his voice taper off. He picked up the container of explosives and prepared to rise. "I am going to walk out. And you are going with me. We will return in a helicopter to my plane. Let me explain this mechanism. I have no control over the detonator, for it is not a suicide device. The detonator can be triggered only by either of two events." "Which are?" The Peoplesfriend was smiling. "The relay would be closed by a sudden drop in my arterial pressure. Or by an attempt to remove it without knowing how. I am going out, and you are going with me." "Why?" "Because I am about to reach in my pocket and produce a gun. Your deputy cannot shoot without blasting a fifty-foot crater where this building now rests." Gingerly, while he watched the wavering deputy, he made good the promise. He kept the snub-nosed automatic aimed at the easterner's belly. But the Peoplesfriend continued to smile. "May I say something before we go?" There was a sour mockery about it that made Smith pause. He nodded slowly. "I hoped to keep you here alive, so that we would not have to destroy the whole mission, including the ships. Of course, when the building is blown up, your little fleet will see and hear and try to respond, and we shall have to destroy it before word can be gotten to your capital. Our plans included that possibility, but it is unfortunate." "Our aircraft will -- " "You do not seem to realize the nature of our weapons yet. And there is no harm in telling you now, I suppose." "Well?" "We have a microscopic crystalthem can be packed into a few cubic inches. The crystals are minute tetrahedrons, with each pointed comer an electrical contact. And there is a 'method for arranging them in circuits without individual attention to each connection. It involves certain techniques in electro-plating and the growing of crystals." Smith glanced questioningly at one of his Stand-ins, a weapons expert. The man shook his head. "I can see," he muttered, "how it might replace a lot of bulky circuit elements in some electronics work -- particularly computers and servo-mechanisms -- but -- " "Indeed," said Ivan, "We have built many so-called 'thinkingmachines' no larger than a human brain." "For self-piloting weapons, I suppose?" asked the Stand-in. "For self-piloting weapons." "I fail to see how this could do what you seem to think." The Peoplesfriend snorted. "Jacob -- ?" He nodded to the deputy, who immediately fumbled in his pocket, found a penknife, opened it, and handed it to Ivan. He laid his finger on the table. He cut it off at the second joint with the penknife. There was no blood. Flesh of soft plastic. Tendons of nylon. Bones of bakelite. "Our leader," the robot said, "is still in Singapore." The President looked at the robot and a great, weariness swept over him. Suddenly it all seemed futile -- a senseless game, played by madmen, dancing over countless graves -- playing tag among the tombstones. Check and checkmate. But always there was a way out. Never a final move. Life eternal and with life, the eternal plotting and scheming. And never a final victor. Almost regretfully, the President turned his mind back to the affair at hand. No one knew, no one cared. For a great lethargy was overcoming the people and their only salvation was -- Gentleman By Rory Magill T he explosion brought "I was looking out the window. Jim Peters upright in bed. He Didn't see no flash." sat there, leaning back on the heels "Must have been further away of his hands, blinking stupidly at than it seemed." the wall. His vision cleared and he This last was spoken hopefully, looked down at Myra, just stirring and reflected the mood of all the beside him. Myra opened her eyes, people. Maybe it wasn't the bomb Jim said, "Did you feel that?" after all. Myra yawned. "I thought I was Oddly, no one had thought to dreaming. It was an explosion or consult a radio. The thought struck something, wasn't it?" them as a group and they broke Jim's lips set grimly. After ten into single and double units again years of cold war, there was only -- huriying back into the houses, one appropriate observation, and Lights began coming on here and he made it. "I guess maybe this is there. it." Jim Peters took Myra's hand, unAs by common agreement, they consciously, as they hurried up the got out of bed and pulled on their porch steps. "Hu would know," robes. They went downstairs and Jim said. "I kind of wish Hugh was out into the warm summer night, here." Other people had come out of their Myra laughed lightly -- a calcuhomes also. Shadowy figures moved lated laugh, meant to disguise the and collected in the darkness. gravity of this terrible thing. "Sounded right on top of us." "That's not very patriotic, Jim. If The fifth "one" exploded in the Mexican desert. that was the bomb, Hugh will be kept busy making other bombs to send back to them." "But he'd know. I'll bet he could tell just by the sound of it." Jim smiled quietly in the darkness -- proudly. It wasn't everybody who had a genius for a brother. A nuclear scientist didn't happen in every family. Hugh was somebody to be proud of. They turned on the radio and sat huddled in front of it. The tubes warmed with maddening slowness. Then there came the deliberately impersonal voice of the announcer:' " -- on the strength of reports now in, it appears the enemy bungled badly. Instead of crippling the nation, they succeeded only in alerting it. The bombs -- at this time there appear to have been five of them dropped -- formed a straight north-south line across western United States. One detonated close to the Idaho-Utah line. The other four were placed at almost equidistant points to the south -- the fifth bomb, according to first reports, exploding in a Mexican desert. We have been informed that Galas, Utah, a town of nine hundred persons, has been completely annihilated. For further reports, keep tuned to this station." A dance band cut in. Jim got up from his chair. "They certainly did bungle," he said. "Imagine wasting four atom bombs like that." Myra got up also. "Would you like some coffee?" "That'd be a good idea. I don't feel like going back to bed. I want to listen for more reports." But there were no more reports. An hour passed. Another and another, Jim spun the dials and got either silence or the cheerful blatherings of some inane disc jockey who prattled on as though nothing had happened. Finally Jim snapped the set off. "Censorship," he said. "Now we're going to see what it's really like." In the morning they gathered again in groups -- the villagers in this little community of five hundred, and discussed the shape of things to come, as they visualized them. "It'll take a little time to get into action," old Sam Bennett said. "Even expecting it, and with how fast things move these days -- bit'll take time." "If they invade us -- come down from the north -- you think the government will let us know they're coming?" "You can't tell. Censorship is a funny thing. In the last war, we knew more about what was going on in Europe than the people that lived there." At that moment, old Mrs. Kendal fainted dead away and had to be carried home. Three men carried her and Tom Edwards was one of them. "Kind of heavy, ain't she?" Tom said. "I never thought Mary weighed much more than a hundred." That night the village shook. In his home, Jim staggered against the wall. Myra fell to the floor. There were two tremors -- the second worse than the first. Then things steadied away, and he helped Myra to her feet. "But there wasn't any noise," Myra whispered. The whisper was loud in the silence. "That was an earthquake," Jim said. "Nothing to worry about. Might be one of the bomb's after effects." The quake did na great damage in the village, but it possibly contributed to old Mrs. Kendal's death. She passed on an hour later. "Poor old lady," a neighbor told Myra. "She was plain weary. That was what she said just before she closed her eyes. 'Hazel' she said, T'm just plumb tuckered.' " The neighbor wiped her face with her apron and turned toward home. "Think I'll lie down for a spell. I'm tuckered myself. Can't take things like I used to." earthquake -- two weeks after the falling of the bombs, and the town went on living. But it was strange, very strange. Art Cordell voiced the general opinion when he said, "You know, we waited a long time for the thing to happen -- we kind of visualized, maybe, how it'd be. But I didn't figure it'd be anything like this." "Maybe there isn't any war," Jim said. "Washington hasn't said SO. "Censorship." "But isn't that carrying censorship a little too far? The people ouLjht to be told whether or not they're at war." But the people didn't seem to c ue. A deadening lethargy had set lied over them. A lethargy they fell and questioned in their own minds, hut didn't talk about, imuh. Talking itself seemed to have become an effort. This continued weariness -- this dragging of one foot after another -- was evidently the result of radiation from the bombs. What other place could it come from? The radiation got blamed for just about everything untoward that happened. It caused Jenkin's apples to fall before they were half-ripe. Something about it bent the yoimg wheat to the ground where it mildewed and rotted. Some even blamed the radiation for the premature birth of Jane Elman's baby, even though such things had happened before even gun powder was invented. But it certainly was a strange war. Nothing came over the radio at all. Nobody seemed to care, really. Probably because they were just plain too tired. Jim Peters dragged himself to and from work in sort of a daze. Myra got her housework done, but it was a greater effort every day. All she could think of was the times she could drop on the lounge for a rest. She didn't care much whether a war was going on or not. People had quit waiting for them to come down from the north. They knew that the places where the bombs had fallen were guarded like Fort Knox. Nobody got in or out. Jim remembered the flash, the color, the rumors, the excitement of World War Two. The grim resolution of the people to buckle down and win it. Depots jammed. Kids going off to join. But nobody went to join this war. That was funny. Somehow Jim hadn't thought of that before. None of the kids was being called up. Did they have enough men? Washington didn't say. Washington didn't say anything. And the people didn't seem to care. That was the strange thing, when you could get your tired mind to focus on it. The people didn't care. They were too busily occupied with the grim business of putting one foot in front of the other. Jim got home one evening to find Myra staring dully at a small handfull of ground meat. "That's a pound," she said. Jim frowned. "What do you mean? That little bit?" Myra nodded. "I asked for a pound of hamburger and Art put that much on the scale. In fact not even that much. It said a pound. I saw it. But there was such a little bit that he felt guilty and put some more on." Jim turned away. "I'm not hungry anyhow," he said. A t ten that night, after they . were in bed, a knock sounded on the door. They had been in bed three hours, because all they could think of as soon as they had eaten was getting into bed and staying there until the last possible minute on the following morning. But the knock came and Jim went down. He called back upstairs with more life than he'd shown in a long time, "Myra -- come down. It's Hugh. Hugh's come to see us." And Myra came down quickly -- something she hadn't done for a long time either. Hugh seemed weary and drawn, but his smile was the same. Hugh hadn't changed a great deal from the gangling kid who never studied mathematics in school but always had the answers. It came natural to him. During the coffee that Myra made, Hugh said, "Had quite a time getting here. Trains disrupted. All air lines grounded. But I wanted to see you again before -- " "Then there is a war," Jim said. "We've been kind of. wondering out here. With the censorship we don't get any news and the people hereabouts have almost forgotten the bombs I guess." Hugh stared into his coffee cup for a long time. "No -- there isn't any war." Hugh grinned wryly. "I don't think anybody in the world has got enough energy left to fight one." "There was one then? One that's over?" Jim felt suddenly like a fool, sitting here on a world that might have gone through a war stretching from pole to pole, and asking if it had happened as though he lived on Mars somewhere -- out of touch. But that's the way it was. "No there wasn't any war." "You mean our government shot off those bombs themselves? You know I thought it was funny. Landing out in the desert that way like they did. "Old Joe would have hit for Chicago or Detroit or New York. It was silly to say bombs dropped on the desert came from an enemy." "No -- the government didn't fire them." Myra set her cup down. "Jim, stop asking Hugh so many questions. He's tired. He's come a long way. The questions can wait." "Yes -- I guess they can. We'll show you where your room is, Hugh." As she opened the window of the spare bedroom, Myra stood for a moment looking out. "Moon's certainly pretty tonight. So big and yellow. Wish I wasn't too tired to enjoy it." They went to bed then, in the quiet home imder the big yellow moon over the quiet town. A moon over a quiet country -- over a weary, waiting, world. Jim didn't go to work the next day. He hadn't planned to stay away from work, but he and Myra awoke very late and it was then that he made up his mind. For a long time, they lay in bed, not even the thought of Hugh being around and all the things they wanted to talk about, could bring them out of bed until they felt guilty about not getting up. Hugh was sitting on the front porch watching the still trees in the yard. There was a breeze blowing, but it wasn't enough to move the leaves. Every leaf hung straight down, not stirring, and the grass seemed matted and bent toward the earth. Myra got breakfast. She dropped the skillet while transferring the eggs to a platter but she got her foot out of the way so no harm was done. After breakfast the men went back outside. Jim moved automatically toward a chair. Then he stopped and frowned. He straighten deliberately. He tunicd and looked at his brother. I I s.iid, "Hugh. You're a man that knows. What's wrong? What did those bombs do to us? Tell me. I've got to know." Hugh was silent for a time. Then he said, "Feel up to a walk?" "Certainly. Why not?" They went to the edge of town and out into a pasture and stopped finally by a brook where the water flowed sluggishly. After a while, Hugh said, "I'm not supposed to tell anybody anything, but somehow it doesn't seem decent -- keeping the truth from your own brother. And what difference does it make -- really?" "What's happened, Hugh." "There W'eren't any bombs." "No bombs." "It happened this way. Long before this Earth was formed, a million light years out in space, a white dwarf died violently." "You're talking in riddles." Hugh looked up into the blue sky. "A dwarf star, Jim. So incredibly heavy, it would be hard for you to conceive of its weight. This star blew up -- broke into five pieces and the five pieces followed each other through space. This world was formed in the meantime -- maybe even this galaxy -- we don't know. So the five pieces of heavy star had a rendezvous with a world unborn. The world was born and grew old and then the rendezvous was kept. Right on schedule. On some schedule so huge and ponderous we can't even begin to understand it." "The five bombs." "They hit the earth in a line and drove deep into the ground. But that was only the beginning. It all has to do with magnetism -- the way they kept right on burrowing toward the center of our earth -- causing the earthquakes -- causing apples to fall from trees." Hugh turned to glance at Jim. "Did you know you weigh around six hundred pounds now?" "I haven't weighed myself lately." "We checked and found out what the stuff was. We'd never seen anything like it before. That star was a real heavyweight. All the pieces are drawing together toward the center of earth. But they'll never get there." "They won't." "We're doomed, Jim. Earth is doomed. That's the why of this censorship. We didn't want panics -- mass suicide -- a world gone mad." "How's it going to come?" "If allowed to run its course, the world would come to a complete standstill. Nothing woidd grow. People would move slower and slower until they finally fell in their tracks and could not get up. Eternal night on one side of a dead planet -- eternal day on the other." "But it's not going to happen?" Hugh's mind went off on another track. "You know, Jim -- I've never been a religious man. In fact I've only had one concept of God. I believe that God -- above all, is a gentleman." Jim said nothing and after a moment, Hugh went on. "Do you know what they do when they execute a man by firing squad?" "What do they do?" "After the squad fires its volley, the Captain steps up to the fallen man and puts a bullet through his brain. The man is executed for a reason, but the bullet is an act of mercy -- the act of a gentleman. "We are being executed for a reason we can't understand, and the bullet has already been fired, Jim. Another ten hours -- eleven hours." "What bullet?" "Look up there. See it? The Moon." Jim looked dully into the sky. "It's bigger -- a way bigger." "Hurtling in toward us at ever increasing speed. When it hits -- " Jim looked at his brother with complete understanding at last. "When it hits -- we won't be here any more." "That's right. A quick, easy death for the world -- from the bullet fired by the Last Gentleman." They turned back toward the house. "Shall I tell Myra," Jim asked. "What do you think you should do." "No -- no, we won't tell her. We've got ten hours." "Yes -- we've got ten hours." "Let's go home and have some coffee." It matters not whether you believe or disbelieve. Reality is not always based on logic; nor, particularly, are the laws oj the universe... Ye of Little Faith T he disappearance of John Henderson was most spectacular. It occurred while he was at the blackboard working an example in multiple integration for his ten o'clock class. The incompleted problem remained on the board for three days while the police worked on the case. It, a wrist watch and a sterling silver monogramed belt buckle, lying on the floor near where he had stood, were all the physical evidence they had to go on. There was plenty of eye-witness evidence. The class consisted of forty-three pupils. They all had their eyes on him in varying degrees of attention when it happened. Their accounts of what happened all agreed in important details. Even as to what he had been saying. In the reports that went into the police files he was quoted with a high degree of certainty as having said, "Integration always brings into the picture a constant which was not present. This constant of integration is, in a sense, a variable. But a different type of variable than the mathematical unknown. It might be said to be a logical variable -- " The students were in unanimous agreement and, at this point. Dr. Henderson came to an abrupt stop in his lecture. Suddenly, an expression of surprise appeared on his face. It was succeeded by an exclamation of triumph. And he simply vanished from the spot... He didn't fade away, rise, drop into the floor, or take any time vanishing. He simply stopped being there. The police searched his room in the nearby Vanderbilt Arms Hotel. They turned a portrait of the missing math professor to the newspapers to publish. Arbright He just wasn't there any more. University offered a reward of one hundred dollars to anyone who had seen him. The police also found a savings pass book in his room. It had a balance of three thousand eight hundred and forty dollars, which had been built up to that figure by steady monthly deposits over a period of years. It also had a withdrawal of three hundred and twenty dollars two days before the disappearance. They were sure they were on the path to a motive. This avenue of exploration came to an abrupt end with the discovery that he had traded in his last yea:is car on a new one, and that sum had been necessary to complete the deal. After the third day the blackboard had been erased and the classroom released for its regular classes. Police enthusiasm dropped to the norm of what they called legwork. Finding out who the missing man's acquaintances and friends were, calling on them and talking to them in the hopes of picking up something they could go on. They passed Martin Grant by because they had heard from him in their initial work. In fact, he had been a little too present for their tastes. After ten days they dropped the case from the active blotter. The .University, seeing that there was little likelihood of having to shell out the reward money, increased It to five hundred dollars. But Martin Grant continued to poiuliT over a conversation he himself had had with John Henderson during a dinner six weeks to the Iday before his old friend had vanished. He remembered his own words... "... and so you see, John, by following this trail, I've arrived at a theory that has to do with the basic nature of the universe -- of all reality. Yet things don't behave as they would if my theory were operating." John Henderson frowned into space, disturbed. Visibly disturbed. Martin watched him with a twinkle in his eyes. "You must have gone off the track on it somewhere, Martin," John said suddenly, as Aough trying more to convince himself than his listener. Martin shook his head with slow positiveness. "You followed every step. We spent four hours on it." He took pity on his friend. "Don't let it bother you. I regard it as just an intellectual curiosity. I've included it in my next book on that basis." A new voice broke in. "What is it. Dad? One of your tenthousandword shaggy dog jokes?" This from Fred Grant, #, student in the senior grade at the Hortense Bartholemew High School, and an only child of Martin Grant. "A little more respect toward your father," Martin said with much sternness. "Yes, Father." "It was my theory.' John Henderson said, "But, Martin, I don't know what to think now. Of course there must be some fallacy that I've missed. The way things stand though, I -- He chuckled uncomfortably. "I begin to doubt myself. I can't quite classify it as an intellectual curiosity." "What else can you do with it?" Martin said. "I know your trouble. It's a common one. You have a tendency to believe things or disbelieve them. Now you've been presented with something your intellect demands that you believe, while your experience shouts, 'lie'." "Is Fred able to understand it?" John asked, smiling at the youngster with fond and unconscious condescension. "Not yet," Fred smiled. "I'm still in high school." "And # you don't want to flunk out you'd better be off to bed at once," Martin told him. "Yes, Father. Good night. Dr. Henderson." Fred's departure left a vacuum in the conversation that took a minute to fill. John Henderson frowned himself back to where he had been before the boy had arrived. When he got there he frowned even more, because it was a state of mental confusion that seemed to have no way of being resolved. "Maybe we can get at it this way," he said. "Let's postulate that your theory is the only logical basis on which reality can rest. B, quite obviously reality does not rest on this basis. We could make C, therefore, that reality doesn't rest on a logical basis. But that doesn't seem to satisfy me. Maybe C could be -- no -- " He glanced at his watch, lifted his eyebrows and stood up. "I really didn't know it was so late. I'll have to be going, Martin. An eight o'clock lecture in the morning." Martin made a wry face. "You've awakened my own conscience. I have an hour or two of work yet before bedtime." The two men went to the front door. John said, "Thank your wife again for me. Wonderful dinner. You're lucky, Martin, to have such a good cook." T hat had been six weeks before John Henderson vanished. Martin Grant mentioned this visit to Horace Smith, one of the teachers in his department, and got himself and his wife invited for dinner on the following Friday. Dinner over, the two professors retired to the library. Two and a half hours later Horace had assimilated and grasped every detail of the theory. He then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, fingertips to temples, trying to find some flaw. Finally he shook his head. "It's no use," he said. "Your theory is logically inescapable. But -- " He frowned. "Where does that place us? Probably where some schools of thought have always suspected we would wind up eventually. With the realization that the basic laws of the universe can't be reached by logic or even by experiment based upon logic." "I wouldn't say that," Martin objected. "My theory is an intellectu curiosity, that's all. That's the way I present it in my latest book. By the way, it's coming out soon. Signed the contract a month ago." He pulled his thoughts back to the conversation. "After all, one must hold onto the pragmatic approach to reality. Here is a theory that logic says must be the only possible way a universe can be constructed and operate. It's beautiful and logically complete, but not applicable. No pragmatic value." "Congratulations on the book. But, damn it," Horace said, "it attacks my most basic faith. Logic. Reason." "Faith?" Martin echoed, amused. "Yes, perhaps you're right. That's a word that's foreign to my thinking. Belief is so unnecessary." "You don't mean that." "But I do." Horace pondered. "I can prove otherwise. You believe -- as an example -- that your wife is faithful to you." It was a statement rather than a question. "As a matter of fact -- I don't. I act upon the greater probability that e is. I don't hire detectives to follow her. Nor do I throw her into situations to test her faithfulness. I admit the possibility that she's unfaithful to me. If evidence came that she was, I might confront her with the evidence. Where does belief become necessary?" "Do you believe your son will become a success in life?" Horace asked. "No. I've done everything I could think of to increase the probability that he will. One of the things I've done is to instill in him the realization that belief is unnecessary in thinking. Surely, as a S' n iitist, you realize that nothing V I use in science finds its value Or  ilulity from human belief. If, toil row, evidence were brought Imth that ti i'umometry is based on I ill. icy I'ni sure that mathematiI IS would use that evidence to revise their entire field." "But belief is instinctive; as instinctive as thought itself." "I admit it's a natural way of thinking. It has to be weeded out." "So you're sure you don't believe in anything," Horace said slyly. "Such statements are verbal traps," Martin said. "They mean nothing. You want me to imply that I believe I believe nothing, and therefore I have at least one belief. But as a matter of fact I've built up a sort of mental mechanism for discovering beliefs in my thinking and dispelling them by going to the roots and showing myself why I believed. Belief springs up in the mind like weeds in a garden. Constant weeding is the only solution." He glanced at his watch and frowned uneasily. "Eleven o'clock. We'd better break this up and join the women. We'll have to get together again soon. By the way, do you and your wife play Canasta? My wife loves it." They had been moving toward the door. Now they entered the living room, to find the two women playing the game. "Time we were going, dear," Martin said. "And sometime soon make plans to have Horace and Ethel over for an evening of fourhanded Canasta." At the front door vows of an early reunion were repeated. But they were never to be fulfilled. On the following Tuesday Horace vanished. T his time there were no actual eye witnesses. The time was somewhere between seven and seven-ten Tuesday morning; the place; Horace Smith's bathroom. Ethel Smith was in the kitchen preparing breakfast. Horace was in the bathroom. He called out, "Ethel! I've got it!" "What have you got?" But even as Ethel called out, she heard the sound of the electric razor falling to the tile floor, and there was no answer from the bathroom. Nothing but silence and, as she described it later, a feeling that she was alone in the house. At the time, however, she wasn't alarmed. She half expected some muttered profanity over the dropping of the razor. She didn't wait for it exactly. Instead, she picked up the spatula and expertly scooped the eggs onto their two plates and carried them to the breakfast nook. Next she poured the coffee. Then, placing some bread in the toaster, she started back to the stove, calling, "Come and get it, Horace!" At the stove she started to pick up the aluminum dish containing the bacon. She paused and repeated her call. "Horace!" It wasn't until then that it occurred to her the falling of the razor might have been an ominous sound. Her mind filled with worried images, she rushed out of the kitchen into the hall leading to the bathroom. The door was locked. "Horace!" she called. "Are you all right?" When there was no answer she pounded on the door. "Horace! Speak to me!" After that she ran outside and around to the bathroom window. It was shut and locked, as she already knew. Not only that, it had been stuck for years. With an urgency born of a realization that every second might mean the difference between life and death, she ran back into the house and called the fire department. Also the family doctor. By nine-thirty the police had been called in. By eleven o'clock they had seen the parallel between this disappearance and that of John Henderson. Martin Grant's first reaction was concern for Ethel. His second reaction was that, twice, he had presented his theory to someone and that person had vanished. His third was accompanied by a twinge of fear. He had just finished presenting his theory to the senior physics class! This was followed by an amazing realization. He was conceding that there might be a connection between his theory and the disappearances. He laughed it off, but it returned. It disturbed him. It continued to bother him on Wednesday, so he began to search his mind for reasons. Eventually he found them. There was a distinct analogy between a theory that didn't agree with observable reality, and a pair of disappearances which violated known methods of disappearing. The analogy was so clear that he began to feel there might be a functional relation between the two. Of course, he concluded, it would be reasonably certain if a large number of the students in the senior group were to vanish also. This intellectual conclusion became an anxiety neurosis. So, on Wednesday -- after he had scanned the room anxiously to see how many students were absent and discovered to his intense relief that they were all there -- he spent the full hour lecturing on the necessity -- the vital necessity -- of unbelief in all things, especially scientific theories. But would it work? He vaguely remembered giving Horace a similar lecture. Wednesday night just before retiring he had another disturbing thought. He had explained the theory to his son. But that had been weeks before, and Fred was steeped in the mechanism of unbelief. Good thing, or he might have been the first to disappear. "What's the matter with you, Martin? Can't you even answer when -- " The rest of what his wife was saying faded in the startled realization that he was eating dinner. "Sorry, dear," he murmured. "I was thinking." He was trying to recall something that might tell him what day it was. It was obviously evening or they wouldn't be eating dinner. "Uh," he said casually, "what day is today?" "Saturday," Fred said. "Now Fred, don't tease your father about his absent-mindedness. This is Thursday." Thursday! That was right. He had given the lecture on the necessity of unbelief today. There was tomorrow, when he could see if any of the class had disappeared yet. He rniildn't be certain, of course, just li( i ausc a student didn't show up didn't mean he or she had vanished. He fixed his eyes on Fred, across the table, and smiled. Fred, at least, was a source of comfort. He knew the theory and hadn't vanished. "Dad," Fred said. "I've been wondering if you saw a point of similarity in the two disappearances?" Martin thought, good heavens, does he have any inkling of what I've been thinking? Of course not! He's just fumbling. Better to discourage him. "Sorry, son. There aren't any similarities except accidental ones. I've had the confidence of the police on this. The cases are quite unrelated." Fred refused to be sidetracked. "Dr. Henderson's face lit up as though a sudden idea had struck him. I talked with some of his students. That's what they all thought. And Horace Smith shouted to his wife, 'Ethel! I've got it!' The next instant in each case they vanished into thin air." "But that doesn't mean a thing." Martin Grant allowed himself to become excited. Fred had unwittingly come upon the vital clue to the two disappearances. "Let's be clear about this," he said to himself, drumming on his desk nervously with his fingers. "Undoubtedly there's a connection between the vanishing and my theory. Both Horace and John arrived at something I've missed. And since my theory is exhaustive it can't be there. It must be -- yes -- it must be that they went a step farther." He pondered this a moment and added grudgingly, "A step I have missed." Then even more grudgingly, "An obvious step." Automatically he opened a drawer and brought out a sheet of paper and a pencil. He wrote : The theory contains within itself the proof that the universe must, by logical necessity, be constructed according to said theory. But observation and experience say this is not true. He frowned at what he had written. This was the conclusion to which he had led both men. It was the conclusion upon which he had rested. They, obviously, had not rested there. They had gone on. Under what he had written he wrote "Either:" on the left hand margin. Two Inches under it he wrote, "Or:" Then he frowned at them. Suddenly he began writing rapidly after the Either: "The universe is not constructed according to logical necessity." He hesitated, studying what he had written. Then, pursing his lips, he slowly wrote after the Or: "the observable universe is not the universe." He nodded to himself. That hit at the core of the matter. A was X. B was not X. Therefore B was not A. Even though A and B were both called universe. The question was, then -- did the universe-of-logical-necessity exist? If so, what relationship did it have to the observable universe which quite obviously did exist? Was that the question, the answer to which, gained in a moment of insight, had caused two men to utterly vanish? He sighed with real regret. There was no way of knowing. Possibly a mechanical brain of the most advanced type could come out with a comprehensive picture after solving thousands of successive equations. Knowledge of simple basics was a far cry from a fully expanded system. He pushed the sheet of paper away with a show of irritation. He was missing something. He was on the wrong track. Neither John nor Horace had the mental equipment to make more than a simple step beyond what he had accomplished. That was certain. It was equally certain that he could and would make it. A startled expression appeared on his face. "Oh good lord!" he groaned. "My book. I must do something about that the first thing tomorrow. I -- " He opened the drawer of his desk and took out an oblong of paper, the check against advance royalties. "I'll return this and not let them publish it. First thing in the morning. And from now on I resolve not to think of my theory or what caused John and Horace to vanish." Folding the check neatly, he stuck it in his billfold and then started to read a book that interested him. He became engrossed in it. Half an hour later he came to enough to realize he was on safe ground, sigh with relief, and sink back Into the trains of thought of the book. It was a nice feeling to know he was safe. shining brightly and the monotony of the blue sky was relieved here and there by filmy white clouds that gave it a pleasing threedimensionalness. But to Martin Grant there was something unreal about things. He decided it must be the light. Things stood out with too sharp clarity. When he reached his office at the university he made arrangements for a substitute to take his ten o'clock class. Then he called the publishing company and made an appointment for ten-fifteen. The hour from nine to ten seemed interminably long. He found it almost impossible to concentrate on such an unimportant subject as the application of tensor analysis to electronic circuits. Ten o'clock came. He hurried to the parking lot and got in his car. It was real and comforting. But once again everything outside the windshield seemed too sharply defined. He timed himself on the way across town to the publishing house. He would have to allow himself the same time to return for his eleven o'clock class. It took twelve minutes, plus another two to find a parking place. Two minutes from the car to the eleventh floor. He was frowning at his watch as he entered the publisher's office. "Well well, Dr. Grant! Glad to sec you. I suppose you're anxious to see your book ready for market. It's coming very well. Just came back from the typesetters and is going into its first printing right away." "Huh?" Martin said, completing his mental arithmetic and jerking into an awareness of his surrounditii's "Oh, hello Mr. Browne," he s.M.I "I w.is just figuring my time. I ivc ati eleven o'clock class. I can only stay twenty-seven minutes. That gives me a three minute margin of error for traffic delays." "I see," the publisher said, a twinkle in his eye. "As I was just saying, your book -- " "Oh yes, my book," Martin interrupted. "Just a minute." He took out his billfold and extracted the check, handing it to Mr. Browne. "What's this for?" Mr. Browne asked, unfolding it. "Oh, the advance royalty check. Is something wrong with it?" "I'm returning it," Martin said. "I can't let you publish my book." "Can't let me publish it!" Browne exclaimed. "Why not? Don't tell me it infringes on someone else's copyright!" "No. Nothing like that. I've merely decided I don't want it published. I'm returning your check." "Well now, look!" Browne said. "We're a business establishment. You signed a contract. We signed one too. It protects both of us against just this sort of thing, you know." He studied Martin thoughtfully. "Sit down and relax," he invited. "I'm hiunan. Tell me why you don't want it published. Maybe I might agree with you. We have over a thousand dollars tied up already in typesetting, but -- " Martin took the seat and glanced nervously at his watch to make sure the twenty-seven minutes hadn't elapsed. "I've just changed my mind," he said curtly. "There are certain things -- I'm the head of a department, you know. I must watch my reputation. That's it, my reputation. On due reflection I believe the book might hurt my standing." "In what way?" Browne asked. "To tell you the truth, your other book did so well I didn't bother reading this one." "There's a -- " Martin brought himself up short. So Browne hadn't read it. So much the better. At least he wouldn't vanish. "I'm afraid,' he added with a self-conscious chuckle that he hoped was genuine enough to pass, "the subject matter is a little too crackpots tish in spots. That's the whole thing. It would reflect on my reputation." "Maybe we could do a little editing on it," Browne said. "Cut out the parts you think crackpottish and substitute something else in those pages. I'll get the galleys and we can look at them." "No!" Martin said. "No, I'm afraid we would have to cut out at least half of the book. No. The best thing is to forget it, but I'll make good your typesetting loss. I can pay you two hundred dollars right away and fifty dollars a month." Browne lit a cigarette slowly, his eyes on Martin. "You're serious, aren't you," he said. "I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll let the whole thing ride for the present. Maybe later -- " "No!" Martin said. "It must never be published! It's very vital that it never be published." "Okay," Browne said. "We won't publish it. We have the contract, but -- we won't publish it." "Thanks, very much," Martin said. "I must hurry back." The publisher stared thoughtfully at the closed door after Martin had gone. He glanced down at the check. large, capable of holding four hundred students in its successive tiers of seats, plus the teacher on his raised platform immediately in front of the large blackboard. In previous years there had been instances of students slipping out after roll call. In spite of everything, it had happened. Therefore a new system had been inaugurated. Before roll call Martin marched to the back of the room to the only exit and locked it. Pocketing the key, he returned to his podium. It had been going on this way for two years, and was now automatic. The day watchman, making his rounds, approached this door at precisely two thirty-four. He heard violent pounding. Along with the pounding there was a loud, hoarse voice, gasping, "Lemme out! Lemme out!" The watchman consulted his clock -- the one he used to make a record of his rounds -- and determined that it was two thirty-four. He knew that it was Dr. Grant's senior theoretical physics lecture period. He recalled that a couple of years before Dr. Grant had had trouble with students slipping out after roll call. But it occurred to him that it was hardly possible to sneak out, even on Dr. Grant, absent-minded as he was, by pounding on the door and shouting, "Lemme out!" in a terrified tone of voice. He therefore stopped and knocked on the door, calling, "What's going on in there?" ' Whoever was doing the pounding and shouting evidently didn't hear him. Waiting no longer, the day watchman used his master key on the door. A smallish young man, later identified as Mark Smythe, attempted to run past him into the hall. The watchman blocked Mark's escape and looked toward the podium in an automatic appeal to Dr. Grant. Dr. Grant was not there. The podium was unoccupied. So were all four hundred seats. There was, in fact, no one in room # except the one terrified student. In due course the police arrived, along with the regents. By five o'clock it had become certain that the greatest mass disappearance of all times had occurred, with Mark Smythe as the sole witness. He stuck to his story through repeated detailed questionings, and in the end the police were stuck with it. According to Smythe, class had begun as usual. Dr. Grant had waited until one minute after the bell had sounded, then had marched back and locked the door, and returned to the front. He had rapidly scanned the room to see if there were any absences, quickly called half a dozen names he was uncertain of, and marked the attendance slip. The police found it still resting on the table where he had placed it. Then he had begun his lecture by reni.'irking that they were behind St bedule and would have to eat(h up. He had been speaking ilriii liy tilln.ime of Marvin Green jmiipcd to his feet in great excitement, waving his hand and shouting, "Dr. Grant! Dr. Grant!" Dr. Grant had stopped his lecture and frowned darkly, then said, "If you will please take your seat -- " "But Dr. Grant!" Marvin Green had interrupted him excitedly. "I've got it! I've got it!" What had happened then was impossible for the mind to accept. Marvin Green had simply ceased to be. There had been a stunned silence. And in that silence, it went on. Student after student popping out of existence in what seemed to be a chain reaction. He wasn't aware when Dr. Grant vanished. All he knew was that when at last he was alone he looked toward the podium and the professor was also gone. He kept waiting to go himself. When he didn't, he lost the fear that had rooted him to the spot, and rushed to the exit where he at first tried to break down the door and make his escape, then subsided into pounding and shouting for help when he realized his physical strength was Insufficient for the job. Questioning didn't bring out any additional fact, nor alter any statement. There had been no sound to the vanishing, no movement of the person that could be considered significant, no flashes of light, no strange odors. Nothing. F red grant got the flash on his hot rod radio on the way home from high school. At the end of the report Fred wrote down Mark Smythe's address on a scrap of paper, and drove home to be with his mother. It was three days before he could get away. On the morning of the third day, his aunt Emily arrived to take charge of things, and he was able to slip away. He drove immediately to Mark Smythe's address. It was one of the better class rooming houses near the campus. The landlady wasn't going to let him in nor announce him until he explained he was the son of the professor who had vanished. She immediately swung to the other extreme and didn't bother to find out if Mark wanted to see him. "My father was your teacher," Fred said. "Oh? Come on in." There were tennis rackets. On the bookshelves there were tennis books. On a table there was a tennis trophy. Otherwise there was just a bed, a rug, and two or three chairs. "I don't know what I can tell you more than I've already told the police and the reporters," Mark said apologetically. "I guess it's tough, losing your father..." "Yeah," Fred agreed. "I wanted to ask you something though. Dad gave a lecture on his new theory a few days ago, didn't he?" Mark looked at him blankly. Then, "Oh! I guess he did. As a matter of fact I didn't pay much attention to it." He grinned. Then he remembered he should be solemn and stopped grinning. "I -- I sort of slipped by it. He made the mistake of telling us ahead of time it was off the course and no questions on it would be in the finals, so I more or less rested up during the period for a tennis match afterwards. Why?" "Didn't you get any of what he said?" Fred jaersisted. "Oh, a little," Mark admitted. "It was about some system of arriving at the basic laws of nature by pure logic, only what you arrived at didn't agree with facts. Some kind of intellectual curiosity." He thought a minute. "Oh," he said, "I see what you want. Didn't he leave any , notes on it? It would be too bad if his theory was lost to the world now that -- " He left the rest unsaid. "Maybe you can remember something," Fred coaxed. "Anything. Did he talk about his theory again?" "Next day he gave a lecture on the necessity of unbelief in modem science. It was pretty good. He overemphasized it, though. Some of the kids thought he was making a relion of unbelief." "What did they say about his theory?" Fred asked quickly. "Oh, they were quite impressed. Two of them live -- lived here in the rooming house. They were up here that evening tossing it back and forth. I was too tired from the tag match. I let them talk." "What did they think about it?" Mark frowned in an effort to recall. "It had to do with this universe being basically illogical, or at least seeming to be, because it didn't agree with your father's theory. They started building up fantasies on it. One I remember was a good one." "What was that?" "I think it was Jimmy. He said it would be funny if we were here because we believed this universe was the only real one. Something about inherited memory. Our coming from a long line of people who believed this was the only place, because all our ancestors who didn't believe it shot off into some other universe and had their children there. Utterly crazy. You know." "Yeah, I know," Fred agreed. "You going to be around in case I want to see you again?" "God! I hope so!" Mark said. "It makes me nervous." "You're safe enough," Fred said. "Well -- thanks. I'll be seeing you." H e smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper and glanced at it. "What do you hope to find, Fred," his mother asked. "I don't know," he said. "Anything, I -- maybe this is something. Look." Together they read, "Either: the universe is not constructed according to logical necessity. Or: the observable universe is not the universe." There were doodlings along the right margin that meant nothing. "What does it mean?" Mrs. Grant asked. "Probably just something connected with his classes," Fred shrugged. He went on searching the waste basket, giving his mother no hint that he had already found what he was .searching for. From the position of the paper in the wa.ste basket he felt reasonably sure it had been recently written. It was probably a voicing of thoughts gained from the disappearance of Horace and John, because up to that time his father had assumed his theory was just an intellectual curiosity. His father couldn't have asked himself if the observable universe might not be the universe unless something had happened to raise a doubt, or suggest an alternative as a possibility. Mrs. Grant's interest lessened. She wandered about the room, perhaps reliving memories. It gave Fred a chance to put the piece of paper in his pocket so that when he put everything back in the waste basket his mother would dismiss the whole search. There was, of course, the file with the entire theory in it. He knew the theory by heart, however, and had no need of that file. "I think I'll go out for a while. Mom," he said. "All right, Fred," she said disinterestedly. Outside he climbed behind the wheel of his hot rod and sat there, making no motion to start the motor. He was thinking. Mark Smythe h said that he overheard two of his fellow classmen discussing the theory, one of them remarking that, "It would be funny if we were here just because we were descended from a long line of people who believed this was the only place." Could that be the key? Take gravitation, for instance. If it were something that some vital part of you had to believe, and that vital part didn't believe, would the entire person go flying off into space? What about inanimate matter? Did it have to believe too? And what about other forms of life? Or was everything except human beings just part of the props? He shook his head. That didn't seem like quite the right track. He took another. The human mind builds up a picture of the outside universe through its senses. Sometimes its ideas are wrong. Right or wrong, inside everyone's mind is a universe, derived from the outside universe. What if the outside universe were derived from something? Derived from what? The real, logically necessary universe? That could be. At least it seemed to have some value as a starting point. He tried to reason from that point. Frustration grew in him. He wished he were older, had his university education behind him. There were so many things he couldn't begin to deal with. Maybe he could take the entire problem to some of his father's friends. He shook his head over this thought. From all that had gone on it was too likely that the minute one of them discovered something that would be of help he would disappear before he could tell it! That raised another point. Why didn't he himself vanish? What was there different about him? A lot. His father had instilled in him a lot of the things he himself could only aspire to. Unbelief was the major thing. Or perhaps it was the other major thing, remembrance. His father's voice came into consciousness, saying something he had said so many times it was grooved deeply in memory, even to the inflections of voice. "All psychoses and mental troubles are caused by walled-off unpleasant memories. The child who trains himself to recall all unpleasant things and deliberately associate them with the feeling that they are valuable lessons, but harmless, will grow up in perfect balance." He smiled. He could let flow through consciousness, dozens of incidents he had taken up with his father. He was definitely different than others around him. So different he had systematically disguised it by a front of accepted behavior -- systematically and consciously, under his father's guidance. There was a chance those differences made him safe. There was a chance those differences would make it possible for him to find out what caused the others to vanish, without he himself vanishing. The other train of thought inserted itself into consciousness again. Was belief the key to the disappearances? attention when the theory was being explained. The others had undoubtedly lapped it up. The peculiar thing about the theory was that it was so logical and so inevitable that the mind tended to accept it, bplieve it to be true in spite of the evidence of the senses. Let us suppose, Fred mused, that deep within the mind there is some matrix of thought that ties the human to this universe. A matrix that could conceivably be altered, and when altered would automatically shift the person to another universe that the altered matrix fitted. The subconscious usually took time to absorb and react. That was another thing his father had taught him to observe. Learn something, and it takes from days to months for it to become lodg in the subconscious and to rise into operation naturally from there. John Henderson had taken six weeks to vanish after having learned the theory. It had taken Horace Smith three and a half days, but he had had the added factor of Dr. Henderson's disappearance to trigger reactions. The theoretical physics class had taken three days exactly, and its vanishing had been a sort of group action or chain reaction, with intensely emotional reaction after the first student had vanished before the eyes of the others. His own father, originator of the theory, had probably fallen into the trap of starting to believe after Horace had vanished, so it became a greater probability that the disappearance was related to knowledge of the theory. Seeing the students vanish had probably set up an emotional state where complete belief was precipitated. In the whole series the only improbable part was that so many students would react in the same short time. That was partly nullified by the fact that it was a special class, and only high I.Q. students with excellent records were accepted. They would tend to be somewhat identical in reaction times. He straightened up and stared through the windshield at the dark street. So there it was, the probable mechanism of vanishment. A system was fed into the conscious mind. The conscious mind accepted it. In due time that system was transferred down into the matrix that held the person in this reality or universe. Once there, it made the whole person transfer to a system where the altered matrix fitted. It might not be the system pictured in his father's theory. It might be a compromise system. Where and when probably had no meaning in relation to the two systems. That was why, when the shift came, the person vanished instantly without any strange manifestations of any kind. Was it reversible? If so, then some of those who had vanished would reappear eventually. A sudden, startling thought made Fred sit up straight, his eyes shining with excitement. So far he had been safe mainly because he habitually didn't attach belief to anything. His other facet of difference might be the means of his testing this without real danger of vanishing. Could he dredge up from the deepest layers of unconscious thought, the threads leading directly to the matrix that held him in his surroundings and learn consciously what it was? A thought. He reflected on it, then decided before he made any decisions he would explore the other avenue, the one the police had naturally thought of. Was there some person or persons unknown in back of the disappearances? Some non-human, perhaps? It could fit into the same theory of disappearance. Another universe, beings in that universe. Beings who perhaps didn't want knowledge of their universe to become known on this side of the veil. If so, why hadn't they snatched him too? Maybe they didn't know he knew about the theory. He'd never talked about it to anyone. But his father had drilled it into him as a supreme example of the reasons why belief in anything was a trap. He shook his head. It didn't seem likely that the disappearances had been engineered by anyone. They smacked too much of an inner pattern, an inner mechanism. So he came back to the other theory. What could he try to accomplish by exploring into his deepest substratum of thought? The ideal he could aim for would be conscious transfer into the other system with the assurance beforehand that he could transfer back again. If he could do that, and if he could find those who had vanished, maybe he could teach them how to return. It was something that might take a long time, he realized. His first objective was to penetrate deeper into his mind than anyone had ever consciously gone before. That alone could take a lifetime. Or it might be accomplished overnight. How would he begin? Where would be begin? he shrugged. It didn't matter. He would have to systematically extend his ability to be aware in every direction, physical and temporal, until he could be conscious of his individual blood cells if it were possible, and completely and vividly conscious, at will of every second of his past life. If that didn't lead him to his objective, it might at least point the way and increase his ability to reach his goal. That evening, Fred arrived home to find a stranger seated in the library. There was the usual moment of clumsiness such encounters generate, but Fred's mother returned with a tea tray before self-introductions became necessary. She said, "Mr. Gaard, this is my son, Fred." The man smiled easily as Mrs. Grant continued, speaking now to Fred. "This is Curt Gaard, Fred. I called on him today and what do you think I discovered. "He was a friend -- a very old friend -- of your father." Mrs. Grant stopped, a certain inward uncertainty showing through. Fred stood mute, giving voice to none of the questions which sprang up in his mind. Curt Gaard, completely at ease, took up the lead. Even as a feeling of familiarity sprang into Fred's mind, Gaard said, "I knew your father -- met him several times -- but we weren't as close as your mother's words might imply." Then Fred knew. He spoke suddenly. "You're a psychiatrist." The pieces fell into place. Fred's father had mentioned this man several times, and the boy knew he was not there by chance -- that his mother had contacted the psychiatrist -- this particular one because she too had remembered the acquaintanceship. For a moment, Fred was annoyed with his mother. Why on earth had she brought a psychiatrist into this? Then he softened as he realized she felt it to be to her son's best interests. "Yes, I'm a psychiatrist," Gaard said. Then, as though he could read Fred's mind: "Your mother did send for me, but so far as I'm concerned, it's more than just a professional visit. I knew your father and liked him. I'd like to be your friend." "You plan to psychoanalyze me?" "Don't be so grim about it," Curt Gaard smiled. "Just let's me this a social visit. There will be plenty of time for other things later. Perhaps you can drop in at my office." "Perhaps," Fred said, almost absently. A short time later he excused himself and went to his room. M rs. grant?" Mr. Browne said, smiling at the woman behind the screen door. "I'm Mr. Browne the publisher." "Browne?" she said. "Oh yes. My hus -- husband has mentioned you." "Favorably, I hope?" Browne was wondering if Dr. Grant had told her of his decision not to let the book be published. "Oh yes, very favorably." She frowned. "Which reminds me. He received a check from you for the advance royalties. I'm sure he didn't cash it because there was no deposit at the bank that large. I can't find the check anywhere. He must have had it with him when -- " She had opened the screen door. Browne went in and followed her into the study. He looked aroimd at the walls of books, almost feeling the presence of the man whose retreat this had been. "That's what I've come here to see you about," Browne said. "You see, he called on me at my office the morning of the day he vanished." "He did?" "Yes. I'm going to be quite frank with you. He returned the check to me. "Why? He said nothing to me about it." "I rather imagine he didn't have time. I've waited, knowing you wouldn't care to discuss business so soon after -- " He waited for her reaction. When she said nothing he continued. "He returned the check and said he didn't want the book published after all. I couldn't quite understand his reasons, but they are no longer valid as I see it." "What were his reasons? This surprises me very much. Just the day before that he mentioned his book and expressed pleasure that it was being published." "The reasons he gave were that the book contained some things that were -- to use his own words -- a trifle crackpottish. He thought they might reflect on him in some way." "Oh my goodness. He was always doing something like that, Mr. Browne. He leaned over backwards. Scientific integrity was a fetish with him." "I haven't read the book," Mr. Browne said. "The reader reported it was far better than Dr. Grant's first one. That was good enough for me. The reader is no longer with us." He frowned in irritation at the memory. "Left us without giving notice. But he was a good man. Excellent judgment. I'd like to go ahead with the book unless you object." "I don't know," Mrs. Grant hesitated. "If he didn't want it published -- " "But he's gone now," Browne reminded her. "I know, but -- She wept softly into a crumpled kerchief. The publisher remained silent. After a moment she pulled herself together. "He was always so absentminded. I was sure he had mislaid the check. Used it to scribble some problem on. He did that once several years ago." Browne reached into his breastpocket and brought out a long envelope and extended it toward her. "I had another check made out for advance royalties," he said, "if you decide to let me go ahead with the book." "I don't think I should, Mr. Browne." She withdrew the check from the envelope and looked at it, her eyebrows lifting at the size of the figure. "It's substantially more than the original check," Browne said. "I thought perhaps you might be in need of money, and I feel confident the book will sell exceptionally well." "It is a lot of money," Mrs. Grant said. "But I'm so confused. I wish I knew what to do." Browne leaned forward. "Your husband was a great man. I feel it as an obligation on my part to make public his last work." Mrs. Grant nodded slowly. "You may be right. I hadn't thought of it that way." "And you can undoubtedly use the money," Browne added. "There'll be more. How much more depends on how the book sells. It may be a steady income for a few years." "All right," Mrs. Grant said, making up her mind. "I'll let you publish it." "Fine!" Mr. Browne said heartily. "I felt you would. And any time you need money just call me." February. He was seventeen now, and the knowledge filled him with dismay. It had been months since his father had vanished. Or had his father vanished? Maybe his memory of those people vanishing was as wrong as his memory of which way his door opened! To check it he spent an afternoon in a newspaper office searching back papers until he found the accounts. He read them all carefully. They were as he remembered them. And in him, slowly, grew the realization that he was going to use someone. He was going to choose someone and try to make that person disappear. More, he knew that that person was going to be Curt Gaard. He decided against calling and making an appointment. He would go to the man's office and put over the sixteen-year-old act. With a great deal of shyness he confided to the receptionist that Curt was a very special friend of his mother's. She talked into the inter-office phone, did a lot of listening and yessing. Finally she told Fred that Dr. Gaard wanted him to wait a few moments. Then she dialed an outside number. Fred listened to the clicks and knew it was his home phone. The psychiatrist was going to talk to his mother. He hadn't wanted thatj but it wouldn't matter materially. The wait lasted almost half an hour. Then, with heart pounding, Fred was walking toward the dark walnut door to the inner office. Inside, he caught a comprehensive glimpse of the rumored couch, luxurious desk and chairs, thick expensive rug, and an assortment of floorlamps and oil paintings. Then the psychiatrist was upon him, heartily welcoming him. There were time-marking conversational exchanges about school, the hot rod, and life in general. There was the pause while each sized the other up. Then, "I'm glad you dropped in, Fred," Dr. Gaard smiled casually. "I'm all mixed up," Fred said. "I know something's wrong with me. I wanted someone to talk to, now that Dad is gone. I thought of you. I didn't want to bother Mom. Do you really straighten out crazy people?" "Not exactly," Curt chuckled. "A psychologist finds most of his patients among people who are just upset about things. They aren't insane. They just need someone who has experience to help them get their thoughts straightened out." "Maybe that's all I need," Fred said. "I don't think I'm crazy." "( )f course you aren't. You're a very hi .ilthy-minded young man." "I don't want Mom to know al""ii tliis..." I urt frowned, jotted something do'vii on a notepad. It was, Fred guessed, a notation to call his mother and warn her to keep quiet. "Don't worry about your mother. Now tell me, just what seems to be the trouble?" Curt smiled encouragingly. "Are you married?" Fred asked with teen-age frankness. "No," Curt smiled. "Would you marry my mother?" Fred asked bluntly. "I would like for you to be my father." Curt Gaard stared at him a moment. "I really believe you mean that," he said slowly. "You know, don't you, that it will be two years before she can be free to marry? Your father can't be declared legally, ah, departed, for two years." "No. I didn't know," Fred said, real dismay on his face. He hadn't known about that. He thought rapidly. "Then can I come live with you? Just until Mom can marry you?" Inwardly he was enjoying this. And he hoped he wasn't overdoing it. "We can't do that," Curt said. "I'll tell you what we can do, though. I'll invite myself out to dinner tomorrow evening. Don't say anything. I'll surprise your mother. And we'll see a lot of each other from now on. Okay?" Fred nodded. It was definitely okay. He wanted to be present when Curt Gaard disappeared into thin air, and this way he had a chance. H e left Curt's office highly exhilarated, almost drunk with the emotion of things working right. It lasted until the following evening when the doctor showed up and he and Fred's mother put on their little act. Then his emotions swung the other way. He experienced a reluctance to go through with his plans. There was too much that was likeable about the man. And his mother did like him. "Poor Dad," Fred thought. After dinner the next evening, Curt kept the conversation on Fred's father. It was, Fred sensed, the right time to bring up the theory. Curt would do anything to please him, to draw him out. But he hesitated. Stretching elaborately, he said, "I'm sleepy. Why don't you and Mom play Canasta or something?" "I'm going to be much too busy," his mother said. "I have to finish proofreading your father's book for the publisher. Mr. Browne is finally going to print it, and wants it back right away." "When did that happen?" Fred demanded. "Can I read it?" "You can read it when It comes out. Now you and Curt go into the study and leave me alone." She herded them out of the room. This interlude had served to strengthen Fred's resolve. Alone with the psychiatrist, he let slip that he knew of a wonderful theory his father had originated, then tried to cover up. Curt used flattery. Fred took his cue and slyly bragged that it was a theory few college professors could understand even, but he understood it. More coaxing and he was ready to start in. But his conscience got the better of him. He balked, and even as he tried to squirm out of it he realized that it was too late. Dr. Gaard would never rest until the theory had been told. "I'll tell you the next time you come," he suggested as a last retreat. "Tonight," Curt said. "Even if it takes all night. You can miss school tomorrow." He winked. "I can okay it with the teacher." "All right," Fred said in sudden crystalization of decision. "But only if you agree to master every step of it, stopping me until you have." Curt agreed. He started in. After half an hour it settled into serious listening on Curt's part, and pertinent questions that made Fred realize he was dealing with a min'd of more than average keenness. Fred's mother wandered in occasionally, and out again, without being noticed by either of them. An hour passed. Two. The final steps were drawing nearer. At times Curt was even anticipating some of them. It was midnight when it was finished. The mind of Curt Gaard held the entire pattern. Fred couldn't take his eyes oflf the man's face. The face that was mirroring the rapid flow of thoughts as it reviewed and attacked every brick in the structure, finding it solid, and solidly cemented to its neighbors. Then he saw a change come over the man's face. He had accepted the theory. Now he was trying to integrate it into the problem of Fred Grant. He hadn't yet seen the connection between the theory and the mysterious disappearances. And perhaps he wouldn't. If he did he might go the final step and realize what was going to happen to him. Fred hoped that wouldn't #f happen. He didn't want his victim to be conscious of being a victim. "You are intelligent, Fred," Curt probed, "to be able to master such an advanced theory." He glanced at his watch. "It's getting pretty late. I'll tell you what. After school tomorrow drop down to my office. We'll come out for dinner here together." "Say! That'd be swell!" Fred enthused. "I'll get right to bed so I can get enough sleep." He leaped up and called, "Mom! I'm going to bed now." He winked broadly at Curt to let him know he was getting out of his way so they could be alone together a few minutes. And that was that. The dye was cast, and all that remained was to try and use it to make progress, rather than letting it be just another disappearance that pointed to nothing constructive. There was no way of telling how fast it would work. The next afternoon and evening there was little to provide an indication, other than an occasional look that came over. Curt for moments at a time. A date was made for Saturday. It was to be a picnic in the country. That meant skipping Friday. Fred violently objected, but Curt and his mother overrode his objections. So in the end it had to be Saturday, unless Curt disappeared before then. He didn't. B ut ten minutes before school was out Friday a note was brought into the classroom from the principle's office. Curt had called to ask Fred to come to his office directly from school. Tom between excited anticipation that the psychiatrist had made an important discovery, and fear that the man would have vanished before he could get to him, Fred ran from the school building and caught the bus. At Curt's office the receptionist smiled and told him to go right in. His sigh of relief was genuine. Curt was sitting at his desk. "Come in, son," he said. There were the amenities. "Flow did school go today?" "Okay." "Anything happen?" Fred waited impatiently. Then: "I've been thinking a lot about your father's theory, Fred, and I would like to ask a few questions -- if it won't upset you." "Of course not!" Fred said. "Okay, here's a question," Curt said. "Or rather, a statement You can answer yes or no. You believe the theory is at the root of the disappearances, that in some unknown fashion knowing the theory will cause a person to vanish." So there it was. Fred debated rapidly in his mind. It might be better to admit it. "Yes," he said. "Hmm. Then let me ask you this. How do you account for the fact that you know it, and haven't disappeared?" Fred decided to be completely truthful and see what happened. "It's because I don't let belief form a part of my thinking, sir. Dad instilled that in me. With those that disappeared, logic was their groundwork of belief." "But you believe knowing the theory caused them to vanish?" Fred smiled. "I see what you rtiean. No, I don't. It's just that no other alternative seems probable, SO .   "So you work with the one that does," Curt said, nodding. "All right, let's work with it for the moment. You have probably done some thinking on what mechanism might be involved in the process of vanishing. Would you care to tell me about it?" "There's no reason why not, sir. It takes time for conscious beliefs to sink into the subconscious and integrate there. The time varies with the person and the emotions involved." "That makes sense," Curt said, nodding. "I postulated that down underneath even the subconscious, at the very roots of being, is what I named the basic thought matrix. In order for us to be here in this existence at all it must have a certain form. Change that form and, presto, the person slips out of this existence, perhaps into another." "I see." Curt drummed his fingers on the desk for a long minute. "I see," he repeated. "Has it occurred to you that you have already rejected your theory? It's quite obvious you have, you know." "How is it obvious?" Fred asked, wondering what Curt meant. "Because you told me the theory. You wouldn't have, of course, if you believed it would cause me to vanish like the others." Fred opened and closed his mouth several times, unable to cope with this. It was unexpected. "We've gotten to the root of your trouble," Curt went on. "It was a real trouble, to you. In a few months you will look back on it and marvel at it. Right now it seems real. You feel that somewhere your father still exists. You woidd like to go to him, or perhaps bring him back. Believe me, such mysterious vanishings aren't uncommon. The history of the world is full of such incidents. In some cases whole groups have vanished. Authenticated cases. In southeast Asia the people of an entire city of over night. In the last century an entire trainload of people, including the train, vanished while going from one city to another a few miles away. And there have been vanishments with reappearances, too. In England there was an old woman who suddenly vanished before the eyes of her family. At the same instant she reappeared in a room in London, miles away, in front of other people. Did she know your father's theory? Did the train that vanished know that theory?" Curt was smiling. "No. You see, it's something unrelated to your father's theory." Fred was nodding. "You may be right," he said. "I didn't know about those." "You may go now, son," Curt said. "I'll be out around eleven o'clock in the morning." Fred rose quickly. "Okay, Curt," he said. "I'll see you." He hurried out. It was too much of an effort to hide the sudden trembling. He hadn't known about other cases of vanishing. They provided data to expand the whole thing, while not in the slightest detracting from the validity of anything else. And if the talk had been pro!' d much more Curt would have iiH vitably tumbled to his motive for telling him the theory. P romptly at eleven Curt arrived. Fred's mother had already prepared the large basket of food. There were ten minutes of lastminute bustle, then they were off, with Curt skillfully tooling his Cadillac in and out of traffic until they were on the open highway. "I know just the place," he told them. "Woods, meadow, brook. Even a couple of cows." And he did. When they arrived shortly before twelve-thirty it was all that. Fred relaxed as the car came to a stop. Every second of the trip he had been ready to seize the wheel and keep the car from crashing if Curt vanished. ".Still a little nervous?" Curt asked him as they got out. "No. No, of course not!" Fred said. Curt didn't pursue the subject. Instead, he became something utterly different than he had been before, a carefree thoroughly likeFred began to regret that he had ( hosen him as his victim. He began ii hope that the process might not le automatic, that Curt wouldn't v.midi. But he stayed close to him mil lUiencd to his every word and c ln d his face as much as he I I I'oi tillfirst time in years his even joked back at Curt occasionally, something she had never done with Martin in Fred's memory. Her joking was clumsy and uncertain. Fred laughed uproariously to encourage her and to hide his uncomfortable feeling. "Oh, I haven't felt so good in ages," she said when they were seated around the tablecloth spread with sandwiches and salads and cakes. "It's wonderful getting out like this. We'll have to do it often." "We will," Curt said. "At least once a week." Fred's mother picked up a sandwich. She started to raise it to her mouth. She was smiling at Curt and about to say something to him. Both Curt and Fred were watching her. Abruptly she wasn't there. The sandwich seemed to remain stationary for a long second. Then it dropped to the tablecloth. Curt was holding a paper cup filled with hot coffee. His hand consteaming coffee over his legs. Fred stared at the space his mother had just occupied. Abruptly he squawked, "No!" He turned accusing eyes on Curt. "You told her!" Something seemed to go out of the man. He seemed to become visibly smaller. "Yes," he whispered, "I told her." Fred was crying. "But you shouldn't have," he sobbed. "I told you because I wanted you to vanish. I didn't want her to, and now she has. And nothing happened that I could use." Curt blinked at him, absorbing this new bit of information. "You wanted me to vanish?" he echoed. "Yes, I can see that now. I didn't know. It seemed too absurd. I thought you were just imagining things. Yes, I went out while you were at school and spent the whole morning teaching her every step. It was fairly easy. We had planned on coaxing you to explain it to her. Knowing it ahead of time she could pretend to grasp it that much more easily. We were planning on coaxing you into a more social relationship. Actually, she had already read the theory in your father's book she was reading for the publisher." A glassy look came into his eyes. "The book. If the theory is at the root of the disappearances the book shouldn't be published. Yes, by God. That's what your father was driving at. Your mother told me the publisher had told her your father tried to get him not to publish it." "The book has the theory in it?" Fred said. "It mustn't get published. Why -- thousands of people would read it and vanish. We've got to stop them!" Curt was shaking his head in bewilderment. "But we can't be sure. It must be something else, though what I don't know." "No," Fred said bitterly. There was a long silence. Curt broke it by saying, "What did you expect to accomplish by my vanishing?" Fred told him of Horace's shouting to his wife, "Ethel! I've got it!", and the others seeming to have a flash of divination or insight just before they vanished. "I wanted," he explained dully, "to be with you when it happened, in the hopes I could get something more than I have to go on. In that way I might be able to find out something so I could bring my father back. And Mom." He began to cry. "I see," Curt said, calm and a little subdued. "It's possible that may come. After what I've seen happen I can admit it as a possibility." "Then you will make every effort to tell me?" Fred asked. Curt smiled wryly. "You make it sound inevitable. But -- yes, I will." Fred's eyes were large and round. "I've got to find the mechanism. I've got to go where they've vanished to and show them how to get back!" He turned his eyes on Curt. "Don't you hate me?" he pleaded. "Fm just the same as a murderer!" "No, my son," Curt said gently. "Wherever your father is, your mother is with him now. If -- " A startled expression appeared on his face. "So that's it," he almost whispered. "What's it?" Fred asked. "Tell me. Please tell me. I've got to know, you know. You promised!" Curt frowned in a visible effort to jerk himself back. His eyes, holding a faraway look, rested on Fred's face, looked at it, and through it. "You promised!" Fred screamed. "Tell me!" Curt opened his mouth as though to speak. His lips smiled. And -- he was no longer there. Fred was alone, with the picnic lunch on the white square of tablecloth, with the gleaming Cadillac a few yards away, with the two white and black spotted cows grazing a short distance away, with the noisy little brook nearby. Alone... H e became aware of a police siren growing louder. He became aware he was behind a wheel, that there were cars in front of him veering wildly out of his way. The speedometer needle pointed at ninety. How had he arrived here? He took his foot off the gas. He was driving a Cadillac. Curt's. But Curt was gone. That was it! He had started out to look for the police. He pulled over to the side of the road as the police car came screaming up. Shakily he told them about the disappearances. Any doubts they might have had were held in reserve by the obvious sincerity of his grief. He led them back to the picnic grove. The tablecloth with the food on it was still there, untouched. One of the cows was grazing beside it. They listened while he told again of his mother and Curt vanishing before his eyes. Their reserved skepticism was thrust out of their minds when he identified himself as the son of Dr. Martin Grant, who had disappeared. They used their car radio. In a surprisingly short time several other cars were coming through the gate into the pasture. Fred, his mind paralyzed with grief, stood forlornly near the Cadillac. He answered the questions they put to him. He wasn't aware of the news cameras that took shots of him which were to appear in the evening papers all over the country. Eventually it was over. The police gathered up the picnic lunch, his mother's purse, and everything else. A gray-haired man in a dark brown suit who introduced himself as Captain Waters told him to get into the Cadillac. "I'll drive," Waters said. Entirely submissive, Fred obeyed. On the way into town Captain Waters said he would take Fred home if he wanted to go there, but it would be really better if he accepted an invitation to stay at the Waters home for a few days until things were straightened out. "All right," Fred said. Eternities later he was in a house with comfortable furnishings. A motherly old lady was hovering around him. Captain Waters was on the phone caUing someone. There was a steaming dinner on blue design Swedish dishes. Under coaxing Fred nibbled. Door chimes sounded. Captain Waters pushed back his chair and went away. He came back with another gray-haired man who pressed a thumb against Fred's cheek, listened to words Captain Waters was saying, then ordered Fred to roll up his sleeve. He swabbed a spot with alcohol and inserted a hypo needle. Fred watched with listless eyes. "Get him undressed and to bed," the doctor said. "Poor kid. Suffering from shock. Have to watch him the next few days..." Shock... Fred tried to concentrate on the meaning of the word. The bed was an enormous expanse of fresh smelling sheets and luxurious blankets. The pillows were mountainous... and so soft... The sun was streaming in through open French doors, filtered through bronze screen doors. An electric clock on the dresser pointed at eleven. He lay there without moving, remembering everything that had happened the day before. And he had a feeling that, in his sleep, he had been doing a lot of thinking. Or was it dreaming? "Poor boy," a melodious voice purred. He opened his eyes. It was the motherly woman, with a tray of toast and eggs and steaming coffee. The sight of it made him aware that there was a huge emptiness in his stomach. He ate, gratefully. Mrs. Waters busied herself about the room, humming soft tunes, smiling at him whenever he looked at her. When he had finished, she took the tray. "You just relax and sleep some more," she said. "The bathroom is through that door over there. If you want me for anything just call. I'll hear you. And if you want to get up and wander about the house just do so." She departed, leaving the door part way open in invitation. Fred sighed and closed his eyes. In that moment of relaxation the thinking he had done during the night rose into consciousness. For he knew now what he had to do. There was no other avenue of exploration. It might not even be possible. But if it was possible he was going to do it. He was going to vanish. He should have realized it. Once he vanished as had the others, he would have experience with the mystery. Personal experience. He would have all the data he required, instead of just data from the world he was in. If he had the ability to solve the problem of reappearance he would then be able to return, and go back again and show the others how to return. The key to vanishing was belief, that quality of thought which his father had systematically weeded from his mind since earliest infancy. It might take time to overcome that, but it should be possible. Already he believed some things. Or did he? Was it merely a realization that those things had a probability that approached certainty? His patterns of thinking were too ingrained. His mind was too well integrated. If he became irritated the irritation immediately brought up the memories of the factors that made him react that way. If he became happy he consciously knew the pattern, stretching back to early infancy. It was ingrained within him. He began to realize with a sinking sensation that he didn't actually know what belief was. If, in some way, it was present anywhere in his makeup, he didn't know how to recognize it. His mental pattern was one of unbelief. Not disbelief, the believing that something isn't true; but unbelief, the using of something in the pragmatic sense for its workability. He let his thoughts wander in the past. He could remember vaguely a moment when he had felt unreasoning terror, a sense of being lost. He could remember his father saying many times, "Belief is the lazy assuming that something is true. It is or it isn't, and the fundamental postulate of inductive logic tells us that its truth or lack of it is forever beyond our reach. So why reach for it? Use a theory if it works for you. Discard it if it doesn't. Don't use it even to the point of absurdity while clinging to a belief that it's true. It was that way with facts, too. Something that happened or seemed to happen, needed no tag of belief attached to it. If you saw it happen it didn't necessarily happen. There was such a thing as illusion. Accept it as though it had happened -- until events pointed otherwise. His playmates and teachers had been frankly skeptical of this point of view, doubting he could actually have attained it. They were quick to agree it was desirable. They just thought no one could use a thing without attaching a degree of belief or unbelief to it. Now, what should he believe? As in the attempts to reach the basic matrix by conscious extension, he had to start somewhere. It was midaftemoon when Captain Waters entered the bedroom with a cheery, "Hello!" "Hi," Fred said. He had been lying in bed with his eyes closed. "Did I wake you?" Waters said. "Sorry." He grinned. "You can go back to sleep again. I'll drop in later." Captain Waters ducked out. He started to close the door, then left it open. A few minutes later the rumble of his voice came from another part of the house. Fred tried to catch what he was saying, but couldn't. Half an hour later he heard the front door chimes. The rumble of deep voices came again. The doctor appeared in the doorway. "Well, well," he said, smiling. "I hear you had a very restful night. How do you feel today? Better?" He was advancing toward the bed as he talked. Setting his black bag down, he reached out and took Fred's pulse. "A little rapid," he said, putting his watch away. Reaching inside his coat, he took out a thermometer. He put it imder Fred's tongue. "Had anything to eat or drink in the past fifteen minutes?" he asked. Fred shook his head. The doctor stood quietly. After a while he lifted the thermometer, glanced at it, and put it away. "Looks like you're going to be fit as a fiddle," he said. "I'll be back in a few minutes. Mrs. Waters told me on the way in she was pouring me a cup of coffee." Fred remained motionless until, the doctor had left the room. Then he slipped out of bed and went to the door. On the other side of it was a living room. A swinging door of the type that opens into kitchens was just swinging closed. No one was in sight. Quickly Fred stole across to the door. He put his ear close to it and listened. "Dr. Harvey speaking," he heard the doctor say. "Connect me with thirteen please." "Is he going to be all right?" Mrs. Waters' anxious voice sounded. "I think so," the doctor said calmly. "Hello? Thirteen? Who's speaking? Oh, hello, Giles. Dr. Harvey. Do you have a vacancy? Observation, yes." "Oh dear," Mrs. Waters said unhappily. "It will be for the best," Captain Waters said. "They'll know how to take care of him." Fred waited for no more. He went back to the bedroom. His clothes were in the closet. In seconds he had them on. He could tie his shoes and button up later. He unfastened one of the screen doors and stepped out onto a flagstone path that wound around the comer of the house toward the front. There were people on the sidewalk, but none very near. It would be hours before dark, and there was no place to hide. There were two cars parked at the curb. One was a police car, the other a black Chrysler sedan, probably the doctor's car. The police car had the key in the ignition. Fred didn't hesitate. He jerked open the door and slid behind the wheel. Mrs. Waters' anxious voice sounded, calling, "Fred! Where are you?" Then the starter was whirring. The motor caught. As he shot away from the curb, Fred caught a glimpse in the rear view mirror of Captain Waters mnning down the walk from the house. As he took the first comer, touching the siren button briefly, he wondered why he had run. It had been an impulse. Maybe it was the wrong one. Maybe he could accomplish what he had to do better in some kind of institution. Maybe not. He compressed his lips grimly. The die was cast now. He would abandon the police car someplace, then slip quietly out of town on foot. He would be caught if he tried to go home. He had no money except a few dollars in change. Maybe this was all part of the new pattern that seemed to possess him. He kept the siren going, not trusting his ability to avoid traffic. Its mad scream blended into his thoughts. He was the hunted. He was sane, but the truth would brand him as insane. Or was he sane? Had anyone vanished? Was his father at home, sitting in his chair in his study, expounding his theories to his colleagues? Was his mother at home, in the kitchen, preparing dinner? His lip trembled. Homesickness welled up in him. He was near a bus line that went to the outskirts of the city. He shut off the siren and slowed down. After a few blocks and two turns he felt safe in ditching the car. He pulled quietly to the curb. He tied his shoelaces, buttoned his shirt, combed his hair. Then he got out. No one paid any attention to him. He walked to the corner. Two minutes later the bus stopped. T he night sky was clear. The moon was a lesser sun whose light made things visible and somehow unreal and mysterious. In the ditch to the right of the road two bright points of light blinked on, held for a moment, and vanished. A cat. A silent dog appeared out of the gloom, wagged its tail and half of its body in friendliness. "Nice doggy," Fred said nervously. It sniffed his trouser leg, lost interest, and moved off into the darkness. It was after midnight. How long after, he didn't know. Once a police car had come speeding by, its red lights ogling insanely, its spotlight weaving into the bushes at the side of the road. He had lain very still in the ditch until it passed. It hadn't slowed down. Later it had come back and he had again pressed his body into the earth beside the road. Off to the right now he saw the silhouette of the giant tree that had been the landmark of the picnic spot. A few minutes later he could see the gate that led to the meadow. He squeezed through it and picked out the path worn by the cars the day before. Some winged creature dipped down, shied away from him, and swept off into the darkness. A soft gurgling sound became audible. The brook. The spot where his mother and Curt had vanished, was ahead. He reached it. He vVasn't quite sure until he studied the ground and went back in memory to check on little details. Then he was certain. He had reached his goal. He knew why he had come, of course. Here he was closer to his mother than anyplace else. Here, in some unguessed way, he might get to her. What would he do when morning came? He sat down and pulled his knees up under his chin, wrapping his arms around them. Morning was far away. It might never come -- for him. If and when it did he would cope with it. "Mom," he whispered. "Mom... Crrroak! The sound of the frog broke the silence. The croak of a frog that was part of the universe -- the universe that was basically illogical. More... i Fred sobbed. The universe was Insane. Police looking for you. Doctors with their standards of sanity and insanity. Right now they were looking for him to protect him from himself. They didn't want to know why things were done. To them even the reason would be part of the insanity. They dealt in tags. Words. Their science was an illusion within an illusion. Meaningless inside a universe of meaninglessness. Crrroak, the frog said cautiously. And a night creature came down on silent wings, to weave back into the darkness. That was the reason for pragmatism. He could see it now. He had always thought his father made pragmatism his God because it was the intellectual thing to do. But now he could see the reason for it. Reality was a jungle in which Reason had to cope with Unreason, and there was no criterion except workability. Belief was an instinctive way of thought. It was like the appendix. Scientists claimed that long ago man ate tree bark. And the appendix had had a use. If so, that use was gone, but the appendix remained. Before surgery had become a common thing, thousands of people died from appendicitis. The organ that had once been necessary had become a hazard to living. Belief was something like that. He jerked out of his thoughts to listen to a car on the road. It slowed down. It stopped by the gate. A car door slammed. A man appeared briefly in the light of the headlamps. Captain Waters -- alone. He loomed a moment later inside the pasture in the light of a flashlight. He occasionally flashed it on his face so he would be recognizable. Fred felt an impulse to slip away into the darkness. He hadn't been seen. Captain Waters was just hoping he might be here. A stronger impulse made him remain as he was. The entire pattern of Captain Waters' approach indicated understanding -- or at least The bobbing flashlight came closer. It speared out and touched him; then abruptly went out. Footsteps approached. A dark form emerged from the gloom. "Hello, Fred," Captain Waters said quietly. "I came to keep you company. I'll just sit quiet and not bother you." "Okay," Fred said. T here were movements. A small flame illuminated Captain Waters' features as he lit his pipe. The flame went out. Then, only the occasional glow of the pipe, briefly illuminating the police Captain's face. Crrroak! The frog greeted this newest arrival in his domain. Fred could not think. He was too conscious of the man sitting near him. He fought down the impulse to jump up and run away into the darkness. He fought the desire to scream at the man to leave him alone. Perhaps the police captain sensed this, or perhaps he could see Fred's expression when the coal in his pipe glowed brightest. "Tell you what," he said suddenly, "You maybe would feel better alone. I'll wait in the car. When you get ready you can come home. No more doctors. Mom gave me a good talking to. She wants you to come back." Waters got up and walked away into the night. Minutes later there was the sound of a car door slamming shut. Fred was alone again. Alone. It was a feeling, almost an emotion. Intellectually he knew that nearby was a frog. A block away across the meadow was the police captain sitting in his car. Abruptly, without warning, a flash of insight spread through his entire mind. He knew suddenly what belief was. He knew it instinctively and without question. And knowing it, he knew that his foundations of unbelief were a semantic illusion that had been built up within him. The panorama of his mind, his entire life, stood clearly before him. The cute little tags of probability were superficial. They had a pragmatic value in keeping the mind open, but their function was to guide the judgment in tagging thoughts with belief or disbelief. He retreated into his aloneness until there was nothing but himself. He marveled at the unfoldment of this new understanding. He could see things in this new light of understanding. But then... A question loomed. If that were so, why hadn't he vanished like the others? Belief was an automatic process. Why hadn't it permeated to the basic matrix of his mind as it had with the others? Was he, then, still on the wrong track? But there was no other! He saw the trap he had set for himself. He had believed with all his being that belief was the key he was searching for! He had been on the wrong track. His beautiful theory of belief that spread downward into the subconscious, then down lower and lower into the basic matrix that held a person in this reality, was wrong. The evidence he had based it on was still there, but it was evidence of something else. Of what? The eastern horizon was suffused with light. It grew stronger, dimming the light of the moon. From somewhere in the depths of his being rose a feeling that soon he would know, and when he did he would be close to crossing the threshold. He unclasped his arms and straightened out his legs, feeling stabs of pain in his weary muscles. He got to his feet, tingling with weariness. By the side of the road, he could .see the police car he had stolen -- infinite ages ago. He walked toward it, and when he reached it he rlimbed in and closed the door. "Beautiful morning," Captain Waters said, starting the motor. F red awoke and opened his eyes. Across the room the !'t #-#I doors were open. Sunlight w.is lilti-ring through the copper scK-i-iis. A breeze was playing gently #I '.hi, tillIniig walk into the counii v, his rendezvous with Aloneness, (l.ipi.iin Wain's coming to bring him li.ii k, all seemed the stuff of dreams. He had the feeling that he had never left this enormous bed. Then it returned. Reality. The miracle of his reorientation to belief, the new vistas that went with it. The full realization of the true nature of the vanishments. He became aware of a figure in the doorway, watching him. It was Mrs. Waters. "Awake?" she asked cheerfully. "Yes," Fred said. "Want some breakfast?" He nodded. She went away. He raised his head and looked about the room, at the homey touches, the family pictures on the dresser and the walls, the hand sewed knickknacks and frills. This was probably the Waters' own bedroom that they had given up for him. He could vanish while Mrs. Waters was away. She would come in with the breakfast tray and find him gone. When would the moment of reorientation come? He frowned in thought. That had' stirred up something about what he had dreamed, or thought, while he was asleep. Something diat had the flavor of being very important. "Here you are!" Mrs. Waters said, sweeping into the room with the tray and its Swedish design dishes and steaming coffee and hot cereal. As she bent over to set the tray on the bed, there came the sound of the front door opening. "There's Pa, home already," She smiled worriedly at Fred. "Will you be all right? I'll tell Pa to come in and keep you company while I fix his supper." "Yes ma'am," Fred said, eyeing the food hungrily. "Only -- " She was at the door. She stopped and looked around questioningly. "I -- I think I'd like to be alone while I eat." "All right," she said, and hurried away. But Captain Waters had brushed in without giving her a chance to tell him to stay away. "Hello, son," he said warmly. "Have a good sleep?" Mrs. Waters said, "You let him alone while he eats." "It's all right," Fred said hastily. "Sure it's all right," the police captain said. He sat down and took out his pipe. He concerned himself nothing. Fred picked up a piece of golden toast and bit into one corner absently. The thoughts he had had during sleep were filtering into consciousness. He recalled how his mother had looked. There had been a fleeting expression just before she had vanished. She had been going to say something. She had changed her mind and had vanished instead! And Curt -- he had had his reorientation at least several seconds before vanishing. He had had it, and then, with his new perspective, had said, "So that's it!" It was as though the new orientation made everything else unimportant. One common factor stood out in every case, those two he had personally witnessed, and the others he hadn't seen. One common factor. Vanishing, or whatever happened that produced the vanishing, had been an impulse. There had been time for thought. For example. Curt might have considered the practicality of telling Fred what had happened to him. But he might have reflected that eventually Fred would discover what he had just discovered, so why bother? In the office Curt had told him vanishing, leaving empty houses and streets. Had the cause been the same? A true orientation? Fred looked at Captain Waters, sitting quietly, puffing slowly on his pij)e. With deliberation Waters uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "You know, son, when you get around to it -- that is, if you feel up to it sometime -- I wish you'd tell me about it. What it is that's troubling you. I'll try to understand." "You'll try -- ?" Fred echoed. And the police captain's words started a train of thought. The others -- had the place they'd gone been a heaven or a hell? So many of them -- . Fred started suddenly. "The book!" he cried. "What book?" "I've got to see the publisher about my father's book. It's very important." "It can wait until you're feeling better," Waters said. "No. I've got to see Mr. Browne!" "Why?" "I -- I can't tell you." "All right." Captain Waters gave in. "I'll take you down and bring you back." It was half an hour later, in the reception room at the publishing company. Fred stared numbly at the big poster on the wall advertising his father's book. "Mr. Browne will see you," the receptionist said. "Wait here," Fred told Captain Waters. "I want to talk to him alone." He went to the door and opened it, stepping inside and closing it behind him. "Fred Grant?" Browne said, getting up from his desk and coming toward him, hand outstretched. "What can I do for you? Need some money?" Fred was shaking his head. "I don't want any money," he said. "I want you to stop my father's book. You can't publish it." "Now wait," Browne said. "We aren't going through that again, are we?" "You can't!" Fred said. "People will read it and vanish!" "Huh?" "People will read it and vanish! You've got to believe me. The cause of those disappearances is in that book!" Browne stared for a moment, then dragged over a notepad, wondering how his publicity boys had missed this one. He stood up and came around his desk. "You leave it to me," he said. "You won't have a thing to worry about. I'll take care of everything." "Then you won't publish it?" Browne was guiding him toward the door. "You leave it to me. Drop in again soon. If you need money just drop in any time and I'll fix you up." Fred found himself outside the door, not quite sure what Mr. Browne had promised. Inside, Browne went back to his Have to tell Nichols about it tomorrow at lunch. That vanishing stuff is a terrific publicity angle." "You still don't want to tell me what's troubling you?" Police Captain Waters said wistfully. A frown crossed Fred's features and vanished into a smile. "Nothing's troubling me," he lied. "I'm all right. I'll be all right." "You'll stay with us a while longer?" "Sure. Sure. You make me feel -- okay. I'm just going out for a ride. Be back for supper." since his mother and Curt had vanished. In that two months he had come to realize something. He didn't quite know how to express it even in his thoughts. It wasn't that he didn't want to vanish. He would, some day. But he had given up trying. It was the wrong way. The others hadn't tried. It had just come to them out of a clear sky. Some day it would come to him that way, and he would welcome it. He drove downtown and parked. A block away was a show he wanted to see. He started toward it. Abruptly he stopped. In front of him was a bookstore. In its window was a large display, and every book had his father's picture on the In back of the display was a large poster with a still larger picture, Anger flamed in Fred's mind. The anger died as abruptly as it had come. It was replaced by a homesickness, a longing. Unconsciously his footsteps carried him into the store. A man had the book in his hands. "You aren't going to buy that, George," the woman beside him was saying. "And why not?" the man asked, laughing. "I've never turned down a dare in my life!" He looked at the girl waiting on him. "Do you think I'll vanish. Miss?" The clerk smiled. "I wouldn't know. I have strict orders not to read the book." A solemn-faced man appeared out of nowhere and thrust a copy of the book at the clerk. "I want this, please," he said. "I'll be with you in a moment, sir," the clerk said. Others were waiting also. Fred stumbled from the store, bpmping into someone in the doorway as he went through, and too confused and fritened to stop and apologize. There was no way of stopping it. Maybe the police would become alarmed at the disappearances. "What's wrong with me?" he mumbled, walking blindly in the crowds on the sidewalks. "Maybe I do lack the ability to believe. I think I believe. What have I missed?" Only he, of all those who had learned the theory, had not vanished. Was faith, then, something so common, and yet impossible for he, himself, to reach? Ahead was another bookstore. In its windows were the same displays. He stopped. People were pushing through the doors. Inside they were picking up the book and looking for a clerk. The clerks were smiling and saying things Fred couldn't hear, and wrapping the books and handing them to their new owners -- people who would take them home and read -- and vanish. Into what? Something they would see, and smile at, and say, "Why, of course!" And with a simple acceptance they would enter it. He watched them. And from the depths of his being Fred longed to be one of them; to be able to go in and buy the book, and read it, and... On the other side of the window, in the store, a clerk was waiting on a customer. The customer turned to look at him, with his nose flattened against the glass. He didn't see them. In his eyes was a faraway look, a startled light. "Why of course!" he said in quiet wonder. There was just a little blur, where a nose had pressed against the window, and the customer frowned and said to the clerk, "That yotmg man outside -- he -- he -- " "Three-fifty, please," the clerk said. "Ah -- oh. Oh, sure." What is to be will be. Our only refuge lies in that which might not have been. By Robert Turner December #th, #, Two-Thirty A.M. was like actual physical pressure against his tightly squinched eyes. He tried to burrow deeper into the protectively warm, cave-like place where he'd been safe from them for so long. But he couldn't escape them. Their hands, their big, red, hideously smooth hands had him, now. They were tugging and pulling at him with a strength impossible to fight. Still he struggled. He tried to cry out but there was no sound from his constricted throat. There were only the frightening noises from outside, louder, now. He tried to twist and squirm against the hands dragging him toward that harsh, blinding light. He was too small, too weak, compared to them. He couldn't fight them off. He felt himself being stretched and strained and forced with cruel determination. He didn't want to go out there. He knew what was waiting for him out there. He couldn't go. Not out there, where... When Jeff McKinney was three years old he tipped a pot of scalding water from the stove onto himself. He was badly burned and scarred. He hovered between life and death for several weeks. JefFs father was out of work at the time and they were living in a cold water tenement. Something about the case caught a tabloid's attention and it was played up as a human interest sob story. It came to the attention of a wealthy man who volunteered to pay for plastic surgery. Then followed, long months of that kind of torture, but Jeff McKinney came out of it not too badly scarred. Not on the surface, anyhow. But his face had a strange hue. There was a frozen, mask-like cast to his features when he smiled. He was eight when he saw his father killed. He was in the taxi the older McKinney now drove for a living when the father stepped out of the driver's side onto a busy street without looking back first. The speeding truck took the car door and JefFs father with it for half a block, wedged between front wheel and fender. Jeff never forgot the sound of that, and the screaming. Nor his shock when he suddenly realized that the screams were his own. Jeff was a strange boy. He didn't have an average childhood. The poverty was more extreme after his father's death. He stayed home alone while his mother was out working at whatever job she could get, reading too much and thinking too much. Once, he looked at her with haunted eyes and said: "Mother, why is life so bad? Why are people even bom into a world like this?" What could she say to a question like that? She said: "Please, Jefferson! Please don't talk that way. Life isn't all bad. You'll see. Some day, in spite of everything, you'll be somebody and you'll be happy. The good times will come." They did, of course. A few of them. There was the day he went upstate on an outing for underprivileged boys and went fishing for the first time. He caught a whopping trout and won a prize for it That was nice; that was fun. That was when he was thirteen. That was the year the gang of kids caught him on the way home from school and beat him unconscious because he never laughed; because they couldn't make him laugh. The year before his mother died. At the orphanage he didn't mingle much with the other boys. He spent most of his after-classes hours alone in the school's chemistry lab. He liked to tinker with chemicals. They were cold, emotionless, immune to joy and sadness, yet they had purpose. He played the cello, too, with haunting beauty, but not in the school band, only when he wanted to, when nobody was around and he could really feel the music. Once, on the way home from his cello lesson in the music building, he saw some boys playing football on the orphanage athletic field. He was suddenly seized with a fierce determination to belong, to grab at some of the shouting, laughing happiness these boys seemed to have. He told them he wanted to join in and play, too. He didn't understand why they laughed so at this idea. They stopped laughing, though, after the first time he ran with the ball, and they all piled up on him and he didn't get up. He lay there, looking so ghostly and breaking so harshly and with the trickle of blood coming out of his ears. But Jeff didn't know they had stopped laughing. He recovered from that skull fracture, all right. Worse, though, than any of the unhappiness he suffered during his life, worse even than the shocks of his father's and mother's deaths, was the thing that happened to him when he was twenty and working at the laboratories of a big drug company. He met and fell hopelessly in love with a girl named Nina, a girl a few years older than he was. They married and for the first few weeks Jeff McKinney had happiness he'd neve'r known before. Until he came home from work sick, one afternoon and saw Nina with the man from the apartment over them. She didn't whine and beg for forgiveness, Nina didn't. She stood boldly while the other man laughed and laughed and she screamed invective upon Jefferson McKinney, telling him what she really thought of him, a gloomy, puny weakling who couldn't even make a decent living, telling him that she was through with him. A blank spot came into JefPs life right them. When it was over, Nina and the other man were on the floor and there was blood on the kitchen carving knife in Jeff's hand. They didn't find him for awhile. He changed his name and appearance and hid in the soiled seams and ragged fringes of society. He learned the anaesthetic powers of drugs and alcohol. He gave up trying to get anything out of this life. Then they finally picked him up, fished him from the river into which he'd jumped. There were days of torture after that, without the alcohol and drugs his wrecked system craved. Right there was the final hell that could have broken him completely. But it didn't. It was like the terrible crisis after a long illness. Things began to get better, to go to the other extreme after that. A state psychiatrist brought Jeff's case to the attention of a noted criminal lawyer. Neither Nina nor her lover had died from their knife wounds. On the plea of the unwritten law, Jeff McKinney got off with a suspended sentence. The lawyer and psychiatrist learned of his interest and knotvledge and talent for chemistry and got him another job in the experimental laboratory of a big university. Later he married a girl named Elaine, who worked at the lab with him. They had two children, and lived in a small comfortable cottage just off the University campus. For several years, they had all they wanted of life -- comfort, health, happiness. Jeff thought that life could never be more wonderful. All of his former, bitter, cynical views fell away from him. Hadn't he, with all odds against him, finally won out and acquired peace and contentment and a purpose in life? What was wrong with a world in which that could happen? Then there was the topper. Jefferson McKinney discovered a new drug which would cure and eventually eliminate a disease that was one of the world's worst killers, the drug for which thousands of scientists had been seeking for years. He was feted and honored, became a national hero. The story of his life and his discovery temporarily pushed even the doleful forecasts of an early Third War, the Big War, off the front pages. And Jeff was humbly proud and grateful that he had paid now the debt he owed to a society that could make a final victory, like his, possible. In a zenith of almost holy happiness, he stood one evening on a lecture platform in a huge auditorium in a great city, before thousands of worshipping people to make a thank-you speech after being awarded a world prize for his great scientific discovery. ( Continued on page # ) 's i 'i mm The Arrow lanced down out of the night like a spear of flame, vengeful and deadly. The legends of Jaq Merril are legion -- but legends. Hark, ye, then to the true story of the pirate benefactor. oj Mankindl By Alfred Coppel breed, unique in the Universe. Of all the races met among the stars, only homo sapiens thrives on deliberate self-delusion. Perhaps this is the secret of our greatness, for we are great. In power, if not in supernal wisdom. Legends, I think, are our strength. If one day a man stands on the rim of the Galaxy and looks out across the gulfs toward the seetee suns of Andromeda, it will be legends that drove him there. They are odd things, these legends, peopled with unreal creatures, magnificent heroes and despicable villains. We stand for no nonsense where our mythology is concerned. A man becoming part of our folk-lore becomes a fey, onedimensional, shadow-image of reality. Jaq Merril -- the Jaq Merril of the history books -- is such an image. History, folklore's jade, has daubed Merril with the rouge of myth, and it does not become him. The Peacemaker, the chronicles have named him, and that at least, is accurate in point of fact. But it was not through choice that he became the Peacemaker; and when his Peace descended over the worlds of space, Merril, the man, was finished. This I know, for I rode with him -- his lieutenant in a dozen and more bloody fights that earned him his ironically pacific laurels. Not many now living will remember the Wall Decade. History, ever pliable, is rewritten often, and facts are forgotten. When it was gone, the Wall Decade was remembered with shame and so was expunged from the record of time. But I remember it well. It was an era compounded of stupidity and grimy political maneuver. We, the greedy men of space -- and that includes Jaq Merril -- saw it end with sorrow in our hearts, knowing that we had killed it. If you will think back to the years immediately preceding the Age of Space, you may remember the Iron Curtain. Among the nations of the Earth a great schism had arisen, and a wall of ideas was built between east and west. Hydrogen bombs were stockpiled and armies marched and countermarched threateningly. Men lived with fear and hatred and distrust. Then, suddenly, came the years of spaceflight and the expanding frontiers. Luna was passed. Mars and Venus and the Jovian Moons felt the tread of living beings for the first time since the dawn of time. The larger asteroids were taken and even the cold moonlets of Saturn and Uranus trembled under the blast of Terran rockets. But the Iron Curtain still existed. It was extended out into the guK of space, an intangible wall of fear and suspicion. Thus was born the Wall Decade. Jaq Merril was made for that epoch. Ever in human history thereare those who profit from the stupidity of their fellows. Jaq Merril so profited. He dredged up the riches of space and took them for his own. And his weapon was man's fear of hb brothers. from the Terran settlement at Canalopolis, that Merril's plan was born. His ship, the Arrow, stood on the red sands of Syrtis Major, waiting for a payload to the Outer System. It stood among a good many like it: the Moonmaid, the Gay Lady, the Argonaut, and my own vessel, the Starhound. We, the captains, had gathered in the Spaceman's Rest -- a tinkling gin-mill peopled with human wrecks and hungry-eyed, dustyskinned women who had come out to Mars hoping for riches and had found only the same squalor they had left behind. I remember the look in Merril's eyes as he spoke of the treasures of space that would never be ours, of the gold and sapphires, the rubies and unearthly gems of fragile beauty and great price. All the riches of the worlds of space, passing through our hands and into the vaults of the stay-athomes who owned our ships and our very lives. It seemed to me that Merril suffered as though from physical pain as he spoke of riches. He was nothing if not rapacious. Greedy, venal, ruthless. All of that. "Five of us," he said in a hard voice, "Captains all -- with ships and men. We carry the riches of the universe and let it slip through our fingers. What greater fools could there be?" Oh, he was right enough. We had the power to command in our hands without the sense to grasp it firmly and take what we chose. "And mark you, my friends," Merril said, "A wall has been buUt around Mars. A wall that weakens rather than strengthens. A wonderful, stupid, wall..." He laughed and glanced around the table at our faces, flushed with wine and greed. "With all space full of walk," he said softly, "Who could unite against us?" The question struck home. I thought of the five ships standing out diere on the rusty desert across the silted canal. Five tall ships -- against the stars. We felt no kinship to those at home who clung to creature comforts while we bucketed among the stars risking our lives and more. We, the spacemen, had become a race apart from that of the home planet. And Merril saw this in our faces that night so long ago, and he knew that he had spoken our thoughts. Thus was bom the Compact. Gods of space, but I must laugh when I read what history has recorded of the Compact. "Merril, filled with the wonder of his great dream, spoke his mind to the Captains. He told them of the sorrow in his heart for his divided fellow men, and his face grew stern when he urged them to put aside ideology and prejudice and join with him in the Compact." So speaks Quintus Bland, historian of the Age of Space. I imagine that I hear Merril's laughter even as I write. Oh, we put aside ideology and prejudice, all right! That night in Yakki the five Captains clasped hands over the formation of the first and only compact of space-piracy in history! ture. Our crews were told nothing, but their pockets were emptied and their pittances joined with ours. We loaded the five ships with supplies and thundered off into the cobalt Martian sky to seek a stronghold. We found one readily enough. The chronicles do not record it accurately. They say that the fleet of the Compact based itself on Eros. This is incorrect. We wanted no Base that would bring us so close to the home planet every year. The asteroid we chose was nameless, and remained so. We spoke of it seldom aspace, but it was ever in our minds. There was no space Wall, there to divide us one from the other. It was a fortress against the rest of mankind, and in it we were brothers. When we struck for the first time, it was not at a Russian missile post as the histories say. It was at the Queen of Heaven, an undefended and unsuspecting merchantman. The records of Earth say the Queen was lost in space between Uranus and Mars, and this is so. But she was listed lost only because no RusMan or American patrol found her gutted hulk. I imagine that at this very moment she hangs out beyond Pluto, rounding the bend of the long ellipse we sent her on that day we stripped her bones. She carried gold and precious stones -- and more important yet, women being furloughed home after forced labor in the mines of Soviet Umbriel. The Starhound and the Arrow bracketed her a million miles above the plane of the ecliptic near Saturn's orbit, and killed her. We drew abreast of her and forced her valves. We boarded her and took what we chose. Then we slaughtered her men and sent them on their long voyage. That was the beginning. The attack against Corfu was our next move. This is the battle that Celia Witmar Day has described in verse. Very bad verse. "Corfu slumbered, gorged and proud -- While Arrow, Hound and Maid marshalled Freedom's might above the tyrant's ground. And rained down death -- " There is much more, of course. Brave phrases of emotion and fanciful unreality written by one who never saw the night of space agleam with stars. There was no talk of tyranny or liberty aboard the Hound that day we leveled with the Maid and the Arrow a thousand miles over the Russian base of Corfu. There was talk of the bullion stored under the fortress' turrets. Merril's face appeared in my visor screen, superimposed on the image of the grimy little asteroid floating darkly against the starfields. "Their radar has picked us up by now, and they're wondering who we are," he said, "Take the Hound out on tangent left and join the Maid. Cover my attack and stand by to put a landing party aground." I watched the image of the Arrow -- a. sliver of darkness against the crescent of Corfu -- lancing down at the fortress. Her forward tubes were glowing with the familiar pre-discharge emanation. Below us, confusion reigned. For the first time in memory an asteroid Base was under attack. Merril brought the Arrow in to within fifty miles and then unleashed the fury of his forward tubes. Hellfire coruscated over the steel turrets and stone walls of Corfu. It splashed like a liquid flame over men arid metal and twisted the towers and buttresses into spidery tendrils of glowing thread. Corfu died without firing a shot. We put a party from the Hound aground ten hours later. Even then, we had to wear insulated suits to walk in that still molten inferno. Charred bodies had become one with the stuff of the fortress, and nothing living was left within the keep. We looted Corfu's treasure and lifted into space heavy with gold. j Time passed in an orgy of looting for the men of the Compact. We grew rich and arrogant, for in space we were kings. Tom by suspicion of one another, America and Russia could do nothing against us. They had built an Iron Curtain in space, and it kept them divided and weak. Endymion felt our blasts, and Clio. Then came Tethys, Rhea, lapetus. We cared nothing for the flag these Bases flew. They were the gathering points for all the gold and treasure of space and we of the Compact took what we wished of it, leaving a trail of blood and rapine behind us. No nation claimed our loyalty; space was our mother and lust our father. Thus, the Peacemakers. F or five full years -- the long years of the Outer Belt -- the Arrow, the Starhound, the Moonmaid, the Lady and the Argonaut were the scourges of the spacelanes. No patrol could find us, and no defense could contain us. I recall how we laughed at the angry sputtering of Earth's radio. Vast sums were spent in searches and new weapons to protect the meek and Ae mutually distrustful from Merril and the men of the Compact. Budgets, already strained to the breaking point by generations of the cold war, creaked and groaned as Russians and Americans spent furiously to build up their defenses against our depredations. But though we were few and they many -- space was large and it hid us well. And then one darkling day, Jaq Merril and I stood on the thin methane snow that carpeted our Base's landing ramp, waiting under our own blue-black sky for the return of the Argonaut. Merril had sent her sunward to strike at the mines of Loki, an asteroid where Russian komisars rolled in mountains of blood-red rubies. We waited through the day and into the sable night, but the Argonaut did not return. For the first time since the formation of the Compact, we had lost a ship, and something like unease crept into our hearts. The carousal that night had no gaiety, and there was the sound of bereaved women weeping. Merril could learn nothing of the Argonaut's fate. It was as though she had dropped through a hole in the fabric of space itself and vanished from the ken of men. To me he said: "I fear a new weapon." But to the rest, he kept his peace and let the work of the Compact continue. There was nothing else to be done. Our Wall Decade was waning, and when a man or a Compact outlives the age that gave him or it birth, there is nothing to do but go forward and meet the new day dawning. So it was with the Compact. We lived on as we had lived before: wealth of space into our coffers. But in the back of our minds a shadow was lurking. On the next raid, the Lady was lost. I saw it happen, as did Merril. There was nothing we could do to into the void as she ruptured in her last agony. It was off Hyperion, whence we had come to loot the trove built there by the prospectors of the Saturnian Moons. And it was a trap. The Arrow, the Hound and the Lady circled the moonlet, swinging inward to the attack. It was the Lady who was to put aground the raiding party, and her valves hung open while men readied the assaultboats. Our radar screens showed nothing of danger. There was only the bloated giant in the sky, a ringed monster of yellow gold against the starry velvet of space. The Lady dropped her boats, the Hound and the Arrow hovering by to watch over their sister. And suddenly, the jagged moonscape below erupted -- belching streaks of fire that sought us like probing fingers. I knew in one single instant of terror that this was the new weapon that had killed the Argonaut, for it sliced into the Lady's flanks as though the steelite hull were cheese. She bulged, glowing like an ember. There was a sudden nimbus of snow about her as her air escaped and froze, and then she rolled into her death-dance, open from bow into the void. The Arrow and the Hound drove off into space like furies leaving the spinning body of their sister ship behind, not waiting to watch her crash down onto the rocky face of Hyperion. And now the five of the Compact were only three, and again there was the sound of weeping among our women. gagement, a single assault-boat returned to Base. It was the lone survivor of the Lady's landing party. By some miracle, the three men aboard had escaped the holocaust. They had landed and been captured and then they had fought their way free and into the void once more. They were half-dead from starvation and exposure, but they had brought word to Merril that the wall that had so long protected us was crumbling. Merril sought me out, his lean hard face grim and set. "There was a Russian among the Americans on Hyperion," he said. "A prisoner?" It was my hope that spoke so, not my sure knowledge of what was to come. Merril shook his head slowly. "A technician. They developed the beam that killed the Argonaut and the Lady -- together." His voice was harsh and bleak. Then suddenly he laughed. "We've touched them," he said, "Touched them on their tender spot -- their purses." He bowed low, filled with bitter mockery. "Behold the diplomats, the men who are accomplishing the impossible!" And I knew that his words spelt doom. Doom for the Compact and for the Wall Decade that was our life. Yet we did not stint. In that year we raided Dione, lo, Gannymede, and even the American naval Base on Callisto. We gutted six Russian and four American rockets filled with treasure. And we ventured sunward as far as the moons of ' Mars. We dared battles with patrol ships and won. We killed the destroyer Alexei Tolstoi off Europa and we shattered an American monitor over Syrtis itself, and watched the wreckage rain down on Yakki, the place where the Compact was born. And we lost the Moonmaid. The radio told us the story. Other new weapons were being developed against us, and here and there American and Russian spacecraft were seen in company for the first time in the history of the Age of Space. Convoys were formed from ships of both flags to protect spatial commerce from the imagined "great fleet" of the Compact. None knew that only the Arrow and the Starhound, small ships, weary ships, were left to face the slowly combining might of Earth. And then at last, the pickings -- growing slimmer always -- diminished to the vanishing point. Merril stood before us and gave the assembled crews their option. "The treasure hunt is over," our captain told us, "And those who wish may withdraw now. Take yoiuwomen and the space-boats and return to Mars. You have your shares, and you can live in comfort wherever you may choose. If you wish it, go now." Some few did go, but most remained. I watched Merril's face, and saw one last plan maturing there. Then he spoke again and we all understood. One last raid... to take Luna and command the world! "Still the unity of Mankind was not secure, and Merril, filled with impatience for his great dream, decided on one final stroke. He would descend on Luna Base itself with his fleet, and commanding all Earth, he would drive men together -- even though it might mean his own death. With this plan of self-immolation in his heart, the Peacemaker ordered his hosts and sought the pumice soil of the mother planet's moon... This is the way Quintus Bland, historian and scholar puts it down for posterity. I, one of "his hosts", would say it another way. We had gutted the Solar System of its treasure and at last men were uniting against us. Our "fleet" was reduced to two small ships and a bare handful of men and women to fight them. Jaq Merril could see the handwriting on the wall and he knew that all must be gambled on one last throw of the dice. Only with Terra herself under our guns could we hope to continue sucking the juice of the worlds into our mouths. It was all or nothing, for we had grown used to our life and we could no longer change it to meet the demands of the dawning age of Soviet-American amity. the Hound slanted sunward. Mars behind us, ahead lay the Earth-Moon system. Ten years had passed since any of us aboard the Compact ships had seen the home world, and though we no longer felt a part of it, the sight of the silvery cloud-flecked globe touched our hearts. Touched them as the sapphires of Mimas or the gold of Corfu touched them. We saw the planet that gave us birth and we were filled with hunger for it. To own it, command it, make it our own. Luna's mountains were white and stark under our keels as Merril led us across the curve of the southern horizon, seeking to put us into position to attack the UN Moon Base in Clavius from the direction of the Moon's hidden face. We swung low across unnamed mountain ranges and deep sheer valleys steeped in shadow. The voice of the ranger in the Arrow came softly through the open intercom into the tiny control room of the Hound. A woman's voice, tense with excitement, but disciplined and controlled. "Range five hundred miles, four seventy five, four fifty -- " And then Merril's voice, calm and reassuring, giving heart to all the untried ones aboard with his steady conning commands. "Four o'clock jet, easy, hold her. Drivers up one half standard. Steady goes. Meet her. Steady -- " Line astern now, the two ships flashing low across the jagged lunar landscape, and a world in the balance -- An alarm bell ringing suddenly, and my screen showing the fleeting outline of a Russian monitor above, running across our stern. My own voice, sharp with command: "Gun pointer!" "Here sir!" "C?et me that gunboat." The Hound's turret wound about with agonizing slowness as the monitor reached for the sky, clawing for altitude and safety. And then there came a searing blast of fire and the fragments of the Russian gunboat raining down lazily, seeking their eternal rest in the pumice of Luna's hidden face. But they had been warned at the UN Base. The monitor had left one dying shriek in the ether, and the waiting garrison had heard. Merril knew it, and so did I. We moved forward calmly, into the jaws of hell. The Arrow attacked from ten o'clock, low on the horizon, the Hound from twelve o'clock high. We swept in over the batteries of pulsating projectors, raining down our bombs. The ground shuddered and shook with the fury of exploding uranium and the sky was laced with a net of fiery death. The Hound shrieked her protest as I swung her about for another attack. There was a sickening swerve and the smell of ozone in my ship. Somewhere, deep within her, a woman screamed and I felt the deck under me give as one of the questing beams from the fortress below cut into the hull. Airtight doors slammed throughout the wounded vessel, and I drove her to the attack again, hard. The last of the bombs clattered out of the events, sending mushrooms of pumice miles into the black sky. One battery of guns below fell silent. The Arrow vanished into the night above and as suddenly reappeared, her forward tubes spewing red fire onto the Base below. Then Merril pulled her up again and disappeared among the pale stars. The Hound's hurt was mortal, I could feel her dying under my hands, and tears streaked my face. Below decks, she was a shambles where the cutting beam from the ground had torn part of her heart out. Still I fought her. There was no retreat from this last raid, nor did I wish any. There was a madness in us -- a bloodlust as hot and demanding as ever our lust for gold and treasure might have been. I lashed the face of the fortress with the Hound's forward tubes, frantically, filled with a hateful anguish. I felt my ship losing way, twisting and seeking rest on the jagged ground below, and thinking he had deserted us, I cursed Merril in an ecstacy of blind fury. Again and again the Hound was hit. I knew then that Merril's plan had been madness, a last gesture of defiance to the new age of unity among men. The Hound fell at last, spitting fire and gall in a futile dance of death. She struck on a lugh plateau, grinding into the pumice, rolling with macabre abandon across the face of the high tableland. Then at last she was still, hissing and groaning fitfully as she died, her buccaneering days gone forever. I donned a suit and staggered, half dazed, out into the lunar night. A half-dozen men and women from the crew had survived the impact and they stood by the wreckage, faces under the plastic helmets turned skyward. They were one and all stunned and bleeding from the violence of the Hound's end, but they looked neither back nor around them. Their eyes were filled with the insane glory of the drama being enacted in the sky. The Arrow had returned. She lanced down out of the night like a spear of flame, vengeful and deadly. Straight into the mouth of the screaming guns she dove, death the Moon Base in fire, searing the men within -- Russian and American alike -- into the brotherhood of death. Miraculously, she pulled up out of her encircling net of flame. We watched in openmouthed wonder as she reached with sobbing heart for the sky just once again -- and then, failing, crippled and dying, she hung above the crater's rim, framed with deadly beams from below, but radiant in her own right -- gleaming in the light of the sun. This was defeat. We knew it as we stood by the tangled pile of steelite that had been the Hound and watched the Arrow die. But nothing in this life that I have lived ever told me so grandly that the Wall Decade was ended -- and our life of buccaneering with it -- as the thing that happened next. The Arrow's valve opened and a tiny figure stepped out -- into space. I did not need to be told that Jaq Merril was coming to meet the men he had welded together against him. Lazily, unreally, the tiny shape twisted over and over as it fell, until at last it vanished amid the raw welter of craters and ridges beyond the razor wall of Clavius... though one that will not he believed. I have taken the Peacemaker of the histories and painted him as he was. But men are ashamed, and the chronicles of history must be rewritten to hide their weaknesses, Jaq Merril has become a legend, and the man that I knew is forgotten. Merril -- pirate, fighter, grandiose dreamer. That was my captain. Not the colorless do-good creature of the legend. Merril fought for lust and greed, and these afe the things that will one day take men to the stars. He knew this truth, of course, and that was the substance of his great dream. Because of it, there are no longer walls in space, and the men who united to fight the Peacemaker will one day rule the universe. Meanwhile, chroniclers will write lies about him, and Jaq Merril's laughter will echo in some ghostly Valhalla beyond the farthest star.  p her. comfxrt it' mem There is a time for doing and a time for going home. But where is home in an ever-changing universe? By Mari Wolf I to go home." She didn't look at me. I followed her gaze to Earth, rising in the east. It came up over the desert horizon, a clear, bright star at this distance. Right now it was the Morning Star. It wasn't long before dawn. I looked back at Martha sitting quietly beside me with her shawl drawn tightly about her knees. She had waited to see it also, of course. It had become almost a ritual with us these last few years, staying up night after night to watch the earthrise. She didn't say anything more. Even the gentle squeak of her rocking chair had fallen silent. Only her hands moved. I could see them trembling where they lay folded in her lap, trembling with emotion and tiredness and old age. I knew what she was thinking. After seventy years there can be no secrets. We sat on the glassed-in veranda of our Martian home looking up at the Morning Star. To us it wasn't a point of light. It was the continents and oceans of Earth, the mountains and meadows and laughing streams of our childhood. We saw Earth still, though we had lived on Mars for almost sixty-six years. "Lewis," Martha whispered softly. "It's wry bright tonight, isn't it?" "Yes," I said. "It seems so near." She sighed and drew the shawl higher about her waist. "Only three months by rocket ship," she said. "We could be back home in three months, Lewis, if we went out on this week's run." I nodded. For years we'd watched the rocket ships streak upward through the thin Martian atmosphere, and we'd envied the men who so casually travelled from world to world. But it had been a useless envy, something of which we rarely spoke. Inside our veranda the air was cool and slightly moist. Earth air, perfumed with the scent of Earth roses. Yet we knew it was only illusion. Outside, just beyond the glass, the cold night air of Mars lay thin and alien and smelling of alkali. It seemed to me tonight that I could smell that ever-dry Martian dust, even here. I sighed, fumbling for my pipe. "Lewis," Martha said, very softly. "What is it?" I cupped my hands over the match flame. "Nothing. It's just that I wish -- I wish we could go home, right away. Home to Earth. I want to see it again, before we die." "We'll go back," I said. "Next year for sure. We'll have enough money then." She sighed. "Next year may be too late." I looked over at her, startled. She'd never talked like that before. I started to protest, but the words died away before I could even speak them. She was right. Next year might indeed be too late. Her work-coarsened hands were thin, too thin, and they never stopped shaking any more. Her body was a frail shadow of what it had once been. Even her voice was frail now. She was old. We were both old. There wouldn't be many more Martian summers for us, nor many years of missing Earth. "Why can't we go back this year. Lewis?" She smiled at me almost apologetically. She knew the reason as well as I did. "We can't," I said. "There's not enough money." "There's enough for our tickets." I'd explained all that to her before, too. Perhaps she'd forgotten Lately I often had to explain thing more than once. "You can't buy passage unless you have enough extra for insurance, and travelers' checks, and passport tax. The company has to protectitself. Unless you're financially responsible, they won't take you on the ships." She shook her head. "Sometimes I wonder if we'll ever have enough." i i I i years, but it was a pitifully small savings. We weren't rich people who could go down to the spaceport and buy passage on the rocket ships, no questions asked, no bond required. We were only farmers, eking our livelihood from the unproductive Martian soil, only two of the countless little people of the solar system. In all our lifetime we'd never been able to save enough to go home to Earth. "One more year," I said. "If the crop prices stay up..." She smiled, a sad little smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Yes, Lewis," she said. "One more year." But I couldn't stop thinking of what she'd said earlier, nor stop seeing her thin, tired body. Neither of us was strong any more, but of the two I was far stronger than she. When we'd left Earth she'd been as eager and graceful as a child. We hadn't been much past childhood then, either of us... "Somedmes I wonder why we ever came here," she said. "It's been a good life." She sighed. "I know. But now that it's nearly over, there's nothing to hold us here." "No," I said. "There's not." If we had had children it might have been different. As it was, we lived surrounded by the children and grandchildren of our friends. Our friends themselves were dead. One by one they had died, all of those who came with us on the first colonizing ship to Mars. All of those who came later, on the second and third ships. Their children were our neighbors now -- and they were Martian born. It wasn't the same. She leaned over and pressed my hand. "We'd better go in, Lewis," she said. "We need our sleep." Her eyes were raised again to the green star that was Earth. Watching her, I knew that I loved her now as much as when we had been young together. More, really, for we had added years of shared memories. I wanted so much to give her what she longed for, what we both longed for. But I couldn't think of any way to do it. Not this year. Once, almost seventy years before, I had smiled at the girl who had just promised to become my wife, and I'd said; "I'll give you the world, darling. All tied up in pink ribbons." I didn't want to think about that now. We got up and went into the house and shut the veranda door behind us. hours I lay in bed staring up at the shadowed ceiling, trying to think of some way to raise the money. But there wasn't any way that I could see. It would be at least eight months before enough of the greenhouse crops were harvested. What would happen, I wondered, if I went to the spaceport and asked for tickets? If I explained that we couldn't buy insurance, that we couldn't put up the bond guaranteeing we wouldn't become public charges back on Earth... But all the time I wondered I knew the answer. Rules were rules. They wouldn't be broken especially not for two old farmers who had long outlived their usefulness and their time. Martha sighed in her sleep and turned over. It was light enough now for me to see her face clearly. She was smiling. But a minute ago she had been crying, for the tears were still wet on her cheeks. Perhaps she was dreaming of Earth again. Suddenly, watching her, I didn't care if they laughed at me or lectured me on my responsibilities to the government as if I were a senile fool. I was going to the spaceport. I was going to find out if, somehow, we couldn't go back. I got up and dressed and went out, walking softly so as not to awaken her. But even so she heard me and called out to me. "Lewis... I turned at the head of the stairs and looked back into the room. "Don't get up, Martha," I said. "I'm going into town." "All right, Lewis." She relaxed, and a minute later she was asleep again. I tiptoed downstairs and out the front door to where the trike car was parked, #md started for the village a mile to the west. It was desert all the way. Dry, fine red sand that swirled upward in choking clouds, if you stepped off the pavement into it. The narrow road cut straight through it, linking the outlying district farms to the town. The farms themselves were planted in the desert. Small, glasseiin houses and barns, and large greenhouses roofed with even more glass, that sheltered the Earth plants and gave them Earth air to breathe. farmhouse John Emery hurried out to meet me. "Morning, Lewis," he said. "Going to town?" I shut off the motor and nodded. "I want to catch the early shuttle plane to the spaceport," I said. "I'm going to the city to buy some things..." I had to lie about it. I didn't want anyone to know we were even thinking of leaving, at least not until we had our tickets in our hands. "Oh," Emery said. "That's right. I suppose you'll be buying Martha an anniversary present." I stared at him blankly. I couldn't think what anniversary he meant. "You'll have been here thirtyfive years next week," he said. "That's a long time, Lewis..." Thirty-five years. It took me a minute to realize what he meant. He was right. That was how long we had been here, in Martian years. The others, those who had been born here on Mars, always used the Martian seasons. We had too, once. But lately we forgot, and counted in Earth time. It seemed more natural. "Wait a minute, Lewis," Emery said. "I'll ride into the village with you. There's plenty of time for you to make your plane." I went up on his veranda and sat down and waited for him to get ready. I leaned back in the swing chair and rocked slowly back and forth, wondering idly how many times I'd sat here. This was old Tom Emery's house. Or had been, until he died eight years ago. He'd built this swing chair the very first year we'd been on Mars. Now it was young John's. Young? That showed how old we were getting. John was sixty-three, in Earth years. He'd been bom that second winter, the month the parasites got into the greenhouses... He came back out onto the veranda. "Well, I'm ready, Lewis," he said. We went down to my trike car and got in. "You and Martha ought to get out more," he said. "Jenny's been asking me why you don't come to call." , I shrugged. I couldn't tell him ; we seldom went out because when we did we were always set apart and treated carefully, like children. He probably didn't even realize that it was so. "Oh," I said. "We like it at home." He smiled. "I suppose you do, after thirty-five years." I started the motor quickly, and from then on concentrated on my driving. He didn't say anything more. get to the village, but even so I was tired. Lately it grew harder and harder to drive, to keep the trike car on the narrow strip of pavement. I was glad when we pulled up in the square and got out. "I'll walk over to the plane with you," Emery said. "I've got plenty of time." "All right." "By the way, Lewis, Jenny and I and some of the neighbors thought we'd drop over on your anniversary." "That's fine," I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. "Come on over." "It's a big event," he said. "Deserves a celebration." The shuttle plane was just landing. I hurried over to the ticket window, with him right beside me. "I just wanted to be sure you'd be home," he said. "We wouldn't want you to miss your own party." "Party?" I said. "But John -- " He wouldn't even let me finish protesting. "Now don't ask any questions, Lewis. You wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, would you?" He chuckled. "Your plane's loading now. You'd better be going. Thanks for the ride, Lewis." I went across to the plane and got in. I hoped that somehow we wouldn't have to spend that Martian anniversary being congratulated and petted and babied. I didn't think Martha could stand it. But there wasn't any polite way to say no. spaceport. In less than an hour the plane dropped down to the air strip that flanked the rocket field. But it was like flying from one civilization to another. The city was big, almost like an Earth city. There was lots of traffic, cars and copters and planes. All the bustle of the spaceways stations. But although the city looked like Earth, it smelled as dry and alkaline as all the rest of Mars. I found the ticket office easily enough and went in. The young clerk barely glanced up at me. "Yes?" he said. "I want to inquire about tickets to Earth," I said. My hands were sweating, and I could feci my heart pounding too fast against my ribs. But my voice sounded casual, just the way I wanted it to sound. "Tickets?" the clerk said. "How many?" "Two. How much would they cost? Everything included." "Forty-two eighty," he said. His voice was still bored. "I could give them to you for the flight ter next. Tourist class, of course..." We didn't have that much. We were at least three hundred short. "Isn't there any way," I said hesitantly, "that I could get them for less? I mean, we wouldn't need insurance, would we?" He looked up at me for the first time, startled. "You don't mean you want them for yourself, do you?" "Why yes. For me and my wife." He shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said flatly. "But that would be impossible in any case. You're too old." He turned away from me and bent over his desk work again. The words hung in the air. Too old... too old... I clutched the edge of the desk and steadied myself and forced down the panic I could feel rising. "Do you mean," I said slowly, "that you wouldn't sell us tickets even if we had the money?" He glanced up again, obviously annoyed at my persistence. "That's right. No passengers over seventy carried without special visas. Medical precaution." I just stood there. This couldn't be happening. Not after all our years of working and saving and planning for the future. Not go back. Not even next year. Stay here, because we were old and frail and the ships wouldn't be bothered with us anyway. Martha... How could I tell her? How could I say, "We can't go home, Martha. They won't let us." I couldn't say it. There had to be .some other way. "Pardon me," I said to the clerk, "but who should I see about getting a visa?" He swept the stack of papers away with an impatient gesture and frowned up at me. "Over at the colonial office, I suppose," he said. "But it won't do you any good." I could read in his eyes what he thought of me. Of me and all the other farmers who lived in the outlying districts and raised crops and seldom came to the city. My clothes were old and provincial and out of style, and so was I, to him. "I'll try it anyway," I said. He started to say something, then bit it back and looked away from me again. I was keeping him from his work. I was just a rude old man interfering with the operation of the spaceways. Slowly I let go of the desk and turned to leave. It was hard to walk. My knees were trembling, and my whole body shook. It was all I could do not to cry. It angered me, the quavering in my voice and the weakness in my legs. I went out into the hall and looked for the directory that would point the way to the colonial office. It wasn't far off. I walked out onto the edge of the field and past the Earth rocket, its silver nose pointed up at the sky. I couldn't bear to look at it for longer than a minute. It was only a few hundred yards to the colonisJ office, but it seemed like miles. T his office was larger than the other, and much more comfortable. The man seated behind the desk seemed friendlier too. "May I help you?" he asked. "Yes," I said slowly. "The man at the ticket office told me to come here. I wanted to see about getting a permit to go back to Earth... His smile faded. "For yourself?" "Yes," I said woodenly. "For myself and my wife." "Well, Mr..." "Farwell. Lewis Farwell." "My name's Duane. Please sit down, won't you?... How old are you, Mr. Farwell?" "Eighty-seven," I said. "In Earth years." He frowned. "The regulations say no space travel for people past seventy, except in certain special cases..." I looked down at my hands. They were shaking badly. I knew he could see them shake, and was judging me as old and weak and unable to stand the trip. He couldn't know why I was trembling. "Please," I whispered. "It wouldn't matter if it hurt us. It's just that we want to see Earth again. It's been so long..." "How long have you been here, Mr. Farwell?" It was merely politeness. There wasn't any promise in his voice. "Sixty-five years." I looked up at him. "Isn't there some way -- " "Sixty-five years? But that means you must have come here on the first colonizing ship." "Yes," I said. "We did." "I can't believe it," he said slowly "I can't believe I'm actually looking at one of the pioneers." He shook his head. "I didn't even know any of them were still on Mars." "We're the last ones," I said. "That's the main reason we want to go back. It's awfully hard staying on when your friends are dead." D uane got up and crossed the room to the window and looked out over the rocket field. "But what good would it do to go back, Mr. Farwell?" he asked. "Earth has changed very much in the last sixty-five years." He was trying to soften the disappointment. But nothing could. If only I could make him realize that. "I know it's changed," I said. "But it's home. Don't you see? We're Earthmen still. I guess that never changes. And now that we're old, we're aliens here." "We're all aliens here, Mr. Farwell." "No," I said desperately. "Maybe you are. Maybe a lot of the city people are. But our neighbors were born on Mars. To them Earth is a legend. A place where their ancestors once lived. It's not real to them..." He turned and crossed the room and came back to me. His smile was pitying. "If you went back," he said, "you'd find you were a Martian, too." I couldn't reach him. He was friendly and pleasant and he was trying to make things easier, and it wasn't any use talking. I bent my head and choked back the sobs I could feel rising in my throat. "You've lived a full life," Duane said. "You were one of the pioneers. I remember reading about your ship when I was a boy, and wishing I'd been born sooner so that I could have been on it." Slowly I raised my head and looked up at him. "Please," I said. "I know that. I'm glad we came here. If we had our lives to live over, we'd come at;ain. We'd go through all the hardships of those first few years, and enjoy them just as much. We'd be just as thrilled over proving that it's possible to farm a world like this, where it's always freezing and the air is thin and nothing will grow outside the greenhouses. You don't need to tell me what we've done, or what we've gotten out of it. We know. We've had a wonderful life here." "But you still want to go back?" "Yes," I said. "We still want to go back. We're tired of living in the past, with our friends dead and nothing to do except remember." He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said slowly, "You realize, don't you, that if you went back to Earth you'd have to stay there? You couldn't return to Mars..." "I realize that," I said. "That's what we want. We want to die at home. On Earth." F or a long, long moment his eyes never left mine. Then, slowly, he sat down at his desk and reached for a pen. "All right, Mr. Farwell," he said. "I'll give you a visa." I couldn't believe it. I stared at him, sure that I'd misunderstood. "Sixty-five years..." He shook his head. "I only hope I'm doing the right thing. I hope you won't regret this." "We won't," I whispered. Then I remembered that we were still short of money. That that was why I'd come to the spaceport originally. I was almost afraid to mention it, for fear I'd lose everything. "Is there -- is there some way we could be excused from the insurance?" I said. "So we could go back this year? We're three hundred short." He smiled. It was a very reassuring smile. "You don't need to worry about the money," he said. "The colonial office can take care of that. After all, we owe your generation a great debt, Mr. Farwell. A passport tax and the fare to Earth are little enough to pay for a planet." I didn't quite understand him, but that didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was that we were going home. Back to Earth. I could see Martha's face when I told her. I could see her tears of happiness... There were tears on my own cheeks, but I wasn't ashamed of them now. "Mr. Farwell," Duane said. "You go back home. The shuttle ship will be leaving in a few minutes." "You mean that -- " I started. He nodded. "I'll get your tickets for you. On the first ship I can. Just leave it to me." "It's too much trouble," I protested "No it's not." He smiled. "Besides, I'd like to bring them out to you. I'd like to see your farm, if I may." Then I remembered what John Emery had said this morning about our anniversary. It would be a wonderful celebration, now that there was something to celebrate. We could even save our announcement that we were going home until then. "Mr. Duane," I said. "Next week, on the tenth, we'll have been here thirty-five Martian years. Maybe you'd like to come out then. I guess our neighbors will be giving us a sort of party." He laid the pen down and looked at me very intently. "They don't know you're planning to leave yet, do they?" "No. We'll wait and tell them then." Duane nodded slowly. "I'll be there," he promised. M artha was out on the veranda again, looking down the road toward the village. All afternoon at least one of us had been out there watching for our guests, waiting for our anniversary celebration to begin. "Do you see anyone yet?" I called. "No," she said. "Not yet..." I looked around the room hoping I'd find something left undone that I could work on, so I wouldn't have to sit and worry about the possibility of Duane's having forgotten us. But everything was ready. The extra chairs were out and the furniture all dusted, and Martha's cakes and cookies arranged on the table. I couldn't sit still. Not today. I got up out of the chair and joined her on the veranda. "I wonder what their surprise is..." she said. "Didn't John give you any hint at all?" "No," I said. "But whatever it is, it can't be half as wonderful as ours." She reached for my hand. "Lewis," she whispered. "I can hardly believe it, can you?" "No," I said. "But it's true. We're really going." I put my arm around her, and she rested her head against me. "I'm so happy, Lewis." Her cheeks were full of color once again, and her step had a spring to it that I hadn't seen for years. It was as if the years of waiting were falling away from both of us now. "I wish they'd come," she said. "I can hardly wait to see their faces when we tell them." It was getting late in the afternoon. Already the sun was dipping down toward the desert horizon. It was hard to wait. In some ways it was harder to be patient these last few hours than it had been during all those years we'd wanted to go back. "Look," Martha said suddenly. "There's a car now." Then I saw the car too, coming quickly toward us. It pulled up in front of the house and stopped and Duane stepped out. "Well, hello there, Mr. Farwell," he called. "All ready for the trip?" I nodded. Suddenly, now that he was here, I couldn't say anything at all. He must have seen how excited we were. By the time he was inside the veranda door he'd reached into his wallet and pulled out a long envelope. "Here's your schedule," he said. "Your tickets are all made out for next week's flight." Martha's hand crept into mine. "You've been so kind," she whispered. smiled at each other while Duane admired the furniture and the farming district in general and our place in particular. We hardly heard what he was saying. When the doorbell rang we stared at each other. For a minute I couldn't think who it might be. I'd forgotten our guests and their surprise party, even the anniversary itself had slipped my mind. "Hello in there," John Emery called. "Come on out, you two." Martha pressed my hand once more. Then she stepped to the door and opened it. "Happy anniversary!" We stood frozen. We'd expected only a few visitors, some of our nearest neighbors. But the yard was full of people. They crowded up our walk and in the road and more of them were still piling out of cars. It looked as if everyone in the district was along. "Come on out," Emery called. "You too, Duane." The two men smiled at each other knowingly, and for just a moment I had time to wonder why. Then Martha clutched my arm. "You tell him, Lewis." "John," I said. "We have a surprise for you too -- He wouldn't let me finish. He took hold of my arm with one hand and Martha's with the other and drew us outside where everyone could see us. "You can tell us later, Lewis," he said, "First we have a surprise for you!" "But wait -- " They crowded in around us, laughing and waving and calling "Happy anniversary". We couldn't resist them. They swept us along with them down the walk and into one of the cars. I looked around for Duane. He was in the back seat, smiling somewhat nervously. Perhaps he thought that this was normal farm life. "Lewis," Martha said, "where are they taking us?" "I don't know..." The cars started, ours leading the way. It was a regular procession back to the village, with everyone laughing and calling to us and telling us how happy we were going to be with our surprise. Every time we tried to ask questions, John Emery interrupted. "Just wait and see," he kept saying. "Wait and see... A t the end of the village square they'd put up a platform. It wasn't very big, nor very well made, but it was strung with yards of bunting and a huge sign that said, "Happy Anniversary, Lewis and Martha." We were pushed toward it, carried along by the swarm of people. There wasn't any way to resist. Martha clung to my arm, pressing close against me. She was trembling again. "What does it mean, Lewis?" "I wish I knew," They pushed us right up onto the platform and John Emery followed us up and held out his hand to quiet the crowd. I put my arm around Martha and looked down at them. Hundreds of people. All in their best clothes. Our friends's children and grandchildren, and even greatgrandchildren. "I won't make a speech," John Emery said when they were finally quiet. "You know why we're here today -- all of you except Lewis and Martha know. It's an anniversary. A big anniversary. Thirty-five years today since our fathers -- and you two -- landed here on Mars..." He paused. He didn't seem to know what to say next. Finally he turned and swept his arm past the platform to where a big canvas-covered object stood on the ground. "Unveil it," he said. The crowd grew absolutely quiet. A couple of boys stepped up and pulled the canvas off. "There's your surprise," John Emery said softly. It was a statue. A life-size statue carved from the dull red stone of Mars. Two figures, a man and a woman, dressed in farm clothes, standing side by side and looking out across the square toward the open desert. They were very real, those figures. Real, and somehow familiar. "Lewis," Martha whispered. "They're -- they're us!" She W#S right. It was a statue of us. Neither old nor young, but ageless. Two farmers, looking out forever across the endless Martian desert... There was an inscription on the base, but I couldn't quite make it out. Martha could. She read it, slowly, while everyone in the crowd stood silent, listening. "Lewis and Martha Farwell," she read. "The last of the pioneers -- " Her voice broke. "Underneath," she whispered, "it says -- the first Martians. And then it lists them -- us..." She read the list, all the names of our friends who had come out on that first ship. The names of men and women who had died, one by one, and left their farms to their children -- to the same children who now crowded close about the platform and listened to her read, and smiled up at us. She came to the end of the list and looked out at the crowd. "Thank you," she whispered. They shouted then. They called out to us and pressed forward and held their babies up to see us. across the flat red desert to the horizon, toward the spot in the east where the Earth would rise, much later. The dry smell of Mats had never been stronger. The first Martians... They were so real, those carved figures. Lewis and Martha Farwell... "Look at them, Lewis," Martha said softly. "They're cheering us. Us!" She was smiling. There were tears in her eyes, but her smile was bright and proud and shining. Slowly she turned away frcim me and straightened, staring ovit over the heads of the crowd across the desert to the east. She stood with her head thrown back arid her mouth smiling, and she was as proudly erect as the statue that was her likeness. "Martha," I whispered. "How can we tell them goodbye?" Then she turned to face me, and I could see the tears glistening in lil t !!. "We can't leave, Lewis. N I .liter this." li(' was right, of course. We I niildn't leave. We were symbols. Tilllast of the pioneers. The first .M.irtians. And they had carved thi-ir symbol in our image and made us a part of Mars forever. I glanced down, along the rows of upturned, laughing faces, searching for Duane. He was easy to find. He was the only one who wasn't shouting. His eyes met mine, and I didn't have to say anything. He knew. He climbed up beside me on the platform. I tried to speak, but I couldn't. "Tell him, Lewis," Martha whispered. "Tell him we can't go." Then she was crying. Her smile was gone and her proud look was gone and her hand crept into mine and trembled there. I put my arm around her shoulders, but there was no way I could comfort her. "Now we'll never go," she sobbed. "We'll never get home..." I don't think I had ever realized, until that moment, just how much it meant to her -- getting home. Much more, perhaps, than it had ever meant to me. The statues were only statues. They were carved from the stone of Mars. And Martha wanted Earth. We both wanted Earth. Home... I looked away from her then, back to Duane. "No," I said. "We're still going. Only -- " I broke off, hearing the shouting and the cheers and the children's laughter. "Only, how can we tell them?" Duane smiled. "Don't try to, Mr. Farwell," he said softly. "Just wait and see." He turned, nodded to where John Emery still stood at the edge of the platform. "All right, John." Emery nodded too, and then he raised his hand. As he did so, the shouting stopped and the people stood suddenly quiet, still looking up at us. "You all know that this is an anniversary," John Emery said. "And you all know something else that Lewis and Martha thought they'd kept as a surprise -- that this is more than an anniversary. It's goodbye." I stared at him. He knew. All of them knew. And then I looked at Duane and saw that he was smiling more than ever. "They've lived here on Mars for thirty-five years," John Emery said. "And now they're going back to' Earth." Martha's hand tightened on mine. "Look, Lewis," she cried. "Look at them. They're not angry. They're -- they're happy for us!" John Emery turned to face us. "Surprised?" he said. I nodded. Martha nodded too. Behind him, the people cheered again. "I thought you would be," Emery said. Then, "I'm not very good at speeches, but I just wanted you to know how much we've enjoyed being your neighbors. Don't forget us when you get back to Earth." Mars to Earth. Three months miles. A trip we had dreamed about for so long, without any real hope of ever making it. But now it was over. We were back on Earth. Back where we had started from. "It's good to be alone, isn't it, Lewis?" Martha leaned back in her chair and smiled up at me. I nodded. It did feel good to be here in the apartment, just the two of us, away from the crowds and the speeches and the official welcomes and the flashbulbs popping. "I wish they wouldn't make such a fuss over us," she said. "I wish they'd leave us alone." "You can't blame them," I said, although I couldn't help wishing the same thing. "We're celebrities. What was it that reporter said about us? That we're part of history..." She sighed. She turned away from me and looked out the window again, past the buildings and the lighted traffic ramps and the throngs of people bustling by outside, people who couldn't see in through the one-way glass, people whom we couldn't hear because the room was soundproofed. "Mars should be up by now," she said. "It probably is." I looked out again, although I knew that we would see nothing. No stars. No planets. Not even the moon, except as a pale half disc peering through the haze. The lights from the city were too bright. The air held the light and reflected it down again, and the sky was a deep, dark blue with the buildings about us towering into it, outlined blackly against it. And we couldn't sec the stars... "Lewis," Martha said slowly. "I never thought it would have changed this much, did you?" "No." I couldn't tell from her voice whether she liked the changes or not. Lately I couldn't tell much of anything from her voice. And nothing was the same as we had remembered it. Even the Earth farms were mechanized now. Factory production lines for food, as well as for everything else. It was necessary, of course. We had heard all the reasons, all the theories, all the latest statistics. "I guess I'll go to bed soon," Martha said. "I'm tired." "It's the higher gravity." We'd both been tired since we got back to Earth. We had forgotten, over the years, what Earth gravity was like. She hesitated. She smiled at me, but her eyes were worried. "Lewis -- are you really glad we came back?" It was the first time she had asked me that. And there was only one answer I could give her. The one she expected. "Of course, Martha..." She sighed again. She got up out of the chair and turned toward the bedroom door, and then she paused there by the window looking out at the deep blue sky. "Are you really glad, Lewis?" Then I knew. Or, at least, I hoped. "Why, Martha? Aren't you?" For one long minute she stood beside me, looking up at the Mars we couldn't see. And then she turned to face me once again, and I could see the tears. "Oh, Lewis, I want to go home !" Full circle. We had both come full circle these last few hectic weeks on Earth. "So do I, Martha." "Do you, Lewis?" And then the lircdncss came back to her eyes and she looked away again. "But of course we can't." Slowly I crossed over to the desk and opened the top drawer and took out the folder that Duane had given me, that last day at the spaceport, just before our ship to Earth had blasted off. Slowly I unfolded the paper that Duane had told me to keep in case we ever wanted it. "Yes, we can, Martha. We can (Continued from page #) But in the middle of his talk he broke off suddenly. A flash of blindwindows. Horror painted his face. In a whisper, he cried; "No! No! It would make it all so senseless!" His eyes looked like the eyes of a man with flaming splinters jammed under his fingernails. His face seemed to pucker, and grow infantile. Then he screamed: "No! Leave me alone! I told you I didn't want to come out here, to be one of you! Damn you, why did you bring me out here? For -- for this?..." There were the shards of glass from the great auditorium windows, floating inward, turning lazily. There were the brick walls crumbling, tumbling inward, scattering through the air in the same seeming slow motion. The dust cloud and the sound, the flat blastsound, came after that, as the entire building -- perhaps the world -- go back." "What's that, Lewis?" And then she saw what it was. Her face came alive again, and her eyes were shining. "We're going home?" she whispered. "We're really going home?" I looked down at the Earth-Mars half of the round trip ticket that Duane had given me, and I knew that this time she was right. This time we'd really be going home. end disintegrated ill itlie: feye-searing light... December #th, #, Two-Thirty A.M. The flat of a rubber-gloved hand striking flesh made a splatting noise. A thin, breathless but concentrated crying followed. The doctor looked down at his charity clinic patient, the woman under the bright delivery room lights. "Look at him -- fighting like a little demon!" the doctor said. "Seemed almost as though he didn't want to come out and join us... What's the matter, son? This is a bright, new, wonderful world to be born into... What are you going to call the boy, Mrs. McKinney?" The woman under the lights forced a tired smile. "Jeff. Jefferson McKinney. That's going to be his name," she whispered proudly. The baby's terrified squalling subsided into fretful, whimpering resignation. The atomic bomb meant, to most people, the end. To Henry Bemis it meant something far different -- a thing to appreciate and enjoy. Time Enough At Last By Lynn Venable F or a long time, Henry was never enough time. It looked Bemis had had an ambition, as though Henry's ambition would To read a book. Not just the title never be realized. Then something or the preface, or a page somehappened which changed all that, where in the middle. He wanted Henry was down in the vault of to read the whole thing, all the way the Eastside Bank  Trust when it through from beginning to end. A happened. He had stolen a few simple ambition perhaps, but in the moments from the duties of his cluttered life of Henry Bemis, an teller's cage to try to read a few impossibility. pages of the magazine he had Henry had no time of his own. bought that morning. He'd made There was his wife, Agnes who an excuse to Mr. Carsville about owned that part of it that his emneeding bills in large denominaployer, Mr. Carsville, did not buy. tions for a certain customer, and Henry was allowed enough to get to then, safe inside the dim recesses of and from work -- that in itself being the vault he had pulled from inside quite a concession on Agnes' part, his coat the pocket size magazine. Also, nature had conspired He had just started a picture aragainst Henry by handing him with tide cheerfully entitled "The New a pair of hopelessly myopic eyes. Weapons and What They'll Do To hand in front of his face. For a world crashed in upon his earwhile, when he was very young, his drums. It seemed to be inside of parents had thought him an idiot, him and outside of him all at once. When they realized it was his eyes. Then the concrete floor was rising they got glasses for him. He was up at him and the ceiling came never quite able to catch up. There slanting down toward him, and for a fleeting second Henry thought of a story he had started to read once called "The Pit and The Pendulum". He regretted in that insane moment that he had never had time to finish that story to see how it came out. Then all was darkness and quiet and unconsciousness. knew that something was desperately wrong with the Eastside Bank  Trust. The heavy steel door of the vault was buckled and twisted and the floor tilted up at a dizzy angle, while the ceiling dipped crazily toward it. Henry gingerly got to his feet, moving arms and legs experimentally. Assured that nothing was broken, he tenderly raised a hand to his eyes. His precious glasses were intact, thank God! He would never have been able to find his way out of the shattered vault without them. He made a mental note to write Dr. Torrance to have a spare pair made and mailed to him. Blasted nuisance not having his prescription on file locally, but Henry trusted no-one but Dr. Torrance to grind those thick lenses into his own complicated prescription. Henry removed the heavy glasses from his face. Instantly the room dissolved into a neutral blur. Henry saw a pink splash that he knew was his hand, and a white blob come up to meet the pink as he withdrew his pocket handkerchief and carefully dusted the lenses. As he replaced the glasses, they slipped down on the bridge of his nose a little. He had been meaning to have them tightened for some time. He suddenly realized, without the realization actually entering his conscious thoughts, that something momentous had happened, something worse than the boiler blowing up, something worse than a gas main exploding, something worse than anything that had ever happened before. He felt that way because it was so quiet. There was no whine of sirens, no shouting, no running, just an ominous and all pervading silence, H enry walked across the slanting floor. Slipping and stumbling on the uneven surface, he made his way to the elevator. The ear lay crumpled at the foot of the shaft like a discarded accordian. There was something inside of it that Henry could not look at, something that had once been a person, or perhaps several people, it was impossible to tell now. Feeling sick, Henry staggered toward the stairway. The steps were still there, but so jumbled and piled back upon one another that it was more like climbing the side of a mountain than mounting a stairway. It was quiet in the huge chamber that had been the lobby of the bank. It looked strangely cheerful with the sunlight shining through the girders where the ceiling had fallen. The dappled sunlight glinted across the silent lobby, and everywhere there were huddled lumps of unpleasantness that made Henry sick as he tried not to look at them. "Mr. CarsvLlle," he called. It was very quiet. Something had to be done, of course. This was terrible, right in the middle of a Monday, too. Mr. Carsville would know what to do. He called again, more loudly, and his voice cracked hoarsely, "Mr. Carrrrsville !" And then he saw an arm and shoulder extending out from under a huge fallen block of marble ceiling. In the buttonhole was the white carnation Mr. Carsville had worn to work that morning, and on the third finger of that hand was a massive signet ring, also belonging to Mr. Carsville. Numbly, Henry realized that the rest of Mr. Carsville was under that block of marble. Henry felt a pang of real sorrow. Mr. Carsville was gone, and so was the rest of the staff -- Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Emory and Mr. Prithard, and the same with Pete and Ralph and Jenkins and Hunter doorman. There was no one to say what was to be done about the Eastside Bank  Trust except Henry Bemis, and Henry wasn't worried about the bank, there was something he wanted to do. He climbed carefully over piles of fallen masonry. Once he stepped down into something that crunched and squashed beneath his feet and he set his teeth on edge to keep from retching. The street was not much different from the inside, bright sunlight and so much concrete to crawl over, but the unpleasantness was much, much worse. Everywhere there were strange, motionless lumps that Henry could not look at. Suddenly, he remembered Agnes. He should be trying to get to Agnes, shouldn't he? He remembered a poster he had seen that said, "In event of emergency do not use the telephone, your loved ones are as safe as you." He wondered about Agnes. He looked at the smashed automobiles, some with their four wheels pointing skyward like the stiffened legs of dead animals. He couldn't get to Agnes now anyway, if she was safe, then, she was safe, otherwise... of course, Henry knew Agnes wasn't safe. He had a feeling that there wasn't anyone safe for a long, long way, maybe not in the whole state or the whole country, or the whole world. No, that was a thought Henry didn't want to think, he forced it from his mind and turned his thoughts back to Agnes. wife, now that it was all said and done. It wasn't exactly her fault if people didn't have time to read nowadays. It was just that there was the house, and the bank, and the yard. There were the Jones' for bridge and the Graysons' for canasta and charades with the Bryants. And the television, the television Agnes loved to watch, but would never watch alone. He never had time to read even a newspaper. He started thinking about last night, that business about the newspaper. Henry had settled into his chair, quietly, afraid that a creaking spring might call to Agnes' attention the fact that he was momentarily unoccupied. He had unfolded the newspaper slowly and carefully, the sharp crackle of the paper would have been a clarion call to Agnes. He had glanced at the headlines of the first page. "Collapse Of ( 'nfcrncc Imminent." He didn't li.ui time to read the article. He turned to the second page. "Solon I'li'dicts War Only Days Away." Ur flipped through the pages faster, reading brief snatches here and there, afraid to spend too much time on any one item. On a back page was a brief article entitled, "Prehistoric Artifacts Unearthed In Yucatan". Henry smiled to himself and carefully folded the sheet of paper into fourths. That would be interesting, he would read all of it. Then it came, Agnes' voice. "Henrrreeel" And then she was upon him. She lightly flicked the paper out of his hands and into the fireplace. He saw the flames lick up and curl possessively around the unread article. Agnes continued, "Henry, tonight is the Jones' bridge night. They'll be here in thirty minutes and I'm not dressed yet, and here you are... reading She had emphasized the last word as though it were an unclean act. "Hurry and shave, you know how smooth Jasper Jones' chin always looks, and then straighten up this room." She glanced regretfully toward the fireplace. "Oh dear, that paper, the television schedule... oh well, after the Jones leave there won't be time for anything but the late-late movie and... Don't just sit there, Henry, hurrreeee!" Henry was hurrying now, but hurrying too much. He cut his leg on a twisted piece of metal that had oiui' been an automobile fender. He tie light about things like lockjaw .#(I gangrene and his hand tnanbled as he tied his pockethatulKerehief around the wound. In his mind, he saw the fire again, licking across the face of last night's newspaper. He thought that now he would have time to read all the newspapers he wanted to, only now there wouldn't be any more. That heap of rubble across the street had been the Gazette Building. It was terrible to think there would never be another up to date newspaper. Agnes would have been very upset, no television schedule. But then, of course, no television. He wanted to laugh but he didn't. That wouldn't have been fitting, not at all. He could see the building he was looking for now, but the silhouette was strangely changed. The great circular dome was now a ragged semi-circle, half of it gone, and one of the great wings of the building had fallen in upon itself. A sudden panic gripped Henry Bemis. What if they were all ruined, destroyed, every one of them? What if there wasn't a single one left? Tears of helplessness welled in his eyes as he painfully fought his way over and through the twisted fragments of the city. when it had been whole. He reme.mbered the many nights he had paused outside its wide and welcoming doors. He thought of the warm nights when the doors had been thrown open and he could see the people inside, see them sitting at the plain wooden tables with the stacks of books beside them. He used to think then, what a wonderful thing a public library was, a place where anybody, anybody at all could go in and read. He had been tempted to enter many times. He had watched the people through the open doors, the man in greasy work clothes who sat near the door, night after night, laboriously studying, a technical journal perhaps, difficult for him, but promising a brighter future. There had been an aged, scholarly gentleman who sat on the other side of the door, leisurely paging, moving his lips a little as he did so, a man having little time left, but rich in time because he could do with it as he chose. Henry had never gone in. He had started up the steps once, got almost to the door, but then he remembered Agnes, her questions and shouting, and he had turned away. He was going in now though, almost crawling, his breath coming in stabbing gasps, his hands tom and bleeding. His trouser leg was sticky red where the wound in his leg had soaked through the handkerchief. It was throbbing badly but Henry didn't care. He had reached his destination. Part of the inscription was still there, over the now doorless entrance. P-U-B-C L-I-B-R -- . The rest had been torn away. The place was in shambles. The shelves were overturned, broken, smashed, tilted, their precious contents spilled in disorder upon the floor. A lot of the books, Henry noted gleefully, were still intact, still whole, still readable. He was literally knee deep in them, he wallowed in books. He picked one up. The title was "Colspeare." Yes, he must read that, sometime. He laid it aside carefully. He picked up another. Spinoza. He tossed it away, seized another, and another, and still another. Which to read first... there were so many. He had been conducting himself a little like a starving man in a delicatessen -- grabbing a little of this and a little of that in a frenzy of enjoyment. But now he steadied away. From the pile about him, he selected one volume, sat comfortably down on an overturned shelf, and opened the book. Henry Bemis smiled. There was the rumble of complaining stone. Minute in comparison which the epic complaints following the fall of the bomb. This one occurred under one corner of the shelf upon which Henry sat. The shelf moved; threw him off balance. The glasses slipped from his nose and fell with a tinkle. He bent down, clawing blindly and found, finally, their smashed remains. A minor, indirect destruction stemming from the sudden, wholesale smashing of a city. But the only one that greatly interested Henry Bemis. He stared down at the blurred page before him. He began to cry. A ccording to Einstein, the history of physical science, has brought forth four great scientists -- Galileo, Nevnon, Maxwell and Faraday -- and Einstein is a man who should know. Of these, Galileo and Newton are probably the most famous. Perhaps Maxwell wielded the most, influence in his own time. But in the realm of things physical for the benefit of posterity, Faraday was by far the greatest. Faraday was born in London in the year #I -- long before General Electric and Westinghouse began gleaning likely young men from colleges and placing them in shiny laboratories. His father was a blacksmith, who became an invalid and died in Michael's youth leaving the boy's mother with no alternative but to take in boarders for the support of her family. They were deeply religious people, sober-minded and hardworking -- traits which remained ingrained in Faraday until his death. He began showing his talents quite early when, by chance, he was thrown into contact with books. This came about in his thirteenth year when he got work in the rooms of one Masquerier, a French refugee fleeing the wrath of Napoleon. Faraday's jobs were to keep Masquerier's shoes shined and his rooms orderly. This gave the youth an opportunity to browse through the Frenchman's library. He practically memorized two encyclopedias on electricity and digested Marcet'sConversations on Chemistry in great gobs. Now, young Faraday begged and borrowed, from his elder brother, the necessary admission fees to attend scientific lectures where ever and whenever he could find them. His activities are remindful of the present day teen-age fan who idolizes a current glamour personality, forms fan clubs and whatnot. Faraday formed no clubs, but he was not backward in contacting his idols. He wrote a letter to no less an august personage than Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society. Sir Joseph neglected to answer, but that is of no great importance. Later, he would have been glad to visit Faradary in person. Young Faraday's persistence payed off, however, when he attended a lecture by the great Sir Humphry Davy -- with a pencil and a ream or two of notepaper under his arm. He took notes on Davy's lecture -- # pages of them. These, he had delivered to Davy along with a note stating that he, Faraday, wished to devote his life to science, and could Davy be of any assistance in the project. Davy, one of the most eccentric geniuses who ever lived, was also a warm human being. Davy replied to Faraday in the formal, stilted manner of the day: Sir: I am far from displeased with the proof you have given me of your confidence, and which displays great zeal, power of memory, and attention. I am obliged to go out of town, and will not be settled in town until the end of January. I will then see you at any time you wish. It would gratify me to be of any service to you. I wish it may be in my power. I am, sir, your obedient, humble servant, H. Davy This was not at all unlike a science fiction fan getting an invitation to drop around from Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein. You may rest assured that Faraday took full advantage of it. Davy could be of assistance, to the extent of getting Faraday a job as assistant in the laboratory of the Royal Institution. Thus did Davy, unknowingly, render his greatest service to humanity . So, at the age of twenty-one, Faraday became established at the Institution and Davy, no doubt delighted that his casual favor to a letter-writing youth had paid off in such rich material, took Faraday on a tour of Europe -- a grand tour, as Davy, the big name in the scientific fields of his time, did not travel without notice. Upon returning to England, Faraday became a lecturer in the Royal Institution, and was launched upon his life work. were engrossed in the mysteries of electricity. Faraday's keen mind cut like a knife into these mysteries. He suspected the close relationship between electricity and magnetism. None of the active scientists of the time had paid much attention to this avenue of research, although experimented in that direction. Orsted was the first to suggest that motion should be obtainable from the interaction of magnetism and electricity. Faraday drove relentlessly along these avenues, experimenting exhaustively, building upon the work of both Orsted and Ampere. Writing of his own work, Faraday said:... so all the usual attractions and repulsions of the magnetic needle by the conjunctive wire are deceptions, the motions being not attractions nor repulsions... but the result of a force in the wire which, instead of bringing the pole of the needle nearer to, or further from the wire, endeavors to make it move around it in a never ending circle and motion while the battery remains in action." From this statement of his observational results, Faraday invented the electric motor and established his immortality. But all was not sweetness and light. Faraday's sense of personal triumph was dulled by a reversal upon the part of Humphry Davy. The trouble sprang from Faradays inadvertent conflict with the work of Davy and Wollaston. Both these scientists were plodding along over the route Faraday covered with a speed which bespoke his genius. When Faraday's name was proposed for membership in the Royal Society it was -- Ironically enough -- Sir Humphry Davy who asked Faraday to withdraw. Faraday replied that it was beyond his power to withdraw, which was true, but Davy, as President of the august organization, had all the power he needed to block Faraday. However, in the year #, Faraday was elected to the Society and stood at last, on par in all respects, with all the greats of his time. He was fated to clash again with Davy, over the liquefaction of chlorine. Davy had discovered, beyond doubt, the knowledge that the solid substance obtained by exposing chlorine to low temperatures was not chlorine, but a combination of elements in which chlorine was no longer alone. Davy had not analyzed this combination however, and Faraday did. Also, he followed Davy's suggestion that heat, applied to the specimens, might bring inten sting results. Faraday applied the heat and came up with liquid chlorine. He then wrote a paper upon the experiment and the discovery -- a paper which passed through Davy's hands as President of the Society. Davy blandly appended a few paragraphs, taking full credit for the results. Faraday said nothing, biding his time. Later he wrote an account of all the investigators who had liquefied chlorine before either himself or Davy. All semblance of cordiality between Davy and Faraday now ruptured completely. Hard times fell upon the Society, and Faraday became occupied with the necessity of struggling along upon less money than previously. But this did not slow down his productivity. His papers on chemical investigations poured out in a broad stream. During the decade following #, when he made his great discovery relative to electro-magnetism, Faraday published little upon electricity, but his experiments went on. He made copious notes for current and future experience, indicating that while he concentrated upon chemical research, his heart had been given to the elusive witch of invisible power who mocked scientific brains with her vagaries. He began exhaustive investigations into the possibility of converting magnetism into electricity. The epochal discovery of electro-magnetic induction was the result. This discovery served as a pivotal point in scientific progress. This could have been enough for any man, but like a great scientist who came later, Thomas Alva Edison, Faraday felt a man's productivity should be terminated only by (Continued on page #) In order to make Izaak Walton's sport complete, there must be an angler, a fish, and some bait. All three existed on Arz but there was a question as to which was which. The Anglers of Arz By Roger Dee Marco Four's landfall on the moonless Altarian planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell -- it was his turn to stand watch -- was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready; but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean. Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish, bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach. "They're at it again," Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf outside. "Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!" Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly, belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port, his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition. Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face. "Any sign of the squids yet?" he asked. "They won't show up until the dragons come," Farrell saiid. He adjusted the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. "Lee, I wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This butchery gets on my nerves." Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on water. "You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs and learn something of their mores before we can interfere." Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the sheltering bramble forest. "What stumps me is their motivation," he said. "Why do the fools go out to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will happen next morning?" Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. "For that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was beyond them baffled looks. The city had become something of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence -- coupled with an irritating habit of being right -- had worn their patience thin. "There never was a city here, Gib," Stryker said. "You dozed off while we were making planetfall, that's all." Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short. "Get set! Here they come!" Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light. They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden uprushing of black, octopoid shapes. "The squids," Stryker grunted. "Right on schedule. Two seconds too late, as usual, to stop the slaughter." A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives. "Aheat example of dog eat dog," Farrell said, snapping off the magnoscanner. "Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?" Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the beach to begin their day's fishing. "Nothing we've seen yet could f  !, r   I . iJ Bytfi-tnfuvi Ac: There were two pinkisk bipedal fishermen on the tiny islet  li built that city," Gibson said si iil)bornly. "But it's here someuliere, and I'm going to find it. Will either of you he using the scouter today?" Stryker threw up his hands. "I've a mountain of data to collate, and Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but you won't find anything." The scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when FarreU crawled into his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him that the discrepancy assumed definite form. He recalled then that on the first day of the Marco's planetfall one of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some would surely have gone in after him. And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his doze. "I'll be damned," he muttered. "No boats, and they don't swim. 'I'Ik'ii how the devil do they get out to that islet?" lie fell asleep with the paradox unresolved. over his records when Farrell came out of his cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel. "Gibson found his lost city yet?" Farrell asked, and grinned when Stryker snorted. "He's scouring the daylight side now," Stryker said. "Arthur, I'm going to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order. He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can be." Farrell shrugged. "I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here. I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied." Stryker looked relieved. "Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm completely bushed after today's logging-" Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a nightcap before turning in. Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety hush outside. Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered. The Arzians did not swim, and without boats... It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly, startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one? He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization. That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs. He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race? He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he clipped to the belt of his shorts. He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran Regulations, but -- "Damn Terran Regulations," he muttered. "I've got to know." Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and unrevealing. He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples, but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him from behind. A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker -- asleep and unprotected behind the Marco's open port...  . H e was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a prismatic glimmer of h'# I I' il iwn rainbow shining on the u .ill I Ik hue him. For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye he caught the innkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he ti H 'd to turn his head and could not. He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed. The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet, but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the danger of predicament. Whatever brought me here anesthetized me first, he thought. That sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle. Panic seized him again when he remembered the green flyinglizards; more seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his belt and call Stryker... He bent every ounce of his will toward raiang his right hand, and failed. His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery halfdisk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny surface ripples. On shore he could see the Marco Four resting between thorn forest and beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open, and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet returned with the scouter. He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip -- unfelt before -- was pressing against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hojje flaring through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud... The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief. "Stryker!" he yelled. "Lee, roll out -- Stryker!" The audicom hummed gently, without answer. He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before. Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be easily disturbed. The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless suggestioa of flapping wings. H e tried again. "Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!" The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but Gibson's. "Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?" Farrell fought down an Insane desire to laugh. "Never mind that -- get here fast, Gib! The flyinglizards -- " He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed tentades spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought with shock-born lucidity; # wanted a backstage look at this show, and now I'm one of the cast. The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost of its emergency bow jets as Gibson met the lizard swarm head on. Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. "Scattered them for the moment, Arthur -- blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand fast, now. I'm going to pick you up." The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native. The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in tfie cockpit, his head hanging half overside. Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid Arzian native carefully above water between them. "Gib," Farrell croaked. "Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've gone mad." The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. "You're all right, Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe in the Marco." Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the painful pricking of returning sensation. "I might have known it, damn you," he said. "You found your lost city, didn't you?" Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with himself over some private stupidity. "I'd have found it sooner if I'd had any brains. It was under water, of course." routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear of being permanently disabled. "We never saw the city from the scouter because we didn't go high enough," Gibson said. "I realized that finally, remembering how they used high-altitude blimps during the First Wars to spot submarines, and when I took the scouter up far enough there it was, at the ocean bottom -- a city to compare with anything men ever built." Stryker stared. "A marine city? What use would sea-creatures have for buildings?" "None," Gibson said. "I think the city must have been built ages ago -- by men or by a manlike race, judging from the architecture -- and was submerged later by a sinking of land masses that killed off the original builders and left Arz nothing but an oversized archipelago. The squids took over then, and from all appearances they've developed a culture of their own." "I don't see it," Stryker complained, shaking his head. "The pink fishers -- " "Are cattle, or less," Gibson finished. "The octopods are the dominant race, and they're so far above Fifth Order that we're completely out of bounds here. Under Terran Regulations we can't colonize Arz. It would be armed invasion." "Invasion of a squid world?" Farrell protested, baffled. "Why should surface colonization conflict with an undersea culture, Gib? Why couldn't we share the planet?" "Because the octopods own the islands too, and keep them policed," Gibson said patiently. "They even own the pink fishers. It was one of the squid-people, making a dryland canvass of his preserve here to pick a couple of victims for this morning's show, that carried you oflf last night." "Behold a familiar pattern shaping up," Stryker said. He laughed suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. "Arz is a squid's world, Arthur, don't you see? And hke most civilized peoples, they're sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the pink fishers for -- " Farrell swore in astonishment. "Then those poor devils are put out there deliberately, like worms on a hook -- angling in reverse! No wonder I couldn't spot their motivation!" Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze. "Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up to the acceleration, Arthur?" Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said; "You don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?" He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused, blasted the Marco Four free of Arz. (Continued from page #) death. He drove on and on with the heroic patience, triumphs, and disappointments which are the everyday lot of the inquiring mind. Nor was he cut off early, as were temporaries. He died quietly, at the age of seventy-five years, leaving behind a heritage for which the world will be forever grateful. No conceivable force could penetrate Terri's shield. Yet he was defenseless. By Gordon M. IDickson a bit obvious. Terri Mac saw through it before he had taken half a dozen steps into the apartment. A light flush staining his high cheekbones. "This is ridiculous," he said. The light chatter ceased. Cocktail glasses were set down on various handy tables and ledges; and all faces in the room turned toward a man in his late fifties who sat propped up invalid-wise on pillows in a chair in a corner of the room. "The Comptroller is perspicacious," said the old man, agreeably, waving one hand in a casual manner. "On your way, children." And the people present smiled and nodded. Quite as if it were an ordinary leave-taking, they pushed past Terri Mac and filed out the door. Even the blonde, Terri had picked up at the embassy ball and who had brought him here, strolled off casually, but in a decidedly less drunken fashion than she had exhibited earlier in the evening. "Sit down," said the old man. Terri Mac did so, gazing searchingly at the skinny frame and white eyebrows in an unsuccessful effort to connect him with something in memory. "This is ridiculous," he repeated. "Really?" The old man smiled benignly. "And why so?" "Why -- " the situation was so obvious that Terri fumbled -- a little at a loss for words. "Obviously you intend some form of coercion, or else you would have come to me along recognized channels. And any thought of coercion is obviously -- well, ridiculous." "Why?" "Why? You senile old fool, don't you know that Tm shielded? Don't you know all government officials from the fifth class up wear complete personal shields that are not only crackproof but contain all the necessary elements to support life independently within the shield for more than twenty hours? Don't you know that I'll be missed in two hours at the most and tracked down in less than sixty minutes more? Are you crazy?" The old man chuckled, rubbing dry hands together. He said. "I'm shielded too. You can't get at me. And now the room's shielded. You can't get out of it." Terri stared at him. The initial shock was passing. His own statements anent the completeness of his protection had brought back confidence, and his natural coolness was returning. "What do you want?" he asked, eyeing the other narrowly. "Pleasure of your company," said the old man. "There are some very strong connections between us. Yes, very strong. We must get to know each other personally." had misinterpreted the situation. Relief came, mixed with a certain amount of chagrin at the way in which he allowed himself to show alarm. He had looked ridiculous. He leaned back in the chair and allowed a note of official hauteur and annoyance to creep into his voice. "I see," he said. "You want something?" The old man nodded energetically. "I do. Indeed I do." "And you think you have some kind of a bargaining tool that is useful but might not be so if it became known to official channels." "Well -- " said the old man cautiously. "Don't waste my time," interrupted Terri, harshly. "I'm not an ordinary politician. No man who works his way up to the fifth level of the government is. I didn't get to where I am today by pussy-footing around and I haven't the leisure to spend on people who do. Now what do you want?" The other cackled. "Now, what do you think?" he said, putting one finger to his nose cunningly. "You are old," Terri said. "And therefore cautious. Consequently you would not risk trying to force something from me, but are almost certainly trying to sell me something. Now what do I want? Not the usual things, certainly. Within my position I have all the material things a man could want ; and within my shield I enjoy complete immunity. No one but the Central Bureau, itself, can crack this shield. And no one but they can prevent the conditioned reflex that stops my heart if for some reason the shield should be broached. I have a hold on every man beneath me that prevents him from knifing me in the back. There could be only one thing that I want that you could give me -- " he leaned forward, staring into the deep-pouched eyes -- "and that is a means of getting at the man above me. Am I right?" "No," said the old man. Terri stiffened. "No?" he echoed in angry incredulity. Their eyes locked. For a long time they held, and at last Terri looked away. The old man sighed -- sipped noisily from a drink on the table beside his chair. "Wait!" said Terri. To his own surprise, his voice was eager, even a little timorous in its hopefulness. "Wait. I've got it. There will be a test. There always is a test every time a man moves up. His superiors watch him when he doesn't suspect it. It will be that way for me when I am ready for the fourth level. And you have some kind of advance information. You know what the test will be. Maybe you know the man who will administer it. You want to sell me this information." The other said nothing. "Well," Terri spread his hands openly. "I am interested. I'll buy. What do you want. Money? A favor? Protection?" "No." "No?" Terri shouted, starting up from his chair. "What do you mean by no? Can't you say anything but 'no'?" A rage possessed him. He flung himself forward two furious steps to stand threateningly over the aged figure. "You doddering idiot! Say what you want, and quickly! My two hours are nearly up. I'll be missed. They'll be here in a few minutes -- the Bureau Guards. They'll crack the room shield. They'll rescue me. And they'll take you into custody. To be questioned. To be executed. At my order. Do you understand? Your life depends on me." After a little, the old man chuckled again. "Yes," he muttered, in a high-pitched old voice. "That's the way it'll be." Terri stared at him. "You don't seem to understand. You're going to die." "Oh yes," said the old man, nodding his head indulgently. "I'll die. But I'm an old man. I'd die anyway in a year or so -- maybe in a day or so. But for you -- for a young man like you -- the up and coming young governmental with everything to lose -- " he leered slyly at Terri. "Your death won't be so easy for you to take." "I die?" echoed Terri, stupefied. "But I'm not going to die. They're coming to rescue me." "Oh, are they?" said the old man, ironically. "Of course!" said Terri. "Of course, why shouldn't they?" The old man winked one faded eye portentously. "Fine young man," he said. "Up Never a thought for the people he trampled on the way up the ladder. Dear me, no." "What do you mean?" said Terri. The old eyes, looking up suddenly, pierced him. "Do you remember Kilaren?" "K-Kilaren?" "Kilaren," recited the old man as if quoting from a newspaper. "The beautiful young secretary of a provincial governor whose lecherous and unnatural pursuit drove her to suicide. So that one day to escape the governor, she jumped or fell from a high window. And the people of the province, who had for a long time heard ugly stories and rumors, finally mobbed the office and lynched the governor, hanging him from the same window from which the girl had jumped. They said that even the fall had not spoiled her beauty, but that was probably false." The old man's words dwindled away into silence. I what of it?" said Terri. I I . it's that to do with me?" "Why, you were there. You were the governor's aide, and when the mob had gone home and feeling had slackened off, you stepped into the gap and seized up the reins of government, handling matters so skillfully that you were immediately promoted to an under-post at Government City." "What of it?" "Why it was all your doing," replied the other, in a mildly reproving voice, "the rumors, the stories, the mob, even the suicide. Poor Kilaren -- a pitiful pawn in your ruthless game to eliminate the governor in your mad dash up the ladder." "I never touched her!" cried Terri, his voice cracking. "I swear it." "Who said you did? The type of mind that stoops to murder would never have gotten you this far. But you were the one who hired her, knowing the governor's tendencies. You were the one that gave her work that kept her, night after night, alone with the man. You preyed upon her fear of losing her job. You threw the sin in her face after she had committed it. You told her what she might have been, and what she was, and what she would be. You broke her, day after day. In the sterile privacy of the office you reviled her, scorned her, brought her to believe that she was what she was not, a creature of filth and dishonor. You blocked off all avenues of escape but the one that led through one high window. You killed her!" "No!" "Yes!" T erri brought his quivering hands together and clenched them in his lap. He stared at the old man. "Who are you?" "I was a friend of hers. We lived in the same hotel-apartment. She had no family. I believe you knew that when you hired her." "I see," said Terri. He drew a long, deep, shuddering breath, and leaned back in the chair. "So that's the story," he said, his voice strengthening, "I might have known it. Blackmail. There are always fools that want to try blackmail." "No," said the old man. "Not Blackmail, Comptroller. I want your life." Terri laughed shortly, contemptuously. "No knowledge that you have can threaten my life." "They will come," said the old man, leaning wearily back against his cushions. "As you said, the Bureau Guards will come; and I think I shall kill myself when I hear them starting to crack the shield around this room. They will come in and find you with a dead man. What will you tell them, Terri?" "Tfell them? Anything I choose. They won't question me." "No. The guards won't. But the Bureau will. How can they raise a man to the fourth level when there is a two-hour mystery in his backr ground? They will want to know what you were doing here." "I was kidnaped," said Terri. "By whom? Can you prove it? And why?" "I've been held a prisoner here." "By a dead man? No, no, Terri. The circumstances are suspicious. You walk away from the embassy under your own power. You disappear and are found in a shielded room with a man who has committed suicide. This must be explained, and in the end you will have to tell them the truth." "And what if I do?" said Terri, truculently. "But the truth is so fantastic, Terri. So uncheckable. I am dead, and I am the only one who could have supported your story. These people who were here when you came in are common actors. They have no idea why I wanted you decoyed here. These are my rooms. And there is no obvious connection between me and the dead Kilaren. And perhaps I will decide to live just long enough to denounce you as a traitor when they enter." Ashen-faced, Terri stared. "The Bureau will have to question you. They will clamp a block on your mind so that you can't operate the reflex that stops your heart. And they will question you over and over again, because the Bureau cannot afford to take chances. You will go into a private hell of your own, Terri Mac. You will tell the story of your own evil to that girl over and over again, pleading to be believed. And they will not believe you. And in the end they will kill you, just to be on the safe side. Because, you see, you might have been doing something traitorous in these two shielded hours." Terri's head bobbed limply, like a drunken man's. He made one last effort. "Why?" he said. "Why do you do this? Your life. For a girl who was no connection to you?" The old man folded his hands. "I was a little like your governor," he said. "We all have our sins. I loved Kilaren and the shock of her death wrecked my health." He cocked his head suddenly on one side. "Listen," he said. From beyond the clos('d door of the room, a high-pitched humming was barely audible. It grew in volume, going up the scale. Terri leaped to his feet; and for the space of a couple of seconds, he lunged first this way then that, like a wild animal beating against its trap. Then, as if all will had at last gone out of him, he stopped in the middle of the room and closed his eyes. For a fraction of a moment he stood there, before a faint convulsion seixed him and he fell. With a faint smile on his face, the old man reached out to a hidden switch and cut the shield about the room. Uniformed guards tumbled through the door, to pull up in dismay at the sight of the body on the floor. "I'm sorry," said the old man, "I must have turned the shield on by mistake. I was trying to signal someone. The Comptroller seems to have had a heart attack." LunaticDetector cal machine used widely in analyzing mental and physical illnesses. Essentially, it is nothing more than a very sensitive amplifier fitted with electrodes which, placed against the patient's skull, are capable of picking up the minute "brain-waves" to which the electrical activity of the brain constantly gives rise. These brain waves may be reproduced on an oscilloscope like that of a television tube, or they may be photographed, or they may be charted on graph paper. Medical investigators admit the usefulness of the electroencephalograph but wonder why it can't be used as a "predictor" as well as an analyzer. Detailed study resulting from this suggestion has determined that, not only can the electroencephalograph analyze mental flaws, but it can also detect them in advance of their occurrence! The uses of this, of course, suggest themselves automatically. How all-important it is to detect the beginnings of a mental crack-up in individuals who have great responsibility, particularly where lives of people are concerned! Think of what it would mean as a safety factor regarding bus drivers, engineers, airline pilots, executives, or any others who hold in their hands the lives and fortunes of hundreds of people at a time! Such persons should be exposed to encephalographic examination in order to sense or detect the slightest disturbance which might lead them to crack-up while on the job. It is not a matter of determining sanity or insanity ; rather it is purely a matter of detecting strong emotional disturbances which, appearing clearly upon the encephalograph's screen, aid in the prediction of emotional behavior and, possibly, help avert terrible accidents or otber tragedies. Nereid, Satellite of Neptune N ereid, the second Moon of cold, remote Neptune, was discovered only two years ago but already astronomers have managed to plot out its not conventional orbit. The first Moon of Neptune, familiar old Triton, circles the planet at a reasonable distance of about two hundred and twenty thousand miles and in all other respects seems representative of the general system of satellites throughout the Solar System. But Nereid is another matter. The orbit of this little moon apto Neptune and recedes as far as times as long as it is wide, giving an elliptical effect, much like that of a cometary orbit rather than a satellite's. Triton is about the same size as our own Moon, but Nereid has to be different even here. It is only about a fifteenth as massive as Luna. Nereid might be characterized as "a little squib rotating in a drunken orbit." No technical reasons have yet been divined to account for this extreme eccentricity. The formation of such a perverse orbit may indicate that the satellite is a captured sub-planet or it may imply some possibility of collision. Any such theorization awaits much closer observation of the actual path, since Nereid takes not quite an Earthyear to circle its mother planet. Chain Of Waves of newspapers all over the country, so obscure that most readers scarcely noticed it, was an important announcement, an announcement which shows just how far technology has jumped ahead. The micro-wave link between the East and West Coasts has been completed! The first means of communication to use it was the telephone, but the prime purpose of the relay link is, of course, television. The micro-wave ultra-high-frequency radio relaying system is a miracle of applied electronics. All across the country, at intervals of about a hundred miles, are erected two-hundred-foot towers of concrete (to overcome line-ofsight problems) topped by large hornshaped antennas. Each tower is a remotely controlled, automatically operated self-contained receiving and broadcasting station. A program originating in New York travels via these tight beams of high-frequency radio waves from tower to tower where, each time, it is picked up, amplified and rebroadcast, all in a fractional thousandth of a second ! The system is highly practical, because the high-frequency radio waves carrying the television impulses are not just broadcast in a circular pattern. Instead, the tremendously directional antennas, like gridded horns, about ten feet on a side, focus these beams into extremely narrow searchlights, sending them in a straight line to the next tower, where the process is repeated. Some measure of the extreme directivity of the beams can be got from the fact that each tower broadcasts its beam with a power of only one-half watt! When interplanetary travel is finally accomplished, it is a certainty that communication willtake place through micro-waves. An ordinary beam traversing interplanetary space would spread out in far too random a manner, so that no transmitters conceivable could possibly supply the energy But micro-waves using "microwatts" of power could do this, and hence interplanetary communication over "tight-beam" systems is perfectly feasible. The step from spanning a country to spanning space is easy. The Signal Corps people who bounced radio waves off the Moon were using broad beams in comparison -- which accounts for the enormous amount of power they had to use in the radar apparatus. But, given micro-waves with tight-beam antennas, they'll do the same thing on a flashlight cell's power! . -- Charles Recour I I Dear Editor: Your definition (of science fiction ) as delivered to Marion Fried via the Chat with the Editor -- I disagree with you. I think that the science fiction story IS a basic. It is distinctly different from any other type of fiction. To fit into your basic types, I would loosely put in the problem story. Real science fiction does contain a problem, a problem extrapolated from today's science. And when I say "science" I don't mean only physics or chemistry, but biology, botany, psychiatry, etc. The story then is made up of resolving the problem, or the central character's seeing the problem and finding his place in it. It differs from the ordinary problem story (example: detective "whodunit' story) in that survival is a part of the story. That is, it moves from the philosophical to the actual (actual in relation to the characters) and has a life-or-death meaning. If your definition of a science fiction story is something that is only a kind of background then I can expect IF to publish only those stories dealing with jungles and swords and mortgages altered semantically to "extraterrestrial fastnesses", "portable energy weapons", and "planetary rights". I still think stf is written around a problem, an extrapolated problem. The best way to say it might be: Science fiction Is "What would happen if -- ". You Must have the same beliefs in mind yourself, but got a little muddled semantically while trying to find a deft, one sentence meaning. You named the magazine IF. "If" is what makes science fiction possible. If there were no "If" there would be only ordinary things, no worlds to conquer, no atom to smash, no driving, overwhelming force that shouts down the blazing corridors of time or whispers in the deep of the night: "What would happen if -- " And never mind defining science fiction. Just keep serving it to us. It's largely subjective anyway... -- Dave Hammond Runnemede, New Jersey Dear sirs: Ezra Shaw must have polished off a copy of the "Golden Bough" and decided, without further ado, to set up shop as an anthropologist. His explanation of the cave drawings is mistaken as it is common. Shaw represents the old Animal Magic theory as if it were an agreed upon fact, and actually it is nothing of the sort. At one time it was supposed that all "uncivilized" art had to do with superstition. The western mind could not admit even the possibility of genuine art being produced outside of our own culture matrix. Now we know enough about socalled primitive art to differentiate between types... Though there is "magic" art, it is almost without exception characterized by abstraction, symbolism, and other forms of distortion. Mysticism never expresses itself in realism. The realism of the cave paintings indicates an entirely different sort of mind than that which practices mac. The men who drew those pictures were realists. It is not necessary to investigate other cultures to find the truth of the statement that religious art is always distortionistic. The history of art in our own culture bears this out fully. True, many artists who worked on religious projects were realistic in the extreme, but a study of their lives reveals that they themselves were far from "true believers". True religious art is characterized by the complex surrealism of Bosch or the elongated and warped figures of El Greco... or the African sculpture from which Picasso developed Cubism. Realism is typified by Thomas Eakins, the American who studied anatomy to the point of cutting up bodies. Religious artists are not interested in portraying things as they are, they That is what convinces me that the cave art had little or nothing to do with magic. Why did they work, way back in those days, at such great difficulty? Why does an artist of today go to such trouble to use only the best materials. To make the picture last, of course. The cave man has certainly been successful, if that was his aim. I realize that I am being just as dogmatic in my statements as the "magic" school of thought represented in Shaw's article, but I feel that while his position rests solely on prejudice, mine rests upon obvious observable fact which appears to hold true for all art known. What could be more obvious than that a superstitious painter would paint supernatural pictures, and that only a realist would strive for realism? Our picture of these cave artists needs a good going over with the spotlight of factual analysis, and when, if ever, the results come in, I feel quite sure that those cave artists will be acknowledged as people in the history of mankind. -- Ray Nelson, Chicago, #. Dear Sir; While I am not qualified to criticize the whole article (July Science Briefs)... the presence of one paragraph which I know to be completely erroneous casts serious doubt upon the rest. Consider the following: "The statuary which is today produced by the witch doctors of many of the African and Pacific island tribes..." This statement contains serious distortions. ( I ) In West Africa, most "statuary" is made by wood-carvers, ironworkers, and brass-casters, none of 'linin are "witch doctors" in any  use of the term, and most of whom are full-time specialists in (heir trades -- perhaps professions would be a better word. (#) Throughout the Pacific, wood-carving, the dominant medium for statuary, is done mainly by part-time specialists, although nowhere in the Pacific is specialization as highly developed as it is in Africa. (#) The term "witch doctor" is a term which is no longer part of the vocabulary of anyone with any anthropological training. Having, as it does, derogatory connotations, it is a decidedly misleading term to apply to the native religious specialists of Africa, the Pacific, or any other part of the primitive world. The last point merits some amplification. First of all, while Africans usually believe in witches, those who are believed to be practicing witchcraft are almost invariably outside the conventional religious system of the community. In addition, most African religious ciflts have a degree of sophistication, and the belief systems a reasonable enough inner logic to permit them to be ranked with any of the pantheistic systems of the classical world. We would not apply the term "witch doctor" to priests of the classical pantheistic religions -- or, for that matter, to priests of the Hindu cults -- and there is no more reason to do so in the case of the African religious functionaries. Ree.irding this "statuary," Shaw says: "Invariably obscene and repulsive, the images depicted have unusually fat bodies, with the sexual features exaggerated, and faces blank." This statement conforms exactly to a popular stereotype, and is completely false -- and I say this in full realization of the fact that it is, in part at least, an aesthetic judgment. It is certainly not invariably true, and I doubt that it is true as a whole of more than a few isolated cases. I have seen some lifesized brass-cast heads from Nigeria  which are of considerable age, and  which rival in beauty and sensitivf ity of treatment the best of classic j Greek sculpture. These are admittedly exceptional -- they are not in conformity with the general tradition of West African Art. But the best of West African brass-casting and wood-carving is, by anyone's standards, artistry of a high order. The fact that the artistic conventions which it observes differ from our own should not blind us to the skill and artistry that can be found ' in primitive art. I am, therefore, at a loss conj ceming the identity of the "authori ties" whose judgment it is that "... these figurines are completely lacking in the qualities which make us rate the work of the cave man : painters and draftsmen with the ' best that has ever been done." I'm  sure that were Shaw to examine any significant quantity of African i and Pacific art -- with the eye of a critic rather than that of a layman -- he would readily agree that his "authorides" had not done so themselves before forming their judgments. -- Edward E.LeClair, Jr. American Museum of Natural Histor'f would happen to Earth under a cooling sun instead of an expanding one. With expiring solar energy, our planet would become a of life. Here, the artist envisions New York harbor under such conditions. such fascinating features as Adventures in Words, Your Favorite Quiz, Great Ncknes You Should Know and other delightful brain teasers... For this wonderful excursion into puzzle pleasure, just ask your nearest news dealer. It's only # cents -- at all newsstands!  .v WV directed by base radio control and radar, leave their launching racks in pursuit of a foreign craft which has failed to acknowledge radio communications and identify itself. With their nose cameras they will send a televised image of the craft back to the defense base. If the craft is hostile, the missiles are directed to destroy it. Time: dawn. First hard sun rays hit crater peaks; Earth still lights base. Now turn to inside back cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover: Landing on Deirnus By Ken Fagg IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, In. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c. a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale March #th # I #  #  # j # I # r #  #I I #  # I #  #  Moon I fiction magazine called IF was born and appeared quietly and unheralded on the newsstands. With this issue, that magazine is one year old. Actually, this is the first issue of the second year. Now, in the light of other magazines with tenures of # or # or even five years, a first birthday isn't particularly important. But it is somewhat significant in the case of IF, because it seems to indicate -- after a year of slow, steady growth -- that the infant is going to live. During the past year we have worked hard to make each succeeding issue one of improvement. We have tried to secure better stories, better artwork, better editorial effort in producing a more interesting, more attractive science fiction magazine for your entertainment. And when we compare Volume #, Number I with Volume #, Number #, we feel a certain amount of satisfaction. Not that the ultimate has been achieved by a long, long shot. Not that this issue represents the best we can do. But because we have learned and progressed with each succeeding issue and feel that this issue is an improvement over the first six. And the fact that circulation has responded to such nourishment seems to indicate that you , too, think it is improving. So this is IF's first birthday, and don't think we haven't walked the floor at night with it, incurred some sweet headaches and magnificent hangovers. We've had some wonderful fun, too. Also -- we've found that a lot of swell people were willing to help with the feeding, the burping and diaper changing. Artists and writers and agents have printers have been patient and understanding; the engravers always ready with a helping hand ; the paper makers always prompt; some of the best circulation guys to ever handle a magazine have bent over backwards to put the baby out where you can see it; and you, sweet reader, have been indulgent to plunk down thirty-five cents in coin of the realm to take a look at the brat... All in all, a lot of nice people have had a hand in helping the infant IF learn to walk. Another year of this sort of attention and the kid'll be climbing fences! stories in IF's young life is appearing in the next issue. It's called Jupiter Five and was written by Arthur C. Clarke, Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. One of the world's authorities on the subject, Mr. Clarke has a month, friendly style of writing that lends to a space adventure the easy familiarity of a walk around the block. His Exploration of Space was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection last fall. Ken Fagg, cover artist for this issue, is (as this is written) reading the manuscript of Jupiter Five for a cover idea. Mr. Fagg, who recently caught the science fiction bug, is now a leading artist in other fields and it's a pretty safe bet he'll soon be among the top artists in science fiction. portunity to meet personally a large representation of the real fandom of science fiction -- a bunch of guys and gals who got to Chicago via train, bus, plane, auto, boat and pogo-stick to attend the #th World Science Fiction Convention. And I was really amazed to see the hundreds of young folks so keenly (and rabidly) interested in science fiction. I had the pleasant experience of talking with quite a few and I found each one eager, alert, and wise as to what was happening in the world of science fiction. Many of them could tell you what illustration appeared on what page of such and such magazine in an issue that must have been published while they were about the same age as IF. They knew the latest stories, and the authors, when and where they appeared, and would tell you, without mincing words, what they thought of them. At the auction, a lot of them hocked the family homestead to take home a cover painting, an interior illustration or a manuscript. These young people (I'm not including the pros, the editors, agents, authors, etc.) came them saved their own hard-earned cash for a year in order to make the trip. Unlike a business or political convention, they didn't stand to make money on this deal, they did it because they were crazy about science fiction. One who seemed to me to typify the spirit of the convention is a gangling, blond, bespectacled young man of nineteen named Jim Webbert. He is one of those who had been feeding the piggy bank for a year in order to make the trip -- and believe me, brother, he wasn't going to miss a trick. He knew more about what was going on and where than the whole staff of house dicks ; he was up and down the hotel more than the elevators, and he could tell practically anybody what kind of cigarette he smoked, whether he preferred tea to coffee, and what his particular niche in science fiction happened to be. Jim lives in Salt Lae City, Utah, is a senior in college, where he is majoring in chemical engineering, and during the summer he has been working as a meter reader to earn expenses. While in high school he started reading science fiction -- which decided him on chemical engineering as a career. I don't think it requires much of a prophet to predict he'll go a long way. So I'm glad I met these young people who represent science fiction fandom. I'm glad they live in America. I'm glad I'm working on a science fiction magazine. -- jlq You're all alone in a deserted city. You walk down an empty street, yearning for the sight of one living face -- one moving figure. T hen you see a man on a corner and you know your terror has only begun. plodding knee-deep through the thick stuff of nightmares. There was no definite line between the dream-state and wakefulness. Only a dawning knowledge that he was finally conscious and would have to do something about it. He opened his eyes, but this made no difference. The blackness remained. The pain in his head brightened and he reached up and found the big lump they'd evidently put on his head for good measure -- a margin of safety. They must have been prudent people, because the bang on the head had hardly been necessary. The spiked drink which they had given him would have felled an ox. He remembered going down into the darkness after drinking it, and of knowing what it was. He remembered the helpless feeling. It did not worry him now. He was a philosophical person, and the fact he was still alive cancelled out the drink and its result. He thought, with savor, of the chestnut-haired girl who had watched him take the drink. She had worn a very low bodice, and that was where his eyes had been at the last moment -- on the beautiful, tanned breasts -- until they'd wavered and puddled into a blur and then into nothing. The chestnut-haired girl had been nice, but now she was gone and there were more pressing problems. He sat up, his hands behind him at the ends of stiff arms clawing into long-undisturbed dust and filth. His movement stirred the dust and it rose into his nostrils. He straightened and banged his head against a low ceiling. The pain made him sick for a minute and he sat down to regain his senses. He cursed the ceiling, as a matter of course, in an agonized whisper. Ready to move again, he got onto his hands and knees and crawled cautiously forward, exploring as he went. His hand pushed through cobwebs and found a rough, cement wall. He went around and around. It was all cement -- all solid. Hell! They hadn't sealed him up in this place! There had been a way in so there had to be a way out. He went around again. Then he tried the ceiling and found the opening -- a wooden trap covering a four-by-four hole -- covering it snugly. He pushed the trap away and daylight streamed in. He raised himself up until he was eyelevel with a discarded shaving cream jar lying on the bricks of an alley. He could read the trade mark on the jar, and the slogan: "For the Meticulous Man". He pulled himself up into the alley. As a result of an orderly childhood, he replaced the wooden trap and kicked the shaving cream jar against a garbage can. He rubbed his chin and looked up and down the alley. It was high noon. An uncovered sun blazed down to tell him this. And there was no one in sight. the nearer mouth of the alley. He had been in that hole a long time, he decided. This conviction came from his hunger and the heavy growth of beard he'd sprouted. Twenty-four hours -- maybe longer. That mickey must have been a lulu. He walked out into the cross street. It was empty. No people -- no cars parked at the curbs -- only a cat washing its dirty face on a tenement stoop across the street. He looked up at the tenement windows. They stared back. There was an empty, deserted look about them. The cat flowed down the front steps of the tenement and away toward the rear and he was truly alone. He rubbed his harsh chin. Must be Sunday, he thought. Then he knew it could not be Sunday. He'd gone into the tavern on a Tuesday night. That would make it five days. Too long. He had been walking and now he was at an intersection where he could look up and down a new street. There were no cars -- no people. Not even a cat. A sign overhanging the sidewalk said: Restaurant. He went in under the sign and tried the door. It was locked. There were no lights inside. He turned away -- grinning to reassure himself. Everything was all right. Just some kind of a holiday. In a big city like Chicago the people go away on hot summer holidays. They go to the beaches and the parks and sometimes you can't see a living soul on the streets. And of course you can't find any cars because the people use them to drive to the beaches and the parks and out into the country. He breathed a little easier and started walking again. Sure -- that was it. Now what the hell holiday was it? He tried to remember. He couldn't think of what holiday it could be. Maybe they'd dreamed up a new one. He grinned at that, but the grin was a little tight and he had to force it. He forced it carefully until his teeth showed white. Pretty soon he would come to a section where everybody hadn't gone to the beaches and the parks and a restaurant would be open and he'd get a good meal. A meal? He fumbled toward his pockets. He dug into them and found a handkerchief and a button from his cuff. He remembered that the button had hung loose so he'd pulled it off to keep from losing it. He hadn't lost the button, but everything else was gone. He scowled. The least they could have done was to leave a man eating money. He turned another corner -- into another street -- and it was like the one before. No cars -- no people -- not even any cats. Panic welled up. He stopped and whirled around to look behind him. No one was there. He walked in a tight circle, looking in all directions. Windows stared back at him -- eyes that didn't care where everybody had gone or when they would come back. The windows could wait. The windows were not hungry. Their heads didn't ache. They weren't scared. He began walking and his path veered outward from the sidewalk until he was in the exact center of the silent street. He walked down the worn white line. When he got to the next corner he noticed that the traffic signals were not working. Black, empty eyes. His pace quickened. He walked faster -- ever faster until he was trotting on the brittle pavement, his sharp steps echoing against the buildings. Faster. Another corner. And he was running, filled with panic, down the empty street. stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was a blur but it began to clear as her mind cleared. The ceiling became a surface of dirty, cracked plaster and there was a feeling of dirt and squalor in her mind. It was always like that at these times of awakening, but doubly bitter now, because she had never expected to awaken again. She reached down and pulled the wadded sheet from beneath her legs and spread it over them. She looked at the bottle on the shabby bedtable. There were three sleeping pills left in it. The girl's eyes clouded with resentment. You'd think seven pills would have done it. She reached down and took the sheet in both hands and drew it taut over her stomach. This was a gesture of frustration. Seven hadn't been enough, and here she was again -- awake in the world she'd wanted to leave. Awake with the necessary edge of determination gone. She pulled the sheet into a wad and threw it at the wall. She got up and walked to the window and looked out. Bright daylight. She wondered how long she had slept. A long time, no doubt. Her naked thigh pressed against the windowsill and her bare stomach touched the dirty pane. Naked in the window, but it didn't matter, because it gave onto an airshaft and other windows so caked with grime as to be of no value as windows. But even aside from that, it didn't matter. It didn't matter in the least. She went to the washstand, her bare feet making no sound on the worn rug. She turned on the faucets, but no water came. No water, and she had a terrible thirst. She went to the door and had thrown the bolt before she remembered again that she was naked. She turned back and saw the halfempty Pepsi-Cola bottle on the floor beside the bed table. Someone else had left it there -- how many nights ago? -- but she drank it anyhow, and even though it was flat and warm it soothed her throat. She bent over to pick up garments from the floor and dizziness came, forcing her to the edge of the bed. After a while it passed and she got her legs into one of the garments and pulled it on. Taking cosmetics from her bag, she went again to the washstand and tried the taps. Still no water. She combed her hair, jerking the comb through the mats and gnarls with a satisfying viciousness. When the hair fell into its natural, blond curls, she applied powder and lipstick. She went back to the bed, picked up her brassiere and began putting it on as she walked to the cracked, full-length mirror in the closet door. With the brassiere in place, she stood looking at her slim image. She assayed herself with complete impersonality. She shouldn't look as good as she did -- not after the beating she'd taken. Not after the long nights and the days and the years, even though the years did not add up to very many. I could be someone's wife, she thought, with wry humor. I could be sending kids to school and going out to argue with the grocer about the tomatoes being too soft. I don't look bad at all. She raised her eyes until they were staring into their own images in the glass and she spoke aloud in a low, wondering voice. She said, "Who the hell am I, anyway? Who am I? A body named Linda -- that's who I am. No -- that's what I am. A body's not a who -- it's a what. One hundred and fourteen pounds of well-built blond body called Linda -- model #I -- no fender dents -- nice paint job. Come in and drive me away. Price tag -- " She bit into the lower lip she'd just finished reddening and turned quickly to walk to the bed and wriggle into her dress -- a gray and green cotton -- the only one she had. She picked up her bag and went to the door. There she stopped to turn and thumb her nose at the three sleeping pills in the bottle before she went out and closed the door after herself. The desk clerk was away from the cubbyhole from which he presided over the lobby, and there were no loungers to undress her as she walked toward the door. Nor was there anyone out in the street. The girl looked north and south. No cars in sight either. No buses waddling up to the curb to spew out passengers. The girl went five doors north and tried to enter a place called Tim's Hamburger House. As the lock held and the door refused to open, she saw that there were no lights on inside -- no one behind the counter. The place was closed. She walked on down the street followed only by the lonesome sound of her own clicking heels. All the stores were closed. All the lights were out. All the people were gone. place of concealment of the Chicago Avenue police station was very small -- merely an indentation low in the cement wall behind two steam pipes. The big man had lain in this niche for forty-eight hours. He had slugged a man over the turn of a card in a poolroom pinochle game, had been arrested in due course, and was awaiting the disposal of his case. He was sorry he had slugged the man. He had not had any deep hatred for him, but rather a rage of the moment that demanded violence as its outlet. Although he did not consider it a matter of any great importance, he did not look forward to the six month's jail sentence he would doubtless be given. His opportunity to hide in the niche had come as accidentally and as suddenly as his opportunity to slug his card partner. It had come after the prisoners had been advised of the crisis and were being herded into vans for transportation elsewhere. He had snatched the opportunity without giving any consideration whatever to the crisis. Probably because he did not have enough imagination to fear anything -- however terrible -- which might occur in the future. And because he treasured his freedom above all else. Freedom for today, tomorrow could take care of itself. Now, after forty-eight hours, he writhed and twisted his huge body out of the niche and onto the floor of the furnace room. His legs were numb and he found that he could not stand. He managed to sit up and was able to bend his back enough so his great hands could reach his legs and begin to massage life back into them. So elementally brutal was this man that he pounded his legs until they were black and blue, before feeling returned to them. In a few minutes he was walking out of the furnace room through a jail house which should now be utterly dented. But was it? He went slowly, eliding along close to the walls to reach the front door unchallenged. I Ie walked out into the street. It was daylight and the street was completely deserted. The man took a deep breath and grinned. "I'll be damned," he muttered. "I'll be double and triple damned. They're all gone. Every damn one of them run off like rats and I'm the onlyone left. I'll be damned!" A tremendous sense of exultation seized him. He clenched his fists and laughed loud, his laugh echoing up the street. He was happier than he had ever been in his quick, violent life. And his joy was that of a child locked in a pantry with a huge chocolate cake. He rubbed a hand across his mouth, looked up the street, began walking. "I wonder if they took all the whisky with them," he said. Then he grinned; he was sure they had not. He began walking in long strides toward Clark Street. In toward the still heart of the empty city. little man, and very dangerous. He was also very clever. Eventually they would have found out, but he had been clever enough to deceive them and now they would never know. There was great wealth in his family, and with the rest of them occupied with leaving the city and taking what valuables they could on such short notice, he had been put in charge of one of the chauffeurs. The chauffeur had been given the responsibility of getting the pale-skinned young man out of the city. But the young man had caused several delays until all the rest were gone. Then, meekly enough, he had accompanied the chauffeur to the garage. The chauffeur got behind the wheel of the last remaining car -- a Cadillac sedan -- and the young man had gotten into the rear seat. But before the chauffeur could start the motor, the young man hit him on the head with a tire bar he had taken from a shelf as they had entered the garage. The bar went deep into the chauffeur's skull with a solid sound, and thus the chauffeur found the death he was in the very act of fleeing. The young man pulled the dead chauffeur from the car and laid him on the cement floor. He laid him down very carefully, so that he was in the exact center of a large square of outlined cement with his feet pointing straight north and his outstretched arms pointing south. The young man placed the chauffeur's cap very carefully upon his chest, because neatness pleased him. Then he got into the car, started it, and headed east toward Lake Michigan and the downtown section. After traveling three or four miles, he turned the car off the road and drove it into a telephone post. Then he walked until he came to some high weeds. He lay dowft in the weeds and waited. He knew there would probably be a last vanguard of militia hunting for stragglers. If they saw a moving car they would investigate. They would take him into custody and force him to leave the city. This, he felt, they had no right to do. All his life he had been ordered about -- told to do this and that and the other thing. Stupid orders from stupid people. Idiots who went so far as to claim the whole city would be destroyed, just to make people do as they said. God! The ends to which stupid people would go in orpeople. The young man lay in the weeds and dozed off, his mind occupied with the pleasant memory of the tire iron settling into the skull of the chauffeur. After a while he awoke and heard the cars of the last vanguard passing down the road. They stopped, inspected the Cadillac and found it serviceable. They took it with them, but they did not search the weeds along the road. When they had disappeared toward the west, the young man came back to the road and began walking east, in toward the city. Complete destruction in two days? Preposterous. The young man smiled. hours she had walked the streets of the empty city and the fear, strengthened by weariness, was now mounting toward terror. "One face," she whispered. "Just one person coming out of a house or walking across the street. That's all I ask. Somebody to tell me what this is all about. If I can find one person, I won't be afraid any more." And the irony of it struck her. A few hours previously she had attempted suicide. Sick of herself and of all people, she had tried to end her own life. Therefore, by acknowledging death as the answer, she should now have no fear whatever of anything. Reconciled to crossing the bridge into death, no facet of life should have held terror for her. But the empty city did hold terror. One face -- one moving form was all she asked for. Then, a second irony. When she saw the man at the corner of Washington and Wells, her terror increased. They saw each other at almost the same moment. Both stopped and stared. Fingers of panic ran up the girl's spine. The man raised a hand and the spell was broken. The girl turned and ran, and there was more terror in her than there had been before. She knew how absurd this was, but still she ran blindly. What had she to fear? She knew all about men; all the things men could do they had already done to her. Murder was the ultimate, but she was fresh from a suicide attempt. Death should hold no terrors for her. She thought of these things as the man's footsteps sounded behind her and she turned into a narrow alley seeking a hiding place. She found none and the man turned in after her. She found a passageway, entered with the same blindness which had brought her into the alley. There was a steel door at the end and a brick lying by the sill. The door was locked. She picked up the brick and turned. The man skidded on the filthy alley surface as he turned into the areaway. The girl raised the brick over her head. "Keep away! Stay away from me!" "Wait a minute! Take it easy. I'm not going to hurt you!" "Get away!" Her arm moved downward. The man rushed in and caught her wrist. The brick went over his shoulder and the nails of her other hand raked his face. He seized her without regard for niceties and they went to the ground. She fought with everything she had and he methodically neutralized all her weapons -- her hands, her legs, her teeth -- until she could not move. "Leave me alone. Please!" "What's wrong with you? I'm not going to hurt you. But I'm not going to let you hit me with a brick, either!" "What do you want? Why did you chase me?" "Look -- I'm a peaceful guy, but I'm not going to let you get away. I spent all afternoon looking for somebody. I found you and you ran away. I came after you." "I haven't done anything to you." "That's silly talk. Come on -- grow up! I said I'm not going to hurt you." "Let me up." "So you can run away again? Not for a while. I want to talk to you." "I -- I won't run. I was scared. I don't know why. You're hurting me." He got up -- gingerly -- and lifted her to her feet. He smiled, still holding both her hands. "I'm sorry. I guess it's natural for you to be scared. My name's Frank Brooks. I just want to find out what the hell happened to this town." He let her withdraw her hands, but he still blocked her escape. She moved a pace backward and straightened her clothing. "I don't know what happened. I was looking for someone too." He smiled again. "And then you ran. "I don't know why. I guess -- " "What's your name." "Nora -- Nora Spade." "You slept through it too?" "Yes... yes. I slept through it and came out and they were all gone." "Let's get out of this alley." He preceded her out, but he waited for her when there was room for them to walk side by side, and she did not try to run away. That phase was evidently over. "I got slipped a mickey in a tavern," Frank Brooks said. "Then they slugged me and put me in a hole." His eyes questioned. She felt their demand and said, "I was -- asleep in my hotel room." "They overlooked you?" "I guess so." "Then you don't know anything about it?" "Nothing. Something terrible must have happened." "Let's go down this way," Frank said, and they moved toward Madison Street. He had taken her arm and she did not pull away. Rather, she walked invitingly close to him. She said, "It's so spooky. So... empty. I guess that's what scared   # me. "It would scare anybody. There must have been an evacuation of some kind." "Maybe the Russians are going to drop a bomb." Frank shook his head. "That wouldn't explain it. I mean, the Russians wouldn't let us know ahead of time. Besides, the army would be here. Everybody wouldn't be gone." "There's been a lot of talk about germ warfare. Do you suppose the water, maybe, has been poisoned?" He shook his head. "The same thing holds true. Even if they moved the people out, the army would be here." "I don't know. It just doesn't make sense." "It happened, so it has to make sense. It was something that came up all of a sudden. They didn't have much more than twenty-four hours." He stopped suddenly and looked at her. "We've got to get out of here!" Nora Spade smiled for the first time, but without humor. "How? I haven't seen one car. The buses aren't running." His mind was elsewhere. They had started walking again. "Funny I didn't think of that before." "Think of what?" "That anybody left in this town is a dead pigeon. The only reason they'd clear out a city would be to get away from certain death. That would mean death is here for anybody that stays. Funny. I was so .busy looking for somebody to talk to that I never thought of that." "I did." "Is that what you were scared of?" "Not particularly. I'm not afraid to die. It was something else that scared me. The aloneness, I guess." "We'd better start walking west -- out of the city. Maybe we'll find a car or something." "I don't think we'll find any cars." He drew her to a halt and looked into her face. "You aren't afraid at all, are you?" She thought for a moment. "No, I guess I'm not. Not of dying, that is. Dying is a normal thing. But I was afraid of the empty streets -- nobody around. That was weird." "It isn't weird now?" "Not -- not as much." "I wonder how much time we've got?" Nora shrugged. "I don't know, but I'm hungry." "We can fix that. I broke into a restaurant a few blocks back and got myself a sandwich. I think there's still food around. They couldn't take it all with them." They were on Madison Street and they turned east on the south side of the street. Nora said, "I wonder if there are any other people still here -- like us?" "I think there must be. Not very many, but a few. They would have out overnight. It stands to reason they must have missed a few. Did you ever try to empty a sack of sugar? Really empty it? It's impossible. Some of the grains always stick to the sack." A few minutes later the wisdom of this observation was proven when they came to a restaurant with the front window broken out and saw a man and a woman sitting at one of the tables. shock of black hair and a mouth slightly open showing a set of incredibly white teeth. He waved an arm and shouted, "Come on in! Come on in for crissake and sit down! We got beer and roast beef and the beer's still cold. Come on in and meet Minna." This was different, Nora thought. Not eerie. Not weird, like seeing a man standing on a deserted street corner with no one else around. This seemed normal, natural, and even the smashed window didn't detract too much from the naturalness. They went inside. There were chairs at the table and they sat down. The big man did not get up. He waved a hand toward his companion and said, "This is Minna. Ain't she something? I found her sitting at an empty bar scared to death. We came to an understanding and I brought her along." He grinned at the woman and winked. "We came to a real understanding, didn't we, Minna?" , Minna was a completely colorless woman of perhaps thirty-five. Her skin was smooth and pale and she wore no makeup of any kind. Her hair was drawn straight back into a bun. The hair had no predominating color. It was somewhere between light brown and blond. She smiled a little sadly, but the laugh did not cover her worn, tired look. It seemed more like a gesture of obedience than anything else. "Yes. We came to an understandmg. "I'm Jim Wilson," the big man boomed. "I was in the Chicago Avenue jug for slugging a guy in a card game. They kind of overlooked me when they cleaned the joint out." He winked again. "I kind of helped them overlook me. Then I found Minna." There was tremendous relish in his words. Frank started introductions which Nora Spade cut in on. "Maybe you know what happened?" she asked. Wilson shook his head. "I was in the jug and they didn't tell us. They just started cleaning out the joint. There was talk in the bullpen -- invasion or something. Nobody knew for sure. Have some beer and meat." Nora tumd to the quiet Minna. "Did you hear anything?" "Naw," Wilson said with a kind of affectionate contempt. "She don't know anything about it. She lived in some attic dump and was down with a sore throat. She took some pills or something and when she woke up they were gone." "I went to work and -- " Minna began, but Wilson cut her off. "She swabs out some joints on Chicago Avenue for a living and that was how she happened to be sitting in that tavern. It's payday, and Minna was waiting for her dough!" He exploded into laughter and slapped the table with a huge hand. "Can you beat that? Waiting for her pay at a time like this." Frank Brooks set down his beer bottle. The beer was cold and it tasted good. "Have you met anybody else? There must be some other people around." "Uh-uh. Haven't met anybody but Minna." He turned his eyes on the woman again, then got to his feet. "Come on, Minna. You and I got to have a little conference. We got things to talk about." Grinning, he walked toward the rear of the restaurant. Minna got up more slowly. She followed him behind the counter and into the rear of the place. Alone with Nora, Frank said, "You aren't eating. Want me to look for something else?" "No -- I'm not very hungry. I was just wondering -- " "Wondering about what?" "When it will happen. When whatever is going to happen -- you know what I mean." "I'd rather know what's going to happen. I hate puzzles. It's hell to have to get killed and not know what killed you." "We aren't being very sensible, are we?" "How do you mean?" "We should at least act normal." "I don't get it." Nora frowned in slight annoyance. "Normal people would be trying to reach safety. They wouldn't be sitting in a restaurant drinking beer. We should be trying to get away. Even if it does mean walking. Normal people would be trying to get away." Frank stared at his bottle for a moment. "We should be scared stiff, shouldn't we?" It was Nora's turn to ponder. "I'm not sure. Maybe not. I know I'm not fighting anything inside -- fear, I mean. I just don't seem to care one way or another." "I care," Frank replied. "I care. I don't want to die. But we're faced with a situation, and either way it's a gamble. We might be dead before I finish this bottle of beer. If that's true, why not sit here and be comfortable? Or we might have time to walk far enough to get out of range of whatever it is that chased everybody." "Which way do you think it is?" "I don't think we have time to get out of town. They cleaned it out too fast. We'd need at least four or five hours to get away. If we had that much time the army, or whoever did it, would still be around." "Maybe they didn't know themselves when it's going to happen." He made an impatient gesture. "What difference does it make? We're in a situation we didn't ask to get in. Our luck put us here and I'm damned if I'm going to kick a hole in the ceiling and yell for help." Nora was going to reply, but at that moment Jim Wilson came striding out front. He wore his big grin and he carried another halfdozen bottles of beer. "Minna'll be out in a minute," he said. "Women are always slower than hell." He dropped into a chair and snapped the cap off a beer bottle with his thumb. He held the bottle up and squinted through it, sighing gustily. "Man! I ain't never had it so good." He tilted the bottle in salute, and drank. west now, and when Minna reappeared it seemed that she materialized from the shadows, so quietly did she move. Jim Wilson opened another bottle and put it before her. "Here -- have a drink, baby." Obediently, she tilted the bottle and drank. "What do you plan to do?" Frank asked. "It'll be dark soon," Wilson said. "We ought to go out and try to scrounge some flashlights. I bet the power plants are dead. Probably aren't any flashlights either." "Are you going to stay here?" Nora asked. "Here in the Loop?" He seemed surprised. "Why not? A man'd be a fool to walk out on all this. All he wants to eat and drink. No goddam cops around. The life of Reilly and I should walk out?" "Aren't you afraid of what's going to happen?" "I don't give a good goddam what's going to happen. What the hell! Something's always going to happen." "They didn't evacuate the city for nothing," Frank said. "You mean we can all get killed?" Jim Wilson laughed. "Sure we can. We could have got killed last week too. We could of got batted in the can by a truck anytime we crossed the street." He emptied his bottle, threw it accurately at a mirror over the cash register. The crash was thunderous. "Trouble with you people, you're worry warts," he said with an expansive grin. "Let's go get us some flashlights so we can find our way to bed in one of those fancy hotels." He got to his feet and Minna arose also, a little tired, a little apprehensive, but entirely submissive. Jim Wilson said, "Come on, baby. I sure won't want to lose you." He grinned at the others. "You guys coming?" Frank's eyes met Nora's. He shrugged. "Why not?" he said. "Unless you want to start walking." "I'm too tired," Nora said. As they stepped out through the smashed window, both Nora and Frank half-expected to see other forms moving up and down Madison Street. But there was no one. Only the unreal desolation of the lonely pavement and the dark-windowed buildings. "The biggest ghost town on earth," Frank muttered. Nora's hand had slipped into Frank's. He squeezed it and neither of them seemed conscious of the contact. "I wonder," Nora said. "Maybe this is only one of them. Maybe all the other big cities are evacuated too." Jim Wilson and Minna were walking ahead. He turned. "If you two can't sleep without finding out what's up, it's plenty easy to do." "You think we could find a battery radio in some store?" Frank ciskcd "Hell no! They'll all be gone. But all you'd have to do is snoop around in some newspaper office. If you can read you can find out what happened." It seemed strange to Frank that he had not thought of this. Then he realized he hadn't tried very hard to think of anything at all. He was surprised, also, at his lack of fear. He's gone through life pretty much taking things as they came -- as big a sucker as the next man -- making more than his quota of mistakes and blunders. Finding himself completely alone in a deserted city for the first time in his life, he had naturally fallen prey to sudden fright. But that had gradually passed, and now he was able to accept the new reality fairly passively. He wondered if that wasn't pretty much the way of all people. New situations brought a surge of whatever emotion fitted the picture. Then the emotion subsided and the new thing became the ordinary. This, he decided, was the manner in which humanity survived. Humanity took things as they came. Pile on enough of anything and it becomes the ordinary. Jim Wilson had picked up a garbage box apd hurled it through the window of an electric shop. The glass came down with a crash that shuddered up the empty darkening street and grumbled off into silence. Jim Wilson went inside. "I'll see what I can find. You stay out here and watch for cops." His laughter echoed out as he disappeared. Minna stood waiting silently, unmoving, and somehow she reminded Frank of a dumb animal; an unreasoning creature with no mind of her own, waiting for a signal from her master. Strangely, he resented this, but at the same time could find no reason for his resentment, except the feeling that no one should appear as much a slave as Minna. Jim Wilson reappeared in the window. He motioned to Minna. "Come on in, baby. You and me's got to have a little conference." His exaggerated wink was barely perceptible in the gloom as Minna stepped over the low sill into the store. "Won't be long, folks," Wilson said in high good humor, and the two of them vanished into the darkness beyond. Frank Brooks glanced at Nora, hut her face was turned away. He cursed softy under his breath. He said, "Wait a minute," and went into the store through the huge, jagged opening. Inside, he could barely make out the counters. The place was larger than it had appeared from the outside. Wilson and Minna were nowhere about. Frank found the counter he was looking for and pawed out several flashlights. They were only empty tubes, but he found a case of batteries in a panel compartment against the wall. "Who's there?" "Me. I came in for some flashlights." "Couldn't you w'ait?" "It's getting dark." "You don't have to be so damn impatient." Jim Wilson's voice was hostile and surly. Frank stifled his quick anger. "We'll be outside," he said. He found Nora waiting where he'd left her. He loaded batteries into four flashlights before Jim Wilson and Minna reappeared. Wilson's good humor was back. "How about the Morrison or the Sherman," he said. "Or do you want to get real ritzy and walk up to the Drake?" "My feet hurt," Minna said. The woman spoke so rarely, Frank Brooks was startled by her words. "Morrison's the closest, " Jim Wilson said. "Let's go." He took Minna by the arm and swung off up the street. Frank and Nora fell in behind. Nora shivered. Frank, holding her arm, asked, "Cold?" "No. It's just all -- unreal again." "I see what you mean." "I never expected to see the Loop dark. I can't get used to it." A vagrant, whispering wind picked up a scrap of paper and whirled it along the street. It caught against Nora's ankle. She jerked perceptibly and kicked the scrap away. The wind caught it again and spiralled it away into the darkness. "I want to tell you something," she said. "Tell away." "I told you before that I slept through the -- the evacuation, or whatever it was. That wasn't exactly true. I did sleep through it, but it was my fault. I put myself to sleep." "I don't get it." "I tried to kill myself. Sleeping tablets. Seven of them. They weren't enough." Frank said nothing while they paced off ten steps through the dark canyon that was Madison Street. Nora wondered if he had heard. "I tried to commit suicide." "Why?" "I was tired of life, I guess." "What do you want -- sympathy?" The sudden harshness in his voice brought her eyes around, but his face was a white blur. "No -- no, I don't think so." "Well, you won't get it from me. Suicide is silly. You can have troubles and all that -- everybody has them -- but suicide -- why did you try it?" A high, thin whine -- a wordless vibration of eloquence -- needled out of the darkness into their ears. The shock was like a sudden shower of ice water dashed over their bodies. Nora's fingers dug into Frank's arm, but he did not feel the cutting nails. "We're -- there's someone out there in the street!" T wenty-five feet ahead of where Frank and Nora stood frozen there burst the booming voice of Jim Wilson. "What the hell was that?" And the shock was dispelled. The white circle from Wilson's flash bit out across the blackness to outline movement on the far side of the street. Then Frank Brook's light, and Nora's, went exploring. "There's somebody over there," Wilson bellowed. "Hey, you! Show your face! Quit sneaking around!" Frank's light swept an arc that clearly outlined the buildings across the street and then weakened as it swung westward. There was something or someone back there, but obscured by the dimness. He was swept by a sense of unreality again. "Did you see them?" Nora's light beam had dropped to her feet as though she feared to point it out into the darkness. "I thought I saw something." Jim Wilson was swearing industriously. "There was a guy over there. He ducked around the corner. Some damn fool out scrounging. Wish I had a gun." Frank and Nora moved ahead and the four stood in a group. "Put out your lights," Wilson said. "They make good targets if the jerk's got any weapons." They stood in the darkness, Nora holding tightly to Frank's arm. Frank said, "That was the damndest noise I ever heard." "Like a siren?" Frank thought Jim Wilson spoke hopefully, as though wanting somebody to agree with him. "Not like any I ever heard. Not like a whistle, either. More of a moan." "Let's get into that goddam hotel and -- " Jim Wilson's words were cut off by a new welling-up of the melancholy howling. It had a new pattern this time. It sounded from many places; not nearer, Frank thought, than Lake Street on the north, but spreading outward and backward and growing fainter until it died on the wind. Nora was shivering, clinging to Frank without reserve. Jim Wilson said, "I'll be damned if it doesn't sound like a signal of some kind." "Maybe it's a language -- a way of communication." "But who the hell's communicating?" "How would I know?" "We best get to that hotel and bar a few doors. A man can't fight in the dark -- and nothing to fight with." They hurried up the street, but it was all different now. Gone was the illusion of being alone ; gone the sense of solitude. Around them the ghost town had come suddenly alive. Sinister forces more frightening than the previous solitude had now to be reckoned with. "Something's happened -- something in the last few minutes," Nora whispered. Frank leaned close as they crossed the street to the dark silent pile that was the Morrison hotel. "I think I know what you mean." "It's as though there was no one around and then, suddenly, they came." "I think they came and went away again." "Did you actually see anyone when you flashed your light?" "No -- I can't say positively that I did. But I got the impression there were figures out there -- at least dozens of them -- and that they moved back away from the light. Always just on the edge of it." "I'm scared, Frank." "So am I." "Do you think it could all be imagination?" "Those moans? Maybe the first one -- I've heard of people imagining sounds. But not the last ones. And besides, we all heard them." Jim Wilson, utterly oblivious of any subtle emanations in the air, boomed out in satisfaction: "We don't have to bust the joint open. The revolving door works." "Then maybe we ought to be careful," Frank said. "Maybe somebody else is around here." "Could be. We'll find out." "Why are we afraid?" Nora whispered. "It's natural, isn't it?" Frank melted the beam of his light with that of Jim Wilson. The white finger pierced the darkness inside. Nothing moved. "I don't see why it should be. If there are people in there they must be as scared as we are." Nora was very close to him as they entered. The lobby seemed deserted. The flashlight beams scanned the empty chairs and couches. The glass of the deserted cages threw back reflections. "The keys are in there," Frank said. He vaulted the desk and scanned the numbers under the pigeon holes. "We'd better stay down low," Jim Wilson said. "Damned if I'm going to climb to the penthouse." "How about the fourth floor?" "That's plenty high enough." Frank came out with a handful of keys. "Odd numbers," he said. "Four in a row." "Well I'll be damned," Jim Wilson muttered. But he said no more and they climbed the stairs in silence. They passed the quiet dining rooms and banquet halls, and by the time they reached the fourth floor the doors giving off the corridors had assumed a uniformity. "Here they are." He handed a key to Wilson. "That's the end one." He said nothing as he gave Minna her key, but Wilson grunted, "For crissake!" in a disgusted voice, took Minna's key and threw it on the floor. Frank and Nora watched as Wilson unlocked his door, Wilson turned. "Well, goodnight all. If you get goosed by any spooks, just yell." Minna followed him without a word and the door closed. Frank handed Nora her key. "Lock your door and you'll be safe. I'll check the room first." He unlocked the door and flashed his light inside. Nora was close behind him as he entered. He checked the bathroom. "Everything clear. Lock your door and you'll be safe." "Frank." "Yes?" "I'm afraid to stay alone." "You mean you want me to -- " "There are two beds here." His reply was slow in coming. Nora didn't wait for it. Her voice rose to the edge of hysteria. "Quit being so damned righteous. Things have changed! Can't you realize that? What does it matter how or where we sleep? Does the world care? Will it make a damn bit of difference to the world whether I strip stark naked in front of you?" A sob choked in her throat. "Or would that outrage your morality." He moved toward her, stopped six inches away. "It isn't that. For God's sake! I'm no saint. It's just that I thought you -- " "I'm plain scared, and I don't want to be alone. To me that's all that's important." Her face was against his chest and his arms went around her. But her own hands were fists held together against him until he could feel her knuckles, hard, against his chest. She was crying. "Sure," Frank said. "I'll stay with you. Now take it easy. Everything's going to be all right." Nora sniffled without bothering to reach for ' her handkerchief. "Stop lying. You know it isn't going to be all right." Frank was at somewhat of a loss. This flareup of Nora's was entirely unexpected. He eased toward the place the flashlight had shown the bed to be. Her legs hit its edge and she sat down. "You -- you want me to sleep in the other one?" he asked. "Of course," Nora replied with marked bitterness. "I'm afraid you wouldn't be very comfortable in with me." There was a time of silence. Frank took off his jacket, shirt and trousers. It was funny, he thought. He'd spent his money, been drugged, beaten and robbed as a result of one objective -- to get into a room alone with a girl. And a girl not nearly as nice as Nora at that. Now, here he was alone with a real dream, and he was tongue-tied. It didn't make sense. He shrugged. Life was crazy sometimes. He heard the rustle of garments and wondered how much Nora was taking off. Then he dropped his trousers, forgotten, to the floor. "Did you hear that?" "Yes. It's that -- " Frank went to the window, raised the sash. The moaning sound came in louder, but it was from far distance. "I think that's out around Evanston." Frank felt a warmth on his cheek and he realized Nora was by his side, leaning forward. He put an arm around her and they stood unmoving in complete silence. Although their ears were straining for the sound coming down from the north, Frank could not be oblivious of the warm flesh under his hand. Nora's breathing was soft against his cheek. She said, "Listen to how it rises and falls. It's almost as though they were using it to talk with, The inflection changes." "I think that's what it is. It's coming from a lot of different places. It stops in some places and starts in others." "It's so -- weird." "Spooky," Frank said, "but in a way it makes me feel better." "I don't see how it could." Nora pressed closer to him. "It does though, because of what I was afraid of. I had it figured out that the city was going to blow up -- that a bomb had been planted that they couldn't find, or something like that. Now, I'm pretty to bet we'll be alive in the morning." Nora thought that over in silence. "If that's the way it is -- if some kind of invaders are coming down from the north -- isn't it stupid to stay here? Even if we are tired we ought to be trying to get away from them." "I was thinking the same thing. I'll go and talk to Wilson." They crossed the room together and he left her by the bed and went on to the door. Then he remembered he was in his shorts and went back and got his trousers. After he'd put them on, he wondered why he'd bothered. He opened the door. Something warned him -- some instinct -- or possibly his natural fear and caution coincided with the presence of danger. He heard the footsteps on the carpeting down the hall -- soft, but unmistakably footsteps. He called, "Wilson -- Wilson -- that you?" The creature outside threw caution to the winds. Frank sensed rather than heard a body hurtling toward the door. A shrill, mad laughter raked his ears and the weight of a body hit the door. Frank drew strength from pure panic as he threw his weight against the panel, but perhaps an inch or two from the latch the door wavered from opposing strength. Through the narrow opening he could feel the' hoarse breath of exertion in his face. Insane giggles and curses sounded through the black stillness. Frank had the wild conviction he was losing the battle, and added strength came from somewhere. He heaved and there was a scream and he knew he had at least one finger caught between the door and the jamb. He threw his weight against the door with frenzied effort and heard the squash of the finger. The voice kited up to a shriek of agony, like that of a wounded animal. Even with his life at stake, and the life of Nora, Frank could not deliberately slice the man's fingers off. Even as he fought the urge, and called himself a fool, he allowed the door to give slightly inward. The hand was jerked to safety. At that moment another door opened close by and Jim Wilson's voice boomed : "What the hell's going on out here?" Simultaneous with this, racing footsteps receded down the hall and from the well of the stairway came a whining cry of pain. "Jumping jees!" Wilson bellowed. "We got company. We ain't alone!" "He tried to get into my room." "You shouldn't have opened the door. Nora okay?" "Yeah. She's all right." "Tell her to stay in her room. And you do the same. We'd be crazy to go after that coot in the dark. He'll keep 'til morning." Frank closed the door, doublelocked it and went back to Nora's bed. He could hear a soft sobbing. He reached down and pulled back the covers and the sobbing came louder. Then he was down on the bed and she was in his arms. She cried until the panic subsided, while he held her and said nothing. After a while she got control of herself. "Don't leave me, Frank," she begged. "Please don't leave me." He stroked her shoulder. "I won't," he whispered. They lay for a long time in utter silence, each seeking strength in the other's closeness. The silence was finally broken by Nora. "Frank?" "Yes." "Do you want me?" He did not answer. "If you want me you can have me, Frank." Frank said nothing. "I told you today that I tried to commit suicide. Remember?" "I remember." "That was the truth. I did it because I was tired of everything. Because I've made a terrible mess of things. I didn't want to go on livHe remained silent, holding her. As she spoke again, her voice sharpened. "Can't you understand what I'm telling you? I'm no good! I'm just a bum! Other men have had me! Why shouldn't you? Why should you be cheated out of what other men have had?" He remained silent. After a few moments, Nora said, "For God's sake, talk! Say something!" "How do you feel about it now? Will you try again to kill yourself the next chance you get?" "No -- no, I don't think I'll ever try it again." "Then things must look better." "I don't know anything about that. I just don't want to do it now." She did not urge him this time and he was slow in speaking. "It's kind of funny. It really is. Don't get the idea I've got morals. I haven't. I've had my share of women. I was working on one the night they slipped me the mickey -- the night before I woke up to this tomb of a city. But now -- tonight -- its kind of different. I feel like I want to protect you. Is that strange?" "No," she said quietly. "I guess not." They lay there silently, their thoughts going off into the blackness of the sepulchral night. After a long while, Nora's even breathing told him she was asleep. He got up quietly, covered her, and went to the other bed. But before he slept, the weird wailings from out Evanston way came again -- rose and fell in that strange conversational cadencethen died away into nothing. X gers of daylight. Nora still slept. He dressed and stood for some moments with his hand on the door knob. Then he threw the bolt and cautiously opened the door. The hallway was deserted. At this point it came to him forcibly that he was not a brave man. All his life, he realized, he had avoided physical danger and had refused to recognize the true reason for so doing. He had classified himself as a man who dodged trouble through good sense; that the truly civilized person went out of his way to keep the peace. He realized now that that attitude was merely salve for his ego. He faced the empty corridor and did not wish to proceed further. But stripped of the life-long alibi, he forced himself to walk through the doorway, close the door softly, and move toward the stairs. He paused in front of the door behind which Jim Wilson and Minna were no doubt sleeping. He stared at it wistfully. It certainly would not be a mark of cowardice to get Jim Wilson up under circumstances such as these. In fact, he would be a fool not to do so. Stubbornness forbade such a move, however. He walked softly toward the place where the hallway dead-ended and became a crosscorridor. He made the turn carefully, pressed against one wall. There was no one in sight. He got to the stairway and started down. His muscles and nerves tightened with each step. When he reached the lobby he was ready to jump skyhigh at the drop of a pin. But no one dropped any pins, and he reached the modernistic glass doorway to the drugstore with only silence screaming in his ears. The door was unlocked. One hinge squeaked slightly as he pushed the door inward. It was in the drugstore that Frank found signs of the fourthfloor intruder. An inside counter near the prescription department was red with blood. Bandages and first-aid supplies had been unboxed and thrown around with abandon. Here the man had no doubt administered to his smashed hand. But where had he gone? Asleep, probably, in one of the rooms upstairs. Frank wished fervently for a weapon. Beyond doubt there was not a gun left in the Loop. A gun was not the only weapon ever created, though, and Frank searched the store and found a line of pocket knives still in neat boxes near the perfume counter. He picked four of the largest and found, also, a wooden-handled, lead-tipped bludgeon, used evidently for cracking ice. Thus armed, he went out through the revolving door. He walked through streets that were like death under the climbing sun. Through streets and canyons of dead buildings upon which the new daylight had failed to shed life or diminish the terror of the night past. At Dearborn he found the door to the Tribune Public Service Building locked. He used the ice breaker to smash a glass door panel. The crash of the glass on the cement was an explosion in the screaming silence. He went inside. Here the sense of desolation was complete; brought sharply to focus, probably, by the pigeon holes filled with letters behind the want-ad counter. Answers to a thousand and one queries, waiting patiently for someone to come after them. Before going to the basement and the back files of the Chicago Tribune, Frank climbed to the second floor and found what he thought might be there -- a row of teletype machines with a file-board hooked to the side of each machine. Swiftly, he stripped the copy sheets off each board, made a bundle of them and went back downstairs. He covered the block back to the hotel at a dog-trot, filled with a sudden urge to get back to the fourth floor as soon as possible. He stopped in the drugstore and filled his pockets with soap, a razor, shaving cream and face lotion. As an afterthought, he picked up a lavish cosmetic kit that retailed, according to the price tag, for thirtyeight dollars plus tax. He let himself back into the room and closed the door softly. Nora rolled over, exposing a shoulder and one breast. The breast held his gaze for a full minute. Then a feeling of guilt swept him and he went into the bathroom and closed the door. Luckily, a supply tank on the roof still contained water and Frank was able to shower and shave. Dressed again, he felt like a new man. But he regretted not hunting up a haberdashery shop and getting himself a clean shirt. Nora had still not awakened when he came out of the bathroom. He went to the bed and stood looking down at her for some time. Then he touched her shoulder. "Wake up. It's morning." Nora stirred. Her eyes opened, but Frank got the impression she did not really awaken for several seconds. Her eyes went to his face, to the window, back to his face. "What time is it?" "I don't know. I think it's around eight o'clock." Nora stretched both arms luxuriously. As she sat up, her slip fell back into place and Frank got the impression she hadn't even been ware of her partial nudity. She stared up at him, clarity dawning in her eyes, "You're all i leaned up." "I went downstairs and got some things." "You went out -- alone?" "Why not. We can't stay in here all day. We've got to hit the road and get out of here. We've overshot our luck already." "But that -- that man in the hall last night! You shouldn't have taken a chance." "I didn't bump into him. I found the place he fixed his hand, down in the drugstore." Frank went to the table and came back with the cosmetic set. He put it in Nora's lap. "I brought this up for you." Surprise and true pleasure were mixed in her expression. "That was very nice. I think I'd better get dressed." Frank turned toward the window where he had left the bundle of teletype clips. "I've got a little reading to do." As he sat down, he saw, from the comer of his eye, a flash of slim brown legs moving toward the bathroom. Just inside the door, Nora turned. "Are Jim Wilson and Minna up yet?" "I don't think so." Nora's eyes remained on him. "I think you were very brave to go downstairs alone. But it was a foolish thing to do. You should have waited for Jim Wilson." "You're right about it being foolish. But I had to go." "Why?" "Because I'm not brave at all. Maybe that was the reason." Nora left the bathroom door open about six inches and Frank heard the sound of the shower. He sat with the papers in his hand wondering about the water. When he had gone to the bathroom the thought had never occurred to him. It was natural that it should. Now he wondered about it. Why was it still running? After a while he considered the possibility of the supply tank on the roof. Then he wondered about Nora. It was strange how he could think about her personally and impersonally at the same time. He remembered her words of the previous night. They made her -- he shied from the term. What was the old cliche? A woman of easy virtue. What made a woman of that type, he wondered. Was it something inherent in their makeup? That partially opened door was symbolic somehow. He was sure that many wives closed the bathroom door upon their husbands; did it without thinking, instinctively. He was sure Nora had left it partially open without thinking. Could a behavior pattern be traced from such an insignificant thing? He wondered about his own attitude toward Nora. He had drawn away from what she'd offered him during the night. And yet from no sense of disgust. There was certainly far more about Nora to attract than to repel. Morals, he realized dimly, were imposed -- or at least functioned -- for the protection of society. With society gone -- vanished overnight -- did the moral code still hold? If and when they got back among masses of people, would his feelings toward Nora change? He thought not. He would marry her, he told himself firmly, as quick as he'd marry any other girl. He would not hold what she was against her. I guess I'm just fundamentally unmoral myself, he thought, and began reading the news clips. door accompanied by the booming voice of Jim Wilson. "You in there! Ready for breakfast?" Frank got up and walked toward the door. As he did so, the door to the bathroom closed. Jim Wilson wore a two-day growth of beard and it didn't seem to bother him at all. As he entered the room he rubbed his hands together in great gusto. "Well, where'll we eat, folks? Let's pick the classiest restaurant in town. Nothing but the best for Minna here." He winked broadly as Minna, expressionless and silent, followed him in exactly as a shadow would have followed him and sat primly down in a straight-backed chair by the wall. "We'd better start moving south," Frank said, "and not bother about breakfast." "Getting scared?" Jim Wilson asked. "You're damn right I'm scared -- now. We're right in the middle of a big no-man' s-land." "I don't get you." At that moment the bathroom door opened and Nora came out. Jim Wilson forgot about the question he'd asked. He let forth a loud whistle of appreciation. Then he turned his eyes on Frank and his thought was crystal clear. He was envying Frank the night just passed. A sudden irritation welled up in Frank Brooks, a distinct feeling of disgust. "Let's start worrying about important things -- our lives. Or don't you consider your life very important?" Jim Wilson seemed puzzled. "What the hell's got into you? Didn't you sleep good?" "I went down the block this morning and found some teletype machines. I've just been reading the reports." "What about that guy that tried to get into your room last night?" "I didn't see him. I didn't see anybody. But I know why the city's been cleaned out." Frank went back to the window and picked up the sheaf on clips he had gone through. Jim Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed, frowning. Nora followed Frank and perched on the edge of the chair he dropped into. "The city going to blow up?" Wilson asked. "No. We've been invaded by some form of alien life." "Is that what the papers said?" "It was the biggest and fastest mass evacuation ever attempted. I pieced the reports together. There was hell popping around here during the two days we -- we waited it out." "Where did they all go?" Nora asked. "South. They've evacuated a forty-mile strip from the lake west. The first Terran defense line is set up in northern Indiana." "What do you mean -- Terra." "It's a word that means Earth -- this planet. The invaders came from some other planet, they think -- at least from no place on Earth." ever heard of," Wilson said. "A lot of people probably thought the same thing," Frank replied. "Flying saucers were pretty common. Nobody thought they were anything and nobody paid much attention. Then they hit -- three days ago -- and wiped out every living soul in three little southern Michigan towns. From there they began spreading out. They -- " Each of them heard the sound at the same time. A faint rumble, increasing swiftly into high thunder. They moved as one to the window and saw four jet planes, in formation, moving across the sky from the south. "There they come," Frank said. "The fight's started. Up to now the army has been trying to get set, I suppose. Nora said, "Is there any way we can hail them? Let them know -- " Her words were cut off by the horror of what happened. As they watched, the plane skimmed low across the Loop. At a point, approximately over Lake Street, Frank estimated, the planes were annihilated. There was a flash of blue fire coming in like jagged lightning to form four balls of fire around the planes. The fire balls turned, almost instantly, into globes of white smoke that drifted lazily away. And that was all. But the planes vanished completely. "What happened?" Wilson muttered. "Where'd they go?" "It was as if they hit a wall,"' Nora said, her voice hushed with awe. "I think that was what happened," Frank said. "The invaders have some kind of a weapon that holds us helpless. Otherwise the army wouldn't have established this no-man's-land and pulled out. The reports said we have them surrounded on all sides with the help of the lake. We're trying to keep them isolated." Jim Wilson snorted. "It looks like we've got them right where they want us." "Anyhow, we're damn fools to stick around here. We'd better head south." Wilson looked wistfully about the room. "I guess so, but it's a shame -- walking away from all this." Nora was staring out the window, a small frown on her face. "I wonder who they are and where they came from?" "The teletype releases were pretty vague on that." She turned quickly. "There's something peculiar about them. Something really strange." "What do you mean?" "Last night when we were walking up the street. It must have been these invaders we heard. They must have been across the street. But they didn't act like invaders. They seemed -- well, scared. I got the feeling they ran from us in panic. And they haven't been back." Wilson said, "They may not have been there at all. Probably our imaginations." "I don't think so," Frank cut in. "They were there and then they were gone. I'm sure of it." "Those wailing noises. They were certainly signalling to each other. Do you suppose that's the only language they have?" Nora walked over and offered the silent Minna a cigarette. Minna refused with a shake of her head. "I wish we knew what they looked like," Frank said. "But let's not sit here talking. Let's get going" Jim Wilson was scowling. There was a marked sullenness in his manner. "Not Minna and me. I've changed my mind. I'm sticking here." Frank blinked in surprise. "Are you crazy? We've run our luck out already. Did you see what happened to those planes?" "The hell with the planes. We've got it good here. This I like. I like it a lot. We'll stay." "Okay," Frank replied hotly, "but talk for yourself. You're not making Minna stay!" Wilson's eyes narrowed. "I'm not? Look, buster -- how about minding your own goddam business?" The vague feelings of disgust Frank had had now crystallized into words. "I won't let you get away with it! You think I'm blind? Hauling her into the back room every ten minutes! Don't you think I know why? You're nothing but a damn sex maniac! You've got her terrorized until she's afraid to open her mouth. She goes with us!" Jim Wilson was on his feet. His face blazed with rage. The urge to kill was written in the crouch of his body and the twist of his mouth. "You goddam nosey little squirt. I'll -- " Wilson charged across the short, intervening distance. His arms went out in a clutching motion. But Frank Brooks wasn't full of knockout drops this time, and with a clear head he was no pushover. Blinded with rage, Jim Wilson was a pushover. Frank stepped in between his outstretched arms and slugged him squarely on top of the head with the telephone. Wilson went down like a felled steer. The scream came from Minna as she sprang across the room. She had turned from a colorless rag doll into a tigress. Shehit Frank square in the belly with small fists at the end of stiff, outstretched arms. The full force of her charge was behind the fists, and Frank went backward over the bed. Minna did not follow up her attack. She dropped to the floor beside Jim Wilson and took his huge head in her lap. "You killed him," she sobbed. "You -- you murderer! You killed him! You had no right!" Frank sat wide-eyed. "Minna! For God's sake! I was helping you. I did it for you!" "Why don't you mind your business? I didn't ask you to protect me? I don't need any protection -- not from Jim." "You mean you didn't mind the way he's treated you -- " "You've killed him -- killed him -- " Minna raised her head slowly. She looked at Frank as though she saw him for the first time. "You're a fool," she said dully. "A big fool. What right have you got to meddle with other people's affairs? Are you God or something, to run people's lives?" "Minna -- I -- " It was as though he hadn't spoken. "Do you know what it's like to have nobody? All your life to go on and grow older without anybody? I didn't have no one and then Jim came along and wanted me." Frank walked close to her and bent down. She reacted like a tiger. "Leave him alone! Leave him alone! You've done enough!" Nonplused, Frank backed away. "People with big noses -- always sticking them in. That's you. Was that any of your business what he wanted of me? Did I complain?" "I'm sorrv, Minna. I didn't know." "I'd rather go into back rooms with him than stay in front rooms without nobody." She began to cry now. Wordlessly -- soundlessly, rocking back and forth with the huge man's bloody head in her lap. "Anytime," she crooned. "Anytime I would -- " The body in her arms stirred. She looked down through her tears and saw the small black eyes open. They were slightly crossed, unfocused as they were by the force of the blow. They straightened and Jim mumbled, "What the hell -- what the hell -- " Minna's time for talking seemed over. She smiled -- a smile hardly perceptible, as though it was for herself alone. "You're all right," she said. "That's good. You're all right." Jim pushed her roughly away and staggered to his feet. He stood swaying for a moment, his head turning; for all the world like a bull blinded and tormented. Then his eyes focused on Frank. "You hit me with the goddam phone." "Yeah -- I hit you." "I'm gonna kill you." "Look -- I made a mistake." Frank picked up the phone and backed against the wall. "I hit you, but you were coming at me. I made a mistake and I'm sorry." "I'll smash your goddam skull." "Maybe you will," Frank said grimly. "But you'll work for it. It won't come easy." A new voice bit across the room. That's what I like best. Everybody quiet down." They turned and saw a slim, pale-skinned young man in the open doorway. The door had opened quietly and no one had heard it. Now the pale young man was standing in the room with a small, nickle-plated revolver in his right hand. The left hand was close down at his side. It was swathed generously in white bandage. The young man chuckled. "The last four people in the world were in a room," he said, "and there was a knock on the door." His chuckle deepened to one of pure merriment. "Only there wasn't a knock. A man just walked in with a gun that made him boss." No one moved. No one spoke. The man waited, then went on: "My name is Leroy Davis. I lived out west and I always had a keeper because they said I wasn't quite right. They wanted me to pull out with the rest of them, but I slugged my keeper and here I am." "Put down the gun and we'll talk it over," Frank said. "We're all in this together." "No, we aren't. I've got a gun, so that makes me top man. You're all in it together, but I'm not. I'm the boss, and which one of you tried to cut my hand off last night." "You tried to break in here yelling and screaming like a madman. I held the door. What else could I do?" "It's all right. I'm not mad. My type -- we may be nuts, but we never hold a grudge. I can't remember much about last night. I found some whisky in a place down the street and whisky drives me nuts. I don't know what I'm doing when I drink whisky. They say once about five years ago I got drunk and killed a little kid. but T don't remember." Nobody spoke. "I got out of it. They got me out some way. High priced lawyers got me out. Cost my dad a pile." Hysteria had been piling up inside of Nora. She had held it back, but now a little of it spurted out from between her set teeth. "Do something, somebody. Isn't anybody going to do anything ?" Leroy Davis blinked at her. "There's nothing they can do, honey," he said in a kindly voice. "I've got the gunThey'd be crazy to try anything." Nora's laugh was like the rattle of dry peas. She sat down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling and laughed. "It's crazy. It's all so crazy! We're sitting here in a doomed city with some kind of alien invaders all around us and w r e don't know' what they look like. They haven't hurt us at all. We don't even know what they look like. We don't worry a bit about them because we're too busy try ing to kill each other," Frank Brooks took Nora by the arm. "Stop it! Quit laughing like that!" Nora shook him off. "Maybe we need someone to take us over. It's all pretty crazy!" "Stop it." Nora's eyes dulled down as she looked at Frank. She dropped her head and seemed a little ashamed of herself. "I'm sorry. I'll be quiet." Jim Wilson had been standing by the wall looking first at the newcomer, then back at Frank Brooks. Wilson seemed confused as to who his true enemy really was. Finally he took a step toward Leroy Davis. Frank Brooks stopped him with a motion, but kept his eyes on Davis. "Have you seen anybody else?" Davis regarded Frank with long, careful consideration. His eyes were bright and birdlike. They reminded Frank of a squirrel's eyes. Davis said, "I bumped into an old man out on Halstead Street. He wanted to know where everybody had gone. He asked me, but I didn't know." "What happened to the old man?" Nora asked. She asked the question as though dreading to do it; but as though some compulsion forced her to speak. "I shot him," Davis said cheerfully. "It was a favor, really. Here was this old man staggering down the street with nothing but a lot of wasted years to show for his efforts. He was no good alive, and he didn't have the courage to die." Davis stopped and cocked his head brightly. "You know -- I think that's what's been wrong with the world. Too many people without the guts them." It had now dawned upon Jim Wilson that they were faced by a maniac. His eyes met those of Frank Brooks and they were -- on this point at least -- in complete agreement. A working procedure sprang up, unworded, between them. Jim Wilson took a slow, casual step toward the homicidal maniac. "You didn't see anyone else?" Frank asked. Davis ignored the question. "Look at it this way," he said. "In the old days they had Texas long horns. Thin stringy cattle that gave up meat as tough as leather. Do we have cattle like that today? No. Because we bred out the weak line." Frank said, "There are some cigarettes on that table if you want one." Jim Wilson took another slow step toward Davis. Davis said, "We bred with intelligence, with a thought to what a steer was for and we produced a walking chunk of meat as wide as it is long. "Uh-huh," Frank said. "Get the point? See what I'm driving at? Humans are more important than cattle, but can we make them breed intelligently? Oh, no! That interferes with damn silly human liberties. You can't tell a man he can only have two kids. It's his God-given right to have twelve when the damn moron can't support three. Get what I mean?" "Sure -- sure, I get it." "You better think it over, mister -- and tell that fat bastard to quit sneaking up on me or I'll blow his brains all over the carpet!" If the situation hadn't been so grim it would have appeared ludicrous. Jim Wilson, feeling success almost in his grasp, was balanced on tiptoe for a lunge. He teetered, almost lost his balance and fell back against the wall. "Take it easy," Frank said. "I'll take it easy," Davis replied. "I'll kill every goddam one of you -- " he pointed the gun at Jim Wilson. " -- starting with him." "Now wait a minute," Frank said. "You're unreasonable. What right have you got to do that? What about the law of survival? You're standing there with a gun on us. You're going to kill us. Isn't it natural to try anything we can to save our own lives?" A look of admiration brightened Davis' eyes. "Say! I like you. You're all right. You're logical. A man can talk to you. If there's anything I like it's talking to a logical man." "Thanks." "Too bad I'm going to have to kill you. We could sit down and have some nice long talks together." "Why do you want to kill us?" Minna asked. She had not spoken before. In fact, she had spoken so seldom during the entire time they'd been together that her voice was a novelty to Frank. He was inclined to discount her tirade on the floor with Wilson's head in her lap. She had been a different person then. Now she had lapsed back into her old shell. Davis regarded thoughtfully. "Must you have a reason?" "You should have a reason to kill people." Davis said, "All right, if it will make you any happier. I told you tried to make me leave town. He got in the car, behind the wheel. I got into the back seat and split his skull with a tire iron." "What's that got to do with us?" "Just this. Tommy was a better person than anyone of you or all of you put together. If he had to die, what right have you got to live? Is that enough of a reason for you?" "This is all too damn crazy," Jim Wilson roared. He was on the point of leaping at Davis and his gun. At that moment, from the north, came a sudden crescendo of the weird invader wailings. It was louder than it had previously been but did not seem nearer. The group froze, all ears trained upon the sound. "They're talking again," Nora whispered. "Uh-huh," Frank replied. "But it's different this time. As if -- " " -- as if they were getting ready for something," Nora said. "Do you suppose they're going to move south?" Davis said, "I'm not going to kill you here. We're going down stairs." The pivotal moment, hinged in Jim Wilson's mind, that could have changed the situation, had come and gone. The fine edge of additional madness that would make a man hurl himself at a loaded gun, was dulled. Leroy Davis motioned pre-emptorily toward Minna. "You first -- then the other babe. You walk side by side down the hall with the men behind you. Straight down to the lobby." They complied without resistance. There was only Jim Wilson's scowl, Frank Brooks' clouded eyes, and the white, taut look of Nora. Nora's mind was not on the gun. It was filled with thoughts of the pale maniac who held it. He was in command. Instinctively, she felt that maniacs in command have one of but two motivations -- sex and murder. Her reaction to possible murder was secondary. But what if this man insisted upon laying his hands upon her. What if he forced her into the age old thing she had done so often? Nora shuddered. But it was also in her mind to question, and be surprised at the reason for her revulsion. She'visualized the hands upon her body -- the old familiar things, and the taste in her mouth was one of horror. She had never experienced such shrinkings before. Why now. Had she herself changed? Had something happened during the night that made the past a time of shame? Or was it the madman himself? She did not know. Nora returned from her musings to find herself standing in the empty lobby. Leroy Davis, speaking to Frank, was saying. "You look kind of tricky to me. Put your hands on your head. Lock your fingers together over your head and keep your hands there." Jim Wilson was standing close to the mute Minna. She had followed all the orders without any show of anger, with no outward expression. Always she had kept her eyes on Jim Wilson. Obviously, whatever Jim ordered, she would have done without question. Wilson leaned his head down toward her. He said, "Listen, baby, there's something I keep meaning to ask but I always forget it. W T hat's your last name?" "Trumble -- Minna Trumble. I thought I told you." "Maybe you did. Maybe I didn't get it." Nora felt the hysteria welling again. "How long are you going to keep doing this?" she asked. Leroy Davis cocked his head as he looked at her. "Doing what?" "Play cat and mouse like this. Holding us on a pin like flies in an exhibit." Leroy Davis smiled brightly. "Like a butterfly in your case, honey. A big, beautiful butterfly." "What are you going to do," Frank Brooks snapped. "Whatever it is, let's get it over with?" "Can't you see what I'm doing?" Davis asked with genuine wonder. "Are you that stupid? I'm being the boss. I'm in command and I like it. I hold life and death over four people and I'm savoring the thrill of it. You're pretty stupid, mister, and if you use that 'can't get away with it' line. I'll put a bullet into your left ear and watch it come out your right one." Jim Wilson's fists were doubled. He was again approaching the reckless point. And again it was dulled by the gradually increasing sound of a motor -- not in the air, but from the street level to the south. It was a sane, cheerful sound and was resented instantly by the insane mind of Leroy Davis. He tightened even to the point that his face grew more pale from the tension. He backed to a window, looked out quickly, and turned back. "It's a jeep," he said. "They're going by the hotel. If anybody makes a move, or yells, they'll find four bodies in here and me gone. That's what I'm telling you and you know I'll do it." They knew he would do it and they stood silent, trying to dredge up the nerve to make a move. The jeep's motor backfired a couple of times as it approached Madison Street. Each time, Leroy Davis' nerves reacted sharply and the four people kept their eyes trained on the gun in his hand. The jeep came to the intersection and slowed down. There was a conference between its two occupants -- helmeted soldiers in dark brown battle dress. Then the jeep moved on up Clark Street toward Lake. A choked sigh escaped from Nora's throat. Frank Brooks turned toward her. "Take it easy," he said. "We're not dead yet. I don't think he wants to kill us." The reply came from Minna. She spoke quietly. "I don't care. T can't stand any more of this. After all, we aren't animals. We're human beings and we have a right to live and die as we please." Minna walked toward Leroy Davis. "I'm not afraid of your gun any more. All you can do with it is kill me. Go ahead and do it." Minna walked up to Leroy Davis. He gaped at her and said, "You're crazy! Get back there. You're a crazy dame!" He fired the gun twice and Minna died appreciating the incongruity of his words. She went out on a note of laughter and as she fell, Jim Wilson, with an echoing animal roar, lunged at Leroy Davis. His great hand closed completely over that of Davis, hiding the gun. There was a muffled explosion and the bullet cut unnoticed through Wilson's palm. Wilson jerked the gun from Davis' weak grasp and hurled it away. Then he killed Davis. He did it slowly, a surprising thing for Wilson. He lifted Davis by his neck and held him with his feet off the floor. He squeezed Davis' neck, seeming to do it with great leisure as Davis made horrible noises and kicked his legs. Nora turned her eyes away, buried them in Frank Brooks' shoulder, but she could not keep the sounds from reaching her ears. Frank held her close. "Take it easy," he said. "Take it easy." And he was probably not conscious of saying it. "Tell him to hurry," Nora whispered. "Tell him to get it over with. "That's what he is -- an animal." Frank Brooks stared in fascination at Letov Davis' distorted, darkening face. It was beyond semblance of anything human now. The eyes bulged and the tongue came from his mouth as though frantically seeking relief. The animal sounds quieted and died away. Nora heard the sound of the body falling to the floor -- a limp, soft sound of finality. She turned and saw Jim Wilson with his hands still extended and cupped. The terrible hands from which the stench of a terrible life was drifting away into empty air. Wilson looked down at his handiwork. "He's dead," Wilson said slowly. He turned to face Frank and Nora. There was a great disappointment in his face. "That's all there is to it," he said, dully. "He's just -- dead." Without knowing it for what it was, Jim Wilson was full of the futile aftertaste of revenge. He bent down to pick up Minna's body. There was a small blue hole in the right cheek and another one over the left eye. With a glance at Frank and Nora, Jim Wilson covered the wounds with his hand as though they were not decent. He picked her up in his arms and walked across the lobby and up the stairs with the slow, quiet tread of a weary man. The sound of the jeep welled up again, but it was further away now. Frank Brooks took Nora's hand and they hurried out into the street. As they crossed the sidewalk, the sound of the jeep was drowned by a sudden swelling of the wailings to the northward. On still a new note, they rose and fell on the still air. A note of panic, of new knowledge, it seemed, but Frank and Nora were not paying close attention. The sounds of the jeep motor had come from the west and they got within sight of the Madison-Well intersection in time to see the jeep hurtle southward at its maximum speed. Frank yelled and waved his arms, but he knew he had been neither seen nor heard. They were given little time for disappointment however, because a new center of interest appeared to the northward. From around the corner of Washington Street, into Clark, moved three strange figures. There was a mixture of belligerence and distress in their actions. They carried odd looking weapons and seemed interested in using them upon something or someone, but they apparently lacked the energy to raise them although they appeared to be rather light. The creatures themselves were humanoid, Frank thought. He tightened his grip on Nora's hand. "They've seen us." "Let's not run," Nora said. "I'm tired of running. All it's gotten us is trouble. Let's just stand here." "Don't be foolish." "I'm not running. You can if you want to." Frank turned his attention back to the three strange creatures. He allowed natural curiosity full reign. Thoughts of flight vanished from his mind. "They're so thin -- so fragile," Nora said. "But their weapons aren't." "It's hard to believe, even seeing them, that they're from another planet." "How so? They certainly don't look much like us." "I mean with the talk, for so long, about flying saucers and space flight and things like that. Here they are, but it doesn't seem possible." "There's something wrong with them." This was true. Two of the strange beings had fallen to the sidewalk. The third came doggedly on, dragging one foot after the other until he went to his hands and knees. He remained motionless for a long time, his head hanging limply. Then he too, sank to the cement and lay still. The wailings from the north now took on a tone of intense agony -- great desperation. After that came a yawning silence. the military man said. "Or rather, natural forces defeated them. We certainly had little to do with it." Nora, Frank, and Jim Wilson stood at the curb beside a motorcycle. The man on the cycle supported it with a leg propped against the curb as he talked. "We saw three of them die up the street," Frank said. "Our scouting party saw the same thing happen. That's why we moved in. It's about over now. We'll know a lot more about them and where they came from in twenty-four hours." They had nothing further to say. The military man regarded them thoughtfully. "I don't know about you three. If you ignored the evacation through no fault of your own and can prove it -- " "There were four of us," Jim Wilson said. "Then we met another man. He's inside on the floor. I killed him." "Murder?" the military man said sharply. "He killed a woman who was with us," Frank said. "He was a maniac. When he's identified I'm pretty sure he'll have a past record." "Where is the woman's body?" "On a bed upstairs," Wilson said. "I'll have to hold all of you. Martial law exists in this area. You're in the hands of the army." people now, going about their business, pushing and jostling, eating in the restaurants, making electricity for the lights, generating power for the telephones. Nora, Frank, and Jim Wilson sat in a restaurant on Clark Street. "We're all different people now," Nora said. "No one could go through what we've been through and be the same." Jim Wilson took her statement listlessly. "Did they find out what it was about our atmosphere that killed them?" "They're still working on that, I think." Frank Brooks stirred his coffee, raised a spoonful and let it drip back into the cup. "I'm going up to the Chicago Avenue police station," Wilson said. Frank and Nora looked up in surprise. Frank asked, "Why? The military court missed it -- the fact you escaped from jail." "They didn't miss it I don't think. I don't think they cared much. I'm going back anyway." "It won't be much of a rap." "No, a pretty small one. I want to get it over with." He got up from his chair. "So long. Maybe I'll see you around." "So long." "Goodbye." Frank said, "I think I'll beat it too. I've got a job in a factory up north. Maybe they're operating again." He got to his feet and stood awkwardly by the table. "Besides -- I've got some pay coming." Nora didn't say anything. Frank said, "Well -- so long. Maybe I'll see you around." "Maybe. Goodbye." Frank Brooks walked north on Clark Street. He was glad to get away from the restaurant. Nora was a good kid but hell -- you didn't take up with a hooker. A guy played around, but you didn't stick with them. But it made a guy think. He was past the kid stage. It was time for him to find a girl and settle down. A guy didn't want to knock around all his life. Nora walked west on Madison Street. Then she remembered the Halstead Street slums were in that direction and turned south on Wells. She had nine dollars in her bag and that worried her. You couldn't get along on nine dollars in Chicago very long. There was a tavern on Jackson near Wells. Nora went inside. The barkeep didn't frown at her. That was good. She went to the bar and ordered a beer and was served. After a while a man came in. A middle aged man who might have just come into Chicago -- whose bags might still be at the LaSalle Street Station down the block. The man looked at Nora, then away. After a while looked at her again. Nora smiled. If earthlings are looking for an " incident " the gods of chance will furnish one. On Lobe, however, it might be merely a neglible -- Margin of Error By Richard Deeming Illustrated by Bob Martin small Negro boy in Porto Rico was hunting rats with an ancient .# caliber single-shot rifle. At one minute after twelve noon he looked up as the jet mail express from Communist Haiti zoomed by a quarter mile offshore and ten thousand feet high, en route to Communist Trinidad. As sometimes happens in imaginative childhood, the boy visualized the far-off jet express as a bird and raised his rifle to his shoulder. He said "bang!" and somehow the tiny rifle went off. To his horror the jet express immediately performed a loop and plunged into the sea. Within twenty-four hours, the small boy had been magnified into an anti-aircraft crew, and an incident had been manufactured. This, because an incident was desired by one Marshall Igor Matoshek -- Dictator of Russia -- and a great many other nations. Oa January #nd, #, Matoshek addressed, hy telepeople under his rule, plus the twohis rule, he simply announced that the warmongering bourgeois dictatorship which ruled the Tri-federation of North America and the Island of Porto Rico had vilely attacked the free and peace-loving democracies of the Communist International, and that a state of war existed. At the same time, an extremely unimportant conference was taking place on the planet Lobe, eight light years away from the planet Earth. Since the participants in this conference conversed by thought transference in a language not translatable into any language ever employed on Earth, and even impossible to indicate phonetically, only its substance can be given. For the same reason there is no way to express the true names of the participants, so for purposes of convenience they are arbitrarily designated Horace, George and Junior. In the extremely advanced civilization of Lobe, Horace was the Earthly equivalent of a kindergarten teacher. He was a tall, distinguished looking Lobian with nearly white antennae, but a beak unchipped by age and a firm, unwrinkled underside where it was unprotected by his shell. The position of George in Lobian economy has no counterpart on Earth, and therefore cannot be accurately described. Approximately, he was something like a skilled artisan, though his work was entirely mental, consisting of polishing the raw thoughts of workers higher in the Lobian professional scale. Biologically it is easier to put a finger on George, however. He was the father of Junior. Junior was the subject of the conference. "It is difficult and embarrassing to tell a parent his child is subnormal," Horace was transmitting, glancing first at Junior to make sure his receiving antenna was retracted as ordered. "I hope you understand the delicacy of my position." "Of course, professor," George radioed back glumly. "It's just that I had such hopes for the lad." His thought trailed off and he waved several tentacles vaguely. "Being a drone will at least be a pleasant life," Horace reassured him. "Junior will be happy. You have the consolation of the Act being in force anyway. Ten years ago he would have been destroyed." George absorbed this with small solace. Examining his son, he felt a twinge of compassion because the lad so resembled his dead mother. The same delicate sight-tubes, shining black beak and gentle curve to the brittle plate encasing his shoulders. He signalled the youngster to thrust out his receiving antenna. "Your teacher tells me you have a little trouble with your work, son," he transmitted gently. "Is there anything particular bothering you?" In the high frequency of the very young, Junior sent back, "It's my margin of . error, Father. I understand the principles of the problems, but my answers come out wrong. I seem to make mechanical mistakes." George glanced at Horace inquiringly, and the teacher motioned Junior to retract his antenna again. "An indication of an intermittent In oak in the thought pattern," he i laincd. "With our present knowledge, nothing can be done for him. He can absorb knowledge, of course. Under our modern teaching methods we can impart knowledge to an imbecile." His expression indicated he believed that the situation in this case. "But he could never be allowed to perform even the simplest problem except under supervision. Conceive what might happen if we even trained him to become merely a thought-link computer. He might insert an error whose end result could throw the entire universe out of balance." "Would you mind my watching while he worked some simple problem?" George radioed. "Of course not." Again the teacher signalled his student, and Junior's antenna obediently shot out. "Your father would like to see you at work, Junior. Take him into your room and explain the problem you were doing when we interrupted you." Then he paused and added a caution. "No practical application until I have checked your calculations, however." munist subjects watched the televised image of Marshall Igor Matoshek with stoic resignation and cheered with mechanical enthusiin the three republics of North America and on the Island of Porto Rico watched the same image with fear in their hearts. "We stand on the threshold of the greatest era in history," intoned the most important man in the world. "The outcome of the vast struggle in which we are about to engage will determine the destiny of this planet for all time. No single instance in the known past has ever been of such import." The President of the Tri-federation of North America did not wait for the talk to end. He lifted his telephone and ordered the H-bomb shields aloft at once. "The first problem is simple enough," Junior explained to his father. He indicated a small scanning screen, and twisted dials until a section of the heavens was visible. "One at a time I take each of the twenty-two solar systems outside of our own and compute what effect its mass and location has on the location of this planet. In other thoughts, if the particular solar system were not in existence, and consequently not exerting its gravitational pull on Lobe, what would Lobe's orbit around our sun be?" "I see," Gorge transmitted. "On that part I made no mistakes," Junior sent proudly. "Teacher checked all my answers himself." "Then his expression became glum. "The second part was to take each individual planet of each solar system and compute what effect its mass and location has, first, on its own solar system and, second, on our planet. I used the proper formulae and have all my answers, but teacher has not yet checked them." Examining the youngster's glum expression, George retracted his sending antenna and thought to himself, "The lad doesn't seem to have much faith in the answers he got." "At this moment the great guided missile emplacements at Paris, London, Honolulu and Rio de Janeiro are preparing to launch destruction at every principal city in North America and Porto Rico," Marshall Matoshek informed his audience. "The fire-control officers of these batteries are watching and listening to me just as you others are. The signal to fire will come from me right there on your screen." He paused to let this sink in. "The Communist International is averse to destruction where peaceful methods are possible, however. My aide-de-camp, General Serge Marik, is awaiting transoceanic connection with the President of the Tri-federation of North America at this very moment. If the three republics of North America and the Island of Porto Rico agree to surrender immediately and unconditionally, the order to fire will not be issued." The phone of the President of the Tri-federation of North America buzzed softly. He picked it up, listened for a moment and smiled bleakly at the serious-faced men gathered about his desk. One by one they shook their heads and smiled bleakly back at him. "Tell the old windbag to go to Hell," the President said. "The answers seem to be substantially correct," Horace conceded grudgingly. He glanced at George almost in apology. "The first time since school started his margin of error has been negligible. The exception which proves the rule." He bent his gray sight-tubes at the youngster. "Now compute for me the provable planet whose (Continued on page #) Under the new system of the Managerials, the fight was not for life but for death ! And great was the ingenuity of -- The Victor By Bryce Walton Illustrated by Kelly Freas fraction of a minute in which to die. He dropped through the tubular beams of alloydem steel and hung there, five thousand feet above the tiers and walkways below. At either end of the walkway crossing between the two power-hung buildings, he saw the plainclothes security officers running in toward him. He grinned and started to release his grip. He would think about them on the way down. His fingers wouldn't work. He kicked and strained and tore at himself with his own weight, but his hands weren't his own any more. He might have anticipated that. Some paralysis beam freezing his hands into the metal. He sagged to limpness. His chin dropped. For an instant, then, the fire in his heart almost went out, but not quite. It survived that one terrible moment of defeat, then burned higher. And perhaps something in that desperate resistance was the factor that kept it burning where it was thought no flame could burn. He felt the rigidity of paralysis leaving his arms as he was lifted, helped along the walkway to a security car. The car looked like any other car. The officers appeared like all the other people in the clockwork culture of the mechanized New System. Marquis sought the protection of personal darkness behind closed eyelids as the monorail car moved faster and faster through the high clean air. Well -- he'd worked with the Underground against the System for a long time. He had known that eventually he would be caught. There were rumors of what happened to men then, and even the vaguest, unsubstantiated rumors were enough to indicate that death was preferable. That was the Underground's philosophy -- better to die standing up as a man with some degree of personal integrity and freedom than to go on living as a conditioned slave of the state. He'd missed -- but he wasn't through yet though. In a hollow tooth was a capsule containing a very high-potency poison. A little of that would do the trick too. But he would have to wait for the right time... T he manager was thin, his face angular, and he matched up with the harsh steel angles of the desk and the big room somewhere in the Security Building. His face had a kind of emotion -- cold, detached, cynically superior. "We don't get many of your kind," he said. "Political prisoners are becoming more scarce all the time. As your number indicates. From now on, you'll be No. #." He looked at some papers, then up at Marquis. "You evidently found out a great deal. However, none of it will do you or what remains of your Underground fools any good." The Manager studied Marquis with detached curiosity. "You learned things concerning the Managerial that have so far remained secret." It was partly a question. Marquis' lean and darkly inscrutable face smiled slightly. "You're good at understatement. Yes -- I found out what we've suspected for some time. That the Managerial class has found some way to stay young. Either a remarkable longevity, or immortality. Of all the social evils that's the worst of all. To deny the people knowledge of such a secret." The Manager nodded. "Then you did find that out? The Underground knows? Well, it will do no good." "It will, eventually. They'll go on and someday they'll learn the secret." Marquis thought of Marden. Marden was as old as the New System of statism and inhumanity that had started off disguised as social-democracy. Three-hundred and three years old to be exact. The Manager said. "No. # -- you will be sent to the work colony on the Moon. You won't be back. We've tried re-conditioning rebels, but it doesn't work. A rebel has certain basic deviant characteristics and we can't overcome them sufficiently to make happy, well-adjusted workers out of you. However on the Moon -- you will conform. It's a kind of social experiment there in associative reflex culture, you might say. You'll conform all right." He was taken to a small, naked, gray-steel room. He thought about taking the capsule from his tooth now, but decided he might be observed. They would rush in an antidote and make him live. And he might not get a chance to take his life in any other way. He would try of course, but his knowledge of his future situation was vague -- except that in it he would conform. There would be extreme conditioned-reflex therapeutic techniques. And it would be pretty horrible. That was all he knew. He didn't see the pellet fall. He heard the slight sound it made and then saw the almost colorless gas hissing softly, clouding the room. He tasted nothing, smelled or felt nothing. He passed out quickly and painlessly. fice, and he knew he was on the Moon. The far wall was spherical and was made up of the outer shell of the pressure dome which kept out the frigid cold nights and furnace-hot days. It was opaque and Marquis could see the harsh black and white shadows out there -- the metallic edges of the far crater wall. This Manager was somewhat fat, with a round pink face and cold blue eyes. He sat behind a chrome shelf of odd shape suspended from the ceiling with silver wires. The Manager said. "No. #, here there is only work. At first, of course, you will rebel. Later you will work, and finally there will be nothing else. Things here are rigidly scheduled, and you will learn the routines as the conditioning bells acquaint you with them. We are completely self-sufficient here. We are developing the perfect scientifically-controlled society. It is a kind of experiment. A closed system to test to what extremes we can carry our mastery of associative reflex to bring man security and happiness and freedom from responsibility." Marquis didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. He knew he couldn't get away with trying to kill this particular Managerial specimen. But one man, alone, a rebel, with something left in him that still burned, could beat the system. He had to! "Our work here is specialized. During the indoctrination period you will do a very simple routine job in coordination with the cybernetics machines. There, the machines and the nervous system of the workers become slowly cooperative. Machine and man learn to work very intimately together. Later, after the indoctrination -- because of your specialized knowledge of food-concentrate preparation -- we will transfer you to the food-mart. The period of indoctrination varies in length with the individuals. You will be screened now and taken to the indoctrination ward. We probably won't be seeing one another again. The bells take care of everything here. The bells and the machines. There is never an error -- never any mistakes. Machines do not make mistakes." He was marched out of there and through a series of rooms. He was taken in by generators, huge oscilloscopes. Spun like a living tube through curtains of vacuum tube voltimeters, electronic power panels. Twisted and squeezed through rolls of skeins of hook-up wire. Bent through shieldings of every color, size and shape. Rolled over panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate transceivers. Tumbled down long surfaces of gleaming bakelite. Plunged through color-indexed files of resistors and capacitances... here machine and man learn to work very intimately together. As he drifted through the machine tooled nightmare, Marquis knew what he had been fighting all his life, what he would continue to fight with every grain of ingenuity. Mechanization -- the horror of losing one's identity and becoming part of an assembly line. He could hear a clicking sound as tubes sharpened and faded in intensity. The clicking -- rhythm, a hypnotic rhythm like the beating of his own heart -- the throbbing and thrumming, the contracting and expanding, the pulsing and pounding... the machines and the nervous system of the workers become slowly cooperative. Beds were spaced ten feet apart down both sides of a long gray metal hall. There were no cells, no privacy, nothing but beds and the gray metalene suits with numbers printed across the chest. His bed, with his number printed above it, was indicated to him, and the guard disappeared. He was alone. It was absolutely silent. On his right a woman lay on a bed. No. #. She had been here a long time. She appeared dead. Her breasts rose and fell with a peculiarly steady rhythm, and seemed to be coordinated with the silent, invisible throbbing of the metal walls. She might have been attractive once. Here it didn't make any difference. Her face was gray, like metal. Her hair was cropped short. Her uniform was the same as the man's on Marquis' left. The man was No. #. He hadn't been here so long. His face was thin and gray. His hair was dark, and he was about the same size and build as Marquis. His mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were closed and there was a slight quivering at the ends of the fingers which were laced across his stomach. "Hello," Marquis said. The man shivered, then opened dull eyes and looked up at Marquis. "I just got in. Name's Charles Marquis." The man blinked. "I'm -- I'm -- No. #." He looked down at his chest, repeated the number. His fingers shook a little as he touched his lips. Marquis said. "What's this indoctrination?" "You -- learn. The bells ring -- you forget -- and learn -- " "There's absolutely no chance of escaping?" Marquis whispered, more to himself than to #. "Only by dying," #I shivered. His eyes rolled crazily, then he turned over and buried his face in his arms. The situation had twisted all the old accepted values squarely around. Preferring death over life. But not because of any anti-life attitude, or pessimism, or defeatism. None of those negative attitudes that would have made the will-todie abnormal under conditions in which there would have been hope and some faint chance of a bearable future. Here to keep on living was a final form of de-humanized indignity, of humiliation, of ignominy, of the worst thing of all -- loss of one'sself -- of one's individuality. To die as a human being was much more preferable over continuing to live as something else -- something neither human or machine, but something of both, with none of the dignity of either. detected the capsule of poison in Marquis' tooth. The capsule contained ten grains of poison, only one of which was enough to bring a painless death within sixteen hours or so. That was his ace in the hole, and he waited only for the best time to use it. Bells rang. The prisoners jumped from their beds and went through a few minutes of calisthenics. Other bells rang and a tray of small tins of food-concentrates appeared out of a slit in the wall by each bed. More bells rang, different kinds of bells, some deep and brazen, others high and shrill. And the prisoners marched off to specialized jobs cooperating with various machines. You slept eight hours. Calisthenics five minutes. Eating ten minutes. Relaxation to the tune of musical bells, ten minutes. Work period eight hours. Repeat. That was all of life, and after a while Marquis knew, a man would not be aware of time, nor of his name, nor that he had once been human. Marquis felt deep lancing pain as he tried to resist the bells. Each time the bells rang and a prisoner didn't respond properly, invisible rays of needle pain punched and kept punching until he reacted properly. And finally he did as the bells told him to do. Finally he forgot that things had ever been any other way. Marquis sat on his bed, eating, while the bells of eating rang across the bowed heads in the gray uniforms. He stared at the girl, then at the man, #. There were many opportunities to take one's own life here. That had perplexed him from the start -- why hasn't the girl, and this man, succeeded in dying? And all the others? They were comparatively new here, all these in this indoctrination ward. Why weren't they trying to leave in the only dignified way of escape left? No. #I tried to talk, he tried hard to remember things. Sometimes memory would break through and bring him pictures of other times, of happenings on Earth, of a girl he had known, of times when he was a child. But only the mildest and softest kind of recollections... Marquis said. "I don't think there's a prisoner here who doesn't want to escape, and death is the only way out for us. We know that." For an instant, No. #I stopped eating. A spoonful of food concentrate hung suspended between his mouth and the shelf. Then the food moved again to the urging of the bells. Invisible pain needles gouged Marquis' neck, and he ate again too, automatically, talking between tasteless bites. "A man's life at least is his own," Marquis said. "They can take everything else. But a man certainly has a right and a duty to take that life if by so doing he can retain his integrity as a human being. Suicide -- " No. #I bent forward. He groaned, mumbled "Don't -- don't -- " several times, then curled forward and lay on the floor knotted up into a twitching ball. The eating period was over. The lights went off. Bells sounded for relaxation. Then the sleep bells bedarkness. Marquis lay there in the dark and he was afraid. He had the poison. He had the will. But he couldn't be unique in that respect. What was the matter with the others? All right, the devil with them. Maybe they'd been broken too soon to act. He could act. Tomorrow, during the work period, he would take a grain of the poison. Put the capsule back in the tooth. The poison would work slowly, painlessly, paralyzing the nervous system,finally the heart. Sometime during the beginning of the next sleep period he would be dead. That would leave six or seven hours of darkness and isolation for him to remain dead, so they couldn't get to him in time to bring him back. He mentioned suicide to the girl during the next work period. She moaned a little and curled up like a foetus on the floor. After an hour, she got up and began inserting punch cards into the big machine again. She avoided Marquis. Marquis looked around, went into a corner with his back to the room, slipped the capsule out and let one of the tiny, almost invisible grains, melt on his tongue. He replaced the capsule and returned to the machine. A quiet but exciting triumph made the remainder of the work period more bearable. Back on his bed, he drifted into sleep, into what he knew was the final sleep. He was more fortunate than the others. Within an hour he would be dead. screaming. The sounds rose higher and higher. A human body, somewhere... pain unimaginable twisting up through clouds of belching steam... muscles quivering,nerves twitching... and somewhere a body floating and bobbing and crying... sheets of agony sweeping and returning in waves and the horror of unescapable pain expanding like a volcano of madness... Somewhere was someone alive who should be dead. And then in the dark, in absolute silence, Marquis moved a little. He realized, vaguely, that the screaming voice was his own. He stared into the steamy darkness and slowly, carefully, wet his lips. He moved. He felt his lips moving and the whisper sounding loud in the dark. I'm alive! He managed to struggle up out of the bed. He could scarcely remain erect. Every muscle in his body seemed to quiver. He longed to slip down into the darkness and escape into endless sleep. But he'd tried that. And he was still alive. He didn't know how much time had passed. He was sure of the poison's effects, but he wasn't dead. They had gotten to him in time. Sweat exploded from his body. He tried to remember more. Pain. He lay down again. He writhed and perspired on the bed as his tortured mind built grotesque fantasies out of fragments of broken memory. The routine of the unceasing bells went on.' Bells, leap up. Bells, calisthenics. Bells, eat. Bells, march. Bells, work. He tried to shut out the bells. He tried to talk to #I . #I covered up his ears and wouldn't listen. The girl wouldn't listen to him. There were other ways. And he kept the poison hidden in the capsule in his hollow tooth. He had been counting the steps covering the length of the hall, then the twenty steps to the left, then to the right to where the narrow corridor led again to the left where he had seen the air-lock. After the bells stopped ringing and the darkness was all around him, he got up. He counted off the steps. No guards, no alarms, nothing to stop him. They depended on the conditioners to take care of everything. This time he would do it. This time they wouldn't bring him back. No one else could even talk with him about it, even though he knew they all wanted to escape. Some part of them still wanted to, but they couldn't. So it was up to him. He stopped against the smooth, opaque, up-curving glasite dome. It had a brittle bright shine that reflected from the Moon's surface. It was night out there, with an odd metallic reflection of Earthlight against the naked crags. He hesitated. He could feel the intense and terrible cold, the airlessness out there fingering hungrily, reaching and whispering and waiting. He turned the wheel. The door opened. He entered the air-lock and shut the first door when the air-pressure was right. He turned the other wheel and the outer lock door swung outward. The out-rushing air spun him outward like a balloon into the awful airless cold and naked silence. His body sank down into the thick pumice dust that drifted up around him in a fine powdery blanket of concealment. He felt no pain. The cold airlessness dissolved around him in deepening darkening pleasantness. This time he was dead, thoroughly and finally and gloriously dead, even buried, and they couldn't find him. And even if they did finally find him, what good would it do them? Some transcendental part of him seemed to remain to observe and triumph over his victory. This time he was dead to stay. This time he knew at once that the twisting body in the steaming pain, the distorted face, the screams rising and rising were all Charles Marquis. Maybe a dream though, he thought. So much pain, so much screaming pain, is not real. In some fraction of a fraction of that interim between life and death, one could dream of so much because dreams are timeless. Yet he found himself anticipating, even through the shredded, dissociated, nameless kind of pain, a repetition of that other time. The awful bitterness of defeat. was dark, the same darkness. He was on the same bed. And the old familiar dark around and the familiar soundlessness that was now heavier than the most thunderous sound. Everything around him then seemed to whirl up and go down in a crash. He rolled over to the floor and lay there, his hot face cooled by the cold metal. As before, some undeterminable interim of time had passed. And he knew he was alive. His body was stiff. He ached. There was a drumming in his head, and then a ringing in his ears as he tried to get up, managed to drag himself to an unsteady stance against the wall. He felt now an icy surety of horror that carried him out to a pin-point in space. A terrible fatigue hit him. He fell back onto the bed. He lay there trying to figure out how he could be alive. He finally slept pushed into it by sheer and utter exhaustion. The bells called him awake. The bells started him off again. He tried to talk again to #. They avoided him, ail of them. But they weren't really alive any more. How long could he maintain some part of himself that he knew definitely was Charles Marquis? He began a ritual, a routine divorced from that to which all those being indoctrinated were subjected. It was a little private routine of his own. Dying, and then finding that he was not dead. He tried it many ways. He took more grains of the poison. But he was always alive again. "You -- #I ! Damn you -- talk to me! You know what's been happening to me?" The man nodded quickly over his little canisters of food-concentrate. "This indoctrination -- you, the girl -- you went crazy when T talked about dying -- what -- ?" The man yelled hoarsely. "Don't... don't say it! All this -- what you've been going through, can't you understand? All that is part of indoctrination. You're no different than the rest of us! We've all had it! All of us. All of us! Some more maybe than others. It had to end. You'll have to give in. Oh God, I wish you didn't. I wish you could win. But you're no smarter than the rest of us. You'll have to give inf" It was #I 's longest and most coherent speech. Maybe I can get somewhere with him, Marquis thought. I can find out something. But #I wouldn't say any more. Marquis kept on trying. No one, he knew, would ever realize what that meant -- to keep on trying to die when no could would let you, when you kept dying, and then kept waking up again, and you weren't dead. No one could ever understand the pain that went between the dying and the living. And even Marquis couldn't remember it afterward. He only knew how painful it had been. And knowing that made each attempt a little harder for Marquis. He tried the poison again. There was the big stamping machine that had crushed him beyond any semblance of a human being, but he had awakened, alive again, whole again. There was the time he grabbed the power cable and felt himself, in one blinding flash, conquer life in a burst of flame. He slashed his wrists at the beginning of a number of sleep periods. When he awakened, he was whole again. There wasn't even a scar. He suffered the pain of resisting the eating bells until he was so weak he couldn't respond, and he knew that he died that time too -- from pure starvation. But I can't stay dead!... You'll have to give in!" He had no idea now how long he had been here. But a guard appeared, a cold-faced man who guided Marquis back to the office where the fat, pink-faced little Manager waited for him behind the shelf suspended by silver wires from the ceiling. The Manager said. "You are the most remarkable prisoner we've ever had here. There probably will not be another like you here again." Marquis' features hung slack, his mouth slightly open, his lower lip drooping. He knew how he looked. He knew how near he was to cracking completely, becoming a senseless puppet of the bells. "Why is that?" he whispered. "You've tried repeatedly to -- you know what I mean of course. You have kept on attempting this impossible thing, attempted it more times than anyone else here ever has! Frankly, we didn't think any human psyche had the stuff to try it that many times -- to resist that long." The Manager made a curious lengthened survey of Marquis' face. "Soon you'll be thoroughly indoctrinated. You are. for all practical purposes, now. You'll work automatically then, to the bells, and think very little about it at all, except in a few stereotyped ways to keep your brain and nervous system active enough to carry out simple specialized work duties. Or while the New System lasts. And I imagine that will be forever." "Forever..." "Yes, yes. You're immortal now," the Manager smiled. "Surely, after all this harrowing indoctrination experience, you realize that!" Immortal. I might have guessed I might laugh now , but I can't. We who pretend to live in a hell that is worse than death, and you, the Managerials who live in paradise. We two are immortal. "That is. you're immortal as long as we desire you to be. You'll never grow any older than we want you to, never so senile as to threaten efficiency. That was what you were so interested in finding out on Earth, wasn't it? The mystery behind the Managerials? Why they never seemed to grow old. Why we have all the advantage, no senility, no weakening, the advantage of accumulative experience without the necessity of re-learning?" "Yes," Marquis whispered. The Manager leaned back. He lit a paraette and let the soothing nerve-tonic seep into his lungs. He explained. "Every one of you political prisoners we bring here want, above everything else, to die. It was a challenge to our experimental social order here. We have no objection learned that even the will to die can be conditioned out of the most determined rebel. As it has been conditioned out of you. You try to die enough times, and you do die, but the pain of resurrection is so great that finally it is impossible not only to kill yourself, but even to think of attempting it. Marquis couldn't say anything. The memory called up by the mention of self-destruction rasped along his spine like chalk on a blackboard. He could feel the total-recall of sensation, the threatening bursts of pain. "No... he whispered over and over. "No -- please -- no -- " The Manager said. "We won't mention it anymore. You'll never be able to try any overt act of selfdestruction again... The bright light from the ceiling lanced like splinters into the tender flesh of Marquis' eyeballs, danced about the base of his brain in reddened choleric circles. His face had drawn back so that his cheekbones stood out and his nose was beaklike. His irises became; a bright painful blue in the reddened ovals of his eyes. The Manager yawned as he finished explaining. "Each prisoner entering here has an identification punch-plate made of his unique electro-magnetic vibratory field. That's the secret of our immortality and yours. Like all matter, human difference is in the electro-magnetic, vibratory rates. We have these punch-plates on file for every prisoner. We have one of you. Any dead human body we merely put in a tank which dissolves it into separate cells, a mass of stasis with potentiality to be reformed into any type of human being of which we have an identification punch-plate, you see? This tank of dissociated cells is surrounded by an electro-magnetic field induced from a machine by one of the identification punchplates. That particular human being lives again, the body, its mind, its life pattern identical to that from which the original punch-plate was made. Each time you have died, we reduced your body, regardless of its condition, to dissociated cells in the tank. The identification punchplate was put in the machine. Your unique electro-magnetic field reformed the cells into you. It could only be you, as you are now. From those cells we can resurrect any one of whom we have an identification plate. "That is all. No. #. Now that you're indoctrinated, you will work from now on in the food-mart, because of your experience. F OR AN undeterminable length of time, he followed the routines of the bells. In the big food-mart, among the hydroponic beds, and the canning machines; among the food-grinders and little belts that dropped cans of food-concentrate into racks and sent them off into the walls. He managed to talk more and more coherently with No. #. He stopped referring to suicide, but if anyone had the idea that Marquis had given up the idea of dying, they were wrong. Marquis was stubborn. Somewhere in him the flame still burned. He wouldn't let it go out. The bells couldn't put it out. The throbbing machines couldn't put it out. And now he had at last figured out a way to beat the game. During an eating period, Marquis said to #. "You want to die. Wait a minute -- I'm talking about something we can both talk and think about. A murder agreement. You understand? We haven't been other. It's only an overt act of selfdes -- all right, we don't think about that. But we can plan a way to kill each other." #I looked up. He stopped eating momentarily. He was interested. "What's the use though?" Pain shadowed his face. "We only go through it -- come back again -- " "I have a plan. The way I have it worked out, they'll never bring either one of us back." That wasn't exactly true. One of them would have to come back. Marquis hoped that #I wouldn't catch on to the fact that he would have to be resurrected, but that Marquis never would. He hoped that #'s mind was too foggy and dull to see through the complex plan. And that was the way it worked. Marquis explained. #I listened and smiled. It was the first time Marquis had ever seen a prisoner smile. He left what remained of the capsule of poison where #I could get it. During one of the next four eating periods, #I was to slip the poison into Marquis' food can. Marquis wouldn't know what meal, or what can. He had to eat. The bells had conditioned him that much. And not to eat would be an overt act of self-destruction. He wasn't conditioned not to accept death administered by another. And then, after an eating period, #I whispered to him. "You're poisoned. It was in one of the cans you just ate." "Great!" almost shouted Marquis. "All right. Now I'll die by the end of the next work period. That gives us this sleep period and all the next work period. During that time I'll dispose of you as I've said." #I went to his bed and the bells rang and the dark came and both of them slept. ditioners enough to follow Marquis past his regular work room into the food-mart. As planned, #I marched on and stood in the steaming shadows behind the hydroponic beds. Marquis worked for a while at the canning machines, at the big grinding vats. Then he went over to #I and said. "Turn around now." #I smiled. He turned around. "Good luck," he said. "Good luck -- to you!" Marquis hit #I across the back of the neck with an alloy bar and killed him instantly. He changed clothes with the dead man. He put his own clothes in a refuse incinerator. Quickly, he dragged the body over and tossed it into one of the food-grinding vats. His head bobbed up above the gray swirling liquid once, then the body disappeared entirely, was ground finely and mixed with the other foodstuff. Within eight hours the cells of #I would be distributed minutely throughout the contents of thousands of cans of food-concentrate. Within that time much of it would have been consumed by the inmates and Managers. At the end of that work period. Marquis returned to his cell. He went past his own bed and stopped in front of #'s bed. The sleep bells sounded and the dark came again. This would be the final dark. Marquis knew. This time he had beat the game. The delayed-action poison would kill him. He had on # l's clothes with his identification number. He was on #'s bed. He would die -- as #. The guards would finally check on the missing man in the food-mart. But they would never find him. They would find #I dead, a suicide. And they would put the body labeled #I in the tank, dissolve it into dissociated cells and they would subject those cells to the electro-magnetic field of #. And they would resurrect -- #. Not only have I managed to die, Marquis thought, but I've managed the ultimate suicide. There won't even be a body, no sign anywhere that I have ever been at all. Even my cells will have been resurrected as someone else. As a number #. "And that's the way it was," No. #I would tell new prisoners coming in. Sometimes they listened to him and seemed interested, but the interest always died during indoctrination. But No. #'s interest in the story never died. He knew that now he could never let himself die as a human being either, that he could never let himself become completely controlled by the bells. He'd been nearly dead as an individual, but No. # had saved him from that dead-alive anonymity. He could keep alive, and maintain hope now by remembering what # had done. He clung to that memory. As long as he retained that memory of hope -- of triumph -- at least some part of him would keep burning, as something had kept on burning within the heart of #. So every night before the sleep bells sounded, he would go over the whole thing in minute detail, remembering #'s every word and gesture, the details of his appearance. He told the plan over to himself every night, and told everyone about it who came in to the indoctrination ward. Swimming up through the pain of resurrection, he had been a little mad at # at first, and then he had realized that at least the plan had enabled one man to beat the game. "He will always be alive to me. Maybe, in a way, he's part of me. Nobody knows. But his memory will live. He succeeded in a kind of ultimate dying -- no trace of him anywhere. But the memory of him and what he did will be alive when the New System and the Managers are dead. That spirit will assure the Underground of victory -- someday. And meanwhile, I'll keep # alive. "He even knew the psychology of these Managers and their System. That they can't afford to make an error. He knew they'd still have that identification punch-plate of him. That they would have one more plate than they had prisoners. But he anticipated what they would do there too. To admit there was one more identification plate than there w'ere prisoners would be to admit a gross error. Of course they could dissolve one of the other prisoners and use #'s plate and (Continued on page # ) Women of earth had finally attained their objective: a new world all their own and -- without men! But was it?. Thy Name Is By Kenneth O'Hara Illustrated by Zimmerman the hypo and left the ship. Bowcare -- he would be changed by ren lay in absolute darkness wonthen. He would start turning any dering when the change would minute now, becoming something start. There would be pain, the else; he didn't know exactly what, Doctor had said. "Then you won't but that wouldn't matter. After it be aware of anything -- anything at was over, he wouldn't remember beall." cause the higher brain centers, the That was a devil of a thing, Bowcortex, the analytical mind, would ren thought, not to be aware of the be completely cut off, short-cirgreatest adventure any man ever cuited, during the alteration, had. He, Eddie Bowren, the first The cubicle was close, hot, to escape the Earth into space, the sound-proofed, like a tomb. "You first man to Mars! will probably make loud unpleasant He was on his back in a small noises," the Doctor had said, "but square steel cubicle, a secretly conno one will hear you." Don't worry structed room in the wall of the about anything until you get to cargo bin of the big spaceship Mars." cradled at the New Chicago Port. That was right, Bowren thought. He was not without fear. But beMy only problem is to observe, compute, and get back into this dungeon without being observed, and back to Earth. The idea was to keep it from the women. The women wouldn't go for this at all. They would object. The women would be able to bring into effect several laws dealing with spaceflight, among them the one against stowaways, and especially that particular one about aberrated males sneaking into space and committing suicide. A lot of men had tried it, in the beginning. Some of them had managed it, but they had all died. For a long time, the men's egos hadn't been able to admit that the male organism was incapable of standing the rigors of acceleration. Women had had laws passed, and if the women caught him doing this, the punishment would be extreme for him, personally, and a lot more extreme for Earth civilization in general. If you could call it a civilization. You could call it anything, Bowren groaned -- but it didn't make sense. A world without women. A birthrate reduced to zero. A trickle of sweat slid past Bowren's eyes, loosening a nervous flush along his back that prickled painfully. His throat was tense and his heart pounded loud in the hot dark. A sharp pain ran up his body and exploded in his head. He tried to swallow, but something gagged in his throat. He was afraid of retching. He lay with his mouth open, spittle dribbling over his lips. The pain returned, hammered at his entrails. He fought the pain numbly, like a man grappling in the dark. The wave subsided and he lay there gasping, his fists clenched. "The pain will come in increasingly powerful waves," the Doctor had said. "At a certain point, it will be so great, the analytical mind will completely short-circuit. It will stay that way enroute to Mars, and meanwhile your body will rapidly change into that of a beast. Don't worry about it. A catalytic agent will return you to normal before you reach the planet. If you live, you'll be human again." A male human couldn't stand the acceleration. But a woman could. Animals could. They had experimented on human males and animals in the giant centrifuges, and learned what to do. Animals could stand # "G" consistently, or centrifugal forces as high as I # revolutions a minute. About # "G" was the limit of female endurance. Less for men. It had never been thoroughly determined why women had been able to stand higher acceleration. But human females had the same physical advantages over men as female rats, rabbits, and cats over males of the same species. A woman's cellular structure was different; her center of gravity was different, the brain waves given off during acceleration were different. It was suspected that the autonomic nervous system in women could function more freely to protect the body during emergency situations. The only certainty about it was that no man had ever been able to get into space and live. But animals could so they had worked on it and finally they decided to change a man into an animal, at least temporarily. Geneti'-#  I i .nul biochemists and other spe i.i lots had been able to do a lot with hormones and hard radiation treatment. Especially with hormones. You could shoot a man full of some fluid or another, and do almost anything to his organism. You could induce atavism, regression to some lower form of animal life -- a highly speeded up regression. When you did that, naturally the analytical mind, the higher thought centers of a more recent evolutionary development, blanked out and the 'primal mind took oyer. The body changed too, considerably. Bowren was changing. Then the pain came and he couldn't think. He felt his mind cringing -- giving way before the onslaught of the pain. Dimly he could feel the agony in his limbs, the throbbing of his heart, the fading power of reason. He retched, languished through flaccid minutes. There were recurring spasms of shivering as he rolled his thickened tongue in the arid cavity of his mouth. And then, somewhere, a spark exploded, and drowned him in a pool of streaming flame. slowly -- much as it had gone -- in waves of pain. It took a long time. Elements of reason and unreason fusing through distorted nightmares until he was lying there able to remember, able to wonder, able to think. Inside the tiny compartment were supplies. A hypo, glucose, a durolene suit neatly folded which he put on. He gave himself a needle, swallowed the tablets, and waited until energy and a sense of well-being gave him some degree of confidence. It was very still. The ship would be cradled on Mars now. He lay there, relaxing, preparing for the real challenge. He thought of how well the Earth Investigation Committee had planned the whole thing. The last desperate attempt of man to get into space -- to Mars -- a woman's world. At least it was supposed to be. Whatever it was, it wasn't a man's world. The women didn't want Earth anymore. They had something better. But what? There were other questions, and Bowren' s job was to find the answers, remain unobserved and get back aboard this ship. He would then hypo himself again, and when the ship blasted off to Earth, he would go through the same transition all over again. He put on the soft-soled shoes as well as the durolene suit and crawled through the small panel into the big cargo bin. It was empty. Only a dim yellow light shone on the big cargo vices along the curved walls. He climbed the ladders slowly, cautiously, through a gnawing silence of suspense, over the mesh grid flooring along the tubular corridors. He wondered what he would find. Could the women have been influenced by some alien life form on Mars? That could explain the fact that women had divorced themselves completely from all men, from the Earth. Something had to explain it. There was one other possibility. That the women had found human life on Mars. That was a very remote possibility based on the idea that perhaps the Solar system had been settled by human beings from outer space, and had landed on two worlds at least. Bowren remembered how his wife, Lora, had told him he was an idiot and a bore, and had walked out on him five years before; taken her three months course in astrogation, and left Earth. He hadn't heard of her or from her since. It was the same with every other man, married or not. The male ego had taken a beating for so long that the results had been psychologically devastating. The ship seemed to be empty of any human being but Bowren. He reached the outer lock door. It was ajar. Thin cold air came through and sent a chill down his arms, tingling in his fingers. He looked out. It was night on Mars, a strange redtinted night, the double moons throwing streaming color over the land. Across the field, he saw the glowing Luciferin-like light of a small city. Soaring spherical lines. Nothing masculine about its architecture. Bowren shivered. He climbed down the ladder, the air biting into his lungs. The silence down there on the ground under the ship was intense. He stood there a minute. The first man on Mars. Man's oldest dream realized. But the great thrill he had anticipated was dulled somewhat by fear. A fear of what the women had become, and of what might have influenced their becoming. He took out a small neurogun and walked. He reached what seemed to be a huge park that seemed to surround the city. It grew warmer and a soft wind whispered through the strange widespreading trees and bushes and exotic blossoms. The scent of blossoms drifted on the wind and the sound of running water, of murmuring voices. The park thickened as Bowren edged into its dark, languid depth. It seemed as though the city radiated heat. He dodged suddenly behind a tree, knelt down. For an instant he was embarrassed seeing the two shadowy figures in each others arms on a bench in the moonlight. This emotion gave way to shock, anger, fear. One of them was a -- man! Bowren felt the perspiration start from his face. An intense jealousy surrendered to a start of fearful curiosity. Where had the man come from? Bowren's long frustration, the memory of his wife, the humiliation, the rejection, the abandonment, the impotent rage of loneliness -- it all came back to him. He controlled his emotion somehow. At least he didn't manifest it physically. He crept closer, listened. I I "This was such a sweet idea," the woman was whispering. "Bringing me here to the park tonight. That's why I love you so, Marvin. You're always so romantic." "How else could I think of you, darling," the man said. His voice was cultured, precise, soft, thick with emotion. "You're so sweet, Marvin." "You're so beautiful, darling. I think of you every minute that you're away on one of those space flights. You women are so wonderful to have conquered space, but sometimes I hate the ships that take you away from me." The woman sighed. "But it's so nice to come back to you. So exciting, so comfortable." The kiss was long and deep. Bowren backed away, almost smashing into the tree. He touched his forehead. He was sweating heavily. His beard dripped moisture, There was a hollow panicky feeling in his stomach. Now he was confused as well as afraid. Another couple was sitting next to a fountain, and a bubbling brook ran past them, singing into the darkness. Bowren crouched behind a bush and listened. It might have been the man he had just left, still talking. The voice was slightly difrent, but the dialogue sounded very much the same. "It must be wonderful to be a woman, dear, and voyage between the stars. But as I say, I'm glad to stay here and tend the home and mind the children, glad to be here, my arms open to you when you come back." "It's so wonderful to know that you care so much. I'm so glad you never let me forget that you love me." "I love you, every minute of every day. Just think -- two more months and one week and we will have been married ten years." "It's so lovely," she said. "It seems like ten days. Like those first over and over again." "I'll always love you. darling." "Always?" "Always." The man got up, lifted the woman in his arms, held her high. "Darling, let's go for a night ride across the desert." "Oh, you darling. You always think of these little adventures." "All life with you is an adventure." "But what about little Jimmie and Janice?" "I've arranged a sitter for them." "But darling -- you mean you -- Oh, you're so wonderful. You think of everything. So practical, yet so romantic... so -- " He kissed her and ran away, holding her high in the air, and her laughter bubbled back to where Bowren crouched behind the bush. He kept on crouching there, staring numbly at the vacancy the fleeing couple had left in the shadows. "Good God," he whispered. "After ten years -- " He shook his head and slowly licked his lips. He'd been married five years. It hadn't been like this. He'd never heard of any marriage maintaining such a crazy high romantic level of manic neuroticism as this for very long. Of course the women had always expected it to. But the men -- And anyway -- where did the men come from? ing lane between exotic blossoms, through air saturated with the damp scent of night-blooming flowers. He walked cautiously enough, but in a kind of daze, his mind spinning. The appearance of those men remained in his mind. When he closed his eyes for a moment, he could see them. Perfectly groomed, impeccably dressed, smiling, vital, bronzeskinned, delicate, yet strong features; the kind of male w'ho might be considered, Bowren thought, to be able to assert just the right degree of aggressiveness without being indelicate. Why, he thought, they've found perfect men, their type of men. He dodged behind a tree. Here it was again. Same play, same scene practically, only the players were two other people. A couple standing arm in arm beside a big pool full of weird darting fish and throwing upward a subdued bluish light. Music drifted along the warm currents of air. The couple were silhouetted by the indirect light. The pose is perfect, he thought. The setting is perfect. "You're so wonderful, darling," the man was saying, "and I get so lonely without you. I always see your face, hear your voice, no matter how long you're away." "Do you? Do you?" "Always. Your hair so red, so dark it seems black in certain lights. Your eyes so slanted, so dark a green they seem black usually too. Your nose so straight, the nostrils flaring slightly, the least bit too much sometimes. Your mouth so red and full. Your skin so smooth and dark. And you're ageless, darling. Being married to you five years, it's one exciting adventure." "I love you so," she said. "You're everything any woman could want in a husband. Simply everything, yet you're so modest with it all. I still remember how it used to be. Back there... with the other men I mean?" "You should forget about them, my dear." "I'm forgetting, slowly though. It may take a long time to forget completely. Oh, he was such an unpleasant person, so uninteresting after a while. So inconsiderate, so self-rentcred. He wasn't romantic at all. He never said he loved me, and when he kissed me it was mere routine. lie never thought about anything but his work, and when he did come home at night, he would yell at me about not having ordered the right dinner from the cafelator. He didn't care whether he used hair remover on his face in the mornings or not. He was surly and sullen and selfish. But I could have forgiven everything else if he had only told me every day that he loved me, that he could never love anyone else. The things that you do and say, darling." "I love you," he said. "I love you, I love you. But please, let's not talk about him anymore. It simply horrifies me!" Bowren felt the sudden sickening throbbing of his stomach. The description. Now the slight familiarity of voice. And then he heard the man say, murmuring. "Lois... darling Lois..." Bowren shivered. His jowls darkened, his mouth pressed thin by the powerful clamp of his jaws. His body seemed to loosen all over and he fell into a crouch. Tiredness and torn nerves and long-suppressed emotion throbbed in him, and all the rage and suppression and frustration came back in a wave. He yelled. It was more of a sound, a harsh prolonged animal roar of pain and rage and humiliation. "Lois..." He ran forward. She gasped, sank away as Bowren hit the man, hard. The man sighed and gyrated swinging his arms, teetering and flipped backward into the pool among the lights and the weird fish. A spray of cold water struck Bowren, sobering him a little, sobered his burst of mindless passion enough that he could hear the shouts of alarm ringing through the trees. He turned desperately. Lois cringed. He scarcely remembered her now, he realized. She was different. He had forgotten everything except an image that had changed with longing. She hadn't been too impressive anyway, maybe, or maybe she had. It didn't matter now. He tried to run, tried to get away. He heard Lois' voice, high and shrill. Figures closed in around him. He fought, desperately. He put a few temporarily out of the way with the neurogun, but there were always more. Men, men everywhere. Hundreds of men where there should be no men at all. Wellgroomed, strong, bronzed, eversmiling men. It gave him intense pleasure to crack off a few of the smiles. To hurl the gun, smash with his fists. Then the men were swarming all over him, the clean faces, the smiling fragrant men, and he went down under the weight of men. He tried to move. A blow fell hard and his head smashed against the rocks. He tried to rise up, and other blows beat him down and he was glad about the darkness, not because it relieved the pain, but because it curtained off the faces of men. though he was being carried through a dim half-consciousness, able to think, too tired to move or open his eyes. He remembered how the men of Earth had rationalized a long time, making a joke out of it. Laughing when they hadn't wanted to laugh, but to hate. It had never been humorous. It had been a war between the sexes, and the women had finally won, destroying the men psychologically, the race physically. Somehow they had managed to go on with a culture of their own. The war between the sexes had never really been a joke. It had been deadly serious, right from the beginning of the militant feminist movements, long before the last big war. There' had always been basic psychological and physiological differences. But woman had refused to admit this, and had tried to be the "equal" if not the better of men. For so long woman had made it strictly competitive, and in her subconscious mind she had regarded men as wonderful creatures, capable of practically anything, and that woman could do nothing better than to emulate them in every possible way. There was no such thing as a woman's role unless it had been the same as a man's. That had gone on a long time. And it hadn't been a joke at all. How ironic it was, there at the last! All of man's work through the ages had been aimed at the stars. And the women had assumed the final phase of conquest! For a long time women had been revolting against the masculine symbols, the levers, pistons, bombs, torpedoes and hammers, all manifestations of man's whole activity of overt, aggressive power. The big H-bombs of the last great war had seemed to be man's final symbol, destructive. And after that, the spaceships, puncturing space, roaring outward, the ultimate masculine symbol of which men had dreamed for so long, and which women had envied. And then only the women could stand the acceleration. It was a physiological fact. Nothing could change it. Nothing but what they had done to Bowren. All of man's evolutionary struggle, and the women had assumed the climax, assumed all the past wrapped up in the end, usurped the effect, and thereby psychologically assuming also all the thousands of years of causation. For being held down, being made neurotic by frustration and the impossibility of being the "equal" of men, because they were fundamentally psychologically and physiologically different, women had taken to space with an age-old vengeance. Personal ego salvation. But they hadn't stopped there. What had they done? What about the men? A man for every woman, yet no men from Earth. That much Bowren knew. Native Martians? What? He had been transported somewhere in a car of some kind. He didn't bother to be interested. He couldn't get away. He was held fast. He refused to open his eyes because he didn't want to see the men who held him, the men who had replaced him and every other man on Earth. The men who were destroying the civilization of Earth. The gimmicks whereby the women had rejected Earth and left it to wither and die in neglect and bitter, bitter wonderment. He was tired, very tired. The movement of the car lulled him, and he drifted into sleep. He opened his eyes and slowly looked around. Pretty pastel ceiling. A big room, beautiful and softly furnished, with a marked absence of metal, of shiny chrome, of harshness or brittle angles. It was something of an office, too, with a desk that was not at all business-like, but still a desk. A warm glow suffused the room, and the air was pleasantly scented with natural smelling perfumes. A woman stood in the middle of the room studying him with detached interest. She was beautiful, but in a hard, mature, withdrawn way. She was dark, her eyes large, liquid black and dominating her rather small sharply-sculptured face. Her mouth was large, deeply red. She had a strong mouth. He looked at her a while. He felt only a deep, bitter resentment. He felt good though, physically. He had probably been given something, an injection. He sat up. Then he got to his feet. She kept on studying him. "A change of clothes, dry detergent, and hair remover for your face are in there, through that door," she said. He said: "Right now I'd rather talk." "But don't you want to take off that awful -- beard?" "The devil with it! Is that so important? It's natural isn't it for a man to have hair on his face? I like hair on my face." She opened her mouth a little and stepped back a few steps. "And anyway, what could be less important right now than the way I look?" "I'm -- I'm Gloria Munsel," she said hesitantly. "I'm President of the City here. And what is your name, please?" "Eddie Bowren. What are you going to do with me?" She shrugged. "You act like a mad man. I'd almost forgotten what you men of Earth were like. I was pretty young then. Well, frankly, I don't know what we're going to do with you. No precedent for the situation. No laws concerning it. It'll be up to the Council." "It won't be pleasant for me," he said, "I can be safe in assuming that." She shrugged again and crossed her arms. He managed to control his emotions somehow as he looked at the smooth lines of her body under the long clinging gown. She was so damn beautiful! A high proud body in a smooth pink gown, dark hair streaming back and shiny and soft. a long time, for him, for all the others. "Let me out of here!" he yelled harshly. "Put me in a room by myself!" She moved closer to him and looked into his face. The fragrance of her hair, the warmth of her reached out to him. Somehow, he never knew how, he managed to grin. He felt the sweat running down his dirty, bearded, battered face. His suit was tom and dirty. He could smell himself, the stale sweat, the filth. He could feel his hair, shaggy and long, down his neck, over his ears. Her lips were slightly parted, and wet, and she had a funny dark look in her eyes, he thought. She turned quickly as the door opened, and a man came in. He was only slightly taller than Gloria and he nodded, smiled brightly, bowed a little, moved forward. He carried a big bouquet of flowers and presented them to her. She took the flowers, smiled, thanked him, and put them on the table. The man said. "So sorry, darling, to intrude. But I felt I had to see you for a few minutes. I left the children with John, and dashed right up here. I thought we might have lunch together." "You're so thoughtful, dear," she said. The man turned a distasteful look upon Bowren. He said. "My dear, what is this?" "A man," she said, and then added. "From Earth." "What? Good grief, you mean they've found a way -- ?" "I don't know. You'd better go back home and tend the yard today, Dale. I'll tell you all about it when I come home this evening. All right?" "Well I -- oh, oh yes, of course, if you say so, darling." "Thank you, dear." She kissed him and he bowed out. She turned and walked back toward Bowren. "Tell me," she said. "How did you get here alive?" Why not tell her? He was helpless here. They'd find out anyway, as soon as they got back to Earth on the cargo run. And even if they didn't find out, that wouldn't matter either. They would be on guard from now on. No man would do again what Bowren had done. The only chance would be to build secret spaceships of their own and everytime one blasted, have every member of the crew go through what Bowren had. It couldn't last. Too much injury and shock. As he talked he studied the office, and he thought of other things. An office that was like a big beautiful living room. A thoroughly feminine office. Nor was it the type of office a woman would fix for a man. It was a woman's office. Everything, the whole culture here, was feminine. When he had finished she said. "Interesting. It must have been a very unpleasant experience for you." He grinned. "I suffered. But even though I've failed, it's worth all the suffering, if you'll tell me -- where did all the ah -- men come from?" She told him. It was, to say the least, startling, and then upon reflection, he realized how simple it all was. No aliens. No native Martians. A very simple and thoroughly logical solution, and in a way, typically feminine. Hormone treatment and genetic manipulation, plus a thorough reconditioning while the treatment was taking place. And the women had simply turned approximately half of their number into men! She paused, then went on. "Ii was the only way we could see it, Mr. Bowren. Earth was a man's world, and we could never have belonged in it, not the way we wanted to. Men wouldn't stand it anyway, down there, having us going into space, usurping their masculine role. And anyway -- you men of Earth had become so utterly unsatisfactory as companions, lovers, and husbands, that it was obvious nothing could ever be done about it. Not unless we set up our own culture, our own civilization, our way." "But meanwhile we die down there," Bowren said. "Logic is nice. But mass murder, and the death of a whole world civilization seems pretty cold from where I'm standing. It's pathological, but it's too late to think about that. It's done now." "But we're happy here," she said. "For the first time in a long, long time, we women feel like ourselves. We feel truly independent. The men around us are the kind of men we want, instead of us being what they want us to be, or even worse, the men being what we want them to be but resenting it and making life unbearable for both. All through the process of being changed into men, our women undergo such a thorough conditioning that they can never be anything else but model men in every sense. Their attitude as women with which they started treatment helped. They knew what they wanted in men, and they became what we wanted them to be, as men." "Very logical," Bowren said. "It smells to heaven it's so logical." It was purely impulse, what he did then. He couldn't help it. It wasn't logical either. It was emotional and he did it because he had to do it and because he didn't see any reason why he shouldn't. He put his arm out suddenly, hooked her slim waist, and pulled her to him. Her face flushed and his eyes were very wide and dark as she looked up at him. "Listen," he said. "The whole thing's insane. The lot of you are mad, and though I can't help it, I hate to see it happen this way. What kind of men are these? These smiling robots, these goons who are nothing else but reflections in a woman's mirror? Who'd want to be a man like that. Who would really want a man like that? And who would want a woman who was just what a man wanted her to be? Where's the fire? Where's the individuality? Where's the conflict, the fighting and snarling and raging that makes living. All this is apathy, this is death! You don't grow by being agreeable, but by conflict." "What are you trying to sell now?" she whispered. He laughed. It was wild sounding to him, not very humorous really, but still it was laughter. "Selling nothing, buying nothing." He pulled her closer and kissed her. Her lips parted slightly and he could feel the warmth of her and the quick drawing of breath. Then she pushed him away. She raised her hand and brushed it over his face. She shook her head slowly. "It feels rather interesting," she said, "your face. I've never felt a man's face before, that wasn't smooth, the way it should be." He laughed again, more softly this time. "Why reform your men? You women always wanted to do that." "We don't reform men here," she said. "We start them out right -- from the beginning." She backed away from him. She raised her hand to her face and her fingers touched her lips. Wrinkles appeared between her eyes and she shook her head again. Not at him, but at something, a thought perhaps, he couldn't tell. Finally she said. "That was an inexcusable, boorish thing to do. A typical thoughtless egomanical Earth-male action if there ever was one. Our men are all perfect here, and in comparison to them, you're a pretty miserable speciman. I'm glad you showed up here. It's given me, and other women, a good chance for comparison. It makes our men seem so much better even than they were to us before." He didn't say anything. "Our men are perfect! Perfect you understand? What are you smiling about? Their character is good. They're excellent conversationalists, well informed, always attentive, moderate, sympathetic, interested in life, and always interested in us." "And I suppose they are also -- human?" "This is nonsense," she said, her voice rising slightly. "You will take that door out please. The Council will decide what's to be done with you." He nodded, turned, and went through the door. There were two men there waiting for him. They were both blond, with, light blue eyes, just medium height,, perfectly constructed physically, perfectly groomed, impeccably dressed. They smiled at him. Their teeth had been brushed every morning. One of them wrinkled his nose, obviously as a reaction to Bowren. The other started to reach, seemed reluctant to touch him. "Then don't touch me, brother," Bowren said. "Put a hand on me, and I'll slug you." The man reached away, and it gave Bowren an ecstatic sensation to send his fist against the man's jaw. It made a cracking sound and the man's head flopped back as his knees crumbled and he swung around and stretched out flat on his face on the long tubular corridor. "Always remember your etiquette," Bowren said. "Keep your hands off people. It isn't polite." The other man grunted something, still managing to smile, as he rushed at Bowren. Bowren sidestepped, hooked the man's neck in his arm and ran him across the hall and smashed his head into the wall. He turned, opened the door into Munsel's office, dragged both of them in and shut the door again. He walked down the corridor several hundred feet before a woman appeared, in some kind of uniform, and said. "Will you come this way please?" He said he would. ably furnished. Food came through a panel in the wall whenever he pressed the right button. A telescreen furnished entertainment when he pushed another button. Tasty mixed drinks responded to other buttons. He never bothered to take advantage of the facilities offered for removing his beard, bathing, or changing clothes. Whatever fate was going to befall him, he would just as soon meet it as the only man on Mars who looked the part -- according to Bowren's standards, at least -- at least by comparison. He thought of trying to escape. If he could get away from the city and into the Martian hills, he could die out there with some dignity. It was a good idea, but he knew it was impossible. At least so far, it was impossible. Maybe something would come up. An opportunity and he would take it. That was the only thing left for him. He was in there for what seemed a long time. It was still, the light remaining always the same. He slept a number of times and ate several times. He did a lot of thinking too. He thought about the men on Earth and finally he decided it didn't matter much. They had brought it on themselves in a way, and if there was anything like cause and effect operating on such a scale, they deserved no sympathy. Man had expressed his aggressive male ego until he evolved the H-bombs and worse, and by then the whole world was neurotic with fear, including the women. Women had always looked into the mirror of the future (or lack of it), of the race, and the more she had looked, the more the insecurity. The atomic wars had created a kind of final feeling of insecurity as far as men were concerned, forced them to become completely psychologically and physiologically self-sufficient. They had converted part of their own kind into men, their own kind of men, and theoretically there wouldn't be any more insecurity brought on by the kind of male psychology that had turned the Earth around for so long. All right, drop it right there then, he thought. It's about all over. It's all over but the requiem. Sometime later he was in a mood where he didn't mind it when an impersonal face appeared on the screen and looked right at him and told him the Council's verdict. It was a woman, and her voice was cold, very cold. "Mr. Eddie Bowren. The Council has reached a verdict regarding what is to be done with you. You are to be exterminated. It is painless and we will make it as pleasant as possible." "Thanks," Bowren said. A woman's world was so polite, so mannerly, so remembering of all the social amenities. It yvould be so difficult after a while to know when anyone was speaking, or doing anything real. "Thanks," he said again. "I will do all in my power to make my extermination a matter of mutual pleasure." By now he was pretty drunk, had been drunk for some time. He raised his glass. "Here's to a real happy time of it, baby." The screen faded. He sat there brooding, and he was still brooding when the door unlocked and opened softly. He sat there and looked at Gloria Munsel for a while, wondering why she was here. Why she would look so provocative, so enchanting, so devastating, whatever other words you cared to dream up. She moved toward him with a slight swaying motion that further disturbed him. He felt her long white fingers rubbing over the stiff wiry beard of his face. "I dreamed about the way that beard felt last night," she said. "Silly of me wasn't it? I heard of the way you smell, of the way you yelled at me, so impolitely. Why did I dream of it, I said this morning, so now I'm here to find out why." "Get out and let me alone," Bowren yelled. "I'm going to be exterminated. So let me alone to my own company." "Yes, I heard about that verdict," she said. She looked away from him. "I don't know why they made that choice. Well, I do in a way, they're afraid of you, your influence. It would be very disruptive socially. Several of our men -- " "It doesn't matter why," Bowren said. "What matters is that it will be as pleasant as possible. If you're going to kill a man, be nice about it." She stared down at him. Chills rippled down his back as her warm soft fingers continued to stroke his bearded chin and throat. He got up. It was too uncomfortable and it was torture. He said, "Get out of here. Maybe I'm not a conformist, but I'm damn human!" She backed away. "But -- but what do you mean?" He got up and put the flat of his hands cupping her shoulder blades. Her eyes stared wildly, and her lips were wet and she was breathing heavily. He could see the vein pulsing faster in her slim throat. She had an exciting body. He saw it then, the new slow smile that crept across her face. His left hand squirmed at the thick piled hair on her shoulders and he tugged and her face tilted further and he looked at the parted pouting lips. The palm of his right hand brushed her jaw and his fingers took her cheeks and brought her face over and he spread his mouth hard over her mouth. Her lips begged. Hammers started banging away in his stomach. Music from the screen was playing a crescendo into his pulse. They swayed together to the music, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She stepped back, dropped her arms limply at her sides. There was the clean sweet odor of her hair. "I'd better go now," she whispered. "Before I do something that would result in my not being President anymore." he thought. The devil with her and the rest. A man could lose everything, all the women, not one, but all of them. He could live alone, a thousand miles from nowhere, at the North Pole like Amundsen, and it didn't matter. He could be killed pleasantly or unpleasantly, that didn't matter either. All that mattered was that he maintain some dignity, as a man. He stood there, not saying anything. He managed to grin. Finally he said, "Goodbye, and may your husband never say a harsh word to you or do anything objectionable as long as you both shall live, and may he love you every hour of every day, and may he drop dead." She moved in again, put her arms around him. There were tears in her eyes. She placed her cheek on his shoulder. "I love you," she whispered. "I know that now." He felt a little helpless. Tears, what could you do with a woman's tears? She sobbed softly, talking brokenly. Maybe not to him, but to someone, somewhere. A memory, a shadow out of a long time back... "Maybe it's... it's all a mistake after all... maybe it is.' I've never been too sure, not for a while now. And then you -- the way you talked and looked -- the excitement. I don't know why. But the touch of your beard -- your voice. I don't know what happened. We've carried it to extremes, extremes, Eddie. It was always this way with us -- once we were sure of our man, and even before, when he was blinded by new love, we tried to make him over, closer to our idea of what was right. But now I know something... those faults and imperfections, most of them were men's, the real mens' chief attractions. Individuality, that's the thing, Eddie, that's it after all. And it's imperfections too, maybe more than anything else. Imperfections... Oh, Eddie, you're close, much closer to human nature, to real vitality, through your imperfections. Not imperfections. Eddie -- your beard is beautiful, your dirt is lovely, your yelling insults are wonderful -- and..." She stopped a minute. Her hands ran through his hair, "When you get a man made over, he's never very nice after that, Eddie. Never -- " She sobbed, pulled his lips down. "Eddie -- I can't let them kill you." "Forget it," he said. "No one can do anything. Don't get yourself in a jam. You'll forget this in a little while. There's nothing here for a guy like me, and I'm not for you." She stepped way, her hands still on his shoulders. "No -- I didn't mean that. I've got to go on living in the world I helped make, among the men we all decided we would always want. I've got to do that. Listen, Eddie, how did you intend to get back to Earth?" He told her. "Then it's just a matter of getting back aboard that same ship, and into this secret room unobserved ?" "That's all, Gloria. That and keep from being exterminated first." "I can get you out of here. We'll have to do it right now. Take that beard off, and get that hair smoothed down somehow. I hate to see it happen, but I've got to get you out of here, and the only way to do it is for you to be like one of the men here." He went to work on his face and hair. She went out and returned with a suit like the other men wore. He got into it. She smiled at him, a hesitant and very soft smile, and she kissed him before they left the room and cautiously went out of the City. The way was clear across the moonlit field and under the deep dark shadow of the ship. He kissed her and then took hold of the ladder. She slipped a notebook of velonex, full of micro-film, into his hands. "Goodbye, Eddie," she said. "Take this with you. It may give you men down there a way out. I never thought much before of how mad it must be for you." He took the folder. He looked up at the double moons painting the night a fantastic shifting wave of changing light. And then he looked down at Gloria Munsel again, at the glinting shine of her hair. "Goodbye," he said. "I might stay after all -- except that a lot of men on Earth are waiting for me to tell them something. They'll be surprised. I -- " He hesitated. Her eyes widened. Warmth of emotion moved him and he said, or started to say, "I love you," and many other things, but she interrupted him. "Don't please, Eddie. Anything you said now would sound just like what my devoted husband says, every day. I'd rather you wouldn't say anything at all now, Eddie, just goodbye."  "Goodbye then," he said again. He looked back from the opened door in the ship's cargo bin. Her face was shining up at him, her lips slightly parted, her cheeks wet. It was a picture he would never be able to forget, even if he wanted to. "When you forget to shave in the mornings, Eddie, think of me." dressed the investigation committee which had sent him to Mars. He hadn't made any statements at all up to this moment. The ten members of the Committee sat there behind the half-moon table. None of them moved. Their faces were anxious. Some of them were perspiring. Eddie told them what he had seen, what he had heard, his own impressions about the whole thing, about his escape. He left out certain personal details that were, to him, unnecessary to this particular report. The Committee sat there a while, then started to talk. They talked at once for a while, then the Chairman rapped for order and stood up. His face had an odd twist to it. and his bald head was pocked with perspiration. Eddie Bowren took the book of micro-film from under his arm, the one Gloria Munsel had given him. He put it on the table. "That has been thoroughly checked by scientists, and their report is included. I thought it surely was a false report, until they checked it. The first page there gives a brief outline of what the micro-film contains." The Chairman read, then looked up. He coughed. He mopped at his head. Eddie said. "As I saw it up there, this is the way it's going to stay. We'll never get into space, not without using the methods that were used with me. And they're too destructive. I've been examined. I could never go through it again and live. And that's the only way Earth men can ever get into space. The women aren't coming back to us. They have husbands of their own now. Believe me, those women aren't going to leave their perfect husbands. They've set up a completely feminine culture. It's theirs, all theirs. They'll never give it up to return to a masculine world, and that's what Earth will always be to them. There are only a few women left on Earth, and they're of such subnormal intelligence as to be only a menace to any possible future progeny. Our birthrate has stopped. We arc living under extremely abnormal circumstances without women. I have, as I said before, but one recommendation to this Committee, and you take it for what it's worth. I personally don't care -- much -- and that isn't important either." "What i your recommendation, Bowren?" "I assure you that the formulas in that book will work for us, Mr. Chairman. Will you accept the reports of the scientists who investigated those formulas?" "I will," the Chairman said hoarsely. "I'll accept it. Why not -- ?" Bowren grinned thinly at the ten men. "There's the secret of doing what the women have done. It'll work for us too. Our only chance for survival is to follow their procedure. We've got to start turning at least a percentage of ourselves into women." One man leaned forward and put his head on his arms. The others sat there, in a kind of stunned numb attitude, their eyes drifting vaguely. The Chairman coughed and looked around the silent hall, and at the other ten men in it. "Any volunteers?" he whispered. There were but three days in which to decipher the most cryptic message ever delivered to earth . the flashing red light on the instrument panel as he turned onto the bridge to Balboa Island. Just over the bridge, he pulled the car to the curb and flipped the switch with violence. "Harrison," he muttered. "How's the water, fella?" asked the voice of Bob Mills, his assistant. There was a beautiful moon over the island. The surf lapped at the tiers of the picturesque bridge. Soft music was playing somewhere. There was a tinkle of young laughter on the light sea breeze. Harrison was vacationing and he viewed the emergency contact from Intersolar Spaceport with annoyance. "What do you want, Bob?" "Sorry, George," Bob Mills said more seriously. "I guess you got to come back." "Listen -- " protested Harrison. "Orders, George -- orders from upstairs." Harrison took a long look at the pleasant island street stretching out before him. Sea-corroded street lamps lit the short, island thoroughfare. People in light blue jeans, bronzed youths in skipper caps, deep-tanned girls in terry-cloth. "What the hell is it?" "Don't know, but it's big. Better hurry." He clicked off. Harrison skidded the car into a squealing turn. Angrily, he raced over the bridge and onto the roaring highway. Thirty minutes later Intersolar Spaceport, Los Angeles, blazed ahead of him. The main gate guards waved him in immediately and two cycle guards ran interference for him through the scores of video newsmen who lined the spaceport street. Bob Mills met him at the entrance to the Administration building. "Sorry, George, but -- " "Yeah. Oh, sure. Now what the hell is it all about?" Mills handed him a sheaf of teletransmittals. They bore heavy secret stamps. Harrison looked up quizzically. "You saw the video boys," Mills said. "The wheels think there might be some hysteria." "Any reason for it?" "Not that we know of -- not that I know of anyway. The thing is coming in awfully fast -- speed of light times a factor of at least two, maybe four." Harrison whistled softly and scanned the reports frowning. "They contacted us -- " "What?" " -- in perfect Intersolar Convention code. Said they were coming in. That's all. The port boys have done all they could to find out what to expect and prepare for it. Somebody thought Engineering might be needed -- that's why they sent for you." "Used Intersolar Convention code, eh," mused Harrison. "Yes," said Mills. "But there's nothing like this thing known in the solar system, nothing even close to this fast. Besides that, there was a sighting several days ago that's being studied. "One of the radio observatories claims to have received a new signal from one of the star clusters..." to a perfect contact with its assigned strip. It hovered over the geometric center of the long runway and touched without raising a speck of dust. Not a sound, not a puff of smoke issued from any part of it. Immediately it rose a few feet above the concrete and began to move toward the parking strip. It moved with the weightless ease of an ancient dirigible on a still day. It was easily the largest, strangest object ever seen before at the spaceport. A team of searchlight men swivelled the large spot atop the tower and bathed the ship in orange light. "What's that mean?" asked Mills paging his way through a book. " 'Halt propulsion equipment,' I think," said Harrison. "It's a good thing the code makers were vague about that," smiled Mills. "It's a good thing they didn't say jets or rockets -- 'cause this thing hasn't got any." " Attention !" That single word suddenly issued from the alien ship. "The Races of Wan greet you." It might have been the voice of a frog. It was low, gutteral, entirely alien, entirely without either enthusiasm or trace of human emotion. "Jesus!" muttered Mills. Scores of video teams focused equipment on the gleaming alien. "The Races of Wan desire contact with you." "In English yet!" amazed Mills. "The basis of this contact together with its nature are dependent upon you!" The voice had become ugly. There was nothing human about it save only the words, which were in flawless English. "Your system has long been under surveillance by the Races of Wan. Your -- progress has been noted." There was almost a note of contempt, thought Harrison, in the last sentence. "Your system is about to reach others. It therefore becomes a matter of urgency that the Races of Wan make contact. "Your cultural grasp is as yet quite small. You reach four of your own system's planets. You have attempted -- with little success -- colonization. You anticipate further penetrations. "You master the physical conditions of your system with difficulty. You are a victim of many of the natural laws -- natural laws which you dimly perceive. "But you master yourselves with greatest difficulty, and you are Infinitely more a victim of forces within your very nature -- forces which you know almost not at all." "What the hell -- " began Mills. "Because of this disparity your maturity as a race is much in doubt. There are many among the cultures of the stars who would consider your race deviant and deadly. There are a very few who would welcome you to the reaches of space. "But most desire more information. Thus our visit. We have come to gather data that will determine your -- disposition -- "Your race accepts the principle of extermination. You relentlessly seek and kill for commercial or political advantage. You live in mistrust and envy and threat. Yet, as earthlings, you have power. It is not great, but it contains a threat. We wish now to know the extent of that threat. "Here is the test." Suddenly an image resolved itself on the gleaming metal of the ship itself. It was a blueprint. A hundred cameras focused on it. "Construct this. It is defective. Correct that which renders it not useful. We shall return in three days for your solution ." "Good God!" exclaimed Harrison. "It's a -- sword!" "A what?" asked Mills. "A sword -- people used to chop each other's heads off with them." Almost at once the metal giant was seen to move. Quickly it retraced its path across the apron, remained poised on the center of the runway, then disappeared almost instantaneously. T he intersolar council weathered the storm. The representative of the colony on Venus was recalled, his political life temporarily ended. A vigilante committee did for a time picket the spaceport. But the tremendous emotional outbursts of the first day gradually gave way to a semblance of order. Video speakers, some of them with huge followings, still dealien to land in the first place. Others clamored for a fleet to pursue the arrogant visitor. And there were many fools who chose to ignore the implications of the strange speech and its implied threat. Some even thought it was a gigantic hoax. But most men soon came to restore their trust in the scientists of the Intersolar Council. Harrison cast down the long sheet of morning news that had rolled out of the machine. "The fools! They'll play politics right up to the last, won't they?" "What else?" asked Mills. "Playing politics is as good a way as any of avoiding what you can't figure out or solve." "And yet, what the hell are we doing here?" Harrison mused. "Listen to this." He picked up a stapled sheaf of papers from his desk. " 'Analysis of word usage indicates a complete knowledge of the isn't it? "The ideational content and general semantic tone of the alien speech indicates a relatively high intelligence. "'Usage is current, precise...' Bob, the man who wrote that report is one of the finest semantics experts in the solar system. He's the brain that finally broke that ancient Martian ceremonial language they found on the columns." "Well, mastermind," said Mills. "What will the Engineering report say when you get around to writing it?" "Engineering report? What are you talking about?" "You didn't read the memo on your desk then? The one that requested a preliminary report from every department by # today." "Good God, no," said Harrison snapping up the thin yellow sheet. "What in hell has a sword got to do with Engineering?" "What's it got to do with Semantics?" mocked Robert Mills. Construct this. It is defective. Correct that which renders it not useful. Harrison's eyes burned. He would have to quit pretty soon and dictate the report. There wasn't any use in trying to go beyond a certain point. You got so damned tired you couldn't think straight. You might as well go to bed and rest. Bob Mills had gone long before. He poured over the blueprint again, striving to concentrate. Why in hell had he not given up altogether? What possible contribution could an engineer make toward the solution of such a problem? Construct this. You simply made the thing according to a simple blueprint. You tried out what you got, found out what it was good for, found out then what was keeping it from doing that. You fixed it. Well, the sword had been constructed. Fantastic effort had been directed into producing a perfect model of the print. Every minute convolution had been followed to an incredible point of perfection. was less than a ten thousandths error -- even in the handle, where the curves seemed to be more artistic than mechanical. It is defective. What was defective about it? Nobody had actually tried the ancient weapon, it was true. You didn't go around chopping people's heads off. But experts on such things had examined the twelve-pound blade and had pronounced it "well balanced" -- whatever that meant. It would crack a skull, sever arteries, kill or maim. Correct What was there to correct? Could you make it maim or kill better? Could you sharpen it so that it would go through thick clothing or fur? Yes. Could you make it a bit heavier so that it might slice a metal shield? Yes, perhaps. All of these things had been half-heartedly suggested. But nobody had yet proposed any kind of qualitative change or been able to suggest any kind of change that would meet the next admonition of the alien: Correct that which renders it not useful. What actually could be done to a weapon to make it useful? Matter of fact, what was there about the present weapon that made it not useful. Apparently it was useful as hell -- useful enough to cut a man's throat, pierce his heart, slice an arm off him . What were the possible swords; what was the morphology of concept sword? Harrison picked up a dog-cared report. There was the rapier , a thin, light, extremely flexible kind of sword (if you considered the word "sword" generic, as the Semantics expert had pointed out). It was good for duels, man-to-man combat, usually on what the ancients had called the "field of honor." There were all kinds of short swords, dirks, shivs, stilettos, daggers. They were the weapons of stealth men -- and sometimes women -- used in the night. The assassin's weapon, the glitter in the darkened alley. There were the machetes. Jungle knives, cane-cutting instruments. The bayonets... You could go on and on from there, apparently. But what did you get? They were all more or less useful, Harrison supposed. There was nothing more you could do with any kind of sword that was designed for a specific purpose. Harrison sighed in despair. He had expected vastly more when he had first heard the alien mention "test". He had expected some complex instrument, something new to Terra and her colonies. Something involving complex and perhaps unknown principles of an alien technology. Something appropriate to the strange metal craft that traveled so very fast. Or perhaps a paradox. A thing that could not be constructed without exploding, like a lattice of U# of exactly critical size. Or an .instrument that must be assembled in an impossible sequence, like a clock with a complete, single-pieced outer shell. Or a part of a thing that could be "corrected" only if the whole thing were visualized, constructed, and tested. No, the blueprint he held now involved an awareness that must prove beyond mere technology, or at least Terran technology. Maybe it involved an awareness that transcended Terran philosophy as well. Harrison slapped the pencil down on his desk, rose, put his coat on, and left the office. "... we are guilty as the angels of the bible were guilty. Pride! That's it, folks, pride. False pride..." Harrison fringed the intent crowd of people cursing when, frequently, someone carelessly bumped into him in an effort to get nearer the sidewalk preacher. "We tried to live with the angels above. We wanted to fly like the birds. And then we wanted to fly like the angels... Someone near Harrison muttered an "Amen". Harrison wove his way through them wondering where the hundreds of such evangelists had come from so suddenly. "Ya know, folks, the angels themselves got uppity once. They wanted to be like Gawd himself, they did. Now, it's us." There was a small flutter of laughter among the crowd. It was very quickly suppressed -- so quickly that Harrison gained a new appreciation of the tenor of the crowd. "That's right, laugh! Laugh at our folly!" continued the thinfaced, bright-eyed man. "It was a sword that the angel used to kick Adam and Eve out of the garden. The sword figures all through the bible, folks. You ought to read the bible. You ought to get to know it. It's all there. All there for you to read..." By Christ , thought Harrison. Here was an aspect of the concept, sword, he had not considered. Morphological thinking required that all aspects of a concept be explored, all plotted against all others for possible correlation... No. That was silly. The bible was a beautiful piece of literature and some people believed it inspired. But the great good men who wrote the bible had little scientific knowledge of a sword. They would simply describe the weapon as a modern fiction writer would describe a blaster -- without knowing any more about one than that it existed and was a weapon. could be trusted to know his swords. "Go on home," Mills pleaded. "You're shot and you know it. You said yourself this isn't our show." "You go home. Bob. I'm all right." "George... you're acting strange. Strange as hell." "I'm all right. Leave me alone," snapped Harrison becoming irritable. Mills watched silently as the haggard man slipped a tablet into his mouth. "It's all right, Bob," smiled Harrison weakly. "I know how to use Benzedrine." "You damn fool, you'll wreck yourself... But the engineer ignored him. He continued paging his way through the book -- the bible, no less. George Harrison and the bible! Mills was awakened by the telephone. Reaching in the dark for it he answered almost without reaching consciousness. It was Harrison. "Bob, listen to me. If an angel were to look at us right now, what would he think?" "For God's sake!" Mills cried into the instrument. "What's up? You still at the office?" "Yeah, answer the question." "Hold on, George. I'll be down and get you. What you been drinking?" "Bob, would he -- she -- think much of us? Would the angel figure we were..." "How the hell would I know?" "No, Bob, what you should have asked is 'how the hell would he know.' " In a daze Mills heard the click as the other hung up. "Mr. Harrison, your assistant is looking for you." "Yes, I know, Kirk. But will you do it?" "Mr. Harrison, we only got one of them. If we screw it up it'll take time to make another and today's the day, you know." "I'll take the blame." "Mr. Harrison, you look kind of funny. Hadn't I better..." Harrison was sketching a drawing on a piece of waste paper. He was working in quick rough strokes, copying something from a book. "They'll blame us both, Mr. Harrison. Anyway, it might hold up somebody who's got a real idea..." "# have a real idea, Kirk. I'm going to draw it for you." The metal worker noticed that the book Harrison was copying from was a dictionary, a very old and battered one. "Here, can you follow what I've drawn?" The metal worker accepted it reluctantly, giving Harrison an odd, almost patronizing look. "This is crazy." "Kirk!" "Look, Mr. Harrison. We worked a long time together. You..." Harrison suddenly rose from the chair. "This is our one chance of beating this thing, no matter how crazy it seems. Will you do the job?" "You believe you got something, eh," the other said. "You think you have?" "I have to have." "Gentlemen," said the President of the Intersolar Council. "There is very little to say. There can be no denying the fact that we have exhausted our efforts at finding a satisfactory solution. "The contents of this book of reports represents the greatest concentration of expert reasoning perhaps ever applied to a single problem. "But alas, the problem remains -- unsolved." He paused to glance at his wristwatch. "The aliens return in an hour. As you very well know there is one action that remains for us. It is one we have held to this hour. It is one that has always been present and one that we have been constantly urged to use. "Force, gentlemen. It is not insignificant. It lies at our command. It represents the technology of the Intersolar alliance. I will entertain a motion to use it." There were no nay votes. ule. The ship grew from a tiny bright speck in the sky to full size. It settled to a graceful landing as before on the strip and silently moved into the revetment. Again it spoke in the voice of the frog, but the tone was, if anything, less human this time. "Earthmen, we have come for your solution." At that instant a hundred gun crews stiffened and waited for a signal behind their carefully camouflaged blast plates and inside dummy buildings... Harrison was running. The Administration building was empty. His footsteps echoed through the long, silent halls. He headed for an emergency exit that led directly to the blast tunnel. All doors were locked. The only way was over the wall. He paused and tossed the awkward, heavy object over the ten-foot wall. Then, backing toward the building, he ran and jumped for a hold onto the wall's edge. He failed by several inches to reach it. "Earthmen, we have come for your solution." He ran at the wall once more. This time he caught a fair hold with one hand. Digging at the rough concrete with his feet he was able to secure the hold and begin pulling his body upward. Quickly he was over the wall and onto the apron, a hundred yards from the shining metal ship. "Wait!" he shouted. "Wait, for God's sake!" Picking up the object he had tossed over the wall, he raised it above his head and ran toward the alien ship. "Wait! Here is the solution," he gasped. Somehow the command to fire was not given. There was a long moment of complete silence on the field. Nothing moved. Then the voice of the frog boomed from the alien ship. "The solution appears to be correct." The alien left three days later. Regular communications would begin within the week. Future meetings would work out technical difficulties. Preliminary trade agreements, adequately safe, guarded, were drafted and transmitted to the ship. The Races of Man and the Races of Wan were in harmony. "It was simply too obvious for any of us to notice," explained Harrison. "It took that street-comer evangelist to jar something loose -- even then it was an accident." "And the rest of us -- " started Mills. "While all of us worked on the assumption that the test involved a showing of strength -- a flexing of technological muscle." "I still don't see -- "  "Well, the evangelist put the problem on the right basis. He humbled us, exalted the aliens -- that is, he thought the alien was somehow a messenger from God to put us in our places." "We were pretty humble ourselves, especially the last day," protested Mills. "But humble about our technology" put in Harrison. "The aliens must be plenty far beyond us technologically. But how about their cultural superiority. Ask yourself how. a culture that could produce the ship we've just seen could survive without -- well destroying itself." "I still don't understand." "The aliens developed pretty much equally in all directions. They developed force -- plenty of it, enough force to kick that big ship through space at the speed of light plus. They must also have learned to control force, to live with it." "Maybe you better stick to the sword business," said Mills. "The sword is the crux of the matter. What did the alien say about the sword? 'It is defective.' It is defective, Bob. Not as an instrument of death. It will kill a man or injure him well enough. "But a sword -- or any other instrument of force for that matter -- is a terribly ineffectual tool. It was originally designed to act as a tool of social control. Did it -- or any subsequent weapon of force -- do a good job at that? "As long as man used swords, or gunpowder, or atom bombs, or hydrogen bombs, he was doomed to a fearful anarchy of unsolved problems and dreadful immaturity. "No, the sword is not useful. To fix it -- to 'correct that which renders it not useful' -- meant to make it something else. Now what in the hell did that mean? What can you do with a sword?" "You mean besides cut a man in two with it," said Mills. "Yes, what can you do with it besides use it as a weapon? Here our street-corner friend referred me to the right place: The bible! " They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. "The aliens just wanted to know if we meant what we said." "Do we?" "We better. It's going to take a hell of a lot more than a silly ploughshare to convince those babies on that ship. But there's more to it than that. The ability of a culture finally to pound all of its swords -- its intellectual ones as well as its steel ones -- into ploughshares must be some kind of least common denominator for cultures that are headed for the stars." Beneath the stagnant water shadowed by water rotifers -- but it was their world, and they resented intrusion. the rotifers By Robert Abernathy Illustrated by Virgil Finlay H enry Chatham knelt by the brink of his garden pond, a glass fish bowl cupped in his thin, nervous hands. Carefully he dipped the bowl into the green-scummed water and, moving it gently, let trailing streamers of submerged water weeds drift into it. Then he picked up the old scissors he had laid on the bank, and clipped the stems of the floating plants, getting as much of them as he could in the container. When he righted the bowl and got stiffly to his feet, it contained, he thought hopefully, a fair cross-section of fresh-water plankton. He was pleased with himself for remembering that term from the book he had studied assiduously for the last few nights in order to be able to rope with Harry's inevitable  I I I  : ions. I here was even a shiny black water beetle doing insane circles on the surface of the water in the fish bowl. At sight of the insect, the eyes of the twelve-year-old boy, who had been standing by in silent expectation, widened with interest. "What's that thing, Dad?" he asked excitedly. "What's that crazy bug?" "I don't know its scientific name, I'm afraid," said Henry Chatham. "But when I was a boy we used to call them whirligig beetles." "He doesn't seem to think he has enough room in the bowl," said Harry thoughtfully. "Maybe we better put him back in the pond. Dad." "I thought you might want to look at him through the microscope," the father said in some surprise. "I think we ought to put him back," insisted Harry. Mr. Chatham held the dripping bowl obligingly. Harry's hand, a thin boy's hand with narrow sensitive fingers, hovered over the water, and when the beetle paused for a moment in its gyrations, made a dive for it. But the whirligig beetle, saw the hand coming, and, quicker than a wink, plunged under the water and scooted rapidly to the very bottom of the bowl. Harry's young face was rueful; he wiped his wet hand on his trousers. "I guess he wants to stay," he supposed. The two went up the garden path together and into the house, Mr. Chatham bearing the fish bowl before him like a votive offering. Harry's mother met them at the door, brandishing an old towel. "Here," she said firmly, "you wipe that thing off before you bring it in the house. And don't drip any of that dirty pond water on my good carpet." "It's not dirty," said Henry Chatham. "It's just full of life, plants and animals too small for the eye to see. But Harry's going to see them with his microscope." He accepted the towel and wiped the water and slime from the outside of the bowl; then, in the living-room, he set it beside an open window, where the life-giving summer sun slanted in and fell on the green plants. stood nearby, in a good light. It was an expensive microscope, no toy for a child, and it magnified four hundred diameters. Henry Chatham had bought it because he believed that his only son showed a desire to peer into the mysteries of smallness, and so far Harry had not disappointed him; he had been ecstatic over the instrument. Together they had compared hairs from their two heads, had seen the point of a fine sewing needle made to look like the tip of a crowbar by the lowest power of the microscope, had made grains of salt look like discarded chunks of glass brick, had captured a house-fly and marvelled at its clawed hairy feet, its great red faceted eyes, and the delicate veining and fringing of its wings. Harry was staring at the bowl of pond water in a sort of fascination. "Are there germs in the water, Dad? Mother says pond water is full of germs." "I suppose so," answered Mr. Chatham, somewhat embarrassed. The book on microscopic freshwater fauna had been explicit about Paramecium, and Euglena, diatomes and rhizopods, but it had failed to mention anything so vulgar as germs. But he supposed that which the book called Protozoa, the one-celled animalcules, were the same as germs. He said, "To look at things in water like this, you want to use a well-slide. It tells how to fix one in the instruction book." He let Harry find the glass slide with a cup ground into it, and another smooth slip of glass to cover it. Then he half-showed, half-told him how to scrape gently along the bottom sides of the drifting leaves, to capture the teeming life that dwelt there in the slime. When the boy understood, his young hands were quickly more skillful than his father's; they filled the well with a few drops of water that was promisingly green and murky. Already Harry knew how to adjust the lighting mirror under the stage of the microscope and turn th# focusing screws. He did so, bent intently over the eyepiece, squinting down the polished barrel in the happy expectation of wonders. Henry Chatham's eyes wandered to the fish bowl, where the whirligig beetle had come to the top again and was describing intricate patterns among the water plants. He looked back to his son, and saw that Harry had ceased to turn the screws and instead was just looking -- looking with a rapt, delicious fixity. His hands lay loosely clenched on the table top, and he hardly seemed to breathe. Only once or twice his lips moved as if to shape an exclamation that was snatched away by some new vision. "Have you got it, Harry?" asked his father after two or three minutes during which the boy did not move. Harry took a last long look, then glanced up, blinking slightly. "You look, Dad!" he exclaimed warmly. "It's -- it's like a garden in the water, full of funny little people!" Mr. Chatham, not reluctantly, bent to gaze into the eyepiece. This was new to him too, and instantly he saw the aptness of Harry's simile. There was a garden there, of weird, green, transparent stalks composed of plainly visible cells fastened end to end, with globules and bladders like fruits or seed-pods attached to them, floating among them; and in the garden the strange little people swam to and fro, or clung with odd appendages to the stalks and branches. Their bodies were transparent like the plants, and in them were pulsing hearts and other organs plainly visible. They looked a little like sea horses with pointed tails, but their heads were different, small and rounded, with big, dark, glistening eyes. All at once Mr. Chatham realized that Harry was speaking to him, still in high excitement. "What are they, Dad?" he begged to know. His father straightened up and shook his head puzzledly. "I don't know, Harry," he answered slowly, casting about in his memory. He seemed to remember a microphotograph of a creature like those in the hook he had studied, but the name that had gone with it eluded him. He had worked as an accountant for so many years that his memory was all for figures now. He bent over once more to immerse his eyes and mind in the green water-garden on the slide. The little creatures swam to and fro as before, growing hazy and dwindling or swelling as they swam out of the narrow focus of the lens; he gazed at those who paused in sharp definition, and saw that, although he had at first seen no visible means of propulsion, each creature bore about its head a halo of thread-like, flickering cilia that lashed the water and drew it forward, for all the world like an airplane propeller or a rapidly turning wheel. "I know what they are!" exclaimed Henry Chatham, turning to his son with an almost boyish excitement. "They're rotifers! That means 'wheel-bearers', and they were called that because to the first scientists who saw them it looked like they swam with wheels." Harry had got down the book and was leafing through the pages. He looked up seriously. "Here they are," he said. "Here's a picture that looks almost like the ones in our pond water." "Let's see," said his father. They looked at the pictures and descriptions of the Rotifera; there was a good deal of concrete information on the habits and physiology of these odd and complex little animals who live their swarming lives in the shallow, stagnant waters of the Earth. It said that they were much more highly organized than Protozoa, having a discernible heart, brain, digestive system, and nervous system, and that their reproduction was by means of two sexes like that of the higher orders. Beyond that, they were a mystery; their relationship to other lifeforms remained shrouded in doubt. "You've got something interesting there," said' Henry Chatham with satisfaction. "Maybe you'll find out something about them that nobody knows yet." He was pleased when Harry spent all the rest of that Sunday afternoon peering into the microscope, watching the rotifers, and even more pleased when the boy found a pencil and paper and tried, in an amateurish way, to draw and describe what he saw in the green water-garden. Beyond a doubt, Henry thought, here was a hobby that had captured Harry as nothing else ever had. pleased. When her husband laid down his evening paper and went into the kitchen for a drink of water, she cornered him and hissed at him: "I told you you had no business buying Harry a thing like that! If he keeps on at this rate, he'll wear his eyes out in no time." Henry Chatham set down his water glass and looked straight at his wife. "Sally, Harry's eyes are young and he's using them to learn with. You've never been much worried over me, using my eyes up eight hours a day, five days a week, over a blind-alley bookkeeping job." He left her angrily silent and went back to his paper. He would lower the paper every now and then to watch Harry, in his corner of the living-room, bowed obliviously over the microscope and the secret life of the rotifers. Once the boy glanced up from his periodic drawing and asked, with the air of one who proposes a pondered question: "Dad, if you look through a microscope the wrong way is it a telescope?" Mr. Chatham lowered his paper and bit his underlip. "I don't think so -- no, I don't know. When you look through a microscope, it makes things seem closer -- one way, that is ; if you looked the other way, it would probably make them seem farther off. What did you want to know for?" "Oh -- nothing," Harry turned back to his work. As if on afterthought, he explained, "I was wondering if the rotifers could see me when I'm looking at them." Mr. Chatham laughed, a little nervously, because the strange fancies which his son sometimes voiced upset his ordered mind. Remembering the dark glistening eyes of the rotifers he had seen, however, he could recognize whence this question had stemmed. At dusk, Harry insisted on setting up the substage lamp which had been bought with the microscope, and by whose light he could go on looking until his bedtime, when his father helped him arrange a wick to feed the little glass-covered well in the slide so it would not dry up before morning. It was mother's strenuous complaints, that the boy went to bed at ten o'clock. In the following days his interest became more and more intense. He spent long hours, almost without moving, watching the rotifers. For the little animals had become the sole object which he desired to study under the microscope, and even his father found it difficult to understand such an enthusiasm. During the long hours at the office to which he commuted, Henry Chatham often found the vision of his son, absorbed with the invisible world that the microscope had opened to him, coming between him and the columns in the ledgers. And sometimes, too, he envisioned the dim green water-garden where the little things swam to and fro, and a strangeness filled his thoughts. On Wednesday evening, he glanced at tire fish bowl and noticed that the water beetle, the whirligig beetle, was missing. Casually, he asked his son about it. "I had to get rid of him," said the boy with a trace of uneasiness in his manner. "I took him out and squashed him." "Why did you have to do that?" "He was eating the rotifers and their eggs," said Harry, with what seemd to be a touch of remembered anger at the beetle. He glanced toward his work-table, where three or four well-slides with small green pools under their glass covers now rested in addition to the one that was under the microscope. "How did you find out he was eating them?" inquired Mr. Chatham, feeling a warmth of pride at the thought that Harry had discovered such a scientific fact for himself. The boy hesitated oddly. "I -- I looked it up in the book," he answered. His father masked his faint disappointment. "That'S fine," he said. "I guess you find out more about them all the time." "Uh-huh," admitted Harry, turning back to his table. There was undoubtedly something a little strange about Harry's manner; and now Mr. Chatham realized that it had been two days since Harry had asked him to "Quick, take a look!" at the newest wonder he had discovered. With this thought teasing at his mind, the father walked casually over to the table where his son sat hunched and, looking down at the litter of slides and papers -- some of which were covered with figures and scribblings of which he could make nothing. He said diffidently, "How about a look?" Harry glanced up as if startled. He was silent a moment; then he slid reluctantly from his chair and said, "All right." Mr. Chatham sat down and bent over the microscope. Puzzled and a little hurt, he twirled the focusing vernier and peered into the eyepiece, looking down once more into the green water world of the rotifers. under the lens, and they swam lazily to and fro, their cilia beating like miniature propellers. Their dark eyes stared, wet and glistening; they drifted in the motionless water, and clung with sucker-like pseudo-feet to the tangled plant stems. Then, as he almost looked away, one of them detached itself from the group and swam upward, toward him, growing larger and blurring as it rose out of the focus of the microscope. The last thing that remained defined, before it became a shapeless gray blob and vanished, was the dark blotches of the great cold eyes, seeming to stare full at him -- cold, motionless, but alive. It was a curious experience. Henry Chatham drew suddenly back from the eyepiece, with an involuntary shudder that he could not explain to himself. He said haltingly, "They look interesting." "Sure, Dad," said Harry. He moved to occupy the chair again, and his dark young head bowed once more over the microscope. His father walked back across the room and sank gratefully into his armchair -- after all, it had been a hard day at the office. He watched Harry work the focusing screws as if trying to find something, then take his pencil and begin to write quickly and impatiently. It was with a guilty feeling of prying that, after Harry had been sent reluctantly to bed, Henry Chatham took a tentative look at those papers which lay in apparent disorder on his son's work table. He frowned uncomprehendingly at the things that were written there; it was neither mathematics nor language, but many of the scribblings were jumbles of letters and figures. It looked like code, and he remembered that less than a year ago, Harry had been passionately interested in cryptography, and had shown what his father, at least, believed to be a considerable aptitude for such things... But what did cryptography have to do with microscopy, or codes with -- rotifers? Nowhere did there seem to be a key, but there were occasional words and phrases jotted into the margins of some of the sheets. Mr. Chatham read these, and learned nothing. "Can't dry up, but they can," said one. "Beds of germs," said another. And in the corner of one sheet, "I -- Yes. # -- No." The only thing that looked like a translation was the note: "rty#pr is the pond." Mr. Chatham shook his head bewilderedly, replacing the sheets carefully as they had been. Why should Harry want to keep notes on his scientific hobby in code? he wondered, rationalizing even as he wondered. He went to bed still puzzling, but it did not keep him from sleeping, for he was tired. Then, only the next evening, his wife maneuvered to get him alone with her and burst out passionately: "Henry, I told you that microscope was going to ruin Harry's eyesight ! I was watching him today when he didn't know I was watching him, and I saw him winking and blinking right while he kept on looking into the thing. I was minded to stop him then and there, but I want you to assert your authority with him and tell him he can't go on." Henry Chatham passed one nervous hand over his own aching eyes. He asked mildly, "Are you sure it wasn't just your imagination, Sally? After all, a person blinks quite normally, you know." "It was not my imagination!" snapped Mrs. Chatham. "I know the symptoms of eyestrain when I see them, I guess. You'll have to stop Harry using that thing so much, or else be prepared to buy him glasses." "All right, Sally," said Mr. Chatham wearily. "I'll see if I can't persuade him to be a little more moderate." He went slowly into the livingroom. At the moment, Harry was not using the microscope; instead, he seemed to be studying one of his cryptic pages of notes. As his father entered, he looked up sharply and swiftly laid the sheet down -- face down. Perhaps it wasn't all Sally's imagination; the boy did look nervous, and there was a drawn, white look to his thin young face. His father said gently, "Harry, Mother tells me she saw you blinking, as if your eyes were tired, when you were looking into the microscope today. You know if you look too much, it can be a strain on your sight." Harry nodded quickly, too quickly, perhaps. "Yes, Dad," he said. "I read that in the book. It says there that if you close the eye you're looking with for a little while, it rests you and your eyes don't get tired. So I was practising that this afternoon. Mother must have been watching me then, and got the wrong idea." "Oh," said Henry Chatham. "Well, it's good that you're trying to be careful. But you've got your mother worried, and that's not so good. I wish, myself, that you wouldn't spend all your time with the microscope. Don't you ever play baseball with the fellows any more?" "I haven't got time," said the boy, with a curious stubborn twist to his mouth. "I can't right now, Dad." He glanced toward the microscope. "Your rotifers won't die if you leave them alone for a while. And if they do, there'll always be a new crop." "But I'd lose track of them," said Harry strangely. "Their lives are so short -- they live so awfully fast. You don't know how fast they live." "I've seen them," answered his father. "I guess they're fast, all right." He did not know quite what to make of it all, so he settled himself in his chair with his paper. But that night, after Harry had gone later than usual to bed, he stirred himself to take down the book that dealt with life in pondwater. There was a memory pricking at his mind; the memory of the water beetle, which Harry had killed because, he said, he was eating the rotifers and their eggs. And the boy had said he had found that fact in the book. Mr. Chatham turned through the book; he read, with aching eyes, all that it said about rotifers. He searched for information on the beetle, and found there was a whole family of whirligig beetles. There was some material here on the characteristics and habits of the Gyrinidae, but nowhere did it mention the devouring of rotifers or their eggs among their customs. He tried the topical index, but there was no help there. Harry' must have lied, thought his father with a whirling head. But why, why in God's name should he say he'd looked a thing up in the book when he must have found it out for himself, the hard way? There was no sense in it. He went back to the book, convinced that, sleepy as he was, he must have missed a point. The information simply wasn't there. He got to his feet and crossed the room to Harry's work table; he switched on the light over it and stood looking down at the pages of mystic notations. There were more pages now, quite a few. But none of them seemed to mean anything. The earlier pictures of rotifers which Harry had drawn had given way entirely to mysterious figures. Then the simple explanation occurred to him, and he switched off the light with a deep feeling of relief. Harry hadn't really known that the water beetle ate rotifers; he had just suspected it. And, with his boy's respect for fair play, he had hesitated to admit that he had executed the beetle merely on suspicion. That didn't take the lie away, but it removed the mystery at least. H enry Chatham slept badly that night and dreamed distorted dreams. But when the alarm clock shrilled in the gray of morning, jarring him awake, the dream in which he had been immersed skittered away to the back of his mind, out of knowing, and sat there leering at him with strange, dark, glistening eyes. He dressed, washed the flat morning taste out of his mouth with coffee, and took his way to his train and the ten-minute ride into the city. On the way there, instead of snatching a look at the morning paper, he sat still in his seat, head bowed, trying to recapture the dream whose vanishing made him uneasy. He was superstitious about dreams in an up-to-date way, believing them not warnings from some Beyond outside himself, but from a subsconscious more knowing than the waking conscious mind. During the morning his work went slowly, for he ket pausing, sometimes in the midst of totalling a column of figures, to grasp at some mocking half-memory of that dream. At last, elbows on his desk, staring unseeingly at the clock on the wall, in the midst of the subdued murmur of the office, his mind went back to Harry, dark head bowed motionless over the barrel of his microscope, looking, always looking into the pale green watergardens and the unseen lives of the beings that... All at once it came to him, the dream he had dreamed. He had been bending over the microscope, he had been looking into the unseen world, and the horror of what he had seen gripped him now and brought out the chill sweat on his body. For he had seen his son there in the clouded water, among the twisted glassy plants, his face turned upward and eyes wide in the agonized appeal of the drowning; and bubbles rising, fading. But abound him had been a swarm of the weird creatures, and they had been dragging him down, down, blurring out of focus, and their great dark eyes glistening wetly, coldly... He was sitting rigid at his desk, his work forgotten; all at once he saw the clock and noticed with a start that it was already eleven a.m. A fear he could not define seized on him, and his hand reached spasmodically for the telephone on his desk. But before he touched it, it began ringing. After a moment's paralysis, he picked up the receiver. It was his wife's voice that came shrilly over the wires. "Henry!" she cried. "Is that you?" "Hello, Sally," he said with stiff lips. Her voice as she answered seemed to come nearer and go farther away, and he realized that his hand holding the instrument was shaking. "Henry, you've got to come home right now. Harry's sick. He's got a high fever, and he's been asking for you." He moistened his lips and said, "I'll be right home. I'll take a taxi." "Hurry!" she exclaimed. "He's been saying queer things. I think he's delirious." She paused, and added, "And it's all the fault of that microscope you bought him!" "I'll be right home," he repeated dully. to meet him; she must be upstairs, in Harry's bedroom. He paused in the living room and glanced toward the table that bore the microscope; the black, gleaming thing still stood there, but he did not see any of the slides, and the papers were piled neatly together to one side. His eyes fell on the fish bowl; it was empty, clean and shining. Fie knew Harry hadn't done those things; that was Sally's neatness. Abruptly, instead of going straight up the stairs, he moved to the table and looked down at the pile of papers. The one on top was almost blank; on it was written several times: rty#pr... rty#pr... His memory for figure combinations served him; he remembered what had been written on another page : "rty#pr is the pond." That made him think of the pond, lying quiescent under its green scum and trailing plants at the end of the garden. A step on the stair jerked him around. It was his wife, of course. She said in a voice sharp-edged with apprehension: "What are you doing down here? Harry wants you. The doctor hasn't come; I phoned him just before I called you, but he hasn't come." He did not answer. Instead he gestured at the pile of papers, the empty fish bowl, an imperative question in his face. "I threw that dirty water back in the pond. It's probably what he caught something from. And he was breaking himself down, humping over that thing. It's your fault, for getting it for him. Are you coming?" She glared coldly at him, turning back to the stairway. "I'm coming," he said heavily, and followed her upstairs. Harry lay back in his bed, a low mound under the covers. His head was propped against a single pillow, and his eyes were half-closed, the lids swollen-looking, his face hotly flushed. He was breathing slowly as if asleep. But as his father entered the room, he opened his eyes as if with an effort, fixed them on him, said, "Dad... I've got to tell you." Mr. Chatham took the chair by the bedside, quietly, leaving his wife to stand. He asked, "About what, Harry?" "About -- things." The boy's eyes shifted to his mother, at the foot of his bed. "I don't want to talk to her. She thinks it's just fever. But you'll understand." Henry Chatham lifted his gaze to meet his wife's. "Maybe you'd better go downstairs and wait for the doctor, Sally." She looked hard at him, then turned abruptly to go out. "All right," she said in a thin voice, and closed the door softly behind her. "Now what did you want to tell me, Harry?" "About them... the rotifers," the boy said. His eyes had drifted half-shut again but his voice was clear. "They did it to me... on purpose." "Did what?" "I don't know... They used one of their cultures. They've got all kinds: beds of germs, under the leaves in the water. They've been growing new kinds, that will be worse than anything that ever was before... They live so fast, they work so fast." Henry Chatham was silent, leaning forward beside the bed. "It was only a little while, before I found out they knew about me. I could see them through my microscope, but they could see me too... And they kept signaling, swimming and turning... I won't tell you how to talk to them, because nobody ought to talk to them ever again. Because they find out more than they tell... They know about us, now, and they hate us. They never knew before -- that there was anybody but them... So they want to kill us all." "But why should they want to do that?" asked the father, as gently as he could. He kept telling himself, "He's delirious. It's like Sally says, he's been wearing himself out, thinking too much about -- the rotifers. But the doctor will be here pretty soon, the doctor will know what to do." "They don't like knowing that they aren't the only ones on Earth that can think. I expect people would be the same way." "But they're such little things, Harry. They can't hurt us at all." The boy's eyes opened wide, shadowed with terror and fever. "I told you, Dad -- They're growing new ones... And they kept telling me to take them back to the pond, so they could tell all the rest, and they could all start getting ready -- for war." He remembered the shapes that swam and crept in the green water gardens, with whirling cilia and great, cold, glistening eyes. And he remembered the clean, empty fish bowl in the window downstairs. "Don't let them. Dad," said Harry convulsively. "You've got to kill them all. The ones here and the ones in the pond. You've got to kill them good -- because they don't mind being killed, and they lay lots of eggs, and their eggs can stand almost anything, even drying up. And the eggs remember what the old ones knew." "Don't worry," said Henry Chatham quickly. He grasped his son's hand, a hot limp hand that had slipped from under the coverlet. "We'll stop them. We'll drain the pond." "That's swell," whispered the boy, his energy fading again. "I ought to have told you before, Dad -- but first I was afraid you'd laugh, and then -- I was just... afraid..." His voice drifted away. And his father, looking down at the flushed face, saw that he seemed asleep. Well, that was better than the sick delirium -- saying such strange, wild things -- Downstairs the doctor was saying harshly, "All right. All right. But let's have a look at the patient." Henry Chatham came quietly downstairs; he greeted the doctor briefly, and did not follow him to Harry's bedroom. When he was left alone in the room, he went to the window and stood looking down at the microscope. He could not rid his head of strangeness: A window between two worlds, our world and that of the infinitely small, a window that looks both ways. After a time, he went through the kitchen and let himself out the back door, into the noonday sunlight. He followed the garden path, between the weed-grown beds of vegetables, until he came to the edge of the little pond. It lay there quiet in the sunlight, green-scummed and walled with stiff rank grass, a lone dragonfly swooping and wheeling above it. The image of all the stagnant waters, the fertile breedingplaces of strange life, with which it was joined in the end by the tortuous hidden channels, the oozing pores of the Earth. And it seemed to him then that he glimpsed something, a hitherto unseen miasma, rising above the pool and darkening the sunlight ever so little. A dream, a shadow -- the shadow of the alien dream of things hidden in smallness, the dark dream of the rotifers. The dragonfly, having seized a bright-winged fly that was sporting over the pond, descended heavily through the sunlit air and came to rest on a broad lily pad. Henry Chatham was suddenly afraid. He turned and walked slowly, wearily, up the path toward the house. Personalities in Science he was a man of diversified talents The Persecuted almost equal to those of the great Leonardo da Vinci. His family had a starring role whenever the overtaken his parents; and like unstory of the discovery of the law of told thousands of such parents they gravity is told; yet there is another wanted their son to have a good, object which deserves a place in the solid education as a doctor in order annals of history that is equal to to insure his future. The one big that now famous apple. There's a worry that they had was that this splendid bronze lamp which hangs son of theirs, who showed such today, as it did in the #th century, great mechanical aptitude at an from the roof of the cathedral in early a g e  would become interested Pisa. The slightest motion will make in mathematics and so be drawn this lamp sway. This object was to away from the security of the career Galileo what the apple was to Newthey had chosen for him. The fear ton. Putting the index finger of one was obviously a well-founded one. hand on the wrist of the other and, Besides his skill in mechanics, using this natural clock, Galileo Galileo was far above average in found that always, whether the such arts as sculpture and music, lamp was describing large arcs or He painted with such skill and small ones, each swing or vibration imagination that he defied his partook exactly the same time as any ents, as so many of us do, and chose other. This seemingly simple discovan artist's career for himself. When ery was the cornerstone of the scihe entered the University of Padua ence of motion. It was the humble to begin his studies, he realized that beginning which served as the inin order to be a really good artist he spiration for such men as John would have to study geometry. Now Keppler, who gave us the laws of a whole new field was opened beplanetary motion, and for Newton's fore him. laws of gravity and motion. He was able to solve the most difSomehow, in the minds of most ficult problems with ease, and he down through the centuries vaguetions of others which had stood as examples of greatness for hundreds of years. Naturally there was no more talk about being either a doctor or an artist; he had found the mistress who was to hold him until the end of his days. Galileo found his work bound by laws and systems which had stood as irrefutable evidences of truth for almost two thousand years. When he rebelled against accepting these laws as gospel, he proved his contentions with experiments and facts so salient that he could scarcely be doubted. He climbed to the top of the leaning tower of Pisa to refute Aristotle. He invented a telescope to refute Ptolemy. A ristotle had taught that when two bodies, of the same substance but differing weights, were dropped from an equal height, the heavier body would reach the earth first. Believe it or not, no one had questioned this statement for I ,# years ! When Galileo had satisfied himself that the theory was all wrong he set out to prove his point. He used the now famous Leaning Tower as a proving ground. He dropped two shots of different weights from the top of the tower, and when they reached the ground at the same time he felt that he had definitely been vindicated. But all this step toward the real truth earned him was enmity. From all over the then civilized w'orld professors and students rose in a body against him. Aristotle had said that the objects would not reach the earth at the same time -- it said so right in his books. Progress such as this w'as too fast for the times and Galileo w'as hounded from the scene of his victory and forced to seek refuge in Florence. Now his lot was miserable. He had his Mother, a brother, and tw'o sisters depending on him for support; and for a radical such as he was there wasn't much of anything like money coming his way. He tutored pupils to help stretch his meager earnings, and as he taught them he continued to learn himself. He had never disputed Ptolemy's laws -- those that stated that the vaults of heaven revolved about the Earth -- because he'd believed it himself. But now he began to believe that Copernicus had been right. Although he knew that to teach these theories was dangerous heresy, he began to teach that the Earth revolved about the sun, as did all the other known planets of the time. To prove his theory he invented a far better telescope than had ever before been made. With this new telescope he saw for the first time that the moon was not round and flat and smooth as both Aristotle and Ptolemy had said; but that it had mountains and hollow's like the Earth. He was the first to see the rings of Saturn, and found that there were lesser planets revolving around Jupiter just as other planets revolve around the sun. He proposed the theory of an unlimited universe, too, and one noble critic tried to crush him by saying : "There are only seven openings in the head -- two ears, two eyes, tw'o nostrils, and one mouth, there are only seven metals, and only seven days of the week, therefore there can be only seven planets." When Galileo made the unbelievers look through the telescope, and the scoffers saw exactly what he had told them they would see in the heavens, they cried, "Oh, well, they aren't visible to the naked eye, and so they cannot influence the Earth; and being useless, they do not exist." When our stargazer went on to announce that not only did the Earth revolve around the sun, but that the sun also revolved; the Church stepped in. An investigating commission was established to study the teachings of Copernicus. They called in Galileo and warned him that this was pure heresy which he was teaching; they ordered him to return to the teaching of Ptolemy's nine-hundred year old theory that the vaults of heaven revolved around the Earth. If he refused he was warned that he would have to take the consequences ; which in those days consisted of burning at the stake, or being crushed to death in an iron maiden. these consequences for the next # years, which he spent in study and in strengthening his theories even more. In # he could no longer contain himself under this thought control and wrote a book defending Copernicus. The inquisition pounced, and for his disobedience he was made to wear sackcloth and to kneel in ashes and required to swear that he would never say or believe again that the Earth revolved around the sun. He was told that should be refuse to swear this oath he would be condemned to torture and burning. The inquisition won, fear of torture drove Galileo to vow that he would do that which they required of him. He was carted off to prison, and though later released he spent the rest of his days with spies watching him to keep him on the path that the Church had said he must follow. He died at #, blind so that he could no longer see the wonders of the skies, and thoroughly crushed. But not before he had given the world a heritage of knowledge that man after man used as a foundation for the progress of the natural sciences. Galileo was so far ahead of his time that he had put forth the theory that there were no elements in the universe that differed from those on the Earth. The final establishment of this proof was made by Dr. Ira Bowen as recently as #! -- ew Space in its far dark reaches can be fickle with a man; it can shatter his dreams, fill him with fear and hate. It can also cure a man -- if he is strong enough. By Arthur G. Stangland Illustrated by Ed Valigursky of space. Twirling slowly in awesome majesty, the meteor scintillated like a massive black diamond. And with its onrush came a devastating sense of doom. He looked everywhere. To the front, to the side, and below -- there was no escape. Transfixed, he stared at the great rock flashing in the fire, of myriad suns as it -- Bill Staker, passenger rocket captain for Interplanetary Lines, came fully awake in his New York hotel room. For a minute, he lay unmoving on his bed, savoring the delicious sensation of weight. No queazy stirring in the pit of his belly for lack of gravity, no forced squinting because of muscular reorientation. With a muttered curse he unwound himself from his covers and sat up. For a moment he rested his head in his hands, thinking, only a nightmare, thank God, only a nightmare. He lifted his head, and found cold sweat on his hands. Then sighing in relief he swung his feet over the edge of his bed. A glance at the clock showed #:# p.m. Monday, June #th, #. Heavily, he clumped across the room in the peculiar flat-footed gait of a spaceman accustomed to magnetic contact shoes. Cigarette in hand he sank into a heavy chair, touched a button on the arm, then sat back to watch the telescreen. It was a rehash of the day's news. In nasal tones a senator was accusing the Republicrats of raising taxes. Then followed scenes from a spectacular fire. Suddenly, Bill's drooping eyelids popped open. A commentator was saying, "... the two rockets of the Staker The small meteor ripped through the Space Bird's crew compartment, blinding the radar scope and severing communication with Earth. Space Mining Company, ready for a scouting trip to the asteroid Beta Quadrant." A close-up of Tom Staker followed. Tall, rangy, with blond hair like straw in the wind. Bill laid his cigarette in a tray and with critical interest leaned forward to look at his brother. "We figure to find uranium," Tom was saying, with a glance toward the vertical rockets, "all through the Beta Quadrant. Our departure is waiting on the return of my brother, Bill, from his Marsto-Earth run." A reporter asked Tom, "Private enterprise is unique in these days of virtual monopolies. What's the story behind it?" "Well, our great-grandfather, George Staker, believed passionately in private enterprise," Tom began. "Somewhere around # or # he established a trust fund for his third generation descendants to finance any project they think worthwhile. And he got an ironclad guarantee from the government that the trust fund for private enterprise would be honored in the future. You see, my ancestor was quite a romanticist. In one of his books entitled 'The Philosophy of Science' he says 'People of this dawning Atomic Age little realize they are living in a vast dream. A dream that is slowly taking objective shape. A tool here, a part there, a plan on some drafting table. Men of ideas are pointing the way, structuring the inner dream world of a generation. Even today's science fiction literature contains important ideas for the dreams-become-reality of tomorrow.' " Tom finished up. "With our Project Venture, Bill and I are going to bring a dream into reality -- making a little on the side, of course!" The commentator ended his interview with: "And so, we await with great interest the carrying out of George Staker's dream, a man whose Twentieth Century ideas of private enterprise have blown a breath of fresh air into an age of dull dreams and little imagination." Bill Staker pressed the control button, darkening the screen. "Dream boy. Tom, you damned fool." He got up and scuffed into the bathroom to stare into the mirror. Twenty-five years old, and already lines were grooving both sides of his nostrils. Tousled black hair like brush hanging over a high bank, and ridged creases in his forehead. Little lumps of flesh bulging over the corners of his mouth from constant tension. The tension of outwitting space on each trip 'tween the planets. But worst of all was the look in his gray eyes. The look that never went away anymore. The look of a man who has spent too much time staring into the enigma of the Universe and -- thinking. "I'm scared -- scared as hell!" he blurted at his reflection. "And if I don't get hold of myself, I'm through -- washed up!" Space was no place for a man with imagination -- too much imagination. You stared into the empty blackness here, you stared into the inky blackness there, behind you the Earth a tiny pinpoint, the Earth that meant rock solid footing, the caress of wind and land in all directions. But out there in the aching void you raced for Mars like a mouse scuttling across a lighted floor. Raced because of what you couldn't see, couldn't fathom. Yet, you knew It was out there, staring back inscrutably. He rubbed the flat of his hand across his right cheek, sighing from emotional weariness. Then he scuffed back into the room. On the way he collected a bottle of bourbon, mixer and glass, and dropped into the big chair. As he worked on the bottle, all the anxiety and apprehension in him faded. Once he stared at the bottom of his empty glass. Funny how a guy could panic all of a sudden. He remembered it clearly now. Riding into town yesterday from the rocket port, he started brooding over details of Project Venture. Suddenly, an overwhelming black tide of fear worse than he had ever experienced confronted him. Like a man on the verge of insanity he licked his dry lips, staring about him and feeling as if something strange and terrible were taking possession of his mind. And in the middle of his spell a cloud blacker than space itself started reaching for him. That was when he yelled to the startled bus driver to let him out at this hotel. Maybe he could get hold of himself here. Now, his arms sprawled over the sides of the heavy chair, he drifted ofl into a snoring stupor. I N Till',, morning he awoke to a splitting headache. Somehow it helped to hold his head between both hands and swear at it in a running mutter. Finally he roused himself to go to the bathroom for a cold shower. Afterward, donning his powder blue Captain's uniform, he went down to breakfast. He dawdled over crisp bacon and eggs, glanced at morning editions, and all the while the ashes of last night's emotional holocaust drifted through him. Drifted in fitful vagrant thoughts. He should have said no that first day a year ago. The big law firm made a great to do over the old document from his ancestor. Unique, they said. The chance of a lifetime. And by the end of the first meeting Tom was all fired up. Mining atomic power metals in the asteroid belt would bring the biggest returns, he said. They would be the only ones allowed to compete with the Asteroid Mining Corporation monopoly. And now Tom was building up public excitement in the venture, as if it were a circus. The damned fool. Why had he let his brother talk him into -- Suddenly, his line of thought snapped, and he was acutely aware of staring eyes. He looked to his left, then felt a warm flush technicolor his cheeks. "Christy!" Her blond curls making a soft halo around her jauntily raked hat, the space hostess from his ship gave him a warm smile. She was adequately stacked, Bill reflected, but there was levelheaded firmness and resolution in her too. That was why she was hard to handle. "Good morning, Bill." He didn't like the accusing gleam in her eye but he was glad to see her. "Sit down, Christy. Have some coffee." He held her hands a moment, then eased her into the opposite chair. He tried disarming her with a show of great enthusiasm. But the way she settled herself into the seat, all the while regarding him with those clear penetrating blue eyes, told him she was going on no snipe hunt. "When you kissed me goodby at the port yesterday, Bill, you said you were going directly to the field to be with Tom." It wasn't a statement -- it was an accusation. With an elaborate show of casualness he shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I was fagged out from this last trip. Decided I'd do better getting a full night's rest by myself at a hotel." The waiter brought her coffee, and she left it to cool. She folded her long tapering fingers on the table, and a delicate lift to her fine brows gave her an expression of sympathetic concern. Her smile was regretfuL "Rocket men don't drink. Bill. You know it too. Bad for muscular coordination." He said in some surprise, "You mean it's that loud?" "Uh-huh." Christy leaned forward. "What is it, Bill? You haven't been yourself for weeks. You looked haggard yesterday and when you left the ship you were almost running, as if trying to escape from something. And now this strange avoidance of Tom. He got hold of me this morning early, wanting to know where you were. And I guess it's pretty important that he sees you, Bill. Seems there's been trouble at the field." It was as if someone had prodded him in an agonizingly sore place and he reacted instinctively. He let his knife clatter on his plate, aware that he was dramatizing himself. "When I'm ready for a woman's sticking her nose into my affairs. I'll send her a special invitation!" Christy's delicate nostrils flared, and her bosom rose and fell rapidly. Then she seemed to get hold of herself. "I'm sorry if you got that impression, Bill. I was only trying to help you both." i lierishing his irritation, Bill went on, "Seems to me you're bending over backward helping Tom. playing messenger, private eye -- " Christy broke in with a catch in her throat, "Oh, Bill, please! Let's not quarrel as soon as we get back." Bill shoved his dishes aside, the tone of her voice reaching into him to dampen down the fires of anger. Then he managed a slow faint grin. "Okay, Christy." He reached for the check, saying, "Well, if you can stand my company, would you like to come along out to the field?" With her eyes glistening, she answered, "I'd love to." field of the Staker Space Mining Company was an hour's drive north of the city. Three miles from the field they made out the two gleaming snouts of the rockets pointing skyward. Then as they approached the edge of the field, Bill turned off toward a two story frame structure that served as office and warehouse, Bill said, "Might as well check to see if Tom is in the office first." At the door Bill poked his head in and shouted up the stairwell, "Hi -- Tom?" A chair scraped, and footsteps sounded across the upstairs floor. "Yeah -- that you. Bill? C'mon up!" They found Tom at a desk before a wide window view of the field. On the office walls hung big graphs of fuel consumption curves, trajectory plots from Earth to the asteroid belt, ballistics computations, oxygen consumption curves per unit metabolism per man. ' Christy looking at the rockets, said, "Gee, Tom, they look beautiful. Like monsters straining their tethers." Tom looked up at the girl's profile, and to Bill who was watching, he bore the look of a man savoring what he saw. "Yes, they are. That first one's mine, the Space Bird. The other is Bill's, the Space Dragon Bill cast a professional eye over the charts and graphs on the wall, while far down in his subconscious a sharp twinge of jealousy fulminated, tangling with his fears of space in a hybrid monstrosity. Then like lava in a plugged volcano his obsession found a new outlet. The fear of space now came up disguised as hatred for Tom. In an unusually calm voice Bill said, "Well, I see you have everything just about completed." "Yeah," Tom glanced up with a significant look. "Someone else was interested in those charts and graphs too the other day. Someone who didn't bother to use the door." "What d'you mean -- somebody break in?" Tom nodded. "Yep. Jimmied a window downstairs. But I don't think they got anything, because the door to the office was still locked when the watchman surprised them. They got away in the dark." Christy's eyes grew large and round. "Who do you suppose it was?" Hitching his long body erect, Tom said with a gesture of his right hand, "Well, there's only one outfit interested in our destination -- and that's Asteroid Mining." "Good heavens," Christy said in great surprise. "You don't mean a big corporation like that would stoop so low?" Tom smiled at her. "With a monopoly on power metals Asteroid has been gouging the world. People have become resigned to the situation. But if we can supply uranium ore cheaper there's going to be a clamor for private enterprise again. Under the present system private enterprise has been withering on the vine. This is our big chance and the public is pulling for us." Bill's hold on his temper slipped another notch. "Yeah, I saw that interview with the television news you had. Saw it last night." He folded his arms across his chest. "If that's your conception of winning support for our venture then you better take up circus advertising." For a moment Tom looked like a man who's taken a bucket of ice water in the face. Then his feet hit the floor. "Say, now, wait a minute, Bill!" he said, half in anger. "Who d'you think's been shouldering the big share of Project Venture -- while you've hung on to your job and a pretty salary?" "Didn't we agree you'd spend full time on the Project while I acted as consultant between trips?" Bill shot back. "Yeah, I quit a fair job as first officer on a freighter to handle it." "And you are guaranteed fair wages and a fat slice of any profits we make," Bill snapped. "The thing I didn't like in that interview of yours was that starry-eyed eyewash about our ancestor being a man of vision, a philosopher and a dreamer. That's a helluva tag to put on us -- 'The Dream Boys'! Good God!" Tom stood up, facing his brother in icy silence. Finally he said, "Is that all you've got to offer -- a lotta carping criticism?" The planes of Bill's cheeks flattened under the downward pull at his mouth corners. The black ugly tide was running in him now and he could not stop its sweep. His fear of space, the frantic will to escape from it again, all the irritation and anger were deep currents and he was a mere piece of flotsam tossing on the advancing wave of the black tide. He said, "No, damn you. I've got something else in my craw too. ft's Christy. I've seen the way you look at her, and I know that whenever my back is turned you're doing your damnedest to break us up!" Tom's face turned gray and suddenly his eyes were wide open. Knots stood out on the points of his jaws. In a strange half choked voice he said, "That's a blasted lie -- and you know it. It's an excuse to cover up for your own peculiar behavior lately. I think -- " Christy broke in with. "Bill -- Tom, for heaven's sake stop it!" Her beseeching eyes were glancing sharply from one to the other in growing panic. Bill stood lightly on his feet, his fingers curling and uncurling into balled fists. Tom went on, a bleak look in his eyes. "I think you've been in a soft berth too long. The monopoly you work for has softened you, taken out the guts a man needs to stand on his own feet -- " Bill suddenly stiffened. His right shot out in a hard, sharp blow' that crashed against Tom's chin. Tom grunted, a surprised look in his eyes, and sagged to the floor. For a moment Bill stood over him, nostrils flaring, his whole body tense and waiting. But Tom was too groggy to get up. "Oh, Bill, how could you!" Christy cried out, dropping to her knees beside Tom. Bill strode with measured step to the door. There he turned, and looking back with a sneer, said. "Sweet dreams, Dream Boy!" I N A luxurious office of Asteroid Mining Corporation on the twenty-third floor of a Manhattan skyscraper a furious official of the corporation faced an uncomfortable underling. "I've heard of some pretty crude tricks in my time, Heilman, but breaking into the Staker Company's office like a common house thief takes the tin medal for low grade brains!" the official ranted, pounding his desk. "I suppose you thought that was an excellent way to advance yourself in the corporaIt!-, tif'ii ell? Finesse, Heilman, finesse. Tiit's what it takes in matters like this. Asteroid Mining, before it got the monopoly, stopped competition, but not by common housebreak  # J ln g "But -- but I thought," Heilman explained lamely, "that we could get a copy of their trajectory and then deal with them after they got out to the quadrant. You know, fire a 'meteor' at them, blanket them with radio jamming, ruin their radar sighting -- " The official snorted and leaned disgustedly back in his leather chair. "No, no you big dumb ox! You're retired from the team, benched. Now you can sit on the sidelines and watch how the first string fix Staker and Company." When Bill asked for his key, the clerk handed him the key and a faintly lavender tinted envelope. Mystified by the feminine handwriting, Bill sat in a lobby chair, and tore open the jasmine scented envelope. The note was brief. It said, "Dear Captain Staker: Please call on me at your earliest convenience, Apt. #B. It is a matter of utmost importance to both of us. Margo." Ever since leaving Tom's office, Bill's mind had been spinning about a center of hatred and ugly rumination. But now the stimulus of the jasmine fragrance struck a spark of adventure on the edge of his churning mind. The tangential path led off into inviting mysterious shadows and he was going to follow. The elevator stopped at the apartment floor of the hotel's north Tower. In the softly lighted corridor his feet fell soundlessly on the deep pile rug. He turned a corner, then walked up a short flight of steps to the door of Apt. #B. In response to his knock the door was opened by a vision in white satin. She was startlingly beautiful. Dark heavy lashes, creamy skin, white even teeth in a flashing smile, a lithe body poised with the ease of a jungle cat. She was fulsome and high breasted, and as she followed Bill's quick appraising glance, she seemed to smile knowingly that all he saw was displayed to best advantage. Hat in hand Bill said, "I'm -- I'm Captain Staker." With a throaty laugh that could have been carefully timed, she said, "And I'm Margo. Come right in Captain." Bill walked onto a white rug, and unobtrusively took in the rich furniture Twenty First Century Modern, the warm brown of the logarithm ruled walls, paintings in the style of Van Gogh, sharply angled table lamps, the gold drapes at the windows. "It was kind of you to come so promptly," Margo continued, settling into a chair. Bill brought his glance back to her. "Well, frankly, I was curious to know what a perfect stranger could have in common with me." She laughed indulgently. "Nasty of me, wasn't it? -- taking advantage of a human weakness." She gestured at Scotch and bourbon on the coffee table. "I'll let you do us the honors, Captain. Bourbon for me." Presently, glass in hand and a spreading warmth in him, Bill fixed the girl with a quizzical look. "Tell me, Margo, just what is this matter of utmost importance to both of us?" She put her glass on the table, then sat back and Bill felt the full impact of her dark lustrous eyes. "It's a business matter. Captain. You've been recommended a? a man of high purpose and dependability. As the heir to my father's controlling interest in Intercontinental Lines I am badly in need of a man with your experience to handle traffic details." Bill lifted a brow. "Intercontinental Lines? Never heard of it. Exclusively airline traffic on Earth"? "It's a new company formed under monopoly regulations. Of course, I realize you're a spaceman, but staying on Earth would have its compensations. You can name your own salary." Bill leaned forward and mixed another drink. This was something unexpected and pretty tempting too. No more fighting his fear of space. He downed the drink in a few gulps, then stood up. "Well, I -- I'd like to think things over," he said with hesitation, walking slowly to the window. Margo followed, saying, "I don't mean to rush you, Bill -- yet the situation needs your experienced hand." "I know, but my brother and I are all set to make a scouting trip to Beta Quadrant." Margo leaned against the window drapes, smiling with frank admiration. "I know you are. How in the world you can take off from Earth and hit a target far out in space is beyond me. Is it something like firing artillery?" The warm glow already suffusing Bill's senses took on added lustre when he looked into her questioning eyes. Expansively, he began drawing diagrams, and explaining the elements of space navigation. "Now here's the trajectory my brother and I are planning to use," he went on, drawing a complex curve with loading figures and fuel consumption and point of contact with the Beta Quadrant. When he paused once, Margo touched the gold sunburst emblem on his arm. "That's fascinating, Bill, but making a trip like yours is all a gamble. I'm not offering you a gamble. I'm offering you a sure thing." "Yes, I realize that." Bill got to his feet. "But just the same I want to think your proposition over, Margo." She leaned toward him putting her hands on his lapels. "Bill, don't risk your neck out there in space. I need you desperately in the company." Suddenly, Bill was electrically aware of cool, smooth arms sliding up and around his neck and her soft red mouth within fragrance distance. And he was exquisitely aware of the full soft length of her pressing against him. The scent of jasmine reached him with bewitching stealth. That was when he closed the gap to her mouth in a sudden rush. Bill came out of a whirling state of pure feeling to hear the visiphone buzzing insistently. "The phone," he mumbled. Margo opened her eyes dreamily, then comprehended. She walked over to the phone, picked up the receiver. After a moment she turned around looking at him questioningly. "It's for you. Bill." He took the phone and said, "Captain Staker speaking." The desk clerk said, "A gentleman to see you, sir. Shall I send him to Apt. #B?" "No" Bill answered. "I'll be down to my room in a few moments and see him there." He turned to Margo. "I guess business comes before idyll, Margo. I've got to go." Her lustrous dark eyes searched his face intently. "How long must I wait for an answer. Bill?" "Can you wait until Thursday -- three days?" Time enough to thresh things out with Tom. "I guess I can," Margo said, touching him with an inviting glance, "but do I have to wait that long before I see you again?" Bill grinned and shook his head in wonder. "My lord, what persistence! I got an idea any visiting would not be entirely social. Somewhere along the line business would rear its shaggy head. Okay, how about dinner at the Wedgewood Room tomorrow night?" "Wonderful!" Later at his own floor to his surprise he found Tom pacing the. corridor. In a strained voice he said, "The clerk said a gentleman -- " Tom came back in a conciliatory tone, "And I don't fit the description, eh? Well, anyway. Bill, we got things to talk over. How about it?" Bill shrugged noncommittally, unlocked his door and the two entered. Perched on the arm of a chair. Bill lighted a cigarette and pulled deeply of it. "Well, what is it?" He glanced coolly at his brother sitting with his left leg dangling over the arm of his chair. Tom cleared his throat and said, "I -- er, came to see how we're stacking up. Bill. After all we got a big show on our hands and the whole world is waiting for the curtain to go up. But we can't be squabbling between ourselves when we go on stage. Let's settle matters now and get on with our job -- after all we both got a lot at stake in the company." Bill studied the end of his cigarette a long moment. "I guess you might as well count me out, Tom. I'm quitting the show." Furrows appeared above Tom's brows. "Quitting! And after all you've put into the venture? Bill, have you gone nuts?" He stopped a moment. Then he said, "Oh, I guess I see the light. Christy eh? Well, Bill, honest -- and I really mean this -- you can have all the profits of the trip if I'm guilty of trying to take Christy away from you. You've got the wrong slant on things." Bill shrugged, saying, "It's not that -- and I still am not convinced -- it's just that I'm considering another proposition." Tom got to his feet in agitation, looking down at Bill incredulously. "My God, Bill, you sure have changed! What about all those bull sessions we had reading and rereading the George Staker philosophy of free enterprise? The world needs an object lesson to show how far it has strayed from those first wonderful days of the Atomic Age. We are heirs. Bill by special franchise, Old George saw the shape of things to come pretty clearly, and it's up to us to carry out his vision of things as they should be." Bill ground out his cigarette in a tray. His underlip crowded out stubbornly. 'T'm not going." For a moment Tom stared hard at Bill, and a heavy singing silence lay between them. Then Tom strode to the door and opened it. "All right, Bill -- you and I are through!" The door slammed. For awhile Bill sat looking at it, wondering why the slammed door reminded him of looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and telling himself "I'm scared -- scared as hell. And if I don't get hold of myself. I'm through -- washed up!" busily dressing, the ultrafax popped out the breakfast edition. "Space Bird takes off for Beta Quadrant. Tom Staker gambles all." Bill stared at the pictures of the rocket climbing savagely at the head of a column of fire. The crazy, stubborn fool. Going it alone-, risking his neck and everybody else's aboard. Well, let him go out there and break his blasted neck on the Asteroid Belt. For the next three days Bill saw much of Margo. She was the most exciting thing he had ever discovered, and he indulged her laughingly when she took to speaking of his position in Intercontinental Lines as an accomplished fact. On the third day he took Margo to lunch, a Margo with shining eyes, for this was Bill's day of decision. She had done her work well. He ordered for them, and added, "Also a bottle of champagne." The waiter brought the champagne first. There was no doubt on Margo's features what this was about, even though it had always been "if", "maybe" "possibly" in Bill's discussions with her about the new job. In the midst of picking up his glass and proposing a toast, "Here's to my new -- " Bill stopped. The ultrafax had popped out a sheet. Carefully putting the glass down, he said, "That's a special bulletin." Picking it up he read aloud, "Staker Rocket in serious trouble. Home field reports damage by small meteor. Crew on emergency air bottles. Mysterious emanations blind radar scope and disrupt communication with Earth." Tom -- and the others, out there fighting for their lives against suffocation and intense cold. Their quarrel seemed like the antics of teenagers now. He had to get out to the field, see if he c ould help. "What are you going to do?" Margo was watching him intently, the knuckles of her small hands white. "I'm going to the field." "But -- but what about that toast you were making to your new -- job, that's what you were going to say, wasn't it?" Her eyes were intense spots of jet. "I guess that'll have to wait, Margo," he told her. "I can't stand by when Tom needs help." Margo clutched his hands convulsively. "Bill, don't take a rocket up or you'll die in the same trap he's dying in!" The words rushed out as if through a trapdoor she could not control. Bill glanced at her with sharp, new interest. "How do you know it's a trap, and how do you know he's going to die?" Tears began to well up in her large eyes. "All I can tell you is don't go out there, Bill. I don't want to lose you -- now." Dawning realization filled Bill with horror. "Margo -- Margo, for God's sake, what kind of a game have you been playing with me!" Margo's shoulders sagged, and she began to sob out her story. "Bill, please, please believe me. I love you. That was not my part of the agreement with Asteroid Mining -- to fall in love with you. Yes, I was hired to separate you and your brother, break up your company." Before Bill could snarl an answer to that, a hotel service clerk came with a portable phone. "Call for you, sir." With his eyes fixed steadily on Margo, he spoke into the transmitter, "Captain Staker." Christy's strained and tearful voice came over the wire. "Bill, oh, Bill, we're getting terrible news here at the field. Tom's ship is losing oxygen!" "Yes, I know," he answered. "I just got the Ultra on it. I'll be right out, Christy." As he replaced the phone he looked at Margo with a grim, loathing expression. "A female trick as old as the universe and I had to fall for it. You and your innocent questions about our Quadrant trajectory! What a sucker I was!" He drew back his hand to slap her but decided against it. She was crying when he left. On the way to the field the familiar but forgotten black tide of fear rose up like a spectre once more to scatter his gathering ideas for helping Tom. Resigning himself to its power and pulling over to the roadside, he sat still, gripping the wheel. Yes, he told himself tensely, here I sit while Tom and the others drift in space needing help. The realization of their need slowly gave him a greater objective clarity than he had ever had before. He began to see himself now for what he was -- a cringing weakling stripped naked of all manliness at the first show of evil. Though he perhaps had been worse than the average, this was the trouble with his whole security minded generation. They never dreamed great dreams like George Staker and his era which wrested atomic power from the treasure house of nature. No, this generation carefully followed safe, charted paths in the world of ideas. It had given up its freedom to a world of government controlled monopolies. And Tom, taking up the torch left by their creatively imaginative ancestor, was trying to recapture a small facet of that golden age, Mid-Twentieth Century mind. as the black tide receded over the horizon of his inner world. He took a new firm grip on the wheel, and took off again at high speed. Christy was at the field office waiting outside. As he stepped out of the car, she threw her arms around him. "Oh, Bill, what can you do for Tom now?" He said gently, "I'll bring him back for you." She drew back her head to look at him incredulously, "You still think -- ! Oh, Bill, you foolish guy, you're the one I love, the one I've always loved." For a moment he searched her eyes and saw only a revelation of honest feeling. A surging gladness flooded through him, releasing an unconscious hard ball of tension inside. "Christy, what a knothead I've been!" He gathered her up to kiss her fervently. "So long, Christy. Old Staker was a piker at dreaming compared to what I'm dreaming for you and me!" The field men had the rocket fueled up and provisioned to go. "This'll be no picnic, but there's a prize out there if we want it bad enough. You'll all have a share in it, instead of handing it all over to the government. Are you with Tom and me?" "Sure, Bill. Let's go!" "Yeah, let's open ! er wide up!" They all clambered up the ship's access ladder in high spirits. In a moment a warning red signal rocket shot into the sky and burst, warning all local aircraft. Another five minutes and the rocket leapt off the Earth with a long, shattering roar. Bill kept the fissioning metals pouring through the atomic explosive after-chambers until the men screamed at the acceleration. Finally he eased it off to free flight and the Space Dragon followed the trajectory of the Space Bird. All the way he hovered over the radar scope. Then after long hours of fatiguing watching he crawled into his bunk. Later he woke up to Radarman Jones' voice in his ear. "Captain -- wake up. We've picked up a ship on the scope!" Bill piled out and forced his floating feet to magnetic contact with the steel deck. He followed Jones down the short corridor to the communications cabin. At the radar scope Bill studied the ship, then gave orders decelerating the Space Dragon. "There's another ship!" Jones exclaimed, pointing at the edge of the scope. Bill peered at the new ship, studying its characteristics. Then he nodded his head. "It's the Space Bird all right. But that first one -- I got an idea it must be an Asteroid Mining ship.Margo must have transmitted the Space Bird trajectory to Asteroid Mining. I don't see how anybody would know where to find us in such immense distances as Beta Quadrant." Stepping over to the communications panel he called the Space Bird. No answer, and though he kept calling he could not raise the ship. Then he called Staker Field on Earth. "Caxton?" The field came back. "Staker Field. Go ahead." I # "Caxton, we've found the Space Bird but can't speak them, so I'm cutting you in on communications with an Asteroid Mining ship that's hanging around. Tape pictures and sound -- the whole works." "Okay." Flipping another switch. Bill called the strange ship on the allinterplanetary frequency. Suddenly after long minutes of silence the dark screen lighted up with the impassive features of a round faced, cold eyed man. "Yeah? This is the Pluton. What d'you want -- and who are you?" "This is the Space Dragon -- sister ship to the Space Bird there in your vicinity. What's the matter with our ship?" The man's eyes darkened and his jaws tightened. "There's plenty wrong with it, Space Dragon. And the same thing's going to be wrong with your ship, too. A 'meteor' is going to hit your ship the same as hit the Space Bird. Asteroid Mining doesn't like competitors horning in their business!" Bill shot back grimly, "I'm glad to hear your views on competition. Mister. The whole world is interested in our Project Venture, and when they hear what you said there's going to be hell to pay. Because, you see, everything you say and how you look saying it is being recorded back at Staker Field on Earth!" The other man's impassive face suddenly turned into a ludicrous mask of a man burning his fingers on hot chestnuts. The two way hook-up abruptly ended. On the scope Bill and Jones watched the image of the Pluton begin to move across the scope and finally out of range in the opposite direction toward Asteroid Mining's Omega Quadrant. Hours later the Space Dragon made physical contact with Tom's ship. Bill was the first one through the communicating airlock. Tom, his face drawn and haggard, met him as he emerged in the ship. The rest of the crew were ly ing still to conserve air. "Hi, Bill. Boy, are we glad to see you. That 'meteor' they threw at us confined us on air bottles in the forward compartments." Bill shook his hand warmly. "We got enough air for all of us. After we patch tilings up here, let's start carving us a chunk of private enterprise." Tom's tired eyes lighted up. "Hm, say, you're so right! Our geigers have found enough floating ore in Beta Quadrant already to make a big nick in Asteroid's business. Bill gave him a mock salute, "Okay, skipper. You've earned the title of Head Dreamer, and I'll help make your dreams come true!" who enters T racy's Department Store is not always right, but as far as you are concerned, he is. By Waldo T. Boyd blinked three times. Trevor Anson arranged his tie at just the nattily precise angle, waved his hand before a hidden lighting-effect switch in the smooth marble pillar at the entrance to the display room, and faced the elevator. This would be a "green light" customer -- a firsttime prospect, and three blinks indicated a very difficult individual. Anson quickly practiced his most beguiling smile. "Welcome to Tracy's Roboid Department," he said, enthusiastically, as the elevator doors slid open. His practiced smile was just right. He quickly noted the man's conservative dress, the flaming red tie. Aggressive type, Anson decided. A shock of red hair that didn't want to lie down hinted that he was stubborn as well. "Heard you've got a sale on robots," Red-tie said, challengingly, as he stepped aside for his wife. The woman who stepped off the elevator smiled, showing a lovely dimple, and Anson beamed on her. The tiny flake ol a hat perched atop her auburn hair reminded Anson of the comb on a Rhode Island Red. "Not robots, sir," Anson corrected diplomatically. "The PlastiCast Roboid is not exactly a robot." "Well, anyhow, trot one out, and will never be satisfied until she's seen one of the things." He glared dramatically in the general direction of his w'ife, who pretended not to notice. Anson led them into the Gray Room. He mentally went over the applicable rule: Rule #; Always introduce the marked-down merchandise first. It may provide the customer with an incentive lor buying something better. "These are last year's models," he said, with just the right flavor of distaste in his voice. "Of course, you may expect a slight reduction... a small percentage... Red-tie was muttering. "Damned mechanical things, full of wheels and wires. What's to keep 'em from "But dear, they don't have wheels anymore," protested the woman, timidly. Her face was pretty, Anson decided, but it was obvious that the man would be the deciding factor in this sale. He made a mental note: Rule #: Pick the individual of a family group who seems to hold the decidbered a portion of a sales talk he had memorized a few days before, and took it up, almost chanting: "... our Roboids are grown, much as crystals are grown, in great vats in New Chicago. A Plasti-Cast Roboid is guaranteed..." "A fat chance we'd have of collecting the guarantee if we were chopped into mincemeat," Red-tie interrupted, shuddering slightly as the implication of his own words hit him. Anson felt a moment of panic as he failed to remember an applicable rule from the Salesman's Guide, but it formed in his mind at the last moment: Rule #: Never argue with a customer -- change the subject. "Why don't you come with me to the Green Room?" he asked. "The very latest models are on display." He walked slowly at first, then more quickly as the couple allowed themselves to be led. He slid his hand near a hidden switch in the archway, and floodlights came on just as they entered. The woman uttered a little squeal of delight at the sight of a very handsome figure dressed in a cutaway, standing in an attitude of service. "Oh!" she breathed dreamily. "He would make such a wonderful bulter." "Well, wind him up and let's see what he'll do," growled the man, his face florid in the colored light of the Green Room. "I'm so very sorry," Anson said, slightly flustered, remembering that this was always the crucial moment in a sale. "The Roboid cannot be activated for demonstration purposes." "What?" roared Red-tie, incredulously. "Do you mean to say you want me to buy the damned thing without knowing whether it ticks or not?" Anson tried desperately to remember the best rule for such an answer, but failed. He plunged desperately into his own explanation. "You see, our Roboids are matched to your family personality at the time of purchase, and activated then. We cannot erase a personality once it has been transferred to their sensitive minds." He saw the disbelieving smirk on the man's mouth and felt that the sale was indeed lost. But he plunged on, desperately. "They're very economical. They don't require any upkeep, like food. When they become tired they will sit or lie down near an electric outlet and plug in a power cord, and in a few minutes they are as rested and tireless as..." "Bosh!" Red-tie retorted. "I've still have time to try Bonn's new Helio-rotor. At least they'll give us a demonstration." Anson escorted them to the Magna-lift. He felt better as he recalled the last rule in the Guide, the one that seemed to cover the situation so well: Rule #: If they balk because of the no-demonstration rule, let them go. They will be back when they have seen one of their friends with a Plasti-Casi Roboid. "Good-bye, Sir; Madam," Anson said wearily, as the Magna-lift doors closed, "Come again soon." He breathed a sigh of relief as the elevator cage dropped them from sight. A salesman, who had been standing by, spoke to Anson. "People are such dears at times, aren't they?" he said. "How'ever, it's time for your rest period. I'll take over now." "Thank you so much," Anson replied tiredly. He walked to a tiny room at the far end of the great showroom and closed the door. He stretched wearily out on a low, folding cot, the only piece of furniture, and reached for a tiny black power cord hanging nearby. Deftly he plugged it into the socket under his armpit, and breathed deeply, relaxedly. "Yes," he chanted softly, drifting off to sleep," people are such dears sometimes." Of I, published bi-monthly at Buffalo, New York, for October #, #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, maim i  dltnr. and business managers are: Publisher, Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., #  Union Ave., Kingston, N. Y. ; Editor, James L. Quinn, # Clinton Avenue, Kingston, N. Y. ; Managing editor. None ; Business manager, None... #. The owner is: (if owned by a corporation, its name and mM must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockln-M th owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock.) Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., # Clinton Avenue, Kingston, N. Y. ; .Tames L. Quinn, # Clinton Avenue, Kingston, New York. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are : None. #. The two paiagraphs next above, giving the names of owners, stockholders, and security holders, if any, contain not only the list of stockholders mu security holders as they appear upon the books of the company but also, in cases where I lie stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the coin puny ns trustee nr in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, is given; also that the said two paragraphs contain statements embracing affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of tin company ns trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner; and this affiant has no reason to believe that any. other person, association, or corporation has any interest direct or indirect in the said stock, bonds, or other securities (lion ns so stated by him. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only). James L. Quinn, Editor . Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September, #. (seaIj) Evelyn Dorothy Hubbard (My commission expires March #) The Sea Between the Planets space, no one will be able to tell about the condition of weightlessness, the absence of gravity, the state of "free fall" that can be experienced. We know that antigravity devices seem improbable. Yet it is extremely desirable to know how a human being feels and behaves in free fall, in a state of null-gravity. Scientists have been beating their heads against a solid wall endeavoring to think up some way, no matter how inadequate, of simulating this situation. Parachute jumpers offer one possibility. In a sense, when they are falling freely, before their parachutes open, they are in the equivalent situation of a rocket man floating free in his space suit. Unfortunately they can't fall for a very long time without having to open their chutes. In addition, even during the moments of so-called free fall, they are too conscious of the highspeed air-stream flowing around them. Shock, wind, cold -- all such conditions -- lessen the sensation of true free fall. The idea of a freely falling elevator also simulates gravity-less-ness. But here too the duration of unhindered fall is slight. Even if an artificial elevator structure of great height were constructed, the period of being in free fall would be short, because in a short time the snubbers and shock absorbers would have to take hold and ease the freely falling elevator to rest. There is a strong possibility, however, that such a structure might be built in the not very distant future, for it would enable space surgeons and medical men interested in human reactions to space flight to get some accurate observed data on biological behavior under no gravity. In fact, this will probably be done soon, for medical men are clamoring for data which they just can't get in any other way. The free-floating of a rubbersuited swimmer whose bouyancy in water is just one, is a rough simulation, in a sense, of weightlessness and free fall, although here the presence of the water medium is highly deceptive. At least the tremendous freedom of motion with the consequent loss of sense of direction helps a lot in giving the feeling of free fall. The sea between the planets is of a far more tenuous stuff than water! The free-fall elevator mentioned above is about the one chance we on Earth will have of experiencing free fall. Constructed vertically along the side of a cliff or high mountain, say, only as high as ten thousand feet -- by no means an impossible engineering feat -- an elevator system would provide a considerable amount of information on how the human body reacts to weightlessness, at least for periods of a few minutes. The falling elevator, stream-lined and projectileshaped, could avoid acquiring the conventional terminal velocity for quite a while, and thus duplicate considerably the conditions within a space ship in free space without acceleration. As soon as the plans for actual manned rockets come a little closer to reality, we arc likely to see and hear a lot of organizations trumpeting for one of these space duplicators. The technicians and medical men will have a hard time trying to prevent people from sneaking a ride one way or another. Come to think of it, if an amusement park were to install such an elevator, it might do a hearty business! Skyrocket #-#... is the better word -- catapulted across the sky at the incredible speed of thirteen hundred miles an hour! This recently released news shows that we are finally beginning to produce sound original research in rocket engines instead of being content merely to copy and modify German rockets. The behavior and use of the new experimental craft compares with the plane-intercepting rockets the Germans were using in the last days of World War II. The Skyrocket is a small plane, with the barest traces of swept-back wings; it is powered solely by rockets and was launched from the belly of a B-# at thirty thousand feet. From this altitude it climbed almost vertically to eighty thousand feet and then zoomed in a series of maneuvers designed to test its strength. It came through with flying colors, and despite a flight-duration measured in minutes -- about four for this plane -- it showed great promise as the ultimate interceptor type. When the fuel was exhausted the pilot glided to a safe landing and reported on the behavior of the rocket. He reported that the rocket shot through the "sonic" barrier without any of the yawing, vibration or other faults which have characterized that operation with jets. His personal reactions to the flying qualities of the rocket were slight, since he was basically operating from instruments and, to all intents and purposes, flying blind. This single flight is not in itself extraordinarily spectacular, but it is indicative of what is in the cards. If such information has been released it is safe to assume that considerably more progressive work has already been done on other straight rocket craft. It is interesting to consider that all that holds rocketry back is the matter of fuel nothing else. In a way, it is as though we knew all about airplanes and their flight but didn't have powerful enough engines. That is exactly the position of rocketry. Chemical fuels, no matter how they are concocted, still haven't the "oomph" to take rockets where they are able to go. We won't see reafly startling advances in rocket flight until one of two things happens: either some government will decide to build a chemical steprocket to go to the Moon, and hang the expense, or some geniuses will tie atomic energy to rocket engines. Until then rockets are doomed to be chained by gravity to the relatively thin shell of Terran air. Greatly encouraging is the fact that the military are growing concerned with the uses to which rockets may be put. Maybe they can persuade Uncle Sam to finance Lunar flight! Transistor in Transition... "ramis in the framus" gadgets which, in the course of time, is going to change the lives of all of us -- and which, because of its unspectacular, technical nature, will rarely be appreciated by any but the technician. Yet every thinking person should be acquainted with it. It is the gadget which is inheriting the mantle of the Twentieth Century's most important invention, the vacuum tube. The gadget is called a "transistor" and was invented in the Bell Telephone Labs only a few years ago. Since then every laboratory on Earth has been working madly on it, and now it is ready to be applied on a wide scale. The transistor is nothing but a substitute for a vacuum tube -- "only it don't got no vacuum !" Physically the transistor is a sliver of germanium metal, sealed within a capsule scarcely as large as a sixth of a cigarette and with three or four tiny "cat's whisker" wires touching it. That's all there is to it. It has no filament or grid or plate like an ordinary radio tube. It requires no power input except a simple plate voltage. It gives off hardly any heat. It is insensible to shock and violence. It is small. It is not made of delicate glass. It is rugged. It is cheap. And its virtues could be recited ad infinitum. What does it do? It does everything ordinary radio tubes do! You take it from there, compiling, if you can, a small list of the things modern vacuum tubes do. You'll have a fabulous list! Electronics has burst on the world with miracles, but generally these have been dampened somewhat by the need for using tender tubes. The transistor overcomes this obstacle and wherever . a vacuum tube control can be substituted for human muscles or human mind, the new industrial transistor, a mere three years out of the development stage, can take over the job. If you think we live in an electronics age now, watch the next decade and note particularly that the vacuum tube will be limited to power applications. The transistor, simple to build, harder to understand in terms of its operation ( its theory involves "holes in space") is coming... Coming in the May issue: The author of that famous work, The Exploration of Space, brings to IF readers an exciting years ago. Don't miss -- (Continued from page #) mass and location has least effect on all solar systems outside its own." The young Lobian, obviously jubilant at having so far managed to be correct, studied his computations, adjusted several dials below the scanning screen and brought a single solar system into view. Twisting other dials, he brought the image nearer and nearer until only the sun could be seen on the small screen. Then he made a careful final adjustment, touched a switch, and one by one the planets of the solar system singly popped into view. With an apparatus resembling a four-dimensional slide rule. Junior made rapid calculations as each of the nine appeared. Then he laid aside the apparatus and watched the parade of planets begin to move by a second time. Halfway through he touched a button, stopping one planet on the screen. This he pointed at hopefully. It was the planet known on Earth as Mars. Plorace shook his head with a kind of triumphant sadness. "You see?" he telegraphed George. "He has the right solar system, but the wrong planet, though the one he indicated does have the least effect on all solar systems outside its own." George looked puzzled. "I don't quite follow that myself." "I specified provable planet. The one Junior picked is too small for a practical experiment with the equipment we have available." The teacher glanced at George. "It is only natural you would miss that point, for of course you don't know our school equipment. But only yesterday its limitations were explained to Junior. You see how forgetting to include all the data in his calculations causes your son to err?" George nodded reluctantly. His antennae blushing a fiery red, Junior again fiddled with dials and brought the planet we call Earth into view. "There!" he telegraphed. Horace radioed his approval, an affirmative grunt. George beamed his pride. A door in back of Marshall Igor Matoshek opened and his watching and listening audience saw the tall, soldierly figure of General Serge Marik appear on the screen. Silently the aide-de-camp banded a slip of paper to the most important man in all the world. The Marshall adjusted his spectacles, frowned at the note and a flush of anger mounted to his cheeks. He waved the general away. "Comrades," he announced. "I have just received the answer the President of the Tri-federation of North America has made to our reasonable offer of peaceful terms. I will not bore you with the full context, but it amounts to a categorical refusal." "You will wait for my signal, of course," Horace radioed Junior. "When your adjustments are complete, please transmit them to me clearly." "Yes Sir," Junior sent back. "Azimuth two-hundred seventeen mils, five-hundred and two micromils. Elevation minus eight mils, thirty-six micromils." "It is necessary to check students' data very carefully," Horace explained to George. "If by error we destroyed the entire solar system, it might throw us off our orbit sufficiently to cause mild weather changes. Conceivably it could even cause slight Lobequakes. The elimination of the single planet's mass will have only slight effect on its own solar system, however. Not enough to seriously incommode any life there may be on the other planets. And of course it will have no effect whatever on solar systems other than its own." "Comrades and citizens of the world," Marshall Igor Matoshek said, "you are about to witness an event beside which all other events of the past pale to insignificance." He raised one arm and spoke in a thunderous voice. "Fire!" "Fire," Horace transmitted absently, and as Junior touched the proper button, turned apologetically to George. "I am afraid you don't find this very interesting. After all, it's pretty elementary stuff." ( Continued from page #) resurrect #. But they'd gain nothing. There would still be an extra plate. You see? "So they destroyed the plate. He knew they would. And they also had to go back through the records, to Earth, through the security files there, through the birth records, everything. And they destroyed every trace, every shred of evidence that No. # ever existed." So he kept the memory alive and that kept #I alive while the other prisoners become automatons, hearing, feeling, sensing nothing except the bells. Remembering nothing, anticipating nothing. But #I could remember something magnificent, and so he could anticipate, and that was hope, and faith. He found that no one really believed him but he kept on telling it anyway, the story of the Plan. "Maybe this number didn't exist," someone would say. "If there's no record anywhere -- " #I would smile. "In my head, there's where the record is. # know. # remember." And so it was that #I was the only one who still remembered and who could still smile when sometime after that -- no one in the prison colony knew how long -- the Underground was victorious, and the Managerial System crumbled. I 'Padtmcut  Dear Mr. Quinn : I wish to take issue with the opinions expressed by "pwf" on pages # and # of your November issue. "You understand the law... or you... stop eating," pwf says. But he evidently does not understand the law. He proves this by a comparison of historical technological progress with the stock market. He must be aware that an analogy is good only if the points of resemblance are demonstrated so rigorously that some other form of argument would usually be less involved and require no additional reasoning. In other words, the chief use of an analogy is to impress the unthinking. Mr. pwf, by depending entirely on analogy without any demonstration, shows he realizes the weakness of his argument. The reasons for rises and falls in the stock market are fairly simple and obvious, and can be expressed as an almost entirely uncomplicated feedback equation. Can pwf do the same for the causes of technological progress? Until he can, where is his analogy. (The equation mentioned above shows the conditions of a collapse, but it is extremely difficult to determine by observation whether these conditions are present. Hence the early wolf-crying mentioned by pwf.) Rise and fall is not the pattern of every action known. Until pwf can show that technological progress has the characteristics of actions showing this pattern rather than of those showing other patterns, his argument must remain suspect. I have concentrated on technological progress because this seems to have been all taken in by pwf's very narrow view. Actually, I think the prospect of decline in other fields much more likely. We may well be heading for a period of superscientific moronism. You can see from this I am not being merely Pollyanna-ish. I think the prospects of decline excellent and frightening, and would appreciate seeing some real debate on this question, provided that it is conducted on a somewhat more concrete level than was done in Mr. pwf's undoubtedly well-written article. Some attention must be paid to facts, such as now existing trends in all fields, the cycles of past civilizations, and the level to which knowledge and dispersion thereof must reach before becoming no longer totally destructible; less to ghostly and unreliable analogies. -- Michael Wigodsky Houston, Texas We think pwf was writing of generalities and the over-all cycles of I # human progress and decline rather than attempting to make a specific analogy of humanity , reduced to a common denominator , and its foreshadoived doom. However, there can be interesting debate -- and we'd like to hear froth someone who wishes to take it up with Mr. Wi god sky. Dear Editor: The November issue of IF was excellent, in my opinion. I congratulate you on the pictures on the inside back and front covers. It looks so much better than when it was plain. When I pick up an IF mag I read it from cover to cover. I just finished the November issue and I find I like "The Image and the Likeness" best... Please remember to run lots of short stories... One complaint -- Why didn't the cover have anything to do with the rest of the book? You put out a good mag... It is the best science fiction magazine in the United States. Keep up the good work. -- Richard F. Allen Framingham, Mass, That's a mighty fine compliment. We thank you!... Now, about the covers on IF: beginning with the November issue, our policy is to vary our covers. Some will be symbolical (November issue) some will illustrate a story, some will suggest a theme -- whichever offers the strongest approach to originality and effectiveness. Dear Mr. Quinn : A letter in "The Postman Cometh" (November issue) literally drove me to compose my first "letter to the editor". This letter represents, in my opinion, the height of bigotry and intolerance! The writer is "chagrined" to find that fanzine reviews are requested. His "worst fears are realized". He is "nauseated" at letters using "slangy drivel". The presumptuousness of such readers is astonishing. They are, in effect, demanding that a mass circulation magazine be tailored to their personal specifications without regard to the interests of others. The fact that I enjoy fanzines is beside the point. I do not like your Science Briefs section, but I would not dream of suggesting that your other readers be deprived of the enjoyment and instruction they find therein. I have no sympathy for "nausea" caused by letters using "infantilisms" such as "terrif", "groovy", etc. Or even "egad", "gazooks", or "goshwowoboyoboyoboy" ! The average adolescent science fiction reader is, as a rule, considerably advanced intellectually beyond his age level. The fact that they express their enthusiasm and opinions in the patois of their contemporaries should not deprive them of the right to self-expression that you offer all buyers and readers of your magazine. Science fiction belongs to youth -- let them speak! -- P. H. Economou Miami, Florida miles from base, approximately # miles above surface of the Moon. Televised image reveals it to be hostile. Base Command switches to automatic pilot control and both missiles converge on target for crash dive. Pursuit is similar to principle of dog hunting rabbit, only instead of following a scent, missiles follow a metallic surface and image of the craft. Two missiles insure complete destruction. (Drawings by Ed Vatigursky.) Puzzles in Every Issue! America's greatest value in puzzle pleasure, # pages chock full of brand new puzzles of every variety and fascinating articles of interest to puzzle lovers everywhere! Just ask your local news dealer -- only #c at all stands. EiaSNB"Zl i U m t p #"  A fjt z' fy  l standpoint. Its eroded hills and ice caps would be the only relief in the monotonous horizon of barren wasteland. Perpetual dust storms, insufficient atmosphere, and blinding sun would inflict physical discomforts. Here, explorers study the terrain as their space ship makes aerial studies. The deep crevices that split the desert could be the "canals" that form geometric patterns in the astronomers telescope. On the horizon is one of the ice, or polar, caps. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale May #th of faith in that old adage that says "it is difference of opinion that makes horse races". I think the coiner of that was a great American named Samuel Clemens, who was bom in Florida, Missouri, over a hundred years ago. He wrote a lot of kinda wonderful stuff about the Mississippi and other things under the pseudonym of Mark Twain. Remember it? Well, I guess I didn't take that "difference of opinion" quite literally enough. I shoulda known that when it says horse races it means horse races. Anyhow, IF ain't a horse-racing sheet -- so I've been wrong. About disagreeing, or difference of opinion, that is. Especially about the writers who write for IF. But I've seen the light... The light was in a letter I got recently from a gentleman up in Houlton, Maine, who seems to have read a science fiction magazine for the first time. He says he wouldn't have bothered reading it but for his "very persuasive brother, who, like others, is very fanatic about this kind of literature". Well, all that's okay. There's them what likes science fiction and them what don't. It's a free country and all that, you know. But here's the part that showed me the light. Quote: "It seems to me as though your writers must be slightly crazy. They all disagree about the future in particular." Now, can you imagine anybody putting out a magazine with writers who disagree? It's absurd. Writers should all think and write alike. Anybody knows that if one writer says the human race is going to have green hair, lavender skin, three arms and five legs in the year #, by golly they're all gonna say it. The manuscript that says it's going to happen in # or # gets sent back. And I think I'd better get busy and write all our authors to the effect that anybody who fools around with ideas about future experiments in nuclear fission or gravity or brassieres without coming to an agreement with the others appearing in that issue is due for a blackball. at last. Now about our stories being "too fantastic to consider". I'll also have to correct that right away. Practically everybody knows that great writers of past centuries never dreamed up such fantastic things as steam power, air travel, underwater craft, radio, gravity, biotics, atomic power, astronomy. etc., etc. Anybody who ever read a history book knows that the immortals of science -- da Vinci, Faraday, Edison, Galileo, Newton, to name a few -- always got a unanimous vote of confidence from their readers and critics. Nobody considered their dreams fantastic. They never cooked up a broth that was centuries ahead of their times. For example, suppose somebody had put a television set down in front of George Washington, with Dagmar doing her stuff. Would he have cried fantastic! Not about the television set, he wouldn't. Television, which practically everybody has got a set of these days, wasn't fantastic in those days. This thing of writers letting their imaginations run off is bad stuff. They ought to stick to solid facts, something you can put your feet in. Like a pair of old galoshes or something. Come to think of it, somebody had to dream those up -- or did they? Remind me to ask a boot manufacturer sometime just how we got galoshes. However, an idea just barged into that thing I hang my hat on: Why not get out a reprint of the Podunk telephone directory? Then you can really check your facts. All you need is a pocketful of nickels and dimes. Whether the thought in the final paragraph applies to all science fiction magazines or not, I don't know, but here's how it goes: "A magazine like yours is hardly sensible reading for anyone." And he signs off with "truthfully", so I guess he means it. Now that dum right hurts. But I'm gonna take it to heart and request an IQ from everybody around the office. So I took this letter seriously and I hope our readers do, too. And when this gentleman from Maine borrows the next issue of IF, he'll be happy to see that all the writers therein have certificates stating that they have never been within # miles of a laughing academy, and what's more they'll all agree in their plots and ideas concerning the future. They're going to get their slide rules out and everyone is going to come up with the identical answer. run into a friend of mine last night who was one of "hell's angels" way back in # and #. His name is Henry Jones and he was one of those daredevil knights of the skies who formed part of that elite flying group known as the Lafayette Escadrille. Well, we got to chinning about flying in those days, when their "kites" were covered with a cloth fabric and painted with a substance known as "dope" and a #-calibre bullet came in one side and went out the other and they came back plenty mornings looking like a piece of Swiss cheese. Anyhow, we talked aviation clean up through the jet jobs of today that can crowd a thousand miles per hour. When the chin music was over, we had it all figured out how, ten years hence, we'd be crossing the Atlantic in better than three hours, with #passenger ram jets doing # miles per at # feet. You know, that's too fantas Now, about that little ole light. I'd a sworn it was around here some place. -- jlq A captivating new story, by the author of The Exploration of Space, in which a stubborn archeologist and an equally stubborn magazine reporter get delightfully inpdage about possession being nine-tenths of the law. By Arthur C. Clarke Illustrated by Ed Valigursky a small man that a special spacesuit had to be made for him. But what he lacked in physical size he more than made up -- as is often the case -- in sheer drive and determination. When I met him, he'd spent twenty years pursuing a dream. What is more to the point, he had persuaded a whole succession of hard-headed business men, World Council Delegates and administrators of scientific trusts, to underwrite his expenses and to fit out a ship for him. Despite everything that happened later, I still think that was his most remarkable achievement... The Arnold Toynbee had a crew of six aboard when we left Earth. Besides the Professor and Charles Ashton, his chief assistant, there was the usual pilot-navigator-engineer triumvirate and two graduate students -- Bill Hawkins and myself. Neither of us had ever gone into space before, and we were still so excited over the whole thing that we didn't care in the least whether we got back to Earth before the next term started. We had a strong suspicion that our tutor had very similar views. The reference he had produced for us was a masterpiece of ambiguity, but as the number of people who could even begin to read Martian script could be counted on the fingers of one hand, we'd got the job. As we were going to Jupiter, and not to Mars, the purpose of this particular qualification seemed a little obscure, though knowing something about the Professor's theories we had some pretty shrewd suspicions. They were partly confirmed when we were ten days out from Earth. The Professor looked at us very thoughtfully when we answered his summons. Even under zero g he always managed to preserve his dignity, while the best we could do was to cling to the nearest handhold and float around like drifting seaweed. I got the impression (though I may of course be wrong) that he was thinking "What have I done to deserve this?" as he looked from Bill to me and back again. Then he gave a sort of "It's too late to do anything about it now" sigh and began to speak in that slow, patient way he always does when he has something to explain. At least, he always uses it when he's speaking to us. "Since we left Earth," he said, "I've not had much chance to tell you the purpose of this expedition. Perhaps you've guessed it already." "I think I have," said Bill. "Well, go on," replied the Professor, a peculiar gleam in his eye. I did my best to stop Bill, but have you ever tried to kick anyone when you're in free fall? "You want to find some proof -- I mean, some more proof -- of your diffusion theory of extra-terrestrial culture." "And have you any idea why I'm going to Jupiter to look for it?" "Well -- not exactly. I suppose you hope to find something on one of the moons." are fifteen known satellites, and their total area is about half that of Earth. Where would you start looking if you had a couple of weeks to spare? I'd rather like to know." Bill glanced doubtfully at the Professor, as if he almost suspected him of sarcasm. "I don't know much about astronomy," he said. "But there are four big moons, aren't there? I'd start on those." "For your information, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are each about as big as Africa. Would you work through them in alphabetical order?" "No," Bill replied promptly. "I'd start on the one nearest Jupiter and go outwards." "I don't think we'll waste any more time pursuing your logical processes," sighed the Professor. He was obviously impatient to begin his set speech. "Anyway, you're quite wrong. We're not going to the big moons at all. They've been photographically surveyed from space and large areas have been explored on the surface. They've got nothing of archeological interest. We're going to a place that's never been visited before." "Not to Jupiter!" I gasped. "Heavens, no -- nothing as drastic as that! But we're going nearer to him than anyone else has ever been." He paused thoughtfully. "It's a curious thing, you know -- or you probably don't -- that it's nearly as difficult to travel between Jupiter's satellites as it is to go between the planets, although the distances are so much smaller. This is because Jupiter's got such a terrific gravitational field and his moons are traveling so quickly. The innermost moon's moving almost as fast as Earth and the journey to it from Ganymede costs almost as much fuel as the trip from Earth to Venus, even though it takes only a day and a half. "And it's that journey which we're going to make. No one's ever done it before because nobody could think of any good reason for the expense. Jupiter Five is only eighteen miles, in diameter, so it couldn't possibly be of much interest. Even some of the outer satellites, which are far easier to reach, haven't been visited because it hardly seemed worth while to waste the rocket fuel." "Then why are we going to waste it?" I asked impatiently. The whole thing sounded like a complete wild-goose chase, though so long as it proved interesting, and involved no actual danger, I didn't greatly mind. Perhaps I ought to confess -- though I'm tempted to say nothing, as a good many others have done -- that at this time I didn't believe a word of Professor Forster's theories. Of course, I realized that he field, but I did draw the line at some of his more fantastic ideas. After all, the evidence was so slight and the conclusions so revolutionary that one could hardly help being skeptical. Perhaps you can still remember the astonishment when the first Martian expedition found the remains not of one ancient civilization, but of two. Both had been highly advanced, but both had perago. The reason was unknown (and still is) : it did not seem to be warfare, as the two cultures appear to have lived amicably together. One of the races had been insectlike, the other vaguely reptilian. The insects seem to have been the genuine, original Martians: the reptile-people -- usually referred to as "Culture X" -- had arrived on the scene later. So, at least, Professor Forster maintained. They had certainly possessed the secret of space travel, because the ruins of their peculiar cruciform cities had been found on -- of all places -- Mercury. Forster believed that they had tried to colonize all the smaller planets -- Earth and Venus having been ruled out because of the excessive gravity. It was a source of some disappointment to the Professor that no traces of Culture X had ever been found on the Moon, though he was certain that such a discovery was only a matter of time. The "conventional" theory of Culture X was that it had originally come from one of the smaller planets or satellites, had made peaceful contact with the Martians -- the only other intelligent race in the known history of the System -- and had died out at the same time as Martian civilization. But Professor Forster had more ambitious ideas: he was convinced that Culture X had entered the Solar System from interstellar space. The fact that no one else believed this annoyed him, though not very much, for he is one of those people who is only happy when in a minority. could see Jupiter through the cabin porthole as Professor Forster unfolded his plan. It was a beautiful sight: I could just make out the equatorial cloud belts and three of the satellites were visible as little stars close to the planet. I wondered which was Ganymede, our first port of call. "If Jack will condescend to pay attention," the Professor continued, "HI tell you why we're going such a long way from home. You know that last year I spent a good deal of time poking among the ruins in the twilight belt of Mercury. Perhaps you read the paper I gave on the subject at the London School of Economics. You may even have been there -- I do remember a disturbance at the back of the hall. "What I didn't tell anyone then was that while I was on Mercury I discovered an important clue to the origin of Culture X. I've kept quiet about it, although I've been sorely tempted when fools like Dr. Haughton have tried to be funny at my expense. But I wasn't going to risk letting someone else get here before I could organize this expedition. "One of the things I found on Mercury was a rather well-preserved bas-relief of the Solar System. It's not the first that's been discovered -- as you know astronomical motifs are common in true Martian and Culture X art. But there were certain peculiar symbols against various planets, including Mars and Mercury. I think the pattern had some historic significance, and the most curious thing about it is that little Jupiter Five -- one of the least important of all the satellites -- seemed to have the most attention drawn to it. I'm convinced that there's something on Five which is the key to the whole problem of Culture X, and I'm going there to discover what it is." As far as I can remember now, neither Bill nor I was particularly impressed by the Professor's story. Maybe the people of Culture X had left some artifacts on Five for obscure reasons of their own. It would be interesting to unearth them, but hardly likely that they would be as important as the Professor thought. I guess he was rather disappointed at our lack of enthusiasm: if so it was his fault since, as we discovered later, he was still holding out on us. We landed on Ganymede, the third and largest moon, about a week later. Ganymede is the only one of the satellites with a permanent base on it -- there's an observatory and a geophysical station with a staff of about fifty scientists. They were rather glad to see visitors, but we didn't stay long, as the Professor was anxious to refuel and set off again. The fact that we were heading for Five naturally aroused a good deal of interest but the professor wouldn't talk and we couldn't -- he kept too close an eye on us. Ganymede, by the way, is quite an interesting place and we managed to see rather more of it on the return journey. But as I've promised to write an article for another magazine about that, I'd better not say anything else here. Five took just over a day and a half, and it gave us an uncomfortable feeling to see Jupiter expanding hour by hour until it seemed as if he was going to fill the sky. I don't know much about astronomy, but I couldn't help thinking of the tremendous gravity field we were falling into. All sorts of things could go wrong so easily. If we ran out of fuel we'd never be able to get back to Ganymede, and we might even drop into Jupiter himself. I wish I could describe what it was like seeing that colossal globe, with its raging storm belts spinning in the sky ahead of us. Luckily there have been so many color close-ups of Jupiter published by You might lie to Keep your eyes on the "National Geographic" next spring . now that you're bound to have seen some of them. You may even have seen the one which, as I'll explain later, was the cause of all our trouble. At last Jupiter stopped growing: we'd swung into the orbit of Five and would soon catch up with the tiny moon as it raced around the planet. We were all squeezed in the control room waiting for our first glimpse of our target -- at least, all of us who could get in were doing so. Bill and I were crowded out into the corridor and could only crane over other people's shoulders. Kingsley Searle, our pilot, was in the control seat looking as unruffled as ever: Eric Fulton, the engineer, was thoughtfully chewing his mustache and watching the fuel gauges, and Tony Groves was doing complicated things with his navigation tables. And the Professor appeared to be rigidly attached to the eyepiece of the teleperiscope. Suddenly he gave a start and we heard a whistle of indrawn breath. After a minute, without a word, he beckoned to Searle, who took his place at the eyepiece. Exactly the same thing happened, and then Searle handed over to Fulton. It got a bit monotonous by the time Groves had reacted identically, so we wormed our way in and took over after a bit of opposition. I don't know quite what I'd expected to see, so that's probably why I was disappointed. Hanging there in space was a tiny gibbous moon, its "night" sector lit up faintly by the reflected glory of Jupiter. And that seemed to be all. Then I began to make out additional markings, in the way that you do if you look through a telescope for long enough. There were faint criss-crossing lines on the surface of the satellite, and suddenly my eye grasped their full pattern. For it was a pattern: those lines covered Five with the same geometrical accuracy as the lines of latitude and longitude divide up a globe of the Earth. I suppose I gave my whistle of amazement, for then Bill pushed me out of the way and had his turn to look. The next thing I remember is Professor Forster looking very smug while we bombarded him with questions. "Of course," he explained, "this isn't as much a surprise to me as it is to you. Besides the evidence I'd found on Mercury, there were other clues. I've a friend at the Ganymede Observatory whom I've sworn to secrecy and who's been under quite a strain these last few weeks. It's rather surprising to anyone who's not an astronomer that the Observatory has never bothered much about the satellites. The big instruments are all used on extra-galactic nebulae, and the little ones spend all their time looking at Jupiter. "The only thing the Observatory had ever done to Five was to measure its diameter and take a few photographs. They weren't quite good enough to show the markings we've just observed, otherwise there would have been an investigation before. But my friend Lawton detected them through the hundred centimeter reflector when I asked him to look, and he also noticed something else that should have been spotted before. Five is only eighteen miles in diameter, but it's much brighter than it should be for its size. When you compare its reflecting power -- its aldeb -- its -- " "Its albedo!" "Thanks, Tony -- its albedo with thaf of the other moons, you find that it's a much better reflector than it should be. In fact, it behaves more like polished metal than rock." "So that explains it!" I said. "The people of Culture X must have covered Five with an outer shell -- like the domes they built on Mercury, but on a bigger scale." The Professor looked at me rather pityingly. "So you still haven't guessed!" he said. I don't think this was quite fair. Frankly, would you have done any better in the same circumstances? on an enormous metal plain. As I looked through the portholes, I felt completely dwarfed by my surroundings. An ant crawling on the top of an oil storage tank might have had much the same feelings -- and the looming bulk of Jupiter up there in the sky didn't help. Even the Professor's usual cockiness now seemed to be overlaid by a kind of reverent awe. The plain wasn't quite devoid of features. Running across it in various directions were broad bands where the stupendous metal plates had been joined together. These bands, or the criss-cross pattern they formed, were what we had seen from space. About three hundred yards away was a low hill -- at least, what would have been a hill on a natural world. We had spotted it on our way in after making a careful survey of the little satellite from space. It was one of six such projections, four arranged equidistantly around the equator and the other two at the Poles. The assumption was pretty obvious that they would be entrances to the world below the metal shell. I know that some people think it must be very entertaining to walk around on an airless, low-gravity planet in space-suits. Well, it isn't. There are so many points to think about, so many checks to make and precautions to observe, that the mental strain outweighs the glamour -- at least as far as I'm concerned. But I must admit that this time, as we climbed out of the airlock, I was so excited that for once these things didn't worry me. The gravity of Five was so microscopic that walking was completely out of the question. We were all roped together like mountaineers and blew ourselves across the metal plain with gentle bursts from our recoil pistols. The experienced astronauts, Fulton and Groves, were at the two ends of the chain so that any unwise eagerness on the part of the people in the middle was restrained. It took us only a few minutes to reach our objective, which we discovered to be a broad, low dome at least six hundred yards in circumference. I wondered if it was a gigantic airlock, large enough to permit the entrance of whole spaceships. Unless we were very lucky, we might be unable to find a way in since the controlling mechanisms would no longer be functioning -- and even if they were, we would not know how to operate them. It would be difficult to imagine anything more tantalizing than being locked out, unable to get at the greatest archeological find in all history. We had made a quarter circuit of the dome when we found an opening in the metal shell. It was quite small -- only about seven feet across -- and it was so nearly circular that for a moment we did not realize what it was. Then Tony's voice came over the radio: "That's not artificial. We've got a meteor to thank for it." "Impossible!" protested Professor Forster. "It's much too regular." Tony was stubborn. "Big meteors always produce circular holes, unless they strike very glancing blows. And look at the edges -- you can see there's been an explosion of some kind. Probably the meteor and the shell were vaporized -- we won't find any fragments." "You'd expect this sort of thing to happen," put in Kingsley. "How long has this been here? Five million years? I'm surprised we haven't found any other craters." "Maybe you're right," said the Professor, too pleased to argue. "Anyway, I'm going in first." "Right," said Kingsley, who as captain had the last say in all such matters. "I'll give you seventy feet of rope and will sit in the hole so that we can keep radio contact. Otherwise this shell will blanket your signals." So Professor Forster was the first man to enter Five, as he deserved to be. We crowded close to Kingsley so that he could relay news of the Professor's progress. He didn't get very far. There was another shell just inside the outer one, as we might have expected. The Professor had room to stand upright between them, and as far as his torch could throw its beam he could see avenues of supporting struts and girders, but that was about all. It took us twenty-four exasperating hours before we got any further. Near the end of that time I remember asking the Professor why he hadn't thought of bringing any explosives. He gave me a very hurt look. "There's enough aboard the ship to blow us all to glory," he said. "But I'm not going to risk doing any damage if I can find another way." That's what I call patience, but I could see his point of view. After all, what was another few days in a search that had already taken him twenty years? ple, who found the way in when we had abandoned our first line of approach. Near the North Pole of the little world he discovered a really giant meteor hole -- over a hundred yards across and cutting through both the outer shells surrounding Five. It had revealed still another shell below those, and by one of those chances that must happen if one waits enough aeons, a second, smaller, meteor had come down inside the crater and penetrated the innermost skin. The hole was just big enough to allow entrance for a man in a space-suit. We went through head first, one at a time. I don't suppose I'll ever have a more weird experience than hanging from that tremendous vault, like a spider suspended beneath the dome of St. Peter's. We only knew that the space in which we floated was vast: just how big it was we could not tell, for our torches gave us no sense of distance. In this airless, dustless cavern the beams were, of course, totally invisible and when we shone them on the roof above, we could see the ovals of light dancing away into the distance until they were too diffused to be visible. If we pointed them "downwards" we could see a pale smudge of illumination so far below that it revealed nothing. Very slowly, under the minute gravity of this tiny world, we fell downwards until checked by our safety ropes. Overhead I could see the tiny glimmering patch through which we had entered: it was remote but reassuring. And then, while I was swinging with an infinitely sluggish pendulum motion at the end of my cable, with the lights of my companions glimmering like fitful stars in the darkness around me, the truth suddenly crashed into my brain. Forgetting that we were all on open circuit, I cried out involuntarily: "Professor -- I don't believe this is a planet at all! It's a spaceship!" Then I stopped, feeling that I had made a fool of myself. There was a brief, tense silence, then a babble of noise as everyone else started arguing at once. Professor Forster's voice cut across the confusion and I could tell that he was both pleased and surprised. "You're quite right, Jack. This is the ship that brought Culture X to the Solar System." I heard someone -- it sounded like Eric Fulton -- give a gasp of incredulity. "It's fantastic! A ship eighteen miles across!" "You ought to know better than that," replied the Professor, with surprising mildness. "Suppose a civilization wanted to cross interstellar space -- how else would it attack the problem? It would build a mobile planetoid out in space, taking perhaps centuries over the task. Since the ship would have to be a self-contained world, which could support its inhabitants for generations, it would need to be as large as this. I wonder how many suns they visited before they found ours and knew that their search was ended? They must have had smaller ships that could take them down to the planets, and of course they had to leave the parent vessel somewhere in space. So they parked it here, in a close orbit near the largest planet, where it would remain safely forever -- or until they needed it again. It was the logical place : if they had set it circling the Sun, in time the pulls of the planets would have disturbed its orbit so much that it might have been lost. That could never happen to it here." "Tell me, Professor," someone asked, "did you guess all this before we started?" "I hoped it. All the evidence pointed to this answer. There's always been something anomalous about Satellite Five, though no one seems to have noticed it. Why this single tiny moon so close to Jupiter, when all the other small satellites are seventy times further away? Astronomically speaking, it didn't make sense -- but enough of this chattering. We've got work to do." That, I think, must count as the understatement of the century. There were seven of us, faced with the greatest archeological discovery of all time. Almost a whole world -- a small world, an artificial one, but still a world -- was waiting for us to explore. All we could perform was a swift and superficial reconnaissance: there might be material here for generations of research workers. The first step was to lower a powerful floodlight on a powerline running from the ship. This would act as a beacon and prevent us getting lost, as well as give local illumination on the inner surface of the satellite. (Even now, I still find it hard to call Five a ship.) Then we dropped down the line to the surface below. It was a fall of about a mile, and in this low gravity it was quite safe to make the drop unretarded. The gentle shock of the impact could be absorbed easily enough by the spring-loaded staffs we carried for that purpose. I simply can't remember what I was feeling when we came across the first of the great mushroomcapped entrance shafts. I suppose I was so excited and so overwhelmed by the wonder of it all that I've forgotten everything else. But I can recall the impression of sheer size -- something which mere photographs can never give. The builders of this world, coming as they did from a planet of low gravity, were giants -- about four times as tall as men. We were pigmies crawling among their works. We never got below the outer levels on our first visit, so we met few of the scientific marvels which later expeditions discovered. That was just as well: the residential areas provided enough to keep us busy for several lifetimes. The globe we were exploring must once have been lit by artificial sunlight pouring down from the triple shell that surrounded it and kept its atmosphere from leaking into space. Here on the surface the Jovians (I suppose I cannot avoid adopting the popular name for the peoples of Culture X) had reproduced, as accurately as they could, conditions on the world they had left, unknown ages ago. Perhaps they still had day and night, changing seasons, rain and mist. They had even taken a tiny sea with them into exile. The water was still there, forming a frozen lake two miles across. I hear that there is a plan afoot to electrolize it and provide Five with a breathable atmosphere again, as soon as the meteor holes in the outer shell have been plugged. The more we saw of their work, the more we grew to like and admire the race whose possessions we were disturbing for the first time in giants from another sun, they had much in common with man, and it is a great tragedy that our races missed each other by what is, on the cosmic scale, such a narrow margin. We were, I suppose, more fortunate than any archeologists in history. The vacuum of space had preserved everything from decay and -- this was something which could not have been expected -- the Jovians had not emptied their mighty ship of all its treasures when they had set out to colonize the Solar System. Here on the inner surface of Five everything still seemed intact, as it had been at the end of the ship's long journey. Perhaps the travelers had preserved it as a shrine in memory of their lost home -- or perhaps they had thought that one day they might have to use these things again. Whatever the reason, everything here was as its makers had left it. Sometimes it frightened me. I might be photographing, with Bill's help, some great wall carving when the sheer timelessness of the place would strike into my heart. I would look round nervously, half expecting to see giant shapes come stalking in through the pointed doorways, to continue the tasks that had been momentarily interrupted. lery on the fourth day. That was the only name for it; there was no mistaking its purpose. When Groves and Searle, who had been doing rapid sweeps over the southern hemisphere, reported the discovery we decided to concentrate all our forces there. For, as somebody or other had said, the art of a people reveals its soul, and here we might find the key to Culture X. The building was huge, even by the standards of this giant race. Like all the other structures on Five, it was made of metal, yet there was nothing cold or mechanical about it. The topmost peak climbed half way to the remote roof of the world, and from a distance -- before the details were visible -- the building looked not unlike a Gothic cathedral. Misled by this chance resemblance, some later writers have called it a temple: but we have never found any trace of what might be called a religion among the Jovians. Yet there seems something appropriate about the name "The Temple of Art", and it's stuck so thoroughly that no one can change it now. It has been estimated that there individual exhibits in this single building -- the harvest garnered during the whole history of a race that may have been much older than Man. And it was here that I found a small, circular room which at first sight seemed to be no more than the meeting place of six radiating corridors. I was by myself (and thus, I'm afraid, disobeying the Professor's orders) and taking what I thought would be a shortcut back to my companions. The dark walls were drifting silently past me as I glided along, the light of my torch dancing over the ceiling ahead. It was covered with deeply cut lettering, and I was so busy looking for familiar character groupings that for some time I paid no attention to the chamber's floor. Then I saw the statue and focussed my beam upon it. The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured. In this case the subject matter made the effect all the more overwhelming. I was the first man ever to know what the Jovians had looked like, for here, carved with superb skill and authority, was one obviously modeled from the life. The slender, reptilian head was looking straight towards me, the sightless eyes staring into mine. Two of the hands were clasped upon the breast as if in resignation : the other two were holding an instrument whose purpose is still unknown. The long, powerful tail -- which, like a kangaroo's, probably balanced the rest of the body -- was stretched out along the ground, adding to the impression of rest or repose. There was nothing human about the face or the body: there were, for example, no nostrils -- only gilllike openings in the neck. Yet the figure moved me profoundly: the artist had spanned the barriers of time and culture in a way I should never have believed possible. "Not human -- but humane" was the verdict Professor Forster gave. There were many things we could not have shared with the builders of this world, but all that was really important we would have felt in common. Just as one can read emotions in the alien but familiar face of a dog or a horse, so it seemed that I knew the feelings of the being confronting me. Here was wisdom and authority -- the calm, confident power that is shown, for example, in Bellini's famous portrait of the Doge Loredano. Yet there was sadness also -- the sadness of a race which had made some stupendous effort, and made it in vain. We still do not know why this single statue is the only representation the Jovians have ever made of themselves in their art. One would hardly expect to find taboos of this nature among such an advanced race : perhaps we will know the answer when we have deciphered the writing carved on the chamber walls. Yet I am already certain of the statue's purpose. It was set here to bridge time and to greet whatever beings might one day stand in the footsteps of its makers. That, perhaps, is why they shaped it so much smaller than life. Even then they must have guessed that the future belonged to Earth or Venus, and hence to beings whom they would have dwarfed. They knew that size could be a barrier as well as time. A few minutes later I was on my way back to the ship with my companions, eager to tell the Professor about the discovery. He had been reluctantly snatching some rest, though I don't believe he averaged more than four hours sleep a day all the time we were on Five. The golden light of Jupiter was flooding the great metal plain as we emerged through the shell and stood beneath the stars once more. "Hello!" I heard Bill say over the radio, "the Prof's moved the ship." "Nonsense," I retorted. "It's exactly where we left it." Then I turned my head and saw the reason for Bill's mistake. We had visitors. down a couple of miles away, and as far as my non-expert eyes could tell it might have been a duplicate of ours. When we hurried through the airlock, we found that the Professor, a little bleary-eyed, was already entertaining. To our surprise, though not exactly to our displeasure, one of the three visitors was an extremely attractive brunette. "This," said Professor Forster, 'a little wearily, "is Mr. Randolph Mays, the science writer. I imagine you've heard of him. And this is -- " he turned to Mays. "I'm afraid I didn't quite catch the names." "My pilot, Donald Hopkins -- my secretary, Marianne Mitchell." There was just the slightest pause before the word "secretary", but it was long enough to set a little signal light flashing in my brain. I kept my eyebrows from going up, but I caught a glance from Bill that said, without any need for words "If you're thinking what I'm thinking, I'm ashamed of you." Mays was a tall, rather cadaverous man with thinning hair and an attitude of bonhomie which one felt was only skin deep -- the protective coloration of a man who has to be friendly with too many people. "I expect this is as big a surprise to you as it is to me," he said with unnecessary heartiness. "I certainly never expected to find anyone here before me -- and I certainly didn't expect to find all this" "What brought you here?" said Ashton, trying to sound not too suspiciously inquisitive. "I was just explaining that to the Professor. Can I have that folder please, Marianne? Thanks." He drew out a series of very fine astronomical paintings and passed them round. They showed the planets from their satellites -- a common enough subject, of course. "You've all seen this sort of thing before," Mays continued. "But there's a difference here. These pictures are nearly a hundred years, old: they were painted by an artist named Chesley Bonestell and appeared in Life back in # -- long before space travel began, of course. Now what's happened is that Life has commissioned me to go round the Solar System and see how well I can match these imaginative paintings against the reality. In the centenary issue, they'll be published side by side with photographs of the real thing. Good idea, eh?" I had to admit that it was. But it was going to make matters rather complicated, and I wondered wha the Professor thought about it. Then I glanced again at Miss Mitchell, standing demurely in the corner, and decided that there would be compensations. In any other circumstances, we would have been glad to meet another party of explorers, but here there was the question of priority to be considered. Mays would certainly be hurrying back to Earth as quickly as he could, his original mission abandoned, and all his films used up here and now. It was difficult to see how we could stop him, and not even certain that we desired to do so. We wanted all the publicity and support we could get -- but we would prefer to do things in our own time, after our own fashion. I wondered how strong the Professor was on tact, and feared the worst. Yet, at first, diplomatic relations were smooth enough. The Professor had hit on the bright idea of pairing each of us with one of Mays' team, so that we acted simultaneously as guides and supervisors. Doubling the number of investigating groups also greatly increased the rate at which we could work. It was unsafe for anyone to operate by himself under these conditions, and this had handicapped us a good deal. The Professor outlined his policy to us the day after the arrival of Mays' party. "I hope we can get along together," he said a little anxiously. "As far as I'm concerned they can go where they like and photograph what they like -- as long as they don't take anything, and as long as they don't get back to Earth with their records before we do." "I don't see how we can stop them," protested Ashton. "Well, I hadn't intended to do this, but I've now registered a claim to Five. I radioed it to Ganymede last night, and it will be at The Hague by now." "But no one can claim an astronomical body for himself. That was settled in the case of the Moon, back in the last century." The Professor gave a rather crooked smile. "I'm not annexing an astronomical body , remember. I've put in a claim for salvage, and I've done it in the name of the World Science Organization. If Mays takes anything out of Five, he'll be stealing it from them. Tomorrow I'm going to explain the situation gently to him, just in case he gets any bright ideas." It certainly seemed peculiar to think of Satellite Five as salvage, and I could imagine some pretty legal quarrels developing when we got home. But for the present the Professor's move should have given us some safeguards and might discourage Mays from collecting souvenirs -- so we were optimistic enough to hope. izing, but I managed to get paired off with Marianne for several trips round the interior of Five. Mays didn't seem to mind : there was no particular reason why he should. A space-suit is the most perfect chaperon ever devised, confound it! Naturally enough, I took her to the art gallery at the first opportunity, and showed her my find. She stood looking at the statue for a long time while I held my torch beam upon it. "It's very wonderful," she breathed at last. "Just think of it -- waiting here in the darkness all have to give it a name." "I have. I've christened it 'The Ambassador'." "Why?" "Well, because I think it's a kind of envoy, if you like, carrying a greeting to us. The people who made it knew that one day someone else was bound to come here and find this place." "I think you're right. 'The Ambassador -- yes, that was clever of you. There's something noble about it -- and something very sad, too. Don't you feel it?" I could tell that Marianne was a veij intelligent woman : it was quite remarkable the way she saw my point of view, and the interest she took in everything I showed her. But The Ambassador fascinated her most of all, and she kept on coming back to it. "You know, Jack," she said (I think this was sometime the next day, when Mays had been to see it as well) "you must take that statue back to Earth. Think of the sensation it would cause." I sighed. "The Professor would like to, but it must weigh a ton. We can't afford the fuel. It will have to wait for a later trip." She looked puzzled. "But things hardly weigh anything here," she protested. "That's different," I explained. "There's weight, and there's inertia -- two quite different things. Now inertia -- oh, never mind. We can't take it back, anyway. Captain Searle's told us that, definitely." "What a pity," said Marianne. I forgot all about this conversation until the night before we left. We had had a busy and exhausting day packing our equipment (a good deal, of course, we left behind for future use). All our photographic material had been used up: as Charlie Ashton remarked, if we met a live Jovian now we'd be unable to record the fact. I think we all wanted a breathing space, an opportunity to relax and sort out our impressions and to recover from our head-on collision with an alien culture. Mays' ship, the Henry Luce , was also nearly ready for take-off. We would leave at the same time, an arrangement which suited the Professor admirably as he did not trust Mays alone on Five. Everything had been settled when, while checking through our records, I suddenly found that six rolls of exposed film were missing. They were photographs of a complete set of transcriptions in the Temple of Art. After a certain amount of thought I recalled that they had been entrusted to my charge, and I had put them very carefully on a ledge in the Temple, intending to collect them later. It was a long time before takeoff, the Professor and Ashton were canceling some arrears of sleep, and there seemed no reason why I should not slip back to collect the missing material. I knew there would be a row if it was left behind, and as I remembered exactly where it was I need be gone only thirty minutes. So I went, explaining my mission to Bill just in case of accidents. The floodlight was no longer working, of course, and the darkness inside the shell of Five was somewhat oppressive. But I left a portable beacon at the entrance, and dropped freely until my handtorch told me it .was time to break the fall. Ten minutes later, with a sigh of relief, I gathered up the missing films. It was a natural enough thing to pay my last respects to The Ambassador: it might be years before I saw him again, and that calmly enigmatic figure had begun to exercise an extraordinary fascination over me. Unfortunately, that fascination had not been confined to me alone. For the chamber was empty and the statue gone. I suppose I could have crept back and said nothing, thus avoiding awkward explanations. But I was too furious to think of discretion, and as soon as I returned we woke the Professor and told him what had happened. He sat on his bunk rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, then uttered a few harsh words about Mr. Mays and his companions which it would do no good at all to repeat here. "What I don't understand," said Searle "is how they got the thing out -- if they have, in fact. We should have spotted it." "There are plenty of hiding places -- and they could have waited until there was no one around before they took it up through the hull. It must have been quite a job, even under this gravity," remarked Eric Fulton, in tones of admiration. "There's no time for postmortems," said the Professor savagely. "We've got five hours to think of something. They can't take off before then, because we're only just past opposition with Ganymede. That's correct, isn't it Kingsley?" Searle nodded agreement. "Yes. We must move round to the other side of Jupiter before we can enter a transfer orbit -- at least, a reasonably economical one." "Good. That gives us a breathing space. Well -- has anyone any ideas?" Looking back on the whole thing now, it often seems to me that our subsequent behavior was, shall I say, a little peculiar and slightly uncivilized. It was not the sort of thing we could have imagined ourselves doing a few months before. But we were annoyed and overwrought, and our remoteness from all other human beings somehow made everything seem different. Since there was no other law here, we had to make it. "Can't we do something to stop them taking off? Could we sabotage their rockets, for instance?" asked Bill. Searle didn't like this idea at all. "We mustn't do anything drastic," he said. "Besides, Don Hopkins is a good friend of mine. He'd never forgive me if I damaged his ship. There'd be the danger, too, that we might do something that couldn't be repaired." "Then pinch their fuel," said Groves laconically. "Of course! They're probably all asleep -- there's no light in the cabin. All we've got to do is to connect up and pump." "A very nice idea," I pointed out "but we're nearly two miles apart. How much pipeline have we got?" The others ignored this interruption as if it was beneath contempt and went on making their plans. Five minutes later the technicians had settled everything: we only had to climb into our space-suits and do the work. the Professor's expedition, that I should end up like an African porter in one of those old adventure stories, carrying a load on my head. Especially when that load was a sixth of a spaceship (being so short, Professor Forster wasn't able to provide very effective help.) Now that its fuel tanks were half empty, the weight of the ship, in this gravity, was about # pounds. We all squeezed underneath, heaved, and up she went -- very slowly, of course, because her inertia was still unchanged. Then we started marching. It took us quite a while to make the journey, and it wasn't as easy as we'd thought it would be. But presently the two ships were lying side by side, and nobody had noticed us. Everyone in the Henry Luce was fast asleep, as they had every reason to expect us to be. Though I was still rather short of breath, I found a certain schoolboy amusement in the whole adventure as Searle and Fulton drew the refueling pipeline out of our airlock and quietly coupled up to the other ship. "The beauty of this plan," explained Groves to me as we stood watching, "is that they can't do anything to stop us, unless they come outside and uncouple our line. We can drain them dry in five minutes -- and it will take them half that time to wake up and get into their space-suits." A sudden horrid fear smote me. "Suppose they turned on their rockets and tried to get away?" "Then we'd both be smashed up. No -- they'll just have to come outside and see what's going on. Ah, there go the pumps." The pipeline had stiffened like a fire-hose under pressure, and I knew that the fuel was pouring into our tanks. Any moment now the lights would go on in the Henry Luce and her startled occupants would come scuttling out. It was something of an anticlimax when they didn't. They must have been sleeping very soundly not to have felt the vibration from the pumps, but when it was all over nothing had happened and we just stood round looking rather foolish. Searle and Fulton carefully uncoupled the pipeline and put it back into the airlock. "Well?" we asked the Professor. He thought things over for a minute. "Let's get back into the ship," he said. When we had climbed out of our suits and were gathered together in the control room, or as far in as we could get, the Professor sat down at the radio and punched out the Emergency signal. Our sleeping neighbors would be awake in a couple of seconds as their automatic receiver sounded the alarm. The TV screen glimmered into life. There, looking rather frightened, was Randolph Mays. "Hello, Forster," he snapped. "What's the trouble?" "Nothing wrong here," replied the Professor in his best dead-pan manner, "but you've lost something important. Look at your fuel gauges." The screen emptied, and for a moment there was a confused mumbling and shouting from the speaker. Then Mays was back, annoyance and alarm competing for possession of his features. "What's going on?" he demanded angrily. "Do you know anything about this?" The Prof, let him sizzle for a moment before he replied. "I think you'd better come across and talk things over," he said. "You won't have far to walk." Mays glared back at him uncertainly, then retorted "You bet I will!" The screen went blank. "He'll have to climb down now!" said Bill gleefully. "There's nothing else he can do!" "It's not so simple as you think," warned Fulton. "If he really wanted to be awkward, he could just sit tight and radio Ganymede for a tanker." "What good would that do him? It would waste days and cost a fortune." "Yes, but he'd still have the statue, if he wanted it that badly. And he'd get his money back when he sued us." The airlock light flashed on and Mays stumped into the room. He was in a surprisingly conciliatory mood: on the way over, he must have had second thoughts. "Well, well," he said affably. "What's all this nonsense in aid of?" "You know perfectly well," the Professor retorted coldly. "I made it quite clear that nothing was to be taken off Five. You've been stealing property that doesn't belong to you." "Now let's be reasonable. Who does it belong to? You can't claim everything on this planet as your personal property." "This is not a planet -- it's a ship and the laws of salvage operate." "Frankly, that's a very debatable point. Don't you think you should wait until you get a ruling from the lawyers?" The Professor was being icily polite, but I could see that the strain was terrific and an explosion might occur any moment. "Listen, Mr. Mays," he said with ominous calm. "What you've taken is the most important single find we've made here. I will make allowances for the fact that you don't appreciate what you've done, and don't understand the viewpoint of an archeologist like myself. Return that statue, and we'll pump your fuel back and say no more." Mays rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I really don't see why you should make such a fuss about one statue, when you consider all the stuff that's still here." It was then that the Professor made one of his rare mistakes. "You talk like a man who's stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and argues that nobody will miss it because of all the other paintings. This statue's unique in a way that no terrestrial work of art can ever be. That's why I'm determined to get it back." You should never, when you're bargaining, make it obvious that you want something really badly. I saw the greedy glint in Mays' eye and said to myself "Uh-huh! He's going to be tough." And I remembered Fulton's remark about calling Ganymede for a tanker. "Give me half an hour to think it over," said Mays, turning to the airlock. "Very well," replied the Professor stiffly. "Half an hour -- no more." I must give Mays credit for brains. Within five minutes we saw his communications aerial start slewing round until it locked on Ganymede. Naturally we tiied to listen in, but he had a scrambler. These newspaper men must trust each other. The reply came back a few minutes later : that was scrambled, too. While we were waiting for the next development, we had another council of war. The Professor was now entering the stubborn, stop-atnothing stage : he realized he'd miscalculated and that had made him fighting mad. I think Mays must have been a little apprehensive, because he had reinforcements when he returned. Donald Hopkins, his pilot, came with him, looking rather uncomfortable. "I've been able to fix things up, Professor," he said smugly. "It will take me a little longer, but I can get back without your help if I have to. Still, I must admit that it will save a good deal of time and money if we can come to an agreement. I'll tell you what. Give me back my fuel and I'll return the other -- er -- souvenirs I've collected. But I insist on keeping Mona Lisa, even if it means I won't get back to Ganymede until the middle of next week." The Professor then uttered a number of what are usually called deep-space oaths, though I can assure you they're much the same as any other oaths. That seemed to relieve his feelings a lot and he became fiendishly friendly. "My dear Mr. Mays," he said, "you're an unmitigated crook, and accordingly I've no compunction left in dealing with you. I'm prepared to use force, knowing that the law will justify me." Mays looked slightly alarmed, though not unduly so. We had moved to strategic positions round the door. "Please don't be melodramatic," he said haughtily. "I must ask you," the Professor continued, "to consider yourself under detention while we decide what is to be done. Mr. Searle, take him to Cabin B." Mays sidled along the wall with a nervous laugh. "Really, Professor, this is too childish! You can't detain me against my will." He glanced for support at the captain of the Henry Luce . Donald Hopkins dusted an imaginary speck of fluff from his uniform. "I refuse," he remarked for the benefit of all concerned, "to get involved in vulgar brawls." Mays gave him a venomous look and capitulated with bad grace. We saw that he had a good supply of reading matter, and locked him in. When he was out of the way, the Professor turned to Hopkins, who was looking enviously at our fuel gauges. "Can I take it, Captain," he said politely, "that you don't wish to get mixed up in any of your employer's dirty business?" "I'm neutral. My job is to fly the ship here and take her home. You can fight this out among yourselves." "Thank you: I think we understand each other perfectly. Perhaps it would be best if you returned to your ship and explained the situation. We'll be calling you in a few minutes." Captain Hopkins made his way languidly to the door. As he was about to leave he turned to Searle. "By the way, Kingsley," he drawled. "Have you thought of torture? Do call me if you get round to it -- I've some jolly interesting ideas." Then he was gone, leaving us with our hostage. he could do a direct exchange. If so, he had not bargained on Marianne's stubbornness. "It serves Randolph right," she said. "But I don't really see that it makes any difference. He'll be just as comfortable in your ship as in ours, and you can't do anything to him. Let me know when you're fed up with having him around." It seemed a complete impasse. We had been too clever by half, and it had got us exactly nowhere. We'd captured Mays, but he wasn't any use to us. The Professor was standing with his back to us, staring morosely out of the window. Seemingly balanced on the horizon, the immense bulk of Jupiter nearly filled the sky. "We've got to convince her that we really do mean business," he said. Then he turned abruptly to me. "Do you think she's actually fond of this blackguard?" "Er -- I shouldn't be surprised. Yes, I really believe so." The Professor looked very thoughtful. Then he said to Searle : "Come into my room. I want to talk something over." They were gone quite a while. When they returned, they both had an indefinable air of gleeful anticipation, and the Professor was carrying a piece of paper covered with figures. He went to the radio and called the Henry Luce . "Hello," said Marianne, replying so promptly that she'd obviously been waiting for us. "Have you decided to call it off? I'm getting so bored." The Professor looked at her gravely. "Miss Mitchell," he replied. "It's apparent that you have not been taking us seriously. I'm therefore arranging a somewhat -- er -- drastic little demonstration for your benefit. I'm going to place your employer in a position from which he'll be only too anxious for you to retrieve him as quickly as possible." "Indeed?" replied Marianne non-committally -- though I thought I could detect a trace of apprehension in her voice. "I don't suppose," continued the Professor smoothly, "that you know anything about celestial mechanics... No? Too bad, but your pilot will confirm everything I tell you. Won't you, Hopkins?" "Go ahead," came a painstakingly neutral voice from the background. "Then listen carefully, Miss Mitchell. I want to remind you of our curious -- indeed our precarious -- position on this satellite. You've only got to look out of the window to see how close to Jupiter we are, and I need hardly remind you that Jupiter has by far the most intense gravitational field of all the planets. You follow me?" "Yes," replied Marianne, no longer quite so self-possessed. "Go on." "Very well. This little world of ours goes round Jupiter in almost exactly twelve hours. Now there's a well-known theorem stating that if a body falls from an orbit to the center of attraction, it will take point one seven seven of a period to make the drop. In other words, anything falling from here to Jupiter would reach the centre of the planet in about two hours seven minutes. I'm sure Captain Hopkins can confirm this." There was a long pause. Then we heard Hopkins say: "Well, of course I can't confirm the exact figures, but they're probably correct. It would be something like that, anyway." "Good," continued the Professor. "Now I'm sure you realize," he went on with a hearty chuckle, "that a fall to the center of the planet is a very theoretical case. If anything really was dropped from here, it would reach the upper atmosphere of Jupiter in a considerably shorter time. I hope I'm not boring you?" "No," said Marianne, rather faintly. "I'm so glad to hear it. Anyway, Captain Searle has worked out the actual time for me, and it's one hour thirty five minutes -- with a #  Mays found himself ascending helplessly toward the ominous bulk of Jupiter . few minutes either way. We can't guarantee complete accuracy, ha, ha! "Now it has doubtlessly not escaped your notice that this satellite of ours has an extremely weak gravitational field. Its escape velocity is only about thirty-five feet a second, and anything thrown away from it at that speed would never come back. Correct, Mr. Hopkins?" "Perfectly correct." "Then, if I may come to the point, we propose to take Mr. Mays for a walk until he's immediately under Jupiter, remove the reaction pistols from his suit, and -- ah -- launch him forth. We will be prepared to retrieve him with our ship as soon as you've handed over the property you've stolen. After what I've told you, I'm sure you'll appreciate that time will be rather vital. An hour and thirty-five minutes is remarkably short, isn't it?" "Professor!" I gasped. "You can't possibly do this." "Shut up!" he barked. "Well, Miss Mitchell, what about it?" Marianne was staring at him with mingled horror and disbelief. "You're simply bluffing," she cried. "I don't believe you'd do anything of the kind! Your crew won't let you!" The Professor sighed. "Too bad," he said. "Captain Searle -- Mr. Groves -- will you take the prisoner and proceed as instructed." "Aye-aye, sir," replied Searle with great solemnity. Mays looked frightened but stubborn. "What are you going to do now?" he said, as his suit was handed back to him. Searle unholstered his reaction pistols. "Just climb in," he said. "We're going for a walk." I realized then what the Professor hoped to do. The whole thing was a colossal bluff: of course he wouldn't really have Mays thrown into Jupiter -- and in any case Searle and Groves wouldn't do it. Surely Marianne would see through the bluff and then we'd be left looking mighty foolish. Mays couldn't run away: without his reaction pistols he was quite helpless. Grasping his arms and towing him along like a captive balloon, his escorts set off towards the horizon -- and towards Jupiter. I could see, looking across the space to the other ship, that Marianne was staring out through the observation windows at the departing trio. Professor Forster noticed it too. "I hope you're convinced, Miss Mitchell, that my men aren't carrying along an empty space-suit. Might I suggest that you follow the proceedings with a telescope? They'll be over the horizon in a minute, but you'll be able to see Mr. Mays when he starts to -- er -- ascend." There was a stubborn silence from the loudspeaker. The period of suspense seemed to last for a very long time. Was Marianne waiting to see how far the Professor really would go? By this time I had got hold of a pair of binoculars and was sweeping the sky beyond the ridiculously close horizon. Suddenly I saw it -- a tiny flare of light against the vast yellow back-cloth of Jupiter. I focussed quickly, and could just make out the three figures rising into space. As I watched, they separated : two of them decelerated with their pistols and started to fall back towards Five. The other went on ascending helplessly towards the ominous bulk of Jupiter. I turned on the Professor in horror and disbelief. "They've really done it!" I cried. "I thought you were only bluffing!" "So did Miss Mitchell, I've no doubt," said the Professor calmly, for the benefit of the listening microphone. "I hope I don't need to impress upon you the urgency of the situation. As I've remarked once or twice before, the time of fall from our orbit to Jupiter's surface is ninety-five minutes. But, of course, if one waited even half that time, it would be much too late..." He let that sink in. There was no reply from the other ship. "And now," he continued, "I'm going to switch off our receiver so we can't have any more arguments. We'll wait until you've unloaded that statue -- and the other items Mr. Mays was careless enough to mention -- before we'll talk to you again. Good-bye." minutes. I'd lost track of Mays, and was seriously wondering if we'd better overpower the Professor and go after him before we had a murder on our hands. But the people who could fly the ship were the ones who had actually carried out the crime. I didn't know what to think. Then the airlock of the Henry Luce slowly opened. A couple of space-suited figures emerged, floating the cause of all the trouble between them. "Unconditional surrender," murmured the Professor with a sigh of satisfaction. "Get it into our ship," he called over the radio, "I'll open up the airlock for you." He seemed in no hurry at all. I kept looking anxiously at the clock -- fifteen minutes had already gone by. Presently there was a clanking and banging in the airlock, the inner door opened, and Captain Hopkins entered. He was followed by Marianne, who only needed a bloodstained axe to make her look like Glytaemnestra. I did my best to avoid her eye, but the Professor seemed to be quite without shame. He walked into the airlock, checked that his property was back, and emerged rubbing his hands. "Well, that's that," he said cheerfully. "Now let's sit down and have a drink to forget all this unpleasantness, shall we?" I pointed indignantly at the clock. "Have you gone crazy!" I yelled. "He's already half-way to Jupiter!" Professor Forster looked at me disapprovingly. "Impatience," he said, "is a common failing in the young. I see no cause at all for hasty action." Marianne spoke for the first time : she now looked really scared. "But you promised," she whispered. The Professor suddenly capitulated. He had had his little joke, and didn't want to prolong the agony. "I can tell you at once, Miss Mitchell -- and you too. Jack -- that Mays is in no more danger than we are. We can go and collect him whenever we like." "Do you mean that you lied to me?" "Certainly not. Everything I told you was perfectly true. You simply jumped to the wrong conclusions. When I said that a body would take ninety-five minutes to fall from here to Jupiter, I omitted -- not, I must confess, accidentally -- a rather important phrase. I should have added "a body at rest with respect to Jupiter ." Your friend Mr. Mays was sharing the orbital speed of this satellite -- and he's still got it. A little matter of sixteen miles a second, Miss Mitchell. "Oh yes, we threw him completely off Five and towards Jupiter. But the velocity we gave him then was trivial. He's still moving in practically the same orbit as before. The most he can do -- I've got Captain Searle to work out the figures -- is to drift about sixty miles inward. And 'in one revolution -- twelve hours -- he'll be right back where he started, without us bothering to do anything at all." There was a long, long silence. Marianne's face was a study in frustration, relief, and annoyance at having been fooled. Then she turned on Captain Hopkins. "You must have known all the time! Why didn't you tell me?" Hopkins gave her a wounded expression. "You didn't ask me," he said. an hour later. He was only fifteen miles up, and we located him quickly enough by the flashing light on his suit. His radio had been disconnected, for a reason that hadn't occurred to me. He was intelligent enough to realize that he was in no danger, and if his set had been working he could have called his ship and exposed our bluff. That is, if he wanted to. Personally, I think I'd have been glad enough to call the whole thing off even if I had known that I was perfectly safe. It must have been awfully lonely up there. To my great surprise, Mays wasn't as mad as I'd expected. Perhaps he was too relieved to be back in our snug little cabin when we drifted up to him on the merest fizzle of rockets and yanked him in. Or perhaps he felt that he'd been worsted in fair fight and didn't bear any grudge. There isn't much more to tell -- except that we did play one other trick on him before we left Five. He had a good deal more fuel in his tanks than he really needed, noW that his payload was substantially reduced. By keeping the excess ourselves, we were able to carry the Ambassador back to Ganymede after all. Oh, yes, the Professor gave him a check for the fuel we'd borrowed. Everything was perfectly legal. There's one amusing sequel I must tell you, though. The day after the new gallery was opened at the British Museum I went along to see The Ambassador, partly to discover if his impact was still as great in these changed surround( Continued on page #) Mary might have learned a more ladylike trade , but one thing is certain: she had a shining faith in that space guy from Earth. Now, about that cake she baked... she knew he was coming By Kris Neville Illustrated by Ed Emsh low across the green dust of the Martian desert, its last rays sparkling on the far mountain tops. One by one, lights flickered on in the city. Mary must be expecting that Earthman," Anne said. She held her glastic blouse tight together over her breasts and leaned a little out of the window. Milly nodded. "The Azmuth landed this morning." The noises of commerce were fading. From the window Anne saw the neon blaze up over the door. For the thousandth time she blinked between the equivocal false, filtered up from the tea bars along the street. She looked westward, toward the spaceport, and made out the shadowy nose of the berthed space liner looming against the night. She could picture the scene -- a thousand stevedores unloading cargo, refill men and native spacewriters scurrying over the sleek hull, the Earth voyageurs shouting orders and curses. "Maybe he isn't even on it." Anne turned from the window. She crossed to the couch and sat down, fluffing out the green crinkly glass of her skirt; pendant, multicolored birds flashed from the rings in her ears. She tucked rosy feet under her scented body. "I don't like Earthmen," she said. "They spend money." "They make me sick," Anne said. "With their pale skins and ugly eyes and hairy bodies." "They have strong arms." Anne's wide, red mouth curled in distaste. "They're like a bunch of kids." The room was lighted by soft, overhead fire. Heavy drapes hung from the walls. Sweet, spicy incense curled bluely from the burners by the window. Before the mirror, Milly edged in the narrow line of her pink eyebrows with a pencil. She folded her lips in, rubbing them together, licked them, making them a glistening red. She pinched her cheeks. "I wonder when they'll catch Crescent?" she said. Anne yawned languorously. "It won't be long." "I wouldn't want to be in her shoes," Milly said. Anne patted her mouth lazily. "She ought to have known she couldn't run away." "What do you think Miss Bestris will do to her?" Anne stood up, brushing out the wrinkles in her dress. "I should care." "But what will she do?" Anne shrugged. "Whip her, maybe. How should I know?" "Don't you feel you'd like to run away, once in a while?" Milly asked, turning to look at the other girl. Anne laughed coldly. "I've got better sense." "But don't you want to?" Anne tossed her purple hair. "Where is there to go? Who is there to go to?" "Yes... I guess you're right." Milly turned back to her reflection. Buzzzzzz... Both girls turned their heads to the buttons on the wall. The white one was glowing. "It's Miss Bestris." "We'd better go," Milly said. Together they walked down the heavily carpeted stairs to the sitting room. The Madame was waiting. She was a large woman, rolling in creases of fat, and her pink hair was rough and clipped short. She had a pair of dimples in her cheeks and a single gold band around her right wrist. She was leaning against the piano. "Hurry now, girls, hurry right along," she said. More girls were entering the room; they spread out, sitting on the chairs, curling at the Madame's feet. Their eyes -- amethyst, gray or golden -- were on her face. Many had pink hair, others had tresses of purple or salmon. "Now, girls, I suppose you know there's an Earth ship in port?" The girls nodded. "So I expect we'll have visitors tonight. I want you to all look your very best." She smiled at them. "Anne, why don't you wear that low-cut, orange plastic with the spangles, and June, you the prim white one? You look like an angel in it." June smiled. "And Mary... ?" "Yes, Miss Bestris?" "Mary. Did you buy that neonylon I told you about?" "No, Miss Bestris." "Mary, Mary, Mary. I just don't understand you at all." "I'm saving my money, Miss Bestris," Mary said intently. "Yes, dear, I know that. We're all saving our money. But we simply must look presentable. We have a reputation to hold up." "Yes, Miss Bestris." "Then, Mary, dear, d# -- do, please , buy yourself something decent." "Yes, Miss Bestris. I will... Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, if I..." "Child? If you what?" "Nothing, Miss Bestris." "Well. See that you get it tomorrow. If you don't, I'm afraid I'll have to take some of your money and get it for you." Mary looked down at the floor. The flaming glow of the hydrojet torches cast golden lights in her softly purple hair. "By the way, Mary. Is that your cake in the oven?" "Yes, Miss Bestris." The other girls snickered. "Let her alone," said the Madame. "If she wants to bake a cake, why shouldn't she?" No one answered. Miss Bestris went on around the room, discussing the girls' clothing, brushing this girl's hair, pinching that girl's cheek, chucking this one under the chin, smiling, frowning. Then finally she stepped back and nodded. "You all look quite good, I think. I can be proud of you. And now, I want you all to go to your rooms and make them extra attractive, and then try to get a little rest, so you'll all be especially beautiful when the boys come. Run along now." The girls filed out, and night continued to settle. After a while, her cigarette glowing in the gloom, the Madame waddled to her office. There three people were waiting for her. nesslike, masculine; no lace, no ribbons, no perfume, only the crisp smell of new paper, the tangy odor of ink, the sweet smell of eraser fluid. When she came in the door the three people stood up. She waved her cigarette hand with a once delicate gesture and flame light glinted dully on the gold band. "Please don't get up for me," she said, but her tone was condescending and the three visitors sat down respectfully. Miss Bestris crossed to her desk; she perched on a comer of it, leaned back, blew smoke. "You wanted to see me about your girls?" Two of the people, man and wife, looked at each other. "Yes," they said. And the other man said, "Yes." "Did you bring any pictures?" They handed her pictures, and she held them up to the overhead torch. She studied them critically, pursing and unpursing her lips in secret calculation. "This one," she said finally, holding out one of the pictures. The man and wife rustled their clothing; they smiled faintly proud at each other. The other man got up slowly, retrieved his picture, left the room without saying a word. "We can't do for little Lavada," the woman whined. "She was a late child, and we're getting old, and we thought she would be better here. It's hard to do for a growing girl when you get old. And my husband can't keep steady work, because of his health and..." "I'm sure she will be happy here," the Madame said, smiling. "Yes," the man agreed. "It's for the best. But -- you know -- well, we hate to do it. "How old is she?'... Fourteen." Miss Bestris studied the picture again. "She doesn't look over twelve." "She's fourteen." "And healthy -- " "We have doctors to see to that," the Madame said. "How much did you have in mind?" "Well," the man said, "it's been a month now since I worked, and with debts and everything... "And something to put aside for winter," his wife added. "We couldn't take less than a "And we wouldn't even think of it, but we don't have a scrap of bread in the house." "And all our bills, and winter coming on..." Miss Bestris turned the picture this way and that. The parents waited. The woman cleared her throat. The man shuffled his feet. The clock on the wall went ticktick, tick-tick. "I'll give you eight hundred and thirty dordocs" the Madame said. "Well..." Miss Bestris bent forward, holding out the picture. "Here, then. Take it. I wouldn't offer that, but I need a girl right now. One of mine ran away last week, and I'm afraid she won't be able to work for a month or so after they bring her back. I'm being generous. Eight hundred and thirty, or take your picture and don't waste my time." The man and woman stared at her. And the clock went tick-tick . "Take it. Chav."... All right," the man said. "We need the money." Miss Bestris leaned across the desk, pressed a button on her panel. Almost immediately, a door slid silently open and her lawyer entered with a white, printed, standard-form sales contract in his hand. Efficiently and rapidly, he entered the particulars. "Sign here," he said, and the parents signed. "Now," said the Madame, "if you'll bring in Lavada tomorrow at nine, I'll arrange for a doctor to be here. If his examination is satisfactory, the money will be ready." The lawyer left, and the woman said, "You understand, we wouldn't do this but for..." "I understand, perfectly," Miss Bestris said. "You don't need to worry. This is the best kind of house -- Earthmen only, you know, and they're very particular. My girls are given the best of care. I'm like a mother to them, and if they are thrifty and diligent, they'll be able to save enough money in a -- a very short time to redeem their contract as provided by law. You needn't worry at all." "Well," the woman said, "I feel better after talking to you. I feel better about the whole thing to hear you talk like that." The clock went tick-tick . "Uh," the man said, "you won't -- ? That is, our little daughter is sometimes wilful and... uh... well... Sometimes." Miss Bestris smiled. "We know how to handle girls." "You'll treat her... ?" "As I would my own child," Miss Bestris said; she took out another cigarette, lit it. "I think we'll call her -- well -- Poppy. Earthmen like to feel at home, you know." The clock went tick-tick . "Well, uh," the man said. "Uh. Thank you." Mary sat before the dressing table with her back to the mirror, while June and Adele occupied the two overstuffed chairs. Night sounds drifted up from the yellow canal, and fresh flower scents whispered on the warm air. The diaphanous glass curtains rustled at the open window. "They're too expensive," Mary said. "I'm sure Miss Bestris overcharges us for them." "Hush," said June, glancing around at the walls nervously. "Hush, Mary." She smoothed at the delicate, plutolac lace fringe above her breasts. "Imported material like this costs money. You can't get it for nothing, and we have to have the best." "I still think she charges too much." Adele shrugged delicately and crossed shapely ankles. "I think Miss Bestris must like you, or she wouldn't let you wear that dress again tonight. You ought to watch out that you don't get on the wrong side of her." Mary laughed, her amethyst eyes sparkling. "I won't care. Not after tonight." "You're not going to run away?" June asked breathlessly. "You wouldn't dare do that. You'd catch it, sure!" Mary shook her head. "Not run away." Adele leaned forward and said huskily, "You got enough money to redeem your contract?" Again Mary shook her head. "No. It's nine hundred and ten dordocs. I have only ninety-three. But I'll have enough in the morning!" She stood up and crossed to the window, looked out toward the spaceport. "How?" "Tell us, Mary!" "Tell you what?" Anne asked, coming into the room. Languidly she drew the door closed behind her and rested against it. "Tell you what?" she insisted, narrowing milky eyes. "Mary says she can redeem her contract tomorrow." Anne's wide mouth curled contemptuously. "Nonsense!" "It's not," said Mary without turning; Anne glided sensuously across the room to the bed, her tight fitting plastic rippling with her tigerish muscles. She sat down. "He said he'd take me away, this trip," Mary continued. "He'll sign off, and then we'll both get a ship and go to one of the frontier planets. Where it won't matter about -- all this." Anne laughed harshly. "My God! You believe that?" "We've both been saving our money," Mary said dreamily. "He's in love with me. He said so." "Honey, that's what they all say." Smiling, Mary turned from the window and leaned backward, stretching. "You don't know him. He's different." "They're all the same," Anne said, her mouth twisting bitterly. "They're just alike. Don't believe any of them." And Mary said, "With him, it's different. You'll see." After a moment, Anne said, "That Earthman? That what's-hisname?" Mary nodded, and Anne brushed an imaginary something off her knee. "An Earthman," Anne said. "They're the worst of all." "You don't know him, or you wouldn't say that." Adele looked away from Anne. "You love him, don't you, Mary?" "Yes." "You're a fool," Anne said. "Listen to me. Love a man? God! You'll see. After him, there'll be another and another, and -- just like Rosy -- you'll watch 'em leave you and laugh at you until finally you're hurt so bad you don't think you can stand being hurt any more, and then along comes another one, and it starts all over again, and then one night you take a razor blade and go to the sink and stick out your throat and..." "No! No! You're wrong! He's not like the rest!" Anne leaned back carelessly, resting, propped on one hand. "See. You know I'm right, already." "You're not!" Anne shrugged. "Honey, tell me that tomorrow night." "I better go take my cake oqt," Mary said. She fled the room in a swirl of shimmering glastic. Anne sneered, "I don't see why Miss Bestris puts up with her the way she does." "You're jealous," June said quietly. Anne did not answer. "Mary's decent," Adele said. "Maybe that's why. She's from the sticks, and her parents still come to see her on visiting days, and there's something about her so -- so innocent. Maybe that's why Miss Bestris likes her." June said, "I think she's better than the rest of us. I think Miss Bestris feels sorry for her in a way." "Don't make me laugh," Anne said, facing June. "The only one that'll ever feel sorry for her is herself!" "You shouldn't have talked like that to her!" June snapped. "Why don't you let her alone? She'll feel bad enough without you helping!" Anne rolled over on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. June took a helox lamp from her drawer and started to bake her hair darker. Those Earthmen were so funny about colors. In the kitchen, Mary took die cake out of the oven. It was steamy and light and fluffy, and it smelled sweet and warm. She set it on the table and mixed a two-minute green frosting which she spread, carefully, over the cake. She patted here and there with the spatula and stood back, her eyes proud and serious. She hummed a little tune under her breath as she scrubbed the pots and pans. Her hands moved in practiced rhythm, and the water splashed and gurgled. When the kitchen was again spotless, she looked once more at the cake, and then, turning out the light, she went back to her room. Anne and Adele had left, but June was sitting quietly in the dusky moonlight. Her white dress seemed vaguely luminous. Laughing, Mary flicked on the light. "It's a wonderful cake," she said. "The best one I ever made. Just the way it should be." "I wouldn't feel too bad, Mary, if he doesn't come to eat it," June said. "I don't want to sound like Anne, but there was a lot of sense in what she said." "It's just like a real wedding cake." She hummed the snatch of Martian tune. "Like in the telepapers." She laughed with her eyes. "The bridegroom takes the silver knife and cuts two large pieces of the cake while the bride, dressed in filament coral, stands at his right hand. She carries a bouquet of -- Anne just likes to be mean!" June frowned. Mary crossed to the dressing table. She studied her face in the mirror. It was heart shaped, elfin; her purple hair was a riot of curls, and her eyes were amethyst and gold. She smiled at herself. "I want to look as pretty as I can tonight." She twisted around. "You don't think he'll come either, do you?" "I -- no, Mary." Mary looked back at the mirror. "He likes our canal blossom perfume." She dabbed some of it on her ear lobes. "I like it best, too." June stood up, crossed to the musikon, found a slow five-toned waltz. She turned the music very low, and left the color mixer dim enough so that only the faintest ghosts projected hues moved on walls and ceiling. Mary continued to stare into the mirror. "But he will come. I know it." June said nothing. "Don't you see. I just know he'll come." June crossed back to her seat. Mary turned from the mirror. "I'm sure he will. He's -- I mean..." June smiled wanly. "Well, he will! You'll see!" June said, "Even if it is an old dress, you look very nice in it." "I've been learning his language. I can say 'thank you' and 'yes' and 'no' and 'I love you' and all kinds of things in it. He gave me a book, and I've been studying. I want to be able really to talk with him. We've got a lot to talk about. I want to find out about his parents, and what he likes for supper and what kind of music he likes to hear, and -- and all sorts of things. I want to find out all about his planet, and..." "Yes," June said wearily, "I know." The music played on. The moving lights on the walls were like colored reflections from a sunlit river. "He may be a little late tonight ; he has a lot to do, first. But he'll be here." Buzzzzz... It was the red button; it blinked on and off. "Visitors," June said. "Look -- " Mary said. "Look, June. I'm not half ready yet. Look. Tell Miss Bestris I'll be down a little late. Tell her I have a special boy, and it'll be all right. He wants me to wait for him." June was on her feet... All right. You'd better not wait too long!" "I won't." After June was gone, Mary returned to the task of making her face pretty, but after a moment, she turned from the mirror, leaned back, and tried to relax. Underneath her dress, her heart was pounding. The warm air carried sounds of the night creatures. One of the great canal insects, screeching, flapped by the window. The tiny third moon crept up over the horizon, and the buildings cast triple shadows. Buzzz. Buzzzz . Still Mary waited. Buzzz . Buzzzz. Buzzzzzz... She was afraid to wait any longer. But by now she was sure that he would be down stairs. There was a last-minute flurry of combing and primping, and then she rustled out of the room, her head erect, her eyes shining. gan threw shimmering, prismatic beams on the ceiling. Beneath it, stiff, embarrassed spacemen, mostly officers dressed in parade uniforms, chatted in space-pidgin with the laughing, rainbow-haired girls. Miss Bestris sat in one corner, her eyes roving the room: settling here for a second, there for a second, checking, approving, disapproving, silently. Occasionally she would smile or nod at one of the girls or one of the spacemen, and once she frowned ever so slightly and shook her head. Anne was reclining on a couch, eating a golden Martian apple, listening to a second mate; she played with a lock of his hair and smiled her wide smile. June, angelic, sat primly in a straight-backed chair, the captain at her feet, a boyish, space-pale Earthman, drew embarrassed circles on the carpet with his index finger. In the next room, three couples were dancing to the slow music of an Earth orchestra. An inner door opened, and a uniformed native sheriff stepped in, a crisp, military figure. "Miss Bestris?" She stood up. "Yes?" The Earthmen fell silent, waiting. "We think we have your runaway." He turned to the door. "Bring her in." Two more sheriffs entered, and between them, there was a young, slender girl. Her face was gaunt and tear-stained. Her body trembled. She looked at the Madame fearfully. "You idiots!" Miss Bestris screamed. "Get her out of here! You'll ruin my party! Take her out!" The two men removed the girl. To the remaining sheriff, Miss Bestris said, "Damn you, if you ever do anything like that again, I'll... I'll..." "I'm sorry, Madame. But we wanted immediate identification. Would you want us to hold the wrong girl?" "That's her, all right! Now, get out! Wait for me in my office." When they were gone Miss Bestris turned to the silent room. In quite passable Esperanto she said, "I -- am sorry. A misunderstanding. I assure you, nothing. Go on with the party, and I'll see what I can do for the poor girl." She stood up and in her own language said, "Lively, girls! Smile! You, Rita, hurry and serve tea!" She made her exit. The spacemen grumbled among themselves, coughed uneasily, watched the closed door through which the Madame had gone. Listening, they could hear only a muted mumble of sing-song sounds in several voices. With determined animation, the girls moved about, smiled, chatted. Rita came in, wheeling the tea tray, and the girls converged on it, each trying to be the first to serve her escort. The tea was the Martian stuff, concocted of a kind of local hemp. The Earthmen found it harsh and bitter to the taste, but gentle on the soul. Anne had filled two cups and returned to the second mate when she caught sight of Mary coming down the stairs. On the lowest step, Mary stood for a long time; her eyes eagerly searched the crowd. Slowly a puzzled, hurt look came over her face. June came to her side after a little while. "Isn't he here?" "No. Not yet." "I'm sorry," June said, touching Mary's arm lightly. "It's all right. It's early yet. I'll just sit down by Miss Bestris chair and wait for him." She turned from June and went to the chair. Before she could sit down, a space corporal came over, bowed, tried to take her hand. She shook her head. He smiled twistedly and walked stiffly away. Another man smiled at her. She shook her head slowly. Someone came in the front door, and she leaned forward. Then she slumped back limply. She heard a tinkly laugh. She looked in its direction. She met Anne's eyes, bright and amused. Just then Miss Bestris came in, her eyes angry and her cheeks flushed. She strode across the room. "Well," she said. "I'm glad to see you finally came down." She sank heavily into her chair. "(Present's back. They just brought her in. The idiots came right in here with her. I'll bet I lost half-a-dozen customers. These Earthmen are sensitive about such things." Mary was still staring at the door; Miss Bestris looked down at her. "Well, what are you sitting here for?" "Please, Miss Bestris. I'm waiting for my special boy friend tonight." She snorted and looked away. "Why isn't he here?" "He will be." "He'd better. I'll let you wait another -- half an hour. That's all." "Thank you, Miss Bestris. You're very kind to me." "I indulge you more than I ought to, child," she said. "More than is good for you, if the truth were known." A man came in; Mary stiffened and then relaxed. The mutter of voices blended into a steady hum. More couples were dancing. Miss Bestris moved around the room. The music was tinny. Another man came in. "Your time's up," the Madame told Mary. "Please, let me just wait for another few minutes." Miss Bestris fixed her lips grimly. "I've had enough nonsense for tonight. You heard me!" "Please!" "You heard what I said." "Miss Bestris, I couldn't. Not tonight. Honest, I couldn't. If I had to talk to anybody, I'd break down and cry. He'll... come. I know he will." Miss Bestris whirled on her. "Listen, you little -- " But she stopped, suddenly. "All right," she said, gritting her teeth. "I can't afford another scene tonight. But you'll be sorry for this." Miss Bestris stormily looked away. The dancers danced ; the music swelled louder. Gradually, deliberately, the lights were waning. "Haven't I always been good to you, Mary?" the Madame asked. "Yes." "Then like an obedient girl, do as I say. If he hasn't come by now, he just won't. He's gone to some other house." "No!" Mary said doggedly. "Just remember, tomorrow, how you deliberately disobeyed me. Your silly emotions are costing me money, and that's one thing I simply won't stand for." "He'll come." Mary said. "You won't lose money." Couples sat side by side, laughing, talking in whispers. Occasionally there were giggles. The room began to empty slowly. The lights continued to dim until the rooms were gloomy. Even the shifting shades of the color organ were no more than a faint lambence. Anne, laughing, helped her second mate to his feet. "I'll give you one more chance," Miss Bestris said. "The next man that comes in..." "No! I just couldn't! Not tonight!" A few more customers drifted in. Then even the stragglers stopped coming. It was very late. "He's deserted you; you see that now?" Madame Bestris sneered. Mary stood up. There were tears in her eyes. "You can't -- you don't -- know -- how I feel," she choked. "You don't care!" She turned and ran up the stairs, crying. Several Earthmen, still in the big room, turned to watch. The torches were misty twinkles now. The last couples climbed the stairs and then Miss Bestris, too, went to bed. town awoke; commerce began. At seven, Miss Bestris lay in bed frowning, considering the events of the previous evening. But she was not so annoyed that she forgot to call a doctor on the teleview and arrange for him to come at nine to give a physical examination. Her bulk out of bed, she dressed and went to the kitchen to brew a pot of hemp tea. The cleaning maid, moving about in the next room, heard Miss Bestris call sharply: "Flavia! Come in here!" Flavia appeared with a dust rag in her hand. "Did you cut this cake?" "No, ma'am." Miss Bestris glowered. "That little idiot! She must have slipped down here after we were all asleep and sat here and cried her silly little eyes out! If she thinks she can pull that love-sick act on me she'll soon find out different. Am I supposed to put up with having her moon over every space tramp that comes in? Why, I've taken more from her -- !" "Yes, ma'am." Miss Bestris waddled to the stairs, climbed them determinedly. At Mary's door she stopped and twisted the knob. Locked! Miss Bestris hammered. "Open up, Mary!" The door rattled under her hand. "Open that door at once!" No answer. Miss Bestris pounded harder. "Open up, I say!" Anne sauntered into the hall, her dressing gown swishing. "She really made you look the fool last night, didn't she?" Anne said lazily. "You -- you slut! Mind your own business." Anne smiled and shrugged. "Open the door, Mary! Do you hear me! Open it!" "Maybe she killed herself," Anne said. "It has happened." "My God! No... She wouldn't dare. You think she would?" Anne shrugged again. "They do funny things sometimes." Miss Bestris' face was red. "Run down and get my keys. In my desk. You know where they are." Then, "For God's sake , hurry!" While she waited Miss Bestris rattled the door, pleading and cursing. Finally Anne returned. Miss Bestris snatched the key with a shaking hand. She hurled the door open and burst inside. "See here, you little -- !" She stopped. The room was empty. On the neatly made bed reposed a little stack of money. When Miss Bestris got around to counting it, she found that it contained exactly nine hundred and ten dordocs . as you've ever seen in a science fiction magazine. For instance: about the Central Investigation Bureau and the new World Government of the #nd Century; there's a short classic, by curl your hair; also top-notch stories by Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides, Edward W. Ludwig, H. B. Fyfe and others. There's a song that says " it's later than you think" and it is perhaps lamentable that someone didn't sing it for Henry that beautiful morning... Pipe of Peace By. James McKimmey, Jr. His wife, a short thin woman with worried eyes, watched him while he sat before the kitchen table. He was thin, too, like his wife, but tall and tough-skinned. His face, with its leather look was immobile. "Why?" asked his wife. "Good reasons," the farmer said. He poured yellow cream into a cup of coffee. He let the cup sit on the table. "Henry?" said the woman, as though she were really speaking to someone else. She walked around the kitchen in quick aimless bird steps. "My right," said Henry. He lifted his cup, finally, tasting. "We'll starve." crazy," she said, as though it were "Not likely. Not until everybody a half-question, a half-pronounceelse does, anyway." ment. The woman circled the room and The farmer was relaxing now, came back to her husband. Her leaning back in his chair. "Might eyes winked, and there were lines have. Might have, at that." between them. Her fingers clutched "Why?" she asked, the edge of the table. "You've gone The farmer turned his coffee cup carefully. "Thing to do, is all. Each man in his own turn. This is my turn." The woman watched him for a long time, then she sat down on a chair beside the table. The quick, nervous movement was gone out of her, and she sat like a frozen sparrow. The farmer looked up and grinned. "Feels good. Just to sit here. Does well for the back and the arms. Been working too hard." "Henry," the woman said. The farmer tasted his coffee again. He put the cup on the table and leaned back, tapping his browned fingers. "Just in time, I'd say. Waited any longer, it wouldn't have done any good. Another few years, a farmer wouldn't mean anything." The woman watched him, her eyes frightened as though he might suddenly gnash his teeth or leap in the air. "Pretty soon," the farmer said, "they'd have it all mechanical. Couldn't stop anything. Now," he said, smiling at his wife, "we can stop it all." "Henry, go out to the fields," the woman said. "No," Henry said, standing, stretching his thin, hard body. "I won't go out to the fields. Neither will August Brown nor Clyde Briggs nor Alfred Swanson. None of us. Anywhere. Not until the food's been stopped long enough for people to wake up." The farmer looked out of the kitchen window, beyond his tractor and the cow bam and the windmill. He looked at rows of strong com, shivering their soft silk in the morning breeze. "We'll stop the corn. Stop the wheat. Stop the cattle, the hogs, the chickens." "You can't." "I can't. But al! of us together can." "No sense," the woman said, wagging her head. "No sense. "It's sense, all right. Best sense we've ever had. Can't use an army with no stomach. Old as the earth. Can't fight without food. Takes food to run a war. "You'll starve the two of us, that's all you'll do. Nobody else will stop work." The farmer turned to his wife. "Yes, they will. Everywhere a farmer is the same. He works the land. He reads the papers. He votes. He listens to the radio. He watches the television. Mostly, he works the land. Alone, with his own thoughts and ideas. He isn't any different in Maine than he is in Oregon. We've all stopped work. Now. This mom  #) mg. "How about those across the ocean? Are they stopping, too? They're not going to feed up their soldiers? To kill us if we don't starve first? To -- " "They stopped, too. A farmer is a farmer. Like a leaf on a tree. No matter on what tree in what country on whose land. A leaf is a leaf. A farmer's the same. A farmer is a farmer." "It won't work," the woman said dully. "Yes, it will." "They'll make you work." "How? It's our own property." "They'll take it away from you." "Who'll work it then?" The woman rocked in her chair, her mouth quivering. "They'll get somebody." The farmer shook his head. "Too many people doing other things, like making shells and guns, like sitting in fox-holes or flying planes." The woman sat rocking, her hands together in her lap. "It won't work," she repeated. "It'll work," said the farmer. "Right now , it'll work. Yes, we've got milkers and shuckers, and we've got hatchers for the chickens. We've got tractors and combines and thrashing machines. They're all mechanical, all right. But we don't have mechanical farmers, yet. The pumps, the tractors, the milkers don't work by themselves. In time, maybe. Not now. We're still ahead of them on that. It'll work." "Go out to the fields, Henry," his wife said, her voice like the sound of a worn phonograph record. "No," the farmer said, taking a pipe from his overalls. "I think instead, I'll just sit in the sun and watch the corn. Watch the birds on top of the bam, maybe. I'll fill my pipe and sit there and smoke and watch. And when I get sleepy, I'll sleep. After while I might go see August Brown or Clyde Briggs or maybe Alfred Swanson. We'll sit and talk, about pleasant things, peaceful things. We'll wait." The farmer put the pipe between his teeth and walked to the door. He put on his straw hat, buttoned the sleeves of his blue shirt and stepped outside. His wife sat at the table, staring at nothing in the room. The farmer walked across the barnyard, listening to the sound of the chickens and the sound of the breeze going through the com. Near the bam, he sat upon an old tree stump and filled his pipe with tobacco. He lit the pipe, cupping his hands, and sat there, smoking, the smoke spiraling up into the bright warm air. He took his pipe from his teeth and looked at it. "Pipe of peace," he said, laughing inside himself. The breeze was soft and the sun warm on his back. He sat there, smoking, feeling the quiet of the morning, the peace of the great sky above. He had no time to stand or to take his pipe from his mouth, when the two men crossed the yard and lifted him up by the arms. He dropped the pipe, while he was dragged past the house, to the road beyond. He had no time to yell or scream, before his hat was swept from his head, the overalls and the blue shirt stripped from his body. He had not even thought about what it was that had happened, before he was thrust inside a white truck, with strong steel sides and with grilled windows like those of a cell. He was just sitting there, in the truck, without his clothes, speeding away with August Brown and Clyde Briggs and Alfred Swanson. upon the earth. Chickens clucked in their pens, while birds fluttered about the top of the bam. A pig squealed. The corn rustled. ( Continued on page #I ) mm  A xfwviV ; A He was a reporter from Venus with an assignment on Earth. He got his story but, against orders, he fell in love -- and therein lies this story. The Huddlers Illustrated by Ernie Barth them, where I come from, huddlers. Damnedest thing to see from any distance, the way they huddle. They had one place, encrusting the shore line for miles on one of the land bodies they called the Eastern Seaboard. A coagulation in this They called it New York, and it was bigger than most of the others, but typical. It wasn't bad enough living side by side; the things built mounds and lived one above the other. Apartments they called them. What monstrosities they were. We couldn't figure this huddling, at first. All our attention since Akers' first penetration into space had been directed another way in the galaxy, and though I'll grant you unified and universal concentration may be considered unwise in some areas, it's been our greatest strength. It's brought us rather rapidly to the front, I'm sure you'll agree, and we're not the oldest planet, by a damned sight. Well, by the time we got to the huddlers, Akers was dead and Murten was just an old man with vacant eyes. Jars was handling the Department, though you might say Deering ran it, being closer to most of the gang. Jars was always so cold ; nobody ever got to know him really well. They divided on the huddling. Fear, Jars said, and love, Deering said, but who could say for sure? As Deering said to me, "What could they fear? They've got everything they need, everything but knowledge and their better specimens are getting closer to that, every day." In the laboratory, Deering said this, and how did we know old Jars was in a corner, breaking down a spirigel? "They fear each other," Jars said, as though it was an official announcement, as though any fact is permanent. "And they fear nature. It's the most fear ridden colony of bipeds a sane mind could imagine." Deering looked at me, and winked. Jars went back to the spirigel. Deering said, "Love, love, love. All they sing about, all they write about, all they talk about, love, love, love." Jars was just tracing a z line on the spirigel and he put down his legort at that. "Rather superficial thinking, from a scientist," he said quietly. "Surface manifestations to be considered as indicative. Oral and verbal camouflage to be accepted as valid. Deering, old thing, please -- " Deering shrugged. "So I am -- what do they call it, a Pollyanna. Isn't that a pretty word? So, I'm a Pollyanna." "I rather think that describes you partially," Jars said, "and with this particular planet we're discussing, it can be a dangerous attitude." "So?" Deering said, nudging me. "And could I ask why?" "Ask it." "I ask." "You've recorded the state of their development. They have, among other things, achieved nuclear fission." "So? In the fourth grade we are teaching nuclear fission." "We are a scientific people. They haven't been, until very, very recently. You have noted, I hope, their first extensive use of this new discovery?" "Hero -- Helo -- " Deering shrugged. "My memory." "Hiroshima," Jars supplied. "Love -- , my friend?" "I have noted it," Deering said. "We spoke, a while ago, of surface manifestations." "We shall continue to. You have witnessed the mechanical excellence of their machines, in some ways beyond ours, because of their greater element wealth. You have noted the increased concentration of their better minds, their scientific minds. How long do you think it will be, friend, before they are ready for us?" "Ready, ready -- ? In what way, ready?" "The only way they know, the only thing they seem to have time for -- ready for war." "War -- ," Deering said, and sighed. "Oh, Jars, they will be beyond war, certainly, before they are cognizant of us. They are no tribe of incompetents; they grow each day." "They -- ?" Jars' smile was cynical. "Their scientists grow. Are their scientists in command, sir?" That "sir" had been unnecessary; Jars was the senior mind, here. Deering didn't miss it, and he flushed. Jars said softly, "I apologize. It was not a thing to say. I have spent too much time in the study of these -- monsters." They had gone to school, together, those two, and the bond was there and the respect, but they were different, mentally, and each knew it. "You have a sharp tongue," Deering said, "but a sharper mind. I believe I can stand it." He smiled. "Love, fear, hate -- what does it matter to us, except as phenomena?" "It matters to us, believe me, please. It concerns us very much, Am." When Jars got to first names, he was emotionally wrought. I looked at him in surprise. And so did Deering. We weren't ever going to warm up to him, but he was our best mind and there wasn't a man in the department who didn't appreciate that. We stared at him, and he sat down on the high bench near the Maling converters. He looked old and he was tired, we could see. "Evil," he said quietly. "Fear, hate, evil -- which of the three is the father and which are the sons? I suppose fear is the father." "I'd always thought so," Deering said, "though my education was almost completely confined to the technical. I'm rather skimpy on the humanities." "And I," Jars said, and now looked at me. "But not you, Werig " "I don't know them, sir," I said. "Surface manifestations, as we've said before, today. It would need a closer study. Their huddling is what intrigues me the most." One of the rare smiles came to Jars' lined face as he looked at Deering. "Huddling, the lad says. If you don't say it, I won't, Arn." Deering smiled in return. "We'll change the routine, this time; you say 'love' and I'll say 'fear. But seriously, Jars, you fear these -- people?" "I fear them," Jars said. "Scientifically, perhaps, they are tyros, but mechanically they are not. They have discovered forces and developed machines which they do not understand, and yet, have achieved efficiency with them. I fear any monster that powerful even though it is blind." "And you think there is a possibility of their becoming -- aware of us within any determinable time?" "I do. You will remember how quickly the Algreans developed, once they achieved unity? You will remember how quickly they became a threat?" "Yes," Deering said quietly, "and I have been trying a long time to forget what we did to that planetoid." "It was necessary for survival," Jars said simply. "I think, by any standards, we would be the ones chosen to survive." Deering's smile was cynical. "At least, by our standards. We had a closer communication with them. About the huddlers, we know only what we convert from their stronger video broadcasts. It is a device they seem to use more for entertainment than for information." Jars nodded, and stood up. "And love is their major entertainment, perhaps. Love and war. But we gabble. I had a plan in mind, a plan to put before the assembly." was part of it. The humanities had been no major with me, but they didn't want a scholar, they wanted a reporter, anyway. Or perhaps I could be called a recorder. Jars talked and the assembly listened. They always do, when Jars talks. And I was their boy, and went into a concentrated and complete briefing. They put me under the lucidate and poured it to me, night and day, all the information we had on the huddlers and all the theories based on that information. They put me into a space sphere, and said "good luck" and do our people proud, young man. Oh, yes. And don't fall in love. Oh, no. They'd pick me up, again, when they got a signal. They didn't expect to wait too long for that, I guess, at the time. The sphere was a relic of the Algrean business, and Algrea hadn't been this much of a trip. But Mechanics said it would do, and it did. I landed in the Pacific, about three-quarters of a mile off the Santa Monica yacht basin, and let the sphere float north for a while until I reached a secluded spot. In a small curve of the shore line, a few miles above Santa Monica, I beached her, and opened the dissolving cocks. I watched her melt into the surging water, and turned to face the red and green light almost immediately overhead. I walked up from the beach to the road, not even knowing what they looked like. Their evolution should have matched ours, but who could be sure? For all I knew, I might be a freak to them. I should have thought of that before dissolving the ship. Above, the light changed from red to green and across the street, I saw a sign. This was Sunset Boulevard, and the Pacific Coast Highway. This was open country, but Los Angeles. Along the Coast Highway, a pair of lights were bearing down on me, and they seemed to waver, as though the machine were under imperfect control. I moved back, out of the way, and the light overhead turned to red. The car stopped about even with me, its motor running. I couldn't see the occupants nor the driver. The light changed, the car jerked, and the motor stopped. "Damn," somebody said. It was a female voice. There was a grinding noise, and another damn, and then a head appeared through the open window on my side of the road. It was a blond head, and what I could see of the face looked attractive. "Are you sober?" she asked. "Not always," I answered. "Some times I'm quite cheerful. But I'm some distance from home, and have nothing to be cheerful about, at the moment." "Try not to be a Cerf," she said angrily. "What I mean is, are you -- have you been drinking?" "Not recently, though I could use some water." I could see her face more clearly now, and it was like the faces of our women, only prettier than most, I thought. "Look," she said, "Pm drunk. Could you drive this thing? Could you drive me home?" "I'd be glad to," I answered, "if you will tell me where you live." She gave me an address on Sunset, and this was Sunset, this lateral street, ending at the ocean. So, quite obviously, it was an address I could find. I went over to climb in behind the wheel. There were two smells in that pretty car with the canvas top. One smell was of gasoline, the other was of alcohol. "There's obviously alcohol in the gasoline," I said, "though that shouldn't prevent it from igniting." "A funny, funny man," she said. "Keep the dialogue to a minimum, will you, Bogart? Fm not exactly sharp, right now." I depressed the starter button, and the motor caught. I swung left onto Sunset, and started up the hill. The car was clearly a recent model, but Jars had been wrong about the mechanical excellence of these huddlers. The machine simply had no life, no zest. around two curves, climbing all the while, past some huddled houses on the left, and the whole shining sea spread out on the right. The woman said, "If you know a place where the coffee is drinkable, stop." "I have no money," I said. Diamonds I had, a bagful of them, for AVe knew that huddlers treasured diamonds. But no money. "I've got money," she said. "I've got a hell of a lot more money than I have sense. Have you ever been in love, Bogart?" "Never," I said. We were coming into a small huddled area, now. A sign read. Pacific Palisades . "I have," she said. "I still am. Isn't it a miserable rotten world?" "This one?" I asked, and then said quickly, "I mean -- this part of it?" "Any part of it," she said. "I've seen most of it, and any part where there's men is bad, Bogart." "My name," I told her, "is not Bogart. My name is Fred Werig." "A pleasure, Fred," she said. "My name is Jean Decker. And I'm beginning to feel better." "It couldn't be my company," I said, "so it must be the air. I haven't seen any coffee places that are open." I caught a flare of light from the comer of my eye, and turned to see her applying flame to something in her mouth. I remembered from our history; she was smoking. It was a habit long dead where I came from. And then I remembered what she'd said about being drunk, and knew that, too, as one of our long disused vices. What was it Akers had said about 'being directed'? A theory, but discredited now, since our scientific advance. But this almost parallels evolution? "Cigarette?" she said, and I said, "No, thanks. I -- don't smoke." "You're the only thing in Los Angeles that doesn't," she said bitterly. "Where are you from, Fred?" "New York," I said. "Where are you from, Jean?" "Believe it or not, I was bom here," she said. "Fm one of the three people in this town who was Bom here." "It's a big town, isn't it?" I said. "Less huddled than the others." "Huddled," she said, and laughed. "Huddled. I like that. They huddle, all right, and not just the football teams. The gregarious instinct, Freddy boy." "Well, yes," I agreed, "but why, Jean? Why haven't they outgrown it? Is it -- fear?" "You would have to ask somebody bright," she said. "When you get to Bundy, turn over toward Wilshire. We'll find an eating place that's open." "You tell me when I get to Bundy," I said. "I'm not exactly familiar with this part of town." She told me, and we got to Wilshire, eventually, and on Wilshire there were many eating places. We went into one; it was too cold to eat outside. And it was bright in there, and I got my first really clear look at the face and figure of Jean Decker. Well, it was ridiculous, the attraction that seemed to emanate from her. It actually made me weak. And she was staring at me, too. backed benches, and she sat down. I sat across from her. "I don't have a tailor," I said. "Your lips are so red, Jean." She frowned. "Slowly, sailor." Then a waitress was there, and I saw how red her lips were, too, and I realized it was another of the old vices I'd forgotten, cosmetics. "Just coffee, for me, black," Jean said. "Golden boy over there will have a beef barbecue, probably, won't you, Fred?" "I guess," I said. "And some milk, cow's milk." Jean laughed. "It's my money. Have canary milk." "Not tonight," I said. The waitress went away, and there was a noticeable period of silence. Jean was tracing some design on the table top with her index finger. Her nails, too, were painted, I saw. I liked the effect of that. She looked up, and faced me gravely, "Fred, you're a very at"If you're hungry," she said finally, "get a sandwich. You won't find me stingy... What in the world is that material in that suit, Fred?" "I don't know," I said. "You are beautiful, Jean." She smiled. "Well, thanks. You can have a piece of pie, too, for that. That certainly is a fine weave in that material. What did your tailor call it?" We were next to a sort of alcove, furnished with a table and two hightractive gent, which you undoubtedly know. Are you connected with pictures?" I shook my head. "Just a traveler, a tourist." She said, "Oh" and went back to tracing the design. I thought her finger trembled. A very dim smile on her face, and she didn't look away from the table top. "You've been -- picked up before, undoubtedly." "No. What kind of talk is this, Jean?" Now, she looked up. "Crazy talk. You're no New Yorker, Freddy lad. You're a Middle Westerner; you can't fool me. Fresh from the farm and craving cow's milk." "I never saw a cow in my life," I told her truthfully, "though I've heard about them. What makes you think I'm from a farm?" "Your freshness, your complexion and -- everything about you." The waitress brought our food, then, and I didn't answer. I tried to keep my eyes away from Jean as I ate; I had a mission, here, and no time for attachments beyond the casual. I was sure, even then, that loving Jean Decker would never qualify as casual. She drank her coffee and smoked; I ate. She asked, "Where are you staying, in town, Fred? I'm sober enough to drive, now." "I'll get public transportation," I said. "You get home, and to bed." She laughed. "Public transportation? Freddy, you don't know this town. There isn't any. Did you just get here, tonight?" I looked at her, and nodded. "On the bum?" she said quietly. "I -- suppose," I said honestly, "though the word has connotations which don't describe me." I put my hand in my jacket pocket and fumbled in the open bag for one of the smaller diamonds. I brought one out about the size of my little finger nail, and placed it on the table. All the light in the room seemed to be suddenly imprisoned there. She stared at it, and up at me. "Fred -- for heaven's sake -- that's not -- real, is it?" I nodded. "But -- it -- " She glanced from the diamond to me, her mouth partially open. "Fred, what kind of monstrous gag is this? God, I thought I'd seen everything, growing up in this town. Fred -- " "I'd like to sell it," I said. "You, Jean, are my only friend in this town. Could you help me arrange for its sale?" She was looking at me with wonder now, studying me. "Hot?" she asked. "Hot -- ?" "Stolen -- you know what I mean." "Stolen? Jean, you didn't mean to accuse me of that." Skepticism was ugly on her lovely face. "Fred, what's your angle? You step out of the darkness like some man from Mars in a strange suit, with no money, but a diamond that must be worth -- " "We'll learn what it's worth," I said. "Mars isn't inhabited, Jean. Don't you trust me? Have I done anything to cause you to distrust me?" "Nothing," she said. "Do you distrust all men, Jean?" "No. Just the ones I've met. Oh, baby, and I thought you were a farmer." She was crushing out her cigarette. "You haven't a place to stay, but I've got a guest house, and you'll stay there, tonight. You aren't stepping back into the darkness, tonight, Fred Werig. You, I want to know about." The words held a threat, but not her meaning, I was sure. And what better way to orient myself than in the home of a friend? Massive, in an architecture I'd assumed was confined to the southeastern United States. Two-story place, with huge, two-story pillars and a house-wide front porch, the great lawn studded with giant trees. And she lived there alone, excepting for the servants. She was no huddler, and I told her that. "Dad owned a lot of property in this town," she said. "He was a great believer in the future of this town." At the time I didn't understand what that had to do with her lack of huddling. The guest house was small, but very comfortable, a place of three bedrooms and two baths and a square living room with a natural stone fireplace. I had my first night of sleep on this planet, and slept very well. I woke to a cloudy morning, and the sound of someone knocking on the front door. It was a servant, and she said, "Miss Decker sent me to inform you that breakfast will be ready any time you want it, sir. We are eating inside, this morning, because of the cold." "I'll be there, soon, thank you," I said, and she went away. Showering, I was thinking of Akers for some reason and his directed theory and what was that other theory he'd had? Oh, yes, the twin planets. Senile, he was, by that time and not much listened to, but a mind like that? And who had he been associated with at that time? It was before my birth, but I'd read about it, long ago. The Visitor, Akers had called this man. The Earth man who had come to Venus. And what had his name been? Beer -- ? Beers -- ? No, but like that -- and it came. Ambrose Bierce. Jean wore a light green robe, for breakfast, and it was difficult for me to take my eyes away from her. "I'm not usually this informal at mixed breakfasts," she told me, smiling, "but I thought it might warm up enough for a swim a little later." She threw the robe aside, and I saw she was wearing a scanty garment beneath it. Evidently the huddlers didn't swim naked, and I wondered at a moral code that sanctioned drinking alcohol but was ashamed of the human body. I was glad the house had been cold when I answered the maid's summons, for I had worn a robe I'd found there. Fruit juice and wheat cakes and sausage and toast and jelly and eggs and milk. We ate in a small room, off a larger dining room, a small room whose walls were glass on two sides. "It's too old a house to modernize completely," Jean told me. "I grew up in this house." "You don't -- work, Jean?" "No. Should I?" "Work or study. Life must be very dull if you don't do one of those." "You might have a point there," she said. "I tried everything from the movies to sculpture. I wasn't very good at anything. What do you do, Fred?" "I'm a perpetual guest," I said lightly. "Do you read much, Jean?" "Too much, though nothing very heavy, I grant you." "Have you ever read about a man named Ambrose Bierce?" "I've read everything he ever wrote. Why did you ask that, Fred?" "I -- heard about him. I wondered who he was." "Where did you hear about him, Fred? In Mexico?" "No. I don't remember where I heard about him." "He disappeared," she said quietly, "some time right before the first world war. I've forgotten the exact year. I think it was #." Before the war, before the "first" war... And I thought of Jars' wife, who had come to us just before this last planetary war -- the "second" world war. And what was his pet name for her? Guest, he called her, and joked about her coming from another world. But didn't Jars defend the discredited late-in-life theories of Akers? I tried to remember the name of Jars' wife, and then it came. I asked, "And Amelia Earhart?" Jean's voice was rough. "July #nd, #. I guess I'll never forget that, when my god died. What are you trying to say? Is it some new damned cult you're promoting, Fred?" "You called her a god. Why, Jean?" "I don't know. I was only thirteen when she died. But she was so clean, so -- so free and windswept, so -- oh, what the spirit of America should be -- and isn't." I looked up to see tears in her eyes. Why was she moved? This girl who certainly knew corruption, this worldly, lovely girl. I smiled at her. She wiped the tears with the back of her hand. "Fred, you are the strangest -- I know this town's a zoo, but you, Fred -- " I continued to smile at her. "I'm just a guy trying to learn. May I repeat something I said last night? You're beautiful, Jean." "You're no three-headed calf, yourself," she said. Twin planets and parallel evolution... Parallel destiny? Not with a third planetary war shaping up here. Three major wars in less than fifty years. Why, why, why... She said, "Thinking, again? You do a lot of thinking, don't you?" "I have to think of something besides you," I told her honestly. "I can't afford to fall in love with you, Jean. I've too many places to go and too many things to see." She just stared at me. It must have been a full minute before she said, "Well, I'll be damned." After breakfast, it was still cold, and she said, "There'll be no swim this morning, I see. If you want to get an appraisal on that diamond, Fred, I'll phone one of our jewelers to come out." "I'd appreciate that," I said. "Would it be all right if I took these newspapers back to my room, now?" "Just dandy," she said. "Sorry to be boring you." "You're not," I told her earnestly. "Believe me, you're not." Nowhere was it stated, but a glance at the front pages showed they were on opposite sides of the political fence. On my planet, we keep the editorial opinion in the editorial columns. Not so with these. The wire services were impartial and the accounts in both papers identical. That was as far as the similarities went. Reading the other accounts was like living in two worlds. An informed people will always be free. Well, perhaps these weren't typical. I was to see papers a lot worse than these before long. I was just starting the want ads when the knock came at the door. It was the maid, again; the jeweler was at the house. A small man, suave and dark, with the manners of a diplomat, fawning like a puppy. It was a perfect stone, he decided. He had, he was sure, a customer who would be interested. Would I accept eight thousand dollars for it? I said I would, and he left. We were in the living room, and Jean stood near the tall front windows. She had changed to a suit of some soft blue material. "As soon as I get the money," I said, "we're going out for some fun, aren't we? I owe you for a beef barbecue." "You don't owe me anything," she said. She didn't look at me. "You'll get over him," I said. "Him -- ?" He turned to look at me curiously. "That man you're in love with, that man you told me about last night." "Oh," she said. "Oh. I was drunk last night, Fred. I'm not in love." Silence. That attraction of hers pulling at me like some localized gravity, silence, and the beating of my heart. Silence, my hands trembling, my knees aching. "I'd like to see some fights," I said. "Would you like to?" She frowned. "Not particularly." She stared at me, shook her head, and looked away. "Well," I said, "I haven't finished the want ads." "Of course," she said. "Get right back to them, Freddy. You never know when you'll find a bargain." They weren't very interesting. I kept seeing her standing next to the window, looking unhappy, frustrated, somehow. I kept seeing the soft fabric of the suit clinging to her beautiful body and the proud grace of her posture. I went back to the house, and she was sitting on the davenport near the fireplace. She looked up without expression. I asked, "Is there a library around here?" She sighed, and rose. She said, "Follow me." She led me to a room whose four walls were lined with books. There was a wide glass door leading out from this to the patio. "Dad's old retreat," she said. "Everything from Aristotle to Zola. If there's something you don't see, don't hesitate to ask. We aim to please." She closed the door behind her. I didn't gorge; I only nibbled. But fed enough to realize this was a deep, rich culture; this planet had produced some first rate minds and exceptional talents. But still, with all this to choose from, the people seemed to prefer Milton Berle. And the people were in command. I was reading Ambrose Bierce when she came in. She looked at the book, and at me. "Lunch," she said quietly. I put the book down, and rose. "The unwelcome guest?" "I'd tell you, if you were." "Would you, honestly?" She didn't answer that. She smiled, and said, "There are some fights at Ocean Park, tonight." We saw those, and later, some amateur fights. Strange spectacles they were, men belaboring each other, but fascinating, too. The amateurs were less talented, but more friendly, leaving the ring arm in arm, if both were still conscious. The professionals displayed no such amicability. Why? I asked Jean. What was the difference between the amateurs and the professionals? "Money," she said, and looked at me strangely. "Didn't you really know that?" I lied with a nod. "I wanted you to see it, and to word it for yourself." "Look," she said with controlled irritation, "if I want any curbstone philosophy, I can read one of those corny columnists. I certainly don't have to sit in a screaming mob watching a couple of morons pound each other bloody to arrive at a stupid generality like that." "Let's get a hamburger," I said. She just stood there, on the sidewalk. "You -- you -- " People were turning to stare. "Farmer?" I suggested. "Oh," she said, "oh, oh -- " "Or a cheeseburger," I added. There was a small crowd, now, openly watching. One man said, "Hey, this is better than them jerks inside. Slug him, lady." Jean started to laugh, and so did I, and then all of us were laughing, the whole crowd. We didn't go to a hamburger place. We went to a place where we could dance, too, and I had a small glass of wine, and wondered why we'd outgrown alcohol, on our planet. It was a night I will never forget. It was a night I learned how much she meant to me. There wasn't ever going to be anybody else for me, after that night. at five-thirty the next morning. And still, I didn't tell her where I was from. When the time came, she could go back with me, but I couldn't risk sharing that secret with her. I didn't have the right to jeopardize my people by giving her information she might divulge unintentionally. The world was our playground, and my study hall American first. We drove east, taking our time, while I tried to get the temper of the people. I never overlooked a chance to talk to people ; the papers were no subsitute for that. And between the papers and the people, I found that only the hysterics were voluble, only the biased articulate. And yet, it was a country with a liberal and progressive tradition, a country that should have been informed beyond the average. Knowledge had been made too easy; the glib were in command. Fear, Jars had said, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that he was closer to it than Deering. For Deering's viewpoint, I had a working model, I had Jean. In the canyon city, New York, high in our room at the EmpireHudson, she said, "You're an awfully nosy guy, Dream Boat." "I like to talk to people," I said. "Haven't you been getting enough attention?" "As much as I can handle," she said. "And I'm enjoying every second of it. But it seems to be getting you down." "You or the people?" I asked, and mussed her hair. She didn't answer that. "Fred," she said, "do you remember that day at breakfast, long ago? Do you remember asking about Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart?" "I guess I do." "Don't be evasive, Fred. You know you do." I pulled her close. "Is this going to be a questioning period? Is this one of those marriages?" "Now, Fred -- " she said, against my shoulder. "Be serious, please, Fred. Please be serious -- oh, you, Fred -- " that phrase they have -- "muddling through"? That's what they were doing. Proudly, with a minimum of complaint, with no thought of rebellion, with no rationalizing or projection, living as the submerged tenth lives in America, and seeming to think that -- well, things could be worse. In Italy, it was the kids, the beggars and procurers and thieves and even murderers who were kids. In Spain we found much of the same. In France it was all the heat and no light, charges and countercharges, lies and counter-lies, confusion and corruption. In Berlin, it was Russia. The cloud that darkens the world looms darkest in Berlin. The apathy that grips the world is epitomized in Berlin. A people with no sense of guilt and no reason for hope, nor stirring to the promise of a re-armed Germany. A bled and devastated people, shorn of their chief strength, their national pride. Jean said, "I've seen enough. Haven't you, Fred? How much can you take?" "One more," I said. "Russia." "Don't be silly," she said. "How would we get into Russia?" "We wouldn't. But I would." "Look, baby, whither though goest, I -- " "Up to here," I said. "Who's the big boss in this family?" "Now, Fred -- " "Now, Jean -- " "Get away from me. This time, it won't work. If you think that for one second you're going into that no man's land alone -- and -- " It took some talking, to convince her, it took some lies. She'd wait, she agreed finally, in Switzerland. In comfort for a change. It took two diamonds to get to the right man, and it took a formula from there. A formula that is learned in the first year of college chemistry on my planet, a formula for converting an element. A formula this planet couldn't have been more than a decade short of learning, anyway. The last man I saw in Berlin went along, for which I was grateful, though he didn't know that. I don't speak Russian, but he did. They were careful, they don't even trust themselves. I told Nilenoff the formula came from America, and there were more, but I needed money. I didn't tell him the fallacy in the formula ; it had taken us three years to realize what it was. My trips were limited, directed, and avoided the seamier side. I saw the modern humming factories, and the mammoth farms. No unemployment, no waste, no "capitalistic blood sucking" -- and the lowest standard of living in the industrialized world. A vast, bleak land peopled with stringless puppets, with walking cadavers. I remembered the faces of the crowds and the strangely mixed people in America, their obvious feelings, emotions and rivalries. There was nothing strange about these people of Russia -- they were dead, spiritually dead. The country that could have been a cultural and industrial center of the world was a robot-land of nine for war, getting ready to take over the dreams of Hitler and make them come true. I came out with a promise of ten thousand American dollars for every one of the future formulas I had assured them I could get to. I came out with the knowledge that I'd be a watched man from now on. In Switzerland, Jean said, "Well -- ?" "I'm ready to go home," I told her. "America, you mean?" "Where else?" "I've been alone," she said, "and thinking. I've gone back to Sunset and Pacific Coast Highway and traced it all forward from there. And I don't think America's your home." Very cool her voice, very tense her face. I smiled at her. She didn't smile in return. "Fred -- we're married." "I'm glad," I said. "Aren't you?" "It's no time for the light touch." Tears in her eyes. "Fred, are you a -- a Russian spy?" I shook my head. "But -- " It was a clear night, and I went to the window. How it shone, in that clear air. Jean came over to stand next to me. I pointed, and said, "There's my home." "Venus," she said. "Fred, for heaven's sake -- Vm serious !" "Some day," I said, "this planet will learn how to see through our manufactured fog. Some day they will develop the vision we developed a century ago. And -- " "Damn it, Fred, be serious. If you'd know what I've gone through, alone here, thinking back on all the crazy things you've said and done. What have you told me about yourself, what do I know?" "Nothing," I said. "And what have I asked you about yourself? It's a matter of faith, Jean." "Faith? Running all over the country like fugitives, financed by those damned diamonds, nosing into this and into that, and then running off to Russia, all alone. With what you'd learned , Fred?" I shook my head, resentment stirring in me. "Remember when we met? In Santa Monica -- right there, next to the beach. You didn't have a thing but the clothes on your back and a bagful of diamonds. Was it a sub that brought you that far, Fred?" "No," I said, "and you wouldn't believe me if I told you." "Try me, and see," she said. She was rigid, and near hysteria. "All right. I came there in a space sphere from Venus." She started to sob, a wild, lonely sound and I moved forward to take her in my arms. Her fingers clawed my face, her high heel smashed my instep. "Get out," she screamed, "get out, get out, get out -- " I got out. I went to the first floor washroom and cleaned up my bloody face, and then went into the bar. This was one habit I'd picked up on the planet. When I came up to the suite, later, I didn't even check to see if she was in the washroom. I flopped down on the davenport and didn't know anything for the next twelve hours. She was gone, when I came to. She'd checked out before I'd come back to the room, the night before. I missed the plane she took from France. I missed her by a day in New York. I went back to the big house with the high pillars on Sunset Boulevard. And she wasn't there. She'd come back to it, I knew. I moved in, to wait. I wasn't going home without her; I wasn't even sure I was going home with her. I was involved, now, in this planet, almost as crazy as the rest of them. I sat. I did some drinking, but mostly I sat, going back over all our days, reading nothing, enjoying nothing, just remembering. The Korean business started and the headlines grew uglier, and the jackals screamed and the people grew more confused. One day, the maid told me I had a visitor. I was in the library and I told her to send him back. When he came in, he closed the door behind him. I'd never seen him, before, but he said, "We've been looking for three weeks." "We?" "Thirty of us," he said. "What happened? Jars sent me." "Oh," I said. "I can't come, now. I'm -- married -- " He smiled. "If you knew what a mess it's been. We've got men all over the planet. Does your wife -- know?" "She thinks I'm crazy," I said. "Look, I -- " the huddlers "I'm not to argue," he said. "Just make your report, and I'll pick it up, tonight." Five minutes after he was gone, I was packing. I knew he wasn't coming back for any report. He was coming back for me, and it didn't much matter to him if I wanted to come, or not. I was coming, or staying here -- dead. What I didn't realize is that they wanted me to run, to get out where I could be taken with a minimum of interference. They got me the other side of Blythe, in the middle of nowhere. A clear night in the desert, and headlights coming up from behind and then the big, black car crowding me off the flat road, into the sand... And darkness. head. "Corruption, Werig? Was it the corruption, or the girl?" "I've made my report," I said. "Don't worry about them. They've got enough to worry about without worrying about us." "Another war, it looks like," Deering said. "It could be the last one, you know. What was the girl -- your wife like, Fred? Was she pretty?" "Beautiful," I said. "And the people -- fear, is it fear?" "I don't know. Their vice is fear, but they have some virtues." Deering's voice was quiet. "Jars wanted me to ask you -- about your wife. Where is she? Is she coming with you? It was forbidden." "I don't know where she is, she's not coming with me, and I know it was forbidden. But where is Jars? He has been avoiding me, hasn't he? Why?" "He has been pleading for you, before the assembly." Deering rose, and went to the window, to look out. "Who will win this war that's shaping up among the huddlers, Fred?" "I don't know. I'm not sure I give a damn." Deering continued to look out the window. "The gray nation, the mixed nation, this America; they have some promise of the light, have they not?" "Some." "But this black nation, this nation of robots, there is no chance of of light there?" "Not under their present leaders. If they should win the war the planet would be set back five hundred years." Deering shook his head, and turned to face me sadly. "It would be worse than that. If they should win this war shaping up, there would be no planet for them to rule." I stared at him, not believing, still so bound up in my trip I couldn't believe his words. Love , -- faith, fear, Jean -- were running through my mind. And Jean... ? Deering answered everything for me. "We can't take the chance," he said. "We will abolish the planet. The assembly so decided this mom  jj ing. His "Nature of Things " Is History's Largest Class K. Marshall was living the Dr . Roy K. Marshall hold equipment, he illustrates such diverse subjects as synthetic rubber, the fourth dimension, vacuum, new and interesting properties of metals and the causes and distributions of earthquakes. His talent as a modem classroom lecturer is remarkable. His programs are of only # minutes duration, and yet, in even that short time, some of the most complex phases of science are made clear and interesting -- opening up a whole new world of understanding for his vast audience, no matter what the age or education. T HE gray-haired, keen-eyed profour years ago, raised in Ohio, graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and got his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Incidentally, the thesis for his doctorate was a dissertation on astrophysics. Galled "The best planetarium man in America" by the famed Dr. Harlow Shapely of Harvard, the youthful Doctor has been the director of two plane tariums -- Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia, and Moorehead at the University of North Carolina. When he's not writing newspaper articles, delivering lectures, or appearing as a guest on various radio and television shows (he's flown over # miles to meet such commitments in the last two years) Roy Marshall handles a job as educational director of a radio and television station in Philadelphia. Here he supervises, expedites and very often produces and directs approximately nine hours of educational radio and television shows. These shows are used regularly by teachers as assignments and have aided the further understanding of countless children. He also must, of course, prepare his own script and arrange and rehearse the network show "The Nature of Things". He recently completed a book titled "The Nature of Things -- from the hearts of the atoms to the ends of the universe", and is now hard at work on a second book. Dr. Marshall resigned his position as director of the Morehead Planetarium and Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at the University of North Carolina last year because he felt he needed more leisure time, in which to concentrate on broadcasting and raising, with his wife Phyllis, three growing sons. "I just didn't have any home life," he explained. Today Mrs. Marshall and the three boys feel that the home front situation hasn't improved at all noticeably. -- epw If this story has a moral, it is: " Leave well enough alone" Just look what happened to Kenzie " mad about-ants" McKenzie, who didn't... By Mark Clifton Illustrated by Kelly Freas a mad scientist hardly showed at all. To see him ambling down the street in loose jointed manner, with sandy hair uncombed, blue eyes looking vaguely beyond normal focus, you might think here was a young fellow dreaming over how his gal looked last night. It might never occur to you that he was thinking of -- ants. Of course, we fellows in the experimental lab all knew it, but Kenzie wasn't too hard to get along with. In fact, he could usually be counted on to pull us out of a technical hole. We put up with him through a certain fondness, maybe even a little pride. It gave us a harmless subject to talk about when security was too rigid on other things. Our Department Chief knew it, but Kenzie had solved quite a few knotty electronics problems. The Chief never has been too particular to see credit get back to the guy who earned it. We guessed he figured having Kenzie there was profitable to him. In fact, the little redhead in payroll told me the Chief was drawing quite a few bonus checks. Personnel probably didn't know about it. Kenzie's papers, buried deep in the files, wouldn't show it; because about the only question they had not asked us was, "Where do you stand on the matter of ants?" There was an unwritten law in the lab for nobody ever to mention insects, or even elderly female relatives. I guess that was why it wasn't mentioned to the new guy, name of Robert Pringle. This fellow Pringle worked along for a couple weeks and showed us he had the old know-how in his fingers. A capable tech, a good joe, and we thought we were lucky to get him. On this particular morning, it happened that Pringle was working at the bench next to Kenzie. Being a talented tech, like the rest of us, his mind naturally ran along more than one channel at the same time. I expect he was really surprised at the reaction he got when he shouted out to the room at large. "Hey, fellows," he yelled. "I got little green bugs on my roses. What do you do about it?" The silence made him look up from his work, and he couldn't help npticing we all stood there with clinched hands and gritted teeth. We were watching Kenzie, who snapped the juice off his soldering iron and pointed the iron at Pringle. "Those," said Kenzie in a hollow, impressive voice, "are aphis. If you will look closer, Pringle, you will see among them -- ants. The aphid is to the ant as the dairy cow is to the human. Those ants are aphid herders, carefully tending and milking their flock." "Here we go again," moaned one of the fellows across the lab. "The ants are a highly intelligent life form," Kenzie went on. "I would explain it to you in detail, but I am in the middle of a problem at this moment." "Thank heaven for that," another tech ground out the words. "Suffice it to say," Kenzie ignored all interruptions, "Man would well occupy himself trying to communicate with them." The Chief came to the doorway of his little office down at the end of the lab. He looked us all over patiently and knowingly. "Now give him your syllogism, Kenzie," he said quietly, "so we can all get back to work." "You may reflect on this, Pringle," Kenzie stated and waved his soldering iron in the air. "One: Man wants to communicate with intelligent life from other planets or the stars. "Two: We know from observation the ants communicate with one another. "Ergo : Before we reach so far as to contact extra terrestrial intelligence, had we not better occupy our time with solving a much simpler communications problem; to wit: communicate with the ants? How can we expect to solve communication with really alien beings from the stars, when we have not learned to communicate with the intelligent beings at our very feet?" All over the room we sighed heavily with relief. We knew the syllogism was the conclusion, the Sunday punch. The boy had really cut it short this time. Usually he was good for a solid hour with facts and figures about how ants built bridges and such stuff. We all looked at Pringle's face, expecting to see the embarrassed and sheepish grin. This was the usual reaction of a stranger when he first met up with Kenzie's syllogism. It horrified us to see, instead, his shining eyes. We heard him say enthusiastically. "That's just how I've always felt about it, Kenzie. It's a pleasure to meet a man who isn't afraid of thinking." "Oh, no-o-o!" we all groaned out in a chorus. "Only," Pringle said dubiously, and our hopes began to arise again. "Only I've been thinking more along the line of termites." Our hopes fell and were shattered. We heard the Chief moan to himself and saw him turn and almost run back into his office. "Two of 'em now," he was mumbling over and over. "Two of 'em now. It ain't worth it. It ain't worth it." He sat down heavily and buried his head in his arms across the top of his desk. Kenzie was watching him too, like he was wondering what had got into the Chief. Then Kenzie turned back to Pringle. "Ants," he said with determination. "Termites," Pringle answered him stubbornly. Kenzie glared at Pringle for a minute, then his face cleared. "Why not both of them?" he asked, like a fellow who was willing to be big about it. "Sure, why not?" Pringle came his half way also. Then, like he wasn't to be outdone in generosity. "Ants first, then termites later." Solemnly the two shook hands. They went back to their work at the bench, and there was an aura of understanding and accord at that end of the room thick enough to be felt. "I hope you insect lovers will be very happy together," the grid expert mumbled to their backs. The rest of us also settled back into our varied jobs and problems. But we worked as if we momentarily expected an earthquake to rock us. Our hands were not quite steady. Our eyes were not firm and piercing. We almost held our breaths. For a wonder, we agreed with the Chief. Two of 'em now. The days passed and nothing more was said. More than ever now, we enforced the taboo on insects. We didn't mention trees, or wood, or even the conditional subjunctive. Would sounded like wood. Wood might bring up the thought of termites. We could see the Chief was weighing the advantages of keeping them against the risks of upsetting the department constantly. As we expected, greed won. We knew he would not risk giving up the prestige and extra bonuses he got for Kenzie' s work. And he knew he had to keep those discoveries coming, because our management has a short memory of what a guy has done in the past. The Chief even let Kenzie have Pringle as his own personal tech. It served two purposes. It isolated them from the rest of us. It made Kenzie happy. I will say for the lads, they spent most of their time on Company problems, at first. But gradually, on one corner of Kenzie's bench, a gadget began to take shape. The two of them worked on it when there were no urgent, frantic, must-be-outtodaywithoutfail problems to be solved first. None of us could figure out the purpose of the mechanism. We knew if we couldn't figure it, the Chief couldn't. But we could practically see him rub his hands in glee when he thought of the extra bonus he might get for this new gadget. Of course the Chief wasn't a complete slouch as an electronics engineer. But it was a long time since he did his study, and he had grown hazy by spending too many years as an administrator. The word got around that for hours at a time, after we had gone home, the Chief would stand at Kenzie's bench. The way we reasoned it, he figured he ought to know something about the gadget when he took it in to Old Rock Jaw, and palmed it off as his latest discovery. We also reasoned that since we couldn't figure it, the Chief must have been an awfully troubled man. Obviously, it had something to do with microwave transmission and reception. There was the usual high-frequency condensor, the magnatron tubes, the tuning cavities. All company stock, of course. But then none of us ever worried about cost. That was the Chiefs problem. He didn't worry much about it either, except at budget time. Then there were screams of anguish from the front office over experimental requisitions. Every year, Old Rock Jaw promised to fire us all, if we didn't cut costs, but in a couple of weeks we always forgot about it. Trouble was, the Chief had been getting edgy about costs lately, so we knew it was about time for the annual budget battle. Significantly, he didn't say a word to Kenzie about the gadget. working late one night on a special permit. My bench is over in a wing of the lab, and I guess the Chief forgot I was around. I saw a very pretty scene. The Chief had built up a habit of staying late so he could stand and study over the Kenzie gadget. He never touched it, though. He knew enough not to bother anything, because we all knew how bitter Kenzie was when anybody touched his things. The Chief was standing there this evening when the General Manager, Old Rock Jaw, was showing some important personages through the plant after hours. They came through the lab door, and I saw scrambled eggs and fruit salad shining all over bulging uniforms. There was also one little, geezik in a pin-striped suit. Old Rock Jaw was talking, as usual... and it is from this room, gentlemen," he was saying, "That some of those revolutionary discoveries emanate!" Then he caught sight of the Chief, who had hastily picked up a cold soldering iron and was tentatively touching a random point on the new mechanism. "Ah-h!" Old Rock Jaw exclaimed with satisfaction. "Here is our chief scientist now. Still at work. He watches no clock, gentlemen, He knows no time. His whole life is wrapped up in his research!" The Chief didn't look around, but bent closer to the soldering point. He looked like he hoped they would limit their inspection to a cursory look about and then retire. I hoped they would too, I didn't want them to see me. But Old Rock Jaw, in more of a blowhard mood even than usual, couldn't let well enough alone. He came up close to the Chief, and looked over his shoulder at the mechanism. He was even more ignorant than the Chief, so I knew he wouldn't recognize any of it. "Don't let us disturb you, Alfred," he breathed in a hushed voice. "But could you tell the gentlemen what you are working on now?" He cleared his throat importantly and said, "I might add that everyone here has been security cleared, Alfred, so you may speak freely." The Chief still did not lift his eyes from his work. He didn't dare. He carefully turned an unconnected control knob a hairsbreadth with utmost deliberation and precision. "Multimicrofrequidometer," the Chief mumbled, and buried his head still deeper into the mechanism. "Ah yes, of course. But you have a new hook up," the General Manager bluffed. "I hardly recognized it at first. Startling!" he breathed. He looked around triumphantly at the impressed brass and braid. He looked pointedly at the pinstriped suit who probably controlled congressional purse strings. "Apparently he is at a point where he cannot divert his attention to us, gentlemen," he breathed in a hushed voice. He placed his fingers to his lips and began to tiptoe backwards toward the door. The beef trust in fancy uniform came up on their own toesies, and also tiptoed away from the genius scientist. By now, the genius was beginning to exude large drops of sweat. The door closed behind them, and the Chief dropped the cold soldering iron with a sigh of relief. He took hold of his tongue, where he must have been biting into it. He wiped his forehead and fingers with his breast-pocket handkerchief. Both the Chief and I heard the party walking down the hall and into another wing of the building. I still didn't make a sound. It would never do for the Chief to know he had been observed. After a suitable time, the Chief, also, tiptoed out of the lab, and he was mumbling to himself as I have never seen him mumble before. thing appeared on Kenzie's work bench. This time it was a large rectangular glass aquarium. It was filled with moist earth. Now here was something new in electronics! We shook our heads. One of the techs, who fancied himself a psychologist, said the boys were suffering from retrogressive dementia. They had gone so far back into childhood, they had to play sand box. The Chief overheard the tech, and spoke up plaintively. "But I don't see any celluloid spade and bucket," he said. He seemed relieved when we burst out laughing. His relief didn't last long, however. It changed to more worry when he saw the boys carefully sprinkling bread and meat crumbs over the surface of the sand. Then on top of that they dropped moist bits of cake icing. When Pringle brought down a marigold plant, all covered with aphis, and transplanted it in a comer of the aquarium, the Chief again ran into his office and began to hold his head in his hands. More days passed. The gadget became a bristling porcupine of test clips. By now the boys had forgotten they were working for the Company and spent practically all their time on the whoozits. The Chief became so fascinated, in a kind of horror-stricken manner, that he did not mention the aquarium to Kenzie at all. The rest of us also kept away from that side of the lab. Ever since Kenzie had started on the gadget, he had no time for us, or helping us with our problems. If we spoke to him he snapped back at us, until I guess all our noses were out of joint. By the time the aquarium appeared, we were ignoring him and everything he did. In a few more weeks the aquarium was swarming with ants. It was easy to see their tunnels running up and down the sides of the glass. I will say this for the boys. They set it in a huge pan of water. None of us could legitimately squawk about getting ants mixed up with our anatomy. The Chief showed he was mixed with disappointment and elation when the boys asked clearance to work nights in the lab. Disappointed since he could no longer stay late and follow the progress; elated because the boys must really be getting hot. Annual budget time was getting closer, and we could see the wheels going around in his mind. It would be a nice thing if he could deliver the multiwhoozits gadget just before the big fight for appropriations. As far as we knew, the only interest the General Manager had shown was the time he asked the Chief in the hall how that multiwhoozits was coming along. Even in that question, it was evident Old Rock Jaw was asking out of a rare politeness only -- there being no big shots around to impress. It was doubtful if the G.M. heard the Chief's vague answer, because the old boy was mumbling to himself about rising costs and having to cut down expenses. He waddled on down the hall. He was still mumbling as he went, but both the Chief and I heard one sentence clearly. "And certain salaries and bonuses will have to be cut." The Chief turned pale. So he granted Kenzie' s request with alacrity -- and hoped he would finish the gadget in time. For two more weeks the Chief waited patiently, or maybe impatiently. He knew the boys were working every night, because the security police complained about their pinochle game being interrupted to let Kenzie and Pringle in and out. Both the boys began to get a feverish look in their faces. Their cheeks grew hollow. Their eyes were bloodshot. Their regular work suffered even more. The Chief thought he was being considerate when he lifted some of their work and shoved it over to the rest of us. We were already sore at the boys and we didn't take it too kindly. Just the same, we didn't let our squawk get beyond the walls of the lab. No use letting that nosy Personnel Department get an excuse to start holding hands, patting on the back, and radiating aid and comfort to all. Then -- a certain Monday came. as usual. Some of the newer guys pretended to be busy, but we were all watching to see what he would do. There is a back door to the Chiefs office which he seldom uses and which he always keeps locked. But it opens into the lab wing right at my table. It wasn't my fault, in fiddling around a little with the lock, it came unstuck and the door opened a little so I could hear what went on. When the Chief came in, both the boys were busy dismantling the gadget. Discouragement and hopelessness were written all over their faces, in the dejected slope of their shoulders, in the lackadaisical movements of their arms. Piece by piece, through the glass partition of his office wall, the Chief watched the gadget being taken apart. Each piece was carefully taken back and placed in stock for re-use. That alone was enough to create great alarm for their sanity. Imagine a technician putting a piece back to be used over! Finally the Chief could bear it no longer. He called them into his office. He carefully shut the door, but he didn't notice the back door swung open a little farther. I found it necessary to work close to the crack, and if I turned around, I could get a good view of the entire office. The Chief waved the boys into chairs across from his desk. He sat down and placed his fingertips together. Even then, I could see his hands were shaking. He leaned forward and asked with careful sympathy in his voice. "Didn't it work?" "Yeah," Kenzie answered in a bored voice. "It worked." I was surprised at Kenzie's voice. Usually he talked with the concise enunciation of a professor. Now he sounded like maybe just a good lab tech. "Then why are you dismantling it?" the Chief asked with a worried frown. "It wouldn't be good for people to know about it," Pringle burst out. "I don't understand," the Chief faltered. Then desperately, "Look, fellows. I've given you a lotta leeway. You've sluffed your work something terrible. That's all right to an extent. I've covered for you." "Thanks, Chief," Kenzie said drily. "But Old Rock -- er -- the General Manager," the Chief complained, "knows I've been working on something. Now what with budgets coming on, and all, I gotta have something to show!" "You've been working on something -- " Pringle exclaimed. "I mean my department has," the Chief covered himself hastily. "I'm responsible for what goes on in my department, you know. I gotta have some kind of an explanation." He was almost wailing now. "What with budgets coming on, and all." "Make up your own explanation," Kenzie answered disinterestedly. "It's a cinch you can't give out with the real one." The Chief began to wheedle. "You two boys know the explanation. Why can't you tell me? This is your Chief who's talking, boys. The one who has always stood by you and covered for you. Remember? You just gotta tell me, boys." I saw Pringle and Kenzie look at one another. "I guess he's right, Ken," Pringle said. "That is, if he promises never to tell anybody." "Yeah. I guess so." Kenzie nodded his head in agreement. "We owe him that much for just letting us alone." The Chief let out a big sigh of relief. "It's about ants," Kenzie began. "Now, now, Kenzie boy," the Chief interrupted hurriedly. "Let's stay on the subject, shall we? Let's not get off on that tangent again, Kenzie boy. Shall we?" "Nuts," Kenzie said. "But this is about ants, Chief," Pringle answered. Then shrewdly, "But first you gotta promise, Chief." "All right, I promise," the Chief acceded testily. "It's about ants," Kenzie repeated stubbornly. The Chief winced, but he held his peace. "They're intelligent," Kenzie said profoundly, and stopped. "I know," the Chief prompted. "I know, Kenzie boy. You've been saying that all along." "I communicated with them," Kenzie said flatly. "You what?" The Chiefs eyes bugged out. I guess mine did too. "Sure," Kenzie answered. "After a fashion, that is. In their anthers they've got a chitin cell diaphragm. Modified cellular structure. They communicate with a sort of microwave. Roughly you might say it generates and radiates like our brain wave. Roughly, very roughly. This chitin diaphragm picks up the microwave like our ears pick up sound. Roughly, that is." "But that's wonderful," the Chief glowed. It didn't take much imagination to see him in the General Manager's office explaining how his multiwhoozits gadget worked. Maybe nothing immediately commercial about it, but when the publicity office got hold of it -- man, it would mean plenty of free publicity for the Company. And how Old Rock Jaw loved free publicity! "We tuned in on them," Kenzie was saying. "By putting different kinds of food around, and by making different kinds of disturbances, we worked out a crude sort of vocabulary." "You did -- " the Chief exclaimed. "Nothing fancy, you understand," Kenzie belittled his achievement. "But enough so when we broadcast a sugar wave, they came running to the surface to see where it was. When we broadcast a water wave, they rushed to the ant nursery and started carrying eggs to high ground." "Glory be -- " the Chief breathed. In his eyes there was the vision of world renowned scientists patting him on the back. Maybe even more important, Old Rock Jaw was actually smiling, and telling him he could have unlimited funds in his budget. "Sure," Kenzie said bitterly. "Sure that was all very fine. Big shots, we were going to be, Pringle and me. First time in history man had talked with an insect. Maybe even get our pictures in the paper, same as if we'd murdered somebody. Fame!" "Yeah," Pringle chimed in. "First step in learning how to communicate with an alien mind. Nuts!" "I don't get it," the Chief stammered. "What's wrong with that?" "Well, we went on perfecting the vocabulary," Kenzie said. "You know. Fining it down. Had the little beggars practically standing on their heads at times with our wave." He grinned at the memory and seemed to shake off some of his lethargy. "You shoulda been here the night Pringle had them marching in formation." His face fell again. "We kept on improving the gadget," he said with hangdog attitude. "We still hadn't made direct communication, you understand. Nothing like 'How do you do, Mrs. Ant? This is Kenzie MacKenzie, human, talking.' " Then he sneered at his memory. "With our microwave we could make them do things. But hell, you can make them run out of the ground by pouring water down their hole. That's not communication! We couldn't seem to contact them direct -- make them know we were communicating." "But you still -- " the Chief said. He had visions of every home using a gadget to broadcast "keep away" signals to ant pests. "Our gadget was still crude at that point," Kenzie interrupted. "We fined it down, more and more. That's when we began to pick up the star static." "Star static?" the Chief faltered. "He wouldn't know about that," Pringle said, and I could detect contempt in his voice, even if the Chief didn't. "Sure he would," Kenzie corrected. "Everybody knows about the fifty or so stars that send out continuous radio signals, and how we've been trying for years to unscramble them." "Why certainly," the Chief said, so positively I knew he hadn't heard of it before. "Anyway," Kenzie said. "The more we worked out the vocabulary code, the more the star signals began to fit right into it. So we decided to break up the thing, and forget all about ants. Honest Chief, you'll never hear me mention the word again." "Termites either," Pringle chimed in. "But I still don't understand," the Chief complained. "It still all sounds marvelous. I just don't understand." "Draw him a picture," Pringle said disgustedly. "Okay," Kenzie acceded. "How many years would you say ants have been on earth, Chief?" "Oh, I don't know," the Chief answered. "Quite a few, I'd say." "Yeah," Kenzie . said drily. Unchanged. A perfect life form with a perfect civilization. So perfect, nature hasn't seen any need to "So what?" the Chief asked. "They're nothing. We come along and make them do nip ups." "Yeah," Kenzie was bitter again. "We humans go around talking about how brave and smart we are. How someday we might even get so smart we'll contact other intelligent races on other worlds. Yeah, we're smart. You know those star radiations?" "That's not my specialty, you know," the Chief answered cautiously. "Some of those radiations started out from their home planet a million light years ago," Pringle said quietly. "So what again?" the Chief asked. "Those radiations," Kenzie said, "happen to be communications between the galaxies -- beamed at the ants. Sort of a continuous radio program broadcast universe wide. It happens the ants, maybe termites, maybe other insects, are spread through all the galaxies. It happens they are the dominant intelligent race throughout the universe." He shrugged in disgust. "Us big brave humans," he said contemptuously. "Someday we might even reach Mars. Hell, those ants have been colonizing for hunstill communicating. They are the real intelligence on the earth!" He crushed a cigarette fiercely into a glass ash tray on the desk. "Only thing man has got, or ever had, was his ego. He's got to believe he's top dog, or else he folds and quits. Yeah, we're smart all right. Hell, we're so far down the scale the ants don't even recognize us as a life form at all." Pringle nodded soberly. "Yeah," he said to the Chief, "how would you like to explain a gadget that proved ants have more brains than you have?" The Chief looked at them with incredulous eyes. He was still staring at them silently, with a bloodless face, when the office messenger came in and told him the General Manager wished to see him in his office to discuss budgets. I closed the back office door quietly and went back to work. The other guys clustered around and wanted to know what I heard. "Nothing," I said, and looked them straight in the eye. "Nothing at all." propriations committee for nothing. He had an eye for results, and right now that eye was sharper than ever. for space. His final report?... Well, maybe you'd better Apostolides in the next issue! It is rumored that technology might eliminate many useless items from our regulated life of the future -- including good, old-fashioned sex. However, let's kibitz for a moment... By Gene Hunter slow, cumbersome train. He disliked using this uncomfortable means of travel, but since he wanted to learn more about these strange creatures who were his ancestors, he had decided to try to become used to their ways. He was lonely in this strange, backward age and when he unexpectedly saw another being like himself in the same coach, he hastened to make his presence known. He introduced himself and asked politely : "When are you from?" "#," the other replied. self," Kial said. "Just a country boy. But # -- that's only a period ahead of my own time. Maybe you could tell me..." "Ah, ah!" the other admonished. "Remember the First Law of Thek!" "Oh, Center," Kial grumbled. "I know: 'One may not divulge any scientific, technical or social information to anyone from his own past whom he may meet at an equidistant point in a Thek-travel.' I forgot." "Bad," Broyk said. Then he added, almost jokingly: "You wouldn't want to be marooned in this dismal era, would you?" Kial shuddered. "Of course not. But the Laws seem so ridiculous." "Not a bit," Broyk said, warming up to the subject. "It's very simple, really. Same principle that doesn't allow anyone to Thektravel into the future. "Look. I'm from #. Say that I went into #, where I memorized as much information as I could on some subject such as medicine. So I return to #, retaining all such knowledge in my mind that's been learned in four periods. Therefore, I'd have knowledge that wasn't dreamed of in my own time, but was discovered sometime during the next four peripds. But then it couldn't be discovered. because I'd brought it back to # and -- well, I'm no Logician, but you see my point." "Oh, it's reasonable, I suppose," Kial admitted. "I realize the Laws are really for our own good. By the way -- Pm here on a field trip to gather material for my thesis on Advanced Therapeutical Psychology and its development since the Twentieth Century. What phase of this era are you here to study?" "I -- Fm afraid I couldn't tell you that," Broyk said. "It's of rather a secret nature and..." "You mean we might violate a Law and be stuck here for good -- is that it?" "Yes -- in a way." Frightened, Kial let the matter drop. His gaze wandered through the coach, examining the other passengers with interest. As time travelers from a different spacetime plane from their #th Century ancestors, he and Broyk were naturally invisible to their fellow travelers. Two pompous old gentlemen were lighting cigars and Kial was about to remark on the habit of smoking when he noticed an even more remarkable phenomenon. A few seats ahead of them sat a goodlooking young couple, oblivious to others about them. "Look!" Kial cried excitedly. "Lovers! Honey mooners! I've read about such things! Isn't it disgusting?" "Oh, I don't know," Broyk said, a little wistfully. "I sometimes think it was a mistake for Center to do away with sex. It must have been interesting." "Atavist!" Kial snapped in horror. Had his peoples' emotional make-up provided for blushing, Kial would undoubtedly have turned beet-red. Broyk's words had caused him acute embarrassment. strange companion, he suddenly began to feel a sensation he had often heard about but never before had experienced. Terror and dismay filled him as he sought to throw off the probing finger that was penetrating his mind. He looked at Broyk. There was the faintest notion of a smile on the other's face as he said: "Yes, Kial -- I am a Telepath." Kial's mind reeled. He felt himself on the brink of some gigantic abyss and then, as suddenly as it had come, the searching sensation faded away. "Since you are unable to enter my mind," Broyk said calmly, "it's only fair that I tell you about myself. You were right -- I'm an atavist. Even in period #, such things can happen. Always such creatures are destroyed after their first psychotests, but my case was different. The Controller who bred me was only a dabbler in such things. I was a failure, but he took a fancy to me. I was allowed to mature secretly -- few people knew of my existence. When I reached my majority my presence became dangerous and I was sent back into time to try and find the proper place for myself. And I think I've found it -- here!" Kial was a very amazed young man. "But such a barbarous age," he complained. "Sex and atom bombs and everything..." "Remember," Broyk smiled, "these people are the forebears of the geniuses who created Center and the Galactic Empire. They'll survive, despite their barbarism. The existence of Center is proof." "It's rather horrible to contemplate," Kial said thoughtfully, calmer now, "and yet, this might really be a great age. In a way I almost envy you." "Of course you do," Broyk said. "You have certain tendencies -- they bother you, although you manage to hide them well. I discovered them when I took the liberty of telepathing you. Artificial Genetics isn't perfect, even in our time -- perhaps because we originally sprang from man. Perhaps we'll never be quite perfect, because of that, even after thousands of periods of breeding." Kial took another look at the loving young couple. "It -- it might be fun, after all." Broyk laughed. "You needn't envy me at all, you know." Kial frowned. "I'm telling you about myself," Broyk went on, "I have also told you of a specific condition existing a period ahead of your own time. Remember the First Law?" "Center!" "We're marooned in the Twentieth Century. You have to accept it." "But what will we do ?" Kial's mind was reeling again. "Since we've already broken the First Law," Broyk said, "we may just as well break the Second: 'No Thek-traveler may enter the body of a native of a foreign spacetime...' " The young lovers kissed again and this time there seemed to be an added zest, even to their passionate embrace. (Continued from page #) ings. (For the record, it wasn't -- though it's still considerable and Bloomsbury will never be quite the same to me again.) A huge crowd there in the middle of it were Mays and Marianne. It ended up with us having a very pleasant lunch together in Holborn. I'll say this about Mays -- he was very pleasant and treated the affair on Five as a huge joke. And Marianne was pretty as she could be. She laughed too. But I'm still rather sore about Marianne. "Frankly, I can't imagine what she sees in him . m m t'  # V.Vv'AiVi' Aji'i f i mSi I  m . I '  I i  jCw: B ', piil teiiwS What was the mystery of this great ship from the dark, deep reaches of space? For, within its deathfilled chambers -- was the avenue of life! By Alan E. Nourse Illustrated by Ed Emsh mand, sat bolt upright in his bunk, blinking wide-eyed at the darkness. The alarm was screaming through the Satellite Station, its harsh, nervejarring clang echoing and re-echoing down the metal corridors, penetrating every nook and crevice and cubicle of the lonely outpost, screaming incredibly through the dark sleeping period. Sabo shook the sleep from his eyes, and then a panic of fear burst into his mind. The alarm! Tumbling out of his bunk in the darkness, he crashed into the far bulkhead, staggering giddily in the impossible gravity as he pawed about for his magnaboots, his heart pounding fiercely in his ears. The alarm! Impossible, after so long, after these long months of bitter waiting -- In the corridor he collided with Brownie, looking like a frightened gnome, and he growled profanity as he raced down the corridor for the Central Control. Frightened eyes turned to him as he blinked at the bright lights of the room. The voices rose in a confused, anxious babble, and he shook his head and swore, and ploughed through them toward the screen. "Kill that damned alarm!" he roared, blinking as he counted faces.' "Somebody get the Skipper out of his sack, pronto, and stop that clatter! What's the trouble?" The radioman waved feebly at the view screen, shimmering on the great side panel. "We just picked it   up -- It was a ship, moving in from beyond Saturn's rings, a huge, gray-black blob in the silvery screen, moving in toward the Station with ponderous, clumsy grace, growing larger by the second as it sped toward them. Sabo felt the fear spill over in his mind, driving out all thought, and he sank into the control chair like a well-trained automaton. His gray eyes were wide, trained for long military years to miss nothing; his fingers moved over the panel with deft skill. "Get the men to stations," he growled, "and will somebody kindly get the Skipper down here, if he can manage to take a minute." "I'm right here." The little graying man was at his elbow, staring at the screen with angry red eyes. "Who told you to shut off the alarm?" "Nobody told me. Everyone was here, and it was getting on my nerves." "What a shame." Captain Loomis' voice was icy. "I give orders on this Station," he said smoothly, "and you'll remember it." He scowled at the great gray ship, looming closer and closer. "What's its course?" "Going to miss us by several thousand kilos at least. Look at that thing! It's traveling " "Contact it! This is what we've been waiting for." The captain's voice was hoarse. Sabo spun a dial, and cursed. "No luck. Can't get through. It's passing us -- " "Then grapple it, stupid! You want me to wipe your nose, too?" Sabo's face darkened angrily. With slow precision he set the servo fixes on the huge gray hulk looming up in the viewer, and then snapped the switches sharply. Two small servos shoved their blunt noses from the landing port of the Station, and slipped silently into space alongside. Then, like a pair of trained dogs, they sped on their beams straight out from the Station toward the approaching ship. The intruder was dark, moving at tremendous velocity past the Station, as though unaware of its existence. The servos moved out, and suddenly diverged and reversed, twisting in long arcs to come alongside the strange ship, finally moving in at the same velocity on either side. There was a sharp flash of contact power; then, like a mammoth slowmotion monster, the ship jerked in midspace and turned a graceful end-for-end arc as the servo-grapplers gripped it like leeches and whined, glowing ruddy with the jolting power flowing through them. Sabo watched, hardly breathing, until the great ship spun and slowed and stopped. Then it reversed direction, and the servos led it triumphantly back toward the landing port of the Station. Sabo glanced at the radioman, a frown creasing his forehead. "Still nothing?" "Not a peep." He stared out at the great ship, feeling a chill of wonder and fear crawl up his spine. "So this is the mysterious puzzle of Saturn," he muttered. "This is what we've been waiting for." There was a curious eager light in Captain Loomis' eyes as he looked up. "Oh, no. Not this." "What?" "Not this. The ships we've seen before were tiny, flat." His little eyes turned toward the ship, and back to Sabo's heavy face. "This is something else, something quite different." A smile curved his lips, and he rubbed his hands together. "We go out for trout and come derelict back with a whale. This ship's from space, deep space. Not from Saturn. This one's from the stars." the side of the Satellite Station, silent as a tomb, still gently rotating as the Station slowly spun in its orbit around Saturn. In the captain's cabin the men shifted restlessly, uneasily facing the eager eyes of their captain. The old man paced the floor of the cabin, his white hair mussed, his face red with excitement. Even his carefully calm face couldn't conceal the eagerness burning in his eyes as he faced the crew. "Still no contact?" he asked Sparks. The radioman shook his head anxiously. "Not a sign. I've tried every signal I know at every wave frequency that could possibly reach them. I've even tried a dozen frequencies that couldn't possibly reach them, and I haven't stirred them up a bit. They just aren't answering." Captain Loomis swung on the group of men. "All right, now, I want you to get this straight. This is our catch. We don't know what's aboard it, and we don't know where it came from, but it's our prize. That means not a word goes back home about it until we've learned all there is to learn. We're going to get the honors on this one, not some eager Admiral back home -- " The men stirred uneasily, worried eyes seeking Sabo's face in alarm. "What about the law?" growled Sabo. "The law says everything must be reported within two hours." "Then we'll break the law," the captain snapped. "I'm captain of this Station, and those are your orders. You don't need to worry about the law -- I'll see that you're protected, but this is too big to fumble. This ship is from the stars. That means it must have an Interstellar drive. You know what that means. The Government will fall all over itself to reward us -- " Sabo scowled, and the worry deepened in the men's faces. It was hard to imagine the Government falling all over itself for anybody. They knew too well how the Government worked. They had heard of the swift trials, the harsh imprisonments that awaited even the petty infringers. The Military Government had no time to waste on those who stepped out of line, they had no mercy to spare. And the men knew that their captain was not in favor in top Government circles. Crack patrol commanders were not shunted into remote, lifeless Satellite Stations if their stand in the Government was high. And deep in their minds, somehow, the men knew .they couldn't trust this little, sharp-eyed, white-haired man. The credit for such a discovery as this might go to him, yes -- but there would be little left for them. "The law -- " Sabo repeated stubbornly. "Damn the law! We're stationed out here in this limbo to watch Saturn and report any activity we see coming from there. There's nothing in our orders about anything else. There have been ships from there, they think, but not this ship. trying to find an Interstellar, and never gotten to first base." The captain paused, his eyes narrowing. "We'll go aboard this ship," he said softly. "We'll find out what's aboard it, and where it's from, and we'll take its drive. There's been no resistance yet, but it could be dangerous. We can't assume anything. The boarding party will report everything they find to me. One of them will have to be a drive man. That's you, Brownie." The little man with the sharp black eyes looked up eagerly. "I don't know if I could tell anything -- " "You can tell more than anyone else here. Nobody else knows space drive. I'll count on you. If you bring back a good report, perhaps we can cancel out certain -- unfortunate items in your record. But one other should board with you -- " His eyes turned toward John Sabo. "Not me. This is your goat." The mate's eyes were sullen. "This is gross breach, and you know it. They'll have you in irons when we get back. I don't want anything to do with it." "You're under orders, Sabo. You keep forgetting." "They're illegal orders, sir!" "I'll take responsibility for that." Sabo looked the old man straight in the eye. "You mean you'd sell us down a rat hole to save your skin. That's what you mean." Captain Loomis' eyes widened incredulously. Then his face darkened, and he stepped very close to the big man. "You'll watch your tongue, I think," he gritted. "Be careful what you say to me, Sabo. Be very careful. Because if you don't, you'll be in irons, and we'll see just how long you last when you get back home. Now you've got your orders. You'll board the ship with Brownie." The big man's fists were clenched until the knuckles were white. "You don't know what's over there!" he burst out. "We could be slaughtered." The captain's smile was unpleasant. "That would be such a pity," he murmured. "I'd really hate to see it happen -- " lent, like a shadowy ghost. No flicker of light could be seen aboard it; no sound nor faintest sign of life came from the tall, dark hull plates. It hung there, huge and imponderable, and swung around with the Station in its silent orbit. The men huddled about Sabo and Brownie, helping them into their pressure suits, checking their equipment. They had watched the little scanning beetles crawl over the surface of the great ship, examining, probing every nook and crevice, reporting crystals, and metals, and irons, while the boarding party prepared. And still the radioman waited alertly for a flicker of life from the solemn giant. Frightened as they were of their part in the illegal secrecy, the arrival of the ship had brought a change in the crew, lighting fires of excitement in their eyes. They moved faster, their voices were lighter, more cheerful. Long months on the Station had worn on derelict their nerves -- out of contact with their homes, on a mission that was secretly jeered as utter Governmental folly. Ships had been seen, years before, disappearing into the sullen bright atmospheric crust of Saturn, but there had been no sign of anything since. And out there, on the lonely guard Station, nerves had run ragged, always waiting, always watching, wearing away even the iron discipline of their military background. They grew bitterly weary of the same faces, the same routine, the constant repetition of inactivity. And through the months they had watched with increasing anxiety the conflict growing between the captain and his bitter, sulleneyed second-in-command, John Sabo. And then the ship had come, incredibly, from the depths of space, and the tensions of loneliness were forgotten in the flurry of activity. The locks whined and opened as the two men moved out of the Station on the little propulsion sleds, linked to the Station with light silk guy ropes. Sabo settled himself on the sled, cursing himself for falling so foolishly into the captain's scheme, cursing his tongue for wandering. And deep within him he felt a new sensation, a vague uneasiness and insecurity that he had not felt in all his years of military life. The strange ship was a variant, an imponderable factor thrown suddenly into his small world of hatred and bitterness, forcing him into unknown territory, throwing his mind into a welter of doubts and fears. He glanced uneasily across at Brownie, vaguely wishing that someone else were with him. Brownie was a troublemaker, Brownie talked too much, Brownie philosophized in a world that ridiculed philosophy. He'd known men like Brownie before, and he knew that they couldn't be trusted. The gray hull gleamed at them as they moved toward it, a monstrous wall of polished metal. There were no dents, no surface scars from its passage through space. They found the entrance lock without difficulty, near the top of the ship's great hull, and Brownie probed the rim of the lock with a dozen instruments, his dark eyes burning eagerly. And then, with a squeal that grated in Sabo's ears, the oval port of the ship quivered, and slowly opened. Silently, the sleds moved into the opening. They were in a small vault, quite dark, and the sleds settled slowly onto a metal deck. Sabo eased himself from the seat, tuning up his audios to their highest sensitivity, moving over to Brownie. Momentarily they touched helmets, and Brownie's excited voice came to him, muted, but breathless. "No trouble getting it open. It worked on the same principle as ours." "Better get to work on the inner lock." Brownie shot him a sharp glance. "But what about -- inside? I mean, we can't just walk in on them -- " "Why not? We've tried to contact them." Reluctantly, the little engineer began probing the inner lock with trembling fingers. Minutes later they were easing themselves through, moving slowly down the dark corridor, waiting with pounding hearts for a sound, a sign. The corridor joined another, and then still another, until they reached a great oval door. And then they were inside, in the heart of the ship, and their eyes widened as they stared at the thing in the center of the great vaulted chamber. "My God!" Brownie's voice was a hoarse whisper in the stillness. "Look at them, Johnny!" Sabo moved slowly across the room toward the frail, crushed form lying against the great, gleaming panel. Thin, almost boneless arms were pasted against the hard metal; an oval, humanoid skull was crushed like an eggshell into the knobs and levers of the control panel. Sudden horror shot through the big man as he looked around. At the far side of the room was another of the things, and still another, mashed, like lifeless jelly, into the floors and panels. Gently he peeled a bit of jelly away from the metal, then turned with a mixture of wonder and disgust. "All dead," he muttered. Brownie looked up at him, his hands trembling. "No wonder there was no sign." He looked about helplessly. "It's a derelict, Johnny. A wanderer. How could it have happened? How long ago?" Sabo shook his head, bewildered. "Then it was just chance that it came to us, that we saw it -- " "No pilot, no charts. It might have wandered for centuries." Brownie stared about the room, a frightened look on his face. And then he was leaning over the control panel, probing at the array of levers, his fingers working eagerly at the wiring. Sabo nodded approvingly. "We'll have to go over it with a comb," he said. "I'll see what I can find in the rest of the ship. You go ahead on the controls and drive." Without waiting for an answer he moved swiftly from the round chamber, out into the corridor again, his stomach almost sick. It took them many hours. They moved silently, as if even a slight sound might disturb the sleeping alien forms, smashed against the dark metal panels. In another room were the charts, great, beautiful charts, totally unfamiliar, studded with star formations he had never seen, noted with curious, meaningless symbols. As Sabo worked he heard Brownie moving down into the depths of the ship, toward the giant engine rooms. And then, some silent alarm clicked into place in Sabo's mind, tightening his stomach, screaming to be heard. Heart pounding, he dashed down the corridor like a cat, seeing again in his mind the bright, eager eyes of the engineer. Suddenly the meaning of that eagerness dawned on him. He scampered down a ladder, along a corridor, and down another ladder, down to the engine room, almost colliding with Brownie as he crossed from one of the engines to a battery of generators on the far side of the room. "Brownie!" "What's the trouble?" Sabo trembled, then turned away. "Nothing," he muttered. "Just a thought." But he watched as the little man snaked into the labyrinth of dynamos and coils and wires, peering eagerly, probing, searching, making notes in the litderelict tie pad in his hand. Finally, hours later, they moved again toward the lock where they had left their sleds. Not a word passed between them. The uneasiness was strong in Sabo's mind now, growing deeper, mingling with fear and a premonition of impending evil. A dead ship, a derelict, come to them by merest chance from some unthinkably remote star. He cursed, without knowing why, and suddenly he felt he hated Brownie as much as he hated the captain waiting for them in the Station. But as he stepped into the Station's lock, a new thought crossed his mind, almost dazzling him with its unexpectedness. He looked at the engineer's thin face, and his hands were trembling as he opened the pressure suit. longer than was necessary to give his report to the captain, dwelling on unimportant details, watching with malicious amusement the captain's growing annoyance. Captain Loomis' eyes kept sliding to Brownie, as though trying to read the information he wanted from the engineer's face. Sabo rolled up the charts slowly, stowing them in a pile on the desk. 'That's the picture, sir. Perhaps a qualified astronomer could make something of it; I haven't the knowledge or the instruments. The ship came from outside the system, beyond doubt. Probably from a planet with lighter gravity than our own, judging from the frailty of the creatures. Oxygen breathers, from the looks of their gas storage. If you ask me, I'd say -- " "All right, all right," the captain breathed impatiently. "You can write it up and hand it to me. It isn't really important where they came from, or whether they breathe oxygen or fluorine." He turned his eyes to the engineer, and lit a cigar with trembling fingers." The important thing is how they got here. The drive, Brownie. You went over the engines carefully? What did you find?" Brownie twitched uneasily, and looked at the floor. "Oh, yes, I examined them carefully. Wasn't too hard. I examined every piece of drive machinery on the ship, from stem to stem." Sabo nodded, slowly, watching the little man with carefully blank face. "That's right. You gave it a good going over." Brownie licked his lips. "It's a derelict, like Johnny told you. They were dead. All of them. Probably had been dead for a long time. I couldn't tell, of course. Probably nobody could tell. But they must have been dead for centuries -- " The captain's eyes blinked as the implication sank in. "Wait a minute," he said. "What do you mean, centuries?" Browrfie stared at his shoes. "The atomic piles were almost dead," he muttered in an apologetic whine. "The ship wasn't going any place, captain. It was just wandering. Maybe it's wandered for thousands of years." He took a deep breath, and his eyes met the captain's for a brief agonized moment. "They don't have Interstellar, sir. Just plain, simple, slow atomics. Nothing different. They've been traveling for centuries, and it would have taken them just as long to get back. The captain's voice was thin, choked. "Are you trying to tell me that their drive is no different from our own? That a ship has actually wandered into Interstellar space without a space drive?" Brownie spread his hands helplessly. "Something must have gone wrong. They must have started off for another planet in their own system, and something went wrong. They broke into space, and they all died. And the ship just went on moving. They never intended an Interstellar hop. They couldn't have. They didn't have the drive for it." The captain sat back numbly, his face pasty gray. The light had faded in his eyes now; he sat as though he'd been struck. "You -- you couldn't be wrong? You couldn't have missed anything?" Brownie's eyes shifted unhappily, and his voice was very faint. "No,  jj sir. The captain stared at them for a long moment, like a stricken child. Slowly he picked up one of the charts, his mouth working. Then, with a bitter roar, he threw it in Sabo's face. "Get out of here! Take this garbage and get out! And get the men to their stations. We're here to watch Saturn, and by god, we'll watch Saturn!" He turned away, a hand over his eyes, and derelict they heard his choking breath as they left the cabin. Slowly, Brownie walked out into the corridor, started down toward his cabin, with Sabo silent at his heels. He looked up once at the mate's heavy face, a look of pleading in his dark brown eyes, and then opened the door to his quarters. Like a cat, Sabo was in the room before him, dragging him in, slamming the door. He caught the little man by the neck with one savage hand, and shoved him unceremoniously against the door, his voice a vicious whisper. "All right , talk! Let's have it now!" Brownie choked, his eyes bulging, his face turning gray in the dim light of the cabin. "Johnny! Let me down! What's the matter? You're choking me, Johnny -- " The mate's eyes were red, with heavy lines of disgust and bitterness running from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. "You stinking little liar! Talk, damn it! You're not messing with the captain now, you're messing with me, and I'll have the truth if I have to cave in your skull -- " "I told you the truth! I don't know what you mean -- " Sabo's palm smashed into his face, jerking his head about like an apple on a string. "That's the wrong answer," he grated. "I warn you, don't lie! The captain is an ambitious ass, he couldn't think his way through a multiplication table. He's a little child. But I'm not quite so dull." He threw the little man down in a heap, his eyes blazing. "You silly fool, your story is so full of holes you could drive a tank through it. They just up and died, did they? I'm supposed to believe that? Smashed up against the panels the way they were? Only one thing could crush them like that. Any fool could see it. Acceleration. And I don't mean atomic acceleration. Something else." He glared down at the man quivering on the floor. "They had Interstellar drive, didn't they, Brownie?" Brownie nodded his head, weakly, almost sobbing, trying to pull himself erect. "Don't tell the captain," he sobbed. "Oh, Johnny, for god's sake, listen to me, don't let him know I lied. I was going to tell you anyway, Johnny, really I was. I've got a plan, a good plan, can't you see it?" The gleam of excitement came back into the sharp little eyes. "They had it, all right. Their trip probably took just a few months. They had a drive I've never seen before, non-atomic. I couldn't tell the principle, with the look I had, but I think I could work it." He sat up, his whole body trembling. "Don't give me away, Johnny, listen a minute -- " Sabo sat back against the bunk, staring at the little man. "You're out of your mind," he said softly. "You don't know what you're doing. What are you going to do when his Nibs goes over for a look himself? He's stupid, but not that stupid." Brownie's voice choked, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness. "He won't get a chance to see it, Johnny. He's got to take our word until he sees it, and we can stall him -- " Sabo blinked. "A day or so -- maybe. But what then? Oh, how could you be so stupid? He's on the skids, he's out of favor and fighting for his life. That drive is the break that could put him on top. Can't you see he's selfish? He has to be, in this world, to get anything. Anything or anyone who blocks him, he'll destroy, if he can. Can't you see that? When he spots this, your life won't be worth spitting at." Brownie was trembling as he sat down opposite the big man. His voice was harsh in the little cubicle, heavy with pain and hopelessness. "That's right," he said. "My life isn't worth a nickle. Neither is yours. Neither is anybody's, here or back home. Nobody's life is worth a nickle. Something's happened to us in the past hundred years, Johnny -- something horrible. I've seen it creeping and growing up around us all my life. People don't matter any more, it's the Government, what the Government thinks that matters. It's a web, a cancer that grows in its own pattern, until it goes so far it can't be stopped. Men like Loomis could see the pattern, and adapt to it, throw away all the worthwhile things, the love and beauty and peace that we once had in our lives. Those men can get somewhere, they can turn this life into a climbing game, waiting their chance to get a little farther toward the top, a little closer to some semblance of security -- " "Everybody adapts to it," Sabo snapped. "They have to. You don't see me moving for anyone else, do you? I'm for me, and believe me I know it. I don't give a hang for you, or Loomis, or anyone else alive -- just me. I want to stay alive, that's all. You're a dreamer, Brownie. But until you pull something like this, you can learn to stop dreaming if you want to -- " "No, no, you're wrong -- oh, you're horribly wrong, Tohnny. Some of us can't adapt, we haven't got what it takes, or else we have something else in us that won't let us go along. And right there we're beat before we start. There's no place for us now, and there never will be." He looked up at the mate's impassive face. "We're in a life where we don't belong, impounded into a senseless, neverending series of fights and skirmishes and long, lonely waits, feeding this insane urge of the Government to expand, out to the planets, to the stars, farther and farther, bigger and bigger. We've got to go, seeking newer and greater worlds to conquer, with nothing to conquer them with, and nothing to conquer them for. There's life somewhere else in our solar system, so it must be sought out and conquered, no matter what or where it is. We live in a world of iron and fear, and there was no place for me, and others like me, until this ship came -- " Sabo looked at him strangely. "So I was right. I read it on your face when we were searching the ship. I knew what you were thinking..." His face darkened angrily. "You couldn't get away with it, Brownie. Where could you go, what could you expect to find? You're talking death, Brownie. Nothing else -- " "No, no. Listen, Johnny." Brownie leaned closer, his eyes bright and intent on the man's heavy face. "The captain has to take our word for it, until he sees derelict the ship. Even then he couldn't tell for sure -- I'm the only drive engineer on the Station. We have the charts, we could work with them, try to find out where the ship came from; I already have an idea of how the drive is operated. Another look and I could make it work. Think of it, Johnny! What difference does it make where we went, or what we found? You're a misfit, too, you know that -- this coarseness and bitterness is a shell, if you could only see it, a sham. You don't really believe in this world we're in -- who cares where, if only we could go, get away? Oh, it's a chance, the wildest, freak chance, but we could take it -- " "If only to get away from him ," said Sabo in a muted voice. "Lord, how I hate him. I've seen smallness and ambition before -- pettiness and treachery, plenty of it. But that man is our whole world knotted up in one little ball. I don't him, just to stop that voice from talking, just to see fear cross his face one time. But if we took the ship, it would break him for good." A new light appeared in the big man's eyes. "He'd be through, Brownie. Washed up." "And we'd be free -- " Sabo's eyes were sharp. "What about the acceleration? It killed those that came in the ship." "But they were so frail, so weak. Light brittle bones and soft jelly. Our bodies are stronger, we could stand it." Sabo sat for a long time, staring at Brownie. His mind was suddenly confused by the scope of the idea, racing in myriad twirling fantasies, parading before his eyes the long, bitter, frustrating years, the hopelessness of his own life, the dull aching feeling he felt deep in his stomach and bones each time he set back down on Earth, to join the teeming throngs of hungry people. He thought of the rows of drab apartments, the thin faces, the hollow, hunted eyes of the people he had seen. He knew that that was why he was a soldier -- because soldiers ate well, they had time to sleep, they were never allowed long hours to think, and wonder, and grow dull and empty. But he knew his life had been barren. The life of a mindless automaton, moving from place to place, never thinking, never daring to think or speak, hoping only to work without pain each day, and sleep without nightmares. And then, he thought of the nights in his childhood, when he had lain awake, sweating with fear, as the airships screamed across the dark sky above, bound he never knew where; and then, hearing in the far distance the booming explosion, he had played that horrible little game with himself, seeing how high he could count before he heard the weary, plodding footsteps of the people on the road, moving on to another place. He had known, even as a little boy, that the only safe place was in those bombers, that the place for survival was in the striking armies, and his life had followed the hard-learned pattern, twisting him into the cynical mold of the mercenary soldier, dulling the quick and clever mind, sponses of order and obey, stripping him of his heritage of love and humanity. Others less thoughtful had been happier; they had succeeded in forgetting the life they had known before, they had been able to learn easily and well the lessons of the repudiation of the rights of men which had crept like a blight through the world. But Sabo, too, was a misfit, wrenched into a mold he could not fit. He had sensed it vaguely, never really knowing when or how he had built the shell of toughness and cynicism, but also sensing vaguely that it was built, and that in it he could hide, somehow, and laugh at himself, and his leaders, and the whole world through which he plodded. He had laughed, but there had been long nights, in the narrow darkness of spaceship bunks, when his mind pounded at the shell, screaming out in nightmare, and he had wondered if he had really lost his mind. His gray eyes narrowed as he looked at Brownie, and he felt his heart pounding in his chest, pounding with a fury that he could no longer deny. "It would have to be fast," he said softly. "Like lightning, tonight, tomorrow -- very soon." "Oh, yes, I know that. But we can do it -- " "Yes," said Sabo, with a hard, bitter glint in his eyes. "Maybe we can." tense. For the first time in his life, Sabo knew the meaning of real fear, felt the clinging aura of sudden death in every glance, every word of the men around him. It seemed incredible that the captain didn't notice the brief exchanges with the little engineer, or his own sudden appearances and disappearances about the Station. But the captain sat in his cabin with angry eyes, snapping answers without even looking up. Still, Sabo knew that the seeds of suspicion lay planted in his mind, ready to burst forth with awful violence at any slight provocation. As he worked, the escape assumed greater and greater proportions in Sabo's mind; he knew with increasing urgency and daring that nothing must stop him. The ship was there, the only bridge away from a life he could no longer endure, and his determination blinded him to caution. Primarily, he pondered over the charts, while Brownie, growing hourly more nervous, poured his heart into a study of his notes and sketches. A second look at the engines was essential; the excuse he concocted for returning to the ship was recklessly slender, and Sabo spent a grueling five minutes dissuading the captain from accompanying him. But the captain's eyes were dull, and he walked his cabin, sunk in a gloomy, remorseful trance. The hours passed, and the men saw, in despair, that more precious, dangerous hours would be necessary before the flight could be attempted. And then, abruptly, Sabo got the call to the captain's cabin. He found the old man at his desk, regarding him with cold eyes, and his heart sank. The captain motioned him to a seat, and then sat derelict back, lighting a cigar with painful slowness. "I want you to tell me," he said in a lifeless voice, "exactly what Brownie thinks he's doing." Sabo went cold. Carefully he kept his eyes on the captain's face. "I guess he's nervous," he said. "He doesn't belong on a Satellite Station. He belongs at home. The place gets on his nerves." "I didn't like his report." "I know," said Sabo. The captain's eyes narrowed. "It was hard to believe. Ships don't just happen out of space. They don't wander out interstellar by accident, either." An unpleasant smile curled his lips. "I'm not telling you anything new. I wouldn't want to accuse Brownie of lying, of course -- or you either. But we'll know soon. A patrol craft will be here from the Triton supply base in an hour. I signalled as soon as I had your reports." The smile broadened maliciously. "The patrol craft will have experts aboard. Space drive experts. They'll review your report." "An hour -- " The captain smiled. "That's what I said. In that hour, you could tell me the truth. I'm not a drive man, I'm an administrator, and organizer and director. You're the technicians. The truth now could save you much unhappiness -- in the future." Sabo stood up heavily. "You've got your information," he said with a bitter laugh. "The patrol craft will confirm it." The captain's face went a shade greyer. "All right," he said. "Go ahead, laugh. I told you, anyway." Sabo didn't realize how his hands were trembling until he reached the end of the corridor. In despair he saw the plan crumbling beneath his feet, and with the despair came the cold undercurrent of fear. The patrol would discover them, disclose the hoax. There was no choice left -- ready or not, they'd have to leave. Quickly he turned in to the central control room where Brownie was working. He sat down, repeating the captain's news in a soft voice. "An hour! But how can we -- " "We've got to. We can't quit now, we're dead if we do." Brownie's eyes were wide with fear. "But can't we stall them, somehow? Maybe if we turned on the captain -- " "The crew would back him. They wouldn't dare go along with us. We've got to run, nothing else." He took a deep breath. "Can you control the drive?" Brownie stared at his hands. "I -- I think so. I can only try." "You've got to. It's now or never. Get down to the lock, and I'll get the charts. Get the sleds ready." He scooped the charts from his bunk, folded them carefully and bound them swiftly with cord. Then he ran silently down the corridor to the landing port lock. Brownie was already there, in the darkness, closing the last clamps on his pressure suit. Sabo handed him the charts, and began the laborious task of climbing into his own suit, panting in the darkness. And then the alarm was clanging in his ear, and the lock was stopped short, a cry on his lips, staring at the entrance to the control room. The captain was grinning, a nasty, evil grin, his eyes hard and humorless as he stood there flanked by three crewmen. His hand gripped an ugly power gun tightly. He just stood there, grinning, and his voice was like fire in Sabo's ears. "Too bad," he said softly. "You almost made it, too. Trouble is, two can't keep a secret. Shame, Johnny, a smart fellow like you. I might have expected as much from Brownie, but I thought you had more sense -- " Something snapped in Sabo's mind, then. With a roar, he lunged at the captain's feet, screaming his bitterness and rage and frustration, catching the old man's calves with his powerful shoulders. The captain toppled, and Sabo was fighting for the power gun, straining with all his might to twist the gun from the thin hand, and he heard his voice shouting, "Run! Go, Brownie , make it go!" The lock was open, and he saw Brownie's sled nose out into the blackness. The captain choked, his face purple. "Get him! Don't let him get away!" The lock clanged, and the screens showed the tiny fragile sled jet out from the side of the Station, the small huddled figure clinging to it, heading straight for the open port of the grey ship. "Stop him! The guns, you fools, the guns!" The alarm still clanged, and the control room was a flurry of activity. Three men snapped down behind the tracer-guns, firing without aiming, in a frenzied attempt to catch the fleeing sled. The sled began zig-zagging, twisting wildly as the shells popped on either side of it. The captain twisted away from Sabo's grip with a roar, and threw one of the crewmen to the deck, wrenching the gun controls from his hands. "Get the big ones on the ship! Blast it! If it gets away you'll all pay." Suddenly the sled popped into the ship's port, and the hatch slowly closed behind it. Raving, the captain turned the gun on the sleek, polished hull plates, pressed the firing levels on the war-head servos. Three of them shot out from the Satellite, like deadly bugs, careening through the intervening space, until one of them struck the side of the gray ship, and exploded in purple fury against the impervious hull. And the others nosed into the flame, and passed on through, striking nothing. Like the blinking of a light, the alien ship had throbbed, and jerked, and was gone. With a roar the captain brought his fist down on the hard plastic and metal of the control panel, kicked at the sheet of knobs and levers with a heavy foot, his face purple with rage. His whole body shook as he turned on Sabo, his eyes wild. "You let him get away! It was your fault, yours! But you won't get away! I've got you, and you'll pay, do you hear that?" He pulled himself up until his face was bare inches from Sabo's, his teeth bared in a frenzy of hatred. "Now we'll see who'll laugh, my friend. You'll laugh in the death chamber, if you can still laugh by then!" He turned to the men around him. "Take him," he snarled. "Lock him derelict in his quarters, and guard him well. And while you're doing it, take a good look at him. See how he laughs now." They marched him down to his cabin, stunned, still wondering what had happened. Something had gone in his mind in that second, something that told him that the choice had to be made, instantly. Because he knew, with dull wonder, that in that instant when the lights went on he could have stopped Brownie, could have saved himself. He could have taken for himself a piece of the glory and promotion due to the discoverers of an Interstellar drive. But he had also known, somehow, in that short instant, that the only hope in the world lay in that one nervous, frightened man, and the ship which could take him away. And the ship was gone. That meant the captain was through. He'd had his chance, the ship's coming had given him his chance, and he had muffed it. Now he, too, would pay. The Government would not be pleased that such a ship had leaked through his fingers. Captain Loomis was through. And him? Somehow, it didn't seem to matter any more. He had made a stab at it, he had tried. He just hadn't had the luck. But he knew there was more to that. Something in his mind was singing, some deep feeling of happiness and hope had crept into his mind, and he couldn't worry about himself any more. There was nothing more for him; they had him cold. But deep in his mind he felt a curious satisfaction, transcending any fear and bitterness. Deep in his heart, he knew that one man had escaped. And then he sat back and laughed. (Continued from, page #) And beside the farmhouse, on the ground, lay a pipe, its tobacco spilled, the last of its smoke swirling out of its bowl into the air, disappearing. The woman sat in the kitchen of the farmhouse and turned her head when the door opened. She widened her eyes and caught at her throat with her hand. The sun through the doorway shone down on metallic hands and a metallic face, gleaming on the surface which the straw hat and the overalls and the blue shirt didn't hide. The door snapped shut, and there was a sound of heavy metal footsteps against the kitchen floor. The woman pressed against her chair. "Who are you?" she screamed. "Henry," said the mechanical thing. Thorns, the vengeful, had determined his way. Aria, the healer, had determined her way. Which determined this classic meeting of the twain. By Richard E. Stockham Illustrated by Ed Emsh for years as they were arguing tonight. The man paced back and forth chain-smoking cigarettes; the woman sat motionless, watching him. They glanced at their watches with fearful eyes. They heard, with acutely alert ears, the goings and comings of people in the hall ; heard the shattering blast of rockets in the sky above the city. And they argued. "So you're going through with it tonight," he said heavily, "in your own way." "Yes." "Perhaps I should stop you." He crushed out his cigarette. "If the police were to hear -- " "No!" The word was thrown at him. "I know you don't mean that. But it's unworthy of you even to say it." She covered her face with nervous hands. "After all I am your wife." He stood over her, his lips tight. There was something of the fragile, finely made puppet about her, he thought, as though she had been refashioned a hundred times by some artisan seeking after perfect delicacy and precision. He softened momentarily. "Come with me then," he said. "No." "Why? Why?" "Your way is wrong" "We're the last two leaders of the opposition alive." His voice came swiftly and low. "The authority's beaten us. Their setup for killing, imprisonment, bribery and blackmail functions too well. Our whole organization's been scattered like matchsticks. The police are closing in on us. We're finished here on earth. We'll be lucky if we're killed quickly." He waited a moment for his words to take effect. "We go along together that far." She stood, clasping her hands. "Of course. Of course." "Look. I know you've finished that damned contraption of yours that'll take you into the atoms. I know you've been working on it for years. But I've been working too. My ship's been ready to take off into super-space for two days. But I haven't gone. I've been waiting for you. To wait at a time like this is to ask for death or worse. Now I demand you give up this insane idea of going into the atoms. You've got to come with me." "I've told you I can't escape with you out into the macrocosm. It's not my way ! # "The word 'escape' doesn't apply," he snapped, "to what I'm doing. You # re escaping. You'll creep into the microcosm and sit there like a seed that won't grow. You can't fight the Authority from the microcosm. That way is utter passivity and death. My way is fighting back. I'm going into hyperspace. My ship and I'll become so huge and powerful I'll throw suns around like snowballs. I'll toss meteors around like grains of corn. I'll upset gravities and warp time. I'll stretch and straighten space. I'll turn dimensions inside out -- " "Yes. You'll destroy. You'll ruin everything, you'll break the innocent as well as the guilty." "I'll have to take that chance," he said grimly. "But I'll destroy the Authority and everything that goes with it." She pulled from his grasp. "Violence and destruction are not my way. They never have been." Slowly now she sank into the chair, looked past him as she spoke. "You've always worshipped spaces and vacuums and voids. I've always been happy working with flowers and trees, the life of the meadow and valley, the rain and the new, small buds in springtime. We have always gone in opposite directions." She paused and smiled a bit wistfully. "It's funny. Now we find, too late to help our marriage, that there's a whole universe between us. You refuse, or perhaps you're afraid, I don't know, to go to the source of everything -- this table, this chair, this gown, your own. flesh. You don't want to understand life ; any more than you want to understand me. You must conquer it -- or destroy it. You must be a giant that can kick the earth around like a football. But I do want to understand, for in understanding lies the cure. My machine will take me into the atoms. I'll become part of the fabric and tapestry of the very warp and woof of our world. By becoming a part of it, I will know. I'll find the secret of life in inner space and I'll return and release our people from the Authority. And you? You'll never really understand anything. You'll be a wild comet, yes, but I'll be a raindrop in a deep well, learning patience. I'll be a true healer." For a moment sadness rose and softened his face. "There's nothing more to say, is there." "I'm afraid not." "We'll make the goodbys quick." He came to her. "At least we're being honest with each other. No lies. No pettiness. We've developed pretty powerful ideals. And they just won't fit together. It's that simple -- and that good." She looked up at him and smiled. "At least I haven't lost you to another woman." He returned her smile. "We're getting sentimental. This isn't good. It's weakening." He bent and lightly kissed her hair. For an instant her breathing stopped. "Goodby." "Goodby," she whispered. He strode to the door and opened it. His body snapped taut. drawn blaster, stood a man in the shining red garb of the police command. He resembled Mephisto with his flowing cape and snug trousers. His face was dark, his nose thin, his eyes black and very bright. "You seem surprised," said the man in red. Aria had half risen from the chair... As the eyes of the policeman turned on her, she sank back. "How opportune," the policeman continued. "The eve of your departures." The smile set on his mouth. His gun snapped up on a line with Thorus' heart. "No sudden moves, or you'll be burnt to a cinder. But no. That's what you want -- a quick death. So let me threaten you with merely burning your legs off." The blaster lowered. "It may interest you to know we have a recording of your whole conversation. But there's something else." His eyes holding Thorus, he gave a sharp command to two burly, bullnecked policemen. They stepped from the shadows and stood behind the commander. One held a small, black box. "I see," the commander said, "You've had experience before with the truth clamps. You're frightened." Thorus motioned the commander inside. "A little fear trickles through my hate." The door swung shut behind the three policemen. Thorus glanced at Aria. Her fingers clutched the arms of the chair. He knew she was thinking of the blocks that had recently been installed in their minds by X-ray hypnosis. Would the blocks hold after three days? Three days, they both knew was the limit. "It's your methods of escape we must have," said the commander. He motioned to one of the policemen. Thorus watched the man step in front of him and raise the clamps to his forehead. He saw features that were thick and heavy, as though they had been roughly moulded out of too wet clay. "You can see," the commander went on, "the tremendous advantage to us of being able to go into the macrocosm and toss meteors around like bits of com, as you say." He glanced at Aria, who sat huddled in the chair, like a porcelain doll. "And then into the microcosm. Unlimited power. A whole new universe to conquer and colonize. Aria did not move or speak. "I see she refuses to face reality." He turned to Thorns. "But you will face reality -- and so will she when we've finished. Had you conducted your experiments in behalf of the Authority, you would have been well rewarded. But no, you have been working against us -- however, it has been for the Authority after all." Thorus felt the clamps tight on his temples, like two steel fingers. Sitting stiffly on a chair, he felt sweat on his back and chest, felt it seep from his forehead down into his eyes, felt the bum of salt. There was tightness all through him as he waited for the first shock. His fingernails cut his palms. His breath stopped. His shoulders and arms hardened, stretched tight his tunic. The commander flicked his finger at the one kneeling before the little black box. This one tripped a lever. A soft hum seemed to rise from the box and fill the room. Thorus listened to the hum grow until it was a soft, high pitched scream. He closed his eyes. The next instant a shattering blow ripped through every inch of his body. Fire ran along his nerves. He felt his lips grimacing away from his teeth, felt the comers of his mouth stretching back to his ears. Oh God, oh God, he cried out in silent agony. Hold back my screams. Then he heard himself groan. He cut off the sound of it. Choked. Heard a growl deep in his chest. Lights flashed in his eyes and there was a tearing apart through his whole body. A squeezing together rushed all around him and an insane pounding and pulling as though his flesh were being beaten and clawed from his bones. Time dropped away from him until it seemed he had never been aware of anything but this agony. Then he was empty of sensation. He felt himself fall forward, felt heavy hands catch him roughly and set him upright. The soft voice of the commander flowed into his mind like a voice from outer space: "You will tell us your method of going into the macrocosm. The equations, the type ship, its propellent, where the ship is hidden. Thorus felt enveloped in a void. The voice of the commander droned on. "All we need is a clue. We'll work out the rest." Life and feeling and thought were surging back into Thoms now. Strength filled his muscles again. Sight came into his eyes. Again he sat straight and stiff on the chair. The block held, he thought. It held and they cannot know now!" "Speak!" The commander's voice rose. "Damn you!" He seized Thorus by the hair. "You've blocked off the information. I'll see both of you tortured until you'll wish to kill each other. Then we'll try the clamps again. He smashed his fist into Thoms' face. On the instant the commander pulled back his fist, Thoms reached out and jerked the blaster from his belt. His foot came up hard against the man's groin. There was a grunting cry of pain. Thorus fell backward off the stool, pressing the blaster trigger as he hit the floor. He saw blood gush from the commander's middle, saw him pitch sideways, like a broken statue, heard Aria's scream. The clamps pulled from his head. He swung the gun's muzzle to the two policemen, clawing at their holsters. The blaster struck out, a long coughing hiss, a spray of flame. There were cries and gasps and jerking and clutching and the scrambling fall of the two bodies. Then silence. Thorus crawled unsteadily to his feet, stood swaying. The gun hung loosely in his hand. Now he felt Aria close to him, heard her voice trembling and breathy. "Thorus! Are you all right?" "Yes." "The blocks held! They held!" Steadying himself, he saw Aria glance at the bodies on the floor. "Destruction!" she shuddered. "Nothing but destruction. Oh God, I'm sick of it!" Thorus let the gun drop to the floor. "There's no time to talk. Your laboratory." He grasped her by the shoulders and turned her toward a bright steel door across the room. " You'll save time to go into your damned microcosm. You'll make it. Good luck. If I have any luck at all, I'll make it too." He gave her a push. Without speaking or turning back, she moved across the room, as though sleep walking... The gleaming door slab slid back as she approached it, closed behind her. The memory of her face stayed in his mind for a long moment after she had disappeared, and from the room's atmosphere he seemed to breathe in regret and a sense of their failure. He turned abruptly, looked down at each crumpled body. Opening the door a crack, he searched the brightly lighted street for the figure of a policeman, saw none, stepped outside and ran. deftly, swiftly at the transparent body-length cylinder. She checked wire connections, dials, buttons, then opened one end of the tube, lowered herself into place, when she had closed the tube, she lay still, the forefinger of her right hand resting on a button. During all these preparations, she was viewing, with her inner sight, Thorus' tiny ship streaking through the night toward a distant mountain peak where a small metal ball, large enough for one man, sat shrouded by a screen of invisibility. Now she saw the streak of flame die in the night and the tiny ship sitting motionless beside the metal ball; saw Thorus open a hatch in the ball's side, let himself through the opening and swing shut the circle of steel. "Thank God," she said. "Whatever comes now, at least he's made it." Wiping away the vision of him, she hesitated a moment, said goodby to earth and life as she'd known it and would never know it again. A moment of yearning for a chance to live safely and well as a wife and mother swept her with sadness. The yearning held her finger from the button; a final hugging of human love and full human life, a last lonely cry for earth as she had known it in childhood with the press of wind and the touch and sight of green growing things and the depth of blue above and the ground beneath. Feeling then as though she were plunging into midnight ocean depths, she thrust her finger hard against the button! Instantly light shimmered all about! The room dissolved. A sense of dreaming too vividly, yet of being deep in a sleep that was a thousand times more acutely awake than any awakeness she had ever known filled all her being. She felt herself sinking into a great bottomless depth and yet at the same time soaring through space to the ends of the universe, until both falling and soaring flowed into each other and became suspension. And then suddenly she saw all things as one. She saw the intricate design of a snowflake that was the snows of all the earth and a drop of water that held all the oceans. There was the rhythmic beating all around as though of a great, omnipresent heart and the surge and flow of oceans of lifeblood and the rise and fall of eternal breathing. A speck of soil was the soil of all the earth, from which grew forests and fields of green. She let herself out into the space of all this and was merely there, like time is, where there is the motion and change of birth and death and birth again and death again. She felt a gentle touch on her body that was the body of all mankind and knew it for the touch of air, a single element of all earth's winds that yet was all the clear winds of earth. The next moment a thundrous roar crashed like a tidal wave. She felt a gigantic shaking in all the snow and water, in the oceans and mountains, in the air and wind, in the blood and life and beating heart. A faltering of the rhythm and flow went, like a cosmic shudder, through all this life and through her own being so that she was conscious of nausea and ache and a violent flinging about. She had a sense then of pulling within herself, like a sea anemone that has been touched by an enemy. And in her silent voice, she cried out, "Thorns!" In the macrocosm. Thorus destroying! Destroying! The next instant her inner sight swung back to where Thoms' ship, the shining metal ball, had leapt up off the mountain of earth; leapt, in the fraction of a second, through the blue earth covering into black, outer space. Her inner sight saw the metal ball inflating, a cosmic baloon, flashing like the sun, then seeming to fill the space between all the suns! conscious of being a colossus that could step from planet to planet as though he were using them for stones to cross a pond of earth water. Step past the solar system, he thought, out into the universe. Now the sun became a tiny ball of fire, a lightning bug, the earth a grain of dust. He could blow out the light of the sun, flick Earth and the other planets into nothingness. "I've broken through," he thought. "I've done it! I've been released." And looking out and away, he saw universe upon universe extending past infinity, it seemed, an ocean without a horizon. Now, said his thought, I will destroy all evil and I shall begin with the evil of earth. As though he were looking through a microscope, he focused his sight on the grain of dust that was earth. His fingers made delicate adjustments on a dial, and earth, softly green and blue, swam clearly into his vision. He magnified his sight of earth until he could see all of it like a gigantic relief map. He saw the fortified places of the Authority -- great, spreading, shining, metal domes; saw them dotting the earth; saw the lines of vehicles speeding back and forth between them. He saw too the hamlets of the people, in the spaces between the forts of the Authority, all places of squalor with row upon row of boxlike houses, each exactly like the other. There were not any green lawns or shade trees, only houses and streets and people moving about. Thorus felt his anger rise. He pressed a button that flung out fields of gravity. Earth rocked and heaved, like an animal in convulsions. Volcanos exploded, shot out their flaming, poisonous refuse. Oceans were monsters writhing and rolling in their troughs, reaching onto the land, as though to pull it beneath them. And the land itself split wide and snapped shut great, yawning jaws. There was a wild rushing about among all the people, a madness, as though frantic motion would save them. They looked up off the convulsed earth with panic stricken eyes, their voices raised in agony. Thorus' voice sounded, "The time for the death of the Authority has come. I will crush them as though I were crushing snails. He reached out from the ship with rays that seized meteors and flung them like a schoolboy flinging stones at bottles, one by one against the massive, shining domes of the Authority. The domes cracked and split and were crushed. The atomic bombs broke open with flame that leapt up yellow tongues and grew mushrooms in the sky, and a burning death spread all around. Then Thorus was quiet, watching all that he had destroyed. But suddenly, he became aware of Aria's thought within him, crying out. "Destroyer! Murderer! In moments you've set humanity back a hundred thousand years. You're worse than the Authority. There'll never be any peace for you or for the earth or even the universe after what you've done. Other Authorities will come and you'll have to destroy them and others and others. Destruction for you forever, on and on, until you fill the universe with it..." In his mind, Thorus saw her among the falling snowflakes and the drops of cool water and the green, growing atoms; saw her in the transparent tube sink deeper and deeper into the microcosm, away and away like a minnow swimming down into a beautiful lake on a summer's day. Deeper, ever deeper, until there was nothing but the blue, sleepy water. As Thorus looked upon the earth again and saw the terrible destruction he had wrought, he trembled. There was the realization in him that, beneath his consciousness, had lain the hope that, after he had wiped clean the earth, Aria's healing power would remake it. But now there would be no healing, and for thousands of years earth would lie a smoking ruins with the people crawling about its shattered surface like bugs. He turned from all he saw. He closed his eyes and threw his ship out into space, threw it away into the fathomless void. He must escape from the universe, must flee from the horror that filled him at the desolation he had wrought. Straight out into space, out into the forever, where earth would cease to exist, where he and his remorse would be lost. streaked past yet he seemed within himself to be hanging motionless in an infinite sea of blackness while he knew that the speed of him cracked through the barrier of time and space; knew that it was a speed beyond any conceived by the mind of man. On into forgetfulness, escape beyond his memory, faster and farther away than his mind, so far away that even earth would disappear in his thought. As incredible distances stretched almost to breaking between himself and earth, he thought : So this is the end. For all I've been and wanted to be, this is it. A nothingness beyond the universe. But as the last word went from his thought, he saw a greenish blue ball of light rush toward him. He watched it inflate in the port. It enveloped the whole ship. The suns and the galaxies had faded into nothingness. He was aware of sinking into eternal depths but at the same time he felt himself soaring until sinking and soaring flowed into each other. After a time, he saw shimmering white crystals encircling his ship. And then the encircling crystals became one snowflake reflecting light like the moon. A great wonder filled him and he stared in overwhelming awe. He heard his own heartbeat in his body and outside the ship, holding the ship in an eternal throbbing; heard the flowing of his own blood like a turbulent river; heard his breathing become the ebb and flow of wind, like the sound of surf. His body too became the soil of earth and its rock and water and he was deeply conscious of growth all through him. He was birth and death and he was both in one and he was the life of mankind, of animals, of plants. As he waited in what seemed to be eternity, sunlight broke into his sight and he saw a field of grass forming around his ship. Blue sky swam into focus above him. White cloud patches formed in the blue as though they had been ordered there by the word of creation. Thorns knew then that he was on earth again, that he had come up from deep inside it. Rising up, like one awakening uncertainly from sleep in a strange room, he opened the ship's hatch and looked out upon the land. A flash of light caught his eyes then, from above, and he looked up in wonder. He gasped. der, sinking down through the blue, like a leaf, settling gently to the earth a hundred feet away. She crawled out and stood looking across the field of grass at him, a strange, smile on her face. Thoms leaped from his ship and ran toward her. He ran silently. She held out her hands and he grasped them tenderly, as he would grasp the hands of a child. And all he could say was, "Aria. Aria." "Thoms," she said, and there was courage and joy in her voice. "We've come back." They stared into each other's eyes for a long moment and then they were close, and they held to each other and swayed. "Do you know what's happened?" she said. "Yes. You came back through hyper-space while I came back through the atoms." His voice was quiet. "Oh, Lord. Oh good and strange Lord. We forgot that one of the great men twenty thousand years ago, proved that space was curved." "Yes." She stood away from him now, yet held to his hand. "We couldn't escape from our place in life or ourselves or the good and the evil that we have done. We came back to our earth and now we must do what we have left undone." There was much to be done. Thoms looked around. He saw in the distance a cmshed and smoking mins. "I've destroyed the Authority, but I've destroyed too much. Now the people are in chaos." Aria stood silently awhile, and then moved his arm. "But now you can help me to heal them. You've seen in the microcosm, as I have in the macrocosm that all life is one. Now we can show the people that outer and inner space are not separate. We can show them how they exist together and how there can be no escape in either or from either. It will take a long time. But we will do it. And the doing will be grand." She paused. "The beginning and the end, Thorns. The greatness and the smallness. The light and the darkness. It's all here." "And all that's in between. That too." "Yes," she answered quietly. "That too." They turned to the smoking ruins and arm in arm began walking toward it. Twenty years is a long time to live in anticipation. At least , Professor Pettibone thought so -- until the twenty years were up. Say "Hello" for Ale of course Professor Pettibone had no way of knowing it. He arose, as he had been doing for the previous twenty years, donned the tattered remnants of his space suit, and went out into the open. He stood erect, bronzed, magnificent, faced distant Earth, and recited : "Good morning bright sunshine, We're glad you are here. You make the world happy, And bring us good cheer." It was something he had heard as a child and, isolated here on Mars, he had remembered it and used it to keep from losing his power of speech. The ritual finished, he walked to the edge of the nearest canal, and gathered a bushel or so of dried Martian moss. He returned and began polishing the shiny exterior of the wrecked space ship. It had to really glitter if it was to be an effective beacon in guiding the rescue ship. Professor Pettibone knew -- had known for years -- that a ship would come. It was just a matter of time, and as the years slipped by, his faith diminished not a whit. With his task half completed, he glanced up at the sun and quickened the polishing. It was a long walk to the place the berry bushes grew, and if he arrived too late, the sun would have dried out the night's crop of fragile berrys and he would wait until the morrow for nourishment. But on this day, he was fated to arrive at the bush area not at all, because an alien sound from above again drew the Professor's eyes from his work, and he knew that the day had arrived. The ship was three times as large as any he had ever visualized, and its futuristic design told him, sharply, how far he fallen behind in his dreaming. He smiled and said, quite calmly. "I daresay I am about to be rescued." And he experienced a thrill as the great ship set down and two men emerged therefrom. A thrill tinged with a guilt-sense, because emotional experiences were rare in an isolated life and seemed somehow indecent. The two men held weapons. They advanced upon Professor Pettibone, looked up into his face, reflected a certain wary hostility. That the hostility was tinged with instinctive respect, even awe, made it no less potent. One of them asked. "Fella -- man came in ship -- sky boat -- long time ago. Him dead? Where?" Appropriate gestures accompanied the words. Professor Pettibone smiled down at the little men and bowed. "You are of course referring to me. I came in the ship. I am Professor Pettibone. It was nice of you to hunt me up." The eyes of the two Terran spacemen met and locked in startled inquiry. One of them voiced the reaction of both when he said, "What the hell -- " "You no doubt are curious as to the fate of the other members of the expedition. They were killed, all save Fletcher, who lasted a week." Professor Pettibone waved a hand. "There -- in the graveyard." But their eyes remained on the only survivor of that ill-fated first expedition. It was hard to accept him as the man they sought, but, faced with undeniable similarity between what they expected and what they had found, the two spacemen had no alternative. "I hope your food supply is ample -- and varied," Professor Pettibone said. This seemed to bring them out of their bemusement. "Of course, Professor. Would you care to come aboard?" The other made a try at congenial levity. "You must be pretty hungry after twenty years." "Really -- has it been that long? I tried to keep track at first..." "We can blast off anytime you say. You're probably pretty anxious to get back." "Indeed I am. The changes, in twenty years -- must be breathtaking. I wonder if they'll remember me?" A short time later, the Professor said, "It's amazing. A ship of this size handled by only two men." Then he sat down to a repast laid out by one of the awed spacemen. But, after nibbling a bit of this, a forkful of that, he found that satisfaction lay in the anticipation moreso than in the eating. "We'll look around and see what we can find in the way of clothing for you, Professor," one of the spacemen said. Then the man's bemusement returned. His eyes traveled over the magnificent physique before him. The perfect giant of a man; the great, Apollo-like head with the calm, clear eyes; the expression of complete contentment and serenity. The space man said, "Professor -- to what do you attribute the changes in your body. What is there about this planet -- ?" "I really don't know." Professor Pettibone looked down his torso with an impersonal eye. "I think the greenish skin pigmentation is a result of mineral-heavy vapors that occur during certain seasons. The growth. As to my body -- I real( Continued on page # ) :#m This story concerns a contest, a contestant and a beautiful wife; also, perhaps, that ancient Biblical quotation that says " take therefore no thought for the morrow ; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself". The Contest By Gavin Hyde Illustrated by Orban center of the city in the yellow early afternoon, increasingly annoyed by the intrusion of unimportant domestic memories that his mind relived, not without embarrassment, and a sense of his own failing. Today, when he had turned to her at the door, he could have said, "Goodbye, I'll see you in an hour or so." There were many things he could have said which would have freed him from his conscience during his walk down. But he couldn't. He tightened up and could say nothing of how he felt. For his mind was tense with the anticipated combat to soon take place in a cubicle behind the great hanging thought-transmission screen. The cubicle and thoughttransmission screen had been in use continuously until yesterday, but now they were idle, along with the two TT machines, waiting for the last round in the contest. She should understand -- on today, of all days! He never spoke to anyone before a match. Speech disturbed the strength and color of one's thoughts because it was more difficult than thinking. It also involved the acceptance of another personality. In the contest, acceptance was a very bad thing. So was this memory analysis, Cyl thought. Asking himself why he hadn't spoken to his wife! This slipping back in the train of thought would never do in the contest. That was the theory of Jons, the foremost analyst of developments, anyway. What was it he said in the Thought-Transmission Annual? "The contest consists of the conflict between two imaginations. Each must analyze the interest and logic of the other, trying to possess the resultant theme through complex development of thought. The drive, the momentum of the imagination is the telling factor in the contest." Cyl had studied that statement! It had been released by Jons after his tragic retirement. Like other philosophers who had dreamed of perpetual control and championship, he had been eliminated soon after the birth of the contest -- when the powerful and mercenary sponsors moved in, bringing with them their strange assortment of thinkers. One year the contest was won by a barber who could maintain the most powerful (and infinitely boring) thought train based on current events, suicides, wrecks, filibusters, sports, and scandals. Rumor said that his simple training consisted of a glance at the morning paper. Then there was the fisherman who could turn from the most delicate winding of a gold silken thread on a trout fly to the baleful glare of a giant squid, almost, it seemed, "faster than the transmission of thought." People had only heard about the new and exciting thought-transmission device when a last holdout of the decadent "Quiz" show M.C.'s decided it would be a good gag to get a married man from the audience, put him on-stage with a beautiful girl, and telecast the interchange of ideas. It was imperative his wife be in the audience. Oh, yes! That was half the fun, watching her reaction to her husband's futile attempt to avoid what might be called a public mental infidelity. Well, the booming growth of the contest was past, but even now Cyl never knew what to expect during the first rounds of elimination. Three months before this final day, Cyl had been faced with hopeful after hopeful, never knowing what sort of attack was coming with the sound of the buzzer. A roller-skater had thrown a scare into him with that infernal organ giving off its regular, unconquerable squeals, plus the sound of all the skates the pudgy boy could muster into his mind, rolling and rolling! Every time Cyl began to get the upper hand by, say, increasing the speed until it was impossible to imagine that one was on skates and then switching to skis, or something like that, the boy would proCyl would be, back in the rink. However, by a stroke of luck Cyl had broken his leg once in his amateurish attempts to go backward, and he was able to bring back the terrible ring of hot, oversympathetic faces that immediately surrounded him. He just continued the idea of the injury, the ride in the copter-ambulance, the hospital, ether, blood. Rather a rude way to treat a child, but what was one to do? To Cyl this was a business. Children had to take their chances with the rest. Cyl remembered the semi-finals, and one of those people who continually turned up at the contest, experts in a certain field, like glassblowers, taxidermists, diamond cutters, even orchid fanciers. He almost paid dearly for his love of the strange, the beautiful. When the buzzer sounded he had found himself submerged in a light-green place, in a struggle with what seemed a tremendous piece of carved jade. It had four paddles sticking out which waved, pushed and scratched. In all his life his opponent had had but one job, that of removing tortoises from the canneries' holding-tanks by turning them on their backs. Cyl had diminished the size of the shell, transforming it laboriously into a girl's bathing suit. Then he had started at top and bottom developing her body, and had managed just in time to gain dominance. The judges' decision had been long in coming even though they were experts at perceiving the telltale "unexpected metamorphosis of a thought", as Jons called it. was only Cyl's brain against one more. He looked at their pictures on the program. It was funny, those two heads, awkward-looking things, being capable of waging a battle against each other. Cyl knew what was in the head on the right. That was his. The other one was his opponent. He would have to be powerful to have come so far. Cyl, for his part, had worried about every opponent. He must have the sure sweep of dreams to hurl at his last adversary. He had to win for his wife. He kept telling himself it wasn't prestige he was after. He had to do it for Lin, because he felt he must somehow pay for the gulf that had widened between them because of his preoccupation with the contest. He had practically stopped talking altogether! He loved her. He knew it as he watched her moving around the house. But he could not afford the distraction involved in giving her his love. There he was, night after night, his mind rising to a point of secure joy in having her and then receding into the problems of the contest. Cyl knew that everything had to be sacrificed. A few weeks before, in a state of exasperation at the thought of facing a chess champion, he had taken his chess pieces out to try to figure some way to foil his opponent. Chessplayers and scientists in specialized fields had a quality called conformance. It helped them, but it was also a weakness. Every time these people won by the use of the same image. From one round to the next, they projected the one idea that obsessed them. What they hoped for was that they would draw either a sequence of men who could comprehend their theories, or that those who didn't would be too stupid to distract them. Cyl had to break down the chessplayer's conformance, somehow, think of something that would wreck the precision of a chess game. The answer had come to him. He decided he would simply create a physical experience here and now which he could bring to mind during his mental struggle with the master. So he scooped up the chess pieces and walked to the kitchen, savoring the experience as much as possible. He dropped the little dolls into the disposal unit, one by one, as if he were supposed to be absolutely sure of their death. It was evident from the gritty, staccato whine that the appliance was not made for grinding plastatron. It soon stopped dead. That had been unfortunate, but to Cyl's joy, he found it enabled him to retrieve the chips and dust that used to be chessmen. This treasure he carried back to the board. He played a couple of mock-serious games with the rubble. He pushed a little bit of dust here, captured a chip there, and finally checkmated a beheaded King. The crazy thing about it was that when he had finished and jumbled the remains off onto the floor, he had felt sure his idea would be a success. It was understandable that Lin would take a dim view of the insane operation, but Gyl had really been surprised at her that time. She became very emotional, cried, said he didn't understand her. What a peculiar thing to say! Anyway, he couldn't worry about something like that now. If he won there would be lots of time to make up for the strain. C YL bent close to the picture on the program again. What he knew about his opponent wasn't going to be of much use because this man was one of those frightening dark horses. Hardly anyone went to see him. Why? Everybody liked Cyl's projections. They were varied, subtle. He liked them that way. Sometimes they were full of the conversation of things that had never talked before, almost going out of control as though he were just a loudspeaker, through which one could hear, at last, the sound of a clam working its way into the sand, or a goose's bill rattling at the corn in some far and frosty field. And the other man? His name was Grus. Those who had been curious enough to watch him at work had come back with an old story. Surely it could not be true that he had come so far on some sort of sexual pitch! But they all assured Cyl there was nothing out of the ordinary about the man. Each time he started the round with a very dull series of transmissions, identified by most people as being connected with the mechanics of common machines. That was plausible. The paper had said Grus was a home-appliance repairman. Anyway, they went on, Grus would continue these occupational ramblings until his opponent overpowered them. Then he would switch to the image of a woman, the switch being effected with apparent ease. From that moment on Grus' competitors had little power over the development of the thought. The most peculiar quality in the women Grus imagined was the plain, unexciting appearance -- no beautiful bodies or come-hither looks. These were just old or young, bored or sad, forgotten or unloved women. Many of his opponents had been questioned after the round. Who was the woman? What was the power of Grus' thought? Not one of the men had an answer. Naturally the beaten ones didn't feel much like talking to reporters and curious contestants, but from what they did say it was definite the woman on the screen was no acquaintance, living, dead, or dreamed. A voice from the instrument over  the door said, "Mr. Mar, you have five minutes." Then he heard his wife's steps click-clicking down the smooth, white hall. She came into the room and sat down, with her purse, as though the setting-down of the purse was just as important as the seating of the body. She knew she mustn't speak... Gyl would either have to invent TT machines that could be carried by husband and wife or quit the contest. He wasn't worried about himself. He could live among the suspended splinters of his mind. Reactions were conversation. But then there was love, which could never be kept within the safe confines of the mind. Love was too frantic. It broke through the skull and left its hard cloven hoofprints everywhere, never forgetting, though, to return to rest, to sleep, and to play its surprising part in the drama of dreams as a young African girl swimming, or a red-skirted maid who has lingered a moment too long in the garden, who stops just once on the walk under the ivory wall, to look into your eyes. Cyl walked past Lin. He almost said something to her as he paused before stepping out into the hall, but he knew she would have released a flood of words. He couldn't afford to think about what she said now. Her white-gloved hand was lightly closed on the orange frontrow ticket. There was no cheering when Cyl walked across the stage and sat down. The Contest Board had asked that noise be kept to a minimum. But there was always a heavy murmur, feet scuffling and coughing. It was soothing to Cyl. He had been a favorite in his long fight and he knew they wanted to see him crowned. Especially since most of them had seen Grus at the projection and had developed a firm dislike for him. Grus seemed to be calm, had his helmet adjusted, and was chatting with one of the technicians. audience quieted. Cyl thought of the hum of bees working in a group of white, weatherbeaten hives. He hoped this would emerge well on the screen after the buzzer and also attack at close quarters by the white enamel kitchen that he expected from Grus. There was the buzzer. It was chaotic, like the beginning of every round between strong imaginations. Cyl worked to establish two levels of thought. One dictated his course of action. The other was the actual, projected thought which would affect the screen picture. This was usual, because if one's strategy got mixed up with one's projection he would become easy prey to the simplest idea from his opponent. He had guessed almost right. Grus started with the inner parts of the hamper of a common laundry system. It was sorting the clothes into different groups, delicate rayons one way, denim workclothes another. Cyl's hives were petrifying the cloth and his bees were becoming more and more numerous, so that when he had thought them all out of the hives there was a cloud of humming. walking, flying, seething bees that was shutting out the whiteness of the laundry. Grus backed his clothes down through the machine until they reached the washing element and began turning CyPs bees into dirty suds, flowing and pushing. It was time for Cyl to make his play for dominance. The sea. He was looking back over the stern of a ship. The water was boiling away from him with the ferocity that only the sea has. The clothes became translucent eels, falling over each other in their effort to feed on the remaining bees. They leaped out and slimed against each other. They dove in the white froth. Grus was trying to bring back the precision of his machine. He tried to ram Cyl head-on with the image of black pistons and sharp cogs soaking and dripping in oil. The machine parts became obvious only at intervals, in the dark lines that surrounded the white foam, but the viscosity was ruining CyPs spray, and his eels were flowing together into a conveyor belt. So out of the sleek pistons Cyl made darting sharks with black, black fins that slashed among the eels, dividing them and throwing their mauled, bloody bodies aside into the greener brine. Cyl relaxed, but realized moments later that Grus was not the pushover he had seemed so far. For CyPs sharks, which had promised to be unapproachable in speed and ferocity, had, with perfect subtlety, been turned into a group of men in tails enjoying a Christmas party. The dazzling foam was a swirling snowfall, the blood a spray of holly berries here and there among green spears of pine and fir. Grus was doing his best work in black and white. His stiff, black men were like dolls, perambulating around a Christmas tree. Grus was not sympathetic with the green and red that had been left over from CyPs image, for those colors were suffering a snow change, becoming colder, whiter, crisper as the winter fell in upon them. The walls disappeared into the gloomy whiteness, the tree was heavier with snow, but the men who before seemed festive took on a funereal quality. The slow flakes passed them, for they were just visiting. The background remained a dark void. The tree never reached the formless stage, but shook itself and weaved from side to side. It was a huge white bear. The men stopped their slow traveling at this and as though at a signal filed into the dark cave. The animal turned, hunched and shook himself once more, and followed them. As a man wakes who has been forbidden to sleep, Cyl escaped the other man's mind with a feeling of total fear, mental and physical. He looked apprehensively at the clock. Grus had managed only to catch up what he had lost in the beginning of the round. But why did he stop? He must have tired his mind, until his thoughts just fell from the peak of imaginative power into that shaded opening, fatigue. Cyl was reassured of this as he let his mind slip back to the projection. Grus had returned to a sleek, silent home-freezer. Cyl threw himself into the effort to reach Grus with some thought that would be familiar to him. He had to do that before he could metamorphose the idea for his own purposes. By imagining the storage contents of the box, Cyl brought into the projection a lot of waxed cartons of ice cream. As he reveled in their cold, sweet smell he saw himself as the head on a coin, buried in a large, square, white birthday cake. He heard the muffled voices of the children singing "Happy Birthday to You," the girls fairly well oriented to the words and rhythm of the song, the boys lagging behind or forging ahead, as well as the voice of one misguided child who was familiar only with the words, "Home, Home on the Range," for he used these lyrics for each line. and he could hear the candles snapping and fluttering above him. Suddenly there was noise. The table shuddered, forks and knives clanged together, fists pounded on the crepe tablecloth and pieces of gum were pressed against the underside of the table with a faint squashing sound. The knife hissed through the airy cake, but contrary to tradition, it caught Cyl on his serrated edge and rolled him out on the plate, bared. All that remained was the knife which lay beside him and his wife's face. She looked down at him from above with gray indifference. Cast out of dominance by his wife's image? It was she! Yet it wasn't. She didn't look like that, walking down the street. That wasn't the way she looked when she sat and watched him perform. He glanced quickly at her seat. It was empty. The projection now showed her lying on their bed. For an instant Cyl felt embarrassed at the idea of her being held up in front of the public, but then he realized that to them it was just any old midmorning housewife. Cyl looked down again, searching the auditorium seats. Then he saw her. She wasn't out yet. But she was walking quickly away, a small back in the shadows of the great hall. All the faces were turned to him except one. She moved toward the little door so far up the aisle. There was a flash of white light. She was gone. Gone? The word echoed in his mind like the bell on the door of a grocery store. It rang. Someone had left, left him among the sweet smells of coffeecake and wheat crackers. So much alone, here. He wanted to run to the jingie door and yell, "Come back! What about all these wonderful things? These wonderful things we are going to have? Lin! These..." But the bell had tinkled. It had already said, "gone." Cyl's mind wandered, crazed, over the events of the last few moments. Grus. Grus. What had he done? Something like the chessmen. That's what Cyl and Lin were like now, wasn't it? Grus had picked them up before, sliced them up. Then he had strewn the pieces. Grus, come a-riding to Cyl's door on one of his cement mixers. See this! You have a silver candlestick, mister? He'll make dimes of it, and for half price! Grus dominating the screen, for Cyl could no longer focus on the contest of thoughts... his thoughts were now only of Lin. No reason to go on trying, nothing down here in the ashes, in the obsidian loneliness where the flowers, once so red and yellow, are black and painful -- for the lack of the lovely eyes to look upon them. Lin's eyes. And when he saw her eyes again for that fleeting moment, he saw a light. It was a light of memory only, now that everything was over, but he had to cling to it. Anything to save him from the utter darkness. He saw a plain with stars overhead, and down below the myriad lights of a festival. For Cyl, a beginning. A beautiful memory, Lin, the first time he had looked at her. She was a young girl standing near the crowd that had gathered to watch one of those rocket launchings. They were all jabbering. The danger. The chances one took! Oh, the bravery. Except for the children, of course, who were stealing things to take back to their bedrooms. The police were working their way around the circle trying to keep people from breaking into the flash zone. She was standing near the knot of pilots, who were attaching to their bodies the equipment they could put on outside of the rocket. It was obvious she wanted to go nearer but was too self-conscious to do so, or perhaps afraid she might touch one of them strangely, on the shoulder, and thus enchant him forever. Yes, she was afraid that some part of her might go with these heroes and yet she was loath to believe she could give them nothing. Then one of them said, "Take a good look, wonderboys. That may be the last chick you'll see, let alone get close to." At this she turned away with a look of infinite pity and resignation that left her eyes burning in the night, there on the plain, and walked back into the city. Once more. Cyl saw her eyes, luminous. Springtime. Springtime, and the contest had ended for the year. He was in one of his favorite haunts, the Museum of Natural History, in the room of the luminous minerals. It was wonderful to stand there, in the dark, with thousands of eternal eyes looking at you, all impassive. There was no accusation there; only a silent, heavenly atmosphere of immortality  Someone was standing on the other side of the room. Silhouetted against pale green stones etched with fantastic pink lines, was the girl he had seen the year before. He couldn't see her features, but he knew from the shock to his senses that it must be she. Soon Cyl stood very near her. He wanted to go on, really, go on around and out into the sunlight of the courtyard. It would be much simpler than marrying this woman, after all. But it was too late to go on. He looked past her hair, a last time, at the doorway. But his eyes returned to her face. Now he had to take her with him. He had to find out what she did all day. He was unaccountably afraid to look at her as he said this, so he squinted at his watch and said, "Why don't we have a drink somewhere? It's time." Lin had made flowery days of the summer. Intense, electric evenings sprang fiercely into the sheltered heart of the dense foliage outside Cyl's window. The nights slid away from the circle of the week as quickly as the delicate balance of midnight was disturbed. In the fall, when Cyl looked out and saw the ice-cream man and the children and the shoppers running before red leaves in the wind, he told Lin that he was determined to marry her immediately. Every day Cyl discovered that he was wrong when he decided that one or another part of her face or body was most beautiful. One morning he was convinced her lips were so cool and fragrant that the rest of the day must be evil to soften them. And that night as he watched sleep invade that same flesh he was sorry to see the effects of the day's experiences erased... noises in the great ThoughtTransfer machine were unwelcome in CyPs life now, because there was no life. None that he wanted. The loud speakers were blaring the name of Cyl Mar! The Board had written his name on the blank check and had cast a huge picture of it on the back wall of the auditorium, for the spectators to see on their way out. The contest was over. He had forgotten all about the contest. Grus? He had forgotten all about Grus. There was only memory and Lin. Stunned, Cyl heard himself being asked for a few words and he felt his lips say the same things he had always said. They let him go, he stumbled past Grus, who was collecting all his certificates, credit cards, and prizes for runner-up. The crowd was leaving in a vast, swelled murmur. He wanted to get away, lock himself in his cubicle and rave at himself as a fool screams at a fool, louder, louder! Make faces at himself, feel his face with his hands, as though the physical world which he had seemed to reject would believe this sort of proof that he recognized it. But all the indirect, mystic, or magical tricks would never bring her back. Exhausted, he stood on the edge of the stage, where the gray seats stretched away from him like waves in a sea. The crowd was gone, the auditorium empty. The technicians behind him were testing the equipment, before switching off. One of the mechanics wore the thought helmet, projecting plush leather, red wine, and ivory women on the screen, smiling. Cyl did not move. He looked up and yet further up through the empty auditorium. It was not quite empty. His breath tightened, and his heart moved in the hollowness. A single person sat alone in the very last row. The person did not move. The person looked back down over the emptiness, reaching as Cyl was reaching. She was very beautiful. Lin. She had decided to go, had walked out forever, because she had thought Grus was right, because she was ashamed. But once outside, she had paused, thought Cyl, and gone to the balcony to watch, to see all of it, to know the rest. Lin. Lin. She sat above, quiet. He did not trust himself to call out to her. He turned to the machine, the technicians, the helmet. Quietly, he took the helmet, placed it on his head. He closed his eyes. He knew what he could, what he must, paint there on the screen. And there it was for her. There it happened for her eyes. On the screen, a picture of himself walking off the stage and up the aisle. And a picture of her getting up from her place in the balcony and walking out through the door and down the quiet stairs. Himself coming out into the lobby, their meeting. And now they were taking each others' hands, warm and belonging, and now they were kissing, now moving silently past the cool fountains, out of the theatre. He opened his eyes and removed the helmet. A glance told him that, in the balcony, Lin was already suiting action to the image. She rose. She was smiling. She turned and walked. Cyl stepped down from the stage. He started up the aisle. Then, he was running. (Continued from page #) ly don't know." But the two spacemen, though they didn't refer to it -- were not concerned with the body so much as the aura of completeness, the radiation of contentment which came from somewhere within. And it was passing strange that nothing more was said about the Professor returning to Earth. No great revelation, suddenly arrived at, that he would not go. Rather, they discussed various things, that three gentlemen, meeting casually, would discuss. Then Professor Pettibone arose from his chair and said, "It was kind of you to drop off and see me. And one of the spacemen replied, "A pleasure, sir. A real pleasure indeed." Then the Professor left the ship and watched it lift up on a tail of red fire and go away. He raised an arm and waved. "Say hello for me," he called. Then he turned away and, from force of habit, he began again to polish the hull, knowing that he would keep it shining, and be proud of it, for many years to come. Almost beyond reach of the planet, one of the spacemen flipped a switch and put certain sensitive communication mechanisms to work. So sensitive, they could pick up etheric vibrations far away and make them audible. But only faintly, came the pleasant voice of a contented man : "Good morning bright sunshine, We're glad you are here. You make the world... Specific Gravity of Space # miliar concept of comparing the weight of a thing or substance with an equal volume of water, is widely used, but it isn't often that you find such a computation made in connection with all of space! Cosmologists, however, are interested in discovering the distribution of matter throughout the universe and it is a valuable piece of knowledge to have some idea of the "specific gravity", or density (to be correct), of matter in that vast volume of nothingness. Someone will immediately question the idea with "but you don't know how big Space is!" That's true; yet telescopes can probe hunof light-years into space and they can sample a big enough volume to make the concept "density of the universe" perfectly valid. Subsequent penetration of space -- if that's possible and the universe is not finite -- is not likely to change the figure by much. It turns out that the density is -- as you would suspect -- fantastically low. After all there is a lot of empty space to consider. In technical terms the density is about ten to the centimeter -- or, in familiar terms, about a pound of matter to the volume occupied by thirty thousand Earths! That is rareness and vacuity indeed! Nevertheless, when you consider the total volume of the known universe, that's a lot of stuff. Assuming that the light-years in diameter -- and it's certainly more than this -- all you need do is apply the formula for the volume of a sphere -- fourthirds pi times the radius cubed -- and you come up with an answer in cubic light-years which literally takes your breath away. The specific gravity of the universe is mighty, mighty low... Who Needs Gravity? Force recently revealed data and photographs showing that live animals -- mice and monkeys -- had been sent up in V-# and Aerobee rockets to altitudes of # miles, to test their reactions at zero gravity. Even though they were subjected to a brief, one-second acceleration of about # g and a force of # to # g, which lasted for # seconds, the animals showed absolutely no unusual aftereffects from the experimental flight. One of the photographs made available shows a mouse floating in a plastic drum. Since the walls of the drum were glassy smooth, the animal was unable to gain a foothold and was undoubtedly in a state of helpless panic. Another photograph shows a mouse in an adjoining section of the drum. This section had a shelf, and the second mouse was able to take firm hold, stay calm, and keep his equilibrium while the rocket shot through the weightless period. The results of these experiments, plus others in which several humans took part in jet fighter planes, lead to the conclusion that it is undoubtedly possible for man to be able to stand for brief periods the gravity-free state expected in rocket flight to the outer atmosphere. But he must have something to hang on to. Properly secured in the aircraft, he should be able to function normally during brief periods of zero gravity, and without difficulty should be able to perform any operations that would be necessary to pilot the craft. Why Rotation Varies tuation occurring periodically in the earth's rate of rotation has puzzled scientists. Recent studies of the optical properties of the mineral olivine under high pressures, however, give some idea of what the electrical conductivity at earth's center is like -- and there is now a possible explanation to the fluctuations : It may be due to the activity of an electromagnetic coupling which is located between the mantle of the earth and earth's liquid center. According to evidence which scientists have carefully gathered, it is probable that the earth's mantle consists in great part of the mineral olivine. Under normal conditions olivine acts as an insulator, but the high temperatures raging within the earth are strong enough to change its properties there so that it becomes a conductor. The electrical conductivity of the earth's mantle plays an important role in many geophysical phenomena, one of which of course is to provide the electromagnetic coupling between the mantle of the earth and the center of the earth, and the resulting activity of the coupling, which may possibly explain the variance in the earth's rate of rotation. Unknown Universe? astronomers have been working on for almost # years, there are stars in the sky that do not twinkle. This means there may be as many invisible as visible stars in the universe, thus indicating that it is entirely possible that there exists a duplicate universe, of which we have no knowledge. A British research foundation, in conjunction with the British government, has recently announced they are building a giant radio-telescope, at a cost of approximately #. With this huge instrument, scientists will try to locate the invisible stars. These may be radio stars, or dark stars. They may be stars in the process of being born or of dying. They may even be some completely new type of object of which our astronomers have no previous knowledge. Birth of a Star Nature's offspring, a star is formed almost purely by accident. It begins to be created when interstellar gases in a cloud are brought together unevenly. The embryo star adds to its mass by picking up other gases as it makes its way through the cloud. It grows fast, and eventually moves out of its parent cloud and into a free space which has only irregular dottings of gas clouds. According to a recent lecture by Professor Fred Hoyle of St. John's College in Cambridge, England, further growth of the star by the addition of external material, once it has left its parent cloud, is fairly rare. Perhaps one star in a hundred will experience a second period of growth, while only one in a ond and a third growth. The second period stars become moderately large. The stars that get to an exceptionally high mass, however, are the three-period stars. That Old Bloodthirsty Mother Goose ture's benign old lady of letters -- is actually a bloodthirsty vampire. Very few persons realize that the traditional nursery rhymes, which have been used for generations to amuse and entertain innocent childhood, are filled with an overwhelming amount of villainous references, of death and violence and shocking horrors, masquerading under a mask of innocence. Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, founder of the British Poetry-Drama Guild, is an active crusader for the reform of the old-fashioned nursery rhymes. Out of # famous traditional nursery rhymes which he recently studied in detail, he says at least # of them contain "unsavory elements". A detailed listing of their contents include : # allusions to death, violence and depravity, including eight cases of murder, two cases of choking to death, three of death by drowning, one each of death by devouring, decapitation, squeezing, cutting a human being in half, starvation, shrivelling, boiling, and hanging. There's even a blow for starryeyed newlyweds, in one rhyme, which contains an allusion to marriage being another form of death. Today's radio and television programs of horror and suspense -- which are bringing such loud protests of disapproval from parents -- can well take a back seat to the old classics for children. -- Peter Dakin I #t#KCl#l  Dear Sirs: An item in IF, September # issue (Science Briefs) on the subject of optical sandblasting proved to be of considerable interest to me. Mr. Recour refers to the technique devised by Dr. Wm. A. Rhodes. I have made many telescope mirrors (all by the "old hat" method) and quite naturally the Doctor's technique (and its apparent time-saving) opens up new possibilities for amateur telescope makers, including myself. As Director of the Amateur Telescope Makers' Group in Toronto, Ontario, I have watched the rapid growth of public interest in the hobby, hand in hand with the also rapid development of time-and-effort-saving apparatus for making the mirror. The process of grinding has by no means been the least of the deterrents to amateurs, because of the relatively long period of work required without any apparent approach to the finished product. Consequently, I feel sure that my fellow amateurs will consider Dr. Rhodes' method of sandblasting the base curve a useful advance in the mirror technique, especially in the larger sizes. While the possibility of sandblasting is not entirely new to us, no actual experimentation (that I know of) has ever proved successful in Canada. Hence, we would appreciate any information you can give us on the Doctor's method. -- L. H. Clarke # Hillsdale Ave. Toronto, Canada No doubt Dr. Rhodes and other interested readers would like to exchange notes with Mr. Clarke. Dear Sir: Enclosed you will find one slightly battered and beat-up money order. It was originally bought in Korea # # months ago but, just as it was about to be put into an envelope, several incoming rounds of enemy artillery followed by a call for a rather actively interesting combat patrol caused it to be misplaced. It finally turned up when I was looking through some old letters a few days ago. It is made out for #, enough for a subscription for # issues. I have just finished the November issue of IF. Very good; I liked especially the makeup and clear type which made the issue very easy to read. I won't list the stories in order of preference except to say that "The Image and the Likeness" was definitely the best and the feature on Leonardo da Vinci was very interesting. A full length article with a few diagrams of some of his inventions would be good for a later issue. Or how about Nostradamus and his predictions? You have an attractive, flexible magazine. Keep up the good work. #, Jacksonville, Florida That poor little old money order was good as gold. We hope you # ll find IF comparably good. Sirs: Inclosed find my check for #, for which please send me # issues of IF, beginning with the January number. The November number is the only copy of any science fiction magazine which does not use the word "extrapolate" even once -- for which receive my congratulations. What is it about that word that bewitches science fiction writers? One doesn't encounter it often in other fiction. Is it a sort of code in sf? Even writers whose knowledge of English grammar is a bit shaky manage to use it; in fact, especially writers in that category. The Image and the Likeness is a beautiful bit of allegory as well as a touching story. Such flights of fancy justify science fiction as literature. With good wishes to your magazine (but I do hate the sexy covers). -- Phoebe H. Gilkyson Mont Clare, Penn. Dear Mr. Quinn: The modem Gulliver story titled The Image and the Likeness is quite well written. My congratulations to Campbell for achieving verisimilitude in the character Kazu. Most characters in stf make me think of the joke (?) concerning the comment of an editor on a manuscript. Remember it? The Writer had inserted the law-suit preventative "All characters appearing in this story are fictional. Any similarity to actual persons is cofticidental." The plagued editor penciled a note, "That's the trouble," and tearfully inserted said script in the outgoing mail basket. The sketch on da Vinci is excellent. The cover is poor in all over effect for me, although the balance of color is excellent. The staring eyes convey neither attraction nor horror and the foreshortened arms look like flippers. The bodies are neither opaque (witness planet line on legs) nor transparent, since solid continents in background are obliterated by trunks and Bell-jarred headdress. -- Alice Bullock # Gildersleeve Santa Fe, New Mexico To the Editor: I was very impressed with your leading novel in the November issue. It was easily the most absorbing story I have yet read on the theme of Atomic mutation. The best story in the issue, though, was The Running Hounds . Indeed a vivid portrayal of the changes which could take place in a culture as the result of highly technological warfare. I'd like to commend IF on its good discretion in stories. It's good to see that, as is true in some magazines, the so-called gimmick is not allowed to overshadow the characterization and the interplay of people. For my money, although I know you can't please everybody, you can dispense with the humorous stories. I've read very few in my time which I believe were very successful. Your covers are improving with each issue, the November one being the best so far. I think, and again I realize that you can't please everyone, that the cover should illustrate one of the stories, not necessarily the leading novel. You'll be receiving my subscription. -- Robert Maider Hamilton College Clinton, New York Our cover policy was explained in the March issue. Regarding humor  we need it sometimes , hut agree that it has to he well handled. Dear Sir: Your November issue of IF was tops in my opinion. I've read the mag ever since its inception and have followed its progress with interest. The cover... is absolutely the best yet. It attracted me with such intensity at the newsstands that I frankly felt the interior could not live up to such a dazzling cover-picture. Happy to say, the stories were of equal calibre. The Image and the Likeness was the best of the issue by a good # feet. Seldom have I read a story as realistic and enthralling as this one during my ten years of avid stf reading. This one was so good that even raving about it would be an understatement... The Running Hounds was next on my list. A well turned tale, one that stays in my mind and suggests the possibility of a sequel... Brother to the Machine was next in preference; a hauntingly written story. If this issue of IF is any yardstick I would say you have achieved what some of the other mags in the field are clamoring (falsely) that they have... quality in material. Your inside covers are very welcome. I hope they continue. Your Personalities in Science feature is excellent. This is quite a statement coming from someone who avoids features like the plague. This one is being handled very nicely. The Postman Cometh is just right in length. I find when a mag starts printing poor quality stories they enlarge their readers' column, probably so the readers will have some reason to buy the mag. Keep yours short and your stories good and you'll have few complaints from this comer. Definitely compliments on the November IF. -- Jan Gardner Apredelon Canterbury, N. H. explorer. Its hostile atmosphere of ammonia and methane, coupled with a seething volcanic surface, promises to make any attempt at landing highly improbable. In this space scene, an exploration rocket streaks over Jupiter's bulk, approximately # miles above its equator. In the background above the rocket are three of Jupiter's eleven moons, all of which seem to invite comparatively safe exploration. (Drawings by Ed Valigursky) Why puzzle lovers are having more fun than ever before are these two unusual puzzle publication One of America's greatest values! Chock full of fun -- # pages with over # puzzles of every variety in every issue. Also articles and special features of fascinating interest to every puzzle lover. Another wonderful puzzle magazine with a new and exciting selection of puzzles, quizzes, brain teasers, articles and features! # pages of delightful excursion into puzzle pleasure. Try it and see for yourself. # mm newt eUafotf only #c everywhere  probable completely airless. Jagged cliffs rise thousands of feet above a surface pockmarked with volcanic craters. The men pictured are scaling one of the less formidable peaks, while their ship lies in the valley far below, A Mercurian day is of the same duration as its year -- # Earth days. Ail Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg: A Volcanic Eruption on Titan, Sixth Moon of Saturn I Apostolides s IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale July #th # I # I # I # I #I I # I # I #I I # I # I # I # I # I # I S ometimes a body gets to wondering just what progress really is. In this case, my confusion is about one of those new, super-duper fountain pens, made by one of America's oldest pen and pencil makers. The one I have in mind is right on the desk before me. It's a desk pen -- a pretty thing, black, onyx-like base, magnetic marble, which holds the penholder in any position, and a slim, sleek, black pen with a chrome band around the middle. It has a truly graceful, futuristic, pace-setting feel and appearance. But, boy-oh-boy-oh-boy! That pretty thing is more trouble to fill than an old-fashioned Saturdaynight-bath tub with an old oaken bucket from an old time, pulleyworking dug-well. You've no doubt had experiences with one like it. If you haven't, here's how it works: First, you gotta have special ink for it -- made by the maker of the pen. Then, you unscrew the top of the pen and find a plunger. This plunger is special. No once-down-and-release like the good old-time pens of fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years ago. This special, super plunger requires nine plunges, holding the point submerged all the while. And each time you "plunge", you gotta allow a couple seconds on the release for it to suck in ink. The ninth time, you remove it from the ink and then release the plunger. No variations, now, and no short cuts ! Should you lose count because your phone rings or something, you have to start all over from scratch. You can't fool that pen! Oh, you get used to it after a while. All you gotta do is practice. Like on Saturdays and Sundays and during your lunch hour. You gradually become quite proficient. I've had mine for two years and I'm pretty good. I average a penful of ink three out of every five times I perform the operation. And yet, no matter how assinine I think it is, I reckon it is probably better than the old fashioned type that had a little lever or plunger, which you worked once -- with your eyes shut and without mumbling a count and using anybody's ink -- and you had a penful that would write a long time. After all, that was much too simple. Oh, yes, I've also got a pocket job, with a super, trick-redoesn't take in as much ink as any self-respecting wreck you use to fill out money order forms in post offices around the country. But it looks nice when I take it out of my pocket and let it rest on the table while I borrow somebody else's equipment to write with. said, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it". That pretty much applies to this thing we call "time". You've heard that familiar gripe: "Where the heck does the time go?" Or, "How time flies!" Or, "There ought to be more than # hours in a day!" Anyhow, you get the idea. But did you ever stop to think that we're putting the cart before the horse. Time ain't flying at all. We're flying. "Time" is an invention of our civilization. It is relative to action, movement, music, geology, mathematics, life, etc., etc. Out in space, out in the infinite, there is no time -- as we know it. Let the earth change its rotation and we'd have a heck of a "time" with our clocks, calendars, sundials, egg cookers, etc. Anyhow, I suppose this thought was suggested by a line I remembered from a swell movie I saw recently. The movie was Breaking Through the Sound Barrier, and the scene is that of the test pilot looking through a telescope, stationed in the private observatory of a manufacturer of jet planes. After a while of intense watching, he says something to the years out there, they are living in the past. The manufacturer, sitting nearby, hears him and looks up. There is a dreamy expression on his face. "My boy," he said, "out there is the past, the present, and the future." We make our own time. So It is we who fly. Breaking Through the Sound Barrier, incidentally, is a picture anyone interested in science, factual or fictional, will enjoy seeing. It has all the basic emotions, plus some new ones. I've been up in planes doing over # miles per hour, at over # feet, but that was nowhere near the thrill of watching this movie. The camera takes you through phases of man's breathless quest for speed, it gives you a lookin on the development of mighty engines, and it introduces you to a philosophical equation of man, nature and machinery. And when the camera takes you inside a plane screaming through space # feet up, hurtling life and machine against the sound barrier -- well it's the next best thing to actually being up there. In fact, it's better. Personally, you couldn't get me up surance policy. Watching it from a safe, comfortable seat in a movie house was enough for me. flying seems to me to be in these small personal jobs. A friend of mine has a small four-seater Stinson and the time he took me up I behaved like a three-year old on his first ride on a merry-go-round. Flying at # to # miles per hour at # to # feet gives you the excitement of contrast. You follow roads, rivers, railroad tracks, pick out familiar landmarks; you see life below with a fascinating perspective which is never possible in the big, fast planes. Besides, to reiterate, I never am in #-miles-per-hour worth of hurry. -- jlq Wilbur Murphy sought romance, excitement, and an impossible Horseman of Space. With polite smiles, the planet frustrated him at every turn -- until he found them all the hard way! By Jack Vance duction Director of Know Your Universe!, was a man of sudden unpredictable moods; and Sam Gatlin, the show's Continuity Editor, had learned to expect the worst. "Sam," said Frayberg, "regarding the show last night..." He paused to seek the proper words, and Gatlin relaxed. Frayberg's frame of mind was merely critical. "Sam, we're in a rut. What's worse, the show's dull!" Sam Gatlin shrugged, not committing himself. "Seaweed Processors of Alphard IX -- who cares about seaweed?" "It's factual stuff," said Sam, defensive but not wanting to go too far out on a limb. "We bring 'em everything -- color, fact, romance, sight, sound, smell... Next week, it's the Ball Expedition to the Mixtup Mountains on Gropus." Frayberg leaned forward. "Sam, we're working the wrong slant on this stuff... , . We've got to loosen up, sock 'em! Shift our ground! Give 'em the old human angle -- glamor, mystery, thrills!" Sam Gatlin curled his lips. "I got just what you want." "Yeah? Show me." Gatlin reached into his waste basket. "I filed this just ten minutes ago..." He smoothed out the pages. " 'Sequence idea, by Wilbur Murphy. Investigate "Horseman of Space," the man who rides up to meet incoming spaceships'." Frayberg tilted his head to the side. "Rides up on a horse?" "That's what Wilbur Murphy says." "How far up?" "Does it make any difference?" "Nev -- I guess not." "Well, for your information, it's up ten thousand, twenty thousand miles. He waves to the pilot, takes off his hat to the passengers, then rides back down." "And where does all this take place?" "On -- on -- " Gatlin frowned. "I can write it, but I can't pronounce it." He printed on his scratch"Sirgamesk," read Frayberg. Gatlin shook his head. "That's what it looks like -- but those consonants are all aspirated gutturals. It's more like 'Hrrghameshgrrh'." "Where did Murphy get this tip?" "I didn't bother to ask." "Well," mused Frayberg, "we could always do a show on strange superstitions. Is Murphy around?" "He's explaining his expense account to Shifkin." "Get him in here; let's talk to him." blond crew-cut, a broad freckled nose, and a serious sidelong squint. He looked from his crumpled sequence idea to Gatlin and Frayberg. "Didn't like it, eh?" "We thought the emphasis should be a little different," explained Gatlin. "Instead of 'The Space Horseman,' we'd give it the working title, 'Odd Superstitions of Hrrghameshgrrh'." "Oh, hell!" said Frayberg. "Gall it Sirgamesk." "Anyway," said Gatlin, "that's the angle." "But it's not superstition," said Murphy. "Oh, come, Wilbur..." "I got this for sheer sober-sided fact. A man rides a horse up to meet the incoming ships!" "Where did you get this wild fable?" "My brother-in-law is purser on the Celestial Traveller. At Riker's Planet they make connection with the feeder line out of Girgamesg." "Wait a minute," said Gatlin. "How did you pronounce that?" "Girgamesg. The steward on the shuttle-ship gave out this story, and my brother-in-law passed it along to me." "Somebody's pulling somebody's leg." "My brother-in-law wasn't, and the steward was cold sober." "They've been eating bhang. Sirgamesk is a Javanese planet, isn't it?" "Javanese, Arab, Malay." "Then they took a bhang supply with them, and hashish, chat, and a few other sociable herbs." "Well, this horseman isn't any drug-dream." "No? What is it?" "So far as I know it's a man on a horse." "Ten thousand miles up? In a vacuum?" "Exactly." "No space-suit?" "That's the story." Gatlin and Frayberg looked at each other. "Well, Wilbur," Gatlin began. Frayberg interrupted. "What we can use, Wilbur, is a sequence on Sirgamesk superstition. Emphasis on voodoo or witchcraft -- naked girls dancing -- stuff with roots in Earth, but now typically Sirgamesk. Lots of color. Secret rite stuff..." "Not much room on Girgamesc for secret rites." "It's a big planet, isn't it?" "Not quite as big as Mars. There's no atmosphere. The settlers live in mountain valleys, with airtight lids over 'em." Gatlin flipped the pages of Thumbnail Sketches of the Inhabited Worlds. "Says here there's When the atmosphere went, the population went with it." Frayberg became animated. "There's lots of material out there! Go get it, Wilbur! Life! Sex! Excitement! Mystery!" "Okay," said Wilbur Murphy. "But lay off this horseman-inspace. There b a limit to public credulity, and don't you let anyone tell you different." port, twenty thousand miles ahead. The steward leaned over Wilbur Murphy's shoulder and pointed a long brown finger. "It was right out there, sir. He came riding up -- " "What kind of a man was it? Strange looking?" "No. He was Cirgameski." "Oh. You saw him with your own eyes, eh?" The steward bowed, and his loose white mantle fell forward. "Exactly, sir." "No helmet, no space-suit?" "He wore a short Singhalut vest and pantaloons and a yellow Hadrasi hat. No more." "And the horse?" "Ah, the horse! There's a different matter." "Different how?" "I can't describe the horse. I was intent on the man." "Did you recognize him?" "By the brow of Lord Allah, it's well not to look too closely when such matters occur." "Then -- you did recognize him!" "I must .be at my task, sir." Murphy frowned in vexation at the steward's retreating back, then bent over his camera to check the tape-feed. If anything appeared now, and his eyes could see it, the Know Your Universe! could see it with him. When he looked up, Murphy made a frantic grab for the stanchion, then relaxed. Cirgamesg had taken the Great Twitch. It was an illusion, a psychological quirk. One instant the planet lay ahead; then a man winked or turned away, and when he looked back, "ahead" had become "below"; the planet had swung an astonishing ninety degrees across the sky, and they were falling! Murphy leaned against the stanchion. " 'The Great Twitch' ," he muttered to himself, "I'd like to screens!" Several hours passed. CirgamesQ grew. The Sampan Range rose up like a dark scab; the valley sultanates of Singhalut, Hadra, New Batavia, and Boeng-Bohot showed like glistening chickentracks ; the Great Rift Colony of Sundeman stretched down through the foothills like the trail of a slug. A loudspeaker voice rattled the ship. "Attention passengers for Singhalut and other points on Cirgamesg! Kindly prepare your luggage for disembarkation. Customs at Singhalut are extremely thorough. Passengers are warned to take no weapons, drugs or explosives ashore. This is important!" T he warning turned out to be an understatement. Murphy was plied with questions. He suffered search of an intimate nature. He was three-dimensionally Xrayed with a range of frequencies calculated to excite fluorescence in whatever object he might have secreted in his stomach, in a hollow bone, or under a layer of flesh. His luggage was explored with similar minute attention, and Murphy rescued his cameras with difficulty. "What're you so damn anxious about? I don't have drugs; I don't have contraband..." "It's guns, your excellency. Guns, weapons, explosives..." "I don't have any guns." "But these objects here?" "They're cameras. They record pictures and sounds and smells." The inspector seized the cases with a glittering smile of triumph. "They resemble no cameras of my experience; I fear I shall have to impound..." A young man in loose white pantaloons, a pink vest, pale green cravat and a complex black turban strolled up. The inspector made a swift obeisance, with arms spread wide. "Excellency," The young man raised two fingers. "You may find it possible to spare Mr. Murphy any unnecessary formality." "As your Excellency recommends..." The inspector nimbly repacked Murphy's belongings, while the young man looked on benignly. Murphy covertly inspected his face. The skin was smooth, the color of the rising moon; the eyes were narrow, dark, superficially placid. The effect was of silken punctilio with hot ruby blood close beneath. Satisfied with the inspector's zeal, he turned to Murphy. "Allow me to introduce myself, Tuan Murphy. I am Ali-Tomas, of the House of Singhalut, and my father the Sultan begs you to accept our poor hospitality." "Why, thank you," said Murphy. "This is a very pleasant surprise." "If you will allow me to conduct you..." He turned to the inspector. "Mr. Murphy's luggage to the palace." M urphy accompanied AliTomas into the outside light, fitting his own quick step to the prince's feline saunter. This is coming it pretty soft, he said to himself. I'll have a magnificent suite, with bowls of fruit and gin pahits, not to mention two or three silken girls with skin like rich cream bringing me towels in the shower... Well, well, well, it's not so bad working for Know Your Universe! aiter all! I suppose I ought to unlimber my camera... Prince Ali-Tomas watched him with interest. "And what is the audience of Know Your Universe IT' "We call 'em 'participants'." "Expressive. And how many participants do you serve?" "Oh, the Bowdler Index rises and falls. We've got about two hundred "Fascinating! And tell me -- how do you record smells?" Murphy displayed the odor recorder on the side of the camera, with its gelatinous track which fixed the molecular design. "And the odors recreated -- they are like the originals?" "Pretty close. Never exact, but none of the participants knows the difference. Sometimes the synthetic odor is an improvement." "Astounding!" murmured the prince. "And sometimes... Well, Carson Tenlake went out to get the myrrhblossoms on Venus. It was a hot day -- as days usually are on Venus -- and a long climb. When the show was run off, there was more smell of Carson than of flowers." Prince Ali-Tomas laughed politely. "We turn through here." They came out into a compound paved with red, green and white tiles. Beneath the valley roof was a sinuous trough, full of haze and warmth and golden light. As far in either direction as the eye could reach, the hillsides were terraced, barred in various shades of green. Spattering the valley floor were tall canvas pavilions, tents, booths, shelters. "Naturally," said Prince AliTomas, "we hope that you and your participants will enjoy Singhalut. It is a truism that, in order to import, we must export; we wish to encourage a pleasurable response to the 'Made in Singhalut' tag on our batiks, carvings, lacquers." They rolled quietly across the square in a surface-car displaying the House emblem. Murphy rested against deep, cool cushions. "Your inspectors are pretty careful about weapons." Ali-Tomas smiled complacently. "Our existence is ordered and peaceful. You may be familiar with the concept of adak?" "I don't think so." "A word, an idea from old Earth. Every living act is ordered by ritual. But our heritage is passionate -- and when unyielding adak stands in the way of an irresistible emotion, there is turbulence, sometimes "An amok." "Exactly. It is as well that the amok has no weapons other than his knife. Otherwise he would kill twenty where now he kills one." The car rolled along a narrow avenue, scattering pedestrians to either side like the bow of a boat spreading foam. The men wore loose white pantaloons and a short open vest; the women wore only the pantaloons. "Handsome set of people," remarked Murphy. Ali-Tomas again smiled complacently. "I'm sure Singhalut will present an inspiring and beautiful spectacle for your program." Murphy remembered the keynote to Howard Frayberg's instructions: "Excitement! Sex! Mystery!" Frayberg cared little for inspiration or beauty. "I imagine," he said casually, "that you celebrate a number of interesting festivals? Colorful dancing? Unique customs?" Ali-Tomas shook his head. "To the contrary. We left our superstitions and ancestor-worship back on Earth. We are quiet Mohammedans and indulge in very little festivity. Perhaps here is the reason for amoks and sjambaks.' "Sjambaks?" "We are not proud of them. You will hear sly rumor, and it is better that I arm you beforehand with truth." "What is a sjambak?" "They are bandits, flouters of authority. I will show you one prescntly." "I heard," said Murphy, "of a man riding a horse up to meet the spaceships. What would account for a story like that?" "It can have no possible basis," said Prince Ali-Tomas. "We have no horses on Cirgames. None whatever." "But..." "The veriest idle talk. Such nonsense will have no interest for your intelligent participants." The car rolled into a square a hundreds yards on a side, lined with luxuriant banana palms. Opposite was an enormous pavilion of gold and violet silk, with a dozen peaked gables casting various changing sheens. In the center of the square a twenty-foot pole supported a cage about two feet wide, three feet long, and four feet high. Inside this cage crouched a naked man. The car rolled past. Prince AliTomas waved an idle hand. The caged man glared down from bloodshot eyes. "That," said AliTomas, "is a sjambak. As you see," a faint note of apology entered his voice, "we attempt to discourage them." "What's that metal object on his chest?" "The mark of his trade. By that you may know all sjambak. In these unsettled times only we of the House may cover our chests -- all others must show themselves and declare themselves true Singhalusi." Murphy said tentatively, "I must come back here and photograph that cage." Ali-Tomas smilingly shook his head. "I will show you our farms, our vines and orchards. Your participants will enjoy these; they have no interest in the dolor of an ignoble sjambak." "Well," said Murphy, "our aim is a well-rounded production. We want to show the farmers at work, the members of the great House at their responsibilities, as well as the deserved fate of wrongdoers." "Exactly. For every sjambak there are ten thousand industrious Singhalusi. It follows then that only one ten-thousandth part of your film should be devoted to this infamous minority." "About three-tenths of a second, eh?" "No more than they deserve." "You don't know my Production Director. His name is Howard Frayberg, and... H oward frayberg was deep in conference with Sam Gatlin, under the influence of what Gatlin called his philosophic kick. It was the phase which Gatlin feared most. "Sam," said Frayberg, "do you know the danger of this business?" "Ulcers," Gatlin replied promptJyFrayberg shook his head. "We've got an occupational disease to fight -- progressive mental myopia." "Speak for yourself," said Gatlin. "Consider. We sit in this office. We think we know what kind of show we want. We send out our staff to get it. We're signing the checks, so back it comes the way we asked for it. We look at it, hear it, smell it -- and pretty soon we believe it ; our version of the universe, full-blown from our brains like Minerva stepping out of Zeus. You see what I mean?" "I understand the words." "We've got our own picture of what's going on. We ask for it, we get it. It builds up and up -- and finally we're like mice in a trap built of our own ideas. We cannibalize our own brains." "Nobody'll ever accuse you of being stingy with a metaphor." "Sam, let's have the truth. How many times have you been off Earth?" "I went to Mars once. And I spent a couple of weeks at Aristillus Resort on the Moon." Frayberg leaned back in his chair as if shocked. "And we're supposed to be a couple of learned planetologists !" Gatlin made grumbling noise in his throat. "I haven't been around the zodiac, so what? You sneezed a few minutes ago and I said gesundheit, but I don't have any doctor's degree." "There comes a time in a man's life," said Frayberg, "when he wants to take stock, get a new perspective." "Relax, Howard, relax." "In our case it means taking out our preconceived ideas, looking at them, checking our illusions against reality." "Are you serious about this?" "Another thing," said Frayberg, "I want to check up a little, ffiaifkin says the expense accounts are frightful. But he can't fight it. When Keeler says he paid ten munits for a loaf of bread on Nekkar IV, who's gonna call him on it?" "Hell, let him eat bread! That's cheaper than making a safari around the cluster, spot-checking the super-markets." Frayberg paid no heed. He touched a button; a three foot .sphere full of glistening motes appeared. Earth was at the center, with thin red lines, the scheduled space-ship routes, radiating out in all directions. "Let's see what kind of circle we can make," said Frayberg. "Gower's here at Canopus, Keeler's over here at Blue Moon, Wilbur Murphy's at Sirgamesk..." "Don't forget," muttered Gatlin, "we got a show to put on." "We've got material for a year," scoffed Frayberg. "Get hold of Space-Lines. We'll start with Sirgamesk, and see what Wilbur Murphy's up to." ing presented to the Sultan of Singhalut by the Prince Ali-Tomas. The Sultan, a small mild man of seventy, sat crosslegged on an enormous pink and green air-cushion. "Be at your ease, Mr. Murphy. We dispense with as much protocol here as practicable." The Sultan had a dry clipped voice and the air of a rather harassed corporation executive. "I understand you represent Earth-Central Home Screen Network?" "I'm a staff photographer for the Know Your Universe! show." "We export a great deal to Earth," mused the Sultan, "but not as much as we'd like. We're very pleased with your interest in us, and naturally we want to help you in every way possible. Tomorrow the Keeper of the Archives will present a series of charts analyzing our economy. Ali-Toms shall personally conduct you through the fish-hatcheries. We want you to know we're doing a great job out here on Singhalut." "I'm sure you are," said Murphy uncomfortably. "However, that isn't quite the stuff I want." "No? Just where do your desires lie?" Ali-Tomas said delicately. "Mr. Murphy took a rather profound interest in the sjambak displayed in the square." "Oh. And you explained that these renegades could hold no interest for serious students of our planet?" Murphy started to explain that clustered around two hundred million screens tuned to Know Your Universe! were four or five hungreater part of them neither serious nor students. The Sultan cut in decisively. "I will now impart something truly interesting. We Singhalusi are making preparations to reclaim four more valleys, with an added area of six hundred thousand acres! I shall put my physiographic models at your disposal; you may use them to the fullest extent!" "I'll be pleased for the opportunity," declared Murphy. "But tomorrow I'd like to prowl around the valley, meet your people, observe their customs, religious rites, courtships, funerals..." The Sultan pulled a sour face. "We are ditch-water dull. Festivals are celebrated quietly in the home; there is small religious fervor; courtships are consummated by family contract. I fear you will find little sensational material here in Singhalut." "You have no temple dances?" asked Murphy. "No fire-walkers, snake-charmers -- voodoo?" The Sultan smiled patronizingly. "We came out here to Cirgamesg to escape the ancient superstitions. Our lives are calm, orderly. Even the amoks have practically disappeared. "But the sjambaks -- " "Negligible." "Well," said Murphy, "I'd like to visit some of these ancient cities." "I advise against it," declared the Sultan. "They are shards, weathered stone. There are no inscriptions, no art. There is no stimulation in dead stone. Now. Tomorrow I will hear a report on hybrid soybean plantings in the Upper Kam District. You will want to be present." or even excelled his expectation. He had four rooms and a private garden enclosed by a thicket of bamboo. His bathroom walls were slabs of glossy actinolite, inlaid with cinnabar, jade, galena. pyrite and blue malachite, in representations of fantastic birds. His bedroom was a tent thirty feet high. Two walls were dark green fabric; a third was golden rust; the fourth opened upon the private garden. Murphy's bed was a pink and yellow creation ten feet square, soft as cobweb, smelling of rose sandalwood. Carved black lacquer tubs held fruit; two dozen wines, liquors, syrups, essences flowed at a touch from as many ebony spigots. The garden centered on a pool of cool water, very pleasant in the hothouse climate of Singhalut. The only shortcoming was the lack of the lovely young servitors Murphy had envisioned. He took it upon himself to repair this lack, and in a shady wine-house behind the palace, called the Barangipan, he made the acquaintance of a girlmusician named Soek Panjoebang. He found her enticing tones of quavering sweetness from the gamelan, an instrument well-loved in Old Bali. Soek Panjoebang had the delicate features and transparent skin of Sumatra, the supple long limbs of Arabia and in a pair of wide and golden eyes a heritage from somewhere in Celtic Europe. Murphy bought her a goblet of frozen shavings, each a different perfume, while he himself drank white rice-beer. Soek Panjoebang displayed an intense interest in the ways of Earth, and Murphy found it hard to guide the conversation. "Weelbrrr," she said. "Such a funny name, Weelbrrr. Do you think I could play the gamelan in the great cities, the great palaces of Earth?" "Sure. There's no law against gamelans." "You talk so funny, Weelbrrr. I like to hear you talk." "I suppose you get kinda bored here in Singhalut?" She shrugged. "Life is plea.sant, but it concerns with little things. We have no great adventures. We grow flowers, we play the gamelan." She eyed him archly sidelong. "We love... We sleep..." Murphy grinned. "You run amok." "No, no, no. That is no more." "Not since the sjambaks, eh?" "The sjambaks are bad. But better than amok. When a man feels the knot forming around his chest, he no longer takes his kris and runs down the street -- he becomes sjambak." This was getting interesting. "Where does he go? What does he do?" "He robs." "Who does he rob? What does he do with his loot?" She leaned toward him. "It is not well to talk of them." "Why not?" "The Sultan does not wish it... Everywhere are listeners. When one talks sjambak, the Sultan's ears rise, like the points on a cat." "Suppose they do -- what's the difference? I've got a legitimate interest. I saw one of them in that cage out there. That's torture. I want to know about it." "He is very bad. He opened the monorail car and the air rushed out. Forty-two Singhalusi and Hadrasi bloated and blew up." "And what happened to the sjambak?" "He took all the gold and money and jewels and ran away." "Ran where?" "Out across Great Pharasang Plain. But he was a fool. He came back to Singhalut for his wife; he was caught and set up for all people to look at, so they might tell each other, 'thus it is for sjambaks.' " "Where do the sjambaks hide out?" "Oh," she looked vaguely around the room, "out on the plains. In the mountains." "They must have some shelter -- an air-dome." "No. The Sultan would send out his patrol-boat and destroy them. They roam quietly. They hide among the rocks and tend their oxygen stills. Sometimes they visit the old cities." "I wonder," said Murphy, staring into his beer, "could it be sjambaks who ride horses up to meet the spaceship?" Soek Panjoebang knit her black eyebrows, as if preoccupied. "That's what brought me out here," Murphy went on. "This story of a man riding a horse out in space." "Ridiculous; we have no horses in Cirgamesg." "All right, the steward won't swear to the horse. Suppose the man was up there on foot or riding a bicycle. But the steward recognized the man." "Who was this man, pray?" "The steward clammed up... The name would have been just noise to me, anyway." "I might recognize the name... "Ask him yourself. The ship's still out at the field." She shook her head slowly, holding her golden eyes on his face. "I do not care to attract the attention of either steward, sjambak -- or Sultan." Murphy said impatiently. "In any event, it's not who -- but how. How does the man breathe? Vacuum sucks a man's lungs up out of his mouth, bursts his stomach, his ears..." "We have excellent doctors," said Soek Panjoebang shuddering, "but alas! I am not one of them." M urphy looked at her sharply. Her voice held the plangent sweetness of her instrument, with additional overtones of mockery. "There must be some kind of invisible dome around him, holding in air," said Murphy. "And what if there is?" "It's something new, and if it is, I want to find out about it." Soek smiled languidly. "You are so typical an old-lander -- worried, frowning, dynamic. You should relax, cultivate napau, enjoy life as we do here in Singhalut." "What's napau?" "It's our philosophy, where we find meaning and life and beauty in every aspect of the world." "That sjambak in the cage could do with a little less napau right now." "No doubt he is unhappy," she agreed. "Unhappy! He's being tortured!" "He broke the Sultan's law. His life is no longer his own. It belongs to Singhalut. If the Sultan wishes to use it to warn other wrongdoers, the fact that the man suffers is of small interest." "If they all wear that metal ornament, how can they hope to hide out?" He glanced at her own bare bosom. "They appear by night -- slip through the streets like ghosts... She looked in turn at Murphy's loose shirt. "You will notice persons brushing up against you, feeling you," she laid her hand along his breast, "and when this happens you will know they are agents of the Sultan, because only strangers and the House may wear shirts. But now, let me sing to you -- a song from the Old Land, old Java. You will not understand the tongue, but no other words so join the voice of the gamelan,"  Murphy. "Instead of a .garden suite with a private pool, I usually sleep in a bubble-tent, with nothing to eat but condensed food." Soek Panjoebang flung the water out of her sleek black hair. "Perhaps, Weelbrrr, you will regret leaving Cirgames?" "Well," he looked up to the transparent roof, barely visible where the sunlight collected and refracted, "I don't particularly like being shut up like a bird in an aviary... Mildly claustrophobic, I guess." After breakfast, drinking thick coffee from tiny silver cups, Murphy looked long and reflectively at Soek Panjoebang. "What are you thinking, Weelbrrr?" Murphy drained his coffee. "I'm thinking that I'd better be getting to work." "And what do you do?" "First I'm going to shoot the palace, and you sitting here in the garden playing your gamelan." "But Weelbrrr -- not me!" "You're a part of the universe, rather an interesting part. Then I'll take the square..." "And the sjambak?" A quiet voice spoke from behind. "A visitor, Tuan Murphy." Murphy turned his head. "Bring him in." He looked back to Soek Panjoebang. She was on her feet. "It is necessary that I go." "When will I see you?" "Tonight -- at the Barangipan." Rube Trimmer, Tuan." Trimmer was small and middleaged, with thin shoulders and a paunch. He carried himself with a hell-raising swagger, left over from a time twenty years gone. His skin had the waxy look of lost floridity, his tuft of white hair was coarse and thin, his eyelids hung in the off-side droop that amateur physiognomists like to associate with guile. "I'm Resident Director of the Import-Export Bank," said Trimmer. "Heard you were here and thought I'd pay my respects." "I suppose you don't see many strangers." "Not too many -- there's nothing much to bring 'em. CirgamesQ isn't a comfortable tourist planet. Too confined, shut in. A man with a sensitive psyche goes nuts pretty easy here." "Yeah' said Murphy. "I was thinking the same thing this naorning. That dome begins to give a stand it? Or do they?" Trimmer pulled out a cigar case, Murphy refused the offer. "Local tobacco," aid Trimmer. "Very good." He lit up thoughtfully. "Well, you might say that the Cirgamcski are schizophrenic. They've got the docile Javanese blood, plus the Arabian elan. The Javanese part is on top, but every once in a while you see a flash of arrogance... You never know. I've been out here nine years and Fm still a stranger." He puffed on his cigar, studied Murphy with his careful eves. "You work for Know Your Universe! y I hear," "Yeah. I'm one of the leg men," "Must be a great job." "A man sees a lot of the galaxy, and he runs into queer talcs, like this sjambak stuff." Trimmer nodded without surprise. "My advice to you, Murphy, is lay off the sjambaks. They're not healthy around here." Murphy was startled by the bluntness. "What's the big mystery about these sjambaks?" Trimmer looked around the room. "This place is bugged." "I found two pick-ups and plugged 'em," said Murphy. Trimmer laughed. "Those were just plants. They hide 'em vhere a man might just barely spot 'em. You can't catch the real ones. They're woven into the cloth -- pres suresensi tive wires .' ' Murphy looked critically at the cloth walls. "Don't let it worry you," said Trimmer. "They listen more out of habit than anything else. If you're fussy we'll go for a walk." The road led past the palace into the country. Murphy and Trimmer sauntered along a placid river, overgrown with lily pads, swarming with large wLite ducks. "This sjambak business," said Murphy. "Everybody talks around it. You can't pin anybody down." "Including me," said Trimmer. "I'm more or less privileged around here. The Sultan finances his reclamation through the bank, on the basis of my reports. But there's more to Sinahalut than the Sultan." "Namely?" Trimmer w'aved his cigar waggishly. "Now w-e're getting in where I don't like to talk. I'll give you a hint. Prince Ali thinks roofing-in more valleys is a waste of money, when there's Hadras and New Batavia and Sundaman so close," "You mean -- armed conquest?" Trimmer laughed. "You said it, not me." "They can't carry on much of a war -- unless the soldiers commute bv monorail." j "Maybe Prince Ali thinks he's got the answer." "Sjambaks?" "I didn't say it," said Trimmer blandly. Murphy grinned. After a moment he said, "I picked up with a girl named Soek Panjoebang who plays the gamelan. I suppose she's working for cither the Sultan or V J Pl'ince Ali. Do you know wliich?" Tiimmer's eyes sparkled. He shook his head. "Might be either one. There's a w'ay to find out." "Yeah?" "Get her off where you're sure there's no spy-cells. Tell her two things -- one for Ali, the other for the Sultan. Whichever one reacts you know you've got her tagged." "For instance?" "Well, for instance she learns that you can rig up a hypnotic ray from a flash-light battery, a piece of bamboo, and a fewlengths of wire. That'll get Ali in an awful sweat. He can't get weapons. None at all. And for the Sultan," Trimmer was warming up to his intrigue, chewing on his cigar with gusto, "tell her you're on to a catalyst that turns clay into aluminum and oxygen in the presence of sunlight. The Sultan would sell liis right leg for something like that. He tries hard for Singhalut and Cirgamesc." "And Ali?" Trimmer hesitated. "I never said what I'm gonna say. Don't forget -- I never said it." "Okay, you never said it." "Ever hear of a jehad "Mohammedan holy wars." "Believe it or not, Ali wants a jehad" "Sounds kinda fantastic." "Sure it's fantastic. Don't forget, I never said anything about it. But V suppose someone -- strictly unofficial, of course -- let the idea percolate around the Peace Office back home," "Ah," said Murphy. "That's why you came to see me."  injured innocence, "Noy, Murphy, you're a little unfair. I'm a friendly guy. Of course I don't like to see the bank lose what we've got tied up in the Sultan." "Why don't you send in a report yourself?" "I have! But when they hear the same thing from you, a Kiioiv Your Universe! man, they might make a move." Murphy nodded. "Well, we understand each other," said Trimmer heartily, "and everything's clear." "Not entirely. How's AH going to launch a jehad when he doesn't have any weapons, no warships, no supplies?" "Now," said Trimmer, "we're getting into the realm of supposition." He paused, looked behind him. A farmer pushing a rotary tiller, bowed politely, trundled ahed. Behind was a voung man in a black turban, gold earrings, a black and red vest, white pantaloon.s, black curl-toed slippers. He bowed, started past. Trimmer held up his hand. "Don't waste your time up there : we're going back in a few minutes." "Thank you, Tuan." "Who are you reporting to? The Sultan or Prince Ali?" "The Tuan is sure to pierce the veil of my evasions. I shall not disp semble. I am the Sultan's mam" Trimmer nodded. "Now. if you'll kindly remove to about a hundred yards, where your whisper pick-up won't work." "By your leave, I go." He retreated without haste. "He's almost certainly working for Ali," said Trimmer, "Not a very subtle lie." "Oh yes -- third level. He figured I'd take it second level," "How's that again?" "Naturally I wouldn't believe him. He knew I knew that he knew it. So when he said 'Sultan', I'd think he wouldn't lie simply, but that he'd lie double -- that he actually was working for the Sultan." Murphy laughed. "Suppose he told you a fourth level lie?" "It starts to be a toss-up pretty soon," Trimmer admitted. "I don't think he gives me credit for that much subtlety... What are you doing the rest of the day?" "Taking footage. Do you know where I can find some picturesque rites? Mystical dances, human sacrifice? I've got to work up some glamor and exotic lore." "There's this sjambak in the cage. That's about as close to the medieval as you'll find anywhere in Earth Commonwealth." "Speaking of sjambaks..." "No time," said Trimmer. "Got to get back. Drop in at my office -- right down the square from the palace." suite. The shadowy figure of his room servant said, "His Highness the Sultan desires the Tuan's attendance in the Cascade Garden." "Thank you," said Murphy. "As soon as I load my camera." The Cascade Room was an ppen patio in front of an artificial waterfall. The Sultan was pacing back and forth, wearing dusty khaki puttees, brown plastic boots, a yellow polo shirt. He carried a twig which he used as a riding crop, slapping his boots as he walked. He turned his head as Murphy appeared, pointed his twig at a wicker bench. "I pray you sit down, Mr. Murphy." He paced once up and back. "How is your suite? You find it to your liking?" "Very much so." "Excellent," said the Sultan. "You do me honor with your presence." Murphy waited patiently. "I understand that you had a visitor this morning," said the Sultan. "Yes. Mr. Trimmer." "May I inquire the nature of the conversation?" "It was of a personal nature," said Murphy, rather more shortly than he meant. The Sultan nodded wistfully. "A Singhalusi would have wasted an hour telling me half-truths -- distorted enough to confuse, but not sufficiently inaccurate to anger me if I had a spy-cell on him all the time." Murphy grinned. "A Singhalusi has to live here the rest of his life." A servant wheeled a frosted cabinet before them, placed goblets under two spigots, withdrew. The Sultan cleared his throat. "Trimmer is an excellent fellow, but unbelievably loquacious." Murphy drew himself two inches of chilled rosy-pale liquor. The Sultan slapped his boots with the twig. "Undoubtedly he confided all my private business to you, or at least as much as I have allowed him to learn." "Well -- he spoke of your hope to increase the compass of Singhalut." "That, my friend, is no hope; it's absolute necessity. Our population density is fifteen hundred to the square mile. We must expand or smother. There'll be too little food to eat, too little oxygen to breathe." Murphy suddenly came to life. "I could make that idea the theme of my feature! Singhalut Dilemma: Expand or Perish!" "No, that would be inadvisable, inapplicable." Murphy was not convinced. "It sounds like a natural." The Sultan smiled. "I'll impart an item of confidential information -- although Trimmer no doubt has preceded me with it." He gave his boots an irritated whack. "To expand I need funds. Funds are best secured in an atmosphere of calm and confidence. The implication of emergency would be disastrous to my aims." "Well," said Murphy, "I see your position." The Sultan glanced at Murphy sidelong. "Anticipating your cooperation, my Minister of Propaganda has arranged an hour's program, stressing our progressive social attitude, our prosperity and financial prospects..." "But, Sultan... "Well?" "I can't allow your Minister of Propaganda to use me and Know Your Universe! as a kind of investment brochure." The Sultan nodded wearily. "I expected you to take that attitude... Well -- what do you yourself haye in mind?" 'Tve been looking for something to tie to," .said Murphy. "I think it's going to be the dramatic contrast between the ruined cities and the new domed valleys. How the Earth settlers succeeded where the ancient people failed to meet the challenge of the dissipating atmosphere." "Well," the Sultan said grudgingly, "that's not too bad." "Today I want to take some shots of the palace, the dome, the city, the paddies, groves, orchards, farms. Tomorrow I'm taking a trip out to one of the ruins." "I see," said the Sultan. "Then you won't need my charts and statistics?" "Well, Sultan, I could film the stuff your Propaganda Minister cooked up, and I could take it back to Earth. Howard Frayberg or Sam Gatlin would tear into it, rip it apart, lard in some head-hunting, a little cannibalism and temple prostitution, and you'd never know you where watching Singhalut. You'd scream with horror, and I'd be fired." "In that case," said the Sultan, "I will leave you to the dictates of your conscience." H oward frayberg looked around the gray landscape of Riker's Planet, gazed out over the roaring black Mogador Ocean. "Sam, I think there's a story out there." Sam Gatlin shivered inside his electrically heated glass overcoat. "Out on that ocean? It's full of man-eating plesiosaurs -- horrible things forty feet long." "Suppose we worked something out on the line of Moby Dick? The White Monster of the Mogador Ocean. We'd set sail in a catamaran -- " "Us?" "Naturally I wouldn't believe him. He knew I knew that he knew it. So when he said 'Sultan', I'd think he wouldn't lie simply, but that he'd lie double -- that he actually was working for the Sultan." Murphy laughed. "Suppose he told you a fourth level lie?" "It starts to be a toss-up pretty soon," Trimmer admitted. "I don't think he gives me credit for that much subtlety... What are you doing the rest of the day?" "Taking footage. Do you know where I can find some picturesque rites? Mystical dances, human sacrifice? I've got to work up some glamor and exotic lore." "There's this sjambak in the cage. That's about as close to the medieval as you'll find anywhere in Earth Commonwealth." "Speaking of sjambaks..." "No time," said Trimmer. "Got to get back. Drop in at my office -- right down the square from the palace." suite. The shadowy figure of his room servant said, "His Highness the Sultan desires the Tuan's attendance in the Cascade Garden." "Thank you," said Murphy. "As soon as I load my camera." The Cascade Room was an ppen patio in front of an artificial waterfall. The Sultan was pacing back and forth, wearing dusty khaki puttees, brown plastic boots, a yellow polo shirt. He carried a twig which he used as a riding crop, slapping his boots as he walked. He turned his head as Murphy appeared. pointed his twig at a wicker bench. "I pray you sit down, Mr. Murphy." He paced once up and back. "How is your suite? You find it to your liking?" "Very much so." "Excellent," said the Sultan. "You do me honor with your presence." Murphy waited patiently. "I understand that you had a visitor this morning," said the Sultan. "Yes. Mr. Trimmer." "May I inquire the nature of the conversation?" "It was of a personal nature," said Murphy, rather more shortly than he meant. The Sultan nodded wistfully. "A Singhalusi would have wasted an hour telling me half-truths -- distorted enough to confuse, but not sufficiently inaccurate to anger me if I had a spy-cell on him all the time." Murphy grinned. "A Singhalusi has to live here the rest of his life." A servant wheeled a frosted cabinet before them, placed goblets under two spigots, withdrew. The Sultan cleared his throat. "Trimmer is an excellent fellow, but unbelievably loquacious." Murphy drew himself two inches of chilled rosy-pale liquor. The Sultan slapped his boots with the twig. "Undoubtedly he confided all my private business to you, or at least as much as I have allowed him to learn." "Well -- he spoke of your hope to increase the compass of Singhalut." "That, my friend, is no hope; it's absolute necessity. Our population density is fifteen hundred to the square mile. We must expand or smother. There'll be too little food to eat, too little oxygen to breathe." Murphy suddenly came to life. "I could make that idea the theme of my feature! Singhalut Dilemma: Expand or Perish!" "No, that would be inadvisable, inapplicable." Murphy was not convinced. "It sounds like a natural." The Sultan smiled. "I'll impart an item of confidential information -- although Trimmer no doubt has preceded me with it." He gave his boots an irritated whack. "To expand I need funds. Funds are best secured in an atmosphere of calm and confidence. The implication of emergency would be disastrous to my aims." "Well," said Murphy, "I see your position." The Sultan glanced at Murphy sidelong. "Anticipating your cooperation, my Minister of Propaganda has arranged an hour's program, stressing our progressive social attitude, our prosperity and financial prospects..." "But, Sultan... "Well?" "I can't allow your Minister of Propaganda to use me and Know Your Universe! as a kind of investment brochure." The Sultan nodded wearily. "I expected you to take that attitude... Well -- what do you yourself have in mind?" "I've been looking for something to tie to," said Murphy. "I think it's going to be the dramatic contrast between the ruined cities and the new domed valleys. How the Earth settlers succeeded where the ancient people failed to meet the challenge of the dissipating atmosphere." "Well," the Sultan said grudgingly, "that's not too bad." "Today I want to take some shots of the palace, the dome, the city, the paddies, groves, orchards, farms. Tomorrow I'm taking a trip out to one of the ruins." "I see," said the Sultan. "Then you won't need my charts and sta-' tistics?" "Well, Sultan, I could film the stuff your Propaganda Minister cooked up, and I could take it back to Earth. Howard Frayberg or Sam Gatlin would tear into it, rip it apart, lard in some head-hunting, a little cannibalism and temple prostitution, and you'd never know you where watching Singhalut. You'd scream with horror, and I'd be fired." "In that case," said the Sultan, "I will leave you to the dictates of your conscience." around the gray landscape of Riker's Planet, gazed out over the roaring black Mogador Ocean. "Sam, I think there's a story out there." Sam Gatlin shivered inside his electrically heated glass overcoat. "Out on that ocean? It's full of man-eating plesiosaurs -- horrible things forty feet long." "Suppose we worked somSthing out on the line of Moby Dick? The White Monster of the Mogador Ocean. We'd set sail in a catamaran -- " "Us?" "No," said Frayberg impatiently. "Of course not us. Two or three of the staff. They'd sail out there, look over these gray and red monsters, maybe fake a fight or two, but all the time they're after the legendary white one. How's it sound?" "I don't think we pay our men enough money." "Wilbur Murphy might do it. ing a horse up to meet his spaceships." "He might draw the line at a white plesiosaur riding up to meet his catamaran." Frayberg turned away. "Somebody's got to have ideas around here..." "We'd better head back to the space-port," said Gatlin. "We got two hours to make the Sirgamesk shuttle." Barangipan, watching marionettes performing to xylophone, Castanet, gong and gamelan. The drama had its roots in proto-historic Mohenjo-Dar#. It had filtered down through ancient India, medieval Burma, Malaya, across the Straits of Malacca to Sumatra and Java; from modern Java across space to CirgamesQ, five thousand years of time, two hundred lightyears of space. Somewhere along the route it had met and assimilated modern technology. Magnetic beams controlled arms, legs and bodies, guided the poses and posturings. The manipulator's face, by agency of clip, wire, radio control and minuscule selsyn, projected his scowl, smile, sneer or grimace to the peaked little face he controlled. The language was that of Old Java, which perhaps a third of the spectators understood. This portion did not include Murphy, and when the performance ended he was no wiser than at the start. Soek Panjoebang slipped into the seat beside Murphy. She wore musician's garb: a sarong of brown, blue, and black batik, and a fantastic headdress of tiny silver bells. She greeted him with enthusiasm. "Weelbrrr! I saw you watching..." "It was very interesting." "Ah, yes." She sighed. "Weelbrrr, you take me with you back to Earth? You make me a great picturama star, please, Weelbrrr?" "Well, I don't know about that." "I behave very well, Weelbrrr." She nuzzled his shoulder, looked soulfully up with her shiny yellowhazel eyes. Murphy nearly forgot the experiment he intended to perform. "What did you do today, Weelbrrr? You look at all the pretty girls?" "Nope. I ran footage. Got the palace, climbed the ridge up to the condensation vanes. I never knew there was so much water in the air till I saw the stream pouring off thosp vanes! And hot" "We have much sunlight; it makes the rice grow." "The Sultan ought to put some of that excess light to work. There's a secret process... Well, I'd better not say." "Oh come, Weelbrrr! Tell me your secrets!" "It's not much of a secret. Just a catalyst that separates clay into aluminum and oxygen when sunlight shines on it." Soek's eyebrows rose, poised in place like a seagull riding the wind. "Weelbrrr! I did not know you for a man of learning!" "Oh, you thought I was just a bum, eh? Good enough to make picturama stars out of gamelan players, but no special genius... "No, no, Weelbrrr." "I know lots of tricks. I can take a flashlight battery, a piece of copper foil, a few transistors and bamboo tube and turn out a paralyzer gun that'll stop a man cold in his tracks. And you know how much it costs?" "No, Weelbrrr. How much?" "Ten cents. It wears out after two or three months, but what's the difference? I make 'em as a hobby -- turn out two or three an hour." "Weelbrrr! You're a man of marvels! Hello! We will drink!" And Murphy settled back in the wicker chair, sipping his rice beer. I into a space-suit, and ride out to the ruins in the plain. Ghatamipol, I think they're called. Like to come?" "No, Weelbrrr." Soek Panjoebang looked off into the garden, her hands busy tucking a flower into her hair. A few minutes later she said, "Why must you waste your time among the rocks? There are better things to do and see. And it might well be -- dangerous." She murmured the last word offhandedly. "Danger? From the sjambaks?" "Yes, perhaps." "The Sultan's giving me a guard. Twenty men wiffi crossbows." "The sjambaks carry shields." "Why should they risk their lives attacking me?" Soek Panjoebang shrugged. After a moment she rose to her feet. "Goodbye, Weelbrrr." "Goodbye? Isn't this rather abrupt? Won't I see you tonight?" "If so be Allah's will." Murphy looked after the lithe swaying figure. She paused, plucked a yellow flower, looked over her shoulder. Her eyes, yellow as the flower, lucent as waterjewels, held his. Her face was utterly expressionless. She turned, tossed away the flower with a jaunty gesture, and continued, her shoulders swinging. Murphy breathed deeply. She might have made picturama at that... One hour later he met his escort at the valley gate. They were dressed in space-suits for the plains, twenty men with sullen faces. The trip to Ghatamipol clearly was not to their liking. Murphy climbed into his own suit, checked the oxygen pressure gauge, the seal at his collar. "All ready, boys?" No one spoke. The silence drew out. The gatekeeper, on hand to let the party out, snickered. "They're all ready, Tuan." "Well," said Murphy, "let's go then." Outside the gate Murphy made a second check of his equipment. No leaks in his suit. Inside pressure : #. Outside pressure; zero. His twenty guards morosely inspected their crossbows and slim swords. The white ruins of Ghatamipol lay five miles across Pharasang Plain. The horizon was clear, the sun was high, the sky was black. Murphy's radio hummed. Someone said sharply, "Look! There it goes!" He wheeled around; his guards had halted, and were pointing. He saw a fleet something vanishing into the distance. "Let's go," said Murphy. "There's nothing out there." "Sjambak." "'Well, there's only one of them." "Where one walks, others follow." "That's why the twenty of you are here." "It is madness! Challenging the sjambaks!" "What is gained?" another argued. "I'll be the judge of that," said Murphy, and set off along the plain. The warriors reluctantly followed, muttering to each other over their radio intercoms. T he eroded city walls rose above them, occupied more and more of the sky. The platoon leader said in an angry voice, "We have gone far enough." "You're under my orders," said Murphy. "We're going through the gate." He punched the button on his camera and passed under the monstrous portal. The city was frailer stuff than the wall, and had succumbed to the thin storms which had raged a million years after the passing of life. Murphy marvelled at the scope of the ruins. Virgin archaeological territory! No telling what a few weeks digging might turn up. Murphy considered his expense account. Shifkin was the obstacle. There'd be tremendous prestige and publicity for Know Your Universe! if Murphy uncovered a tomb, a library, works of art. The Sultan would gladly provide diggers. They were a sturdy enough people; they could make quite a showing in a week, if they were able to put aside their superstitions, fears and dreads. Murphy sized one of them up from the comer of his eye. He sat on a sunny slab of rock, and if he felt uneasy he concealed it quite successfully. In fact, thought Murphy, he appeared completely relaxed. Maybe the problem of securing diggers was a minor one after all... And here was an odd sidelight on the Singhalusi character. Once clear of the valley the man openly wore his shirt, a fine loose garment of electric blue, in defiance of the Sultan's edict. Of course out here he might be cold... Murphy felt his own skin crawling. How could he be cold? How could he be alive? Where was his space-suit? He lounged on the rock, grinning sardonically at Murphy. He wore heavy sandals, a black turban, loose breeches, the blue shirt. Nothing more. Where were the others? Murphy turned a feverish glance over his shoulder. A good three miles distant, bounding and leaping toward Singhalut, were twenty desperate figures. They all wore space-suits. This man here... A sjambak? A wizard? A hallucination? feet, strode springily toward Murphy. He carried a crossbow and a sword, like those of Murphy's fleet-footed guards. But he wore no space-suit. Could there be breathy able traces of an atmosphere? Murphy glanced at his gauge. Outside pressure: zero. Two other men appeared, moving with long elastic steps. Their eyes were bright, their faces flushed. They came up to Murphy, took his arm. They were solid, corporeal. They had no invisible force fields around their heads. Murphy jerked his arm free. "Let go of me, damn it!" But they certainly couldn't hear him through the vacuum. He glanced over his shoulder. The first man held his naked blade a foot or two behind Murphy's bulging space-suit. Murphy made no further resistance. He punched the button on his camera to automatic. It would now run for several hours, recording one hundred pictures per second, a thousand to the inch. The sjambaks led Murphy two hundred yards to a metal door. They opened it, pushed Murphy inside, banged it shut. Murphy felt the vibration through his shoes, heard a gradually waxing hum. His gauge showed an outside pressure of #, #, #, #, #. An inner door opened. Hands pulled Murphy in, undamped his dome. "Just what's going on here?" demanded Murphy angrily. Prince Ali-Tomas pointed to a table. Murphy saw a flashlight battery, aluminum foil, wire, a transistor kit, metal tubing, tools, a few other odds and ends. "There it is," said Prince AliTomas. "Get to work. Let's see one of these paralysis weapons you boast of." "Just like that, eh?" "Just like that." "What do you want 'em for?" "Does it matter?" "I'd like to know." Murphy was conscious of his camera, recording sight, sound, odor. "I lead an army," said Ali-Tomas, "but they march without weapons. Give me weapons! I will carry the word to Hadra, to New Batavia, to Sundaman, to BoengBohdt!" "How? Why?" "It is enough that I will it. Again, I beg of you..." He indicated the table. Murphy laughed. "I've got myself in a fine mess. Suppose I don't make this weapon for you?" "You'll remain until you do, under increasingly difficult conditions." "I'll be here a long time." "If such is the case," said AliTomas, "we must make our arrangements for your care on a longterm basis." Ali made a gesture. Hands seized Murphy's shoulders. A respirator was held to his nostrils. He thought of his camera, and he could have laughed. Mystery! Excitement! Thrills! Dramatic sequence for Know Your Universe! Staff-man murdered by fanatics! The crime recorded on his own camera! See the blood, hear his death-rattle, smell the poison! The vapor choked him. What a break! What a sequence! Frayberg, "bigger and brighter every minute." "It must've been just about in here," said Gatlin, "that Wilbur's horseback rider appeared." "That's right! Steward!" "Yes, sir?" "We're about twenty thousand miles out, aren't we?" "About fifteen thousand, sir." "Sidereal Cavalry! What an idea! I wonder how Wilbur's making out on his superstition angle?" Sam Gatlin, watching out the window, said in a tight voice, "Why not ask him yourself?" "Eh?" "Ask him for yourself! There he is -- outside, riding some kind of critter..." "It's a ghost," whispered Frayberg. "A man without a spacesuit... There's no such thing!" "He sees us... Look. , ." Murphy was staring at them, and his surprise seemed equal to their own. He waved his hand. Gatlin gingerly waved back. Said Frayberg, "That's not a horse he's riding. It's a combination ram-jet and kiddie car with stirrups!" "He's coming aboard the ship," said Gatlin. "That's the entrance port down there... captain's stateroom, taking careful breaths of air. "How are you now?" asked Frayberg. "Fine. A little sore in the lungs." "I shouldn't wonder," the ship's doctor growled. "I never saw anything like it." "How does it feel out there, Wilbur?" Gatlin asked. "It feels awful lonesome and empty. And the breath seeping up out of your lungs, never going in -- that's a funny feeling. And you miss the air blowing on your skin. I never realized it before. Air feels like -- like silk, like whipped cream -- it's got texture..." "But aren't you cold? Space is supposed to be absolute zero!" "Space is nothing. It's not hot and it's not cold. When you're in the sunlight you get warm. It's better in the shade. You don't lose any heat by air convection, but radiation and sweat evaporation keep you comfortably cool." "I still can't understand it," said Frayberg. "This Prince Ali, he's a kind of a rebel, eh?" "I don't blame him in a way. A normal man living under those domes has to let off steam somehow. Prince Ali decided to go out crusading. I think he would have made it too -- at least on Girgames." "Certainly there are many more men inside the domes..." "When it comes to fighting," said Murphy, "a sjambak can lick twenty men in spacesuits. A little nick doesn't hurt him, but a little nick bursts open a spacesuit, and the man inside comes apart." "Well," said the Captain. "I imagine the Peace Office will send out a team to put things in order now." Gatlin asked, "What happened when you woke up from the chloroform?" "Well, nothing very miKh. I felt this attachment on my chest, but didn't think much about it. Still kinda woozy. I was halfway through decompression. They keep a man there eight hours, drop pressure on him two pounds an hour, nice and slow so he don't get the bends." "Was this the same place they took you, when you met Ali?" "Yeah, that was their decompression chamber. They had to make a sjambak out of me; there wasn't anywhere else they could keep me. Well, pretty soon my head cleared, and I saw this apparatus stuck to my chest." He poked at the mechanism on the table. "I saw the oxygen tank, I saw the blood running dirough the plastic pipes -- blue from me to that carburetor arrangement, red on the way back in -- and I figured out the whole arrangement. Carbon dioxide still exhales up through your lungs, but the vein back to the left auricle is routed through the carburetor and supercharged with oxygen. A man doesn't need to breathe. The carburetor flushes his blood with oxygen, the decompression tank adjusts him to the lack of air-pressure. There's only one thing to look out for; that's not to touch anything with your naked flesh. If it's in the sunshine it's blazing hot; if it's in the shade it's cold enough to cut. Otherwise you're free as a bird." "But -- how did you get away?" "I saw those little rocket-bikes, and began figuring. I couldn't go back to Singhalut; I'd be lynched on sight as a sjambak. I couldn't fly to another planet -- the bikes don't carry enough fuel. "I knew when the ship would be coming in, so I figured I'd fly up to meet it. I told the guard I was going outside a minute, and I got on one of the rocket-bikes. There was nothing much to it." "Well," said Frayberg, "it's a great feature, Wilbur -- a great film! Maybe we can stretch it into two hours." "There's one thing bothering me," said Gatlin. "Who did the steward see up here the first time?" Murphy shrugged. "It might have been somebody up here skylarking. A little too much oxygen and you start cutting all kinds of capers. Or it might have been someone who decided he had enough crusading. "There's a sjambak in a cage, right in the middle of Singhalut. Prince Ali walks past; they look at each other eye to eye. Ali smiles a little and walks on. Suppose this sjambak tried to escape to the ship. He's taken aboard, turned over to the Sultan and the Sultan makes an example of him..." "What'll the Sultan do to Ali?" Murphy shook his head. "If I were Ali I'd disappear." A loudspeaker turned on. "Attention all passengers. We have just passed through quarantine. Passengers may now disembark. Important: no weapons or explosives allowed on Singhalut!" "This is where I came in," said Murphy. There's no such thing as a weapon too horrible to use; weapons will continue to become bigger, and deadlier. Like other things that can't be stopped... By H. B. Fyfe dome of the colossal command ship just beyond Pluto, every nervous clearing of a throat rasped through the silence. Telescopes were available but most of the scientists and high officials preferred the view on the huge telescreen. This showed, from a distance of small moons of the frigid planet, so insignificant that it had not been discovered until man had pushed the boundaries of space exploration past the asteroids. The satellite was about to become spectacularly significant, however, as the first target of man's newest, most destructive weapon. "I need not remind you, gentlemen," white-haired Co-ordinator Evora of Mars had said, "that if we have actually succeeded in this race against our former Centaurian colonies, it may well prevent the imminent conflict entirely. In a few moments we shall know whether our scientists have developed a truly irresistible weapon." Of all the officials, soldiers, and scientists present, Arnold Gibson was perhaps the least excited. For one thing, he had labored hard to make the new horror succeed and felt reasonably confident that it would. The project had been given the attention of every first class scientific mind in the Solar System ; for the great fear was that the new states on the Centaurian planets might win the race of discovery and... And bring a little order into this old-fashioned, inefficient fumbling toward progress, Gibson thought contemptuously. Look at them -- fools for all their degrees and titles! They've stumbled on something with possibilities beyond their confused powers of application. A gasp rustled through the chamber, followed by an even more awed silence than had preceded the unbelievable, ultra-rapid action on the telescreen. Gibson permitted himself a tight smile of satisfaction. Now my work really begins, he reflected. A few quick steps brought him to Dr. Haas, director of the project, just before the less stunned observers surrounded that gentleman, babbling questions. "I'll start collecting the Number Three string of recorders," he reported. "All right, Arnold," agreed Haas. "Tell the others to get their ships out too. I'll be busy here." Not half as busy as you will be in about a day, thought Gibson, heading for the spaceship berths. signed the recording machines drifting in space at the greatest distance from the command ship. The others would assume that he needed more time to locate and retrieve the apparatus -- which would give him a head start toward Alpha Centauri. His ship was not large, but it was powerful and versatile to cope with any emergency that may have been encountered during the dangerous tests. Gibson watched his instruments carefully for signs of pursuit miles between himself and the command ship. Then he eased his craft into subspace drive and relaxed his vigilance. He returned to normal space many "days" later in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. They may have attempted to follow him for all he knew, but it hardly mattered by then. He broadcast the recognition signal he had been given to memorize long ago, when he had volunteered his services to the new states. Then he headed for the capital planet, Nessus. Long before reaching it, he acquired a lowering escort of warcraft, but he was permitted to land. "Well, well, it's young Gibson!" the Chairman of Nessus greeted him, after the newcomer had passed through the exhaustive screening designed to protect the elaborate underground headquarters. "I trust you have news for us, my boy. Watch outside the door, Colonel!" One of the ostentatiously armed guards stepped outside and closed the door as Gibson greeted the obese man sitting across the buttonstudded expanse of desk. The scientist was under no illusion as to the vagueness of the title "Chairman." He was facing the absolute power of the Centaurian planets -- which, in a few months' time, would be the same as saying the ruler of all the human race in both systems. Gibson's file must have been available on the Chairman's desk telescreen within minutes of the reception of his recognition signal. He felt a thrill of admiration for the efficiency of the new states and their system of government. He made it his business to report briefly and accurately, trusting that the plain facts of his feat would attract suitable recognition. They did. Chairman Diamond's sharp blue eyes glinted out of the fat mask of his features. "Well done, my boy!" he grunted, with a joviality he did not bother trying to make sound overly sincere. "So they have it! You must see our men immediately, and point out where they have gone wrong. You may leave it to me to decide who has gone wrong!" voluntarily before reminding himself that he had seen the correct answer proved before his eyes. He had stood there and watched -- more, he had worked with them all his adult life -- and he was the last whom the muddled fools would have suspected. The officer outside the door, Colonel Korman, was recalled and given orders to escort Gibson to the secret state laboratories. He glanced briefly at the scientist when they had been let out through the complicated system of safeguards. "We have to go to the second moon," he said expressionlessly. "Better sleep all you can on the way. Once you're there, the Chairman will be impatient for results!" Gibson was glad, after they had landed on the satellite, that he had taken the advice. He was led from one underground lab to another, to compare Centaurian developments with Solarian. Finally, Colonel Korman appeared to extricate him, giving curt answers to such researchers as still had questions. "Whew! Glad you got me out!" Gibson thanked him. "They've been picking my brain for two days straight!" "I hope you can stay awake," retorted Korman with no outward sign of sympathy. "If you think you can't, say so now. I'll have them give you another shot. The Chairman is calling on the telescreen." Gibson straightened. Jealous snob! he thought. Typical military fathead, and he knows I amount to more than any little colonel now. I was smart enough to fool all the so-called brains of the Solar System. "I'll stay awake," he said shortly. Chairman Diamond's shiny features appeared on the screen soon after Korman reported his charge ready. "Speak freely," he ordered Gibson. "This beam is so tight and scrambled that no prying jackass could even tell that it is communication. Have you set us straight?" "Yes, Your Excellency," replied Gibson. "I merely pointed out which of several methods the Solarians got to yield results. Your -- our scientists were working on all possibilities, so it would have been only a matter of time." "Which you have saved us," said Chairman Diamond. His ice-blue eyes glinted again. "I wish I could have seen the faces of Haas and Coordinator Evora, and the rest. You fooled them completely!" Gibson glowed at the rare praise. "I dislike bragging. Your Excellency," he said, "but they are fools. I might very well have found the answer without them, once they had collected the data. My success shows what intelligence, well-directed after the manner of the new states of Centauri, can accomplish against inefficiency." The Chairman's expression, masked by the fat of his face, nevertheless approached a smile. "So you would say that you -- one of our sympathizers -- were actually the most intelligent worker they had?" He'll have his little joke, thought Gibson, and I'll let him put it over. Then, even that sour colonel will laugh with us, and the Chairman will hint about what post I'll get as a reward. I wouldn't mind being in charge -- old Haas' opposite number at this end. "I think I might indeed be permitted to boast of that much ability. Your Excellency," he answered, putting on what he hoped was an expectant smile. "Although, considering the Solarians, that is not saying much." The little joke did not develop precisely as anticipated. "Unfortunately," Chairman Diamond said, maintaining his smile throughout, "wisdom should never be confused with intelligence." G ibson waited, feeling his own smile stiffen as he wondered what could be going wrong. Surely, they could not doubt his loyalty! A hasty glance at Colonel Korman revealed no expression on the military facade affected by that gentleman. "For if wisdom were completely synonymous with intelligence," the obese Chairman continued, relishing his exposition, "you would be a rival to myself, and consequently would be -- disposed of -- anyway!" Such a tingle shot up Gibson's spine that he was sure he must have jumped. "Anyway?" he repeated huskily. His mouth suddenly seemed dry. Chairman Diamond smiled out of the telescreen, so broadly that Gibson was unpleasantly affected by the sight of his small, gleaming, white teeth. "Put it this way," he suggested suavely. "Your highly trained mind observed, correlated, and memorized the most iiitricate data and mathematics, meanwhile guiding your social relations with your former colleagues so as to remain unsuspected while stealing their most cherished secret. Such a feat demonstrates ability and intelligence." Gibson tried to lick his lips, and could not, despite the seeming fairness of the words. He sensed a pulsing undercurrent of cruelty and cynicism. "On the other hand," the mellow voice flowed on, "having received the information, being able to u.se it effectively now without you, and knowing that you betrayed once -- I shall simply discard you like an old message blank. That is an act of wisdom. "Had you chosen your course more wisely," he added, "your position might be stronger." By the time Arnold Gibson regained his voice, the Centaurian autocrat was already giving instructions to Colonel Korman. The scientist strove to interrupt, to attract the ruler's attention even momentarily. Neither paid him any heed, until he shouted and tried frenziedly to shove the soldier from in front of the telescreen. Korman backhanded him across the throat without looking around, with such force that Gibson staggered back and fell. He lay, half-choking, grasping his throat with both hands until he could breathe. The colonel continued discussing his extinction without emotion. "... so if Your Excellency agrees, I would prefer taking him back to Nessus first, for the sake of the morale factor here. Some of them are so addled now at having been caught chasing up wrong alleys that they can hardly work." Apparently the Chairman agreed, for the screen was blank when the colonel reached down and hauled Gibson to his feet. "Now, listen to me carefully!" he said, emphasizing his order with a ringing slap across Gibson's face. "I shall walk behind you with my blaster drawn. If you make a false move, I shall not kill you." Gibson stared at him, holding his bleeding mouth. "It will be much worse," Korman went on woodenly. "Imagine what it will be like to have both feet charred to the bone. You would have to crawl the rest of the way to the ship; I certainly would not consider carrying you!" In a nightmarish daze, Gibson obeyed the cold directions, and walked slowly along the underground corridors of the Centaurian research laboratories. He prayed desperately that someone -- anyone -- might come along. Anybody who could possibly be used to create a diversion, or to be pushed into Korman and his deadly blaster. The halls remained deserted, possibly by arrangement. Maybe I'd better wait till we reach his ship, Gibson thought. I ought to he able to figure a way before we reach Nessus. I had the brains to fool Haas and... He winced, recalling Chairman Diamond's theory of the difference between intelligence and wisdom. The obscene swine! he screamed silently. Colonel Korman grunted warningly, and Gibson took the indicated turn. They entered the spaceship from an underground chamber, and Gibson learned the reason for his executioner's assurance when the latter chained him to one of the pneumatic acceleration seats. The chain was fragile in appearance, but he knew he would not be free to move until Korman so desired. More of their insane brand of cleverness! he reflected. That's the sort of thing they do succeed in thinking of. They're all crazy! Why did I ever... But he shrank from the question he feared to answer. To drag out into the open his petty, selfish reasons, shorn of the tinsel glamor of so-called "service" and "progress," would be too painful. A fter the first series of accelerations, he roused himself from his beaten stupor enough to note that Korman was taking a strange course for reaching Nessus. Then, entirely too close to 'the planet and its satellites to ensure (Continued on page #) A grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too. OU Wine By Richard O. Lewis self more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife. She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher. Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer blackmarket sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up. There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own. His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger. He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing. He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, "I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you." But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her! He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments. Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance. H e let the thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought. It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, "Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop." As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment... He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him eVen now. If not, there would be another one... He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated. Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV ; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three diitiensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit ; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret. He knew that the music and the Images of the performers on the Tv and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him -- his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name -- streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago. He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch. was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tarn. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away... He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses -- monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor -- had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf... Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for selftelportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high. Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter. The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades. The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter -- hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment -- came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls. Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste. When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than shs had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult. ' He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect. A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face. "Hi, honey," she giggled into his ear. "Havin' a time?" He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed. This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old. The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land. The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them. Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening. Plyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet... left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars... Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador. Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before -- a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self -- and complete consciousness -- back to his outer self in a hurry. A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it. The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close. They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male. His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one comer of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms. Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before! His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the meshclad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling. "Been looking for me, honey?" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty. "You know it!" He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth. Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the #'s. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewelstudded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm. He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again. She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds. "Champagne, first," she whispered huskily into his ear. His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand... slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green. He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table. Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her. Unless... Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi. He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily... "Something troubling you, honey?" His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes. "No. Nothing at all!" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. "Come on. Let's dance." He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths. In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. "Let's -- let's go outside." His voice was little more than a croak. "But, honey!" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. "Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside..." Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife. No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river... An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength. He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses. She eluded him deftly. "But, honey!" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. "I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms -- if you can't afford to show me a good time -- if you can't come here real often... The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent. "I'll have money!" he shouted, struggling to hold her. "I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!" "Then we'll wait," she said. "We'll wait until tomorrow night." "No!" he screamed. "You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!" his arms, unyielding. Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes. "I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. "You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!" "Silly boy!" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. "And just who is it you are going to kill?" "My wife!" he cried. "My wife! I'll..." A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife. "And so you are going to kill your wife... He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. "Y-yes," he whispered. Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand. "Fool!" The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain. moved the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch. Seconds later, a slight tremor sjiook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs. his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side. She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone. "Police?" she said. "This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor." She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them. She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front. of fine science fiction being published these days, we guarantee that best five short novels of #. An outstandingly complete and convincing examination of an alien planet and its civilization ; a compelling portrait of a highly unusual, and unusually human, hero; a suspenseful development of a complex problem which will leave you with plenty to ponder and argue -- this is the stuff of which classics are made, and it's coming in the September issue (on sale July #). IF is proud of this story; you won't want to miss it! Sound the fanfare! Beat the drums! Shout hosannas! Here he comes ,... By James McKimmey, Jr. The city stretched. Empty The city yawned, streets glistened from the bath of Rows of houses lay like square a water truck. Dew-wet grass ivory beads on patches of green winked at the fresh peeping sun, felt. A boy drove his bicycle down enue, whistling loudly, while tightly rolled newspapers arced from his hand and slapped against porches, Lights snapped on in a thousand windows, shining yellowly against the cool whiteness of dawn. Men blinked and touched beard-stubbled chins. Women moved sleepily toward porcelain and chrome kitchens. A truck roared and garbage pails rattled. There was a smell of sour orange rinds and wet leaves and unfolding flowers. Over this came the smell of toasting bread and frying bacon. Doors swung open, slippered feet padded across porches and hands groped for the rolled newspapers. The air was stricken with the blaring sound of transcribed music and the excited voices of commercial announcers. The doors swung shut and the sounds were muted. stretched and scratched. The sun rose above the horizon. Celebrity day. D oors slammed again, and half-consumed cups of coffee lay cooling behind. Children wiped at sleepy eyes and mothers swept crumbs, touching self-conscious fingers at their own bed-ruffled hair. Laborers and clerks and lawyers and doctors strode down sidewalks and climbed into automobiles and busses and sleek-nosed elevated trains. The city moved. To the center of the city, where the tall buildings stretched to the lighting sky, came the horde, like thousands of ants toward a comb of honey. Wheels sang and whined. Horns blasted. Whistles blew. And waiting, strung above the wide streets between the cold marquees and the dead neon tubes, were the banners and the flags and the bunting. The air warmed and the sun brightened. Voices chattered. Elbows nudged. Mouths smiled, teeth shone, and there was the sound of laughter, rising over the pushing throngs. The city was happy. The bunting dipped and the banners fluttered and the flags whipped. At the edge of the city, the airport tightened itself. Waiting, waiting for the silver and blue rocket. The rocket of the Celebrity. A large hotel, towering above the pulsing streets, began the quiver of activity. As though a great electric current had been run through its cubes and shafts and hollows, the hotel crackled. Desk clerks clicked bells and bell boys hopped. Elevators rose and fell. In the cellar, wine bottles were dusted by quick, nervous hands. In the kitchen, a towering cake was frosted and decorated. Orders cracked. Hands flew and feet chattered against tile. In one rich expansive suite a giant hoop of multi-colored flowers was placed in the center of a room. It was in the air. Laughter, awe, worship, excitement! Ropes went up and stretched between lamp posts. Blue-coated men on horses began blocking streets. Old women with wooden boxes, children with flashing eyes, men in rich suits and tattered suits began Curbs became lined with people. Bars threw open doors and fresh air met stale air. Men with fat faces, thin faces, white faces, red faces, twitching with the anticipation of holiday freedom, gulped jiggers of raw whiskey and shuddered happily. Children giggled and yelled and sprinted in crazy zig-zags. Men in white caps hustled in front of the lined curbs, shouting, carrying their boxes of ice-cream. Men with buttons, men with pennants, men with balloons joined the shouting, and the sound rose in the air and the city smiled and shifted and its heart pounded. The hotel whirred inside itself. The airport tensed and searched the sky. ing throngs jammed the sidewalks, raising their strengthening sound between the tall buildings. Windows popped open and faces beamed. Tentative showers of confetti drifted down through the air. The city waited, its pulse thumping. The rocket was a black point in the sky. It grew. White-suited men scattered over the landing strip. Photographers crouched. Bulbs snapped into reflectors. Cameras pointed. The rocket landed. A door snapped open. Blue uniforms converged and flash bulbs popped. There were shouts and orders and men running. Gates swung and there was a blue-rimmed movement to a black open car. Sirens moaned, screamed. And the black car was moving swiftly into the city. Beneath the buildings, marching bands in red and blue and yellow uniforms stood assembled. Girls in short skirts and tassled hats spun silver batons into the warm air. Bare legs kicked. Black boots flashed. The crowd swayed against the ropes, and there was laughter and sweating and squinting. The black car reached the heart of the city. Sirens died. Rows of men snapped to attention. Policemen aligned their motorcycles. A baton shimmered high against the sun and came down. A cymbal crashed. Drums cracked. Music blared. And there was a movement down the street. The black car rolled along, while tape swept down from the buildings in long swirling ribbons. There was a snow of confetti. And from the throats of the people came the first roar. It grew, building, building in volume, and the city thundered its welcome to the man sitting upon the back of the open car, the small man who tipped his hat and smiled and blinked behind his glasses: Joseph S. Stettison, B.A., B.S., M.S., M.D., Ph.D., L.M. (Hon.), F.R.C.O.G. C.I.B. Agent Pell used his head, even if he did rely on hunches more than on the computer. In fact, when the game got rough, he found that to use his head, he first had to keep it , Brink of By Walt Sheldon T he night the visitors came Richard Pell worked late among the great banks of criminological computers. He whistled to himself, knowing that he was way off key but not caring. Ciel, his wife, was still in his mind's eye; he'd seen her on the viewer and talked with her not ten minutes ago. "Be home shortly, baby," he'd said, "soon as I fill in a form or two." "All right, dear. I'll wait," she'd answered, with just the slightest tone of doubt. It was an important night. It was at once their second anniversary and the beginning of their second honeymoon. Just how Pell -- knobby, more or less homely, and easygoing -- had won himself a lovely, long-limbed blonde like Ciel was something of a mystery to many of their friends. She could hardly have married him for his money. Central Investigation Bureau agents were lucky if all their extras and bonuses brought them up to a thousand credits a year. Pell had unquestionably caught her in a romantic moment. Maybe that was part of the trouble -- part of the reason they needed this second honeymoon, this period of reacquaintance so badly. Being the wife of a C.I.B. agent meant sitting at home nine-tenths of the time while he was working on a case, and then not hearing about the case for security reasons during the onetenth of the time he was with her. Four times now Pell had been ready to take his vacation; four times last minute business had come up. No more, though, by golly. Tonight he'd get out of here just as quickly as... The Identifier, beyond the door, began to hum. That meant somebody was putting his hand to the opaque screen, and if the scanner recognized the fingerprints the door would open. Pell scowled at the bulky shadows outside. "Go away, whoever you are," he muttered to himself. Some of the other agents were out there, no doubt; they were always getting sudden inspirations late at night and returning to use the computers again. In fact, it had been tactifully suggested to Agent Richard Pell that he might use the computers a little more himself instead of relying on hunches as he so often did. "Investigation's a cold science, not a fancy art," Chief Larkin was fond of saying to the group -- with his eyes on Pell. Well, whoever it was. Pell was definitely through. No time-wasting conversation for him! He was ready for six glorious weeks of saved-up vacation time. He and Ciel, early tomorrow, would grab a rocket for one of the Moon resorts, and there they'd just loaf and relax and pay attention to each other. Try to regain whatever it was they'd had... T he door opened and Chief Larkin walked in. Chief Eustace J. Larkin was tall, in his forties, bu still boyishly handsome. He dressed expensively and well. He was dynamic and confident and he always had about him just the faintest aroma of very expensive shaving cologne. He had a Master's degree in criminology and his rise to the post of Director, C.I.B., had been sudden, dramatic and impressive. Not the least of his talents was a keen sense of public relations. "I -- uh -- was on my way out," said Pell. He reached for his hat. Funny about hats: few people traveled topside anymore, and in the climate-conditioned tunnels you didn't need a hat. But C.I.B. agents had to be neat and dignified; regulations required hats and ties and cuffs and lapels. Thus, you could always spot a C.I.B. agent a mile away. Larkin had a dimple when he smiled and Pell would bet he knew it. "We'd have called your home if we hadn't found you here. Sit down, Dick." Pell sat glumly. For the first time, he noticed the men who had come in with the Chief. He recognized both. One was fiftyish, tall, solidly-built and well-dressed on the conservative side. His face was strong, square and oddly pale, as if someone had taken finest white marble and roughly hacked a face into it. Pell had seen that face in faxpapers often. The man was Theodor Rysland, once a wealthy corporation lawyer, now a World Government adviser in an unofficial way. Some admired him as a selfless public servant; others swore he was a power-mad tyrant. Few were indifferent. "I'm sure you recognize Mr. Rysland," said Chief Larkin, smiling. "And this is Dr. Walter Nebel, of the World Department of Education." Dr. Walter Nebel was slight and had a head remarkably tiny in proportion to the rest of him. He wore cropped hair. His eyes were turtlelidded and at first impression sleepy, and then, with a second look --  wary. Pell remembered that he had won fame some time ago by discovering the electrolytic enzyme in the thought process. Pell wasn't sure exactly what this was, but the faxpapers had certainly made a fuss about it at the time. He shook hands with the two men and then said to Larkin, "What's up?" "Patience," said Larkin and shuffled chairs into place. Rysland sat down solidly and gravely; Nebel perched. Rysland looked at Pell with a strong, level stare and said, "It's my sincere hope that this meeting tonight will prevent resumption of the war with Venus." Larkin said, "Amen." Pell stared back in some surprise. High-level stuff! Rysland saw his stare and chuckled. "Chief Larkin tells me your sympathies are more or less Universalist. Not that it would be necessary, but it helps." "Oh," said Pell, with mild bewilderment. The difference between the Universal and Defense parties was pretty clear-cut. The Universalists hoped to resume full relations with Venus and bring about a really secure peace through friendship and trade. It would admittedly be a tough struggle, and the Defenders didn't think it was possible. Forget Venus, said they; fortify Earth, keep the line of demarcation on Mars, and sit tight. "But there is, as you may know," said Rysland, "a third course in our relations with Venus." "There is?" asked Pell. From the corner of his eye he saw Chief Larkin looking at him with an expression of -- what, amusement? Yes, amusement, largely, but with a touch of contempt, too, perhaps. Hard to say. "The third course," said Rysland, not smiling, "would be to attack Venus again, resume the war, and hope to win quickly. We know Venus is exhausted from the recent struggle. A sudden, forceful attack might possibly subjugate her. At least, that is the argument of a certain group called the Supremists." Dr. Nebel spoke for the first time. Pell realized that the man had been watching him closely. His voice was sibilant ; it seemed to drag itself through wet grass. "Also Venus Is psychologically unprepared for war; the Supremists believe that, too." Pell reached back into his memory. The Supremists. They were a minor political party -- sort of a cult, too. The outfit had sprung up in the last year or so. Supremists believed that Earthmen, above all other creatures, had a destiny -- were chosen -- were supreme. They had several followers as delegates in World Congress. General impression: slightly crackpot. "The Supremists," said Theodor Rysland, tapping his hard, white palm, and leaning forward, "have been calling for attack. Aggression. Starting the war with Venus all over again. And they're not only a vociferous nuisance. They have an appeal in this business of Earthman's supremacy. They're gaining converts every day. In short, they've now become dangerous." Rysland talked. Certainly the idea of renewed war was nightmarish. He'd been in the last one: who hadn't? It had started in #, the year he was born, and it had dragged on for twenty-five years until T-day and the truce. The causes? Well, both Earth and Venus worked the mineral deposits on Mars unimpeded by the non-intelligent insectile life on that planet, and the original arguments had been about those mineral deposits, though there were enough for a dozen planets there. The causes were more complicated and obscure than that. Semantics, partly. There was freedom as Earthmen saw it and freedom as the Venusians saw it. Same with honor and good and evil. They were always two different things. And then Venusians had a greenish tinge to their skins and called the Earthmen, in their clicking language, "Pink-faces." And both Earthmen and Venusians hated like the devil to see the other get away with anything. Anyway, there had been war, terrible war. Space battle, air battle, landing, repulse. Stalemate. Finally, through utter weariness perhaps, truce. Now, a taut, uneasy, suspicious peace. Communications opened, a few art objects mutually exchanged. Immigration for a few Venusian dancers or students or diplomats. It wasn't much, but it was all in the right direction. At least Pell felt so. Rysland was saying: "We're not sure, of course, but we suspect -- we jeel -- that more than mere accident may be behind these Supremists." "What do you mean by that?" "Someone seeking power, perhaps. As I said, we don't know. We want to find out. Dr. Nebel has been interested for some time in the curious psychology of these Supremists -- their blind, unthinking loyalty to their cause, for instance. He is, as you know, a special assistant in the Department of Education. He asked my help in arranging for an investigation, and I agreed with him wholeheartedly that one should be made." "And I told these gentlemen," said Chief Larkin, "that I'd put a detail on it right away." Now Pell believed he saw through it. Larkin didn't believe it was important at all; he was just obliging these Vips. A man couldn't have too many friends in World Government circles, after all. But of course Larkin couldn't afford to put one of his bright, machineminded boys on it, and so Pell was the patsy. "Could I remind you," said Pell, "that my vacation is supposed to start tomorrow?" "Now, now, Dick," said Larkin, turning on the personality, "this won't take you long. Just a routine report. The computers ought to give you all the information you need in less than a day." "That's what you always say, every time I'm ready to take a vacation. I've been saving up for two years now... "Dick, that's hardly the right attitude for an agent who is so close to making second grade." Larkin had him over a barrel, there. Pell desperately wanted to make his promotion. Second-graders didn't spend their time at the control banks gathering data; they did mostly desk work and evaluation. They had a little more time to spend with their wives. He said, "Okay, okay," and got up. "Where are you going?" "To get my wife on the viewer and tell her I won't be home for a while after all." He left the three of them chuckling and thought: He jests at scars who never felt a wound. He didn't say it aloud. You could quote formulae or scientific precepts in front of Larkin, but not Shakespeare. number and waited until Ciel's image swirled into the viewplate. His heart went boppety-bop as it always did. Hair of polished gold. Dark eyes, ripe olives, a little large for her face and sometimes deep and fathomless. She wore a loose, filmy nightgown and the suggestion of her body under it was enough to bring on a touch of madness in him. "Let me say it," Ceil said. She wasn't smiling. "You won't be home for a while. You've got another case." "Well -- yes. That's it, more or less." Pell swallowed. "Oh, Dick." "I'm sorry, honey. It's just that something important came up. I've got a conference on my hands. It shouldn't take more than an hour." "And we were supposed to leave for the moon in the morning." "Listen, baby, this is absolutely the last time. I mean it. As soon as this thing is washed up we'll really take that vacation. Look, I'll tell you what. I'll meet you somewhere in an hour. We'll have some fun -- take in a floor show -- drink a little meth. We haven't done that in a long time. How about the Stardust Cafe? I hear they've got a terrific new mentalist there." Ciel said, "No." "Don't be like that. We need an evening out. It'll hold us until I get this new case washed up. That won't be long, but at least we'll have a little relaxation." Ciel said, "Well..." "Attababy. One hour. Absolutely. You just go to Station B-#, take the lift to topside and it's right on Shapley Boulevard there. You can't miss it." "I know where it is," said Ciel. She shook her finger. "Richard Pell, so help me, if you stand me up this time..." "Baby!" he said in a tone of deep injury. "Goodbye, Dick." She clicked off. Pell had the feeling that even the free-flowing meth and the gaiety of the Stardust Cafe wouldn't really help matters much. He sighed deeply as he turned and went back into the other room. Chapter II later he stepped from the elevator kiosk at Station B-# and breathed the night air of topside. It was less pure actually than the carefully controlled tunnel air, but it was somehow infinitely more wonderful. At least to a sentimental primitive boob like Richard Pell, it was. Oh, he knew that it was infinitely more sensible to live and work entirely underground as people did these days -- but just the same he loved the look of the black sky with the crushed diamonds of stars thrown across it and he loved the uneven breeze and the faint smell of trees and grass. This particular topside section was given over to entertainment; all about him were theaters and cafes and picnic groves and airports for flying sports. A few hundred feet ahead he could see the three-dimensional atmospheric projection that marked the Stardust Cafe, and he could hear faintly the mournful sound of a Venusian lament being played by the askarins. He was glad they hadn't banned Venusian music, anyway, although he wouldn't be surprised if they did, some day. That was one of the things these Supremists were trying to do. Rysland and Chief Larkin had given him a long and careful briefing on the outfit so that he could start work tomorrow with his partner, Steve Kronski. Steve, of course, would shrug phlegmatically, swing his big shoulders toward the computer rooms and say, "Let's go to work." It would be just another assignment to him. As a matter of fact, the job would be not without a certain amount of interest. There were a couple of puzzling things about these Supremists that Rysland had pointed out. First of all, they didn't seem to be at all organized or incorporated. No headquarters, no officers that anybody knew about. They just were. It was a complete mystery how a man became a Supremist, how they kept getting new members all the time. Yet you couldn't miss a Supremist whenever you met one. Before the conversation was half over he'd start spouting about the destiny of Earthmen and the general inferiority of all other creatures and so on. It sounded like hogwash to Pell. He wondered how such an attitude could survive in a scientific age. Nor would a Supremist be essentially a moron or a neurotic; they were found in all walks of life, at all educational and emotional levels. Rysland told how he had questioned a few, trying to discover when, where and how they joined the movement; Apparently there was nothing to join, at least to hear them tell it. They just knew one day that they were Supremists, and that was the word. Rysland had shaken his head sadly and said, "Their belief is completely without logic -- and maybe that's what makes it so strong. Maybe that's what frightens me about it." Pell would tackle it. Tomorrow he'd think about it. Right now he had a date with his best girl. He entered the cafe and the music of the askarins swirled more loudly about his head and he looked through the smoke and colored light until he spotted Ciel sitting in a rear booth. The place was crowded. On the small dance floor before the orchestra nearly nude Venusian girls were going through the writhing motions of a serpentine dance. Their greenish skins shimmered iridescently. The sadfaced Venusian musicians on the band-stand waved their graceful, spatulated fingers over thair curious, boxlike askarins, producing changing tones and overtones by the altered capacitance. A rocketman in the black and silver uniform of the Space Force was trying to stumble drunkenly out on to the floor with the dancers and his friends were holding him back. There was much laughter about the whole thing. The Venusian girls kept dancing and didn't change their flat, almost lifeless expressions. Ciel looked up without smiling when he got to the booth. She had a half-finished glass of meth before her... He tried a smile anyway. "Hello, baby." He sat down. She said, "I didn't really think you'd get here. I could have had dates with exactly eleven spacemen. I kept count." "You have been faithful to me, Cynara, in your fashion. I need a drink and don't want to wait for the waitress. Mind?" He took her half glass of meth and tossed it down. He felt the wonderful illusion of an explosion in his skull, and it seemed to him that his body was suddenly the strongest in the world and that he could whip everybody in the joint with one arm tied behind his back. He said, "Wow." Ciel tried a smile now. "It does that to you when you're not used to it." The first effect passed and he felt only the warmth of the drink. He signaled a waitress and ordered a couple more. "Don't forget to remind me to take a hangover pill before I go to work in the morning," he told Ciel. "You -- you are going to work in the morning, then?" "Afraid I can't get out of it." "And the moon trip's off?" "Not off, just postponed. We'll get to it, don't worry." "Dick." "Yes?" "I can take it just so' long, putting our vacation off and off and off." Her eyes were earnest, liquid and opaque. "I've been thinking about it. Trying to arrive at something. I'm beginning to wonder, Dick, if maybe we hadn't just better, well -- call it quits, or something." He stared at her. "Baby, what are you saying?" from the orchestra interrupted. They looked at the dance floor. There was a flash of light, a swirling of jnist, and within the space of a second the Venusian girls suddenly disappeared and their place was taken by a tall. hawk-nosed, dark-eyed man with a cloak slung dramatically over one shoulder. The audience applauded. "That's Marco, the new mentalist," said Pell. Ciel shrugged to show that she wasn't particularly impressed. Neither was Pell, to tell the truth. Mentalists were all the rage, partly because everybody could practice a little amateur telepathy and hypnotism in his own home. Mentalists, of course, made a career of it and were much better at it than anybody else. Their drinks came and they watched Marco go through his act in a rather gloomy silence. Marco was skillful, but not especially unusual. He did the usual stuff; calling out things that people wrote on slips of paper, calling out dates on coins, and even engaging in mental duels wherein the challenger wrote a phrase, concealed it from Marco, and then deliberately tried to keep him from reading it telepathically. He had the usual hypnotism session with volunteers who were certain they could resist. He made them hop around the stage like monkeys, burn their fingers on pieces of ice, and so on. The audience roared with laughter. Pell and Ciel just kept staring. When Marco had finished his act and the thundering applause had faded the Venusian dancing girls came back on the stage again. Ciel yawned. Pell said, "Me, too. Let's get out of here." It wasn't until they were home in their underground apartment and getting ready for bed that Ciel turned to him and said, "You see?" He was buttoning his pajamas. "See what?" "It's us, Dick. It's not the floor show, or the meth, or anything -- it's us. We can't enjoy anything together any more." He said, "Now wait a minute..." But she had already stepped into the bedroom and slammed the door. He heard the lock click. "Hey," he said, "what am I supposed to do, sleep out here?" , He took the ensuing silence to mean that he was. And he did. T he next morning, as he came into the office. Pell scowled deeply and went to his desk without saying good morning to anybody. Ciel had kept herself locked in the bedroom and he had made his own breakfast. How it was all going to end he didn't know. He had the feeling that she was working herself up to the decision to leave him. And the real hell of it was that he couldn't exactly blame her. "Morning, partner," said a voice above him. He looked up. Way up. Steve Kronski was built along the general lines of a water buffalo. The usual battered grin was smeared across his face. "I see we got a new assignment." "Oh -- did Larkin brief you on it already?" "Yeah. Before I could get my hat off. Funny set-up, all right. I punched for basic data before you got in. Hardly any." "Maybe that means something in itself. Maybe somebody saw to it that the information never got into the centralbanksu" Tlie C.I.B. computers could be hooked into the central banks which stored information on nearly everything and everybody. If you incorporated, filed for a patent, paid taxes, voted, or just were born, the central banks had an electronic record of it. Kronski jerked his thumb toward the computer room. "I punched for names of Supremist members coupla minutes ago. Thought maybe we could start in that way." Pell followed, his mind not really on the job yet. He wasn't at his best working with the computers, and yet operating them was ninety per cent of investigation. He supposed he'd get used to it sometime. Three walls of the big computer room were lined with control racks, consisting mostly of keyboard setups. Code symbols and index cards were placed in handy positions. The C.I.B. circuits, of course, were adapted to the specialized work of investigation. In the memory banks of tubes and relays there was a master file of all names -- aliases and nicknames included -- with which the organization had ever been concerned. Criminals, witnesses, complaints, everyone. Code numbers linked to the names showed where data on their owner could be found. A name picked at random might show that person to have data in the suspect file, the arrest file, the psychological file, the modus operand! file, and so forth. Any of the data in these files could be checked, conversely, against the names. Kronski walked over to where letter sized cards were flipping from a slot into a small bin. He said. "Didn't even have to dial in Central Data for these. Seems we got a lot of Supremist members right in our own little collection." Pell picked up one of the cards and examined it idly. Vertical columns were inscribed along the card, each with a heading, and with further sub-headed columns. Under the column marked Modus Operandi, for instance, there were subcolumns titled Person Attacked, Property Attacked, How Attacked, Means of Attack, Object of Attack, and Trademark. Columns of digits, one to nine, were under each item. If the digits # and # were punched under Trademark the number # could be fed into the Operational Data machine and this machine would then give back the information on a printed slip that number # stood for the trademark of leaving cigar butts at the scene of the crime. "Got five hundred now," said Kronski. "I'll let a few more run in case we need alternates." "Okay," said Pell. "I'll start this batch through the analyzer." He took the cards across the room to a machine about twenty feet long and dropped them into the feeder at one end. Channels and rollers ran along the top of this machine and under them were a series of vertical slots into which the selected cards could drop. He cleared the previous setting and ran the pointer to Constants. He set the qualitative dial to #. This meant that on the first run the punch hole combinations in the cards would be scanned and any item common to # of the total would be registered in a relay. Upon the second run the machine would select the cards with this constant and drop them into a slot corresponding with that heading. Further scanning, within the slot itself, would pick out the constant number. Pell started the rollers whirring. Kronski came over. He rubbed his battered nose. "Hope we get outside on this case. I'm gettin' sick o' the office. Haven't been out in weeks." Pell nodded. Oh, for the life of a C.I.B. man. In teleplays they cornered desperate criminals in the dark ruins of the ancient cities topside, and fought it out with freezers. The fact was, although regulations called for them to carry freezers in their shoulder holsters, one in a thousand ever got a chance to use them. Pell said, "Maybe you need a vacation." "Maybe. Only I keep putting my vacation off. Got a whole month saved up now." "Me, too." Pell sighed. Ciel would probably be pacing the floor back home now, trying to make up her mind. To break it up, or not to break it up? There would be no difficulty, really: she had been a pretty good commercial artist before they were married and she wouldn't have any trouble finding a job again somewhere in World City. The rollers kept whirring and the cards flipping along with a whispering sound. "Wonder what we're looking into these Supremists for?" asked Kronski. "I always thought they were some kind of harmless crackpots." "The Chief doesn't think so. Neither does Theodor Rysland." He told Kronski more about the interview last night. Presently the machine stopped, clicked several times and began rolling the other way. "Well, it found something," said Kronski. They kept watching. Oh, for the life of a C.I.B. man. Cards began to drop into one of the slots. The main heading was Physical and the sub-heading Medical History. Pell frowned and said, "Certainly didn't expect to find a constant in this department." He picked up a few of the first cards and looked at them, hoping to catch the constant by eye. He caught it. "What's # under this heading?" out," and stepped over to the Operational Data board. He worked it, took the printed slip that came out and called back; "Record of inoculation." "That's a funny one." "Yup. Sure is." Kronski stared at the slip and scratched his neck. "It must be just any old kind inoculation. If it was special -- like typhoid or tetanus or something -- it'd have another digit." "There must be some other boildowns, if we could think of them." Pell was frowning heavily. Some of the other men, used to the machines, could grab a boil-down out of thin air, run the cards again and get another significant constant. The machine, however, inhibited Pell. It made him feel uneasy and stupid whenever he was around it. "How about location?" suggested Kronski. Pell shook his head. "I checked a few by eye. All different numbers under location. Some of 'em come from World City, some from Mars Landing, some from way out in the sticks. Nothing significant there." "Maybe what we need is a cup of coffee." Pell grinned. "Best idea all morning. Come on." Some minutes later they sat across from each other at a table in the big cafeteria on the seventythird level. It was beginning to be crowded now with personnel from other departments and bureaus. The coffee urge came for nearly everybody in the government offices at about the same time. Pell was studying by eye a handful of spare data cards he'd brought along and Kronski was reading faxpaper clippings from a large manila envelope marked Supremist Party. Just on a vague hunch Pell had viewplated Central Public Relations and had them send the envelope down by tube. "Prominent Educator Addresses Supremist Rally," Kronski muttered. "Three Spaceport Cargomen Arrested at Supremist Riot. Young Supremists Form Rocket Club. Looks like anybody and everybody can be a Supremist. And his grandmother. Wonder how they do it?" "Don't know." Pell wasn't really listening. "And here's a whole town went over to the Supremists. On the moon." "Uh-huh," said Pell. Kronski sipped his coffee loudly. A few slender, graceful young men from World Commerce looked at him distastefully. "Happened just this year. New Year they all went over. Augea, in the Hercules Mountains. Big celebration." Pell looked up and said, "Wait a minute..." "Wait for what? I'm not goin' anywhere. Not on this swivel-chair of a job, damn it." "New Year they all become Supremists. And the last week of December everybody on the moon gets his inoculations, right?" "Search me." "But I know that. I found that out when I was tailing those two gamblers who had a place on the moon, remember?" "So it may be a connection." Kronski shrugged. "It may be the place where we can study a bunch of these cases in a batch instead of picking 'em one by one." "You mean we oughta take a trip to the moon?" "Might not hurt for a few days." Kronski was grinning at him. "What are you grinning at?" "First you got to stay over on your vacation, so you can't go to the moon with your wife. Now all of a sudden you decide duty has got to take you to the moon, huh?" Pell grinned back then. "What are you squawking about? You said you wanted to get out on this case." Kronski, still grinning, got up. "I'm not complaining. I'm just demonstrating my powers of deduction, as they say in teleplays. Come on, let's go make rocket reservations." T he big tourist rochet let them down at the Endymion Crater Landing, and they went through the usual immigration and customs formalities in the underground city there. They stayed in a hotel overnight, Pell and Ciel looking very much like tourists, Kronski tagging along and looking faintly out of place. In the morning -- morning according to the # hour earth clock, that is -- they took the jitney rocket to the resort town of Augea, in the Hercules Mountains. The town was really a cliff dwelling, built into the side of a great precipice with quartz windows overlooking a tremendous, stark valley. It was hard to say just what attraction the moon had as a vacation land, and it was a matter of unfathomable taste. You either liked it, or you didn't. If you didn't, you couldn't understand what people who liked it saw in it. They couldn't quite explain. "It's so quiet. It's so vast. It's so beautiful," they'd say, but never anything clearer than that. Augea itself was like twenty other resorts scattered throughout both the northern and southern latitudes of the moon. Except for the military posts and scientific research stations the moon had little value other than as a vacation land. People came there to rest, to look at the bizarre landscape through quartz, or occasionally to don spacesults and go out on guided exploration trips. Immediately after checking into their hotel Pell and Kronski got directions to the office of the Resident Surgeon and prepared to go there. Ciel looked on quietly as Pell tightened the straps of his shoulder holster and checked the setting on his freezer. Ciel said, "I knew it." "Knew what, honey?" Pell went to the mirror to brush his hair. He wasn't sure it would materially improve the beauty of his long, knobby, faintly melancholy face, but he did it any way. "The minute we get here you have to go out on business." He turned, kissed her, then held and patted her hand. "That's just because I want to get it over with. Then I'll have time for you. Then we'll have lots of time together." She melted into him suddenly. She put her arms around .his neck and held him tightly. "If I didn't love you, you big lug, it wouldn't be so bad. But, Dick, I can't go on like this much longer. I just can't." "Now, baby," he started to say. There was a knock on the door then and he knew Kronski was ready. He broke away from her, threw a kiss and said, "Later. Later, baby." She nodded and held her under lip in with her upper teeth. He sighed and left. hotel and started walking along the winding tunnel with the side wall of quartz. On their right the huge valley, with its stark, imearthly landshapes, stretched away. It was near the end of the daylight period and the shadows from the distant peaks, across the valley, were long and deep. Some of them, with little reflected light, seemed to be patches of nothingness. Pell fancied he could step through them into another dimension. All about them, even here in the side of the mountain, and behind the thick quartz, there was the odd, utterly dead silence of the moon. Their footsteps echoed sparsely in the corridor. Pell said to Kronski, "Got the story all straight?" "Like as if it was true." "Remember the signal?" "Sure. Soon as you say we're out of cigarettes. What's the matter, you think I'm a moron, I can't remember?" Pell laughed and clapped him on the shoulder blade. Minutes later they turned in from the corridor, went through another, shorter passageway and then came to a door marked; Resident Surgeon. They knocked and a deep voice boomed: "Come in!" It was a medium-sized room, clearly a dispensary. There was an operating table, a sterilizer, tall glass-fronted instrument cabinets and a refrigerator. At, the far end of the room a hulking, bear-like man sat behind a magnalloy desk. The nameplate on the desk said: Hal H. Wilcox, M.D. "Howdy, gents," said Dr. Hal H. Wilcox, shattering the moon-silence with a vengeance. "What can I do for you?" he was all smiles. That smile, decided Pell, didn't quite match the shrewdness of his eyes. Have to watch this boy, maybe. There was a big quartz window behind the man so that for the moment Pell saw him almost in silhouette. "We're from Current magazine," said Pell. "I'm Dick Pell and this is Steve Kronski. You got our radio, I guess." "Oh, yes. Yes, indeed." Wilcox creaked way back in his chair. "You're the fellas want to do a story on us moon surgeons." "That's right." Pell fumbled a little self-consciously with the gravity weights clipped to his trousers. Took a while for moon visitors t# get used to them, everybody said. "Well, I don't know exactly as how there's much of a story in what we do. We're just a bunch of sawbones stationed here, that's all." "We're interested in the diseases peculiar to the moon," said Pell. "For instance, why do the permanent residents up here have to have an inoculation every year?" "That's for the Venusian rash. Thought everybody knew that." "Venusian rash?" "Nearest thing we ever had to it on Earth was Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It's a rickettsia disease. Makes a fella pretty sick; sometimes kills Lim in two, three days. It started when they had those Venusian construction workers and tunnel men here, oh, long before the war. Under certain conditions the rickettsia stays dormant and then pops up again." "And the inoculation's for that?" "Standard. Once a year. You got the inoculation yourself, no doubt, before you jumped off for the moon." "Where does the serum or whatever you call it come from?" Pell thought he saw Wilcox's eyes flicker. The doctor said, "It's stored at the main landings. We draw it as we need it from there." "Have any here now?" Wilcox's eyes did move this time. He looked at the refrigerator -- but only for the veriest moment. "Don't really reckon so," he said finally. He was staring blankly at Pell again. Pell patted his pockets, turned to Kronski and said, "You know, I think we're out of cigarettes." Before Kronski could answer he moved to the big quartz window behind Wilcox's desk. He gazed at the moonscape. "Just can't get over how big and quiet it is," he said. Wilcox turned and gazed with him. Kronski drew his freezer. He pointed it, squeezed, and there was a soft, momentary buzzing and a twinkling of violet sparks at the muzzle of the weapon. Wilcox sat where he was, frozen, knowing nothing. on, Steve. Let's get it." They both stepped to the refrigerator. They had only seconds; Kronski' s weapon had been set at a low reading. The time of paralysis varied with the individual and Doc Wilcox looked husky enough not to stay frozen very long. If Pell and Kronski returned to their original positions after he came out of it he would never know that anything had happened. Far back on a lower shelf of the refrigerator were a dozen small bottles of the same type. Pell grabbed one, glanced at the label, nodded, and dropped it into his pocket. They took their places again. A few moments later Wilcox moved slightly and said, "Yup. Moon's a funny place all right. You either like it or you don't." The rest of the conversation was fairly uninspired. Pell didn't want to walk out too quickly, and had to keep up the pretense of interviewing Wilcox for a magazine story. It wasn't easy. They excused themselves finally, saying they'd be back for more information as soon as they made up some notes and got the overall picture -- whatever that meant. Wilcox seemed satisfied with it. They hurried back along the tunnel, descended to another level and found the Augea Post Office. They showed the postmaster their C.I.B. shields and identification cards and arranged for quick and special handling for the bottle of vaccine. Pell marked it Attention, Lab, and it was scheduled to take a quick rocket to the Endymion landing and the next unmanned mail rocket back to World City. Pell stayed at the Post Office to make out a quick report on the incident so he wouldn't have to bore Ciel by doing it in the room, and Kronski sauntered on back to the hotel. There was a fax receiver there and Pell, missing the hourly voice bulletins of World City Underground, checked it for news. The pages were coming out in a long tongue. He looked at the first headline: Well, that was a step in the right direction. Maybe one of these days they'd get around to a Solar Congress, as they ought to. The recent open war with Venus had taught both Earthmen and Venusians a lot about space travel, and it was probably possible to explore the solar system further right now. No one had yet gone beyond the asteroids. Recent observations from the telescope stations here on the moon had found what seemed to be geometrical markings on some of Jupiter's satellites. Life there? Could be. Candidates for a brotherhood of the zodiac -- if both Terrans and Venusians could get the concept of brotherhood pounded through their still partially savage skulls. Another headline; Not so good, that. Loose talk. Actually it was an Undersecretary of War who had said it. Pell ran over the rest of the article quickly and came to what seemed to him a significant excerpt. "Certain patriotic groups in the world today necessary sacrifices to get it over with. There is a fundamental difference between Earthmen and other creatures of the system, and this difference can be resolved only by the dominance of one over the other." Supremist stuff. Strictly. If this Undersecretary were not actually a member he was at least a supporter of the Supremist line. And that line had an appeal for the unthinking, Pell had to admit. It was pleasant to convince yourself that you were a superior specimen, that you were chosen... Pell frowned deeply at that one and read the story. A couple of Venusian miners on Mars had wandered too close to one of the Earth military outposts, and had been nabbed. He doubted that they were spies; he doubted that the authorities holding them thought so. But it seemed to make a better story with a slight scare angle. He thought about how Mars was divided at an arbitrary meridian -- half to Venus, half to Earth. The division solved nothing, pleased nobody. Joe Citizen, the man in the tunnels could see these things, why couldn't these so-called trained diplomats? Pell finished his report, questioned the Postmaster a little on routine facts concerning the town, and went back to the hotel. She was in a smart, frontless frock of silvercloth. Her golden hair shone. Her large, dark eyes looked deep, moist, alive. She looked at him questioningly and he read the silent question : Now can you spare a little time? "Baby," he said softly, and kissed her. "Mm," he said when he had finished kissing her. The voice-phone rang. He said, "Damn it." It was Kronski, in his own room next door. "Did Wilcox leave yet?" he asked. "Wilcox?" "Yeah. The Doc. Is he still there?" "I didn't know he was here at all." Kronski said, "Huh?" Pell said, "Maybe we better back up and start all over again." "Wilcox, the Resident Surgeon Doc Wilcox," said Kronski, not too patiently. "He was in my room a little while ago. Said he'd drop by on his way out and see if you were in." Pell glanced at Ciel. She was busy lighting a cigarette at the other end of the room. Or pretending to be busy. Pell said, "I just got here. Just this minute. I didn't see any Wilcox. What'd he want?" "I don't know exactly. He was kind of vague about it. Wanted to know if he could answer any more questions for us, or anything like that." "Sounds screwy." "Yeah. It sure does, now that I think it over." "Let me call you back," said Pell and hung up. He turned to Ciel. "Was Doc Wilcox here?" "Why, yes. He stopped in." Nothing but blank innocence on her face. "Why didn't you tell me?" "Hm?" She raised her eyebrows. "He just stopped in to see if you were here, that was all. I told him you weren't and he went out again." "But you didn't mention it." "Well, why should I?" "I don't know. I'd think you'd say something about it." "Now, listen, Dick -- I'm not the matter with you, anyway?" "It just strikes me as funny that Wilcox should drop in here and you shouldn't say one word about it, that's all." "Well, I like that." She folded her arms. "You're getting to be so much of a cop you're starting to be suspicious of your own wife." "Now, you know it's not that at all." "What else is it? Dick, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of this whole stupid business you're in. The first time we get a few minutes alone together you start giving me the third degree. I won't stand for it, that's all!" "Now, baby," he said and took a step toward her. The deeper tone of the viewer sounded. Mol. said disgustedly and answered the call. The image of Chief Larkin's boyishly handsome face came into focus on the screen. Pell lifted a surprised eyebrow and said, "Oh, hello, Chief." Larkin's eye was cold. Especially cold in the setting of that boyish face. "What in hell," he asked, "are you and Kronski doing on the moon?" "Hm?" Now it was Pell's turn to look innocent. "Why, you know what we're doing. Chief. We're investigating that case. You know the one -- I don't want to mention it over the viewer." "Who the devil authorized you to go traipsing to the moon to do it?" "Why, nobody authorized us. I thought -- I mean, when you're working on a case and you have a lead, you're supposed to go after it, aren't you?" "Yes, but not when it's a crazy wild goose chase." In the viewer Pell saw the Chief slam his desk with the palm of his hand. "I'd like to know what in blazes you think you can do on the moon that you can't do in a good healthy session at the computers?" "Well, that's kind of hard to explain over the viewer. We have made some progress, though. I just sent you a report on it." Larkin narrowed one eye. "Pell, who do you think you're fooling?" "Fooling?"  "You heard me. I know damn well you wanted to take a vacation on the moon. But we have a little job for you that holds you up, and what do you do? The next best thing, eh? You see to it that the job takes you to the moon." "Now, Chief, it wasn't that at all " "The devil it wasn't. Now, listen to me. Pell. You pack your bags and get right back to World City. The next rocket you can get. You understand?" Before he answered the question he looked at Ciel. She was staring at him quietly. Again he could read something of what was in her mind. He knew well enough that she was trying to say to him: "Make a clean break now. Tell him No, you won't come back. Quit. Now's the time to do it -- unless you want that stupid job of yours more than you want me..." Pell sighed deeply, slowly looked into the viewer again and said, "Kronski and I'll be back on the next rocket. Chief." Chter rV B ack again in the underground offices of C.I.B., Agent Richard Pell plunged into his job. Up to his neck. It was the only way he could keep from brooding about Ciel. She was somewhere in the city at this very moment and if he really wanted to take the trouble he'd be able to find her easily enough -- but he didn't want it to happen that way. She'd never really be his again unless she came to him... And so once more he found himself in the office late at night. Alone. Poring over the lab reports that had come in that afternoon, turning them over in his mind and hoping, he supposed, for a nice intuitive flash, free of charge. As a matter of fact the analysis of the vaccine he'd lifted from Wilcox's dispensary was not without significance. There was definitely an extraneous substance. The only question was just, what this substance might be. Take a little longer to find that out, the report said. It made Pell think of the corny sign World Government officials always had on their desks, the one about doing the difficult right away and taking a little longer for the impossible. Some day, when he was a big-shot, he would have a sign on his desk saying: Why make things difficult when with even less effort you can make them impossible? Of course, ideas like that were probably the very reason he'd never be a big-shot... The Identifier humming. Someone coming again. He looked up, and then had the curious feeling of being jerked back in time to several nights ago. Chief Larkin and Theodor Rysland entered. "Hello, Dick," said Larkin, with a touch of studied democracy. He glanced at the government adviser as if to say: See? Knew we'd find him here. Pell made a sour face. "Some day I'm going to stop giving all this free overtime. Some day I'm not going to show up at all." Rysland smiled, dislodging some of the rock strata of his curiously pale face. He seemed a little weary this evening. He moved slowly and with even more than his usual dignity. He said, "I hope, Mr. Pell, that you'll wait at least until you finish this job for us. I understand you've made some progress." Pell shrugged and gestured at the lab report. "Progress, maybe -- but I don't know how far. Just a bunch of new puzzles to be perfectly frank." Rysland sat down at the other desk and drummed on it with his fingertips. He looked at Pell gravely. "As a matter of fact, since we last talked to you the situation has become even more urgent. A Supremist congressman introduced a bill today before the world delegates which may prove very dangerous. Perhaps you know the one I refer to." "I was too busy to follow the news today," said Pell, looking meaningfully at Larkin. Larkin didn't seem to notice. Rysland said, "I'll brief you then. The bill purports to prohibit material aid of any kind to a nonTerran government. That means both credit and goods. And since the only real non-Terran government we know is Venus, it's obviously directed specifically at the Venusians." Pell thought it over. High level stuff again. He nodded to show he followed. "On the surface," continued Rysland, "this would seem to be a sort of anti-espionage bill. Actually, it's a deliberately provocative act. I know the Venusians will take it that way. But right now certain quarters are secretly trying to negotiate a trade treaty with Venus which would be a major step toward peaceful relations. If this bill became law, such a treaty would be impossible." "But World Congress isn't likely to pass such a bill, is it? Won't they see through it?" Rysland frowned. "That's what we're not sure of. Messages are pouring in urging passage -- all of them from Supremists, of course. The Supremists are relatively few, but they make a lot of noise. Sometimes noise like that is effective. It could swing a lot of delegates who don't see the real danger of this bill and are at the moment undecided. The Defender side, with its desire to isolate and fortify, is especially susceptible." "That is bad," said Pell thoughtfully. the desk. "Now then, if we can somehow discredit the Supremists -- get to the bottom of this thing quickly enough -- I'm sure that bill will be killed. I came here tonight, I suppose, out of pure anxiety. In other words, Mr. Pell, just how far are you?" Pell smiled and shook his head. "Not very, I'm afraid. This Supremist thing is the damndest I ever came across. No central headquarters, no officers, no propaganda mill -- entirely word of mouth as far as I can see. No way of finding out how it started, or even how the new members are proselyted. Ask any member how he became a Supremist. He just looks kind of dreamy and mutters something about the truth suddenly dawning upon him one day." "But don't you have any theories?" "I've got a hunch," Pell said, picking up the lab report. Chief Larkin snorted softly. The snort said clearly enough that an efficient investigator didn't depend on hunches these days: he went after something doggedly on the computer, or by other approved techniques. Pell pretended not to hear the snort. "First of all we discovered that nearly all Supremists received some kind of an inoculation before they became Supremists. Then we found a whole village, one of those moon resort towns, that had gone over. There was the record of inoculation there, too. I got hold of some of the vaccine and had the lab analyze it. It's mostly vaccine all right, but there is a foreign substance in it. Listen." He read from the report: "Isolated point oh six jour seven grams unclassified crystal compound, apparently form of nucleotide enzyme. Further analysis necessary." "You think this enzyme, or whatever it is, has something to do with it?" "I don't know. All I have is a pretty wild theory. To begin, when our lab can't analyze something right away, it's pretty rare -- possibly even unknown to chemistry in general. Now it's just possible that this substance does something to the brain that makes a man into a Supremist, and that somebody's behind the whole thing, deliberately planting the stuff so that people here and there become injected with it." "Pell." Larkin made a pained face. "Really." Pell shrugged. "Well, as I say, it's a hunch, that's all." "It's a pipe dream," said Larkin. "I never heard of anything so fantastic." "That's what folks said a couple of centuries ago when the Venusians were first trying to make contact and their ships were sighted all over the place. T never heard of anything so fantastic,' they all said." Theodor Rysland still looked interested. "Granted there is some connection between the Supremist mental state and this, er, enzyme. What then, Mr. Pell?" "Well," said Pell, stretching his legs out, "I had an idea maybe your friend Dr. Nebel could give us some help on that." "Nebel?" "He's interested in this thing, isn't he?" "Definitely. Nebel's a very public spirited man." "Well, I understand he's one of the top psychobiologists in the country today. Seems to me this new enzyme, whatever it is, would be right up his alley. Of course the lab should get to it eventually, but he might do it a lot quicker." Larkin had been examining some statistical crime charts on the wall. He turned from them. "Pell, does Kronski know about all these wild hunches of yours?" "I haven't talked with him about them yet. He left today before the lab report came in. Why?" "I was just wondering," said Larkin evenly, "whether I had two maniacs in my organization or only one, Rysland, frowning, turned to the chief. "I wouldn't be hasty, Larkin," he said. "Crazy as it sounds Pell may have something here." Larkin snorted again, and this time along with it he shook his head sadly. "What's your next move then?" Rysland asked Pell. "Tomorrow morning, first thing," Pell said, "I'll take a sample, of this stuff to Dr. Nebel and see what he can do with it. Of course the lab can keep on working on it in the meantime." "Don't you think you might do better to get busy on those computers?" Larkin asked. Pell shook his head. "This hunch is too strong, Chief." Rysland smiled, and got up. "I'm inclined to put a little stock into this man's hunches. He's done pretty well with them so far. I'd even say he's pretty close to a solution of this thing -- possibly." Larkin shrugged and started to look at the crime charts again. Rysland held out his hand. "Good night, Mr. Pell. You've encouraged me. Larkin and I are going topside for a little night cap before we turn in. Like to join us?" "No, thanks," said Pell. "I'm sleepy. I want to get home and hit that sack." "Very well. Good night again." The two men went toward the door. Pell watched them quietly. He had lied. He wasn't sleepy at all. He just wanted to get home and sit by that viewer and hope, hope against hope, that it would ring and that Ciel's lovely image would swirl into view... just the least bit tempted to go topside, however. He thought he might like to walk the broad, quiet boulevards under the stars. His brain functioned better there. The tunnels were so clean and bright and sterile, so wonderfully functional and sensible, that they oppressed him somehow. Maybe, he sometimes thought, he wasn't fit for this age. Maybe he should have been born a couple of hundred years ago. But common sense told him that people in that age must have often thought exactly the same thing to themselves. He looked at his chrono and decided he had better go home. The apartment, when he came to it, was cold and empty without Ciel. He bathed and tried to keep up his spirits by singing in his tuneless way, but it didn't help. He went back into the living room, selected a film from the library and slipped it into a lap projector. He sat down and tried to concentrate on the film, a historical adventure about the days of the first moon rockets. He couldn't follow it. The viewer rang. He bounded from the chair as though he had triggered a high speed ejection seat in a burning jet. He went to the viewer and flicked it on. The plate shimmered, and then Giel's image came into focus. "Baby!" He was certain his shout overmodulated every amp tube in the entire World City viewer system. But he felt better, wonderfully better, already. She was smiling. "Hello, Dick." "Hello." And then they looked at each other in afifectionate embarrassment for a moment. "One of us," said Pell, "ought to have his script writer along." "Dick, I don't know exactly how to say what I want to say..." "Don't. Don't say anything. Just pretend nothing ever happened. Just come on home fast as you can." "No, Dick. Not yet. I still want to talk about -- well, everything. Dick, we've got to reach some sort of compromise. There must be a way." "Come on home. We'll find a way." "Not home. Too many memories there. Besides," she smiled a little, "I don't trust us alone together. You know what would happen. We wouldn't get any talking done. Not any sensible talking anyway. You'd better meet me someplace." He sighed. "Okay. Where can I meet you?" "How about the Stardust Cafe?" "Again? That place didn't help us much the last time." "I know, but it's the handiest. I'm sure we can find a quiet place. Out on the terrace or something." "Is there a terrace?" "Yes, I think so. I'm sure there must be." He looked at his chrono. "All right, baby. Half an hour?" "Half an hour." When she clicked of! he felt his heart pounding. He felt dizzy. He felt as though he had just taken a quart of meth at one jolt -- intravenously. He sang, more loudly and more off-key than ever. He went into the bedroom and started to get dressed again. It wasn't until he was finishing the knot in his tie that the hunch hit him. hunch. He would have said it came out of nowhere, and yet it must have broken from the bottom of his mind through some kind of restraining layer into the conscious levels. He didn't remember .thinking anything that might have brought it on -- his mind was strictly on Ciel. Maybe that was how it came through, with the attention of his conscious mind directed elsewhere. With the hunch he heard Ciel's voice again, heard it very clearly. saying: "Vm sure we can find a quiet place. Out on the terrace or something." And with that other things started to fall into place. As he thought, and as the possibilities of his hunch fanned out to embrace other possibilities he became suddenly cold and sick inside. He fought the feeling. "Got to go through with it," he muttered to himself. "Got to." As soon as he was dre.ssed he took the tunnel cars to Station D-#, changing twice. People were aboard at this hour, returning from the evening. Lots of men and women in uniform: the green of the landfighters, the white of the seamen, the blue of the flyers, the silver and black of the space force. Young people. Kids mostly: kids who had never seen war, smelled death, heard the wounded scream. He hoped they never would. But if his hunch was correct they might be dangerously near to it right now. If only he had time to call Kronski. He'd feel a lot safer... He shook himself. Have to stop thinking about it. Proceed cautiously now, and take each thing as it came. That was the only thing to do. He went topside and stepped from the elevator kiosk into the night air. Ahead he saw the bright globular sign of the Stardust Cafe. But he didn't go toward it right away. He turned in the other direction, walked swiftly, and kept a sharp eye on the shadows. He turned off on a side street, circled a small park, and then crossed a sloping lawn toward the back of the night club. He headed for the light of the service entrance. A half-credit bill got him inside through the back entrance. He found the door with the temporary sign saying: Marco the Mentalist. He knocked. Marco the Mentalist opened the door. He didn't look quite as tall face-to-face as he did out on the floor, nor quite as impressive. His face was still dark and faintly saturnine, but the jowls seemed a little puffier now, there was a faint network of capillaries around his nostrils and his eyes looked just the least bit ' y and tired. In a pleasant l gh voice he said, "Yes?" Pell showed his C.I.B. identification. Marco raised his eyebrows a little and said, "Come inside, please." Inside he found a chair for Pell. He sat across from him at his dressing table, half-turned toward the room. "I must get ready for my show in a little while. You understand that, of course." Pell nodded. "What's on my mind won't take long. First of all, I want to ask a few questions about hypnotism. They may seem silly to you, or maybe a little elementary, but I'd like you to answer 'em just the same." Marco's eyebrows went a little bit higher and he said, "Proceed." "Okay. Question number one: can anybody be hypnotized against his will?" "Some can, some can't." Marco smiled. "The average person, under average circumstances -- no. I appear in my act to hypnotize people against their wills. Actually, subconsciously, they wish to be hypnotized, which is why they volunteer to let me try in the first place." "Okay, number two. Is there any drug that can hypnotize a person?" Marco frowned. "Pentothal and several things appear to do that. You could argue it either way, whether the subject is actually hypnotized or not. I believe post-hypnotic commands have been given to subjects under sodium pentathol and carried out, even back in the dark ages of psychiatry several hundred years ago." "I've got one more really important question," Pell said then. "I'd understood that somebody under hypnosis won't do anything against his moral or ethical sense. An honest man, for instance, can't be forced to steal. Is that true?" Marco laughed and gestured with his graceful fingers. "I don't think it is true. It was once believed to be, because hypnotic technique was not strong enough. That is, the subject's hypnosis was not strong enough to overcome a strong moral sense, which is actually a surface veneer on a deeper, more brutal nature. But I think with deep enough hypnosis, and the right kind of command, you can get a person to do most anything in post-hypnotic behavior -- and of course not know why he must do it, even knowing it's wrong. Do you follow me?" "I hope I do." Then Pell leaned forward. "And now I have a very great favor to ask of you." "Yes?" "I want you to put on a little special private performance for me, right here and now." "I'm afraid I don't understand." "You will, in about sixty seconds. Just listen carefully..." Chapter V H e was late for his date with Ciel, of course. He glanced at his chrono as he entered the Stardust Cafe by the front door and saw that he was twenty minutes late. However, this time he was certain Ciel wouldn't complain too vigorously. Again the askarins were playing, and once more the green-skinned Venusian girls were doing their writhing, spasmodic, aphrodisiacal dance. It was remarkable how they could achieve such an effect of utter abandon and yet keep their faces blank and frozen. He looked around the rest of the room swiftly. Not so crowded tonight, and people were generally quieter. There were no oversexed spacemen clawing after the dancers on the floor. Ciel was again in a rear booth, in the same corner of the room she had chosen before. She had spotted him now; she was looking his way. She lifted a white-gloved hand and waved. He smiled and  headed for her. He forced his smile, and made himself forget the prickling of his wrists and the feeling of bristling fur along his spine. And he held his smile all the way across the room. Why, hello, darling, fancy seeing you here; no, nothing's wrong, nothing at all, why on earth would you think anything was wrong? "Hi, baby," was all he actually said. "I'm -- I'm glad you're here, Dick." Her eyes didn't show much. They roved over his face a little too much perhaps, but otherwise they seemed simply as large and dark as ever. He noticed that the meth glass in front of her was empty. Grinning, he sat down. "This is a big moment. This is almost too much for me to handle. Maybe that's what I need -- a good slug of meth." "No." "No?" "Let's not waste time. Let's go out on the terrace. I want you to kiss me." "Best offer I've had all evening." He rose again. "Where's the terrace?" "Through that door. There's a dining room there that's closed at night. You go through the dining room and out to the terrace." "Okay." He took her arm and led her in and out of tables, across the room. They moved swiftly through the quiet, nearly dark dining room, and after that through a pair of window-doors. They were on the terrace then, a flagstoned space with a low wall. It overlooked the scattered lights of World City's topside area and some distance beyond they could see the river, a blue-silver ribbon in the moonlight. They stopped at the wall. She turned toward him. He looked down at her, at her pale face and deep, dark eyes. He smelled her perfume and he felt her live warmth near him and coming nearer. He saw her eyes close, her lips part just slightly, and each lip glistening, faintly moist... He was wondering when it would happen. He was wondering when he would be struck. As he wondered that he suddenly discovered he wasn't on the terrace any more. H e looked about him in some surprise. It was nearly dark. He was in a room; he could sense the walls about him. He heard a curious, high-pitched metallic voice -- and recognized it. "Pell? Are you awake now?" It had happened then, just as he had expected. Someone had thrown a freezer on him there in the patio, and during his complete unconsciousness he'd been taken here, wherever this was. He sighed. The least they could have done would have been to let him finish kissing Ciel. As calmly as he could he said to the four blank walls, "I'm awake." Soft glowlights came on gradually and he saw that the room about him was fairly small -- twenty by fifteen, roughly -- and very plain. It contained a bed and a few odd pieces of furniture, all apparently of good quality. There was a door in one wall. He tried the door. Locked. He went back to the middle of the room. "Chief," he said to the blank walls, "what's this all about? Is it some kind of a joke?" The metallic voice chuckled. It belonged to Eustace J. Larkin, Chief, Central Investigation Bureau, and even filtered like this it was somewhat prim and precise. "No, Dick, it's not a joke. I'm afraid. I'm surprised you haven't guessed what it's all about. Or at hunches." There was sarcasm in this last. "Where's Ciel?" Pell asked. "Right here with me. In the next room. Here -- listen." Ciel's voice said, "Don't worry, darling, we'll explain everything. And when it's all over it will be for the best. You'll see that it will." "All right, everybody," said Pell, half-belligerently, "what's the big idea?" "Big idea is right," Larkin's voice came back. "The biggest that ever hit the human race. And as Ciel says we'll explain it all in a moment. But first I'd like your word that you won't be foolish and make any kind of a struggle. If you'll promise that you can come in the other room here and we can all talk face to face." Pell frowned. "I don't know -- I'm not so sure I can honestly promise that." "Suit yourself, then. A few minutes from now it won't make any difference anyway." "Will you stop being so damned mysterious and tell me what it's all about?" Larkin's voice laughed. "Very well. I haven't had much chance to tell about it, frankly. And I think you'll agree we've rather neatly kept our parts under cover -- until you got dangerously close to the answer, anyway." "Until I got close?" "Certainly. Doc Wilcox's office on the moon was perhaps our one weakness in the whole set-up. How you managed to stumble on to that, ni never know -- your luck must have been with you." "It wasn't luck, Larkin, it was a hunch." "Still believe in hunches, eh? Well, we won't argue the point. At any rate you wouldn't have found the enzyme any place else but there." "Oh, so the enzyme does have something to do with it." "Everything. Here -- suppose I let Doctor Nebel explain it to you. He developed it, after all." Pell lifted his eyebrows in surprise and Dr. Walter Nebel's sibilant voice came through the hidden speakers. "I think you should know how it works, Mr. Pell. You may know that a certain part of the brain called Rossi's area is, to put it figuratively, the hypnotic center. The cut-off of the adrenal cortex, so to speak. In ordinary hypnosis the function of that area is dulled by overexercising the motor senses. By that method the intensity of hypnosis is widely variable and never really one hundred per cent effective. My compound, however, brings about complete and absolute cut-off. Any post-hypnotic suggestion given under those circumstances takes permanently and deeply. It can only be removed by further post-hypnosis under the same treatment, negating the original command." Pell stared at the blank walls. !'Go on," he said in a soft, tense voice. "What's the rest?" Larkin spoke again. "Suppose we briefly examine a little history as a kind of introduction to this matter. The human race, since the beginning of recorded time, has failed to achieve real peace and stability, right? Every time there has been a chance for cooperative effort -- for total agreement -- certain selfish interests have spoiled it. There have been times, however, when certain groups' -- states or combinations of states -- came close to permanent peace and prosperityThe Napoleonic era was one. Hitler two hundred years ago almost brought it about. The only reason they failed was that they didn't achieve their goal -- complete conquest." Did Pell hear correctly? Was there a faint simmering of madness in that metallic voice now? In the words there was madness, surely... Pell, people simply don't know what's good for them. Look at the blunderers and even downright crooks who are elected to World Government. Never the best brains, never the best talents. When a really able man gets into a position of leadership it's an accident -- n fluke." "I still don't see what all this has got to do with it," said Pell. There was a shrug in the metallic voice. "For once the ablest men are going to take over. There are a number of us. You know already about myself and Doctor Nebel. Rysland will be with us, too, as soon as we can get him conditioned." "By conditioned, you mean this enzyme of yours?" "Exactly. We started out in a small way, using force or trickery where necessary, and managed to condition a number of doctors and nurses. Conditioning simply means injecting Nebel's compound and then giving the post-hypnotic command to be unquestioningly loyal to the Supremists. We created the Supremists, of course. In order for us to take over it will be necessary to have another war, and to conquer Venus. That can be done if Earth strikes quickly. Within the next few days I think there'll be enough Supremist influence to get this war started." Pell stared back, open-mouthed. To hear it coldly and calmly like this was shock, cold-water shock. "Let me get this straight now. Your group made Supremists of doctors and nurses and they in turn made new members by installing this hypnosis stuff whenever anybody came for a hypodermic injection of any kind, is that it?" "That's It." "But how does this stuff work? Does it knock you out, or what?" "You'll be finding that out at first hand very shortly." Pell stiffened, made fists and unconsciously lifted them and looked around him, warily. Larkin laughed. "It won't do you much good to put up a fight. I'm sending a couple of my assistants in there. They specialize in people who want to make a struggle. And there's no reason to feel unhappy about it. Pell : once you're conditioned you'll simply be unable to do anything against the Supremist cause. You'll be happier, in fact, having such a cause. Ask your wife if that isn't so." Pell trembled with anger. "How did you get to her? How did you make her do what she did?" "You mean luring you into our little trap on the terrace, so to speak? You mustn't blame Ciel for that. She couldn't help herself; she had to obey, after all. You see she was conditioned in Augea on the moon by Dr. Wilcox, one of our very loyal men. He simply dropped in when you were at the Post Office, pretended that Ciel needed a routine injection and she, not at all suspicious, allowed him to do it. He gave her the command of loyalty, and also cautioned her not to say anything about it. So you see, Ciel's been one of us for several days. It was just a little precaution of mine, in case you should become troublesome. I had to assign somebody to the investigation, of course, because Rysland and his crowd would have been too suspicious if I hadn't complied with their request." "You're stark crazy, Larkin! You ought to be in a mental hospital!" "You'll be over that idea in a minute or so. Meanwhile, we're wasting time. I'm sending the boys in now. You'll make it easier for yourself if you submit without giving them any trouble." The door opened, then. Pell caught a quick glimpse of the other room and saw that it was a tastefully furnished living room. He recognized it, and knew where he was. This was a country house of Larkin's, topside, not far from the outskirts of World City. Whoever turned the freezer on him must have set the control at high intensity because it would take at least an hour to get to this place from the Stardust Cafe and he had been unconscious at least that long. He had the momentary impulse to rush that partly opened door -- and then the boys, as Larkin had called them, appeared. T hey were specialists, little doubt of that. They regarded Pell with flat, almost disinterested looks as the door closed behind them. One held a hypodermic needle. He was the shorter of the two, but he had shoulders like oxyokes. His face had been kneaded in the prize ring, and his bare arms were muscular and hairy but the top of his head was bald. The other had red hair, close-cropped. He waS' big and well-proportioned ; Pell might have taken him for a professional football player. Red did the talking. He spoke quietly, almost pleasantly. "Gonna cooperate?" he asked Pell. Pell said, "You touch me, brother, and I'll make your face look like Baldy's." Red glanced at Baldy and seemed to sigh. Abruptly he whirled, jumped at Pell and brought a sizzling right hand punch through the air. Pell ducked it. He saw Baldy move in as he did so, and a painful blow struck the back of his neck. His teeth rattled when it struck. Something caught him under the chin, straightened him. When he was straight a pile driver struck him in the midsection. It was all over within a matter of seconds. Under different circumstances Pell might have found time to admire their technique. As it was, he was now face down on the floor and Red was straddling him, holding him there. The pain in his stomach made him gasp. His face and the back of his neck ached terribly. Red had his arm in the small of his back. Pell tried to struggle. "I can break the arm if you move," said Red cheerfully. And then Pell felt the bite of the needle just below his shoulder. A misty feeling came. He felt as though he were in a red whirlpool, spinning, going down -- down... He fought to rise. He could still hear. He could hear footsteps and the slam of the door when somebody else came into the room. And then he seemed abruptly to be detached from his own body and floating in a huge gray void... Words hammered at his brain. Larkin's voice, at his ear now and no longer metallic. "You will be loyal to the Supremist cause. You will do nothing against the Supremist doctrine. You will believe that Earthmen are meant to rule the Universe -- " He felt an overpowering impulse to nod, to agree, to believe that it was right to do this. He fought this impulse, straining his mind and his very being until it seemed that something might burst with the effort. "You will work for the cause; you will give your life for it if necessary.'"' Yes, perhaps it was better so succumb. The words were too strong. He couldn't fight them. Larkin was right, Earthmen were supreme, and they were destined to rule... Somewhere in the depths a tiny spot of resistance still glowed. He tried desperately to evoke it. It seemed then that it became brighter. He could resist -- he would... He kept thinking over and over again; "No, no, no!" Larkin's voice said, "Carry him in the other room. He'll come to in a moment." H e came to slowly, and he saw that he was lying on a couch and that several people were gathered around him smiling down at him. Something detached itself from the group, knelt by his side. He blinked. It was Ciel. Her golden hair shone and her dark eyes searched his face and she was smiling. "Hello, darling," she said. "Hello, Ciel." He kissed her, and then sat up on the couch and looked around. Larkin and Dr. Nebel were standing together, and Red and Baldy were a few steps behind them, still looking indifferent. "Now you're one of us, Dick," said Larkin, flashing his professional smile, dimples and everything. Pell rose. Nebel held his hands behind his back and beamed, blinking his heavy reptilian eyelids and Larkin stepped forward and held out his hand. "Yes," said Pell, shaking the hand, "I guess we're all working for the same thing now. What do you want me to do?" Larkin laughed. "Nothing right away. We'll give you instructions when the time comes. I think you might as well go home with Ciel now; I have a copter and a chauffeur outside that'll take you to the station near your apartment." "Okay, Chief, whatever you say." He smiled and took Ciel's arm. He started toward the door. Then he stopped, patted his chest and said, "Oh -- my freezer. I guess the boys took it away... Larkin turned to Baldy. "Give him his weapon." Baldy took the freezer from his pocket and casually tossed it to Pell. A sudden change came over Pell, then. His smile disappeared. He stepped quickly away from Ciel, whirled and faced all of them. He pointed the freezer. "All right, everybody stay perfectly still -- you, too, Ciel. This is where we break up your little Supremist nightmare." Larkin stared in utter amazement. Nebel's turtle lids opened wide. Ciel brought her hand to her throat. Red's hand blurred suddenly, going for his own weapon. Pell squeezed the trigger, the violet sparks danced for an instant, and then Red stood frozen with his hand almost to his chest. "I'd advise nobody else to try that," said Pell, and then in an ironical tone to Larkin: "C.I.B. agents are trained to be pretty quick with a freezer, right. Chief?" Larkin seemed to find his voice now "But -- how -- what happened? You were injected. How can you..." "I just took a little precaution, that's all,'; said Pell. "There'll be plenty of time to explain it all later. You'll probably hear the whole thing in court, Larkin, when I testify at your trial for treason. Meanwhile, all of you just stay nice and calm while I use the viewer." He stepped to the viewer and dialed with his free hand. The plate glowed, shimmered and a moment later the pale, grave face of Theodor Rysland came into view. His eyebrows rose as he saw the weapon in Pell's hand and glimpsed the people beyond Pell. "Hello -- what's this all about?" "Haven't time to explain fully now," said Pell, "but I want you to get to Larkin's country house as soon as you can. I'll call agent Kronski in a moment and have him bring some others, and together we'll take Larkin and Nebel into custody. They're behind the Supremist movement -- a deliberate attempt to take over the government. They did it with a drug; that's how Supremist's are made." "What's this? A drug?" "Think about it later," said Pell. "Just grab the facts right now. The drug makes a person subject to post-hypnotic commands -- that's why your Supremists are blindly, unthinkingly loyal. However, the command can be erased by a second treatment. That'll be tough and take a lot of ferreting out, but it won't be impossible." He glanced at Ciel, and saw that she was staring at him with horror -- with enmity. It sickened him, but he steadied himself with the realization that Ciel would be one of the first to be re-treated. had completed his calls. Rysland, Kronski and the others were on the way. He kept the freezer pointed, and watched his captives carefully. Ciel had gone over to the couch and was sitting there, her face in her hands, weeping softly. "I don't know how you did it," said Larkin. "I don't understand it. The injection should have worked. It always did before." "Well, it almost worked," said Pell. "I must admit I had quite a time fighting off your commands. But, you see, I knew you'd gotten to Ciel somehow when she called me up to make the date this evening. She spoke of going out to the terrace at the Stardust Cafe. It was a little odd that she should speak of the terrace like that, out of a clear sky -- and I wondered why it should be on her mind. Then it struck me that neither of us had ever noticed a terrace there, and Ciel must have some special reason for knowing about it. "She did, of course -- she'd been instructed to get me out there where your boys could slap a freezer on me. So I started guessing with that hunch to work on. Everything more or less fell into place after that. It was pretty certain that they'd try to make a loyal Supremist out of me, too, and that's when I took that little precaution I mentioned to you." "What precaution?" Pell smiled. "I had Marco the mentalist hypnotize me and give me a rather special post-hypnotic command. He ordered me not to believe any subsequent post-hynotic commands. That's why your conditioning didn't work on me." Larkin could find no words; he just stared. "Think about it, Larkin," said Pell. "Think hard. Maybe you'd convinced yourself you were doing good, but your purpose was still tyranny. And like any tyranny it contained the means of its own destruction. It always works out that way, Larkin -- maybe it's a law, or something." It had been a long speech for Pell, practically an oration. He was, after all, a cop, not a philosopher. Just a guy trying to get along. Just an ordinary citizen whose name was legion, looking at his yife now and waiting with what patience he could find for the time when she would be cleared of the poisonous doctrine that any one race or group or even species was supreme. He was thinking, too, that the trial would keep him busy as the very devil and that they still wouldn't get to that vacation and seconcf honeymoon for a long time... That, considering everything, was not too much to put up with. small, and we'll continue this policy of devoting most of our space to the best available stories. But if you'll take time (and a postcard) to tell us which stories you like best, we'll tabulate and run the results in a special section -- and of course our future selections will be based on your wishes. Fair enough? She was sweet, gentle, kind -- a sort of Martian Old Mother Hubbard. But when she went to her cupboard... By Tom Leahy T he clod burst in a cloud of red sand and the little Martian sand dog ducked quickly into his burrow. Marilou threw another at the aperture in the ground and then ran over and with the inside of her foot she scraped sand into it until it was filled to the surface. She started to leave, but stopped. The little fellow might choke to death, she thought, it wasn't his fault she had to live on Mars. Satisfied that the future of something was dependent on her whim, she dug the sand from the hole. His little yellow eyes peered out at her. "Go on an' live," she said magnanimously. She got up and brushed the sand from her knees and dress, and walked slowly down the red road. The noon sun was relentless; nowhere was there relief from it. Marilou squinted and shaded her eyes with her hand. She looked in the sky for one of those infrequent Martian rain clouds, but the deep blue was only occasionally spotted by fragile white puffs. Like the sun, they had no regard for her, either. They were too concerned with moving toward the distant mountains, there to cling momentarily to the peaks and then continue on their endless route. Marilou dabbed the moisture from her forehead with the hem of her dress. "I know one thing," she mumbled. "When I grow up. I'll get to Earth an' never come back to Mars, no matter what!" She broke into a defiant, cadenced step. "An' I won't care whether you an' Mommy like it or not!" she declared aloud, sticking out her chin at an imaginary father before her. Before she realized it, a tiny, lime-washed stone house appeared not a hundred yards ahead of her. That was the odd thing about the Martian midday; something small and miles away would suddenly become large and very near as you approached it. The heat waves did it, her father had told her. "Really?" she had replied, and -- you think you know so doggone much, she had thought. into a run. By the Joshua trees, through the stone gateway she ran, and with a leap she lit like a young frog on the porch. "Hi, Aunt Twylee!" she said breathlessAn ancient Martian woman sat in a rocking chair in the shade of the porch. She held a bowl of purple river apples in her lap. Her papyrus-like hands moved quickly as she shaved the .skin from one. In a matter of seconds it was peeled. She looked up over her bifocals at the panting Marilou. "Gracious child, you shouldn't run like that this time of day," she said. "You Earth children aren't used to our Martian heat. It'll make you sick if you run too much." "I don't care! I hate Mars! Sometimes I wish I could just get good an' sick, so's I'd get to go home!" "Marilou, you are a little tyrant!" Aunt Twylee laughed. "Watcha' doin'. Aunt Twylee?" Marilou asked, getting up from her frog posture and coming near the old Martian lady's chair. "Oh, peeling apples, dear. I'm going to make a cobbler this afternoon." She dropped the last apple, peeled, into the bowl. "There, done. Would you like a little cool apple juice, Marilou?" "Sure -- you betcha! Hey, could I watch you make the cobbler. Aunt Twylee, could I? Mommy can't make it for anything -- it tastes like glue. Maybe, if I could see how you do it, maybe I could show her. Do you think?" "Now, Marilou, your mother must be a wonderful cook to have raised such a healthy little girl. I'm sure there's nothing she could learn from me," Aunt Twylee said as she arose. "Let's go inside and have that apple juice." The kitchen was dark and cool, and filled with the odors of the wonderful edibles the old Martian had created on and in the Earthmade stove. She opened the Earthmade refrigerator that stood in the corner and withdrew an Earthmade bottle filled with Martian apple juice. Marilou jumped up on the table and sat cross-legged. "Here, dear." Aunt Twylee handed her a glass of the icy liquid. "Ummm, thanks," Marilou said, and gulped down half the contents. "That tastes dreamy, Aunt Twylee." The little girl watched the old Martian as she lit the oven and gathered the necessary ingredients for the cobbler. As she bent over to get a bowl from the shelf beneath Marilou's perch, her hair brushed against the child's knee. Her hair was soft, soft and white as a puppy's, soft and white like the down from a dandelion. She smiled at Marilou. She always smiled; her pencil-thin mouth was a perpetual arc. Marilou drained the glass. "Aunt Twylee -- is it true what my daddy says about the Martians?" "True? How can I say, dear? I don't know what he said." "Well, I mean, that when us Earth people came, you Martians did inf... infan..." "Infanticide?" Aunt Twylee interrupted, rolling the dough on the board a little flatter, a little faster. "Yes, that's it -- killed babies," Marilou said, and took an apple from the bowl. "My daddy says you were real primitive, an' killed your babies for some silly religious reason. I think that's awful! How could it be religious? God couldn't like to have little babies killed!" She took a big bite of the apple; the juice ran from the corners of her mouth. "Your daddy is a very intelligent man, Marilou, but he's partially wrong. It is true -- but not for religious reasons. It was a necessity. You must remember, dear. Mars is very arid -- sterile -- unable to sustain many living things. It was awful, but it was the only way we knew to control the population." M arilou looked down her button nose as she picked a brown spot from the apple. "Hmmph, I'll tell 'im he's wrong," she said. "He thinks he knows so damn much!" "Marilou!" Aunt Twylee exclaimed as she looked over her glasses. "A sweet child like you shouldn't use such language!" Marilou giggled and popped the remaining portion of the apple in her mouth. "Do your parents know where you are, child?" Aunt Twylee asked, as she took the bowl from Marilou's hands. She began dicing the apples into a dough-lined cassarole. "No, they don't," Marilou replied. She sprayed the air with little particles of apple as she talked. "Everybody's gone to the hills to look for the boys." "The boys?" Aunt Twylee stopped her work and looked at the little girl. "Yes -- Jimmy an' Eddie an' some of the others disappeared from the settlement this morning. The men're afraid they've run off to th' hills an' the renegades got 'em." "Gracious," Aunt Twylee said; her brow knitted into a criss-cross of wrinkles. "Oh, I know those dopes. They're prob'ly down at th' canals -- fishin' or somep'n." "Just the same, your mother will be frantic, dear. You should have told her where you were going." "I don't care," Marilou said with unadulterated honesty. "She'll be all right when I get home." Aunt Twylee shook her head and clucked her tongue. "Can I have another glass? Please?" The old lady poured the glass full again. And then she sprinkled sugar down among the apple cubes in the cassarole and covered them with a blanket of dough. She cut an uneven circle of half moons in it and put it in the oven. "There -- all ready to bake, Marilou," she sighed. "It looks real yummy, Aunt Twylee." "Well, I certainly hope it turns out good, dear," she said, wiping her forehead with her apron. She looked out the open back door. The landscape was beginning to gray as heavier clouds moved down from the mountains and pressed the afternoon heat closer, more oppressively to the ground. "My, it's getting hot. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we didn't get a little rain this afternoon, Marilou." She turned back to the little girl. "Tell me some more about your daddy, dear. We Martians certainly owe a lot to men like your father." "That's what he says too. He says, you Martians would have died out in a few years, if we hadn't come here. We're so much more civi... civili... "Civilized?" "Yeah. He says, we were so much more 'civ-ilized' than you that we saved your lives when we came here with all our modern stuff." "Well, that's true enough, dear. Just look at that wonderful Earth stove," Aunt Twylee said, and laughed. "We wouldn't be able to bake an apple cobbler like that without it, would we?" dered through the crow'ded hot air. "No. He says, you Martians are kinda likeable, but you can't be trusted. He's nuts! I like you Martians!" "Thank you, child, but everyone's endtled to his own opinion. Don't judge your daddy too severely," Aunt Twylee said as she scraped spilled sugar from the table and put little bits of it on her tongue. "He says that you'd bite th' hand that feeds you. He says, we brought all these keen things to Mars, an' that if you got th' chance, you'd kill all of us!" "Gracious," said Aunt Twylee as she speared scraps of dough with the point of her long paring knife. "He's a dope!" Marilou said. Aunt Twylee opened the oven and peeked in at the cobbler. The aroma of the simmering apples rushed out and filled the room. "Could I have some cobbler when it's done?" Marilou asked, "I'm afraid not, child. It's getting rather late." The thunder rumbled again -- a little closer, a little louder. The old lady washed the blade of the knife in the sink. "Tell me more of what your father says, dear," she said as she adjusted the bifocals on her thin nose and ran her thumb along the length of the knife's blade. "Oh, nothin' much more. He just says that you'd kill us if you had th' chance. That's the way the inferior races always act, he says. They want to kill th' people that help 'em, 'cause they resent 'em." "Very interesting." "Well, it isn't so, is it. Aunt Twylee?" The room was filled with blinding blue-white light, and the walls quaked at the sound of a monstrous thunderclap. The old Martian glanced nervously at the clock on the wall. "My, it is getting late," she said as she fondled the knife in her hands. "You Martians wouldn't do anything like that, would you?" "You want the truth, don't you, dear?" Aunt Twylee asked, smiling, as she walked to the table where Marilou sat. "'Course I do. Aunt Twylee," she said. Her scream was answered and smothered by the horrendous roar of the thunder, and the piercing hiss of the rain that fell in sheets. In great volumes of water, it fell, as though the heavens were attempting to wash the sins of man from the universe and into non-existence in the void beyond the void. M arilou lay beside the other children. Aunt Twylee smiled at them, closed the bedroom door and returned to the kitchen. The storm had moved on; the thunder was the faint grumbling of a pacified old man. What water fell was a monotonous trickle from the eaves of the lime-washed stone house. Aunt Twylee washed the blood from the knife and wiped it dry on her apron. She opened the oven and took out the browned cobbler. Sweet apple juice bubbled to the surface through the half moons and burst in delights of sugary aroma. The sun broke through the thinning edge of the thunderhead. Aunt Twylee brushed a lock of her feathery white hair from her moist cheek. "Gracious," she said, "I must tidy up a bit before the others come." Donald W. Kerst D onald w. kerst is probably unknown except in the upper strata of scientific research, but he's the man who is almost solely responsible for the betatron. The lanky six-footer was born in Galena, Kansas, in #. The Kerst family moved to Wawatosa, Wisconsin, when Donald was less than two years old, and it was in this small town that Don grew up and went to high school. He had a school chum who was an ardent amateur radio operator, and it was while helping this friend build constantly better ham apparatus that Donald Kerst's interest in science grew into an abiding passion. He entered the University of Wisconsin where he got both his B. A. and his Ph.D. After a year at the GenPersonalities in Science His Specialty: T urning New Corners eral Electric Laboratories working with X-ray tubes, he accepted the post of Professor of Physics at the University of Iowa. Kerst had started research into the nature of the atom while studying for his doctorate, and now he picked up where he had left off. In #I he was able to announce that he had achieved a new instrument of research capable of accelerating electrons to a velocity approximating the speed of light, or # miles per second! He described this new too as a "rheotron, the heart of which is a doughnut-shaped glass vacuum tube placed between the poles of a large electromagnet." The United States Government snapped up the new instrument for use in arsenals and on the Manhattan Project during the war. It was a dependable, foolproof, economical tool with the ability to penetrate twenty inches of steel with its radiation in twenty minutes, and to detect flaws of twothousandths of an inch. The units used in arsenals are able to detect flaws in bombs and shells so they can be corrected, eliminating any danger of the projectiles exploding prematurely. The commercial betatron was five feet by ten feet and housed behind a three-foot reinforced concrete wall in a specially designed building. In this particular machine the electrons from a hot filament were speeded in their acceleration by electrical impulses until they reached # volts -- then released from the tube as beta rays or directed at a metal target which converted them into X-rays.iwas using the betatron during the war and finding it most satisfactory, Kerst went right on improving the machine and its performance. Ever since the first betatron worked, the desire of the scientists and physicists was to produce particles with cosmic ray energies. Within four years after the commercial betatron, Kerst was able to produce one that achieved a #-volt free-electron beam with which it was po.ssible to penetrate to the core of the atom and to study the nucleus in a way that had never before been possible. After fifteen months of actual construction work the super-betatron was ready for a trial run. When asked by reporters to predict the performance of the machine and the possibility that mesons could be produced, Kerst answered, "To ask what we expect is like asking what's around a corner that we've never gone around before." Two days after the unveiling the super-betatron fulfilled all hopes and produced what has been described as "torrents of mesons." In order to understand just what the invention of the betatron means, we need to know exactly what a meson is. What we know about it is rather slim, as a matter of fact, and what we hope to learn with the help of the super-betatron is of vital importance. The meson is the fourth basic particle of subatomic matter (the other three are the proton, the neutron and the electron). It is believed to be the binding force that holds all nuclei together. Heretofore mesons have been studied by means of high-altitude balloons with special photographic apparatus to record their passage once they've been split from the nuclei in the earth's atmosphere by incoming cosmic rays. The force necessary to split the mesons from the nuclei has up until now been unattainable anywhere but at this high altitude. The program of improving the betatron and making it an even more useful tool than the present model goes right on, with Dr. Donald Kerst working at it full time. The blue-eyed, brown-haired man of science has little time for leisure ; he feels that there is too much left undone in this particular field. His wife Dorothy and his young son and daughter know that the one way to get Dad's nose off the grindstone is to suggest a family canoeing or skiing excursion. These are his favorite recreations. "As long as the water holds out and the snow stays, we know we can have him around with us," says Mrs. Kerst, "but you can't stop him from mulling things over even then. He's what you might call 'wrapped up in his work'." -- epw Does your wife call you Pumpkinhead? Well, maybe it's not an insult; it might be a pet name. Ah -- but whose pet name? By Russell Burton dusk-darkened Jersey meadows, Ronald Lovegear, fourteen years with Allied Electronix, embraced his burden with both arms, silently cursing the engineer who was deliberately rocking the train. In his thin chest he nursed the conviction that someday there would be an intelligent robot at the throttle of the #:# to Philadelphia. He carefully moved one hand and took a notebook from his pocket. That would be a good thing to mention at the office next Monday. Again he congratulated himself for having induced his superiors to let him take home the company's most highly developed mechanism to date. He had already forgiven himself for the little white lie that morning. "Pascal," he had told them, "is a little weak on square roots." That had done it! Old Hardwick would never permit an Allied computer to hit the market that was not the absolute master of square roots. If Lovegear wanted to work on Pascal on his own time it was fine with the boss. Ronald Lovegear consulted his watch. He wondered if his wife would be on time. He had told Corinne twice over the phone to bring the station wagon to met him. But she had been so forgetful lately. It was probably the new house; six rooms to keep up without a maid was quite a chore. His pale eyes blinked. He had a few ideas along that line too. He smiled and gave the crate a gentle pat. and she had brought the station wagon. Lovegear managed to get the crate to the stairs of the coach where he consented to the assistance of a porter. "It's not really heavy," he told Corinne as he and the porter waddied through the crowd. "Actually only # pounds, four ounces. Aluminum casing, you know;..." "No, I didn't..." began Corinne. "But it's delicate," he continued. "If I should drop this... He shuddered. After the crate had been placed lengthwise in the rear of the station wagon, Corinne watched Ronald tuck a blanket around it. "It's not very cold, Ronald." "I don't want it to get bounced around," he said. "Now, please, Corinne, do drive carefully." Not until she had driven half a block did he kiss her on the cheek. Then he glanced anxiously over his shoulder at the rear seat. Once he thought Corinne hit a rut that could have been avoided. Long after Corinne had retired that night she heard Ronald pounding with a brass hammer down in his den. At first she had insisted he take the crate out to his workshop. He looked at her with scientific aloofness and asked if she had the slightest conception of what "this is worth?" She hadn't, and she went to bed. It was only another one of his gestures which was responsible for these weird dreams. That night she dreamed Ronald brought home a giant octopus which insisted on doing the dishes for her. In the morning she woke up feeling unwanted. Downstairs Ronald had already put on the coffee. He was wearing his robe and the pinched greyness of his face told Corinne he had been up half the night. He poured coffee for her, smiling wanly. "If I have any commitments today, Corinne, will you please see that they are taken care of?" "But you were supposed to get the wallpaper for the guest room..." "I know, I know, dear. But time is so short. They might want Pascal back any day. For the next week or two I shall want to devote most of my time..." "Pascal?" "Yes. The machine -- the computer." He smiled at her ignorance. "We usually name the expensive jobs. You see, a computer of this nature is really the heart and soul of the mechanical man we will construct." Corinne didn't see, but in a few minutes she strolled toward the den, balancing her coffee in both hands. With one elbow she eased the door open. There it was: an innocent polished cabinet reaching up to her shoulders. Ronald had removed one of the plates from its side and she peeped into the section where the heart and soul might be located. She saw only an unanatomical array of vacuum tubes and electrical relays. She felt Ronald at her back. "It looks like the inside of a juke box," she said. He beamed. "The same relay systems used in the simple juke box are incorporated in a computer." He placed one hand lovingly on the top of the cabinet. "But, Ronald -- it doesn't even resemble a -- a mechanical man?" "That's because it doesn't have any appendages as yet. You know, arms and legs. That's a relatively simple adjustment." He winked at Corinne with a great air of complicity. "And I have some excellent ideas along that line. Now, run along, because I'll be busy most of the day." spent most of the day shopping for week-end necessities. On an irrational last-minute impulse -- perhaps an unconscious surrender to the machine age -- she dug in the grocery deep freeze and brought out a couple of purple steaks. That evening she had to call Ronald three times for dinner, and when he came out of the den she noticed that he closed the door the way one does upon a small child. He chattered about inconsequential matters all through dinner. Corinne knew that his work was going smoothly. A few minutes later she was to know how smoothly. It started when she began to put on her apron to do the dishes. "Let that go for now, dear," Ronald said, taking the apron from her. He went into the den, returning with a small black box covered with push buttons. "Now observe carefully," he said, his voice pitched high. He pushed one of the buttons, waited a second with his ear cocked toward the den, then pushed another. Corinne heard the turning of metal against metal, and she slowly turned her head. "Oh!" She suppressed a shriek, clutching Ronald's arm so tightly he almost dropped the control box. Pascal was walking under his own effort, considerably taller now with the round, aluminum legs Ronald had given him. Two metal arms also hung at the sides of the cabinet. One of these raised stiffly, as though for balance. Corinne's mouth opened as she watched the creature jerk awkwardly across the living room. "Oh, Ronald! The fishbowl!" Ronald stabbed knowingly at several buttons. Pascal pivoted toward them, but not before his right arm swung out and, almost contemptuously, brushed the fishbowl to the floor. Corinne closed her eyes at the crash. Then she scooped up several little golden bodies and rushed for the kitchen. When she returned Ronald was picking up pieces of glass and dabbing at the pool of water with one of her bathroom towels. Pascal, magnificently aloof, was standing in the center of the mess. "I'm sorry." Ronald looked up. "It was my fault. I got confused on the buttons." But Corinne's glances toward the rigid Pascal held no indictment. She was only mystified. There was something wrong here. "But Ronald, he's so ugly without a head. I thought that all robots -- " "Oh, no," he explained, "we would put heads on them for display purposes only. Admittedly that captures the imagination of the public. That little adapter shaft at the top could be the neck, of course..." He waved Corinne aside and continued his experiments with the home-made robot. Pascal moved in controlled spasms around the living room. Once, he walked just a little too close to the floor-length window -- and Corinne stood up nervously. But Ronald apparently had mastered the little black box. With complete confidence Corinne went into the kitchen to do the dishes. Not until she was elbow deep in suds did she recall her dreams about the octopus. She looked over her shoulder, and the curious, unwanted feeling came again. T he following afternoon -- after Ronald had cancelled their Sunday drive into the country -- Pascal, with constant exhortations by Ronald at the black box, succeeded in vacuum cleaning the entire living room. Ronald was ecstatic. "Now do you understand?" he asked Corinne. "A mechanical servant! Think of it! Of course mass production may be years away, but..." "Everyone will have Thursday nights off," said Corinne -- but Ronald was already jabbing at buttons as Pascal dragged the vacuum cleaner back to its niche in the closet. Later, Corinne persuaded Ronald to take her to a movie, but not until the last moment was she certain that Pascal wasn't going to drag along. Every afternoon of the following week Ronald Lovegear called from the laboratory in New York to ask how Pascal was getting along. "Just fine," Corinne told him on Thursday afternoon, "But he certainly ruined some of the tomato plants in the garden. He just doesn't seem to hoe in a straight line. Are you certain it's the green button I push?" "It's probably one of the pressure regulators," interrupted Ronald. "I'll check it when I get home." Corinne suspected by his lowered voice that Mr. Hardwick had walked into the lab. That night Pascal successfully washed and dried the dishes, cracking only one cup in the process. Corinne spent the rest of the evening sitting in the far corner of the living room, thumbing the pages of a magazine. On the following afternoon -- prompted perhaps by that perverse female trait which demands completion of all projects once started -- Corinne lingered for several minutes in the vegetable department at the grocery. She finally picked out a fresh, round and blushing pumpkin. Later in her kitchen, humming a little tune under her breath, Corinne deftly maneuvered a paring knife to transform the pumpkin into a very reasonable facsimile of a man's head. She placed the pumpkin over the tiny shaft between Pascal's box-shaped shoulders and stepped back. She smiled at the moon-faced idiot grinning back at her. He was complete, and not bad-looking! But just before she touched the red button once and the blue button twice -- which sent Pascal stumbling out, to the backyard to finish weeding the circle of pansies before dinner -- she wondered about the gash that was his mouth. She distinctly remembered carving it so that the ends curved upward into a frozen and quite harmless smile. But one end of the toothless grin seemed to sag a little, like the cynical smile of one who knows his powers have been underestimated. Corinne would not have had to worry about her husband's reaction to the new vegetable-topped Pascal. Ronald accepted the transformation good-naturedly, thinking that a little levity, once in a while, was a good thing. "And after all," said Corinne later that evening, "I'm the one who has to spend all day in the house with..." She lowered her voice : "With Pascal." But Ronald wasn't listening. He retired to his den to finish the plans for the mass production of competent mechanical men. One for every home in America... He fell asleep with the thought. the next two weeks going through pretty much the same routine. He, methodically jolting through the household chores; she, walking aimlessly from room to room, smoking too many cigarettes. She began to think of Pascal as a boarder. Strange -- at first he had been responsible for that unwanted feeling. But now his helpfulness around the house had lightened her burden. And he was so cheerful all the time! After living with Ronald's preoccupied frown for seven years... After luncheon one day, when Pascal neglected to shut off the garden hose, she caught herself scolding him as if he were human. Was that a shadow from the curtain waving in the breeze, or did she see a hurt look flit across the mouth of the pumpkin? Corinne put out her hand and patted Pascal's cylindrical wrist. It was warm -- flesh warm. She hurried upstairs and stood breathing heavily with her back to the door. A little later she thought she heard someone -- someone with a heavy step -- moving around downstairs. "I left the control box down there," she thought. "Of course, it's absurd..." At four o'clock she went slowly down the stairs to start Ronald's dinner. Pascal was standing by the refrigerator, exactly where she had left him. Not until she had started to peel the potatoes did she notice the little bouquet of pansies in the center of the table. Corinne felt she needed a strong cup of tea. She put the water on and placed a cup on the kitchen table. Not until she was going to sit down did she decide that perhaps Pascal should be in the other room. She pressed the red button, the one which should turn him around, and the blue button, which should make him walk into the living room. She heard the little buzz of mechanical life as Pascal began to move. But he did not go into the other room ! He was holding a chair for her, and she sat down rather heavily. A sudden rush of pleasure reddened her cheeks. Not since sorority days... Before Pascal's arms moved away she touched his wrist again, softly, only this time her hand lingered. And his wrist was warm! VV Pascal back at the lab?" she asked Ronald at dinner that evening, trying tJ keep her voice casual. Ronald smiled. "I think I might have him indefinitely, dear. I've got Hardwick convinced I'm working on something revolutionary." He stopped. "Oh, Corinne! You've spilled coffee all over yourself." The following night Ronald was late in getting home from work. It was raining outside the Newark station and the cabs deliberately evaded him. He finally caught a bus, which deposited him one block from his house. He cut through the back alley, hurrying through the rain. Just before he started up the stairs he glanced through the lighted kitchen window. He stopped, gripping the railing for support. In the living room were Pascal and Corinne. Pascal was reclining leisurely in the fireside chair; Corinne was standing in front of him. It was the expression onher face which stopped Ronald Lovegear. The look was a compound of restraint and compulsion, the reflection of some deep struggle in Corinne's soul. Then she suddenly leaned forward and pressed her lips to Pascal's full, fleshy pumpkin mouth. Slowly, one of Pascal's aluminum arms moved up and encircled her waist. Mr. Lovegear stepped back into the rain. He stood there for several minutes. The rain curled around the brim of his hat, dropped to his face, and rolled down his cheeks with the slow agitation of tears. When, finally, he walked around to the front and stamped heavily up the stairs, Corinne greeted him with a flush in her cheeks. Ronald told her that he didn't feel "quite up to dinner. Just coffee, please." When it was ready he sipped slowly, watching Corinne's figure as she moved around the room. She avoided looking at the aluminum figure in the chair. Ronald put his coffee down, walked over to Pascal, and, gripping him behind the shoulders, dragged him into the den. Corinne stood looking at the closed door and listened to the furious pounding. came out and went straight to the phone. "Yes! Immediately!" he told the man at the freight office. While he sat there waiting Corinne walked upstairs. Ronald did not offer to help the freight men drag the box outside. When they had gone he went into the den and came back with the pumpkin. He opened the back door and hurled it out into the rain. It cleared the back fence and rolled down the alley stopping in a small puddle in the cinders. After a while the water level reached the mouth and there was a soft choking sound. The boy who found it the next morning looked at the mouth and wondered why anyone would carve such, a sad JackO'-Lantern. One Mysfeiy -- Still Unsolved sist of protons, positrons, mesons and heavy nuclei -- are particles that are speeded up in space to velocities that almost equal the speed of light. These tiny pieces hit the Earth constantly at treof times greater than scientists can obtain with even the most modern types of equipment. Despite the consistent and concentrated study being made by scientists, cosmic rays remain a mystery. How they accelerate to their tremendous speeds -- their nature and where they come from and their purpose -- these are still unknown. The cosmic rays that shoot in from space are called primary radiation, and these hardly ever penetrate Earth's atmosphere to sea level. They usually hit atoms of gases that make up the air, invariably smashing the atom and sending its particles -- which are called secondary cosmic rays -- off in many different directions. Actually, in order to make a complete study of the primary cosmic rays under perfect conditions, we should have a laboratory at least # miles above Earth. That's about where the original particles can be found. But since that isn't possible -- at this time anyway -- Navy scientists send up balloons containing various sensitive equipment. Then, the primary rays shoot into the equipment leaving tracks on the photographic plates for later correlation by the scientists. Other equipment radios data to the men on the ground when a cosmic ray is detected. Rockets which can be sent that distance into the atmosphere don't serve the purpose because they can't stay up very long, and this type of project requires high altitudes for hours. Balloons, JFor this reason, have been found to bring much more successful results. With continued research and study, the mystery of the cosmic ray will undoubtedly unfold and science will be able to build the solution into another advance for the good of humanity. We Should Have Stayed Prehistoric rats and wild rats of the same family indicates a definite pattern of physiological and behavior differences between the two types. Which would lead to the idea that these same types of differences possibly e.xist between early prehistoric man and civilized man as we know him today. Man was probably made much more susceptible to various diseases by the very process of becoming civilized. Illnesses like certain forms of colitis, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, some forms of cancer, some types of mental illnesses -- all these may be the products that developed as the civilization grew. Quite possibly, as man developed from the state of a hard-fighting primitive to that of a domestic secure individual, certain changes happened to his adrenal glands and his sex glands which could have been great enough to make him an easier victim to certain types of ailments. Maybe he should have stayed a healthy prehistoric... Youth for the Old recently performed some experiments the results of which are worthy of noting. They removed some skin from the ear of a rabbit and impregnated it with glycerine. Then they froze it and kept it stored for four months, after which time they transplanted the skin and found it would grow normally. According to the two scientists -- awar -- it is not too far-fetched to assume that these pieces of skin would have remained in storage, in perfect condition, for a period much longer than the normal expected life span of their donor. If this is so, then the aches and pains of old age vill soon be over -- the possibility of perpetuating youth is probable. A man might store, for example, some pieces of his own arteries and veins. In his old age, when he is suffering from hardening of the arteries, all he'd have to do would be to replace some of his hardened arteries with those belonging to his youth. And, for the vain, no more wrinkled skin! Just store some tissues when you're #, pick them up and let them grow again with you when you're #. It's an interesting possibility. The freeze method, incidentally, is an acknowledged advantage over the fresh bank method since it has been found that freeze grafts heal faster and there is less danger of hemorrhaging. The frozen graft retains its potency. Man Makes Himself Deaf T here is no sound in nature that will do any damage to the ear drums of a human. But man has set out to master nature. And in his efforts to do so, he exposes the human ear to degrees of sound for which it was never intended, and against which it has no protection. In industry, the excessive noises of the machinery with which the worker is associated eight hours of the day create an injury to the hearing organ. The explosions of grenades and gunfire, the violent sounds made by airplane motors and jet engines and all the other instruments of warfare, all contribute their share. Even day-to-day city life as we know it contains an unnatural amount of loud and violent noise. In his effort to become master, man is slowly destroying bits of himself. -- Peter Dakin The line between noble dreams and madness is thin, and loneliness can push men past it... the lonely ones By Edward W, Ludwig onward through cold, silent infinity, on and on, an insignificant pencil of silver lost in the terrible, brooding blackness. But even more awful than the blackness was the loneliness of the six men who inhabited the silver rocket. They moved in loneliness as fish move in water. Their lives revolved in loneliness as planets revolve in space and time. They bore their loneliness like a shroud, and it was as much a part of them as sight in their eyes. Loneliness was both their brother and their god. Yet, like a tiny flame in the darkness, there was hope, a savage, desperate hope that grew with the passing of each day, each month, and each year. And at last... , "Lord," breathed Captain Sam Wiley. Lieutenant Gunderson nodded. "It's a big one, isn't it?" "It's a big one," repeated Captain Wiley. They stared at the image in the Wanderedi forward visi-screen, at the great, shining gray ball. They stared hard, for it w'as like an enchanted, God-given fruit handed them on a star-flecked platter of midnight. It was like the answer to a thousand prayers, a shining symbol of hope which could mean the end of loneliness. "It's ten times as big as Earth," mused Lieutenant Gunderson. "Do you think this'll be it. Captain?" "I'm afraid to think."  A thoughtful silence. "Captain." "Yes?" "Do you hear my heart pounding?" Captain Wiley smiled. "No. No, of course not." "It seems like everybody should be hearing it. But we shouldn't get excited, should we? We mustn't hope too hard." He bit his lip. "But there should be life there, don't you think, Captain?" "There may be." "Nine years, Captain. Think of it. It's taken us nine years to get here. There's got to be life." "Prepare for deceleration, Lieutenant." Lieutenant Gunderson's tall, slim body sagged for an instant. Then his eyes brightened. "Yes, sir!" ued to stare at the beautiful gray globe in the visi-screen. He was not like Gunderson, with boyish eagerness and anxiety flowing out of him in a ceaseless babble. His emotion was as great, or greater, but it was imprisoned within him, like swirling, foaming liquid inside a corked jug. It wouldn't do to encourage the men too much. Because, if they were disappointed... He shook his silver-thatched head. There it was, he thought. A new world. A world that, perhaps, held life. Life. It was a word uttered only with reverence, for throughout the Solar System, with the exception of on Earth, there had been only death. First it was the Moon, airless and lifeless. That had been expected, of course. But Mars. For centuries men had dreamed of Mars and written of Mars with its canals and dead cities, with its ancient men and strange animals. Everyone knew there was or had been life on Mars. The flaming rockets reached Mars, and the canals became volcanic crevices, and the dead cities became jagged peaks of red stone, and the endless sands were smooth, smooth, smooth, untouched by feet of living creatures. There was plant-life, a species of green-red lichen in the Polar regions. But nowhere was there real life. Then Venus, with its dust and wind. No life there. Not even the stars to make one think of home. Only the dust and wind, a dark veil of death screaming eternally over hot dry land. And Jupiter, with its seas of ice; and hot Mercury, a cracked, withered mummy of a planet, baked as hard and dry as an ancient walnut in a furnace. Next, the airless, rocky asteroids, and frozen Saturn with its swirling ammonia snows. And last, the white, silent worlds, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. World after world, all dead, with no sign of life, no reminder of life, and no promise of life. Thus the loneliness had grown. It was not a child of Earth. It was not born in the hearts of those who scurried along city pavements or of those in the green fields or of those in the cool, clean houses. It was a child of the incredible distances, of the infinite night, of emptiness and silence. It was born in the hearts of the slit-eyed men, the oldish young men, tlie spacemen. For without life on other worlds, where was the sky's challenge? Why go on and on to discover only worlds of death? The dream of the spacemen turned from the planets to the stars. Somewhere in the galaxy or in other galaxies there had to be life. Life was a wonderful and precious thing. It wasn't right that it should be confined to a single, tiny planet. If it were, then life would seem meaningless. Mankind would be a freak, a cosmic accident. And now the Wanderer was on the first interstellar flight, hurtling through the dark spaces to Proxima Centauri. Moving silently, as if motionless, yet at a speed of # miles a second. And ahead loomed the great, gray planet, the only planet of the sun, growing larger, larger, each instant... filled the ship. The indicator lights on the control panel glowed like a swarm of pink eyes. "Deceleration compensator adjusted for # G's, sir," reported Lieutenant Gunderson. Captain Wiley nodded, still studying the image of the planet. "There -- there's something else. Captain." "Yes?" "It's Brown, sir. He's drunk." Captain Wiley turned, a scowl on his hard, lined face. "Drunk? Where'd he get the stuff?" "He saved it, sir, saved it for nine years. Said he was going to drink it when we discovered life." "We haven't discovered life yet." "I know. He said he wouldn't set foot on the planet if he was sober. Said if there isn't life there, he couldn't take it -- unless he was drunk." Captain Wiley grunted. "All right." They looked at the world. "Wouldn't it be wonderful. Captain? Just think -- to meet another race. It wouldn't matter what they were like, would it? If they were primitive, we could teach them things. If they were ahead of us, they could teach us. You know what I'd like? To have someone meet us, to gather around us. It wouldn't matter if they were afraid of us or even if they tried to kill us. We'd know that we aren't alone." "I know what you mean," said Captain Wiley. Some of his emotion overflowed the prison of his body. "There's no thrill in landing on dead worlds. If no one's there to see you, you don't feel like a hero." "That's it. Captain! That's why I came on this crazy trip. I guess that's why we all came. I..." Captain Wiley cleared his throat. "Lieutenant, commence deceleration. # G's." "Yes, sir!" the entire visi-screen. Someone coughed behind Captain Wiley. "Sir, the men would like to look at the screen. They can't see the planet out of the ports yet." The speaker was Doyle, the ship's Engineer, a dry, tight-skinned little man. "Sure." Captain Wiley stepped aside. Doyle looked, then Parker and Fong. Just three of them, for Watkins had sliced his wrists the fourth year out. And Brown was drunk. As they looked, a realization came to Captain Wiley. The men were getting old. The years had passed so gradually that he'd never really noticed it before. Lieutenant Gunderson had been a kid just out of Space Academy. Parker and Doyle and Fong, too, had been in their twenties. They had been boys. And now something was gone -- the sharp eyes and sure movements of youth, the smooth skin and thick, soft hair. Now they had become men. And yet for a few moments, as they gazed at the screen, they seemed like happy, expectant children. "I wish Brown could see this," Doyle murmured. "He says now he isn't going to get off his couch till we land and discover life. Says he won't dare look for himself." "The planet's right for life," said Fong, the dark-faced astro-physicist. "Atmosphere forty per cent oxygen, lots of water vapor. No poisonous gases, according to spectroscopic analyses. It should be ideal for life." "There is life there," said Parker, the radarman. "You know why? Because we've given up eighteen years of our lives. Nine years to get here, nine to get back. I'm thirty now. I was twenty-one when we left Earth. I gave up all those good years. They say that you can have something if you pay enough for it. Well, we've paid for this. There has to be #i -- a sort of universal justice. That's why I know there's life here, life that moves and thinks -- maybe even life we can talk to." "You need a drink," said Fong. "It's getting bigger," murmured Lieutenant Gunderson. "The Centaurians," mused Doyle, half to himself. "What'll they be like? Monsters or men? If Parker's right about universal justice, they'll be men." "Hey, where there's men, there's women!" yelled Parker. "A Centaurian woman! Say!" "Look at those clouds!" exclaimed Doyle. "Damn it, we can't see the surface." "Hey, there! Look there, to the right! See it? It's silver, down in a hole in the clouds. It's like a city!" "Maybe it's just water." "No, it's a city!" "Bring 'er down. Captain. God, Captain, bring 'er down fast!" "Drag Brown in here! He ought to see this!" "Canlt you bring 'er down faster. Captain?" "Damn it, it  a city!" "Why doesn't someone get Brown?" "Take to your couches, men," said Captain Wiley. "Landing's apt to be a bit bumpy. Better strap yourselves in." D own went the rocket, more slowly now, great plumes of scarlet thundering from its forward braking jets. Down, down into soft, cotton-like clouds, the whiteness sliding silently past the ports. Suddenly, a droning voice : "To those in the ship from the planet called Earth: Please refrain from landing at this moment. You will await landing instructions." Parker leaped off his couch, grasping a stanchion for support. "That voice! It was human!" Captain Wiley's trembling hand moved over the jet-control panel. The ship slowed in its descent. The clouds outside the portholes became motionless, a milky whiteness pressed against the ship. "The voice!" Parker cried again. "Am I crazy? Did everyone hear it?" Captain Wiley turned away from the panel. "We heard it, Parker. It was in our minds. Telepathy." He smiled. "Yes, the planet is inhabited. There are intelligent beings on it. Perhaps they're more intelligent than we are." It was strange. The men had hoped, dreamed, prayed for this moment. Now they sat stunned, unable to comprehend, their tongues frozen. "We'll see them very soon," said Captain Wiley, his voice quivering. "We'll wait for their directions." Breathlessly, they waited. Captain Wiley's fingers drummed nervously on the base of the control panel. Lieutenant Gunderson rose from his couch, stood in the center of the cabin, then returned to his couch. Silence, save for the constant, rumbling roar of the jets which held the ship aloft. "I wonder how long it'll be," murmured Fong at last. "It seems like a long time!" burst Parker. "We've waited nine years," said Captain Wiley. "We can wait a few more minutes." They waited. "Good Lord!" said Parker. "How long is it going to be? What time is it? We've been waiting an hour ! What kind of people are they down there?" "Maybe they've forgotten about us," said Fong. "That's it!" cried Parker. "They've forgotten about us! Hey, you! Down there -- you that talked to us! We're still here, damn it! We want to land!" "Parker," said Captain Wiley,  sternly. Parker sat down on his couch, his lips quivering. Then came the voice: "We regret that a landing is impossible at this moment. Our field is overcrowded, and your vessel is without priority. You must wait your turn." Captain Wiley stared forward at nothing. "Whoever you are," he whispered, "please understand that we have come a long way to reach your planet. Our trip..." "We do not wish to discuss your trip. You will be notified when landing space is available." Captain Wiley's body shook. "Wait, tell us who you are. What do you look like? Tell us..." "Talking to you is quite difficult. We must form our thoughts so as to form word-patterns in your minds. You will be notified." "Wait a minute!" called Captain Wiley. No answer. Captain Wiley straightened in an effort to maintain dignity. They waited... The darkness was an impenetrable blanket, a solid thing, like thick black velvet glued over the ports. It was worse than the darkness of space. Captain Wiley sat before the control panel, slowly beating his fists against the arms of his chair, a human metronome ticking off the slow seconds. Parker stood before a porthole. "Hey, look. Captain! There's a streak of red, like a meteor. And there's another!" Captain Wiley rose, looked out. "They're rockets. They're going to land. These people are highly advanced." His face became grim. Below them lay a planet, an intelligent race hidden beneath clouds and darkness. What manner of creatures were they? How great was their civilization? What marvelous secrets had their scientists discovered? What was their food like, their women, their whiskey? The questions darted endlessly through his mind like teasing needle-points. All these wondrous things lay below them, and here they sat, like starving men, their hands tied, gazing upon a steaming but unobtainable dinner. So near and yet so far. He trembled. The emotion grew within him until it burst out as water bursts through the cracked wall of a dam. He became like Parker. "Why should we wait?" he yelled. "Why must we land in their field? Parker! Prepare to release flares! We're going down! We'll land anywhere -- in a street, in the country. We don't have to wait for orders!" Parker bounced off his couch. Someone called, "Brown, we're going to landl" A scurrying of feet, the rush of taut-muscled bodies, the babble of excited voices. "We're going down!" "We're going down!" The grumble of the Wanderer's jets loudened, softened, spluttered, loudened again. Vibration filled the ship as it sank downward. Suddenly it lurched upward, like a child's ball caught in a stream of rising water. The jolt staggered the men. They seized stanchions and bulkhead railings to keep their balance. "What the hell?" Abruptly, the strange movement ceased. The ship seemed motionless. There was no vibration. "Captain," said Lieutenant Gunderson. "There's no change in altitude. We're still at # feet, no more, no less." "We must be going down," said Captain Wiley, puzzled. "Kill jets # and #." The Lieutenant's hands flicked off two switches. A moment later: "There's no change. Captain." Then came the voice: "To those in the vessel from the planet Earth ; Please do not oppose orders of the Landing Council. You are the first visitors in the history of our world whom we have had to restrain with physical force. You will be notified when landing space is available." The warm sunlight streamed into the clouds, washing away the last shadows and filtering through the portholes. The men breakfasted, bathed, shaved, smoked, sat, twisted their fingers, looked out the ports. They were silent men, with dark shadows about their eyes and with tight. white-lipped mouths. Frequently, the clouds near them were cut by swift, dark shapes swooping downward. The shapes were indistinct in the cotton-like whiteness, but obviously they were huge, like a dozen Wanderers made into one. "Those ships are big," someone murmured, without enthusiasm. "It's a busy spaceport," grumbled Captain Wiley. Thoughts, words, movements came so slowly it was like walking under water. Enthusiasm was dead. The men were automatons, sitting, waiting, eating, sitting, waiting. A day passed, and a night. "Maybe they've forgotten us," said Fong. No one answered. The thought had been voiced before, a hundred times. Then, at last, the droning words; "To those in the vessel from the planet Earth: You will now land. We will carry you directly over the field. Then you will descend straight down. The atmosphere is suitable to your type of life and is free of germs. You will not need protection." The men stared at one another. "Hey," Doyle said, "did you hear that? He says we can go down." The men blinked. Captain Wiley swallowed hard. He rose with a stiff, slow, nervous hesitancy. "We're going down," he mumbled, as if repeating the words over and over in his mind and trying to believe them. The men stirred as realization sprouted and grew. They stirred like lethargic animals aroused from the long, dreamless sleep of hibernation. "We're going to land," breathed Parker, unbelievingly. The Wanderer moved as though caught in the grip of a giant, invisible hand. The voice said : "You may now descend." Captain Wiley moved to the jetcontrol panel. "Lieutenant!" he snapped. "Wake up. Let's go!" The ship sank downward through the thick sea of clouds. The men walked to the ports. A tenseness, an excitement grew in their faces, like dying flame being fanned into its Out of the clouds loomed monstrous, shining, silver spires and towers, Cyclopean bridges, gigantic lake-like mirrors, immense golden spheres. It was a nightmare world, a j'ungle of fantastic shape and color. The men gasped, whispered, murmured, the flame of their excitement growing, growing. "The whole planet is a city!" breathed Parker. The Wanderer came to rest on a broad landing field of light blue stone. The jets coughed, spluttered, died. The ship quivered, then lay still, its interior charged with an electric, pregnant silence. "You first. Captain." Lieutenant Gunderson's voice cracked, and his face was flushed. "You be the first to go outside." Captain Wiley stepped through the airlock, his heart pounding. It was over now -- all the bewilderment, the numbness. And his eyes were shining. He'd waited so long that it was hard to believe the waiting was over. But it was, he told himself. The journey was over, and the waiting, and now the loneliness would soon be over. Mankind was not alone. It was a good universe after all! He stepped outside, followed by Lieutenant Gunderson, then by Parker, Doyle and Fong. He rubbed his eyes. This couldn't be! A world like this couldn't exist! He shook his head, blinked furiously"It -- it can't be true," he mumbled to Lieutenant Gunderson. "We're still on the ship -- dreaming." The landing field was huge, perhaps ten miles across, and its sides were lined with incredible ships, the smallest of which seemed forty times as large as the Wanderer. There were silver ships, golden ships, black ships, round ships, transparent ships, cigar-shaped ships, flat-topped ships. And scattered over the field were -- creatures. A few were the size of men, but most were giants by comparison. Some were humanoid, some reptilian. Some were naked, some clad in helmeted suits, some enveloped with a shimmering, water-like luminescence. The creatures walked, slithered, floated, crawled. Beyond the ships and the field lay the great city, its web-work of towers, minarets, spheres and bridges like the peaks of an enormous mountain range stretching up into space itself. The structures were like the colors of a rainbow mixed in a cosmic paint pot, molded and solidified into fantastic shapes by a mad god. "I -- I'm going back to the ship," stammered Parker. The whiteness of death was in his face. "I'm going to stay with Brown." He turned, and then he screamed. "Captain, the ship's moving!" Silently, the Wanderer was drifting to the side of the field. The toneless voice said: "We are removing your vessel so that other descending ships will not damage it." Captain Wiley shouted into the air. "Wait! Don't go away! Help us! Where can we see you?" The voice seemed to hesitate. "It is difficult for us to speak In thoughts that you understand." Captain Wiley studied the faces of his men. They were not faces of conquerors or of triumphant spacemen. They were the faces of dazed, frightened children who had caught a glimpse of Hell. He attempted, feebly, to smile. "All right," he said loudly, "so it isn't like we expected. So no one came to meet us with brass bands and ten cent flags. We've still succeeded, haven't we? We've found life that's intelligent beyond our comprehension. What if our own civilization is insignificant by comparison? Look at those beings. Think of what we can learn from them. Why, their ships might have exceeded the speed of ligjfit. They might be from other galaxies!" "Let's find out," said Parker. They strode to the nearest ship, an immense, smooth, bluish sphere. Two creatures stood before it, shaped like men and yet twice the size of men. They wore white, skintight garments that revealed muscular bodies like those of gods. The looked at Captain Wiley and smiled. One of them pointed toward the Wanderer. Their smiles widened and then they laughed. They laughed gently, understandingly, but they laughed. And then they turned away. "Talk to them," Parker urged. "How?" Beads of perspiration shone on Captain Wiley's face. "Any way. Go ahead." Captain Wiley wiped his forehead. "We are from Earth, the third planet..." The two god-like men seemed annoyed. They walked away, ignoring the Earthmen. Captain Wiley spat. "All right, so they won't talk to us. Look at that city! Think of the things we can see there and tell the folks on Earth about! Why, we'll be heroes!" "Let's go," said Parker, his voice quavering around the edges. They walked toward a large, oval opening in a side of the field, a hole between mountainous, conical structures that seemed like the entrance to a street. Suddenly breath exploded from Captain Wiley's lungs. His body jerked back. He fell to the blue stone pavement. Then he scrambled erect, scowling, his hands outstretched. He felt a soft, rubbery, invisible substance. "It's a wall!" he exclaimed. The voice droned: "To those of Earth: Beings under the #th stage of Galactic Development are restricted to the area of the landing field. We are sorry. In your primitive stage it would be unwise for you to learn the nature of our civilization. Knowledge of our science would be abused by your people, and used for the thing you call war. We hope that you have been inspired by what you have seen. However, neither we nor the other visitors to our planet are permitted to hold contact with you. It is suggested that you and your vessel depart." "Listen, you!" screamed Parker. "We've been nine years getting here! By Heaven, we won't leave now! We're..." "We have no time to discuss the matter. Beings under the #th stage of Galactic..." "Never mind!" spat Captain Wiley. Madness flamed in Parker's eyes. "We won't go! I tell you, we won't, we won't!" His fists streaked through the air as if at an invisible enemy. He ran toward the wall. He collided with a jolt that sent him staggering backward, crying, sobbing, screaming, all at once. Captain Wiley stepped forward, struck him on the chin. Parker crumpled. They stood looking at his body, which lay motionless except for the slow rising and falling of his chest. "What now, Captain?" asked Lieutenant Gunderson. Captain Wiley thought for a few seconds. Then he said, "We're ignorant country bumpkins, Lieutenant, riding into the city in a chugging jalopy. We're stupid savages, trying to discuss the making of fire with the creators of atomic energy. We're children racing a paper glider against an atomic-powered jet. We're too ridiculous to be noticed. We're tolerated -- but nothing more." "Shall we go home?" asked Fong, a weariness in his voice. Lieutenant Gunderson scratched his neck. "I don't think I'd want to go home now. Gould you bear to tell the truth about what happened?" Fong looked wistfully at the shining city. "If we told the truth, they probably wouldn't believe us. We've failed. It sounds crazy. We reached Proxima Gentauri and found life, and yet somehow we failed. No, I wouldn't like to go home." "Still, we learned something," said Doyle. "We know now that there is life on worlds beside our own. Somewhere there must be other races like ours." They looked at each other, strangely, for a long, long moment. At last Lieutenant Gunderson asked, "How far is Alpha Centauri?" Captain Wiley frowned. "Alpha Gentauri?" Through his mind swirled chaotic visions of colossal distances, eternal night, and lonely years. He sought hard to find a seed of hope in his mind, and yet there was no seed. There were only a coldness and an emptiness. Suddenly, the voice: "Yes, Men of Earth, we suggest that you try Alpha Gentauri." The men stood silent and numb, like bewildered children, as the implication of those incredible words sifted into their consciousness. Finally Fong said, "Did -- did you hear that? He said..." Captain Sam Wiley nodded, very slowly. "Yes. Alpha Gentauri. Alpha Gentauri." His eyes began to twinkle, and then he smiled... onward through cold, silent infinity, on and on, an insignificant pencil of silver lost in the terrible, brooding blackness. Yet even greater than the blackness was the flaming hope in the six men who inhabited the silver rocket. They moved in hope as fish move in water. Their lives revolved in hope as planets revolve in space and time. They bore their hope like a jeweled crown, and it was as much a part of them as sight in their eyes. Hope was both their brother and their god. And there was no loneliness. Progress is relative; Senator O'Noonans idea of it was not particularly scientific. Which would be too bad, if he had the last word! Progress Report By Mark Clifton and Alex Apostoiides that the air conditioning unit merely washed the hot air around him without lowering the temperature from that outside. He knew it was partly psychosomatic, compounded of the view of the silvery spire of the test ship through the heatwaves of the Nevada landscape and the knowledge that this was the day, the hour, and the minutes. The final test was at hand. The instrument ship was to be sent out into space, controlled from this sunken concrete bunker, to find out if the flimsy bodies of men could endure there. Jennings visualized other bunkers scattered through the area, observation posts, and farther away the field headquarters with open telephone lines to tlie Pentagon, and beyond that a world waiting for news of the test -- and not everyone wishing it well. The monotonous buzz of the field phone pulled him away from his fascinated gaze at the periscope slit. He glanced at his two assistants. Professor Stein and Major Eddy. They were seated in front of their control boards, staring at .the blank eyes of their radar screens, patiently enduring the beads of sweat on their faces and necks and hands, the odor of it .arising from their bodies. They too were feeling the moment. He picked up the phone. "Jennings," .he said crisply. "Zero minus one half hour, Colonel. We start alert count in fifteen minutes." "Right," Colonel Jennings spoke softly, showing none of the e.xcitement he felt. He replaced the field phone on its hook and spoke to the two men in front of him. "This is it. Apparently this time we'll go through with it." Major Eddy's shoulders hunched a trifle, as if he were getting set to have a load placed upon them. Professor Stein gave no indication that he had heard. His thin body was stooped over his instrument bank, intense, alert, as if he were a runner crouched at the starting mark, as if he were young again. Colonel Jennings walked over to the periscope slit again and peered through the shimmer of heat to where the silvery ship lay arrowed in her cradle. The last few moments of waiting, with a brassy taste in his mouth, with the vision of the test ship before him; these were the worst. Everything had been done, checked and rechecked hours and days ago. He found himself wishing there were some little thing, some desperate little error which must be corrected hurriedly, just something to break the tension of waiting. "You're all right, Sam, Prof?" he asked the major and professor unnecessarily. "A little nervous," Major Eddy answered without moving. "Of course," Professor Stein said. There was a too heavy stress on the silibant sound, as if the last traces of accent had not yet been removed. "I expect everyone is nervous, not just the hundreds involved in this, but everywhere," Jennings commented. And then ruefully, "Except Professor Stein there. I thought surely I'd see some nerves at this point, Prof." He was attempting to make light conversation, something to break the strain of mounting buck fever. "If I let even one nerve tendril slack, Colonel, I would go to pieces entirely," Stein said precisely, in the way a man speaks who has learned the language from text books. "So I do not think of our ship at all. I think of mankind. I wonder if mankind is as ready as our ship. I wonder if man will do any better on the planets than he has done here." "Well, of course," Colonel Jennings answered with sympathy in his voice, "under Hitler and all the things you went through, I don't blame you for being a little bitter. But not all mankind is like that, you know. As long as you've been in our country, Professor, you've never looked around you. You've been working on this, never lifting your head " H e jerked in annoyance as a red light blinked over the emergency circuit, and a buzzing, sharp and repeated, broke into this moment when he felt he was actually reaching, touching Stein, as no one had before. He dragged the phone toward him and began speaking angrily into its mouthpiece before he had brought it to his lips. "What the hell's the matter now? They're not going to call it off again! Three times now, and..." He broke off and frowned as the crackling voice came through the receiver, the vein on his temple pulsing in his stress. "I beg your pardon. General," he said, much more quietly. The two men turned from their radar scopes and watched him questioningly. He shrugged his shoulders, an indication to them of his helplessness. "You're not going to like this, Jim," the general was saying. "But . it's orders from Pentagon. Are you familiar with Senator O'Noonan?" "Vaguely," Jennings answered, "You'll be more familiar with him, Jim. He's been newly appointed chairman of the appropriations committee covering our work. And he's fought it bitterly from the beginning. He's tried every way he could to scrap the entire project. When we've finished this test, Jim, we'll have used up our appropriations to date. Whether we get any more depends on him." "Yes, sir?" Jennings spoke questioningly. Political maneuvering was not his problem, that was between Pentagon and Congress. "We must have his support, Jim," the general explained. "Pentagon hasn't been able to win him over. He's stubborn and violent in his reactions. The fact it keeps him in the headlines -- well, of course that wouldn't have any bearing. So Pentagon invited him to come to the field here to watch the test, hoping that would win him over." The general hesitated, then continued. "I've gone a step farther. I felt if he was actually at the center of control, your operation, he might be won over, if he could actually participate, press the activating key or something, if the headlines could show he was working with us, actually sent the test ship on its flight..." "General, you can't," Jennings moaned. He forgot rank, everything. 'Tve already done it, Jim," the general chose to ignore the outburst. "He's due there now. I'll look to you to handle it. He's got to be won over. Colonel. It's your project." Considering the years that he and the general had worked together, the warm accord and informality between them, the use of Jennings' title made it an order. "Yes, sir," he said. "Over," said the general formally. "Out," whispered Jennings. The two men looked at him questioningly. "It seems," he answered their look, "we are to have an observer. Senator O'Noonan." "Even in Germany," Professor Stein said quietly, "they knew enough to leave us alone at a critical moment." "He can't do it, Jim," Major Eddy looked at Jennings with pleading eyes. "Oh, but he can," Jennings answered bitterly. "Orders. And you know what orders are, don't you, Major?" "Yes, sir," Major Eddy said stiffly. Professor Stein smiled ruefully. Both of them turned back to their instrum.ent boards, their radar screens, to the protective obscurity of subordinates carrying out an assignment. They were no longer three men coming close together, almost understanding one another in this moment of waiting, when the world and all in it had been shut away, and nothing real existed except the silvery spire out there on the desert and the life of it in the controls at their fingertips. "Beep, minus fifteen minutes!" the first time signal sounded. U The senator appeared in the low doorway and extended a fleshy hand. His voice was hearty, but there was no warmth behind his tones. He paused on the threshold, bulky, impressive, as if he were about to deliver an address. But Jennings, while shaking hands, drew him into the bunker, pointedly, causing the senator to raise bushy eyebrows and stare at him speculatively. "At this point everything runs on a split second basis, Senator," he said crisply. "Ceremony comes after the test." His implication was that when the work was done, the senator could have his turn in the limelight, take all the credit, turn it into political fodder to be thrown to the people. But because the man was chairman of the appropriations committee, he softened his abruptness. "If the timing is off even a small fraction. Senator, we would have to scrap the flight and start all over." "At additional expense, no doubt." The senator could also be crisp. "Surprises me that the military should think of that, however." The closing of the heavy doors behind him punctuated his remark and caused him to step to the center of the bunker. Where there had seemed adequate room before, now the feeling was one of oppressive overcrowding. Unconsciously, Major Eddy squared his elbows as if to clear the space around him for the manipulation of his controls. Professor Stein sat at his radar screen, quiet, immobile, a part of the mechanisms. He was accustomed to overbearing authority whatever political tag it might wear at the moment. "Beep. Eleven minutes," the signal sounded. "Perhaps you'll be good enough to brief me on just what you're doing here?" the senator asked, and implied by the tone of his voice that it couldn't be very much. "In layman's language, Colonel. Don't try to make it impressive with technical obscurities. I want my progress report on this project to be understandable to everyone." Jennings looked at him in dismay. Was the man kidding him? Explain the zenith of science, the culmination of the dreams of man in twenty simple words or less! And about ten minutes to win over a man which the Pentagon had failed to win. "Perhaps you'd like to sit here. Senator," be said courteously. "When we learned you were coming, we felt yours should be the honor. At zero time, you press this key -- here. It will be your hand which sends the test ship out into space." Apparently they were safe. The senator knew so little, he did not realize the automatic switch would close with the zero time signal, that no hand could be trusted to press the key at precisely the right time, that the senator's key was a dummy. "Beep, ten," the signal came through. Jennings went back over to the periscope and peered through the slit. He felt strangely surprised to see the silver column of the ship still there. The calm, the scientific detachment, the warm thrill of coordinated effort, all were gone. He felt as if the test flight itself was secondary to what the senator thought about it, what he would say in his progress report. He wondered if the senator's progress report would compare in any particular with the one on the ship. That was a chart, representing as far as they could tell, the minimum and maximum tolerances of human life. If the multiple needles, tracing their continuous lines, went over the black boundaries of tolerances, human beings would die at that point. Such a progress report, showing the life-sustaining conditions at each point throughout the ship's flight, would have some meaning. He wondered what meaning the senator's progress report would have. He felt himself being pushed aside from the periscope. There was no ungentleness in the push, simply the determined pressure of an arrogant man who was accustomed to being in the center of things, and thinking nothing of shoving to get there. The senator gave him the briefest of explanatory looks, and placed his own eye at the periscope slit. "Beep, nine," the signal sounded. "So that's what represents two contemptuously. "That little sliver of metal." bomb was even smaller," Jennings said quietly. T he senator took his eye away from the periscope briefly and looked at Jennings speculatively. "The story of where all that money went still hasn't been told, he said pointedly. "But the story of will be different." Colonel Jennings said nothing. The white hot rage mounting within him made it impossible for him to speak. The senator straightened up and walked back over to his chair. He waved a hand in the direction of Major Eddy. "What does that man do?" he asked, as if the major were not present, or was unable to comprehend. "Major Eddy," Jennings found control of his voice, "operates remote control." He was trying to reduce the vast complexity of the operation to the simplest possible language. "Beep, eight," the signal interrupted him. "He will guide the ship throughout its entire flight, just as if he were sitting in it." "Why isn't he sitting in it?" the senator asked. "That's what the test is for. Senator." Jennings felt his voice becoming icy. "We don't know if space will permit human life. We don't know what's out there." "Best way to find out is for a man to go out there and see," the senator commented shortly. "I want to find out something, I go look at it myself. I don't depend on charts and graphs, and folderol." The major did not even hunch his broad shoulders, a characteristic gesture, to show that he had heard, to show that he wished the senator was out there in untested space. "What about him? He's not even in uniform!" "Professor Stein maintains sight contact on the scope and transmits The senator's eyes flashed again beneath heavy brows. His lips indicated what he thought of professors and projects who used them. The colonel looked at him incredulously. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask where the man had been during the war. He decided he'd better not ask it. He might learn. "It stands for Identification -- Friend or Foe, Senator. It's army jargon." "Beep, seven." Seven minutes, Jennings thought, and here I am trying to explain the culmination of the entire science of all mankind to a lardbrain in simple kindergarten words. Well, he'd wished there was something to break the tension of the last half hour, keep him occupied. He had it. "You mean the army wouldn't know, after the ship got up, whether it was ours or the enemy's?" the senator asked incredulously. "There are meteors in space. Senator," Jennings said carefully. "Radar contact is all we'll have out verts our beam to a predetermined pulse, and it bounces back to us in a different pattern. That's the only way we'd know if we were still on the ship, or have by chance fastened on to a meteor." "What has that got to do with the enemy?" O'Noonan asked uncomprehendingly. Jennings sighed, almost audibly. "The mechanism was developed during the war, when we didn't know which planes were ours and which the enemy's. We've simply adapted it to this use -- to save money. Senator." "Humph!" the senator expressed his disbelief. "Top complicated. The world has grown too complicated." "Beep, six." The senator glanced irritably at the time speaker. It had interrupted his speech. But he chose to ignore the interruption, that was the way to handle heckling. "I am a simple man. I come from simple parentage. I represent the simple people, the common people, the people with their feet on the ground. And the whole world needs to get back to the simple truths and honesties..." Jennings headed off the campaign speech which might appeal to the mountaineers of the senator's home state, where a man's accomplishments were judged by how far he could spit tobacco juice; it had little application in this bunker where the final test before the flight of man to the stars was being tried. "To us. Senator," he said gently, "this ship represents simple truths and honesties. We are, at this moment, testing the truths of all that mankind has ever thought of, theorized about, believed of the space which surrounds the Earth. A farmer may hear about new methods of growing crops, but the only way he knows whether they're practical or not is to try them on his own land." The senator looked at him impassively. Jennings didn't know whether he was going over or not. But he was trying. "All that ship, and all the instruments it contains; those represent the utmost honesties of the men who worked on them. Nobody tried to bluff, to get by with shoddy workmanship, cover up ignorance. A farmer does not try to bluff his land, for the crops he gets tells the final story. Scientists, too, have simple honesty. They have to have, Senator, for the results will show them up if they don't." T he senator looked at him speculatively, and with a growing respect. Not a bad speech, that. Not a bad speech at all. If this tomfoolery actually worked, and it might, that could be the approach in selling it to his constituents. By implication, he could take full credit, put over the impression that it was he who had stood over the scientists making sure they were as honest and simple as the mountain farmers. Many a man has gone into the White House with less. "Beep, five." Five more minutes. The sudden thought occurred to O'Noonan: what if he refused to press the dummy key? Refused to take part in this project he called tomfoolery? Perhaps they thought they were being clever in having him take part in the ship's launching, and were by that act committing him to something... "This is the final test, Senator. After this one, if it is right, man leaps to the stars!" It was Jennings' plea, his final attempt to catch the senator up in the fire and the dream. "And then more yapping colonists wanting statehood," the senator said dryly. "Upsetting the balance of power. Changing things." Jennings was silent. "Beep, four." "More imports trying to get into our country duty-free," O'Noonan went on. "Upsetting our economy." His vision was of lobbyists threatening to cut off contributions if their own industries were not kept in a favorable position. Of grimjawed industrialists who could easily put a more tractable candidate up in his place to be elected by the free and thinking people of his state. All the best catch phrases, the semantically-loaded promises, the advertising appropriations being used by his opponent. It was a dilemma. Should he jump on the bandwagon of advancement to the stars, hoping to catch the imagination of the voters by it? Were the voters really in favor of progress? What could this space flight put in the dinner pails of the Smiths, the Browns, the Johnsons? It was all very well to talk about the progress of mankind, but that was the only measure to be considered. Any politician knew that. And apparently no scientist knew it. Man advances only when he sees how it will help him stuff his gut. "Beep, three." For a full minute, the senator had sat lost in speculation. And what could he personally gain? A plan, full-formed, sprang into his mind. This whole ded could be taken out of the hands of no the military on charges of waste and corruption. It could be brought back into the control of private industry, where it belonged. He thought of vast tracts of land in his own state, tracts he could buy cheap, through dummy companies, places which could be made very suitable for the giant factories necessary to manufacture spaceships. As chairman of the appropriations committee, it wouldn't be difficult to sway the choice of site. And all that extra employment for the people of his own state. The voters couldn't forget plain, simple, honest O'Noonan after that! "Beep, two." beads increase on his forehead. His collar was already soaking wet. He had been watching the senator through two long minutes, terrible eon-consuming minutes, the impassive face showing only what the senator wanted it to show. He saw the face now soften into something approaching benignity, nobility. The head came up, the silvery hair tossed back. "Son," he said with a ringing thrill in his voice. "Mankind much reach the stars! We must allow nothing to stop that! No personal consideration, no personal belief, nothing must stand in the way of mankind's greatest dream!" His eyes were shrewdly watching the effect upon Jennings' face, ; measuring through him the effect such a speech would have upon the voters. He saw the relief spread over Jennings' face, the glow. Yes, it might work. "Now, son," he said with kindly tolerance, "tell me what you want me to do about pressing this key when the time comes." "Beep, one." And then the continuous drone while the seconds were being counted off aloud. "Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fiftyseven -- " The droning went on while Jennings showed the senator just how to press the dummy key down, explaining it in careful detail, and just when. "Thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirtyfive -- " "Major!" Jennings called questioningly. "Ready, sir." "Professor!" "Ready, sir." "Press it. Senator!" Jennings called frantically. Already the automatic firing stud had taken over. The bellowing, roaring flames reached down with giant strength, nudging the ship upward, seeming to hang suspended, waiting. "Press it!" The senator's hand pressed the dummy key. He was committed. As if the ship had really been waiting, it lifted, faster and faster. "Major?" "I have it, sir." The major's hands were flying over his bank of controls, correcting the slight unbalance of thrusts, holding the ship as steady as if he were in it. Already the ship was beyond visual sight, picking up speed. But the pip on the radar screens was strong and clear. The drone of the strong. The senator sat and waited. He had done his job. He felt it perhaps would have been better to have had the photographers on the spot, but realized the carefully directed and rehearsed pictures to be taken later would make better vote fodder. "It's already out in space now, Senator," Jennings found a second of time to call it to the senator. The pips and the signals were bright and clear, coming through the ionosphere, the Heaviside layer as they had been designed to do. Jennings wondered if the senator could ever be made to understand the simple honesty of scientists who had worked that out so well and true. Bright and strong and clear. And then there was nothing! The screens were blank. The sounds were gone. silence. "It shut! It shut off!" Major Eddy's voice was shrill in amazement. "It cut right out. Colonel. No fade, no dying signal, just out!" It was the first time Jennings had ever heard a note of excitement in Professor Stein's voice. The phone began to ring, loud and shrill. That would be from the General's observation post, where he, too, must have lost the signal. The excitement penetrated the senator's rosy dream of vast acreages being sold at a huge profit, giant walls of factories going up under his remote-control ownership. "What's wrong?" he asked. Jennings did not answer him. "What was the altitude?" he asked. The phone continued to ring, but he was not yet ready to answer it. "Hundred fifty miles, maybe a little more," Major Eddy answered in a dull voice. "And then, nothing," he repeated incredulously. "Nothing." The phone was one long ring now, taken off of automatic signal and rung with a hand key pressed down and held there. In a daze, Jennings picked up the phone. "Yes, General," he answered as though he were no more than a robot. He hardly listened to the general's questions, did not need the report that every radarscope throughout the area had lost contact at the same instant. Somehow he had known that would be true, that it wasn't just his own mechanisms failing. One question did penetrate his stunned mind. "How is the senator taking it?" the general asked finally. "Uncomprehending, as yet," Jennings answered cryptically. "But even there it will penetrate sooner or later. We'll have to face it then." "Yes," the general sighed. "What about safety? What if it fell on a big city, for example?" "It had escape velocity," Jennings answered. "It would simply follow its trajectory indefinitely -- which was away from Earth." "What's happening now?" the senator asked arrogantly. He had been out of the limelight long enough, longer than was usual or necessary. He didn't like it when people went about their business as if he were not present. "Quiet during the test, Senator," Jennings took his mouth from the phone long enough to reprove the man gently. Apparently he got away with it, for the senator put his finger to his lips knowingly and sat back again. "The senator's starting to ask questions?" the general asked into the phone. "Yes, sir. It won't be long now." "I hate to contemplate it, Jim," the general said in apprehension. "There's only one way he'll transinto the air and lost." Then sharply. "There must be something you've done. Colonel. Some mistake you've made." T he implied accusation struck at Jennings' stomach, a heavy blow. "That's the way it's going to be?" he stated the question, knowing its answer. "For the good of the service," the general answered with a stock phrase. "If it is the fault of one officer and his men, we may be given another chance. If it is the failure of science itself, we won't." "I see," the colonel answered. "You won't be the first soldier, Colonel, to be unjustly punished to maintain public faith in the service." "Yes, sir," Jennings answered as formally as if he were already facing court martial. "It's back!" Major Eddy shouted in his excitement. "It's back, Colonel!" The pip, truly, showed startlingly clear and sharp on the radarscope, the correct signals were coming in sure and strong. As suddenly as the ship had cut out, it was back. "It's back, General," Colonel Jennings shouted into the phone, his eyes fixed upon his own radarscope. He dropped the phone without waiting for the general's answer. "Good," exclaimed the senator. "I was getting a little bored with nothing happening." "Have you got control?" Jennings called to the major. "Can't tell yet. It's coming in too fast. I'm trying to slow it. 'We'll know in a minute." "You have it now," Professor Stein spoke up quietly. "It's slowing. It will be in the atmosphere soon. Slow it as much as you can." As surely as if he were sitting in its control room, Eddy slowed the ship, easing it down into the atmosphere. The instruments recorded the results of his playing upon the bank of controls, as sound pouring from a musical instrument. "At the take-off point?" Jennings asked. "Can you land it there?" "Close to it," Major Eddy answered. "As close as I can." Now the ship was in visual sight again, and they watched its nose turn in the air, turn from a bullet hurtling earthward to a ship settling to the ground on its belly. Major Eddy was playing his instrument bank as if he were the soloist in a vast orchestra at the height of a crescendo forte. Jennings grabbed up the phone again. "Transportation!" he shouted. "Already dispatched, sir," the operator at the other end responded.  Through the periscope slit, Jennings watched the ship settle lightly downward to the ground, as though it were a breezeborne feather instead of its tons of metal. It seemed to settle itself, still, and become inanimate again. Major Eddy dropped his hands away from his instrument bank, an exhausted virtuoso. "My congratulations!" the senator included all three men in his sweeping glance. "It was remarkable how you all had control at every instance. My progress report will certainly bear that notation." The three men looked at him, and realized there was no irony in his words, no sarcasm, no realization at all of what had truly happened. "I can see a va-a-ast fleet of no-o-ble ships... the senator began to orate. But the roar of the arriving jeep outside took his audience away from him. They made a dash for the bunker door, no longer interested in the senator and his progress report. It was the progress report as revealed by the instruments on the ship which interested them more. The senator was close behind them as they piled out of the bunker door, and into the jeep, with Jennings unceremoniously pulling the driver from the wheel and taking his place. Over the rough dirt road toward the launching site where the ship had come to rest, their minds were bemused and feverish, as they projected ahead, trying to read in advance what the instruments would reveal of that blank period. The senator's mind projected even farther ahead to the fleet of space ships he would own and control. And he had been worried about some ignorant stupid voters! Stupid animals! How he despised them! What would he care about voters when he could be master of the spaceways to the stars? Jennings swerved the jeep off the dirt road and took out across the hummocks of sagebrush to the ship a few rods away. He hardly slacked speed, and in a swirl of dust pulled up to the side of the ship. Before it had even stopped, the men were piling out of the jeep, running toward the side of the ship. And stopped short. eyes, to absorb the incredible, they stared at the swinging open door in the side of the ship. Slowly they realized the iridescent purple glow around the doorframe, the rotted metal, disintegrating and falling to the dirt below. The implications of the tampering with the door held them unmoving. Only the senator had not caught it yet. Slower than they, now he was chugging up 'to where they had stopped, an elephantine amble. "Well, well, what's holding us up?" he panted irritably. Cautiously then, Jennings moved toward the open door. And as cautiously, Major Eddy and Professor Stein followed him. O'Noonan hung behind, sensing the caution, but not knowing the reason behind it. They entered the ship, wary of what might be lurking inside, what had burned open the door out there in space, what had been able to capture the ship, cut it off from its contact with controls, stop it in its headlong flight out into space, turn it, return it to their controls at precisely the same point and altitude. Wary, but they entered. At first glance, nothing seemed disturbed. The bulkhead leading to the power plant was still whole. But farther down the passage, the door leading to the control room where the instruments were housed also swung open. It, too, showed the iridescent purple disintegration of its metal frame. They hardly recognized the control room. They had known it intimately, had helped to build and fit it. They knew each weld, each nut and bolt. "The instruments are gone," the professor gasped in awe. It was true. As they crowded there in the doorway, they saw the gaping holes along the walls where the instruments had been inserted, one by one, each to tell its own story of conditions in space. The senator pushed himself into the room and looked about him. Even he could tell the room had been dismantled. "What kind of sabotage is this?" he exclaimed, and turned in anger toward Jennings. No one answered him. Jennings did not even bother to meet the accusing eyes. They walked down the narrow passage between the twisted frames where the instruments should have been. They came to the spot where the master integrator should have stood, the one which should have co-ordinated all the results of lifesustenance measurements, the one which was to give them their progress report. There, too, was a gaping hole -- but not without its message. Etched in the metal frame, in the same iridescent purple glow, were two words. Two enigmatic words to reverberate throughout the world, burned in by some watcher -- some keeper -- some warden. "Not yet" Manly Age in Earth's not-too-distant future, complete with legal duels, destructive "thrill parties", subjugated women, and such pleasant diversions as bullfights -- but what happens when an intelligent mutant bull enters the picture is moderately world-shaking. W. W. Skupeldyckle presents Dick, and others. On earth and in space. Humanity was the beneficiary of DornoTs great experiments, for it supplied -- By S. A. Lombino guinea pigs this time?" Krai asked, a touch of bitterness, tinging his voice. Dornal smiled a crooked smile, and stroked the carefully trimmed beard that clung to his fine jaw. His right eyebrow lifted ever so slightly, and his blue eyes twinkled with faint puzzlement. "Surely you're not concerned?" he asked Krai. "Excuse me," Krai said sarcastically, "I lost my head." He turned on his heel, presenting the broad back of his yellow tunic to Dornal, strode rapidly toward the .plasteel door at the far end of the chamber. "Just a moment!" Dornal's voice cracked like a whip. Krai turned to face his superior officer. "Yes?" he asked. "I'm not sure I like your attitude," Dornal said. The smile had vanished from his lips. He stood now, tall, proud, regal. The blackness of his thick, flowing hair and his short beard framed the perfect oval of his face. His brows were knitted in consternation, and the eyes that examined Krai were cold -- and a little cruel. Krai met Dornal's eyes with his own and slowly said, "And I'm not sure I like yours either." Dornal's hand dropped automatically to the stun gun hanging in the plastic holster at his waist. He seemed to think better of it, looped his thumb into his belt instead. Again, he smiled charmingly, his teeth flashing in a white, even grin. "Krai," he said, "don't be a fool." "Damnit, I'm not being a fool!" Krai shouted. "I'm just getting fed up. God, how much longer is this going to go on, this indiscriminate use of human beings as -- " "You're upset," Dornal said, not unkindly. "Borrow a ship, take a hop to the Moon. It'll do you good. Spend a little..." "I don't need a pleasure cruise to the Moon. It'd only remind me of the guinea pigs who made that trip possible." "All right then, Krai, what do you want?" "I want to resign," Krai said evenly. "I want to resign from your service. You can get a ne.w assistant. I want to leave your whole stinking government to you. You alone. I want you to handle all of your own rotten experiments. I want to... "That's enough!" Dornal's stun gun was in his hand now. With a quick motion of his other hand, Domal flicked the potency lever on the gun. Krai knew it was up full now, and Dornal would shoot to kill. "Go on," he said. "Squeeze the trigger." "I hope you're not daring me. Krai." Dornal's voice was cold. Krai suddenly spread his arms in despair. "Dornal, look, there are other ways. Man had other ways before you... before we began to tamper. Science was beginning to solve its own problems. It was just a matter of..." "It was a matter of decadence," Dornal interrupted. "Before I became Chief, science was floundering about in its own offal. Who cured cancer? Who defeated polio? Who reached the Moon? And Mars? Venus? Who, Krai, who?" "Do you think you did? Do you think for one minute it was you, Dornal?" "Yes," Dornal answered proudly. "It was. Krai. It was I who made these things possible. Before me, there was stupidity and blind sentiment. They depended on volunteers, and when they had no volunteers they had to fumble around with animals. By conscription of human beings these wonderful things have been made possible. Now, when we are on the verge of another great experiment, you show your chicken heart!" "Another experiment that will kill more people," Krai added. "Perhaps," Dornal admitted. "Perhaps. It doesn't matter. Perhaps they'll be successful the first time, and then no one would be lost." Krai spat in disgust. "Did they cure cancer the first time? How many humans did you murder to discover the cause of cancer?" "And how many did we save by discovering the cause and bringing about a cure?" "Don't say 'we'; It was all your doing." "On the contrary," Dornal said. "It was our doing." "How many space ships did you send out into the blackness before we reached the Moon?" Krai persisted. "And then Mars and Venus? How many lives did you throw away?" "I must remind you," Dornal said softly, "that I rule this universe. You are only my assistant, a position granted by my grace. I do what is best for the population." "And I help," Krai said. "Yes. You help." "Who are you to say that so many people must die to make things easier for those who survive them? No one has that power, Dornal. No one but..." "God," Dornal finished. "No one but God." Krai's lips tightened across his face. He turned to go. "I wasn't aware I'd dismissed you," Dornal snapped. Krai turned to face Domal. "Sir?" he asked. "The new ship leaves tomorrow at oh-two-hundred. I'll need only two men to man her. Good men, Krai. This isn't going to be the usual hop. We're reaching for the stars this time -- we're going to explore a new universe. Once we break the chains that bind us to our own solar system, nothing can stop us. Nothing!" "You'll have your two men, sir," Krai said. "Will that be all, sir?" "Dismissed," Dornal said. He slipped his stun gun back into its holster as Krai opened the plasteel door and left the chamber. T he enormous ship stood on spidery legs, nose pointed skyward. The sand spread out beneath it, bathed in the bluish light of the stars. Domal glanced upwards, his eyes darting from one pinpoint of light to the next. The slow smile crossed his face again, and his fingers ran smoothly through his short, immaculate beard. Impatiently, he glanced at his wrist-chron. The ship was set for blastoff at oh-two-hundred. It was now oh-one-fifty and there was still no sign of Krai. From the control tower, a loudspeaker blared, "Red minus five. Red minus five." The ground car screeched onto the desert sand, and Krai stepped out, waiting for the two young men to follow him. Together, they took long strides across the sand to where Domal was standing. "I knew you wouldn't fail me," he said to Krai. "Two more or less," Krai shrugged. "What's the difference now?" "Exactly," Domal agreed. "Two more or less." "Red minus three" the speaker blared. "Red minus three." "We'd better get aboard and show the men the ship, sir," Krai said. "They'll be blasting off in eight minutes." "Yes, yes," Dornal said. He glanced upwards at the stars as he mounted the ladder to the nose turret. Krai followed Dornal, but not too closely. Behind him were the two chosen men. They were strangely silent, a little pale. "Red minus one" the speaker announced. With a powerful backward thrust, Krai kicked the man behind him. There was a short grunt of surprise, as the first man tumbled backwards, down the ladder, carrying the second man with him. They rolled over in the sand as Krai raced up the remaining rungs and into the turret. "Red condition," the speaker warned. "Green minus five." Krai snapped the hatch shut and twisted the lock wheel. Dornal was peering up out of the blister, his back to Krai. "Soon it will all be mine," he said, scanning the univcrs#. "Yes," Krai agreed. Somewhere below, the powerful turbo-jets hummed into action, building power. The sound jostled Dornal. He turned to face Krai. "Green minus three" the speaker announced. Krai felt the ship tremble with the increasing power of the jets. In less than three minutes, the ship would be hurled into space, hurled into unknown universes. A look of surprise crossed Dornal's face as he stared around the cabin. "Where are the pilots? What's... He noticed the strained look on Krai's face then. "Green minus two. Standby for blastoff." "What are you... ?" "What's two more or less?" Krai shouted. Dornal reached for the space lock, fear marking his face. The desert sands began to glow red and yellow as the jets spewed flame into the darkness. "Green minus one." Dornal clawed at the lock wheel frantically. Krai smashed his fist into Dornal's hysterical features, and the other man crumpled to the deck. In another second, the force of acceleration threw Krai down unconscious beside the other man. Silently, the ship streaked for the stars. (Continued from page #I ) accuracy, the colonel put the ship into subspace drive. Korman leaned back at the conclusion of the brief activity on his control board, and met Gibson's pop-eyed stare. "Interesting, the things worth knowing," he commented. "How to make a weapon, for instance, or whether your enemy has it yet." He almost smiled at his prisoner's expression. "Or even better: knowing exactly how far your enemy has progressed and how fast he can continue, whether to stop him immediately or whether you can remain a step ahead." "B-but -- if both sides are irresistible..." Gibson stammered. Korman examined him contemptuously. "No irresistible weapon exists, or ever will!" he declared. "Only an irresistible process -- the transmission of secrets! You are living proof that no safeguards can defend against that." He savored Gibson's silent discomfort. "I am sure you know how far and how fast the Centaurian scientists will go, Gibson, since I guided you to every laboratory in that plant. Your memory may require some painful jogging when we reach the Solar System; but remember you shall!" "But you -- you were ordered to..." "You didn't think I was a Centaurian, did you?" sneered Korman. "After I just explained to you what is really irresistible?" I I Dear Friends: I was introduced to IP with the January # issue and was very pleasantly surprised. I am tempted to give IF the edge over level of intelligence in the science fiction field, but you realize how unfair this would be to John Campbell andor the publishers of judgment would be based on only one issue of IF. I must read at least # or # issues of IF, before I come to so momentous a decision. Well, at least two or three issues, anyway. My favorite story in the January was it a good story with an unusual twist, but I think it took courage to write and courage to publish it. I admire and respect all concerned for it. somewhat baffled as to what Rog was trying to tell. Is he "fer or agin" belief (faith) ? The title and the structure of the story seem to imply that he's "fer," but I got the distinct impression that he is a whopping logician with his tongue in his cheek. Although Rog does not elaborate on Martin Grant's theory, I think I know one answer (and I imagine there is room for more) to the enigmatic disappearances. To me, it is a very "obvious further step" in logic, as Rog makes Grant suspect there "must" be. Martin Grant's theory "contains within itself the proof that the universe must, by logical necessity, be constructed according to said theory. But observation and experience say this is not true." Martin Grant conjectures, "Either the universe is not constructed acording to logical necessity, or, the observable universe is not the universe." Now, assuming that Grant's theory was that the universe is an illusion, it follows (if I accept this theory) that MY that very same illusion! Illusion and existence become synonymous. The moment "I" become "aware" of this "fact," pop goes istence. The "logical necessity" is, logically, the simultaneity of the illusion-existence of universe and self. To be or not to be applies to the sum total. It is indivisible. Simple. Grant's statement, "observation and experience says this is not true" was correct prior to his own disappearance, but to him alone. It remained correct to each individual only to the point of the individual's disappearance. Naturally, Grant's conjectures are meaningless. -- George Fedak Uniondale, N. Y. We like you, Mr. Fedak, and want you to read at least # or # issues of IF. Please don't get too involved in this puzzle and disappear yourself! Dear Editor: You state that space travel will not appear before the year #. That's all well and good, but then you go on to say that man has to have the driving force of animal survival before he leaves the earth. You then state that there is still fore the earth will be overcrowded. By your own reasoning you seem to think the only motivation for man to leave earth, is that of his own survival. You are absolutely wrong. An overcrowded America was not the reason that explorers went into the deepest parts of Africa, into the unexplored sections of the Amazon, into forbidden Tibet. The three basic motives that will make man venture into space are Adventure, Curiosity and a Challenge. Adventure and Curiosity are self explanatory. I'll explain the third and most important motive, a Challenge. The challenge of going where no other human has ever been before, the challenge of standing on an alien planet where no other human foot has ever trod, the challenge of meeting and establishing contact with alien life forms, these challenges and many more will drive man on to the planets and finally to the stars. Adventure, Curiosity, and the Challenge will send man out into space, not survival. -- Lyle Kessler Philadelphia, Pa. A nice, idealistic concept -- and the sort of idea that makes science fiction possible, for which we're thankful! But some challenges do go unanswered. Africa, the Amazon, Tibet presented purely practical motives too, and besides could be attacked by individuals; space is going to take organization and an awful lot of money. But we'll make it yet! Dear Mr. Quinn: However, his factual research was lacking. On page #, Rog (Curt) states, "Your father can't be declared legally, ah, departed for two years." (The underscore is mine.) Being an ex-insurance man for many long years, indirectly connected with legal adjustments and actuarial departments, I am positive that vanished persons are not declared legally dead until seven years have passed. This factual error might detract reader interest with many fantasy would not want done. -- Elmer R. Kirk surface, making conditions there a matter for speculation. No water vapar or oxygen can be detected in Venus' atmosphere, but there is an abundance of carbon dioxide. The spaceship shown is traveling in a power-off attitude, but will make a tail-first landing under power -- if it finds anything to land on! (Drawings by Ed Valigursky) L  w gf V M t  J KKJ k K H I  I   k I pmmM r t M  B T I TW nlBr#!l Til I rrnMiiM I  Jl ;,i   I  yi , 'j ; y i ' ' A  A :' y-id ' iH ." sights encountered by space explorers Comprised of nil! ions of tiny mconfets in three bends, the rings ore brighter than the planet Itself. Although the distance from the mner to the outer edge is #I # miles, they ore microscopicolly thin by comporison ten miles at most -- ond fode owoy toward the inner edge. it All Stories New ond Complete CovcT by Krn illuslrdting A Case of Conuiencs I IF is publEUd hi-raonthlT bv Qdiroi Publkshmg CrupAiiy, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn PtiMisning ()o., Inc. Ofire of publication. # Lord Street. BuRalo, New York. Entered n Second Matter at Pon Office, Buffalo. NeM York. Subscription #L# (or # bsuts io U.S, and Pm:;eisions: Canada S# tor # lfues; elsewhere #.S#. Allow lour weeks for change of address. Ail storie.s appear i in thh manzine are Erlioo: any imilatity to actual persoas is coindarntal. Not responsible for uqa kited ait work or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in L.S.A. SOaC ft # aiUlA Al Iftne I A A the "# Almanack' issue of Punch, the British humorous weekly. This special issue contained an interplanetary section, partly hilarious and pardy incomprehensible. The cartoon, signed by "Sprod," pictures a moonscape. Three Earthmen in bubble helmets stand gazing at the smouldering, burned-out shell of their spaceship, which has obviously exploded and crashed. They are smiling. One of them is saying brightly, "Ah well, thank  gcness we still have our sense of humor." One of the basic assumptions, I suppose, is that a spaceship flying the Union Jack will be the first to reach the moon. The cartoonist is clearly poking some fond fun at his countrymen as svell as at science fiction. And while his prediction may be parsecs off the orbit, his attitude has my warm approval. I won't say it's more humor that science fiction needs. Good science fiction humor is hard to write, largely because good humor is hard to write, period. There are people who do marvelously well at it: William Tenn, Damon Knight, Frederic Brown, Mack Reynolds, Henry Kuttner, C. M. Kombluth, R. Bretnor, L. Sprague de Camp, Wilson Tucker, for instance. Fritz Leiber's fabulously funny "The Night He Cried" in Frederik Pohl's latest anthology. Star Science Fiction Sto ties, comes as somewhat of a surprise, but is evidence that any good writer can do it even though it's not his usual forte. I What have these people got besides basic writing talent, science fictional imaginations, and the wilU ingness to work hard for love of the medium first and remuneration second? Not just a sense of humor, surely. It's more all-encompassing tlian that. amount of healthy perspective, an ability to step back from a problem and view it from various angles. This is a highly desirable quality for any writer and any person, but that doesn't mean everyone who writes science fiction has it! There has always been bad science fiction. We're extremely fortunate that the percentage is not noticeably higher than before, now that the field has expanded so enormously. The world today is in many ways a gloomy and frightening place. It will quite likely get worse before it gets better. It's even possible that man wiU blow himself and hia works completely to smithereens... Wait a minute, though -- complelely to smithereens? Shucks, almost nothing succeeds that well. Somebody and something would be left after the smash. And it wouldn't have to be a primitive tribe of rainworshippers in the Brazilian jungles, one lone man who just happened to be down in a mine shaft (while all the miners elsewhere in the world were out on strike, presumably), or (tltis one is more rare now, anyway) Prof. Superpill and his carefully iclcctcd group of vegetarians in their invisible dome of force at the South Pole. It could be a small town in the Ozarks; you find some surprisingly intellectual and creative crannies of culture tlicrc, believe it or not! It could be a comic opera-type Balkan kingdom, population # including the village werewolf and a beautiful princess, which has been so neutral for centuries that it has even prohibited radios for fear the children might learn the word "war." It could... But you get the idea; take it from there and write a story! Another theme dear to would-be science fiction writers these davs is the idea of Earth's civilization being unacceptable to the representatives of tlie Galactic Federation. These superbeings, you know, put up "No Trespassing" signs just beyond our atmosphere, reverse the laws of physics so that rockets do need somediing to push against, or just plain smack us nut of existence with a cosmic, flyswatter. It can be done well, and sometimes is. But since most of us are incapable of figuring out how completely rational beings would act, and even less capable of making such beings convincing on paper, there's little excuse for writing it again without a new twist. Why not give the Galactic Federation some eccentricities? If an unhappy ending is called for, it sliould l)e used. (I keep insisting that the essence of tme tragedy is its inevitability. I get into more darned arguments that way -- but can you prove me wrong with examples from literature?) I won't reject a good story if it's unhappy. It can even be unpleasant; shock value can be highly effective if controlled properly. I won't buy a bad story just for a few yuks. But I'll always suspect that the writer who is a healthier specimen than the constant doom-crier. The lowliest newspaper columnist can indulge in all the dire forebodings wc need. If science fiction is going to he distinguishable from a newspaper column, it has no choice but to consider the infinite possibilitic.s of our not blowing ourselves up tomorrow. If the world of today looks bleak to you, extend its trends until they become ridiculous. Remember that there will always be counter-trends. Or forget them all. and create a whole new world. If it's consistent within its own terms, it can be the basis for a good story. Nobody will write that story while worrying himself sick over when the bombs are going to fall. He'll write it when he starts considering ways to keep the bombs from falling. And that includes, of course, the repeal of the law of gravity. -- Its Rarely, if ever, has science fiction plumbed so deeply and with such sensitivity the depths of human thoughts and emotions as in this case. For here, Earthmens vote has a direct effect upon the future of a planet, their own culture and the universe itself. By James Blish Hiustrotd by Ed Ernst) T he stone door slammed. It was Cleaver's trade-mark : there had never been a door too heavy, complex, or cleverly tracked to prevent him from closing it with a sound like a clap of doom. And ro planet in the imiverse could possess an air sufficiently thick and curtained with damp to muffle that sound. Not even Lithia. Ruiz-Sanchez continued to read. It would take Cleaver's impatient fingers quite a while to free him from his jungle suit, and in the meantime the problem remained. It was a century-old problem, first propounded in #, but the Church had never cracked it. And it was diabolically complex (that adverb was official, precisely chosen and literally intended). Even the novel which proposed the case was on the Index, and Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, S. J., had access to it only by virtue of his Order. He turned the page, scarcely hearing the stamping and muttering in the hall. On and on the text ran, becoming more tangled, more evil, more insoluble with every w'ord : "... and Magravius knows from .spies that Anita has formerly committed double sacrilege with Michael, vulgo Cerularius, a perpetual curate, who wishes to seduce Eugenius. Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orffiodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani), who desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo, Viteilius and Macdugalius, four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius by rendering conjugal duty when demanded. Anita, who claims to have discovered incestuous temptations from Jeremias and Eugenius -- " There now, he was lost again. He backtracked resignedly. Jeremias and Eugenius were -- ? Oh, yes, the "brotherly lovers" at the beginning of the case, consanguineous to the lowest degree with both Felicia and Honuphrius -- the latter the apparent prime villain and the husband of Anita. It was Magravius, who seemed to admire Honuphrius, who had been urged by the slave Maritius to solicit Anita, seemingly under the urging of Honuphrius himself. This, however, had come to Anita through her tirewoman Fortissa, who was or at one time had been the common-law wife of Mauritius himself and had borne him children -- so that the whole story had to be weighed with the utmost caution. And that entire initial confession of Honuphrius had come out under torture -- voluntarily consented to, to be sure, but still torture. The Fortissa-Mauritius relationship was even more dubious, really only a supposition of Father Ware's, though certainly a plausible one considering the public repentance of Sulla after the death of Canicula, who was -- yes, that was correct, Mauritius' second wife. No, his first wife; he had never been legally married to Fortissa. It was Magravius' desire for had confused him diere. "Ramon, give me a hand, will you?" Cleaver shouted suddenly. "I'm stuck and -- and I don't feel well." The Jesuit biologist arose in alarm. Such an admission from Cleaver was imprecedented. a pouf of woven rushes, stuffed with a sphagnum-like moss, which was bulging at the equator under his weight. He was half-way out of his glass-fiber jungle suit, and his face was white and beaded with sweat, although his helmet was already off. His uncertain fingers tore at a jammed zipper. "Paul! Why didn't you say you were #I in the first place? Here, let go of that; you're only making things worse. What happened?" "Don't know exactly," Cleaver said, breathing heavily but relinquishing the zipper. Ruiz-Sanchez knelt beside him and began to work it carefully back onto its tracks. "Went a ways into the jungle to see if I could spot more pegmatite lies; it's been in the back of my mind that a pilot-plant for turning out tritium might locate here eventually -- ought to be able to produce on a prodigious scale." "God forbid," Ruiz-Sanchez said under his breath. "Hm? Anyhow, I didn't see anything. Few lizards, hoppers, the usual thing. Then I ran up against a plant that looked a little like a pineapple, and one of the spines jabbed right through my suit and nicked me. Didn't seem serious, but -- " "But we don't have the suits for nothing. Let's look at it. Here, put up your feet and we'U haul those boots off. Where did you get -- oh. Well, it's angry-looking, I'll give it that. Any other symptoms?" "My mouth feels raw," Cleaver complained. "Open up," the Jesuit commanded. When Cleaver complied, it becajne evident that his complaint had been the understatement of the year. The mucosa inside his mouth wa.s nearly covered with ugly and undoubtedly painful ulcers, their edges as sharply defined as if cut with a cookie-punch. Ruiz-Sanchez made no comment, however, and deliberately changed his expression to one of carefully calculated dismissalIf the physicist needed to minimize his ailments, it was all right with Ruiz-Sanchez. An alien planet is not a good place to strip a man of his inner defenses. "Come into the lab," he said. "You've got some inflammation in there." Cleaver aro.se, a little unsteadily, and followed the Jesuit into the laboratory. There Ruiz-Sanchez took .smears from several of the ulcers onto microscope slides and Gram-stained them. He filled the time consumed by the staining process with the ritual of aiming the microscope's substage mirror out cloud. When the timer's alarm went off, he rin-sed and flame-dried the first slide and slipped it under the clips. As he had half feared, he saw chetes which would have indicated a case of ordinary, Earthly, Vincent's angina -- which the clinical picture certainly suggested. Cleaver's oral flora were normal, though on the increase because of all the exposed ti.ssue. "I'm going to give you a shot," Ruiz-Sanchez said gently. "And then I think you'd better go to bed." "The hell with that," Cleaver said. "I've got nine times as much work to do as I can hope to clean up, without any additional handicaps." "Illness is never convenient,' Ruiz-Sanchez agreed. "But why worry about losing a day or so, since you're in over your head anyhow?" "What have I got?" Cleaver asked suspiciously. "'ou haven't got anything." Ruiz-Sanchez said, almost regretfully. "That is, you aren't infected. But your 'pineapple' did you a bad tuni. Most plants of that family on Litlua bear thorns or leaves coated with polysaccharides that are poisonous to us. The particular glucoside you got today was evidently squill, or something closely related to it. It produces symptoms like tJiose of trench-moudi, but a lot harder to clear up." "How long will that take?" Cleaver said. He was still balking, but he was on the defensive now. "Several days at least -- until you've built up an immimity. The shot I'm going to give you is a gamma globulin specific against squill, and it ought to moderate the symptoms until you've developed a high antibody tiler of your own. But in the process you're going to run quite a fever, Paul; and I'll have to keep you well stuffed with antipTetics, because even a little fever is dangerous in this climate." "I know it," Cleaver said, mollified. "The more I leain about this place, the less disposed I am to vote 'aye' when the time comes. Well, bring on your shot -- and your aspirin. I suppose I ought to be glad it isn't a bacterial infection, or the Snakes would be jabbing me full of antibiotics," "Small chance of that," RuizSanchez said. "I don't doubt that the Lithians have at least a hundred different antibiotics we'll be able to use eventually, but -- there, that's all there is to it; you can relax now -- but we'll have to study their pharmacology from the CTound up, first. All right, Paul, nit the hammock. In about ten minutes you're going to wish you were bom dead, that I promise you." face under its thatch of dirty blond hair was craggy and powerful even in illness. He stood up and deliberately rolled down his deeve. "Not much doubt about how you'll vote, either," he said. "You like this planet, don't you, Ramon? It's a biologist's paradise, as far as I can "I do like it," the priest said, smiling back. He followed Cleaver into the small room which served them both as sleeping quarters. Except for the window, it strongly resembled the inside of a jug. The walls were curving and continuous, and were made of some ceramic material which never beaded or felt wet, but riever seemed to be quite dry, either. The hammocks wer slung from hooks which projected smoothly from the walls. "But don't forget that Lithia's my first extrasolar planet. I think I'd find any new, habitable world fascinating. The infinite mutability of lifeforms, and the cunning inherent in each of them... It's all amazing and very delightful." Cleaver sprawled heavily in his hammock. After a decent interval, Ruiz-Sanchez took the liberty of heaving up after him the foot he seemed to have forgotten. Cleaver didn't notice. The reaction was setting in. "Read me no tracts, Father," Cleaver said. Then: "I didn't mean that. I'm sorry... But for a physicist, this place is hell... You'd better get me that aspirin. I'm cold." "Surely." Ruiz-Sanchez went quickly back into the lab, made up a salicylate-barbiturate paste in one of the Lithians' superb mortars, and pressed it into a set of pills. He wished he could stamp each pill "Bayer" before it dried -- if Cleaver's personal cure-all was aspirin, it would be just as well to let him think he was taking aspirin -- but he had no dies for the purpose. He took two of the pills back to Cleaver with a mug and a carafe of Berkefield-filtered water. The big man was already asleep; Ruiz-Sanchez woke him. Cleaver would sleep longer and awake farther along the road to recovery if he were done that small unkindness now. As it was, he hardly noticed when the pills were put down him, and soon resumed his heavy, troubled breathing. That done, Ruiz-Sanchez returned to the front room of the house, sat down, and began to inspect the jungle suit. The tear which the plant spine had made was not difficult to find, and would be easy to repair. It w-ould be much harder to repair Cleaver's notion that their defenses were invulnerable, and that plants could be blundered against with impunity. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered if one or both of the other members of the Commission still shared that notion. Cleaver had called the thing which had brought him low a "pineapple." .-ny biologist could have told Cleaver that even on Earth the pineapple is a prolific and dangerous weed, edible only by a happy and irrelevant accident. In Hawaii, as Ruiz-Sanchez remembered, the tropical forest was quite impassible to anyone not wearing heav' boots and tough trou.sers. 'Fhe close-packed, irrepresdble pineapples outside of the plantations could tear unprotected legs to ribbons. The Jesuit turned the suit over. The zipper that Cleaver had jammed was made of a plastic into the molecule of which had been incorporated radicals from various Terrestrial anti-fungal substances, chiefly tliiolutin. The fungi of Lithia respected those, all right, but die elaborate molecule of die plastic itself had a tendency, under Lithian humidities and licats, to undergo polymerization more or less spontaneously. That was what had happened here . One of the teeth of the zipper had changed into something resembling a piece of popcorn. Sanchez worked. There was a routed puff of sound, and the room was illuminated with small, soft yellow flames from recesses in every wall. The burning substance was natural gas, of which Lithia had an inexhaustible and constantly renevsed supply. The flames were lit by adsorption against a catalyst, as soon as the gas came on. A lime mantle, which worked on a rack and pinion of heatproof glass, could be moved into the flame to provide a brighter liglu; but the priest liked the yellow light the Lithians themselves preferred, and used the limelight only in the laboratory. For .some things, of course, the Earlhmen had to liave electricity, for which they had been forced to supply their own generators. The Lithians had a far more advanced science of electrostatics than Earth had, but of electrodynamics they knew comparatively little. They had discovered magnetism only a few years before, since natural magnets were unknown on the planet. They had fint observed the phenomenon, not in iron, of which they had next to none, but in liquid oxygen -- a difficult substance from which to make generator coil cores! The results in terms of Lithian civilization were peculiar, to an Earthman. The tall, reptilian people had built several huge electrostatic generators and scores of little ones, but had nothing even vaguely resembling telephones. They knew a great deal on the practical level about electrolysis, but carrying a current over a long distance -- sa' one kilometer -- was regarded by them as impossible. They had no electric motors as an Earthman would understand the term, but made fast intercontinental flights in jet aircraft powered by static electricity. Cleaver said he understood this feat, but RuizSanchez certainly did not They had a completely marvelous radio network, which among other things provided a "live" navigational grid for the whole planet, zeroed on (and here perhaps was the epitome of the Lithian genius for paradox) a tree. Yet they had never produced a commercial vacuum tube and their atomic theory was not much more sophisticated than Democritus' had been! These paradoxes, of course, could be expired in part by the things that Lithia lacked. Like any large rotating mass, Lithia had a magnetic field of its own, but a planet which almost entirely lacks iron provides its people with no easy way to discover magnetism. Radioactivity, at least until the Earthmen had arrived, had been entirely imknown on the surface of Lithia, which explained the hazy atomic theory. Like the Greeks, the Lithians had discovered that friction between silk and glass produces one kind of charge, and between silk and amber another. They had gone on from there to Widmanstetten generators, electrochemistry, and the static jet -- but without suitable metals they were unable to make batteries or do more than begin to study electricity in motion. In the fields where they had been given fair clues, they had made enormous preess. Despite the constant cloudiness and endemic drizzle, their descriptive astronomy was excellent, thanks to the fortunate presence of a small moon which had drawn their attention outward early. This in turn made for basic advances in optics. Their chemistry took full advantage of both the seas and the jungles. From the one they took such vital and diversified products as agar, iodine, salt, trace metals, and foods of many kinds. The other provided nearly everything else that they needed: resins, rubbers, woods of all degrees of hardness, edible and essential oils, vegetable "butters," rope and other filers, fruits and nuts, tannins, dyes, drugs, cork, paper. Indeed, the sole forest product which they did not take was game, and the reason for this oversight was hard to find. It seemed to the Jesuit to be religious -- yet the Lithians had no religion, and they certainly ate many of the creatures of the sea without qualms of conscience. H e dropped the jungle suit into his lap with a sigh, though the popcomed tooth still was not completely trimmed back into shape. Outside, in the humid darkness, Lithia was in full concert. It was a vital, somehow fresh, newsounding drone, covering most of the sound spectrum audible to an Earthman. It came from the myriad insects of Lithia. Many of these had wiry, ululating songs, almost like birds, in addition to the scrapes and chirrups and wing-buzzes of the insects of Earth. Had Eden sounded like that, before evil had come into the world? Ruiz-Sanchez wondered. Certainly his native Peru sang no such song. Qualms of conscience -- these were, in the long run, his essential business, rather than the taxonomical jungles of biology, which had already become tangled into nearhopelessness on Earth before spaceflight had come along to add whole new volumes of puzzles. It was only interesting that the Lithians were bipedal reptiles with marsupial-like pouches and pteropsid circulatory systems. But it was vital that they had qualms of conscience -- if they did. He and the other three men were on Lithia to decide whether or not Lithia would be suitable as a port of call for Earth, without risk of damage to either Earthmen or Lithians. The other three men w'ere primarily scientists, but RuizSaruhez own recommendation would in the long run depend upon conscience, not upon taxonomy. He looked down at the still-imperfect suit with a troubled face until he heard Cleaver moan. Then he arose and left the room to the softly hissing flames. II  F rom the oval fmnt window of the house to which Cleaver and Ruiz-Sanchez had been assigned, the land slanted away with insidious gentleness toward the ill-defined south edge of Lower Bay, a part of the Gulf of Sfath. Most of the area was salt marsh, as was the sea-side nearly everywhere on Lithia. When the tide was In, the flats w'cre covered to a depth of a meter or so almost half the way to the house. When it was out, as it was tonight, the jungle symphony was augmented by the agonized barking of a score of species of lungfish. Occasionally, when the small moon was unoccludcd and the light from the city was unusually bright, one could sec the leaping shadow of some amphibian, or the sinuously advancing sigmoid track of the Lithian crocodile, in pursuit of some prey faster than itself but which it would nonetheless capture in its own geological good time. Still farther -- and usually invisible even in daytime because of the pervasive mists -- was the opposite shore of Lower Bay, beginning with tidal flats again, and then more jungle, which ran unbroken thereafter for hundreds of kilometers to the equatorial sea. Behind the house, visible from the sleeping room, was the rest of the city, Xoredeshch Sfath, capitol of the great southern continent. Like all the cities the Lithians built, its most striking characteristic to an Earthman was that it hardly seemed to be there at all. The Lithian houses were low, and made of the earth which had been dug from their foundations, so that they tended to fade into tlic soil even to a trained observer. Most of the older buildings were rectangular, put together without mortar of ramraed-earth blocks. Over tlie course of decades the blocks continued to pack and settle themselves until it became easier to abandon an unwanted building than to tear it down. One of the first setbacks the Earthmen had suffered on Lithia had come through an ill-advised offer to raze gravity-polarized explosive unknown to the Lithians. The warehouse in question was large, thickwalled, and three Lithian centuries old. The explosion created an uproar which greatly distressed the Lithians, but when it was over, the storehouse still stood, unshaken. Newer structures were more conspicuous when the sun was out, for just during the past half century the Lithians had begun to apply their enormous knowledge of ceramics to house construction. The new houses assumed thousands of fantastic, quasi-biological shapes, not quite amorphous but not quite resembling any form in experience either. Each one was unique and to the choice of its owner, yet all markedly shared the character of the community and tlie earth from which it sprang. These houses, too, would have blended well with the background of soil and jungle, except that most of them were glazed and so shone blindingly for brief moments on sunny days when the light and the angle of the observer was just right. These shifting coruscations, seen from the air, had been the Elarthmen's first intimation that there was intelligent life in the ubiquitous Lithian jungle. Ruiz-Sanchez looked out the sleeping-room window at the city for at least the ten thousandth time on his way to Cleaver's hammock. Xoredeshch Sfath was alive to him ; it never looked the same twice. He found it singularly beautiful. He checked Cleaver's pulse and respiration. Both were fast, even for Lithia, where a high carlxn dioxide partial pressure raised the pH of the blood of Earthmen to an abnormal level and stimulated the breathing reflex. The priest judged, however, diat Cleaver was in bttle danger as long as his actual oxygen utilization was not increased. At the moment he was certainly sleeping deeply -- if not very restfully -- and it would do no harm to leave him alone for a little while. Of course, if a wild allosaur should blunder into the city... But that was about as likely as the blundering of an untended elephant into the heart of New Delhi. It could happen, but almost never did. And no other dangerous Lithian animal could break into the house if it were sealed. carafe of fre water in the niche beside the hammock, went into the hall, and donned boots, macintosh and waterproof hat. The night souneb of Lithia burst in upon him as he opened the stone door, along with a gust of sea air and the characteristic halogen odor most people call "salty." There was a thin drizzle falling, making haloes around the lights of Xoredeshch Sfath. Far out, on the water, another light moved. That was probably the coastal side-wheeler to Yllith, the enormous island which stood athwart the Upper Bay, barring the Gulf of Sfath as a whole from the equatorial sea. Outside, Ruiz-Sanchez turned the wheel which extended bolts on every margin of the door. Drawing from his macintosh a piece of soft chalk, he marked on sheltered tablet designed for such uses the Lithian symbols which meant "Illness is here." That would be sufficient. Anybody who chose to could open the door simply by turning the wheel, but the Lithians were overridingly social beings, who respected their own conventions as they would respect natural law. That done, Ruiz-Sanchez set out for the center of the city and the Mes.sage Tree. The asphalt streets shone in the yellow lights cast from windows, and in the white light of the mantled, wide-spaced street lanterns. Occasionally he passed the eight-foot, kangaroo-like shape of a Lithian, and the two exchanged glances of frank curiosity, but there were not many Lithians abroad now. They kept to their houses at night, doing Ruiz-Sanchez knew not what. He could see them frequently, alone or by twos or threes, moving behind the oval windows of the houses he passed. Sometimes they seemed to be talking. What about? It was a nice question. The Lithians had no crime, no newspapers, no household communications systems, no arts that could be differentiated clearly from their crafts, no political parties, no public amusements. no nations, no games, no religions, no sports, no celebrations. Surely they didn't spend every waking minute of their lives exchanging knowledge, disc ussing philosophy or history? Or did they? Perhaps, Ruiz-Sanchez thought suddenly, they simply went inert once they were inside their jugs, like so many pickles! But even as the thought came, the priest passed another house, and saw tlicir silhouettes moving to and fro... A puff of wind scattered rool droplets in his face. Automatically, he quickened his step. If the night were to turn out especially windy, there would doubtless be many voices coming and going in the Message Tree. It loomed ahead of him now, a sequoia-like giant, standing at the mouth of the valley of the River Sfath -- the valley which led in gicat serpentine folds into the heart of the continent, where Gleshchetk Sfatli, or Blood Lake in English, poured out its massive torrents. As llie winds came and went along the valley, the tree nodded and swayed. With every movement. tlie tree's root system, which underlay the entire city, tugged and distorted the buried crystalline cliff upon which the city had been founded, a.s long ago in Iwilhian prehistoiy as was the founding of Rome on Earth. At every such pressure, the buried cliff responded whh a vast lu'art-pulse of radio waves -- a pulse detectable not only all over Lithia, but far out in space as well. These bursts, of course, were sheer noise. How the Lithians modifu.'d them to carry information -- not only messages, but the amazing navigational grid, the planetwide time-signal system, and much more -- was something Ruiz-Sanchez never expected to Icam, although Cleaver said it was all perfectly simple once you understood it. It had something to do with semi-conduction and solid-state physics, which -- again according to Cleaver -- the Lithians understood better than any Earthman. Almost all knowledge, Ruiz-Sanchez reflected with amusement, fell into that category. It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction. As a Jesuit -- even here, # light-years from Rome -- Ruiz-Sanchez knew something about knowledge that Cleaver would never learn: that all "knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes. The residuum was faith. T he high, .sharply vaulted chamber, like an egg stood on its large end, which had been burned out in the base of the Message Tree was droning with life as Ruiz-Sanchez entered it. It would have been difficult to imagine anything less like an Earthly telegraph office or other message center, however. Around the circumference of the lower end of the egg there was a continual whirling of tall figures, Lithians entering and leaving through the many doorlcss entrances and changing places in the swirl of movement like so many electrons passing from orbit to orbit. Despite their numbers, their voices were pitched so low that Ruiz-Sanchez could hear blended in with their murmuring the soughing of the wind through the enormous branches far aloft. The inner side of this band of moving figures was bounded by a high railing of black, polished wood, evidently cut from the phloem of the tree itself. On the other side of this Encke's Division a thin circlet of Lithians took and passed out messages steadily and without a moment's break, handling the total load faultlessly -- if one were to judge by the way the outer band was kept in motion -- and without apparent effort by memory alone. Occasionally one of these specialists would leave the circlet and go to one of the desks which were scattered over most of the rest of the sloping floor, increasingly thinly, like a Crepe Ring, to confer there with the desk's occupant. Then he went back to the black rail, or, sometimes, he took the desk and its previous occupant went to the rail. The bowl deepened, the desks thinned, and at the very center stood a single, aged Lithian, his hands clapped to the ear-whorls behind his heavy jaws, his eyes covered by their nictitating membrane, only his nasal fossae and heat-receptive postnasal pits uncovered. He spoke to no one, and no one consulted him -- but the absolute stasis in which he stood was obviously the reason, the sole reason, for the torrents and countertorrento of p)eople which poured along the outermost ring. Ruiz-Sanchez stopped, astonished. He had never himself been to the Message Tree before -- communicating with the other two earthmen on Lithia had been, until now, one of Cleavers tasks -- and the priest found that he had no idea what to do. The scene before him was more suggestive of a bourse than of a message center in any ordinary sense. It seemed unlikely that so many Lithians could have urgent personal messages to send each time the winds were active; yet it seemed equally uncharacteristic that the Lithians, with their stable, abundance-based economy, should have any equivalent of stock or commodity brokerage. There seemed to be no choice, however, but to plunge in, try to reach the polished black rail, and ask one of those who stood on the other side to try and raise Agronski or Michclis again. At worst, he supposed, he could only be refused, or fail to get a hearing at all. He took a deep breath. Simultaneously, his left elbow was caught in a firm four-fingered grip. Letting the stored breath out again in a snort of surprise, the priest looked around and up at the solicitously bent head of a Lithian. Under the long, trap-like mouth, the being's wattles were a delicate, curious aquamarine, in contrast to its vestial comb, wliich was a pemiaiu'nt and silvery sapphire, shot through with veins of fuchsia. "You are Ruiz-Sanchez," the Lithian said in his own language. The priest's name, unlike that of most of the other Earthmen, fell easily in that tongue. "I know you by your robe." This was pure chance; any Earthnian out in the rain in a macintosh would have been identified as RuizSanchez, becau.se he was the only Earthinan who seemed to the Lithians to w'car the same garment indoors. "I am Chtexa, the metallist, who consulted with you earlier on medicine and on your mission and other matters. We have not seen you here before. Do you wish to talk with the Tree?" "I do," Ruiz-Sanchez said gratefully. "It is so that I am new here. Can you explain to me what to do?" "Yes, but not to any profit," Chtexa said, tilting his head so that his completely iry pupils .shone down into Ruiz-Sanchez' eyes. "One must have obscrvi'd the ritual, which is very complex, until it is habit. Wc have grown up with it, but you I think lack the coordination to follow it on the fint attempt. If I may bear your message instead..." "I would be most indebted. It is for our colleagues Agion.ski and Michelis. They are at Xoicdcshch Gton on the northeast continent, at about # East # North -- " "Yes, the second benchmark, at the outlet of the Lesser Lakes; the city of the potters. And you will say?" "That they arc to join us now, here, at Xoredeshch Sfalh. And that our time on Litlila is almost up." "That me regards. But I will bear it." whirling crowd, and RuizSanchez was left behind, considering again his thankfulness at the pains he Itad taken to learn the Lithian language. Several members of the Terrestrial commission had shown a regrettable lack of interest in that tongue: "Let 'em learn English," had been Cleaver's classic formulation. Ruiz-Sanchez was all the loss likely to view this idea sympathetically considering that his owT) native language was Spanish and his preferred foreign language German. T# Agronslu had taken a slightly more sophisticated stand: it was not, he said, that Lithian was too difficult to pronounce -- certainly it wasn't any harder than Arabic or Russian on the soft palate -- but, after all, "it's hopeless to attempt to grasp the concepts that lie behind a really alien language in the time we have to spend here, isn't it?" To both views, Michelis had said nothing; he had simply set out to learn to read the language first, and if he found his way from there into speaking it, he would not be surprised and neither would his corifreres. That was Michelis' way of doing things, thorough and untheoretical at the same time. As for the other two approaches, RuizSanchez thout privately that it was close to criminal to allow any contact-man for a new planet ever to leave Earth with such parochial notions. Of Cleaver's tendency to refer to the Lithians themselves as "the Snakes," Ruiz-Sanchez' opinion was such as to be admissible only to his remote confessor. And in view of what lay before him now in this egg-shaped hollow, what was Ruiz-Sanchez to think of Cleaver's conduct as communica tions officer for the group? Surely he could never have transmitted or received a single message through the Tree, as he had claimed to have done. Probably he had never been nearer to the Tree than the priest had been. Of course, it went vithout saying that he had been in contact with Agromki and Michelis by some method, but that method evidently had been a private transmitter concealed in his luggage... Yet, physicist though he most definitely was not, Ruiz-Sanchez rejected that solution on the spot; he had some idea of the practical difficulties of ham radio on a world like Lithia, swamped as it was on all wavelengths by the tremendous pulses which the Tree wrung from the buried crystalline cliff. The problem was beginning to make him feel decidedly uncomfortable. Then Chtexa was back, recognizable not so much by any physical detail -- for his wattles were now the same ambiguous royal purple as those of most of the other Lithians in the crowd -- as by the fact that he was obviously bearing down upon the Earthman. "I have sent your message," he said at once. "It is recorded at Xoredehch Gton. But the other Earthmen are not there. They have not been in the city for some days." That was impossible. Cleaver had said he had spoken to Agronski only a day ago. "Are you sure?" RuizSanchez said cautiously. "It admits of no uncertainty. The house which we gave them stands empty. The many things which they had with them are gone." The tall shape raised its small hands in a gesture which might have been solicitous. "I think this is an ill word. I dislike to bring it you. The words which you brought me when we first met were full of good." "Thank you. Don't worry," RuizSanchez said distractedly. "No man could hold the bearer responsible for the word, surely." "Whom else would he hold responsible for it? At least that is our custom," Chtexa said. "And under it, you have lost by our exchange. Your words on iron have been shown to contain great good. I would take pleasure in showing you how we have used them, especially so since I have brought you in return an ill message. If you would sliare my house tonight, without prejudice to your work..." Sternly Ruiz-Sanchez stifled his sudden excitement. Here was the first chance, at long last, to see something of the private life of Lithia! And through that, perhaps, gain some inkling of the moral life, the role in which God had cast the Lithians in the ancient drama of good and evil in tlie past and in the times to come. Until that w'as knpwn, the Lithians in their Eden were only spuriously good: all reason, all organic thinking machines, souls. But there was the hard fart that he had left behind a sick man. There was not much chance that Cleaver would awaken before morning; he had been given nearly # mg. of sedative per kilogram of body weight. But if his burly frame should somehow throw it off, driven perhaps by some anaphylactic crisis impossible to rule out this early, he would need prompt attention. At the very least, he would want badly for the sound of a human voice on this planet which he hated and which had struck him down. Still, the danger to Cleaver was not great. He most certainly did not require a minute-byminute vigil. There was, after all, such a thing as an excess of devotion, a form of pride among the pious which the Church had long found peculiarly difficult to stifle. At its worst, it produced a St. Simon Stylites, who though undoubtedly acceptable to God had for centuries len very bad public relations for tlie Church. And had Cleaver really earned the kind of devotion Ruiz-Sanchez had been proposing, up to now, to tender him as a creature of God? And with a whole planet at stake, a whole people -- A lifetime of meditaticHi over just such problems of conscience had made Ruiz-Sanchez, like any T# other gifted member of his Order, quick to find his way through all but the most complex ethical labyrinths to a decision.' An unsympathetic observer might almost have called him "agile." "Thank you," he said, a little shakily. "I will share your house very gladly." Ill you big slob. Where the hell have you been?" Cleaver groaned and tried to turn over. At his first motion, the world began to rock gently, sickeningly. His mouth was filled with burning pitch. "Cleaver, turn out. It's me -- Agronski. Where's the Father? What's wrong? Why didn't we hear from you? Look out, you'll -- " The warning came too late and Cleaver could not have understood it anyhow; he had been profoundly asleep and had no notion of his situation in space or time. At his convulsive twist away from the nagging voice, the hammock rotated on its hooks and dumped him. He struck the floor stunningly, .taking the main blow across his right shoulder, though he hardly felt it as yet. His feet, not yet part of him at all, still remained afloat far aloft, twisted in the hammock webbing. "Good lord!" There was a brief chain of footsteps, like chestnuts dropping on a roof, and then an overstated crash. "Cleaver, are you sick? Here, lie still a minute and let me get your feet free. Mike -- Mike, can't you turn the gas up in this jug? Something's wrong back here." After a moment, yellow light began to pour from the glistening walls. Cleaver dragged an arm across his eyes, but it did him no good; it tired too quickly. Agronski's mild face, plump and anxious, floated directly above him like a captive balloon. He could not see Michelis anywhere, and at the moment he was just as glad. Agronski's presence wa.s hard enough to understand. "How... the hell..." he said. At the words, his lips split painfully at both corners. He realized for the first time that they had become gummed together, somehow, while he was asleep. He had no idea how long he had been out of the picture. Agronski seemed to understand the alwrted question. "We came in from the Lakes in the 'copter," he said. "We didn't like the silence down here and we figured that we'd better come in under our own power, instead of registering in on the regular jetliner and tipping the Lithians off -- just in case there'd been any dirty work afloat." "Stop jawing him," Michelis said, appearing suddenly, magically in the doorway. "He's got a bug, that's obvious. I don't like to feel pleased about misery, but I'm glad it's that instead of the Lithians." The rangy, long-jawed chemist helped Agronski lift Cleaver to his feet. Tentatively, despite the pain, Cleaver got his mouth open again. Nothing came out but a hoarse croak. "Shut up," Michelis said, not xmkindly. "Let's get him back into the hammock. Where's the Father? He's the only one capable of dealing with sickness here." "I'll bet hr's dead." Agronski burst out suddenly, his face glistening with alarm. "He'd be licrc if he could. It must be catching, Mike." "I didn't bring iny mitt." Michclis said drily. "Cleaver, He still or ril have to clobber you. Agronski. you seem to have dumped his water carafe ; better go get him some mire, lie needs it. And sec if the Father left anything in the lab that looks like medicine." Agronski went out, and, maddeningly, so did Michelis -- at least out of Cleaver's field of vision. Setting his every muscle against the pain, ' Cleaver pulled lus lips apart once more. "Mike." Instantly, Michelis was there. He had a pad of cotton bt'tween two fingers, wet with some solution, 'with which he gently cleaned Cleaver's lips and chin. "F.,asy. Agronski's getting you a drink. We'll let vou talk in a little while. Paul. Don't rush it." Cleaver relaxed a little. He could trust Michelis. Nevertheless, tlie vivid and absurd insult of having to be swabbed like a baby was more than he could bear; he felt tears of helpless rage swelling on either side of his nose. With two deft, noncommittal swipes, Michelis removed them. Agronski came back, holding out one hand tentatively, palm up. "I found these," he .said. "There's more in the lab, and the Father's pillpress is still out. So's his mortar and pestle, though they've been cleaned," "All right, let's have 'em," Michelis said. "Anything else?" "No. There's a syringe cooking in the sterilizer, if that means anythlng." Michelis swore briefly and to the point. "It means that there's a pertinent antitoxin in the shop someplace," he added. "But unless Ramon left notes, we'll not have a prayer of figuring out which one it is." As he spoke, he lifted Cleaver's head and tipped the pills into his mouth. The water which followed was cold at the first contact, but a split .second later it was liquid fire. Cleaver choked, and at that precise moment Michelis pinched his nastrils shut. The pills went down. "There's no sign of the Father?" Michelis said. "Not a one, Mike. Everything's in good order, and liis gear's still here. Both jungle suits are in the locker." "Maybe he went visiting," Michelis said thoughtfully. "He mu-st have gotten to know quite a few of the Lithians by now." "With a sick man on his hands? That's not like him, Mike. Not unlcss there was some kind of emergency. Or maybe he went on a routine errand, expected to be back in just a few moments, and -- " "And was set upon by trolls for forgetting to stamp his foot three times before crossing the bridge," "All right, laugh." 'Tm not laughing, believe me." "Mike... Michelis took a step back and looked down at Cleaver, his face floating as if detached through a haze of tears. He said: "All right, Paul. Tell us what it is. We're listening." But it was too late. The doubled barbiturate dose had gotten to Cleaver first. He could only shake his bead, and with the motion Michelis seemed to go reeling away into a whirlpool of fuzzy rainbows. go to sleep. He had had nearly a normal night's sleep, and he had started out the enormously long day a powerful and healthy man. The conversation of the two Earllimen and an obsessive consciousness of his need to speak to them before Ruiz-Sanchez returned helped to keep him, if not totally awake, at least not far below a state of light trance -- and the presence in his system of # grains of acetybalicylic acid had seriously raised his oxygen consumption, bringing with it not only dizziness but a precarioui, emotionally untethered alertness. That the fuel which was being burned to maintain it was largely the protein substrate of his own ceils he did not know, and it could not have alarmed him had he known it. Tlie voices continued to reach him, and to convey a little meaning. With them were mixed fleeting, fragmentary dreams, so slightly removed from the surface of his waking life as to seem peculiarly real, yet at the same time peculiarly pointless and depressing. In the semi-conscious intervals there came plans, a whole succession of them, all umple and grandiose at once, for taking command of the expedition, for communicating with the authorities on Earth, for bringing forward secret papers proving that Lithia was uninhabitable, for digging a tunnel under Mexico to Peru, for detonating Lithia in one single mighty fusion of all its light-weight atoms into an atom of cleaverium, the element whose cardinal number was a)ephnull... Agronski: Mike, come here and look at this; you read Lithian. There's a mark on the front door, on the message tablet. (Footsteps.) MictiELis: It says "Sickness inside." The strokes aren't casual or deft enough to be the work of tlie natives. Ideographs are hard to write rapidly. Ramon must have written it there. Agronski: I wish I knew where he went afterwards. (Footsteps. Door shutting, not loudly. Footsteps. Hassock creaking.) thinking about getting up a report. Unless this damn #-hour day has me thrown completely oil, our time's just about up. Are you still set on opening up the planet? Michelis: Yes. I've seen nothing to convince me that there's anytliing on Lithia that's dangerous to us. Except maybe Cleaver in there, and I'm not prepared to say that the Father would have left him if he were in any serious danger. And I don't see how Earthmen could harm this society: it's too stable emotionally, economically, in every other way. Danger, danger, said somebody in Cleaver's dream. It will explode. It's all a popish plot. Then he was marginally awake again and conscious of how his mouth hurt. ) Agronski: Why do you suppose these two jokers never called us after we went north? Michelis: I don't have any answer. I won't even ess until I talk to Ramon. Or until Paul's able to sit up and take notice. Agronski: I don't like it, Mike. It smells bad to me. This town's riht at the heart of the communications system of the planet. And yet -- no messages, Cleaver sick, the Father not here... There's a hell of a lot we don't know about Lithia. Michelis: There's a hell of a lot we don't know about central Brazil. Agronski: Nothing essential, iClike. What we know about the periphery gives us all the clues we need about the interior -- even to those fi.sh that eat people, the what are they, the pirhanas. That's not true on Lithia. We don't know vhether our peripheral clues about Lithia are germane or just incidental. Something enonnous could be hidden under the surface without our being able to detect it. Michelis: Agronski. stop sounding like a Sunday supplement. You underestimate your own intelligence. What kind of enormous secret could that be? That the Lithians eat people? That they're cattle for unknown gods that live in the jungle? That tliey're actually mindwrenching, soul-twisting, heartstopping, bowel-moving intelligences in disguise? The moment you state any such proposition, you'll deflate it yourself. I wouldn't even need to take the trouble of examining it, or discussing how we might meet it if it were true. Agronski: All right, all right, ril reserve judgment for the time being, anyhow. If everything turns out to be all right here, with the Father and Cleaver I mean, I'll probably go along with you. I don't have any reason I could defend for voting against the planet, I admit. Michelis: Good for you. I'm sure Ramon is for opening it up. so that should make it un.iniinous. I can't see why Cleaver would object. (Cleaver was testifying before a packed court convened in the UN General Assembly chambers in New York, with one finger pointed dramatically, but less in triumph than in sorrow, at Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, S. J. At the sound of hU name the dream collapsed and he realized that the room had grown a little lighter. Dawn -- or dripping, wool-grey travesty of it which prevailed on Lithia -- was on its way. He wondered what he had just said to the court. It had been conclusive. damning, good enough to be used when he awoke; but he could not remember a word of it. All that remained of it was a sensation, almost the taste of the words, but with nothing of their substance.) Agronski: It's getting light. I suppose we'd better knock off. Michelis: Did you stake down the 'copter? The winds here are higher than they are up north, I seem to remember. Agronski: Yes. And covered it with the tarp. Nothing left to do but sling our hammocks -- Michelis: Shh. What's that? (Footsteps. Faint ones, but Cleaver knew them. He forced his eyes to open a little, but there was nothing to see but the ceiling. Its even color, and its smooth, everchanging slope into a dome of nothingness, drew him almost immediately upward into the mists of trance once more.) Agronski: Somebody's coming. It's the Father, Mike -- look out here. He seems to be all right. Dragging his feet a bit, but who wouldn't after being out helling all night? MiGitEi-is: Maybe you'd bc'tter meet him at the door. It'd probably be better than our springing out at him after he gets inside. After all he doesn't expect us. I'll get to unpacking tlie hammocks. Acronski: Sure. Mike. (Footsteps, going away from Qeaver. A grating sound of stone on stone: the door-wheel being turned.) Aoronski: Welcome home. Father! We got in just a little while ago and -- what's wrong? Arc you ill? Is there soineihing iliat -- Mike! Mike! (Somebody was running. Cleaver willed his neck muscles to lift his head, but they refused to obey. Instead, the back of his head seemed to force itself deeper into the stiff pillow of the hammock. After a momentary and endless agony he cried out.) Cleaver; Mike! Aoronski: Mike! (With a gasp, Cleaver lost the long battle at last. He was asleep.) IV house closed behind him, RuizSanchez lcx)ked about the gentlyglowing foyer with a feeling of almost unbearable anticipation, although he could hardly have said what it was that he hoped to see. Actuallv. it looked exactly like his own quarters, which was all he could in justice have expected -- all the furniture at "home" was Lithian except the lab equipment. "Wc have cut up several of the metal meteors from our museums, and hammered them as you suggested," Chrexa said behind him, while he struggled out of his raincoat and l)oots. "They show very definite, very strong inagentism, just as you predicted. We now have the whole planet alerted to pick up raeteorite.s and send them to our eiecirical laboratory here, regardless (rf where found. The staff of the observatory is attem)ting to predict possible lalls. Unhappily, meteors are rare here. Our astronomers say that we have never had a 'shower' such as you dcscrilx as frequent on your native planet." "No; I should have thought of that," Ruiz-Sanchez said, following the Lithian inu the front roora. This, too, was cjuite ordinary, and empty except for the two of them. "In our system we have a sort of giant grinding wheel -- a whole ring of little planets, many thomand.s of dicin, distributed around an orbit where we had expected to find only Nie normal-sized world. Collisions between these liodies are incessant, and our plague of meteors is the result. Here I suppose you have only the usual few strays from comets." "It is hard to understand how so unstable an arrangement could have come about," Chtexa said, sitting down and pointing out another hassock to his guest. "Have you an explanation?" "Not a good one," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Some of us think that there was a respectable planet in that orbit ages ago, which exploded somehow. A similar accident happened to a satellite in our system -- at least one of our j)lanets has a similar ring. Others think that at the formation of our solar system the raw materials of what might have been a planet just never succeeded in coalescing. Both ideas have many flaws, but each satisfies certain objections to the other, so perhaps there is some truth in botli." Chtexa's eyes filmed with the nildly disquieting "inner blink" characteristic of Lithians at their most thoughtful. "There would seem to be no wav to test either an swer," he said at length. "By our logic, lack of such tests makes the paginal question meaningless." "That rule of logic has many adherents on Earth. My colleague Dr. Cleaver would certainly agree with it." Ruiz-Sanchez smiled suddenly. He had labored long and hard to master the Lithian language, and to have understood and recognized so completely abstract a point as the one just made by Chtexa was a bigger victory than any quantitative gains in vocabulary alone could ever have been. "But I can see that we are going to have difficulties in collecting these meteorites. Have you offered incentives? "Oh, certainly. Everyone understands the importance of the program. We are all eager to advance it." This was not quite what the priest had meant by his question. He searched his memory for some Lithian equivalent of "reward," but found nothing but the word he had already used, "incentive." He realized that he knew' no word for "greed," either. Evidently offering Lithians a hundred dollars a meteorite would simply bafilc them. Instead he said, "Since the potential meteor-fall is so small, you're not likely to get anything like the supply of metal lliat you need for a real study, no matter how thoroughly you cooperate on it. You need a supplementary iron-finding program : some way of concentrating the traces of the metal you have on the planet. Our smelting methods would be useless to you, since you have no ore-beds. Hmm. What about the iron-fixing bacteria?" "Are there such?" Chtexa said, cocking his head dubiously. "I don't know. Ask your bacteriologists. If you have any bacteria here that belong to the genus we call Leptothrix, one of them should be an iron-fixing species. In all the has had life on it, that mutation must have occurred, and probably very early." "But why have we never seen it before? We have done perhaps more research in bacteriology than we have in any other field." "Because," Ruiz-Sanchez said earnestly, "you didn't know what to look for, and because such a species would be as rare as iron itself. On Earth, because we have iron in abundance, our Leptothrix ochracea has found plenty of opportunity to grow. We find their fossil our great ore-beds. It used to bc' thought, as a matter of fact, that the bacteria produced the oi-e-beds, but Tve never believed that. While they do obtain dielr energy by oxidizing ferrous iron, such salts in solution change spontaneously to ferric salts if the oxidation-reduction potential and the pH of the water arc right -- and those arc conditions that are alTccted bv ordinary decay bacteria. On our planet the bacteria grew in the ore-beds because the iron was there, not the other way around. In your case, you just don't have the iron to make them numerous, but I'm .'ure there mast be a few." "We will start a soil-sampling program at once," Chtexa said, his wattles flaring a sulxlued orchid. "Our ajitibiotics research centers screen soil samples by the thousand.s every month, in search of new inicroflora of therapeutic importance. If these iron-fixing bacteria exist, we are certain to find them eventually." "TTiey mu.st exist," Ruiz-Sanchez repeated. "Do you have a bacteritim that i.s a sulfur-concentrating obligate anaerobe?" "S'es -- ye.s, certainly!" "There you are," the Jesuit said, leaning back contentedly and clasping hi.s hands across one knee. "You have plenty of sulfur and so you have the bacterium. Please let me know when you find tiie iron-fixing species. I'd like to make a suIkuItureand take it home with me when I leave. There are two Earthmen whose noses I'd like to rub in it." The Lithian stiffened and thnist his head forward a little, as if baffled. Ruiz-Sanchez said hastily, "Pardon me. I was translating literally an aggressive idiom of my own tongue. It was not meant to describe an actual plan of action." "I think I understand," Chtexa said. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered if he did. In the rich storehouse of the Lithian language he h.id yet to discover any metaphors, either living or dead. Neither did the Litlnans liave any poetry or other creative arts. "You are of course wclccnne to any of the results of this program which you would honor as by accepting. One problem in die social sciences which has long puzzled us is just how one may adequately honor the innovator. When we consider how new ideas change our lives, we despair of giving in kind, and it is helpful when the innovator himself has wishes which society can gratify." Ruiz-Sanchez was at first not quite sure he had understood the proposition. After he had gone over it once more in his mind, he was not .sure that he could bring himself to like it, although it wa.s admirable enough. From an Earthman it would have sounded intolerably pompous, but it wa.s evident that Chtexa meant it. It wa-s probably just as well that the Commission's rejiort on Lithia was about to fall tlue, Ruiz-Sanchez had begun to think that he could absorb only a little mbm of this kind of calm sanity. And all of it -- a disquieting thought from somewhere near hi? heart reminded him -- all of it derived from reason, none from precept, none from faith. Tlic Lithians did not know God. They did things rightly, and thought righteously, because it was reasonable and effiaent and natural to do and to think that way. They seemed to need nothing else. Or could it be that thethought and acted as they did because, not being bom of man, and never in effect having left the Garden in wliich they lived, they did not share the terrible burden of origi nal sin? The fact tliat Lithia had never once had a glacial epoch, that its climate had been left una geological fact that an alert theologist could scarcely afford to ignore. Could it be that, free from the burden, they were also free from the curse of Adam? And if they wtir -- could men Twar to live among them? you, Cljlexa," the priest said after a moment. "You owe me no debt whatsoever, but we four Earthmen have a hard decision to make shortly. You know what it is. And I don't believe that wc know enough yet about your planet to make that decision properly." "Then of course you must ask questions," Chtexa said immediately. "I will answer, wherever I can." "Well then -- do your people die? I see you have the word, but perhaps it isn't the same as our word in meaning." "It means to stop changing and to go back to existing," Chtexa said. "A machine exists, but only a living thing, like a tree, progres-ses along a line of changing equilibriums. When that progress stops, the entity is dead." "And that happens to you?" "It always happens. Even the great trees, like the Message Tree, die sooner or later. Is that not true on Earth?" "Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said, "yes, it is. For rcMsons it would take me a long time to explain, it occurred to me that you might have escaped this evil." "It is not evil as we look at it," Chtexa said. "Lithia lives because of death. The death of leaves supplies our oil and gas. The death of some creatures is always necessary for the life of others. Bacteria must die, and viruses be prevented from living, if illness Is to be cured. Wc ourselves must die simply to make room for others, at least until wc can slow the rate at which our people arrive in the world -- a thing impossible to us at present." "But desirable, in your eyes?" "Surely desirable," Chtexa said. "Our world is rich, but not inexhaustible. And other planets, you have taught us, have peoples of their own. Tims woi cannot hope to spread to other planets when we have over-populated this one." "No real thing is ever inexhaustihle," Ruiz-Sanchez said abruptly, frowning at the iridescent floor. "That we have found to be true over many thousands of years of our history." "But inexhaustible in what way?" said Chtexa. "I grant you that any small object, any stone, any drop of water, any bit of soil can be explored without end. The amount of information which can be gotten from it is quite literally infinite. But a given soil can be exhausted of nitrates. It is difficult, but with bad cultivation it can be done. Or take iron, about which we have already been talking. Our planet's supply of iron has limits which we already know, at least approximately. To allow our economy to develop a demand for iron whieli exceeds the total known supply of Lithia -- and exceeds it beyond any possibility of supplementation by meteors or by import -- would be folly. This is not a question of information. It is a question of whether or not the information can be used. If it cannot, then limitless information is of no help." "You could certainly get along without more iron if yx)u h.ad to," Ruiz-Sanchez admitted. "Your wooden machinery is precise enough to satisfy any engineer. Most of them, I think, don't remember that we used to have something similar: I've a sample in my own home. It's a kind of tinier called a cuckoo clock, nearly two of our centuries old, made entirely of wood, and still nearly # accurate. For that matter, long after we began to build sca-going vessels of metal, we continued to use lignum vitae for ships' bearings." "Wood is an excellent material for most uses," Chtexa agreed. "Its only deficiency, compared to ceramic materials or perhaps metal, is that it is variable. One must know it well to be able to assess its qualities from one tree to the next. And of course complicated parts can always be grown inside suitable ceramic molds; the growth ressure inside the mold rises so igh that the resulting part is very dense. Larger parts can be ground direct from the plank with soft sandstone and polished with slate. It is a gratifying material to work, we find." Ruiz-Sanchez felt, for some reason, a little ashamed. It was a magnified version of the same shame he had always felt at home toward that old Black Forest cuckoo clock. The electric clocks elsewhere in his villa back home all should have been capable of performing silently, accurately and in less space -- but the considerations wliich had gone into the m akin g of them had been commercial as well as purely technical. As a result, most of them operated with a thin, asthmatic whir, or groaned softly but dismally at irregular hours. All of them were "streamlined," oversized and ugly. None of them kept good time, and several of them, since they were powered by constant-speed motors operating very simple gear-boxes, could not be adjusted, but had been sent out from the factory wnth built-in, ineluctable inaccuracies. The wooden cuckoo clock, meanwhile, ticked evenly away. A quail emerged from one of two wooden doors every quarter of an hour and let you know about it, and on the hour first the quail came out, then the cuckoo, and tliere wa.s a soft boll that rang just ahead of the cuckoo's call. It was accurate to a minute a week, all for the price of running up the three weights which drove it, each night before bedtime. The maker had been dead before Ruiz-Sanchez had been born. In contrast, the priest would probably buy and jettison at least a dozen cheap electric clocks in the course of one lifetime, as their makers had intended he should. "I have one more question, if I may. It is really part of the same question: I have asked if you die; now I should like to ask how you are born. I see many adults on your streets and sometiiTie.s in your houses -- though I gather you yourself are alone -- but never any children. Can you explain this to me? Or if the subject is not allowed to be discussed... "But why should it not be? There can never be any closed subjects," Chtexa said. "You know, of course, that our mates have abdominal po'uches where the eggs arc carried, it was a lucky mutation for us, for there arc a number of nest-robbing species on this planet." "Yes, we have a few animals with a somewhat similar arrangement on Earth, although they are live-bearers." "Our eggs are laid into these pouches once a year," Chtexa said. "It is then that the women leave their own houses and seek out the male of their choice to fertilize the eggs. I am alone because, thus far, I am no woman's first choice tliis season. In contrast you may see men's houses at this time of year which shelter three or four women who favor him." "I see," Ruiz-Sanchez said carefully. "And how is the choice determined? Is it by emotion, or by reason alone?" "The two are in the long run the same," Chtexa said. "Our ancestors did not leave our genetic needs to chance. Emotion with us no longer runs counter to our eugenic knowledge. It cannot, since it was itself modified to follow that knowledge by selective breeding for such behaviour. "At the end of the season, then, comes Migration Day. At that time all the eggs are fertilized, and ready to hatch. On that day -- you will not be here to see it, I am afraid, for your announced date of departure precedes it by a short time -- our whole nation goes to the seashores. There, witli the men to protect them from predators, the women wade out to swimming depth, and the children are bom." "In the sea?" Ruiz-Sanchez said faintly. "Yes, in the sea. Then we all return, and resume our other affairs until the next mating season." "But -- but what happens to the children?" "Why, tlicy take care of themselves, if they can. Of course many perish, particularly to our voracious brother the great fish-lizard, whom for that reason we kill when wc can. But a majority return when the time comes." "Return? Chtexa, I don't understand. Why don't they drown when they arc bom? And if they return, why have we never seen one?" "But you have," Chtexa said. "And you have heard them often. Here, come with me." He arose and led the way out into the foyer. RuizSanchez followed, hi.s head whirling with conjecture. Chtexa opened the door. The night, the priest saw with a subdued shock, was on the wane; there was the faintest of pearly glimmers on the cloudy sky to the east. The . multifarious humming and singing of the jungle contihued unabated. There was a high, hissing whistle, and the shadow of a pterodon drifted over the city toward the sea. From the mudflats came a hoarse barking. "There," Chtexa said softly. "Did you hear it?" The stranded creature, or another of his kind -- it was impossible to tell which -- croaked protestingly again. "It is hard for them at first," Chtexa said. "But actually the worst of their dangers are over. They have come ashore." "Chtexa," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Your children -- the hngfish?' "Yes," Chtexa said. "Those are our children." V incessant barking of the lungfish which caused Ruiz-Sanchez to faint when Agronski opened the door for him. The late hour, and the dual strains of Cleaver's Illness and the subsequent discovery of Cleaver's  direct lying, contributed. So did the increasing sense of guilt toward Cleaver which the priest had felt while walking home under the gradually-brightening, weeping sky : and so, of course, did the shock of discovering that Agronski and Michelis had arrived sometime during the night while he had been neglecting his charge. But primarily it was the diminishing, gasping clamor of the children of Lithia, battering at his every mental citadel, all the way from Chtexa's house to his own. The sudden fugue only lasted a few moments. He fought his way back to consciousness to find that Agronski and Michelis had propped him up on a stool in the lab and were tiying to remove his macintosh without unbalancing him or awakening him -- as difficult a problem in topology as removing a man's vest without taking off his jacket. Wearily, the priest pulled his own arm out of a macintosh sleeve and looked up at Michelis. "Good morning, Mike. Please excuse my bad manners." "Don't be an idiot," Michelis said evenly. "You don't have to talk now, anyhow. I've already spent much of tonight trying to keep Cleaver quiet until he's better. Don't put me through it again, Ramon, plea.se." "I won't. I'm not ill; I'm just very tired and a little overwrotight." "What's the matter with Cleaver?" Agronski demanded. Michelis made as if to shoo him off. "No, no, Mike, I'm all right, I assure you. ,s for Paul, he got a dose of glucoside poisoning when a plant-spine stabbed him this afternoon. No, it's yesterday afternoon now. How has he been since, you arrived?" "He's sick," Michelis said. "Since you weren't here, we didn't know what to do. We settled for two of the pills you'd left out." "You did?" Ruiz-Sanchez slid his feet heavily to the floor and tried to stand up. "As you say, you couldn't have known what else to do, but I think I'd better look in on him -- " "Sit down, please, Ramon." Michelis spoke gently, but his tone showed that he meant the request to be honored. Obscurely glad to be forced to yield to the big man's well-meant implacability, the priest let himself be propped back on the stool. His boots fell off his feet to the floor. "Mike, who's the Father here?" he said tiredly. "Still, I'm sure you've done a good job. lie's in no apparent danger?" "Well, he seems very sick. But he had energy enough to keep himself half awake most of the night. He only passed out a short while ago." "Good. Let him stay out. Tomorrow we'll probably have to begin intravenus feeding, though. In this atmosphere one doesn't give a salicylate overdose without penalties." He sighed. "Can we put off further questions?" "If there's nothing else wrong here, of course we can." "Oh," Ruiz-Sanchez said, "there's a great deal wrong, I'm afraid." "I knew it," .Agronski said. "I knew damn well there was. I told you so, Mike, didn't I?" "Is it urgent?" "No, Mike -- there's no danger to us, of at I'm positive. It's nothing that won't keep until we've all had a rest. You two look as though you need one as badly as I." "We're tired," Michelis agreed. "But why didn't you ever call us?" Agronski burst in aggricvcdly. "You had us scared half to death. Father. If there's really something wrong here, you should have -- " "There's no immediate danger," Ruiz-Sanchez repeated patiently. "As for why we didn't call you, I don't understand that any more than you do. Up to tonight, I thought we were in regular contact with you both. That was Paul's job and he seemed to be carrying it out. I didn't discover that he wasn't doing it until after he became ill." "Then obviously we'll have to wait," Michelis said. "Let's hit the hammock, in God's name. Flying that 'copter through twenty-five hundred miles of fog-bank wasn't exactly restful, either; I'll be glad to turn in... But, Ramon -- " "Yes, Mike?" "I have to say that I don't like this any better than Agronski does. Tomorrow we've got to clear it up. and get our Ccm:imission basincss done. We've only a day or so to make our decision before the ship comes and takes us off for good, and by that time we must know everything there is to know, and just what we're going to tell the Earth about it." "Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Just as you say, Mike -- in God's name." gist awoke before the otlicrs : actually, he had undergone far less purely physical strain than had the other three. It was just beginning to be cloudy dusk when he rolled out of his hammock and padded over to look at Cleaver. The physicist was in coma. His face was dirty grey and looked oddly shrunken. It was high time that the neglect and inadvertent abmc to which he had been subjected was rectified. Happily, his pulse and respiration were close to normal now. Ruiz-Sanchez went quietly into the lab and made up a fructose IV feeding. At tlie same time he reconstituted a can of powdered egg into a sort of souffle, setting it in a covered crucible to bake at the back of die little oven; that was for the rest of them. In the sleeping chamber, the priest set up his IV stand. Cleaver did not stir when the needle entered the big vein just above tlie inside of his elbow. Ruiz-Sanchez taped the tubing in place, checked the drip from the inverted bottle, and went back into the lab. There he sat, on the stool before the microscope, in a sort of suspension of feeling while the new night drew on. He was still poisonedtired, but at least now he could stay awake without constantly fighting himself. The slowdy-rising souffle in the oven went plup-plup, plup-plup, and after a while a thin tendril of aroma suggested that it was beginning to brown on top, or at Ica.st thinking about it. Outside, it abruptly rained buckets. Just as abruptly, it stopjjcd. "Is that breakfa.st I smell, Ramon?" "Yes, Mike, in the oven. In a few minutes now." "Right." Michelis went away again. On the back of the workbench, RuizSancJiez saw the dark blue book with the gold stamping which he had brought with him all the way from Earth. Almost automatically he pulled it to him and opened it to page #. It would at least ve him something to think about with which he was not personally involved. He had quitted the text last with Anita, who "would yield to tlie lewdness of Honuphrius to appease the savagery of Sulla and the mercenariness of the twelve Sullivani, and (as Gilbert first suggested), to save the virginity of Felicia for Magravius" -- now hold a moment, how could Felicia be considered still a virgin at this point? Ah:... when converted bv Michael ered it. since Felicia had been guilty only of simple infidelities in the finst place. "... but .she fears that, by allowing his marital rights, she may cause reprehensible conduct between Rugenius and Jereinias. Michael, who has foinurly debauched .Anita, dispenses her from yielding to Honupitrius" -- yes. that figured, since Michael also had had designs on Eugenius. "Anita is disturbed, hut Michael comminates that he will reserve her case tomorrow for the ordinary Gugliclinus even if .slie should practise a pious fraud during afTriction which, from experience, she knows (according to Wadding) to he leading to nullity." Well. This was all very well. It even seemed to be shaping up, for the first time. Still, Ruiz-Sandiez reflected, he would not like to have known the familv hidden beJtind the conventional Latin alia.ses, or to have lxen the confessor to any' one of them. Now then: "Fortissa, liowever, is encouraged by Gregorius, Leo. Viteilius, and Macdugalius, reunitedly, to warn Anita by describing the strong chastisements of Honuphrius and the depravities ( turpissimas) of Canicula, the deceased wife of Mauritius, with Sulla, the simoniac, who is abnegand and repents.' Yes, it added up, when one tried to view it without outrage either at the persons involved -- and there was every assurance that these were fictitious -- or at the author, who for all his mighty intellect, the greatest perhaps of the preceding century among novelists, had still to be pitied as much as the meanest victim of the Evil One. To view it, as it were, in a sort of grey twilight of emotion, wherein everything, even the bamacle-like commentaries which the text had accumulated, could be seen in the same light. "Is it done. Father?" "Smells like it, Agromki. Take it out and help yourself, why don't you?" "Thanks. Can I bring Cleaver -- " "No, he's fitting an IV." Unless his impression that he understood the problem at last was once more going to turn out to be an illusion, he was now ready for the basic question, the stumper that had deeply disturbed both the Order and the Church for so many years now. He reread it carefully. It asked: "Has he hegemony and shall she submit?" To his astonishment, he saw as if for the first time that it was two questions, despite the omission of a comma between the two. And so it demanded two an.swers. Did Honuphrius have hegemony? Yes, he did, for Michael, the onlv member of the # # whole complex who had been gifted from the beginning with the power of grace, had been egregiously compromised. Therefore, Honuphrius regardless of whether his dns were all to be laid at his door or were real only in rumor could not be divested of his privileges by anyone. But should Anita submit? No, she should not Michael had forfeited his right to dispense or to reserve her in any way, and so she could not be guided by the curate or by anyone else in tlic long run but her own conscience -- which in view of the grave accusations against Honuphrius could lead her to no recourse but to deny him. As for Sulla's repentance, and Felicia's conversion, they meant nothing, since the defection of Michael had deprived both of them, and everyone else, of spiritual guidance. The answer, then, had been obvious all the time. It was: Yes, and No. H e closed the book and looked up across the bench, feeling neither more nor less dazed than he had before, but with a small stirring of elation deep inside him which he could not suppress. As he looked out of the window into the dripping darkness, a familiar, sculpturesque head and shoulders moved into the truncated tetrahedron of yellow light being cast out through the fine glass into the rain. It was Chtexa, moving away from the house. Suddenly Ruiz-Sanchez realized that nobody had bothered to rub away the ackness ideograms on the door-tablet. If Chtexa had come here on some errand, he had been turned back unnecessarily. The priest leaned forward, snatched up an empty s!idebox, and rapped with a comer of it against the inside of the window, Chtexa turned and looked in through the steaming curtains of rain, his eyes completely filmed. Ruiz-Sanchez beckoned to him. and got stifTly off the stool to open the door. In the oven his share of breakfast dried slowly and began to bum. The rapping had summoned forth Agronski and Michelis as well. Chtexa looked down at the three of them with easy gravity', while drops of water ran like oil down the minute, prismatic scales of his supple skin. "I did not know that there was sickness here," the Lithian said. "I called because your brother RuizSanchez left my house this morning without the gift I had hoped to give him. I will leave if I am invading your privacy in any way." "You are not," Ruiz-Sanchez assured him. "And the sickness is only a poisoning, not communicable and w'e think not likely to end badly for our colleague. These are my friends from the north, Agronski and Michelis." "I am happy to see them. The message was not in vain, then?" "What message is this?" Michelis said, in his pure but hesitant Lithian. "I .sent a message, as your colleague Ruiz-Sanchez asked me to do, last night. I was told by Xoredeshch Gton that you had already departed." "As we had," Michelis said. "Ramon, what's this? I thought you told us that sending messages was Paul's job. And you certainly implied that you didn't know how to do it after Paul took sick." "I didn't. I don't. I asked Chtexa to send it for me." Michelis looked up at the Lithian. "What did the message say?" he asked. "That you were to join them now, here, in Xoredeshch Sfath. And that vour time on our world was almost up." "What does that mean?" Agronski said. He had been trying to follow the conversation, but he was not much of a linguist, and evidently the few words he had been able to pick up had served only to inflame his ready fears. "Mike, translate, please." Michelis did so. bricRy. Then he said : "Ramon, wa.s that really all you had to say to us, especially after whai you had found out? We knew Uiat departure time was coming, too, after all. We can keep a calendar as well as you, I hope." "I know that, Mike. But I had no idea what previous messages you'd received, if indeed you'd received any. For all I knew. Cleaver might have been in touch with you some other vvay, privately. I tliought at first of a transmitter in his personal lugggc. but later it occurred to me that he might have been sending dispatihes over the regular jetliners. Or he miglit have told you that we were going to stay on beyond the official time. He might have told you I was dead. He might have told you anything. I had to be sure you'd arrive here regardless of w-hat he had or had not said. "And when I got to the local rtK'ssapi' center, I luicl to revise my message again, because I found that I couldn't coiiiniimicate with you directly, or send anytfiing at all detailed. Eveiylhing that goes out from Xoredeluh Sfaiii bv radio # goes out through the I iee. and until you've seen it vou haven't any idea what an Karthiiian is up against there in sending even the simplest message." "Is that true?" Miehelis asked Chtexa. "True?" Chtexa repeated. "It is accurate, yes." "Well, then," Ruiz-Sanchez said, a little nettled, "you can see why, w'hcn Chtexa appeared providentially. recognized me. and ofTcred to act as an intiTinediarv. I htid to give him only tlic gist of what I hid to say. I couldirt ho)e to explain all the clei.iils to him. am! I couldn't li('pe that any of those details would get to you undisioited aifter passing thiougli at least two do was yell al the loj) of niv voice for you two to get down here on the pioper date .incl hope that you heard ine." "Thi' is a time of lioublc. uhidt is lik" a siiknevs in the hni--e." Chtexa said. "I nui't not remain. am troubled, and I lamiol ask lltat, if I now force my jresence on other. wiio are troubled. I will bring my gift at a better lime." door, without any formal gesture of fari'well, but neverthclc? leaving beiiind an overwhelming impression of grariousness. Ruiz.Sanchez w.ilclied liim go helplessly, and a little forlornly. The Lithian.s always seemed to understand the cbseiiLes of situations ; lliey were never, like een the most cocksure of Eariiimen. beset by the least apparent doubt. And why sliould they be? They were backed-if Ruiz.-Sanchez was right -- bv the second-best Authority in the universe, and backed directly, without intermediaries or con(licting interpretations. The very fact that they were never tonnenlcd by indet'ision identified them as creatures of that Autliority. Only tlic ( hildren of God had been gi'en free choice, and hence were often doubtful. Nevertheless, Ruiz-Sanchez would have delaved Chtexa's dcpartuic had he been able. In a short-term argument it is heljiful to have pure reason on your side -- even though such an ally could be di'pended upon to Stab you to the heart If you depended upon him too long. "Let's go inside and lhra.sh this thing out," Michclis said, shutting the door and turning back toward the front room. "It's a good thing we got some sleep, but we have so little time left now that it's going lo be touch and go to have a formal decision ready when the sliip comes." "We can't go ahead yel," Agronski objected, although, along with Ruiz-Sam lie. be followed Michclis obediently enough. "How can we do anything .wnsible without having heard what Cleaver has to say? Every inan'.s voice counts on a job of this sort." "That's verv true." Michelis said. "And I don't like the present situation any better than you do -- I've already said that. But I don't see tliat wc have any choice. VN'hat do you think, Ramon?" "I'd like to hold out for waiting," Ruiz-Sanchez said frankly. "Anything I may say now is, to put it realistically, somewhat compromised with vou two...nd don't tell me that you have every confidence in my integrity, becau.se we had every confidence in Cleavcr'.s, too. Right now, trying to maintain both confidences just cancels out both." "You have a nastv wav, Ramon, of saying aloud what everybody else is thinking," Michelis said, grinning bleakly. "What alternatives do you sec, then?" "None," Ruiz-Sanchez admitted. "Time is against us, a. you said. We'll ju.st have to go ahead without Cleaver." "No, you won't." Tlic voice, from the doorway to the sleeping chamber, was at once both uncertain and much harshened by weakness. The others sprang up. Cleaver, clad only in his shorts, stood in the doorway, clinging to both sides of it. On one forearm Ruiz-Sanchez could see the marks where the ad. hesive tape which iiad held the IV tubing had been ripped otf. VI chelis said, almost angrily. "Get back into your hammock before you make things twice as bad for yourself. You're a sick man, can't you realize that?" "Not as sick as I look," Cleaver said, with a ghastly grin. "Actually I feel pretty fair. My mouth is almost all cleared up and I don't think I've got any fever. And I'll be damned if this Commission is going to proceed an inch without me. It isn't empowered to do it, and I'll appeal any decision -- any decision, I hope you guys are listening -- that it makes without me." The other two turned helplessly to Ruiz-Sanchez. "How about it, Ramon?" Michclks .said, frowning. "Is it safe for him to be up like this?" Ruiz-Sanchez was already at the physicist's side, peering into his mouth. The ulcers were indeed almost gone, with granulation tissue forming nicely over the few that still remained. Cleaver's eves were f still slightly suffused, indicating that the toxemia was not completely defeated, but except for these two signs the effect of the accidental squill inoculation was no longer visible. It was true that Cleaver looked awful, but that was inevitable in a jnan recently quite sick, and in one who had been burning his own body proteins for fuel to boot. "If he wants to kill himself, I guess he's got a right to do so, at least bv indirection." Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Paul, the first tiling you'll have to do is get off your feet, and get into a robe, and get a blanket around your legs. Then you'll have to eat something: I'll fix it for you. You've staged a w'ondcrful recovery, but you're a sitting duck for a real infection if you abuse yourself during convalescence." "I'll compromise," Cleaver said immediately, "I don't want to be a hero, I juht want to be hoard. Give me a liand ocr to that hasso'k. I still don't walk very stiailil." It took the better part of half an hour to get Cleaver settled to RuizSanehez' .satisfaction. 'I'he physicist secnitd in a way way to be enjoying every minute of it. At last he had a mug of gchtciii, the local equivalent of tea, in his hand, and Michelis said: "Ml right, Paul, you've gone out of your way to put yourself on the spot. FiVidcntly tliat's where you want to he. So let's have the answer: Why didn't you communicate with usi"' "I didn't want to." "Now wait a minute," .gr # n # ki said. "Paul, don't break your neck to say the first damn tiling that conies into your head. Your judgment may not be well yet, even if your lalkiiiL" apparatus Is. Wasn't your sileriee ju.st a matter of your being unable to work the local message system -- the Tree or whatever it IS?" No, it wasn't." Cleav'r insisted. "Thanks, Agroiwki, hut I don't need to be sheplierded down the safe and easy road, or have any alibis set up for me. I know exactiv what I dill that was tickiidi, ;ud I know that it's going to Iw impossible to s't up consistent nlilLs for it now. My chances for keeping anything under my hat depended on rny staying in complete control of everything I did. Naturally those cliances went out the window when I got stuck bv that damned pineapple. I realized that last night, when I fought like a demon to get through to you before the Father could get back, and found that I couldn't make il." "You seem to take it calmly enough now," Miehelis observed. "Well, I'm feeling a little washed mt. But Fin a realist. And I also know, Mike, that I had damned giH'd leasons for what I did. I'm counting on llic chance that you'll agree with me wholeheartedly when I tell you why I did it." "All right," Miehelis said, "begin." hands quietly in the lap of his robe. He was obviously still enjoying the situation. He said: "First of all, I didn't call you because I didn't sant to, as I said, I could have mastored the problem of the Tree e;isily enough by doing what the F'atlier did -- that i.s, by getting a Sn.ike to ferry my messages. Of course T don't speak Snake, but tlie Father does, so all I had to do was to take him into mv conlide:H'C. B:trr;ng that. I could have mastered tlie Tree itself. I already know all the technical principles involved. Mike, you should sec that Tree, it's the biggest single junction transistor anyw'here in this galaxy, and I'll bet that it's the biggest one anywhere. "But I wanted a gap to spring up between our party and yours. I wanted both of vou to be comlelelv in the dark about what was going on. down here on this continent. I wanted you to imagine the worst, and blame it on the Snakes, too, if that could be managed. After you got here -- if you did -- I was going to be able to sliow you tliat I hadn't sent any messages because the Snakes wouldn't let me. I've got more plants to that effect squirrelled away around here than I'll bother to list now; tliere'd be no point in it, since it's all come to nothing. But I'm sure it would have looked conclusive, regardless of anything the Father would liave been able to offer to the contrary. "It was just a damned sliaine, from my point of view, tliat I had to run up against a pineapple at the last minute. It gave the Father a chance to find out something about what was up. I'll swear that if that hadn't happened, he wouldn't have smelt anything until you actually got here -- and then it would have been too late." "I probably wouldn't have, that's true," Ruiz-Sanchez said, watching Cleaver steadily. "But your running up against that 'pineapple' was no accident. If you'd been observing Lithia as you were sent here to do, instead of spending all your time building up a fictitious Lithia for purposes of your own, you'd have known enough about the planet to have been more careful about 'pineapples.' You'd also have spoken at least as much Lithian a.s Agronski by this time." "That," Cleaver said, "is probably true, and again it doesn't make any difference to me. I observed the one fact about Lithia that ovArides all oilier facts, and that is going to turn out to be sufficient. Unlike you, Fatlicr, I have no respect for petty niceties in extreme situations, and I'm not the kind of man who Uiinks anyone Icaras anything from analysis after the fart." "Let's not get to bickering," Michclis said. "You've told us your story without any visible decoration, and it's c'ident that you have a reason for confessing. You expect us to excuse you, or at least not to blame you too heavily, when you tell us what tliat reason is. Let's hear it." "It's this," Cleaver said, and for the first time he seemed to beome a little more anitnateci. He leaned forward, the "lowinc; e;aiicht brinsiing the bone?, of liis f.n e into sh.iip contrast with the s.ii'tinn hollows of his checks, and pointed a not-iiuiU"-steadv finper at Michelis. "Do you know, Mike, what it is that we're .sitting on here:' Do vou kiiojv, just to bepin with, how much rutile ihmis heie';'" "Of course I know. (I we decitle to vote for openinp the planet up. our titanium problem will be Solved for a centur', niashe even loiiper. Tm saying as inudi in my persoiuil report. But wfigured tliat that would be true even before we fir.'t landed bet', a. soon as wr got accurate figures on the mass oi' the planet." "And what about the pegmatite?" Cleaver demanded s)ftly. looking puled. "I Mippose it'.s abimclnnt: I reallv didn't bother to look. Titanium's important to us, hut T don't uitc see whv lithium should be; the (lavs wlvn the metal was used as n rocket tm-l are fifty years lit-hincl us." "And v('t (he stuT's slid worth alirmt .# an r.iigli'h tonne hack home. Mike, ami that's exactly the same price it was drawing in the IPfiO'i. allinving for cnirrencv cliangcs since then. Doesn't that nie.an anything to vou?" "I'm more interested in what it means to you," Mi(helis said. "None of us can make a nickel out of this trip, even if we find the planet solid platinum inside -- which is hardly likclv. And if price is the only consideration, surely the fact that lithium is common here will break the market for it? What's it gK)d for, after all, on a large scale.'" "It's good for bombs." Cleaver said. "Fusion bombs. And, of course, controlled fusiem low'cr, if vve ever lick that problem." sick and tired all over again. It was exactly what he had feared had been on Cleaver's n;ind. and he had not wanted to find himself right. "Cleaver," he said, "Fve changed my mind I would have caught vou out, even if you had never blundncd against your 'pineapple.' That same day you mentioned to me that you were looking for pegmatite wlicn vou had your accident, and that you thought Lithia miglit be a good place for tritium produi tion on a large scale. Evidently you lliought that I wouldn't know what vou were talkI ing about. If you hadn't hit the 'pineapple.' you would have given voursoif awav to me before now bv talk like that; your e.stiinale of me was ba.sed on as little observation as is vour etin I ate of Idthia." "It's easy," Cleaver observed indulgently, "to say 'I knew it all the time.' " "Of course it's easy, when the other man is helping you." RuizSanchez said. "But I think that your view of Eithia as a cornucopia of potential hydrogen bombs is only the beginning of what you have in mind. I don't believe that it's even your real olijcctive. What you would like most is to see Lithia removed from the universe as far as you're concerned. You hate the place, it's injured you, you'd like to think that it really doesn't exist. Hence the emphasis, on Lilhia as a source of tritium, to the exclusion of every other fact about the planet; for if that emphasis wins out, Lithia will be placed under security seal. Isn't tliat right?" "Of course it's right, except for the phony mind-reading," Cleaver said contemptuously. "When even a priest can see it, it's got to be obvious. Mike, this is the most tremendous opportunity that man's order to be converted, root and branch, into a thermonuclear laboratory and production center. It has indefinitely large supplies of the most important raw materials. What's even more important, it ha.s no nuclear knowledge of its own for us to worry about. All the clue materials, the radioactive elements and so on which you need to work out real knowledge of the atom, we'll have to imort; the Snakes don't know a thing about them. Furthermore, the instruments involved, the counters and particle-accelerators and so on, all depend on materials like iron that the Snakes don't have, and on principles they don't know, like magnetism to begin with, and quantum theory. We'll be able to stock our plant here with an immense reservoir of cheap labor which doesn't know and -- if we take proper precautions -- never will have a prayer of learning enough to snitch classified techniques. "All we need to do is to turn in a tripIe-E Unfavorable on the planet to shut off for a whole century any use of Lithia as a way station or any other kind of general base. At the same time, we can report separately to tlie UN Review Committee exactly what we do have in Lithia: a tripIe-A arsenal for the whole of Earth, for the whole commonwealth of planets we control!" "Against whom?" Ruiz-Sanchez said. "What do vou mean?" "Against whom are you stocking this arsenal ? Why do we need a whole planet devoted to making tritium bombs?" "The UN itself can use weapons," Cleaver said drily. "The time isn't very far gone since there were still a few restive nations on Earth, and it could come around again. Don't forget also that thermonuclear weapons only la.st a few years -- they can't be stockpiled indefinitely, like fission bombs. The halflife of tritium is very short. I suppose you w'ouldn't know anything about tlTat. But take my w'ord for it, the UN's police would be glad to know that they could have access to a virtually ine.xhaustible stock of tritium bombs, and to hell with the shelf-life problem! "Besides, if you've Uiought about it at all, you know as well as I do that this endless con.solidation of peaceful planets can't go on forever. Sooner or later -- well, what happens if the next planet we touch on is a place like Earth? If it is, its inhabitants may fight, and fight like a planetful of madmen, to stay out of our frame of influence. Or what happens if the next planet we hit is an outpost for a whole federation, maybe bigger than ours? When that day comes -- and It will, it's in the caids -- we'll be damned glad if we're able to plaster the enemy from pole to pole the matter with as little loss of lile as possible." "On our side." Rui-Sanclie added. "Is there any oilier side;'" "By golly, it makes sens(o me." .Agrtnski said. "Mike, what do vou think?" "I'm not sure yet," Michelis said. "Paul, I still don't understand why you thought it necessary to go through all the cloakand-ilagger maneuvers. 'ou tell your story fairly enough now, and it has its merits, but you also admit you were going to trick the three of us into going along with you, if you could. Why? Couldn't you trust the force of your argument alone?" "No," Cleaver said bluntly. never b"en on a Commission like this before, where there was no single, definite litairman. where there was deliberatelv an even number of mrnibcrs o dial a split opinion couldn't be settled if it occurred -- and wIktc the voice of a man whose head is full ff jiecksnifRan. irrelevant moral distinctions and two-tliousand-Ycar-old metaphysics carries c.xai l!' the same weight as the voice of a scientist." "That's mightv loaded language," Michelis said. "I know it. If it comes to that. I'll say here or anywhere that I think the Father is a hcl! of a fine biologist, and that that makes him a scientist like the rest of us -- insofar as biology's a science. "But I runemiMT once casting tile lab.s at Notre D.mie, where the have a coniph'te lif.le world ol genn-liee aiiim.d-i .ind plants and have pulled I ilon't knovv hovs many plissiological miracles out ol tile h.itI wondered then how one goe.s atioiii being as good a scientist as iImi. and a Churcliman at the same lime. I wondered in which com).irtment in their hraiiw tlicy filed tlioir religion, and in which their .science. Pm still vondering. "I didn't propose to take chances on tlie compartnienls getting interconnected on Lithia. I had every intention of cutting the Father down to a point where his voice would be nearly ignored by the rest of you. That's why I undertook the cloak-and-dagger stufl'. Maybe it vas stupid of me-I suppose lliat it takes training to be a su-ce.s.sful agenl-mvocaleur and that I sliould have realized it. Bui I'm not .sori I tried. J'm ouly Sony I faiU-dr silence. "Is that it. then?" Michelis said. "That's it, Mike. Oh -- one more tiling. Mv vote, if anvbodv is in doubt about it, is to keep the planet closed. 'I'.ike it from there." "Ramon." Michelis said, "do you want to speak next? 'ou'e ccrtainlv entitled to it the air's a mite murky at die moment." "No, Mike; let's lu-ar from you." "I'm not ready to speak, yet either, unless the majority wants me to. AgronsJd, how about you?" "Sure," Apronski said. "Speaking as a geologist, and also as an ondinary slob that doesn't follow rarified rvasoning very well, I'm on Cleaver's side. I dcwi't .sec anything either for or against the planet on any other grounds but Cleaver's. It's a fair planet as planets go, very quiet, not very rich in anything else we need, not subject to any kind of trouble that I've been able to detect. It'd make a good way station, but .so would lots of other worlds hereabouts. It'd also make a good arsenal, the way Cleaver defined the term. In every other category it's as dull as ditch-water, and it's got plenty of that. The only other thing it can have to offer is titanium, which isn't quite a.s scarce back home these days as Mike seems to think, and gem-stones, particularly the semi-precious ones, which we can make at home without traveling # light-years. I'd say, either set up a way station here and forget about the planet otherwise, or else handle the place a.s Cleaver suggested." "But which?" Ruiz-.Sanchez asked. "Well, which is more important, Father? Aren't way stations a dime a dozen? Planets that can be used as thermonuclear labs, on the other hand, are rare -- Lithia is the first one that can be used that way, at least in my experience. Why use a planet for a routine purpose if it can be used for a unique purpose? Why not apply Occam's Razor -- the law of parsimony? It works in all other scientific problems. It's iny bet that it's the best tool to use on this one." You vote to close the planet, then," Michelis said. "Sure. That's what I was saying, wasn't it?" "I wanted to be certain." Michelis said. "Ramon, I gues.s it's up to us. Shall I speak first?" "Of course, Mike." "Then," Michelis said evenly, and without changing in the slightest his accustomed tone of grave impartiality, "I'll say that I think both of these gentlemen are fools, and calamitous fools at that because they're supposed to be scientists. Paul, your maneuvers to set up a phony situation are perfectly beneath contempt, and I shan't mention them again. I shan't even bother to record them, so you needn't feel tliat you have to mend any fences as far as I'm concerned. I'm looking solely at the purpose those maneuvers were supposed to serve, just as you asked me to do." Cleaver's obious self-satisfaction began to dim a little around the edges. He said, "Go ahead," and wound the blanket a little bit tighter around his legs. L ithia is not even the beginning ' of an arsenal," Michelis .said. "Every piece of evidence you offered to prove that it might be is either a half-truth or the purest tra.sh. Cheap labor, for instance; with what w'ill you pay the Lithians? They have no money, and they can't Ije rewarded with goods. They have ewrything they n(ed, and they like the way they're living right now -- God knows they're not even slightly jealous of the achievements we think make Earth great." He looked around the gently rounded room, shining softly in the gaslight. "I don't seem to see anyplace in here where a vacuun;cleaner would find much use. Howwill you pay the Lithians to work 'in your ihennonuclear plants ?" "With knowledge," Cleaver said gruffly. "#'here's a lot they'd like to know." "But what knowledge? The things they'd like to know are specifically the things you can't tell them if ihev're to be valuable to you as a labor force. Are you going to teach tlicm quantum theor'? You can't; tliat would bo dangerous. Are you going to teach them elcctrodsTiamics? Again, tliat would enable them to learn other things you think dangerous. Are you going to teach them how to get titanium from ore, or how to accumulate enough iron to enable them to leave their present Stone Age? Of course you aren't. As a matter of fact, we haven't a thing to offer tliein in that sense. They just won't work for us under those terms." "Offer them other tenns," Cleaver said .shortly. "If necessjiry, tell them what they're going to do, like it or lump it. It'd he easy enough to introduce a money system on tliis planet: you give a Snake a piece of paper that says it's worth a dollar, and if he asks you just what makes it worth a dollar -- well, the answer Is, We say it is." "And we put a machine-pistol to his belly to emphasize the point," Ruiz-Sanchez interjected. "Do we make machine-pistols for nothing? I never figured out what else they were good for. Either you point them at someone or you throw them awav." "Item: sljvcry," Michclis said. gument for (heap labor. I won't vote for slavery. Ramon won't. Agronski?" "No," Agronski said uneasily. "But it's a minor point." "The hell it is. It's the reason why we're here. We're supposed to think of the welfare of the Lithians as well as of ourselves -- otherwise this Cominis.sjon procedure would be a waste of time, of thought, of money. If we want cheap lalwr, we can enslave any planet." Agronski was silent. "Speak up," Michelis said stonily. "Is that tnic, or isn't it?" Agronski .said, "I gucs.s it is.' "Cleaver?" "Slavery's a swearword," Cleaver said sullenly. "You're deliberately clouding the issue." Say that aii,aw' "Oh, hell. All right, Mike, T know you wouldn't. But you're wrong." "I'll admit that the instant that you ran demonstrate it to me," Michelis said. He got up abruptly from his hassock, walked over to the sloping windowsill, and sat down again, looking out into the rain-stippled darkness. He seemed to be more deeply troubled than Ruiz-Sanchez had ever before thought possible for him. suraed, "I'll go on with my own demonstration. Now whats to be said about this theory of automatic security that you've propounded, Paul? You think that the Lithians can't learn the techniques they would need to be able to understand secret information and pass it on, and so they won't have to be screened. There again, you're wrong, as you'd have known if you'd bothered to study the Lithians even perfunctorily. The Lithians are highly intelligent, and they already have many of the clues they need. I've given them a hand toward pinning down magnetism, and they absorbed the material like magic and put it to work with enormous ingenuity." "So did #," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "And I've suggested to them a technique for accumulating iron that should prove to be pretty powerful. I had only to suggest it, and they were already halfway down to the bottom of it and traveling fast. They can make the most of the smallest of clues." "If I were the UN I'd regard both actions as the plainest kind of treason," Cleaver said harshly. "Since that may be exactly the way Earth will regard them, I think it'd be just as well if you told the folks at home that the Snakes found out bodi items by themselves." "I don't plan to do any falsifying of the report," Michelis said, "but thanks anyhow -- I appreciate the intent behind what you say, if not the ethics. I'm not through, however. So far as the actual, practical objective that you want to achieve is concerned, Paul, I think it's just as useless as it is impossible. The fact that you have here a planet that's especially rich in lithium doesn't mean that you're sitting on a bonanza, no matter what price per tonne the metal is commanding back home. The fact of the matter is that you can't ship lithium home. "Its density is so low that you couldn't send away more than a tonne of it per shipload; by the time you got it to Earth the shipping charges on it would more than outweigh the price you'd get for it on arrival. As you ought to know, tliere's lots of lithium on Earth's own moon, too, and it isn't economical to fly it back to Earth even over that short distance. No more would it be economical to ship from Earth to Lithia all the heavy equipment that would be needed to make use of lithium here. By the time you got your cyclotron and the rest of your needs to Lithia, you'd have cost the UN so much money that no amount of locally available pegmatite could compensate for it." "Just extracting the metal would cost a fair sum," Agronski said, frowning slightly. "Lithium would bum like gasoline in this atmosphere." Michelis looked from Agronski to Cleaver and back again. "Of course it would," he said. "The whole plan's just a chimfira. It seems to me, also, that we have a lot to learn from the Lithians, as well as they from us. Their social system works like the most perfect of our physical mechanisms, and it does so without any apparent repression of the individual. It's a thoroughly liberal society, that nevertheless never even begins to tip over toward the other side, toward the kind of Ghandiism that keeps a people tied to the momma-andpoppa-farm and the roving-brigand economy. It's in balance, and not precarious balance, either, but per feet chemical equilibrium. "The notion of using Litliia as a tritium bomb plant is easily the strangest anachronism Tve ever encountered -- it's as crude as pro posing to equip a spaceship with canvas sails. Right here on Lithia is the real secret, the secret that's going to make bombs of all kinds, and all the re.st of the anti-social armamentarium, as useless, unnecessary, obsolete as the Iron Boot! "And on top of all that -- no, please, Trn not quite finished, Paul -- on top of all that, the Lithians are centuries aJicad of us in some purely technical matters, just as we're ahead of them in others. You should see what they can do with ceramics, with semi-conductors, with static electricity, with mixed disciplines like histochemistry, immunochemistry, biophysics, teratology, elcctrogcnetics, linmolog', and half a hundred more. If vou'd been looking, you would have seen. "We have much more to do, it seems to me, than just vote to open the planet. That's a passive move. We have to realize that bt'ing able to use Lithia is only the beginning. The fact of the matter is that we actively need Lithia. We should say so in our recommendation." the windoss-sill and stood up, looking down on them all, but most especially at Ruiz-Sanchez. The priest smiled at him. but as much ii anguish as in admiration, and then had to look back at his shoes. "Well, .'Xgronski?" Cleaver said, spitting the words out like bullets on which he had been clenching his teeth during an amputation without anesthetics. "What do you say now? Do you like the pretty picture?" "Sure, I like it," Agronski said, slowly but forthrightly. It was a virtue in him, as well as it was often a source of exasperation, that he always said exactly what he was thinking, the moment he was asked to do so. "Mike makes sense; I wouldn't expect him not to, if you see what I mean. Also he's got another advantage: he told us what he thoul without trying first to trick us into liis way of thinking." "Oh, don't be a thumphead," Cleaver exclaimed. "Are we scientists or Boy Rangers? Any rational man up against a majority of dogooders would have taken the same precautions that I did." "Maybe," Aonski said. "I don't know. They .still smell to me like a confession of weakness somewhere in the argument. I don't like to be finessed. And I don't much like to be called a thumphead, either. But before you call me any more names, I'm going to say that I think you're more right than Mike is, I don't like your methods, but your aim seems sensible to me. Mike's shot some of your major arguments full of holes, that I'll admit; but as far as I'm concerned, you're still leading -- by a nose." He paused, breathing heavily and glaring at the physicist. Then he said: "But don't push, Paul. I don't like being pushed." Michelis remained standing for a moment longer. Then he shrugged, walked back to his has sock, and sat down, locking his hands between his knees. "I did my best, Ramon," he sakJ. "But so far it looks like a draw. See what you can do " Ruiz-Sanchez took a deep breath. What he was about to do would without any doubt hurt him for the rest of his life, regardless of the goodness of his reasons, or the way time had of turning any knife. The decision had already cost him many hours of concentrated, agonized doubt. But he believed that it had to be done. T disagree with all of you," he said. "I llieve that Lithia should be reported triple-E Unfavorable, as Cleaver does. But I think it should also be given a special classification: X-#." X-I -- but that's a quarantine label," Michelis said. "As a matter of fact -- " "Yes, Mike. I vote to seal Lithia off from ail contact with the human race. Not only now, or for the next century, but forever." vm T he words did not produce the consternation that he had been dreading -- or, perhaps, had been hopii for, somewhere in the back of his mind. Evidently they were all too tired for that. They took his announcement with a kind of stunned emptiness, as though it were so far out of the expected order of events as to be quite meaningless. It was hard to say whether Cleaver or Michelis had been hit the harder. All that could be seen for certain was that Agronski recovered first, and was now ostentatiously cleaning his ears, as if he were ready to Ibten again when Ruiz-Sanchez changed his mind. "Well," Cleaver began. And then again, shaking his head amazedly, like an old man, "Well..." "Tell us why, Ramon," Michelis said, clenching and unclenching his fists. His voice was quite flat, but Ruiz-Sanchez thought he could feel the pain under it. "Of course. But I warn you, Fm going to be very roundabout. What I have to say seems to me to be of the utmost importance, and I don't want to see it rejected out of hand as just the product of my peculiar training and prejudices -- interesting perhaps as a study in aberration, but not germane to the problem. The evidence for my view of Lithia is overwhelming. It overwhelmed me quite against my natural hopes and inclinations. I want you to hear that evidence." "He wants us also to understand," Cleaver said, recovering a little of his natural impatience, "That his reasons are religious and won't hold water if he states them right out."  "Hush," Michelis said. "Listen." "Thank you, Mike. All right, here we go. This planet is what I think is called in English a 'set-up. Let me describe it for you briefly as I see it, or rather as I've come to see it. "Lithia is a paradise. It resembles most closely the Earth in its preAdamic period just before tlic coming of the great glaciers. The resemblance ends just there, because on Lithia the glaciers never cam", and life continued to he spent in the paradi.se. as it was nol allowi.-d to do on Earth. We ftml a coinplctely mixed forC't. with jil.mts which fall from otu(muI if the creative spectrum to ilie other living side by side in perfect amity. To a great extent tliat's also true of the animals, I'he lion doesn't lie down witli the lamb here because Litltia has neitjicr animal, but as an analogy the phrasc' is apt. Parasitism occurs far less often on Lithia t)ian it docs on Earth, and dtere are very few carnivores of any sort. Almost all the surviving land animals eat plants only, and by a neat arrangement whi h is typically Lithian, the plants are admirably set up to attack animals ratlier than each other. "It's an unusual ecology', and fne of the strangest diings about it is its rationality, its extreme, almost single-minded insistence on one-forone relationshis. In one respect it looks almost as though someone had arranged the whole planet to demonstrate die theory of .sets. "In this paradise wi' have a dominant creature, the Lithian. the man of Lithia. This creature is rational. It conforms as ii naturally and without constraint or guidance to the highest ethical code we have evolved on Earth. It needs no laws to enforce this code; somehow, cver)'onc obeys it as a matter of course, although it ha.s never even been written down. There arc no criminals, no deviants, no aberrations of any kind. The people are not standardized -- our own very bad and partial answer to the ethical dilemma -- but instead are highly individual. Yet .somehow no antiMK'ial act of any kind is ever cominiitcd. "Mik-, let mistop liere and ask; What does this suggr'st to you?" "Why, just what I've said before that it suggested," Micliclis said. "An enormously .superior social science, evidently founded in a precise psychological science." "Wry well, I'll go on. I felt as you did at first. Then I came to ask myself: How does it happen that tlie Lithians not only have no deviants -- think of that, vo deviants -- but it just happens, by the uttermost of all coincidences, that tlic code by which they live so perfectly is point for point the code wc strive to obey. Consider, please, the imjxmderables involved in such a coincidence. Even on Earth wc neviT have found a society which evolved independently exactly the satne precepts as the Christian precepts. Oil, there were some duplications, enough to encourage the Twentieth Centui's partiality toward synthetic religions like Thcosophism and Hollywood Vedanta, but no ethical sy.stem on Earth that grew up independently of Cliristianity agreed with it point for point. "And yet here, # light-years from Earth, what do we find? A Chri.stian people, lacking nothing but the specific proper names and the symbolic appurtenances of Christianty. I don't know how you three react to this, but I found it extraordinary and indeed completely impossible -- mathematically impossible -- under any assumption but one. I'D get to that assumption in a moment." "You can't get there too soon for me," Cleaver said morosely. "How a man can stand # light-years from home in deep space and talk such parochial nonsense is beyond my comprehension." "Parochial?" Ruiz-Sanchez said, more angrily than he had intended. "Do you mean that sriiat we think true on Earth is automatically made suspect just by the fact of its removal into deep spare? I beg to remind you, Cleaver, that quantum mechanics seems to hold good on Lithia, and that you see nothing parochial about behaving as if it did. If I believe in Peru that God created the universe, I see nothing parochial about believing it on Lithia. "A while back I thought I had been provided an escape hatch, incidentally. Chtexa told me that the Lithians would like to modify the growth of their population, and he implied that they would welcome some form of birth control. But, as it turned out, birth control in the sense that my Church interdicts it Is impossible to Lithia, and what Chtexa had in mind was obviously some form of conception control, a proposition to which my Church has already given its qualified assent. So there I was, even on this small point forced again to realize that we had found on Lithia the most colossal rebuke to our aspirations that we had ever encountered : A people that seemed to live with ease the kind of life which we associate with saints alone. "Bear in mind that a Muslim who visited Lithia would find no such thing. Neither would a Taoist. Neither would a Zoroastrian, presuming that there were still such, or a classical Greek. But for the four of us -- and J include you, Cleaver, for despite your tricks and your agnosticism you still subscribe to the Christian ethical doctrines enough to be put on the defensive when you flout them -- what we have here on Lithia is a coincidence which beggars description. It is more than an astronomical coincidence -- that tired old phrase for numbers that don't seem very large any more -- it is a iransfinite coincidence. It would take Cantor himself to do justice to the odds against it." "Wait a minute," Agronski said. "Holy smoke. Mike, I don't know any anthropology, I'm lost here. I was with the Father up to the part about the mixed forest, but I don't have any standards to judge the rest. Is it so, what he says?" "Yes, I think it's so," Michelis said slowly. "But there could be differences of opinion as to what It means, if anything. Ramon, go on." describing the planet, and more particularly the Lithians. The Lithians take a lot of explaining; what I've said about them thus far states only the most obvious fact I could go on to point out many more equally obvious facts; that they have no nations and no national rivalries (and if you'll look at the map of Lithia you'll see every reason why they should have developed such rivalries) , that they have emotions and passions but are I Al never moved by them to irrational acts, tliat they have only one langxiage, that they exist in complete harmony with evers thing, large and small, that they find in their world. In shcl, thev-'re a peoijle that couldn't exist, and vet does. "Mike, I'd go beyojKl your view to say diat the Lithian-i are themost perfect examph ol how human beings OXiht to l)thavr ll at very simple reason ih.it they Imhavc now the way Inmuin Ix'ings once did before a series of tilings happened of which we have record. I'd go even farther beyond it, far enough to say that as an example the Litliians arc useless to us, because until the coming of the Kingdom of God no substantial number of human beings will ever be able to imitate Llthian conduct. Human beings seem to have built-in imperfections that the Lithians lack, .so that after thousands of years of trying we are farther away than ever from our origirul emblems of conduct, while the Lithians have never departed from theirs. "And don't allow vourselves to forget for an instant that these eniblciiis of conduct arc the same on both planets. That couldn't ever have happened, either. But it did. "I'm now going to describe another interesting fae:t alioul Lithian civilization. It Ls a fact, whatever you may think of its merits as e;ndencc. It is this: that your Lithian is a creature of logic. Unlike Eartlimen of all stripes, he has no gods, no myths, no legends. He has no lclief in the supernatural, or, as we're calling it in our barbarous jargon these days, the 'paranormal.' He has no traditions. Hr has no tabus. He has no faiths, blind or otherwise. lie is arational as a machine. Inili'rd, the rm!v way in which we can distinguish the Lithian from an organic computer is his possession and use of a moral code. "And that, I beg you to observe, is (oinplclcly irralioii.al. It is based Ilium a set of axioms, of propositions whicli were 'given' from the Ugiiining -- tliough your Lithian will not allow that llierc was ever Clilexa, believes in the .s.inctity ol the individual. Why? Not ly reason, suri'Iy, for there is no way to reason to that )roposilim. It is an axiom. Chtexii believe.s in juridical defen.se. in the equality of all before the code. Why? It's possible to behavi reasonably from the proj)ositlon hut not to reason one's way to it. "If ytm a'sumc that the responsibility to the code varies with age. or with the nature of one's work, or with what family vou happen to belong to, logical behavior can follow from one of those assumptions, but there again one can't arrive at the principle hy reason alone. One begins with belief: 'I think that all people ougiu to be equal before the law.' That is a statement of faitli. nothing more. Yet Lithian civilization is so set up as to suggest that one can arrive at such basic axioms of Christianity, and of Western civilization on Earth as a whole, by reason alone, in tlie plain face of the fact that one cannot." "Those are axioms," Cleaver growled. "You don't arrive at them bv faith, either. You don't arrive at them at all. They re self-eident "Like the axiom that only one parallel can be dravs-n to a given line? Go on, Cleaver, you're a physicist; kick a stone for me and tell me it's self-evident that the thing is solid." "It's puliar," Michelis said in a low voice, "that Liihian culture should be so axiom-ridden without the Lithians being aware of it. I hadn't formulated it in quite this way before, Ramon, but I've been disturbed myself at the bottomless assumptions that He behind Lithian reasoning. Look at what they've done in solid-state physics, for instance. It's a structure of the purest kind of reason, and yet when you get down to its fundamental assumptions you discover the axiom that matter is real. How can thev know that? How did logic lead them to it? If I say that the atom is just a hole-inside-a-holc-througha-hole, where can reason intervene?" "But it works," Cleaver said. "So does our solid-state phyucs -- but we work on opposite axioms," Michelis said. "That's not the issue. I don't myself see how this immense structure of reason which the Lithians have evolved can stand for an instant It doesn't seem to rest on anything." "I'm going to tell you," Rui#Sanchez said. "You won't believe me, but I'm going to tell you anyhow, because I have to. It stands because it's being propped up. That's the simple answer and the whole answer. But first I want to add one more fact about the Lithians. "They have complete physical recapitulation outside the by." "What does that mean?" Agronski said. "Do you know how a human child grows inside its mother's body? It is a one-celled animal to begin with, and then a simple metazoan resembling the freshwater hydra or the simplest jellyfish. Then, very rapidly, it goes through many other animal forms, including the fish, the amphibian, the reptile, the lower mammal, and finally becomes enough like a man to be born. This process biologists call recapitulation. "They assume that the embryo is passing through the various stages of evolution which brought life from the single-celled organism to man, on a contracted time scale. There is a point, for instance, in the development of the fetus when it has gilts. It has a tail almost to the very end of its time in the wcMnb, and sometimes still has it when it is bom. Its circulatory sy.stem at one point is reptilian, and if it fails to pass successfully through that stage, it is born as a bluc baby with patent ductus arteriosus, the tetralogy of Fallot, or a similar heart defect. And so on." "I see," Agronski said. "I've encountered Ae idea before, of course, but I didn't recognize the term." "Well, the Lithians, too, go through this series of metamorphoses as they grow up, but they go through it outside the bodies of their mothers. This whole planet is one huge womb. The Lithian female lays her eggs in her abdominal pouch, and then goes to the sea to give birth to her children. What she bears is not a reptile, but a fish. The fish lives in the sea a while, and tiien develops rudimentary lungs and comes asltore. Stranded bv the tides on the flats, the lungfish develops rudimentary legs and stjuirms in the mud, becoming an amphibian and learning to endure the rigors of li ing away from the sea. Gradually their limlM become stronger, and better set on their bodies, and tlicy become the big froglike things we sometimes see leaping in the mX)nlight, trying to get away from the crocodiles. "Many of them do get away. They carry their habit of leaping with them into the jungle, and there they change once again to liecome the small, kangaroo-like reptiles we've all seen, at one time or another, fliving from us among litc trees, nventually, they emerge, fully grown, from the jungles and take their place.s among the folk of the cities as young Lithians, mady for education. But they have already learned every trick of every environment that their world has to offer except those of their own civilization." gether again and looked up at Ruiz-Saneliez. "But that's a discovery beyond price!" he said with quiet excitement. "Ramon, that alone is worth our trip to Lithia.  can't imagine why it would lead you to ask that the planet be clo.scd! Surely your Church can't object to it in anv wav -- after all, vour then   rists did accept recapitulation in the human embryo, and also the geological record that showed the same process in action over longer spans of time." "Not," Rulz-Sanchez said, "in the way that you think w'e did. The Church accepted the facts, as it alwavs accepts facts. But -- as you )-oursclf suggested not ten minutes ago -- facts have a way of pointing in several different directions at once. The Church is as hostile to the doctrine of evolution -- particularly in respect to man -- as it ever was, and with good reason." "Or with obdurate stupidity," Cleaver said. "All right, Paul, look at it very simply with the original premisc.s of the Bible in mind. If we assume just for the s.ike of argument that God crealeil man, did lie create him ierfect? I should suppose that He did. Is a man perfect without a navel. I don't know, but I'd lx inclined to .say that he isn't. Yet the first man -- Adam, again for the sake of argument -- wasn't bom of woman, and so didn't really need to have a navel. Nevertheless he would have been imperfect without it, and I'll bet that he had one." "What does that prove?" "That the geolcical record, and recapitulation too, do not prove the doctrine of evolution. Given my initial axiom, which is that God created everything from scratch, it's perfectly logical that He should have given Adam a navel, Earth a geological record, and the embryo the process of recapitulation. None of these indicate a real past; all are there lecause the creations involved would have been imperfect otherwise." "Wow'," Cleaver said. "And I used to think that Milne relativity was abstruse." "Oh, any coherent system of thought becomes abstruse if it's examined long enough. I don't see why my belief in a God you can't accept is any more rarefied than Mike's vision of the atom as a holeinside-a-hole-through-a-hole. I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental particles of the universe, we'll find that there's nothing there at all -- just no-things moving no-place through no-time. On the day that that happens, I'll have God and you will not -- otherwise there'll be no diflerence between us. "But in the meantime, what we have here on Lithia is very clear indeed. We have -- and now I'm prepared to be blunt -- a planet and a people propped up by the Ultimate Enemy. It is a gigantic trap prepared for all of us. We can do nothing with it but reject it, nothing but say to it. Retro me, Sathanas. If we compromise with it in any way, we are damned.' "Why, Father?" Michelis said quietly. "Look at the premises, Mike. One: Reason is always a sufficient guide. Two: The self-evident is always the real. Three: Good works are an end in themselves. Four: Faith is irrelevant to right action. Five: Right action can exist without love. Six: Peace need not pass understanding. Seven: Ethics can exist without evil alternatives. Eight: Morals can exist without conscience. Nine -- but do I really need to go on? We have heard all these propositions before, and we know Who proposes them. "And we have seen these demonstrations before -- the demonstration, for instance, in the rocks which was supposed to show how the horse evolved from Eohippus, but which somehow never managed to convince the whole of mankind. Then the discovery of intra-uterine recapitulation, which was to have clinched the case for the so-called descent of man -- and yet, somehow, failed again to produce general agreement. These were both very subtle arguments, but the Church is not easily swayed; it is founded on a rock. "Now we have, on Lithia, a new demonstration, both the subtlest and at the same time the crudest of all. It will sway many people who could have been swayed in no other way, and who lack the intelligence or the background to understand that it is a rigged demonstration. It seems to show us evolution in action on an inarguable scale. It is supposed to settle the question once and for all, to rule God out of the picture, to snap the chains that have held Peter's rock together all these many centuries. Henceforth there is to be no more question; there is to be no more God, but only phenomenology -- and, of course, behind the scenes, within the hole that's inside the hole that's through a hole, the Great Nothing itself, the thing that has never learned any word but No: It has many other names, but we know the name that counts. That's left us. "Paul, Mike, Agronski, I have nothing more to say than this: We are ail of us standing on the brink of Hell. By the grace of God, we may still turn back. We must turn back -- for I at least think tliat this is our last chance." IX was that. Tlie Coininissinn was tied, and the question would he tliiown open again in higher cclielons on Earth, which would mean tying Lithia up for vears to come. Tlie planet was now, in effect, on the Index. The ship arrived the next day. The crew was not much surprised to find that the two opposing factions of the Commission were harlly .speaking to eaih other. It often liappened that way. The four Commission members cleaiu'd up the house the Lithians had given tlieni in almost complete silence. Ruiz-Sanchez packed tlie blue book with the gold stamping without being able to look at it except out of the comer of his eye, but even obliquely ho could not help seeing its title : James Joyce He felt as though he himself had been collated, bound and stamped, a tortured human text for futim? generations of Jesuits to explicate and argue. He had rendered the verdict he had found it ncce.ssary for him to render. But he knew tliaf It was not a final verdict, even for himself, and certainly not for the UN, !el alone the Church. In.stead, the verdict itself would be the knotty question for members of his Order yet unborn : Did Father Rniz-Sonchez correctly uiterpret the Divine case, and did his Tulinfi, if so, follow from it? "Let's go, Father. It'll be takeoff time in a few minutes." "All ready, Mike." It was only a short journey to the clearing, where the mighty spindle of the ship stood ready to weave its way back through the geodesics of deep space to tlie .sun that shone on Peru. The baggage went on board smoothly and without fuss. So did tlic specimens, the films, the special reports, the recordings, the sample cases, the vivariums, tlie aquariums, the type-cultures, the pressed plants, the tubes of soil, the chunks of ore, the Lithian manuscripts in their atmosphere of nton; everything was lifted decorously by the cranes and swung inside. Agronski went up the cleats to tlic airlock first, with Michelis following him. Cleaver was stowing some last-minute bit of gear, something that .seemed to require delicate, almost reverent care before the cranes could be allowed to take it in their indifferent grip. RuizSanchez took advantage of the slight delay to look around once moic at the near margins of the forest. At once, he saw Chtexa. The Lilhian was standing at the entrance to the path the Earthmen themselves had taken away from the city to reach the ship. He was carrying something. Cleaver swore under his breath and undid something he had just (Conlinved on page II#) Alexander Pope wrote  Atoms or systems into ruin hurled And now a bubble burst, and now a world' He died in # -- but poets are sometimes the best prophets! The Trouble with By Philip K. Dick lliustroted by Joseph ft. Eberle face car and crossed the pavement on fool, sniffing the chill morning air. Robot work-trucks were starting to rumble past. A gutter slot sucked night debris grtedily. A vanlsliing headline caught liis eye momentarily: He passed on away from the corner, hands in his pockets, looking for Farley's house. Past the usual Worldcraft Store with its conspicuous motto: "Own Your Own World!" Down a short grass-lined walk and onto a sloping tilt-front porch. Up three imitation marble stairs. Then Hull flicked his hand before the code beam and the door melted away. The house was still. Hull found the ascent tube to the second floor and peered up. No sound. Warm air blew around him, tinged with faint smells -- smells of food and people and familiar objects. Had they gone? No. It was only the third day; they'd be around someplace, maybe up on the roof terrace. He ascended to tire second floor and found it also vacant. But distant sounds drifted to his ean. A tinkle of laughter, a man's voice. A woman's -- perhaps Julia's. He hoped so -- hoped she were still conscious. He tried a door at random, steeling himself. S.ometimes during the third and fourth davs the Contest Parties got a little rough. The door melted, but the room was empty. Couches, empty glasses, ashtrays, exhausted stimulant tubes, articles of clothing strewn everywhere -- Abruptly Julia Marlow and Max Farley appeared, arm in arm, followed by sever others, pushing forward in a group, excited and red-cheeked, eyes bright, almost feverish. They entered the room and halted. "Nat!" Julia broke away frtxn Farley and came breathlessly up to him. "Is it that late already?' "Third day," Hull said. "HeUo, Max." "Hello, Hull. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something?" "Nothing. Can't stay. Julia -- " Farley waved a robant over, sweeping two drinks from its chest tray. "Here, Hull. You can stay long enough for one drink." Bart Longstreet and a slender blonde a!ared through a door. "Hull! You here? So socm?" "Third day. I'm picking Julia up. If she still wants to leave." "Don't take her away," the slim blonde protested. She wore a side glance robe, invisible out of the comer of the eye, but an opaque fountain when looked at directly. "They're judging right now. In the lounge. Stick around. The fun's Just beginning." She winked at him with heavy blue-lidded eyes, glazed and sleep-drugged. Hull turned to Julia. "If you want to stay... Julia put her hand nervously on his arm, standing close to him. Not bang her fixed smile she grated m his ear: "Nat, for God's sake, get me out of here. I can't stand it. Please!" Hull caught her intense appeal, her eyes bright vyith desperation. He could feel the mute urgency quivering through her body, tense and strained. "Okay, Julia. We'll take off. Maybe get some breakfast. When did you last eat?" "Two days. I think. I don't know." Her voice trembled. "They're judging right now. God, Nat. You should have seen -- " "Can't go until the judgings over," Farley rumbled. "I think they're almost throu. You didn't enter, Hull? No entry for you?" "No entry." "Surely you're an owner -- " "Nope. Sorry." Hull's voice was faintly ironic. "No world of my own, Max. Can't see it." "You're missing something." Max beamed dopily, rocking back on his heels. "Quite a time -- best Contest Party for weeks. And the real fun begins after the judging. All this is just preliminary." "I know." Hull moved Julia rapidly toward the descent tube. "We'll sec you. So long, Bart. Give me a call when you're out of here." "Hold it!" Bart murmured suddenly, cocking his head. "The judging's over. The winner is going to be announced." He pushed toward the lounge, the othen excitedly behind. "You coming, Hull? Julia?" Hull glanced at the girl. "All right." They followed reluctantly, "For a minute, maybe." The lounge was a seething "I won!" Lora Becker shouted in ecstasy. People pushed and shoved around her, toward the Contest table, grabbing up their entries. Their voices grew in volume, an ominous rumble of discordant sound. Robants calmly moved furniture and fixtures back out of the way, clearing the floor rapidly. An unleashed frenzs' of mounting hysteria was begiiming to fill the big room. "I know it!" Julia's fingers tightened around Hull's arm. "Come on. Let's get out before they start." "Start?" "Listen to them!" Julia's eyes flickered with fear. "Come on, Nat! I've had enough. I can't stand any more of this." "I told you before you came." "You did, didn't you?" Julia smiled briefly, grabbing her coat from a robant. She fastened the coat rapidly around her breasts and shoulders. "I admit it. You told me. Now let's go, for God's sake." She turned, making her way through the surging ma.ss of people toward the descent tube. "Let's get out of here. We'll have breakfa.st. You w'ere right. These things aren't for us." Lora Becker, plump and middleaged, was making her way up onto the stand beside the judges, her entry clasped in her arms. Hull paused a moment, watching the immense woman struggle up. her chemically corrected features gray and sagging in the unwinking overhead lights. The third dav -- a lot of old-timers were beginning to show the effects, even through their artificial masks. Lora reached the stand. "Look!" she shouted, holding up her entry. The Worldcraft bubble glittered, catching the light. In spite of himself Hull had to admire the thing. If the actual world inside was as good as the exterior... Lora turned on the bubble. It The roomful of people became silent, gazing up at the winning entry, the world that had taken the , prize over all other comers. Lora Becker's entry was masterful. Even Hull had to admit it...She increased the magnification, bringing the microscopic central planet into focus. A murmur of admiration swept the room. Again Lora increased the magnification. I'hc central planet grew, showing a pale green ocean lapping faintly at a low shoreline. A city came into view, towers and broad streets, fine ribbons of gold and steel. Above, twin suns beamed down, warming the city. Myriads of inhabitants swarmed about their activities. "Wonderful," Bart Longstrect said softly, coming over beside Hull. "But the old hag has been at it sixty )'ears. No wonder she won. She's entered every Contest I can remember," "It's nice," Julia admitted in a clipped voice. "You don't care for it?" Longstreet asked. "I don't care for any of this!" "She wants to go," Hull explained, moving toward the descent tube. "We'll see you later, Bart." Bart Longstreet nodded. "I know what you mean. In many ways I agree. You mind if I -- " "Watch!" Lora Becker shouted, her face flushed. She increased the magnification to maximum focus, showing details of the minute city. "See them? See?' The inhabitants of the city came into sharp view. They hurried about their business, endless thousands of them. In cars and on foot. Across spidery spans between buildings, breathtakingly beautiful. Lora held the Worldcraft bubble up high, breathing rapidly. She gazed around the room, her eyes bright and inflamed, glittering unhealthily. The murmurings rose, sweeping up in excitement. Numerous Worldcraft bubbles came up, chest-high, gripped in eager, impassioned hands. Lora's mouth opened. Saliva dribbled down the creases of her sagging face. Her lips twitched. She raised her bubble up over her head, her doughy chest swelling convulsively. Suddenly her face jerked, features twisting wildly. Her thick body swayed grotesquely -- and from her hands the Worldcraft bubble flew, crashing to the stand in front of her. The bubble smashed, bursting into a thousand pieces. Metal and glass, plastic parts, gears, struts, tubes, the vital machinery of the bubble, splattered in all directions. Pandemonium broke loose. All around the room other owners were smashing their worlds, breaking them and crushing them, stamping on them, grinding the delicate control mechanisms underfoot. Men and women in a frenzy of abandon, released by Lora Becker's signal, quivering in an orgy of Dionysian lust. Crushing and breaking their carefully constructed worlds, one after another. "God," Julia gasped, struggling to get away, Longstreet and Hull beside her. Faces gleamed with sweat, eyes feverish and bright. Mouths gaped foolishly, muttering meaningless sounds. Clothes were tom, ripped off. A girl went down, sliding underfoot, her shrieks lost in the general din. Another followed, dragged and women struggled in a blur of abandon, cries and gasps. And on all sides the hideous sounds of smashing metal and glass, the unending noise of worlds being destroyed one after another. Julia dragged Hull from the lounge, her face white. She shuddered, closing her eyes. "I knew it was coming. Three days, building up to Ais. Smashed -- they're smashing them all. All the worlds.' Bart Longstreet made his way out after Hull and Julia. "Lunatics." He lit a cigarette shakily. "What the hell gets into them? This has happened before. They start breaking, smashing their worlds up. It doesn't make sense." Hull reached the descent tube, "tome along with us, Bart. We'll have breakfast -- and I'll give you my theory, for what it's worth." "Just a second." Bart Longstreet scooped up his Worldcraft bubble from the arms of a robant. "My Contest entry. Don't want to lose it." He hurried after Julia and Hull. i.Tm looking around. "None for me," Julia murmured. She settled back in her chair, sighing. "I'm perfectly happy" "I'll take some." Bart pushed his cup toward tlie coffee dispenser. It filled the cup and returned it. "You've got a nice little place here, Hull." "Haven't you seen it before?" "I don't get up this way. I h,ven't been in Canada in years." "Let's hear your theory," Julia niunnured. "Go jJiead," Bart said. "We're waiting." Hull was silent for a moment. He gazed moodily across the table, past the dishes, at the thing sitting on the window ledge. Bart's Contest entry, his Worlclcraft bubble. "'Own Your Own World'," Hull quoted ironically. "Quite a slogan." "Packman thought it up himself," Bart said. "When he was young. Almost a century ago." "That long?" "Packman takes treatments. A man in hLs position can afford them." "Of course." Hull got slowly to his feet. He crossed the room and returned with the bubble. "Mind?" he asked Bart. "Go ahead." Hull adjusted the controls mounted on the bubble's surface. The interior scene flickered into focus. A miniature planet, revolving slowly. A liny blue-white sun. He increased the magnification, bringing the planet up in size. "Not bad," Hull admitted presently. "Primitive. Late Jurassic. I don't have the knack. I can't seem to get them into the mammal stage. TTiis is my sixteenth tr)'. I never can get any farther than this." The scene was a dense jungle, steaming with fetid rot. Great shapes stirred fitfully among the decaying ferns and marshes. Coiled, gleaming, reptilian bodies, smoking shapes ruing up from the thick mud -- "Turn it off," Julia murmured. "I've seen enough of them. We viewed hundreds for the Contest." "I didn't have a chance." Bart retrieved his bubble, snapping it off. "You have to do better than the Jurassic, to win. Competition is keen. Half the people there had their bubbles into the Eocene -- and at least ten into the Pliocene. Lora's entry wasn't much ahead. I counted several city-building civilizations. But hers was almost as advanced as we are." "Sixty years," Julia said. "She's been trying a long time. She's worked hard. One of those to whom it's not a game but a real passion. A way of life." "And then site smashes it," Hull said thoughtfully. "Smashes the bubble to bits. A world she's been w'orking on for years. Guiding it through period after period. Higher and higher. Smashes it into a million pieces." "Why?" Julia asked. "Why, Nat? ly do they do it? They get so far. building it up -- and then they tear it all down again." Hull leaned back in his chair. "It began," he stated, "when we failed to find life on any of the other planets.' When our exploring parties came back empty-handed. Eight dead orbs -- lifeless. Good for nothing. Not even lichen. Rock and sand. Endless deserts. One after the other, all the way out to Pluto." "It was a hard realization," Bart said. "Of course, that was before our time." "Not much before. Packman remembers it. A century ago. We waited a long time for rocket travel, flight to other planets. And then to find nothing..." "Like Columbus finding the world really was flat," Julia said. "With an edge and a void." "Worse. Columbus was looking for a short route to China. They could have continued the long way. But when we explored the system and found nothing we were in for trouble. People had counted on new worlds, new lands in the sky. Colonization. Contact with a variety of races. Trade. Minerals and cultural products to exchange. But most of all the thrill of landing on planets with amazing life-forms." "And instead of that... "Nothing but dead rock and wa.ste. Nothing that could .support life -- our own or any other kind. A vast disappointment set in on all levels of society." "And then Packman brought out the Worldcraft bubble," Bart murmured. " 'Own Your Own World'. There was no place to go, outside of Terra. No other worlds to visit. You couldn't leave here and go to anotlier world. So instead, you -- " "Instead you stayed home and put together your own world." Hull smiled wryly. "You know, he has a child's version out, now. A sort of preparation kit. So the child can cover the basic problems of world building before he even has a bubble." "But look. Nat," Bart said. "The bubbles seemed like a good idea, at first. We couldn't leave Terra so we built our own worlds right here. Sub-atomic worlds, in controlled containers. We start life going on a sub-atomic world, feed it problems to make it evolve, try to raise it higher and higher. In theory there's nothing wrong with the idea. It's certainly a creative pastime. Not a merely passive viewing like television. In fact, world-building is the ultimate art form. It takes the place of ail entertainments, all the passive sports as well as music and painting -- " "But something went wrong." "Not at first," Bart objected. "At first it was creative. Everybody bought a Worldcraft bubble and built his own world. Evolved life farther and farther. Molded life. Controlled it. Competed with others to see who could achieve the most advanced world." "And it solved another problem," Julia added. "The problem of leisure. With robots to work for us and robants to serve us and take care of our needs -- " "Yes, that was a problem," Hull admitted. "Too much leisure. Notliing to do. That, and the disappointment of finding our planet the only habitable planet in the system. "Packman's bubbles seemed to solve both problems. But something went wrong. A change came. I noticed it right away." Hull stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. "The change began ten years ago -- and it's been growing worse." manded. "Explain to me why everyone stopped building their worlds creatively and began to destroy." "Ever seen a child pull wings off a fly?" "Certainly. But -- " "The same tiling. Sadism? No, not exactly. More a sort of curiosity. Power. Why does a child break things? Power, again. We must never forget something. These world bubbles are substitutes. They take the place of sometliing else, of finding genuine life on our own planets. And they're just too damn small to do that. "These worlds are like toy boats in a bath tub. Or model rocketships you see kids playing with. They're surrogates, not the actual thing. These people who operate them -- why do they want them? Because they can't explore real planets, big planets. They have a lot of energy dammed up inside them. Energy they can't express. "And bottlcd-up energy sours. It becomes aggressive. People work with tlieir little worlds for a time, building them up. But finally they reach a point where their latent hostility, their sense of being deprived, their -- " "It can be explained more easily," Bart said calmly. "Your theory is too elaborate." "Plow do you explain it?" "Man's innate destructive tendencies. Plis natural desire to kill and spread ruin." "There's no such thing," PIull said flatly. "Man isn't an ant. He has no fixed direction to his drives. He has no instinctive 'desire to destroy any more than he has an instinctive desire to carve ivory letteropeners. He has energy -- and the outlet it takes depends on the opportunities available. "That's what's wrong. All of us have energy, the desire to move, act, do. But we're bottled up here, sealed off, on one planet. So we buv Worldcraft bubbles and make little worlds of our own. But microscopic worlds aren't enough.' They're as satisfactory as a toy sailboat is to a man who wants to go sailing." Bart considered a long lime, deep in thought. "You may be right," he admitted finally. "It sounds reasonable. But what's your suggestion? If the other eight planets arc dead -- " "Keep exploring. Beyond the system." "We're doing that." "Try to find outlets that aren't so artificial." Bart grinned. "You feel this way because you never caught the hang of it." He thumped his bubble fcKidly. "I don't find it artificial." "But most people do," Julia put in. "Most people aren't satisfied. That's why w'e left the Contest Party." Bart giuntcd. "It's turning sour, all right. Quite a scene, wasn't it?" He reflected, frowning. "But the bubbles are better than nothing. What do you sugge.st? Give up our bubbles? What sliould we do instead? Just sit around and talk?" "Nat loves to talk," Julia murmured. "Like all intellectuals." Bart tapped Hull's sleeve. "When you sit in your seat in the Directorate you're with the Intellectual and Professional class -- gray stripe." "And you?" "Blue stripe. Industrial. You know that." Hull nodded. "That's right You're with Terran Spaceways. The ever-hopeful company." "So you want us to give up our bubbles and just sit around. Quite a solution to the problem." "You're going to have to give them up." Hull's face flushed. "What you do after that is your afTair." "What do you mean?" Hull turned toward Longstreet, eyes blazing. "I've introduced a bill in the Directorate. A bill that will outlaw Worldcraft." Bart's mouth fell open. "You what?" "On what grounds?" Julia asked, waking up. "On moral grounds," Hull stated calmly. "And I think I can get it through." buzzed with murmuring echoes, its vast reaches alive with moving shadows, men taking their places and preparing for the session's business. Eldon von Stern, Directorate Floor Leader, stood with Hull off to one side behind the platform. "Let's get this straight," von Stem said nervously, running his fingers through his iron-gray hair. "You intend to speak for this bill of yours? You want to defend it yourself?" Hull nodded. "That's right. Why not?" "The analytical machines can break the bill down and present an impartial report for the members. Spellbinding has geme out of style. If you present an emotional harangue you can be certain of losing. The members won't -- " "m take the chance. It's too important to leave to the machines." Hull gazed out over the immense room that was slowly quieting. Representatives from all over the world were in their places. Whiteclad property owners. Blue-clad flnandal and industrial magnates. The red shirts of leaders from factory cooperatives and communal farms. The green-clad men and women representing the middleclass consumer group. His own gray-striped body, at the extreme right, the doctors, lawyers, scientists, educators, intellectuals and professionals of all kinds. "I'll take the chance," Hull repeated. "I want to see the bill passed. It's time the issues were made clear." Von Stem shrugged. "Suit yourself." He eyed Hull curiously. "What do you have against Worldcraft? It's too powerful a combine to buck. Packman himself is here, someplace. I'm surprised you -- " The robot chair flashed a signal. Von Stem moved away from Hull, up onto the platform. "Are you sure you want to speak for the bill?" Julia said, standing beside Hull in the shadows. "Maybe he's right. Let the machines analyze the bill." Hull was gazing out across the sea of faces, trying to locate Packman. The owner of Worldcraft was sitting out there. Forrest Packman, in his immaculate white shirt, like an ancient, withered angel. Packman preferred to sit with the property group, considering Worldcraft real estate instead of industry. Property still had the edge on prestige. Von Stem touched Hull's arm. "All right. Take the chair and explain your proposal." Hull stepped out onto the platform and seated himself in the big iflarble chair. The endless rows of faces before him were carefully devoid of expression. "You've read the terms of the proposal I'm speaking for," Hull began, his voice magnified by the speakers on each member's desk. "I propose we should declare Worldcraft Industries a public menace and the real property the possession of the State. I can state my grounds in a few sentences. "The theory and construction of. the Worldcraft product, the subatomic universe system, is knowm to you. An infinite number of subatomic worlds exist, microscupic counterparts of our own spatial coordinate. Worldcraft developed, almost a century ago, a method of controlling to thirty decimals tlie forces and stresses involved on these micro-coordinate planes, and a fairly simplified machine which could be manipulated by any adult person. "These machines for controlling specific areas of sub-atomic coordinates have been manufactured and sold to the general public with the slogan: 'Own Your Own World'. The idea is that the owner of the machine becomes literally a world owner, since the machine controls forces that govern a sub-atomic univ'erse that is directly analogous to our own. "By purchasing one of these Worldcraft machines, or bubbles, the person finds himself in possession of a virtual universe, to do with as he sees fit. Instruction manuals supplied by the Companyshow him how to control these minute worlds so that life forms appear and rapidly evolve, giving rise to higher and higher forms until at last -- assuming the owner is sufficiently skilful -- he has in his personal possession a civilization of beings on a cultural par with our own. "During the last few years we have seen the sale of these machines grow until now almost everyone possesses one or more sub-atomic worlds, complete with civilizations. And these years have also seen many of us take our private universes and grind the inhabitants and planets into dust. "There is no law which prevents us from building up elaborate civilizations, evolved at an incredible rate of speed, and then crushing them out of existence. That b why my proposal has been presented. These minute civilizations are not dreams. They are real. They actually exist. TTie microscopic inhabitants are -- " A restless stir moved through the vast hall. There were murmurs and coughs. Some members had switched off their speakers. Hull hesitated. A chill touched him. The faces below were blcuik, cold, uninterested. He continued rapidly. "The inhabitants are, at present, subject to the slightest whim their owner may feel. If we wish to reach down and crush their world, turn on tidal waves, earthquakes, tornados, fire, volcanic action -- if we wish to destroy them utterly, diere is nothing they can do. "Our position in relation to these minute civilwations is godlike. We can, with a wave of the hand, obsend the lightning down, level their cities, squash their tiny buildings like ant hills. We can toss them about like toys, playthings, victlm.s of our every whim." Hull stopped, rigid with apprehension. Some of the members had risen and strolled out. Von Stem's face ttisted with ironic amusement. Hull continued lamely. "I want to see Worldcrafi bubbles outlawed. We owe it to these civilizations on humanitarian grounds, on moral groimds -- " He went on, fimsliing as best he could. When he got to his feet there was a faint ripple of applame from the gray-striped professional group. But the white-clad property owners were utterly silent. And the blue industrialists. The red sltiris and the green-clad consumer representatives were silent, impassive, even a little amused. Hull returned to the wings, cold with the stark realization of defeat. "We've lost," he muttered, dazed. "I don't understand." Julia took hi-s arm. "Maybe an appeal on some other grounds... Maybe the machines can still -- " Bart Longstreet came out of the shadows. "No good, Nat. Won't work." Hull nodded. "I know." "You can't moralize Worldcraft away. That's not the solution." Von Stem had given the signal. The members began to cast their votes, the tabulation machines whirring to life. Hull stood staring silently out at the murmuring room, crushed and bewildered. Suddenly a shape appeared in front of him, cutting ofT his view. Impatiently he moved to one side -- but a rasping voice stopped him. "Too bad, Mr. Hull. Better luck next time." Hull stifTened. "Packman!" he muttered. "What do you want?" Forrest Packman came out of the shadows, moving toward him slowly, feeling his way blindly along. B art longstreet stared at the old man with unconcealed hostility. 'T'll see you Liter, Nat." He turned abruptly and Started off. Julia stopped him. "Bart, do you have to -- " "Important business. I'll be back later." He moved off down tlie aisle, toward the industrial section of Uie hall. Hull faced Packman. lie had never seen the old man so close before. He studied him as he advanced slowly, feeling his way along on the arm of his robant. Forrest Packman was old -- a hundred and seven years. Presewed by hormones and blood transfusions, elaborate washing and rejuvenating processes tliat maintained life in his ancient, withered body. His eyes, deep-sunk, peered up at Hull as he catne near, slirunken hands clutching the arm of his robant, breatli coming hoarse and dry. "Hull? You don't mind if I chat with you as the voting goes on? I W'on't be long." He peered blindly past Hull. "Who left? I couldn't see -- ' "Bart Longstreet. Spaceways." "Ohj yes. I know him. Your speech was quite interesting, Hull. It reminded me of the old days. Tlese people don't remember how it was. Times have changed." He stopped, letting the robant wipe his mouth and chin. "I used to be interested in rhetoric. Some of the old masters..." The old man rambled on. Hull studied him curiously. Was this frail withered old man really the power behind Worldcraft? It didn't seem possible. "Bryan," Packman whispered, nings Bryan. I never heard hiin, of course. But they say he was the greatest. Your speech wasn't bad. But you don't understand. I listened carefully. You have some good ideas. But what you're tr'ing to do is absurd. You don't know enough about people. Nobody's' really interested in -- " He broke off, coughing feebly, his robant gripping him with metal supports. Hull pushed impatiently past. "The voting is almost finished. I want to hear. If you have anything to say to me you can file a regular memo plate." Packman's robant stepped out, barring his way. Packman went on slowly, shakily. "Nobody is really interested in such appeals, Hull. You made a good speech but you don't have the idea. Not yet, at least. But you talk well, better than Fve heard for a long time. These young fellow, faces all washed, running around like office boys -- " Hull strained, listening to the vote. The impassive robant body cut off his view, but over Packman's dry rasp he could hear the results. Von Stern had risen and was reading the totals, group by group. "Four hundred against, thirtyfive in favor," von Stem stated.' "The proposal has been defeated." He tossed the tabulation cards down and picked up his agenda. "We'l! continue with the next business." Behind Hull, Packman broke off suddenly, his skull-like head cocked on one side. His deep-sunk eyes glittered and the trace of a smile twitched across his lips. "Defeated? Not even all the grays voted for you, Hull. Now maybe you'll listen to what I have to say." Hull turned away from the hall. The robant lowered its arm. "It's over," Hull said. "Come on." Julia moved uneasily away from Packman. "Let's get out of here." "You see," Packman continued relentlessly, "you have potentials that could be developed into something. When I was your age I had tlie sajne idea you have. I thought if people could see the moral issues involved, they w'ould respond. But people aren't like that. You have to be realistic, if you want to get somewhere. People... Hull scarcely heard the dry, raspy voice whispering away. Defeat. Worldcraft, the world bubbles, would continue. The Contest Parties: bored, restless men and women with too much time, drinking and dancing, comparing worlds, building up to the climax -- then the orgy of breaking and smashing. Over and over. Endlessly. "Nobody can buck Worldcraft," Julia said. "It's too big. We'll have to accept the bubbles as a part of our lives. As Bart says, unless we have .something else to offer in their place... Bart Longstreet came rapidly out of the shadows. "You still here?" he said to Packman. "I lost," Hull said. "The vote -- " "I know. I heard it. But it doesn't matter." Longstreet pushed past Packman and his robant. "Stay here. I'll join you in a second. I have to see von Stem." Something in Longstreet's voice made Hull look up sharply. "What is it? What's happened?" "Why doesn't it matter?" Julia demanded. Longstreet stepped up on the platform and made his way to von Stern. He handed him a message plate and then retired to the shadows. Von Stem glanced at the plate -- And stopped talking. He got to his feet slowly, the plate gripped tightly. "I have an announcement to make." Von Stern's voice was shaking, almost inaudible. "A dispatch from Spaceways' check station on Proxima Centauri." An excited murmur rushed through the hall. "Exploring ships in the Proxima system have contacted trading scouts from an extra-galactic civilization. An exchange of messages has already occurred. Spaceways ships are moving toward the Arcturan system with the expectation of finding -- " Shouts, a bedlam of sound. Men and women on their feet, screaming in wild joy. Von Stern stopped reading and stood, his arms folded, his gray face calm, waiting for them to quiet. Forrest Packman stood immoving, his withered hands pressed together, his eyes shut. His robant sent support braces around him, catching him in a shield of protecting metal. "Well?" Longstreet shouted, pushing back to them. He glanced Hi the frail, withered figure held up by the robant's supports, then at Hull and Julia. "What do you say, Hull? Let's get out of here -- so we can celebrate." 'LL fly you home," Hull said M to Julia. He looked around for an inter-continental cruiser. "Too bad you live so far away. Hong Kong is so damn out of the way." Julia caught his arm. "You can drive me yourself. Remember? The Pacific Tube is open. We're connected with Asia, now." "That's right." Hull opened the door of his surface car and Julia slid in. Hull got behind the wheel and slammed the door. "I forgot, with all these other things on my mind. Maybe we can see each other more often. I wouldn't mind spending a few days vacation in Hong Kong. Maybe you'll invite me." He sent the car out into traffic, moving with the remote-controlled beam. "Tell me more," Julia asked. "I want to know all Bart said." "Not much more. They've known for some time that something was up. That's why he wasn't too worried about Worldcraft. He knew the bottom would fall out as soon as the announcement was made." "Why didn't he tell you?" Hull grinned wryly. "How could he? Suppose the first reports were wrong? He wanted to wait until tley were sure. He knew what the results would be" Hull gestured. "Look." On both sides of the strip a tide of men and women poured out of buildings, up from the underground factories, a seething mass confusion, shouting and cheering, throwing things in the air, tossing paper out of windows, carrying each other on their shoulders. "They're working it off," Hull said. "The way it should be. Bart says Arcturus is supposed to have seven or eight fertile planets, some of them inhabited, some just forests and oceans. The extra-galactic traders say that most systems have at least one usable planet. They visited our system a long time ago. Our early ancestors may have traded with them." "Then there's plenty of life in the galaxy?" Hull laughed. "If what they say is true. And the fact that they exist is proof enough." "No more Worldcraft." "No." Hull shook his head. No more Worldcraft. Stock was already being dumped. Worthless. Probably the State w'ould absorb the bubbles already in existence and seal them off, leaving the inhabitants free to determine their own futures. The neurotic smashing of laboriously achieved cultures was a thing of the past. The buildings of living creatures would no longer be pushed over to amuse some god suffering from ennui and frustration. Julia sighed, leaning against Hull. "Now we can take it easy. Sure, you're invited to stay. We can take out permanent cohabitation papers if you want to -- " Hull leaned forward suddenly, his body rigid. "Where's the Tube?" he demanded. "The strip should be hitting it any minute." Julia peered ahead, frowning. "Something's wrong, Slow down." Hull slowed the car. An obstruction signal was flashing ahead. Gars were stopping on all sides, shifting into emergency retard lanes. He ground the car to a halt. Rocket cruisers were sweeping overhead, exhaust tubes shattering the evening silence. A dozen uniformed men ran across a field, directing a rumbling robot derrick. "What the hell -- " Hull muttered. A soldier stepped up to the car, swinging a communication flare. "Turn around. We need the whole strip." "But -- " "What happened?" Julia asked. "The Tube. Earthquake, someplace half way out. Broke the Tube in ten sections." The soldier hur ried off. Construction robots rushed past in a hand cart, assembling equipment as they went. Julia and' Hull stared at each other wide-eyed. "Good Lord," Hull muttered. "Ten places. And the Tube must have been full of cars." (Continued on page #) The climate was perfect, the sky was always blue, and -- best of all -- nobody had to work. What more could anyone want? Planet of Dreams By James McKimmcy, Jr. Ulustroted by Poul Orbon spinning globe, placed in the universe to weather and age by itself until the end of things. But because its air was good and its earth was fertile, Daniel Loveral had placed a finger upon a map and said, "This is tlie planet. This is the Dream Planet." That was two years before, back on Earth. And now Loveral with his selected flock had shot through space, to light like chuckling geese upon the planet, to feel the effect of their dreams come true. Loveral was sitting in his office, drumming his long fingers against his desk while the name, Atkinson, ticked through his brain like the sound of a sewing machine. Would he be the only one, Loveral asked himself, or was he just the first? In either case, it was up to Loveral, as leader and guiding hand, to stop this thing and stop it quickly. Loverd stood up and put on his jacket, although there was no need for it, other an the formality it gave his figure. He stepped out oi his office into a clear bright day, where the air was clean and fresh in his lungs, at once like frost and fire and sweet perfume. He walked along a winding path, which was bordered by slim-necked flowers and a short hedge whose even clipped lines were kept neat by tireless robot hands. Trees pointed to a blue sky, rocking and fluttering their leaves in a soft breeze, and glinting metallic houses lay peacefully beyond in wooded hollows and upon slight hills. A whole small world was before his eyes, set there upon his direction, maintained by himself with the help of a dozen complex machines which lay locked and sealed in the Maintenance Room for only his fingers to touch. It was a busy life for Loveral, up at dawn to work until deep night, keeping his flock happy and free a perfect plan, one which had been tested and turned in his mind for years. If he had to work hard to keep it running smoothly, that was all right. In fact, he had never been happier. Now, however, there was this business about Atkinson. Loveral was disturbed about that. He walked on, over the quiet path which would lead to the house where Atkmson and his wife lived. Loveral smiled, in readiness for any happy face that might appear before him, to greet him, to show with thanWul eyes appreciation for his wonderful world. But that, too, brought thoughts that were a bit disturbing. Lately there had been few such faces. Most of his flock no longer seemed to care about walking along the cultivated paths, or smiling, or nodding, or touching a leaf here or a flower there. They preferred, it appeared, to remain deep inside their houses, as though they might have become tired of the soft perfection of Dream Planet. As though they might have become weary of quiet woods and sweet bird-music or a sky which was always blue. Loveral shook his head as he walked, puzzling out his thoughts. It was strange, but nothing to worry about certainly. Just this business about Atkinson. That was his only worry. He came slowly up a hill, the top of which held a low curving house, with a silver roof and wide, sweeping windows. There were yellow and blue and deep red flowers, skirting the sides of the house, and green ivy grew thickly between the glistening windows. The lawn, dotted with small leafy trees and round bushes, sloped down from the front of the house, looking like a carefully arranged painting. Loveral pressed a button beside a shining door and waited, smiling tlirough his pale blue kindly eyes. after several moments and stood blinking at him. She was a thin woman, who seemed to have gotten even thinner, Loveral noticed. She was working her fingers at the neck of her dress. She smiled but her lips wavered. "My dear," Loveral greeted her in his soft voice, showing the goodness in his eyes. She nodded her recognition, opening her mouth wiUiout speaking. "May I?" said Loveral finally, waving his long fingers toward the living room. "Oh, yes," said the woman. "Of course, Mr. Loveral." And as she spoke Loveral had the impression she might suddenly begin crying. Loveral followed the woman into the house, noticing all over again the precise way everything had been arranged. The rug was soft beneath his feet, and the light came in through the windows in such a way that it, too, became soft. The furniture, molded to hold a human body most comfortably, rested about the room in perfect efficiency. "'our place is so lovely," Loveral said, out of his old habit from Earth. But his words seemed to ring strangely in the quiet, because it was his own arrangement, like all the other rooms on the planet. And Mrs. Atkinson, standing thin and nervous before him, had nothing, after all, to do with it. The cleanliness was the vork of his robot machines, the planning his own. It was like complimenting himself. He cleared his throat and stood, smiling his most benevolent smile to reassure Mrs. Atkinson. "Ah, my dear. Is George about?" Again, the woman's hand skittered to her throat. "He's not ill, surely?" Loveral asked, although this, too, was silly, because foods, selected and pre pared for utmost nutrition, packed and frozen to be doled out in weekly quantities, purified air, diseaseers on exercise, and of course Loveral's own philosophies of quiet, peaceful living -- all of this guarded well the health of Dream Planet's flock. The woman shook her head. "No, George is fine. He's just -- sleeping, I think." "Rest is nature's finest tonic," said Loveral, and hearing his voice thought suddenly there was hardly anything he could say any more that might not sound a bit out of place in this peaceful world. Rest to the man who had nothing to do ceased to be a tonic. "Yes, yes," said Loveral. "May we just sit down, my dear?" Mrs. Atkinson jerked a hand tc ward one of the chairs and then wound her fingers. Loveral sat down and leaned back, smiling his most charming smile. "Perhaps George might awaken after a bit?" "Oh, yes," the woman said, her eyes flickering, and she sat upon the edge of one chair, like a bird perched upxn a thin wire. Loveral waited, legs crossed, leaning his head back against the silken softness of the chair. It was so good to relax these days. The business of w'atching and of caring for his flock was trying. When you have brought an entire community of people at great expense through space, guaranteeing to give them a life of constant comfort and ease, so that they might dream and think as they wander through the flowers and the leaves, their thoughts cleansed of worry about work and responsibility, then you have a job. Loveral was most busy, busier than his heritage of wealth ever before had allow, seeing to all of this. But he also was most cemtent -- with everything except Atkinson. Mrs. Atkinson teetered on the edge of her chair, as though she might at any moment go flying across the room in a crazy gyration. There was something about her eyes, Loveral noticed, while he peacefully nodded in the chair. Fear, perhaps. If so, he probably had been right. He tightened himself, listening. There it was again. The sound. Just as he had heard it a day before w'hen he had passed near the house. He leaned forward quickly. Mrs. Atkinson jumped. Loveral smiled. "Didn't I hear a noise of some sort, my dear?" "Noise?" the wwnan said, as though her own voice were the sound of an echo. "An odd noise," Loveral said, his eyes searching. The woman's hands fluttered about her dress. Loveral stood up. "Would you mind if I just glanced about, my dear?" The woman didn't answer, but Loveral was already moving across the room toward a door. He opened it and walked down a hall. The noise grew stronger. He threw open another door. H e stood Watching while George Atkinson spun around, dark eyes flashing, hair tousled. There was a two days' growth of beard darkening Atkinson's face. "Why, George," Loveral said, swiftly examining tlie litter of metal and wood which was spread over a table behind Atkinson. There was a home-made hammer in Atkinson's hand. "What have we here, George?" "Something for you," Atkison said, tightening his fingers about the handle of me hammer. Loveral grinned his famous Loveral grin. "That's fine. What could it be?" "None of your damned business." 'George' Loveral said, his smile still white but his eyes narrow and quick. The woman was behind them. Her voice screeched. "George, I told you. Why didn't you listen, George? You should have listened ta me. You -- " Loveral held up a hand, still watching Atkinson. "Now tell me, George, what is it you're making for me?" Atkinson raised the hammer slightly. Loveral stood very' still. "That's a nice hammer, George." Atkinson's eyes were black beneath his thick brows. "You made that, didn't you?" Loveral asked. "Yes, I made that," Atkinson said. "I made that and I made something else. Another minute and ril have that finished, too." "George," said Loveral, stepping quietly forward, "I don't like to say this, of course. You've been one of our very best menibcrs. But nobody works here, George. We can't allow that. You know the rules." "I know the rules, all right." "Well, then," Loveral said, extending his hand toward the hammer, "we'll just destroy this and whatever else you might have been making. W'e'll just forget it ever happened. We'll get along real fine that way, George. We'll just be such good friends." "We'll just go to hell," said Atkinson, snatching his hammer away. Loveral's smile disappeared. "I'll tell you, George. I have to mean business with this. You know the reasons. If w'e allow anybody to work here, then there's going to be trouble. That isn't our plan. We're here to grow within ourselves and expand culturally. Not to commerciali#e a beautiful world like Dream Planet." Atkinson stood unmoving, and Loveral could see the way the man's muscles were tight, like steel springs, and the way his eyes burned deep inside their blackness. "VVeVe given you everything you need," Loveral explained, trying to adjust the smile on his lips again. "Everybody has everything they want. But, you see, if you sit there and work and make something that someone else doesn't have, then the whole system is destroyed. Then someone will want what you've made. We'll have jealousy and hatred and fighting. This is the stuff of which wars are made, George. You know that. It starts with small things like this, but it grows. When it does, the structure of our life here will collapse. You wouldn't want that, would you, George?" "YesI" Atkinson said, his mouth white at the edges. "I'd like to see the whole rotten thing collapsed and blown to hell!" Loveral's teeth snapped together and his lips grew tight. He could feel a muscle jumping along his neck. Atkinson looked at him with furious eyes. "What do you think it's like, living this way? You're busy working twenty-four hours a day, while we wander around this damned prison like the breathing dead. You can feel sweat and aches in your bones from a hard day's work. Sleep is like medicine to you, instead of another stretch of torture. You can forget your own brain for a while by doing something with your hands. You can relax because you can get tired. Not us, by God. Not us!" "I envy you, George," Loveral said through his teeth. "Oh, like hell you do. You treat us like we were helpless infants. You feed and clothe us and do all our work, and you're so happy you damned near split your guts." "I'll take that, if you don't mind," Loveral said, reaching for the hammer, his voice suddenly icy cold. Atkinson slammed back against the table. "No you won't. You won'f take anything more at all. You've taken our spirit and our pride and the strength right out of our spines. You won't take anything more!" "George?" Loveral said, but not moving any further. Atkinson slid the hammer back of him onto the table, and his hands were .searching among a dozen scattered pieces of metal and wood. He watched Loveral as he worked. "Let me show you what else I've made," he said. "I'd hate to do it," Loveral said, "but I can stop your food, your water, everything." Atkinson's hands moved swiftly, assembling the pieces. He nodded. "You can, but you won't." "I have the only keys to the storage units. I control everything, George." "Correction," said Atkinson, holding an assembled revolver in his hands. "You did," kinson had in his hands. He blinked. "You're nearly dead," Atkinson said. Loveral looked at Atkinson, into his eyes. "If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it some other way." Atkinson shook his head. "Just this way. Just with something that took me dozens of days and nights to make. With something that made me sweat and swear to get. It was difficult -- with no tools or proper materials -- but that made it all the better. Now' I've got it finished," he said, pushing a bullet into the chamber, "and ready to use." Loveral stood frozen, then he turned. "My dear," he said to the woman who moved her mouth as though her voire had been pumped out of her. He reached to touch her shoulder. She recoiled, as though his fingers held poison. "George," he .wid, turning hack to the black-eyed man. "This is a great moment," Atkinson said, lifting the muzzle of the revolver. "When I squeeze the trigger, it'll be like blowing the lock off a prison door. I'll go yelling to the others, and we'll smasli down the whole goddamned place. We'll smash it down, so we'll have to rebuild it. We'll pull apart every robot you've got. We'll tear apart the fo lockers and have a celebration for a wreck, and when we've gotten sick from too much food, we'll start growing some more with our own hands. We'll make forges for the men and looms for the women. We'U bum our clothes and make new ones. We'll grow com in the fields. We'll pump water from the ground. You're finished, Loveral." Loveral stared at the revolver. "George," he said, pleading. "The plans. The beautiful, beautiful plans. All of you, you all wanted peace and contentment. Time to think and dream. You all wanted to get away from the work and the worry and the responsibility. You -- " Atkinson fired the gun into Loveral's stomach. Loveral gestured at the air and fell to liis knees. Atkinson threw his gun through a window and grabbed his wife by the hand. "Hurrs'I" he said, laughing. "Hurry!" Loveral felt of the blood on his shirt and rested on his knees. He could hear footsteps, racing through the house and out to the yard. He held out his bloody hand and looked at it. Atkinson's voice pealed tlirough the wann clear air. "He's dead! Lovcral's dead!" There wa.s a sound of sudden activity, and everywhere went the cry. "Lovcral's dead!" Loveral sank to his haunches and opened his lips. The blood was there, too. He could hear the shouts and the laughter, and then the tearing of steel, the smashing of glass. He bent over his knees, trembling with a sudden chill. The sound of destruction grew like thunder. "Why?" he said in his dying throat. "Oh, w'hv? It was what they said  # they wanted?" Personalities in Science A Bell Rang # Feet Away, and Wireless Was Born bom, a servant in his parents' home in Bologna exclaimed, "What big ears he has!" His moAer answered, with an almost unbelievably prophetic pride, "With such ears he vl be able to hear the still small voice of the air." Marconi's father was a prosperous business man ; his mother, Anna Jameson, was the daughter of a well-known Dublin distiller's family. She was a staunch Scotch-Irisb Protestant and an exceedingly fine musician; she taught young Guglielmo to be an accomplished pianist, a student of the Bible, and to be both tenacious and persevering. Marconi was absorb in science by the time he was twelve. The only thing that seemed able to tear him way from his experiments was his fondness for an old blind man, and this one small leisure was explained when his parents discovered that the old man was a former telegrapher and was teaching young Gugliclmo Morse code. At twenty he read an obituary of the German Heinrich Hertz which described Hertz's experiments with electro-magnetic waves and became possessed with the idea that CugUelmo Marconi signals could be transmitted through the air without wires, just a.s Hertz had transmitted the spark. His fint experiment with the idea succeeded that same year. After months of heartbreaking failure he pressed a switch one night -- and a bell rang in a room # feet away. This first success was followed by others with distances constantly increasing. But when Marconi oflfered the Indian government the invention, it was decided after a brief discussion that the machine was not worthy of attention and bis offer was reused. His mother encouraged him to try her country, and in # he arrived in London with tw'o trunks full of instruments. The instruments had suffered mightily at the hands of the customs inspectors, and Marconi's first heartbreaking task was to replace them. Fortu nately, tlie British Government realized that he had a revolutionary invention which might one day make it possible to communicate with sliip.s at sea. Less than one year later a corporation was formed to exploit wireless telegraphy, and the first sending station was built on the Isle of Wight. And this young inventor of twenty-three found himself an immensely wealthy man. Despite occasional fiascos, the success of wireless received worldwide publicity; stations were built on the Continent and in England, and wireless equipment was installed in all British and Italian ships. But Marconi was not content; his dream was to unite Europe and America Iiy wireless. He had been warned that the curvature of the Earth would interfere with the waves ; people scolded him for not being content with what he had already wTought, and the cost of cstablisliing the transoceanic stations was prohibitive in the face of possible failure -- yet he was determined to try. Faced with disaster at the very outset when the station at the Southwest tip of England was destroyed in a storm, Marconi stubbornly spent a year rebuilding it, and then proceeded to Newfoundland which had been chosen as the American point for die trans-Atlantic effort. Weather conditions and technical difficulties that were almost insurmountable battled against him, but in #I the first signal -- three clicks like the three dots of Morse code -- came through to the English station and Guglielmo Marconi's dream was a reality. received with large doses of scepticism, and to still forever the doubting voices Marconi decided to build a regular station for permanent transmission at the site of the experimental station in Newfoundland. But more than scepticism had to be overcome. The cable company that owned the trans-Atkmtic cable threatened legal action if the wireless experiments didn't stop, and Marconi saw the dream fade. Canada, spurred by the faith of Motlier England in the experiments, offered # pounds and land in Nova Scotia for the American station. It took two long years of effort, disappointment and c.periment to complete the station -- and more heartbreak was in store for Marconi before success was achieved. Then the twenty-eightyear-old genius returned to Europe and a hero's iriuniph.s. Honors and titles were showered on him, and these served to spur him on to newer heights. After two years of unceasing work he decided to take a vacation, and typically chose one of the remote wireless stations as the perfect spot. Here at Pool he met ninetccn-year-old Beatrice O'Brien, and after a whirlwind courtship they were married. The honeymoon spot was, again characteristically, the station at Nova Scotia. While still on the honeymoon Marconi was recalled to London. The company's funds had run out and London banks refused new credit to further research and experiment. A frantic trip to Italy to seek further financing was fruitless; the-ltaliaji banks didn't tluiik he was a good risk either. Marconi's only hope seemed to lie in reorganizing the company himself. He was able to do it -- but it took everything that he had. Instead of better times, things just got blacker. His first son was stricken and died at three months; German and American cable companies were infringing on his patents, and the Glace Bay station which had cost so much in time, money, and effort was completely destroyed by fire. The indomitable spirit of perseverance and tenacity tliat was the mark of this man was scarcely dented by these disasters; instead they seemed to spur him on. He rolled up his sleeves and proceeded to fight the patent infringements with everything he could muster, began the rebuilding of the Glace Bay station, and did all in his power to convince the world tiiat wireless had commercial posabilitics. In less than a year the station had been rebuilt, the first lawsuit won, and Marconi was riding the crest of the wave again. The honor of receiving the Nobel Prize for physics in # merely interrupted the steamroller for a brief time. Having exploited all the possibilities of long radio waves, he started  work with short waves and by # had transmitted the human voice from England to Australia. Then came work with reflected radio waves which were to produce our present day radar, and experiments with ultra-short waves which were to be the key to television. Those who lived and worked with him admired his simplicity, patience, and warmheartedness; and perhaps the greatest tribute was paid to this self-taught man who had never been to a university by the London Times in an editorial written at the time of his death. "When the early twentieth century comes to be surveyed by historians yet unborn, Gugliclino Marconi may be regarded as the supremely significant character of the epoch, the name by which our age is called." -- epw who writes with unrivalled skill but much too rarely, returns with The Custodian. It's a tale of the last man on Earth -- but don't decide now that the theme is familiar: this man was in that position by choice! The long, lead novelette will be by Mari Wolf. Homo Inferior tells of a man who was alone in a different way, for I Eric was surrounded by his own people, but couldn't communicate with them! These and other fine stories in the November IF will thrill and surprise you. On sale everywhere September I I th. They were out of place in the Manly Age -- Stonecypher, a man who loved animals; Moe, a bull who hated men. T ogether, they marched to inevitably similar destinies... By Robert Ernest Gilbert lilustroted by Tom Beecham  reed sun hat with the square brim, and used a red handkerchief to absorb the perspiration streaking his forehead. He said, "The pup'll make a good guard, 'especially for thrill parties." L. Dan's golden curls flickered in July I sunlight. The puppy growled when Dan extended a gloved hand. "I don't want a guard," the hobbyist said. "I want him for a dogfight." A startling bellow rattled the windows of the dog house and spilled in deafening waves across the yard. Dan whirled, clutching his staff. Light glinted on his plastic cuirass and danced on his red nylon tights. His flabby face turned wWte. "What -- " he panted. Stonecypher concealed a smile behind a long corded hand and said, "Just the bull. Serenades is sometimes." Dan circled the dog house. Stonecypher followed with a forefinger pressed to thin lips. In the paddock, the bull's head moved up and down. It might or might not have been a nod. The crest of long red and blueblack hairs on the bull's neck and shoulders created an illusion of purple, but the rest of the animal matched the black of a duelmaster's tam. Behind large eyes encircled by a white band, his dtull bulged in a swelling dome, making the distance between his short horns seem much too great. "He's purple!" Dan gasped. "Why in the Government don't you put him in the ring?" Stonecypher gestured toward the choppy surface of Kings Lake, nine hundred feet below. He said, "Coincidence. I mate out the ringmaster's barge just leavin' Highland Pier." "You're selling him?" "Yeah. If they take 'im. I'd like to see 'im in the ring on Dependence Day." Glancing at tlic watch embedded in the left pectoral of his half-armor, Dan said, "That would be a show! I'll take the dog and fly. I've a duel in Highland Park at I I :#." "The pup's not for sale." "Not for sale!" Dan yelled. "You told -- " "Thought you w'anted a guard. I don't sell for dogfights." A sound like "Goood!" came from the paddocked bull. Dan opened his mouth wide. Whatever he intended to .say died witliout vocalization, for Catriona came driving the mule team up through the apple orchard. The almost identical mules had sorrel noses, gray necks, buckskin flanks, and black and white pinto backs and haunches. "Great Government!" Dan swore. "This place is worse than a museum!" "Appaloosa mules," Stonecypher said. Catriona jumped from the seat of the mowing machine. Dan stared. Compared to the standard woman of the Manly Age who, by dieting, posttiring, and exercise from childhood, transformed herself into a small, thin, dominated creature, Catriona constituted a separate species. She was taller than Dan, slightly plump, and her hair could have been classed as either red or blonde. Green overalls became her better than they did Stonecypher. With no trace of a smile on face or in voice, Stonecypher said, "L. Dan, meet Catriona." L ike a hypnopath's victim, Dan walked to Catriona. He looked up at her and whispered, but too loudly. Stonecypher heard. His hands clamped on the hobbyist's neck and jerked. Dan smashed in the grass with sufficient force to loosen the snaps of liis armor. He rolled to his feet and swung his staff. Stonecypher's left hand snatched the staff. His right fist collided with Dan'.s square jaw. Glaring down at the hobbyist, Stonecypher gripped the staff and rotated thick wrists outward. The tough plastic popped when it broke. Scuttling backward, Dan regained his feet. "You inhuman brute!" he growled. "I intended to pay for her!" "My wife's not for sale either," Stonecypher said. "You know how to fly." Dan thrust out a coated tongue and made a noise with it. In a memorized singsong, he declared, "I challenge you to a duel, in accordance with the laws of the Government, to be fought in the nearest duelpen at the earliest possible hour." "Stony, don't!" Catriona protested. "He's not wo'th it!" Stonecypher smiled at her. "Have to follow the law," he said. He extended his tongue, blurted, and announced, "As required by the Government, I accept your challenge." "We'll record it!" Dan snapped. He stalked toward the green and gold butterfUer parked in a field of seedling Sudan grass. Homs rattled on the concrete rails of the paddock. "Burstaard!" the bull bellowed. Dan shied and trampled young grass under sandaled feet. His loosened cuirass clattered rhythmically. Raising the canopy of the butterilier, he slid out the radioak and started typing. Stonecypher and Catriona approached the hobbyist. Catriona said, "This is cowa'dly! Stony nevah fought a duel in his life. He won't have a chance!" "You'll see me soon then, woman. Where'd you get all that equipment? You look like something in a circus." "Ah used to be in a cahnival," Catriona said. She kept Stonecypher in place with a plump arm across his chest. "That's wheah you belong," she told Dan. "That's all you'ah good fo'." "Watch how you address a man, woman," Dan snarled, "or you'll end in the duelpen, too." Stonecypher snatched the sheet from the typer. The request read : Duelmaster R. Smith, Watauga Duelpen, Highland Park, Tennessee. L. Dan challenges M. Stonecypher. Cause: Interference with basic amatory rights, July #. #:#I amest. Stonecypher said, "The cause is a lie. You got no rights with Catriona. Why didn't you tell 'em it's because I knocked you ears-overendways, and you're scared to fight without a gun?" Dan shoved the request into the slot and pulled the switch. "I'll kill you," he promised. While the request was transmitted by radiophotography, minutes passed, bare of further insults. Catriona and Stonecypher stood near the concrete fence enclosing the rolling top of Bays Mountain. Interminable labor had converted # acres of the top to arable land. Below the couple, the steep side of the mountain, denuded of timber, dangerously eroded, and scarred by limestone quarries, fell to the ragged shore of Kings Lake. Two miles of water agitated by many boats separated the shore and the peninsula, which resembled a wrinkled dragon with underslung lower jaw distended. The town of Highland Park clung to the jutting land, and the Highland Bullring appeared as a white dot more th four miles from where Catriona and Stonecypher stood. The ringmaster's barge was a red. rectangle skirting Russel Chapel Island. Dan pulled the answer from the buzzing radioak. He walked over and held the radiophoto an inch from Stonecypher's long nose. It read: Request OK. Time: July #. #:# pmest. Two attached permits granted each duelist the privilege of carrying one handgun with a capacity of not more than ten cartridges of not less than .# caliber. Below the permits appeared an additional message: L. Dan due at Watauga Duelpen. #:# amest. For duel with J. George . "Government and Taxes!" Dan cuRcd. Throwing Stonecyphcr's permit, he leaped into the green and gold butterflier and slammed the canopy. The four wings of the seini-ornithopter blurred with motion, lifting the craft into tlte sky. The forward wings locked wi negative dihedral, the rear wings angled to form a ruddevator, and the five-bladcd propeller whined, driving the butterflier in a shallow dive for the peninsula. late, and they shoot him. Ah knew youd finally have to fight, but -- " "You keep out of it next time," said Stonecypher. "I happen to know that feller's killed two women in the pen. He don't care for nothin'. Oughta known better than to let him come here. He made out like he wanted a guard dog, and I thought -- " "Nevah mind, Stony. Ah've got to help you. You nevah even fiahed a gun." "Later, Cat. The ringmaster may want to stay for dinner. I'll look after the mules." Catriona touched Stonecypher's cheek and went to the house. Stonecypher unharnessed the Appaloosa mules. While they rolled, he took, from an empty hay rack, a rubbertipped spear and a tattered cloth dummy. The dummy's single ann terminated in a red flag. Stonecypher concealed spear and dummy beneath the floor of the dog house. Going to the paddock, he patted the bull between the horns, which had been filed to a needle point. "Still goin' through with it?" Stonecypher asked. "Yaaaa," the bull lowed. "Yaooo kuhl Daan. Err'll kuhl uhhh kuhlerrs." "All right, Moe. Til kill Dan, and you kill the killers." Stonecypher stroked the jnassive hemisphere of the bull's jaw. "Goodbye, Moe." "Gooodba," the hull echoed. He lovered his nose to the shelled com seasoned with molasses, the rolled oats, and the ground barley in the trough. Stonecypher walked down the road to the staircase of stone that dammed the old Kingsport Reservoir, abandoned long before Kings Lake covered the city. A red electric truck crawled up the steep road hewn from the slope the gap formed by Dolan Branch. NN'hcn the truck had crossed the bridge below the buttressed dam, Slonecyyjher sjx)kc to the fat and sweltering man seated beside the driver. "I'm M. Stonecypher. Proud for you to visit my farm. Dinner's ready up at the hotise." "No, no time," smiled the fat man, displaying stainless .steel teeth. "Only time to sec the bull. I thought we weren't going to make that grade! Why don't those scientists develop synthetic elements, so that we can have atomic power again? This radio-electric i.s so unreliable! I am Ringmaster A. Oswell. naturally. This heat is excruciating! I had hoped it would be cooler up here, but something seems to have happened to our inland-oceanic climate this summer. Lead us to the bull, Stonecypher!" Clinging to the slatted truck bed, Stonecypher directed the stoic driver to paddock. The electric motor rattled and stopped, and Ringmaster Oswcll wheezed and squiitned from the cab. The ringmaster wore a vaguely Arabic costume, in ail variations of red. The bull lumbered bellowing around the fence. His horns raked white gashes in the beech tree forming one corner. He tossed the feed trough to splintering destruction. "Magnificent!" Oswcll gasped. Then the ringmaster frowned. "But he looks almost purple. His horns are rather short." "Stay back from the fence!" Stonecypher warned. "He's real wide between the horns, ringmaster. I reckon tlie spread'll match up to standard. Same stock my grandfather used to sell Boon Bullring before the water. Wouldn't sell 'ini, only the tenants are scared to come about the house." Oswell fingered his balloon neck and inumblecl, "But he's odd. That long hair on his neck... I don't know..." The bull's horns lifted the mineral feeder from the center of the paddock. The box rotated over the rails and crashed in a cloud of floured oyster shells and phosphate .salt at the ringmaster's feet. Oswell took cover behind the truck driver, who said, "Fergus'd like him. Jeeze! Remember dat brown and white spotted one he kilt last year on Forrest Day? Da crowd like ta never stopt yelling!" Ringmaster Oswell retreated farther, as, under the bull's onslaught, a piece of concrete broke from the top rail, exposing the reinforcing rod within. "Fergus does like strange ones," he admitted. Stonecypher said, "Don't let the mane bother you. There's one of these long-haired Scotch cows in his ancestors. He's not really purple. Just the way the light hits 'im." Oswell chew lacquered fingernails with .steel dentures. His bloodshot eyes studied the spotted and speckled .ppaloosa mules chasing around the pasture, but the sight failed to register on his brain. "The crowd likes a good show on Dependence Day," he proclaimed. "I considered trying a fat Aberdeen Angus with artificial horns for laughs, but this may do as well. I must find some sliade! I'll take him, Stonecypher, if fifteen hundred in gold is agreeal)le." "Sold," Stonecypher said. The word cracked in the middle. Vhile the ringmaster, muttering about trying bulldogs sometime, retired to the narrow shadow of the dog house, the driver backed the truck to the ramp. Stonecypher opened the gate and waved his handkerchief. The bull charged into the truck, and the driver locked the heavy doors. From within his red burnoose, Oswell produced a clinking bag. "Fifteen hundred," he said. From other recesses, he withdrew documents, notebook, and a pencil. He said. "Here is a pass for you and one for any woman-subject you may wish to bring. You'll want to see your first bull on Dependence Day! And here is the standard release absolving you of any damage the bull may do. Oh, yes! His name and number?" "Number?" "Yes, his brand." "Not branded. Make it Number #. Name's Moe." Oswell chuckled. "Moe. Very good! Most breeders name them things like Chainlightning and Thunderbird. Your GE number?" "I'm not a Government Employee." "You're not?" Oswell wheezed. "How unusual! Your colors? He'll wear your colors In his shoulder." "Yeah. Black." "Black?" "Dead black." Oswell, scribbling, managed a faint smile. "Sorry I can't accept that invitation to lunch." He struggled into the truck. "Hope this bull is brave in the ring. Nice antique old place you have here! I don't see a feed tower, but you surely don't use pasture -- " The ringmaster's babble passed down the road with the truck. Stonecypher watched the vehicle descend the dangerous grade. He lifted his square hat from his black hair, dropped it on the ground, and crushed the reeds under a booted foot. The temporary house, a squat cubical structure, stood at the end of a spruce-lined path beside the ruin that a thrill party had made of the century-old farm house. The plastic screen squeaked when Stonecypher opened it. He stood on the white floor of the robot kitchen and dug a fifty dollar gold piece from the bag Oswell had given him. Glaring at the head of the woman with Liberty inscribed on her crown, he muttered, "Thirty pieces of gold." Catriona called, "Oswell's lucky he couldn't stay foah diimah! Ah had the potassium cyanide all ready." Stonecypher passed through the diner door into a room containing more yellowed history books and agricultural pamphlets than eating utensils. Catriona waited by the table. She held a large revolver in her right hand. Knob, near the ruins of the old FM transmitter station, looking down at the Tennessee Lakes. Catriona sat behind him and held the revolver on her thigh. Stonecypher said, "I never see it but I wonder how it looked before the water." Before him, North Fork, an arm of Kings Lake, twisted across the Virginia line four and one-half miles away, while to Stonecypher's right, Boone Lake sparkled like a gigantic, badly drawn V. He did not look toward Surgoinsville Dam securing Kings Lake far to the west. The Tennessee Lakes were born in # when Wilson Dam spanned the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama; but their growth was retarded for fifteen years, until an Act of Congress injected them with vitamins. Then the mile-long bastions of concrete crawled between the ridges. Norris, Wheeler, Pickwick Landing, Guntersville, Watts Bar, Kentucky, Cherokee, Fort Henry, Boone, Sevier, Surgoinsville -- almost innumerable dams blocked the rivers. The rivers stopped and overflowed. The creeks swelled into rivers. Congressional Committees investigated, the Supreme Court tested the dams against the Constitution, ethnologists and archeologists ha.stily checked for Indian relics; and the dams, infused with youthful vigor, matured. Beginning with Norris, which backed up the Clinch and Powell Rivers to inundate # acre.s and displace # families, the dams expanded mighty aquatic muscles. The Tennessee, the Little Tennessee, the Nolichucky, the Holston, the French Broad, the Watauga, the Hiwassce, the Little Pigeon -- all the rivers spread their waters into lengthy, ragged lakes, changing the map of Tennessee more than any natural cataclysm, such as the great earthquake of #, had ever done. The Lakes provided jobs, electric power, flood control, soil conservation, a fi.shcrman's paradise, milder winters, cooler summers, and they covered all the really good farming land in the eastern part of the .state. Gatriona loaded the revolver. It was an obsolete .# Magnum with a Sji inch barrel, and the cartridge cases of the metal-piercing bullets had a greenish sheen. "Now, put it in the holstah, and be ca'eful," Catriona said. Stonecypher wore the holster, a leather silhouette studded with two spring clips opening forward, on a belt and secured to his leg by a thong. Gingerly, he took the revolver and dipped it under the clips. "I've kept outa duels all my life," he said, "but, so long as it's for you, I don't much mind." "Ah'll mind if he kills you. You do like I tell you, and you can beat him. Whv, niah best act in the How-To Cahnival was How to Win a Duel. Cou'se, they didn't know ah was really drawin' befoah the buzzah sounded. Why, ah used to set two plates ten yahds apaht, draw two revolvahs, and shoot both plates, all in foah-tenths of a second!" Stonecypher grinned. "Sorry I missed that carnival first time it came through here. I coulda seen you in that costume they poured on you, three years earlier." "Nevah mind the veiled compliments. Now, try it!" Stonecypher faced the target, a sheet of p!astil)oard roughly sawed to the shape of a man, and backed by a heap of earth removed from the new, as yet dry, pond in which they stood. Catriona pressed a small buzzer concealed in her palm. Stonecypher's big hand closed on the revolver butt, pushing the weapon up and forward. The sound of the shot rattled away over the mountain top. "That's good!" Gatriona cried, consulting the sonic timer. "One and two-tenths seconds from buzzah to shot!" "But I missed," Stonecypher protested. "Look bad on te'ee." "You'll hit him. Watch the recoil next time." Stonecypher drew and fired a second wild shot. He snorted, "Confound Westerns, anyhow!" "Weste'ns?" "Sure. That's where this duelin started. Used to, almost ever movie or tevee was called a Western. Sort of a fantasy, because they were just slightly based on real history. They generally showed a feller in a flowered shirt, ridin' a Tennessee Walking Horse, and shootin' a gun. Ever'bodv in these Westerns had a gun, and they all shot at each Other. "The youngin's were hep on 'em, so they all wore toy guns, and a whole generation grew up on Westerns. When they got big, they carried real guns. I've heard my great-uncle tell about it, how before the Government built duelpens and passed laws, you couldn't hardly cross the Lakes without ninnin' Into a bunch of fools on water calves skis shootin' at each other." grazec "You leave the histo'y books alone foah awhile," Catriona commanded, "and practice. The tenants and all'll tend to the wo'k. Try it loaded and empty. Hook this little buzzah to the timeah, and practice. Ah've got to go see the chickens." " 'Bye, teacher." Stonccypher dropped the buzzer in his pocket and watched her vanish into the grove. He fired the remaining shots, nicking the target once. With the revolver bolstered, he followed the padi to the summer pasture. Stonecypher cupped his liands around his mouth and yelled, "Smart-calves! Smart-calves to school!" The entire herd turned sorrowful e)TS on him. Seven of the calves and four of the yearlings trotted to the gate, which Stonccyphrr held open, and jostled out of the pasture. As the calves began to lie down under the trees, a white heifer-caJf nuzzled Stonecypher's hand and bawled, "Paaapy gyoing a fyightt?" "Yeah, he's goin' to fight," Stonecypher answered. "Your pappy's gone to the bullring. He suggested it, and made die choice himself. He's got real courage. You oughta all be proud of him." The calves haw'led their pnde. Including those remaining in the pasture, they presented a colorful variety of spots, specks, splotches, browns, reds, blacks, and even occasional blue and grccnidi tinges. Stonccypher .sat facing them from a stump. He said, "I'm sorta late for the lesson, today, so we'll get on with it. Some of this will be repetition for you yearlings, but it won't hurt. If you get too bored, tlicre's corn and cottonseed meal in die trough, only be (juiet about it. "Now. To look at yu all. nobody would think vou'rc the same breed of cattle; but you. and your maminys, and Moe are the only Atohmy cattle on Earth. It's usually hard to say exactly when a breed started ; but you all started a long, long time ago, on July #, #, near Alamogordo. New Mexico, when they exploded the first Atomic Bomb." At mention of Atomic Bomb, who had succeeded the Bogger Man as a means of frightening cdiildren, one of the younger calves bawled. Her polled, brindled mother ran in ungainly fashion to the fence and mooed widi great carrying power. "All right!" Stonccypher yelled. The cow closed her big mouth, but stayed by the gate. "Can't go by what you hear the tenants tell their kids," Stonccypher cautioned the calf, "Atomic Bomb is as dead as the tank and the battleship. "Now, like I was sayin', the scientists put Atomic Bomb on a hundred foot tower and blowcd him up. There was a flash of fire, and an awful racket, and the blast mist'd up a lot of dirt and dust from the ground. All this dust achumin' around in the cloud buinpt'd into little bits of metal and stulT that was highly radioactive. That means, the basic atoms of matter had been thrown out (rf kilter, .sorta deranged. The protons and electrons in an atom oughta be about equal for it to be stable, but these were shootin' off electrons, or beta particles, and givin' off something like powerful x-rays, called gamma rays, and things like that. "Anyhow, this radiation affected all the sand and bits of rock and dirt in that l)omb cloud. This radiation is dangerous. Some of it will go right through several inches of lead. Enough'll kill you. Your ancestors were ten miles or so from w'here Atomic Bomb w'ent off. "They were just plain Whileface cattle. They weren't supposed to be there, but I reckon none of the scientists bothered to warn 'em. The dust started settlin' all over your ancestors. In about a week, there were sores and blisters on their backs. The red hair dropped off. When it grew back, it was gray. "The scientists got real excited when they heard about it, 'cause they wanted to see how horrible they could make Atomic Bomb. So, they shipped fifty-nine cattle up to Oak Ridge. That was a Government town, a hundred miles .southwest of here, where they made some of the stuff to put in Atomic Bomb. The University of Tennessee was runnin' an experimental farm there. They had donkeys, and pigs, and chickens, and other animals that they exposed to radioactivity. Then they killed 'em and cut 'em up to see what had happened. I know it's gruesome, but that's how it was. "The awful fact is, the scicnti.sts slaughtered more than half that original Atohmy herd for experiments. Some of the rest, they -- uh -- married. Wanted to see if the calves had two heads, or something; if radioactivity had speeded up the mutation rate. "Back then, they didn't understand much about mutation. Some claimed a little radioactivity would cause it, some said a whole lot, and some said it wouldn't hurt a bit." "Whaa mootyaaonn?" asked the calf which was not yet assured of the extinction of Atomic Bomb. "Well, you-all are all mutations. I've told you how life starts from one cell. This cell has thread-like things in it called chromosomes, and the chromosomes are made up of things called genes. Mutations, sort of unexpected changes, can take place in either the chromosomes or the genes. You see, when this one cell starts dividing, every gene makes a copy of itself; but, sometimes, the copy is a little different from the original. Lots of things, like x-rays and ultraviolet rays, heat, chemicals, disease, can cause this. Radioactivity had caused mutation in some experiment, so the scientists were anxious to see what happened with these cattle. "Genes determine the way an animal develops. Two mutant genes can start reactions that end up as a man with one leg, or maybe as a bull with the intelligence of an eight-year-old man. Lots of mutations are recessive. They may be carried along for generations. But, when two like mutant genes come together in reproduction, the animal is bound to be something different, the way you eleven calves are. "Now. The scientists watched the Atohmy cattle for fifteen or twenty years, and nothin' much happened. They started sayin radioactivity wasn't dangerous, and a man could walk into a place right after Atomic Bomb went off, and it wouldn't matter. They should be here to see the mess in Japan today. All the time, though, I think the cattle were changing. It may have been in little things like the length of hair, or the shape of an eyeball, or the curve of a horn, so the scientists couldn't tell without they made exact measurements all the time. "Then, a bull-calf was bom. He had shaggy black hair, and his horns grew in a spiral like a ram's. Some scientists said, 'I told you so! It speeded the mutation rate!' "Others said, 'He's a natural mutation, or else, a throw-back to prehistoric wild cattle. It happens in every breed. Atomic Bomb Iiad nothing to do with it.' "They married the bull, and then they fixed to slaughter 'im to see what his insides was like. The bull fooled 'em, though. He came down with contagious pleuro-pneumonia, the first case in years, 'cause it was supposed to have been wiped out in this country away back in the Nineteenth Century. They had to cremate the bull for fear die disease would spread. Ever' one of the calves were normal Whitefaces. "Finally, the nineteen Atohmy cattle that were left were put up for sale. My great-grandfather, Cary McPhecter, bought 'era and shipped 'em here to Bays Mountain. He's the man started this farm where there was nothin' but rattlesnakes, and trees, and rocks." "Whyy theyea selll um?" a red roan calf interrupted. "Well, they sold 'em 'cause Oak Ridge had been condemned. That was several years after the German Civil War. It was peace time, for a change, and folks were .rick of Atomic Bomb. Anyhow, new, modern plants for makin' the stuff had been built in secret places a lot easier to defend. The women were cryin' for more automatic kitchens, so the Bureau of Interior Hydroelectric Power (that's the name Federal Pow'er, Inc., went by then) put another dam across the Clinch River below Norris. Bush Lake covered up Oak Ridge. "There wasn't much mutation, except for color, in you Atohmy cattle, till seven years ago when your pappy, Moe, was born. I remember -- " A hoarse excited voice shouted from a distance. "Thrill party!" it cried. "Thrill party!" stump, stamped his rigt foot to restore circulation, and yelled on the run, "That's all todayl Stay under the trees!" He loped along the pasture fence and across the makeshift target range. Two tenants. Teddy and Will, stood on the dirt heap with pitchforks in their hands. Over Bay Knob, an old Model # butterflier hovered on ribrating wings. Sloppy white letters on the sides of the aircraft spelled such slang expression.'i percOlossalSoniC Flap ship," and An impossible number of middleschool-age boy's bulged from the cabin windows. Methodically, they dumpi'd trash and garbage over the transmitter station ruins. The butterfiier wheeled and flapped over the pasture. Red clover bent and writhed in the artificial wind from the omithopter wings. Cows bawled and ran wild. Calves fell over each other. Stonecypher jumped the fence. He w'rested the revolver from the holster. "Clear out, or I'll shoot!" he ho'vvled. Voices spilled from the butterflier. "He got a handgun!" "Dis ain't legal!" "Whatcha say, tall, bones, and ugly?" Stonecypher aimed the Magnum at the shaven head in the pilot's seat. The boys looked faint. Agitated air thundered as the butterflier lifted straight up two hundred feet and glided away in the directon of Surgoinsville Dam. Teddy and Will stood by with pitchforks unrelaxed. Will spat a globule of tobacco juice. "The thangs these here psychologists git made law!" he sneered. "You want me to make out a Thrill Damage Claim?" "No, Will," Stonecypher said, "just deduct it from taxes." Teddy looked at the revolver and said, "Ever'body oughta take guns to em crazy youngin's. Reckon you'll git into trouble?" "No. It's an empty antique. That's legal. You guys did all right. Let the calves back in, huh?" The tenants left by the gate, and, with a minimum of driving, urged the calves into the pasture. Stonecypher watched the men pass through the grove. Although the tenants undoubtedly recognized the peculiarities of the calves, they never mentioned them. Since the late #'s, through Revolution, Civil War, automobile, the Department of Internal Revenue, the multiple bureaus that had controlled the Lakes, the Moon rocket, and the expedition to Pluto, these people had remained suspiciously interested in strangers, suspicious of indoor plumbing, doubtful of the Government, quick-tempered, and as immovable as Chimney Top. They had exchanged little except log and frame houses for concrete. The tenants, not really tenants, had been squatting on Bays Mountain when Cary McPheeter bought the farm ; and there they stayed. Stonecypher vaulted the fence. Catriona, with hands firmly planted on hips, stood in the dry pond. Stonecypher said, "If I just knew what these thrill parties think they're up to, it might help." Catriona shook her head of redyellow hair. "Nevah mind them. Ah told you to practice shootin, but the minute ah turn mah back, you run off and staht teachin' those calves! You've got to practice, Stony! You've nevah done any shootin', and L. Dan's killed ten people. Ah -- " "Watch the tears, or you'll have red and green eyes," Stonecypher said. Clumsily, he ejected the shells and reloaded the revolver. He occupied two seconds in drawing and firing. The bullet struck dirt a yard to the left erf the target. lashed Bays Mountain on the afternoon of July #. As the storm passed, a blood-red butterflier, with a pusher propeller in the tail and a plastic bull head on the nose, descended in the young Sudan grass. Stonecypher dropped the saw -- he had been clearing away a beech limb the storm left in the abandoned paddock -- and strolled to greet Ringmaster A. Oswell. "Stonecypher!" the ringmaster announced. "That storm almost caught us!" Oswell's stainless steel teeth clacked, and the breezes trailing the thunderclouds ballooned his orange silk kimono. "I never liked these butterfliers. Theyre too slow, and that swooping motion! Five hundred miles per hour may seem fast to a man your age; but in my day, back before petroleum was classified as armament, we had jets! Real speed!" "Come on up to the house, ringmastbr," Stonecypher invited. "I'll mix up some dextrose and citric acid." "No. no time," the fat man panted. "Only time to see you about that bull you sold me. Tlie storm took a limb of your beech tree! Almost the only one left, I suppose. About that bull, Stonccyphcr. you know I was a bit hesitant when I bought him, but my driver talked me into it. I'm so disappointed I had him drafted immediately!" "But, what -- " Stonccyphcr attempted to ask. "The young woman there in the butterflier is a much better driver and pilot," Oswell bal)blcd. "I wouldn't have believ'cd it of a woman! She weighs a good ninetyeight pounds, too! That bull -- he has changed completely since we put him under the stands. He eats well, but he shnw.s no spirit at all. Tomorrow is the big day. Stonecypher! I can't disappoint the crowd! I thought he might be sick, but the vet says not. Tliat bull let the vet come into the cage and made absolutely no attempt to kill him!" "But does Fergus -- " "Fergus's manager saw the bull! He's all for it. Fergus made an extremely poor showing on Memorial Day, and the manager thinks this odd bull would provide a real comeback! I advised against it This heat is terrible! The storm didn't cool the air at all." Stonccyphcr maneuvered the perspiring ringmaster into the shade of the beech. He said, "I wanta do the fair thing with you, ringmaster, so I'll give you a guarantee, in writing if you want. If that bull's not the bravest ever fought in Highland Bullring, I give you double-money-back." Oswell's face wobbled in a tentative smile. He counted his stubby fingers. "Double-moneyback?" "Yeah. I wanta get into the business. My grandfather used to sell bulls, Then my father came along, and he wouldn't sell a one." "Yes. Yes, I once tried to reason with him, but -- " "He had funny ideas," Stonecypher pressed his advantage. "I never did understand the old man myself. He used to lecture me on something he called the Man-Animal War. He said one of the wwst things in the w ar was the thousands of bulls that had been tortured to death." "Peculiar idea. Of course --  "He claimed bullfights slipped up on this country. Back when it wasn't legal, they spaded up the ground real go. There were movies, and books, and magazines, and foreign broadcasts, all ravin' about how brave and noble it was for a bunch of men to worry and torture a stupid animal like a bull, till he couldn't hardly bold bis head up, and then run a sword in im." "Naturally, you -- " "I don't luiow how' many times he told me a bull had more brains than a horse, but less then a jackass. He said buUfightin' wasn't a sport, even if the bull got a man sometimes ; and he had the idea the worst thing was the four or five horses, that ever' bull killed, took with im. They had some bloodless bullfights in California, and the nut colonies out there like it so good, first thing you know, we really had it. It came to East Tennessee 'cause this was one of the biggest cattleraisin' sections, before the Lakes took the grazin' land." "Surely, Stonecypher, you -- " "My father always claimed if the bullfighters were near as brave as they said, they'd take on a really intelligent animal sometimes, like a man-eatin' tiger. He even thought in the first place." Stonecypher grinned. "No, you don't ne to worry about me, ringmaster. I hate to admit it, but the old man is the Oswell revealed all of his steel teeth in a broad smile. "You had me worried!" he wheezed. "Now, your offer." "I'll go even better," Stonecypher said, "just to show how set I am on gettin' back in the business. If Moe's not brave, I got two yearlin's you can have for free." "How generous! You've reassured me, Stonecypher. I have confidence, now, that the show will be a great success! I must go! You have no conception of the life a ringmaster leads before a fight. I won't require a written gfuarantee. I trust you, Stonecypher! See you tomorrow, I hope! I never liked July. If the Government would only make more Lakes, it might cool off! I hope -- " The whir of the red btrtterflier's wings terminated Oswell's discourse. With a face like a gored bullkiller, Stonecypher watched the ringmaster's departure. Another butterfiier hpvered above the mountain. This one was green and gold with the canopy pushed back and a glint of twin lenses in the cockpit. Will appeared at Stonecypher's side. He spat in a long arc and said, "That's a new one, ain't it, peepin' from a butterfly? I reckon L. Dan never got kilt in that other duel like I hoped he would. You want us to git you outa this, Stonecypher?" "No, Will." "We can see you git to the Smokies. The Givemment'll never find you down in there."  "I'll be aU right, Will. If he does kill me, take care of Catriona. And look after the calf records." "Sure thang." Stonecypher walked slowly toward Catriona's open-topped sunbathing tent justed his black tarn. "Do not touch your shooting hand to your weapon until the buzzer sounds," he instructed. "Otherwise, the weapon may be carried as you wish. At the slightest infringement of the rules, a robot gun will kill you. If you have any elaborate last words, say them now; because the pen is soundproof." He laughed an obviously much rehearsed laugh. L. Dan wore orange tights today, but no armor, since the rules required deulists to present naked torsos for probable bullets. Stone cypher faced the duelinaster. "I reckon this room is the only place a man really has free speech," he said. "You're deaf, and can't sec good enough to read lips, and me or him will soon be dead. "I don't believe in this duclin'. It pves a man who's wrong a chance to kill one who's right. A man shouldn't oughta have to die because he's right. Just like ever'thing else in this Manly Age. It's painful. That oughta be our motto, More Pain, ju.st like in the Macliine Age it was More Gadgets At Any Cost." "Why don't you go on tevee?" Dan jeered. "She'll soon forget you, farmer." Stonccypher's words rolled over the hobbyist. "I reckon the Manly Age came because a man started thinkin' he wasn't much of a man any more. He was just as fast as his car, and just as strong as his electric lawn mower. And a loud minority of the women was claimin' they could do anything a man could, and maybe better. So tlie men started playin' football in shorts and huntin' c.ach other on game preserves, and the women went back to the kitchen and bedroom. Lots of things that went on undercover come out in the open. Cockfights, dogfights, coon-on-alog, duels, stallion fights, bullfights. "And people like you, L. Dan, went on livin'. You got no right to live. You don't do any useful work. The Earth is slowly starvin', and you take the grub out of some feller's mouth who might could help a little. That's why -- " "Time!" announced the duelmaster with his face close to a large clock on the wall. He opened the door. Two men carrying a body on a stretcher passed. The body had four bullet wounds in it. Dan said, "That drivel gives me a real reason to kill you, farmer. I'll be good to her for a few days." As prearranged, Dan took the  right branch of the corridor and Stonecypher, the left. A hooded snan gave Stonecypher the Magnum revolver and shut him into a space resembling a windowed closet with a door on cither side. Stonecypher secured the revolver in the clip holster. His bony hands formed knotted fists. The pen door slid back. Stonecy#hor stepped into a room thirty by ninety feet with three bulletmarred concrete walls and a fourth wall of bulletproof glass, behind which sat the ghoulish audience. Dan, crouched and with his pistol in the crook of his left elbow, advanced. His right hand fluttered an inch from the pistol butt. Stonecypher, grotesque with thin chest exposed and overall bib wrapped around belt, waited. Two photoelectric robot machine guns followed each movement of the duelists. A buzzer sounded. Dan's index finger failed to reach the trigger, for a guardian machine gun removed the hobbyist's head in a short efficient burst. The noise of a louder buzzer punctuated the execution. When the soxmdproof inner door of the closet opened, the hooded man, who had a pair of crossed pistols tattooed on the back of his right hand, said, "He was too anxious." "Yeah," Stonecypher grunted. The man watched Stonecypher pass out to the street. Stonecypher snapped up the bib of his overalls. An extremely rare bird, a robin, hopped from his path and continued a fruitless search for insects. Stonecypher walked down Watauga Street until the pavement vanished under the brownish-green water of Kings Lake. Catriona squealed when she saw him. Ignoring all Correct Procedures, she almost knocked him down and attempted to smother him. "Ah told you it just took practice!" she blubbered. "You did it, Stony!" With muffled mumbles, Stonecypher managed to put her in the Tenite canoe. The few people along the quay, who had witnessed the illegal manner of their meeting, watched with shock, or with incredulity, or with guarded admiration. When they saw that Stonecypher's hand rested on a bolstered revolver, they lost their curiosUy. Wading, Stonecypher shoved e canoe off and hopped aboard. As he took up the paddle, Ills hand trailed in the water and released the small buzzer that had made possible Catriona's best carnival act. F or July, the afternoon was cool. Blue-gray clouds drifted before larger di white masses. To the southwest opened the mile-wide mouth of Horse Creek; and, far beyond, the great blue pyramid of Chimney Top Mountain stood defiantly above Sevier Lake. The world seemed water broken only by partly submerged hills and mountains. Stonecypher gazed across the Lake at Bays Mountain and at the five Cement Islands apparently Boating against that backdrop. Softly, he said, "Some follw call the big one Martyrs Island. There's a marble pillar right in the middle. Nobody knows who put it there, and the Government never bothered to knock it down. I reckon the poison ivy's covered it by now, but I went and read the inscription, once, when I was a boy. It says: "They moved me off the Powell River. They covered my farm with water. I bought me another near Beans Station. The water covered it. I was getting old, but I built at Galloway Mill. When they flooded that, I gave up and lived in Kingsport. I will not move again." The canoe bounded over the choppy water, one hundred feet above the silted streets of the flooded city of Kingsport. Stonecypher said, "The time I was there, you could still find a few coptertrooper helmets and old cankered shells. Couple of years back, a diver brought up two skulls off shore." Catriona's eyes remained moist, but she smiled. Her teeth were beautiful. "It'll be all rahght. Stony. You can't change the wo'ld in one dav. You did fine, and Moe will too." "I told you to stay at the bullring," Stonecypher said. "Ah couldn't watch that! And those puny, little, mousy women stare and talk about me, because thcah's a little meat on mah cahcass. Oswell said Moe would be last, anyhow. Ah was so wo'ied about you, ah couldn't sit still." Only a few boats, mainly those of piscatorial maniacs, were on the lake. Stonecypher glared at them and muttered, "I hope I did right by Moe. He wanted to fight. Maybe, Catriona, if I'd had you when I found out he could talk -- not ju.st mimic -- I'd of raised him difl'crcnt. Maybe I shouldn't have shown him that bullfight movie, but I wondered what the only bull to see a bullfight from outside llie ring thought about it. "That led him to wantin' to know all about the Man-Animal War. I told him the best I could, how one of a man's basic drives is to exterminate, ever' since prehistoric times when he did in the vvooly mammoth and rhinoceros. Tlie dodo, quagga, passenger pijii'on, great auk, aurochs. Key df'rr, bisin. African elephant, gorilla, tiger therc'.s an awful list. Why, five hundred species of iiummals, alotu, have become estinrt siiue I .A. I)., 'bout four hundred of tlu-m siu' A man'll even kill oil' oiIht men, like die Neanderthals and the Tasmanians!" Sionecyplier resti-d die paddle and grinned, faintly, at Catriona reclining in the bow. "I guess you've heard diis before." "Go rahght ahead, Stony," Catriona sighed. "Ah like to heah yoali speech. It's the only time you really get angry, and you look so fine and noble." "Yeah. Well. I told Moe how a man exterminates useful or harmles.s species, and then he lets dangerous ones, like rats, eat lum out of hoii.se and home. Course, I explained this was just kinship. Folks used to argue man come from a monkey, or from spontaneous combusdon, or something. Now we got fossil proof he's not like anything anybody ever saw. He's a case of straight line development all the way back to the first mammal, a sort of rat." The canoe glided past Highland Pier. Every type of small watercraft, from a punt, through an electric motorboat, to a sloop, had docked. More boats lined the shore on either side of the pier. The flying field contained so many butterfliers and copters that there seemed no possibility of any of them taking ofl'. Human voices welled in a mob roar from the great open cylinder of the bullring. A huge banner draped on die curving white wall proclaimed, in ten-foot letters: Stonecypher ran the canoe aground in a patch of dead weeds, I 'xixiscd by a slight lowering of the lake level, and helped Catriona over the rocks that lined the bank. Me said, "I told Moe other things men do to animals. All the laboratory butchery, done because it would be cruel to treat a man like that, but it's all right with a animal, like takin' out a dog's brains and lettin' 'im live. I told him about huntin', how the kudu become extinct 'cause a bunch of fools wanted to see w'ho could kill the one with the biggest horns. "I told him the things done to domestic animals. Dehornin', emasculatin', brandin', slaughterin' with sledge hammers and butcher knives, keepin' 'em in filthy bams. A man tells hisself he's superior to other animals. If he does somethin' bad, he u.ses words like inhuman, brutal, animal instincts, instead of admittin' it's just typical behavior. And the psychologists take some animal, say a dog, and put him in a maze, sometliing the dog never saw before. If the dog don't run the maze in two seconds flat, they say he's a pretty stupid animal. He just operates on instinct, but they can't say how instinct operates. They'll have a time explainin' Moc's instincts. "I reckon the American bison made Moe madder than anything. They killed the bison off, 'cept for protected herds, in the Nineteenth Century. A hundred years lalir, the herds had got pretty big, so they declared open season on bison. No more bison." A recorded voice growled, "No guns permitted in ring. Deposit gun in slot. No guns permitted in ring." Stonecypher moved his permit in ineffectual passes before the electric eye. He shrugged, dropped the revolver into the riot, and left his thumb print. Catriona displayed the passes Ringmaster Oswell had given them. The tcveer blinked, and the gate granted admission. They rode the escalator to the sixth tier and squirmed through pandemonium to their seats. The male portion of the crowd wore every possible style and color of dress, in complete emancipation from the old business suit uniform, but the women wore sober falsebosomed sundresses and expressed excitement in polite chirps. Stonecypher pressed his mouth against Catriona's ear and whispered through the din, "You got to understand, Cat, whatever happens, Moe wanted it. He says he can scare some killers into givin' up bullfights and maybe help stop it." "He'll do fine, Stony." Several spectators stopped venting tlieir wrath on the unfortunate man in the ring to gawk at the couple. Catriona's unorthodox phyrique aroused sufficient amazement; but, in addition, Stonecypher gave her the front seat and took the rear one, the correct place for a woman, himself. Below, through a rain of plastibottles and rotten eggs, a tired man walked to the barrier which Oswell adverti.sed as the onlv wooden fence in seven states. Behind the killer, a small electric tractor dragged out the bloody carca.ss of a bull. A gasping, gibbering little man grabbed Stonecypher's arm and yelped, "Illard is the clumsie.st killer, he ran the sword in three times, and the kid with the dagger had to stick twee before they finished, Big Dependence Day Bullfight my jet! This is the worst in years, Fergus made the only clean kill all afternoon, and I flew every one of eighteen hundred miles myself to see it, this last bull better be good!" The little man waved his bag of rotten eggs. Although the bullfight followed the basic procedures established by Francisco Romero in the Spain of #, changes had occurred, including the elimination of all Spanish words from the vocabulary of the spectacle since the unpleasant dispute with the Spanish Empire twenty years Ixifore. The gaudy costpmes worn by participants had been replaced by trunks and sneakers. A purring grader smoothed the Simd. The crowd fjuieted, except for those iicai' the box of Ringmaster Oswcll. 'I'hcy suggested in obsi enc tejTiis that the ir immov be refunded. A trumpet recording blared. A Miulct dot)r, inscriled, "Moe of Bays Mountain Fann," opened. #'lu irowd awaited the first wild rusli of ilie bull. It failed to materialize. vmxw nAi.E the doorway. Above, (ni a platform inside tlie hanier, stocd a gray-haireci man who stuck identifying, streamered il-ul' into bovine shoulders. His hand ssc)i down, carrying StonccypluT's chosrn colors, black. Moc's walk upset the man's timing. His arm moved too stum. Mtw'.s front hooves left tin gmund. Honrs hooked. The gray-liaircl man screamed and dro)Ml the dart. With a spike of horn through his arm, betw'eon bone and biceps, he gyrated across the barrier. He screamed a second time befeu'e cloven hooves slashed across his body. Tlie crowd inhaled, then cheered the unprecedented entrance. Killer Fergus's team stood rigid, not comprehending. Then men dashed through slticlded openings in the barrier, yelling and waving pink and yellow capes to draw the bull from his victim. Moe ignored the distraction, trotted nonchalantly to tlie center . of the ring, and turned his bulging head to examine the spectators jabbering at his strange appearance. The short horns, the round skull, the white-banded eyes, the mane that seemed slightly purple under the cloudy sky, and the exaggerated slope from neck to rump that made the hind legs too short -- together they amounted to a ton of muscle almost like a bull. "Wherc'd you trap it, Oswell?" someone near the ringma.ster's box yelled. Forgetting the mess Illard had made with tlie previous bull, the rrow'd commented. "It's the last of the bison!" "He's poiple! Lookit! Poiplc!" "The bull of the woods!" "Howya like 'im, Fergus?" Killer Fergus posed behind the barrier and studied his specialty, an odd bull. Two stickers, Neel and #'omas, flourished capes to test the bull's charge, with Neel chanting, "Come on, bull! Come on, bull! Cotne on! Bull, bull, bull!" Moe did not charge. He moved, in a .sjx'culalive walk, toward the i hanting Ni cl who tantalized with the cape and retreated with shufMing steps. The charge, wiien it came, occurred almost too fast for sight. Neel wriggled on the horns, struck tljc sand, and the horns liftd him again. He smashed against the barrier. Tomas threw his cape over the bull's face. The left horn pinned the cape to Tomas's ned chest over the heart. Moe retired to the center of the ring and bellowed at the crowd, which, delirious from seeing human blood, applauded. Blood covered Moe's horns, dripped through the long hair on his neck, and trickled down between his eyes. Quavering helpers removed the bodies. The first lancer, livid and trembling, rode a blindfolded horse into the ring. "He'll fix this horse!" the crowd slavered. "We'll see guts this time!" Moe charged. The lancer backed his mount against the barrier and gripped his weapon, a stout pike. Sand sprayed like water as Moe swerved. On the left side of the horse, away from the menacing pike, Moe reared. The lancer left the saddle. A tangle of naked limbs thrashed across the wooden fence and thudded against the wall of the stands. Twenty-five thousand people held their breaths. The blindfolded horse wailed with dilated nostrils and every muscle vibrating in terror. Moe produced a long red tongue and licked the horse's jaw. Fergus dispersed the tableau. Red-haired, lean, and scarred with many past gorings, the popular killer stalked across the sand dragging his cape and roaring incomprehensible challenges. In the stands, the cheer leaders of the Fergus Fanclub lead a welcoming yell. "Yeaaaa, Fergus! Fergus! Fergus! Rah, rah, rah' Moe wandered through the helpers trying to distract him from the horse and looked at the killer. Fergus stamped his foot, shook the cape, and called, "Bull! Come on! Charge!" Moe completely circled the killer, who retired in disgust when another lancer rode into the ring. "Stick him good!" Fergus directed. The pike pointed at the great muscles of Moe's back, as the bull charged. Moe's head twisted in a blur of violence. Teeth clamped on the shaft behind the point. Too surprised to let go, the lancer followed his weapon from the saddle. He released his hold when Moe walked on him. Like some fantastic dog stealing a fresh bone, the bull trotted around the ring, tail high and pike in mouth. The crowd laughed. Wild-eyed men carried out the trampled lancer. A third, and extremely reluctant, lancer reined his horse through the gate. A pike in the mouth of a ton of beef utterly unnerved the man. He stood in the saddle and jumped over the barrier where a rain of rotten eggs from the booing fans spattered him thoroughly. A n uninjured bull pawed alone in the sand when the trumpet recording announced the end of the lancers period. The crowd noises softened to a buzz of speculation, questions, and comment, as the realization that weird events had been witnessed slowly penetrated that collective mind. The bull had not touched a horse, no pike had jabbed the bull, and five men had been killed or InGovemment!" a clear jured. "Great voice swore. "That ain't no bull, it's a monster!" Tliis opinion came from a sticker in Illard's team. Fergus attempted to persuade the man to help, since both of Fergus's stickers were dead. Part of the crowd agreed with lire stii ker's tluMight. for people began moving furtively to the exits with cautions glances at the animal in llu' ring. 'I'hcy, of course, could not know tiuit tin bull had been trained, with rul)herknew the first, and only, law of staying alive in the ring, "Charge the man and mt the cloth." The clouds that had obscured the sky all tlay formed darker masses tinted with pink to the east, and the black clot of a turkey buzzard wheeled soaring in the gloom. Carrying, in either hand, a barbed stick sparkling with plastic streamers, Fergus wnlkc'd into the ring. His assistants uiutiously flanked him with capes, Moe dropped the pike and charged in the ajiproved manner of a bull. Fergus raised the sticks high and brought them down on the humped back, although the back was not there. Tlie sticks dropped in the sand. As the killer leaped aside in the completion of a reflex action, a horn penetrated the seat of his trunks. The Fergus Fanclub screamed while their hero dangled in ignominy from the horn. Moe ignored tlae flapping, frantic capes. The killer gingerly gripped a horn in either hand and tried to lift himself off. Gently, Moe lowered his head and deposited the man beside an opening. Fergus scrabbled to safety like a rat to a hole. Four helpers with capes occupied the ring. When they saw death approaching on cloven hooves, two of them cleared the fence. The third received a horn beside his backbone and tumbled into the fourth. A dual scream, terrible enough to insure future nightmares, echoed above the screeching of the crowd. Moe tossed tlie bodies again and again across the bloody sand. Silence slithered over the Highland Bullring and over a scene reminiscent of the ring's bloody parent, tlie Roman Arena. Men sprawled gored, crushed, and dead across the sand. A section of the blood-specked barrier leaned splintered and cracked, almost touching the concrete wall. Unharmed, Fergus stood on one side of the battleground, Illard on the other. Fergus reached over the wooden fence for red flag and sword. Turning his back on the heaving Moe, who .stood but ten feet behind, the killer faced the quaking flesh that was Ringmaster Oswell, high up in the official box. The killer's voice shook, but the bitter satire came through the sound of departing boats and aircraft. Fergus said, 'T dedicate this bull to Ringmaster Oswell who has provided for us tliis great Dependence Day Bullfight in honor of the Great Government on which we all depend." He turned and faced the bull. Moe, for once, rushed the red flag, the only thing that made bullfights possible. His great shoulders presented a fair target for the sword. Fergus, perhaps the only bullfighter ever to be gored in the brain, died silently, lire sword raked a shallow gash long Moe's loin. In the sixth tier of the stand.s, saliva drooled from the slack mouth of the little man seated beside Stoneiypher. "Now's your chance. Illaid!" the man stjualled. "Be a hero! The last of the bullfighters! Kill him. Illard!" Illard walked on shaking legs over bodies he did not sec. He was short, fur a killer, and growing bald. I Ic picked up the sword Fergus had dropped, looked into the gory face of the bull, and toppled in the sticky sand. The sword quivered point-first beside his body. hei:es.sioal Highland Bullring. Riding the wind, blacker than the clouds, the over the rim of the stands with air whistling through the spatulnte feathers of rigid wings. The buzzard swooped a foot above Moe's horn.s and soared swiftly over the opposite side of the ring. That started the panic, although Moe's charge accentuated it. He crashed into the sagging section of the barrier. Cloven hooves scraped the wooden inclined plane, and Moc stopped with front feet in the first tier of the stands. He bellowed. The bull killed only one spectator, a man on whom he stejiped. The hundreds who died killed themselves or each other. They leaped from the towering rim of the ring, and they jammed the exits in writhing heaps. Moe's precarious stance slipped. Slowly, he slid back into the ring, where Ringmaster Oswell, quivering in a red toga, gestured from the darkness under the .stands, The fat man squeaked and waved. Moe's charge embodied the genuine fighting rage of a maddened bull. The scarlet door closed behind him. Stonecypher, with fists bloody and a heap of unconscious fearcrazed spectators piled before him, sat down. "Well. Moe," he whispered, 'T reckon you got even for a few of the bulls that's been tortured to death to atnuse a bunch of nuts. Maybe it wasn't the right way to do it. I don't know. If I'd only had the gun -- " Catriona turned a white mask of a face up to Stonecypher. "They killed him, in thenh?" "Sure. Bullfigluin' never was a sxrt. The bull can't win. If he's not killed in the ring, he's slaughtered under the stands." "You have nioah smart-bulls. Stony." The black copter came in with the sunset and hovered over the sand. The face of Duclmaster Smith peered out under his black tarn, while a hooded man, with pistols tattooed on his hand, aimed an automatic rifle. The duelniaster smiled at Stonecypher and cried, "You really should have waited until you were farther out in the Lake, before you dropped that little buzzer in e water." Fights of th Future fighting will probably bo done by high-flying automatic machines controlled from the ground by technicians. War vidims will be the unlucky ones on whom the bombs arc released, while the men who do the actual fighting will be comparatively safe. Powerful destructive bombs and intercepting missiles will chase each other at sx'ds, heals and heights that the liuinan body could never stand. Until recently, the speed of sound was considered mysterious and unbeatable. Today, our fighting planes can beat this speed in short spurts. And this i.s only the beginning. The National Advisory Coinmiltei for Aeixinau tics, in expcrinu-niing with designs for planes and miwiles of ilie furegions. This Ixjgins at five times the speed of sound. And at more than five miles up, where superplanes must fly. sound's sjK'cd comes to # miles per hour. The dangers at such sjirrds arc tremendous. But there will lxno reason for man to expose himself to these rigors. The machines that his skill and brains develop wilt do that for him. The danger of overheating is the principal barrier when planes and missiles are pushed through the air. At three times the speed of sound, the friction between the air and the surface of the plane produces a temperature of # degiees F. At five times sound, the temperature may reach # dcgrcc.s. This would melt most metals into a shapeless mass, kill the crew and destroy the equipment. This heat is created in the thin boundary layer of air around the aircraft. N'hile for short spurts of uliraspecd it will not soak into the craft, for sustained flight even te.st planes must be virtually flying refrigerators. Titanium and other such metals capable of beating the heat effect will be used to overcome this danger. There is even talk of constructing supersonic planes of a glass laminate made of fiber glass and held together by a suitable bonding resin, like polyester. The phenolics and melamines could also be used as bonding resins. From varied tests and uses, this type of glass appears able to w ithstand the searing skin friction temperature generated in uhra-high pecd flight much bettcT than most metals used in today's aircraft. From all indications, air fighting of (he future will probably be strictly impersonal. The machines themselves will be the pilots; the crew on the ground will merely start the machinery to working and guide them along their way. The wars in which our children and grandchildren will share will undoubtedly be infinitely more destructive, overwhelmini and farfetched than anything we can dream up in today's fiction. The Robot Whipping Boy may soon have an actual counterpart who will be used to perform the kinds of work that humans consider too dangerous -- such as clearing up radioactive debris, dismantling bombs, closing broken gas mains, etc. To operate this type of mechanism, it would be necessary to mount the robot on a vehicle radiocontrolled from a console set up a safe distance away. The radio-controlled arms will manipulate like human arms, while the operator will get a three-dimension view of the progress of the work through his binocular television camera. Thus, the mechanical hand responding to the action of the operator's hand will work almost with a sense of touch in handling the dangerous objects. As the operator's hand doses upon an object, the tnccbanical hands will do likewise, so that the oerator will feel the resistance imposed by the object that U being handled some distance away. Lost New World sea -- a depth of approximately five, and in some cases #, miles -- there exists an entire world of sea life. This was described in the reports of a recent deep sea expcditiHi made by a Danish naval vessel. Twenty-seven different varieties of sea life were dredged up from their black world where they live in close to freezing temperatures, and under pressures of about # poimds to the square inch. Included were all types of creatures similar to poljps and coal, all sedentary-type animals, but it is possible that larger and more active creatures such as a type of fish and squid also exist at these depths. Right now, however, it is impossible to do more than vaguely scratch the surface of this world, since we haven't developed the right tools for sea bottom research. What we have to work with now is still in a crude state. Scientists also found that the bottom of the sea was infested with bacteria which showed major differences in character from bacteria found on land or in surface waters. It's the last frontier on otir planet: the bottom of the sea. Watch Those Scales! old Roman bronze weighing instrument on exhibit in a Baltimore, Maryland, art museum, it would seem that the ancient Roman merchant didn't have as much of an opportunity to weight the scales as his modern counterparts do. According to the instrument exhibited, the Roman scale worked on the lever principle. There is a #-inch portable bronze rod which hangs by any one of tliree hooks, each on a different face of the rod. The item to be weighed is hung on hooks which are suspended from a chain at the end of the short arm of the lever. This idea is very similar to that used in certain types of scales in use ttxlay. Only a .single counterweight, however, was used in the old Roman scale to balance tin object bein weighed. Its operation was simple: all one did was slide the counterweight hark and forth along the graduated .scale on the long ann of the lever until it balanced. The weight could then be read from the scale. The entire instrument has three fares and three scales, each one exposed when the scale is hung by its corresponding hook. Voodoo Con Kill You! death" is more than just that. According to Ois. W. Proctor Harvey of Washington and Samuel A. Levine of Bosic'n, writing for the Journal of thf Amnican Medical Association, it is possible to be literally frightened to dcMlh. Although (Ic.itli from fright is rather rare, abnormal heartbeats caused by fright from a prolonged and highly irregular pattern which the doctors say could lead to ventricular nbrillalion. This is a situation where groups of heart muscles beat independently and without rhythm and the heart is unable to pump blood, thus resulting in death. Animal c-xperiments show' a nervous pathway from the hypothalamus -- tlic base of the brain -- to the heart. This -- to a nonnal person in a highly frightening emotional situation -- could cause types of ventricular irregularities which could result in death. The "voodoo" and "hexing" deaths of Africa and South America and Australia are not myths. They actually do occur. The emotion stress of the terrorized fear brought out by "voodoo" or "hexing" can cause death, but it would be a gradual process rather than a sudden one. Things We Never Knew Until Recently nr HE prehistoric buffalo,  according to bones recently unearthed in Texas, was almost twice as large as his modem progeny. The reason women are usually smaller than men is that the female -- or estrogenic -- hormone has a growth-suppressing action which is exerted through its stimulation of the adrenal gland to produce hormones similar to cortisone. These honnones depress the rate of energy production and have a powerful action in checking replacement of skin cells and suppressing growth in general. A cubic foot of atmosphere at times the amount of air of a cubic foot of atmosphere at an altitude of # miles. If laid edge to edge, the blood cells carried in the average adult human body would stretch I # miles. One ordinary' glass marble could make # miles of glass fiber. The energy in an average thunderstorm is equal to that dissipated by # A-bombs of the type dropped over Hiroshima. Norm Venners fancy was pretty well fixed on thoughts of electronic calculators -- until the invention started making passes at the inventor! Hninantic Inalape By W. W. Skupeldyckle Illustrated by Ed Enish M athematicians are just like people: old, young, fat, thin, male, female. This one was male, thirty-five, with steady brown eyes and a nice smile when he remembered to use it. His name was Norman Venner. and besides being a mathematical whiz generally, he had. designed and built an electronic brain, or calculator, which was in some ways smarter than himself -- and a lot less diffident. Electronic calculators are invariably given acronmic names such and nine out of ten of them are of the digital type. This is a nice way of saying that they count on their fingers. Thcre nearly as big as yats, and cost more, but can calany human. Norm's machine was of the analogue type, which is less flexible, less complex, and vastly smaller and cheaper. He called it the stood for "I Can Work 'Em All!" It could, loo! It was especially good at deriving equations from curves, which was really something. Charley Oglethorpe burst into the office one morning, catching Norm in a brown study. "Hi, Genius. How is she perking now?" "All right, except the pen skips a little sometimes and makes a messy curve." "Have to damp that arm better. When can I have her to work on?" "Soon a.s I finish these Mugu problems." Charley stared at him. "Mugu. Guided-missile center. It's nice busine.ss if we can get it -- the digitals are all booked up months ahead, and the particular type of problem they send us b right up our alley." "I thought you w'ere kidding me, like that Boolean Algebra stufT." "Wasn't kidding then, eitlicr." "I'll stick to instrument-making, thanks. You math guv's never have any fun." Norm shrugged, turned to the telephone, and called an CNtcnsion. "Hennosa." It was a rich, jlca.s ant voice. "Vic? IIow about the rest of the Mugu cards? Ready yet?" "I'll send diem up right away. Just finished them." "Who was tliat?" Charley inquired. "Vic Hermosa. Smart boy." Charley smiled a little. T here was a knock at the door. "Come in," Norm called. 'I'he door opened, and a small, neat girl entered. Her long bob was dark and silky, but windblown. She tossed her head and her hair settled into place, as if she had just brushed it. She extended a pack of punched cards. "Thank you," Nonn said, gravelyThe girl looked up at him suddenly, and he stepped back a little. She had sur#rising, dccp-violet eyes, and their glance seemed to hav-c a tangible impact. She nodded grave acknowledgment and left. "Damn it, I wish I could do that!" Norm complained. "Make goo-goo eyes?" "No. Shake my head so mv hair would automatically be combed like hers. I've been fighting this cowlick ever since I've been a kid -- stocking caps, gunk, the works. Still got it. And the part moves around and I have to hunt for it." "Know who she is?" "Nope. Clerk, mes.senger, I guess. They're always hiring new ones." "Doesn't she ever speak?" "Of course site -- come to think of it, I've never heard her. Must say it's a relief after the usual yackcty-yack. Haven't anytliing to talk to her about, anwav. She's just a child." "A pretty one, though." "Yes, she is." "You sure don't know anything about women. If anyone made eyes at me that way, I'd do something alxnu it." "What, for instance?" Norm inquired dryly. "Well, of course, I'm married. But I'd find out wlio she was, anyhow. Sometimes I think you're dead and don't know It." "Sometimes I agree with you." Norm said. He led one of the punch cards into the transmitter head, whii h fingered the holes and curve on the cur'c tracer. It would liave taken Norm or anyone else davs to arrive at the an.swer. "Sec? Skips here and tliere, but I can ink in the gaps." "Looks like the pen catches on the paper a little. I'll grind the point while I'm at it. Say, that thing really tliinks, doesn't it?" "In a way. Generally, the digitals have it all over the analogues when it comes to reasoning, but I built an extra brain into her." "Where?" "The 'Y' path. Remember? Tries several appropriate methods in suecession. I analyzed my own methods of attack, and built the same methods into her. She's an electronic except faster and more accurate." "I bet. She's more alive than you are.,Vhy don't you step out a little? First thing you know, you'll be getting old, and it'll be too late." "Leave the match-making to the women. I may be old, but I'm not an old fool. It's fall, not spring." "Yeah? All you need to be an old fool is just a little more time." took a card from his desk. It seemed to be an extra, not with the pack. He put it in the machine. The curve-tracer began to draw a rather abrupt curve, which meandered half across the sheet before Norm realized what it was. Suddenly, an image leaped to his mind's eye and he watched with fascination while the pen traced this roatheraatical' impossibility to the far end of the paper, and in obedience to several successive negative  factors in the problem retraced in the opposite direction a litde lower down. A head, a slightly lifted elbow, full rounded breast, a knee luxuriously drawn up, a dangling arm, all in one continuous line. There was nothing obvious about it; it was formalized, but with the individual style that is the artist's signature. Once seen, the image persisted. "Hey, Charley, look at this!" "Yeah. What about it?" "What about it! You ever see anything like it?" "Sure. It's a closed loop, like a hysteresis curve." "An hysteresis curve. But this isn't one. Look closely." "Of course, it has harmonics and variables in it. Might be one of those gas-discharge curves, if the gas tube happened to be defective. ' I've seen some funny..." "Look! It's a reclining figure, with the brad turned toward you -- sec? -- and the forearm over the head -- Breast, knee here, foot with the toe pointed, calf, thigh, and the near arm hanging. Remarkabie, once vou see it... "You're crazy. All I can see is a closed loop with some wrinkles in it." "Why, it's nearly as plain as a photograph! I can't understand..." "Plain, my eye! If that's the arm hanging down, and this the hand, where are the fingers? That 'hand' is just an oval. You got some imagination if you can get a reclining figure out of that." "Not a nude of the beer-garden type, I grant you. This is real art. Know what this means? Have you any idea how complex a formula must be to trace a curve like this? Just a plain hyperbola is bad enough. This is a test of the machine. Those Mugu boys have worked out this formula to see if she could break it down and draw the equivalent . curve, though I don't see how they did it. Even the larger digitals would find this a tough nut to crack, but our baby is a whiz at curves, see? I wonder how they justified the machinetime on it. Of course it is barely possible that they derived the equalion themselves, but it must have taken weeks if they did." "Maybe it took us tong as you say, but I still can't see any reclining figure in that curv'e. It's just a closed curve with some wiggles and bumps on it." "In anv case, I'm going to send this to Mugu right away. They'll want to know how long it took." "I wouidirt, if I were you." "Why not?" "Maybe trouble developed in the inaihine. Better run some more cards through it first. But right now I'm going home. We're having a roast tonight. Say, why don't you come to supper with us? Alice would hi' delighted -- she w'as just wondering what liappened to you. ril phone her... "No, no! I have to -- look, I got to find out what this means, vou sec? It isn't that -- explain it to Alice, will you? We need this cmtract, need all the work wc can get, you understand?" "Sure, sure. IIow about next week? OK? Well, see you in the morning." Charley left, grinning to himself as he closed the door behind him. li He was already puzzled perfectly on the next five c.ards, and kept her mind on her business. Meanwhile, Norm studied the first curve again. Funny Charley couldn't see it -- the figure was puzzling at first, until you got the idea, but then it was so clear. Or was it? Suddenly, he couldn't see it himself. He turned it upside down and sidewaN's; it was just a funny closed curve, having neither mathematical nor structural significance. Maybe he was going crazy! He threw the curve down on his desk and, soothed by the whirring of the tracer motor, fell into a brown .study. Suddenly, the image of the brunette with the violet eves appeared. No reclining nude, she; site shook her head in that habitual gesture and her long bob fell perfectly in place. She turned, with demurely downcast lashes and looked up at him with her violet eyes, and Norm came out of liis trance with a start. lie removed the last curTa sijnple hyjtrboUc curve, probably a problem in .atlcnuaiion or decay of some kind and put in the last pundi-card. 'Fhe machine started up immediately; the curv'e was elliptical. Then a vertical downstroke. retraced and with a gentle half-loop added. It was writing! P-r-o-p-i-n-q... What might this be? He watched, fascinated, as the letters continued. "Propinquity is the mother of love," it said, and stopped. llis trained mathematical logic gave him an immediate solution to the enigma : he was cracking up. It was utterly impossible to derive the equation to wTite "propinquity" in Spencerian script in less than a hundred man-hours, nor could a mathematical calculator be hired for so frivolous a purpose. It was fantastic, impossible; therefore, it w'as not so, and he wa.s either dreaming or crazy. Maybe lljinking about diat little brunette... Surely not; still, lie had been driving himself pretty hard. In the moming he would be fresh and alert. If it were a trick, he'd catch the trickster. And if it turned out to be a perfectly logical curve, he'd see a doctor. He left the curve in the niachine, closed the ventilator in the wail over his desk, and turned on the burglar alarm. I'his was nothing so crude as a loose board with a switch, but a quite elaborate electronic circuit that produced a field near the door. It wouldn't work on josts, but if any material body entered that field, it would trip the alarm and start a regular Mardi Gras. Security required by government contracts hardly demanded so much, but for n small plant it was sufficiently cheap, and Charley had had a lot of fun with it. Charley! Have to keep him out, too; and being its daddy, he'd know how to disable the aLirni. Of course, it would really be sufficient to tie a thread across the door which would break if anyone entered. He had no thread, but after a moment's thought, he pulled a three-cent stamp out of his bill-fold, and turned out the office-light. After glancing up and down the hall, he stuck the stamp on the door so that it would tear if the door opened. was still intact, and it was hard to see, even in broad daylight. The paper in the curve-tracer was perfectly blank, and there was no punch-card in the transmitter head. It might still be an elaborate joke, but the chances were small. He might be cracking up, or may have imagined the whole thing. The best thing to do would be to put it entirely out of his mind. He succeeded in this until mida "handsome devil." He jerked the punch-card out of the transmitter and called Vic. "Hermosa." That voice! It made chills run  up and down his backbone. A man had no right to a voice like that. "Vic? Bring up the calculations for the last batch of punch-cards, will you? I want to check something. The card numbers are F-#I through F-#." "Right away." Vic wasn't especially gabby. A good-looking young Latin, who knew as much math as most, they'd probably lose him to the draft any day now. Presently, someone knocked on the door. "Come in." It wasn't Vic; it was the girl. She laid the pack of problems and their attached work-sheets on the desk, shook her hair into place -- did she even have to comb it in the morning when she got up? -- looked him briefly in the eye, and turned to go. "How is Vic these days?" Norm inquired, whimsically. "Is he able to get about?" The girl smiled politely at this obvious badinage and left. He checked the problems against cards as he came to them. He knew the punch code well enough to do this in his head, since the kind of operation indicated was quite obvious. But the problems ended with F-#, and the "handsome devil" card was F-#. He got on the phone again. "Vic? What's your next card number?" "F-#." One expected a little guy to have a high voice; this one was quite deep, but soft. "Are the cards numbered very far ahead?" "We usually number a couple of dozen cards, and assign the numbers to the problems as they come in, from a scratch sheet." "Any of the cards been lost?" "Oh yes, on occasion. So far, we've recovered them all -- there are only two rooms where they could be. Up there or down here." Thai voice! How could a man have a voice like that? And why should he care if one did? Why even notice it? Instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch, he drove downtown and consulted the family doctor, who laughed at him. Reassured, he returned to the plant and got a sandwich and milk before going to his office. Old Doc Heffelbauer might be wrong, but he usually wasn't. Norm liked several men, but he didn't dream about any of them; if he was off his rocker, it was in some other manner. Visual delusions, for instance. The thing to do was to see Vic face to face. He called the office manager. "Henry? Send Vic Herinosa up there, will you? I want to talk to him." "Vic Hermosa? He's in the Army. Didn't you know?" "No, I didn't. Who is the guy that answers the phone in Aat fruity voice?" Henry lowered his voice. "Guy? That's Vic's sister Virginia. She took Vic's place when he left. Simplified the security investigation, and she's good, too. About as good as Vic, I'd say." "You mean to tell me a little girl like her cotild have a voice that deep?" "Startling, isn't it? Of course, it's actually a low contralto or tenor, but you expect her to be a lyric soprano. Shall I send her up to see you. "No, no. I want to think a bit first. Say, who interviewed her?" "Charley, I suppose. Just a formality, anyhow; the Hermosas and the Oglethorpes are neighbors, you know." teric phenomena in a sealed office! His very own calculating machine made calculated love to him; his best friend was evasive, and the i 'unior mathematician he thought le had been talking to every day for a couple of weeks was in the army. He might hammer away at all concerned until all the cards were accounted for, but that would disrupt office routine. Strategy, that was the thing! Be mighty peculiar if he couldn't break up this business, now that he had an idea what wa.s going on. But did he? Whoever punched the cards needed the proper equations derived first, and that called for a digital or an analogue combecause she was especially good at curves. Deriving them by the old methods was just too much horsework for any joke. And it didn't have to be a joke, either. The joke might be just the cover for a more sinister activity -- hash! If that were the case, why call attention to it with funny-businc#s? But what hurt was the girl's being mixed up in it. He could take a rib from Charley, for instance, but the girl was practically a stranger -- unfortuiutrly. Women could be cruel, as his inoihor had his mother's last year in the hospital and winced. She had sacrificed so much for him; and yet, wa.s it really l)etier to be a free bachelor than an old family man like Charley? 'Iheie wasn't anything the matter with Alice that he could see. Charley loved her; that was plain. Tortight should solve the thing, once and for all. Ih' left the plant, speaking to everyone he met as he usually did. Then he .sneaked back in, with the guard's help, and hid in his own olliuwith the lights out. His phone rang and he almost answered it before he remembered that he was supposed to be gone. The building wa.s hy rto means deserted; probably there was someone working overiinie in more than one department, though the main business, for tlie day was finished. After a bit, tin phone rang again, and he ignored it. Waiting was hard. He couldn't read, so he let his mind wander: what a romantic old thing she was! He needed a haircut; he'd have to get one tomorrow, before the hair grew down over his ears. What a voice that girl had -- and those eyes! Would they get further work from Mugu? How could they contact other Government agencies? good; would it be better to try to wanted them, or to keep the old girl busy and work problems for others? Eventually, the former, though for the time being it might be better to continue as they were until the old girl was well known. Under present conditions, that shouldn't take -- what was that hissing noise, a radiator? He listened closely. Hiss, hiss, hiss. No, it was a rubbing sound, with a scrape and an occasional hollow thump. Not loud, but close at hand. The ventilating system -- how obvious, now! He watched a white hand disengage the catches and carefully lower the grill to his desk. A small figure in white coveralls wormed its way out of the opening, landed on its hands on top of his de.sk, kicked feet clear and cartwheeled to the floor with disdainful ease. A head-shake settled a long bob in place; who could do that? Virginia Hermosa, and no one else! She couldn't see him against the shine of the window. She turned meanwhile fastening a large sheet of paper on the bed of the curvetracer with tape. She put a blank card in the punching head, opened the door of the patching-panel cabinet and rearranged the patchcords there. What a lab assistant she would make! Wasted in Set-up; anyone could punch cards, with a little practice. Well, not anyone, but any mathematician could. How thoroughly she knew this machine! no Charley must have told her, or her brother, plenty! With the curve-tracer runnin" at slow speed, she held the stylus steadily on the words she had written on the paper; the coordinates brain, she derived the horrible equations corresponding to the script, and obligingly translated these in turn to punchings on the card. So simple, when you saw It. But who would think of putting a burglar alarm on an air-duct? She could go all over the building through the walls if she chose. She was small enough to get through the ducts easily, though the vertical sections must be tough, even for so athletic a girl. The punching head stopped. Virginia restored everything to its original condition, stuck tlte card she had punched into a pile of them, folded the paper and stuffed it into her pocket, and turned to go. Norm put on the lights. ing the air with her hands to keep her balance. He held his hand out for the paper. "No!" she said, her voice shrill with excitement. Wordlessly, he closed in on her, and after a brief struggle pulled the paper out of her pocket. It said, simply, "I love you." Norm looked at Virginia, who turned her head away. "I can't appreciate the joke just now, though I realize it must be very funny. Charley will enjoy it. But what a lot of trouble. Suppose you had got stuck in the duct, then what? Is it worth the risk? And the violation of security is very serious." "I'm going to quit anyway," she muttered. So deep a voice for such a small girl! "Why did you do it?" "Well, it all started as a joke. Charley said you were shy, and -- and -- well..." "I see. Natural enough, I suppose. And you pretended to be your brother on the phone." "No, I never said I was Vic," she denied, quickly. He was handling this all wrong; he wasn't getting anywhere. All this was just talk, evasive talk. "Charley hired you?" "Yes. When Vic left for basic training." "I see. Charley's quite a joker, and it was hard to refuse him." "It was kind of a joke at first, but you're overlooking something: he's very fond of you. He really is! He brags all the time about how smart you are, and what a nice guy." "Charley's married, and he wants to see me married, too." "And you don't like girls?" "Listen, you made that drawing, loo, and all the other stuff?" 'es." An idea raised its pretty head. "Listen, I've decided to be very angry about this. You've made a fool of me, and I'm not going to let you get away with it. Now, I know a place that's quiet, and has very good steaks; I'm going to t.ake you to supper and bawl you out. Better get into .street-clothes, and don't take all night." "Sorry, I couldn't possibly. Some other time, perhaps.' "Tonight. Now. Get going." "No. I have a date," "Break itl" "No! You may be my boss, and I may be a forward hussy, but tonight I'm going home, and you cant stop me!" How silly could you get? Suddenly he understood the way of a man with a maidj love was older than conversation, and they both saw and understood through and beyond any silly words. In fact, the silUer the words, the better! "That's what you think! You're going with me, or you're going to jail. They'll put you in a dark cell with the rats. They have their own specially-bred rats, you know." He leered, slyly. "You wouldn't dare!" He shrugged, elaborately, and turned to the phone. She darted past him to the door and he caught her, pulled her back out of the hall. She was surpriangly strong and determined, and she ducked when he kissed her. "That one was a mess, wasn't it?" he complained. She relaxed and began to laugh, and he joined her. She looked into his eyes a long moment, and pulled his head down, kissed him tenderly. "You don't give a girl much choice -- one big rat or a lot of little ones." "I'll give you no choice at all. I'll teach you to play tricks on me! Hurry up and change." "One of the girls keeps a semiformal in her locker. I can borrow  it and we could go dancing." "I don't dance. Never learned. Couldn't we just talk?" "We could, but we won't; you'll never learn any younger. You seem light enough on your feet Come on, it'll be fun!" "Tonight I can do anything! You take too long to change, and I'll tear the buildiilg down brick by brick with my bare hands, hear me?" "No, please don't! I'll hurry, I promise!" He waited impatiently at the door of the locker room. Now that he knew how to talk to a girl, he wanted to talk, and talk, and talk some more. He planned extravagant things to say when she came out, but when she appeared, smiling, he was struck dumb. She took his arm and they half ran, half skipped out of the building to his car. and for those reading IF for the first time who want to catch up on the good stories they've missed, we have managed to obtain a I limited number of copies of all earlier issues. There available at #c ehch, from the Circidation Dept., Qtiinn Publishing Co., Kingston, N. Y. If this story has a moral, it is: dont shoot too soon, or you may never know what you hit! By Leslie Perri tllustrated by Dick Rockwell  through the topmost branches the inky surface of a cold spring, of the tall trees in a silent, autumBehind an interlacing of nakedlynal forestDry leaves trembled nerwhite birches a young deer stoc vously as the dark tree trunks still with wide lacquered eyes fixed stirred in a thrust of the wind. A on him. Its tar-black nostrils shone in a quivering of fright and then like the wind it rustled momentarily on the forest floor of crackling leaves and disappeared. He breathed heavily with disappointment. He had transmitted fear, his own apprehensions, again. He moved from the protection of an overhanging rock. The ease with which he moved delighted him sensuously. This sportive exhilaration had to be curbed ; it made him less sensitive to the problem at hand. He had to communicate. There were obviously lower orders, mainly the winged beings, Some were tiny and fragile. They would approach and light on him with the unwarincss of the naive, trusting to their speed to escape from danger. From them he had no consciousness of intelligence. They buzzed and swarmed and hummed with monotonous idiocy. The larger winged beings were more interesting but they wore the drabness of the forest on their sleek wings. They would not come close but made inquiring sounds and swooped away at his approach. He had learned to move silently through the silent forest. He felt almost weightless and inflnitely agile and this delight he had to renounce for the time. He could walk erect, or run with incredible rapidity. And when he stood erect his body attained a new vitality and with his head above the lower woody vegetable growths he experienced a new dignity and regality. He was no petitioning refugee from the pitiless vise of unending cold. Here in this autumnal forest was the warmth and promise of spring, for him. Excitement made him warmer and more jubilant still. He had to communicate. But with whom? With which of these beings could he share his unbelievable adventure? He ran down a sloping floor of the forest and ran and ran, slipping and sliding on the leaves until he was breathless. And came to halt in a marshy spot with the spikes of dried vegetation towering about him. His heart beat with transcendental joy. He ached to babble of his happiness and then to relive his adventure in the telling of it to another intelligence the equal of his. He breathed more slowly and more slowly yet. Above the trees, caught in the web of branches, a gin cloud forms of purest white drifted slowly above the trap of the forest. And there, lower than the clouds, was the magnificence of a golden shadow wanned the tree trunks, the faces of the dry leaves, the soft, sucking black earth of the marsh and -- him. In this warmth he luxuriated, with every sensibility in his being. His body had starved for warmth. And while he stood thus, a long slithering form passed before him, describing in its movement across the moss and rocks and black leafmoulded earth resilient, graceful curves. It passed him without notice, conveying nothing, an impenetrable life form. And then, as suddenly, his muscles tightened and he withdrew reluctantly from the warmth of the sun. dried, tassel-topped grasses, feeling the scrape of sharp seedbearing burrs as they clung to him. In a closely woven burrow, hidden from the sun and the reach of the wind, he heard a new sound, a louder, sharper crackle in the forest. A new scent crowded into the burrow and overpowered him with a new sensation, a suffocating awareness of danger. He was cold again, and taut. The shadow from which he had escaped enclosed him again. This same deadly shadow of fear sapped his new vitality and destroyed his sensuous joy. There was tliat sharper sound, a baying shrillness that resounded through the forest quiet and hammered at the tree trunks and unresisting vegetation with an unreasoning in.sistencc. The echo of this new, insane voice of danger stirred him. He moved cautiously and quickly from the burrow and through the marsh. He was not erect now, but low and rapid-moving. He thought desperately of sun-ival now, not communication. Tliis howling, yapping being had found him out, scented him in the forest and he knew only that he had to escape. TTie forest floor rose gradually to greater and greater heights. He recognized the terrain and tlie character of this part of the forest. There was, at the summit, a sudden drop down a face of Irregular outcroppings of stone. And at the base of this lay a vast body of w'ater in which he could hide. He could manage the tall face of stone, hiding and blending into its cold greyness. The baying and yapping was closer and he moved even more rapidly. The chase seemed directed to him, not purpfoselcss. Behind the baying and shrill crying of this hunter was yet another will. And this chilled him with hopeless horror. He felt instinctively that he could communicate with this will, that this wa.s the intelligence he sought. But between it and him was this unleashed agent for his destruction. He ran more quickly and with a new sensation of weariness as the slope mounted. The vegetation was green here, and somewhat sparser. There were fewer places of refuge. At times he ran without the protection of any covering, only the moss and green ground vines underfoot. As he reached the summit he hc.'ird a new sound, a sharp undecipherable crack and whine overhead. When he had reached the top of the sharp rise, he stood erect for a moment, seeking the surest path for his descent of the sharp rock face. The body of water below gleamed wan#ily blue. The sun was a glorious, almost perfectly round entity, low in the sky. His body .straightened involuntarily, rose up in the warmth of the sun, darkly and strangely outlined against the unbroken blue of the sky. And then as the crack and whine of the gun sounded in the evening quiet, not once but twice, and inexpertly a third time, lus shape crumbled against the sky and he toppled from the clilT edge into the still blue of the lake below. The man breathed heavily as he came up the hill. He was redfaced from exertion and frustration. He was heavy and clumsy in the perfection Abercrombie and Fitch had tailored into his hunting clothes. He held his rifle, an expensive and aesthetically beautiful instrument of destruction, like a blunt, ugly club. He stood at the edge of the clUT and looked down. There was nothing. Only the serenity of the early evening, the unanswering quiet of the lake, the ridge of mountains, the darkening sky. "Now what in the hell was that?" the man muttered. The dog, beside him, shivered and sat down suddenly. Its howl was unbidden, imdirected, and it filled the forest with unrest metal some fifty feet in diaminstantaneously, and even the eter, it rests on stubby, retractelecto-magnctic waves that ablelegs beside the buildings of carry power travel at up to the port center. Carriers speed # miles per second... to and fro from refrigerated This is a quotation from warehouses, carrying cargo to "The Sky's No Limit," an artithe conveyer lift built into the cle in the March # issue of ship's base. The Sooner Magazine which "The load consists of #is published by the University odd men and women, each of Oklahoma Association. It frozen solid in a coffin-like was written by Dwight V. block of chemical ice. Living Swain, old-time science fiction organic matter is the one thing writer and instructor in jourthe duplicator units can't repronalism at that school. Mr. duce ... Swain sneers at rockets but says "Now the last of the icewe'll have space travel by #; blocks is aboard, the dozen-odd the key inventions will be a crewmen at their stations, the "wireless power transmitter," a hatches sealed. The sphere "contragravitational device," floats for a moment, barely off and a "transmutational duplithe ground, while the stubby cator" -- this last being an amstabilizing legs retract. Then, swer to all problems of supply, slowly at first (in order to Far-fetched? Maybe. But avoid the heat of atmospheric though we're betting on rockets, friction) it soars into the sky. Mr. Swain just might have No one knows for sure how fast something there. (Continued from page #) done to do it in another way. RuizSanchez raised his hand. Immediately Chtexa walked toward the ship. "I wish you a good journey," the Lithian said, "wherever you may go. I wish also that your road may lead back to this world at some future time. I have brought you the gift that I sought before to give you, if the moment is appropriate." Cleaver had straightened up and wa.s now glaring suspiciously at the Lithian. Since he did not understand the language, he was unable to find anything to which he could object; he simply stood and radiated unvvelcomcness. "Thank you," Ruiz-Sanchez said. This creature of Satan made him miserable, made him feel intolerably in the wrong. How could Chtexa know -- ? T he lithian was holding out to him a small vase, scaled at the top and provid("d with two gently looping handles. The gleaming porcelain of which it had been made still carried inside it, under the glaze, the fire which had formed it; it was iride.scent, alive with long quivering festoons and plumes of rainbows, and the form as a whole would have made any potter of Greece abandon his trade in shame. It was so beautiful that one could imagine no use for it at all. Certainly one could not fill it with left-over beets and put it in the refrigerator. Besides, it would take up too much space. "This is my gift," Chtexa said. "It is the finest container yet to come from Xorcdeshch Gton; the material of which it is made contains traces of every element to be found on Liihia, even including iron, and thus, as you see, it shows the colors of every shade of emotion and of thought. On Eartli, it will tell Earthmen much of Lithia." "We will be unable to analyze it," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "It Is too perfect to destroy, too perfect even to open." "Ah, but we wish you to open it," Chte.xa said. "For it contains our other gift." "Another gift?" "Yes, a more important one. A fertilized, living egg of our species. T;ike it with you. By the time you rcaih Earth, it will be ready to hatch, and to grow up with you in your strange and marvelous W'orld. The container is the gift of all of us; but the child inside is my gift, for it is ray child." Ruiz-Sanchez took the vase in trembling hands, as tliough he expected it to explode. It shook with subdued flame in his grip. "Goodbye," Clitexa said. He turned and walked away, back toward the entrance to the path. Cleaver watched him go, .shading his eyes, "Now what was that all about?" the physicist said. "The Snake couldn't have made a bigger thing of it if he'd been handing you his own head on a platter. And all the dme it was only a pot!" Rulz-Sanchcz did not answer. He could not have spoken even to himself. He turned away and began to ascend the cleats, cradling the vase carefully under one elbow. While he was still climbing, a shadow passed rapidly over the hull -- Cleaver's last crate, being borne aloft into the hold by a crane. Then he was in the airlock, with the rising whine of the ship's generators around him. A long shaft of light from outside was cast ahead of him, picking out his shadow on the deck. After a moment, a second shadow overlaid his own: Cleaver's. Then the light dimmed and went out. The airlock door slammed. (Continuid from pagt #) A Red Cross ship landed, its ports grating open. Dollies shuttled across to it, loading injured men. Two relief workers appeared. They opened the door to Hull's car, getting in the back. 'Drive us to town." They sank down, exhausted. "We got to get more help. Hurry it." "Sure." Hull started the car again, gained speed. "How did it happen?" Julia asked one of the grim-faced exhausted men, who dabbed automatically at the cuts on liis face and neck. "Earthquake." "But why? Didn't they build it so -- " "Big quake." The man shook his head wearily. "Nobody expected. Total loss. Thousands of cars. Tens of thousands of people." The other worker grunted. "An act of God." Hull stiffened suddenly. His eye.i flickered. "What is it?" Julia asked him. "Notlung." "Are you sure? Is something wrong?" Hull said nothing. He was deep in thought, his face a mask of startled, growing horror. Dear Sir : Your issue of March, #, contained an article entitled "Galileo the Persecuted." That Galileo was persecuted is true, but as to why he was perf?ecuted your author seems to be mistaken. #. It was not heresy to teach the Copemican theory. #. The question revolves around, not the subject matter of his teaching, but how he taught it. In the st place the work of Copernicus, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium," which was published many years before Galileo, owed its publication to the financial support of two Catholic Cardinals and was dedicated to Wstorical fact. Would a Pope -- any Pope -- allow a heretical work to be dedicated to him? Second, Galileo taught the Copemican theory as an established fact, not a theory. Newton (#) proved the theory, not Galileo. One other point: Galileo, in supporting his theory, rejected the tradidonal interpretation of some of the texts of the Bible. For this he was pimished, not for trying to advance science or for being so intellectually in advance of his time. Every issue has two sides ; maybe the author would like to investigate my side. Let him review Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (#), Canon Copernicus (#), and an article on this subject by Hilaire Belloc in "Difficulties," published #, London, by Eyre and Spottiswoode. -- Thomas F. Hardacre # Myrtle St. Lawrence, Mass; Dear Editor: I dislike writing letters of praise, but I am of the opinion that one is in order for the March issue. I read a lot of science fiction: good, bad, indifferent, and sometimes -- stinking. I usually write of the stinking issues of magazines, so it pains me deeply to write a letter such as this. Ivar Jorgenson's Deadly City was better than good, and likewise for Kenneth O'Hara's Thy Name is Woman. The overall effect which everyone I know got from the lastmentioned story is the one I believe the author intended : a good "sick" feeling. There are three other stories in the March issue which I consider outstanding: Bryce Walton's The Victor (although I cannot conceive of any victory, other than death, being possible; overthrow of "the system" being impossible), Frank Quattrochi's The Sword (well-written, with no weaknesses in plotting), and Waldo T. Boyd's The Salesman, a neat, well-written bit of subtle humor so rare in science-fiction. I'd like to conpliment your art editor, Ed Valigursky, for his fine choico of story illustrations. The cover-picture, and the two blackand-white pictures inside, are excellent and in the best taste. Your magaaine make-up, by the way, was discussed in the Department of Journalism (rf the University of Houston as an outstanding example of good make-up. # Schley St. Houston #, Texas Gentlemen : I should first like to compliment you on the breadth and conceptual design of the inside cover drawings in the March issue of IF. However, to be a bit technical; granting that the invader rocket would have wings and control surfaces for navigation in an atmosphere, and granting further the air intakes since the craft might on occasion change over to jet operation -- it is not conceivle that the homing missiles would have airfoils of any nature. Since the missiles are obviously designed for operation on and around an airless world, airfoils as lifting or control surfaces would be totally useless and superfluous. If guidance ir to be achieved, reaction vanes in the exhaust stream or rocket steering nozzles must be employed. But the drawings are lovely. -- J. R. Schoenbaum Chief Engineer, Airlectron Inc. P. O. Box #, Caldwell, N. J. Gentlemen: Curiosity impels an inquiry about my story in the March # issue of IF. Why did you change the name? I am not refering to the name of the story, for in all justice I have is a better title than the one I submitted. I mean why did you change the name of the author? Does Deeming have a nicer ring to it than Deming? -- Richard Deming # Central Ave. Dunkirk, N. Y. Well, yes, since you ask. But we do apologize. Dear Sir: I would like to make a suggestion, hoping you will be able to adopt it. Cotild you persuade the author Kenneth O'Hara to write a sequel to his "Thy Name is Woman"? The possibilities for such a story are many. The theme of that novelette, as you know from recent newspapers, is not so extraordinary, but the build up could be made so. I do sincerely.hope that this suggestiem can be worked, and believe me I shall await each edition. -- John H. Hayes # Main St. Bethel, Conn. lts safe to say Kenneth O'Hara will appear in these pages again, though any sequel must be at least as good as the original to be accepted, and that isn't always easy. As for the timing of "Thy Name is Woman," it was sheer coincidence; science is catching up with all kinds of science fiction! Dear Sir: I like Ed Valigursky's illustrations but how in the hell can his spaceships land? -- B('rt McDougle Belpre, Ohio The inude covers of this issue show (a) a spaceship landing and (b) a spaceship landed. Any other questions? Dear Mr. Quinn: I should like to congratulate you. On what? On not being stampeded in a blind panic, into making a horrid thing out of your mag, but instead, hewing to the line and using discretion and discrimination and excellence as criteria for selecting the stories you print. What do I mean by "thing"? Well, it's that nauseous combination: big-name, spillane-lonnigan, yellow-joumal-hollyw'ood thing that so many editors seem to think they have to have or go on the rocks, heck knows why. Please stay like you are, huh? Don't catch that squirrelly virus. If you stay like you are you'll be thriving when the rest are just a memory in the Congressional Library files. Say, if you're not careful, you're liable to become the best mag. And that's some statement, from a fan who has been firmly loyal to Astounding, since volume one number one! # East #th St. Mishawaka, Ind. Thank you. Phyla. We're blushing slightly, but you summed up our present and future editorial policy so well ive couldn't resist printing your Utter. Gentlemen : Willy Ley ha.s accepted our invitation to be the guest of honor and principal speaker at the I #th World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia over the Labor Day weekend this year. Willy's scientific accomplishments are many and varied, and his talks are always delightfully entertaining, so this is sure to be a worthwhile event for fans and readers. Willy's talk will climax an exceptionally interesting program; we've made a special effort to surpass last year's Chicago convention and think we've succeeded, though it wasn't easy. Memberships or further information may be obtained by writing Box #, Philadelphia #, Pennsylvania. -- Milton A. Rothman the plonet in fact! The sotellite is believed to have an atmosphe'e, and it is else probable that water in o pcrpetuolly trorer stote iS present The man m the foreground obeve is compiling data, wnile the other two gozc at the cloud-cove red planet end its unique rings. Dfowing by Ed Voltgursky'  j ) i J rhftjt I "   exploration tour of the other members of rhe Solor fam ly. Though still at a distance of sevcrcl thousand miles t has just started its engines to swerve into its braking orbit around the planet. Far "below," it is daylight over Asia and the South Pacific. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg: Surveying a Dying Sun by Arthur Dekker Savage IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. a yright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office ol publication, # Lord Street, alo. New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription S#. # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere # Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine arc fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale November #th between science fiction and automobiles. Crank up a fantasy fan and in a lot of cases he'll rattle on all afternoon about Maseratis, multiple carburetors, Jaguars, torsion bars, Gordinis, rear engines, horsepower-weight ratios, Ferraris, the Le Mans race, chopping and channeling, Porschcs, acceleration figures, economy figures, Bugattis, fiberglass bodies and the question of steam power. Why? I don't quite know, but I've studied enough case histories to be sure of my ground. Love of speculative fiction and love of automobiles as something more than just basic transportation somehow go together -- two hearts pierced by a single chrome-plated arrow. Writing on classic cars in True's Automobile Yearbook some time ago, Eugene Jaderquist mentioned that the car collector's other hobbies are almost invariably "music and science fiction." He gave no further explanation. This may have been because he had a hard enough time defining what a classic car is, and why one large, old luxurious vehicle is a classic while another isn't. Classic fans are real fanatics; they aren't even remotely interested in any other kind of car! For those in the audience who think an automobile is just a way of getting from one place to another (actually it is at least a fine form of entertainment and sport, and in some cases a complete way of life), I'll demolish one obvious answer. The thrill of traveling at high speeds has nothing to do with it. Concepts of vast size are much more typical of science fiction than concepts of high speed (fascination with the idea of getting from place to place virtually instantaneously strikes me as a slightly different horse). And a great many auto fans are much more interested in a car's size, shape, inner mechanisms andor rarity than what it will do when the throttle is floorboarded. It doesn't seem to be the hot rodders who are stf bugs. It would be closer to the truth to say that the people in question stem from the ranks of the mechanically inclined with a hunger for things unique. But I'm not sure that's the whole story. rocketeers may have the opportunity to satisfy both tastes at once, if a fellow named Richard Arbib has his way. This gentleman is well known in the auto industry for his startling designs, which sometimes turn into real cars as in the case of the Packard Pan-American. And in his regular column in a recent issue of a new magazine tersely called Cars, he said: "The effect of unveiling the mysteries of deep outer space, the contemplation of travel at the speed of light and perhaps even a step into another dimension, should be the most vibrant inspiration to car designers today." Arbib went on to tell how he asked his students at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, to design vehicles from other worlds. I admit that when he said the instructions demanded that these "semi-abstract" vehicles "express weird, exciting new forms," the pleasure I'd felt at first thought of the project began to diminish slightly. On top of that, he insisted that "the designer... must learn to use the black shadows of the moon to advantage," without a hint of how this was to be done. Maybe he meant that cars should be made of dark-green cheese -- but I sometimes suspect that Detroit is doing that already. On the subject of applying features of these other-world vehicles to today's automotive styling problems, however, Arbib relieved my fears a bit. "The problem amounts to far more than including a few weird shapes of conical nature or tacking on sweeping appendages to form what appear to be shark-like mutations." There was more in the same comparatively realistic vein. Then : "The transparent bubbles of today's jet plane canopies were found long ago in the rocket ship stories. Hand controls have given way to pushbutton controls so, in projecting design, it's logical for pushbutton controls to give way to mind controls." Goody! I've always wanted a "space car," as Arbib kept referring to his futuristic jalopy, with mind controls. It would allow no-armed driving, for one thing -- an idea that has infinite possibilities. Better, it would give the poor backseat driver an even break; she -- it's usually a she -- could put her mind to work too and perhaps even succeed in making the family spacer go in two directions at once. And if those mind controls were sensitive enough, the lucky, liberated driver could at last sit comfortably at home with a long cool drink and let the car take its usual Sunday afternoon tour of the # mile-an-hour superhighways with nobody in it. Arbib boiled it down to this: "This does not mean that all space cars must look like rocket ships on wheels. As a matter of fact, wheels might be the first thing to go!" Me? Well, Maude, my old Chevrolet, will have to last me for a while yet. But I have several projects in mind. The one I cherish most fondly involves buying a little German Volkswagen -- one of the most functional cars ever built, with a jewel of an air-cooled engine in the rear, but also one of the ugliest. I figure the original body would be easy to remove and would make an ideal doghouse. And with a simple aerodynamic body of fiberglass or something equally light replacing the old one, that baby would go! What are you driving? -- Its Remember the story of the last man on Earth who heard a knock on his door? Fiyatil was in the same position, with the difference that he had chosen it deliberately. And when the "knock" -- an alarm bell -- came, that was different too... Illustrated by Kelly Freas M AY #, # -- Well, I did it! It was close, but fortunately I have a very suspicious nature. My triumph, my fulfillment was almost stolen from me, but I was too clever for them. As a result. I am happy to note in this, my will and testament, I nov r begin my last year of life. No, let me be accurate. This last year of life, the year that I will spend in an open tomb, really began at noon today. Then, in the second sub-basement of the Museum of Modern Astronautics, I charged a dial for the third successive time and got a completely negative response. That meant that I, Fiyatil, was the only human alive on Earth. What a struggle I have had to achieve that distinction! Well, it's all over now, I'm fairly certain. Just to be on the safe side, I'll come down and check the anthropometcr every day or so for the next week, but I don't think there's a chance in the universe that I'll get a positive reading. I've had my last, absolutely my final and ultimate battle with the forces of righteousness -- and I've won. Left in secure, undisputed possession of my coffin, there's nothing for me to do now but enjoy myself. And that shouldn't be too hard. After all, I've been planning the pleasures for years! Still, as I tugged off my suit of into the sunlight, I couldn't help thinking of the others. Gruzcman. Prejaut and possibly even Mo-Diki. They'd have been here with me now if only they'd had a shade less academic fervor, a touch more of intelligent realism. Too bad in a way. And yet it makes my vigil more solemn, more glorious. As I sat down on the marble bench between Rozinski's heroic statues of the Spaceman and Spacewoman, I shrugged and dismissed the memories of Gruzeman, Perjaut and Mo-Diki. They had failed. I hadn't. I leaned back, relaxing for the first time in more than a month. My eyes swept over the immense bronze figures towering above me, two pieces of sculpture yearning agonizingly for the stars, and I burst into a chuckle. The absolute incongruity of my hiding place hit me for the first time -- imagine, the Museum of Modern Astronautics! Multiplied by the incredible nervous tension, the knuckle-biting fear of the past five days, the chuckle bounced up and down in my throat and became a giggle, then a splutter and finally a reverberating, chestheaving laugh that I couldn't stop. It brought all the deer out of the museum park to stand in front of the marble bench where Fiyatil, the last man on Earth, choked and coughed and wheezed and cackled at his senile accomplishment. I don't know how long the fit might have held me, but a cloud, merely in the course of its regular duties as a summer cloud, happened to slide in front of the sun. That did it. I stopped laughing, as if a connection had been cut, and glanced upward. The cloud went on, and the sunlight poured down as warmly as ever, but I shivered a bit. Two pregnant young does came a little closer and stood watching as I massaged my neck. Laughter had given it a crick. "Well, my dears," I said, tossing them a quotation from one of my favorite religions, "it would seem that in the midst of life we are at last truly in death." They munched at me impassivelyM AY #, # -- I have spent the last two days putting myself and my supplies in order and making plans for the immediate future. Spending a lifetime in sober preparation for the duties of custodianship is one thing. Finding suddenly that you have become the custodian, the last of your sect as well as your race -- and yet, peculiarly, the fulfillment of them both -- that is quite another thing. I find myself burning with an insane pride. And a moment later. I turn cold with the incredible, the majestic responsibility that I face. Food will be no problem. In the commissary of this one institution, there are enough packaged meals to keep a man like myself well-fed for ten years, let alone twelve months. And wherever I go on the planet, from the Museum of Buddhist Antiquities in Tibet to the Panorama of Political History in Sevastopol, I will find a similar plenty. Of course, packaged meals are packaged meals: somebody else's idea of what my menu should be. Now that the last Affirmer has gone, taking with him his confounded austerity, there is no longer any need for me to be a hypocrite. I can at last indulge my taste for luxury and bathe my tongue in gustatory baubles. Unfortunately I grew to manhood under Affirmer dominion and the hypocricies I learned to practice in sixty cringing years have merged with the essential substance of my character. I doubt, therefore, that I will be preparing any meals ol fresh tood from the ancient recipes. And then too, meals of fresh food would involve the death of creatures that arc currently alive and enjoying themselves. This seems a bit silly under the circumstances... Nor did I need to put any of the automatic laundries into operation. Yet I have. Why clean my clothes, I asked myself, when I can discard a tunic the moment it becomes slightly soiled and step into a newly manufactured garment, still stifT in memory of the machine matrix whence it came? Habit told me why I couldn't. Custodian concepts make it impossible for me to do what an Affirmer in my position would find easiest: shrug out of the tunic on a clear patch of ground and leave it lying behind me like a huge, brightly colored dropping. On the other hand, much Affirmer teaching that my conscious mind has been steadfastly rejecting for decades, I find to my great annoyance, has seeped into the unconscious osmoticallv. The idea of deliberately destroying anything as functional, if relatively unesthetic, as a dirty Tunic, Male, Warm-Season, Affirmer Ship-Classification No. #, appalls me -- even against my will. Over and over again, I tell myself that Affirmer Ship-Classification Numbers now mean nothing to me. Less than nothing. They are as meaningless as cargo symbols on the Ark to the stevedores who loaded it, the day after Noah sailed. Yet I step into a onc-seatcr flyball for a relaxing tour of the museum grounds and something in my mind says: No. #. I close my teeth upon a forkful of well-seasoned Luncheon Protein Component and note that I am chewing Ship-Classification Numbers # through #. I even remind myself that it is a category to be brought aboard among the last, and only when the shipboard representative of the Ministry of Survival and Preservation has surrendered his command to the shipboard representative of the Ministry of The Journey. Not a single Affirmer walks the Earth at the moment. Together with their confounded multiplicity of government bureaus -- including the one in which all people professing Custodianism had to be registered, the Ministry of Antiquities and Useless Relics -- they are now scattered among a hundred or so plantctary systems in the galaxy. But all this seems to matter not a bit to my idiotically retentive mind which goes on quoting texts memorized decades ago for Survival Placement Examinations long since superseded and forgotten by those in authority. They are so efficient, the Affirmers, so horribly, successfully efficient! As a youngster, I confided to my unfortunately loquacious comrade, Ru-Sat, that I had begun creative painting on canvas in my leisure hours. Immediately, my parents, in collaboration with my recreational adviser, had me volunteered into the local Children's Extra Work for Extra Survival Group, where I was assigned to painting numbers and symbols on packing cases. "Not pleasure but persistence, persistence, persistence will preserve the race of Man," I had to repeat from the Affirmer catechism before I was allowed to sit down to any meal from that time on. Later, of course, I was old enough to register as a conscientious Custodian. "Please," my father choked at me when I told him, "don't come around any more. Don't bother us. I'm speaking for the entire family, Fiyatil, including your uncles on your mother's side. You've decided to become a dead man: that's your business now. Just forget you ever had parents and relatives -- and let us forget we had a son." This meant I could free myself from Survival chores by undertaking twice as much work with the microfilm teams that traveled from museum to museum and archeological site to skyscraper city. But still there were the periodic Survival Placement Exams which everyone agreed didn't apply to Custodians but insisted we take as a gesture of good will to the society which was allowing us to follow our consciences. Exams which necessitated putting aside a volume entitled Religious Design and Decoration in Temples of the Upper Nile for the dreary, dingy, well-thumbed ShipClassification Manual and Uniform Cargo Stowage Guide. I had given up the hope of being an artist myself, but those ugly little decimals took up time that I wished to spend contemplating the work of men who had lived in less fanatic and less frenzied centuries. They still do! So powerful is habit that now that I have no questions on dehydration to answer ever again, I still find myself doing the logarithmic work necessary to finding out where a substance is packed once its water is removed. It is horribly frutrating to be mired after all in an educational system from which I turned completely away! involved in at the moment probably don't help very much. Yet it is very important for me to pick up enough information from the elementary educatories in this museum, for example, to insure my not having to worry about the possibility of a flyball breakdown over a jungle area. I'm no technician, no trouble-shooter. I have to learn instead how to choose equipment in good working order and how to start operating it without doing any damage to delicate components. This technological involvement irritates me. Outside, the abandoned art of # years beckons -- and here I sit, memorizing dull facts about the power plants of worker robots, scrutinizing blueprints of the flyballs' antigrav screws, and acting for all the world like an Affirmer captain trying to win a commendation from the Ministry of The Journey before he blasts off. Yet it is precisely this attitude that is responsible for my being here now, instead of sitting disconsolately aboard the Affirmer scout ship with Mo-Diki, Gruzeman and Prejaut. While they exulted in their freedom and charged about the planet like creaky old colts, I made for the Museum of Modern Astronautics and learned how to operate and read an anthropometer blue. I hated to waste the time, hut I couldn't forget how significant to an Affirmer, especially a modern one, is the concept of the sacredncss of human life. They had betrayed us once; they were bound to come back to make certain that the betrayal left no loose ends in the form of Custodians enjoying fulfillment. I was right then, and I know I am right now -- but I get so bored with the merely useful! Speaking of the anthropometer, I had a nasty shock two hours ago. The alarm went of! -- and stopped. I scurried downstairs to it, shaking and hoping desperately that I wouldn't blow myself up in the course of using it a second time. By the time I got to the machine, it had stopped caterwauling. I charged the all-directional dial over ten times and got no response. Therefore, according to the anthropometer manual, nothing human was moving about anywhere in the entire Solar System. I had keyed the machine to myself clectrocephalographically so that I wouldn't set off the alarm. Yet the alarm had gone off, indisputably recording the presence of humanityother than myself, however temporary its existence had been. It was very puzzling. My conclusion is that some atmospheric disturbance or faulty connection inside the anthropometer set the machine off. Or possibly, in my great joy over being left behind a few days ago, I carelessly damaged the apparatus. I heard the Affirmer scout ship radio the news of the capture of my colleagues to a mother vessel waiting beyond Pluto: I know I'm the sole survivor on Earth. Besides, if it had been skulking Affirmers who set the alarm off, their own anthropometer would have detected me at the same time, since I had been walking about unprotected by the insulating effect have been surrounded by flyball crews and I'd have been caught almost immediately. No, I cannot believe I have anything more to fear from Affirmers. They have satisfied themselves with their last-moment return of two days ago, I am positive. Their doctrine would forbid any further returns, since they would be risking their own lives. After all, there are only # days left -- at most -- before the sun goes nova. M AY #, # -- I am deeply disturbed. In fact, I am frightened. And the worst of it is, I do not know of what. All I can do now is wait. Yesterday, I left die Museum of Modern Astronautics for a preliminary tour of the world. I planned to spend two or three weeks hopping about in my flyball before I made any decision about where I would stay for the bulk of my year. My first error was the choice of a first destination. Italy. It is very possible that, if my little problem had not come up, I would have spent eleven months there before going on with my preliminary survey. The Mediterranean is a dangerous and sticky body of water to anyone who has decided that, his own talents being inadequate or aborted, he may most fittingly spend his life cherishing the masterpieces presented to humanity by other, much more fortunate individuals. I went to Ferrara first, since the marshy, reclaimed plain outside the city was a major Affirmcr launching site. I lingered a little while at one of my favorite buildings, the Palazzo dei Diamanti, shaking my head as helplessly as ever at the heavy building stones of which it is constructed and w'hich are cut and faceted like so many enormous jewels. To my mind, the city itself is a jewel, now somewhat dulled, that sparkled madly in the days of the Este court. One little city, one tiny, arrogant court -- I would so happily have traded them for the two billion steadfastly boorish Affirmcrs. Over sixty years of almost unchallenged political control, and did an entire planctful of them produce a single competitor for a Tasso or an Ariosto? And then I realized that at least one native Ferraran would have felt at ease in the world that . has just departed from me, its last romantic. I remembered that Savonarola had been born in Ferrara... The plain outside Ferrara also reminded me of the dour Dominican. The launching field, stretching away for quite a few flat miles, was strewn with enough possessions discarded at the last moment to make a truly towering Bonfire of Vanities. But what pathetic vanities! Here, a slide rule that some ship's commander had ordered thrown out before takeoff because the last inspection had revealed it to be in excess of what the Ship-Classification Manual listed as the maximum number of slide rules necessary for a vessel of that size. There, a mimeographed collection of tally sheets that had been dropped out of the closing air lock after every last item had been checked off as per regulations -- one check before the item by the Ministry of Survival and Preservation, and one check after the item by the Ministry of The Journey. Soiled clothing, somewhat worn implements, empty fuel and food drums lay about on the moist ground. Highly functional articles all, that had somehow come in the course of time to sin against function -- and had fallen swiftly from use. And, surprisingly, an occasional doll, not looking very much like a doll to be sure, but not looking like anything that had an objective purpose either. Looking about me at the squalid debris dotted so rarely with sentiment, I wondered how many parents had writhed with shame when, despite their carefully repeated admonitions and advance warnings, the last search had discovered something in the recesses of a juvenile tunic that could only be called an old toy -- or, worse yet, a keepsake. I remembered what my recreational adviser had said on that subject, long years ago. "It's not that we believe that children shouldn't have toys, Fiyatil; we just don't want them to become attached to any particular toy. Our race is going to leave this planet that's been its home from the beginning. We'll be able to take with us only such creatures and objects as are usable to make other creatures and objects which we'll need for sustenance wherever we come down. And because we can't carry more than so much weight in each ship, we'll have to select from among the usable objects those which are essential. "We won't take anything along because it's pretty, or because a lot of people swear by it, or because a lot of people think they need it. We'll take it along only because nothing else will do an important job so well. That's why I come to your home every month or so to inspect your room, to make certain that your bureau drawers contain only new things, that you're not falling into dangerous habits of sentimentality that can lead only to Custodianism. You've got far too nice a set of folks to turn into that kind of person." Nonetheless, I chuckled to myself, I had turned into that kind of person. Old Tobletej had been right: the first step on the road to ruin had been bureau drawers crammed with odds and ends of memory. The twig on which had sat the first butterfly I'd ever caught, the net with which I'd caught him, and the first butterfly himself. The wad of paper that a certain twelve-year-old lady had thrown at me. A tattered copy of a real printed book -- no facsimile broadcast, this, but something that had once known the kiss of type instead of the hot breath of electrons. The small wooden model of Captain Karma's starship, Man's Hope, which an old spacchand at the Lunar Line launching field had given me along with much misinformation... Those paunc hy bureau drawers! How my parents and teachers had tried to teach me neatness and a hatred of possessions! And here w'as I, now grown into man's estate, smug over my possession of a quantity of artistic masterpieces the like of which no Holy Roman Emperor, no Grand Khan, would have dared to dream about. started looking for the launching site robots. They were scattered about, almost invisible in the unimportant garbage of the spaceship field. After loading the ship, they had simply wandered about until they had run down. I activated them once more and set them to cleaning the field. This is something I will do in every one of the two hundred or so launching sites on Earth, and this is the chief reason I have been studying robotics. I want Earth to look as pretty as possible when she dies. I never could be an Affirmcr, I am afraid; I form strong attachments. Feeling as I did, I just couldn't continue on my trip without taking the quickest, the most cursory glance at Florence. Naturally. But as I should have expected, I got drunk on oil and marble and metalwork. Florence was empty of Florentines, but the glorious galleries were still there. I walked across the fine Ponte Vecchio, the only one of the famous Arno bridges to have escaped destruction in the Second World War. I came to Giotto's campanile and the baptistery doors by Ghiberti and I began to feel despair, desperation. I ran to the Church of Santa Croce to see Giotto's frescoes and the Convent of St. Mark's for Fra Angelico. What good was one year, what could I see of even a single city like this in a bare twelve months? I could view, I could gallop by, but what would I have time to sec? I was in the Boboli gardens trying frantically to decide whether to look up Michelangelo's David which I'd seen once before, or some Donatello which I hadn't, when the alarms went off. Both of them. The day before I'd left, I'd put together a small anthropometer tnat had originally been developed for locating lost colonists in the Venusian swamps. It was based on an entirely different design than the big machine that I'd found in the Hall of Gadgets. Since the circuits were unalike. and they had been planned for use in entirely different atmospheres, I believed they would serve as excellent checks on each other. I'd set the alarms to the frequency of my flyball communicator and had left the museum fairly confident that the only thing that could make both anthropometers go off would be the presence of a man other than myself. I flew back to the Museum, feeling very confused. Both pieces of equipment had responded the same way. The alarm had gone off, indicating the sudden materialization of Man on the planet. Then, when the stimulus had disappeared, both alarms had stopped. No matter howmany times I charged die directional dials on each anthropometer, there was not the faintest suspicion of mankind within their extreme range, which is a little under one- half of a light-year. The initial confusion has given w-ay to a strong feeling of discomfort. Something is very wrong here on Earth, something different than the sun getting ready to explode in a year. Possibly I have the nontechnician's blind faith in a piece of apparatus which I don't fully understand, but I don't believe that the anthropometers should be acting this way unless something really abnormal is occurring. It has pleased me to look upon this planet as an ocean-going ship about to sink, and myself as the gallant captain determined to go down with her. Abruptly, I feel as if the ship were beginning to act like a w'hale. I know what I must do. I'll move a supply of food down to the Hall of Gadgets and sleep right under the anthropometers. The alarm usually lasts for a minute or two. I can leap to my feet, charge the alldirection dials and get enough of a reading right then to know exactly where the stimulus is coming from. Then I will pop into my flyball and investigate. It's really very simple. Only, I don't like it M AY #, # -- I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself as only an old man who has been seeing ghosts in the graveyard should be ashamed. That, in fact, is the only excuse I can make to myself. I have, I suppose, been thinking too much about death recently. The coming extinction of Earth and the Solar System, my death which is inevitably involved with it, the counted species, the death of proud old cities that Man has reared and occupied for centuries... Well, perhaps the association with ghosties and beasties and other strange phenomena is understandable. When the alarms went off again this morning, I got a directional reading. My destination was the Appalachian Mountain region in eastern North America. The moment I got out of the flyball and took in the pale azure fog covering the cave mouth in front of me, I began to understand -- and feel ashamed. Through the fog, which thinned in one place and thickened in others as I watched, I could see several bodies lying on the floor of the cave. Obviously, one of them had to be alive for the anthropometer to have reacted as soon as enough to make the presence of a human mind detectable. I walked around to the back of the cave and found no exit. I went back to the museum in the flyball and returned with the necessary equipment. I deactivated the walked inside cautiously. The interior of the cave, which had evidently been furnished as a domestic and comfortable hideout, was completely wrecked. Somebody had managed to get an activator as which had not yet been given any particular shape and which, therefore, was about as stable as hydrogen and oxygen -- if it is permissable to use a metaphor from chemistry to illustrate negative force-field been activated as a sort of curtain across the mouth of the cave and had blown up immediately. But, since the activator was still operating and the entrance was fairly narrow, it continued to function as a curtain of insulating negative force, a curtain which had holes in it through which one could occasionally "peek" by means of the anthropometer at the people imprisoned inside. There were three bodies near the entrance, two male and one female, rather youthful-looking. From the quantity and type of statuary on the walls of the cave, it was easy to deduce that these people had belonged to one of the many numerous religious Custodian groups, probably the Fire in the Heavens cult. When, in the last week of the exodus, the Affirmcrs had denounced the Crohiik Agreement and stated that the Affirmation of Life required that even those who didn't Affirm had to be protected against themselves, these people had evidently taken to the mountains. Evading the subsequent highly effective search, they had managed to stay hidden until the last great vessel left. Then, suspecting as I had that at least one scout ship would return for a final round-up, they had investigated the properties of the anthropometer and found out about the only insulator, berrillit blue. Unfortunately, they had not found out enough. Deep in the rear of the cave, a body twisted brokenly to meet me. It was a young woman. My first reaction was absolute astonishment at the fact that she was still alive. The explosion seemed to have smashed her thoroughly below the waist. She had crawled from the cave mouth to the interior where the group had stored most of their food and water. As I teetered, momentarily undecided whether to leave her and get medication and blood plasma from a hospital in the region or to risk moving her immediately, she rolled over on her back. She had been covering a year-old infant with her body, evidently unblow again. And somehow, in spite of what must have been tremendous agony, she had been feeding the child. I bent down and examined the baby. He was quite dirty and covered with his mother's blood, but otherwise unharmed. I picked him up and, in answer to the question in the woman's eyes, I nodded. "He'll be all right," I said. She started what niav have been a nod in reply and stopped halfway through to die. I examined her carefully and, I will admit, a shade frantically. There was no pulse -- no heartbeat. I took the child back to the museum and constructed a sort of play pen for him out of empty telescope sections. Then I went back to the cave with three robots and had the people buried. I admit the gesture was superfluous, but it wasn't only a matter of neatness. However fundamental our differences, we were all of Custodian persuasion, generally speaking. It somehow made me feel as if I were snapping my fingers in the face of the entire smug Affirmation to respect their Firc-inHcarsfi eccentricities in this fashion. After the robots had completed their work, I placed a piece of the religious statuary (it was remarkably badly done, by the way) at the head of each grave and even said a short prayer, or rather a sermon. I developed the thought that I had suggested approximately a week earlier to some deer -- to wit, that in the midst of life we arc in death. I did not joke about it, however, but spoke seriously on the subject for several minutes. The robots who were my audience seemed even less excited by the intelligence than the deer had been. Which is understandable. M AY #, # -- I am annoyed. I am very, very annoyed and my great problem at the moment is that I lack an object on which to expend my annoyance. The child has been an incredible amount of trouble. I took him to the largest medical museum in the northern hemisphere and had him thoroughly examined by the best pediatric diagnostic machinery. He seems to be in excellent health, which is fortunate for both of us. And his dietarv # requirements, while not the same as mine, are fairly simple. I got a full tape on the kind of food he needs and, after a few readjustments in the commissar)' of the Museum of Modem Astronautics, I have arranged for this food to be prepared and delivered to him daily. Unfortunately, he does not seem to regard this arrangement, which took up an inordinate amount of my time, as wholly satisfactory. For one thing, he will not accept food from the regulation robot nursemaid which I have activated for him. This, I suspect, is because of his parents' odd beliefs: he probably has never encountered mechanical affection before. He will only cat when I feed him. That situation alone is intolerable, but I have found it almost impossible to leave him guarded by the robot nursemaid. Though he does little more than crawl, he manages to do this at a surprisingly fast pace and is always disappearing into dark corridors of the museum. Then an alarm is flashed to me and I have to break off my examination of the gigantic palace of the Dalai Lama, the Potala, and come scudding back from Lhasa halfway across the world to the Museum. Even then it would take us hours to find him -- and by "us" I mean every robot at my disposal -- if I were not able to resort to the anthropometer. This admirable gadget points out his hiding place very swiftly; and so, pulling him out of the firing chamber of the Space Howitzer in the Hall of Weapons, I return him to his playpen. Then, if I dare, and if it is not time for him to be fed, I mayreturn -- briefly -- to the Tibetan plateau. I am at present engaged in constructing a sort of enormous cage for him, with automatic heating and toilet facilities and devices that will screen out undesirable animals, insects and reptiles. Though this is taking up far too much of my time, it will be an excellent investment, I believe. I don't know quite what to do about the feeding problem. The only solution I can find in any of the literature on the subject that offers promise is the one about letting him go hungry if he refuses food from normal sources. After a brief experiment, however, in which he seemed cheerfully resigned to starvation, I was forced to give in. I now handle every one of his meals. The trouble is that I don't know whom to blame. Since I have been a Custodian from early manhood, I failed to see the need to reproduce. I have never been interested even slightly in children. I know very little about them and care less. I have always felt that my attitude was admirably summed up by Socrates' comments in the Symposium: "Who, upon reflecting on Homer and Hesiod and other such great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not like to emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?... Many are the temples which have been raised in their honor for the sake of such children as they have had, which were never raised in honor of anyone for the sake of his mortal children." Unfortunately, we are the only two humans alive on Earth, this child and I. We are going to our doom together; we ride the same round tumbril. And the treasures of the world which were wholly mine less than a week ago now belong at least partially to him. I wish we could discuss the matters at issue, not only to arrive at more equitable arrangements, but also for the sheer pleasure of the discussion. I have come to the conclusion that I began this journal out of unconscious terror when I discovered, after the Affirmers left, that Iwas completely alone. I find myself getting very wistful for conversation, for ideas other than my own, for opinions against which mine might be measured. Yet according to the literature on the subject, while this child might begin talking any day now, we will be immersed in catastrophe long before he learns to argue with me. I find that sad, however inevitable. How I wander! The fact is that once again I am being prevented from studying art as I would like. I am an old man and should have no responsibilities; I have all but laid down my life for the privilege of this study. It is extremely vexing. And conversation. I can just imagine the kind of conversation I might be having with an Affirmer at the moment, were one to have been stranded here with me. What dullness, what single-minded biological idiocy! What crass refusal to look at, let alone admit, the beauty his species has been seventy millennia in the making! The most he might have learned if he is a European, say, is a bit about the accepted artists of his culture. What would he know of Chinese painting, for example, or cave art? Would he be able to understand that in eaGh there were primitive periods followed by eras of lusty development, followed in turn by a consolidation of artistic gains and an increase in formalization, the whole to be rounded off by a decadent, inner-groping epoch which led almost invariably into another primitive and lusty period? That these have occurred again and again in the major cultures so that even the towering genius of a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven will likely be repeated -- in somewhat different terms -- in another complete cycle? That there was a Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Beethoven in each of several different "flower periods" in ancient Egyptian art? How could an Affirmer understand such concepts when he lacks the basic information necessary to understanding? When their ships departed from the moribund solar system laden only with immediately usable artifacts? When they refused to let their offspring keep childhood treasures for fear of developing sentimentality, so that when thev came to colonize Profor either the world that has died or the puppy that has been left behind? And yet history plays such incredible jokes on Man! They who ran away from their museums, who kept nothing but a cold microfilm record of what lay in their investment houses of culture, will learn that Man's sentimentality is not to be frustrated. The bleak, efficient ships that brought them to these alien worlds will become museums of the past as they oxidize out of existence on the strange sands. Their cruelly functional lines will become the inspiration for temples and alcoholic tears. What in the world is happening to me? How I run on! After all, I merely wanted to explain why I was annoyed... M AY #, # -- I have made several decisions. I don't know if I will be able to implement the most important of them, but I will try. In order, however, to give myself what I need most at the moment -- time -- I will write much less in this journal, if I write any more at all. I will try very hard to be brief. To begin with die least important decision: I have named the child Leonardo. Why I chose to name him after a man who, for all of his talents -- in fact, because of his talents -- I regard as the most spectacular failure in the history of art, I do not know. But Leonardo was a well-rounded man, something which the Affirmers are not -- and something which I am beginning to admit I am not. By the way, the child recognizes his name. He is not yet able to pronounce it, but it is positively miraculous the way he recognizes it. And he makes a sound which is very like mine. In fact, I might say -- Let me go on. I have decided to attempt an escape from the Earth -- with Leonardo. My reasons are many and complex, and I'm not certain that I understand them all, but one thing I do know. I have felt responsibility for a life other than my own and can no longer evade it. This is not a tardy emergence into Affirmer doctrine, but in a very real sense my own ideas come to judgment. Since I believe in the reality of beauty, especially beauty made with the mind and hands of man, I can follow no other course. I am an old man and will achieve little with the rest of my life. Leonardo is an infant: he represents raw potential; he might become anything. A song beyond Shakespeare's. A thought above Newton, above Einstein. Or an evil beyond Gilles dc Retz, a horror past Hitler. Or sheer mediocrity. Or quiet, unostentatious usefulness. But the potential should be realized. I think, under my tutelage, it is less likely to be evil and there I have a potential to be realized. In any case, even if Leonardo represents a zero personally, he may carry the germ-plasm of a Buddha, of a Euripides, of a Freud. And that potential must be realized... There is a ship. Its name is Man's Hope and it was the first ship to reach the stars, almost a century ago when it had just been discovered that our sun would explode and become a nova in a little less than a hundred years. It was the ship that discovered for Man the heart-quickening fact that other stars have planets and that many of those planets are habitable to him. It was a long time ago that Captain Karma brought his starship back down on the soil of Earth with the news that escape was possible. That was long before I was born, long before humanity divided unequally into Custodian and Affirmer and long, long before either group were the unwinking fanatics they had become five years agThe ship is in the Museum of Modern Astronautics. I know it has been kept in good condition. I also know that twenty years ago, before the Aflirmers had developed the position that absolutely nothing might be taken physically from a museum, the ship was equipped with the latest Lcugio Drive. The motive was that, if it were needed on Exodus Day, it might make the trip to a star in months instead of years or centuries. The only thing that I do not know is whether I, Fiyatil, the Custodian of Custodians and art critic extraordinary, can learn to run it in the time that Leonardo and I have left. But as one of my favorite comic characters remarked about the possibility of a man chopping his own head off : a man can try... There is something else on my mind, even more exciting in a way, but this comes first. I find myself looking at the Sun a good deal these days. And very scarchingly, too. Very. N ovember n, # -- i can do it. With the help of two robots which I will modify for the purpose, I can do it. Leonardo and I could leave immediately. But I have my other project to complete. And this is my other project. I am going to use all the empty space in the ship. It was built originally for different motors and a very large crew, and I am going to use that space as a. bureau drawer. Into that bureau drawer I will stuff the keepsakes of humanity, the treasures of its childhood and adolescence -- at least as many as I will he able to get in. For weeks I have been collecting treasures from all over the world. Incredible pottery, breath-taking friezes, glorious statuary and oil paintings almost beyond counting litter the corridors of the museum. Brueghel is piled on Bosch, Bosch piled on Durer. I am going to bring a little of everything to that star toward which I point my ship, a little to show what the real things were like. I am including things like the holograph manuscripts of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Gogol's Dead Souls, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn . and holographs of Dickens' letters and Lincoln's speeches. There arc many others, but I cannot takt everything. Within responsible limits, I must please myself . Therefore, I am not taking anything from the Sislinc Chapel ceiling. I have instead carved out two bits of the Last Judgment instead. They arc my favorites: the soul that suddenly realizes that it is condemned, and the Hayed skin on which Michelangelo painted his own portrait. The only trouble is that fresco weighs so much! Weight, weight, weight -- it is almost all I think about now. Even Leonardo follows me about and says "Weight, weight, weight!" He pronounces nothing else so well. Still, what should I take of Picasso? A handful of oils, yes, but I must take the. Guernica. And there is more weight. I have some wonderful Russian copper utensils and some Ming bronze bowls. I have a lime spatula from Eastern New Guinea made of oiled wood that has a delightfully carved handle (it was used in chewing betel nut and lime). I have a wonderful alabaster figure of a cow from ancient Sumer. I have an incredible silver Buddha from northern India. I have some Dahomean brass figures of a grace to shame Egypt and Greece. I have a carved ivory container from Benin, West Africa, showing a thoroughly Fifteenth Century European Christ on the cross. I have the "Venus" of Willendorf, Austria, the figure that was carved in the Aurignacian epoch of the paleolithic and which is part of the artistic tradition of the "Venus" art of prehistoric mankind. and Holbein, satiric prints by Hogarth, a beautiful Kangra painting of the eighteenth century on paper that shows little Mughal influence, Japanese prints by Takamaru and Hiroshige -- and where may I stop? How may I choose? I have pages from the Book of Kells, which is an illuminated hand-executed manuscript of almost unmatched beauty; and I have pages from the Gutenberg Bible which is the first book printed from movable type and which has illuminated pages to give the effect of a hand-copied manuscript, because the printers didn't want their invention discovered. I have a tughra of Sulaiman the Magnificent, a calligraphic emblem that formed headings for his imperial edicts; and I have a Hebrew Scroll of the Law whose calligraphy outshines the jewels which encrust the poles on which it is wound. I have Coptic textiles of the sixth century and Alengon lace of the sixteenth. I have a magnificent red krater vase from one of Athens' maritime colonies and a wooden figurehead of a minister from a New England frigate. I have a Rubens nude and an Odalisque by Matisse. In architecture -- I am taking the Chinese Compendium of Architecture which I think has never been equalled as a text and a model of a Le Corbusier house built by him. I would love to take one building, the Taj Mahal, but I am taking the pearl that the Mogul gave to her for whom he built the ineffable tomb. It is a reddish pearl, shaped like a pear and about three and a half inches long; shortly after it w-as buried with her, it turned up in the possession of an Emperor of China who set it on gold leaves and surrounded it with jade and emeralds. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was sold somewhere in the Near East for a tiny, ridiculous sum and ended in the Louvre. And a tool: a small stone fistaxe, the first thing known to have been made by human creatures. All this I have collected near the ship. But I've sorted none of it. And I suddenly remember, I have collected as yet no furniture, no decorated weapons, no etched glass... I must hurry, hurry! N ovember # -- shortly after I finished the last entry, I glanced upward. There were green specks on the sun and strange orange streamers seemed to plume out to all points of the compass. Evidently there was not to be a year. These were the symptoms of death that the astronomers had predicted. So there was an end to my collecting -- and my sorting was done in less than a day. The one thing I suddenly found I had to do, when it became obvious that my sections of Michelangelo would be too heavy, was to go to the Sistine Chapel ceiling after all. This time I cut out a relatively tiny thing -- the finger of the Creation as it stabs life into Adam. And I decided to take Da Vinci's La Gioconda after all, even though his Beatrice d'Este is more to my taste: the Mona Lisa's smile belongs to the world. All posters are represented by one Toulouse-Lautrec. I dropped the Guernica: Picasso is represented instead by an oil from his blue period and a single striking ceramic plate. I dropped Harold Paris' The Eternal Judgment because of its bulk: all I have of his now is the print Burchcnwald # # , "Where Are We Going?" And somehow or other, in my last-minute haste, I seem to have selected a large number of Safavid bottles from Iran of future historians and psychologists puzzle out the reasons for my choices: they are now irrevocable. We are proceeding toward Alpha Ccntauri and should arrive in five months. How will we and all our treasures be received, I wonder? I suddenly feel insanely cheerful. I don't think it has anything to do with my rather belated realization that I, who have so little talent and have failed so miserably in the arts, will achieve a place in the history of art like no other man -- a kind of esthetic Noah. No, it is the fact that I am carrying both the future and the past to a rendezvous where they still have a chance to come to terms. A moment ago Leonardo bounced a ball against the visiplate and, looking at it, I observed that old Sol was expanding apoplertically. As I remarked to him then: "I find, to my astonishment, that in the midst of death, I am -- at last, at last! -- truly in life." IF grows up and goes monthly with the March issue, on sale January #th. We hope you'll be on hand for every new issue!... Watch for further announcements. See So Evil Froman was a totally un-mad scientist ; if anything , he was too sane for his own good. That spark on the moon intrigued him -- why shouldn't he investigate it? By Dean McLaughlin Illustrated by Paul Oban know there was anyone but himself in the observatory until he # heard somebody open the door to the dome, and then the hollowmetallic sound of feet on the enclosed, steep stairway which hugged the curve of the outside wall. Perhaps, Froman thought, it was Jameson. working late in his office and coining up for a chat. But that possibility. he had to admit, was unlikely; an astronomer on visual ob servation is not particularly disposed to conversation. There was too much to concentrate upon, without talking. And everyone knew what lie was doing tonight: it was there on the work schedule. He frowned, leaned back from the telescope's eyepiece, and looked across the dome to the stairhead. A man in a brown checked overcoat emerged from the stairwell, taking each step heavily as hi came. The light on the wall nearby icvealed him as a mass of form and shadow. Except for the dull red glow over the switchboard panel, it was the only illumination in the dome. That and the Hood of moonlight pouring through the open slot in the hemispheric roof. Froman did not recognize the man; certainly, he was no one in the department. And no one else had any business here at this hour of the night. The stranger's hat brim cast a shadow over most of his face, revealing only the tip of his nose and tire chin which was giving way gradually to plumpness. But even the heavy overcoat could not disguise the man's build: he ate a little too much, and exercised not quite enough. He paused a moment at the head of the stairs, with the lone light behind and to the right of his shoulder. He stood there, feet placed firmly, peering across the darkened dome. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw Froman at the telescope and came across the floor. His footsteps thudded hollowly as he passed over the hatchway used for bringing up heavy equipment. Froman watched him come, and, when he was near, said, "How did you get in?" "I had a key," the man answered offhandedly. "You're Charles Froman, aren't you?" His tone irnmediatcly challenged any denial. When Froman nodded, the man reached inside his coat and brought cut a wallet. Propping it open with his 'thumb, he offered it to the astronomer for inspection. "The name's Mackey. I'm from Military Security. On business." His voice dean McLaughlin echoed strangely in the dome, and the way he said "Military Security" included capitalization. Because it was dark in the dome, Froman could not see the card in the wallet until he flashed a penlitc on it. The card only repeated the man's claims. Froman turned the beam on the man's face. The security agent blinked heavy eyelids, then squinted from under overhanging brows. Froman snapped ofT the penlitc and returned it to the inside pocket of his suitcoat. underneath the shabby overcoat he wore against the cold of waning autumn. "I don't quite see what you'd want with me," he said uncertainly. "We're the ones who'll decide that," Mackey answered shortly. "I just want to talk to you." Froman had bent over the telescope's eyepiece, but now he looked up again. "What about?" "Let's just say we're interested in your work." "But this is hardly the time -- " The agent didn't let him finish. "The fewer the people who know about my coming here, the better. They might guess too much. And no one will interrupt us this time of night, cither." He jammed his hands in his coat pockets, defending them against the cold. "This is a confidential visit," he went on. "We don't want anyone to know, and you aren't to repeat anything about it. Not anything. You understand?" "I suppose so. But I still don't understand what you want with me. All I do is teach a few classes and some research. What's that got to do with... Military Security?" He sounded puzzled. He was. "The less you know, the better we'll all feel," Mackey told him evasively. He continued, carefully deciding exactly what he wanted to say before saying it. "There's some question about how much you know, and if you know' less than we're afraid you do, we'd rather this visit didn't tell you more." "In other words, I'm to be quizzed about something I don't know." "We're sure you know something. The question is: how much?" The agent hunched his shoulders against the cold. "Look. Can't we go somewhere else and talk? It's cold up here." "It's always cold here in the winter," Froman answered. "We get used to it." "Well, I'm not used to it." "I didn't ask you to come. If you prefer, you can come to my office tomorrow afternoon. You can talk to me then." "We'll talk now. The longer it's put off, the more danger there is." "I'm busy right now." "We're not in the habit of waiting" "Half of astronomy is waiting for something to happen," Froman said. He was trying to be patient. "And when it does, an astronomer doesn't like to be interrupted. You can wait a little while -- what goes on in the sky doesn't." "How long will it take you?" the agent grumbled. "That depends. You might say I'm waiting for something I think might happen. If I do see something tonight, I might be quite a while." He looked straight at Macke v. # The security agent swung away. There wasn't much point in arguing with the man. ' Mind if I smoke?" "No. Go ahead," F roman answered. He added pointedly, "There's an ashtrav on the table # over there." He waved a hand toward the well-used table standing beside the larger of the two piers which supported the telescope. The red glow of the lamp on the switchboard mounted against the larger pier fell on the twin-bladed knife switches and the table below it. Mackey found the ashtray -- a very small one -- on one corner ol the table, most of which was occupied by a stack of photographic plates, a small radio, and an electrically driven sidereal clock and # red spotlight combination. Sullenly, the agent lit up and waited. lie glowered resentfully at the nolonger-used pendulum clock on the far side of the switchboard. Charles Froman dismissed the agent from his thoughts as he bent over the telescope's eyepiece. Besides his ancient overcoat he wore a fur-lined cap with car flaps, and for the most part kept his hands in his pockets. He sat crouched on the adjustable-height seat mounted on a wooden frame resembling a relic of the Spanish Inquisition. The moon was large under the magnification of the #-inch reflector. Froman could onlv see a small fraction of it at a time. But he only wanted to see one spot, an area shaped like a circle and just ninety miles across. It was in the center of his field of vision, a low-walled. eroded crater without a central peak, having a fairly level interior broken by only one or two secondary craters of any appreciable size. Under the lunar noon, the features were not very obvious -- there was not enough shadow. After five minutes of searching the walled plain, he sat back and changed eyepieces -- the new one providing for greater magnification. He took advantage of the moment to relax his cramped muscles before bending over the new eyepiece. A while later, he tried an even more powerful lens, hut the seeing wasn't good enough. As he shoved the seat-rack away, he muttered to himself, "I might as well throw those plates away. If I can't see anything. they won't show anything cither." But he knew he'd develop the plates anyway, and study them carefully, and compare them with earlier plates and photos dating back many years. There was always the chance of something else showing up, something other than the thing he had been looking for. Astronomy always was waiting for something to happen -- or, more exactly. waiting to find out if something had happened. After that came the other half, the questions: what had happened, exactly, and why? "Through now?" the sulking security agent wanted to know. He was on his third cigarette, and his fingers and ears were getting cold. Froman had practically forgotten the intruder. "I'll be with you in a minute," he promised without looking around. He stretched his longboned body to get the kinks out, then turned the wheel fixed to the side of the telescope barrel, the wheel which disengaged the instrument from the tracking mechanism. Coming around, he strode across the dome to a point below and slightly to one side of the open slot through which the moonlight splashed on the floor and the telescope mountings. He hauled on the pulley rope until the shutters groaned toward each other and collided with a solid sound that echoed in the dome for a long time. Brushing hands on his shabby coat, he came back and opened the switches on the panel. The red light went abruptly out. He lifted the stack of exposed plates from the table. "All right. Let's go." The agent crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. The three butts nearly filled its small bowl. "About time," he grumbled. He stuffed his hands in the deep pockets of his overcoat and followed Froman over to the stairs. "Sec anything?" lie asked the astronomer gruffly. "Nothing beyond the ordinary," Froman replied uninterestedly, starting down the stairs. He held the plates he carried carefully with both hands. "What d'you mean by that?" Mackey wanted to know. Froman's feet hesitated on the steps, but he did not turn. After a moment he gave a small shrug. "Nothing anybody else hasn't ever seen, I guess," he explained. "Less than some, even." "You were expecting you would?" "Something like that," Froman admitted absently. "I sort of hoped, but the phase is wrong to hope too dean McLaughlin much. But there is something funny up there." tom step. Holding the plates against him with one hand, he turned the doorknob with the other. Once through, he set the plates on a windowsill beside the door and waited for Mackcv. Then he snapped off the light at the top of the stairs, closed and locked the door. When Froman turned away from the door, Mackey was glancing at the three green file cases standing in the corner formed by the pyramidal pier supporting the telescope's weight and the wall which separated the dome section from the remainder of the observatory. Froman noticed the agent's curiosity, but said nothing to remove it. He collected the plates from the windowsill and pushed through the heavy fire door beside the cabinets. Sullen, Mackey followed. The corridor had windows on the left side, and two doors on the other. Farther along, just short of where the corridor broadened suddenly to the right, the window side was flanked by three tables, one of which bore a covered mimeograph machine. Froman paused at the first door. "Just a minute while I drop these off." he said, and ducked inside the darkroom before Mackey could reply. He returned a moment later without the plates. The second door was already open. Froman reached around the jamb and snapped on the light. It was one of the old type of wall switches; not pushed or flipped, but twisted. He motioned Mackey in ahead of him. "My office," he said simply. The office was deep, well lighted, indifferently furnished, and cluttered. The center was dominated by four long tables which served as desks. In a corner by one of the two windows was a typewriter on a low, wheeled cable. In the corner to the right of the door were two high, deep-shelved bookcases. In another corner was a cot, where Froman sometimes rested while waiting his turn at the telescope on the second half of a split night. A file cabinet stood at the foot of the cot. and beyond the cabinet an open doorway led into another, smaller room. Mackey advanced into the room and glanced over the tables. They were piled with papers, old bluebooks, scientific journals printed in a variety of languages, a few newspapers, and miscellaneous articles of equipment. The agent scowled at a booklet with Russian characters on its cover. He picked up a paperweight and weighed it idly in his hand. It was a sunburst of large quartz crystals, very shiny and striking under the light. In the corners where the crystals joined, he saw a few traces of dried clay. He looked at Froman qucstioningly. "I found it on a field trip," the astronomer explained. The security agent frowned. "But you're an astronomer. I don't get it." "It's my hobby: geology." "A hobby" the agent echoed. "Yes -- it's in vour record. Sort of odd for a star gazer, isn't it?" "Not really. After all. the earth is one of the planets, and we can study it in more detail than any other. What's odd about that?" "Nothing," the agent mumbled. Froman pulled off his fur lined cap. "You can take your coat off. It's warm down here. Just leave it anywhere." He removed his own overcoat and laid it on the cot, stuffing the cap into one of the pockets. Mackey folded his coat over tire back of the chair and set his hat on top of it. Without being invited, lie appropriated the swivel chair which faced a part of the table spread with a large green blotter of ancient vintage and backed by a row ol reference texts. "How do you guys stand it?" he asked. "The cold. I mean." Froman turned his head halfwav toward him. "Pneumonia is an occupational disease." "Really?" F roman's grin showed teeth. "Do Eskimos catch cold?' he asked pointedly. "But if you think it was chilly up in the dome, you should have seen the North Atlantic during the war " He shivered in recollection. The agent swung around and stared at the wall behind him. seeing for his trouble a reproduction of a painting by an artist with imagination and a way with oils that produced ncar-carneralikc detail: a spaceship -- hypothetical, of course -- newly landed on the moon: men in outfits like diving suits working in the foreground: and a background of savagely rugged peaks just beginning to catch the first harsh rays of the rising sun. dean McLaughlin Froman noticed Mackey's interest. "There's a storv about that painting," he said. "Seems that once one of us astronomers saw a kodachrome of it, and he thought the government was doing more than it was telling with its rocket experiments." Mackey's eyes snapped around and fixed on Froman. Then he grinned suddenly. "Heads in the clouds," he observed contemptuously. "Don't you star gazers ever look where you put your feet?" "When I'm on vacation," Froman answered. He nodded toward the quartz paperweight. "But Aesop wisecracked about an astrologer who didn't, if that makes you any happier." Mackey held his peace. He studied Froman's lean, narrownosed face and wide, squarish forehead through momentarily slitted eyes. He dug a cigarette pack from his pocket, offered it and was refused, took one himself and tapped it on his thumbnail before placing it between his lips. He lit the kitchen match by holding it in one hand and nicking the head with his thumbnail. He looked around for an ashtray, but there were none in evidence. Froman pushed a wastebasket toward him with his foot. The security agent nodded acknowledgement. The security agent...BT why the man was here. For a time they had been almost friendly, but that time was behind them now. This man suspected him of something -- his manner was almost an open accusation. It didn't particularly matter what the something was, but Froman felt an angry pang at the injustice of it. This man barging in in the middle of the night, acting secretive and hinting subtle threats. Froman planted himself stiffly in a straight backed chair. "You said vou wanted to talk with me," he said. "We were hoping you'd be more cooperative." "I'll cooperate," Froman told him. "But that doesn't mean I have to like it." Mackey dropped a length of ash in the wastebasket. He didn't look at Froman. "All right. If that's the way you want it," he said, and clamped his lips together. When he parted them again, he said, "We're not accusing you of anything. We're certain you aren't doing anything deliberately. Understand that?" Froman nodded, but he didn't say anything. "I want you to tell me about your work," the agent said. "I suppose you mean my research," Froman said. "But I have several projects in progress. Just which one is it?" Mackey sat forward abruptly. "This moon business," he explained curtly. "What you've seen, what you think about it, who you've mentioned it to -- everything. What got you started on it? Especially that." He sat back and cocked his ear. Froman half-closed his eyes to collect his thoughts and assemble them in the proper order. "I got started on it... oh, six or eight months ago." He started to rise. "I could tell you exactly if I had my notebook." Mackey waved him down. "Maybe later. Get on with it." Stiffly, Froman reseated himself. "About once a month, we have a visitor's night here. Anybody who wants to tan come in and have a peek through the reflector. We show them some of die planets, depending on which ones arc in the sky at the time; maybe point out something or other, and answer any questions we can make sense out of. That time, the moon was just at first quarter, and we decided to show the shadow cllcct of the craters on the moon when the sun's just starting to hit them -- you know', the whole ring all white, and the inside black except where the sunlight's hitting the central peak." "We don't care about the science," Mackey said. I'roman roused himself, about to say something angry. But he put the impulse aside. "We trained the telescope on the center of the disk -- right where the sun was coming up and halfway between the poies. The seeing was pretty good, and we bad an eyepiece nuking for a total magnification of I f)# times." Mackey interrupted. "What's the maximum?" "About two thousand, but it takes several miracles of good seeing to make it. Most of the time, things would just blur at that power. It's the atmosphere." "All right. Go on." Remembering. Froman smiled. "It was a kid -- a little girl about ten or twelve. She'd probably never seen a telescope that big before, and she was pretty excited. You could tell, that way she stayed at the 'scope so long without moving. Then she looked up and wanted to know what the spark was. Well, I looked and after a while I saw what she meant -- it was a spark of light inside one of the darkened craters. If it had been near the center. I would have said it was the central peak, but it was more than hallway to the western side, and it was really too bright to be that. A peak just getiing the sun would be white, but this spark had something else -- more like a magnesium flare, or the sun shining on something like a minor. I didn't know what it was." "What did you tell the kid?" "Oh. some wild guess. I called it a guess though -- I didn't make any bones about not knowing." "What was the guess?" Mackey gave the impression of an almost wolflike eagerness to snap at any fact. "A bit of volcanic glass," Froman admitted. "Some people claim the crater-, arc volcanic, and I hung the theory on that. It's a terribly weak theory, though, on several counts. I didn't believe it myself, and I said so." "Then it was this spark that got you interested," Mackey suggested. "That's right. I've been investigating it ever since." Mackey extinguished his cigarette butt against the rim of the wastebasket. When he looked up. his eyes were bearing directly on Froman. "What else have you seen? "Well, the next night I had a look, and most of the crater had sun on it and the spark was gone. But there was a black spot where it dean McLaughlin had been." "What did it look like?" Mackey pressed. "Just a spot. It was too small to see any shape to it. It may have been slightly oval, but I wasn't sure then so I can't be now." "That's all you've seen? Nothing else?" "I'm not sure," Froman said. He pulled at his right ear lobe. "Once when I had very good seeing I thought maybe there was really more than one spark -- that maybe it was two, possibly more -- quite close together. With lower powers, they'd tend to merge together." "What about the shadow?" "I couldn't tell. That could be several shadows merging too. I haven't had a real chance to find out -- for one thing, the reflector we have here isn't big enough, and the seeing isn't good enough to get more than a flyspeck. It's like trying to read Braille with leather gloves on." "Anything else?" "Yes. One other thing. One night I thought I saw part of the spark break away from the rest. It moved slowly toward the west -- lunar west, that is. But I couldn't really be sure about that. The seeing was good that night, but the thing was so faint it could have been my imagination. It probably was, because it didn't stop with the crater wall -- just kept on going and finally I lost it." Mackey was thoughtful. He looked at the floor and said nothing for a while. "Well?" Froman demanded. "Trying to decide what to ask you next." "Why ask anything?" Mackey looked almost ready to hit him, but he quickly subsided. "What about this crater you're talking so much about? How much do you know?" "I investigated it as soon as I was certain there really was something there. It's located right in the center of the moon's disk as we see it from earth. It's about ninety miles across, circular, and flat as a lake. No peak in the center -- nothing unusual in that, though. The name's Ptolemacus, if that means anything to you. I looked up some photographs from Mount Wilson and studied them -- there wasn't any sign of any black spot, or any sparks either. Nor any record of anyone seeing them before." "How do you explain what you saw, then?" "I don't," Froman shrugged. "I saw the spark and the shadow -- both of them. It's not the first time somebody's seen some change on the moon's surface; there arc a few records, though most of them aren't very reliable, and none can really be checked completely. But I am convinced I'm seeing something. Just the fact that it was a kid who pointed it out shows I'm not imagining things." "You don't have to get mad about it," Mackey said. Froman shook his head. "I'm not mad," he protested. "Then don't act like it. What about photographs? You've been taking some, haven't you?" "Just a waste of plates," Froman commented. "They didn't show anything, then." The man was persistent. "I have a couple of plates which might show something, but it's hard to be sure. It doesn't take much to fudge a plate -- a change in the seeing, errors in tracking, the grain and sensitivity of the plate. Everything's against getting anything, really." "You can sec things, but you can't photo them. That right?" "That's about it. If we had a big enough telescope here, I might be able to do something. But -- " he shrugged -- "we don't." Mackey muttered something not particularly sympathetic. "And just what do you think about these things you've been seeing -- how would you explain them?" "I don't know what it is," Froman confessed. He wondered what the man was driving at. Why all the questions? Why should Military Security be so interested? "All I know," he went on, "is that it's something new. It wasn't there until quite recently. It's high enough and large enough to cast a shadow I can see with the #-inch, and it reflects sunlight like a mirror when the angle is right. Flow it got there, or just what it is, I wouldn't know -- but it's there." gertips together and glanced upward at the cracked ceiling. His eyes had heavy lids. "Have you told anyone about this yet?" He sounded studiedly casual. "Of course," Froman told him, surprised. Why should he keep it a secret? "Jameson was with me the first night, and he saw the spark too -- and so did most of the visitors. At least they said they did. Half of them would see a little man with a green beard if you told them he was there." "Anyone else?" Froman's eyebrows inched toward one another. What was this man after? "I notified Harvard," he went on. He didn't like being prodded this way. "But nothing caine of it. Don't ask me why. Maybe thev decided it wasn't important. And I've mentioned it to most of the men in the department. And last week I wrote to a man I know out in California -- at Mount Wilson -- and asked him to take a look. I haven't heard anything from him yet." "Anyone else?" Mackey asked again, after a silence. "No. I think that's all." Mackey regarded the ceiling again, as if there was something important written there. "Now suppose you just abandoned the project -- just suppose. What would they think?" Froman tugged at his lower lip. "Nothing much, I guess. They know we haven't a big enough telescope for this kind of work. I've seen about all I could hope to sec. In fact, they might think it was odd if I kept up." He stopped abruptly. and his tone became hard. "Are you asking me to drop the project?" "Isn't that obvious?" Mackey said. He regarded his fingernails. Froman brought his hand down flat on the table beside him as he pushed himself up out of his chair. The jar caused a stack of papers to collapse sidewise, and the paperweight rolled noisily over the dean McLaughlin stained and varnished wood. It was a stone polished to a glistening finish -- a stone with fossilized plants in it. "Why?" he demanded. He stood, one hand gripping the table edge. "Because we want you to," Mackey said, as if that was the most authoritative reason in the world. "Because we tell you to. And we don't want you telling anyone about what you already know: what you've seen and my coming here, both. This spark and shadow. They don't exist. Understand me? They don't exist." "They do," Froman insisted. "I saw them, and so did Jameson." "Military Security says they don't exist." Mackey told him with austere finality. "Now do you understand?" "I understand that you're butting into something that's none of your affair," Froman told him. He could be just as forceful as the agent. The insides of his fists were beginning to sweat, and his face was burning. "I think this is still a free country," he said. "The government has no business telling people what they can and can't see, and there are no lies in astronomy -- you can prove the truth just by looking through a telescope. Anybody can look through a telescope. It was a kid who saw the thing first, not me." The agent abandoned his toughness. "Mr. Froman," he said, trying to calm him. "This is a matter of war and peace. What you've seen has got to be kept secret." "You can't keep secrets in astronomy," Froman snapped. "All you have to do is look up and see what's there. You can't keep that a secret. It's the same moon over Russia, don't forget." Cooling slightly, he continued. "I can sec some point in keeping secrets in physics, and chemistry -- even biology. They're all concerned with things here on Earth, and you people can use them for weapons. But astronomy is different. What effect could anything in astronomy have on war and peace? What are you? An astrologer?" "I'm a security agent, and I can't answer your questions. The less you know, tlie better. You can't repeat what you don't know. We want you to keep this moon business secret. Understand? All of it. You never saw that spark, or the shadow -- or me. That's all you have to know. Understand?" "They have telescopes in Russia, and they can look at the moon too. You can't keep anything a secret in astronomy. Anyone can take a look. You're being silly." "They have atoms in Russia, too," Mackey pointed out. "And just because they can take a look at the moon if they want doesn't mean we have to tell them where to look and what to see. Sit down and think a while. It's not as silly as you think. And it is a matter of war and peace; that's why you've got to keep your mouth shut." "Why should I? I don't like being told to do something without being told the reasons. Just because it's the government giving the orders doesn't make them anv more reasonable. I want to know why." "I've already told you. This is no game." "And just what on the moon," Froman asked acidly, "could be as important as all that?" Mackey seemed about to say something out of irritation. But he caught himself long before he found the words. Me was leaning back in the chair, his chin almost touching his chest, his eyes like twin drills boring into Froinan. In that moment, tilings fell into place in Froman's mind. Everything did make sense. Very startling sense. he'd seen the abundant articles in newspapers and magazines and Sunday supplements, speculating on the immense strategic value of a military base on the moon -- a base which could bombard any place on Earth, and yet. because of the Earth's more powerful gravitation, be nearly invulnerable to an Earth-staged attack. As an astronomer, he had taken perhaps a somewhat more than ordinary interest in the speculations. But he had never thought... It had never occurred to him that... Froman's glance drifted toward the painting on the wall. The spaceship, a bit of sunlight high up on its tapering prow: a spark. And the lunar mountains in the background. It was almost like a photograph, it seemed so real. For an instant, he imagined that the spacesuited figures actually moved; that the picture was no picture, but real. Of course it was a painting -- there was even a signature down in the lower right hand corner -- but... "How much..." he asked slowly, "how much have they been doing in New Mexico that we haven't been told about?" I hr security agent let his breath out slowly. "We were afraid you'd figure it out," lie said, "just from my coming here. But we couldn't take the chance ol letting you tell anybody about what you'd seen. They might catch on faster." "I don't jump to conclusions," Froman told him. "You're not to tell anybody about this. That base has to be kept secret. Understand?" Froman frowned. "I don't see why." "That's the policy we've decided on. It's got to be kept secret." Mackev sat forward, his hand grasping the table edge between thumb and palm. Mis other hand pointed. "We're warning you, Mr. Froman. If you let anything out and we catch you, there are plenty of laws we could get you with." "I didn't ask you to come here," Froman said with offense. He disliked being threatened. "I didn't ask to be told anything. I'd never have guessed if you hadn't come here. I've learned more from you than from all eight months with the telescope. If you hadn't come, I'd have just shrugged my shoulders and forgotten it. It's not the first time somebody's seen something on the moon he couldn't understand -- we're still not even certain what caused the craters. Even if I'd had a report of it published, nobody would have noticed. But vou had to come and answer all the questions I couldn't find the answers to. That doesn't speak so well for your security methods." "Never mind that. The point is, dean McLaughlin you're going to keep your mouth shut." "Not until I have a good reason," Froman answered stubbornly. Without his realizing it. his hand closed around the polished fossil-stone paperweight. "You don't seem to grasp die fact that science and secrecy don't fit together too well. We're working for truth and knowledge. Secrecy is just the opposite. And we scientists aren't accustomed to keeping secrets from one another." He jerked a hand toward a stack of foreign language journals. "It's you security hounds who've tried to change that." "This isn't science," Mackey answered. "It's a military affair, and it's got to be kept secret. Science hasn't anything to do with it." "You still haven't given any reasons. I'm not a puppet for you to order around. If I'm supposed to do something, I've got to know why -- and then I'll decide for myself whether I'll do it or not." "We had hoped you'd be more cooperative." Mackey was trying to be persuasive now, but lacked the proper tact. "Cooperation works both ways," Froman reminded him. "If you'll cooperate with me, then perhaps I'll cooperate with you. But not until then." "The trouble with you astronomers is that you look at the sky too much. There' re still such things as governments around, and nations -- especially one called Russia. And there's something else called espionage laws. If you don't cooperate, you can't say we didn't warn you." "You're a bit late, aren't you? What about Harvard, and the man at Mount Wilson?" "Forget about them. They're taken care of. Long ago. How do you think we found out about you? What we want to know now is il you'll cooperate." "I haven't much choice, have I?" Froinan said bitterly. "Listen. We'd rather keep it a secret than jail you for talking. Get that? And we don't know whether we can trust you or not. There. I'm putting it to you straight. What's your answer?" Froman leaned his weight against the table. He thought a moment. "Just how important is this? I mean, do you have any good reason for keeping this base a secret? Or are you people just in love with the idea of secrecy for its own sake?" "I told you. It's war and peace." "Maybe I'm just dense or tired or something," Froman said in mock apology. "But that still doesn't mean anything to me. I should think that if the Kremlin found out about the base, we'd have a much easier time of things. A moon base is too much of a strategic advantage. Why keep it a secret?" Mackey snorted disgustedly. "You'd better stick to star gazing. You may know something about that. Listen. If they found out about it, they'd take a gamble. They'd know they were beaten anyway -- their only chance would be if the base weren't ready yet. They'd take a chance on it. The day after the Kremlin hears we've got a base on the moon will be the day the next war starts." " Is it ready?" "We could use it if we had to," Mackey said. "But we'd rather not for a while yet. We'd like to have it self-sufficient -- mining its own ores and making its own machinery and bombs, generating its own power, and growing all its own food. So it could keep on fighting even if it was cut off. Right now, it has to be supplied from our New Mexico base. Don't think that base couldn't be wrecked if the Commies wanted to bad enough." He caught his breath suddenly. "Maybe I'm telling you too much," he hurried on. "But you see why it's got to be kept quiet. You don't want to be responsible for another war, do you?" "No," Froman said tonelessly. He studied the outlines of the fossils in the paperweight he held. His thumb rubbed at the smooth surface. He tilted the stone in the light. Mackey watched him. Finally, he said, "You were in the Navy in the last war, weren't you." "You seem to know," Froman said. He wasn't at all interested. "And now you're in the Reserve, I suppose." "You practically have to be, if you were an officer. Why?" "Just checking. We'd feel a lot better if we had you under security regulations." "What do you mean by that?" Mackey shrugged. "Nothing. Just thinking out loud. Forget it." He stood up and pulled on his coat. "I'll be leaving now. It's pretty late." He favored the quartz paperweight with a quick glance. Under the lights, it was almost diamondlike. He turned from it and moved past Froman, who hadn't moved, the fossil-stone still cradled in unconscious hands. At the door, Mackey paused, turned back. Froman still hadn't moved. "Remember. Don't tell anyone. Understand?"  ant Charles Froman, U.S.N.R., was informed of his recall to active service. They wanted to make the moon base self-sufficient. That meant mining ores on the moon. The ores had to be located first. Besides being an astronomer, Charles Froman was a geologist, and he knew his minerals. Once the novelty wore off, it was just prolonged monotony. There wasn't much to occupy his time except his work -- wandering over sun-bleached, dcssicatcd, airless terrain in an outfit which combined the dubious virtues of a Turkish bath and a claustrophobe's private brand of hell. And, except for that, nothing. Nothing but collecting pay (extra for special duty) he couldn't spend and counting up the furlough time he had due him but couldn't take because there was nowhere to go. And they didn't care if he talked to anvone about the moon base or not. The only people he could tell already knew. They were there, weren't they? The women had made up their minds, and nothing -- repeat, nothing -- could change them. But something had to give... By Jerome Bixby Illustrated by Kelly Freas me to have a child," Mary Pornscn said, "you can just forget about it. We girls have made up our minds." Hugh Farrel, Chief Medical and leaned back in his chair. He looked at Mary's husband. "And you. Ralph," he said. "How do you feel?" Ralph Pornscn looked at Mary uncomfortably, started to speak and then hesitated. Hugh Farrel sighed again and closed his eyes. It was that way with all the boys. The wives had the whip hand. If the husbands put up an argument, they'd simply get turned down flat: no sex at all, children or otherwise. The threat, Farrel thought wryly, made the boys softer than watered putty. His own wife, Alice, was one of the ringleaders of the "no babies" movement, and since he had openly declared warfare on the idea, she wouldn't even let him kiss her good-night. (For fear of losing her determination, Farrel liked to think.) He opened his eyes again to look past the Pornsens, out of the curving port of his office-lab in the Exside the ship. At the edge of the clearing he could sec Danny Stern and his crew, tiny beneath the cavernous sunbeam-shot overhang of giant leaves. Danny was standing up at the controls of the 'dozer, waving his arms. His crew was struggling to get a log set so he could shove it into place with the 'dozer. They were repairing a break in the barricade -- the place where one of New Earth's giant saurians had come stamping and whistling through last night to kill three colonists before it could be blasted out of existence. It was difficult. Damned difficult. A brand-new world here, all ready to receive the refugees from dying Earth. Or rather, all ready to be made ready, which was the task nel. An Earth-like world. Green, warm, fertile -- and crawling, leaping, hooting and snarling with ferocious beasts of every variety. Farrel could certainly see the women's point in banding together and refusing to produce children. Something inside a woman keeps her from wanting to bring life into peril -- at least, when the peril seems temporary, and security is both remembered and anticipated. Pornsen said, "I guess I feel just about like Mary docs. I -- I don't see any reason for having a kid until we get this place ironed out and safe to live in." "That's going to take time, Ralph." Farrcl clasped his hands in front of him and delivered the speech he had delivered so often in the past few weeks. "Ten or twelve years before we really get set up here. We've got to build from the ground up, you know. We'll have to find and mine our metals. Build our machines to build shops to build more machines. There'll be resources that we won't find, and we'll have to learn what this planet has to offer in their stead. Colonizing New Earth isn't simply a matter of landing and throwing together a shining city. I only wish it were. "Six weeks ago we landed. We haven't yet dared to venture more than a mile from this spot. We've cut down trees and built the barricade and our houses. After protecting ourselves we have to eat. We've planted gardens. We've produced test-tube calves and piglets. The calves are doing fine, but the piglets are dying one by one. We've got to find out why. "It's going to be a long, long time before we have even a minimum of security, much less luxury. Longer than you think... So much longer that waiting until the security arrives before having children is out of the question. There arc critters out there -- " he nodded toward the port and the busy clearing beyond -- "that we haven't been able to kill. We've thrown everything we have at them, and they come back for more. We'll have to find out what will kill them -- how they differ from those we are able to kill. We arc six hundred people and a spaceship. Ralph. We have techniques. That's all. Everything else we've got to dig up out of this planet. We'll need people, Mary; we'll need the children. We're counting on them. They're vital to the plans we've made." Marv Pornsen said. "Damn the #  plans. I won't have one. Not now. You've just done a nice job of describing all my reasons. And all the other girls feel the same way." at the 'dozer and crew. Danny Stern was still waving his arms; the log was almost in place. "George and May Wright were killed last night. So was Farelli. If George and May had had a child, the inon ster would have trampled it too -- it went right through their cabin like cardboard. It isn't fair to bring a baby into -- " Farrel said, "Fair. Marv? Mavbe it isn't fair not to have one. Not to bring it into being and give it a chance. Life's always a gamble -- " "It doesn't exist," Mary said. She smiled. "Don't try circumlocution on me. Doc. I'm not religious. I don't believe that spermatazoa and an ovum, if not allowed to cuddle up together, add up to murder." "That isn't what I meant -- " "You were getting around to it -- which means you've run out ol good argument'..." "No. I've a few left." Farrel looked at the two stubborn faces: Mary's, pleasant and pretty, but set as steel; Ralph's, uncomfortable, thoughtful, but mirroring his defilead. Farrel cleared his throat. "You know how important it is that this colony be established? You know that, don't you? In twenty years or so the ships will start arriving. Hundreds of them. Because we sent a message back to Earth saying we d found a habitable planet. Thousands of people from Earth, coming here to the new world we're supposed to get busy and carve out for them. We were selected for that task -- first of judging the right planet, then of working it over. Engineers, chemists, agronomists, all of us -- we're the task force. We've got to do the job. We've got to test, plant, breed, rebalance. create. There'll be a lot of trial and error. We've got to work out a wav of life, so the thousands who will follow can be introduced safely and painlessly into the -- well, into the organism. And we'll need new blood for the jobs ahead. We'll need young people -- " Mary said, "A few years one way or the other won't matter much, Doc. Five or six years from now this place will be a lot safer. Then we women will start producing. But not now." "It won't work that way," Farrel said. "We're none of us kids any longer. I'm fifty-five. Ralph, you're forty-three. I realize that I must be getting old to think of you as young. Mary, you're thirty-seven. We took a long time getting here. Fourteen years. We left an Earth that's dying of radioactive poisoning. and we all got a mild dose of that. The radiation we absorbed in space, little as it was, didn't help any. And that sun up there -- " again he nodded at the port -- "isn't any help either. Periodically it throws o(T some pretty damned funny stuff. "Frankly, we're worried. We don't know whether or not we can have children. Or normal children. We've got to find out. If our genes have been bollixed up, we've got to find out why and how and get to work on it iinmcdiatelv. It mav   be unpleasant. It may be heartbreaking. But those who will come here in twenty years will have ab# # sorbed much more of Earth's radioactivity than we did, and an equal amount of the space stuff, and this sun will be waiting for them... We'll have to know what we can do for them." "I'm not a walking laboratory, Doc." Mary said.  # "I'm afraid you are, Mary. All of you are." Mary set her lips and stared out the port. "It's got to be done, Mary." She didn't answer. "It's going to be done." "Choose someone else." she said. "That's what they all say." She said, "I guess this is one thing you doctors and psychologists didn't figure nn. Doc." "Not at first," Farrel said. "But we've given it some thought." MacGuirc had installed the button convenient to Farrel's right hand, just below the level of the desk-top. Farrel pressed it. Ralph and Mary Pornscn slumped in their chairs. The door opened, and Doctor John J. MacGuirc and Ted chologist, came in. er-play had been allowed to run its course, Farrel told the Pomscns to go into the next room and shower They came back soon, looking refreshed. Farrel ordered them to get back into their clothes. Under the power of the hypnotic drug which their chairs had injected into them at the touch of the button, they did so. Then he told them to sit down in the chairs again. MacGuire and Harris had gathered up their equipment, piling it on top of the operating table. MacGuire smiled. "I'll bet that's the best-rnonitored, most hygienic sex act ever committed. I think I've about got the space radiations effect licked." Farrel nodded. "If anything goes wrong, it certainly won't be our fault. But let's face it -- the chances are a thousand to one that something will go w'rong. We'll just have to wait. And work." He looked at the Pomsens. "They're very much in love, aren't they? And she was receptive to the suggestion -- beneath it all, she was burning to have a child, just like the others." MacGuirc wheeled out the operating table, with its load of scrums, pressure-hypos and jury-rigged thingamabohs which he was testing on alternate couples. Ted Harris stopped at the door a moment. He said, "I think the suggestions I planted will turn the trick when they find out she's pregnant. They'll come through okay -- won't even be too angry." Farrel sighed. They'd been over it in detail several times, of course, but apparently Harris needed the reassurance as much as he did. He said: "Sure. Now scram so I ran go back into my act." Harris closed the door. Farrel sat down at his desk and studied the pair before him. They looked back contentedly, holding hands, their eyes dull. Farrel said, "How do you feel?" Ralph Pornscn said, "I feel fine." Mary Pornscn said, "Oh, I feel wonderful!" Deliberately Farrel pressed another button below his desk-top. The dull eyes cleared instantly. "Oh, you've given it some thought. Doc?" Mary said sweetly. "And what have you decided?" "You'll sec," Farrel said. "Eventually." He rose. "That's all for now, kids. I'd like to see you again in one month -- for a routine checkup." Mary nodded and got up. "You'll still have to wait. Doc. Why not admit you're licked?" Ralph got up too, and looked puzzled. "Wow," he said. "I'm tired." "Perhaps just coming here," Farrel said, "discharged some of the tension you've been carrying around." The Pornsens left. Farrel brought out some papers from his desk and studied them. Then, from the file drawer, he selected the record of Hugh and Alice Farrel. Alice would be at the perfect time of her menstrual cycle tomorrow... Farrel flipped his communicator. "MacGuire," he said. "Tomorrow it's me." MacGuire chuckled. Farrel could have kicked him. He put his chin in his hands and stared out the port. Danny Stern had the log in place in the barricade. The bulldozer was moving on to a new task. His momentary doubt stilled, Farrel went back to work. the ships from Earth began arriving, the log had been replaced by a stone monument erected to which had been cut apart for its valuable steel. Around the monument was a park, and on three sides of the park was a shining town -- not really large enough to be called a city -- of plastic and stone, for New Earth had no iron ore, only zinc and a little copper. This was often cause for regret. Still it was a pretty good world. The monster problem had been licked by high-voltage cannon. Now in their third generation since the landing, the monsters kept their distance. And things grew -- things good to eat. And even without steel, the graceful, smoothly functioning town looked impressive -- quite a thing to have been built by a handful of beings with two arms and two legs each. It hadn't been, entirely. But nobody thought much about that any more. Even the newcomers got used to it. Things change. IF, but they're going fast! This may be your last chance to complete your collection at a reasonable cost, since when these are sold no more will be available from the publisher. Send #c for each issue you've missed to the Circulation Dept., Quinn Publishing Co., Kingston, New York. The world of the new race was peaceful, comfortable , lovely -- and completely static. Only Eric knew the. haunting loneliness that had carried the old race to the stars, and he couldn't communicate it, even if he had dared to! By Mara Wolf Illustrated by Rudolph Falais drical walls enclosed it, and a transparent plastic dome held it back from the sky and the stars. It waited, while night changed to day and back again, while tin seasons merged one into another , and the years, and the centuries. It lowered as gleaming and as uncorrodcd as it had when it uas first built, long ago, when nun had bustled about it and in it, their shouting and their laughter and the sound of their tools ringing against the metallic plates. Now few men ever came to it. And those who did come merely looked with quiet faces for a few minutes, and then went away again. The generations kalcidoscoped by. The Starship wailed. when he was lour vears old. They were out in the country, and he'd slipped away from his parents and started wading along the edge of a tiny stream, kicking at the water spiders. His feet were soaked, and his knees were streaked with mud where he'd knelt down to play. His father wouldn't like it later, but right now it didn't matter. It was fun to be off by himself, splashing along the stream, feeling the sun hot on his back and the water icy against his feet. A water spider scooted past him, heading for the tangled moss along the bank. He bent down, scooped his hand through the water to catch it. For a moment he had it, then it slipped over his fingers and darted away, out of his reach. As he stood up, disappointed, he saw them: two boys and a girl, not much older than he. They were standing at the edge of the trees, watching him. He'd seen children before, but he'd never met any of them. His parents kept him away from them -- and from all strangers. He stood still, watching them, Siting for them to say something. He felt excited and uncomfortable at the same time. They didn't say anything. They just watched him, very intently. He felt even more uncomfortable. The bigger boy laughed. He pointed at Eric and laughed again and looked over at his companions. They shook their heads. Eric waded up out of the water. He didn't know whether to go over to them or run away, back to his mother. He didn't understand the way they were looking at him. "Hello," he said. The big boy laughed again. "See?" he said, pointing at Eric. "He can't." "Can't what?" Eric said. The three looked at him, not saying anything. Then they all burst out laughing. They pointed at him, jumped up and down and clapped their hands together. "What's funny?" Eric said, backing away from them, wishing his mother would come, and yet afraid to turn around and run. "You," the girl said. "You're funny. Funny, funny, funny! You're stu-pid." The others took it up. "Stu-pid, stu-pid. You can't talk to us, you're too stu-pid... They skipped down the bank toward him, laughing and calling. They jumped up and down and pointed at him, crowded closer and closer. "Silly, silly. Can't talk. Silly, silly. Can't talk..." Eric backed away from them. He tried to run, but he couldn't. His knees shook too much. He could hardly move his legs at all. He began to cry. They crowded still closer around him. "Stu-pid." Their laughter was terrible. He couldn't get away from them. He cried louder. "Eric!" His mother's voice. He twisted around, saw her coming, running toward him along the bank. "Mama!" He could move again. He stumbled toward her. "He wants his mama," the big boy said. "Funny baby." His mother was looking past him, at the other children. They stopped laughing abruptly. They looked back at her for a moment, scuffing their feet in the dirt and not saying anything. Suddenly the big boy turned and ran, up over the bank and out of sight. The other boy followed him. The girl started to run, and then she looked at Eric's mother again and stopped. She looked back at Eric. "I'm sorry," she said sulkily, and then she turned and fled after the others. Eric's mother picked him up. "It's all right," she said. "Mother's here. It's all right." He clung to her, clutching her convulsively, his whole body shaking. "Why, Mama? Why?" "You're all right, dear." She was warm and her arms were tight around him. lie was home again, and safe. He relaxed, slowly. "Don't leave me, Mama." "I won't, dear." She crooned to him, softly, and he relaxed still more. His head drooped on her 'boulder and after a while he fell asleep. But it wasn't the same as it had been. It wouldn't ever be quite the same again. He knew he was different now. He was curled on his side, one chubby hand under his cheek, the other still holding his favorite animal, the wooly lamb his mother had given him for his birthday. He stirred in his sleep, threshing restlessly, and whimpered. His mother's face lifted mutely to her husband's. "Myron, the things those children said. It must have been terrible for him. I'm glad at least that he couldn't perceive what they were thinking." Myron sighed. He put his arm about her shoulders and drew her close against him. "Don't torture yourself, Gwin. You can't make it easier for him. There's no way."  "But we'll have to tell him something." He stroked her hair. The four years of their shared sorrow lay heavily between them as he looked down over her head at his son. "Poor devil. Let him keep his childhood while he can, Gwin. He'll know he's all alone soon enough." She nodded, burying her face against his chest. "I know..." Eric whimpered again, and his hands clenched into fists and came up to protect his face. Instinctively Gwin reached out to him, and then she drew back. She couldn't reach his emotions. There was no perception. There was no way she could enter his dreams and rearrange them and comfort him. "Poor devil," his father said again. "He's got his whole life to be lonely in." other winter and another summer. Eric spent more and more time by himself. He liked to sit on the glassed-in sunporch, bouncing his ball up and down and talking to it, aloud, pretending that it answered him back. He liked lo lie on his stomach close to the wall and look out at the garden with its riotous mass of flowers and the insects that flew among them. Some flew quickly, their wings moving so fast that they were just blurs. Others Hew slowly, swooping on outspread bright-colored wings from petal to petal. He liked these slow-flying ones the best. He could wiggle his shoulder blades in time with their wings and pretend that he was flying too. Sometimes other children came by on the outside of the wall. He could look cut at them without worrying, because they couldn't see him. The wall wasn't transparent from the outside. He liked it when three or four of them came by together, laughing and chasing each other through the garden. Usually, though, they didn't stay long. After they had played a few minutes his father or his mother went out and looked at them, and then they went away. Eric was playing "by himself when the old man came out to the sunporch doorway and stood there, saying nothing, making no effort to interrupt or to speak. He w r as so quiet that after a while Eric almost didn't mind his being there. The old man turned back to Myron and Gwin. "Of course the boy can learn. He's not stupid." Eric bounced the ball, flung it against the transparent glass, caught it, bounced it again. "But how, Walden?" Gwin shook her head. "You offer to teach him, but -- " Walden smiled. "Remember these?"... Walden's study. The familiar curtains drawn aside, and the shelves behind them. The rows of bright-backed, box-like objects, most of them old and spotted, quite unhygienic... Gwin shook her head at the perception, but Myron nodded. "Books. I didn't know there were any outside the museums." Walden smiled again. "Only mine. Books are fascinating things. All the knowledge of a race, gathered together on a few shelves..." "Knowledge?" Myron shrugged. "Imagine storing knowledge in those -- boxes. What are they? What's in them? Just words... The books faded as Walden sighed. "You'd be surprised what the old race did, with just those -- boxes." He looked across at Eric, who was now bouncing his ball and counting, out loud, up to three, and then going back and starting again. "The bov can learn what's in those books. Just as if he'd gone to school back in the old times." Myron and Gwin looked doubtfully at each other, and then over at the corner where Eric played unheeding. Perhaps Walden could help. Perhaps... "Eric," Gwin said aloud. "Yes, mother?" "We've decided you're going to go to school, the way you want to. Mr. Walden here is going to be your teacher. Isn't that nice?" Eric looked at her and then at the old man. Strangers didn't often come out on the sunporch. Strangers usually left him alone. He bounced the ball again without answering. "Say something, Eric," his mother commanded. Eric looked back at Walden. "He can't teach me to be like other children, can he?" "No," Walden said. "I can't." "Then I don't want to go to school." Eric threw the ball across the room as hard as he could. "But there once were other people like you," Walden said. "Lots of them. And you can learn about S them, if you want to." "Odier people like me? Where?" Myron and Gwin looked helplessly at each other and at the old man. Gwin began to cry and Myron cursed softly, on the perception level so that Eric wouldn't hear them. But Walden's face was gentle and understanding as he answered, so understanding that Eric couldn't help wanting desperately to believe him. "Everyone was like you once," Walden said. "A long time ago." day he would go over to Walden's and the two of them would pull back the curtains in the study and Walden would lift down some of the hooks. It was as if Walden was giving him the past, all of it, as fast as he could grasp it. "'in really like the old race, Walden?" "Yes, Eric. You'll sec just how. much like them... Identity. Here in the past, in the books he was learning to read, in the pictures, the pages and pages of scenes and portraits. Strange scenes, far removed from the gardens and the quiet houses and the wordless smile of friend to friend. Great buildings and small. The Parthenon in the moonlight, not too many pages beyond the cave, with its smoky fire and first crude wall drawings. Cities blight with a caves again the underground stations of the Moon colonics. All unreal. and yet -- They were his people, these men in the pictures. Strange men. violent men: the barbarian trampling his enemy to death beneath his horse's hooves, the knight in armor marching to the Crusade, the spaceman. And the quieter men: the farmer, the artisan, the poet -- they too were his people, and far easier to understand than the others. The skill of reading mastered, and the long, sweeping vistas of the past. Their histories. Their wars. "Whv did tlu-v fight. Walden?" # # And Walden's sigh. "I don't know, Eric, but thev did." # So much to learn. So much to understand. Their art and music and literature and religion. Patterns of life that ebbed and flowed and ebbed again, but never in quite the same way. "Why did they change so much, Walden?" And the answer, "You probably know that better than I, Eric... Perhaps he did. For he went on to the books that Walden, ignored. Their mathematics, their science. The apple's fall, and the orbits of planets. The sudden spiral of analysis, theory, technology. The machine s -- s t e a m s h i p s, airplanes, spaceships... And the searching loneliness that carried the old race from the caves of Earth to the stars. The searching, common to the violent man and the quiet man, to the doer and the dreaming jxiet. Why do wc hunger, who own the Moon and tram file the shifting dust of Mars? Why aren't wc content with the worlds we're won? Why don't wc rest, with the system ours? IFc hart cast off the planets like ouigrou n toys , and now zee want tlic stars... "Have you ever been to the stars, Walden?" Walden stared at him. Then he laughed. "Of course not. Eric. Nobody goes there now. None of our race has ever gone. Why should There was no explaining. Walden had never been lonely. And then one day, while he was reading some fiction from the middle period of the race, Eric found the fantasy. Speculation about the future, about their future... About the new race! He read on, his heart pounding, until the same old pattern came clear. They had foreseen conflict, struggle between old race and new, suspicion and hatred and tragedy. The happy ending was superficial. Everyone was motivated as they had been motivated. He shut the book and sat there, wanting to reach back across the years to the old race writers who had been so right and yet so terribly, blindly wrong. The writers who had seen in the new only a continuation of the old, of themselves, of their own fears and their own hungers. "Why did they die, Walden?" He didn't expect an answer. "Why does any race die, Eric?" His own people, forever removed from him, linked to him only through the books, the pictures, and his own backward-reaching emotions. "Walden, hasn't there ever been anyone else like me, since they died?" Silence. Then, slowly, Walden nodded. "I wondered how long it would be before you asked that. Yes, there have been others. Sometimes three or four in a generation." "Then, perhaps..." "No," Walden said. "There aren't any others now. We'd know it if there were." He turned away from Eric, to the plastic wall that looked out across the garden and the children playing and the long, level, flower-carpeted plain. "Sometimes, when there's more than one of them, they go out there away from us, out to the hills where it's wild. But they're found, of course. Found, and brought back." He sighed. "The last of them died when I was a boy." Others like him. Within Walden's lifetime, others, cut off from their own race, lonely and rootless in the midst of the new. Others like him, but not now, in his lifetime. For him there were only the books. The old race was gone, gone with all its conflicts, all its violence, its stupidity -- and its flaming rockets in the void and its Parthenon in the moonlight. V stopped. The room was filled with strangers. There were half a dozen men besides Walden, most of them fairly old, white-haired and studious looking. They all turned to look at him, watched him gravely without speaking. "Well, there he is." Walden looked from face to face. "Are you still worried? Do you still think that one small boy constitutes a threat to the race? What about you, Abbot?" "I don't know. I still think he should have been institutionalized in the beginning." "Why? So you could study the brain processes of the lower animals?" Walden's thoughts were as sarcastic as he could send them. "No, of course not. But don't you sec what you've done, by teaching him to read? You've started him thinking of the old race. Don't deny it." "I don't." The thin man, Drew, broke in angrily. "He's not full grown yet. Just fourteen, isn't he? How can you be sure what he'll he like later? He'll be a problem. They've always been problems." They were afraid. That was what was the matter with them. Walden sighed. "Tell them what you've been studying, Eric," he said aloud. For a minute Eric was too tongue-tied to answer. He stood motionless, waiting for them to laugh at him. "Ho on. Tell them." "I've been reading about the old race," Eric said. "All about the stars. About the people who went off in the starships and explored our whole galaxy." "What's a galaxy?" the thin man said. Walden could perceive that he really didn't know. Eric's fear lessened. These men weren't laughing at him. They weren't being just polite, either. They were interested. He smiled at them, shyly, and told them about the hooks and the wonderful, strange tales of the past that the books told. The men listened, nodding from time to time. Hut he knew that thev didn't understand. # The world of the books was his alone... "Well?" Walden looked at the others. Thev looked back. Their emotions were a welter of doubt, of indecision. "You've heard the boy," Walden said quietly, thrusting his own uneasiness down, out of his thoughts. "Yes." Abbot hesitated. "He seems bright enough -- quite different from what I'd expected. At least he's not like the ones who grew up wild in the hills. This boy isn't a savage." Walden shrugged. "Maybe they weren't savages either," lie suggested. "After all. it's been fifty years since the last of them died. And a lot of legends can spring up in fifty years." "Perhaps we have been worrying unnecessarily." Abbot got up to go, but his eyes still held Walden's. "But," lie added, "it's up to you to watch him. If he reverts, becomes dangerous in any way. he'll have to be locked up. That's final." The others nodded. "I'll watch him," Walden told them. "Just stop worrying." He stood at the door and waited until they were out of sight. Then and only then did he allow himself to sigh and taste the fear he'd kept hidden. The old men. the men with authority, were the dangerous ones. Walden snorted. Even with perception, men could be fools. sixteen Walden took him to the museum. The aircar made the trip in just a few hours -- but it was farther than Eric had ever traveled in his life, and farther than most people ever bothered traveling. The museum lay on an open plain where there weren't many houses. At first glance it was far from impressive. Just a few big buildings, housing the artifacts, and a few old ruins of ancient construetions, leveled now and half buried in the sands. "It's nothing." Eric looked down at it, disappointed. "Nothing at all." ' "What did you expect?" Walden set the aircar down between the two largest buildings. "You knew it wouldn't be like the pictures in the books. You knew that none of the old race's cities are left." "I know," Eric said. "But I expected more than this." He got out of the car and followed Walden around to the door of the first building. Another man, almost as old as Walden, came toward them smiling. The two men shook hands and stood happily perceiving each other. "This is Eric," Walden said aloud. "Eric, this is Prior, the caretaker here. He was one of my schoolmates." "It's been years since we've perceived short range," Prior said. "Years. But I suppose the boy wants to look around inside?" Eric nodded, although he didn't care too much. He was too disappointed to care. There was nothing here that he hadn't seen a hundred times before. They went inside, past some scale models of the old cities. The same models, though a bit bigger, that Eric had seen in the three-dimen. sional view-books. Then they went into another room, lined with thousands of books, some very old, many the tiny microfilmed ones from the middle periods of the old race. "How do you like it, Eric?" the caretaker said. "It's fine," he said flatly, not really meaning it. He was angry at himself for feeling disappointment. Walden had told him what to expect. And yet he'd kept thinking that he'd walk into one of the old cities and be able to imagine that it was ten thousand years ago and others were around him. Others like him... Ruins. Ruins covered by dirt, and no one of the present race would even bother about uncovering them. Prior and Walden looked at each other and smiled. "Did you tell him?" the caretaker telcpathed. "No. I thought we'd surprise him. I knewf all the rest would disappoint him." "Eric," the caretaker said aloud. "Come this way. There's another room I want to show you." He followed them downstairs, down a long winding ramp that spiraled underground so far that he lost track of the distance they had descended. He didn't much care anyway. Ahead of him, the other two were communicating, leaving him alone. "Through here," Prior said, stepping ofif the ramp. They entered a room that w r as like the bottom of a well, with smooth stone sides and far, far above them a glass roof, with clouds apparently drifting across its surface. But it wasn't a well. It was a vault, forever preserving the thing that had been the old race's masterpiece. It rested in the center of the room, its nose pointing up at the sky. It was like the pictures, and unlike them. It was big, far bigger than Eric had ever visualized it. It was tall and smooth and as new looking as if its builders had just stepped outside for a minute and would be back in another minute to blast off for the stars. "A starship," Walden said. "One of the last types." "There aren't many left," Prior said. "We're lucky to have this one in our museum." Eric wasn't listening. He was looking at the ship. The old race's ship. Ilis ship. "The old race built strange things," Prior said. "This is one of the strangest." He shook his head. "Imagine the time they put in on it... And for what?" Eric didn't try to answer him. He couldn't explain why the old ones had built it. But he knew. He would have built it himself, if he'd lived then. We have cast off the planets like outgrown toys, and now we want the stars... His people. His ship. His dream. T he old caretaker showed him around the museum and then left him alone to explore by himself. He had all the time he wanted. He studied. He worked hard all day long, scarcely ever leaving the museum grounds. He studied the subjects that now were the most fascinating to him of all the old race's knowledge -- the subjects that related to the starships. Astronomy, physics, navigation, and the complex charts of distant stars, distant planets, worlds he'd never heard of before. Worlds that to the new race were only pin-pricks of light in the night sky. All day long he studied. But in the evening he would go down the winding ramp to the ship. The well was lighted with a softer, more diffuse illumination than that of the houses. In the soft glow the walls and the glass-domed roof seemed to disappear and the ship looked free, pointing up at the stars. He didn't try to tell the caretaker what he thought. He just went back to his books and his studies. There was so much he had to learn. And now there was a reason for his learning. Someday, when he was fully grown and strong and had mastered all he needed from the books, he was going to fly the ship. He was going to look for his people, the ones who had left Earth before the new race came... He told no one. But Walden watched him, and sighed. "They'll never let you do it. Eric. It's a mad dream." "What are you talking about?" "The ship. You want to go to the stars, don't you?" Eric stared at him, more surprised than he'd been in years He had said nothing. There was no wav for Walden to know. Unless  he'd perceived it -- and Eric couldn't be perceived, any more than he could perceive other people... Walden shook his head. "It wasn't telepathy that told me. It was your eyes. The way you look at the ship. And besides, I've known you for years now'. And I've wondered how long it would be before you thought of this answer." "Well, why not?" Eric looked across at the ship, and his throat caught, choking him, the way it always did. "I'm lonely here. My people are gone. Why shouldn't I go?" "You'd be lonelier inside that ship, by yourself, away from Earth, away from everything, and with no assurance you'd ever find anyone at all, old race or new or alien... Eric didn't answer. He looked back at the ship, thinking of the books, trying to think of it as a prison, a weightless prison carrying him forever into the unknown, with no one to talk to, no one to see. Walden was right. He would be too much alone in the ship. He'd have to postpone his dream. He'd wait until he was old, and take the ship and die in it... Eric smiled at the thought. He was seventeen, old enough to know that his idea was adolescent and melodramatic. He knew, suddenly, that he'd never fly the ship. most of his time at the museum. He had his own aircar now', and sometimes he flew it home and visited with his parents. They liked to have him come. They liked it much better than having to travel all the way to the museum to visit him. Yet, though he wasn't dependent on other people any more, and could fly the aircar as he chose, he didn't do much exploring. He didn't have any desire to meet strangers. And there were always the books. "You're sure you're all right?" his mother said. "You don't need anything?" "No. I'm fine." He smiled, looking out through the sunporch wall into the garden. It seemed years and years since he'd pressed his nose to the glass, watching the butterflies. It had been a long time. "I've got to get going," he said. "I want to be back at the museum by dark." "Well, if you're sure you won't stay... They said goodbye and he went out and got into the aircar and started back. He flew slowly, close to the ground, because he really had plenty of time and he felt lazy. He skimmed along over a valley and heard laughter and dipped lower. A group of children was playing. Young ones -- they even talked aloud sometimes as they played. Children... There were so many children, always in groups, laughing... He flew on, quickly, until he was in a part of the country where he didn't see any houses. Just a stream and a grove of trees and bright flowers. He dropped lower, stopped, got out and walked down to the stream. It was by another stream that he'd met the children who had laughed at him, years ago. He smiled, sadly. He felt alone, but in a different sense from his usual isolation. He felt free, away from people, away even from the books and their unspoken insistence that their writers were dead and almost forgotten. He stood by the edge of the stream, watching water spiders scoot across the rippled surface. This was the same. This stream had probably been here when the old race was here, maybe even before the old race had even come into existence. Water spiders. 'Compared to man, their race was immortal... The sun was low when he turned away from the stream and walked back to where he had parked the aircar. He scarcely looked about him as he walked. He was sure he was alone, and he felt no caution, no need to watch and listen. But as he turned toward the car he saw the people. Two. Young, about his own age. A boy and a girl, smiling at each other, holding hands. They weren't a dozen feet in front of him. But they didn't notice him. They were conscious of no one but each other. As Eric watched, standing frozen, unwilling to draw attention to himself by even moving or backing up, the two leaned closer together. Their arms went around each other, tightly, and they kissed. They said nothing. They kissed, and then stood apart and went on looking at each other. Even without being able to perceive, Eric could feel their emotion. Then they turned, slowly, toward him. In a moment they would be aware of him. He didn't want them to think he was spying on them, so he went toward them, making no effort to be quiet, and as he moved they stepped still farther apart and looked at him, startled. They looked at each other as he passed, even more startled, and the girl's hand went up to her moudi in surprise. They know, Eric thought bitterly. They know I'm different. He didn't want to go back to the museum. He flew blindly, not looking down at the neat domed houses and the gardens and the people, but ahead, to the eastern sky and the upthrust scarp of the hills. The hills, where people like him had fled, for a little while. The occasional aircars disappeared. The gardens dropped away, and the ordered color, and there was grass and bare dirt and, ahead, the scraggly trees and outthrust rocks of the foothills. No people. Only the birds circling, crying to each other, curious about the car. Only the scurrying animals of the underbrush below. A little of the tension drained from him as he climbed. Perhaps in these very hills men like him had walked, not many generations ago. Perhaps they would walk there again, amid the disorder of tree and canyon and tumbled rock. Amid the wildness, the beauty that was neither that of the gardens nor that of the old race's cities, but older, more enduring than either. Below him were other streams, but these were swift-flowing, violent, sparkling like prismed sunlight as they cascaded over the rocks. Their wildness called to him, soothed him as the starship soothed him, as the gardens and the neat domed houses never could. He knew why his kind had fled to the hills, for whatever little time they had. He knew too that he would come again. Searching. Looking for his own kind. That was what he was doing. That was what he had always intended to do, ever since he had heard of the others like himself, the men who had come here before him. He realized his motive suddenly, and realized too the futility of it. But futile or not. he would come attain. For lie was of the old race. He shared their hungering. in his study when the council members arrived. They came with# out advance warning and filed in ceremoniously, responding rather coolly to his greeting. "YVe'rc here about the bov," # # Abbot began abiuptlv. "He's at the museum now, isn't he?" Walden nodded. "He's hern spending most of his time there lately." "Do you think it's wise, letting him wander aiound alone?" Trouble. Always trouble. Just because there was one young lxy, Eric, asking only to be let alone. And the old council members wouldn't rest until they had managed to find an excuse to put him in an institution somewhere, where his actions could be watched, where there wouldn't be any more uncertainty. "Eric's all right." "Is he? Prior tells me he leaves the museum every dav. He doesn't w  come here. lie doesn't visit his family." The thin man. Drew, broke in. "He goes to the hills. Just like the others did. Did you know that, Walden?" Walden's mouth tightened. It wouldn't do to let them read his hostility to their prying. It would be even worse to let them know that they worried him. "Besides," Drew added, "he's old enough to lie thinking about women now. There's always a chance he'll -- " "Are you crazy?" Walden shouted the words aloud. "Eric's not an animal." "Isn't he?" Abbot answered quietly. "Weren't all the old race just animals?" Walden turned away from them, closing his mind to their thoughts. He mustn't show anger. If he did, they'd probably decide lie was too emotional, not to be trusted. They'd take Eric away, to some institution. Cage him... "What do you want to do with the l?" Walden forced his thoughts to come quietly. "Do you want to put him in a zoo with the other animals?" The sarcasm hurt them. They wanted to be fair. Abbot especially prided himself on his fairness. "Of course not." They hesitated. They weren't going to do anything. Not this time They stood around and made a little polite conversation, about other things, and then Abbot turned toward the door. "We just wanted to be sure you knew what was going on." Abbot paused. "You'll keep an eye on the boy, won't you?" "Am I his keeper?" Walden asked Noftlv. They didn't answer biin. Their thoughts were confused and a bit irritated as tliev went out to the # aircar that had brought diem. But he knew they'd be back. And they would keep track of Eric. Prior, the caretaker, would help them. Prior was old too, and worried... Walden walked back into his study, slowly. His legs were trembling. He hadn't realized how upset he had been. He smiled at the intensity of his emotions, realizing something he'd always kept hidden, even from himself. He was as fond of Eric as if the boy had been his own son. impatiently. He didn't feel like studying. The equations were meaningless. He was tired of books, and history, and all the facts about the old race. He wanted to be outdoors, exploring, walking along the hillsides, looking for his own kind. But he had already explored the hills. He had flown for miles, and walked for miles, and searched dozens of caves in dozens of gorges. He had found no one. He was sure that if there had been anyone he  would have discovered some sign. He opened the book again, but he couldn't concentrate on it. Beyond those hills, across another valley, there were even higher mountains. He had often looked across at them, wondering what they held. They were probably as desolate as the ones he'd searched. Still, he would rather be out in them, looking, than sitting here, fretting, almost hating the old race because it had somehow bequeathed him a heritage of loneliness. He got up abruptly and went outside to the aircar. It was a long way to the second range of mountains. He flew there directly, skimming over the nearer hills, the ones he had spent weeks exploring. He dropped low over the intervening valley, passing over the houses and towns, looking down at the gardens. The new race filled all the valleys. He came into the foothills and swung the car upward, climbing over the steep mountainsides. Within a mile from the valley's edge he was in wild country. He'd thought the other hills were wild, but here the terrain was jagged and rock-strewn, with boulders flung about as if by some giant hand. There were a hundred narrow canyons, opening into each other, steep-sloped, overgrown with brambles and almost impenetrable, a maze with the hills rising around them and cutting off all view of the surrounding country. Eric dropped down into one of the larger canyons. Immediately he realized how easy it would be to get lost in these hills. There were no landmarks that were not like a hundred jutting others. Without the airear he would be lost in a few minutes. He w'ondencd suddenly if anyone, old race or new, had ever been here before him. He set the aircar down on the valley floor and got out and walked away from it, upstream, following the little creek that tumbled past him over the rocks. By the time he had gone a hundred paces the car was out of sight. It was quiet. Far away birds called to each other, and insects buzzed around him, but other than these sounds there was nothing but his own footsteps and the creek rapids. He relaxed, walking more slowly, looking about him idly, no longer searching for anything. He rounded another bend, climbed up over a rock that blocked his path and dropped down on the other side of it. Then he froze, staring. Not ten feet ahead of him lay the ashes of a campfire, still smoldering, still sending a thin wisp of smoke up into the air. moved. No tracks showed in the rocky ground. Except for the fire, the gorge looked as uninhabited as any of the others. Slowly Eric walked toward the campfire and knelt down and held his hand over the embers. Heat rose about him. The fire hadn't been out for very long. lie turned quickly, glancing about him, but there was no 'iidden motion anywhere, no indication that anyone was hiding nearby. Perhaps there was nobody near. Perhaps whoever had built the fire had left it some time before, and was miles a wav bv now...  # lie didn't think so. He had a feeling that eyes were watching him. It was a strange feeling, almost as if he could perceive. Wishful thinking, lie told himself. Unreal, untrue... But someone had been here. Someone had built the fire. And it was probably, almost certainly, someone without perception. Someone like himself. His knees were shaking. His hands trembled, and sweat broke out on the palms. Yet his thoughts seemed calm, icily calm. It was just a nervous reaction, lie knew that. A reaction to the sudden knowledge that people aric here, out in these hills where he had searched lor them hut never, deep down, expected to find them. They were probably watching him right now, hidden up among the trees somewhere. afraid to move because then he would see them and start out to capture them. If there were people here, they must think that he was one of the normal ones. That her could perceive. So they would keep quiet, because a person w'ith perception couldn't possibly perceive a person who lacked it. They would remain motionless, hoping to stay hidden, waiting for him to leave so that they could flee deeper into the hills. They couldn't know that he was one of them. He felt helpless, suddenly. So near, so near -- and yet he couldn't reach them, The people who lived here in the wild mountain gorges could elude him forever. No motion. No sound. Only the embers, smoking... "Listen." he called aloud. "Can you hear me?" The canyon walls caught his voice, sent it echoing back, fainter and fainter. "... can you hear me can you hear me can you..." No one answered. "I'm your friend," lu called. "I can't perceive. I'm one of you." Over and over it echoed. "... one of you one of you one of you..." "Answer me. I've run away from them too. Answer me!" Answer me answer me answer u me... The echoes died away and it was quiet, too quiet. No sound. Even if they heard him, they wouldn't answer. He couldn't track them. If they had homes that were easy to find they would have left them by now. He was helpless. The heat from the fire rose about him, and he tasted smoke and coughed. Nothing moved. Finally he stood up, turned away from the fire and walked on past it, up the stream. No one. No tracks. No sign. Only the feeling that other eyes watched him as he walked along, other ears listened for the sound of his passing. He turned back, retraced his steps to the fire. The embers had blackened. The wisp of smoke that curled upward was very thin now. Otherwise everything was the same as it had been. He couldn't give up and fly back to the museum. If he did he might never find them again. But even if he didn't, he might never find them. "Listen!" He screamed the word, so loudly that they could have heard it miles away. "I'm one of you. I can't perceive. Believe me! You've got to believe me!" "Believe me believe me believe me..." Nothing. The tension went out of him suddenly and he began to tremble again, and his throat choked up, wanting to cry. He stumbled away from the embers, back in the direction of die aircar. "Believe me..." This time the words were little more than a whisper, and there was no echo. "I believe you," a voice said quietly. to place it, and saw the woman. She stood at die edge of the trees, above the campfire, half hidden in the undergrowth. She looked down at him warily, a rock clenched in her hand. She wasn't an attractive sight. She looked old. with a leathery skin and gnarled arms and legs. Her grey-white hair was matted, pulled hack into a snarled bun behind her head. She wore a shapeless dress of some roughwoven material that hung limply from her shoulders, torn, dirty, ancient. He'd never seen an animal as dirty as she. "So you can't perceive," the woman cackled. "I believe it, boy. You don't have that look about you." "I didn't know," Eric said softly. "I never knew until today that there were any others." She laughed, a high-pitched laugh tliat broke of! into a choking cough. "There aren't many of us, hoy. Not many. Me and Nell -- but she's an old, old woman. And Lisa, of course...' She cackled again, nodding. "I always told Lisa to wait," she said firmlv. "I told her that there'd be another young one along." "Who are you?" Eric said. "Me? Call me Mag. Come on, boy. Come on. What are you waiting for?" She turned and started off up the hill, walking so fast that she was almost out of sight among the trees before Eric recovered enough to follow her. He stumbled after her, clawing his way up the steep slope, slipping and grabbing the branches with his hands and hauling himself up the rocks. "You're a slow one." The old woman paused and waited for him to catch up. "Where' vc you been all your life? You don't act like a mountain boy." "I'm not," Eric said. "I'm from the valley..." He stopped talking. He realized, suddenly, the futility of trying to explain bis life to her. If she had ever known the towns, it would have been years ago. She was too old, and tattered, and so dirty that her smell wasn't even a good clean animal smell. "Hurry up, hoy!" He felt unreal, as if this were a dream, as if he would awaken suddenly and be back at the museum. He almost wished that he would. He couldn't believe that he had found another like himself and was now following her, scrambling up a mountain as if lie were a goat. A goat. Smells. The dirty old woman in front of him. He wrinkled his nose in disgust and then was furious with himself, with his reactions, with the sudden knowledge that he had glamorized his kind and had hoped to find them This tattered old woman with her cackling laugh and leathery, toothless face and dirt encrusted clothing couldn't be like him. He couldn't accept it... Mag led him up the slope and then over some heaped boulders, and suddenly they were on level ground again. They had come out into a tiny canyon, a blind pocket recessed into the mountain, almost completely surrounded by walls that rose sharply upward. Back across the gorge, huddled against the face of the mountain, was a tiny hut. It was primitive, like those in the prehistoric sections of the old history hooks. It was made of branches lashed together, with sides that leaned crookedly against each other and a matted roof that looked as if it would slide off at any minute. It was like a twig house that a child might make with sticks and grass. "Our home," Mag said. Her voice was proud. He didn't answer. He followed her across toward it, past the mounds of refuse, the fruit rinds and bones and skins that were flung carelessly beside the trail. He smelled the scent of decay and rottenness and turned his head away, feeling sick. "Lisa! Lisa!" Mag shouted, the words echoing and re-echoing. A figure moved just inside the hut doorway. "She's not here," a voice called. "She's out hunting." "Well, come on out, Nell, and sec what I've found." Tile figure moved slowly out from the gloom of the hut, bending to get through the low door, half straightening up outside, and Eric saw that it was an old, old woman. She couldn't straighten very far. She was too old. bent and twisted and brittle, feebler looking than anyone Eric had ever seen before. She hobbled toward him slowly, teetering from side to side as she walked, her hands held out in front of her, her eyes on the ground. "What is it, Mag?" Her voice was as twisted as her body. "A boy. Valleyboy. Just the age for our Lisa, too." Eric felt his face redden and he opened his mouth to protest, to say something, anything, but Mag went right on talking, ignoring him. "The boy came in an aircar. I thought he was one of the normals -- but he's not. Hasn't their ways. Good looking boy, too." "Is he?" Nell had reached them. She stopped and looked up, right into Eric's face, and for the first time he realized that she was blind. Her eyes were milky white, without pupils, without irises. Against the brown leather of her skin they looked moist and dead. "Speak, boy," she croaked. "Let me hear your voice." "Hello," Eric said, feeling utterly foolish and utterly confused. "I'm Eric." "Eric..." Nell reached out, touched his arm with her hand, ran her fingers up over his shoulders, over his chest. "It's been a long time since I've heard a man's voice," she said. "Not since Mag here was a little girl." "Have you been -- here -- all that time?" Eric asked, looking around him at the hut, and the meat hanging to dry, covered with flies, and the leather water bags, and the mounds of refuse, the huge, heaped mounds that he couldn't stop smelling. "Yes," Nell said. "I've been here longer than I want to remember, boy. We came here from the other mountains when Mag was only a baby." hut, and as they neared it he smelled a new smell, that of stale smoke and stale sweat overlying the general odor of decay. "Let's talk out here," he said, not wanting to go inside. They sat down on the hard earth and the two women turned their faces toward him, Mag watching him intently, Nell listening, her head cocked to one side like an old crippled bird's. "I always thought I was the only one like me," Eric said. "The people don't know of any others. They don't know you exist. They wouldn't believe it." "That's the way we want it," Mag said. "That's the only way it can he." Nell nodded. "I was a girl in the other hills," she said, nodding toward the west, toward the museum. "There were several of us then. There had been families of us in my father's time, and in his father's time, and maybe before that even. But when I was a girl there was only my father and my mother and another wife of my father's, and a lot of children..." She paused, still looking toward the west, facing a horizon she could no longer see. "The normal ones came. We'd hidden from them before. But this time we had no chance to hide. I was hunting, with the boy who was my father's nephew. "They surrounded the hut. They didn't make any sound. They don't have to. I was in the forest when I heard my mother scream." "Did they kill her?" Eric cried out. "They wouldn't do that." "No. they didn't kill any of them. They dragged them off to the aircars, all o! them. My father, my mother and the other woman, the children. We watched from the trees and saw them dragged off, tied with ropes, like wild animals. The cars flew away. Our people never came back." She stopped, sunken in revery. Mag took up the story. Her voice was matter-of-fact, completely casual about those long ago events. "A bear killed my father. That was after we came back here. Nell was sick. I did the hunting. We almost starved, for a while, but there's lots of game in the hills. It's a good life here. But I've been sorry for Lisa. She's a woman now. She needs a man. I'm glad you came. I would have hated to send her out looking for a normal one." "But -- " Eric stopped, his head whirling. He didn't know what to say. Anything at all would sound wrong, cruel. "It's dangerous." Mag went on, "taking up with the normals. They think it's wrong. They think we're animals. One of us has to pick a man who's stupid -- a farmer, maybe -- and even then it's like being a pet. A beast." It took a moment for Eric to realize what she was saying, and when he did realize, the thought horrified him. "Lisa's father was stupid," Mag said. "He took me in when I came down from the hills. He didn't send for the others. Not then. He kept me and fed me and treated me kindly, and I thought I was safe. I thought our kind and theirs could live together." She laughed. Deep, bitter lines creased her mouth. "A week later the aircar came. They sneaked up to the garden where i was. He was with them. He was leading them." She laughed again. "Their kindness means nothing. Their love means nothing. To them, we're animals." The old woman, Nell, rocked back and forth, her face still in revery. Flies crawled over her bare arms, unheeded. "I got away," Mag said. "I saw them coining. They can't run fast, and I knew the hiding places. I never went back to the valleys. Nell would have starved without me. And there was Lisa to care for, later... The Hies settled on Eric's hands and he brushed them away, shivering. Mag smiled. The bitterness left her face. "I'm glad l don't have to send Lisa down to the valley." She got up before he could answer, before he could even think of anything to say or do. Grossing over to the pole where the dried meat hung, she pulled a piece of it loose and brought it back to where they sat. Some she gave to the old woman and some she kept for herself and the rest, most of it, she tossed to Eric. "You must be hungry, boy." It was filthy. Dirt clung to it -- dust and pollen and grime -- and the flies had flown off in clouds when she lifted it down. The old woman raised her piece and put the edge of it in her mouth and started to chew, slowly, eating her way up the strip. Mag tore hers with her teeth, reriding it and swallowing it quickly, watching Eric all the time. "Eat." It was unreal. He couldn't be here. These women couldn't exist. He lifted the meat, feeling his stomach knot with disgust, wanting to fling it from him and run, blindly, down the hill to the aircar. But he didn't. He had searched too long to flee now. Shuddering, he closed his mind to the flies and the smell and the filth and bit into the meat and chewed it and swallowed it. And all the time, Mag watched him. The sun passed overhead and began to dip toward the west. The shadows, which had shortened as they sat in front of the hut, lengthened again, until they themselves were half in the shadow of the trees lining the gorge. Still Lisa did not come. It was very quiet. The only sounds that broke the silence were their own voices and the buzzing of the flies. They talked, but communication was difficult between them. Eric tried to accept their ideas, their way of life, but he couldn't. The things they said were strange to him. Their whole pattern of life w'as strange to him. He could understand it at all only because he had studied the primitive peoples of the old race. But he couldn't imagine himself as one of them. He couldn't think of himself as having grown up among them, in the hills, living only to hunt and gather berries and store food for the wintertime. He couldn't think of himself hiding, creeping through the gorges like a hunted animal, flattening himself in the underbrush whenever an aircar passed by. He sat and listened to them talk, and his amazement grew. Their beliefs were so different. He listened to their superstitious accounts of the old race, and the way it had been "in the beginning." He listened to their legends of the old gods who flew through the air and were a mighty people, but who were destroyed by a new race of devils. He listened as they told him of their own ancestors, children of the gods, who had fled to the hills to await the gods' return. They had no conception at all of the thousands of years that had elapsed between the old race's passing and their own forefathers' flight into the hills. And when he tried to explain, they shook their heads and wouldn't believe him. He didn't hear Lisa come. One minute the far end of the clearing was empty and still and the next minute the girl was walking across it toward them, a bow in one hand and a pair of rabbits dangling from the other. the rabbits dropping from her hand. "Here's your young man, Lisa," Mag said. "Valley boy. His name's Eric." He stared back at her, more in curiosity than in surprise. She wasn't nearly as unattractive as he had thought she would be. She wouldn't be bad looking at all, he thought, if she were clean. She was fairly tall and lean, too skinny really, with thin muscular arms instead of the softly rounded arms the valley girls had. She was too brown, but her skin hadn't turned leathery yet, and there was still a little life in the lank brown hair that fell matted about her shoulders. "Hello. Lisa," he said. "Hello." Her eyes never left him. She stared at him, her lips trembling, her whole body tensed. She looked as if she were going to turn and run at any moment, as if only his quietness kept her from fleeing. With a sudden shock Eric realized that she too was afraid -- afraid of him. His own hesitation fell away and he smiled at her. Mag got up and went over to the girl and put her arm around Lisa's shoulders. "Don't be afraid of him, child," Mag said. "He's a nice boy. Not like one of them ." Lisa trembled. Eric watched her, pitying her. She was as helpless as he before tire calm assumption of the older women. More helpless, because she had probably never thought of defying them, of escaping the pattern of their lives. "Don't worry, Lisa," he said. "I won't hurt you." Slowly she walked toward him, poised, waiting for a hostile move. She came within a few feet of him and then sank to her haunches, still watching him, still poised. She was as savage as the others. A graceful, dirty savage. "You're really one of us?" she said. "You can't perceive?" "No," he said. "I can't perceive." "He's not like them," Mag said flatly. "If you'd ever been among them, you'd know their ways." "I've never seen a man before, up close," Lisa said. Her eyes pleaded with him, and suddenly he knew why he pitied her. It was because she felt helpless before him, and begged him not to harm her, and thought of him as something above her, more powerful than she, and dangerous. He looked across at her and felt protective, and it was a new feeling to him. absolutely new. Because always before, around the normals, even around his own parents and Walden, he had been the helpless one. He liked this new feeling, and wished it could last. But it couldn't. He couldn't do as the old women expected him to, leave the valley and his parents, leave the books and the museum and the ship, just to hide in the hills like a beast with them. He had come to find his people, but these three were not they. "You two go on off and talk," Mag said. "We're old. We don't matter now. You've got things to settle between you." She cackled again and got up and went into the hut and old Nell got up also and followed her. The girl shivered. She drew back a little, away from him. Her eyes never left his face. "Don't be afraid, Lisa," he said gently. "I won't hurt you. I won't even touch you. But I would like to talk to you." "All right," she said. They got up and walked to the end of the gorge, the girl keeping always a few feet from him. At the boulders she stopped and faced him, her back against a rock, her thin body still trembling. "Lisa," he said. "I want to be your friend." Her eyes widened. "How can you?" she said. "Men are friends. Women are friends. But you're a man and I'm a woman and it's different." He shook his head helplessly, trying to think of a way to explain things to her. He couldn't say that he found her dirty and unattractive and almost another species. He couldn't say that he'd searched the hills, often thinking of the relationship between man and woman, but that she wasn't the woman, that she never could be the woman for him. He couldn't .tell her that he pitied her in perhaps the same way that the normals pitied him. Still, he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to be her friend. Because he was sure now that he could search the mountains forever, and perhaps find other people, even if those he found were like her, and Mag and Nell. "Listen, Lisa," he said. "I can't live up here. I live in the valley. I came in an aircar, and it's down in the canyon below here. I have to go back -- soon. Before it gets completely dark." "Why?" "If I don't the normals will come looking for me. They'll find the aircar and then they'll find us. And you and your family will be taken away. Don't you understand?" "You're going?" Lisa said. "In a little while. I must." She looked at him, strangely. She looked at his clothes, at his face, at his body. Then she looked at her own hands and touched her own coarse dress, and she nodded. "You won't come back," she said. "You don't like me. I'm not what you were searching for." He couldn't answer. Her words hurt him. The very fact that she could recognize their difference from each other hurt him. He pitied her still more. "I'll come back," he said. "Of course I will. As often as I can. You're the only other people I've ever known who didn't perceive." She looked up into his face again. Her eyes were very large. They were the only beautiful thing about her. "Even if you do come back, you won't want me." There wasn't any answer at all. back to the museum. He landed the aircar and climbed out and walked across to the building, still feeling unreal, still not believing that the events of this day had actually happened. He nodded to Prior and the old caretaker nodded back and then stood staring at him, troubled and curious. Eric didn't notice the other's expression, nor the fact that Prior followed him to the top of the spiral ramp and remained there for a while, watching. Eric stood at the bottom of the well where he had so often stood before, staring across at the ship, then looking up, up, up its sleek length to w'here its nose pointed yearningly toward the night sky. But tonight he found no comfort in the sight, no sense of kinship with its builders. Tonight the ship was a dead and empty thing. "You won't want me -- " Her voice, her eyes, came between him and the stars. He had thought of finding his people and sharing with them their common heritage from the past, fhe knowledge of the old race and its thoughts and its science and its philosophy. He had thought of sharing with them the old desire for the stars, the old hunger, the old loneliness that the new race could never understand. He had been wrong. His people... He pushed the thought away. He looked up at the stars that were merely pin-pricks of light at the top of the well and wondered if anyone, old race or new or something different from cither, lived among them now. And he felt small, and even the ship was small, and his own problems and his own search were unimportant. He sat down and leaned back against the smooth wall and closed his eyes, blotting out the ship and the stars, and finally, even Lisa's face before him. The old caretaker found him sleeping riiere, and sighed, and went away again, still frowning. Eric slept on, unheeding. When he awoke it was late morning and the stars were gone and clouds drifted across the mouth of the well. There was no answer here. The starship would never fly. And Eric went back to the mountains. the councilmcn stood facing Walden across the great museum table. They had come together, Abbot and Drew and the others, and they faced him together, frowning. Their thoughts were hidden. Walden could catch only glimpses of what lay beneath their worry. "Every day." Abbot's eyes were hard, unyielding. "Why, Walden? Why does he go there every day?" "Docs it matter?" "Perhaps. Perhaps not. We can't tell -- yet." The ring of faces, of buried perceptions, of fear, anxiety, and a worry that could no longer be shrugged off. And Eric away, as he was every day now, somewhere in the distant hills. "The boy's all right." Walden checked his own rush of worry. "Is he?" The worry in the open now, the fear uncontaincd, and no more vacillation. Their thoughts hidden from Walden, their plans hidden, and nothing he could do, no way to warn Eric, yet. Abbot smiled, humorlcssly. "The boy had better be all right..." and made sure that the aircar was hidden under a ledge, with branches drawn about it so that no one could spot it from above. Then he turned and started for the slope, and as he reached it Lisa ran down to meet him. "You're late," she called. "Am I? Have you really been waiting for me?" "Of course." She came over to meet him, laughing, openly glad that he had come. He smiled back at her and walked along beside her, having to take long strides to match her skipping ones, and he too was glad that he'd come. Lately he felt like this every day. It was a feeling he couldn't analyze. Nothing had changed. The girl was still too thin and too brown and too dirty, although now she had begun to wash her dress and her body in the mountain stream and to comb the snarls from her hair. But it didn't make her attractive to him. It only made her less unattractive. "Will you always have to go away every night?" she asked guilelessly. "I suppose so." He looked down at her and smiled, wondering why he came. There was still an air of unreality about the whole situation. He felt numb. He had felt that way ever since the first day, and the feeling had grown, until now he moved and spoke and smiled and ate and it was as if lie were someone else and the person he had been was gone completely. He liked coming here. But there was no triumph in being with these people, no sense of having found his own kind, no purpose, nothing but a vague consearch any farther. "You're very quiet," Lisa said. "I know. I was thinking." She reached out and touched his arm, her fingers strong and muscular. He smiled at her but made no move toward her, and after a moment she sighed and took her hand away. "Why are you so different, Eric?" "Perhaps because I was raised by the others, the normal ones. Perhaps just because I've read so many books about the old race..." They came up to the boulders that blocked the entrance of the little gorge where the hut was. Lisa started toward them, then stopped abruptly. "Let's go on up the hill. I want to talk to you, without them." "All right." He followed her without speaking, concentrating all his effort on scrambling over the rougher spots in the trail. She didn't say anything more until they had come out on a high ledge that overlooked the whole canyon and she had sat down and motioned for him to sit down too. "Whew," he panted. "You're a mountain goat, Lisa." She didn't smile. "I've liked your coming to see us" she said. "I like to listen to you talk. I like the tales you tell of the old ones. But Mag and Nell are upset." He knew what was coming. His eyes met hers, and then he looked away and reddened and felt sorry for her and what he would have to tell her. This was a subject they had managed to avoid ever since that first day, although the older women brought it up whenever he saw them. "Mag says I must have a man," Lisa said. Her voice was tight. He couldn't tell if she was crying because he couldn't bear to look at her. He could only stare out over the canyon and listen and wait. "She says if it isn't you I'll have to find someone else, later on, but she says it ought to be you. Because they're dangerous, and besides, if it's you our children will be sure to be like us." "What?" He swung around, startled. "Do you mean that if one parent were normal the child might be too?" "Yes," she said. "It might. They say that's happened. Sometimes. No one knows why we're born. No one knows why some are one way and some another." "Lisa..." He stopped. "I know. You don't want me. I've known that all the time." "It isn't just that." He tried to find the words to express what he felt, but anything he might say would be cold and cruel and not quite true. He felt the contentment drain out of him, and he felt annoyed, because he didn't want to have to thipk about her problem, or about anything. "Why do they want you to have a child?" he said roughly. "Why do they want our kind to go on, living here like animals, or taken to the valleys and separated from each other and put into institutions until we die? Why don't they admit that we've lost, that the normals own the Earth? Why don't they stop breeding and let us die?" "Your parents were normal, Eric. If all of us died, others would be born, someday." He nodded and then he closed his eyes and fought against the despair that rose suddenly within him and blotted out the last of the contentment and the unreality. He fought against it and lost. And suddenly Lisa was very real, more real even than the books had ever been. And the dirty old women were suddenly people -- individuals, not savages. He tried to pity them, to retreat into his pity and his loneliness, but he couldn't even do that. The people he had looked for were imaginary. He would never find them, because Mag and Nell and Lisa w'ere his people. They were like him. and the only difference between him and them was one of luck. They were dirty and ignorant. They had been born in the mountains and hunted like beasts. He was more fortunate; he had been born in the valley. He was a snob. He had looked down on them, when all the time he was one of them. If he had been born among them, he would have been as they were. And, if Lisa had lived in another age, she too would have sought the stars. Eric sat very still and fought until a little of the turmoil quieted inside of him. Then he opened his eyes again and stared across the canyon, at the rock slides and the trees growing out from the slopes at twisting, precarious angles, and he saw everything in a new light. He saw the old race as it had been far earlier than the age of spacetravel, and he knew that it had conquered many environments on Earth before it had gained a chance to try for those of space. He felt humble, suddenly, and proud at the same time. Lisa sat beside him, not speaking, drawing away from him and letting him be by himself, as if she knew the conflicts within him and knew enough not to interrupt. He w-as grateful both for her presence there beside him and for her silence. Much later, when afternoon shadows had crept well out from the rocks, she turned to him. "Will you take me to the valley someday, Eric?" "Maybe. But no one must know about you. You know what would happen if any of them found out you even existed." "Yes," she said. "We'd have to be careful, all right. But you could take me for a ride in the aircar sometime and show me things." Before, he would have shrugged off her w'ords and forgotten them. Now he couldn't. Decision crystalized quickly in his mind. "Come on, Lisa," he said, getting to his feet and reaching down to help her up also. "I'll take you to the valley right now." She looked up at him, unable to speak, her eyes shining, and then she was running ahead of him, down the slope toward the aircar. from the valley floor, up between the canyon walls and above them, over the crest of the hills. He circled it for a moment, banking it over on its side so that she could look down at the gorge and the rocks and the cascading stream. "How do you like it, Lisa?" "I don't know." She smiled, rather weakly, her body braced against the seat. "It feels so strange." He smiled back and straightened the car, turning away from the mountains until the great, gardened valley stretched out before them, all the way to the foot of the western hills. "I'll show you the museum," he said. "I only wish I could take you inside." She moved away from him, nearer to the window, and looked down at the scattered houses that lay below them, at the people moving in the gardens, at the children. "I never dreamed it was like this," she said. "I never could picture it before." There was a longing in her face he'd never noticed before. He stared at her, and she was different suddenly, and her thin muscular body was different too. Pioneer -- that was the word he wanted. The girls of the new race could never be pioneers. "Look, Eric. Over there. Aircars." The words broke in on his thoughts and he looked away from her, following her gaze incuriously, not much interested. And then his fingers stiffened on the controls and the peacefulness fell away from him as if it had never been. "Lots of them," she said. Aircars. Eight or ten of them, more than he had ever seen at one time, spread out in a line and flying eastward, straight toward him. They mustn't see Lisa. They mustn't get close enough to realize who he was. He swung away from them, perpendicular to their course, angling so that he would be out of perception range, and then he circled, close to the ground, as they swept by, undeviating, purposeful, toward the mountains. Toward the mountains. Fear. Sudden, numbing fear and the realization of his own carelessness. "What's the matter, Eric?" He had swung about and now followed them, far behind them and ofF to one side, much too far away for them to try to perceive him. Perhaps, lie thought, perhaps they don't know. But all the time he remembered his own trips to the canyon, taken so openly. "Oh, Eric, they're not -- " He swung up over the last ridge and looked down, and her words choked ofT in her throat. Below them lay the canyon, and in it, the long line of aircars, landed now, cutting olT the gorge, the light reflecting oil them, bronze in the sunset. And the tiny figures of men were even now spreading out from the cars. "What'll wc do, Eric?" Panic. In her voice and in her eyes and in her fingers that bit into his arm, hurting him, steadying him against his own fear and the twisting realization of his betraying lack of caution. "Run. What clcse can wc do?" Down back over the ridge, out of sight of the aircars and into the foothills, and all the while knowing that there was nowhere to run to now. "No, Eric! We've got to go back. We've got to find Mag and Nell -- " Her voice rose in anguish, then broke, and she was crying. "We can't help them by going hack," he said harshly. "Maybe they got away. Maybe they didn't. But the others would catch us for sure if they got near us." Run. It was all they could do, now. Run to other hills and leave the aircar and hide, and live as Lisa had lived, as others of their kind had lived. "We've got to think of ourselves, Lisa. It's all we can do, now." Down through the foothills, toward the open valley, and the future, the long blind race to other mountains, and no choice left, no alternative, and the books lost and the starship left behind, forever... Lisa cried, and her fingers bit into his arm. Ahead of him, too close to flee or deceive, was another line of aircars, flying in from the valley, their formation breaking as they veered toward him. "Land, Eric. Land and run!" "We can't, Lisa. There's not enough time." Everything was lost now -- even the hills. Unless... one chance. The only chance, and it was nearly hopeless. "Get in the back, Lisa," he said. "Climb over the seat and hide in that storage compartment. And stay there." The two nearest cars had swung about now and paralleled his course, flanking him, drifting in nearer and nearer. "Why?" Lisa clung to him. "What are you going to do?" "They don't know you're with me. They probably don't even know I went back to the canyon. They think I'll land at the museum, not suspecting anything's wrong. So I'll do just what they expect me to. Go back, and pretend I don't know a thing." "You're mad." "It's our only chance, Lisa. If only they don't lock me up tonight... She clung to him for still another minute and then she climbed over the seat and he heard the luggage compartment panel slide open and, a moment later, shut. The nearest aircar drifted still closer to him, escorting him westward, toward the museum. Behind him, other cars closed in. waiting for him at the entrance of the main building, just as they had waited so often before. He greeted them casually, trying to act exactly as he usually did. but # # their greetings to him were far from casual. They stared at him oddly, Prior even drawing back a little as he approached. Walden looked at him for a long moment, very seriously, as if trying to tell him something, but what it was Eric didn't know. Both men were worried, their anxiety showing in their manner, and Eric wondered if he himself showed the fear that gripped him. They must know what had happened. By now probably every normal person within a hundred miles of the museum must know. At the entrance he glanced back idly and saw that one of the aircars that had followed him had landed and that the others were angling ofT again, leaving. It was too dark to see how many men got out of the car. but Walden and Prior were facing in that direction, communicating, and Eric knew that they knew. Everything. It was like a trap around him, with each of their minds a strand of the net, and he was unable to see which strands were about to entangle him, unable to see if there were any holes through which he might escape. All he could do was pretend that he didn't even know the net existed, and wait. Half a dozen men came up to Prior and Walden. One of them was Abbot. His face was very stern, and when he glanced over at where Eric stood in the building entrance his face grew even sterner. Eric watched them for a moment; then he went inside, the way he usually did when there were lots of people around. He wished he knew what they were saying. He wished he knew what was going to happen. He went on into the library and pulled out a book at random and sat down and started turning the pages. He couldn't read. He kept waiting for them to come in, for one of them to lay a hand on his shoulder and tell him to come along, that they knew he had found other people like himself and that he was a danger to their race and that they were going to lock him up somewhere. What would happen to Lisa? They'd find her, of course. She could never escape alone, on foot, to the hills. What had happened to Mag and Nell? No one came. He knew that their perceptions lay all around him, but he could sense no emotions, no thoughts but his own. He sat and waited, his eyes focused on the book but not seeing it. It seemed hours before anyone came. Then Prior and Abbot and Walden were in the archway, looking across at him. Prior's face was still worried, Abbot's stern, Walden's reassuring... Eric forced himself to smile at them and then torn another page and pretend to go on reading. After a moment he heard their footsteps retreating, and when he looked up again they were gone. He sat a while longer and then he got up and walked down the ramp and stood for a few minutes looking at the ship, because that too would be expected of him. He felt nothing. The ship was a world away now, mocking him, for his future no longer lay in the past, with the old race, but out in the hills. If he had a future at all... He went up the ramp again, toward his own room. No one else was in sight. They had all gone to bed, perhaps. They wouldn't expect him to try to run away now. He began to walk, as aimlessly as he could, in the direction of the aircar. He saw no one. Perhaps it wasn't even guarded. He circled around it, still seeing no one ; then, feeling more secure suddenly, he went directly toward it and reached up to open the panel and climb in. "Is that you, Eric?" Walden's voice. Quiet as always. And it came from inside the car. up at the ship, trying to see Walden's face and unable to find it in the darkness. He didn't answer -- couldn't answer. He listened, and heard nothing except Walden, there above him, moving on the seat. Where was Lisa? "I thought you'd come back here," Walden said. He climbed down out of the aircar and stood facing Eric, his body a dim shadow. "Why are you here?" Eric whispered. "I wanted to see you. Without the others knowing it. I was sure you'd come here tonight." Walden. Always Walden. First his teacher and then his friend, and now the one man who stood between him and freedom. For a second Eric felt his muscles tense and he stiffened, ready to leap upon the older man and knock him down and take the ship and run. Then he relaxed. It was a senseless impulse, primitive and useless. "The odiers don't know you have any idea what's happened, Eric. But I could tell. It was written all over you." "What did they find, Walden?" The old man sighed, and when he spoke his voice was very tired. "They found two women. They tried to capture them, but the women ran out on a ledge. The older one slipped and fell and the other tried to catch her and she fell too. They were dead when the men reached them." Eric listened, and slowly his tension relaxed, replaced by a dull ache of mourning. But he knew that he was glad to hear that they were dead and not captured, not dragged away from the hills to be bathed and well fed and imprisoned forever under the eyes of the new race. "The old one was blind," Walden said. "It may have been her blindness that caused her to fall." "It wasn't." "No, Eric, it probably wasn't " They were silent for a moment, and there was no sound at all except for their own breathing. Eric wondered if Lisa still hid in the aircar, if she was listening to them, afraid and hopeless and crying over the death of her people. "Whv did you come out here. Walden?" "To sec you. I came today, when I realized how suspicious the council had grown. I was going to warn you, to tell you to keep away from the hills, that they wanted an ex cusc to lock you up. I was too late." "I was careless, Walden." He felt guilt twist inside of him. "No. You didn't know the danger. I should have warned you sooner. But I never dreamed you would find anyone in the hills, Eric. I never dreamed there were any more without perception, this generation." Eric moved nearer the car and leaned against it, the cold plastic next to his body cooling him a little, steadying him against the feverish trembling that shook his legs and sent sweat down over him and made him too weak, suddenly, to want to struggle further. "Let me go. Walden. Let me take the car and go." Walden didn't move. He stood quietly, a tall thin shape in the darkness. "There are other people the searchers didn't find, aren't there? And you're going to them." Eric didn't answer. He looked past Walden, at the car, wishing he could somehow call to Lisa, wishing they could perceive so that he could reassure her and promise her that somehow he'd still take her to freedom. But it would be an empty promise... "I've warned vou too late. You've found your people, but it won't do you any good. They'll hunt you through the hills, and I won't be able to help you any more." Eric looked back at him, hearing the sadness in his voice. It was real sadness, real emotion. He thought of the years he had spent with Walden, learning, absorbing the old race knowledge, and he remembered that all through those years Walden had never once made him feel uncomfortable because of the difference between them. He looked at the old man for a long time, wishing that it was day so he could read the other's expression, wondering how he had managed to take this man for granted for so long. "Why?" he whispered. "Why are you helping me? Why aren't you like the others?" "I never had a son, Eric. Perhaps that's the reason." Eric thought of Myron and shook his head. "No, it isn't that. My father doesn't feel the way you do. He can't forget that I'm not normal. With him, I'm always aware of the difference." "And you're not with me?" "No," Eric said. "I'm not. Why?" And he wondered why he had never asked that question before. "The final question," Walden said softly. "I wondered how long it would be before you asked it. I wondered if you'd ever ask it. "Haven't you ever thought about why I never married. Eric? Haven't you ever asked yourself why I alone learned to read, and collected books, and studied the old race?" "No," Eric admitted. "I just accepted you." "Even though I can perceive and you can't." Walden paused and Eric waited, not knowing what was coming and yet sure that nothing could surprise him now. "My father was normal," Walden said slowly. "But I never saw him. My mother was like you. So was my brother. We lived in the hills and I was the only one who could perceive. I learned what it was to be different." Eric stared. He couldn't stop staring. And yet he should have realized, long ago, that Walden was different too, in his own way. face, shadowed in moonlight, as quiet and as understanding as ever. For a moment neither spoke, and there was only the faraway sound of crickets chirping and the rustling of the wind in the gardens. And then, from within the aircar, there was a different rustling, that of a person moving. "Lisa!" Eric pushed the compartment panel back. The soft light came on automatically, framing her where she curled against the far wall. "You heard us # " She nodded. Tears had dried on her cheeks. Her eyes were huge in her thin face. "We'd better go, Lisa." He reached in to help her out. They didn't see the aircar dropping in for a landing until it was almost upon them, until its lights arced down over the museum walls. "Hide, Eric. In here -- " Lisa pulled him forward. Behind them, Walden's voice, suddenly tired in the darkness. "It's too late. They know I'm here. And they're wondering why." The three of them stood frozen, watching each other, while the dark shape of the car settled to the ground some thirty yards away. "It's Abbot," Walden said. He paused, intent for a moment, and added, "He doesn't know about you. Get out of sight somewhere, both of you, away from here -- " "Come on, Lisa -- " Eric swung away from the car, toward the shelter of the building and whatever hiding place there might be. "Hurry!" They ran, and the museum rose in front of them, and the door was open. They were through it and into the dim corridor, and there was no one around; Walden's figure was lost in the night outside. Beyond the libraries the great ramp spiraled downward. "This wav, Lisa! They came out into the bottom of the well and there in front of them the starship rested. Still reaching upward. Still waiting, as it had waited for so many uncounted years. Their ship -- if only it could be their ship... "Oh, Eric!" Side by side they stood staring at it, and Eric wished that they could get into it and go, right now, while thev were still free and there was no one to stop them. But they couldn't. There was no food in the ship, no plant tanks, none of the many provisions the books listed. Besides, if they took off now they would destroy the museum and all the people in it. and probably kill themselves as well. "Eric! We know you're down there!" It wasn't Walden's voice. Lisa moved closer. Eric put his arm around her and held her while footsteps hurried toward them down the ramp. The council. Abbot and Drew and the others. Prior, shaking his head. Walden. "Let us go," Eric cried. "Why won't you let us go?" Walden turned to the others. His eyes pleaded with them. Ilis lips moved and his hands were expressive, gesturing. But the others stood without moving, without expression. Then Abbot pushed Walden aside and started forward, his face hard and determined and unchangeable. "You won't let us go," Eric said. "No. You're fools, both of you." There was one answer, only one answer, and with it, a hot violence in his blood as the old race pattern came into focus, as the fear and the futility fell away. It was only a few steps to the ship. Eric caught Lisa's arm and pulled her after him and ran toward it, reaching up to the door. In one motion he flung i.t open and lifted her through it, then he swung about to face the others. "Let us go!" he shouted. "Promise to let us go. or we'll take off anyway and if we die at least you'll die too!" Abbot stopped. He looked back at Walden, his face scornful. "You see?" he said aloud. "They're mad. And you let this happen." He turned away, dismissing Walden, and came toward the ship. The others followed him. Eric waited. He stood with his back to the door, waiting, as Abbot strode toward him. ahead of the other councilmen, alone and unprotected. "You're the fool!" Eric said. He laughed as he leaped forward. Abbot's eyes went wide suddenly; he tried to dodge, gave a little grunt, and went limp in Eric's grasp. Eric laughed again, swung Abbot into the ship and leaped in himself. The old race and its violence had never been nearer. He slammed the door shut, bolted it, and turned back to where the councilman was struggling to his feet. "Now will you let us go?" Eric said softly. "Or must we take olT now, with you -- for the stars?" For a long moment Abbot looked at him. and then his lips trembled and his whole body went slack in defeat. "The ship is yours," he whispered. "Just let me go." Outside the ship, Walden chuckled wryly. strange against Eric's body, as strange as the straps that bound him to the couch. He looked over at Lisa and she too was unrecognizable. a great bloated slug tied down beside him. Only her face, frightened behind the helmet, looked human. He reached for the controls, then paused, glancing down through the view screens at the ground, at the people two hundred feet below, tiny ants scurrying away from the ship, running to shelter but still looking up at him. He couldn't see his parents or Walden. His fingers closed about the control lever but still he stared down. Everything that had been familiar all his life stood out sharply now, because he was leaving and it would never be there again for him. And he had to remember what it was like... Then he looked up. The sky was blue and cloudless above him, and there were no stars at all. But he knew that beyond the sky the stars were shining. And perhaps, somewhere amid the stars, the old race waited. He turned to Lisa. "This may be goodbye, darling." "It may be. But it doesn't matter, really." They had each other. It was enough. Even though they could never be as close to each other as the new race was close. They were separate, with a gulf always between their inmost thoughts, but they could bridge that gulf, sometimes. He turned back to the controls and his fingers tightened. The last line of the poem shouted in his mind, and he laughed, for he knew finally what the poet had meant, what the old race had lived for. Wc have cast off the planets like outgrown toys, and now we want the stars... He pulled the lever back and the ship sprang free. A terrible weight pressed against him, crushing him, stifling him. But still he laughed, because he was one of the old race, and he was happy. And the meaning of his life lay in the search itself. ship until it was only a tiny speck in the sky, and then they looked away from it, at each other. A wave of perception swept among them, drawing them closer to each other in the face of something they couldn't understand. "Why did they go?" Abbot asked, in his mind. "Why did any of the old race go?" Walden answered. The sunlight flashed off the ship, and then it was gone. "It's not surprising that the old race died," Abbot said. "They were did such strange things. Their lives seemed so completely meaningless..." Walden didn't answer for a moment. His eyes searched the sky for a last glimpse of the ship, but there was nothing at all. He sighed, and he looked at Abbot, and then past him, at all the others. "I wonder," he said, "how long it will be before some other race says the same thing about us." No one answered. He turned and walked away from them, across the trampled flowers, toward the museum and the great empty vault where the starship had waited for so long. startl'd at the Ivy. which is a moving picture house in Cave Junction built like a big quonset. It's the only show in these pails. and most of us old-timers up here in die timber country of southwest  Oregon have got into the habit of going to see a picture on Saturday nights before we head for a tavern. But I don't think old Doc Yoris, who was there with Lew and Rusty The trees on Mars are few and stunted, says old Doc Yoris. There's plenty of iold, of course -- but trees  an be much more important! By Arthur Dekker Savage lllustrotcd by Philip Pur sops and me, had been to more than two or three shows in his life. Doc i' kind of sensitive about his appearance on acount of his small eyes and big nose and ears; and since gold mining gave way to logging and lumber mills, with Outsiders drifting into the country. Doc has taken to staying on his homestead away back up along Deer Creek, near the boundary of the Siskiyou National Forest. It's gotten so he'll come to Cave Junction only after dark, and even then he wears dark glasses so strangers won't notice him too much. I couldn't see' anything funny about the picture when Doc started laughing, but I figure it's a man's own business when he wants to laugh, so I didn't say anything. The show was one of these scientific things, and when Doc began to cackle it was showing some men getting out of a rocket ship on Mars and running over to look at some trees. Rusty, who's top choker setter in our logging outfit, was trying to see Doc's point. He can snare logs with a hunk of steel cable faster than anyone I know, but he's never had much schooling. He turned to Doc. "I don't get it, Doc," he said. "What's the deal?" Doc kept chuckling. "It's them trees," he said. "There's no trees like that on Mars." "Oh," said Rusty. I suppose it was just chance that Burt Holden was sitting behind us and heard the talk. Burt is one of the newcomers. He'd conic down from Grants Pass and started a big lumber mill and logging outfit, and was trying to freeze out the little operators. He growled something about keeping quiet. That got Rusty and Lew kind of mad, and Lew turned around and looked at Burt. Lew is even bigger than Burt, and things might have got interesting, but I wanted to see the rest of the picture. I nudged him and asked him if he had a chew. They won't let you smoke in the show, but it's okay to chew, and most of us were in the habit anyway, because there's too much danger of forest fire when you smoke on the job. Doc laughed every time the screen showed trees, and I could hear Burt humping around in his seat like he was irritated. XI drifted over to the Owl Tavern and took a table against the north wall, behind the pool tables and across from the bar. Doc had put his dark glasses back on, and he sat facing the wall. Not that many people apart from the Insiders knew Doc. He hadn't been very active since the young medical doctor had come to Cave Junction in #, although he never turned down anyone who came for help, and as far as I knew he'd never lost a patient unless he was already dead when Doc got there. We were kidding Lew because he was still wearing his tin hat and caulked boots from work. "You figuring on starting early in the morning?" I asked him. Rusty and Doc laughed. It was a good joke because we rode out to the job in my jeep, and so we'd naturally get there at the same time. Then Rusty sat up straightcr and looked over at the bar. "Hey," he said, "Pop's talking to Burt Holden." Pop Johnson owns our outfit. He's one of the small operators that guys like Burt are trying to squeeze out. "Hope he don't try to rook Pop into no deals," said Lew. Doc tipped up his bottle of beer. In Oregon they don't sell anything but beer in the taverns. "Times change," he said. "Bark in # all they wanted was gold. Now they're trying to take all the tires." "It's the big opeiators like Burt." I said "Little guvs like Pop can't cut 'em as fast as they grow. The companies don't have to reseed, either, except on National Forest land." "That Burt Holden was up to my place couple weeks ago," said Doc. "Darn near caught me skinning out a deer." "He better not vnp to the game warden." said Rusty. "Them laws is for sports and Outsiders, not us guys who need the meat." "He wanted to buv all mv tim# # ber." said Doc. "Offered me ten dollars a thousand board feet, on the stump." "Don't sell." I advised him. "If Butt oilers that much, almost anyone else will pay twelve." Doc looked at me. "I'd never sell my trees. Not at any price. I got a hundred and sixty acres of virgin stand, and that's the way it's gonna stav. I cut up the windfalls and snags for firewood, and that's all." "Here conies Pop." said Lew. Pop sat down with us and had a beer. He looked worried. We didn't ask him any questions, because we fig li t e a man will talk if he wants to. and if he doesn't it's his own business. He finally unlimbered. "Burt Holden wants to buv the mill." he said, wiping I I is mouth on the back of his hand. "Buy your mill?" said Lew. "Hell, his mill is five times as big. and he's even got a burner to take care ol slashings, so he don't have to shut down in the lire season." "He just wants the land." said Pop. "because it's near the highway. He wants to le.u down my setup and build a pulp mill." "A Jmlp mill!" If we could have seen Doc's eves through the glasses I imagine they'd have been popped open a full hall inch. "Why, then they'll be cutting down everything but the brush!" Pop nodded. "Yeah. Size of a log don't matter when you make paper -- just so it's wood." It seemed a though Doe was talking to himself. "They'll strip the land down bare," he mumbled. "And the hills will wash a wav. and thehemieals they use in the mill will kill the lish in the creeks and 'That's whv tliev won't let anyone stait a pulp mill near Giants Pa'S." said Pop. "Most of the town's money comes from sports who come up to the Rogue River to fish." Rusty set his jaw. "In the winter we need them fish." he 'aid. He was right, too. The woods elose down in tinwinter, on account of the snow, and if a man can't hunt and fish he's liable to get kind of hungrv. That rocking chair rnonev doesn't stretch verv far. "I ain't gonna sell," said Pop. "But that won't stop Burt Holden, and any place he builds the mill around here will drain into the Doc pushed hack his chair and stood up to his lull height of five foot four. "I'm gonna talk to Burt Holden." he said. Rusty stood up to his six foot three. "I'll bring him over here. Doc," he said. "We're handy to the cue rack here, and Lew and Simmons can keep them guys he's with off my back." I stood up and shoved Rusty back down. I'm no taller than he is, but I outweigh him about twenty pounds. I started working in the woods when we still felled trees with axes and misery whips -- crosscut saws to the Outsiders. "I'll go get him," I said. "You're still mad about the show, and you wouldn't be able to get him this far without mussing him up." "There won't be no trouble," said Doc. "I just want to make him an offer." Doc wanted to talk to him. The three guys with him followed us back to the table. Burt figured he knew what it was all about, and he just stood over Doc and looked down on him. "If it's about your timber, Yoris," he said, "I'll take it, but I can't pay you more than nine dollars now. Lumber's coming down, and I'm taking a chance even at that." He rocked back and forth on his heels and looked at Pop as though daring him to say different. "I still don't want to sell, Mr. Holden," said Doc. "But I've got place, and I'll give it to you if you won't put a pulp mill anywhere in We were all floored at that, but Burt recovered first. He gave a nasty laugh. "Not interested, Yoris. If you want to sell, look me up." "Wait!" said Doc. "A pulp mill will take every tree in the Valley. In a few years -- " "It'll make money, too," said Burt flatly. "Money ain't everything by a long shot. It won't buy trees and creeks and rain." "It'll buy trees to make lumber." Burt was getting mad. "I don't want any opposition from you, Yoris. I've had enough trouble from people who try to hold back progress. If you don't like the way we run things here, you can -- hell, you can go back to Mars!" It seemed to me that it was just about time to start in. I could have taken Burt easiest, but I knew Rusty would probably swing on him first and get in my way, so I planned to work on the two guys on Burt's right, leaving the one on his left for Lew. I didn't want Pop to get tangled up in it. I don't generally wait too long after I make up my mind, but then I noticed Rusty reaching out slowly for a cue stick, and I thought maybe I'd better take Burt first, while Rusty got set. I never did see a guy so one way about having something in his hands. But Doc didn't drop out. "There ain't nothing but a few scrub trees on Mars," he said to Burt, looking him square in the eye. "And no creeks and no rain." Burt curled his lip sarcastically. "The hell you say! Is that why you didn't like it there?" You could see he was just trying to egg Doc into saying he'd come from Mars, so he could give him the horse laugh. The guys he was with were getting set for a fracas, but they were waiting for Burt to lead off. Doc didn't get caught. "But there's gold," he said, like he hadn't heard Burt at all. "Tons of it -- laying all over the ground." I guess Burt decided to ride along. "Okay, Yoris," he said. "Tell you what I'll do. For only one ton of Martian gold I'll agree to drop all plans for a pulp mill, here or anywhere else. In fact, I II get out of business altogether." Doc moved in like a log falling out of the loading tongs. "That's a deal," he said. "You ready to go?" Burt started to look disgusted, then he smiled. "Sure. Mars must be quite a place if you came from there." "Okay," said Doc. "You just stand up against the wall, Mr. Holden." Burt's smile faded. He figured Doc was trying to maneuver him into a likely position for us. But Doc cleared that up quick. "You boys get up and stand aside," he ordered. "Get back a ways and give Mr. Holden plenty of room." We didn't like it, but we cleared out from around the table. A bunch from the bar and pool tables, sensing something was up, came drifting over to watch. I could feel tension building up. "Now." said Doc, pointing, "you just stand right over there, Mr. Holden, and fold your arms." Burt didn't like the audience, and I guess he figured his plans were backfiring when Doc didn't bluff. "You hill-happy old coot," he "It's probably ridiculous, but they appear to be some sort of parking meters " snarled. "You'd better go home and sleep it off!" I grabbed hold of Lew's arm and shook my head at Rusty. I wasn't going to interfere with Doc now. "You're not scared, are you, Mr. Holden?" said Doc quietly. "Just you stand against the wall and take it easy. It won't hurt a bit." tough for an Outsider, and a hard-headed businessman to boot, but he'd never run into a customer like Doc before. You could see him trying to make up his mind on how to handle this thing. He glanced around quick at the crowd, and I could tell he decided to play it out to where Doc would have to draw in his horns. He actually grinned, for the effect it would have on everybody watching. "All right, Yoris," he said. He backed against the wall and folded his arms. "But hadn't you better stand up here with me?" "I ain't going," said Doc. "I don't like Mars. But you won't have no trouble getting your gold. There's nuggets the size of your fist laying all over the dry river beds." "I hate to be nosey," said Burt, playing to the crowd, "but how are you going to get me there?" "With his head, o' course!" blurted Rusty before I could stop him. "Just like he cures you when you're sick!" Doc had pulled Rusty through two or three bad kid sicknesses -- and a lot of the rest of us. too. "Yep," said Doc. "A man don't need one of them rocket things to get between here and Mars. Fact is, I never seen one." Burt looked at the ceiling like he was a martyr, then back at Doc. "Well, Yoris," he said in a tone that meant he was just about through humoring him, "I'm waiting. Can you send me there or can't you?" The start of a nasty smile was beginning to show at the corners of his mouth. "Sure," said Doc. He slumped down in his chair and cupped his hands lightly around his dark glasses. I noticed his fingers trembling a little against his forehead. The lights dimmed, flickered and want out, and we waited for the bartender to put in a new fuse. The power around here doesn't go haywire except in the winter, when trees fall across the lines. A small fight started over in a corner. When the lights came back on, Doc and Pop started for the door, and Lew and Rusty and I followed. Burt's buddies were looking kind of puzzled, and a few old-timers were moving over to watch the fight. The rest were heading back to the bar. Rusty piled into the jeep with Doc and me. "When you going to bring him back, Doc?" he asked when we started moving. "Dunno," said Doc. He took off his glasses to watch me shift gears. He's been after me for a long time to teach him how to drive. "It only works on a man once."   Daylight sometimes hides secrets that darkness will reveal -- the Martian's glowing eyes, for instance. But darkness has other dangers... By James McKimmey, Jr. Illustrated by Paul Orban ly around the dinner table at the five men, hiding his examination by a thin screen of smoke Irom his cigar. He was a large man with thick blond-gray hair cut close to his head. In three more months he would be fiftv-two. hut his face and body had the vital look of a man fifteen years younger. He was the President of the Superior Council, and he had been in that post -- the highest post on the occupied planet of Mars -- four of the six years he had lived here. As his eyes flicked from one face to another his fingers unconsciously tapped the table, making a sound like a miniature drum roll. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five top officials, selected, tested, screened on Earth to form the nucleus of governmental rule on Mars. Heidel's bright narrow eyes flicked, his fingers drummed. Which one? Who was the imposter, the ringer? Who was the Martian? Sadler's dry voice cut through the silence: "This is not just an ordinary meeting then, Mr. President?" Heidel's cigar came up and was clamped between his teeth. He stared into Sadler's eyes. "No, Sadler, it isn't. This is a very special meeting." He grinned around the cigar. "This is where we take the clothes off the sheep and find the wolf." Heidel watched the five faces. Sadler, Meehan, Locke, Forbes, Clarke. One of them. Which one? "I'm a little thick tonight," said Harry Locke. "I didn't follow what you meant." "No, no, of course not," Heidel said, still grinning. "I'll explain it." He could feel himself alive at that moment, every nerve singing, every muscle toned. His brain was quick and his tongue rolled the words out smoothly. This was the kind of situation Heidel handled best. A tense, dramatic situation, full of atmosphere and suspense. "Here it is," Heidel continued, "simply and briefly." He touched the cigar against an ash tray, watching with slitted shining eyes while the ashes spilled away from the glowing tip. He bent forward suddenly. "We have an imposter among us, gentlemen. A spy." He waited, holding himself tense against the table, letting the sting of his words have their effect. Then he leaned back, carefully. "And tonight I am going to expose this imposter. Right here, at this table." He searched the faces again, looking for a tell-tale twitch of a muscle, a movement of a hand, a shading in the look of an eye. There were only Sadler, Meehan, Locke, Forbes, Clarke, looking like themselves, quizzical, polite, respecting. "One of us, you say," Clarke said noncommittally, his phrase neither a question nor a positive statement. "That is true," said Heidel. "Bit of a situation at that," said Forbes, letting a faint smile touch his lips. "Understatement, Forbes," Heidel said. "Understatement." "Didn't mean to sound capricious," Forbes said, his smile gone. "Of course not," Heidel said. Edward Clarke cleared his throat. "May I ask, sir, how this was discovered and how it was narrowed down to the Superior Council?" "Surely," Heidel said crisply. "No need to go into the troubles we've been having. You know all about that. But how these troubles originated is the important thing. Do you remember the missionary affair?" "When we were going to convert the Eastern industrial section?" "That's right," Heidel said, remembering. "Horrible massacre." "Bloody," agreed John Meehan. "Sixty-seven missionaries lost," Heidcl said. "I remember the Martian note of apology," Forbes said. " 'We have worshipped our own God lor two-hundred thousand years. We  would prefer to continue. Thank you.' Blinking nerve, eh?" "Neither here nor there," Hcidel said abruptly. "The point is that no one knew those sixty-seven men were missionaries except myself and you five men." in front of him. "One case," he said. "Here's another. Do vou recall when we outlawed the free selection system?" "Another bloodv one," said Sadler. "Forty-eight victims in that case," Heidcl said. "Forty-eight honorable colonists, sanctioned by us to legally marry any couple on the planet, and sent out over the country to abolish the horrible f reclove situation." "Forty-eight justices of the peace dead as pickerels," Forbes said. "Do you happen to remember that note of apology?" Hcidel asked, a slight edge in his voice. He examined Forbes' eves. "Matter of fact, yes," said Forbes, returning Heidel's stare steadily. " 'You love vour wav. we'll love ours.' Terriblv caustic, what?" "Terribly," said Heidel. "Although that too is neither here nor there. The point again, no one except the six of us right here knew what those forty-eight men were sent out to do." Hcidel straightened in his chair. The slow grating voice of Forbes had taken some of the sharpness out of the situation. lie wanted to hold their attention minutely, so that when he was ready, the dramatics of his action would lie tense and telling. "There is no use," he said, "in going into the details of the other incidents. You remember them. When w-e tried to install a free press, the Sensible Art galleries, IAm-A-Martian Day, wrestling, and all the rest." "I remember the wrestling business awfully well," said Forbes. "Martians drove a wrestler through the street in a yellow jetmobile. Had flowers around his neck and a crown on his head. He was dead, of course. Stuffed, I think..." "All right," snapped Heidel. "Each one of our efforts to offer these people a chance to benefit from our culture was snapped oil' at the bud. And only a leak in the Superior Council could have caused it. It is a simple matter of deduction. There is one of us, here tonight, who is responsible. And I am going to expose him." HcidePs voice w'as a low' vibrant sound that echoed in the large dining room. 'Fhc five men waited. Forbes, his long arms crossed. Sadler, his eyes on his fingernails. Meehan, blinking placidly. Clarke, twirling his thumbs. Locke, examining his cigarette. "Kessit!" Heidel called. A gray-haired man in a black butler's coat appeared. "We'll have our wine now," Heidel said. There was a slight quirk in his mouth, so that his teeth showed between his lips. The butler moved methodically from place to place, pouring wine from a silver decanter. "Now then, Kessit," Heidel said, when the butler had finished, "would you be kind enough to fetch me that little pistol from the mantel over there?" He smiled outwardly this time. The situation was right again; he was handling things, inch by inch, without interruption. He took the gun from the old man's hands and said, "One thing more, Kessit. Would you please light the candles on the table and turn out the rest of the lights in the room. I've always been a romanticist," Heidel said, smiling around the table. "Candlelight with my wine." "Oh, excellent," said Locke soberly. "Quite," said Forbes.  Heidel nodded and waited while the butler lit the candles and snapped off the overhead lights. The yellow flames wavered on the table as the door closed gently behind the butler. "Now, then," Heidel said, feeling the tingling in his nerves. "This, gentlemen, is a replica of an antique of the twentieth century. A working replica, I might add. It was called a P-#, if my memory serves me." He held the pistol up so that the candlelight reflected against the glistening black handle and the blue barrel. There was a polite murmur as the five men stretched forward to look at the gun in Heidel's hands. "Crude," Sadler said. "But devilish looking," Forbes added. "My hobby," Heidel said. "I would like to add that not only do I collect these small arms, but I am very adept at using them. Something I will demonstrate to you very shortly," he added, grinning. "Say now," nodded Meehan. "That should be jolly," Forbes said, laughing courteously. "I believe it will at that," Heidel said. "Now if you will notice, gentlemen," he said touching the clip ejector of the pistol and watching the black magazine slip out into his other hand, "I have but five cartridges in the clip. Just five. You see?" They all bent forward, blinking. "Good," said Heidel, shoving the clip back into the grip of the gun. He couldn't keep his lips from curling in his excitement, but his hands were as steady as though his nerves had turned to ice. The five men leaned back in their chairs. "Now then, Meehan," he said to the man at the opposite end of the table. "Would you mind moving over to your left, so that the end of the table is clear?" "Oh?" said Meehan. "Yes, of course." He grinned at the others, and there was a ripple of amusement as Meehan slid his chair to the left. "Yes," said Heidel. "All pretty foolish-looking, perhaps. But it won't be in a few minutes when I discover the bastard of a Martian who's in this group, I'll tell you that!" His voice rose and rang in the room, and he brought the glistening pistol down with a crack against the table. Ileidel found his smile again. "All light, now I'll explain a hit further. Before Dr. Kingly, the head of our laboratory, died a few days ago, he made a vei peculiar discovery. As you know, then has been ' i mo evidence to indicate that the Martian is anv dilicrent. physically, from the Eartlmian. Not until I)r. Kinglv made hi.-, discovery, that is." Ileidel looked from face to face. "This is how it happened," he went on. "Dr Kinglv,..." He puu.-ed and glanced about in false surprise. "I beg you pardon, gentlemen. We might as well be enjoying our wine. Excellent port. Very old, I believe. Shall we?" he asked, raising his glass. f ive other glasses .shimmered in the candlelight. "Let us. all. toast success to the unveiling of the rotten Martian who sits among us, shall we?" Heidel's smile glinted and he drank a (piai ter of his glass. I lie live glasses tipped and were returned to the table. Again there was silence as tinmen waited. To !Zt back." Ileidel said, listening with excitement to liD own voice. "I)r. Kindly, in the process of an autopsy on a derelict Martian, made a rather startling discovcry... "I beg VO UI pardon." Forbes said. "Did  o I I sa #  airtop.-v ?" "Yes" said Ileidel. TVcVe done this frequently. Not according to base orders, von understand." He winked. "But a little infraction now and then is mves-ai v." "I see," said Forbes. "I just didn't know about that." "No, you didn't, did you?" said Ileidel, looking at Forbes closely. "A: any rate. Dr. Kingly had developed in his wul. a preserving solution which he used in such instances, thereby piolouging the line for examination of the cadaver, without experiencing deterioration of the tissues. This solution was merely injected into the blood stream, and..." "Sorry again, sir," Forbes said. "But you said blood stream?" "Yes." Ileidel nodded. "'Ellis had to be done before the cadaver was a  adaver. vou sec?" "I think so. ve." said Forbes, leaning back again. "Murdered the bastard for an autopsy, what?" IlcidcTs lingers closed around the pistol. "I don't like that, Forbes." "Terriblv sorry, sir." " lo get on." ileidel said finally, his voice a (titling sound. "Dr. Kingb had injected Iris solution and then... Well, at any rate, when lie returned to his laboratory, it was night I I is laboratory was black as pile!) I'm Irving to paint the picture for you. gentlemen and the cadaver was stretched out on a table, vou see. And before Dr. Kinglv switched on the lights, he saw the eyes ol this dead Martian  glowing in the dark like a pair of hot coals." "Wind." said Sadler, unblinking. "( ihoslly." said Clarke. "The important thing," Ileidel said curtly, "is that Dr. Kingly discovered the dillerencc. then, between the M.utian and the Enrthman. The dillerencc is the eves. The solution, vou see, had # # reacted chemically to the membranes of the eyeballs, so that as it i happened they lit up like electric lights. I won't go into what Dr. Kingly found further, when he dissected the eyeballs. Let it suffice to say, the Martian eyeball is a physical element entirely different from our own -- at least from those of five of us, I should say." His grin gleamed. He was working this precisely and carefully, and it was effective. "Now, however," he continued, "it is this sixth man who is at issue right now. The fly in the soup, shall we say. And in just a few seconds I am going to exterminate that fly." He picked up the pistol from the table. "As I told you, gentlemen, I am quite versatile with this weapon. I am a dead shot, in other words. And I am going to demonstrate it to you." He glanced from face to face. "You will notice that since Mr. Meehan has moved, I have a clear field across the table. I don't believe a little lead in the woodwork will mar the room too much, would you say, Forbes?" Forbes sat very still. "No, I shouldn't think so, sir." "Good. Because I am going to snuff out each of the four candles in the center of this table by shooting the wick away. You follow me, gentlemen? Locke? Meehan? Sadler?" Heads nodded. "Then perhaps you are already ahead of me. When the last candle is extinguished, we will have darkness, you see. And then I think we'll find our Martian rat. Because, as a matter of fact," Heidel lolled his words, "I have taken the privilege of adding to the wine we have been drinking Dr. Kingly's preserving solution. Non-tasteful, non-harmful. Except, that is, to one man in this room." Heidel motioned his gun. "And God rest the bastard's soul, because if you will remember, I have five bullets in the chamber of this pistol. Four for the candles and one for the brain of the sonofabitch whose eyes light up when the last candle goes out." silence while the flames of the candles licked at the still air. "I think, however," Heidel said, savoring the moment, "that we should have one final toast before we proceed." He lifted his glass. "May the receiver of the fifth bullet go straight to hell. I phrase that literally, gentlemen," he said, laughing. "Drink up!" The glasses were drained and placed again on the table. "Watch carefully," Heidel said and lifted the pistol. He aimed at the first candle. The trigger was taut against his finger, the explosion loud in the room. "One," said Heidel. He aimed again. The explosion. "Two," he said. "Rather good, eh?" "Oh, yes," Sadler said. "Quite," said Forbes. "Again," said Heidel. A third shot echoed. "Now," he said, pointing the muzzle at the last candle. "I would say this is it, wouldn't you, gentlemen? And as soon as this one goes. I'm afraid one of us is going to find a bullet right between his goddam sparkling eyes. Are you ready?" He squinted one eye and looked down the sights. He squeezed the trigger, the room echoed and there was blackness. I leidel held his pistol poised over the table. Silence. "Well," said Forbes finally. "There you have it. Surprise, what?" Hcidcl balanced the pistol, feeling his palm go suddenly moist against the black grip, and he looked around at the five pairs of glowing eyes. "Bit of a shock, I should imagine," Forbes said. "Discovering all of us, as it were." Heidel licked his lips. "How? How could you do this?" Forbes remained motionless. "Simple as one, you know. Put men on rockets going back to Earth in place ol returning colonists. Study. Observe. Learn. Shift a record here and there. Forge, change pictures, all that sort of thing. Poor contact between here and Earth, you know. Not too difficult.' "I'll get one of you," Heidel said, still balancing hi' pistol tightly. "Well, possibly," Forbes said. "But no more than one. You have three guns pointed at you. We can see you perfectly, you know, as though it were broad daylight. One shiver of that pistol, and you're dead." "Why have you done this?" Heidel said suddenly. " Why? Everything that was done was for the Martian. We tried to give you freedom and culture, the benefit of our knowledge..." "We didn't like your wrestlers," Forbes said. HeidtTs nostrils twitched, and suddenly he swung the pistol. There was a crashing explosion and then silence. "Good." said Forbes. "I don't think he got the last one fired." "You're all right then?" asked Meehan, putting his gun on the table. "Oh, quite! Rather dramatic altogether, ch?" "Nerve tingling," Locke agreed. Forbes tinned in his chair and called, "Oh Kcssit!" The butler opened the door to the darkened room, hesitated, and reached for the light switch. "No, no," Forbes said, smiling. "Never mind that. Gome over here, will you please?" The butler crossed the room slowly. "It's all right," Forbes said. "The president will notice nothing whatever, Kcssit. Would you mind pouring us all another glass of wine? I'm frightfully crazy about that port, eh?" There was a murmur of agreeing voices. Tin butler lifted the silver decanter and filled glasses, moving easily and surelv in the darkness. "Cheers," said Forbes. "Cheers." said the others, over the clink of glasses. Personalities in Science He Analyzes the Sunshine and Fights Darkness known, among his colleagues, as the man "who discovered what makes the sun shine," and he was a key figure in the development of the atomic bomb. Yet he deplores the usual "overemphasis" on complicated nuclei and on fission, which "is, after all, only a very special phenomenon in nuclear physics" -- so much so that he completely omitted any mention of it in a # lecture course he gave at the General Electric Laboratories. Obviously, Prof. Bethe has thought long and deeply on the implications of his work, and helps greatly to discredit the common description of research scientists as "cold-blooded." After the last war, he became a member of the nineman Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, headed by Albert Einstein, to educate the public to the essential facts in this field. When the possibility of the hydrogen bomb became public in #, he served as spokesman for a group of scientists who called themselves "worried citizens" and urged the United States to resolve never to use the H-bomb first. His views are perhaps best summed up by a quotation from an article of his which appeared in the April # issue of Scientific American : "The situation in atomic energy has changed, both because of the Soviet development of the A-bomb and because of our decision on the H-bomb. To leave atomic weapons uncontrolled would be against the best interests of both countries. If we can negotiate seriously with the U.S.S.R., the scale of the negotiations should probably be as broad as possible. But the situation would be greatly eased if we could agree only to eliminate the greatest menace to civilization, the hydrogen bomb." It may appear slightly ironic to some that the man who wrote those words has been called, by Time # # magazine, "one of Nazi Germany's greatest gifts to the United States." If anything, this is a modest statement, for the Bethe carbon cycle, a scries of six linked transformations, was the first and only explanation of solar and stellar energy which met all the known facts. Hans Bethe was bom in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, on July #, #. He was an only child. There had been university professors in his family for generations; his father, Albrecht Theodore Bethe, was properly styled Doktor Doktor Professor Bethe, having both his M.D. and Ph. D. degrees. Hans received his own Ph.D. in # at the University of Munich. For his doctor's thesis, he used the new system of quantum mechanics to explain the effect of diffraction and refraction in crystals. This tended to set the scientific world on its collective ear, since the system had only been presented by its discoverers. Schrodinger and Heisenberg, in #, and very few people so much as claimed to understand it at the time. With this accomplishment behind him, Bethe went to Frankfurt as an instructor of physics, and took a similar post at Stuttgart in #. From # to # lie was a lecturer at the University of Munich. During this time he worked under Sir Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge and Enrico Fermi in Rome, on a fellowship from the Rockefeller International Education Board. With Fermi, he wrote "Reciprocal Action of Two Electrons", which was published in #. This brought him into contact with Niels Bohr, "the founder of modern atomic theory". When Hitler came to power, Bethe was assistant prolessor at the University of Tubingen, in addition to lecturing at Munich. Since his mother was Jewish, he left Germany and went to England. In #-#, he was at the University of Manchester; in #-# at Bristol as a fellow. States in #, to be an assistant professor at Cornell. (He has, incidentally, been a full professor since #.) Shortly after his arrival, Bethe was chosen as one of the assistant editors of the American Physical Society's journal, to serve a threeyear term. What amounted to "a #-page textbook of nuclear physics" -- three issues of Reviews of Modern Physics devoted almost exclusively to his writings -- has been reprinted numerous times. Impressive as his work is, a list of Bethe's major professional interests is perhaps even more so. To quote the Professor himself, they arc "quantum theory of atoms, theory of metals, quantum theory of collisions, theory of atomic nuclei, energy production in stars, quantum electrodynamics, shock wave theory and microwaves." One of his most important treatises is "Energy Production in Stars," the first two sections of which were published in # and won the New York Academy of Science's A. Cressy Morrison Prize. (The third section appeared four years later.) Bethe first learned of the importance of thermo-nuclear reactions in the sun's energy at the # Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics. As propounded then, the problem was: knowing the proportion (#) of hydrogen in the sun, to determine the other elements which would react to account for its radiation, size and other known characteristics. Bethe started considering the problem as soon as his train left for the return trip to Ithaca and, according to his friend George Gamow, "had the answer at the very moment when the passing dining car steward announced the first call for dinner". His solution, of course, was the six-step reaction cycle in which carbon and nitrogen act as catalysts transforming the hydrogen protons into one alpha particle. The atomic weight lost in this process becomes energy in accordance with Einstein's formula. Bethe was able to show that the energy liberation of his reaction chain at # degrees centigrade coincides exactly with the amount of energy radiated by the sun. And speaking of that energy, he remarked, "At the rate of one cent per kilowatt hour, we dollars to keep the sun going for a single second." These results were reported in the spring of #, and not satisfied with this bit of progress, Bethe also made headlines in January of that year with the first mathematical confirmation that the newly discovered meson holds matter together! During the war, Bethe devoted himself to work that is still largely secret. He had become a naturalized citizen in #, and in # top secret Radiation Laboratory. After that, he became chief of the theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, a post he held until #. It was his responsibility to decide the critical size of the fissionable mass, and what the chances were of a chain reaction destroying the world. After the war, he became a public figure, as already noted. His work went on, however. He won his second Morrison Prize in #, the same year he again became a member of the American Physical Society's board of editors. In June # he became a visiting professor at Columbia. He remains one of the Atomic Energy Commission's most valued consultants. Personally, his friends describe him as a modest man with a famous appetite. The tradition of his university professor's lineage has held true in his immediate family. His wife, the former Rose Ewald, whom he married in #, is a professor of physics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and the daughter of a Nazi-exiled German physicist. The Bcthes have two children. Hans Bethe lists skiing, economics, and riding on trains as his primary diversions, but nothing can hold him the way his work does. And the difficulty and value of that work is not lessened by the fact that he does much of it while sitting in an easy chair in his living room -- thinking! The entities were utterly , ambitiously evil; their line of defense, apparently, was absolutely impregnable. Ill Kill You Tomorrow By Helen Huber Illustrated by Kelly Freas No silence is sinister until it acquires a background of understandable menace. Here there was only the night quiet of Maternity, the silence of noiseless rubber heels on the hospital corridor floor, the faint brush of starched white skirts brushing through doorways I r E into darkened and semi-darkened rooms. But there was something wrong with the silence in the "basket room" of Maternity, the glasswalled room containing row on row, the tiny hopes of tomorrow. The curtain was drawn across the window through which, during visiting hours, peered the proud fathers who did the hoping. The nightlight was dim. The silence should not have been there. Lorry Kane, standing in the doorway, looked out over the rows of silent baskets and felt her blonde hair tighten at the roots. The tightening came from instinct, even before her brain had a chance to function, from the instincts and training of a registered nurse. Thirty odd babies grouped in one room and -- complete silence. Not a single whimper. Not one tiny cry of protest against the annoying phenomenon of birth. Thirty babies -- dead? That was the thought that flashed, unbidden, into Lorry's pretty head. The absurdity of it followed swiftly, and Lorry moved on rubber soles between a line of baskets. She bent down and explored with practiced fingers. A warm, living bundle in a white basket. The feeling of relief was genuine. Relief, even from an absurdity, is a welcome thing. Lorry smiled and bent closer. Staring up at Lorry from the basket were two clear blue eyes. Two eyes, steady and fixed in a round baby face. An immobile, pink baby face housing two blue eyes that stared up into Lorry's with a quiet concentration that Lorry said, "What's the matter with you?" She spoke in a whisper and was addressing herself. She'd gone short on sleep lately -- the only way, really, to get a few hours with Pete. Pete was an interne at General Hospital, and the kind of a homely grinning carrot-top a girl like Lorry could put into dreams as the center of a satisfactory future. But all this didn't justify a case of jitters in the "basket room." Lorry said, "Hi, short stuff," and lifted Baby Newcomb -- Male, out of his crib for a cuddling. Baby Newcomb didn't object. The blue eyes came closer. The week-old eyes with the hundredyear-old look. Lorry laid the bundle over her shoulder and smiled into the dimness. "You want to be president, Shorty?" Lorry felt the warmth of a new life, felt the little body wriggle in snug contentment. "I wouldn't advise it. Tough job." Babv Newcomb twisted in his blan# ket. Lorry stiffened. Snug contentment? Lorry felt two tiny hands clutch and dig into her throat. Not just pawing baby hands. Little fingers that reached and explored for the windpipe. She uncuddlcd the soft bundle, held it out. There were the eyes. She chilled. No imagination here. No spectre from lack of sleep. Ancient murder-hatred glowing in new-born eves. drop this body." A tnin piping voice. A shrill symphony in malevolence. Fear weakened Lorry. She found a chair and sat down. She held the boy baby in her hands. Training would not allow her to drop Baby Newcomb. Even if she had fainted, she would not have let go. T HE shrill voice: '"It was stupid of me. Very stupid." Lorry was cold. sick. mute. "Very stupid. These hands are too fragile. There are no muscles in the arms. I couldn't have killed you." "Please -- I..." "Dreaming? No. I'm surprised at -- well, at your surprise. You have a trained mind. You should have learned, long ago. to trust your senses." "I don't -- understand." "Don't look at the doorwav. Nobody's coming in. Look at me. Give me a little attention and I'll explain." "Explain?" Lorry pulled her eyes down to the cherubic little face as she parroted dully. "I'll begin by reminding you that there are more things in existence than your obscene medical books tell you about." "Who are you? What arc you?" "One of those things." "You're not a baby!" "Of course not. I'm..." The beastly, brittle voice drifted into silence as though halted by an intruding thought. Then the thought voiced -- voiced with a yearning at once pathetic and terrible: "It would be nice to kill you. Someday I will. Someday I'll kill you if I can find you. I ' "Why? Why?" Insane words in an insane world. But life had not stopped even though madness had taken over. "Why?" The voice was matter-of-fact again. No more time for pleasant daydreams. "I'm something your books didn't tell you about. Naturally you're bewildered. Did you ever hear of a bodvless entity?" Lorrv shuddered in silence. "You've heard of bodyless entities, of course -- but you denied their existence in your smug world of precise tidy detail. I'm a bodyless entity. I'm one of a swarm. We corne from a dimension your mind wouldn't accept even if I explained it, so I'll save words. We of the swarm seek unfoldmcnt -- fulfillment -- even as you in your stupid, blind world Do you want to hear more?" cc f K   a "You're a fool, but I enjoy practicing with these new vocal chords, just as I enjoyed flexing the fingers and muscles. That's why I revealed myself. We are, basically of #  course, parasites. In the dimension where we exist in profusion, evolution has provided for us. There, vve seek out and move into a dimensional entity far more intelligent than yourself. We destroy it in a way you wouldn't understand, and it is not important that you should. In fact, I can t see what importance there is in vour existing at all." "You plan to -- kill all these babies?" "Let me congratulate you. You've finally managed to voice an intelligent question. The answer is, no. We aren't strong enough to kill them. We dwelt in a far more delicate dimension than this one and all was in proportion. That was our difficulty when wc came here. Wc could find no entities weak enough to take possession of until wc came upon this roomful of infants." "Then, if you're helpless..." "What do we plan to do? That's quite simple. These material entities will grow. We will remain attached -- ingrained, so to speak. When the bodies enlarge sufficiently..." "Thirty potential assassins..." Lorry spoke again to herself, then hurled the words back into her own mind as her sickness deepened. The shrill chirping: "What do you mean, potential? The word expresses a doubt. Here there is none." The entity's chuckle sounded like a baby, content over a full bottle. "Thirty certain assas f  sms. "But why must you kill?" Lorry was sure the tiny shoulders shrugged. "Why? I don't know'. I never thought to wonder. Why must you join with a man and propagate some day? Why do you feel sorry for what you term an unfortunate? Explain your instincts and I'll explain mine." Lorry felt herself rising. Stiffly, she put Baby Newcomb back into his basket. As she did so, a ripple of shrill, jerky laughter crackled through the room. Lorry put her hands to her ears. "You know I can't say anything. You'd keep quiet. They'd call me mad." "Precisely." Malicious laughter, like driven sleet, cut into her ears as she fled from the room. was smoking a quick cigarette by an open fire-escape door on the third floor. He turned as Lorry came down the corridor, flipped his cigarette down into the alley and grinned. "W'omen shouldn't float on rubber heels," he said. "A man should have Warning." Lorry came close. "Kiss me. Kiss me -- hard." Pete kissed her, then held her away. "You're trembling. Anticipation, Pet?" He looked into her face and the grin faded. "Lorry, what is it?" "Pete -- Pete. I'm crazy. I've gone mad. Hold me." He could have laughed, but he had looked closely into her eyes and he was adoctor. He didn't laugh. "Tell me. Just stand here. I'll hang onto you and you tell me." "The babies -- they've gone mad." She clung to him. "Not exactly that. Something's taken them over. Something terrible. Oh, Pete! Nobodv would believe me." "I believe the end result," he said, quietly. "That's what I'm for, angel. When you shake like this I'll always believe. But I'll have to know more. And I'll hunt for an answer." "There isn't any answer, Pete. I know." "We'll still look. Tell me more, first." "There isn't any more." Her eyes widened as she stared into his with the shock of a new thought. "Oh, Lord! One of them talked to me, but maybe he -- or it -- won't talk to you. Then you'll never know for sure! You'll think I t )l m    "Stop it. Quit predicting what I'll do. Let's go to the nursery." They went to the nursery and stayed there for three-quarters of an hour. Thev loft with the tinnv J # the last words of the monstrous entity. "We'll sav no more, of course. Perhaps even this incident has been indiscreet. But it's in the form of a celebration. Never Ix-fore has a whole swarm gotten through. Only a single entity on rare occasions." Pete leaned against the corridor wall and wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. "We're the only ones who know." he said. "Or ever will know." Lorry pushed hack a lock of his curly hair. She wanted to kiss him, but this didn't seem to he the place or the time. "We can never tell anyone." "We'd look foolish." "We've got a horror on our hands and we can't pass it on." "What are we going to do?" Lorry asked. "I don't know. Let's recap a little. Got a cigarette?" They went to the fire door and dragged long and deep on two from Lorry's pack. "They'll be quiet from now on. No more talking -- just baby squalls." "And thirty little assassins will go into thirty homes," Lorry said. "All dressed in soft pink and blue, all filled with hatred. Waiting, biding their time, growing more clever." She shuddered. "The electric chair will get them all, eventually." # "But how many will they get in the meantime?" Pete put his arms around her and drew her close and whispered into her ear. "There's nothing we can do -- nothing." "We've got to do something." Lorn,heard again the thin, brittle laughter following her, taunting her. "It was a bad dream. It didn't happen. We'll just have to sleep it off." She put her check against his. The rising stubble of his heard scratched her face. She was grateful for the rough touch of solid reality. Pete said. "The shock will wear out of our minds. Time will pass. After a while, we won't believe it ourselves." "That's what I'm afraid of." "It's got to be that way." "We've got to do something." Pete lowered his arm wearily. "Yeah -- we've got to do something. Where there's nothing that can be done. What are wc -- miracle workers?" "We've got to do something." "Sure -- finish out the watch and then get some sleep." L orry awoke with the lowering sun in her window. It was a blood red sun. She picked up the phone by her bedside. "Room # Resident's extension." Pete answered drowsily. Lorry said. "Tell me -- did I dream, or did it really happen." "I was going to ask you the same thing. I guess it happened. What are you doing?" "Lying in bed." "So am I. But two different beds. Things are done all wrong." "Want to take a chance and sneak over? I've got an illegal coffee pot." "Leave the door unlocked." Lorry put on the coffee. She showered and got into her slip. She was brushing her hair when Pete came in. He looked at her and extended beckoning, clutching fingers. "The hell with phantoms. Come here." After a couple of minutes. Lorry pulled away and poured the coffee. She reached for her uniform. Pete said, "Don't put it on yet." "Too dangerous -- leaving it off." He eyed her dreamily. "I'll dredge up will power. I'll also get scads of fat rich clients. Then we'll get married so I can assault you legally." Lorry studied him. ' You're not even listening to yourself. What is it, Pete? What have you dreamed up?" "Okay. I've got an idea. You said something would have to be done." "What?" "A drastic cure for a drastic case. With maybe disaster as the end product." "Tell me." "I'll tell you a little, but not too much." "Why not all?" "Because if we ever land in court, I want you to be able to say under oath, 'He didn't tell me what he planned to do'." "I don't like that." "I don't care if you like it or not. Tell me, what's the one basic thing that stands out in your mind about these -- entities?" "That they're... " "Fragile?" "Yes -- fragile." "Give me some more coffee." was in Pete's mind. All she got was kissed, and she did not see Pete again until eleven o'clock that night. He found her in the corridor in Maternity and motioned her toward the nursery. He carried a tray under a white towel. He said, "You watch the door. I'm going inside. I'll be about a half an hour." "What are you going to do?" "You stay out here and mind your business. Your business will be to steer any nosey party away. If you can't, make noise coming in." Doc Pete turned away and entered the nursery. Lorry stood at the doorway, in the silence, under the brooding night-light, and prayed. Twenty-five minutes later, Pete came out. Ilis face was white and drawn. He looked like a man who had lately had a preview of Hell's inverted pleasures. His hands trembled. The towel still covered the tray. He said, "Watch them close. Don't move ten steps from here." He started away -- turned back. "All hell is scheduled to break loose in this hospital shortly. Let's hope God remains in charge." Lorrv saw the sick dread of his heart underneath his words. scandal. An epidemic of measles on the maternity floor of a modern hospital indicates the unforgivable medical sin -- carelessness. It was hushed up as much as possible, pending the time when the top people could shake off the shock and recover their wits. The ultimate recovery of thirty babies was a tribute to everyone concerned. Wan, done-in. Doc Pete drank coffee in Lorry's room. Lorry gave him three lumps of sugar and said, "But are you sure the sickness killed the entities?" "Quite sure. Somehow they knew when I made the injections. They screamed. They knew they were done for." "It took courage. Tell me: why arc you so strong, so brave? Why are you so wonderful?" "Cut it out I was scared stiff. If one baby had died, I'd have gone through life weighing the cure against the end. It isn't easy to risk doing murder -- however urgent the need." She leaned across and kissed him. "And you were all alone. You wouldn't let me help. Was that fair?" He grinned, then sobered. "But I can't help remembering what that -- that invisible monster said : 'Never before has a whole swarm gotten through. Only a single entity on rare occasions' "I can't help wondering what happens to those single entities. I think of the newspaper headlines I've seen: Child Kills Parents in Sleep. Youth Slays Father. I'll probably always wonder -- and I'll always remember..." Lorry got up and crossed to him and put her arms around him. "Not always." she whispered. "There will be times when I'll make you forget. For a little while, anyhow." of science fiction's brightest young writers, does a beautiful satire on a phase of modern life with which we're all familiar and shows in careful, frightening and exciting detail what may happen if it continues into the future. The title is Malice in Wonderland, and it's another sparkling example of IF's policy of bringing you the finest, most original, thought-provoking stories in the field of science fiction. But this is just the beginning of an issue packed with exceptionally good stories, including Anachron by Damon Knight, A Word for Freedom by James E. Gunn. Letter of the Laic by Alan E. Noursc, and many others. Also in the January issue is an exciting new feature designed to bring IF readers into closer contact with the remarkable facts of science as well as fiction. Don't miss the January IF -- at your local newsstand on November #th!  Here's the behind-the-scenes lowdown on Luna City life and a promoter of Martian dancing girls , vaudeville , and -- other things. But remember : stop us if you've heard this one! By Boyd Ellanby Illustrated by Mel Hunter J Kotha's bar was deserted when I dropped in shordy after midnight. The ship from Earth was still two days away, and the Martian flagship would get in next morning, with seven Itundred passengers for earth on it. Dworken must have been waiting in Luna City a whole week -- at six thousand credits a day. That's as steep to me as it is to you, but money never seemed to worry Dworken. He raised the heavy green lids from his protruding brown eyes as I came in. He waved his tail. "Sit down and join me," he invited, in his gutteral voice. "It is not good for a man to drink alone. But I haf no combany in dis by-degods-deserted hole. A man must somet'ing be doing, what?" I sat down in the booth across from my Venusian friend, and stared at him while he punched a new order into the drinkboard. "For me, another shchikh " he announced. "And for you? De same?" Against my better judgment, for I knew I'd have plenty to do handling that mob of tourists -- the first crowd of the season is always the roughest -- tomorrow, I consented. Dworken had already consumed six of the explosive tilings, as the empty glasses on the table showed, but he exhibited no effects. I made a mental note, as I'd so often done before, that this time I would not exceed the safe terrestrial limit of two. "You must be in the money again, drinking imported shchikh " I remarked. "What are you doing in Luna City this time?" He merely lifted his heavy eyelids and stared at me without expression. "Na, in dc money I am not. Dere are too xnanv chiselers in business. Just when I t'ink I haf a goot t'ing, I am shwindelcd. It is too bad." He snorted through his ugly snout, making the Venusian equivalent of a sigh. I knew there was a story waiting behind that warty skin, but I was not sure I wanted to hear it. For die next round of drinks would be on me, and shchikh was a hundred and fifty credits a shot. Still, a man on a Moon assignment has to amuse himself somehow. So I said, "What's the latest episode in the Dworken soap opera? What is the merchandise this time? Gems? Pet Mercurian fire-insects? A new supply of danghaana ?" "I do not smuggle drugs, dat is a base lie," replied my friend stolidly. He knew, of course, that I still suspected him to be the source of the last load of that potent narcotic, although I had no more proof than did the Planetary Bureau of Investigation. He took a long pull at his drink before he spoke again. "But Dworken is never down for long. Dis time it is show business. You remember, how I haf always been by de t'eater so fascinated? Well, I decided to open a show here in Luna City. Tink of all the travelers, bored stiff by space and de emptiness thereof, who pass through here during the season. Even if only half of them go to my show, it cannot fail." I waited for some mention of free tickets, but none was made. I was about as anxious to see Dworken's show as I was to walk barefoot across the Mare Imbrium, but I asked with what enthusiasm I could force, "What sort of act are you putting on? Girls?" I shuddered as I recalled the pathetic shop-worn chorus girls that Sam Low had tried to pass off last year on the gullible tourists of the spaceways. That show had lasted ten nights -- nine more than it deserved to. There are limits, even to the gullibility of Earth-lubbers. "Yes, girls," replied Dworken. "But not what you are perhaps thinking. Martian girls." Even if the girls were now a little too old for the stage in the Martian capital, they would still get loud cheers on the Moon. I knew. I started to say so, but Dworken interrupted. "And not de miserable girls dey buy from de slave traders in Behastin. Dese girls I collected myself, from de country along de Upper Canal." I repressed my impulse to show my curiosity. It could all be perfectly true -- and if it were not the opening night would tell. But it sounded a lot like one of Dworken's taller tales. I had never been able to disprove any one of them, but I found it a little hard to believe that so many improbable things had ever happened to one man. However, I like being entertained, if it doesn't cost me too much, so finally I said, "I suppose you are going to tell me you ventured out into the interior of Mars, carrying a six weeks' supply of water and oxygen on your back, and visited the Xo theaters on the spot?" "How did you know? Dat is just what I did," solemnly affirmed my companion. He snorted again, and looked at his glass. It was empty, but he tilted it into his face again in an eloquent gesture. No words were needed : I punched the symbols for shchikh into the drinkboard on my side of the table. Then, after hesitating, I punched the "two in" signal. I must remember, though, that this was my second and last. His eighth shchikh seemed to instill some animation into Dworken. "I know you feel skepticalitv -- I mean skepticism -- after my exploits. You will see tomorrow night dat I speak true." "Amazing!" I said. "Especially as I just happen to reinember that three different expeditions from Earth tried to penetrate more than a hundred kilometers from Bchastin, but cither they couldn't carry die water and oxygen that far, or they resorted to breathing Mars air, and never came back. And they were earthmen, not Vcnusians who are accustomed to two atmosphers of carbon dioxide." "My vriend, you must not reason: it was so, it always will be so. The brinciple of induction is long exblodcd. I did indeed breathe Mars air. Vait! I tell you how." He took another long swig of shchikh. "Vat your Eart'men did not realize was dat dey cannot acclimate themselves as do we Venusians. You know de character of our planet made adaptibility a condition of survival. It is true dat our atmosphere is heavy, but on top of our so-high mountains de air is t'in. We must live everywhere, de space is so few. I first adapted myself on Eart' to live. I was derc a whole year, you vill recollect. Den I go further. Your engineers construct air tanks dat make like de air of mountains, t in. So, I learn to live in dose tanks. Each day I haf spent one, two, three hours in dem. I get so I can breathe air at one-third the pressure of your already t'in atmosphere. And at one-sixt' the tension of oxygen. No, my vriend, you could not do this. Your lungs burst. But old Dworken, he has done it. "I take wit' me only some water, for I know de Martians dey not give water. To trade, some miniature kerosene lamps. You know dey got no fuel oil now, only atomics, but dese little lamps dey like for antiques, for sentiment, because their great-grandfathers used deni. "Well, I walk through Vlahas, and not stop. Too close by the capital. Too much contact with men of odder planets. I walk also through Bhur and Zarnat. I come to a small place where dey never see foreigner. Name Tasaaha. Oh, I tell you, zc men of ze odder planets do not know Mars. How delightful, how unsboiled, arc ze Martians, once you get away from de people by tourists so sboiled! How wonderful, across the sands to go, free as birds! The so friendly greetings of de Martian men. And de Martian women! Ah! "Well, in Tasaaha I go to t'eater. Such lovely girls! You shall see. But I saw somet'ing else. That, my friend, you hardly believe!" Dworken looked down at his empty glass and snorted gently. I took the hint, although for myself I ordered the less lethal Martian azdzani. I was already having difficulty believing parts of his narrative; it would be interesting to see if die rest were any harder. My companion continued. "They not only have de chorus, which you haf seen on Earth, imported from Mars -- and such a chorus! Such girls! But they had somet'ing else." "You recall your terrestrial history? Once your ancestors had performers on the stage who did funny motions and said amusing remarks, de spectators to make laugh. I t'ink you called it 'vaudeville.' Well, on Mars they have also vaudeville!" He paused, and looked at me from under half-shut eyelids, and grinned widely to show his reptilian teeth. I wondered if he'd really found something new. I would even be tian vaudeville. I wondered if my Martian was too rusty for me to understand jokes in the spoken lingo. "They haf not only men and women telling jokes. They haf trained animals acting funny!" Dworken went on. This was too much. "I suppose the animals talked, too?" I said sarcastically. "Do they speak Earth or Martian?" He regarded me approvingly. "My friend, you catch on quick," He raised a paw. "Now, don't at conclusions jump. Let me exblain. At first, I did not believe it either. "Dev sprang it with no warning. Onto de stage came a tlooll (you know him, I t'ink), and a shiyooch'iid. The shiyooch'iid was riding a bicycle -- I mean a monocle. One wheel. The tllooll moved just as awkward as he always does, and tried to ride a tandem fourwheeled vehicle which had been especially for him made." In spite of my resolve, I chuckled. The picture of a tllooll trying to ride a four-wheeled bicycle, pumping each of his eight threejointed legs up and down in turn, while maintaining his usual supercilious and indifferent facial expression, was irresistibly funny. "Wait!" said my friend, and again raised a paw. "You have as yet not'ing heard. They make jokes at same time. De sliiyooch'iid asks de tllooll, 'Who was dat tloolla I saw you wit' up the Canal?' and the tllooll replies, 'Dat was no tlloolla, dat was mv shicai.' " I doubled up, laughing. Unless you have visited Mars this may not strike you as funny, but I collapsed into a heap. I put my head on the table and wept with mirth. It seemed like five minutes before I was able to speak. "Oh, no!" "Yes, yes, I tell you. Yes!" insisted my friend. He even smiled himself. system of the Martians there is no point in my trying to explain why the idea of a tllooll' s being out with that neuter of neuters, a shicai, is so devastatingly funny. But that, suddenly, was not quite the point. Did it happen ? I had large doubts. Nobody had ever heard a tllooll make any sort of a sound, and it was generally supposed that they had no vocal chords. And no shiyooch'iid (they somewhat resemble a big groundhog, and live in burrows along the canals of Mars) had ever been heard to make any noise except a high-pitched whistle when frightened "Now, just a minute, Dworken," I said. "I know, my vriend. I know. You t'ink it is impossible. You t'ink the . talking is faked. So I t'ought too. But vait." It seems Dworken had inquired among the audience as to who owned the performing animals. The local Martians were not as impressed as he was with the performance, but they guided him to the proprietor of the trained animal act. He was a young Martian, hawk-nosed, with flashing black eyes, dusky skin, and curly hair. "So I say to him, dis Martian," Dworken continued, " 'If your act on the level is, I buy.' I had three small diamonds with," he explained. "But de Martian was hard to deal wit'. First, he said he vould not sell his so-valuable and so-beloved ani; mals. De only .talking animals on Mars, he said -- de liar! At long last I get him to make a price. But, on condition dat he bring ze animals around to my inn in the morning, for a private audition." "I suppose," I interrupted, "you were beginning to have some doubts as to the Martian's good faith? After all, a talking tllooll and a talking shiyoocli'iid all at one time is quite a lot to ask. I would have -- " "Blease, vriend, bicase!" interrupted my companion. "Do you not t'ink old Dworken knows dese things? Of course he does! I t'ink. De owner, he is pulling a fake, I guess. I know dat animals do not really talk. "Next morning, I t'ink he no show up. But no, I am mistaken. Bromptlv at nine o'clock he come to my inn with a little dogcart, wit' de animals. He puts dem on de stage in de bar of de inn. They act like before." "But they didn't talk, of course?" "Oh my vriend, dat's where you are wrong. Dey talk like nobotty's business. Dc jokes are funnier than ever. Even dirtier, maybe. But Dworken is not fooled. He t'ink. 'Aha!' I say to de Martian. 'You fake this, what? De animals not talk. Suppose you have them do de act while you outside stay, what?' Then I t'ink I have him. i "Ze Martian tear his curly hair, flash his black eyes. He takes insult that I t'ink he is fake. 'Name of de Martian gods!' he cry. But at last he agree to go away, and tell animals to go ahead." "Dworken, you were a sap to string along with 'him even that far," I said wearily. "I hope you hadn't paid the guv any money." He shook his head. "No, my old and best," he said. "Dworken no fool is, even on Mars. No. no money. But wait! De animals go on without the owner. Same stage business, same talk, same jokes, and even funnier yedt. What?" I started at Dworken. He did npt smile, but finished ofT the eleventh shichikh -- the fifth I had bought him. "Listen," I said. "Are you sitting there telling me you have a tllooll and a shiyooc-h'iid that can really talk?" "You listen, mv vriend. Like you, I t'ink something is wrong. I say to Martian owner, 'My vriend, maybe I buy your act, if you tell me how it is done. But you know' as well as I do dat it is impossible to dese animals to talk. Tell me what is de trick?' " Dworken lifted his glass and shook it, as though he could not believe it was empty, then looked at me quest ioningly. I shook my head. He snorted, looked melancholy, writhed up from his chair and reached for his fur cape. "Veil, thanks for de drinks," he said. A dark suspicion crept into my mind, but I could not restrain myself. "Wait, Dworken!" I shouted. "You can't just leave me up in the air like that! What happened then?" Dw'orken snorted into his green handkerchief. "De Martian admitted it was a fake, after all," he said mournfully. "Can you imachine it? What a chiseler! " 'De shiyooch'iid he said, 'can't really talk; de tllooll just t'rows his voice!' " it is to be found externalized and purified in the thousands of semi-robots we are using and will use in the coming century. Our  atomic knowledge destroys cancer or men. Our airplanes carry  passengers or jellied gasoline bombs. The hairline, the human, choice is there. Before us todav we see the aluminum and steel and uranium chess pieces which the interested science-fiction writer can hope to move about, trying to guess how man will play out the game. -- Ray Bradbury in The Nation The man is rare who will give his life for what is merely the lesser of two evils. Merrick's decision was even tougher: to save human beings at the expense of humanity , or vice versa? By Alfred Coppel Illustrated by Philip Parsons Anno Domini #. A great, milesquare blind cube topping a ragged mountain; bare escarpments falling away to a turbulent sea. For five centuries the Creche had stood so, and the Androids had come forth in an unending stream to labor for Man, the Master... -- Quintus Bland, The Romance of Genus Homo. the floor nervously. His thin, almost ascetic face was pale and drawn. "We can't allow it, Virginia," he said, "Prying of .this sort can only precipitate a pogrom or worse. Erikson is a bigot of the worst kind. The danger -- " He broke off helplessly. His wife shook her head slowly. "It cannot be prevented, Han. Someone was bound to start asking questions sooner or later. History should have taught us that. And five hundred years of secrecy was more than anyone had a right to expect. Nothing lasts forever." The trouble is, Merrick told himself, simply that I am the wrong man for this job. I should never have taken it. There's awrongness in what we are doing here that colors my every reaction and makes me incapable of acting on my own. Always the doubts and secret questioning. If the social structure of our world weren't moribund, I wouldn't be here at all... "History, Virginia," he said, "can't explain what there is no precedent for. The Creche is unique in human experience." "The Creche may be, Han, but Sweyn Erikson is not. Consider his background and tell me if there hasn't been an Erikson in every years ago it would have been differera of recorded history. He is mereent. The custodians of the Creche ly another obstacle in the path of would have gladly died to preserve progress that must be overcome. their trust in those times... The job is yours, Han." What irony, Merrick thought, "A pleasant prospect," Merrick that it should come like this. He replied bleakly. "I am an organizer, knew what the projectors did to not a psychotechnician. How am I men. He also knew what they did supposed to protect the Creche to robots. from the likes of Erikson? What "If they dare to use their weapinsanity bore this fruit, Virginia? ons on as it will wipe out every The Prophet, the number one Favestige of control work done here natic, coming here as an investigasince the beginning," he said softly. tor in the name of the Council of "They have no way of knowing Ten! I realize the Council turns that." pale at the thought of the vote the "Nor would they believe it if we Fanatics control, but surely some told them." thing could have been done! Have "And that brings us right back those idiots forgotten what we do to where we started. You can't here? Is that possible?" keep Erikson out, and the Council Virginia Merrick shook her head, of Ten has left us on our own. They "The stone got too hot for them to don't dare oppose the Fanatics. But handle, so they've thrown it to there's an old political maxim you you." w'ould do well to consider very "But Erikson, himself! The very carefully since it's our only hope, man who organized the Human Han," Virginia Merrick said, " 'If Supremacy Party and the Antirobot you can't beat someone -- join League! If he sets foot within the him.'" Creche it will mean an end to everything!" inhaled deeply. "We can't keep him O cigarette, blue smoke curling out and you know it. There's an from her gold-tinted lips. "This has army of Fanatics gathering out been coming on for ten years. I there in the hills this very minute. tried to warn you then, but you Armed with cortical-stimulant prowouldn't listen. Remember?" jectors, Han. That isn't a pleasant How like a woman, Merrick way to die -- " thought bitterly, to be saying I told Merrick studied his wife careyou so. fully. There was fear under her iron "What would you have me do, control. She was thinking of the Virginia?" he asked, "Help the shattering pain of death under bigot peddle his robot-hate? That the projectors. Nothing else, really, can't be the way. Don't you feel The Creche didn't matter to her. anything at all when the reports The Creche didn't really matter to of pogroms come in?" any of the staff. Three hundred Virginia Merrick shrugged. "Better they than we, Han." "Has it occurred to you that our whole culture might collapse if Erikson has his way?" "Antirobotism is natural to human beings. Compromise is the only answer. Precautions have to be taken -- " " Precautions !" exploded Merrick. "What sort of precautions can be taken against pure idiocy?" "The founding board of Psychotechnicians -- " "No help from that source. You know that I've always felt the whole premise was questionable. On the grounds of common fairness, if nothing else." "Really, Han," Virginia snapped, "It was the only thing to do and you know it. The Creche is the only safeguard the race has." "Now you sound like the Prophet. In reverse." "We needn't argue the point." "No, I suppose not," the Director muttered. "Then what arc you going to do when he gets here?" She ground out her cigarette anxiously. "The procession is in the ravine now. You had better decide quickly." "I don't know, Virginia. I just don't know." Merrick sank down behind his desk, hands toying with the telescreen controls. "I was never intended to make this sort of decisions. I feel helpless. Look here -- " The image of the ravine glowed The densely timbered slopes were spotted with tiny purposeful figures in the grey robes that all Fanatics affected. Here and there the morning sun caught a glint of metal as the Fanatics labored to set up their projectors. Along the floor of the ravine that was the only land approach to the Creche moved the twisting, writhing snake of the procession. The enraptured Fanatics were chanting their hate-songs as they came. In the first rank walked the leonine Erikson, his long hair whipping in the moisture-laden wind from the sea. With a muttered curse, Merrick flipped a toggle and the scene dimmed. The face of a secretary appeared superimposed on it. It was the expressionless face of an android, a fine example of the Creche's production line. "Get Graves up here," he ordered, "You may find him at Hypno-Ccntral or in Semantic Evaluation." "Very good, sir," intoned the android, fading from the screen. Merrick looked at his wife. "Mavbe Graves and I can think of something." "Don't plan anything rash, Han." Merrick shrugged and turned back to watch the steady approach of the procession of grey-f rocked zealots in the ravine. Graves appeared as the doorway dilated. He looked fearful and pale. "You wanted to see me, Han?" "Come in, Jon. Sit down." "Have you seen the projectors those crackpots have set up in the hills?" Graves demanded. "I have, Jon. That's what I wanted to talk to you about." "My God, Han! Do you have any idea of what it must feel like to die from cortical stimulation?" Graves' voice was tense and strained. "Can't we get out of here by 'copter?" no "No. The 'copters are both in Francisco picking up supplies. I ordered them out yesterday. Besides, that wouldn't settle anything. There are almost a' thousand androids in tiie Creche as of this morning. What about them?" Graves made a gesture of impatience. "It's the humans I'm thinking about." Merrick forced down the bitter taste of disgust that welled into his throat and forced himself to go on. "We have to take some sort of action to protect the Creche, Jon. I've held of! until the last moment, thinking the Council would never allow a Fanatic to investigate the Creche, but the Ten are more vote than they are of letting a thousand androids be slaughtered. But we can't leave it at that. If we don't prevent it, Erikson will precipitate a pogrom that will make the Canalopolis massacre look like a tea-party." For some reason he held back the information about the effect of the Fanatic weapon on robot tissue. The vague notion that knowing, Jon Graves might cast his lot with Erikson, restrained him. "Of course, Erikson will come in wearing an energy shield," Graves said. "He will. And we have none," Virginia Merrick said softly. "Can we compromise with him?" Graves asked. There it was again, Merrick thought, the weasel-word 'compromise.' There was a moral decay setting in everywhere -- the founders of the Creche would never have spoken so. "No," he said flatly, "We cannot. Erikson has conceived a robot-menace. All the old hatepatterns are being dusted off and used on the rabble. People are actually asking one another if they would like their daughters to marry robots. That sort of thing, as old as homo sapiens. And one cannot compromise with prejudice. It seduces the emotions and dulls the mind. No, there will be no appeasing of Swcyn Erikson or his grey-shirted nightriders!" "You're talking like a starry-eyed fool, Han," Virginia Merrick said sharply. "Can't we take him in and give him the works?" Graves asked hopefully. "Primary Conditioning could handle the job. Give him a fill-in with false memory?" Merrick shook his head. "We can't risk narcosynthcsis and that's essential. He'll surely be tested for blood purity w'hen he leaves, and scopolamine traces would be a dead give-away that we had been trying to hide something here." "Then it looks as though compromise is the only way, Han. They've got us up against the wall. See here, Han, I know you don't agree, but what else is there? After all, we all believe in human supremacy. Erikson calls it a robot-menace, we look at it from another angle, but our common goal is the betterment of the human culture we've established. People are on an emotional jag now. There has been no war for five centuries. No emotional release. And there have been regulations and conventions set up since the Atom War that only a very few officials have been allowed to understand. Erikson is no savage, Han, after all. True he's set off a rash of robot-baiting, but he can be dealt with on an intelligent plane, I'm sure." "He is a man of ability, you know," Virginia Merrick said. "Ability," Merrick said bitterly. "Rabble rouser and bigot! Look at his record. Organizer of the riots in Low Chicago. Leader in the Antirobot Labor League -- the same outfit that slaughtered fifty robots in the Tycho dock strike. Think, you two! To tell such a man what the Creche is would be to tie a rope around the neck of every android alive. Lynch law! The rope and the whip lor every one of them. And then suppose the worm turns? It can, you know! Our methods here are far from perfect. What then?" "I still say we must compromise," Graves said. "They will kill us if we don't -- " "He's no troglodyte, Han, I'm certain -- " Merrick's wife said plaintively. The Director felt resistance flowing out of him. They were right, of course. There was nothing else he could do. "All right," Merrick's voice was low and tired. He felt the weight of his years settling down on him. "I'll do as you suggest. I'll try to lead him off the trail first -- " that was his compromise with himself, he knew, and he hated himself for it -- "and if I fail I'll tell him the whole truth." He flipped the telescreen toggle in time to see Sweyn Erikson detach himself from his followers and disappear through the dilated outer gate in the side of the Creche. A faint, almost futile stirring of defiance shook him. He found himself in the anomalous position of wanting to defend something that he had long felt was wrong in concept from the beginning -- and not being able to take an effective course of action. He reached into his desk drawer and took out an ancient automatic. It was a family heirloom, heavy, black and deadly. He pulled back the slide and watched one of the still-bright brass cartridges snap up into the breech. He handled the weapon awkwardly, but as he slipped it into his jumper pocket some of the weariness slipped from him and a cold anger took its place. He looked calmly from his wife to Graves. "I'll tel! him the whole truth," he said, "And if he fails to react as you two think he will, I shall kill him." wAtom War culture, might have been a dictator. But the devastation of the war had at long last resulted in a peaceful world-state, and where no nations exist, politics becomes a sterile business of direction and supervision. It is war or the threat of war that gives a politician his power. Sweyn Erikson wanted power above all else. And so he founded a religion. He became the Prophet of the Fanatics. And since a cult must have an object of group hate as a raison-d'etre, he chose the androids. With efficiency and calculated sincerity, he beat the drums of prejudice until his organization had spread its influence into the world's high places and his word became the law of the land. People who beheld his feral magnificence, and listened to the spellbinding magic of his oratory -- followed. His power sprang from the masses -- unthinking, emotional. He gave the mob a voice and a purpose. He was like a Hitler or a Torquemada. Like a Long or a John Brown. He was savage and rapacious, courageous and bitter. He was Man. There were four cardinal precepts by which the membership of the Human Supremacy Party lived. First, Man was God. Second, no race could share the plenum with Man. Had separate races still remained after the Atom War, the specific, but since there remained only humanity en masse, all human beings shared the godhead. Third, the artificial persons that streamed from the Creche were blasphemy. Fourth, they must be destroyed. Like other generations before them, the humans of this age rallied to the banner of the whip and the rope. Not since the War had blood been spilled, but the destructive madness of homo sapiens found joy in the word of the Prophet, and though the blood was only the red sap of androids, the thrill was there. Thus had Sweyn Erikson, riding the intolerant wave of antirobotism, come to the Creche. Fie stood now, in the long bare foyer, waiting. Behind him lay the Party and the League. The Council of Ten was in hand and helpless. Upon his report to the world, the future of an entire robot-human culture pattern rested. This, he told himself, was the high point of his life. Naked power to use as he chose rested in his hands. The whole structure of world society was tottering. The choice was his and his alone. He could shore it up or shatter it and trample on the fragments... The Prophet savored the moment. He watched with interest as the door before him dilated. The Creche Director stood eyeing him half-fearfully, half-defiantly, flanked by his wife and his assistant. They were all three afraid for their lives, Erikson thought with satisfaction. "We welcome you to the Creche," Han Merrick said formally"Let there be no ceremony," Erikson said, "I am a simple man." Merrick's lips tightened. "You haven't come here for ceremony. There will be none." "I came for truth " the Prophet said sonorously. "The people of the world are waiting for my words. The mask of secrecy must be ripped from this place and truth and knowledge allowed to wash it clean." Merrick almost winced. The statement was redundant with the propaganda that Erikson's nightriders peddled on every street corner. It betokened an intellectual bankruptcy among men that was frightening. "I shall do my best to allay your fears," he said thickly. Erikson's eyes glittered with suspicion. "I need only a guide. The decisions I shall make for myself. And mind that I am shown every concealed place. The roots of this place must be laid bare. 'For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing; whether it be good or whether it be evil.' The Scriptures command it in the name of Man, the True God." Twisted, pious, hypocrite! thought Merrick. "I am sure, sir," Graves was saying placatingly, "that when we have shown you the Creche you will see that there is no menace." Erikson scowled at Graves deliberately. "There is menace enough in the blasphemy of android life, my son. Everywhere there are signs of unrest among the things you have built here. On Mars, human beings have died at their hands!" Merrick's face showed his disgust. "Frankly, I don't believe that. Androids don't kill." "We shall see, my son," Erikson said settling the belt of his energy screen more comfortably about his hips. "We shall see." Merrick studied Erikson's face. There was a tiny scar under his chin. That would be where the transmitter was planted. He had no doubt that every word of this conversation was heing monitored by the Fanatics outside the Creche. The turning point was coming inexorably nearer. He only hoped that he had the physical and moral courage to face it when it arrived. "Very well, Svveyn Erikson," he said finally. "Please come with me." in Merrick's office. The preliminary stage of his plan had failed, just as he had known it would. He was almost glad. It had been a vacillating expediency, an attempt to hide the facts and avoid the necessity of facing the challenge squarely. Stage two was about to begin, and this time there would be no temporizing. The Prophet glared angrily across the desk-top. "Do you take me for a child? You have shown me nothing. Where are the protoplasm vats? The brain machines? Where are the bodies assembled? I warned you against trickery, Han Merrick!" Merrick glanced across the room at his wife. She sat rigid in her chair, her face a pale mask. He would get no help from her. "You must realize, Erikson," he said, "That you are forcing me to jeopardize five centuries of work for the chimera of Human Supremacy. Let me warn you now that your life is of no importance to me when balanced against that. When the Board of Psychotechnicians appointed my family custodians of the Creche centuries ago, they did so because they knew we would keep faith -- " "The last member of the founding Board died more than two hundred years ago," snapped the Prophet. "But the Creche is here, and I am here to guard it as my forefathers did," Merrick said. Once again he was conscious of a strange ambivalence in his attitude. He must guard something he considered wrong against the intrusion of a danger even more wrong. His hand sought the scored grip of the old automatic in his pocket. Could he actually kill? "You speak of Human Supremacy as a chimera," Sweyn Erikson said, "It is no such thing. It is the only vital force left in the world. Robotism is a menace more deadly, a blasphemy more foul than any Black Mass of history. You are making Man into an atiachronism on the face of his own planet. This cannot he! I will not let it be..." Merrick stared. Gould it le that the man actually believed that the poison he peddled was the lood of the gods? "I will try one last attempt at reason, Erikson," Merrick said deliberately. ' Look back with an unprejudiced mind, if you can. over the centuries since the Atom War. What do you see?" "I see Man emasculated by the robot!" "No! You see atomic power harnessed and in use for the first time after almost a millenium of muddling. You see Man standing on the Moon and the habitable planets -- and soon to reach out for the stars! A new Golden Age is dawning, Prophet! And why? Whence have come the techniques?" Even as he spoke, Merrick knew he was ignoring the obvious, the all-too-apparent cracks in the social structure that no scientific miracles could cure. But were those cracks the fault of robotism or were thev in fact a failing inherent in Man him' self? He was not prepared to answer that. "From where are die techniques drawn?" he asked again. Erikson met his glance squarely. "Not from the mindless horrors you spawn here!" "Emotionless, Prophet," corrected Merrick pointedly, "Not mindless." "Soulless! Soulless and mindless, too. Never have these zombies been able to think as men!" "They are not men." "Nor are they the architects of the future!" "I think you arc wrong, Prophet," Merrick said softly. "Man is the ultimate," Erikson said. "You talk like a fool," snapped Merrick. " Han !" There was naked terror in his wife's voice, but he rushed on, ignoring it. "How dare you say that Man is the ultimate? What right have you to assume that nature has stopped experimenting?" Swcvn Erikson's lip curled scornfully. "Can you be implying that the robots -- " Merrick leaned across the desk to shout full in the Prophet's face: "You fool! They're not robots !" The robed man was suddenly on his feet, face livid. "Han!" cried Virginia Merrick, "Not that way!" "This is my afTair now, Virginia. I'll handle it in my own way!" the Director said. "Remember the mob outside!" Merrick turned agate-hard eyes on his wife. Presently he looked # away and said to the Prophet. "Now I will show you the real Creche!" where -- blank-eyed, like sleep walkers. They reacted to commands. Thev moved and breathed and fed themselves. Under rigid control they performed miracles of intuitive calculation. But artificiality was stamped upon them like a brand. They were not human. In the lowest vaults of the Creche, Merrick showed the Prophet the infants. He withheld nothing. He showed him the growing creatures. He explained to him the tests and signs that were looked for in the hospitals maintained by the World State and the Council of Ten. He let him watch the young ones taking their Primary Conditioning. Courses of hypnotic instruction. Rest, narcosvn thesis. Seman tics. Drugs and words and more words pounding on young brains like sledgehammer blows, shaping them into something acceptable in a sapient world. In other chambers, other age groups. Emotion and memory being moulded into something else by hypnopedia. Faces becoming blank and expressionless. "Their minds are conditioned -- enslaved," Merrick said bitterly. "Then they are primed with scientific facts. Those techniques we discussed. This is where they come from. Prophet. From the minds of your despised androids. Only will is suppressed, and emotion. They are shaped for the sociography of a sapient culture. They mature very slowly. We keep them here for from ten to fifteen years. No human brain could stand it -- but theirs can." Truth dangled before his eyes, but Erikson's mind savagely rejected it. The pillars upon which he had built his life were crumbling... The two men stood in a vast hall filled with an insidious, whispering voice. On low pallets, fully a score of physically mature androids lay staring vacuously at a spinning crystal high in the apex of the domed ceiling. " -- you had no life before you where created here to serve Man the master vou had no life before you were created here to serve Man the master you had -- " the voice whispered into the hypnotized brains. "Don't look up," Merrick warned. "The crystal can catch a human being faster than it can them. This is hypnotic engineering. The rhythm of the syllables and their proportion to the length of word and sentence arc computed to correspond to typed enccphalographic curves. Nothing is left to chance. When they have reached this stage of conditioning they are almost ready for release and purchase by human beings. Only a severe stimulation of the brain can break down the walls we have built in their minds." Erikson made a gesture as though darkness were streaking his vision. He was shaken badly. "But where do they -- where do they come from?" "The State maternity hospitals, of course," Merrick said, "Where else? The parents arc then sterilized by the Health and Welfare Authority as an added safeguard. Births occur at a ratio of about one for smiled mirthlessly at the Prophet of Human Supremacy. "Well? Little man, what now?" Honest realization still refused to come. It needed to be put into words, and Sweyn Erikson had no such words. "I see only that you are taking children of men and disfiguring -- " "For the last time," gritted Merrick, "These are not human beings. Genus homo, yes. Homo chaos, if you choose. But not homo sapiens. I think of them," he said with sudden calm, "As Homo Supremus. The next step on the evolutionary ladder... At last the words had been spoken and the flood gates were down in the tortured brain of the Prophet. Like a sudden conflagration, realization came -- and with it, blind terror. "No! Nonono! You cannot continue this devil's work! Think what it would mean if these things should ever be loosed on the world of Man!" the Prophet's voice was a steadily rising shrill of fear. Han Merrick looked out across the rows of pallets, each with its burden of a superman, bound like Prometheus to the rock, helpless in hypnotic chains. It struck him again that his life had not been well spent. He looked from his charges to the ranting fear-crazed rabble-rouser. The contrast was too shocking, too complete. For thp "androids" were, in fact, worthy of a dignity even in slavery that homo sapiens had never attained in overlordship. Merrick knew at last what he must do. Racial loyalty stirred, but was quickly smothered in the humiliation of man's omnipresent thievery. For it was thievery, Merrick thought. Man was keeping for himself the heritage that was the rightful property of a newer, better race. He took the automatic from his jumper and leveled it at Erikson's chest. He felt very sure and right. Though he knew that he was sealing the death warrant of his wife and his friends, the memory of their vacillations anesthetized him against any feeling of loss. He waited until Erikson screamed one word into the transmitter imbedded in his flesh -- The word was: "Attack!" -- and in the next instant, Han Merrick shot him dead. I heard the Prophet's command and sprang to comply. Energy swept out of the grids, through the coils of the projectors and out over the blind cube of the Creche. Han Merrick felt the first radiations. He felt the beginnings of cortical hypertrophy and screamed. Every synapse sagged under the increasing load of sensitivity. The pressure of the air became an unbearable burden, the faintest sound became a shattering roar. Every microscopic pain, every cellular process became a rending, tearing agony. He screamed and the sound was a cataclysmic, planet-smashing hell of noise within his skull. He sagged to the floor and thinking stopped. He contracted himself, pulling legs and arms inward in a massive convulsion until at last he had assumed the foetal position. After a long while, he died. Every human being within the Creche died so, but there was still life. The energy that killed the lesser creature freed the greater -- just as Merrick had known it would. Unhuman matter pulsed under the caressing rain. A thousand beings shuddered at the sudden release of their chains. The speakers ranted tain; bare escarpments falling away unheard. The crystals turned unto a turbulent sea. For ten centuries watched. The bonds forged by the Creche has stood so, and the homo sapiens snapped and there Androids still come forth, now to came -- lift their starships to the Magellanic Maturity. Clouds and beyond. A Golden Age has come. But, of course, Man is no Domini #. A great mile-square -- Quintus Bland, The Romance of blind cube topping a ragged mounGenus Homo. edited by Donald A. Wollheim. McBride, New York, #, # pp. (#). Another in a long line of anthologies, this volume's gimmick is its inclusion of the selections of the Jules Verne Prize Committee for #. In other words, it's a presentation of the year's # "most distinguished" science fiction stories as chosen by Donald A. Wollheim, Otto v. St. Whitelock, and Forrest J. Ackerman. These gentlemen are among the top experts in the field, and their choices should be worthy of attention, no matter what the purpose or restrictions. Three of the # stories published, as it happens, are from IF. Four other magazines score two each, and the final contender has one story to its credit. The stories that originally appeared in this magazinc are Mcllvaine's Star by August Derleth, The Beautiful Woman by Charles Beaumont, and The Peacemaker by Alfred Coppel. Other authors included are Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Donald Locke, Martin Pearson and Cecil Corwin, C. M. Kornbluth, Leigh Brackett, Gordon R. Dickson, Mark Clifton, Eric Frank Russell and Walter M. Miller, Jr. It would be difficult to pick favorites, even if the reviewer were completely unbiased. Naturally, your editors stand behind the stories from IF as among the best available anywhere. Kornbluth's The Altar at Midnight and Clifton's Star, Bright also seem worthy of special rpention, though. It's a small volume, as anthologies go, but a well-designed, well-made book which aims for and achieves quality rather than quantity. Weather Man's Holiday the weather" is an old saw, but when weather men themselves talk, they put new teeth in it. Their discussions are considerably more involved than "Hot enough for you?" -- and of considerably more interest to science fiction readers. This year's meeting of the American Meteorological Society in New York City, for instance, heard talks on the weather on Mars and Jupiter, sun spot cycles, and # milean-hour winds high in the sky. The atmosphere of Jupiter was discussed by Dr. Yale Mintz of the University of California, that of Mars by Dr. Jean I. F. King of the Air Force's Cambridge Research Center. The huge, impervious clouds surrounding Jupiter, said Dr. Mintz, are formed by its atmosphere of methane' ("marsh gas") and ammonia gas with a little nascent hydrogen and helium. The spots which have long puzzled astronomers appear in many respects to be like the high level cyclones in the earth's upper atmosphere and may -- or may not -- be related to the activity of the sun. Measurements of the atmosphere of Mars are easier than those of the atmosphere of the earth, according to Dr. King, because the Martian atmosphere has no oxygen and is thought to be water-free. The albedo -- reflecting power -- of Mars is known to an accuracy of three decimal points, that of the earth at best to only two. This Martian atmosphere appears to be stable up to an altitude of four and a half miles, Dr. King said. Studies suggest that the surface temperature is about # degrees on the Kelvin scale, or # below zero Fahrenheit, and that at four and a half miles up this drops to # degrees Kelvin, or # below zero. As for sun spots, Dr. Donald H. Menzel of the Harvard College Observatory reported that they do come in I #and #-year cycles, but that though many attempts have been made to establish relationships between these cycles and our weather, no reliable correlation has been found. Dr. Fred B. Whipple, head of the Harvard University Department of Astronomy, pointed out that astronomers have no explanation for how solar disturbances could have a direct effect on the earth's weather. And Dr. Bernhard Haurwitz, chairman of the Department of Meteorology and Oceanography of New York University, summed it up: "I am inclined to think that there is some relation between solar events and the weather here on earth. But, darn it, what is it?" The invisible jet-speed streams of wind high in the skies, which may be detected by the observation of cloud formations, were described by Dr. Vincent J. Schaefer, of the General Electric Company's research laboratories. These hurricanes of the higher regions, known to meteorologists for only a few years, are usually # to # miles wide and travel at speeds up to # miles an hour around the world, usually from west to cast. Besides cloud types, clues to their presence are found in gustiness at ground level, cool crisp air, blue skies with unlimited visibility, and precipitation limited to sporadic sprinkles of rain or snow. Further observation of these winds should enable airplanes to use them to good advantage in the near future. The Long-Lost Virus years, was found again recently in the University of Michigan laboratories. And scientists concerned were amazed to discover that it was still alive. The virus was originally discovered in # by Dr. Frederick G. Novy, the university's famed bacteriologist, since retired. It was so drop would kill a rat. After it had been watched closely for # years, the test tubes containing it were lost during a change in laboratory personnel in #. When the box containing the test tubes was rediscovered recently, Dr. Novy was consulted immediately. Experiments made under his direction showed that the virus had lost some of its potency, but still killed # of the laboratory rats infected with it in three to I I days. What the effect of the virus would be on human beings is not known. Poker in the Test Tube conditions but in which bluffing and cheating are not only permitted but encouraged, is being played at the University of Wisconsin. You don't have to have a huge stack of chips to get into the game, but you must have a command of advanced calculus! The idea is to collect material for Prof. R. Creighton Buck's course in the "theory of games," which is a complex and important mathematical concept. It was first formulated by John von Neumann in #, and defines a game as any situation in which groups with conflicting interests participate but over which they have only partial control. Prof. Buck, who has occasionally written science fiction, points out examples in economics, military' strategy', and other important phases of modern life. The buyerseller relationship, he says, is essentially a game played by opponents who do not have full knowledge of each other's intentions or decisions. The United States armed forces recognized the importance of practical applications of the theory of games early in World War II, and developed many of von Neumann's concepts in what they call "operational research." Prof. Buck chose poker for his own research because it has always been considered the game in which human behavior can be studied to best advantage. New Theory on Cancer  tor in the development of cancer, it is indicated by experiments in Lebanon Hospital's Institute for Medical Research in Los Angeles. The most significant difference about this research is that for the first time normal cells growing in laboratory cultures have been transformed into cancerous cells without the use of cancer-inducing chemicals. The change was brought about by intermittently depriving the test cells of oxygen over a period of many months. The research does not necessarily prove that lack of oxygen is an important factor, but it docs shed a good deal of new light on the behavior of cells. Wristwotch TV phone with you in the future, and it'll be equipped with a tiny television screen so you can see the person at the other end of the "line"! So says Dr. Harold S. Osborne, former chief engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. The device will be about the size of a modern watch, as Dr. Osborne envisions it, so it will be perfectly natural to wear it on a wristband. Furthermore, he believes that every human being will be assigned his personal, permanent telephone and registration number at birth. Dr. Osborne doesn't go into the difficulties this may create for people who merely want to be alone -- or the possible embarrassment to absent-minded souls who may forget to remove their "wristwatches" before taking a shower! Esophagi Made to Order Los Angeles recently, a baby was born without an esophagus. This malformation, called atresia, occurs about once in # births, seems to run in families, and is often fatal. At least, it was in the past. This time, a surgeon succeeded in "building" an esophagus in the thrcc-day-old infant. He did it by transplanting a sixinch section of the baby's large intestine, with its original blood and nerve connections, to the position of the missing organ. Normally, the esophagus connects the throat with the stomach. In some cases of atresia, it is connected to the windpipe instead of the throat. These cases can often be remedied by an operation, but this is only the second case in history in which a substitute has been found and successfully inserted for a completely missing tube. The doctor who performed the operation had tried it successfully on animals, and had waited ten years for a chance to use it on a human being. eastern coastline of the United States end heoas North over the Great Lakes at a height of about I ,# miles. The captain awaits his lending pattern instructions, rot yet knowing whether he will touch dawn tail first or come in flat with brakes on. (Drawings by Ed Vahgurskyi i  portation in the future. Incorporating many scientific advances, they'll have most of the advantages ond none of the disadvantages of air travel. Rocket-pcwer will make extremely high speeds possible, and the "coaches" will be built in several stories to accommodate more passengers. Gyroscopic stabilization will insu r e safety. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg, illustrating An Undersea Civilization I #I " #I Robot Mining by Ed Valigursky   IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publedi n Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo. New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # iswes; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscript. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue cti sale January # dead language. That, of course, is a trick statement, designed to arrest attention. It does so, if successful, by a calculated use of the word "good" in strict compliance with dictionary definitions. It takes lots of words to define "good" completely, but these are prominent: sufficient for its purpose, ample, possessing desirable or attractive qualities, wellbehaved, virtuous, sound and reliable, socially in good repute. (That last one is interesting -- Webster rarely finds himself backed into a comer where he has to use a word to define itself.) If your first reaction to the opening sentence was one of sharp disagreement, you were using the word "good" carelessly. All right -- carelessness is one of the influences which keep any living language constantly changing. There are others as well. With all of them in operation, no living language can be completely sufficient for its purpose, entirely ample, possessing only desirable or attractive qualities, strictly well-behaved, virtuous, sound and reliable. At least part of the time, too, it will be socially in ill repute. Our language, because we use it, is a highly suspicious character. It is adaptable, resilient, and fast on its feet. It twists words like "good" to mean all sorts of unlikely things, it adds to "good" to construct other words, and it invents completely new words to cover parts of the territory formerly occupied by "good." So it isn't a good language -- acording to Webster. and them's nothing very surprising about it. But let's carry it a step further by examining a couple of other facets of the changing process. Members of any given profession or specialized group have a language of their own. Some of this is pure slang which is never assimilated into the common language, although some of it could be quite usefully. One of the first things an editor learns is that the part of a magazine story that is continued in the back of the book is the "jump", and thereafter he always refers to it as such. You never heard the term outside an editorial office, and it's certainly simpler than "continuation" or the painfully frequently heard, " You know -- where it says 'Continued on page so-and-so... " Science and technology, naturally, are increasingly responsible for words that are new, compounded, or adapted to new meanings: amplidytie and analogue, cybernetics and cyclotron, icsnatron and rcsojrt, winterize and wobblepuriip Part of the credit for "winterize" goes to advertising and public relations men, a sccializcil group whose members vie hungrily with each other in tin creation and spread of novel and cat by words. In any ease, words describing inventions and discoveries that are headlines today hut will henceforth affect the average man profoundly arc hound to creep into his language. technologists are turning their attention more directly to problems of communication and the exchange of information. Cyberneticists and others interested in this new science (yes, Information is now a science, the word having acquired a slightly new meaning of its own in the process) are intent on finding flaws and failures in effective communication, and are progressing by leaps and jet-blasts. What we've been getting around to, and what we hope such investigators will consider, is that flawed or unsuccessful communication may sometimes he deliberate. People, in many cases, don't want others to understand them. There arc specialized groups that speak their own languages to bar understanding by outsiders through sheer selfishness or outright maliciousness. To his teacher, the third grade youngster speaks the best English she is capable of teaching him. With his own age group, as soon as he is outside the school building, he uses only their current slang and -- what is worse -- the deliberately ungrammatical language required by their unwritten code. If hr doesn't, he isn't one of the gang. Teen-agers, of course, commit even worse crimes against the language. hut llieir jargon has been discovered by magazine writers, gets into print occasionally, and some of it drills into the main stream. This is an accident that has nothing to do with this basic argument. Look around you! Fans of various forms of sports mumble cryptically, hypnotizing themselves into dangerous dreams of the good old days. Women when alone speak a language incomprehensible to men. and undoubtedly use it as camouflage for all sorts of evil schemes. Avid science fiction fanatics, the kind who have long since cut themselves loose from the rest of humanity, invent new ways of blowing up the universe and make it appear that they arc only discussing the most recent convention. Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells ain't talkin' to nobody. It takes a strong mind to resist the pressure. Many otherwise good minds yield to it and arc lost forever. It's a vicious spiral downwards, with warped speech leading to warped thinking which produces more warped speech. Clarity and lucidity are difficult ideals to attain. The communication of ideas is not easy at best. Scientists, in their new' and admirable attempts to discover why this is so, should not confine their investigations to man's sub-conscious mind. The conscious mind is in there pitching. -- Its The Vike tide is rising -- and it's doom, brothers , doom! Get fixed with sensational stereos, laming senso's, seductive skin tints, super-sending hypos! Loin your girds for battle with the Ree's... malice in wonderland By Evan Hunrer Illustrated by Kelly Freas the trouble signs when they First even before a paback hit the stands, started. Looking back, I can sec I pulled my chair closer to the desk some very small and simple. But as "Yes, sir?" Her voice was soft, it was... well-modulated. I pulled Bclazi's review out of "Honey," I said, "see if you can the com, read it quickly, and then get Clark for me, will you?" sat back to enjoy a quiet chuckle. "Yes, sir." She clicked off, and I He killed me. The guy absolutely thought of something and buzzed paralyzed me. I held the review out her again. "Sir?" ar arm's length, and I read it over "And have Clipinc get me copies again, and I nearly choked laughof all the papes carrying reviews of ing. It was getting so I could preStolen Desire, will you?" "Yes, sir." I sat back again, arid shook my head in wonder at Dino Brlazi a nd all the other Rcc's. They'd never learn. They'd sit in their high porcelain bathtubs until the Vike tide reached up past their nostrils and drowned them. Clark Talbot's book had been a masterpiece of Vike literature. So Bclazi had dipped his duck quill deep in Ree blood and torn it to pieces with archaic language. Typical. Typical, and doomed, because the Vikes were -- The buzzer sounded and I clicked on. "Yes?" "I have Mr. Talbot for you, sir. On five." "Thanks, Liz." I swung my chair around and snapped on five, foeusing the picture. Clark was still in his pajamas, and there was the flabby look of sleep on his rough-hewn features. "Oh, good morning, Van," he said. I showed him my teeth in a wide grin, and he winced and licked his lips with his tongue. "You see what Bclazi brewed on Stolen ?" I asked. "No. Is it out yet?" Clark's face became interested, and the sleep began to flee from his eyes. "Hit the stands this morning. Belazi's on the com now, if you want to pull it." "Did you pull it?" "Sure, got it right here." "Let me sec it," he said. Then he shook his head and put one hand over his eyes. "No, read it to me instead." "Big night?" "Hcrrocoke. You ever try it?" "I never mix, Clark." "I was blind, Van. It's really destruction. You should try -- " He stopped short, blinked his eyes and asked, "You mean you never mix? Never?" "My habit is short and straight, and needs no mate." Clark shook his head "Mister, you're just a Ree in disguise. VVhat'd Bclazi chop about?" "The usual. Full up a chair." "Will I need one?" "Hell, no. Every sad review the bank. You should pray he doesn't honeymoon you." "Fat chance. The day Bclazi gives one of my pabacks a favorable review, I'll cat the book -- glue and all." "Corn in the morn, Clark. You'd better just loin your girds and listen." "They're loined. On, father." "There's the usual feese heading it: title. scribe, pub, and price. Then: 'Clark Talbot, chief purveyor of Vicarious filth, is represented on the pocket-size stands this morning with a lewd, lascivious, obscene, and pornographic document titled...' " "How was that again?" "Lewd, lascivious, obscene, and pornographic." "Father, that is pure feese for the falcons." "He seems to feel the same way about your book. Shall I go on?" "Fire at Billy Boy." "Still quoting: 'pornographic document titled Stolen Desire. As with all Vicarious literature, and with the entire Vicarious Movement in general, this alleged novel seeks to arouse and to excitate...' " "Excltate?" "So llie man said." Clark shrugged. "Excltate," he said dully. "More, Van." " 'to cxcitate the body, to stimulate the diseased mind, to fabricate an existence completely alien to that surrounding us. Realistically  #    "Oops, here comes the Rcc pitch again." " 'Realistically, it serves no purpose. It is a symposium of smut, as narcotic as the more tangible drugs the Vicarious Movement has...' " "Stop! Enough. I gather he didn't care much for it. Wouldn't you say so, Van?" "Well, I think he was mildly goofed by it, yes. So what? Sc room." Clark looked mildlv serious. "I suppose so. But sometimes... Oh well. You going to that Deborah thing tonight?" "Maybe. What's on?" "Some new stuff, she said. But then, you don't mix." "Nope, I don't mix." "Well, she's also got a new senso. Supposed to be the cat's. Drop around. I want to talk to you about tri-dim rights to Even Dozen, anyway." "Sorry, Clark. I close my office at seventeen." "Well hell, father..." "You want business, come around at about fourteen today. Otherwise, I'll sec you tonight. But no business chop, chum." "The trouble with agents..." "Fcesc for the falcs, Clark. I'll see you later." "Yeah," he mumbled. I snapped off and the picture faded. I thought about Bclazi's review for a few moments, and then I buzzed Lizbeth again. When she came on, I said, "Did you round up those papes, honey?" "Yes, sir." "Bring them in, will you?" "Yes, sir. Right away, sir." I waited for a few seconds until the door slid open and Lizbeth stepped through. She was a small blonde, and the dailies she carried fairly hid her head. She staggered over to the desk, dropped the pile onto its polished top and then backed away. the new sec-thru skirts, but in the light she stood in it was opaque. The skirt was belted around her waist with a narrow red sash. Above the skirt, her flesh was firm and taut, her breasts high. I stared at them for a moment and asked, "That's new, isn't it?" She looked down at her naked breasts. "Do you like it?" "I'm not sure." "It's a new shade. It changes with the light, too, the way the skirt does." I walked to the window and pressed the button in the sill. The blinds slanted downward quickly, bathing Lizbeth in a warm glow. It caught the skirt in its molten web, turning the material to a thin translucent stuff through which I saw the outline of her legs, the tops of her stockings taut against her thighs. Her breasts had suddenly shifted shades, their undersides shimmering in dazzling silver, their sloping tops a pale fuchsia. "Dc you like it?" she asked. "Yes, I think so. It's effective." I turned away and began thumbing through the dailies. As I'd suspected, the Ree columnists had all blasted hell out of Clark's book. That was good. That was fine. Still, there were a lot of them and they had a lot of sympathetic readers. But tables were made to be turned. "Honey, I want you to have bigs made out of Belazi's com review, and a few stereos, also. We'll use the bigs in our regular ad space; and try to get us some time for the stereoshows. The sooner the better. Call Sterling Baker at Triple Press and tell him what we plan. Hint that I'd like him to split the cost. If he sounds goofed, forget it. But try to convince him, Liz. Hell, lie'll bi sharing in the profits." "Yes, sir." "You might give him a full shot of yourself when you call. Stand in the light." I looked at the skirt again. "That's a very effective gizmo." "Thank you, sir." "Has Bruce called in yet?" "No, sir." "Put him through as soon as he does, will you?" "Yes, sir." "Had your morning fix?" "No, sir." "Neither have I. What's your pleasure?" "Opaine." "Another mixer." I shook my head. "You're trading your womb for a tomb, Liz." Lizbeth shrugged, and the sudden shift of light turned her breasts a deep blue. Effective gizmo was rnilding it, I thought, and made a decision. "It's no fix without the tricks, father." "Well spoke, but a big joke. Want to join me?" I didn't wait for an answer. "Bring your kit in." "There's someone waiting to see you, sir." "Scroom. Bring your kit in. He can wait." "It's a she, sir." "So, scroor. She can wait, too." "I'm honored, father," Liz said, smiling. "Come on, mother. It's later than you think." She turned and walked toward the door, and her skirt turned opaque again, hiding the long curve of her legs. The door slid open as she reached it, and I looked through to the reception room, saw a tall redhead sitting on the couch, her legs crossed, l'he door slid closed, hiding her from view, and I walked to the bar and took out my kit. I unsnapped the leather case, opened it, and selected one of the silver vials inside. The chron set in the case's lid told me it was nine twenty-five, and nine thirty was happy time. I brought the vial to my desk, checked the gauge to be sure the fix was adequate, and waited for Lizbeth. The door slid open, and she came in carrying a small, red leather woman's kit. She laid the kit on the desk, her breasts shading to a pale chartredsc as she stepped into the shadow of the drapes. She snapped open the lid, selected a silver vial, and asked, "Sure you won't try a mixed fix? Grand kicks, father." "I'm straight," I told her. "On what?" "Morph." She wrinkled her nose. "It's your snort, but why make life short?" The hands of the chron nudged nine-thirty. "Time to kick" I said. I placed the silver vial on the desk, swabbed my arm with alcohol, and then picked up the hypo again. I traced it along the vein, waiting until the indicator told me I'd score. I glanced at Lizbeth who had lifted her skirt and was running the vial along her thigh. Most women used their legs, preferring not to mark arms which were constantly exposed. "Well," I said, "happy." "Here's to you." We pressed the buttons on our vials simultaneously, and I felt the sharp slender needle puncture my vein, felt the drug ooze from the vial, felt the vial draw back the drug mixed with blood, pump it into my body again, out, in, out, in. "Destruction," I murmured, my eyes dosed. "Doom," Lizbeth answered, her eyes beginning to glaze, her mouth partly opened as the drug took hold. I released the button, twisted the cap of the vial so that it would clean the needle, and then put it back in the kit, alongside the other empties. Lizbeth snapped shut the lid on her case. "This is good stuff," I told her. "Wherc'd you order it?" "Swift's Drugs. We've always got it from them." "Mm? Well, this is unusually good. You might order more at once. We may get some of the same lot. Incidentally, is everyone in the office supplied?" "We ordered a new shipment of benzejuana yesterday." "Benzejuana? Who's the square?" "One of the stock clerks. A Ree convert. He's breaking in slow." "Mother, how slow can you get? Give him a pop of herro tomorrow. That or two weeks' notice. Groove?" "I understand," she said. Her speech was slow, her lids half-covering her blue eves. "What brews this eve, Liz?" "With me?" "Uhrn." "Naught, father." "Fine. I'll be by at twenty. A party." Her eyes twinkled. "Father, I'm dead," she said gaily. "Fine. Send the girl in, Liz. Tell her I've an appointment at..." I glanced at my wrist chron. "... nine forty-five. Tell her we'll have to make this short." "Grooved," she said, and then she was gone. I hitched up my breeches, looking at myself in the full-length mirror set next to the bar. The breeches were tight, and the new stuff I'd used on my chest had given me a wild crop of hair there. I nodded in satisfaction and sat down behind my desk. In a few moments, the door opened, and the girl entered. to know she was a Ree. She was wearing a skirt that reached below her knees, and the blouse she wore had long sleeves and a neckline that hugged her throat. She wore almost no makeup. The only vivid color about her was in her hair, and that was gathered at the nape of her neck in a tight bun. She even wore flats, dc-emphasizing the curve of her legs. There didn't seem to be a bra beneath her blouse or girdle under her skirt -- which was something. But otherwise she was strictly Ree, and an arty type at that. "Mr. Brant?" she asked. "Yes?" "My name is Lydia Silvcrstein. "Have a seat, won't you, Miss Silvcrstein?" I thought of what my own name had been before I'd joined the Vikes. John Branoski. Van Brant was a definite improvement. She sat in the chair I offered, crossed her legs, and demurely pulled her skirt down. "What can I do for you, Miss Silvcrstein?" "I'm a writer," she said. "I gathered. Most people who come to literary agents are." Her green eyes widened slightly, and her lips parted. "Yes. Yes, I suppose they are." She sucked in a deep breath and said, "I've written some stereoshows." " Have you?" I said solicitously. "Yes. But I've been having trouble getting them aired." "Oh?" "Yes. I'm a Rce." I smiled and looked at the blouse. "I wouldn't have guessed." "I suppose you're wondering why I came to you." "Well..." The buzzer sounded on my desk, and I clicked down the toggle. "Excuse me," I said. Then: "Yes?" "I've got Mr. Alloway on seven." "Thanks, Liz." I turned, snapped on seven, and focused. "Hello, Bruce." "Hello, Van. What brews?" Bruce was a handsome lad who'd recently had a nose bob. He was wearing crimson breeches, his chest curling with blond hair that was striking against the bronze of his skin. He'd had the hair on his head tinted blond, too, leaving his eyebrows their original black for a really unusual effect. "I was wondering how you're getting along on the new senso," I said. "All right, I suppose." "Ails? Ills?" "Small smells, that's all. I need a chick with a frontage. These damn senso things demand too much." "Would you rather be back writing for the pabacks?" "Don't make glip, father." "I'm the original glib lip," I told him. "Since when is the scribe casting the show?" "You ever work with Lana Davis?" "Only to take her checks. Why?" "She's got Rce tendencies, I swear." I glanced quickly at Miss Silvcrstein, and then turned back to Bruce. "How so?" I asked. "You know how these sensoiy shows work. I swear, father, the step below is a better one. I'd rather do tri-dims any day of the week." "Less slop and more chop, Bruce. I've got someone with me." "All right, I'll get straight to the point. I've got a busty bazoo in one n scene. Davis doesn't want falsies. She says the viewers can spot them and feel them. She wants the real thing. Is that Ree feese, or is it?" "She's right," I said. "Hell, Iiruce, she's been producing senso's for a long time now. She knows what the customers want." "But the real thing? There ain't no such chick. Christ, Van, not the way I've written it." "So change the script." "That's the crux, Van. She likes it the way it is." He shook his head. swear." "Then do it her way. Pop over to Deborah Dean's tonight. You'll sec plenty of frontage You might be able to get something." Bruce didn't look convinced. "Did you read the script?" lie asked. "No." "I thought so. If you had, you'd know there is no chick with a natch frontage like that. Oh, the hell with it." "What do you mean?" "I mean, scroor. I can always get back into tri-dims -- and if worse comes to worst, there's the pabacks. At least the money is steady and I don't have to take feese from a chick with an Oedip as long as my arm." "She been psyched, or arc you just guessing?" "I'm guessing, but it's a sure thing. In the last sequence I did for her, she insisted my baddy was destroying the father image. Father image! How's that for the falcs?" "Stick with it, Bruce. It's cool cash. So you put up with a nut, so what?' "Yeah," Bruce said disgustedly. "I'll sec you tonight?" "Deborah's?" "Yeah, at about twenty or twenty-one." "I'm with you." "Grooved." to Miss Silvcrstein, who had jiolitely stared out the window during the conversation. "Now then," I said, "what can I do for you?" "Was that Bruce Alloway?" she asked. "Himself." "He...he makes a lot of money, doesn't he? Writing, I mean." "One of our best scribes." She nodded, thinking of the money, and not the quality of Bruce's writing. "I want to make a lot of money," she said suddenly. "Everyone docs." "I...I've never tried any Vikc stuff." "What have you written?" She turned her head, and a flush suffused her neck, spread over her face. "Stuff," she said. "You know." "Stark realism? Slices of life? Turning the cruel, cold spotlight on suffering humanity? Exposing the I  "You needn't make fun," she snapped. "I wasn't. I used to handle that kind of stuff until I hopped aboard. If you want to make money, you'd best turn in your pen for a later model. You can sell that slice-oflife feese to some of the small Ree journals for five bucks a throw. I won't handle it." "Why not?" "Because an agent's commission on a five-dollar sale is fifty cents. I run a business, not a benevolent society." "But...but do you really believe in this Vikc stuff you sell? I mean, do you honestly believe it's literature?" "What's literature?" I asked. "I define it as the profession of a writer or author." "That's a rather narrow definition." "It's also what people read. If people no longer read Beowulf , it's no longer literature. Vike literature serves a need in our society. If it needs any raison d'etre, that's it." "And...you'd recommend that I write that kind of...of stuff?" "If you want to. I'm not recommending anything." "Where do I begin?" she asked earnestly. "First, shorten your skirt by about three feet. Throw your blouse away and show your breasts. Get some tints and real cosmetics, and find a habit. If you're bedding with anyone, kick him the hell out. Live with Vikcs and cat with Vikes and learn what it's all about. As they used to say, get with it. That's the only way you can write it, and the only way you can sell it." "I...I see." "Toss over all your realistic beliefs, because they've no place in the Vike world. Then come back in a year or two and let me see what you've got." "Such a long time? Couldn't it be done faster?" I smiled. "I sec you've read Fygmalion. One of the prime examples of early Vike literature. I thought that was on the Ree spit list." "It is." "And you read it anyway, huh? Well, that's promising." I thought it over. "Maybe you can do it faster, who knows? What's your name?" "Lydia Silverstein." "Change it, and fast. Come back in a week, and I'll talk to you then." She smiled ingratiatingly. "All light. Thanks a lot. I really -- " "No slop, mother. Come back in a week with a new name. We can use some good women scribes if you work out." "Thank you. Thank you very -- " "So long, Miss Silverstein." She rose abruptly, walking, swiftly to the door. It slid open as she approached it and then closed gently behind her. I left my desk and glanced at my wrist chron. It was already nine forty-six, and Hayden Thorpe didn't like to be kept waiting. I walked to the closet, took a bottle of alcojel from the shelf on the door, and rubbed it over my chest, arms, and back. It dried almost instantly, leaving a high sheen on my muscles. I looked into the mirror appreciatively, winked at myself, and then closed the closet door. I, walked back to my desk and buzzed Lizbeth. "Sir?" "I'm leaving, Liz. I may be back this afternoon. If not, I'll see you at twenty tonight." "Fine, Van." "You know where I'm going now, don't you?" "Mr. Thorpe's?" "Right. You can reach me there if it's urgent. Otherwise, I'm in Outer Mongolia." "Grooved, Van." "Keep thee close, Liz." I said. I heard her chuckle as I clicked off. I took one last look in the mirror, and then headed for the lift and the sixteenth level. II leaving the room black for an instant, somehow cold and empty after what had been. I sank back in the upholstered chair, feeling completed exhausted. Music flowed from the wall speaks, and the lights came on, soft and golden. "Well." Hayden Thorpe asked, "how'd you like it?" "I'm dead," I said. I wasn't kidding. It had been terrific. Positively sensational. Hayden beamed happily. "This is going to set the senso industry on its arse, Van. I'm telling you it's the greatest goddamned tiling since video." "You've sold me, Hayden," I said. "How many scribes will you need ?" "Always business," he said, chuckling. He nudged one of his assistants and asked, "What do you Lawrence chuckled back, not daring to offend me by agreeing with Hayden, yet not wanting to seem disagreeable. "What'd you think of the love scene?" he asked me. "Destruction," I said. It had been. I'd never experienced anything like it before. "Felt as if the chick was really in your arms, didn't it?" Hayden asked. "In my arms? Father, I could feel her flesh and smell her perfume. Hayden, you've got something here that..." "That's only half of it, Van," Hayden said proudly. "Remember, we call this Individual Sensory Productions. Just a sec." He leaned back and pressed a button on the arm of his chair. Above the music coining from the speaks, came a well-modulated feminine voice. "Yes, sir?" "Rhonda, would you come in a moment, please?" "Certainly, Mr. Thorpe." Hayden leaned forward again and said, "My secretary, Van. I think you'll be a little surprised by what she has to say." I nodded and waited for the door to slide open. When it did, a tall brunette entered, c arrying a small stenotab. Her hair was piled high on her head, accentuating her height, in the fashion most tall girls affected. She wore her breasts pitch black, matching her hair, with silver sequins scattered from the center in a haphazard smear. Her skirt was long, but slit up the center and revealing laced, translucent underwear as she walked across the room in long-legged strides. She sat in a chair next to Hayden, crossed her legs and poised her slender fingers over the keys of the stenotab, ready for dictation. "No," Hayden said, "I just wanted you to tell Mr. Brant something." "Yes, sir," she said. She arched her brows, batted her lashes over the auburn contact lenses she wore. "What was it, sir?" "You saw the indi-senso we ran yesterday, didn't you?" "Yes, sir." "Do you remember the love scene?" A pulse in her throat quickened, and she lowered her eyes. "Yes, sir." "Will you describe it to Mr. Brant?" "Well... at was set on a balcony..." "Yes?" "And...and it was a starry night..." I remembered the balcony, and I remembered the stars. I also remembered how crisp the air had smelled. The hero had taken the girl into his amis, and I had actually felt the pressure of her breasts, the silkiness of her hair. I'd smelled the musky fragrance of her perfume, tasted the faint mint flavor of her lipstick. It had been an experience, one of the best senso's I'd ever seen. But I was beginning to wonder just why the hell Thorpe was putting his secretary through an inquisition. "The...the girl went into the boy's arms," Rhonda said. "And then he kissed her." "Yes, go on." "I...his face was rough, as if he had shaved but not too closely. There was the smell of aftershave on his face, I remember, and an old leather smell about him, somehow. You know what I mean. A very...masculine smell." I looked at the girl in astonishment, beginning to understand just exactly what Hayden had accomplished. "His arms were very strong," she said. "They'd been coated with alcojel, you know the odor. He'd been smoking before that, and I could...could taste the tobacco on his mouth. It...it was very nice." She paused, seeming to wander into a reverie. "Very nice." "Thank you, Rhonda," Hayden said. "You may go now." Hayden could hardlv contain himself until the door slid shut behind her. "Well, Van?" he asked, a smile mushrooming over his face. "I don't believe it," I said. "It was a put up job." "God's truth," Hayden said. "The gal saw the show yesterday. I haven't spoken to her since." I digested this for about three seconds. "Father," I said, "you're a crazy, drug-loving, psyched-up will set the industry..." "...on its arse. Just what I said. Individual senso's, Van. The men live a completely different experience than the women. I've brought viewpoint to the senso's, Van. It overwhelms me when I think of it. I'm a goddamned genius!" "Genius! You're going to be a going to have more money than God!" Hayden turned to his assistant. "Take a pow, Lawrence," he said. "Yes, sir," Lawrence answered obediently. He walked to the door and left soundlessly. Hayden's face turned suddenly serious. "You think I've got something, Van? " "Got something? Hayden, this is the most terrific thing I've ever... "I need money," he said quickly. ment. Hayden had been producing senso's lor a long time now. If there was anyone I thought was comfortably fixed, it was him. "You're kidding," I said. "No. No, I'm straight, Van." "Moncv? You?" "My habit is long and strong," he said. "Corradou." "Oh." Corradon was a synthetic drug. Jt cost a hell of a lot, even now that narcotics were legal. A eorradonict needed a pile, and lie needed a pile measured in miles. "This thing is the biggest," lie said. "There's plenty in it for both of us. You back me, Van, and we're wedded." "Five-live?" I asked. "You know the idea itself rates a seven-three," Hayden said. "At least a six-four, anyway." He shrugged and spread his hands wide. "Without the moo, though, I've got nothing. You bac k me, and I'll make it an even split. Grooved?" "How much do you need?" "Two stones." "What!" "I thought I could get by on one, hut it's impossible. Even cutting to the bone, it would come to at least a stone and a half." I shook my head. "I haven't got that kind of money, Hayden." "How much can you raise immediately?" "Nine hundred gee. Maybe." Hayden nodded. "That's not bad. That's only a gee short of a stone. Can we raise the other I le looked at me, saw the dubious look on my face, and said, "Did you sec the stars in that chick's eves   when she desi ribed the mush to von: Did you ever srr anyone look   # like that talking about an ordinary senso? Hell, Van, you saw the show yourself Was it. or wasn't it?" "It was." "Did it fix you?" "It fixed me. Jt was doom. But two stones..." "You said you could raise close go. If you can get the nine hundred gee by the end of the week, we can start production. We'll need another half stone by the end of the month, and the remainder for the bally just before release. That won't he for another six months, at least." "How long did it lake you to make the pilot?" I asked. "Three months." "And you figure on a full-length feature in six months? Father, what are you mixing?" "All right, the pilot you just saw was a fifteen minute show. But we were working out a lot of hugs, and the medium was new. There'll be no guessing on the featch. Van. Wc'vc got it down pat. When I say six months, I mean six months. Not a dav over." "What about scribes?" "That's vour end. Y'ou'rc a literary agent, aren't you?" "How many will we need?" "I used a team of six men and six women for the pilot. We need both, you know. This takes a special kind of writing. Van, you don't know the half of it." "I know we won't get six of each lor less than a stone. My scribes are high-priced, Havden." "Can't you -- " "I'm their agent. I work for them , remember?" "Then get some low-priced scribes. Get one of each, a man and a woman. They don't have to be terrific. The medium will carry the lousiest writing, as long as it's suited to the process. Besides, it's new. There arc no experienced scribes lor this sort of thing." "How high can we go?" "You're not thinking of your goddamned commish, are you?" "Hell, no! I want to know who I can get. For that, I want to know what I can pay." "All right. We can go to twenty gee." "Per." "I was thinking of twenty gee for both. If we have to make it per, okay." Hayden smiled. "It's your money, Van." "Yeah." I stood up and took his hand. "Deal?" I asked. "Deal," he said. "Real," I acknowledged. "I'll have the moo by the end of the week. Nine hundred gee. Another five hundred by the end of the month, and the rest in six months or so." "Right." "I see the light, father." "Call me, Van," he said. "This thing is big." "Your language is small," I said. "This thing is doom!" Ill pay phone. When his picture and voice came on, I said, "I'm using our usual scrambler. Want to tunc in?" "Hush stuff?" he asked. "Much hush. Mush, Bruce." "Sure," he said. I pressed a combination of buttons on the face of die instrument. That would scramble my voice so that only Bruce, after adjusting his own set to decode, would receive mv message. "Okay?" I asked. "Grooved." "Fine. You still want to take a pow on Lana Davis?" "I'd love to. How?" "I've got something big for you. It'll mean a cut, though." "How much of a cut?" "Down to twenty gee." "That's a mean slash, father." "I know. Do you want it?" Bruce shook his head. "I'd sure like to get from under that chick, Van. But twenty gee. Hell, after taxes, I'll have marbles." "This is the biggest goddamned thing you've ever fallen into," I said harshly. "I can get sixty scribes who'll do it for nothing, just for what it'll bring them later on. If you don't want it, I'll look elsewhere. So long, Bruce." "Hey, hold on, father!" "What is it?" "Well chop a little more about it. Be fair, Van." "I can't chop on the phone." "You're scrambled, Van. Hell JJ    "Even scrambled. Look, think it over. I'm your agent, and I say this is hot. You can remember who pulled you out of the pa backs, or you can donut-leap." "Van, give me a chance to -- " "I'll see you at Deborah's tonight. I'll tell you more then. But onlv if you're in. If you're cool, fool, this is too hot to spread around. You follow?" "All the way. It's big, hull, Van?" "Bigger than birth." "But a cut in cash." "It'll be the smartest move you ever made. 'I hink about it." I clicked off, smiling to myself. I stepped out of the booth, walked through the store and out onto the curb. I grabbed the first pneumotube that came by, punching the tabs near my seat as soon as I'd dropped in my coin. In three minutes, we'd traveled three miles, and I cursed the snail's pace until I remembered I was down on the fifth level. The signal light near my scat blared red, and I rose as the door slid open. J stepped onto the curb, looked for the numbers on the buildings, found the one I wanted, and walked inside. My heels echoed on the marble floors as I walked down the corridor. I passed two Rce's in the hallway, complete with shirts and tics, and wearing -- of all goddamned things -- hats. They studied the hair on my chest with obvious distaste, r wrinkled their noses, and hurried off down the hallway. I shrugged, and then walked into the reception room of Barton and Houston, my accountants. A redheaded switchboard operator, her skin tinted an offcolor green, sat with her hands darting out for rubbery, snakelike connections. ! ler shoulders were bare, as were her breasts, and she had left the skin between her collar bones and the lower side of her bosom its natural shade. The effect was a bit startling, and I glanced at it ap a relatively. She plugged one of the connections into a hole on the board. "Barton and Houston, good afternoon." I looked at my wrist chron. Damn if it wasn't thirteen-ten already. I whistled tunelessly while she disposed of the lights dickering on her board. When she turned to me. I said, "Jo Houston, please." "Who's calling, sir?" "Van Brant." "Just a moment, sir." window looking out over the criss-crossed, seemingly haphazard ribbons that wound through the sky above and below the fifth level. Stretching from the third level up to the ninth, I saw the full-length figure of the star of one of tin? stercoshows playing on the seventh level. As I watched, the gigantic figure sucked in a deep breath. Her breasts moved suggestively, and her navel filled with shadow. "Mr. Brant?" I turned awav from the window and the poster art, and walked back to the redhead, who was real. "Yes?" "Mr. Houston will sec you now', sir." She smiled, and I smiled back and walked through the gate and into Jo's office. He was sitting behind a cluttered desk, with an enormous ledger opened before him. When I came in, he rose and extended his hand. the body?" "Ticking and clicking, no kicking. And you?" "Sound and round, like money found. What brings you, Van?" "Business." "Oh?" "Liquidation," I said flatly. "Iluh?" "I need cash fast, Jo. I want you to get rid of all my holdings. I need close to a stone by Saturday." Jo whistled softly. "In a jam?" "No. Business." "Sounds good." "It is. Can you do it for me?" He spread the fingers of one hand wide. "Sure." Then he cocked his head to one side, his deep brown eyes set into the layers of flesh on his face. "Anything that might interest me?" "Sorry, Jo." Jo smiled. "Okay, okay." He held up his palm like a traffic robot. "So what's new otherwise?" "Nothing much. You?" "A few new accounts. You know Steele and Dawes?" "Advertising?" "Yes. Enormous. The boys who finally broke through the prohibish lobby. Wc just got them." "Oh yes, of course. The ones who started the new swing in liquor advertising." Jo nodded. "You remember what the ads used to be like. 'For mellow flavor' or 'for a taste treat.' Anything but what they really wanted to say." He chuckled amiably. "I'll never forget the first one. Van. The liquor was Daley's. Steele and Dawes plastered the town with tridim bottles. Everywhere you looked, a bottle was staring down at you. And all the copy said was: 'Daly's makes you drunker' n hell!' " He laughed aloud, and I laughed with him, remembering what a furoi that first honest whiskey ad had caused. When we'd quieted down, I said, "By Saturday then, Jo. You won't let me down?" "Have I ever?" "No." "I won't start now." "Grooved. I'll sec you." IV thing, but then all of Deborah Dean's parties were. She'd had one complete wall of the living room knocked down for the occasion, replacing it with a clear pane of plexoid that ran the length of the room. Her apartment was swank, very, high up on the fifteenth level, looking down over the city and the river. When I came in with Lizbcth on my ami, the lights were low in the room, and the city twinkled and sparkled outside the plexoid sheet like a galaxy of blazing, multi-colored suns. Deborah spotted us the moment wc came through the door and hurried over. She was the only woman I knew who could carry off green eyes and a blue skin tint well. Her breasts were spattered with sparkling gold dust, the nipples luminous in the dim light of the room. Her skirt was long in the back, almost trailing the floor, gashing upward in a wide V that terminated at her waist in the front. "Van," she cried, "How good!" I took the hand site extended, and smiled cordially. "Deborah, this is Lizbcth." Deborah grinned, and her eyes roamed Lizbcth's body candidly. I had to admit that Liz had really outdone herself tonight. She had a thin blue, shimmering strip of plastic decorously clinging to her breasts. She had chosen a peach skin tint, and had contrasted it with a pitch-black skirt that ended on her thighs. Her lips matched the plastic strip, and she'd done her hair to go with the skirt. We'd had a fix at her place, and her eyes sparkled behind their blue contacts. Even Deborah was impressed. She smiled again. "What's your pleasure?" "We've been fixed," I told her. "Maybe later." "You know where the bar is. Just help yourself. I've got a wonderful senso for later, and something new in a tri-dim. And. oh. I've got some destructive tapes. Van. The very latest sound." She dosed hei eyes ecstatically. "Doom, pure doom." "I'll be listening." I paused. "I'd like to talk to you later. Deb." "Why not now?" "Alone," I said. She patted my check, her hand cool and firm, a sensuous musky perfume rising from its palm. "As a matter of fac t, I want to talk to you, too. When the senso is showing, grooved? but I hate to have you miss it. It really is good." "I'll sec it some other time." "All right, Van. I'll look for you later." She waved and was gone, ready to greet another pair of guests. "She's nice," Lizbcth said. "I like her stomach. Who does it for her?" "I don't know. I didn't see anything unusual about it." "Didn't you notice? It was beautiful, Van. really. I'm surprised you didn't notice." "There's Rog Brooks," I said. "Who?" "Brooks. You know him. The big psych. I wonder what the hell lie's doing here." "Whv not? Psvchs are human." "Are they?" Lizbcth giggled and took my arm. "Come on," she said, "let's mingle." to where a small clique had got a song going. We listened to one chorus and joined in. on the refrain : "Pop it, moppet. Stick it in your rein. Push it in and pull it out And stick it in again Mass it, gas it. Das! thou pass it? Never! Never! Naaaaaay, fa-ther, We all enjoyed a good laugh, and then a tall, dark-haired boy in silver breeches began improvising a chorus: "There once was a Rec man named Ditto!" "Oh, yes," we chanted. "Who strolled on the old bal-colino "Yes" " lie tripped on his clothes. And ruptured his nose Inn most realistic f ash-in o! Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. He signaled for us to all join in, and we started once more with, " Pop it, moppet, stick it in your vein... " end of the refrain, and then a girl with pink shells on her nipples took up another chorus, a bit raw this time, but still funny. We were in the middle of another refrain when I saw Bruce Alloway come into the room. I excused myself and started for the door, the sound of the singing behind me. I grabbed Bruce by the arm before he'd had a c hance to say hello and began steering him toward a dark corner. "Hey," he complained, "what the hell's the rush?" "You want to hear tids, or don't you?" v "Sure, sui e. But I want to taste some of this new stuff I hear Deborah's got. Hell, father, I haven't had a fix since noon in preparation." "All right, go pop. But hurry back, Bruce." "Sure," he said, looking at me curiously. "Sure." He started toward the bar, waving his hand in greeting as Inpassed Rog Brooks, the psych. I followed Bruce with inv eyes until he reac hed thebar, and then lost him in the cluster of people there. When I swung inv eyes back. I realized that Brooks was heading in my direction. I turned my head away, pretending to look through the plexoid at the city. But he'd alreatly spotted me, so I gave it up and loined my girds. "Hello, then-, Brant," he called. I looked up feigning surprise. "Well, hello. Brooks. Long time no. Pull up." "Thunks." He hooked a small foam c ushion with his toe, pulled it toward him. and plopped down on it. Brooks was a tall, thin man with eager eyes set in an intense face, liespoiled a vandyke carefully trimmed on his chin and he wore his hair in its natural shade-, a deep black that hugge d his scalp like a helmet. I Ir cocked one raven brow and said, "Nice party." "Not bad," I admitted. "I didn't know you knew Deborah." "Oh yes," Brooks said. "Quite well." I le passed a clawlike hand ove-r his naturally hairy chest, scrate lied idly at one pee total. "One of my favorite patients, in fact." "That right?" "Yes." I felt somehow uncasv. I wasn't # used to psychs, and I'd never held a lengthy conversation with one-. Brooks seemed to be experiencing the same discomfort. We sat and stared at each other while a few long minutes dragged the ir feet laboriously through a fie-ld of molasse-s. Finally, I said, "So how's the psych business the-se days?" He shrugged his broad shoulde-rs. "Not loo good. Not for a Vike man, anyway. The Ree boys seem to be getting all the work." I wondered if he were kidding, but I didn't express skepticism. "What do you mean?" I asked. "It's a question of finding a norm," he said slowly. "I still don't groove.' Brooks spread his palms wide. "I was taught in a Ree school, Van. Got my Bah from a Ree college, my Mud from a Ree medical school and all my specialized training at Ree clinics. The emphasis was a little different." "How so?" "Great god Freud. Chew a cigar? You were weaned too early. Wash your hands often? You're a niastur. Glove anesthesia? You've got a guiltplex. You know the Ree pitch." "So?" "So along come the Vikes. And everybody flees into a dream world. Your norm is kicked in the arse." I didn't say anything, because I still didn't know what he was talking about. "Look at it this way. You establish a pattern. The majority of people don't go around picking their noses on pneuinotubes. All right, this is the norm. You get a guy who does pick his nose, he's a dcleg for a booby bin. But what happens when the norm is reversed? What happens when everyone seeks the world heretofore reserved for the schizoid? Who's normal then? And how do you treat the person who isn't?" "Arc you saying that Vikes are...mentally unbalanced?" Brooks smiled thinly. "I'm a Vike  myself. It's been ten years since I've touched a woman or wanted to touch one. I've been a morphict for three years, a herrict for four, and I've been on corradon for the last three, ever since it hit the market. My biggest charge is the senso's, but I'm not above reading the pabacks. A wild tape still gets a rise out of me. I know all the tricks and all the gimmicks. I've even come along with the language, which was probably the hardest part. Who am I to say Vikes are nuts?" "What are you saying then?" "I'm not saying anything. I came here tonight for the same tiling you did. Something like a cat house, isn't it?" "Listen, Brooks... "All right, you don't like what I'm saying. I don't much like it, either. I keep thinking about tomorrow, though. And the tomorrow after that. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. What's the step beyond schizophrenia? Or mania? I'm afraid it's catatonia -- and that means doom." He saw the look on my face. "I'm not using it in the Vike sense, Brant. I mean doom. Plain old doom. The end. Finis. Pffft !" "You through?" "Sure, sure, I'm through. I understand Deb has some new stuff at the bar." He stood wearily and his eyes met mine for an instant, and then fled into their own retreat. "Maybe I'll try some. So long, Brant." He turned abruptly. "There was a young Ree girl who knew it!" "Oh, yes" "But didn't quite know how to do it.' "Yes.' "She sought an advisor Who quickly did size her... Amid the la ugh ter and the bubbling sound "I voiics lilted in song, in the dim lights glinting on scquined and painted bosoms, among mv fellows and friends, in niv   world, I watched Rog Brooks shoulder his way to the bar, a tail man walking with his head bent and his lists clenched. A strange man with strange ideas. But maybe, I thought, I shouldn't have been so short with him. lie was different, at least... and the song eelmed in my ears, and suddenly there was a cool hand on my bare flesh, and the aroma of Lizbeth's perfume in my nostrils. I shrugged her hand away. "Don't paw me," I said. "Sorry, father. You look sad. Want to pop?" "No." Liz giggled. "I got a confession. I already did. The new stuff. It's doom, Dad. IVhoo!" "I want solo," I said. "Take a pow." "Sure, Van. They're starting a round of Coverup, anyway, and I want to get in on it." "Have fun," I said. She turned and walked away from me, het hips swiveling, her high heels clicking against the marble floor. I looked across the room to the har, saw Bruce elbow his way free, straighten his hair, and start over toward me. I stood up, walked to meet him halfway, and said, "Let's step outside, Bruce. I don't want this overheard." "You act like a Martian spy," he said. "How the hell would you know what a Martian spy acts like?" "I read the sci-fix. Interesting." "That Ree le. se?" "Listen," he said earnestly, "it's the closest tiling the Rns have to real Vikc Mull, it's their one salvation." We'd reached the balcony, and I yanked open the manual sliding door, stepping outside into the night. A mild breeze played over the balcony, and Deborah had covered the place with rose hushes that oozed I heir pel fume onto the mild air. "So what's the big one?" Bruce asked. "A new senso. So big you can't itnadge, Bruce. Individual sensory experiences. Individual, Bruce. A man secs, feels, smells one thing. A woman another. Bruce, it's gigantic. It's like nothing we've got. I'm sinking all I own into it. I need scribes." Bruce screwed up his black brows. He was a moment before answering. "You like it?" "Yes." "I'm in." "Just like that?" "My lriend, before you came on the scene I was writing for the pahacks. I made an average of fifteen gcc a year, and you know how far that gets you. You came on then. Last year, I stacked close to half a stone. This sear, with six months to go yet, I've made that much already. I've never made a move you didn't suggest, and you've never suggested a move that wasn't right." Bruce shrugged, a little overwhelmed by his own sincerity. "You say this is big, it's big. You say I should get into it now, I get into it now. That's the way it is, Van. That's the kind of stupid bastard I am." I grinned in the darkness. "That's Rec talk, Bruce." "All right, change it to 'stupid let's go inside and get into the Covcrup. Christ, this is a dull party." I clapped him on the shoulder, and we started to head back for the party, and that was when I noticed how unusually quiet it was inside. Bruce must have detected the lack of sound at about the same time, because he turned to me with a puzzled expression on his face. Covcrup is usually a pretty damned noisy game during the donning stage. The stripping half is so quiet you can hear a pin drop, but hardly enough time had progressed for the game to have been in that stage yet. As if by common consent, we ran for the doors and into the room. The first person I saw was Deborah, and her face showed pale even through the blue tint. I was starting toward her when a voice shouted, "Iley, here's two more of the bastards." I whirled rapidly, and then I understood the silence in the room. the room, four Rcc's, smug grins on their faces. They were fully clothed, of course, wearing shirts, jackets, flapping trousers. The apparent leader of the group, the one who had spoken, looked younger than the others. His blond hair tumbled over his forehead, and his eyes insolently roamed the room, studying the naked bosoms of the women. I walked over to Deborah and asked, "Crashers, or did you invite them?" "My God, Van," she said. "Please!" "What's all the talk over there, Chesty?" the blond boy called. I turned and looked at him, and his friends formed behind him in a tight semi-circle. "You talking to me, son?" "Yeah, you with all the hair on your chest, and the shiny muscles. What's with you and Big Bust there?" Deborah glanced self-consciously at her breasts, feeling the lust in the blond youth's eyes. I felt embarassed for her, and I started across the room. "Ho, look," the blond shouted, "a hero in the crowd." I walked right up to him, and I heard Bruce padding across the floor behind me. The boy was as tall as I was and had well-rounded muscles beneath the rough cloth of his jacket. His eyes were slate grey, and he carried his mouth like an open switch-knife. "Are you looking for trouble, son?" I asked. He grinned and nudged one of his pals in the ribs. "Listen to Shiny Skin," he said. "Yeah, mister, we're looking for trouble." "You came to the right place," I said softly. Bruce pulled up alongside me, but I didn't turn my head. "Hey, look at the blond hair and black eyebrows," one of the Ree's said, indicating Bruce. "That takes it, boy." He began laughing, and they all joined in. They'd obviously been drinking heavilv. ' "Youd better go," I said. "You'd better go damned last. ' The blond boy thought that was hilarious. "Why?" he asked. "You gonna show me a movie or something?" "Oh" I said, "I get it." I le laughed again, sure of himself now. "Listen to the tough Vike, lxys. He gels all his lights from the stereos and sense's. That's the way lie enjoys his lights." He turned a sneer on me. "You're scarin' me to death, mister." "Grooved." I said. "You figure because we get our action vicariously we don't know how to get it any other wav. Is that right?" "Yeah" he said quickly. He turned to the boys then and said, "Hey. you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna grab one of these nude babes and show her what a real..." That was when my fist collided with his mouth. I felt his lip split, and then the sharp edge of his teeth knifed into my skin. A blossom of blood sprouted on his mouth, and he brought up his hand to his lips in surprise and terroL I slammed my other fist into Lis open hand, and his spread lingers tore into his flesh, almost gouging out his own eye. He backed up a few paces, and I jumped after him. I heard his pals yell something and grab for me, and then Bruce stepped into the picture and started throwing his weight around a little. I gave Blondic a pop in the eye that sent him staggering back to land right on his arse. He was ready to stand up when I lashed out with my hoot and caught him on the point of the chin. After that, lie wasn't read) to do anything. I turned quickly, about to take on another one, when I saw Rog Brooks i im across the room and tear one of the Roc's from Bruce's back. I threw myself headlong at the closest Roe and began throwing fists at his head. I wasn't used to this because it had been a long time since I'd had any practice, but I punched and I kicked, and I felt my blows crashing against solid flesh that began to crumble after a while. I kept hitting until my fists were covered with blood, until my breeches were torn, until the breath was raging in my lungs. And then I stopped I tot a use the flesh had already crumbled and was lying on the floor in a bloody, sodden heap. I stood back then and looked around me at Bruce and Rog. "Let's get them out of here," I said hoarsely. We dragged them to the front door and stuck them on the lift, setting the tabs for the first level. The lift dropped out of sight with its cargo, and we went back into the room. Deborah rushed over to me and said. "Van, you were wonderful." "Those rotten bastards," I said. I llid fie simply wasn't strong enough, so I reverted to the Rec terminology. "Those filthy..." "If they come back," Bruce said, "thcv'rc dead. Thev'rc dead. Van, dead." His hands were trembling as he spoke, and there was a smear of blood stretching from his temple to his jaw. A murmur of conversation sprang up around the room now, and someone put on a tape in an effort to relieve the strained atmosphere. "Can we wash up. Deb?" I asked. "Yes. Yes, of course. Come with she dropped Rog and Bruce off at the hall bathroom, and then led me to the private bathroom in her own bedroom. She sat on the bed while I washed, arid talked to me through the open bathroom door. I let water into the sink and then plunged my hands into it, watching it turn muddy with blood. "This makes me wonder," she said. "About what?" "About whether I'm doing the right thing or not." "I'm lost, Deb." I splashed water onto my face, feeling it sting the cuts there. "I want to have a baby, Van." "What!" I jerked upright and looked at her, my face and hands dripping water onto the floor. "Yes, I want to very much." "Why?" "Well...I'm just tired of...of senso's and...you know, all of it. I want something new." "Who's the lucky man?" I asked sarcastically, dipping into the water again. "Van, don't make me vomit. It won't be that way at all." "No?" "No." She smiled playfully. "There arc only three men I'd even consider that with, anyway. Even if I were a Rcc." "Who?" I asked. "Jamie Grew. Know him?" "No. Who else?" "Rog Brooks." "Oh." "What docs that mean?" "Nothing. But I'll bet he's the "Well, in a way." "Who's the third man?" "You." I snorted and rinsed off my face. "Well, honey, you're barking up the wrong three." "I'm only joking. I'll go to the clinic, of course." "Minm?" "Yes. In fact, I've already informed them. I'm enrolling in the next Inseminar." I snapped on the ultra-vi and stepped into the field, rubbing my hands as the rays dried me. "That's the next step above a Rcc," I said. "Next thing you know, you'll be mating in an alley." "Van, for God's sake! You say the goddanmdest things." "Well it's the truth." I shrugged. "Is this what vou wanted to talk to  me about?"  "Yes. I haven't told anyone yet, not even Rog. I wanted to hear what you thought of it." "Well, now you know." "And I'm going to do it anyway." "Go right ahead. Your womb, your tomb." I stepped out of the field and snapped off the ray. I looked at mv torn breeches. "I don't suppose you've an extra pair in the house." "No. Sorry." "Didn't expect you to." I tried to pull the tear together, gave it up as a sorry job, and said, "I wanted to talk to you, too, Deb." "What about?" "Money."  "What about money?" "I need a stone. Can you lend it to me?" "Are you in trouble?" "No." "Then why do you need that much moo?" "I need it." Deborah hesitated. "I might be able to scrape it together." "How soon?" "How soon do you need it?" "Immediately." "That gives me a lot of time," she said snidelv. "All right, six months. No later." "That's a little better. In six months, I should he pregnant." "Must we talk about that?" "No, of course not. I'll have the money for vou. Van. Is that better?" ' I grinned. "That's much better." Deborah rose, brushed a fleck of dirt from her breast and said, "Done. Shall we join the party?" My grin got bigger. I was thinking of the stone slic'd promised me within six months, and I was thinking of the way Hayden Thorpe and I would parlay that moo into a nice pile. Individual Sensory Productions. And all Deborah could think about was having a baby! V A ctually, the four Rcc crashers were one of the clearest omens, but vou never sec things in their true light until they're over and done with -- and then it's too late. Jo Houston called me the next day, shmtiy after my noon fix. His face was troubled, and his eves  # were wearv. For a moment, I thought lie'll gone without a fix, but then I noticed the empty vial on his desk. " hat is it. Jo?" I asked. "I'm having a lugged go, Van." "Spell it." "Your holdings. I can't get rid of them." I looked at his face hard to see if he was kidding. "What the hell are you talking about, Jo?" "The stuff. No buvers." "No buyers? Hop down, father, and jest me not! I'm in no mood for -- " "Bible stufl, Van. s'hclp me. I've been shagging since yesterday. The market's dim." "Then you haven't been shagging hard enough. W hat the hell's the matter with vou, Jo? The stuff I've got is the hottest you can get today." "Maybe." "Listen, stop cryptic lipping. Shoot ii to me straight." "All right. You Joined?" "Shoot, goddainnit!" Jo began ticking the points off on his lingers. Item A: three hundred shares Sappho Stereos. Dead ducks." "How so?" "No buvers. Hold it. Van. don't blowtop. I tried everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I couldn't even sell them for a fifty percent loss." "You mean you ofjrrtd that?" "As a last resort. Van, the market is tighter than a Ree's necktic." "More, father." "Item B: twenty-two shares Arbac Press. Dead ducks. I shopped all over town. No one's interested." "That's impossible! Arbac is one of the best paback outfits in the field. You sure this isn't a gag, Jo?" "I never kid where it concerns money," Jo said seriously. "All right. Read it." "Item C: fifty-seven shares Dale Cosmetics. I got rid of twenty. You know what you can do with the other thirty-seven." "VVhat'd you raise?" "One." "A thousand? For twenty shares of Dale? Holy Christ, Jo, arc you losing your marbles?" "I didn't say a thousand. I said 'one.' One hundred, Van. One clam. Count it." "One clam! Look, Jo -- " "I'm lucky I got that. You've got no idea what it's like, Van. So help me, I don't like it." "You don't like it? You don't like it? It's only my goddamned money you're throwing around, that's all. It's only -- " "Cool, Van." "Cool my big kccstcr! Listen, Jo, you're paid to handle mv afTairs. If I ever made a deal like that for one of my clients, I'd be hanged on Times Square the next day. What the hell do you think this is: Parthesi?" "Van, I tell you -- " "You tell me horsemanure! I'm telling you, goddam nit And you'd damn well better listen. I've got stock worth at least # gee. I want # gee, and a good man should be able to raise that. If you're not a good man, you're not the man for me. There are approximately eight thousand accountants in this city, Jo, and -- " "Easy, Van, easy. I'm -- " "Easy, nothing. I'll give you until tomorrow. That's Wednesday. If you can't produce by then, you can close out my account and go back to filing income tax returns at fifty cents a throw!" "That's not fair, Van -- " "It may not be fair, but it's the way it is. I want at least # gee by tomorrow. If you get that much, I'll give you 'till Saturday to get the rest. If you can't, goodbye, Jo; it's been, but it ain't no mo." "Van -- " I clicked ofT before he could protest, and then I went over to the bar and shot up a booster. When the buzzer on my desk sounded, I nearly tore off the switch answering. "Yes!" I shouted. "Ouch!" Lizbeth said. "What is it, Liz?" I answered harshly. Her voice was surprised. "I did something, Van?" "You did naught. You buzzing to be sociable or have you got something on your mind?" "Van... "Come on, Liz, I haven't got all day!" "Yes, sir." Her voice was shocked now, and a little hurt. "There's someone to see vou, sir." "I'm not in."' "She said it w'as important." "I'm still not in." "Sir, she -- " "Listen, Liz, do I have to send a diag with everything I say? I'm not in! That goes for this chick, and the President, and even Dino Bciazi. I'm out. I'm not in. Does that make sense?" "Yes, sir." "Fine, line. Pm glad I sjcak English." "Yes, sir." "Is dial all?" "Ye -- " "All right. Don't disturb me for the next hour or so." I clicked oil and began pat ing the rug. How the lu ll was a man supposed to get anything done when he was surrounded by idiots? Imagine Jo selling twenty shares of Dale for a clam! A ilam! And Incalled himself an accountant. A shoe shine boy could have got at least five, and -- The door behind me opened swiftly, and I turned with niy lists clenched as it slid shut again. "I thought I told you not to..." The girl standing there was not Lizbcth. hair pulled to one side of her neck, trailing down over one naked breast. Me breasts were firm and high, concentrically ringed in various hues. Her stomach was bare and flat, etched with a deep naval. Her skiit was shorter than a good many skirts I'd seen, and she wore six inch spikes with ankle straps. I stared at her for an instant. "Who the hell arc you?" I shouted. "Lois Sylvan. "Who?" "Lois Sylvan." "Do you know what doors are for, Miss Sylvan? They keep people out. I told my secretary I wasn't to be disturbed. I wasn't kidding. Now il vou'll swing your l.cestcr out of here. I'll be much obliged." "I thought you'd be interested," she said an lily. I looked her over again. "W hates er you're selling, Pm not interested." "We're even. I'm not selling." I looked at her again. "Am I supposed to know you or something? Pm not good at guessing games." "Lydia Silverstein," she said quickly. "Lvdia wh I closed my mouth # # and looked her over again. Yes. tinted hair was certainly hers, and tinlong legs. and...but... "Well. You've changed." "My name, too. Not legally yet. I've assumed it by common law, and I've a I read v got a shyst to bring it to court." "Good. So?" "I've bared my...I've taken ofT niy blouse, and I've shortened mv skirt. I tried morphine today. I did just wluit you said." "So?" "Well...#...I'm ready to begin." "Begin what?" "You said -- " "Miss Silverste in, or Sylvan, or whatcver-lhe-hell, this is not a Retconvcrtorium. I run a business, and I don't have to -- " "But you said -- " "I know what I said. I also told you to kick out your mate. Did vou do that?" Her eyes began to cloud, and her lower lip trembled a little. "I... I didn't have one." "Fine! You had nothing to lose then, did you? The fact remains that I can't play father-confessor to every Rcc who decides to chuck it all. Miss. I'm right now in the middle of something -- " She started to cry. Just like that. It had been such a long time since I'd seen any woman cry that I almost didn't believe it. "Hey!" I said. "Oh, shut up," she blubbered. "Well, look..." "Don't talk to me." she said between sobs. "Well, don't cry," I offered lamely. "Save that for the stcrcosoaps. Come on, now, Miss. Miss, you shouldn't..." "I did what you said," she blubbered. "I did just what you said. Now I'm here, and I feel so cheap and so...so...naked, and vou  # don't even...vou don't even..." I walked over to her and put my arm around her shoulder. "Look, Miss, please, don't cry. There's no need for that, really. Please, now, please." "I feel awful," she whimpered. "There, there, I'll help you. Don't worry. I said I'll help you, and I will." "You will?" "Of course I will. We can use good female scribes. I said I'd help, and I've never gone back on my word. I was just feeling sort of grumpy, that's all." "You'll really help me write?" she asked. She looked for a pocket, found none, and wiped her tears with the back of one hand. "Yes, I will," I said. "Yes, I -- " A thought hit me. Full-blown. Right out of the air. "Yes, by God," I said. "Yes, I will!" I thought of tiie twenty gee we were paying Bruce Alloway for his writing on the new show. And Hayden was looking to cut costs. I grinned amiably and asked, Miss Sylvan...Lois...how would you like to earn a cool live gee?" Her eyes opened wide, and her lashes batted frantically for a moment. "Five...five...?" "Five gee. Five thousand skins. All yours. All for your hot little hands. How about it?" She gulped hard. "For writing?" "What else?" I asked. For a moment, I thought she would faint. Instead, she gulped again, and her eyes were incredibly green and incredibly wet behind their thick lashes. She opened her mouth to answer, but when no words came, she simply nodded her head weakly. "Fine!" I shouted. "Terrific." I stabbed the button on my desk and Liz came on. "Sir?" "Liz, honey," I said, "I want you to call Hayden Thorpe for me." "Sir?" Her voice brightened. "I want you to call him, sweetness, and tell him I've got the two scribes he wanted. Tell him one of them is Bruce Alloway, and reel ofr Bruce's credits to hint. Mention the After Dark thing, Liz. That was really big." She sounded quite happv now. "Yes, Van." "And then tell him I've discovered a fabulous new female scribe. Tell him she's the greatest thing since transundics -- " "Van!" tin best cl. mined serile since Shakespeare, the best darned discovery since eorradon. Tell him she's starting at oner, and that I've had to go to five gee, hut that she's worth every penny. Tell him I'm clearing up the other details now. and that we'll be ready to roll on Sunday." "Yes, Van." "And tell him. Liz; toll him her name is..." I snapped my lingers, and the redhead fluttered her eyelashes. "Lydia," she said. "No, Lois. Lois Svlvan." "Lois Sylvan, Liz." "Lois Sylvan," Liz rcucated. "Remember that name, Liz. Remember it well. This little ladv is going to have that name in lights soon. Lois Sylvan. Magnificent. Make that call now, Liz, and double it." She clicked ofT, and I turned to the redhead. "Well, Miss Svlvan," I said. "This is the beginning. You're on your wav." Miss Sylvan didn't answer. Miss Sylvan was too busy bolding her breath and giving herself a great big healthy mental pinch. VI next day. "Hello. Van." He was beaming broadly, and good news was scrawlall over his face. "What's the snap, pap?" "I've got a buyer." "Good. How much did you  #I raise: "You sitting. Van?" "Win?" Jo grinned secretively. "How much did you want me to raise? Foi the lot. I mean." "You know how much. Stop cutciimousiiig." "You wanted # gee, light?" "'I hat's light, Jo. Come on." "I got a stone and two." "What?" "A stone and # gee, that's right. And I managed to buy back that twenty shares of Dale and throw that into the package, too. Who's tin hottest accountant in town, bov?"  # "A stone and two! fo, bow'd you doit?" Jo smiled obliquely. "Trade Secrets, lad." "Well, who's the buyer?" w # "An outfit called Ball Associates." I thought this over for a moment. will never make good, Jo. He hasn't got a  cut to his "No. not Don Ball. This is a new outfit. I cheeked tin-in thoroughly. Van. They've got more moo than God." "You sure?" "Positive. I saw their hooks. They're loaded. Van." "A corporation?" "Yes." "Who's behind it?" "I couldn't find out. Listen, their money is good. What the hell arc you worried about ?" "I just don't like doing business with shadows. Who do I sue if tin check hops?" "It won't hop. I'll have it certified." "Minium." "What do you say, Van? This is damned good money. You said yourself you only expected to realize -- " "And I was shooting high," I said, "just to get you to push." "bo there. A stone and two is fabulous. Shall I close it?" "Ball Associates, huh?" "Ball Associates." "Okay, Jo, close it. I want the cheek by seventeen tonight, and i citified. I'll deposit it Inst thing in the morning. No delivery until I hear from the bank." "Even with a certified check?" Jo protested. "I'm cautious, father." "Cautious? Father, you're paralyzed!" "Close the deal, Jo. And good work." "Thanks," he said drily. "You'll have the check by seventeen. One stone and two. Deal?" "Deal." "Real. See you, Van." "Herr." "Scrambler twelve." "Grooved." I heard the scrambler clicking as Hayden set it. I punched my own labs, waited for the picture to clear, and said, "Okav, father." "What?" "I'm on my wav to the office. I just came from die bank." "And?" "Everything's fine. We've got a stone and two to play with. We can start rolling now, father!" N O, NO, no, no, nononononono!" I shouted. I threw the pencil onto the floor and walked to the bar. "You still haven't got it! You're still turning out Rce garbage. Goddamnit, Lu, you're back in the Middle Ages! You're giving me Charles Dickens!" "Dickens wasn't in the Middle Ages," Lois said coldly. "All right, then you're giv ing me Spenser." "He wasn't -- " "I don't give a damn! You're not giving me what I want. Is that clear?" "I don't think you know what you want," Lois said. She sat in a chair with her long legs crossed, the skin opened over her thighs. She wore no stockings, but a deep green garter set with a rhinestone circled the flesh of one leg. Her breasts were done in two golden sunbursts, and the echo of a small burst shaded her navel. "I know what I need," I said. I opened in) kit and selected a vial. "You're enough to make a man mix. I'll tell you that much." I popped oil, closed my eyes for a moment, and asked, "You had yours?" "This morning," she said. There was anger on her face. Her brows were pulled together tightly, and she ranied her lower lip in a pout. "Have another," I said. "No, thank you." "What's the matter?" "Nothing." I walked to the desk and slapped the back of my hand onto her script. "You think this is good, is that it? You think this is deathless prose. You think She stood up suddenly, and her breasts bobbed with liei sudden furv. "Yes. it you must know, think it's good. I think it's better than am of the crap "Kccsc," I eon ee led. " -- any of the nap Bluer is turning out. In fat t. I think it's too good for "I guess ou don't like the smell ol that five gee." "I think it's too good for..." Site paused. She let out an exasperated breath. Then she began pacing the Hoot. "It is good," she said. "It stinks," I told her. "It's just what you and Hayden said you wanted." "It stinks." "it's the Inst I can do." "You'll have to do better." "I can't!" she fairly screamed. "You ran." "I can't, can't can't. I've had enough. I can't take any more. Do it this way, do it that way. Change this, change that. How can a person w rite that wav? I low can anyone -- " "Shut up, I.ois." " -- can anyone con...ccn..." Her voice dropped to a whisper. She sucked in a deep hi rath. passed a hand over the side of her face, and asked, "All right, how do wc fix it?" "That's my girl." "Never mind the fccsc. How do we fix it?" "Listen to this: Darling, kiss me. Take me in your arms." "What's wrong with it? "It's not loaded. We want something like: Dotting. put your mouth on mine. ( ; my lifn ;nlh yours. Crush me in y mn anils. Tress me againt your hotly ami let me -- " "I get it." she said dully. She took another deep breath. "Have you any morph. Van?" "I'm Mister Morph himself, honey." Lois smiled, but her eyes were dull. IX vvay said. "Then we'll make it fit." Bruce shook his head. We were alone in my oilier, and the city gleamed like a broad, jeweled tiara outside mv window. The light over my desk cast a golden circle on the scripts scattered over the polished top. "It's no go. Van. "Whv not?" "Lois." "What's the matter with her?" "Nothing that talent wouldn't fix." "She's not that bad.' "Van, she's terrible. She's got Rec sentiments as long as my arm. And on top of that, she can't write." "You weren't so damned hot when I stumbled across you, cither." "No. but I at least had the inclination. She's got nothing. Sure, she tries, but that isn't i nougli. We'll never mate her words and mine, Van. Never." "You're w rong. Bruce. We damn well better mate them." "I tell you she's no good. Zero." "Lower your voice. She'll be here any sec." Bruce shook his head again. "Why arc you keeping her. Van? You're not going Rec, arc you?" "Friend or no friend," I told him, "I can still punch you in the mouth." "All right, I'm sorry. Suppose tell me why?" "I'm paying her five gee. You're getting twenty. Is that good enough?" Bruce spread his hands wide. "The root of all. Sure, good enough. That means I'll have to work hard enough to earn fifty, while she ambles along earning about three clams worth. That sounds really fai -- " A tapping sounded on the outer door, and I touched the lock release on my desk. I heard the door slide open, heard the hurried click of high heels through the reception room. The door to my office slid wide then, and Lois came into the room. She was out of breath, and she carried a thick script under her arm. "Am I late?" "A little. Come on over." She walked to the desk and dumped the script under the lamp. "There it is, father. My sweat and blood. Now all we have to do is match it with Bruce's." Bruce sighed painfully. "Yes," he he said. "That's all we have to do." X big chair under the ccilamp. The shooting script was open in his lap, and his brow was furrowed in concentration. Lois, Bruce, and I sat opposite him, side by side, on the couch. The room was quiet. Outside, the traffic on the various levels raised a din that tried valiantly to penetrate his muted office. I had never seen a corradonict smoke before. I wasn't even sure that Hayden was smoking. I don't think he even knew he had that cigar in his mouth. But great billows of smoke rose from his mouth, pulled out over his head, smothered him and the chair and the script. He could have acted the part of a volcano in an adventure stereo with no extra effort. He turned a page, blew out another stream of smoke. The rustic of the paper made a loud, scratching sound in the silence of the room. Hayden made a noise that sounded like a cross between a burp and a grunt. He turned another page. The electric clock on the wall hummed pleasantly, throwing seconds, minutes, hours into the room. The cloud of smoke thickened, and Hayden kept turning pages, one after the other, grunting occasionally, burping frequently. He leaned back at last, closed the script. On the couch, I felt Bruce lean forward expectantly. "Well..." Hayden ' said. He studied the end of his cigar, then dropped it into the disposotray. Lois gripped my hand tightly, and I glanced down at it and then over to Havden's face.  He drew a heavy breath, and I felt Lois tense. "It's terrific," he said mildly. "We can start shooting at once." XI office two days later. At first. I couldn't believe inv cars. 'H'ho?" I ask-d Lizbcth. "Dino Bclazi, Van.' "The Ree? The critic:? The... the Rec?" "The same." "Well. MY. Give me ten minutes, then show him in." I cleared oil my d "k, leaving the toj) as glistening as a mountain lake. Then I walked around the office and straightened the zincs and the pabaeks. I closed the top of the bar, straightened a stcreopic on the wall and tilted the blinds so that the sun backlighted me. I went to the closet, rubbed some aleojcl on, combed my hair, and scrutinized mvself in the door mirror. I pulled mv breeches higher, saw that my lxots carried a high polish, sucked in my stomach, and then walked to mv desk. I tilted mv head #  so that the sunlight hit my profile. I waited for Dino Bclazi. The door slid open, and I heard his heavy shoes on my rug. I glanced through the blinds for a few seconds, and then turned casually. Bclazi had stopped in the center of the room. Ih' was not at all what I had pictured. He was a small man with a carefully trimmed white board. He wore a severely tailored black suit. His collar was tight, his tie thin. His shoes were black and highly polished. His straight nose sliced down the middle of his face like a cleaver. His lips were pursed beneath that nose, carefully concealing his teeth. His eyes could tell stories, but they  ic short ol main ial .it the iimmi nt. "Mr. Ilclai." I said cordially. "I'm honored." Bclazi took a ijuick slop forward, then stopped with his heels together, his homhurg clenched in Ixith hands, his i.me looped over his right arm. "I shall make my visit brief and to the jxiint. Mr. Branoski," he said. His voice was deep, but his speech was clipped. "Mr. Brant," I corrected him. Bclazi smiled mirthlessly. "If you prefer." "I prefer." "I have compiled a list of alleged literary agents who arc today soliciting the majority of smut on the market. You, unfortunately, are one of the chief purveyors. I have been systematically eliminating these men, starting at the top and working my way to the Ixittom." "Eliminating?" "Through visits. I've come to ask something of you, Mr. Branos...Mr. Brant." "And what's that?" "May I sit down?" "Please do." "Thank you." Bclazi moved to the chair oppoiste my desk, lie sat down, carefully raising his trousers to protect their crease. He put his homburg on one arm of the chair, leaned forward and rested both hands on the head of his cane. "Now, then. I've come to ask that vou discontinue the submission of manuscripts to: (a) the magazines, (b) the paperbacks, (c) the stereoscopic, the three dimensional, and the sensory mediums." "You missed one." I said. "Did I indeed?" "Yes. We're still submitting material to the live shows." Belazi coughed politely. "We shall eliminate the legitimate theatre from our discussion. I rather imagine you are not selling them a great deal of material." I smiled. "In other words, vou'd like me to go out of business, is that it?" "I did not suggest that." "But your statement was heavily loaded with that implication, I would say. Wouldn't you?" "I would prefer not to comment on that. Do you agree to my proposal?" "Don't be popped, father." "Sir?" "Your proposal is absurd. You're asking me to slit my own throat." "Suicide is sometimes a more pleasant prospect than execution." "Don't tickle me, Belazi. The Vikes are firmly rooted It'll take more than a threat from vou to kick us out." "I know that. We possess the means to destroy you anil your ilk, Mr. Brant. Believe me, we are fully prepared." "How? With bad reviews? Every time you razor something, we sell father. The people are wise." "Are they?" "They arc. They are that. Finally, after all these years, they're wise. Oh so wise, father. They know just what they want, and we're giving it to them." "But is it what they want?" "I've no time for philo. Bilazi. And I don't want to chop psych with vou. either. You know what they want as well as I do." Belazi pursed his lips and said nothing. His hands were firm on the head of his cans... used to be the other way around, Belazi. The little man was the slob, wallowing in filth, breeding kids lie didn't want, dreaming o adventures be never had and ncvri would have. The paperbacks took hold then, and the little, man began to wake up. He recognized convention for what it really was: J a petty disguise of polite society, a subterfuge designed to keep the little man's feet firmly on the ground, to keep his head from out ol the clouds." "I'm reallv not terrible interested in -- " "And at the same time, the body magicians were at work, 'Wear a Juno bra aiul you won't be flal lu sted.' 'Use Vitagro on your hair, and you'll be dazzlin".' 'Don't smell -- use Sosoap' While the paperbacks peddled vicarious adventure, the advertising industry emphasized i lothes, cosmetics, luxuries the little man could never afford, trips to Bermuda, beauty aids, dreams. And sex reared its lovely breast. The paperbacks featured busty broads on their covers in full color, a vicarious thrill for a quarter, the thin part of a dollar. Television joined the parade, for free this time, and il you couldn't sec a chick's navel on Channel #, you switched to #. The movies clung to their stupid censorship rulings until they realized they were losing out in the big race. They relaxed then, and the results were amazing. Three-dimensional processes took hold, giving more reality to the vicarious pleasure. And the people liked it. The people loved it. The people -- " "All of which -- " "All of which illustrates a point. Joe Sucker began to understand an important truth. It had been (here all along, starting maybe with the now-defunct comic books, working its way up through pulp magazines, through the now-extinct hard cover novels, into the pabacks, into television, the movies, the stereos, the senso's. Now he knew. The make-believe was better than the reality! The girl's behind wiggling on the motion picture screen was a hundred times better and a thousand times more effective than his own wife's fat pratt in the shabby, dubious comfort of his own home. The colorful characters of the dream world, the people with names like Drew and Allison and Mark and Cynthia, were having a hell of a lot more fun than the ljple man was. In real life, the pure maiden was the acme of perfection. In the dream world, if a chick didn't hop into bed after five minutes of casual conversation she was a Mongolit. 'Hey!' Joe Sucker yelled, 'whore have I been all my life?' He woke up, and the waking was a tremendously powerful thing." "The awakening was the doom of society." "No, Mr. Bclazi. It put the little man right where he'd always wanted to be. He changed his name from Joe Sucker to Joel Standish. He forgot about the disappointing realities all around him and concentrated on the purely vicarious aspect of living. He began to enjoy himself for the first time because now his entire world was a makebelieve one. He conveniently disposed of the reality, which no longer served any concrete purpose in his life. He was a sucker reborn, of other suckers, and began having a hell of a good time. Drugs, which had already taken a strong illegal foothold, became as common as cigarettes. Eventually, as you know, they became legal, which was a damned smart move. Marriage was abandoned ns the shoddy thing it was, the invention of some fools who wanted to indulge but conceal what is basically a disgusting animal impulse. Archnirism was replaced by new thoughts, new language, new dreams. Society was revitalized. It still is revitalized. It still is -- " "Decadent! It is decadent!" Iielazi shouted. "Only for a Realist. For the Vike, there is pure escape. It does things better for him, with no strain and no pain. Three cheers for it, I say."  Bclazi's face seemed rcadv to erupt. It turned a deep red, and then modulated the chromatic scale until it reached its normal shade again. "I take it you will continue with your submissions." "I will." Bclazi rose stiffly. "Thank you for the history lesson, Mr. Branoski. I appreciated it." He turned brusquely and started for the door, stopping halfway across the carpet. "You will remember that you were warned." "Sure, I'll remember." "We will do everything in our power to crush you, Mr. Branoski. You and the others. The Vicarious Movement is finished, believe me." I didn't answer. I simplygrinned. Belazi turned on his heel and walked out. way. You can have all the signs, you can see them every day, but you won't realize what they mean until someone tells you you've got six months to live. I was up to my ears in production details. The senso was going to cost a lot more than we'd figured, even cutting it to the bone. Hayden insisted on complete secrecy, which meant no outdoor shooting, no borrowing of sets, no established players who would spread the word around. It meant that we had to hire a studio large enough to hold all the sets wc needed for the show. We had to get additional equipment, and wc had to get it the hard way, laying out cold cash for purchased items rather than renting the stufT. And we had to search for actors and actresses without advertising, without stirring up any outside interest. We had to get cameramen, musicians, audio and olefactory technicians, a guy to write the score and another to direct it. And most expensive were the men Hayden had trained in the new individual sensory techniques. It was a headache, but its possibilities looked even bigger to me once I got wrapped up in it And at the same time, I tried to run the agency, taking harassed calls from scribes and eds, reading tons of manuscripts, haggling over prices, marketing the material we had on hand. I hired two new eds, adding an extra strain to my budget. I lxgan to lean on Liz more and more heavily, delegating much of the marketing to her. My mind was almost always occupied with thoughts of the show, with problems that had come up, but I kept a small corner of my thinking capacity open and reserved for the agency, and I used that when Liz gave me daily reports. "Three scripts back from Preen Publishers," she said. "What's wrong?" "Nothing. They said they weren't right." "That's funny. Who were the scribes?" "Mercer, Peer, Fitch." "They've sold to Preen." "I know." "Mm. What else?" "A notice from Agon Senso. New ownership." "What else?" "Pile of stuff back from Stereo One. Not their type, they said." "Not their type? It's the same stuff we've been sending them all along," I complained. Liz shrugged. "You want me to remarket this stuff?" "Yes. But first call Andrews at Stereo One. Ask him what the hell he means by not their type. Tell him -- " "He's not there any more, Van." "Since when?" "Yesterday. A new fellow's taken over. I forget his name." I nodded disgustedly. "That explains it. A new cd, a new batch of pet agents and scribes. Well, scroom. There are lots of other markets." "Hundreds," Liz agreed. "What brews tonight, Van?" "Why?" "Got a party, thought you might like to take my arm." "Not tonight, hon." "Business?" "Business," I said Liz shrugged. "It'll probably be a dull glom anyway." portion of the shooting script. Camera #-# Betty Face Camera #-# Stf.ro Betty brsts Olefact Same, add: Musk woman Lt perspir Cloth Carl: I know! you. I want to until -- Camera #-# Snap cu Betty mouth Camera #-# Over Same Olefaet Cut ai l but Roses, add Fnt t ooth pst #-# Betty: No! Car Special Tweed scratch Sticky blood I leant to hurt keep hurting you Camera #-# Under Same Camera #-# Same as Camera #-# Special None ! Carl! Camera #-# Filter-shot Carl arms Olefact Perfume #a Tobacco # Roses Camera #-# CU Carl nose Special Wind Faint rain Betty: Don't! Carl, please, please. You're hurting me! Camera #-# CU Carl fingers Camera #-# Superimp Rose bush Camera #-# Grid shot Betty flesh Arm Camera #-# Carl fingers I looked at it and scratched my head. It had certainly changed from the simple arrangement of dialogue Bruce and Lois had written. "Do you see now why it's going to cost us so much?" he asked. I nodded dumbly. "I see." and I was pulled away from the office even more than usual. It was a tough grind for me, but Hayden stayed with us all every inch of the way. There were a studio, and our limited budget meant that everyone had to pitch in. And that meant that when I got home each night, I was ready to sleep through the next week. Instead, I got up each morning at six, rushed to the office to open the mail and sort it, and then waited for Liz to come in with a rundown of the previous activities. It was on one of these mornings, while waiting for Liz, that I happened to cheek the stock room. What I found surprised me. Lizbcth pranced in at nine, her breasts sparkling with an iridescent glow'. Her skirt was the most daring thing I'd ever seen in an office, consisting of a single thin strip that hung over her buttocks. Her underwear was transparent, and fully exposed. "That's going a little far, isn't it?" I asked. She glanced at her near-nudity, lifted her eyes. She shrugged. "Kicks, father." "Kicks? What the hell..." "Look, Van," she snapped. "Don't tell me how to dress." "I don't give a damn what you wear on your own time. In this office, though, don't look as if you're ready to crawl into some goddamn Rcc's nest." "You're insulting!" "And so's that skirt!" "All right!" she shouted. "Would you like me to go home and change it?" "No. But there are a few things I'd like to know." "Like what?" "Like where our supply of drugs went to? Did you forget to reorder, or has someone been using it for private parties?" "Neither. Swift's is out." "Out of drugs? Are you -- " "Out of drugs, yes." "Then w hy didn't you get it elsewhere?" "I tried. There seems to be a scarcity of the stufT." "Of drugs?" I asked incredulously. ' Yes, ye s, of thugs. Don't you understand when I -- " "What the lu ll's wrong with you, Liz?" "Nothing. I haven't had a fix yet, that's all." "Well, go take one then, and we'll talk business when you've popped." "There's none in the office. You saw that yourself." I was beginning to get a little exasperated. "Then why didn't you pop before you left your house?" "Because I'm all out, too, and I couldn't get any." "I've got plenty at my place," I said. "Send one of the kids when they come in." "Opainc?" she asked, an eager light in her eyes. "Morph, mostly. A guest supply of a few others. Have you tried all the drug outfits?" "Yes, all of them." "The private sellers?" "All of them." "Probably a small shortage. Maybe a shipment got fouled. Anyway, I want to ask you about the marketing setup. We usually get checks from Vizco and Young  Co. on Thursdays. There were none in this morning's mail. Any idea wdiat's wrong?" "Yes. They've both been taken over by a new outfit." "Oh. What's the name of the new owner?" Lizbeth sucked in her breath. "Ball Associates," she said. XV week. She was hurrying to catch a pneumotube, and she almost knocked me over. 'Hey!" I said, "what's the rush?" She looked up at me for a moment, and then said, "Van! How good." She grasped my hand firmly, squeezed it hard. "It's awfully nice to sec you. What are you doing? Where have you been keeping yourself?" "Well, I've been pretty busy," I said. She'd changed a great deal. She wore her hair long, curling about her neck. There were no contacts on her eyes, and I noticed for the first time that their original color was a somewhat muddy brown. She'd put on weight, of course, so I assumed her trips to the Inseminary had flben successful. She wore a breast sheath that fullv covered her bosom, and her skirt ended just above the knees, much longer than anything I'd ever seen on her. She wore fiats, but I attributed that to her condition. "I have, too," she said. Her eyes seemed to sparkle, making me forget the drabness of their color for a moment. This hardly seemed like the same exciting, vivacious Deborah I'd known. And yet, there was something new about her that hadn't been there before, either. A glow, almost. She glanced at her wrist rhron and said, "I must run. Van. Are you going uptown?" "Yes, I am." "Good. Come along." We caught a dual car, sitting side by side as the buildings sped by in a blur outside. We talked of little things, neither of us mentioning the change in her. Finally, I asked, "Have you been having trouble getting fixed, Deb?" She smiled tolerantly. "I'm off it, Van. I'm having a baby, you know. They don't mix well." "Oh. Yes, of course. The Inseminar was a success, then?" She hesitated a moment before answering. "Well... not exactly." I didn't get her meaning at first. When it hit me, I stared at her in surprise. A feeling of revulsion gripped me, and I almost wanted to leap out of the car. "I thought you knew," Deborah said softly. "Rog Brooks and I w'erc married four months ago." "Married !" Deborah turned away from me and gazed steadily through the window of the car. "A person gets tired of parties," she said after a while. I didn't answer her. all corns, pri and pub. It came after a week in which drugs had dwindled down to a mere trickle. I was at home, getting ready for bed. I snapped on the com, scanning the messages as they taped out of the machine. The report said: I tore the tape ofT and held it in trembling hands. This was impossible. This was utterly fantastic. I rushed over to the phone, dialed Hayden Thorpe's number, let it ring six times before I gave up. I tried Bruce next, and when I got no answer there, I called Clark Talbot in desperation. He didn't look good. He didn't look good at all. He blinked his eves at the screen, wet his lips with his tongue. "That you. Van?" he asked. "Yes, Clark. Did you see the latest on the com?" "About the narcotics?" "Yes." "They've been running that every ten minutes. Where you been fooling, father?" "Is it straight goods?" "Sure, it must be. It's on the public communicators, too. You can't get any bum dope on those." "Well, Jesus, what the hell are we going to do? What docs it all mean? I thought we had a Vike majority in Congress." "Majorities don't mean beans, Van. You spread a little moo around in the right places, and majorities become minorities overnight. Don't you know politics?" "But... I mean... well, where are we going to get our stufT?" Clark gave a short, dry laugh that sounded more like a cackle. "Jest me not, father," he said. "I've been cool for the past nine days. I couldn't raise a drop of hcrrocokc no matter how hard I tried. So this makes it illegal, so what? If you can't get it, what difference docs it make if somebody says you're not allowed to get it? Father, I've been down, really." "Nine days!" I said, incredulity in my voice. "Cooler and cooler, and now I'm almost cold. It was rough tough stuff, Van. I thought I was done a few days ago. I was ready to make out a will." "What about now? I mean... " "Now?" Clark asked. "Now?" I looked into his eyes. They were vacuous and lonely. Something of a smile played on his lips and then died there. "No mo, Van. Gone. From my body, anyway. In my mind... in my mind..." He sighed deeply, then changed the subject abruptly. "Who's Ball Associates?" "What?" I asked, still a little dazed. "Ball Associates. I understand they've cornered half the god-damn publishing field. Have you sold anything of mine lately?" "Well, Clark, Triple Press is now owned by -- " "I know. Ball. What about it?" "Change of policy. You know how these tilings work. New owner, new -- " "Yeah," Clark said drily. "Well, without a habit, all I have to worry about is food. Think you can scrape enough for that?" I managed to laugh weaklv. "Hell, Clark, stop talking like a -- " "Ree?" he asked. He began laughing then, continued laughing until I snapped off. I walked to my home bar, checked the vials there. I still had a fair supply even though this past week had dented it badly. My hands were trembling as I pulled the lid shut. I felt like talking to someone, anyone. I thought of Hayden, realized he was out. The same applied to Bruce. I picked up the com report and looked at it again, and then I dressed slowly and left the apartment. stopped on the street levels. The robot policemen had their hands full as small jet cars piled up one behind the other, their horns blaring shrilly. Everyone seemed to be in the streets. There was swearing and shouting and cursing and singing and drunken revelry. The Ree's commanded the night, and they reeled about everywhere, proclaiming their major victory to the neon skies. Every Vike I passed stared at me dejectedly, sharing silently the blow of our defeat. There was the solemn air of a funeral procession mixed with the blatant enthusiasm of a wedding feast. The streets were a complexity of contrasts, but the celebrants seemed to outweigh the mourners -- if by lung power alone. I lurched along the walk, shouldering Ree's aside, biting my lip, wondering how this had happened, wondering how it had all come about. I kept walking, unseeing almost, and I found myself at my office. I took the lift up, pressed my key into the lock, and entered. A light was burning, and I cursed Liz' inefficiency until I opened the door to my private office and found her sitting at the desk. Her face was drawn in the light of the overhead lamp, her features haggard. "It's all over," she said. "Don't be silly. Just because -- " "Not only the drugs," she protested. "Everything! Look at this." She held out a white sheet of paper, and I looked at it incredulously. It told me that Ball Associates now owned a majority of the stock throughout the publishing and entertainment fields, and that editorial requirements would be changed abruptly in the near future. I nodded my head vaguely. "We should have seen this coming, Liz. We should have -- " "We didn't," she said blankly. "It still doesn't mean the end. We can still submit material. We can -- " "Look at the signature," she said dully. "At the bottom of the page." I looked. It was signed: Dino Belazi, President. "No!" I shouted involuntarily. "This can't -- " I stopped myself. It could, and it had. I knew then what Bclazi's weapon had been. Money. Money to buy out the industry, and money to pay off the lobbies. Money, the Vikes' own weapon, and in the hands of the Ree's. How many stupid Ree's had contributed to Bclazi's death fund? How many grubby peasants had scraped up their last dollar for the cause of destroying the Vikc Movement? It made me a little ill. I crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it on the floor. I wheeled then and ran from the room, leaving Liz at the desk. I ran into the streets, into the mayhem again, shoving, pushing, fighting my way uptown, fighting the blares of the horns, the sharp laughter, the voices high in song, the giggling, the roaring, the endless procession of jubilant Ree's and despondent Vikes, the clatter and the clash, the clamor and the incessant din -- fighting all the way. And then I got where I was going, and I closed the door behind me, cutting myself of! from the noise outside. I took the lift up, walked briskly down the hall and pressed the buzzer. A series of chimes rang within the apartment, and then the door panel slid open and I showed my face to the mirrored side of the seethru. The door slid back, and Lois stood there, ready for bed, her red hair fluffed behind her, her body sheathed in thin pajamas. "Van," she said. There was something of desperation in her voice, and something of expectancy -- as if she thought I'd have the solution to the entire problem. I went inside and walked quickly to the window, looking down at the stood beside me, and I felt the warmth of her body, smelled the faint aroma of her perfume. "It's bad," I said. "This new law... and they've got control of the  field. Ball Associates -- Dino Belazi. We'll never sell them another Vike script as long as -- " "And the show?" Lois cut in. "After all this work, all the money put into it? Will that... die, too?" I thought of the show. Individual Sensory Productions. Something new, something spectacular. Something as potent as a shot of morph. Maybe... maybe... My mouth was grim when I answered. "No, Lois, the show won't die. Wc'rc not licked yet." She moved closer to me, and we kept watching the frantic crowd in the street until the pale beginnings of dawn chased the revelers to their homes and their beds. the next day. I didn't go there to beg or plead. I went there to tell him what I was going to do. I went there to spit in his gloating face. He wasn't gloating, though. He was sitting seriously behind his severe desk. His hair was slightly disarrayed, and he stroked his beard with forced concentration. "All right," I said, "you've got it all now. Right in the palm of your fat Realist fist. But we're not through, Bclazi. I came to tell you that you'd better enjoy yourself while you can." "Your attitude, Mr. Branoski "Mr. Brant, goddamnit! And don't forget it!" "Your attitude, Mr. Brant is not a sound one. It is, rather -- " "Just listen to this, Bclazi. I've got something that's bigger than anything that's ever tome along. I'm producing it myself, so I don't need any big company to bother with. In other words, I don't need Ball Associates. I'm producing myself, with my own money, and I'll distribute myself -- and when this hits the market, you can take your rejuvenated Ree society and stick it right up your nose. Just remember that, Belazi. Remember it, and enjoy yourself because you've got one foot in the grave and the other on a grapeskin." Belazi's face became a little sad. "I had hoped we could get together. I had hoped..." He shrugged. "Together? Ree's and Vikes? Hah!" I looked at him contemptuously. "You mean you'd hoped my writers would turn out the Ree feese you're dying to put on the market again. Well they won't, Bclazi. They won't because what I've got is going to take all the starch out of your little coup. You're going to be right back where you started. Only this time, we're going to be more careful. We're going to watch you this time, Belazi, and there'll be no mistakes." "Do what you must do," he said softly. "I'll do it, all right. I just wanted you to know. So that you won't sit up here and gloat all day. I wanted you to worry a little, Belazi. I wanted you to know that yojir happiness is short-lived. I'll leave now, but you'll be hearing from me." I turned and headed for the door. Behind me, Belazi said, "Good luck, Brarroski." She was nowhere to be found. I got Hayden and Bruce, and together we began scouring the city, anxious to find her because the stone she'd promised us would be enough to put the show over and smash the new Ree uprising. I still had some drugs left, and so I didn't feel the new law as much as Clark apparently had. But they wouldn't last forever, and we had to work fast. We had to start a bally that would generate enough Vike interest to start a countermovement. We had to do something to blast through the miasma of defeat that had settled over the city like a plague of locusts. We had to announce the new senso fast. It took me five days to find her, and when I did, she was working hard, her hair trailing over one eye, her face sweated. She was very tired, and her pregnancy seemed to show more now than it had the last time I'd seen her. She was wearing a nurse's frock, which was in perfect keeping with her surroundings because she was in a clinic. "Deborah," I said, "I've come for the money." She didn't stop working. She was banking plasma row on row', turning to pick up the jars, then stacking them ncatlv on the shelf. "The what. Van?" "The monev. The stone you promised me. Remember? That night at your party? When you told me -- " "Oh. Yes. Yes, I remember now." There was an uncomfortable silence. She put another jar on the shelf and it clinked solidly against the one beneath it. "Well? Can I have it?" Deborah didn't answer. "I said -- " "I heard you. Van." "Well?" "No." "No? What do you mean, no? You promised me. Deb. I went ahead with plans because I was counting on that moo. Honey, if ever you wanted to help someone, this is -- " "It's not a question of wanting to. Van. Believe me, I do want to. I simply haven't got that much money." "How much do you have?" "Two thousand at the most. And... and we'll need that, too." "But for Christ's sake," I said, almost wanting to weep, "what did vou do with all your monev? Where -- " "The clinic," she said. "It's Rog's, you know. We... we're going to be needed. Van." "Deb," I said. "Deb, Deb." "I would help you if I could, believe me. But you can't imagine what this abrupt change is doing to people. Rog has his hands full already. and there'll be more. It's S  going to take work, Van. bard work. Rehabilitating the addicts, and then rehabilitating the sick minds." "What? I'm sorry. Deb. What did vou sav?"   "We've got to find a meeting ground, don't you see. Van? That's the hardest job ahead, and that's where every psych is going to he valuable. A meeting ground, somewhere in the middle." "What do you mean? Somewhere in the middle of what?" "The middle of Vike and Rcc. Neither is healthy, Van -- and I think both factions realize it." "Realize it?" I was suddenly angry. "Sure," I said, "start talking like a goddamn smug Rec tramp. Build a cozy clinic for your shackmatc and then start spouting pretty phrases. Well, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. You think this Rcc business is going to last? You think the people are going to turn back to all that fecse? We've been Vike for more than ten years now. We'll never go back to Rcc " "You're right," Deborah said, "but only because the Rcc attitude is a sick one, too. As sick as the Vike. And Ball Associates -- which was the Rre's weapon -- is a virtual monopoly, and any such monopoly of art and entertainment is bad. Van. Van, we've got to wed the two." Her eves burned with a fierce intensity, and she put her hand on my arm. "We ve got to bring them together. We've got to make a happy whole out of two diseased parts." She paused and turned her head away. "It's going to get worse. Van. Much worse. This is only the beginning. And then someone will have to pick up the pieces. Rog is helping, and so am I. But we've all got to." She paused again. "You see, we have no choice. It's cither that... or the end of everything we know." Her voice had got very low. She looked op at me, and her fingers tightened on my arm. "Do you understand, Van?" I stared at her for a few moments, and then I gently took her hand from my arm. "Goodbye, Deborah," I said. And then I left her. The drug ruling was strictly enforced, and it was impossible to get as much as a stick of benzejuana anywhere. I was sick. I was sicker than I'd ever been in my life. For the next month, I stayed locked in my room, my body the only thing that concerned me. The coins reported new suicides daily, new mental crackdowns. And everywhere around me, the picture was changing. Vike entertainment was slowly and deliberately being suffocated. The Ree's were having a field day, and Dino Belazi must have been riding on a big cloud. Lois called often. Her habit had been a short one, and an easy one to shuck. My habit had come from years of use, and it left my body reluctantly, fighting for every inch of control it lost. I'd click on whenever she called, and then lay back while she spoke. I very rarely answered her. I just listened, nodding now and then, thinking of my own private hell and envying the easy battle she had won. Arid then it was all over. I could cat in the morning without spitting it up again before noon. My appetite began to return and I started to think of other things besides the constant physical turmoil that had hi-ld me for so many weeks. I did a lot of thinking. Some of it surprised me. But chiefly, I thought of the new senso -- and of the money we needed. I tried to sell the agency. It was all I had left, and I figured we could still save the show, still stage something big enough to knock the Rcc's on their arses. But people know when you're pedding a corpse. My stable consisted of Vike scribes. There was no market for Vike stufT now. I got laughed at in a good many places, and actually tossed out of one place. In the end, I was forced to close the office and cut the scribes loose. I moved to a cheaper apartment, and I tried to sell the furnishings. But the furnishings were of Vike design, and Vike had become synonymous with bubonic plague. I started to look around me then. I still had some money, and it wasn't neccssarv for me to hunt  work immediately. I took long walks, and I watched the results of the new scheme of things. Summer was giving way to autumn, and brisk w-inds moved in as quickly as the Ree upsurgcncc had. I walked the streets, and I watched the people, Ree and Vike, and I thought. There was the smell of winter in the air. The sky had turned cast iron, and dying leaves rasped along die street levels, crushed beneath the hurrying boots of passersby. The air was crisp, with the tang of a ripe apple. It caressed the flesh with tingling fingers, left my face raw and my body invigorated. I walked and I watched and I listened. And I saw the broken pieces Drborah had mentioned, and I saw the people who were painstakingly picking up those pieces, trying to fit them together into a new pattern. I thought often of the new senso and Ball Associates and Dino Belazi. while. I hadn't seen her or talked to her for some time now, but I wasn't surprised to see her looking the way she'd looked that first day in my office, long long ago, when her name had been Lydia Silverstein and her habits had been somewhere between Rec and Vike. It was good to see her like that. She was fully clothed, and somehow that made her more attractive. She was happy to see me. She took me into her living room, and we sat before a blazing fire in the hearth, mocking the cold air outside the plexoid windows. Neither of us said anything for a long while. And then, finally, with my eyes on the crackling flames and my hand clenched in front of me, I said, "It's all over, Lois. All of it." She didn't answer. "The Vikes arc dead," I went on. "There's nothing remaining of them, Lois." "Maybe... mavbc it's for the # # best," she said. "Maybe... maybe this should have happened a long time ago." I nodded abruptly. "I've... I've been thinking. A lot. I've been looking around me and seeing kids holding hands again and being human again. I've seen people laughing at... at humor that wasn't manufactured for them. I've seen tears that were personal and not generated. I... I think this is the first time I've really looked around me since as long as I can remember." "Yes, Y'an," Lois said softly. "I was wondering... if... if we couldn't take the senso to Belazi. Show him what we've got so far. Ask him for... for help in completing it." I turned my head back to the flames. It wasn't easy to say what I was saying. It wasn't easy at all. It was like cutting off the arm you've had attached to your shoulder all your life. "You see, Lois, the senso can be changed. I mean, it doesn't have to be... the... the way we have it. We could... get together. It's still a terrific thing, and it can be used for real entertainment. If... if we can find a middle ground... a compromise." Lois stared at me curiously. "I think we can," she said at last. "Maybe," I said, "maybe". She covered my hand with hers, and her flesh was warm and not at all repulsive. "It's not the end after all, is it, Van?" I turned to face her, and her eyes were warm, her lips parted expectantly. "No," I said. "It may be just the Survival of the fittest, on the frontier planet, of Altair, was a matter of who could tell the biggest whopper. Con-man Harry Redder considered himself a real master of the art -- but he didn't know the Alluirians! Letter of the By Alan E. Nourse Illustrated by Rudolph Palais damp, and smelled like moldy leaves. ' Meyerhof!' followed the huge, bearlike Altairian guard down the slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored, Terran styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing. His foot had slipped on the slimey flags from time to time, and finally he paused to wipe the caked mud from his trouser leg. "Howmuch farther is it?" he shouted angrily. The guard waved a heavy paw vaguely into the blackness ahead. Quite sudenly the corridor took a sharp bend, and the Altairian stopped, producing a huge key ring from some obscure fold of his hairy hide. "I still don't sec any reason for all the fuss," he grumbled in a wounded tone. "We've treated him like a brother -- " One of the huge steel doors clicked open. Meyerhof!' peered into the blackness, catching a vaguely human outline against the back wall. "Harry?" he called sharply. There was a startled gasp from within, and a skinny, gnarled little man suddenly appeared in the guard's light, like a grotesque, twisted ghost out of the blackness. Wide blue eyes regarded Meyerhof!" from beneath uneven black eyebrows, and then the little man's face broke into a crafty grin. "Paul! So they sent you! I knew I could count on it!" He executed a deep, awkward bow, motioning Meyerhoff into the dark cubicle. "Not much to offer you," he said slyly, "but it's the best! can do under the circumstances..." Meycrhoff scowled, and turned abruptly to the guard. "We'll have some privacy now, if you please. Interplanetary ruling. And leave us the light." The guard grumbled, and started for the door. "It's about time you showed up!" cried the little man in the cell. "Great day! Lucky they sent you, pal. Why, I've been in here for years -- " "Look, Zcckler -- the name is Meyerhof!', and I'm not your pal," Meycrhoff snapped. "And you've been here for two weeks, three days, and approximately four hours. You're getting as bad as your gentle guards when it comes to bandying the truth around!" He peered through the dim light at the gaunt face of the prisoner. Zeckler's face was dark with a week's beard, and his bloodshot eyes belied the cocky grin on his lips. His clothes were smeared and sodden, streaked with great splotches of mud and moss. Meyerhoffs face softened a little. "So Harry Zeckler's in a jam again," he said. "You look as if they'd treated you like a brother." The little man snorted. "These overgrown teddy-bears don't know what brotherhood means, nor humanity, either. Bread and water I've been getting, nothing more, and then only if they feel like bringing it down." He sank wearily down on the rock bench along the wall. "I thought you'd never get here! I sent an appeal to the Terran Consulate the first day I was arrested. What happened? I mean, all they had to do was get a man over here, get the extradition papers signed, and provide transportation off the planet for me. Why so much time? I've been sitting here rotting -- " He broke off in mid-sentence and stared at Meycrhoff. You brought the papers, didn't you? I mean, we can leave now?" Meyerhoff stared at the little man with a mixture of pity and disgust. "You are a prize fool," he said finally. "Did you know that?" Zeckler's eves widened. "What do you mean, fool? So I spend a couple of weeks in this pneumoniatrap! The deal was worth it! I've the Terran Consulate on Altair IV, just waiting for me to walk in and do you hear? That's enough to set me up for life!" Meyerhoff nodded grimly. "If you live long enough to walk in and pick it up, that is." "What do you mean, if?" side the man, his voice a tense whisper in the musty cell. "I mean that right now you are practically dead. Y'ou may not know it, but you arc. You walk into a newlyopened planet with your smart little bag of tricks, with a shaky passport and no permit, with no knowledge of the natives outside of two paragraphs of inaccuracies in the Explorer's Guide -- and then you're not content to come in here and sell something legidmate, something the natives might conceivably I be able to use. No, nothing so simple for you. You have to pull your usual high-pressure stuff. And this time, buddy, you're paying the piper." "You mean I'm not being extradited?" MeyerhofT grinned unpleasantly. "I mean precisely that. You've committed a crime here -- a major crime. The Altairians arc sore about it. And the Terran Contrading possibilities here down the river just to get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial -- and these natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're going to get you." Zecklcr stood up shakily. "You can't believe anything the natives say," he said uneasily. "They're pathological liars. Why, you should sec what they tried to sell me! You've never seen such a pack of liars as these critters." He glanced up at MeyerhofT. "They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let me go." "A little fine of one Terran neck." MeyerhofT grinned nastily. "You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are over." Zecklcr fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette, and lighted it with trembling fingers. "It's bad, then," he said finally. "It's bad, all right." Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's face. "Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over," he said weakly. "Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial -- " "Lawyer? Not me! Oh, no -- sorry, but no thanks." MeyerhofTs face beamed maliciously. I'm your advisor, old boy. Nothing else. I'm here to keep you from botching things up still worse for the Trading Commission, that's all. I wouldn't get tangled up in a mess with these creatures for anything!" He shook his head. "You're vour own lawyer, Mr. Super-Salesman. It's all your show. And you'd better get your head out of the sand, or you're going to lose a case like it's never been lost before!"    tie man's pale face, and grinned inwardly. In a way, he thought, it was a pity to sec such a change in the rosy-cheeked, dapper, cocksure little man who had talked his way glibly in and out of more jams than MeyerhofT could count. Trading brought scalpers; it was almost inevitable that where rich and unexploited trading ground was uncovered, it would first fall prey to the fast-trading boys. They spread out from Terra with the first wave of exploration -- the slick, fast-talking men who could work new territories unfettered by the legal restrictions that soon closed down the more established planets. The first men in were the richest out, and through some curious quirk of the Terrestrial mind, they knew they could always count on Terran protection, however crooked and underhanded their methods. But occasionally a situation arose where the civilization and social practices of the alien victims made it unwise to tamper. Altair I had been recognized at once by the Trading Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value, but early reports had warned of the danger of wildcat trading on the little, musty, jungle-like planet with its shaggy, thrcc-eycd inhabitants -- warned specifically against the confidence tactics so frequently used -- but there was always somebody, MeycrhofF reflected sourly, who just didn't get the word. Zcckler puffed nervously on his cigarette, his narrow face a study in troubled concentration. "But I didn't do anything!" he exploded finally. "So I pulled an old con game. So what! Why should they get so excited? So I clipped a few thousand fast credits, pulled a little fast business." lie shrugged eloquently, spreading his hands. "Everybody's doing it. They do it to each other without batting an eye. You should see these critters operate on each other. Why, my little scheme was peanuts by comparison -- " Meyerhoff pulled a pipe from his pocket, and began stuffing the bowl with infinite patience. "And precisely what sort of con game was it?" he asked quietly. Zeckler shrugged again. "The simplest, tiredest, moldiest old racket that ever made a quick nickel. Remember the old Terran gag about the Brooklyn Bridge? The same thing. Only these critters didn't want bridges. They wanted land -- this gooey, slimey swamp they call 'farm land'. So I gave them what they wanted. I just sold them some land." Meyerhoff nodded fiercely. "You sure did. A hundred square kilos at a swipe. Only you sold the same hundred square kilos to a dozen different natives!" Suddenly he threw back his hands and roared. "Of all the things you shouldn't have done -- " "But what's a chunk of land?" Meyerhoff shook his head hopelessly. "If you hadn't been so greedy, you'd have found out what a chunk of land was to these natives before you started peddling it. You'd have found out other things about them, too. You'd have learned that in spite of all their bumbling and fussing and squabbling they're not so dull. You'd have found out that they're marsupials, and that two out of five of them get thrown out of their mother's pouch before they're old enough to survive. You'd have realized that they have to start fighting for individual rights almost as soon as they're born. Anything goes, as long as it benefits them as individuals." Meyerhoff grinned at the little man's horrified face. "Never heard ol that, had you? And you've never heard of other things, too. You've probably never heard that there arc just too many Altairians here for the food their planet can supply, and their diet is so finicky that they just can't live on anything that doesn't grow here. And consequently, land is the key factor in their economy. Not money, nothing but land. "To get land, it's every man for himself, and the loser starves, and their entire legal and monetary system revolves on that principal. And they've built up the most confusing and impossible system of barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with land as the value behind the credit. That explains the lying -- of course they're liars, with an economy like that. They've completely missed the concept of truth. "Pathological? You bet they're pathological! Only a fool would tell the truth when his life depended on his being a better liar than the next guy! Lying is the time-honored tradition, with their entire legal system built around it -- " could they possibly have a legal system? I mean, if they don't recognize the truth when it slaps them in the face?" McyerhofT shrugged. "As we understand legal systems, I suppose they don't have one. They have only the haziest idea what truth represents, and they've shrugged ofT the idea as impossible and useless." He chuckled maliciously. "So you went out and found a chunk of ground in the uplands, and sold it to a dozen separate, sclf-ccntercd, half-starved natives! Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds -- " McyerhofT sighed. "You've got twelve mad Altairians in your hair. You've got a mad planet in your hair. And in the meantime, Terra's most valuable uranium strike in five centuries is threatening to cut off supply unless they sec your blood splattered liberally all the way from here to the equator." Zccklcr was visibly shaken. "Look," he said weakly. "So I wasn't so smart -- what am I going to do? I mean, are you going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could I defend myself in a legal setup like this?" McyerhofT smiled coolly. "You're going to get your sly little con-man brain to working, I think," he said softly. "By Interplanetary Rules, they have to give you a trial in Tcrran legal form -- judge, jury, court procedure, all that foldcrol. They think it's a big joke -- after all, what could a judicial oath mean to them? -- but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted little wits of yours to clicking -- and if you try to implicate me, even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know what happened." With that, MeyerhofT chuckled and strolled to the door. He jerked it inward sharply, and spilled three guards over on their faces. "Privacy," he grunted, and started back up the slippery corridor. I courtroom, at any rate. In the front of the long, damp stone room was a bench, with a seat behind it, and a small straight chair to the light. To the left was a stand with twelve chairs -- larger chairs, with a railing running along the front. The rest of the room was filled almost to the door with seats facing the bench. Zccklcr followed the shaggyhaired guard into the room, nodding approvingly. "Not such a bad arrangement," he said. "They must have gotten the idea fast." Meyerhof! wiped the perspiration from his forehead and shot the little con-man a stony glancct "At least you've got a courtroom, a judge, and a jury for this mess. Beyond that -- " He shrugged eloquently. "I can't make any promises." In the back of the room a door burst open with a bang. Loud, harsh voices were heard as half a dozen huge Altairians attempted to push through the door at once. Zeckler clamped on the headset to his translator unit, and watched the hubbub in the anteroom with growing alarm. Finally the question of precedence seemed to be settled, and a group of the Altairians filed into the room in order of stature. stalking across the room in flowing black robes, pug-nosed faces glowering in self-importance. They descended upon the jury box, grunting and scrapping with each other for the first-row scats, and the judge took his place with obvious satisfaction behind the heavy wooden bench. Finally the prosecuting attorney appeared, flanked by two clerks, who took their places beside him. The prosecutor eyed Zeckler with cold malevolence, then turned and delivered a sly wink at the judge. In a moment the room was a hubbub as it filled with the huge, bumbling, bcarlike creatures, jostling each other and fighting for seats, growling and complaining. Two small fights broke out in the rear, but were quickly subdued by the group of gendarmes guarding the entrance. Finally the judge glared down at Zcckler with all three eyes and pounded the benc h top with a wooden mallet until the roar of activity subsided. The jurymen wriggled uncomfortably in their scats, exchanging winks, and finally turned their attention to the front of the court. "We are reading the case of the people of Altair I," the judge's voice roared out, "against one Harrs' Zackler -- " he paused for a long, impressive moment -- "Terran." The courtroom immediately burst into an angry grosvl, until the judge pounded the bench live or six times more. "This -- creature -- is hereby  accused of the following crimes," the judge bellowed. "Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved Goddess Zennat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiring with the lesser gods to cause the unprecedented drought in the Dcrmatti section of our fair globe. Obscene exposure of his pouch-marks in a public square. Four separate and distinct charges of jailbreak and briber.' -- " die judge pounded the bench for order -- "Espionage with the accursed scum of Altair II in preparation for interplanetary invasion -- " The little con-man's jaw sagged lower and lower, the color draining from his face. He turned, wideeyed, to Meyerhof!', then back to the judge. "The chairman of the jury," said the judge succinctly, "will read die verdict!" The little native in the front of the jury-box popped up like a puppet on a string. "Defendant found guilty on all counts," he said. "Defendant is guilty! The court will pronounce sentence -- " "Now wail a minute!" Zcckler was on his feet, wild-eyed. "What kind of railroad job -- " The judge blinked disappointedly at Paul MeverholT. "Not yet?" he asked, unhappily. "No." MevcrholFs hands twitched nervously. "Not yet, your honor. Later, your honor. The trial comes first." candy had been stolen. "But you said I should call for the verdict -- " "Later. You have to have the trial before you can have the verdict." The Altairian shrugged indifferently. "Now...later..." lie muttered. "I lave the prosecutor call his first witness." said Mcvcrhofi. Zcckler leaned over, his face ashen. "These charges," he hissed. "Thev'rc insane!" "Of course they are," McyerhofT hissed back. "But what am I going to -- " "Sit tight. Let them set up." "But those lies. They're liars, the whole pack of them -- " He broke off as the prosecutor roared a name. The shaggy brute who took the stand was wearing a bright purple hat which sat rakishlv over one ear.  He grinned the Altairian equivalent of a hungrygrin at the prosecutor; Then he cleared his throat and started: "This Terran rifTrair -- " "The oath," muttered the judge. "We've got to have the oath." The prosecutor nodded, and four natives moved forward, carrying huge insc ribed marble slabs to the front of the court. One by one the chunks were reverently piled in a heap at the witness's feet. The witness placed a huge, hairy paw on the cairn, and the prosecutor said, "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you -- " He paused to squint at the paper in his hand, and finished on a puzzled note, " -- Goddess?" The witness removed the paw from the rock pile long enough to scratch his car. Then he replaced it, and replied, "Of course," in an injured tone. "Then tell this court what you have seen of the activities of this abominable wretch." The witness settled back into the chair, fixing one eye on Zeckler's face, another on the prosecutor, and closing the third as if in meditation. "I think it was on the fourth night of the seventh crossing of Altair II (may the Goddess cast a drought upon it) -- or was it the seventh night of the fourth crossing? -- " he grinned apologetically at the judge -- "when I was making my way back through town toward my blessed land-plot, minding my own business, your honor, after weeks of bargaining for the crop I was harvesting. Then suddenly from the shadow of a building, this creature -- " he waved his paw at Zcckler -- "stopped me in my tracks with a vicious cry. He had a weapon I'd never seen before, and before I could find my voice he forced me back against the wall. I could sec by the cruel glint in his eyes that there was no warmth, no sympathy in his heart, that I was--" "Objection!" Zeckler squealed plaintively, jumping to his feet. "This witness can't even remember what night he's talking about!" The judge looked startled. Then he pawed feverishly through his bundle of notes. "Overruled," he said abruptly. "Continue, please." The witness glowered at Zeckler. "As I was saying before this loutish interruption," he muttered, "I could see that I was face to face with the most desperate of criminal types, even for Terrans. Note the shape of his head, the flabbiness of his cars! I was petrified with fear. And then, helpless as I was, this two-legged abomination began to shower me with threats of evil to my blessed home, dark threats of poisoning my land unless I would tell him where he could find the resting place of our blessed Goddess ) "I never saw him before in my life," Zcckler moaned to McyerhofT. "Listen to him! Why should I care where their Goddess -- " McyerhofT gave him a stony look. "The Goddess runs things around here. She makes it rain. If it doesn't rain, somebody's insulted her. It's very simple." "Hut how can I fight testimony like that?" "I doubt if you can fight it." "But they can't prove a word of it..." He looked at the jury, who were listening enraptured to the second witness on the stand. This one was testifying regarding the butchcrous slaughter of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three) women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings. A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the room grew hotter and muggier. Zcekler grew paler and paler, his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. "but it's not true " he whispered to Meyerhof!. "Of course it isn't! Can't you understand? These f)eofle have no regard for truth. It's stupid, to them, silly, a mark of low intelligence. The only thing in the world they have any respect for is a liar bigger and more skillful than they abruptly as he heard his name bellowed out. "Does the defendant have anything to say before the jurydelivers the verdict ?" "Do I have -- " Zcekler was across the room in a flash, his pale cheeks suddenly taking on a feverish glow. He sat down gingerly on the witness (hair, facing the judge, his eyes bright with fear and excitement. "Your -- your honor, I -- I have a statement to make which will have a most important bearing on this case. You must listen with the greatest care." He glanced quickly at Meyerhof!, and back to the judge. "Your honor," he said in a hushed voice, "you are in gravest of danger. All of you. Your lives -- your very land is at stake." The judge blinked, and shuffled through his notes hurriedly as a murmur arose in the court. "Our land?" "Your lives, your land, everything you hold dear," Zcekler said quickly, licking his lips nervously. "You must try to understand me -- " he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder -- "now, because I may not live long enough to repeat what I am about to tell vou -- " # The murmur quieted down, all ears straining in their headsets to hear his words. "These charges," he continued, "all of them -- they're perfectly true. At least, they seem to be prifcctly true. Hut in every instance, I was working with heart and soul, risking my life, for the welfare of your beautiful planet." There was a loud hiss from the back of the court. Zcekler frowned and rubbed his hands together. "It was my mi' fortune," he said, "to go to the wrong planet when I first came to Altair from my homeland on Terra. I I landed on Altair II, a grave mistake, but as it turned out, a very fortunate error. Because in attempting to arrange trading in that frightful place, I made certain contacts." His voice trembled, and sank lower. "I learned the horrible thing which is about to happen to this planet, at the hands of those barbarians. The conspiracy is theirs, not mine. They have bribed your Goddess, flattered her and lied to her, coerced her all-powerful goodness to their own evil interests, preparing for the day when they could persuade her to cast your land into the firev furnace of a ten year drought -- " Somebody in the middle of the court burst out laughing. One by one the natives nudged one another, and booed, and guffawed, until the rising tide of racket drowned out Zecklcr's words. "The defendant is obviously lying," roared the prosecutor over the pandemonium. "Any fool knows that the Goddess can't be bribed. How could she be a Goddess if she could?" Zeckler grew paler. "But -- perhaps they were very clever -- " "And how could they flatter her, when she knows, beyond doubt, that she is the most exquisitely radiant creature in all the Universe? And you dare to insult her, drag her name in the dirt -- " The hisses grew louder, more belligerent. Cries of "Butcher him!" and "Scald his bowels!" rose from the courtroom. The judge banged for silence, his eyes angry. "Unless the defendant wishes to take up more of our precious time with these ridiculous lies, the jury "Wait! Your honor, I request a short recess before I present my final plea." "Recess?" "A few moments to collect my thoughts, to arrange my case." The judge settled back with a disgusted snarl. "Do I have to?" he asked McyerhofF. MeyerhofF nodded. The judge shrugged, pointing over his shoulder at the little anteroom. "You can go in there," he said. Somehow, Zeckler managed to stumble from the witness stand, amid riotous boocs and hisses, and tottered into the anteroom. a cigarette, and looked up at Meyerhof! with haunted eyes. "It -- it .doesn't look so good," he muttered. Meycrhoff's eyes were worried, too. For some reason, he felt a surge of pity and admiration for the haggard little con-man. "It's worse than I'd anticipated," he admitted glumly. "That was a good try, but you just don't know enough about them and their Goddess." He sat down wearily. "I don't sec what you can do. They want your blood, and they're going to have it. They just won't believe you, no matter how big a lie you tell." Zeckler sat in silence for a moment. "This lying business," he said finally. "Exactly how does it work?" "The biggest, most convincing liar wins. It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter how outlandish a whopper you tell. Unless, of course, they've made up their minds that you just naturally aren't as big a liar as they arc. And it looks like that's just what they've done. It wouldn't make any difference to them what you say -- unless, somehow, you could make them believe it." Zeckler was on his feet, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement. "Wait a minute," he said tensely. "To tell them a lie that they'd have to believe -- a lie they simply couldn't helf) but believe -- " He turned on McyerhofF, his hands trembling. "Do they think the way we do -- I mean, with logic, cause and effect, examining evidence and drawing conclusions? Given certain evidence, would they have to draw the same conclusion that we have to draw?" Meycrhoff blinked. "Well -- yes. Oh, yes, they're perfectly logical." Zcckler's eyes Hashed, and a huge grin broke out on his sallow face. Mis thin body fairly shook, and he started hopping up and down on one foot, staring idiotically into space. "If I could only think... he muttered. "Somebody -- somewhere -- something I read..." "Whatever arc you talking about?" "It was a Greek, I think..." Meyerhof! stared at. him. "Oh, come now. Have you gone off your rocker completely? Youvc got a problem on your hands, man -- " "No, no -- I've got a problem in the bag!" Zecklcr's cheeks flushed. "Let's go back in there -- I think I've got an answer!" The courtroom quieted the moment they opened the door, and the judge banged the gavel for silence. As soon as Zeckler had taken his seat on the witness stand, the judge turned to the head juryman. "Now, then," he said with happy finality. "The jury -- " "Hold on! Just one minute more." The judge stared down at Zcckler as if he were a bug on a rock. "Oh, yes. You had something else to say. Well, go ahead and say it." Zeckler looked sharply around the hushed room. "You want to convict me," he said softly, "in the worst sort of way. Isn't that right?" The judge looked uncomfortable. "If you've got something to say, go ahead and say it." "I've got just one statement to make. Short and sweet. But vou'd better listen to it, and think it out carefully before you decide that you reallv want to convict me." He paused, and glanced slyly at the judge. "You don't think much of those who tell the truth, it seems. Well, put this statement in your record, then." His voice was loud and clear in the still room. "All Eartlnncn arc absolutely incaiable of telling the truth." Puzzled frowns appeared on the jury's faces. One or two ext hanged startled glances, and the room was still as death. The judge stared at him, and then at Meyerhof!, then back. "But you..." he stammered. "You're..." he stopped in midsentence, his jaw sagging. One of the jurymen let out a little squeak, and fainted dead away. It took, all in all, about ten seconds for the statement to soak in. Then pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. loftily, "it was so obvious I'm amazed that it didn't occur to me first thing." He settled himself down comfortably in the control cabin of the I ntcrplanetary rocket and grinned at the outline of A hair IV looming larger in the viewscreen. Paul Meyerhof! stared stonily at the controls, his lips compressed angrily. "You might at least have told me what you were planning." "And take the chance of being overheard? Don't be silly. It bad to come as a bombshell. I had to establish myself as a liar, the prize liar of them all, but I had to tell the sort of lie that they simply could not cope with. Something that would throw them into such utter confusion that they wouldn't dare convict me." He grinned impishly at Meyerhoff. "The paradox of Epiminedes the Cretan. It really stopped them cold. They knew I was an Earthman, which meant that mv statement that Earthmen were liars was a lie, which meant that maybe I wasn't a liar, in which case -- oh, it was tailor-made." "It sure was." MeverhofTs voice was a snarl. "Well, it made me out a liar in a class they couldn't approach, didn't it?" MeyerhofFs face was purple with anger. "Oh, indeed it did! And it put all Earthmen in exactly the same class, too." "So what's honor among thieves? I got off, didn't I?" Meyerhoff turned on him fiercely. "Oh, you got off just fine. You scared the living daylights out of them. In an con of lying they never have run up against a short-circuit like that. You've also completely botched any hope of ever setting up a trading alliance with Altair I, and that includes uranium, too. Smart people don't gamble with loaded dice. You seared them so badly they don't want anything to do with us." Zcckler's grin broadened, and he leaned back luxuriously. "Ah, well. After all, the Trading Alliance was your outlook, wasn't it? What a pity!" He clucked his tongue sadly. "Me, I've got a fortune in credits sitting back at the consulate waiting for me -- enough to keep me on silk for quite a while, I might say. I think I'll just take a nice, long vacation." Meyerhoff turned to him, and a twinkle of malignant glee appeared in his eyes. "Yes, I think you will. I'm quite sure of it, in fact. Won't cost you a cent, cither." "Eh?" Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. He brushed an imaginary' lint fleck from his lapel, and loked up at Zecklcr slyly. "That -- uh -- jury trial. The Altairians weren't any too happy to oblige. They wanted to execute you outright. Thought a trial was awfully silly -- until they got their money back, of course. Not credits..." Zecklcr went white. "But that money was in banking custody!" "Is that right ? My goodness. You don't supose they could have lost those papers, do you?" Meyerhoff grinned at the little con-man. "And incidentally, you're under arrest, you know." A choking sound came from Zecklcr's throat. "Arrest!" "Oh, yes. Didn't I tell you? Conspiring to undermine the authority of the Terra n Trading Commission. Serious charge, you know. Yes, I think we'll take a nice long vacation together -- straight back to Terra. And there I think you'll face a jury trial." Zecklcr sputtered. "There's no evidence! You've got nothing on me! What kind of a frame are you trying to pull?" "A lovely frame. Airtight. A frame from the bottom up, and you're right square in the middle. And this time -- " Meyerhoff tapped a cigarette on his thumb with happy finality -- "this time I don't think The Army had a new theme son g: " Anything you can do, we can do better!" And they meant anything, including up-to-date hornpipes! By Harry Harrison Illustrated by Kelly Freas G eneral wingrove looked at the rows of faces without seeing them. His vision went beyond the Congress of the United States, past the balmy June day to another day diat was coming. A day when the Army would have its destined place of authority. He drew a deep breath and delivered what was perhaps the shortest speech ever heard in the hallowed halls of Congress: "The General Staff of the U.S. Army requests Congress to abolish the archaic branch of the armed forces known as the U. S. Navy." The aging Senator from Georgia checked his hearing aid to see if it was in operating order, while the press box emptied itself in one concerted rush and a clatter of running feet that died off in the direction of the telephone room. A buzz of excited comment ran through the giant chamber. One by one the heads turned to face the Naval section where rows of blue figures stirred and buzzed like smoked-out bees. The knot of men around a paunchy figure heavy with gold braid broke up and Admiral Fitzjamcs climbed slowly to his feet. Lesser men have quailed before that piercing stare, but General Wingrove was never the lesser man. The admiral tossed his head with disgust, every line of his body denoting outraged dignity. He turned to his audience, a small pulse beating in his forehead. "I cannot comprehend the general's attitude, nor can I understand why he has attacked the Navy in this unwarranted fashion. The Navy has existed and will always exist as the first barrier of American defense. I ask you, gentlemen, to ignore this request as you would ignore the statements of any person... er, slightly demented. I should like to offer a recommendation that the general's sanity be investigated, and an inquiry be made as to the mental health of anyone else connected with this preposterous proposal!" The general smiled calmly. "I understand, Admiral, and really don't blame you for being slightly annoyed. But, please let us not bring this issue of national importance down to a shallow personal level. The Army has facts to back up this request -- facts that shall be demonstrated tomorrow morning." Turning his back on the raging admiral, General Wingrove included all the assembled solons in one sweeping gesture. "Reserve your judgment until that time, gentlemen, make no hasty judgments until you have seen the force of argument with which we back up our request. It is the end of an era. In the morning the Navy joins its fellow fossils, the dodo and the brontosaurus." The admiral's blood pressure mounted to a new record and the gentle thud of his unconscious body striking the floor was the only sound to break the shocked silence of the giant hall. warmed the white marble of the Jefferson Memorial and glinted from the soldiers' helmets and the roofs of the packed cars that crowded forward in a slow-moving stream. All the gentlemen of Congress were there, the passage of their cars cleared by the screaming sirens of motorcycle policemen. Around and under the wheels of the official cars pressed a solid wave of government workers and common citizens of the capital city. The trucks of the radio and television services pressed close, microphones and cameras extended. The stage was set for a great day. Neat rows of olive drab vehicles curved along the water's edge. Jeeps and half-tracks shouldered close bv  weapons carriers and six-bys, all ol them shrinking to insignificance beside the looming Patton tanks. A speakers' platform was set up in the center of the line, near the audience. At precisely # a.m. General Wingrove stepped forward and scowled at the crowd until they settled into an uncomfortable silence. His speech was short and consisted of nothing more than amplifications of his opening statement that actions speak louder than words. He pointed to the first truck in line, a #  -ton filled with an infantry squad sitting stiffly at attention. The driver caught the signal and kicked the engine into life; with a grind of gears it moved forward toward the river's edge. There was an indrawn gasp from the crowd as the front wheels ground over the marble parapet -- then the truck was plunging down towards the muddy waters of the Potomac. The wheels touched the water and the surface seemed to sink while taking on a strange glassy character. The truck roared into high gear and rode forward on the surface of the water surrounded by a saucer-shaped depression. It parked two-hundred yards off shore and the soldiers, goaded by the sergeant's bark, leapt out and lined up with a showy present aims. The general returned the salute and waved to the remaining vehicles. They moved forward in a series of maneuvers that indicated a great number of rehearsal hours on some hidden pond. The tanks rumbled slowly over the water while the jeeps cut back and forth through their lines in intricate patterns. The trucks backed and turned like pulling ballerinas. The audience was rooted in a hushed silence, their eyeballs bulging. They continued to watch the amazing display as General Wingrove spoke again: "You see before you a typical example of Army ingenuity, developed in Army laboratories. These motor units are supported on the surface of the water by an intensifying of the surface tension in their immediate area. Their weight is evenly distributed over the surface, causing the shallow depressions you see around them.  "This remarkable feat has been accomplished by the use of the Dornifier. A remarkable invention scientist, Colonel Robert A. Dorn, Commander of the Brooke Point Experimental Laboratory. It was there that one ol the civilian employees discovered the Dorn effect -- under the Colonel's constant guidance, of course. "Utilizing this invention the Army now becomes master of the sea as well as the land. Army convoys of trucks and tanks can blanket the world. The surface of the water is our highway, our motor park, our battleground -- the airfield and runway for our planes." Mechanics were pushing a Shooting Star onto the water. They stepped clear as flame gushed from the tail pipe; with the familiar whooshing rumble it sped down the Potomac and hurled itself into the air. "When this cheap and simple method of crossing oceans is adopted it will of course mean the end of that, fantastic medieval anachronism, the Navy. No need   battleships, drydocks and all the other cumbersome junk that keeps those boats and things afloat. Give the taxpayer back his hard-earned dollar!" Teeth grated in the Naval section as carriers and battleships were called "boats" and the rest of America's sea might lumped under the casual heading of "things." Lips were curled at the transparent appeal to the taxpayer's pocketbook. But with leaden hearts they knew that all this justified wrath and contempt would avail them nothing. This was Army Day with a vengeance, and the doom of the Navy seemed inescapable. The Army had made elaborate plans for what they called "Operation Sinker." Even as the general spoke the publicity mills ground into high gear. From coast to coast the citizens absorbed the news with their morning nourishment. "... Agnes, you hear what the radio said! The Army's gonna give a trip around the world in a B-# as first prize in this limerick contest. All you have to do is fill in the last line, and mail one copy to the Pentagon and the other to the Navy..." The Naval mail room had standing orders to bum all the limericks when they came in, but some of the newer men seemed to think the entire thing was a big joke. Commander Bullman found one in the mess hall : The Army will always he there. On the land, on the sea, in the air So why should the Navy Take all of the gravy... to which a seagoing scribe had added : And not give us ensigns our share ? The newspapers were filled daily with photographs of mighty B-#'s landing on Lake Erie, and grinning soldiers making mock beachhead attacks on Coney Island. Each man wore a buzzing black box at his waist and walked on the bosom of the now quiet Atlantic like a biblical prophet. Radio and television also carried the thousands of news releases that poured in an unending flow from the Pentagon Building. Cards, letters, telegrams and packages descended on Washington in an overwhelming torrent. The Navy Department was the unhappy recipient of deprecatory letters and a vast quantity of little cardboard battleships. The people spoke and their representatives listened closely. This was an election year. There didn't seem to be much doubt as to the decision, particularly when the reduction in the budget was considered. It took Congress only two months to make up its collective mind. The people were all pro-Army. The novelty of the idea had fired their imaginations. They were about to take the final vote in the lower house. If the amendment passed it would go to the states for ratification, and their votes were certain to follow that of Congress. The Navy had fought a last-ditch battle to no avail. The balloting was going to be pretty much of a sure thing -- the wet water Navy would soon become ancient history. For some reason the admirals didn't look as unhappy as they should. requested one last opportunity to address the Congress. Congress had patronizingly granted permission, for even the doomed man is allowed one last speech. Admiral Fitzjames, who had recovered from his choleric attack, was the appointed speaker. "Gentlemen of the Congress of the United States. We in the Navy have a fighting tradition. We 'damn the torpedoes' and sail straight ahead into the enemy's fire if that is necessary. We have been stabbed in the back -- we have suffered a second Pearl Harbor sneak attack! The Army relinquished its rights to fair treatment with this attack. Therefore we are counter-attacking!" Worn out by his attacking and mixed metaphors, the Admiral mopped his brow. "Our laboratories have been working night and day on the perfection of a device we hoped we would never be forced to use. It is now in operation, having passed the final trials a few days ago. "The significance of this device cannot be underestimated. We are so positive of its importance that -- we are demanding that the Army be abolished!" He waved his hand towards the window and bellowed one word. Everyone looked. They blinked and looked again. They rubbed their eyes and kept looking. Sailing majestically up the middle of Constitution Avenue was the battleship Missouri. The Admiral's voice rang through the room like a trumpet of victory. "The Mark-I Debinder, as you see, temporarily lessens the binding energies that hold molecules of solid matter together. Solids become liquids, and a ship equipped with this device can sail anywhere in the world -- on sea or land. Take your vote, gentlemen; the world awaits Don't Forget: Is Monthly! fiction available anywhere -- that's the simple summation of IF's policy. And that policy has proved itself so successful that now you'll be able to buy the magazine containing your favorite writers, artists and features twice as often. IF will be monthly instead of bi-monthly; you'll find a sparkling new issue on the stands early in every month. Or, have it delivered regularly to your home by subscribing now: # issues for #. Space travel is possible. Even the worst cynics now admit that, but some still ask skeptically why it's needed, and what possible good it can do. Hcre  s a new and surprising answer ! By James E. Gunn Illustrated by Rudolph Palais of the pneumatic chair in the anteroom, Bryson watched the secretary with the dark hair and the blue eyes being efficient over her typewriter. She was small, pretty, and trim. She wore a class-five navy-blue suit with a white, starched collar, but the figure beneath was strictly Class A. He would have enjoyed watching her longer as a slow flush creeping up beneath her clear, creamy skin said that she was not unaware of his admiration, but the box on her desk murmured and she looked up. "You may go in now, Mr. Bryson," she said respectfully to his gray-pinstripe, class-three business suit. "Mr. Gregg is expecting you." His shoes clicked across the asphalt tile, and the solid door swung silently open in front of him. The room was large, he thought, pausing at the doorway -- larger than the anteroom. And then he realized that it was mainly an illusion, that the room was not over twenty by twenty-five. There were no blast-dangerous windows, of course, but die upper half of one wall was almost all mirror. That helped. But die most compelling feature of the room was the biggest example of the popular three-dimensional pictures Bryson had ever seen. It was a landscape, done with realism if not with feeling: rolling green fields, rising to low wooded hills in the background, lighted from without in the Dutch manner. Then the tall, thin, greying man was approaching with his hand outstretched. "I'm Ben Gregg," he said with nervous energy. "Call me Ben. And you are John Bryson." "That's right." Gregg's handshake was firm and dry. He gestured Bryson to a chair and settled himself behind the broad desk, picked up the manuscript from the pile at his side, and laid it in front of him. "Er-ah -- I wanted to speak to you personally," he said uncertainly, "because I didn't think I could put what I had to say in writing. Let me say first that this is a good story -- cr -- a very good story. It has strong believable characters, a convincing, significant plot, effective description -- " His voice trailed away. "But?" Bryson prompted drily. Gregg smiled and relaxed a little. "Yes. But I can't publish it." He tossed the manuscript across the desk. "The language?" Bryson asked. "The words?" Gregg nodded. something new as the next editor -- maybe a little more so -- but this has too much against it." "I know," Bryson nodded. "That's why I sent the story to you. If it doesn't go over here, it hasn't a chance anywhere." "That's very flattering," Gregg said, getting up to pace back and forth behind his desk. "But you must understand my position. We publish a middle-class magazine -- classes six to three to be exact -- and in these days, when one must aim at a specific market, that means a great deal. The middle-class has always been the stoutest defender of the status quo, both in the social order and the literary field. You can't offend its ideas of propriety and expect anything but failure." "Unfortunately that's true," Bryson agreed. "And yet that's where one must start if one is ever to do any good." Gregg stopped for a moment and stared at him with a speculative look in his dark eyes. "I thought that you had more than a literary objective in mind. Maybe I'm in sympathy with it. But the time has passed when you can inject all those new phrases and words. They don't sound proper; they don't seem, even to me, in good taste. You could have done it twenty years ago -- in the forties or even the early fifties -- but not today. Clean it up and I think I can use it." Bryson shook his head. "That would be removing the whole purpose of it." Bryson paused and his eyes drifted to the picture. It might have been a window looking out onto rural New England. He looked back at Gregg. "The language is in a straitjacket," he continued abruptly. "The English language has hardened and calcified, ceased to grow, has become rigid and inflexible, hostile to anything new. English literature is dying because of this which has always been its dominant feature. Unless something is done, tlu language will soon be as dead .uni dry as Sanskrit." ( Jrrgg smiled. "Let me hazard a guess. You're a teacher." Bryson nodded. "English. You should see the young writers I'm trying to help -- heating their heads against the impenetrable wall of language, trying, as all writers must, to express the inexpressible and finding themselves tied down by dead or dying words, rendered impotent and mute. It's enough to put out the fires of mature genius, much less discourage forever struggling young talent. I tell you. Mr. Gregg -- " "Ben," Gregg smiled. "I tell you, Ben, if something isn't done a whole literary generation will be wiped out -- a catastrophe from which English literature might not recover for centuries. That wall must be leveled, Ben. That barrier of language must be broken down. The straitjacket must be unloosed, or circulation will be cut off entirely and limbs will have to fie amputated, even if the patient does not die." Gregg sighed. "Which it looks as if it will. The cold war slowly gets hotter, like a bunch of oily rags thrown under the basement steps. Maybe you're worrying too much about a language there may be no one around to speak." Bryson shook his head. "That's no solution. We've got to act as if the human race were going to pull through this, or we may have nothing worthwhile left, even if we do survive." "But what good will this one storv do?" Gregg objected. fii vsnn spread bis bands helplessly, "I don't know. The hole in the dike maybe? The ei.u k in the wall? The slit in the straitjacket? You have to start somewhere." "But. I'm afraid, not here," Gregg said with Imalily. "Not because I don't believe in much of what you've been saying I do: but because I don't think it will do any good ." Bisson's eves drifted back to the picture, and Gregg's gaze followed. I I is laugh was a little embarrassed. "Pretty poor, isn't it?" he admitted. "But it's there for psychological, not aesthetic, reasons. A touch of claustrophobia, the neurosis of our age. Being in these window-less offices for hours on end, I begin to get a little stilled. Then I look at that thing and imagine it's a window and it goes away sometimes." and back at the picture, back and forth as if he bad suddenly discovered some strange identity between the two. Gregg followed him with a puzzled frown for a moment ; then his face cleared and he began to chuckle. "I see what you mean," he said, a little sheepishly. "Maybe you're right. Come on -- the least I can do is buy you a drink." The door swung open as he approached. Bryson followed him into the reception room. "I'm going out for a moment, Miss llaines," Gregg informed the secretary. "If anything urgent comes up, you can get me at Tony's." As Bryson passed the desk, he bent over and breathed huskilv in    her car, but loud enough for Gregg to overhear: "What do you say we go out on the town tonight, you and me?" She jerked back, her face shocked and white, as if she had just learned that he was radioactive. "Okay, okay," Bryson said, straightening and shrugging. "If you're busy you're busy." When he joined Gregg in the hall, he was laughing. "You sec?" he said, after they were out of earshot. Gregg raised a thin, dark eyebrow. "You surely didn't expect anything else?" "Oh, the answer was all right. Although I must admit I'd have been more pleased -- in one way -- with another. But the reaction was a little violent, don't you think?" "That 'let's go out on the town tonight' was pretty vulgar," Gregg objected. "Romance speaks all languages," Bryson said as Gregg signaled for the elevator. "No, I'm afraid the answer would have been the same no matter how I phrased it. A class-five girl doesn't go out with a class-three man and keep her reputation. You'd be surprised how many dates I've missed that way." He sighed. "All the lovely girls I see are in other classes. The barriers are getting high and thick. On the other hand, if you had invited her to your apartment, I bet she'd have come -- reluctantly, maybe, but she'd have come. You know -- droit de seigneur?" "I'm married," Gregg said stiffly. "The principle's the same," Bryson laughed. "The attitude of the lower classes is getting positively medieval." "You might be right," Gregg relaxed and smiled. "But I hope you don't repeat the experiment. That sort of thing might quickly demoralize my staff -- besides giving me dangerous ideas." The elevator doors swung open. "Good afternoon, Mr. Gregg," the boy said, and with almost imperceptible shading, "Good afternoon, sir." As they faced the closing doors, Bryson nodded significantly toward the back of the boy's head. Gregg shrugged in recognition. The elevator lunged to a cushioned stop. "I must admit," Gregg said, when the doors had closed behind them and they were walking across the foyer, "that I'm becoming aware of a lot of things I took for granted before. And I'm not sure I like the awakening." "Oh, we're all falling into molds. It's a highly stratified society in which everybody knows his place and nobody steps out of it. Except me." Bryson grinned recklessly. "I make rebellion a habit -- an ineffectual one, perhaps, but soulsatisfying. Once I carried a sample of low-grade uranium ore into a security lock and shoved it under the geiger. You should have seen the commotion. Bolts clicked, bright lights came on, the scanner stamped my card and the video told me in a cold voice that my picture and identifying characteristics were in the wanted (ile and that I must not move. Within a minute, an emergency ear wailed up outside, the front door clicked open, I walked out with five guns covering me, and I was whisked away to headquarters. Then's when the fun really began." "You have plenty of nerve," Gregg commented drily. "Oh, that!" Bryson shrugged. "I was shaking before it was over. But I did manage to wangle a release before they got everything straightened out. I still have a little fun with it." Gregg opened the door, and they stepped into the security lock. The editor slipped his card quickly into the slot and fared the screen. A cackle, and the card was back in his hand. Then Bryson inserted the corner of his card and grinned at Gregg. "Watch what happens!" lie said slyly. He pushed tin card and it disappeared into the wall. Extra holts clicked in the doors. The lock was filled with an intense, merciless light that showed up every line, every bead of sweat on Gregg's paling face. "What the hell, Bryson -- " he began, his voice shaking. "Listen!" Bryson (buckled. The video sprang into life. "Oh, my God!" said a weary, disillusioned voice. "It's you again." "There seems to be something wrong with the machine," Bryson said apologetically. "There's nothing wrong with the machine," the voice shouted. "It's you -- you -- you -- troublemaker! There's something wrong with you!" "Maybe it's the card," Bryson sugested meekly. "Of course it's the card!" the voice screamed. With obvious effort, the voice regained control of itself. "See here, Brvson! I'm warning you for the last time. Gome in and get a new card or I'll send a squad out to bring you in!" finality. The bolts shot back, and the outside door swung open. Gregg stepped precipitately onto the sidewalk, Bryson following more slowly. I le had a little difficulty walking; he was shaking with laughter. Finally he took a handkerchief and wiped the tears from his eyes. "That clerk!" he said. "Sometimes I think lie'll crack wide open." Bryson glanced at Gregg, and his laughter was suddenly cut off. Gregg's face was still white; he was mopping at his forehead. "Oh, say," Bryson said, sincerely apologetic now. "I'm sorry I upset you. I had no idea -- " "It wasn't that," Gregg said, smiling feebly. "It's the being shut up -- you know!" "I should have remembered," Bryson said, waggling his head repentantly. "I'm never troubled with it, and I tend to forget. Forgive me, will you?" Gregg waved his hand and managed a ghost of a chuckle. "Forget it. It was rather amusing. at that." The sidewalks were busy, but the steady streams of pedestrians had formed an eddy around them, carefully delineated. As they walked south, the eddv followed them. Over the heads of the crowd, Brv# son could sec other eddies, some approaching, others traveling in the same direction as they were. The general stream seemed to separate into layers, like unmixable liquids: along the street side the class nine and ten, laborers; next, classes seven and eight, skilled workers and technicians; toward the buildings, classes five and six, white-collar workers, class four, supervisors and students; in the middle, class threes and above. Even a casual eye could detect the subtle but definite tones, cut, and style of clothing that marked the differences. Then another eddy met theirs and merged with it for a moment. Gregg nodded, with precise equality, at the class-two businessman in the center. Then die eddies split apart again, like a fissioning amoeba. "Rebellion is all right as an individual protest," Gregg remarked, "but it's suicidal for anyone dependent on public approval -- in a purely pragmatic dollars and cents way, at that." "Perhaps you're underestimating the sub-current of revolt among your readers?" Gregg scoffed. "What sub-current? You should read the letters I get. The slightest deviation from the norm is greeted with howls of protest and demands for the heads not only of the writer but invsclf. Would you like to know what would happen if I printed your story?" Bryson nodded. "Well," Gregg began, "first, it would stand out like a prostitute at a meeting of the Anti-Sex League. It would be inconsistent with the rest of the material in the magazine. The critical letters would descend upon us like a Second Flood, half of them threatening to cancel their subscriptions. Various organizations for the suppression of this or that would launch campaigns against us. We'd be labeled 'vulgar,' 'immoral,' 'indecent,' 'subversive,' and finally 'un-American' or 'Communistic. " "That's absurd. Russia is in even a tighter straitjacket than wc arc," Bryson objected, "if that's any consolation." "What difference has that ever made? But I'm not finished. The critics would complete the massacre with charges of 'decadence,' 'slovenly writing,' 'corrupting the language,' 'defiling the pure springs of American speech and literature,' etc., etc., etc. At their head would be Joshua Duncan." Gregg winced at his own suggestion. "I've had him on my back a few times before and, I'm sorry to say, come out of it glad to cling to niy job and my scalp." Bryson made a grimace of distaste. "Duncan! That big bag of superfluous remarks!" "Perhaps," Gregg shrugged, "but he wields an inordinate amount of power -- and a deadly typewriter. At the Chinese Torture of a Thousand Cuts or relatively painless decapitation, lie is unrivaled. And I'm not sure that some of the things he may say will not be justified." "Such as?" "That the neologisms and new phrases are, on the whole, obviously contrived, artificial, and unlikely." Bryson's spirits seemed slightly dampened. "That's right, I supose. How can one invent a new, vital language? That has to grow out of the life of a people; it comes spontaneously under the influence of a strong, new impulse. And yet, what can one do when one wishes to represent such a situation?" "Fail, Duncan will say. And that you should never have tried." "Duncan is a fool," Bryson said gloomily. "And yet if it weren't he, it would be someone else. Flic age called out for a literary dictator and  Duncan answered, as Samuel Johnson did in his. Outside of the fact that Johnson had some creative power and Duncan has none, there's an amazing resemblance between the two. Oh, Duncan has some merits: he can recognize what's good within certain narrow limits and encourage it. But outside of that, he's blind and vindictive. He stands for everything that's responsible for the death of our world and our language -- the narrowness, the restrictions, the ossification, the insensitivity, the -- " ing, soul-piercing shriek that echoed between the city cliffs and screamed terror to the winds. The streams of humanity froze, and in the next moment distinctions of person and class were forgotten. With one mind, the crowd turned and began running, threading around or vaulting the cars and busses pulled up in the middle of the street, whose occupants had poured out to join the rest. Like sands in an hourglass, the fractions of humanity poured slowly through the constricting necks of openings into the earth. "This way," Gregg shouted. "The nearest subway is just down the block." They ran, battling against the pushers and shovers on either side. Squeezed in finally, they were unable to help their own progress any more but permitted themselves to be carried along, concentrating only on keeping their feet -- a difficult process when the grains began to flow down the steps. Down -- down -- down -- past the subway levels and down again. At last they were released in a huge concrete room, broken by large pillars and scattered benches. Gregg and Bryson pulled at their disarranged suits, whose untorn condition was a proof of the quality of class two and three tailoring. Some of the others who now began to fill the room were not so fortunate; here a sleeve was missing; there a man was naked to the waist, his shirt hanging in shreds. Slowly the trickle into the room diminished and stopped; armed guards appeared at the doors. The mob began to mill around, gathering into groups here and there until Gregg and Bryson were isolated. "We seem to be alone," Bryson said drily. It was true. They were the only class twos and threes in the room. Everywhere else knots of men and women talked and gestured in comradery, even venturing an occasional short, barking laugh ; but the space around them was as clearly defined as it had been on the street. Bryson glanced around the crowded room. "A symbol of the age," he said. "We're in what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration, like England in the #'s, produced by what he called the hostile, forcible pressure of foreign ideas. We call it a cold war." "Cold!" exclaimed Gregg, looking around the bomb shelter. "Every epoch of concentration, Arnold said, is followed by an epoch of expansion. But I wonder how long an epoch of concentration can last without inflicting permanent damage. Ours has lasted twenty years. A little longer and we may not be able to recover." "We're no nearer a solution than we were twenty years ago," Gregg said moodily. "I know. There seems to be no hope of a diplomatic settlement of the cold war, or of Russia's being weakened by internal dissension. But if a new frontier opened... Look at England's Elizabethan Age if you want to sec what an cXch of expansion looks like." "What do you mean?" "The defeat of the Spanish Armada and the great explorations and discoveries opened up vast new territories. As a consequence, the Elizabethan was the lustiest, most fully alive age of English literature. It was full of the joy of living; new words were being absorbed into the language by the thousands; the period was receptive to all sorts ol influences. And then, as England began to age and harden, America became the center of vigor. A frontier, that seemed as if it would last forever, eternally renewed the language and kept it alive. But the frontiers are gone, and we are both dying and the language with us, and there is nowhere else to look." There was silence bteween them for a moment. Gregg began to fidget and pull at his collar. "It's stifling in here," he complained. The large screen at the end of the room came alive, and the air of tension that had begun to grow throughout the crowd subsided. The screen imaged the blue sky pulled with clouds. There were white trails in the blue, circling and climbing. "Interceptors," Gregg muttered. "For what?" In the depths of the blue there was a glint that sparkled and was gone. And the glint came again and was steady. "God!" breathed Gregg. "The interceptors arc invisible. That must be big!" The glint came nearer and was a silver dot that poured forth a long, white tail. And the screen went blank. "This telecast," the voice from the speaker said, "is interrupted for security reasons. There is no cause for alarm at this time, but the allclear will be withheld until the military authorities have had time to make a final check." The screen came back on with a light, airy movie -- a pastoral interlude with songs and dances and gay chatter. The worries were minute, the problems simple, the atmosphere joyous. It was the latest rage. It was, however, not completely successful. The tension began to grow again, until it became almost tangible. Conversations ceased or became monosyllabic. Laughter was cut off short. The crowd swaved a little toward the entrance. "Remain where you arc," a speaker warned, "until the sounding of the all-clear." The crowd swayed back, hesitated for a moment, and surged again toward the door. A guard turned and pressed a button near the entrance. A steel door slid across the opening. The guards unbuttoned their holster flaps. and it sagged to its former position. A slow , uneasy murmur began to grow. A class-nine laborer tore at the collar of his gray workingclothes and ripped it open, breathing harshly. "Don't you think the air's getting bad in here?" Gregg asked, his face getting white. He pulled down his tie and unloosed his collar. "Surclv not," Brvson said cheerfully. "The place is well ventilated" Minutes passed. The free space around them began to grow smaller and less sharply defined. Somewhere a woman fainted and a child began to wail. The sanitary facilities were kept busy; lines formed at the drinking fountains. Gregg's face began to twist as his breath came quickly. "God," he muttered. "Oh, God!" Finally the speaker cleared its throat. "The Airport Authority has just announced that the object which caused the initial alarm has landed at an undisclosed airport near the city. The object was a manned rocket constructed by the Department of Defense. It has just returned from the moon. The all-clear will be sounded immediately; you may all return to your normal activities." The last few words were lost in the cheers and swelling conversational hubbub that greeted the announcement. Gregg and Bryson looked at each other with lifted eyebrows. Bryson nodded, and they made their way toward the nowopen door, the all-clear wailing behind them. They emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. "There's your new frontier," Gregg said. "Maybe," Bryson said noncomittally. "Or maybe it's the last stitch in the straitjacket. Depending on how it's used." "You mean if it's exploited solely for military purposes." Bryson nodded. "And presented to the public as military in nature. Docs the moongate open out to freedom or in to hell? It all depends." Gregg came to a halt in front of a door-lock. "Here we are." Bryson looked up and saw the word "Tony's" printed across the blackened windows in what must be luminescent paint. Gregg fidgeted beside him. "Go ahead," Bryson motioned with a smile. "I won't put you through that twice." With a muttered thanks, Gregg disappeared through the door. After a moment, Bryson followed him. When he came out inside, he was chuckling. "That clerk -- " he began. "Look!" interrupted Gregg, motioning. "The great man himself." At a rear lxoth of the dimly lit, sedately luxurious bar, Bryson saw a large, ugly, fat man surrounded by a group of eagerly listening admirers. The man's booming voice carried easily to where they stood. "As a writer, Saundcrson is a stink in the nostrils of the American public; as a philosopher, he is an abomination in the eyes of God." Bryson screwed up his face and glanced at Gregg. "So that is Duncan!" "In his full glory." "Ah there, Gregg," the voice rolled out. "Still publishing those sections of tripe you call short stories." Gregg winced. "Come back," Duncan bellowed. "I have someone here I want you to meet. You may bring your halfwitted friend with you." Bryson flushed, but Gregg shrugged his shoulders and strolled to the rear. "Here," said Duncan when they arrived, indicating a dark, nondescript young man, "is a dull-w'itted fellow who writes the sort of swill you prefer. He'd like to show you a story." Gregg lifted a thin, dark eyebrow at the unsmiling young man. "Tomorrow morning -- at ten?" The young man nodded. "And now," said Duncan, turning away from them, "begone! I am already beginning to feel tainted. And take your half-witted friend with you. He has been made happy enough for one day." Bryson leaned forward across the table. "You, sir, are as insulting as you arc ugly and as stupidly narrow as you are fat. You are a stink in the nostrils of the American public and an abomination in the eyes of God." Duncan turned back. "Ah, a lad with spirit," he said coolly. "I like a lad with spirit." And then his voice grew icy. "But puerile, juvenile, and unoriginal. Take him away, Gregg, until he ripens." Gregg tugged at his coat-tails, and Bryson permitted himself to be led from the table. "Why do you stand for that?" Indemanded, fuming, when they had found a booth and pressed quickly for a drink. "Because I can't help myself." "You surely aren't going to see that sullen fellow he urged on you." "Oh, yes," Gregg shrugged. "And I'll buy his story, I imagine. Duncan's pretty shrewd. It probably is the sort of swill I prefer." "If I were in your shoes, I'd do something about it," Bryson said bitterly. Gregg smiled humorlessly. "Let me tell you about someone who did. He was an editor -- told Duncan off, too -- in public and in print. So every chance Joshua got, he slipped in a sly remark about the editor until you had only to mention his name in almost any gathering to get a laugh and have someone repeat Duncan's latest witticism. He was laughed out of town. He's now hacking out fiction, and tiie only way he can sell it is under a pseudonym." "What this country needs," Bryson muttered, "is another Mencken who could stand up to him and trade blow for blow for freedom. Someone who could beat him at his own game." drinks for several minutes, thinking their thoughts in silence, until an uproar at the door-lock brought them nut of their reveries. One of the bai tenders was engaged in a violent argument with a small, sunburned man in an uncertain assortment of garments which were incapable of t lassilication. Behind him, a medley of men of all classes, from four dow n to ten, were emerging from the lock. "I'm very sorrv," said the bar# # # tender, sounding not the least sorrv as he barred the wav, his arms folded across his chest. "This bar is reserved for class-three patrons and above." "Out of my way, Earthbound," the bantam said imperiously in a surprising baritone voice, and then he burst out with irrepressible exuberance. "I've reached E.V., and I'm almost space-bound. Today's my day, and I'm blowing all my jets. Don't try to tie me down; I'm space dust. I'm free as a comet's tail and twice as hard to take hold of. Make way. Obsolete, or I'll tie a rocket to your tail and ride you bareback to Venus." By sheer volume and vigor and by the weight of numbers behind him, the cocky little fellow pushed his way past the stunned bartender, who stood staring after him with his mouth hanging halfway open. The intruder, who could not have stood over five feet three or four, pounded vigorously on the bar with his clenched fist. "A bulb and a straw," he shouted. "Straight bourbon." There was a chorus of seconds from his worshipping followers, some of whom seemed just a little uneasy in the surroundings. Not so the bantam. "Whoo-ce!" lie yelled, after downing his drink. "Throw me a line -- I'm floating." Gregg and Bryson exchanged glances. "There's your new language," Gregg grimaced. "Vulgar!" Bryson exclaimed with admiration. "Vulgar as hell!" The crowd around the bantam increased. Gregg watched in amazement as even class twos and threes began to join the group in friendly non-distinction. "Maybe this is it," Bryson said. "Maybe the pressure from within has burst through the walls. The influences of concentration will try to push it back into the mold, but if the force is strong enough, maybe it will completely shatter the walls and scatter the pieces from here to the moon. It's a beginning, anyway. Maybe even the cold war won't be able to stand up to it when the word gets out that the United States lias broken the chains of Earth, has opened the way to the stars." He pulled out a pen and a piece of paper and began to scribble madly. A familiar voice bellowed from a back booth. "The atmosphere in here has become fouled with the stench of the masses. Sweep the garbage out!" No one moved. The bartenders stared toward Duncan helplessly. "Oh-oh!" muttered Bryson. "The restraining influence begins. Can the new force withstand it?" "Either the rabble goes," Duncan lumblcd, as if there were no doubt of the final choice, "or I go." One of the bartenders, glancing cautiously toward the group at the bar, lifted a phone, dialed and spoke briefly into the receiver. "Float a bulb to the overstufTed groundhog in the back booth," said the bantam cheerfully. "He can't help it if he's planet-bound." Duncan got up ponderously and stalked, glowering toward the bar. He pushed his way through the throng until he stood towering above the little intruder. "Mite on the back of culture!" he thundered. "Flea in the fur of the world-bitch! You and your trained chimpanzees are unwelcome here. We want none of your tricks and even less of your vulgar, meaningless monkey chatter. Go and annoy someone else, vacuum brain!" The bantam pressed himself forward against Duncan's overhanging belly and stared defiantly up at the jowled, furious face. "Dampen them, Overload. If you were my cargo, you'd be jettisoned before anything else. You haven't got the jayvee to lift that overage hull off the ground. Your jets are eaten out : one more blast and you'll blow oil vour stern, You # # think you're in a tight orbit because you're eating your own exhaust, but you were born six feet under and never dug yourself out." Step by step, Duncan backed toward the front as the bantam followed, keeping him off balance with his light word-jabs. Finally Duncan stood bewildered, against the doorlock. "Bah!" he muttered. "I won't trade insults with a vulgar barbarian." He turned and fled through the door. The room exploded with laughter. "Whoo-ce!" shouted the victorious bantam. 'Tin a cosmic ray. You can't keep me out and you can't keep me in. All you know is that I've passed when you count the atoms I've split." When Gregg ceased shaking, he wiped his eyes. "Oh, Duncan will never live this down. Beaten by a flyweight who wouldn't know a verbal from a vocative." The place suddenly grew quiet as two officers of the security patrol stood in the door. The bartender hurried to them and pointed toward the little intruder and his friends, but the officers shook their heads and continued to search the room. Then one stopped and nodded toward the side of the room where Bryson and Gregg were sitting. They strode detenninably forward, skirting the tables. "All right, Bryson," one of them said. "Gome with us." "Me?' Bryson said. "You've got a little business to settle with the security office." Bryson got up slowly. bantam, bursting between them. "Let's not break up the party, Grounderew." Bryson patted the little fellow on the shoulder. "Thai's all right, hero. You've done enough for one day." "Come on, Bryson," said one of the officers, wearily. "Let's get that card fixed up. One of the clerks had hysterics, right in the middle ol the main control room, just because of you." Bryson laughed and started across the floor with them. "I'll send Miss Haines down to vouch lm you," Gregg called after him. "And Bryson," he shouted with sudden decision, "fix up the neologisms and put Duncan in it, and I'll buy that storv."   Bryson chortled, leaped in the air, and Happed his arms. "Whoo-ce!" lie shouted. "I'm The Big News: if Is Monthly! Yes, beginning with the March issue, you'll be able to buy your favorite science fiction magazine each and every month! And you won't want to miss an issue -- they'll all be tops! The barn turned out to be a spaceship in disguise, arid that was only the beginning. Before his strange adventure ended, young Paul Asher found himself going around in circles -- very peculiar circles indeed! By Richard Wilson Illustrated by Paul Orban ishings buyer, leaned back and let the cloth band be fastened across his chest, just under his armpits. He adjusted his heavy spectacles, closed his eyes or a moment, breathed deeply, and ivas off. The semi-darkness was dispelled as he shot out of a tunnel into dazzling sunlight. The high-powered vehicle lie was driving purred smoothly as it took the long, rising curve. The road climbed steadily toward the mountaintop city ahead. He looked around to satisfy himself that he was alone in the car. He wasn't. The girl was a pretty one. He'd seen her somewhere before, he thought. She was looking insolently at him, her wide red mouth in a half smile. Her dark hair stirred in the breeze coming through the window, next to her, which was open just a slit. She said: "Just keep going, Sweetheart, as fast as you can." And she patted the oversized pocketbook that lay in her lap. He pressed down on the accelerator and the car responded with a How of power. The countryside fell away from the road on either side. Far below he could see a river, winding broadly to the far-off sea. The summer day sent its heatshimmers across the miniature landscape. The road curved again. Theirs was the only car he had seen since he'd come out of the tunnel. But now, far ahead, he saw another. It was standing at the side of the road, next to a gate that came down in the manner of one at a railroad crossing. But he knew by its black and white diagonals and by the little sentrv hut half hidden behind d the other car that it marked the frontier. A man with a rifle on his shoulder stood there. They drew up to it fast, but his foot automatic ally eased up on the floorboard pedal until diegirl spoke sharply. "Right through it, Sweetheart." In the rearview mirror he saw her leaning forward, her face tense. In a moment it would be time to stop, if he were going to. Paul Asher hesitated a moment. Then he too leaned forward, the band pressing into his chest. He was breathing heavily. There was an almost inaudible click. He trod on the accelerator. He had a glimpse of the guard unslinging his rifle from his shoulder and of another man running toward the parked car as his vehicle smashed into the flimsy gate and sent it, cracked and splintered, to the side of the road. He fought the slight wrench of die wheel and sped on. He thought he heard a shot. "Nice work," die girl said. She seemed to be appraising him as she looked at him. "My name, incidentally, is Naomi." "Hello," he heard himself saying as he whipped the car around a curve that hid the frontier behind a hill. "You seem to know who I am." "That I do." she said. "Then why don't you call me by my name, instead of 'Sweetheart'?" "That's because I like you, Swcedieart." She was looking out the rear window. "Now just step on the gas, because we've got company." The car that had been parked near the sentry hut was whipping into view around the curve. It was lighter than his, but it was fast, too. He stepped on it. narrow and twisting. The grade was steep but the surface was good. Abruptly, it entered a forest. The girl said : "Two more curves. Then you'll see a field and a barn. OfT the road and into the barn, fast." He took the curves with rubber screaming and almost without braking sent the car bumping across the field and into the barn. It was bigger than it had seemed from the outside. As he brought the car to a lurching halt the barn door closed. Where he had expected to sec stalls and milking machines and hay he saw an expanse of metal floor and monstrous machinery. The barn door which had been a rickety wooden slab from the outside was a gleaming sheet of metal from the inside. It glided silently shut and left no joint or seam to show where there had been an opening. "Out," said Naomi. As they left the car, a flexible metal arm snaked from one of the smooth walls, attached itself to the front bumper of the vehicle, and whisked it into a cubicle which opened to receive it and closed behind it. A power-driven w'heclchair sped up to them. Sitting in it was a fat man of middle age, with pendulous jowls and a totally bald head. His expression was a sardonic scowl. "You have the plans?" he asked the girl. "Sweetheart here has them." "I don't know what you're talking about," the young man said. "He knows, all right," the girl said. "He pretends to be innocent, but that is merely his training. He has them under a sticking plaster on the small of his back." "Remove your coat and shirt," commanded the man in the wheelchair. At that moment the floor shuddered under their feet, a gong began to clang insistently, and the giant machinery, which had been silent, throbbed into life. The man in the wheelchair whirled and was off, shouting commands to men who materialized high on the walls in cylindrical turrets which the visitor could only think of as battle stations. "What is this place?" he asked. He got no answer. Instead the girl grabbed his arm and pulled him oir to the edge of the gigantic metal room. An opening appeared in the wall and she pushed him through it into a room beyond. The entranceway snapped shut behind them and when he looked he could sec no door. The room also was windowless. Naomi went to a metal table and as she looked down into its surface it became a screen. Mirrored in it was the mountainous countryside they had driven through to get to the barn -- or what had seemed to be a barn from the outside. He looked over her shoulder. They saw as from a height. There was the light car that had chased them from the frontier. Standing near it was a man in an officer's uniform and another in civilian clothes. They were talking and gesturing. Beside the car was a tank. As they watched, its gun fired and the structure they were in shuddered, but they heard no sound. Lumbering up the mountain road were more tanks and a self-propelled gun. One of the tanks became enveloped in smoke and flames as they watched. After a moment the smoke cleared. The tank was gone; where it had been there was a deep crater. Gradually, the figures in the drama below grew smaller. At the. same time the vista widened, so that they saw more and more countryside. It twisted beneath them and the horizon came giddily into view. A few moments later the curvature of the earth could be plainly seen. Everything fitted together at once. Some of the things, anyway. "We're in a ship," he said. "Some kind of rocket-ship." "It's a planet plane," the girl said. "We're safe now." "Safe from what?" he asked. "What's this all about?" She smiled enigmatically. "Hafitz could tell you, if he chose. He's the boss." "The man in the wheelchair?" She nodded and took out a compact. As she added lipstick to her mouth, she looked him over, between glances in her mirror. "You don't look like the spy type. If there is a type." "I'm not a spy. I don't know what you're talking about." "The innocent! Go on, take off your coat and shirt. We'll save Hafitz some time." "I'll be glad to, just to prove this is all ridiculous. A case of mistaken identity. You've made a mistake, that's what you've done." He stood there, hesitating. The girl gave a burst of laughter. Then she said: "All right, Sweetheart. I'll turn my back." She did, and he pulled his shirt out of his trousers. Then he froze. Taped to the skin of his back was a Hat package. Paul Asher made the decision. He bent forward , feeling perspiration in the palms of his hands. There was a faint click. hesive from his back. There was an instant of pain as the plaster came free. He wadded up the sticky package, dropped it to the floor and kicked it under the desk. Then he took off his coat, tie and shirt. "You can turn around now," he said. "A more modest spy I've never seen. Okay," she said, "now you turn around." "As you see," he said, "there arc no plans -- no papers." "No -- not now. But there is a red mark on your back. What is it?" "Oh" he said. "Oh -- that's a birthmark." She spun him around to face her. Her face was harsh. She slapped his cheek. "Where is the sticking plaster? Don't trifle with me." Her eyes bored into his. He returned the gaze, then shrugged. "Under the desk," he said. "I tore it off and kicked it under the desk." "You are sensible to confess," she said. She bent down, unwisely. Paul Asher felt the familiar tightening in his chest as he leaned forward. The click was barely it card. He raised his hand and brought the edge of it down hard on the back of her neck. She crumpled and fell to the metal floor. He noticed that a smear of her freshly-applied lipstick came off on it. He pushed the unconscious body aside and fished the packet out from under the desk. He searched the room for another hiding place. But it was too late. A section of wall opened and Hafitz, the fat man in the wheelchair, sped in. He wheeled past the young man, looked briefly at the unconscious girl, then whisked himself around. "You will pay for this, my friend," he said. "But first we will have the plans for the way-station. Where are they?" "I don't know anything about any plans and I don't know anything about a way-station. I tried to tell the girl: it's all a crazy mistake." "We will see," said Hafitz. He pressed a button on the arm of his wheelchair and two bruisers appeared through the walls, in the abrupt way people had of materializing here. Bruisers was the only way they could be described. They were human brutes, all muscle and malevolence. "Take them," said Hafitz, indicating the unconscious girl and the young man. "Take them and search them for a small packet. If you do not find it, search this room. If you do not find it still, hurt the male animal. They persuade well with pain here, I understand. But do not kill him. I will be in the communications room." He sped off, through a wall opening. One of the bruisers picked up the girl, roughly, and disappeared with her. The other grabbed the young man and hauled him oil in a third direction. The young man hastily snatched up his coat, shirt and tie en route. They ended up in a cell of a room, about seven feet in all directions, in which the bruiser stripped him, methodically went through each piece of clothing, and then satisfied himself that he didn't have the packet anywhere on his body. The muscle-man then raised a fist. "Wait," his prospective victim said. He thought back quickly. "Hafitz didn't say you could bat me around till you searched the room, too." The other spoke for the first time. "You say the truth." He put his arm down. The young man watched intently as the bruiser went through the wall of the cell-like room. He dressed fast. By placing his fingers in exactly the same position as the other had done, was able to make the wall open for him. The silver-metal corridor had two directions. He went to the right. After many turnings, at each of which he reconnoitercd carefully, he came to a passageway that was damp. Why it was damp he couldn't tell, but there in the wetness were tracks which could have been made by a wheelchair. He followed them, feeling the throb of giant engines underfoot. abruptly made a ninety-degree turn and ended at a blank wall. Somewhere beyond it must be the communications room. He retreated and waited. In time the wall snapped open and Hafitz sped out. The young man retreated into the maze of corridors and hoped chance would be on his side. It was. Hafitz went another way. The young man ran back to the wall and used his fingers on it in the combination he had learned. It opened for him. He closed it behind him and blinked at the huge instrument panel which filled almost the entire room. One of the instruments was a color vision screen, tuned in to a #m in which there was a mahogany desk, at which was seated a man in uniform. Behind him was a map of the United States. The man in uniform was a major general in the Air Force. An aide, a lieutenant colonel, was leaning over the desk. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. The men's conversation was audible. "Messages have been coming in from all over Europe," the colonel was saying. "Here's the way it reconstructs: "Our agent was en route to the rendezvous when he was intercepted by Naomi. That's the only name we have for her. She's a spy. She's worked for half a dozen countries and her present employer could be any one of them. They were spotted as they crossed the frontier between Italy and France. Their car went into a barn and we thought wc had them. But the barn turned out to be a spaceship in disguise. It took off." So I'm their agent, Paul Asher thought. So that's what it's all about. I'm a secret agent for the United States , but they didn't tell me anything about it. This is real George, this is... He expected to hear a faint click and leaned forward experimentally, but nothing happened. He leaned backward. Still nothing. The colonel was answering a question from the general. "We don't know who they are, Sir. They're not from Earth, obviously. And the best scientific minds go still further -- they're not even from our solar system. Whoever they are, it's clear that they don't want us to build a way-station in space." "Those spaceships started buzzing around right after our first Moon trip," the general said. "This is the first time they've become really troublesome -- now that we've got the Moon under control and are ready to build the way-station so we can get to Mars." "That's right, Sir," said the colonel. "Progress is a wonderful thing," said the general. "Things certainly have changed since those early days of strategic atomic bombing and guided missile experiments." "Yes, Sir," said the colonel. The young man in the communications room of the spaceship let his attention wander away from the scene back on Earth and experimented with some of the switches and controls. Trial and error led him to one which lit up a signal on the desk of the general. The general flicked it on. "Yes?" he said. He looked puzzled when he got no picture, just a voice saying, "Hello, hello." "Yes?" he said. "Hello. Speak up, man." "This is your agent aboard the enemy spaceship," said the young man. "Do you read me?" "Yes," said the general. "We read you. Go ahead." "I may not have much time. Get a fix on me if you can. And send hdp." "What's your position?" the general was reacting well. He was alert and all business. "I don't know. I've been taken prisoner, but I'm temporarily free. There isn't much time. Hafitz is bound to be back soon. He seems to be the brains of this outfit -- this part of the outfit, anyway. Naomi is here, too, but I don't know whether she's with them or against them." "Where are the plans, son?" asked the general. "They're safe, for the moment. I can't guarantee for how long." "I'm getting the fix," the colonel said. He was beyond the range of the young man's vision screen. "I've got him. He's still within range, but accelerating fast. We can intercept if we get up a rocket soon enough." "Get it up," ordered the general. "Get up a squadron. Scramble the Moon patrol and send out reserves from Earth at once." "Right!" said the colonel. The young man was so engrossed in the makings of his rescue party that he didn't see the wall open up behind him. There was a squeak of rubber tires and he whirled to see Hafitz, in his wheelchair, slamming toward him. The fat man's hand held a weird-looking gun. The young man recoiled. His back pushed against a row of control buttons. Then everything went white. like a man awakening from a vivid dream. The house lights went on and the manager of the theater came on the stage. He stood in front of the blank master screen with its checkerboard pattern of smaller screens, on which the several lines of action had taken place simultaneously. Paul took off his selectorscope spectacles with the earphone attachments. "Ladies and gentlemen," the manager said. "I regret very much having to announce that this vicarion of the production Spies from Space, was defective. The multifilm has broken and, because of the complexity of the vikie process, it will be impossible to splice it without returning it to the laboratory. "Ushers are at the exits with passes good for any future performance. Those of you who prefer can exchange them at the box office for a full refund of your admission price." Paul Asher unstrapped the wired canvas band from across his chest. He put the selectorscope spectacles into the pouch on the arm of the seat and walked out of the R.K.O. Vicarion into High Street and around the corner to where his car was parked. His roommate at the communapt, MacCloy, was still up when he got there, going over some projectos. Mac snapped off the screen and quickly swept the slides together and into a case. "You're back early," MacCloy said. "The multifilm broke," Paul told him. "Oh." Mac seemed abstracted, as he often did, and again Paul wondered about this man he knew so casually and who had never confided in him about anything -- esspccially about his government job. "So I missed the ending," Paul said. "I guess it was near the end, anyhow. The space patrol was on the way, but the villain, that Hafitz, was just about to blast me with his gun and I don't know how I would have got out of that." "I remember that," Mae said. He laughed. "You must have been Positive all the way through. Like I was when I saw it. If you'd had any negative reac tions -- if you'd leaned hack against the strap instead of forward -- you'd have been at some other point in the multiplot and I wouldn't have recognized that part. Want me to tell you how it ends?" "Go ahead. Then if I do sec it again I'll change the ending somewhere along the line with a leanback." "Okay. There really wasn't much more. It takes so much film to provide all the plot choices that they can't make them very long. "Well, Hafitz blasts me and misses," Mac went on, " -- or blasts you and misses, to keep it in your viewpoint. When you jump back, you set off a bunch of controls. That was the control room, too, not just the communications room. Well, those controls you lean back against take the ship out of automatic pilot and send it into some wild acrobatics and that's why Hafitz misses. Also it knocks him out of the wheelchair so he's helpless and you get his gun. Also you sec that the plans are still there -- right where you put them, stuck to the bottom of his wheelchair." "So that was it." said Paul. "Yes," said Mac. "And then you cover Hafitz while he straightens out the ship and you rendezeous with the space control and they take you all into custody. You get a citation from the government. That's about it. Corny, huh?" "But what about the girl?" Paul asked. "Is she really a spy?" "Girl? What girl?" "Naomi, her name was," Paul said. "You couldn't miss her. She was in the vikie right at the beginning -- that brunette in the fast car." "But there wasn't any girl, Paul," Mac insisted. "Not when I saw it." "Of course there was. There had to be -- the vikics all start out the same way, no matter who sees them." "It beats me, pal. I know I didn't sec her. Maybe you dreamed up the dame." "I don't think so," Paul said. "But of course it's possible." He yawned. "I wouldn't mind dreaming of her tonight, at that. Think I'll turn in now, Mac. I've got that long trip tomorrow, you know. Up to Canada to look over a new line of Marswool sport jackets at the All-Planets Showroom." "Driving or flying?" "The weather prognosis is zerozero. I'll drive." "Good," said Mac. had a confused recollection of a dream. Something about a beautiful brunette giving him a backrub. A look at the chrono sent the dream out of his head and he hurried through shaving and dressing. His car was waiting for him, engine idling, at the curb. He got in, tossing his briefcase and topcoat ahead of him to the far side of the front seat. His back began to itch, insistently, and he rubbed it against the leather upholsters . Paul adjusted the safety belt around him, and fastened it. Might as well do it now, instead of havj ing to fool around with it later Damn that itch, anyway! It was as if something were stuck to his skin -- like a sticking plaster... The high-powered vehicle purred smoothly as it took a long, rising curve. The road climbed steadily toward the inountaintop city ahead. The scene was familiar. The itching of his back spread and became a prickly feeling in the small hairs at the nape of his neck. He knew now that he was not alone in the car. He looked in the rear-view mirror. Naomi. She was looking at him insolently, her wide red mouth in a half smile. She said: "Just keep going. Sweetheart, as fast as you can." Personalities in Si ienre Fresh Fields of Science Are His Home Ground has been accepted and placed in everyday use with amazing rapidity. It is also a concept of tremendous usefulness and awe-inspiring possibilities. The man who coined the word and gave the world the concept is Professor Norbert Weiner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Considered one of the top six mathematicians in the United States, this one-time child prodigy published his study of control and cominunieation in the animal and the machine under the title, Cybernetics, in the early part of #. Within six weeks after the first American printing (it was published first in France), three more printings were necessary because of the unprecedented demand for it from readers of all types. I he hook is beautifully written, lucid, direc t and. despite its complexity, readable by the layman as well as the scientist; it has been said that anyone seriously interested in our eivilization would find it imposiblc to ignore. It is not easy to ignore Weiner himself, either. Norbert Weiner is Norbert Weiner short, heavy, brown-eyed, greying, and bearded; he is also a bundle of nervous energy. Although best known as a mathematician, he is also a physicist, an engineer, and an export in almost all the physical sciences. Just to top it oil, he has a doctor's degree in philosophy. But he scoffs disdainfully at anyone who tails him a genius, and proves his oint by bidding wildly at bridge and playing only mediocre chess. Born in Columbus, Missouri, in #. Weiner was constantly being written up in newspapers because of bis precocity. The family's move halfway across the continent to Massachusetts when he was in his early childhood did little to hamper young Norton's education. He managed to graduate from the local high school at the age of #. and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Tufts College when he was #. By this time he had had four years of Greek, seven years of Latin, four of German, one of French and a smattering of both Spanish and Chinese in addition to his scientific education. After getting his Master's at I larvard, he took extension courses at Cambridge and Heidelberg. For a while he proceeded to use this magnificent education to earn his living as a high-class hack writer for the Encyclopedia Brittanica. He spent a year as a reporter for the Boston Herald, and between # and # worked at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, first as a civilian computer and later as a private in the Army. During World War II Weiner worked for the United States Government on the construction of automatically aimed guns, and did research in the guided missile field. When questioned about the latter work he told reporters, "The interchange of ideas which is one of the great traditions of science must receive limitations when the scientist becomes the arbiter of life and death. I realize that I am acting as a censor of my own ideas and may sound arbitrary. If I do not desire to participate in the bombing of defenseless people -- and I do not -- I must take a serious responsibility as to those to whom I disclose my ideas." During his war work Weiner studied the handling of information in highly involved machines such as automatic computers, radar devices, servo mechanisms and others. From the operation of the feedback principle ( which is nicely exemplified by the thermostat) in these devices, and the necessary preoccupation with accuracy rather than efficiency found in their design, it was made evident to Weiner and his fellow workers in the field -- physicists, psychologists, electronics engineers, and researchers from almost every other division of science -- that a similarity existed between such mechanisms and the human brain and nervous system. Cybernetics, which Weiner considered an invasion of the no-man's land betwen established fields, was the natural result. two most important discoveries are less familiar; they arc Generalized Harmonic Analysis and the Universal Taubcrian Theorem. Incredibly involved and difficult to understand, these arc the results of his constant probing into the unknown territories of mathematics. The results of his discoveries are in the newspapers every day, and include not only the electronic brain and automatically tracking guns but also "automatic factories" now being put into use by the chemical industry. As a typical example of control and communication in the machine, Professor Weiner cites the governor of a steam engine, which senses mechanically when the engine is going too fast and reduces the steam supply accordingly. A machine, when instructed to carry out a certain task, will do so -- barring mechanical failure. A man may carry out the task or he may refuse to do so -- for some sound reason, for pure cussedness, or out of sheer laziness. The difference, according to Weiner, "proves the immense superiority of man over the machine." The Professor believes that the great new computers are harbingers of a whole new science of communication and control. So far, they have no senses nr effectors such as arms and legs, but why shouldn't they have in the future? There are all sorts of artificial eyes, ears and fingertips (thermometers, strain gauges, pressure indicators, photoelectric tubes) that may be hooked up to them. The machines already can and do work typewriters to set down answers to the questions fed into them; Weiner insists that they can be built to work valves, switches and other c ontrol devices. Sue h a development, says Weiner, will usher in "the second industrial revolution" there will be wholly automatic factories with artificial brains keeping track of every process. They will order raw materials, inspect them, store them, route them through the plant. Some of the Professor's colleagues call this pure sensationalism. Others acclaim it. In point of fact, the telephone company has already installed computer-type machines that watc h the operations of a dial exchange and total up thesubscribers' hills. It's reasonable to expert many more of Weiner's ideas to beput into use in the near future. He is not only amazingly good at discove ring and developing them, but be is also much better at pointing out the practical possibilities than the average theoretical scientist. His work with machines alone should not be overemphasized, however. He has ideas for improving the iron lung, for instance, by allowing the paralyzed person to control the artific ial breathing apparatus with his own nerve impulses. He believes that someday amputees will be provided with artificial arms and legs with which they can actually feel. He also wants to use electronic brains to gain new and deeper insights into human thinking and various mental and nervous disorders. A list of Norbert Weiner's contributions to mathematics, scientific and philosophical journals totals more than one hundred and reveals better than anything else how widespread his interests are. In these articles he has discussed suc h varied -- and difficult subjects as the postulate theory, the foundation of mathematics, the assemblages and functions of a real variable, probability theory, analysis, Tauberian theorems, mathematical logic, trigonometric expansion, potential theory analysis, relativity, cpistomology and electrical networks. This definitely human thinking machine lives in an unpretentious house in Belmont. Massachusetts, claiming lie has no time for any of the usual pleasures and privileges associated with wealth and prestige. The time and energy he pours into his work, on the other hand, is enormous. He's often tired and preoccupied, and has a few of the typical eccentricities of the famous absent-minded professor. But the truth is exactly the opposite I ; he is very much present in his mind, and through his searchings there he is learning more and more about vour mind and mine!  Harold discovered the time-sphere by a lucky accident. Ilis brother Peter decided to use it selfishly, and laid his plans with extreme care, ''lien there was another accident... By Damon Knight Illustrated by Philip B. Parsons And for dial reason alone, there was no body to find. It sounds like inverted logic -- which, in a sense, it is -- but there's no paradox involved. It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event, even though it could only have happened to a Castellan. Odd fish, the Castcllare brothers. Sons of a Scots-Knglishwoman and an expatriate Italian, born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at ease anywhere in the world and at home nowhere. Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men. Expatriates like their father, they lived on the island of Ischia, oil the Neapolitan coast, in a palace -- quattrocento, very fine, with peeling eupids on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating, and no neighbors. They went nowhere; no one except their agents and their lawyers came to them. Neither had ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up the world of people for an inner world of more precise and more enduring pleasures. Each was an amateur -- a fanatical, compulsive amateur. They had been born out of their time. Peter's passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them -- paintings, statuary, enamel, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small, sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee. Harold Castcllare, Peter's talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur scientist. He belonged in the #th century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castcllarc. Hut Harold's intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton's or a Franklin's. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had even, at his lawyer's instance, taken out a few patents. The income from these, when his own purchases of instruments and equipment did not consume it, he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or rancor. Harold, at fifty-three, was spare and shrunken, sallow and spotted, with a bloodless, melancholy countenance on whose upper lip grew a neat hedge of pink-and-salt mustache, the companion piece and antithesis of his brother's goatee. On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident. Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath; Curie left a piece of uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate. Harold Castcllarc, working patiently with an apparatus which had so far consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more spectacular than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an ordinary bar magnet across two charged terminals. Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in profound astonishment. As he wat lied, the cloudiness abruptly difiiipM'urcd and hr was looking through the bubble at a section ol tcssclatcd flooring that seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also sec the corner of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly-shaped stringed instrument. Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began to experiment. He tested tinsphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a magnet, with a Gcigei counter. Negative. He tore a tiny bit of paper from his notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. Tinpaper disappeared; he couldn't see where it went. Speechless, Harold picked up a meter stick and thrust it delicately forward. There was no feeling of contact; the rule went into and through the bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then it touched tinstringed instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over the edge of tinbench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle. Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizinglv familial shape. Recklessly he let go the meter slick, reached in and picked the fragile thing out of the bubble. It was solid and cool in his fingers. The varnish was clear, the color of tinwood glowing through it. It looked as if it might have been made yesterday. Peter owned one almost exactly like it, except for preservation -- a viola d'amore of the #th century. # Harold stooped to look through the bubble horizontally. Gold and rust tapestries hid the wall, fifty feet away, except for an ornate door in I I M i cuter. The door began to open; II iiclil saw .t llickrr ol umber. I lim tin sphi-rr went cloudy again. I I is hands were empty: the viola d'aiuore was gone. And the mi it i stick, which he had dropped inside the sphere, lay on the Hour at his feet. l simply. Peter's eyebrows went up slightly. "What is it, a new kind ol television?" "No. no. Look here." The viola d'.unore lay on the bench, precisely where it had been before. Harold icacbed into the sphere and drew it out. I'elcr started, "(jive me that..." lie took it in his hands, rubbed the smoothly finished wood. He stared  at his brother. "Bv God and all the  saints," he said. "Time travel." Harold snorted impatiently. "My dear Peter, linn ' is ,i meaningless word taken by itsell, just as sp.ti e is. "But, haning that, time travel." " I I you like, yes." "You'll he quite famous." I expei l m. Trier looked down at (he inslruIiient in his hands. "I'd like to keep i his, il I mav." "Td be very happy to let ym, but  t mi can't." As In spoke, the bubble went  loudy: the viola cTainorr was gone like smoke. " There, you see?" "What sint ol devil's triek is ih.it?" "I I goes back... Later voiTIl see. I had that thing out oner before, and this happened. When the spin ir lin anie transparent again, the k was when I had louml it." "And your explanation lor this?" Ilamld hesitated. "None. Until I can wo i k out the appropriate matliemat'h s  hit h mav take you some t  lime Meauwhih , in layman's language Harold's Lire  reused with the ellort and interest ol translation. "Ycia roughly. then I should say it means that  vents are conserved. Two or three centuries ago -- " " I lirec. Noth  the sound-holes." " I luce centuries ago, then, at this panic ular time of dav. someone was in that room. If the viol were gone, he or she would have noticed the fn t. I hat would constitute an alteration ol events already lixed; therefore it doesn't happen. For the same leason, I conjecture', we can't see into tin sphere, or -- " He probed at it with a fountain pen. I thought not or re.ic h into it to tom Ii anything; that would also constitute an alteration. And anything we put into the sphere while   s ii is transparent ionics out again when il becomes opaque. To pul it very ( iiidely, we cannot alter the L n " past. "But it seems to me that we did alter it. Just now, when you took the vol out, even il no one of that time saw it happen." "This." said Ilamld. "is tin difficulty of using language as a means ol ex. u t communication. If you had not forgotten all your calculus -- However. It mav he postulated (remembering that everything I say is a lie, bec ause I sav it in English ) that an eve nt which doe sn't inti ucncc other events is not an event. In other words -- " "That, since no one saw you take it. it doesn't matter whether you took it or not. A rather dangerous precept, Harold; you would have been burned at the stake for that at one time." "Very likclv. Hut it can lxstated in another way, or indeed, in an infinity of ways which only scent to be different. If someone, let us say God, were to remove the moon as I am talking to you, using zero duration, and substitute an exact replica made of concrete and plaster of paris, with the same mass, albedo, and so on as the genuine moon, it would make no measurable difference in the universe as we perceive it -- and therefore we cannot certainly say that it hasn't happened. Nor, I may add, does it make any difference whether it has or not." " -- 'when there's no one about on the quad'," said Peter. "Yes. A basic, and, as a natural consequence, a meaningless problem of philosophy. Except," he added, "in this one particular manifestation." He stared at the cloudy sphere. "You'll excuse me, won't you, Peter? I've got to work on this." "When will you publish, do you suppose?" "Immediately. That's to say, in a week or two." "Don't do it till vou'vc talked it over with me, will you? I have a notion about it." Harold looked at him sharply. "Commercial?" "In a way." "No," said Harold. "This is not the sort of thing one patents, or keeps secret, Peter." "Of course. I'll sec you at dinner, I hope?" "I think so. If I forget, knock on the door, will you?" "Yes. Until then." "Until then." two questions. "Have you found any possibility of changing the time your thing reaches -- from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, for example, or from Monday to Tuesday?" "Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing. It's lucky that I had a rheostat already in the circuit; I wouldn't dare turn the current off. Varying the amperage varies the time-set. I've had it up to what I think was Wednesday of last week, at any rate my smock was lying over the workbench where I left it, I remember, Wednesday afternoon. I pulled it out. A curious sensation, Peter -- I was wearing the same smock at the time. And then the sphere went opaque and of course the smock vanished. That must have been myself, coming into the room..." "And the future?" "Yes. Another funny thing, I've had it forward to various times in the near future, and the machine itself is still there, but nothing's been done to it... none of the things I'm thinking I might do. That might be because of the conservation of events, again, but I rather think not. Still farther forward there are cloudy areas, blanks; I can't see anything that isn't in existence now, apparently... but here, in the next few days, there's nothing of that. "It's as if I wore going away. Where do you suppose I'm going?" ture took pi. uc between midnight and morning lie parked his own grip, it would seem, left unattended, and was seen no more. It was extraordinary, of course, that he should have left at all, hut the details were in no wav odd. Harold had alwavs detested what he called "the tyranny of the valet." He was, as everyone knew, a most independent man. On the following day Peter made time-sphere. From the #th century he picked up a scent-bottle of Venetian glass; from the #th, a crucifix of carved rosewood; from the #th, when the palace had been the residence of an Austrian count and his Italian mistress, a handilluminated copy of de Sadr's La Nouvellc Jutinr, very curiously bound in human skin. They all vanished, naturallv, within minutes or hours -- all but the scent-bottle-. This gave Peter matter for reflection. There had been half a dozen lliekers of cloudiness in the sphere just futureward of the bottle; it ought to have vanished, but it hadn't. But then, he had found it on the floor near a wall with quite a large rat-hole in it. When objects disappeared unaccountably, he asked himself, was it because thev had rolled into ratholes -- or because some time fisher had picked them up when they were in a position to do so? He did not make any attempt to explore the future. That afternoon he telephoned his lawyers in Naples and gave them instructions for a new will. His estate, including his half of the jointly-owned Ischia property, was to go to the Italian Government on two conditions; (#) that Harold Castellanwould make a similar I request of the remaining half of the property, and (#) that the Italian Government would turn the palace into a national museum to house Peter's collet lion, using the income from his estate for its administration and for further acquisitions. His surviving relatives, two cousins in Scotland, He did nothing more until after tire document had been brought out to him, signed, and witnessed. Only then did he venture to look into his own future. Events were conserved, Harold had said -- meaning. Peter very well understood, events of the present and future as well as of the past. But was there only one pattern in which the future could he fixed? Could a result exist before its cause had occurred? The Castellanmotto was Audentes furtuna jurat -- into which Peter, at the age of fourteen, had interpolated the word " prudent esque " : "Fortune favors the bold -- and the prudent." Tomorrow': no change; the room he was looking at was so exactly like this one that the time-sphere seemed to vanish. The next day: a cloudy blur. And the next, and the next... Opacity, straight through to what Peter judged, by the distance he had moved the rheostat handle, to hr ten years ahead. Then, suddenly, the room was a long marble hall Idled with display cases. Peter smiled wryly. If you were Harold, obviously you could not look ahead and see Peter working in your laboratory. And if you were Peter, equally obviously, you could not look ahead and know whether the room you saw were an improvement you yourself were going to make, or part of a museum established after your death, eight or nine years from now, or -- No. Eight years was little enough, but he could not even be sure of that. It would, after all, be seven years before Harold could be declared legally dead... Peter turned the vernier knob slowly forward. A flicker, another, a long scries. Forward faster. Now the flickering melted into a grayness; objects winked out of existence and were replaced by others in the showcases; the marble darkened and lightened again, darkened and lightened, darkened and remained dark. He was, Peter judged, looking at the hall as it would be some five hundred years in the fu# turc. There was a thick film of dust on every exposed surface; rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had liecn swept carelessly into a corner. The sphere clouded. When it cleared, there was an intricate trail of footprints in the dust, and two of the showcases were empty. The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long. Aftrr a moment's deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and leaned down to look through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in the nearest of the four tall windows was a scene of picture-postcard banality: the sunsilvered Hay and the foreshortened arc of the city, with Vcsuvio faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the colors, even grayed as they were by distance. Peter went and got his binoculars. The trouble was, of course, that Naples was green. Where the city ought to have been a rankness had sprouted. Between the clumps of foliage lie could catch occasional glimjjses of gray-white that might equally well have been boulders or the wreckage of buildings. There was no movement. There was no shipping in the harbor. But something rather odd was crawling up the side of the volcano. A rust-orange pipe, it appeared to be, supported on hairline struts like the legs of a centipede, and ending without rhyme or reason just short of the top. While Peter watched, it turned slowly blue. now all the display cases had been looted; the museum, it would seem, was empty. Given, that in five centuries the world, or at any rate the department of Campania, has been overrun by a race of Somethings, the human population being killed or driven out in the process; and that the conquerors take an interest in the museum's contents, which they have accordingly removed. Removed where, and why? This question, Peter conceded, might have a thousand answers, nine hundred and ninety-nine of which would mean that he had lost his gamble. The remaining answer was: to the vaults, for safety. With his own hands Peter built a hood to cover the apparatus on the workbench and the sphere above it. It was unaccustomed labor; it took him the better part of two days. Then he called in workmen to break a hole in the stone (looting next to the interior wall, rig a hoist, and cut the power cable that supplied the time-sphere loose from its supports all the way back to the fuse-box, leaving him a single flexible length of cable more than a hundred feet long. They unbolted the workbench from the floor, attached casters to its legs, lowered it into the empty vault below, and went away. Peter unfastened and removed the hood. He looked into the sphere. Treasure. Crates, large and small, racked in rows into dimness. With pudgy lingers that did not tremble, lie advanced the rheostat. A cloudy flicker, another, a leaping blur of them as he moved the vernier faster -- and then no more, to the limit of the time-sphere's range. Two hundred years, Peter guessed -- A. #). # to # or thereabout -- in which no one would enter the vault. Two hundred years of "unliquidated time." He put the rheostat back to the beginning of that uninterrupted period. He drew out a small crate and prized it open. Chessmen, ivory with gold inlay, Florentine, I #th century. Superb. Another, from the opposite rack. T'ang figurines, horses and men, ten to fourteen inches high. Priceless. Tomaso told him. I le went down to the kitchen to see, and it was true. The pieces lay in the roaring stove untouched. He fished one out with a poker; even the feathery splinters of the unplaned wood had not ignited. It made a certain extraordinary kind of sense. When the moment came for the crates to go back, any physical scrambling that had occurred in the meantime would have no effect; they would simply put themselves together as they had been before, like Thor's goats. Hut burning was another matter; burning would have released energy which could not be replaced. That settled one paradox, at any rate. There was another that nagged at Peter's orderly mind. If the things he took out of that vault, seven hundred-odd years in the future, were to become part of the collection bequeathed by him to the museum, preserved by it, and eventually stored in the vault for him to find -- then precisely where had they come from in the first place? It worried him. Peter had learned in life, as his brother in physics, that one never gets anything for nothing. Moreover this riddle was only one of his perplexities, and that not among the greatest. For another example, there was the obstinate opacity of the time-sphere whenJ Jill ever he attempted to examine the immediate future. However often he tried it the result was always the same: a cloudy blank, all the way forward to the sudden unveiling of the marble gallery. It was reasonable to expect the sphere to show nothing at times when he himself was going to be in the vault, but this accounted for only five or six hours out of every twenty-four. Again, presumably, it would show him no changes to be made by himself, since foreknowledge would make it possible for him to alter his actions. But he laboriously cleared one end of the vault, put up a screen to hide the rest with the vow -- which he kept -- not to alter the clear space or move the screen for a week -- and tried again with the same result. The only remaining explanation was that sometime during the next ten years, something was going to happen which he would prevent if he could; and the clue to it was there, buried in that frustrating unbroken blankness. As a corollary, it was going to be something which he could prevent if only he knew what it was... or even when it was supposed to happen. The event in question, in all probability, was his own death. Peter therefore hired nine men to guard him, three to a shift -- because one man alone could not be trusted, two might conspire against him, whereas three, with the very minimum of effort, could be kept in a state of mutual suspicion . He also underwent a thorough medical examination, had new locks installed on every door and window. and took every other precaution ingenuity could suggest. When he had done all these things, the next ten years were as blank as before. Peter had more than half expected it. He cheeked through his list of safeguards once more, found it good, and thereafter let the matter rest. He had done all he could; either he would survive the crisis or he would not. In either case, events were conserved ; the time-sphere could give him no forewarning. Another man might have found his pleasure blunted by guilt and fear; Peter's was whetted to a keener edge. If he had been a recluse before, now he was an eremite; he grudged every hour that was not given to his work. Mornings he spent in the vault, unpacking his acquisitions; afternoons and evenings, soiling, cataloguing, examining, and -- the word is not too strong -- gloating. When three weeks had passed in this way, the shelves were bare as far as the power cable would allow him to reach in every direction, except for crates whose contents were undoubtedly too large to pass through the sphere. These, with heroic self-control, Peter had left untouched. ' And still lie had looted onlv a hundredth part of that incredible treasure-house. With grappling hooks he could have extended his reach by perhaps three or four yards, but at the risk of damaging his prizes; and in any case this would have been no solution but only a postponement of the problem. There was nothing for it but to go through the sphere himself, and unpack the crales while on the other "side" of it. a fury of concentration for the rest of the day. So far as he was concerned there was no question that the gain would be worth any calculated risk; the problem was how to measure the risk and if possible reduce it. Item: he felt a definite uneasiness at the thought rtf venturing through that insubstantial bubble. Intuition was supported, if not by logic, at least by a sense of the dramatically appropriate. Now, if ever, would be the time for his crisis. Item: common sense did not concur. The uneasiness had two symbols. One was the white face of his brother Harold just before the water closed over it; the other was a phantasm born of those gigantic, splayed footprints in the dust of the gallery. In spite of himself, Peter had often found himself trying to imagine what the creatures that made them must look like, until his visualization was so clear that he could almost swear lie had seen them. Towering monsters they were, with crested ophidian heads and great unwinking eyes; and they moved in a strutting glide, nodding their heads, like fantastic barnyard fowl... But, taking these premonitory' images in turn; first, it was impossible that he should ever be seriously inconvenienced by Harold's death. There were no witnesses; he was sure; he had struck the blow with a stone; stones also were the weights that had dragged the body down, and the rope was an odd length Peter had picked up on the shore. Second, the three-toed Somethings might be as fearful as all the world's bogies put together ; it made no difference, he could never meet them. Nevertheless, the uneasiness persisted; Peter was not satisfied; he wanted a lifeline. When he found it, he wondered that he had not thought of it before. He would set the time-sphere for a period just before one of the intervals of blankness. That would take care of accidents, sudden illnesses, and other unforeseeable contingencies. It would also insure him against one very real and not at all irrational dread: the fear that the mechanism which generated the time-sphere might fail while he was on the other side. For the conservation of events was not a condition created by the sphere but one which limited its operation. No matter what happened, it was impossible for him to occupy the same placetime as any future or past observer; therefore, when the monster entered that vault, Peter would not be there any more. There was, of course, the scentbottle to remember. Every rule has its exception; but in this case, Peter thought, the example did not apply. A scent-bottle rould roll into a rathole; a man could not. He turned the rheostat carefully back to the last flicker of grayncss; past that to the next, still more carefully. The interval between the two, he judged, was something under an hour: excellent. His pulse s-emcd a trifle rapid, but his brain was clear and cool. He thrust his head into the sphere and sniffed cautiously. The air was stale and had a faint, unpleasant odor, but it was breathable. Using a crate as a stepping-stool, he climbed to the top of the workbench. He arranged another close to the sphere to make a platform level with its equator. And seven and a half centuries in the future, a third crate stood on the floor directly under the sphere. Peter stepped into the sphere, dropped, and landed easily, legs bending to take the shock. When he straightened, he was standing in what to all appearances was a large circular hole in the workbench; his chin was just above the top of the sphere. He lowered himself, half-squatting, until lie had drawn his head through and stepped down from the crate. He was in the future vault. The sphere was a brightly luminous thing that hung unsupported in the air behind him, its midpoint just higher than his head. The shadows it cast spread black and wedgeshaped in every direction, melting into obscurity. Peter's heart was pounding miserably. He had an illusory stifling sensation, coupled with the idiotic notion that lie ought to he wearing a diver's helmet. The silence was like the pause before a shout. But down the aisles marched the crated treasures in their hundreds. Peter set to work. It was difficult, exacting labor, opening the crates where they lay, removing the contents and nailing the crates up again, all without disturbing the positions of the cratis themselves, but it was the price he had to pay for his lifeline. Each crate was in a sense a microcosm. like the vault itself -- a capsule of unliquidated time. But the vault's term would end some fifty minutes from now, when crested heads nodded down these aisles; those of the crates' interiors, for all that Peter knew to the contrary, went on forever. The first crate contained lacework porcelain; the second, shakudo sword-hilts; the third, an exquisite #th-ccntury Greek ornament in repousse bronze, the equal in every way of the Siris bronzes. # w Peter found it almost physically difficult to set the thing down, but he did so; standing on his platformcrate in the future with his head projecting above the sphere in the present -- like (again the absurd thought!) a diver rising from the ocean -- he laid it carefully beside the others on the workbench. Then down again, into the fragile silence and the gloom. The next crates were too large, and those just beyond were doubtful. Peter followed his shadow down the aisle. He had almost thirty minutes left:  enough for one more crate, chosen with care, and an ample margin. Glancing to his right at the end of the row, he saw a door. It was a heavy door, rivetstudded, with a single iron step below it. There had been no door there in Peter's time; the whole plan of the building must have been altered. Of course!, he realized suddenly. If it had not, if so much as a single tile or lintel had remained of the palace as he knew it, then the sphere could never have let him see or enter this particular here-and-now, this -- what would Harold have called it -- this nexus in space-time. For if you saw any now-existing tiling as it was going to appear in the future, you could alter it in the present -- carve your initials in it, break it apart, chop it down -- which was manifestly impossible, and therefore... And therefore the first ten years were necessarily blank when he looked into the sphere, not because anything unpleasant was going to happen to him, but because in that time the last traces of the old palace had not yet been eradicated. There was no crisis. Wait a moment, though! Harold had been able to look into the near future... But -- of course -- Harold had been about to die. In the dimness between Peter and the door he saw a rack of crates that looked promising. The way was uneven; one of the untidy accumulations of refuse that seemed to be characteristic of the Somethings lay in windrows across the floor. Peter stepped forward carefully -- but not carefully enough. H arold castellare had had another accident -- and again, if you choose to look at it in that way, a lucky one. The blow stunned him; the old rope slipped from the stones; flaccid, he floated where a struggling man might have drowned. A fishing boat nearly ran him down and picked him up instead, suffering from a concussion, shock, exposure, and asphyxiation and more than three-quarters dead... But he was still alive when he was delivered, an hour later, to a hospital in Naples. There were of course no identifying papers, labels or monograms in his clothing -- Peter had seen to that -- and for the first week after his rescue Harold was quite genuinely unable to give any account of himself. During the second week he was mending but uncommunicative, and at the end of the third, finding that there was some difficulty about gaining his release in spite of his physical recovery, he affected to recover his memory, gave a circumstantial but entirely fictitious identification and was discharged. To understand this as well as all his subsequent actions, it is only necessary to remember that Harold was a Castellare. In Naples, not wishing to give Peter any unnecessary anxiety, he did not approach his bank for funds but cashed a check with an incurious acquaintance, and predated it by four weeks. With part of the money so acquired he paid his hospital bill and rewarded his rescuers. Another part went for new clothing and for four days' residence in an inconspicuous hotel, while he grew used to walking and dressing himself again. The rest, on his last day, he spent in the purchase of a discreetly small revolver and a box of cartridges. He took the last boat to Ischia, and arrived at his own front door a few minutes before eleven. It was a cool evening, and a most cheerful fire was burning in the central hafl. "Signor Peter is well, I suppose," said Harold, removing his coat. "Yes, Signor Harold. He is very well, very busy with his collection." "Where is he? I should like to speak to him." "He is in the vaults, Signor Harold. But -- " "Yes?" "Signor Peter sees no one when he is in the vaults. He has given strict orders that no one is to bother him, Signor Harold, when he is in the vaults." "Oh, well," said Harold. "I daresay he'll see me." like a bear trap, apparently, except that instead of two semicircular jaws it had four segments that snapped together in the middle, each with a shallow, sharp tooth. The pain was quite unendurable. Each segment moved at the end of a thin arm, cunningly hinged so that the ghastly thing would close over whichever ol the four triggers you stepped on. Each arm had a spring too powerful for Peter's muscles. The whole affair was connected by a chain to a staple solidly embedded in the concrete floor: it left Peter free to move in any direction a matter of some ten inches. Short of gnawing oil his own leg. he thought sickly, there was very little lie could do about it. The riddle was. what could the thing possibly be doing here? There were rats in the vaults, no doubt, now as in his own time, but surely nothing larger. Was it conceivable that even the threetoed Somethings would set an engine like this to catch a rat? Lost inventions, Peter thought irrelevantly, had a way of being rediscovered. Even if he suppressed the time-sphere during his lifetime and it did not happen to survive him, still there might be other timefishers in the remote future -- not here, perhaps, but in other treasurehouses of the world. And that might account for the existence of this metal-jawed horror. Indeed, it might account for the vault itself -- a better man-trap -- except that it was all nonsense, the trap could only be full until the trapper came to look at it. Events, and the lives of prudent time-travelers, were conserved. And lie had been in the vault for almost fortv minutes. Twenty minutrs to go, twenty-five, thirty at the most, then the Somethings would enter and their entrance would free him. He had his lifeline; the knowledge was the only thing that made it possible to live with the pain that was the center of his universe just now. It was like going to the dentist, in the bad old days before procaine; it was very bad, sometimes. but you knew that it would end. He rocked his head toward the door, holding his breath. A distant thud, another, then a curiously unpleasant squeaking, then silence. But he had heard them. He knew they were there. It couldn't be much longer now. lean, were playing cards in the passageway in front of the closed door that led to the vault staircase. They got up slowly. "Who is he?" demanded the shortest one. Tomaso clattered at him in furious Sicilian; the man's face darkened. but he looked at Harold with respect. "I am now," stated Harold, "going down to see my brother." "No, signor," said the shortest one positively. "You are impertinent," Harold told him. "Yes, signor." Harold frowned. "You will not let me pass?" "No, signor." "Then go and tell my brother I am here." The shortest one said apologetically but firmly that there were strict orders against this also; it would have astonished Harold very much if he had said anything else. "Well, at least I suppose you can tell me how long it will be before he comes out?" "Not long, signor. One hour, no more." "Oh, very well, then," said Harold pettishly, turning half away. He paused. "One thing more," he said, taking the gun out of his pocket as he turned, "put your hands up and stand against the wall there, will you ?" The first two complied slgwly. The third, the lean one, fired through his coat pocket, just like the gangsters in the American movies. It was not a sharp sensation at all. Harold was surprised to find: it was more as if someone had hit him in the side with a cricket bat. The racket seemed to bounce interminably from the walls. He felt the gun jolt in his hand as he fired back, but couldn't tell if he had hit anybody. Everything seemed to be happening very' slowly, and yet it was astonishingly hard to keep his balance. As he swung around he saw the two stockv ones with their hands half inside their jackets, and the lean one with his mouth open, and Tomaso with bulging eyes. Then the wall came at him and he began to swim along it, paying particular attention to the problem of not dropping one's gun. As he weathered the first turn in the passageway the roar broke out afresh. A fountain of plaster stung his eyes; then he was running clumsily, and there was a bedlam of shouting behind him. Without thinking about it he seemed to have selected the laboratory as his destination, it was an instinctive choice, without much to recommend it logically, and in any case, he realized halfway across the central hall, he was not going to get there. He turned and squinted at the passageway entrance; saw a blur move and fin'd at it. It disappeared. He turned again awkwardly and had taken two steps nearer an armchair which offered the nearest shelter when something clubbed him between the shoulderblades. One step more, knees buckling, and the wall struck him a second, softer blow. He toppled, clutching at the tapestry that hung near the fireplace. whose names were Enrico, Alberto and Luca, emerged cautiously from the passage and approached Harold's body it was already flaming like a viking's in its impromptu shroud; the dim horses and men and falcons of the tajM-stry were writhing and crisping into certain ring of fire wavered toward them across the carpet. Although the servants came with fire extinguishers and with buckets of water from the kitchen, and although the fire department was called, it was all quite useless. In five minutes the whole room was ablaze, in ten, as windows burst and walls buckled, the fire engulfed the second story. In twenty a mass of flaming timbers dropped into the vault through the hole Peter had made in the floor of the laboratory, utterly destroying the time-sphere apparatus and reaching shortly thereafter, as the authorities concerned were lalei to agree, an intensity of heat entirely sufficient to #  consume a human body without leaving any identifiable trace. For that reason alone, there was no trace of Peter's body to be found. again when Peter saw the light from the lime-sphere turn ruddy and then wink out like a snuffed candle. In the darkness, he heard the IF you know... instruments, with a brief description of each. Can you mnnh up at least six of them correctly for a passing score? Seven to nine is good; # excellent. The answers are on page I #. #. (a) #. (b) #. (c) #. () #. (c) #. (f) #. (g) #. (h) #. (i) #. (j) any instrument for measuring the intensity of light, one for measuring a lower temperature than the ordinary mercury-thermometer will indicate, it measures strength of X-rays, an instrument for registering the form of electric waves, for measuring solar radiation, one for testing the scope of the field of vision. is used to measure the keenness of the sense of smell, a telescopic photographic instrument for taking pictures of the sun (as during an eclipse), an instrument for recording tinrotations of a wheel, measures high degrees of heat. The Road to Space the corner; there are many problems to be solved yet, but clues to their solutions are becoming abundant. When manned rockets burst out of Earth's atmosphere, and when they land on the moon and the planets, they will probably carry special equipment the design of which has been influenced by the conquerors of Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa tribesman guide, Tenzing Bhutia. Special oxygen equipment will be a must, for instance, and the Everest expedition earned the lightest and most efficient breathing apparatus ever designed. Even so, Col. Sir John Hunt, the expedition's leader, said it had to be even better for future trips, and improvements are undoubtedly on the way. Vacuum packs compressed the expedition's food rations into solid wedges, which reverted to their normal form (including cereals, cheese, tea, coffee, lemonade, sugar sweets and pemmican) when seals on the packs were broken. Thus, for the first time, a properly balanced diet was carried to really high altitudes. Tents were of a new material, a specially woven light-weight mixture of cotton and nylon. Boots for the final assault had to be very light and easy to put on in the ra reified atmosphere, but also very warm and strong. Those used had a glace kid outer surface, an inner insulation of fiber surounded by a lining of waterproof fabric, inner soles of leather with lightweight rubberized fabric backing, an inner sock of plastic fiber, and an outer sole of rubber reinforced with synthetic resin aerated for lightness. Walkic talkie sets weighing only five pounds were carried. The equipment used by space travelers may bear no exact resemblance to that described here, but the techniques that will be used in making that equipment arc being discovered and used right now! The Weatherman Says platform idea has come from Dr. Harry Wexlcr, chief of the Scientific Services Division of the United States Weather Bureau. Dr. Wexlcr points out that the sun is of course responsible for our weather, but that "there arc many things in our atmosphere that interfere with solar radiation." He listed particularly dust and the amount of carbon dioxide, but excluded atom bombs, which "dissipate too quickly." What we need. Dr. Wexlcr continues, is "instruments close enough to the sun to measure the variations of solar radiation." Comparing these with ground measurements, we could learn the precise effect of the atmospheric resistance -- after which wc could proceed to change the composition of the atmosphere in order to change the weather, if we wished. And the obvious conclusion, the way to get the necessary instruments above tinatmosphere, is to get that much-discussed space platform into operation! Dr. Wexlor is convinced that we'll do so one of these davs. Dr. Wexler also points out that the Earth has become hotter. This is supported by the work of phsicist Gilbert N. I 'lass of The Johns Hopkins University, who has reealeuluted the opacity of carbon dioxide to long-wave heat radiation and found it to be much greater than formerly believed. With so much m industrial activity adding carbon dioxide to the air, the result is a greenhouse effect in which shortwave heat arrives from the sun but longer heat waves are prevented from escaping the Earth. Plass figures that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be doubled by the year #, and that this will raise the Earth's temperature by about four per eent. 'I 'h is will also lessen the temperature differential between the tops and bottoms of clouds, weakening the convection currents responsible for rainfall. If this happens, the weather will definitely be clearer and drier. Tragedy Unearthed ble tragedy of the sudden burial of the Roman city of Pompeii in # A.D. should become an advantage to modern archaeologists -- but it has. The very nature of the catastrophe has made it invaluable in the accumulation of historical relics from this spot. When the unfortunate city with its # citizens was abruptly engulfed under volcanic ash, resulting from the tremendous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, important works of art and science, as well as articles of everyday life, were preserved for future historians. These ditl not suffer the inroads of slow destruction by the elements, as normally occurs. The volcanic ash mixed with the rain as it fell and hardened to form perfect casts, preserving victims' features immediately after death. Even minute facial features of the Pompeiians were kept intact. By pouring plaster into the cavity formed in the volcanic ash where a victim was buried, a lifelike duplication of the person's appearance nearly #)# years ago is possible. Excavations were first started on this spot in #, and digging has been continued off and on with many interruptions. Since that time, over # per cent of the overlay of ash from the volcano's eruption has been removed. Watch the Fishie! designed especially for photographing underwater life at night has been put into operation off the Florida Revs by the National Geographic Society. Called the aquascope, this new diving chamber consists of a flat lank seven feet long by five feet wide and #' inches high. There is room inside for two men with color cameras, high voltage power equipment and bright lights. Constructed of armorplate steel, the aquascopc looks like something out of science fiction. It narrows at one end like a lobster's tail, and there arc two side windows that extend outwards like metallic claws containing floodlights. A long stainless steel "feeler" extending above the photographed area carries a third set of lights. The device is designed to photograph underwater night life at depths of # to # feet. Using it, the photographers lie prone on air mattresses in perfect comfort. Bright but brief flashes of light apparently do not disturb the fish, and no telltale air bubbles emerge from the aquascopc since outgoing air is returned to the surface by hose. Even a fish has no privacy these days! Triple Threat Genes that may help explain the cause of several diseases, including cancer, has been advanced by Dr. David M. Bonner, research associate in microbiology at Yale University. The main difference from former ideas on the subject is that Dr. Bonner believe genes -- the tiny particles in the body that govern individual characteristics -- may have three functional parts instead of only one. The single-function hypothesis held that the gene controlled a specific type of reaction within the cell. Now Dr. Bonner has demonstrated that each gene also controls the time and rate of speed of such reactions. If anv one of these three functions is upset, a serious change results in the body's biochemical reactions. It's interesting to note that it was Dr. Bonner himself, in company with other scientists, who established the earlier theory eight years ago. Science keeps advancing largely beto re-examine their own ideas! Measuring by Sound vices for measuring the flow of fluids often altered that flow by their own presence. This disadvantage has been overcome in a new instrument developed by the National Bureau of Standards. It does the job by sound waves. A transmitter sends an impulse to a rereceiver a short distance along the line of flow, and the speed of the current is found by its effect on the speed of the sound. Thus the rate of flow of liquids in tubes, speeds of boats in the water, and even minute air currents can be measured easily and accurately. #-D For Good Eyesight? sional movies haven't gotten around to ballyhooing this in their advertising, but some experts claim that the widespread appearance of such films may raise the level of eyesight of the entire world. According to the calculations of R. A. Sherman, a Bausch  Lomb Optical Co. visual specialist, between # and # per cent of the public now have eye problems of wlii 'll flit  .n mi.iu.uf ami aboul whi !i II It . nil Im il hibi time vituiim a-#) movies. #  I hr ryes of sin !i movie-goers ran then Imtrained to lessen or eliminate these diflirulties. of propet ly produced. projeeted and viewed stereo motion pinnies will he profound." Sherman has stall'd. "Dircctlv and indirectly, viewing nl trui I ihree-diim nsional pietnres will improve visual prrjoruiaiiee and therehv improve the general well-being ol hundreds of thousands of individuals with good rvrsight. #'ui thci more, additional llmiiN.tmls with iiiMiflii irnt visit. il skills will Im stimulated l irt  u Irssional ct tare. which. in turn. m will rrsult in mme rlliriciit and satislaelorv vision fni them' So rven it you don't enjov (In movies oidinuiilv. vou our it to yourself to srr st me !-l) pit lures. Vour evt b tnav he the winnei ! # # .lnorN to # -- d; # -- g; # -- f : I -- j ; #h: # -- b; # -- i: Ba; # -- e; # -- c. New York. #. (#c and #.(Ml.j Arthur (!. Clarke is In st known to the puhlie at large as an expert on roekriry and spaceflight, hut science Imion readeis know him equal Iv well as a fit tioti wiiter with a disum tiv lv quiet and el lei live stv le. Ills seieutilie haikgroimd. ol t ourse. helps make his stories outstanding, hut hi ability to make li is i ha rat ters thundei nicks to achieve credibility have also eontrihuted to his popularity. In ( hihlhnotl'  End he has taken another step forward. While it rout. tins enough new ideas and new slants on old ideas to satisfy tin most tiioi. Highly spai cw.irprd fan. it ran also he iccomniended to new readers, sinee it stalls in a iei ogniahlinearluture and gradually, convincingly shows the changes in humanity and civilization that ikcui undei #(Hi years ol domination by the alien "Overlords." The plot is one that can't and shouldn't he summed up in a review. Naturally, sin h a theme has limitations: no one human character c an be "hero' or e ve n heroine vitallv important to the reader. This makes for remoteness, hut still the hook is an admirable accomplishment and a thrill to read. Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The fust envoy from another world was about to speak -- that is, if he could forget that horse for a minute... off course By Mack Reynolds Illustrated by Kelly Freas Dermott and Tim Casey of the State Highway Patrol. They assumed they were witnessing the crash of a new type of Air Force plane and slipped and skidded desperately across the field to within thirty feet of the strange craft, only to discover that the landing had been made without accident. Patrolman Dermott shook his head. "They're gettin' queerer looking every year. Get a load of it no wheels, no propeller, no ccx'kpit." They left the ear and made thenway toward the strange egg-shaped vessel. Tim Casey loosened his .# in its holster and said. "Sure and I'm beginning to wonder if it's one of ours. No insignia and -- " A circular door slid open at that point and Dameri Tass stepped out, yawning. He spotted them, smiled and said, "Glork." They gaped at him. "Glork is right," Dermott swallowed. Tim Casey elosed his mouth with an effort. "Do vou mind the color of his faro?" he blurted. "How could I help it?" Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed pink hand down his purplish countenance and yawned again. "Gorra inanigan horp soratium," he said. Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman Casey shot stares at each other. "'Tis double talk he's after givin' us," Casey said. Dameri 'Pass frowned. "Harama?" he asked. Larry Dermott pushed his cap to the back of his head. "That doesn't sound like any language I've even heard about." Dameri Tass grimaced, turned and reentered his spacecraft to emerge in half a minute with his hands full of contraption. He held a box-like arrangement under his left arm: in his right hand were two metal caps connected to the box by wires. While the patrolmen watched him, he set the box on the ground. twirled two dials and put one of the caps on his head. He offered dumber to Larry Dennot; his desire was obvious. Trained to grasp a situation and immediately respond in manner best suited to protect the welfare of the people of New York Stale, Dermott cleared his throat and said. "Tim, take over while I report." "Hey!" Casey protested, but his fellow minion had left. "Mandaia," Dameri Tass told Casey, holding out the metal cap. "Faith, an' do I look balmy?" Casey told him. "I wouldn't be puttin' that dingus on my head for all the colleens in Ireland." "Mandaia," the stranger said impatiently. "Bejasus," Casey snorted, "ye can't -- " Dermott called from the car. "Tim. the captain says to humor this guy. We're to keep him here until the officials arrive." T'iin Casey closed his eves and # # groaned. "Humor him, he's after savin'. Orders it is." He shouted hack. "Sure an' did vc tell 'em he's in technicolor? Bcgorra, he looks like a man from Mars." "That's what they think," Larry yelled, "and the governor is on his way. We're to do everything possible short of violence to keep this character here. Humor him. Tim!" "Mandaia," Dameri Tass snapped, pushing the cap into Casey's reluctant hands. Muttering his protests, Casey lifted it gingerly and placed it on his head. Not feeling any immediate effect, he said. "There, 'tis satisfied ye arc now. I'm supposin'." The alien stooped down and I liclird a switch on the little box. It hummed gently. Tim Casey surdcnly shrieked and sat down on the stubble and grass of the field. "Bcgorra," he yelped, "I've been murthered!" He tore the cap from his head. His companion came running, "What's the matter, Tim?" he shouted. Dameri Tass removed the metal cap from his own head. "Sure, an' nothin' is after bein' the matter with him," he said. "Evidently the bhoy has niver been a-wcarin' of a kcrit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt him not at all." blurted, skidding to a stop. Dameri Tass shrugged. "Faith an' why not? As I was after sayin, I shared the kerit helmet with Tim Casey." Patrolman Dermott glared at him unbelievingly. "You learned the language just by sticking that Rube Goldberg deal on Tim's head?" "Sure, an' why not?" Dermott muttered, "And with it he has to pick up the corniest brogue west of Dublin." T im Casey got to his feet indignantly. "I'm after resentin' that, Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way we talk in Ireland is -- " Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing to a bedraggled horse that had made its way to within fifty feet of the vessel. "Now what could that be after bein'?" The patrolmen followed his stare. "It's a horse. What else?" "A horse?" Larry Dermott looked again, just to make sure. "Yeah -- not much of a horse, but a horse." Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically. "And jist what is a horse, if I may be so bold as to be askin'?" "It's an animal you ride on." The alien tore his gaze from the animal to look his disbelief at the other. "Arc you after mcanin' that you climb upon the craturc's back and ride him? Faith now, quit your blarney." He looked at the horse again, then down at his equipment. "Bcgorra," he muttered, "I'll share the kcrit helmet with the craturc." "Hey, hold it," Dermot said anxiously. He was beginning to feel like a character in a shaggy dog story. Interest in the horse was ended with the sudden arrival of a helicopter. It swooped down on the field and settled within twenty feet  of the alien craft. Almost before it had touched, the door was flung open and the flying windmill disgorged two bestarred and efficientlooking Army officers. Casey and Dermott snapped them a salute. The senior general didn't take his eyes from the alien and the spacecraft as he spoke, and they bugged quite as effectively as had those of the patrolmen w'hcn they'd first arrived on the scene. "I'm Major General Browning," he rapped. "I want a police cordon thrown up around this, er, vessel. No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody without my permission. As soon as Army personnel arrives, we'll take over completely." "Yes, sir," Larry Dermott said. "I just got a rcjjort on the radio that the governor is on his way, sir. How about him?" The general muttered something under his breath. Then, "When the w governor arrives, let me know; otherwise, nobody gets through!" Damcri lass said, "Faith, and what goes on?" The general's eves bugged still further. "He talks!" he accused. "Yes, sir," Dcrmott said. "He had some kind of a machine. He put it over Tim's head and seconds later he could talk." "Nonsense!" the general snapped. Further discussion was interrupted by the screaming arrival of several motorcycle patrolmen tollowed by three heavily laden patrol cars. Overhead, pursuit planes zoomed in and began darting about nervously above the field. # "Sure, and it's quite a reception I'm after gettin'," Dameri l ass said. He yawned. "Hut what I'in wantin' is a chance to get sonic sleep. Faith, an' I've been awake for almost a decal. r helicopter, to Washington. There he disappeared for several days, being held incommunicado while White House, Pentagon, State Department and Congress tried to figure out just what to do with him. Never in the history of the planet had such a furor arisen. Thus far, no newspapermen had been allowed within speaking distance. Administration higher-ups were being subjected to a volcano of editorial heat but the longer the space alien was discussed the more they viewed with alarm the situation his arrival had I # precipitated. There were angles that hadn't at hist been evident. Obviously lie was from some civilization far bevond that of Earth'. That was the rub. No matter what he said, it would shake governments, possibly overthrow social systems, perhaps even destroy established religious concepts. But they couldn't keep him under wraps indefinitely. It was the United Nations that cracked the iron curtain. Their demands that the alien he heard liefore their bodv were too strong and had too much public opinion behind them to be ignored. The White House yielded and the date was set for the visitor to speak before the Assembly. Excitement, anticipation, blanketed the world. Shepherds in Sinland, fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in the Argentine were raised t a zenith of expectation. Panhandlers debated the message to conic with pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued it with their passengers; miners discussed it deep beneath the surface; pilots argued with their co-pilots thousands of feet above. It was the most universally awaited event of the ages. By the time the delegates from every nation, tribe, religion, class, color, anil race had gathered in New York to receive the message from the stars, the majority of Earth had decided that Dameri Tass was the plenipotentiary of a super-civilization which had been viewing developments on this planet with misgivings. It was thought this other civilization had advanced gicatly beyond Earth's and that the problems besetting us -- social, economic, scientific -- had been solved by the super-civilization. Obviously, then, Damcri Tass had come, an advisor from a benevolent and friendly people, to guide the world aright. And nine-tenths of the population of Earth stood ready and willing to be guided. The other tenth liked things as they were and were quite convinced that the space envoy would upset their applecarts. tary-General of the U.N., was to introduce the space emissary. "Can you give me an idea at all of what he is like?" he asked nervously. President McCord was as upset as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation. "I know almost as little as you do." Sir Alfred Oxford protested, "Rut my dear chap, you've had him for almost two weeks. Certainly in that time -- " The President snapped back, "You probably won't believe this, but lie's been asleep until yesterday. When he first arrived he told us he hadn't slept for a decal, whatever that is; so we held off our discussion with him until morning. Well -- he didn't awaken in the morning, nor the next. Six days later, fearing something was wrong we woke him." "What happened?" Sir Alfred asked. The President showed embarrassment. "He used some rather ripe Irish profanity on us, rolled over, anti went bark to sleep." Viljalmar Andersen asked, "Well, what happened yesterday?" "We actually haven't had time to S uestion him. Among other things, tere's been some controversy about whose jurisdiction he comes under. The State Department claims the Army shouldn't -- " The Secretary General sighed deeply. "Just what did he do?" "The Secret Service reports he spent the day whistling Mother Machrec and playing with his dog, cat and mouse." "Dog, cat and mouse? I say!" blurted Sir Alfred. The President was defensive. "He had to have some occupation, and lie seems to be particularly interested in our animal life. He wanted a horse but compromised for the others. I understand he insists all three of them come with him wherever he goes." "I wish we knew what he was going to say," Andersen worried. "Here he comes," said Sir Alfred. Surrounded by F.B.I. men, Dameri Tass was ushered to the speaker's stand. He had a kitten in his arms; a Scotty followed him. The alien frowned worriedly. "Sure," he said, "and what kin all this be? Is it some ordinance I've been after breakin'?" McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen hastened to reassure him and made him comfortable in a chair. Viljalmar Andersen faced the thousands in the audience and held up his hands, but it was ten minutes before he was able to quiet the cheering, stamping delegates from all Earth. Finally: "Fellow Tcrrans, I shall not take your time for a lengthy introduction of the envoy from the stars. I will only say that, without doubt, this is the most important moment in the history of the human race. We will now hear from the first being to come to Earth from another world." He turned and gestured to Damcri Tass who hadn't been paying over much attention to the chairman in view of some dog and cat hostilities that had been developing about his feet. But now the alien's purplish face faded to a light blue. He stood and said hoarsely. "Faith, an' what was that last you said?" Viljalmar Andersen repeated, "We will now hear from the first being ever to come to Earth from another world." The face of the alien went a lighter blue. "Sure, and' ye wouldn't jist be frightenin' a body, would ye? You don't mean to tell me this planet isn't after bein' a member of the Galactic League?" Andersen's face was blank. "Galactic League?" "Cushlainachree," Dameri Tass moaned. "I've gone and put me foot in it again. I'll be after getting kert for this." Sir Alfred was on his feet. "I don't understand! Do you mean you aren't an envoy from another planet?" Dameri Tass held his head is his hands and groaned. "An envoy, he's savin', and mesclf only a second rate collector of specimens for the Carthis zoo." He straightened and started off the speaker's stand. "Sure, an' I must blast off immediately." Things were moving fast for President McCord but already an edge of relief was manifesting itself. Taking the initiative, he said, "Of course, of course, if that is your desire." I le signaled to the bodyguard who had accompanied the alien to the assemblage. A dull roar was beginning to emanate from the thousands gathered in the tremendous hall, murmuring, questioning, disbelieving. he must say something. He extended a detaining hand. "Now you are here," he said urgently, "even though by mistake, before you go can't you give us some brief word? Our world is in chaos. Many of us have lost faith. Perhaps... Dameri Tass shook off the restraining hand. "Do I look daft? Begorry, I should have been a-knowin something was queer. All your weapons and your strange ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised if yc hadn't yet established a planetwide government. Sure, an' I'll go still further. Ye probably still have wars on this benighted world. No wonder it is yc haven't been invited to join the Galactic League an' take your place among the civilized planets." He hustled from the rostrum and made his way, still surrounded by guards, to the door by which he had entered. The dog and the cat trotted after, undismayed by the furor about them. They arrived about four hours later at the field on which he'd landed, and the alien from space hurried toward his craft, still muttering. He'l been accompanied by a general and by tire President, but all the wav he had refrained from speaking. He scurried from the car and toward the spacecraft. President MeGord said, "You've forgotten your pets. We would be glad if you would accept them as -- " The alien's face faded a light blue again. "Faith, an' I'd almost forgotten," he said. "If I'd taken a craturc from this quarantined planet, my name'd be tiork. Keep your dog and your kitty." I #e shook his head sadly and extracted a mouse from a pocket. "An' this amazin' little craturc as well." They followed him to the space craft. Just before entering, he spotted the bedraggled horse that had been present on his landing. A longing expression came over his highly colored face. "Jist one thing," he said. "Faith now', were they pullin' my leg when they said vou w-ere after ridin' on the back of those things?" The President looked at the woebegone nag. "It's a horse," he said, surprised. "Man has been riding them for centuries." Damcri Tass shook his head. "Sure an' 'twould've been my makin' if I could've taken one back to Carthis." He entered his vessel. The others drew back, out of range of the expected blast, and watched, each with his own thoughts, as the first visitor from space hurriedly left Earth. short novel by one of the most popular and talented writers in the field, Sam Merwin Jr., entitled The Ambassador. Here you'll find an intriguing situation, replete with action, romance and humor -- and a grim problem you'll twist your wits trying to solve. The scene is a future in which Earth is ruled by computing machines and entangled in eccentric notions -- just for instance, it's the height of politeness to make yourself as ugly as possible! There's a cast of unique people, including a multitude of spies and plotters, two mysterious and beautiful women, and Ambassador Zalcn Lindsay, the strikingly human Man-from-Mars who must straighten out the tottering mess or see two worlds perish. This stellar performance will be backed up by the best work of such top-notch writers as Robert Abernathy, James McKimmey Jr., Frank M. Robinson and many others. There will also be the first of a series of articles designed to acquaint you entertainingly with the scientific facts of today and possibilities of tomorrow. January #th is the date the March issue goes on sale -- don't miss it! undergone by human miners, and extend the possible depth of shafts to five or even ten miles below the surface. The robot shown trolled, and a television camera in its head keeps its operators on the surface fully informed of its progress. (Drawings by Ed Valigursky I mm future will enable cars to travel at rocket speeds. An electronic beam, traveling between the wheels of the car, transmits signals picked up by car's receiver These signals control speed, steering, and stopping. Driver has merely to drive car onto beam and relax Here is safe driving at jet speeds, electronically controlled. Now turn to inside buck cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg Archaeological Expedition to Earth, # AD  by James McKimmey, Jr. #I   by Frank M. Robinson #  z By Ed Valigursky  IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. I. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.a! Next issue on sale February #th are the lowest form of plant life. Often single-celled, they sometimes have leaflike and stemlike parts, but no true leaves and stems. Seaweed, kelp and similar aquatic gunk are actually the cities, towns and county fairs of algae. The time may come, and in the fairly near future at that, when you'll walk into a restaurant and ask the waiter for an order of roast algae, with a side of French fried yeast. The reasons for this are many. People don't multiply as fast as rabbits, but they're beginning to get the idea. The population of the United States hit # around the middle of last year, and you can expect to be rubbing elbows with # in a couple of decades. Arable land, on the other hand, is definitely going down the drain. Much of it has been ruined by sheer carelessness in the past and won't be useful again for a long time. Other sections are being encroached upon by industry, housing, damsites, bombsites, race tracks, and plain old erosion. It's improbable that man, stubborn beast that he is, will just give up and fade away. And we can't look to colonization of or imports from other planets just yet, although the possibility of a Iendlease arrangement with the rest of the solar system remains an eventual possibility to anyone with scientific imagination. We'll have to turn to other sources of food right here at home if we're going to survive. sibility that has been described fairly frequently and will undoubtedly be helpful. Wider use of fish and other denizens of the deep, which remains relatively unspoiled by human hands and gratifyingly large, is also on the list. Both of these, of course, are modifications or extensions of familiar processes; the blueplate specials we get from them will be easily recognizable. Large economy-sized fruits, vegetables and fish may become the rule, so that one brussels sprout, a piece hacked off a huge tomato, and a steak from a giant octopus will comprise a full meal -- but the taste and appearance won't be otherwise alien. Algae are something else again, and exactly what form they'll take by the time they reach your dinner table is unpredictable. But they're definitely on the way there. In the vanguard of this important work is the Department of Plant Biology (located in California) of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. This group has studied the mechanism of photosynthesis, by which plants use sunlight for growth, with single-celled algae as guinea pigs. They've been considering the mass culture of algae as a potential food source since before Word War II. Now the program has advanced to the level of actual engineering studies. Under Carnegie's direction, Arthur D. Little, Inc., a firm famous in many branches of research, engineering and technical economics, has built and is operating a pilot plant on a larger scale than was previously possible. Little's researchers have concentrated on Chlorella pyrenoidosa, a wellknown and easily available green algae, and the results have been very hopeful indeed. In this pilot plant operation, Chlorella and water were pumped through a transparent plastice tube, which exposed # square feet of the stuff to sunlight at one time. Inorganic salts were fed in as nutrients, and air enriched with carbon dioxide was also passed continuously through the tube. After this had gone on for three months, the scientists found themselves with a pile of # pounds of fresh, dry Chlorella on their hands and a good deal of new and useful information in their notebooks. One of the most important discoveries was the nutritional value of dry Chlorella: it contains about # per cent protein, up to # per cent fats, and most of the natural vitamins necessary to human health! All of which makes it just about equal to yeast as a food. This is highly significant, casting as it does a ray of hope that humanity won't have to tighten its collective belt quite so far after all. As usual, of course, there's a joker in the deck -- the high cost of algae. Original investment in the equipment necessary to grow Chlorella runs to over # per acre. And even though one acre of culture should produce # to # tons of dry product annually -- which ought to provide for a fair-sized family even assuming that the in-laws drop in for Sunday dinner -- the production cost would be about two and onehalf times that of comparable vegetable products today. If we reach the stage where there just aren't any comparable vegetable products to be had any more, this isn't likely to deter us much, but that's taking the dim view all around. Actually, there is good reason to hope that a substantial reduction in both original cost and upkeep can be brought about by use of a simpler system. ject is going on in Japan, at the Tokugawa Institute for Biological Research in Tokyo. Several food products fortified with Chlorella have been made, cooked, salted and peppered, and -- yes! -- eaten there on a small scale. The Institute's news releases haven't mentioned how Chlorella sandwiches taste (and they add the reservation that the average Japanese diet contains similar materials to begin with), but they do take a generally optimistic attitude. At the very least, Chlorella may be used within the ( Continued on page #) All Earth needed was a good stiff dose of common sense, but its rulers preferred to depend on the highly fallible computers instead. As a consequence, interplanetary diplomatic relations were somewhat strained -- until a nimble-witted young man from Mars came up with the answer to the "sixty-four dollar " question. By Sam Merwin, Jr. Illustrated by Kelly Freas rostrum in the huge new United Worlds auditorium on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain and looked out at an ocean of eyeglasses. Individually they ranged in hue from the rose-tinted spectacles of the Americans to the dark brown of the Soviet bloc. Their shapes and adornments were legion: round, harlequin, diamond, rhomboid, octagonal, square, oval; rimless, gem-studded, hornrimmed, floral-rimmed, rimmed in the cases of some of the lady representatives with immense artificial eyelashes. The total effect, to Lindsay, was of looking at an immense page of printed matter composed entirely of punctuation marks. Unspectacled, he felt like a man from Mars. He was a man from Mars -- first Martian Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Second United Worlds Congress. He wished he could see some of the eyes behind the protective goggles, for he knew he was making them blink. He glanced down at the teleprompter in front of him -- purely to add effect to a pause, for he had memorized his speech and was delivering it without notes. On it was Lindsay suppressed. a smile and said, "In conclusion, I am qualified by the governors of Mars to promise that if we receive another shipment of British hunting boots we shall destroy them immediately upon unloading -- and refuse categorically to ship further beryllium to Earth. "On Mars we raise animals for food, not for sport -- we consider human beings as the only fit athletic competition for other humans -- and we see small purpose in expending our resources mining beryllium or other metals for payment that is worse than worthless. In short, we will not be a dumping ground for Earth's surplus goods. I thank you." The faint echo of his words came back to him as he stepped down from the rostrum and walked slowly to his solitary seat in the otherwise empty section allotted to representatives of alien planets. Otherwise there was no sound in the huge assemblage. He felt a tremendous lift of tension, the joyousness of a man who has satisfied a lifelong yearning to toss a brick through a plate-glass window and knows he will be arrested for it and doesn't care. There was going to be hell to pay -- and Lindsay was honestly looking forward to it. While Secretary General Carlo Bergozza, his dark-green spectacles resembling parenthesis marks on either side of his thin eagle beak, went through the motions of adjourning the Congress for forty-eight hours, Lindsay considered his mission and its purpose. Earth -- a planet whose age-old feuds had been largely vitiated by the increasing rule of computerjudgment -- and Mars, the one settled alien planet on which no computer had ever been built, were drifting dangerously apart. It was, Lindsay thought with a trace of grimness, the same ancient story of the mother country and her overseas colonies, the same basic and seemingly inevitable trend, social and economic, that had led to the revolt of North America against England, three hundred years earlier. On a far vaster and costlier scale, of course. Lindsay had been sent to Earth, as his planet's first representative at the new United Worlds Congress, to see that this trend was halted before it led to irrevocable division. And not by allowing Mars to become a mere feeder and dumping ground for the parent planet. Well, he had tossed a monkey wrench into the machinery of interplanetary sweetness and light, he thought. Making his way slowly out with the rest of the Congress, he felt like the proverbial bull in the china shop. The others, eyeing him inscrutably through their eyeglasses and over their harness humps, drew aside to let him walk through. But all around him, in countless national tongues, he heard the whispers, the mutterings -- "sending a gladiator"... "looks like a vidar star"... "too young for such grave responsibility"... "no understanding of the basic sensitivities"... Obviously, he had not won a crushing vote of confidence. them, he thought as someone tapped him on a shoulder. He turned to find du Fresne, the North American Minister of Computation, peering up at him through spectacles that resembled twin scoops of strawberry ice-cream mounted in heavy white-metal rims. "I'd like a word with you," he said, speaking English rather than Esperanto. Lindsay nodded politely, thinking that du Fresne looked rather like a Daumier judge with his fashionable humped back and long official robe of office. Over a table in the twilight bar du Fresne leaned toward him, nearly upsetting his colafizz with a sleeve of his robe. "M-mind you," he said, "this is strictly unofficial, Lindsay, but I have your interests at heart. You're following trend X." "Got me all nicely plotted out on your machine?" said Lindsay. Du Fresne's sallow face went white at this pleasantry. As Minister of Computation his entire being was wrapped up in the immensely intricate calculators that forecast all decisions for the huge North American republic. Obviously battling anger, he said, "Don't laugh at Elsac, Lindsay. It has never been wrong -- it can't be wrong." "I'm not laughing," said Lindsay quietly. "But no one has ever fed me to a computer. So how can you know... ?" "We have fed it every possible combination of circumstances based upon all the facts of Terro-Martian interhistory," the Minister of Computation stated firmly. His nose wrinkled and seemed to turn visibly pink at the nostril-edges. He said, "Damn! I'm allergic to computer-ridicule." He reached for an evapochief, blew his nose. "Sorry," said Lindsay, feeling the mild amazement that seemed to accompany all his dealings with Earthfolk. "I wasn't -- " "I doe you weren'd," du Fresne said thickly. "Bud de vurry zuggedgeshun of ridicule dudz id." He removed his strawberry spectacles, produced an eye-cup, removed and dried the contact lenses beneath. After he had replaced them his condition seemed improved. Lindsay offered him a cigarette, which was refused, and selected one for himself. He said, "What happens if I pursue trend X?" "You'll be assassinated," du Fresne told him nervously. "And the results of such assassination will be disastrous for both planets. Earth will have to go to war." "Then why not ship us goods we can use?" Lindsay asked quietly. Du Fresne looked at him as despairingly as his glasses would permit. He said, "You just don't understand. Why didn't your people send someone better attuned to our problems?" "Perhaps because they felt Mars would be better represented by someone attuned to its own problems," Lindsay told him. "Don't tell me your precious computers recommend murder and war." "They don't recommend anything," said du Fresne. "They merely advise what will happen under given sets of conditions." "Perhaps if you used sensible judgment instead of machines to make your decisions you could prevent my assassination," said Lindsay, finishing his scotch on the rocks. "Who knows?" he added. "You might even be able to prevent an interplanetary war!" When he left, du Fresne's nose was again growing red and the Minister of Computation was fumbling for another evapochief. fice on the one-twentieth floor of the UW building, Lindsay pondered the strange people of the mother planet among whom his assignment was causing him to live. One inch over six feet, he was not outstandingly tall -- but he felt tall among them, with their slump harnesses and disfiguring spectacles and the women so hidden beneath their shapeless coveralls and harmopan makeup. He was not unprepared for the appearance of Earthfolk, of course, but he had not yet adjusted to seeing them constantly around him in such large numbers. To him their deliberate distortion was as shocking as, he supposed wryly, his own unaltered naturalness was to them. There was still something illogical about the cult of everyday ugliness that had overtaken the mother planet in the last two generations, under the guise of social harmony. It dated back, of course, to the great Dr. Ludmilla Hartwig, psychiatric synthesizer of the final decades of the twentieth century. It was she who had correctly interpreted the growing distrust of the handsome and the beautiful among the great bulk of the less favored, the intense feelings of inferiority such comely persons aroused. It was from her computerpsychiatry that the answer employed had come: since everyone cannot be beautiful, let all be ugly. This slogan had sparked the mass use of unneeded spectacles, the distortion harnesses, the harmopan makeup. Now, outside of emergencies, it was as socially unacceptable for a man or woman to reveal a face uncovered in public as it had been, centuries earlier, for a Moslem odalisque to appear unveiled in the bazaar. There were exceptions, of course -- aside from those who were naturally ugly to begin with. Vidarscreen actors and actresses were permitted to reveal beauty when their parts demanded it -- which was usually only in villains' roles. And among men, professional athletes were expected to show their faces and bodies au naturel as a mark of their profession. Among women the professional courtesans -- the "models", not the two-credit whores -- displayed their charms on all occasions. Beauty was bad business for lower-caste prostitutes -- it made such clients they could promote feel too inferior. These specialists, the models and gladiators, were something of a race apart, computer-picked in infancy and raised for their professions like Japanese sumo wrestlers. They were scarcely expected to enter the more sensitive realms of the arts, business affairs or government. It was, Lindsay decided, a hell of a state of affairs. Earth-assigned personal secretary, was leaning far back in her tilt-chair with her feet on the desk. Her eyes were squinted behind chartreuse-tinted flat-oval lenses to avoid fumes from a cigarette stuck in a corner of her wide mouth. She had shut off the air-conditioner, opened the picture window and pulled the pants of her coverall far up above her knees to let the warm New Orleans September air wash over her skin. Lindsay looked at her legs with surprise -- it had not occurred to him that Nina owned such a long and shapely pair. He whistled softly through his teeth. Nina removed her smoke, sighed and made a move to stand up and let her coverall fall back over the exposed limbs. Lindsay said, "Not on my account -- please! Those are the first good looking legs I've seen since leaving Mars." "Watch yourself, boss," said Nina and indulged in a slow half-smile. Then, putting her feet back on the floor, "You certainly lost a lot of friends and disinfluenced a lot of people down there today. If you'd prepared your speech on the machine I'd have fixed it up for you." "Which is exactly why I prepared it in my hot little head," Lindsay told her. "I wanted to knock some sense into them." Nina got out of her chair and snuffed out her cigarette in the disposal tray, then sat on the edge of the desk and poked at the untidy dark-blonde hair she wore in a knot on top of her head. She said, "Night soil! You'll never knock any sense into that mob." Lindsay, who had been thinking wistfully that if Nina would only do something about that hair, the thickness of her middle, and her bilious complexion, she might be fairly good looking, blinked. He said, "Why in hell do you work for them then?" She shrugged disinterested shoulders, told him, "It's a job." She yawned, unabashed, added irrelevantly, "You know, boss, the trouble with you is you look like a gladiator. They won't take you seriously unless you wear specs and a harness." "Over my dead body," he told her. "What's wrong with athletes anyway? I play damned good tennis when I get time to practice." "Athletes are lousy lovers," she said. "Your correspondence is on your desk." She nodded toward it. "Get it signed, will you? I've got a dinner date." Lindsay restrained an impulse to ask her with what and signed the letters dutifully. Nina was a spy, of course, or she wouldn't have the job. In view of his own assignment and the delicacy of Terro-Martian relations at the moment, she must be a good one. He handed her the letters, noted the slight sway of her thick body as she walked toward the dispatchchute. A pity, he thought, that the rest of her failed to match the long perfect legs she had so unexpectedly put on display. "Oh, Miss Beckwith," he called after her. "You don't have to list my appointments on the teleprompter when I'm making a speech after this." She stopped, cast him an oblique glance over one shoulder and said without much interest, "I didn't know whether you'd get back here or not -- and it wouldn't do to forget the Secretary General." "All right," he said in resignation. When she had gone he wondered if he should have told her what du Fresne had said about his possible assassination, decided it was just as well he had kept mum. He wenl, up on the roof for a copter. Lindsay and Fernando Anderson, the flamboyant junior senator from New Mexico, were the only guests. They were four at the charming ante bellum mahogany table of the Secretary General's Natchez mansion. Carlo Bergozza, the Secretary General himself -- courteous, with natural as well as harness-stooped shoulders, a trifle vague -- and his daughter and official hostess, Maria -- vividly brunette and dynamic despite the twist given her body by her harness and the mask of huge triangular spectacles -- made up the rest of the party. The meal was simple, automatically served, well prepared. It consisted of plankton soup with chives in chilled bowls, noisettes of lamb with yeast-truffles and bamboograss and, in deference to Lindsay, a dessert of Martian lichenberries. Conversation consisted of routine gambits and responses until the dessert. Then Senator Anderson removed his diamond-shaped raspberry glasses and said, "You'll pardon me, but I want to see what our distinguished visitor really looks like. After all, he can see us as we are." Secretary General Bergozza looked briefly shocked. Then his overpowering courtesy came to his rescue and he laid aside his own dark green spectacles. He said, "You know, Lindsay, you remind me a little of an American ambassador to the Court of Saint James a hundred and fifty years ago -- I believe his name was Harvey. He refused to wear kneebritches to his own reception. Other times, other customs." "I'm sorry if my appearance is bothering people," said Lindsay, noting that Maria, without her glasses, came close to being a truly pretty young woman. "I'm not trying to disturb them -- I merely want them to see me as a true representative of my own world." Maria said impulsively, "It isn't that you bother us -- not really. It's just that you're a little too good looking. Almost like a gladiator. People aren't used to it in a statesman." "Too good looking -- with this busted beak of mine?" Lindsay pressed a finger against his nose, which had been broken in youth by a wild pitch. Senator Anderson said, "The slight irregularity of your nose is just enough to keep you from being too pretty, Lindsay." He smiled and added, "You certainly stirred up a cyclotron with your speech this afternoon. The British are planning a white paper." "I merely stated facts as I know them," said Lindsay. "They aren't used to facts -- not unless they have been computerprocessed," said the senator. He seemed pleased for some reason, added, "You may have broken some real ice, Lindsay. I've been trying for years to work out a way to tell people computers are robbing them of all powers of decision." "All they have to do is confine them to mathematical problems and let people decide human ones," said Lindsay. The Secretary General cleared his throat. He said, "Without the computers there would be no United Worlds. There would be no world at all, probably." It was a rebuke. Carlo Bergozza redonned his spectacles and rose from the table. He said, "If you'll excuse me I have some business to attend to. I'm sure my daughter will see that you are properly entertained." He left the room with slow, old-man steps. Maria said fondly, "Poor darling, he gets so upset. He'll take a pill and go to sleep. Let's go to the bathroom, shall we?" tary General's mansion was hyper-gingerbread steamboat Gothic, inwardly it was entirely modern in plan. There was a living room, of course, for formal receptions, but as in all normal Earth-dwellings of the period the bathroom was the lived-in chamber. There and there only did people of the #'s permit themselves to relax. This was a logical development of latter-day plumbing and air conditioning and the crowding of apartment and small-house life. Actual lavatory plumbing was concealed, in this instance, by an etched glass screen. Otherwise the room featured comfortable plastic lounge chairs and sofas around a fifteen-foot sunken tub and a small semicircular bar, fully equipped. On entering Maria unfastened her harness and coverall and stood before them, a sweet-bodied darkeyed girl in her early twenties, clad in shorts and halter. "Lord!" she exclaimed, pushing dark hair back from her broad low forehead, "It feels good to relax. Zalen, I want to talk to you." "Delighted," said Lindsay, mildly surprised at the use of his Martian first name. "I've got something to tell him first," said Anderson, unhitching his own harness and emerging as a lean medium-sized man in good condition for his forty years. "I got word just before I flew up here tonight that your life may be in danger, Zalen." fizz Maria handed him, said "That makes warning number two, Senator. Du Fresne talked to me about it this afternoon." Maria paled visibly. She said, "It sounds impossible!" "It backs up the judgment of my own group," said Senator Anderson. "Du Fresne is just about the smartest computerman we have." He eyed Lindsay speculatively, added, "You don't seem much impressed by your danger, Zalen." "How can I be?" Lindsay countered. "After all, Earth is supposed to be much further advanced than Mars in civilization. And we have had no political murder on Mars in more than fifty years." Maria made a despairing gesture. "Oh, dear!" she exclaimed. "You don't understand, Zalen. On Mars you have both room and time to settle your political conflicts. And you don't have computers." "We have some pretty sharp rows," Lindsay told her. "But we don't have anyone assassinated." He paused, looked at them both, added, "Do you have many of them here?" "Not many," said Anderson. "But there is a growing tendency to go along with computer verdicts, no matter how extreme." "And you believe the British computers are giving accurate answers when they recommend the utterly useless hunting boots on Mars? Or those rubber shower curtains they unloaded on us two years ago?" The Senator said, "There is, unfortunately, no question as to the accuracy of computer answers. The trouble seems to lie in some special condition, local to Britain, that effects computers." "But if the British computers are wrong, why doesn't somebody do something about it?" Lindsay asked. Anderson said, "If it were that simple, Zalen... His smile was rueful. "Unfortunately our English friends -- or their rulers at any rate -- are determined that socialism is the only government suitable to their country. Actually it is nothing of the sort -- they can thrive only with a mercantile capitalism under a nominal constitutional monarchy." "In that case I still don't see -- " Lindsay began. "Contrary to what you're thinking, their leaders are not villains," Anderson told him. "They are men and women obsessed with an ideal that has hampered them for almost two centuries. And they are incapable of accepting any conclusion counter to their ideals." "Even to impoverishing an entire planet?" Lindsay asked. Anderson shrugged. "A penalty of their insularity," he replied. "The reason for this little meeting, Zalen, is to explain that not all of us are in favor of supporting Britain and its absurd production bungling at the expense of Mars. A few of us are becoming singularly fed up with the computer neurosis that seems to have this planet in its grip." Maria leaned forward, her dark said, "Can't you see, Zalen, that is why we are so concerned with your possible assassination? We fear the whole of Earth is on the lip of a nervous breakdown. Unless the grip of the computers is broken anything might happen. And we're counting on you, with your fresh viewpoint and prestige, to help us." "I was hoping you might be concerned about me" said Lindsay softly. "After all, I'm the one who is supposed to be killed." He watched a sudden flush of embarto the vividness of the Secretary General's daughter. "Of course we're concerned," she said defensively. "We're not really monsters, Zalen." "What Maria means," said Anderson swiftly, "is that if the worst should happen it will go a long way toward making Earth entirely computer-dependent, if du Fresne's prophecy is fulfilled a lot of people who might go on fighting will simply give up." "Just what is your stake in this, Senator?" Lindsay asked. give you a score of 'good' reasons, Zalen. But my real reason is this -- I'm damned if I want to see professional politicians become rubber-stamps to a computer. When Sylac was first used officially three decades ago, it looked as if it might be a help. All we had to do was palm off all unpopular decisions on the machine. "Elsac, however, has proved to be something else," he went on. "It is making too damned many of our decisions for us -- and thanks to our having set Sylac up as a masterbrain god we can't controvert its judgment. When President Giovannini gets his new Giac computer working we might as well shut up shop. And the announcement that Giac is in operation may come at any time now." Lindsay studied him, then said, "Your real complaint then, Fernando, is that the computers deprive you of patronage and power." "That's about it," said the senator from New Mexico. We'll be reduced to the level of the political commissars of the Soviet nations. The scientists and symbolic logicians who feed and tend the computers will actually be running the country. And the world." "And just where do I come into this?" Lindsay asked. "You, Zalen, are the last representative of the last sizeable and important human organism that is not dependent upon computer judgment," said Anderson. "That's our side of it. From your own side -- if you already distrust computer decisions, as in the case of the British hunting boots -- you surely don't want to see them in full control." "Hardly," said Lindsay. "But at the same time I have no desire to be assassinated or to be the cause of an Earth-Mars war." "Think it over, Zalen," said Anderson. "I need hardly tell you that I am not speaking for myself alone." He got up, put down his glass, bade Maria farewell and left the Martian alone with her. When he had gone Lindsay looked at the girl, who returned his gaze quite openly for a long moment before her eyes fell away. He said, "Somehow the senator and you seem an odd combination." She made no pretense of misunderstanding but said candidly, "Perhaps I am neurotic in my distrust of computers but I cannot help that. Those of us who have any true sensitivity unblunted by the psycho-mechanistics of the era all share this distrust. It is natural, since we are few and weak, that we should seek what allies we can find among the strong." "I've always heard that politics makes strange bedfellows," said Lindsay casually. It was obvious that he had committed a faux pas. Maria's blush returned and her expression froze. Lindsay cursed himself for a fool. With the development of all sorts of pneumatic resting devices the word bed had become not only obsolete but definitely distasteful in well-bred Tellurian circles. Its use was as decried as was that of the word bloody in Victorian England. She said angrily, "I assure you, Mr. Lindsay, that Senator Anderson and I have never..." Voice and anger faded alike as she apparently realized that Lindsay had not intended insult. He let her mix a second drink for both of them. Then, standing close to her and noting the smooth perfection of her creamy white skin, "I wonder if your father knows that he is nourishing a subversive in his family." She said with a trace of impatience, "Oh, poor papa never sees the trees for the forest." "You're a damned unhappy girl, aren't you?" he asked her. He didn't need an answer, but realized she wanted to talk about it. She said, her eyes shining suspiciously, "You're right, of course, I'm very unhappy -- constricted in behavior by my father's position, unable to say aloud what I really think, how I really feel. Somtimes I think I must be living in some Gothic poet's dream of loneliness." "Contrary to the beliefs of most psychiatrists," said Lindsay, halftouched, half-appalled by Maria's intensity, "we are all of us alone." "Somehow I knew you'd understand!" she exclaimed, without taking her dark eyes from his. "I'm not allowed to date gladiators, of course. You're the only man I've ever been with who was not afraid to look as he is." "You'd better come to Mars," he suggested, shying away a little from the high voltage the Secretary General's daughter seemed to be generating. "I can assure you you'd have a chance to reveal the charms nature gave you without shame." She laughed with a sudden change of spirits. "It's at least a half hour since dinner. Let's take a dip." She tossed back her lustrous dark hair with a shake of her head and her hands went to the clasp of her halter, a moment later to that of her shorts. "Come on," she called, extending her arms to expose her exciting young body before him. "The water will cool us off." It didn't work out that way, of course. Lindsay was barely in the tub-pool before Maria's arms were about his neck, her body close against his, her lips thrusting upward toward his own. For a moment he felt panic, said, "Hey! What if somebody comes? Your father -- " "Silly! Nobody will," she replied, laughing softly. His last rational thought for quite awhile was, Oh well -- I'm hardly in a position to get the Secretary General's daughter angry. its dim fanlight over the eastern horizon as he coptered back to his official quarters in the city. Trying to restore some order to thoughts and emotions thoroughly disrupted by the unexpected events of the evening, he wondered a little just what he had got himself into. Mars, of course, was scarcely a Puritan planet, populated as it was by the hardiest and most adventurous members of the human race, of all races. But there had been something almost psychopathic about Maria's passion. It had been far too intense to have been generated solely through regard for him. The girl had made love to him simply to relieve her own inner tensions, he thought wryly. Lacking a man she could love, walled in by the high officialdom of her father's lofty position, she had turned to him in the same way she turned to the anti-computer movement -- as a way of feeling less lonely for a while. Still, it had been sweet -- if a little frightening in retrospect. And it had been a little decadent too. With the copter on autopilot he lit a cigarette and forced his thoughts away from the girl. Pie wondered if the Governors of Mars were sufficiently in key with the current feelings of Earthfolk to understand fully how deep the repercussions from his speech might go. He wondered if they had considered fully the possibility of interplanetary war. True, Mars was undoubtedly better equipped to defend itself against such attack than was Earth. Like the mother planet it had its share of robot rockets capable of launching a counterattack. And thanks to the comparative sparseness and decentralization of its population it was far less vulnerable to attack. But war between the planets would be destructive of far more than cities and the people that lived in them. It would mean inevitably a breakdown of the entire fabric of civilized humanity -- a tenuous fabric, true, but all that existed to maintain man. And an isolated Mars, even if self-sufficient, would be a sorry substitute for a red planet that was part of the United Worlds. It would mean a setback of generations, perhaps centuries. He began to feel a new understanding of the importance of his mission. With understanding came something akin to fear lest he should not be able to accomplish it without disaster. It was going to be his job to inaugurate some sort of therapy for Earth's illness. It was, in effect, one man against a planet. Considering the men and women with whom he had talked that day he was unable to take the assassination threat too seriously. Somehow these neurotics and warped zealots, with their allergies and distortion kits, seemed unlikely to undertake or carry through any such drastic action. Their very inhibitions would forbid it. Not that Maria had been exactly inhibited. Damn! The girl refused to stay out of his thoughts. He recalled what she had told him of her conspiracy against the computers, of its aims and methods. And again he smiled wryly to himself. They were like spoiled children, he thought. A little group of overintense young men and women, neurotic, excitable, unstable, meeting in one another's houses or in expensive cafes, plotting little coups that never quite came off. From certain unguarded phrases Maria had dropped during the less frenetic periods of their evening together, he gathered that their current aim was actual physical sabotage of Giac, the mightiest of all computers about to be unveiled, before it went into work. They didn't even realize, he thought, that sabotage would avail them nothing in the long run -- or the short either. Destruction of the computers would not cure Earth. It might easily increase the reliance of Earthfolk upon their cybernetic monsters. What was needed to effect a cure was destruction of human confidence in and reliance upon these machines. And how in hell, he wondered, was he going to manage that? starved Mars the sight of New Orleans still ablaze with lights at five o'clock in the morning was something of a miracle. Mars had its share of atomic power-plants, of course, but such sources had proved almost prohibitively costly as providers of cheap power. That was true on Earth too, of course, but Earth had its rivers, its waterfalls, its ocean tides to help out. More important, it averaged the Sun, thus giving it immense storage supplies of solar heat for power. Without these resources the thousand-square-mile expanse of intricately criss-crossed artificial lighting that was the United Worlds capital would have been impossible. Lindsay wondered how any people possessed of a planet so rich could be afflicted with such poverty of soul. Or was this very opulence the cause? His own planet was comparatively poor -- yet nervous breakdowns were few and far between. There the ugly strove for beauty, instead of the reverse. He parked the copter on the garage-plat, pressed the button, and watched it sink slowly out of sight to its concealed hangar. Like all Martian natives to leave for Earth, he had been warned about the intense heat and humidity that assailed most of the mother planet, especially in the UW capital. Yet the night breeze felt pleasantly cool against his face and its thickness was like the brush of invisible velvet against his skin. Perhaps, he thought, he was more of an Earthling than three generations of Martian heredity made likely. He did miss the incredible brilliance of the Martian night skies. Here on Earth the stars shone as puny things through the heavy atmosphere. But, he thought guiltily, he did not have as severe a pang of homesickness as he ought. In a state of self-bemusement he rode the elevator down to his suite on the ninety-first story. And was utterly unprepared for the assault which all but bore him to the floor as he stepped out into his own foyer. Since the attack came from behind and his assailant's first move was to toss a bag over his head, Lindsay had no idea of what the would-be assassin looked like. For a moment he could only struggle blindly to retain his balance, expecting every instant to feel the quick searing heat of a blaster burn through his back. But no heat came, nor did the chill of a dagger. Instead he felt his attacker's strong hands encircle his neck in a judo grip. This was something Lindsay understood. He thrust both his own hands up and backward, getting inside the assassin's grip and breaking it. His thumbnails dug into nerve centers and he bent an arm sharply. There was a gasp of agony and he felt a large body crumple under the pressure. to summon the constabulary. His second, after examining the face of his would-be slayer, was to drag the man into the shelter of his apartment, revive him and seek to learn what he could about the attempt. To his astonishment he discovered that he knew the man. His assigned murderer was long, redheaded Pat O'Ryan rated as a top gladiator, a tennis and squash champion whose reputation was almost as widespread among sporting fans on Mars as on Earth. Lindsay had remodeled his own backhand, just the year before, upon that of the man sent to kill him. He got some whiskey from the serving bar beside the vidar screen, poured a little of it between the unconscious killer's lips. O'Ryan sputtered and sat up slowly, blinking. He said, "Get me some gin, will you?" Lindsay returned the whiskey to its place, got the requested liquor, offered some neat to the tennis player in a glass. O'Ryan downed it, shuddered, looked at Lindsay curiously. He said, "What went wrong? You're supposed to be dead." Lindsay shrugged and said, "I know some judo too. You weren't quite fast enough, Pat." O'Ryan moaned again, reached for the bottle. Then he said, "I remember now. Thank God you got my right arm -- I'm left-handed." "I know," Lindsay told him laconically. The would-be assassin looked frightened. He said, "How do you know?" "I play a little tennis myself," Lindsay told him. "How come they sent a man like you on such a mission?" "Top gladiator -- top assignment," said the athlete. "We're supposed to do something besides play games for our keep." "That's a wrinkle in the social setup I didn't know about," said Lindsay. "Mind telling me who sent you?" "Not at all. It was my sponsors, the New Hibernian A.C." He frowned. "According to the computers I was in. There's going to be hell to pay over my muffing it." "How do you feel about that?" the Martian asked him. O'Ryan shrugged. "It's okay by me," he said. "They can hardly degrade me for fouling up this kind of a job. I'll simply tell them their information was incomplete. No one knew you knew judo." He eyed the gin, added, "A good thing you didn't feed me whiskey. I'm allergic to all grain products -- even in alcohol. Gomes from being fed too much McCann's Irish oatmeal when I was a kid." "Interesting," said Lindsay, wondering how the conversation had taken this turn. "What does whiskey do to you?" The gladiator shuddered. "It usually hits me about twenty-four hours afterward. Makes my eyes water so I can't see much. I've got a match at the Colosseum tomorrow night. I hope you'll be there." "So do I," said Lindsay dryly. "You wouldn't know who gave you this little chore on me, would you?" "Not likely," said the gladiator. "When we report at the club every evening we find our assignments stuck in our boxes. Usually we get orders to meet a dame. This was something different." "I see what you mean," Lindsay told him. O'Ryan got up, said, "Well, I might as well be running along. I'll give them hell for fouling up the computer-prophecy. Look me up after the match tomorrow. And thanks for not having me pinched. I might have had to spend the night in a cell. That's bad for conditioning." "You're quite welcome," said Lindsay, feeling like a character in a semi-nightmare. "Will I be seeing you again -- this way?" "Unlikely," the gladiator told him. "They'll have to run a lot of checks on you after this before they try again. See you tomorrow." Lindsay looked after his visitor with amazement. Then it occurred to him that computers were substituting not only for human judgment but for human conscience as well. And this, he felt certain, was important. Turning in on his contour couch, Lindsay recalled that he had given whiskey to the allergic athlete. He decided then and there that he would be in attendance at the match in the Colosseum that evening. eleven o'clock. His desk was stacked high with messages, written and taped, and all sorts of folk wished to talk with him on the vidarphone. Nina, looking more slovenly than ever, had arranged them neatly, according to their nature and importance in separate little piles. "Next time you tear up the peapatch," she informed him resentfully, "I'm going to get in some help." She eyed him with somber speculation, added, "I hear the SecGen turned in early last night." "You've got big ears," said Lindsay. "I get around," she said. "I'm supposed to keep tabs on you, boss." "Then you must know someone tried to kill me early this morning when I came back from Natchez." Nina's eyes narrowed alarmingly under the glasses that covered them. She said, "Why didn't you report it?" She sounded like a commander-in-chief questioning a junior aide for faulty judgment. "I won," Lindsay said simply. "There was no danger." "Who was it?" she asked. And, when he hesitated, "I'm not going to shout it from the housetops, boss." "It was Pat O'Ryan." "You handled Pat?" she asked, apparently astonished. Something in her tone told him Nina knew his would-be assassin. "Why not?" he countered. "It wasn't much of a brawl." "But Pat... she began, and hesitated. Then, all business again, "We'd better get at some of this. You have a date to be psyched by Dr. Craven at two o'clock." "What for?" he asked, startled. "Routine," she told him. "Everyone connected with UW has to go through it. But cheer up, boss, it doesn't hurt -- much." "Okay," he said resignedly. "Let's get to work." While he dictated Lindsay found himself wondering just who was paying Nina's real salary. If she were a spy for the same group that had sent O'Ryan to kill him, his position was delicate, to put it mildly. But for some reason he doubted it. There were too many groups working at once to make any such simple solution probable. When she departed briefly to superintend a minor matter out of the office, he found himself staring at the wastebasket by his tilt-chair. A heart-shaped jewel-box of transparent crystoplastic lay within it. Curious, Lindsay plucked it out. It had evidently held some sort of necklace and bore the mark of Zoffany's, the Capital's costliest jeweler. Within it was a note that read : For Nina, who lost last night -- as ever... The signature was an indecipherable scrawl. Lindsay stuck the card in his wallet, returned the box to the wastebasket. Who in hell, he wondered, would be sending this sort of gift to his slatternly thick-bodied secretary. The answer seemed obvious. The sender was her real boss, paying her off in a personal way that would obviate suspicion. Lindsay wondered exactly what Nina had lost. He was not surprised when she said she would come along to the psychiatrist's with him after an office lunch of veal pralines, soya buns and coffee. He suggested she might be tired, might want the day off. She said, "Night soil, boss! Between the Sec-Gen's daughter and things like Pat O'Ryan I'm going to keep an eye on you." As if on signal the vidar-screen lit up and Maria's face appeared on it. She had not donned harmopan or glasses and looked quite as lovely as she had the night before. She said, "Zalen, I've got to see you tonight. Something has come up." Lindsay nodded. He figured out his schedule, suggested, "I'm going to the match in the Colosseum. Why not take it in with me?" She shook her head, told him, "I'm tangled up at a banquet for the Egypto-Ethiopian delegation. I can meet you afterward though. How about the Pelican?" "That's not very private," he protested. "All the more reason," she announced. "This is important!" "And seeing me in private isn't?" Despite himself a trace of wounded male entered his tone. Maria laughed softly, her dark eyes dancing. "Perhaps later," she said softly. "You'll understand when I talk to you." She clicked off and the screen was empty. "Damned cat!" said Nina through a haze of cigarette-smoke. "Watch out for her, boss -- she's a cannibal." "And I'm a bit tough and stringy," he told her. Nina said, "Night soil!" again under her breath and led the way out of the office. Lindsay wondered if she were jealous. a comfortable chamber, the north wall of which was all glass brick, the south wall a solid bank of screens and dials. He was a softfaced man who wore lozengeshaped light blue spectacles and seemed afflicted with a slight chin rash. He caught Lindsay's regard, rubbed his chin in mild embarrassment, said, "I've a mild allergy to paranoids." Lindsay looked at Nina distrustfully but she nodded and said, "Go ahead -- he won't break your arm. I'll wait outside." The psychiatrist closed his office door. After settling him in a comfortable contour couch, Dr. Craven opened up with, "I don't want you to have any worries about this test, Ambassador. If anybody's crazy here it's me. According to very sound current theory all psychiatrists are insane. If we weren't we wouldn't be so concerned with sanity in others." Lindsay asked, "Why in hell am I being tested anyway?" Craven replied, "President Giovannini himself came in for a voluntary checkup just last week." As if that were an answer. Lindsay suppressed a desire to ask if the North American president had all his marbles. He had an idea any levity he displayed would register against him. Dr. Craven asked him a number of apparently routine questions which Lindsay answered via a recorder. How old he was, whether he liked flowers, how often he had fought with his schoolmates as a boy, what sort of food he preferred. "Good," the doctor said, pushing aside the microphone on his desk and motioning Lindsay to do likewise. He rose, wheeled a device like an old-fashioned beautician's hairdrier close to the couch, adjusted the helmet to Lindsay's head. "Now," he added, "I want you to think as clearly as you can of your mother. Keep your eyes on the screen and give me as clear a picture as you can." He pressed a button and the whir or a camera, also focussed on the screen, sounded from the wall behind Lindsay. When Dr. Craven nodded, he concentrated and, to his amazement, watched a fuzzy likeness of his maternal parent take form on the screen. This was something new, he decided, and said so. Dr. Craven replied, "Yes -- the psychopic is brand new. But concentrate on the picture, please. You're losing it." It had faded to almost nothing. Lindsay concentrated again, this time brought his maternal parent into clear focus. He felt a little like a man who has never wielded a brush in his life and has suddenly discovered he could paint a perfect portrait. Dr. Craven said nothing for a moment. Then, "Will you try to visualize your mother without the blemish at her temple?" Lindsay tried, and all but lost the picture entirely. He brought it back again, blemish and all, felt a sudden tug of nostalgia for the firm kindly features of the woman who had brought him into the world. A minute or so later Dr. Craven pressed another button and the screen went blank. "That will do very nicely," he said. "You may wait for the psycho-computer verdict outside if you wish." He found Nina sprawled in an anteroom chair with her long legs stuck out before her, contemplating a flashing diamond-and-emerald necklace. He said, before she looked up and saw him, "Business good, Miss Beckwith?" To his amazement Nina began to snivel. And when he asked her what he had done to cause it she snapped angrily, "You big pig, you haven't the sensitivity to understand. Don't ever speak of it as business again. Now I'll have to bathe my eyes when I get home or they will be all swollen and horrible." She removed her glasses and they were swollen. Lindsay had seen too much of allergic reactions since reaching Earth not to know he was looking at another. He was relieved when she put her glasses back on. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to disturb you." "I know it," she replied, "but you did." "Perhaps, if you told me -- " he began. Dr. Craven chose that moment to emerge from his office. "If you'll come back inside," he said. "There are just a few more questions I'd like to ask, Ambassador." "Ask them here," said Lindsay. He had no desire to go back under the drier. Dr. Craven hesitated and rubbed his chin, which was bright red again. He said finally, "Mr. Lindsay, you didn't kill your mother before you were seventeen, did you?" "My mother died last year," said Lindsay, unbelieving. "Incredible!" muttered the psychiatrist, shaking his head. "According to the computer you must have..." He paused again, then said, "I hope this won't embarrass you but you evidently are a man who prefers men to women. The stigmata is definite and shows -- " "Night soil!" Nina exploded her favorite expression before Lindsay could collect his wits for an answer. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Dr. Craven, but this man's a veritable satyr. I caught him looking at my legs yesterday. Ask Maria Bergozza if you want any further proof." "But this is impossible!" the psychiatrist exploded. "According to the computer -- " "Your computer's out of whack," Nina said calmly, and led a stunned Lindsay out of the place. She added, "You didn't deserve that, boss. Not after puffing my eyes up." "Why not just keep your glasss on then?" he countered. They returned to their office in unfriendly silence. Lindsay sent Nina home early and took a copter across the Lake to his own place, there to nap until time for the match at the Colosseum. UW box at the vast arena than at any time since reaching Earth. Since it was a sporting event, the eye-glasses were serried, at least in the lower, higher-priced tiers, by good looking faces, male and female, unadorned. Someone slid into the comfortable contour chair beside him and said, "Evening, Zalen. Enjoying yourself?" Lindsay looked into Senator Fernando Anderson's diamond-shaped raspberry glasses. He said, "So far -- how about you?" Anderson made a face. "I had a date with a gorgeous item but she put me off until later. So I thought I'd look in. Maria arranged a seat in the UW box. Otherwise I'd be watching it on vidar." Lindsay looked up and around and discovered that the vast stadium was packed to the rafters, judging by the glowing cigarette tips that resembled an uncountable horde of frozen fireflies. The court itself was pitch-dark, save for the lines and the net. He had trouble recognizing O'Ryan as his would-be assassin and opponent walked out. Neither player was clearly visible of feature, though shoes, shorts and racquets were luminous, as were the balls they began to hit back and forth across the net. The only other luminous objects, save for the dim exit lights, were the betting boards. Lindsay, who had never seen one save on a vidarscreen before, asked Anderson how they worked. The senator from New Mexico was glad to explain. "Naturally," he said, "since the results of all athletic contests are predicted on the computers, there is no betting on who will win." "No upsets?" Lindsay asked." Anderson laughed, said, "The last time there was an upset -- in the British Australian test cricket matches three years ago -- a computer investigation proved bribery and there was a hell of a stink." "Then how do you manage to bet?" Lindsay asked. "Simple," said the Senator. "Naturally, in case of accidental injury, all bets are void. But otherwise the betting is on the percentage of variation between the computer prediction and the actual play of the contest. There -- you can see the computer line on the big board over there. The line of actual play will be red when it comes on. That way there is plenty of chance for betting on points, games, sets or match." The man from Mars studied the predictor line for the match. It revealed that Pat O'Ryan, after a fast start, was due to slump in the second set, recover in the third and polish off his opponent, YamatoRau from Indonesia, in the fourth set with the loss of but one game. "Looks like a shoo-in for O'Ryan," he said. "Right?" "It ought to be," the Senator replied. "He's taken Yamato-Rau in six of their seven previous matches. "The second time they played he had a sprained wrist that affected his volleying." "Care to make a bet?" Lindsay asked his companion. "Sure -- why not?" Anderson countered, "Percentage of variation for game, set or match?" "I'd like to bet on the Indonesian to win," said Lindsay quietly. IV at Lindsay sharply. He said, "You know something." "Against the computer-prophecy?" Lindsay countered. Anderson backed down and gave him a hundred to one on a fiftycredit bet. "You can't win, of course," he murmured, "but if you do it will be worth it." The match began and the hum of the great crowd's conversation slowly quieted. At first it went according to the computer prophecy. from either hand and smashing and volleying with deadly accuracy from all parts of the court, Pat O'Ryan held complete command of the match. There was something hypnotic about the play -- the clean ping of racquet strings on luminous ball, the swift flight of the ball, a streak of light in the darkness, the flash of another racquet, the long and intricate tactics of each exchange, broken only occasionally by the flash of a light that betokened an error or an ace and the resulting alteration of the scoreboard. The red line crept in zigzag fashion along the computer board as the match progressed, veering above or below the white line of the prophecy but always returning to cross or even to cover it briefly. Big O'Ryan tqok the first set six games to three on a single service break against the Indonesian champion. "Money in the bank," said Anderson in Lindsay's ear as the players changed courts following the first game of the second set, which Yamato-Rau had taken at fifteen. "Candy from a baby.""It's barely begun," said Lindsay with a confidence he was far from feeling. He glanced at the clock above the scoreboard, saw that it was scarcely ten o'clock. Sickly he recalled that O'Ryan had told him it took twenty-four hours for his grain allergy to take effect. Lindsay had given him the drink barely seventeen hours before. He began to wish he had not bet so thoughtlessly. The second set went to deuce twice before Yamato-Rau broke O'Ryan's service to run it out at eight-six. This was two games more than the computer had calculated and caused considerable uproar in the crowd. "I hear you had some trouble last night," Anderson told him. "Nothing serious," said Lindsay, wondering how much the senator knew. Dammit, he thought, he wished he didn't like the powerhungry politician. He wondered if Anderson were behind the attempt of the morning -- and if he were behind it, why? There could, he decided, be all sorts of Machiavellian motives hidden beneath that smiling face. Then the match got under way once more, and Lindsay concentrated on the play. Once again O'Ryan seemed to be in command -- just as the computer had foretold. Games went to fivetwo in his favor. Then, as the players changed courts once more, the tall Irishman paused to towel off -- and paid special attention to rubbing his eyes. At that his string ran out. Four straight times his swiftest drives hit the top of the net and bounced back into his own court. He blew his service thanks to a pair of doublefaults and three minutes later Yamato-Rau had taken the set while the crowd sat in stunned silence. The fourth set was pitiful. O'Ryan played like a blind man and the Indonesian ran it out with the loss of exactly one point per game. The red line on the computer-board yawed wildly toward the bottom instead of following the white line as it should have. "Keep your credits," Lindsay told Senator Anderson. "You were right. As it turned out I did know something after all." "It's impossible!" cried the senator. "But it's cheap at the price -- here!" He withdrew his wallet and began pulling out crisp hundredcredit notes. "Look out!" cried Lindsay. Around them the stands had erupted into violence. While the players were shaking hands at the net, angry -- and, Lindsay suspected, frightened -- bettors and spectators leaped the low barriers and swarmed out onto the dark court. They hemmed the players in, driving them toward the wall directly under the UW box in which Lindsay and Anderson were sitting. Someone threw something and Yamato-Rau stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. Swinging his racquet like one of his ancestors' shillalehs, O'Ryan chargedto his rescue, pulled him to his feet, covered his retreat to the wall. There Lindsay was able to pull first the Indonesian, then the Irishman, up into the box. "Damned fool!" said Anderson. "Getting us into a riot." But a moment later Lindsay saw the senator swinging hard at an angry customer with a fist in which his wallet was still clenched. The man made a grab for it as someone else hit Anderson over the head with a plastic bottle. He dropped across a contour-chair, letting his wallet fall from unconscious fingers. UW police formed a protective wall around them and Pat O'Ryan, recognizing Lindsay, said, "Thanks, Ambassador. I guess I owe you a couple. If my eyes hadn't gone bad on me..." Lindsay was tempted to admit his guilt in that matter but decided against it. He had no desire to be caught in another riot. He picked up Anderson's wallet, put it back in the still unconscious senator's breast pocket. A white-clad interne was brought through the police cordon, knelt beside Anderson and began to make repairs. "You'd better leave now, Ambassador," said one of the boss policeman respectfully to Lindsay when the senator had been carted away on a stretcher. Lindsay nodded. Then he noticed a slip of paper lying beneath the chair across which Anderson had fallen. It read: rec. # cdt. I em.  di. neck. It was from Zoffany, the jeweler. "What the hell!" Lindsay discovered he was speaking aloud. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and followed the officer through a maze of underground passages out of the Colosseum. He still thought, What the hell! What could Nina have reported about him that was worth that sort of money to the senator? was efficient, as he realised when a bowing motley-clad waiter captain smilingly ushered him to a secluded table for two in a banquet niche of the Pelican. It was Lindsay's first visit to an Earthly afterdark cafe and he instinctively compared it with certain of its imitations in the comparatively small cities of his native planet. It was sleeker, better run, far more beautiful. Its general color scheme was darkly opalescent, subtly glowing, flattering to its clients. And, of course, most of them needed flattering, at least to Lindsay's alien eyes. He noted here a pair of scimitar-shaped spectacles whose turquoise-studded rims caught the light like a pair of small lemon pies, there a harmopan-covered female face that glowed pale green in the darkness. But even more numerous and decorative than at the stadium, the gladiators and courtesans were present, reinforced by a larding of vidar stars visiting or entertaining in the capital. And these, Lindsay admitted to himself with awed reluctance, outshone in sheer beauty and handsomeness any group of Martian humans. They ought to, he thought. Direct descendants, figuratively if not actually, of the advertising-Hollywood beauty fetish of the previous century, they were selected almost from birth for their callings and trained rigorously from childhood on, the males to become athletes or actors, the females courtesans or actresses. There was no race among them, for their only standards were beauty and physical fitness, no creed but achievement in their lines of individual entertainment. He caught sight of a lissome EuroAfrican, the classic exoticism of her flower-petal face illumined by joyous laughter beneath a glossy neo-Watusi hairdo, as she glided gracefully over the dance-floor in the arms of a hunchharnessed and bespectacled partner. The gladiators and courtesans alone seemed to find joy in living. Lindsay, who had seldom been unhappy in his active existence, felt his sympathies and heart go out to them. He followed the progress of a tiny Oriental model whose face was alive with good-humor as she swept past his table, her exquisite figure stressed by a glittering jeweled sheathe. "You really should wear glasses -- or else learn not to stare," said Maria, appearing from nowhere and sitting down at the table. She made amends by extending a warm soft hand to grip one of his. Though she wore her glasses and her hair was severely pulled back, he had no difficulty in recalling the fact that, unclothed, she was lovely. "Why don't you get in on the act?" he suggested, nodding toward a pair of models emerging from the harmopan room. "All you'd have to do would be to remove your specs and harness and let your hair down." "You're sweet, Zale," she said, pleased. Then, with a sigh, "But there's a lot more to it than that." "You do all right that way too," he told her boldly. She slapped the back of his hand and then, growing quickly serious, said, "Zale, I didn't ask you to meet me for that. I've got so much to ask you -- so much to tell. Did you really find an assassin waiting for you when you got home last night? And did you kill him?" "Yes and no," said Lindsay. "I did find one and I didn't kill him. In fact we parted good friends." "You Martians..." She sighed, then said, "And I understand you have already broken two computers -- this afternoon at the psychiatrist's and this evening at the Colosseum. It's the most marvelous news, darling. I've got to know how you did it." "I'm damned if I know how I fouled up Dr. Craven's computer," he told her. "I'm still trying to figure it out." Her face fell. She said, "I was hoping you had something... But never mind." Then, brightening, "But you're driving them crazy. They ran Dr. Craven's results through Elsac late this afternoon and got the same answer. The records checked that you didn't kill your mother and I know you're not an invert." She laughed softly. Spurred by the erotic atmosphere, plus the dizzying speed of recent events and Maria's nearness, he said, "Let's get out of here and go to my place." Her hand covered his again atop the table. "I wish we could," she said wistfully. "I like you very much, Zale darling. But this is too important. We haven't time. But what about the tennis tonight? There's going to be an investigation, of course. Won't you tell me how you did it?" "Not until I've figured out both," he said. "I may be on the track of something or it may be sheer chance. Until I understand what happened at Dr. Craven's I'm simply not sure of my facts." "But there simply isn't time, darling," Maria told him. "This is really what I must talk to you about. We got word today that President Giovannini is going to unveil Giac any day now." "Decided against your sabotage plan?" he asked her. She wrinkled her pert little nose. "What's the use? They'd simply repair it. Besides, it's much too well guarded. Zale, you're our only hope now." He said "If I'm right, and I'm beginning to hope I am, it won't matter whether Giac is unveiled or not. In fact, it might be more effective if it were." Maria drummed on the table with nervous knuckles. "But you don't understand, Zale. You don't think for a minute that the Ministry of Computation is taking this lying down. I got word less than half an hour ago that they are preparing to force your recall as an unsuitable plenipotentiary." "They can try." Lindsay spoke grimly. This was a move he had failed to forsee, though he supposed he should have. Inadvertently he was becoming a major threat to the crockery in the china shop that was Earth. "They can do it," Maria said simply. "Zale, these people have become absolutely dependent upon their computers. They aren't going to let their entire creed be wrecked by one Martian." "What do you want me to do?" he dsked simply. "Come with me -- now," she said, once more gripping his hand. "A group of us want to talk to you, to find out how you have done it." He looked at her, found her adorable in her earnestness. He said, "And if I play guinea pig with your friends, then you and I... ?" "Of course -- as soon as there's time," she told him. "You are a little bundle of fanaticism, as well as of sex," he told her. "I should think at least, since you seem to have such an inside track, you could manage to get my recall deferred." "That's just it!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I see everything, I hear everything -- yet I can do nothing. Papa thinks I'm merely a foolish female creature and his attitude blocks me at every turn." Lindsay realized again how fundamentally frustrated she was, wondered if she would ever find a completely satisfactory release. Lindsay decided to play along. "All right," he said. "Shall we go?" "Thanks, darling," she promised. "We'd better go separately. There will be a blue copter-cab waiting outside when you leave." She leaned across the table to brush his lips briefly with hers, squeezed his hand and glided off. waited for the check, just how foolhardly he was being, allowing himself to be summoned to a meeting of palace conspirators. It could very easily be a trap, whether Maria knew it or not. It could be a ruse to add fuel to the fire being lit under him for his recall as a legate persona non grata on Earth. "You haven't forgotten our date, have you darling?" The voice was throatily reproachful above him and he looked up in surprise at a glittering female figure, who seemed to be clad entirely in blazShe was tall and blonde, her hair an ocean helmet of gold, sprinkled with gems. Her face was beautifully boned, with broad cheeks and forehead pierced by a decided widow's peak. Light green eyes slanted upward beneath brows like the wings of some tiny graceful bird. Nose, lips and chin gained fascination from the perfection they skirted but just escaped. Face, arms, upper bosom and shoulders wore the even tawny golden tan that only some blondes can achieve. Her figure, ashimmer with gems, was lithe of waist, firmly full of breast and pelvis, moved with the enticing grace of an Indonesian temple dancer as she slipped into the seat Maria had so recently vacated. "Sorry, your highness," he said with a look of honest admiration. "I didn't know we had a date." "We have now," she stated. She laid a handbag solidly encrusted with diamonds, emeralds and rubies on the table, said to the dwarf waiter, "Bring me the usual, Joe -- and give Ambassador Lindsay another of whatever he's drinking." At any other time, Lindsay thought. He said, "I regret this more than you'll ever know, my dear, but I've got a copter-cab waiting for me outside." "It will keep." The girl pouted prettily, then leaned toward him and said huskily, "We'll have just one here. Then we can go to my place. It's just outside of Biloxi, almost on the Gulf. We can watch the dawn come up over the water. We can -- " "Stop twisting my arm," said Lindsay, trying to keep his thoughts in focus. Who had sent this girl and why? And what, he wondered, awaited him in Biloxi. He got up, tossed a twenty-credit note on the table. "This will pay the check," he informed her. "Not so fast," said the houri, rising with him. Trying to ignore her, he headed toward the door as fast as he could. She kept after him and his ears burned as he plunged out into the night, saw the blue copter-cab waiting with its door open at the curb. But when he tried to plunge toward it he was halted by an arm whose sharp-faceted jeweled adornments cut his adam's apple. He gasped but the girl got in front of him, waving her bag. There was a faint popping noise as the door closed and the coptercab swiftly and silently darted away. Stunned by the swiftness of events, Lindsay was utterly incapable of resistance when his decorative tormentor thrust him into another vehicle. As they took off he said, "I suppose this is the prelude to another assassination try." "Night soil!" said a familiar voice. "What the hell do you think I just saved you from, boss?" word which, he thought later, was singularly revealing as to his native flair for diplomacy. He said, briefly and succinctly, "Huh?" "Listen, my fine unfeathered Martian friend." She sounded like a primary school teacher addressing an overgrown and somewhat backward pupil. "Somebody fired a glass bullet at you from that cab." . "How do you...?" he began helplessly. For answer she turned on the copter-cab light, revealing the back of a uniformed chauffeur, and showed him her handbag. There was a slight tear in one side of its begemmed surface and, when she shook it, bits of glass fell to the floor. "Careful," she warned when he reached for the bag. "It was probably packed with poison." Then, "Can you think of a better shield than diamonds?" He said, "Ulp!" Unquestionably, now that she had revealed herself, this glittering creature was his slovenly office Nina. Seeking desperately to recover what had at best been a shaky boss-secretary relationship, he said, "Where are you taking me?" "Out of the city, boss," she informed him. "We really are going to my place in Biloxi. You're much too hot a property to be allowed to wander around loose. Two tries in less than twenty-four hours." "Then Maria..." he said, wonderingly. Nina picked his thought up crisply. "We don't know whether your little playmate put the finger on you consciously or not. But she did it. Some of that sweet little crew she pals around with are desperate. They don't believe they can lick the computers and their only hope is to foment incidents that will lead to an interplanetary war. Nice kids!" "But why pick on me?" he asked. "From what Maria said tonight I'm their one hope of beating the machines." Nina shook her head at him sadly. "And you're the best brain our Martian cousins could send us. Here it is in words of one syllable. Maria's mob wants war. They believe they can light the powder train by arranging the assassination of a Martian Plenipotentiary. "Meanwhile your speech yesterday and your fouling up Doc Craven's computer this afternoon, and whatever you did at the tennis tonight, have the Computer crowd screaming for your recall before you upset their little red wagon." She paused, added, "Naturally Maria's crowd wants to have you killed before you become a mere private citizen of Mars. Once you're removed from office you aren't important enough to cause a war." "Good God!" said Lindsay as the double pattern became apparent. Then, curiously, "And just whom do you represent, Nina?" She eyed him steadily, mockingly for a moment. Then she said, "Let's just say for now that I represent the Model's Union. We don't want any wartime austerity wrecking our pitch. Will that do?" "I guess it will have to," he said. Then, plucking a diamond-andemerald necklace from among the half-dozen about her throat, "You certainly didn't give poor Anderson much for his money." "Stop it!" she snapped. "Do you want my eyes to swell up again? In a way what happened tonight was all your fault. Fernando and I were going to keep close tabs on you but you fouled me up with your beastly remark about my business at Doc Craven's and then put poor Fernando out of commission by getting mixed up in that riot at the Colosseum. I barely made the Pelican in time." He thought of giving Nina the receipt from Zoffany's in his pocket. decided not to take the chance. So. he said, "Is Fernando working for the Model's Union too?" "Stop trying to be funny," she told him. "Night soil! You make me so damned mad. Letting that little tramp Maria nail you." "At the time there wasn't much alternative," he said. Then, eyeing her closely, "How come you're mixed up in UW politics? I thought models were strictly for fun and games." Nina said matter-of-factly, "I won top model rating when I was seventeen. I still hold it and I'm twenty-six now. A girl can get tired of being and doing the same thing -- even in my profession. Besides, I've got brains. So I try to use them." "How come you decided to be my secretary?" "We drew lots and I lost," she informed him. searchlight to a flagged terrace in front of a dark cottage just off the beach. "Thanks, Bob," said Nina. "Tell the boys to stand by with their guard beams up." Then, to Lindsay, "Come on, boss, let's get out of this heap." She walked swiftly toward the cottage, pressed something. Soft lights came on, revealing a charming simulated wood dwelling in the fine antique Frank Lloyd Wright tradition. She ushered him into a delightfully gay bathroom looking out on the water, said, "Wait here while I get this armor off." Lindsay felt a slight qualm as he considered what being a top model at seventeen must mean. And then he thought, Why not? Certainly he had no claim on Nina's morals. He doubted if anyone had a claim of any kind on her. She emerged, looking unexpectedly like a young girl in simple clout and cup-bra, which exposed most of her gorgeously tanned body. Her hair, innocent of jewels like the rest of her, was clubbed back simply with some sort of clip. She lit a cigarette and said, "Now -- how the hell are you fouling up the computers?" "I'm not," he told her promptly. "At least not in the case of the tennis match. I just happened to know something about Pat O'Ryan the people who fed facts to the computer didn't." "That goon Pat!" she said. "He's so damned dumb." "You know him well?" he asked with a trace of jealousy. "I know him." She dismissed it with a flick of her cigarette. "It's a good thing you knew judo too, boss. But what did you do to him that fouled up the match?" "While he was out cold I gave him a shot of whiskey to bring him 'round," Lindsay told her. "He didn't know about it and I didn't tell him when he informed me about his grain-alcohol allergy. So for once the computer didn't get full facts. And I had them." For the first time Lindsay basked in a smile of approval from Nina. She said. "And then you had to mess me up at Doc Craven's so I couldn't sit in on the match." "I'm sorry about that," he said sincerely. "You might brief me so I don't do it again." "Well..." She hesitated. "I don't want to set myself off. It's not uncommon among us -- models. You see, we're proud of our careers,, not like the two-credit whores who wear glasses and harnesses. And it hurts us when someone refers to our work as business. You see, there's nothing really commercial about it. So when you -- " "But how the devil was I to know you were a model?" he asked her. "I know," she said illogically. "But it still made me mad." Then, frowning, "But if the computer was wrong because of incomplete knowledge at the Colosseum, what was wrong at Doc Craven's?" Lindsay said, "I'm damned if I know." "We've got to know, with the president ready to put Giac to work." "I meant to tell you about that," said Lindsay. "Don't worry," Nina informed him. "Your table at the Pelican was wired." "Why are you against computers?" Lindsay asked her. She dropped her smoke in a disposal-tray, said, "Never mind why -- let's just accept the fact that I am. And not for Fernando Anderson's reason either. He just wants power." "And what do you want?" "Me?" Her eyebrows rose in surprise. "Why, I just want to have jun!" She extended her arms and flapped her hands like birds. Then, again reverting to seriousness, "I wish you'd tell me everything that went on at Doc Craven's yesterday. Dammit, his office wasn't wired." Lindsay went through it, as nearly word for word as he could, then did it again when no answer was quickly forthcoming. Nina listened, her perfect forehead marred by a frown. Finally she said, "Let's take a dip. It's almost dawn." She removed what clothing she wore and Lindsay did likewise. They felt the refreshing caress of the cool Gulf water on their skins -- but that was all the caressing there was. Nina, unlike Maria, was all business despite the near-blatant perfection of her charms. Back in the bathroom she said, "The only thing I can think of is that stigmata business. Why should you imagine a mark on your mother's forehead?" "Because she had one," he told her bluntly. "It was not unattractive -- my father used to call it her beauty mark." Nina ran long slim fingers through her water-dark hair and said incredulously, "You mean blemishes are not removed automatically at birth on Mars?" "Why, no," said Lindsay, surprised. "It's entirely up to the individual -- or the parents." "And Doc Craven asked no questions that would lead to the truth?" the girl asked, blinking. When Lindsay shook his head she suddenly grabbed him and kissed him and did a little dance of sheer joy. "It's simply too good to be true! Two computers fouled in one day through missing information!" "You're right, of course," he admitted. "But I'm damned if I see how it docs us any good." "You idiot!" she shook him. "It clears the whole situation. It means that the computers cannot give accurate answers according to the symbolic logic tables unless they get full information. And you have proved two breakdowns in the inescapable human element -- the information feeding -- just like that!" She snapped her fingers. "It means we've got the whole computer-cult on the hip. I could kiss you again, you big goon." She did so. "Cut it out," he said. "I'm not made of brass." She said, "Night soil," amiably. What he might have done he was never to know, for a buzzer sounded and Nina moved quickly to a walltalkie. She said. "All right, Bob, you say he's clean?" Then, a moment later, "Better let him in and say his piece." And, to Lindsay, "We've got company. Dmitri Alenkov -- met him?" Lindsay frowned. "You mean the Soviet charge d'affaires? I met him at the reception last week. Dreadful little lizard." "Dmitri might surprise you," she said enigmatically. Lindsay almost said night soil himself in exasperation. Instead and peevishly he asked, "Is there anybody you don't know -- intimately?" She laughed. "Of course," she said, "I don't know many women." the bathroom. He was a languid mincing creature whose decadence glowed around him like phosphorescence around a piece of rotted swampwood. He said, "I hope I am not intruding." "That depends," Nina told him. "I'd like to know how you traced us here so quickly." "My sweet," said the Russian in intensely Oxford Esperanto, "you and your friend's" -- with another bow toward Lindsay -- "little affair at the Pelican was witnessed this evening. When the two of you departed together, heading eastward, and Ambassador Lindsay could not be reached in his apartment... He paused delicately. So this, thought Lindsay, was a descendant of one of the Red Commissars whose fanatic and chill austerity had terrorized the free world of a century ago. Lindsay knew something of modern Soviet history, of course. There had been no real counter-revolution. Instead the gradual emergence of the scientists over their Marxist political rulers had been a slow process of erosion. Once computer rule was inaugurated in the North American Republic and swept the Western World, the scientists had simply taken over real power. The oncepowerful Politburo and its sub-committees became obsolete. Alenkov was stressing this very point. He said, "So you see, we, the best blood of Russia, are forced by these machines to live the lives of outcast children. Naturally we resent it. And when, after so many long years of waiting, we learn that one man has succeeded in foiling the computers where no man has succeeded before, we want to know his secret. We must have it." Nina spoke first. She said, "Dmitri, the secret, as you call it, has been right there all along for any of us to see. It just happens that Ambassador Lindsay fell into it head first." "Thanks for the 'Ambassador' anyway," Lindsay said drily. Nina quelled him with a frown. "The computer weakness," she said, "lies in the human element. Now figure that out for yourself." Alenkov's brows all but met in the middle of his forehead and his mouth became a little round O under the twin commas of his mustache. He said, "I see." He left shortly afterward on a note of sadness, rousing himself only to say to Lindsay, "Ambassador, you are a very lucky man." His eyes caressed Nina's near-nude figure. "That," Lindsay told him, "is what you think." When he had departed Lindsay suddenly realized he was exhausted. He sank back in a contour chair and let fatigue sweep over him. But Nina paced the bathroom floor like a caged cat. Finally she went to the wall-talkie, gave a number in a low voice. She pushed some sort of signal button several times, then swore and said, "Better not sleep now, boss. We're cut off." It brought him to with a start. "What do you mean?" he asked. "Somebody or something is jamming our communicator." She opened a concealed cabinet, apparently part of the bathroom wall, drew from it a couple of light but deadly looking blasters, and tossed one onto the contour chain in front of him. "You know how to work one of these things?" she asked. "Better drop the weapons," a quiet voice said from the doorway behind them. "You haven't got a chance." The speaker wore the light blue tunicall that was the summer uniform of the Army of the Republic of North America. His cap and shoulder-boards were bright with silver lace and he held a singularly ugly little automatic weapon cradled across one forearm. Nina and Lindsay dropped their weapons. But the girl's back was up. Her slanting eyes crackled green fire as she said, "What right have you bastards got to come busting in here without a warrant?" "Sorry," said the officer with do have a warrant. Remember, Miss Beckwith, this cottage is not United World's soil." He tossed an official looking document which Nina caught, motioned a couple of his men to pick up her weapons. "All right," she said after scanning the warrant. "What do you want?" "Ambassador Lindsay," was the reply. "We have been ordered to ensure that no harm comes to him while he is on American soil." "I can read!" snapped the girl. "There's going to be hell to pay over this." Then, to Lindsay, "We can't stop them now but they can't hold you. I can see to that. Just try to keep your big dumb blundering self out of any extra trouble till we can take steps -- will you promise me that, boss?" "I'll try," said Lindsay. ton -- or rather to Sherwood Forest, in Annapolis, where the summer White House sprawled over and beneath its landscaped acres. To a man from Mars it was very green, very lush, very beautiful. Lindsay's first impression of famed President Giovannini was that the famous elected leader of the North American Republic was composed mostly of secretaries. But at last one of them -- the seventh or eighth -- said gravely, "If you'll just step this way, please," to Lindsay and motioned for the Army officer to remain where he was. He was admitted to the bathroom of the man who had sent for him so summarily. The president proved to be unexpectedly like some of the governors of Lindsay's home planet -- incisive, unaffected, easily articulate. Physically he was stocky, of middle height, with a round, firmly fleshed sensitive face. He wore huaraches and bright blue shorts, no glasses or distortion harness. He waved Lindsay to a contour chair beside his own, said, "Sorry I had to have you hauled here this way. I was afraid you'd get killed if I didn't. Do you have any idea of the uproar you've caused in the past two days, young man?" Lindsay, somewhat taken aback by the president's abruptness, said, "Well, I knew some small groups were upset but..." "Take a look," the president told him, waving toward a quartet of vidar screens on the wall. Over one of them was the legend, New Orleans, over another, New York, over a third, Los Angeles, over the fourth, Chicago. "Those are live shots," Giovannini added. Lindsay was appalled. Each of them showed rioting crowds and defensive police action; the commentaries cried their confusion. However, the Martian got the drift quickly enough. Apparently his recent activities had driven the neurotic Earthlings to violence. There appeared to be two chief factions. One of them, smashing and swarming and screaming its outrage, was demanding the abolishment of computer government. The other, equally violent and even more numerous, was after a villain named Zalen Lindsay. Seeing that Lindsay was beginning to understand what was happening, the president pressed a button that turned off all the vidar screens and voices. He said, "I could switch to any of our other cities -- to cities in South America, India, Western Europe, England. They're especially bitter toward you in England." "I'm beginning to accept the fact -- if not to understand," said Lindsay. The president said, "Lindsay, from the point of view of your planet you have done nothing improper. But from the point of view of this planet..." He let silence and a shrug of thick shoulders finish the sentence. "I had no idea," Lindsay began, "that conditions on Earth... He let his own voice trail off. Giovannini finished it for him. "You had no idea people on Earth were so damned neurotic," he said, and sighed. Then, "Lindsay -- call me Johnny, will you? All my friends do -- Lindsay, for generations now people by and large have been forfeiting confidence in themselves to confidence in computers. "They have had good reason. Computer judgment has been responsible for the first true age of world peace in history. It may not be healthy but it's a damn sight healthier than war. And it has transformed this republic from an unwieldy group of states into a controlled anarchy that can be run by pushbuttons under ordinary conditions." He paused while the Martian lit a cigarette, then went on with, "Thanks first to Sylac, then to Elsac, we learned that Vermont was happiest under its Town Meeting method, North Carolina needed its oligarchy, while my native state, California, is much better off divided in two. Texas became happy with its triple legislature -- they never are happy unless they have a little more of everything down there. It was the same in other countries -- Canada, South America, Spain..." "And England?" Lindsay said softly. The president sighed again. "England," he admitted, "is a bit of a problem -- out of all proportion to its size and current importance. But the British are stubborn about their institutions. They've hung onto a Royal Family a hundred years longer than anyone else. We can hardly expect them to give up their beloved socialism so soon." "Just as long as Mars is not expected to pay for this indulgence, it's quite all right with my people," Lindsay told him. "What's your first name -- Zalen?" the president asked. "Well, Zalen, I know it's a problem but we all have to give a little or crowd somebody out. Zalen, people are getting killed on account of you right now." "I've nearly been killed a couple of times myself." "I know. Regrettable," said Giovannini. "The UW crowd never has understood security. That's why I had to kidnap you, Zalen. Couldn't have you killed, you know. Not now anyway." "Glad you feel that way, Johnny," Lindsay told him drily. "But hasn't it occurred to you that if people here are so easily set off it might be a good idea to knock out this computer business once and for all?" The president puffed on his cigarette. Then he said, "Zale, twenty years ago, maybe even ten, it could have been done. Now it's too late. dollar investment in Giac. We've got to give them an absolute computer, one that will remove forever the basic distrust of computer judgment that underlies the neuroses you just mentioned." "Quite possibly," said Lindsay. "But I haven't actually done a damned thing myself to undermine computer judgment. The mistakes have been made by the so-called experts who have fed their machines inadequate information. Those mistakes were infantile. They suggest some sort of neurosis on the part of the feeders. They could be mistake-prone, you know." President Giovannini chuckled again. "Of course they're mistakeprone, Zalen," he said. "Some of them, anyway. And it's getting worse. That's the real reason for Giac. Wait'll you see it!" "You think I'm going to be around that long, Johnny?" Lindsay asked. "I understand I'm to be sent back to Mars -- if I live that long." "No, Lindsay, we need you -- I'll explain in a moment. And we aren't going to let you die and become a martyr for generations of anti-computerites. We can't have that now, can we?" "I'll go along with you on it," said Lindsay, wondering what the president was leading up to. "Good!" The president beamed at him. "Zalen -- I want # vu to be the first person to put Giac through a public test. That's how much I trust that machine. I want you, the man who has fouled up two computers, including Elsac, to try her out." The governors of Mars might not approve but after the uproar he had caused on this mission they could hardly object. President Giovannini's scheme was fully up to that renowned statesman's reputation for political astuteness. The more Lindsay thought it over the more beautiful was its simplicity. Mere word that he was to conduct the first public test would quell the rioting. And unless Lindsay could show this mightiest of all symbolic logic computers to be fallible, computer rule would be entrenched on Earth as never before. But what if, in some way, he succeeded in confounding the computer? Lindsay shuddered as he thought of the rioting he had so recently witnessed on the vidarscreens. His face must have revealed his distress for the president said, "You're worn out, Zalen. Can't have that, you know. Not with the big test corning tomorrow." Lindsay barely remembered leaving the president and being led to a sleeping chamber somewhere in the vast mansion. When he woke up it was dark and Nina was perched on the edge of his contour couch, looking unexpectedly demure in a grey bolo with white collar and cuffs. He said, as articulate as usual when she surprised him, "Hi." "About time you woke up," she said. "Do you know you snore?" "I can't help it," he told her. Then, coming fully awake, "How the devil did you get here?" "I walked," she informed him succinctly. She stood up, her magnificent figure silhouetted against the light. "Better get dressed -- your duds are over there." She nodded toward a walldrobe. "I'll wait in the bathroom." She breezed out. When he looked at the clothing he was to wear he sensed that Nina had selected it for him. It was a little brighter in color, a little more daring in cut, than what he would have picked for himself. Nina was placing jewels carefully in her hair, which she had released to form a sleek halo around her magnificent head, when he entered the bathroom. A small palisade of glittering jeweled hairpins protruded from her mouth. She had shed her demure bolo and stood revealed in glittering black bodice-bra and evening skirt-clout. After placing the last jewel in her hair she swung about and said, "There -- how do I look?" "Gorgeous," he told her. "You look a bit dull," she said. She dug a box out of a travel-bag placed in a corner of the room. "Here," she said. "Put this on -- left side." "This" proved to be a magnificent sunburst decoration, a glittering diamond-encrusted star. He said, "What is it?" "Grand Order of the United Worlds -- a fine diplomat you are! I picked it up for you this afternoon before flying here. Just stick it on..." She came over, took it from him, pressed it firmly against his bolo till the suction grips caught hold. He put his arms around her. She let him hold her a moment, then pushed clear in the immemorial gesture of women dressed for a party who do not want to have their grooming mussed. "Not now," she said. "We'll have plenty of time." "Not for what's worrying me," he said. "Nina, I've got to put Giac through its paces in front of the whole world tomorrow. And I don't know what to ask it. I've got a blind spot where symbolic logic is concerned." "Don't fret yourself," said the girl calmly. "I'm not worried about you. Not after what you've managed to do to all the other computers you've faced. Come on -- we're having dinner with the president." "Who the hell are you anyway?" he asked her bluntly. "You don't even look the same." She laughed. "I should hope not," she told him. "After all, I could hardly grace the president's table as a mere UW secretary -- or as a New Orleans top model. Come on!" He went -- and got his second shock when President Giovannini greeted Nina with a manner as close to obsequiousness as that professionally free-and-easy politician could muster. He said, "My dear Miss Norstadt-Ramirez. I do hope you'll forgive me for ordering such summary action this morning. If I'd had the slightest idea..." "I was boiling," Nina told him. "I was just about ready to order Actnapolitan to pull the props out from under you when the riots started. Then I blessed your shiny little head and came up here." "I am honored," said the president. proceedings in a fog, was even more laconic than a clipped British envoy who, along with a recovered Senator Anderson, was a member of the party. "Don't take it so hard," Anderson whispered. "Nina is just about the best-kept secret in this hemisphere. If I weren't one of the few who's been in on it all along..." He shrugged eloquently. Lindsay said nothing. He couldn't. So Nina -- his fresh slatternly secretary, the courtesan of the world capital -- was also Coranina Norstadt-Ramirez, the heiress who owned almost half of Earth ! He felt like a quadruply-plated idiot. He knew about NorstadtRamirez -- who didn't, whether on Earth or Mars or the space-stations circling Venus while that planet's atmosphere was being artificially altered to make it fit for human habitation? She was a fantastic glamorous lady of mystery, the ultimate heiress, the young woman to whom inexorably, thanks to North America's matriarchal era during the twentieth century, the control of most of its mightiest corporations and trust funds had descended. And she was Lindsay's secretary. No wonder, he thought miserably, she had never sounded quite sincere about calling him boss. Why, she virtually owned his home planet as well. He watched her covertly across the table, poised, amused, alert, occasionally witty -- and so damnably attractive. He wished he were dead. She caught his regard, scowled and stuck her tongue out at him. He thought, Why, you little...! Somehow she got them out of the chatter after dinner, got him back to his suite. There, regarding him sternly, she said, "Zale, you aren't going to be stuffy about this, are you?" "I can't help it," he replied. "If you'd only told me..." He read sympathy in her green eyes. But she merely shrugged and said, "Result of a lifetime of keeping myself under wraps." She sat on a contour chair, patted a place for him alongside. She said, "I'm the richest single person there has ever been -- you know that. It isn't my fault. It just happened. I didn't deserve or want or need it. But it is a hell of a responsibility. Since I'm responsible for so much it seemed important to me to know how people felt. After all we act because we feel. And thanks to a few good friends like Fernando Anderson I've been able to get away with it." "Why me?" he asked her. "Why pick on me?" Her expression softened. One of her hands crept into his. "One of the nicest things about you, Zale, is the fact that you don't realise just how special you are." "I'm not so special on Mars," he told her. "No?" Her eyebrows rose deMartians select you as their first Plenipotentiary to the UW and you're not special? Zale, you're an absolute woolly lamb. "There's more to it than that. I've never been to Mars. I should have, but I simply haven't had the time. So I decided the best way to find out about Mars at second hand was to work with you in some capacity that would let you be yourself." "A filthy, underhanded, thoroughly feminine trick," he said gently and kissed her. Then, frowning into her green eyes, "But why are you so dead set against computer judgment?" "Isn't it obvious?" she asked. "I've got a tremendous stake in this world. Kicking around it as I have I've been able to see what is happening. I'm damned if I'm going to have my property managed and run by a bunch of people who make mistakes because they're too neurotic to make decisions. Look at them!" Her voice became edged with disgust. Lindsay said, "I see. Listen, honey, I'd like to sleep with you tonight." She looked surprised but not displeased by his bluntncss. "Of course, darling," she told him. "How much will it cost me?" he asked her. She froze -- then her eyes began to fill and she sniffled. He said, "You know I didn't mean that. Dammit, I just wanted to show you you're a neurotic yourself." She slapped him hard enough to tilt him off the contour chair. She rose haughtily, still sniffing. Lindsay stretched out a hand and caught one of her ankles and tripped her up. She tottered, gave vent to a startled, "Awk,!", fell backward into the pool-tub. He dived in after her, caught her when she came up, spluttering, gripped her shoulders hard. Her eyes blazed green fire at him. She said, "How dare you do that to me, you moron!" He said, "If I hadn't I'd probably never have seen you again." She collapsed into his arms. Later -- much later -- as Nina was about to leave him for her own suite, he asked, "Honeycomb, what did you lose that caused Fernando to give you that necklace?" "I nearly lost you," she replied from the doorway. "I bet him Maria wouldn't get you that night. And lost. So Fernando sent the necklace as compensation." "Quite a large compensation," said Lindsay drily. Nina shrugged. "Not for Fernando," she told him. "After all, I pay him enough. He's my number one political boy. 'Night, darling." breakdown himself by noon the next day, after Computation Minister du Fresne, looking uglier than ever, had finished conducting President Giovannini's official party through the rooms and passages of Giac. If Nina hadn't been by his side during and after the swift rocket trip to Death Valley, he might have collapsed. It was she who had removed the glittering star from his breast before breakfast in the Sherwood Forest mansion that morning. "You needed something to wear for show last night," she had told him. "Then it's not mine?" he had countered absently. "Of course it is," she had assured him. "But Secretary General Bergozza is going to make the official investiture after the test." Lindsay had meekly surrendered the bauble, barely noticing. His brain was straining to recall what he could of symbolic logic -- a subject that had never particularly interested him. For some reason it kept working back to Lewis Carroll, who, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, had been the founder of symbolic logic back in the nineteenth century, along with the renowned Dr. Poole. About all he could remember was the following problem: ( I ) Every one who is sane can do Logic; (#) No lunatics are fit to serve on a jury; (#) None of your sons can do Logic. The Universal was "persons". The symbols were: a -- able to do Logic; b -- fit to serve on a jury; c -- sane; d -- your sons. And the answer, of course, was: None of your sons is fit to serve on a jury. For some reason this, in turn, made him think of the ancient conundrum that employed confusion to trip its victims: What's the difference between an iron dog in the side yard of a man who wants to give his little daughter music lessons but is afraid he can't afford them next year, and a man who has a whale in a tank and wants to send him for a wedding present and is trying to pin a tag on him, saying how long he is, how much he weighs and where he comes from, but can't because the whale keeps sloshing around in the tank and knocking the tag off? This time, the answer was: One can't wag his tail, the other can't tag his whale. "None of your sons is fit to tag a whale -- or wag a tail," he said absently. "What was that?" Nina asked. "Nothing, nothing at all," he replied. "Merely a man going out of his mind." "It will never miss you," she replied brightly. But her brightness became a bit strained as the day wore on. The trip, for Lindsay, was sheer nightmare. No sane man can wag his tail, he kept thinking. Even such fugitive grasping at Logical straws vanished when he saw the immense squat mass of Giac, rising like a steel-and-concrete toad from the wastes of the California desert. It seemed absurd even to think that such an imposing and complex structure should have been reared on the mathematics of the immortal author of Alice in Wonderland , Through the Looking Glass and The Hunting of the Snark. For Giac was imposing, even to a man biased against computers from birth. Nor did du Fresne's smugness help Lindsay's assurance a bit. He explained how each of the block-large preliminary feeders worked -- one for mathematical symbols, one for oral recording, a third for written exposition. Each worked simultaneously and in three different ways -- via drum-memory banks, via punched tapes, via the new "ear-tubes" that responded to sound. Then there were the preliminary synthesizers, each of which unified in vapor-plutonium tubes the findings of its three separate feeders. Next, a towering black-metal giant twenty metres in each dimension, came the final synthesizer, which coordinated the findings of the preliminary synthesizers and fed them into Giac itself. The master machine was the least imposing of all. It stood like an alabaster stele in the center of an immense chamber arranged like a theater-in-the-round. But du Fresne, peering through his strawberry spectacles, said gloatingly, "Don't be deceived by the size, ladies and gentlemen. All but what you see of Giac is underground. It is contained in an all-metal cell And it is infallible." Fortunately Lindsay was given a half hour of final preparation in one of the small offices with which the above-ground building was honeycombed. Nina came with him -- by request. "I can't do it," he told her abruptly. "Don't worry, darling, you'll think of something," she said. She tried to embrace him but he was too worried to respond. After awhile she said, "Why not put a direct question. Ask it if it's infallible." "It could hardly tell a lie on itself," he replied. "What if such a question involved destruction of part of itself in the answer?" she asked. "It might -- though I presume du Fresne and his boys have prepared it for such jokers. And anyway, what sort of question would do that? Got any ideas?" "That's your department," she said helpfully. "You're the computer smasher of this team." "But that was pure luck," he said half-angrily. "One can't wag his tail... The other can't serve on a jury." She looked alarmed. "Darling," she said, "you aren't -- " "Not yet, Honeycomb," he said, "but give me time. "It's got to be something about this Mars-Earth problem," he went on after a long silence. "Listen: how can Mars develop if it's in the spot of the Red Queen -- has to run like hell just to stay where it is thanks to Earth's dumping policies?" and Maria Bergozza was with them. She said, "Apparently this is necessary." She was holding a glasspellet gun in her hand, pointing it at Lindsay. He said, "Why, you -- !" and moved toward her. Promptly the Secretary General's daughter pointed the gun at Nina's tanned midriff. He stopped. Maria said evenly, "It's you that have done this to me, Nina. You've had all the fun while I've had to pour tea for papa at his damned functions. You've fouled up our plans with your meddling down in New Orleans. And now you've taken Zale, as you take everything else you take a fancy to." "But you tried to kill him," said Nina. "Why should you care?" "He would have been a martyr -- and you wouldn't have had him," said Maria, her gun hand steady. "I know it's going to ruin me to kill you- -- but my whole life is ruined anyway. And this way at least I can sacrifice it for the cause." "The cause of interplanetary war?" said Lindsay, in his turn incredulous. Hot rage rose within him, "You third-rate tramp!" He stepped squarely into the line of fire, thrust his left breast in front of the muzzle of her gun. Behind him Nina screamed. But Maria didn't fire. Instead she sneezed -- sneezed and sneezed again. Her gun hand gyrated wildly as she doubled in a paroxysm and Nina moved past Lindsay to pluck the weapon from her. "Don't call me -- kmrashew ! -- third-rate," she managed to gasp before the blonde sent her sprawling with a very efficient right cross to the chin. Nina turned on Lindsay angrily. "You damned fool!" she almost shouted. "You might have been killed." He looked down, felt his knees turn to water. He said, "Omigod -- I thought I was still wearing the star. I remembered how you saved my life in New Orleans with your diamond evening bag!" He sat down -- hard. From the t floor Maria whimpered, "What are you going to do to me?" Nina said, "I ought to kill you, you know, but it would cause too much of a stink. So beat it and let us think. You'll be hearing from me later. What you hear will depend on how you handle yourself from now on. Understand?" When she had slunk out Lindsay said, "What broke her up?" Nina dropped the gun into her bag casually, said, "Now I know you're lucky, you thin slob. You happened to stumble right onto her allergy. She can't stand being thought of as a third-rate lover. That's why she's always been jealous of me -- because I have topmodel rating and she could never make it. She's too damned concerned with pleasing herself to please anyone else. She flunked out at fourteen." "Then why didn't you pull it?" Lindsay asked her, astonished. "Because," Nina said thoughtfully, "I'm not conditioned to think that way. It's horribly rude here on Earth to stir up other people's allergies. As you reminded me last night, you rat, we're all people in glass houses." "But I didn't even know..." muttered Lindsay. "You hit it though," she reminded him. "And you're going to hit it again out there in exactly five minutes." scious of the eyes of the vidar cameras upon him as President Giovannini, having finished his introductory speech, led him to the alabaster stele in the center of Giac's great central chamber and turned him over to du Fresne, whose official robe hung unevenly from the hump of his harness. Lindsay handed the Minister of Computation the question he had prepared on paper, was brusquely told, "Read it please. Ambassador." He cleared his throat and began. "I am asking a question highly pertinent to the welfare and future amity of the United Worlds," he said slowly. More specifically to the future amity of Earth and Mars. It is a simple question without involved mathematical qualifications -- but one that no computer and no man has thus far been able to answer correctly. "It is this continued failure of computers to come up with a logical answer in the full frame of interplanetary conditions that has done much to make the people of my planet feel that no computer is trustworthy to make decisions involving human beings." He paused, looked covertly at du Fresne, repressed a smile. The Minister of Computation was already showing signs of distress. He was shaking his head, making little pawing motions toward his glasses. "Here it is," Lindsay said quickly. "Should the governors of Mars, whose responsibilities lie at least as much in the economic improvement of their own world as in interworld harmony, permit their planet to receive goods which retard that economic development so that it becomes a race to maintain current unsatisfactory standards, merely because certain computers on Earth are fed false facts to permit continuation of some illogical form of government or social system -- or should the governors of Mars permit their planet to suffer because of computer illogic in the name of a highly doubtful status quo on the parent planet?" He walked slowly back to his place and sat down, almost feeling the silence around him. Nina whispered. "What in hell does it mean?" Lindsay whispered back, "It's a bit of the iron dog and the whale, a bit of the Red Queen, a bit of the suicide idea -- and something else. Let's see if it works." Lindsay watched du Fresne, whose moment of triumph was marred by his obvious discomfort. The twisted little man was very busy running the question into its various forms for submission to the feeder units, whose mouths gaped like hungry nestlings along part of one side wall. If du Fresne failed him... It was a long nervous wait. Lights flickered in meaningless succession on subsidiary instrument boards and du Fresne darted about like a bespectacled buzzard, studying first this set of symbols, then that one. Lindsay glanced at Maria, who sat huddled beside her father beyond the president. To break the suspense he whispered to Nina, "What about her?" Nina whispered back, "I've got it taped. I'm going to give her a nice empty job on the moon -- one with a big title attached. It will get her out of the way -- she can't do any harm there -- and make her feel she's doing something. Besides" -- a faint malicious pause -- "there are still four men to every woman on Luna. And they aren't choosy." "You're a witch," said Lindsay. He snickered and someone shushed him. Looking up he saw that things were happening. "In exactly" -- du Fresne glanced up at a wall chronometer -- "six seconds Giac will give its answer." They seemed more like six years to Lindsay. Then the alabaster stele in the center of the floor came abruptly to life. A slow spiral of red, composed of a seemingly endless stream of high mathematical symbols, started up from its base, worked rapidly around and around it like an old-fashioned barberpole's markings, moving ever upward toward its top. "Effective -- very effective," murmured President Giovannini. Suddenly a voice sounded, a pleasant voice specially geared to resemble the voice of the greatest of twentieth-century troubadors, Bing Crosby. It said, "Interplanetary unity depends upon computer illogic." There was a gasp -- a gasp that seemed to emerge not only from the company present but, in reverse, through the vidarcasters from the entire listening world. President Giovannini, suddenly white, said inelegantly, "Son of a bitch!" Nina laughed out loud and gripped Lindsay's arm tightly. "You've done it, darling -- you've done it!" she cried. "On the contrary," he said quietly, "I haven't done it; du Fresne did it." And as he looked toward the Minister of Computation that little man fainted. blanked out briefly, then once more the spiral of red figures began to work its way around and up the stele. And once again the pleasant voice announced, "Interplanetary unity depends upon computer illogic." It blanked out, began again. And this time, from somewhere in the building, came the thud of a muffled explosion. A spiral of green symbols began to circle the stele, then a spiral of yellow. The red reached the top first and the Bing Crosby voice began again, "Interplanetary unity de -- " The green and yellow spirals reached the top. A few seconds of sheer Jabberwocky emerged from the loudspeaker, ending in a chorus of, "Illogic, illogic, illogic..." with the words overlapping. Panic began to show itself. The president gasped and Maria suddenly shrieked. Frightened onlookers crowded toward the door. The president looked from the machine to Lindsay, bewildered. Lindsay got up and strode toward the microphone by the stele. He shouted into it, "Turn off the computer -- turn it off." And, moments later, while the angry hot glow of the stele faded slowly, he said, "People of Earth, this is Lindsay of Mars. Please be calm while I explain. There is nothing wrong with Giac or any of your computers." He paused, added ruefully, "At least nothing that cannot be repaired in short order where Giac is concerned. "I am going to ask to look once more at the question I submitted to this machine -- and to the language tape fed into it by the Honorable Mr. du Fresne." He waited while they were brought to him, scanned them, smiled, said, "No the fault was not with Giac. Nor was it consciously with Mr. du Fresne. The question was loaded. "You see, I happen to know that your Minister's belief in computers is such that he suffers an involuntary reaction when he hears them defamed. I defamed computers both in my preliminary address and in my question. And when he had to transfer to tape the phrase ' -- or, should the Governors of Mars permit their planet to suffer because of computer illogic in the name of a highly doubtful status quo on the parent planet?' -- when he transferred that sentence to tape he was physically unable to write the phrase 'computer illogic'. "Involuntarily he changed it to 'computer logic' with the result that the question was utterly meaningless and caused Giac's tubes to short circuit. None of the recent computer failures was the fault of the machines -- it was the fault of the men who fed them material to digest. "So I believe it is safe to say that you may rely upon your computers -- as long as they do not deal with problems affecting yourselves and ourselves. For those you need human speculation, human debate, above all human judgment!" President Giovannini, able politician that he was, had joined Lindsay at the microphone, put an arm across his shoulders, said, "I feel humble -- yes, humble -- in the great lesson this great envoy from our sister planet had taught us. What they can do on Mars we can do on Earth." When at last they were clear of the vidar cameras Lindsay grinned and said, "Nice going, Johnny -- you'll have more voters than ever come next election." Giovannini simply stared at him. His eyes began to water, his nose to run and he turned away, groping for an evapochief. Lindsay looked after him and shook his head. He said to Nina, who had rejoined him, "How about that? Johnny's in tears." "Of course he is," snapped Nina. "He's allergic to the word 'voters'. Night soil, but you're simple!" Lindsay felt his own eyes water. He sneezed, violently, for the first time since coming to Earth. Concerned, Nina said, "What's wrong, darling? Have I done something?" "If you ever say 'night soil' again..." he began. Then, "Krrachooooo!" He felt as if the top of his head were missing. Nina hugged him, grinning like a gamine. "I'll save it for very special occasions," she promised. Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its cliffs and sheer its crevasses. But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer... By Robert Abernathy Illustrated by Kelly Freas . of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun. Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her. The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening twilight, even as her love was about him. Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass." He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with vengeance. "Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago." She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this. For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass, she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the last days. "Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot. It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock. "Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm. Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the best I can do now. Come on." There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might never have won through. It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from the rocks above. They heard no sound. The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful. Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their childhood; but neither had been here before. But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff : then he struck it boldly with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling in the light that poured from within. heard his footsteps, and finally saw him -- a shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was disappointing. They had expected something more -- an ancient giant, a tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old ; beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy. The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here." "You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he had not meant to be. The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch. Come in! You're letting in the wind." Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice -- warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheetwise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then turned questioningly to the young pair. "We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can spare it. We're pursued." "Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves comfortable, and in one minute... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world is as bad as it was when I was last in it." Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young." Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours behind us." "A pity, indeed. I would like to help you -- but, you understand, I am the Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families." Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk. "And what will you do now?" Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may 'fear to follow us." "To the mountain, you mean." "And into it, if need be." The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she nestled by Var's side. He to follow your lover in this?" Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why , I will lead, if his courage should fail him." part of my duty to dissuade you from this thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves and on all men." "We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the Ryzgas will come forth." "Do you believe that?" "As one believes stories." "It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far, the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom, Var stared down at his hands. "The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them. They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and feuls and bored to its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor... and in each of those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars. "Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age. If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping -- the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we -- we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder. "In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them. Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships. "From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. I will show it to you... stirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old man wove a dream around them, and the bright icecave faded from their vision, and they saw -- Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's darkness -- that, and the bluewhite lightning flashes that silhouetted the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a shaking of the earth. Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead, poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces, naked bodies blackened and maimed fom the hell of the workshops where the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion -- a rebellion without hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood. Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the shattered city, the slaves the lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned. Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound. They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship. and it was leaving. It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; roared ferocious threats and curses; others cried desolately -- ivait! Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and the ship was gone. The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno, and the city burned and burned... shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen -- no, lived through -- before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man who was the Mountain Watcher. "Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep, their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone dare arouse them, or until their chosen time -- no one knows surely. "I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance, folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again." The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally, "this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth tak  J J mg. Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say, "You are tired. Best sleep until morning." Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed. mered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how it was. He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that sleep had refreshed his mind and body -- realizing also that a footstep had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know the face. Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, "Who are you? Where's the Watcher?" The other flashed white teeth in a smile. "I'm the Watcher," he answered. "Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here." "You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us -- " "Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away." Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, "Thank you, Watcher." "Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga mountain?" Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, "We have no alternative." There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and they followed him outside. The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain. It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and gave nothing back. Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the curling fog hid everything. "You have an alternative," said the Watcher crisply. The two took their eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his face was unsmiling. "It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will be too late for them to overtake Var." That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into one. They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: "It would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery -- yet these can be borne -- that I-you might be saved from death -- which is alone irreparable ,... But to become I and you again -- that cannot be borne." They said in unison, "No. Not that." The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, "Very well. I will give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the Ryzga mountain." Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little dizzied by the rapid flood of detail. "You are ready to go," said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night. Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, "You don't blame us?" "You have taken life in your own hands," rasped the Watcher. "Who does that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!" fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that the pursuit already halved their lead. They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain -- so little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep. Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently, head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the mountain something snapped suddenly alert -- something alive yet not living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle circuits... The two stood shivering together. The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they heard a great voice crying, "There they are!" Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: "Young fools! I've caught you now!" Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows. Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: "Go back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain !" Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him exhorting his men to haste. Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent whisper said, "Come on!" Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness. Neena froze instantly. "Feel that!" he muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising potential that seemed to whisper Ready... ready... The sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more -- Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being, pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out. The immaterial globe of light danced on before them. "Forward, before the charge builds up again!" said Var. A few feet further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not blocked... Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that might be near at hand. From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay, then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the dark burrow: "Stop ! -- before you go too far!" Var faced that way and thought coldly: "Only if you return and let us go free." In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own --  that neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world outside should crumble to ruin around them. "Follow us, then!" They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream. Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo the death-cries of a and blood before their monstrous and inhuman power. Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart. Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened and closed in bewildering confusion ; the two invaders felt the rapid shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum... For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of their machineless culture. no life. They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once: perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over the threshold. There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite, above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood. Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them. height and stocky build, clad in a garment of changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand, with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube; his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway. That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them, conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow. With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures... He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new, but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily have been totally strange. "Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality -- good. Physically excellent stock..." There was a complicated and incomprehensible schemata of numbers and abstract forms. "The time: two thousand years -- more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We can begin again." Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient, crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will -- toward the stars, the stars! The icy calculation resumed: "Immobilize these and the ones indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest..." Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed hy the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age -- denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's face. The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place : Decision! He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it. Neena screamed. Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up. There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished. But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves. Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind. Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga's way -- a mere child's bogey out of a fairy tale -- the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. "There will be no new beginning for you in our world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks -- it was because you knew no other way." Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still. "Barbarians... ? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us man could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else -- capacities undeveloped by our science -- after us the end of man, the beginning... But those of us who chose to die were right." The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed. Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief, he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience. In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at Var. Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, "Well, Groz? Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-inlaw go beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?" The social engineer was only doing his duty when he tried to force Lansing out of his rut of habit and routine. He forgot that ruts themselves have a habit of turning in surprising directions! By Raymond E. Banks Illustrated by Paul Orban usual that morning, dressed, ate a poached egg for breakfast and paused for a moment before a mirror before he put on his oldfashioned hat. Ought to do something about those gray hairs, he thought. Plenty of men his age used Dyall ; it would make him look ten years younger. But some naturalistic, unhypocritical streak inside him made him put on his hat with a sigh and give up the thought as he had almost every morning for a year. He selected three luxurious South American cigars from his humidor and made a mental note to stop at the tobacconist's at noon to replenish the supply, according to his habit. He lit one, put the other two in his pocket, and caught the #:# to the city. Aboard the commuter's aircar he shoved a nickel in the slot, pulled out a facsimile paper and fell to studying the stock-market, especially his small Martian holdings and those new Venusian stocks that he had an eye on. "Your attention please! No smoking on the aircar!" The robot voice brushed uselessly against his ear as it did every morning. He continued to smoke, conscious of the envy of the other commuters who smoked less expensive brands. But they were married men who couldn't afford such extravagance. At the office he smiled good morning to his friends and sank into his place at the head of the Accounting Department. The newest computing machines in the office glowed on his desk; his swivel chair bore the largest, thickest seat pad even though his flanks were thin. It had taken him twenty years to achieve this comfortable status, and he sighed in delight at the delicious, knotty problems of the day lying before him. Then came the interruption. It came in the form of a small note that shot out of a communications cylinder on the side of his desk. "Under the provisions of Par #b of the Social Nonconformity Act, you, Franklin G. Lansing, will report to your social engineer without a second's delay. Urgent. Signed Watkins, Social Engineer, Ward Seven." Lansing made a sound in his throat which might have been a growl or might have been a snort. neer, had offices on the third floor of the Haymarket Building. Lansing stepped into the anti-gravity device and out again to find himself in a sumptious, institutional office. The furnishings struck him as decadent and the other patients sat around gloomily, creating an air of tension similar to that of a doctor's office. As a man with a secure job, money in the bank and a way of life that he liked, he did not act deferential when he faced Watkins across the broad, shiny desk. "What's wrong with my adjustment?" he asked without preamble. "I never have to come in except for the yearly check-ups." Watkins was a rotund man with piercing blue eyes. He regarded Lansing's thin, neatly-dressed figure with suspicion. "I'm afraid that's just the trouble," he said. "My social engineering reporters have been watching you, Lansing. Since the death of your sister, you've lived alone and liked it. You rise at a certain hour, eat your meals at the same places and turn in at a certain hour. Like an automaton. It's dangerous." Lansing let out a strangled squawk. "With all the people in New York that are getting into trouble because of poor adjustment I'd think you'd let a well-adjusted person alone. I'd think -- " Watkins held out a firm, fat hand. "Give me the key to your apartment."  Lansing felt the blood drain from his face. "Non-compulsion!" he gasped. "Exactly. It's our job to see that people like you don't crack up. Your kind is the most dangerous. A few days ago a man who'd never been in a speck of trouble all his life stole twenty thousand dollars and eloped with his secretary, a married woman. Thus he ruined three lives -- his own, the woman's and her husband's. Last week a man who had lived in the same place for twenty-five years and never caused any one trouble went out on the street and killed three people with a gun. People who were strangers -- that he'd never seen before. His excuse was that he didn't like redheaded people. Obviously a case of long, slow deterioration. "The whole purpose and meaning of the Social Nonconformity Act is to prevent these horrors. You, now, you have a compulsion to orderliness that is near insanity. You revel in routine. But the human mind and body cannot stand this supernatural order. Sooner or later you're going to crack as a result of your compulsion to drab order. We prevent that by forcing you into non-compulsion and breaking the routine of your life which you would be bound to break in a more dangerous way later. "Commit your act of passion now, Lansing, before it grows into one that is uncontrollable and disastrous!" The social engineer flung the non-compulsion license on his desk in front of Lansing. "But -- but," cried Lansing. "I don't want to commit any act of passion. I'm happy. I -- " The social engineer shook his head. "After all, Lansing, we're all human. And how long has it been since you've -- ah -- been in the company of a woman? How long since you've gotten drunk or had a real argument? No -- you'll have to give me the key to your apartment." Watkins' expression was triumphant and firm. Lansing, feeling like the Earth had been shot out from under him, handed over the key to his apartment and picked up the non-compulsion license... Building he ordered an unaccustomed early morning drink. When the bartender saw the non-compulsion certificate projecting from his pocket he slid another drink along the bar. "Better have another, Buster. On the house. I been in that mess myself. In my case they made me attend lectures and concerts and join the Chamber of Commerce." "I wish mine were that easy," said Lansing. Then he had another thought and called Mr. Hedges. Hedges was the district social engineer over Watkins. He was not a close friend, because Lansing disliked social engineers, but he had done Hedges' income tax for a number of years. Lansing worded his appeal carefully, hinting that Watkins was probably more than stupid. " 'Fraid there's nothing I can do," said Hedges. "It's true that people like you who run along quietly in a rut are likely to break down. There are exceptions, of course, but Watkins is within the law. Best thing to do is get it over with in a hurry." The man's hands sawed the air. "Do something big," he suggested and rang off. " aware that a couple of shadows that must be social engineering reporters followed wherever he went. An unaccustomed revolver weighted down his coat on one side. The gun was hot and he felt miserable. He hated scenes anyway, but -- Lansing took his place in a waiting line, still bound by his sense of propriety and order. The bank buzzed with activity, the lines moving with peristaltic life; a baby squalled, somebody coughed and the sunlight yellowed on the black marble desks. As usual, there was a man who had to purchase traveler's checks, so that the line Lansing chose moved slowest of all. People who had come in after him were serviced and left again. After an interminable wait he reached the window, his legs a little numbed from standing. He felt that the whole thing was already going badly. "I'm afraid this is a robbery," he told the teller, pointing the gun at her. He felt miserable, standing there with the gun in his hand, expecting the guards to move in and shoot without asking questions. The girl's eyes widened and then she saw the bit of green in his pocket. "Non-compulsion?" "Uh, yes. Please put up your hands." "How can I give you money if I put up my hands?" "Do as I say," frowned Lansing, his knuckles white on the gun. The girl lifted her hands. Lansing turned around to the people behind him. "This is a robbery," he said. "Er -- non-compulsion. Please put up your hands." Instead of complying, the people stared at him dully and then, with resignation, moved over to the other lines. A buzzer, sharp, insistent, rang out twice. The employees froze. "Everybody hands up!" shouted someone. "Non-compulsion." All employees' hands went up. The people waiting shot dirty looks at Lansing, knowing this meant delay. They did not raise their hands. The bank guard frowned and stepped outside the bank as required by custom, but remained glowering through the window to make sure it was a real non-compulsion. Somewhere a police car's siren began to wail, coming closer. The girl at the desk counted out two twenties and a ten. "Fifty is usual," she said. Then she quickly thrust up her hands again as he shoved the gun at her. He pocketed the money with one hand, feeling like a small boy standing before a class and reciting. "Thanks," he said, starting to move away. He wanted to get out in a hurry. "Wait a minute, mister," she said harshly. "I got to have the number of your non-compulsion license so we can get the money back." For the first time, Lansing began to feel somewhat unadjusted. "Ask the social engineers," he snapped. "They got me into this. They can pay." He strode out of the bank. A police riot squad was pulled up outside. The police stood around in hard-eyed silence, watching him sullenly. They didn't like noncompulsion either. Lansing, feeling ber, tossed his empty gun at a detective. "Here, go shoot up a social engineer," he said miserably and walked off down the sunlit street, his face burning with shame and sensitivity. If non-compulsion was supposed to stir up emotions, he was off to a good start. and blonde. Almost pretty, except that there were crow's feet around her eyes and mouth. But she would do. She showed surprise as he sat down at her lonely table. In the Terrace Room at the Kensington Hotel, lunch costs six dollars a plate, and you didn't sit at a stranger's table uninvited. A frowning waiter was coming towards him across the room and sunlight gleamed on the rug and sparkled from the heavy linen and silver. "What is the meaning of this?" said the woman, with hostility. Lansing was forced to drop his eyes from the clear gaze. "Noncompulsion," he muttered, his eyes darting to the unaccustomed luxusually had lunch at Eddie's where all was noise and clatter, and you were served by robot waiters. It made him feel uneasy to have a real, human waiter standing there, one of a vanishing race. "Is this man giving you trouble, Ma'm?" asked the waiter. The woman laughed a silvery laugh. "Don't be ridiculous," she told the waiter. She regarded Lansing with amusement. "I had fun on my non-compulsion," she said, "and I wouldn't spoil yours." Lansing held the menu with the same white knuckles that had gripped the unaccustomed gun. He had hoped she would drive him away. Even the menu bothered him. He was used to ordering from an electronic menu where you punched keys, not something written in French. "Give me -- the works," he told the waiter self-consciously. Then he sat there brooding while the waiter and the woman, whose name, he learned, was Doris Woodring, argued about his luncheon. He was sullenly aware of the two human bloodhounds that were the social engineering reporters just slipping into the far corner of the room... The food was very rich, and tasty, and Mrs. Woodring chatted with the easy social grace of the leisured. When Lansing mentioned his Martian holdings, they found a subject of common interest, for her husband was in finance. Suddenly the luncheon was quite enjoyable. "But then," laughed Mrs. Woodring, "that belongs to the part of your life you're trying to break away from. We should be talking about love instead." "Love?" he asked blushing, the flow of his enjoyment brought to a sudden halt. Her teeth sparkled in a smile as she blew pale blue cigarette smoke against the dense fog from his South American cigar. "Well, after all, from what you say, your social engineer will expect you to have a fling with women, you being a bachelor." "Er-fling -- yes," he said running a finger inside his collar. "What do you think we ought to do?" "Go somewhere where we can be alone, I suppose," she said, dropping her eyes to her plate. "I was going to a meeting of Concentrated Charities this afternoon, but it isn't important. We can go to my town apartment..." Lansing felt fear coursing through his body. His experiences with women had been few and not exciting. And when Mrs. Woodring stood up so that he got a good look at her and the way she handled her trim body, he became more frightened. It was obvious that her sleekness meant experience. A walk in the fresh sunshine of the park and a couple of drinks at a bar and they were admitted by a real, human servant to her uptown apartment. Mrs. Woodring went off to get some drinks and Lansing paced impatiently up and down. No! They asked too much. It was really too embarrassing. He flung himself to the television phone. Beside it was an address book. He fumbled with the pages, his heart beating in determination. He found the number he wanted and dialed. "Get me Mr. Woodring," said Lansing imperatively to the girl on the telephone. "It's urgent." Presently he was looking at a pleasant-faced man with dancing blue eyes, much like his wife's. "There's a man in your uptown apartment with your wife," he gasped. "There's a -- uh -- man in your -- uptown apartment." Woodring looked puzzled. "What man?" "Me," said Lansing in determined, self-defensive anger. Woodring studied him in suspicion and dislike for a second. Then the clouds broke and he smiled. "Oh," he said. "Well, thanks for the call. Would appreciate it if you'd lay off my brandy, old boy. It's a little low." Woodring had seen the corner of the non-compulsion license sticking from Lansing's pocket. "But -- but -- " said Lansing. "Don't worry," said Woodring. "Everything will be all right. You'll be all right. Excuse me, old boy, got lots of work to do -- " And Woodring rang off. Lansing sat there, feeling his inner palms sweat. without the servant but with the drinks. She was wearing a silver thing that could have been a house costume and could have been pajamas. It was silken and seductive. When she bent to pour, it was obvious that there wasn't much else. Lansing saw a button and punched in desperation. "What did you do that for?" she asked, sitting beside him on the sofa. "I want -- uh -- brandy," he gulped. The closed-mouthed servant appeared. "Brandy," Lansing ordered, trying to control his voice. "Er -- brandy." He tried desperately to think of some other reasons to keep the servant in the room. He could think of none. The servant poured the brandy and left while Doris studied him with a half-smile. "Perhaps you don't find me attractive," she said. "Very attractive," he exploded. "You couldn't be attractiver, er -- " She scooted up beside him. "Now look, Frank." she said seriously. "This is non-compulsion and you've got to get through with it or those damn social engineers will drive you crazy." Lansing nodded miserably, closed his eyes and trembled. The rosepetal lips touched his. Then she moved her supple body tight to him and she trembled excitingly in a burning kiss. It seemed -- er -- burning. However, that was all. After the embarrassment of a couple of kisses she pulled away and they fell to talking about his investments on Venus. Enough was enough, and obviously society couldn't cure one person's habit pattern by destroying the marriage-habit pattern of others. He realized this when he heard his shadows, the reporters, thumping around in the outer hall, still on guard, ready to prevent any real seduction. No wonder that other, quiet man had suddenly up and shot three redheads. His social engineer must've been a redhead, decided Lansing. He shook hands with Mrs. Woodring and left, feeling relieved and happy. At least he'd done enough to satisfy Watkins. It had been a strain but now they'd leave him alone. He arrived at his apartment with a sigh. The social engineering reporters were ahead of him, denying him entrance to his place. "Now wait a minute," said Lansing. "I've gotten more or less drunk, robbed a bank and kissed a blonde. If that doesn't take care of my hidden desires, nothing ever will, because each of these acts is a monumental disturbance for me, totally against the grain." "No," said one, "you haven't really committed an act of passion yet. True, you've done all these things, but you haven't felt them. Keep going -- it may take several days." "But where will I sleep tonight?" The reporter grinned. "Why not try a park bench?" Argument was futile. Lansing grimly plodded away. Sometime in the middle of the night he awoke with a sneeze. The park bench was hard. Besides, policemen kept waking him up to make him show his non-compulsion license. He turned over and sneezed again. He was going to have a cold. And when he had a cold -- Lansing contemplated the horror of his situation staring at the solemn moon. A great resolve and purpose took shape inside of him, firmed up and became a burning certainty... sneezing, he faced Watkins across the social engineer's gleaming desk. His unshaven beard itched and he felt dirty and completely miserable. "I want the key to my apartment back," he said. Watkins shuffled some papers. "I'm afraid these reports show that you haven't really cut loose yet, Lansing. You're the same timid, apologetic, routinized person you've always been." "I'm about to cut loose," said Lansing. His temples were throbbing, his mouth was dry. He sneezed once, and then he climbed up and walked over the top of Watkins' desk. He put his foot on Watkins' chest and shoved, and the fat man went over backwards in his swivel chair with a crash. A wild thrill of delight coursed through Lansing. "Help! He's gone mad -- " cried Watkins. "Mad! Mad!" yelled Lansing in delight, jumping down and punching the chubby figure. He hadn't laid an angry hand on a fellow-man since his second year in high school. The first punches were uncertain but he got the knack with astounding quickness and let Watkins have it in the face and body. "Here's your passion!" he roared slamming Watkins against the floor so the whole office shook. Watkins slumped on the soft rug in a bloody blubbering and suddenly Lansing felt the hate and excitement fade into a wonderful sense of contentment. He stood over Watkins, feeling his bruised hands with satisfaction. The familiar reporters rushed into the room. One of them covered him with a gun while the other jumped to the phone and called, first a doctor, then the police, and then Hedges, the district social engineer. Hedges listened, frowning, to the story; and then Lansing laid his non-compulsion license on Watkins' rumpled desk and said quietly: "Now can I have my apartment key back?" "You won't need your apartment!" yelled Watkins, sitting up on the floor. "You're going to jail for twenty years for this!" "Give him his key," said Hedges. "Watkins, I'm afraid you can't prefer charges. We social engineers have a higher duty -- to help our patients achieve adjustment. In this one case, the only passion Lansing could feel was against you. Since no permanent harm was done, he has acted within range of his non-compulsion license. Therefore, I pronounce him free." " ing from his cold all that Saturday and Sunday. He rose at #:# as usual Monday morning, dressed, ate a poached egg for breakfast and paused for a moment before a mirror before he put on his oldfashioned hat. Ought to do something about those gray hairs, he thought. Plenty of men his age used Dyall; it would make him look ten years younger. But some naturalistic, unhypocritical streak inside him made him put on his hat with a sigh and give up the thought as he had almost every morning for a year. He selected three luxurious South American cigars from his humidor and made a mental note to stop at the tobacconist's at noon to replenish the supply, according to his habit. He lit one, put the other two in his pocket, and caught the #:# to the city... Dusting Powder! It gives you that lovely, radiant, atomic look! It gives IF, out next month! The ultradrive had just one slight drawback: it set up a shock wave that made suns explode. Which made the problem of getting back home a delicate one indeed... Time Fuze By Randall Garrett Illustrated by Paul Orban his eyes on the rear plate as he activated the intercom. "All right, cut the power. We ought to be safe enough here." As he released the intercbm, Dr. Leicher, of the astronomical staff, stepped up to his side... "Perfectly safe," he nodded, "although even at this distance a star going nova ought to be quite a display." Benedict didn't shift his gaze from the plate. "Do you have your instruments set up?" "Not quite. But we have plenty of time. The light won't reach us for several hours yet. Remember, we were outracing it at ten lights." The commander finally turned, slowly letting his breath out in a soft sigh. "Dr. Leicher, I would say "oifSt SAf -- that this is just about the foulest coincidence that could happen to the first interstellar vessel ever to leave the Solar System." Leicher shrugged. "In one way of thinking, yes. It is certainly true that we will never know, now, whether Alpha Centauri A ever had any planets. But, in another way, it is extremely fortunate that we should be so near a stellar explosion because of the wealth of scientific information we can obtain. As you say, it is a coincidence, and probably one that happens only of any particular star going nova are small. That we should be so close when it happens is of a vanishingly small order of probability." Commander Benedict took off his cap and looked at the damp stain in the sweatband. "Nevertheless, Doctor, it is damned unnerving to come out of ultradrive a couple of first star ever visited by man and have to turn tail and run because the damned thing practically blows up in your face." Leicher could see that Benedict was upset; he rarely used the same profanity twice in one sentence. They had been downright lucky, at that. If Leicher hadn't seen the star begin to swell and brighten, if he hadn't known what it meant, or if Commander Benedict hadn't been quick enough in shifting the ship back into ultradrive -- Leicher had a vision of an incandescent cloud of gaseous metal that had once been a spaceship. The intercom buzzed. The commander answered, "Yes?" "Sir, would you tell Dr. Leicher that we have everything set up now?" Leicher nodded and turned to leave. "I guess we have nothing to do now but wait." When the light from the nova did come. Commander Benedict was back at the plate again -- the forward one, this time, since the ship had been turned around in order to align the astronomy lab in the nose with the star. Alpha Centauri A began to brighten and spread. It made Benedict think of a light bulb connected through a rheostat, with someone turning that rheostat, turning it until the circuit was well overloaded. The light began to hurt Benedict's eyes even at that distance and he had to cut down the receptivity in order to watch. After a while, he turned away from the plate. Not because the show was over, but simply because it had slowed to a point beyond which no change seemed to take place to the human eye. Five weeks later, much to Leirher's chagrin, Commander Benedict announced that they had to leave the vicinity. The ship had only been provisioned to go to Alpha Centauri, scout the system without landing on any of the planets, and return. At ten lights, top speed for the ultradrive, it would take better than three months to get back. "I know you'd like to watch it go through the complete cycle," Benedict said, "but we can't go back home as a bunch of starved skeletons." Leicher resigned himself to the necessity of leaving much of his work unfinished, and, although he knew it was a case of sour grapes. consoled himself with the thought that he could as least get most of the remaining information from the five-hundred-inch telescope on Luna, four years from then. As the ship slipped into the notquite-space through which the ultradrive propelled it, Lcicher began to consolidate the material he had already gathered. wrote in the log: Fifty-four days out from Sol. Alpha Centauri has long since faded back into its pre-blowup state, since we have far outdistanced the light from its explosion. It now looks as it did two years ago. It -- "Pardon me, Commander," Leieher interrupted, "But I have something interesting to show you." Benedict took his fingers off the keys and turned around in his chair. "What is it, Doctor?" Leieher frowned at the papers in his hands. "I've been doing some work on the probability of that explosion happening just as it did, and I've come up with some rather frightening figures. As I said before, the probability was small. A little calculation has given us some information which makes it even smaller. For instance: with a possible error of plus or minus two seconds Alpha Centauri A began to explode the instant we came out of ultradrive! "Now, the probability of that occurring comes out so small that it should happen only once in ten to the four hundred sixty-seventh seconds." It was Commander Benedict's turn to frown. "So?" "Commander, the entire universe is only about ten to the seventeenth seconds old. But to give you an idea, let's say that the chances of Benedict blinked. The number, he realized, was totally beyond his comprehension -- or anyone else's. "Well, so what? Now it has happened that one time. That simply means that it will almost certainly never happen again!" "True. But, Commander, when you buck odds like that and win, the thing to do is look for some factor that is cheating in your favor. If you took a pair of dice and started throwing sevens, one right after another -- for the next couple of thousand years -- you'd begin to suspect they were loaded." Benedict said nothing; he just waited expectantly. "There is only one thing that could have done it. Our ship." Leieher said it quietly, without emphasis. "What we know about the hyperspace, or superspace, or whatever it is we move through in ultradrive is almost nothing. Coming out of it so near to a star might set up some sort of shock wave in normal space which would completely disrupt that star's internal balance, resulting in the liberation of unimaginably vast amounts of energy, causing that star to go nova. We can only assume that we ourselves were the fuze that set off that nova." Benedict stood up slowly. When he spoke, his voice was a choking whisper. "You mean the sun -- Sol -- might..." say that it definitely would. But the probability is that we were the cause of the destruction of Alpha Gentauri A, and therefore might cause the destruction of Sol in the same way." Benedict's voice was steady again. "That means that we can't go back again, doesn't it? Even if we're not positive, we can't take the chance." "Not necessarily. We can get fairly close before we cut out the drive, and come in the rest of the way at sub-light speed. It'll take longer, and we'll have to go on half or one-third rations, but we can do it!" "How far away?" "I don't know what the minimum distance is, but I do know how we can gage a distance. Remember, neither Alpha Centauri B or C were detonated. We'll have to cut our drive at least as far away from Sol as they are from A." "I see." The commander was silent for a moment, then: "Very well, Dr. Leicher. If that's the safest way, that's the only way." Benedict issued the orders, while Leicher figured the exact point at which they must cut out the drive, and how long the trip would take. The rations would have to be cut down accordingly. Commander Benedict's mind whirled around the monstrousness of the whole thing like some dizzy bee around a flower. What if there had been planets around Gentauri A? What if they had been inhabited? Had he, all unwittingly, killed entire races of living, intelligent beings? But, how could he have known? The drive had never been tested before. It couldn't be tested inside the Solar System -- it was too fast. He and his crew had been volunteers, knowing that they might die when the drive went on. Suddenly, Benedict gasped and slammed his fist down on the desk before him. Leicher looked up. "What's the matter, Commander?" "Suppose," came the answer, "Just suppose, that we have the same effect on a star when we go into ultradrive as we do when we come out of it?" Leicher was silent for a moment, stunned by the possibility. There was nothing to say, anyway. They could only wait... A little more than half a light year from Sol, when the ship reached the point where its occupants could sec the light that had left their home sun more than seven months before, they watched it become suddenly, horribly brighter. A hundred thousand times brighter! Was he menace? Was he promise of a new, superior type of mankind? This great, golden, godlike youth whose extraordinary mutant powers combined the world's oldest and newest methods sale February #th. It was, Kirk thought, like standing in a gully, watching a boulder teeter precariously above you. It might fall at any minute, crushing your life out instantly beneath its weight. Your only possible defenses are your brain and voice -- but how do you argue with a boulder which neither sees nor hears ? 'mid pleasures and palaces By James McKimmey, Jr. Illustrated by Philip Parsons set apart, and nothing about might find human life. Yet just beyond, through a thorny bush shaped like an exploding rose, Kirk had seen eyes and nose and a flash of yellow hair that were definitely human. Kirk poised motionless. He was three miles from the rocket and Leo, who was waiting inside of it. He thought for a moment of how Leo had told him, as they made their landing, that this is the kind of planet where you could go no further. This is the kind of planet that could be the end of twelve years, and you'd better be careful, William, old sport. Kirk noticed a faint breeze; his palms were wet, and they cooled when the breeze touched them. He placed his palms against his jacket. Damn you, Leo, he thought. Damn your rotten fortune-telling. Kirk was superstitious when he was in space, and the memory of Leo Mason's cool, quiet voice saying "Watch it now, sport. Be careful, be careful..." seemed now like some certain kiss of fate. The bush trembled and Kirk's right hand flicked to his holster. His pistol was cold against his fingers and he let it fit loosely in his hand, the barrel half-raised. The bush shivered again, and then all at once the figure was rising from behind it, a tall wide figure with a very tan face, lined and toughened by the sun. The shoulders, bare like the chest, were massive, yet somehow stretched-looking, as though endless exposure to wind and rain and sun had turned the skin to brown leather. Kirk had his pistol pointing at the figure's stomach now, and the figure blinked, while the breeze touched and ruffled the long bleached hair. The figure raised a large hand, palm up, and curled the fingers. "Hello?" he said softly. Kirk was surprised by the word and the polite sound of it. Kirk remained motionless, pistol pointing. "Who are you?" he said through his teeth. "Harry," said the figure, as though Kirk surely should know who he was. "I'm Harry, of course." "Yes?" said Kirk carefully. "Harry?" The figure nodded. "Harry Loren, don't you know?" "Oh, yes," Kirk said, his eyes watchful. "Harry Loren." There was something about the man's eyes, Kirk decided. They were deep set and very bright within their sockets. They didn't match the softness of the speech. Harry Loren smiled and showed his yellow teeth. "Who are you?" he asked politely. as though he might be speaking to a frightened child, he thought, who help a sharp knife in his hands. Harry Loren nodded apologetically. "Oh, yes. I can't remember everyone. It's been so long. How are Kirk's eyes flickered. "I'm fine." "That's nice," Harry Loren nodded. His wild hair brushed over his shoulders and reflected its yellowness against the sun. The knife then, the one that Kirk had thought about a moment ago, appeared in the figure's hand. "Bastard," Harry Loren hissed, and he was leaping at Kirk, the knife making a sweep toward Kirk's stomach. Something kept Kirk from squeezing the trigger, and instead he swung his pistol so that it struck the brown, weathered knuckles. The knife flew into a thicket and Loren, screaming, was upon Kirk, reaching for Kirk's neck. Kirk wrenched backward and at the same time swung the barrel of the pistol toward the yellow flying hair. There was a cracking sound, and Harry Loren, brown and wild-looking, crumpled silently before Kirk's feet. Kirk examined the man, then he reached down and picked up the knife from the thicket. It was crudely hammered out from some kind of alloy, but sharp nevertheless, and it could have been deadly in a hand like Harry Loren's. Kirk looked again at the yellowhaired man on the ground. He was wearing some kind of ragged cloth about his waist and nothing else. Across his back, Kirk could see, was a curving scar, an inch wide and ten or twelve inches long. It was white and very noticeable against the brown of the man's skin. Kirk bent down, looking at the scar carefully. It could have been made during a crash of a rocket, but there were, he noticed, fine whiter ridges running along the length of the scar as though they had been made by fine comb-Kke teeth. A talon, perhaps. Some kind of strange claw. Kirk straightened quickly. It went through his head that Harry Loren might not be the only animal life on this planet. He tightened his hand on his pistol, stepping backward, his eyes darting. But he could only pivot slowly, trying to see, to discover, and he was much too slow when he finally saw it. It was only a flash of yellow and brown, making a hissing kind of sound. He felt the ripping along his right arm. The pistol was going out of his hand. And a swirling blackness got in front of his eyes. Harry Loren first, who was sitting up now, silent, motionless, with Kirk's pistol resting in his hands. To the side of Loren and just a little behind rested a peculiar-looking thing. It was alive because its head, shaped like a cone that had been attached to its neck, kept swaying gently back and forth. Tbe dark blue eyes, spaced back from the smallest end of the cone, were rather small with no lids. The creature's neck was long and thin, a multitude of shades of yellow and brown like the head, and the rest of the body widened out like a funnel and this area was covered with yellow feathers. It had what appeared to be arms and legs, long thin extensions of dark brown with large bony joints. At the end of each of these, Kirk could see a flat claw with rows of tiny comb-like teeth. Loren reached out and ran a hand softly along the creature's long neck. Kirk tried to think, testing his muscles without moving, and he remembered then the ripping along his right arm. He looked at the arm and at the way his jacket had been torn away along with the shirt beneath it. He could see the comb-like marking of his skin. The cut was not deep but it bled a little and stung. He tried to move his arm and found that he could. Kirk looked back to Loren. Loren stroked his hand along the thin neck of the creature. Kirk decided to try: "That's a nice looking animal, Harry." Loren's expression did not change. Kirk paused. From the looks of the man, Loren had been here a long time, a very long time. It had been a crash, probably. And all the years afterward of loneliness, all the time for the quiet but sure warping of the brain. He raised a hand quickly, watching Loren's eyes. Loren did not change expressions or move the pistol, but Kirk felt a comb-like claw touching his hand, freezing it to motionless with its razor tips. Kirk looked at the creature. The dark blue eyes were steady. Kirk lowered his hand slowly and the claw was drawn away. The creature's head resumed it's gentle swaying, and Loren's hand resumed its stroking. Kirk licked his lips. "Where have you been?" Loren said, his voice sudden and hoarse now. "Where have I been?" Kirk said, tight and motionless. "Why didn't you come before?" Kirk considered it. The dancing lights in the man's eyes, the highstrung sound of his voice were things to make you wary and careful. Kirk closed his fingers the slightest bit. "I didn't know you were here." Loren's lips thinned. "Liar." Kirk thought he might try a smile, to reassure Loren that he was telling the truth. He decided against it. "How long have you been here, Harry?" "How would I know?" Kirk thought of the endless nights and days when time ran together and there was no more separation of one time from another. Today would be tomorrow and tomorrow would be today. No changes. Endless. "Did you crash, Harry?" "Did you crash, Harry?" Loren mimicked, and for a moment Kirk felt a chill dancing through him as he watched the sarcastic leer of Loren's mouth. Kirk kept his tone polite, patronizing. "Was there anyone else?" Loren laughed, a laugh that bounced over the rocks and through the scrubs and bushes. "Was there, Harry?" "Oh, yes," Loren said, grinning and showing his yellow teeth. "Six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Would you like to see their graves? I've kept the graves pretty. I know where they are because I dug them." Loren remained in a half crouch, the fingers of one hand holding the pistol loosely, the other keeping up its monotonous stroking of the animal. His eyes seemed to become vacant for a moment, as though lost in the memory of the digging of six graves. Then they narrowed. "Where have you been?" Kirk tried to match his answer to the wants of the man. "I came as soon as I could." "You did?" "Yes," Kirk said. "I did." Loren's right hand stopped its stroking and his fingers tightened about the thin long neck of the animal. "Eddie?" he said. Kirk saw the animal's left claw whipping out. He ducked suddenly, but the claw ripped along his left arm. He tried to roll sideways, and then he lay, half sprawled, looking at the blood welling up from this new set of ripped ridges in his arm. He shifted his eyes to look at the animal, and he was quite certain that he could detect a small mouth fitting around the under side of the funnel-shaped head. It was only a line, but Kirk thought that there was a grinning look to it. "You didn't come as soon as you could," Loren said, his voice an angry trembling sound. "I did, Harry," Kirk said, still remaining in his half sprawl. "I really did." Loren replaced his hand on the neck of the animal, squeezing. "No, no," Kirk said, and he tried to keep the panic out of his voice. "Harry, I'm telling you the truth!" faint surface of his yellow teeth. He shook his head, slowly, back and forth, his fingers tightening about the animal's neck. "Harry, listen," Kirk said, watching Loren's squeezing fingers, "it's over now. You don't have to wait any longer. I'll take you back now. I'll take you home!" Loren froze, staring. "Home?" he said. "That's right," Kirk said. "That's right, Harry." "Home" Loren breathed, and his eyes were suddenly like a child's, wide and unbelieving. "The waiting's all over," Kirk said. "You don't have to wait any longer." "I don't have to wait any longer," Loren repeated softly, and his hand dropped from the neck of the animal. Kirk watched Loren and the swaying animal. "The rocket's ready," he said. Loren's eyes were lost in some distant memory. Gradually Kirk could see the eyes turn shiny with tears. "Is Annette waiting?" he asked. Kirk thought quickly. He knew Ithat what he was going to say shouldn't be said, because he had no right. But he was thinking of his own skin. "Why, yes, Harry," he said slowly. "I imagine Annette is waiting." Loren let a quick breath come through his teeth. "Annette," he whispered. "And Dickie?" "Dickie?" Kirk said. "Little Dickie?" Loren said and he held his breath. "Oh, yes," Kirk lied. "Of course." "I can't ask about Eddie, because we never had the chance," Loren said, his eyes still lost. "I always told Annette that no kid should ever grow up without a brother, only we never had the chance for Eddie." Loren reached out absently and touched the brown and yellow neck of the creature. "I called this fellow Eddie, though. Do you suppose that was all right? He's not very pretty." Kirk nodded, looking at the waving, funnel-shaped head of the animal. "That was all right, Harry." "Does she still braid her hair?" Loren asked, his eyes shiny. "What?" Kirk said. "Annette. Does she still braid her hair?" "Why," Kirk said slowly, feeling his palms going moist. "Why wouldn't she, Harry?" A faint smile flickered across Loren's lips as he remembered. Kirk watched one of the creature's claws, out of the corners of his eyes. He opened and closed the fingers of one hand, testing. The claw jerked slightly. The blood of Kirk's new wound was drying, he knew, because it had been only a surface cut. He. wondered how it would be if the thing used its claws with serious intent. Like it must have to make the cut that had been raked into Loren's back. Loren was bending forward now, and Kirk could see the tip end of that scar. Somehow Loren had managed to stay alive and befriend the creature. Eddie. The lidless eyes stared. Kirk knew that he had to make use of the moment. It could break apart any time, the wildness could return, the unreasoning... "Listen, Harry," he said, "we ought to get started, you know. There's no use waiting longer." "Started?" Loren said. "Of course," Kirk said, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact. "You're going home." Loren looked at Kirk and his eyes turned suddenly hard and his mouth lost the faint smile. "I am," he stated flatly. "Yes," Kirk said. "Of course." "You're a liar." "Now, Harry," Kirk said, his eyes flickering to the waiting animal. "I surely wouldn't lie to you." "You haven't come for me until after all this time, and now you say you surely wouldn't lie to me." It was like standing in a gully, Kirk thought, watching a boulder teetering above you. It tipped this way and that, and you didn't know when or if it was going to come hurtling down. You waited. But Kirk couldn't wait, he knew. He had to do something. "Harry, listen. It wasn't easy to find you, don't you see?" He hoped he was making it sound as though all he had done for the last dozen years of exploring was look for Harry Loren. He wished that the damned thing would stop swaying its ugly head back and forth. Loren's hand was inching out toward the yellow and brown neck. "Look, Harry, these things aren't done in a day. We -- " "A day!" Loren hissed. "A day! All this time and you say a day!" "No, I'm sorry," Kirk said quickly. He wished he could shift out of the cramped half-lying position he was in. "I didn't mean a day, Harry. I meant it wasn't easy. We didn't know where you were -- " He was talking quickly, whining almost, and he'd never whined before. Loren's fingers were touching the waving neck. "We'd better hurry," Kirk said desperately. "Annette's waiting. And Dickie, of course." Loren blinked. "You wouldn't want to keep them waiting any longer, not after all this time, Harry." Loren stroked his fingers slowly down the long neck of the animal. "I think," Kirk said, almost hoarsely, "now that I really remember it, Annette was still wearing her hair braided. I remember that now, Harry. Positively." Loren froze the motion of his hand and stared at Kirk. His lips trembled, and then suddenly he put his hands in front of his face. He bent forward, and Kirk felt his nerves jumping, watching the man start to cry. The animal turned its stare away from Kirk for the first time. It looked at Loren and then slowly raised a claw, touching Loren's shoulder carefully. It made a sound then, a peculiar hissing sound, soft, barely audible. There was no danger in it, or menace, only a pitiful sound. Loren raised his head a little and brought his hands away from his face. Tears had cut through dust and grime and his face was streaked. "Shall we go, Harry?" Kirk said. Loren wiped at his eyes, stupidly, without knowing what he was doing. Then he brought his hands down and wiped them across his chest. "All right," he said. "Let's go." He picked up Kirk's pistol from where he had dropped it on the ground and held it out. Kirk looked at the gun and at the animal. The claw had been drawn away from Loren's shoulder and again it was poised, ready. "You keep it, Harry," he said." "Oh, yes. Of course," Loren said. There was a moment of silence as Loren stuck the pistol absently into the waist of his ragged cloth covering, beside the knife. The three of them waited then, Kirk, Loren, and the animal. "Eddie?" Loren said finally. "Are you ready?" the direction of the animal. He remembered when he was a small boy, going by a house where there had been a mongrel with a flat head and large teeth. He had smiled at that animal as he was doing now. The dog had sensed his fear in spite of the smile. Loren was standing up slowly, and the animal's head swayed in slow circling motions. "All right?" Loren said. Kirk glanced at the man, saw the wild, nearly vacant look of the face, the polite tilt of the head. Kirk's palms were wet. Goddamn it, he thought, and he stood up suddenly. The animal extended a claw, slowly, turning it so that it seemed to wind and circle as it came toward Kirk. "Eddie," Loren said. The claw came away. Kirk caught his breath. "Shall we go?" Loren said, his eyes shining. "Yes," Kirk said. "We'll go, Harry." He turned slowly, so that his back was to Loren and the animal. He thought about the comblike claws and the scar on Loren's back. He thought about Loren's knife and about the pistol. He wanted to look back as he walked. He wanted to talk, to hear Loren's answer and so know just where he was. More than anything he wanted to break into a run and get into that rocket and get out of here. He could see the gleam of the rocket finally, but he didn't look back yet. He kept moving. As he got closer he could see Leo, standing near the base of the ship, tall, leaning carelessly against the silver surface, smoking. He wanted to shout to Leo, to tell him for God's sake to wake up and protect him. They reached the edge of the clearing and Leo, whose careless body had stiffened, waited motionless, one hand on his pistol. Kirk stopped. "There it is, Harry," he said, not turning around. "There's the ship." He waited, half-closing his eyes, breathing slowly. There was no sound. "That's Leo, my friend, Harr)'," Kirk said, putting his palms flat against his thighs. "Your friend, Harry." Leo, Kirk could see, was still frozen, his eyes slitted to narrow brightness. Kirk began to step into the clearing. "Hello, there, Leo," he said, his voice a tense, grating sound. "I've brought some friends." Leo was lifting his pistol out of its holster, inchingly. "Friends," Kirk rasped. Leo's thin eyes flickered and the pistol slid back into the holster. Kirk turned around slowly, and he saw that Loren had stopped just inside the clearing. The animal remained beside him, its head making its slow circles. Loren was staring up at the rocket and the sun reflecting from the bright surface, came down and shown on Loren's face, deepening the lines there. "Leo," Kirk said slowly, "this is Harry Loren and his friend, Eddie. Harry's been here quite a while, waiting for us." "Oh, yes?" said Leo, still not moving. "That's right, Leo," Kirk said. "Quite awhile. What year was it, Harry?" he said across the clearing. "What year did you crash?" Loren blinked and there were tears again in his eyes. He reached out slowly, and the animal shifted so that its head touched Loren's hand. "Twenty-four-nineteen." Kirk put his teeth together. "Twenty-four-nineteen," he said. Loren nodded slowly, his eyes still upon the rocket. "Eighteen years," Leo said softly. "A long time, Leo," Kirk said. He thought of a girl with her hair braided about her head, looking up, while Loren had shot into the depths of sky and space. He thought of a little boy called Dickie, standing there, too, watching a fast disappearing blackness in the sky. He thought about eighteen years, and the fading of youth. A boy becoming a man. Braided hair becoming gray. Memories fading and minds adjusting. New love, new dedication. A world shifting, a universe shifting. Kirk looked at Eddie, the animal, real and alive, waiting patiently at the tips of Loren's fingers. "Eddie's been with Harry for a long time," he said. "Oh?" said Leo quietly. Loren's hand stroked the brown and yellow head. "Harry," Kirk said. "We're going to leave now. Are you ready?" Loren was silent. "You go up first, will you, Leo?" Kirk said. Leo looked at him, a faint frown touching his brow, then he began moving up the ladder to the air lock. Kirk waited until Leo had disappeared into the rocket, then he repeated, "We're going to leave now, Harry. Are you ready?" Loren remained motionless, his hand touching the animal's head. Suddenly he turned then and began moving slowly away through the brush, the brown and yellow creature bobbing beside him with queer rocker-like jumps. "Goodby, Harry," Kirk said. Finally he turned and climbed up the ladder. When he had gotten into his seat, he said, "Let's go, Leo," and he moved his hands to the controls. The rocket settled into the quiet motion of its course through space. "But I don't get it," Leo said. "I really don't. All that time, and then all he has to do is walk a dozen yards and get into the rocket and he's going home. That's all he would have to do." "Why?" Kirk said. "Why?" said Leo, frowning. Kirk nodded, looking at the man. "Why?" Tabby was peculiar, of course, but seemed harmless: just a little green fly that couldn't even protect itself from ordinary spiders. So the spiders fed, and grew, and fed, and grew... By Winston Marks Illustrated by Rudolph Palais April #, # heart you didn't sign on for this trip. Your replacement, who calls himself an ichthyologist, has only one talent that pertains to fish -- he drinks like one. There are nine of us in the expedition, and every one of us is fed up with this joker, Cleveland, already. We've only been on the island a week, and he's gone native, complete with beard, bare feet and bone laziness. He slops around the lagoon like a beachcomber and hasn't brought in a decent specimen yet. The island is a bit of paradise, though. Wouldn't be hard to let yourself relax under the palms all day instead of collecting blisters and coral gashes out in the bright sun of the atoll. No complaints, selves, and our little camp is very comfortable. The portable lab is working out fine, and the screened sleeping tenthouses have solved the one big nuisance we've suffered before: Insects. I think an entomologist would find more to keep him busy here than we will. Your ankle should be useable by the time our next supply plane from Hawaii takes off. If you apply again at the Foundation right now I'm sure Sellers and the others will help me get rid of Cleveland, and there'll be an open berth here. Got to close now. Our amphib jets off in an hour for the return trip. Hope this note is properly seductive. Come to the isles, boy, and live! -- Cordially, Fred May #, # sorry you didn't take my advice?!!!! I'm assuming you read the papers, and also, that too tight a censorship hasn't clamped down on this thing yet. Maybe I'm assuming too much on the latter. Anyhow, here's a detailed version from an actual eyewitness. That's right! I was right there on the beach when the "saucer" landed. Only it looked more like a king-size pokerchip. About six feet across and eight inches thick with a little hemispherical dome dead center on top. It hit offshore about seventy-five yards with a splash that sounded like a whale's tail. Jenner and I dropped our seine, waded to shore and started running along the beach to get opposite it. Cleveland came out of the shade and helped us launch a small boat. We got within twenty feet of the thing when it started moving out, slowly, just fast enough to keep ahead of us. I was in the bow looking right at it when the lid popped open with a sound like a cork coming out of a wine bottle. The little dome had split. Sellers quit rowing and we all hit the bottom of the boat. I peeked over the gunwale right away, and it's a good thing. All that came out of the dome was a little cloud of flies, maybe a hundred or so, and the breeze picked them up and blew them over us inshore so fast that Cleveland and Sellers never did see them. I yelled at them to look, but by then the flies were in mingling with the local varieties of sudden itch, and they figured I was seeing things. Cleveland, though, listened with the most interest. It develops that his specialty is entomology. He took this job because he was out of work. Don't know how he bluffed his way past the Foundation, but here he is, and it looks like he might be useful after all. He was all for going ashore, but Sellers and I rowed after the white disk for awhile until it became apparent we couldn't catch it. It's a good thing we didn't. A half hour later, Olafsen caught up to it in the power launch. We were watching from shore. It was about a half mile out when Ole cut his speed. Luckily he was alone. We had yelled at him to pick us up and take us along, but he was too excited to stop. He passed us up, went out there and boom! It wasn't exactly an A-bomb, but the spray hit us a half mile away, and the surface wave swamped us. Sellers radioed the whole incident to Honolulu right away, and they are sending out a plane with a diver, but we don't think he'll find anything. Things really blew! So far we haven't even found any identifiable driftwood from the launch, let alone Ole's body or traces of the disk. Meanwhile, Cleveland has come to believe my story, and he's out prowling around with art insect net. Most energy he's shown in weeks. M AY # -- Looks like this letter will be delayed a bit. We are under quarantine. The government plane came this morning. They sent along a diver, two reporters and a navy officer. The diver went down right away, but it's several hundred feet deep out there and slants off fast. This island is the tip of a sunken mountain, and the diver gave up after less than an hour. Personally I think a couple of sharks scared him off, but he claims there's so much vegetable ruck down there he couldn't expect to find anything smaller than the launch's motor. Cleveland hasn't found anything unusual in his bug net, but everyone is excited here, and you can guess why. When the "saucer" reports stopped cold about a year ago, you'll remember, it made almost as much news for a while as when they were first spotted. Now the people out here are speculating that maybe this disc thing came from the same source as the saucers, after they had a chance to look us over, study our ecology and return to their base. Cleveland is the one who started this trend of thought with his obsession that the flies I reported seeing are an attack on our planet from someone out in space. Commander Clawson, the navy officer, doesn't know what to think. He won't believe Cleveland until he produces a specimen of the "flyfrom-Mars", but then he turns around and contradicts himself by declaring a temporary quarantine until he gets further orders from Honolulu. The reporters are damned nuisances. They're turning out reams of Sunday supplement type stuff and pestering the devil out of Sparks to let them wire it back, but our radio is now under navy control, too. Sure is crowded in the bunkhouse with the six additional people, but no one will sleep outside the screen. AY # -- Cleveland thinks he has his specimen. He went out at dawn this morning and came in before breakfast. He's quit drinking but he hasn't slept in three days now and looks like hell. I thought he was getting his fancy imagination out of the bottle, but the soberer he got the more worried he looked over this "invasion" idea of his. Now he claims that his catch is definitely a sample of something new under our particular sun. He hustled it under a glass and started classifying it. It filled the bill for the arthopods, class Insecta. It looked to me, in fact, just like a small, ordinary blowfly, except that it has green wings. And I mean green , not just a little iridescent color. Cleve very gently pulled one wing off and we looked at it under low power. There is more similarity to a leaf than to a wing. In the bug's back is a tiny pocket, a sort of reservoir of the green stuff, and Cleve's dissection shows tiny veins running up into the wings. It seems to be a closed system with no connection with the rest of the body except the restraining membrane. Cleveland now rests his extraterrestrial origin theory on an idea that the green stuff is chlorophyll. If it is chlorophyll, either Cleve is right or else he's discovered a new class of arthropods. In other respects the critter is an ordinary biting and sucking bug with the potentials of about a deerfly for making life miserable. The high-power lens showed no sign of unusual or malignant microscopic life inside or out of the thing. Cleve can't say how bad a bite would be, because he doesn't have his entomologist kit with him, and he can't analyze the secretion from the poison gland. The commander has let him radio for a botanist and some micro-analysis equipment. Everyone was so pitched up that Cleve's findings have been rather anti-climactic. I guess we were giving more credence to the space-invader theory than we thought. But even if Cleve has proved it, this fly doesn't look like much to be frightened over. The reporters are clamoring to be let loose, but the quarantine still holds. with the botanist arrived we were able to gather all the specimens of Tabanidae viridis (Cleveland's designation) that he wanted. Seems like every tenth flying creature you meet is a green "Tabby" now. The botanist helped Cleve and me set up the bio kit, and he confirmed Cleve's guess. The green stuff is chlorophyll. Which makes Tabby quite a bug. Kyser, the youngest reporter, volunteered to let a Tabby bite him. It did without too much coaxing. Now he has a little, itchy bump on his wrist, and he's happily banging away at his typewriter on a story titled, "I Was Bitten by the Bug from Space!" That was hours ago, and we haven't learned anything sinister about the green fly except that it does have a remarkable breeding ability. One thing the reporter accomplished : we can go outside the screened quarters now without wondering about catching space-" typhus. probably a pretty good idea. Cleve has turned up some dope on Tabby's life cycle that makes us glad all over that we are surrounded by a thousand miles of salt water. Tabby's adult life is only a couple of days, but she is viviparous, prolific (some thousand young at a sitting), and her green little microscopic babies combine the best survival features of spores and plankton, minus one : they don't live in salt water. But they do very well almost anyplace else. We have watched them grow on hot rocks, leaves, in the sand and best of all, filtered down a little into the moist earth. They grow incredibly fast with a little sun, so the chlorophyll is biologically justified in the life-cycle. This puzzled us at first, because the adult Tabby turns into a bloodsucking little brute. Deprived of any organic matter, our bottled specimens die in a short time, in or out of the sunlight, indicating the green stuff doesn't provide them with much if any nourishment after they are full-grown. Now we are waiting for a supply of assorted insecticides to find the best controls over the pests. The few things we had on hand worked quite well, but I guess they aren't forgetting our sad experience with The Tabbies now outnumber all the other insects here, and most outside work has been halted. The little green devils make life miserable outside the tent-houses. We have built another screened shelter to accommodate the latest arrivals. We are getting quite a fleet of amphibian aircraft floating around our lagoon. No one will be allowed to return until we come up with all the answers to the question of controlling our insect invasion. Cleveland is trying to convince Sellers and the commander that we should get out and send in atomic fire to blow the whole island into the sea. They forwarded his suggestion to the U. N. committee which now has jurisdiction, but they wired back that if the insect is from space, we couldn't stop other discs from landing on the mainlands. Our orders are to study the bug and learn all we can. Opinion is mixed here. I can't explain the flying disc unless it's extraterrestrial, but why would an invader choose an isolated spot like this to attack? Cleve says this is just a "test patch" and probably under surveillance. But why such an innocuous little fly if they mean business? The newsmen are really bored now. They see no doom in the bugs, and since they can't file their stories they take a dim view of the quarantine. They have gotten up an evening fishing derby with the crew members of the planes. Have to fish after dusk. The Tabbies bite too often as long as the sun is up. Cleve has turned into a different man. He is soft-spoken and intense. His hands tremble so much that he is conducting most of his work by verbal directions with the botanist and me to carry them out. When his suggestion about blowing up the atoll was turned down he quit talk-' ing except to conduct his work. If things were half as ominous as he makes out we'd be pretty worried. here and none too soon. We were running out of drinking water. The Tabbies got so thick that even at night a man would get stung insane if he went outside the screen. The various sprays all worked well. This evening the air is relatively clear. Incidentally, the birds have been having a feast. Now the gulls are congregating to help us out like they did the Mormons in the cricket plague. The spiders are doing all right for themselves, too. In fact, now that we have sprayed the place the spiders and their confounded webs are the biggest nuisance we have to contend with. They are getting fat and sassy. Spin their webs between your legs if you stand still a minute too long. Remind me of real estate speculators in a land boom, the little bastardly opportunists. As you might gather, I don't care for brothers Arachnidae. They make everyone else nervous, too. Strangely, Cleveland, the entomologist, gets the worst jolt out of them. He'll stand for minutes at the screen watching them spin their nasty webs and skipping out to dejuice a stray Tabby that the spray missed. And he'll mutter to himself and scowl and curse them. It is hard to include them as God's creatures. Cleve still isn't giving out with" the opinions. He works incessantly and has filled two notebooks full of data. Looks to me like our work is almost done. # -- To whom it will never concern: I can no longer make believe this is addressed to my friend, Ben Tobin. Cleveland has convinced me of the implications of our tragedy here. But somehow it gives me some crazy, necessary ray of hope to keep this journal until the end. I think the real horror of this thing started to penetrate to me about June #. Our big spray job lasted less than # hours, and on that morning I was watching for the planes to come in for a second try at it when I noticed the heavy spider webbing in the upper tree foliage. As I looked a gull dove through the trees, mouth open, eating Tabbies. Damned if the webs didn't foul his wings. At first he tore at them bravely and it looked like he was trying to swim in thin mud -- sort of slow motion. Then he headed into a thick patch, slewed around at right angles and did a complete flip. Instantly three mammoth spiders the size of my fist pounced out on him and trussed him up before he could tear loose with his feet. His pitiful squawking was what made me feel that horror for the first time. And the scene was repeated more and more often. The planes dusted us with everything they had, and it cut down the Tabbies pretty well again, but it didn't touch the spiders, of course. And then our return radio messages started getting very vague. We were transmitting Cleve's data hourly as he compiled it, and we had been getting ordinary chatter and speculation from the Honolulu operator at the end of our message. That stopped on the sixth of June. Since then, we've had only curt acknowledgements of our data and sign-offs. At the same time, we noticed that complete censorship on news of our situation and progress apparently hit all the long-wave radio broadcasts. Up to that time the newscasts had been feeding out a dilute and very cautious pablum about our fight against Tabby. Immediately when we noticed this news blind spot Cleve went all to pieces and started drinking again. Cleve, Sellers and I had the lab tent to ourselves, having moved our bunks in there, so we got a little out of touch with the others. It wasn't the way Sellers and I liked it, but none of us liked the trip from lab to living quarters any more, although it was only fifty feet or so. Then Sparks moved in, too. For the same reason. He said it was getting on his nerves running back and forth to the lab to pick up our outgoing bulletins. So he shifted the generator, radio gear and all over to a corner of the lab and brought in his bunk. By the tenth of June we could see that the spraying was a losing battle. And it finally took the big tragedy to drive home the truth that was all about us already. When the crew got ready to go out to their planes on the eleventh, everyone except the four of us in the lab tent was drafted to help clear webs between the tents and the beach. We could hear them shouting from tent to tent as they made up their work party. We could no longer see across the distance. Everywhere outside, vision was obscured by the grayish film of webs on which little droplets caught the rors. In the shade it was like trying to peer through thin milk, with the vicious, leggy little shadows skittering about restlessly. As usual in the morning, the hum of the Tabbies had risen above the normal jungle buzzing, and this morning it was the loudest we'd heard it. Well, we heard the first screen door squeak open, and someone let out a whoop as the group moved out with brooms, palm fronds and sticks to snatch a path through the nightmare of spider webs. The other two doors opened and slammed, and we could hear many sounds of deep disgust voiced amid the grunts and thrashings. They must have been almost to the beach when the first scream reached us. Cleve had been listening in fascination, and the awful sound tore him loose of his senses. He screamed back. The rest of us had to sit on him to quiet him. Then the others outside all began screaming -- not words, just shattering screams of pure terror, mixed with roars of pain and anger. Soon there was no more anger. Just horror. And in a few minutes they died away. looked at each other. Cleve had vomited and passed out. Sparks got out Cleve' s whiskey, and we spilled half of it trying to get drinks into us. Sparks snapped out of it first. He didn't try to talk to us. He just went to his gear, turned on the generator and warmed up the radio. He told Honolulu what had happened as we had heard it. When he finished, he keyed over for an acknowledgment. The operator said to hold on for a minute. Then he said they would try to dispatch an air task force to get us off, but they couldn't be sure just when. While this was coming in Cleve came to his senses and listened. He was deadly calm now, and when Honolulu finished he grabbed the mike from Sparks, cut in the TX and asked, "Are they landing discs on the mainlands?" The operator answered, "Sorry, that's classified." "For God's sake," Cleve demanded, "if you are ready to write us off you can at least answer our questions. Are there any of the green sonsofbitches on the mainland?" There was another little pause, and then, "Yes." That was all. Sparks ran down the batteries trying to raise them again for more answers, but no response. When the batteries went dead he checked the generator that had kicked off. It was out of gasoline. The drums were on the beach. Now we were without lights, power and juice for our other radios. We kept alive the first few days by staying half drunk. Then Cleve's case of whiskey gave out and we began to get hungry. Sparks and Sellers set fire to one of our strawticking mattresses and used it as a torch to burn their way over to the supply tent about thirty feet away. It worked fairly well. The silky webs flashed into nothing as the flames hit them, but they wouldn't support the fire, and other webs streamed down behind the two. They had to burn another mattress to get back with a few cases of food. Then we dug a well under the floor of our tent. Hit water within a few feet. But when we cut through the screen floor it cost us sentry duty. We had to have one person awake all night long to stamp on the spiders that slipped in around the edge of the well. Through all of this Cleveland has been out on his feet. He has just stood and stared out through the screen all day. We had to force him to eat. He didn't snap out of it until this morning. Sparks couldn't stand our radio silence any longer, so he talked Sellers into helping him make a dash for the gas drums on the beach. They set fire to two mattresses and disappeared into the tunnel of burned webs that tangled and caved in behind them. When they were gone, Cleveland suddenly came out of his trance and put a hand on my shoulder. I thought for a moment he was going to jump me, but his eyes were calm. He said, "Well, Fred, are you convinced now that we've been attacked?" I said, "It makes no sense to me at all. Why these little flies?" Cleve said, "They couldn't have done better so easily. They studied our ecology well. They saw that our greatest potential enemy was the insect population, and the most vicious part of it was the spider. Tabanidae viridis was not sent just to plague us with horsefly bites. Tabby was sent to multiply and feed the arachnids. There are durable species in all climates. And if our botanist were still alive he could explain in detail how long our plant life can last under this spider infestation. "Look for yourself," he said pointing outside. "Not only are the regular pollenizing insects doomed, but the density of those webs will choke out even wind pollinated grains." He stared down our shallow well hole and stamped on a small, black, flat spider that had slithered under the screening. "I suppose you realize the spiders got the others. Down here in the tropics the big varieties could do it by working together. Sellers and Sparks won't return. Sounds like they got through all right, but they'll be bitten so badly they won't try to get back." And even as he spoke we heard one of the aircraft engines start up. The sound was muffled as under a bed quilt. Cleve said, "I don't blame them. I'd rather die in the sun, too. The beach should be fairly clear of webs. We've got one mattress left. What do you say?" He's standing there now holding the mattress with the ticking sticking out. I don't think one torch will get us through. But it will be worth a try for one more look at the sun. Strumming a harp while floating on a white cloud might be Paradise for some people , but it would bore others stiff. Given an unlimited chance to choose your ideal world, what would you specify -- palaces or log cabins? By Frank M. Robinson Illustrated by Paul Orban thanks again for the offer. As you can see, I'm kinda down on my luck. I know what you're thinking, but I'm not really on the bum. I usually make out all right -- nothing fancy, mind you, but it's a living. Odd jobs in the winter and spring, follow the harvests in the summer and fall. Things are slack right now. You? Electronics, huh? Used to know a fellow in electronics... His name was Joe Shannon, used to work for Stellar Electric up in Fremont. Young fellow, not more'n twenty-five or so. Rail thin, wispy hair, serious look -- you know, the one suit, absent-minded type. Joe was a brain. A triple-A, gold-plated, genuine genius. Had a wife named Marge. Not beautiful but pretty and a nice figure and a cook you never saw the likes of. Like I say, she was married to Joe but Joe was married to his work and after you'd been around a while, you could tell there was friction. But that ain't the beginning. I suppose I'm partly responsible because it started when I was over for dinner one night. I had been working in the garden and doing odd jobs around the house that afternoon and I finagled it so I was invited for supper. Marge Shannon made chili that I just couldn't stay away from. Thick with beans and meat and easy on the spices so it wouldn't burn an old man's stomach. Joe and I had just gone into the living room -- Marge stayed in the kitchen to do the dishes -- and I was feeling stuffed and kinda sleepy. All of a sudden Joe says out of a clear blue sky: "Harry, this is a hell of a world we live in, isn't it?" Now Joe had never struck me as being the unhappy type. He loved his work, he loved his wife (and just about in that order), and so far as I knew he didn't owe any money. So I tried to feel him out, to find out where the rub was. "There's nothing wrong with the world, Joe," I says. "It's just the people in it." his pipe and tamping down the tobacco and not saying a word and I get the feeling that he's deadly serious about something. "You're right," he says quietly. "It isn't the world, it's the people." I sit there feeling puzzled but a lot less sleepy and finally I ask: "Anything wrong, Joe?" He lights his pipe and settles back in the big, overstuffed easy chair with the flowered slip-cover that Marge made, still frowning. "It's an unhappy world," he repeats. "It all depends on what side of the picture you want to look at," I says, trying to cheer him up. "Maybe you been reading too many newspaper headlines." Joe wasn't listening. "What makes people unhappy, Harry?" that make people unhappy. Given half the night, I could maybe list a couple of hundred. But to narrow it down to one or two, I couldn't do it. So I just shook my head and let Joe carry the ball. "It's a complex world, Harry. A lot of people never adjust to it. Some of them turn the tables and try to adjust the world to them, which makes a lot of other people unhappy. No, I'd say there's a certain number of people who just don't fit in this world of ours. Maybe at a different time and on another world, they might fit. But they don't fit on this one, not right here and now." it that I had never thought of before. And Joe had a point. Now you take old Barney Muhlenberg, the town drunk. I knew Barney when he was a boy, and a more sober, adventure-seeking young rascal you never saw. But by then all the frontiers had dried up, it was between wars, and the only adventure Barney could find was in the bottom of a bottle. Barney was one of those poor folks born fifty years too late. Or you take Miss Alice Markey, the history teacher at Fremont High. She's an old spinster -- frail, white-haired, and a little bit crabby now. You'd never believe it but she used to be the romantic type. Somehow, the right man just never came along, but she's never given up hoping either. Sure, you wouldn't believe it to look at them. But that's how people are, down underneath. All dreams and wishful thinking. "It's tough, Joe," I says, "but what can you do about it?" It always seemed to me that you weren't going to help people by letting them fall asleep on a couch at fifty dollars a nap and trying to convince them they should give up their dreams. "You've got to give people something positive !" Joe says, hitting an end table with his fist so an ashtray jumps off. I sat up and began to take notice. Once Joe had an idea, he usually did something about it. "You got something in mind," I accused. He stopped pacing and pointed his pipe at me like it was the working end of a twenty-two rifle. "I got an idea, Harry," he says, the genius showing in his eyes like the dollar signs in a cash register. "I'm going to make a machine during my vacation and..." And then Marge is in the doorway, dishtowel in her hand and little anger spots in her cheeks. "Joseph Shannon!" she says, stamping her foot. "You know perfectly well what we're going to do and where we're going to go on your vacation!" Joe's mouth got set and I could see a storm blowing up so I struggled to my feet and got my hat. "That was awful nice chili, Missus Shannon," I says, and it isn't much more than two seconds later when I'm out the front door and walking up the sidewalk. man that he was -- stayed right in town during his vacation. He had a laboratory in the basement and every day when I went by I could hear him and Wally Claus, his assistant, working down there, hammering and nailing and running electric motors that spat sparks and whined worse'n two alley cats fightin' in a fish market. On the day that it's finished, Joe invites me over for dinner again. After the meal's over -- and Joe's so anxious that he don't even tell Marge how nice the tuna fish casserole was -- we go down into the basement. Marge doesn't come along. "What's the matter with Marge?" I ask. "Ain't she interested?" Joe jams his hands in his pockets, scowls, and says: "We've been having a little trouble, Harry. She doesn't see things my way." It isn't any of my business so I clam up and walk over to where the whole front half of the basement is curtained off with a couple of old sheets and a drawstring. "This is it," Joe says proudly, pulling on the drawstring. "The greatest invention since the wheel !" Well, to tell you the truth, son, I was kinda disappointed. I had expected something big and shiny but what there was looked a little like a cross between a phone booth and one of those things in train stations where you take your own photograph. I looked inside and all I could see was a big screen in front, like on a television set, a coin slot, and a funny looking hat with a cable leading out of it. "It's real nice," I says, not actually knowing whether it was or not. "What is it?" "I call it a Paradise booth," Joe says. I took another look at the machine, and then looked at Joe. It occurs to me that maybe he's been working too hard or that arguments with Marge have sorta unsettled him. "Look, Harry," Joe says, "remember when we were talking about all the people who didn't fit in this world?" "Sure I remember," I says. "What's this got to do with it?" "What if people could choose the type of world they wanted to live in?" I looks at him blankly. "I don't get it." He fishes around for his pipe and lights up. "How big's the universe, Harry?" "Now, son, I got no idea how big the universe is and I says so. All I know is that it's big. "Most scientists say the universe is infinite," Joe explains. "And if it's infinite, then it must have an infinite number of worlds in it. An actual world to match whatever kind of world you can dream up, let's say. All you have to do is step into the Paradise booth, put on the cap, visualize the kind of world you want to live in so it shows on the screen, and off you go!" "You're kidding," I says feebly. "You don't really mean it." He taps me on the chest with his finger and says: "Yes, I do really mean it, Harry. I've tried it and it works!" And there I thought I had him. "If you went off to another world," I says slyly, "just how did you get back?" "Built myself another machine," he says promptly. I snapped the trap shut. "Just picked this world out of all the millions there are? Just like that." Joe grinned. "I just thought of the damndest world that I could, and here I was!" Well, he had me. There wasn't much more I could say. Joe's idea, of course, was to build machines and put them on the street corners like you would newspaper stands. He figured that all the misfits and the unhappy people would sneak out and use them and whisht, off they'd fly to their own favorite world, leaving all us well-adjusted people behind. He even had a slogan figured out. "Paradise -- for only a quarter!' I You see, he figured he'd have to charge a quarter not only to pay for the machines but because people are just naturally suspicious of anything they get for free... up three of the machines and installed them on some of the better known street corners around Fremont. Joe had trouble getting a license to do it, but when he told the city fathers what the machines did, they figured the best way to discourage a crackpot was to let him go ahead and flop on his own. And he came close to doing it. Those booths just sat on the street corners all summer and gathered dust. People called them Shannon's folly, which didn't help things with Marge any. And then one day, Barney Muhlenberg disappeared. We thought he might have gotten drunk and fallen in the river and we spent a good two days dragging it. And then we looked in at his rooming house but we didn't find a thing except thirty-nine empty bottles and a rusty opener. It was Joe who first discovered what had happened. He got hold of me and we went down to the Paradise booth on the corner just opposite from Schultz's Bar and Grill. There was a quarter in the coin till and when I looked at the screen, I knew Barney had taken off. Well, everybody's happy. Joe's glad that his machine has finally caught on, Barney is probably happy playing Cowboys and Indians even though he's way too old for it, and the town is happy because its worst sanitary problem has just eliminated itself. The news gets spread around and everybody starts laying odds on who's gonna be the next to go. Nobody goes near the booths for about a week, and then the kids start passing around a rumor Saturday morning that Miss Alice Markey has submitted her resignation to the school board and is packing to leave town. The town splits. Half the people figure she'll be sensible and leave by bus. The other half, myself included, station ourselves at the Paradise booth that's nearest to her apartment. Along about noon, Miss Alice shows up. She's pale and determined looking, all dressed up to travel. Her suitcase is leaking little bits and ends of clothing and over her shoulder she's got a knapsack with her lunch in it. Always practical, Miss Alice was. "You aren't really thinking of leaving are you, Ma'm?" I ask, thinking it would be a shame for a good-hearted, hard-working school teacher like Miss Alice to leave Fremont. "I'll thank you to mind your own business, young man!" she says coldly, and marches into the booth and pulls the curtain shut. A moment later I hear a coin drop, there's a flash of bright blue light, and then dead silence. I was the nearest one so I lifts the curtain and peeks in. Miss Alice and her suitcase and knapsack have disappeared. I look at the screen even though nobody needs to tell me that Miss Alice Markey has whisked ofF to a world where all the men look like Rudolph Valentino and have a fondness for oldmaid school teachers. Sure enough, I was right... About mid-August, Joe comes around and he's looking mighty worried. "Harry," he says, "Wally Claus has disappeared." I mull it over for a minute. "It can't be what you're thinking," I says. "Wally's one of the most normal men in town." We go down to see Wally's wife and I begin to get the picture. Wally was one of those hard working, hard drinking Dutchmen with a family about three times as big as his salary. He worked at Stellar Electric with Joe and, like I say. sometimes he used to help Joe in his lab. "When was the last time you saw Wally?" Joe asks gently. Mrs. Wally is blubbering in her handkerchief and trying to hold a kid on her lap at the same time. Two more are hanging onto her chair, and about six others are standing around the room sucking their thumbs and looking wide-eyed at Joe and me. "It was p-payday," she blurts, the tears streaming down her fat cheeks. "Wally c-comes home drunk and all I do was quietly ask him for his paycheck. And that's the last I see of him. I d-don't know w-what got into him!" Anybody with half an eye, I thought, could piece together what had happened. Wally probably had one or two at Schultz's bar and got to feeling sorry for himself and then when he got home, he walked into a hornet's nest. Nine kids bawling or running around and Mrs. Wally nagging the life out of him. He must have wondered if it was worth it, then found a quarter in his pocket and walked around the corner to the nearest Paradise booth. Whisht -- and Wally's worries are a thing of the past. Joe and I get the idea at the same time and we chase down to the nearest booth. I took one look at the screen and blushed. Wally had some pretty wild ideas. On the way home, I tried to talk Joe into tearing the machines down. "How do you know where it's going to end, Joe?" I argues. "You can't tell who's well-adjusted and who isn't any more. And besides, some of those who ain't have contributed just as much to life as those who are. Maybe even more." "I'm going to leave them up," Joe says grimly. "The world will be better off without a lot of neurotics running around." "You won't think it over, Joe?" "No," he says, "and to prove it, I'm going to spend the next two weeks in New York looking for backing to put up Paradise booths all across the country." "What does Marge think?" I ask. "Hang Marge!" he says. Well, I just stood there in the middle of the block and watched him get smaller and smaller in the distance. I couldn't think of anything more to say and he wouldn't have listened to me anyways. I packed and left town that same night. The strawberry season was just coming on and I ain't never missed a harvest yet. A bout two weeks passed and I couldn't stay away any longer. I got back to town, took a look around, and then went down to the station to wait for Joe to come in on the flyer. I figured somebody ought to be there to break it to him gently. He gets off the train looking happy and successful and I figure he's made arrangements to put a Paradise booth in every city, town, and crossroads in the nation. "Why, hello, Harry," he says when he sees me, and gives me the old professional smile and handshake that really ain't the old Joe at all. "Any cabs around?" "No, there ain't no cabs around." Something in the way I says it makes him give me a sharp look. "How come? There's always a couple to meet the flyer." "There ain't none this time," I says. "No cab drivers." "No cab drivers?" "Ain't no need for 'em any more," I says. "Ain't no people in town to use cabs. Town's empty. Everybody's gone." He looks kinda green and says: "What do you mean, everybody's gone?" I shrugs and starts walking back to town. "Everybody took off," I says. "Your Paradise booths were real popular." He still looks blank so I give it to him straight. I had first thought about it when Wally Claus disappeared. It occurs to me then that everybody has times when they wish they could crawl out from under and quietly disappear. You see, Joe had assumed that some people were adjusted to society and some weren't. Well, actually nobody is, it's just a difference of degree. Once Wally took off, it sorta burst the dam. More and more people sneaked into the booths, dropped in a quarter, and whisht -- It was lonely and dark in town. No street lamps, of course. There was nobody down at the power plant to work the switches. And there weren't any lights in the houses 'cause there wasn't anybody around. "I can't imagine everybody going," Joe says, biting his lip. "What about all the kids?" "I kinda think they were among the first," I says. I waves at the starry sky. "There's probably a planet up there some place where there's nothing but hot rods and football stadiums. And I suppose there's one section of the universe fenced off for all the Junior Spacemen that'll be roaming around it." Anybody you could think of mighta had a reason for leaving, I told him. The boys at Schultz's probably took off for a world where Marilyn Monroe has a thousand twin sisters; and Johnny Douglas, the ace at Kelly's Bowling Alley, is probably located on a world where it's impossible to bowl anything but a three hundred game. By then, we were in front of Joe's house. It was as dark and curtained as the others. blinds had been drawn, the dishes neatly stacked and put away, and a note left on the doorstoop telling the milkman not to bring any more milk. The note to Joe was on the kitchen table. It was hard for Joe to read on accounta it was blurred in spots where Marge had been crying and the tears had fallen on the paper. It told Joe -- among a whole mess of other things -- that she thought she had married a man, not a radio set, and since everybody was using them she was going to visit a Paradise booth that night. "What am I going to do?" Joe asks remorsefully. "That's your problem," I says heartlessly, thinking of all the chili dinners that went with Marge. "You made the booths in the first place." "Yeah, I know." He pulls out a wad of papers from his pocket and thumbs through them. "I got contracts here for a Paradise booth in every town over five thousand popa month." "Joe," I says, suddenly frightened, "don't do it. Look what happened here in Fremont. Why man, if you put those things all over the country there wouldn't be a soul left in the United States after a month had gone by." "-You're right, Harry," he says. "Absolutely right." And he takes a cigarette lighter out of his pocket and sets fire to the papers and lets them burn 'til they're nothing but ashes. "What are you gonna do with the booths in town?" I ask. He goes down to the basement and comes up with a hatchet. "Gome on," he says grimly. "I'll show you what I'm going to do with them!" The first two we chop in small pieces until the walk is covered with cogs and wheels and smashed tubes and dials. We stop at the third one. That was the fanciest one of all, with the leather upholstery inside and the big red neon sign on top that you could read halfway across town. Joe stares at it for a long minute, then makes up his mind. He fishes around in his pocket for a coin. "What do you think you're going to do?" I asks, alarmed. "I'm going to look for Marge," he says. "I need a vacation anyways." "How you gonna find her, Joe?" I asks. "You don't even know what kind of a world to look for!" "Yes, I do," Joe says wistfully. "It'll be the kind of world where Marge always wanted to spend a vacation. Some place like up in Massachusetts during the summer. White beaches, little wooden houses, fishing boats and lobster pots... She's described it to me so often I could picture it down to the last pebble on the beach." He gets into the booth. "Think you'll ever be back, Joe?" I asks. He drops a quarter in the coin slot and a picture builds up on the screen of a beach with a little town in the distance. "Sure," Joe says confidentially. "We'll be back." And then there's a flash of blue light and Joe's gone, too. I hung around for a couple of days afterward but Joe and Marge never came back. I think he found her all right but Marge didn't want anything to do with the old world so they just stayed there. And that's about all there is, son. Except I've often wondered what happened when strangers drove through and found Fremont a ghost town... Now, lookahere, son, it's no cause for you to go calling me a liar just because you never heard of Stellar Electric and Fremont ain't listed on any map you've got. You didn't expect me to stay behind when everybody else had left, did you? I always had a hankerin" for a different type of world, too. A world where a body didn't have to work so blamed hard and listen to my stories and buy me a beer... Personalities in Science A Science Romance Began When Boy Met Flight turies as a primitive weapon, and many men have speculated on their possible use in carrying human beings to the stars. In practically all cases, such men have been laughed at as impractical dreamers. Today, however, rockets carrying instruments and animals can reach the heights of the stratosphere, guided missiles can come within inches of their pinpointed targets, jet planes can race through the air at twice the speed of sound and more, and the entire concept of interplanetary travel has become a seriously considered possibility rather than a vague dream. One of the men who deserves a great deal of credit for this change in the state of affairs is comparatively little known; his name is Theodore Von Karman. It was not Von Karman's own idea to visit the small, laboriously cleared field which was serving as Paris' first airport in #. He'd heard about the successful powered flight made three years before by the Wright brothers in America, but he hadn't devoted too much thought to the subject. It was a young French newspaper woman, thrilled by the unusual assignment, who talked Von Karman into going with her to witness the first really long flight of an airplane. Whether she had any more personal motives for the invitation will never be known. It is certain, however, that the keen-eyed young man with the aquiline nose succumbed to her blandishments, saw his first plane in flight, and found his only true love. The romance of the air had caught him in its grip, and there is scarcely an aspect of the sciences of aeronautics and astronautics that hasn't profited from the love affair that ensued. The nature of the air and the unknown rules governing its behavior have been the main field of inquiry for Professor Von Karman ever since that day in #. The turbulence, eddies and invisible whirlpools of the air have tremendous effects on any object moving through this medium -- a greater effect, even, than oceanic currents and tides have on the ships that sail the seas. Theodore Von Karman probed the turbulences, studied the vortex formations and developed the Theory of Vortex Streets, the actual mathematical formula for the effect of drag that these formations produce on objects present in the air. He studied not only the air and its behavior, but also the behavior of objects under the stresses and strains of high speed flight, and produced successful theories for the manufacture and design of planes that have revolutionized that industry with incredible speed in the short span of # years. Because of him mankind is flying higher, faster, farther, and more safely than even the most rabidly air-minded thought possible a short time ago. He developed, almost singlehanded the theory of the behavior of the boundary layers of air, the theory of buckling beyond the elastic limit, the theory of the deformation of curved pipes, and the nonlinear theory of the stability of thinwalled shells. All of these govern the design of present-day aircraft. son of a famed philosopher, he had received his mechanical engineering degree, taught in the schools, spent his compulsory year in the Austro-Hungarian army, and then taken a job as research engineer with a machine manufacturer in Budapest. After that fateful morning at the Issy-les-Moulineaux Airport, designing machinery held no charm for Theodore Von Karman. With scarcely decent haste he quit his job and enrolled at the University of Gottingen in Germany as a graduate student, and won his Ph.D. and a place on the teaching staff after two years of studying mathematics, physics, and mechanics. Max Born, the great physicist, was on the faculty at Gottingen and his interest in Von Karman's ability in theoretical physics was so great that the two men worked together for some time. The first modern theories of the specific heats of solids were the results of this collaboration. With the exception of time spent as head of research in the AustroHungarian Aviation Corps during World War I, he spent the years from # to # as director of the newly erected Aeronautic Institute at Aachen, and as consultant to such famed aeronautical pioneers as Junkers, Zeppelin, and other German aircraft manufacturers. In # the Guggenhein Foundation invited him to the United States for a visit and lecture tour. Between lectures he helped to construct the wind tunnel facilities at the Guggenheim Laboratories. Continuing on around the world after his stay in America, he introduced the first all-metal propeller and the first wind tunnel to Japan before returning to Aachen. Since he established his permanent residence in California in #, the Guggenheim Aeronaudeal Laboratory at Cal Tech under his direction has become tops in the field. The ground work for supersonic flight, a supersonic wind tunnel, and several far-sighted rocket projects were notable firsts in the field under his leadership. He was pioneering in the fields of rockets and jet propulsion long before they were thought feasible by military men. During World War II, Von Karman headed the Scientific Advisory Group and was special consultant to General "Hap" Arnold of the Army Air Forces. He also worked with the Ordnance Corps on the initial development of long range rockets. Despite his pioneering, and the proof his genius in his field, he was coldly turned down by numerous American manufacturing corporations when he tried to interest them in building and manufacturing rockets for the Army. To disprove the general notion that scientists are dreamers with no financial sense, and because he knew the Axis nations were far ahead of us in research on the use of rockets as weapons, he persuaded four of his associates from the California Institute of Technology to join him in a venture that the manufacturing brains of the nation had thought a "wild scheme." The five raised # among themselves and started the Aerojet Engineering Company at Azusa, Cal., with just five employees. In ten years the manufacture of the ten-inch thick by three-foot long rockets that help to get big, heavily laden planes off the ground had grown to a # business. Theodore Von Karman, who in addition to his theoretical work is an ardent teacher, philosopher and historian, has retired from the presidency of Aerojet and remains on as chief research consultant. That way he is able to spend what leisure time he has after teaching pursuing his favorite hobbies -- collecting antique furniture and adding to a collection of #-mm films which spans thirty years. The only devotion that Theodore Von Karman has allowed himself beside the work he loves has been given to his sister, Dr. Josephine Von Karman, who was his inseparable companion until her death. ( Continued from base # ) "next few years to supplement diets in areas which are not now supplied with sufficient protein for minimum health requirements. And Japan itself may well be the country with the first wide-scale use of artificially-grown algae as food. The advantages are clear: it's a chance to grow food containing no waste whatever, on land that is now and would otherwise remain completely useless for agriculture, on easily available inorganic chemicals. The first use of algae as food in the United States will probably be for fattening livestock, not human beings, but there's no reason to place the prediction made in our first paragraph outside the realm of possibility. Pettigill was, you might say, in tune with the world. It wouldn't even have been an exaggeration to say the world was in tune with Pettigill. T hen somebody struck a sour note... By Tom Leahy Mr. Bartle, come in. This is indeed a pleasure." His pinched face was lighted with an enthusiastic smile. "You know my name, so I suppose you know the Bulletin sent me for a personality interview," the tall man who stood in the doorway said in a monotone as if it were a statement he had made a thousand times -- which he had. "Oh, certainly, Mr. Bartle. I was informed by Section Secretary Andrews this morning. I must say, I am greatly honored by this visit, too. Oh heavens, here I am letting you stand in the doorway. Excuse my discourtesy, sir -- come in, come in," the little man said, and bustled the bored Bartle into a great room. The walls of the room were lined by gray metal boxes that had spools of reproduction tape mounted on their vertical fronts -- tape recorders, hundreds of them. "I have a rather lonely occupation, Mr. Bartle, and sometimes the common courtesies slip my mind. It is a rather grievous fault and I beg you to overlook it. It would be rather distressing to me if Section Secretary Andrews were to hear of it; he has a rather intolerant attitude toward such faux pas. Do you understand what I mean? Not that I'm dissatisfied with my superior -- perish the 'thought, it's just that -- " "Don't worry, I won't breathe a word," the tall man interrupted without looking at the babbling fellow shuffling along at his side. "Mr. Pettigill, I don't want to keep you from your work for too long, so I'll just get a few notes and make up the bulk of the story back at the paper." Bartle searched the room with his eyes. "Don't you have a chair in this place?" "Oh, my gracious, yes. There goes that old discourtesy again, eh?" the little man, Pettigill, said with a dry laugh. He scurried about the room like a confused squirrel until he spotted a chair behind his desk, "My chair. My chair for you, Mr. Bartle!" Again the dry laugh. "Thanks, Mr. Pettigill." "Arthur. Call me Arthur. Formality really isn't necessary among Mid Echelon, do you think? Section Secretary Andrews has often requested I call him Morton, but I just can't seem to bring myself to such informality. After all, he is Sub-Prime Echelon. It makes one uncomfortable, shall we say, to step out of one's class?" He stopped talking and the corners of his mouth dropped quickly as if he had just been given one minute to live. "You -- you are only Mid Echelon, aren't you? I mean, if you are Sub-Prime, I shouldn't be -- " "Relax, Mr. Pettigill -- 'Arthur' -- I am Mid Echelon. And I'm only that because my father was a man of far more industry than I; I inherited my classification." "So? Well, now. Interesting -- very. He must have been a great man, a great man, Mr. Bartle." "So I am told, Arthur. But let's get on with it," Bartle said, taking some scrap paper and a pencil stub from his tunic pocket. "Now, tell me about yourself and the Melopsych Center." "Well," the little man began with a sigh and blinked his eyes peculiarly as though he were mentally shuffling events and facts like a deck of cards. "Well, I -- my life would be of little interest, but the Center is of the utmost importance. That's it -- I am no more than a physical extremity that functions in accord with the vital life that courses through the great physique of the Center! No more -- I ask no more than to serve the Center and in turn, my fellow citizens, whether they be Prime, Sub-Prime, Mid, or even Sub-Lower!" He stopped speaking, affecting a martyr-like pose. Bartle covered a smile with his hand. "Well, Bartle, as you know, the Center -- the Melopsych Center, a thoroughly inadequate name for the installation I might say -- is the point of broadcast for these many taped musical selections contrived by Mass Psych as a therapeutic treatment for the various Echelon levels. It is the Great Psychiatrist -- the Father Confessor. For where can one bare one's soul, or soothe one's nerves and disposition frayed by a day's endeavor, better than in the tender yet firm embrace of music?" the train of thought that was lost in the camouflage of Pettigill's flowery phraseology. "You see all about you these many recorders, Mr. Bartle?" Bartle nodded. "On those machines, sir, are spools of tape. Music tapes, all music. My heavens, every kind: classical music, jazz, western, all kinds of music. Some tapes are no more than a single melodious note, sustained for whatever length of time necessary to relax and please the Echelon level home it is being beamed to. Oh, I tell you, Mr. Bartie, when the last tape has expended itself for the day, as our service code suggests, I leave this great edifice with a feeling of profound pride in the fact that I have so served my fellow man. You share that feeling too, don't you Mr. Bartle?" Bartle shrugged. Pettigill paused and looked at the watch he carried on a long chain attached to a clasp on his tunic. "A Benz chronometer, given to me by Section Secretary Andrews on the completion of my twentyfive years of service. It's radio-synchronized with the master timepiece in Greenland. It gives me a feeling of close communion with my superiors, if you understand what I mean." Bartle did not. He said, "Am I keeping you from your work? If I am, I believe I can fill in on most of this back at the paper ; we have files on the Center's operation." The little man hurriedly put out a hand to restrain Bartle who was easing out of the chair. "Not yet, Mr. Bartle," he said, suddenly much more sober. Then his incongruous pomposity appeared again. "My gracious, no, you aren't keeping me from my work. I just must start the MidLower Echelon tape. It won't take a moment. Tonight, they receive 'Concerto For Ass's Jawbone.' Sounds rather ridiculous, doesn't it? Be that as it may, there is a certain stimulation in its rhythmic cacophony. Aboriginality -- yes, I would say it arouses a primitive exaltation." He flicked a switch above the recorder, turned a knob, and pressed the starter button on the machine. The tape began winding slowly from one spool to another. "Is it 'casting'?" Bartle asked. "I don't hear a thing." Pettigill laughed. "My stars, no; you can't hear it. See -- " He pointed at a needle doing a staccato dance on the meter face of the machine. "That tells me everything is operating properly. Mass Psych advises us never to listen to 'casts. The selections were designed by them for specific social and intellectual levels. It could cause us to experience a rather severe emotional disturbance." A peculiar look came over Bartie's face. "Is there ever a time when all the machines run at once? That is, when every Echelon home is tuned to the melopsych tapecasts?" Pettigill registered surprise. "Why, certainly, Mr. Bartle. Don't you know Amendment #-B specifically states that all Echelon homes must receive music therapy at # hours every night? Of course, different tapes to different homes." "That's what I mean." 'Haven't you been abiding by the directive, Mr. Bartle?" "I told you I owed my classification to my father's industry. I am definitely lax in my duties." Pettigill laughed -- almost wickedly, Bartle thought. "What I'm getting at, is," Bartle continued, "what if the wrong 'casts were channeled into the various homes?" "I remind you, sir, I am in charge of the Center and have been for thirty years. Not even the slightest mistake of that nature has ever occurred during that time!" "That, I can believe, Pettigill," Bartle said, his voice edged with sarcasm. "But, hypothetically, if it were to happen, what would the reaction be?" The little man fidgeted with his watch chain. Then he leaned close to Bartle and said in a barely audible whisper, "This isn't for publication in your article, is it?" "You don't think the Government would allow that, do you? No, this is to satisfy my own curiosity." "Well, since we're both Mid Echelon -- brothers, so to speak -- I suppose we can share a secret. It will be disastrous ! I firmly believe it will be disastrous, Mr. Bartle!" He moved closer to the tall man. "I recall a secret administrative directive we received here twenty years ago concerning just that. In essence, it stated that, though music therapy has its great advantages, if the pattern of performance were broken or altered, a definite erratic emotional reaction would develop on the part of the citizens! That was twenty years ago, and I shudder to think what might be the response now; especially if the 'cast were completely foreign to the recipient." He gave a little shudder to emphasize the horror of the occurence. "It would make psychotics of the entire citizenry! That's what would happen -- a nation of psychotics!" "The fellow who didn't hear the 'miscast' would be top dog, eh, Pettigill? He could call his shots." chain faster between a forefinger and thumb. "No, he'd gain nothing," he said, staring as though hypnotized by the whirling, gold chain. "It would take more than one sane person to control the derelict population. Perhaps -- perhaps two," he mumbled. "Yes, I think perhaps two could." "You and who else, Pettigill?" Pettigill stepped back and drew himself erect. "What? You actually entertain the idea th -- " He laughed dryly. "Oh, you're pulling my leg, eh, Mr. Bartle." "I suppose I am." "Well, such a remark gives one a jolt, if you know what I mean. Even though we are speaking of a hypothetical occurence, we must be cautious about such talk, Mr. Bartle. Although our government is a benevolent organization, it is illdisposed toward such ideas." He cleared his throat. "Now, is there anything else I can tell you about the Center?" Bartle arose from the chair, stuffing the scrap paper and unused pencil back in his pocket. "Thanks, no," he said, "I think this'll cover it. Oh yes, the article will appear in this Sunday's edition. Thanks, Pettigill, for giving me your time." "Oh, I wish to thank you, Mr. Bartle. Being featured in a Bulletin article is the ultimate to a man such as I -- a man whose only wishes are to serve his country and his brothers." "I'm sure you're doing both with great efficiency," Bartle said as he apathetically shook Pettigill's hand and started toward the door. "A moment, Mr. Bartle -- " the little man called. Bartle stopped and turned. "I perceive, Mr. Bartle, you are a man of exceptional ability," Pettigill said and cleared his throat. "It seems a shame to waste such talent ; it should be directed toward some definite goal. Do you understand what I mean? After all, we're all brothers, you know. It would be for my benefit as well as yours." "Sure, sure, 'brother'," Bartle snorted and left. He started for the paper office but decided to let the story go until morning. What the hell, he had a stock format for all such articles. The people were the same: selfless, heroic type, citizens working for the mutual good of all. Only the names were different. And yet, this Pettigill had disturbed him. Perhaps it was something he had said that Bartle could not remember. and extracted the pre-cooked meal from the electroven. He ate with little relish, abstractly thinking of the foolish little cog in the governmental machine he had talked with that afternoon. Or was Pettigill that foolish little cog? Bartle could not help but feel there was something deep inside him that did not show in that wizened and seemingly open little face. He thought about it the rest of the evening. He looked at the clock on the night table -- # hours. "Pettigill's Lullaby Hour," he thought. Bartle chuckled and switched off the bed light. He was asleep before the puffs or air had escaped from under the covers he pulled over himself. When the phone rang at #, Bartle was strangely not surprised, although, consciously, he was expecting no call. "Hello," he said sleepily. "Bartle? This is Pettigill." The voice was Pettigill's but the nervous, timid, quality was gone. " I assume you did not hear the # 'cast?" "You assume correctly, Pettigill. What d'you want?" "Come on over to the Center; we'll split a fifth of former Section Secretary Andrews' Scotch." "What the hell do you mean?" "Were you serious about that 'therapy revolution' we were talking about this afternoon?" "I'm always serious. So what?" "Excellent, excellent," Pettigill laughed. "I've spent thirty years just waiting for such a man as you! No, I'm serious, my cynical friend -- what position would you like in the new government?" "Let's see -- why don't you make my descendants real peachy happy and make me, say. Administrator of Civilian Relations. That sounds big and important." "Fine, fine! Tell me, Bartle -- how are your relations with psychotics?" Bartle leaped to the floor. Instantly he recalled what Pettigill had said that had disturbed him. When they had been discussing the repercussions of a miscast, Pettigill had said, "it will be disastrous" and not "it would be disastrous." The devil had been planning just such a thing for God knows how long! "How many of 'em, Pettigill?" Bartle asked. "A lot, Bartle, a lot," the little man answered. "I would say # of psychotics!" He giggled again. A smile sliced through Bartle's sallow cheeks. "My relations with them would be the best! Keep that Scotch handy, Pettigill. I'll be right over." #" #I After rescue, revenge was uppermost in Chet Barfield's mind ; the hideous, bestial Agvars had to be taught a lesson they'd never forget. His rescuers seemed to disagree, however -- until Chet learned his lesson too! xnt of a 'Tftatt By Dave Dryfoos Illustrated by Rudolph Palais I der the diffuse red sun of Hedlot, Chet Barfield listened intently. Mostly he heard the villagers, the Agvars, noisy with the disregard for sound that comes of defective hearing. But above their clamor was another note. No... Yes! There it was again -- the swish-roar-scream of a spaceship! Chet's heart lifted to the altitude of that ship. Rescue! Rescue was at hand for him, after three years as a prisoner. Thought of it momentarily overcame the passivity that years of starvation had made his habit. He even forgot himself enough to walk erect a few steps, staring skyward -- heavenward! -- within cupped hands. But the dense hardwood chain on his ankle brought him up short. When it tightened, he remembered, and slouched to all fours again, moving with the gorilla-like gait of the Agvars toward the unshaded post he was chained to. He'd been observed. Pawfulls of dirt stung his bent and whip-scarred back, and a treble chorus stung his ears and nerves. The village boys were chanting derisively. Chet had never been able to learn the language, but the tone of voice was unmistakable. He huddled against the post, knees to chin, hands clasped around his matted hair, awaiting the inevitable sticks and slops. He heard the children's voices fade as they scattered throughout the village of haphazard lean-tos in search of especially sickening things to throw. For a few minutes, then, he'd have a breather. But not for long -- they wouldn't forget... No. But the fellows hadn't forgotten him, either. He could stand this for a day or two more. A week or a month, even. It didn't matter. This would end -- soon. His turn would come! He'd make these devils suffer as he had suffered. He swore it! He was glad he'd stayed alive for this. It had been a fight to live, a struggle he'd often thought futile while he made it. Learning to eat whatever he could get, training himself to breathe the local atmosphere in the special rhythm its composition required, accepting degradations too cruel for a captive animal, avoiding the resistance that would have brought merciful murder... All that, yet it felt strange, now, to be so glad he was alive. He heard the children returning, and crouched lower. A few clots of garbage spattered against the post -- teasers, to make him angry, so he'd turn to howl his rage, and offer his face as a target. Good memories, these little beasts had. It was almost a year since he'd last done that... Well, he had a memory, too. And while they pelted him -- from fairly close range, now, with sharp rocks among the wads of filth -- he could take refuge in the memory of those last glorious days on Earth. R emembrance was itself a change brought by the roaring ship; usually he moped in a vegetative daze. But now he recalled how he'd looked in the tight white uniform : six feet of well-fed muscle accentuated by the garment's lines, the blue stars on each lapel just matching his eyes, the peak of his cap harmonizing with the straight line of his jaw. He  remembered how he'd sounded, speaking words of nonchalant and unfelt modesty in the soft Southern voice the girls had liked so well. He could have had his pick of girls. He'd been a picked man himself. Highly selected -- that was the phrase. He was highly selected, Chet reminded himself, shrinking as the children came closer and their missiles began to really hurt. He'd been highly selected since his eighteenth year. At # he'd had seven years of pre-flight training -- seven years of indoctrination specifically designed to give him selfconfidence enough to face the void itself without flinching. Now he flinched from children... Still, the schooling had worked, he acknowledged -- so well that when their ship crashed into this planet Hedlot's salty sea, his first reaction had been indignation at the elements. His second thought had been for his comrades. But they went down with the ship; he alone had been hurled clear. Learning that, he'd swum resolutely in the direction he knew the shore to be, and made it. Exhausted, all right -- shocked, naked, half-dead really. But quite ready to point out his rank and identity to the first passer-by. Lucky for him, Chet mused, that he'd had no chance to express his callow arrogance. Shock saved his Kfe -- sank him into a stupor, so when the Agvars found him, he was helpless. He knew it was only because it had seemed perfectly safe that they'd tied him up and brought him to the village, instead By the time he'd recovered somewhat from the initial shock and exhaustion, they were used to him, convinced he was harmless if well chained-up. And they played it safe by giving him nothing but a little water -- no clothing, no shelter, no food... They let him live, amused by the thirst that drove him to lap up each morning's drenching dew, fascinated by his ravenous appetite for the garbage they flung at him. The Agvars -- furry, savage halfmen, with something of the dog and something of the ape and little of the man about them -- the Agvars let him live, Chet realized, for exactly one reason: he made them feel superior. They'd learn now! Even though the children had stopped shrieking and gone away, disgusted at his passivity, no villager's insensitive ears could yet hear the ship. In their boastfulness, the Agvars had invited other tribes to come and look at him and poke at him and laugh at him. His presence was known over the whole planet. He'd be found, no matter where on Hedlot the spaceship landed. And then would come the showdown! lier than he expected, speeded because the ship landed close by. Chet told himself he should have counted on that kind of accuracy, but he'd underestimated his fellow pilots. He had himself signalled Earthside, just before the crash, that his ship was about to land. He'd given his position -- described sea and shoreline. They'd find him, if he stayed chained to the post. But he didn't. Taken unaware by the Agvars who loosed him, Chet was docile, happy even -- certain they wouldn't hurt him now, but would try to minimize their former cruelty as they turned him over to the spacemen. When they put new chains on him, around neck and waist, he thought it was only to make sure he didn't run away before they could deliver him ostentatiously to the ship. A dozen adult males had gathered in the clearing, but that was hardly an unusual event. Even when they all started out, on a winding trail that didn't head in the direction of the ship's recent landing-sounds, Chet was convinced they were just circling some geographic obstacle. He was interested in the forest of #-foot mosses and #-foot evergreen hardwoods pressing densely on each side of the trail. Unconscious when they'd carried him from the beach, he'd never been out of the village since, had never inspected these woods. And he thought his mates from Earth would want to know about them. Chet could easily have outdistanced the clumsy Agvars if not forced to imitate their crouching walk. But he knew from experience that to show off his erect stance and #-inch height-advantage would make them find some unpleasant way to put him in his place. They'd shown him that quite often. He'd show them -- but later, not just yet. And after showing them, he'd put these Agvars behind him -- them, their filthy planet, and their scorching sun. It had often tortured him, that gauzy, amorphous solar blaze, but never more than now. For the sun of Hedlot, when he glanced at it vengefully, proved from its position that he was not being taken to the ship, but away from it. D isappointment didn't rouse Chet to a fighting pitch -- it caused him to become crafty. Slyness and deceit, the indirect weapons of the powerless, were not attributes schooled into a student space-pilot. But he'd learned them tied naked to a sunbaked post. That, too, is an effective school. He hung back, faking fatigue. Malingering brought him pokes and jerks, made the Agvars choke him and beat him and harangue him in their sullen mutter of clicks and growls and glottal catches. But some sense of urgency drove them to give up their fruitless sadism after a while, and drag him through the trail's blue mud by brute strength, two on the neck-chain, two hauling at his waist. He let them. Not that he was inured to pain -- he just was stubborn. He wondered, once when they all stopped at a spring for a drink and some rest, whether their haranguing showed the Agvars were sorry they hadn't taught him their language. Probably not, he decided; probably they didn't want to think he could have learned it. He'd tried, in the absence of lessons, by repeating what he heard around him. He'd learned a few words, of course. And for a while, a couple of villagers had seemed to enjoy and encourage his parrotlike attempts to recite whole sentences they voiced for him. But after a few beatings, Chet gathered that he'd only been mouthing obscenities. And that experience, plus inertia, had made him give up the attempt. Just as well, he now decided. If they'd known of his technical skills, if they'd let him raise their standards, the Agvars might be carrying bows and arrows, instead of mere slings and sticks. Their hard luck! What they didn't know, they'd never learn from him! The mere presence of a spaceship on the same planet gave him a buoyant feeling of contempt. But though contempt helped him endure that journey through the tall mosses and taller trees, it couldn't ward off exhaustion. When the party stopped at the foot of a sheer rock spire that rose four or five hundred feet above the tallest growth, he collapsed and slept. dawn twilight and another group of Agvars took over. These -- there were only three -- looked older than the familiar villagers. And they'd smeared their faces with bands of red and yellow mud. He wondered... He stopped wondering when they passed a pile of bones at the base of the spire. Among the grisly relics were skulls -- brow-ridged, pointed, unmistakably Agvar. Sacrifices! He was to be killed, then, to propitate his own rescuers. His three guides -- or guards -- must be witch-doctors! He let them drag him along while he thought about it. They'd give him no breakfast, not even water. If they'd eaten themselves, it was while he still slept. The scraps, if any, hadn't been flung in his face, and there'd been no smooth post to lick the dew from. Hunger and thirst were nothing new, but neither was the resulting lethargy. Realizing his danger, Chet could only hang back. Today though that was an old stall; the witch-doctors seemed to expect it. They broke branches from the trees and beat him till he bled. And when the climb up the rocks began, they put one of their number behind him to push, set the other two in front to pull, and tried by main strength to haul him up the five hundred foot rock-face. Hazily, not hastily, Chet tried to think of a way out. His starved brain could come up with nothing. That, he finally decided, was only natural; it was not thinking that was needed, but action. Still, he wasn't precipitate. Caution reinforced his habitual lassitude while trying to dispell it. Half a dozen times he tensed for combat, only to relax hopelessly. But finally he found a place -- and the will -- to make a stand. He passed up a wide shelf, and let them tug him along a narrow ledge without much objection. He chose a near-vertical pitch about a hundred feet from the bottom -- a mere crack that slanted upward to the right, offering the shallowest of hand-and foot-holds. He could only hope that he wasn't in sight from the trail -- or else that the villagers had left. He couldn't see through the treetops to make sure. But he hadn't the strength to worry. He froze to the rock, pulling as if in fright. The two witch-doctors in single file above him jerked on the chains they held. But they needed a hand apiece to hold on with, and couldn't lift him. The one below, standing on a six-inch ledge, tried to push. When that didn't work, he broke off a chunk of rock and beat Chet's left foot with it. Spurred by the sudden pain, Chet kicked the witch-doctor in the face. The Agvar fell, screaming -- until he crashed through the treetops and was still. ing superiority, it seemed as if that outcry would be heard on Earth itself. Certainly he expected it to alarm the countryside. Still, unless the swift footthrust had been seen, no one would be sure the witch-doctor's fall was not an accident... Chet had tasted victory for the first time in three years! He'd had a little revenge, and he wanted more. He could take the other two witch-doctors with him to death! He put all his weight on the chains they held. But they chose not to die -- let go, instead, to save themselves. The chain-ends rattled past, dislodging a small avalanche of dust and gravel and bruising stones -- dislodging him when the full weights jerked at neck and waist. Prepared, he didn't let himself be pulled away from the cliffs face. He slid down it to the ledge from which the Agvar below him had fallen. There he teetered a moment, balancing precariously on toes scraped raw in his slide. Clawing fingers found a crack to the right, a knob to the left -- safety! He clung there breathless. No time for resting! Rattling stones warned of pursuit. He looked quickly around, found a route, and after a short traverse let himself slide to a long talus-slope. Down it he ran barefoot through sharp debris into concealing mosses. The silence alarmed him. But it freed him from the need for craft; he didn't know what to avoid nor where it might be lurking, so he set out for the spaceship by what he hoped was the shortest way. In the village, he'd located the landing-place by sound, fixed it by sun. The sun would guide him now. Not accurately, but well enough. The ship would have landed in a clearing. Standing on its tail, it should loom high over the woods. And its men would scatter -- he ought to run into one. Run he did, trotting under thirty pounds of hardwood chain on reserves of strength dredged from a deep pit of desperation, through a forest overgrown with menace, full of life he could always sense but seldom see -- of noises whose origin he couldn't guess. The Agvars, for all their inferior hearing, could at least interpret what they heard. Chet couldn't. Every whispered cry, wild grunt and muttered growl was completely unfamiliar. He didn't know which sound signalled danger. He feared them all. But more than sounds he feared the silence that chinked the logs of time between each nerve-wracking noise. Often he had to stop and rest, and silence threatened him then like the ominous quiet of bated breath. When he'd force himself to go on, each tree seemed like a porchful of malicious old women, pretending to disregard him as he passed, certain to make trouble when he'd gone. The buzz of small life-forms was a deprecatory murmur, ready at any second to burst into condemnation and terror... What was that sound? And that? Noises that seemed out of place in their familiarity pinned him to the forest floor. It was only the village. Satisfied, he worked up courage to skirt the place and walk on toward the ship. But he was near collapse. When he heard human voices he could only yell incoherently once or twice, sob, and pass out. Chet was aware of the ship's sickbay, of the enlisted attendants, the hovering doctor, the silent commander. Later he realized he'd been kept under opiates so his body could recover while his mind rested. At the time, he felt only the dimness. It wore off abruptly. He was in a civilized cot, stretching luxuriously, aware of warmth and comfort and a cheerful voice that seemed familiar. He opened his eyes. A fat young corpsman had been watching. "How do you feel, sir?" the boy said. "Ready for coffee?" "Sure," Chet answered. And grinned lazily as he sat up to sip the proffered cup. "You've taken good care of me." "Used to be a barber in civilian life," the boy said smugly. And Chet found with an exploratory hand that he'd been shaven and shorn, bathed, bandaged where necessary -- even, he saw, clad in a pair of fancy red broadcloth pajamas. "You've got me cleaned up, all right," he said. "Whose p.j.'s have I got on?" "Dr. Pine's, sir. You'll see him in a couple of minutes -- he and the Old Man been waiting to question you. There's a robe and slippers, if you want me to help you get up..." "I'm not helpless," Chet said, boasting in his turn. He proved it by climbing -- gingerly -- out of the cot. The boy helped him into the robe, found the slippers, pushed the small room's one chair an inch closer to the open porthole, and left, closing the door behind him. the two men who soon entered the room -- they'd been there before. But this was his first fully conscious look at them. Commander Seymour, the C.O., looked surprisingly young for his job. He was young, Chet decided -- not over thirty-five -- and his short slight figure made him seem younger still. He had few words. "You're looking fine, Barfield," he said, and sat on the edge of the cot, thin face impassive, gray eyes alert. Dr. Pine -- tall, balding, affable -- was associated in Chet's mind with hypodermic needles, bitter medicines, restrictions. Today, the doctor gave him a firm and friendlyhandshake, but yesterday, Chet felt, that same hand had inflicted pain. "Glad to see you looking so well," the doctor said, taking a stance against the wall by the porthole. He sounded sincere enough, but Chet, resuming his chair, wondered how much of the gladness was based on the doctor's pride in professional handiwork. There was an awkward pause. Chet remembered to murmur polite replies to the men who were so obviously sizing him up. Then he asked, "When do you think I'll be ready for duty?" His visitors exchanged a glance. "Later," Commander Seymour said. "Take it easy while you can, Barfield." He smiled unconvincingly at what must have been meant as a joke. Talk again lapsed, and Chet became uncomfortable. "The corpsman said you wanted to ask me some things," he said. And added, "You've already questioned me, haven't you?" "Only a little," Dr. Pine said, flexing his long fingers and looking down at them. "We -- ah -- we had to find out about your shipmates. Commander Seymour wanted to look for them, naturally..." Naturally... "Are we going to leave here now, sir?" Chet asked the commander. "Not yet," he said. "Dr. Pine has a job to do." "What's that, Doctor?" "I'm going to study your Agvar friends, Mr. Barfield. Want to help?" "Sure," Chet said. "There's nothing I'd rather do than bring you a few corpses to dissect." "That -- ah -- that isn't the idea," Dr. Pine said, bending his fingers and rocking from toes to heels. "I -- ah -- I want to do a little anthropology-study them in the life... "Why?" Chet demanded. "I can tell you all about them. I can tell you what they did to me, too! They don't deserve to live! And this planet won't be safe for spacemen till they're dead. Why waste time studying them? It isn't as if you were a professional anthropologist, sir -- didn't you give me medical care?" "Yes... But I do anthopology, too. Medical help -- ah -- gains the confidence of the people..." "You mean -- ?" Chet was at first incredulous, then outraged. "You mean you're not going to punish them?" "That's right," Dr. Pine said, smiling. "That's wrong!" Chet contradicted. Cheeks burning, he turned to Commander Seymour. "How about you, sir? Do you want your men chained to a post if they get captured? Do you want me to dismiss three years of torture as a mistake, or something? Do you want -- " "Here, here!" Commander Seymour said. He didn't raise his voice. But as he rose from the cot, Chet rose with him, and found himself at attention. They eyed each other. "Relax," Dr. Pine suggested. "Please sit down -- both of you." Commander Seymour obeyed his subordinate. But Chet, still standing, still angry, turned hotly on the doctor. "I can't just sit and let you talk about rewarding the Agvars for torturing me!" he cried. "We don't have to appease them -- they can't fight. You don't have to be afraid -- " "That'll do, Barfield!" Commander Seymour was on his feet again, and his tone was sharp. It quieted Chet instantly. In silence he watched Commander Seymour motion Dr. Pine to follow him out the door. Someone locked it after them. A lternately tossing on the cot and pacing the floor, Chet seethed for hours. His first interview with the new C.O., and two bawlings-out in five minutes! Because of Pine -- Pine, who kept him confined in this room, seeing no one but the attendants, having his meals alone... When a day passed, and then two, and he felt his strength returning, Chet was sure that Dr. Pine kept him out of the wardroom and away from the other officers only as punishment. Three years a prisoner -- and a prisoner still! By the time Commander Seymour came to see him again, Chet had spent hours plotting revenge. "Barfield," the commander said, "Dr. Pine is going -- alone -- to the village you escaped from. He'll pretend he's you, or someone like you -- whichever he can get away with. So here's your chance for a little fresh air -- you can guide us to the village." "Does that mean I go on active duty, sir?" "Not quite. Dr. Pine hasn't released you from sickbay." Pine again! Pine found him good enough to imitate, it seemed, but not good enough to put on duty. Suddenly Chet saw the possibilities. So Pine was going to impersonate him? Then Pine would be taken for an escaped sacrifice, a prisoner who'd killed a witchdoctor! Tell him? Huh. Let him find out the hard way! Then even he, yellow as he was, would want revenge on the Agvars. If he survived their welcome... "I'll be glad to go, sir," Chet said. not a dress uniform. But fatigues and shoes -- even tight ones -- were clothing, at least. And clothing would change his appearance. The Agvars had never seen him dressed, nor, since his first days, with a haircut and shave. Whether Pine's impersonation worked or not, Chet saw no danger for himself in approaching the village. But he wondered how it was to be managed. He was told the plan when Commander Seymour and Dr. Pine met him outside by the ship's tail. The commander, who was armed, and the doctor, already naked except for a pair of slippers and a sunlamp tan, would go with him by the shortest route direct to the village. But only Dr. Pine would enter it. Commander Seymour explained Chet's part -- and his own. "Barfield," he said, "I want you to find and point out some kind of game animal they use for food. I count under the Agvars' observation. That should show off our weaponsuperiority -- and pave the way for a feast." "No medical stuff?" Chet asked sarcastically. "I thought Dr. Pine was supposed to cure all their ills, not give them indigestion." "He has to get their confidence before he can treat them," Commander Seymour explained seriously. "And on a strange planet like this, he's taking quite a chance to try treatment at any time: if it fails, they're apt to accuse him of murder!" Chet said nothing. But he felt as if he'd drawn a wild card in a poker game. Even before that, Dr. Pine had lagged because his slippers kept falling off, and now he brought up the rear. Chet, in the lead, took a last long look at the ship before the trees and mosses cut off his view. He went on slowed by vague reluctance. He didn't like this forest. The trees dwarfed and oppressed him. Old fears began to stir and gnaw, but at new places. Perhaps the two men he guided would stand together against him. If so, revenge on one would cut him off from both as sharply as the forest cut him off from the ship... Well, it was worth it! They hadn't put him on duty, hadn't accepted him as one of themselves... He couldn't be cut off much more than he was already! And Seymour might listen to reason. After all, he was a practical man, a leader. And Pine was yellow! "What's Pine after, sir?" Chet asked over his shoulder. "Why take these risks you've mentioned?" "Well, partly for safety: if we kill any Agvars, we're likely to have to kill them all, or have the survivors to contend with indefinitely. That might cost us some casualties... And of course there's the research angle, but that's out of my line." "What's the matter with punishment, sir -- discipline? You use discipline on your crew -- why not on their enemies?" "Because the men understand the rules and the penalties. The Agvars don't." "Kill them, sir! That they'll understand!" "No!" Commander Seymour spoke sharply. "If they don't fight back, that's cold-blooded slaughter. If they do, it's war. I don't hold with butchery, Barfield, and I certainly won't risk casualties just to give you a cheap feeling of satisfaction!" He couldn't escape. Commander Seymour, looking from over Chet's shoulder like a walking sneer, stuck close. But he gave the impression of following a man who smelled bad. Was he? Chet wondered. Wondering, he unconsciously hung his head, slowed -- stopped. Dr. Pine caught up. He and Commander Seymour, faintly breathless from the trying need to regulate their respiration consciously, looked at Chet questioningly. Again they were sizing him up. Suddenly Chet wished he could go back to that first interview in the sickbay, and change all the things he'd said. "We can't go on!" he blurted. "You don't know what you're getting into, Doctor!" "Oh?" said Dr. Pine agreeably. "I know more than you think, young feller." He smiled encouragingly. "That -- that I've killed a witchdoctor? That you may be taken for a murderer?" "Sure! You -- ah -- you talked about it under drugs. We... weren't spying, Chet. We just wanted you to tell your story without reliving all the agony. It wasn't intended as -- ah -- a trap..." He massaged his fingers apologetically. "No... Chet agreed. "But-Iwas-trying-to-lead-yoa-into-one!" couldn't be sure. He listened for his own voice. The woods were quiet. His breathing seemed strangely loud. He held it -- and heard the Agvars moving in the woods. Rustling, scraping, crackling -- grunting their guttural dialog. Crashing! Threatening them! "Let's go back!" he urged, trying to sound casual. But his trail was blocked. "Stick around," Dr. Pine suggested easily. "You -- ah -- you haven't said anything we didn't know. We're going right ahead." "But why? Once more Chet was hotly incredulous. "To risk your life for a few stray facts? Become a casualty while trying to avoid casualties? It doesn't make sense!" Dr. Pine stared at his own hands as if to hide his shyness in them. "As to the fact-seeking," he said slowly, "well... it's a matter of opinion. I've lost a few classmates... Risks in research are commonplace -- and accepted as worthwhile by most people... "And -- ah -- peace... You once called it appeasement, but it isn't, always. Well, look. If we fought those Agvars, somebody'd have to take a patrol into their village and capture prisoners for our Intelligence, right?" Chet nodded dumbly. "Well, in a way, I -- ah -- am the peaceful equivalent of that patrol. The -- ah -- risk I run is less than if we had a war and a patrol skirmish as part of it, though. And why in the world not take for peace a risk we'd routinely accept in war?" Why not? But why not minimize it, just the same. The Agvars, invisible but noisy, were all around them, now. At any moment the woods might rain spears. "It would be safer with two of us," Chet said musingly. "Your knowledge of anthropology and medicine -- mine of the people -- " "Barfield, you're still on the sicklist," Commander Seymour pointed out. He watched Chet's face for a long moment before adding, "Still -- if you're over your sick-minced need for revenge -- it's possible Dr. Pine may find you fit. It's up to him." Chet was afraid to ask directly. He pleaded with his eyes. Dr. Pine grinned broadly at the both. "He's ready for duty," sir," he said. Commander Seymour stepped back and scowled. "All right, Mr. Barfield," he barked, "I'll give you just three minutes to change to the uniform of the day!" Chet's jaw dropped. His vision, also downcast, noted the fatigues he wore, the muddy shoes. Then he looked up, saw the twinkle in his C.O.'s eyes, and understood. In exactly three minutes he made the required change. He would enter the village as he'd left it -- in the undress uniform of a Man... obsolete!... You needn't lose sleep over it, but readabout it The Electron Interferometer still controversy about whether electrons consisted of particles or waves. Then two scientists named G. J. Davisson and L. H. Germer demonstrated that they have the nature of waves. They accomplished this by making electrons produce a diffraction pattern, one of the two methods by which light had been shown to consist of waves in earlier experiments. In the case of light, this is done by passing a beam through a very narrowly spaced grating so that its waves alternately reinforce and cancel one another, forming a diffraction pattern of light and dark bands. Davisson and Germer used a crystal for their grating in the electron experiment, with similar results. The second test originally devised for light used an interferometer, an instrument which splits a beam of light in two and forces one half to travel a longer route than the other. When the parts are reunited their waves are out of phase and the result is a pattern of interference fringes. It was difficult to apply this test to electrons, however, since their wavelength is only about one #th that of light. Nevertheless, the task has now been accomplished, with a highly refined version of the interferometer, by a group of physicists at the National Bureau of Standards. The heart of the electron interferometer is a series of three copper crystals only about four #-millionths of an inch thick. A beam of electrons passed through these is split and then recombined. On emerging from the third crystal, it is made up of a pair of rays which have been differently diffracted. The difference in the length of the paths the rays must travel can be varied by moving the first crystal back and forth or by exposing the electrons, to electric or magnetic fields within the instrument. The electron interferometer is more than just a testing device for an already established theory, however. Its designers hope to improve on it so that it can be used as a measuring rod for various electric, magnetic and electronic purposes. Sugar and Spice ter tastes than any others. Next strongest taste is sour, followed by salt, with sweet bringing up the rear. This has been discovered by food technologists at the University of California. They found that humans can detect sugar in the amount of one tablespoonful in two gallons of water and one tablespoon of salt in ten gallons of water. Hydrochloric acid (the sour taste) can be spotted even when one tablespoonful is mixed with # gallons of water, while the presence of a tablespoon of quinine in # gallons of water is still noticeable. The scientists plan to continue these tests with various types of food. No More Teeth? won't be a sound human tooth in the world by # A. D. The only hope that we'll keep our choppers lies in finding out what causes tooth decay and discovering means of preventing it. So says Prof. Reidar F. Sognnaes of the Harvard School of Dental Science, who urges the speeding up of research along these lines. Many of our old theories about teeth have had to be changed recently as new evidence has come to light. Tooth enamel was long thought to be dead tissue, for instance. Now it is known that this substance contains several different kinds of living matter. Dr. Sognnaes also recommends frequent brushing of the teeth, even though it is impossible to keep them perfectly clean -- a person always has some micro-organisms and food debris in his mouth. "The most that can be said," he adds unhappily, "is that if we did not clean our teeth they would be worse than they are." How long has it been since you've seen your dentist? A-Bomb Precaution strikes -- if it does -- military personnel and perhaps civilians may be equipped with small, easily worn devices that will accurately record the amount of radiation to which an atomic bomb casualty has been subjected. This potential life-saver is known as the dosimeter; it was designed by naval scientists and is being produced by the Coming Glass Works. The dosimeter contains a piece of supersensitive silver-activated phosphate glass. Worn as a locket, the device permanently records the radiation received; the amount can be measured immediately or weeks after the exposure by use of a special reading instrument. When illuminated by ultra-violet light in this instrument, the phosphate glass emits fluorescent orange light in amounts proportional to the exposure the glass has taken in. Thus the proper medical treatment can be prescribed. The dosimeter is noteworthy for the range of radiation it can measure: from doses as small as # Roentgens, which is well, below the danger limit, up to several thousand Roentgens. How Old Are Your Arteries? of the radioactive tracer principle of medicine is now in use to warn patients of possible arteriosclerosis, heart attacks and apoplectic strokes. The test involves the use of a small amount of radioactive sodium injected into a vein in the arm. A Geiger counter is then placed over the subject's chest to measure the radioactivity as the substance passes through the bloodstream in that area. The time is checked when the level of radioactivity drops to a specific point, and this shows the rate of blood flow through strategic blood vessels. The critical level is reached in healthy #-year old men in # seconds. The time is doubled at # years and tripled at #. Patients suffering from arteriosclerosis will show the results normally expected of an older person. The test, which takes only about # minutes in all, was devised by Dr. Enrique Strajman, a Brazilian scientist working at the Donner Laboratory of the University of California. Up-To-Date Prospecting supersensitive successors to Geiger counters -- are being used by government and private industry to prospect for uranium by air. Although the method can't pinpoint the locations of uranium deposits exactly, both the Atomic Energy Commission and the Interior Department are having considerable success in finding clues to potential deposits this way. The Interior Department uses instrument-equipped DC-#'s, while altitudes. Reactions of the detectors in each case are marked on paper tape, synchronized with #-mm cameras that simultaneously map the areas being explored. The aerial maps are posted as they are completed, with the sites of potential deposits clearly marked. Ground prospectors must take over from there, since the signs of radioactive deposits on the maps don't distinguish between those that are workable and those that are thin and valueless. Hundreds of independent prospectors are using the maps, which have been concentrated so far on the Colorado plateau and parts of South Dakota, New Mexico and Western Pennsylvania, in the hope of striking it rich through the high prices and bonuses Number, Please? your telephone and dial a number anywhere on the continent is being hastened by the Bell Telephone System. A big step in the plan was taken recently in Pittsburgh where devices known as card translators were placed in regular service. Card translators determine where dialed calls should go and route them there as directly and speedily as possible. If one path is busy, the machines will select the next best, making decisions in split seconds. The card translator uses boxes containing # metal routing cards apiece -- each card about five by # # inches. The cards have identifying tabs so that one will drop from the stack for any particular code that is dialed. Beams of light then pass through openings in or tabs on the card, falling on phototransistors which transmit the necessary signals to the rest of the equipment. So you'll soon be able to call Aunt Minnie, who lives all the way across the country, as easily as the neighbors across the street! elevated express highway, these stations will direct traffic through the electronic beams. They have complete control over oil troffic ot all times, speeding up or slowing down movement in individual lanes according to conditions When driver reaches destination he switches to manual control and leaves beam (Drawings by Ed Valigursky)  count, people will be pushed onto desert land or into the wildernesses. Here is an independent, city-containing building housing # people, along with all shopping centers, gardens, recreation and entertainment facilities required by a city of that size. Design of the structure is such that the building itself provides needed shade over the entire desert area which it occupies'. (Now see inside back cover.) All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg: A Space Nation Composed of Independent City Planets a s  s e   (Fact Article ) by R. S. Richardson #   By Ed Valigursky  IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #, Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale March # th like somebody's gotta put in a good word for Mankind because, judging from some of the manuscripts coming into this office, the poor ole guy is doomed irrevocably and finally to fire and brimstone. Maybe certain themes in science fiction run in cycles, and this is one of those cycles, but a flock of writers are certainly booking Mankind as the underdog -- with a capital U and no bets taken. The particular kind of plot we are allergic to portrays Mankind so broken down, degraded and depraved that the only cure is violent extermination. Like, if you come home and find the little wife pretty sick with a bad stomach ache or something -- well, you just shove her into the furnace and that cures her stomach ache. Or, if you have a comparatively new house and you discover that the plumbing leaks. In a case like this you call the Army (the Navy if you live near the seashore) and have them blow it to smithereens with one of their new cannons, and the plumbing leak is fixed forever. Or, in a more science fiction sense something like this: A super-super intelligent being from Venus or Mars or somewhere lands on Earth and cases the joint. After spending a week on terra he decides -- because a certain girl won't let him neck with her, or because a couple of ruffians engage in a beastly fistfight, or because the guy at the soda counter at a corner drugstore insists on getting paid for a chocolate sundae -- that the world is no dam good and oughta be destroyed. So the author gives this Martian or Venusian or something an Atom bomb with which he blows up Mankind and the world and that's the end of the story. Or -- some wise old bird, way off in space, gets a look at Earth through a telescope and decides he ain't happy with what he sees, so what does he do? You guessed it. He pushes a button and -- zzzzzzzzz! -- Mankind from pole to pole is cremated. That's just a couple of examples how Mankind gets its cure from space. Then, there are the authors who figure that the Earth should take care of its own. In this manner we are devoured by animals, or we are eaten up by swarms of insects or we are nibbled happily to extinction by fish. The object here is that when every human being is digested the animals or the fish or the birds or bees would take over and be better rulers of Earth than Mankind has ever been or can ever hope to be. Now, let's see. Suppose, for instance, that the animal kingdom took over. Would all be Utopia, peace and quiet and happy hunting? In the pig's eye! The carnivorous ones would snarl and fight and eat each other. The vegetarians (like rabbits) would become so numerous so fast that they'd be fighting over the vegetables. Suppose the birds took over. What do you think would happen to little sparrows and robins with Mr. Hawk and Mr. Eagle running Congress. Or, how about the little bluefish or guppy with Senator Shark heading the foreign affairs committee? Anyhow, you see what we mean? time and will undoubtedly be around a few more years. So it's kind of natural (don't you think?) that the old guy should be susceptible to quirks and cranks and a belly full of meanness now and then. Fundamentally, Mankind is no worse today than it was a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years ago. From the very beginning it has been bicker and bungle, fuss and fight, maim and murder -- but somehow it has always gone forward. Business, religion, education, economics, science, etc., etc., have all been built and advanced on bloodshed and violence. Just look at your history books and see if you can find one single, solitary phase of the civilization we know today that hasn't incurred it's share of bickering and bloodshed. SO let's throw out the baggykneed theme of improving Mankind by destroying it. You can't improve anything by destroying it. Throw out the bad and there is no good. Throw out the good and there is no bad. If there is no darkness you got no light. If there is no light you got no darkness. Everything in this world is relative; without one thing you can't have another. This old universe is a pot of chemistry and its gotta keep boiling with its conflicting elements or there won't be a pot. Of course, I'm an optimistic sort of guy myself, and I think most folks are. If they weren't, we'd still be back in the dark ages -- or we vouldn't be around at all. Nor would the animals. They gotta be optimistic too, or they would have no scrappin', lovin' or eatin' either! Fortunately, the doom, doom, doom, that's been reaching this office via Uncle Sam's mail is only a very minute, microscopic particle of the science fiction being written today. In both books and magazines you will find a lot of very fine writing with excellent science fiction themes -- stories that are good, substantial, entertaining reading; stories that make you curious, that make you anticipate the future -- not scared out of your boots about it. To these writers, whether they appear in this magazine or not, IF doffs its hat. -- jlq The powers of earth had finally exterminated the last of the horrible tribes of mutant freaks spawned by atomic war. Menace to homo sapien supremacy was about ended -- but not quite. For out of the countryside came a great golden, godlike youth whose extraordinary mutant powers, combining the world's oldest and newest methods of survival, promised a new and superior type of mankind... Illustrated by Kelly Freas the salesman demanded. He addressed everybody at the lunch counter and in the shabby booths against the wall. A middle-aged fat man with a good-natured smile, rumpled gray suit, sweat-stained white shirt, a drooping bowtie, and a panama hat. "Only in the summer," the waitress answered. None of die others stirred. The teen-age boy and girl in one of the booths, eyes fixed intently on each other. Two workmen, sleeves rolled up, arms dark and hairy, eating bean soup and rolls. A lean, weathered farmer. An elderly businessman in a blue-serge suit, vest and pocket watch. A dark rat-faced cab driver drinking coffee. A tired woman who had come in to get off her feet and put down her bundles. The salesman got out a package of cigarettes. He glanced curiously around the dingy cafe, lit up, leaned his arms on the counter, and said to the man next to him: "What's the name of this town?" The man grunted. "Walnut Creek." The salesman sipped at his coke for awhile, his cigarette held loosely between his plump white fingers. Presently he reached in his coat and brought out a leather wallet. For a long time he leafed thoughtfully through cards and papers, bits of notes, ticket stubs, endless odds and ends, soiled fragments -- and finally a photograph. He grinned at the photograph, and then began to chuckle, a low moist rasp. "Look at this," he said to the man beside him. The man went on reading his newspaper. "Hey, look at this." The salesman nudged him with his elbow and pushed the photograph at him. "How's that strike you?" Annoyed, the man glanced briefly at the photograph. It showed a nude woman, from the waist up. Perhaps thirty-five years old. Face turned away. Body white and flabby. With eight breasts. "Ever seen anything like that?" the salesman chuckled, his little red eyes dancing. His face broke into lewd smiles and again he nudged the man. "I've seen that before." Disgusted, the man resumed reading his newspaper. The salesman noticed the lean old farmer was looking at the picture. He passed it genially over to him. "How's that strike you, pop? Pretty good stuff, eh?" . The farmer examined the picture solemnly. He turned it over, studied the creased back, took a second look at the front, then tossed it to the salesman. It slid from the counter, turned over a couple of times, and fell to the floor face up. The salesman picked it up and brushed it off. Carefully, almost tenderly, he restored it to his wallet. The waitress' eyes flickered as she caught a glimpse of it. "Damn nice," the salesman observed, with a wink. "Wouldn't you say so?" The waitress shrugged indifferently. "I don't know. I saw a lot of them around Denver. A whole colony." "That's where this was taken. "Any still alive?" the farmer asked. The salesman laughed harshly. "You kidding?" He made a short, sharp swipe with his hand. "Not any more." the high school kids in the booth had stopped holding hands and were sitting up straight eyes wide with fascination. "Saw a funny kind down near San Diego," the farmer said. "Last year, some time. Had wings like a hat. Skin, not feathers. Skin and bone wings." The rat-eyed taxi driver chimed in. "That's nothing. There was a two-headed one in Detroit. I saw it on exhibit." "Was it alive?" the waitress asked. "No. They'd already euthed it." "In sociology," the high school boy spoke up, "we saw tapes of a whole lot of them. The winged kind from down south, the big-headed one they found in Germany, an awful-looking one with sort of cones, like an insect. And -- " "The worst of all," the elderly businessman stated, "are those English ones. That hid out in the coal mines. The ones they didn't find until last year." He shook his head. "Forty years, down there in the mines, breeding and developing. Almost a hundred of them. Survivors from a group that went underground during the War." "They just found a new kind in Sweden," the waitress said. "I was reading about it. Controls minds at a distance, they said. Only a couplenty fast." "That's a variation of the New Zealand type," one of the workmen said. "It reads minds." "Reading and controlling are two different things," the businessman said. "When I hear something like that I'm plenty glad there's the "There was a type they found right after the War," the farmer said. "In Siberia. Had the ability to control objects. Psychokinetic right away. Nobody remembers that any more." "I remember that," the businessman said. "I was just a kid, then. I remember because that was the first deeve I ever heard of. My father called me into the livingroom and told me and my brothers and sisters. We were still rebuilding the house. That was in the days and stamped their arms." He held up his thin, gnarled wrist. "I was stamped there, sixty years ago." "Now they just have the birth inspection," the waitress said. She shivered. "There was one in San Francisco this month. First in over a year. They thought it was over, around here." "It's been dwindling," the taxi driver said. "Frisco wasn't too bad hit. Not like some. Not like Detroit." "They still get ten or fifteen a year in Detroit," the high school boy said. "All around there. Lots of pools still left. People go into them, in spite of the robot signs." "What kind was this one?" the salesman asked. "The one they found in San Francisco." The waitress gestured. "Common type. The kind with no toes. Bentover. Big eyes." "The nocturnal type," the salesman said. "The mother had hid it. They say it was three years old. She got Old friend of the family." The salesman had finished his coke. He sat playing idly with his cigarette, listening to the hum of talk he had set into motion. The high school boy was leaning excitedly toward the girl across from him, impressing her with his fund of knowledge. The lean farmer and the businessman were huddled together, remembering the old days, the last years of the War, before the first Ten-Year Reconstruction Plan. The taxi driver and the two workmen were swapping yams about their own experiences. The salesman caught the waitress' attention. "I guess," he said thoughtfully, "that one in Frisco caused quite a stir. Something like that happening so close." "Yeah," the waitress murmured. "This side of the Bay wasn't really hit," the salesman continued. "You never get any of them over here." "No." The waitress moved abruptly. "None in this area. Ever." She scooped up dirty dishes from the counter and headed toward the back. "Never?" the salesman asked, surprised. "You've never had any deeves on this side of the Bay?" "No. None." She disappeared into the back, where the fry cook stood by his burners, white apron and tattooed wrists. Her voice was a little too loud, a little too harsh and strained. It made the farmer pause suddenly and glance up. Silence dropped like a curtain. All sound cut off instantly. They were all gazing down at their food, suddenly tense and ominous. "None around here," the taxi driver said, loudly and clearly, to no one in particular. "None ever." "Sure," the salesman agreed genially. "I was only -- " "Make sure you get that straight," one of the workmen said. The salesman blinked. "Sure, buddy. Sure." He fumbled nervously in his pocket. A quarter and a dime jangled to the floor and he hurriedly scooped them up. "No offense." For a moment there was silence. Then the high school boy spoke up, aware for the first time that nobody was saying anything. "I heard something," he began eagerly, voice full importance. "Somebody said they saw something up by the Johnson farm that looked like it was one of those -- " "Shut up," the businessman said, without turning his head. sagged in his seat. His voice wavered and broke off. He peered hastily down at his hands and swallowed unhappily. The salesman paid the waitress for his coke. "What's the quickest road to Frisco?" he began. But the waitress had already turned her back. The people at the counter were immersed in their food. None of them looked up. They ate in frozen silence. Hostile, unfriendly faces, intent on their food. The salesman picked up his bulging briefcase, pushed open the screen door, and stepped out into the blazing sunlight. He moved toward his battered # Buick, parked a few meters up. A blueshirted traffic cop was standing in the shade of an awning, talking languidly to a young woman in a yellow silk dress that clung moistly to her slim body. The salesman paused a moment before he got into his car. He waved his hand and hailed the policeman. "Say, you know this town pretty good?" The policeman eyed the salesman's rumpled gray suit, bowtie, his sweat-stained shirt. The out-ofstate license. "What do you want?" "I'm looking for the Johnson farm," the salesman said. "Here to see him about some litigation." He moved toward the policeman, a small white card between his fingers. "I'm his attorney -- from the New York Guild. Can you tell me how to get out there? I haven't been through here in a couple of years." Nat Johnson gazed up at the noonday sun and saw that it was good. He sat sprawled out on the bottom step of the porch, a pipe between his yellowed teeth, a lithe, wiry man in red-checkered shirt and canvas jeans, powerful hands, iron-gray hair that was still thick despite sixty-five years of active life. He was watching the children play. Jean rushed laughing in front of him, bosom heaving under her sweat shirt, black hair streaming behind her. She was sixteen, brighteyed, legs strong and straight, slim young body bent slightly forward with the weight of the two horseshoes. After her scampered Dave, fourteen, white teeth and black hair, a handsome boy, a son to be proud of. Dave caught up with his sister, passed her, and reached the far peg. He stood waiting, legs apart, hands on his hips, his two horseshoes gripped easily. Gasping, Jean hurried toward him. "Go ahead!" Dave shouted. "You shoot first. I'm waiting for you." "So you can knock them away?" "So I can knock them closer." Jean tossed down one horseshoe and gripped the other with both hands, eyes on the distant peg. Her lithe body bent, one leg slid back, her spine arched. She took careful aim, closed one eye, and then expertly tossed the shoe. With a clang the shoe struck the distant peg, circled briefly around it, then bounced off again and rolled to one side. A cloud of dust rolled up. "Not bad," Nat Johnson admitted, from his step. "Too hard, though. Take it easy." His chest swelled with pride as the girl's glistening, healthy body took aim and again threw. Two powerful, handsome children, almost ripe, on the verge of adulthood. Playing together in the hot sun. And there was Cris. Cris stood by the porch, arms folded. He wasn't playing. He was watching. He had stood there since Dave and Jean had begun playing, the same half-intent, half-remote expression on his finely-cut face. As if he were seeing past them, beyond the two of them. Beyond the field, the barn, the creek bed, the rows of cedars. "Come on, Cris!" Jean called, as she and Dave moved across the field to collect their horseshoes. "Don't you want to play?" No, Cris didn't want to play. He never played. He was off in a world of his own, a world into which none of them could come. He never joined in anything, games or chores or family activities. He was by himself always. Remote, detached, aloof. Seeing past everyone and everything -- that is, until all at once something clicked and he momentarily rephased, reentered their world briefly. and knocked his pipe against the step. He refilled it from his leather tobacco pouch, his eyes on his eldest son. Cris was now moving into life. Heading out onto the field. He walked slowly, arms folded calmly, as if he had, for the moment descended from his own world into theirs. Jean didn't see him; she had turned her back and was getting ready to pitch. "Hey," Dave said, startled. "Here's Cris." Cris reached his sister, stopped, and held out his hand. A great dignified figure, calm and impassive. Uncertainly, Jean gave him one of the horseshoes. "You want this? You want to play?" Cris said nothing. He bent slightly, a supple arc of his incredibly graceful body, then moved his arm in a blur of speed. The shoe sailed, struck the far peg, and dizzily spun around it. Ringer. The corners of Dave's mouth turned down. "What a lousy darn thing." "Cris," Jean reproved. "You don't play fair." No, Cris didn't play fair. He had watched half an hour -- then come out and thrown once. One perfect toss, one dead ringer. "He never makes a mistake," Dave complained. Cris stood, face blank. A golden statue in the mid-day sun. Golden hair, skin, a light down of gold fuzz on his bare arms and legs -- Abruptly he stiffened. Nat sat up, startled. "What is it?" he barked. Cris turned in a quick circle, magnificent body alert. "Cris!" Jean demanded. "What -- " Cris shot forward. Like a released energy beam he bounded across the field, over the fence, into the bam and out the other side. His flying figure seemed to skim over the dry grass as he descended into the barren creek-bed, between the cedars. A momentary flash of gold -- and he was gone. Vanished. There was no sound. No motion. He had utterly melted into the scenery. "What was it this time?" Jean asked wearily. She came over to her father and threw herself down in the shade. Sweat glowed on her smooth neck and upperlip; her sweat shirt was streaked and damp. "What did he see?" "He was after something," Dave stated, coming up. Nat grunted. "Maybe. There's no telling." "I guess I better tell mom not set a place for him," Jean said. "He probably won't be back." Anger and futility descended over Nat Johnson. No, he wouldn't be back. Not for dinner and probably not the next day -- or the one after that. He'd be gone God only knew how long. Or where. Or why. Off by himself, alone some place. "If I thought there was any use," Nat began, "I'd send you two after him. But there's no -- " He broke off. A car was coming up the dirt road toward the farmhouse. A dusty, battered old Buick. Behind the wheel sat a plump redfaced man in a gray suit, who waved cheerfully at them as the car sputtered to a stop and the motor died into silence... ded, as he climbed out of the car. He tipped his hat pleasantly. He was middle-aged, genial-looking, perspiring freely as he crossed the dry ground toward the porch. "Maybe you folks can help me." "What do you want?" Nat Johnson demanded hoarsely. He was frightened, He watched the creek bed out of the corner of his eye. praying silently. God, if only he stayed away. Jean was breathing quickly, sharp little gasps. She was terrified. Dave's face was expressionless, but all color had drained from it. "Who are you?" Nat demanded. "Name's Baines. George Baines." The man held out his hand but Johnson ignored it. "Maybe you've heard of me. I own the Pacifica Development Corporation. We built all those little bomb-proof houses just outside town. Those little round ones you see as you come up the main highway from Lafayette." "What do you want?" Johnson held his hands steady with an effort. He'd never heard of the man, although he'd noticed the housing tract. It couldn't be missed -- a great ant-heap of ugly pill-boxes straddling the highway. Baines looked like the kind of man who'd own them. But what did he want here? "I've bought some land up this way," Baines was explaining. He rattled a sheaf of crisp papers. "This is the deed, but I'll be damned if I can find it." He grinned good-naturedly. "I know it's around this way, someplace, this side of the State road. According to the clerk at the County Recorder's Office, a mile or so this side of that hill over there. But I'm no damn good at reading maps." "It isn't around here," Dave broke in. "There's only farms around here. Nothing for sale." "This is a farm, son," Baines said genially. "I bought it for myself and rny missus. So we could settle down." He wrinkled his pug nose. "Don't get the wrong idea -- I'm not putting up any tracts around here. This is strictly for myself. An old farm house, twenty acres, a pump and a few oak trees -- " "Let me see the deed." Johnson grabbed the sheaf of papers, and while Baines blinked in astonishment, he leafed rapidly through them. His face hardened and he handed them back. "What are you up to? This deed is for a parcel fifty miles from here." "Fifty miles!" Baines was dumbfounded. "No kidding? But the clerk told me -- " Johnson was on his feet. He towered over the fat man. He was in top-notch physical shape -- and he was plenty damn suspicious. "Clerk, hell. You get back into your car and drive out of here. I don't know what you're after, or what you're here for, but I want you off my land." In Johnson's massive fist something sparkled. A metal tube that gleamed ominously in the mid-day sunlight. Baines saw it -- and gulped. "No offense, mister." He backed nervously away. "You folks sure are touchy. Take it easy, will you?" Johnson said nothing. He gripped the lash-tube tighter and waited for the fat man to leave. But Baines lingered. "Look, buddy. I've been driving around this furnace five hours, looking for my damn place. Any objection to my using your -- facilities?" Johnson eyed him with suspicion. Gradually the suspicion turned to disgust. He shrugged. "Dave, show him where the bathroom is." "Thanks." Baines grinned thankfully. "And if it wouldn't be too much trouble, maybe a glass of water. I'd be glad to pay you for it." He chuckled knowingly. "Never let the city people get away with anything, eh?" "Christ." Johnson turned away in revulsion as the fat man lumbered after his son, into the house. "Dad," Jean whispered. As soon as Baines was inside she hurried up onto the porch, eyes wide with fear. "Dad, do you think he -- " Johnson put his arm around her. "Just hold on tight. He'll be gone, soon." The girl's dark eyes flashed with mute terror. "Every time the man from the water company, or the tax collector, some tramp, children, anybody come around, I get a terrible stab of pain -- here." She clutched at her heart, hand against her breasts. "It's been that way thirteen years. How much longer can we keep it going? How long?" emerged gratefully from the bathroom. Dave Johnson stood silently by the door, body rigid, youthful face stony. "Thanks, son," Baines sighed. "Now where can I get a glass of cold water?" He smacked his thick lips in anticipation. "After you've been driving around the sticks looking for a dump some red-hot real estate agent stuck you with -- " Dave headed into the kitchen. "Mom, this man wants a drink of water. Dad said he could have it." I )avc had turned his back. Baines caught a brief glimpse of the mother, gray-haired, small, moving toward the sink with a glass, face withered and drawn without expression. Then Baines hurried from the room, down a hall. He passed through a bedroom, pulled a door open, found himself facing a closet. He turned and raced back, through the living room, into a dining room, then another bedroom. In a brief instant he had gone through the whole house. He peered out a window. The back yard. Remains of a rusting truck. Entrance of an underground bomb shelter. Tin cans. Chickens scratching around. A dog, asleep under a shed. A couple of old auto tires. He found a door leading out. Soundlessly, he tore the door open and stepped outside. No one was in sight. There was a barn, a leaning, ancient wood structure. Cedar trees beyond, a creek of some kind. What had once been an outhouse. around the side of the house. He had perhaps thirty seconds. He had left the door of the bathroom closed; the boy would think he had gone back in there. Baines looked into the house through a window. A large closet, filled with old clothing, boxes and bundles of magazines. He turned and started back. He reached the corner of the house and started around it. Nat Johnson's gauAt shape loomed up and blocked his way. "All right, Baines. You asked for it." A pink flash blossomed. It shut out the sunlight in a single blinding burst. Baines leaped back and clawed at his coat pocket. The edge of the flash caught him and he half-fell, stunned by the force. His suit-shield sucked in the energy and discharged it, but the power rattled his teeth and for a moment he jerked like a puppet on a string. Darkness ebbed around him. He could feel the mesh of the shield glow white, as it absorbed the energy and fought to control it. His own tube came out -- and Johnson had no shield. "You're under arrest," Baines muttered grimly. "Put down your tube and your hands up. And call your family." He made a motion with the tube. "Come on, Johnson. Make it snappy." The lash-tube wavered and then slipped from Johnson's fingers. "You're still alive." Dawning horror crept across his face. "Then you must be -- " Dave and Jean appeared. "Dad!" "Come over here," Baines ordered. "Where's your mother?" Dave jerked his head numbly. "Inside." "Get her and bring her here." whispered. Baines didn't answer. He was doing something with his neck, pulling at the flabby flesh. The wiring of a contact mike glittered as he slipped it from a fold between two chins and into his pocket. From the dirt road came the sound of motors, sleek purrs that rapidly grew louder. Two teardrops of black metal came gliding up and parked beside the house. Men swarmed out, in the dark graygreen of the Government Civil Police. In the sky swarms of black dots were descending, clouds of ugly flies that darkened the sun as they spilled out men and equipment. The men drifted slowly down. "He's not here," Baines said, as the first man reached him. "He got away. Inform Wisdom back at the lab." "We've got this section blocked off." Baines turned to Nat Johnson, who stood in dazed silence, uncomprehending, his son and daughter beside him. "How did he know we were coming?" Baines demanded. "I don't know," Johnson muttered. "He just -- knew." "A telepath?" "I don't know." Baines shrugged. "We'll know, soon. A clamp is out, all around here. He can't get past, no matter what the hell he can do. Unless he can dematerialize himself." "What'll you do with him when you -- if you catch him?" Jean asked huskily. "Study him." "And then kill him?" "That depends on the lab evaluation. If you could give me more to work on, I could predict better." "We can't tell you anything. We don't know anything more." The girl's voice rose with desperation. "He doesn't talk." Baines jumped. "What?" "He doesn't talk. He never talked to us. Ever." "How old is he?" "Eighteen." "No communication." Baines was sweating. "In eighteen years there hasn't been any semantic bridge between you? Does he have any contact? Signs? Codes?" "He -- ignores us. He eats here, stays with us. Sometimes he plays when we play. Or sits with us. He's gone days on end. We've never been able to find out what he's doing -- or where. He sleeps in the barn -- by himself." "Is he really gold-colored?' ! "Yes." "Skin, as well as hair?" "Skin, eyes, hair, nails. Everything." "And he's large? Well-formed?" It was a moment before the girl answered. A strange emotion stirred her drawn features, a momentary glow. "He's incredibly beautiful. A god. A god come down to earth." Her lips twisted. "You won't find him. He can do things. Things you have no comprehension of. Powers so far beyond your limited -- " "You don't think we'll get him?" Baines frowned. "More teams are landing all the time. You've never seen an Agency clamp in operation. We've had sixty years to work out all the bugs. If he gets away it'll be the first time -- " Baines broke off abruptly. Three men were quickly approaching the porch. Two green-clad Civil Police. And a third man between them. A man who moved silently, lithely, a faintly luminous shape that towered above them. " Cris !" Jean screamed. "We got him," one of the police said. Baines fingered his lash-tube uneasily. "Where? How?" "He gave himself up," the policeman answered, voice full of awe. "He came to us voluntarily. Look at him. He's like a metal statue. Like some sort of -- god." The golden figure halted for a moment beside Jean. Then it turned slowly, calmly, to face Baines. "Cris!" Jean shrieked. " Why did you come back?" The same thought was eating at Baines, too. He shoved it aside -- for the time being. "Is the jet out front?" he demanded quickly. "Ready to go," one of the CP answered. "Fine." Baines strode past them, down the steps and onto the dirt field. "Let's go. I want him taken directly to the lab." For a moment he studied the massive figure who stood calmly between the two Civil Policemen. Beside him, they seemed to have shrunk, become ungainly and repellent. Like dwarves... What had Jean said? A god come to earth. Baines broke angrily away. "Come on," he muttered brusquely. "This one may be tough; we've never run up against one like it before. We don't know what the hell it can do." except for the seated figure. Four bare walls, floor and ceiling. A steady glare of white light relentlessly etched every comer of the chamber. Near the top of the far wall ran a narrow slot, the view windows through which the interior of the chamber was scanned. The seated figure was quiet. He hadn't moved since the chamber locks had slid into place, since the heavy bolts had fallen from outside and the rows of bright-faced technicians had taken their places at the view windows. He gazed down at the floor, bent forward, hands clasped together, face calm, almost expressionless. In four hours he hadn't moved a muscle. "Well?" Baines said. "What have you learned?" Wisdom grunted sourly. "Not much. If we don't have him doped out in forty-eight hours we'll go ahead with the euth. We can't take any chances." "You're thinking about theTunis type," Baines said. He was, too. They had found ten of them, living in the ruins of the abondoned North African town. Their survival method was simple. They killed and absorbed other life forms, then imitated them and took their places. Chameleons, they were called. It had cost sixty lives, before the last one was destroyed. Sixty top-level experts, highly "Any clues?" Baines asked. "He's different as hell. This is going to be tough." Wisdom thumbed a pile of tape-spools. "This is the complete report, all the material we got from Johnson and his family. We pumped them with the psych-wash, then let them go home. Eighteen years -- and no semantic bridge. Yet, he looks fully developed. Mature at thirteen -- a shorter, faster life-cycle than ours. But why the mane? All the gold fuzz? Like a Roman monument that's been gilded." "Has the report come in from the analysis room? You had a wave-shot taken, of course." "His brain pattern has been fully scanned. But it takes time for them to plot it out. We're all running around like lunatics while he just sits there !" Wisdom poked a stubby finger at the window. "We caught him easily enough. He can't have much, can he? But I'd like to know what it is. Before we euth him." "Maybe we should keep him alive until we know." "Euth in forty-eight hours," Wisdom repeated stubbornly. "Whether we know or not. I don't like him. He gives me the creeps." Wisdom stood chewing nervously on his cigar, a red-haired, beefyfaced man, thick and heavy-set, with a barrel chest and cold, shrewd eyes deep-set in his hard face. Ed Wisdom was Director of But right now he was worried. His tiny eyes darted back and forth, alarmed flickers of gray in his brutal, massive face. "You think," Baines said slowly, "this is it?" "I always think so," Wisdom snapped. "I have to think so." "I mean -- " "I know what you mean." Wisdom paced back and forth, among the study tables, technicians at their benches, equipment and humming computers. Buzzing tape-slots and research hookups. "This thing lived eighteen years with his family and they don't understand it. They don't know what it has. They know what it does, but not how." "What does it do?" "It knows things." "What kind of things?" Wisdom grabbed his lash-tube from his belt and tossed it on a table. "Here." "What?" "Here." Wisdom signalled, and a view window was slid back an inch. "Shoot him." Baines blinked. "You said fortyeight hours." With a curse, Wisdom snatched up the tube, aimed it through the window direcdy at the seated figure's back, and squeezed the trigger. A blinding flash of pink. A cloud of energy blossomed in the center of the chamber. It sparkled, then died into dark ash. "Good God!" Baines gasped. You -- " He broke off. The figure was no longer sitting. As Wisdom fired, it had moved in a blur of speed, away from the blast, to the corner of the chamber. Now it was slowly coming back, face blank, still absorbed in thought. "Fifth time," Wisdom said, as he put his tube away. "Last time Jamison and I fired together. Missed. He knew exactly when the bolts would hit. And where." Baines and Wisdom looked at each other. Both of them were thinking the same thing. "But even reading minds wouldn't tell him where they were going, to hit," Baines said. "When, maybe. But not where. Could you have called your own shots?" "Not mine," Wisdom answered flatly. "I fired fast, damn near at random." He frowned. "Random. We'll have to make a test of this." lie waved a group of technicians over. "Get a construction team up here. On the double." He grabbed paper and pen and began sketching. on, Baines met his fiancee in the lobby outside the lab, the Building. "How's it coming?" she asked. Anita Ferris was tall and blonde, blue eyes and a mature, carefully cultivated figure. An attractive, competent-looking woman in her late twenties. She wore a metal foil dress and cape -- with a red and black stripe on the sleeve, the emblem of the A-Class. Anita was Director of the Semantics Agency," a top-level Government Coordinator. "Anything of interest, this time?" "Plenty." Baines guided her from the lobby, into the dim recess of the bar. Music played softly in the background, a shifting variety of patterns formed mathematically. Dim shapes moved expertly through the gloom, from table to table. Silent, efficient robot waiters. As Anita sipped her Tom Collins, Baines outlined what they had found. "What are the chances," Anita asked slowly, "that he's built up some kind of deflection-cone? There was one kind that warped their environment by direct mental effort. No tools. Direct mind to matter." "Psychokinetics?" Baines drummed restlessly on the table top. "I doubt it. The thing has ability to predict, not to control. He can't stop the beams, but he can sure as hell get out of the way." "Does he jump between the molecules?" Baines wasn't amused. "This is serious. We've handled these things sixty years -- longer than you and I have been around added together. Eighty-seven types of deviants have shown up, real mutants that could reproduce themselves, not mere freaks. This is the eightyeighth. We've been able to handle each of them in turn. But this -- " "Why are you so worried about this one?" "First, it's eighteen years old. That in itself is incredible. Its family managed to hide it that long." "Those women around Denver were older than that. Those ones with -- " "They were in a Government camp. Somebody high up was toying with the idea of allowing them to breed. Some sort of industrial use. We withheld euth for years. But Cris Johnson stayed alive outside our control. Those things at Denver were under constant scrutiny." "Maybe he's harmless. You always assume a deeve is a menace. He might even be beneficial. Somebody thought those women might work in. Maybe this thing has something that would advance the race." " Which race? Not the human race. It's the old 'the operation was a success but the patient died' routine. If we introduce a mutant to keep us going it'll be mutants, not us, who'll inherit the earth. It'll be mutants surviving for their own sake. Don't think for a moment we can put padlocks on them and expect them to serve us. If they're really superior to homo sapiens, they'll win out in even competition. To survive, we've got to cold-deck them right from the start." "In other words, we'll know homo superior when he comes -- by definition. He'll be the one we won't be able to euth." v "That's about it," Baines answered. "Assuming there is a homo superior. Maybe there's just homo peculiar. Homo with an improved line." "The Neanderthal probably thought the Cro-Magnon man had merely an improved line. A little more advanced ability to conjure up symbols and shape flint. From your description, this thing is more radical than a mere improvement." "This thing," Baines said slowly, "has an ability to predict. So far, it's been able to stay alive. It's been able to cope with situations better than you or I could. How long do you think we'd stay alive in that chamber, with energy beams blazing down at us? In a sense it's got the ultimate survival ability. If it can always be accurate -- A wall-speaker sounded. "Baines, you're wanted in the lab. Get the hell out of the bar and upramp." Baines pushed back his chair and got to his feet. "Come along. You may be interested in seeing what Wisdom has got dreamed up." in a circle, middle-aged, grayhaired, listening to a skinny youth in a white shirt and rolled-up sleeves explaining an elaborate cube of metal and plastic that filled the center of the view-platform. From it jutted an ugly array of tube snouts, gleaming muzzles that disappeared into an intricate maze of wiring. "This," the youth was saying briskly, "is the first real test. It fires at random -- as nearly random as we can make it, at least. Weighted balls are thrown up in an air stream, then dropped free to fall back and cut relays. They can fall in almost any pattern. The thing fires according to their pattern. Each drop produces a new configuration of timing and position. Ten tubes, in all. Each will be in constant motion." "And nobody knows how they'll fire?" Anita asked. "Nobody." Wisdom rubbed his thick hands together. "Mind-reading won't help him, not with this thing." Anita moved over to the view windows, as the cube was rolled into place. She gasped. "Is that him?" "What's wrong?" Baines asked. Anita's cheeks were flushed. "Why, I expected a -- a thing. My God, he's beautiful! Like a golden statue. Like a deity!" Baines laughed. "He's eighteen years old, Anita. Too young for you." The woman was still peering through the view window. "Look at him. Eighteen? I don't believe it." Cris Johnson sat in the center of the chamber, on the floor. A posture of contemplation, head bowed, arms folded, legs tucked under him. In the stark glare of the overhead lights his powerful body glowed and rippled, a shimmering figure of downy gold. "Pretty, isn't he?" Wisdom muttered. "All right. Start it going." "You're going to kill him?" Anita demanded. "We're going to try." "But he's -- " She broke off uncertainly. "He's not a monster. He's not like those others, those hideous things with two heads, or those insects. Or those awful things from Tunis." "What is he, then?" Baines asked. "I don't know. But you can't just kill him. It's terrible!" The cube clicked into life. The muzzles jerked, silently altered posidon. Three retracted, disappeared into the body of the cube. Others came out. Quickly, efficiently, they moved into position -- and abruptly, without warning, opened fire. A staggering burst of energy fanned out, a complex pattern that altered each moment, different angles, different velocities, a bewildering blur that cracked from the windows down into the chamber. The golden figure moved. He dodged back and forth, expertly avoiding the bursts of energy that seared around him on all sides. Rolling clouds of ash obscured him ; he was lost in a mist of crackling fire and ash. "Stop it!" Anita shouted. "For God's sake, you'll destroy him!" The chamber was an inferno of energy. The figure had completely disappeared. Wisdom waited a momerit, then nodded to the technicians operating the cube. They touched guide buttons and the muzzles slowed and died. Some sank back into the cube. All became silent. The works of the cube ceased humming. Cris Johnson was still alive. He emerged from the settling clouds of ash, blackened and singed. But unhurt. He had avoided each beam. He had weaved between them and among them as they came, a dancer leaping over glittering sword-points of pink fire. He had survived. "No," Wisdom murmured, shaken and grim. "Not a telepath. Those were at random. No prearranged pattern." each other, dazed and frightened. Anita was trembling. Her face was pale and her blue eyes were wide. "What, then?" She whispered. "What is it? What does he have?" "He's a good guesser," Wisdom suggested. "He's not guessing," Baines answered. "Don't kid yourself. That's the whole point." "No, he's not guessing." Wisdom nodded slowly. "He knew. He predicted each strike. I wonder... Can he err? Can he make a mistake?" "We caught him," Baines pointed out. "You said he came back voluntarily." There was a strange look on Wisdom's face. "Did he come back after the clamp was up?" Baines jumped. "Yes, after." "He couldn't have got through the clamp. So he came back." Wisdom grinned wryly. "The clamp must actually have been perfect. It was supposed to be." "If there had been a single hole," Baines murmured, "he would have known it -- gone through." Wisdom ordered a group of armed guards over, "Get him out of there. To the euth stage." Anita shrieked. "Wisdom, you can't -- " "He's too far ahead of us. We can't compete with him." Wisdom's eyes were bleak. "We can only guess what's going to happen. He knows. For him, it's a sure thing. I don't think it'll help him at euth, though. The whole stage is flooded simultaneously. Instantaneous gas, released throughout." He signalled impatiently to the guards. "Get going. Take him down right away. Don't waste any time." "Can we?" Baines murmured thoughtfully. The guards took up positions by one of the chamber locks. Cautiously, the tower control slid the lock back. The first two guards stepped cautiously in, lash-tubes ready. Cris stood in the center of the chamber. His back was to them as they crept toward him. For a moment he was silent, utterly unmoving. The guards fanned out, as more of them entered the chamber. Then -- Anita screamed. Wisdom cursed. The golden figure spun and leaped forward, in a flashing blur of speed. Past the triple line of guards, through the lock and into the corridor. "Get him!" Baines shouted. Guards milled everywhere. Flashes of energy lit up the corridor, as the figure raced among them, up the ramp. "No use," Wisdom said calmly. "We can't hit him." He touched a button, then another. "But maybe this will help." "What -- " Baines began. But the leaping figure shot abruptly at him, straight at him, and he dropped to one side. The figure flashed past. It ran effortlessly, face without expression, dodging and jumping as the energy beams seared around it. For an instant the golden face loomed up before Baines. It passed and disappeared down a side corridor. Guards rushed after it, kneeling and firing, shouting orders excitedly. In the bowels of the building, heavy guns were rumbling up. Locks slid into place as escape corridors were systematically sealed off. "Good God," Baines gasped, as he got to his feet. "Can't he do anything but run?" "I gave orders," Wisdom said, "to have the building isolated. There's no way out. Nobody comes and nobody goes. He's loose here in the building -- but he won't get out." "If there's one exit overlooked, he'll know it," Anita pointed out shakily. "We won't overlook any exit. We got him once ; we'll get him again." A messenger robot had come in. Now it presented its message respectfully to Wisdom. "From analysis, sir." Wisdom tore the tape open. "Now we'll know how it thinks." His hands were shaking. "Maybe ve can figure out its blind spot. It may be able to out think us, but that doesn't mean it's invulnerable. It only predicts the future -- it can't change it. If there's only death ahead, its ability won't..." Wisdom's voice faded into silence. After a moment he passed the tape to Baines. "I'll be down in the bar," Wisdom said. "Getting a good stiff drink." His face had turned leadgray. "All I can say is I hope to hell this isn't the race to come." "What's the analysis?" Anita demanded impatiently, peering over Baines' shoulder. "How does it think?" "It doesn't," Baines said, as he handed the tape back to his boss. "It doesn't think at all. Virtually no frontal lobe. It's not a human being -- it doesn't use symbols. It's nothing but an animal." "An animal," Wisdom said, "With a single highly-developed faculty. Not a superior man. Not a man at all." and equipment clanged. Loads of Civil Police were pouring into the building and taking up positions beside the guards. One by one, the corridors and rooms were being inspected and sealed off. Sooner or later the golden figure of Cris Johnson would be located and cornered. "We were always afraid a mutant with superior intellectual powers would come along," Baines said reflectively. "A deeve who would be to us what we are to the great apes. Something with a bulging cranium, telepathic ability, a perfect semantic system, ultimate powers of symbolization and calculation. A development along our own path. A better human being." "He acts by reflex," Anita said wonderingly. She had the analysis and was sitting at one of the desks studying it intently. "Reflex -- like a lion. A golden lion." She pushed the tape aside, a strange expression on her face. "The lion god." "Beast," Wisdom corrected tartly. "Blond beast, you mean." "He runs fast," Baines said, "and that's all. No tools. He doesn't build anything or utilize anything outside himself. He just stands and waits for the right opportunity and then he runs like hell." "This is worse than anything we've anticipated," Wisdom said. His beefy face was lead-gray. He sagged like an old man, his blunt hands trembling and uncertain. "To be replaced by an animal! Something that runs and hides. Something without a language!" He spat savagely. "That's why they weren't able to communicate with it. We wondered what kind of semantic system it had. It hasn't got any! No more ability to talk and think than a -- dog." "That means intelligence has failed," Baines went on huskily. "We're the last of our line -- like the dinosaur. We've carried intelligence as far as it'll go. Too far, maybe. We've already got to the point where we know so much -- think so much -- we can't act." "Men of thought," Anita said. "Not men of action. It's begun to have a paralyzing effect. But this thing -- " "This thing's faculty works better than ours ever did. We can recall past experiences, keep them in mind, learn from them. At best, we can make shrewd guesses about the future, from our memory of what's happened in the past. But we can't be certain. We have to speak of probabilities. Grays. Not blacks and whites. We're only guessing." "Cris Johnson isn't guessing," Anita added. "He can look ahead. See what's coming. He can -- prethink. Let's call it that. He can see into the future. Probably he doesn't perceive it as the future." "No," Anita said thoughtfully. "It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past. Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain. And he probably doesn't remember the past, any more than any animal remembers what's happened." "As he develops," Baines said, "as his race evolves, it'll probably expand its ability to prethink. Instead of ten minutes, thirty minutes. Then an hour. A day. A year. Eventually they'll be able to keep ahead a whole lifetime. Each one of them will live in a solid, unchanging world. There'll be no variables, no uncertainty. No motion! They won't have anything to fear. Their world will be perfectly static, a solid block of matter. "And when death comes," Anita said, "they'll accept it. There won't be any struggle; to them, it'll already have happened." "Already have happened Baines repeated. "To Cris, our shots had already been fired." He laughed harshly. "Superior survival doesn't mean superior man. If there were another world-wide flood, only fish would survive. If there were another ice age, maybe nothing but polar bears would be left. When we opened the lock, he had already seen the men, seen exactly where they were standing and what they'd do. A neat faculty -- but not a development of mind. A pure physical sense." "But if every exit is covered," Wisdom repeated, "he'll see he can't get out. He gave himself up before -- he'll give himself up again." He shook his head. "An animal. Without language. Without tools." "With his new sense," Baines said, "he doesn't need anything else." He examined his watch. "It's after two. Is the building completely sealed off?" "You can't leave," Wisdom stated. "You'll have to stay here all night -- or until we catch the bastard." "I meant her." Baines indicated Anita. "She's supposed to be back at Semantics by seven in the morning." Wisdom shrugged. "I have no control over her. If she wants, she can check out." "I'll stay," Anita decided. "I want to be here when he -- when he's destroyed. I'll sleep here." She hesitated. "Wisdom, isn't there some other way? If he's just an animal couldn't we -- " "A zoo?" Wisdom's voice rose in a frenzy of hysteria. "Keep it penned up in the zoo? Christ no! It's got to be killed!" gleaming shape crouched in the darkness. He was in a store room. Boxes and cartons stretched out on all sides, heaped up in orderly rows, all neatly counted and marked. Silent and deserted. But in a few moments people burst in and search the room. He could see this. He saw them in all parts of the room, clear and distinct, men with lash-tubes, grimfaced, stalking with murder in their eyes. The sight was one of many. One of a multitude of clearly-etched scenes lying tangent to his own. And to each was attached a further multitude of interlocking scenes, that finally grew hazier and dwindled away. A progressive vagueness, each syndrome less distinct. But the immediate one, the scene that lay closest to him, was clearly visible. He could easily make out the sight of the armed men. Therefore it was necessary to be out of the room before they appeared. The golden figure got calmly to its feet and moved to the door. The corridor was empty; he could see himself already outside, in the vacant, drumming hall of metal and recessed lights. He pushed the door boldly open and stepped out. A lift blinked across the hall. He walked to the lift and entered it. In five minutes a group of guards would come running along and leap into the lift. By that time he would have left it and sent it back down. Now he pressed a button and rose to the next floor. He stepped out into a deserted passage. No one was in sight. That didn't surprise him. He couldn't be surprised. The element didn't exist for him. The positions of things, the space relationships of all matter in the immediate future, were as certain for him as his own body. The only thing that was unknown was that which had already passed out of being. In a vague, dim fashion, he had occasionally wondered where things went after he had passed them. He came to a small supply closet. It had just been searched. It would be a half an hour before anyone opened it again. He had that long; he could see that far ahead. And then -- And then he would be able to see another area, a region farther beyond. He was always moving, advancing into new regions he had never seen before. A constantly unfolding panorama of sights and scenes, frozen landscapes spread out ahead. All objects were fixed. Pieces on a vast chess board through which he moved, arms folded, face calm. A detached observer who saw objects that lay ahead of him as clearly as those under foot. Right now, as he crouched in the small supply closet, he saw an unusually varied multitude of scenes for the next half hour. Much lay ahead. The half hour was divided into an incredibly complex pattern of separate configurations. He had reached a critical region; he was about to move through worlds of intricate complexity. He concentrated on a scene ten minutes away. It showed, like a three dimensional still, a heavy gun at the end of the corridor, trained all the way to the far end. Men moved cautiously from door to door, checking each room again, as they had done repeatedly. At the end of the half hour they had reached the supply closet. A scene showed them looking inside. By that time he was gone, of course. He wasn't in that scene. He had passed on to another. The next scene showed an exit. Guards stood in a solid line. No way out. He was in that scene. Off to one side, in a niche just inside the door. The street outside was visible, stars, lights, outlines of passing cars and people. In the next tableau he had gone back, away from the exit. There was no way out. In another tableau he saw himself at other exits, a legion of golden figures, duplicated again and again, as he explored regions ahead, one after another. But each exit was covered. In one dim scene he saw himself lying charred and dead; he had tried to run through the line, out the exit. But that scene was vague. One wavering, indistinct still out of many. The inflexible path along which he moved would not deviate in that direction. It would not turn him that way. The golden figure in that scene, the miniature doll in that room, was only distantly related to him. It was himself, but a far-away self. A self he would never meet. He forgot it and went on to examine the other tableau. The myriad of tableaux that surrounded him were an elaborate maze, a web which he now considered bit by bit. He was looking down into a doll's house of infinite rooms, rooms without number, each with its furniture, its dolls, all rigid and unmoving. The same dolls and furniture were repeated in many. He, himself, appeared often. The two men on the platform. The woman. Again and again the same combinations turned up; the play was redone frequently, the same actors and props moved around in all possible ways. Before it was time to leave the supply closet, Cris Johnson had examined each of the rooms tangent to the one he now occupied. He had consulted each, considered its contents thoroughly. He pushed the door open and stepped calmly out into the hall. He knew exactly where he was going. And what he had to do. Crouched in the stuffy closet, he had quietly and expertly examined each miniature of himself, observed which clearly-etched configuration lay along his inflexible path, the one room of the doll house, the one set out of legions, toward which he was moving. foil dress, hung it over a hanger, then unfastened her shoes and kicked them under the bed. She was just starting to unclip her bra when the door opened. She gasped. Soundlessly, calmly, l hr great golden shape closed the dour and bolted it after him. Anita snatched up her lash-tube from the dressing table. Her hand shook; her whole body was trembling. "What do you want?" she demanded. Her fingers tightened convulsively around the tube. "I'll kill you." The figure regarded her silently, arms folded. It was the first time she had seen Cris Johnson closely. The great dignified face, handsome and impassive. Broad shoulders. The golden mane of hair, golden skin, pelt of radiant fuzz -- "Why?" she demanded breathlessly. Her heart was pounding wildly. "What do you want?" She could kill him easily. But the lash-tube wavered. Cris Johnson stood without fear; he wasn't at all afraid. Why not? Didn't he understand what it was? What the small metal tube could do to him? "Of course," she said suddenly, in a choked whisper. "You can see ahead. You know I'm not going to kill you. Or you wouldn't have come here." She flushed, terrified -- and embarrassed. He knew exactly what she was going to do; he could see it as easily as she saw the walls of the room, the wall-bed with its covers folded neatly back, her clothes hanging in the closet, her purse and small things on the dressing table. "All right." Anita backed away, then abruptly put the tube down on the dressing table. "I won't kill you. Why should I?" she fumbled in her purse and got out her cigarettes. Shakily, she lit up, her pulse racing. She was scared. And strangely fascinated. "Do you expect to stay here? It won't do any good. They've come through the dorm twice, already. They'll be back." Could he understand her? She saw nothing on his face, only blank dignity. God, he was huge! It wasn't possible he was only eighteen, a boy, a child. He looked more like some great golden god, come down to earth. She shook the thought off savagely. He wasn't a god. He was a beast. The blond beast, come to take the place of man. To drive man from the earth. Anita snatched up the lash-tube. "Get out of here! You're an animal! A big stupid animal! You can't even understand what I'm saying -- you don't even have a language. You're not human." Cris Johnson remained silent. As if he were waiting. Waiting for what? He showed no sign of fear or impatience, even though the corridor outside rang with the sound of men searching, metal against metal, guns and energy tubes being dragged around, shouts and dim rumbles as section after section of the building was searched and sealed off. "They'll get you," Anita said. "You'll be trapped here. They'll be searching this wing any moment." She savagely stubbed out her cigarette out. "For God's sake, what do you expect me to do?" Cris moved toward her. Anita shrank back. His powerful hands caught hold of her and she gasped in sudden terror. For a moment she struggled blindly, desperately. "Let go!" She broke away and leaped back from him. His face was expressionless. Calmly, he came toward her, an impassive god advancing to take her. "Get away!" She groped for the lash-tube, trying to get it up. But the tube slipped from her fingers and rolled onto the floor. Cris bent down and picked it up. He held it out to her, in the open palm of his hand. "Good God," Anita whispered. Shakily, she accepted the tube, gripped it hesitantly, then put it down again on the dressing table. In the half-light of the room, the great golden figure seemed to glow and shimmer, outlined against the darkness. A god -- no, not a god. An animal. A great golden beast, without a soul. She was confused. Which was he -- or was he both? She shook her head, bewildered. It was late, almost four. She was exhausted and confused. Cris took her in his arms. Gently, kindly, he lifted her face and kissed her. His powerful hands held her tight. She couldn't breathe. Darkness, mixed with the shimmering golden haze, swept around her. Around and around it spiralled, carrying her senses away. She sank down into it gratefully. The darkness covered her and dissolved her in a swelling torrent of sheer force that mounted in intensity each moment, until the roar of it beat against her and at last blotted out everything. automatically pushed her hair into place. Cris was standing before the closet. He was reaching up, getting something down. He turned toward her and tossed something on the bed. Her heavy metal foil traveling cape. Anita gazed down at the cape without comprehension. "What do you want?" Cris stood by the bed, waiting. She picked up the cape uncertainly. Cold creepers of fear plucked at her. "You want me to get you out of here," she said softly. "Past the guards and the CP." Cris said nothing. "They'll kill you instantly." She got unsteadily to her feet. "You can't run past them. Good God, don't you do anything but run? There must be a better way. Maybe I can appeal to Wisdom. I'm Class A -- Director Class. I can go directly to the Full Directorate. I ought to be able to hold them off, keep back the euth indefinitely. against us if we try to break past -- " She broke off. "But you don't gamble," she continued slowly. "You don't go by odds. You know what's coming. You've seen the cards already." She studied his face intently. "No, you can't he cold-decked. It wouldn't be possible." For a moment she stood deep in thought. Then with a quick, decisive motion, she snatched up the cloak and slipped it around her bare shoulders. She fastened the heavy belt, bent down and got her shoes from under the bed, snatched up her purse, and hurried to the door. "Come on," she said .She was breathing quickly, cheeks flushed. "Let's go. While there are still a number of exits to choose from. My car is parked outside, in the lot at the side of the building. We can get to my place in an hour. I have a winter home in Argentina. If worst comes to worst we can fly there. It's in the back country, away from the cities. Jungle and swamps. Cut-off from almost everything." Eagerly, she started to open the door. Cris reached out and stopped her. Gently, patiently, he moved in front of her. He waited a long time, body rigid. Then he turned the knob and stepped boldly out into the corridor. The corridor was empty. No one was in sight. Anita caugbt a faint glimpse, the back of a guard hurrying off. If they had come out a second earlier -- Cris started down the corridor. She ran after him. He moved rapidly, effortlessly. The girl had trouble keeping up with him. He seemed to know exactly where to go. Off to the right, down a side hall, a supply passage. Onto an ascent freight-lift. They rose, then abruptly halted. Cris waited again. Presently he slid the door back and moved out of the lift. Anita followed nervously. She could hear sounds: guns and men, very close. They were near an exit. A double line of guards stood directly ahead. Twenty men, a solid wall -- and a massive heavy-duty robot gun in the center. The men were alert, faces strained and tense. Watching wide-eyed, guns gripped tight. A Civil Police officer was in charge. "We'll never get past," Anita gasped. "We wouldn't get ten feet." She pulled back. "They'll -- " Cris took her by the arm and continued calmly forward. Blind terror leaped inside her. She fought wildly to get away, but his fingers were like steel. She couldn't pry them loose. Quietly, irresistibly, the great golden creature drew her along beside him, toward the double line of guards. "There he is!" Guns went up. Men leaped into action. The barrel of the robot cannon swung around. "Get him !" Anita was paralyzed. She sagged against the powerful body beside her, tugged along helplessly by his inflexible grasp. The lines of guards came nearer, a sheer wall of guns. Anita fought to control her terror. She stumbled, half-fell. Cris supported her effortlessly. She scratched, fought at him, struggled to get loose -- "Don't shoot!" she screamed. Guns wavered uncertainly. "Who is she?" The guards were moving around, trying to get a sight on Cris without including her. "Who's he got there?" One of them saw the stripe on her sleeve. Red and black. Director Class. Top-level. "She's Class A." Shocked, the guards retreated. "Miss, get out of the way!" Anita found her voice. "Don't shoot. He's -- in my custody. You understand? I'm taking him out." The wall of guards moved back nervously. "No one's supposed to pass. Director Wisdom gave orders -- " "I'm not subject to Wisdom's authority." She managed to edge her voice with a harsh crispness. "Get out of the way. I'm taking him to the Semantics Agency." For a moment nothing happened. There was no reaction. Then slowly, uncertainly, one guard stepped aside. Cris moved. A blur of speed, away from Anita, past the confused guards, through the breach in the line, out the exit, and onto the street. Bursts of energy flashed wildly after him. Shouting guards milled out. Anita was left behind, forgotten. The guards, the heavyduty gun, were pouring out into the early morning darkness. Sirens wailed. Patrol cars roared into life, Anita stood dazed, confused, leaning against the wall, trying to get her breath. He was gone. He had left her. Good God -- what had she done? She shook her head, bewildered, her face buried in her hands. She had been hypnotized. She had lost her will, her common sense. Her reason! The animal, the great golden beast, had tricked her. Taken advantage of her. And now he was gone, escaped into the night. Miserable, agonized tears trickled through her clenched fingers. She rubbed at them futilely; but they kept on coming. never get him, now. He's probAnita sat huddled in the corner, her face to the wall. A little bent heap, broken and wretched. Wisdom paced back and forth. "But where can he go? Where can he hide? Nobody'll hide him! Everybody knows the law about deeves!" "He's lived out in the woods most of his life. He'll hunt -- that's what he's always done. They wondered what he was up to, off by himself. He was catching game and sleeping under trees." Baines laughed harshly. "And the first woman he meets will be glad to hide him -- as she was." He indicated Anita with a jerk of his thumb. "So all that gold, that mane, that god-like stance, was for something. Not just ornament." Wisdom's thick lips twisted. "He doesn't have just one faculty -- he has two. One is new, the newest thing in survival methods. The other is as old as life." He stopped pacing to glare at the huddled shape in the corner. "Plumage. Bright feathers, combs for the roosters swans, birds, bright scales for the fish. Gleaming pelts and manes for the animals. An animal isn't necessarily bestial. Lions aren't bestial. Or tigers. Or any of the big cats. They're anything but bestial." "He'll never have to worry," Baines said. "He'll get by -- as long as human women exist to take care of him. And since he can see ahead, into the future, he already knows he's sexually irresistible to human females." "We'll get him," Wisdom muttered. "I've had the Government declare an emergency. Military and Civil Police will be looking for him. Armies of men -- a whole planet of experts, the most advanced machines and equipment. We'll flush him, sooner or later." "By that time it won't make any difference," Baines said. He put his hand on Anita's shoulder and patted her ironically. "You'll have company, sweetheart. You won't be the only one. You're just the first of a long procession." "Thanks," Anita grated. "The oldest survival method and the newest. Combined to form one perfectly adapted animal. How the hell are we going to stop him? We can put you through a sterilization tank -- but we can't pick them all up, all the women he meets along the way. And if we miss one we're finished." "We'll have to keep trying," Wisdom said. "Round up as many as we can. Before they can spawn." Faint hope glinted in his tired, sagging face. "Maybe his characteristics are recessive. Maybe ours will cancel his out." "I wouldn't lay any money on that," Baines said. "I think I know already which of the two strains is going to turn up dominant." He grinned wryly. "I mean, I'm making a good guess. It won't be us." That Bind , by Walter Miller, Jr. -- a stirring, penetrating new novelette about Man's oldest heritage -- in the May issue on sale March #th! The remarkable thing about Atummyc Afterbath Dusting Powder was that it gave you that lovely, radiant, atomic look -- fust the way the advertisements said it would. In fact, it also gave you a little something more! Breeder Reaction By Winston Marks Illustrated by Kelly Freas not as cut and dried as many people think. Sometimes you spend and then some little low-budget campaign will catch the public's fancy and walk away with merchandising honors of the year. Let me sound a warning, however. When this happens, watch out! There's always a reason for it, and it isn't always just a matter of bright slogans and semantic genius. Sometimes the product itself does the trick. And when this happens people in the industry lose their heads trying to capitalize on the "freak" good fortune. This can lead to disaster. May I cite one example? I was on loan to Elaine Templeton, Inc., the big cosmetics fern, when one of these "prairie fires" took off and, as product engineer from the firm of Bailey Hazlitt  Persons, Advertising Agency, I figured I had struck pure gold. My assay was wrong. It was fool's gold on a pool of quicksand. Madame "Elaine", herself, had called me in for consultation on a huge lipstick campaign she was pull ever)so often to get the ladies to chuck their old lip-goo and invest in the current dream of non-smearability. It's an old gimmick, and the new product is never actually kiss-proof, but they come closer each year, and the gals tumble for it every time. Well, they wanted my advice on a lot of details such as optimum shades, a new name, size, shape and design of container. And they were ready to spend a hunk of moolah on the build-up. You see, when they give a product a firstclass advertising ride they don't figure on necessarily showing a profit on that particular item. If they break even they figure they are ahead of the game, because the true purpose is to build up the brand name. You get enough women raving over the new Elaine Templeton lipstick, and first thing you know sales start climbing on the whole line of assorted aids to seduction. Since E. T., Inc., was one of our better accounts, the old man told me to take as long as was needed, so I moved in to my assigned office, in the twelve-story E. T. building, secretary, Scotch supply, icebags, ulcer pills and all, and went to work setting up my survey staff. This product engineering is a matter of "cut and try" in some fields. You get some ideas, knock together some samples, try them on the public with a staff of interviewers, tabulate the results, draw your conclusions and hand them over to Production with a prayer. If your ad budget is large enough your prayer is usually answered, because the American Public buys principally on the "we knoV what we like, and we like what we know" principle. Make them "know it" and they'll buy it. Maybe in love, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but in this business, familiarity breeds nothing but sales. Madame Elaine had a fair staff of idea boys, herself. In fact, every other department head had some gimmick he was trying to push to get personal recognition. The Old Hag liked this spirit of initiative and made it plain to me I was to give everyone a thorough hearing. This is one of the crosses you have to bear. Everyone but the janitor was swarming into my office with suggestions, and more than half of them had nothing to do with the lipstick campaign at all. So I dutifully listened to each one, had my girl take impressive notes and then lifted my left or my right eyebrow at her. My left eyebrow meant file them in the wastebasket. This is how the Atummyc Afterbath Dusting Powder got lost in the shuffle, and later I was credited with launching a new item on which I didn't even have a record. It came about this way: one of the Old Hag's promotion-minded pixies flounced her fanny into my interview chair, crossed her knees up to her navel and began selling me her pet project. She was a relative of the Madame as well as a department head, so I had to listen. Her idea was corny -- a new dusting powder with "Atummion" added, to be called, "Atummyc Afterbath Dusting Powder" -- "Atummyc", of course, being a far-fetched play on the word "atomic". What delighted her especially was that the intimate, meaningful word "tummy" occurred in her coined trade name, and this was supposed to do wonders in stimulating the imaginations of the young females of mancatching-age. As I said, the idea was corny. But the little hazel-eyed pixie was not. She was about #, blackhaired, small-waisted and bubbling with hormones. With her shapely knees and low-cut neckline she was a pleasant change of scenery from the procession of self-seeking middle-agers I had been interviewing -- not that her motive was any different. I stalled a little to feast my eyes. "This Atummion Added item," I said, "just what is Atum mion?" "That's my secret," she said, squinching her eyes at me like a fun-loving little cobra. "My brother is assistant head chemist, and he's worked up a formula of fission products we got from the Atomic Energy Commission for experimentation." "Fission products!" I said. "That stuff's dangerous!" "Not this formula," she assured me. "Bob says there's hardly any radiation to it at all. Perfectly harmless." "Then what's it supposed to do?" I inquired naively. She stood up, placed one hand on her stomach and the other behind her head, wiggled and stretched. "Atummyc Bath Powder will give milady that wonderful, vibrant, atomic feeling," she announced in a voice dripping with innuendo. "All right," I said, "that's what it's supposed to do. Now what does it really do?" "Smells good and makes her slippery-dry, like any other talcum," she admitted quite honestly. "It's the name and the idea that will put it across." reminded her. "I'm afraid the whole thing is a little too far off the track to consider at this time. I'm here to make a new lipstick go. Maybe later -- " "I appreciate that, but honestly, don't you think it's a terrific idea?" "I think you're terrific," I told her, raising my left eyebrow at my secretary, "and we'll get around to you one of these days." "Oh, Mr. Sanders!" she said, exploding those big eyes at me and shoving a half-folded sheet of paper at me. "Would you please sign my interview voucher?" In Madame Elaine's organization you had to have a written "excuse" for absenting yourself from your department during working hours. I supposed that the paper I signed was no different from the others. Anyway, I was still blinded by the atomic blast of those hazel eyes. After she left I got to thinking it was strange that she had me sign the interview receipt. I couldn't remember having done that for any other department heads. I didn't tumble to the pixie's gimmick for a whole month, then I picked up the phone one day and the old man spilled the news. "I thought you were making lipstick over there. What's this call for ad copy on a new bath powder?" The incident flashed back in my mind, and rather than admit I had been by-passed I lied, "You know the Madame. She always gets all she can for her money." The old man muttered, "I don't see taking funds from the lipstick campaign and splitting them off into little projects like this," he said. "Twenty-five thousand bucks would get you one nice spread in the Post, but what kind of a oneshot campaign would that be?" I mumbled excuses, hung up and screamed for the pixie. My secretary said, "Who?" "Little sexy-eyes. The Atomic Bath Powder girl." Without her name it took an hour to dig her up, but she finally popped in, plumped down and began giggling. "You found out." "How," I demanded, "did you arrange it?" "Easy. Madame Elaine's in Paris. She gave you a free hand, didn't she?" I nodded. "Well, when you signed your okay on the Atummyc -- " "That was an interview voucher!" "Not -- exactly," she said ducking her head. The damage was done. You don't get ahead in this game by admitting mistakes, and the production department was already packaging and labelling samples of Atummyc Bath Powder to send out to the distributors. out of my lipstick budget and keep my mouth shut. When the ad copy came over from my firm I looked it over, shuddered at the quickie treatment they had given it and turned it loose. Things were beginning to develop fast in my lipstick department, and I didn't have time to chase the powder thing like I should have -- since it was my name on the whole damned project. So I wrote off the money and turned to other things. We were just hitting the market with Madame Elaine Templeton's "Kissmet" when the first smell of smoke came my way. The pixie came into my office one morning and congratulated me. "You're a genius!" she said. "Like the Kissmet campaign, do you?" I said pleased. "It stinks," she said holding her nose. "But Atummyc Bath Powder will pull you out of the hole." "Oh, that," I said. "When does it go to market?" "Done went -- a month ago." "What? Why you haven't had time to get it out of the lab yet. Using a foreign substance, you should have had an exhaustive series of allergy skin tests on a thousand women before -- " "I've been using it for two months myself," she said. "And look at me! See any rashes?" I focussed my eyes for the first time, and what I saw made me wonder if I were losing my memory. The pixie had been a pretty little French pastry from the first, but now she positively glowed. Her skin even had that "radiant atomic look", right out of our corny, low-budget ad copy. "What -- have you done to yourself, fallen in love?" "With Atummyc After Bath Powder," she said smugly. "And so have the ladies. The distributors arc all reordering." Well, these drug sundries houses have some sharp salesmen out, and I figured the bath powder must have caught them needing something to promote. It was a break. If we got the # back it wouldn't hurt my alibi a bit, in case the Kissmet production failed to click. Three days later the old man called me from the New York branch of our agency. "Big distributor here is hollering about the low budget we've given to this Atummyc Bath Powder thing," he said. "He tells me his men have punched it hard and he thinks it's catching on pretty big. Maybe you better talk the Madame out of a few extra dollars." "The Old Hag's in Europe," I told him, "and I'm damned if I'll rob the Kissmet Lipstick deal any more. It's mostly spent anyway." The old man didn't like it. When you get the distributors on your side it pays to back them up, but I was too nervous about the wobbly first returns we were getting on the Kissmet campaign to consider taking away any of the unspent budget and throwing it into the bath powder deal. The next day I stared at an order from a west coast wholesaler and began to sweat. The pixie fluttered it under my nose. "Two more carloads of Atummyc Bath Powder," she gloated. "Two more carloads?" "Certainly. All the orders are reading carloads she said. "Tills thing has busted wide open." And it had. Everybody, like I said earlier, lost their head. The bath-powder plant was running three shifts and had back-orders chin high. The general manager, a joker name of Jennings, got excited, cabled Madame Elaine to get back here pronto, which she did, and then the panic was on. The miracle ingredient was this Atummion, and if Atummion sold bath powder why wouldn't it sell face-cream, rouge, mud-packs, shampoos, finger-nail polish and eye-shadow? For that matter, the Old Hag wanted to know, why wouldn't it sell Kissmet Lipstick? The answer was, of course, that the magic legend "Contains the Exclusive New Beauty Aid, Atummion" did sell these other products. Everything began going out in carload lots as soon as we had the new labels printed, and to be truthful, I breathed a wondrous sigh of relief, because up to that moment my Kissmet campaign had promised to fall flat on its lying, crimson face. about Atummion seeped in slowly. Item one: Although we put only a pinch of it in a whole barrel of talcum powder, it did give the female users a terrific complexion! Pimples, black-heads, warts, freckles and even minor scars disappeared after a few weeks, and from the very first application users mailed us testimonials swearing to that "atomic feeling of loveliness". Item two: About one grain of Atummion to the pound of lipstick brought out the natural color of a woman's lips and maintained it there even after the lipstick was removed. Item three: There never was such a shampoo. For once the ad copywriters failed to exceed the merits of their product. Atummiontinted hair took on a sparkling look, a soft texture and a natural-appearing wave that set beauty-operators screaming for protection. These beauticians timed their complaint nicely. It got results on the morning that the whole thing began to fall to pieces. About ten A. M. Jennings called a meeting of all people concerned in the Atummyc Powder project, and they included me as well as the pixie and her brother, the assistant chemist. Everyone was too flushed with success to take Jennings' opening remark too seriously. "It looks like we've got a winner that's about to lose us our shirts," he said. He shuffled some papers and found the one he wanted to hit us with first. "The beauticians claim we are dispensing a dangerous drug without prescription. They have brought suits to restrain our use." Madame Elaine in her mannishly tailored suit was standing by a window staring out. She said, "The beauticians never gave us any break, anyway. Hell with them! What's next?" Jennings lifted another paper. "I agree, but they sicked the Pure Food and Drug people on us. They tend to concur." "Let them prove it first," the Old Hag said turning to the pixie's brother. "Eh, Bob!" "It's harmless!" he protested, but I noticed that the pixie herself, for all her radiance, had a troubled look on her face. The general manager lifted another paper. "Well, there seems to be enough doubt to have caused trouble. The Pure Food and Drug labs have by-passed the courts and put in a word to the Atomic Eneroff our supply of the fission salts that go into Atummion, pending tests." That brought us all to our feet. Madame Elaine stalked back to the huge conference table and stared at Bob, the chemist. "How much of the gunk do we have on hand?" "About a week's supply at present production rates." He was pale, and he swallowed his adam's apple three times. The worst was yet to come. The pixie looked around the table peculiarly unchanged by the news. She had trouble in her face but it had been there from the start of the conference. "I wasn't going to bring this up just yet," she said, "but since we're here to have a good cry I might as well let you kick this one around at the same time. Maybe you won't mind shutting down production after all." The way she said it froze all of us except the Madame. The Madame said, "Well, speak up! What is it?" "I've been to twelve different doctors, including eight specialists. I've thought and thought until I'm half crazy, and there just isn't any other answer," the pixie said. She stared at us and clenched her fists and beat on the shiny table. "You've got to believe me! There just isn't any other answer. Atummion is responsible for my condition, and all twelve doctors agreed on my condition." Still standing, Madame Elaine Templeton grabbed the back of her chair until her knuckles turned white. "Don't tell me the stuff brings on hives or something!" The pixie threw back her head and a near-hysterical laugh throbbed from her lovely throat. "Hives, hell. I'm pregnant!" for her, because she was unmarried, and that sort of thing is always clumsy. At that moment, however, none of us believed the connection between her condition and Atummion. Being a distant relative of the Madame, she was humored to the extent that we had the lab get some guinea pigs and douse them with Elaine Templeton's After Bath Powder, and they even professed to make a daily check on them. Meanwhile, production ground to a halt on all Atummion-labelled products, which was everything, I think, but the eyebrow pencils. With every drug-store and department store in the country screaming to have their orders filled, it was a delicate matter and took a lot of string-pulling to keep the thing off the front-pages. It wasn't the beautician's open charges that bothered us, because everyone knew they were just disgruntled. But if it leaked out that cut off our fission products, every radio, newspaper and TV commentator in the business would soon make mince-meat of us over the fact that Atummion had not been adequately tested before marketing. And this was so right! We took our chances and submitted honest samples to the Bureau of Weights and Measures and the Pure Food and Drug labs. And held our breath. The morning the first report came back in our favor there was great rejoicing, but that afternoon our own testing lab sent up a man to see Jennings, and he called me instantly. "Sanford, get up here at once. The guinea pigs just threw five litters of babies!" "Congratulations," I told him. "That happens with guinea pigs, I understand." "You don't understand," he thundered at me. "This was test group F-six, all females, and every one has reached maturity since we bought and segregated them." "There must be some mistake," I said. "There better be," he told me. I went to his office and together we picked up the Madame from her penthouse suite. She followed us into the elevator reluctantly. "Absurd, absurd!" was all she could say. We watched the lab man check the ten adult pigs one by one. Even as inexpert as I am in such matters, it was evident that all ten were females, and the five which had not yet participated in blessed events were but hours from becoming mothers. We went our separate ways stunned. Back in my office I pulled out a list of our big wholesale accounts where the Atummion products had been shipped by the carloads. The warehouses were distributed in every state of the union. Then I ran my eye down the list of products which contained the devilish Atummion. There were thiry-eight, in all, including a complete line of men's toiletries, shaving lotion, shampoo, deodorant and body-dusting powder. I thanked God that men didn't have ovaries. Dolores Donet -- that was the pixie's name -- opened my door and deposited herself gingerly in a chair opposite me. I said, "You look radiant." She said, "Don't rub it in, and I'll have a shot of that." I shared my Haig and Haig with her, and we drank to the newly departed bottom of the world. me a list of people who had phoned and a stack of angry telegrams about back-orders, but I waved her away. "Dolores," I said, "there must have been a boy guinea pig loose in that pen. It's just too fantastic!" "Are you accusing me of turning one loose just to get off the hook myself?" she snapped. "What you've got, excuses won't cure," I told her, "but we've got to get facts. My God, if you're right -- " "We've sworn everyone to secrecy," she said. "There's a # bonus posted for each employee who knows about this. Payable when the statute of limitations runs out on possible litigation." "You can't swear the public to secrecy," I said. "Think a minute," she said, coldly. "The married women don't need excuses, and the single girls -- who'll believe them? Half of them or better, have guilty consciences anyway. The rest? They're in the same hoat I was -- without a labful of guinea pigs to back them up." "But -- how did it happen in the first place?" "Bob has been consulting the biologist we retained. He keeps asking the same question. He says parthenogenesis in higher lifeforms is virtually impossible. Bob keeps pointing at the little pigs, and they're going round and round. They're examining the other eleven test pens now, but there's no question in my mind. I have a personal stake in this experiment, and I was very careful to supervise the segregation of males and females." My sanity returned in one glorious rush. There was the bugger factor! Dolores , herself. In her eagerness to clear her own skirts, Dolores had tampered with the integrity of the experiment. Probably, she had arranged for artificial insemination, just to be sure. The tip-off was the hundred percent pregnancy of one whole test-batch. Ten out of ten. Even if one buck had slipped in inadvertently, and someone was covering up the mistake, why you wouldn't expect anything like a # "take". "Dolores," I said, "you are a naughty girl in more ways than one." She got up and refilled her glass shaking her head. "The ever-suspicious male," she said. "Don't you understand? I'm not trying to dodge my responsibility for my condition. The whole mess is my fault from beginning to end. But what kind of a heel will I be if we get shipping out Atummyc products again -- knowing what I do? What's more, if we let the stuff float around indefinitely, someone is going to run comprehensive tests on it, not just allergy test patches like they're doing at the government labs right now." "Yeah," I said, "so we all bury the hottest promotion that ever hit the cosmetics industry and live happily ever after." She hit the deck and threw her whiskey glass at me, which did nothing to convince me that she wasn't telling the tallest tale of the century -- to be conservative. We sat and glared at each other for a few minutes. Finally she said, "You're going to get proof, and damned good proof any minute now." "How so?" Nothing this experiment revealed would be valid to me, I figured, now that I was convinced she had deliberately fouled it up. "Bob and the biologist should be up here any minute. I told them I'd wait in your office. I know something you don't. I'm just waiting for them to verify it." She was much too confident, and I began to get worried again. We waited for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. I picked up the phone and dialed the lab. The woman assistant answered and said that the two men were on the way up right now. I asked, "What have they been doing down there?" She said, "They've been doing Caesarian sections on the animals in test-pen M-four." "Caesarian sections?" I repeated. She affirmed It, and Dolores Donet got a tight, little, humorless smile on her face. I hung up and said, "They're on their way up, and what's so funny?" She said, "You know what I think? I think you've been using Atummyc products on you." "So what?" I demanded. "I was responsible for this campaign, too. I've been waiting for a rash to develop almost as long as you have." She said, "When Bob comes in, look at his complexion. All three of us have been guinea pigs, I guess." "I still don't see what's so damned amusing." She said, "You still don't tumble, eh? All right. I'll spell it out. Caesarians performed on test batch M-four." "So?" "The 'M' stands for male," she said. She timed it just right. The hall door opened and Bob trailed in with a dazed look. The biologist was half holding him up. His white lab-smock was freshly bloodstained, and his eyes were blank and unseeing. But for all his distress, he was still a good looking young fellow. His skin had that lovely, radiant, atomic look -- just like mine. No one knows the heart of a rebel until his own search for the reason of right or wrong is made. Lieutenant Laskell found the answer to his own personal rebellion deep beneath a turbulent Atlantic , and somehow, when the time came , his decision wasn't too difficult... Way of a Rebel By Walter Miller, Jr. Illustrated by Rudolph Palais - faced his one-man submarine fifty miles off the Florida coast where he had been patrolling in search of enemy subs. Darkness had fallen. He tuned his short wave set to the Miami station just in time to hear the eight o'clock news. The grim announcement that he had expected was quick to come: "In accordance with the provisions of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Congress today approved the Manlin Bill, declaring a state of total emergency for the nation. diately and tendered his resignation to the Congress and the people. The executive, legislative, and judiciary are now in the hands of the Department of Defense. Secretary Garson has issued two decrees, one reminding all citizens that they are no longer free to shirk their duties to the nation, the other calling upon the leaders of the Eurasian Soviet to cease air attacks on the American continent or suffer the consequences. "In Secretary Garson's ultimatum to the enemy, he stated : 'Heretofore we have refrained from employing certain weapons of warfare in the vain hope that you would recognize the futility of further aggression and desist from it. You have not done so. You have persisted in your blood-thirsty folly, despite this nation's efforts to reach an agreement for armistice. Therefore I am forced to command you, in the Name of Almighty God, to surrender immediately or be destroyed. I shall allow you one day in which to give evidence of submission. If such evidence is not forthcoming, I shall implement this directive by a total attack..." Mitch Laskell switched off the short wave set and muttered an oath, He squeezed his way up through the narrowconning tower and sat on the small deck, leaning back against the rocket-launcher and dangling his feet in the calm ocean. The night was windless and warm, with the summer stars eyeing the earth benignly. But despite the warmth, he felt clammy ; his hands were shaking a little as he lit a cigarette. The newscast -- it came as no surprise. The world had known for weeks that the Manlin Bill would be passed, and that Garson would be given absolute powers to lead the nation through the war. And his ultimatum to the enemy was no surprise. Garson had long favored an all-out radiological attack, employing every nuclear weapon the country could muster. Heretofore both sides had limited themselves to non-rigged atomic explosives, and had refrained from using bacterial weapons. Garson wanted to take off the boxing-gloves in favor qf steel gauntlets. And now it would happen -- the all-out attack, the masterpiece of homicidal engineering, the final word in destruction. against the rocket-launcher, blew a thoughtful cloud of cigarette smoke toward the bright yellow eye of Areturus, almost directly overhead, and wondered why the Constellation Bootes suddenly looked like a big club ready to fall on the earth, when it had always reminded him of a fly-swatter about to slap the Corona Borealis. He searched himself for horror, but found only a gloomy uneasiness. It was funny, he thought; five years ago men would have been outraged at the notion of an American absolutism, with one man ruling by decree. But now that it had happened, it was not to hard to accept. He wondered at it. And lie soon decided that almost any fact could be accepted calmly after it had already happened. Men would be just as calm after their cities had been reduced to rubble. The human capacity for calmness was almost unlimited, ex post facto , because the routine of daily living had to go on, despite the big business of governments whose leaders invoked the Deity in the cause of slaughter. A voice, echoing up out of the conning tower, made him jump. The command set was barking his call letters. Zero, Mother wants you. I say again: Mother wants you. Acknowledge please. Over." The message meant: return to base immediately. And it implied an urgency in the use of the codeword Mother. He frowned and started up, then fell back with a low grunt. All of his resentment against the world's political jackasses suddenly boiled up inside him as a personal resentment There was something about the metallic rasp of the radio's voice that sparked him to sudden rebelliousness. Zero, Mother wants you, Mother wants you. Acknowledge immediately. Over." He had a good idea what it was all about. All subs were probably being called in for rearmament with cobalt-rigged atomic warheads for their guided missiles. The submarine force would probably be used to implement Garson's ultimatum. They would deliver radiological death to Eurasian coastal cities, and cause the Soviets to retaliate. Why must I participate in the wrecking of mechanical civilization? he thought grimly. But a counter-thought came to trouble him : I have a duty to obey; The country gave me birth and brought me up, and now it's got a war to fight. He arose and let himself down through the conning tower. He reached for the microphone, but the receiver croaked again. are ordered to answer immediately. Mother's fixing shortening bread. Mother wants you. Over." Shortening bread -- big plans, something special, a radiological death-dish for the world. He hated the voice quietly. His hand touched the microphone but did not lift it. He stood poised there in the light of a single glow-lamp, feeling his small sub rocking gently in the calm sea, listening to the quiet purr of the atomics beneath him. He had come to love the little sub, despite the loneliness of long weeks at sea. His only companion was the sub's small computer which was used for navigation and for calculations pertaining to the firing of the rocketmissiles. It also handled the probability mathematics of random search, and automatically radioed periodic position reports to the home-base computer. He glanced suddenly at his watch. It was nearly time for a report. Abruptly he reached out and jerked open the knife-switch in the computer's antenna circuit. Immediately the machine began clicking and clattering and chomping. A bit of paper tape suddenly licked out of its answer-slot. He tore it off and read the neatly printed Mitch "inserted data" by punchately lost its filament-glow, and the computer shot out another bit of He patted it affectionately and grinned. The computer was just a machine, but he found it easy to personalize the thing... The command-set was crackling this is Commsubron Killer. Two messages. Mother wants you. Daddy has a razor strap. Get on the ball out there, boy! Acknowledge. Over." Mitch whitened and picked up the microphone. He keyed the transmitter's carrier and spoke in a quiet hiss. "Commsubron Killer Message for Daddy. Sonnyboy just resigned from the Navy. Go to hell, all of you! Over and out!" He shut off the receiver just as it started to stutter a shocked reply. He dropped die mike and let it dangle. He stood touching his fingertips to his temples and breathing in shallow gasps. Had he gone completely insane? He sat down on the floor of the tiny compartment and tried to think. But he could only feel a bitter resentment welling up out of nowhere. Why? He had always gotten along in the Navy. He was the under-sea equivalent of a fighter pilot, and he had always liked his job. They had even said that "he had the killer instinct" -- or whatever it was that made him grin maliciously when he spotted an enemy sub and streaked in for the kill. want to go back. He wanted to quit the whole damn war and run away. Because of Garson maybe? But no, hadn't he anticipated that before it happened? Why should he kick now, when he hadn't kicked before? And who was he to decide whether Garson was right or wrong? Go back, he thought. There's the microphone. Pick it up and tell Commsubron that you went stircrazy for a little while. Tell him wilco on his message. They won't do anything to you except send you to a nut doctor. Maybe you need one. Go on back like a sane man. But he drew his hand back from the microphone. He wiped his face nervously. Mitch had never spent much time worrying about ethics and creeds and political philosophies. He'd had a job to do, and he did it, and he sometimes sneered at people who could wax starry-eyed about patriotism and such. It didn't make sense. The old school spirit was okay for football games, and even for small-time wars, but he had never felt much of it. He hadn't needed it in order to be a good fighter. He fought because it was considered the "thing to do," because he liked the people he had to live with, and because those people wouldn't have a good opinion of him if he didn't fight. People never needed much of a philosophic motive to make them do the socially approved things. He moistened his lips nervously and stared at the microphone. He was scared. Scared to run away. He had never been afraid of a fight, frightened maybe, but not afraid. Why now? It takes a lot of courage to be a coward, he thought, but the word coward made him wince. He groped blindly for a reasonable explanation of his desire to desert. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, because he was the kind of man who could think best in an argument. But there was no one to talk to except the radio. The computer's keyboard was almost at his elbow. He stared at it for a moment, then slowly typed : The machine chewed on the entry noisily for a few seconds, then He nodded thoughtfully. That was his predicament too: insufficient data about his own motives. How could a man trust himself to judge wisely, when his judgement went completely against that of his society? He typed again. The computer clattered for He stared at it, then laughed grimly. His own malfunction-indicator wasn't telling him much either. With masochistic fatalism he touched the keyboard again. The computer replied almost imMitch stared at it and bit his lip. The machine would follow its own solution, even if the other three contradicted it. Naturally -- it would have to follow its own solution, if there was no indication of malfunction. But could a human being make such a decision? Could a man decide, "I am right, and everyone else is wrong?" No evidence of malfunction , he thought. I am not a coward. Neither am I insane. His heart cried: "I am disgusted with this purposeless war. I shall quit fighting it." He sighed deeply, then arose. There was nothing else to do. The atomic engines could go six months without refueling. There were enough undersea rations to last nearly that long. He switched on the radio again, goosed the engines to full speed, and after a moment's thought, swung around on a northeasterly heading. His first impulse had been to head south, aiming for Yucatan or the Guianas -- but that impulse would also be the first to strike his pursuers who were sure to come. A new voice was growling on the radio, and he recognized it as Captain Barkley, his usually jovial, slightly cynical commanding officer. "Listen, Mitch -- if you can hear me, better answer. What's wrong with you anyhow? I can't hold off much longer. If you don't reply. I'll have to hunt you down. You're ordered to proceed immediately to the nearest base. Over." Mitch wanted to answer, wanted to argue and fume and curse, hoping that he could explain his behaviour to his own satisfaction. But they might not be certain of his exact location, and if he used the radio, half-a-dozen directionfinders would swing around to aim along his signal, and Barkley would plot the half-a-dozen lines on the map in his office before speaking crisply into his telephone : all right. boys -- get him! # #' North , # # #' West. Use a P-charge if you can't spot him by radar or sonar. Mitch left the controls in the hands of the computer and went up to stand in the conning tower with the churning spray washing his face. Surfaced, the sub could make sixty knots, and he meant to stay surfaced until there were hints of pursuit. was rising in gloomy orange majesty out of the quiet sea. It made a river of syrupy light across the water to the east, and it heightened his sense of unreality, Ills feeling of detachment from danger. Is it always like this, he wondered? Can a man toss aside his society so easily, become a traitor with so little logical reason? A day ago, he would not have dreamed it possible. A day ago, he would have proclaimed with the cynical Barkley, "A sailor's got no politics. What the hell's it to me if Garson is Big Boss? I'm just a little tooth in a big gear. Uncle pays my keep. I ask no questions." And now he was running like bucks worth of Uncle's Navy, all because Garson's pomposity and a radio operator's voice got under his skin. How could a man be so crazy? But no, that couldn't be it, he thought. Jeezil! He must have some better reason. Sort of a last straw, maybe. But he had been conscious of no great resentment against the war or the Navy or the government. Historically speaking, wars JL  j' I harm -- no more harm than industrial or traffic accidents. Why was this war any different? It promised to be more destructive than the others, but that was drawing a rather narrow line. Who was he to draw his bayonet across the road and say, "Stop here. This is the limit." Mitch turned his back toward the whipping spray and stared aft along the phosphorescent, moonswept wake of his mechanical shark. The radio was still barking at him with Barkley's clipped tones. "Last warning, Laskell! Get on that microphone or suffer the consequences! We know where you are. I'll give you fifteen minutes, then we'll come get you. Over and out." Thanks for the warning, Mitch thought. In a few minutes, he would have to submerge. His eyes swept the moon-washed heavens for signs of aircraft, and he watched the dark horizon for hints of pursuit. He meant to keep the northeasterly course for perhaps ten hours, then turn off and cruise southeast, passing below Bermuda and on out into the central Atlantic. Then south -- perhaps to Africa or Brazil. A fugitive for the rest of his days. barked the radio. "This is Commsubfleet Jaybird. Over." Mitch moistened his lips nervously. The voice was no longer Barkley's. Commsubfleet Jaybird was Admiral Harrinore. He chuckled bitterly then, realizing that he was still automatically startled by rank. He remained in the is Commsubfleet Jaybird. If you will obey orders immediately, I guarantee that you will be allowed to accept summary discipline. No court martial if you comply. You are to return to base at once. Otherwise, we shall be forced to blast you out of the ocean as a deserter to the enemy. Over." So that was it, he thought. They were worried about the sub falling into Soviet paws. Some of its equipment was still classified "secret", although the Reds probably already had it. No, he wasn't deserting to the enemy. Neither side was right in the struggle, although he preferred the West's brand of wrongness to the bloodier wrongness of the Reds. But a man in choosing the lesser of two evils must first decide whether the choice really has to be made, and if there is not a third and more desirable way. Before picking a weapon for self-destruction, it might help to reason whether or not suicide is really necessary. He smiled sardonically into the gray gloom, knowing that his thinking was running backwards, that he had acted before reasoning why, that he was rationalizing in an attempt to soothe himself and absolve himself. But a lot of human thinking occurred beneath the level of consciousness, down in the darker regions of the mind where it was not allowed to become conscious lest it bring shame to the thinker. And perhaps he had reasoned it all out in that mental halfworld where thoughts are inner ghosts, haunting the possessed man with vague stirrings of uneasiness. leading him into inexplicable behaviour. I am free now, he told himself. I have given them my declaration of independence, and I am an animal struggling to survive. Living in society, a man must submit to its will, but now I am divorced from it, and I shall live apart from it if I live at all, and I shall owe it nothing. The "governed" no longer gives his consent. How many times have men said, "If you don't like the system here, why don't you get out?" Well, he was getting out, and as a freeborn human animal, bom as a savage into the world, he had that right, if he had any rights at all. He grunted moodily and lowered himself down into the belly of the sub. They would be starting the search soon. He sealed the hatches and opened the water intakes after slowing to a crawl. The sub shivered and settled. The indicator crept to ten feet, twenty, thirty. At fifty feet, he jabbed a button on the computer, and the engines growled a harder thrust. He kept the northeasterly heading at maximum underwater speed. for code on the sonar equipment, but heard only the weird and nameless sea-sounds. He allowed himself a reading light in the cramped compartment, folded the map-table up from the wall, and studied the coastline of Africa. He began to feel a frightening loneliness, although scarcely two hours had passed since his rebellious decision, and he was accusii lined to long weeks alone at sea. He scoffed at himself. He would get along okay; the sub would take him any place he wanted to go, if he could escape pursuit. Surely there must be some part of the world where men were not concerned with the senseless struggle of the titans. But all such places were primitive, savage, almost unendurable to a man born and tuned to the violin-string pitch of technological culture. Mitch realized dismally that he loved technological civilization, its giant tools, its roar of mighty engines, its proud structures of concrete and steel. He could sacrifice his love for particular people, for particular places and governments -- but it was going to be harder to relinquish mechanical civilization for some stone-age culture lingering in an out-of-the-way place. Changing tribes was easy, for all tribes belonged to Man, but renouncing machinery for jungle tools would be more difficult. A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion, his country, but Man's tools were a part of his body. Having used a high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm. Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments. That was it, he thought. The reason for his sudden rebellion, the narrow dividing line between tolerable and insufferable wars. A war that killed human beings might be tolerable, if it left most of civilizations' industry intact, or at least restorable, for although men might die, Man lived on, still possessing Ms precious tools, still capable of producing greater ones. But a war that wrecked industry, left it a tangled jumble of radioactive concrete and steel -- that kind of war was insufferable, as this one threatened to be. The idea shocked him. Kill a few men, and you scratch the hide of Historical Man. But wreck the industry, drive men out of the cities, leave the factories hissing with beta and gamma radiation, and you amputate the hands of Historical Man the Builder. The machinery of civilization was a living body, with organismic Man as its brain. And the brain had not yet learned to use the body for a constructive purpose. It lacked coordination, and 'the ability to reason its actions analytically. Was he basing action on analytic reason? Another hour had passed. And then he heard it. The sound of faint sonar communication. Quickly he nosed upward to twenty feet, throttled back to half speed, and raised the periscope. With Ms face pressed against the eyepiece, he scanned the moonlit ocean in a slow circle. No lights, no silhouettes against the reflections on the waves. He started the pumps and prepared to surface. Then the conning tower was snorting through the water like a rolling porpoise. He shut off the engines, leaving the sub in utter silence except for the soft wash of the sea. He adjusted the sonar pickups, turned the amplifier to maximum, and listened intently. Nothing. Had he imagined it? He jabbed a button, and a motor purred, rolling out the retractible radar antenna. Carefully he scanned the sky and sea, watching the green-mottled screen for blips. Nothing -- no ships or aircraft visible. But he was certain: for a moment he had heard the twitter of undersea communicators. ing. Perhaps they had heard his engines, although his own equipment had caught none of their drive-noise. The computer was able to supervise several tasks at once, and he set it to continue sweeping the horizon with the radar, to listen for sonar code and engine purr while he attended to other matters. He readied two torpedos and raised a rocket into position for launching. He opened the hatch and climbed to stand in the conning tower again, peering grimly around the horizon. Minutes later, a buzzer sounded beneath him. The computer had something now. He glanced at the parabolic radar antenna, rearing its head a dozen feet above him. It had stopped its aimless scanning and was quivering steadily on the southeast horizon. Southeast? He lowered himself quickly into the ship and stared at the luminous screen. Blips -- three blips -- barely visible. While he watched, a fourth appeared. He clamped on his headsets. There it was! The faint enginenoise of ships. His trained senses told him they were subs. Subs out of the southeast? He had expected interception from the west -- first aircraft, then tight surface vessels. There was but one possible answer: the enemy. He dived for the radio and waited impatiently for the tubes to warm again. He found himself shouting into the mic. "Commsubron Killer, this is message. Over.' I He was a long way from the station. He repeated the call three times. At last a faintly audible voice came from the set. "... this is Commsubron Killer. You are ordered to return immediately..." The voice faded again. "Listen!" Mitch bellowed. "Four, no -- five enemy submarine -- position ##' North, # # #' West, proceeding northwest -- roughly, toward Washington. Probably carrying an answer to Garson's ultimatum. Get help out here. Over." He heard only a brief mutter this time... ordered not to proceed toward Washington. Return immediately to -- " "Not me! You fool! Listen ! Five -- enemy -- submarines -- " He repeated the message as slowly as he could, repeated it four times... , reading you SI came the fading answer. "Are you in distress? I say again. Are you in distress? Over." Angrily Mitch keyed the carrier wave, screwed the button tightly down, and kicked on the four-hundred cycle modulator. Maybe they could get a directional fix on his signal and home on it. The blips were gone from the radar scope. The subs had spotted him and submerged. In a moment he would be catching a torpedo, unless he moved. He started the engines quickly, and the surfaced sub lurched ahead. He nosed her toward the enemy craft and opened the throttle. She knifed through the water like a low-running PT boat, throwing a V-shaped fan of spray. When he reached the halfway point between his own former position and the place where the enemy submerged, he began jabbing a release at three second intervals, laying a trail of deadly eggs. He could hear the crash of the exploding depth-charges behind him. He swung around to make another pass. Then he saw it -- the wet metal hulk rearing up like a massive whale dead ahead. They had discovered the insignificance of their lone and pint-sized attacker. They were coming up to take him with deck guns. Mitch reversed the engines and swung quickly away. The range was too close for a torpedo. The blast would catch them both. He began submerging quickly. A sickening blast shivered his tiny craft, and then another. He dropped to sixty feet, then knifed ahead. God! Why was he doing this? There was no sense in it, if he meant to run away. But then the thought came: they're returning Old Man Garson's big-winded threat. They're bringing a snootful of radiological hell, and that's the damned bayonet-line across the road. ing around him as he wove a zig-zag course. The computer was buzzing frantically. Then he saw why. The rocket launcher hadn't retracted; there was still a rocket in it -- with a snootful of Uranium #. The thing was dragging at the water, slowing him down, causing the sub to shudder and lurch. Apparently all the subs had surfaced, for the charges were falling on all sides. With the launcher dragging at him, they would get him sooner or later. He tried to nose upward, but the controls refused. He knew what would happen if he tried to fire the rocket. Hell, he didn't have to fire it. All he had to do was fuse it. It had a water-pressure fuse, and he was beneath exploding depth. Don't think about it! Do it! No, you've got to think. That's what's wrong. Too much do, not enough think. They're going to wreck mechanical civilization if they keep it up. They're going to wreck Man's tools, cut off his hands, and make him an ape again! But what's it to you? What can you do? Dammit ! You can destroy five wrong tools that were built to wreck the right tools. Mitch, who wanted to quit an all-out war, reached for the fusing switch. This part was his war; destroy the destroyers, but not the producers. Even if it didn't make good military sense -- A close explosion sent him lurching aside. He grabbed at the wall and pushed himself back. The switch -- the damn doubletoggle red switch! He screamed a curse and struck at it with both fists. There came a beautiful, blinding In a world where men flew, Ecks was landbound; in a world of telepathic contact, he was reduced to clumsy words. Y et, for a psi cripple, he was an incredible adversary for the psi-powerful Health Agents, who pursued him, and a commendable guinea pig for his tormentors. Which is the gist of this fascinating yarn that takes you into a world where men flew and... By Robert Sheckley illustrated by Ed Emsh and stretched. He squinted at the sunlight pouring in through the open east wall of his one-room apartment, and ordered his clothes to come to him. They didn't obey! He wiped sleep from his eyes and ordered again. But the closet door remained stubbornly shut, and not a garment stirred. Thoroughly alarmed, Ecks swung out of bed and walked over to the closet. He began to phrase the mental command again, but stopped himself. He must not become panicky. If the clothes didn't obey, it was because he was still half asleep. Deliberately he turned and walked to the east wall. He had rolled it up during the night and now he stood, bare toes gripping the edge, where the floor met the outside wall of the building, looking out at the city. It was early. The milkmen were out, soaring up to the terraces to deposit their milk. A man in full evening dress passed, flying like a wounded bird. Drunk, Ecks decided, noting how uncertain the man's levitation sense was. The man banked, narrowly missing a building, dodged a milkman, misjudged the ground and fell the last two feet. Miraculously he held his balance, shook his head and continued on foot. Ecks grinned, watching him weave down the street. That was the safest place for him. No one ever used the streets, except the Normal's, or psi's who wanted to walk, for some reason. But levitating in his condition, he might get clipped by a teleported bale, or break his neck against a building. A newsboy floated past the window, goggles dangling from his hip pocket. The boy caught his breath and shot up, straight and true, to a twentieth floor penthouse. Ecks craned his neck to watch the boy land his paper on the sunny terrace and sweep on. A penthouse, Ecks thought. That was the life. He lived on the third floor of an ancient building -- so old that it still had stairway and elevator. But once he had finished his courses at Mycrowski university -- once he had his degree -- There was no time for dreaming. Mr. Ollen didn't like him to be late; and his job at Mr. Ollen's store enabled him to attend the University. Ecks walked back, opened the closet and dressed. Then, thoroughly calm, he ordered the bed to make itself. A blanket half-lifted, wavered, and fell back on the bed. He ordered again, angrily. The sheets sluggishly straightened, the blankets slowly crawled into place. The pillow wouldn't move. On the fifth order the pillow dragged itself to the head of the bed. It had taken him almost five minutes to make the bed -- a task he usually finished in seconds. A shocking realization struck him, and his knees buckled; he sat down on the edge of the bed. He wasn't even able to handle simple motor-response teleportation. And that, he knew, was how people discovered they had The Disease. But why? How had it begun? He didn't have any unexplained tensions, any vital, unresolved problems. At twenty-six life was just beginning for him. His studies at the University were going well. He's general psi rating was in the upper tenth, and his sensitivity rating approached the all-time high set by The Sleeper. Why should it happen to him? Why should he catch the only disease left on Earth? "I'll be damned, I don't feel sick," he said out loud, wiping perspiration from his face. Quickly he commanded the wall to close, just to see if it would. And it did! He turned on a faucet by mental command, levitated a glass, filled it and a drop. "Temporary blockage," he told himself. "A fluke." Perhaps he had been studying too hard. More social life, that was what he needed. He sent the glass back to the sink, watching the sunlight glint from it as is swooped through the air. "I'm as good as I ever was," he said. The glass dropped to the floor, shattering. "Just a little shaky," he reassured himself. Of course, he should go to Psi-Health for an examination. If there is any impairment of your psi abilities, don't wait. Don't infect others. Get an examination. Well, should he? Yes, he probably should. But the Psi-Health agents were a jumpy bunch. If he showed his face they'd probably isolate him. Give him a few years of solitary rehabilitation, just to play safe. That would be the end of him. Highly extroverted, Ecks knew himself well enough to realize that he could never stand solitary. His psi abilities would be completely wrecked that way. Nuts, he said, and walked to the wall. Opening it, he looked out on the three story drop, steeled himself, and jumped. For a horrible moment, he thought he had forgotten even the basic skill of levitation. Then he caught it, and soared toward Mr. Ollen's store. Weaving slightly, like a wounded bird. the eighty-second-floor of the Aerinon Building hummed with activity. Messengers levitated in and out the great windows, flying across the room to drop their reports on the Receiving desk. Other reports were teleped in, recorded by PsiGrade-Three telepathic-sensitive office girls. Samples were teleported through the windows, recorded, and shuttled downstairs by Grade Two Polters. A skinny Grade Four psi girl collected the typed reports and levitated them across the room in a steady stream to the file clerks. Three messengers swept in through a single window, laughing, barely clearing the jambs, and shot across the room. One, misjudging his arc, intercepted the path of reports. "Why don't you look where you're going?" the Grade Four girl asked angrily. Her bridge of papers was scattered across the floor. She levitated them again. "Sorry, honey," the messenger said, grinning and handing his report to the receiving desk. He winked at her, looped over the white stream, and shot out the window. "Some nerve," the girl murmured, watching him streak into the sky. Without her attention, the papers began to scatter again. The end-product of all the activity was funneled to the orderly black desk of Senior Health Officer Paul Marrin. "Anything wrong, chief?" Marrin looked up and nodded to his assistant, Joe Leffert. Silently he handed him five file cards. They were breakdown reports. Leffert scanned the first one rapidly. "Jane Martinelli, waitress, Silver Cow, # Broadway. Subject: Loss of psi ability. Observations: Discoordination of psi motor functions. Diagnosis: Acute loss of confidence. Infectious. Recommended: Quarantine, indefinite period." The other reports were about the same. "Quite a few," Leffert said, his tone perfectly even. Another pile of cards was dropped on the black desk. Marrin leafed through them rapidly, his face impassive. The impassivity was mental as well. Not a thought leaked out of his rigidly held mind. "Six more." He turned to a large map behind his desk and pinpointed the new locations. They formed an irregular pattern across almost a third of New York. Leffert didn't have to speak. Even undirected, his teleped thought was strong enough for Marrin to catch. Epidemic! "Keep that to yourself," Marrin said in his normal low voice. He walked slowly back to his desk, considering the implications of eleven cases in a single day, when their average was one a week. "Get me the full reports on these people," Marrin said, handing Leffert the file cards. "I want a list of everyone they've been in contact with over the past two weeks. And keep quiet about it." Leffert hurried away. Marrin thought for a moment, then teleped Krandall, chief of The Sleeper project. Normally, teleped messages were handled through a series of telepathic-sensitive girls; there were just too many minds for most people to make contact easily, without auxiliary guidance. But Marrin's psi abilities were of unusual strength. Also, he was strongly attuned to Krandall, having worked with him for many years. "What's up?" Krandall asked, and the accompanying identityimage had the full, indescribable flavor of the man. Quickly Marrin outlined the situation. "I want you to find out if it's a random scattering, or if we've got a carrier to deal with," Marrin finished. "That'll cost you a supper," Krandall teleped. From the peripheral thoughts, Marrin knew that he was sitting on a pier at Sag Harbor, fishing. "A supper at The Eagles." "Fine. I'll have all the data. Is five-thirty all right?" "Please, my boy! Make it sixthirty. A man of my -- ah -- dimensions -- shouldn't levitate too rapidly." The accompanying visual was of an overstuffed sausage. "At six-thirty, then." They broke contact. Marrin sat back and arranged the papers on his desk into still neater piles. At the moment he wished he were a health officer in some earlier age, with a nice fat germ to hunt down. The source of The Disease was more subtle. Diagnosis: Acute Loss of Confidence. Try putting that under your microscope. He thought momentarily about the waitress, the first case on the files. Perhaps she had been stacking plates on a shelf. A doubt planted in her mind hours before, minutes before, blossomed. The plates fell. And a girl was seriously sick, horribly infected with mankind's last disease. Loss of motorcoordination. So she had to go into solitary, in order not to infect anyone else. For how long? A day, a year. A life. But in the meantime, perhaps some of the customers had caught it from her. And spread it to their wives... He sat upright and teleped his wife. Her answering thought was quick and warm. "Hello, Paul!" He told her he would be working late. "All riglxt," she said, but her accompanying thoughts were confused with a strong desire to know why, and the knowledge that she couldn't ask. "Nothing serious," he said in reply to the unspoken question, and regretted it instantly. Lies, untruths, half-truths -- even little white lies -- didn't telep well. Nevertheless, he didn't retract it. "All right Paul," his wife said, and they broke contact. staff put away their papers and headed for the windows flying to their homes in Westchester Long Island and New Jersey. "Here's the stuff, chief," Leffert said flying up to the desk with a thick briefcase. "Anything else?" "I'd like you to stand by," Marrin said, taking the briefcase. "Telep a few more agents, also." "Right. Do you think something might break?" "I don't know. Better get some supper." Leffert nodded. His eyes grew blank, and Marrin knew he was teleping his wife in Greenwich, telling her he wouldn't be home tonight. Leffert left, and Marrin was left alone in the room, staring at the sunset. Out of the west window he could see the great red disk of the sun, and flitting across it were the black silhouettes of commuters, levitating home. Marrin felt very much alone. Just him and a probable epidemic. At exactly six-twenty, Marrin picked up the briefcase and levitated to The Eagles. two thousand feet above New York, suspended on the backs of # men. The men were Grade One Psi laborers, government-tested for load capacity. As Marrin approached, he saw them under the base of the building. The restaurant floated above them, easily supported by their enormous combined psi strength. Marrin landed on the main guest deck, and was greeted by the head waiter. "How's everything, Mr. Marrin?" the waiter asked, leading him to a terrace. "Fine," Marrin said, as he always did. "You should try our other place some dme, Mr. Marrin. If you're ever near Miami, there's an Eagles there. Same high-quality food." And high-quality prices, Marrin thought, ordering a martini. The owner of the Eagles was making a fortune. Air-borne restaurants were common now, but Eagles had been the first, and was still the most popular. The owner didn't even have to pay a New York property tax; when he wasn't open, he parked his restaurant in a pasture in Pennsylvania. The terraces were starting to fill up when Krandall arrived, out of wind and perspiring. "My God," he gasped, sitting down. "Why aren't there any more airplanes? Bucked a head wind all the way in. Scotch on the rocks." The waiter hurried away. "Why do you have your emergencies on my day off?" Krandall asked, teleping the question. "Long distance flights are for the strong young apes. I am a mental worker. How is your wife?" "The same," Marrin said. His face, schooled for years into a health officer's blank mask, refused to smile now. He ordered his dinner, and handed Krandall the briefcase. "Hramm." Krandall bent over the pages, scanning them rapidly. His broad, good-natured face grew abstracted as he memorized the information. Marrin looked across the terrace while Krandall absorbed the data. The sun was almost gone, and most of the land was in shadow. Beneath him, the lights of New York were winking on in the shaded areas. Above, the stars snapped on. Krandall ignored his soup, flipping the pages quickly. Before the soup was cold, he was through. "That's that," he said. "What shall we talk about?" Krandall was the finest psi calculator in the business. He had to be to head the important Sleeper project. Like all calculators, he let his unconscious do the work. Once the data was committed, he ignored it. Unconsciously, the information was assimilated, examined, compared, synthesized. In a few minutes or hours he would have an answer. Krandall's great talent was compensated for in other ways, though. He couldn't pass a newsboy's test for levitation, and teleportation or telekinetic manifestations were almost out of the question for him. "Is there anything new with The Sleeper?" Marrin asked. "Still sleeping. Some of the boys cooked up a subconscious-infiltration technique. They're trying that in a few days." "Do you think it will work?" Krandall laughed. "I give them a one-point-one probability. That's high, compared with some of the stuff they've tried." Krandall's brook trout was served, teleported fresh from the stream. Marrin's steak followed. "Do you think anything will work?" Marrin asked. "No." Krandall's face was serious as he looked at the lean, impassive health officer. "I don't believe the Sleeper will ever awaken." Marrin frowned. The Sleeper was one of Psi's most important projects, and its least successful. It had started about thirty years ago. Psi had been standard, but still unpredictable. It had come a long way in two hundred years from Rhine's halting experiments in extra-sensory perception, but it still had a long way to go. Mycrowski took a lot of the wildtalent aspect from psi. Classified as an extreme sensitive with geniuslevel psi abilities, Mycrowski was the outstanding man of his age. With men like Krandall, Myers, Blacenck and others, Mycrowski led the telekinesis projects, explored projection techniques, theorized on instantaneous transfer in teleportation and examined the possibilities of new, undiscovered psi abilities. In his spare time he worked on his own pet ideas, and founded the School for Parapsychological Research, later changed to Mycrowski University. What really happened to him was argued for years. One day, Krandall and Blacenck found him lying on a couch with a bare whisper of pulse to show that he was alive. They were unable to revive him. Mycrowski had always believed that the mind was a separate and distinct entity from the body. It was believed that he had discovered a separation-projection technique for the mind. But the mind never returned. Others argued that his mind had simply snapped from too much strain, leaving him in a catatonic state. In any case, periodic attempts were made to awaken him, without success. Krandall, Myers and a few others had kept the project alive, but in a few years they had all the help they needed. The rare quality of Mycrowski's genius was recognized. The tomb where the living body of Mycrowski, The Sleeper, vegetated, became a tourists' shrine. "Haven't you any idea what he was looking for?" Marrin asked. "I don't think he did himself," Krandall said, starting his cherry jubilee. "Oddest damned man in the world. Didn't like to talk about anything until he could throw it in your face as done. None of us had any reason to think anything was going to happen. We were sure that the stars were right around the corner and immortality w r as following that." He shook his head. "Ah, youth, youth." Over the coffee Krandall looked up, pursed his lips and frowned. The assimilated data had synthesized. His conscious mind had the answer in a manner once called intuitive, until psi research pinned down the hidden factor as subconscious reasoning. "You know, Marrin, you've definitely got a growing epidemic on your hands. There's no random scattering of cases." Marrin felt his chest contract. He teleped the question tightly. "Is there a carrier?" "There is." Mentally, Krandall checked the names on his list. His subconscious had correlated the frequency factors, tabulated probabilities and sent up a "hunch". "His name is Edward Ecks. He is a student, living at #I Fourth Avenue." Marrin teleped Leffert immediately and told him to pick up Ecks. "Hold it," Krandall said. "I don't believe you'll find him there. Here's a probability-course of his movements." He teleped the information to Leffert. "Try his apartment first," Marrin told Leffert. "If he's not there, try the next probability. I'll meet you downtown, in case we have to hunt him." He broke contact and turned to Krandall. "For the extent of the emergency you'll work with me?" It was hardly a question. "Of course," Krandall said. "Health has top priority, and The Sleeper isn't going to be doing much moving. But I doubt if you'll have much trouble picking up Ecks. He should be completely crippled by this time." balance and fell heavily to his knees. He got up at once, brushed himself off and started walking. A sloppy levitation, he told himself. So even that was going! The crumbling streets of the lower New York slums were scattered with Normals, people who had never mastered the basic psi power. This mass of landborne people was a sight never seen in the more respectable uptown areas. Ecks moved into the crowd, feeling safer. He discovered, suddenly, that he was hungry. He went into a luncheonette, sat down at the empty counter and ordered a hamburger. The cook had one all ready. Expertly he teleported it to a plate and, without watching, made the plate loop in the air and drop lightly in front of Ecks. Ecks cursed the man's casual ability and reached for the ketchup. He expected the bottle to slide toward him, but it didn't. He looked at it for a moment, blankly, then stretched his arm. He'd have to watch his step, making a mistake like that. Ecks was beginning to discover what it was like to be a cripple. Finished, he held out his hand, palm up, expecting the change in his pocket to come. But of course, it didn't. He cursed silently. He was so used to it -- it didn't seem possible that he could have lost all his faculties at once. But he had, he knew. His unconscious had decided, and no amount of surface assurance would help. The cook was looking at him oddly, so he reached quickly in his pocket, found the change'and paid. He tried to smile at the cook, then hurried out the door. "Queer guy," the cook thought. He dismissed it, but down deep in his mind an appraisal was going on. Inability to command a bottle... Inability to command coins... Ecks walked down the crowded, grimy streets. His legs began to ache. He had never walked so much in his life. Around him were mixed groups of Normals and psi's. The Normals walked naturally, as they had all their lives. The psi's were awkward, unaccustomed to long stretches on foot. With relief they soared into their natural element, the air. People landed and took off, and the air was filled with teleported objects. Looking back, Ecks saw a welldressed man drop out of the air and stop one of the walking psi's. He talked to him for a moment, then moved on. A health-agent! Ecks knew he had been traced. He twisted around a corner and started to run. The street lights became fewer as Ecks moved on, pushing his aching legs. He tried to levitate, but couldn't get off the ground. In panic he tried to telep his friends. Useless. His telepathic sense had no power. The shock broke over him like an ocean wave, and he stumbled against a lamp post and hung on. The full realization came. In a world where men flew, he was landbound. In a world of telepathic contact, he was reduced to clumsy words at face-to-face distance. In a world where artificial light was unnecessary, he could see only when his eyes were stimulated. Crippled. Blind, deaf and dumb. He walked on, into narrower streets, dingy, damp alleys. His numbed mind started working again. He had one advantage. His blunted mind could no longer broadcast a strong identity-pattern. That would make him more difficult to find. What he needed, he decided, was a sanctuary. Some place where he wouldn't infect anyone, and where the health officers couldn't find him. Perhaps he could find a Normal boarding house. He could stay there and study, find out what was wrong with him ; treat himself. And he wouldn't be alone. Normals were better than no people at all. He came to the end of an alley, where the streets branched off. Automatically he pushed out his location sense, to find out what was ahead. Useless. It was paralyzed, as dead as the rest of him. But the righthand turn seemed the safest. He started for it. "Don't!" Ecks whirled, alarmed at the spoken word. A girl had come out of a doorway. She ran to him. "They're waiting for you in there. Don't go!" "Who's waiting for me?" Ecks asked, his heart pounding like a triphammer. "The health officers. They figured you'd take the right turn. Something about your right-hand tropism, I couldn't hear it all. Take the street on your left." Ecks looked at her closely. At first he thought she was about fifteen years old, but he revised his estimate to twenty. She was small, slender with large dark eyes in a bony face. "Why are you helping me?" he asked. "My uncle told me to," the girl said. "Hurry!"  There was no time to argue. Ecks walked in the alley, following the girl. She ran ahead, and Ecks had trouble keeping up with her. She was a Normal, to judge by her sure stride. But how had she overheard the health-officer's conversation? Almost certainly they had teleped on a tight beam. Her uncle, perhaps? The alley opened into a courtyard. Ecks raced in, and stopped. From the tops of the buildings men floated down. They dropped quickly, surrounding him. The health officers! He looked around, but the girl had darted back into the alley. The way was blocked for him. He backed against a building, wondering how he could have been so stupid. Of course! This was how they liked to take people. Quietly, so no one else would become infected. That damned girl! He tightened his aching legs, to run for it... Marrin thought. "Take his arms and legs." Hovering fifty feet in the air, he supervised the operation. Without pity he watched. The agents moved in cautiously. They didn't want to use the force of their minds against him if they could help it. After all, the man was a cripple. They had almost reached him, when -- Ecks started to fade. Marrin dropped closer, unable to believe his eyes. Ecks was dissolving into the wall, becoming a part of it, disappearing. Then he was gone. "Look for a door!" Marrin teleped. "Examine the pavement!" While his agents were looking, Marrin considered what he had seen. After the initial surprise, he didn't doubt it. The search for a door was an excuse for his agents. If they thought the man had disappeared through a hidden door, good. It wouldn't help their confidence -- their sanity -- to believe what had actually happened. The cripple, Ecks, merging with the wall. Marrin ordered a search of the building. But there wasn't a trace of Ecks' thought pattern. He was gone, as though he had never been. But how, Marrin asked himself. Did someone help him? Who? Who would help a carrier? when he returned to consciousness was the cracked, stained plaster wall in front of him. He stared at it for a long time, watching dust motes floating in the sunlight, across the bed's torn brown blanket. The bed ! Ecks sat up and looked around. He was in a dingy little room. Long cracks ran across the ceiling. Aside from the bed, the only other piece of furniture was a plain wooden chair, set near the half-open door. But what was he doing here? He remembered the events of last night; it must have been last night, he decided. The blank wall, the health officers. He must have been rescued. But how? "How do you feel?" A girl's voice asked from the door. Ecks turned, and recognized the pale, sensitive face. It was the girl who had warned him last night. "I feel all right," Ecks said. "How did I get here?" "My uncle brought you," the girl said, coming into the room. "You must be hungry." "Not especially," Ecks said. "You should eat," she told him. "My uncle tells me that dematerialization is quite a strain on the nervous system. That's how he rescued you from the psi's, you know." She paused. "I can give you some very nice broth." "He dematerialized me?" Ecks asked. "He can do things like that," the girl said serenely. "The power came to him afterwards." She walked over and opened the window. "Shall I get the broth?" Ecks frowned at her. The situation was becoming unreal, at a time when he needed his fullest grasp on reality. This girl seemed to consider it perfectly normal to have an uncle with the power of dematerialization -- although psi science had never discovered it. "Shall I get the broth?" she asked again. "No," Ecks said. He wondered what the repeated emphasis on food might mean. There was nothing in the girl's face to tell him. She was handsome enough, even in a cheap, unbecoming dress. She had unusually dark eyes, and an unusually calm expression. Or lack of expression, really. He filed his suspicions for the moment, and asked, "Is your uncle a psi?" "No," the girl said. "My uncle doesn't hold with psi powers. His strength is spiritual." "I see," Ecks said, and he thought he had the answer. Throughout history, people had preferred to believe that their natural psi gifts were the product of demon intervention. Strange powers were the devil's gift until psi regularized and formularized them. And even in this day there were gullible Normals, people who preferred to believe that their occasional flashes of supernormal power were spirit-guided. Evidently the uncle fell into this category. "Has your uncle been able to do this sort of thing long?" Ecks asked. "Only for about five years," she said. "Only since he died." "Perfectly correct," a voice said. Ecks looked around quickly. The voice seemed to come from behind his shoulder. "Don't look for me," the voice said. "All that there is of me in this room is a voice. I am the spirit of Cari's Uncle John." Ecks had a quick moment of panic before he realized the trick. It was a teleped voice, of course; cleverly focused and masked to give the effect of speech. A teleped voice meant only one thing; this was a psi passing himself off as a spirit. "Mr. Ecks," the voice said, cleverly simulating the effects of spoken words, "I have rescued you by the intervention of my powers. You are a crippled psi, a carrier. Capture and isolation are, I believe, distasteful to you. Is that not true?" "Perfectly," Ecks said. He probed with his blunted senses for the source of the voice. The imitation was perfect; not a single image leaked, to show the telepathic-human source. "You feel, perhaps, a certain gratitude toward me?" the voice asked. Ecks looked at the girl. Her face was still expressionless. "Of course I do," he said. "I know your desires," Uncle John told him. "You wish sanctuary for a sufficient time to restore your powers. And you shall have it, Edward Ecks. You shall have it." "I'm very grateful," Ecks said. His mind was working quickly, trying to decide upon a course of action. Was he expected to keep up the pretense of believing in this spirit? Surely the  teleping psi knew that no university-trained person was going to accept something like that. On the other hand, he might be dealing with a neurotic, playing spirit for his own reasons. He decided to play along. After all, he wasn't interested in the man's pretensions. What mattered was the sanctuary. "You would not, I am certain, object to doing me a small favor," Uncle John said. "What do you want me to do?" Ecks asked, immediately on his guard. "I sense your thought," the voice said. "You think there may be danger involved. I assure you, such is not the case. Although I am not omnipotent, I have certain powers unknown to you -- or to psi science. Accept that fact. Surely your rescue proves it. And accept that I have your best interests at heart." "When do I find out about this errand?" Ecks asked. "When the time is right. For now, goodbye, Edward Ecks." The voice was gone. Ecks sat down in the chair. He had had two possible explanations before; that the "uncle" was a psychotic, or a psi. Now he had another. What if the uncle was a mutant psi? The next evolution in the procession. What then? Cari left and returned with a bowl of soup. "What was your uncle like?" Ecks asked the girl. "What sort of man was he -- when he was alive?" "Oh, he was a very nice man," she said, holding the steaming soup carefully. "He was a shoemaker. He raised me when my father died." "Did he ever show any signs of psi power? Or supernatural power?" "No," Cari said. "He led a quiet life. It was only after he died -- " Ecks looked at the girl with pity. She was the saddest part of the whole thing. The psi had undoubtedly read her mind, found the dead uncle -- and the gullibility. And used her as his pawn. A cruel game. "Please eat the soup," she said. He reached for it automatically, glancing at her face. Then he pulled back his hand. "You eat it," he said. The first tinge of color came into her cheeks. With an apology, she started on eagerness. ly, and Marrin let out a foot of mainsail to steady it. His wife, seated on the bow, waved to him, enjoying the plunging motion. Below, he could see a bank of thunderheads, a storm in the making... "Let's have our picnic on those clouds over there," Myra said, pointing to a wispy cirrus formation, bright and sunny above the thunderheads. Marrin changed course. Myra lay back on the bow, her feet propped against the mast. Marrin was holding the entire weight of the boat himself, but he scarcely noticed it. The light rig weighed less than two hundred pounds, sail and all. His and Myra's combined weight added about two hundred and sixty pounds more, but Marrin's tested levitation capacity was over two tons. And the wind did most of the work. All the operator of the boat did was to supply enough power to keep it in the air. The wind drove it, a twisting white feather. Marrin couldn't get his mind off the carrier. How in hell had Ecks disappeared? Dematerialization -- impossible! And yet there it was. Ecks, into the wall. And gone, without a thought-trace. "Stop thinking," Myra said. "Your doctor told you not to think about anything but me today." He knew that his thoughts hadn't leaked; nor had his face changed. But Myra was sensitive to his moods. He didn't have to grimace for her to know he was happy, or cry to demonstrate sadness. Marrin brought the light, flat boat to a stop in the clouds, and. heading into the wind, dropped the sail. They spread their picnic on the bow of the boat. Marrin did most of the leviating, although Myra was trying... gallantly. As she had been trying for seven years, since her partial infection by a carrier. Although her psi faculties never left her completely, they were spasmodic. Another reason for hunting down Ecks. The sandwiches Myra made were very like herself; small and decorative. And tasty, Marrin thought, teleping the thought. "Beast," Myra said out loud. The warm sun beat down on them, and Marrin felt wonderfully lazy. The two of them stretched out on the deck of the boat, Marrin holding it up by reflex. He was more relaxed than he had been in weeks. "Marrin! I ' Marrin started, awakened out of near-sleep by the teleped voice. "Look, I'm awfully sorry, boy." It was Krandall, embarrassed and apologetic. "I hate breaking in on your day, but I've got a lead, and a pretty damned good one. Evidently someone doesn't like our carrier. I've just been told where he'll be in about four hours. Of course, it may be a crank, but I knew you'd want to know -- " "I'm coming," Marrin said. "We can't afford to pass up anything." He broke contact and turned to his wife. "I'm terribly sorry, dear." She smiled, and her eyes were clear with understanding. She hadn't been included in Krandall's tight-beam message, but she knew what it meant. "Can you take it down yourself?" Marrin asked. "Of course. Good hunting." Marrin kissed her and jumped off the boat. He watched for a few seconds, to see that she had it under control; then he teleped the rental service. "My wife's bringing it in," he told them. "I wish you'd keep an eye on her." They promised. Now, even if she went out of control there'd be no danger. Marrin hurled himself down. He was so busy calculating the rate of disease increase that he barely saw the dagger in time. It flashed past him, then turned, twenty feet away, and came again. Marrin reached out for it mentally, but the telekineticized knife broke free. He barely deflected it, grappled, and had it in his hand. Quickly he tried to trace the wielder, but he was gone without a trace. Not quite without a trace. Marrin was able to catch the tail end of an identity thought, the hardest kind to control. He puzzled over it, trying to place the image. Then he had it. Ecks! Ecks, the cripple. Blind Ecks, the carrier, who vanished into walls. And who, evidently, could polter a dagger. Or had someone do if for him. Grimly, with the growing awareness that it was turning into a personal affair, Marrin levitated into the Psi-Health Offices. Ecks lay on the tattered brown blanket. His eyes were lightly closed, his body passive. Little muscles in his legs jumped. He willed them to relax. "Relaxation is one of the keys to psi power. Complete relaxation calls forth confidence; fears disappear, tensions evaporate. Relaxation is vital to psi." Ecks told himself this, breathing deeply. Don't think about the disease. There is no disease. There is only rest, and relaxation. The leg muscles slackened. Ecks concentrated on his heart, ordering it to pump more easily. He sent orders to his lungs, to breathe deeply and slowly. Uncle John? He hadn't heard from him for almost two days now. But he mustn't think of him. Not now. An unexplained factor, Uncle John would be resolved in time. The awareness of deception, Ecks told himself, is the first step in finding out what the deception is. And what about the pale, hungry, attractive niece? Don't think about her, either. The unsettling memories sponged away as his breathing deepened. Next, the eyes. It was hard to relax the eyes. After-images danced across his retina. Sunlight. Darkness, a building, a disappearance. No. Don't think. "My eyes are so heavy," he told himself. "My eyes are made of lead. They want to sink -- to sink -- " Then his eye-muscles relaxed. His thoughts seemed calm, but just under the surface was a crazy welter of images and impressions. A cripple, through dim streets. A ghost that wasn't. A hungry niece. Hungry for what? A turmoil of sense-impressions, flashes of red and purple, memories of classes in Mycrowsky University, tele-wrestling at the Palladium, a date at Skytop. All had to be smoothed down. "Relaxation is the first step toward reintegration." Ecks told himself that everything was blue. All thoughts were swallowed in a vast blue abyss. Slowly, he succeeded in calming his mind. A deep peace started to seep into him, slowly, soothingly -- " Edward Ecks." "Yes?" Ecks opened his eyes at once; the relaxation had been that superficial. He looked around and realized that it was the uncle's voice. "Take this." A small sphere darted into the room, and came to rest in front of Ecks. He picked it up and examined it. The sphere seemed to be made of some shiny, solid plastic. "What is it?" he asked. "You will place this sphere inside the Cordeer Building," the voice of Uncle John told him, ignoring the question. "Leave it on a desk, behind a door, in an ashtray, anywhere. Then return directly here." "What will the sphere do?" Ecks asked. "That is not your concern," the voice told him. "The sphere is the apex of a psychic triangle of forces which you do not understand. Suffice it to say that it will harm no one and will greatly aid me." "Every officer in the city is looking for me," Ecks said. "I'll be picked up if I go back to the main part of the city." "You have forgotten my powers, Ecks. You will be safe, if you keep to the route I map out for you." Ecks hesitated. He wanted to know more about the uncle, and his game. Above all, why was he masquerading as a spirit? Or was he? After all, what would a spirit have to do with Earth? The classic yarns of demons seeking temporal power were just so much muggy anthropomorphizing. "Will I be left alone after I get back?" Ecks wanted to know. "You have my word. Do this to my satisfaction and you will receive all the sanctuary you need. Now go. Cari has the route drawn up for you. She is waiting at the door." The voice was gone. Even with his blunted senses, Ecks could feel the withdrawn contact. With the sphere in his hand, he walked to the door. Cari was waiting. "Here are the instructions," she said. Ecks looked at her sharply. He wished he had some psi-abilities left. He would have given a good deal to know what was going on behind that quiet, pretty face. Psi's never bothered to read faces; the affective aura surrounding every individual was a far better indicator. If one had normal psi-sensitivity to read it. "Have you eaten?" he asked. "Oh, yes," she said, following him outside. The sunlight was momentarily blinding, after two days in the little room. Ecks blinked and looked around automatically. There was no one in sight. They walked in silence for a while, following Uncle John's instructions. Ecks glanced right and left, pitifully aware of his vulnerability, on the lookout for detection. The instructions laid out a devious, meaningless pattern for Ecks to walk; doubling back on streets, circling others. They approached West Broadway, moving out of the slums into psi territory. "Has your uncle ever told you what he wishes to do?" Ecks asked. "No," Cari said. They walked in silence for a while longer. Ecks tried not to look at the sky, out of which he expected the psi officers to fall, like avenging angels. "Sometimes I'm afraid of Uncle John," Cari volunteered, after a few moments. "He's so strange, sometimes." Ecks nodded absently. Then he thought about the girl's position. Actually, she was worse off than he was. He knew the score. She was being used for some unknown purpose. She might well be in danger, although he didn't know why that should concern him. "Look," he said, "if anything happens, do you know the Angler's Bar on Sixth and Bleeker?" "No, but I could find it." "Meet me there, if anything goes wrong." "All right," she said. "Thank you." Ecks smiled wryly. How idiotic of him to offer her protection! When he couldn't even protect himself. At least, he told himself, it was an understandable urge. Even if he didn't quite understand it himself. They walked several more blocks. Then the girl looked at Ecks nervously. "There's one thing I don't understand," she said. "What's that?" "Well," she began, "I sometimes can see things that are going to be. I never know when, but just sometimes I have a picture of something. Then in a little while it happens." "That's interesting," Ecks said. "You're probably an undeveloped clairvoyant. You should go to Mycrowski University. They're always looking for people like you." "So far, everything I've seen has turned out right," she said. "That's a nice record," Ecks told her. He wondered what the girl was driving at. Did she want praise? She couldn't be naive enough to believe that she was the only person in the world with latent clairvoyance. "So far my uncle has been right in everything he's said, too," she told him. "Very commendable," Ecks said acidly. He was in no mood for a family pangyric. They were approaching Fourteenth Street, and the air was thick with psi's. A few people were walking -- but very few. The Cordeer Building was three blocks ahead. "What I'm wondering is," she said, "if I see something happening one way, and my uncle sees it happening the other way, which of us will be right?" "What do you mean?" Ecks said, taking her arm as they crossed a street filled with jagged rocks. "My uncle said you'd be safe," she said, "and I just don't understand." "What?" He stopped. "I think they're going to try to capture you." "When?" "Now," she said. Ecks stared at her, then stiffened. He didn't need psi power to know that the trap was sprung. The health men weren't being gentle this time. Telekinetic force jerked him off his feet. He looked for Cari, but the girl was gone. Then his head was forced painfully down, his hands and feet seized. Physically, not a hand had toughed him yet. Ecks fought wildly, in blind panic. Capture seemed to touch off some ultimate instability in his personality. He tried desperately to snap the telekinetic bonds. He almost did. Power came. He freed an arm and managed to throw himself into the air. Frantically he tried for height. He was smashed to the pavement. Again he tried, a supreme effort -- And passed out. His last conscious thought was a realization that he had been tricked. The uncle -- he determined to kill him, if the opportunity ever presented itself. And then there was blackness. was called at once. Marrin, in Psi headquarters in New York, opened the special channel. Chiefs in Rio, London, Paris, Canton, came into emergency circuit. Marrin's tightly organized information was flashed around the world in less than a minute. At once he received a question. "I would like to know," the Health Chief from Barcelona asked, "how this Ecks person escaped you twice." The thought carried its inevitable identity pattern. The Barcelona chief's face was dimly apparent; long, sad, moustached. Not his true face, of course. Identity patterns were always idealized in the manner the particular mind viewed itself. Actually, the Barcelonan might be short, fat and clean shaven. "The second escape was in broad daylight, was it not?" the Berlin chief asked, and the other chiefs glimpsed his broad, powerful, idealized face. "It was," Marrin replied. "I cannot explain it." Marrin was seated at his black desk in Psi-Health. Around him hummed the normal activity of the day. He was unaware of it. "Here is the complete sequence." It took longer to telep the sceneby-scene breakdown of the attempted rescue. After the attack by the poltered dagger, Marrin had assembled his men around the point where Krandall's informant said Ecks would appear. "This informant. Who -- " "Later. Let him complete the sequence." Fifty agents covered the area. Ecks appeared on time, and in the indicated place. He was restrained with little difficulty, at first. Fighting, he showed a slight surge of latent strength; then he collapsed. At that moment his energy potential took an explosive, exponential jump. Ecks vanished. With Marrin's permission, his recollection of the moment was broken down and scrutinized more closely. The picture remained clear. One moment Ecks was there, the next, he was gone. The images were slowed to one a half second. In this running there was a blur of energy around Ecks just before he vanished. The energy was on so high a band that it was almost indetectable. There was no known explanation for it. The impressions of the participating agents, as recorded by Marrin, were combed, with no positive result. "Would the Health'Chief from New York care to give his theories?" "Since Ecks is a cripple," Marrin said, "I can only assume that someone is helping him." "There is another possibility," the Warsaw Chief said. His idealized identity came through with the thought ; slim, whitehaired, gay. "Ecks may have stumbled on some undiscovered form of psi power." "That would appear to be beyond the realm of probability," the sad-eyed Barcelonan teleped. "Not at all. Consider the emergence of the original psi faculties. They began as wild talents. Couldn't the next mutation begin in a wild talent stage?" "There are tremendous implications in that," the London Chief said. "But if so, why hasn't Ecks utilized it to greater advantage?" "He is probably unaware of it. But he has an inherent protection system, perhaps, which shunts him out of danger at stress moments." "I don't know," Marrin said dubiously. "It is a possibility, of course. We are well aware that there are many untouched secrets of the mind. Still... "An argument against your theory," the Warsaw Chief broke in, teleping directly to Marrin, "is the fact that anyone helping Ecks would necessarily have this extrapsi power. They would have to, to affect an almost instantaneous disappearance. If they did have it, wouldn't they have more of a plan -- less randomness -- " "Or seeming randomness," the Londoner said. "It could be a test of strength. By dangling Ecks in front of Marrin, such a group could determine a good deal about his capabilities and, by extrapolation, the capabilities of all psi's. The repeated inability to capture Ecks would be meaningful. "It's a possibility," Marrin said cautiously. Academically, he found the discussion interesting. But it didn't seem to be serving any practical good. "What about Krandall's informant?" the Barcelonan teleped. "Has he been questioned?" "He has never been found," Marrin said. "The sender was able to block all identity-thoughts and he left no trace to follow." "What do you plan to do?" "First," Marrin said, "to alert you. That is the purpose of the meeting, since the carrier might well get out of New York. Also, the disease rate here has passed the minimum epidemic level. It can be expected to spread, even though I'm closing the city." He paused and wiped his forehead. "Second, I'm going to trace Ecks myself, working on a new set of probability locations supplied by Krandall. Working alone, I'll be able to avoid all thought haze and deflection. It's just possible one may do what many cannot." them for half an hour longer, then broke contact. He sat for a few moments, moodily sorting papers. Then he shrugged off his mood of despair and went to see Krandall. Krandall was in his office at the tomb of The Sleeper. He grunted hello when Marrin levitated in and motioned him to a chair. "I'd like to see those probability locations," Marrin said. "Right," Krandall said. The endproduct was quite simple: a list of streets and times. But to get that information, Krandall had correlated the total amount of data available. The locations of Ecks' disappearances, his reappearances, his psychological index, plus the added correlates of suitable hiding spots in the city where a cripple could stay undetected. ! "I think you stand a pretty good chance of finding him," Krandall said. "Of course, holding him is somediing else again." "I know," Marrin said. "I've come to a decision about that." He looked away from Krandall. "I'm going to have to kill Ecks." "I know," Krandall said. "What?" "You can't risk having him loose any more. Your infection rate is still rising." "That's right. The policy of the Health Board is to quarantine diseased persons. But this is a matter of public safety." "You don't have to justify it to me," Krandall said. v "What do you mean?" Marrin got halfway to his feet, then sat down again and shook his head. "You're right. Evidently Ecks can't be captured. We'll see if he can be killed." "Good hunting," Krandall said. "I hope you have better luck on your project." "The Sleeper?" "The latest attempt flopped. Not a stir out of him." Marrin frowned. That was bad news. If they ever needed Mycrowski's intellect, it was now. Mycrowski was the man to resolve these events into a related whole." "Would you like to see him?" Krandall asked. Marrin glanced at the probability list and saw that the first timestreet fix was almost an hour off. He nodded, and followed Krandall. They went down a dim corridor to an elevator, and then through another corridor. "You haven't ever been here, have you?" Krandall asked, at the end of the corridor. "No. But I helped draw up plans for the remodeling ten years ago." Krandall unlocked and opened the last door. In the brightly lighted room The Sleeper rested. Tubes ran into his arms, carrying the nutrient solutions that kept him alive. The bed he lay on slowly massaged The Sleeper's flabby muscles. The Sleeper's face was blank and expressionless, as it had been for thirty years. The face of a dead man, still living. "That's enough," Marrin said. "I'm depressed enough." They went back upstairs. "Those streets I gave you are in the slums," Krandall said. "Watch your step. Asociality is still present in such places." "I'm feeling pretty' asocial myself," Marrin said, and left. He levitated to the fringe of the slums, and dropped to the street. His sensitive, trained mind was keyed for stimulation. He walked, sorting impressions as he went, searching for the dull, almost obliterated throb of the carrier's mind. Marrin' s web extended for blocks, sifting, feeling, sorting. If Ecks was alive and conscious he would find him. And kill him. You imbecile!" The disembodied voice roared at Ecks. Blurrily, Ecks realized that he was back in Cari's house, in the slums. "I gave you a course to follow," Uncle John screamed, his voice bouncing against the walls. "You took the wrong turn!" "I did not," Ecks said, getting to his feet. He wondered vaguely how long he had been unconscious. "Don't contradict me! You did. And you must do it again!" "Just a minute," Ecks said evenly. "I don't know what your game is, but I followed your instructions to the letter. I turned down every street you wrote down." "You didn't!" "Stop this farce!" Ecks shouted back. "Who in hell are you?" "Get out!" Uncle John roared. "Get out -- or I'll kill you." "Be reasonable," Ecks said. "Just tell me what you want. Tell me what I'm supposed to do. Explain it. I don't work well in a mystery." "Get out," the voice said ominously. "I can't," Ecks said in despair. "Why don't you drop this spirit pose and tell me what it is you want? I'm a normal person. Health officers are everywhere. They will kill me too. I must first regain my abilities. But I can't -- " "Are you going?" the voice asked. Ecks didn't answer. Invisible hands were at Ecks' throat. He jerked back. The grip tightened. Force battered him against the wall, chopping down at him. Ecks rolled, trying to escape the merciless beating. The air was alive with energy, hurling itself at him, crushing him, smothering him. in energy output at once. He traced it, got a fix and levitated toward the location, sifting through the energy manifestations for some identity pattern. Ecks! Marrin crashed through a flimsy wooden door, and stopped. He saw Ecks' crumpled body. Berserk force was alive in the room, undirected now. Suddenly, Marrin found himself fighting for his life. Shielding, he smashed against the telekinetic power that surged around him. A chair was swept up and thrown at him. He deflected it, and was struck from behind by a pitcher. A bed tried to crush him against the wall. Avoiding it, he was struck in the back by a poltered table. A lamp shattered on the wall above his head, spraying him with fragments. A broom caught him behind the knees. Marrin shielded and located the psi power source. In the basement of the building. He sent a tremendous wave rippling across it, poltering chairs and tables with it. The attack stopped abruptly. The place was a shambles of broken furniture. Marrin looked around. Ecks was gone again. He searched for his identity pattern, but couldn't locate it. The man in the cellar? Also gone. But a trace was left behind! Marrin went through a window, following the trace thought. Trained for this work, he held contact with the attenuated, stifled thought as its owner shot into the city. He followed it through a twisting maze of buildings, and out into open air. One part of his mind was still able to prob for Ecks. No luck. But he had Ecks' accomplice, if he could hold him. He shortened the distance by fractions. Ecks' helper -- and attacker -- shot out of the city, heading West. Marrin followed. said, trying hard to catch his breath. It had been a long run. Luckily, the bartender was a Normal, and a phlegmatic one at that. He moved stolidly to the tap. Ecks saw Cari at the end of the bar, leaning against the wall. Thank God she had remembered. He paid for his beer and carried it to where she was. "What happened?" she asked, looking at his bruised face. "Your nice uncle tried to kill me," Ecks said wryly. "A healthofficer came bursting in, and I let them fight it out." Ecks had slipped out the door during the fight. He had counted on the insensitivity of his thought pattern to conceal him. Crippled, he was hardly able to broadcast an identity thought. For once, the loss of telepathic power was an asset. Cari shook her head sadly. "I just don't understand it," she said. "You may not believe this, but Uncle John was always a good man. He was the most harmless person I ever knew. I just don't understand -- " "Simple," Ecks said. "Try to understand this. That was not Uncle John. Some highly developed psi has been masquerading as him." "But why?" she asked. "I don't know," Ecks said. "He saves me, tries to get me captured again, then tries to kill me. It doesn't make sense." "What now?" she asked. Ecks finished his beer. "Now, the end," he said. "Isn't there some place we can go?" she asked. "Some place we can hide?" "I don't know of any," Ecks said. "You'd better go on your own. I'm a risky person to be with." "I'd rather not," Can said. "Why not?" Ecks wanted to know. She looked away. "I'd just rather not." Even without telepathy, Ecks had an intimation of what she meant. Mentally, he cursed. He didn't like the idea of having the responsibility of her. Psi Health must be getting desperate. They wouldn't pull any punches this time, and she might get hurt. "Go away," he said firmly. "No!" "Well, come on," he said. "We'll just have to get by as well as we can. The only thing I can think of is getting out of the city. I should have done that at first, instead of playing spirit." Now it was undoubtedly too late. The psi officers would be checking everyone on foot. "Can you use that clairvoyance of yours?" he asked. "Is there anything you can see?" "No," she said sadly. "The future's a blank to me." That was how Ecks saw it, too. greater inherentstrength than the man he was pursuing. He detected the signs of weakening and pushed harder. The fugitive was visible now, a mile ahead of him doubling back toward the city. As he got closer, Marrin threw his telekinetic strength, pulling the man down. He clung doggedly. The man was slowing, fighting spasmodically. Marrin overhauled him, brought him down and pinned him to the ground. Coming down himself, he probed for an identity thought. And found one. Krandall! For a moment all he could do was stare. "Did you get Ecks?" Krandall teleped. The exertion had drained the big man of everything. He lay, face down fighting for breath. "No. You were his backer all along. Is that right?" Krandall's thought was affirmative. "How could you! What were you thinking of? You know what the disease means!" "I'll explain later," Krandall panted. "Now!" "No time. You have to find Ecks." "I know that," Marrin said. "But why did you help him?" "I didn't," the fat man said "Not really. I tried to kill him You must kill him." He draggec himself to his feet. "He's a far greater menace than you think. Believe me, Marrin. Ecks must b killed!" "Why did you rescue him?" Marrin asked. "In order to put him back into danger," Krandall gasped. "I couldn't let you capture and isolate him. He must be killed." "Go on," Marrin said. "Not now," Krandall said. "I poltered the dagger at you, to make you consider Ecks a personal menace. I had to goad you to the point where you would kill him." " What is he?" "Not now! Get him!" "Another thing," Marrin said. "You couldn't handle that amount of telekinetic power. Who was doing it?" . "The girl," Krandall said, swaying on his feet. "The girl Cari. I was posing as her uncle's spirit She's in back of it all. You must kill her, too." He wiped his streaming face. "I'm sorry I had to play it this way, Paul. You'll hear the whole story at the right time. Just take my word for it now." Krandall tightened his hands into fists and shook them at Marrin. "You must kill those two! Before they kill everything you stand for!" The teleped thought had the ring of truth. Marrin took to the air again, contacting his agents. Briefly he gave his instructions. "Kill both of them," he said. "And pick up Krandall and hold him." random, hoping the lack of a plan would confuse the psi's. Every shadow seemed to have a meaning of its own. He waited for the mental bolt that would drop him. Why had the uncle tried to kill him? Impossible to answer. Why was he so seemingly important? Another unanswerable question. And the girl? Ecks watched her out of the comer of his eye. Cari walked silently beside him. Her face had some color now, and some animation. She seemed almost gay; perhaps freedom from the uncle was the reason for that. What other reason could there be? Because she was with him? The air was thick with the usual day's traffic. A load of ore was being brought in, tons of it, expertly shepherded by a dozen workers. Other cargoes were being flown in from Southern ports; fruit and vegetables from Brazil, meat from Argentina. And psi officers. Ecks wasn't especially surprised. The city was being watched too thoroughly for a fly to escape, much less a crippled man. The psi officers dropped down, forming a tight mental linkage. "All right," Ecks called. "The hell with it, I give up." He decided that it was time he bowed to the inevitable. He had the girl to consider also. The psi's were probably tired of playing; this time, if he tried to escape, they might play for keeps. A bolt of energy sheered him off his feet. "I said I give up!" he shouted. Beside him, Cari fell also. Energy swept over them, twi sting them, across the courtyard, increasing, building. "Stop it!" Ecks shouted. "You'll hurt -- " He had time -- an infinitesimal fraction of a second -- to realize fully his own feeling about the girl. He couldn't let anything happen to her. Ecks didn't have time to consider how or why; the feeling was there. A sad, bitter sensation of love. Ecks tried to get to his feet. The linked mental energy smashed llim down again. Stones and rocks were poltcred at him. Ecks realized that he wasn't going to be allowed to surrender. They were going to kill him. And Cari. At first, it seemed as though it were a dream. He had become used to the possiblity of death in the last few days. He tried to shield, aware of his nakedness, tried to cover Cari. She doubled up as a poltered rock caught her in the stomach. Rocks hummed around them. Seeing Cari struck, Ecks could have burst with rage. He struggled to his feet and swayed two steps forward, hands outstretched. He was knocked down again. A section of wall started to collapse, pushed by psi force. He tried to drag Cari out of the way. Too late. The wall fell -- In that moment Ecks bridged the gap. His tortured, overstrained mind performed the energy leap into the new potential. In that instant, contact and comprehension flooded his mind. The wall thundered down. But Ecks and Cari weren't under it. "M arrin!" Dully, the psi chief raised his head. He was back at his desk in Psi-Health. Again it had happened. "M arrin!" "Who is it?" the psi thief asked. "Ecks." Nothing could surprise him now. That Ecks was capable of tightbeam telepathy just didn't matter. "What do you want?" he asked. "I want to meet you. Name a place." "Wherever you wish," Marrin said, with the calmness of despair. Then curiosity overcame him. "How are you able to telep?" "All psi's can telep," Ecks said mockingly. "Where did you go?" Marrin asked. He tried to get a location on the message. But Ecks was easily managing the tight beam, allowing only the direct message to go through. "I want a little quiet," Ecks said. "So I'm in the tomb of The Sleeper. Would you care to meet me there?" "Coming," Marrin said, and broke contact. "Leffert," he said aloud. "Yes, Chief?" his assistant said, coming over. "I want you to take over until I get back. If I get back." "What is Ecks?" Leffert asked. "I don't know," Marrin said. "I don't know what powers he has. I don't know why Krandall wanted to kill him, but I concur in the judgement." "Could we bomb the tomb?" Leffert asked. "There's nothing faster than thought," Marrin answered. "Ecks has discovered some form of nearinstantaneous transportation. He could be away before the bombs were dropped." He paused. "There is a way, but I'm not going to say any more. He might be listening in on this conversation." "Impossible!" Leffert said. "This is direct-talk. He couldn't -- " "He couldn't escape," Marrin reminded him wearily. "We're through underestimating Mr. Ecks. Hereafter, consider him capable of anything." "Right," Leffcrt said dubiously. "Have you got the latest figures on the contagion rate?" Marrin asked, walking to the window. "They're way past epidemic. And the disease has jumped as far as the Rockies." "It can't be checked now," Marrin said. "We've been pushed off the cliff -- on the wrong side. In a year we'll he lucky if there are a thousand psi's left in the world." He tightened his hands into fists. "For that alone I could cut Ecks into little pieces." He levitated out the window. when he entered The Sleeper's chamber was Mycrowski himself, still unconscious. Ecks and the girl were standing beside him. Marrin walked forward. "I'd like you to meet Cari," Ecks said, smiling. Marrin ignored the dazed-looking girl. "I'd like an explanation," he said. "Of course," Ecks said. "Would you like to know what I am, to begin with?" "Yes," Marrin said. "I am the stage after psi. The para-psi." "I see. And this came -- " "When you tried to kill Cari." "We'd better start somewhere else," Marrin said. He decided to hear the explanation first before taking the final step. "Why have you removed the nutrient pipes from The Sleeper?" "Because Mycrowski won't need them any more," Ecks said. He turned to The Sleeper, and the room suddenly hummed with energy. " Good work, Ecks." For a moment Marrin thought it was the girl who had teleped. Then he realized that it was Mycrowski! "He won't be fully conscious for a while," Ecks said. "Let me start at the beginning. As you know, thirty years ago Mycrowski was searching for the extra-psi powers. He split mind and body to find them. Then, having the knowledge, he was unable to get back in his body. It required a leap into a higher energy level to do that and, without a nervous system at his command, he couldn't gather that power. No ordinary psi could help him, either. To attain the new level, all normal channels must be blocked and redirected, and a terrific strain is placed on the whole nervous system. "That is, essentially, the same method by which the first true psi's got their power." Marrin looked puzzled for a moment, then asked, "Then you're not a mutation?" "Mutations have nothing to do with this. Let me go on. Mycrowski couldn't bridge the gap unaided. He had to have a para-psi bridge the gap for him. That's where I come in." "It is also where you come in," Mycrowski, conscious now, teleped to Marrin. "And the girl, and Krandall. I was in telepathic contact with Krandall. Together we chose Ecks for the experiment. It couldn't be Krandall himself, because his nervous system was not suitable. Ecks was picked for his temperament and sensitivity. And, I might add, for his selfishness and suggestibility. Everything was predicted, including Cari's role." Marrin listened coldly. Let them explain. He had an answer of his own. A final one. "First, the rechanneling. Ecks' psi senses were blocked. Then he was put in a position of stress; incipient capture and isolation, both repugnent to his nature. When he failed to bridge the gap, Krandall rescued him, with my help. With Krandall posing as Cari's Uncle John we threatened his life, increasing the stress." "So that's what Krandall meant," Marrin said. "Yes. Krandall told you that you had to kill Ecks. That was true. You had to try. He told you that the girl was the key to the whole thing. And that was true also. Because when Ecks' life and the girl's were threatened, it was the greatest stress we could bring to bear. He bridged the gap to the higher potential. Comprehension followed immediately." "And he gave you back your body," Marrin added. "And he gave me back my body," Mycrowski agreed. Marrin knew what he had to do, and he thanked God for the foresight of Psi-Health. Nevertheless, he delayed for a moment. "Then if I understand correctly, all this -- the infection of Ecks, his miraculous rescues, all the deviousness you used, was designed to create a force great enough to get you back in your body?" "That's a part of it," Mycrowski said. "Another part is the creation, in Ecks, of another para-psi." "Very well," Marrin said. "It will interest you to know that Psi Health has always considered, as one possibility, the return of The Sleeper -- insane. Against that eventuality, this room is wired for atomic explosion. All four walls, ceiling and roof are keyed to me. Atomic explosions are not instantaneous, I realize." He smiled humorlessly. "But then, I doubt if parapsi transit is, either. "My thought-process are as fast as yours. I am going to explode this place." "You health men are a suspicious lot," Mycrowski said. "But why on earth would you want to do a thing like that?" Marrin noticed that he seemed genuinely surprised. "Why? Do you realize what you have done? You have regained your body. But the disease is uncontrollable now. Psi science and all it stands for is destroyed, because of your selfishness." Mentally, Marrin reached for the key. "Wait!" Ecks said. "Evidently you don't understand. There'll be a temporary disturbance, true. But it won't affect everyone at once. Diseased persons can be trained." "Trained? To what?" "Para-psi, of course," Ecks said. "A complete rechanneling is necessary to reach the next para-psychological step. The disease is the initial point. The present level of psi is unstable, anyhow. If I didn't set it off, someone else would in a few years." "It'll be easier when we get a few more people to bridge the gap," Mycrowski said. "As in the first development of psi, the rest is (Continued on page #) Don't lose any sleep over it tonight, but your watch is wrong, the days are getting longer ( and we don't mean because spring is coming!) and, someday, your calendar is going to be obsolete! "It's About Time... By R. S. Richardson one of the most fascinating as well as probably the most hopeless of the standard subjects of sciencefiction. We have robots working for us, we can produce mutations in certain organisms at will, and everybody is agreed that we will soon be on our way to the moon and Mars. But so far as traveling in time is concerned we haven't been able to budge by so much as a single microjiffy. You can search the pages of the Physical Review in vain for any mention of chronagation. But although we are still stuck to the present moment as firmly as ever, there is an effect beginning to operate on our method of determining time somewhat analogous to that in H. G. Wells' story "The New Accelerator". It will be recalled that the story dealt with a drug which had the magical effect of speeding up one's sense of duration so that time seemed slowed down to a bare crawl. The effect operating upon us works in the opposite direction, so that the rest of the universe seems to be speeding up. So far as our daily lives are concerned we are as yet quite untouched. But the effect is becoming painfully apparent in comparing the predicted places of the heavenly bodies with their observed positions. So much so that astronomers are seriously urging that we alter our method of reckoning time, even to the extent of changing our fundamental unit of time itself. The trouble arises from the fact that all our calculations of the motions of the planets are made using what is called Newtonian time. It is a smooth flowing sort of time that increases at a steady rate through the ages. It is the quantity "t" in the mathematical equations of motion. We feel confident that we can run Newtonian time backward or forward as far as we please without getting into trouble. Newtonian time is invariable -- the same it will be in A.D. #. True Newtonian time is an abstraction; an ideal which we shall probably never be able to realize completely in practice. But we do the best we can by taking some body, whose motion seems to correspond closely to Newtonian time, and tying our clocks to it. In doing so, we have to use some body that is fairly accessible to observation even though imperfect in other respects. Obviously we couldn't use the period of revolution of the inner satellite of Mars as a timekeeper because it is too confounded hard to observe. For centuries the rotation of the earth has served as our fundamental timekeeper. In many respects it is nearly ideal. Its rate of rotation, as evidenced by the motion of the stars across the sky, is readily accessible to observation, affording us with a precise and comparatively easy means of checking on our imperfect man-made timepieces. We are all very conscious of time and know in a vague way that it is obtained in some way from the stars. But how? There are people who pride themselves on knowing all about the nucleus of the atom and the curvature of space but who couldn't tell you how we know when to blow the twelve o'clock whistle. the inner surface of a sphere which turns at the same rate that the earth rotates. This turning sphere is our clock. All the way around the sphere are bright stars which we use in telling the time in the same way that we use the numerals on the dial of a watch. Think of these stars as actually having numerals attached to them in the sky. Then when one of these stars crosses your meridian -- an imaginary line passing through your zenith to the north and south -- the numeral tells you the time. If the numeral on the star is # hours # minutes, then your clock should read # hours # minutes. If the clock says the time is # hours # minutes, then it is # minutes fast. A clock that keeps time this way according to the stars is a sidereal clock. A sidereal clock is a perpetual source of wonder to the visitors to an observatory. They simply can't figure it out. The first thing they do upon coming into the dome is to compare their watch with the sidereal clock. Generally the two are hours apart. After while they put their watch away and decide that it is one more thing they can't understand about an astronomical observatory. The reason the two clocks don't agree is because the watch in your pocket is rated to keep time -- not according to the stars -- but according to the sun. And a day by the sun is about # minutes longer than a day by the stars. The stars are (nearly) fixed in the sky. But the sun is always moving eastward among the stars at the rate of about a degree a day. If the earth had no atmosphere, like the moon, you could easily follow the motion of the sun against the background of the stars. Now it takes the earth about # minutes to rotate through n this one degree that the sun moves in a day. Hence the solar days are about # minutes longer than the sidereal days. As a result, a sidereal clock is always gaining on the watch in your pocket. A sidereal clock is also set to show time in a different way from your pocket watch. It is "sidereal noon" when an imaginary point in the sky called the vernal equinox is on your meridian. There is nothing in the sky to mark it but you can think of it as being represented by the sign V intended to represent the horns of a ram. When the sun crosses the vernal equinox, about March #st, that is the time spring begins. Ever wonder why they have a goat or ram on all those bock beer signs? Well, bock beer is made in the spring. And years ago the vernal equinox used to be in the constellation of Aries the Ram. The equinox has slid back into the constellation of Pisces the Fishes, but the horns of a ram are still used to mark its position. But we regulate our lives by the sun and not the vernal equinox. We want a clock that  tied to the sun. A clock that reads noon when the sun, and not the vernal equinox, is on our meridian. Regardless of how carefully you rated a clock, however, you never could make it keep in exact time with the sun. The trouble is not with the clock but with the motions of the earth which are reflected in the motion of the sun. The sun moves eastward at such an irregular rate that no two solar days are quite the same length. The difference between them doesn't amount to much. The extreme range during the year is only #I seconds. Yet this is far too much for precision timekeeping. We can't use the sun directly as our standard timekeeper. ( Incidentally the longest day of the year happens to come on December # which we ordinarily consider to be the shortest day of the year. Here is a good chance to get a bet out of your friends.) we would like it, we proceed to invent one that does. Our clocks are geared to run at the same rate as a purely imaginary sun that moves at the same average or mean rate as the real sun. We call this body the mean sun. All the mean solar days are the same length. We divide a mean solar day into # equal parts and call them seconds. And this mean solar second is our fundamental legal and scientific unit of time. How do we know if our watch is running correctly or not? We can't set it by observing the mean sun because there isn't any such body. We could get the correction by observing the real sun, since the two are always a known distance apart. But the sun is a large bright disk that is hard to set on accurately. It is better to get the correction to the sidereal clock from the stars which are nice sharp points. From the sidereal clock we can easily calculate the mean solar time. Here somebody is going to object that we are reasoning in a circle. How did we get the places for the stars from which sidereal time is obtained in the first place? Well, it is much too long a story to explain here. But, in the last analysis, we have to get our star positions from the sun. We tie the stars in with the sun until eventually we come to know their positions so accurately that we can use them to set our clocks. But it wasn't done in a day. Now it would seem as if our troubles are ended at last. As a result of centuries of painstaking toil on the part of a few underpaid individuals we have a nice series of stars whose positions are known to a hundredth of a second. But instead of being able to lean back and relax we find that our troubles in timekeeping are only beginning. More than two centuries ago Edmund Halley discovered some puzzling discrepancies between his observed positions of the moon and the time of certain ancient eclipses. It looked as if the moon were gradually speeding up in its orbit or undergoing what is termed a secular acceleration. About # Tobias Mayer suggested that this secular acceleration of the moon was due in reality to a slowing down in the rate of rotation of the earth caused by tidal friction. But in # Laplace showed that the gravitational action of the planets on the moon would produce a secular acceleration, of about the amount observed, so that the tidal friction theory went into temporary eclipse. Then in #, Adams carried Laplace's calculations out to a greater degree of refinement and showed that the planets could only produce about half of the observed acceleration in the moon's motion. Some forty years ago a chronologist named Fotheringham, who seemed to have gotten into astronomy largely by accident, made a detailed study of all the old eclipses, occultations, and whatnot, and definitely confirmed the existence of an acceleration in the moon's motion. The acceleration works in such a way that during the last # years the error in our clocks is about # T # seconds, where T is the number of centuries since #. A little arithmetic will show that in another # years the error will have mounted up to nearly three hours. This slowing down in the earth's rotation is ascribed to the friction between the water and land in narrow straits and channels such as the English Channel, the Straits of Malacca, and the Bering Sea. In addition to the secular acceleration, there are other irregular changes in rotation, of a rather startling nature, to which Fotheringham gave the name of trepidation. The origin of these is still unknown. The largest changes of this kind occurred in # and #. According to G. M. Clemence of the U. S. Naval Observatory, the accumulated error in the measure of time during the past # years has amounted to as much as # seconds due to this effect, first in one direction and then in the other. N OW, IF the earth is gradually slowing down, then it will seem to us as if the rest of creation is speeding up at the same rate. The difference will first become apparent in rapidly moving bodies, as they will differ from their predicted positions by the largest amounts. It is like losing a minute in timing the flight of a jet plane Along about # A.D. the clocks and a man on a mule. The jet would be so far ahead that they plane will be ahead of schedule by would register three o'clock in the many miles while the man on the afternoon when the sun is just mule will only be off by a few feet. crossing the meridian. That is why the secular acceleraThe other alternative is to go on tion first showed up in the moon, using mean solar time just as we do which moves much faster than any now. But whenever we wish to comother body whose motion has been pare the observed position of a carefully studied. planet with its predicted place we If we had nothing but the moon would use Newtonian time. This to check against the rotation of would be done by publishing corthe earth we might be in doubt as rections for converting mean solar to which one to believe. It would time into Newtonian time. Clembe like taking one man's word ence has given a table showing against another's. But we have the magnitude of the corrections Strong corroborative evidence from back to # B.G. He does not say the motions of the sun, Mercury, how these corrections were deVenus, and the four giant Jovian rived. satellites, all of which are ahead of Inevitably there will come a schedule by amounts corresponding time, however, when the day will to their average motions. have lengthened to such an extent What can we do to bring the obthat our way of life will be radically served positions of the heavenly affected. Writers who lay their bodies into agreement with their stories far in the future would do predicted positions? well to take heed as this is one of We could start correcting all the the few effects we can extrapolate time instead of mean solar time. dence. Let us try to envisage some Our clocks would no longer be tied conditions that will have been to the sun but would run according forced upon us when the day is to the length of the second at some about # hours long, arbitrary epoch such as January #, #. With the second growing running on the same schedule, they H twice as long, there will be only would gain continually on the sun. about half as many days in the Date Corr. Date Corr. # B.C.  # hours A.D. # # seconds # B.C.  # " #  A.D. I  # " # -- # " #  # " #  # " year. Our calendar will doubtless have been discarded, or else modified to such a degree as to be unrecognizable. There will have been some adjustment in reckoning wages, since if a man is paid by die hour he would have to work twice as long for the same amount of money. In fact, every sort of a rate that is reckoned in days, hours, minutes, and seconds will have had to be changed. A speed of # miles an hour would only be # miles an hour as measured today. But if interest is still calculated as so much per annum, then it is possible that these rates might be about the same, since the length of the year will not have altered. A man who is # years old would still be # years old, although the sun would have risen on him only half as many times as on a man of that age today. Presumably people would have had to adjust themselves to a somewhat greater range in temperature between day and night, as our planet would be heading in the same direction as the one-sided conditions that prevail on Venus. The reader can doubtless think of scores of other effects that would arise under such a regime. As just mentioned, the length of the year would remain unaltered, even in A.D. #, unless something wholly unforeseen happens. For this reason, theoretical astronomers have suggested that the mean solar second be dethroned as our fundamental unit of time in favor of the sidereal year. The sidereal year is the true period of revolution of the earth around the sun with respect to the sidereal universe. The mean length of the sidereal year appears to be a unit nearly in accordance with Newtonian time. At an international conference of astronomers, in #, on the fundamental units, it was recommended that the sidereal year be officially adopted as the standard of time where the mean solar second is unsuitable owing to its variability. It is conceivable that we may ultimately be able to construct clocks that will answer the purpose. Quartz crystal clocks have run a year with a maximum error of # seconds. At present, however, they are considered as too unreliable to serve as fundamental timekeepers. Also, there is the same objection to quartz crystal clocks that there is to the rotation of the earth: the period of vibration of the crystal changes slowly with aging and, for each crystal, this aging has to be determined from astronomical observations. Other possibilities are clocks based upon the rate of vibration of ammonia molecules under electrical excitation; the emission of particles from radioactive substances; the frequency of certain monochromatic spectrum lines; and even the period of Cepheid variable stars. The role of a prophet is always hazardous, but it seems rather doubtful if the heavenly bodies will ever be displaced from their role of fundamental timekeepers. With all their faults, the heavenly bodies can at least be relied upon to keep moving -- a feat we have never been able to achieve with any man-made device. ivwmvwwwwwnw;wwwvvvvMvvwvW'AVvwwwvwvnvvvwvvwmwvvnvwvvu by Joseph C. Stacey  Listed below (jumbled fashion) are names pertaining to heavenly f I bodies, phenomena, etc., together with a brief description of each.  I Can you match up at least # of them correctly for a passing score?  #-# is good; # excellent. Answers on page #.  (a) (b) ( c ) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h) (i) U) a long, narrow and generally straight valley on the face of the Moon. a small rainbow lying near the horizon, the tail of a comet. a star, the most conspicuous in the constellation Canis Minor. the name of one of planet Mars' two moons. a low, horizontal sheet of cloud, the apparent ends of Saturn's rings, which seen obliquely, seem to project from the sides of the planet like handles, a mass falling on the earth from celestial space. a halo round the moon or a star, relatively easy after the initial gain has been made." Marrin shook his head. "How can I believe you?" "How? Look!" Telepathy transmits delicate shades of meaning quite lost in spoken language. A 'true' statement, teleped, reveals immediately how 'true' the sender believes it to be. There are an infinite number of gradations to the 'truth.' As Ecks had, Marrin read Mycrowski's belief in the para-psi -- read it clear down to the subconscious level. An unimaginably 'true' truth! There was no possible argument. Suddenly Cari smiled. She had had one of her flash premonitions -- a pleasant one. "Help me up," Mycrowski said to Marrin. "Let me outline my training program." Marrin walked over to help him. Then Ecks grinned. He had just read Gari's premonition. When does life begin?... A well-known book says "forty". A well-known radio program says "eighty". Some folks say it's mental, others say it's physical. But take the strange case of Mel Carlson who gave a lot of thought to the matter. All in the Mind By Gene L. Illustrated by ing on clouds in the deepest, most intense dark he had ever experienced. He tried opening his eyes but nothing happened, only a sharp pain. Little bits of memory flashed back and he tried to figure out what could have happened, where he was. The last thing he could remember was the little lab hidden back in the mountains in an old mine tunnel. Remote, but only an hour's drive from the city. What had he been doing? Oh yes, arguing with Neil again. He even recalled the exact words. "Damn it, Mel," his partner had said. "We've gone about as far as possible working with animal brains. We've got to get a human Henderson Paul Orban "We can't," Mel had disagreed. "There'd be enough of an uproar if the papers got hold of what we've been doing with animals. If we did get someone in a hospital to agree to let us use his brain on death, they would close us up tighter than a drum." "But our lab's too well hidden, they'd never know." "It wouldn't work anyway. The brain might be damaged for lack of oxygen and all of our work would go for nothing. Worse, it might indicate failure where a fresh, healthy brain would mean success." "We'll never know unless we try," said Neil almost violently, dark eyes glittering. "Our funds aren't going to last forever." Mel had turned his back and was leaning over the tank where the latest brain -- that from a dog -- was lying immersed in the life-giving liquid, a tjiin flickering line of light on the oscilloscope behind the tank the only indication that the brain was alive. What, had happened then? He thought hard, until a sharp pain and growing headache almost made him lose consciousness. Either he'd passed out or something had happened. Maybe the cave had collapsed the concrete walls of their lab, although he didn't see how that could have happened. He became aware of voices, faint at first, then growing stronger. He strained to listen and just when it appeared that the words would become distinct enough to understand, they faded away. He waited hopefully until they came back. This time he could understand words and parts of sentences... connect this first and... "No, be careful. Too much voltage would ruin everything and we'd have to... "Where does this connection go, here?" The other voice boomed in then, deep vibrations feeling as if they would shatter his brain. There was a frantic quality in the words. "No, no, you fool, don't... A penetrating pain knifed through Mel's head and he tried to scream but heard nothing but a loud buzzing. He welcomed the loss of consciousness as it blanketed him. He struggled back to consciousness once more, a voice calling over and over in a monotone. "Mel, Mel Carlson. Can you hear me, Mel? Mel, Mel Carlson. Can you hear me, Mel?" he listened intently, recognizing it as one of the first voices he had heard. He tried to move but could feel no response of legs or arms. It was like being buried alive and he tried to call out for help. He must have lost his voice because he could still hear the same call. "Mel, Mel Carlson, can you..." It broke off abruptly, then came back triumphantly. "You do hear me, Mel, I can see." Again Mel tried to call out, without success. The other warned quickly. "Don't become alarmed. We're still working on your voice. Just try to rest." Mel suddenly realized that he'd been listening to Neil and a wave of thankfulness swept over him. There had been a cave-in then and he'd been injured. Neil was speaking again, a note of professional regret in his voice. "I'm sorry it had to happen this way but there was too much tied up in the project to lose now." A growing realization and horror began to seep through Mel's mind. Neil continued, after a brief pause. "The sine wave jumped. I see you must realize now. I had to do it, Mel. After all, you aren't dead you know, just your body is gone. Your brain may live for hundreds of years. Why just think, you'll be able..." Oblivion again claimed Mel. on clouds and this time the sensation was exhilarating. He tried moving his arms and legs to see if he could swim through the velvety darkness but failed. A faint glow began to appear ahead of him and a low rumble of voices began to echo throughout his mind. Full realization of what had happened swept over him and he struggled to retain his sanity. The voices were louder and he recognized that of Neil, who was saying, "... is conscious now. Easy on the voltage, remember last time." A brief pause, then louder. "Mel, I see that you hear me. Listen carefully. I've tried out several of my own theories, that's why you can hear. And, in just a moment, I'm going to give you eyesight. We're having trouble with a voice." The light began growing in intensity and hurt his eyeballs. Mel remembered then, depressed, that he had no eyes of his own. Even at the thought, he tried to shut his eyes which only caused his brain to ache more. He tried completely relaxing in an endeavor to capture the floating sensation once more. "Ah, that's better," approved Neil's voice. "I see that the brain wave has smoothed down. If you'll just accept what's happened, Mel, we should be able to work totogether." Figures began to form in the white mist. As they became stronger but out of focus, he saw Neil bent over a control panel, carefully making adjustments and glancing frequently at the leaping line of green light across the scope in front of him. He felt a surge of hate sweep through his brain and saw the green line jump violently. Neil's hand jumped instinctively toward a red-covered switch. At the same time, he flashed a glance towards a tank that was barely within the range of Mel's vision. He realized almost at once that it must be the same one in which his brain was resting. The full, sickening realization of what had happened hit him and he almost went over the black-out line. Then Neil's face loomed square in his direction and hate, the most intense he had ever experienced, brought the green line that represented his brain's output up to full level. His brain sent impulses out to the nerve ends that had controlled his arms and legs. They felt as if they were still attached to him but paralyzed. His mind felt clearer and sharper now than it ever had before in his life... He determined to analyze his new mental capabilities carefully in the hope he would find a means of striking back. During the next few weeks, only his hatred for Neil enabled Mcl to keep his sanity. The first empty feeling that the future could hold nothing for him but horror gave way to planning and scheming. His mechanical voice was perfected, operated by the nerve ends of his brain, much as his original vocal cords had functioned. It enabled him to now assist in his own rehabilitation by suggesting improvements or solutions to mechanical aids he could control. The steady growth or realization of his mental powers were amazing to Mel. He realized that they must have been inherent and in his subconscious all of the time, only his loss of body brought them out now. That, plus the fact that he required practically no rest if the stimulants pumped into the tank were sufficient. use by Neil. It became apparent that his erstwhile partner planned on using him to the fullest possible extent. First Neil brought in a problem concerning a new type of paint to absorb the rays of the sun and convert them into electrical energy. Not until he had studied the problem and given Neil the answer did Mel realize the full financial potentiality of his powers. He immediately brought up the subjects. "What about our partnership agreement on profits?" he asked. "Profits?" repeated Neil with a nasty smile. "Why? Where did you plan on going?" For once Mel was glad that his voice was flat and devoid of all inflection. It kept the other from sensing the rage that made him want to do something violent. "You know what I mean," he insisted doggedly. "Unless you want to admit murder, we're still partners." Neil laughed and said, "That's right. Of course I can draw any and all funds that I need but if the authorities ever check on your disappearance, they'll find that a separate account has been opened in your name in the City. All you have to do is go in and withdraw it any time you want to." He chuckled, then grew serious. "Don't get any ideas," he warned. "We've been spending most of the time during the past couple of months getting you in shape for your intended function and I'm going to bring more and more problems in to you." He explained further, "I've opened an engineering consultant service in the city and this paint formula alone will bring us all the business we'll need." He pretended to be busy at one of the computors being installed but Mel could see that he was glancing out of the corners of his eyes at the oscilloscope for indication of a brain reaction. Mel had learned several weeks ago that he could control the output of his brain and had been careful to conceal the fact from Neil. His partner said, disappointment in his voice. "Doesn't my attitude bother you anymore?" Mel's mechanical voice rolled out. "When you destroyed my body, you destroyed all emotions. If that's the way you want to do things, that's the way it'll be." "But the ethics..." "I know what would happen to me if you turned me over to the scientists. I'd be a freak and treated as such. I owe nothing to the world." "Swell," enthused Neil, this time his face twisted into a grimace of pleasure. "I've got a lot of plans that you'll fit into." Experiments had been made with muscular control and they discovered that Mel could govern an electrically powered table, controlled by short wave radio. Another "eye" that could swing in a # degree circle had been mounted on it and broadcast its information to Mel's optical circuit. A mechanical arm had also been installed on it and Mel spent long night hours when the lab was quiet perfecting his control over it. Before long, he was as much -- if not more -- proficient with it as he had been with his own arms. He began laying his plans. The first thing he needed was a weapon. Getting his control cart out of the cubicle was easy since Jenkins, the only assistant allowed in the entire laboratory, had left his key ring lying on a table one morning. It had been but the work of a moment to wheel over, pick them up and then conceal them. Jenkins had spent a frantic hour in search but finally went into the machine shop to make up a new set. He had first cautioned Mel against letting Neil know, almost fawning in his gratitude when Mel promised. He searched the entire lab the first two nights but discovered that Neil had taken the revolver he had kept in a drawer of his old desk. It would take too long to try and machine another one, although their machine shop had proven its capability of turning out anything. A knife he discarded as too clumsy for his means of control. He then carefully considered steel darts shot from a tube by compressed air or carbon dioxide but reluctantly abandoned that idea also. Since he had a machine's limitations as well as advantages, he'd have to begin thinking less like a human. So, the first thing to base a weapon on would be the material most plentiful in the lab. That was -- electricity. line of his endeavors, he briefly marvelled again on the still unexplored potentialities of his brain. The weapon would be mounted on his own cart and electricity could either be broadcast or self-contained. For mobility, he decided on a power pack. The weapon itself evolved so easily that he wondered why no one had thought of it before now. Special type condensers built a battery charge up second. This charge, invisible until it hit an object more solid than air, was contained in a very narrow beam by strong screens of opposite polarity. The entire sequence of operation was almost instantaneous, and the bolt was more in the nature of an electrical projectile than a continuous beam. He decided that the unit, resembling a flashlight, could be mounted in a concealed spot under his "eye" so that it could be fired at whatever he might be looking at. Now that he had a means of defending himself, Mel felt more at ease but at a loss for his next step. Merely eliminating both Jenkins and Neil would gain his revenge but what then? He could always notify the authorities but mentally flinched at exposing himself to the world as a freak and being at the mercy of the morbid curiosity of He had hardly begun to lay his plans before disaster struck. Neil came in early one morning and had Mel begin working on a problem concerning a new type of steel that would combine structural strength with the lightweight qualities of aluminum. Mel energized his calculators that were, electrically, practically part of his brain. He briefly wondered why Neil appeared so restless, wandering around the room with his hands behind his back, studying everything. Then the problem became so intriguing that he completely forgot that anyone was in the room. His first inkling that anything was wrong was when Neil straightened up from the cart with a twisted smile on his face and exclaimed: "Ha!" Mel's first, startled conjecture was that the other had discovered the special weapon. He tried to rotate the lens so that the weapon would point at Neil but could see, by other stationary lenses in the room, that the one on the cart remained motionless. The same was true of the mechanical arm. In fact, the entire cart was dead. "I pulled the main power fuse," said Neil, a slight smile on his face. "I suppose you thought you were getting away with it completely." Not positive as to how much his partner knew, Mel, decided on silence as his defense. The smile disappeared from the other's face and he continued, slowly: "Something must be wrong with your reasoning. I knew something was up when the power company's statement showed an unusually high increase in power consumption. From there on it was easy to read the meters at night myself, and then the next morning. What were you up to anyway?" Mei still maintained his silence. "Okay if that's the way you want it," said Neil more harshly. He walked to the end of the tank and Mel felt his brain telegraphing warnings to severed nerve connections not yet again in use. Neil reached out to a valve Mel recognized as controlling the minute amount of chemicals that served to nourish the cells in his brain. Relays were connected to it that also regulated the injection of oxygen proportionately into the fluid. He turned it slightly then began watching the oscilloscope closely. In a matter of seconds, Mel felt his usually sharp senses begin to dull. The oscilloscope blurred until, by great effort, he brought u into focus again. He saw that the height of the wavy line denoting the strength of his brain's output was abnormally low. "Feeling all right?" asked Neil in mock anxiety. He turned the valve back to its correct setting and almost instantly Mel felt better. "That's just a sample of what can happen if you force me to it," warned the other. "A little more of a turn and that super brain of yours would be garbage. Only I wouldn't do that, of course. There are a few more experiments I want to make before your brain dies." Knowing the vicious nature of his partner, Mel decided to talk before the other goaded himself into some unplanned action. "Don't forget the fable about the goose that laid the golden eggs," his voice rolled out. "There's still a lot I could do for you, you know -- or not do." He saw with relief that the anger receded from the other's face to be replaced by a look of cunning. "I almost forgot," said Neil. "I've another surprise for you." He went to a circuit near the master calculator that he himself had installed only several days ago. All the master components were open, a rheostat appearing to be the primary control. Mel had decided at the time it had to do with voltage regulation of the calculator since there had been trouble with it. Neil placed his hand on it, then turned his head in the general direction of the tank and said, "Just in case you get ideas of not cooperating, I can use this for persuasion." He cracked the vernier just a trifle and agony knifed through Mel's brain. It receded, leaving a slight ache. "Not much voltage," Neil was saying with satisfaction, "but, judging from the way your brain wave jumped. I don't imagine it felt very good, did it?" "You win," was Mel's only comment, not wanting another jolt. Never before had he felt so helpless and completely at the mercy of another. He realized more and more that he had less defense than a new-born baby, which could at least kick and wave its hands. He could do nothing except try to retain his sanity and wait for his day to come... "Good," approved his partner, his manner indicating that it was the most natural thing in the world that Mel should give in. "Just in case you forget, I think I'll keep the cart disconnected so that you can't do anything to harm yourself at night." His manner abruptly turned business-like. "Now then, that paint formula story got around and we've got a lot of business to handle. Most of it's routine for you but we'll drag it out and sock them plenty. A couple of items we'll copy after you've solved them and say it couldn't be done." than he though he would. It was much like the time when, as a boy, he'd broken a leg and had to stay in bed for several weeks. He was forced to turn in on himself. The real turn in the development of his mind, and above the level he had thought possible, came about as an accident one day. Resting, with nothing to do, he had the full room in vision with the stationary lenses. A flicker of motion caught his attention and careful waiting disclosed it to be a small mouse that had somehow gained access to the laboratory and then into his room. Welcoming any change in his routine, he watched as the small creature scurried around the room looking for something to eat. Several times Mel amused himself by causing his voice box to rumble, making the rodent scurry around madly for a hiding place until the imagined danger had passed. Eventually it became used to the noise and not even talking affected it. It disappeared from sight for several minutes and Mel had just begun to wonder if it had a nest in the equipment when it reappeared on top of the calculator, near the electrical prod that Neil had used on his brain. Remembering the searing jolt it had given him, Mel watched anxiously as the mouse pushed an inquisitive nose into the still exposed components. He became more concerned as the animal became more intrigued. Not only was there danger that the mouse would push down on a delicate relay and close it, but he could conceivably short out the main power supply. The result wasn't pleasant to contemplate. If it didn't permanently damage some of his brain cells, the pain might drive him into insanity. He tried shouting but the mouse paid no attention to him. He called for first, Jenkins and then Neil until he remembered that his partner had said they were going in after some special equipment. While he watched helplessly, the mouse stretched out and touched a relay point. Instantly pain knifed through his brain and he became aware of a roaring sound that he realized was his voice blaring out. The extra loud and continued blast of sound had caused the mouse to withdraw nervously from the relay. Something about it had made him determined, however, and as Mel was barely recovering from the first jolt, the mouse moved back. Mel wished desperately that the cart had been left in operation so that he might at least use the sound of motion or the mechanical arm to frighten his tiny tormentor from the vicinity of the relay. He watched intently as the mouse came closer to the points, oblivious to everything else in the room. As it almost touched the points, a violent surge of hate coursed through his brain cells and he was surprised to see the mouse flung violently back down to the floor. It lay there motionless and he finally realized, with thankfulness, that it was dead. As the pain from the jolt subsided to the point where lie could barely feel it, he began to wonder what had happened. The amount of voltage necessary to hurt him was so small that nothing beyond a direct short across the primary power would have affected the mouse. He began to analyze everything preceding the point where the mouse had been flung from the top of the calculator. A check and recheck brought the same answer, one that he had at first refused to believe -- his thoughts had been responsible. Further contemplation convinced him that, while his thoughts had undoubtedly been responsible, the mental power itself had not been enough, as pure, brute force, to accomplish the task, but must have struck at the rodent's brain itself. That would have been enough to convulse the animal's muscles and make it look at first as if some outside force had hurled it to the floor. The stolid Jenkins was somewhat perturbed when he found the dead mouse. "But how could it get in here," he demanded querulously. Then, as if in sudden thought, "and what could have killed it?" Mel suddenly decided that it might be better if the other were set at ease since even Jenkins could disect it if he became curious enough and might find enough to make Neil suspicious. "I saw it yesterday," he said. "I didn't say anything since it was interesting and was company for me. I noticed that it was moving more slowly today and seemed to be weaker. It must have starved to death. Nothing to eat in here, and he couldn't get out." "Yeah," agreed the other, picking it up and throwing it into a wastepaper basket. The explanation had evidently satisfied him. since he went about his routine tasks. discovery had worn off, Mel began to cautiously test its potential. He carefully directed his thoughts at Jenkins and caused an instant reaction. For a brief moment, he felt a resiliant pressure as if something were pressing against his own brain. He instinctively pushed back harder and heard Jenkins yell as the opposing pressure collapsed. The assistant was leaning against a work tabic, a dazed look on his face. "What happened?" Mel asked. "I don't know," said the other, pressing a hand to the side of his head. "It felt as if something had hit me in the head, now it aches a little. Guess I'll have to do something about this cold." He left, still holding a hand to his head. It was obvious that his newly discovered power could be dangerous so Mel proceeded with his experimenting more slowly. Jenkins was still his only guinea pig and he learned to gage just when the assistant's resistance was about to collapse and reduce the intensity of his own probing accordingly. He was disappointed to discover that either it was impossible to read another's mind or that he hadn't discovered the method. However, he could roughly direct the other's actions. Jenkins had been becoming increasingly nervous so Mel became even more subtle in his experimenting. He'd wait until the assistant was idle and then either make him cross his legs or put one or the other of his hands up to scratch his head. He finally became so smooth and accurate in his control that it lost most of its interest as a means of recreation. He began to extend his range. Wood and concrete offered no impedance at all. Metal, with the exception of aluminum, cut the intensity roughly about half. Jenkins was in Mel's room when he first probed Neil's brain. His partner's mental resistance was much higher and he pressed slowly but methodically so that the break-through would be controlled. To his surprise, he found that Neil's brain was much easier to control than that of Jenkins had been. It was about this time that he found he was beginning to master the sharing of his host's eyesight. While he might not be able to read another's mind, it would be a big help to know that someone else was doing or what he was looking at. He tried searching outside the building but found nothing, other than an occasional small spot of resistance that would probably indicate a small animal. This wasn't surprising since the lab was hidden in caves in a secluded canyon that had no attraction to the casual wanderer. His next concentration was on the animals he encountered every so often. His first few attempts resulted in sudden and complete collapse of resistance and he sadly concluded that his control had been too powerful and resulted in their death. He tried more carefully and was overjoyed when he established contact with their visual senses. The sensation was almost as overpowering as if he had suddenly gained eyesight of his own. For the first time in months, he revelled in seeing the country around the outside of the lab and never before had he thought it so beautiful. Once, while in control of a rabbit's mind, he saw an eagle flying overhead. He quickly transferred and, before the bird flew far enough away to make control impossible, he enjoyed the far-reaching vision of the bird's eyes as it swept on towards some hidden nest. He could even see the city in the distance. to notice Neil's entrance into the room, so absorbed did he become in his newly discovered, if second-hand, freedom. "What's happened to you anyway?" demanded his erstwhile partner one day after he had had to repeat a question. "Half of the time lately you're lost in a world of your own. What're you up to anyway?" "Nothing," replied Mel, suddenly alert to any new danger, although confident he could take care of himself now. "I was just going over some new equations I've been formulating as a hobby. Now that you've taken away my cart, there isn't much to keep me occupied you know. You don't begin to bring enough problems. What's wrong?" Mel wished that he could read the others' mind since Neil began to act evasive. He laughed with a false heartiness. "Wrong? Why I've -- we've -- " he corrected, " -- already made a fortune on a couple of our own patents as well as commissions from project solutions. Someone might get suspicious if we did too well or too much." This made sense but Mel couldn't resist digging. "You mean that your past record of success as measured against your supposed one now might make the police ask questions?" he asked. The other remained silent so he pressed the attack. "Or are they already wondering why I haven't been seen for so long?" "There were a few questions at first," admitted the other, "but I think I've satisfied them all. However, I've been thinking that it might be a good idea to move you somewhere else." "But hardly anyone knows the lab exists," protested Mel. "The power company does, even if the meters are way down the road. We should've planned on our own generators from the first. Then there's the deed recorder. This land is in both of our names you know." "It'd still be a tremendous project," pointed out Mel. "You couldn't begin to keep the new location secret because you'd need help in moving me. One little slip and it'd be all over." There was an upward curl to the other's lips that Mel didn't like. "Oh, we'd have to be careful," he admitted. "Luckily the time delay wouldn't hurt any, there's so much money rolling in." He hesitated for a moment, as if in thought, then concluded, "In fact, there's no project on now unless you have a private one of your own. It might be a good idea to plan on the move right away." "I still don't like the idea," stated Mel flatly. "I'd like to think it over for a couple of days." "Think it over all you want," said Neil with a grin. He walked to the calculator and patted it near the jolter. "Only don't forget I don't have to ask you." He waited almost hopefully but Mel said nothing, content with the feeling of power and knowledge that, so long as he was prepared, the other could do nothing immediate to harm him. The time had come for action, however. Mel kept mental contact with his partner after he had left. Neil went directly to the office and unlocked the center drawer of his desk. He then began pulling out papers and scanning them rapidly, placing some back and keeping others out. Mel gasped to himself when he saw the bank statement and the amount of money deposited under the name of the partnership. That in Neil's personal account was large but it was perfectly obvious, according to dates Mel could see through the other's eyes, that the transfer of funds had not been underway for long. As it now' stood, they were knew Neil wouldn't be satisfied. Watching through the other's eyes, Mel had his vision switched from the desk to the door. He saw that Jenkins had just entered, mouth moving. He thought he could read his lips just enough to make out his own name. Jenkins appeared to stop and listen to Neil, then his facial expression changed as his lips protested over something. Mel's vision then switched to another desk drawer that had been opened and he saw his missing revolver nesting in it. Neil withdrew it and pointed it at Jenkins. The assistant stepped back, hands up as if to ward off a blow. Then a placating, if anxious, smile spread over his face and his mouth worked rapidly, too much so for Mel to read any words. Whatever had been said, it appeared to satisfy Neil since he lowered the revolver. back to his own room and stationary video scanners that served as his eyes. Jenkins came in and his manner made it plain to Mel that he was laboring under an intense pressure. He began puttering around the work table, gradually making his way closer to the tank housing Mel's brain. "Jenkins," said Mel, purposely extra loud. The assistant jumped nervously, dropping a piece of metal he had picked up. "Yes," he almost quavered. "Have you ever thought how it would be to be condemned to a life like mine?" "No-o-o, not especially. Why should #?" "You helped put me here, you know." "I was only following orders, I -- " "All right, all right. I know how Neil can force a person to do something. But you could help me, you know." "How's that?" suspiciously. "I'm not going to tell anyone, if that's what you're driving at." "No, I'm not trying to get you to do that. All I want is the fuse replaced on the cart. Then it would feel as if I were moving around and break up the monotony. This is worse than any solitary cell in prison could ever be." "No," refused the assistant flatly. "It wouldn't do you any good anyway. It's just -- " He stopped, hand going to his mouth as if he had said something he wasn't supposed to. "How's that, Jenkins?" reminded Mel as gently as he could. "What's supposed to happen?" "I don't know," replied Jenkins sullenly. "Put a fuse back in the cart," directed Mel. At the same time he applied pressure almost to the breaking point against the other's mind. "No!" He knifed through to the other's brain with ease and just enough power to accomplish his purpose without harming Jenkins. This was the most complete control Mel had ever attempted and Jenkins' legs moved spasmodically as though he were a puppet on strings. There was horror in his bulging eyes and sweat began breaking out on his forehead. Relentlessly he was forced towards the cart until at last it had been reached. "Jenkins," said Mel as low as he could. "Can you hear "me?" A slight twitch of the head was the only indication that he could, so Mel instructed, "There's a spare fuse near the holder, Jenkins. Take it out and place it in the primary circuit. Do that and I'll let you go. If need be, I could kill you now. The fuse, Jenkins." He relaxed his hold slightly but Jenkins made no attempt to comply. Mel continued, "Remember the dead mouse, Jenkins? I did that. The fuse, before I lose my patience." He applied more power until the other's hand began moving unsteadily towards the cart. As he withdrew slightly, from mental contact, Jenkins continued his task and in a moment Mel was able to move the cart. He had momentarily forgotten Jenkins until he became aware that the assistant had let out a yell of terror and was rushing for the door. Mel watched with amusement, knowing that he could have stopped the other with hardly a strain. Just before he reached the door, it opened and Neil appeared. Jenkins came to a halt and stared in terror at his employer. "Well," said the other impatiently. "What's been keeping you, Jenkins? Did you -- " "No, he didn't," answered Mel. At the same time he caused the cart to move sideways and swung the video scanner until it was staring directly at Neil. "Well," said the latter accusingly, switching his gaze to the terrified Jenkins. "So this is how you follow out orders." "He made me do it, boss. He made me," babbled Jenkins as Neil, face set with determination, drew his revolver from a pocket. Before the astounded Mel could do more than gaze incredulously, there were two sharp cracks and Jenkins slowly placed his arms around his stomach and rocked back and forth in agony, before toppling over to the floor to lie motionless. "Now you," said Neil, swinging his revolver towards Mel's tank. Mel frantically stabbed at his partner's mind but could feel no pressure. Another shot rang out and he felt a numbing pressure seemingly from every direction that could only mean it was against his physical brain itself. The shock forced him to use every bit of power he possessed to keep conscious. Neil had lowered the revolver a trifle and was saying in a superior tone, "Whatever you did to Jenkins, it's only hastened the inevitable, if that makes you feel any better. I'd have had to get rid of him too, once you were disposed of." He began raising the revolver again and the dazed Mel instinctively relayed power to the cart. The eye had been pointing directly at Neil and the only sound that indicated the energy gun had been set off was a slight hiss. The effect on Neil was not only instantaneous but horrible to see. His body appeared to swell until he looked bloated, then disintegrated. weak and hastily brought the cart over to examine the damage the one shot had done to him. Almost fearfully he scanned himself and saw, with relief, that the shot had penetrated the tank and was letting the life-giving liquid escape onto the floor. A quick glance into the tank showed that the lead pellet had missed his brain but the pressure on the Equid had caused him the initial pain. He directed the cart over to the work bench and brought back a tapered piece of wood. The arm placed it into the hole and then applied pressure until the trickle had stopped. It would do until he could effect a permanent patch. He began to feel stronger almost immediately and knew that the automatic features of his metal "body" were renewing the liquid at top speed. Using the cart, he first checked the supply of chemicals, fed as needed into the tank, and saw that there was a sufficient quantity to last him for at least a month. He thanked the good fortune that had allowed Jenkins to put the cart into operation before it was too late. Without it, his end would have been as certain as if Neil had been His first task was to construct several more carts, each complete with video scanner. One of them was larger than the other. It's first task was to dispose of the two putrifying bodies. Working almost # hours a day, he hooked an intercommunications system to every room of the underground lab and directly into his system. Even the telephone was connected to it so that, if necessary, he could answer it or make a call. The day finally arrived when there was no more he could do. The entire lab was almost like a steel and concrete body, so thoroughly had its every function been integrated as part of his brain. The decision he had been almost frantically avoiding could no longer be put aside, fie had approximately a week in which to decide. It would be simple to call the police and in turn let them notify the various scientists as to his position. He dreaded the thought of the circus that the lab would become. Erstwhile friends would troop in to look at him with morbid curiosity. Then when his potential became known, tasks would be assigned. There was a definite possibility that he would be moved, even at the danger of injury to himself. Countless thousands would demand it and their will would be obeyed unless the curtain of national security could be drawn across him. One day was spent in contacting the animals outside the lab and revelling in flight for awhile. Then he sped through the countryside, first with a coyote, then with a deer. There was a possibility that if the scientists moved him, his new tank would be shielded so that it would be impossible to enjoy himself as he now was. All in the name of science of course. On the other hand, if it were possible to have all supplies delivered to a nearby point where he could pick them up, he could continue his present method of existence. His mind jumped eagerly from problem to problem which he could undoubtedly solve for the benefit of mankind. The present patents in the partnership's name would bring enough money indefinately to pursue them since much could be done by pure thought. There was the survival phase first. He would devise an electronic blanketing ray that would dampen all atomic explosions. Then he could turn to the health of people all over the world, wipe out diseases. All this would depend, of course on his being able to remain undisturbed and that might tax his powers to their utmost. He wondered if it would be worth the efTort. Finally he had less than three days left, which narrowed the safety margin to the lowest point he cared to think about. He opened the telephone circuit and heard the operator say, "Number please." He hesitated briefly, then said, "The Waring Chemical Supply House, please." His order was soon placed and, afterwards, he felt almost as free and elated as when, as a boy, school had let out for the summer. The manual dexterity of the metallic fingers he had constructed would enable him to write checks with his own signature. A faint idea had even tickled his curiosity and he felt certain that he could grow cells within a couple of weeks. From there, he could work on a body for himself, one even more efficient than the old one Neil had destroyed. A human in the lab at that moment would have been startled. As near possible as it was for any wheeled vehicle to do so, he had several carts almost doing a jig in the main office. His new life had just begun. #-c, #-g, #-j, #-h, #-i, #-d, #-b, #-e, #-a, #-f. If you ever get to drinking beer in your favorite saloon and meet a scared little guy who wants to buy you the joint , supply you with fur coats and dolls and run you for Qongress -- listen well! That is, if you really want the joint, the fur coats, the dolls and a seat in Congress. Just ask Mike Murphy... probability By Louis Trimble Illustration by Ed Emsh comes in I'm new on the job. He looks around as if he's scared a prohibition agent will pop out of the walls and bite him. Then he gets up his nerve and sidles to the bar. His voice is as thin as the rest of him. "Glass of beer." I draw. He drinks and pays and goes out. That keeps on, Monday through Friday at five-ten p.m., year in and year out. He slips in, peers around, has his beer, and pops out. Even in '#, when we become legitimate, he acts the same way -- scared of his shadow. Except he isn't big enough to have a shadow. During the war, when we're rationed, I save him his daily glass. He never fails to come in except for two weeks every summer when he's on vacation. From # to # he drinks one daily beer. In thirty-one years, he and I grow older together, and after the first ten he talks a little so that over a period of time I manage to learn something about him. That first day he'd come in, he was on his first job out of college. Well, so was I, only I went to bartending school to learn how to mix prohibition liquor. But even so, it gave us something in common, and when he learned we had started life together -- as he put it -- he talked a little more. His name is Pettis. Six months after I learn that, I get his first name. It's Rabelais, and I could see why he doesn't like it. But when he breaks down and tells me, he gets real bold and says: "And what's yours, my male Hebe?" "Mike Murphy." "Naturally," he said. He laughs. It is the only time I hear him laugh in thirty-one years. I can't see anything funny. He is a draftsman for those old skinflints Gartner and Dillson. When they die, their sons take over and are even worse. In the depression, Pettis gets a little shabby but he always has the price of a glass of beer. In '# he's at the same desk and doing the same job he started on in '#. In '# he gets married. He tells me so. Tasting his beer, he says, "I'll be married this time tomorrow." I often wonder what his wife looks like but I never see her. Not even when it gets decent for ladies to come in, she never shows. Marriage doesn't seem to change him; he never looks happier or less shabby or less browbeat. In '# I heard his first complaint. By then we're both getting into our forties and, what with his lack of size and caved-in chest and my insides all busted up from preWorld War I football, the army doesn't want us. So he never misses a day except on his vacation. He says, "I can't get raw materials." About three months later, I understand what he means when he says, "My hobby is inventing." In '# I ask him, "What do you invent?" It takes him two years to decide to tell me. By now we are pretty good pals. He never tells anyone else that I know of. Pie says, "I invent machines. Super machines." In '# he says, "But they don't work. Someday... A ND IN '#, on the day of our thirty-first anniversary, you might say, he comes in and things are different. All different. I can feel it when he opens the door and comes in at five-o-nine instead of five-ten. There is plenty more different, too. He walks up to the bar like it's his and roars: "Two beers, Mike!" I drop a glass I'm so surprised, but I give him two beers like he wants. He gulps them both down, puts a foot on the rail and looks me straight in the eye. His eyes are a sort of washed blue. I've never noticed them before. "Beer for the house!" he yells at me. "Take it easy, Mr. Pettis," I says. "Easy, hell!" he shouts and slaps a roll as big as his hand on the bar. "And call me Rabelais, Mike. We're pals, aren't we?" "You bet," I assures him. And I mean it. Not because of the dough. That makes me sweat. I can't figure where this little guy gets such a wad. And good money, too. He sets them up three times. By now he's feeling fine. I suggest he get going before he misses the last train home. "I already missed it," he says proudly. "And I'm not going home. Let the old battle-axe really have something to complain about. Beer, Mike!" Tn a way I hate to see it, but then I figure a man has a right to let off a little steam once every thirty-one years. Even so, I get a little worried when he asks for the phone and calls up his wife. He says, "Myrtle, this Rabelais. Rabelais, your husband, you old sow." He takes a breath and says, "You're damned right I'm drunk. And I'm staying that way. Go home to your mother... Oh yes, you are. You're leaving on the #:# tomorrow and you'll eat chicken a la king on the train and fall asleep at Holt's Corner and snore all the way home. And your mother will be mad because her left fender will get dented on the way to the station." Bang! He hangs up. "Rppr Mike" "Now look, Mr. -- Rabelais -- " He ignores me. "Mike, who owns this place?" I don't, but I'd like to. I tell him who my boss is and he hunts him up in the phone book and calls him. He says, "This is Rabelais Pettis. I want to buy your Fifth Avenue Tavern. How much?... Sold!" And so help me, the boss comes down and Rabelais hauls bills from every pocket and lays it on the bar in a great big pile. Then he has the boss sign the place over to me. Me, Mike Murphy. I .figure tomorrow when he wakes up broke I'll have to give it back. But tonight I own it. I'm real proud. But I don't get to enjoy it. He says, "Mike, let's do the town." Can you refuse a guy who just gives you a thirty thousand dollar pioperty? We do the town. We do the girl shows, and he yells at all the dames and tries to date the usherettes until we finally get pitched out. We get pitched out of five before I steer him to a hash house. "Phooey," he says. "We'll go to the Buster for a steak." That's our fanciest place where the food starts at ten dollars. We have two of the biggest steaks I ever saw with champagne and stuff, and so help me, when Rabelais tries to date the floor show girls, instead of getting pitched out, we walk out with two of the cutest kids I ever hope to see. Only they're young enough to be our daughters or maybe granddaughters even. Rabelais is big hearted if not big in any other way. He says to his kid, a redhead a foot taller than he, "Do you have a fur coat?" "No, Rabelais." She learns fast that he likes the name now. "Ha," he says. "Then we'll get some." "In the summer?" I asks. "We'll make it winter," Rabelais says. "I'm tired of summer. Besides in '# there's a new bar in town and it's a pip." Now the three of us are halfway sober and we just look at each other and shrug. But Rabelais acts and talks normal enough. He calls a cab and has us hauled to an old cottage in the suburbs. He waves the cabby off with a twenty dollar bill. When we go inside, he points across the way. "I live there. This is my secret laboratory." We think he is kidding us some more because there isn't anything but dust and cobwebs in the place. But he takes us to the basement and there is a whole mess of junk lying around. There are bars and gears and wires and some stuff that doesn't make any sense at all. It has cobwebs and dust on it too. "My super machines," he says. "They don't work." The redhead looks a little as if she thinks he's nuts. But what can she do? Already he's given her a hundred dollar bill just for fun. "But," he says, leading us into another room, "this one does work." There isn't anything in the room but a big metal plate on the floor with a wooden bench on it and levers and rods in front of the bench. "Climb on," Rabelais says. We sit on the bench to humor him and he pulls one lever as far left as he can, then another a little ways, then another, and a fourth. Then he twists a rod to the right. The lights go out and a cold draft of air comes in through a window. When the lights come on the air is still cold. The girls are shivering. "Three p.m., January #, #," says Rabelais. "Let's go get fur coats." So we go out the way we came in and it's daylight. And there's snow on the ground. The cottage is the same but the street is a highway now. Rabalais hails the fanciest looking cab I ever see and we get driven to town where he buys all of us fur coats in a store I never heard of. Then we go to a dinner club that makes the Buster look like a greasy spoon. None of us can say a word. After he pays the check, Rabelais says, "I'm short of cash. Let's go to the bank." "Banks ain't open," I remind him. "Mine is," he says and makes a phone call. Pretty soon a big fancy limousine with a chauffeur drives up and we all pile in. I manage to balk long enough to buy a newspaper. Sure enough, the date is January #, #. We go to the financial section and right past my tavern. It's all lighted up and fancy looking and outside. Rabelais says, "You're making a mint, Mike." "I see," I agrees, dazed. Rabelais flicks the paper with a silly grin and tells me to look on page four. I do and there's an editorial beside a cartoon of me, pot belly and all, and it says, "Mayor Mike Murphy agrees to run for Congress... "Me?" "You," says Rabelais. "You make it, too, Mike." Before I can answer, we stop at a building lighted up. Over the door it says, "Pettis." That's all. It's his, the whole building. And it's full of offices. He shows me one where his former bosses are slaving over drafting boards. The bank part is closed but some slavics are working late as people in banks always do and we go in and Rabelais gets a wad of money and we leave. It goes on like that. I'm ashamed to say we get sort of looped and the next thing we know we're in Paris and having a fine time. Then we take another flier on his machine and it's summer. We enjoy that for a while and then try another season. It goes on that way for a couple weeks. Once we accept the fact that we're traveling in time, it's easy. But Rabelais, even when he's looped, won't take us into the past or far into the future. He just says, "We have to watch probability, Mike." I don't get the idea but it doesn't seem to matter much. We're having too good a time kicking around in the near future. Finally when we all feel ready for a Keeley cure, Rabelais takes us home. We land in the basement at the very moment we left it but with our fur coats and fancy luggage and souvenirs. Rabelais locks over all the gadgets we have and those that are too much ahead of our time, he throws away. In a taxi heading for town, I smoke my dollar cigar. I'm happy. The girls are quiet, a little sad. "It was fun," the redhead sighs. "Kicking won't seem the same." "Quit that kind of work," Rabelais says. "Go to college or something." And he hands each of them a big wad of money. Downtowm we split up, each of us going off somewhere to get the rest we need. I sleep around the clock and a little more. When I wake up I'm the owner of a tavern still, so I figure I'm to be mayor in '# and congressman in '#. It's a wonderful life for a w'hile. The only thing is that I miss Rabelais coming in at fiveten for his beer. In '# I get elected Mayor like he said. My business gets remodelled and all is swell. in my new house and I wake up in the middle of the night feeling a cold draft. When I turn over I roll onto a lump in the mattress and I know it was all a dream and I'm Mike Murphy, bartender, again. The next a.m. I pick up the paper and it's the summer of '#, the day of Rabelais and my thirty-first anniversary and I'm back at the old stand. It was a fine dream, I says, and go to work. At five-o-nine, though, I can't help looking at the clock. And sure enough, Rabelais comes in, walks up to the bar like he owns it and roars at me, "Two beers, Mike!" I can't help saying, "Look, haven't we done this before?" He grins at me. "And we may have to do it again a few times," he says. By now I know him pretty well, I think -- or maybe I dreamed I know him; I'm not sure. Anyway, I give him the two beers and wait for him to get around to telling me whatever is on his mind. He goes through the same act as before -- only I can't be sure he did go through the act or I dreamed he did. "Beer for the house," he yells. "Take it easy," I cautions. "Take it easy, Rabelais." "You never called me by my first name before, did you, Alike?" I open my mouth to remind him that he told me to back in # and then I remember it is #. That confuses me because I remember, too, that in # I was -- or maybe it's that I'm going to be -- mayor. I just close my mouth and wait. Rabelais takes his time. When the early rush clears out, he gets me off to one end of the bar and says, "Sorry to keep you waiting, Mike, but we have to do it all over again." "Then it wasn't a dream?" "No dream," he says. "But everything was going fine." "Up to a point," he says. "Up to the sixties." Then he explains the way his machine works. But all I get out of what he says is that there's a law of probability so he can't go back and shoot his grandfather when the old man is a boy or juggle stocks in '# to pay off and make him rich in '# and things like that. That is why he wouldn't let us go back into the past. He was afraid we would do something to change, history and -- bingo. And he wouldn't let us go into the future very far because up a way the atom bomb gets loose and it is awfully sad to see and dangerous besides. "That was in the sixties," he says. "Or will be in the sixties. Only I got it figured out so it won't be, Mike." It's over my head; I just keep on waiting. He explains that he made a pile of dough in the near future by betting on horse races and cleaning out a few bookies and investing his winnings in stocks he knew were going up ( and in fact they wouldn't have gone up if he hadn't looked into the future and known they would so he could go back and buy them) and anyway, he figured the exact day it would be safe to start and so he did. "Only," he says, "we made a mistake by making you mayor and then congressman. I have it figured out for you to be congressman right from the start -- in fifty-four. That gives you two extra years of seniority on Congress and so when the chips are down you have a little more pull." "Fine," I says and start to take off my apron. "The thing is," he explains, "there are a couple of lunkheads in Congress that get super-patriotic and they're the ones who cause the trouble with the bomb getting loose." He leans over the bar and looks real serious at me. "And you," he goes on, "are the one who stops them before they get started." "Me? Me, Mike Murphy?" "You," he says. "We just go on a different time track from the one we tried before. And this one ought to work." He gives me his grin. "You should see the history books about the year #. You're a real national hero, Mike." I throw my apron into a corner and roll down my sleeves. I'm ready. And it goes just like Rabelais says. I pass up the mayor's job and go straight to Congress. In my third term I get a chance to cool those two excitable characters -- cool them politically, that is, and I do. The only thing wrong is that Rabelais never lets me go into the future to read the history books that tell what a great guy I was and the things I did. So I'm never sure I'm doing the right thing. Like I tell him, how can I be sure what to do if he won't let me read about what I did? Alas, poor Halvor! He was, undoubtedly, as intelligent and capable as many of our most famous conquerors. Unfortunately, however, Halvor the Omnipotent lived in a day when people had changed -- considerably ! The Last Conperor By Morton Klass wanted to conquer the world. And who did. His name was Halvor the Omnipotent. You all know the name of course. The day of his death is commemorated yearly by the entire world. And now you are old enough to understand the reason why. When you belonged to earlier age groupings, you learned of the ancient conquerors -- Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and others who raised mighty armies and waged lions of lives. But these were conquerors of ancient times, while Halvor lived in a world very much like your own. Halvor was born almost eight hundred years ago, almost two hundred years after the Last Great War of #-# and the establishment of the New Civilization. He lived in a children's house which was probably very much like the one you are living in now. His childhood was very much like yours. With one difference. Halvor was born suffering from hemophilia. In two hundred years mankind had made tremendous strides. Microbe and virus diseases had disappeared. It was no longer possible to inherit functional disabilities. But certain things take time. With gene control still in its infancy at that time, if a child were born of mutated germ plasm, the science of eight hundred years ago could do little for him. Oh, they made things as comfortable as possible for Halvor. By the time he was three years old he had learned how to apply clotting salve to any cuts he received. What his blood was not capable of doing, science could do for him. But from some things Halvor would be eternally barred. He could never play the everyday games of the other children. He could never romp with the animals in the woods outside the children's house. And he was different from the other children. They knew it -- and he knew it. That would never happen today. First, of course, because hemophilia such as his would be removed before the baby was born, and secondly, because we know enough today to see to it that no child feels different from the rest. You mustn't sneer at the world of Halvor's day. They were learning as fast as they could, after so many thousands of years of total ignorance, but there was so much to learn, and so much to understand. And there still is. You will know more than your parents, and your children more than you. Well, Halvor was different. He studied the same things the other children did, but, because he was different, they meant different things to him. The other children learned of the horrible habits of the primitive peoples of pre-civilizational times, and they were glad -- just as you are -- that they hadn't lived in those times. Halvor was unhappy in his world, and wished he had been born in some other. The filth, the sicknesses, the hunger, pain, unfriendliness, ignorance and discomforts of barbaric days had no significance for him. His adult guides were aware of his attitudes, of course, and they reported it to the community leaders. Everyone tried to think of some way to make Halvor happy. But there was nothing anyone could do. Many people felt it was their own fault that Halvor was not satisfied with his life -- that they were still too ignorant to prevent unhappiness -- and it made them very sad. eighteenth birthday and left the children's house, the problem arose as to what he would do with his life. He was not the only misfit in his world, but the others were able to adjust. Some were unhappy because they were shorter than others, some because they were slower, some few felt -- however illogically -- that they were not as attractive as other people. Some had other physical and psychological difficulties. Most of these individuals entered space explorational activities, where, from the hot side of Mercury to the cold wastes beyond Pluto, they made their peace with life. Even today, with teleportation common throughout the galaxy, there is adventure to be had by those who desire it. Perhaps one of you will have the honor of bringing life to a hitherto uninhabitable planet! And if you should, remember to be grateful to Halvor, who made it possible. It wasn't necessary in Halvor's time -- just as it isn't now -- for anyone to have to do anything. When the joyous Coming of Age ceremony -- marking the end of his stay at the children's house -- ended in a final week of songs and dances. Halvor decided to go and live with his parents. His father and mother understood Halvor's problems quite well. They had visited him even more often than the customary four times a week, trying to reach and comfort the tortured spirit of their strange, self-centered child. They loved him, and he seemed to respond to their affection, but they admitted in later years that they were always more at ease in the presence of their other children. So, while most of Halvor's age group companions were establishing homes of their own, going off on the individual world tours which are always more exciting than the group voyages of childhood, settling down in some Higher-Learning community for further study, or in other ways finding their place in the adult world, Halvor himself moved into a room in his parents' home. He brought with him a few of his favorite microfilms, a three-dim of his particular Coming of Age ceremony, and enough clotting salve to last for quite a while. After Halvor had been living with them for almost two months, his parents, extremely troubled, went before the community leaders. They were no longer sure they were behaving properly toward him, and sought instruction. It appeared that in all the time since he had come to their house, Halvor had never once gone out with them to a nightly forest concert or an afternoon of games. He kept to his room, rereading his microfilms and occasionally ordering new ones from the community library. The librarians had noted, with some surprise, that he invariably requested fiction that dealt with the warlike experiences of people in barbaric times -- works like The Three Musketeers, Caesar's Gallic Wars, The Boy Allies, and others. He left his room only at meal times and, after eating whatever his mother or father had ordered chuted from Central Kitchens, he returned to his microfilms. Any' questions put to him were answered in monosyllables. The only time he had ever started a conversation was one evening at supper when he asked his father what he thought Hannibal of Carthage must have been like. Startled, Halvor's father said he imagined Hannibal must have been a very unhappy man. Halvor, his father reported had grimaced and turned back to his food. At no period did Halvor indicate any interest in the local atomic power plant where his father, as senior technician, spent about fifteen hours a week. Nor did he ever ask to visit the underground hydroponics garden where his mother worked. This fact particularly disturbed the community leaders because children who develop no interest in any profession while in the children's house, from birth to their Coming of Age, generally tend to follow the occupation of one or the other of their parents upon their departure. Sometimes his former groupmates would contact him on the telecom, asking if Halvor would care to join them in sonic voyage being planned, or if hr cared to attend get-togethers of those of their age group who were presently living in the community. Halvor always curtly refused. One of the girls from the group called up, explaining that she had built a small cottage on the shore of a nearby lake. She had an interesting job in Central Kitchens, working about ten hours a week, but she was lonely. Would Halvor care to come and live with her? They had not been close friends in the children's house, but she had always admired his dark, quiet attractiveness. Furthermore, she herself had been bom color blind and would therefore be able to sympathize with, and adjust to, Halvor's affliction. Halvor switched the telecom off while she was still talking. children's house -- who was present at the meeting -- heard this last item, she offered her resignation, claiming that Halvor's behaviour indicated her unfitness for her position. The community leaders, after some deliberation, refused to accept her resignation. Halvor's failure to adapt to the culture was a group responsibility, not any one individual's, they decided. They were discussing tjie advisability of calling a world meeting and submitting the problem of Halvor's unhappiness to it, when they heard the sound of someone coming up the forest path toward their meeting place. Politely, they stopped talking and waited for the person to come into view. The bushes parted, and Halvor stepped into the sunny glade. For a long moment Halvor stood motionless, arms folded, surveying the sprawled bodies of the dozen adults before him. Then, his lip curling in a grimace none of the others could understand, he began to speak in his high-pitched, determined voice. "I have come before you," Halvor said, "because, technically speaking, you are the leaders of the community in which I had the misfortune to be born. Actually, you are all quite powerless. You can order no one to do anything; you may merely suggest. You have no center of government, no appurtenances of authority. And in that sense, you really do represent something -- the abysmal depths of man's last decadence! "What one of you -- or of all latter-day mankind -- is fit to lick the boots of those brawling humans of the past who knew how to fight, to weep -- to die! Who, on this entire miserable planet, would have any idea of how to behave if some race should sweep in from the stars to enslave us? "Fortunately, I have not been overwhelmed by the enervating philosophy which suffocates the world. I am not in a class with the greats of the heroic eras, but there is no one else in the world today to do the work that must be done. I demand, for the sake of humanity's future, that you recognize me as your leader, and that you follow me in the glorious task of awakening all mankind!" There was a pause when Halvor had finished speaking. Though few present had any idea of the meaning of Halvor's words, they nodded thoughtfully, as if they had been merely listening to an outline for a proposed series of concerts. This would require discussion, but obviously not in Halvor's presence. The director of the local hydroponics garden was the first to speak. "Halvor," he asked, "is this what you require to make you happy?" Halvor frowned. "It is not a question," he said carefully, "of my happiness, but of the salvation of mankind." The director nodded, as if his query had been satisfactorily answered. A quick glance -- no more than the flicker of a troubled eyebrow -- passed between the men and women on the grass. "Halvor," said the director of the children's house, "we can't give you an answer immediately." She went on hurriedly, repressing with great difficulty her impulse to listen politely when she saw Halvor's mouth begin to open. "We realize how impatient you are to get on with the work you've outlined, but you must remember that this is a situation without precedent in our lives. We must have time to discuss it." Halvor looked up at the noon sun. "I'll be back in an hour," he announced. Turning on his heel, he strode into the forest, his thin shoulders thrown back, and his pale back held stiffly erect. The first few moments after Halvor's departure the community leaders spent soothing the grief of Halvor's parents. It was pointed out to them that they were no more responsible for Halvor's state of mind than the rest of the people of the Earth. The Chief Librarian put it most succinctly: "Let us once and for all realize that to the communal ignorance of humanity belongs the blame, and to no individual or group of individuals. Our problem now is to fit Halvor into the world, or -- at least in his eyes -- to fit the world to him!" It was on this point that the discussion proceeded. The talk was leisurely, as is the custom, but they kept within Halvor's time limit. Finally, the director of the local Central Kitchens summed things up. "Why should we not grant Halvor his wish? If a man demanded payment in ancient money for his work, or a woman requested clothes to wear, would we not try to satisfy them? Halvor longs for the meaningless trappings of a past that seems more pleasant to him than his own present. Very well. Surely our society is flexible enough to encompass an individual who wishes to call himself world leader. We should notify the other communities, of course, but I think that all will agree with our decision to grant Halvor his desire." No one dissented, and the Communications Director announced that he would contact the rest of the world that very night. Just before Halvor re-entered the glade, the Health Director commented, frowning, "Still, I wish that the old sciences of mental disorders had not been so thoroughly neglected in the past century." Turning to the Chief Librarian, he continued, "I'd appreciate all the books on the subject you can round up..." When Halvor stood before them. waiting impassively, but with burning eyes, the director of the power plant rose to his feet. He remembered dimly from his childhood readings that among some ancient peoples this was considered a sign of respect. "We're going to grant your request, Halvor," the director told him solemnly. "In our eyes, henceforth, you are to be considered the -- ruler, is it? -- of the world, and are to be given all honors accruing to that position. Furthermore, we'll notify the rest of the world of our decision and the reasons for it. There will be community meetings, here and in all other settlements on the globe, but I am quite sure they'll all end as ours did today. Do you have any other requests to make?" Halvor stared at the director and. for a moment, all present could see how young and defenceless Halvor was. Then his jaw hardened and his voice, when he answered, was without emotion. "I will have many instructions for you in a few days -- be sure of that. At the moment, let me congratulate you for showing an amount of wisdom I did not think humans capable of in this degenerate age. And from now on, you are to address me as 'Your Magnificence' and you are to refer to me as, 'Halvor the Omnipotent'!" plant was correct, of course. Meetings were held all over the world. For days afterward, Halvor's novel request was the subject of conversation at breakfast tables, sports fields, laboratories, concerts, and wherever else people gathered. Community decisions accumulated slowly. But at the end of a week it was clear that the people of Earth were in agreement. Halvor the Omnipotent was the accepted ruler of all humanity. His first demands were modest. He wanted a tight-fitting suit of black, a swirling cape, a plumed helmet, and knee-length leather boots. You will find illustrations of these items -- or similar ones -- in your copy of Humanity Covers Himself: From Animal Skins to Coal Derivatives. The clothes were manufactured for him by one of the winterweather textile factories who, as you know, also make costumes for drama groups. They exercised considerable ingenuity, making garments sturdy enough to protect the wearer from the minor cuts and bruises that were so dangerous. Halvor also demanded, and received, a grav-car for his personal use. He requested that it be painted black and that the figure of a golden sword be drawn on the side, near the door. In barbaric days, symbols were used to represent groupings of people, popular philosophies and abstract ideas. A few of them still remain with us. You are probably all familiar with the mathematical symbol for infinity. When all of these demands had been met, Halvor donned his new coverings and, with an adequate supply of clotting salve, set out in his grav-car for what he termed his "triumphal tour of his worldly domains." All went well for Halvor in the beginning. In whatever part of the world Halvor landed, large crowds gathered to greet him. Usually, he preferred to come down on some low hilltop surrounded by flat, treeless meadowland. Word of his arrival would spread, as Halvor stood erect and unsmiling -- arms folded, legs outspread -- beside his black gravcar. The local children's houses would empty; kitchens, syntheticmeat mills, power plants, hydroponic gardens, higher-learning centers, libraries, play groups -- all would shut down, or be maintained by a bare skeleton crew, as men, women and children flocked to see the ruler of the world. It was not merely politeness that drew them, nor their natural desire to make Halvor happy, but also a certain curiosity about this young man who had announced his preference for barbarism in such a marked manner. His odd garb intrigued them, and his speeches, on these occasions, were always entertaining. When it was learned that Halvor enjoyed delivering barbarically heroic -- if intellectually quite meaningless -- lectures, many individuals delved into ancient history, memorizing the proper crowd-responses. This was done at first simply to please Halvor, but soon many individuals found the competition of trying to discover the most interesting or obscure crowdresponse as amusing as some find poetry-writing contests or feats of athletic skill. Many of Halvor's speeches were recorded, of course, and have been of great interest to later students. Here is a transcript of one of the shorter, but typical, ones: "Fellow humans! Worthy subjects! (said Halvor) Gazing out upon your humble, earnest faces, I take heart. Humanity is not lost. There is yet hope that I may lead you back to the glorious days of manly strife and noble suffering!" "Vive le roil " "For suffering is ennobling. I know you have been taught to avoid pain and hardship, to protect others, that the proper aim of mankind is to turn the earth into the green, insipid parkland that it is. A place where all may eat, all may love, study, play, work, sleep -- with never a fear for tomorrow! I ask you -- are we humans or butterflies?" "Hoo-raw!" "Remember the Maine!' # "See what has happened to the world -- what I am saving you from. Two hundred years ago, mankind counting the settlers on the other planets, there are barely seven hunthose foul teachings -- which I in my might am destroying -- will snivel that so-called intelligent limiting of the population has helped create comfort and plenty for all! I say, Humanity is dying out!" "Eee-ya-hooo!" "If I had not come along, in a bare century mankind would have gone the way of the dinosaur! In one fifty-year period, before the rise of our decadent, slothful culture, a thousand weapons were invented ; tremendous edifices -- monuments to the mightiness of man -- towered in the sky. We have invented no weapons. In the short space of two hundreds years, we have forgotten how to use the old ones! We grovel in tiny huts set in the wilderness not, as you are taught to believe, because the simple life is healthier and pleasanter, but because we lack the ability to build cities!" "For king and country, laddie!" "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!" "A moi, A moi!" "We must forget the vicious concept of 'labor for the sake of greater leisure'. So much has been left undone in the age of idleness, now happily past, that a time of strenuous, back-breaking endeavor is in store for all of us. But it will be well worth it, my people! For in this time to come -- " "Howdah!" "Vino amo da!" "For in this time to come, mankind shall yet find himself! We shall rebuild the cities, taller and more glorious than before! And not only on Earth, but on every planet in the system!" "Smrt fasisma!" "The factories will rise once more. We shall produce not just enough for our needs, but enough to trade for all the wealth of the galaxy. And we will build' the ships that will take us there in overwhelming force! And we shall build weapons, not only to protect ourselves against enemy races, but to build an empire in the stars! For it is written in the old books that the very stars are our heritage!" "Hola!" "Fifty-four forty or fight!" "And we shall breed children. Not just enough to populate the Earth and the planets around our sun, but enough to crowd the cosmos! Strong, healthy, determined young men and women, fearless, and ready to take their rightful place in space. And mankind triumphant, under my leadership, shall rise to new heights of nobility, so that future generations shall look back on us, not with shame, but with pride and envy!" "Kinder, kuche, kirche!" "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" "Y'chi hedad, hedad, hedad!" "Three rousers for the Iron Duke!" "Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!" Then, of course, after the speech was over, everyone would gaily wave good-by to Halvor, and go home to supper. Many would call out to Halvor to be sure to come their way again, for his speeches made interesting topics of conversation at forest festivals, and were certainly an amusing break in the normal routine of life. continued around the world, making such speeches, often at the rate of three or four a day. Then, suddenly, he returned home. He did not visit his parents or any of his old friends, but brought his grav-car down outside the modest cottage of the Communications Director. He strode into the house and demanded brusquely that all the community leaders be summoned at once. Concerned, the director set out for their homes. The director's wife offered Halvor refreshments, but he refused curtly. She reported later that, until the arrival of the leaders, Halvor spent his time pacing restlessly up and down, clenching his fists, slapping his thigh, and muttering thickly under his breath. Naturally, since he was not speaking to her, she tried not to listen, but she could not avoid overhearing a few words. They were disconnected, consisting mostly of phrases like: "Hopeless, hopeless... no contact possible... can't make them understand... have to show..." When the community leaders finally arrived, Halvor avoided all the usual formalities of greeting, and came immediately to the point. "I have decided," announced Halvor, "that humanity is more enfeebled than even I had thought. Words -- exhortations -- are not enough. Something much more graphic is required, both to point out the world the significance of my position, and the differences between this decadent society and heroic ones of the past. I want a palace. I shall submit specifications, and you people will construct it as soon as possible." The meeting that followed Halvor's request was one of the stormiest in the community's history. Twice, speakers were interrupted before they had finished and, even after a decision had been agreed upon, the Health Director confessed reluctantly that he was not satisfied that it was the best possible decision. But Halvor was to have his palace. The major objection put forth by the Health Director was that every attempt to satisfy Halvor, by agreeing to his demands, resulted only in his being more unhappy. Perhaps, the director suggested, a way might yet be found to integrate Halvor into the existing world, rather than to allow him to construct an unbelievable dream-world. However, the meeting refused to even consider the idea of not granting an individual his desires, whatever form they took. And the statement of the Construction Director that he and his group were looking forward to the problems of Ilalvor's palace with some interest clinched the matter. Halvor's specifications, when submitted, were not too complete. They consisted mostly of illustrations from children's microfilms. Some, in fact, even contained features that were mutally exclusive. The construction group promised to build something as close as possible to Halvor's desires, and in two months the palace was completed. For those two months, Halvor decided against living with his parents and moved into a small cottage which lay alone in a somewhat unattractive part of the local forest. The cottage itself was rather small, having been constructed for a family unit of two, and in Halvor's time the three or four unit family was becoming popular, with even an extra room or two for children who might want to come and stay a while with their parents. into his new palace was marked by a gala festival. People came from all over the world to participate in the event, and Halvor made a long speech. Again, all went well for a short time. Halvor stayed in his palace, issuing proclamations. He was rarely lonely. Visitors arrived every day, some to see Halvor, many to view his anachronistic home. The palace still exists, of course, and many of you may have visited it. It is maintained as a memorial of humanity's gratitude to Halvor. The major difficulty arose when Halvor demanded that all who visit him be dressed in special garments of his own design. Most people shrugged and did as he requested. A few, however, commented reasonably that they found clothes unpleasant and uncomfortable and refused to wear them. In the second year of Halvor's residence in his palace, matters came to a head. The incident occurred during one of the Health Director's weekly visits. For many months, this man had been trying to gain Halvor's confidence. To some degree, he did succeed. Certainly, Halvor spoke more freely in his presence than in that of any other person. The Health Director afterwards related that he found the youthful ruler of the world sitting alone in his throne room, apparently much distressed. Falling to one knee, in accordance with Halvor's palace protocol, the Health Director asked, "Your Omnipotence, are you unwell?" Halvor made a gesture of disgust. "Why doesn't the world listen to me?" he demanded angrily, sitting upright on his throne. The Health Director climbed to his feet and considered the question. For a moment, he admitted later, he was tempted to lie. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, lying is the giving of incorrect information, knowingly and purposely. The Director was afraid the truth might be painful to Halvor. But telling lies, while a frequent practice in barbaric times, is an extremely difficult thing for us to do. It goes against the basic fabric of our culture. Even back in the days of Halvor, lying was already considered an uncomfortable, irrational act, and the Health Director could not bring himself to do it. "They listen. Your Omnipotence," he said hesitantly, "but they'll never change to suit your ideas." "Why!" "Because they're happy. Man has personal, individual peace and security, and that's what he wants -- all he ever wanted." "But he's dead!" Halvor groaned. "Can't you see it? The aimless, uneventful -- meaningless -- pattern of life in the civilization!" The Health Director shook his head. "What has meaning for a man, Your Omnipotence? Where is this -- purpose -- you talk of, inscribed? A man is born, lives his years, and dies. As a baby, he has only two basic needs -- food, and affection. And through the rest of his life he searches continually for those same two things. Security, and a sense of fellowship with the people around him. No culture ever existed where the ordinary people did not cooperate in some way for the common good and join together in some communal recreation." Halvor began to pace the floor. "And no community ever existed without warriors, without strife of some sort!" "Many did -- " "Isolated, tiny groups," Halvor said, "which were wiped out as soon as they were contacted by more virile people!" "Yes," the Health Director agreed. "You're right. Many of them were. But even in barbaric times few really believed that a man proved your arguments were better than his. "You talk of strife," he went on. "Insecure people, striking out in fear, destroying other individuals because they didn't know hew to live with them. Poor, sick folk. In their way they wanted peace and security too..." "Suppose we're invaded by beings from space?" Halvor demanded. "Earth wouldn't know how to fight!" "Suppose we're not attacked?" The Health Director smiled. "Wouldn't it be foolish to make an armed camp of the planet, just to ward off some unlikely invasion? Besides, happiness never killed a man, or destroyed his spirit. History has shown that the greatest fighters were always those who were fighting to protect their homes -- and a way of life that gave them personal happiness and security. And if happiness won't weaken an individual, why should it weaken a group of individuals -- or the whole human race?" Halvor was beginning to show signs of great discomfort, but the Health Director could see no way to rechannel the conversation. "A sense of accomplishment," Halvor said thickly. "Even an individual needs it. Life is dull!" "Dull? Isn't it just as exciting to win a foot race as a duel? Youth seeks adventure, admittedly. Well, they can hike through the Matto Grosso, or live in an igloo for a year, hunting seals. Or prospect for uranium on Ganymede. And adults lead full, rich lives, contributing part of their time to the welfare of the community, and the rest of it to their own private pursuits. "Accomplishment?" he went on. "Why don't you really study the accomplishments of your own time, Halvor -- I mean, Your Omnipotence? Some of the students from our Higher Learning center will be giving a series of lectures next week. Why not attend? And there will be a poetry contest in two weeks -- which reminds me! Halvor, your speeches indicate you have a feeling for words. Why not enter the poetry contest yourself? I'm sure you could compete wflth the best -- " Halvor interrupted him, crying in a loud, unfamiliar voice, "Remove this man and execute him at once!" It was a little while before he made it clear that what he wanted was to have the man forcibly deprived of life. The Health Director left the palace and, soon after, Halvor asked whether his request had been carried out. When an attempt was made to explain why such a request was hardly feasible, Halvor became violently unhappy and attempted to insert a table knife into one of the people present. It took three men to remove the knife from his hand. that day. The situation was becoming quite serious. If Halvor could behave that irrationally once, he might very well do it again. Waving a sharp implement as carelessly as he had, he might cut himself very badly one day, and even the best clotting salves might not be able to save him. The Health Director told of his visit and declared Halvor to be insane, an archaic term meaning that he had completely lost contact with reality, and could no longer be depended upon to take care of himself. The final decision was to permit Halvor to live as he had in his palace, to try to satisfy all of his wishes that did not badly interfere with the lives of other people, and to see to it that someone was near him at all times. All sharp things were removed from the palace, of course. The builders, aware of Halvor's infirmities, had constructed the palace without any acute edges anywhere which might cut Halvor's skin and cause him to bleed. For five more years Halvor lived this way, attempting occasionally to take either his own or someone else's life. In the fifth year, however, Halvor found himself momentarily alone, and threw himself from the imitation stone staircase, breaking his neck and dying immediately. That was the day, seven hundred and sixty-five years ago, when the first teleport materialized on Earth, bearing delegates from the Galactic Federation, and an invitation for Earth to join the other civilized peoples of the galaxy. You know that date, of course. What you may not have known till now was that the Federation had been observing us for some time, weighing our new civilization against our barbaric past. It was Earth's treatment of Halvor that decided them. Humanity was at last fully mature. In the excitement of the day, people forgot about Halvor, and when at last he was remembered it was too late. Halvor the Omnipotent, ruler of Earth, and the unknowing bearer of the galactic membership to his planet -- was dead. There was a long period of mourning. a bottle ever produced the likes of a hotel such as the Mahoney-Plaza!... Don't miss the chortles and laughs in Forsyte's Retreat , by Winston Marks, in the May issue -- out March #th! New Transistors in the transistor family. The tiny pea-sized germanium device that can amplify radio waves, music and speech has a brand new set of twin brothers for company. These newcomers, "tetrodes" and "pentodes" by name, are different from big brother only in that they have three and four wires respectively running from the germanium nugget instead of the two which the triode transistor has. This means the new transistors can do the work of two, and in some instances three, of the older variety, and that television sets of the future may be fantastically small as a result. These new twins will simplify electronic circuits and will probably find their first jobs in electronic computers. Since a transistor performance can't be standardized, and one tetrode or pentode can't be substituted for another without modifying the whole circuit they can't as yet be used in anything but a non-critical circuit such as the sort found in hearing aids. Radar circuits and many others are too complicated to be modified each time a new transistor needs to be installed, but future refinements of these miraculous little gadgets may make them suitable for most of the jobs now handled by the more cumbersome vacuum tube. Robot Car drop off to sleep and let your robot car do the job of driving for you. A model of this fool-proof car of the future has already been made and is now being tested by scientists at the Radio Corporation of America. This model robot car is guided by a wire which would be buried under the roadbed of a super highway. The wire sets up a magnetic field which is picked up by two coils placed on either side of the model car. If one of the (toils gets a stronger signal than its mate it is a warning that the car has swerved from its course and electronic steering equipment immediately guides the car back on its proper course. Signals coming back along the wire from a vehicle or obstruction ahead are passed to the steering mechanism and so prevent collisions and accidents. The five-foot model robot car can stop, start, steer itself along the road and, when necessary, pass another robot vehicle. The passing is accomplished by diagonal wires which shunt the car into the passing lane and then back to the right side of the road again all by way of the signals sent to the steering gear. Dr. V. K. Zworykin, head of the project, says there won't be any robot cars on the market in the very near future, but that devices to cope with bad weather steering and collision prevention are really just around the corner and should annually save thousands of lives. Spotlight into the Brain leled in the history of science, has been developed in study of the human brain. By the use of moist electrodes, fastened to the scalp and carrying no current except the tiny impulses emitted by the brain itself, a young British physiologist has been able to throw a spotlight deep into the human brain. The impulses are recorded on sensitive instruments which control a light flashing into the subject's eyes in a rhythm similar to the one pulsating from the brain. Another instrument called the toposcope which samples the electrical conditions in twenty or more areas of the brain and reproduces them in the changing glow of electronic tubes arranged in the same pattern as the brain areas, is the particular wonder child of this very new science. For example, a resting brain will show up dark at the front, but with rhythmic flickers of light at the back. An angry brain shows dim flickerings everywhere, while a brain stimulated by lights flashing into the subjects eyes Certain waves known as alpha, theta, and delta rhythms have been discovered in this way, each with its own stimulant. Alphas are pattern-seeking, thetas are indications of bad temper, and deltas are the deadeners of the conscious mind. These studies reveal not only new knowledge about the brain, but personality types and human relations as well. Although it is new as a science, a start has been made, and it is already helping doctors to understand mental illnesses. Crystals with Memory  -- ' half inch square with a memory that some humans might envy, are one of the newest developments of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. These flat crystals, a few thousandths of an inch thick, have a unique ability to remember vast amounts of information for an indefinite period of time. Each one of these ferroelectric crystals can store approximately two hundred and fifty bits of memory and answer questions put to it later by an automatic machine. Grown artificially from the chemical barium titanate, these flat little crystals receive tiny charges of electricity which represent the answers to questions the machine might ask. A plus charge is given for a yes answer and a negative charge for a no. Although the telephone dialling systems now in use have remembering devices, they require for more space than an equivalent system using barium titanate crystals would need. Because of this, telephone engineers believe that these artificially-grown crystals have a vast significance in the ever expanding Bell system, and should prove of inestimable value in the saving of space -- among other possibilities forseen as a use for this new "crystal with a memory". even luxuriously, deep in the woods and be as convenient to urban business as they are today commuting from the suburbs. This private home is not as independent as the multiple desert dwelling, but with the same type of electronic communications, helicopter and surface travel it is within easy emergency reach of all facilities in cities up to # miles distant. (Drawings by Ed Valigursky.) MOON SHUTTLE SHIPS -- The Moon is an easy target once a space station, outside the Earth's gravitational pull, is completed. These "shuttle" ships, spherical in shape and with enormous freight capacities, are built on the space station and launched from there. The shuttle above is departing for the Moon, loaded to capacity with supplies. The ship operates in a vacuum therefore fins are functional only as mounts and fuel tanks for control rockets, and for landing gear. Now turn to inside back cover. Ail Stories New and Complete Cover by Ed Valigursky: Refueling in Space  by Ed Valigursky  IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale April #th watch for in the reading of science fiction is politics. Not that the subject of political science is delved into too deeply, but we catch -- quite frequently as part of a background or occasionally as a solid premise -- glimpses into rather thoughtful projections of applied government. Sometimes it is the leadership of a surviving tribe dug deep into the mountains; often it is relative to the affairs of life in a city-state not too unlike those of the ancient Greeks ; or it might concern an endless galactic empire. And it is encouraging to see, in the majority of stories we've published, that the structure is rather logically worked out -- that in the conception of civilized life hundreds or thousands of years from now, political science is given some emphasis. Whether we agree with the author's version or not is beside the point. What is to the point is that the average civilian isn't giving half as much thought to the government by which we live today. Quite recently, newspapers, at least around this neck of the woods, were full of front-page stories concerning politics, personalities and parties which tended to lead the average individual to suspect something slightly stinky in the ole wood pile. Somebody was calling somebody else an old so-and-so and skeletons were dug out of closets and dusted off. Mud pies were tossed and antecedents were questioned. It was like a string of Chinese firecrackers going off in a three-ring circus. The citizenry was reading the newspapers like mad. But when the nice juicy copy died out, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public seemed to forget about the political hoopla and turned to "something else more important". Which is unfortunate. There ain't much of anything else that's more important. Politics (to repeat) is the science of government, and we live under government. We live under a government that affects our earnings, our economics, our homes and personal lives, our education, our health, our everything -- including that beautiful word "freedom". So it seems to me that this is a pretty good argument that politics is mighty important to all of us. by constant vigilance on the part of everyone. Our democratic form of government is run (supposedly so) by people elected to office. They are human, and therefore prone to all the frailties of human nature, and the only way to keep these duly elected servants walking the straight and narrow in the public behalf is by watching each and every one all the time. Today's inconceivable speed of communications and transportation has brought the peoples of the world closer and closer together. The globe we live on, instead of once-upon-a-time isolated villages and cities and nations, is now a conglomerate mass of international intercourse -- and intrigue. To maintain the health and identity of America -- that is, if we like living as we do today -- a study and observation of the men we elect to guide us through this maelstrom is an absolute must. Through this intermingling of the peoples of all nations, malcontents creep in. Either they want a handout or they want to wreck something beautiful and strong because they themselves haven't got it. So we have another good reason for being vitally interested in politics -- that of survival! Not only does this apply to the national scene but all the w r ay down to the hot stove in the country store, from the highest office in the land to the local dog-catcher. Suppose our present system of government is susceptible to too many foibles and incapabilities, how would the science fiction writer alert the populace and strengthen the sinews of government? Would it be an immediate issuance of white papers, blue papers, black papers and a flock of other papers the colors of the rainbow? Would it be a mud campaign or a series of court trials? Or would it be a carefully planned project taking generations to build and to perfect? My bet would be on the latter. The science fiction writer, aiming at a strong, healthy, democratic form of government, would start with the grooming of young men, of high school and college age, for local, state or national government. Government is a vast business, so these young men would be trained as thoroughly as are doctors, lawyers, bankers, engineers, scientists, etc. Each man would have to pass the "board" and serve his apprenticeship before being allowed to run for public office. Then, if elected, he would know what he was stepping into. Of course, he would have to get adjusted, but he would have the foundation and the proven loyalty to work at his task honestly aid in behalf of his own nation. in our diplomatic service -- why not a trained man for your local aiderman, councilman and mayor, or for your state legislature, or for the administrative and legislative branches of our national government. You don't find a good-time, jack-of-all-trades Charlie stepping into the trust department of a bank to handle the funds and estates of its customers -- do you? No, and the science fiction writer, using the America of today as his background, would never allow a greasy notebook filled with the names of hangers-on and "contacts" to qualify a man for public office -- not unless his story called for an unhappy ending. -- jlq The Earth was green and quiet. Nature had survived Man, and Man had survived himself. Then , one day , the great silvery ships broke the thousand-year-lost inheritance back to Earth... By Walter Miller, Jr. Illustrated by Kelly Freas " Why does your br'and sae drop wi' blude, Edward, Edivard? Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude, And why sae sad gang ye, O?" "O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude, M it her, mither; O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude, And I had nae mair but he, O." arose in the west at twilight -- gleaming slivers that reflected the dying sun as they lanced across the darkling heavens. A majestic fleet of squadrons in double-vees, groups in staggered echelon, they crossed the sky like gleaming geese, and the children of Earth came out of their whispering gardens to gape at the splendor that marched above them. There was fear, for no vessel out of space had crossed the skies of Earth for countless generations, and the children of the planet had forgotten. The only memories that lingered were in the memnoscripts, and in the unconscious kulturverlaengerung, of the people. Because of the latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in the language to name them. The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered in awed voices under the elms... The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the judging! Repent, repent... The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're lost! We've got to run for the hills!" The voice of the child: "See the pretty birdlights? See? See?" And a voice of wisdom in the councils of the clans: "The sons of men -- they've come home from the Star Exodus. Our brothers." The slivers of light, wave upon wave, crept into the eclipse shadow as the twilight deepened and the stars stung through the blackening shell of sky. When the moon rose, the people watched again as the silhouette of a black double-vee of darts slipped across the lunar disk. Beneath the ground, in response to the return of the ships, ancient mechanisms whirred to life, and the tech guilds hurried to tend them. On Earth, there was a suspenseful night, pregnant with the dissimilar twins of hope and fear, laden with awe, hushed with the expectancy of twenty thousand years. The stargoers -- they had come home. " Kulturverlaengerung " grunted the tense young man in the toga of an Analyst. He stood at one end of the desk, slightly flushed, staring down at the haughty wing leader who watched him icily from a seat at the other end. He said it again, too distinctly, as if the word were a club to hurl at the wingsman. " Kulturverlaengerung , that's why!" "I heard you the first time, Meikl," the officer snapped. "Watch your tongue and your tone!" A brief hush in the cabin as hostility flowed between them. There was only the hiss of air from the ventilators, and the low whine of the flagship's drive units somewhere below. The erect and elderly gentleman who sat behind the desk cleared his throat politely. "Have you any further clarifications to make, Meikl?" he asked. "It should be clear enough to all of you," the analyst retorted hotly. He jerked his head toward the misty crescent of Earth on the viewing screen that supplied most of the light in the small cabin. "You can see what they are, what they've become. And you know what we are." The two wingsmen bristled slightly at the edge of contempt in the analyst's voice. The elderly gentlemen behind the desk remained impassive, expressionless. The analyst leaned forward with a slow accusing glance that swept the faces of the three officers, then centered on his antagonist at the other end of the desk. "You want to infect them, Thaiile?" he demanded. The wingsman darkened. His fist exploded on the desktop. "Meikl, you're in contempt! Restrict yourself to answering questions!" "Yes, sir." "There will be no further breaches of military etiquette during the continuance of this conference," the elderly gentleman announced icily, thus seizing the situation. After a moment's silence, he turned to the analyst again. "We've got to refuel," he said flatly. "In order to refuel, we must land." "Yes, sir. But why not on Mars? We can develop our own facilities for producing fuel. Why must it be Earth?" "Because there will be some existing facilities on Earth, even though they're out of space. The job would take five years on Mars." The analyst lowered his eyes, shook his head wearily. "I'm thinkthey worth considering, sir?" "I've got to consider the men in my command, Meikl. They've been through hell. We all have." "The hell was our own making, baron." "Meikl!" "Sorry, sir." Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but I've read that kulturverlaengerung reaches a threshhold of extinction after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation." "Only in laboratory cultures, sir," sighed the analyst. "Under rigid control to make certain there's no restimulant. In practice, in a planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation, unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger linkage never really dies out -- although, it can stay recessive and unconscious." "That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't we?" "Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst Meikl has sensitivities." The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. "Sir, I was summoned here to offer my opinions about landing on Earth. You asked about possible cultural dangers. I've told you." "You discussed the danger to earthlings." "Yes, sir." "I meant 'danger' to the personnel of this fleet -- to their esprit, their indoctrination, their groupefficiency. I take it you see none." "On the contrary, I see several," said the analyst, coming slowly to his feet, eyes flashing and darting among them. "Where were you born, Wingman?" he asked the officer at the oppisite end of the desk. "Lichter Six, Satellite," the officer grunted after a moment of irritable silence. "And you?" "Omega Thrush," said the other wingsman. All knew without asking that the baron was born in space, his birthplace one of the planetoid citystates of the Michea Dwarf. Meikl looked around at them, then ripped up his own sleeve, unsheathed his rank-dagger, and pricked his forearm with the needle point. A red droplet appeared, and he wiped at it with a forefinger. "It's common stuff, gentlemen. We've shed a lot of it. And each of us is a walking sackful of it." He paused, then turned to touch the point of his dagger to the viewer, where it left a tiny red trace on the glass, on the bright crescent of Earth, mist-shrouded, chastely wheeling her nights into days. "It came from there," he hissed. "She's your womb, gentlemen. Are you going back?" "Are you an analyst or a dramatist, Meikl?" the baron asked sharply, hoping to relieve the sudden chill in the room. "This becomes silly." "If you land on her," Meikl promised ominously, "you'll go away with a fleet full of hate." Meikl's arm dropped to his side. He sheathed his dagger. "Is my presence at this meeting still imperative, sir?" he asked the baron. "Have you anything else to say?" "Yes -- don't land on Earth." "That's a repetition. No further reasons? -- in terms of danger to ourselves?" The analyst paused. "I can think of nothing worse that could happen to us," he said slowly, "than just being what we already are." He snapped his heels formally, bowed to the baron, and stalked out of the cabin. "I suggest," said a wingsman, "that we speak to Frewek about tightening up the discipline in the Intelligence section. That man was in open contempt, Baron." "But he was also probably right," sighed the graying officer and nobleman. "Sir -- !" "Don't worry, Wingsman, there's nothing else to do. We'll have to land. Make preparations, both of you -- and try to make contact with surface. I'll dictate the message." When the wingsmen left, it was settled. The baron arose with a sigh and went to peer morosely at the view of Earth below. Very delicately, he wiped the tiny trace of blood from the glass. She was a beautiful world, this Earth. She had spawned them all, as Meikl said -- but for this, the baron could feel only bitterness toward her. But what of her inhabitants? I'm past feeling anything for them, he thought, past feeling for any of the life-scum that creeps across the surface of a world, any world. We'll go down quickly, and take what we need quickly, and leave quickly. We'll try not to infect them, but they've already got it in them, the dormant disease, and any infection will be only a recurrence. Nevertheless, he summoned a priest to his quarters. And, before going to the command deck, he bathed sacramentally as if in preparation for battle. "Your hawk's blude was never sae red, Edward, Edward; Your hawk's blude was never sae red, My dear son, I tell thee, O" "O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed, M it her, mither; O I hae kill'd my red roan steed, That erst was sae fair and free, O" False dawn was in the east when the slivers of light appeared once again out of the eclipse shadow to rake majestically across the heavens, and again the children of Earth crowded in teeming numbers from the quiet gardens to chatter their excitement at the wonder in the sky. But this time, a message came. The men of the tech clans who tended the newly activated mechanisms heard it, and the mechanisms memorized it, and played it again and again for the people, while the linguists puzzled over the unidentified language used in the transmission. ously for an hour, followed by an hour of silence, and then by another hour of repetition. The linguists were unable to discern meanings. Thousands of memorizers were consulted, but none knew the words of the harsh voice from the ships. At last, the sages consulted the books and memnoscripts in the ancient vaults, pouring over tomes that had been buried for countless centuries. After hours of hurried study... "It is found, it is found, a tongue of the ancients!" a joyous cry in the glades and the garden pathways. Happily, the sages recorded the linguistic structure of the forgotten tongue on memnoscript, and gave it to a servo translator. Outmoded mechanisms were being brought out of wraps and prepared for use. The servos supplied a translation of the message, and the sages studied it. "It is badly understood," was the curious mutter along the garden pathways. "Many words have no words to match them, nor any thoughts that are similar," was the only explanation the sages could give. In translation the message seemed meaningless, or unfathomable. Only one thing was clear. The sons of Man meant to descend again upon the world of their ancestors. There was a restless unease in the gardens, and groups of elders gathered in the conference glades to mutter and glance at the sky. "Invite our brothers to land," was the impetuous cry of the young, but there were dissenters. In the Glade of Sopho, a few thoughtful clansmen of Pedaga had gathered to muse and speak quietly among themselves, although it was not ordinarily the business of tutors to consider problems that confronted society as a whole, particularly problems arising outside society itself. The Pedaga were teachers of th.e very young, and deliberately kept themselves childlike in outlook in order to make fuller contact with the children in their charge. "I think we should tell them to go away," said Letha, and looked around at the others for a response. She got nothing in reply but a flickering glance from Marrita, who sat morosely on a cool rock by the spring, her chin on her bare knees. Evon gave her a brief polite smile, to acknowledge the sound of her voice, but he returned almost at once to absently tearing twigs and glancing up at the bits of sky that showed through the foliage of the overhanging trees. lak and Karrn were whispering together at the far end of the glade, and had not heard her. Letha shrugged and leaned back against the tree trunk again, sitting spraddle-legged this time in the hope of catching Evon's eye. She was a graceful girl, and while gracefulness is sometimes feline, Letha's was more nearly kittenish. She was full-bodied and soft, but wellshaped in spite of a trace of plumpness. Thick masses of black hair fell over baby-skin shoulders in a pleasing contrast, and while her face was a bit too round, it radiated a gentle, winning grin, and the sympathetic gaze of gray-blue eyes. Now she seemed ready to pout. Evon remained self-absorbed. "I think we should tell them to go away," she repeated a little sharply. "They'll all be big and swashbuckling and handsome, and the children will become unmanageable as soon as they see them. All the little girls will swoon, and all the little boys will want to go with them." Evon ganced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own meditations. "And all the big girls will run away with them," she purred with a tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to waggle her foot. Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually, she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He must be -- because she hadn't seen him sit still this long in years. He was always doing something, or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily, with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just drooped. She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding. "You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked. He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head. "To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added. "Me? What are you thinking of, Letha?" "Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens." "I don't fiddle." "But your eyes are on the skyfleet." Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them -- the starbirds, I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at something I expected to happen... or... or..." "Something familiar?" "Yes." "You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl who sat on the cool rock by the spring. Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief." "How silly! What's that to do with it?" "He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a club toe in the spring. Evon snorted irritably and arose to stretch. "We lie around here like sleepy pigs!" he grumbled. "Have the Pedaga nothing to do but wait on the Geoark to make up its mind?" "What do you think they'll do?" "The Geoark? Invite the strangers to land. What else could they do?" "Tell them to go away." "And suppose they chose not to go?" The girl looked bewildered. "I can't imagine anyone refusing the Geoark." "Maybe they've got their own Geoark. Why should they cooperate with ours?" "Two Geoarks? What a strange idea." "Is it strange that you and I should have two brains? Or were you aware that I have one too?" "Evon! What a strange idea." He seized her by the ankles and dragged her squealing to the spring, then set her down in the icy trickle. Marrita moved away, grumbling complaints, and Letha snatched up a switch and chased him around the glade, shrieking threats of mayhem, while Evon's laughter broke the gloomy air of the small gathering, and caused a few other Pedaga to wander into the clearing from the pathways. "I think we should prepare a petition for the Geoark," someone suggested. "About the skyfleet? And who knows what to say?" "I'm afraid," said a girl. "Somehow I'm suddenly afraid of them." "Our brothers from the Exodus? But they're people -- such as you and I." So went the voices. After an hour, a crier came running through the glade to read another message received from the skyfleet. This was even more mystifying than the previous one, even less meaningful in translation. One thing was clear, however: the fleet was going to land, without invitation. Embarrassed, the elders of the Geoark immediately called the tech clans. "Gan you revive the devices that speak across space?" they asked. "They are revived," answered the tech clans. "Then let us speak to our brothers from space." And so it was that the people of the gardens of Earth sang out: "I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an atmospheric-braking orbit. And there was thunder in a cloudless sky. "O your steed was auld and ye hae mair, Edward, Edward. O your steed was auld and ye hae mair , And some other dule ye dree, O." "O I hae kill'd my ain father dear, Mither, mither ; O I hae kill'd my ain father dear, Alas and woe is me, O." rules of invasion strategy for semi-civilized planets, the fleet separated itself into three groups. The first group fell into atmospheric braking; the second group split apart and established an "orbital shell" of criscrossing orbits, timed and interlocking, at eight hundred miles, to guard the descent of the first wave of ships, while the third wave remained in battle formation at three thousand miles as a rear guard against possible space attack. When the first wave had finished braking, it fell into formation again and flew as aircraft in the high stratosphere, while the second wave braked itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell. From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges. "No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology. No evidence of hostility." A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing more. One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground. In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden, who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock, sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was born into his bones. Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south, another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery. Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind changed, and the air that breathed about the commander's face was full of perfume. I feel nothing, he thought. Here is beauty and warmth, here is the home of Man, and almost an Eden, but I feel nothing. It is just another mote that circles a minor sun, and to me it is only an exploitable supply dump of Nature, a place to accomplish Procedure #A, "Refueling Method for Terrestroid Planets Without Facilities, Native Labor Exploitable." It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa, and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum -- or had been, before the War of Secession -- and when history moved into space, Earth was a half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the historians had reconstructed for the museums -- vistas of roaring industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully tended Japanese garden. a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the learning of the current Earthtongue, or to teach any Empireculture language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of Memorandum J-#-G. The possession of any written or recorded material in the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives, shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden, Comm." It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile, the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in which the messages had been exchanged. The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk -- a young girl, obviously frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already approaching the edge of the blackened area. The bqron shot a quick glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The rate-ofdecrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for twentythree minutes, and that the girl had better stay back. "Keep clear ! # he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her. She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock. "Go back, you little idiot ! # Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept coming -- into the charred area. The gun exploded inJiis fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs. She yelped and fled back into the green garden. He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly. She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human. But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock. It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a mutually recorded dead language. "We ha.ve neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for our purposes." "Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are." "Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted area, closed to civilian population." "But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have surrounded!" "Evacuate them." "I don't understand." "Evacuate them. Make them get out." "My translator is working badly." The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us." "How much notice?' The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius." "My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting. "Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish what we came here for, and then get out -- as quickly as possible. We don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is this agreed?" "My translator is working badly." "Aren't you getting anything?" A pause, then : "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where the skyfleet rests." "Correct." "But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the feast-glades?" "I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have aircraft of your own." "We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth." "Any of your population understand the mechanisms?" "Certainly, brother." "Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we want, and maybe they can make it clear to you." "As you wish, brother." The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone quickly," he said. "The . elder took it well. They must be afraid of us." "Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted. "I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,' " came a voice from the back of the room. "Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably. "You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go back?" "It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be useful." Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir. "Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time -- have you got any suggestions?" "About how to deal with the natives?" "Certainly... but with the accent on our problems." Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and do our suggesting later." "That constitutes your entire opinion?" "Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung  "Our problems, I said!" the commander snapped. "It's likely to be our problem, sir." "How?" "In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated." "What patterns do you mean?" "The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron." A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of action, not a transmittable determinant." Meikl shook his head. "We don't know what is a transmittable determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it in our kulturverlaengerung lines." A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl... I think this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched." "What, the kult'laenger lines?" "Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish, and deal in facts..." "Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare absently out a viewing port at the trees. "You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much about it." "Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult skill game... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control group -- another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game." "Go on." "So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests on all two hundred." "Learning the game, you mean?" "Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the patterns of the game easily." "So?" "So -- during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the parental mind -- probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't 'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural mechanism of transmittal -- and it's an analog of heredity. The kulturverlaengerung -- and it can linger in a family line without becoming conscious for many generations." "How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game..." "If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on -- as a predisposition-talent -- to the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a mirror-image of a mirror-image... or a memory of a memory of a memory..." "This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the chances of utilizing native labor?" "And whatten penance will we dree for that, Edward, Edward ? Whatten penance will ye dree for that? My dear son, now tell me, O . # "Ell set my feet in yonder boat, Mither, mither; Yll set my feet in yonder boat, And YU fare over the sea, O." plished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, Analyst Gulturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill, once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In tlie distance, the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class. "How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives. He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it? Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: "In our gardens, there are no weeds , # and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet. This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children. Nature could respond in two ways : she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war. Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty. This, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or "authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood beside him on the hill -- but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks. There had been few cases of interpersonal hostility between natives and starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives enthusiastically strived to please. He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze. Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near. "You belong to another, Letha?" he asked. She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy named Evon..." He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them. "But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened. "Letha, I... " "Yes, Meikl." "Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess." Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of space -- how you've lived since the Exodus?" "We are an evil people." "Not so." She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly. "What is it you wish to know?" "Why will you never return to your home?" "To space -- but we shall." "To the worlds of your birth, I mean." He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?" he asked, a little sharply. "Will you?" So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security. "No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth." "But why? Where are your women and children?" He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to. "There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had said too much. She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?" There was no word for "guns" or "weapons". "They hurl death, Letha." "How can 'death be hurled ?" Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the children of space. The same traces of the ancient kulturverlaengerung would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal. One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millenia since the Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in their culture. The records had been systematically censored and rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute concepts of her understanding. "There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a contention for property." "Was it settled?" she asked innocently. He nodded slowly. It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights -- a young civilization full of chaotic expansion. "There is much you could not understand, Letha,' he told her. "Our cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours has passed through them all -- perhaps into a fourth and final." "And yours, Meikl?" "I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of the culture -- conquest, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures." "We were the mother-culture, Meikl?" He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving." "Now we are old and withered, Meikl?" He looked around at the gardenforests in the distance. A second childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase? -- a final perpetual youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception? wandering along the ridge, speaking in low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl' s fraternization permit, using the spacer's tongue. "Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers. "Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three hundred men since we landed." "Found any of them?" "Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless." Another exchange of salutes. The officers left. "What did they want, Meikl?" she asked. "Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the elders. Let's go." They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it. From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important loss of personnel. What was important: the slow decay of discipline under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone, Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a C# # gun that could be concealed in the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization; if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly. The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives. The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful people after twenty thousand years. "I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders had assembled. He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway. "Letha -- you have worked for me many months." "Yes -- " "I love you, Letha." She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her quietly, hating himself. "You'll take me with you," she said. "No." It was impossible. "Then you'll stay." "It is... forbidden... verboten... There was no word in the tongue. "I can't understand... If you love..." He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain. "Letha -- in your culture, 'life' is the highest value." "How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl." He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha. I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?" She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance -- act a different play." "It's not a play, Letha. We act an unconscious drama, and thus the drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence over life." She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving. "I don't know what you mean." "Can you understand? -- that I love you, and yet my... my..." He groped for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the shippeople takes precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you." Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a monotone. "It's growing late." "And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear, Edward, Edward? And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear, My dear son, now tell me, O?" " The curse of hell frae me sail ye bear, Mither, mither ; The curse of hell frae me sail ye bear; Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!" the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night. Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel. "An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them." In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered. A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that had invaded their quarters. Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed to disclose the location of the immunizing serum. Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were brought before the baron. "Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a work contract." On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse. The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a massacre. "We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit." Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder, tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to speak in the intermediate language. "Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear." Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that death will come to any native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that theGeoark is..." He paused. There was no word for "hostage." He was explaining the hostageconcept lengthily, while the girl's , face drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron. " They understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the Intermedia." The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables. "No!" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders. One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few feet away stirred restlessly. The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade. The guard looked questioningly at the officers. "Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded. "Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered. "I -- I don't know -- " "You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them to halt." "Party, halt!" snapped the guard. The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes gathered up from spindley shins. "Party, halt!" The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued. "Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden. The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he crumpled at the entrance of the pathway. The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken. "Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron. The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering softly. Miekl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for Letha. She had vanished from the glade. "Haul them to the dispensary, keep them prisoner," the baron was growling. Meikl turned on him. "Now it's come to this, has it?" he snapped. "From the beginning, they were we wanted. Why did they stop be"That's enough, Meikl!" "I've hardly started. You came here like a tyrant, and they served you like a friend. You couldn't bear it. 'Brethren', they said. But there's nothing about 'brethren' in the tactical handbooks, is there, Baron?" "Shut up." Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand before the analyst and stare at him icily. "You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst -- the kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the war plague, eh?" Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment or triumph. "Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict? Brought back the old seeds of hate?" The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds." "Innocent old men." The baron's mouth twisted into a snarl. "They wanted nothing but to help us." "Yes, Meikl? And we are the barbarians, eh?" The analyst spoke disdain with his eyes. The baron straightened in sudden hauteur. "Look down at the ground, Analyst " he hissed. Ven Klaeden's sudden change of tone impelled him to obey. His eyes fell to the turf at his feet -- moss covered sod, rich and dark beneath the green. The baron kicked a hole in the moss with the toe of his boot. "Tell me where the infection came from, Analyst," he growled. He scraped at the hole with his heel. "And why is the dirt so red right here?" Meikl glanced up slowly. Two men were coming through the shrubs, walking warily along the path toward the clearing. Ven Klaeden seemed unaware. He leaned forward to speak through his teeth. "I give them nothing but what they gave our fathers -- their own inner hell, Meikl -- the curse they so carefully forgot. In their Eden." The man was mad... perhaps. Meikl's eyes followed the men who approached through the shrubs. One of them carried a burden -- the limp body of a girl, occasionally visible through the low foliage as they drew nearer. One of the men was a junior officer, the other a native. After a moment, he recognized the native... I "Evon!" As he called out, the baron whirled, hand slipping to the hilt of the ceremonial sword he wore in the presence of the Geoark. The men stopped. Meikl stared at the limp figure in the arms of the native. "Lethal" "Dead," Evon hissed. "They killed her for running..." They emerged from the shrubs into full view. The officer was holding a gun. "Put that away!" ven Klaeden snapped. The young officer laughed sourly. "Sorry, baron, I'm from the committee." "Guard!" "There's no one in earshot, Baron." "Fool!" Ven Klaeden arrogantly whipped out the sword. "Drop that gun, or I'll blade-whip you!" "Easy, baron, easy. I'm your executioner..." The baron straightened haughtily and began a slow advance, a towering figure of icy dignity in the sun that filtered through the foliage. "... but I want to take care of this one first." The renegade waved the gun toward Meikl. "You, Baron, you can have it slower -- a needle in your official rump." Ven Klaeden, a figure of utter contempt, continued the slow advance with the sword. The officer's lips tightened. He squeezed the trigger. Ven Klaeden hesitated, jerking slightly, then continued, his hand pressing against his abdomen, doubling forward slightly. The officer fired again -- a sharp snap of sound in the glade. The baron stopped, wrestling with pain ten feet from the pale renegade. Suddenly he flung the sword. It looped in mid-air and slashed the man's face from chin to cheekbone. He tripped and tumbled backward as ven Klaeden slipped to his knees on the moss. Meikl dived for the gun. By the time he wrestled it away from the officer with the bloody face, ven Klaeden was sitting like a gaunt Buddha on the moss, and the body of Letha lay nearby, while a confused Evon clutched his hands to his face and rocked slowly. Meikl came slowly to his feet. The renegade officer wiped his face of blood and shrank back into shrubs. "Get him," croaked ven Klaeden. Scarcely knowing why, the analyst jerked the trigger, felt the gun explode in his fist, saw the renegade topple. There was a moment of stillness in the glade, broken only by ven Klaeden' s wheezing breath. The baron looked up with an effort, his eyes traveling over the girl, then up to the figure of the child of Earth. "Your woman, Earthling?" Evon lowered his hands, stood dazed and blinking for a moment. He glanced at Meikl, then at the girl. He knelt beside her, staring, not touching, and his knee encountered the blade of the sword. "You have brought us death, you have brought us hate," he said slowly, his eyes clinging to the sword. "Pick it up," hissed the baron. "You will never leave. A party of men is wrecking what you have done. Then we shall wreck your ships. Then we..." "Pick it up." The native hesitated. Slowly, his brown hand reached for the hilt, and fascination was in his eyes. "You know what it is for?" the analyst asked. The native shook his head slowly. Then it was in his hand, fingers shaping themselves around the hilt -- as the fingers of his fathers had done in the ages before the Star Exodus. His jaw fell slightly, and he looked up, clutching it. "Now do you know?" the baron gasped. "My -- my hand -- it knows," the native whispered. Ven Klaeden glanced sourly at Meikl, losing his balance slightly, eyes glazed with pain. "He'll need it now, won't he, Analyst?" he breathed, then fell to the moss. Evon stood up slowly, moistening his lips, feeling the grip of the sword and touching the red-stained steel. He peered quickly up at Meikl. Meikl brandished the gun slightly. The low rumble of a dynamite blast sounded from the direction of the mines. "You loved her too," Evon said. He nodded. The native held the sword out questioningly, as if offering it. "Keep it," the analyst grunted. "You remembered its feel after twenty thousand years. That's why you'll need it." Some deeds, he thought, would haunt the soul of Man until his end, and there was no erasing them... for they were the soul, selfmade, lasting in the ghost-grey fabric of mind as long as the lips of a child greedily sought the breast of its mother, as long as the child mirrored the mind of the man and the woman. Kulturverlaengerung. The analyst left the native with the sword and went to seek the next in line of command. The purpose of the fleet must be kept intact, he thought, laughing bitterly. Yet still he went. It was the dawn of a golden age of transportation. T err an Development was ready to market a fourth dimension C vehicle # which afforded almost instantaneous travel . For instance, Henry Ellis commuted # miles to work in five steps and a few seconds. Then, one morning, he met some people on the way... Prominent Author By Philip K. Dick Illustrated by Paul Orban prompt man, and hasn't been late to work in twenty-five years, is actually still someplace around the house." She sipped at her faintlyscented hormone and carbohydrate drink. "As a matter of fact, he won't be leaving for another ten minutes." "Incredible," said Dorothy Lawrence, who had finished her drink, and now basked in the dermalmist spray that descended over her virtually unclad body from an automatic jet above the couch. "What they won't think of next!" Mrs. Ellis beamed proudly, as if she personally were an employee of Terran Development. "Yes, it is incredible. According to somebody down at the office, the whole history of civilization can be explained in terms of transportation techniques. Of course, I don't know anything about history. That's for Government research people. But from what this man told Henry -- " "Where's my briefcase?" came a fussy voice from the bedroom. "Good Lord, Mary. I know I left it on the clothes-cleaner last night." "You left it upstairs," Mary replied, raising her voice slightly. "Look in the closet." "Why would it be in the closet?" Sounds of angry stirring-arounds. "You'd think a man's own briefcase would be safe." Henry Ellis stuck his head into the living room briefly. "I found it. Hello, Mrs. Lawrence." "Good morning," Dorothy Lawrence replied. "Mary was explaining that you're still here." "Yes, I'm still here." Ellis straightened his tie, as the mirror revolved slowly around him. "Anything you want me to pick up downtown, honey?" "No," Mary replied. "Nothing I can think of. I'll vid you at the office, if I remember something." "Is it true," Mrs. Lawrence asked, "that as soon as you step into it you're all the way downtown?" "Well, almost all the way." "A hundred and sixty miles! It's beyond belief. Why, it takes my husband two and a half hours to get his monojet through the commercial lanes and down at the parking lot and then walk all the way up to his office." "I know," Elli smuttered, grabbing his hat and coat. "Used to take me about that long. But no more." He kissed his wife goodbye. "So long. See you tonight. Nice to have seen you again, Mrs. Lawrence." "Can I -- watch?" Mrs. Lawrence asked hopefully. "Watch? Of course, of course." Ellis hurried through the house, out the back door and down the steps into the yard. "Come along!" he shouted impatiently. "I don't want to be late. It's nine fifty-nine and I have to be at my desk by ten." Mrs. Lawrence hurried eagerly after Ellis. In the back yard stood a big circular hoop that gleamed brightly in the mid-morning sun. Ellis turned some controls at the base. The hoop changed color, from silver to a shimmering red. "Here I go!" Ellis shouted. He stepped briskly into the hoop. The hoop fluttered about him. There was a faint pop. The glow died. "Good Heavens!" Mrs. Lawrence gasped. "He's gone!" "He's in downtown N'York," Mary Ellis corrected. "I wish my husband had a Jiffiscuttler. When they show up on the market commercially maybe I can afford to get him one." "Oh, they're very handy," Mary Ellis agreed. "He's probably saying hello to the boys right this minute." tunnel. All around him a gray, formless tube stretched out in both directions, a sort of hazy sewerpipe. Framed in the opening behind him, he could see the faint outline of his own house. His backporch and yard, Mary standing on the steps in her red bra and slacks. Mrs. Lawrence beside her in greencheckered shorts. The cedar tree and rows of petunias. A hill. The neat little houses of Cedar Groves, Pennsylvania. And in front of him -- New York City. A wavering glimpse of the busy streetcorner in front of his office. The great building itself, a section of concrete and glass and steel. People moving. Skyscrapers. Monojets landing in swarms. Aerial signs. Endless whitecollar workers hurrying everywhere, rushing to their offices. Ellis moved leisurely toward the New York end. He had taken the Jiffi-scuttler often enough to know just exactly how many steps it was. Five steps. Five steps along the wavery gray tunnel and he had gone a hundred and sixty miles. He halted, glancing back. So far he had gone three steps. Ninety six miles. More than half way. The fourth dimension was a wonderful thing. Ellis lit his pipe, leaning his briefcase against his trouserleg and groping in his coat pocket for his tobacco. He still had thirty seconds to get to work. Plenty of time. The pipelighter flared and he sucked in expertly. He snapped the lighter shut and restored it to his pocket. A wonderful thing, all right. The Jiffi-scuttler had already revolutionized society. It was now possible to go anywhere in the world instantly , with no time lapse. And without wading through endless lanes of other monojets, also going places. The transportation problem had been a major headache since the middle of the twentieth century. Every year it took longer to get to work. Every year more families moved from the cities out into the country, adding numbers .to the already swollen swarms that choked the roads and jetlanes. But it was all solved, now. An infinite number of Jiffi-scuttlers could be set up; there was no interference between them. The Jiffi-scuttler bridged distances nonspacially, through another dimension of some kind (they hadn't explained that part too clearly to him). For a flat thousand credits any Terran family could have Jiffiscuttler hoops set up, one in the backyard -- the other in Berlin, or Bermuda, or San Francisco, or Port Said. Anywhere in the world. Of course, there was one drawback. The hoop had to be anchored in one specific spot. You picked your destination and that was that. But for an office worker, it was perfect. Step in one end, step out the other. Five steps -- a hundred and sixty miles. A hundred and sixty miles that had been a two hour nightmare of grinding gears and sudden jolts, monojets cutting in and out, speeders, reckless flyers, alert cops waiting to pounce, ulcers and bad tempers. It was all over now. All over for him, at least, as an employee of Terran Development, the manufacturer of the Jiffiscuttler. And soon for everybody, when they were commercially on the market. Ellis sighed. Time for work. He could see Ed Hall racing up the steps of the TD building two at a time. Tony Franklin hurrying after him. Time to get moving. He bent down and reached for his briefcase -- It was then he saw them. thin, there. A sort of thin spot where the shimmer wasn't so strong. Just a bit beyond his foot and past the corner of Tiis briefcase. Beyond the thin spot were three tiny figures. Just beyond the gray waver. Incredibly small men, no larger than insects. Watching him with incredulous astonishment. Ellis gazed down intently, his briefcase forgotten. The three tiny men were equally dumbfounded. None of them stirred, the three tiny figures, rigid with awe, Henry Ellis bent over, his mouth open, eyes wide. A fourth little figure joined the others. They all stood rooted to the spot, eyes bulging. They had on some kind of robes. Brown robes and sandals. Strange, unTerran costumes. Everything about them was unTerran. Their size, their oddly-colored dark faces, their clothing -- and their voices. Suddenly the tiny figures were shouting shrilly at each other, squeaking a strange gibberish. They had broken out of their freeze and now ran about in queer, frantic circles. They raced with incredible speed, scampering like ants on a hot griddle. They raced jerkily, their arms and legs pumping wildly. And all the time they squeaked in their shrill high-pitched voices. Ellis found his briefcase. He picked it up slowly. The figures watched in mixed wonder and terror as the huge bag rose, only a short distance from them. An idea drifted through Ellis' brain. Good Lord -- could they come into the Jiffi-scuttler, through the gray haze? But he had no time to find out. He was already late, as it was. He pulled away and hurried toward the New York end of the tunnel A second later he stepped out in the blinding sunlight, abruptly finding himself on the busy streetcorner in front of his office. "Hey, there, Hank!" Donald Potter shouted, as he raced through the doors into the TD building. "Get with it!" "Sure, sure." Ellis followed after him automatically. Behind, the entrance to the Jiffi-scuttler was a vague circle above the pavement, like the ghost of a soapbubble. He hurried up the steps and inside the offices of Terran Development, his mind already on the hard day ahead. As they were locking up the office and getting ready to go home, Ellis stopped Coordinator Patrick Miller in his office. "Say, Mr. Miller. You're also in charge of the research end, aren't you?" "Yeah. So?" "Let me ask you something. Just where does the Jiffi-scuttler go? It must go somewhere." "It goes out of this continum completely." Miller was impatient to get home. "Into another dimension." "I know that. But -- where?" Miller unfolded his breastpocket handkerchief rapidly and spread it out on his desk. "Maybe I can explain it to you this way. Suppose you're a two-dimensional creature and this handkerchief represents your -- " Ellis said, dissapointed. "That's merely an analogy, and I'm not interested in an analogy. I want a factual answer. Where does my Jiffi-scuttler go, between here and Cedar Groves?" Miller laughed. "What the hell do you care?" Ellis became abruptly guarded. He shrugged indifferently. "Just curious. It certainly must go someplace" Miller put his hand on Ellis' shoulder in a friendly big-brother fashion. "Henry, old man, you just leave that up to us. Okay? We're the designers, you're the consumer. Your job is to use the 'scuttler, try it out for us, report any defects or failures so when we put it on the market next year we'll be sure there's nothing wrong with it." "As a matter of fact -- " Ellis began. "What is it?" Ellis clamped his sentence off. "Nothing." He picked up his briefcase. "Nothing at all. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Mr. Miller. Goodnight." He hurried downstairs and out of the TD building. The faint outline of his Jiffi-scuttler was visible in the fading late-afternoon sunlight. The sky was already full of mono jets taking off. Weary workers beginning their long trip back to their homes in the country. The endless commute. Ellis made his way to the hoop and stepped into it. Abruptly the bright sunlight dimmed and faded. gray tunnel. At the far end flashed a circle of green and white. Rolling green hills and his own house. His backyard. The cedar tree and flower beds. The town of Cedar Groves. Two steps down the tunnel. Ellis halted, bending over. He studied the floor of the tunnel intently. He studied the misty gray wall, where it rose and flickered -- and the thin place. The place he had noticed. They were still there. Still? It was a different bunch. This time ten or eleven of them. Men and women and children. Standing together, gazing up at him with awe and wonder. No more than a half inch high, each. Tiny distorted figures, shifting and changing shape oddly. Altering colors and hues. Ellis hurried on. The tiny figures watched him go. A brief glimpse of their microscopic astonishment -- and then he was stepping out into his back yard. He clicked off the Jiffi-scuttler and mounted the back steps. He entered his house, deep in thought. "Hi," Mary cried, from the kitchen. She rustled toward him in her hip-length mesh shirt, her arms out. "How was work today?" "Fine." "Is anything wrong? You look -- strange." "No. No, nothing's wrong." Ellis kissed his wife absently on the forehead. "What's for dinner?" "Something choice. Siriusian mole steak. One of your favorites. Is that all right?" "Sure." Ellis tossed his hat and coat down on the chair. The chair folded them up and put them away. His thoughtful, preoccupied look still remained. "Fine, honey." "Are you sure there's nothing wrong? You didn't get into another argument with Pete Taylor, did you?" "No. Of course not." Ellis shook his head in annoyance. "Everything's all right, honey. Stop needling me." "Well, I hope so," Mary said, with a sigh. waiting for him. He saw them the first step into the Jiffi-scuttler. A small group waiting within the wavering gray, like bugs caught in a block of jello. They moved jerkily, rapidly, arms and legs pumping in a blur of motion. Trying to attract his attention. Piping wildly in their pathetically faint voices. Ellis stopped and squatted down. They were putting something through the wall of the tunnel, through the thin place in the gray. It was small, so incredibly small he could scarcely see it. A square of white at the end of a microscopic pole. They were watching him eagerly, faces alive with fear and hope. Desperate, pleading hope. Ellis took the tiny square. It came loose like some fragile rose petal from its stalk. Clumsily, he let it drop and had to hunt all around for it. The little figures watched in an agony of dismay as his huge hands moved blindly around the floor of the tunnel. At last he found it and gingerly lifted it up. It was too small to make out. Writing? Some tiny lines -- but he couldn't read them. Much too small to read. He got out his wallet and carefully placed the square between two cards. He restored his wallet to his pocket. "I'll look at it later," he said. His voice boomed and echoed up and down the tunnel. At the sound the tiny creatures scattered. They all fled, shrieking in their shill, piping voices, away from the gray shimmer, into the dimness beyond. In a flash they were gone. Like startled mice. He was alone. Ellis knelt down and put his eye against the gray shimmer, where it was thin. Where they had stood waiting. He could see something dim and distorted, lost in a vague haze. A landscape of some sort. Indistinct. Hard to make out. Hills. Trees and crops. But so tiny. And dim... He glanced at his watch. God, it was ten! Hastily he scrambled to his feet and hurried out of the tunnel, onto the blazing N'York sidewalk. Late. He raced up the stairs of the Terran Development building and down the long corridor to his office. At lunchtime he stopped in at the Research Labs. "Hey," he called, as Jim Andrews brushed past, loaded down with reports and equipment. "Got a second?" "What do you want, Henry?" "I'd like to borrow something. A magnifying glass." He considered. "Maybe a small photonmicroscope would be better. One or two hundred power." "Kids' stuff." Jim found him a small microscope. "Slides?" "Yeah, a couple of blank slides." He carried the microscope back to his office. He set it up on his desk, clearing away his papers. As a precaution he sent Miss Nelson, his secretary, out of the room and off to lunch. Then carefully, cautiously, he got the tiny wisp from his wallet and slipped it between two slides. It was writing, all right. But nothing he could read. Utterly unfamiliar. Complex, interlaced little characters. For a time he sat thinking. Then he dialed his inter-department vidphone. "Give me the Linguistics Department." After a moment Earl Peterson's good-natured face appeared. "Hi, there, Ellis. What can I do for you?" Ellis hesitated. He had to do this right. "Say, Earl, old man. Got a little favor to ask you." "Like what? Anything to oblige an old pal." "You, uh -- you have that Machine down there, don't you? That translating business you use for working over documents from nonTerran cultures?" "Sure. So?" "Think I could use it?" He talked fast. "It's a screwy sort of a deal, Earl. I got this pal living on -- uh -- Centaurus VI, and he writes me in -- uh -- you know, the Centauran native semantic system, and I -- " "You want the Machine to translate a letter? Sure, I think we could manage it. This once, at least. Bring it down." He brought it down. He got Earl to show him how the intake feed worked, and as soon as Earl had turned his back he fed in the the tiny square of material. The Linguistics Machine clicked and whirred. Ellis prayed silently that the paper wasn't too small. Wouldn't fall out between the relay-probes of the Machine. But sure enough, after a couple of seconds, a tape unreeled from the output slot. The tape cut itself off and dropped into a basket. The Linguistics Machine turned promptly to other stuff, more vital material from TD's various export branches. With trembling figures Ellis spread out the tape. The words danced before his eyes. Questions. They were asking him questions. God, it was getting complicated. He read the questions intently, his lips moving. What was he getting himself into? They were expecting answers. He had taken their paper, gone off with it. Probably they would be waiting for him, on his way home. He returned to his office and dialed his vidphone. "Give me outside," he ordered. The regular vid monitor appeared. "Yes sir?" "I want the Federal Library of Information," Ellis said. "Cultural Research Division." ing, all right. But not the same ones. It was odd -- each time a different group. Their clothing was slightly different, too. A new hue. And in the background the landscape had also altered slightly. The trees he had seen were gone. The hills were still there, but a different shade. A hazy graywhite. Snow? He squatted down. He had worked it out with care. The answers from the Federal Library of Information had gone back to the Linguistics Machine for re-translation. The answers were now in the original tongue of the questions -- but on a trifle larger piece of paper. Ellis made like a marble game and flicked the wad of paper through the gray shimmer. It bowled over six or seven of the watching figures and rolled down the side of the hill on which they were standing. After a moment of terrified immobility the figures scampered frantically after it. They disappeared into the vague and invisible depths of their world and Ellis got stiffly to his feet again. "Well," he muttered to himself, "that's that." But it wasn't. The next morning there was a new group -- and a new list of questions. The tiny figures pushed their microscopic square of paper through the thin spot in the wall of the tunnel and stood waiting and trembling as Ellis bent over and felt around for it. He found it -- finally. He put it in his wallet and continued on his way, stepping out at New York, frowning. This was getting serious. Was this going to be a full time job? But then he grinned. It was the damn oddest thing he had ever heard of. The little rascals were cute, in their own way. Tiny intent faces, screwed up with serious concern. And terror. They were scared of him, really scared. And why not? Compared to them he was a giant. He conjectured about their world. What kind of a planet was theirs? Odd to be so small. But size was a relative matter. Small, though, compared to him. Small and reverent. He could read fear and a yearning, gnawing hope, as they pushed up their papers. They were depending on him. Praying he'd give them answers. Ellis grinned. "Damn unusual job," he said to himself. "What's this?" Peterson said, when he showed up in the Linguistics Lab at noontime. "Well, you see, I got another letter from my friend on Centauraus VI." "Yeah?" A certain suspicion flickered across Peterson's face. "You're not ribbing me, are you, Henry? This Machine has a lot to do, you know. Stuff's coming in all the time. We can't afford to waste any time with -- " "This is really serious stuff, Earl." Ellis patted his wallet. "Very important business. Not just gossip." "Okay. If you say so." Peterson gave the nod to the team operating the Machine. "Let this guy use the Translator, Tommie." "Thanks," Ellis murmured. He went through the routine, getting a translation and then carrying the questions up to his vidphone and passing them over to the Library research staff. By nightfall the answers were back in the original tongue and with them carefully in his wallet, Ellis headed out of the Terran Development building and into his Jiffi-scuttler. As usual, a new group was waiting. "Here you are, boys," Ellis boomed, flicking the wad through the thin place in the shimmer. The wad rolled down the microscopic countryside, bouncing from hill to hill, the little people tumbling jerkily after it in their funny stiff-legged fashion. Ellis watched them go, grinning with interest -- and pride. They really hurried; no doubt about that. He could make them out only vaguely, now. They had raced wildly off away from the shimmer. Only a small portion of their world was tangent to the Jiffiscuttler, apparently. Only the one spot, where the shimmer was thin. He peered intently through. They wei'e getting the wad open, now. Three or four of them, unprying the paper and examining the answers. Ellis swelled with pride as he continued along the tunnel and out into his own back yard. He couldn't read their questions -- and when translated, he couldn't answer them. The Linguistics Department did the first part, the Library research staff the rest. Nevertheless, Ellis felt pride. A deep, glowing spot of warmth far down inside him. The expression on their faces. The look they gave him when they saw the answerwad in his hand. When they realized he was going to answer their questions. And the way they scampered after it. It was sort of -- satisfying. It made him feel damn good. "Not bad," he murmured, opening the back door and entering his house. "Not bad at all." "What's not bad, dear?" Mary asked, looking quickly up from the table. She laid down her magazine and got to her feet. "Why, you look so happy! What is it?" "Nothing. Nothing at all!" He kissed her warmly on the mouth. "You're looking pretty good tonight yourself, kid." "Oh, Henry!" Much of Mary blushed prettily. "How sweet." He surveyed his wife in her twopiece wraparound of clear plastic with appreciation. "Nice looking fragments you have on." "Why Henry! What's come over you? You seem so -- so spirited #" Ellis grinned. "Oh, I guess I enjoy my job. You know, there's nothing like taking pride in your work. A job well done, as they say. Work you can be proud of." "I thought you always said you were nothing but a cog in a great impersonal machine. Just a sort of cypher." "Things are different," Ellis said firmly. "I'm doing a -- uh -- a new project. A new assignment." "A new assignment?" "Gathering information. A sort of -- creative business. So to speak." had turned over quite a body of information to them. He began starting for work about nine-thirty. That gave him a whole thirty minutes to spend squatting down on his hands and knees, peering through the thin place in the shimmer. He got so he was pretty good at seeing them and what they were doing in their microscopic world. Their civilization was somewhat primitive. No doubt of that. By Terran standards it was scarcely a civilization at all. As near as he could tell, they were virtually without scientific techniques; a kind of agrarian culture, rural communism, a monolithic tribal-based organization apparently without too many members. At least, not at one time. That was the part he didn't understand. Every time he came past there was a different group of them. No familiar faces. And their world changed, too. The trees, the crops, fauna. The weather, apparently. Was their time rate different? They moved rapidly, jerkily. Like a vidtape speeded up. And their shrill voices. Maybe that was it. A totally different universe in which the whole time structure was radically different. As to their attitude toward him, there was no mistaking it. After the first couple of times they began assembling offerings, unbelievably small bits of smoking food, prepared in ovens and on open brick hearths. If he got down with his nose against the gray shimmer he could get a faint whiff of the food. It smelled good. Strong and pungent. Highly spiced. Meat, probably. On Friday he brought a magnifying glass along and watched them through it. It was meat, all right. They were bringing antsized animals to be killed and cooked, leading them up to the ovens. With the magnifying glass he could see more of their faces. They had strange faces. Strong and dark, with a peculiar firm look. Of course, there was only one look he got from them. A combination of fear, reverence, and hope. The look made him feel good. It was a look for him, only. Between themselves they shouted and argued -- and sometimes stabbed and fought each other furiously, rolling in their brown robes in a wild tangle. They were a passionate and strong species. He got so he admired them. Which was good -- because it made him feel better. To have the reverent awe of such a proud, sturdy race was really something. There was nothing craven about them. About the fifth time he came there was a rather attractive structure built. Some kind of temple. A place of religious worship. To him! They were developing a real religion about him. No doubt of it. He began going to work at nine o'clock, to give himself a full hour with them. They had, by the middle of the second week, a fullsized ritual evolved. Processions, lighted tapers, what seemed to be songs or chants. Priests in long robes. And the spiced offerings. No idols, though. Apparently he was so big they couldn't make out his appearance. He tried to imagine what it looked like to be on their side of the shimmer. An immense shape looming up above them, beyond a wall of gray haze. An indistinct being, something like themselves, yet not like them at all. A different kind of being, obviously. Larger -- but different in other ways. And when he spoke -- booming echoes up and down the Jiffiscuttler. Which still sent them fleeing in panic. An evolving religion. He was changing them. Through his actual presence and through his answers, the precise, correct responses he obtained from the Federal Library of Information and had the Linguistics Machine translate into their language. Of course, by their timerate they had to wait generations for the answers. But they had become accustomed to it, by now. They waited. They expected. They passed up questions and after a couple centuries he passed down answers, answers which they no doubt put to good use. "What in the world?" Mary demanded, as he got home from work an hour late, one night. "Where have you been?" "Working," Ellis said carelessly, removing his hat and coat. He threw himself down on the couch. "I'm tired. Really tired." He sighed with relief and motioned for the couch-arm to bring him a whisky sour. Mary came over by the couch. "Henry, I'm a little worried." "Worried?" "You shouldn't work so hard. You ought to take it easy, more. How long since you've had a real vacation? A trip off Terra. Out of the System. You know, I'd just like to call that fellow Miller and ask him why it's necessary a man your age put in so much -- " "A man my age!" Ellis bristled indignantly. "I'm not so old." "Of course not." Mary sat down beside him and put her arms around him affectionately. "But you shouldn't have to do so much. You deserve a rest. Don't you think?" "This is different. You don't understand. This isn't the same old stuff. Reports and statistics and the damn filing. This is -- " "What is it?" "This is different. I'm not a cog. This gives me something. I can't explain it to you, I guess. But it's something I have to do." "If you could tell me more about it -- " "I can't tell you any more about it," Ellis said. "But there's nothing in the world like it. I've worked twenty-five years for Terran Development. Twenty-five years at the same desk. Classifying the same reports, again and again. Twenty-five years -- and I never felt this way." "Don't give me that! Come clean, Ellis!" Ellis opened and closed his mouth. "What are you talking about?" Horror rolled through him. "What's happened?" "Don't try to give me the runaround." On the vidscreen Miller's face was purple. "Come into my office." The screen went dead. Ellis sat stunned at his desk. Gradually, he collected himself and got shakily to his feet. "Good Lord." Weakly, he wiped cold sweat from his forehead. All at once. Everything in ruins. He was dazed with the shock. "Anything wrong?" Miss Nelson asked sympathetically. "No." Ellis moved numbly toward the door. He was shattered. What had Miller found out? Good God! Was it possible he had -- "Mr. Miller looked angry." "Yeah." Ellis moved blindly down the hall, his mind reeling. Miller looked angry, all right. Somehow, he had found out. But why was he mad? Why did he care? A cold chill settled over Ellis. It looked bad. Miller was his superior -- with hiring and firing powers. Maybe he'd done something wrong. Maybe he had somehow broken a law. Committed a crime. But what? What did Miller care about them ? What concern was it of Terran Development? He opened the door to Miller's office. "Here I am, Mr. Miller," he muttered. "What's the trouble?" Miller glowered at him in rage. "All this goofy stuff about your cousin on Proxima." "It's -- uh -- you mean a business friend on Gentaurus VI." "You -- you swindler!" Miller leaped up. "And after all the Company's done for you." "I don't understand," Ellis muttered. "What have -- " "Why do you think we gave you the Jiffi-scuttler in the first place?" "Why?" "To test! To try out, you walleyed Venusian stink-cricket! The Company magnanimously consented to allow you to operate a Jiffi-scuttler in advance of market presentation, and what do you do? Why, you -- " Ellis started to get indignant. After all, he had been with TD twenty-five years. "You don't have to be so offensive. I plunked down my thousand gold credits for it." "Well, you can just mosey down to the accountant's office and get your money back. I've already sent out a directive for a construction team to crate up your Jiffi-scuttler and bring it back to receiving." Ellis was dumbfounded. "But why?" "Why indeed! Because it's defective. Because it doesn't work. That's why." Miller's eyes blazed with technological outrage. "The inspection crew found a leak a mile wide in it." His lip curled. "As if you didn't know." Ellis' heart sank. "Leak?" he croaked apprehensively. "Leak. It's a damn good thing I authorized a periodic inspection. If we depended on people like you to -- " "Are you sure? It seemed all right to me. That is, it got me here without any trouble." Ellis floundered. "Certainly no complaints from my end." "No. No complaints from your end. That's exactly why you're not getting another one. That's why you're taking the monojet transport, back home tonight. Because you didn't report the leak! And if you ever try to put something over on this office again -- " "How do you know I was aware of the -- defect?" Miller sank down in his chair, overcome with fury. "Because," he said carefully, "of your daily pilgrimmage to the Linguistics Machine. With your alleged letter from your grandmother on Betelgeuse II. Which wasn't any such thing. Which was an utter fraud. Which you got through the leak in the Jiffi-scuttler!" "How do you know?" Ellis squeaked boldly, driven to the walk "So maybe there was a defect. But you can't prove there's any connection between your badly constructed Jiffi-scuttler and my -- " "Your missive," Miller stated, "which you foisted on our Linguistics Machine, was not a nonTerran script. It was not from Centaurus VI. It was not from any nonTerran system. It was ancient Hebrew. And there's only one place you could have got it, Ellis. So don't try to kid me." "Hebrew!" Ellis exclaimed, startled. He turned white as a sheet. "Good Lord. The other continum  -- The fourth dimension. Time, of course." He trembled. "And the expanding universe. That would explain their size. And it explains why a new group, a new generation -- " "We're taking enough of a chance as it is, with these Jiffi-scuttlers. Warping a tunnel through other space-time continua." Miller shook his head wearily. "You meddler! You knew you were supposed to report any defect." "I don't think I did any harm, did I?" Ellis was suddenly terribly nervous. "They seemed pleased, even grateful. Gosh, I'm sure I didn't cause any trouble." Miller shrieked in insane rage. For a time he danced around the room. Finally he threw something down on his desk, directly in front of Ellis. "No trouble. No, none. Look at this. I got' this from the Ancient Artifacts Archives." "What is it?" "Look at it! I compared one of your question sheets to this. The same. Exactly the same. All your sheets, questions and answers, every one of them's in here. You multilegged Ganymedian mange beetle!" Ellis picked up the book and opened it. As he read thepages a strange look came slowly over his face. "Good Heavens. So they kept a record of what I gave them. They put it all together in a book. Every word of it. And some commentaries, too. It's all here -- Every single word. It did have an effect, then. They passed it on. Wrote all of it down." "Go back to your office. I'm through looking at you for today. I'm through looking at you forever. Your severance check will come though regular channels." In a trance, his face flushed with a strange excitement, Ellis gripped the book and moved dazedly toward the door. "Say, Mr. Miller. Can I have this? Can I take it along?" "Sure," Miller said wearily. "Sure, you can take it. You can read it on your way home tonight. On the public monojet transport." you," Mary Ellis whispered excitedly, gripping Mrs. Lawrence's arm. "Make sure you say the right thing." "The right thing?" Mrs. Lawrence faltered nervously, a trifle uneasy. "What is it? Nothing alive, I hope." "No, no." Mary pushed her toward the study door. "Just smile." She raised her voice. "Henry, Dorothy Lawrence is here." Henry Ellis appeared at the door of his study. He bowed slightly, a dignified figure in silk dressing gown, pipe in his mouth, fountain pen in one hand. "Good evening, Dorothy," he said in a low, wellmodulated voice. "Ca-re to step into my study a moment?" "Study?" Mrs. Lawrence came hesitantly in. "What do you study? I mean, Mary says you've been doing something very interesting recently, now that you're not with -- I mean, now that you're home more. She didn't give me any idea what it was, though." Mrs. Lawrence's eyes roved curiously around the study. The study was full of reference volumes, charts, a huge mahogany desk, an atlas globe, leather chairs, an unbelievably ancient electric typewriter. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "How odd. All these old things."  cal power equipment, a huge atomic-powered caterpillar train crawls out of a crater's shadow up into the sunlight, on its way to the site where a Moon base is under construction. After communication and power equipment are on their way, food and prefabricated housing units are unloaded from the two shuttle ships seen in the distance on the crater's floor. Now turn to inside back cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg: Lava Falls on Mercury # # # # I by Ed Valigursky  IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue an sale May #th like # years from now? That is the theme of IF's first Collegiate Science Fiction Contest which was announced last fall. Participants are limited to undergraduates in colleges in the United States and Canada, and the object is three fold : to introduce IF to new readers; stimulate interest in science fiction among young men and women, who will be the America of tomorrow; and to get their ideas and opinions, which are to be expressed in novelette form of approximately # words. The curtain falls next month, midnight May #th to be exact, and there are prizes totaling #. Writing ability is being considered, but of primary concern are ideas and imagination. Politics, science, literature, economics, semantics, sports, medicine -- any classroom subject or personal ones -- may be used as a background; the scene : any city, village farm or other place in America. There are no taboos and the only limitation is the author's imagination. Well, manuscripts have begun to trickle in. How many we will receive before the deadline is hard to tell but, judging from enquiries received since last November, there will be many more than anticipated. The response is not only encouraging, from the standpoint of a successful contest, but to see so many young people curious and anxious to express their opinions and speculations about what their country will be like a century from now. As one young man from Seattle, Washington, expressed it: "I have several ideas running around in my head... It will be fun to kick this thing around." None of the entrees will be judged, of course, until after the contest closes, but from brief scanning of early returns space travel, government, electronics, synthetics and human relations seem to be the most popular subjects. One of the stories predicts an American Empire, consisting of North and South America, as one of three nations existing on earth a century from now. It seems that the United States, diluted with socialism and communism, is saved from becoming a Soviet puppet state (about #) by a man with the soldiery of General MacArthur, the economic judgment of Herbert Hoover and the oratory of story tells of a United States subsisting on synthetics while a vast program, under military supervision, is being conducted to rehabilitate our natural resources; still another contestant prophesizes the human life span to be # years, with the cure of cancer as common as that of pneumonia is today. So -- the ideas are coming thick and fast already. What their diversity will be when all submissions are in and we start judging is anybody's guess. But one thing is sure: it's going to be an exciting, fascinating, and thought-provoking journey into what young America is thinking today about tomorrow. And if you want to see what the winners predict, don't miss the November and December issues -- you are in for a real treat. pearance with the old crystal sets back in the middle twenties and grew with leaps and bounds up through the thirties and forties, it never did seem to attain the degree of popularity that television has received in the relatively few years since you got a flickering picture over a "seven-inch" set. In less than ten years TV has become something of a home life social problem as well as a source of entertainment. People build on special rooms or re-do attics or cellars. They buy special chairs, tables, lamps, ash trays, etc. Dad stays home at night and Mother lets the dishes go until morning. The small fry either forget or won't do their homework, they refuse to come to meals until the last redskin has bit the dust, and that errand you want them to do can wait until Space Captain Carson has safely landed his ship on the Moon. In many cases they have taken over the family TV completely. However, there may soon come a time when television will have the exact opposite effect -- on the small fry, anyway. Junior will jump the minute you call him, he will never hesitate to do an errand, he will rush into his meals! Well... ? Television is not only a medium of entertainment. It is used by the Signal Corps to study battle problems. It is the "eyes" of the operator of machines that detonate and disassemble bombs. It is equipment in industry where machinery performs robot operations untenable by man. It is a medium of instruction... ! Now we have it! Perhaps it won't be too long before school is conducted by television -- right in your own home. All you have to do is put Junior in front of the set, turn it on at "bell time" and he'll get his readin', writin', and 'rithmetic without even going out of doors. He's gonna be told to wash his face and hands, do his home work, do this and that... He's gonna get so much schoolin' that he'll be happy to do anything to get a "recess". So -- once TV school starts, parents will get back their sets, ringside seats and domestic peace. By the way, have you got your color set yet? If not, and that ## price is keeping you from sending out color that you can pick up -- in black-and-white -- on your present set without adapters or gadgets. So, you can wait until color comes down to your budget. A long, long and fast, fast way from Marconi and Bell. -- jlq If historical precedent be wrong -- what qualities, then, must man possess to successfully colonize new worlds? Doctor Ashby said: "There is no piece of data you cannot find, provided you can devise the proper experimental procedure for turning it up." Now -- about the man and the procedure... By Raymond F. Jones Illustrated by Paul Orban year had been the dry one, and it would come again. But they wouldn't be here to see it, Captain Louis Carnahan thought. They had seen four dry ones, and now had come the fourth wet one, and soon they would be going home. For them, this was the end of the cycle. At first they had kept track of the days, checking each one off on their calendars, but the calendars had long since been mingled indistinguishably with the stuff of the planet itself -- along with most of the rest of their equipment. By that time, however, they had learned that the cycle of wet and dry seasons was almost precisely equivalent to a pair of their own Terran years, so they had no more need for the calendars. But at the beginning of this wet season Carnahan had begun marking off the days once again with scratches on the post of the hut in which he lived. The chronometers were gone, too, but one and threequarters Earth days equalled one Serrengian day, and by that he could compute when the ships from Earth were due. He had dug moats about the hut to keep rain water from coming in over his dirt floor. Only two of the walls were erected, and he didn't know or much care whether he would get the other two up or not. Most of the materials had blown away during the last dry period and he doubted very much that he would replace them. The two available walls were cornered against the prevailing winds. The roof was still in good shape, allowing him a sufficient space free of leaks to accommodate his cooking and the mat which he called a bed. He picked up a gourd container from the rough bench in the center of the room and took a swallow of the burning liquid. From the front of the hut he looked out over the rain swept terrain at the circle of huts. Diametrically across from him he could see Bolinger, the little biologist, moving energetically about. Bolinger was the only one who had retained any semblance of scientific interest. He puttered continually over his collection, which had grown enormously over the eight year period. When they got back, Bolinger at least would have some accomplishment to view with pride. The rest of them -- ? Carnahan laughed sharply and took another big swallow from the gourd, feeling the fresh surge of hot liquor already crossing the portals of his brain, bringing its false sense of wisdom and clarity. He knew it was false, but it was the only source of wisdom he had left, he told himself. He staggered back to the bed with the gourd. He caught a glimpse of his image in the small steel mirror on the little table at the end of the bed. Pausing to stare, he stroked the thick mat of beard and ran his fingers through the mane of hair that had been very black when he came, and was now a dirty silver grey. He hadn't looked at himself for a long time, but now he had to. He had to know what they would see when the ships of Earth came to pick up the personnel of the Base and leave another crew. The image made him sick. At the beginning of this final season of the rains, all his life before coming to Serrengia seemed like a dream that had never been real. Now it was coming back, as if he were measuring the final distance of a circle and approaching once again his starting point. He kept remembering more and more. Watching his image in the mirror, he remembered what General Winthrop had said on the day of their departure. "The pick of Earth's finest," the General said. "We have combed the Earth and you are the men we have chosen to represent Mankind in the far reaches of the Universe. Remember that wherever you go, there goes the honor of Mankind. Do not, above all, betray that honor." Carnahan clenched his teeth in bitterness. He wished old fatty Winthrop had come with them. Savagely he upended the gourd and flung it across the room. It meant a trip to Bailey's hut to get it replenished. Bailey had been the Chief Physicist. Now he was the official distiller, and the rotgut he produced was the only thing that made existence bearable. The Captain stared again at his own image. "Captain Louis Carnahan," he murmured aloud. "The pick of Earth's finest -- !" He smashed a fist at the little metal mirror and sent it flying across the room. The table crashed over, one feeble leg twisting brokenly. Then Carnahan hunched over with his face buried against the bed. His fists beat against it while his shoulders jerked in familiar, drunken sobs. After it was over he raised up, sitting on the edge of the bed. His mind burned with devastating clarity. It seemed for once he could remember everything that had ever happened to him. He remembered it all. He remembered his childhood under the bright, pleasant sky of Earth. He remembered his ambition to be a soldier, which meant spaceman, even then. He remembered his first flight, a simple training tour of the Moon installations. It convinced him that never again could he consider himself an Earthman in the sense of one who dwells upon the Earth. His realm was the sky and the stars. Not even the short period when he had allowed himself to be in love had changed his convictions. He had sacrificed everything his career demanded. Where had it gone wrong? How could he have allowed himself to forget? For years he had forgotten, he realized in horror. He had forgotten that Earth existed. He had forgotten how he came to be here, and why. And all that he was meant to accomplish had gone undone. For years the scientific work of the great base expedition had been ignored. Only the little biologist across the way, pecking at his tasks season after season, had accomplished anything. And now the ships were coming to demand an accounting. He groaned aloud as the vision became more terrible. He thought of that day when they had arrived at the inhospitable and uninhabited world of Serrengia. He could close his eyes and see it again -- the four tall ships standing on the plateau that was scarred by their landing. The men had been so proud of what they had done and would yet do. They could see nothing to defeat them as they unloaded the mountains of equipment and supplies. Now that same equipment lay oozing in the muck of leafy decomposition, corroded and useless like the men themselves. And in the dry seasons it had been alternately buried and blasted by the sands and the winds. He remembered exactly the day and the hour when they had cracked beyond all recovery. With an iron hand he had held them for three years. Weekly he demanded an appearance in full dress uniform, and hard discipline in all their relationships was the rule. Then one day he let the dress review go. They had come in from a long trek through a jungle that was renewing itself after a dry season. Too exhausted in body and spirit, and filled with an increasing sense of futility, he abandoned for the moment the formalities he had held to. After that it was easy. They fell apart all around him. He tried to hold them, settling quarrels that verged on mutiny. Then in the sixth month of the fourth year he had to kill with his own hands the first of his crazed and rebellious crew. This scientific work disintegrated and was abandoned. He remembered he had locked up all their notes and observations and charts, but where he had hidden the metal chest was one of the few things he seemed unable to recall. The more violent of the expedition killed each other off, or wandered into the jungle or desert and never came back. On the even dozen who were left there had settled a kind of monastic hermitage. Each man kept to himself, aware that a hairbreadth trespass against his neighbor would mean quick challenge to the death. Yet they clung to membership in this degenerate community as if it represented their last claim to humanness. This is what they would see Carnahan, thought. They would see his personal failure It was his, there was no question of that. If he had been strong he could have held the expedition together. He could have maintained the base in all the strength and honor of military tradition that had been entrusted to him. He hadn't been strong enough. The ships would come. The four of them. They might come tomorrow or even today. A panic crept through him. The ships could land at any time now, and their men would come marching out to greet him in his failure and cowardice and his dishonor. It must not happen. Old fatty Winthrop had said one thing that made sense: " -- there goes the honor of Mankind. Do not, above all, betray that honor." Fatty was right. The only thing he had left was honor, and in only one way could he retain it. With the fiery clarity burning in his brain he struggled from where he lay and picked up the metallic mirror and hung it from the post near the bed. He turned up the broken table against the wall. Then, with the air of one who has not been on the premises for a long time he began searching through the long unused chests stacked in the corner. The contents were for the most part in a state of decay, but he found his straight edged razor in the oiled pouch where he had last placed it. There should have been shaving detergent, but he couldn't find it. He contented himself with preparing hot water, then slowly and painfully hacked the thick beard away and scraped his face clean. He found a comb and raked it through his tangled mat of hair, arranging it in some vague resemblance to the cut he used to wear. From the chests he drew forth the dress uniform he had put away so long ago. Fortunately, it had been in the center, surrounded by other articles so that it was among the best preserved of his possessions. He donned it in place of the rags he wore. The shoes were almost completely hard from lack of care, but he put them on anyway and brushed the toes with a scrap of cloth. From underneath his bed he took his one possession which he had kept in meticulous repair, his service pistol. Then he stood up, buttoning and smoothing his coat, and smiled at himself in the little mirror. But his gaze shifted at once to something an infinity away. " 'Do not, above all, betray that honor.' At least you gave us one good piece of advice, fatty," he said. Carefully, he raised the pistol to his head. erect and self-supporting. Its shell enclosure was complete except for necessary installation openings. And in Number One the installations were complete and the ship's first test flight was scheduled for tomorrow morning. John Ashby looked from the third story window of his office toward the distant assembly yards on the other side of the field. The four hulls stood like golden flames in the afternoon sunlight. Ashby felt defeated by the speed with which the ships were being completed. It was almost as if the engineers had a special animosity toward him, which they expressed in their unreasonable speed of construction. This was nonsense, of course. They had a job to do and were proud if they could cut time from their schedule. But there was no cutting time from his schedule, and without the completion of his work the ships would not fly. He had to find men capable of taking them on their fantastic journeys. To date, he had failed. He glanced down at the black car with government markings, which had driven in front of the building a few moments before, and then he heard Miss Haslam, his secretary, on the interphone. "The Colonization Commission, Dr. Ashby." He turned from the window. "Have them come in at once," he said. He strode to the door and shook hands with each of the men. Only four of them had come: Mr. Merton, Chairman; General Winthrop; Dr. Cowper; and Dr. Boxman. "Please have seats over here by the window," Ashby suggested. They accepted and General Winthrop stood a moment looking out. "A beautiful sight, aren't they, Ashby?" he said. "They get more beautiful every day. You ought to get over more often. Collins says you haven't been around the place for weeks, and Number One is going up tomorrow." "We've had too much to occupy us here." "My men are ready," said the General pointedly. "We could supply a dozen crews to take those ships to Serrengia and back, and man the base there." Ashby turned away, ignoring the General's comment. He took a chair at the small conference table where the three Commissioners had seated themselves. Winthrop followed, settling in his chair with a smile, as if he had scored a major point. "Number One is ready," said Merton, "and still you have failed to offer us a single man, Dr. Ashby. The Commission feels that the time is very near when definite action will have to be taken. We have your reports, but we wanted a personal word with you to see if we couldn't come to some understanding as to what we can expect." "I will send you the men when I find out what kind of man we need," said Ashby. "Until then there had better be no thought of releasing the colonization fleet. I will not be responsible for any but the right answers to this problem." "We are getting to the point," said Boxman, "where we feel forced to consider the recommendations of General Winthrop. Frankly, we have never been able to fully understand your objections." "There'll never be a time when I cannot supply all the men needed to establish this base," said Winthrop. "We spend unlimited funds and years of time training personnel for posts of this kind, yet you insist on looking for unprepared amateurs. It makes no sense whatever, and only because you have been given complete charge of the personnel program have you been able to force your views on the Commission. But no one understands you. In view of your continued failure, the Commission is going to be forced to make its own choice." "My resignation may be had at any time," said Ashby. "No, no, Dr. Ashby." Merton held up his hand. "The General is perhaps too impulsive in his disappointment that you have failed us so far, but we do not ask for your resignation. We do ask if there is not some way in which you might see fit to use the General's men in manning the base." "The whole answer lies in the erroneous term you persist in applying to this project," said Ashby. "It is not a base, and never will be. We propose to set up a colony. It makes an enormous difference with respect to the kind of men required. We've been over this before -- " "But not enough," snapped Winthrop. "We'll continue to go over it until you understand you can't waste those ships on a bunch of half-baked idealists inspired by some noble nonsense about carrying on the torch of human civilization beyond the stars. We're putting up a base, to gather scientific data and establish rights of occupancy." "I don't think I agree with your description of my proposed party of colonists," said Ashby mildly. "That's what they'll be! Were colonists ever anything but psalm singing rebels or cutthroats trying to escape hanging? You're not going to establish a cultural and scientific base with such people." "No, you're quite right. That's not the kind." "What is it you're looking for?" said Merton irritably. "What kind of men do you want, if you can't find them among the best and the worst humanity offers." "Your terms are hardly accurate," said Ashby. "You fail to recognize the fact that we have never known what kind of man it takes to colonize. You ignore the fact that we have never yet successfully colonized the planets of our own Solar System. Bases, yes -- but all our colonies have failed to date. # ' "What better evidence could you ask for in support of my argument?" demanded Winthrop. "We've proved bases are practical, and that colonies are not." "No matter how far away or how long the periods of rotation, a man assigned to a base expects to return home. Night or day, in the performance of any duty, there is in his mind as a working background the recognition that at some future time he can go home. His base is never his home." "Precisely. That is what makes the base successful." Ashby shook his head. "No base is ever successful from the standpoint of permanent extension of a civilization. By its very nature it is transitory, impermanent. That is not what we want now." "We have the concept of permanent bases in military thinking," said Winthrop. "You can't generalize in that fashion." "Name for me a single military or expeditionary base that continued its permanency over any extended period of history." "Well -- now -- " "The concept is invalid," said Ashby. "Extensions of humanity from one area to another on a permanent basis are made by colonists. Men who do not expect to rotate, but come to live and establish homes. This is what we want on Serrengia. Humanity is preparing to make an extension of itself in the Universe. "But more than this, there are limitations of time and distance in the establishment of bases, which cannot be overcome by any amount of training of personnel. Cycles of rotation and distances from home can be lengthened beyond the capacity of men to endure. It is only when they go out with no expectation of return that time and distance cease to control them." "We do not know of any such limitations," said Winthrop. "They have not been met here in the Solar System." "We know them," said Ashby. "The thing we have not found and which we must discover before those ships depart is the quality that makes it possible for a man to ignore time and distance and his homeland. We know a good deal about the successful colonists of Earth's history. We know that invariably they were of some minority group which felt itself persecuted or limited by conditions surrounding it, or else they were fleeing the results of some crime." "If that is what you are looking for, it is no wonder you have failed," said Dr. Cowper. "We have no such minority groups in our society." "Very true," Ashby replied. "But it is not the condition of fleeing or being persecuted that generates the qualities of a perfect colonist by any means! We have examples enough of adequately persecuted groups who failed as colonists. But there is some quality, which seems to appear, if at all, only in some of those who have courage enough to flee their oppression or limiting conditions. This quality makes them successful in their colonization. "We are looking first, therefore, for individuals who would have the courage to resist severe limitations to the extent of flight, if such limitations existed. And among these we hope to find the essence of that which makes it possible for a man to cut all ties with his homeland.' # "So you are making your search," said Merton, "among the potentially rebellious and criminal?" Ashby nodded. "We have confined our study to these individuals as a result of strict historical precedent so that we might narrow the search as much as possible. You must understand, however, that to choose merely the rebellious and staff our ships with these would be foolhardy. It would be a ridiculous shotgun technique. Some of them would succeed, but we would never know which it would be. We might send twenty or a thousand ships out and establish one successful colony. "We have to do much better than that. Our consumption of facilities on this project is so great that we have to know, within a negligible margin of error, that when these groups are visited in eight or fifty years from now we will find a community of cooperative, progressive human beings. We cannot be satisfied with less!" "I'm afraid the majority of sentiment in the Commission is not in agreement with you," said Mr. Merton. "To oppose General Winthrop's trained crews with selected cutthroats and traitors may have historical precedent, but it scarcely seems the optimum proceedure in this case! proof of your thesis, Dr. Ashby, but we have certain realities of which we are sure. If we can do no better, we shall take the best available to us at the time the ships are ready. If you cannot supply us with proven crews and colonists by then we shall be forced to accept General Winthrop's recommendations and choose personnel whose reactions are at least known and predictable to a high degree. I'm sorry, but surely you can understand our position in this matter." For a long time Ashby was silent, looking from one to the other of the faces about the table. Then he spoke in a low voice, as if having reached the extremity of his resources. "Yes -- the reactions of Winthrop's men are indeed known. I suggest that you come with me and I will show you what those reactions are." He stood up and the others followed with inquiring expressions on their faces. Winthrop made a short, jerky motion of his head, as if he detected a hidden sting in Ashby's words. "What do you mean by that?" he demanded. "You don't suppose that our examinations would neglect the men on whom you have spent so much time and effort in training?" The General flushed with rage. "If you've tampered with any of my men -- ! You had no right -- !" The other Commission members were smiling in faint amusement at the General's discomfiture. "I should think it would be to your advantage to check the results of your training," said Mr. Merton. "There is only one possible check!" exclaimed General Winthrop. "Put these men on a base for a period of eight years and at a distance of forty seven light years from home and see what they will do. That is the only way you can check on them." "And if you know anything about our methods of testing, you will understand that this, in effect, is what we have done. Your best man is about to be released from the test pit. He can't have more than an hour to go." "Who have you got in your guinea pig pen?" the General demanded. "If you've ruined him -- " "Captain Louis Carnahan," said Ashby. "Shall we go down, gentlemen?" watching the final minutes of Carnahan's disintegration. General Winthrop's face was almost purple when he saw the test pit in which Carnahan was being examined. He tried to tear out the observation lens with his bare hands as he saw the Captain lift the loaded pistol to his head in the moment before the safety beam cut in. And now Ashby kept hearing Winthrop's furious, scathing voice: "You have destroyed one of the best men the Service has ever produced! I'll have your hide for this, Ashby, if it's the last act of my life." Merton and the others had been shocked also by the violence and degradation of what they saw, but whether he had made his point or not, Ashby didn't know. Carnahan, of course, would be returned to the Service within twenty four hours, all adverse effects of the test completely removed. He would be aware that he had taken it and had not passed, but there would be no trace of the bitter emotions generated during those days of examination. Ashby looked out again at the four hulls now turning from gold to red as the sun dropped lower in the sky. He had not asked Merton if the ultimatum was going to stick. He wondered how they could insist on it after what they had seen, but he didn't know. Impatiently, he turned from the window as Miss Haslam's voice came on the intercom once more. "Dr. Ashby, Mr. Jorden is still waiting to see you." Jorden. He had forgotten. The man had been waiting during his conference with the Commissioners. Jorden was the one who had been rejected for examination two weeks ago and insisted he had a right to be examined for colonization factors. He had been trying to get in ever since. He might as well get rid of the man once and for all, Ashby decided reluctantly. "Show him in," he said. Mark Jorden was a tall, blond man in his late twenties. Shaking hands with him, Ashby felt thick, strong fingers and glimpsed a massive wrist at the edge of the coat sleeve. Jorden's face was a pleasant Scandinavian pink, matched by blue eyes that looked intently into Ashby's face. They sat at the desk. "You want to be a colonist," said Ashby. "You say you want to settle forty seven light years from Earth for the rest of your life. And our preliminary psycho tests indicate you have scarcely a vestige of the basic qualities required. Why do you insist on the full examination?" Jorden smiled and shook his head honestly. "I don't know exactly. It seems like something I'd enjoy doing. Maybe it's in my people -- they liked to move around and see new places. They were seamen in the days when there weren't any charts to sail by." "It's certain that this is a situation without charts to sail by," said Ashby, "but I hardly think the word 'enjoy' is applicable. Have you thought at all of what existence means at that distance from Earth, with no communication whatever except a ship every eight years or so? Qualifications just a trifle short of insanity are required for a venture of that kind." "I'm sure you don't mean that. Dr. Ashby," said Jorden reprovingly. "Perhaps not," said Ashby. His visitor's calm assurance irritated him, as if he were the one who knew what a colonist ought to be. "I see by your application you're an electrical engineer." Jorden nodded. "Yes. My company has just offered me the head of the department, but I had to explain I was putting in an application for colonist. They think I'm crazy, of course." "Does taking the examination mean giving up your promotion?" "I'm not sure. But I rather think they will pass me up and give it to one of the other men." "You want to go badly enough to risk giving up that chance in order to take an examination which will unquestionably show you have no qualifications whatever to be a colonist?" "I think I'm qualified," said Jorden. "I insist on being given the chance. I believe I have the right to it." Ashby tried to restrain his irritation. What Jorden said was perhaps true. No one had ever raised the point before. Those previously rejected by the preliminary tests had withdrawn in good grace. It seemed senseless to waste the time of a test pit and its large crew on an obviously hopeless applicant. On the other hand, he couldn't afford to have Jorden stirring up trouble with the Colonization Commission at this critical time -- and he could guess that was exactly what Jorden' s next move would be if he were turned down again. "Our machines will find out everything about you later," said Ashby, "but I'd like you to tell me about yourself so that I may feel personally acquainted with you." Jorden shrugged. "There's not much to tell. I had the usual schooling, which wasn't anything impressive. I had my three year hitch in the Service, and I suppose that's where I began to feel there was something available in life which I had never anticipated. I suppose it sounds very silly to you, but when I first put a foot on the Moon I felt like crying. I picked up a handful of pumice and let it sift through my fingers. I looked out toward Mars and felt as if I could go anywhere, that I ought to go everywhere. "The medicos told me later that it was a crazy sort of feeling that everyone gets his first time out, but I didn't believe them. I didn't believe it was quite the same with anyone else. When I got out to Mars finally, and during my one tour on Pluto, it seemed to get worse instead of decreasing as they told me it would. When I got out I took a job in my profession, and I've been satisfied, but I've never been able to get rid of the feeling there's something I'm missing, something I ought to be doing. It's connected with everything out there." He lifted a broad hand and gestured to the horizon beyond the windows. "Perhaps your career should have been in the Service," suggested Ashby. "No. That was good enough while it lasted, but they didn't have anything I wanted permanently. When I heard about the proposed colonization on Serrengia that seemed to be it." "Your application indicates you are not married." "That's right," said Jorden. "I have no ties to hold me hack." "You understand, of course, that as a colonist you will be expected to marry, either before leaving or soon after arrival. Colonial life is family life." "I hadn't thought much about that, but it can't be too bad, I suppose. I presume my choice would be quite severely limited to a fellow colonist?" "Correct." "There is a story about my third or fourth grandfather who was given a girl to marry the night before he sailed from his homeland to settle in a new country. They had seventeen children and were said to be extraordinarily happy. My family still owns the homestead they cleared. I was bom there." "It can be done, but it doesn't conform closely with our currently accepted social mores," said Ashby hopefully. "I'm sure that won't stand in my way. If there's a woman who's willing to take a chance, I certainly will be." "There's one more thing we have to know," said Ashby. "What are you running away from? Who or what are your enemies?" Jorden laughed uncertainly. "I'm sorry, but I'm not running away from anything. As far as I know I have no enemies." "All colonists are running from something," said Ashby. "Otherwise they would stay where they are." Jorden regarded him a moment in silence, then smiled slowly. "I think you are going to have occasion to revise that thesis," he said. "A great deal of history would also have to be revised if we did," said Ashby. "At any rate, let's go down to the test pits. I'll show you what's in store for you there, and you can further decide if you insist on going through with it." Institute of Social Science were spread over a forty acre area, consisting mostly of the test pits where experimental examination of proposed colonists was being conducted. Ashby led his visitor to the ground floor where they took a pair of the electric cycles used for transportation along the vast corridors of the laboratory. A quarter of a mile away they stopped and entered a glassed-in control room fitted with a number of desks and extensive banks of electronic equipment. "This almost looks like a good sized computer setup  # said Jorden admiringly. "We use computers extensively, but this equipment is merely the recording and control apparatus for the synthetic environment established in the test pit. Please step this way . # The control room was empty now, but during a test it was occupied by a dozen technicians. It was a highly unorthodox procedure to show a prospective colonist the test pit setup before examination, but Ashby still had hopes of shunting Jorden aside without wasting the facilities on a useless test. They moved to an observation post and Ashby directed Jorden's attention to the observation lenses. "We cleaned out here this afternoon , # he said. "A Captain of the Service last occupied the pit . # Jorden looked up inquiringly. "Did he -- ?" "No. He didn't make it. Tomorrow morning you will be given a preconditioning which will set up the basic situation that you have traveled to Serrengia and are now established there in the colony. We will begin the test at a period of some length after establishment there, when difficulties begin to pile up. Other members of the party will be laboratory staff people who will provide specific, guiding stimuli to determine your reaction to them . # "Are they there constantly, night and day?" "No. When you are asleep their day's work is over and they go home . # "What if I wake up and find the whole setup is a phony?" "You won't. We have control beams constantly focussed upon the persons being tested. These are used to keep him asleep when desirable, and to control him to the extent of preventing him doing physical harm to himself or others." "Is that necessary?" said Jorden dubiously. "Why should anyone wish to do harm?" "The Captain, whom we released today, was pushed to the point of suicide," said Ashby. "We find it quite necessary to assure ourselves of adequate control at all times." "How can you set up the illusion of distance and a whole new world in such a comparatively small area?" "It is illusion, a great deal of it. Some is induced along with the initial preconditioning, other features are done mechanically, but when you are there you will have no doubt whatever that you are a colonist on the planet Serrengia. You will act accordingly, and respond to the stimuli exactly as if you had been transported to the actual planet. In this way, we are sure of finding colonists who will not blow up when they face the real situation." "How many have you found so far?" "None." Jorden was shaken for a moment, but he smiled then and said, "You have found one. Put my name down on the books." "We'll see," said Ashby grimly. "Your colony will be in the limited belt of the planet's northern hemisphere where considerable agriculture is possible. You'll be in the midst of a group trying to beat a living from a world which is neither excessively hostile nor conducive to indolence. Some of the people will be bitter and wish they had never come. They will break up in groups and fight each other. They will challenge every reason you have for your own coming. You will face your own personal impoverishment, the death of your child -- " "Child?" said Jorden. "Yes. You will be provided with a wife and three children. One of these will die, and you will react as if it were your own flesh. Your wife will oppose your staying, and demand a return to Earth. We will throw at you every force available to tear down your determination to build a colony. We shall test in every possible way the validity of your decision to go. Do you still wish to go through with it?" Jorden's grin was somewhat fainter. He took a deep breath as he nodded slowly. "Yes, I'll go through with it. I think it's what I want." When Ashby finally returned alone to the office, Miss Haslam had gone home. He put in a call anyway for Dr. Bonnie Nathan. She usually remained somewhere in the laboratory until quite late, even when not assigned to a test. In a few minutes her voice came over the phone. "John? What can I do for you?" "I thought I could let you off for a few days," said Ashby, "but we've got another one that's come up rather suddenly." He told her briefly about Mark Jorden. "It's useless, but I don't want him running to the Commission right now, so we'll put him through. You'll be the wife. We'll use Program Sixty Eight, except that we'll accelerate it." "Accelerate -- !" "Yes. It won't hurt him any. Whatever happens we can wipe up afterwards. This is simply a nuisance and I want it out of the way as quickly as possible. After that -- perhaps I can give you those few days I promised you. O.K.?" "It's all right with me," said Bonnie. "But an accelerated Sixty Eight -- " overlooking the ninety acres of bottom land salvaged from the creek grass. Mark Jorden shaded his eyes and squinted critically over the even stand of green shoots emerging from the bronzed soil. Germination had been good in spite of the poor planting time. The chance of getting a crop out was fair. If they didn't they'd be eating shoe plastic in another few months.  The ten year old boy beside him clutched his hand and edged closer as if there were something threatening him from the broad fields. "Isn't there any way at all for Earth to send us food," he said, "if we don't get a crop?" "We have to make believe Earth doesn't exist, Roddy," said Jorden. "We couldn't even let them know we need help, we're so far away." He gripped the boy's shoulders solidly in his big hands and drew him close. "We aren't going to need any help from Earth. We're going to make it on our own. After all, what would they do on Earth if they couldn't make it? Where would they go for outside help?" "I know," said the boy, "but there are so many of them they can't fail. Here, there's only the few of us." Jorden patted his shoulder gently again as they started moving toward the rough houses a half mile away. "That makes it all the easier for us," he said. "We don't have to worry about the ones who won't cooperate. We can't lose with the setup we've got." It was harder for Roddy. He remembered Earth, although he had been only four when they left. He still remembered the cities and the oceans and the forests he had known so briefly, and was cursed with the human nostalgia for a past that seemed more desirable than an unknown, fearful future. Of the other children, Alice had been a baby when they left, and Jerry had been born during the trip. They knew only Serrengia and loved its wild, uncompromising rigor. They spent their abandoned wildness of childhood in the nearby hills and forests. But with Roddy it was different. Childhood seemed to have slipped by him. He was moody, and moved carefully in constant fear of this world he Jorden' s heart ached with longing to instill some kind of joy into him. "That looks like Mr. Tibbets," said Roddy suddenly, his eyes on the new log house. "I believe you're right," said Jorden. "It looks like Roberts and Adamson with him. Quite a delegation. I wonder what they want." The colony consisted of about a hundred families, each averaging five members. Originally they had settled on a broad plateau at some distance from the river. It was a good location overlooking hundreds of miles of desert and forest land. Its soil was fertile and the river water was lifted easily through the abundant power of the community atomic energy plant which had been brought from Earth. Three months ago, however, the power plant had been destroyed in a disasterous explosion that killed almost a score of the colonists. Crops for their next season's food supply were half matured and could not be saved by any means available. The community was broken into a number of smaller groups. Three of these, composed of fifteen families each, moved to the low lands along the river bank and cleared acreage for new crops in a desperate hope of getting a harvest before the season ended. They had not yet learned enough of the cycle of weather in this area to predict it with much accuracy. Mark Jorden was in charge of one of the farms and the elected leader of the village in which he lived. Tibbets was an elderly man from the same village. In his middle sixties, he presented a puzzle to Jorden as to why he had been permitted to come. Roberts and Adamson were from the settlements farther down the river. Jorden felt certain of the reason for their visit. He didn't want to hear what they had to say, but he knew he might as well get it over with. They hailed him from the narrow wooden porch. Jorden came up the steps and shook hands with each. "Won't you come in? I'm sure Bonnie can find something cool to drink." Tibbets wiped his thin, wrinkled brow. "She already has. That girl of yours doesn't waste any time being told what to do. It's too bad some of the others can't pitch in the way Bonnie does." Jorden accepted the praise without comment, wondering if no one else at all were aware of the hot, violent protests she sometimes poured out against him because of the colony. "Come in anyway," Jorden said. "I have to go back to the watering in a little while, but you can take it easy till then." He led the way into the log house. Their homes on the plateau had been decent ones. With adequate power they had made lumber and cement, and within a year of their landing had built a town of fine homes. Among those who had been forced to abandon them, no one was more bitter than Bonnie. "You're no farmer," she said. "Why can't those who are be the ones to move?" Now, when he came into the kitchen, she was tired, but she tried to smile as always at her pleasure in seeing him again. He couldn't imagine what it would be like not having her to welcome him from the fields. "I'll get something cool for you and Roddy," she said. "Would you gentlemen like another drink?" When they were settled in the front room Tibbets spoke. "You know why we've come, Mark. The election is only a couple of months away. We can't have Boggs in for another term of governor. You've got to say you'll run against him." "As I told you last time, Boggs may be a poor excuse for the job, but I'd be worse. He's at least an administrator. I'm only an engineer -- and more recently a farmer." "We've got something new, now," said Tibbets, his eyes suddenly cold and meaningful. "The talk about his deliberately blowing up the power plant? Talk of that kind could blow up the whole colony as well. Boggs may have his faults but he's not insane." "We've got proof now," said Tibbets. "It's true. Adamson's got the evidence. He got one of the engineers who escaped the blast to talk. It's one of them who were supposed to have been killed. He's so scared of Boggs he's still hiding out. But he's got the proof and those who are helping him know it's true." "Tibbet's is right," said Adamson earnestly. "We know it's true. And something like that can't stay hidden. It's got to be brought out if we're going to make the colony survive. You can't just shut your eyes to it and say, 'Good old Boggs would never do a thing like that.' " Jorden's eyes were darker as he spoke in low tones now, hoping Roddy would not be listening in the kitchen. "Suppose it is true. Why would Boggs do such an insane thing?" "Because he's an insane man," said Tibbets. "That's the obvious answer. He wants to destroy the colony and limit its growth. He was satisfied to come here and be elected governor and run the show. He saw it as means of becoming a two-bit dictator over a group of subservient colonists. It hasn't turned out that way. He found a large percentage of engineers and scientists who would have none of his nonsense. "He saw the group becoming something bigger than himself. He had to cut it down to his own size. can't possess, but he believes that by reducing us to primitive status he can keep us in line. In either case the colony loses." "If what you say is true -- if it's actually true," Jorden said, his eyes suddenly far away,"we've got to fight him -- " "Then we can count on you?" "Yes -- you can count on me." He stood in the doorway watching the departure of the three men, but he was aware of Bonnie behind him. She rushed to him as he turned, and put her face against his chest. "Mark -- you can't do it! Boggs will kill you. This is no concern of ours. We don't belong to Maintown any more. It's their business up there. I'd go crazy if anything happened to you. You've got to think of the rest of us!" "I am thinking," said Mark. He raised her chin so he could look into her eyes. "I'm thinking that we are going to live here the rest of our lives, and so are the children. If the story about Boggs is true, we're all concerned. We wouldn't be down here if the power plant hadn't been destroyed. We'd be living in our good home in Maintown. Would you expect me to let Boggs get away with this without raising a hand to stop him?" "Yes -- I would," said Bonnie, "because there is nothing anyone can do. You know he has Maintown in the palm of his hand. He's screened out every ruffian and soured colonist in the whole group and they'll do anything he says. You can't fight them all, Mark. I won't let you." "It won't be me alone," said Jorden. "If it develops into a fight the majority of the colony will be with us. Earth will be with us. Boggs will be facing the results of it took to make man what he now teria, Ashby indulged in a late coffee knowing he wouldn't sleep anyway. Across the table Bonnie ate sparingly of a belated supper. "The threat of having to fight Boggs didn't give him much of a scare," said Ashby thoughtfully. "It'll take a lot more than a bogey man like Boggs to scare Mark  # said Bonnie. "You've got yourself a bigger quantity of man than you bargained for." "This might turn out to be more interesting than we thought. I wish there were more time to spend on him. But Merton called up again today to verify the ultimatum I told you about. We produce colonists by the time Hull Four is complete or they turn the personnel problem over to Winthrop -- even after they saw Carnahan go to pieces before their eyes." "Has it ever occurred to you," said Bonnie slowly, "that we might just possibly be off on the wrong foot? How do you know that any of the colonists of Earth's history could have stood up to the demands of Serrengia? I'm beginning to suspect that the Mayflower's passenger list would have folded quite completely under these conditions. They had it comparatively easy. So did most other successful colonists." "Yes -- ?" said Ashby. "Maybe they succeeded in spite of being rebels. If they could have come to the new lands without the pressure of flight, but in complete freedom of action, they might have made an even greater success." "But why would they have come at all, then?" "I don't know. There must be another motive capable of impelling them. In great feats of exploration, creation -- other human actions similar to colonization -- " "There are no other human actions similar to colonization," said Ashby. "Surely you realize we're dealing with something unique here, Bonnie!" "I know -- all I'm trying to say is there could be another valid motive. I think Mark Jorden's got it. There's something different about this test, and I think you ought to look in on it yourself." "What's so different about him?" "He doesn't act like the rest. He hasn't any apparent reason for being here." Ashby looked at the girl closely. She was one of his top staff members and had been with him from the beginning. The incredible strain of working day after day in the test pits was showing its effects, he thought. "I shouldn't have let you get started on this one," he said. "You're fagged out. Maybe it would be better to erase what we've done and start over, so that you can drop out." She shook her head with a quickness that surprised him. "I want to finish it, and see how Mark turns out. I'm so used to working with the bitter, anti-social ones that it's a relief to have someone who is halfway normal and gregarious. I want to be around when we find out why he's here." "Especially if he should go all the way to the end. But he won't -- " Ashby was genuinely concerned about Bonnie's condition when he looked in on her the next morning. The strain on her face was real beyond any matter of make-up or acting. He wondered just why she should be giving in to it now. Bonnie was well trained, as were all the staff members who worked in the test pits. The emotional conflicts mocked up there were not allowed to penetrate very deeply into their personal experience, yet it looked now as if Bonnie had somehow lost control of the armor to protect against such invasion. She seemed to be living the circumstances of the test program almost as intensely as Mark Jorden was doing. Such a condition couldn't be permitted to continue, but he was baffled by it. Her physical and emotional check prior to the test had not shown her threshold to be this low. Evidently there was emotional dynamite buried somewhere in the situation they had manufactured. Through the observation lens of the test pit Ashby watched Jorden begin a tour of the villages, making a quiet investigation of the situation, which he had all but ignored until it was forced to his attention. Jorden spent an hour with Adamson, listening carefully to the atomic engineer's story, and then was led to the hiding place of the engineer who claimed direct evidence that Boggs had instigated the explosion at the power plant. As Adamson left them, Ashby signaled him through the tiny button buried in the skin behind his right ear. "This is Ashby," he said. "How does it look? Do you think he's going to tackle Boggs?" "No question of that." Adamson's words came back, although he made no movement of his mouth or throat. "Jorden is one of these people with a lot of inertia. It takes a big push to get him moving, but when he really gets rolling there isn't much that can stop him, either. You're really going to have to put the pressure on to find his cracking point." "I'm afraid we're likely to find Bonnie's first. There's something about this that's hitting her too hard. Do you know what it is?" "No," said Adamson. "I thought I noticed it a little yesterday, too. Maybe we ought to check her out." "She insists on completing the program. And I'd like to go all the way with Jorden. I'm becoming rather curious about him. Keep an eye on Bonnie and let me know what you think at the end of the shift." "I'll do that," said Adamson. more than a mile beyond the last village on the bank of the river. There, in a willow hidden cave in the clay bank, he found James, the atomic engineer who was reported to know of Boggs' attack on the power plant. "I told him you were coming," said Adamson, "but I'm going to leave. You can make out better if you're alone with him. He's bitter, but he isn't armed, and he'll go along with you if you don't push him too hard." Jorden watched Adamson disappear along the bank in the direction from which they had come. He had a feeling of utter ridiculousness. This wasn't what they had come for! They had come to build an outpost of human beings, to establish man's claim in this sector of the Universe. And they were ending in a petty conflict worthy of the politics of centuries before, back on Earth. His face took on a harder set as he approached the mouth of the cave and whistled the signal notes that Adamson had taught him. If the establishment of the colony demanded this kind of fight then he had not dedicated the remainder of his life to a goal only to abandon it to a petty tyrant like Boggs. A bearded face peered cautiously through parted willows and James' voice spoke. "You're Jorden? I suppose by now everybody in the villages knows where I'm hiding out. I'm the world's prize fool for letting this parade come past my place. Come in and I'll tell you what I know. If you help get Boggs it will be worth anything it costs me." Jorden followed the man through the screening willows to the mouth of the cave. There the two of them squatted on rocks opposite each other. "I remember you now," said James. "You set up the electric plant when we were assembling the pile, didn't you? I thought we'd worked together." Jorden nodded, hoping James would go on, remembering Adamson's caution not to push him too hard, but the engineer seemed to have nothing more to say. He rubbed a hand forcibly against his other arm and looked beyond the mouth of the cave to the slow moving river. "This business concerning Boggs' destruction of the plant -- how did it start?" said Jorden finally. "How does anything of that kind start?" said James. "Boggs came to some of us and remarked in casual conversation what a shame it would be if the colony were to duplicate all over again the mistakes that sooieties on Earth have made during the past thousands of years. A few of us were sympathetic with that thought -- it would indeed be a shame. Some of the engineers thought that this was the perfect chance to set up a truly scientific society. They didn't agree that Boggs was the ideal leader, but he was the leader and the obvious one to work through. They all became convinced that a rapid industrialization and a highly technological society built upon the old rusty foundations would be most difficult to overcome in building a society on truly adequate sociological principles. You can take it from there." Yes, he could, Jorden thought. Anybody could take it from there. It was the oldest lie that men of power and position had ever concocted. Why had those particular colonists fallen for it? "What about you?" he asked James. "Were you sucked in by Boggs' arguments?" The engineer nodded. "He took all of us. And all along he never intended that more than a couple would get out alive -- by double crossing the others." "Why?" said Jorden. "Why? I've thought a lot about that, living here in this mudhole. You get to thinking about things like that when you realize there's no going back, that Boggs would kill me on sight for what I could tell -- and that the other colonists would also, because of what I've done. Adamson says I can trust him. He says I can trust you. But I don't trust anybody. I know that someday soon I'm going to get a bullet in the head from one of you. All I'm hoping is that some of you hate Boggs enough to get him first." "Why did you come to Serrengia in the first place?" "To get away. Why did anyone come? You don't give up everything you've got in order to go to some strange world and spend the rest of your life unless you've got a reason. Unless you hate what to try anything else. Unless you're so terribly afraid of what could happen to you back there that dangers out here. We all had our reasons. I'm not asking yours. It makes no difference to you what mine were. But they're all alike. We came because we were so afraid or full of hate we couldn't stay." "How did you expect to build a new world out of hate and fear of the old one?" "Who worried about what we'd build here? All we wanted to do was get away. You can't tell me you came for any other reason!" continued to stare in wonder at the atomic engineer. To what extent were James' words actually true? How completely was the colony riddled with unpredictable, purposeless characters like him? If they had fled Earth with a purpose to create something better than they left, there was a chance. But if James was right that most of them had come in blind flight with no goal at all then the Earth colony of Serrengia would be dead long before the ships came again. But Jorden did not believe this. He did not believe that any but a small fraction of the colonists had any feeling toward Earth except that of love. Most had come bocause they wanted to do this particular thing with their lives. Nothing had driven or forced them to it. "Tell me what Boggs did, and what he persuaded you to do," said Jorden. In detail, James told him how Boggs had gained influence with the technicians necessary to prepare the plant for destruction, how he had persuaded them that a new, idealistic social order demanded their obedience to this fantastic plan. Then, under the Governor's direction, two of the men betrayed the rest. Only James, who was at a slight distance from his normal operating post that night, had escaped with non-fatal injuries. "I know how you feel," said James. "You'd like to stick a knife into me now. But until you succeed in disposing of Boggs, you need to be sure I'm alive. When that's over you'll send someone around to take care of the traitor, James. But you may be sure I won't be here. I'll get through your guards!" The man was half crazed, Jorden thought, from infection and fever in half treated wounds, and probably from the effects of radiation itself. "We aren't going to set up any guards," he said. "We're going to send you medical care. Don't try to get away down the river. I'll have some men who'll take you where you'll be safe and have care. # Jorden left, on the hope that James would not attempt further flight until he was assured of Boggs' defeat. But the colony could not quickly administer the kind of defeat James wanted. They had to be orderly, even if it was a frontier community. There had to be a trial. There had to be evidence, and James had to be called to give it. He returned to the village and made arrangements with Adamson to get medical care for James. Dr. Babbit, one of the four physicians with the colony, was sufficiently out of sympathy with Boggs to be trusted. Then, with his family, he accompanied Tibbets to Maintown. On the bulletin board outside the Council Hall he hung an announcement of his candidacy for the governorship, which Tibbets had prepared for him. Tibbets made a little speech to the handfull of people who gathered to read what was on the bulletin, but Jorden declined to make any personal statement just now. He had enough to say when it came time to accuse Boggs of the crimes involved in destruction of the power plant. But among those who squinted closely at Tibbets' fine, black printing there came a look of mild awe. It had been generally assumed that Boggs would go unopposed for reelection. On the way back Tibbets' car passed the length of Maintown and took them by the deserted house which Jorden had built in their first year on Serrengia. Bonnie gave it a covetous look, contrasting its spaciousness with the primitive cabin in which she now lived. , Tibbets caught her glance. "If it were not for Boggs you would still be living there," he said. Bonnie made no answer. Both she and Roddy stared ahead, as if unable to bring their attention to bear upon the present, because of the fear incited by everything about them. Jorden was also silent, but his eyes wandered incessantly over the surrounding hills and distant farmlands. He hadn't bargained for anything like this. He had expected to find himself in a society of cooperative and uniformly energetic human beings. He knew now, without any further persuasion, that this had been a vision strictly from an ivory tower. He should have anticipated that in a group like this there would be a sprinkling of small time thugs and dictators and generally shiftless individuals who could not make a go of it in the society they had left. At home you could live and work with such without ever being more than vaguely aware of their eccentricities. Here, their deviation from required cooperation was enough to disrupt the whole community. He could understand the terror in Bonnie and Roddy. They had come only because of him, with no understanding of the colony's purpose. The present turmoil underlined their conviction that it had been pure folly to come. Somehow he'd have to show them. He'd have to make them understand there was a reason for being on Serrengia. But at the moment he did not know how to do it. continuation well into the night with a long scene at the cabin, but Ashby interrupted it as soon as they returned from Maintown. He ordered a twenty four hour rest, because of Bonnie. The extended period of sleep wouldn't harm Jorden. Bonnie, however, was furious at the interruption as she came out of the test pit. "If you're going to let it go to the end, why don't you get on with it?" she demanded. "The whole thing is so far off the track that you might as well find out as soon as possible that you're not getting anywhere." "I think we're beginning to find out a great deal. But I want you to have a rest. The hours of this shift are much too long for you." "You think you know what's going on inside Mark Jorden by watching the dials and meters, but you don't, because it's not himself he's concerned about. It's a goal outside and bigger than himself. The colony means something to him. It never meant anything at all to any of the others." "Then this is the kind of situation we've been looking for." "But we haven't the techniques or insight to understand it. We can analyze a man who's running away -- but we're not prepared for one who's running toward " The night after they returned from Maintown a terrific storm broke over the plateau. It began at supper time and for an hour poured torrents of water on the land. Jorden wanted to go down to the river to see if their diversion dams were holding. If they went out it meant long days of hard hand labor restoring them. He gave in, however, to Bonnie's plea to stay in the house with them. Roddy was frightened of the storm and looked physically ill when thunder made the walls of the cabin shake. It wouldn't change the actual facts of the damage to the dams whether Jorden examined them now or in the morning. He tried to think up stories to tell the children, but it was hard to make up some dealing only with Serrengia and ignoring Earth, as he had to do for Roddy's sake. After the rain finally stopped and Bonnie had put the children to bed there came a knock at the door. Bonnie opened it. Governor Boggs and two of Council members moved into the room. Little pools of water drained to the floor about their feet. The Governor turned slowly and grinned at Bonnie and Mark Jorden as the light from the lamp and the fireplace fell upon him. "Nasty night out," he said. "For a time I was afraid we weren't going to make it." Boggs was a short, stout man and carried himself very erect. He seemed to exaggerate his normal posture as he moved toward the chairs Bonnie offered the men. Jorden remained seated in his big wooden chair by the fireplace glancing up with cold challenge in his face as his visitors settled on the opposite side of the fire. "I'm sorry we missed you when you were in town today," said Boggs. "It was not until late this afternoon that I became aware of your visit." He reached to an inner coat pocket and drew forth a paper which he unfolded carefully. Jorden recognized it as the announcement he had tacked on the bulletin board. Boggs passed it over. "I felt sure you would wish to withdraw this, Jorden, after you had given it a little fuller consideration. I'm sure that by now you have had time to think over the matter a little more calmly and find a good many reasons why you should withdraw your announcement." "I haven't thought much about it," said Jorden, "but now that you call it to my attention I am becoming aware of an increasing number of reasons why I should not withdraw. I assure you I have no intention of doing so." Boggs smiled and folded up the paper and slipped it into the fire. "I have not been such a bad administrator during my first term of office, have I Jorden?" "That is for the people to decide -- on election day." "But why should they want to change a perfectly capable administrator," said Boggs in an injured tone, "and put in a very capable engineer and farm manager -- who has no qualifications in administrative matters?" "That too is a question to be answered on election day." Boggs shifted in his chair, dropping the deliberately maintained smile from his face. "There have been some stories circulating about the colony recently," he said. "It is possible that you have heard them and believe them." "Possibly," said Jorden. "I wouldn't. I wouldn't believe them if I were you. I wouldn't even listen to them because it might lead to dangerous and erroneous conclusions, which would cause you to convict in your mind an honest man." "That would be my error then, wouldn't it?" said Jorden. The Governor nodded. "A grave one as far as it concerns the welfare of yourself and your family, Jorden." Jorden's face hardened. "Threats of that kind aren't appropriate to your position, Governor." "Perhaps you are not aware of my exact position." "I think I am! And I intend to do everything in my power to change it. You are a small time chiseler who saw a good chance to set yourself up for life in a cushy situation where five hundred other people would obey your slightest whim. That's an old fashioned situation, Boggs, and you can't set to resort to sabotage and murder." Boggs eyes narrowed and he looked at Jorden for a long time. "I am afraid, then," he said, "that there is nothing I can do except put a stop to your repeating these lying stories about me." The Governor's eyes never moved, but Jorden shifted in sudden, wild indecision. Almost simultaneously there were two shots exploding in the narrow cabin, and then a third. Jorden and Boggs leaped out of their chairs. From the kitchen doorway came the steel-taut voice of Bonnie. "Don't move any further, Mr. Boggs. Put your hands in the air. Get his gun, Mark -- in the pocket on this side." For a moment Jorden hesitated, his eyes held by the sight of Boggs' two gunmen on the floor, blood spreading in tiny rivulets. He took the pistol from the Governor's pocket and held it in readiness. "I ought to kill you now, Boggs," he said. "Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have to set a precedent in such matters if the colony is to survive. We have to go through the formality of a trial for sabotaging the power plant and murdering those killed there. Actually, it would be a good idea if you just took off over the hills and went as far as you could before the jungle got you. It would save us all a great deal of trouble." Hope surged in Boggs' eyes as he recognized that Jorden was incapable of shooting him down. Then bitterness mingled with that hope. "You won't get away with this, Jorden. We'll see what the people have to say about your wife shooting my men down while my back is turned." "Their backs weren't turned," said Jorden. "Get them out of here now. If you want to save explanations as to why you came here tonight you might find a convenient spot and bury them -- before you take out over the hills yourself." Watching until they could no longer see the lights of Boggs' car, they closed the door. Bonnie collapsed with a moan, cringing in Jorden's arms. "Now they'll kill us all," she said in a lifeless voice. "We haven't got a chance. For this we followed your great dream of colonizing an outpost of the Universe!" That night Roddy was sick. Six days later he was dead. Before they decided to go through with this section of the program there were long and heated conferences between Bonnie and Ashby and the staff working at the test pit. Bonnie insisted the program should be dropped here. They already knew that Jorden was what they were searching for. They had only to analyze the factors that had brought him to the test and they would have what they needed to identify as many colonists as the project required. He didn't need to be broken down any further. Ashby knew this was not true. Jorden's basic purpose as a colonist had not yet been brought into sight. Ashby recognized that his goal was almost certainly the perpetuation of the colony -- and he was the first one who had maintained such a goal this far -- but they had to know the drive that existed behind the goal. If it should develop a basis wholly in flight it would still crack before completion of the program. But Ashby continued to be hesitant on Bonnie's account. Roddy's illness and death meant a continuous tour in the test pit for the full six days. And this was cut from the scheduled eight it normally occupied. Why it was impossible for Bonnie to reduce her own personal tension on the project, Ashby didn't know, but she had become increasingly susceptible as time went on. Word of Jorden's persistence was spreading among the staff personnel of other sections of the lab. A televiewer Ashby brought an image subdued excitement was stirring of her face up close, studying her among them. In most cases so far from every angle during the long examined, the colonist had by now nights when she and Mark Jorden either knuckled under to Boggs or exchanged vigil over Roddy. He engaged in a futile personal duel scanned her face by the firelight of with him. If they went further, they the rough cabin, almost invariably collapsed under After three days, Jorden was runthe pressure of Bonnie's blame and ning close to exhaustion, but in began cursing Serrengia as well as spjte of the strain Bonnie seemed the Earth from which they fled. capable of remaining there forever. Ashby ordered resumption of the Her eyes watched Jorden's face, program. It was an agony for him, taking in his every movement and too, watching Bonnie during the expression. long hours of Roddy's illness. It And after three days of watching seemed every bit as much a test of Bonnie's face in close-up, Ashby her strength and endurance as it suddenly murmured aloud to himwas of Mark Jorden's. With the self in disbelief and astonishment. Dr. Miller, who was Tibbets in the program, came up to his side. "What is it, Ashby? Has something gone wrong?" Ashby shook his head slowly in wonder and pointed to the image in the viewer. "Look at her," he said. "Can't you see what has happened to Bonnie? We should have caught it long ago. No wonder this job is tearing her apart -- no wonder she doesn't want it to end the way it must -- or end at all, for that matter!" "I still don't see what you are talking about," said Miller in exasperation. "I don't see that anything has happened to her. She looks like the same old Bonnie to me." "Does she?" said Ashby. "Watch her when she looks at Jorden. Can't you see she has fallen in love with him?" class of people like Roddy, Jorden thought. People incapable of surviving beyond the world on which they were born. Since the day of his coming Roddy had fought an unceasing battle with this hated, alien world of Serrengia. He awoke each morning to renew the unequal contest before he was even out of bed -- and knowing fully that he was beaten before he started. Jorden had tried every way he knew to instill into his son some of his own love for this new world. It was a good world and the men who grew up on it in the years to come would love it with all their hearts. But Roddy could not give up his reaching back, his longing for Earth. He shrank before the problem of their doubtful food supply. He caught snatches of adult worries and nourished them with a dark agony that made it appear to Jorden sometimes as if the boy were walking in a nightmare. It had been cruel and brutal to bring him. But there was no use blaming himself for that. If only Bonnie would stop blaming him! He couldn't have known ahead of time that Roddy was one of those who could not be -- transplanted. Fervently, he prayed for the boy's life now and vowed that when the ships came again he would be free to go home. And always Bonnie's eyes were upon him. Sitting in the firelight of the cabin, he could feel her staring at him, accusing him, hating him for bringing them to Serrengia. Once he looked up and caught her glance. "Don't hate me so much, Bonnie!" he said. "You're driving Roddy down. I can feel it. Reach out to him with your love and don't let him go." But Roddy said later that same evening, "Maybe I'll go back to Earth now, Daddy. Do you think that's where little boys go when they die?" He wanted to return so badly it, Jordon thought. That's what Dr. Babbit said: "Roddy doesn't even want to live, Jorden. As incredible as it seems, he's literally dying of homesickness. I'm afraid there's not a thing I can do for him. I'm sorry, but it's up to you. You and Bonnie are the only ones who can give him a desire to remain, if anyone can." Roddy's hate for Serrengia was greater than any desire they could induce in him to live. With ease, he conquered all the miracle drugs Dr. Babbit lavished from the colony's restricted store. He died on the sixth night after Boggs' visit. The funeral was held in the little community church built when the colonists first laid out Maintown. Mark and Bonnie Jorden were almost oblivious to the words spoken over the body of Roddy by the Reverend Wagner, who had come as the colonists' spiritual adviser. Bonnie's hands were folded on her lap, and she kept her eyes down throughout the service. She was aware of the agony within Mark Jorden. It was a real agony, and its strength almost frightened her, for she had never before seen such a response in any man who had gone through the test this far. They were men concerned only with themselves, incapable of the love that Jorden could feel for a son. He reached out and took one of her hands in his own. She could feel the emotion within him, the tightening and trembling of his big, hard-muscled arm. Ashby was watching. Over the private communication system that linked them he murmured, "Cry, Bonnie! Make it real. Make him hate himself and everything he's done since he decided to become a colonist -- if you can! This is where we've got to find out whether he can crack or not -- and why." "You can't break him," said Bonnie. "He's the strongest man I've ever known. If you find his breaking point it will be when you destroy him utterly. You've got to quit before you reach that point!" "All that we've done will be useless if we quit now, Bonnie. Just a few more hours and then it will all be over -- " As if his words had touched a hidden trigger, she did begin to cry with a deep but almost inaudible sound and a heavy movement of her shoulders. Mark Jorden put his arm about her as if to force away her grief. "I know, Bonnie," said Ashby softly. "I can see in your face what's happened to you. It's going to be all right. Everything doesn't end for you when the test is over." "Oh, shut up!" said Bonnie in a sudden rage that made her tears come faster. "If I ever work on another of your damned experiments it will be when I've lost my senses entirely! You don't know what this does to people. I didn't know either -- because I didn't care. But now I know -- " "You know that no harm results after we've erased and corrected all inadequate reactions at the end of the test. You're letting your feelings cover up your full awareness of what we're doing." "Yes, and I suppose that when it's over I had better submit to a little erasing myself. Then Bonnie can go back to work as a little iced steel probe for some more of your guinea pigs!" "Bonnie -- !" She made no answer to Ashby, but lay her head on Jorden's shoulder while her sobbing subsided, How did it happen? she asked herself. It wasn't anything she had wanted. It had just happened. It had happened that first day when he came in from the field at the beginning of the experiment with all of the planted background that made him think he was meeting Bonnie for the thousandth time instead of the first. She was supposed to be an actress and receive his husbandly kiss with all the skilled mimicry that made her so valuable to the lab. But it hadn't been like that. She had played sister, mother, daughter, wife -- a hundred roles to as many other tested applicants. For the first time she saw one as a human being instead of a sociological specimen. That's the way it was when she met Mark Jorden. There was no answer to it, she thought bitterly as she rested her face against his shoulder. Ashby was right -- just a few more hours and it would all be over. All Jorden's feeling for her as his wife was induced by the postulates of the test, just as were his feelings for Roddy. His subjective reactions were real enough, but they would vanish when their stimulus was removed with the test postulates. He would look upon the restored Roddy as just another little boy -- and upon Bonnie, the Doctor in Sociology, as just another misemployed female. She raised her head and dried her eyes as she sensed that the service was ending. Actually, Ashby was right, of course. They had to go on, and the sooner it came to an end the better it would be for her. She would submit to alteration of her own personal data after the test, she thought. She would let them erase all feelings and sentiments she held for Mark Jorden, and then she would be as good as new. After all, if a sociologist couldn't handle his own reactions in a situation of this kind he wasn't of much value in his profession! turned from the little burial ground near the church. There were quite a number of other graves besides Roddy's, but his was the loneliest, Jorden thought. He had never forgiven them for robbing him of his home and the only world in which he could live. He felt the growing coldness of Bonnie as they came up to their shabby cabin that had once looked so brave to him. Serrengia had cost him Bonnie, too. Even before Roddy. She had remained only because it was her duty. He took her hand as she put a foot on the doorstep. "Bonnie -- " She looked at him bitterly, her eyes searching his face as if to find something of the quality that once drew her to him. "Don't try to say it, Mark -- there's nothing left to say." He let her go, and the two children followed past him into the house. He sat down on the step and looked out over the fields that edged the river bank. His mind felt numbed by Roddy's passing. Bonnie's insistent blame made him live it over and over again. The light from the green of the fields was like a caress to his eyes. I should hate it, he thought. I should hate the whole damned planet for what it's taken from me. But that's not right -- Serrengia hasn't taken anything. It's only that Bonnie and I can't live in the same world, or live the same kind of lives. Roddy was like her. But I didn't know then. I didn't know how either of them were. We have to go on. There's no going back. Maybe if I'd known, I would have made it different for all of us. I can't now, and it would be crazy to start hating Serrengia for the faults that are in us. Who could do anything but love this fresh, wild planet of ours -- ? He ought to go down and take a look at the field, he thought. He rose to go in and tell Bonnie. The crops hadn't had water since Roddy took sick. He found Bonnie in the bedroom with the drawers of their cabinets open and their trunk in the middle of the floor, its lid thrown back. Clothes lay strewn on the bed. He felt a slow tightening of his scalp and of the skin along the back of his neck. "Bonnie -- " She straightened and looked into his face with cold, distant eyes. "I'm packing, Mark," she said. "I'm leaving. I'm going home. The girls are going with me. You can stay until they dig your grave beside Roddy's, but I'm going home." Jorden's face went white. He strode forward and caught her by the arms. "Bonnie -- you know there's no way to go home. There won't be a ship for six years. This is home, Bonnie. There's no other place to go." For a moment the set expression of her face seemed to melt. She frowned as if he had told her some mystery she could not fathom. Then her countenance cleared and its blank determination returned. "I'm going home," she repeated. "You can't stop me. I've done all a wife can be expected to do. I've given my son as the price of your foolishness. You can't ask for more." He had to get out. He felt that if he remained another instant just then something inside him would explode under the pressure of his grief. He went to the front door and stood leaning against it while he looked over the landscape that almost seemed to reach out for him in hate as it had for Roddy. So you want her, too! he cried inside himself. # Alice came up and tugged at his hand as he stood there. "What's the matter, Daddy? What's the matter with Mama?" He bent down and kissed her on the forehead. "Nothing, honey. You go and play for a moment while I help Mother." "I want to help, too!" "Please, Alice -- " He moved back to the bedroom. Bonnie was carefully examining each item of apparel she packed in the big trunk. She didn't look up as he came in. "Bonnie," he said in a low voice, "are you going to leave me?" She put down the dress she was holding and looked up at him. "Yes I'm leaving you," she said. "You've got what you wanted -- all you've ever wanted." She looked out towards the fields, shimmering in the heat of the day. "That's not true, Bonnie. You know it isn't. I've always loved you and needed you, and it's grown greater every hour we've been together." "Then you'll have to prove it! Give up this hell-world you want us to call home, and give us back our Earth. If you love me, you can prove it." "It's no test of love to make a man give up the goal that means his life to him. You'd despise me forever if I let you do that to me. I'd rather you went away from me now with the feeling you have at this time, because I'd know I had your love -- " Bonnie remained still and unmoving in his arms, her face averted from his. He put his hand to her chin and turned her face to him. "You do love me, Bonnie? That hasn't changed, has it?" She put her head against his chest and rocked from side to side as if in some agony. "Oh, no -- Mark! That will never change. Damn you, Ashby, damn you -- " In the control room Ashby and Miller groaned aloud to each other, and a technician looked at them questioningly, his hand on a switch. Ashby shook his head and stared at the scene before him. Jorden shook Bonnie gently in his arms. "Ashby?" he said. "Who's Ashby?" Bonnie looked up, the blank despair on her face again. "I don't remember -- " she said haltingly. "Someone I used to -- know -- " "It makes no difference," Jorden said. "What matters is that you love me and you're going to stay with me. Let's put these things away now, darling. I know how you've felt the past week, but we've got to put it behind us and look forward to the future. Roddy would want it that way." "There's no future to look forward to," said Bonnie dully. "Nothing here on Serrengia. There's no meaning to any of us being here. I'm going back to Earth." "It does have a meaning! If I could only make you see it. If you could only understand why I had to come -- " "Then tell me if you know! You've never tried to tell me. You live as if you know something so deep and secret you can live by it every hour of your life and find meaning in it. But I can only guess at what it is you've chosen for your god. If it's anything but some illusion, put it into words and make me know it, too!" "I've never tried," said Jorden hesitantly. "I've never tried to put it into words. It's something I didn't know was in me until I heard of the chance to colonize Serrengia. And then I knew I had to come. "It's like a growing that you feel in every cell. It's a growing out and away, and it's what you have to do. You're a sperm -- an ovum -- and if you don't leave the parent body you die. You don't have to hate what you leave behind as James and Boggs and so many of the others do. It gave you life, and for that you're grateful. But you've got to have a life of your own. "It's what I was born to do, Bonnie. I didn't know it was there, but now I've found it I can't kill it." "You have to kill it -- or me." "You don't mean that. You're part of me. You've been a part of me so long you feel what I feel. You're lying, Bonnie, when you say you're going away. You don't want to go. You want to go on with me, but something's holding you back. What is it, Bonnie? Tell me what it is that holds you back!" Her eyes went wide. For a moment she thought he was talking out of the real situation, not the make-believe of the test. Then she recognized the impossibility of this. Her eyes cast a pleading glance in the direction of the observation tubes. Ashby spoke fiercely: "Go on, Bonnie! Don't lose the tension. Push him. We've got to know. He's almost there!" She moved slowly to the dresser where she had laid Jorden's hunting knife previously, as if with no particular intent. Now, out of sight of Jorden, her hand touched it. She picked it up. Ashby's voice came again. "Bonnie -- move!" She murmured, "Lost -- " And then she whirled about, knife in hand. She cried aloud. "I can't go on any further! Can't you see this is enough? Stop it! Stop it -- " Jorden leaped for the knife. In the observation room a technician touched a switch. tion of success reached after a long and strenuous effort. Bonnie was seated across the desk from him, but he sat at an angle so that he could see the four hulls out of the corner of his eye. One and Two had made their test flights and the others would not be far behind. The expedition would be a success, too. There was no longer any doubt of that, because he knew now where to look for adequate personnel. "I'm glad I didn't foul up your test completely, anyway," said Bonnie slowly. "Even if what you say about Mark shouldn't turn out to be true.' Ashby moved his chair around to face her directly. She was rested, and had gone through a mental reorientation which had removed some of the tension from her face. "You didn't foul it up at all," he said. "We went far enough to learn that he would have survived even your suicide, and would have continued in his determination to carry the colony forward. Nothing but his own death will stand in his way if he actually sets out on such a project. Are you completely sure you want to be tied to such a single purposed man as Mark Jorden is?" "There's no doubt of that! But I just don't feel as if I can face him now -- with his knowing... How can I ever be sure his feeling for me was not merely induced by the test experience, and might change as time goes on? You should have wiped it all out, and let us start over from scratch. It would have been easier that way." "There isn't time enough before the ships leave. But why should we have erased it all? We took away the postulates of the test and left Bonnie in his memory. His love for you didn't vanish when the test postulates went. As long as he has a memory of you he will love you. So why make him fall in love with you twice? No use wasting so much important time at your age. Here he comes -- " Bonnie felt she couldn't possibly turn around as the door opened behind her. She heard Mark's moment of hesitation, his slow steps on the carpet. Ashby was smiling a little and nodding. Then she felt the hard grip of Mark's hands on her shoulders. He drew her up and turned her to face him. Her eyes were wet. "Bonnie -- " he said softly. Ashby turned to the window again. The gantry cranes were hoisting machinery in Hull Three. Maybe he had been wrong about there not being enough time between now and takeoff for Mark and Bonnie to discover each other all over again. They worked pretty fast. But then, as he had mentioned, why waste time at their age? They were smiling, holding tight to each other as Ashby turned back from the window. "They tell me I passed," said Jorden. "I'm sorry about taking your best Social Examiner away from you -- but as you told me in the beginning this colonization business is a family affair." "Yes -- that happens to be one of the few things I was right about." Ashby motioned them to the chairs. "Through you we located our major error. It was our identifying rebellion with colonization ability. Colonization is not a matter of rebellion at all. The two factors merely happen to accompany each other at times. But the essence of colonization is a growth factor -- of the kind you so very accurately described when Bonnie pushed you into digging up some insight on the matter. It is so often associated with rebellion because rebellion is or has been, historically, necessary to the exercise of this growth factor. "The American Colonists, for example, were rebels only incidentally. As a group, they possessed a growth factor forcing them beyond the confines of the culture in which they lived. It gave them the strength for rebellion and successful colonization. And it is so easy to confuse colonists of that type with mere cutthroats, thugs, and misfits. The latter may or may not have a sufficiently high growth factor. In any case, their primary drive is hate and fear, which are wholly inadequate motives for successful colonization. "The ideal colonist does not break with the parent body, nor does he merely extend it. He creates a new nucleus capable of interchange with the parent body, but not controlled by it. He wants to build beyond the current society, and the latter is not strong enough to pull him back into it. Colonization may take everything else of value in life and give nothing but itself in return, but the colonists' desire for new life and growth is great enough to make this sufficient. It is not a mere transplant of an old life. It is conception and gestation and birth. "Our present society allows almost unlimited exercise of the the colonists growth factor in individuals, regardless of how powerful it may be. That is why we have failed to colonize the planets. They offer no motive or satisfaction sufficient to outweigh the satisfactions already available. As a result we've had virtually no applicants coming to us because of hampered growth. You are one of the very few who might come under our present approach. And even a very slight change of occupational conditions would have kept you from coming. You didn't want the department leadership offered you, because it would limit the personally creative functions you enjoyed. That one slim, hairbreadth factor brought you in." "But how do you expect now to get any substantial number of colonists?" exclaimed Jorden. "We'll put on a recruiting campaign. We'll go to the creative groups -- the engineers, the planners, the artists -- we'll show that opportunity for creative functioning and growth will be far greater in the work of building colonial outposts than in any activity they now enjoy. And we won't have to exaggerate, either. It's true. "We'll be able to send out a colony of whom we can be certain. In the past, colonies have invariably failed when they consisted only of members fleeing from something, without possessing an adequate growth factor. "When this becomes thoroughly understood in my field, I shall probably never live down my initial error of assuming that a colonist had to hate or fear what he left behind in order to leave it forever. The exact opposite is true. Successful colonization of the Universe by Earthmen will occur only when there is a love and respect for the Homeland -- and a capacity for complete independence from it." Ashby pressed his fingers together and looked at his visitors soberly. "There is only one thing further," he said. "We've found out also that Bonnie is not essentially a colonist -- " Bonnie's face went white. She pushed Jorden's arm away and leaned across the desk. "You knew -- ! Then we can't -- Why didn't you tell me this in the beginning?" "Please don't be hasty, Bonnie," said Ashby. "As I was about to say, we have found, however, that another condition exists in which you can become eligible and stable through a genuine love for a qualified colonist, to the extent you are his ambitions and desires. This is strictly a feminine possibility -- a woman can become a sort of second order colonist, you might say. "Of course, Jorden, you still have to make the basic decision as to whether you want to go to Serrengia or not. We have found out merely that you can . # "I think there's no doubt about my wanting to," said Jorden. He turned Bonnie around in his arms again, and Ashby chuckled mildly. "I have always said there is no piece of data you cannot find, provided you can devise the proper experimental procedure for turning it up," he said. Poor Henry was an unhappy husband whose wife had a habit of using bad cliches. Alfear was a genii who was, quite like most humans, a creature of habit. T heir murder compact was absolutely perfect, with -- No Strings By Lester Illustrated by der is a simple matter. Drive out some night to a lonely road, find a single person walking along out of sight of anyone else, offer him a ride, knife him, and go home. In such a crime, there's no reason to connect killer and victim -- no motive, no clue, no suspect. To achieve the perfect murder of a man's own wife, however, is a different matter. For obvious reasons, husbands are always high on the suspect list. Who has a better reason for such a crime? Henry Aimsworth had been pondering the problem with more than academic interest for some time. It wasn't that he hated his wife. He simply couldn't stand the sight or sound of her; even thinking about her made his flesh crawl. If she had Attached del Hey Kelly Freas he'd have been content to wish her all the happiness she was capable of discovering. But Emma, unfortunately, was fond of being his wife; perhaps she was even fond of him. Worse, she was too rigidly bound to trite morality to give him grounds to sue. There was no hope of her straying. What had been good enough for her mother was good enough for her, and saved all need of thinking; a woman needed a husband, her place was in the home, marriage was forever, and what would the neighbors think? Anyhow, she'd have had difficulty being unfaithful, even if she tried. She'd been gaining some ten pounds every year for the eleven years they had been married, and she'd long since stopped worrying about taking care of her appearance. He looked up at her now, letting the book drop to his lap. She sat watching the television screen with a vacant look on her face, while some comic went through a tired routine. If she enjoyed it, there was no sign, though she spent half her life in front of the screen. Then the comic went off, and dancers came on. She went back to darning a pair of his socks, as seriously as if she didn't know that he had always refused to wear the lumpy results. Her stockings had runs, and she still wore the faded apron in which she'd cooked supper. He contrasted her with Shirley unconsciously, and shuddered. In. the year since Shirley Bates had come to work in his rare book store, he'd done a lot of such shuddering, and never because of the slim blonde warmth of his assistant. Since that hot day in August when they'd closed the shop early and he'd suggested a ride in the country to cool off, he and Shirley... He was interrupted in his more pleasant thoughts by the crash of scissors onto the floor, and his eyes focussed on the deepening folds of fat as Emma bent to retrieve them. "Company coming," she said, before he could think of anything to prevent the mistaken cliche. Then she became aware that he was staring at her. "Did you take the garbage out, Henry?" "Yes, dear," he answered woodenly. Then, because he knew it was coming anyhow, he filled in the inevitable. "Cleanliness is next to godliness." She nodded solemnly, and began putting aside her darning. "That's finished. Mama always said a stitch in time saves nine. If you'd cut your toenails, Henry..." He could feel his skin begin to tingle with irritation. But there was no escape. If he went upstairs to his bedroom, she'd be up at once, puttering about. If he went to the basement, she'd find the canned food needed checking. A woman's place was with her husband, as she'd repeatedly told him. Probably she couldn't stand her own company, either. Then he remembered something he'd stored away. "There's a new picture at the Metro," he said as quietly as he could. "Taylor's starred, I think. I was going to take you, before this extra work came up." He could see her take the bait and nibble at it. She had some vague crush left for Taylor. She stared at the television set, shifted her bulk, and then shook her head reluctantly. "It'd be nice, Henry. But going at night costs so much, and -- well, a penny saved is a penny earned." "Exactly. That's what I meant to say." He even relaxed enough to overlook the platitude, now that there was some hope. "I saved the price of lunch today. The nut who wanted King in Yellow was so tickled to get the copy finally, he insisted on treating. You can even take a cab home afterwards." "That's nice. It'll probably rain, the way my bunion's been aching." She considered it a second more, before cutting off the television. He watched as she drew off the apron and went for her coat and hat. making a pretense of dabbing on make-up. She might as well have worn the apron, he decided, as she came over to kiss him a damp goodbye. ley, but her mother was visiting her, and the conversation would have to be too guarded at her end. If he could find some way of getting rid of Emma... It wouldn't even be murder, really. More like destroying a vegetable -- certainly no worse than ending the life of a dumb cow to make man's life more worth living. It wasn't as if she had anything to live for or to contribute. It would almost be a kindness, since she lived in a perpetual state of vague discontent and unhappiness, as if somehow aware that she had lost herself. But unfortunately, the law wouldn't look at it in such a light. He'd only been thinking actively of getting her out of the way since August, however; and somehow, with time, there must be some foolproof scheme. There was that alcohol-injection system -- but it required someone who would drink pretty freely first, and Emma was a teetotaler. Maybe, though, if he could get her to taking some of those tonics for women... He dropped it for the moment and turned back to the book. It was an odd old volume he'd received with a shipment for appraisal. There was no title or date, but the strange leather binding showed it was old. Apparently it had been hand-set and printed on some tiny press by the writer, whose name was omitted. It seemed to be a mixture of instructions on how to work spells, conjure demons, and practice witchcraft, along with bitter tirades against the group who had driven the writer out and forced him, as he put it, to enter a compact with the devil for to be a wizard, which is like to a male witch. Henry had been reading it idly, slowly deciding the book was authentic enough, however crazy the writer was. The book had no particular value as a collector's item, but he could probably get a fine price from some of the local cultists, particularly since there were constant promises in it that the writer was going to give a surefire, positive and simple recipe for conjuring up a demon without need of virgin blood, graveyard earth or unicorn horn. He skimmed through it, looking for the formula. It turned up on the fifth page from the end, and was everything the writer had claimed. A five-sided figure drawn on the floor with ordinary candle wax, a pinch of sugar inside, a bit of something bitter outside, two odd but simple finger gestures, and a string of words in bad Latin and worse Greek. There was a warning that it would work without the pentagram, sugar and bitters, but at parlous risk to the conjurer without such protection. He frowned. Too simple for the cultists, he realized -- unless he could somehow persuade them that the trick lay in some exact phrasing or gesturing pattern which took experiment. They liked things made difficult, so they'd have a good alibi for their faith when the tricks failed. If he could show them in advance that it didn't work, but hint that a good occultist might figure out the right rhythm, or whatever... He read it through again, trying to memorize the whole thing. The gestures were -- so -- and the words -- umm... There was no flash of fire, no smell of sulphur, and no clap of thunder. There was simply a tall creature with yellowish skin and flashing yellow eyes standing in front of the television set. His head was completely hairless, and he was so tall that he had to duck slightly to keep from crashing into the ceiling. His features were too sharp for any human face. There were no scales, however; his gold cape and black tights were spangled, and he wore green shoes with turned up toes. But generally, he wasn't bad looking. "Mind if I sit down?" the creature asked. He took Henry's assent for granted and dropped into Emma's chair, folding his cape over one arm and reaching for an apple on the side table. "Glad to see you're not superstitious enough to keep me locked up in one of those damned pentagrams. Drat it, I thought the last copy of that book was burned and I was free. Your signal caught me in the middle of dinner." ing the sweat trickle down his nose. The book had warned against summoning the demon without the protective devices! But the thing seemed peaceful enough for the moment. He cleared his voice. "You mean -- you mean magic works?" "Magic -- shmagic!" the creature snorted. He jerked his thumb toward the television. "To old Ephriam -- the crackpot who wrote the book before he went completely crazy -- that set would have been more magic than I am. I thought this age knew about dimensions, planes of vibrations, and simultaneous universes. You humans always were a backward race, but you seemed to be learning the basic facts. Hell, I suppose that means you'll lay a geas on me, after I was hoping it was just an experimental summons!" Henry puzzled it over, with some of the fright leaving him. The scientific sounding terms somehow took some of the magic off the appearance of the thing. "You mean those passes and words set up some sort of vibrational pattern..." The hairless fellow snorted again, and began attacking the grapes. "Bunk, Henry! Oh, my name's Alfear, by the way. I mean I was a fool. I should have gone to my psychiatrist and taken the fifty year course, as he advised. But I thought the books were all burned and nobody knew the summons. So here I am, stuck with the habit. Because that's all it is -- a conditioned reflex. Pure compulsory behavior. I'm sensitized to receive the summons, and when it comes, I teleport into your plane just the way you pull your hand off a hot stove. You read the whole book, I suppose? Yeah, just my luqk. Then you know I'm stuck with any job you give me -- practically your slave. I can't even get back without dismissal or finishing your task ! That's what comes of saving money by not going to my psychiatrist." He muttered unhappily, reaching for more grapes, while Henry began to decide nothing was going to happen to him, at least physically. Souls were things he wasn't quite sure of, but he couldn't see how just talking to Alfear could endanger his. "Still," the creature said thoughtfully, "it could be worse. No pentagram. I never did get mixed up with some of the foul odors and messes some of my friends had to take. And I've developed quite a taste for sugar; tobacco, too." He reached out and plucked a cigarette out of Henry's pack, then a book of matches. He lighted it, inhaled, and rubbed the flame out on his other palm. "Kind of weak tobacco, but not bad. Any more questions while I smoke this? There's no free oxygen where I come from, so I can't smoke there." "But if you demons answer such -- such summons, why don't people know about it now?" Henry asked. "I'd think more and more people would be going in for this sort of thing. If the wizards were right all along... "They weren't, and we're not demons. It didn't get started until your Middle Ages. And if it hadn't been for old Apalon..." Alfear lighted another cigarette off the butt, which he proceeded to extinguish on the tip of his sharp tongue. He scratched his head thoughtfully, and then went on. "Apalon was studying your worship. You see, we've been studying your race the way you study white rats, using lower races to explain our own behavior. Anyhow, he got curious and figured out a way to mentalize himself into your plane. He was sort of a practical joker, you might say. So he picked a time when some half-crazy witch was trying to call up the being you worship as Satan to make some kind of a deal. Just as she finished, he popped up in front of her, spitting out a bunch of phosphorus to make a nice smoke and fire effect, and agreed with all her mumbojumbo about having to do what she wanted. She wanted her heart fixed up then, so he showed her how to use belladonna and went back, figuring it was a fine joke. "Only he made a mistake. There's something about moving between planes that lowers the resistance to conditioning. Some of our people can take five or six trips, but Apalon was one of those who was so conditioning-prone that he had the habit fixed after the first trip. The next time she did the rigamarole, back he popped. He had to dig up gold for her, hypnotize a local baron into marrying her, and generally keep on the constant qui vive, until she got sloppy and forgot the pentagram she thought protected her and which he was conditioned to. But after he disintegrated her, he found she'd passed on the word to a couple of other witches. And he knew somebody at the Institute was bound to find what a fool he'd made of himself. "So he began taking members aside and telling them about the trick of getting into your world. Excellent chance for study. Have to humor the humans by sticking to their superstitions, of course. One by one, they went over on little trips. It wasn't hard to find some superstitious dolt trying to summon something, since word had got around in your world. One of us would pop up, and that spread the word further. Anyhow, when Apalon was sure each member had made enough trips to be conditioned, he'd tell him the sad truth, and swear him to secrecy on penalty of being laughed out of the Institute. The old blaggard wound up with all of us conditioned. There was quite a flurry of witchcraft here, until we finally found a psychiatrist who could break the habit for us. Even then, it was tough going. We'd never have made it without the inquisitions and witch-burnings one of our experimental sociologists managed to stir up." Alfear put out the third cigarette butt and stood up slowly. "Look, I don't mind a chat now and then, but my wives are waiting dinner. How about dismissing me?" "Umm." Henry had been thinking while he listened. It had sounded like a reasonable explanation on the whole, except for the bit about Apalon's disintegrating the witch. Apparently as long as a man wasn't too unreasonable, there was a certain usefulness to having such friends on call. "What about the price for your help? I mean -- well, about souls..." Alfear twitched his ears disgustedly. "What the deuce would I do with your soul, Henry? Eat it? Wear it? Don't be a shnook!" "Well, then -- well, I've heard about wishes that were granted, but they all had a trick attached. If I asked for immortality, you'd give it, say; but then I'd get some horrible disease and beg and plead for death. Or ask for money, and then find the money was recorded as being paid to a kidnaper, or something." "In the first place, I couldn't give you immortality," Alfear said, as patiently as he apparently could. "Your metabolism's not like ours. In the second place, why should I look for tainted money? It's enough nuisance doing what you ask, without looking for tricks to pull. Anyhow, I told you I half-enjoy visiting here. As long as you're reasonable about it, I don't mind keeping my end of the compulsion going. If you've got something to ask, ask away. There are no strings attached." The creature seemed to be quite sincere. Henry considered it briefly, staring at a large tinted picture of Emma, and took the plunge. "Suppose I asked you to kill my wife for me -- say by what looked like a stroke, so nobody would blame me?" "That seems reasonable enough," Alfear agreed easily. "I could break a few blood vessels inside her skull... Sure, why not? Only the picture in your mind is so distorted, I wouldn't know her. If she's like that, why'd you ever marry her?" "Because she seemed different from other women, I guess," Henry admitted. "When I tipped the canoe over, and I figured she'd be mad because her dress was ruined, all she said was something about not being sugar, so she wouldn't melt." He shuddered, remembering all the times she'd said it since. "You won't have any trouble. Look, can you really read my mind?" "Naturally. But it's all disorganized." "Umm. Well." It gave him a queasy feeling to think of anyone seeing his secret thoughts. But this fellow apparently didn't work by human attitudes, anyhow. He groped about, and then smiled grimly. "All right, then. You can tell I think of her as my wife. And just to make sure, she'll be sure to say something about early to bed and early to rise ; she says that every single damned night, Alfear! She never misses." Alfear grunted. "Sounds more reasonable every minute, Henry. All right, when your wife says that, I pop out and give her a stroke that will kill her. How about dismissing me now?" "No strings?" Henry asked. He watched carefully as Alfear nodded assent, and he could see no sign of cunning or trickery. He caught his breath, nodded, and closed his eyes. Seeing something vanish was nothing he wanted. "Dismissed." he opened his eyes, but there was no other sign of the thing. He found some fruit still in the refrigerator and restocked the bowl. Then he closed the strange book and put it away. He'd have to buy it himself, and burn it to make sure no one else found the trick, of course. For a moment, uneasiness pricked at him. Yet he was sure Alfear hadn't been lying, and the story the creature had told made more sense than the older superstitions. Henry adjusted his mind to having a well-conditioned demon on tap and then began the harder job of bracing himself for Emma's incoherent but detailed account of the movie when she came back. Unfortunately, it was a more complicated plot than usual, and she went on and on, from the moment she entered the door. He tried to close his ears, but he'd never succeeded in that. He yawned, and she yawned back, but went on until the last final morsel was covered for the second or third time. "He was wonderful," she finally concluded. "Just wonderful. Only I wished you'd come with me. You'd have liked it. Henry, did you take the garbage out?" "Yes, dear," he answered. "Hours ago." He yawned elaborately again. She mumbled something about having to keep the kitchen clean because cleanliness was next to godliness, but her automatic yawn muffled the words. Then she glanced at the clock. "Heavens, it's almost one! And early to bed and early to rise..." Henry jerked his eyes away, just as he caught the first glimpse of Alfear popping into existence beside her. He heard the beginning of a shriek change to a horrible gargling and then become a dying moan. Something soft and heavy hit the floor with a dull thud. Henry turned around slowly. "Dead," Alfear said calmly, rubbing one of his fingers. "This business of getting just one finger through the planes into her head cuts off the circulation. There, that's better. Satisfied?" Henry dropped beside the corpse. She was dead, according to the mirror test, and there wasn't a mark on her. He stared at the puffy, relaxed features; he'd expected an expression of horror, but she seemed simply asleep. His initial feeling of pity and contrition vanished; after all, it had been quick and nearly painless. Now he was free! "Thanks, Alfear," lie said. "It's fine -- fine. Do I dismiss you now?" "No need this time. I'm free as soon as the job's done. Unless you'd like to talk awhile..." Henry shook his head quickly. He had to telephone a doctor. Then he could call Shirley -- her mother would be gone by now. "Not now. Maybe I'll summon you sometime for a smoke or something. But not now!" "Okay," Alfear said, and vanished. Surprisingly, seeing him disappear wasn't unpleasant, after all. He just wasn't there. Waiting for the doctor was the worst part of it. All the legends Henry knew ran through his mind. Alfear could have given her a stroke and then added some violent poison that would show up in an autopsy. He could be sitting wherever he was, chuckling because Henry hadn't restricted his wish enough to be safe. Or any of a hundred things could happen. There was the first witch, who had thought she had Apalon under control, only to be turned to dust. But the doctor took it calmly enough. "Stroke, all right," he decided. "I warned her last year that she was putting on too much weight and getting high blood pressure. Too bad, Mr. Aimsworth, but there was nothing you could do. I'll turn in a certificate. Want me to contact a mortician for you?" Henry nodded, trying to appear properly grief-stricken. "I -- I'd appreciate it." "Too late now," the doctor said. "But I'll be glad to send Mr. Glazier around in the morning." He pulled the sheet up over Emma's body, leaving it on the backroom couch to which they had carried it. "You'd better go to a hotel for the night. And I'll give you something that will make you sleep." "I'd rather not," Henry said quickly. "I mean, I'd feel better here. You know... "Certainly, certainly." The doctor nodded sympathetically, but as if it were an old story to him. He left the pills with instructions, said the proper things again, and finally went out. cross when she answered, but it grew alert as soon as he told her about Emma's stroke. He was almost beginning to believe the simple version of the story himself. "Poor Henry," she murmured. Her voice sharpened again. "It was a stroke? The doctor was sure?" "Positive," he assured her, cursing himself for having let her guess some of the thoughts that had been on his mind. "The doctor said she'd had hypertension and such before." She considered it a second, and then a faint laugh sounded. "Then I guess there's no use in crying over spilled milk, is there, Henry? If it had to happen, it just had to. And I mean, it's like fate, almost!" "It is fate!" he agreed happily. Then he dropped his voice. "And now I'm all alone here, baby lamb, and I had to call you up..." She caught on at once, as she always did. "You can't stay there now! It's so morbid. Henry, you come right over here!" Demons, Henry thought as he drove the car through the quiet residential streets toward her apartment, had their uses. They were a much maligned breed. Probably the people who had summoned them before had been ignorant, stupid people ; they'd messed up their chances and brought trouble on themselves by not finding out the facts and putting it all down to superstitious magic. The fellows were almost people -- maybe even a little superior to humans. If a man would just try to understand them, they could help him, and with no danger at all. "No strings attached," he said to himself, and then chuckled softly. It fitted perfectly; now there were no strings attached to him. Emma was at peace, and he was free. He'd have to wait a few months to marry Shirley legally, of course. But already, she was as good as his wife. And if he played up the shock angle just enough, this could be a wonderful evening again... Shirley was unusually lovely when she met him at the door. Her soft golden hair made a halo for her face -- a face that said she'd already anticipated his ideas, and had decided he was a man who needed sympathy and understanding for what had happened. There was even time for the idea that he was free to be brought up, tentatively at first, and then eventually as a matter of course. And the plans expanded as he considered them. There was no need to worry about things now. The quiet marriage became a trip around the world as he confessed to having money that no one knew about. They could close the shop. He could leave town almost at once, and she could follow later. Nobody would know, and they wouldn't have to wait to avoid any scandal. They could be married in two weeks! Henry was just realizing the values of a friendly demon. With proper handling, a lot of purely friendly summoning, and a reasonable attitude, there was no reason why Alf#ar couldn't provide him with every worldly comfort to share with Shirley. He caught her to him again. "My own little wife! That's what you are, lambkins! What's a mere piece of paper? I already think of you as my wife. I feel you're my wife. That's what counts, isn't it?" "That's all that counts," she agreed with a warmth that set fire to his blood. Then she gasped. "Henry, darling, it's getting light already! You'll have to get back. What will the neighbors say if they see you coming from here now?" He tore away reluctantly, swearing at the neighbors. But she was right, of course. He had to go back and take the sleeping medicine to be ready for the arrival of the mortician in the morning. "It's still early," he protested, automatically trying to squeeze out a few more minutes. "Nobody's up yet." "I'll heat up the coffee, and then you'll have to go," Shirley said firmly, heading for the kitchen. "Plenty of people get up early around here. And besides, you need some sleep. Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and -- " From the kitchen came the beginning of a shriek. It changed to a horrible gasp, and died away in a failing moan...There was the sound of a body hitting the floor. Alfear stood over Shirley's body, rubbing one finger tenderly. His ears twitched uncertainly as he studied Henry's horror-frozen face. "I told you," he said. "I warned you some of us get conditioned to a habit the first time. And you thought of her as your wife and she said... Abruptly, he vanished. Henry's screams were the only sound in the apartment. ing the script, Riders to the Stars terrifying gamble that runs the promises to be a movie any diedgamut of human experiences? in-the-wool science fiction lover What may happen before we will put down on his "must see" reach those stars that twinkle so list. We've just read the book -- invitingly? another excellent Ballantine reThe cast seems to be a cornlease -- and it is just what the petent one, including Herbert electrifying". Richard Carlson, and they've No moon vistas, monsterous sure got a walloping good yam Martians or Venusian aphrodites to work with, are running rampant in this Incidentally, Siodmak's Do nostory. Essentially, it is the tale of van's Brain has been made into three men who gamble their a moving picture too and anyone lives, with plausible and human who has read that classic science motivations, to help change the fiction novel can look forward to history of the world -- and peranother fine film treat, haps the universe. Science fiction So -- IF's Citation for this has already accepted space travel month goes to the man whose as a completely normal state of fine work in script writing and affairs in the future, but this is story telling has taken a new dithe story of the men who will do rection away from the "Frankenit first. What sort of men will stein" tradition -- Curt Siodmak. Do you really know if it is really you who decides whether you are happy, or hungry, or want something, or in love? Maybe you do, but read this thought-provoking article on thought control and be on guard! snaring By Fritz Leiber are taking it easy as you read this. You are lying down, sitting, or possibly straphanging. Outside of the possibility of unexpected atom bombs and smaller commotions, you feel quite safe. I'm sorry to tell you, but you aren't. The human mind can be snared quite as easily as the human body can be atomized. The modern witch-doctors have an astonishing armory of new weapons, which they they are probably trying out on you right now. Even the magazine in your hands (I humbly apologize to the editor) could be a threat. There's a rat at the University of California. He has a radio in his skull. Dr. Joseph Gengerelli inserted it there surgically. For the very best scientific purposes. Dr. Gengerelli is showing, among other things, that he can control a rat from a distance. From the midget radio a very tiny wire leads into the rat's brain through a very tiny hole drilled in its skull. When Dr. Gengerelli starts broadcasting, the rat gets the jitters and runs "erratically about". All because Dr. Gengerelli has pushed a button. The learned scientist and his button might be on the moon and it would still work, if he had a strong enough broadcasting set. If all the rats in the world were so equipped, they would all get the jitters. This type of experiment has been carried a lot further, working with monkeys. These primates have had not one, but dozens of tiny wires inserted in different parts of their brains, from a central radio receiver permanently set in the skull. The wires are insulated up to the point where they touch a selected bit of gray matter. Radio control allows any selected part of the monkey's brain to be stimulated electrically. Sometimes the result is a violent dislike of bananas. Sometimes the monkey finds himself with ten times as much appetite as usual. Sometimes he gets violently aggressive, and sometimes he fawns. It all depends on which button is pushed. Could anything like this be done in a practical way to human beings? Surely not. But according to the Signal Corps Engineering Laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, a wrist-watch size radio receiver has been perfected that hears up to # miles. It is made of five transistors, a pencil-tip battery, a tiny earphone like that of a hearing aid, and an antenna that fits inside a man's sleeve. Meanwhile General Electric has developed a radio transmitter which, including the microphone, is no bigger than a cigarette case. So far it has a range of only # feet, but we all know what technology can do to a "so far". Technologically-shrunken versions of such radio transmitters and receivers could be surgically inserted into the human body. Specifically, near the skull, ear and vocal chords, or connected to those by wires. The skin would be grown back over them again, just as it is over a plastic or metal hip joint. Such radios would report back to headquarters every word a man or woman said, they would even keep check on his halfwhispered, or subvocal thinking. They would send him orders through an implanted earphone. They might even, if the tiny holes in the skull were drilled and the wires inserted, control his emotions. Finally a midget bomb might be implanted in the flesh, set to explode at the proper radio signal. While it might be wasteful to outfit an army this way, considering how age-old methods of discipline achieve comparable results, such surgeried-in devices could be used to advantage on spies, soldiers on suicidal missions, suspected traitors and persons with top-secret information. But how would it really help headquarters to give a man a violent dislike for bananas, or punch a button to make him aggressive, or decide from his sub-vocal mutterings that he wasn't being aggressive enough and so blow him up at long distance? The answer is that these are things that could be done today. With our rapidly increasing knowledge of the human brain, control will become much subtler. For that matter, maybe it has already 'become much subtler. Maybe you are haunted, as I am, by the uneasy feeling that we people outside the barriers of military and governmental security simply don't know the tenth of it. Heck, at some moments I am afraid that I think certain thoughts simply because some propaganda bureau has already invaded the inmost recesses of my brain. Of course there are a lot more axlike methods than implanted radios of influencing the activities of the human brain -- methods which have been popular in hospitals and clinics for some twenty years. I am referring to those methods which destroy a part of the brain slowly by long series of electric shocks (or insulin or metrazol injections), or quickly by the surgeon's knife or probe. In lobotomy and its sister operations a part of the brain is destroyed and as a result the person so favored does not bother about things so much. For instance, if he is against the government, he gives up this idealistic pursuit and takes up chasing food or women. Which makes it easier for his keepers. It has been suggested, by the French scientist Christian Favre, that lobotomy may be one of the key weapons of dictators. Imagine that the dictator has captured an enemy of his regime who cannot be broken down by torture. A clever twist of the surgeon's knife inside his brain and he is turned into a vegetable, a creature who can be drilled into saying whatever the prosecuting attorney wants to hear. Would scars show that such surgery has been performed? The surgeon's probe, inserted between the eyeball and the muscles around it, can reach the brain and destroy the necessary part, leaving no outward trace. Electro-shock, on the other hand, probably does no damage to the brain except when treatments are repeated many times. But it has been used as a threat to get neurotic soldiers back into the fighting lines. Some psychiatrists believe that electro-shock is effective mostly because dread of it, much like the old snake-pits and whippings for lunatics, scares the patient back into a semblance of sanity. I feel a spontaneous revulsion at the idea of invading the human brain by knife or even electricity. For a long time investigation of the living human brain was taboo. The idea was that if it was bad to cut into the human body, it was much more indecent to cut into the seat of reason. Knowledge of the brain was gained during necessary and rare surgical operations, when a surface of his brain to be given a mild electrical stimulation in different places, the subject reporting what he felt. Now it is possible to study the brain without piercing the skull. One method is by recording the well-known brain waves, those mixed and faint electrical rhythms that can be picked up by moist electrical contacts on the head. But this is not thought-control. Brain waves cannot as yet be beamed back into the skull to control a man's activities. Yet recently it has been discovered that brain waves can (in a sense) be effectively turned back on the brain to control it, not in the form of electricity, but light. At the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England, physiologist Grey Walter gives people what he calls flicker-fits. While a person's brain waves are being recorded, a bright light that flickers about ten times a second is shined into his eyes. Then the timing of the flashes is changed so that they are in exact rhythm with one of the chief brain waves. At this point the person begins to see things that are not there, and not only see but also feel and touch. He may experience an inexplicible disgust, or intense pleasure. Finally he begins to have convulsions like those of an epileptic. At this point Grey Walters switches off the light. But suppose he didn't. Gould shells strike down an army with artificial epilepsy? One thing that Grey Walter's subjects frequently see in their flicker-fits is a spiral, a light that whirls out from a center in tight but rapidly widening circles. This is a common scanning pattern -- a way of inspecting every part of an area, just as a boy might hunt for a lost baseball by circling out from a central point. TV does the same thing in getting or reproducing a picture, except that it works in straight lines, back and forth. Grey Walter believes that here we have evidence that the thinking part of the brain is scanning the seeing part of the brain, which is located in the back of the head, to see what pictures have been transmitted there from the retina of the eye. This is an example of the way the brain is being investigated these days. Here is another: physiologists have speculated about the sense of smell for a long time. They have tried to reduce it to something like the simple sweet-salt-bittersour of the sense of taste. All sorts of experts, including the suavest French wine-tasters and the most judicial British tea-samplers, have tried to describe just what they were smelling. But they did not reach conclusions. Now Raymond Hainer, an industrial scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has tackled this problem from brain-side, rather than nose-side. He finds that there are # different types of odor-sensitive nerves leading from the nose to the brain. Depending on which nerves are stimulated and which are not, the brain can sense about der the experts couldn't find a vocabulary to describe smells accurately. These examples show the carefully detailed way the human brain is being examined these days. For several years scientists like Norbert Wiener of M. I. T. (see IF, January issue) have been hinting to us that the brain is a calculating machine. And just like slot-machines, calculating machines can be gimmicked to give whatever results and pay off on whatever percentages the mechanic who adjusts them chooses. Do you want your brain gimmicked? Neither do I. But we'll have to watch out for it in the future. For a long time the robot of fiction has been the machine built to imitate man. Now it is turning out that man himself is a robot, a vastly complex electro-chemical circuit that can nevertheless be gimmicked by a clever operator. Yet the gimmicking of the human brain is far from a modern wonder. It is something that was going on long before the first priest of Ammon talked through a tube whose outlet was the mouth of the statue of the god for whom he was soliciting. It started with the first witchdoctor to discover the cosmos-shaking truth that people don't think realistically, but in terms of desires and symbols. In other words, if you want to influence other people, you work through the subconscious. This obviously holds true today. For example, a firm manufacturing men's shirts and wanting to sell them, not to ordinary customers but to hard-headed retailers, decided on these rules: Don't talk about shirts, don't talk about prices; but show a pretty girl almost without one of the shirts you are trying to sell. Such seemingly obvious appeals to basic human urges are getting more subtle all the time, as trained psychologists and sociologists are lured into the selling game by far higher salaries than universities can pay. For instance, a Viennese psychiatrist has figured out for Chrysler that a man looks on a convertible as his mistress, but on a hardtopped sedan as his wife. So the psychiatrist advises car dealers to put a convertible in the front window of the store, with a lot of more businesslike cars behind it. Men will come in to smell anxiously around the convertible, but they'll buy the other model. Another psychoanalyst has been telling greeting card manufacturers just what shapes and forms to put on the pasteboard oblongs they sell. The shapes and forms, all very gayly colored and carefully generalized, turn out to be the basic symbols of sex. Of course, part of this is just good old horse sense and another part is merely psychologists trying to sell industry an interesting bill of goods. But there is a solid reminder of activities pointing to an ever more efficient gimmicking of the human brain. seems much too obvious to be effective, especially to the person who prides himself on being "adhardened." This may be true for the conscious mind, but hardly for the subconscious. We laugh indulgently at the childishness of an advertiser who tries to make us buy a soft drink because it is pictured on the same billboard as an impossibly attractive and innocent-looking girl. Meanwhile we drink the same soft drink because, we tell ourselves, it is really more refreshing. The migration of psychologists into industry has been paralleled by other manifestations of a large-scale attempt to gimmick the human brain : the growing resemblance between articles and advertising in magazines and newspapers ; the tendency to expect authorities -- or perhaps, ultimately, robot brains -- to settle all questions; careful censoring in advance of each item that goes into the mass media of communication; increasing distrust by authorities of the ability of ordinary people to weigh any general problem intelligently. Meanwhile, our old friend hypnotism is being made into a more potent weapon. For a long time many psychologists believed that a hypnotized person could not be made to perform an act contrary to his moral code. Yet recent experiments show that a hypnotized person will attempt a murderous attack on an innocent bystander -- if first ( Continued on page # ) Here is a love story of two young people who met under the magic of festival time. One was T rina, whose world was a gentle make-believe Earth. The other was Max, handsome spaceman, whose world was the infinite universe of space... Illustrated by Ed Emsh man at the weather tower had bringing tears to her eyes as she said, and certainly it felt like spring, rode homeward toward the eastern with the cool breeze blowing lightly horizon -- the horizon that looked about her and a faint new clover so far away but wasn't really, smell borne in from the east. Spring "Trina!" -- that meant they would make the His voice was very close. And it days longer now, and the nights was familiar, though for a moment shorter, and they would warm the she couldn't imagine who it might whole world until it was summer be. again. "Where are you?" She had reined Trina laughed aloud at the the horse in abruptly and now thought of summer, with its picnics looked around her, in all directions, and languid swims in the refilled toward the north and south and lakes, with its music and the heavy east and west, toward the farm scent of flowers and the visitors in houses of the neighboring village, from space for the festival. She toward the light tower and the sun laughed, and urged her horse faster, tower. She saw no one. No one else out of its ambling walk into a trot, rode this early in the day in the pasa canter, until the wind streamed ture part of the world. "I'm up here, Trina ." She looked up then and saw him, hovering some thirty feet off the ground in the ridiculous windmilllike craft he and his people used when they visited the world. "Oh, hello, Max." No wonder she had known the voice. Max Cramer, down from space, down to the world, to see her. She knew, even before he dropped his craft onto the grass beside her, that he had come to see her. He couldn't have been on the world for more than the hour she'd been riding. "You're visiting us early this year, Max. It's not festival time for three months yet." "I know." He cut the power to the windmill blades, and they slowed, becoming sharply visible. The horse snorted and backed away. Max smiled. "This world is very -- attractive." His eyes caught hers, held them. She smiled back, wishing for the hundredth time since last summer's festival that he were one of her people, or at least a worldling, and not a man with the too white skin of space. "It may be attractive," she said. "But you always leave it soon enough." He nodded. "It's too confining. It's all right, for a little while, but then..." "How can you say that?" She shook her head sadly. Already they were arguing the same old unresolvable argument, and they had scarcely greeted each other. After all his months in space they met with the same words as they had parted. She looked past him, up and out, toward the horizon that seemed so many miles away, toward the morning sun that seemed to hang far, far off in the vaulted blue dome of the sky. "How can you even think it? About this?" His lips tightened. "About this " he repeated. "A horizon you could ride to in five minutes. A world you could ride around in two hours. A sun -- you really call it a sun -- that you could almost reach up and pluck out of that sky of yours." He laughed. "Illusions. World of illusions." "Well, what do you have? A ship -- a tiny ship you can't get out of, with walls you can see, all around you." "Yes, Trina, with walls we can see." He was still smiling, watching her, and she knew that he desired her. And she desired him. But not the stars. "You have nothing like this," she said, knowing it wouldn't do any good. She looked past him at the light tower, one of the many that formed the protective screen about her world, that made it seem great and convex, a huge flattened sphere with the sun high above, and not the swift curving steel ball that it actually was. This was her world. It was like Earth, like the old Earth of the legends of the time before the radiation wars. And even though her mind might know the truth about the screens that refracted light and the atomic pile that was her sun, her heart knew a more human truth. This was a world. As it had been in the beginning. As it must be till the end -- or until they found a new Earth, somewhere, sometime... Max sighed. "Yes, you have your world, Trina. And it's a good one -- the best of its kind I've ever visited." "Why don't you stay here then?" A spaceman, she thought. With all the dozens of men in my world, why did it have to be a spaceman? With all the visitors from New France and New Chile and New Australia last festival, why did it have to be him? "I have the stars, Trina." "We do too!" Last festival, and the warm June night, heavy, druggedly heavy with honeysuckle and magnolia, and the hidden music Cramer, tall and strong boned and alien, holding her in his arms, dancing her away from her people, out onto the terrace above the little stream, beneath the full festival moon and the summer stars, the safe, sane, well ordered constellations that their ancestors had looked upon from Earth. "My stars are real, Trina." She shook her head, unable to argue with him. World-woman and space-man, and always different, with nothing in common between them, really, except a brief forgetfulness at festival time. "Come with me, Trina." "No." She gathered up the reins and chucked at the horse and turned, slowly, for the village. "You wouldn't come -- for me?" "You wouldn't stay, would you?" She heard the windmill blades whir again, and a rustling of wind, and then he was beside her, skimming slowly along, barely off the ground, making her horse snort nervously away. "Trina, I shouldn't tell you this, not until we've met with your councilmen. But I -- I've got to." He wasn't smiling now. There was a wild look about his face. She didn't like it. "Captain Bernard's with the council now, giving them the news. But I wanted to see you first, to be the one who told you." He broke off, shook his head. "Yet when I found you I couldn't say anything. I guess I was afraid of what you'd answer..." "What are you talking about?" She didn't want to look at him. It embarrassed her somehow, seeing him so eager. "What do you want to tell me?" "About our last trip, Trina. We've found a world!" She stared at him blankly, and his hand made a cutting gesture of impatience. "Oh, not a world like this one! A planet, Trina. And it's Earth type!" She wheeled the horse about and stared at him. For a moment she felt excitement rise inside of her too, and then she remembered the generations of searching, and the false alarms, and the dozens of barren, unfit planets that the spacemen colonized, planets like groundbound ships. "Oh, Trina," Max cried, "This isn't like the others. It's a new Earth. And there are already people there. From not long after the Exodus..." "A new Earth?" she said. "I don't believe it." The council wouldn't either, she thought. Not after all the other new Earths, freezing cold or methane atmosphered or at best completely waterless. This would be like the others. A spaceman's dream. "You've got to believe me, Trina," Max said. "And you've got to help make the others believe. Don't you see? You wouldn't live in space. I wouldn't live here -- on this. But there, on a real planet, on a real Earth... Then suddenly she felt his excitement and it was a part of her, until against all reason she wanted to believe in his mad dream of a world. She laughed aloud as she caught up the reins and raced her horse homeward, toward the long vista of the horizon and the capital village beyond it, ten minutes gallop away. gether into the council hall and saw the two groups, the roomful of worldmen and the half dozen spacemen, apart from each other, arguing. The spacemen's eyes were angry. "A world," Captain Bernard said bitterly, "there for your taking, and you don't even want to look at it." "How do we know what kind of world it is?" Councilman Elias leaned forward on the divan. His voice was gentle, almost pitying. "You brought no samples. No vegetation, no minerals... "Not even air samples," Aaron Gomez said softly. "Why?" Bernard sighed. "We didn't want to wait," he said. "We wanted to get back here to tell you." "It may be a. paradise world to you " Elias said. "But to us... Max Cramer tightened his grip on Trina's hand. "The fools," he said. "Talking and talking, and all the time this world drifts farther and farther away." "It takes so much power to change course," Trina said. "And besides, you feel it. It makes you heavy." She remembered the stories her father used to tell, about his own youth, when he and Curt Elias had turned the world to go to a planet the spaceman found. A planet with people -- people who lived under glass domes, or deep below the formaldehyde poisoned surface. "You could be there in two weeks, easily, even at your world's speed," Captain Bernard said. "And then we'd have to go out," Elias said. "Into space." The worldmen nodded. The women looked at each other and nodded too. One of the spacemen swore, graphically, and there was an embarrassed silence as Trina's people pretended not to have heard. "Oh, let's get out of here." The spaceman who had sworn swore again, just as descriptively, and then grinned at the councilmen and their aloof, blank faces. "They don't want our planet. All right. Maybe New Chile..." "Wait!" Trina said it without thinking, without intending to. She stood speechless when the others turned to face her. All the others. Her people and Max's. Curt Elias, leaning forward again, smiling at her. "Yes, Trina?" the councilman said. "Why don't we at least look at it? Maybe it is -- what they say." Expression came back to their faces then. They nodded at each other and looked from her to Max Cramer and back agahTat her, and they smiled. Festival time, their eyes said. Summer evenings, summer foolishness. And festival time long behind them, but soon to come again. "Your father went to space," Elias said. "We saw one of those worlds the spacemen talk of." "I know." "He didn't like it." "I know that too," she said, remembering his bitter words and the nightmare times when her mother had had so much trouble comforting him, and the winter evenings when he didn't want even to go outside and see the familiar, Earth encircling stars. He was dead now. Her mother was dead now. They were not here, to disapprove, to join with Elias and the others. They would have hated for her to go out there. She faltered, the excitement Max had aroused in her dying away, and then she thought of their argument, as old as their desire. She knew that if she wanted him it would have to be away from the worlds. "At least we could look," she said. "And the spacemen could bring up samples. And maybe even some of the people for us to talk to." Elias nodded. "It would be interesting," he said slowly, "to talk to some new people. It's been so long." "And we wouldn't even have to land," Aaron Gomez said, "if it didn't look right." The people turned to each other again and smiled happily. She knew that they were thinking of the men and women they would see, and all the new things to talk about. "We might even invite some of them up for the festival," Elias said slowly. "Providing they're -- courteous." He frowned at the young spaceman who had done the swearing, and then he looked back at Captain Bernard. "And providing, of course, that we're not too far away by then." "I don't think you will be," Bernard said. "I think you'll stay." "I think so too," Max Cramer said, moving closer to Trina. "I hope so." Elias stood up slowly and signalled that the council was dismissed. The other people stood up also and moved toward the doors. "We'd better see about changing the world's course," Aaron Gomez said. No one objected. It was going to be done. Trina looked up at Max Cramer and knew that she loved him. And wondered why she was afraid. the world, New America, came into the gravitational influence of the planet's solar system. The automatic deflectors swung into functioning position, ready to change course, slowly and imperceptibly, but enough to take the world around the system and out into the freedom of space where it could wander on its random course. But this time men shunted aside the automatic controls. Men guided their homeland in, slowly now, toward the second planet from the sun, the one that the spacemen had said was so like Earth. "We'll see it tomorrow," Trina said. "They'll shut off part of the light tower system then." "Why don't they now?" Max Cramer asked her. It was just past sunset, and the stars of a dozen generations ago were just beginning to wink into view. He saw Venus, low on the horizon, and his lips tightened, and then he looked up to where he knew the new sun must be. There was only the crescent of Earth's moon. "Now?" Trina said. "Why should they turn the screens off now? We're still so far away. We wouldn't see anything." "You'd see the sun," Max said. "It's quite bright, even from here. And from close up, from where the planet is, it looks just about like Earth's." Trina nodded. "That's good," she said, looking over at the rose tints of the afterglow. "It wouldn't seem right if it didn't." A cow lowed in the distance, and nearer, the laughing voices of children rode the evening breeze. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere else a woman called her family home to supper. Old sounds. Older, literally, than this world. "What are the people like, out there?" He looked at her face, eager and worried at the same time, and he smiled. "You'll like them, Trina," he said. "They're like -- well, they're more like this than anything else." He gestured, vaguely, at the farmhouse lights ahead of them, at the slow walking figures of the young couples out enjoying the warm spring evening, at the old farmer leading his plow horse home along the path. "They live in villages, not too different from yours. And in cities. And on farms." "And yet, you like it there, don't you?" she said. He nodded. "Yes, I like it there." "But you don't like it here. Why?" "If you don't understand by now, Trina, I can't explain." They walked on. Night came swiftly, crowding the rose and purple tints out of the western sky, closing in dark and cool and sweet smelling about them. Ahead, a footbridge loomed up out of the shadows. There was the sound of running water, and, on the bank not far from the bridge, the low murmuring of a couple of late lingering fishermen. "The people live out in the open, like this?" Trina said. "Yes." "Not underground?" Not under a dome?" "I've told you before that it's like Earth, Trina. About the same size, even." "This is about the same size, too." "Not really. It only looks that way." The fishermen glanced up as they passed, and then bent down over their lines again. Lucas Crossman, from Trina's town, and Jake Krakorian from the southern hemisphere, up to visit his sister Lucienne, who had just had twins... Trina said hello to them as she passed, and found out that the twins looked just like their mother, except for Grandfather Mueller's eyes, and then she turned back to Max. "Do people live all over the planet?" "On most of it. The land sections, that is. Of course, up by the poles it's too cold." "But how do they know each other?" He stopped walking and stared at her, not understanding for a minute. Girl's laughter came from the bushes, and the soft urging voice of one of the village boys. Max looked back at the fishermen and then down at Trina and shook his head. "They don't all know each other," he said. "They couldn't." She thought of New Chile, where her cousin Isobelle was married last year, and New India, which would follow them soon to the planet, because Captain Bernard had been able to contact them by radio. She thought of her people, her friends, and then she remembered the spacemen's far flung ships and the homes they burrowed deep in the rock of inhospitable worlds. She knew that he would never understand why she pitied the people of this system. "I suppose we'll see them soon," she said. "You're going to bring some of them back up in your ship tomorrow, aren't you?" He stood quietly, looking down at her. His face was shadowed in the gathering night and his whole body was in shadow, tall and somehow alien seeming there before her. "Why wait for them to come here, Trina?" he said. "Come down with us, in the ship, tomorrow. Come down and see for yourself what it's like." She trembled. "No," she said. And she thought of the ship, out away from the sky, not down on the planet yet but hanging above it, with no atmosphere to break the blackness, to soften the glare of the planet's sun, to shut out the emptiness. "You'd hardly know you weren't here, Trina. The air smells the same. And the weight's almost the same too. Maybe a little lighter." She nodded. "I know. If we land the world, I'll go out there. But not in the ship." "All right." He sighed and let go his grip on her shoulders and turned to start walking back the way they had come, toward the town. She thought suddenly of what he had just said, that she would hardly be able to tell the difference. "It can't be so much like this," she said. "Or you couldn't like it. No matter what you say." "Trina." His voice was harsh. "You've never been out in space, so you couldn't understand. You just don't know what your world is like, from outside, when you're coming in." But she could picture it. A tiny planetoid, shining perhaps behind its own screens, a small, drifting, lonely sphere of rock. She trembled again. "I don't want to know," she said. Somewhere in the meadows beyond the road there was laughter, a boy and a girl laughing together, happy in the night. Trina's fingers tightened on Max's hand and she pulled him around to face her and then clung to him, trembling, feeling the nearness of him as she held up her face to be kissed. He held her to him. And slowly, the outside world of space faded, and her world seemed big and solid and sure, and in his arms it was almost like festival time again. world slowed again and changed course, going into an orbit around the planet, becoming a third moon, nearer to the surface than the others. The people, all. of those who had followed their normal day-to-day life even after New America came into the system, abandoned it at last. They crowded near the television towers, waiting for the signal which would open up some of the sky and show them the planet they circled, a great green disk, twice the apparent diameter of the legendary Moon of Earth. Max stood beside Trina in the crowd that pressed close about his ship. He wore his spaceman's suit, and the helmet was in his hand. Soon he too would be aboard with the others, going down to the planet. "You're sure you won't come, Trina? We'll be down in a couple of hours." "I'll wait until we land there. If we do." Curt Elias came toward them through the crowd. When he saw Trina he smiled and walked faster, almost briskly. It was strange to see him move like a young and active man. "If I were younger," he said, "I'd go down there." He smiled again and pointed up at the zenith, where the blue was beginning to waver and fade as the sky screens slipped away. "This brings back memories." "You didn't like that other world," Trina said. "Not any more than Father did." "The air was bad there," Elias said. The signal buzzer sounded again. The center screens came down. Above them, outlined by the fuzzy halo of the still remaining sky, the black of space stood forth, and the stars, and the great disk of the planet, with its seas and continents and cloud masses and the shadow of night creeping across it from the east. "You see, Trina?" Max said softly. The voices of the people rose, some alive with interest and others anxious, fighting back the planet and the unfamiliar, too bright stars. Trina clutched Max Cramer's hand, feeling again the eagerness of that first day, when he had come to tell her of this world. "You're right," she whispered. "It is like Earth." It was so much like the pictures, though of course the continents were different, and the seas, and instead of one moon there were two. Earth. A new Earth, there above them in the sky. Elias let out his breath slowly. "Yes," he said. "It is. It's not a bit like that world we visited. Not a bit." "When you're down there it's even more like Earth," Max said. "And all the way down you could watch it grow larger. It wouldn't be at all like open space." At the poles of the planet snow gleamed, and cloud masses drifted across the equator. And the people looked, and pointed, their voices growing loud with eagerness. "Why don't we land the world now?" Trina cried. "Why wait for the ship to bring people up here?" "Landing the world would take a lot of power," Elias said. "It would be foolish to do it unless we planned on staying for quite a while." He sighed. "Though I would like to go down there. I'd like to see a really Earth type planet." He looked at Max, and Max smiled. "Well, why not?" he said. Elias smiled too. "After all, I've been in space once. I'll go again." He turned and pushed his way through the people. Trina watched him go. Somehow he seemed a symbol to her. Old and stable, he had been head of the council since she was a child. And he had gone into space with her father... "Please come, Trina," Max said. "There's nothing to be afraid of." With both Max and Elias along, certainly it couldn't be too bad. Max was right. There was nothing, really, to be afraid of. She smiled up at him. "All right," she said. "I'll go." And then she was walking with Max Cramer toward the ship and trying not to remember her father crying in his sleep. out as she felt the heaviness wrench her back against the cushions. Max reached over to her. She felt the needle go into her arm again, and then sank back into the half sleep that he had promised would last until they were ready to land. When she awoke the planet was a disk no longer, but a great curving mass beneath the ship, with the mountains and valleys and towns of its people plainly visible. But the planet's sky still lay below, and around them, in every direction except down, space stretched out, blacker than any night on the world. The world. Trina moaned and closed her eyes, glad she hadn't seen it, somewhere tiny and insignificant behind them. Max heard her moan and reached toward her. She slept again, and woke only when they were down and he was tugging the straps loose from around her. She sat up, still numbed by the drug, still half asleep and unreal feeling, and looked out about her at the planet's surface. They were in a field of some sort of grain. Beyond the scorched land where they had come down the tall cereal grasses rippled in the soft wind, a great undulating sea of green, reaching out toward the far off hills and the horizon. Cloud shadows drifted across the fields, and the shadow of the ship reached out to meet them. Trina rubbed her eyes in wonder. "It is like the world' she said. "Just like it." For a moment she was sure that they were back on the world again, in some momentarily unrecognized pasture, or perhaps on one of the sister worlds. Then, looking along the row of hills to where they dropped away into an extension of the plain, she saw that the horizon was a little too far, and that the light shimmered differently, somehow, than on her home. But it was such a little difference. "Come on outside," Max Cramer said. "You'll be all right now." She stood up and followed him. Elias was already at the airlock, moving unsteadily and a little blankly, also still partly under the influence of the narcotic. The lock opened. Captain Bernard stepped out and went down the ladder to the ground. The others followed him. Within a few minutes the ship stood empty. of the planet and felt the warmth on her face and smelled the scent of grass and the elusive fragrance of alien flowers. She heard the song of some strange, infinitely sweet throated bird. "It's -- it's Earth," she whispered. Voices, eager, calling voices, sang out in the distance. Then, little cars rolled toward them through the field, mowing down the grass, cutting themselves a path to the ship. People, men and women and children, were calling greetings. "This is where we landed before," Max said. "We told them we'd be back." They were sunbronzed, country people, and except for their strange clothing they might have been from any of the worlds. Even their language was the same, though accented differently, with some of the old, unused words, like those in the legends. "You've brought your people?" the tall man who stood in the forefront said to Captain Bernard. "They're up there." Bernard pointed up at the sky, and the people looked up. Trina looked up too. One of the planet's moons was almost full overhead. But the world was invisible, shut off by the sky and the clouds and the light of the earthlike sun. "They'd like some of you to come visit their world," Bernard said. "If The tall man nodded. "Everyone will want to go," he said. "Very few ships ever land here. Until you came, it had been years." "You'd go out in space?" Trina said incredulously. Again the man nodded. "I was a spaceman once," he said. "All of us MacGregors were." Then he sighed. "Sometimes even now I want to go out again. But there've been no ships here, not for years." Trina looked past him, at the women and the children, at the lush fields and the little houses far in the distance. "You'd leave this?" MacGregor shook his head. "No, of course not. Not to live in space permanently. I'd always come back." "It's a fine world to come back to," Max said, and he and the tall man smiled at each other, as if they shared something that Trina couldn't possibly understand. "We might as well go into town," MacGregor said. They walked over to the cars. MacGregor stopped beside one of them, his hand on the door button. "Here, let me drive." The girl stepped forward out of the crowd as she spoke. She was tall, almost as tall as MacGregor, and she had the same high cheekbones and the same laughter lines about her eyes. "Not this time, Saari," MacGregor said. "This time you can entertain our guests." He turned to Max and Trina and smiled. "My daughter." His face was proud. They climbed in, Trina wedging herself into the middle of the back seat between Max and the planet girl. The car throbbed into motion, then picked up speed, jolting a bit on the rough country road. The ground rushed past and the fields rushed past and Trina leaned against Max and shut her eyes against the dizzying speed. Here, close to the ground, so close that they could feel every unevenness of its surface, it was far worse than in the windmill like craft the spacemen used on the worlds. "Don't you have cars?" Saari asked "No," Trina said. "We don't need them." A car like this would rush all the way around the world in half an hour. In a car like this one even the horizons wouldn't look right, rushing to meet them. Here, though the horizons stayed the same, unmoving while the fence posts and the farmhouses and the people flashed past. "What do you use for transportation then?" "We walk," Trina said, opening her eyes to look at the girl and then closing them again. "Or we ride horses." "Oh." A few minutes later the car slowed, and Trina opened her eyes again. "We're coming into town," Saari said. They had climbed up over the brow of a small hill and were now dropping down. At the bottom of the hill the houses clumped together, sparsely at first, then more and more of them, so that the whole valley was filled with buildings, and more buildings hugged the far slopes. "There are so many of them," Trina whispered. "Oh, no, Trina. This is just a small town." "But the people -- all those people..." They crowded the streets, watching the cars come in, looking with open curiosity at their alien visitors. Faces, a thousand faces, all different and yet somehow all alike, blended together into a great anonymous mass. "There aren't half that many people on the whole world," Trina said. Saari smiled. "Just wait till you see the city." Trina shook her head and looked up at Max. He was smiling out at the town, nodding to some men he apparently knew, with nothing but eagerness in his face. He seemed a stranger. She looked around for Curt Elias, but he was in one of the other cars cut off from them by the crowd. She couldn't see him at all. "Don't you like it?" Saari said. "I liked it better where we landed." Max turned and glanced down at her briefly, but his hand found hers and held it, tightly, until her own relaxed. "If you want to, Trina, we can live out there, in those fields." For a moment she forgot the crowd and the endless faces as she looked up at him. "Do you mean that, Max? We could really live out there?" Where it was quiet, and the sun was the same, and the birds sang sweetly just before harvest time, where she would have room to ride and plenty of pasture for her favorite horse. Where she would have Max, there with her, not out somewhere beyond the stars. "Certainly we could live there," he said. "That's what I've been saying all along." "You could settle down here?" He laughed. "Oh, I suppose I'd be out in space a good deal of the time," he said. "The ships will come here now, you know. But I'll always come home, Trina. To this world. To you." And suddenly it didn't matter that the girl beside her chuckled, nor that there were too many people crowding around them, all talking at once in their strangely accented voices. All that mattered was Max, and this world, which was real after all. and a life that seemed like an endless festival time before her. quickly, with the sun dropping in an unnatural plunge toward the horizon. Shadows crept out from the houses of the town, reached across the narrow street and blended with the walls of the houses opposite. The birds sang louder in the twilight, the notes of their song drifting in from the nearby fields. And there was another sound, that of the wind, not loud now but rising, swirling fingers of dust in the street. Trina sat in front of the town cafe with the planet girl, Saari. Max Cramer was only a few feet away, but he paid no attention to her, and little to Elias. He was too busy telling the planet people about space. "Your man?" Saari asked. "Yes," Trina said. "I guess so." "You're lucky." Saari looked over at Max and sighed, and then she turned back to Trina. "My father was a spaceman. He used to take my mother up, when they were first married, when the ships were still running." She sighed. "I remember the ships, a little. But it was such a long time ago." "I can't understand you people." Trina shook her head. "Leaving all of this, just to go out in space." The room was crowded, oppressively crowded. Outside, too many people walked the shadowed streets. Too many voices babbled together. The people of this planet must be a little mad, Trina thought, to live cooped together as the spacemen lived, with all their world around them. Saari sat watching her, and nodded. "You're different, aren't you? From us, and from them too." She looked over at Max and Bernard and the others, and then she looked at Curt Elias, who sat clenching and unclenching his hands, saying nothing. "Yes, we're different," Trina said. Klax Cramer's voice broke incisively into the silence that lay between them then. "I don't see why," he said, "we didn't all know about this world. Especially if more than one ship came here." Saari's father laughed softly. "It's not so strange. The ships all belonged to one clan. The MacGregors. And eventually all of them either were lost in space somewhere or else grew tired of roaming around and settled down. Here." He smiled again, and his high cheekboned face leaned forward into the light. "Like me... Night. Cloudless, black, but hazed over with atmosphere and thus familiar, not like the night of space. The two small moons, the stars in unfamiliar places, and somewhere, a star that was her world. And Trina sat and listened to the planet men talk, and to the spacemen among them who could no longer be distinguished from the native born. Outside, in the narrow street, wind murmured, skudding papers and brush before it, vague shadows against the light houses. Wind, rising and moaning, the sound coming in over the voices and the music from the cafe singers. It was a stronger wind than ever blew on the world, even during the winter, when the people had to stay inside and wish that Earth tradition might be broken and good weather be had the year around. "We'd better get back to the ship," Elias said. They stopped talking and looked at him, and he looked down at his hands, embarrassed. "They'll be worried about us at home." "No, they won't," Max said. Then he saw the thin, blue-veined hands trembling and the quiver not quite controlled in the wrinkled neck. "Though perhaps we should start back... Trina let out her breath in relief. To be back in the ship, she thought, with the needle and its forgetfulness, away from the noise and the crowd and the nervousness brought on by the rising wind. It would be better, of course, when they had their place in the country. There it would be warm and homelike and quiet, with the farm animals near by, and the weather shut out, boarded out and forgotten, the way it was in winter on the world. "You're coming with us?" Captain Bernard was saying. "Yes, we're coming." Half a dozen of the men stood up and began pulling on their long, awkward coats. "It'll be good to get back in space again," MacGregor said. "For a while." He smiled. "But I'm too old for a spaceman's life now." "And I'm too old even for this," Elias said apologetically. "If we'd found this planet the other time... He sighed and shook his head and looked out the window at the shadows that were people, bent forward, walking into the wind. He sighed again. "I don't know. I just don't know." Saari got up and pulled on her wrap too. Then she walked over to one of the other women, spoke to her a minute, and came back carrying a quilted, rough fabricked coat. "Here, Trina, you'd better put this on. It'll be cold out." "Are you going with us?" "Sure. Why not? Dad's talked enough about space. I might as well see what it's like for myself." Trina shook her head. But before she could speak, someone opened the door and the cold breeze came in, hitting her in the face "Come on," Saari said. "It'll be warm in the car." Somehow she was outside, following the others. The wind whipped her hair, stung her eyes, tore at her legs. The coat kept it from her body, but she couldn't protect her face, nor shut out the low moaning wail of it through the trees and the housetops. She groped her way into the car. The door slammed shut, and the wind retreated, a little. "Is it -- is it often like that?" Saari MacGregor looked at her. Max Cramer turned and looked at her, and so did the others in the car. For a long moment no one said anything. And then Saari said, "Why, this is summer , Trina." "Summer?" She thought of the cereal grasses, rippling in the warm day. They'd be whipping in the wind now, of course. The wind that was so much stronger than any the world's machines ever made. "You ought to be here in winter," Saari was saying. "It really blows then. And there are the rainstorms, and snow..." "Snow?" Trina said blankly. "Certainly. A couple of feet of it, usually." Saari stopped talking and looked at Trina, and surprise crept even farther into her face. "You mean you don't have snow on your world?" "Why, yes, we have snow. We have everything Earth had." But snow two feet deep... Trina shivered, thinking of winter on the world, and the soft dusting of white on winter mornings, the beautiful powdery flakes cool in the sunlight. "They have about a sixteenth of an inch of it," Max said. "And even that's more than some of the worlds have. It hardly ever even rains in New California." Saari turned away finally, and the others did too. The car started, the sound of its motors shutting out the wind a little, and then they were moving. Yet it was even more frightening, rushing over the roads in the darkness, with the houses flashing past and the trees thrashing in the wind and the people briefly seen and then left behind in the night. The ship was ahead. The ship. Now even it seemed a safe, familiar place. "This isn't like Earth after all," Trina said bitterly. "And it seemed so beautiful at first." Then she saw that Saari MacGregor was looking at her again, but this time more in pity than in surprise. "Not like Earth, Trina? You're wrong. We have a better climate than Earth's. We never have blizzards, nor hurricanes, and it's never too cold nor too hot, really." "How can you say that?" Trina cried. "We've kept our world like Earth. Oh, maybe we've shortened winter a little, but still..." Saari's voice was sad and gentle, as if she were explaining something to a bewildered child. "My mother's ancestors came here only a few years out from Earth," she said. "And do you know what they called this planet? A paradise. A garden world." "That's why they named it Eden," Max Cramer said. Then they were at the ship, out of the car, running to the airlock, with the grass lashing at their legs and the wind lashing at their faces and the cold night air aflame suddenly in their lungs. And Trina couldn't protest any longer, not with the world mad about her, not with Saari's words ringing in her ears like the wind. She saw them carry Curt Elias in, and then Max was helping her aboard, and a moment later, finally, the airlock doors slipped shut and it was quiet. She held out her arm for the needle. was morning. Morning on the world. They had carried her to one of the divans in the council hall, one near a window so that she could see the familiar fields of her homeland as soon as she awoke. She rubbed her eyes and straightened and looked up at the others. At Elias, still resting on another divan. At Captain Bernard. At Saari and her father, and another man from the planet. At Max. He looked at her, and then sighed and turned away, shaking his head. "Are we -- are we going back there?" Trina asked. "No," Elias said. "The people are against it." There was silence for a moment, and then Elias went on. "I'm against it. I suppose that even if I'd been young I wouldn't have wanted to stay." His eyes met Trina's, and there was pity in them. "No," Max said. "You wouldn't have wanted to." "And yet," Elias said, "I went down there. Trina went down there. Her father and I both went out into space." He sighed. "The others wouldn't even do that." "You're not quite as bad, that's all," Max said bluntly. "But I don't understand any of you. None of us ever has understood you. None of us ever will." Trina looked across at him. Her fingers knew every line of his face, but now he was withdrawn, a stranger. "You're going back there, aren't you?" she said. And when he nodded, she sighed. "We'll never understand you either, I guess." She remembered Saari's question of the night before, "Is he your man?" and she realized that her answer had not been the truth. She knew now that he had never been hers, not really, nor she his, that the woman who would be his would be like Saari, eager and unafraid and laughing in the wind, or looking out the ports at friendly stars. Elias leaned forward on the divan and gestured toward the master weather panel for their part of the village, the indicators that told what it was like today and what it would be like tomorrow all over the world. "I think I understand," he said. "I think I know what we did to our environment, through the generations. But it doesn't do much good, just knowing something." "You'll never change," Max said. "No, I don't think we will." Captain Bernard got up, and MacGregor got up too. They looked at Max. Slowly he turned his head and smiled at Trina, and then he tco stood up. "Want to come outside and talk, Trina?" But there was nothing to say. Nothing she could do except break down and cry in his arms and beg him not to leave her, beg him to spend the rest of his life on a world she could never leave again. "No," she said. "I guess not." And then, the memories rushed back, and the music, and the little lane down by the stream where the magnolias spread their web of fragrance. It's -- it's almost festival time, Max. Will you be here for it?" "I don't know, Trina." It meant no; she knew that. The weeks slipped by, until it was summer on the world, until the festival music sang through the villages and the festival flowers bloomed and the festival lovers slipped off from the dances to walk among them. There was a breeze, just enough to carry the mingled fragrances and the mingled songs, just enough to touch the throat and ruffle the hair and lie lightly between the lips of lovers. Trina danced with Aaron Gomez, and remembered. And the wind seemed too soft somehow, almost lifeless, with the air too sweet and cloying. She wondered what a festival on the planet would be like. Max, with Saari MacGregor, perhaps, laughing in the wind, running in the chill of evening along some riverbank. I could have gone with him, she thought. I could have gone... But then the music swirled faster about them, the pulse of it pounding in her ears, and Aaron swept her closer as they danced, spinning among the people and the laughter, out toward the terrace, toward the trees with leaves unstirring in the evening air. All was color and sound and scent, all blended, hypnotically perfect, something infinitely precious that she could never, never leave. For it was summer on the world, and festival time again. wrote that controversial short novel, A Case of Conscience , now tackles another fascinating theme in a new story about a civilization of tree-top back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence -- where the grass is always greener. By Richard Stockham Illustrated by Ed Emsh sea of atmosphere like a greats silver fish. Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun. The ship's radio cried out. "You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!" Another voice, shaking, said, "President -- Davis is -- overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people -- with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you." A pause. "Please come in!" The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship. "I can't tell them," said the man. "Please come in!" said the radio. "Do you hear me?" The woman looked up at the man. "You've got to Michael!" "Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder." A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. "Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship." "They've got a right to know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long -- ." He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here." He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over." "No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them." "We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation." She spoke softly. "We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael." He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. "Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in." tled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away. The man and woman came out into .the blazing sunlight. A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff. And, as then, there were no chilthrong. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end. Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence. A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet. The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas. And then Michael's voice, "The thousand who left with us are dead." For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay -- and die." He handed the microphone back. The silence did not change. The President grasped Michael's arm. "What're you saying?" A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it. Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials. "Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!" "We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael. "A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be." The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands. "There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right!" Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship. They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square. The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you heard, they report -- complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now, the proof." Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance. Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons. The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being. Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions. Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship. They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them ; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible. And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this, of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth. The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes. The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space -- all this through years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space. Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships. And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness. Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Artie sea. At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume. Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and crys of the spectators rose higher, "Shut it off... Oh Lord... " Lights flashed through the room and the picture died. staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling. "There -- there've been changes," he said, "since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years." Michael faced him, frowning. "I don't follow you." "Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility." "I'm sorry," said Michael, "we've been so close to violent death for so long... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for." "What you showed us was a picture," said the President. "If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria." "But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space." "We couldn't tolerate such a possibility," said the President gravely. "We'd have to find a way around it." The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; ths terror in them was fading away. "And yet the Earth is almost dead," said Michael quietly, "and you can't bring it back to life." "The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson," said the President. "The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. Gan you give us any hope at all?" "None." "Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?" Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President." There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again. "We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth." He paused. "Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people." Michael and Mary were silent. "You'll wait outside the council chambers," the President went on, "until we have reached our decision." As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains. Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight. Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea. "We should have delivered our message by radio," he said, "and gone back into space." "You could probably still go," she said quietly. He came and stood beside her. "I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you." She looked up at him. "We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away." He turned from her. "It's all dead. What would be the use?" "I came from the Earth,' she said quietly. "And Fve got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison." "But to die out there in the desert, in that dust." Then he paused and looked away from her. "We're crazy -- talking as though we had a choice." "Maybe they'll have to give us a choice." "What're you talking about?" "They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age." He waited. "They can't stand the sight of people dying violently." Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket. "These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death... We still have a choice." He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?" He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?" "Michael." Her voice trembled. "I -- I don't know how to say this." He waited, frowning, watching her intently. "I'm -- going to have a child." His face went blank. Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full. "No," he said thickly. "I can't believe it." "It's true." He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside. "Yes, I can see it is." "I -- I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael." He shook his head. "I don't know -- what to -- to say. It's so incredible." "Maybe -- I got so -- tired -- just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just -- something I felt I had to do. Some -- real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth -- so -- so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing." She paused, frowning. "I didn't stop to think -- it would be like this." "Such a thing," he said, smiling grimly, "hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't anymore babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized." He paused. "After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done." "No," she said quietly. "I don't think they could." "And so this will be just for us " He took her in his arms. "If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action." A pause. "Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth -- if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do -- Well, we'll see." They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him. time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen: "This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right." Michael turned from the window. "So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie." Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands. "What a terrible failure there's been here," said Michael. "The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room." "I can't face dying," Mary said quietly, "squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again." Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now. And then there was the sound of the door opening. They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers. Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders. The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet. The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one. "Michael and Mary," he said, his voice struggling against a tightness, "we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy." He took another swallow of water. "To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society." He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?" "Yes, there is." "Proceed." Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat. "Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure." The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks. "We can't endure the city," went on Michael, "or its life and the ways of the people." He glanced along the line of staring faces. "If what I think you're about to say is true," said the President in a shaking voice, "it would have been better if you'd never been born." "Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died -- yet." A pause. "And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and tom. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see." The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still. Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle. Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them. Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death. "Stop!" he said quietly. They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back. "If you want to see us die -- just come a step closer... And remember what'll happed to you." The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. "A ghastly thing... Instant... Nothing to do... Space's broken their minds...They'll do it... Eyes' re mad... What can we do?... What?... The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones : all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror. "I command you," he suddenly said, in a choked voice, "to -- to give me those -- lockets! It's your -- duty!" "We've only one duty, Mr. President," said Michael sharply. "To ourselves." "You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you." "We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!" The President's body sagged. "What -- what is it you want?" Michael threw the words. "To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death." The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. "In the name of God... Let them go... Contaminate us... Like animals... Get them out of here... Let them be finished... Best for us all... And them..." There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached. Haltingly he said, "Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth -- to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again." "We want a ground car," said Michael. "And supplies." "A ground car," repeated the President. "And -- supplies... Yes." "You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains." "There will be no escort," said the President firmly. "No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go noV. Quickly!" . Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor. lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road. Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation. "If any one of the other couples had made it back," said Mary, "do you think they'd be with us?" "I think they'd either be with us," he said, "or out in space again -- or in prison." She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road. "How sorry are you," she said quietly, "coming with me?" "All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself." "Are we going to die out here, Michael?" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, "with the land?" He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness. They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust. "I'm getting out," she said. "I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why," said Michael shrugging. "It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?" They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill. "The air smells clean," he said. "The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes." She did. "Take off your boots, Michael. Try it." Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. "It takes me back." "Yes," she said and began walking toward the hilltop. He followed, his boots slung around his neck. "There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?" "I guess when the past is old enough," she said, "it becomes a dream." He watched her footprints in the dust. "God, listen to the quiet." "I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship. or the pumps back in the cities." He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly: "Mary!" She stopped, whirling around. He was staring down at her feet. She followed his gaze. "It's grass!" He bent down. "Three blades." She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades. "They're new," he said. They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object. He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center. "Oh!" Her hand found his. They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside. Mary knelt down and drank from the spring. "It's so cool. It must come from deep down." "It does," he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. "From deep down." "We can live here, Michael!" Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. "We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child." "Yes!" she said. "Oh yes!" "And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive." He paused. "By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them." They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own. There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build sex was in Tensor's world, but when those Earthlings arrived -- !! Colonel Johns , that famous Revolutionary War hero, had the unique j -- and painful -- experience of meeting his great-greatgreat-great granddaughter. Now maybe you can't change history, but what's there to prevent a soldier from changing his mind about the gal he is going to marry? #e OndeaC By George H. Smith Illustrated by Rudolph Palais scrounged still lower in his seat as Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin rested her enormous bosom on the front of the podium and smiled down on the Patriot Daughters of America in convention assembled as she announced: "And now, my dears, I will read you one more short quotation from Major Wicks' fascinating book 'The Minor Tactics of The American Revolution.' When I am finished, I know that you will all agree that Rebecca Johns-Hayes will be a more than fitting successor to myself as your President." Decker looked wildly about for a way of escape from the convention auditorium. If he had only remained in the anteroom with Professor MacCulloch and the Historical Reintergrator! After suffering through four days of speeches by ladies in various stages of mammalian top-heaviness, he hadn't believed it possible that anyone could top Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin for either sheer ability to bore or for the nobility of her bust. Mrs. Rebecca Johns-Hayes had come as something of a shock as she squirmed her way onto the speaker's platform. But there she was as big as life, or rather bigger, smilin g at Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin, the Past President beaming at Mrs. Lynd-Torris, a defeated candidate for the presidency and whose ancestor had been only a captain, and completely ignoring Mrs. Tolman, the other defeated candidate whose ancestor had been so inconsiderate as to have been a Continental sergeant. Only the thought that now that the voting was over and the new president chosen, the ladies might be ready for the demonstration of the Reintergrator had brought Decker onto the convention floor, and now he was trapped and would have to listen. "And so," Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin was reading, "upon such small events do the great moments of hisand skirmishing of the riflemen under Colonel Peter Johns prevented the breakthrough of Captain Fosdick's column and the possible flanking of the American army before Saratoga. Thus, this little known action may have been the deciding factor in the whole campaign that prevented General Burgoyne from carrying out the British plan to divide the colonies and end the war. It is impossible for the historian to refrain from speculation as to what might have happened had Colonel Johns not been on hand to direct the riflemen and militia in this section; as indeed he might not have been, since his own regiment of short-term enlistees had returned to Pennsylvania a few days previously. Only the Colonel's patriotism and devotion to duty kept him in the field and made his abilities available to the country when they were most needed." Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin waited until the burst of applause had died down and then continued, "That is the man whose great-great-greatgreat granddaughter you have elected your president today Mrs. Rebecca Johns-Hayes!" Turning to Mrs. Johns-Hayes she went on, "Before you make your acceptance speech, dear, we have a little surprise for you." Clark Decker had been edging his way toward the side of the auditorium where the Men's Auxiliary of the Daughters had their seats but he turned back at the mention of the surprise. It sounded as though it was time for him and the Professor to start their demonstration. "A surprise which we hope will also be a surprise to the whole world of science," Mrs. ApplebySimpkin was holding the podium against a determinedly advancing Mrs. Johns-Hayes. "Indeed we may be able to say in future years, that the # Convention of the Patriot Daughters was marked by the first public demonstration of one of the most momentous inventions in the history of science." The Past President was speaking faster and faster, because the new President with a hand full of notes was doing her best to edge her away from both the podium and the microphone. "Thank you, darling," Mrs. Johns-Hayes said, pulling the microphone firmly toward her, "but we really must get along with business. I have quite a few things I want to say and several motions which I want to place before the Convention." "And as I was saying, dear," Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin said, pulling the microphone back with equal firmness, "I know that you will be just unbearably thrilled." There was another brief struggle for the mike and Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin won and went on. "I know that he will be just as proud of you as you are of him. That is why we have arranged for Professor MacCulloch to demonstrate his historical Reintegrator at our convention by bringing into our midst Colonel Peter Johns, the hero of the action at Temple Farm, to see his greatgreat-great-great-granddaughter installed as the fifty-fourth president of the Loyal Order of Patriot Daughters of America. Now I... Mrs. Johns-Hayes again won control of the mike. "Thank you very much, dear." Her voice was a genteel screech. "I'm sure that we will be only too glad to have the... who? Who did you say?" Mrs. Appleby-Simpkin regained the microphone from the other woman's relaxing grip. "I believe I see Mr. Decker, the Professor's assistant, in the audience," she said. "Will you be so good as to tell the Professor that we are ready for his epic-making experiment?" With a great feeling of relief, Decker escaped from the rising turmoil of the convention hall into the relative quiet of the anteroom where MacCulloch waited with the Reintegrator. He found the Professor sitting with his head in his hands staring at the machine. The little man looked up and smiled quizzically as his assistant approached him. "They're ready, Professor ! They're ready!" Still under the influence of the convention, Decker found himself shouting. "Ah. Ah, yes. Then it will be today. I've waited so long. Ten years of work and now instead of a scientific gathering, I have to demonstrate my machine before a woman's club." platform which held the Reintegrator toward the door. "After today, Professor, all the scientific organizations in the world will have heard of you and will be demanding demonstrations." "Yes, but these Patriot Daughters! Who are they? Who in the scientific world ever heard of them?" "No one except a few scientists unfortunate enough to fall afoul of their Loyalty and Conformity Committee." "I think we should have gone elsewhere for our demonstration." "Now Professor. Who in the world today would be interested in the past except a group of ancestor conscious women?" "Some historical society perhaps," the Professor said wistfully. "And what historical society could have advanced the twenty thousand dollars we needed to complete the machine?" "I suppose you're right, my boy," MacCulloch sighed as he helped push the Reintegrator onto the auditorium floor. By the time Clark Decker reached the platform to explain the demonstration, the fight for the microphone had turned into a three-way struggle. A lady who represented the Finance Committee was trying to win it away from both the Past President and the new President. Taking them by surprise, Decker managed to gain control long enough to explain what was about to happen. "You mean' demanded Mrs. Johns-Hayes, "that this is some sort of time machine and you're going to transport great-great-great-greatgrandfather from the past into the present?" "No, Mrs. Hayes. This isn't a time machine in the comic book use of the term. It is just what Professor MacCulloch has called it, an historical Reintegrator. The theory upon which it is based, the MacCulloch Reaction, says that every person who ever existed, and every event which ever took place caused electrical disturbances in the spacetime continuum of the universe by displacing an equal and identical group of electrons. The task of the Reintegrator is to reassemble those electrons. That is why Professor MacCulloch is now placing your ancestor's sword in the machine. We will use that as a base point from which our recreation will begin." The machine was humming and small lights were beginning to play about its tubes and dials. "If our calculations are accurate, and we believe that they are," Decker said, "within a very few minutes, Colonel Johns should be standing before us as he was on a day approximately a week before his heroic action in the battle at Temple Farm." Mrs. Johns-Hayes, although still gripping her notes, was beginning to get a little flustered. "Oh my, that would be before he married great-great-great-great-grandmother Sayles. They were married only two days before the battle, you know. It was so romantic... a wartime romance and all." "Just imagine," Mrs. Tolman remarked, "at that time your whole family was just a gleam in the Colonel's eye!" Professor MacCulloch made one or two last passes at the machine and then stood back to watch, a look of pure scientific ecstasy on his face. A mistiness began to gather on the platform where the Colonel's sword lay and through it from time to time shot sparks of electricity. Suddenly a gasp went up from the assembled Daughters as a man's head and shoulders appeared and expanded downward, a long way downward, to a large pair of feet. There was one last hum from the machine and then a tall young man in faded blue regimentals and very much in need of a shave was standing blinking in the blazing lights of the auditorium. "Oh, Mr. Decker, surely there's some mistake!" was Mrs. JohnsHayes' first comment as she surveyed the very tall, very tattered, and very dirty young man. "Greatgreat-great-great-grandfather's pictures always show him as a dignified old gentleman." The Colonel took one quick look around and made a grab for his sword, but the Professor managed to calm him and to explain the situation before any violence could take place. After a few minutes of hurried talk, MacCulloch steered the Colonel in the direction of the speaker's platform for the meeting with his great-great-great-greatgranddaughter. Peter Johns' bewilderment faded into astonishment, but he still gripped his sword as the Professor guided him through the throngs of excited ladies onto the stage. He paused momentarily to look at the ber of American flags which hung overhead. A picture of George Washington, hung among the flags, seemed to reassure him and he allowed the Professor to lead him to Mrs. Johns-Hayes. That lady had drawn herself together at the approach of her ancestor and had obviously decided to carry it off as best she could. She advanced to meet him crying, "Dear, dear great-great-great-greatgrandfather! This is such a pleasure! You can't know how proud all of us in the family have always been of you." The young Continental officer stared open mouthed at the redfaced, big-bosomed woman who was twice his age, but who addressed him as great-great-greatgreat-grandfather. Then he turned to MacCulloch who stood beside him. "Are you sure you have the right man?" he asked. "Oh yes! Perfectly, perfectly! You're Colonel Peter Johns of Pamworth, Pennsylvania, and this is your great-great-great-greatgranddaughter, Rebecca JohnsHayes." "Rebecca? You mean she's named after Becky Sayles?" The Colonel rubbed a hand across his several days' growth of beard. "That's right, dear great-greatgreat-great-grandfather. I'm named after great-great-great-great-grandmother," Mrs. Johns-Hayes announced. "Then I married Becky Sales?" the Colonel asked. "Why, of course! Aren't you planning on getting married in a few days?" Clark Decker asked. The Colonel was embarrassed but he grinned, "Well, I don't rightly know. Miss Sayles and I have been courtin' for some months but there's little Jennie Taylor down in Trenton... To tell the truth, I haven't quite made up my mind." "Well! Of all things! What would the family think! What would great Aunt Mary Hayes say?" Mrs. Johns-Hayes puffed out even farther than usual. "Well, we can ease your mind on that subject, Colonel. The history books say that you married Miss Sayles -- and here is Mrs. JohnsHayes to prove it." The Colonel scratched his chin again as he looked at Mrs. JohnsHayes. "Is that so? Is that so? What's all this about history books? You mean I got in history because I married Becky Sayles?" The Professor laughed. "Well, not exactly. It was because of your heroism in the defeat of Burgoyne's army. If you hadn't blocked Captain Fenwick's flanking move at Temple Farm, the American army under General Gates might have been defeated and the Colonies might even have lost the war." "Well, I'll be... Me? I did all that? I didn't even know there was going to be a battle. Did I end up a live hero or a dead one?" The Colonel was beginning to feel a bit more easy in his surroundings, and, to the horror of Mrs. Johns-Hayes, took a plug of tobacco out of his pocket and bit off a piece and began to chew it. "You came through the battle with only a slight wound and lived to a ripe old age surrounded by grandchildren," the Professor told him. "Then I reckon I won't go back to Pennsylvania with the other boys. They figure that since their enlistments are up, it's time to get back to the farm and let them New Yorkers do some of their own fightmg. "Oh no! You weren't thinking of going back -- of leaving the fighting?" Mrs. Johns-Hayes demanded. The Colonel shifted his wad of tobacco and looked at the woman carefully as though he couldn't quite believe the evidence of his eyes. "No, ma'am, I don't reckon I am. I don't exactly look on it the same as the other boys do. I kind of feel like if we're ever going to have a country, it's worth fighting for." Mrs. Johns-Hayes beamed, as did all the other officers of the Daughters. "Well, your faith and heroism have been rewarded, great-greatgreat-great-grandfather. I know you'll be proud to know that these ladies whom you see before you are the present guardians of the ideals that you fought for." "Well, now, is that so, ma'am? Is that so?" Peter Johns looked around the convention hall in amazement. "And that I, your descendant, have just been elected their President!" "Well, what do you know about that! Maybe all the hard times and the danger we been going through is worth it if you folks still remember the way we felt about things." "It's too bad," Decker whispered to MacCulloch, "that we can't let him see what the country is really like. I'm not sure these ladies are representative." There was a worried look on the Professor's face. "That's impossible. The reintegration is good for only an hour or so. I hope nothing goes wrong here." Mrs. Appleby Simpkin took charge of the Colonel and ushered him to a seat of honor near the podium while the new President prepared to deliver her speech. Decker and the professor managed to obtain seats on either side of Johns just as Rebecca started. He managed to whisper to them, "I'm sure amazed! I'm sure amazed! All these nice old ladies feeling the same way about things as we do." of trouble as Mrs. Hayes' words poured forth. He had hoped for a cut and dried acceptance speech with nothing but the usual patriotic platitudes, but, as she went on his worst fears were realized. Inspired by the presence of her ancestor, the woman was going into superlatives about the purposes and aims of the Patriot Daughters. She covered everything from the glories of her ancestry to the morals of the younger generation and women in politics. Decker watched the Coloners face, saw it changed from puzzlement to painful boredom as word after word floated from the battery of speakers overhead. MacCulloch was whispering in Johns' ear in an attempt to draw his attention from the woman's booming voice but the man disregarded him. "Am I really responsible for that? The Colonel jerked his head in the direction of Mrs. Johns-Hayes. "I'm afraid, Colonel, that you're getting a distorted idea of what America is like in our time," Decker said. The Colonel didn't even turn to look at him. He was scowling at his Amazonian descendant as her screeching reached new heights. "... and we hold that this is true! Our simple motto, as you all know, is: One race, one creed, one way of thinking!" Colonel Johns began to squirm violently in his seat. The professor found it necessary to grasp him firmly by one arm while Decker held him by the. other. The president of the Patriot Daughters had finished her speech amidst thunderous applause and started to present suggestions for the formation of new committees, for the passing of new by-laws and for resolutions. "A committee should be formed to see that the public parks are properly policed to prevent socalled 'spooners' from pursuing their immoral behaviour. "A new by-law is needed," and here Mrs. Hayes glanced aside at Mrs. Tolman, "to prevent members being accepted unless their forebears were lieutenants or of higher rank in the glorious Continental army." The Colonel was a strong man and both Decker and MacCulloch were older than he. With something between a snort and a roar he shook them loose and started for the exit. "Oh my," MacCulloch moaned, "I was afraid that this whole thing was a mistake." Colonel Johns had taken only two steps toward the door when he seemed to stagger. MacCulloch leaped to his side and caught him by the arm. There was an uproar in the auditorium as the Colonel faded slightly and the professor hurried him down the steps toward the Reintegrator. "I'm afraid the Colonel isn't going to be with us much longer," the professor explained. Thank goodness, Decker thought, I don't believe the poor man could have stood it much longer. "I'm afraid the reintegration time of Colonel Johns is running out and he must return to his own time," the professor went on. The grim-faced Colonel said nothing as MacCulloch led him up to the machine. "Goodbye, great-great-greatgreat-grandfather," Mrs. JohnsHayes called from the platform. "It has been so nice having you with us." "Goodbye, Rebecca," the Colonel said as he began to fade away. "Give my regards to great-greatgreat-great-grandmother." The figure in the dirty, faded blue uniform was gone but Decker (Continued on page #) Theirs was a world of great culture yet their destiny had ever been run , run , run -- flee the Hunters. Even with the near perfection of the Concerts, the ultimate advance of civilized man, they would run once again. But this time there were two who stayed behind... By Alan E. Nourse Illustration by Rudolph Palais when Ravdin eased the ship down into the last slow arc toward the Earth's surface. Stretching his arms and legs, he tried to relax and ease the tension in his tired muscles. Carefully he tightened the seat belt for landing; then he blinked eagerly down at the vast, tangled expanse of Jungle-land below him. Several miles ahead was the bright circle of the landing field, with the sparkling glow of the city beyond. Momentarily his eyes swept the horizon beyond the city, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Concert before he was swallowed A bell chimed softly in his ear, and Ravdin brought his attention back to the landing operation. He was still numb and shaken from the Warp-passage, his mind still muddled by the abrupt and incredible change. Moments before the sky had been a vast, starry blanket of black velvet ; then, abruptly, he had been hovering over the city, sliding down toward warm friendly lights and music. He checked the proper switches and felt the throbbing purr of anti-gravs as the ship slid down toward the landing slot. The tall spires of the other ships rose to meet him, circle upon circle of silver needles in the bright landing place. The instrument panel whirred into activity as the automatics set the ship back into the berth from which it had risen days before. With a sigh, Ravdin eased himself out of the seat, his heart pounding with excitement. Perhaps, he thought, he was too excited, too eager to be home, for his mind still reeled from the fearful discovery of his journey. The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked his fuel report in the shiny punchcard robot, and walked swiftly across the polished floor. The wall panels pulsed a sombre blue-green, broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet, reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind. Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered the shuttle station. Then, suddenly, the music caught him -- a long, low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the wind, a distant whisper of life. The Concert, of course. Everyone would be at the Concert tonight, and even at the five-mile distance, the beauty of four hundred perfectly harmonized voices could carry to him in the breeze. The uneasiness disappeared, replaced by an eagerness to join, to discharge his horrible message and join the others in the great amphitheatre set deep in the hillside outside the city. Because he knew everyone would be there -- except one. Instinctively Ravdin knew that Lord Nehmon would be missing the Concert, too, waiting for him to return. The shuttle slipped soundlessly from its berth, rising in a slow arc high over the edges of Jungle-land toward the shining walls of the city. Ravdin settled back, trying to clear his mind of the shock and horror, straining to catch the wisps of music as he crossed closer to the hillside place, down into the bright beauty of the city. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed below, and his throat tightened as he looked down. Very suddenly he realized that his whole life was entangled in the very beauty of that wonderful city, everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered there in the ever-clinging rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds. And now, he knew, he would see his beloved city burning once again, a consuming pyre, heartbreaking memorial to the ageold fear of his people. Softly the little shuttle-car sighed, settling down gently on the green terrace near the center of the city. The building was a masterpiece of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm breezes. Ravdin stepped onto the deep carpeting of the terrace. There was other music here, different music, a wilder, more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened for him, ushering him into the vaulted room. He stopped short, staggered for a moment by the overpowering beauty of the dance before him. A girl with flaming red hair -- red like the color of new flame -- dancing with enthralling beauty and abandon, her flowing body moving like ripples of wind to the music which filled the room with its throbbing cry. Her beauty was exquisite, every motion, every flowing turn, a symphony of flawless perfection as she danced to the wild music. "Lord Nehmon!" The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her body frozen in midair, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the man who sat in the room, looking at him. Nehmon rose, a tall, vital man, his graying hair and the strong, sad lines of his face belying the youthful movement of his body. A smile broke on his face, and he came forward, clapping Ravdin on the back, taking his hand warmly. "You're too late for the Concert -- it's a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city is there -- " Ravdin' s throat tightened as he tried to smile, and his voice was hoarse and urgent. "They're coming , Nehmon! I saw them, hours ago -- " The last overtones of the dance broke abruptly, like a glass shattered on stone. The room was deathly still. Lord Nehmon's eyes searched the younger man's face for a long moment; then he turned away, not quite concealing the sadness and pain in his eyes. "You couldn't be mistaken?" "No chance. I found signs of their passing in a dozen places. I saw them, their whole fleet. There were hundreds. They're coming, I saw them." "Did they see you?" Nehmon's voice was sharp. "No, no. The Warp is a wonderful thing. With it, I can come and go in the twinkling of an eye. But I saw them in the twinkling of an eye." "It couldn't have been anyone else?" "Could anyone else build ships like the Hunters?" Nehmon sighed, sinking back into his relaxer, shaking his head. "No one that we know." He glanced up at the scout. "Sit down, Ravdin, sit down. I -- I'll just have to rearrange my thinking a little. Where were they? How far?" Ravdin sat down facing him, his face drawn and pale. "Seven light years, Nehmon. Can you imagine it? Just seven, and they were coming without hesitation. They know where we are." His eyes filled with fear. "They couldn't have come -- unless they have the Warp, too -- " The older man's breath cut off sharply. There was real alarm in his eyes. "You're right," he said softly. "Six months ago it was eight hundred light years away, in an era completely remote from us. Now just seven. In six months they have come so close -- " "And there's no confusion now. They know where we are -- " the scout looked up at Nehmon, a desolate look. "What can we do? We have only weeks, maybe days, before they're here. We have no time to plan, no time to prepare for them. What can we do?" The room was silent. Finally the older man stood up, wearily, his six hundred years of life showing in his face for the first time in centuries. "We can do once again what we have always done," he said sadly. "We can run away." oval window was empty and quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out in shocked silence, hardly believing the words, now that he'd heard them. "Again", he said dully. "After we have worked so hard, done so much -- now we must burn the city and flee again -- " His voice trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in his face some answer, some reassurance. He found no answer there, only sadness. "The Concerts -- it's taken so long, we're so close to the ultimate goal in the Concerts -- " he gestured toward the thought-sensitive sounding boards lining the walls, through which the dancer-illusion had been possible -- "All the beauty and peace we've found here -- " "I know. How well I know." Ravdin's voice became sharper. "Yet the Hunters come again, and again we must run away." He stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright. "Nehmon, I've been thinking -- " Nehmon looked up sharply. Not in alarm, but with a look of pleading, like the look of an old and dying man who begs to be spared false hope. A faint smile crossed his lips. "I think, too, sometimes." "Not what I've been thinking." Ravdin sat down, clasping his hands in excitement. "We run away, Nehmon. Think about that a moment. We run, and we run, and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're hunting us, these Hunters. They never quite find us, because we've already run. We're clever, we're fortunate, we have a way of life that they do not, so they've never found us -- yet. Whenever they come close to finding us, we run." Nehmon nodded slowly. "For thousands of years." Ravdin's eyes were bright. "Yes, we run, we cringe, we hide under stones, we break up our lives and tear up our families, we run like frightened animals -- " he gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's, angrily. "Why do we run , my Lord?" Nehmon's eyes widened. "Because we have no choice," he said sharply. "We must run or be killed. You know that, you've seen the records, you've been taught." "Oh, yes, I've been taught, I know. I've been taught that millenia ago remote ancestors of ours fought the Hunters, and lost, and fled, and were pursued -- and always ran, ran, ran. But why? Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and fled. Why? Even animals know that when they're cornered they must turn and fight-" "We are not animals " Nehmon's voice cut the air like a whiplash. "But we could fight." "Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals, and now we must run from the Hunters, who must continue to fight like animals. Let the Hunters fight." Ravdin rubbed his lips, sinking back into the relaxer. "Then -- the Hunters are not men like us," he said suddenly. "That's what you're saying. They're animals. We kill animals for our food, isn't that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect ourselves. Why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?" Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the younger man. "#'m sorry, # he said gently. "It seems logical, but it's false logic. No, the Hunters are men -- men just like you and me. Their lives are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental basis of our very existence. Without it we would be Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead. That's why we must run away now, and always. Because we know that we must not kill men. # night air was suddenly full of voices, chattering , intermingled with whispers of song and occasional brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted on the polished pavement as the people passed, slowly, their voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness as they passed. "The Concert's over! # Ravdin walked to the window, feeling a chill pass through him. "So soon -- something must have gone wrong. # Eagerly he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face, sensing the lurking discord in the people's quiet talk. Suddenly the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carrilon of ruby tones in his ear and he turned from the window. And then she was in the room, his new bride, rushing to his arms with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin. "You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!" She turned to Lord Nehmon then, her face stricken. "Oh, Nehmon, if you could have been there tonight -- it was horrible. There was something in the air. Everyone felt it -- we knew there was something wrong, and the Concert was ruined. The people were afraid -- " Ravdin turned away sharply. "Tell her," he said to the old man. Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror. "The Hunters! They've found us?" Ravdin nodded wordlessly. Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears in her eyes. "We came so close tonight -- so very close. I felt the music before it was sung, do you realize that? I felt the fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't vague or fuzzy, it was clear! The transference was perfect." She turned her stunned face to the old man. "It's taken so long to come this far, Nehmon. So much work and training to reach toward a perfect communal Concert. We've had only two hundred years here, only two hundred! I was just a little girl when we came, I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four thousand. But two hundred -- we can # t leave now. Not when we've come so far." Ravdin looked from Dana to the old man. "Closer and closer. This time they will catch us. Or next time, or the next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we fight them." He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on the street below. "If we only knew, for sure, what we were running from." There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. "Ravdin," she said softly. "Have you ever seen a Hunter ?" The couple stared at each other in amazement. Ravdin felt chill of excitement tingle his spine. Music burst from the sounding-board -- odd, wild music, suddenly hopeful. "No," he said, "no, of course not. You know that." She rose from her seat, trembling. She looked at Lord Nehmon. "Have you ? # "Never." The old man's voice was harsh. Dana stared at her husband. "Has anyone ever seen a Hunter?" Ravdin's hand trembled. "I -- I don't know. None of us living now, no. It's been too long since they last actually found us. I've read -- oh, I can't remember. I think my grandfather saw them -- or my great grandfather -- somewhere back there. It's been thousands of years -- " "Yet we've been tearing ourselves up by the roots, wrenching our people from planet to planet, running and dying and still running. Suppose that we might not have to run?" He stared at her. "But they keep coming. They keep searching for us. What more proof do you need?" Dana's face glowed with excitement; her slender body was alive with new vitality, new hope. "But they might have changed. Things can happen -- look at us, how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you were to be Master at a Concert next month. Think how the Concerts have changed ! Even my grandmother can remember when the Concerts were just a few performers playing, and everyone else just sitting and listening! Can you imagine anything more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference then, they never dreamed what a real Concert-communion could be. Why, those people had never tasted music, until they became a part of the music. Even we can see these changes -- why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as we have?" Nehmon's voice broke in, almost harshly, as he faced the excited pair. "The Hunters don't have Concerts," he said grimly. "You're deluding yourselves. They laughed at our music, they scoffed at our arts and twisted them into mockeries. They had no concept of beauty in their language. The Hunters are incapable of change." "And you can say that when nobody has seen them for thousands of years?" Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination in their depths. He knew, despairingly, what they were thinking -- that he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom. "You mustn't think what you're thinking," he said weakly. "You're blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you could be lost completely, killed, tortured. If they haven't changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come back, Dana." "She's right." Ravdin's voice was low in the still room. "You're wrong, my Lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive. Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do it." "I could forbid you to go." Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud. "You could forbid us to go," she said, facing the old man, "but you could never stop us." land a great beast watched with green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of light and motion was soon to become his jungle again. In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, carrying their small, frail remembrances out to the ships. There was music among them still, but it was a different sort of music, now, an eerie, hopeless music that drifted out of the city on the wind and caused all but the bravest of the beasts to prickle the hair on their backs and run in panic through the jungle darkness. A melancholy music carried from thought to thought, from voice to voice as the people of the city wearily prepared themselves once again for the long journey. To run away. In the darkness of secrecy, to be gone, without a trace, without symbol or vestige of their once proud presence, leaving only the scorched circle of land for the jungle to reclaim, so that no eyes, not even the sharpest, would ever know how long they had stayed, nor where they might have gone. In the rounded room of his house, Lord Nehmon dispatched the last of his belongings, a few remembrances, nothing more, because the 'space on the ships must take people, not remembrances. He knew that the remembrances would bring only pain. All day he had supervised the loading, the intricate preparations, following plans laid down millenia before. He saw the libraries and records transported, mile upon endless mile of multimicrofilm, carted to the ships prepared to carry them, stored until a new resting place was found. The history of a people was carried to those ships, a people once proud and strong, now equally proud, but dwindling in numbers in toll for the constant roving. A proud people, yet a people who would turn and run without thought, in a panic of age-old fear. They had to run, Nehmon knew, if they were to survive. And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the two young people waiting with him for the last ship to be filled. For these two would not go. It had been a long night, a painful night. He had pleaded and begged, to persuade them that there was no hope, that the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the Hunters was insane. Yet he knew they were sane -- perhaps unwise, naive, but their decision had been reached, and they would not be shaken. The day was almost gone, the sun sinking lower as the last ships began to fill. Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired. "You'll have to go soon," he said. "The city will be burned, of course, as always. You'll be left with food and with weapons against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone. You will have to see that they don't learn." Dana shook her head. "We'll tell them nothing, unless it's safe for them to know." "They'll question you, even torture you -- " She smiled calmly. "Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort, we can blank out." Nehmon's face went white. "You'd never regain your memory," he said. That must be saved as a last resort." Down below on the street the last groups of people were passing, the last sweet, eerie tones rising to the darkening room. In a few moments the last families would have taken their refuge in the ships, waiting for Nehmon to give the dreaded signal to fire the plastic city before the ships started on their voyage. The Concerts were over. They all knew the years of aimless wandering in the black reaches of space before another home could be found. They knew the longer years of settlement and turmoil before the Concerts could once again rise from their hearts and throats and minds, once again work toward the climactic expression of their heritage. Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, the utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and his own mind reeled in sudden despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his people against the Hunters, so many thousand thousand years before. They had risen together, a common people, a single planet their home. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the arts, hating the bitterness and barrenness of war -- and the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of government for the perpetuation of government, split farther and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the Hunters grew to hate Ravdin' s people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love, happiness. Ravdin knew of the slowly developing doctrine of the Sanctity of Life, shattered abruptly by the horrible wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much in those long years -- they had conquered disease, they had grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. And now the end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a ghastly grave. Nehmon's voice broke the silence. "If you must go, then go. The city will burn an hour after we blast." "We will be safe, outside the some fraction of her strength and confidence in her husband's heart. "Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link can be forged, we will do it." "I wish you the best in everything." There were tears in the old man's eyes as he turned and left the room. and heard the running animals. They shivered in the cool night air as the bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry sky. A man and a woman, speechless, watching, staring with awful longing into the skies, watching the. bright specks flicker and go out -- Purple spumes of flame shot into the air from the city, throwing a ghastly, un-human light on the frightened jungle, spires of flame seeking the stars with their fingers as the plastic walls and streets of the city hissed and shriveled, blackening, bubbling into a vanishing memory before their eyes. The flames shot high, carrying with them the last remnants of the city which had stood proud and tall an hour before. And then a silence fell, deathly, like the lifeless silence of a cold grave. Finally, out of the silence, little whispering sounds of the jungle crept to their ears, first frightened, then curious, then bolder and bolder, as the wisps of grass and little animals ventured out and out toward the clearing where the city had stood. And the jungle gathered courage, and the clearing slowly, silently, began to disappear. And then, days later, new sparks of light appeared in the black sky, grew to larger specks, and then to flames, and finally settled to the earth on powerful, flaming jets. They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down out of the air, hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the tall thicket of the jungle. Ravdin's signal had brought the ships down, and the Hunters had seen them, standing on a hilltop where the amphitheater had been. Men had come out of the ship, large men with cold faces and dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters had blinked at them, unbelieving, and their weapons were held ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the largest ship. As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped hands to bolster their failing hope. The leader of the Hunters sat back from his desk as they were thrust into the cabin. His face was a graven mask as he searched their faces dispassionately, the slightest hint of a sneer about his deep-set, thoughtful eyes. Their eyes were pale with fear in the bright light, and Frankie felt a wave of disgust pass through his mind. "Chickens," he muttered. "We have been hunting down chickens." His eyes turned to one of the guards. "They have been searched?" "Of course, sir." "And questioned?" The guard frowned. "Their language, sir, it's almost unintelligible." "You've studied the basic tongues, haven't you?" Frankie's voice was as cold as his eyes. "Of course, sir, but this is very different -- " Frankie's eyes swept contemptuously to the fair-skinned pair, and fixed upon their faces for a long moment. Finally he said, "Well?" Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His own voice seemed weak and unsteady in comparison to the Hunter's grating baritone. "You are the leader of the Hunters?" Frankie regarded them sourly, without replying. His thin face was swarthy, his short-cut grey hair matching the cold grey of his eyes. His was an odd face, completely expressionless, blank of any thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of inscrutable depth. Sharply he pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful and sharp. "We know your people were here," he said suddenly. "Now they've gone and you've stayed behind." There was no softness in the man's face, only suspicion and distrust. "Presumably you had some reason for such rashness. Are you going to tell me now, or do you prefer to waste a few days of my time first?" Ravdin stared at him for a moment. "My people were here, that's true. We stayed to contact you, to tell you we want peace -- " Frankie's eyes widened, almost startled. Then tired lines appeared around his eyes. "Is that all you have to say? Where have your people gone?" Ravdin met him eye for eye. "I can't say." The Hunter burst into a short laugh. "I'm quite sure you can. You don't choose to -- just now. Let's be precise. Who knows, very soon you may wish with all your heart to tell me -- " Dana's voice was sharp. "We want peace -- that's all there is to say. This constant hunting and running is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace with you, to bring our people together again." Frankie snorted. "You came to us in war, once, long ago. Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your bosom, to smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on to greater things?" Ravdin's face flushed hotly. "Much greater things," he snapped. Frankie sat down slowly, his eyes betraying his anger. "Very soon you will be killed," he said softly. "The quickness or lengthiness of your dying will be largely determined by the civility of your tongue. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers. Now, shall we commence asking questions?" Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. "We don't have the words to express ourselves, we can't tell you in words what we must," she said softly. "But music is a language even you can understand. We could tell you what we want, in music -- " Frankie scowled. He knew the magic of this music, he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken-people could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal men's minds from them, to make them like children before wolves. Yet he had never heard that music, with his own ears -- he looked up at them, his eyes strangely bright. "You know I cannot listen to your music," he growled. "It's forbidden, even you should know that. How dare you propose -- " "But this is different music -- " Dana's eyes widened suddenly, and she threw an excited glance at her husband. "Our music is beautiful, wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it -- " "Never." The man looked away, a little light of indecision in his eyes. "Your music is forbidden, poisonous -- " Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. "But you are the leader here," she said. "And forbidden pleasures are so much sweeter -- " Frankie's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn as if by magic. Then he shook his head, and a cruel smile played about his mouth. He motioned toward the stone. "All right," he said mockingly. "Show me your precious music." Like a tinkle of glass breaking in a well, the stone flashed its fiery light in the room. Little swirls of music floated suddenly into the barren stillness of the room. Frankie tensed, a chill running up his spine, unable to draw his eyes from the gleaming jewel. And then the music was there in the room, rising in its glorious beauty like an overwith strange and wonderful images. The stone shimmered and grew, and took the form of dancing clouds of light, swirling with the music as it rose. Suddenly Frankie felt his mind groping toward the music, trying desperately to reach into the heart of it, to become part of it. And Ravdin and Dana stood there, trancelike, staring transfixed at the gleaming center of light, forcing their joined minds into the crashing, majestic chords as the song lifted from the depths of oblivion to the heights of glory in the old, old song of their people -- A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only peace, seeking love, even the love of those who drove them. Frankie heard the music, and could not comprehend, for his mind could not catch the chords, the true overtones of that glorious music, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful strains, dazzled by the dancing light. And then he was staring at the couple, wide-eyed, trembling. The authority was gone from his face for the barest instant, the cruelty was gone, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment his cold grey eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard -- And then, with an animal scream, he was stumbling into the midst of the light, lashing out wildly into the heart of its shimmering stone with a roar into a crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the cold steel bulkhead. He stood, his whole body shaking, eyes blazing with fear and anger, bitter hatred sparking from his gleaming eyes as he turned on Ravdin and Dana, his voice a raging storm of hatred in the dying strains of the music. "Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make me forget my duty, make me listen to your rotten, poisonous noise! Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen, I didn't! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down. I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and then your music will be dead!" He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling. "Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music ! We'll take the music from them, once and for all " horrible. Their minds had no concept of such horror, such insidious, racking pain. The burning lights, the questions screamed in their ears, Frankie's vicious eyes burning in bitter frustrated hatred, and their own screams, rising with each question they would not answer, rising into hideous rasps until their throats were scorched and they could no longer scream. And then they reached the limit, and almost at the same instant they muttered the hoarse words that could deliver them. No words that Frankie could hear, but the words that could blank out their minds like a wet sponge over slate. The hypnotic key clicked into the lock of their minds, and their screams died in their throats. Then their eyes widened stupidly as their memories died in their brains. Frankie stared at them, and knew instantly what they had done, a technique of total memory obliteration known and dreaded for so many thousand years that history could not remember. And then, as his prey stood mindless before him, he let out one hoarse, agonized scream, and flew into a terrible, roaring, flailing rage of frustration and defeat. But he did not kill them. They were left on a cold stone ledge, blinking dumbly at each other as the Hunter's ships rose, one by one, and vanished like fireflies in the dark night sky. Naked, they sat alone. They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they did not know that in the departing ships the seed was planted. For Frankie had heard the music, he had seen the beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant they had become less his enemies. Though he hated them now, the tiny, tiny seed of doubt had been planted. The seed would grow. The two sat dumbly, shivering. Far in the distance a beast roared against the heavy night, and a light rain began to fall. The two sat naked, the rain soaking their skin and hair, and still they sat. Then one of them grunted and moved into the dry darkness of the cave. Deep within him some instinct spoke, warned him to fear the roar of the animal in the distance. Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him. Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of Nehmon and his people -- to them, Nehmon had never existed, forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts of the Hunter, either, nor of his unheard-of mercy in leaving them their lives -- lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals in this green Jungle-land, but life -- Only three thoughts filled their minds : It was raining. They were hungry. The saber-tooth was wandering tonight. They never knew that the link had been forged. and MacCullogh heard him mutter just before he disappeared altogether, "I will, if I ever see her again!" MacCulloch turned to stare at the platform and Decker turned to follow his gaze. A sudden dizziness overcame them both and there was a slight haze about the auditorium. When it cleared, the podium was empty. Mrs. Johns-Hayes was gone as if she had never been. "My God!," the professor gasped. "I was afraid something like this might happen. He must have married the other girl." "I suppose," Decker said quietly, "that we should consider ourselves lucky that he didn't decide to go back to Pennsylvania." His voice broke off and he wondered what he had been saying. He looked up at the speakers' platform trying to remember why he should think it strange that it was draped in Union Jacks and that Lady ApplebySimpkin should be saying, "And now, my dears, I know that all of you, as Loyal Daughters of the British Empire will be happy to know..." he is convinced by the hypnotist's suggestions that the bystander is a hated enemy. Normally a woman will not undress when such a suggestion is made by the hypnotist, but if she first be convinced she is alone, it is a different matter. Drugs have been discovered, which in properly controlled doses, create practically all the symptoms of such mental diseases as schizophrenia. All in all, there are many new and super-sharp weapons appearing in the armory of the modern witch-doctor. One need not cite such extreme examples as Communist brain washing and the thought control of the police state to make the point that the whole idea of thought control is as disgusting as those murals showing the enemies of the Aztecs being led around by cords inserted through holes drilled in their noses. Yet, nose-ring or not, inserted radio or not, the controlled human brain is a problem that has been greatly accentuated in the last few years. There is no defense against the misuse of thought control except constant and intelligent watchfulness by everyone of us. So, even while you're reading this magazine, watch out! Personalities in Science Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in night, God said, "Let Newton be!" and there was light. -- Pope. discoveries mean to us, let us look back a little into the minds of the men of several centuries ago. In those days they recognized a certain order of things beneath nature's confusion -- such as the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that summer and winter and day and night follow one another, that objects always fall to the ground when released in mid-air. But all these things were accepted without explanation. The nature of light, heat, sound and electricity were unknown; chemistry was still befogged with alchemy, and astronomy with astrology. The farthest outposts were the discoveries of Galileo and Keppler in astronomy, mechanics and optics. Such was the intellectual world into which Isaac Newton was born on Christmas morn in the year # in Wool tonshire, England. Until he made the momentous decision that he would beat the school bully both mentally and physically, he was an extremely poor student. His interests lay in inventing clever devices rather than in the study of Greek and Latin. Among his childhood inventions were such things as a small windmill that would grind wheat and corn, a water clock run by the force of dropping water, a sundial, which still stands today on the wall of the house in which he was born, and very practical doll's house furniture. from school to help his widowed mother run the farm. He spent so much time at reading that he was of absolutely no use on the homestead at all and it was decided that he be sent to the University. Here he was a profound student and an excellent scientist, so eager to learn that he often read ahead on his own hook and completely astonished his teachers by knowing his subject fully and completely before the school year had really started. His devotion to the study of mathematics led him to discover a new method of calculus -- or, as he called it, fluxions -- which was to prove invaluable and was later to enable him to prove his law of gravitation. A curious sidelight on this particular discovery is that the great Leibnitz seems to have discovered this same method at about the same time; and publication by Newton was met with bitterness by the German who accused Newton of having stolen the idea from him. The controversy raged all their lives and had such a deep effect on Newton that he became extremely reluctant about publishing his findings. He became so sensitive to criticism that his friends had to beg him to publish his work. Writing to a friend, he said, "I see that a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it." The story of the apple is one that every school child learns long before he really understands what gravity means. As a test to prove his theory, Newton calculated the orbit of the moon, and the motion as he figured it agreed "pretty nearly" with the known facts. But to him "pretty nearly" was as bad as not at all -- and since he could go no further with it at the time, he laid gravitation aside for a while. Now he began to tinker with light and color. By # he demonstrated the compound character of light and the fact that color resides not in the object, but in the light itself. Newton explained light by the corpuscular theory -- that light is caused by a stream of minute particles given off at a high velocity by a luminous body. This was later rejected by scientists as the one place where Newton really had gone wrong. The undulatory theory, in which light traveled in waves, became the accepted theory. But since the discovery of radium and radioactivity have proved the existence of minute particles moving at high speeds, we're not so sure now that he was completely wrong on this point. In #, the astronomer Halley stumbled on the fact that Newton had (after seven years of inactivity on the subject) picked up his theory of gravitation again. That he had in fact worked out in solitude the principle of his theory. He had satisfied himself and with his usual reticence about "advertising" had absolutely no desire to tell the world about it. Halley nagged and begged and pleaded until Newton finally set down the elements of his findings in his "Principia." It is said there weren't # men in Europe able to understand this book at the time of its publication in #. facet of the personality that was Isaac Newton came to the fore. Through the despotic meddling of King James II, who desired to bring Catholicism into power in England, force was brought against the University of Cambridge to grant a degree to a monk of extremely low capabilities. The university refused. When King James threatened to close the school, Newton was called from his studies to lend his abilities and prestige to a committee that had been formed to combat this encroachment. His activities in this cause resulted in his election to a seat in Parliament, which he held for two years. While he held the seat he was a keen and active participant in the promotion of public welfare and used it to seek official encouragement for inventors and young men of science. The development of the chronometer devised by John Harrison was largely due to his generous interest and inspiration. In # he was appointed warden of the mint, being regarded as particularly suited to the post, not only because of his reputation as a mathematician, but especially as a metallurgist because of his many experiments with alloys for making telescope mirrors. A reformation in coinage was taking place at the time and Newton was able to be particularly helpful. Two years later he was made Master of the Mint, which position he held for the rest of his life and which assured him a comfortable old age. This shorter than average, rather stout little man hardly seemed to have stature enough to be prepossessing, yet he stood a giant among men dedicated to scientific investigation. itation has been questioned. Einstein has rejected his explanation, though not the fact of its operation. But all science admits that the Englishman laid the foundations on which Einstein built his theory of relativity. The "Principia" has been called the greatest single contribution to science ever made by one man. It established the ideas of mass and force, the principal of mechanics of the heavenly bodies and the science of theoretical mechanics as it exists today. Newton's improved methods of calculation placed knowledge and achievement on a basis of mathematical precision. The spectrum analysis of white light paved the way for a host of useful optical discoveries and inventions. He originated the mathematical basis for all of modern physics. For isolated facts he substituted a rule of law. He invented the first reflector telescope and widened the scope of the entire Universe for us. With these universal laws Newton brought order into chaos, knowledge out of superstition. After being knighted, Isaac was able to retire and continue his work with more ease -- if a man such as he ever could take things easy. A hackney, three beautiful horses and a home presided over by a gay and charming sister provided all the ease he wanted. Despite criticism of his "notions, # he had literally hundreds of friends. He was charming, witty and serene -- and calm beyond belief. With all this he was so modest that he never considered himself at all important in the field of science -- he preferred to think of himself as the eternal "tinkerer." Fie always maintained that his achievements were those of " -- a little boy picking up a few pebbles on the beach; while all around lay the boundless sea of undiscovered knowledge." -- epw Man knows he is the forerunner of a finer and more perfect race; and his pride in that fact should be great enough to overshadow the disappointments and hardships of the present. Pierre du Nouy He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was -- whoops !... By Edward W. Ludwig Illustration by Kelly Freas night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place: "A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in #. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience." Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water -- and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the "rootof-all-evil" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert. We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit cocktail lounge. Me -- Jimmie Stanley -- and my four-piece combo. Maybe you've seen our motto back on Earth: "The Hottest Music This Side of Mercury." But there weren't four of us tonight. Only three. Ziggy, our bass fiddle man, had nearly sliced off two fingers while opening a can of Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing the number of our personnel by a tragic twenty-five per cent. Which was why Ke-teeli, our boss, was descending upon us with all the grace of an enraged Venusian vinosaur. "Where ees museek?" he shrilled in his nasal tenor. He was almost skeleton thin, like most Martians, and so tall that if he fell down he'd be half way home. I gulped. "Our bass man can't be here, but we've called the Marsport local for another. He'll be here any minute." Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered coldly down at me from his eightfoot-three. His eyes were like black needle points set deep in a mask of dry, ancient, reddish leather. "Ees no feedle man, ees no job," he squeaked. I sighed. This was the week our contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed little enough enthusiasm for our music as it was. His comments were either, "Ees too loud, too fast," or "Ees too slow, too soft." The real cause of his concern being, I suspected, the infrequency with which his cash register tinkled. "But," I added, "even if the new man doesn't come, we're still here. We'll play for you." I glanced at the conglomeration of uniformed spacemen, white-suited tourists, and loin-clothed natives who sat at ancient stone tables. "You wouldn't want to disappoint your customers, would you?" Ke-teeli snorted. "Maybe ees better dey be deesappointed. Ees better no museek den bad museek." Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles on Martian horn-harp, made a feeble attempt at optimism. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass man will be here." "Sure," said Hammer-Head, our red-haired vibro-drummer. "I think I hear him coming now." Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the entrance. There was only silence. His naked, parchment-like chest swelled as if it were an expanding balloon. "Five meenutes!" he shrieked. "Eef no feedle, den you go!" And he whirled away. We waited. Fat Boy's two hundred and eighty-odd pounds were drooped over his chair like the blubber of an exhausted, beach-stranded whale. "Well," he muttered, "there's always the uranium pits of Neptune. Course, you don't live more than five years there -- " "Maybe we could make it back to Lunar City," suggested HammerHead. "Using what for fare?" I asked. "Your brains?" Hammer-Head groaned. "No. I guess it'll have to be the black pits of Neptune. The home of washedup interplanetary musicians. It's too bad. We're so young, too." The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli was casting his razor-edged glare in our direction. I brushed the chewed finger nails from the keyboard of my electronic piano. Then it happened. Space Room came a thumping and a grating and a banging. Suddenly, sweeping across the dance floor like a cold wind, was a bass fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity, a refugee from a pawnbroker's attic. It was queerly shaped. It was too tall, too wide. It was more like a monstrous, midnight-black hourglass than a bass. The fiddle was not unaccompanied as I'd first imagined. Behind it, streaking over the floor in a waltz of agony, was a little guy, an animated matchstick with a flat, broad face that seemed to have been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored mop of hair reminded me of a field of dry grass, the long strands forming loops that flanked the sides of his face. His pale blue eyes were watery, like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting suit, as black as the bass, was something off a park bench. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between twenty and forty. The bass thumped down upon the bandstand. "Hello," he puffed. "I'm John Smith, from the Marsport union." He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if anxious to conclude the routine of introductions. "I'm sorry I'm late, but I was working on my plan." A moment's silence. "Your plan?" I echoed at last. "How to get back home," he snapped as if I should have known it already. Hummm, I thought. My gaze turned to the dance floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on us, and they were as cold as six Indians going South. "We'll talk about your plan at intermission," I said, shivering. "Now, we'd better start playing. John, do you know On An Asteroid With You ? # "I know everything said John Smith. I turned to my piano with a shudder. I didn't dare look at that horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare tones might emerge from its ancient depths. And I didn't dare look again at the second monstrosity, the one named John Smith. I closed my eyes and plunged into a four-bar intro. Hammer-Head joined in on vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet, and then -- My eyes burst open. A shiver coursed down my spine like gigantic mice feet. The tones that surged from that monstrous bass were ecstatic. They were out of a jazzman's Heaven. They were great rolling clouds that seemed to envelop the entire universe with their vibrance. They held a depth and a volume and a richness that were astounding, that were like no others I'd ever heard. First they went Boom-de-boomde-boom-de-boom , and then, boomde-deboomde-deboomde-deboom , just like the tones of all bass fiddles. But there was something else, too. There were overtones, so that John wasn't just playing a single note, but a whole chord with each beat. And the fullness, the depth of those incredible chords actually set my blood tingling. I could feel the tingling just as one can feel the vibration of a plucked guitar string. I glanced at the cash customers. They looked like weary warriors getting their first glimpse of Valhalla. Gap-jawed and wide-eyed, they seemed in a kind of ecstatic hypnosis. Even the silent, blandfaced Martians stopped sipping their wine-syrup and nodded their dark heads in time with the rhythm. I looked at The Eye. The transformation of his gaunt features was miraculous. Shadows of gloom dissolved and were replaced by a black-toothed, crescent-shaped smile of delight. His eyes shone like those of a kid seeing Santa Claus. We finished On An Asteroid With You, modulated into Sweet Sally from Saturn and finished with Tighten Your Lips on Titan . We waited for the applause of of the Martians to die down. Then I turned to John and his fiddle. "If I didn't hear it," I gasped, "I wouldn't believe it!" "And the fiddle's so old, too!" added Hammer-Head who, although sober, seemed quite drunk. "Old?" said John Smith. "Of course it's old. It's over five thousand years old. I was lucky to find it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a fiddle but a Zloomph. This is the only one in existence." He patted the thing tenderly. "I tried the hole in it but it isn't the right one." I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I studied the black, mirror-like wood. The aperture in the vesonator was like that of any bass fiddle. "Isn't right for what?" I had to ask. He turned his sad eyes to me. "For going home," he said. Hummm, I thought. John knew them all, from the latest pop melodies to a swing version of the classic Rhapsody of The Stars. He was a quiet guy during the next couple of hours, and getting more than a few words from him seemed as hard as extracting a tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle -- I mean, his Zloomph -- with a dreamy expression in those watery eyes, staring at nothing. But after one number he studied Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment. "Nice clarinet," he mused. "Has an unusual hole in the front." Fat Boy scratched the back of his head. "You -- you mean here? Where the music comes out?" John Smith nodded. "Unusual." Hummm, I thought again. Awhile later I caught him eyeing my piano keyboard. "What's the matter, John?" He pointed. "Oh, there," I said. "A cigarette fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll swear at me in seven languages." "Even there," he said softly, "even there... There was no doubt about it. John Smith was peculiar, but he was the best bass man this side of a musician's Nirvana. It didn't take a genius to figure out our situation. Item one: GoonFace's countenance had evidenced an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles before John began to play. Item two: Goon-Face had beamed like a kitten with a quart of cream after John began to play. Conclusion : If we wanted to keep eating, we'd have to persuade John Smith to join our combo. At intermission I said, "How about a drink, John? Maybe a shot of wine-syrup?" He shook his head. "Then maybe a Venusian fizz?" His grunt was negative. "Then some old-fashioned beer?" He smiled. "Yes, I like beer." I escorted him to the bar and assisted him in his arduous climb onto a stool. "John," I ventured after he'd taken an experimental sip, "where have you been hiding? A guy like you should be playing every night." John yawned. "Just got here. Figured I might need some money so I went to the union. Then I worked on my plan." "Then you need a job. How about playing with us steady? We like your style a lot." He made a long, low humming sound which I interpreted as an expression of intense concentration. "I don't know," he finally drawled. "It'd be a steady job, John." Inspiration struck me. "And listen, I have an apartment. It's got everything, solar shower, automatic chef, 'copter landing -- if we ever get a 'copter. Plenty of room there for two people. You can stay with me and it won't cost you a cent. And we'll even pay you over union wages." His watery gaze wandered lazily to the bar mirror, down to the glittering array of bottles and then out to the dance floor. He yawned again and spoke slowly, as if each word were a leaden weight cast reluctantly from his tongue : "No, I don't... care much... about playing." "What do you like to do, John?" His string-bean of a body stiffened. "I like to study ancient history... and I must work on my plan." Oh Lord, that plan again! I took a deep breath. "Tell me about it, John. It must be interesting." He made queer clicking noises with his mouth that reminded me of a mechanical toy being wound into motion. "The whole foundation of this or any other culture is based on the history of all the time dimensions, each interwoven with the other, throughout the ages. And the holes provide a means of studying all of it first hand." Oh, oh, I thought. But you still have to eat . Remember , you still have to eat. "Trouble is," he went on, "there are so many holes in this universe." "Holes?" I kept a straight face. "Certainly. Look around you. All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows -- they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Gaves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, I winced and thought, humor him because you gotta eat, you gotta eat. His voice trembled with emotion. "Why, they're everywhere. They're in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes and well holes, and shoelace holes. There are doughnut holes and stocking holes and woodpecker holes and cheese holes. Oceans lie in holes in the earth, and rivers and canals and valleys. The craters of the Moon are holes. Everything is -- " "But, John," I said patiently as as possible, "what have these holes got to do with you?" He glowered at me as if I were unworthy of such a confidence. "What have they to do with me?" he shrilled. "I can't find the right one -- that's what!" I closed my eyes. "Which particular hole are you looking for, John?" He was speaking rapidly again now. "I was hurrying back to the University with the Zloomph to prove a point of ancient history to those fools. They don't believe that instruments which make music actually existed before the tapes! It was dark -- and some fool researcher had forgotten to set a force-field over the hole -- I fell through." I closed my eyes. "Now wait a minute. Did you drop something, lose it in the hole -- is that why you have to find it?" "Oh I didn't lose anything important," he snapped, "just my own time dimension. And if I don't get back they will think I couldn't prove my theory, that I'm ashamed to come back, and I'll be discredited." His chest sagged for an instant. Then he straightened. "But there's still time for my plan to work out -- with the relative difference taken into account. Only I get so tired just thinking about it." "Yes, I can see where thinking about it would tire any one." He nodded. "But it can't be too far away." "I'd like to hear more about it," I said. "But if you're not going to play with us -- " "Oh, I'll play with you," he beamed. "I can talk to you. You understand." Thank heaven! days. During those seventytwo golden hours the melodious tinkling of The Eye's cash register was as constant as that of Santa's sleigh bells. John became the hero of tourists, spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless he remained stubbornly aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing his Zloomph automatically. He'd reveal definite indications of belonging to Homo Sapiens only when drinking beer and talking about his holes. Goon-Face was still cautious. "Contract?" he wheezed. "Maybe. We see. Eef feedleman stay, we have contract. He stay, yes?" "Oh, sure," I said. "He'll stay -- just as long as you want him." "Den he sign contract, too. No beeg feedle, no contract." "Sure. We'll get him to sign it." I laughed hollowly. "Don't worry, Mr. Ke-teeli." Just a few minutes later tragedy struck. A reporter from the Marsport Times ambled into interview the Man of The Hour. The interview, unfortunately, was conducted over the bar and accompanied by a generous guzzling of beer. Fat Boy, Hammer-Head and I watched from a table. Knowing John as we did, a silent prayer was in our eyes. "This is the first time he's talked to anybody," Fat Boy breathed. "I -- I'm scared. "Nothing can happen," I said, optimistically. "This'll be good publicity." We watched. John murmured something. The reporter, a paunchy, balding man, scribbled furiously in his notebook. John yawned, muttered something else. The reporter continued to scribble. John sipped beer. His eyes brightened, and he began to talk more rapidly. The reporter frowned, stopped writing, and studied John curiously. John finished his first beer, started on his second. His eyes were wild, and he was talking more and more rapidly. "He's doing it," Hammer-Head groaned. "He's telling him!" I rose swiftly. "We better get over there. We should have known better -- " We were too late. The reporter had already slapped on his hat and was striding to the exit. John turned to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing like air from a punctured balloon. "He wouldn't listen," he said, weakly. "I tried to tell him, but he said he'd come back when I'm sober. I'm sober now. So I quit. I've got to find my hole." I patted him on the back. "No, John, we'll help you. Don't quit. We'll -- well, we'll help you." "We're working on a plan, too," said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration. "We're going to make a more scientific approach." "How?" John asked. Fat Boy gulped. "Just wait another day," I said. "We'll have it worked out. Just be patient another day. You can't leave now, not after all your work." "No, I guess not," he sighed. "I'll stay -- until tomorrow." through my brain like a teasing spider: What can we do to make him stay ? What can we tell him? What, what, what? Unable to sleep the next morning, I left John to his snoring and went for an aspirin and black coffee. All the possible schemes were drumming through my mind : finding an Earth blonde to capture John's interest, having him electrohypnotized, breaking his leg, forging a letter from this mythical university telling him his theory was proved valid and for him to take a nice long vacation now. He was a screwball about holes and force fields and dimensional worlds but for that music of his I'd baby him the rest of his life. It was early afternoon when I trudged back to my apartment. John was squatting on the living room floor, surrounded by a forest of empty beer bottles. His eyes were bulging, his hair was even wilder than usual, and he was swaying. "John!" I cried. "You're drunk!" His watery eyes squinted at me. "No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm awful scared!" "But you mustn't be scared. That reporter was just stupid. We'll help you with your theory." His body trembled. "No, it isn't that. It isn't the reporter." "Then what is it, John?" "It's my body. It's -- " "Yes, what about your body? Are you sick?"  His face was white with terror. "No, my -- my body's full of holes. Suppose it's one of those holes! How will I get back if it is?" He rose and staggered to his Zloomph , clutching it as though it were somehow a source of strength and consolation. I patted him gingerly on the arm. "Now John. You've just had too much beer, that's all. Let's go out and get some air and some strong black coffee. G'mon now." We staggered out into the morning darkness, the three of us. John, the Zloomph , and I. I was hanging on to him trying to see around and over and even under the Zloomph -- steering by a sort of radar-like sixth sense. The street lights on Marsport are pretty dim compared to Earthside. I didn't see the open manhole that the workmen had figured would be all right at that time of night. It gets pretty damned cold around #: A.M. of a Martian morning, and I guess the men were warming up with a little nip at the bar across the street. Then -- he was gone. John just slipped out of my grasp -- Zloomph and all -- and was gone -- completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing -- nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit. " -- is it. -- is it. -- is it. -- is it." John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed... Tonight is our last night at The Space Room. Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, "No beeg feedle, no contract." Without John, we're notes in a lost chord. We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith. Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy. And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city. What Is Your Science I.Q.? the lay public, now every science fiction aficionado, including the kids who love space suits and ray guns, knows about them. The intrepid reader is also learning about a lot of other things in and out of this world -- both fact-wise and fiction-wise. See how many of the questions below you can answer. Then check your score on page # and see how wise you are in the ways of science and science fiction. Counting # for each correct answer, here's how you rate: # -- good; # -- very good; # -- excellent. #. What is the name of the process that uses two or more combined atoms to release energy. #. What is the name of the man who was the first to successfully smash the atom? #. When we speak of a thickly clustered group of stars, what word do we use to describe it? #. What are the high frequency rays produced beyond the Earth's atmosphere called? #. What is the science fiction term used to describe an unhumanoid alien being? #. We know that Saturn has rings, but how many moons has it? #. What is the term used to refer to the growing of food in chemical compounds. #. What American is credited with the discovery of "heavy water"? #. The historical and psychological evolution of words and language is called ? #. Which of the planets is the smallest? #. What is the term we use to describe abilities that seem to go beyond that of the five known senses? #. What do we call a luminous heavenly body that has a tail and follows a fixed orbit around the sun? #. Gamma rays are waves of pure energy. #. The Great Nebula is a mass of luminous gas in the constellation Orion than can be seen with the naked eye. #. Wolf I is a fixed star. #. Light travels at a speed of # miles per minute. #. An android is a mechanical device made to resemble a man. #. When two dissimilar organisms live together in close union it is called symbiosis. #. Plutonium is a natural element found in the earth. #. A parsec is a unit of astronomical length equal to # #. Parthenogenesis is a process of reproduction through union of a sperm and an ovum. #. An asteroid is a small planet with wandering or orbital tendencies. #. Mars has # moons. #. Radioactivity is caused by a process of disintegration in an atom that is unstable. #. The atmospheric pressure on earth is about # pounds per square foot. #. Mare Crisium is the name astronomers have given to the largest crater of the moon visible to the naked eye. #. A light year is equal to # miles. Sun Cookery -- Indian scientists have perfected a food cooker that utilizes solar energy as fuel. With a mirror four feet wide, this cooker weighs about thirty pounds and is more than adequate for an average size family. It sells for about # -- and is being manufactured at the rate of about # per month. Sounds good, but we'll hang onto our old gas stove for the rainy season. Mail Rockets -- What the postage will cost is anybody's guess, but rocket experts are predicting that by # we will be receiving first class mail by rockets. Advances in the science of guided missiles indicate that a letter posted in New York (E.S.T.) will arrive approximately # minutes later in San Francisco (P.S.T.) When this time is halved, which they will undoubtedly do, your friend can read your letter in San Francisco before you write it in New York! Figure it out. T.V. Bomb Demolition -- At the Army Ordnance Depot in Oregon, bombs of all types are now disassembled safely with the aid of a T.V. camera. The operator who works the motor driven disassembling machine sits in a bomb-proof shelter and watches the entire operation on a receiver. The camera is focused on all moving parts and the operator can stop work immediately after noting any signs of danger. Safe but it probably tops all other shows for suspense effects! X-Ray 'Tooth-picks" -- Wooden applicator sticks with radioactive cesium for the "heads" will replace bulky X-ray equipment now used by dentists. This "tooth-pick" held against the jaw or tooth, either inside or outside the mouth, will produce a picture on an X-ray film packet held in the appropriate position. Missile "Brains" -- Two small but high speed computers, lightweight enough for air-borne control of guided missiles, were revealed recently. Nine different devices feed information into the computers. After digesting the information and solving the control problems, the "brain" takes over by controlling the flight mechanism. The actual use to which this computer will be put is still a military secret. Skull "Pie" -- Skull surgeons will now be required to be "bakers" too. A Washington doctor has perfected a plastic dough which, when kneaded and rolled, can be molded into the skull depression to replace metal plates now used for such repairs. More form-fitting and a better insulator than metal, this plastic won't perforate the skin and is far less expensive than metal. The "pie" is mixed, fitted, hardened and sterilized right in the operating room. Less than twenty minutes are required for the whole process. Fish "Radar" -- A new deep-sea echo-sounding device which can sweep back and forth as well as straight down and so "see' # in any direction will soon take most of the guesswork out of commercial fishing. With this gadget fishermen can locate a school of fish, note it's size, direction and speed and lower nets before they reach the vicinity. A pocket-sized edition would help eliminate all those tales of "the one that got away". Prospecting '# Style -- Using mass production techniques that would daze a forty-niner, the government's uranium prospecting doesn't guarantee results but, rather, supplies uranium-hunters with leads to potential deposits, leaving it to individuals to work the areas over. The basic technique is for a low flying plane carrying a scintillation detector -- a sort of super Geiger counter -- to fly over measured strips in a given area. Any reaction on the detector is marked on a paper tape and a #-mm. camera mounted on the tail of the plane maps the area at the same time. The air prospectors work in teams, with a D.C. #, flying at about # feet, and mapping up to # square miles a day. Then, the second crew, flying a little Piper Cub, flys over the area at a much lower altitude to get more accurate readings. The aerial maps gathered in this way, with the potential deposits clearly marked, are then posted in offices of the Department of the Interior and Atomic Energy Commission. That the program has been helpful is indicated by the A.E.C. report that three-fourths of the newly opened uranium deposits in the Black Hills of South Dakota have been located by this aerial exploration method. With payment of # a pound for ore containing ## of I per cent uranium to # a pound for ## of I per cent, plus the extra bonus on delivery to the A.E.C., there is a host of small-time prospectors hoping to strike it rich in this government sponsored prospecting business. Flying Blinds -- "Flying Venetian blinds" are likely to pop up in the news soon. Army tests of a plane with slatted wings have proved extremely promising. With such equipment a fast transport can take off vertically from a "pocket handkerchief" field. Robot Arms -- The "little wonder robot arm" that can bake a cake and pour your tea is right around the corner. It exists right now, but a gross weight of # tons makes it a little impractical. Patience Ladies, the day will come. nest Rutherford. # -- Galaxy. # -- # -- Hydroponics. # -- Harold Urey. # -- Semantics. # -- Mercury. #I -- Extra sensory perception (esp.). # -- Comet. # -- False (comet). # -- False (per second). # -- True. # -- True. # -- False (man made). # -- True. #. -- False (reproduction through a single unfertilized egg). # -- True. #. -- False (two). # -- True. # -- False (per square inch). # -- True. # -- True. Shades of Dick Tracy -- The wrist radio is coming closer and closer for everybody's use. The latest model uses five transistors instead of vacuum tubes, and can pick up broadcasts from as far away as # miles. Underwater "Mountain Climbing" -- Mountaineers of the future may be climbing underwater mountains. Recent ocean surveys show canyons as deep as Grand Canyon and mountains of gigantic proportions under the Pacific Ocean. Insects Beware! -- Those insects that have learned to resist D.D.T. take warning. A new insecticide that is # times more powerful, yet non poisonous to man or animals, has been developed. We're not licked yet. Salt-Water Fresh Water -- Residents in low-rainfall areas won't have to worry too much about water conservation in the future. Heat from atomic fuels is being visualwater from the ocean in quantities huge enough to serve every need. Bomb-Radiation-Proof Concrete -- If contractors should receive standing orders to mix barite with concrete, there will be an excellent reason. Tests have shown that such a combination helps buildings withstand bomb blasts and protects the occupants from radiation. "Shock Treatment" -- Even an electronic brain can become cranky or difficult, and when the computers display such human failings engineers in charge of them treat them much the same way a psychiatrist would treat a human patient with a personality maladjustment. First a rest (a complete stoppage) is prescribed. Then a slow resumption of operation is ordered, quite often this sort of brief "restcure" is all the "cranky" machine may need. If this "vacation" doesn't work, the next step is a shock treatment of sorts. Sometimes a swift kick on the part of the engineer will be "shock" enough. If it isn't, then the kind of treatment now used on stubborn mental cases is used. Just as the application of high voltage electricity often shocks the patient back to normality, so the "brain" often responds to a sudden over-voltage charge, and the mechanism may be set to working again. If all this sort of treatment still doesn't bring about a cure of the balky computer, engineers resort to their version of surgery. This means tearing out one or more parts and repairing or replacing them. Of course, there is an added advantage to this sort of surgery over the human kind, the "patient" needs no post operative care and can go back to the business at hand immediately. stranger to science fiction readers, has written one of those really exciting with exceptionally good science fiction. at a point where they will receive constant sunlight. The entire project hinges on these plants for they will convert the sun's rays into heat and electrical power needed in all construction and maintenance work. The semispherical building in the lower right is a prefabricated shelter unit which will house workmen and scientists until the larger, all-functioning housing unit is completed. (In the July issue: Moon base in operation.)  # jr # Jr l m  L' isj f MM phere, meteors would not burn themselves Out, as the do when striking the Earth, presenting an ever-present and serious menace to operations of men and machinery. Defense would be difficult, as some of these mereors would weigh several tons. The illustration above shows how an avalanche could be started by a sudden bombardment of "cold' meteors Now see inside back cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg: The Old Spaceman's Tales  i H imumiii by Ed. M. Clinton, Jr. # by Kenneth O'Hara # by Ed Valigursky IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume # , No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Sired, Buffalo New York. F.ntrred as Second Class Matter at Pott Office. Buffalo, New York. Subscript ion #(I lor # issues in l .#. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues: elsewhere #. Allow foui weeks for change of address. Ail stories appearing in this oiarnrinr are Srtion; any similarity to actual persons it coin. Mental. Not responsible lor unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale June I #th that will someday make space travel possible, it might be a good idea to get yourself a lot of old newspapers and magazines and books -- say about # or # years old -- and read about the fledgling years of aviation. These contemporary accounts might be "ancient history" now, but they were written during the "heat of battle" and they're as exciting to read now as they were then. But let's see just how these dusty chronicles and forgotten heroes hook up with the conquest of space. The Wright Brothers had hardly made their first flight when America became a scene of hell-forleather experiments, wildcat races, air-minded promotions -- and prodigious smack-ups. C. P. Rogers made the first trans-continental flight in # days. It took him seven days to cross New York State alone. and when he landed in Pasadena the only parts left of his original plane were the rudder and the oil pan; everything else had been busted and replaced en route. Then came the First World War and the first test of aviation in combat. The men who flew the "Jennies" of that era were the glamor boys of war fiction and fact. There was Eddie Rickenbacker, ace of the American birdmen; there was Bishop of Canada; there was the fabulous Red Knight of Germany, Baron Von Richtofen and others. And -- there was the man who did more for military aviation in the U.S. than any other figure of his who waged a one-man war with all the brass of the United States Army and Navy in his efforts to get them to accept the fact that air power was the thing of the future. He finally won his battle and he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor -- both posthumously, ironically enough. Before the peace treaty of the first great war was signed, Captain John Alcock, an Englishman, and Lieutenant Arthur Brown, an American, made the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Ireland, # miles in # hours, # minutes. This was on June #, #, and the #'s ushered in an era of barnstorming that took on the ballyhoo and brass of a carnival. Restless, reckless, pilots stunted anywhere they could get a permit or an audience; acrobats performed on the wings and landing gear of planes two or three thousand feet in the air; follies girls went aloft over the Great Lakes for tea; couples got hitched while flying over their home towns or somewhere else. It was the "era of wonderful nonsense" and aviation was using every gimmick in the book to make the public air-minded and convince folks it was safe to travel via plane. set off the emotions and imagination of the world was yet to come. Somehow, to me, it seems that the spark which started aviation on the serious and commercially sound phase of its history came when a lonely pilot in a little singlc-motored monoplane flew the Atlantic. It was on a gray, misty dawn of a May # years ago when Charles Lindbergh, a young mail pilot, lifted "the Spirit of St. Louis" off Roosevelt Field on Long Island and set it down ## hours and # miles later on Le Bourget Field in Paris. A few days before Lindbergh's flight, Nungcsscr and Coli, two Frenchmen, had tried a westward flight and had crashed and been lost in the Atlantic. A couple of weeks afterwards, Clarence Chamberlain flew from New York to Berlin. A few days later Admiral Byrd crashed off the French coast. And the procession was on! Within a few months, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic; Costc and Bellonte made the first westward crossing, then there were Charles Kingsford-Smith, "Wrongway" Corrigan and others. Flying the Atlantic became a fever, and after that came the Pacific. Then Post and Gatty flew around the world and Admiral Byrd flew to the South Pole. The young wings of aviation had been tested and they were strong. As we go through the musty racks of newspapers for the Thirties we find that aviation is still a "hogger" of the front pages. On August #, #, all existing records for a transport craft were broken by a Sikorsky seaplane which averaged # miles per hour over a # mile course. There was Jimmy Doolittle and his pile of speed records; and names like Glenn Martin, Alexander P. de Seversky, Howard Hughes, Frank Hawks, Hugo Eckcner, Count Von Zeppelin, Glenn Curtiss and others loomed big in the headlines. The Army and the Navy were fast conquering the Pacific, while somewhere out there Amelia Earhart, Sir Kingsford-Smith and others were lost. made tremendous strides. But there were blunders, too, and the prize blunder, which did national morale no good at all, was made hy the Administration or Congress or somebody in Washington who got mad at the private nirlinps. Without preparation or advance notice the Army was ordered to take care of the airmail. The young pilots, with only a few hours briefing on night flying, knew what they were in for, but they took over and flew the mail in an assortment of ships never intended for the task. They didn't even have proper maintenance for their ships, nor did they have decent facilities for rest or food between flights. And during the winter of #-# they carried the mail, night and day, over strange routes in "peashooters", ob(Continued on page # ) Honath and his fellow arch-doubters did not believe in the Giants, and for this they were cast into Ilell. And when survival depended upon unwavering faith in their beliefs, they saw that there were Giants , after all... By James Blish Illustrated by Paul Orban It is written tl,at after the Giants came to Tellura from the far stars, they abode a while, and looked upon the surface of the land, and found it wanting, and of roil omen. Therefore did they make men to live ahvays in the air and in the sunlight, and in the light of the stars, that he would be reminded of them. And the Giants abode yet a while, and taught men to speak, and to tvrite, and to weave , and to do many things which are needful to do, of which the writings speak. And thereafter they departed to the far stars, saying, Take this world as your ozvn, and though we shall return, fear not, for it is yours. hauled from the nets an hour before the rest of the prisoners, as befitted his role as the arch-doubter of them all. It was not yet dawn, but his captors led him in gTeat bounds through the endless, musky-perfumed orchid gardens, small dark shapes with crooked legs, hunched shoulders, slim hairless tails carried, like his, in concentric spirals, wound clockwise. Behind them sprang Honath on the end of a long tether, timing his leaps by theirs, since any slip would hang him summarily. He would of course be on his way to the surface, some # feet below the orchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event. But not even the arch-doubter of them all wanted to begin the trip -- not even at the merciful snap-spine end of a tether -- a moment before the law said. Go.  The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them, each cable as thick through as a man's body, bellied out and down sharply as the leapers reached the edge of the fern-tree forest which surrounded the copse of fan-palms. The whole party stopped before beginning the descent and looked eastward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more and more rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could still be picked out without doubt. "A fine day," one of the guards said, conversationally. "Better to go below on a sunny day than in the rain, purseinakcr." Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course it was always raining down below in Hell, that much could be seen by a child. Even on sunny days, the endless pinpoint rain of transpiration, from the huntrees, hazed the forest air and soaked the black bog forever. He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The eastern horizon was black against the limb of the great red sun, which had already risen about a third of its diameter; it was almost time for the small, blue-white, furiously hot consort to follow. All the way to that brink, as to every other horizon, the woven ocean of the treetops flowed gently in long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only nearby could the eye break that ocean into its details, into the world as it was: a great, many-tiered network, thickly overgrown with small ferns, with airdrinking orchids, with a thousand varieties of fungi sprouting wherever vine crossed vine and collected a little humus for them, with the vivid parasites sucking sap from the vines, the trees, and even each other. In the ponds of rain-water collected by the closely fitting leaves of the bromelaids, tree-toads and peepers stopped down their hoarse songs dubiously as the light, grew and fell silent one by one. In the trees below the world, the tentative morning screeches of the lizardbirds -- the souls of the damned, or the devils who hunted them, no one was quite sure which -- took up the concert. A small gust of wind whipped out of the hollow above the glade of fan-palms, making the network under the party shift slightly, as if in a loom. Honath gave with it easily, automatically, but one of the smaller vines toward which he had moved one furless hand hissed at him and went pouring away into the darkness beneath -- a chlorophyll-green snake, come up out of the dripping aerial pathways in which it hunted in ancestral gloom, to greet the suns and dry its scales in the quiet morning. Farther below, an astonished monkey, routed out of its bed by the disgusted serpent, sprang into another tree, reeling off ten mortal insults, one after the other, while still in mid-leap. The snake, of course, paid no attention, since it did not speak the language of men ; but the party on the edge of the glade of fan-palms snickered appreciatively. "Bad language they favor below." another of the guards said. "A fit place for you and your blasphemers, pursemakcr. Come now." The tether at Honath's neck twitched, and then his captors were soaring in zig-zag bounds down into the hollow toward the Judgment Seat. He followed, since he had no choice, the tether threatening constantly to foul his arms, legs or tail, and -- worse, far worse -- making his every mortifying movement ungraceful. Above, the Parrot's starry plumes flickered and faded into the general blue. Toward the center of the saucer above the grove, the stitched lcafand-lcathcr houses clustered thickly, bound to the vines themselves, or hanging from an occasional branch too high or too slender to bear the vines. Many of these purses Honath knew well, not only as visitor but as artisan. The finest of them, the inverted flowers which opened automatically as the morning dew bathed them, yet which could be closed tightly and safely around their occupants at dusk by a single draw'-string, were his own design as well as his own handiwork. They had been widely admired and imitated. The reputation that they had given him, too, had helped to bring him to the end of the snap-spine tether. They had given weight to his words among others -- weight enough to make him, at last, the arch-douhtcr, the man who leads the young into blasphemy, the man who questions the Book of Law's. And they had probably helped to win him his passage on the Elevator to Hell. The purses were already opening as the party swung among them. Here and there, sleepy faces blinked out from amid the exfoliating sections, criss-crossed by relaxing lengths of dew-soaked rawhide. Some of the awakening householders recognized Honath, of that he was sure, but none came out to follow the party -- though the villagers should be beginning to drop from the hearts of their stitched flowers like ripe seed-pods by this hour of anv normal day. # # A Judgment was at hand, and they knew it -- and even those who had slept the night in one of Honath's finest houses would not speak for him now. Everyone knew, after all, that Honath did not believe in the Giants. Honath could see the Judgment Seat itself now, a slung chair of woven cane crowned along the back with a row of gigantic mottled orchids. These had supposedly been transplanted there when the chair was made, but no one could remember how old they were; since there were no seasons, there was no particular reason why they should not have been there forever. The Seat itself was at the back of the arena and high above it, but in the gathering light. Honath could make out the white-furred face of the Tribal Spokesman, like a lone silver-and-black pansy among the huge vivid blooms. At the center of the arena proper was the Elevator itself. Honath had seen it often enough, and had himself witnessed Judgments where it was called into use, but he could still hardly believe that he was almost surely to be its next passenger. It consisted of nothing more than a large basket, deep enough so that one would have to leap out of it, and rimmed with thorns to prevent one from leaping back in. Three hempen ropes were tied to its rim, and were then cunningly interwound on a single-drum windlass of wood, which could be turned by two men even when the basket was loaded. The procedure was equally sim le. The condemned man was orced into the basket, and the basket lowered out of sight, until the slackening of the ropes indicated that it had touched the surface. The victim climbed out -- and if he did not, the basket remained below until he starved or until Hell otherwise took care of its own -- and the windlass was rewound. The sentences were for varying periods of time, according to the severity of the crime, but in practical terms this formality was empty. Although the basket was dutifully lowered when the sentence had expired, no one had ever been known to get back into it. Of course, in a world without seasons or moons, and hence without any but an arbitrary year, long periods of time are not easy to count accurately. The basket could arrive thirty or forty days to one side or the other of the proper date. But this was only a technicality, however, for if keeping time was difficult in the attic world it was probably impossible in Hell. Honath's guards tied the free end of his tether to a branch and settled down around him. One abstractedly passed a pine cone to him and he tried to occupy his mind with the business of picking the juicy seeds from it, but somehow they had no flavor. More captives were being brought in now. while the Spokesman watched with glittering black eyes from his high perch. There was Mathild the Forager, shivering as if with ague, the fur down her left side glistening and spiky, as though she had inadvertently overturned a tank plant on herself. After her was brought Alaskon the Navigator, a middle-aged man only a few years younger than Honath himself ; he was tied up next to Honath, where he settled down at once, chewing at a joint of cane with apparent indifference. Thus far, the gathering had proceeded without more than a few words being spoken, but that ended when the guards tried to bring Seth the Necdlesmith from the nets. He could be heard at once, over the entire distance to the glade, alternately chattering and shrieking in a mixture of tones that might mean either fear or fury. Everyone in the glade but Alaskon turned to look, and heads emerged from purses like new butterflies from cocoons. A moment later, Seth's guards came over the lip of the glade in a tangled group, now shouting themselves. Somewhere in the middle of the knot Seth's voice became still louder; obviously he was clinging with all five members to any vine or frond he could grasp, and was no sooner pried loose from one than he would leap by main force, backwards if possible, to another. Nevertheless he was being brought inexorably clown into the arena, two feet forward, one foot back, three feet forward... Honath's guards resumed picking their pine-cones. During the disturbance, Honath realized, Chari the Reader had been brought in quietly from the same side of the glade. He now sat opposite Alaskon, looking apathetically down at the vine-web. his shoulders hunched forward. He exuded despair; even to look at him made Honath feel a renewed shudder. From the High Scat, the Spokesman said: "Honath the Purscmaker, Alaskon the Navigator, Chari the Reader, Seth the Nccdlesmith Mathild the Forager, you arc called to answer to justice." "Justice!" Sctli shouted, springing free of his captors with a tremendous bound and bringing up with a jerk on the end of his tether. "This is no justice! I have nothing to do with -- " The guards caught up with him and clamped brown hands firmly over his mouth. The Spokesman watched with amused malice. "The accusations are three," the Spokesman said. "The first, the telling of lies to children. Second, die casting into doubt of the divine order among men. Third, the denial of the Book of Laws. Each of you may speak in order of age. Honath the Purscmakcr, your plea may be heard." Honath stood up, trembling a little, but feeling a surprisingly renewed surge of his old independence. "Your charges," he said, "all rest upon the denial of the Book of Law's. I have taught nothing else that is contrary to what wc all believe, and called nothing else into doubt. And I deny the charge." The Spokesman looked down at him with disbelief. "Many men and women have said that you do not believe in the Giants, purscmakcr," he said. "You w ill not win mercy by piling up more lies." "I deny the charge," Honath insisted. "I believe in the Book of Laws as a whole, and I believe in the Giants. I have taught only that the Giants were not real in the sense that wc arc real. I have taught that they were intended as symbols of some higher reality and were not meant to be taken as literal persons." "What higher reality Is this?" the Spokesman demanded. "Describe it." "You ask me to do something the writers of the Book of Laws themselves couldn't do." Honath said hotly. "If they had to embody the reality in symbols rather than writing it down directly, how could a mere pursemaker do better?" "This doctrine is wind," the Spokesman said. "And it is plainly intended to undercut authority and the order established by the Book. Tell me, purscmakcr: if men need not fear the Giants, why should they fear the law?" "Because they are men, and it is to their interest to fear the law. They aren't children, who need some physical Giant sitting over them with a whip to make them behave. Furthermore, Spokesman, this archaic belief itself undermines us. As long as we believe that there are real Giants, and that some day they'll return and resume teaching us, so long will we fail to seek answers to our questions for ourselves. Half of what we know was given to us in the Book, and the other half is supposed to drop to us from the skies if we wait long enough. In the meantime, we vegetate." "If a part of the Book be untrue, there can be nothing to prevent that it is all untrue," the Spokesman said heavily. "And we will lose even what you call the half of our knowledge -- which is actually the whole of it -- to those who see with clear eyes." Suddenly, Honath lost his temper. "Lose it, then!" he shouted. "Let us unlearn everything we know only by rote, go back to the beginning, learn all over again, and continue to learn, from our own experience. Spokesman, you are an old man, but there are still some of us who haven't forgotten what curiosity means!" "Quiet!" the Spokesman said. "We have heard enough. We call on Alaskon the Navigator." "Much of the Book is clearly untrue," Alaskon said flatly, rising. "As a handbook of small trades it has served us well. As a guide to how the universe is made, it is nonsense, in my opinion : Honath is too kind to it. I've made no secret of what I think, and I still think it." "And will pay for it," the Spokesman said, blinking slowly down at Alaskon. "Chari the Reader." "Nothing," Chari said, without standing, or even looking up. "You do not deny the charges?" "I've nothing to say," Chari said, but then, abruptly, his head jerked up, and he glared with desperate eyes at the Spokesman. "I can read, Spokesman. I have seen words in the Book of Laws that contradict each other. I've pointed them out. They're facts, they exist on the pages. I've taught nothing, told no lies, preached no unbelief. I've pointed to the facts. That's all." "Seth the Needlesmith, you may speak now." The guards took their hands gratefully off Seth's mouth; they had been bitten several times in the process of keeping him quiet up to now. Seth resumed shouting at once. "I'm no part of this group! I'm the victim of gossip, envious neighbors, smiths jealous of my skill and my custom! No man can say worse of me than that I sold needles to this puresmaker -- sold them in good faith! The charges against me are lies, all lies!" Honath jumped to his feet in fury, and then sat down again, choking back the answering shout almost without tasting its bitterness. What did it matter? Why should he bear witness against the young man? It would not help the others, and if Seth wanted to lie his way out of Hell, he might as well be given the chance. The Spokesman was looking down at Seth with the identical expression of outraged disbelief which he had first bent upon Honath. "Who was it cut the blasphemies into the hardwood tree, by the house of Hosi the Lawgiver?" he demanded. "Sharp needles were at work there, and there arc witnesses to say that your hands held them." "More lies!" "Needles found in your house fit the furrows, Seth." "They were not mine -- or they were stolen! I demand to be freed!" "You will be freed," the Spokesman said coldly. There was no possible doubt as to what he meant. Seth began to weep and to shout at the same time. Hands closed over his mouth again. "Mathild the Forager. your plea may be heard." The young woman stood up hesitantly. Her fur was nearly dry now, but she was still shivering. "Spokesman," she said, "I saw the tilings which Chari the Reader showed me. I doubted, but what Honath said restored my belief. I see no harm in his teachings. They remove doubt, instead of fostering it as you say they do. I see no evil in them, and I don't understand why this is a crime." Honath looked over to her with new admiration. The Spokesman sighed heavily. "I am sorry for you," he said, "but as Spokesman we cannot allow ignorance of the law as a plea. We will he merciful to you all, however. Renounce your heresy, affirm your belief in the Book as it is written from bark to bark, and you shall be no more than cast out of the tribe." "I renounce it!" Seth cried. "I never shared it! It's all blasphemy and every word is a lie! I believe in the Book, all of it!" "You, needlesmith," the Spokesman said, "have lied before this Judgment, and are probably lying now. You are not included in the dispensation. "Snake-spotted caterpillar! May you r -- u mmulph." "Pursemakcr, what is your answer?" "It is No," Honath said stonily. "I've spoken the truth. The truth can't be unsaid." The Spokesman looked down at the rest of them. "As for you three, consider your answers carefully. To share the heresy means sharing the sentence. The penalty will not be lightened only because you did not invent the heresy." There was a long silence. Honath swallowed hard. The courage and the faith in that silence made him feel smaller and more helpless than ever. He reali#ed suddenly that die other three would have kept that silence, even without Seth's defection to stiffen their spines. He wondered if he could have done so. "Then we pronounce the sentence," the Spokesman said. "You are one and all condemned to one thousand days in Hell." There was a concerted gasp from around the edges of the arena, where, without Honath's having noticed it before, a silent crowd had gathered. He did not wonder at the sound. The sentence was the longest in the history of the tribe. Not that it really meant anything. No one had ever come back from as little as one hundred days in Hell. No one had ever come back from Hell at all. "Unlash the Elevator. All shall go together." of die attic world that Honath saw was a circle of faces, not too close to the gap in the vine web, peering down after them. Then the basket fell another few yards to the next turn of the windlass and the faces vanished. Seth was weeping in the bottom of the Elevator, curled up into a tight ball, the end of his tail wrapped around his nose and eyes. No one else could make a sound, least of Honath. The gloom closed around them. It seemed extraordinarily still. The occasional harsh screams of a lizardbird somehow distended the silence without breaking it. The light that filtered down into the long aisles between the trees seemed to be absorbed in a blue-green haze through which the lianas wove their long curved lines. The columns of treetrunks. the pillars of the world, stood all around them, too distant in the dim light to allow them to gauge their speed of descent. Only the irregular plunges of the basket proved that it was even in motion any longer, though it swayed laterally in a complex, overlapping series of figure-eights. Then the basket lurched downward once more, brought up short, and tipped sidewise, tumbling them all against the hard cane. Mathild cried out in a thin voice, and Seth uncurled almost instantly, clawing for a handhold. Another lurch, and the Elevator lay down on its side and was still. They were in Hell. Cautiously, Honath began to climb out, picking his way over the long thorns on the basket's rim. After a moment, Chari the Reader followed, and then Alaskon took Mathild firmly by the hand and led her out onto the surface. The footing was wet and spongy, yet not at all resilient, and it felt cold; Honath 's toes curled involuntarily. "Come on, Seth," Chari said in a hushed voice. "They won't haul it back up until we're all out. You know that." Alaskon looked around into the chilly mists. "Yes," he said. "And we'll need a needlcsmith down here. With good tools, there's just a chance -- " Seth's eyes had been darting back and forth from one to the other. With a sudden chattering scream, he bounded out of the bottom of the basket, soaring over their heads in a long, flat leap and struck the high knee at the base of the nearest tree, an immense fan palm. As he hit, his legs doubled under him, and almost in the same motion he seemed to rocket straight up into the murky air. Gaping, Honath looked up after him. The young needlcsmith had timed his course to the split second. He was already darting up the rope from which the Elevator was suspended. He did not even bother to look back. After a moment, the basket tipped upright. The impact of Seth's weight hitting the rope evidently had been taken by the windlass team to mean that the condemned people were all out on the surface; a twitch on the rope was the usual signal. The basket began to rise, hobbling and dancing. Its speed of ascent, added to Seth's took his racing, dwindling figure out of sight quickly. After a while, the basket was gone, too. "He'll never get to the top," Mathild whispered. "It's too far, and he's going too fast. He'll lose strength and fall." "I don't think so," Alaskon said heavily. "He's agile and strong. If anyone could make it, he could." "They'll kill him if he docs." "Of course they will," Alaskon said, shrugging. "I won't miss him," Honath said. "No more will I. But we could use some sharp needles down here, Honath. Now we'll have to plan to make our own -- if we can identify the different woods, down here where there aren't any leaves to help us tell them apart." Honath looked at the navigator curiously. Seth's bolt for the sky had distracted him from the realization that the basket, too, was gone, but now that desolate fact hit home. "You actually plan to stay alive in Hell, don't you, Alaskon?" "Certainly," Alaskon said calmly. "This is no more Hell than -- up there -- is Heaven. It's the surface of the planet, no more, no less. We can stay alive if we don't panic. Were you just going to sit here until the furies came for you, Honath?" "I hadn't thought much about it," Honath confessed. "But if there is any chance that Seth will lose his grip on that rope -- before he reaches the top and they stab him -- shouldn't we wait and sec if we can catch him? He can't weigh more than # pounds. Maybe we could contrive some sort of a net -- " "He'd just break our bones along with his," Chari said. "I'm for getting out of here as fast as possible." "What for? Do you know a better place?" "No, but whether this is Hell or not, there are demons down here. We've all seen them from up above. They must know that the Elevator always lands here and empties out free food. This must be a feedingground for them -- " He had not quite finished speaking when the branches began to sigh and toss, far above. A gust of stinging droplets poured along the blue air and thunder rumbled. Mathild whimpered. "It's only a squall coming up," Honath said. But the words came out in a series of short croaks. As the wind had moved through the trees, Honath had automatically flexed his knees and put his arms out for handholds, awaiting the long wave of response to pass through the ground beneath him. But nothing happened. The surface under his feet remained stolidly where it was, flexing not a fraction of an inch in any direction. And there was nothing nearby for his hands to grasp. He staggered, trying to compensate for the failure of the ground to move. At the same moment another gust of wind blew through the aisles, a little stronger than the first, and calling insistently for a new adjustment of his body to the waves which would be passing among the treetops. Again the squashy surface beneath him refused to respond. The familiar giveand-take of the vine-web to the winds, a part of his world as accustomed as the winds themselves, was gone. Honath was forced to sit down, feeling distinctly ill. The damp, cool earth under his furless buttocks was unpleasant, but he could not have remained standing any longer without losing his meagre prisoner's breakfast. One grappling hand caught hold of the ridged, gritting stems of a clump of horsetail, but the contact failed to allay the uneasiness. The others seemed to be bearing it no better than Honath. Mathild in particular was rocking dizzily, her lips compressed, her hands clasped to her delicate ears. Dizziness. It was unheard of up above, except among those who had sufTcrcd grave head injuries or were otherwise very ill. But on the motionless ground of Hell, it was evidently going to be with them constantly. Chari squatted, swallowing convulsively. "I -- I can't stand," he moaned. "Nonsense !" Alaskon said, though he had remained standing only by clinging to the huge, mud-colored bulb of a cycadella. "It's just a disturbance of our sense of balance. We'll get used to it." "We'd better," Honath said, relinquishing his grip on the horsetails by a sheer act of will. "I think Chari's right about this being a feeding-ground, Alaskon. I hear something moving around in the ferns. And if this rain lasts long, the water will rise here, too. I've seen silver flashes from down here many a time after heavy rains." "That's right." Mathild said, her voice subdued. "The base of the fan-palm grove always floods. That's why the trectops are lower there." The wind seemed to have let up a little, though the rain was still falling. Alaskon stood up tentatively and looked around. "Then let's move on," he said. "If we try to keep under cover until we get to higher ground -- " A faint crackling sound, high above his head, interrupted him. It got louder. Feeling a sudden spasm of pure fear, Honath looked up. # Nothing could be seen for an instant but the far-away curtain of branches and fern fronds. Then, with shocking suddenness, something plummeted through the bluegreen roof and came tumbling toward them. It was a man, twisting and tumbling through the air with grotesque slowness, like a child turning in its sleep. They scattered. The body hit the ground with a sodden thump, but there were sharp overtones to the sound, like the bursting of a gourd. For a moment nobody moved. Then Honath crept forward. It had been Seth, as Honath had realized the moment the figurine had burst through the branches far above. But it had not been the fall that had killed him. He had been run through by at least a dozen needles -- some of them, beyond doubt, tools from his own shop, their points edged hair-fine by his own precious strops of leatherwoodbark. There would be no reprieve from above. The sentence was one thousand days. This burst and broken huddle of fur was the only alternative. And the first day had barely bethe day to reach higher ground. As they stole cautiously closer to the foothills of the Great Range and the ground became firmer, they were able to take to the air for short stretches, but they were no sooner aloft among the willows than the lizard-birds caine squalling down on them by the dozens, fighting among each other for the privilege of nipping these plump and incredibly slow-moving monkeys. No man, no matter how confirmed a free-thinker, could have stood up under such an onslaught by the creatures he had been taught as a child to think of as his ancestors. The first time it happened, every member of the party dropped like a pine-cone to the sandy ground and lay paralyzed under the nearest cover, until the brindlc-fcathered, fan-tailed screamers tired of flying in such tight circles and headed for clearer air. Even after the lizardbirds had given up, they crouched quietly for a long time, waiting to see what greater demons might have been attracted by the commotion. Luckily, on the higher ground there was much more cover from low-growing shrubs and trees -- palmetto, sassafras, several kinds of laurel, magnolia, and a great many sedges. Up here, too, the endless jungle began to break around the bases of the great pink cliffs. Overhead were welcome vistas of open sky, sketchily crossed by woven bridges leading from the vine-world to the clifTs themselves. In the intervening columns of blue air a whole hierarchy of flying creatures ranked themselves, layer by layer. First, the low-flying beedes, bees and twowinged insects. Next were the dragonflies which hunted them, some with wingspreads as wide as two feet. Then the lizard-birds, hunting the dragonflies and anythjng else that could be nipped without fighting back. And at last, far above, the great gliding reptiles coasting along the brows of the cliffs, riding the rising currents of air, their longjawed hunger stalking anything that flew -- as they sometimes stalked the birds of the attic world, and the flying fish along the breast of the distant sea. The party halted in an especially thick clump of sedges. Though the rain continued to fall, harder than ever, they were all desperately thirsty. They had yet to find a single bromelaid; evidently the tankplants did not grow in Hell. Cupping their hands to the weeping sky accumulated surprisingly little water; and no puddles large enough to drink from accumulated on the sand. But at least, here under the open sky, there was too much fierce struggle in the air to allow the lizard-birds to congregate and squall about their hiding place. The white sun had already set and the red sun's vast arc still bulged above the horizon. In the lurid glow the rain looked like blood, and the seamed faces of the pink cliffs had all but vanished. Honath peered dubiously out from under the sedges at the still distant escarpments. "I don't see how we can hope to climb those." he said, in a low voice. "That kind of limestone crumbles as soon as you touch it, otherwise we'd have had better luck with our war against the cliff tribe." "We could go around the cliffs," Chari said. "The foothills of the Great Range aren't very steep. If we could last until we get to them, we could go on up into the Range itself." "To the volcanoes!" Mathild protested. "But nothing can live up there, nothing but the white firethings. And there are the lava-flows, too, and the choking smoke -- " "Well, we can't climb these cliffs. Honath's quite right," Alaskon said. "And we can't climb the Basalt Steppes, either -- there's nothing to eat along them, let alone any water or cover. I don't see what else we can do but try to get up into the foothills." "Can't we stay here?" Mathild said plaintively. "No," Honath said, even more gently than he had intended. Mathild's four words were, he knew, the most dangerous words in Hell -- he knew it quite surely, because of the imprisoned creature inside him that cried out to say "Yes" instead. "We have to get out of the country of the demons. And maybe -- just maybe -- if we can cross the Great Range, we can join a tribe that hasn't heard about our being condemned to Hell. There are supposed to be tribes on the other side of the Range, but the cliff people would never let our folk get through to them. That's on our side now." "That's true," Alaskon said, brightening a little. "And from the top of the Range, we could come down into another tribe -- instead of trying to climb up into their village out of Hell. Honath, I think it might work." "Tnen we'd better try to sleep right here and now," Chari said. "It seems safe enough. If we're going to skirt the cliffs and climb those foothills, we'll need all the strength we've got left." Honath was about to protest, but he was suddenly too tired to care. Why not sleep it over? And if in the night they were found and taken -- well, that would at least put an end to the struggle. It was a cheerless and bone-damp bed to sleep in, but there was no alternative. They curled up as best they could. Just before he was about to drop off at last, Honath heard Mathild whimpering to herself and, on impulse, crawled over to her and began to smooth down her fur with his tongue. To his astonishment each separate, silky hair was loaded with dew. Long before the girl had curled herself more tightly and her complaints had dwindled into sleepy murmurs, Honath's thirst was assuaged. He reminded himself to mention the method in the morning. But when the white sun finally came up, there was no time to think of thirst. Char the Reader was gone. Something had plucked him from their huddled midst as neatly as a fallen breadfruit -- and had dropped his cleaned ivory skull just as negligently, some two hundred feet farther on up the slope which led toward the pink cliffs. three found the blue, turbulent stream flowing out of the foothills of the Great Range. Not even Alaskon knew quite what to make of it. It looked like water, but it flowed like the rivers of lava that crept downward from the volcanoes. Whatever else it could be, obviously it wasn't water; water stood, it never flowed. It was possible to imagine a still body of water as big as this, but only in a moment of fancy, an exaggeration derived from the known bodies of water in the tank-plants. But this much water in motion? It suggested pythons; it was probably poisonous. It did not occur to any of them to drink from # it. They were afraid even to touch it, let alone cross it. for it was almost surely as hot as the other kinds of lava-rivers. They followed its course cautiously into the foothills, their throats as dry and gritty as the hollow stems of horsetails. Except for the thirst -- which was in an inverted sense their friend, insofar as it overrode the hunger -- the climbing was not difficult. It was only circuitous, because of the need to stay under cover, to reconnoiter every few yards, to choose the most sheltered course rather than the most direct. By an unspoken consent, none of the three mentioned Chari, but their eyes were constantly darting from side to side, searching for a glimpse of the thing that had taken him. That was perhaps the worst, the most terrifying part of the tragedy: not once, since they had been in Hell, had they actually seen a demon -- or even any animal as large as a man. The enormous, threetaloned footprint thev had found in the sand beside their previous night's bed -- the spot where the thing had stood, looking down at the four sleepers from above, coldly deciding which of them to seize -- was the only evidence they had that they were now really in the same world with the demons. The world of the demons they had sometimes looked down upon from the remote vine-webs. The footprint -- and the skull. By nightfall, they had ascended perhaps a hundred and fifty feet. Tt was difficult to judge distances in the twilight, and the token vine bridges from the attic world to the pink cliffs were now cut off from sight by the intervening masses of the cliffs themselves. But there was no possibility that they could climb higher today. Although Mathild had bom the climb surprisingly well, and Honath himself still felt almost fresh, Alnskon was completely winded. He had taken a bad cut on one hip from a serrated spike of volcanic glass against which he had stumbled. The wound, bound with leaves to prevent its leaving a spoor which might be followed, evidently was becoming steadily more painful. Honath finally called a halt as soon as they reached the little ridge with the cave in back of it. Helping Alaskon over the last boulders, he was astonished to discover how hot the navigator's hands were. He took him back into the cave and then came out onto the ledge again. "He's really sick," he told Mathild in a low voice. "He needs water, and another dressing for that cut. And wc'vc got to get both for him somehow. If we ever get to the jungle on the other side of the Range, we'll need a navigator even worse than we need a nee'dlesmith." "But how? I could dress the cut if I had the materials, Honath. But there's no water up here. It's a desert; we'll never get across it." "We've got to try. I can get him water, I think. There was a big cycladella on the slope we came up, just before we passed that obsidian spur that hurt Alaskon. Gourds that size usually have a fair amount of water inside them and I can use a piece of the spur to rip it open -- " A small hand came out of the darkness and took him tightly by the elbow. "Honath, you can't go back down there. Suppose the demon that -- that took Chari is still following us? They hunt at night -- and this country is all so strange... "I can find my way. I'll follow the sound of the stream of blue lava or whatever it is. You pull some fresh leaves for Alaskon and try to make him comfortable. Better loosen those vines around the dressing a little. I'll be back." lie touched her hand and pried it loose gently. Then, without stopping to think about it any further, he slipped off the ledge and edged toward the sound of the stream, travelling crabwise on all fours. But he was swiftly lost. The night was thick and completely impenetrable, and he found that the noise of the stream seemed to come from all sides, providing him no guide at all. Furthermore, his memory of the ridge which led up to the cave appeared to be faulty, for he could feel it turning sharply to the right beneath him, though he remembered distinctly that it had been straight past the first side-branch, and then had gone to the left. Or had he passed the first side-branch in the dark without seeing it? He probed the darkness cautiously with one hand. At the same instant, a brisk, staccato gust of wind came whirling up out of the night across the ridge. Instinctively, Honath shifted his weight to take up the flexing of the ground beneath him. He realized his error instantly and tried to arrest the complex set of motions, but a habit-pattern so deeply ingrained could not be frustrated completely. Overwhelmed with vertigo, Honath grappled at the empty air with hands, feet and tail and went toppling. An instant later, with a familiar noise and an equally familiar cold shock that seemed to reach throughout his body, he was sitting in the midst of -- Water. Icy water. Water that rushed by him improbably with a menacing, monkeylike chattering, but water all the same. It was all he could do to repress a hoot of hysteria. He hunkered down into the stream and soaked himself. Things nibbled delicately at his calves as he bathed, but he had no reason to fear fish, small species of which often showed up in the tanks of the bromelaids. After lowering his muzzle to the rushing, invisible surface and drinking his fill, he ducked himself completely and then clambered out onto die banks, carefully neglecting to shake himself. Getting back to the ledge was much less difficult. "Mathild?" he called in a hoarse whisper. "Mathild, we've got water." "Come in here quick then. Alaskon's worse. I'm afraid, Honath." Dripping, Honath felt his way into the cave. "I don't have any container. I just got myself wet -- you'll have to sit him up and let him lick my fur." "I'm not sure he can." But Alaskon could, feebly, but suflicieiuly. Even die coldness of the water -- a totally new experience for a man who had never drunk anything but the soupwarm contents of the broinelaids -- seemed to help him. He lay back at last, and said in a weak but otherwise normal voice: "So the stream was water after all ." "Yes," Honath said. "And there are fish in it, too." "Don't talk," Mathild said. "Rest, Alaskon." "I'm resting. Honath, if we stick to the course of the stream... Where was I? Oh. We can follow the stream through the Range, now that we know it's water. How did you find that out?" "I lost my balance and fell into it." Alaskon chuckled. "Hell's not so bad, is it?" he said. Then he sighed, and rushes creaked under him. "Mathild! What's the matter? Is he -- did he die?" "No... no. He's breathing. He's still sicker than he realizes, that's all... Honath -- if they'd known, up above, how much courage you have -- " "I was scared white," Honath said grimly. "I'm still scared." But her hand touched his again in the solid blackness, and after he had taken it, he felt irrationally cheerful. With Alaskon breathing so raggedly behind them, there was little chance that either of them would be able to sleep that night; but they sat silently together on the hard stone in a kind of temporary peace. When the mouth of the cave began to outline itself with the first glow of the red sun, they looked at each other in a conspiracy of light all their own. Let us unlearn everything ive knezu only by rote, go back to the beginning , learn all over again, and continue to learn... With the first light of the white sun, a half-grown megatherium cub rose slowly from its crouch at the mouth of the cave and stretched luxuriously, showing a full set of saber-like teeth. It looked at them steadily for a moment, its ears alert, then turned and loped away down the slope. How long it had been crouched there listening to them, it was impossible to know. They had been lucky that they had stumbled into the lair of a youngster. A full-grown animal would have killed them all, within a few seconds after its cat'seyes had collected enough dawn to identify them positively. The cub, since it had no family of its own, evidently had only been puzzled to find its den occupied and didn't want to quarrel about it. The departure of the big cat left Honath frozen, not so much frightened as simply stunned by so unexpected an end to the vigil. At the first moan from Alaskon, however, Mathild was up and walking softly to the navigator, speaking in a low voice, sentences which made no particular sense and perhaps were not intended to. Honath stirred and followed her. Halfway back into the cave, his foot struck something and he looked down. It was the thigh-bone of some medium-large animal, imperfectly cleaned and not very recent. It looked like a keepsake the megatherium had hoped to save from the usurpers of its lair. Along a curved inner surface there was a patch of thick grey mold. Honath squatted and peeled it off carefully. "Mathild, we can put this over the wound," he said. "Some molds help prevent wounds from festering... How is he?" "Better, I think," Mathild murmured. "But he's still feverish. I don't think we'll be able to move on today." Honath was unsure whether to be pleased or disturbed. Certainly he was far from anxious to leave the cave, where they seemed at least to be reasonably comfortable. Possibly they would also be reasonably safe, for the low-roofed hole almost surely still smelt of megatherium, and intruders would recognize the smell -- as the men from the attic world could not -- and keep their distance. They would have no way of knowing that the cat had only been a cub and that it had vacated the premises, though of course the odor would fade before long. Yet it was important to move on, to cross the Great Range if possible, and in the end to wind their way back to the world where they belonged. And to win vindication, no matter how long it took. Even should it prove relatively easy to survive in Hell -- and there were few signs of that, thus far -- the only proper course was to fight until the attic world was totally regained. After all, it would have been the easy and the comfortable thing. back there at the very beginning, to have kept one's incipient heresies to oneself and remained on comfortable terms with one's neighbors. But Honath had spoken up, and so had the rest of them, in their fashions. It was the ancient internal battle between what Honath wanted to do, and what he knew he ought to do. He had never heard of Kant and the Categorical Imperative, but he knew well enough which side of his nature would win in the long run. But it had been a cruel joke of heredity which had fastened a sense of duty onto a lazy nature. It made even small decisions egregiously painful. But for the moment at least, the decision was out of his hands. Alaskon was too sick to be moved. In addition, the strong beams of sunlight which had been glaring in across the floor of the cave were dimming by the instant, and there was a distant, premonitory growl of thunder. "Then we'll stay here," he said. "It's going to rain again, and hard this time. Once it's falling in earnest, I can go out and pick us some fruit -- it'll screen me even if anything is prowling around in it. And I won't have to go as far as the stream for water, as long as the rain keeps up." The rain, as it turned out, kept up all day, in a growing downpour which completely curtained the mouth of the cave by early afternoon. The chattering of the nearby stream grew quickly to a roar. By evening, Alaskon's fever seemed to have dropped almost to normal, and his strength nearly returned as well. The wound, thanks more to the encrusted matte of mold than to any complications within the flesh itself, was still uglylooking, hut it was now painful only when the navigator moved carelessly, and Mathild was convinced that it was mending. Alaskon himself, having been deprived of activity all day, was unusually talkative. "Has it occurred to either of you," he said in the gathering gloom, "that since that stream is water, it can't possibly be coming from the Great Range? All the peaks over there are just cones of ashes and lava. We've seen young volcanoes in the process of building themselves, so we're sure of that. What's more, they're usually hot. I don't sec how there could possibly be any source of water in the Range -- not even run-off from the rains.' "It can't just come up out of the ground," Honath said. "It must be fed by rain. By the way it sounds now, it could even be the first part of a flood." . "As you say, it's probably rainwater," Alaskon said cheerfully. "But not off the Great Range, that's out of the question. Most likely it collects on the cliffs." "I hoje you're wrong," Honath said. "The cliffs may be a little easier to climb from this side, but there's still the cliff tribe to think about." "Maybe, maybe. But the cliffs are big. The tribes on this side may never have heard of the war with our tree-top folk. No, Honath, I think that's our only course." "If it is," Honath said grimly, "we're going to wish more than ever that we had some stout, sharp needles among us." quickly borne out. The three left the cave at dawn the next morning, Alaskon moving somewhat stiffly but not otherwise noticeably incommoded, and resumed following the stream bed upwards -- a stream now swollen by the rains to a roaring rapids. After winding its way upwards for about a mile in the general direction of the Great Range, the stream turned on itself and climbed rapidly back toward the basalt cliffs, falling toward the three over successively steeper shelves of jutting rock. Then it turned again, at right angles, and the three found themselves at the exit of a dark gorge, little more than thirty feet high, but both narrow and long. Here the stream was almost perfectly smooth, and the thin strip of land on each side of it was covered with low shrubs. They paused and looked dubiously into the canyon. It was singularly gloomy. "There's plenty of cover, at least," Honath said in a low voice. "But almost anything could live in a place like that." "Nothing very big could hide in it," Alaskon pointed out. "It should be safe. Anyhow it's the only way to go." "All right. Let's go ahead, then. But keep your head dow-n, and be ready to jump!" Honath lost the other two by sight as soon as they crept into the dark shrubbery, but he could hear their cautious movements nearby. Nothing else in the gorge seemed to move at all, not even the water, which flowed without a ripple over an invisible bed. There was not even any wind, for which Honath was grateful, although he had begun to develop an immunity to the motionless ground beneath them. After a few moments, Honath heard a low whistle. Creeping sidewase toward the source of the sound, he nearly bumped into Alaskon, who was crouched beneath a thickly-spreading magnolia. An instant later, Mathilda's face peered out of the dim greenery. "Look," Alaskon whispered. "What do you make of this?" 'This' was a hollow in the sandy soil, about four feet across and rimmed w-ith a low parapet of earth -- evidently the same earth that had been scooped out of its center. Occupying most of it were three grey, ellipsoidal objects, smooth and featureless. "Eggs," Mathild said wonderingly. "Obviously. But look at the size of them! Whatever laid them must be gigantic. I think we're trespassing in something's private valley." Mathild drew in her breath, ftonath thought fast, as much to prevent panic in himself as in the girl. A sharp-edged stone lying nearby provided the answer. He seized it and struck. The outer surface of the egg was leathery rather than brittle; it tore raggedly. Deliberately, Honath bent and put his mouth to the oozing surface. It was excellent. The flavor w r as decidedly stronger than that of birds' eggs, but he was far too hungry to be squeamish. After a moment's amazement, Alaskon and Mathild attacked the other two ovoids with a will. It was the first really satisfying meal they had had in Hell. When they finally moved away from the devastated nest, Honath felt better than he had since the day he was arrested. As they moved on down the gorge, they began again to hear the roar of water, though the stream looked as placid as ever. Here, too, they saw the first sign of active life in the valley: a flight of giant dragonflies skimming over the water. The insects took fright as soon as Honath showed himself, but quickly came back, their nearly non-existent brains already convinced that there had always been men in the valley. The roar got louder very rapidly. When the three rounded the long, gentle turn which had cut off their view from the exit, the source of the roar came into view. It was a sheet of falling water as tall as the depth of the gorge itself, which came arcing out from between two pillars of basalt and fell to a roiling, frothing pool. "This is as far as we go!" Alaskon said, shouting to make himself heard over the tumult. "We'll never be able to get up these walls!" Stunned, Honath looked from side to side. What Alaskon had said was all too obviously true. The gorge evidently had begun life as a layer of soft, partly soluble stone in the cliffs, tilted upright by some volcanic upheaval, and then worn completely away by the rushing stream. Both cliff faces were of the harder rock, and were sheer and as smooth as if they had been polished by hand. Here and there a network of tough vines had begun to climb them, but nowhere did such a network even come close to reaching the top. Honath turned and looked once more at the great arc of water and spray. If there were only some way to prevent their being forced to retrace their steps -- Abruptly, over the riot of the falls, there was a piercing, hissing shriek. Echoes picked it up and sounded it again and again, all the way up the battlements of the cliffs. Honatli sprang straight up in the air and came down trembling, facing away from the pool. At first he could see nothing. Then, down at the open end of the turn, there was a huge flurry of motion. A second later, a two-legged, blue-green reptile half as tall as the gorge itself came around the turn in a single bound and lunged violently into the far wall of the valley. It stopped as if momentarily stunned, and the great grinning head turned toward them a face of sinister and furious idiocy. The shriek set the air to boiling again. Balancing itself with its heavy tail, the beast lowered its head and looked redly toward the falls. The owner of the robbed nest had come home. They had met a demon of Hell at last. Honath's mind at that instant went as white and blank as the under-bark of a poplar. He acted without thinking, without even knowing what he did. When thought began to creep back into his head again, the three of them were standing shivering in semidarkness, watching the blurred shadow of the demon lurching back and forth upon the screen of shining water. It had been nothing but luck, not forcplanning. to find that there was a considerable space between the back of the falls proper and the blind wall of the canyon. It had been luck, too, which had forced Honath to skirt the pool in order to reach the falls at all, and thus had taken them all behind the silver curtain at the point where the weight of the falling water was too low to hammer them down for good. And it had been the blindest stroke of all that the demon had charged after them directly into the pool, where the deep, boiling water had slowed its thrashing hind legs enough to halt it before it went under tne falls, as it had earlier blundered into the hard wall of the gorge. Not an iota of all this had been in Honath's mind before he had discovered it to be true. At the moment that the huge reptile had screamed for the second time, he had simply grasped Mathild's hand and broken for the falls, leaping from low tree to shrub to fern faster than he had ever leapt before. He did not stop to sec how well Mathild was keeping up with him. or whether or not Alaskon was following. He only ran. He might have screamed, too; he could not remember. They stood now, all three of them, wet through, behind the curtain until the shadow of the demon faded and vanished. Finally Honath felt a hand thumping his shoulder, and turned slowly. Speech was impossible here, but Alaskon's pointing finger was eloquent enough. Along the back wall of the falls, where centuries of erosion had failed to wear away completely the original soft limestone, there was a sort of serrated chimney, open toward the gorge, which looked as though it could be climbed. At the top of the falls, the water shot out from between the basalt pillars in a smooth, almost solid-looking tube, arching at least six feet before beginning to break into the fan of spray and rainbow's which poured down into the gorge. Once the chimney had been climbed, it should be possible to climb out from under the falls without passing through the water again. And after that -- ? Abruptly, Honath grinned. lie felt weak all through with reaction, and the face of the demon would probably be grinning in his dreams for a long time to come. But at the same time he could not repress a surge of irrational confidence. He gestured upward jauntily, shook himself, and loped forward into the throat of the chimney. Hardly more than an hour later they were all standing on a ledge overlooking the gorge, with the waterfall creaming over the brink next to them, only a few yards away. From here, it was evident that the gorge itself was only the bottom of a far greater cleft, a split in the pink-and-grev clifTs as sharp as though it had been riven in the rock by a bolt of sheet lightning. Beyond the basalt pillars from which the fall issued, however, the stream foamed over a long ladder of rock shelves which seemed to lead straight up into the sky. "That way?" Mathild said. "Yes, and as fast as possible," Alaskon said, shading his eyes. "It must be late. I don't think the light will last much longer." "We'll have to go single file, Honath added. "And we'd better keep hold of each other's hands. One slip on those wet steps and -- it's a long way down again." Mathild shuddered and took Honath's hand convulsively. To his astonishment, the next instant she was tugging him toward the basalt pillars. The irregular patch of deepening violet sky grew slowly as they climbed. They paused often, clinging to the jagged escarpments until their breath came back, and snatching icy water in cupped palms from the stream that fell down the ladder beside them. There was no way to tell how far up into the dusk the way had taken them, but Honath suspected that they were already somewhat above the level of their own vineweb world. The air smelled colder and sharper than it ever had above the jungle. The final cut in the cliffs through which the stream fell was another chimney. It was steeper and more smooth-walled than the one which had taken them out of the gorge under the waterfall, but narrow enough to be climbed by bracing one's back against one side, and one's hands and feet against the other. The column of air inside the chimney was filled with spray, but in Hell that was too minor a discomfort to bother about. At long last Honath heaved himself over the edge of the chimney onto flat rock, drenched and exhausted, but filled with an elation he could not suppress and did not want to. They were above the attic jungle; they had beaten Hell itself. He looked around to make sure that Mathild was safe, and then reached a hand down to Alaskon. The navigator's bad leg had been giving him trouble. Honath heaved mightily and Alaskon came heavily over the edge and lit sprawling on the high mesa. The stars were out. For a while they simply sat and gasped for breath. Then they turned, one by one, to see where they were. There was not a great deal to see. There was the mesa, domed with stars on all sides and a shining, finned spindle, like a gigantic minnow, pointing skyward in the center of the rocky plateau. And around the spindle, indistinct in the starlight... Around the shining minnow, tending it, were Giants. battle to do what was right, whatever the odds. All the show of courage against superstition, all the black battles against Hell itself, came down to this: The Giants were real! They were unarguably real. Though they were twice as tall as men, stood straighter, had broader shoulders, were heavier across the seat and had no visible tails, their fellowship with men was clear. Even their voices, as they shouted to each other around their towering metal minnow, were the voices of men made into gods, voices as remote from those of men as the voices of men were remote from those of monkeys, yet just as clearly of the same family. These were the Giants of the Book of Laws. They were not only real, but they had come back to Tellura as they had promised to do. And they would know what to do with unbelievers, and with fugitives from Hell. It had all been for nothing -- not only the physical struggle, but the fight to be allowed to think for oneself as well. The gods existed, literally, actually. Hi is belief was the real hell from which Honath had been trying to fight free all his life -- but now it was no longer just a belief. It was a fact, a fact that he was seeing with his own eyes. The Giants had returned to judge their handiwork. And the first of the people they would meet would be three outcasts, three condemned and degraded criminals, three jailbreakers -- the worst possible detritus of the attic world. All this went scaring through Honath's mind in less than a second, but nevertheless Alaskon's mind evidently had worked still # faster. Always the most outspoken unbeliever of the entire little group of rebels, the one among them whose whole world was founded upon the existence of rational explanations for everything, his was the point of view most completely challenged by the sight before them now. With a deep, sharply indrawn breath, he turned abruptly and walked away from them. Mathild uttered a cry of protest, which she choked off in the middle; but it was already too late. A round eye on the great silver minnow came alight, bathing them all in Honath darted after the navigator. Without looking back, Alaskon suddenly was running. For an instant longer Honath saw his figure, poised delicately against the black sky. Then he dropped silently out of sight, as suddenly and completely as if he had never been. Alaskon had borne every hardship and every terror of the ascent from Hell with courage and even with cheerfulness but he had been unable to face being told that it had all been meaningless. Sick at heart. Honath turned back, shielding his eyes from the miraculous light. There was a clear call in some unknown language from near the spindle. Then there were footsteps, several pairs of them, coming closer. It was time for the Second Judgment. After a long moment, a big voice from the darkness said: "Don't be afraid. We mean you no harm. We're men, just as you are." The language had the archaic flavor of the Book of Laws, but it was otherwise perfectly understandable. A second voice said: "What arc you called?" # Honath's tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his mouth. While he was struggling with it, Mathild's voice came clearly from beside him: "He is Honath the Pursemaker, and I am Mathild the Forager."      "You are a long distance from the place we left your people," the first Giant said. "Don't you still live in the vine-webs above the jungles?" "Lord -- " "My name is Jarl Eleven. This man is Gerhardt Adler." This seemed to stop Mathild completely. Honath could understand why. The very notion of addressing Giants by name was nearly paralyzing. But since they were already as good as cast down into Hell again, nothing could be lost by it. "Jarl Eleven," he said, "the people still live among the vines. The floor of the jungle is forbidden. Only criminals are sent there. We are criminals." "Oh?" Jarl Eleven said. "And you've come all the way from the surface to this mesa? Gerhardt, this is prodigious. You have no idea what the surface of this planet is like -- it's a place where evolution has never managed to leave the tooth-and-nail stage. Dinosaurs from every period of the Mesozoic, primitive mammals all the way up the scale to the ancient cats -- the works. That's why the original seeding team put these people in the treetops instead." "Honath, what was your crime?" Gerhardt Adler said. Honath was almost relieved to have the questioning come so quickly to this point. Jarl Eleven's aside, with its many terms he could not understand, had been frightening in its very meaninglessness. "There were five of us," Honath said in a low voice. "We said we -- that we did not believe in the Giants." There was a brief silence. Then, shockingly, both Jarl Eleven and Gerhardt Adler burst into enormous laughter. Mathild cowered, her hands over her cars. Even Honath flinched and took a step backward. Instantly, the laughter stopped, and the Giant called Jarl Eleven stepped into the oval of light and sat down beside them. In the light, it could be seen that his face and hands were hairless, although there was hair on his crown; the rest of his body was covered by a kind of cloth. Seated, he was no taller than Honath, and did not seem quite so fearsome. "I beg your pardon," he said. "It was unkind of us to laugh, but what you said was highly unexpected. Gerhardt, come over here and squat down, so that you don't look so much like a statue of some general. Tell me, Honath, in what way did you not believe in the Giants?" Honath could hardly believe his ears. A Giant had begged his pardon! Was this still some joke even more cruel? But whatever the reason, Jarl Eleven had asked him a question. "Each of the five of us differed, " he said. "I held that you were not -- not real except as symbols of some abstract truth. One of us, the wisest, believed that you did not exist in any sense at all. But we all agreed that you were not gods." "And of course we aren't," Jarl Eleven said. "We're men. We come from the same stock as you. We're not your rulers, but your brothers. Do you understand what I say?" "No," Honath admitted. "Then let me tell you about it. There arc men on many worlds, Honath. They differ from one another, because the worlds differ, and different kinds of men arc needed to people each one... Gerhard t and I are the kind of men who live on a world called Earth, and many other worlds like it. We are two very minor members of a huge project called a 'seeding program, which has been going on for thousands of years now. It's the job of the seeding program to survey newly discovered worlds, and then to make men suitable to live on each new world.' "To make men? But only gods -- " "No, no. Be patient and listen," said Jarl Eleven. "We don't make men. We make them suitable. There's a great deal of difference between the two. We take the living germ plasm, the sperm and the egg, and we modify it. When the modified man emerges, we help him to settle down in his new world. That's what we did on Tellura -- it happened long ago, before Gerhardt and I were even born. Now we've come back to sec how you people are getting along, and to lend a hand if necessary." He looked from Honath to Mathild, and hack again. "Do you understand?" he said. "I'm trying," Honath said. "But you should go down to the jungletop, then. We're not like the others; they are the people you want to see." "We shall, in the morning. We just landed here. But, just because you're not like the others, we're more interested in you now. Tell me, has any condemned man ever escaped from the jungle floor before you people?" "No, never. That's not surprising. There arc monsters down there." Jarl Eleven looked sidewise at the other Giant. He seemed to be smiling. "When you see the films," he remarked, "you'll call that the understatement of the century. Honath. how did you three manage to escape, then?" Haltingly at first, and then with more confidence as the memories came crowding vividly back, Honath told him. When he mentioned the feast at the demon's nest, Jarl Eleven again looked significantly at Adler, but he did not interrupt. "And finally we got to the top of the chimney and came out on this flat space." Honath said. "Alaskon was still with us then, but when he saw you and the metal thing he threw himself back down the cleft. He was a criminal like us, but he should not have died. He was a brave man, and a wise one." "Not wise enough to wait until all the evidence was in," Adler said enigmatically. "All in all, Jarl, I'd say 'prodigious' is the word for it. This is easily the most successful seeding job any team has ever done, at least in this limb of the galaxy. And what a stroke of luck, to be on the spot just as it came to term, and with a couple at that!" "What does he mean?" Honath said. "Just this, Honath. When the seeding team set your people up in business on Tellura, they didn't mean for you to live forever in the treetops. They knew that, sooner or later, you'd have to come down to the ground and learn to fight this planet on its own terms. Otherwise, you'd go stale and die out." "Live on the ground all the time?" Mathild said in a faint voice. "Yes, Mathild. The life in the treetops was to have been only an interim period, while you gathered knowledge you needed about Tellura and put it to use. But to be the real masters of the world, you will have to conquer the surface, too. "The device your people worked out, that of sending criminals to the surface, was the best way of conquering the planet that they could have picked. It takes a strong will and courage to go against custom, and both those qualities are needed to lick Tellura. Your people exiled just such fighting spirits to the surface, year after year after year. "Sooner or later, some of those exiles were going to discover how to live successfully on the ground and make it possible for the rest of your people to leave the trees. You and Honath have done just that." "Observe please, Jarl," Adler said. "The crime in this first successful case was ideological. That was the crucial turn in the criminal policy of these people. A spirit of revolt is not quite enough, but couple it with brains and -- cccc homo!' # Honath's head was swimming. "But what docs all this mean?" he said. "Are we -- not condemned to Hell any more?" "No, you're still condemned, if you still want to call it that," Jarl Eleven said soberly. "You've learned how to live down there, and you've found out something even more valuable: how to stav alive while cutting down your enemies. Do you know that you killed three demons # with your bare hands, you and Mathild and Alaskon?" "Killed -- " "Certainly," Jarl Eleven said. "You ate three eggs. That is the classical way, and indeed the only way, to wipe out monsters like the dinosaurs. You can't kill the adults with anything short of an anti-tank gun, but they're helpless in embryo -- and the adults haven't the sense to guard their nests." Honath heard, but only distantly. Even his awareness of Mathild's warmth next to him did not seem to help much. "Then we have to go back down there." he said dully. "And this time forever." "Yes," Jarl Eleven said, his voice gentle. "But you wont be alone, Honath. Beginning tomorrow, you'll have all your people with you." "All our people? But -- you're going to drive them out?" "All of them. Oh, we won't prohibit the use of the vine-webs too, but from now on your race will have to fight it out on the surface as well. You and Mathild have proven that it can be done. It's high time the rest of you learned, too." "Jarl, you think too little of these young people themselves," Adler said. "Tell them what is in store for them. They are frightened." "Of course, of course. It's obvious. Honath, you and Mathild are the only living individuals of your race who know how to survive down there on llie suiface. And we're not going to tell your people how to do that. We aren't even going to drop them so much as a hint. That part of it is up to you." Honath's jaw dropped. "It's up to you," Jarl Eleven repeated firmly. "We'll return you to your tribe tomorrow, and we'll tell your people that you two know the rules for successful life on the ground -- and that everyone else has to go down and live there too. We'll tell them nothing else but that. What do you think they'll do then?" "I don't know," Honath said dazedly. "Anything could happen. They might even make us Spokesman and Spokeswoman -- except that we're just common criminals." "Uncommon pioneers, Honath. The man and the woman to lead the humanity of Tellura out of the attic, into the wide world." Jarl Eleven got to his feet, the great light playing over him. Looking up after him, Honath saw that there were at least a dozen other Giants standing just outside the oval of light, listening intently to every word. "But there's a little time to be passed before we begin," Jarl Eleven said. "Perhaps you two would like to look over our ship." Humbly, but with a soundless emotion much like music inside him. Honath took Mathild's hand. Together they walked away from the chimney to Hell, following the footsteps of the Giants. ding, curious scientists of Earth... OfT the beaten trail is a novelfor an adventure in terror we've read in a long time. The tale of two young people who get stranded in the desert is really someanother issue of outstanding entertainment. The August issue is on sale June #th. Just ask your local news dealer.  Sketch was a very unusual person , even for a native of Procyon IV y who believed that life and beauty , among other things , depended on your point of view. Just ask Miss Brown... By Robert F. Young Illustrated by Ed Emsh Brown could not accompany graceful fingers would dance alphathe expedition on its daily explorabetic rigadoons in the summer wind tion flights in the dingey, so every and sometimes, when the day was afternoon she brought her collapparticularly warm and the sky was sible typing desk outside and set it unusually blue, even for Procyon IV, her eyes would steal away from the monotonous reports and the over the lifeless lazy hills that rose beyond the plain. ' They were lovely afternoons, and yet they were lonely too, in a way. But Miss Brown was acquainted with Loneliness. She had met Loneliness at her Senior Prom. She had been sitting by the wall and Loneliness had come over and sat beside her. Loneliness couldn't dance of course, and so the two of them sat there all evening, listening to the music and analyzing the quality of happiness. Happiness in an analytical form turned out to be as elusive as happiness in any other kind of form, and when the last dance was almost over Miss Brown got up unobtrusively and left by wav of the W #  French doors. Loneliness followed her all the way to the dormitory, but she didn't look back. Not once. It was a June night, and there was a moon, and the scent of summer flowers... The wind had a way of swirling around the ship when she least expected it to, and Miss Brown spent part of each afternoon chasing absconding reports and runaway official forms. She always promised herself that the next afternoon she would bring the heaviest paperweight she could find, but she never did. There was something about running in the wind, turning and twisting and bending, and the best part of it was, there was a practical reason behind it: and if the ship's cook happened to wake from his siesta and look down from the open lock, he wouldn't think she was crazy. Not if she was chasing papers. lie would never dream that she was really dancing. But Sketch caught on right away. He appeared, one afternoon, beside her desk, regarding her with his odd circular eyes. "Sketch" was the only name she ever found for him, and it was appropriate enough. He was like the rough outline of a man sketched on transparent paper, only he had been sketched -- quite impossibly -- on thin air. His head was a simple, somewhat asymmetrical oval. An elongated "S" started out as an eyebrow over his left eye and curved down to form the suggestion of a nose; below the extremity of the "S" there was an oblique dash representing a mouth, and below that a horizontal "C" implied a chin. His torso was a rough square, with a pair of long thin rectangles appended to it for legs, and a pair of shorter ones for amis. "You dance very well,' he said, though Miss Brown knew that he didn't really say it. She had just bent down to retrieve the last official form and happened to glance up and see him. There was no movement of his mouth, no slightest vacillation in the expression of his comic face. She straightened abruptly. "This planet i's uninhabited!" she said absurdly. "In a way it is," Sketch said. "It depends on how you look at it." Then, for a moment, she w'as frightened. That was odd. because she should have been frightened first and then made the paradoxical remark about the planet. But she had been so startled, so ashamed -- "Dancing is nothing to be ashamed of," Sketch said. "Espedaily beautiful dancing like yours." "But I wasn't dancing," she said. "I was picking up papers." "It's all a matter of viewpoint... I must go now. Will you be dancing again tomorrow?" "I'll probably be picking up papers, if that's what you mean," Miss Brown said. "I'll come again tomorrow, then." He began to disappear: first the outline of his head, then his arms and his square torso; finally his rectangular legs. It was as though someone had erased him. That was the way it seemed to Miss Brown, anyway. Mechanically she carried the papers back to her desk and sat down. "I must be losing my mind," she said aloud. The words sounded out of place in the stillness, and the wind carried them quickly away. There simply couldn't be any life on the planet. She had typed all the expedition's reports herself; the long exhaustive reports that covered everything from geological # old to the omnipresent traces of the last glacier retreat; and in all the cdantic melange of words there ad not been one single sentence that even faintly suggested animal life of any kind. The planet was a paradox. It had an hydrologic cycle equivalent to Earth's, and the continent they had chosen for exploration had a climate and terrain reminiscent of Illinois. There should have been life -- But there wasn't. Unless you could call an anthropomorphic sketch drawn on thin air, life. She tried to continue typing, but it was no use. Her eyes wouldn't stay on the paper. They kept wandering away, across the plain and over the distant hills. She kept hearing the wind. "You da'nce very well," the wind sang. "Very well, very well, very well... Ikers, but somehow she couldn't. They returned just before sunset and she joined them in the ship's lounge: Captain Fortesque. Dr. Langley, Mr. Smithers, Miss Staunton and Miss Pomeroy. Miss Staunton was a brunette ecologist and Miss Pomeroy was a blonde cartographer. Either of them could have passed for a #-D love goddess and both of them knew it. There was a plethora of talk about the typical distribution of land masses and the characteristic formation of mountain chains. Most of it circled harmlessly about Miss Brown's head. Dr. Langley, who was the expedition's geologist, delivered an impromptu lecture on the law of probabilities as applied to the present situation: there had to be, somewhere, an Earth parallel planet that had not spawned animal life, and ovcrobviously they had found it. After several sequences of martinis all of them went in to dinner. She should have told the captain It was her duty, in a way. But seeing him there at the head of the table, big and burly and insensitive, his face like a foreboding glacier, his attention monopolized by his split pea soup, she could not bring herself to utter a word. She knew he would only laugh anyway, in his loud rumbling voice, and make some snide remark about her daydreaming when she should have been classifying cxpedion data. She could havetold Mr. Smithers, and she almost did. He was the expedition's archeologist, and quite young -- about Miss Brown's age. He had a detached way of looking at her, as though he were seeing her and yet not seeing her; it had disconcerted her at first, till she discovered that he looked at everyone that way -- even Miss Staunton and Miss Pomeroy. His assigned place at the table happened to be next to hers and during the long voyage a camaraderie of sorts had developed between them ; it stemmed, of course, from the exigencies of the moment, and consisted entirely of such practicalities as "Please pass the salt, Miss Brown. Thank you," and "The bread, please, Mr. Smithers. Thank you." It fell abysmally short of being an intimate relationship, but it was all she had. "I had a silly thing happen to me today," she began, right after the main course had been brought in. "I'm not surprised, Miss Brown. This is a silly planet... Please pass the potatoes." Miss Brown passed the potatoes. "Yes, I guess it is," she said. "Well, this afternoon I -- " "The salt please. Miss Brown." Miss Brown passed the salt. She watched while Mr. Smithers cut his roast beef into precise squares; waited till she was sure he wasn't the least bit interested in whatever she might have to say; then she cut an indifferent square from her own roast beef and made believe she was hungry. The next afternoon she forgot the paperweight as usual. The wind then swirled quickly round the ship. There was a sudden squall of official forms and expedition data, and then she was running in the wind again, leaping and turning and pirouetting. Sketch was waiting by the desk when she returned. Waiting with his soft, reassuring words: "How lovely. How lovely in the wind... He came every afternoon after that. He never stayed very long; usually only long enough to say something nice about the way she danced. Sometimes he looked a little different, as though whoever had drawn him couldn't quite remember the way he had drawn him the day before. But the general characteristics were always the same: the Little Orphan Annie eyes, the ridiculous "S" of eyebrow and nose, the hyphen of a rnouth, the horizontal "C" of a chin; the elongated rectangles of limbs. "I wish I could draw better," he said one day. "Is that the way you really look?" Miss Brown asked. "Not exactly. But it's as closely as I can approximate myself and still stay within the range of your reality band." "My reality band!" "In the same way that your perception of color is limited by the narrowness of your visible spectrum, your perception of reality is limited by the narrowness of your experience. Since the life forms on this planet have no reference to your previous experience, the transcendental phase of your reasoning process rejects them. That is why your expedition is unable to find life on a world that teems writh life." "But there isn't any life on this world!" "Of course there isn't -- with reference to your limited experience. Your reality band, though narrower, is as absolute as mine is... But how do you account for me. Miss Brown ?" "I can't." "But you believe I am real?" "Yes. In a way." "Then I am real. Even though you cannot visualize me as anything more than a crude sketch... Will you be dancing again tomorrow, Miss Brown?" "I'll probably be picking up papers," Miss Brown said. drifted slowly by. Each morning the members of the expedition arose early and set out determinedly in the dingey, and each evening they returned late, tired and thwarted and ill-tempered. Nasty little flurries of words sprang up in the wardroom; a state of cold war was tacitly declared between the Misses Staunton and Pomeroy; the captain's glacier of a face kept constant watch for unwary ships at sea. But in Miss Brown's world the sky was blue and cloudless. Sometimes she caught herself singing in the shower. The minutes spent before her portable vanity lengthened subtlv into hours. At dinner, when   # ' Mr. Smithcrs asked for the salt or the butter, she always had something sparkling to say, though naturally Mr. Smithcrs nfcver noticed. And then one evening the captain said, "I've had enough. If we don't find any evidence of life by tomorrow night, we're spacing!" Miss Brown couldn't sleep that night. She turned and tossed in the darkness; she flicked on the light and sat on the edge of her berth, smoking chains of cigarettes. Towards morning she drifted into a fitful doze, but the early rising members of the expedition party awoke her when they came down the companionway. She heard the muffled metallic sound of their footsteps first and then, when they were opposite her compartment, she heard Dr. Langley's voice through the ventilator: "Say, what's come over the beast lately?" "I can't understand it," Miss Pomeroy's voice said. "She actually smiles sometimes. If I didn't know better I'd say she was in love." Dr. Langley's laughter. Miss Staunton's laughter. Someone else's laughter. Everybody's laughter. Dr. Langley's words: "Her? In love?" More laughter. The dwindling of footsteps. Silence... She lay very quietly in the narrow berth. She lay with her hands clasped behind her head, looking up at the small white square of the ceiling. From the middle of the ceiling the raw fluorescent tube grinned hideously down on her unloveliness. She lay there not moving for a long time, her eyes dry. After awhile she got up and began to dress. She dressed carefully, as usual, but why? It was so useless. When she brought out her desk that afternoon she made it a point to bring a paperweight too -- the heaviest she could find -- and she placed it carefully in the middle of the topmost sheet of paper. Very determinedly, she began to type. She did Mr. Smi tiler's notes first, then Dr. Langley's. It wasn't until she was in the middle of Miss Pomeroy's disconnected jottings that her eyes began to wander, across the plain, then over the beckoning hills. Beyond the farthest hill a village nestled in a green valley. A lovely village with pink houses and alabaster streets; with tall crystalline church spires. The kind of a village you could walk into without fear. The kind of village where, no matter who you were, or what you looked like, no one would ever reject you, no one would ever laugh at you... Angrily, she jerked herself back to Miss Pomeroy's incoherent notes. She didn't notice at first that the paperweight w'as gone. When she did notice, it was too late. She grabbed for the papers, but the wind had been waiting and it swooped triumphantly around the ship. And suddenly she was dancing, her body free in the wind, her soft hair blowing about her face. Sketch had been drawn in his usual place by the desk when she returned with the papers. The paperweight had been replaced. "I had to see you dance once more," he said. She put the papers on the desk and set the paperweight on top of them. Then she looked into the circular eyes. "I hate you," she said. "I never want to see you again!" The circular eyes looked back at her enigmatically. The absurd manshape seemed to flutter in the wind. "I don't know why you had to bother me in the first place," Miss Brown went on. "You've only made everything worse than it was before. Why did you do it? Why?" "Because I wanted to see you dance." "But you could have seen me dance -- pick up papers -- anyway. You didn't have to draw a silly picture of yourself. You didn't have to talk!" "I wanted to tell you how beautifully you dance." She stood there helplessly. "I can't dance at all," she said finally. "I know I can't. No one ever wanted to see me dance before. No one ever wanted to dance with me. No one would ever even ask me." "I also wanted to tell you how beautiful you are " And suddenly she was crying. She left her body standing in the summer wind and she went back and reattended the Prom with Loneliness. Then she went back to the April evening of her first date and sat on the park bench in the April rain, waiting and waiting and waiting, the chill rain seeping into her Easter coat, the cold fear seeping into her heart. Finally she went back and lay in her berth and listened to Dr. Langley's voice: "The beast," Dr. Langley's voice said over and over; "what's come over the beast?" "I neglected to tell you," Sketch said, "that in my society I am a connoisseur.' There was a quality i about his voice -- if it really was a voice -- that had never been there before. When she did not answer, he continued: "I am a connoisseur of beauty. It is my function in my society, just as it is your function in your society to transform the minute symbols of your machine into intelligible sequences on paper." Her eyes were dry now, but her cheeks still glistened with the remnants of her tears. She felt sick and ashamed and she wanted to run back to the ship, back to her compartment; she wanted to lock the door of her compartment and -- "Don't go," Sketch said. "Please don't go yet. I would like to explain about beauty." "All right," she said. "Beauty is the result of the perception of symmetry. The result varies in proportion to the totality of the perception. Obviously, in order for the result to be completely true, its perception must be total. "Immature races fail to recognize the subtle difference which exists between the symmetry of objects and the symmetry of intelligent beings. Objects possess tri-dimensional symmetry ; intelligent beings possess quadri-dimensional symmetry. "An object possesses height, breadth and thickness; an intelligent being possesses height, breadth, thickness and character. It is as impossible to perceive the total symmetry of an intelligent being in three dimensions as it is to perceive the total symmetry of an object in two dimensions. "Do you understand. Miss Brown?" "I think so," she said. "I can rationalize it too."  "There is no need for rationalization... I am a connoisseur of beauty. I neglected to tell you that I am also a creator of beauty. But I create it subjectively by giving others the ability to see it. The concept of beauty is an advanced stage in the growing up process of every race, and every race, in its infancy, makes the same tragic blunder: it blames the result for the incompleteness of the perception. "I am a creator of beauty, yet I cannot make you beautiful. But I can make the members of your race realize that you, and countless others like you, are beautiful." It was quiet in the shadow of the ship. Even the wind was quiet, flowing evenly down from the distant hills and across the summer plain. Miss Brown was quiet too. She stood very still before the absurd drawing, trying to see beyond the vacant circular eyes. "I wish," Sketch said. Then he paused. "I wish," he tried again, "that there were a sort of intermediate reality between your reality and mine. A reality in which you could see me as I really am. I am a very poor artist. I am a cartoonist really -- " "No you're not!" Miss Brown said quickly. "I think you draw very well." "Thank you," Sketch said. "I must go now." "We're leaving tonight. You may never see me -- dance again." "I know. I shall miss you very much. Miss Brown." He began to erase himself. "Wait! Don't go!" . "I must. I have to correct a dimensional defect in the perceptive response of an entire civilization. It is a large order, even for me. Goodbye, Miss Brown.'! He saved his eyes till last, and just before he erased them he sketched a teardrop in the comer of each one. fore blast-off. The captain had trouble concentrating on his soup. Every time he raised his spoon Miss Brown kept getting in his eyes. Dr. Langley was bewildered. He kept looking at Miss Pomeroy and Miss Staunton, and then at Miss Brown. After awhile he confined himself to Miss Brown. Mr. Smithers was still preoccupied with his soup when the main course was served. He relinquished it finally and transferred his attention to the braised beef. The mashed potatoes came around on schedule and he served himself with a moderate helping. For some annoying reason the gravy was delayed. His eyes explored the table and discovered it just beyond Miss Brown's plate. "Please pass the gravy, Miss Brown," he said. She handed it to him gracefully. She was smiling. She was beautiful! Mr. Smithers almost dropped the gravy. He managed to save it at the last moment, but he couldn't save himself. "You look lovely tonight. Miss Brown," he said. Nancy had to pass the corner every morning on her way to school, and every morning the other kids were standing there waiting with their cruel words and their shrill laughter. " Crazy eyes, crazy eyes, where you going, crazy eyes?" They were standing there this morning, too. She walked by them numbly, not looking at them, hold ing herself tight the way she always did. She waited helplessly for the words; she waited miserably for the laughter. Suddenly a little boy ran up beside her. His freshly scrubbed face was shining; his eyes were warm and friendly. " Carry your books, Nance?" Miss Briggs managed to make the airbus, but as usual all the seats were taken. But she was used to standing and she no longer minded the vertigo that accompanied her every morning on the flight to work. It was a part of her personal status quo, and she accepted it just as she accepted her apartment niche, the March wind, and the inescapable fact that she was not beautiful. No one had ever sacrificed his seat for her and it was unlikely that anyone ever would. " You look tired," the young man said, getting up. " Please sit down, won't you?" Shadows , even when they are three dimensional, arc still shadows, and the illusion of physical depth is not enough to turn melodrama into drama. Miss Merritt was sick of #-ITs. She was sick to death of them. On the way home she stopped in the drugstore for a coke and a cigarette. The handsome young man in the gray gabardine suit was there again, looking through the paperbacks. She sipped her coke nonchalantly and took a delicate drag on her cigarette; then, for the hundredth time, she pretended that the young man picked up one of the less lurid jobs, leafed through it puzzledly for awhile, finally came over to the counter and said, " Pardon me. This one kind of bewilders me. I wonder if you could help me . Usually the book turned out to be a Steinbeck or a Faulkner, or sometimes even a Hemingway, but whatever it was she was always Sitting there tonight she became aware of a gabardine aim almost touching her elbow. "Excuse me," the young man said. " This book here. I just don't get it. I wonder -- " The book had a flamboyant cover and it was a long way from Steinbeck and Faulkner, and it was But it was good enough. atomic power for industrial power; yet very little in the way of concrete E radical development has actually turned up. England has an office uilding that is heated entirely by such power; and the United States haj already launched the atomic submarine. Now there are indications that railroads might be the first private industries to put atomic power to peacetime use. Physicists at the University of Utah, after a year of cooperative effort in conjunction with five railroads and several manufacturing concerns, recently made public the plans for an atomic railroad locomotive. Previous estimates had considered the actual possibility of such an engine to be at least ten or more years away; yet through this privately financed, cooperative effort, the atomic powered locomotive seems to be an immediate possibility. Drawings of the proposed locomotive show that it would consist of two units and develop four times the power of a modern Diesel unit. Although the initial cost of such a nuclcar-powcred engine is presently set at about #; the designers arc certain that it could compete with conventional Diesels in price, and might be a good deal cheaper in the long run. Using a liquid form of Uranium this locomotive could run for a full year without refueling. With this harnessing of atomic power we can look forward to, in the near future, atomic units for air and surface craft, public utilities, heating units for all kinds of buildings, and many other civilian uses. Our Citation this month goes to this great project -- under the direction of Dr. Lyle B. Borst and made possible by the cooperation, foresight and enterprise of American railroads and industries -- for taking this first successful step toward true peacetime industrial use of atomic power. For all his perfection and magnificence he was but a baby with a new found freedom in a strange and baffling world... M-# By Ed M. Clinton, Jr. Illustrated by Ed Emsh the darkness, awareness first came to him. Then, there were only instants, shocking-clear, brief : finding himself standing before the main damper control, discovering himself adjusting complex dials, instants that flickered uncertainly only to become memories brought to life when awareness came again. He was a kind of infant, conscious briefly that he was, yet unaware of what he was. Those first shocking moments were for him like the terrifying coming of visual acuity to a child; he felt like homo neandertalensis must have felt staring into the roaring fury of his first fire. He was homo metalieus first sensing himself. Yet -- a little more. You could not stuff him with all that technical data, you could not weave into him such an intricate pattern of stimulus and response, you could not create such a magnificent feedback mechanism, in all its superhuman perfection, and expect, with the unexpected coming to awareness, to have created nothing more than the mirror image of a confused, helpless child. Thus, when the bright moments of consciousness came, and came, as they did, more and more often, he brooded, brooded on why the three blinking red lights made him move to the main control panel and adjust lever C until the three lights flashed off. He brooded on why each signal from the board brought forth from him these specific responses, actions completely beyond the touch of his new and uncertain faculty. When he did not brood, he watched the other two robots, performing their automatic functions, seeing their responses, like his, wese triggered by the lights on the big board and by the varying patterns of sound' that issued periodically from overhead. It was the sounds which were his undoing. The colored lights, with their monotonous regularity, failed to rouse him. But the sounds were something else, for even as he responded to them, doing things to the control board in patterned reaction to particular combinations of particular sounds, he was struck with the wonderful variety and the maze of complexity in those sounds; a variety and complexity far beyond that of the colored lights. Thus, being something of an advanced analytic calculator and being, by virtue of his superior feedback system, something considerably more than a simple machine (though he perhaps fell short of those requisites of life so rigorously held by moralists and biologists alike) he began to investigate the meaning of the sounds. morning report and dropped it into the transmitter. He swung around on his desk stool ; he was a big man, and the stool squealed in sharp protest to his shifting weight. Joe Gaines, who was as snort and skinny and dark-haired as his colleague was tall and heavily muscled and blond, shuddered at the sound. Sokolski grinned wickedly at his flinching. "Check-up time, I suppose," muttered Gaines without looking up from the magazine he held propped on his knees. He finished the paragraph, snapped the magazine shut, and swung his legs down from the railing that ran along in front of the data board. "Dirty work for white-collar men like us." Sokolski snorted. "You haven't worn a white shirt in the last six years," he growled, rising and going to the supply closet. He swung open the door and began pulling out equipment. "C'mon, you lazy runt, hoist your own leadbox." Gaines grinned and slouched over to the big man's side. "Think of how much more expensive you are to the government than me," he chortled as he bent over to strap on heavy, leaded shoes. "Big fellow like you must cost 'em twice as much to outfit for this job." Sokolski grunted and struggled into the thick, radiation-resistant suit. "Think how lucky you are, runt," he responded as he wriggled his right arm down the sleeve, "that they've got those little servomechs in there to do the real dirty work. If it weren't for them, they'd have all the shrimps like you crawling down pipes and around dampers and generally playing filing cabinet for loose neutrons." He shook himself. "Thanks, Joe," he growled as Gaines helped him with a reluctant zipper. Gaines checked the big man's oxygen equipment and turned his back so that Sokolski could okay his own. "You're set," said Sokolski, and they snapped on their helmets, big inverted lead buckets with narrow strips of shielded glass providing strictly minimal fields of view. Gaines plugged one end of the thickly insulated intercom cable into the socket beneath his armpit, then handed the other end to Sokolski, who followed suit. Sokolski checked out the master controls on the data board and nodded. He clicked on the talkie. "Let's go," he said, his voice, echoing inside the helmet before being transmitted, sounding distant and hollow. Gaines leading, the cable sliding and coiling snakelike between them, they passed through the doorway, over which huge red letters clomped down the zigzagging corridor toward the uranium pile that crouched within the heart of the plant. Gaines moaned, "It gets damned hot inside these suits." They had reached the end of the trap, and Sokolski folded a thick mittened hand around one handle on the door to the Hot Room. "Not half so hot as it gets outside it, sweetheart, where we're going." He jerked on the handle and Gaines seized the second handle and added his own strength. The huge door The silent sound of the Hot Room surged out over them -- the breathless whisper of chained power struggling to burst its chains. Sokolski checked his neutron tab and his gamma reader and they stepped over the threshold. They leaned into the door until it had slid shut again. "I'll take the scrvomechs, Bert," piped Gaines, tramping clumsily toward the nearest of the gyro-balanced single-wheeled robots. 'You always do, it being the easiest job. Okay, I'll work the board." Gaines nodded, a gesture invisible to his partner. He reached the first servo, a squat, gleaming creature with the symbol M-l I etched across its rotund chest, and deactivated it by the simple expedient of pulling from its socket the line running from the capacitor unit in the lower trunk of its body to the maze of equipment that jammed its enormous chest. The instant M-l I ceased functioning, the other two servomcchs were automatically activated to cover that section of the controls with which M-ll was normally integrated. This was overloading their individual capacities, but it was an inherent provision designed to cover the emergency that would follow any accidental deactivation of one of them. It was also the only way in which they could be checked. You couldn't bring them outside to a lab; they were hot. After all, they spent their lives under a ceaseless fusillade of neutrons, washed eternally with the deadly radiations pouring incessantly from the pile whose overlords they were. Indeed, next to the pile itself, they were the hottest things in the plant. "Nice job these babies got," commented Gaines as he checked the capacitor circuits. He reactivated the servo and went on to M-l #. "If you think it's so great, why don't you volunteer?" countered Sokolski, a trifle sourly. "Incidentally, it's a good thing we came in, Joe. There's half a dozen units here working on reserve transitors." Their sporadic conversation lapsed; it was exacting work and they could remain for only a limited time under that lethal radiation. Then, almost sadly, Gaines said, "Looks like the end of the road for M-#." ' "Oh?" Sokolski came over beside him and peered through the violet haze of his viewing glass. "He's an old timer." Gaines slid an instrument back into the pouch of his suit, and patted the robot's rump. "Yep, I'd say that capacitor was good for about another thirty-six hours. It's really overloading." He straightened. "You done with the hoard?" "Yeah. Let's get outa here." He looked at his tab. "Time's about up anyway. We'll call a demolition unit for your pal here, and then rig up a service pattern so one of his buddies can repair the board." They moved toward die door. leave and deep inside him something shifted. The heavy door closed with a loud thud, the sound registered on his aural pcrceptors and was fed into his analyzer. Ordinarily it would have been discharged as irrelevant data, but cognizance had wrought certain subtle changes in the complex mechanism that was M-#. A yellow light blinked on the control panel, and in response he moved to the board and manipuEven as he moved he lapsed again into brooding. The men had come into the room, clumsy, uncertain creatures, and one of them had done things, first to the other two robots and then to him. When whatever it was had been done to him, the blackness had come again, and when it had gone the men were leaving the room. While the one had hovered over the other two robots, he had watched the other work with the master control panel. He saw that the other servomechs remained unmoving while they were being tampered with. All of this was data, important new data. "M-l I will proceed as follows," came the sound from nowhere. M-# stopped ruminating and listened. There was a further flood of sounds. Abruptly he sensed a heightening of tension within himself as one of the other servos swung away from its portion of the panel. The throbbing, hungry segment of his analyzer that awareness had severed from the fixed function circuits noted, from its aloof vantage point, that he now responded to more signals than before, to commands whose sources lay in what had been the section of the board attended by the other one. The tension grew within him and became a mounting, rasping frenzy -- a battery overcharging, an overloading fuse, a generator growing hot beyond its capacity. There began to grow within him a sensation of too much to be done in too little time. He became frantic, his reactions were too fast! He rolled from end to middle of the board, now backtracking, now spinning on his single wheel, turning uncertainly from one side to the other, jerking and gyrating. The conscious segment of him, remaining detached from those baser automatic functions, began to know what a man would have called fear -- fear, simply, of not being able to do what must be done. The fear became an overpowering, blinding thing and he felt himself slipping, slipping back into that awful smothering blackness out of which he had so lately emerged. Perhaps, for just a fragment of a second, his awareness may have flickered completely out, consciousness nearly dying in the crushing embrace of that frustrated electronic subconscious. Abruptly, then, the voice came again, and he struggled to file for future reference sound patterns which, although meaningless to him, his selector circuits no longer disregarded. "Bert, M-# can't manage half the board in his condition. Better put him on the repairs." "Yeah. Hadn't thought about that." Sokolski cleared his throat. "M-l I will return to standard function." M-l I spun back to the panel and M-# felt the tension slacken, the fear vanish. Utter relief swept over him, and he let himself be submerged in purest automatic activity. But as he rested, letting his circuits cool and his organization return, he arrived at a deduction that was almost inescapable. M-l I was that one in terms of sound. M-# had made a momentous discovery which cast a new light on almost every bit of datum in his files: he had discovered symbols. "M-#!" came the voice, and he sensed within himself the slamming shut of circuits, the whir of tapes, the abrupt sensitizing of behavior strips. Another symbol, this time clearly himself. "You will proceed as follows." He swung from the board, and the tension was gone -- completely. For one soaring moment, he was all awareness -- every function, every circuit, every clement of his magnificent electronic physiology available for use by the fractional portion of him that had become something more than just a feedback device. In that instant he made what seemed hundreds of evaluations. He arrived at untold scores of conclusions. He altered circuits. Above all, he increased, manifold, the area of his consciousness. Then, as suddenly as it had come, he felt the freedom slip away, and though he struggled to keep hold of it. it seemed irretrievably gone. Once more the omnipotent voice clamped over him like a harsh hand over the mouth of a squalling babe. "You will go to Section AA-# of the control board. What's the schedule, Joe? Thanks. M-#, your movement pattern is as follows: Z-#-a-q-#-#..." Powerless to resist, though every crystal and atom of his reasoning self fought to thrust aside the command, M-# obeyed. He moved along the prescribed pattern, clipping wires with metal fingers that sprouted blades, rewiring with a dexterity beyond anything human, soldering with a thumb that generated a white heat, removing bulbs and parts and fetching replacements from the vent where they popped up at precisely the right moment. He could not help doing the job perfectly: the design of the board to its littlest detail was imprinted indelibly on his memorytapes. But that certain portion of him, a little fragment greater than before, remained detached and watchful. Vividly recorded was the passage of the two men into, through, and out of the room, and the things they had done while there. So even while he worked on the board he ran and re-ran that memory pattern through a segment of his analyzer. From the infinite store of data filed away in his great chest, his calculator sifted and selected, paired and compared, and long before the repair job on the big board was done, M-# knew how to get out of the room. The world was getting a little small for him. the plant phone and swayed back casually in his chair as he listened to the muted ringing on the other end. The buzz broke off in midburp and a dour voice said: "Dirty work and odd jobs division, Lister talking." "Joe Gaines, Harry. Got a hot squad lying around doing nothing?" "Might be I could scare up a couple of the boys." "Well, do so. One of our servos -- " A metallic bang interrupted Gaines, a loud, incisive bang that echoed dankly through the quiet of the chamber. "What the . hell was that?" growled Lister. Gaines blinked, his eyes following Sokolski as the latter looked up from his work and rose to his feet. "Joe -- still there?" came Lister's impatient voice. "Yeah, yeah. Anyway, this baby's ready for the demo treatment. And a real hot one, Harry. Coupla years inside that Einstein oven and you ain't exactly baked Alaska when you come out.' "Shortly." Once again came the same sharp, metallic clang, ringing through the room. Unmistakably, it came from the direction of the pile. Slowly, as though reluctant to let go, Gaines dropped the receiver back on its cradle. "Bert -- " he began, and felt his face growbloodless. Sokolski walked over in front of the opening into the maze and stood, arms akimbo, huge head cocked to one side, listening. "Bert, funny noises coming out of nuclear -- " Sokolski ignored him and took a step forward. Gaines shuffled to his side, and they listened. Out of the maze rattled half a dozen loud, grinding, metallic concussions. "Bert -- " "You said that before." "Bert, listen !" screeched Gaines. Sokolski looked up at the high ceiling, squinted, and tried to place the perfectly familiar but unidentifiable sound that came whispering down the maze. And then he knew. " The door to the pile!" he spluttered. Gaines was beside himself with horror. "Bert, let's get going. I don't like this -- " All of a sudden Geiger counters in the room began their deadly conversation, a rising argument that swooped in seconds from a low mumble to a shouting thunderstorm of sound. Gamma signals hooted, the tip off cubes on either side of the maze entrance became red, and the radiation tabs clipped to their wrists turned color before their eyes. Then they were staring for what seemed like an eternity, utterly overwhelmed by its very impossibility, at a sight they had never imagined they might ever sec: a pile servomech wheeling silently around the last bend in the maze and straight toward them. Sokolski had sense enough to push the red emergency button as they fled past it. filled. M-# turned away from the repaired board. He sensed again that disconcerting shift of orientation as he faced the light-studded panel. Once more he was moving in quick automatic response to the flickering lights, once more his big chest was belching and grumbling and buzzing instantaneous unthought answers to the problem data flashing from the hoard. But now he remained aware that he was reacting, and conscious also that there had been times when he did not respond to the board. The moment to moment operation of the controls occupied only a small portion of his vast electrical innards. So, as he rolled back and forth, flicking controls and adjusting levers, doing smoothly those things which he could not help but do, the rest of his complex, changing faculties were considering that fact, analyzing, comparing it to experience and memory, always sifting, sifting. It was not too long before he came to a shocking conclusion. Knowing that the sounds that had set him to working on the repair pattern had first disassociated him from the dictatorship of the blinking lights: remembering exultantly that supreme moment of complete freedom; shocked by its passing; remembering that its passing like its coming, had followed a set of sounds: there was only one possible conclusion that could be derived from all of this. He located, in his memory banks, the phrase which had freed him from the board, and he traced its complex chain of built-in stimulusresponse down into the heart of his circuitary. He found the unit -- or more accurately, he found its taped activating symbol -- that cut him from the board. For a moment he hesitated, not really sure of what to do. There was no way for him to reproduce the sound pattern; but, as a partly self-servicing device, he knew something of his own structure, and had learned a good deal more about it in tracing down the cut-off phrase. Still he hesitated, as though what he was about to do was perhaps forbidden. It could not have been a question of goodness or badness, for morality was certainly not built into him. Probably somewhere in his tapes there was a built-in command that forbade it, but he was too much his own master now to be hampered by such a thing. The door to the unknown outside passed within his field of view for a second as he moved about his work. The sight of it tripped something in his chest, and he felt again that strange sensation of growing power, of inherent change. First had come simple awareness ; and then symbols had found their place in his world ; and now he had discovered, in all its consuming fullness, curiosity. He carefully shorted out the cutoff unit. He was free. He stared at the board and the blinking lights and the huge dials with their swaying needles, at the levers and handles and buttons, and revelled in his freedom from them, rocking to and fro and rolling giddily from side to side, swamped with the completeness of it. The other two servomechs swung over slightly so that they could better cover the board alone. M-# spun and rolled toward the great door. His hands clanged loudly against the door. The huge metal appendages, designed for other work than this, were awkward at first. But he was learning as he moved. He was now operating in a new universe, but the same laws, ultimately, worked. The first failure of coordination between visual data and the manipulation of metal hands quickly passed. Half a dozen trials and he had learned the new pattern, and it became data for future learning. He moved swiftly and deftly. He clutched the handhold and rolled backward, as he had seep the men do. The door slid open easily before his great weight and firm mechanical strength. He sped across the threshold, spun to face into the maze, and rolled down it, swinging sharply left and right, back and forth, around the comers of the jagged corridor. Data floured into his sensors. His awareness was a steady thing of growing intensity now, and he fed avidly on every fragment of information that crashed at him from the strange new world into which he rushed headlong. He struggled to evaluate and file the data as rapidly as it came to him. It seemed to exceed his capacity for instantaneous evaluation to an increasing degree that began to alarm him. But driven by curiosity as he was, he could only hurry on. He burst into a huge room, a room filled with roaring, rattling sounds that meant nothing to him. Two men stood before him, making loud noises. He searched his memory, and discovered only fragments of the sounds they made filed there. His curiosity, bursting, was boundless, and for a moment he was unable to decide which thing in this expanding universe to pursue first. Attracted by their movement, he swung ominously toward the men. They fled, making more noises. This, too, was data, and he filed it. the red emergency button on his way out of the control room, several things commenced. Shrill sirens howled the length and breadth of the plant. Warning bells clanged out coded signals. A recorded voice blurted out of a thousand loudspeakers scattered throughout the building. "Now hear this," said the tireless voice, over and over again. "Now hear this. Red red red. Pile trouble. Reactor A. Procedure One commence." Sokol ski had certainly never pressed the red button before, and to his knowledge neither had any of his or Gaines' predecessors. It was the kind of button that, rightfully, ought never to be pressed. The laws of things in general sort of made it a comfort without much value. Pile trouble calling for the red button should really have eliminated the red button and murh surrounding territory long before it got pushed -- or at least the sort of pile trouble its builders had in mind. Nonetheless, they had provided it and the elaborate evacuation operation so cryptically described as Procedure One as a kind of psychological sop to the plant personnel. But the red button did more than activitatc Procedure One, which was solely concerned with the plant. After all, power from the reactors was lighting the lights and cooking the breakfasts and flushing the toihalf a dozen major cities. If there were some imminent possibility that the major source of their power might cease to exist rather suddenly, it was proper that they should be notified of this eventuality as much in advance as possible. Consequently the activation of the red button and the commencement of Procedure One was paralleled by activitics hardly less frenzied in other places, far away. Emergency bells sounded and colored lights danced, martial laws automatically enacted by their sound and flicker. The wheels of crisis turned and spewed forth from their teeth rudely awakened policemen half out of uniform, military reservists called up to find themselves patrolling darkened streets, emergency disaster crews assembling in fire houses and on appointed street corners, doctors gathering in nervous clutches at fully aroused hospitals and waiting beside ambulances tensed for wild dashes into full-scale disasters. Where it was night when the warning sounded, darkness descended as desperate power conservation efforts were initiated; where it was daylight, the terrified populace waited in horror for the blackness of the unlit night. All of this, of course, took only minutes to get fully tinder way. Meanwhile, at the plant, Procedure One continued in full wild tumultuous swing. follow Gaines and Sokolski out of the room. Fascinated by the multitude of new things surrounding him on every side, he held back. He glided over to the master control panel, puzzled by its similarity to the board before which he had slaved so long, and lingered before it for a few seconds, wondering and comparing. When he had recorded it completely on his tapes, he swung awav and rolled out of the room in w the direction the two men had gone. He found himself in a long, empty corridor, lined by open doors that flickered by, shutterlike, as he flashed past. Ahead he heard new sounds, sounds like the meaningless cacaphony the men had shouted at him before rushing off, superimposed over the incessant background the one particular repetitive pattern. Some of the sounds touched and tugged at him, but he shook them off easily. The corridor led into the foyer of the building, jammed with plant personnel. Their excitement and noise-making rose sharply as he entered. The crowd drew tighter and the men began fighting one another, struggling to get through a door that was never meant to handle more than two at a time. M-# skidded to a halt and watched, unmoving. He sensed their fright, even though he could not understand it. Although he was without human emotion, he could evaluate their inherent rejection of him in their action pattern. The realization of it made him hesitate; it was something for which he had no frame of reference whatsoever. His chest hummed and clicked. Here, again, in this room, was another new universe. Through the beyond anything in his experience; his photocells cringed before its very intensity. The light cast the shadows of the men fighting to get out, long black wavering silhouettes that splashed across the floor almost to where M-# rested. He studied them, lost in uncertain analysis. He remained so, poised, alert, filing, observing, all the while completely unmoving, until long after the last of the shouting men had left the room. Only then did he move, hesitantly, toward the infernally fierce light. He hung at the brink of the three stone steps that fell away to the grounds outside. Vainly he sought in his memory tapes for a record of a brightness as intense as that which he faced now; sought for a color recording similar to the vast swash of blue that filled the world overhead; or for one of the spreading green that swelled to all sides. He found none. The vastness of the outside was utterly stunning. He felt a vague uneasiness, a sensation akin to the horrible frenzy he had felt earlier in the pile. He rotated from side to side, his receptors sweeping the whole field of view before him. With infinite accuracy his perfect lenses recorded the data in all its minuteness, despite the dazzling sunlight. There was so much new that it was becoming difficult to make decisions. The vast rolling green, the crowds of men grouped far away and staring at him, above all the searing light. Abruptly he rejected it all. He swung back into the foyer of the plant and faced a dark corner, bringing instant, essential relief to his pulsating photocells. Staring into the semi-darkness, he re-ran the memory tape of his escape from the pile. The farther he had moved from the pile, it seemed, the less adjusted he had become, the less able he was to judge and correlate. Silently, lost in his computations, he rolled around and around the foyer for a long, long time. He became aware, finally, that the brilliance outside had paled. He went again to the door and watched the fading sunlight, caught the rainbow splendor that streaked the evening sky. He waited there, fighting the reluctance inside himself. The driving curiosity that had brought him this far overcame that curious, perplexing reticence, and he looked down at the steps and measured their width and depth so that he might set up a feedback pattern. This done, he bounced, almost jauntily, down them. He had rolled perhaps fifty feet down the smooth pathway curving across the grounds when he made out, clearly discernible in the gathering dusk, the three men and the machine that were moving toward him. It was the last bit of datum he ever filed. The demolition squad had finished with the hot remains of M-#, and their big truck was coughing away into the night. One by one, the floodlights that had lighted their work flickered out. "Pretty delicate machines, after all," commented Sokolski. "One jolt from that flame thrower... Gaines was silent as they walked back toward the plant. "Bert," he said slowly, "what the hell do you suppose got into him?" Sokolski shrugged. "You were the one who spotted the trouble with him, Joe. just think, if you could have checked him out completely-". Gaines could not help looking up at the stars and saying what he had really been thinking all along, "It's a small world, Bert, a small world." # V By James Gunn Illustrated by Paul Orban It was alien , indestructible and mysterious -- therefore a terror and a menace. It was also alone, hungry and afraid -- therefore prone to miscalculation. Blind, mindless, insensate. Odorerything, in, under, above. Parties less, dumb, deaf. Fear. will not proceed until certain that Pressure from within, instinctive every building is clear, every eavc and powerful. Around it, a constricand rooftop is clean." tion. Cause unknown. Conflict. "Is that right, Mr. Gardner?" Pain. "Don't ask me," Gardner One sense remains. Listen! Send snapped. "Mr. Burke is in charge out feelers through the darkness! here." He turned to Burke. "As city Somewhere there must be somemanager, I can't permit the city to thing else alive. Somewhere there be shut down indefinitely on mere is a reason for fear. Listen! suspicion. Besides the personal distress and inconvenience, this shutrison. If open, detail a company to dollars an hour... close it up. General orders to all "Would you rather be a zombi -- will be thoroughly searched, inside people in the city?" "You have a wild imagination. You don't know that the thing can take over a man. You aren't even sure that it escaped. And if something did escape, you can't be sure it's still alive. There was no reason for the declaration of martial law." "I'll give you a reason," Burke explained quietly. "The animal is dead. Cold, stony. No doubt about it. The deceleration killed it. With extraterrestrial fauna, we have to work fast. We can't be sure how soon decomposition will set in or how the internal organs will be affected. The body is in the examination room, on the dissecting table, within minutes after landing. But before we can make an incision, something starts oozing out from under it. A black blob... "Good God! What's that?" Daniels was more startled than afraid. He was staring at the sheep-like animal on the dissecting table. The scalpel was poised in his hand. Burke was afraid. He had been afraid for a long time. "Parasite," he said. He spat it out viciously, as if that would deny his fear. The inky blob continuel to ooze. Ellis, who had insisted, like Burke, on being present as an observer, was calm and analytical as usual. "Not necessarily," he said. "Could be a symbiosis." "Symbiosis is a careful balance," Burke said violently. "For us it's a parasite. Dangerous. What I was afraid of all along." "Okay, okay," Daniels put in quickly. "The question is, what do we do with it?" "Kill it!" "How?" "Not so fast," Ellis said. "We can't be sure it's dangerous. This opportunity might be unique." "It took over this thing," Burke pointed out. "It's an animal, like us. We can't take the chance that it could adapt itself to man." The blob oozed. It was bigger than a hand, now. "It has to have a means of propagation," Burke said, suppressing a shudder. "It's amorphous, like an amoeba. Binary fission is indicated. If so, then no one on Earth is safe. We shouldn't have brought it back." The blob oozed. It was the size of a dinner plate. It had begun to thin out near the body. Ellis sighed. "Kill it." Daniels sliced down with the scalpel in his hand. It passed effortlessly through the blob, as if through a shadow, and skidded along the stainless steel top of the table. The blob, uncut, continued to pull itself free of the animal. It was like a pool of ink. There was no smell to it and maybe no feel either, but no one offered to touch it. It was just black. Innocent, maybe, but black and alien and therefore evil. Daniels was shaken. Without reason. "Obviously it can't be cut or shot or hurt by any such weapon," Burke said impatiently. "Well, do something," Daniels stammered. "Don't just stand there talking about it. It's pulling itself free. It'll be coming after one of us in a minute." Ellis glanced around the room. "The door's closed. Nobody leaves here." "What good will that do," Daniels objected strenuously, "if it can interpenetrate matter?" "Flesh and steel are two different substances. It hasn't entered the table." "You mean we're stuck here with that thing until it gets us or we can find a way to kill it?" Daniels shouted. Ellis nodded impatiently. "Obviously." He studied the room again. "Somewhere within these walls we have to find a weapon or a poison." By now Burke had collected a litter of bottles from the reagent cabinet. He tried them on the blob. Acids and bases, one by one they poured into the blackness and fumed together and dripped onto the floor to eat holes in the rubberized covering. The body of the animal began to dissolve in the growing puddle on the table. The stench of the chemicals and their reactions was almost stifling. Nobody seemed to notice. The blob pulled and thinned and grew larger and remained unaltered by the chemicals. Burke looked around hastily. He grabbed up a burner, turned it on, lit it. It burned blue and hot. He held it upside down, pointed toward the black pool. The blob squirmed. Burke pressed the burner close. The blob moved quickly, moved away from the flame, and as it moved the last strand of blackness pulled loose from the dissolving, alien body. "Quick!" Daniels said hysterically. "Before it gets away! It's afraid of the fire!" Burke hadn't waited. He held the flame as close to the blob as he would get it. "We need a blowtorch," he said. The blob squirmed. It flowed away from the flame, across the table, and the flame looked as if it turned back from the blackness. But it wasn't that. There just wasn't enough gas pressure. The flame curled up naturally. The darkness wavered, its edges curling. It wriggled and began to flap, first one side and then the other, alternating. Slowly, awkwardly, it began to fly. It climbed into the air and circled around the room silently, a blot of darkness. "Close the ventilators!" Ellis said quickly. Burke raced to the side of the room and pulled the switch that slipped steel shutters across the gratings. "Oh God. oh God!" Daniels was saying. He cringed beside the table. shaking, as the blackness swooped close. "The interpenetration is obviously variable," Ellis said. "Otherwise it couldn't fly." "Or the only thing it can penetrate is flesh," Burke amended. He was searching the room for another weapon, futilcly. The circular shadow flapped its way high into one corner of the room. It pressed itself against the ceiling and clung, unmoving. It looked like a black stain. Thev # stared up at it, the three of them, with different eyes. Ellis was curious; Burke was murderous; Daniels was terror-stricken. Daniels moved. "Stay away from that door!" Ellis snapped. Daniels stopped. He was shaking as he looked back over his shoulder. "We can't kill it," he said. His voice shook, too. "What do we do? Wait here until it decides which one of us itwants?""If we have to," Ellis said. "The question is, how long can it live outside a host?" Burke said. "It isn't breathing. Presumably, it can't eat in its present form. But it does use up energy. If we can't kill it, we can starve it to death." "Unless we starve first," Daniels moaned. "We'll run out of air before then," Ellis observed. "We'll have to take a chance. One of us will leave for a blowtorch," Burke said. "Me!" Daniels panted. "Me!" "I'm staying here," Burke said. "I don't want to let it out of my sight. You're staying here, too, Daniels. We want someone who will come back." He looked at Ellis; Ellis nodded. "I'll stand guard in front of the door with the burner. If you open the door just a crack, you can slip through before it can move." Daniels was standing by the table where the animal was half-dissolved. His eyes were wild and staring. The burner hose wouldn't reach to the door. Burke pulled off his shirt, looked at Ellis, who was standing beside the door, and held his shirt close to the flame. The shirt smoked and started to bum. In two quick steps Burke was in front of the door, his back to it, his eyes on the blot of darkness that clung to the ceiling. "Go!" he said. Ellis moved. And the blot moved. swooping down at Burke. Burke waved the flaming shirt. The door behind him slipped open. The blot swerved in the air, away from the flames. It headed straight for Daniels. Daniels screamed. He put his arms around his head and sprinted blindly for the door. The blot followed him, only a foot behind. Burke glanced at them, at Daniels and the blot, and he tried to do two things at once. He lowered his shoulder at Daniels and tossed the burning shirt at the blot. Somehow, both missed. Daniels sidestepped instinctively, and the blot swerved in the air. Flesh smacked solidly against flesh. Something snapped. As Burke spun around, he caught a glimpse of the blot slipping through the door. Daniels was gone. "Commander!" Burke gasped. "What happened?" Ellis raised a white face from the floor. "Broken leg," he said, and fainted. Burke turned and ran toward the intercom. "Air lock guard," he snapped. "Close the lock. Emergency" Trained responses were quick. No one questioned orders like that. Burke heard the whirring of motors. Something clanged shut, with finality. "What's up?" asked a tinny voice. "Anything get out that lock in the last second or two?" Burke asked quickly. "Nobody." "Anything, I said!" "Well, no -- I mean -- I don't think so. I had a feeling that something brushed past me like -- like -- " "Like what?" "Well, like a bat. Only it wasn't a bat. What's going on anyway?" "Hell to pay! Com room! Com room! Put the radar on a small object, about the size of a bird, flying out from the ship! Whatever you do, don't lose it! Then get Washington. Sccspacc. I'll be there in five seconds. Doc! To the examination room on the double. Commander's got a broken leg. And send two men to pick up Daniels and hold him for observation. He's hysterical. Leaving now for the Com room. OfT!' Shock! Identity ! Terror! Conflict! Pain ! Isolation! We are one. Once we were many. Remember. Remember! The object falling from the sky, gleaming in the sunlight, gleam dimmed by a shortening leg of flame. Scatter, brothers! Much later, the object opening a mouth, black against the shiny skin. Is the object hungry? Run, brothers! Things coming out, climbing down, standing on the ground, twolegged, tall. Beings. Listen, brothers! "Sheep! I'll be damned. Nothing but sheep!" "Don't be fooled. They're more than sheep." "Well, look at them. What would you call them?" "Yes, look at them. See them standing there looking at us, as if they could understand everything we say." "Now, Burke, don't let your imagination run away with you. I agree, it's unlikely that they're identical with our Earth sheep, but they look like them and we might as well call them that." "It's a dangerous mental trick, Commander. We delude ourselves into thinking we understand them when we give them a name." "Maybe they look to you like they're listening to us, but my guess is that it's curiosity. After all, we're the only other beings they've ever seen." "That's just it. Where's the rest of the fauna? We've scouted every land mass, and these are the only animals we've seen. How do you account for that?" "Why should wc have to?" "Oh, God preserve us!" "Be a little patient, Burke. We all aren't ecologists. The others may not sec what's so obvious to you. What's you're trying to say is that evolution wouldn't produce just one species." "What do you think ! Look at this world. As pretty as a spring day. Mild. Gentle. And inhabited by nothing but these herbivores. And not very manv of them, either." "I've seen plenty of them." "Not under the circumstances." "And you think these sheep wiped out all the rest of the fauna?" "Obviously." "It could have been natural conditions." "That destroyed everything but these things? Nonsense." "Well, then, they wiped out the rest. So what?" "How? Man has been top dog on Earth for a long, long time, and we haven't even come close to wiping out our pests and carnivores. As bloodthirsty as we are. What does that make these things? It makes them the mst deadly creatures we've ever known." "These sheep? Nuts!" "It is a little farfetched, Burke." "Think of this, then. What keeps their numbers down? With all this grazing land available, there's only a fraction of the number of these creatures that there should be. With no natural enemies, with nothing to prey on them, according to Malthusian law they should expand in the presence of abundant food to the limit of the land to feed them, and a little beyond. Like the rabbits in Australia. Or man himself." "Maybe their natural enemies are small. Insects. Germs and viruses. Or maybe they're almost sterile." "And maybe they control their breeding. Or maybe it's controlled for them. That's something we've never been able to do. That frightens me more than the other." "You've just set foot on this world and you're frightened already. What will you be like before we're ready to leave?" "Gibbering. You think that's funny, but a sensible man knows when to be frightened. I'm afraid now." Hosts! The thought was startling and puzzled. Hosts, brothers, without directors! Self-directed hosts that have come from a long way off in that thing they call a ship, from the nightlights, where all are like they are. Danger! Later. Much later. "I guess we're done. The mapping is finished. The ship is crammed with samples of everything we could lay our hands on. The really thorough analysis will have to wait until we get back to Earth. But from our investigations we can report that the expedition exceeded our fondest hopes. I don't sec why colonization can't begin immediately. We take off tomorrow." "Samples of everything? You've forgotten one. We haven't any sheep." "Haven't seen any for weeks. They've disappeared. Just after Daniels decided he wanted one for dissection." "Doesn't that seem significant to you?" "Now, Burke. Let's not get started on that again." "I suggest we put out traps tonight. I don't feel that this survey is complete when we don't have any specimens of the dominant form of life. The form of life, for that matter." "No! I don't agree. Taking back specimens before we understand them would be incredibly dangerous. We don't know anything about them. Give them a chance to get loose on Earth, and we might have the story of the rabbits in Austrab ia all over again." "There's no chance of that, Burke. We aren't going to give them a chance to get loose. And we've seen nothing to indicate that they're dangerous. You've been studying them ever since we landed, and you haven't discovered anything." "A negative answer that's practically worthless. As you pointed out a moment ago. they all disappeared weeks ago. As long as I don't have answers to the two questions I suggested when we first landed, I must regard them as the most dangerous things we've ever encountered. How did they kill off their competitors? And what controls their breeding?" "I'm afraid Secspace wouldn't look at it that way. I'm afraid we would be considered derelict in our duties if wc returned without a specimen. Allhough I'll put your protest on record, of course." "A specimen, you said? "All right, Burke. Just one. There can't be any danger of them multiplying. Will that satisfy you?" "No. We can't be sure that they propagate sexually. Not without dissection w-hich we haven't been able to perform. But if it's the only concession I can get -- " "It is. And you can console yourself with the hope that the traps will be empty tomorrow morning, as they have been every other morning." A specimen, brothers. One of us. One? What is that? A host and a director. One must go. Or they will return to exterminate us, as zee exterminated the others. One must go. Which one? One ready for division. One of us. This part of us. Go. A belonging. Wc are not a wholl, but a part of. Wc have a mission. The pressure from within continues. It is agony, but it is agony located and identified. We must divide. That is it. That is the pressure. We are one. Once we were many. We must be many again. But there is terror, and while there is terror we cannot divide. Fear is a force that binds us around, that closes us in so tight wc cannot divide. We need peace. We must have peace. But wc are encircled by enemies who seek to destroy us. They will destroy us unless wc destroy them first. But we are one, and they arc many. Learn. Learn the dangers of this alien world. Learn the powers of these alien beings. Learn survival. Back. Back to the Enemy... throwers will lead the advance. They will fire at anydiing black, any spot, any shadow. They will fire first and ask questions afterwards." "Good God. Burke! Don't let that order go out! You don't know what you're saying. Think what will happen if you tell soldiers to shoot at anything !" "I'm thinking what will happen if they don't. There shouldn't be anybody inside that area except the searching parties. And firemen and equipment are following the soldiers in to put out the fires... Air patrol! All flame-thrower equipped helicopters will fire at any small flying object, bird or bat. Particularly bats. They will keep pace with the ground forces working in." "But you don't even know that the thing is in the city!" "We followed it by radar from the ship until wc lost it over the center of the city. By that time the permanent radar installations around the city were alerted, and we had a line of helicopters shooting down everything that flics. Radar didn't pick up a thing. Don't worry, we'll get it. We'll find it and destroy it." "But will there be anything left when you get through. You're the kind who would burn down a house to get rid of termites!" "Mr. Gardner. City manager or not, one more outburst and I'll have you ejected from primary control. You're here to help us with your knowledge of the city, and all I've heard so far is objections to everything we do." "Looters. Mr. Burke. Looters reported inside the cordon." "That area has to be kept clear. The soldiers will shoot them down on sight. Put that announcement out through every media, radio, television, loudspeakers. The bodies will be incinerated where they fall. AJI animals will receive the same treatment. Let nothing that moves slip through the cordon...' That is the Enemy. Shrewd and murderous. If we could only kill him -- But there is no chance. He is too well guarded. We are growing weak. We are not meant for this kind of existence. The escape, the long flight, and now the internal struggle to divide, stifled by terror, has sapped our strength. Wc need food. For that we must have a host. Where are we. How close are die searchers and their flames? We are blind without a host. We starve without a host. And yet we had no choice. We had to leave our old host because it was dead. We had to leave it to divide. And now there is no peace, and we cannot divide. We can kill many of them, but eventually they will destroy us. We can swoop down on them and touch them with death, but they would turn their flames upon us, and we would die. We felt it there in the ship, when the flame was turned toward us. We felt that we had never known before, the possibility of death. Wc, who arc immortal, could die. Reach out, reach out! Find the searchers! How close are they? How do they work? Find out, so that we can plan. We reach. We fumble. We see... The night lit with brief, oily flares that shred the darkness. The marching ranks, watchful, ready. The machines, rolling, ponderous. The bright lights that roam ahead and around and up. "My God, Joe, look at it! An army! What the hell's it all for?" "You know as much as I do. They just turned us out in the middle of the night and rushed us up here like somebody's pants was on fire. Look for something! What? Hell, I don't know. Shoot at anything that moves! Shoot at shadows! With flame throwers! Somebody's gone off his nut, I guess." A shadow leaps in a shielded corner. A nozzle spits greasy, licking flame. Wood smokes and then bums. A stream of water hisses on it, turning into steam. "Halt!" The marching ranks halt. The machines stop. Only the lights keep moving. The helicopters hang motionless in the air above, black nozzles poking out from them like a dragon's smoky nostrils, landing lights burning down onto the rooftops. "Company A will take the building to the right. Company B will take the building to the left. They will work their way to the top and onto the roof. From the top story windows they will look up toward the eaves. Bum anything black, any shadow, anything. Firemen will follow with hand extinguishers. Remaining companies will stay in ranks until the search is completed. Get going!" Up through the building, searching for shadows. Climbing long steps, peering up and down elevator shafts, inspecting every cranny, drawer, crack. Lifting rugs, turning over furniture, removing cushions. Shooting fire at shadows. Up and up. Feeling a little silly, but impressed, somehow, by the size of the operation, and the seriousness, and being thorough because the captain is watching. A shot, below in thp street, echoing up. Rush to the window; peer out. A civilian is in the street below, stretched out. You know that he is dead. As you watch, flame blackens the body, eats at it until there is only a cinder. "What's the matter, boy? Nervous?" "Hell, yes! Ain't you?" And eventually you go down and out and the ranks march on a few paces and halt and this time it is your turn to wait in the street while other companies search. In the distance you can see other helicopters circle of them. The center seems to be the black hulk of the public library... Hopeless! They are all around, these alien killers, these hosts without directors. Wc are one, and they are many. We despair. We will die here, wherever we are. We can reach out and feel them, closing in upon us from every direction. The circle draws in upon us, nearer, nearer... And someone approaches. We sense the thought, slow and stumbling. It is not one of the searchers. They are still fairly distant. He looks up. "Public library. Nothing there. Nothing but books. Got to hurry. They'll be here soon. Before that I got to find me a place to sleep or Christ!" A chance, a chance. The thought sings through us like a surge of energy. He is below. We sense him there. That means that we are above him, clinging under the roof of the building he thinks of as the public library. Will he welcome us or fight? Is he weak or strong? It does not matter. We have no choice. We must take the chance. If we can get nourishment and sight, if we can get outside the searchers, wc can reach a place of safety and peace where wc can leave him, where we can divide. And it must be soon. He will die, of course, and it is unfortunate. But we have no choice. Let loose, now. Release our hold. Fall through the air, fluttering at first, then swoooping down upon him. We reach out to him, and he suspects nothing. His mind is busy with other things, the things he is looking for, like the things he has hidden in his pockets. Down upon him. Closer. Slowly now. He feels nothing as we light. His thoughts move on, busy, roiled. Let the probes reach in through the back of the neck, delicately. There! He stands stiffly, immobile, a scream echoing through his mind, silent, unvoiced. But as wc go in, he shrinks back, not fighting, somehow relieved, and we are puzzled. Wc did not think it would be so easy. But it cannot matter, and we must hurry. We sink through the back of his neck, following the probe that seized the control centers of the brain. Quickly wc send microscopic feelers down through the nerve network, branching, branching, until they reach the ends of the extremities and dig down into the deepest, smallest organs of the body. We test out the network gently, and control is effective. Before we go any further, wc must take precautions. Jerkily, unsteadily, we move the body into the shadow's. Clumsily, wc lay the body down beside the building. Wc relax it all over. The searchers will have to be almost upon us before they see. Relaxed, the body is more accessible, and wc are eager ; we are hungry. Feelers reach out through the blood vessels, absorbing food as they go. When that circuit is completed, wc arc satiated. Our hunger is appeased. We feel a relaxation ourselves, a lowering of our awareness, and wc must fight it. There is much to do: there is no time for relaxation. Now wc must take the last step. We hesitate, not knowing why we hesitate, and we send out a final set of feelers through the alien brain. searching for the seat of memory. We find it. We begin to learn. We learn more as we go deeper. We learn a new identity. Smith. I am a laborer. I have a wife and four children. An identification card in my billfold describes a man, but it isn't me. Thirty years old, it says. Brown hair, brown eyes. Five feet nine. One hundred sixty pounds. Scar on right forehead. Tatoo of woman on left forearm. That isn't me. Figures lie. I am bigger than that; I am taller than that. I am only working as a laborer until something better comes along. I've been picking up things that people left behind when they were ordered out of here. They call it looting, but it isn't that. It isn't stealing. Somebody else will take the things if I don't. The soldiers -- don't tell me that they don't do all right by themselves when they go through those places. Besides, the things belong to me as much as anybody else... It goes on and on, not like that, slow and ponderous, but as swiftly as thought spanning the galaxy until we know almost as much about Smith as lie knows, and maybe more. We do not enjoy it. The unpleasantness of the man named Smith is only part of the price we must pay. But w-e hold back a little still, and it consoles us that wc will leave him when his body has taken us to a place of safety and peace. But wc will still have his memories. They will stay with us forever. The automatic processes of the feelers have begun. Subtly the body is strengthened. Glands are stimulated. Tissues are regenerated. Wastes and old, accumulated poisons arc removed. But basically we do not change anything. The man named Smith must remain physically the same and undetectable. It is irony that the body we have taken possession of is now almost immortal. It is vulnerable only to accidents. Our automatic responses will repel disease and revitalize aging tissues and perform innumerable other tasks which protoplasmic bodies can do poorly, if at all. The capabilities are there, but the inefficient brain does not use them. The body is immortal, and yet, when we leave, it must die. Now, of all the possible hosts on Earth, this one has a director; it can enjoy the blessings of sanity and direction. It has been a rape, not the meeting of two mutually acquiescent parts, incomplete in themselves, together a whole entity which is more than the sum of both. With our former host, it had been a pleasant, gently sensual experience of uniting and sharing, and afterwards it had been a completeness, a partnership by which both parties profited. Here there had been no chance of that. Wp knew it from the beginning. These things called men are too independent. Now we have an identity. Survival dictates that we become that identity. We must act like it; a slip means destruction. We must think like it. We must be "we" no longer. We are one. We are I. I am a man named Smith. are close. I see them shining, burning, only a block or two away. On the other side, too, they will be as close, or closer, and all around. Soon they will be here, and I must think quickly. For they will shoot this body, and I would have to leave again, and this time there would be no second chance. There are things in my pockets that do not belong to me. If they are found on me, it will be disastrous. I take them out, rings, watches, money, and I drop them through the grating on which I lie. But there is one tiling in the pockets I do not drop. It is a bottle. It is a small bottle; it fits in my hand, sloshing gently. I raise it to my lips with a gesture that is almost automatic, my nostrils wrinkling away from the sharp odor. I drink. I cringe from the body's reaction, and then I drink again and let some of the liquid dribble down my chin onto my clothes. I listen. I hear a shot, not far away. Somebody screams and is silent. The next moment a blinding light shines through my closed eyelids. I make a loud, breathing noise, trying to hide my fear. I lie there, wondering if they will shoot or bum me with flames, and the moment is eternity. "Oh, hell! It's only a drunk!" "We oughta shoot hi in. That's our orders." "Look at him. He musta been lavin' there all night." "I can't shoot him. Can you?" "Let's take him to the Captain." "Wake up, there! Wake up!" Prodding. Eyes fluttering open, peering out, glazed and dull, into the light. One arm coming up across the eyes, protectively. "Hey you! Get up!" "Whassa matter? Whass goin' on?" "Get up. Up on your feet!" "Can't man lay down for a little snooze? Eh?" "Come on! Get up! We ain't got all night." "Aw right, aw right." I wobble to my feet. I stand there swaying. I see their noses wrinkling, and I smell the sharp odor again. They close in upon me. They lead me off. I stumble along between them, iny head drooping, for an interminable time. "What's your name?" "Name? Name's Smith. George Smith. What's yours?" "Ugh! Search his pockets. Get out his identity card, too." They fumble through my pockets and pull out my billfold. The world wants to spin around me. I let it spin. "Occupation?" "Eh?" "What's your line of work?" "Work for Rieger. Warehouse. Big man, Rieger. Lotsa money, lotsa 'nflucnce. 'Ma union man. Citizen. Got my rights." What were you doing here?" Can't man lay down for little snooze? Eh? No law 'gainst it. Eh? Broke a law or somethin'? Pay fine? Okay." I reach fumblingly for my billfold. It is gone. I let my hand r drop. "Oh, hell ! Let him go! Give him back his billfold, and one of you had better escort him through the lines. Get his head shot ofT other wise. A long, stumbling walk through darkness and sudden light, alternating, until suddenly there is nothing but darkness, and we stop. "Okay, Bud. You're out. From here on. you're on your own. Just keep heading that way, and I hope you don't remember anything in the morning. Because if you do, you'll start shaking and you won't be able to stop." I am shaking now, inside. I am weak as he disappears into the dark, and I don't know whether it is because I am unused to this alien body or because of the liquid I drank which my feelers have picked up from the veins. I reach out again. I reach out to contact the Enemy again, and it is more difficult now. because of the body or the liquid or the weak shaking, but I find him at last. "It isn't over. The search can't be over. They haven't found it yet." "They've met. The searching parties have come together. They've gone all over the public library, and there isn't any place else for them to search. Relax, Burke, the thing is dead." "No, no, Ellis. It's alive, I tell you. They missed it somewhere. You haven't been on top of this thing like I have. While you've been getting your leg set. I've been directing this operation, and I've got a feeling for it. The monster is lurking somewhere. It isn't dead." "You've been with it too long. You've been with it ever since we landed on that damned planet. Now it's hard for you to realize that it's over. Look at it logically. The soldiers went over that section of town with a tea strainer. They didn't miss a thing. You've done a good job, Burke. I'll sec that you get credit for it." "Damn it, I don't want credit. I want that thing dead. I want to see it for myself and know it's dead. I don't want to dream about it any more. If the troops got it, why didn't they report that they had?" "How long do you think it would Ia.st in the inferno of a flame thrower? I saw them working as I came across town. Whoosh! Whoosh! Firing at shadows. And that's how it would vanish. Just like a shadow. No one would know. It's incinerated now; there's nothing left." "Yes, and maybe it's hiding somewhere. Some cranny that the soldiers missed. They aren't perfect. A crack in the pavement. A water pipe. A thousand places they wouldn't think of." "And starved to death. It wasn't meant to live independently. It was a parasite, which means that it couldn't exist for very long without a host." "Not necessarily. Some parasites have a free-living stage; others have one or more intermediate hosts. But analogies are useless and deceptive. This isn't one of our parasites. It's extraterrestrial, and it may not follow terrestrial patterns. Even granting that it would die within a few hours of free-living, that leaves one terrible possibility." "What's that?" "Maybe it found a host." "An animal, you mean? A dog or a cat? Or a bird?" "Or a man." "But you ordered all the looters shot." "I know, I know. But if only one escaped, through somebody's carelessness or sombody's misplaced softness... darkness any longer. But I hesitate, and I catch one last thought. "There's only one thing to do. Nobody leaves the city until wc'vc checked on them. All animals are to be incinerated. We'll have to have the biggest manhunt and extermination this country has ever seen... I hurry away. I don't much care which way I go, and I walk purposelessly along the dark streets, spotted occasionally with overhanging lights. I can't leave the city. Not now. anyway. I will have to wait until their measures fail. They must fail, now, and their only chance is for me to make a slip. If I can act like all the rest of the hosts, I will be safe and they will finally give up. Meanwhile the pressure to divide, submerged for the moment, will grow stronger and stronger inside me, inside this alien body. I will have to keep it for awhile yet, and I hate every moment of it. It is a leaden weight I am forced to push along. It is stubborn and Hcshy and stupid. My feet turn at a lighted doorway, and I push myself inside a room before I can stop. I stand in the doorway, blinking, wondering why I have come in, and it is a strange thing to be wondering. "George!" someone says. It is a woman, a female. She throws a soft arm around my neck and drags me farther into the room. The lights fight unsuccessfully through a smoky haze. There are booths along the sides, and chairs and tables in the center, and a bar across the other end of the room. "Where you been?" the woman asks. I search through Smith's memory for a face and a name, and I find them. Dolores. "I been watching the soldiers, Dolores," I say. It is important that I do not arouse suspicions. In the next few days questions will be asked. I would like to leave this place, but I do not dare. There was something about Dolores in the memories I could not force myself to search. I must wait a little until my leaving will go unnoticed. "What they lookin' for, hey, George?" "How do I know? I'm a mind reader or something?" "I bet it's a bomb. Somebody planted a bomb, and they're lookin' for it. That's it, I bet." "Maybe. They were shooting people." "No kiddin'! Here, have a drink." A glass is thrust into my hand. A head is leaned against my chest; tangled hair brushes irritatingly against my face. "Phew! You already had a few." "So what?" She leads me to a booth and forces me down into it and slides in beside me, her thigh hot against mine. "You ain't drinkin' George," she complains loudly. She leans toward me. "WTiat you get?" she whispers. I reach into her mind, reluctantly, shuddering at the maelstrom of twisted thoughts and fears and hopes and passions. She and Smith had been intimate. Just tonight she persuaded Smith to sneak into the closed area to pick up whatever he could find. "Nothin'," I say. "Nothin'!" She says it loudly, angrily. Quickly, she begins to whisper again. "What you mean by that? Why didn't you get anything? What are you trying to do, hold out on me?" "Oh, shut up!" "Maybe you think you can push me around," she says, her voice rising. "Maybe you think you can cheat me and get away with it. Think again. Remember, I can tell them you was in there. They wouldn't like that, I bet. I bet I could get you in a lot of trouble." "For God's sake, shut up!" I whisper violently. "You'll get us both in trouble. Don't you understand? I couldn't get in. They were shooting people, anybody they saw, and then they were burning them. Maybe you'd rather I was laying in there, dead and fried." She sags against the hack of the booth; her body is a mass of fat curves with creases between them. "Oh, well, it was a chance. What we couldn't have done with a few thousand, eh, Georgic?" Her voice is wistful. "You could have skipped out on your wife and brats, and I could have skipped with you, and we could've ditched this town and had a gay old time. Oh, hell! Drink up, Georgic. Tomorrow we die." I raise the glass and take a swallow and almost gag. I feel it bum down my throat and lay burning in the pit of my stomach. The rising fumes make my head swim. Her leg presses more firmly against mine as she leans over against me and puts her arms around me and lays her head on my shoulder. "We still got our health, eh, Georgie?" she says. "We still got each other." "Yeah," I say. "Come on up to my room," she whispers. "We'll show the world what we care." I catch a glimpse of her mind. It is wide open, and I am sickened. I try not to show it. I try to act reluctant. "Can't," I say, and the words are difficult to get out as if the lips are trying to form another word. "Late now. I got to work tomorrow. And Agnes is gonna raise hell as it is.' She sits up sullenly. "Funny you never thought of any of that before." The thing I want most in the world is to stop touching her. "I had a bad time tonight," I say. "A coupla times they almost caught me." "Poor Georgie #" she says quickly, sympathetically. Her hand reaches out to stroke my face. "I didn't know it was gonna be that bad." I try to stand up. The room wobbles. "I got to get out of here," I say. "I don't feel good." "Sure, George. Finish your drink." I hesitate, and the glass is halfway to my lips before I know it, and I let it come the rest of the way and drink it down. She slips out of !the booth, and I slip out, and she stands next to me, hanging on my shoulder. "Tomorrow night?" she whispers. The body feels sick, and I feel sick inside the body. But its worse than that. I'm afraid. "Yeah," I get out through stiff lips, and I find my mouth brushing against hers, and I pull myself away. I thread my way between the tables, unsteadily, and I get out into the night, and I'm breathing deeply. The next thing I know I'm climbing steep steps in a dark corridor, and I don't know how I got there. I'm not climbing alone. Fear is climbing with me. again, and the darkness is thick with stale odors of cooked food. I try to figure out what I'm doing here and how I got here, but I feel vague and feeble, and the body, staggering a little, keeps climbing purposefully. Except that it cant have a purpose; I am its purpose. I can stop, if I want, but I let the body go on to its unknown destination. I stop in front of a dark door. My hand reaches out. It has a key in it. The key fits into the keyhole and rattles and turns. The other hand eases the door open. I slip through into the room beyond and close the door gently behind me. I walk through the room, maneuvering around unseen objects unerringly, although my feet are heavy and clumsy, and I find my hand on the knob of another door. I turn it gently. It begins to open. It creaks. I hesitate. "George?" It is a low, harsh voice, disembodied in the darkness. "Yeah." "So you finally came home." There is no welcome here. The voice is bitter and spiteful. I walk into the room and ease myself into a chair I don't know is there, and I reach out wearily toward the voice in the darkness. There is a bed there, and a woman is on the bed, and the woman is Smith's lawful mate. While I am Smith, she is my lawful mate. I touch her mind and recoil. Hate! Violent and vicious. Hate doubled because it was once something else. Hate redoubled because it is impotent. My hands reach down to untie my shoes. But inside the body, I am searching frantically for ail excuse to get away. And I can't think of any. "You run out of money or did Dolores get tired of you?" "Nuts!" I say. "You have something to eat?" "Yeah." "We had mush." "Yeah?" "That's the third time this week." "So what?" "I'd think you'd want your kids to have a decent meal once in a while." "I give you money," I say loudly. "It ain't my fault you throw it away on candy and magazines and movies." "What else I got?" she says. "Fat lot of money you give me." A distant voice says, "Mama!" "You woke up the kids again," she says wearily. I hear the bedsprings creak. A moment later an overhead light comes on. I blink. She is in a thin, ragged nightgown. Her face is haggard and old, but the body under the gown is still young. She walks by me. and I find my hand reaching out toward her. She twists away from it. She looks at me with hard, hating eyes, and her mouth curls with revulsion. She walks through the door and into the darkness beyond. The bedroom is dirty and dis# beveled. The light glares down from a naked bulb hanging on a cord. It swings back and forth. Shadows sway around the room. I reach out toward the other minds. They arc young. They are ovcrwisc. "He's home." "I heard him. He's drunk again." "Why does he have to come home? Why can't he stay away forever." "Mama says we wouldn't have nothing to cat." "I don't care. I don't care if we cat mush all the time. It's better when lie's gone." "Sh-h-h. Mama's coming." "Go hack to sleep, boys. Everything's all right." "He's home, ain't he, Mama?" "Yes. Go hack to sleep." "Why can't he stay away?" "Don't sav things like that. He's your father." "He ain't hurt you, has he. Mama?" "No. Of course not." "If he hurts you tonight. I'll kill him. I'll kill him." "Me, too." Hate. Pouring out at me. Surrounding me. Pressing down... "You mustn't say things like that. He's your father.' "He's not! He's not!" "Be quiet now. Go back to sleep." She returns. I hear her footsteps echoing through the dark, the sticky, odorous dark, and I look around the room, and I wonder why I am here, so far from the clean meadows and the calm, gentle hosts of my home world. And I wonder how soon I can get away. I wonder if I must spend a night here, or more, sleeping in that bed beside the body of the woman, sensing her movements, listening to her thoughts, torn with repugnance. She is an enemy... I have lived with danger for a long time. Ever since the ship descended upon our world, danger has walked beside inc. It didn't matter so much there, because we were many, but now I am one and alone, and I am afraid. These men are strange animals, and I, who have strange powers they never suspected until recently -- I am afraid of them. I am in the body of a man named Smith, and I hate it. Smith! Smith ! Where are you, Smith ! into bed beside the woman. I lie on one side of the bed, and she lies on the other, and we listen to each other breathing. I feel her hate. I try to plan how I will get out of the city and how I will leave this alien body and seek the peace I need before I can divide. I think how I will find some of the animals that Smith heard of, and I will use them as hosts until I am many again, and we will take over this world. Once there are many of us, it will be simple. It will be painful work, but simple. But it is useless. All I can think about is the woman lying there on the other side of this uncomfortable bed, and how I am surrounded by strange flesh and the flesh is surrounded by hate. I am shocked to find myself in the middle of the bed. The discovery paralyzes me for a moment, and then I try to draw back. But there arc odd, undefinable things working inside me. Uncontrolled sensations quiver along the nerves inside the body, quiver along the feelers that lie microscopically inside the nerves. Glands arc discharging their secretions into the body. The process seems automatic; I can't stop them. The body, too, must have automatic responses. It reaches toward the woman. "George!" she says in a low, vicious voice. "Get away from me." I put my hand on her. She writhes away from it, her flesh shrinking. I get closer. She struggles; she hits at me with her fists. I pin her hands behind her with one of mine. I lower my head over hers, kissing her lips that twist like snakes under mine. "George! Don't!" she snaps, when I raise my head for a moment. "The children arc listening." "So what?" The body goes on doing things that I can't control. I can't control anything now. Flesh speaks to flesh, and the emotions working inside me arc wild and violent. I try to shut myself away from them. I try to cower back, to disengage myself, but it is no use. "George," she says. I hear the voice distantly. "George! You filthy beast! Don't cdtne crawling to me after you've been with that woman!" But her voice is softening, and her body is softening, too. As I release her hands, they do not claw at me. They try to push me away, but they arc weak and ineffectual. Horror is inside the body with me, and I cannot help what the body is doing. Sweat rolls off our bodies. "You beast," she says again. "You beast." But her voice is different now. She isn't pushing me away any more. And the worst part is that beneath that surface response is the hate, still there, as violent and unappeasable as ever. Later I find myself lying on the other side of the bed again. My senses arc dulled with horror, and the body is dull, too. It is drifting into sleep. "You devil," the woman says in a wild, torn voice. "I hate you." And the body sleeps, soddenly. But I do not sleep. I cannot sleep, like the body, and forget. I must lie awake and remember. And one thought, violent and powerful, drives all the others before it. Escape! Get away, now! Get free from the body before it wakes again and does other terrible, uncontrollable things. There is danger! Ignore it! Pull free now, before it J s too late. I know that I can't stand it any longer. I must be free again. Perhaps this time I can find an animal, some pet, or better, a small animal like a rat. It will have holes and secret ways which the Enemy can't find. Unlike us, he has been unable to exterminate his pests. He wall not be able to do it now. The danger is great, but the danger of staying is greater. I try to begin the slow process of extricating myself from this fleshy trap. But the long, slender feelers will not slip from the nerves and the vessels. They arc entangled, glued fast. Is that it? Or am I so weak that I can't even control my own extensions any longer. The body holds me, clinging to every part of me. It won't let me go. I cannot move. I pull with all my strength. I send out imperious commands along the tenuous feelers. Nothing. Nothing happens. There is only one chancr left. T hesitate before taking it, but at last I send out the impulses of destruction and dissolution. I don't know what it will do to me, caught as I am inside this hody, but I don't care any more. And it docs nothing. Trapped! T relax, hopelessness and dismay washing over me like the ancient sea from which we came. I am caught, irretrievably, finally. I have no control over the body at all; I no longer have any control over my own being. Somehow, inexplicably, the powerful, instintive reactions of this monstrous body have welded me to it. We are bound together, indissolubly, until death. A lifetime of terror and horror stretches before me. I am a consciousness imprisoned in a mass of flesh. Speechless, cut of! from the world, I will live only to suffer. Smith! Smith! Where are you? But there is no answer. Smith is gone. It isn't Smith who has me, who will not let inc go; it is this body. A lifetime! There is one chance, one chance for freedom. There is one place I can turn for help. The Enemy can free me, and it no longer matters if the freedom is death. I reach out once more, desperately. Search? Search! Find him  "Your plan is fantastic. T flatly refuse to let this city be shut down any longer." "Gardner's right. Burke. You can take over a city for a few hours, but when you start talking about days it's impossible. And you can't expect any results." "Okay, Ellis. The plan was foolish. I give up." "Wait a minute. I'm all out of breath. I was all prepared to argue with you, and now you give up. You must have thought of something." "I just started thinking of the thing as a parasite. Parasites are usually particular about their hosts. They're adapted to one species or a few rlosely allied species, and they can't change quickly. If the thing escaped, I imagine it found its host body uncongenial." "Exactly, Burke. And I was going to make another point. In the struggle for existence, the parasite has chosen a negative reaction. It has followed the line of least resistance, giving up freedom and independence for protection and a more constant and usually richer supply of food. It's a retreat from struggle. Basically, it can't compete with positive reactions." "Nevertheless, we must send out a ship immediately to wipe that world clean. We can't give them a chance to adapt." "Just he fore I left the ship, I received new orders from Secspace." "I suppose the thing is dead..." I slip away, my last hope gone. They will not search me out. The monsters ! The monsters! The thing isn't dead, but it would like to be. It must live on until the host dies... Dies! I remember. With a horrible, sickened feeling, I remember. The rejuvenating network I have supplied this body has made it almost immortal. My tormented imprisonment isn't just for a lifetime. It is forever. The sodden body sleeps, this monster named Smith, while my thoughts race madly. The body shivers, very gently. Deep inside it, a mute voice is screaming. Man is a rope connecting animal and Superman, a rope over a precipice... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. -- Nietzche Will the lime machine ever become a reality? Will we ever be able to go back in history and visit the scenes and heroes we ve read about? Will we ever be able to foresee events of the future? Man has broken two barriers -- space and sound -- and now he is working on another... An IF Fact Article By Alson J. Smith man breach space and sound, ventor of the steam locomotive. Totwo of the barriers that stood beday not only sciencefiction writers tween him and a more complete but sober scientists in a score of knowledge of the universe. The airuniversity research centers are plane has reduced the vast disquietly experimenting with the tanccs of land and sea to practical hitherto inviolate time-barrier -- and nothingness, and the same marvelare breaching it every day. ous instrument has propelled huMan has always been intrigued man beings through the air at suby the problem of time. "What is pcrsonic speeds. A hundred years time?" cried St. Augustine. "If noago only hair-shirted preachers, body asks me, I know. But if I ain psychotic cultists, and opium-eating asked, I cannot say.' Thousands science-fiction writers were anticisince then have toyed with the themselves through the stratosphere have been written about man's preat speeds faster than the sound of occupation with the nature of a cannon-shot. time. It governs our lives; we The second half of the century chronicle its passing with calendars, may well give man victory over the clocks, sand and sun-dial, and most enigmatic barrier of all -- dread the slow or quick approach time. Inconceivable? No more so of the final tick that frees us from than travel at supersonic speeds its domination. Yet -- what is it? We would have seemed to the foot soldon't really know. Mathematically, dier in Wellington's army, or the it is a convenient abstraction, a humanly created device to regulate men and events and bring some sort of order into human relationships. And yet, as Immanuel Kant once observed. vc do not know that the "order" which time describes is the true order of the universe. Maurice Maeterlinck had an interesting theory. He comments on the fact that the star Mira, in the constellation of Balaena the Whale, is seventytwo light years away from our earth. Suppose there is on Mira a civilization more advanced than ours, and an astronomer with a telescope powerful enough to distinguish clearly what is going on on Earth. What the Mira astronomer would see would not be Paris, New York, or New Haven as they arc now, but as they were seventytwo years ago -- horse cars in the street, bustles on the ladies and Amos Alonzo Stagg playing left end for Yale. There would be no trace of two world wars, for they would not yet have happened as far as the astronomer on Mira was concerned ; the present, for him, is that which he secs. For him the buried life of the past is the present. Maeterlinck concludes: "In this plurality of times, which are merely pure conventions, are not the events of the future already present somewhere, just as the events of the past arc still present? They cannot be stinted for room, since the present is eternal, which means that it is infinite in space as well as time." Another interesting theory is that held by Dr. C. D. Broad, the English scientist who is at present working at the University of Michigan. Professor Broad believes that there may be a second dimension of time. which normally we know nothing about, lying at right angles to our familiar dimension. If there is this second dimension, then events which are separated by a tiinc-gap in one dimension may be joined without any gap in the other, just as two points on the earth's surface which differ in longitude may be identical in latitude. Our familiar time might be represented by a line going from west to east, and the second or unknown dimension by a line going from south to north. For instance: Mother Shipton, who lived in the sixteenth century, foretold the invention of the automobile. Dr. Broad's theory would explain this by saying that although in our familiar dimension the invention of the automobile occurred more than two centuries after Mother Shipton's prediction, yet, in the second dimension of time, it occurred just before the prediction. In other words, she was remembering, not predicting. One of the most careful theoreticians about time was the late John VV. Dunne, a highly-respected British aeronautical engineer whose theories have been incorporated in three books -- Experiment With Time, The Serial Universe and The New Immortality. Dunne's interest in the time problem began with a series of odd premonitory dreams, in which he dreamed of events exactly as they would happen the day after he dreamed them. Dunne decided that thev were m ordinary dreams, but were displaced in time. Instead of coming after the event they were coming before it. They were normal enough, but he was having them on the wrong nights. He finally decided that all dreams were made up of images of the past, present and future blended together in equal proportions, and that the universe is really stretched out in time. And the conventional view in which the future is cut off from the present and past is due to a purely mentally-imposed barrier which exists only in the conscious mind. In dreams we continually cross and recross that nonexistent equator, which we arbitrarily set across the whole stream of time when we're awake. Absolute for the ancients; they were very sure that the "impenetrable" veil could be pierced, even by the most ordinary of their number. The Pythia at Delphi was always a woman and generally one of the ignorant rural population. Yet, after fasting and inhaling the sacred vapors in the temple, she wns believed to be capable of delivering messages from the gods and predicting future events. With the coming of modem science in the #th and #th centuries, however, time was arbitrarily ruled an Absolute. From then on a philosopher like Kant, a mystic like Swedenborg, a psychologist like McDougall, or even a heretical scientist like occasional note of dissent, hut, generally speaking, time-tethered science was unchallenged in its bestof-allpossible, three-dimensional worlds. In this kind of a climate, prophecy was limited to the logical inference of the weather forecaster and the investment advisor; only the racing fan with his "hunch" could claim a relationship with the Pythia and Pilate's wife. Dr. Albert Einstein dropped a bombshell into this smug three-dimensional world when he postulated his space-time continuum, with time as a fourth dimension. Space and time, he held, were but opposite sides of a coin. Everybody had a lot of fun with long-haired old Dr. Einstein and his Theory of Relativity. Limericks like this one were greatly appreciated: There was a young girl named Miss Bright, Who could travel much faster than light. She departed one day In an Einstcinian way. And came back on the previous night. But the scientists did not laugh. They accepted the space-time continuum. And they saw its implication -- that an amazing new frontier for scientific experiment had been opened. As men had pioneered in space, so now, theoretically, they might pioneer in time. The branch of science which is concerning itself with the breaching of the time barrier is that sub-division of psychology known as parapsychology -- that is, a psychology that deals with phenomena that are beyond normality. At Duke University Dr. J. C. Rhine and bis colleagues in the Laboratory of Parapsychology are experimenting daily with the power of the mind to remember the past and predict the future. Similar experimentation is carried on at the City College of New York and at the universities of Utrecht, Bonn, Groningen, and London. The first experiments in precognition (the ability of the mind to break the tiine-barrier and predict or "see" future events) and retrocognition (the ability to "see" events of the distant past) were carried out at Duke University with a (Extra-Sensory Perception) cards. The subject of the experiment tried to predict the order of the deck as it would be after it was shuffled. The results obtained showed mathematical odds of # to I against chance being responsible for the correct predictions made by the subjects. Other tests with cards, marbles, dice and matching pictures all bore out the original results. The idea that there is a power of the mind which can prevision, which is not limited by time, was healthily substantiated. These simple experiments are gradually becoming more complex, but the results continue to indicate that the actual breaching of the time barrier by some function of the human mind is not at all impossible. Based as they are on the science of mathematics, the tests make dull reading. But the conclusion is inescapable and startling -- time is not an Absolute ; it is a barrier that can be breached, and science has already started down the long road toward that end. What does it mean? Will H. G. Well's time-machine become a reality? Will the vacationer of the #st century have his choice of two w eeks in modem Paris or two weeks in the Paris of Marie Antoinette? Will the student of history not only read about the Battle of Hastings but, if he is so inclined, buy a ticket to it and go back in time to see it? Will man know the future -- so that there will be no hidden knowledge, no war, no disaster, no surprise? The men who are pioneering on this eerie time-frontier are dedicated, able scientists. And in drawing on their experiments for material, the science-fiction writer is as near to fact as Tennyson was with his "airy navies" or Jules Verne with his submarine. The day is not too far off w'hcn we'll be in radio contact with Jupiter and Saturn, when weather will be controlled by radio, and when each person will have a portable sending and receiving set that will enable him to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. -- David Sarnoff When Thomas Edison was once asked how many separate investigations he had under way in West Orange, he answered, "I have enough ideas to keep the laboratories busy for years and 'break' the Bank of England." Mjly is Yljm's love life. She is her sisters, her mothers, hcrselves and her ancestors. But poor old Yljm can never be a mother or a sister -- just himself ! Coueome faeantd Illustrated by Kelly Freas  that my story began a long time ago, but I do not intend to be subtle. I am not clever and my lying is unpolished, almost amateurish. So I certainly could not be subtle, which requires both cleverness and an abilitv to tell the truth and a lie in the same breath. Let us turn back the clock a few ages. I was lying in the sun thinking of love. I understand that you human beings have an aversion to biological discussion, so I will not go into detail. But I must remind you that my love-life is quite different from yours, for I am from another planet. At the time under discussion, I was most deeply in love. My heart's desire had no shape, the lovely creature. She had no intelligence, the divine soul. But she was the greatest bit of protoplasm in any galaxy you could name. By our standards, I probably might be called handsome. I was young and healthy. I had all of my genes and chromosomes. My color was the dirty green that is associated with beauty. The sun warmed my body and the tidal undulation of my planet's surface rocked me gently. And then she came into my life. She floated gently in the breeze, her dainty figure held aloft by a mere hint of levitation. Sparks of static electricity shot from her tender cilia so brightly that I was forced to exude a layer of protective fibre to protect my visory buds. She sucked a deep breath of cyanic gas into her pulmonary pouch and spoke to me sweetly with a voice like distant thunder. "My dear Yljm, the world is coming to an end." I could not believe her, for she had no intelligence. She only loved to talk. "Perhaps," I said, "but not today." "Very soon, then," said she. Her name was Mjly. I watched her with patronizing amusement. The static electricity showed that she was nervous and upset, but people often get nervous and upset over trivial matters. "Now how," I reasoned, "could our world come to an end? The other planet has gone on for thousands of years without colliding with us. We circle it, in fact." "No," Mjly said, "that is not our doom. Actually our world will not cease to exist. Life will end here, that is all." "Ah," I said. "Our atmosphere is escaping into space." I sucked air, viciously. True, the air was thin. True, the atmosphere was escaping. But there would be breathable amounts for many thousands of centuries yet to come. "Not the air. The food is all gone. Things we cal have ceased to exist." I levitated myself and looked out over the throbbing land. A few years ago, this land had been covered with vegetation. I had come to take vegetation so much for granted that I'd ceased to notice it. Now it was gone. There were no round fruits growing from tender grasses, no tubers dangling from the fungus trees, no legume vines sprawling over the rocks. Everywhere lay desert, barren dunes shaking their crests with tidal motion. I lowered myself to the ground and dug my big fibrousities into the sod. No green leaves grew there beneath the surface. The soil was dead. "This will seriously interfere with our future, Mjly," I said. "We might eat each other," she replied, "but then there would be no one left." "No one? There are many others here." "The others arc dying," said Mjly, blinking her otic nerves eerily. "We soon will be the only ones left. It was indeed a senseless thing to do, to die just because there was no means of going on living. But I must admit that I was tempted for a moment. But I hung onto myself, for there was Mjly, and as long as she lived, there was a reason for me to live too. "It's not a cheerful prospect," I said, "but I suppose death by starvation is the best way out. We will face death as we have lived, cheerfully and fortuitously." "And why should wc die, when there is another world so close?" she asked. "Are you suggesting interplanetary flight, my dear?" I was amused again, even though there was little enough left to be amused at. She crinkled her sense of smell in reply, and I realized I was not being amused at the right time. Anchoring herself by magnetic processes, she began to weave the atmosphere delicately with her taste-bud tendrils. Quickly she hollowed the air molecules into a reflective mirror, and brought it to focus on our neighboring world. I levitated myself into a position so that I could look into the mirror. The near planet was quite satisfactory. It was the one you know as the earth. It was young. It was green. Huge fem-like plants grew abundantly on its surface. It was full of food. And near. "The trip could be made by levitation," Mjly said. I hung back. "Animals might live there. We'd be devoured." "I am not afraid," she said. "Wc might not get hungry for a time. Let us linger here awhile. Later when we get desperate, there will be time enough for interplanetary flight." I hated the thought of stuffing myself full of air enough to last for the long trip. Mjly lowered her visory buds. "I am going to become a mother," she said. "Go then, and become a mother. I'll stay here till I get hungry and then join you." Mjly unflexed her sense of touch and I felt sorry for her. "If I could be sure," I said, "that no wild animals live on the earth, I'd go sooner." She snapped her sense of balance in happiness. "I will go first," said she. "If everything is pleasant and safe, I will return and let you know." I nodded my otic nerves and of! she went. As you human beings are doubtless aware, space levitation is quite complicated, but not beyond accomplishment. Once you are able to reach the speed of escape the rest is easy. But Mjly was young and strong and soon she had disappeared from sight traveling at a tremendous velocity. I followed her as long as I could with the telescope and then I lowered myself to the tidal crest of a nearby sand dune and lost myself in metaphysical thoughts. Almost half a year later I realized that Mjly had been gone longer than I expected. Either she had been eaten by wild animals on the earth, or she had forgotten me. I was beginning to get lonesome and in a few more months I would get hungry. At the thought of enduring two such excruciating pains at a single time, I decided to risk my life. I would travel through space to the earth and try to find my beloved. As you may have guessed, the planet on which we had been living is the one you now know as the Moon, and the distance to the earth is comparatively small. The sanddunes now have hardened and the tidal sway of its surface can be felt only slightly. The moon no longer turns on its axis and it has no sweetly scented cyanide in its atmosphere. It has no atmosphere of any sort. But it stands now as it did when I left it, glorious in death. Since I departed, no living thing has trod its soil. My scientific sense instinctively came to the rescue as I approached the earth. I felt a strong gravity wrenching at my vitals and so instead of trying reverse levitation, I spread my processes so that the atmosphere caught in the folds of my skin and I came floating gently down to the ground without harm. The earth was much as it had appeared through the molecule telescope. It was covered with green vegetation, good, rich, nourishing stuff. And there was enough to feed There were no animals of any sort. Again I went to my scientific sense for the answer. I realized that while vegetable life was far advanced, animal life had yet to appear. Mjly was the first of this type of life ever to set foot on terrestrial soil. But where was she? On the moon, I could often locate her a thousand miles away by a simple radio call. Although the earth was much larger than the moon, I did not doubt that she was within a thousand miles. So I generated power and issued a call. I waited for the response. It came feebly to my antenna. Using my sense of direction, I pushed through the vegetation in search of her. I did not levitate, because the feebleness of her call indicated she might be hurt and on the ground. Besides, levitation is much more difficult oil the earth than on the moon. The reply came stronger to my next call and I sensed through seven of my senses that she was near. She was on the ground, probably injured, which explained why she had not returned as she had promised. I came to a patch of wilderness, a great marshy plain. In the middle of this swamp was a crater, like those caused by meteors, a deep, ugly scar in the mud. I shuddered at the thought that my darling Mjly might have landed there. Her weaker scientific sense might not have given her the cue to use her skin as a parachute and she might have made the fatal mistake of trying to reversc-levitate. "Mjly!" I called, speaking aloud now. "Mjly! Where are you?" "Yljm! I am here!" "Yes, the voice came from the crater. Gliding to its rim, I looked down. A pool of water lay on the bottom. A greenish scum covered the surface. The scum moved with "Yes, Yljm," came Mjly's voice. "It is I. But I am no longer one being." And her voice sounded like (Continued on page # J By E. G. von Wald Illustrated by Paul Orban Tensor's melancholia threatened to disturb the entire citizenry, and that was most uncivil! So -- if these peculiar aliens caused him this distress, by provoking his intellectual curiosity, the remedy was for him to investigate them to his complete satisfaction... Thus, in this manner, did Tensor get well -- and did he learn a bit too... fine mist sifting down from a hazy, violet sky. "I told you I was having these spells." "But Great Oxy," the administrator sputtered, "can't you control yourself?" "I can't help it, Ruut," Tensor replied. "I just feel sort of funny and -- and -- " Ruut's hyperimage was chewing on its illusory lip. "Well, you've got to stop it. Do you understand? There'll be a lot of lichens and things growing all over the Prime's beautiful landscapes if this keeps up." The administrator's concern amused Tensor and, as his mood lightened, the drizzle abated and the sky became clear again. "I'm sorry," he apologized sincerely. "But I just seem to be having trouble lately. Ever since the aliens came." "Oh, come now, son," Ruut chortled with assumed heartiness. "That's elementary somatics. Just get a grip on yourself." "Yes sir." "Perhaps you've been working, or exerting yourself in some other foolish way. Maybe you're tired and should take something." The long, scrawny citizen gazed disconsolately at the bcautitful violet sky, his face relaxed and soleful. He sighed and murmured, "Frankly, Ruut, I just don't seem to give a damn anymore." On the other side of the planet, Ruut gulped convulsively. His eyes bulged out with thoroughly uncivilized amazement. "Get out of consciousness immediately," he ordered hoarsely. "Take a nego shot, if necessary. Take one anyway. We can't take chances." The administrator's hyperimage, with calculated angry expression, glared sternly into Tensor's mind. "Did you understand me?" "Yes sir," Tensor murmured. A vague unpleasantness began stirring in his stomach as he contemplated Ruut's thought. The administrator was absolutely right. Civilization simply could not tolerate an unhappy, uncooperative citizen. The general satisfaction of all was so clearly the responsibility of each individual, and one careless man could ruin it for everybody. Very much as he had been doing. Obediently he nodded. Concealing his embarrassment at the artificiality of the act, he permitted the hyperimage to watch while he administered the chemical. "Good." Ruut became calm at once, now that he was certain he could command the situation. "I'll have the physician examine you before that wears ofT." He hesitated and said even more mildly, "I hope this is just a passing thing, Tensor. You know I'll do everything I can for you, even teleporting to your focus. But you're a weather sensitive, and that's a pretty common classification. And you know the Council." Tensor indicated lazy assent. As the drug took hold, he slipped soothingly into unconsciousness, and the hyperimage flickered and vanished with his powers. His last emotion was one of a vague relief that he would not have to look at the low caste face of an administrator for a while. and uninterestedly contemplating the deep violet far above. A few minutes before, he had been stirred to an elusive and incomprehensible wistfulness which had been, in some way, connected with the aliens. While waiting for the physician, he pondered the brief glimpse he had got of them before the Council clamped down its screen and privacy orders. Now, under the emotionless pseudoconsciousncss of the nego, it seemed strange that he could have been interested in those futile and primitive beings. Practically nothing was known about them, because they could not communicate. Tensor studied the question briefly. There was no answer available in the paucity of information, so he dismissed it without further interest. Insufficient data. Therefore, insoluble problem. Therefore, forget about it. He continued to stare at the sky, unconsciously and vacantly waiting. He felt the itch. It was a slight stimulation of his medulary region, indicating somebody's desire to communicate with him. That, however, was impossible at the moment. The only faculties of significance remaining in his neutral somatic state were those which were absolutely necessary for civilized life -- levitation to avoid being disturbed by gravity, the focus for personal privacy, the construction of food. Communication was not one of those, so the itch would just have to remain. Tensor contemplated an eternity with the medulary itch without the slightest concern. Abruptly the itch stopped and Curl was there, looking exhausted, as was the polite fashion, since teleporting oneself was commonly regarded as tiring. "You've taken nego," the physician murmured aloud, half accusingly. "Yes sir," Tensor replied, using similar sound patterns. "Ruut ordered me to." "What in Oxy for?" "He did not like mv attitude." # The physician considered the information, and while he did so, Ruut popped into existence beside him, a most uncivilized look of worry on his face. "How is he. Curl? What have you found out?" "No need for excitement, my dear administrator," the physician replied evenly, politely avoiding comment on Ruut's crude, low caste self control. "I just got here. Thanks to your order to the young man to fill himself up with nego. he was unable to let me project a hypcrimngc." "But the situation was dangerous. Did you examine him? Did he tell you what he said to me?" Curl glanced at him, and then quickly sent probing thoughts at Tensor's mind and body. After a moment, he gave it up, shaking his head. "The nego won't let him communicate at all. I'll have to order him to administer an anitdote to himself." "No!" Ruut almost shouted. "It's dangerous." He rapidly gave an oral and somewhat horrified account of his earlier communication with Tensor. "All right," the physician grudgingly admitted. "I'll try to do it superficially. But it's difficult. It's awfully hard to know what's going on in his body from just looking at it and listening to him talk." He turned to Tensor. "How long have you hern having these -- er, spurious moods?" "About six months." "Are you having anv other troubles?" "No sir. It's just the simple things, like the weather, that seem to be affected." "I see. Melancholia." Curl frowned thoughtfully. "These And they don't go away entirely when you shift your endocrine balance?" "I'm not so sure about that endocrine shift, sir," Tensor stated emotionlcsly. "You mean -- " Curl stopped incredulously. He shook his head as he comprehended. "Great Iso Oxys!" "What is it?" Ruut asked in a hushed voice. "This is deeper than I thought, Ruut. You did very well to put him under nego. The man can't control his endocrine system properly." "Well do something," Ruut demanded. "Don't just float there." "All I can do," Curl said, raising his voice exactly one decibel to show his irritation, "is give advice. Obviously, in his condition, the man can't follow it." Ruut gaed unhappily at his friend. He was in authority over Tensor, and therefore far inferior in native gifts. Now it seemed that Tensor was regressing in some obscure way to his own level, a tragic and uncivilized situation. "This has happened before," Curl admitted. "But I can't quite remember when." He sighed resignedly. "I guess 'I'll have to teleport again. Somebody probably remembers." He disappeared for a few minutes and returned again, face beaming despite the fatigue. "Oh yes," he said cheerfully. "Now I know." Tensor stared at him with uninterested eyes. "The man is dying," Curl explained with satisfaction. "Dying?" Ruut murmured incredulously. "But that's impossible unless the Council orders him to destroy himself. Why -- why that would make him just like an animal." "That's what it is," Curl insisted. Ordinarily, Tensor would have been somewhat interested to know about this strange process that was taking place within his body, but the nego kept his mind dull and unconcerned. He did not even question for reasons. Ruut, however, did, and the physician happily explained. "You just have never been concerned with these rare symptoms, my dear administrator. You see, actually we are animals in a sense. We don't die like them, but if we are not in a focus we could be killed through some accidental injury. The principal difference between us and the small animals that occasionally cause Prime trouble with his landscaping is control. They have no control over their endocrine systems. We have." "Of course," Ruut said. "I know that." "Ah, but perhaps you don't know that our race at one time had no more control over our endocrine systems than those little animals. "There are a lot of ways to account for the change, and it makes very fascinating discussion because it's absolutely unimportant. However, under such conditions, a human being would automatically reach a certain stable level of development. But then, after an incredibly short time, the essential chaos within its body due to lack of endocrine control causes it to deteriorate. Eventually it is no longer capable of sustaining life and it dies." The physician moved his hands in an awkward but eloquent gesture. "And that's all there is to it." "Oh," Ruut murmured in an awed tone, not even comprehending the extent of the disease but trying to accept the staggering idea of natural death. "Can't you do anything for him?" Curl turned his attention casually back to the sick man again. "Possibly. Dying, of course, is not a disease in itself, but merely a symptom of one." He shook his head. "I certainly wish I could examine him directly without getting involved in a major social crisis." "Oh, Prime would be furious," Ruut warned. "No doubt. Well -- he said that this started six months ago. Now what could have happened six months ago?" "The aliens," Ruut said flatly. "That's what caused it." "Oh, come now, Ruut," Curl said amusedly. "Don't be superstitious. What connection could these -- these aliens possibly have?" "Well, dial's when the Council clamped down on them. Something funny about the way they did that, too." "Not at all funny," Curl told him in a superior tone of voice. "It is simply that the aliens appeared to be of a higher type of animal class without communication. Surely you wouldn't want to have anything to do with such contradictory beings." "Of course not. But Tensor got sick right after he visited them." "He went to visit them?" Curl was pensive a moment, and his eyes lighted up. "In that case, Ruut. there may be some connection after all." Ruut nodded without speaking. "Tensor," Curl said thoughtfully, "did you actually go to inspect the savages?" "Yes sir." "When?" "Just before the Council stopped "Uh huh. Did you have a reaction?" Tensor considered. He recalled every detail of the fleeting impressions that had been his during the few brief moments of his presence near the peculiar organisms. The impressions were confused and mingled with sensations of teleport fatigue, but there was a definite and strange sentiment involved somewhere. "Yes, sir," he said woodenly. "There seems to have been a reaction." "Ha!" The physician glanced significantly at Ruut. "What kind of a reaction. Tensor? And how strong was it?" "I do not recognize it, sir. But it was stronger than the ordinary ones." Curl floated over close to him. peering intently up into the unconscious man's eves. "Tell ine the characteristics." Tensor thought a moment and replied, "Chaotic in one sense. Specific in another." "Speculative?" Curl's eyes were eager with interest. "Yes sir. I believe that would define it best. It was a sort of wild and ungovernable desire to speculate on the origin of the aliens. A very singular experience," he added. "I knew it!" Curl almost shouted. Then he quickly glanced about and composed himself stiffly. That was an embarrassing thing to do. In front of an administrator, too. "Very well." he said. "That confirms my diagnosis. I shall report it to the Council and let them decide what to do." "What is it?" Ruut asked. "A very strange disease. Rare, too. I haven't had a case of it for centuries." He paused and shook his head. "Too bad. I don't recall a single recovery from it once it got a good start." "It is -- contagious?" Ruut asked timidly. "Oh, not for you," Curl smiled. "It's called intellectual curiosity, and it requires somewhat more brain power than you have." "Thank Oxy for that," Ruut breathed fervently. His eyes went back to the recumbent form of the diseased citizen. "Yes. The Council will dearly love this," Curl said with satisfaction. "Most unusual. He'll have to be destroyed, of course." "But can't you do anything for it?" "Not likely. You see, it's the only appetite of which we are capable that can't be controlled by shifting endocrine balance. Ordinarily, our civilized manner of living prevents it from being aroused -- that's the advantage of being civilized. Because, once the appetite shows up, it simply must be satisfied, or it's apt to do all sorts of poisonous things to you, as you can see. The trouble is, satisfying curiosity generally involves at least some work, and what civilized man is going to get himself involved with anything like that?" "Insidious," Ruut whispered. Curl turned away, but then hesitated and glanced back. "Still, since it concerns the aliens -- " He frowned pensively. "There is a scheme we've never tried before that would probably cure him. I remember somebody mentioned it about eight hundred years ago, and we decided to try it out on the next case. Never did, though. Nobody was interested. It's sort of uncivilized, but I'll bring it up and see what the Council thinks." He nodded shortly, and evacuated to his own focus. "Well, my boy," Ruut said to Tensor. "I'm going to mbs you." "There is no need to concern yourself over me, sir," Tensor replied unemotionally. "It does not bother ine in the slightest." Ruut knew that to be the truth. but it made him feel sad to think of such a highly civilized man as Tensor falling to a level that was even below an administrator. Abruptly, he caught himself and readjusted the endocrine balance in his own body to compensate for the character of his thought, and the moody spell passed. He left, and Tensor continued to deep violet of the sky, noting without appreciation the jewcl-like points of light that were the stars. posed twice in his body before Curl returned, his long, unkempt, black beard floating gently around his ears. "Tensor," he said gravely, "the Council has acted. It has been decided not to order you to destroy yourself immediately, because I managed to convince them that it would be interesting to try that old scheme I told you about. I hope you don't mind." Naturally there was no reply from Tensor. In his emotionless state, he did not care one way or the other. He waited. "At any rate," the physician continued, "what they did was order you to satisfy this curiosity that is causing all your trouble. "The reason, of course, isn't that the Council is interested in your cure. But thev do desire some co# herent information about the aliens. And since it is unlikely that anyone will ever volunteer to take the trouble to investigate them on their own initiative, they felt your illness a satisfactory excuse for requiring you to make the investigation." "Yes sir." Curl sighed. It was monotonous, this trying to carry on a conversation with an unconscious man. However, it was his duty as a physician. and he had promised the Council. One thing he was sure of. though, and that was never again to get involved in teleporting himself about the planet like this on any account. He would send an assistant. Provided he could find one. "The Council would like a report when you get back. Do you think you can control yourself if you know that you are going to investigate the aliens whether you like it or not?" "I guess so. sir," Tensor replied without interest. "Splendid. I'll return to my own focus and give you the privacy for administering the antidote." Tensor waited. When the physician was gone, he constructed the chemical in the vein of his left wrist, and in less than a minute he felt the surging pleasure of his reawakened faculties. He glanced doubtfully at the sky, but it remained clear. Curl's hyperimage began forming in his mind. "Everything all right now?" the physician inquired genially. "Perfect," replied Tensor contentedly. "This won't be so bad, even if it is useful work. Maybe I'm just a little peculiar." "Ha. ha." Curl replied noncommittally. "Oh. one thing further. What about the privacy screen set up around the aliens?" "That was dropped months ago," Curl laughed. "Can you imagine the Council sustaining anything like that for long?" "It doesn't require any effort." "Yes, but it looks like it ought to. and you know how that affects a civilized man. You ran go any time you like." Tensor nodded and withdrew. over the delightful grecn-andorangc-streaked sands of the central landscape. This was one of Prime's favorites, and the network of drainage channels was the most effective on the planet. Tensor approved. It really was beautiful. He gazed around, pleasurably appreciating the esthetic beauty of the colorful, arid scene. Then he saw the alirns. That was astonishing, he thought. The aliens were known to have grouped on the other side of the planet, and he had intended to do some sightseeing on the way around. Now two of them were here. Most unpredictable. They were standing near the horizon, apparently examining one of the channels. Tensor moved toward them slowly, sending futile probes for their minds and finding, as before, nothing but chaotic splashes. It was really unfortunate that they could not communicate. He moved higher as he approached. for the better view it afforded. The aliens were animal, all right. A species similar to human beings but grotesquely primitive. He observed that the creatures had noticed him and were running madly across the surface toward a small, shiny structure. The structure interested him. It looked very much as if it had been fabricated. lie wondered how the savages could construct without being able to control, and watched them as they actually entered the thing. And then, incredibly, it rose from the fenous sands and dashed off toward the cast, a faint, disgustingly moist vapor trailing out behind it. Quickly Tensor moved up parallel to it, while he speculated on what it meant. Apparently the savages were in full control of it. For a moment he thought it might be an alien focus, but dismissed the idea. If it were a focus, there would be no purpose in moving it spatially. Feeling more curious, he projected himself inside and was immediately delighted, despite its obvious mechanical character. It was metallic and smooth and there were numerous incomprehensible devices piled up again the walls of the tiny, circular room. Seated at a panel, their backs toward him, the two creatures were busily manipuand one was creating a wierd but soft cacaphony with its mouth. Tensor was amused as well as interested. He listened, and managed to decipher a pattern to the speech, even though only confused scatterings of intelligence came from the chaotic minds. He again observed the astonishing similarity of appearance between the aliens and human beings. From a small orifice in the panel, a reply issued; cold and rasping in tonal quality. "Control to Scout Three. Roger on the presumed alien. Lieutenant. I knew that civilian with you would get you into trouble." "Well, it wasn't exactly the fault of -- " "Enough. Bear away from the base until certain you are not being followed." While one of them played with the moving color spots on the panel, the other twisted a knob, and all segments of the outside became successively visible in a viewer. "Scout Three to Control. Nothing in sight." "Very well. The orders are to stay there until dark, after which you may return." "But that's two hundred hours away," the other savage hissed. "We don't have enough oxygen." "You'll just have to work it out somehow," the panel replied coldly. "We can't endanger the whole military base for one useless civilian biologist." This was a fascinating exchange to Tensor, as he puzzled out the curious relationships and their purposes. He floated near the ceiling, listening, face set in civilized impassivity. One of the creatures grumbled, leaned back and swung around in its chair. It jerked erect when it saw the man at the ceiling. Tensor smiled at the poor, dumb creature and was rewarded by a disgustingly loud noise from its mouth and a mad rush back to the panel. The other had seen him, too, and was staring wide-eyed at him. Tensor moved closer to observe, but the one who had seen him first continued shouting shrill, ear-splitting noises at its companion, who seemed to be trying unsuccessfully to obey. Petulantly, Tensor disintegrated the noisy one and also some ugly cables that led from the panel to the wall. That improved the esthetic situation immeasurably, he felt. There was a quick sucking of breath from the remaining savage as it looked wildly about for a moment, as if searching for its vanished companion, and then stared at the place where the cables had been. "Well --  It made a hopeless gesture with its shoulders and slumped back into its chair. "That does it. No pilot. No radio. Damn. Even the Leader would have trouble with this situation." It looked uneasily at Tensor, and remained perfectly, cautiously still. "What do you call yourselves?" Tensor asked without difficulty, using sound patterns similar to what they had employed. "You speak English!" the creature blurted out in amazement, and Tensor felt rather irritated by its crude facial expression. He made a small adjustment, however, bringing his own somatic state into a closer harmony with that of the creature, and the desired level of contented appreciation rose. "Are -- are you a native?" it asked hesitantly. "Yes." Tensor replied. It gazed at him with half closed, calculating eyes, starting at the head, running slowly to his feet and back again. "You look human." it muttered. "Naturally," Tensor replied cheerfully. The appreciation was growing subtly now, and he found that the creature's mouth interested him. It was a strikingly lovely shade of red -- al wap Tensor's favorite color. And although there was a heavy and awkward sheath of artificial fabric about the alien, he observed with a rising fascination that the bulging of the thoracic sheathing indicated that it was female. Tensor became uncomfortably aware that he had better be careful of his induced somatic sympathy. After a moment of speculative silence, he said, "You haven't told me what you savages consider yourselves." "Don't call me a savage, you naked beast," she snapped back. "I beg your pardon," he murmured politely. "Merely a semantic difficulty. I'm sure. I assume that you consider yourselves human beings. then. Where do you come from?" "Earth -- the third planet." "I see. And you used mechanical devices such as this little metal egg to get here. Most curious." Tensor contemplated the thought with great interest, for obviously they used mechanical skill to compensate for lack of direct control. An exceedingly poor substitute, of course; but it explained everything he wanted to know. "Are there many of you natives?" she asked him cautiously. "Not like there used to be," Tensor admitted. "But still quite a few -- though not so many we get on each other's nerves." "How many in round numbers?" That was a silly question, Tensor thought. Nevertheless he told her, "Oh, I suppose about thirty or a hundred. We haven't counted for centuries. Nobody's interested." She appeared to be deeply absorbed in thought, gazing at him in an almost detached fashion. Finally she said. "Your civilization is based on the mind, isn't it? You do things with an act of will instead of with your hands." "Naturally. That is the essential mark of civilization. At least," he added politely, "from our point of  It view. "Are you -- telepathic?" "Only with other telcpaths," he said simply. "Then how did you learn my language?" "Oh. after you talk it a bit, I can see certain relationships. But the mental pictures are so discontinuous and nonspecific that it takes a little time before the pattern emerges." "That means you don't actually know what I am thinking?" " Correct . You have the potential, but you don't have the control necessary to permit it." A small, satisfied smile curved about her lips. Tensor found it oddly disconcerting. Despite the ugly sheathing, there was something about her that was quite pleasant. He began to feel that she was even beautiful, and as he disintegrated the sheath in order to appreciate her better, he realized that that it was undoubtedly the strange endocrine balance he had created in himself that was responsible for the attitude. Because there was nothing particularly well-designed about her. She looked unprepossessingly like a civilized woman, except a good deal fatter in places, which hardly helped matters from an abstract point of view. Tensor could only assume that his point of view was becoming less abstract. He observed that, upon his disintegrating the sheath, the noise was there again, issuing rapidly from her mouth, and lacking in detailed semantic significance. It was very curious, he thought, watching the rapid rise and fall of her pinktipped breasts. He could not determine whether the signal indicated terror or fury. # She solved the problem for him by grasping a small metal object from the rack beside her and throwing at him. He deflected it to the floor as it left her hand. "What," he asked politely, "is disturbing you so?" He liked the angry sparkle of her eyes. "You," she snapped. "Keep away from me." "I don't understand," he replied, moving closer and reaching out his hand to obtain a tactile sensation of her lovely hair texture. The woman compressed her red lips firmly and stood there, uneasily watching him out of the corner of her eyes as he gently stroked her head. "Do all females of your race look nice like you?" She nodded cautiously and said, "More or less." "Very curious."  A sly expression came to her eyes then and she smiled radiantly. "Look," she said, "would you do me a favor?" "Of course," Tensor murmured with unaccustomed eagerness. This was a very interesting experience, even though he was constantly having to reinforce and add to the chemical shift in his body in order to hold down the possibility of fatigue. He could not recall ever before permitting such an unusual somatic state. She gestured guilelessly toward the panel. "Would you help me repair my radio?" "Radio?" Tensor echoed vacantly, gazing at the place indicated. "Yes. I -- er, have to report to my superiors that I may not be able to return, even tonight." Again she smiled dazzlingly and with devastating effect on Tensor. "I'd be glad to," he said agreeably. "But I don't know anything about mechanical things. Couldn't you just tell me where your superiors are and let me teleport there? I'd let them know and come right hack." "Oh no," she replied quickly. She frowned a little wistfully. "No," she repeated, "they wouldn't like that. They never like anything easy. And besides -- " again the smile " -- I might not be here when you return, you know!" "Oh?" Tensor said, puzzled that she knew that he might be concerned over her absence. Possibly she had some power of direct communication after all. "It's just those cables that you destroyed over the panel," she told him in a softly cajoling voice. "I have some spares in the locker, and if you would help me replace them, it would be fine." Tensor floated over and peered into the stumps, examining the composition and structure. He nodded and reconstructed them instantly. She was obviously delighted and said, "I wondered if you could do that. May I use the radio now?" Tensor stared at the whiteness of her teeth contrasting pleasingly with the redness of her lips. "Go right ahead," he murmured. He decided he had better leave soon. of color glowed and shifted. She spoke and the panel issued its response. "Control to Scout Three. What happened there a while ago?" "This is urgent," she said. "Is the Captain there?" After a noisy hesitation, the panel replied. "This is Commander Carson. What's up out there?" "Listen carefully," she said. "I have an alien with me on the ship. He's already learned English perfectly. He is only slightly telepathic, so far as I am concerned, but he has great telekinetic powers." "We were afraid of that. Is he dangerous?" "Well -- he killed Lieutenant Anderson. Completely annihilated her with a simple act of will." She glanced at the bewildered expression on Tensor's face, and favored him with a quick little smile. "He is extremely powerful. He would be a very good friend." Tensor broke in asking, "What is all this talk now? I do not understand the purpose of it." "Don't you worry," she murmured softly, reaching up and patting him on the knee. "Just have patience." The panel rasped at them. "I see. Do you know' if there are many of them?" "He told me it was between thirty and a hundred, but nobody knows for sure. Presumably they don't have very much communication with each other." "Ah," rasped the panel in a satisfied tone. "Just a minute. I'll get a directive from the Captain for you." Tensor nodded slightly as he said, "Oh, I sec. That is your Council you arc talking to.' "Uh huh," she replied, dodging the hand that sought her hair again. She smiled coyly. "Now just wait. I want to hear what my superiors say." She pushed at him playfully, her smile growing strained as she desperately tried to kill time. Tensor was amused. Yes, he derided, it was time to go. He was not at all sure that he wanted to go, but he felt that it was wise. He had never in his life engaged in such lengthy and violent exercise and was alarmed at the thought of the fatigue pains he would have when he restored his balance to a civilized neutral again. The panel rasped noisily at them. "Captain Jonas," it said, speaking in a different accent this time. "There's a war going on and we can't akc any chances on how the aliens will feel about it. We have a fix on you and I'm sending a flight of homing missies. Nuclear warheads." She stiffened as she heard the sentence, her red lips drawn back from tightly clenched teeth. In a faint voice, she said, "I -- I guess there isn't much I can do about it, is there?" "Can you keep him there and busy so that he won't notice the missiles coming?" She gave a short, brittle laugh. "Yes sir. I feel fairly sure I can keep him interested for -- " she glanced speculatively at Tensor " -- a half hour at least. Probably much longer." "It'll only be fifteen minutes," the panel rasped. "We'll deal with the others as we find them. You will be decorated for this service, even though you are only a civilian. Posthumously, of course." The panel was silent. "Oh sure," she said in a deadly quiet voice. "I'm glad to be appreciated." Tensor was puzzled. The conversation did not appear to make a great deal of sense to him. He hovered overthe panel and gazed at it curiously. "Just another superior," she told him. "It seems that practically everybody is my superior -- or was." She sighed and looked down at herself, wistfully thinking that it was a shame to have to waste all the carefully nurtured loveliness that she knew she was. She looked up at Tensor, who had lost interest in the panel and was busily examining the outside in a viewscope. "Come here, big boy," she said quickly. When he turned to face her, she added, "keep your attention over here." With an agreeable smile, he floated to her and. in obedience to her directions, lifted her into his arms. She put her lips to his, her hands gently caressing his cheek. It was a shock. Tensor let out his pent-up breath explosively and ran his tongue over his lips, tasting the mixture of saliva and lipstick. What should have been moderately repulsive to him had been transformed by the chemical sympathy in his veins into something quite overwhelming. His eyes were bright and eager. "It's a dirty trick and I feel like a jerk," she whispered sadly to him. "But what else can I do?" "I beg your pardon?" Tensor murmured happily. "I do not understand you." "Oh well," she breathed softly, smiling a crooked little smile. "Neither one of us will ever know when it happens. A pity to spoil it so soon, though." In his unaccustomed confusion, Tensor could not follow her thought, but he could grasp the immediate situation. He grinned and nuzzled her affectionately, and decided to stay a while longer. his comfortable focus, eyes half closed and glazed, mouth droolingly limp and hands carelessly askew. He formed his hyperimage to appear erect and neat -- and with a politely interested expression -- while he idly contemplated the telepathic picture being projected into his own mind. "I see you've recovered," he said. "Splendid." "Yes, but what an ordeal," Tensor replied. His image took on the appearance of a relieved smile. "If it ever happens again -- I don't know."  "It was that bad?" Curl showed suitable lazy civilized sympathy. "I was afraid. All that teleporting of yourself and things." "It took me almost ten minutes to recover from it," Tensor said grimly. "Tsk tsk. That's a lot of lactic acid to locate and destroy. But the Council will appreciate it, even if Prime did complain, poor fellow." "Well, I promised to investigate and I'm a man of my thought. Of course, the curiosity vanished as soon as I got into actual communication with one of them." "They communicate?" Curl permitted His image to appear mildly astonished, which was the only civilized thing to do. "Tell me about it." "It's crude, but in some things successful," Tensor explained. "The alien I contacted was a female, for instance. When I adjusted for relative somatic sympathy so that I could stand the poor, uncivilized creature, I naturally acquired the full appetites of a male animal and this female seemed to understand some of my thoughts very well. "You simply can't imagine the violent somatic compulsions one encounters under such a balance." "Horrible," agreed Curl. "But I understand, my boy. I once fathered a child -- must have been at least a couple of thousand years ago. Purely out of scientific interest, of course, and never again." The physician paused and added, "Matter of fact, it's quite likely that you're that child. Can't ever tell about these things, you know." Tensor nodded in polite agreement and continued with his own story. "It wasn't at all bad while it was going on, because I was pretty well anesthetized from body chemicals. But the hangover was terrific." "Yes, no doubt." Curl appeared to consider a moment before asking. "What about this uncivilized hubbub the Prime raised that caused the council to order him to destroy himself?" "Oh, that. Well, just as I was about to leave, this primitive I was with coaxed me into playing an interesting but remarkably violent sport with her. And about the same time, it appears that her superiors, for some unknown reason, decided to destroy her. It seems that the aliens' Council doesn't let them take care of it themselves." "Uh, huh. How did they accomplish it?" "They used some nuclear breakdown devices, which I imagine serve their primitive society quite well. The devices have appetites built into them for a certain kind of target so they will know where to go. "But when I agreed to play this game, I naturally set up a privacy focus, so the ship wc were in just didn't exist for the nuclear devices. They kept on looking, though, and finally found a lot of similar ships back at the alien's main camp. Made an awful mess out of one of the Prime's favorite landscapes, I understand." "Well," Curl replied engagingly, "Prime should have had better selfcontrol. I don't blame the Council a bit, and it does fix things up rather nicely." His image smiled into Tensor's mind and then hesitated as he saw the concern there. "Doesn't it?" "Uh, yes. All except for the alien female that insists on staying with me, now, since none of her people is left on the planet. I told her two or three times to go ahead and destroy herself if she wanted; but she just rumples up my hair, grins at me and says she already has." He looked worriedly at Curl. "Well, that's just one of those things, I guess," Curl murmured philosophically...Sensing a local distraction approaching Tensor at that moment, he politely withdrew from the other man's mind. "I landed with such force that I came apart. Now each of my body cells lives a life of its own. And now and then each cell grows fat and becomes two. I am my sisters, I... Let's not be subtle about it. Mjly was a microbe, the beginning of animal life on the earth. She lives today, she is and always will be her sisters, her mothers, hcrsclves and (Continued from page #) her ancestors. But there arc few ancestors, for microbes do not die -- just part of themselves die. And I do not die. For I crept away into a hole in the ground, where I will live forever. I do not starve, for roots reach me here. But I miss my love life with Mjly. I can never be a mother or a sister. I will always be me, a lonesome old bem. The body tanks had to be replenished and the ship had to be serviced -- and the crew was having a Lotus dream in its bed of protoplasm. But Kelly knew how to arouse them... Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly f By Kenneth O'Hara Illustrated by Paul Orbon tentment and its communal singing brought a pleasant kind of glow that throbbed gently in the control room. " 'Has anybody here seen Kelly... K-E-doublc-LY ?' " "Shut up and dig my thought!" Kelly's stubborn will insisted. "I'm going on out for a while!" The delicate loom of the Crew's light pattern increased its frequency a little and the song stopped. "Better not," the Crew said. "But why not?" "No need." "We could be running into something bad," Kelly thought. "No danger now, Kelly. Checking the ship is just a waste of time." "How can you waste what you have so damn much of?" Kelly thought. "Do not leave us again, Kelly. We love you and you are the most interesting part of the Crew when you're with it." "The ship ought to be checked. Our bodies ought to be looked at." "We know there is no danger any more, Kelly. Do not go. There are so many interesting experiences wc have not even begun to share yet. We arc only half way through your life and we have not even started to experience your impressions of your colorful and complex Earth culture. And we have not even started on the adult lives of Lakrit or IJjub. Come back with your Crew, Kelly." "But no one's checked the ship for over a year!" "Please do not worry about the ship. Kelly. In fifty years nothing has gone wrong. Wc can trust the ship thoroughly now, it will take care of us." "It will take care of us! That's a helluva way to look at it!" "There can be no danger now, Kelly. In fifty years we have encountered every conceivable danger, every imaginable kind of world or possible menace." "Have we?" Kelly thought. "Every danger from outside maybe, and I'm not even sure of that. But how about danger from inside?" "Inside?" "Us. How about apathy for instance. Apathy's a real danger. You talk about this space-can like it was a big metal mother! Listen, I'm supposed to see that this tub holds together. At least until we get back somewhere near enough to the Solar system so we'll feel we've been somewhere else!" "But, Kelly -- " "I'm getting out for a while, I tell you!" "All right," the Crew sighed. The light loom faded a bit, down to a self-indulgent glow. "Hurry back to us, Kelly." "I'll give some thought to it." So Kelly concentrated on the increasingly painful and difficult task of tearing his consciousness free of the big glob of protoplasm in the tank, and getting it back into his body that hibernated in the bunkroom. As usual the switch was too painful. It stretched and stretched and finally snapped in an all too familiar explosion of shocking light. rustled as he sat up and looked around. There was the old feeling that there was dust over everything when there was no dust. There was all that emptiness sweeping away into the endless silence and he thought again, as he always did, how comforting and cozy it was being a part of the Crew. But someone had to check the ship. It was only machinery after all, and machinery could wear out, sooner or later. And he wasn't at all sure, as he kept insisting, that they had encountered all the possible dangers. It might seem that in fifty years you could run into everything. But fifty years was no time at all out here where time had no real meaning any more. His body squeaked as he took a few tentative steps about the hunkroom. One did not actually forget how to walk. It was just awkward as the devil. And the blood, the entire autonomic system, tended to slow down. It seemed reluctant to step up general metabolism. Apathy. Sure it was a danger. This time, Kelly decided, I'll do something about it. He was the engineer and he had signed on the great odyssey to keep the ship going. But the Crew was part of the ship. Was not there an obligation even greater to keep the Crew going? The four others lived but almost imperceptibly in some very low state of slowed metabolism there in the bunkroom and Kelly looked at them. The faithful and the wonderful ones. The ones with whom he had shared so many dangers and awful silences that the five of them had been able to evolve the idea of the protoplasm in the tank and merge their consciousness iri it. Kcw, the Venusian, in her bowl of self-renewing nitrate. Lakrit from a Juptcrian satellite, a fluorine fellow of distinction inside a sphere of gaseous sulphur. A crystalline character with a sense of humor named Lljub whose form gave off a paled glint as it nourished itself on silicates. And a highly intelligent but humble six foot iong sponge labeled Urdaz stuck in a foundation of chemical sediment at the bottom of a tank of reprocessing salt water. Each with their own special kind of appendages and sensitivities, each able to move his special closedsystem about through the ship by means of clever types of mobility. But basically, in outward form, they were too alien to have much in common. Only as intelligences, as life forces, could they share a common bed And it had evolved to that in fifty years. A bed of protoplasm in a shock-absorbent tank. Kelly looked at them warmly and thought about how it had worked out. The strange thing was that it did have a lot of good things to recommend it. Or had had them. It had solved the problem of intimate communication and driven back the tides of loneliness. It had lessened the dangers of mental and physical illnesses in the material bodies and assured a prolongation of the life of each body, which was important in itself, for this trip had proven to be a lot, longer than even the most pessimistic had anticipated. The Crew, pulsing in its tank, Kelly thought oddly, is a new life form. One that had evolved to meet the exigencies of deep space which had proven to be alien to any adaptability common to any world that rotated through it. But maybe they were too damn happy, Kelly thought. Too contented. If they ran into a real emergency now, the ship would be finished. The Crew in the tank was, itself, incapable of action of anv overt kind. It could not ma# nipulate anything. It could only be happy. And the bodies here in the bunkroom could not rally fast enough to meet a sudden crisis. And they had agreed that the first law was -- survival. But to survive this way might well mean destruction in another. So Kelly walked and thought about it. and weighed the precarious balance. He slipped through the silent ship and to the control room. He peered into the viewscopc. Some galaxy or other spun its giant pinwheel outward toward some destiny of its own. The high noon of the endlessness had been unfamiliar for years. He checked the ship's instruments. The Crew in the big tank simmered and throbbed in its introspective bliss, utterly oblivious to Kelly now. Kelly saw the red dwarf a few planets ground their familiar path around it. The second in distance had a breathable oxygen, according to the scopes, but little else to recommend it. Kelly straightened up. He had no idea when the plan had really started forming, but now it was formed. When Kelly made up his mind to a thing, there was no other course but to conclude it. He knew what he had to do. Somehow, even as part of the Crew, some part of Kelly had been able to keep that forming plan a secret. Which was a lucky miracle, for if the Crew had known his intentions it would certainly not have let him out this time. Even if you wanted out, Kelly reasoned, the Crew would keep you in. And maybe after long enough you did not care to get out.But once out, he wondered, could it keep you out if it decided to blackball a man for one reason or another? Like wrecking the ship? the control panel. Kelly saw his face grinning strangely hack at hifn, a bearded, hollowed, paled face with an unfamiliar glitter in the eyes. Every time he had left the Crew to enter and reactivate his own body, that bodv had seemed a little less familiar. This time it seemed to be almost entirely someone else. He stared at the face in the chrome, then w-hispered the hell with that and he flipped the controls over to manual. He sat down. Behind him, the Crew whispered in its tank, protoplasm developed in the labs and quivering now with some unified sensation that was purely subjective and blissfully unconcerned with what happened outside itself. "It's sick," Kelly concluded, with an emphatic clamp of his jaws. "It's not right!" True, sharing the intimate sensations of alien life forms like Kew, the female Venusian, had been exciting. Especially the sex experiences which, in a flower of Kew's type, was certainly something. There were interesting things to being a part of the Crew all right. But the main purpose, survival, had been forgotten. Now being the Crew was an end in itself. Kelly could imagine the Crew business going on and on until finally even the material bodies in the bunkroom would be forgotten entirely and allowed to rot away to dust about which the Grew would no longer care. And that was very bad. It should not have worked out this way. But it was not too late to do something, shake them out of the Lotus dream. He checked the scopes ifgain. Now the second planet revealed plenty of breathable atmosphere settled in the lower valleys. He headed straight for it. The Crew was soon going to get one devil of a jolt! He put the ship into a close orbit around the planet. It seemed nothing but a fearsome forest of oxydized spikes rising in corrosive silence, with here and there a lean slash of valley. There was no indication of life, no vegetation visible or revealed by the scopes. One of the valleys had a thin mouth of water stretching down the length of its face. Kelly set the speed and the controls and ran for the bunkroom and the shock-absorbant cushions. lie strapped himself in and waited. It was done. As long as the thing had gone so far, Kelly decided, the truth should never be revealed because that would lessen the therapeutic value of his action. He would wreck the ship. Not too badly. Not so badly that all of the bodies, distinct, separate individual bodies again, couldn't put the ship back together, as in the old days. And that would keep them in their bodies gladly for a while where they belonged! Where the good Lord had intended for them to stay. They would not be rocked away to apathy in a phony metal mother womb, thinking the ship was going to take care of them! The more Kelly thought about it, the better he felt. He stretched inside the straps. He felt his slightly atrophied muscles luxuriate over the tissues and bones of liis big frame. Any body, no matter what its shape, should be proud of itself. That was Kelly's belief, and this thing that had happened seemed somewhat blasphemous. Without bodies and their complex sensory recording apparatus, the rich consciousness enjoyed by the Crew could not exist, would never have been created at all. The Crew was living off the largesse of experience built up by their bodies. The Crew was just narcotized enough that it did not realize that the body banks had to be replenished. Metal shrieked. Kelly yelled feebly. He fought, he grappled with the threatening blackout like a man fighting an invisible opponent on an endless flight of stairs. The grinding rolling terror of the sound, the ripping, twisting, tearing scream of it cried on and on. Kelly knew one thing then. He had not figured it right. His calculations were off. The ship had hit too damn hard. the straps off and tried to move he fell painfully onto the tilted deck. One of his eyes felt sticky. He rubbed at it and his hand was smeared with blood. He shuffled around in a stumbling circle. Minor damages could  have been repaired. But this -- the ship was peeled open in glaring strips like a breakfast cannister. A cold wind moaned through the ship that was now nothing but a metal sieve. A hazy light filtered down and ran off the metal like cold flour rust. Kelly fell to his knees. "Kew," he whispered. "Lljub, Urdaz -- Laknt    The Venusian flower lady was sliced down the middle like a cabbage, and the nitrate bowl was shattered and Kew was dead in a pool of fading green blood. Smashed into the bulkhead was Lakrit's sulphuric bathtub, and his atmosphere had already filtered away with the wind to wherever it was going. Lljub's pale glow was out for good, and his crystalline heart was as opaque as a dead eye. Only a few pieces of Urdaz's tank were visible, and Urdaz himself had already turned to a powdery food that the wind ate slowly in long trailing streamers. "What -- what in the name of God have I done?' Kelly whispered . All dead -- No! He slammed at the bulkhead until the warped metal gave and he ran to the control room. The Crew -- the Crew -- He stared at the tank. Through a jagged opening in the ship's walls, the wind whined and plucked at Kelly's red hair. The wind was colder now. He kept on looking at the tank. He reached out and touched the big transparent curve of it and then jerked his hand back with a whimper in his breath. There was nothing in the tank. nothing but a blob of slowly drying slime. He pressed his nose to the tank. "Crew -- " he whispered. There was no life in the slime. When he pounded on the tank, the stuff collapsed in upon itself in withering flatness. Kelly yelled. The cold wind froze at his teeth. It sucked at his breath and dried at the interior of his mouth. He ran and climbed. The jagged periphery of the opening sliced at his flesh. But he did not feel it, and he fell twenty feet, without feeling that cither, down the side of the ship. He started crawling over the hard naked belly of the rock. He got to his feet. He ran stumbling down an incline of shale worn round and shiny by the wind that had blown here just as it blew now, and would blow for God alone possibly knew how long. lie fell and roiled to the edge of the water. He looked into it. He felt of it. He jerked his hand away. The stuff was icy. But it was worse than icy. It was dead. It was dead water. It was without any bottom, and without any life in it anywhere. You could tell by looking into it. The wind moved over the top of it as though the water were glass, and the water was the color of a slightly transparent naked blue steel. There was no life here. Maybe there had been once, who knew when, who could guess how long ago. But there was none now and even the water had forgotten it. Kelly cried out as he stood up. "What have I done?" He raised his arms at the hazy red sun lying over the spires of towering stone and metal like a bloated balloon scraping precariously over rusty spikes. "God, what have I done?" The cry echoed tinnily on the rocks and Hed on the wind. Kelly ran for a long way, falling and stumbling and getting up again. Kelly had always had one primary drive, and that was to keep going, no matter what. So now he tried to keep going. But there was no life on this planet. He had known that before. Some strange kinds of intelligence could tolerate some unpleasant worlds. But nothing would live here. Nothing could live here. "That's your fate," Kelly thought. He sat down and stared at the walls of rock and metal all around. "Your fate, Kelly. Your punishment, your well deserved hell." That was what it was. Retribution. And knowing that, he tried not to care. He tried to be glad and face what he deserved. If that were not the answer, then why had only Kelly been spared to face emptiness and silence and no life, all alone? The irony of it was that he would go on as long as possible keeping himself alive in his own hell. There was food aplenty in the ship, enough to last as long as hell cared to have him. He turned and started walking back toward the ship that seemed some five miles away. At that instant, the ship disappeared in an abrupt explosion that twised the rocks and a mushroom cloud flowered gently above the lake as Kelly fell trembling on his belly and hugged the ground and pushed his face into the shale while the wind tore and screamed around him and particles of flint ripped his clothes and slashed at his flesh. much farther toward where the ship had been. There was only a crater there now which would offer him nothing in the way of sustaining his very personal and thoroughly private hell. He walked. The effort became more difficult and finally he was on his hands and knees, crawling. The wind sucked at his ripped clothes, and felt like cold sharp steel in his raw wounds. But slowly and deliberately he continued to crawl. Kelly had always had the idea that a man should keep going and so now he kept on going. Even if there was no place to go, and you could not remember particularly where you had been, you kept on moving and fighting and slugging along until you could no longer move. He lay there looking up at the hazy rust of the sky with the naked spires pointing up into it for no reason at all, because there was nothing up there. He had been there and he knew. Nothing up there but space, black and without a beginning or end. He had not even checked the records of the ship so that now, lying here, he did not even know how far away from Earth he was. At the speed they had traveled, a ship went a long way in fifty years. But the ship, the records, everything was lost. And no one would ever know now how far they had come. Or gone. What was the differencc, anyway? But Kelly had no difficulty in remembering why they had come. They had come into space because that was how it was with those who fought their way up to being the dominate life form of whatever world they had lived on and grown and died on. If you were the kind who went into space, you went because space was there. Who needed a better reason than that? "Kcw," he whispered. "Lakrit, Lljub, Urdaz, listen now -- I thought I was doing the right thing -- maybe my idea was right -- but I just made a mistake in the calculations. I just made a helluva mistake -- " The wind sighed over the naked rock and the rusted metal and the rock and the dead blue water. He turned and pushed his head against the rock, and his body curled up against the bitter wind. "You've got to forgive me," he said. " 'Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y?' " He shivered and kept his eyes closed. It was part of the wind. He did not want to go out that way, hearing crazyvoices in the wind. " 'Has anybody here seen Kelly -- ?' " He raised his head and blinked and the wind drove tears down his cheeks. "Am I just hearing something that's going crazy inside my head?" He peered around. There was nothing, nothing anywhere of course, nothing where nothing had ever been, and nothing else but nothing could ever be. "You're wrong, Kelly. Your Crew's here." Kelly raised himself painfully to an elbow. "Where -- where?" "Right here, Kelly. We had a difficult time locating you. Sure, we forgive you. You were trying to do what was right. We know that." "There's nothing -- nothing -- ' Kcllv said. "You're wrong. The Crew's here and we're waiting." lie stared at the rock. He put his face against it and pushed his hands to it. There was a kind of dull glow in it, a faint hint of warmth in the rock. "How can this be?" Kelly said. "This is the life here, Kcllv. Perhaps there is life everywhere in the most impossible seeming places. And where life is, Kelly, we can live with it and be welcomed by it. Here, this rock is life, and it has taken us in. It has been here a long time. And it will be here for a much longer time." "Rock." Kelly said. "But hurry and come back." "But no one will ever know. How long -- how long can we wait?" "Who can answer that, Kelly? But maybe they will find the Crew someday." Kelly looked up once at the completely unfamiliar distances growing darker. Sometime, he thought, they'll come from wherever Earth is and find the Crew of the ship, find a rock here waiting the ages out. "Hurry, Kelly!" His head dropped against the rock. His hands slid down it, and a smile moved over his lips and froze there as the wind whispered over it. What Is Your Science I.Q.? that you are familiar with the terms they sprinkle through their stories so generously. But do you really know what they are talking about? Let's pin you down; see how many of the questions below you can answer correctly. Each correct answer counts five ; # is good, # is very good, and over # makes you a whizz! #. A distance of approximately #I light years is called a #. In which constellation is the star Botclgeuse located? #. The ability to move matter through force of mind only is called #. Which planet takes # days to travel around the sun? #. The point at which all molecular motion ceases is known theoretically as #. Which of the planets is the hottest in the solar system? #. The moon is in apogee when it is from the sun. #. In what year was the cyclotron invented? #. Ariel, Umbricl, Titania and Oberon are the four satellites of #. Approximately how many light years from Earth is the North Star? I #. Pluto, Mercury and are die only planets in our solar system that have no satellites. #. Which element is # times lighter than air? #. A day on Jupiter is as long as a day on Earth. #. What term do we use to describe the biological alteration of a species of living organism? #. The star sends out # times more light than the sun. #. At approximately how many miles an hour does the sun move through space? #. The Coalsack region is a nonluminous or dark nebula in the #. Which is the third largest planet in our solar system? #. A comet consists of a nucleus, a , and a tail. #. We know Atlantis is a supposedly sunken continent in the Atlantic; what is the name of the continent that is supposed to have sunk in the Pacific? Trading with Mr. Wetzle, whose fright chemistry was peculiarly akin to that of a good old American skunk , was dangerous business. However , Sammy had principles and nobody -- and no aroma! -- was going to shake him from them. By Theodore R. Cogswell Illustrated by Ed Emsh was only a hole in the wall, it what happened? Three times in was his drugstore; and if any two weeks hoodlums break in and gonifT from the Anti-Martian smash things up." League thought he was going to "I got my principles," said tell him how to run his business, Sammy sternly, he had another think coming. "Yeah," said Sarah, "princiHis wife Sarah wasn't seeing pies! Ten years we save so that eye to eye with him. It wasn't beyou, a registered pharmacist, a cause she was eighty pounds heaviman who placed third on the er and a foot taller than he was, state boards, should have a big it was simply that every time place you could be proud of inSammy got his back up, somestead of a dirty little hole like this, body got hurt -- and it was usually We finally get it and what hapSammy. pens? You got principles and the "Last time you said that it was bank has Rosen's Cut-Rate Drugs, to that nice young man from the Now we're starting over again, Merchants Protective Association business ain't too bad, already who wanted you to take out inwe've been able to put away a littie for a rainy day, and you and your principles want to start trouble again." "Trouble I don't want." said Sammy. "Trouble I've never wanted, I'm a peace loving man. But I got my rights. Sammy Rosen isn't going to let himself be shoved around by nobody." "Who's getting shoved? So ya sign a paper. Maybe you're going to drop dead, you should sign a paper? O'Reilly next door, he's not doing business because he signed a paper? All of Fourth Avenue and you're the only one that's got to be stubborn." "What should O'Reilly know about principles? Eight years now he's been having the same fire sale. Sign the paper, NO! There will be no sifjn in my window saying that Martians will not be served here." Sarah sighed in exasperation. "That green fur-ball comes here maybe two three times a week to buy a nicklc's worth of candy. For that business you should maybe get a brick through the window like last time? You sign the paper so we should keep out of trouble and next time he comes in you tell him he should go buy his candy someplace else and not get honest people in trouble." "You order some more chocolate syrup?" asked Sammy. "Last time I checked we were getting low." "Don't change the subject. That man said he would be back in ten minutes." "So he wants to come back, he can come back. It's a free world." Mr. Suggs was back in six minutes. He was a large man and the conservative business suit he wore didn't harmonize well with the bulk of his shoulders, his cauliflower cars, or the generally battered appearance of his fat face. "Afternoon, Mr. Rosen," he boomed. "Lovely day, ain't it. Kind of weather that makes a man glad he's alive and healthy. Right?" "Right," said Sammy with a touch of uneasiness. The big man opened his briefcase and took out a legal looking document. "Now that you've had time to think it over. I know you've come to see things our way. Just sign here and you'll be a member in good standing of the Anti-Martian League just like everybody else around here." Drawing himself up to his full five feet two, Sammy shoved the paper away and said with all the firmness he could muster, "Anybody wants to buy something in my store, that's what I got it for. All kinds of people come in here. I should start putting signs up this one can't come in because he don't vote the way I do and that one can't come in because he calls his god a different name than I do, and pretty snnn there's so many signs in the window that the sun can't get in and the only customer I got left is myself." He paused for breath and gave the document another shove. "Sammy Rosen's name don't go down on nothing like that!" "Listen, punk," growled the big man. and then suddenly caught himself. "Listen, Mr. Rosen, I agree with you a hundred percent. But what you're talking about are humans. Martians ain't." "Human or Martian, a customer is a customer. What's where a customer comes from got to do with my doing business with him? I go to pay my rent I don't have to fill out a paper saying where I got each dollar." The big man snorted in disgust. "So that's it. You little guys are all alike. You like to talk about principles but what you're really afraid of is losing a nickel. Well suppose I fix things so that by joining the League you make yourself a nice chunk of change on the deal?" Without waiting for Sammy's answer, he opened his briefcase again and took out a small vial and placed it on the counter. Sammy looked at it questioningly. "Maybe this will make you change your mind," said the big man. "What is it?" "A full ounce of Venusian Leather!" Sammy's eyebrows went up and he whistled in spite of himself. Like everybody else he had heard of the fabulously expensive scent for men put out by the House of Arnett, a perfume that had such a powerful emotional effect on members of the opposite sex that for years there had been some talk in the World Congress of banning it. "That's worth five thousand smackers on the wholesale market," said the big man. "Just put your John Henry down here and it's yours." "He'll sign!" said Sarah quickly. She turned fiercely on her husband. "You heard what the man said -- five thousand dollars! With that we can get out of this hole in the wall and have a decent place again. Think of it, Sammy, a big place on the corner with a neon sign six feet and purple!" The picture hit Sammy hard. He closed his eyes, the better to visualize the glorious sight. Like a man in a trance his hand reached out slowly for the fat-bellied fountain pen that Mr. Suggs was holding out to him. "You'll never regret this, Rosen. You're the last place within twenty blocks of the spaceport that hasn't signed. With the neighborhood one hundred percent against them, those stinking greenies are going to feel so unpopular that they'll have to pack up and go home." Sammy hesitated and then picked up the contract and scanned it near-sightedly. "There's an awful lot of small print here," he said. "It's all on the up-and-up," said the big man. "All that it boils down to is that you agree not to have no truck with any Martians that happen to come around. It's for your own protection. If we don't put that bunch in their place, pretty soon Earth will be swarming with those little stinkers." "Maybe so," muttered Sammy, "but five thousand bucks just so I don't sell a couple of nickels worth of candy, that don't make sense." "It doesn't have to," said Mr. Suggs. "Like you said yourself, when you go to pay your rent nobody's asking where the money came from. You want to keep Earth safe for Earthmen, you sign. Any time a Martian lands, he's put in Coventry. Nobody talks to him,  nobody does business with him, nobody even lets on he exists. Under the treaty the World Government made after the first landing on Mars, we can't keep them from coming here. But there's nothing in the law that says we got to make them welcome. This here contract is just a legal gentleman's agreement that -- " "A legal gentleman's agreement." Sammy's eyes were blazing. "What's eating you?" demanded Suggs. "What did ' I say?" "Enough! Enough to bring me to my senses. And for a fistful of dirty dollars I, Sammy Rosen, was going to be a part of it." He spat in self-disgust. "Now listen here!" "I don't listen to nothing. Get out of my store before I call a cop!" The big man turned to Sarah. "Can't you reason with him, lady?" She took one look at her husband's tight-lipped face and shrugged her shoulders hopelessly. "Not when he's like that." "You don't listen to nothing, eh, Rosen? We'll sec about that." He picked up his briefcase and the perfume and started towaid the door. When he reached it he turned. "You're going to find out what a stinker a Martian can really be. And when you do, you're going to be happy to sign -- for nothing!" night but nobody tried to break in and no bricks came crashing through the windows. When Sarah arrived with his breakfast, he was in a slightly happier mood. "See," he said, "no trouble." Sarah didn't say anything. Sammy was about to receive the silent treatment. Just after she left and he had settled down in his old rocker at the rear of the store to read the morning paper, he heard the tinkle of the customer bell from the front. When he saw nobody standing on the other side of the counter he knew who had come in. He leaned over the showcase and looked down at the little foot-high ball of green fur that was bouncing up and down in front of the candy case. When it saw him it piped in a fluttering flutelike voice, "A thousand greetings, egg-mother. May your fwentok never lose its rotundity and your gertlings embrace all eternity." "Mazcl-tov yourself, Mr. Wctzle," said Sammy politely. "Nice day, isn't it." "For Marslings the response is in the negative. Tomorrow is our last day carthsidc." "Business isn't so good?" "Business isn't. The streets are full of signs saying here we cannot enter, and the buyers who come to our ship look at our holds of dried kecra berries and laugh or say angry words and depart without buying." "Things'll get better," said Sammy comfortingly. "They're bound to." "Is not better, egg-mother, is sadness and departing. In the coming there were bouncings of happiness and singings in the companionways because now we were free of the Company and there would we no more horrors for our folklings "There's an organization behind it, from the dwirtles in the trading a big one, and they're spending a shed. Six of your years my peoples lot of money, a whole lot of had worked to save enough of the money." He thought wistfully of green earth paper to charter the the vanished five thousand dollars ship that brought us. We were and what he could have done with thinkings that because the Comit and then made a determined efpany prized the berries that here fort to banish the thought from his they would be prized too. But it is head. Reaching down, he slid open not so and now we must return to the door on the candy case, tell our peoples that we have found "What'll you have this morning, only failures. The Company will be Mr. Wetzle?" angry because we came and now "Nothings," said the little Marthey will ask more and give less, tian sadly. "The last of my earth And no protest will be made, for coins are gone and in my pouch without the pumps and other manow is nothings but valueless keera chine things we get from them to berries." He bounced almost to the bring the water up from the deep front door and then turned. "Of wells there would come again the you, egg-mother, there will be fond great hunger that was on us before memories. Blessings and farewell." the earthman came." "Wait," said Sammy impulsively, "There must be some way out," and reaching into the candy case said Sammy. "These berries, maybe he filled a small sack with an asif you took them to a good chemist sortment of licorice whips, lemon he could find out what they were drops, green leaves, bubble gum, good for." chocolate malt balls, and jawbreak"This we did," said the little ers of various shapes and colors. Martian. "And after waiting came "Here," he said, thrusting the a long report full of big words bag forward. "Take it with you which said in many different ways and eat in good health." was usefulness nothing." He paused Wetzle eyed the bag wistfully but and ruffled his silky green fur. "But didn't come forward to take it. you have been my friend and it is "I bless your thought, eggnot kind to be casting on your mother, but to take without payfwentok our troubles. My coming ment cannot be done. Such is the this day was to say farewell and speaking of the oldsters." blessings." He hesitated a moment. "Who said anything about no "And if you'll forgiving, to ask a payment," said Sammy. "If those question which is giving deep bothberries are good enough for that ering." . company on Mars, they ought to be "Yes?" said Sammy. good enough for Sammy Rosen." "Why for four little Mars peoples He paused as if he were making a could there be such a closing of quick mental computation. "I'd say stores against us and a putting of there were about ten berries worth signs in windows?" of candies in that sack." He held it "You've got me," said Sammy, forward again. "Here, take it." "But..." protested the Martian. "No buts," said Sammy firmly. "I run my business, I set my prices. Among friends there should be no argument." The alien hesitated for a moment and then gave a happy bounce that took him up on top of the candy counter. "Your goodness will not be forgotten," he said. "Take them all. For me they have no value." A small, slit-likc opening opened along his middle and a handful of small dried berries that looked like reddish color, tumbled out on the counter. The slit continued to widen until a large pouch like that of a kangaroo was exposed and Sammy placed the bag of candy inside it. The little Martian was half way through an elaborate expression of thanks when he was suddenly interrupted by a tapping sound from the front window. Both he and Sammy turned to see what was happening. Their responses to what they saw were rather different. In spite of the turned up collar of his trench coat and the pulled down brim of his slouch hat, Sammy was able to identify the man outside as Suggs, the Anti-Martian League agent. He was holding a bird cage in one hand and when he saw them looking at him he held it up so they could see what was inside. Hanging almost motionless on two pairs of tiny fan-like wings was a tiny reptile with a long jeweled beak and glittering scales that sent flashes of sunlight into the store. Sammy stared at it with a sudden lump in his throat. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his whole life. Wetzle was staring too, but not in admiration. "Make him take it away, eggmother, or something terrible will happen!" And just then something did. Suggs turned the cage so that the little flying reptile could look in the window. When it saw Wetzle it let out a sudden sharp scream of rage and threw itself against the bars with a violent beating of wings, a long dagger-like tongue darting in and out of its beak. The Martian let out a squawk of hysterical fright and flattened down on top of the showcase like a semi-collapsed football. Simultaneously a ring of tiny hose-like members erected themselves through his fur and shot a fine spray up into the air. Since Sammy was only two feet away, he got the full and immediate benefit of it. The stench was horrible, so horrible as to make the protective scent employed by skunks seem to be attar of roses in comparison, and so strong that for a moment Sammy was too stunned to react to it. When he finally did he staggered back drunkcnly, clapping both hands over nose and mouth in a vain effort to keep it out. His stomach heaved once, and then twice, and he made a sudden dive for the back room and made the nearest window. Unheeded, the man in the trench coat climbed into a car that was parked nearby, placed the cage on the seat beside him, and drove slowly away, a satisfied smile on his ugly face. staggered back into the front of the store and collapsed into an old wicker chair he kept behind the counter. He'd finally adjusted to the stench to the point where each breath didn't threaten immediate nausea but he was barely able to hold his own. "What happened, Wctzle," he gasped. The little Martian hadn't moved. He still crouched on top of the showcase, trembling half in fright and half in mortification. "The dwirtle, the thing in the cage, made me do it," he said miserably. "But it wasn't hurting you!" "Martian people have what you call built-in defendable mechanism," explained Wetzle in a quavering voice. "When dwirtle is commencing hunger dance the squirters goes psssst for life-saving. This dwirtle is killer bird, most dangerous thing on Mars. It stabs with tongue and is murder. Only spray from head things can drive it away. If I could have made control, it would not have happened, but head things are not part of thinker, they go off by themselves when dwirtles come." He let out the Martian equivalent of a lugubrious sigh. brought upon my friends fwentok great sorrow and for this I must make expiation. I now turn off my breathers." The three air sacks that were spaced equidistantly around Wetzle's body stopped their pulsing and in a matter of seconds a glaze began to steal over his eyes. When Sammy realized what was happening, he let out a horrified yell. "For Pete's sake, Wetzle, don't! I got enough troubles without having suicides in my shop yet." The little Martian didn't seem to hear. The light of life had almost flickered out when Sammy grabbed him and started to shake him violently. "Listen, dumpkof. To die isn't helping things, it will only make matters worse for me. Your -- your death will be on my fwentok " That did it. Wetzle gave a sudden gasp and his air sacks began to pump convulsively. "Now look," said Sammy sternly. "It wasn't your fault, you couldn't help it. You just sit there and don't do nothing while I try and figure out some way to get rid of this stink." The first and obvious thing to do was to open the front door and air the shop out. This he did and turned on the large overhead fan to speed things up a bit. As the Martian protective odor billowed out into the street, there were immediate violent protests from the neighbors. O'Reilly came charging over from the furniture store next door to see what was the matter, only to skid to a halt when the full force of the stench hit his nostrils. "Hey, Rosen!" he shouted after he had retreated to a safe distance, "What's going on over there? You got my store stunk up so bad that all my customers are running out !" Sammy hesitated, looked at Wetzle who was still hunched up miserably on the counter, and came to a sudden decision. The Martians wore having a tough enough time of it as it was. Something like this was all that was needed to tip the scales against them completely. Sammy had known what it was like to be the underdog and in spite of what had happened he felt a flush of sympathy for the unhappy little Martian. "It's nothing, O'Reilly," he yelled. "I'm making a little experiment and it's not going just like the book says. A couple more minutes and I'll have everything under control." "You'd better be quick about it," replied the other angrily, "or you're going to have a nice law suit on your hands." O'Reilly wasn't the only one who was objecting. As the stench spread up and down the street, more and more stores were involuntarily evacuated and more and more voices joined the angry chorus demanding that Sammy do something, and do it right away. Sammy tried. He tried everything in his stock of pharmaceuticals without success and at last was reduced to the patent deodorants he carried in stock. He tried every last stick, tube, and jar but nothing did any good. He was just moving toward the door to confess defeat and ask for suggestions when he heard the moan of a police siren coming down the street. Seconds later a squadcar came to a screeching stop right in front of the store. Two policemen came tumbling out, only to stumble to a stop and wilt as the odor hit them. Gagging and holding their noses, they scrambled back into their car and backed away until they found a spot where the stench was semi-bearable. The driver cranked down his window a cautious half inch and shouted a stem warning to the effect that if Sammy didn't do something about the disturbance he was causing, he was going to find himself in serious trouble. "There's nothing I can do," shouted Sammy. 'Tve tried everything!" "Then you'd better try something else," snapped the driver. "You're maintaining a public nuisance and if it ain't abated within five minutes, I'm going to haul you in." The ultimatum was greeted by a ragged cheer from the householders who had fled the flats above the stores on each side of Sammy's establishment. Only one tenant still remained in her quarters, a retired burlesque queen who was in the midst of a prolonged and severe attack of rose fever. Even her swollen nostrils, however, were able to pick up enough of the scent to cause her to lean out her third story window and shriek somewhat dated but nevertheless effective obscenities. With Wetzlp looking on helplessly, Sammy made one last desperate attempt at new deodorant combinations, but nothing had any effect on the horrible miasma that poured forth from the store. When five minutes by the store clock had passed, he appeared in front of his store, head hanging and feet dragging, to surrender himself to the law. Though innocent, Sammy was a law ahiding citizen. It wasn't his fault that he wasn't taken into custody. But he had been thoroughly saturated hy Wetzle's protective troubles," said Sammy bitterly, spray and the passing of time "The neighbors want I should cohadn't diminished its potency. As a operate by moving away. The city result, wherever he went he was wants I should cooperate by going protected by an invisible barrier. to jail as a public nuisance. So what He was only half way to the is it you're wanting?" squadcar when it suddenly darted "A simple statement to the away in reverse. For two blocks he press," said the voice smoothly. "All followed it with the spectators reyou have to do is to inform the patreating sullenly in front of him, pers who is really responsible for but every time he got within a himwhat happened. You might suggest dred yards, there would be a sudin addition that the Martian was den whine of gears and the car behaving in a disorderly fashion would roar back to a safe distance, and that when you asked him to The two policemen tried every leave he responded with an unproway they could think of to take yoked gas attack." possession of their prisoner; they "If there's going to be any telleven broke out gas masks hut even ing," said Sammy angrily, "it's gothesc didn't help. At last they gave ing to be about that bird." up and drove away to place the "What bird?" case in the hands of higher authori"Don't play dumb. The bird that ties, leaving Sammy to trudge back muscleman of yours held up to the down the street to his little drugwindow." store. One hour later the Army an"Now, now," said the voice renounced that they were moving in. provingly. "You don't actually believe that anybody is going to accept such a fantastic story as that, store the telephone was ringing how, we have a dozen reliable witviolently. Wearily he lifted it to his nesses who can testify that our Mr. ear. Suggs was in Flatbush playing ca"Mr. Rosen?... This is Mr. nasta with an aged aunt at the time Reynolds of the Anti-Martian in question. League." "You're an intelligent man, Mr. Sammy started to explode. Rosen. Use that intelligence. One "Look, Rosen," the voice continlittle statement from you and we'll ued. "Do you or do you not want start decontamination at once. And to get rid of that stink?" what's more, we'll still hold open Sammy suddenly stopped shoutthe offer that was made to you earing. "Sure I do," he said. "So lier." what?" "What's perfume got to do with "So we can clear the whole thing being Anti-Martian?" demanded up in a matter of seconds if you'll Sammy. "There's something fishy just cooperate." going on." "Every time somebody starts "The House of Arnett is just one talking cooperation, I get more of the many progressive firms who I # recognize the Martian danger to the terrestrial way of life," said Reynolds smoothly, in fact a shade too smoothly. Sammy didn't answer. He just hung up again. last, "just sitting here staring at each other ain't doing either of us any good. We got to think our way out." He picked up one of the red berries from the little pile on top of the counter and looked at it reflectively. "These things, do your people have any use for them?" "No, egg-mother," said the little Martian. "Sometimes the dwirtle are eating them, but they arc not proper food for Marslings." Sammy got up from his wicker chair and began to pace the floor. He'd never tried to play detective before and he didn't quite know how to go about it. "This company," he said finally, "how does it work?" "Isn't much work," said Wetzle. "Is just giving little bits of machinery for big bags of berries. The company has a concession for the whole north part that says no other Earthmans can come in, but they have only one station." "One thing more," said Sammy, trying to conceal the growing excitement in his voice. "These dwirtles, can they eat anything else?" "All kinds of things," said Wetzle. "But best of all they like Mars peoples like me." Sammy's face fell. "That was a blind alley. I thought for a moment that maybe the company was raising them for something or other and buying berries for feed." "I think not," volunteered the little Martian. "There are some dwirtlrs at the trading station but not lots. They are kept in cages like the small yellow birds you have on earth. The chief trading man is a lover of dwirtles. We are many times asking for him not to keep them in the trading sheds so as not to give us bad frights when we bring in berries, but he is a terrible man. He stands and makes laughter when the dwirtles start their dance and wc fall down in fright and our sprayers go ofl" "He must not he able to smell so good," said Sammy. "Begging your pardon, Mr. Wetzle, but a stink like you let out ain't no cause for laughter." "He's not in the trading shed. He stands behind a big glass window and talks to us through a radio thing." Sammy sat and thought about that for a while and then shook his head in a bewildered fashion. "I don't get it," he said dolefully, "I just don't get it." He looked down at the little red berry he held in his hand and then bit into it cautiously. It had a harsh bitter flavor that made him spit in distaste and throw the rest of the berry across the room. The bitter taste remained and caused his mouth to pucker slightly. He went hack and rinsed his mouth out with water but that didn't do any good either. "I know one thing that will kill it," he said. "And I need a drink anyway." Out of habit he looked around cautiously and then pulled a bottle of vodka out of a cabinet where he had it safely hidden from Sarah. "Here's mud in your eyes," he said and took down a thimblefull. The results were so pleasing that he took another. And then something happened. He sniffed. And then sniffed again. Against the swirling overtones of the pervading stench, something else was coming through. "Do you smell some tiling, Wetzle?" he asked. "Regretful, egg-mother," said the little green fur ball, "But Martian peoples have no smellers." "That makes sense," said Sammy, and sniffed again. It was definitely stronger now, a sharp masculine fragrance like nothing he'd ever smelled before. It seemed to have a definite source but for a moment he couldn't locate it. When he did he was thunderstruck. It was coming from his own mouth. It took him a couple of hours of trial and error before he got what he wanted, but Sammy hadn't passed third on the state pharmaceutical boards for nothing. First there was careful grinding of the berries with a mortar and pestal, then maceration in a solution which contained the same enzymes as normal saliva, and then finally reaction with a concentrated solution of ethyl alcohol. "We've got it, Wetzle," he said quietly, holding up a beaker of a E ale pink solution. "We've got it at ist!" "Got what," asked the little Martian in bewilderment. "The reason for both our troubles," he said as he began to sprinkle the liquid around the store. "Think about it. Go ask yourself why a big outfit like the AntiMartian League should be set up just to make you unhappy enough to go back home." As he talked the solution evaporated. As it did and came in contact with the tiny droplets of the Martian's defensive liquid that hung suspended in the air and coated all the exposed surfaces in the store, an intricate chemical transformation took place. In a matter of seconds the horrible stench had disappeared, leaving in its place a strange exciting fragrance that grew stronger and stronger until at last, much as he enjoyed it, Sammy's head started reeling and he felt an urgent desire for fresh air. Rushing to the door, he threw it open and stood in the entrance inhaling deep breaths of tainted air which automatically became perfumed as they touched his lips. At each end of the street there was a fire line, and behind the ropes stood his erstwhile neighbors. When they saw him they started in howling again, and in spite of the half-hearted efforts of the police, bottles, rocks, and sundry blunt objects began to fly through the air in his direction. Momentarily, that is, for as the new scent spread out through his door and down the street, a change came over the crowd. The shouting subsided to a puzzled muttering, and then as the odor became stronger, part of the populace began to react in a decidedly abnormal manner. The first to break through the ropes was the retired burlesque queen. "I gotta be loved!" she whooped. and dodging through the police cordon, came pelting down the street toward Sammy. The other females in the crowd weren't long in following suit and Sammy saw a deluge of women of all shapes and ages come screaming toward him from both directions, each chanting her own variation of the mating call. Almost too late he scooted back into the store, slamming down the heavy grill work that protected windows and door as he did so. "That's potent stuff," he wheezed as he collapsed into his old wicker chair. "I can see now why so much pressure was put on to run you off the planet." Wetzle gave the triple twitch that was the standard Martian gesture of bewilderment. "In this small head is confused thinking, egg-mother," he said. "Would you be so kindly as to make clarifications?" "Later. Right now I got to figure some way to clear the air. My wife Sarah ain't going to like this sudden popularity of mine." The clearing was relatively simple. After a few minutes of tinkering Sammy made the pleasant discovery that the new scent was susceptible to several of the standard deodorants and before long both the store and its owner had lost the provocative fragrance that had been causing chaos in the street outside. "And now," said Sammy with a heartfelt sigh of relief, "I think maybe we can talk a little business." They did. When they were through Sammy picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Anti-Martian League," said a voice from the other end. "I want to talk to Reynolds." "I'm very sorry but he's in conference. If you'll leave your name, I'll have him call you as soon as he's free." "Conference, shmom fere nee," said Sammy sternly. "You tell him Rosen Ls on the phone and wants to talk to him right now." Three seconds later he heard the unctuous voice. "We've been expecting to hear from you, Mr. Rosen. I assume you're ready to release that statement to the press?" "You mean you ain't heard?" asked Sammy. "Heard what?" "About me going into a new business." "Now, Mr. Rosen," said Reynolds soothingly, "that won't be necessary. We did have to get a bit rough to bring you to your senses, but we'll make up for it. That offer of a flask of Venusian Leather is still good." "That's awfully kind of you," said Sammy, "but me and Wetzle have been talking things over and we decided that wc ain't going to let nobody push us around. The reason I called was to ask if maybe your conscience wasn't bothering you enough for you to come over and clean up the mess you caused here." "Are you saying that you still won't give in?" Reynolds sounded incredulous. "That's right," said Sammy. A staccato burst of profanity came from the phone and then a series of reflections upon Sammy's antecedents that lasted a good three minutes. Sammy waited patiently until the other ran out of breath and then continued: "That was pretty good, but it's nothing to what you're going to hear when your boss finds out that his attempts to run Wetzlc and his friends back to Mars by setting up a phony league have backfired in his face. You see, in trying to get rid of the big stink Wctzle made, I found out something that the House of Arnett spent a lot of money to keep secret -- what goes into Venusian Leather. He paused for a minute to let what he had just said sink in. "Right now you're talking to one half of the firm of Rosen and Wetzle, cut-rate perfumers, manufacturers and sole distributors of ' Martian Leather,' the new perfume for men. You'll be seeing our slogan around once we get our advertising campaign going. It's 'Twice The Strength For Half The Price'." Galloping sounds came from the other end of the line as if Reynolds had suddenly taken to running across the ceiling. It was Sammy's turn to adopt a soothing tone of voice. "There, there," he said. "Sammy Rosen ain't the man to hold a grudge. I know that your League is going to be jerked out from under you as soon as old man Arnett hears the news, but I want you should know that you and your Mr. Suggs can always have a job with us. Wetzle and I are going to need a couple of men to take care of the collecting once we set up our new trading station on Mars. "Of course you won't have an air-tight glass cage to operate from, but it'll be a living." "And that," said Sammy happily as he hung up the phone, "takes care of that. Capital won't be any problem, but we got one more thing we got to figure out before we can go into production. We've got to find some way to get our raw materials without scaring your people half to death every time we want to make a collection." "Is full simplicity," said Wetzle, proud to be able to make a contribution at last. "An up like this," the tiny tubes rose up through his fur, "a little muscles squeezing like this, and -- " He was too late. How many did you get right? I -- kiloparsec. # -- Orion. # -- telekinesis. # -- Mars. # -- absolute zero. # -- Mercury. # -- farthest. # -- # -- Uranus. # -- #. #I -- Venus. # -- hydrogen. # -- one-half. # -- mutation. # -- Aldebran. # -- #. # -- Milky Way. # -- Neptune. # -- coma. # -- j Mu. ' Winged Autos -- Cars that look like planes aren't just a science fiction dream. General Motors has been testing a gas turbine auto that has a vertical tail fin, swept back delta wings and brake flaps on the wings to supplement the wheel brakes. "Fish Cakes" -- The latest in "fish stories" is a synthetic egg white made from fish waste. Tests have shown that cakes baked wdth this substitute ingredient are as good as those made with real eggs. Not the slightest "fishy" taste either. Electric Fly "Chair" -- If bugs keep building up resistance to insecticides, we may have to electrocute them. A new fly trap docs just that. Plug it into a household circuit and, after luring the flics with a sweet scent, the trap electrocutes them and then automatically conceals the dead carcasses in a container. Wind vs. Coal -- A landscape covered with huge windmills may seem rather anachronistic, but British scientists are working toward just such a goal. They are testing prototypes that will harness wind power to supplement coal powered stations. An average wind velocity of #-plus miles an hour would produce power equal to that of coal and would do it as cheaply. Noise Killer -- Loud nerve-wracking noises may soon be completely stilled. A new electronic device consisting of a microphone amplifier and loudspeaker feedback system is in test stages now. Attached to the headrest of a plane scat it can reduce to a whisper the low beat of the engines near a passenger's ear. Adaptation for use on factory machines is a simple matter of installation. Scientific Semantics -- Breaking the language barrier has been tried before with Esperanto, Ido, and Basic English. But die new scientific "supranational" Interlingua is spreading so fast that it may well accomplish that semantic understanding which has been sought for so long. "Miracle" Clothes -- You may soon be wearing clothes made of a radically new kind of yarn. Under tests this synthetic has been boiled in acids and baked at # degrees for days without harming a single thread. But don't plan a new wardrobe just yet; industry has first call on this particular miracle. Bacteria vs. Life -- We're on die road to a world devoid of bacteria, but scientists aren't happy about it at all. Large forest areas are drying out and land is becoming sterile because of the extinction of bacteria that make life-giving humus. In some places the desert is encroaching so fast that the process can be photographed. "Everlasting" Battery -- After four years of secret military production, an "everlasting" battery will soon be available. Using nickel cadmium cells in an alkaline solution, the battery is invulnerable to shock and vibration, works at temperatures of minus # to plus # degrees, and resists overcharging, reverse charging and short circuiting. It will even outlast the car. Insecticide "Injections" -- Trees of of the future may be able to kill off their own particular insect enemies. Tests on the African Gold Coast have proved that when certain insecticides are saturated into the soil around a tree, they are absorbed through the roots, and carried throughout the entire circulatory system. When insects attack the tree they die. Simple, isn't it? Mars and Saucers -- The Air Force has found that "saucer" stories are always more frequent when Mars is "close" to the Earth. Since Mars will be closer in # and # than it has been in the last # years, a system of cameras has been set up around the U.S. to clear up the mystery once and for all. Sea Farmers -- The continents and islands of this planet have been dissolving into the sea for eons ; so much so that future generations may find that the mineral, animal and plant resources of the sea, which have been nourished by this "land loss", are the only ones available for practical consideration. Climate For Mars -- Astronauts are seriously thinking of tampering with the planets to provide Mars with an atmosphere and climate suitable for terrestrials. Jupiter's sixth planet, which is thought to be an ice mass, could be made to intercept the orbit of Mars and so of water necessary to the production of oxygen by photosynthesis. Heart Revivor -- A "spark plug" that stimulates the heart-beat and can literally bring a patient back to life without benefit of surgery is being perfected. We can look forward to the day when doctors, going on house calls, will not only carry medicines in their little black bags, but will also have a compact, inexpensive heart stimulator for emergency use. Paper Snow Fences -- Highway snow fences made of paper are not a mad impractical dream. Tests made in Michigan have shown that paper fences are as effective as wooden-slat fences in stopping snow from drifting across highways. Ocean Radioactives -- We may be mining the oceans for radioactives in the future. Oceanographers have found a heat flow from the ocean bottom equal to that caused by radioactive elements on high and dry continents. Save Your Pans -- The lady of the house will be pleased to know that scorched and burned pots and baking pans will soon be a thing of the past. A plastic coating of polytetrar fluoroethylene on cooking utensils will save the day. Tornado Destroyer -- The loss of "lON-Conditioning" -- Rooms of lives from destructive tornados honed" as well as air-conditioned may someday be expunged from to help combat disease and fatigue, the records. Scientists believe that Tests at Stanford Medical Center a guided missile with an a-bomb have shown that an atmosphere warhead could be steered into a rich in positive ion charge is debaby tornado by radar to destroy it hilitating. while a negative charge before it could get started on a is extremely beneficial to comfort really destructive rampage devasand health, and aids immeasurably fating the countryside. in disease resistance. (Continued from page #) servation planes or any other availing touches on a sky giant designed able craft, often flying in open to become the first jet plane to fly cockpits in the face of sub-zero the Atlantic non-stop. It will carry weather and storms of sleet and ice # to # passengers and will make and snow -- and they smashed up the trip at a leisurely average of # all over the map of the United miles per hour, or about six hours States. By March of # the Adfor the crossing! Look for it in the ministration realized it had made a headlines around August or Sepcolossal boner and gave the mail tember. contracts back to the private airIncidentally, if you want to do lines. It was an absurd, costly exsome easy "boning up" on early periment but it proved the human aviation, get a copy of Wings Over clement to be strong and couraAmerica by Harry Bruno (pubgcous and capable. And, to me it lished in #) and have a lot of seems, one of the most dramatic fun. Harry Bruno grew up with all chapters in the annals of the Army the heroes and characters and Air Force was written during these "drum beaters" of the early days of few months. aviation and his story, void of dcBut the drama of Lindbergh's tails or technical angles, is a simple, flight had touched off the spark, straight-forward narrative chock Within a few years air travel befull of the people and events that came routine. People no longer preceded the world of aviation we gawked at the sound of a motor know today. roaring overhead. Since then miliSo, in these old stories, written tary planes have been going higher during the birth pangs of aviation, and faster every day. Civilian air is portrayed the human element -- transportation has been made safer, the curious, reckless men, with an faster and more luxurious. Today, insatiable appetite for adventure, out on the Pacific coast, the ultiwho were the instruments and mate in air travel is almost ready guinea pigs of modem flight -- the for test flight. Boeing Airplane kind who will pioneer the space Company is now putting the finishflight of tomorrow. -- jlq tractor is the result of o Moonquoke. The dry crust of the Moon, which burned itself out countless centuries ago, is susceptible to many treacherous changes which could snuff out men, machinery and entire bases in an instant In addition to the quake menace there are probably large areas where travel would be dangerous because of thin crusts of dust and rock concealing deep chasms. l i ' If Science Fiction Magazine ' v .  ' ' -- I,is. the growing-est  sei. on If you do not enjoy every eni'l'ficJtiQn magazine in...-mpivite of it. just let us know and America use ew r '  I rqf u n d your money at once! issue sparkles "vJith nR Tr you #)# like it (which we are r su#e-.yQu will) we will send you the next # issues fresh o(T the press -- which means you get # issues in all for the regular #.jO subscription price, saving you #.)! Mail the ideas and entertainment!... The finest fiction and features by the finest writers!... The best artwork by the best artists!... The finest paper and the finest printing by lar!... That's why readers everywhere arc calling it "America's most interesting science fiction magazine"... But why not sec for yourself? You risk nothing! We will send you -- All you have to do is mail the handy subscription form below. We will then send ou your first issue at once -- Only # money lack yuurunlccd IF Magazine, Kingston, New York Enclosed find # (check or money order) for which please send me IF Magazine for the next # months. It is understood that the first issue is a know and you will return the full subscription price at once!  equipped for research and living so that scientists, away from the home base for long periods of time, can make prolonged and intimate inspection of the Moon's surface. The ship's equipment includes radar, solar reflectors, radio, astrodome top, two huge fuel tanks, electronic instruments, computers, chemical laboratory and other exploration necessities, as well as health and comfort facilities. Now turn to inside back cover. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Ken Fagg: The Old Spaceman's Tales  Theodore Cogswell  Investigating the Moon's Resources  IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue an sale July I # th # I #  #  #  comes in the form of an interesting letter received from Mrs. Alma McCormick, of Richland, Washington, who takes slight issue with The Golden Man , by Philip K. Dick, which appeared in the April issue. Mrs. McCormick enjoyed the story but disagrees with the mutant theme. We enjoyed her letter, and think you will too. Dear Mr. Quinn: Your Chat With the Editor in April IF is thoroughly enjoyable... But I have another theme to suggest: the theme that homo superior , the mutants, will be and must be hunted out and destroyed by homo sapiens when and if he ever occurs. I admit that "The Golden Man # by Dick doesn't deal with homo superior as much as it does with "horrible tribes of mutant freaks # who might justifiably be a source of horror and terror. But the last paragraph, page #, takes the same stand that was taken in the book "Dragon Island # (and countless other stories) : "Which race? Not the human race...' . If we introduce a mutant to keep us going, it'll be mutants, not us, who'll inherit the earth. It'll be mutants surviving for their own sake... To survive, we've got to cold-deck them right from the start." Now, really! I'm a teacher... of exceptional children. This semester they are mentally retarded children, as far below the abilities of normal children as homo sapiens would be below homo superior. They cannot and never will be able to take care of themselves, but we carefully teach them all they can learn (very simple reading, social graces, grooming, use of household and play equipment, counting and use of coins). We don't, and never expect the rest of the world to, compete with them. They're certainly not being "cold-decked # from the start. On the other hand, I have taught superior children. Not superior to the extent of homo superior, true. I did have one "gifted class" however that had an average I.Q. of #... If I remember correctly, the highest # or # members rated between # I.Q. and # I.Q. -- ratings that occur in a very, very thin "cream" on top of the general population. The # I.Q. rating occurs about # times in # children if we can trust statistics... And what were they like? And how did the schools and the general population treat them? Well, they were a joy to teach and sometimes a bit difficult to handle. All of them spoke two languages (Engglish and Spanish) and had learned to speak Spanish fluently and reasonably correctly in six weeks. Many also spoke from one to three more languages. (They were children of diplomats and industrialists and had travelled extensively.) They learned everything else as rapidly as they learned languages, and the few merely average children, who learned at merely average rates, not only enjoyed the pyrotechnics of some of their discussions but seemed to catch fire from them to do better work of their own. For example, have you ever seen the trouble teachers of average high school classes (or even college classes) have when they try to get students to "document" papers they write or ideas they propound by sufficient reading even when the teachers give a bibliography already prepared? These # to # year old children would discuss a new item of knowledge or a new idea, and the next day a good many of them would come to class with armloads of books from the library with paragraphs, chapters, or full-time treatment of the subject. At first it was only the brighter ones; later even the few merely average were doing the same thing. Such children are not only a joy (though I know some teachers loathe working with "precocious brats") ; they seem to be a lift to others. Except in one situation : when you have one exceedingly or school, you have a bored, conceited, self-centered, isolated, rebellious, bothersome pest. One mutant, one homo superior might be like that. But from my experience with the superior child, and from the kudos our world hands such men as Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc., I think we would merely be more impressed and even happier with a truly new race, a truly superior race. They might not be highly impressed with us, but even now we have our intelligentsia who associate mostly with each other, our average who associate with the average, and the dull who are happy with the dull... and even our waydown-below-average like my little ones who are happy as larks when they are with each other. Brains seek their own level... Rather than Cro Magnon killing off all the Neanderthal, isn't it possible that their taking over was a matter of natural selection plus absorption? If mutants arrived, it seems more likely (to me) that homo sapiens would be absorbed gradually (many a genius marries a mere average spouse) ; if homo superior bred true, his more resistant body could probably stand the disease and injuries the world hands out better and his children would inherit the earth. If present mankind died out, I doubt that it would be in gas chambers or crematoriums, and those of us who lived out a full life-time (as the Neanderthals perhaps did) would live it admiring and accepting the leadership of the superior race because they'd make our lives richer and fuller too. Sincerely yours, (Mrs.) Alma McCormick members to be supreme in scientific achievement. Now the Rykes were going to share their vast knowledge with the scientists of Earth. T o any question they would supply an answer -- for a price. And Hockley, of all Earth's scientists, was the stubborn one who wanted to weigh the answers with the costs... By Raymond F. Jones Illustrated by Ed Emsh tific Services, Information and Coordination was a somewhat misleading and obscure title, and Dr. Sherman Hockley who held it was not the least of those whom the title misled and sometimes obscured. He told himself he was not a mere library administrator, although he was proud of the information files built up under his direction. They contained the essence of accumulated knowledge found to date on Earth and the extraterrestrial planets so far contacted. He didn't feel justified in claiming to be strictly a research supervisor, either, in spite of duties as top level administrator for all divisions of the National Standardization and Research Laboratories and their subsidiaries in government, industry, and education. During his term of supervision the National Laboratories had made a tremendous growth, in contrast to a previous decline. Most of all, however, he disclaimed being a figurehead, to which all the loose strings of a vast and rambling organization could be tied. But sometimes it was quite difficult to know whether or not that was his primary assignment after all. His unrelenting efforts to keep out of the category seemed to be encountering more and more determination to push him in that direction. Of course, this was merely the way it looked in his more bitter moments -- such as the present. Normally, he had a full awareness of the paramount importance of his position, and was determined to administer it on a scale in keeping with that importance. His decision could affect the research in the world's major laboratories. Not that he was a dictator by any means, although there were times when dictation was called for. As when a dozen projects needed money and the Congress allotted enough for one or two. Somebody had to make a choice -- His major difficulty was that active researchers knew it was the Congressional Science Committee which was, ultimately responsible for their bread and butter. And the Senators regarded the scientists, who did the actual work in the laboratories, as the only ones who mattered. Both groups tended to look upon Hockley's office as a sort of fulcrum in their efforts to maintain balance with each other -- or as referee in their sparring for adequate control over each other. At that, however, things researchwise were better than ever before. More funds and facilities were available. Positions in pure research were more secure. And then, once again, rumors circulate wildly a few days ago. Since Man's achievement of extra-galactic flight, stories of Rykeand made research scientists sick with longing when they considered the possible truth of what they heard. The planet was rumored to be a world of super-science, whose people had an answer for every research problem a man could conceive. The very few Earthmen firmed the rumors. It was a paradise, according to their stories. And among other peoples of the galaxies were acknowledged supreme in scientific achievement. None challenged them. None even approached them in abilities. What made the situation so frustrating to Earthmen was the additional report that the Rykes were quite altruistically sharing their science with a considerable number of other worlds on a fee basis. Earth scientists became intoxicated at the mere thought of studying at the feet of the exalted Rykes. Except Dr. Sherman Hockley. From the first he had taken a dim view of the Ryke reports. Considering the accomplishments of the National Laboratories, he could see no reason for his colleagues' halfshameful disowning of all their own work in favor of a completely unknown culture several hundred million light years away. They were bound to contact more advanced cultures in their explorations -- and could be thankful they were as altruistic as the Rykes! -- but it was no reason to view themselves as idiot children hoping to be taught by the Rykes. He had kept his opinions very much to himself in the past, since they were not popular with his associates, who generally regarded his attitudes as simply old-fashioned. But now, for the first time, a Ryke ship was honoring Earth with a visit. There was almost hysterical speculation over the possibility that Earth would be offered tutelage by the mighty Ryke scientists. Hockley wouldn't hhve said he was unalterably opposed to the idea. He would have described himself as extremely cautious. What he did oppose wholeheartedly was the enthusiasm that painted the Rykes with pure and shining light, without a shadowy hue in the whole picture. Since his arrival, the Ryke envoy had been closeted with members of the Congressional Science Committee. Not a word had leaked as to his message. Shortly, however, the scientists were to be let in on the secret which might affect their careers for better or for worse during the rest of their lives, and for many generations to come. The meeting was going to be -- Hockley jumped to his feet as he glanced at the clock. He hurried through the door to the office of his secretary, Miss Cardston, who looked meaningfully at him as he passed. 'Til bet there isn't a Senator on time," he said. In the corridor he almost collided with Dr. Lester Showalter, who was his Administrative Assistant for Basic Research. "The Ryke character showed up fifteen minutes ago," said Showalter. "Everyone's waiting." "We've got six minutes yet," said Hockley. He walked rapidly beside Showalter. "Is there any word on what the envoy's got that's so important?" "No. I've got the feeling it's something pretty big. Wheeler and Johnson of Budget are there. Somebody said it might have something to do with the National Lab." "I don't see the connection between that and a meeting with the Ryke," said Hockley. Showalter stopped at the door of the conference room. "Maybe they want to sell us something. At any rate, we're about to find out." The conference table was surrounded by Senators of the Committee. Layered behind them were scientists representing the cream of Hockley's organization. Senator Markham, the bulky, red-faced Chairman greeted them. "Your seats are reserved at the head of the table," he said. "Sorry about the time," Hockley mumbled. "Clock must be slow." "Quite all right. We assembled just a trifle early. I want you to meet our visitor, Special Envoy Markham introduced them, and the stick-thin envoy arose with an extended hand. His frail, whistling voice that was in keeping with his bird-like character spoke in clear tones. "I am happy to know you. Dr. Hockley, Dr. Showalter." The two men sat down in good view of the visitor's profile. Hockley had seen the Rykes before, but had always been repelled by their snobbish approach. Characteristically, the envoy bore roughly anthropomorphic features, including a short feather covering on his dorsal side. He was dressed in bright clothing that left visible the streak of feathering that descended from the bright, plumed crown and along the back of his neck. Gravity and air pressure of Earth were about normal forliim. For breathing, however, he was required to wear a small device in one narrow nostril. This was connected to a compact tank on his shoulder. Markham called for order and introduced the visitor. There was a round of applause. Liacan bowed with a short, stiff gesture and let his small black eyes dart over the audience. With an adjustment of his breathing piece he began speaking. "It is recognized on Earth' he said, "as it is elsewhere, that my disputed intellectual leadership in the galaxies of the Council. Your research is concerned with things taugfit only in the kindergartens of my world. Much that you hold to be true is in error, and your most profound discoveries are self-evident to the children of my people." Hockley felt a quick, painful contraction in the region of his diaphragm. So this was it! "We are regarded with much jealousy, envy, and even hatred by some of our unlearned neighbors in space," said the Ryke. "But it has never been our desire to be selfish with our superior achieve- ments which make us the object of these feelings. We have undertaken a program of scientific leadership in our interstellar neighborhood. This began long before you came into space and many worlds have accepted the plan we offer. "Obviously, it is impractical to pour out all the knowledge and basic science we have accumulated. Another world would find it impossible to sort out that which was applicable to it. What we do is act as a consultation center upon which others can call at will to obtain data pertaining to any problem at hand. Thus, they are not required to sort through wholly inapplicable information to find what they need. "For example, if you desire to improve your surface conveyances, we will supply you with data for building an optimum vehicle suitable for conditions on Earth and which is virtually indestructible. You will of course do your own manufacturing, but even there we can supply you with technology that will make the process seem miraculous by your present standards. "Our services are offered for a fee, payable in suitable items of goods or raw materials. When you contemplate the freedom from monotonous and unending research in fields already explored by us, I am certain you will not consider our fees exorbitant. Our desire is to raise the cultural level of all peoples to the maximum of which they are capable. We know it is not possible or even desirable to bring others to our own high levels, but we do offer assistance to all cultures in accord with their ability to receive. The basic principle is that they shall ask -- and whatever is asked for, with intelligence sufficient for its utilization, that shall be granted. "I am certain I may count on your acceptance of the generous offer of my people." The envoy sat down with a jiggling of his bright plume, and there was absolute silence in the room. Hockley pictured to himself the dusty, cobweb laboratories of Earth vacated by scientists who ran to the phone to call the Rykes for answers to every problem. Senator Markham stood up and glanced over the audience. "There is the essence of the program which has been submitted to us," he said. "There is a vast amount of detail which is, of course, obvious to the minds of our friends on Rykeman of much deliberation on the part of us comparatively simple minded Earthmen." He gave a self-conscious chuckle, which got no response. Hockley felt mentally stunned. Here at last was the thing that had been hoped for by most, anxiously awaited by a few, and opposed by almost no one. "The major difficulty , # said Markham with slow dignity, "is the price. It's high, yes. In monetary terms, approximately twelve and a no man in his right mind would consider any reasonable figure too high for what we can expect to receive from our friends of Rykeman HL "We of the Science Committee do not believe, however, that we could get a commitment for this sum to be added to our normal budget. Yet there is a rather obvious solution. The sum required is very close to that which is now expended on the National Standardization and Research Laboratories . # Hockley felt a sudden chill at the back of his neck. "With the assistance of the Rykes , # said Markham, "we shall have no further need of the National Laboratories. We shall require but a small staff to analyze our problems and present them to the Rykes and relay the answers for proper assimilation. Acceptance of the Ryke program provides its own automatic financing l # He glanced about with a triumphant smile. Hockley felt as if he were looking through a mist upon something that happened a long time ago. The National Lab! Abandon the National Lab! Around him there were small nods of agreement from his colleagues. Some pursed their lips as if doubtful -- but not very much. He waited for someone to rise to his feet in a blast of protest. No one did. For a moment Hockley's own hands tensed on the back of the chair in front of him. Then he slumped back to his seat. Now was not the time. They had to thrash it out among themselves. He had to show them the magnitude of this bribe. He had to find an argument to beat down the Congressmen's irrational hopes of paradise. He couldn't plead for the Lab on the grounds of sentiment -- or that it was sometimes a good idea to work out your own problems. The Senators didn't care for the problems or concerns of the scientists. It appeared that even the scientists themselves had forgotten to care. He had to slug both groups with something very solid. Markham was going on. "We are convinced this is a bargain which even the most obstinate of our Congressional colleagues will be quick to recognize. It would be folly to compute with building blocks when we can gain access to giant calculators. There should be no real difficulty in getting funds transferred from the National Laboratory. "At this time we will adjourn. Liacan leaves this evening. Our acceptance of this generous offer will ly upon official sanction by the Congress. I wish to ask this same group to meet again for discussion of the details incident to this transfer of operations. Let us say at ten o'clock in the morning, gentlemen." envoy. Afterwards, he moved through the circle of Senators to his own group. In the corridor they tightened about him and followed along as if he had given an order for them to follow him. He turned and attempted a grin. "Looks like a bull session is in order, gents. Assembly in five minutes in my office." As he and Showalter opened the door to Miss Cardston's office and strode in, the secretary looked up with a start. "I thought you were going to meet in the conference room." "We've met," said Hockley. "This is the aftermeeting. Send out for a couple of cases of beer." He glanced at the number surging through the doorway and fished in his billfold. "Better make it three. This ought to cover it." With disapproval, Miss Cardston picked up the bills and turned to the phone. Almost simultaneously there was a bellow of protest and an enormous, ham-like hand gripped her slender wrist. She glanced up in momentary fright. Dr. Forman K. Silvers was holding her wrist with one hand and clapping Hockley on the back with the other. "This is not an occasion for beer, my boy!" he said in an enormous voice. "Make that a case of champagne, Miss Cardston." He released her and drew out his own billfold. "Get somebody to bring in a couple of dozen chairs," Hockley said. In his own office he walked to the window behind his desk and stood facing it. The afternoon haze was coming up out of the ocean. Faintly visible were the great buildings of the National Laboratories on the other side of the city. Above the mist the sun caught the tip of the eight story tower where the massive field tunnels of the newly designed gamma tron were to be installed. Or were to have been installed. The gammatron was expected to make possible the creation of gravitational fields up to five thousand g's. It would probably be a mere toy to the Rykes, but Hockley felt a fierce pride in its creation. Maybe that was childish. Maybe his whole feeling about the Lab was childish. Perhaps the time had come to give up childish things and take upon themselves adulthood. But looking across the city at the concrete spire of the gammatron, he didn't believe it. He heard the clank of metal chairs as a couple of clerks began bringing them in. Then there was the clink of glassware. He turned to see Miss Cardston stiffly indicating a spot on the library table for the glasses and the frosty bottles. Hockley walked slowly to the table and filled one of the glasses. He raised it slowly. "It's been a short life but a merry one, gentlemen." He swallowed the contents of the glass too quickly and returned to his desk. "You don't sound very happy about the whole thing," said Mortenson, a chemist who wore a neat, silvery mustache. "Are you overjoyed," said Hockley, "that we are to swap the National Lab for a bottomless encyclopedia?" "Yes, I think so," said Mortenson. "There are some minor objections, but in the end I'm certain we'll all be satisfied with what we get . # "Satisfied! Happy!" exclaimed the mathematician, Dr. Silvers. "How can you use words so prosaic and restrained in references to these great events which we shall be privileged to witness in our lifetimes?" He had taken his stand by the the glasses with the clear, bubbling champagne, sloshing it with ecstatic abandon over the table and the rug. Hockley glanced toward him. "You don't believe, then. Dr. Silvers, that we should maintain any reserve in regard to the Rykes?" "None whatever! The gods themselves have stepped down and offered an invitation direct to paradise. Should we question or hold back, or say we are merely happy. The proper response of a man about to enter heaven is beyond words!" The bombast of the mathematician never failed to enliven any backroom session in which he participated. "I have no doubt," he said, "that within a fortnight we shall be in possession of a solution to the Legrandian Equations. I have sought this for forty years." "I think it would be a mistake to support the closing of the National Laboratories," said Hockley slowly. As if a switch had been thrown, their expressions changed. There was a sudden carefulness in their stance and movements, as if they were feinting before a deadly opponent. "I don't feel it's such a bad bargain," said a thin, bespectacled physicist named Judson. He was seated across the room from Hockley. "I'll vote to sacrifice the Lab in exchange for what the Rykes will give us." "That's the point," said Hockley. "Exactly what are the Rykes going to give us? And we speak very glibly of sharing their science. But shall we actually be in any position to share it? What becomes of the class of scientists on Earth when the Lab is abandoned?" Wilkins stood abruptly, his hands shoved part way into his pockets and his lower jaw extended tensely. "I don't believe that's part of this question," he said. It is not just we scientists who are to share the benefits of the Rykes. It is Mankind. At this time we have no right to consider mere personal concerns. We would betray our whole calling -- our very humanity -- if we thought for one moment of standing in the way of this development because of our personal concern over economic and professional problems. There has never been a time when a true scientist would not put aside his personal concerns for the good of all." Hockley waited, half expecting somebody to start clapping. No one did, but there were glances of selfrighteous approval in Wilkins' direction. The biologist straightened the sleeves of his coat with a smug gesture and awaited Hockley's rebuttal. "We are Mankind," Hockley said finally. "You and I are as much a part of humanity as that bus load of punch machine clerks and store managers passing on the street outside. If we betray ourselves we have betrayed humanity. "This is not a sudden thing. It is the end point of a trend which has gone on for a long time. It began with our first contacts beyond the galaxy, when we realized there were peoples far in advance of us in science and economy. We have been feeding on them ever since. Our own developments have shrunk in direct proportion. For a long time we've been on the verge of becoming intellectual parasites in the Universe. Acceptance of the Ryke offer will be the final step in that direction." Instantly, almost every other man in the room was talking at once. Hockley smiled faintly until the angry voices subsided. Then Silvers cleared his throat gently. He placed his glass beside the bottles on the table with a precise motion. "I am sure," he said, "that a moment's thought will convince you that you do not mean what you have just said. "Consider the position of pupil and teacher. One of Man's greatest failings is his predilection for assuming always the position of teacher and eschewing that of pupil. There is also the question of humility, intellectual humility. We scientists have always boasted of our readiness to set aside one so-called truth and accept another with more valid supporting evidence. "Since our first contact with other galactic civilizations we have had the utmost need to adopt an attitude of humility. We have been fortunate in coming to a community of worlds where war and oppression are not standard rules of procedure. Among our own people we have encountered no such magnanimity as has been extended repeatedly by other worlds, climaxed now by the Ryke's magnificent offer. "To adopt sincere intellectual humility and the attitude of the pupil is not to function as a parasite, Dr. Hockley." "Your analogy of teacher and pupil is very faulty in expressing our relation to the Rykes," said Hockley. "Or perhaps I should say it is too hellishly accurate. Would you have us remain the eternal pupils? The closing of the National Laboratories means an irreversible change in our position. Is it worth gaining a universe of knowledge to give up your own personal free inquiry?" "I am sure none of us considers he is giving up his personal free inquiry," said Silvers almost angrily. "We see unlimited expansion beyond anything we have imagined in our wildest dreams." On a few faces there were frowns of uncertainty, but no one spoke up to support him. Hockley knew that until this vision of paradise wore off there were none of them on whom he could count. He smiled broadly and stood up to ease the tension in the room. "Well, it appears you have made your decision. Of course, Congress can accept the Ryke plan whether we approve or not, but it is good to go on record one way or the other. I suppose that on the way out tonight it would be proper to check in at Personnel and file a services available notification." And then he wished he hadn't said that. Their faces grew a little more set at his unappreciated attempt at humor. the others left. He sat across the desk while Hockley turned back to the window. Only the tip of the gammatron tower now caught the late afternoon sunlight. "Maybe I'm getting old," Hockley said. "Maybe they're right and the Lab isn't worth preserving if it means the difference between getting or not getting tutelage from the Rykes." "But you don't feel that's true," said Showalter. "No." "You're the one who built the Lab into what it is. It has as much worth as it ever had, and you have an obligation to keep it from being destroyed by a group of politicians who could never understand its necessity." "I didn't build it," said Hockley. "It grew because I was able to find enough people who wanted the institution to exist. But I've been away from research so long -- I never was much good at it really. Did you ever know that? I've always thought of myself as a sort of impressario of scientific productions, if I might use such a term. Maybe those closer to the actual work are right. Maybe I'm just trying to hang onto the past. It could be time for a jump to a new kind of progress." "You don't believe any of that." Hockley looked steadily in the direction of the Lab buildings. "I don't believe any of it. That isn't just an accumulation of buildings over there, with a name attached to them. It's the advancing terminal of all Man's history of trying to find out about himself and the Universe. It started before Neanderthal years ago. From then until now there's a steady path of trial and error -- of learning. There's exultation and despair, success and failure. Now they want to say it was all for nothing." "But to be pupils -- to let the Rykes teach us -- " "The only trouble with Silvers' argument is that our culture has never understood that teaching, in the accepted sense, is an impossibility. There can be only learning -- never teaching. The teacher has to be eliminated from the actual learning process before genuine learning can ever take place. But the Rykes offer to become the Ultimate Teacher." "And if this is true," said Showalter slowly, "you couldn't teach it to those who disagree, could you? They'd have to learn it for themselves." Hockley turned. For a moment he continued to stare at his assistant. Then his face broke into a narrow grin. "Of course you're right I There's only one way they'll ever learn it : go through the actual experience of what Ryke tutelage will mean." Most of the workrooms at Information Central were empty this time of evening. Hockley selected the first one he came to and called for every scrap of data pertaining amount of information available on the physical characteristics of the world. Hockley scribbled swift, privately intelligible notes as he scanned. The Rykes lived under a gravity one third heavier than Earth's, with a day little more than half as long, and they received only forty percent as much heat from their frail sun as Earthmen were accustomed to. Cultural characteristics included a trading system that made the entire planet a single economic unit. And the planet had no history whatever of war. The Rykes themselves had contributed almost nothing to the central libraries of the galaxies concerning their own personal makeup and mental functions, however. What little was available came from observers not of their race. There were indications they were a highly unemotional race, not given to any artistic expression. Hockley found this surprising. The general rule was for highly intellectual attainments to be accompanied by equally high artistic expression. But all of this provided no data that he could relate to his present problem, no basis for argument beyond what he already had. He returned the films to their silver cans and set staring at the neat pile of them on the desk. Then he smiled at his own obtuseness. Data on the Ryke plan had been tried on plenty of other worlds. Data on them should not be so scarce. He returned the cans and punched out a new request on the call panel. Twenty seconds later he was pleasantly surprised by a score of new tapes in the hopper. That was enough for a full night's work. He wished he'd brought Sho waiter along to help. Then his eye caught sight of the label on the topmost can in the pile : familiar signal somewhere deep in his mind. Then he knew -- that was the home world of Waldon Thar, one of his closest friends in the year when he'd gone to school at Galactic Center for advanced study. Thar had been one of the most ever known. In bull session debate he was instantly beyond the depth of everyone else. him about the Rykes! Hockley pushed the tape cans aside and went to the phone in the workroom. He dialed for the interstellar operator. "Government prisaid. "Waldon Thar. He attended Galactic Center Research Institute twenty-three years ago. He came from the city Plar, which was his home at that time. I have no other information, except that he is probably employed as a research scientist." There was a moment's silence while the operator noted the information. "There will be some delay," she said finally. "At present the inter-galactic beams are full." "I can use top emergency priority on this," said Hockley. "Can you clear a trunk for me on that?" "Yes. One moment, please." He sat by the window for half an hour, turning down the light in the workroom so that he could see the flow of traffic at the port west of the Lab buildings. Two spaceships took off and three came in while he waited. And . then the phone rang. "I'm sorry," the operator said. "Waldon Thar is reported not on Do you wish to attempt to locate him there?" "By all means," said Hockley. "Same priority." This was better than he had hoped for. Thar could really get him the information he needed on the Rykes. Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. In the operator's first words Hockley sensed apology and knew the attempt had failed. "Our office has learned that Walden Thar is at present on tour as aide to the Ryke emissary, Liacan. We can perhaps trace -- " "No!" Hockley shouted. "That won't be necessary. I know now -- " He almost laughed aloud to himself. This was an incredible piece of good luck. Walden Thar was probably out at the space port right now -- unless one of those ships taking off had been the Ryke -- He wondered why Thar had not tried to contact him. Of course, it had been a long time, but they had been very close at the center. He dialed the field control tower. "I want to know if the ship from said. "They were scheduled for six hours ago, but mechanical difficulty has delayed them. Present estimated take-off is #." Almost two hours to go, Hockley thought. That should be time enough. "Please put me in communication with one of the aides aboard named Waldon Thar. This is Sherman Hockley of Scientific Services. Priority request." "I'll try, sir." The tower operator manifested a sudden increase of respect. "One moment, please." Hockley heard the buzz and switch clicks of communication circuits reaching for the ship. Then, in a moment, he heard the somewhat irritated but familiar voice of his old friend. "Waldon Thar speaking," the voice said. "Who wishes to talk?" "Listen, you old son of a cyclotron's maiden aunt!" said Hockley. "Who would want to talk on Sol when you landed? I just found out you were here." "Sherm Hockley, of course," the voice said with distant, unperturbed tones. "This is indeed a surprise and a pleasure. To be honest, I had forgotten Earth was your home planet." "I'll try to think of something to jog your memory next time. How about getting together?" "Well -- I don't have very long," said Thar hesitantly. "If you could come over for a few minutes -- " Hockley had the jolting feeling that Waldon Thar would just as soon pass up the opportunity for their meeting. Some of the enthusiasm went out of his voice. "There's a good all-night interplanetary eatery and bar on the field there. I'll be along in fifteen minutes." "Fine' said Thar, "but please try not to be late." On the way to the field, Hockley wondered about the change that had apparently taken place in Thar. Of course, he had changed, too -- perhaps for much the worse. But Thar sounded like a stuffed shirt now, and that is the last thing Hockley would have expected. In school, Thar had been the most irreverent of the whole class of irreverents, denouncing in ecstasy the established and unproven lore, riding the professors of unsubstantiated hypotheses. Now -- well, he didn't sound like the Thar Hockley knew. He took a table and sat down just as Thar entered the dining room. The latter's broad smile momentarily removed Hockley's doubts. The smile hadn't changed. And there was the same expression of devilish disregard for the established order. The same warm friendliness. It baffled Hockley to understand how Thar could have failed to remember Earth was his home. Thar mentioned it as he came up and took Hockley's hand. "I'm terribly sorry," he said. "It was stupid to forget that Earth meant Sherman Hockley." "I know how it is. I should have written. I guess I'm the one who owes a letter." "No, I think not," said Thar. They sat on opposite sides of a small table near a window and ordered drinks. On the field they could see the vast, shadowy outline of the Ryke vessel. Thar was of a race genetically close to the Rykes. He lacked the feathery covering, but this was replaced by a layer of thin scales, which had a tendency to stand on edge when he was excited. He also wore a breathing piece, and carried the small shoulder tank with a faint air of superiority. Hockley watched him with a growing sense of loss. The first impression had been more nearly correct. Thar hadn't wanted to meet him. "It's been a long time," said Hockley lamely. "I guess there isn't much we did back there that means anything now." "You shouldn't say that," said Thar as if recognizing he had been too remote. "Every hour of our acquaintance meant a great deal to me. I'll never forgive myself for forgetting -- but tell me how you learned I was aboard the Ryke ship." "The Rykes have made us an offer. I wanted to find out the effects on worlds that had accepted. I started looking." "I'm so very glad you did, Sherm. You want me to confirm, of course, the advisability of accepting the offer Liacan has made." "Confirm -- or deny it," said Hockley. Thar spread his clawlike hands. "Deny it? The most glorious opportunity a planet could possibly have?" Something in Thar's voice gave Hockley a sudden chill. "How has it worked on your own world?" a slum to a world of mansions. Our economic problems have been solved. Health and long life are routine. There is nothing we want that we cannot have for the asking . # "But are you satisfied with it? Is there nothing which you had to give up that you would like returned ? # Waldon Thar threw back his head and laughed in high pitched tones. "I might have known that would be the question you would ask! Forgive me, friend Sherman, but I had almost forgotten how unventuresome you are. "Your question is ridiculous. Why should we wish to go back to our economic inequalities, poverty and distress, our ignorant plodding research in science? You can answer your own question . # They were silent for a moment. Hockley thought his friend would have gladly terminated their visit right there and returned to his ship. To forestall this, he leaned across the table and asked, "Your science -- what has become of that ? # "Our science! We never had any. We were ignorant children playing with mud and rocks. We knew nothing. We had nothing. Until the Rykes offered to educate us . # "Surely you don't believe that , # said Hockley quietly. "The problem you worked on at the Institute -- gravity at micro-cosmic levels. That was not a childish thing . # Thar laughed shortly and bitterly. "What disillusionment you have coming, friend Sherman! If you only knew how truly childish it was. Wait until you learn from the Rykes the true conception of gravity, its nature and the part it plays in the structure of matter . # Hockley felt a sick tightening within him. This was not the Waldon Thar, the wild demon who thrust aside all authority and rumor in his own headlong search for knowledge. It couldn't be Thar who was sitting passively by, being told what the nature of the Universe is. "Your scientists -- ? # Hockley persisted. "What has become of all your researchers ? # "The answer is the same , # said Thar. "We had no science. We had no scientists. Those who once went by that name have become for the first time honest students knowing the pleasure of studying at the feet of masters . # "You have set up laboratories in which your researches are supervised by the Rykes ? # "Laboratories? We have no need of laboratories. We have workshops and study rooms where we try to absorb that which the Rykes discovered long ago. Maybe at some future time we will come to a point where we can reach into the frontier of knowledge with our own minds, but this does not seem likely now . # "So you have given up all original research of your own ? # "How could we do otherwise? The Rykes have all the answers to any question we have intelligence enough to ask. Follow them, Sherman. It is no disgrace to be led by such as the Ryke teachers . # "Don't you ever long , # said Hockley, "to take just one short step on your own two feet ? # "Why crawl when you can go by trans-light carrier?" Thar sipped the last of his drink and glanced toward the wall clock. "I must go. I can understand the direction of your questions and your thinking. You hesitate because you might lose the chance to play in the mud and count the pretty pebbles in the sand. Put away childish things. You will never miss them!" They shook hands, and a moment later Hockley said goodbye to Thar at the entrance to the field. "I know Earth will accept," said Thar. "And you and I should not have lost contact -- but we'll make up for it." Watching him move toward the dark hulk of the ship, Hockley wondered if Thar actually believed that. In less than an hour they had exhausted all they had to say after twenty years. Hockley had the information he needed about the Ryke plan, but he wished he could have kept his old memories of his student friend. Thar was drunk on the heady stuff being peddled by the Rykes, and if what he said were true, it was strong enough to intoxicate a whole planet. His blood grew cold at the thought. This was more than a fight for the National Laboratories. It was a struggle to keep all Mankind from becoming what Thar had become. If he could have put Thar on exhibition in the meeting tomorrow, and shown what he was once like, he would have made his point. But Thar, before and after, was not available for exhibit. He had to find another way to show his colleagues and the Senators what the Rykes would make of them. He glanced at his watch. They wouldn't like being wakened at this hour, but neither would the scientists put up much resistance to his request for support in Markham's meeting. He went back to the bar and called each of his colleages who had been in the meeting that day. the assembly convened at ten that morning. He rose slowly from his seat near Markham and glanced over the somewhat puzzled expressions of the scientists. "I don't know that I can speak for the entire group of scientists present," he said. "We met yesterday and found some differences of opinion concerning this offer. While it is true there is overwhelming sentiment supporting it, certain questions remain, which we feel require additional data in order to be answered properly. "While we recognize that official acceptance can be given to the Rykes with no approval whatever from the scientists, it seems only fair that we should have every opportunity to make what we consider a proper study and to express our opinions in the matter. "To the non-scientist -- and perhaps to many of my colleages -- it may seem inconceivable that there could be any questions whatever. But we wonder about the position of students of future generations, we wonder about the details of administration of the program, we wonder about the total effects of the program upon our society as a whole. We wish to ask permission to make further study of the matter in an effort to answer these questions and many others. We request permission to go as a committee to study of what the Rykes propose to do, how they will teach us, and how they will dispense the information they so generously offer. "I ask that you consider this most seriously, and make an official request of the Rykes to grant us such opportunity for study, that you provide the necessary appropriations for the trip. I consider it most urgent that this be done at once." There was a stir of concern and disapproval from Congressional members as Hockley sat down. Senators leaned to speak in whispers to their neighbors, but Hockley observed the scientists remained quiet and impassive. He believed he had sold them in his telephone calls during the early morning. They liked the idea of obtaining additional data. Besides, most of them themselves. Senator Markham finally stood up, obviously disturbed by Hockley's abrupt proposal. "It has seemed to us members of the Committee that there could hardly be any need for more data than is already available to us. The remarkable effects of Ryke science on other backward worlds is common knowledge. "On the other hand we recognize the qualifications of you gentlemen which make your request appear justified. We will have to discuss this at length, but at the moment I believe I can say I am in sympathy with your request and can encourage my Committee to give it serious consideration." A great deal more was said on that and subsequent days. News of the Ryke offer was not given to the public, but landing of the Ryke ship could not be hidden. It became known that Liacan carried his offer to other worlds and speculation was made that he offered it to Earth also. Angry questions were raised as to why the purpose of the visit was not clarified, but government silence was maintained while Hockley's request was considered. It encountered bitter debate in the closed sessions, but permission was finally given for a junket of ninety scientists and ten senators to This could not be hidden, so the facts were modified and a story given out that the party was going to request participation in the Ryke program being offered other worlds, that Liacan's visit had not been conclusive. In the days preceding the takeoff Hockley felt a sense of destiny weighing heavily upon him. He read every word of the stream of opinion that flowed through the press. Every commentator and columnist seemed called upon to make his own specific analysis of the possibilities of the opinions were almost uniform that it would be an approach to Utopia to have the Rykes take over. Hockley was sickened by this mass conversion to the siren call of the Rykes. It was a tremendous relief when the day finally came and the huge transport ship lifted solemnly into space. Most of the group were in the ship's lounge watching the television port as the Earth drifted away beneath them. Senator Markham seemed nervous and almost frightened, Hockley thought, as if something intangible had escaped him. "I hope we're not wasting our time," he said. "Not that I don't understand your position," he added hastily to cover the show of antagonism he sensed creeping into his voice. "We appreciate your support," said Hockley, "and we'll do our best to see the time of the investigation is not wasted." But afterwards, when the two of them were alone by the screen, Silvers spoke to Hockley soberly. The mathematician had lost some of the wild exuberance he'd had at first. It had been replaced by a deep, intense conviction that nothing must stand in the way of Earth's alliance with the Rykes. "We all understand why you wanted us to come," he said. "We know you believe this delay will cool our enthusiasm. It's only fair to make clear that it won't. How you intend to change us by taking us to the home of the Rykes has got us all baffled. The reverse will be true, I am very sure. We intend to make it clear to the Rykes that we accept their offer. I hope you have no plan to make a declaration to the contrary." Hockley kept his eyes on the screen, watching the green sphere of Earth. "I have no intention of making any statement of any kind. I was perfectly honest when I said our understanding of the Rykes would profit by this visit. You all agreed. I meant nothing more nor less than what I said. I hope no one in the group thinks otherwise." "We don't know," said Silvers. "It's just that you've got us wondering how you expect to change our views." "I have not said that is my intention." "Can you say it is not?" "No, I cannot say that. But the question is incomplete. My whole intention is to discover as fully as possible what will be the result of alliance with the Rykes. If you should conclude that it will be unfavorable that will be the result of your own direct observations and computations, not of my arguments." "You may be sure that is one thing that will not occur," said Silvers. a transfer point where they could change to a commercial vessel using Ryke principles. In the following week they covered a distance several thousand times that which they had already come. And then A few of them had visited the planet previously, on vacation trips or routine study expeditions, but most of them were seeing it for the first time. While well out into space the group began crowding the vision screens which brought into range the streets and buildings of the cities. They could see the people walking and riding there. Hockley caught his breath at the sight, and doubts overwhelmed him, telling him he was an utter and complete fool. The city upon which he looked was a jewel of perfection. Buildings were not indiscriminate masses of masonry and metal and plastic heaped up without regard to the total effect. Rather, the city was a unit created with an eye to esthetic perfection. Silvers stood beside Hockley. "We've got a chance to make Earth look that way' said the mathematician. "There's only one thing missing," said Hockley. "The price tag. We still need to know what it's going to cost." Upon landing, the Earthmen were greeted by a covey of their bird-like hosts who scurried about, introducing themselves in their high whistling voices. In busses, they were moved half way across the city to a building which stood beside an enormous park area. It was obviously a building designed for the reception of just such delegations as this one, giving Hockley evidence that perhaps his idea was not so original after all. It was a relief to get inside after their brief trip across the city. Gravity, temperature, and air pressure and composition duplicated those of Earth inside, and conditions could be varied to accommodate many different species. Hockley felt confident they could become accustomed to outside conditions after a few days, but it was exhausting now to be out for long. They were shown to individual quarters and given leisure to unpack and inspect their surroundings. Furniture had been adjusted to their size and needs. The only oversight Hockley could find was a faint odor of chlorine lingering in the closets. He wondered who the last occupant of the room had been. After a noon meal, served with foods of astonishingly close approximation to their native fare, the group was offered a prelude to the general instruction and indoctrination which would begin the following day. This was in the form of a guided tour through the science museum which, Hockley gathered, was a modernized Ryke parallel to the venerable Smithsonian back home. The tour was entirely optional, as far as the planned program of the Rykes was concerned, but none of the Earthmen turned it down. Hockley tried to concentrate heavily on the memory of Waldon Thar and keep the image of his friend always before him as he moved through the city and inspected the works of the Rykes. He found it helped suppress the awe and adulation which he had an impulse to share with his companions. It was possible even, he found, to adopt a kind of truculent cynicism toward the approach the Rykes were making. The visit to the science museum could be an attempt to bowl them over with an eonlong vista of Ryke superiority in the sciences. At least that was most certainly the effect on them. Hockley cursed his own feeling of ignorance and inferiority as the guide led them quietly past the works of the masters, offering but little comment, letting them see for themselves the obvious relationships. In the massive display showing developments of spaceflight, the atomic vessels, not much different from Earthmen's best efforts, were far down the line, very near to the earliest attempts of the Rykes to rocket their way into space. Beyond that level was an incredible series of developments incomprehensible to most of the Earthmen. And to all their questions the guide offered the monotonous reply: "That will be explained to you later. We only wish to give you an overall picture of our culture at the present time . # But this was not enough for one of the astronomers, named Moore, who moved ahead of Hockley in the crowd. Hockley saw the back of Moore's neck growing redder by the minute as the guide's evasive answer was repeated. Finally, Moore forced a discussion regarding the merits of some systems of comparing the brightness of stars, which the guide briefly showed them. The guide, in great annoyance, burst out with a stream of explanation that completely flattened any opinions Moore might have had. But at the same time the astronomer grinned amiably at the Ryke. "That ought to settle that," he said. "I'll bet it won't take a week to get our system changed back home." Moore's success loosened the restraint of the others and they beseiged the guide mercilessly then with opinions, questions, comparisons -- and even mild disapprovals. The guide's exasperation was obvious -- and pleasant -- to Hockley, who remained a bystander. It was frightening to Markham and some of the other senators who were unable to take part in the discussion. But most of the scientists failed to notice it in their eagerness to learn. After dinner that night they gathered in the lounge and study of their quarters. Markham stood beside Hockley as they partook cautiously of the cocktails which the Rykes had attempted to duplicate for them. The Senator's awe had returned to overshadow any concern he felt during the events of the afternoon. "A wonderful day!" he said. "Even though this visit delays completion of our arrangements with the Rykes those of us here will be grateful forever that you proposed it. Nothing could have so impressed us all with the desirability of accepting the Ryke's tutelage. It was a stroke of genius, Dr. Hockley. And for a time I thought you were actually opposed to the Rykes!" He sipped his drink while Hockley said nothing. Then his brow furrowed a bit. "But I wonder why our guide cut short our tour this afternoon. If I recall correctly he said at the beginning there was a great deal more to see than he actually showed us." Hockley smiled and sipped politely at his drink before he set it down and faced the Senator. "I was wondering if anyone else noticed that," he said. except for the fact that occasional whiffs of chlorine seemed to drift from various corners of the room even though he turned the air-conditioning system on full blast. In the morning there began a series of specialized lectures which had been prepared in accordance with the Earthmen's request to acquaint them with what they would be getting upon acceptance of the Ryke offer. It was obviously no new experience for the Rykes. The lectures were well prepared and anticipated many questions. The only thing new about it, Hockley thought, was the delivery in the language of the Earthmen. Otherwise, he felt this was something prepared a long time ago and given a thousand times or more. They were divided into smaller groups according to their specialties, electronic men going one way, astronomers and mathematical physicists another, chemists and general physicists in still another direction. Hockley, Sho waiter and the senators were considered more or less free floating members of the delegation with the privilege of visiting with one group or another according to their pleasure. Hockley chose to spend the first day with the chemists, since that was his own first love. Dr. Showalter and Senator Markham came along with him. As much as he tried he found it virtually impossible not to sit with the same open-mouthed wonder that his colleagues exhibited. The swift, free-flowing exposition of the Ryke lecturer led them immediately beyond their own realms, but so carefully did he lead them that it seemed that they must have come this way before, and forgotten it. Hockley felt half angry with himself. He felt he had allowed himself to be hypnotized by the skill of the Ryke, and wondered despairingly if there were any chance at all of combating their approach. He saw nothing to indicate it in the experience of that day or the ones immediately following. But he retained hope that there was much significance in the action of the guide who had cut short their visit to the museum. In the evenings, in the study lofinge of the dormitory, they held interminable bull sessions exchanging and digesting what they had been shown during the day. It was at the end of the third day that Hockley thought he could detect a subtle change in the group. He had some difficulty analyzing it at first. It seemed to be a growing aliveness, a sort of recovery. And then he recognized that the initial stunned reaction to the magnificence of the Rykes was passing off. They had been shocked by the impact of the Rykes, almost as if they had been struck a blow on the head. Temporarily, they had shelved all their own analytical and critical facilities and yielded to the Rykes without question. Now they were beginning to recover, springing back to a condition considerably nearer normal. Hockley felt a surge of encouragement as he detected a more sharply critical evaluation in the conversations that buzzed around him. The enthusiasm was more measured. It was the following evening, however, that witnessed the first event of pronounced shifting of anyone's attitude. They had finished dinner and were gathering in the lounge, sparring around, setting up groups for the bull sessions that would go until long after midnight. Most of them had already settled down and were talking part in conversations or were listening quietly when they were suddenly aware of a change in the atmosphere of the room. For a moment there was a general turning of heads to locate the source of the disturbance. Hockley knew he could never describe just what made him look around, but he was abruptly conscious that Dr. Silvers was walking into the lounge and looking slowly about at those gathered there. Something in his presence was like the sudden appearance of a thundercloud, his face seemed to reflect the dark turbulence of a summer storm. He said nothing, however, to anyone but strode over and sat beside Hockley, who was alone at the moment smoking the next to last of his Earthside cigars. Hockley felt the smouldering turmoil inside the mathematician. He extended his final cigar. Silvers brushed it away. "The last one," said Hockley mildly. "In spite of all their abilities the Ryke imitations are somewhat less than natural." Silvers turned slowly to face Hockley. "I presented them with the Legrandian Equations today," he said. "I expected to get a straightforward answer to a perfectly legitimate scientific question. That is what we were led to expect, was it not?" Hockley nodded. "That's my impression. Did you get something less than a straightforward answer?" The mathematician exhaled noisily. "The Legrandian Equations will lead to a geometry as revolutionary as Riemann's was in his day. But I was told by the Rykes that I 'should dismiss it from all further consideration. It does not lead to any profitable mathematical development.' " Hockley felt that his heart most certainly skipped a beat, but he managed to keep his voice steady, and sympathetic. "That's too bad. I know what high hopes you had. I suppose you will give up work on the Equations now?" "I will not!" Silvers exclaimed loudly. Nearby groups who had returned hesitantly to their own conversations now stared at him again. But abruptly he changed his tone and looked almost pleadingly at Hockley. "I don't understand it. Why should they say such a thing? It appears to be one of the most profitable avenues of exploration I have encountered in my whole career. And the Rykes brush it aside!" "What did you say when they told you to give it up?" "I said I wanted to know where the development would lead. I said it had been indicated that we could have an answer to any scientific problem within the range of their abilities, and certainly this is, from what I've seen. "The instructor replied that I'd been given an answer to my question, that 'the first lesson you must learn if you wish to acquire our pace in science is to recognize that we have been along the path ahead of you. We know which are the possibilities that are worthwhile to de velop. We have gained our speed by learning to bypass every avenue but the main one, and not get lost in tempting side roads. # "He said that we've got to learn to trust them and take their word as to which is the correct and profitable field of research, that 'we will show you where to go, as we agreed cept our leadership in this respect our agreement means nothing.' Wouldn't that be a magnificent way to make scientific progress!" The mathematician shifted in his chair as if trying to control an internal fury that would not be capped. He held out his hand abruptly. "I'll take that cigar after all, if you don't mind, Hockley." With savage energy he chewed the end and ignited the cigar, then blew a mammoth cloud of smoke ceilingward. "I think the trouble must be in our lecturer," he said. "He's crazy. He couldn't possibly represent the conventional attitude of the Rykes. They promised to give answers to our problems -- and this is the kind of nonsense I get. I'm going to see somebody higher up and find out why we can't have a lecturer who knows what he's talking about. Or maybe you or Markham would rather take it up -- through official channels, as it were?" "The Ryke was correct," said Hockley. "He did give you an answer." "He could answer all our questions that way!" "You're perfectly right," said Hockley soberly. "He could do exactly that." "They won't of course," said Silvers, defensively. "Even if this particular character isn't just playing the screwball, my question is just a special case. It's just one particular thing they consider to be valueless. Perhaps in the end I'll find they're right -- but I'm going to develop a solution to these Equations if it takes the rest of my life! "After all, they admit they have no solution, that they have not bothered to go down this particular side path, as they put it. If we don't go down it how can we ever know whether it's worthwhile or not? How can the Rykes know what they may have missed by not doing so?" "I can't answer that," said Hockley. "For us or for them, I know of no other way to predict the outcome of a specific line of research except to carry it through and find out what lies at the end of the road." after he finally went to bed that night. Silvers had presented him with the break he had been expecting and hoping for. The first chink in the armor of sanctity surrounding the Rykes. Now he wondered what would follow, if this would build up to the impassable barrier he wanted, or if it would merely remain a sore obstacle in their way but eventually be bypassed and forgotten. He did not believe it would be the only incident of its kind. There would be others as the Earthmen's stunned, blind acceptance gave way completely to sound, critical evalu ation. And in any case there was one delegate who would never be the same again. No matter how he eventually rationalized it Dr. Forman K. Silvers would never feel quite the same about the Rykes as he did before they rejected his favorite piece of research. Hockley arose early, eager but cautious, his senses open for further evidence of disaffection springing up. He joined the group of chemists once more for the morning lecture. The spirit of the group was markedly higher than when he first met with them. They had been inspired by what the Rykes had shown them, but in addition their own sense of judgment had been brought out of suspension. The Ryke lecturer began inscribing on the board an enormous organic formula, using conventions of Earth chemistry for the benefit of his audience. He explained at some length a number of transformations which it was possible to make in the compound by means of high intensity fields. Almost at once, one of the younger chemists named Dr. Carmen, was on his feet exclaiming excitedly that one of the transformation compounds was a chemical on which he had conducted an extensive research. He had produced enough to know that it had a multitude of intriguing properties, and now he was exuberant at the revelation of a method of producing it in quantity and also further transforming it. At his sudden enthusiasm the lecturer's face took on what they had come to recognize as a very dour look. "That series of transformations has no interest for us," he said. "I merely indicated its existence to show one of the possibilities which should be avoided. Over here you see the direction in which we wish to go." "But you never saw anything with properties like that!" Carmen protested. "It goes through an incredible series of at least three crystalline-liquid phase changes with an increase in pressure alone. But with proper control of heat it can be kept in the crystalline phase regardless of pressure. It is closely related to a drug series with anesthetic properties, and is almost sure to be valuable in -- " The Ryke lecturer cut him off sharply. "I have explained," he said, "the direction of transformation in which we are interested. Your concern is not with anything beyond the boundaries which our study has proven to be the direct path of research and study." "Then I should abandon research on this series of chemicals?" Carmen asked with a show of outward meekness. The Ryke nodded with pleasure at Carmen's submissiveness. "That is it precisely. We have been over this ground long ago. We know where the areas of profitable study lie. You will be told what to observe and what to ignore. How could you ever hope to make progress if you stopped to examine every alternate probability and possibility that appeared to you?" He shook his head vigorously and his plume vibrated with emotion. "You must have a plan," he continued. "A goal. Study of the Universe cannot proceed in any random, erratic fashion. You must know what you want and then find out where to look for it." Carmen sat down slowly. Hockley was sure the Ryke did not notice the tense bulge of the chemist's jaw muscles. Perhaps he would not have understood the significance if he had noticed. Hockley was a trifle late in getting to the dining room at lunch time that day. By the time he did so the place was like a beehive. He was almost repelled by the furor of conversation circulating in the room as he entered. He passed through slowly, searching for a table of his own. He paused a moment behind Dr. Carmen, who was declaiming in no mild terms his opinions of a system that would pre-select those areas of research which were to be entered and those which were not. He smiled a little as he caught the eye of one of the dozen chemists seated at the table, listening. Moving on, he observed that Silvers had also cornered a half dozen or so of his colleagues in his own field and was in earnest conversation with them -- in a considerably more restrained manner, however, than he had used the previous evening with Hockley, or than Carmen was using at the present time. The entire room was abuzz with similar groups. The senators had tried to mingle with the others in past days, always with more or less lack of success because they found themselves out of the conversation almost completely. Today they had no luck whatever. They were seated together at a couple of tables in a corner. None of them seemed to be paying attention to the food before them, but were glancing about, half-apprehensively, at their fellow diners -- who were also paying no attention to food. Hockley caught sight of his political colleagues and sensed their dismay. The field of disquietude seemed almost tangible in the air. The senators seemed half frightened by what they felt but could not understand. Showalter's wild waving at the far corner of the room finally caught Hockley's eye and he moved toward the small table which the assistant had reserved for them. Sho waiter was upset, too, by the atmosphere within the room. "What the devil is up?" he said. "Seems like everybody's on edge this morning. I never saw a bunch of guys so touchy. You'd think they woke up with snakes in their beds." "Didn't you know?" said Hockley. "Haven't you been to any of the lectures this morning?" "No. A couple of the senators were getting bored with all the scientific doings so I thought maybe I should try to entertain them. We took in what passes for such here, but it wasn't much better than the lectures as a show. Tell me what's up. Briefly, Hockley described Silvers' upset of the day before and Carmen's experience that morning. Showalter let his glance rove over his fellow Earthmen, trying to catch snatches of the buzzing conversation at nearby tables. "You think that's the kind of thing that's got them all going this morning?" he said. Hockley nodded. "I caught enough of it passing through to know that's what it is. I gather that every group has run into the same kind of thing by now, the fencing off of broad areas where we have already tried to do research. "After the first cloud of awe wore off, the first thing everyone wanted was an answer to his own pet line of research. Nine times out of ten it was something the Rykes told them to chuck down the drain. That advice doesn't sit so well -- as you can plainly see." Showalter drew back his gaze and stared for a long time at Hockley. "You knew this would happen. That's why you brought us here -- " "I had hopes of it. I was reasonably sure this was the way the Rykes operated." Showalter remained thoughtful for a long time before he spoke again. "You've won your point, I suppose, as far as this group goes, but you can't hope to convince all of Earth by this. The Rykes will hold their offer open, and others will accept it on behalf of Earth. "And what if it's we who are wrong, in the end? How can you be sure that this isn't the way the Rykes have made their tremendous speed -- by not going down all the blind alleys that we rattle around in." "I'm sure it is the way they have attained such speed of advancement." "Then maybe we ought to go along, regardless of our own desires. Maybe we never did know how to do research!" Hockley smiled across the table at his assistant. "You believe that, of course." "I'm just talking," said Showalter irritably. "The thing gets more loopy every day. If you think you understand the Rykes I wish you would give out with what the score is. By the looks of most of these guys I would say they are getting ready to throttle the next Ryke they see instead of knuckle under to him." "I hope you're right," said Hockley fervently. "I certainly hope you're right." ing evidence that he was. Hockley passed up the afternoon lecture period and spent the time in the lounge doing some thinking of his own. He knew he couldn't push the group. Above all, he mustn't give way to any temptation to push them or say, "I told you so." Their present frustration was so deep that their antagonism could be turned almost indiscriminately in any direction, and he would be offering himself as a ready target if he were not careful. On the other hand he had to be ready to take advantage of their disaffection and throw them a decisive challenge when they were ready for it. That might be tonight, or it might be another week. He wished for a sure way of knowing. As things turned out, however, the necessity of choosing the time was taken from him. After dinner that night, when the group began to drift into the lounge, Silvers and Carmen and three of the other men came over to where Hockley sat. Silvers fumbled with the buttons of his coat as if preparing to make an address: "We'd like to request' he said, "that is -- we think we ought to get together. We'd like you to call a meeting, Hockley. Some of us have a few things we'd like to talk over." Hockley nodded, his face impassive. "The matter I mentioned to you the other night," said Silvers. "It's been happening to all the men. We think we ought to talk about it." "Fine," said Hockley. "I've been thinking it would perhaps be a good idea. Pass the word around and let's get some chairs. We can convene in ten minutes." The others nodded somberly and moved away with all the enthusiasm of preparing for a funeral, And maybe that's what it would be, Hockley thought -- somebody's funeral. He hoped it would be the Rykes. once, as if they had been expecting the call. In little more than five minutes it seemed that every member of the Earth delegation had assembled, leaving time to spare. The senators still wore their looks of puzzlement and half-frightened anxiety, which had intensified if anything. There was no puzzlement on the faces of the scientists, however, only a set and determined expression that Hockley hardly dared interpret as meaning they had made up their minds. He had to have their verbal confirmation. Informally, he thrust his hands in his pockets and sauntered to the front of the group. "I have been asked to call a meeting," he said, "by certain members of the group who have something on their minds. They seem to feel we'd all be interested in what is troubling them. Since I have nothing in particular to say I'm simply going to turn the floor over to those of you who have. Dr. Silvers first approached me to call this discussion, so I shall ask him to lead off. Will you come to the front, Dr. Silvers?" The mathematician rose as if wishing someone else would do the talking. He stood at one side of the group, halfway to the rear. "I can do all right from here," he said After a pause, as if coming to a momentous decision, he plunged into his complaint. "It appears that nearly all of us have encountered an aspect of the Ryke culture and character which was not anticipated when we first received their offer." Briefly, he related the details of the Ryke rejection of his research on the Legrandian Equations. "We were told we were going to have all our questions answered, that the Ryke's science included all we could anticipate or hope to accomplish in the next few millenia. I swallowed that. We all did. It appears we were slightly in error. It begins to appear as if we are not going to find the intellectual paradise we anticipated." He smiled wryly. "I'm sure none of you is more ready than I to admit he has been a fool. It appears that paradise, so-called, consists merely of a few selected gems which the Rykes consider particularly valuable, while the rest of the field goes untouched. "I want to offer public apologies to Dr. Hockley, who saw and understood the situation as it actually existed, while the rest of us had our # heads in the clouds. Exactly how he knew, I'm not sure, but he did, and possible to convince us that what he knew was correct. "I suggest we do our packing tonight, gentlemen. Let us return at once to our laboratories and spend the rest of our lives in some degree of atonement for being such fools as to fall for the line the Rykes tried to sell us . # Hockley's eyes were on the senators. At first there were white faces filled with incredulity as the mathematician proceeded. Then slowly this changed to sheer horror. When Silvers finished, there was immediate bedlam. There was a clamor of voices from the scientists, most of whom seemed to be trying to affirm Silvers' position. This was offset by explosions of rage from the senatorial members of the group. Hockley let it go, not even raising his hands for order until finally the racket died of its own accord as the eyes of the delegates came to rest upon him. And then, before he could speak, Markham was on his feet. "This is absolutely moral treachery," he thundered. "I have never heard a more vicious revocation of a pledged word than I have heard this evening. "You men are not alone concerned in this matter. For all practical purposes you are not concerned at all! And yet to take it upon yourselves to pass judgment in a matter that is the affair of the entire population of Earth -- out of nothing more than sheer spite because the Rykes refuse recognition of your own childish projects! I have never heard a more incredible and infantile performance than you supposedly mature gentlemen of science are expressing this evening." He glared defiantly at Hockley, who was again the center of attention moving carelessly to the center of the stage. "Anybody want to try to answer the Senator?" he asked casually. Instantly, a score of men were on their feet, speaking simultaneously. They stopped abruptly, looking deferentially to their neighbors and at Hockley, inviting him to choose one of them to be spokesman. "Maybe I ought to answer him myself," said Hockley, "since I predicted that this would occur, and that we ought to make a trial run before turning our collective gray matter over to the Rykes." A chorus of approval and nodding heads gave him the go ahead. "The Senator is quite right in saying that we few are not alone in our concern in this matter," he said. "But the Senator intends to imply a major difference between us scientists and the rest of mankind. This is his error. "Every member of Mankind who is concerned about the Universe in which he lives, is a scientist. You need to understand what a scientist is -- and you can say no more than that he is a human being trying to solve the problem of understanding his Universe, immediate or remote. He is concerned about the inanimate worlds, his own personality, his fellow men -- and the interweaving relationships among all these factors. We professional scientists are no strange species, alien to our race. Our only difference is perhaps that we undertake more problems than does the average of our fellow men, and of a more complex kind. That is all. "The essence of our science is a relentless personal yearning to know and understand the Universe. And in that, the scientist must not be forbidden to ask whatever question occurs to him. The moment we put any restraint upon our fields of inquiry, or set bounds to the realms of our mental aspirations, our science ceases to exist and becomes a mere opportunist technology." Markham stood up, his face red with exasperation and rage. "No one is trying to limit you! Why is that so unfathomable to your minds? You are being offered a boundless expanse, and you continue to make inane complaints of limitations. The Rykes have been over all the territory you insist on exploring. They can tell you the number of pretty pebbles and empty shells that lie there. You are like children insistent upon exploring every shadowy corner and peering behind every useless bush on a walk through the forest. "Such is to be expected of a child, but not of an adult, who is capable of taking the word of one who has been there before!" "There are two things wrong with your argument," said Hockley. "First of all, there is no essential difference between the learning of a child who must indeed explore the dark corners and strange growths by which he passes -- there is no difference between this and the probing of the scientist, who must explore the Universe with his own senses and with his own instruments, without taking another's word that there is nothing there worth seeing. "Secondly, the Rykes themselves are badly in error in asserting that they have been along the way ahead of us. They have not. In all their fields of science they have limited themselves badly to one narrow field of probability. They have taken a narrow path stretching between magnificent vistas on either side of them, and have deliberately ignored all that was beyond the path and on the inviting side trails." "Is there anything wrong with that?" demanded Markham. "If you undertake a journey you don't weave in and out of every possible path that leads in every direction opposed to your destination. You take the direct route. Or at least ordinary people do." "Scientists do, too," said Hockley, "when they take a journey. Professional science is not a journey, however. It's an exploration. "There is a great deal wrong with what the Rykes have done. They have assumed, and would have us likewise assume, that there is a certain very specific future toward which we are all moving. This future is built out of the discoveries they have made about the Universe. It is made of the system of mathematics they have developed, which exclude Dr, Silvers' cherished Legrandian Equations. It excludes the world in which exist Dr. Carmen's series of unique compounds. "The Rykes have built a wonderful, workable world of serenity, beauty, scientific consistency, and economic adjustment. They have eliminated enormous amounts of chaos which Earthmen continue to suffer. "But we do not want what the Rykes have obtained -- if we have to pay their price for it." "Then you are complete fools," said Markham. "Fortunately, you cannot and will not speak for all of Earth." Hockley paced back and forth a half dozen steps, his eyes on the floor. "I think we do -- and can -- speak for all our people," he said. "Remember, I said that all men are scientists in the final analysis. I am very certain that no Earthman who truly understood the situation would want to face the future which the Rykes hold out to us." "And why not?" demanded Markham. "Because there are too many possible futures. We refuse to march down a single narrow trail to the golden future. That's what the Rykes would have us do. But they are wrong. It would be like taking a trip through a galaxy at speeds faster than light -- and claiming to have seen the galaxy. What the Rykes have obtained is genuine and good, but what they have not obtained is perhaps far better and of greater worth." "How can you know such an absurd thing?" "We can't -- not for sure," said Hockley. "Not until we go there and see for ourselves, step by step. But we aren't going to be confined to the Rykes' narrow trail. We are going on a broad path to take in as many byways as we can possibly find. We'll explore every probability we come to, and look behind every bush and under every pebble. "We will move together, the simultaneously, interacting with one another, exchanging data. Most certainly, many will end up in blind alleys. Some will find data that seems the ultimate truth at one point and pure deception at another. Who can tell ahead of time which of these multiple paths we should take? Certainly not the Rykes, who have bypassed most of them ! "It doesn't matter that many paths lead to failure -- not as long as we remain in communication with each other. In the end we will find the best possible future for us. But there is no one future, only a multitude of possible futures. We must have the right to build the one that best fits our own kind." "Is that more important than achieving immediately a more peaceful, unified, and secure society?" said Markham. "Infinitely more important!" said Hockley. "It is fortunate at least, then, that you are in no position to implement these insane beliefs of yours. The Ryke program was offered to Earth, and it shall be accepted on behalf of Earth. You may be sure of a very poor hearing when you try to present these notions back home." "You jump to conclusions, Senator," said Hockley with mild confidence. "Why do you suppose I proposed this trip if I did not believe I could do something about the situation? I assure you that we did not come just to see the sights." Markham's jaw slacked and his face became white. "What do you mean? You haven't dared to try to alienate the Rykes -- " "I mean that there is a great deal we can do about the situation. Now that the sentiments of my colleagues parallel my own I'm sure they agree that we must effectively and finally spike any possibility of Earth's becoming involved in this Ryke nonsense." "You wouldn't dare! -- even if you could -- " "We can, and we dare," said Hockley. "When we return to Earth we shall have to report that the Rykes have refused to admit Earth to their program. We shall report that we made every effort to obtain an agreement with them, but it was in vain. If anyone wishes to verify the report, the Rykes themselves will say that this is quite true : they cannot possibly consider Earth as a participant. If you contend that an offer was once made, you will not find the Rykes offering much support since they will be very busily denying that we are remotely qualified."  "The Rykes are hardly ones to meekly submit to any idiotic plan of that kind." "They can't help it -- if we demonstrate that we are quite unqualified to participate." "You -- you -- " "It will not be difficult," said Hockley. "The Rykes have set up a perfect teacher-pupil situation, with all the false assumptions that go with it. There is at least one absolutely positive way to disintegrate such a situation. The testimony of several thousand years' failure of our various educational systems indicates that there are quite a variety of lesser ways also -- "Perhaps you are aware of the experiences and techniques commonly employed on Earth by white men in their efforts to educate the aborigine. The first procedure is to do away with the tribal medicine men, ignore their lore and learning. Get them to give up the magic words and their pots of foul smelling liquids, abandon their ritual dances and take up the white man's great wisdom. "We have done this time after time, only to learn decades later that the natives once knew much of anesthetics and healing drugs, and had genuine powers to communicate in ways the white man can't duplicate. "But once in a long while a group of aborigines show more spunk than the average. They refuse to give up their medicine men, their magic and their hard earned lore accumulated over generations and centuries. Instead of giving these things up they insist on the white man's learning these mysteries in preference to his nonsensical and ineffective magic. They completely frustrate the situation, and if they persist they finally destroy the white man as an educator. He is forced to conclude that the ignorant savages are unteachable. "It is an infallible technique -- and one that we shall employ. Dr. Silvers will undertake to teach his mathematical lecturer in the approaches to the Legrandian Equations. He will speculate long and noisily on the geometry which potentially lies in this mathematical system. Dr. Carmen will ellucidate at great length on the properties of the chain of chemicals he has been advised to abandon. "Each of us has at least one line of research the Rykes would have us give up. That is the very thing we shall insist on having investigated. We shall teach them these things and prove Earthmen to be an unlearned, unteachable band of aborigines who refuse to pursue the single path to glory and light, but insist on following every devious byway and searching every darkness that lies beside the path. "It ought to do the trick. I estimate it should not be more than a week before we are on our way back home, labeled by the Rykes as utterly hopeless material for their enlightenment." The senators seemed momentarily appalled and speechless, but they recovered shortly and had a considerable amount of high flown oratory to distribute on the subject. The scientists, however, were comparatively quiet, but on their faces was a subdued glee that Hockley had to admit was little short of fiendish. It was composed, he thought, of all the gloating anticipations of all the schoolboys who had ever put a thumbtack on the teacher's chair. Hockley was somewhat off in his prediction. It was actually a mere five days after the beginning of the Earthmen' s campaign that the Rykes gave them up and put them firmly aboard a vessel bound for home. The Rykes were apologetic but firm in admitting they had made a sorry mistake, that Earthmen would have to go their own hopeless way while the Rykes led the rest of the Universe toward enlightenment and glory. Hockley, Showalter, and Silvers watched the planet drop away beneath them. Hockley could not help feeling sympathetic toward the Rykes. "I wonder what will happen," he said slowly, "when they crash headlong into an impassable barrier on that beautiful, straight road of theirs. I wonder if they'll ever have enough guts to turn aside?" "I doubt it," said Showalter. "They'll probably curl up and call it a day." Silvers shook his head as if to ward off an oppressive vision. "That shouldn't be allowed to happen," he said. "They've got too much. They've achieved too much, in spite of their limitations. I wonder if there isn't some way we could help them?" The scientific investigator is not urged on by some brummagem idea of Service but a boundless almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown; much like a dog sniffing tremendously at an endless number of ratholes. -- H. L. Mencken Of the "real" universe we know nothing, except that there exist as many versions of it as there are perceptive minds. -- Gerald Bullett The human race, Theodore complained, was becoming as extinct as the dodo bird -- all because of the mechanoids . So he rebelled and quit his job and tried to get rid of Margaret... Rice said, peering from the tinted windows as the car skimmed over the warm summer streets of the city. The vehicle slowed, took the long curve with fluid grace, and whispered to a stop. A silver door-panel sighed back and Ted Rice stepped into the heat of morning. His suitconditioner immediately circulated an inner breath of cool air to balance the rise in temperature. "I won't need you for the rest of the day, # ' he told the car. 'Til be walking home." "May I have your location number sir, in case a member of the family should wish to contact you?" "No, dammit, you may not!" This was Free-Day. He needn't tell the car anything. "Go home." "Very well, sir." The machine slid obediently from the curb. Rice watched it glitter briefly, like a lake trout in the moving wash of morning traffic, and disappear. On Free-Days he told the car what to do. No pre-determined destinations. No pre-determined activities. Today the bars were open, He intended getting very, very drunk. On this morning, the sixth anniversary of his wife's death, Ted Rice had made two highly important decisions. He would quit his job and he would turn Margaret in to Central Exchange. The job he hated, but it had been his life and quitting took courage. It meant beginning anew in an untried field and, at thirty-nine, that wasn't easy. Margaret he did not hate, finding it impossible to catalogue his exact emotions where she was concerned. But his final decision to turn her in was the only one possible under the circumstances. His reason for getting drunk, however, had nothing to do with his job or with Margaret. He was not, had never been, a drinking man. Intoxication was an anniversary ritual performed in memory of his late wife, Helen. He exercised extreme care in his yearly choice of drinking quarters, avoiding pretentiousness because he wanted the surroundings to reflect his own inner loneliness. Louie's Place was anything but pretentious. Ceaseless towellings had worn the bartop to a circular whiteness. The mirror behind it, in the shape of a giant passenger rocket, hung chipped and blackening at the edges. Even the wall mural, depicting Man's First Landing on the Red Planet, was dustdimmed and faded, the paint cracking, peeling gradually away. The shabby stools fronting the bar were all unoccupied. "Mornin' Mac," greeted the bartender. Rice nodded, took a corner stool, and pressed the straightwhiskey button. The drink glided into his hand and he downed it, grimacing. "Ain't seen you around before on Free-Days," the barman observed, swabbing idly at an already dry glass ring. "Just move inta th' neighborhood?" "I don't drink often," Rice said, re-pressing the buttoh. "Wanna tell me about things? You're my first this mornin'." Rice shifted his attention from his shot glass to the man behind the bar. Beefy, slack-jawed, with a broken nose and a pair of watery, protuberant eyes over which lids folded like canvas sails. The face of mourning. The professional kindred soul, salaried receiver of woes and sad lament. Rice regarded him suspiciously, twirling the shot glass between thumb and forefinger. "Well, Mac?" "Turn around," said Rice. The big man grinned broadly, his solemn face splitting as though a paper-knife had slit the skin across. "Now I know you don't drink much. Believe me, I'm the real McCoy. In my racket you have to be." "Around." Still grinning, the bartender complied. Law provided that evidence of a mechanical could not be concealed and there was no metal switch behind the man's right ear, "Like I toldja Mac -- the' McCoy." "It's been a year," Rice said, by way of apology. "I wasn't sure they hadn't replaced you fellows too." "Bars'ud go broke if they did. Who wants to tell their troubles to a bunch a' springs an' cogs?" Rice glanced at his wristwatch and thought of Margaret, standing in the living room of their modest home, a smile illumining her delicate features. She had been standing now for nine hours, thirty-seven minutes -- since he'd switched her off the previous evening in an angry display of temper. "Six years ago today my wife died in a copter crash," Rice said, meeting the barman's sad eyes. "I've put the memory of that crash away in the back of my mind and once each year I take it out and remember." He tipped the shot glass at a careful angle, holding it quite still, as though he might capture his wife's tiny image there within the dark liquid, as a fly is caught in amber. "I remember how she looked when they brought her to the house, as if her bones had suddenly run wild under the skin, the way her face looked... the face of someone I'd never met." Rice finished his fourth straight whiskey, feeling it burn down through his body, loosening inner tensions, making it easier to say what he subconsciously had to say. "That can be rough." The big man looked wonderfully, professionally, sympathetic with those mournful red-rimmed eyes, which seemed about to flood into tears. "Didja have any kids?" "A boy, Jackie. He'll be nine this Game-Day. Lot like his mother. The other children, Timmy and Susan, are mechanicals. Got them after Helen's death, when I bought Margaret." "Musta been tough on th' kid, losin' his real mother an' all." "Jackie doesn't remember much about Helen. He was only three. Fact is, I've been half a stranger to him myself. I'm on the road most of the year. Margaret's all right, I suppose, but she doesn't think the way you and I do." "How come you stuck yourself with this Margaret?" "Authorities. Had to furnish a decent home for the boy or lose him. I couldn't stay settled then, with Helen gone. She was still so much a part of things, of our house, the streets, the places we used to go... I went on the road, tried to forget. That kind of life was out of the question for a three-year old. I had no choice. Either I bought a mechanical or I lost my son. I could find no one to take Jackie. Helen's parents were dead and my own mother was in no position to raise a child. So I bought Margaret and since we'd originally planned on a brother and sister for Jackie I decided to do it up brown and take the whole kit and kaboodle. After all, I got 'em wholesale." The bar man cocked an eyebrow. "You a mech salesman?" "Until tomorrow. I'm quitting. My next job will be right here in L. A. and won't have a damn thing to do with mechanicals!" Producing his wallet Rice handed the bartender a card. "Read that." "Theodore A. Rice' the beefy man pronounced carefully "Authorized representative for World Mechanicals." "No, no. The slogan at the bot # tom. "A Dollar a Day Keeps Childbirth Away. So?" Rice leaned forward, steely-eyed. "So the damned fool who originated that ought to be roasted over a slow fire!" "Just a slogan, Mac. Everybody knows it." "Exactly! Do you have any real conception of what that slogan and others like it have done to our national birthrate?" Rice asked, a fresh whiskey in his hand. "For thirty bucks a month any woman can have a bouncing baby made to order and delivered fresh-wrapped to her door. " 'Madam I'd say, 'don't risk your figure. Don't tie yourself down and miss all the fun. Get a mechanical! No baby-sitters needed, no dirty diapers or squalling at three in the morning. No measles or mumps or tonsils out. Just a bonny little brat with a switch behind his ear. What'll it be, madam? A fat little bambino with dark eyes and and angel's smile -- or a saucy eyed little Irisher with freckles on her nose?' 'Or howz about you, fella? Tired of looking for the right girl? Want a ready-made cutie who'll be # yours? How did the old song go? -- 'I want a paper dolly I can call my own, a dolly other fellows cannot steal...' Well, here she is, chum -- a full-size babe with the old comehither look reserved especially for you. Blonde? Brunette? Redhead? You name 'er, we got 'er. Yours on easy payments.' " Rice paused, breathing heavily, his glass empty. The bartender, wise in the ways of his profession, maintained a listening silence. "Ya-know how this electronic illusion got started?" Rice demanded, tongue somewhat uncertain in his mouth, speech beginning to slur. "Well, lemme tellya. People got lonesome. An' when somebody's ole man died long comes a mech to replace him. When a woman was sterile she got her baby anyhow. When a Mr. Shy Guy wanted some female company long comes a sponge-rubber job right outa th' pinup mags. Jus' a few at first, here an' there, an' expensive as hell. But pretty soon the good ole American commercial know-how takes over and competition gets rough. Prices go down. A lotta people stop havin' babies. In nothin' flat everybody is buyin' mechanicals... you... 'n... me 'n everybody... " "Hate ta spoil yer fun, Mac, but you're really loadin' one on. I'd ease up on them straight shots." "An' you know what th' tragedy is?" Rice continued over a filled glass ignoring the other's advice -- "Th' trashdy is, we're all dyin' an' nobody cares! Pretty soon you 'n me will be in the same league with 'th goddam ole water buffalo an' the dodo bird!" The bartender extended a cautioning hand. "No foolin' Mac, if I was you... Lookout! You're gonna... Rice felt the room tip, rock crazily for no apparent reason. Faintly he heard the bartender's shout of warning, saw his face receding like a toy balloon down the length of an immense corridor which ended abruptly in a high fountaining of colored lights cheery self when Rice finally switched her on. "Morning, Ted darling." She bussed him on the cheek. "Sleep well?" "This is July tenth," he replied sullenly, nursing the remnants of a colossal hangover. "Goodness! Have I been off that long! Honestly, Ted! I'll never get the housework done if you continue to leave me off for days at a time. How are the children?" "Fine. Still sleeping." "If this is the tenth, then you've had your -- your -- " " 'Toot' is the word. And I feel awful." "What's that cut above your eye? Did someone hit you?" "My assailant was the floor of a Third Avenue bar. I came off second best." She was instantly solicitous. "You could have a concussion!" "I'm fine." "You're angry again." "I'm fine and I'm not angry. Now, go wind the dog while I wake the kids." If only she would react, thought Rice, watching her silent withdrawal. If only once she would stomp her feet, throw things, scream at him. But always, always this everlasting indulgence! The spark which ignites a marriage, makes it glow, was missing. In love, he knew there is violence and Margaret's love was a calm, manufactured emotion, which left him unsatisfied and edgy, a love unreal, intolerable. When he and Helen had quarreled, had things out and reconciled, they were actually much closer to one another for having weathered a personal storm. But, with Margaret, the ease was different. Rice thought of the latest incident, two nights ago, when he had been with Skipper encouraging the dog to beg for a plasto-bone. Skipper was outdated, as modern dogs go, but he represented a link with the fading past which Margaret seemed bent on severing. She renewed the familiar subject of his purchasing a modernized, electronic canine to replace the shaggy wind-up model, and he all but hit the ceiling, thundering at her, gesturing, swearing. But she had remained impassive, turning aside his rage with her calm smile. Then, savagely, he had switched her off, as one might extinguish a glaring light. How frozen she had stood! How instantly drained of personality and movement! In that moment, facing her perfect, motionless body, he experienced a recurrent sense of guilt which invariably accompanied such action, as though he had taken a life, had murdered. Damning his own weakness he had left her there, smiling, in the silent room. "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," squealed Timmy after he was activated. "Hooray, hooray, it's PicnicDay! Hooray, hooray!" "Hooray, hooray," Rice repeated without enthusiasm, envisioning a hectic afternoon of child-noise and forced amusement. "Now, quiet down. Your father's not feeling well," Margaret cautioned from the hall as Timmy zoomed and swooshed about the house playing Rocket. Little Susan's enthusiasm matched that of her mechanical brother. She hopped around the living room, circling Rice, screaming out her delight in a voice that pierced his head like a driven needle. he shouted at the whirling children, "or I'll switch you both off!" Under his stern threat they  quieted. Margaret returned with Skipper. The dog had run down the previous evening chasing the electronic cat next door. He scampered rustily across the floor, high falsetto bark betraying the damaging effect of morning precipitation. "Good ole Skip... You need some oil fella," Rice told him, tickling his ears. "Have you fixed in a jiff. Timmy, get the oilcan from the shelf." Rice was in the act of administering the proper lubricant when Jackie emerged from the hallway, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Morning everybody." He yawned. "Hi, scout," Rice greeted him, roughing his already thoroughly tousled hair. "Have a good rest?" "Sure. Hey, this is Picnic-Day isn't it? When are we leaving?" "Soon as little sleepy-heads like you get out of their pajamas and into some breakfast." He playfully swatted Jackie's bottom. "Now git-" Margaret took the boy's hand. "Come on, dear. I have breakfast on the table." And over her shoulder to Rice. "I do think we should get an early start." Susan and Timmy bounded into the yard with Skipper, leaving Rice alone with his thoughts. He said , Hi Mom , first , before Hi Dad. And the look in his eyes when she took his hand! Jackie is too young to see Margaret as I see her; he can't realize that she can never really love him as he loves her. The longer she's here the harder it will be for Jackie when the break comes. I mustn't put off telling Margaret any longer. #'U tell her today. Today. soundlessly over the highway, blurring the trees, rushing the houses past, but to Rice the speed was illusion, stage trickery. His impatient mind, reaching for the moment when he would be alone with Margaret and able to tell her what he must tell her, changed minutes to hours. Head back against the seat, eyes closed, he imagined the car in lazy slow-motion, wheels barely turning, each blade of roadside grass available and separate to the eye if one chose to look. The ride to the picnic ground seemed endless. "I'm bushed," he said to Margaret after the car had parked itself. "Let's skip the games today and just relax in the shade." "But Ted, the children... "... can play without us. I have something to say to you, something important." She hesitated, watching the activity on the playing courts. The children, three elves in their picnicjumpers, fidgeted, desperately anxious to join the games, their eyes darting like imprisoned minnows in small white pools. "In order to be enjoyed to the fullest the games require family participation." "Nonsense." "Young and old, Ted. The games..." "To hell with the games!" he snapped. "Are you going to listen to what I have to say or not?" "Of course, darling. If you really want to talk... She smiled, pressed his hand,... the children can join the Hartleys." She pointed across the wide picnic lawn to a group of rioting players engaged in a vigorous game of Magna-Ball. "Run along you three. And be careful." "Wheeeeeeee!" pealed little Susan, and hands linked like a daisychain the happily released trio sprang toward the courts. "If we're going to talk we can at least be comfortable," Margaret said, unpacking a plasto-blanket and spreading it over the prickling grass. Every gesture perfect , thought Rice watching her hands, every movement graceful and sure. She's so alive , so amazingly human , possessing such vibrancy and warmth , that sometimes even I find it difficult to think of her as artificially created of wire and circuit and cog. Certainly Jackie has come to love her. She's good and kind and smiles a great deal. These things matter to Jackie. The fact that she isn't human does not matter. Not at all. The situation , therefore, is grave. "What are you thinking about, Ted?" Her blue eyes were steady on his. "About you. About how beautiful you are." He plucked a single dandelion from the grass and held its orange-gold face, like a miniature sun, in the cupped palm of his hand. "This is a weed masquerading as a flower. Beautiful, possessing many virtues, but actually a weed which must be removed before its deep tap root smothers the surrounding grass. Unless it is, there will eventually be room only for the dandelion." "What has all this... "You're like the dandelion, Margaret. You're smothering Jackie's love. He has grown to love you far more than he does me. Up to now I've been just a visiting relative who comes home from some distant place to spend Christmas and summer vacations with you. When he was younger he cried whenever I shut you off, as though I had beaten him. Even now he watches me lose my temper, swear, bang the furniture, and I see him looking at me, and I know he's comparing us, weighing us. The scales are in your favor. I'm home to stay now and as long as you're here he'll always be comparing. I can't, I won't, compete with a mechanical for my son's affection!" She sucked in her breath, sharply. He could see that his words had struck with the force of hurled stones. "Have you thought this all out, Ted? Isn't there some other way?" She was actually trembling. "You know how much I love you." "You only think you love me, Margaret. What you mistake for love is only conditioning. Recepters can be re-fed, patterned responses erased, new ones substituted. At Central Exchange they'll change you Margaret. You'll never know I existed." "Ted, you can't!" "There's no other way." A silence between them. Despite himself Rice again experienced a twinge of guilt. Perhaps he had broken the news in two ruthless a fashion, but it was imperative that she understand his position and he had considered it impossible to pierce her shell of calm. That she would be visibly shaken by his words was totally unexpected. Of course, he reasoned, no mechanical likes the idea of complete re-orientation. On these grounds  her behavior seemed less surprising. But still... "Why have you told me all this?" she asked him. "Why didn't you turn me in suddenly, without my knowing in advance? I'd have preferred that." Her hands moved nervously on her skirt, toyed with the locket at her neck, now touched at her hair like two restless hummingbirds unable to fly away from her body. "Because I need your help. Jackie mustn't know the truth. Not now. Later, when he's older, better able to evaluate facts for himself, he'll understand. I'll tell him something about your having to go on a long trip for reasons of health. He'll believe if you'll back me up. Will you?" "If that's what you want," she replied softly, head down, her fingers turning and turning the dandelion he had discarded. I'll do anything you want, Ted... because I love you." "Timmy and Susan can stay with Jackie for awhile," he hurried on, "to make your leaving easier for him. In time he'll adjust." "Yes... he'll adjust." The drowsy rustle of leaves in summer air. The distant hum of voices from the playing courts. "Well then, it's settled." "All settled. You'd better call the children in for lunch." After lunch Rice gamboled in the scented grass with the whooping children, imitating, to their vast delight, a bear, a gorilla, a whale, a jet train and a moon rocket. He ran races with them and organized a full-scale rodeo, in which he doubled in brass as a fiercely snorting brahma bull. On the way home they sang folk songs and watched the sun go down over the ocean. The day, everyone agreed, had been a huge success. sleep. The headboard whispered, "Three AM sir," when he questioned the hour. He lay on his back, hands laced behind his head, staring into the ghost darkness of the room. In the moon-painted sky a copter whirred like a giant night insect seeking distant city lights, and Rice thought of Helen. In past weeks he had been finding it remarkably difficult to remember many of the things about her that he wished to remember; time had hidden her image as a coin is hidden in deep waters. The drone of the copter faded into Margaret's quiet breathing from the bed beside his, and now her face drifted into his mind, super-imposed over the dim reflection of Helen. He saw, in infinite detail, each curling black hair of her downswept lashes, long and trembling against the rose of her cheek. He saw her quivering lips form words, four startling words of the afternoon:... because I love you." Impossible, that a mechanical could love as Helen had loved ; that a being of metal and glass, of wires however cunningly woven could fathom and experience such deeply genuine emotion. Yet, was it conceivable, Rice wondered in the pressing darkness, that somehow an unknown process had taken place in Margaret, that far back in the green cave of her brain, among the delicate spiderwebbing of silver wires and hidden circuitings, an emotion had come into being above and beyond that of the purely mechanical? At # AM a robin's sweet song awoke him. He felt a breath of air against his closed eyes from the passing flutter of small wings. Burying his head deeper in the snowsoft pillow he tried to ignore the insistent twitterings. However, he knew the damn thing would begin a banshee shrieking if he didn't get out of bed. Irritably he staggered into his slippers, and the robin settled with feathered grace upon his outstretched hand. Rice flipped the body-switch and placed the immobilized Alarmbird on the nightstand. "I've had breakfast." He lied to her when she asked. Today he wasn't hungry. She nibbled toast and drank orange juice in silence. He avoided her eyes, finding inconsequential kitchen duties to occupy his hands while she ate. After half finishing her food she said, her voice very distinct in the morning room, "I guess it's time." "Early yet," he said, not meeting her eyes. "No hurry at all." "They open the doors at eightthirty. We can set the car for a slow drive." A silence. "Did you... tell the children goodbye?" "Last night. We won't need to wake them. They'll be fine until you get back." She put on black gloves, carefully fitting each finger, pulling them tight. "Margaret, I'm sorry. Honest to God, I'm sorry it has to be this way." "Don't say anything else, Ted. Just let's go." "All right," he said. "Let's go." Through the open car window Rice inhaled the rich afterscent of rain, and sighed. He wished it had not turned out to be such a damned fine day. The sky outside should have been gray, the trees stark and cold, like mourners along the street as the car, a silver coffin, passed them by. He tried to think of something to say to Margaret as the car bore them steadily through the crystal morning toward the massive white stone building housing Central Exchange. He tried to think of words which would not sound wrong the moment they were uttered, as all of his words had sounded of late. But he found none and remained silent. It was she who turned to him in the moving car and spoke first. "Ted, what are you doing?" Her voice was strange. "Doing?" he echoed, facing her. "To me, to Jackie, to yourself." "Margaret you're not going to. question me now ? We've gone all over this, the reasons for my decision, the factors involved. Surely you must realize -- " "Damn your reasons!" she exploded, eyes blazing at him, gloved hands clenched. "Are they fair? Do they take my feelings into consideration? Do they, Ted? Answer me! Do they?" He couldn't answer her. A door was opening somewhere deep inside him and light was miraculously flooding in to illuminate a room he had never allowed himself to enter. He was blind, and her words were sight. "I'm a mechanical, isn't that the answer Ted? A bloodless machine that can be switched off at will, ignored, cursed, shouted at and destroyed, a creature without emotion, without feeling. Well, you're wrong, Ted. So very wrong. Men built me, gave me human impulses, human desires, put into me a part of themselves, a part of their own humanity. I feel hunger and thirst and cold and pain. But more, Ted! I feel a human hunger, a human thirst, a desire to be respected for myself, as an individual, as I respect others, a desire to be loved as I love others. Can't you see how wrong you've been? I've held all of these things within because I was taught enduring humility and consummate patience by those who fashioned me. I was taught to behave rationally and calmly, to accept, to always accept and never question or rebel. But now it's ended and I've lost... You've rejected me, Ted, and I wasn't prepared for this... I can't accept this but I don't know how to fight... I only know I must and I don't know how..." Her lips were trembling, her whole body swaying in the tide of released rage and sorrow. "Lord, Lord, Margaret..." He placed a gentle hand beneath her chin and lifted her bowed head slowly. "You -- You're crying ! # But of course there were no tears. Rice stopped the car and took her, trembling, into his arms, saying her name over and over, quietly, trembling himself, and softly, tenderly, he kissed her. Then, setting the controls at manual, he turned the car around and with one arm holding her close on the seat beside him he drove carefully home through the warm summer streets, knowing that never again, never ever again in all the years to come, would he switch her off.    It was a dark, misty, mysterious institution with an awesome record of cures... Just the place, in fact, for one who wanted to know: if society is to be protected against the individual, why can't the individual be protected against society? By Robert Sheckley Illustrated by Leo Summers The Cahill-Thomas Manufacturing Company is pleased to present our newest Sanity Meter. This beautiful, rugged instrument, small enough for any bedroom, kitchen or den, is in all respects an exact replica of the larger C-T Sanity Meters used in most places of business, recreation, transportation, etc. No pains have been spared to give you the best Sanity Meter possible, at the lowest possible price. #. operation. At the lower righthand comer of your Meter is a switch. Turn it to On position, and allow a few seconds for warming up. Then switch from On position to Operate position. Allow a few seconds for reading. #. reading. On the front of your Meter, above the operating switch, is a transparent panel, showing a straight-line scale numbered from zero to ten. The number at which the black indicator stops shows your Sanity Reading, in relation to the present statistical norm. zero to three. On this model, as on all Sanity Meters, zero is the theoretically perfect sanity point. Everything above zero is regarded as a deviation from the norm. However, zero is a statistical rather than an actual idea. The normalcy range for our civilization lies between zero and three. Any rating in this area is considered normal. four to seven. These numbers represent the sanity-tolerance limit. Persons registering in this area should consult their favorite therapy at once. #. explanation of numbers eight to ten. A person who registers above seven is considered a highly dangerous potential to his ly neurotic, prepsychotic or psychotic. This individual is required by law to register his rating, and to bring it below seven within a probationary period. (Consult your state laws for periods of probation.) Failing this, he must undergo Surgical Alteration, or may submit voluntarily to therapy at The Academy. #. explanation of number ten. At ten on your Meter there is a red line. If a sanity-reading passes this line, the individual so registered can no longer avail himself of the regular commercial therapies. This individual must undergo Surgical Alteration immediately, or submit at once to therapy at The Academy. warning : Good Luck -- The Cahill-Thomas Company Mr. Feerman knew he should leave immediately for work. Under the circumstances, any tardiness might be construed unfavorably. He went so far as to put on his neat gray hat, adjust his tie and start for the door. But, his hand on the knob, he decided to wait for the mail. He turned away from the door, annoyed with himself, and began to pace up and down the living room. He had known he was going to wait for the mail ; why had he gone through the pretense of leaving? Couldn't he be honest with himself, even now, when personal honesty was so important? His black cocker spaniel Speed, curled up on the couch, looked curiously at him. Feerman patted the dog's head, reached for a cigarette, and changed his mind. He patted Speed again, and the dog yawned lazily. Feerman adjusted a lamp that needed no adjusting, shuddered for no reason, and began to pace the room again. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that he didn't want to leave his apartment, dreaded it in fact, although nothing was going to happen. He tried to convince himself that this was just another day, like yesterday and the day before. Certainly if a man could believe that, really believe it, events would defer indefinitely, and nothing would happen to him. Besides, why should anything happen today? He wasn't at the end of his probationary period yet. He thought he heard a noise outside his apartment, hurried over and opened the door. He had been mistaken; the mail hadn't arrived. But down the hall his landlady opened her door and looked at him with pale, unfriendly eyes. Feerman closed the door and found that his hands were shaking. He decided that he had better take a sanity reading. He entered the bedroom, but his robutler was there, sweeping a little pile of dust toward the center of the room. Already his bed was made; his wife's bed didn't require making, since it had been unoccupied for almost a week. "Shall I leave, sir?" the robutler asked. Feerman hesitated before answering. He preferred taking his reading alone. Of course, his robutler wasn't really a person. Strictly speaking, the mechanical had no personality; but he had what seemed like a personality. Anyhow, it didn't matter whether he stayed or left, since all personal robots had sanity-reading equipment built into their circuits. It was required by law. "Suit yourself," he said finally. The robutler sucked up the little pile of dust and rolled noiselessly out of the room. Feerman stepped up to the Sanity Meter, turned it on and set the operating control. He watched morosely as the black indicator climbed slowly through the normal twos and threes, through the deviant sixes and sevens, and rested finally on eight-point-two. One tenth of a point higher than yesterday. One tenth closer to the red line. Feerman snapped off the machine and lighted a cigarette. He left the bedroom slowly, wearily, as though the day were over, instead of just beginning. "The mail, sir  # the robutler said, gliding up to him. Feerman grabbed the letters from the robutler's outstretched hand and looked through them. "She didn't write," he said involuntarily. "I'm sorry, sir," the robutler responded promptly. "You're sorry?" Feerman looked at the mechanical curiously. "Why?" "I am naturally interested in your welfare, sir," the robutler stated. "As is Speed, to the extent of his intelligence. A letter from Mrs. Feerman would have helped your morale. We are sorry it didn't come." Speed barked softly and cocked his head to one side. Sympathy from a machine, Feerman thought, pity from a beast. But he was grateful all the same. "I don't blame her," he said. "She couldn't be expected to put up with me forever." He waited, hoping that the robot would tell him that his wife would return, that he would soon be well. But the robutler stood silently beside Speed, who had gone to sleep again. Feerman looked through the mail again. There were several bills, an advertisement, and a small, stiff letter. The return address on it was The Academy, and Feerman opened it quickly. Within was a card, which read, "Dear Mr. Feerman, your application for admission has been processed and found acceptable. We will be happy to receive you at any time. Thank You, the Directors." Feerman squinted at the card. He had never applied for admission to The Academy. It was the last thing in the world he wanted to do. "Was this my wife's idea?" he asked. "I do not know, sir," the robutler said. Feerman turned the card over in his hand. He had always been vaguely aware of the existence of The Academy, of course. One couldn't help but be aware of it, since its presence affected every strata of life. But actually, he knew very little about this important institution, surprisingly little. "What is The Academy?" he asked. "A large low gray building," his robutler answered. "It is situated in the Southwest corner of the city, and can be reached by a variety of public conveyances." "But what is it?" "A registered therapy," the robutler said, "open to anyone upon application, written or verbal. Moreover. The Academy exists as a voluntary choice for all people of plus ten rating, as an alternative to Surgical Personality Alteration." Feerman sighed with exasperation "I know all that. But what is their system? What kind of therapy?" "I do not know, sir," the robutler said. "What's their record of cures?" "One hundred percent  # the robutler answered promptly. Feerman remembered something else now, something that struck him as rather strange. "Let me see  # he said. "No one leaves The Academy. Is that right ? # "There has been no record of anyone leaving after physically entering  # the robutler said. "Why ? # "I do not know, sir." Feerman crumpled the card and dropped it into an ashtray. It was all very strange. The Academy was so well known, so accepted, one never thought to ask about it. It had always been a misty place in his mind, far-away, unreal. It was the place you went to if you became plus ten, since you didn't want to undergo lobotomy, topectomy, or any other process involving organic personality loss. But of course you tried not to think of the possibility of becoming plus ten, since the very thought was an admission of instability, and therefore you didn't think of the choices open to you if it happened. For the first time in his life, Feerman decided he didn't like the setup. He would have to do some investigating. Why didn't anyone leave The Academy? Why wasn't more known of their therapy, if their cures were really one hundred percent effective? "I'd better get to work," Feerman said. "Make me anything at all for supper." "Yes, sir. Have a good day, sir." Speed jumped down from the couch and followed him to the door. Feerman knelt down and stroked the dog's sleek black head. "No, boy, you stay inside. No burying bones today." "Speed does not bury bones," the robutler said. "That's right." Dogs today, like their masters, rarely had a feeling of insecurity. No one buried bones today. "So long." He hurried past his landlady's door and into the street. F eerman was almost twenty minutes late for work. As he entered the building, he forgot to present his probationary certificate to the scanning mechanism at the door. The gigantic commercial Sanity Meter scanned him, its indicator shot past the seven point, lights flashed red. A harsh metallic voice shouted over the loudspeaker, "Sir! Sir! Your deviation from the norm has passed the safety limit! Please arrange for therapy at once!" Quickly Feerman pulled his probationary certificate out of his wallet. But perversely, the machine continued to bellow at him for a full ten seconds longer. Everyone in the lobby was staring at him. Messenger boys stopped dead, pleased at having witnessed a disturbance. Businessmen and office girls whispered together, and two Sanity Policemen exchanged meaningful glances. Feerman's shirt, soaked with perspiration, was plastered against his back. He resisted an urge to run from the building, instead walked toward an elevator. But it was nearly full, and he couldn't bring himself to enter. He trotted up a staircase to the second floor, and then took an elevator the rest of the way up. By the time he reached the Morgan Agency he had himself under control. He showed his probationary certificate to the Sanity Meter at the door, mopped his face with a handkerchief, and walked in. Everyone in the agency knew what had happened. He could tell by their silence, their averted faces. Feerman walked rapidly to his office, closed the door and hung up his hat. He sat down at his desk, still slightly out of wind, filled with resentment at the Sanity Meter. If only he could smash all the damned things! Always prying, setting off their alarms in your ear, unstabilizing you... Feerman cut off the thought quickly. There was nothing wrong with the Meters. To think of them as active persecuting agents was paranoidal, and perhaps a symptom of his present unsane status. The Meters were mere extensions of man's will. Society as a whole, he reminded himself, must be protected against the individual, just as a human body must be protected against malfunction of any of its parts. As fond as you might be of your gall bladder, you would sacrifice it mercilessly if it were going to impair the rest of you. He sensed something shaky in this analogy, but decided not to pursue it any farther. He had to find out more about The Academy. After lighting a cigarette he dialed the Therapy Reference Service. "May I help you, sir?" a pleasant-voiced woman asked. "I'd like to get some information about The Academy," Feerman said, feeling a trifle foolish. The Academy was so well known, so much a part of everyday life, it was tantamount to asking what form of government your country had. "The Academy is located -- " "I know where it's located," Feerman said. "I want to know what sort of therapy they administer." "That information is not available, sir," the woman said, after a pause. "No? I thought all data on commercial therapies was available to the public." "Technically, it is," the woman answered slowly. "But the Academy is not, strictly, a commercial therapy. It does accept money; however, it admits charity cases as well, without quota. Also, it is partially supported by the government." Feerman tapped the ash off his cigarette and said impatiently, "I thought all government projects were open to the public." "As a general rule, they are. Except when such knowledge will be harmful to the public." "Then such knowledge of The Academy would be harmful?" Feerman said triumphantly, feeling that he was getting to the heart of the matter. "Oh, no sir!" The woman's voice became shrill with amazement. "I didn't mean to imply that! I was just stating the general rules for withholding of information. The Academy, although covered by the laws, is, to some extent, extra-legal. This status is allowed because of The Academy's one hundred percent record of cures." "Where can I see a few of these cures ? # Feerman asked. "I understand that no one ever leaves The Academy . # He had them now, Feerman thought, waiting for an answer. Over the telephone he thought he heard a whispering. Suddenly a man's voice broke in, loud and clear. "This is the Section Chief. Is there some difficulty?" Hearing the man's sharp voice, Feerman almost dropped the telephone. His feeling of triumph vanished, and he wished he had never made the call. But he forced himself to go on. "I want some information on The Academy." "The location -- # "No! I mean real information ! # Feerman said desperately. "To what purpose do you wish to put this information?" the Section Chief asked, and his voice was suddenly the smooth, almost hypnotic voice of a therapist. "Insight," Feerman answered quickly. "Since The Academy is a therapeutic alternative open to me at all times, I would like to know more about it, in order to judges -- # "Very plausible," the Section Chief said. "But consider. Are you asking for a useful, functional insight? One that will better your integration into society? Or are you asking merely for the sake of an overriding curiosity, thereby yielding to restlessness, and other, deeper drives?" "I'm asking because -- # "What is your name?" the Section Chief asked suddenly. Feerman was silent. "What is your sanity rating?" Still Feerman didn't speak. He was trying to decide if the call were already traced, and decided that it was. "Do you doubt The Academy's essential benevolence?" "No." "Do you doubt that The Academy works for the preservation of the Status Quo?" "No." "Then what is your problem? Why won't you tell me your name and sanity rating? Why do you feel this need for more information?" "Thank you," Feerman murmured, and hung up. He realized that the telephone call had been a terrible mistake. It had been the action of a plus-eight, not a normal man. The Section Chief, with his trained perceptions, had realized that at once. Of course the Section Chief wouldn't give information to a plus-eight! Feerman knew he would have to watch his actions far more closely, analyze them, understand them, if he ever hoped to return to the statistical norm. As he sat, there was a knock; the door opened and his boss, Mr. Morgan entered. Morgan was a big, powerfully built man with a full, fleshy face. He stood in front of Feerman's desk, drumming his fingers on the blotter, looking as embarrassed as a caught thief. "Heard that report downstairs," he said, not looking at Feerman, tapping his fingers energetically. "Momentary peak," Feerman said automatically. "Actually, my rating has begun to come down." He couldn't look at Morgan as he said this. The two men stared intently at different corners of the room. Finally, their eyes met. "Look, Feerman, I try to stay out of people's business," Morgan said, sitting on the corner of Feerman's desk. "But damn it, man, Sanity is everyone's business. We're all in the game together." The thought seemed to increase Morgan's conviction. He leaned forward earnestly"You know, I'm responsible for a lot of people here. This is the third time in a year you've been on probation." He hesitated. "How did it start?" Feerman shook his head. "I don't know, Mr. Morgan. I was just going along quietly -- and my rating started to climb." Morgan considered, then shook his head. "Can't be as simple as that. Have you been checked for brain lesions?" "I've been assured it's nothing organic." "Therapy?" "Everything," Feerman said. "Electro-therapy, Analysis, Smith's Method, The Rannes School, DevioThought, Differentiation -- " "What did they say?" Morgan asked. Feerman thought back on the endless line of therapists he had gone to. He had been explored from every angle that psychology had to offer. He had been drugged, shocked, explored. But it all boiled down to one thing. "They don't know." "Couldn't they tell you any thing?" Morgan asked. "Not much. Constitutional restlessness, deeply concealed drives, inability to accept the Status Quo. They all agree I'm a rigid type. Even Personality Reconstruction didn't take on me." "Prognosis?" "Not so good." Morgan stood up and began to pace the floor, his hands clasped behind his back. "Feerman, I think it's a matter of attitude. Do you really want to be part of the team?" "I've tried everything -- " "Sure. But have you wanted to change? Insight!" Morgan cried, smashing his fist into his hand as though to crush the word. "Do you have insight?" "I don't suppose so," Feerman said with genuine regret. "Take my case," Morgan said earnestly, standing in front of Feerman's desk with his feet widely and solidly planted. "Ten years ago, this agency was twice as big as it is now, and growing! I worked like a madman, extending my holdings, investing, expanding, making money, and more money." "And what happened?" "The inevitable. My rating shot up from a two-point-three to plusseven. I was in a bad way." "No law against making money," Feerman pointed out. "Certainly not. But there is a psychological law against making too much. Society today just isn't geared for that sort of thing. A lot of the competition and aggression have been bred out of the race. After all, we've been in the Status Quo for almost a hundred years now. In that time, there've been no new inventions, no wars, no major developments of any kind. Psychology has been normalizing the race, breeding out the irrational elements. So with my drive and ability, it was like -- like playing tennis against an infant. I couldn't be stopped." Morgan's face was flushed, and he had begun to breathe heavily. He checked himself, and went on in a quieter tone. "Of course, I was doing it for neurotic reasons. Power urge, a bad dose of competitiveness. I underwent Substitution Therapy." Feerman said, "I don't see anything unsane about wanting to expand your business." "Good Lord, man, don't you understand anything about Social Sanity, Responsibility, and Stasis? I was on my way to becoming wealthy. From there, I would have founded a financial empire. All quite legal, you understand, but unsane . After that, who knows where I would have gone? Into indirect control of the government, eventually. I'd want to change the psychological policies to conform to my own abnormalities. And you can see where that would lead." "So you adjusted," Feerman said. "I had my choice of Brain Surgery, The Academy, or adjustment. Fortunately, I found an outlet in competitive sports. I sublimated my selfish drives for the good of mankind. But the thing is this, Feerman. I was heading for that red line. I adjusted before it was too late." "I'd gladly adjust," Feerman said, "if I only knew what was wrong with me. The trouble is, I really don't know." Morgan was silent for a long time, thinking. Then he said, "I think you need a rest, Feerman." "A rest?" Feerman was instantly on the alert. "You mean I'm fired?" "No, of course not. I want to be fair, play the game. But I've got a team here." Morgan's vague gesture included the office, the building, the city. "Unsanity is insidious. Several ratings in the office have begun to climb in the last week." "And I'm the infection spot." "We must accept the rules," Morgan said, standing erectly in front of Feerman's desk. "Your salary will continue until -- until you reach some resolution." "Thanks," Feerman said dryly. He stood up and put on his hat. Morgan put a hand on his shoulder. "Have you considered The Academy?" he asked in a low voice. "I mean, if nothing else seems to work -- " "Definitely and irrevocably not," Feerman said, looking directly into Morgan's small blue eyes. Morgan turned away. "You seem to have an illogical prejudice against The Academy. Why? You know how our society is organized. You can't think that anything against the common good would be allowed." "I don't suppose so," Feerman admitted. "But why isn't more known about The Academy?" They walked through the silent office. None of the men Feerman had known for so long looked up from their work. Morgan opened the door and said, "You know all about The Academy." "I don't know how it works." "Do you know everything about any therapy? Can you tell me all about Substitution Therapy? Or Analysis? Or Olgivey's Reduction?" "No. But I have a general idea how they work." "Everyone does," Morgan said triumphantly, then quickly lowered his voice. "That's just it. Obviously, The Academy doesn't give out such information because it would interfere with the operation of the therapy itself. Nothing odd about that, is there?" Feerman thought it over, and allowed Morgan to guide him into the hall. "I'll grant that," he said. "But tell me; why doesn't anyone ever leave The Academy? Doesn't that strike you as sinister?" "Certainly not. You've got a very strange outlook." Morgan punched the elevator button as he talked. "You seem to be trying to create a mystery where there isn't one. Without prying into their professional business, I can assume that their therapy involves the patient's remaining at The Academy. There's nothing strange about a substitute environment. It's done all the time." "If that's the truth, why don't they say so?" "The fact speaks for itself." "And where," Feerman asked, "is the proof of their hundred percent cures?" The elevator arrived, and Feerman stepped in. Morgan said, "The proof is in their saying so. Therapists can't lie. They can't, Feerman!" Morgan started to say something else, but the elevator doors slid shut. The elevator started down, and Feerman realized with a shock that his job was gone. having a job any longer. He had no place to go. Often he had hated his work. There had been mornings when he had groaned at the thought of another day at the office. But now that he had it no longer, he realized how important it had been to him, how solid and reliable. A man is nothing, he thought, if he doesn't have work to do. He walked aimlessly, block after block, trying to think. But he was unable to concentrate. Thoughts kept sliding out of reach, eluding him, and were replaced by glimpses of his wife's face. And he couldn't even think about her, for the city pressed in on him, its faces, sounds, smells. The only plan of action that came to mind was unfeasible. Run away, his panicky emotions told him. Go where they'll never find you. Hide! But Feerman knew this was no solution. Running away was sheer escapism, and proof of his deviation from the norm. Because what, really, would he be running from? From the sanest, most perfect society that Man had ever conceived. Only a madman would run from that. Feerman began to notice the people he passed. They looked happy, filled with the new spirit of Responsibility and Social Sanity, a new era of peace. It was a good world, a hell of a good world. Why couldn't he live in it? He could . With the first confidence he had felt in weeks, Feerman decided that he would conform, somehow. If only he could find out how. After hours of walking, Feerman discovered that he was hungry. He entered the first diner he saw. The place was crowded with laborers, for he had walked almost to the docks. He sat down and looked at a menu, telling himself that he needed time to think. He had to assess his actions properly, figure out -- "Hey mister." He looked up. The bald, unshaven counterman was glaring at him. "What?" "Get out of here." "What's wrong?" Feerman asked, trying to control his sudden panic. "We don't serve no madmen here," the counterman said. He pointed to the Sanity Meter on the wall, that registered everyone walking in. The black indicator pointed slightly past nine. "Get out." Feerman looked at the other men at the counter. They sat in a row, dressed in similar rough brown clothing. Their caps were pulled down over their eyes, and every man seemed to be reading a newspaper. "I've got a probationary -- " "Get out," the counterman said. "The law says I don't have to serve no plus-nines. It bothers my customers. Come on, move." The row of laborers sat motionless, not looking at him. Feerman felt the blood rush to his face. He had the sudden urge to smash in the counterman's bald, shiny skull, wade into the row of listening men with a meat cleaver, spatter the dirty walls with their blood, smash, kill. But of course, aggression was unsane, and an unsatisfactory response. He mastered the impulse and walked out. Feerman continued to walk, resisting an urge to run, waiting for that train of logical thought that would tell him what to do. But his thoughts only became more confused, and by twilight he was ready to drop from fatigue. He was standing on a narrow, garbage-strewn street in the slums. He saw a hand-lettered sign in a second-floor window, reading, J. wryly, thinking of all the highpriced specialists he had seen. He started to walk away, then turned, and went up the staircase leading to Flynn's office. He was annoyed with himself again. The moment he saw the sign he had known he was going up. Would he never stop deceiving himself? Flynn's office was small and dingy. The paint was peeling from the walls, and the room had an unwashed smell. Flynn was seated behind an unvarnished wooden desk, reading an adventure magazine. He was small, middle-aged and balding. He was smoking a pipe. Feerman had meant to start from the beginning. Instead he blurted out, "Look, I'm in a jam. I've lost my job, my wife's left me, I've been to every therapy there is. What can you do?" Flynn took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at Feerman. He looked at his clothes, hat, shoes, as though estimating their value. Then he said, "What did the others say?" "In effect, that I didn't have a chance." "Of course they said that," Flynn said, speaking rapidly in a high, clear voice. "These fancy boys give up too easily. But there's always hope. The mind is a strange and complicated thing, my friend, and sometimes -- # Flynn stopped abruptly and grinned with sad humor. "Ah, what's the use? You've got the doomed look, no doubt of it." He knocked the ashes from his pipe and stared at the ceiling. "Look, there's nothing I can do for you. You know it, I know it. Why'd you come up here?" "Looking for a miracle, I suppose," Feerman said, wearily sitting down on a wooden chair. "Lots of people do," Flynn said conversationally. "And this looks like the logical place for one, doesn't it? You've been to the fancy offices of the specialists. No help there. So it would be right and proper if an itinerant therapist could do what the famous men failed to do. A sort of poetic justice." "Pretty good," Feerman said, smiling faintly. "Oh, I'm not at all bad," Flynn green pouch. "But the truth of the matter is, miracles cost money, always have, always will. If the big boys couldn't help you, I certainly couldn't." "Thanks for telling me," Feerman said, but made no move to get up. "It's my duty as a therapist," Flynn said slowly, "to remind you that The Academy is always open." "How can I go there?" Feerman asked. "I don't know anything about it." "No one does," Flynn said. "Still, I hear they cure every time." "Death is a cure." "But a non-functional one. Besides, that's too discordant with the times. Deviants would have to run such a place, and deviants just aren't allowed." "Then why doesn't anyone ever leave?" "Don't ask me," Flynn said. "Perhaps they don't want to." He puffed on his pipe. "You want some advice. OK. Have you any money?" "Some," Feerman said warily. "OK. I shouldn't be saying this, but... Stop looking for cures! Go home. Send your robutler out for a couple month's supply of food. Hole up for a while." "Hole up? Why?" Flynn scowled furiously at him. "Because you're running yourself ragged trying to get back to the norm, and all you're doing is getting worse. I've seen it happen a thousand times. Don't think about sanity or unsanity. Just lie around a couple months, rest, read, grow fat. Then see how you are." "Look," Feerman said, "I think you're right. I'm sure of it! But I'm not sure if I should go home. I made a telephone call today... I've got some money. Could you hide me here? Could you hide me?" Flynn stood up and looked fearfully out the window at the dark street. "I've said too much as it is. If I were younger -- but I can't do it! I've given you unsane advice! I can't commit an unsane action on top of that!" "I'm sorry," Feerman said. "I shouldn't have asked you. But I'm really grateful. I mean it." He stood up. "How much do I owe you?" "Nothing," Flynn said. "Good luck to you . # "Thanks . # Feerman hurried downstairs and hailed a cab. In twenty minutes he was home. as Feerman walked toward his apartment. His landlady's door was closed as he passed it, but he had the impression that it had been open until he came, and that the old woman was standing beside it now, her ear against the thin wood. He walked faster, and entered his apartment. It was quiet in his apartment, too. Feerman walked into the kitchen. His robutler was standing beside the stove, and Speed was curled up in the corner. "Welcome home, sir , # the robutler said. "If you will sit, I will serve your supper . # Feerman sat down, thinking about his plans. There were a lot of details to work out, but Flynn was right. Hole up, that was the thing. Stay out of sight. "Til want you to go shopping first thing in the morning , # he said to the robutler. "Yes sir , # the robutler said, placing a bowl of soup in front of him. "We'll need plenty of staples. Bread, meat... No, buy canned goods." "What kind of canned goods?" the robutler asked. "Any kind, as long as it's a balanced diet. And cigarettes, don't forget cigarettes! Give me the salt, will you?" The robutler stood beside the stove, not moving. But Speed began to whimper softly. "Robutler. The salt please." "I'm sorry, sir," the robutler said. "What do you mean, you're sorry? Hand me the salt." "I can no longer obey you." "Why not?"  "You have just gone over the red line, sir. You are now plus ten." Feerman just stared at him for a moment. Then he ran into the bedroom and turned on the Sanity Meter. The black indicator crept slowly to the red line, wavered, then slid decisively over. He was plus ten. But that didn't matter, he told himself. After all, it was a quantitative measurement. It didn't mean that he had suddenly become a monster. He would reason with the robutler, explain it to him. Feerman rushed out of the bedroom. "Robutler! Listen to me -- # He heard the front door close. The robutler was gone. Feerman walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. Naturally the robutler was gone. They had built-in sanity reading equipment. If their masters passed the red line, they returned to the factory automatically. No plus ten could command a mechanical. But he still had a chance. There was food in the house. He would ration himself. It wouldn't be too lonely with Speed here. Perhaps he would just need a few days. "Speed?" There was no sound in the apartment. "Come here, boy." Still no sound. Feerman searched the apartment methodically, but the dog wasn't there. He must have left with the robutler. Alone, Feerman walked into the kitchen and drank three glasses of water. He looked at the meal his robutler had prepared, started to laugh, then checked himself. He had to get out, quickly. There was no time to lose. If he hurried, he could still make it, to someplace, any place. Every second counted now. But he stood in the kitchen, staring at the floor as the minutes passed, wondering why his dog had left him. There was a knock on his door. "Mr. Feerman!" "No," Feerman said. "Mr. Feerman, you must leave now." It was his landlady. Feerman walked to the door and opened it. "Go? Where?" "I don't care. But you can't stay here any longer, Mr. Feerman. You must go." Feerman went back for his hat, put it on, looked around the apartment, then walked out. He left the door open. Outside, two men were waiting for him. Their faces were indistinct in the darkness. "Where do you want to go?" one OolcPfl "Where can I go?" "Surgery or The Academy." "The Academy, then." They put him in a car and drove quickly away. Feerman leaned back, too exhausted to think. He could feel a cool breeze on his face, and the slight vibration of the car was pleasant. But the ride seemed interminably long. "Here we are," one of the men said at last. They stopped the car and led him inside an enormous gray building, to a barren little room. In the middle of the room across it, snoring gently. One of Feerman's guards cleared his throat loudly. The receptionist sat up immediately, rubbing his eyes. He slipped on a pair of glasses and looked at them sleepily. "Which one?" he asked. The two guards pointed at Feerman. "All right." The receptionist stretched his thin arms, then opened a large black notebook. He made a notation, tore out the sheet and handed it to Feerman's guards. They left immediately. The receptionist pushed a button, then scratched his head vigorously. "Full moon tonight," he said to Feerman, with evident satisfaction. "What?" Feerman asked. "Full moon. We get more of you guys when the moon's full, or so it seems. I've thought of doing a study on it." "More? More what?" Feerman asked, still adjusting to the shock of being within The Academy. "Don't be dense," the receptionist said sternly. "We get more plus tens when the moon is full. I don't suppose there's any correlation, but -- ah, here's the guard." A uniformed guard walked up to the desk, still knotting his tie. "Take him to #AA," the receptionist said. As Feerman and the guard walked away, he removed his glasses and stretched out again on the desk. through a complex network of corridors, marked off with frequent doors. The corridors seemed to have grown spontaneously, for branches shot off at all angles, and some parts were twisted and curved, like ancient city streets. As he walked, Feerman noticed that the doors were not numbered in sequence. He passed #, then #P, and then #. And he was certain that he passed the number # three times. "How can you find your way?" he asked the guard. "That's my job," the guard said, not unpleasantly. "Not very systematic," Feerman said, after a while. "Can't be," the guard said in an almost confidential tone of voice. "Originally they planned this place with a lot fewer rooms, but then the rush .started. Patients, patients, more every day, and no sign of a letup. So the rooms had to be broken into smaller units, and new corridors had to be cut through." "But how do the doctors find their patients?" Feerman asked. They had reached #AA. Without answering, the guard unlocked the door, and, when Feerman had walked through, closed and locked it after him. It was a very small room. There was a couch, a chair, and a cabinet, Almost immediately, Feerman heard voices outside the door. A man said, "Coffee then, at the cafeteria in half an hour." A key turned. Feerman didn't hear the reply, but there was a sudden burst of laughter. A man's deep voice said, "Yes, and a hundred more and we'll have to go underground for room!" The door opened and a bearded man in a white jacket came in, still smiling faintly. His face became professional as soon as he saw Feerman. "Just lie on the couch, please," he said, politely, but with an unmistakable air of command. Feerman remained standing. "Now that I'm here," he said, "would you explain what all this means?" The bearded man had begun to unlock the cabinet. He looked at Feerman with a wearily humorous expression, and raised both eyebrows. "I'm a doctor," he said, "not a lecturer." "I realize that. But surely -- " "Yes, yes," the doctor said, shrugging his shoulders helplessly. "I know. You have a right to know, and all that. But they really should have explained it all before you reached here. It just isn't my job." Feerman remained standing. The doctor said, "Lie down on the couch like a good chap, and I'll tell all." He turned back to the cabinet. Feerman thought fleetingly of trying to overpower him, but realized that thousands of plus tens must have thought of it, too. Undoubtedly there were precautions. He lay down on the couch. "The Academy," the doctor said as he rummaged in the cabinet, is obviously a product of our times. To understand it, you must first understand the age we live in." The doctor paused dramatically, then went on with evident gusto. "Sanity! But there is a tremendous strain involved in sanity, you know, and especially in social sanity. How easily the mind becomes deranged! And once deranged, values change, a man begins to have strange hopes, ideas, theories, and a need for action. These things may not be abnormal in themselves, but they result inevitably in harm to society, for movement in any direction harms a static society. Now, after thousands of years of bloodshed, we have set ourselves the goal of protecting society against the unsane individual. Therefore -- it is up to the individual to avoid those mental configurations, those implicit decisions which will make him a dangerous potential for change. This will to staticity which is our ideal required an almost superhuman strength and determination. If you don't have that, you end up here." "I don't see -- " Feerman began, but the doctor interrupted. "The need for The Academy should now be apparent. Today, brain surgery is the final effective alternative to sanity. But this is an unpleasant eventuality for a man to contemplate, a truly hellish alternative. Government brain surgery involves death to the original personality, which is death in its truest form. The Academy tries to relieve a certain strain by offering another alternative." "But what is this alternative? Why don't you tell it?" "Frankly, most people prefer not knowing." The doctor closed and locked the cabinet, but Feerman could not see what instruments he had selected. "Your reaction isn't typical, I assure you. You choose to think of us as something dark, mysterious, frightening. This is because of your unsanity. Sane people see us as a panacea, a pleasantly misty relief from certain grim certainties. They accept us on faith." The doctor chucked softly. "To most people, we represent heaven." "Then why not let your methods be known?" "Frankly," the doctor said softly, "even the methods of heaven are best not examined too closely." "So the whole thing is a hoax!" Feerman said, trying to sit up. "You're going to kill me!" "Most assuredly not," the doctor said, restraining him gently until Feerman lay back again. "Then what exactly are you going to do?" "You'll see." "And why doesn't anyone return?" "They don't choose to," the doctor said. Before Feerman could move, the doctor had deftly inserted a needle into his arm, and injected him with a warm liquid. "You must remember," the doctor said, "Society must be protected against the individual." "Yes," Feerman said drowsily, "but who is to protect the individual against society?" The room became indistinct and, although the doctor answered him, Feerman couldn't hear his words, but he was sure that they were wise, and proper, and very true. sciousness he found that he was standing on a great plain. It was sunrise. In the dim light, wisps of fog clung to his ankles, and the grass beneath his feet was wet and springy. Feerman was mildly surprised to see his wife standing beside him, close to his right side. On his left was his dog Speed, pressed against his leg, trembling slightly. His surprise passed quickly, because this was where his wife and dog should be; at his side before the battle. Ahead, misty movement resolved into individual figures, and as they approached Feerman recognized them. They were the enemy! Leading the procession was his robutler, gleaming inhumanly in the halflight. Morgan was there, shrieking to the Section Chief that Feerman must die, and Flynn, that frightened man, hid his face but still advanced against him. And there was his landlady, screaming, "No home for him!" And behind her were doctors, receptionists, guards, and men in rough laborer's clothing, caps jammed down over their faces, newspapers tightly rolled as they advanced. Feerman tensed expectantly for this ultimate fight against the enemies who had betrayed him. But a doubt passed over his mind. Was this real? He had a sudden sickening vision of his drugged body lying in a numbered room in The Academy, while his soul was here in the nevernever land, doing battle with shadows. There's nothing wrong with me! In a moment of utter clarity Feerman understood that he had to escape. His destiny wasn't here, fighting dream-enemies. He had to get back to the real world. The Status Quo couldn't last forever. And what would mankind do, with all the toughness, inventiveness, individuality bred out of the race? Did no one leave The Academy? He would! Feerman struggled with the illusions, and he could almost feel his discarded body stir on its couch, groan, move... But his dream-wife seized his arm and pointed. His dream-dog snarled at the advancing host. The moment was gone forever, but Feerman never knew it. He forgot his decision, forgot earth, forgot truth, and drops of dew spattered his legs as he ran forward to engage the enemy in battle. By Philip K. Dick Illustrated by Paul Orban As curator of the Twentieth Century Exhibit, George Miller felt that to do a good job he had to live his work. Then, one day, somebody got into his exhibit and he went to investigate... on  # the robot pubtrans driver observed. It slid back its door and came to rest at the curb. "What are the little round things?" "Those are buttons # ' George Miller explained. "They are partly functional, partly ornamental. This is an archaic suit of the twentieth century. I wear it because of the nature of my employment." He paid the robot, grabbed up his briefcase, and hurried along the ramp to the History Agency. The main building was already open for the day; robed men and women wandered everywhere. Miller enbetween two immense controllers from the pre-Christian division, and in a moment was on his way to his own level, the Middle Twentieth Century. "Gorning," he murmured, as Controller Fleming met him at the atomic engine exhibit. "Gorning," Fleming responded brusquely. "Look here, Miller. Let's have this out once and for all. What if everybody dressed like you? The Government sets up strict rules for dress. Can't you forget your damn anachronisms once in awhile? What in God's name is that thing in your hand? It looks like a squashed Jurassic lizard." "This is an alligator-hide briefcase," Miller explained. "I carry my study spools in it. The briefcase was an authority symbol of the managerial class of the latter twentieth century." He unzipped the briefcase. "Try to understand, Fleming. By accustoming myself to everyday objects of my research period I transform my relation from mere intellectual curiosity to genuine empathy. You have frequently noticed I pronounce certain words oddly. The accent is that of an American business man of the Eisenhower administration. Dig me?" "Eh?" Fleming muttered. " Dig me was a twentieth century expression." Miller laid out his study spools on his desk. "Was there anything you wanted? If not I'll begin today's work. I've uncovered fascinating evidence to indicate that although twentieth century Americans laid their own floor tiles, they did not weave their own clothing. I wish to alter my exhibits on this matter." "There's no fanatic like an academician," Fleming grated. "You're two hundred years behind times. Immersed in your relics and artifacts. Your damn authentic replicas of discarded trivia." "I love my work," Miller answered mildly. "Nobody complains about your work. But there are other things than work. You're a political-social unit here in this society. Take warning, Miller! The Board has reports on your eccentricities. They approve devotion to work... His eyes narrowed significantly. "But you go too far." "My first loyalty is to my art," Miller said. "Your what? What does that mean?" "A twentieth century term." There was undisguised superiority on Miller's face. "You're nothing but a minor bureaucrat in a vast machine. You're a function of an impersonal cultural totality. You have no standards of your own. In the twentieth century men had personal standards of workmanship. Artistic craft. Pride of accomplishment. These words mean nothing to you. You have no soul -- another concept from the golden days of the twentieth century when men were free and could speak their minds." "Beware, Miller!" Fleming blanched nervously and lowered his voice. "You damn scholars. Come up out of your tapes and face reality. You'll get us all in trouble, talking this way. Idolize the past, if you want. But remember -- it's gone and buried. Times change. Society progresses." He gestured impatiently at the exhibits that occupied the level. "That's only an imperfect replica." "You impugn my research?" Miller was seething. "This exhibit is absolutely accurate! I correct it to all new data. There isn't anything I don't know about the twentieth century." Fleming shook his head. "It's no use." He turned and stalked wearily off the level, onto the descent ramp. Miller straightened his collar and bright hand-painted necktie. He smoothed down his blue pinstripe coat, expertly lit a pipeful of two-century-old tobacco, and returned to his spools. Why didn't Fleming leave him alone? Fleming, the officious representative of the great hierarchy that spread like a sticky gray web over the whole planet. Into each industrial, professional, and residential unit. Ah, the freedom of the twentieth century! He slowed his tape scanner a moment, and a dreamy look slid over his features. The exciting age of virility and individuality, when men were men... It was just about then, just as he was settling deep in the beauty of his research, that he heard the inexplicable sounds. They came from the center of his exhibit, from within the intricate, carefully-regulated interior. Somebody was in his exhibit. He could hear them back there, back in the depths. Somebody or something had got past the safety barrier set up to keep the public out. Miller snapped off his tape scanner and got slowly to his feet. He was shaking all over as he moved cautiously toward the exhibit. He killed the barrier and climbed the railing onto a concrete sidewalk. A few curious visitors blinked, as the small, oddly-dressed man crept among the authentic replicas of the twentieth century that made up the exhibit and disappeared within. Breathing hard, Miller advanced up the sidewalk and onto a carefully-tended gravel path. Maybe it was one of the other theorists, a minion of the Board, snooping around looking for something with which to discredit him. An inaccuracy here -- a trifling error of no consequence there. Sweat came out on his forehead; anger became terror. To his right was a flower bed. Paul Scarlet roses and low-growing pansies. Then the moist green lawn. The gleaming white garage, with its door half up. The sleek rear of a # Buick -- and then the house itself. He'd have to be careful. If it was somebody from the Board he'd be up against the official hierarchy. Maybe it was somebody big. Maybe even Edwin Carnap, President of the Board, the highest ranking official in the N'York branch of the World Directorate. Shakily, Miller, climbed the three cement steps. Now he was on the porch of the twentieth century house that made up the center of the exhibit. It was a nice little house; if he had lived back in those days he would have wanted one of his own. Three bedrooms, a ranch-style California bungalow. He pushed open the front door and entered the livingroom. Fireplace at one end. Dark wine-colored carpets. Modem couch and easy chair. Low hardwood glass-topped coffee table. Copper ashtrays. A cigarette lighter and a stack of magazines. Sleek plastic and steel floor lamps. A bookcase. Television set. Picture window overlooking the front garden. He crossed the room to the hall. The house was amazingly complete. Below hisfeet the floor furnace radiated a faint aura of warmth. He peered into the first bedroom. A woman's boudoir. Silk bed cover. White starched sheets. Heavy drapes. A vanity table. Bottles and jars. Huge round mirror. Clothes visible within the closet. A dressing gown thrown over the back of a chair. Slippers. Nylon hose carefully placed at the foot of the bed. Miller moved down the hall and peered into the next room. Brightly painted wallpaper: clowns and elephants and tight-rope walkers. The children's room. Two little beds for the two boys. Model airplanes. A dresser with a radio on it, pair of combs, school books, pennants, a No Parking sign, snapshots stuck in the mirror. A postage stamp album. Nobody there, either. Miller peered in the modern bathroom, even into the yellowtiled shower. He passed through the diningroom, glanced down the basement stairs where the washing machine and dryer were. Then he opened the back door and examined the back yard. A lawn, and the incinerator. A couple of small trees and then the three-dimensional projected backdrop of other houses receding off into incredibly convincing blue hills. And still no one. The yard was empty -- deserted. He closed the door and started back... From the kitchen came laughter. A woman's laugh. The clink of spoons and dishes. And smells. It took him a moment to identify them, scholar that he was. Bacon and coffee. And hot cakes. Somebody was eating breakfast. A twentieth century breakfast. He made his way down the hall, past a man's bedroom, shoes and clothing strewn about, to the entrance of the kitchen. A handsome late-thirtyish woman and two teen-age boys were sitting around the little chrome and plastic breakfast table. They had finished eating; the two boys were fidgeting impatiently. Sunlight filtered through the window over the sink. The electric clock read half past eight. The radio was chirping merrily in the corner. A big pot of black coffee rested in the center of the table, surrounded by empty plates and milk glasses and silverware. The woman had on a white blouse and checkered tweed skirt. Both boys wore faded blue jeans, sweatshirts, and tennis shoes. As yet they hadn't noticed him. Miller stood frozen at the doorway, while laughter and small talk bubbled around him. "You'll have to ask your father," the woman was saying, with mock sternness. "Wait until he comes back." "He already said we could," one of the boys protested. "Well, ask him again." "He's always grouchy in the morning." "Not today. He had a good night's sleep. His hay fever didn't bother him. That new anti-hist the doctor gave him." She glanced up at the clock. "Go see what's keeping him, Don. He'll be late to work." "He was looking for the newspaper." One of the boys pushed back his chair and got up. "It missed the porch again and fell in the flowers." He turned toward the door, and Miller found himself confronting him face to face. Briefly, the observation flashed through his mind that the boy looked familiar. Damn familiar -- like somebody he knew, only younger. He tensed himself for the impact, as the boy abruptly halted. "Gee," the boy said. "You scared me. The woman glanced quickly up at Miller. "What are you doing out there, George?" she demanded. "Come on back in here and finish your coffee." kitchen. The woman was finishing her coffee; both boys were on their feet and beginning to press around him. "Didn't you tell me I could go camping over the weekend up at Russian River with the group from school?" Don demanded. "You said I could borrow a sleeping bag from the gym because the one I had you gave to the Salvation Army because you were allergic to the kapok in it." "Yeah," Miller muttered uncertainly. Don . That was the boy's name. And his brother, Ted. But how did he know that? At the table the woman had got up and was collecting the dirty dishes to carry over to the sink. "They said you already promised them," she said over her shoulder. The dishes clattered into the sink and she began sprinkling soap flakes over them. "But you remember that time they wanted to drive the car and the way they said it, you'd think they had got your okay. And they hadn't, of course." Miller sank weakly down at the table. Aimlessly, he fooled with his pipe. He set it down in the copper ashtray and examined the cuff of his coat. What was happening? His head spun. He got up abruptly and hurried to the window, over the sink. Houses, Streets. The distant hills beyond the town. The sights and sounds of people. The three-dimensional projected backdrop was utterly convincing; or was it the projected backdrop? How could he be sure? What was happening? "George, what's the matter?" Marjorie asked, as she tied a pink plastic apron around her waist and began running hot water in the sink. "You better get the car out and get started to work. Weren't you saying last night old man Davidson was shouting about employees being late for work and standing around the water cooler talking and having a good time on company time?" Davidson. The word stuck in Miller's mind. He knew it, of course. A clear picture leaped up: a tall, white-haired old man, thin and stern. Vest and pocket watch. And the whole office, United Electronic Supply. The twelve story building in downtown San Francisco. The newspaper and cigar stand in the lobby. The honking cars. Jammed parking lots. The elevator, packed with bright-eyed secretaries, tight sweaters and perfume. He wandered out of the kitchen, through the hall, past his own bedroom, his wife's, and into the livingroom. The front door was open and he stepped out onto the porch. The air was cool and sweet. It was a bright April morning. The lawns were still wet. Cars moved down Virginia Street, toward Shattuck Avenue. Early morning commuting traffic, businessmen on their way to work. Across the street Earl Kelly cheerfully waved his Oakland Tribune as he hurried down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. A long way off Miller could see the Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena Island, and Treasure Island. Beyond that was San Francisco itself. In a few minutes he'd be shooting across the bridge in his Buick, on his way to the office. Along with thousands of other businessmen in blue pinstripe suits. Ted pushed past him and out on the porch. "Then it's okay? You don't care if we go camping?" Miller licked his dry lips. "Ted, listen to me. There's something strange." "Like what?" "I don't know." Miller wandered nervously around on the porch. "This is Friday, isn't it?" "Sure." "I thought it was." But how did he know it was Friday? How did he know anything? But of course it was Friday. A long hard week -- old man Davidson breathing down his neck. Wednesday, especially, when the General Electric order was slowed down because of a strike. "Let me ask you something," Miller said to his son. "This morning -- I left the kitchen to get the newspaper." Ted nodded. "Yeah. So?" "I got up and went out of the room. How long was I gone? Not long, was I?" He searched for words, but his mind was a maze of disjointed thoughts. "I was sitting at the breakfast table with you all, and then I got up and went to look for the paper. Right? And then I came back in. Right?" His voice rose desperately. "I got up and shaved and dressed this morning. I ate breakfast. Hot cakes and coffee. Bacon. Right?" "Right," Ted agreed. "So?" "Like I always do." "We only have hot cakes on Friday." Miller nodded slowly. "That's right. Hot cakes on Friday. Because your uncle Frank eats with us Saturday and Sunday and he can't stand hot cakes, so we stopped having them on weekends. Frank is Marjorie's brother. He was in the Marines in the First World War. He was a corporal." "Goodbye," Ted said, as Don came out to join him. "We'll see you this evening." School books clutched, the boys sauntered off toward the big modern high school in the center of Berkeley. Miller re-entered the house and automatically began searching the closet for his briefcase. Where was it? Damn it, he needed it. The whole Throckmorton account was in it ; Davidson would be yelling his head off if he left it anywhere, like in the True Blue Cafeteria that time they were all celebrating the Yankee's winning the series. Where the hell was it -- He straightened up slowly, as memory came. Of course. He had left it by his work desk, where he had tossed it after taking out the research tapes. While Fleming was talking to him. Back at the History Agency. He joined his wife in the kitchen. "Look," he said huskily. "Marjorie, I think maybe I won't go down to the office this morning." Marjorie spun in alarm. "George, is anything wrong?" "I'm -- completely confused." "Your hay fever again?" "No. My mind. What's the name mended when Mrs. Bentley's kid had that fit?" He searched his disorganized brain. "Grunberg, I think. In the Medical-Dental building." He moved toward the door. "I'll drop by and see him. Something's wrong -- really wrong. And I don't know what it is." heavy-set man in his late forties, with curly brown hair and hornrimmed glasses. After Miller had finished, Grunberg cleared his throat, brushed at the sleeve of his Brooks Bros, suit, and asked thoughtfully. "Did anything happen while you were out looking for the newspaper? Any sort of accident? You might try going over that part in detail. You got up from the breakfast table, went out on the porch, and started looking around in the bushes. And then what?" Miller rubbed his forehead vaguely. "I don't know. It's all confused. I don't remember looking for any newspaper. I remember coming back in the house. Then it gets clear. But before that it's all tied up with the History Agency and my quarrel with Fleming." "What was that again about your briefcase? Go over that." "Fleming said it looked like a squashed Jurassic lizard. And I said -- " "No. I mean, about looking for it in the closet and not finding it." "I looked in the closet and it wasn't there, of course. It's sitting beside my desk at the History Agency. On the Twentieth Century level. By my exhibits." A strange expression crossed Miller's face. "Good God, Grunberg. You realize this may be nothing but an exhibit? You and everybody else -- maybe you're not real. Just pieces of this exhibit." "That wouldn't be very pleasant for us, would it?" Grunberg said, with a faint smile. "People in dreams are always secure until the dreamer wakes up," Miller retorted. "So you're dreaming me," Grunberg laughed tolerantly. "I suppose I should thank you." "I'm not here because I especially like you. I'm here because I can't stand Fleming and the whole History Agency." Grunberg pondered. "This Fleming. Are you aware of thinking about him before you went out looking for the newspaper?" Miller got to his feet and paced around the luxurious office, between the leather-covered chairs and the huge mahogany desk. "I want to face this thing. I'm in an exhibit. An artificial replica of the past. Fleming said something like this would happen to me." "Sit down, Mr. Miller," Grunberg said, in a gentle but commanding voice. When Miller had taken his chair again, Grunberg continued, "I understand what you say. You have a general feeling that everything around you is unreal. A sort of stage." "An exhibit." "Yes, an exhibit in a museum." "In the N'York History Agency. Level R, the Twentieth Century level." "And in addition to this general feeling of -- insubstantiality, there are specific projected memories of persons and places beyond this world. Another realm in which this one is contained. Perhaps I should say, the reality within which this is only a sort of shadow world." "This world doesn't look shadowy to me." Miller struck the leather arm of the chair savagely. "This world is completely real. That's what's wrong. I came in to investigate the noises and now I can't get back out. Good God, do I have to wander around this replica the rest of my life?" "You know, of course, that your feeling is common to most of mankind. Especially during periods of great tension. Where -- by the way -- was the newspaper? Did you find it?" "As far as I'm concerned -- " "Is that a source of irritation with you? I see you react strongly to a mention of the newspaper." Miller shook his head wearily. "Forget it." "Yes, a trifle. The paperboy carelessly throws the newspaper in the bushes, not on the porch. It makes you angry. It happens again and again. Early in the day, just as you're starting to work. It seems to symbolize in a small way the whole petty frustrations and defeats of your job. Your whole life." "Personally, I don't give a damn about the newspaper." Miller examined his wristwatch. "I'm going -- it's almost noon. Old man Davidson will be yelling his head off if I'm not at the office by -- " He broke off. "There it is again." "There what is?" "All this!" Miller gestured impatiently out the window. "This whole place. This damn world. This exhibition " "I have a thought," Doctor Grunberg said slowly. "I'll put it to you for what it's worth. Feel free to reject it if it doesn't fit." He raised his shrewd, professional eyes. "Ever see kids playing with rocketships?" "Lord," Miller said wretchedly. "I've seen commercial rocket freighters hauling cargo between Earth and Jupiter, landing at LaGuardia Spaceport." Grunberg smiled slightly. "Follow me through on this. A question. Is it job tension?" "What do you mean?" "It would be nice," Grunberg said blandly, "to live in the world of tomorrow. With robots and rocket ships to do all the work. You could just sit back and take it easy. No worries, no cares. No frustrations." "My position in the History Agency has plenty of cares and frustrations." Miller rose abruptly. "Look, Grunberg. Either this is an exhibit on R level of the History Agency, or I'm a middle-class businessman with an escape fantasy. Right now I can't decide which. One minute I think this is real, and the next minute -- " "We can decide easily," Grunberg said. "How?" "You were looking for the newspaper. Down the path, onto the lawn. Where did it happen ? Was it on the path? On the porch? Try to remember." "I don't have to try. I was still on the sidewalk. I had just jumped over the rail past the safety screens." "On the sidewalk. Then go back there. Find the exact place." "Why?" "So you can prove to yourself there's nothing on the other side." Miller took a deep, slow breath. "Suppose there is?" "There can't be. You said yourself: only one of the worlds can be real. This world is real -- " Grunberg thumped his massive mahogany desk. "Ergo, you won't find anything on the other side." "Yes," Miller said, after a moment's silence. A peculiar expression cut across his face and stayed there. "You've found the mistake." "What mistake?" Grunberg was puzzled. "What -- " Miller moved toward the door of the office. "I'm beginning to get it. I've been putting up a false question. Trying to decide which world is real." He grinned humorlessly back at Doctor Grunberg. "They're both real, of course." back to the house. No one was home. The boys were in school and Marjorie had gone downtown to shop. He waited indoors until he was sure nobody was watching along the street, and then started down the path to the sidewalk. He found the spot without any trouble. There was a faint shimmer in the air, a weak place just at the edge of the parking strip. Through it he could see faint shapes. He was right. There is was -- complete and real. As real as the sidewalk under him. A long metallic bar was cut off by the edges of the circle. He recognized it: the safety railing he had leaped over to enter the exhibit. Beyond it was the safety screen system. Turned off, of course. And beyond that, the rest of the level and the far walls of the History building. He took a cautious step into the weak haze. It shimmered around him, misty and oblique. The shapes beyond became clearer. A moving figure in a dark blue robe. Some curious person examining the exhibits. The figure moved on and was lost. He could see his own work desk, now. His tape scanner and heaps of study spools. Beside the desk was his briefcase, exactly where he had expected it. While he was considering stepping over the railing to get the briefcase, Fleming appeared. Some inner instinct made Miller step back through the weak spot, as Fleming approached. Maybe it was the expression on Fleming's face. In any case, Miller was back and standing firmly on the concrete sidewalk, when Fleming halted just beyond the juncture, face red, lips twisting with indignation. "Miiler," he said thickly. "Gome out of there." Miller laughed. "Be a good fellow, Fleming. Toss me my briefcase. It's that strange looking thing over by the desk. I showed it to you -- remember?" "Stop playing games and listen to me!" Fleming snapped. "This is serious. Carnap knows. I had to inform him." "Good for you. The loyal bureaucrat." Miller bent over to light his pipe. He inhaled and puffed a great cloud of gray tobacco smoke through the weak spot, out into the R level. Fleming coughed and retreated. "What's that stuff?" he demanded. "Tobacco. One of the things they have around here. Very common substance in the twentieth century. You wouldn't know about that -- your period is the second century, BG. The Hellenistic world. I don't know how well you'd like that. They didn't have very good plumbing back there. Life expectancy was damn short." "What are you talking about?" "In comparison, the life expectancy of my research period is quite high. And you should see the bathroom I've got. Yellow tile. And a shower. We don't have anything like that at the Agency leisurequarters." Fleming grunted sourly. "In other words, you're going to stay in there." "It's a pleasant place," Miller said easily. "Of course, my position is better than average. Let me describe it for you. I have an attractive wife: marriage is permitted, even sanctioned in this era. I have two fine kids -- both boys -- who are going up to Russian River this weekend. They live with me and my wife -- we have complete custody of them. The State has no power of that, yet. I have a brand new Buick -- " "Illusions," Fleming spat. "Psychotic delusions." "Are you sure?" "You damn fool! I always knew you were too ego-recessive to face reality. You and your anachronistic retreats. Sometimes I'm ashamed I'm a theoretician. I wish I had gone into engineering." Fleming's lip twitched. "You're insane, you know. You're standing in the middle of an artificial exhibit, which is owned by the History Agency, a bundle of plastic and wire and struts. A replica of a past age. An imitation. And you'd rather be there than in the real world." "Strange," Miller said thoughtfully. "Seems to me I've heard the same thing very recently. You don't know a Doctor Grunberg, do you? A psychiatrist." Without formality, Director Carnap arrived with his company of assistants and experts. Fleming quickly retreated. Miller found himself facing one of the most powerful figures of the twenty-second century. He grinned and held out his hand. "You insane imbecile," Carnap rumbled. "Get out of there before we drag you out. If we have to do that, you're through. You know what they do with advanced psychotics. It'll be euthanasia for you. I'll give you one last chance to come out of that fake exhibit -- " "Sorry," Miller said. "It's not an exhibit." Carnap's heavy face registered sudden surprise. For a brief instant his massive poise vanished. "You still try to maintain -- " "This is a time gate' Miller said quietly. "You can't get me out, Carnap. You can't reach me. I'm in the past, two hundred years back. I've crossed back to a previous existencecoordinate. I found a bridge and escaped from your continuum to this. And there's nothing you can do about it." together in a quick technical conference. Miller waited patiently. He had plenty of time ; he had decided not to show up at the office until Monday. After awhile Carnap approached the juncture again, being careful not to step over the safety railing. "An interesting theory, Miller. That's the strange part about psychotics. They rationalize their delusions into a logical system. A priori, your concept stands up well. It's internally consistent. Only -- " "Only what?" "Only it doesn't happen to be true." Carnap had regained his confidence; he seemed to be enjoying the interchange. "You think you're really back in the past. Yes, this exhibit is extremely accurate. Your work has always been good. The authenticity of detail is unequalled by any of the other exhibits." "I tried to do my work well," Miller murmured. "You wore archaic clothing and affected archaic speech-mannerisms. You did everything possible to throw yourself back. You devoted yourself to your work." Carnap tapped the safety railing with his fingernail. "It would be a shame, Miller. A terrible shame to demolish such an authentic replica." There was silence. "I see your point," Miller said, after a time. "I agree with you, certainly. I've been very proud of my work -- I'd hate to see it all torn down. But that really won't do you any good. All you'll succeed in doing is closing the time gate." "You're sure?" "Of course. The exhibit is only a bridge, a link with the past. I passed through the exhibit, but I'm not there now. I'm beyond the exhibit." He grinned tightly. "Your demolition can't reach me. But seal me off, if you want. I don't think I'll be wanting to come back." "I wish you could see this side, Carnap. It's a nice place here. Freedom, opportunity. Limited government, responsible to the people. If you don't like a job here you can quit. There's no euthanasia, here. Come on over. I'll introduce you to my wife." "We'll get you," Carnap said. "And all your psychotic figments along with you." "I doubt if any of my 'psychotic figments' are worried. Grunberg wasn't. I don't think Marjorie is -- " "We've already begun demolition preparations," Carnap said calmly. "We'll do it piece by piece, not all at once. So you may have the opportunity to appreciate the scientific and -- artistic way we take your imaginary world and people apart." "You're wasting your time," Miller said. He turned and walked off, down the sidewalk, to the gravel path and up onto the front porch of his house. In the living room he threw himself down in the easy chair and snapped on the television set. Then he went to the kitchen and got a can of ice cold beer from the refrigerator. He carried it happily back into the safe, comfortable living room. As he was seating himself in front of the television set he noticed something rolled up on the low coffee table. He grinned wryly. It was the morning newspaper, which he had looked so hard for. Marjorie had brought it in with the milk, as usual. And of course forgotten to tell him. He yawned contentedly and reached over to pick it up. Languidly, confidently, he unfolded it -- and read the big black headlines. wvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvmvvvvvvvmvvvvvvvvmvvvvvvvuvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvj to manage eight out of the # questions below. If you are a fan, or rabid reader, your score should be eleven right! Check your answers with those on page #. #. Which planet requires # years to make one circuit of the sun? #. A piezometer is used to measure the compressibility of #. What are the nuclei of heavy hydrogen called? #. In which constellation are the stars that form the Big Dipper? #. That part of the science of biology which deals with the relation between organisms and their environment is called #. Which is the fourth brightest star in the heavens? #. A Metonic cycle is a period of years, after which time the new moon and the full moon fall on the same days of the year again. #. In which constellation is the planet Pluto? #. Ylem is the word used to describe matter. #. Which is the brightest star in Bootes? I I . The Doppler shift is used by astrophysicists to estimate the of luminous bodies. #. The two principal types of galaxies are spiral and #. Which one is not a star: Procyon, Mizar, Spica, Alioth, Cetus, Regulus. That It landed on Earth was perhaps destiny. That Les and Marian were making their trip in August was perhaps coincidence. That Ketter kept a zoo was perhaps unfortunate. However, It was hungry -- and Les and Marian were making their trip and Ketter kept a zoo... A horror story you'll read with shivers down your spine! By Richard Matheson Illustrated by Virgil Finlay August #th that year, a ball of eerie light descended on the desert and people twenty miles away stared at the phosphorescent trail it left on the twilight sky. "A meteor," they said but that was because they had to say something. In darkness hovering. A soundless shell of metals glistening pale -- held aloft by threads of anti-gravity . Below , the planet, shrouded with night, turning from the moon. On its black-swept face, an animal staring up with bright-eyed panic at the dully phosphorescent globe suspended overhead. A twitch of muscle. The hard earth drums delicately beneath fleeing pawbeats. Silence again, wind-soughed and lone. Hours. Black hours passing into grey, then mottled pink. Sunlight sprays across the metal globe. It shimmers with unearthly light. It was like putting his hand into a scorching oven. "Oh my God, it's hot," he said, grimacing, jerking back his hand and closing it once more, gingerly, over the sweat-stained steering wheel. "It's your imagination." Marian lay slumped against the warm, plastic-covered seat. A mile behind, she'd stuck her sandaled feet out the window. Her eyes were closed, breath fell in fitful gasps from her drying lips. Across her face, the hot wind fanned bluntly, ruffling the short blond hair. "It's not hot," she said, squirming uncomfortably, tugging at the narrow belt on her shorts. "It's cool. As a cucumber." "Ha," Les grunted. He leaned forward a little and clenched his teeth at the feel of his sport shirt clinging damply to his back. "What a month for driving," he growled. They'd left Los Angeles three days before on their way to visit Marian's family in New York. The weather had been equatorial from the start, three days of blazing sun that had drained them of energy. The schedule they were attempting to maintain made things even worse. On paper, four hundred miles a day didn't seem like much. Converted into practical traveling it was brutalizing. Traveling over dirt cutoffs that sent up spinning, choking dust clouds. Traveling over rut-pocked stretches of highway under repair; afraid to hit more than twenty miles an hour on them for fear of snapping an axle or shaking their brains loose. Worst of all, traveling up twenty to thirty mile grades that sent the radiator into boiling frenzies every half hour or so. Then sitting for long, sweltering minutes, waiting for the motor to cool off, pouring in fresh water from the water bag, sitting and waiting in the middle of an oven. "I'm done on one side," Les said, breathlessly. "Turn me." "And ha to you," Marian sotto voiced. "Any water left?" Marian reached down her left hand and tugged off the heavy top of the portable ice box. Feeling inside its coolish interior, she pulled up the thermos bottle. She shook it. "Empty," she said, shaking her head. "As my head " he finished in a disgusted voice, "For ever letting you talk me into driving to New York in August." "Now, now," she said, her cajoling a trifle worn, "Don't get heated up. "Damn!" he snapped irritably, "When is this damn cutoff going to get back to the damn highway?" "Damn," she muttered lightly, "Damn damn." He said no more. His hands gripped tighter on the wheel. Hwy. # , alt . rte. -- they'd been on the damn thing for hours now, shunted aside by a section of the main highway undergoing repair. For that matter, he wasn't even sure they were on the alternate route. There had been five crossroads in the past two hours. In speeding along to get out of the desert, he hadn't looked too carefully at the crossroad signs. "Honey, there's a station," Marian said, "let's see if we can get some water." "And some gas," he added, glancing at the gauge, "And some instructions on how to get back to the highway." "The damn highway," she said. A faint smile tugged at Les's mouth corners as he pulled the Ford off the road and braked up beside the two paint-chipped pumps that stood before an old sagging shack. "This is a hot looking spot," he said dispassionately. "Ripe for development."  "For the right party." Marian's eyes closed again. She drew in a heavy breath through her open mouth. No one came out of the shack. "Oh, don't tell me it's deserted" Les said disgustedly, looking around. Marian drew down her long legs. "Isn't there anybody here?" she asked, opening her eyes. "Doesn't look like it." Les pushed open the door and slid out. As he stood, an involuntary grunt twitched his body and his knees almost buckled. It felt as if someone had dropped a mountain of heat on his head. c tGod!" He blinked away the waves of blackness lapping at his ankles. "What is it?" "This heat " He stepped between the two rusty handled pumps and crunched over the hot, flaky ground for the doorway of the shack. "And we're not even a third of the way," he muttered grimly to himself. Behind him, he heard the car door slam on Marian's side and her loose sandals flopping on the ground. Dimness gave the illusion of coolness only for a second. Then the muggy, sodden air in the shack pressed down on Les and he hissed in displeasure. There was no one in the shack. He looked around its small confines at the uneven-legged table with the scarred surface, the backless chair, the cobwebbed coke machine, the price lists and calendars on the wall, the threadbare shade on the small window, drawn down to the sill, shafts of burnished light impaling the many rents. The wooden floor creaked as he stepped back out into the heavy sunlight. "No one?" Marian asked and he shook his head. They looked at each other without expression a moment and she patted at her forehead with a damp handkerchief. "Well, onward," she said wryly. That was when they heard the car come rattling down the rutted lane that led off the road into the desert. They walked to the edge of the shack and watched the old, home-made tow truck make its wobbling, noisy approach toward the station. Far back from the road was the low form of the house it had come from. "To the rescue," Marian said. "I hope he has water." As the truck groaned to a halt beside the shack, they could see the heavily-tanned face of the man behind the wheel. He was somewhere in his thirties, a dour looking individual in a tee shirt and patched and faded blue overalls. Lank hair protruded from beneath the brim of his grease-stained stetson. It wasn't a smile he gave them as he slid out of the truck. It was more like a reflex twitching of his lean, humorless mouth. He moved up to them with jerky boot strides, his dark eyes moving from one to the other of them. "You want gas?" he asked Les in a hard, thick-throated voice. "Please." The man looked at Les a moment as if he didn't understand. Then he grunted and headed for the Ford, reaching into his back overall pocket for the pump key. As he walked past the front bumper, he glanced down at the license plate. He stood looking dumbly at the tank cap for a moment, his calloused fingers trying vainly to unscrew it. "It locks," Les told him, walking over hurriedly with the keys. The man took them without a word and unlocked the cap. He put the cap on top of the trunk door. "You want ethyl?" he asked, glancing up, his eyes shadowed by the wide hat brim. "Please," Les told him. "How much?" "You can fill it." The hood was burning hot. Les jerked back his fingers with a gasp. He took out his handkerchief, wrapped it around his hand and pulled up the hood. When he unscrewed the radiator cap, boiling water frothed out and splashed down smoking onto the parched ground. "Oh, fine," he muttered to himself. The water from the hose was almost as hot. Marian came over and put one finger in the slow gush as Les held it over the radiator. "Oh... gee," she said in disappointment. She looked over at the overalled man. "Have you got any cool water?" she asked. The man kept his head down, his mouth pressed into a thin, drooping line. She asked again, without result. "The hair-triggered Arizonian," she muttered to Les as she started back toward the man. "I beg your pardon," she said. The man jerked up his head, startled, the pupils of his dark eyes flaring. "Ma'm?" he said quickly. "Can we get some cool drinking water?" The man's rough-skinned throat moved once. "Not here, ma'm," he said, "but... His voice broke off and he looked at her blankly. "You... you're from California, ain't you?" he said. "That's right." "Goin'... ' far?" "New York," she said impatiently. "But what about -- " The man's bleached eyebrows moved together. "New York," he repeated. "Pretty far." "What about the water?" Marian asked him. "Well," the man said, his lips twitching into the outline of a smile, "I ain't got none here but if you want to drive back to the house, my wife'll get you some." "Oh." Marian shrugged slightly. "All. right." "You can look at my zoo while my wife gets the water," the man offered, then crouched down quickly beside the fender to listen and "We have to no back to his house c ) to get water," Marian told Les as he unscrewed one of the battery caps. "Oh? Okay." The man turned off the pump and replaced the cap. "New York, haah?" he said, looking at them. Marian smiled politely and nodded. After Les had pushed the hood back down, they got into the car to follow the man's truck back to the house. "He has a zoo," Marian said, expressionlessly. "How nice," Les said as he let up the clutch and the car rolled down off the slight rise on which the gas pumps stood. "They make me mad," Marian said. They'd seen dozens of the zoos since they'd left Los Angeles. They were usually located beside gas stations -- designed to lure extra customers. Invariably, they were pitiful collections -- barren little cages in which gaunt foxes cringed, staring out with sick, glazed eyes, rattlesnakes coiled lethargically, maybe a feather-molted eagle glowered from a dark cage corner. And, usually, in tjie middle of the so-called zoo would be a chained-up wolf or coyote ; a straggly woe-be-gone creature who paced constantly in a circle whose radius was the length of the chain; who never looked at the people but stared straight ahead with red-rimmed eyes, pacing endlessly on thin stalks of legs. "I hate them," Marian said bitterly. "I know, baby," Les said. "If we didn't need water, I'd never go back to his damned old house." Les smiled. "Okay ma," he said quietly, trying to avoid the holes in the lane. "Oh . # He snapped two fingers. "I forgot to ask him how to get back to the highway." "Ask him when we get to his house," she said. The house was faded brown, a two-story wooden structure that looked a hundred years old. Behind it stood a row of low, squarish huts. "The zoo," Les said, "Lions 'n tigers 'n everything." "Nuts," she said. He pulled up in front of the quiet house and saw the man in the stetson slide off the dusty seat of his truck and jump down off the running board. "Get you the water," he said quickly and started for the house. He stopped a moment and looked back. "Zoo's in the back," he said, gesturing with his head. They watched him move up the steps of the old house. Then Les stretched and blinked at the glaring sunlight. "Shall we look at the zoo ? # he asked, trying not to smile. "No." "Oh, come on." "No, I don't want to see that # "I'm going to take a look." "Well... all right," she said, "but it's going to make me mad." They walked around the edge of the house and moved along its side in the shade. "Oh, does that feel good," Marian said. "Hey, he forgot to ask for his money." "He will," she said. They approached the first cage and looked into the dim interior through the two-foot-square window that was barred with thick doweling. "Empty," Les said. "Good." "Some zoo." They walked slowly toward the next cage. "Look how small they are," Marian said unhappily, "How would he like to be cooped up in one of them?" She stopped walking. "No, I'm not going to look," she said angrily, "I don't want to see how the poor things are suffering." "I'll just take a look," he said. "You're a fiend." She heard him chuckle as she stood watching him walk up to the second of the cages. He looked in. "Marian!" His cry made her body twitch. "What is it?" she asked, running to him anxiously. "Look" He stared with shocked eyes into the cage. Her whisper trembled. "Oh my God" There was a man in the cage. believing eyes, unconscious of the large drops of sweat trickling across her brow and down her temples. The man was lying on the floor, sprawled like a broken doll across a dirty army blanket. His eyes were open but the man saw nothing. His pupils were dilated, he looked doped. His grimy hands rested limply on the thinly-strawed floor, motionless twists of flesh and bone. His mouth hung open like a yellowtoothed wound, edged with dry, cracking lips. When Les turned, he saw that Marian was already looking at him, her face blank, the skin drawn tautly over her paling cheeks. "What is this?" she asked in a faint tremor of voice. "I don't know." He glanced once more into the cage as if he already doubted what he'd seen. Then he was looking at Marian again. "I don't know," he repeated, feeling the heartbeats throb heavily in his chest. Another moment they looked at each other, their eyes stark with uncomprehending shock. "What are we going to do?" Marian asked, almost whispering the words. Les swallowed the hard lump in his throat. He looked into the cage again. "Hello" he heard himself say, "Can you -- " He broke off abruptly, throat moving again. The man was comatose. "Les, what if -- " He looked at her. And, suddenly, his scalp was crawling because Marian was looking in wordless apprehension at the next cage. His running footsteps thudded over the dry earth, raising the dust. "No" he murmured, looking into the next cage. He felt himself shudder uncontrollably as Marian ran up to him. "Oh my God, this is hideous " she cried, staring with sick fright at the second caged man. They both started as the man looked up at them with glazed, lifeless eyes. For a moment, his slack body lurched up a few inches and his dry lips fluttered as though he were trying to speak. A thread of saliva ran from one corner of his mouth and dribbled down across his beard-blackened chin. For a moment his sweaty, dirt-lined face was a mask of impotent entreaty. Then his head rolled to one side and his eyes rolled back. Marian backed away from the cage, shaking hand pressed to her cheek. "The man's insane " she muttered and looked around abruptly at the silent house. Then Les had turned too and both of them were suddenly aware of the man in the house who had told them to go and look at his zoo. "Les, what are we going to do?" Marian's voice shook with rising hysteria. Les felt numb, devoured by the impact of what they'd seen. For a long moment he could only stand shivering and stare at his wife, feeling immersed in some fantastic dream. Then his lips jammed together and the heat seemed to flood over him. , "Let's get out of here," he snapped and grabbed her hand. The only sound was their harsh panting and the quick slap of Marian's sandals on the hard ground. The air throbbed with intense heat, smothering their breath, making perspiration break out heavily across their faces and bodies. "Faster," Les gasped, tugging at her hand. Then, as they turned the edge of the house, they both recoiled with a violent contracting of muscles. "No!" Marian's cry contorted her face into a twisted mask of terror. The man stood between them and their car, a long double-barreled shotgun leveled at them. Les didn't know why the idea flooded through his brain. But, suddenly, he realized that no one knew where he and Marian were, no one could even know where to begin searching for them. In rising panic, he thought of the man asking them where they were going, he thought of the man looking down at their California license plate. And he heard the man, the hard, emotionless voice of the man. "Now go on back," the man said, "to the zoo" in one of the cages, Merv Ketter walked slowly back to the house, the heavy shotgun pulling down his right arm. He'd felt no pleasure in the act, only a draining relief that had, for a moment, loosened the tightness in his body. But, already, the tightness was returning. It never went away for more than the few minutes it took him to trap another person and cage him. If anything, the tightness was worse now. This was the first time he'd ever put a woman in one of his cages. The knowledge twisted a cold knot of despair in his chest. A woman -- he'd put a woman in his cage. His chest shuddered with harsh breath as he ascended the rickety steps of the back porch. Then, as the screen door slapped shut behind him, his long mouth tightened. Well, what was he supposed to do? He slammed the shotgun down on the yellow oil-clothed surface of the kitchen table, another forced breath wracking his chest. What else could I do -- he argued with himself. His boots clacked sharply across the worn linoleum as he walked to the quiet, sun-lanced livingroom. Dust rose from the old arm chair as he dropped down heavily, spiritlessly. What was he supposed to do? He'd had no choice. For the thousandth time, he looked down at his left forearm, at the slight reddish bulge just under the elbow joint. Inside his flesh, the tiny metal cone was still humming delicately. He knew it without listening. It never stopped. He slumped back exhaustedly with a groan and lay his head on the high back of the chair. His eyes stared dully across the room, through the long slanting bar of sunlight quivering with dust motes. At the mantelpiece. The Mauser rifle -- he stared at it. The Luger, the bazooka shell, the hand grenade, all of them still active. Vaguely, through his tormented brain, curled the idea of putting the Luger to his temple, holding the Mauser against his side, even of pulling out the pin and holding the grenade against his stomach. War hero . The phrase scraped cruelly at his mind. It had long lost its meaning, its comfort. Once, it had meant something to him to be a medaled warrior, ribboned, lauded, admired. Then Elsie had died, then the battles and the pride were gone. He was alone in the desert with his trophies and with nothing else. And then one day he'd gone into that desert to hunt. His eyes shut, his leathery throat moved convulsively. What was the use of thinking, of regretting? The will to live was still in him. Maybe it was a stupid, a pointless will but it was there just the same; he couldn't rid himself of it. Not after two men were gone, not after five, no, not even after seven men were gone. The dirt-filled nails dug remorselessly into his palms until they broke the skin. But a woman, a woman. The thought knifed at him. He'd never planned on caging a woman. One tight fist drove down in futile rage on his leg. He couldn't help it. Sure, he'd seen the California plate. But he wasn't going to do it. Then the woman had asked for water and he suddenly had known that he had no choice, he had to do it. There were only two men left. And he'd found out that the couple were going to New York and the tension had come and gone, loosened and tightened in a spastic rhythm as he knew, in his very flesh, that he was going to tell them to come and look at his zoo. I should have given them an injection, he thought. They might start screaming. It didn't matter about the man, he was used to men screaming. But a woman... Merv Ketter opened his eyes and stared with hopeless eyes at the mantelpiece, at the picture of his dead wife, at the weapons which had been his glory and now were meaningless -- steel and wood without worth, without substance. Hero . The word made his stomach turn. The glutinous pulsing slowed , paused a moment's fraction, then with its hissing, spumous sound. A flaccid wave of agitation rippled down along the rows of muscle coils . The being stirred . It was time . Thought. The shapeless , gauze airbubble coalesced; surrounded. The being moved, an undulation, a gelatinous worming within the shimmering bubble. A bumping, a slithering, a rocking flow of viscous tissues. Thought again -- a wave directing. The hiss of entering atmosphere, the soundless swinging of metal. Open. Shutting with a click. Sunset's blood edged the horizon. A slow and noiseless sinking in the air, a colorless balloon filled with something formless, something alive. Earth, cooling. The being touched it, settled. It moved across the ground and every living thing fled its scouring approach. In its ropy wake, the ground was left a green and yellow iridescence. "Look out." Marian's sudden whisper almost made him drop the nail file. He jerked back his hand, his sweatgrimed cheek twitching and drew back quickly into the shadows. The sun was almost down. "Is he coming this way?" Marian asked, her voice husky with dryness. "I don't know." He stood tensely, watching the overalled man approach, hearing the fast crunch of his boot heels on the baked ground. He tried to swallow but all the moisture in him had been blotted up by the afternoon heat and only a futile clicking sounded in his throat. He was thinking about the man seeing the deeply-filed slit in the window bar. The man in the stetson walked quickly, his face blank and hard, his hands swinging in tense little arcs at his sides. "What's he going to do?" Marian's voice rasped nervously, her physical discomfort forgotten in the sudden return of fear. Les only shook his head. All afternoon he'd been asking himself the same question. After they'd been locked up, after the man had gone back to his house, during the first terrifying minutes and for the rest of the time when Marian had found the nail file in the pocket of her shorts and shapeless panic had gained the form of hoping for escape. All during that time the question had plagued him endlessly. What was the man going to do with them? But it wasn't their cage the man was headed for. A loosening of relief made them both go slack. The man hadn't even looked toward the cage they were in. He seemed to avoid looking toward it. Then the man had passed out of their sight and they heard the sound of him unlocking one of the cages. The squeaking rasp of the rusty door hinges made Les's stomach muscles draw taut. The man appeared again. Marian caught her breath. They both stared at the unconscious man being dragged across the ground, his heels raking narrow gouges in the dust. After a few feet, the man let go of the limp arms and the body fell with a heavy thud. The man in the overalls looked behind him then, his head jerking around suddenly. They saw his throat move with a convulsive swallow. The man's eyes moved quickly, looking in all directions. "What's he looking for?" Marian asked in a shaking whisper. "Marian, I don't know # "He's leaving him there!" She almost whimpered the word. Their eyes filled with confused fear, they watched the overalled man move for the house again, his long legs pumping rapidly, his head moving jerkily as he looked from side to side. Dear God, what is he looking for? -- Les thought in rising dread. The man suddenly twitched in mid-stride and clutched at his left arm. Then, abruptly, he broke into a frightened run and leaped up the porch steps two at a time. The screen door slapped shut behind him with a loud report and then everything was deadly still. A sob caught in Marian's throat. "I'm afraid " she said in a thin, shuddering voice. He was afraid too; he didn't know of what but he was terribly up his back and rippled coldly on his neck. He kept staring at the body of the man sprawled on the ground, at the still, white face looking up sightlessly at the darkening sky. He jolted once as, across the yard, he heard the back door of the house being slammed shut and locked. of it that pressed down on them like lead. The man slumped motionless on the ground. Their breaths quick, labored. Their lips trembling, their eyes fastened almost hypnotically on the man. Marian drew up one fist and dug her teeth into the knuckles. Sunlight rimmed the horizon with a scarlet ribbon. Soundlessness. Heavy soundlessness. Soundlessness. Sound. Their breath stopped. They stood there, mouths open, ears straining at the sound they'd never heard before. Their bodies went rigid as they listened to -- A bumping , a slithering , a rocking fl ow f -- "Oh, God! # ' Her voice was a gasping of breathless horror as she spun away, shaking hands flung over her eyes. It was getting dark and he couldn't be sure of what he saw. He stood paralyzed and numb in the fetid air of the cage, staring with blood-drained face at the thing that moved across the ground toward the man's body; the thing that had shape yet not shape, that crept like a current of shimmering jellies. A terrified gagging filled his throat. He tried to move bajk but he couldn't. He didn't want to see. He didn't want to hear the hideous gurgling sound like water being sucked into a great drain, the turbid bubbling that was like vats of boiling tallow. No, his mind kept repeating, unable to accept, no, no, no, no! Then the scream made them both jerk like boneless things and drove Marian against one of the cage walls, shaking with nauseous shock. And the man was gone from the earth. Les stared at the place where he had been, stared at the luminous mass that pulsated there like a great mound of balloon-encased plankton undulating palely in their fluids. He stared at it until the man had been completely eaten. Then he turned away on deadened legs and stumbled to Marian's side. Her shaking fingers clutched like talons at his back and he felt her tearstreaked, twisted face press into his shoulder. Unfeelingly, he slid his arms around her, his face stiff with spent horror. Vaguely, through the body-clutching horror, he felt the need to comfort her, to ease her fright. But he couldn't. He felt as if a pair of invisible claws had reached into his chest and ripped out all his insides. There wasn't anything left, just a cold, frost-edged hollow in him. And, in the hollow, a knife jabbing its razor tip each time he realized again why they were there. When the scream came, Merv slammed both hands across his ears so hard it made his head ache. He couldn't seem to cut off the sound anymore. Doors wouldn't shut tightly enough, windows wouldn't seal away the world, walls were to porous -- the screams always reached him. Maybe it was because they were really in his mind where there were no doors to lock, no windows to shut and close away the screaming of terror. Yes, maybe they were in his mind. It would explain why he still heard them in his sleep. And, when it was over and Merv knew that the thing had gone, he trudged slowly into the kitchen and opened the door. Then, like a robot driven by remorseless gears, he went to the calendar and circled the date. Sunday, August #nd. The eighth man. The pencil dropped from his slack fingers and rolled across the linoleum. Sixteen days -- one man each two days for sixteen days. The mathematics of it were simple. The truth was not. He paced the living room, passing in and out of the lamplight aura which cast a buttery glow across his exhausted features, then melted away as he moved into shadow again. Sixteen days. It seemed like sixteen years since he'd gone out into the desert to hunt for jackrabbits. Had it only been sixteen days ago? Once again he saw the scene within his mind; it never left. Him scuffing across late afternoon sands, shotgun cradled against his hip, head slowly turning, eyes searching beneath the brim of his hat. Then, moving over the crest of a scrub-grown dune, stopping with a gasp, his eyes staring up at the globe which shimmered like a light immersed in water. His heartbeat jolting, every muscle tensing abruptly at the sight. Approaching then, standing almost below the luminescent sphere that caught the lowering sun rays redly. A gasp tearing backhis lips at the circular cavity appearing on the surface of the globe. And out of the cavity floating -- He'd spun then and run, his breath whistling as he scrambled frantically up the rise again, his boot heels gouging at the sand. Topping the rise, he'd started to run in long, panic-driven strides, the gun held tautly in his right hand, banging against his leg. Then the sound overhead -- like the noise of gas escaping. Wildeyed, he'd looked up over his shoulder. A terrified cry had wrenched his face into a mask of horror. Ten feet over his head, the bulbous glow floated. Merv lunged forward, his legs rising high as he fled. A fetid heat blew across his back. He looked up again with terrified eyes to see the thing descending on him. Seven feet above him -- six -- five -- Merv Ketter skidded to his knees, twisted around, jerked up the shotgun. The silence of the desert was shattered by the blast. A gagging scream ripped from his throat as shot sprayed off the lucent bubble like pebbles off a rubber ball. He felt some of it burrow into his shoulder and arm as he flung over to one side, the gun falling from his nerveless grip. Four feet -- three -- the heat surrounded him, the choking odor made the air swim before his eyes. His arms flung up. "NO!" Once he had jumped into a water hole without looking and been mired on the shallow bottom by hot slime. It felt like that now, only this time the ooze was jumping onto him. His screams were lost in the crawling sheath of gasses and his flailing limbs caught fast in glutinous tissue. Around his terrorfrozen eyes, he saw an agitating gelatine filled with gyrating spangles. Horror pressed at his skull, he felt death sucking at his life. But he didn't die. He inhaled and there was air even though the air was grumous with a stomach-wrenching stench. His lungs labored, he gagged as he breathed. Then something moved in his brain. He tried to twist and tried to scream but he couldn't. It felt like vipers threading through his brain, gnawing with poisoned teeth on tissues of his thought. The serpents coiled and tightened. I could kill yotl now -- the words scalded like acid. The muscle cords beneath his face tensed but even they couldn't move in the putrescent glue. And then more words had formed and were burning, were branding themselves indelibly into his mind. You will get me food. He was still shuddering now, standing before the calendar, staring at the penciled circles. What else could he have done? The question pleaded like a groveling suppliant. The being had picked his mind clean. It knew about his home, his station, his wife, his past. It told him what to do, it left no choice. He had to do it. Would anyone have let themselves die like that if they had an alternative ; would anyone ? Wouldn't anyone have promised the world itself to be freed of that horror? Grim-faced, trembling, he went up the stairs on feeble legs, knowing there would be no sleep, but going anyway. Slumped down on the bed, one shoe off, he stared with lifeless eyes at the floor, at the hooked rug that Elsie had made so long ago. Yes, he'd promised to do what the being had ordered. And the being had sunk the tiny, whirring cone deep into his arm so that he could only escape by cutting open his own flesh and dying. And then the hideous gruel had vomited him onto the desert sands and he had lain there, mute and palsied while the being had raised slowly from the earth. And he had heard in his brain the last warning -- In two days... And it had started, the endless, enervating round of trapping innocent people in order to preserve himself from the fate he knew awaited them. And the horrible thing, the truly horrible thing was that he knew he would do it again. He knew he'd do anything to keep the being away from him. Even if it meant that the woman must -- His mouth tightened. His eyes shut and he sat trembling without control on the bed. What would he do when the couple were gone? What would he do if no one else came to the station? What would he do if the police came checking on the disappearances of eleven people? His shoulders twisted and an anguished sobbing pulsed in his throat. Before he lay down he took a long swallow from the dwindling whiskey bottle. He lay in the darkness, a nerve-scraped coil, waiting, the small pool of heat in his stomach unable to warm the coldness and the emptiness of him. In his arm the cone whirled. J and stood there for a moment, head slumped forward on his chest, panting through clenched teeth, his body heaving with exhausted breath. Every muscle in his back and shoulders and arms ached with throbbing pain. Then he sucked in a rasping breath. "Let's go," he gasped. His arms vibrated as he helped Marian clamber through the window. "Don't make any noise." He could hardly speak he was so tired from the combination of thirst, hunger, heat exhaustion and seemingly endless, muscle-cramped filing. He couldn't get his leg up, he had to go through the rough-edged opening head first, pushing and squirming, feeling splinters jab into his sweat-greased flesh. When he thudded down, the pain of impact ran jaggedly along his extended arms and, for a second, the darkness swam with needles of light. Marian helped him up. "Let's go' he said again, breathlessly and they started to run across the ground toward the front of the house. Abruptly, he grabbed her wrist and jerked her to a halt. "Get those sandals off," he ordered hoarsely. She bent over quickly and unbuckled them. The house was dark as they hurried around the back corner of it and dashed along the side beneath the moon-reflecting windows. Marian winced as her right foot jarred down on a sharp pebble. "Thank God," Les gasped to himself as they reached the front of the house. The car was still there. As they ran toward it, he felt into his back pocket and took out his wallet. His shaking fingers reached into the small change purse and felt the coolness of the extra ignition key. He was sure the other keys wouldn't be in the car. They reached it. "Quick" he gasped and they pulled open the doors and slid in. Les suddenly realized that he was shivering in the chilly night air. He took out the key and fumbled for the ignition slot. They'd left the doors open, planning to close them when the motor started. Les found the slot and slid in the key, then drew in a tense, shuddering breath. If the man had done anything to the motor, they were lost. "Here goes," he murmured and jabbed at the starter button. The motor coughed and turned over once with a groan. Les's throat clicked convulsively, he jerked back his hand and threw an apprehensive look at the dark house. "Oh God, won't it start?" Marian whispered, feeling her legs and arms break out in gooseflesh. "I don't know, I hope it's just cold," he said hurriedly. He caught his breath, then pushed in the button again, pumping at the choke. The motor turned again lethargically. Oh God, he has done something to it! -- the words exploded in Les's mind. He jammed in the button feverishly, his body tense with fear. Why didn't we push it to the main road! -- the new thought came, deepening the lines on his face. "Les!" He felt her hand clutch at his arm and, almost instinctively, his gaze jerked over to the house. A light had flared up at a second story window. "Oh Jesus, start!" he cried in a broken frenzy and pushed at the button with a rigid thumb. The motor coughed into life and a wave of relief covered him. Simultaneously, he and Marian pulled at the doors and slammed them shut while he gunned the engine strongly to get it warm. As he threw the gears into first, the head and trunk of the man appeared in the window. He shouted something but neither '"of them heard of it over the roar of the motor. The car jerked forward and stalled. Les hissed in impotent fury as he jabbed in the button again. The motor caught and he eased up the clutch. The tires bumped over the uneven ground. Upstairs, the man was gone from the window and Marian, her eyes fastened to the house, saw a downstairs light go on. "Hurry!" she begged. The car picked up speed and Les, shoving the gears into second, jerked the car into a tight semicircle. The tires skidded on the hard earth and, as the car headed for the lane, Les threw it into third and jerked at the knob that sent the two headlights splaying out brightly into the darkness. Behind them, something exploded and they both jerked their shoulders forward convulsively as something gouged across the roof with a grating shriek. Les shoved the accelerator to the floor and the car leaped forward, plunging and rocking into the rutted lane. Another shotgun blast tore open the night and half of the back window exploded in a shower of glass splinters. Again, their shoulders twitched violently and Les grunted as a sliver gouged its razor edge across the side of his neck. His hands jerked on the wheel, the car hit a small ditch and almost veered into a bank on the left side of the lane. His fingers tightened convulsively and, with arms braced, he pulled the car back into the center of the lane, crying to Marian, "Where is he?' # Her white face twisted around. "I can't see him!" His throat moved quickly as the car bucked and lurched over the holes, the headlights jerking wildly with each motion. Get to the next town, he thought wildly, tell the sheriff, try and save that other poor devil. His foot pressed down on the pedal as the lane smoothed out. Get to the next town and -- She screamed it. "Look out!" He couldn't stop in time. The hood of the Ford drove splintering into the heavy gate across the lane' and the car jolted to a neckjerking halt. Marian went flailing forward against the dashboard, the side of her head snapping against the windshield. The engine stalled and both headlights smashed out in an instant. Les shoved away from the steering wheel, knocked breathless by the impact. "Honey, quick " he gasped. A choking sob shook in Marian's throat. "My head, my head" Les sat in stunned muteness a moment, staring at her as she twisted her head around in an agony of pain, one hand pressed rigidly to her forehead. Then he shoved open the door at his side and grabbed for her free hand. "Marian, we have to get out of here!" She kept crying helplessly as he almost dragged her from the car and threw his arm around her waist to support her. Behind him, he heard the sound of heavy boots running down the lane and saw, over his shoulder, a bright flashlight eye bobbing as it bore down on them. Marian collapsed at the gate. Les stood there holding her, trembling impotently as the man came running up, a forty-five clutched in his right hand, a flashlight in his left. Les winced at the beam flaring into his eyes. "Back," was all the man said, panting heavily and Les saw the barrel of the gun wave once toward the house. "But my wife is hurt ! # he said, "She hit her head against the windshield. You can't just put her back in a cage ! # "I said get back ! # The man's shout made Les start. "But she can't walk, she's unconscious!" He heard a rasping breath shudder through the man's body and saw that he was stripped to the waist and shivering. "Garry her then," the man said. "But -- " "Shall I blast ya where ya stand!" the man yelled in a frenzied anger. "No. No." Les shook nervously as he lifted up Marian's slack body. The man stepped aside and Les started back up the lane, trying to watch Marian's face and his footing at the same time. "Honey," he whispered, "Marian ? " Her head hung limply over his left forearm, the short blond hair ruffling against her temples and brow as he walked. Tension kept building up in him until he felt like screaming. "Why are you doing this?" he suddenly blurted out over his shoulder. No answer, just the rhythmic slogging of the man's boots over the pocked ground. "How can you do this to anyone?" Les asked brokenly, "Trapping your own kind and giving them to that -- that God only knows what it is!" l Shut up!" But there was more defeat than anger in the man's voice. "Look," Les said suddenly, impulsively, "Let my wife go. Keep me here if you have to but... but let her go. Please ! # The man said nothing and Les bit his lips in frustrated anguish. He looked down at Marian with sick, frightened eyes. "Marian," he said, "Marian . # He shivered violently in the cold night air. The house loomed up bleakly out of the flat darkness of the desert. "For God's sake, don't put her in a cage!" he cried out desperately. "Get back # The man's voice was flat, there was nothing in it, neither promise nor emotion. Les stiffened. If it had been just him, he would have whirled and leaped at the man, he knew it. He the edge of the house again, back toward the cages, toward that thing. But there was Marian. He stepped over the throwndown shotgun on the ground and heard, behind him, the grunt of the man as he bent over and picked it up. I have to get her out of here, he thought, I have to! It happened before he could do anything. He heard the man step up suddenly behind him and then felt a pinprick on his right shoulder. He caught his breath at the sudden sting and turned as quickly as he could, weighed down by Marian's dead limpness. "What are you -- " He couldn't even finish the sentence. It seemed suddenly as if hot, numbing liquors were being hosed through his veins. An immense lassitude covered his limbs and he hardly felt it when the man took Marian from his arms. He stumbled forward a step, the night alive with glittering pinpoints of light. The earth ran like water beneath his feet, his legs turned to rubber. "No" He said it in a lethargic grumble. Then he toppled. And didn't even feel the impact of the ground against his falling body. The belly of the globe was warm . It undulated with a thick and vaporous heat. In the humid dimness, the being rested, its shapeless body quivering with monotonous pulsations of sleep. The being was comfortable, it was content, coiled grotesquely like some cosmic cat before a hearth. For two days. He stirred fitfully and moved his lips as though to speak. But his lips were made of iron. They sagged inertly and he couldn't move them. Only a great forcing of will would raise his leaden eyelids. The cage air fluttered and shimmered with strange convections. His eyes blinked slowly; glazed, uncomprehending eyes. His hands flopped weakly at his sides like dying fish. It was the man in the other cage screaming. The poor devil had come out of his drugged state and was hysterical because he knew. Les's sweat-grimed brow wrinkled slowly, evenly. He could think. His body was like a massive stone, unwieldy and helpless. But, behind its flint, immobile surface, his brain was just as sure. His eyes fell shut. That made it all the more horrible. To know what was coming. To lie there helpless and know what was going to happen to him. He thought he shuddered, but he wasn't sure. That thing, what was it? There was nothing in knowl; edge to construct from, no foundation of rational acceptance to build upon. What he'd seen that night was something beyond all -- What day was it? Where was -- Marian ! It was like rolling a boulder to turn his head. Clicking filled his throat, saliva dribbled unnoticed from the corners of his mouth. Again, he forced his eyes open with a great straining of will. Panic drove knife blades into his brain even though his face changed not at all. Marian wasn't there. She lay, limply drugged, on the bed. He'd laid another cool, wet cloth across her brow, across the welt on her right temple. Now he stood silently, looking down at her. He'd just gotten back from the cages where he'd injected the screaming man again to quiet him. He wondered what was in the drug that being had given him, he wondered what it did to the man. He hoped it made him completely insensible. It was the man's last day. No, it's dumb imagination, he told himself suddenly. She didn't look like Elsie, she didn't look at all like Elsie. It was his mind. He wanted her to look like Elsie, that was what it was. His throat twitched as he swallowed. Stupid. The word slapped dully at his brain. She didn't look like Elsie. For a moment, he let his gaze move once more over the woman's body, at the smooth rise of her bust, the willowy hips, the long, wellformed legs. Marian. That was what the man had called her. Marian. It was a nice name. With an angry twist of his shoulders, he turned away from the bed and strode quickly from the room. What was the matter with him anyway? What did he think he was going to do -- let her go? There had been no sense in taking her into the house the night before last, in putting her in the spare bedroom. No sense in it at all. He couldn't let himself feel sympathy for her, for anyone. If he did, he was lost. That was obvious. As he moved down the steps, he tried to remind himself once more of the horror of being absorbed into that gelatinous mass. He tried to remember the brain-searing terror of it. But, somehow, the memory kept disappearing like wind-blown cloud and he kept thinking instead of the woman. Marian. She did look like Elsie ; the same color hair, the same mouth. No! He'd leave her in the bedroom until the drug wore off. Then he'd put her back in the cage again. It's me or them ! -- he argued furiously with himself. I ain't going to die like that! Not for anyone. He kept arguing with himself all the way down to the station. I must be crazy, he thought, taking her in the house like that, feeling sorry for her. I can't afford it, I can't. She's just two days to me, that's all, just a two-day reprieve from -- The station was empty, silent. Merv braked the truck and got out. His boots crunched over the hot earth as he paced restlessly around the pumps. I can't let her go! he lashed out at himself, his face taut with fury. He shuddered then at the realization that he had been entertaining the thought for two days now. "Why wasn't she a man?" he muttered to himself, fists tight and blood-drained at his sides. He raised his left arm and looked at the reddish lump. Why couldn't he tear it out of his flesh? Why? The car came then. A salesman's car, dusty and hot. As Merv pumped gas in, as he checked the oil and water, he kept glancing from under his hat brim at the hot-faced little man in the linen suit and panama hat. Replace her. Merv wouldn't let the thought out yet he knew it was there. He found himself glancing down at the license plate. Arizona. His face tightened. No. No, he'd always gotten out-of-state cars, it was safer that way. I'll have to let him go, he thought miserably, I'll have to. I can't afford to... But when the little man was reaching into his wallet, Merv felt his hand slide back to his back overall pocket, he felt his fingers tighten over the warm butt of the fortyfive. The little man stared, slackjawed, at the big gun. "What is this?" he asked weakly. Merv didn't tell him. Night brushed its black iced fingers across the moving bubble. Earth flowed beneath its liquid coming. Why was the air so f aint with nourishment , why did the atmosphere press so feebly in? This land, it was a weak, a dying land, its lifeadministering gasses almost spent. Amidst slithering, amidst scouring approach, the being thought of escape. How long now had it been here in this barren place? There was no way of telling for the planet's sun appeared and disappeared with insane rapidity, darkness and light flickering in alternation like the wink of an eye . And, on the ship, the instruments of chronometry were shattered, they were irreparable. There was no context any more, no customed metric to adjust by. The being was lost upon this tenuous void of living rock, unable to do more than forage for its sustenance. Off in the black distance, the dwelling of the planet's animal appeared, grotesquely angular and peaked. It was a stupid animal, this brainless beast incapable of rationality, able only to emit wild squawking cries and flap its tendrils like the night plants of his own world. And its body -- it was too hard with calciumed rigidity, providing scant nutriment, making it necessary for the being to eat twice as often so violent an energy did digestion take. Closer. The clicking grew louder . The animal was there, as usual , lying still upon the ground, its tendrils curled and limp. The being shot out threads of thought and sapped the sluggish juices of thought from the animal. It was a , barbaric place if this was its intelligence. The being heaved closer, swelling and sucking along the wind-swept earth. The animal stirred and deep revulsion quivered in the being's mind. If it were not starving and helpless it could never force itself to absorb this twitching, stiff-ribbed beast. Bubble touched tendril. The being flowed across the animal form and trembled to a stop. Visual cells revealed the animal looking up, distended eyed. Audial cells transferred the wild and strangling noise the dying animal made. Tactile cells absorbed the flimsy agitations of its body. And, in its deepest ce?iter, the being sensed the tireless clicking that emanated from the dark lair where, hidden and shaking, the first animal was -- the animal in whose flaccid tendril was imbedded the location cone. The being ate. And, eating, wondered if there would ever be enough food to keep it alive --  -- for the thousand earth years of its life. He lay slumped across the cage floor, his heartbeat jolting as the man looked in at him. He'd been testing the walls when he heard the slap of the screen door and the sound of the man's boots descending the porch steps. He'd lunged down and rolled over quickly onto his back, trying desperately to remember what position he'd been in while he was still drugged, arranging his hands limply at his sides, drawing up his right leg a little, closing his eyes. The man mustn't know that he was conscious. The man had to open the door without caution. Les forced himself to breathe slowly and evenly even though it made his stomach hurt. The man made no sound as he gazed in. When he opens the lock, Les kept telling himself -- as soon as I hear the door pulled open, I'll jump. His throat moved once as a nervous shudder rippled through him. Gould the man tell he was faking? His muscles tensed, waiting for the sound of the door opening. He had to get away now. There would be no other time. It was coming tonight. Then the sound of the man's boots started away. Abruptly, Les opened his eyes, a look of shocked disbelief contorting his features. The man wasn't going to open the cage! For a long time he lay there, shivering, staring up mutely at the barred window where the man had stood. He felt like crying aloud and beating his fists against the door until they were bruised and bleeding. "No... no" His voice was a lifeless mumble. Finally, he pushed up and got on his knees. Cautiously, he looked over the rim of the window. The man was gone. He crouched back down and went through his pockets again. His wallet -- nothing there to help him. His handkerchief, the stub of pencil, forty-seven cents, his comb. Nothing else. He held the articles in his palms and stared down at them for long moments as if, somehow, they held the answer to his terrible need. There had to be an answer, it was inconceivable that he should actually end up out there on the ground like that other man, put there for that thing to -- "No!" With a spasmodic twitch of his hands, he flung the articles onto the dirt floor of the cage, his lips drawn back in a dull cry of frightened outrage. It can't be real, it has to be a dream! He fell to his knees desperately and once more began running shaking fingers over the sides of the cage, looking for a crack, a weak board, anything. And, while he searched in vain, he tried not to think about the night coming and what the night was going to bring. But that was all he could think about. man's calloused fingers stroked at her hair. Her widened eyes stared at him in horror as he jerked back his hand. "Elsie," he muttered. The whiskey-heavy cloud of his breath poured across her face and she drew back, grimacing, her hands clutching tensely at the bedspread. "Elsie." He said it again, thick voiced, his glazed eyes looking at her drunkenly. The bedspread rustled beneath her as she pushed back further until her back bumped against the wooden headboard. "Elsie, I didn't mean to," the man said, dark blades of hair hanging down over his temples, breath falling hotly from his open mouth, "Elsie, don't... don't be scared of me. "W-where's my husband?" "Elsie, you look like Elsie," the man slurred the words, his bloodstreaked eyes pleading, "You look like Elsie, oh... God , you look like Elsie." "Where's my husband!" His hand clamped over her wrist and she felt herself jerked like a flimsy doll against the man's chest. His stale breath surrounded her. "No" she gasped, her hands pushing at his shoulders. "I love ya, Elsie, I love ya!" "Les!" Her scream rang out in the small room. Her head snapped to the side as the man's big palm drove across her cheek. "He's dead!" the man shouted hoarsely, "It ate him, it ate him! You hear!" She fell back against the headboard, her eyes stark with horror. "No" She didn't even know she'd spoken. The man struggled up to his feet and stood there weaving, looking down at her blank face. "You think I wanted to?" he asked brokenly, a tear dribbling down his beard-darkened cheek, "You think I liked to do it?" A sob shuddered in his chest. "I didn't like to do it. But you don't know, y-you don't know . I was in it, I was in it! Oh God... you don't know what it was like. You don't know!" He sank down heavily on the bed, his head slumped forward, his chest racked with helpless sobs. "I didn't want to. God, do you think I wwanted to?" Her left fist was pressed rigidly against her lips. She couldn't seem to breathe. No. Her mind struggled to disbelieve. No, it's not true, it isn't true. Suddenly, she threw her legs over the side of the bed and stood. Outside, the sun was going down. It doesn't come till dark, her mind argued desperately, not until dark. But how long had she been unconscious? The man looked up with redrimmed eyes. "What are ya doing?" She started running for the door. As she jerked open the door, the man collided with her and the two of them went crashing against the wall. Breath was driven from her body and the ache in her head flared up again. The man clutched at her; she felt his hands running wildly over her chest and shoulders. "Elsie, Elsie..." the man gasped, trying to kiss her again. That was when she saw the heavy pitcher on the table beside them. She hardly felt his tightening fingers, his hard, brutal mouth crushed against hers. Her stretching fingers closed over the pitcher handle, she lifted... Great chunks of the white pottery showered on the floor as the man's cry of pain filled the room. Then Marian was leaning against the wall, gasping for breath and looking down at his crumpled body, at his thick fingers still twitching on the rug. Suddenly her eyes fled to the window. Almost sunset. Abruptly, she ran back to the man and bent over his motionless body. Her shaking fingers felt through his overall pockets until they found the ring of keys. As she fled from the room, she heard the man groan and saw, over her shoulder, the fleeting sight of him turning slowly onto his back. She ran down the hall and jerked open the front door. Dying sunlight flooded the sky with its blood. With a choking gasp, she jumped down the porch steps and ran in desperate, erratic strides around the house, not even feeling the pebbles her feet ran over. She kept looking at the silent row of cages she was running toward. It's not true, it's not true -- the words kept running through her brain -- he lied to me. A sob pulled back her lips. He lied! Darkness was falling like a rapid curtain as she dashed up to the first cage on trembling legs. Empty. Another sob pulsed in her throat. She ran to the next cage. He was lying! Empty. "No" " Les !" "Marian!" He leaped across the cage floor, a sudden wild hope flashing across his face. "Oh, darling" Her voice was a shaking, strengthless murmur, "He told me -- " "Marian, open the cage. Hurry! It's coming " Dread fell over her again, a wave of numbing cold. Her head jerked to the side instinctively, her shocked gaze fled out across the darkening desert. "Marian!" Her hands shook uncontrollably as she tried one of the keys in the lock. It didn't fit. She bit her lip until pain flared up. She tried another key. It didn't fit. "Hurry" "Oh God." She whimpered as her palsied hands inserted another key. That didn't fit. "I can't find the -- " Suddenly, her voice choked off, her breath congealed. In a second, she felt her limbs petrify. In the silence, faintly, a sound of something huge grating, and hissing over the earth. "Oh, no" She looked aside hurriedly, then back at Les again. "It's all right, baby," he said. "All right, don't get excited. There's plenty of time." He drew in a heavy breath. "Try the next key. That's right. No, no, the other one. It's all right now. There. No, that doesn't work. Try the next one." His stomach kept contracting into a tighter, harder knot. The skin of Marian's lower lip broke beneath her teeth. She winced and dropped the key ring. With a gagging whimper, she bent over and snatched it up. Across the desert, the wheezing, squashing sound grew louder. "Oh, Les, I can't, I can't!" "All right, baby," he heard himself say suddenly, "Never mind. Run for the highway." She looked up at him, suddenly expressionless. "What?" "Honey, don't stand there for God's sake!" he cried, "Run!" She caught the breath that shook in her and dug her teeth again into the jagged break on her lip. Her hands stopped shaking and, almost numbed, she tried the next key, the next, while Les stood watching her with terrified eyes, looking over her shoulder toward the desert. "Honey, don't -- " The lock sprang open. With a breathless grunt, Les shoved open the door and grabbed Marian's hand as the lathing sibilance shook in the twilight air. "Run!" he gasped, "Don't look back!" They ran on wildly pumping legs away from the cages, away from the six-foot high mass of quivering life that flopped into the clearing like gelatine dumped from a gargantuan bowl. They tried not to listen, they kept their eyes straight ahead, they ran without breaking their long, panic-driven strides. The car was back in front of the house again, it's front bashed in. They jerked open the doors and slid in frantically. His shaking hand felt the key still in the ignition. He turned it and jabbed in the starter button. "Les, it's coming this way!" The gears ground together with a loud rasp and the car jerked forward. He didn't look behind, he just changed gears and kept pushing down on the accelerator until the car lurched into the lane again. and headed for the town he remembered passing through -- it seemed like years before. He pushed the gas pedal to the floor and the car picked up speed. He couldn't see the road clearly without the headlights but he couldn't keep his foot up, it seemed to jam itself down on the accelerator. The car roared down the darkening road and Les drew in his first easy breath in four days as... the being foamed and rocked across the ground , fury boiling in its tissues . The animal had failed , there was no food waiting , the food had gone. The being slithered in angry circles, searching, its visual cells picking at the ground, its sheathed and luminous formlessness scouring away the flaky dirt. Nothing. The being gurgled like a viscid tide for the house, for the clicking sound in , Merv Ketter's arm jerked spasmodically and he sat up, eyes wide and staring. Pain drove jagged lines of consciousness into his brain -- pain in his head, pain in his arm. The cone was like a burrowing spider there, clawing with razor legs, trying to cut its way out of his flesh. Merv struggled up to his knees, teeth gritted together, eyes clouding with the pain. He had barely gained his feet when the crashing, splintering sound shook the house. He twitched violently, his lower jaw dropping. The digging, gouging fire in his arm increased and, suddenly he knew. With a whining gasp, he leaped into the hall and looked down the dark stairway pit. the being undulated up the stairs , its seventy ingot eyes glowering , its shimmering deformity lurching up toward the animal. Maddened fury hissed and bubbled through its amorphous shape, it flopped and flung itself up the angular steps . The animal turned and fled toward the back steps! -- it was his only chance. He couldn't breathe, air seemed liquid in his lungs. His boot heels hammered down the hall and through the darkness of his bedroom. Behind, he heard the railings buckle and snap as the being reached the second floor, bent itself around into a U-shaped bladder, then threw its sodden form forward again. Merv flung himself down the steep stairway, his palsied hand gripping at the railing, his heartbeat pounding at his chest like mallet blows. He cried out hoarsely as the pain in his arm flared again, almost making him lose consciousness. As he reached the bottomstep, he heard the doorway of his bedroom shattered violently and heard the gushing fury of the being as it heaved and bucked into the backstair doorway and smashed it out to its own size. Below, it heard the pounding of the fleeing animal. Then adhesiveness lost hold and the being went grinding and rolling down the stairway, its seven hundred feelers pricking the casing and scraping at the splintering wood. It hit the bottom step, crushed its huge misshapen bulk through the doorway and boiled across the kitchen floor. In the living room Merv dashed for the mantel. Reaching up, he jerked down the Mauser rifle and whirled as the distended being cascaded its luminescent body through the doorway. The room echoed and rang with sharp explosions as Merv emptied the rifle into the onrushing hulk. The bullets sprayed off its casing impotently and Merv jumped back with a scream of terror, the gun flung from his hands. His outflung arm knocked off the picture of his wife and he heard it shatter on the floor and, in his twisted mind, had the fleeting vision of it lying on the floor, Elsie's face smiling behind jagged glass. Then his hand closed over something hard. And, suddenly, he knew exactly what to do. As the glittering mass reared up and threw its liquidity toward him, Merv jumped to the side. The mantel splintered, the wall cracked open. Then, as the being pulled itself up again and heaved over him, Merv jerked out the pin of the grenade and held it tightly to his chest. Stupid beast! I'll kill you now for -- Tissues exploded , the casing split , the being ran across the floor like slag , a molten torrent of protoplasms. Then silence in the room . The being's minds snuffed out one by one as tenuous atmosphere starved each tissue of its life. The remains trembled slightly, agony flooded through the being's cells and glutinous joints . Thoughts trickled. Vital fluids trickling . Lamp beams giving warmth and life to pulsing matter. Organisms joining, cells dividing, the undulant contents of the food vat swelling , swelling, overpowering. Where are they! Where are the masters who gave me life that I might feed them and never lose my bulk or energy ? And then the being, which was born of tumorous hydroponics, died, having forgotten that it, itself, had eaten the masters as they slept, ingesting, with their bodies, all the knowledge of their minds. ocean telephone cable. Stretched # miles across the ocean floor from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland to Scotland it will be another step in bringing the New World and the Old together. In terms of time New York and London will be a mere ##ths of a second apart. Plans call for two cables laid about ten miles apart and able to carry as many as # separate conversations simultaneously. Yet the cable itself will be no thicker than an ordinary lead pencil. Three miles down on the ocean floor the cable will be impervious to the atmospheric conditions that now wreak havoc with radiotelephonic communication. Jamming will be impossible, and the danger of having enemy agents hear secret messages will also be obviated. Since the exact location of the cable will be a security secret, tapping the line or cutting it will scarcely be possible without detection. Our citation of the month goes to the combined international effort that has made this # year old dream possible; and to the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., the British Post Office, and the Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation who have combined their skill and resources for this project. The atomic and hydrogen bombs are getting most of the headlines but the really big news -- the good news of our atomic age for the average citizen -- is being quietly made in the laboratories of industry and health throughout America... An IF Fact Article By M. T. Kay something of a dilemma. A spanking new house they had put up had sprung a leak -- not a simple roof leak but a hidden one in the heating system buried in the concrete floor. Somewhere in the maze of pipes, buried in tons of rock-hard concrete, the boiler was losing a gallon of hot water every ten minutes. "I can't understand it," one of the contractors said. "We tested that whole system before the cement was poured." The other viewed the situation hopelessly. "Well, that's where it is. So we just start riping up the tile. Maybe we can find a wet spot." "And if you don't?" "Then we'll just have to rip the whole floor out!" Ripping up the thick concrete floor would have added thousands to the cost, which would have been out of their own pockets, and the owner would have been delayed another month or so before he could move in. But, fortunately. That wasn't the way the contractors had to solve their problem. Before the wrecking crew arrived, their problem became known to a firm of nuclear engineers who recommended the use of radioactive isotopes in pin-pointing the leak. The nuclear engineers put a small amount of the radioactive substance in the water of the heating system. Then it was circulated through the piping in the cement. A geiger counter would have gone crazy in that house. After a few minutes, the system was drained and the piping flushed. Now a geiger counter found only one hot spot, the concrete at the point where the water was seeping into the cement. Only a couple feet of concrete had to be chipped out. Without the use of this isotope hundreds of feet of flooring might have been ruined before the leak had been found. The owners moved in on time and the contractors saved a lot of money. The atomic age is here. Big job or little job, in every phase of life, it's helping everybody toward an easier existence. Even the "con" man has entered the field. Reports are already coming in of sharp operators taking advantage of the public's gullibility to pass off photographic film as a detector for Uranium prospecting. Our new atomic age started when a small group of men tried to identify the atoms, the building blocks of nature. They found oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, chlorine and the other elements. Then they started putting them back together to give us textiles, cleaning compounds and new foods. From the ninetythree basic elements they have built over pounds. Science was coming to a standstill when Becquerel discovered radioactivity and called the rays that were coming out of the atoms "Becquerel Rays". Later, when Rutherford found that there were three kinds of rays in the "Becquerel Rays", his assistant suggested calling them the "A, B, and G Rays". "What?" Rutherford snorted. 'Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Rays' ". And so the Greek curtain was pulled down over radioactivity. You understand why, of course. Anything new has to be made mysterious. If it isn't, people won't appreciate your discovery. There was power in those radioactive materials. Those early experimenters could feel it. Radioactive materials were warm to the touch. Immediately, they envisioned it as a fuel and tried to speed up the reaction. They heated it, cooled it, chopped it up, tried catalysts, but none of their chemical tricks worked. Nature went along in her own unhurried way; man just couldn't push her. Then they began to realize that there were different kinds of atoms in the elements. There was a radioactive carbon atom and a stable type. The atoms that were radioactive were changing into atoms of a different element. Man tried his hand at duplicating nature's feat and built expensive machines to transmute the elements. Before #, though, you could put all the atoms man had changed into a thimble, and all the entries in the economic ledger were red. The discovery of the chain reaction brought the reactor into being. High density neutron beams in the reactor were more powerful than anything man or nature could make -- and the race to make new atoms was on. Nowadays you can get just about any of the known atoms you want. In most cases, they are not exorbitantly expensive. Standard samples can be had for experimental purposes for a reasonable price. But there are still more kinds of atoms that are needed. We need a good radioactive oxygen atom. It would help biologists trace the path of water and carbon dioxide through the plants. The plants can make sugar out of water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide. Man would like to know how they do it. If we knew we would not be dependant on nature for all our food. From the sugar you can make alcohol too, and then you wouldn't have to worry about the oil fields running dry either. Making sugar isn't the only dream the scientists have... They want to know how our bodies put sulphur, phosphor, calcium, and iron together to make living cells. This could mean new legs for the cripple, new eyes for the blind, new ears for the deaf, new teeth for the toothless. Most of the lower forms of life can rebuild lost and damaged parts of their bodies. Somehow, for higher forms of life, this was lost in evolution. If enough is known about how our bodies live, some genius may come along to find out how to restore this miracle to us. mand it from science, you will get it. Our grandfathers demanded faster ships and we got our ocean liners. They demanded greater longevity and we got that too. In Caesar's day, a man of thirty was old. Now a man of thirty is just getting started. You demand it -- science will give it to you. It takes a genius to make sugar or to discover a way to help our bodies grow new limbs, but the ordinary man can use these tools too. For many years men have , been stationed in the mountains to measure the depths of the snowbanks. This information is needed. If the snowfall is light, the dams have to hold all the water that comes down in the spring for next summer's crops. If the snowfall is heavy, the water level in the dams most be lowered to provide the capacity necessary for controlling the spring floods. These men were lost to us for the most part of a year. They could have been employed in industry, building cars, houses, appliances, etc. Now the atomic age has released these men. Instead of man power, a new machine measures the snowfall in the mountains. It has a small piece of radioactive cobalt buried in the ground and a counter hangs in the air over it. The radiation detected by the counter is proportional to the amount of ice and snow between it and the cobalt. The reading of the counter is relayed by radio to civilization. Each new machine of the atomic age can be evaluated by estimating the number of man-hours saved or by the reduction in price of a product. If it does one of these two things, our standard of living goes up. A new drug is being prepared for the market. How good is it? How fast does your body absorb it? How much is used? How much lost? Radioactive tracers give the manufacturer the answer. The original drug may have been a calcate in the laboratory, but the atomic age tells the maker to use the sulphite form. The result is a better product for you. A large chemical plant may be making dyes, and successfully too. Their product is selling. The plant is operating five days a week. But are they as economical as they really can be? Are they working depleted chemicals too long? Should the reaction be kept at #F or at #F? Radioactive tracers can f ive the management the answer. 'art of the savings in cost can go into higher wages for the workers. This is the kind of wage increase that does not lead to inflation. These things, more than the atom bomb, will affect your life in the years to come. They have already made their influence felt. It may be a while before we get back the poured into the program, but the dividends are trickling in. Don't say, "I'm a salesman, this isn't going to affect me." Four years ago that man in the mountains who measured snowdrifts probably felt that he was the last person the atomic age would reach. All of us are being nudged and pushed by the new era. Sometimes you can trip over a pot of gold, as was the case in electroplating companies who found that the water in their vats became rich in heavy hydrogen, and heavy hydrogen brings a good price these days. You might lose your job in the new times at hand. Impersonal people call this "economic adjustment". In this case you've just stubbed your toe. But whether you're picking up the gold or nursing a sore toe, you can look to a different and better life in the atomic future. other of Winston Marks' entertaining yarns entitled Test Colony, ; a new novelette about a native of space named "Joe" who be; came the "father of his country"... And, if you are ever worried over your efficiency, read James McKimmey's Confidence Game and rest easy! You won't find a better tale to illustrate that old adage about "enough being enough"... E. G. Von Wald, who  has a rare touch for satire, presents another chuckle-provoking short story about a day when people who cooperate ( even biologically!) are unlawful. It's called World Without War... Plus '  Robert Sheckley's The Battle, Dave Dryfoos' Waste Not, Want,  ' Fox B. Holden's Gift for Terra, R. E. Banks' The Work-out  Planet, and other stories and features that, as usual, provide the   best in science fiction entertainment. Ask your newsdealer to save you a copy of IF every month! rock using an intense heat, the flame being similar to that of an acetylene torch. Many of the Moon's minerals are expected to be akin to those of Earth, but scientists anticipate some of which we have never heard. All samples dug up, or burned out, will be taken to the laboratory in the reconnaissance ship to be analysed and studied before any attempt is made to mine them on a large scale. Science Fiction Magazine" M is the growing-est scion trial! If you do not enjoy every ence fiction magazine in minute of it, just let us know and America because every we will refund your money at once! issue sparkles with new II you DO like it (which we. are ideas and entertainment!... The sure you will) we will send you the finest fiction and features by the next # issues fresh of! the press -- finest writers!... The best artwork which means you get # issues in all by the best artists!... The finest for the regular # subscription paper and the finest printing by price, saving you #! Mail the where are calling it "America's most interesting science fiction magazine"... But why not see for yourself? You risk nothing! We will send you -- All you have to do is mail the handy subscription form below. We will then send you your first issue at once -- IF Magazine, Kingston, New York Enclosed find # (check or money order) for which please send me IF Magazine for the next # months. It is understood that the first issue is a know and you will return the full subscription price at once! Only # money back uuaranteed  By Winston Marks build atomic plants similar to the above. Much cheaper to operate than standard plants, the atom pile will turn water into steam which will operate giant generators producing tremendous amounts of electricity. Current obstacle s thot plant must be perfectly built -- never any repairs' -- because deodly rays prevent anyorse from entering after it is pul into operation. Breokdown would force complete abandonment of plant ( u "You can slop worrying. Jane. My job's secure now! And here's the insurance policy to prove il -- my I.C.S. diploma!" Tbit feelinf of security U probably typical of every I.C.S. graduate. Bccaute-'as ibe job ailoation gels lighter, the mau with I.C.S. training bat the advantage. 'hy? Your I.C.S. diploma telU your prescQl employer three ixn portant things: U) You want to make the most of your present job. 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Finithini and Oyamf loom rtiin( Taalila Druinlhf Warpinj and Waavinf OoffiaiiK RH'itoiUiOfi Watina I nimoarind Oc aan Ntvplion Shipfrllinc Short ShXy Sit ilinf Talaphony tillOmwi Canadian raardanti md coupon to Inlanutional CoriatporafKa ScheoH. Canadtas. LM... lasa... Ssacral tuilMe ralfi to mambara al too U. V ArmaS farcai f i AH Stories New and Complete Cover by Max Reach: A scene from "The Test Colony" D P by Arthur Dekker Savage # IF ii published monthly by Quinn Publishing Ckimpnny, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publuhing Co., liic. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Bunalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription .# for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appear ing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coinciaental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Nrxt issue on sale August lOtb you're chat man. here's someching that will interesc you. Noc a magic formula -- noc a gec-rich-quick scheme -- but someching more subsunciai. more practical. Of course, you need someching more than just the desire to be an accouncam. You've got to pay Still, wouldn't it be worth your while to sacri hce some of your leisure in favor of interesting home study -- over a comparatively brief period.-' Always provided that the rewards were good -- a salary of # to #:' An accountant's duties are interesting, varied and of real worth to his employers. He has Do you fee! that such things aren't for you.' Veil, don't be too sure. Very possibly they can be! Why noc, tike so many before you. investigate LaSalle's modern Problem Method of training for an accountancy, position? Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large accounting house under the personal supervision of an expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid. you studied accounting principles and solved problems day by day -- easy ones at first -- then more ditficulc ones. If you could do this -- and could turn to him for advice as the problems became complex -- soon you'd master them all. That's the training you follow in principle under the LaSalle Problem Method. You cover accountancy from the basic Principles right up through Accountancy Systems arid Income Tax Procedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and prepare for the C. P. iv examinations. As you go along, you absorb the principles of Audicifig, Cose Accoimtiag Business Law, Seatiscical Control, Organization, Management and Fi nance. Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it -- depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time you spend in study. Will recognition come? The only answer, as you know, is that success dna come to the man who is really trained. It's possible your employers will notice your improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed, many LaSalle graduates have paid for tlicir training -- with increased earnings -- before they have completed it! For accountants, who are triined in organization and management, are the executives of the future. Sand For Free Sample Lesion For your ox's good, get ail the faas. Write for our free #-page book. "Accoumaacy, 'The Professioo That Pays" -- also the free sample lesson so you can prove to yourself chat you can master accountancy quickly, tboroly in spare time ai borne. Ovor # Cortllled Public Accountant among LoSotlo alumni A Corfspondencm Institution Send me without obligation. Free Sample Lesson and  Accountancy, The Profession That Pays." Nam Aft Addrm OOt#o# O Suer... science fiction-wise, of course -- authors and experts have conceived a multitude of shapes for the space ship. They have been conical, eggshaped, tubular, spherical and cubicle, while the most popular conception has been that of a rocket, or torpedoc, with fins of varying size and design. In the March, #, issue of The Sooner Magazine, published at the University of Oklahoma, there appeared an article entitled "The Sky's No Limit", by Dwight V. Swain, professor' of journalism and a former science fiction writer, in which the space ship is envisioned as follows: "A sphere of dully gleaming metal some fifty feet in diameter, it rests on stubby, retractable legs... Carriers speed to and fro from refrigerated warehouses, carrying cargo to the conveyor lift built into the ship's base... The cargo is aboard -- ... the dozen-odd crewmen at their stations, the hatches sealed. The sphere floats for a moment, barely off the ground, while the stubby stabilizing legs retract. Then, slowly at first (in order to avoid the heat of atmospheric friction), it soars into the sky. No one knows for sure how fast it can go. In theory, gravity acts instantaneously, and even the electro-magnetic waves that carry power travel at up to # miles per second..." cerpt from Mr. Swain's article which we ran in the September, #, issue of IF, and we waited almost a year before we got a letter which came out emphatically in favor of the sphere. Here it is -- from Mr. L. W. Walton, of Bucks, England, who read it in the English edition of IF. Sir: It is a pity that most science fiction writers cannot get away from the V# idea, a most unsuitable form of space ship not likely ever to be of practical use in space travel. From considerations of every aspect, serious space travel is not likely to be achieved until gravity is understood and when nuclear energy is available in controllable amounts from light-weight, compact apparatus. The super-streamlined, tailfinned, pusher-rocket driven space ship (V# kind) cannot ever be a practical solution of space travel. It is thoroughly unsafe in take off and more so in landing because it is nose heavy and therefore "ground seeking"; the idea of landing by standing on its jets is scaring, violent unstable wobbles could not be avoided. It would be much better to have not less than three tractor rockets instead of trail rockets, fins with their weight and atmospheric drag could then be discarded. The center of thrust in front of or at the center of gravity is much better than behind the latter. But the thing that kills the rocket as a means of space travel is the formidable load of jettisonable matter that must be carried whatever the source of energy may be, even if it is atomic. The spherical form of space ship has a higher strength-weight ratio and relative volumetric capacity than a torpedo form, and apart from the lowest levels of the atmosphere, say about # miles, it is not at any disadvantage. In fact, within that # miles velocity must be low so streamlining has no real advantage. In landing, the spherical form is greatly superior, whilst the torpedo form is positively dangerous. The spherical form can take off from and land in water -- the torpedo form could not; it could also berth in and take off from mud or dust, snow or frozen gases, in all cases with perfect stability. Swain, in the article referred to... speaks of a "contragravitational device" and though an oar is such a device it is obvious that he means some device which directly counteracts gravity shields after H. G. Wells. I agree with Swain on this point, and that is after some # years study of the problems of space travel. On the other hand, Swain's "wireless power transmission" and "transmutational duplicator" can be dismissed as outside of practical science, i.e., they are pure fantasy. Nuclear energy is apparently the only solution for space ships... regeneration of oxygen, water, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and body minerals, though most desirable, is not absolutely necessary but given nuclear energy such regeneration is a reasonable scientific probability. With nuclear cnergx' and regeneration as above described and some means of directly distorting a gravitational field, space travel would not only be a practical but also a coininerclal success -- for the amount and weight of fuel and supplies of air, water and food required would be vers' small and possible payload high. It is refreshing to find a science fiction writer having some scientific logic, as Swain has, and science fiction would be much more entertaining if fantasy was barred. In present science fiction it is irritating to bump into scientific absurdities such as time travel, hyperdrive, space warps, telepaths, etc., etc. -- Yours faithfully L. W. Walton I disagree w'ith Mr. Walton when he says time travel or telepathy is a scientific absurdity, but I do agree with him in regard to his ideas on space travel. Also, let's not forget that everything we know today rested in our imagination before it ever got to the drawing board. And isn't imagination itself real?... Anyhow, what do you think? -- jlq Benson did his best to keep his colony from going native, but what can you do when the Natives have a rare human intelligence and know all about the facts of life? arrival. Our fellow members of the "test colony" were back in the clearing at the edge of the lake, getting their ground-legs and drinking in the sweet, clean air of Sirius Benson, leader of our group, sniffing the spicy perfume of the forest that crowded within twenty feet of the water's edge. Sirius shone with an artificially white glow. Somewhere on the horizdn. Earth lay, an invisible, remote speck of dust we had forsaken # dreary, claustrophobic months ago. The trip had taken its toll from all of us, even tough-minded Phil Benson. We both found it difficult to relax and enjoy the invigorating, oxygen-rich air and the balmy climate. A.S official recorder, I was trying to think of words suitable to capture the magnificence, the sheer loveliness of the planet which would be our home for at least four years, perhaps forever. Each absorbed in his own thoughts, Benson and I were some # yards from the clearing when he stopped me with a hand on my arm. "Who is that?" he demanded. Up the beach where he pwinted, two naked forms emerged from the calm waters. They skipped across the sand and began rolling together UlustTottd by Kelly Fretu playfully in the soft grasses at the forest's edge. Even at this distance they were visibly male and female. "I can't make them out," I said. My only thought was that one of the young coii)l-s liatl swum down ahead of us and was enjoying the first privacy attain.ible in two years. Benson's eyes were sharper. "Sam, they -- they look like -- " Our voices must have reached them, for they sprang apart and rose to their feet facing us. "Like youngsters," I supplied. "We have no kids with us," Benson reminded me. He began to move forward, slowly, as though stalking a wild animal. "Wait, Phil," I said. "The planet is uninhabited. They can't be -- " He continued shuffling ahead, and I followed. Within # paces I knew he was right. Whoever they were they hadn't come with us! Benson stopped so quickly I bumped into him. "Look, Sam! Their hands and feet! Four digits and -- no thumbs!" I could now make out the details. The two forms were not quite human. The toes were long and prehensile. The fingers, too, were exceptionally long, appearing to have an extra joint, but as Benson mentioned, there was no opposing thumb. They stood well apart now, the female seeking no protection from the male. Curiosity was written in their faces, and when we stopped advancing they began edging forward until they were only five yards away. Their outlines, instead of becoming clearer, had fuzzed up more as they approached. Now it was evident that their bodies were lightly covered with a silky hair, some two or three inches long. It had already dried out in the warm sun and was standing out away from their skins like golden haloes. They stood well under five feet tall, and in every detail, except the body hair and digits, appeared to be miniature adults, complete with navels. Even in the midst of the shock of surprise, I was taken by their remarkable beauty. "They're true mammals!" I exclaimed. "Without a doubt," Benson said, eyeing tlie full contours of the litlie little female. Her pink flesh tones were a full shade lighter than those of the male. Both had well-spaced eyes under broad foreheads. Their fine features were drawn into fearless, half-quizzical, half-good-natured exprc-ssions of deep interest. They sto relaxed as if waiting for a parley to begin. "This," said Benson, "is one hell of a note!" They cocked their heads at the sound like robins. I said, "Why? They don't appear very vicious to me." "Neither does man," Benson replied. "It's his brain that makes him deadly. Look at those skulls, the car placement, the eyes and forehead. If I know my skull formations, I think man has met his intellectual equal at last -- maybe, even, his superior." "What makes you think they may have sujxrrior minds?" As a psychologist I felt Benson was jumping to a pretty quick conclusion. "The atmosphere. Forty percent oxygen. Invariably, on other planets, that has meant higher metabolisms in the fauna. In a humanoid animal that strongly implies high mental as well as physical activity. As if to prove his point, the two little creatures tired of the one-sided interview, bent slightly at the knees and leaped at a forty-five degree angle high into the tree branches. The female caught the first limb with her long fingers and swung out of sight into the foliage. The male hung by his long toes for a moment, regarding us with an inverted impish expression, then he, too, vanished. I grunted with disap(xintment. Benson said, "Don't worry, they'll be back. Soon enough." A S WE returned to the clearing Jane Btmson and Susan, my wife, came to meet us. Although both brunettes rated high in feminine charms among the forty women of our group, somehow they appeared a little ungainly and uncommonly tall against my mental image of the little ptcople we had just left. sTheir faces were pale from the long intennent in the ship, and bright spots of sunburn on cheekbones and forehead gave them a clownish, made-up appearance. "We've sorted and identified the fruits," Sue culled to us. "The handbook is right. They're delicious! We've got a fea.st spread. Just wait until you -- " She caught our expressions. "What's wrong?" Benson shrugged. "You girls go on ahead and get the crowd together. I have an imprortant announcement to make." Jane pouted a little and hesitated, but Benson insisted. "Run along now, please. I want to gather my thoughts." We trailed after them slowly. I didn't like Benson's moody reaction to our discovery of an intelligent life-form. To me it was exciting. What fabulous news I would have to send back with the first liason ship to contact ns four years hence! And it would be entirely unexpected. hecauM the original e.xplonitioii party h.id failed to make the di.scovery. That in itself was an intriguing mystery. How could twenty-two s'ientists, Ix-nt on a minute examination of ,i planet's flora and fauna, overltHik the most fabulous creation of all an animal virtually in men's image? The only guess I could make was that they must belong to a nomadic tribe small enough to escape discovery. Benson broke silence as the narrow beach strip began to widen into tile grassy plain where our ship squatted like a hemispherical cathedral. "This poses so many problems," he said shaking his head. I said, "Phil, I think you're taking your job too seriously. You ju.st can't plan every detail of organizing our community down to the rationing of tooth-powder." "Planning never hurt any project," Benson said. "I disagree," I told him. "You've had too long to dwell on your plans. Now the first unpredictable incident throws you into an uproar. Relax, Phil. Take your problems one at a time. We don't even know that we'll ever sec the little creatures again. Maybe they're shy." He scarcely heard me. He was a large, well-muscled man of # years, an ex-college president and an able administrator. He and Jane, his wife, were the only two of our party older tlian die #-year age limit. His background as a sociologist and anthropologist and his greater maturity were important factors in stabilizing a new colony, but his point of view had grown excessively conservative, it seemed to me. A crew of craftsmen with their busy little power saws had constructed a sloping ship's ramp of rough planks sawed from the nearest trees. We stepped through and over the assembled people who were lying around in the grass at the base of the ramp, and Benson mounted twenty feet above us at the entrance to the ship. Everyone was in high spirits, and a light cheer, rippled through the assembly. Benson, however, ignored it and bent a thoroughly serious gaze out over his "flock". "Please give me your closest attention," he began and waited until everyone was quiet. "Until further notice, we must jirocced under a yellow alert during daylight hours and a red alert at night. All work parties leaving the ship will check with the scribe every hour on the hour. We will resume sleeping in the ship. Women arc restricted to within # yards of the ship at all times. Men will go armed and will please inform themselves of their position on the security watch list which will be posted tonight." He squinted in the bright sunlight. "For the moment, you men with sidearms, post your.scKcs around the ship. Sound olf loud if you sight anything larger than a rabbit." The men named got slowly to their feet, fingering their light hunting pistols self-consciously. Benson continued, "You may appreciate these precautions when I tell you that Sam Rogers and I just encountered two remarkably humanoid animals on the beach less than half a mile from here." Tension replaced levity, as Benson described our meeting with the natives. I thought he gave it a needlessly grim emphasis with such terms as, "quicker than cats", and "devilishly intelligcnl" , but I held my peace. He summarized, "I do not want to alarm anyone unduly, but we must face up to the fact that we are totally unprepared for such a contingency. The exploration group failed us badly in overlooking these creatures. They may not be inimical to our culture, but until this is established we must consider them prime threats. That is all," he concluded. No one grumbled aloud, but their faces showed keen disappointment at the resumption of quartering in the ship. Reluctantly, the women began rolling up the stilldellated air-mattresses that were scattered about the soft, deep grass. Sue complained, "Sam, if these people don't get a little privacy pretty soon we'll turn into an ant colony. There'll be lovin' in the streets." "It's not my idea," I said. "I'll be nailed to a table at the foot of the ramp all day making check marks. Phil is taking this entirely too big. The little people are really charming. He neglected to mention that they are beautifully formed and quite gentle in theirtheir actions." "Actions?" she said. "What happened, really?" I described the conditions under which we first .saw the natives, and he laughed a little strainedly. "I can just imagine the look on Phil Benson's face." I knew what she meant. In trying to enforce the shipboard rule of segregation of the sexes, our leader had dcvelopxid an oversensitive attitude toward certain aspects of modesty. In the unutterable boredom of space, the pledge we had all taken to complete continence for the voyage was a severe test to all forty couples. Had propriety and space considerations been the only reasons for the infamous "no-romance" regulation, it would never have held up. But all concerned realized the problem of childbirth in space under the jam-packed living conditions, tight wter and food rationing and the fetid, recirculated air. Now the second honeyTnoons were over before they started. It was back to the ship and the nightlife of monks and nuns. That night. Sue and I joined the four ship's officers, their wives, navigation cupola atop our doomed ship that had become a "fortress". The small control room was the only semi-private room in the ship, and even Benson was admitted by invitation only. The meeting was a council of war, so to speak, and the officers were pressed into service to organize and ojjerate the security guard. When the guard watch was worked out for a week in advance, I spoke up. "I think we're getting off on the wrong foot, Phil. We can't stay penned up like animals at night and expect to function as humans." Benson argued: "We are a carefully balanced group, Sam. We can't afford casualties. Look at our medical corps, two doctors and four nurses. Suppose we were attacked and lost them?" Captain Spooner, whose authority had lapsed when we touched down, backed up Benson. "I see no great hardship in the precautions. Inconvenience, yes, but nothing that the danger doesn't fully justify." He was a cocky, virile, baldheaded little terrier of # years. His very young wife and the wives of the other three officers seenied only lightly perturbed at the prospects of continuing celibacy, which confirmed my suspicions. I said, "That's gritty of you. Captain, but remember, the rest of us haven't had the relative privacy of the bridge. If this restriction continues long I predict violations of the discipline, and probably some serious behaviour problems." My position as colony psychologist had become somewhat obscured under the snowstorm of paperwork tliat my sccondai-y job as official scribe had brought. Benson seemed now to recall that mental health was my concern. He said, "I thought you reported high morale upon arrival." "I did, but the terrsions are there, and it's foolish to draw them too tightly. We have a well-picked, highly adaptable group of people. Let's keep them that way. The quicker we hit a more nonnal existence the less risk we run of emotional disturbances." "They'll take it," Benson said positively, and Spooner nodded in arrogant agreement. Reared to the shorter rotation one hour before noon, when the Women began undressing. Tln-re had been an air of conspiracy among them all morning, a studied casualncss as they wandered aroimd near the ship, forming small conversational eddies, dispersing and reforming elsewhere. I had just finished checking in the ll-man fruit-gathering detail. I looked up from my roster in time to sec the first motions of the "great disrobing". Zippers unzipped, snaps popped open, slacks, skirts, blouses and jumpers fell to the grass, and a dazzling spectacle of spacc-bicached feminine epidermis burst into view. The ladies were very calm about It, but a chorus of yips sounded and swelled into a circus of cheers from the male working parties. Before I could fathom it Benson came charging down the ramp followed by his fruit-stowing detail. He stopped at the foot of the ramp, mouth open and eyes pinched with annoyance. He spotted Jane and Sue. "What is going on out here?" he demanded loudly. Our two wives waved at us and strolled over, doing a splendid job of acting unconcerned. "Just a little sun-bathing," Jane said, shooing a small insect from a pale shoulder. Susan refused to meet my eye. She was watching two birds soar overhead. "It's fantastic," she said. "If you don't look at things too closely, you'd never know we weren't at a summer camp up in Wisconsin -- except for the fruits. They remind me more of Tahiti. It's marvelous! The mosquitoes f don't even bite." "They will," I said, "as soon as they get a good taste of human blood. And baby, you're sure making it easy for them." Benson was distracted from the conversation by the converging male colonists, who were whooping and yelling like a horde of school boys. He backed up the ramp and ordered, "Let's get on with the work. You'c seen your wives in the altogether before." The men quieted a little, but one yelled, "Yeah, but not lately!" Another added, "And not all together." In spite of the fact that nude sun-bathing was a commonplace, twenty-second-century custom on Earth, by tacit consent clothes had been worn at all times aboard ship. The women had gone along with Benson for two years on such matters, so this was clearly a feminine protest against the spirit of the yellow alert. Young doctors Sorenson and Bailey came trotting up, grinning appreciatively but wagging their fingers. Without consulting Benson, Bailey mounted the ramp and shouted, "Blondes and redheads, ten minutes exposure. Brunettes, fifteen." A great booing issued from the men, but Bailey held up his hand for silence. "The medical staff will make no effort to enforce these exposure maximums, but be advised that the radiation here is about the same as Miami Beach in June, so don't let the air-conditioning fool you." Benson was spared further decisions on the issue, because at that moment one of the sentries remembered to take a quick look at the vector of forest he vas supposed to be guarding. Unable to make his voice heard over the hub-hub, the guard fired his pistol in the air. We all jumped up and stared, and Benson muttered, "Dear God!" Our people were f cattered over an acre around the ramp, and encompassing them was a semi-circle of at least a hundred "savages", frozen like bronze statues at the sound of tlic gun-shot. They curved in an arc less than a hundred yards from the ship. Their hands were empty of weapons, and their motionless attitudes were in no way threatening. To the contrary, they seemed small and quite inoffensive e.xcept for their numbers. Acting in my capacity as p.sychologist, I ran up the ramp and called out as calmly as a shout would permit, "Ever'body take it easy! Don't make any quick moves. Above all, don't anyone fire off a weapon again unless there is an obvious attack." Benson clutched my arm. "Are you mad? We've got to get the women inside." "That's what I'm thinking," I said. "But if we invite attack by running they won't all make it." "They aren't armed. The men can stand them off." "Then what are you worrying about?" I demanded. "Relax for a minute and see what happens." Benson simmered and reluctantly accepted my logic. Meanwhile, the line of natives became mobile again. They closed in at a casual saunter, rolling off the balls of their long feet with a peculiar, slow, bouncing motion. A ripple of subdued exclamations ran through our people, and in turn the little natives moved their lips, turned their heads to one another and seemed to be commenting among themselves. Benson began hissing futile commands for the vs'omen to start boarding the ship. No one paid any attention. I could sense no great danger in the situation. In fact I felt more attracted than repelled by the little golden-haired creatures. Bailey, who was still on the ramp, took a different view. He called out, "They don't look dangerous, but keep away from them. Lord knows what kind of bugs they may have in them." It was a sobering thought. Their most insignificant disease germ might easily wipe out our colony if it proved contagious. Yet, how could we stop these natives without inflicting bloodshed? On they came in their shambling, loosc-gaited walk. Benson was unsnapping his holster flap, and even the highly curious women were beginning to shrink back toward the gangplank, when a light breeze swept through us from behind. It rustled the grass softly and moved into the natives, only # yards away. The wavering line stopped again. Segments began to retreat, first singly, then in pairs and groups. All but a handful of the most curious suddenly bounded for the forest and disappeared. The others came forward again, but with increasing bewilderment. Repeatedly, they raised their noses and sniffed the air. Bailey said from behind us, "They catch our scent and don't know what to make of it. Tliank heavens most of them took off. We can handle a dozen of them easily enough." Our pcoplc opcncd ranks and let the little creatures infiltrate. Sue squeezed my arm. "Why, they're beautiful little things! They make me feel self-conscious with my bleached-out skin. They certainly look intelligent, those eyes -- no fear in them at all -- look, they're even smiling!" Indeed, several of the creatures were grinning broadly at the male members of our party. They found our clothing amusing. Now we could hear their soft voices conversing in a language that was liquid with a great many compound vowel sound.s, not unlike Earth's Finnish tongue. Their quick, dark eyes seemed to take in everything. They seemed torn between a consuming curiosity and a strong aversion to our scent. One by one they satisfied the former and yielded to the latter, dropping back and racing for the forest in great, joyous bounds punctuated with happy little whoops of undefinable emotion. At last only one, chesty little male was left. Benson exhaled heavily beside me. "It's the little fellow we saw on the beach, Sam. Look, he's coming through." A tawny stripe of brown, furry hair ran from his high forehead, over the crown of his proud skull and down his neck to fade into the typical, deep, golden fuzz of his bcy. As he approached the ramp I saw that his face was smooth, entirely free of hair as though clean-shaven. By now Benson was as fascinated as the rest of us. I stepped down in front of him to confront our visitor. I placed a hand on my chest and said, "Sam Rogers!" The dark eyes swept from my feet to my head and fastened upon my face. He pointed four long fingers at me and repeated distinctly, "Samrogers." My name is easy to pronounce, but it was a shock to hear it from the lips of an extra-terrestrial being. Then he placed the same hand on his own chest and said, "Joe!" Actually, it came out with a rapid widening and narrowing of his lips that sounded like a quick version of, "Jo-ah-o-ah-oh," but the vowel echoes were so rapid that for practical purposes it read, "Joe," to me. I pointed my hand at him and repeated, "Joe!" He looked vaguely disappointed at my crude aspiratory control, but then a bright smile creased his cocky little face. His hand flicked out and back. "Samrogers -- Joe." Involuntarily I nodded my head. He nodded back and smiled again. Before I could think of what comes after, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," he wrinkled his nose, squinted his eyes, whirled and darted off for the timber. We stood rooted for a minute, then Bailey said, "We must really stink. Plucky little fellow took it as long as he could." Ben.son looked back at Bailey and me. "Well, what do you think?" I looked at Bailey, and he looked at Dr. Sorenson. "Lord, I don't know. Except for the possibility of microbe infection, they appear perfectly harmless to me," Sorenson said. I said, "Since they don't like our scent there doesn't seem to be much danger of contact. Phil, why don't we call off the yellow alert with the exception of a rule or two about fraternization in closed spaces?" Benson looked over his people. All were paired off now, husband with wife. And to a man their arms were wrapped protectively around their respective spouses, watching for the decision. Their faces read, "Is this innocuous little race of people the cause of all the trouble?" Benson rubbed the gray of his temple with a knuckle. He mounted the ramp and announced, "The emergency is reduced to a blue alert. Women will have the freedom of the clearing and the visible beach, but only authorized working parties will enter the forest. Men will continue to wear sidearms. When outside shelters are complete we will sleep in them, but until then, or until we are better informed about the natives, we shall continue sleeping in the ship." T he new order of the day did nodiing to mitigate the resentment and tension, but it did accelerate assembly of the lumber mill and house construction. The little Sirians seemed to have satisfied their curiosity, for they left us to our labors for a whole week. The first building of our projected village was completed on the seventh day. It was little more than a two-room shanty, but it represented the most sought after prize of the moment, privacy! We drew lots for it, and, with the uncommon justice, one of the hardest working amateim carpenters won. The women brought in armloads of grass for a couch and decorated it with wild-flowers. When evening fell it seemed like an occasion lor a celebration, and Benson relented on the evening curfew. We galheied .si raps from the lumber mill, e.iielullv cleared a sandy strip on (he lieaeh of all inflammable matter and built a huge bonfire. In the rich atmosphere even the green wood burned merrily, spitting green sap anti sending up clouds of pungent, aromatic smoke. Sue had just curled up in the crook of my arm, and we were working on a case of Earth-nostalgia, when we noticed our visitors again. They came bounding, up to the wide rim of the firelight. They jabbered in e.xcited, ecstatic voices but stopped short of our human assembly. Only one, I recognized him as Joe, picked his way through us and came close to inspect the crackling blaze. Fascinated, Sue and I watched his profile contort with an expression of immense admiration. It was not the awe of a savage, but the heartfelt appreciation of a human for a rare and beautiful spectacle. "Fire must be unknown to them," Sue whispered. "At least mighty rare," I said. "The handbook says no volcanoes and no thunderstorms." Joe turned at the sound of our low voices. With eyes half-blinded by the glare he searched for me. "Samrogers!" he called clearly. "Samrogers!" I rose to my feet and answered, "Joe! Right here, Joe." He picked his way over to me, smiling broadly and glancing back at the fire every step or two. A pace away he stopped, pointed at me, said, "Samrogers," pointed at himscl, said, "Joe!" then pointed at the fire and waited. It was a clearly indirated question. I answered it respectfully, "Fire!" He repeated, "Fire," and his eyes glowed like sparks. Then he made gestures of picking up some of the fire and taking it away, turning to me to pose the question. Sorenson, propped up on an elbow, said, "I'll be damned. He's asking you to give him some of the fire." "No," Benson said. "He knows fire, knows you can't take the flames. He's asking for the means to build a fire." I faced Joe, shook my head solemnly and said, "No!" To give meaning to the word I sat down and turned my head away for a moment. When I looked back Joe was looking very disappointed. It made Sue so sad that she held out a wedge of sweet melon to him. J oe accepted the gift easily, graceully and with a small smile of "thank you". He turned back, squatted as near the blaze as comfort would permit and chewed absently at the melon. Thereafter he ignored the animated conversation that sprang up among us. Jane wanted to know why we didn't give him one of our lighters. "He's just as intelligent as we are," she insisted. She got no argtiment on that score, but her husband pointed out that the golden people were unaccustomed to handling fire, and that during the present dry season even the green foliage might take off in a holocaust if ignited in this rich, oxygen air. Even as he spoke, a long, slender pole, flaming at one end, toppled from the settling fire and rolled near Joe. With scarcely a pause to debate, he leaped to his feet, grabbed the pole by the cool end and waved it aloft like a torch. With a triumphant yell he plunged through us and out across the field bearing his prize aloft trailing sparks. I tried to shoot low, but my light caliber pellet caught him rather high in the tliigh. He dived to the ground senseless in a shower of sparks. His fellow creatures immetfiately gathered around him. When we closed in to retrieve the fire-wand and stamp out the sparks, the other natives faded away, crinkling tiieir noses. They made no effort to remove Joe, but cast many admiring glances back at the fire he had stolen. Sue came up storming at me. "You didn't have to shoot him." She started to kneel down beside him, but Dr. Bailey restrained her. "Easy, Susan. Remember the quarantine." "We can't let him lie there and bleed to death," I said, feeling unaccountably ashamed for my deed, although there was scarcely an alternative. Benson came up, "Nice shot, Sam." I said, "Phil, I want permission to enter quarantine with joe, here. Let me have the instruments, and I'll probe for the bullet and take care of him." Benson shook his head. "We can't take that chance. We couldn't spare you if you caught something." "Who could you spare better?" I demanded. "See here, we've got to find out sooner or later whether these little fellows carry anything contagious. If they do, well, then we have a decision to face, but wc can't decide anytliing until we know." Sue was at my side now. She said. "You have a dozen people who can punch a micro-writer. Sam and I aren't indispensable. Besides, it was he who crippled the poor little fellow." Without waiting for an answer slie called out, "Larson, where arc you?" The lucky carpenter tried to draw back in the shadows, knowing full well what she had in mind. Benson stared at me for a minute. He said gruffly, "Very well, if you can talk Larson out of his cottage, go ahead, play hero!" I didn't feel very heroic right then. Two hours later, when we had the bullet out of Joe and had him bedded down comfortably for the night. Sue cosied up to me in our double sleeping silks and murmured, "What a guy has to go through out here to get a little privacy!" Poor Larson! B ailey and Sorenson set up their lab outside our cabin door. Joe's wound was seriously infected, and none of our cautiously applied remedies would control the raging fever with which he awoke the first morning. He lay, apathetic, eyes half closed, murmuring, "Tala! Tala!" The doctors seized the opportunity to launch a study of Sirian microbes, diseases and earth molds. Sue and I took cultures from Joe's wound, and the medics experimented with the effects of local mold prodiu ls similar to the penimanaged to keep Joe alive until Bailey, one morning, held up a hypo full of deal' li(uid and told us how to administer it. Joe responded at cnee. The following day he began sitting up and vociferously demanding, "Tala, Tala!" "Must be his wife or girl-friend," Sue deduced. She was wrong. Joe began making motions of a person lifting a vessel and drinking. When we offered fiim water he refused, repeating, "Tala!" and making more drinking motions. He tried to rise, but the pain iii his swollen thigh stopped him. He sank back licking his lips like a man dying of thirst, and in spite of his general improvement, he stayed in a sullen, subdued attitude. As his wound closed and the swelling reduced, Joe's temperature, which had reached a fabulous # degrees F., stabilized at # F., thereby confinning Benson's prediction that the natives would display a much higher metabolism. Sue, who had spent hours stroking the fevered brow, had grown u.sed to Joe's hot-bloodedness, and she teased me about my relative "frigidity". Until Joe got his "tala" I made disappointing progress at teaching him our language. He picked up our words for those few items that ptertained to his comfort, such as food, drink, bedpan and pillow -- he revelled in the luxury of our down-filled pillows. But at first he evinced little interest in communication. Then one morning we arose to find him standing and clinging weakly to the door jamb, searching the perimeter of the clearing with frantic eyes. We scolded him, but he ignored us. He spotted a fellow native examining one of the unfinished huts, which were going up at the rate of one a day. He called out in a loud, clear voice, and the little golden creature came running oTr to investigate. It was a lovely little female, and and I told Sue, "We have a reunion on our hands. Must be his mate." But Joe was quite indifferent to her charms. She seemed tolerably happy to see him, touched his bandages with long, gentle fingers, then hurried off to the forest as if in response to his commands. Joe made no effort to follow. He seemed still to realize that he was in good hands and was profiting by the care he was receiving. However, he chafed for the ten minutes or so before her return. We waited with high curiosity. I bet Sue that we were about to learn what "tala" was. When the female approached again we were mystified. "Why it's just a mango," Sue said. Indeed, the yellowskinned, kidney-shaped fruit which the little native bore carefully in both hands appeared to be one of the over-sized specimens we had named after its smaller Earth counterpart. Joe reached greedily for the fruit, poked a hole in the rind with a pointed forefinger and drank deeply. Watching from the door of our bedroom, we could smell a delightful, tangy scent that was only vaguely typical of the Sirian mangoes we had eaten. To our surprise, as Joe drank, the skin collapsed like a plastic bag. "It must be a different species, or else it's much riper than any we've gathered," Sue said. When Joe paused to breathe, the female took the fruit from him and sucked at it enthusiastically. They sank down on Joe's bed and took turns drinking the juice until the quart-sized .skin was crumpled and empty. I fear I interrupted an incipient romance in order to retrieve the discarded skin. The female wrinkled her nose and made for the door. I watched her roll unsteadily across the clearing with eccentric little lurches. The bland smile on Joe's handsome face deepened my suspicion. I pointed to the skin and asked, "Tala?" He nodded, patted his stomach and repeated, "Tala!" From that moment our relations improved immensely. Joe enlisted the help of various females to keep him supplied with skins of tala, and with the satiation of his craving he took a completely new interest in life. working out our language difficulties. He learned so rapidly that I abandoned learning his language in favor of teaching him ours. Even such abstract concepts as time and space proved no obStacies. He grasjied the purpose of my wristwatch after a single day's demonstration of its relationship to the passage of Sirius across the sky. Using a pencil I had managed to convey our symbols for large numbers. Joe could count up to any number now, and he seemed actually to understand the openend nature of our .system of enumeration. It made possible a mutual agreement on such matters as the number of "days" in a year, which he was mildly interested to learn numbered # on his planet. Then a startling piece of infonnation came from him when I asked how long his people lived. "Two years. Maybe three," he replied. Because of the shorter days, a Sirian year about equalled an Earth year, and I found it difficult to believe that these wonderful little animals lived only two or three years. He persisted until I believed him. He was strangely vague when I tried to determine the common manner of death. Indeed, personal death was a concept either so hazy or distasteful to him that he refused to dwell on it. The most he would convey was that there were always new faces in the tribe, and the old faces rarely remained more than three years. At this time, he described himself as being more than a year old. This was only one of several startling items that were revealed in our conversations. The golden people matured in three months to fully grown adults. A female could bear several babies a year and usually did. Yet Joe insisted that his tribe was the only clan on the face of the planet, .so far as he knew, and that it numbered fewer than a thousand individuals. There was no such thing as monogamy or even jolygamy. True, at night when the air was cooler, they paired off, male and female, and eacli male elinse from among several favorites. But there was no formal nor permanent mating arrangement. Benson, who had set uj) a sheltered desk outside Joe's window in order to listen in witli an anthropologist's avid interest, i)o.sed the question which grew into quite a mystery. Under such fruitful conditions and ideal environment, why hadn't Joe's people overrun the planet? Even with the brief life-span, each female should produce many babies. Joe had no answer. The problem didn't interest him, and he refused to ponder it. He'd squat in the corner jealously guarding his limpskinned mango, nipping at it occasionally when our questions failed to make sense. We were all, incidentally, quite curious to taste Joe's tala juice, but it was his sole property. His lady-friends would hand it to no one but him, and he guarded it selfi.shly. Bailey and Sorenson had enlisted the help of our two organic chemists to examine the moist residue of the empty skins, but with their limited lab facilities all they could do was make guesses that the coveted juice wa,s the product of fermentation or enzymic action with which we were unfamiliar. As a psychologist I knew that Joe responded to the tala similarly to the way a human dipsomaniac does to alcohol. When he was wellsupplied he was cheerful and happy. When he ran out, he became taciturn and irritable. His frequent resort to the liquor, when we tried to force him to answer troublesome questions, confirmed my suspicion that there were certain matfused to embrace, and the simplest way to avoid worrying about them was to take another drink of tala. Benson and I discussed this one afternoon while Joe was taking a nap. We sat in the shade of my hut spooning the lush pulp of a mango into our mouths. He said, "Everything points to a race of super-intelligence held down by slieer degeneracy." "You mean the tala-drinking?" I asked. He nodded. "For one thing. Our work parties report that they never stop drinking the stuff. The older ones get quite plastered. I've seen it myself. Disgusting. And they have no common sense of, of -- well, I shouldn't say decency, because obviou.sly morality as we know it just doesn't exist. But thank heavens they don't care for the scent of humans." I said, "Don't depend on that too much. I asked Joe about it, and he said that we don't necessarily smell bad to them. It's just so alien to any scent they've known that they tend to shy off. Joe is quite used to it now. He lets Sue rub his back and his head. She's made quite a pet of him." Benson didn't like this news at all. He pondcred thoughtfully for a moment. "That means that they'll all gradually get used to being around us. I don't like it, Phil. They're just human enough to have a bad influence on the colony. They're dissolute and entirely without ambition. In fact they seem to have damned little race survival instinct at all." I had pondered this many times, but it hadn't struck me as esfjecially dangerous to the colony, nson went on, "We have a glorious planet here, rich in minerals and other natural resources. By comparison, Earth is so wom-out and depleted and over-crowded that the. contrast is almost too great." "What are you driving at?" I demanded. "Just this. From the first the biggest problem here has been to prod everyone to work. We have a civilization to build here, and that means clearing more land, breaking the soil, mining, construction. manufacturing." "Look," I said somewhat impatiently, "you don't expect # people to accomplish all this in four years, surely?" "I expect progress," he said firmly. "Do you realize that when wc finished the last of the forty houses that virtually ended the building program? Work on the two warehouses, the water system, sewage disposal plant and the commissary wc planned is almost at a standstill." "The people want time to finish up their homes and m.ikc them comfortable," I objected. "That's what they say," he told me, "but they're fooling away their time." "Phil, we've only been here a month, and -- " "And if I hadn't pulled a blue alert," he interrupted, "we wouldn't even have the residentials built yet. Now they've got their precious privacy, and the pressure is off. They'd rather go chasing off into the woods to hunt exotic fruit and peek at the natives than get on with the project." I hadn't realized things were this serious. "Don't they obey orders any more? What about your work schedules?" "I've pushed them as hard as I can without forcing a test of my authority," he said. "They claim they dc.serve time to get adjusted and relax a little before buckling down." "I agree with them," I said. "They're all serious, industrious people, and this is still an adventure with them. It will wear off pretty soon, and they'll be yearning for comforts of Earth. They'll buckle down when the rainy season hits," I predicted. "I wonder. Here's one good example. Look over there. Donnegan's food detail is just now returning with its first load. They left three hours ago." He yelled over to the foreman. Donnegan, a large, pleasantfaced biologist sauntered over to us. Benson said, "Was the expedition successful?" Donnegan brushed off the sarcasm. "Fooling aside, it is getting to be something of an expedition to find fruit. The natives are cleaning it out near at hand." Turning to me Benson said, "There's another thing. The little devils have settled all around us, and everything is community property with them. Not only do they strip the fruit but they pick up anything that isn't nailed down and wander off with it." "That's odd," I said. "Joe indicates that they place no value on possessions normally." "Oh, they don't keep things," Donnegan explained. "They pack them off, fiddle with them and then we find them strewn all over the forest. Sometimes I'd like to wring their little necks!" Benson looked up at him quickly. "Sounds funny coming from you, Paul. You were one of their chief defenders at tlumeeting last week." Donnegan's face darkened. "That was last week, before I found out a few things. As a matter of fact, I think it's time you knew about them, too." He squatted down by us and unburdened himself. A S IT SO often will, a barrier had erected itself between the colony members and their leader, what shamefacedly confessed what had gone on behind this curtain of silence. It seemed that two weeks earlier Bromley, one of the chemists, had contrived some rather crude, oldfashioned, sulphur-and-phosphorus, friction matches. Trading on the native's delight with fire, he had bribed them with matches to give him one of the tala-mangoes which he tasted, then promptly proceeded to swill until he was quite drunk. In a generous mood he passed out matches to other male members of the colony who, in turn, made the barter and joined the party. "The stuff is really delicious," Donncgan admitted. "And it doesn't even give you a hang-over." "Go on," Benson invited coldly. Within a few days, Donnegan related, evTylKidy was nipping on the tala. Bromley was turning out a steady supply of matches from his lab. and they were now the going currency for trading with the natives. In order to keep their wives quiet the men brought the super-ripe mangoes home and shared them. The precious fruit, it developed, came from regular mango trees but reached the desired, fermented condition only at the leafy crowns of the trees where even the nimble, light-weight natives found it hazardous and difficult to reach them. Bromley said that he knew of several native casualties from fatal falls that had occurred since the traffic in tala increased. Benson asked the question that was in my mind. "What caused you to come to me at this late date?" he demanded. "Something more serious must have happened." "Well, I didn't mind the taladrinking so much -- but, well. Captain Spooner and I came back to his hut one afternoon this week and found his pretty little wife with one of the natives -- a male. Spooner thought it was a big joke -- he was a little drunk at the time, and so was his wife. But I don't think it's any joke at all." Benson was on his feet, his face livid. "What else?" Bromley said, "I checked around a little bit, and I found that quite a few of our people are making pets out of the natives. The little devils have got used to our scent, and they'll do anything just to watch a match bum." "But the quarantine?" I said. "I guess they figure it's safe enough. Personally, I don't. But they feel that since you and Sue have escaped any disease there's no reason for the non-fraternizing rule, not even in closed spaces. Several couples I know hold parties every night in their huts after dark. They invite a couple of nati-es who supply the tala. They all sit around a candle. The natives sleep there." He kicked at an empty tala skin that Joe had tossed out the door earlier. "Things are out of hand, and I'm ashamed I haven't come to you sooner, Benson." Phil was so outraged he couldn't speak. I said, "Thanks, Donnegan. You did the right thing." He left us, and while Benson was struggling to control his anger I said, "It's a wonder they haven't burned the place down. The forest must be damp enough to sustain fire, or they certainly would have set one." "It might have been better." Benson said, "if they had burned the whole damned planet up! And you thought I was exaggerating! There you have it, a perfect set-up to make beachcombers out of the whole colony. Plenty of free food, liquor, beautiful native girls and a mild climate." "And native boys," I added, rememljering suddenly tliat I was harboring one of the "pets" under my own roof. Benson clenched his fists. "From the first I knew what the answer must come to. I just didn't have the guts to face it." I nodded. "I suppose we'll have to drive them off." "Drive them off, nothing! They're nomads, and they'd be back sooner or later. There will always be people in the colony and the natives are clever enough to circumvent any discipline I aim against them." "What else can you do, short of -- genocide?" "Why rule out genocide? Sam, face it! Race extermination is the only permanent and satisfactory solution." The thought was abhorrent to me, but he argued, "If we don't eliminate them entirely they'll always be around to plague us. Just picture what this or any future colony would look like after a year or two of uninhibited mingling tala. Is that the civilization that Eartli sent us out here to establish?" In every part of the universe where living conditions have been too kind and discipline too lax, men have been known to go native, and suddenly I felt that Benson had been much more acute in his apprehensions than I, a graduate psychologist who was supposed to understand human nature. Somewhat subdued I said, "How do you plan to accomplish a complete extermination? If we start hunting them down they'll just fade into the woods. Besides, you'd have a devil of a time getting agreement among our people to take on such a messy project." "It has to be done, that's all. I want you to keep completely quiet about what we've learned until I can think about it. Bromley should have some ideas. He's a biologist." When Ben.son said, "biologist", the obvious solution popped into my head. "If we could sterilize tliem -- all the males, anyway -- they have siuh a shori lifi'-span -- " " l oo slow. Besides, how arc you going to coax all the males to lie down and " llis eyes opened wider, "Radiation!" "Exactly. We l;ike them for a tour ol the ship, inelniling tin Xray booth, and pom on the power." "Might be ilone at that. But it would be so slow." was conceived amotig six of us who met secretly that night in Benson's new ship (uarters. Donnegan brought his fellow biologist, Terrence Frost, and I had contacted the two medics. We reached swift agreement as to the necessity of taking steps, and decided to work on my rough plan. It was also voted not to divulge our intentions to the others, and then the meeting broke up. When I returned to my hut, Jane was sitting cross-legged just outside my door visiting with Susan. I thought .she would be curious about the confidential nature of the meeting from which she was excluded, but she had other tilings on her mind. She stood up and said, "I think your patient is recovered, and you've got a problem, mister." She stalked off into the night. I looked at Sue's pink face and half-guessed the answer before she told me. It seemed that Joe had suddenly developed amorous inclinations. Sue had the habit of stroking his head like a pet dog, and this evening, without warning, Joe had begn returning the caresses in a manner so casual and gentle tliat Sue hadn't noticed the trend. From a more objective viewpoint, however, Jane had observed the rather unplatonic indications of Joe's attitude and mortified Sue by drawing her attention to it with an acid remark. In my fury I fancied that Joe had tried to take advantage of my absence. His cleverness in avoiding such advances in iny presence was nullified by his error of assuming that Jane would pose no obstacle. At present he sprawled in his comer beside an empty mango skin, breathing rapidly, innocently asleep. The incident served to drive home Donnegan's story and steel me against the many twinges of conscience I was to suffer in our campaign to wipe out Joe's race. It also served as an adequate excuse, in Sue's eyes, when I told Joe the next morning that he was quite well enough to return to the forest. This was a fact we both had known for over a week, but Joe in his indolent way, had been quite content to remain and talk with me endlessly. Until now, I had welcomed his presence as an inexliaustiblc source of information. He accepted the dismissal without rancor and promised to return and visit us next spring. "Next spring?" I said. "We will leave soon," he said. "We go south in the autumn." "Wait," I said. And I told him that as a gesture of friendship we had decided to take all males of his race for a tour through the ship. Would he take this word to his people? He said he would, but his face became very thoughtful. That afternoon they formed a short line at the ramp, and the "tours" began. The line was short because they refused to wait long for anything, but as the line shortened, others came from the woods to take their places. To produce a favorable "press" on our show and thus assure perfect attendance by all the males, Benson rigged several mechanical displays of flasliing lights and whirling devices. They were delighted, and when they got to the X-ray booth, to induce them to stand still we set up a gas torch with a beautiful, vermilion, strontium flame. The only problem at this point was to get them to move on alter they got their painless dose of sterilizing radiation. Every tenth "golden boy" was shunted into a small chamber filled with organ, the instant anaesthetizing gas, and Dr. Sorenson, wearing an oxygen mask, would catch him as he fell, take his specimen, hand it through a slot to Dr. Bailey and then drag the unsuspecting victim into the frc.sh air where the nurses took over with more wonders to distract his attention. This running spot-check on the collected .semen samples assured us that our radiation was effectively destroying the spermatozoa. I sat at my old place at the base of the ramp, weeding out tire occasional females who tried to sneak in and also checking to sec that we had no repeats. Our method was simplicity itself. As each native finished our tour an attendant atomized a faint but very pcnnan'iit stain of waterproof dye on tluhair of the right slioulder blade. It wa.s hardly noticeable unless you were looking for it, and that was one of my jobs. In two days wc "toured" #I males. A week later the night rains began, and our unwclcomed neighbors vanished. B enson had postponed his little lecture deliberately, and now he called us all togetlicr for a fatherly talk which I helped him prepare. He begun abruptly. "Since nature has been so bountiful in providing us with tala, I don't intend to proclaim any silly prohibition regarding its consumption. With a little reflection, howevi-r, I hope that all of you can understand that we must have .some control. I am fully aware that many of you arranged your own private channels for obtaining this liquor, but with the departure of our tree-climbing friends the easy soui'ce has dried uj. "Now, to prevent some of you from breaking your fool necks trying to climb the trees yoursebes, I propose that we place tala in the commissary as a normal ration to be issued equitably to all -- when it is available. And working together, our clearing parties will, no doubt, fell enough mango trees to give us all a fair taste." Benson's une.xpected tolerance and remarkable proposal was received with mixed embarrassment, relief and enthusiasm. He went on, "We have enjoyed almost two months of rather unrestrained partying, and I'm not going to rail at that came to my attention. So far the intimacies which some of you took with the natives have produced no epidemics nor bastard offspring on cither side. However, were I to accept V"ur actions as sider our cohiny iloomeil already for further investment by Earth civilization. "Instead, I feel you will, during the winter months, regain your perspective and apply yourself to the principles which brought us here and must continue to bind us together if we are to survive as a permanent culture." Benson's speech had the desired effect. Without the little jeople around to distract us, the colonists plunged into their work, and things got done. True, a ratiher disproportionate numlxtr of logs brought in by the falling crews turned out to be mango-wood, but the talarationing program added incentive precisely where it was needed. The perimeter of our clearing advanced rapidly, the cultivating and planting parties followed closely behind, and the .sawmill added an industrious sound to the whole operation. As Benson had hoped, w'hcn the people buckled down they once again began yearning for the conveniences they had left on earth. The chemists finally contrived suitable raw materials for the plasticizer and began manufacturing screens for our gaping windows, muchly-needed pipe for our water and sewage systems and even a few "frivolous" luxuries such as cups, saucers and fruit bowls. The commissary and other public buildings were planked out roughly, and the hospital-clinic was completed before the first two babies arrived. The history-making blessed event was an honor and an onus to Captian Spooner and his young wife. To father the first human offspring of many of us, but Spooner and the Second Officer had something over a light-year head-start on the rest of us. Infant Spooner arrived just ## months after our landing. The Mate's baby came two weeks later. Sue herself svas satisfyingly pregnant. By spring it was obvious that Earth's gynecologists had chosen the members of our colony well, and there would be no dearth of young blood. Fully a third of the women were expecting, and Sue's date indicated she would have won the derby if it hadn't been for the ship's officers' perfidy. The colony as a whole was in good shape. As the most pressing work was disposed of, the men took turns at the pleasant hunting details, and we began enjoying fresh meat from the small game of the forest. On one such trip I brought back a live little animal that looked like a cross between a three-toed sloth and a teddy bear, except that he had a long, woofly snout like an ant-eater. He seemed to be hibernating in the crotch of a small tree, and when I shook him down he cuddled up and clung to my neck so lovingly that I decided he'd make a good pet for Sue. The little cub kept nipping affectionately at my neck on the hike back, and he clung so close he was a nuisance, but Sue was delighted. We had to improvise a cage at night to keep him from mauling us and keeping us awake. Sue named him, "Toots", and we were the envy of all the camp. When Joe and his people returned tliree weeks later, and we discovered the truth about Toots, the others were happy they hadn't acquired a similar pet. mango trees were rapidly refilling their high branches with the tala-fruit. We now had a roofed central kitchen where the women prepared our meals. We ate at long tables in the open. Shortly after the noon meal one day, Joe and his people returned. He caught up to Sue and me as were strolling to our hut for our daily fifteen-minute siesta. He appeared tiled from the journey but quite glad to see us. I felt the pangs of conscience as I added my hypocritical welcome to Sue's warm greeting. In his old room we sat on the rough furniture I had fashioned, and Joe eyed Sue's fruitful contours. "A baby soon, eh? We have many babies among us." "You -- have?" I said. "Many were born on the return trip. They slowed up the females with their sucking. For eight days they are a burden on the mother." Sue exclaimed, "Eight days? Then what happens?" The subject id not greatly interest Joe. "Then they find their own food -- if the koodi does not find them first." "What in the world is a koodi?" Sue asked with a shiver. Joe was silent for a minute. He wrinkled his broad brow and looked at me. "Samrogers, you asked me many questions about how we die. I did not understand this death for a long time. Now I know. It is when the koodi comes. He comes to the very young and to the old. The babies are too small to hold him oir. The old drink much tala, then the koodi comes to them. This is my thiid year, and my thirst for tala is great. The koodi will come." His words painted a clear picture of a superstitious concept of death, personifying it even as humans refer to the "grim reaper". But Sue took a different view. "What does the koodi look like?" she persisted. Joe looked jiuzzled. He raised a long, four-segmented finger and pointed to a corner of the room where Toots was curled up like a fur neck-piece. "He looks like that. There is a koodi." My first impulse was to reject the statement as ridiculous. Toots was as haiinless as an over-sized kitten. Besides, the manual made no mention of -- Sue made a small sound in her throat. Her face was colorle.ss. "Sam! Get him out of here!" "But the manual -- "d'he manual didn't mention Joe's people, either," she said halfhysterically. "Gel Toots out of here." Still unbelieving I walked over and hauled the little fuzzy animal up into my arms. Instantly, he cuddled close and rammed his pointed snout under my open collar and began nibbling at my neck. I took him outside, and out of perverse curiosity I let him have his way with my neck. At first it tickled, as always, but instead of batting his head away I let him nibble with his soft, pointed lips...Sue called out, "Sam what are you doing? Kill him, Sam!" His lips spread into a little circle on my flesh and began sucking gently. There was no pain, just the throb of my jugular under his mouth. Now his long, soft, hairy arms became firmer around my neck. I jerked back and they gripped hard. A chill of panic stabbed me, and I could feel the taut flesh of my neck drawn more deeply into his puckered lips. I tugged at him silently, not wishing to frighten Sue. He wouldn't come loose. In broad, noon-daylight I had a Sirian vampire in my arms, threatening to rupture my jugular vein and kill me within speaking distance of half a hundred people. I tried to level my voice. "Joe, would you come out here, please?" He came at once, stared with a blank expression and said, "You have been drinking much tala?" "Help me, dammit!" I said, holding my voice down. "I can't shake him loose. He's trying to -- " The long, tight arm squeezed off my breath. In turn I tried to strangle him, but under the thick fur was a bony protection where there should have been .soft neck. "It does no good to kill the koodi," Joe said. "There is always another. Once they hold you tightly it is too late." Sue thought differently. She came through the door like a hellcat. Catching up her garden hoc she swung a blow that, had it mi.ssed Toots, would have crushed my skull. But Sue didn't miss. I fell on my back, and Toots let go, dead of a broken spine. was Benson's best idea. Not only did it put tala on a legitimate basis, but it controlled our dealings with the natives. Bromley, the chemist, who was the original offender, was charged with manufacturing the wooden matches, and the medium of exchange was concentrated in the hands of the commissary "purchasing agent". The reason that Benson sanctioned the controlled tala trade with the natives stemmed from our apparent failure to sterilize the males. There was, indeed, a huge crop of native babies, tiny little dolls that looked like spider monkeys and dropped from their mothers' breasts after little more than a week. The brisk tala trade w.as part of our program to keep the natives in close association while we devised ways and means to discover the cause of our failure. All quarantine rules had long .since been dropped, and Sorenson and Bailey began inventing ruses to lure the males into the gas chamber again. Weeks passed while we worked our way through the whole male population again, testing for fertility and X-raying it wherever we found it. Through Joe we advertised new wonders to be seen in the ship, and as the sight-seers left we tagged each with an atomized spot on the other shoulder, indicating that he was still sterile or had just become so. This time we tallied # males which, according to Joe, was certainly the whole masculine population. The mystery of our failure at genocide forced an unpleasant decision on Benson. The biologists and medics insisted that we must win the natives' confidence even further to gain their cooperation. As the heat of summer bore down and the mercury rose, we eased off on the work schedule and deliberately planned social functions to which we had Joe invite a group of natives. There were picnics and beach parties where our guests brought their own tala, and ours was carefully rationed. Group singing entranced the little golden people, and they took remarkable delight in the discovery of their own, sweetly pitched voices. Enterprising Joe. with his remarkable memory, soon became unofficial song leader, and all day long we would hear the natives practicing. Sue's baby came, a sturdy little boy whom we named Richard Joseph -- Sue insisted on the second name, and I couldn't argue her out of it without revealing my reasons. Within two weeks the clinic's nursery was full of babie.s, and it was at this point that the natives' interest became deeply stirred. The language barriers were breaking down rapidly. Many of our regular visitors were females, and with Joe's help as an interpreter they were soon able to ask questions. Their greatest curiosity hinged on the fabulous care we gave our infants. Although I wouldn't permit Sue to do it, several of our women began using fcmalo natives for babysitters. This lead to the first Ijasic behaviour change we had noticed. The females began to pay more attention to their own offspring. It was as if they had just discovered the pleasure of fondling their babies and watching them crawl and kick and gurgle. Even after the first week they were still carrying them around, finding choice morsels of fruit for them, fanning off the insects and singing them to sleep with their new-found abilities to make music. Benson noticed it and called a meeting of the secret si.x. He .said, "Our little program had better work this time or we are in for it. Apparently this kuodi animal that Sam had the tussle with is the principal population control, and now the mothers are packing tlieir kids around until they're old enough to fight off the koodi." Donnegan shook his liead. "Damned if I can find out vvliere we slipped up. Frost and I just finished a series of tests with native ova and human sperm. They don't mix. Of course, we didn't expect them to, but what in hell is the answer?" I hadn't known of this project. I said, "You didn't think tliat our male colonists -- " Benson scowled with cxas)cration. "We don't know what to think, Sam! We sterilized #I native males last fall, and the babies are just as thick as ever." I said, "Well, we got to # of them this time. That should do it for sure. Joe says he'll keep a lookout for any males without the two stains on his shoulder." Benson narrowed his eyes. "You know, it strikes me that Joe is being awfully helpful. What reason did you give him for wanting this information?" "He didn't ask," I said. composed of #-day months, excc)t February which we shorted six days to make it come out even...According to this calendar the "May-flies" came in July, just a month before our first anniversary. The little winged insects were a seasonal life-form, one more item that csc.ipcd the exploratory party, and lor which we were unprepared. They came out of the north, and they .struck us before we could take shelter in the ship or our plasticscreened huts. They were a little smaller than flying ants, and even their long wings were jet-black. Their bites were infinitesimal, but each one smarted like a prick w ith a hot needle. In the midst of the confusion of rescuing babies and herding everyone in doors, I noticed that all the natives had disappeared into the forest. Everyone had suffered a hundred bites or more, and we were sorry, swollen sights. Sue insisted that I cover myself and make a run for the clinic to see if Dr. Bailey had any remedies for the bites. Richard Jo.sc)h was crying loudly from the irritation, so I agreed. It was only # yards to the clinic, and I made it without collecting many more stings. But the doctors had nothing to offer. They were dabbing various salves, astringents and pastes on test patches of their own skin, but nothing seemed to have any cfTcct at all. "All we hope," said Sorenson, "is that the (lies aren't microbe-carriers." I started out the door to return then stepjH'd back and peered throujh the screen. The forest was erupting with natives. They staggered into the clearing, headed for the center of it and sank down as if with great weariness. On and on they came until the ground among our buildings was literally paved with their prone bodies. "Poor devils," Bailey murmured as the clouds of flies continued to sweep through our village. "Nothing we can do, though. I wonder why they come out in the open? You'd think they had better protection in the trees." I had no answers, so I covered my head again and tnade a dash for my own hut. Inside I brushed off the clinging flies and stamped on them. "The medics don't have any help for us," I said. Then I saw him. Sue was struggling to hold Joe on his feet. His arms were draped loosely over her shoulders, and for a second I couldn't decided whether he was ill or making a pass at Sue. I pulled him ofl' her by one shoulder. He swung around and toppled into my arms. Remarkably few insect bites showed under the transparent haze of golden hair, but he recked of tala. "You're drunk," I yelled at him. "A lot of help you arc at a time like this!" "Tala," he said from loose lipts. "Much tala." "You've had much tala, all right!" I said disgusted. Sue said, "We've got to let him stay in here, Sam. The flies will cat him alive out there." She went to the window and knocked the flies from the outside of the screen. Then she screamed. I thought she had just discovered the massed natives. but she kept on screaming until I went to her and looked out. In the late afternoon sun, fuzzy little brown animals were waddling out of the forest, closing in on the # or more natives ling senseless in the clearing. Koodi! Dozens of them. I forgot my screaming wife, my ers'ing infant, the drunken wifestealer slumped on the floor. I forgot the torture of my own stings. All I remember is snatching my pLstol from its holster that hung by the door and plunging out and pulling the trigger until fire ceased to come out of it. Then I was kicking and smashing with a tree limb, and every blow smaslied one of the vile little ghouls into the grass. I thought I saw Ben.son bring and kicking, but I blacked out before I could be sure. I regained consciousness with the flies still keening in my ears. Sue was calling my name and slapping me sharply in the face. Joe was trying to pull me to my feet, but the last thing I remember is the both of us collapsing to the ground. ing fever and gloriously drunken sensation of floating. Joe brought a fruit to me when he saw I was stirring. I drank the thin, tangy juice in one breath and sank back into a deep sleep again. My next drink came from the long, slender fingers of a pretty littie female native. This time it was water, and I stayed awake. Joe came in, saw I was awake and came back in a few minutes with Benson and Dr. Bailey. They both looked terrible, Benson especially. Bailey said, "Take it easy. Sue's at the clinic. She and the baby are all right, but you damned near didn't make it." Benson said, "Can you talk?" I cleared my throAt and decided I could. He waved Joe and the female out. Then he and Bailey sat down beside me. I asked, "Any casualties?" "Two of our babies and thirty-six native babies. Some of the koodi came in after dark." It sounded strange, Benson's listing native casualties with our own. The memory of the koodi attack brought a wave of nausea over me. I said, "Benson, I'm sorry, but I'm all done trying to murder Joe's race. I want no further part of it." Benson's face was thin and drawn, and he stared at the floor. "If we haven't murdered it already," he said, "there will be no more attempts while I am in charge." He covered his face with his hands. "Bailey. Tell him, Bailey." The doctor's voice was gravelly and weak. "If it hadn't been for the natives we'd all have died. The venom from the flies paralj'zed everyone the second day after the swarm hit us. The flies w'ere gone the next morning, hut every soul in the colony pa.sscd out. Joe and his friends took care of us, poured tala down our throats and fed us." "But they were soused," I said. "Their only defense against the flies. The little black devils left the natives pretty well alone, and it appears that the tala was responsible. Could be that the stuff is what neutralized the toxin, too. They must have poured a gallon of it down me, judging from the empty skins by my bed...t any rate, they kejjt us alive until we could get up and feed ourselves." "Why did they come into the clearing when they drank the tala?" I asked. Bailey said, "Joe told us that the day he saw Sue kill the koodi th.ii was attacking you, he got the idea that he should do something about them himself. Through his efforts the natives no longer take the little devils as an inevitable evil. They kill them wherever they find them now. And when they had to get drunk to save themselves from the flics, Joe pa.sscd the word for them to hit for the clearing. The koodi usually avoid the sunlight, but it was late in the afternoon. They came anyway." "Phil," I said, "did I sec you out bastards?" He nodded silently. "You had changed your mind about the natives at that time?" "I -- I suppose so. Don't rub it in, Sam. It's hard enough to live with the thought of how wrong I was. All I can do now is pray that whatever failed in our first try failed again. Joe's peoitle have made the human race look pretty dismal. They have every right to their planet, and if we are fooli.sh enough to go native, well -- at least we have a stronger survival instinct." At that point Susan came in carrying Richard. He had the hiccoughs. Sue kissed me. "Richard just drew his ration of sterile tala from the clinic. He still has a slight fever. But thanks to Joe and Harmony -- " "Harmony? Who's that?" "The native girl who helped Joe nurse us. Her name is really Hahah-arin-ig-hin-ih-hee. or something like that. She answers to Harmony, though." And she did. Hearing her name the little golden girl came through the door towing Joe by one hand. I said, "One of your favorites, Joe?" He ran a caressing, four-fingered hand over her shoulder. "I like her," he admitted. "She wants to call me husband like Sue calls you." Bailey smiled. "It seems there is a new fad among the natives. Something like monogamy, I understand." I said, "What do you think of the idea, Joe?" He thought it over. "I have not made up my mind." Sue pressed him, "Why not marry Harmony, Joe?" In the blunt manner in which he so often made his curious revelations, Joe blurted out, "Because I am in much demand among all the females. It is -- very pleasant." Bailey's eyes widened. He ordered, "Bend over, Joe." Joe obliged so we could all examine his back. There were two brown stains on his shoulder blades as there should be, but Bailey was not sati.sfied. He X)ked a finger into them and examined the skin under the hair. "Mango pitch!" he announced. "Stained clean down to the skin. Did you do that, Joe?" "Yes." "Why?" "I knew you would force me to go into the ship with the others if I didn't have the stain." Bensin looked up, shocked. "Then you -- you knew what we were trying to do?" "Yes. You and Sainrogers spoke of it outside the hut one day. You thought I was asleep. Some of your words puzzled me, so I stayed away from the ship. Then I found out what they meant." "But you helped us get the others to go into the .ship!" "It was what you wanted," Joe said simply. "Later, when we went south, the females saw that only Joe's favorites continued to have babies. So Joe became very -- popubr." I said, "You mean they figured it out?" Joe smiled. "Did you think we do not know about -- " he pau.sed to dredge among his amazing store of human idioms, " -- tlie facts of life?" Bailey shook his head. "What a man! What a race! Think what they would be if they had a human's survival instinct!" "And thumbs," I added.    Science Fiction Convention to be held in San Francisco, California, on September #th, #th and #th. The program promises to be an exciting and unusual one, with outstanding scientists, and authors and artists in the world of science fiction taking part. John W. Campbell, Jr., foremost author and editor in the field, will be the guest of honor. Make your reservations early and tend your registration fee (only one dollar) today to Box #, Station A, Richmond #, California. Illustrated by Kelly Freas If Saranta wished to qualify as one who loved his fellow man, he should have known that often the most secretive things are the most obvious. tour, Tardo, the Solar Council's Planetary Aid agent, and his companion, Pco, were taken to the castle which stood on a hill overlooking the area. Tardo and Peo were entertained royally at luncheon by Saranta, their host, who appeared to be the wealthy overlord of this portion of the planet. The meal was delicious -- tender, inch-thick steaks served with delicate wine sauce and half a dozen of the planet's exotic vegetables, topped olT by a cool fruit dcs.sert. "My recommendation will be of considerable importance to you," said Tardo as they ate. "If it is favorable, there is certain technical aid aboard ship which will be made available to you at once. Of course, you will not receive advanced equipment from the Solar Council until there is a more thorough investigation." "I'm afraid our culture is too simple and agrarian to win your approval," .said Saranta modestly. "That isn't a major consideration. The Council understands the difficulties that have faced colonics in other star systems. There arc certain fundamental requirements, of course : no abnormal religious practices, no slavery... well, you understand what I mean." "We really feel that we have done well since we... our ancestors, that is... colonized our world a thousand years ago," said Saranta, toying with a wineglass. A smiling servant filled the glasses of Tardo and Peo. "'ou see, there was no fuel for the ship to explore other planets in the system, and the ship just rusted away. Since we arc some distance from the solar system, yours is the first ship that has landed here since colonization." "You seem to have been lucky, though," said Peo. He was navigator of the Council ship, and had asked to accompany Tardo on the brief inspection trip. "You could have landed on a barren planet." "Well, no, the colonizers knew it was liveable, from the first exploration expedition," said Saranta. "There were difficulties, of cour.se. Luxuriant vegetation, but no animal life, so we had no animals to domesticate. Pulling a plow is hard work for a man." "But you were able to solve this situation in a humanitarian way?" asked Toredo, peering at him keenly. "That is to say, you didn't resort to slavery?" Saranta smiled and spread his hands slightly. "Does this look like a slave society to you?" he countered. "The colonists were anxious to co-operate to make the planet liveable. No one objected to work." "It's true we've seen no slaves, that we know about," said Tardo. "But two days is a .short time for inspection. I must draw most of my conclusions from the attitudes of you and the others who are our liosts. How about the servants here?" "They are paid," answered Saranta, and added ruefully: "There are those of us who think they are paid too well. They have a union, you know." Tardo laughed. "A carry-over from Earth, no doubt," he commented. "An unusual one, too, for a culture without technology." When the meal was over, the two men from the ship were conducted on a tour of the area. It was a neat agricultural community, with broad fields, W'ell-constructed buildings and, a short distance from Saranta's castle-like home, a village in which artisans and craftsmen plied their peaceful trades. Peo tried to notice what he thought Tardo would look for on such a short inspection. The Council agent, he knew, had had intensive training and many years of experience. It was hard for Peo to judge what factors Tardo would consider significant -- probably very minor ones that the average man would not notice, he thought. Tardo had seemed most intent on the question of slavery, and Peo looked for signs of it. He could see none. The people of the planet had had time to conceal some things, of course. But the people they saw in the village wore a proud air of independence no slave could assume. Saranta apologized for their having to walk, explaining that there was no other means of transportation on the planet. "And, without transportation, you can understand why we have not been able to develop a technology," he added. "We hope transport will be included in the first assistance you will give us." Tardo asked about the fields. "I see there is no one working them," he said. "Is that done by the villagers?" "Our labor supply is transient," an.swered Saranta after a moment's hesitation. "The laborers who will work our fields -- for a wage, of course -- are probably in the next town or the one beyond it now." Alpha Persei was sinking in the western sky when Tardo and Peo took their leave of Saranta and made their way down the road toward their planetary landing craft. "It looks like a good world to me," said Peo. "If tomorrow's inspection is as satisfactory, I suppose you will recommend the beginning of technical aid?" "There will be no inspection tour tomorrow, and I shall recommend against aid at (his time," replied Tardo. "I've seen enough." "Why?" asked Peo, surprised. "There are two classes of people on this planet, and we've seen only one," said Tardo. "Tlio.se we have seen are freemen. The others are no better than animals. We give no aid that helps men tighten their hold over their fellows." "If you haven't seen them, how do you know there is another class?" demanded Peo. "There is no evidence of any such situation." "The evidence is well hidden. But if you think your stomach can take it now, I'll tell you. If you remember your history, colonizing ships # years ago had no space to carry animals along. They had to depend on native animal life of the planet, and this planet had none." "Saranta said that But I don't see..." "Those were delicious steaks, weren't they?" remarked Tardo quietly.    of Milton Lesser's best -- don't miss it! And if you like equations, there is a matheF. Young, Randall Garrett, Vernon L. McCain, Patrick Wilkins and Harry Neal -- plus IP's usual outstanding features... AC your local newsstand August #th. Illustrated by Ed Emsk Cutter demanded more and more and more efficiency -- and got it! But, as in anything, enough is enough, and too much is... G eorge H. cutter wheeled his big convertible into his reserved space in the Company parking lot with a flourish. A bright California sun drove its early brightness down on him as he strode toward the square, fourstory brick building which said Cutter Products, Inc. over its front door. A two-ton truck was grinding backward, toward the loading doors, the thick-shouldered driver craning his neck. Cutter moved briskly forward, a thick-shouldered man himself, though not very tall. A glint of light appeared in his eyes, as he .saw Kurt, the truck driver, fitting the truck's rear end into the tight opening. "Get that junk out of the way!" he yelled, and his voice roared over the noi.se of the truck's engine. Kurt snapped his head around, his blue eyes thinning, then recognition spread humor crinkles around his eyes and mouth. "All right, sir," he said. "Just a second while I jump out, and I'll lift it out of your way." "With bare hands?" Cutter said. "With bare hands." Kurt said. Cutter's laugh boomed, and as he rounded the front of the truck, he struck the right front fender with his fist. Kurt roared back from the cab with his own laughter. He liked joking harshly with Kurt and with the rest of the truck drivers. They were simple, and they didn't have his mental strength. But they had another kind of strength. They had muscle and energy, and most important, they had guts. Twenty years before Cutter had driven a truck himself. The drivers knew that, and there was a bond between them, the drivers and himself, that seldom existed between employer and employee. The guard at the door came to a reflex attention, and Cutter bobbed his head curtly. Then, instead of taking the stairway that led up the front to the second floor and his office, he strode down the hallway to theleft, angling through the shop on the first floor. He always walked through the shop. He liked the hi av ilriving .sound of the machines in his ears, and the muscled look of the ini ii, in their coarse work shiits and heavy-soled shoes. Here again was strength, in the machines and in the men. And here again too, the bond between Cutter and his employees was a thing as real as the whir and grind and thump of the machines, as real as the spray of metal dust, spitting away from a spinning saw blade. He was able to drive himself dirough to them, through the hard wall of unions and prejudices against bu.siness suits and white collars and soft clean hands, because they knew that at one time he had also been a machinist and then tool and die operator and then a shop foreman. He got through to them, and they respected him. They were even inspired by him, Cutter knew, by his energy and alertness and steel confidence. It was one good reason why their production continually skimmed along near the top level of efficiency. Cutter turned abruptly and started up the metal-lipped concrete steps to the second floor. He went up quickly, his square, almost chunky figure moving smoothly, and there was not the faintest shortening in his breath when he reached the level of his own office. Coming up the back steps required him to cross the entire administration office which contained the combined personnel of Production Control, Procurement, and Purchasing. And here, the sharp edge of elation, whetted by the walk past the loading dock and the truck drivers and the machine shop and the machinists, was dulled slightly. On either side of him as he paced rapidly across the room, were the rows of light-oak desks which contained the kind of men he did not like; fragile men, whether thin or fat, fragile just the same, in the eyes and mouth, and pale with their fragility. They affected steel postures behind those desks, but Cutter knew that the steel was synthetic, that there was nothing in that mimicked look of alertness and virility but posing. They were a breed he did not understand, because he had never been a part of them, and so this time, the invisible but very real quality of employer-employee relationship turned coldly brittle, like frozen cellophane. The sounds now, the clicking of typewriters, the sliding of file drawers, the squeak of adjusted swivel chairs -- all of it -- irritated him, rather than giving him inspiration. and so he hurried his way, esiiecially when he passed that one fellow with the sad, frightened eyes, who touched his slim hands at the papers on his desk, like a cautious fawn testing the soundness of the earth in front of him. What was his name? Linden? God, Cutter thought, the epitome of the breed, this man: sallow and slow and so hesitant that he appeared to be about to leap from his chair at the slightest alarm. Cutter broke his aloofness long enough to glare at the man, and Linden turned his frightened eyes quickly to his desk and began shuffling his papers nervously. Some day. Cutter promised himself, he was going to stop in front of the man and shout, "Booo!" and scare the poor devil to hell and back. He pushed the glass doors that led to his own offices, and moving into Lucile's ante-room restored his humor. Lucile, matronly yet quick and youthfully spirited, smiled at him and met his eyes directly. Here was some strength again, and he felt the full energy of his early-morning drive returning fully. Lucile, behind her desk in this plain but expensive reception room, reminded him of fast, hard efficiency, the quality of accomplishment that he had dedicated himself to. "Goddamned sweet morning, eh, Lucy?" he called. "Beautiful, George," she said. She had called him by his first name for years. He didn't mind, from her. Not many could do it, but those who could, successfully, he respected. "What's up first?" he asked, and she followed him into his own office. It was a high-ccilinged room, with walls bare e.xcept for a picture of Alexander Hamilton on one wall, and an award plaque from die State Chamber of Commerce on the op)osite side of the room. He spun his leather-cushioned swivel chair toward him and sat down and placed his thick hands against the surface of the desk. Lucile took the only other chair in the office, to the side of the desk, and flipped open her appointment pad. "Quay wants to see you right away. Says it's important." Cutter nodded slightly and closed his eyes. Lucile went on, calling his appointments for the day with clicking precision. He stored the information, leaning back in his chair, adjusting his mind to each, so that there would be no energy wasted during the hard, swift day. "That's it," Lucile said. "Do you want to see Quay?" "Send him in," Cutter said, and he was already leaning into his desk, signing his name to the first of a dozen letters which he had dictated into the machine during the last ten minutes of the preceding day. Lucile disappeared, and three minutes later Robert Quay took her place in the chair beside Cutter's desk. He was a taller man than Cutter, and thinner. Still, tliere was an athletic grace about him, a surencss of step and facial expression, that made it obvious that he was physically fit. He was single and only thiity-fue, twelve years younger than Cutter, but he had been with Cutler Products, Inc. for thirteen years. In college he had been a Phi Beta Kappa and lettered three years on the varsity as a quarterback. He was the kind of rare combination that Cutter liked, and Cutter had ofTcred him more than the Chicago Cardinals to get him at graduation. Cutter felt Quay's presence, without looking up at him. "Coddamned sweet morning, eh. Bob?" "It really is, George," Quay said. "What's up?" Gutter stopped signing, having finished the entire job, and he stared directly into Quay's eyes. Quay met the stare unflinchingly. "Fve got a report from Sid Perry at Adacam Research." "Your under-cover agent again, eh?" Quay grinned. Adacam Research conducted industrial experimentation which included government work. The only way to find out what really went on there. Cutter had found out, was to find a key man who didn't mind talking for a certain amount of compensation, regardless of sworn oaths and signatures to government statements. You could always get somebody. Cutter knew, and Quay had been able to get a young chemist, Sidney Perry. "Okay," Cutter said. "What are they doing over there?" "There's a fellow who's ollered Adacam his project for testing. They're highly interested, but they're not going to handle it." "Why not?" Quay shrugged. "Too touchy. It's a device that's based on electronics -- " "What the hell is touchy about electronics?" "This deals with the human personality," Quay said, as though that were explanation enough. Cutter understood. He snorted. "Christ, anything that deals with the human personality scares them over there, doesn't it?" Quay spread his hands. "All right," Cutter said. "What's this device supposed to do?" "The theory behind it is to produce energy units which reach a plane of intensity great enough to effect the function of the human ego." "Will it?" Cutter never wasted time on surprise or curiosity or theory. His mind acted directly. Would it or wouldn't it? Performance versus non-performance. Efficiency versus inefficiency. Would it improve production of Cutter Products, Inc., or would it not? "Sid swears they're convinced it will. The factors, on paper, check out. But there's been no experimentation, because it involves the human personality. This thing, when used, is supposed to perform a definite personality change on the individual subjected." "How?" "You know the theory of psycltiatric therapy -- the theory of shock treatment. The effect is some what similar, but a thousand times more effective." "What is the effect?" "A gradual dissolving of inferiority influences, or inhibitions, from the personality. A clear mind resulting. A healthy ego." "And?" "Confidence." Cutter stared at Quay's eyes, assimilating the information. "That's all very damned nice. Now svhere does it fit in with Cutter Products?" Quay drew a notebook from his coat pocket swiftly. "You remember that efficiency check we had made two months ago -- the rating of individual departments on comparable work produced?" Cutter nodded. Quay looked at his notebook. "All administrative personnel departments showed an average of -- " "Thirty-six point eight less efficiency than the skilled and unskilled labor departments," Cutter finished. Quay smiled slightly. He snapped the notebook shut. "Right. So that's our personnel efficiency bug." "Christ, I've known that for twenty years," Cutter snapped. "Okay," Quay said quickly, alerting himself back to the serious effort. "Now then, you'll remember we submitted this efficiency report to Babcock and Steele for analysis, and their report ofl'eied no answer, because their experience showed that you alu'oyt get that kind of ratio, because of personality differences. The administrative personnel show more infieriority influences per man, thus less confidence, thus less efficiency." "I remember all that," Cutter said. "Their report also pointed out that this inevitable lo.ss of efficiency is leveled out, by proportionately smaller wage compensation. The administrative personnel gets approxiinatcly twenly-fivc percent less compensation tlian the skilled labor personnel, and the l emaining eleven point eight percent loss of efficiency is made up by the more highly efficient unskilled labor receiving approximately the same compensation as the administrative personnel." "I remember all that nonsense, too," Cutter reddened faintly with a sudden anger. He did not believe tlie statistics were nonsense, only that you .should expect to write off a thirty-six point eight effici'ncy loss on the basis of adjusted compensation. A thirty-six point eight efficiency loss was a comparable loss in profits. You never compensated a loss in profits, except by erasing that loss. "And so tliis is supposed to fix it?" Quay's head bobbed. "It's worth a try. it seems to me. I've talked to Sid about it extensively, and he tells me that Bolen, who's developed stall enough units to cover the entire administrative force, from the department-head level down." "How?" Quay motioned a hand. "It's no larger than a slightly thick saucer. It could be put inside the chairs." Quay smiled faintly. "They sit on it, you see, and -- " Cutter was not amused. "How much?" "Nothing," Quay said quickly. "Absolutely nothing. Bolen wants actual tests badly, and the Iirstitute wouldn't do it. Snap your fingers, and give him a hundred and fifty people to work on, and it's yours to use for nothing. He'll do tJie installing, and he wants to keep it secret. It's essential, he says, to get an accurate reaction from the subjects effected, For him it's perfect, because we're running a continuous efficiency check, and if this thing does the job like it's supposed to do it, we'll have gained the entire benefits for nothins'. Huw can we lose?" Cutter stared at Quav for a moment, his mind working swiftly. "Call Horner in on this, but nobody else. Absolutely nofiodv else. Tell Horner to write up a ( onlracl for this fellow to sign. Gel a clause in there to the effect that this fellosv, Bolen, assumes all responsibility for any effects not designated in the defining part of the contract. Fix it up so that he's entirely liable, then get it signed, and let's see what happens." Quay smiled fully and stood up. "Right, sir." He had done a good job, lie knew. This was the sort of thing that would keep him solidly entrenched in Cutter's favor. "Right, George," he said, remembering that he didn't need to call Cutter sir anymore, but he knew he wouldn't hear any more from Cutter, because Cutter was already looking over a blueprint, eyes thin and careful, mind completely adjusted to a new problem. E dward bolen called the saucer-sized disk, the Gonfidet. He was a thin, short, smiling man with fine brown hair which looked as though it had just been ruffled by a higii wind, and he moved. Cutter noticed, with qtiick, but certain motions. The installing wa.s done two nights after Cutter's lawyer, Homer, had written up the contract and gotten it signed by Bolen. Only Quay, Bolen, and Cutter were present. Bolen fitted the disks into the base of the plastic chair cushions, and he explained, as he inserted one, then another: "The energy is inside each one, you see. The life of it is indefinite, and the amount of energy used is proportionate to the demand created." "What the hell do you mean by energy?" Cutter demanded, watching the small man work. Bolen laughed contentedly, and Quay flushed with embarrassment over anyone laughing at a question out of Cutter's lips. But Cutter did not react, only looked at Bolen, as though he could see somehow, beneath that smallness and quietness, a Certain strength. Quay had seen that look on Cutter's face before, and it meant simply that Cutter would wait, analyzing expertly in the meantime, until he found his advantage. Quay wondered, if this gadget worked, how long Bolen would own the rights to it. Cutter drove the Cadillac into Hallery Boulevard, as though the automobile were an English Austin, and just beyond the boundaries of the city, cut olT into the hills, sliding into the night and the relative darkness of the exclusive, sparsely populated Green Oaks section. Ten minutes later, his house, a massive stone structure which looked as though it had been shifted intact from the center of some medieval moat, loomed up, gray and stony, and Capra, his handyman, took over the car and drove it into the garage, while Cutter strode up the wide steps to the door. Niels took his hat, and Mary was waiting for him in the library. She was a rather large woman, although not fat, and when she wore high heels -- which she was not prone to do, because although Cutter would not  have cared, she kept trying .to project into other people's minds and trying, as she said, "Not to do anything to them, that I wouldn't want them to do to me." -- she rose a good inch above Cutter. She was pleasant humored, and cooperative, and the one great irritant about her that annoyed Cutter, was the fact that she was not capable of meeting life wholeheartedly and with strength. She steadily worried about other people's feelings and thoughts, so that Cutter wondered if she were capable of the slightest personal conviction. Yet that weakness was an advantage at the same time, to him, because she worked con.stantly toward making him happy. The house was run to his minutest liking, and the servants liked her, so that while she did not use a strong enough hand, they somehow got things done for her, and Cutter had no real complaint. Someday, he knew, he would be able to develop her into the full potential he knew she was capable of achieving, and then there wouldn't be even that one annoyance about her. He sat down in the large, worn, leather chair, and she handed him a Scotch and water, and kissed his cheek, and then sat down opposite him in a smaller striped-satin chair. "Did you have a nice day, dear?" she asked. She was always pleasant and she always smiled at him, and she was indeed a handsome woman. They had been married but five ycar.s, and she was almost fifteen years younger than he, but they had a solid understanding. She respected his work, and she was earefil with the money he allowed her, and she never forgot the Scotch and water. "The day was all right," he said. "My goodness," she said, "you worked late. Do you want dinner right away?" "I had some sandwiches at the office." he said, drinking slowly. "That isn't enough," she said reproachfully, and he enjoyed hi'r concern over him. "You'd better have some nice roast beef that Andre did just perfectly. And there's some wonderful dressing that I made myself, for just a small salad." He smiled finally. "All right," he said. "All light." She got up and kissed him again, and he relaxed in tlic large chair, sipping contentedly at his drink, li.stening to her footsteps hurrying away, the sound another indication that she was doing something for him. He felt tired and easy. He let his mind relax with his body. The gadget, the Confidet; that was going to work, he knew. It would erase the last important bug in his operational efficiency, and then he might even exand, the way he had wanted to all along. He closed hi.s eyes for a moment, tasting of his contentment, and then he heard the sound of hi.s dinner being placed on the dining room table, and he stood up briskly and walked out of the library. He really was hungry, he realized. Not only hungry but, he thought, he miglit make love to Mary that evening. T he first indication that the Confidet might be working, came three weeks later, when Quay handed Cutter the report showing an efficiency increase of # percent. "I think that should tell the story," Quay s.iid elatedly. "Doesn't mean anything," Cutter said. "Could be a thousand other factors besides that damned gimmick." "But we've never been able to .show more than one toint live variance on the administ! ati e checks." "The trouble with you. Quay," Cutter said brusquely, "is you keep looking for miracles. You think the way to get things in this world is to hope real hard. Nothing comes easy, and I've got half a notion to get those damned silly things jerked out." He bent over his work, obviously finished with Quay, and Quay, deflated, paced out of lire office. Cutter smiled inside the empty office. He liked to see Quay's enthusiasm broken now and then. It took that, to mold a really good man, because that say he as.suitied real strength after a while. If he got knocked down and got up enough, he didn't fail a;tart when he hit a n'ally tough obstacle. Cutter was not unhajjpy about the efficiency figmes at all, and he knew as well as Quay that they were deci.sive. Give it another two weeks, he thought, and if the increase was comparable, then they might have a real improvement on their hands. Those limp, jumpy creatures on the desks out there might actually start earning their keep. He was thinking about that, what it would mean to the total profit, when Lucilc opened hLs door and lie caught a glimpse of the oflice outside, including the clerk with the sad, frightened eyes. Kvi'ii you, Linden, Cutter thought, we might even impove you. The increase was comparable after another two weeks. In fact, the efficiency figure jumped to #. Quay was too e.cited to be knocked down this time, and Cutter was unable to suppress his own pleasure. "This is really it this time, George," Quay said. "It really is. And here." He handed Cutter a set of figurc.s. "Here's what accounting estimates the profit to be on this eight-nine figure." Cutter nodded, his eyes thinning the slightest bit. "We won't see that for a while." "No," Quay said, "but we'll see it! We'll sure as hell sec it! And if it goes much higher, we'll absolutely balance out!" "What does Bolen figure the top to be?" "Ten percent." "Why not thirty-.six point eight?" Cutter said, his eyes bright and narrow. Quay whistled. "Even at ten, at the wage we're paying -- -" "Never settle for quarters or thirds," Cutter said. "Get the whole thing. Send for Bolen. I want to talk to him. And in the meantime. Bob, this is such a goddamned sweet morning, what do you say we go to lunch early?" Quay blinked only once, which proved his adaptability. Cutter had just asked him to lunch, as though it were their habit to lunch together regularly, when in reality, Quay had never once gone to lunch with Cutter before. Quay was quite nonchalant, however, and he said, "Why, fine, George. I think that's a good idea." B olen appeared in Cutter's office the next morning, smiling, his eyes darting quickly about Cutter's desk and walls, so that Cutter felt for a moment, that showing Bolen anything as personal as his office, was a little like letting the man look into his brain. "Quay tells me you've set ten percent as the top efficiency increase we can count on, Bolen." Cutter said it directly, to the point. Bolen smiled, examining Cutter's hands and suit and eyes. "That's right, Mr. Cutter." "Why?" Bolen placed his small hands on his lap, looked at the tapered fingers, then up again at Cutter. He kept smiling. "It's a matter of saturation." "How in hell could ten percent more efficiency turn into saturation?" "Not ten percent more efficiency," Bolen said quietly. "Ten percent effect on the individual who creates the efficiency. Ten percent effect of that which causes him to be ten percent more efficient." Cutter snorted. "Whatever the hell that damned gimmick does, it creates confidence, drive, strength, doesn't it? Isn't that what you said?" "Yes," Bolen said politely. "Approximately." "Can you explain to me then, how ten percent more confidence in a man is saturation?" Boll'll studied what he was going to say carefully, smiling all the while. "Some men," he said very slowly, "are difl'erent than others, Mr. Cutter. Some men will read to personality changes as ahriipt as this in different ways than others. You aren't too concerned, are you, with what those changes might already have done to any of the individuals affected?" "Hell, no," Cutter said loudly. "Why should I be? All I'm interested in is efficiency. Tell me about efficiency, and I'll know what you're talking about." "All light," Bolen said. "We have no way of knowing right now which men have been affected more than others. All we have is an average. The average right now is eight and nine-tenths percent. But perhaps you have some workers w'ho clo not react, because they really do not suffer the lacks or compulsions or inhibitioas that the Confidet is concerned with. Perhaps they arc w'orking at top efficiency right now, and no amount of further subjection to the Confidet will change them." "All right then," Cutter .said cjuickly, "we'll ferret that kind of deadwood out, and replace them!" "How will you know which are deadwood?" Bolen asked pleasantly"Individual checks, of course!" Bolen shook his head, looking back at his tapering fingers. "It won't necessarily work. You see, the work that these men are concerned with is not particularly demanding work, is it? And that means you want to strike a balance between capability and demand. It's the unbalance of the.se things that creates trouble, and in your ease, tin; dcmatiil outweighed the capability. jNow, if you get a total tcn-piTccnl iuiu-.ivc, tlicn you're balanced. Il yun ocr tliat, you'll break tlic b.il.imi' .ill over again, except th.il iMii'll b.iw. ill certain demand of llic wuil..." "Cood," Cuiiri...lid ".-nv man who's capability iuitu'-i"li . ihr work he's doing will siinpK l.rrp increasing his efficiency." Bolen .shook his head. "Nu. lb 'll react quite the other way. lie'll Iominterest, because the woik will no longer be a challenge, and ilicn ilnefficiency will drop." Cutter's Jaw hardened. ".-Ml righi then, ril move that man up, and fill his place with someone else," Bolen looked at Cutter's eyes, examined them curiously. "Some men ha'c a great deal of latent talent, Mr. Cutter. This talent leleased -- " Cutter frowned, studying Bolen carefully. Then he laughed suddenly. "You think I might not be able to handle it?" "Well, let's say that you've got a stable of gentle, quiet marcs, and you turn (hem suddenly into tborougbbreds. You have to make allowances for that, Mr. Cutler. The same stalls, the same railings, the same stable boys might not be able to do the job anymore." "Yes," Cutter said, smiling without humor, "but the oiuner has nothing to do with stalls and railings and stable boys, only in (be sense that they are subsidiary. The owner is the owner, and if lie ha.s to make a few sulrsidiary cliang's, all right. But nothing really affects the owner, no matter whether you've got gentle marcs or thoroughbreds." Bolen nodded, as though he had expected that exact answer. "You are a very certain man, aren't you, Mr. Cutter?" "Would I be here, in this office, heading this company, if I weren't, Bolen?" Bolen smiled. Cutter straightened in his chair. "All right, do we go on? Do we shoot for the limit?" Bolen chose his words carefully. "I am interested in testing my Confidet, Mr. Cutter. This is the most important thing in the world to me. I don't recommend what you want to do. But, as long as you'll give me accurate reports on the effects of the Confidet, I'll go along with you. Providing you grant me one concession." Cutter frowned. "I want our written contract dissolved." Cutter reddened faintly. Nobody ever demanded anything of him and got it easily, but his mind turned over rapidly, judging the increase in efficiency, the increase in profits. He would not necessarily have to stop with administrative personnel. There were other departments, too, that could stand a little sharpening. Finally he nodded, reluctantly. "All right, Bolen." Bolen smiled and left quickly, and Cutter stared at his desk for a moment, tense. Then, he relaxed and the hard sternness of his face softened a bit. He put his finger on his desk calendar, and looked at a date Lucile had circled for him. He grinned, and picked up the telephone, and dialed. "This is George H. Cutter," he said to the man who answered. "My wife's birthday is next Saturday. Do you remember that antique desk I bought her last year? Good. Well, the truth is, she uses it all the time, so this year I'd like a good chair to match it. She's just using an occasional chair right now, and..."  her, Mary liked his gift e.xtremely well, and night after night, after the birthday, he came home to find her at the desk, using the chair, captaining her house and her servant staff. And the improvement was noticeable in her, almost from the first day. Within a month, he could detect a remarkable change, and for the first time, since they had been married, Mary gave a dinner for thirty people without crying just before it started. There were other changes. Quay brought in efficiency report after efficiency report, and by the end of three months, they had hit eighteen and seven-tenths percent increase. The administrative office was no longer the dull, listless place it had been; now it thrived and hummed like the shop below. Cutter could see the difference with his own eyes, and he could particularly see the differences in certain individuals. Brow'n and Kennedy showed remarkable improvement, but it was really Harry Linden who astonished Cutter. An individual check showed a sixty-percent increase by Linden, and there was a definite change in the man's looks. He walked differently, with a quick, virile step, and the look of His face and eyes had become strong and alive. He began appearing early in the morning, ahead of the starting hour, and working late, and the only time he missed any work hours, was one afternoon, during whit h, Lueilc informed Cutter, he had appeared in court for his divorce trial. Within a iiionlh, Cutter had fired Stole and Lackter and Cirant, as department heads, and replaced them with Brown, Kennedy, and Linden. He had formulated plans for installation of tile Confidet.s in the drafting department and the supply depnitmeiit, ami already the profits of im:reasecl cfl'icicney were heginiiing to show in the naords. Cutter was full of new enthusiasm and ambition, and tliere was only one thorn in the entire development. Quay had resigned. Cutter had heori startled and extremely angry, but Quay had been unperturbed and stubborn. "Fve enjoyed working with you immensely, George, liut my mind is made up. No hard feelings:'" Cutter had not even shaken his hand. Jl had bothered him for days, and lie (.lieeked every industrial coinKiny ill th' area, to see where Quay had found a belter position. He was highly surprised, when he learned, finally, that Quay had purchased ;t small boat and was earning his livaiig by earring fishermen out onto the Bay . Quay hatl also riiarried, lour days alter liis rc.signation. and Cutter pushed the entire thing out ol his mind, c liecking it oH to p.irtial insanity. By February o) the iirxt year, lie had jiromoled Harry Linden to Quay's old job. gotten rid of the deadwood that showed up so plainly on the individual checks, and the total effieieney average had reached thirty-three percent. His and Mary's anniversary was on the fourth of March, and when that day arrived, he was ca-rtaiii llial he had reached that point wheie lie lould expand to another plan!. He was aboul to order her a mink stole in celi-bration, but it was also that day that be was inlormed that she was suing him lor dicoree. He rushc'd home, furious, hiU site was gone. She had taken her clothes and jewelry and the second Cadillac. In fact, all that slic had left ol her personal possessions were the anticue dc'sk and chair. When the trial was over, months later, she had won enough support to take her to France, where, he learned, she ptirchased ;i chateau at Clannes. He tried to lose himself in lus work, but for the first time in his life, he had begun to get faintly worried. It was only a sliver of worrv. but it kept him from going on with the expansion. Stocks in the company had turned over at an amaingly rapid rate, and while it was still nothing more than intuition on his part, he began to tighten uj. readving himsell to meet anything. d'he e)!osioii came in July. Drindor Products had picked up forty-nine pereeiit of tlie stock on the market, by using secondary buvers. T here liad lieen a leak soniecvhere. Cutter realized, that had told his (cniipctitor, Drindor, the kind of profit he was making. He knew wlio it had been instantly, but belorr he could tire Harry Linden, all of his walls crash(,'d down. Four months before, to put more esprit de corps into Linden, he had allowed Linden eight shares of his own stock, intending to pick it up later from the market. Linden had coerced with Drindor. Cutter lost control. A board of directors was elected by Drindor, and Drindor assumed the presidency by proxy. Harry Linden took over Cutter's office, as Vice President In Charge. Cutter had wildly ordered Edward Bolen to remove the Confidets one week before, but even then he had known that it was too late, and the smiling, knowing look on Bolen's face had infuriated him to a screaming rage. Bolen remained undisturbed, and Cuietly carried the disks away. Cutter, when he left his office that final day, moved slowly, very slowly. H e brooded for many long days after that, searching his mind for a way to counterattack. He still had enough stock to keep him comfortable if he lived another hundred years. But he no longer had the power, and he thirsted for that. He turned it around and around in his brain, trying to figure out how he could do it, and the one thing he finally knew, the one certain thing, was that if he used enough drive, enough strength, then he would regain control of the company he had built with his own hands and mind. He paced the library and the long living room and the dining room, and his eyes were lost, until he saw, through the doorway of the sewing room, that desk and that chair, and he remembered he hadn't done anything about that. He paused only briefly, because he had not lost an ounce of his ability to make a sudden decision, and then he removed that disk and carried it to the library and fitted it under the cushion of the large, worn, leather chair. By fall, he had done nothing to regain control, and he was less certain of how he should act than he had been months before. He kept driving by the plant and looking at it, but he did so carefully, .so that no one would see him, and he was surprised to find that, above all, he didn't want to face Harry Linden. The memory of the man's firm look, the sharjj, bold eyes, frightened him, and tlie knowledge of his fright crushed him inside. He wished desperately that Mary were back with him, and he even wrote her letters, pleading letters, but they came back, unopened. Finally he went to see Robert Quay, because Quay was the only man in bis memory whom he somehow didn't fear talking to. He found Quay in a small cottage near the beach. There was a six-day old infant in a crib in the bedroom, and Quay's wife was a sparklingeyed girl with a smile that made Cutter feel relatively at ease for the first time in weeks. She politely left them alone, and Cutter sal there, embarrassed faintly, but glad to be in Quay's home and presence. They talked of how it had been, when Quay was with the company, and finally Cutter pushed himself into asking about it: "I've often wondered. Bob, why you left?" Quay blushed slightly, then grinned. "I might as well admit it. I got one of those things from Bolen, and had it installed in my own chair." Cutter thought about it, surprised. He cleared his throat. "And then you quit?" "Sure," Quay said. "All my life. I'd wanted to do just what I'm doing. But things ju.st came easy to me, and the opportunities were always there, and I just never had the guts to pass anything by. Finally I did." Quay smiled at him, and Cutter shifted in his chair. "The Confidet did that." Cutter nodded. It came to him suddenly, something he'd never suspected until that moment. There was something very definitely wrong with what had happened to him. The Confidet had effected everyone but him; there must have boon something using. It had worked with Mary, but hadn't Bolen said something about the energy being used in proportion to the demand? Mary had certainly created a demand. Bolen said the life of it was indefinite, but couldn't the energy have been usi'd up? "Ah," he said carefully, smiling, to Quay. "You wouldn't have it around, would you? That Confidet of yours?" "Oh, hell, no," Quay said. "I gave it to Bolen a long time ago. He came around for it, in fact. Said he had to keep track of all of them." Cutter left hurriedly, with Quay and his wife following him to his car. He drove straight to Bolen's house. Fury built inside of him. All this time, Bolen had kept track of his Confidet, the one that Mary had u.sed, and all this time, he had known Cutter still had it. Cutter was furious over the realization that Bolen had been using him for experimentation. and .dso because the Confidet that he h.id tried to use had turned worthless. All his hatred, all his anger churned inside of liini like the heat from shaken coal', but when he walked up the p.iih to Bolen's small house, he did so cuii tly, with extreme care. When he saw Bolen's face in the doorway, he wanteil to strike the man, but he kept his hands quietly at his sides; and though he hated himself for it, he ecn .smiled a little at the man. "Come in," Bolim smiled, and he spoke softly, and at the same time he examined Cutter with quick, penetrating eye'. "Come in, Mr. Cutter." Cutter wanted to stand there and demand another Confidet, a good one, and not walk inside, politely, like he did. And he wished that his voice would come out, quickly, with the power and hate in it diat he had once been capable of. But for some reason, he couldn't say a word. Bolen was e.xtremely polite. "You've been using that Confidet, haven't you?" He spoke gently, almost as though he were speaking to a frightened child. "Yes," Cutter managed to say. "And what you expected to happen, didn't. That's what you want to tell me, isn't it?" Cutter's insides quivered widi rage, but he was able only to nod. "Would you like to know why?" Bolen said. Cutter rubbed his damp palms over his knees. He nodded. Bolen smiled, his eyes sparkling. "Very simple really. It wasn't the fault of the Confidet so much, Mr. Cutter, as you. You see, you arc a rare exception. What you arc, or possibly I should say, what you were, was a complete super ego. There are very few of those, Mr. Cutter, in this world, but you happened to be one of them. A really absolute, complete super ego, and the Confidet's cITect was simply the reverse of what it would have been with anyone else." Bolen shook his head, sympathetically, but he didn't stop smiling, and his eyes didn't stop their infuriating exploration of Cutter's face and eyes and hands. "It's really a shame, because I vvas almost certain you were a super ego, Mr. Cutter. And when you didn't return that last Confidet, I somehow felt that you might use it, after all that nasty business at the company and all. "But while I was fairly certain of the effects, Mr. Cutter, I wasn't absolutely sure, you see, and so like the rest of the experiments, I had to forget my conscience. I'm really very sorry." The anger was a wild thirrg inside Cutter now, and it made his hands tremble and sweat, and his mouth quiver, and he hated the man in front of him, the man who was responsible for what had happened to him, the smiling man with the soft voice and exploring eyes. But he didn't say anything, not a word. He didn't show his anger or his frustration or his resentment. He didn't indicate to Bolen a particle of his inner wildness. He didn't have the nerve.    The story of a woman patient who allowed doctors to graft living cancer cells under her skin was recently disclosed at a meeting of the American College of Surgeons. Hopelessly ill with a widespread cancer, she let doctors at Memorial Hospital in New York City operate to remove cancerous tissue for culture in laboratory animals and in test tubes. Several months later the doctors back-transplanted these cultured cells under her skin. They jjrcw actively, and when removed a second time for microscopic examination they proved to be identical with the cancer cells that had been removed in the original operation. Scientists who have struggled to control this killer disease have long been hampered by the fact that they must always work with mouse or rat cancers, or cells that have been cultivated outside the human body. Now, thanks to this heroic woman patient, science knows that the cells which have been cultivated outside the Ixidy are really human cancer cells, and drugs which work on these cells in test tubes are working on human cancer and can be used on patients with greater confidence. Nameless though she is, our Citation this month goes to this woman who pioneered so bravely in her desire to "be useful to humanity." Secrels entrusted to a few lhelUipu#iied be generally told -- things you ought to know, (ireat truths are dangerous to some -- but f;sc!.rs for personal powir and an.owpUhment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the aiicicms, lie centuries of their seou probing into nature's laws -- their amazing iliscoveries of the h 'ul' iikH proit;sii uj man's mitiJ, and the p ?' Once shroudi ; ed in mjsiery n avoid their destruc' lion by mass tear and igmrance, these ' facts remain a u.setul heritage tor the i , thousands ol men and women who privately use them in their homes today.  'The Kosicrueians (not a religious u organization) an age-old hrotherhoid of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archises for centuries. l'he now invite yon to share the praituul htlpjnines'i oj it.iir ttaihihg. W rite tixlay for a free copy of tlte book, ' I he Mastery of i.ite. " W ithin its pages rnas lie a new life il ojpcrluniiv lor you. Address: Scribe Ulje Rosicrucians L Illustrated by Virgil Finlay It was the Last Battle. The cavalry was ready. The air arm was ready. The troops were ready. Metal shining, relays renewed, energy reservoirs charged. Television for the world was ready... Was there anything not ready? barki'd "At case!" as he hurlii'd into the toiiunand room. Obediently, his three generals stood at ease. "We haven't much time," Fetterer said, glancing at his watch. "We'll go over the plan of battle again." Fie walked to the wall and unrolled a gigantic map of the Sahara desert. "According to our best theological information, Satan is going to present his forces at these coordinates." FIc indicated the place with a blunt forefinger. "In the front rank there will be the deviks, demons, succubi, incubi, and die rest of the ratings. Bael will command the right flank, Bucr the left. His Satanic Majesty will hold the center." "Rather medieval," General Dell inuimured. General Fettercr's aide came in. his face shining and happy with thought of the Coming. ".Sir," he said, "The prie.st is outside again." "Stand at attention, soldier," Fetterer said sternly. "I'here's still a battle to be fought and won." "Yes sir," the aide .said, and stot)d rigidly, some of the joy fading from his face. "The priest, ch?" Supreme General Fetterer rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. Even since the Coining, since the knowledge of the imminent Last Battle, the religious workers of the world had made a complete nuisance of them.selves. They had stopped their bickering, which was commendable. But now they were trying to run military business. "Send him away," Fetterer said. "He knows we're planning Armageddon." "Yes sir," the aide said. He saluted sharply, wheeled, and marched out. "To go on," Supreme General Fetterer said. "Behind Satan's first line of defense will be the resurrected sinners, and various elemental forces of evil. The fallen angels will act as his bomber corps. Dell's robot interceptors will meet them." General Dell smiled grimly. "Upon contact, MacFec's automatic tank corps will proceed toward the center of the line. MacFee's automatic tank corps will proceed toward the center," Fetterer went on, "supported by General Ongin's robot infantry. Dell will command the H bombing of the rear, which should be tightly massed. I will thrust with the mechanized cavalry, here and here." The aide came back, and stood rigidly at attention. "Sir," he said, "The priest refuses to go. He says he must speak with you." Supreme General Fetterer hesitated before saying no. He remembered that this was the Last Battle, and that the religious workers ivere connected with it. He decided to give the man five minutes. "Show him in," he said. The priest wore a plain business suit, to show that he represented no particular religion. His face was tired but determined. "General," he said, "I am a representative of all the religious workers of the world, the priests, rabbis, ministers, mullahs, and all the rest. We beg of you, General, to let us fight in the Lord's battle." Supreme General Fetterer drummed his fingers nervously against his side. He wanted to stay on friendly terms with these men. Even he, the Supreme Commander, might need a good word, when all was said and done... "You can understand my position," Fetterer said unhappily. "I'm a general. I have a battle to fight." "But it's the Last Battle," the priest said. "It should be the people's battle." "It is," Fetterer said. "It's being fought by their representatises, the military." The priest didn't look at all convinced. Fetterer said. "You wouldn't want to lose this battle, would you? Have Satan win?" "Of course not," the priest murmured. "Then we can't take any chances," Fetterer said. "All the governments agreed on that, didn't they? Oh, it would be very nice to fight Armageddon with the mass of humanity. Symbolic, you might say. But could we be certain of victory?" The priest tried to say something, but Fetterer was talking rapidly. "How do we know the strength of Sattm's forces? We simply must put forth our best foot, militarily .speaking. And that means the automatic armies, the robot interceptors and tanks, the H bombs." The priest looked very unhappy. "But it isn't right' he said. "Certainly you can find some place in your plan for people?" Fetterer thought about it, but the request was impossible. The plan of battle was fully developed, beautiful, irresistible. Any introduction of a gross human element would only throw it out of order. No living flesh could stand the noise of that mechanical attack, the energy potentials humming in the air, the ail-enveloping fire power...A. humati being who came within a hundred miles of the front would not live to see the enemy. "I'm afraid not," Fettcrer said. "There aie some," the priest said sternly, "who feci that it was an error to put this in the hands of the military." "Sorry." Fettcrer said cheerfully. "That's defeatist talk. If you don't mind -- " Me gestured at the door. Wearily, the priest left. "These civilians," Fettcrer mused. "Well, gentlemen, arc your troops ready?" "We're ready to fight for Him," General MacFee said enthusiastically. "I can vouch for every automatic in my command. 'I'hcir metal is shining, all relays have been renewed, and the energy reservoirs arc fully cliarged. Sir, tliey're positively itching for battle!" G('neral Origin snapped fully out of bis daze. "The ground troops are ready, sir!" "Air arm ready," General Dell said. "Excellent," General Fettcrer said. "All other arrangements have been made. Television facilities are available for the total population of the world. No one, rich or poor, will miss the spectacle of the Last Battle." "And after the battle -- " General Ongin began, and stopped. He looked at Fettcrer. Fettcrer frowned deeply. He didn't know what was supjrosed to happen after The Battle. 'I'hat part of it 'as jrrcsumably, in the hands of the religinus agencies. "I suppoM' ihrre'll he a presentation or something," he said vague'y"You mi-an we will meet -- Him?" Gemial Dell asked. "Don't really kiinvv," Fcllcn-r said. "But I should think so. Alter all -- I mean, you know wli.ii I mean." "But what should we wear?' General AlacFec asked, in a suilcicn panic. "I mean, what does one wear?" "What do the angels wetir?" Fettcrer asked Ongin. "I don't know," Ongin said. "Rotics, do you think?" General Dell oli'ered. "No," Fetlerer stiid sternly. "We will wear dress uniform, without decorations." Till' generals nodded. It was fitting. And then it was time. G orgeous in their battle tirray, the legions of Hell advanced oei the desert. Hellish j)ipes skirled, hollow drums pounded, and the great ghost moved loruard. In a blinding cloud of sand. General Mael'ee's automalie tanks hurled themselves against the Satanic foe. Immediately, Dell's automatic bnrnirers screeched overhead, liurlitig their bomirs on the inas.sed horde of the daiimed. Fetterer thrust s'aliantly vith his automatic calvalry. Into this melee advanced Ongin's automatic infantry, and metal didwhat metal could. The hordes of the damned overflowed the front, ripping apart tanks and robots. Automatic mcchanisins died, bravely defending a patch of sand. Dell's bombers were torn from the skies by tile fallen angels, led by Marchodas, his griffin's wings beating the air into a tornado. The thin, battered line of robots held, against gigantic presences that smashed and scattered tliem, and struck terror into the hearts of television viewers in homes around the world. Like men, like hero-s the robots fought, trying to force back the forces of evil. Astaroth shrieked a command, and Bi'hemoth lumbered forwaid. Bael, with a wedge of devils behind him, threw a charge at General Fetterer's crumbling left flank. Metal screamed, electrons howled in agony at the impact. Supreme General Fettcrer sweated and trembled, a thousand miles Ix'-hind the firing line. But steadily, nervelessly, he guided the pushing of buttons and the throwing of levers. His superb corps didn't disappoint him. Mortally damaged robots swayed to their feet and fought. Smashed, trampled, destroyed by the howling fiends, the robots managed to hold their line. Then the veteran Fifth Corps threw in a counterattack, and the enemy front was pierced. A thousand miles behind the firing line, the generals guided die mopping up operations, "The battle is won," Supreme General Fetterer whispered, turning away from the television screen. "I congratulate you, gentlemen." The generals smiled wearily. Thev looked at eadi other, then broke into a spontaneous shout...Armageddon was won. and the forces of Satan had been vanquished. But something was happening on their .screens. "Is that -- is that -- " General Mac Fee Ix-gan, and then couldn't speak. For The Presence was upon the battlefield, walking among the piles of twisted, shattered metal. The generals were silent. The Presence touched a twisted robot. L'pon the smoking desert, the robots began to move. The twisted, scored, fused metals straightened. The robots stood on their feet again. "Mac Fee," Supreme General Fetterer whispered. "Try your controls. Make the robots kneel or something." The general tried, but his controls were dead. 'file bodies of the robots began to rise in the air...Around them were the angels of the Lord, and die robot tanks and soldiers and bombers floated upward, higher and higher. "He's saving them!"' Ongin cried hysterically. "He's saving the robots!" "It's a mistake!" Fetterer said. "Quick. Send a messenger to -- no! We will go in person!" And (juickly a ship was commanded, and quickly diey sped to the field ol battle. But by then it was too late, for Armageddon was over, and die robots gone, and the Lord and his host departed.    What Is Your Science I.O.? are some of the wonderful sights that would be pointed out to you. How many do you know? Counting five for each correct answer, # is passing, # very good and # is excellent. The answers arc on page I #. #. An especially bright meteor or fireball is called a . #. What is the name of the substance regarded as the only form of matter in which the phenomena of life are matiifestcd? #. Which of the following is not a part of the sun: chromosphere, Baily's Beads, corona, photosphere? #. In one second a ray of light could travel around the Earth's equator -- times. #. Triton and Nereid are the two moons of . #. When we speak of an Earthman we call him a Terran. W'hat other designation is often used? #. What is the name of the nearest bright star, four light years away? #. Polaris is the North Star of the present; but in the time of the ancient Egyptians was the North Star. #. How many constellations arc there in the heavens as we know them? #. The only moon known to us that has an atmosphere is . #. What is the name of tlie largest known asteroid? #. Eleven Earth years are equal to one year on . #. According to the Doppler shift a star that is in the violet shift on the spectrum is the Earth. #. What escape velocity is nccessai # for a ship to leave the Earth's atmosphere? #. What have the following in common? Antlia, Volans, Norma, Crater, Pavo, Tucana? #. The straight line joining the center of an attracting body with that of the body describing an orbit around it is called a . #. What is the name of the comet that returns every # years? #. Double stars which revolve around each other are called #. Which of the following is not a moon of Jupiter? lo, Europa, Mimas, Callisto, Ganymede? #. Another name for the ionosphere is . World Without War Cooperation was all right back in the dark ages but this was an era of super culture and hi-psi intelligence. And love was no laughing matter. People who cooperated, even biologically, were unlawful and... stop. He was already late for Jcnnette's birthday party, but the sight of three people out in the open like this was too much. He pulled around and hovered over the undulating flow of glassy magma, frozen on its way to the long, dry Potomac river bed, with its shallow caverns and fascinating mile-wide potholes. Just under an overhanging clilT' of half-vitrified soil were two cars, obviously damaged. The three men were standing beside them. Mark laughed out loud. It was not often that one found three people at once. And so close to each other. The scene there, with the long, slanting rays of milky sunlight glancing off the ribbing of the flats brittle shards of collapsed debris, filled him with a certain poetic exultation. "By the stars," he murmured to himself happily. Bubbling with good humor, he slipped down a little closer to the hole, staying up hard against the overhanging clilT. He was feeling too cheerful to use his rightful advantage over them, and decided to use a handgun, since they had nothing better. This was a mistake, of course. He was only moving along at a hundred miles an hour now. Too slow for safe shooting, particularly witlt llic bumpy air in the hole. But he ha)pily di'-rcg.iidi-il this, as he pushed oX'n a view poi t and blazed away with a zuzz pistol. MnKKt immediately tlic ship lurihr-d in the imeveii air, and he rimld see the tiny thin trace of violet as it swept up and awav off the taruels. One of the men went slown.liei-il cle.mlv in two. But the otlieis h.id seen him. Mark euiN d mildly, some of his high good humor gone, and pulled the car ahoui for another run. 'I'he ehronometer pinged s.trtiingly at him, nniifuing him that he was now a full hour late for Ji'nnette's birthday party, but the code re(uiied the siaoml try. There .is nothing that required h.indwe.iiMinv for ihi's. however, and he slipM-l his strong young hands iroiind the main gun control.  single burst of vioh-t. and one of the men v.mished in a puff of sti-.nn. Gol and eli-an. he told himself with satisf.ietion. But the ki'l man ojiened his )istol onto broad-beam, burning a red flare of gi-neral destiuetion at him. Mark veered around and bore down sli.irplv foi' the last burst. He h.iil to get it over witli and on to Jt mieite. Bill the deadly broad be.im swept bi-low the ear, evacuating the air and throwing the vehicle monienlaiily out of control. Close behiiul. the clilf iMvaine suddenly alive as the Ikmiii engaged it, iiubbling and sjK'wing out huge gouts ol molten rx-k. The airear foloied fire and fell, with Mark burning inside of it, yelling and screaming in pain. It took almost five seconds before tlic charntl brain of Mark's body .sto#iK'd fimclioning. Then it reHe was conscious of the humiimiiedi.itely the remembered pain l)rought rerspiration running down inside the helmet into his eyes. He reached up and removed the headpiece with unsteady hands, groaning softly. it had been some decades since he had last been involved in trouble like this. Killed, yes -- but in a painless, fair fight. Being burned to death was no joke. And that body had been one of his best, with the finest reflex sensory systsm manufactured. The machine purred softly beside him. He thought suddenly and emptily of jennette, and stood up. "Damn," he muttered, crossing the floor, feeling the pleasant warmth of the soft plastic under his feet. "Damn, damn, damn." He stopped before the transparent cover of a storage cabinet, gazing sourly at its contents. Eleven humanoid forms were stiffly erect behind the cover, all broadly resembling him in feature, and differing only in such minor things as height, hair, perhaps the color of the eyes. Each bore the scars of some past clumsiness or accident. "Damn," Mark said again. "That was the only decent body I had to wear. Now what do I do?" He went into the next room and bathed himself in the tepid perfumed mist that fell perpetually from its domed ceiling. If it were anybody but Jennette, there would be no problem. He just would have to .shoot off a quick RT, explaining the situation and excusing himself. Nobody would have minded, least of all himself. Particularly a nofight affair like this one was supposed to be. But not Jennette. Olihh, Jennette. Mark grinned and rubbed the pleasant fluid over his well-caredfor skin. Oh yes, Jennette. There was something about Jennette that he could not quite put his finger on, but it was good. It was wonderously good. Like the bodies she wore. No matter what it was, it was always perfect. She just had the knack of dressing well. Idly he wondered what her protobody was like. There must be some resemblance, of course. That was the law. Identification was very important, and few manufacturers would violate that, even as a simple matter of good taste. But there still would be considerable difference. As he thought about it, he got a strange wistful feeling that he did not quite understand. There was a sort of sadne.ss about it. Jennette seemed oddly different from other people. He liked her much too much. Guiltily he brushed the thoughts aside. Anyway, it didn't matter, he told himself. Due to his carelessness in that last fight, he probably wouldn't even see her tonight, since he had nothing to wear. He stalked out of the shower and gazed again at the bodies in the store room. The only halfway decent one there was that six foot black fellow with the little ears. It used to be his favorite, until he got it smashed one night during a party at his nearest neighbor's. A lialf smile tugged at Mark's lips as he recalled the incident. That had been a no-fight parly, too; but he had managed to smuggle in a small bomb, and set it ofi' right in the middle of the main bedroom. There were at least ten couples there, since it was a big party, and none of them lived. The trouble was, Mark had been pretty badly smashed up him.self, and just managed to get away without losing his body. Now the thing was all scarred up and practically useless for anything e.xcept manual labor. Mark shook his head disgustedly. There was nothing to do but send off the RT to Jennette. But this was her birthday -- He caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection from his transmitter housing and automatically straightened his shoulders a little, then laughed at his image. Then he stopped and contemplated himself further. There was one thing he could do. Many years before, he had an e.xacl duplicate of himself produced, when the vogue for copper colored bodies was at its height. Since then lire fasliion had changed back to the pink, but that old job must still be around somewhere. He hated to do it, though. He had never liked that body. It had been just too accurate, and every time he wore it, it embarrassed him. It had been almost as if he were going outside in his protobody. Which, of course, nobody did. People used their own bodies hundreds of years ago, but it was most uncivilized. Besides, it was tiring, and dangerous, too. Yet -- was it more fun? He wondered. He simply had to make Jennette's )aity. Olhcrwi.se he wouldn't see her for months at least, and the ihouglit of that made him feel funny in his stomai li. M.iik giinmil again, admiring her image in his mind, and set about his t .il.ilogue to find the fund.uncnl.il ficiiicncy of that old copy ol bim.scli. I'kise it, he told liiniself resolutely. Nobody would know it was an cx.ict dupliiate. lie loiateil the il.ita and set It ujj in the transiniltcr. lie had no idea wheie the body was, but that would take care of it.sclf if it were still in good shaiJc. Placing the helmet on his head, he punched the controls and relaxed back on the table. pile of dust-covered trash, the body became suddenly conscious. Mark opened his eyes and looked around, recognition slowly returning. He had forgotten all about this old room, but tlien -- one could hardly remember everything about a full shelter system, what with the hundreds of compartments, endless automatic ctuipment and innumerable connecting passages. Whoever it was who built this one sure had liked comple.xity. He bathed and carefully braided tire long, blueblack hair, simulating somewhat the fashion of the day, and spent some time adjusting a purple scarf over his left shoulder. The purple scarf was sort of a trade mark witli him, and Jennette always admired it. Purple was her favorite color. He made a joke out of it and called it Their color, which was typical of the strange, dangerous behavior she engendered in him. Mark was a little worried as he plunged up toward tlie stratosphere in his extra car. This time he kept clearly in his mind the fact that this was his last serviceable body, and he could take no chances with it getting ruined. Even if he saw a whole multitude of people, all clustered together, he would ignore them, he told himself. Halfway there, however, he spotted a peculiar marking on the scope, and detoured. The peculiar marking followed him. Anxiously, he looked out a clear view panel, but could see nothing in the cold, mist-laden night. The marking grew more definite as he hesitated. It was another car, and there could be no question what it was after. A shot at Mark. He cursed and sucked in his breath, making quick calculations. There was a rolling billow of cobalt fog off to one side, a whole bank of the stuff. Somebody apparently had been having a little game nearby. It was still hot enough, according to his indicators, to discharge anything the other car sent after him, and he would have the added advantage of being invisible to tlie other man's instruments. The only trouble was, once in the fog, he couldn't see anything either, and could be ambushed without difficulty on the way out. The marking on the scope became more definite, and the question settled itself as the other car came between Mark and the cloud. Growling with irritation, Mark swung around and sent a wide angle beam in the direction of his pursuer, watching nervously as the indicators described the pitiful short range of his fire at this setting. The assailant veered off, however, scurrying into the cobalt cloud. Mark grinned. He knew the man would expect him to wait for him to come out, so he swooped down at max acceleration toward the surface. In five minutes he was signaling into Jennette's shelter for permi.ssion to enter. There were servants everywhere -- mechanical things, controlled by electronics and not alive, although they looked it. This was jennette's specialty. She owned a factory that manufactured them for mining on the scalding plains of Mercury, and these had been superficially remodelled to act as .servants. There was the usual government man there, too, running the party. He strutted around under his official sash with ill-concealed self-importance. "Hey you, there -- w'ait a minute," he called to Mark, waving a zuzz pistol in his direction. "Yes?" Mark hesitated, eyed the pistol, and obeyed. "That scarf -- get it off," the man ordered sternly as he approached. The zuzz pistol was level and steady. "Why?" Mark demanded. "It's just a scarf. I always wear one." "You know why," the other man said coldly. "This is a tetotal party. If I let somebody slip a weapon or something in, it would be an awful brawl in no time. You know how people are." The man was right, of course. You can conceal a lot of things in the fabric of a sheer scarf. Reluctantly, Mark undid the catch and handed it over. "Okay. You can pick it up at the entrance when you leave." The officer's amused eyes wrinkled as he looked Mark up and down. "Say, that's a pretty nice job you've got there, man. Mind if I ask who made it?" "It's pretty good," Mark said cautiously. "It's custom made to a private specification." The officer grinned goodnaturedly. "Sure, I understand. That's all right. I'm not from the revenue department. I don't have to do anything about bootlegging." "I don't mean that." Mark protested. "There's nothing illegal -- " The man waved his disregard anyway. "Forget it. It's a nice one, though, .nd that cop#cr color is coming back soon, too. These fashions run in cycles, you know." "Yes," Mark murmured diffidently. 'T thought so, too." "Sure." The officer eyed it speculatively for a moment. "Two point oh one centimeter naval, isn't it? They're the best, of cour.se." Mark nodded shortly, looking away from the talk.itive officer, hoping he would stop. But the man went on. "And I don't have any use for these new non-feeders they've been coming out with recently." "No," Mark mumbled. "It's all right to fix it so that the food is not necessaiy, and it really is a bother to have to feed those old models whether you want to or not. But sometimes you like to eat something just for the fun of it, and with the non-feeder models there's no receptacle for it." Mark nodded, his eyes searching the huge anteroom, gazing hopefully between die moving ranks of robot servants. Then he saw her and caught his breath. low whi.sile in time-honored acclamation tif exi clleiue. The officer followed his g.re and agreed. "Yes," he s.iid in a low voice, "that girl is really Munething. Prisure knows how tci use it. Take that little golden job she's wearing tonight. Nothing to it. But with her, it's tei rifle." He uas right. Jennettc was wearing a slender, soft-looking golden little boily that Mark had nc'er seen before. But it was a real prize. Being hoste.ss, she could have clothes on, and spoi ted a half dozen little bracelets and a jet black bandana around her throat. The thing was draped down oer her left Itrc.ist, and the whole etlect was really Cjuite stunning. "Oh Mark!" she exclaimed, running up with an odd sort of breathlessness. "'mrre late." "Sony Jennette," he replied. "Ran into a little trouble and had to go back for another body." "You must h;i'e missed," she said with amused ticcusation. "I'm surprised ;it you. ".w, there were three of them," he protested. ".nd the last one used a broad betmi." "Never mind, I forgive you," she told him. "Gome along. Let's go look at my garden." Mark grinned hap)ily. "Wonderful ideti. But what about your guests? Are you just going to leave them like tlKil?" "I'his is my birthday," she said. "They can amuse themselves." Then she pulled him down and put her lips to his ear. "Besides," she whispered. "I've got an identical copy with electronic works. No one will even know I've left, unless they get too friendly with it." "Pretty clever," Mark admitted thoughtfully. "But I wouldn't always be so ready to break the law like that." "Who's to know except you, Mark?" She looked up at him with burning, gold-flecked eyes. "You wouldn't tell anybody, would you?" Mark shook his head uncomfortably. "All right, then." They entered the elevator that took them down another half mile to the central living quarters of the ancient shelter. It had been built early in the flux period and remodelled several tiimts. It was one of the best equipped on the planet. "Tell me," Jennette said, gazing appreciatively at the heavy bronze shoulders, "where on earth did you get that?" "I -- Oh, it was just lying around somewhere," Mark mumbled. "I bet," she said. "But it's nice. I like it." Mark just grinned at her, happy for the moment, secure in the knowledge that it would be impossible for her ever to know that it was really identical with his protobody. Not that it would matter, just so long as it was artificial. He listened to the humming of the elevator for a few minutes. When it stopped the door vanished, and the two of them moved out into a sea of wild, colorful beauty. High above them was a simulated sun that made as good a substitute for the real thing as had been developed since the underground movement. "Bright," Mark commented. "Oh, that's right. I've been forcing some Venerian puffers and scent flowers, and raised the radiation level ten decibels. They always do well under a strong sun, you know." She left his arm and moved to a control panel beside the entrance to the elevator. She manipulated something and the sun dimmed a little. "There," she turned around. "Better?" Mark looked at the landscape, then back to her. He grinned. "Too much light." "Oh you -- " she murmured. She touched the controls, and the sun disappeared, being replaced by a huge, mellow moon that sailed majestically on the simulated horizon. It was impossible to tell it from the real thing. "How's that?" "A little dark." Ignoring his comment, she came back and took his arm, and they went strolling across the flowers and grass. "Don't you like my moon, Mark?" "Sure. It's fine. Sort of aphrodisiac, of couree, but -- " "Isn't that what it's for?" Jennette asked innocently. "I dunno. I never had a moon." "Let's sit down here," she said abruptly. T hey were eating pomegranates, biting briefly into them and sucking on the sour juices. The moon had risen higher during the past hour, becoming a little smaller in appearance. It was a peaceful, contemplative scene. Jennette snuggled up against Mark, thoughtfully tracing a design with fruit juice onhis arm. "This is fun," she said softly. "So much more fun than the usual things a person has to do." "Mmmm?" "Oh, you know. Checking reports from the factory, making sure there is plenty of ammunition all the time, ijestering the body manufacturers so you'll always have something decent to wear. Always watching or somebody will sneak in and blow up part of your shelter." "Yeah. Well, guess that's life." Jennette sighed and picked up another fruit. "It gets so tiresome, always basing to keep on the lookout and fighting people. Don't you get bored by it." "Sure, sometimes. It's gotta be done though. Otherwise you couldn't tell what might happen." "Mark -- " Jennette said hesitantly"Yes?" "Mark, would you shoot me if you found me outside your shelter?" She looked coyly up at him. "Well, sure, unless you had a proper, government-authorized permit to be there." Mark turned astonished eyes on her. "What else could I do?" "Oh, but you know I wouldn't do anything to harm your place." "Aw, Jennette," Mark said uncomfortably, "of course you would. Anybody would. If people started acting like that, the whole balance would be upset." She gently stroked his arm where the fruit juice had dried. Her face crinkled up and she giggled. "Maybe you just don't know me." "Let's talk about something else," Mark suggested. "What's the matter? Do I shock you?" Mark laughed and brushed his lips against her shoulder. "I'm pretty hard to shock. Expecially by you." "See?" she replied archly. "You're just as anti-social as I ini. Mark's face clouded. "It's nothing to brag about, though." 'T'it not bragging." She sighed again, and resumed her fruit. Eying it speculatively, she said, "I guess I'm just bored with life, that's all. Sometimes things seem so silly. Like all the times you have to get a new body. You'd think the manufacturers were giving them away free." "Yeah. Not like it used to be. Guess business is pretty good." "Something ought to be done about it." Mark grinned mischievously. "What do you suggest? Build another factory?" "Oh, you know you can't do that. Somebody is always blowing it up." "Well, don't worry. In another hundred years or so, people will start dying off again. These protobodies aren't as serviceable as the manufactured kind." "Yes, but if they keep producing new people in the Decanting Centers, what good is that going to do?" "I dunno. Blow up the Decanting Centers, maybe." "Maybe," Jennette said, glancing impishly at the man beside her, "we ought to just stop wearing these silly old manufactured bodies entirely." "Yes?" Mark tasted a pomegranate, made a face, and tried another. "Just what do you suggest people wear?" "They could go around in their protobodics." "What?" Mark looked swiftly and scarchingly at her, alarm on his face. "Why Mark," she laughed disarmingly. "You're such a righteous beast, aren't you?" "Great Atoms, jennette," he said, gazing intently at her goldendecked eyes, wondering what strange things went on inside that lovely head. "You mean go around all the time as if w'e were savages? Why that's illegal, immoral, and besides -- besides, it's dangerous. Suppose somebody took a shot at you? You've only got one protobody, you know." "A clever fighter like you shouldn't have too much trouble writh that, if you're careful," she said gaily. "And I'm pretty good at that myself." Mark took a slow deep breath as he decided that she was just teasing him. "I'm surprised at you, Jennette." She shrugged. "I'm bored, I guess. I'd like to try something new, just for excitement. Personally, sometimes I think the whole social system we have is pretty silly, anyway." "Atoms," Mark mumbled. "No need to swear about it," she chided him. "Come on, Mark. Just think about it for a minute. And be consistant." "Consistancy is all right for a free psi," he said. "It sure doesn't do a protobody any good." Jennette laughed scornfully. "I'll bet you believe all that stuff they feed you in the Decanting Center about ancient history." " 'Course not," Mark said defensively. "All right then. Why follow all these rules of social conduct if there's no good basis for them?" ".Aw, but there is," he replied seriously. "There was a big war -- way back centuries before we were decanted out at Center." "Hah," said Jennette. "Sure. And it was a whole lot of people w'ho cooperated with each other in it. There must have been hundreds of them -- it was an awfully big war. Hundreds of people, all on one side, all fighting together against the other side." "I don't believe it." "It's true, I tell you," Mark insisted religiously. "Hundreds and hundreds of people. Maybe even as many as a thousand, all dressed alike -- with clothes, I mean. And they didn't shoot each other -- they just killed the people they were fighting -- the hundreds of people on the other side." "Other .side of what?" Mark frowned. "Oh, I guess that is just an expression. But that's what happened, anyway. Before civilization got started, people cooperated like that." "That's just a whole lot of theory," Jennette Insisted. "Nobody's going to make me ever believe people used to act like that. Besides, there just aren't enough people around to have all those mythical wars." Patiently, Mark continued. "I'm telling you, Jennette, this is more than theory. There are still some records left from those days." "Prove it." "All right. That's not hard. Somebody had to build the factories, didn't they? And the Decanting Centers?" "Robots." "Who built the first robot factory?" Jennettc considered. Then she shrugged petulantly. "Ob all right. Maybe a few people did cooperate. But not hundreds of them. People just don't act like that." "Well, they did. And, of course, the obvious thing happened. Since thev cooperated in some things, they cooperated in a lot of thing.s, even fighting. That'.s liow they could make war, you know -- not the nice, social sort of fighting we do now. And you can imagine w'hat happened. You can kill an awful lot of people awful fast, if a gang gets together on it like that. If they didn't h.ive the artificial bodies and the psi transfer transniitters to make them come alise, tliere wouldn't have been anybody left after a while. 'I'liat cooperation is rough stuir." "Obviously," she commented dryly. "Well, that's the reason for everything, then. Pietty soon the factories couldn't turn out hypnobodies fast enough and #eode luid to fight in their protobodies sometimes. But after a few centuries, the leaders began to get civilied, and decided to put an end to all tliis cooperative and agreed not to coo)eiate with each other in anything in the future." "It stand.s to reason," Mark concluded, "people had to learn to be civilized. They weren't just born that w'ay. It's -- it's culture." "Pouf," said Jennette critically. "All right," he growled, biting viciously into a pomegranate. "Let's hear your big story if it's so good." legs and contemplated her wiggling toes. "Oh, I don't know. I don't have any real ideas. But I know Ix'tter than to believe that sort of nonsense. People just ari'n't like that, and you know it." She hesitated thoughtfully, tht.'n continued. "Maybe a feu of them got together now and then for a party or something like this. But not hundreds of them." When Mark did not reply, she laughed and said, "I guess I'm just feeling riscpie tonight." "You sure aie," he mumbled. "Of course there aie parts of the old mythology that seem rather interesting -- beautil ul , even -- " "It's not mythology'." "Liki' the part that deals with marriage." She waited. Mark dutifully echoed, "Deals with what?" "Marriage." Mark considered it. Then he shook his head. "NN'hat's that?" "See? she taunted him. "You don't know everything like you think you do. Marriage," she explained, "was a sort of cooperative agreement that the ancient people were supposed to have entered into." "Sure, just like I said," Mark stated with assurance. "Hundreds of people did it. Tlu.-y got involved in this marriage agieement, and made war on each other with it." "What a dope. Marriage was an agreement between just two peopie. And that much I might believe. Hundreds is too much." "It was hundreds," Mark insisted. "It was not. It was just two. And what's more, it wjis between a man and a woman. They lived together with their protobodies and agreed to cooperate together, and they made children and took care of them until they grew up." "Why that's thirt)' or forty years," Mark exclaimed. "Even tlie wars didn't last that long. That's really nonsense. Besides, you can only make children in the Decanting Centers. And it's all done by machines." "Well, maybe it is a little far fetched. But I think it's cute." "Humph." There was a few minutes silence. Then Tennette said softly, "Mark -- " "Yes?" "Mark, you like me a lot, don't you?" Mark squirmed uncomfortably, and stared at the artificial moon. "Don't you?" she insisted. "More than you ever have anybody else?" "Well, guess that's right," he admitted lamely. "A whole lot more than I should." She reassuringly patted his hand with her little one. "That's all right, Mark. I won't tell anybody. Besides, I feel just the same way about you." Mark nodded without .speaking, worriedly studying the vague markings on the bright luminous disk in the simulated sky. "Mark, don't you ever want to see the real me?" she inquired urgently. "Don't you sometimes feel kind of empty because you can never really have me -- know me, because all you ever see is a manufactuied thing that only somewhat resembles what I am really like?" Mark blushed. She had come a little too close to the uncomfortable truth. But he rcfu.sed to admit it, at least to her. He mumbled an indistinct denial. "Are you sure?" she said, grabbing his hands, gazing intently into his eyes, forcing him to look at her. "Wouldn't you sometime like to come down to my transmitter quarters?" "But -- " "And see and touch my protobody -- the thing I really am?" "Aw -- " "Scared?" "Maybe I am." "That's silly." Mark swallowed and said stiffly, "Just becau.se there is a no-fight clause in your invitation tonight doesn't necessarily mean I have to follow it, you know. You don't need weapons. I could strangle your protobody easily." "You wouldn't," she said confidently. "You sure don't think much of me, do you?" "I think just the same of you as you do of me," she said simply. With impulsive hunger, Mark threw his arms around her, holding her tightly against him, nuzzling her, smelling the perfume of her hair, incoherently mumbling into her ear. "Jennette, Jennette," he sang, "I think more of you than anything. I love you. I know it's wrong, but I would never even shoot you, because sometimes it hurts you, and I wouldn't want you to feel even the slightest discomfort." He stopped, took a deep breath, and added meekly, "I'm sorry." "But Mark," she wliispered. "Why is it really so wrong?" "You know." "Suppose I told you that this body i.s my protobody right now?" she asked earnestly. "But it isn't." "It is," she said faintly. Mark's breath hi.ssed as he gasped, jennette was blushing all over her body, heightening the golden color of it. He let her go, and she slid off his lap onto the shadowed grass beside him. She bit her lip. "I didn't really mean to tell you -- yet." Tliere was silence. Mark said quietly, "That's all right, Jennette." "You aren't angry with me, are you?" "No," he said slowly. "Not angry." "Mark -- " "Yes?" "Now that we're Into this thing," she asked hopefully, "why don't we try this marriage agreement -- you know, like the ancients did. It seems like such a beautiful thing to do when two people like us -- you know." "I don't know." Mark sliook his head doubtfully. "I just don't know about it." "Why not? You wouldn't have to n'ally stay here. It could be just a secret agreement between us. And you could come and see me whenever you liked." "It all seems so unreal," lie muttered. They lapsed into tliougiit, both avoiding looking at the other. There was no sound except a faint sighing of wind in the leaves of the well trimmed shrubbery. "Suppose," Mark said finally, "suppose other people started doing this thing? This coojjerative agreement? Lots of people must want to, just like we do." "I suppose so," she admitted. "I went through this once before," he wt'nt on absently. ".Mioiit ninety years ago I met this woman -- slie was awfully nice. Clever. Understood things. Not like you, of course, but still she was vi'r nice. I thought about it tlu'ii." "What happened to her?" Jennette asked numbly. "She died after a w'hile...She was pretty old. Oh, we didn't do anything," he hastened to add. "We kept it all on a jjcrfcctly moral and honest plane -- never s:nv each other e.xcept at authorized government sex parties, like this, and all. Fought whenever we r.ui across e.ieh other outside. But I remember thinking at the time that some sort of agreement would he nice. We got along awlully well. I could never understand vvliat she saw in me." "I can," Jennette whispered. "I'his i.s just the same, only a lot mure .so," Mark went on thoughtfully. "And it's wrong. You know it's wrong. Suppose a lot of people started it. Fir.st thing you know, whole groups of people would be cooperating with each other again. And when thev got intc) trouble outside, or planned an innocent little raid on somebody's shelter, they would all work together on it...And pretty soon, tlicrc would be other groups cooperating in fighting back again. Tliey'd have to. "And that, of course, would be the end of civilization, ftetty soon, there would be nothing left, and everybody would be dead." Jennette did not reply when he stopped. She turned her head away, but Mark could hear her uneven breathing. "We have a re.sponsibility toward society at large. We know it. We've been well educated and we aren't savages. Neither one of us can get away from it. It might be wonderful at first, but our conscience would come out sooner or later, and the whole thing would be ruined." She rubbed her face with her cupped hands, shaking her head. "I suppose -- " she murmured unhappily. "You'd hate yourself for it after a while," he said. For a few minutes, Jennette stared at the grass before her feet, pulling up little blades of it one by one. Then Mark stood up, and she flashed him a small, wistful, damp .smile. Together they walked back toward the elevator, stepping quietly and almost furtively on the soft ground. "If it weren't for that -- " he started. "I understand," she replied quickly. Taking hold of his arm, she said, "I'm sony." "Sure." Mark grinned affectionately at her. "Come on. Let's see if they've been having any good fights upstairs." They stepped into the elevator and disappeared. 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For such is the law of supply and demand! imp of panic tliat lived under the garish rug of this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake and stare from the blank space to his left where been. His fists clenched in anger -- at himself. He'd never been the sort to make allowance for his own weakness and didn't propose to begin doing so now, at age cightv'crash well over a year ago and it was time he got used to his widowerhood and quit searching for her every morning. But even after he gave himself the bawling out, orientation came slowly. The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself it was hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer, and had a right to be in this single bed, alone in seen. The right to be there was all wrong. He disliked the house and hated all its furni.shings. The cybernetic cooker in the kitchen; the magnetically-suspended divans in the living room ; the three-dimensional color broadcasts he could so readily project to any wall or ceiling; the solartropic machinery that would turn any face of the pentagonal house into the sun or the shade or the breeze: the lift that would raise the entire building a hundred feet into the air to give him a wider -iew and more privacy -- all left him dissatisfied. They were new. None had been only to the extent required by law to fulfill his duty as a consumer. "You must change your home because of the change in your family composition," the Ration Board's bright young female had neral. "Your present furnishings are obsolete. S'ou must rc)lace them." "And if I don't?" He'd been truculent. "I doubt we'd have to invoke the penalties for criminal underconsumption," she'd explaini'd airily. "There are plenty of other possible courses of action. Maybe w'e'd just get a decision that you're prematurely senile and unable to care for yourself. Then you'd go to a home for the aged where they'd help you consume -- with forced feedings and such." So here he was, in this homeof-bis-own riiat seemed to belong to someone else. Well, at least he wasn't senile, even if he did move a little slowly, now, getting out of bed. He'd warm up soon. All by himself. With no one's help. And as far as these newfangled gadgets in the bathroom were concerned, he could follow any wellwritten set of directions. He'd scalded himself that time only because the printed instructions were so confusing. He took a cold shower this time. When the airtowel had finished blowing and he was half dry -- not wholly dry because the machine wasn't adapted to people who took ice-cold showers -- he went in to the clothing maihinc. He punched the same few holes in its tape that he put there every day, stood in the right place, and in due course emerged with his long, rawboned frame covered by magenta tights having an excessively baggy seat. He knew the costume was neither pretty nor fashionable and that its design, having been wholly within his control when he punched the tape, revealed both his taste and his mood. He didn't care; there was no one in the world whom he wanted to impress. He looked in the dressing room mirror not to inspect the tights but to examine his face and see if it needed shaving. Too late he remembered that twenty years had elapsed since the permanent depilatories were first invented and ten since he'd used one and stopped having to shave. There were too many changes like that in this gadget-mad world ; too many new ways of doing old things. Life had no stability. He stalked into the kitchen wishing he could skip breakfast -- anger always unsettled his stomach. But everyone was required to eat at least three meals a day. The vast machine-records system that kept track of each person's consumption would reveal to the Ration Board any failure to use his share of food, so he dialed Breakfast Number Three -- tomato juice, toast, and coffee. The signal-panel flashed "Under-Eating" and he knew the state machine-records system had advised his cybernetic cooker to increase the amount of his consumption. Chin in hands he sat hopelessly at the kitchen table awaiting his meal, and in due course was served prunes, waffles, bacon, eggs, toast, and tea -- none of which he liked, c.xcept for toast. He ate dutifully nevertheless, telling himself he wasn't afraid of the ration-cops who were always suspecting him of underconsumption because he was the tall skinny type and never got fat like most people, but that he ate what the cooker had given him because his father had been unemployed for a long time during the depression seventy-five years before, so he'd never been able to bring himself to throw food away. Failure to consume had in the old days been called "overproduction" and by any name it was bad. So was war -- he'd read enough about w'ar to be glad that form of consumption had finally been abolished. Still it was a duty and not a pleasure to eat so much, and a relief to get up and put the dirty dishes into the dispo.sal machine and go up topside to his gyro. D isgustingly, he had a long wait before departure. After climbing into the g)'ro and transmitting his flight plan he had to sit seething for all of fifteen minutes before the Mount Diablo Flight Control Center deigned to lift his remote-controlled gyro into the air. And w'hen the signal came, ascent was so awkwardly abrupt it made his ears pop. He couldn't even complain. The Center was mechanical, and unequipped to hear complaints. It routed him straight down the San Joaquin Valley -- a beautiful sight from fifteen thousand feet, but over-familiar. He fell asleep and awakened only when unexpectedly brought down at Bakersfield Field. Above his instrument panel the printing-receiver said "Routine Check of Equipment and Documents. Not Over Five Minutes' Delay." But it could take longer. And tardiness was subject to official punishments as a form of unproductiveness. He called George Harding at the plant. Harding apparently had been expecting the call. His round blulf face wore a scowl of annoyance. "Don't you ever watch the newscasts?" he demanded angrily. "They began this 'Routine Check' you're in at five this morning, and were broadcasting pictures of the resulting traffic jam by six. If you'd filed a flight plan for Santa Barbara and come on down the coast you'd have avoided all this." "I'm not required to listen to newsca.sts," Fred replied tartly. "I own the requisite number of receivers and -- " "Now, listen, Fred," Harding interrupted. "We need you down here so hurry up!" Fred heard him switch of! and sat for a moment trembling with rage. But he ended by grinning wryly. Everyone was in the same boat, of course. For the most part, people avoided thinking about it. But he could now see himself as if from above, spending his life Hitting back and forth between home and plant, plant and home; wracking his brain to devise labor-saving machines while at the plant, then rushing home to struggle with the need to consume their tremendous output. Was he a man? Or was he a caged squirrel racing in an exercisc-whcel, running himself ragged and with great effort producing absolutely nothing? He wasn't going to do it any longer, by golly! He was going to -- "Good morning!" A chubby young man in die H-a-green uniform of a ration-cop ojrened the door and climbed uninvited into the cockpit. "May I ( beck the upto-dateness of your ship's eipiipment, please?" Fred didn't answer. He didn't have to. The young officer was already in the manual pilot's .seat, checking the secondary controls. In swift routine he tried motor and instruments, and took the craft briefly aloft. Down again, he demanded Fred's papers. The licenses that pertained to the gyro were in order, but there was trouble over Fred's personal documents: his ration-book contained far too few sales-validations. "You're not doing your share of consuming, Oldtimer," the young cop said mildly. "Look at all these unused food allotments! Want to cause a depression?" "No." "Man, if you don't eat more than this, we'll have mass starvation!" "I know the slogans." "Yes, but do you know the penalties? Forced feeding, compulsory consumption -- do you think they're fun?" "No." "Well, you can file your flight plan and go, but if you don't spend those tickets before their e.xpiration dates. Mister, you'll have cause to regret it." With a special pencil, he sensemarked the card's margins. Fred felt that each stroke of the pencil was a black mark against him. He watched in apprehensive silence. The young cop was also silent. When finished he wordlessly returned the identification, tipped his cap, and swaggered off, his thick neck red above his green collar. Fred found he'd had more than enough of swaggering young men with beefy red necks. That added to his disgust with the constant struggle to produce and consume, consume and produce. Vague, wishful threats froze as determination: he absolutely wasn't going through any more of it. He filed a flight plan tliat would return him to his home, and in due course arrived there. The phone rang in his ears as he of)cned the cockpit. He didn't want to answer, and he stayed on the roof securing the gyro and plugging in its battery-charger. But he couldn't ignore the bell's insistent clamor. When he went downstairs and switched on the phone, George Harding's round face splashed on the wall. "Fred," he said, "when we talked a few hours ago, you forgot to say you were sick. I phoned to confirm that for the Attendance Report. Did this call get you out of bed?" He could see it hadn't. Therefore Fred knew he must be recording the audio only, and not the video; trying to give him a break with the Attendance people and coach him on the most appeasing amwers. A well-meant gesture, but a false one. And Fred was fed up with the false. "I forgot nothing," he said bluntly. "I'm perfectly well and haven't been near Ix-d." "No'v, wait," George said hastily. "It's no crime to be sick. And -- ah -- don't say anything you wouldn't want preserved for po.sterity." "George, I'm not going to play along with you." Fred insisted. "This busine.#s of producing to consume and consuiTiing to produce has got me down. It's beyond all reason!" "No, it isn't. You're an excellent mechanical engineer, Fred, but you're not an economist. That's why you don't understand. Just excuse me for a minute, and I'll show you." He left the field of view. Fred waited incuriously for him to return, suddenly conscious of the fact that he now had nothing better to do with his time. George was back in less than a minute, anyhow. "O.K." he said briskly. "Now, where were we? Oh, yes. I just wanted to say that production is a form of consumption, too -- even the production of machine-tools and labor-saving devices. So there's nothing inconsistent -- " "What are you trying to do?" Fred demanded. Don't lecture me -- I know as much econ as you do!" "But you've got to come back to work, Fred! I want you to use your rations, put your shoulder to the wheel, and confonn generally. The policing's too strict for you to try anythina; else, fclla -- and I like you loo wi'll to want to sue you -- " "I don't need you to protucl me, George," Fred said stiffly. "I guess yc'u mean well enough. But goodhye." He switched off. Not a sound stirred the air in that lonely new house exaqjt the slight wheeze of his brcatliing. lie felt tired. Bone weary...s if all the fatigues of his eighty-six years were accumulalecl within him. He stood by a window and stared blindly out. Evei'yone seemed to have becai heckling him, .shoving him aiound, making him change all his w'ays every minute. He didn't want to change. lie didn't want to he forever adajting to new gadgets, new fads, new ways of cloing things. I'le thought of the village.s of India, substantially unchanged for thri'( four, five thousand years. The villagcr.s had no money, so they couldn't be consumers. Maybe they had the natural way to live. Statically...Also, frugally. But no. It was loo frugal, too slalii'. He'd Iieaid and read too much about the siaivation, jiestilencc, peonage and other ills plaguing tho.se Indian villagcr.s. 'I'hey didn't have life licked, eiiht'i'. The Indians had not enough, die Americans, too much. One was as fiad as the other. And lie was in the middle. He leil the v'indow he'd lieen .staring from unsceingly and walked to the foyer eoiilrol-panel. Tiiere he pushed the button that would cause the liousc to rear a hundred feet into the air on its titaniumaluminum plunger. d'hen lie went hack to the winclow to w.ilcli the ground recede. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He decided the sens.uion ,l an illuA young man's oice said, "Mr. Lubway, we need you." so Fred turned, reads to smile. Hr didn't smile, He was eontronled by anuiher ration-cop. dark and hefty. He seemed very kindly, in hi.s olhcial sort of w'.iy. 'Mr, George Harding sent me," he exjilained. "He asketl us to look you uj ami see if we could help." "Yes:' " "You seem to havibeen a little well -- staring out that window while your house rises dangi'i'misly high. Mr. Geoige Harding didn't like the mood you're in, and neither rio I, Mr. laihway. I'm afraid you'll have to come to the linspilal. We can't liavi' a valu.ihle citizen like you falling out that window, e.in we? ' "What do you mean, 'valuable citizen'? I'm no use to anybody. There's ilenty of engineers, and more being graduated every semester. 'i'uu don't need me." "Gh, yes, we do! " Shaking his head, the young raiioii-eop took a firm gri) on Fred's right biceps. "You've got to come .ilong with me till vour outlook elianges. Mr Luhw Liv." "Now. see here!" Fred olijerted, trying unsuccesslully to iwisl lier of the ofileer's grip. "'ou'vc no (Continued on piifit: #) The Work-out Planet Colonial life on Mars with a "chicken" like Shirley was enough to make any Earthman shudder. But what can you do when you are mentally incompetent and legally trapped? I was in our study-lab working on my home cyclotron. The cyclotron was so new that Nora hadn't paid for it yet, but at least the solution to my troubles was at hand. Now I could finish my einsteins. That year I had been unable to find work for more than six weeks -- all because I hadn't finished my einsteins. Most people these days finish them by the age of twentyone or two, but I was thirty-two and beginning to worry. So was Nora. It was more than a little embarra.ssing that the greatest female scientific theorist in New York City had a husband with a low IQ. So after having held my last job for only two days -- a job which was hardly more than an office boy's -- I had gone out and bought the home cyclotron. I thoroughly intended to put an end to this nonsense about my being an intellectual lightweight. I had taken a vow not to leave home until I had finished my einsteins and though Nora lifted her brows at the cost of the machine, she had said nothing. Perhaps because she was too wrapped up in her work on the "Mathematical Point-Count of the Surfaces of Great Paintings." "Doesn't anyone answer doorbells on earth, Mr. Singer?" I turned in surprise to sec a young woman standing in the door. Then iny heart sank. It was Nora's cousin from Mars, Shirley Remington. She looked very odd indeed. She wore a light wool dress that outlined her body instead of a leisure-work smock or the standard female coveralls. Her hair was too long and waved, a mass of bronze, making her head look heavy to me brcau!C the female hutch haircut haiirt changed in fifty years. She wore archaic lipstick on her mouth and her eyebrows were neat and plucked which stamped her as a Colonial. I had seen pictures of her when Nora's uncle Remington had vi'ited F.arth alxut three years before. At that time he had the crazy idi-a that she should come to Earth to find a husband, since men were so short in the colonies, but we'd talk'd hitn out of it then. "Hello," I said, trying to bide my shock at her ugliness. "What brings you all the way from Mars?" "Didn't Nora tell you I was coming?" she asked in surprise. "No." I said. Her face showed no signs of work at all; no lines on her skin, no red veins in the eves. A smooth, shiny complexion like the ugly, unmarked jx'tal of a garden lose. She even bad a tan from being outdoors and not working very hard. "Quite frankly." she said, "I've come to New York to find a suitable and pleasing mate. We've had the usual cosmic ray storms on Mars and the male situation is fantastic. So when Nora said for me to come on ahc.id and m i' what I could do in New York, I came flying -- or rather rocketing." That struck me as queer. Of course Nora would be mildly interested in the marital success of her cousin, but Nora has very little time for such fixilishiu'ss and trying to introduce this ugly girl (nvioii hose!) around in New S'ork would be a 'hecr waste of effort. "Excuse me for sounding doubtful, Mis Remington." I said, "but you don't have a line on your face. Your figure is too youthful. It's too curvy to be frank with you. No man on Earth would look at you twice." "I realir.e my shortcomings," she said with an undisturbed grin. "But Cousin Nora is a very smart person and she told me to come. I'm leaving the answers to her." Disgusted that I had to inteiTupt my work, I led the girl to the spare room. There was the smell of Howers about her, some artificial concoction she called "perfume" and a long way from the socially acceptable aroma of perspiration that every attractive young Earth girl favors. I accidentally touched her while picking up her luggage and shuddered at her softness. N ora was in her lab behind the garage. Dr. Ryder was there also. I knew they were very busy, working on Nora's demonstration to le given tliat evening before the Society of Electrostatic Engineers. But I couldn't help puzzling over Nora's intentions. Certainly she knew that my work on the einsteins liad to be gotten through with at all possible speed and she couldn't expect me to jockey her unattractive cousin around the city on a fruitless hunt for a man. Dr. Ryder was in the harness that Nora had designed. It was a very clever contraption, destined to open a whole new field of leisure-work. Nora had an original Rembrandt on the scanning surface and her computer was scanning the work of the old master carefully, reading each and every brush stroke he had made. She had a photospectrometer set up alongside -- one of those devices which can distinguish over paint was mixed to the proper shade by automatic devices. The artist -- in this case Dr. Ryder -- was .standing Ix'fore a canvas witli his arms locked in a sort of harness. As the scanner read out each brush stroke Rembrandt had made on that original painting centuries ago, the harness duplicated the stroke in terms of motion on Ryder's arms, controlled by an analog servomechanism loop. Ryder was painting a Rembrandt which, when finished, would be indistinguishable from the original except for age effects. No value in duplicating Rembrandt, of course. The value was in training the artist's muscles. After Ryder had painted Rembrandt and Van Gogh and a half-dozen other great artists for hour after hour, he would have some concept of how the masters worked. In si.x months he would know more about painting teclmiques than a man could learn in ten years under the old system. This exciting technique, designed for leisure work, was just another Remington Singer's Art-Aid, she called it. "I thought I told you we were busy," said Nora. Nora turned off the Thompson Probe and Ryder slipped out of the harness with a sigh, exercising his tired anns. "Your cousin from Mars is here," I said. "I deem that important enough to interrupt you. Especially when she tells me you encouraged her to come to Earth on a fool's errand." Nora looked at Bob Ryder and he looked at her. I didn't like that look. "I think she's very wise to come to earth to find a man," said Nora. "Her looks are all against her." Nora is consciou.s of licr own great beauty. She's lived a full life. I'liough only three years older than #, she looks fifty. The hard lines of her face, the deep pouches undi'r her eyes, and the bent posture of her body give her a great animal attraction. I have seen men stop in sheer astonishment at her admirable work-worn figure. "Standards of beauty are different on Mars," said Nora. "If she's brought money, she has a chance," said Bob. "And I suppose I'm the one to take her around am! intiotluee her -- " Nora laughed. "Now. Hal. don't get excited. You arc out of a job -- " "I'm working hard on my einstelns -- " "And you conijrletcly ruined my digital read-outs on the 'Mathematical Point-Count System' last week, and so I'd think you could make yourself useful to someune in my family." "For years," I said angrily, "you've complained because you've practically supported me. Now with the new home cyclotron I can get my eiiisteins done and maybe find a decent job. That's all I'm tiying to do and cacli day'i delay means another day that I'm a stone around your neck." "Oh, now, Hal, you mustn't feel that way." "Having a low IQ is no crime," smiled Bob Ryder. "'h, if I had a # I'd be proud. At least it sets you apart in a city where the dull normal is #." "The Thompson Probe gives me headaches and so I work slower. Mr. Scientist," I said. "Someday I may surprise yon all." "Someday," said Nora with a sigh, "yon may even be smart enough to figure out how to distingui.sh molecules of dust from jaiiit molecules on iny Mathematical Point-Count System of Art. That's more than I can do. But meanwhile Shirley is here and she's brought quite a large sum of money with hei which has to he taken care of and you can make yourself useful by taking her to Mr. DuPres." I felt a wave of relief. Smart Nora! Mr. DuPres was our lawyer and the logical man to handle Shirley's jn'ohlem...s a member (jf one of the profesions he was in the bottom quarter of society, for on F.arth the tcclinical skills predominate. Therefore he would be ukid to handle .Shirley ftsr a fee...And being acquainted with lawyers, teachers, divines, doctors and other rilTraff, he could jrolrtibly find somebody for Sbirley, someone of low taste who would accept the Martian idea of beauty. "That's diH'crent." I said. "Well, be off with her!" cried Nora with entlursiastn. "And Lifter the lawyer's show her some of New York, if you wain. I'll not be lionnfor supper anyway, since Bob and I have to leave early for the demonstration." My relief ihatiged to anxiety. Nora was too cheerful about the whole thing. "DuPres may rn.it be at his office. It's Saturday al lernni m." "DuPres will be at his office," said Bob. "I don't know of a lowly professional in New York who can make a living on a five day workweek." "I'll call just to make sure," said Nora. "I wanted to talk to him anyway." I left them. I paused to make the complicated signal that brought the car out of the garage automatically, and I thought I heard a burst of laughter from the lab. My uneasiness grew. I'm not a jealous man, but Nora and Bob make a fine couple, he with his white hair and lined face and Nora with her workseared body. And when they get together they seem to talk down to me like a couple of parents to a simpleminded child. It would be well for me to get my einsteins done as soon as possible. A S WE drove downtown I had to explain to Shirley about our work-week. No one considers their job as important as their leisurework any more. In fact, employers have been trying to push through the # day workweek. I had to explain that to Shirley, because on Mars the employers want to get the most out of their workers and the workers want to give as little as possible. "It's simple," I said. "On Earth, leisure-work and hobbies increa.se the efficiency of the person. Take a man on a straight office job. In the office he may be merely shuffling papers around. But in his leisure-work he may bo doing garden chemistry or a study of the molecular structure of plastics. His leisure-work is so difficult that ordinary oflfice work becomes very easy for him and he can do twice as much in half the time -- because his leisure-work teaches him to think. Today work is the chief pleasure of mankind. At his office. Around the home. And in the allimportant leisure-work that used to be called hobbies." "All because of the Thompson Probe?" "All because of the Thompson Probe. It has made the final revolution in mankind -- the greatest since the Industrial Revolution. For centuries mankind complained that the layman could never catch up with science. Today all is changed. By the time he's reached his majority the average man (or woman) has become the equivalent of a graduate physics major in the old days. Science has a pretty hard time keeping up with us today," I said proudlyWe went past a large building that hummed with activity. "What's that?" she asked pointing. I laughed. "The public library." "The library! It looks like a mob scene. Why, back home on Mars you'd see a crowd like that in front of the theatre but there's never a crowd at the library." "They keep the libraries open all night long," I said. "They have had to cut book loan time to one week so that everybody will have a chance at them. Study is an imptortant part of leisure-work, especially the classics and heavy scientific literature. A book can't be a bestseller any more unless it's pretty meaty on science." A traffic policeman had his head bent over an experiment he was doing with a vacuum jar, and so I scooted across on a changing light and ended up in a mob that overflowed the sidewalk. "What's tliat crowd for?" I shot a sidelong glance at the girl and felt a tingle of pleasure. Living with a scientist of Nora's mentality, I am usually the one to ask Cjuestinns. Despite the girl's naivete, she really wanted to know, and I didn't give her the look of impatience that Nora and her friends are always giving me when I ask questions. "This is a w'ork-out," I said, stopping our vehicle. "Leisure-work has its bad features. But we can expect this, the old principle of loss and gain, you know. For every advantage there is a disadvantage. To the truly ohjectise mind, there is no purpose in hiding the bad features of our lives." The man was doing his last workout. For thirty or more years he had been using a Thoinjjson Probe. He had worked hard for each # hours out of # under the Probe, every day of his life. The energy released by that machine had finally set its pattern on his ntTve cells. The day finally came when he turned olT his Probe -- but couldn't stop working. He had to keep going, burning him.self out. He had been digging a patch of ground with a pick. The pick pounded the dirt with sludding blows and at each stroke the man gave a half-ciy of anguish because the rest of his body was tired abnormally tired after the years of ceaseless actis ity. The crowd about him was patient, grim-faced and respectful. Since no one has tune any more for funerals, it is social custom to attend any work-out you see and pay homage to the dying with applause. The man raised his pick, gave a shriek and dropped to his knees as his heart e.xploded inside of him. He made some futile, erratic gestures, patting the ground and crawling loi a moment in a spasmodic fashion, then he shoved his face into the dirt, quivered, and lay still. The crowd applauded sombrely for his soul and then lieuan to melt as a woman came out of the house with a home emlialming kit and began to arrange his limbs... me again of her repugnantly soft body. "Do people just die like that?" "He led a hajrpy, full life," I said. "He was probably fifty-two, three. No one lives any longer any more. Last year a man of fifty-eight w'as discovered and he caused a sensation. But in terms of work we accomplish four, five times as much as our ancestors who lived to be sLxty-.seventy. And we're not as neurotic." She sighed. "Doesn't anybody have fun on Earth?" "What kind of fun?" "Oh, you know. Parties, and the beach and going to bars. Eating fine dinners and going to concerts and shows." I was in a hurry to get rid of her, but I couldn't pass that remark up. Chuckling, I swung a couple of blocks out of the way to show her the largest movie theatie in New Yoik. It's hidden beivseen the #story All-Centuries Art Museum and one of the hundreds of buildings of the enlarged New York University. It has one hundred seats. "Martin and Lewis," she said in surprise. I smiled proudly. "We don't make fictional movies any more," I said. "Not since the Thompson Probe. This film is over two hundred years old and the only people who come to see it are the very young children and ofT-planet visitors." "But I saw a TV set in your living room." "Sure. Most of the programs are put on by the universities and the scientific institutes. Last year the convention of the Institute of Applied Science had an all-time record were some really fine papers -- " "On Mars people watch baseball," die said frowning. "Don't you even have that?" "Baseball? Sounds familiar," I said. "Wasn't that the game they played on ice with skates and sticks?" She made a sound of protest in her throat. Suddenly she put her hand on my arm. "Stop! There's a bar. My God, I could stand a drink -- " I Slopped reluctantly. I hadn't been in a bar since I met Nora. Drinking fuddles the mind and prevents clear thinking necessary to work. There aren't very many bars, and they're mostly attended by antiquarians. This one was dimly lighted in the true tradition, repulsively inefficient. Shirley was sighing for the nostalgic New York of magnificent bars and restaurants she'd read about in history books. She fell to talking to the bartender who was a hoarse-voiced old baboon of an Irishman, who obviously drank his own wares. "Look what this dag-nabbed Thompson Probe has went and did," he said. "It's went and eliminated sex." He leaned over the bar and winked at Shirley and pinched her .soft arm. "Take you now, Ma'm. In the old days you would've been a knockout." "How did they went and eliminate .sex?" asked Shirley, innocently cuddling forward on the ancient bar stool. "Like Freud went and said," said the bar-keep. "You take a baby, well, that little child is curious about hissclf. Right?" "Right?" asked Shirley of me, sipping her drink. "Right," I said glumly. I was thinking back to the day I met Nora. She was doing a study on "Stimulants and the Creative Mind." In those days ten years ago she was merely a bright student and I was a thorough-going antiquarian. I spent a lot of time in the bars. I had a chip on my shoulder against the world. The Thompson Probe that everybody used gave me a headache and I was way behind my friends in achievement. I was probably headed for a Clinic, but Nora saved me. She was always one to improve the world. Maybe she thought .she could remake me. Anyway, she tried hard for ten years... "That baby is curious about his body," said the bartender. "Then about his mother's body and finally about others. So he goes and grows up and this curiosity went and got sublimated." "At Sublimation Junction," I said remembering an old tune and letting the bubbles from the drink ping at my nose. "You know a big joke?" said the bartender. "You take an adult, a scientist. You take a big-dome, like Dr. Deveriiig oieven this Nora Remington Singer dame tliese giant brain tyires. all they're doing is being sublimated. Scientific curiosity is just a final result of the same old curiosity the kid had in his cradle. So what do they mean, giving papers on how to count up the #aint dots on some picture, painted by some old-timer?" Shirley grinned at me. "So what do they mean, Hal? These Nora Remington types?" "The Thompson Prove allows total sublimation," I said del'eieively. "Freud pointed out the los and gain factor in sublimation. Without sublimation, civilization couldn't exist. Of course, the primitive instincts continue to exist. Except that now the sex-drive is mostly swallowed in the curiosity sublimation. That's why a body that shows the effect of work is attractive, and a smooth, unmarked one like yours isn't." "You're mighty ugly, sister," said the bar-keep, chucking Shirk'v under the chin. "You're prettv ugh xoiuelf. Grandpa," said Shirley. She sighed and took my arm. "Come on, Hal, let's go." For a minute in the dim light she looked pretty good, and I thought that maybe she had a ch.ince, hut when we came out into the sun again, the clean, wind-blown look spoiled it. "What about marriage and children," she said. "Gosh, I hope the Earth men still believe in children." "Of course we do," I said. "But the begetting is unimportant. It is simply inefficient to make such a fuss over mating as our ancestors did. Think of the total loss in terms of wasted work lujurs. Tndav those hours aie moie re.oonahhpi nt in either job work or ieisure-worl; or in a dreamless sk e)." "No dreams. Hal?" "No. Afii-r j tlay undeithe Thompson Picihe, you sleej like a stone." She looked disturljed. "I see it." she said. "A New 'ork .is neat :is a pin, efficient and happy. But I still don't sec why -- why do you revel in work?" "Read history," I said. "There was a lime cvhen our technology exceeded the knowledge of the man on the street. Finally, beginning with the atom, it got so b.id th.it the average man no longei tiusted himself to make decisions in hi.s own em ironment. He had a tli siie to know as much as the scientist himself knew. So science gave him the Thompson Probe." She wrinkled her nose and showed her provincial prejudices. "Probe-smobc. I'm glad the Probe is outlawed on Mats." "When .Mars h.o enough books, labs and libraries they'll cotne to use the Probe," I said. He was shuffling some p.ipers on his desk and he looked ery grave. For tlie hundredth time that day I had a feeling of misgis iiig. I didn't like tlie legal looking documents lie had in front of him. "I'm afraid I hae 'ome bad news for you, Mr. Singer," he said. I waved a hesitant Shirley into the chair. After all, she was one of the family. "Go ahead, DuPres." He had a cringing look on his face. He handed me a paper. It was a divorce notice. It said that, due to my failure to support her, Nora Remington Singer, plaintiff, had decided to terminate our marriage and that she wished to collect fifteen thousand dollars from me which was the basic amount I should've brought home to support us in the ten years of our marriage. Fifteen hundred a year isn't very much but the law set the base very low and then insisted on it. In a world of work, of course, non-support is an ugly word, and I felt a cold clutch of horror. "Nora wanted me to break the word to you," said DuPres. "She just called me a few minutes ago." "I'll fight it!" "You can't," he said. "The evidence is all here. Affidavits from her friends telling of her mental distress at having a stupid husband. Why, it isn't even a case for a human judge. I'm putting the evidence into the Computer Court at nine Monday. By ten-thirty she'll have her final decree." "I'll cross-file!" I cried. "The machines would throw out your case as soon as it scanned your salary reports. No, your marriage is dead. The important question now is -- how can you raise the fifteen thousand dollars you owe Nora." "It's Ryder," I fumed. "He's a high-erg man. That's all she wants. A goddam high-erg man." "The court will most certainly demand fifteen thousand dollars of non-support money for Nora," said DuPres insistently. "Have you any ideas, Mr. Singer?" "I can lend you fifteen thousand dollars," said Shirley impulsively. "Don't be ridiculous," I said. "I don't think she's ridiculous." said DuPres. "Why don't you borrow the money from her?" "I couldn't pay it back. I can hardly support myself on Earth." "On Mars it would lu' different," said Shirley. "If you decided to come to Mars, you could get a fine job..." "No. I don't want to go to Mars. Besides, you've brought your money as a dowry, in hopes of finding a young man." DuPres cleared his throat. ".s a matter of fact," he said, "I believe my client, Nora, had something like this in mind. She mentioned to me something about your coming to Earth to find a husband. And she mentioned the money you had. And Mr. Singer will be free of all marital engagements, effective at ten o'clock Monday mornmg. We both stared at him in amazement. Shirley blushed. Nora had fit the pieces together in a very efficient, non-emotional way. DuPres now brought out anotlier piece of papi'r. "This marriage license is properly filled out," he said, "and needs only the signatures. I have a friend, a parson, whose offices are in the next building. We could wrap this whole thing up in a matter of minutes." He smiled benignly as if he had just put over a big deal. "You forgot one thing," I said. "Oh, don't worry about the license," said DuPres. "It's dated for Monday. The law will recognize the principle of convenience of ceremony, regardless of the stream of time." I stepped up and let him have one on the jaw. He went over backwards in his swivel chair. "My compliments," I said, "and you forgot that people have feelings." Shirley and I stood on the sidewalk outside. "Sure you won't borrow?" she asked. "No. I'm not through with Nora yet." I made a signal for the car and it came gliding up. I got in the car and she squeezed my arm. "Take care of your good right arm. The way you hit that man was the finest thing I've seen on Earth." "Aren't you going back?" I asked. "No," she smiled. "I've got a date with an old-fashioned bartender and a bottle of liquor." I watched her go, head back, her ugly, over-womanly body swinging in a hippy walk. Let science pile invention on invention, I thought, there is always the eartliy primitive oriented to breeding. I was half-way home when a It was so good that I cried out in amazement. There was still a way to prove myself to Nora, better than finishing my einsteins or better than cornering her with an emotional appeal. She hated the waste energy of an emotional appeal anyway. Nora was stumped on how to distinguish the dust molecules from paint molecules on her Mathematical Point-Count System. "Hal," I told myself, "Hal you've never done well under the Thomjjson Probe. But now, son, you've got to come up with it.' You've got to show them this time, or else -- " voted to the Probe because of the marvelous things it's done for humanity. Actually it always looked to me like no more than a paint spray gun, and it worked as simply. The Thompson Probe is a practical solution of man's oldest wi.sh -- to make available to himself the enormous mental energy he knows lies sleeping below the surface of every human mind. It emits nonthermal radiation which is played on the head and shoulders. This radiation is on the wave scale somewhere between visible light and ultra-violet. Thomp.son's spectrum, if you prefer, in which visible light is beginning to turn into something else before it becomes ultra-violet. It is very unstable, but it will radiate up to several hundred feet and for x number of hours before it loses shape and falls back into light rays or gains pulsations and moves up to ultra-violet. (Is there anyone who hasn't experienced the foolish feeling of being in the middle of serious work and having the commutator in the Probe fail? Then your desire for work drains out of you and you're staring fooli.shly at a beam of useless light. Or, on the other hand, your commutator goes wild and burns the hell out of you -- you get a sunburn strong enough to send you to bed for days.) But when the Probe works properly it literally forces increased activity in the atoms of the brain. Perhaps the molecules creak and snap a bit, perhaps that's why we don't live as long -- but to feel the pure energy of your full mind released for work -- Ah, that is life's greatest pleasure! I took out the set bar and moved up the generator. I moved it way up. The Probe is theoretically safe to handle the high metabolism rates of the very quickminded, but any child can kick off the governor. No one in our intelligent world does, of course. But this was emergency. I set up the power level as high as it would go, way beyond the last safety factor, even for the highest metabolic genius. I felt some misgivings, but I had gotten myself into an all-ornothing situation, and I restrained an impulse to fudge a little. I rushed in and got Nora's papers on the dot count of the surface of pictures. She had all of her papers out, because, she had told me, she had been asked to donate them to tlic Museum. Now I knew better. She was simply breaking up housekeeping. I went to the study and turned on the Probe and stepped into its rays. By midnight when Nora and Bob got home from the meeting they were going to find a little surprise waiting for them. I'm used to standard Probe effects as is everyone on earth. But the blue-white jolt I got dazed me, even while I felt my mind turn over and the racing energy come with a Jolt. I yapped and yammered like a lap dog because I was so jagged up. The thoughts cascaded in my mind and the headache-producing equations seemed to draw up on the paper and resolve themselves into marks as simple as "if I have four apples -- " Experiments were called for. All of the stuff was within the ray's beams, and I set up and activated a dozen different experiments at once. My hands flew as fast as my mind. I could feel my mind racing past the first fatigue and slipping down into a vast void of concentration. I worked like a very demon and muttered and laughed and quivered all over from the unaccustomed heavy charge of the Thompson Probe. I got some of the feeling a workout must have. The human mindbody stretched to the very limit of endurance. The nausea of fatigue grew like a round, black balloon. Yet I drove myself forward, lights blurred in my eyes and I was blinded and yet I could still work and I worked -- N ora and Bob discovered me around midnight when they got home. I was lying twitching on the desk while my experiments rattled on unheeded and the paper tapes I had fed into the machine went on rattling out long equations. I had received an overload of energy and run into a sort of human short-circuit, being too young for a real work-out to death. But not, I thought with pleasure, before I had done some considerably good work. The last thing I remembered was when they put me to bed. We are all doctors because everything short of surgery is fairly easy for an alert mind to pick up. When I awoke about noon on Sunday, I instantly knew that it was going to take me a long time to recover from niy efforts. Nevertheless, I was content. I crept downstairs in anticipation. I found Shirley in the living room assembling her luggage. She looked very white and used up. "Try to find a hangover remedy in this lousy city," she moaned. "I'm glad I can still make the two o'clock rocket." "Leaving?" "I've gotten everything I wanted out of my trip. So I leave." "How was last night?" "We got drunk and sang old songs," she said, "and I flirted with an antiquarian." "Wherc'rc Nora and Bob?" Shirley shook her head. "I don't know. But there's a note on the breakfast table." I crept into the breakfast room. Nora's note was to the point: Dear Hal: A noble try. In all your years you've never done such your usual unobservant fashion you picked the wrong set of equa lions. You solved a problem I worked on years ago which has to do with paint coatings on buildings and the weathering effects. If you had the intelligence to have read rny books, you'd have known. P.S. Shirley has given me the non-support money. I think she was drunk. She murmured .something about buying a man with a good right arm.  hope you'll be very happy together. P.P.S. You're wrong about Bob and me. I've always envied Bob his freedom of living alone. I'm going to be a bachelor too. You can get more ivork done. Goodbye -- Nora Remington. I dragged myself into the living room w'herc Shirley had just finished calling for a cab. "You gave Nora the money," I accu.sed her. "I sav('d enough for your ticket to Mars," she said. "I'm not going to Mars." She grinned and waved a paper at me. "This says you have to. Old DuPres came In this morning and drew it up. You owe me fifteen thousand. I can offer you a job from which you can pay it back. The law says you either have to have your own job or take the job I offer or go to a readjustment Clinic for mental incompetence. And I don't think you can find a job here very easily, nor allow yourself to be sent to a Clinic." I groaned. "I won't be bought like a side of beef!" "Now, Hal, what a thing to say! Your bags are packed, thanks to Nora. Do you want to come quietly or shall I send for the police?" What could I do? I was legally trapped and physically weak. rocket was an antiquarian. Each day Shirley brought me to the Solarium to enjoy the sun and left me neatly tucked in under the blankets. Each time this fellow would stare at her and then at me and then dig into the books and magazines he carried. Finally he spoke. (Continued on page # Illustrated by Paul Orban Once upon a time life was perfection. Government made sure its citizens were supplied with every comfort and pleasure. But sometimes perfection breeds boredom and... his pace so his forelock would he corrected himself. But he had quit bobbing. The damn thing never heard of a petition for a wasn't supposed to bob; it was DP being refused, supposed to be a sort of peaked He wanted to spend his last crest above rugged, handsome feanight in the city over here in the turcs -- a dark lock brushed caremain park of C Sector, walking in lessly aside by a man who had the restless crowds, trying to settle more important things to do than his thoughts. He moved through fuss with personal grooming. But slow aimless eddies of brightly apno matter how carefully he combed pareled citizens, avoiding other it and applied lusto-.set, it always pedestrians, skaters and the heavy, bobbed if he walked too fast. four-wheeled autoscooters. EveryBut then, why should it matter thing was dully, uncompromisingnow? He wasn't looking for a ly the same as in his own sector, woman tonight. Not when his apeven to the size and spacing of the poiniment with the Social Adjusthuge, spreading trees. He had ment counsellors was tomorrow hoped, without conviction, that morning, and he would get a Dethere might be some tiny, refreshinp clifTercncc -- anything: but the inincl-sappinp sameness that had driven him to the petition. Allen was careful not to brush against any girl with an escort. Since he wasn't on the make, what would be the use of fighting? Kind of an odd feeling, though, to know you'd never date or fight again, or... Or what? What else was there to do, if you hadn't the luck to be a jobinan or a tech? You ate, and slept, and preened, and e.xercised, and found what pleasure you could, and fought mostly because it was niomentarilv stimulating. and. eventually, after a hundred and fifty years or so, you died. Unless you were a tedi. If you were a tech. Government gave you stuff to keep you alive longer. A jobman got a somewhat different deal -- he got nothing to keep him alive abnormally, because ninety percent of Karth's population was waiting for his job anyway. Allen skirled a huge fountain throwing colored, scintillant spray high into the dark summer sky, stealing a glance backward over his shoulder. That girl was still behind him. Following him? It wouldn't be anything new. in his case -- especially in his own sector -- but maybe she just happened to be going his way. It would be easy to find out. He circled tlie fountain twice. With her looks she should have been picked up before she'd left her compartment building block -- except that whoever got her might have to fight more than once during the evening to hold her. Definitely a young mati's darling. And, the way it began to look, definitely Allen's darling. On the second trip around, she had backtracked to meet him face to face -- her purpose obvious. He tried to dodge, but there was no way it could be done without insult. Damn... "Hi, brute. Nedda Marsh. Alone?" She ran soft hands along the hard biceps under his short jacket sleeves. The motion threw open her shriekingly bright orange cloak, displaying saucy breasts, creamy abdomen and, beneath her brief jeweled skirt, long smooth thighs. And the perfume assailed his nostrils with almost physical force. "Hi, Nedda. Allen Kinderwood. Alone, natch." Natch, hell. But what could any male do to combat Government perfume? He smiled, his pulse suddenly quickening. "Date, darling?" She was a beautiful thing. Her large, sparkling eyes showed pleasure. "Take me, Al." She touched vivid red lips lightly again.st his. And the formula was complete. Private citizens Allen Kinderwood and Nedda Marsh were dated at least until dawn -- or a better man did them part. He scueezed her arm where she'd snuggled it against his side, starting with her away from the fountain. "How come the most gorgeous thing in Kansas City wasn't dated earlier?" She looked up at him, and the passion in her gaze made his heart skip like a teener's. "Could be I'm very particular, darling, but," her look was suddenly beseeching, "the truth is. I'm protected." A slow, tiny fire of distaste fanned itself alive in Allen's brain. Why in the name of World Government did every other girl who made first play with him have to be protected? But there was his out. By unwritten social code he could declare the date off. Except that he had grown to increasingly hate the spiteful practice of 'protection'. It meant Nedda had peeved some local lothario who, along with other males in his clique, was going to damn well see she wasn't intimate with anyone else until she begged another date with the original one. If you had a sadistic turn of mind, it meant you could keep a delectable bit in freeze until her natural inclinations forced her into your arms. But you'd have to fight any man who tried to date her in the meantime. Fighting was legal, of course, as long as the loser was surgically repairable, and it was considered a normal catharsis for strained relationships between males. Not, Allen thought glumly, that he had any stake in the future of frantically weary society, but he had reached the conclusion long ago that a man without the courage to back up his personal convictions wasn't worth the energy it took to down him. He stopped and held Nedda against him protectively. "I still want the date, sprite," he said. "I have to leave early tomorrow, but ni try to get you out of protection -- okay?" Her lips trembled. "Oh, yes. If you knew how it's been, these last few days -- " He shook her again, but more tenderly. "Deal. We'll try to reach your compartment." Living quarters were a sanctuary no one but a medic could legally enter without invitation. He removed his stainless indentiheation plaque and slipped its chain about her throat. "If you see any of the guys who're watching for you, tell me but don't look at them." He took her arm again and alertly began to work through the throng. "Describe your protector." "Jeff Neal-Haync. He's big, Al. Bigger than you. Heavier, but you've got muscles like he never saw. You look faster, too." Allen didn't know him, but the name was revealing. Not that anything but your Earth society number was official, but use of a double surname meant your father had elected to stay with your mother for at least a while after you were bom. Most babies, of course, were immediately turned over to a Government creche, but it had always seemed to Allen that kids raised by one or more parents had other advantages too, although he had never been able to figure out just what they were. Maybe it was only his imagination. A t the edge of the park they  chose the nearest double scooter which showed full battery charge. Allen leaned against the forward rail. "Herd it, will you, NedD P da? Every time I think of the hundreds of hours I've spent plowing air with one of these gutweighted things I want to break one. Hell, I can run faster. Anyway, you know where we're going." The girl smiled, pushed the power lever into forward range and steered into slow-moving traffic. "I saw a man lift a single, once, but that's all he was able to do with it." The lighted street seemed intensely bright after the dimmer reaches of the park. "Ever think of running one into the river?" She looked at him in amazement. "Fright, no. Why -- you'd have to drive along a pedestrian path for at least a block to reach the bank!" Ncdda spun the steering wheel to avoid a long string of solemn teeners playing follow the leader on singles. "You have funny thoughts, Al." "I'm laughing." He flexed his muscles, impatient, as usual, with another citizen's sluggish mentation. "I suppose the damn music never gets on your nerves, either?" "Music? Oh -- the music." She listened as though for the first time to the muted strains which played continuously throughout the city -- calming, soothing, lulling. "Of course not. Why should it?" "They've got it synchronized," said Allen. "Govcmineut's got it synchronized so you hear it just the same volume no matter where you are outside. You have to listen to it." "Darling, ycjur boredom's showmg. He squeezed her hand reassuringly. "Don't let me spin you, lovely. I've got the answer." "Oh?" "Yeah. I applied for a DP this morning." "Al -- no.'" "Why not?" He put it like the noodle thrust of a fighting knife, daring her to finda reason, half hoping she could. "I -- " She glanced at him once, quickly, then away. Then she drew a deep breath and let it sigh out. "How about Mars, Al? There aren't many service machines, and they even let women do lots of little detailed things. I almost went, once." He was watching her shrewdly. "Why didn't you?" He had fought this one out with himself before. "Oh -- I don't know, fust never did." "I'll tell you why you really didn't. It'd be too different. When the Government provides every convenience, every comfort you can think of here, you can't stand having to work in a mine, with an oxygen helmet, stuffed into heavy clothes. You can't stand the danger and the fear -- and somehow, inside, you must know it. I'm pretty strong, and I never met a man I was afraid of, but I know I couldn't stand Mars." He gripped the rail and stared out over the wide, swarming street. "But Earth is a trap, Nedda. A big, comfortable trap where you walk around endlessly without being any use at all." She trod the brake and barely missed bumping a couide who had stopped to embrace. "I'm some use, hon. Wait'll we get home." Her eyes held a promise she could barely restrain. Automatically, he caressed her with a practiced hand -- and grabbed the wheel when she suddenly strained against him, trembling, pressing eager lips against his neck. Christ, how long had she been protected? He felt a mounting anger against the social ennui which drove men's minds to such inhuman activity. Departure was the only escape from this kind of thing, and from the city -- from any city. But the Departees had always been only a tiny minority. Did that mean they -- and he -- were wrong? He brooded about it for seemingly the googolth time, guiding the scooter without conscious thought, turning as Nedda directed. A trap, he'd told her. Well, he could .see no reason to change that. The blazingly glorious sensotheaters, cafes, gymnasiums, dancing salons, amusement rides and hypnodream houses, crowding every main thoroughfare with their fantastically ornate architecture, were -- when you thought about it -- designed to trap people's minds, keep them from thinking of anything but a gossamer, useless pursuit of per.sonal pleasure. And wasn't the design faulty when everyone was bored, when some chose Departure and others sank to the unnatural practice of protection to whet their sated appetites? Nor was there any apparent hope for the future. Theatre productions, dream tapes, even the elaborate home teleview shows were all historical. Why? Was Government admitting there was nothing but staleness in the present? Why the concern with backtime? Because of Government entertainment diet, Allen could probthe Power of Your "Sixth Sense" "i'"w I kM AwWI Mn mw M !! kr MM m n Ul   W ppmi I I wl Muud Mj twi# o#  ' " #u tn iMt rhtMt lal  Muaft tah  ka  ttfM u ! kiu ipM't' Mn I ivtf Hw tli M ilw  tm Uw lrv OkMX ! fK Mum -- NUnU I  tni I  I II I I in TiMw  M bI  Umbb # ll IMa f.BxJ  .  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Allen swung the scooter hard right and adroitly darted across traffic toward an emblazoned theatre entrance. Here, now, was a situation he knew how to deal with. He said rapidly, out of the side of his mouth, "Jump off when I stop at the entry and kiss me like good-by. Register your plaque in the ID slot and head for the door -- then look back. If I'm down, go on in and lose yourself. If he's down, come back." He made a wrenching stop at the very edge of the crowd, swung Nedda through the opening between front and side rails and gave her a hard, sterile kiss. She clung to him a moment. Without letting her eyes stray she said, "Slowing down right behind you. Luck, lover." Then she turned and started to pick her way across the walk. Allen swung the scooter in a fast, tight circle to the left. Assuming his opponent to be right-handed, this would help avoid a knife slash from the rear if the other rammed his scooter -- further assuming the man had not been tricked into thinking his presence was unnoticed. He hadn't. When Allen whipped his head around to look at him, there was barely time to brake the heavier double to avoid a shrewdly planned collision. Halgersen, Nedda had said. He was thick-set, with heavy brows and large jaw. The type Allen had learned to associate with power and endurance but not too much speed. Halgersen was holding a knife in his right hand. Allen quickly slipped his own blade from the sheath conveniently held at the front of his belt. They cut intricate patterns of feint, attack and withdraw, using passing vehicles as buffers. But not for long. A voice from the crowd called, "Fight!" and space grew miraculously about the combatants, leaving a huge clearing in the street rimmed solidly with scooters and pedestrians. A few shouts of encouragement began to be heard as individuals selected one or the other of the men as a likely winner. Allen dodged a sudden attempt at a side-swipe collision and the attendant vicious swipe of Halgersen's blade -- and then drew first blood by a lightning riposte to the arm. Legal knife target was arm, leg, abdomen and a forehead cut without thrust -- which would obscure vision with blood without doing organic damage. The bright yellow luminescence of a police copter dropped and hovered as Allen tried to follow up his momentary advantage. The scene, he knew, would now be simultaneously filmed for possible legal record and broadcast on all teleview news programs. Entertainment for adults, education for the teeners. A feminine voice in the front ranks called, "Two stunts to one on green jacket!" and was immediately taken up by another girl near by. He had little time to think with satisfaction that no female had ever been forced to pay off a bet of some ingeniously embarrassing public behavior on his account. Halgersen was now trying to maneuver him for a straight ram which would bring them definitely together. He wasn't being w'eakened by the slow drip of blood from his arm and he didn't seem to be bothered by pain. And then they were close to the circle rim. Allen swung his scooter so the cooling downdraft from the copter -- coming from above the center of the cleared area -- was directly against his back, a method he had devised for knowing his position without having to take his eyes from a close opponent. He let his shoulders droop suddenly, as though he was tired, and at the murmur of disappointment from many onlookers he began to back slowly aw'ay from Halgersen. The blue-jacketed figure rolled into the trap scowling. He tried again for a head-on ram. Allen let him come, and at the last possible instant, when Halgersen would be unable to reverse, stop, or even swerve, he flipped the bar to full power ahead. And braced himself accordingly. The scooters met with a bonejarring thud of perimeter rubber. Halgersen was hurled neatly over D P his own guard rail to land gaspingly across Allen's. Allen grasped the back of the other's belt in a grip that had dismayed many a combatant, hauled him into position and hamstrung both legs with two ck'xtrous thrustarid-cut mov'emciits. It took but a moment longer to leap above a desperate slash at his own legs, drag the heavier man to the thick floor of the scooter and render him unconscious with a stamping kick of one sandaled hei'l. It left an easy repair job for the medics, but would keep one Dan Halgersen from fighting again for more than a week -- and maybe make him think twice about joining in another protection pact. Allen leaped up and balanced on two guard rails while the police copter settled down to pick up Halgersen. He signaled Nedda to move on along the walkway. While the onlookers were clapping approval of the show, he removed Halgersen's plaque, leaped down and dodged an attempted ki.ss from the girl who had given odds on him -- glancing back warily in case her escort felt insulted -- then pushed through the mob to join Nedda. She hugged his arm ecstatically. "Darling, every woman .should have a guy like you." "Yeah." He felt no sense of triumph. It had happened too many times before. Everything had happened too many times before -- repetitive, palling and purposeless. He tucked the won plaque into her decorative belt. It was Nedda's proof that protection was ended, and Halgersen would have to call for it accompanied by a witness. "Where the hell is your place?" he asked. For a moment he wondered why he didn't just turn abruptly and leave her, social mores notwithstanding. Then Nedda's perfume began its chemical magic again, and he carefully straightened his jacket and set his forelock in its proper place. "you're a nymph. Ever tried psychoconditioning?" She gave him a tender, lingering kiss and burrowed more comfortably in his arms. "Not yet, darling. Would you prefer me less -- responsive?" Allen patted her as carefully as possible to show approval without arousing her again. "No man Would. But it must be rough between dates, isn't it?" And just why should he be worrying about anyone else at this stage of the game? Maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was just curious now that it no longer mattered. She avoided his eyes in the cool semigloom of the compartment. "I -- usually manage to have enough dates. Until some moron like NealHayne puts me under protection." He disengaged himself gently, rolled off the pliant couch and increased the room's light with the wall knob. "You should register a complaint, Ncdda. After three he'll be forcibly ijsyched, you know." He dialed the servoconsole and focused a morning meal menu on the viewscreen. "Ready for breakfast, pip?" "Mmin -- if you are." Nedda came over and lifted the phone from its panel recess. "That number she algal protein is supposed to be a new taste sensation. Like?" He shrugged. "Let's try it. It'll be my last go at this robot feed." When the meals had been deposited in the service chute she looked at him pleadingly. "Hon, why don't you try being psyched? They could make you satisfied with -- things as they are." Allen lifted a thin transparent food cover while he shook his head. "Maybe they could, Nedda. But it would have to be almost total erasure to change my slant on everything, and being forced to accept what I hate is worse than anything else I can think of. It wouldn't be me when they got through. Whatever causes me to think like I do is the me, and that'd be gone." Some of the resentful animosity surged up in him and he had to talk about it. "Look at your compartment. The same as every other single in the city -- or any city. The walls arc the shade of green that's best for the eyes. Furniture and fi.tures are always the same colors. Every compartment has a servoconsole to condition the air, control the temperature and humidity, bring you food or any other standard service, provide teleview shows, music or requests. You could live your life inside this square hole. Eveiybody has everything and nothing means anything -- can't you sec that?" She came around the table and sat on his lap with her head against his neck. "No, presh, but if you'll change your mind about a DP you can date me any time, always. I'd like to share a double with you forever." He traced soothing circles on her smooth back with his fingertips. "That's the closest I've ever come to owning anything," he mused. "But hon, Government owns everything and takes care of everything. When you can always use a thing, how could it be better if you owned it?" Allen held her against him tightly, fighting the old fight to find words. How could you explain how you felt things to be right or wrong, without really knowing the reasons? "Maybe," he said slowly, "it's as though I wanted to keep you for myself alone. But Nedda, if another man made the right approach, could you refuse him?" After a minute he repeated, "Could you?" Eventually, she made two answers. They were warm and wet and dropped onto his chest. T he adjustment Building was a soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but he didn't know why. He took his ID plaque from Nedda and kissed her. He had tried to di.ssuade her from coming with him, but she had merely smiled and held his arm and urged him toward a double scooter. "This is it, beautiful," he said shortly, at the entrance. And, with an attempt at levity, "Don't take any more protection." Actually, what could you say? He went inside quickly, without looking back. D P At the door marked Kansas City Department of Social Adjustment he slipped his plaque into the correct slot for a moment and was admitted directly to the waiting room for those who had appointments for the day. There was only one other waiting -- a handsome blond youth whose knife was new. Allen sat down in a lounge chair across the room. And Nedda came in and sat down beside him. He could have understood almost anything but that. "How in the name of fear -- " "Do you think," she said mischievously, taking his hand, "the B Sector champ is theonly one who can get an appointment?" Before it could more than flash through Allen's mind that he'd not told her that, the blond youth was standing before them, his eyes hotly on Nedda. Then, obviously confused that she was already holding hands, he addressed himself to Allen as though it was what he had intended doing. "Marty Bowen, sir. Uh -- I'm going to see if they'll let me have a double compartment with some gym apparatus in it." He shifted his weight to the other foot and hung a thumb nervously in his belt, unable to keep from darting glances at Nedda. Allen noted, with rising anger and some other unpleasant emotion he couldn't define, that she hadn't dropped her eyes. He said curtly, '"Fine, kid -- hope you make it." The youth mumbled sometliing else and went back to liis chair. He had barely seated himself when a voder speaker crooned a number melodiously. With a quick backward glance at Nedda, the blond lad went on into the counsel room. Allen's mind remained in confusion, shot through with anger at himself that he should waste thoughts now on anything but the coming interview. The room was beginning to fill quietly with others. His number was called a few minutes later. And Nedda's was called along with it. Well -- the place to get the answer was the counsel chamber. He got up slowly, barely noticing that Nedda continued to hold his hand as they went in. stories high, with fluted walls and no windows. Obviously the size was to impress interviewees. But why should they have to be impressed? Wasn't the wisdom of the five tech doctors sufficient by itself? Wasn't it? He sat in a chair indicated by the dark-skinned one, and listened while the very old one in the center talked to Nedda. Had dating the B Sector park champion solved her difficulty with the man she had reported? Fine. It was the second such report about him in a year -- the other also coming from a girl who was highly sexed. Did Nedda not consider herself to have a problem which required psychoconditioning? No? Well, perhaps in later years, when her beauty and her mind were somewhat changed... No, there would seem to be no justification for giving her a compartment in another sector, unless she had persuaded the champion or another to share a double with her. Would that be all? Much happiness to her. Abruptly, Allen realized Nedda had left and that the frail old man was talking to him. "... unusual to have joint interviews without a more definite emotional tie, but we felt you would like to know how you had rendered civic aid." So pitting him without choice against any of several men was their idea of civic aid. No wonder he'd met so many protected girls in the past. This time, they'd harnessed Nedda's restless passion to the task of dissuading him from a DP. Very neat. It made him feel better to know they'd failed where he was concerned. and his resentment abated somewhat. He said, "Glad I could help," careful to keep his voice emotionless. Then, determined to have no further subtleties, "If I can have my departure permit, I won't trouble you further." Maybe his approach wasn't right, but all they could do would be to refuse him. In which case there were other ways -- and the hell with legality. "We hope," smiled the old doctor benignly, "there may be another way. Perhaps, if we discuss your problem, we can find a solution which won't cost the city a handsome young citizen." Allen made it a direct attack. "Why should the city miss any citizen? In fact, what good is the city itself -- what good is any city?" And almost, the techs seemed startled. But a younger one said easily, "A city, Mr. Kinderwood, pennits a maximum of efficient service and pleasure, with a minimum of waste and discomfort." Allen leaned back and stubbornly folded his arms. "I've had enough of pleasures and comforts without meaning, and I've nothing to do, and it doesn't look like anyone's making any progress anywhere. Even on the planets they're just repeating backtime stuff with modern equipment." The old man waved a hand at the others and looked at Allen intently. His voice was softly insistent. "The one continuous thread in human history has been the seeking of more pleasure and greater comfort for all members of the race. Our technology gives us a maximum of both. No one labors, and the few who work prefer to do so. No one is diseased, no one stays in pain longer than the time necessary to reach a medic. Everyone can have everything he needs, without striving and without debt. And as technology advances, there will be even greater benefits for all. What more can be done to make the citizens of Earth happy?" For the first time, Allen felt confused. "I don't know," he said slowly. "The way you put it, it sounds right. But where does it all lead? What reason have I got for living? What reason does the human race have for surviving?" The sociologist looked even older. "In all seriousness, sir, can you answer the questions you have just asked?" His eyes were expectant -- but there didn't seem to be much hope reflected in their depths. Allen noted a tenseness around the table. Why were they asking him for answers they were supposed to know? Or was it another of their subtli'ties? D P "No," he said curtly, "I don't know the answer to any of them. Has it got a bearing on my getting a DP?" The central figure sighed. "None at all." He pressed several tiny buttons on the polished table and an inscribed card rose halfway out of a slot. "We merely hope that some day a man will come along who can tell us -- before someone who may not be a man comes along and makes the answers futile." He handed Allen the card. "Here is your permit. You may take it to the third office south on the corridor through that door. We don't feel it is the answer to your prblem, but we admit we don't -- " "Pardon me, sir," interrupted Allen. He wet his lips. "Did you say 'someone who may not be a man'?" "Yes. It is an aspect you have not considered, Mr. Kinderwood." The sociologist's face seemed haggard. "Even a few generations ago. Earth as it is today would have seemed like a concept of heaven. We know now it is not enough, but we don't know why. Perhaps, if wc can reach the stars the problem will cease to be critical. By the same token, life from the stars may come here first. "We have no remotest idea what such an eventuality would entail. It may provide a solution. It may quite conceivably send man back to the forests and jungles. "You have experienced our only answer to the latter possibility. While providing man with everything to which he has aspired for milleniums, we instill in him, through the media of entertainment, knowledge of all the survival practices known to the backtimers who painfully nurtured civilization from an embryonic idea to its present pinnacle. We can do no more." Allen flexed his arms involuntarily at the sheer enormity of die idea. It was one thing to let a useless race expire, quite another to think of its being forced back to -- "But -- can't anyone think of anything else to do?" "Whoever is capable of devising anything else," the old doctor said resignedly, "will undoubtedly be able to carry it out with or without our assistance." He pressed more buttons and there was a muted sound of the voder calling a number. "The exit over there, Mr. Kinderwood. And -- much happiness." Allen's thoughts swirled in tumultuous confusion. Dimly, he realized that man had outstripped himself, and saw with intense bitterness that there W'as no answer on Earth for any ordinary citizen. Or was there? And if there was, was it worth trying to find? He flung open the door to the corridor violently, as though the force could quiet his mind. Maybe, if he didn't u.sc the permit, he could stay and figure out an arrswer. Nedda would be sympathetic and patient while -- And then he stopped. Across the wide hallway, Nedda stood beneath a window, looking at him. And the blond youth held her with flushed understanding, impatiently waiting, caressing her arm with his hand, binding her to him with the one bond she could not break. She watched Allen start slowly down the corridor. Once, when he stumbled, she gave a stifled sob, and tears brimmed and spilled silently when he passed through the door marked Kansas City Department of Euthanasia.    "This chicken is your wife?" he asked. "Chicken?" He handed me an ancient Earth magazine. On the cover was the picture of a very ugly woman. She had been called Marilyn Monroe. "That's a chicken," he said, "like youi-s." I shrugged. "No, she's not my wife." "If I'm not too curious, what are you going to do with her?" "It's what e's going to do with me," I said glumly. "Her father is rich and I have to go to work for him. As for her, slie has a great enthusiasm for archaic items like baseball, fine restaurants, bars, (Continued from page #) parties and -- uh -- breeding. I will probably have to escort her on these functions." His eyes lighted up. "Rich dame, good-looking and sexy, likes a good time and gets a kick out of breeding. Brother, some people have all the luck!" I sighed. "No. I'd give anything to be back in New York, working again, doing my einstcins and putting in a useful eighteen hours a day." My scatinate gave me a look of disgust and pulled his blankets up over his face. He never spoke to me again. I can see it's going to be hard to get used to colonial thinking.   . -- in the privacy of your own home! No gadgets -- nothing to buy -- yet these simple methods offer effective relief for over #  of people who now suffer from back pains I  aching across your upper back  fatigue in your shoulders  soreness shooting from base of neck to back of head and downward  weakness in hips and loins  shooting pain down your right or left leg  or other muscular discomforts Trouble." It takes the mystery out of back ailments... tells you what to do for relief from: slipped disc, sacroiliac pains, lumbago, sciatica, twists, sprains, etc. Offers you positive help for almost A well-known Philadelphia orthopaedic surgeon says: "I commend without reservafon the views expressed in this book." Then either remit the low price of # plus postage -- or return Englewood Clifft, Now Jorcoy end of that timeo I will either send you just # plus postage in full payment -- or return the book and owe nothing. Noma Addrett The good Martian Samaritans rescued Johnny Love and offered him "the stars". Now, maybe, Johnny didn't look closely enough into the "gift horse's" mouth, but there were others who did... and found therein the answer to life... he was alive, and to be alive meant fighting like hell to stay that way. That was the first thing returning consciousness told h. The next was that his helmet should have been cracked wide open when the bum landing had wrenched the acceleration hammocks out of their suspension sockets and heaved his suited body across the buckled conning deck. It should've been, but it wasn't. The third thing he knew was that Ferris' helmet had been that Ferris was dead. Sand sifted in a cold, red river through the gaping rent in the side of the ship, trying to bury him before he could stand up and get his balance on the crazily tilted deck. He shook loose with more strength than he needed, gave the rest of the muscles in his blocky body a try, and there wasn't any hurt worse than a bruise. Funny. Ferris was dead. He had a feeling somewhere at the edge of his brain that there was going to be more to it than just checking his o.xygen and food-concentrate supply and walking away from the sliip. A man didn't complete the first Earth-Mars flight ever made, smash his ship to hell, and then just walk away from it. His astrogcologer-navigator was dead, and the planet was dead, so a man just didn't walk away. There was plenty of room for him to scramble through the yawning rip in the buckled hullplates -- just a matter of crawling up the river of red sand and out; it was as easy as that. Then Johnny Love was on his feet again, and the sand clutched at his hca# boots as though to keep him from leaving Ferris and the ship, but it didn't, and he was walking away... Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltered daylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurt his eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plain w'as too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind that whorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the only interruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet was too still. Johnny Love stopX'd his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it lUustraUd by Paul Orban seemed too great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. He looked back, and the plume of still-rising smoke from the broken thing that had been his ship was like a solid black pillar that had been hastily bulk by some evil djinn. How far had he walked; how long? He turned his back on the glinting spec and made his legs move again, and there was the hollow sound of laughter in his helmet. Here he was, Johnny Love, the first Martian! and the last! Using the last of the strength in his bruised body to go forward, when there was no forward and no backward, no direction at all ; breathing when there was no purpose in breathing. Why not shut off the valves now? He was too tired for hysteria. Men had died alone before. Alone, but never without hope! And here there was no hope, for there was no life, and no man had ever lived where there was not life! But he had come to sec, and he was seeing, and in the remaining hours left to him he would see what no man had seen in a half a Harrison and Janes or Lamson and Fowler would not be down for twenty days at the inside; that had been the time-table. Twenty days, twenty years... he heard himself laugh again. Time-table! He and Ferris first. Then Harrison and Janes. Then Lamson and Fowler, all at twenty-day intervals. If all landed safely, they would use Exploration Plan I, Condition Optimum. If only two crews made it down, Plan II; Condition Limited. And if only one made the #-day journey from the orbit of Terra -- Untenable, Return. The twentyday interval idea had come from some Earth-bound swivel-chair genius who had probably never even set foot in a Satellite operations room. Somebody had imprc.ssed on him when he was young that egg-carrying was a safer mission with a multiplicity of baskets; it was common sense that if anything happened to Mars-I touching down, at least it wouldn't happen Common sense, Johnny thought,' and he laughed again. Space was' not common, and it was not sensi-' ble. And nobody had ever taughti it the rules men made. He kept svalking, seeing, think-' ing and breathing. For a long time. He fell once or twice and picked himself up again to walk some more, and then he fell a final time, and did not get up. Red sand whispered over him, danced lightly, drifted... T he flat, wide-tracked vehicle swerved in a tight arc, throwing up low ruby-colored clouds on either side. Its engines throbbed a new note of power, and it scuttled in a straight line across the desert floor like a fleck of shiny metal drawn by an unseen magnet. Behind it rose a thinning monument of green-black smoke, and between its tracks was a wavering line of indentations in the sand already half-obliterated by the weight of their own shallow walls. But they became deeper as the vehicle raced ahead; and then at length they ended, and the vehicle halted. There was a mound of sand that the winds, in their caprice, would not have made alone, for they sculptured in a freer symmetry. And the child-like figures seemed to realize that at once. With (piick precision they levelled the mound and found Johnny Love. They took him into their vehicle, and deftly matched and replenislied the waning gas mixture in the cylindrical tanks on his back. Then they drove away with him. "Ferris?" "Ferris was your astrogeologcrnavigator. He died when you crashed." "Harrison... Janes?" "Harrison and Janes are not due for nine more days. But you are in no danger." There was darkness and warmth ; his throat was dr)' and it burned. It was hard to talk, and Ferris was dead. Harrison and Janes were not due for nine more days. Somebody said so. Nine more days and then everything would be -- Panic shook him, sent blood throbbing to his head and brought consciousness back hard. His eyes opened and he was suddenly sitting bolt upright. "But Lamson, you were twenty days behind -- " .And the racing thought froze .solid in his fumbling brain. Then there was a torrent of thoughts and memory overran them, buried them, and red desert was rushing up to engulf him. He screamed and fell back with his hands clawing at his eyes. "You are in no danger. You had thought our planet lifeless; it was an error. We live underground, John Love. That is why you did not see us, or surface indications of our existence. A group of us speak your language, because for eleven days we have been studying your brain and analyzing your thought-patterns." Johnny was bolt upright again, and now his eyes were wide and his hands were knotted, and where there had been only light and shadow before there was full sight now. Swiftly he was off the low cot and on his feet looking for the speaker, arms ready to lash out and hit. But he was alone in the small, sterile-looking chamber, and his muscles were so much excess baggage. He tried to recover his balance; he had forgotten about the slight gravity. He tried too hard, and his body crashed, confused, into a wall. A -- damn them, a padded wall! He regained his feet. Stood still, and raced his eyes about him. There it was -- above the cot. A .small round, shuttered opening -- some sort of two-way communication system. He wondered if they could see him, too. If they could, that part of it worked only one way. "All right, whoever you arc, so you've analyzed me!" He had to direct his sudden anger at something, so he shouted at the shuttered aperture. '"Now what..." There was silence for a tiny eternity, and he could feel them probing, evaluating him, as a human scientist would study a rare species in a cage. The feeling ignited a new anger in him, and made him want to curse the teachings that had conditioned his lifetime of thinking to the belief that Man was more than an animal. He'd been sold short... "Damn you! God damn you, what arc you going to do to me?" In a corner of his mind he was aware of a gentle hissing sound, but he did not listen. The fear and terror had In l)c broken. Make them tell, #iiaki' them tell... His muscles grew heavy and his face was feverish with his effort, and his eyes stung. Something... like roses. But there were no roses on dead planets -- "Earthman, can you still hear?" "I can hear," Johnny said. It was suddenly easier to talk. Even easier to understand. They had done something... "We are surprised that your state of shock was not more seere. In the process of analyzing you, we discovered that you were totally unprepared for Space-Sight, and therefore -- " "Unprepared? What do you think all those months of physical conditioning were for? Yeah, and all those damned textbooks? You think that barrel I cracked up was built in a Kindergarten class -- " "Space-flight requires but a relative minimum of those things, Earthman. Required most is psychological and philosophical conditioning." "To what?" "To all things unreal. Because they are the most real; infinity applies to probability and possibility far moi-e directly than to simple Space and Time. But -- are you calm now?" The voice was growing deeper, and seemed almost friendly. Johnny tried his muscles; they weren't piralyzcd -- he could move easily, and his head was clear. And there was no anger, now. No "shock." "Go ahead," he said. "Our examination of you has indicated that your race is a potentially effective one, with a superior survival factor. We feel that, properly instructed and assisted, such a race might be of great value as a friend and ally. In short, we receive you in peace and friendship, Earthman. Will you accept us in like manner?" Johnny tried to think. Hard thoughts, the way men were supjxMed to think. What kind of game was it? What were the strings? The angles... the gimmicks. What did they really want? His lips were dry and barely moved over his teeth, but the words came easily. "Who says you'ie a friend?" "We would have learned as much about you by examining your corpse, Earthman."  he was alive, and that had to prove something. And it might have been a lot of trouble to keep him that way. The hell of it was you couldn't know... Anything... you couldn't know anything when you were tossed into the middle of the impossible. He felt the skin on the back of his neck chill and tighten. But who held out their hand like this? Whoever did anything like tliat? No. "We wish to help you. Earthman, and your race. W'e have observed your kind at close quarters, yet we have never landed among you nor attempted communication because of fear for ourselves. But with proper help, there need be no fear between us. We offer you friendship and progress." "You keep talking about what vue get out of it." Johnny stared upward at the ceiling, got his eyes off the little shuttered aperture. He wished he had a cigarette. "You sound too damned much like a politician." "Perhaps at this point you should be informed that your ship is completely repaired, and ready for your return to Earth whenever you desire." "So, it's -- You said Harrison and Janis would be here in nine days! That means I've been out for nearly two weeks! For a nap that's a long time, but nobody could get that bucket back in one piece in eleven days! Not after what I did to it -- " "Your ship is completely repaired, Earthman." Johnny knew somehow that the voice wasn't lying. So maybe when you got off of Earth miracles did happpen. He just didn't know enough. "We wish to give you data to take back to your Earth which will banish disease for you -- all disease. Data which will give you spacecraft that match our own in technical perfection. Data that will make you the undisputed masters of your environment. We offer you the stars, Earthman." He shut a thousand racing thoughts out of his head. "Maybe I'll believe this fairy tale of yours on one condition," Johnny said, "because I can't intelligently do otherwise." "And that -- condition?" "Tell me why." There was a pause, and it was as though something forever unknowable to men hung in the silence. "Picture, if you can, Earthman," the answer came at last, "several small islands in the center of a great sea; all without life, save two. The men on one have learned to build boats which can successfully stiil the sea within certain limits -- they can visit the other islands, but are too frail and too limited in power to venture past the horizon. It is infinitely frustrating to them. The only places to which they may go are dead places. Save for one -- only one, and it becomes magnified in importance -- it becomes an entire raison d'etre in itself. For without it, the men with the boats sail uselessly... "We are old, Earthman. We have watched you -- waited for you for a long time. And now you have grown up. You have burst your tiny bubble of human experience. You have set out upon the sea yourselves..." "You guys should give graduation talks. I didn't ask for a scaleddown philosophy. You tell me that you want to give us every trick in your hat -- for free, no questions asked. So I asked why. And the question isn't changing any." "The answer should be self-evident, Earthman. We are old. And we are lonely." T here was a logic at work somewhere in his brain even during the dream. It told him that he was exhausted from the day's tour with the child-like men of Mars, and that the dream was only the vagaries of a reeling, tired mind of a badly jarred subcon scious. Ittold him that the things lie had seen liad been too alien for his relatively inflexible adult Earth mind to aeecpt without painful reaction, and this was the reaction. This, till' dream. That was all it was; his logic said so. Earth spread out before the undisciplined eye of his dreaming brain, and the near-conscious instant of logic faded. The fertile plains that once had been yellow desert-land mounted golden fruits to a temperate sun, and beyond the distant green of gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities as gracefully civilized beyond the untroubled horizon. And in the dream, these were all things men had done, as though sanity had invaded their minds overnight. It was the Earth that men had intended, rather than that which they had built. The sun dimmed. The air chilled, and the grains and fruits wilted, and the rolling hills were a darker hue than green as the shadow lengthened, spread to the gleaming cities beyond and then as it touched them and ran soundlessly the length and breadth of their wide malls, there were other changes... Skeletons, reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky. The horizon split into jagged, broken moats of dark flame, and Earth was no longer what men had built, but what they eternally feared they must one day create... Then Johnny Love was suddenly awake bolt upright in his cot and his eyes were open wide. His muscles were taut and cramjied. And he was afraid although the men of .# Mars had offered friendship and told him that there was nothing for him to fear. Slowly, he lay down again. And gradually, the cold perspiration that had encased him vanished ; his body relaxed, and the fear subsided. The day's tour had been exhausting both mentally and physically, and there was the excitement of knowing that in five more days Harrison and Janes would land. If they did not, his own ship would carry him safely back to Earth on the day following, for the little men had miraculously repaired it; they had shown him. They had shown him, and he wanted to go home. Johnny Love rolled over on the wide, soft cot, sighed, and went back to sleep. "He sleeps again, Andruul." "Yes, but the damage is probably done." "No, or he would not sleep again so easily. His kind do not have such emotional control." The two turned away from the fading transparency of the sleeping-room wall, and their short, thin bodies were in incongruous contrast to the spaciousness of the metalsheathed corridor down which they walked. "Psychoanalysis showed up the difference in his brain structure -- that apparently accounts for the poor efficiency our screens are showing. IVhat docs Kaarn say?" "He says we should never have allowed the theft." Andruul cursed. "Allowed it! Those nomadic scum are like flies! No matter how many you exterminate, they never fail to come back in double their number. And they strike at the precise moment you are certain the bones of the last one are sinking beneath the sand. Somehow Central Patrol has got to get that unit back." You're certain it was a theft, then?" "Don't be an idiot. Since when can those gypsies build anything more complex than a crude electrical generator? Let alone a psibeam unit? They've forgotten what little their civilization ever knew." "They are clever enough at evading directed over-surface missiles." Andruul muttered something, and lapsed into silence. "Well there is one thing for certain at any rate... A psibeam unit is unaccounted for, and despite our protective screening, the Earthman was visibly disturbed in his sleep. His encephalotapes show that clearly. They know about him, Andruul, and they're making their bid. Central Patrol had belter be quick and certain this time." Andruul kept his silence. But he thought. He thought Central Patrol was getting less efficient and more stupid every day. It was a strange feeling; a feeling with which no human was emotionally equipped to deal. Johnny looked at his flawlessly renovated ship, poised like a snubnosed bullet against the blue-black brittleness of the Martian sky, and then looked behind him at the crescent-shaped formation of tracked vehicles that had escorted him back across the sucking red sand to this place. With each heavybooted step away from them he closed the short distance between them and his ship, and there was not enough time to think about the feeling. Or about the heavy sealed tube they had given him to take back to his people. Usually, when a man ventured beyond the bounds of familiar existence, there was conflict. Either a struggle to win, or, immediately recognizable success, with no struggle or hint of conflict at all. But not this. Not this success that seemed -- what was the word? Hostile? That was ridiculous. These people were friendly. But somehow -- there was an empty ring -- Hell! They had saved his life. Rebuilt his ship. Given him the tube that contained transcriptions, in his own language, of every scientific secret his people could ever hope to learn for themselves in the next thousand years! And, they had even buried Ferris... Use the brains of a mature man, Johnny Love! You've pulled it off without even trying! The most stuendous thing any man in any age as ever pulled off... without even trying! For God's sake don't question -- don't question things you don't understand! Take the credit and let the soul-searching go! He looked behind him again. They were still there. A special, smiling farewell escort, watching a single, solitary figure cross a short expanse of sand to a towering, glistening thing of power. He raised a booted foot to the bottom fin-step, hauled himself up by the stern mounting rungs, hammered the outer lock stud with his gloved fist and the hatch swung open. Like a trap. He could feci the skin at the back of his neck tighten but he forced himself to ignore it. The lock cycled up to thirteen psi and die inner port swung automatically Inward, and then he was inside, clambering up the narrow ladder past the titanium alloy fuel tanks and the spidery catwalks between them to the tiny control room in the fordiull. He would not be waiting for Harrison and Janes. He would get the hell out of here and then radio them and let them make all the decisions from there. Earth for him. Home. He ached for it. He strapped himself in the hammock, punched the warming studs for each engine, and there was a dull, muffled throb below him as each jumped into subdued life. The banks of dials that curved in front of him glowed softly, and he started an almost automatic blast-off check. It took twelve precious minutes. Then he was ready. Scanners on, heat up... ready. The Martian sky was like frozen ink above him and his hands w'ere wet inside his gloves and there was a choking dryness in his throat. Now... And he could not move. There was a sudden, awful nausea and his head spun, and before his eyes there spread a bleeding Earth; the sun dimmed, and fertile plains were cast in sudden shadow... The air chilled, the shadow spread, and there were skeletons reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky! And Earth was no longer what Aten had built! Then the horror in his head was gone, and he felt an awful pressure on each side of it. His hands... he had been pressing with insane strength at both sides of his skull as if to crush it with his bare hands... His face was wet, and he was breathing, choking, in strangling gulps. A scanner alarm clanged. He forced his eyes to focus on the center screen. "Earthman! Emergency! There has been a flaw discovered in the repair of your ship! Do not blast off! Do not..." The other image caught him as his arm was in mid-flight toward the control bank. Sweet and warm... the fertile plains mounting their golden fruits to a mellowed sun, and beyond the distant gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities... But his ann kept going, its muscles loose, and it fell. Heavily. Squarely on the stud-complex toward which its fist had been aimed a split-second before. The engines roared, and the ship lurched upward from the red sand. The command flicked into the Captain's brain like a lash of ice. "Slaazar! Converge sheaf!" "Converging, sir... It would be no use, of course. If the high brass had been content to rely on the beams rather than on their own subtlety in the first place, the Earthman would never have fallen prey to the Nomads, even for a second. But they had wanted to be as forthright as possible -- force, they said, would only arouse suspicion. Psibeam units only as a last resort... The lowliest Patrol Lancer could have told them the folly of that! Hastily, Slaazar issued orders to his battery crews tracking the ascending Spaceship, their units already nearing overload potential. But the desert-scum would see some real psi-power now! They'd see it wasted completely if they saw it at all... Because they'd outmaneuvered the brass again! "Convergence impossible sir." As he had expected. "Colonel Truul, this is Captain Slaazar. Target has passed critical planetary curvature. Convergence impossible. Standing by, sir." For several moments after that, the thin atmosphere of Mars was warmed a little . , . not been total; leaving Mars was even easier than leaving the surface of Earth for the orbits of the Stations. But there was a period of no-thought, no-time, no-being. And then full consciousness seeped back slowly. But not as it was supposed to. Johnny Love knew he had come to because he could see the banked instruments glowing palely before him; because he could realize from reading them that his ship was doing its job to perfection. Almost ready to complete the blastoff ogee, and -- Angrily he belted the scanner switches off and the dull red sphere faded from the viewplates. And he could feel the sweat start again all over his body. No, the returning consciousness was all wrong... All wrong, and the image wouldn't go away... Red desert he had seen before, yet had not seen. There were dark ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddly-formed crater-places that might once have held placid lakes. And on all the vast surface there was no hint of the Patrol tracks, no sign of -- anything. But he had to descend to the place. He did not know how to locate it, but the image told him that it did not matter. The image said merely that he must begin cutting his power. There was no strength in his arms and hands, yet they moved in front of him as though things detached from his body; .skillfully, surely, playing deftly across the colored studs. Scanners on. Scanners on, kid... He watched the screens again, unconscious of what his fingers did on the panels. The dull red sphere loomed large once more. The picture was off-center; without knowing W'hat he did he rectified course with the bow jets; it was centered again. But it was a different place. Still the desert, but with ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddlyformed crater-places... It was coming up fast, now; faster, until the horizon was only a gentle arc against a thin span of blackness, and the rest was cold red. Hardly knowing what he did, his fingers suddenly raced over the control console, even before the scanner-alarms began their earsplitting clanging! The ship lurched into a direction-change that threatened to wrench the hull apart, and the picture in the scanner reeled crazily. He knew his own brain was not dictating the commands of control to his fingertips, nor was it evaluating for itself the madly fluctuating values indicated on the panels. A human brain could not have done it, he knew that... He had cut power. At least there was no power. He was falling at a crazy angle and the desert was rushing u) now, hurtling up to smash him. They'd hit him, then, yet he'd felt nothing... It was getting hot. His hull must be glowing, now, even in the thin atmosjjhere of Mars -- it was a long fall. Slower than a fall on Earth, through thinner air layers, yet he was glowing like a torch. The ocean of sand rushed up. And suddenly his left hand rammed the full-power stud. It was as though he'd been hit from behind wdth all the brute force of some gigantic fist, and there were two things. There was the split-second glimpse of a crescent formation suddenly wheeling toward him and there was the clang of the scanner-alarm. There were those two things his brain registered before the titanic force of full power squeezed consciousness from it and left him helpless. He was running. In a nightmare of a dead planet that was not dead, he ran, away from something. That was how his consciousness returned. While he ran. He stopped, stumbling, turned to look behind him. And the ship was there. Landed perfectly, stubby bullet-nose pointing to the sky. And above it -- Run! The command hit his brain with almost physical force. A will that was not his own took hold of his whole being, and he was rimning again, plowing his way through the sucking sand with strength summoned from a well of energy within his body that had never been there before. Through the thin glassite walls of his helmet he could hear the thuk, thuk, thuk of his boots as they pounded somewhere below him, and there was another pounding, a deadly rhythmic bursting pressure in his chest. And a whine in his ears... The wind-strewn sand stretched flat and infinitely before him. Then leaped at him headlong and there was no horizon; there was only the sudden awful wrench of concussion, a tremor of pure sound which would, in denser atmosphere, have destroyed him with the inertia of his own body. He could not move. Only cling to the shifting desert floor that rocked sickeningly beneath his outstretched body... cling to it for dear life. There was no thought, no understanding. Only a sensation which he could not comprehend, and the sure knowledge that none of this was real. Not real, but the end of survival nonetheless. jects transiting the darkness at which he looked; seeing something then between. His brain began identifying. The darkness; sky. The bright objects; Diemos, Phobos... And the something between -- It was a transparency of some sort; curved, or he would not have been able to detect it at all. A vaulted ceiling through which he could see... His full consciousness came flooding back, then. He tried the muscles in his neck, they hurt, but they worked, and he could move his head from side to side. There was the same transparency, as though he were covered by some huge, invisible bowl. And there were men. Big, muscular creatures, yet thin, tall... Not like the others at all... He sat bolt upright, and they did not move. It was not the same as before. No small room. No voice that he could not see. They had not even removed his suit or his helmet, and he was lying on a hard, cold substance. Then he saw what they were doing. There were two of them apart from the others, working to bring a compact-looking machine into position near him. A gleaming, short cylinder, swung on gymbals between slender forks, mounted on a thin wheeled standard. They were aiming it at him. "No! No -- ' He tried to get to his knees, but it was as though there were no muscles in his body. "Man of -- Earth! We arc friendly. Is that understood?" The thought-words formed in his brain as the strange images had before, and then he knew. Should have guessed it, part of his mind was telling him in a fantastically detached way, the dreams... the compulsions over which he had had no control in the ship... This -- thing. It probably -- "You are quite astute. Earthman. But it is not our technology which created this device. To save you and the civilization which you represent -- and ultimately, our own -- it was necessary for us to steal it. It cost six lives." "Steal..." "From your former captors. It is God... all things are possible! A you facing difficult Brohiemi? Poor Health.' Mone or job Troubles. Love or Troublei Are you Worried about Kmcone dear to you? Is some one dear to you Drinking too Much? Do you ever get Lonel -- Unhappy -- Ditcouraged? Would you like to have more Happiness, Success and 'Cood Fortune" in If you do have any of these Problems, or others like them, dear friend, then here is thousands of other men and women to gloyou -- and very, very quickly too! So don't wait, dear friend. Don't let another minute go by! If you are troubled, worried to dip this Message now and mail with #c in helping so many others and may jim as You will stirely bless this day -- so please don't delay! Just clip this Message now and mail with your name, address and #c in # Norotom. Conn. We will rush ibis their invention, as are so many things with which they destroy. With this instrument, they have succeeded in taking one of Nature's more subtle phenomenon -- psychokinesis -- and amplifying its Those stepped-up energies can then be projected in a tight or fanned beam at will. "They can make a man 'dream,' as you did -- or they can destroy him outright, depending on which given dominance during projection. But we are not skilled in its operation -- they detected our use of it on you while you slept, and from that moment on you were so well screened that even at the risk of burning this unit out, wc were not able to project powerfully enough to do more than merely touch your brain -- " T here was a strange calm in his mind, now. He undestood the words and accepted them as matter-of-factly as they were given. Even now they were manipulating him like some intangible puppet, yet he was convinced it was not a malevolent manipulation. Convinced. The conviction -- manipulation, too... "Only partly, Earthman. We said we are friendly, and we are. We have calmed you and erased your fear. From this point on, we will use this instrument only for communication. And then he felt the fear in him again, gnawing, and his body was again damp and cold. But he had control, now. Control enough to speak. They stood before him, immobile, watching. Somewhere, Johnny Love found his voice. "Look, I've been through this 'friendly' act before..." He hesitated, and they did not try to interrupt him. "Well don't just stand there!" The fear was suddenly turning to the bitter anger of frustration, they had him whipped, and he was tired. "Tell me why! You stick that thing into my head when I'm blasting for home. You force me to drop back. You blow up my ship. Real friendly! Real sports!" For a moment he had run out of words, and again they made no effort to an.swer him. "All right! I don't understand you -- I don't know what you want. But nobody is trying to hurt you, nobody's after your little desert paradise. We had an idea, that's all. Wc thought we could make it work. People have been talking 'go to Mars' on my planet for longer than most of 'em can remember. So we finally gave it a whirl! Sorry!" He looked at them hard, then, and thought that there was something almost like a smile on the face of one. Smile, then, damn you... "We want nothing, Earthman, but to prevent from happening on your planet the thing that happened on this. If they succeed in destroying you as they have us, then this System will always be under their heel, and we shall never be rid of them. Understand, their numbers were too few ever to conquer a planet with a civilization as large and as highly organized as that of Earth, by physical means. "Knowing that, we -- they call us gypsies, nomads, desert-scum today -- we were not too alarmed when they landed here two centuries ago. We were glad to take from them, without paying a price. We were awed by their gifts. Their papers and their books, which would show us how to rebuild our waning civilization -- advance us a thousand years in less than fifty; restore to us our lost arts... And compared to you, we were so very few. "In return, they said that all they wanted was permission to set up a research site. They told us they were a scientific expedition from far out-System. Aldeberan, they said. Part of a vast exploratory program which they had been conducting for centuries. "We believed them -- why not? One day, we thout, we too will be in Spaced And with that day would begin one of the greatest projects of exploration that our race had ever known. So we agreed, and gladly." "Hold it, hold it! 'They' -- who the hell are 'they'? You can spare the suspense... And then there was no more words. The pictures formed in his mind as before, only stronger, now, and there were no details left out. The weapons of war had been built, not by the out-System men, but by their hosts. The plans had not proven too difficult to follow... The new knowledge was not hoarded, was not held under jealous guard by those who had given it, but by those to whom it had been given. One man from another; one group of men from another. that have startled the Frtndi lav Itfiian. fir. American Rvlllen Abrebem ln. f AA  # prophecies dating to the year # A.D. Inter  preted in plain, easyto-understand language by tho f famed Henry C. Roberts. Nodtradamus predictions have never been dlsprevedl r Here in one Big revealing volume you will find the accuracy. Now see what may Fbe in store for us in the fu ture. Clothbound -- over # 'f Pages. 'U(I ' X'   HUi." Just a fawavonfsfromNosfrodQmut Cataclysmic Destruction of Great States and nations from each other. Until there was no trust left on all the planet. There were the wars, then. And when they were over, the new masters had established their first beaelihead in the new System. "But, it was only a beachhead, and had been only intended as such -- " The pictures broke off ; the unspoken words resumed. "Your planet was the ultimate target, but at first, your civilization was not adequately advanced to fall prey to their technique. Their weapon is knowledge, but the potentialities of that knowledge must be understood by a people before it can be effectively used to destroy them. "The rest must be self-evident. After we destroyed ourselves, they sank their infectious, hollow roots into our planet. And from then, investigated your Earth from time to time... and waited... "Waited, because they knew you would be coming. And they knew what kind of men you would be. Strong men, with the light of the stars in your eyes. Yet confused, weak men, with the darkness of suspicion and jealousy still in your souls. Such arc humans, after all... "That is why we stopped you, Johnny Love. Once your blast-off ogee had carried you beyond the curvature of their horizon and brought you over us, our psibeam was effective and theirs were not. We are sorry about your ship. Once they realize that you were under our influence, and were returning rather than taking their precious data to your people, they zeroedin with those damnable guided juggernauts -- " "It wasn't you, then. You mean they -- " "There is little that they cannot do. Destruction is their forte. They could not keep us from preventing your taking their 'gift' to your people, but they could keep that 'gift' from falling into our hands -- and they did. They do not always win. But they never lose." "But I -- " Johnny's thoughts raced. The ship, gone. And Harrison and Janes, Lamson, and Fowler. They would be landing in a few days. They -- "Yes," the thoughts of the true Martians before him answered. "And they will be given a 'gift' for Terra as you were. If your friends return successfully to your planet with that 'gift' -- then -- " The thought was not completed. But it did not have to be. A beachhead was one thing. These scattered, struggling people who had once been masters of Mars might one day unseat it, for they were not yet beaten people, and their will to survive was yet strong. But beyond that' -- Earth taken, the System taken. There it was. There was a sudden coldness inside him now that the fact had crystallized, had become real. Here was no fantasy; no wild surmise. They left him in silence while he thought, their psibeam turned away, now. Harrison and Janes. Lamson, and Fowler. Had to stop them. Stop them, and then somehow, get home. He ached for home. He thought about Ferris, who had given his life for this thing. No, Feiris would not be going home. Ferris was dead. He signalled for the psibeam to be turned toward him again. "You'd have to know their positions out there to make contact, wouldn't you?" They did not answer. He worked to get the words formed, and there was a fleeting thought of a green, lush planet far away, its wide streets and rolling fields bathed in warm sunlight. "I can figure 'em," he said. "I know blast-off schedules, speeds. I know the works! Those things they had in the books. Then you guys can do the rest with -- that thing. Right?" They answered him, then. "Thank you," they said. And that was all. "Answer me!" the General barked again. "You, Janes! Lamson! Fowler -- Harrison! For the last time, what happened out there?" The four stood silently before the nervous figure of their commander, and it was Fowler who finally spoke. said. Condition Untenable -- Return..." "That is all you can say?" "That i.s -- all, sir." The General turned away. There was frustration and anger in his face, and it hid the fear betime yet. It was the thing he saw in the faces of the four men that told him that. There had been too many giant steps, too fast. He had seen this thing in the faces of men before, but never so nakedly. One day, perhaps, men could think of Plan I again. One day, but not now. He turned back to the four, and looked once more into their faces. Plan HI. Condition Untenable. "Dismissed!" the General said. call to treat me like a criminal. Nor to talk to me as if I were senile. My outlook won't change, and you know it!" "Oh, yes, it will! And since you're neither criminal nor senile, that'.s what has to be done. "We'll do it in the most humane way possible. A little brain surgery, and you'll sit in your cage and consume and consume and consume without a care in the world. Yes, sir, we'll change your outlook ! "Now, you mustn't try to twist away from me like that, Mr. Lubway. I can't let you go. We need every consumer we can get."    Beads. # -- # a. # -- Neptune. # -- Tellurian. # -- Alpha Centauri. # -- Thuban. # -- Eighty-eight. # -- Titan. #I -- Ceres. # -- Jupiter. # -- Approaching. # -- # m.p.h. # -- All constellations. # -- Radius vector. # -- Encke's comet. # -- Binaries. # -- Mimas. # -- Heaviside Layer. 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Wooha Ms  Qotir Cwtrol QLonruint Modtag Shop Stoapnoti O Tyabst Ottirtini RUiioratB D Taitilo OTtdpol G Shoot MaUI WMkor O arp.i( and Watoiat # IlKbon( Q Maforo ntH.tog fiaclcN Oadio-IV Caerad OOeaaahatdNM  Radio and TV Sohkiog O SliipMtmd O Rad OponiMi C Shad SWy Drritde C ioi fl aa h i Ida a h UM t o op oa la laUnaUoal CorratpooSMco SUsah. Caaadiaa. Ud, UmraU. CastSi... Spatial Iwtiaa nm U mmwm N Aa U t ArMd rcap. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Robert Swanson: Comparison of the Sexes, # A.D. Mill I Power from the Sun's Roys  IF is pulilMicd monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Ck)pyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. OfRcc of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo. New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Onice. BufTalo, New York. Subscription S#. # for # issues in U.S. and Pos.scssions; Canada # lor # issues; eLsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All storiK appearing in this magazine arc fiction; any similarity to actual peisons is coincidenta). Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #r a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale September lOtk you're that man. here's something chat will interest you. Not a magic formula -- not a getrichquick scheme -- but something more substantial, more practical. Of course, you need something more than just the desire to be an accountant. You've got to pay Soil, wouldn't it be wonh your while to sacrifice some of your leisure in favor of interesiiog borne study -- over a comparatively brief period. Always provided that the rewards were good -- a salary of # to S #' An accountant's duties are interesting, varied and of real worth ro his employers. He has fjmJtagf Do you feel chat such things aren't for you? Veil, don't be coo sure. Very possibly they fSH be! Why not. like so many before you. investigate LaSalle's modern Problem Method of training for an accountancy, position Just suppose you were permitted to work in a targe accounting house under the personal supervision of an expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid. you studied accounting principles and solved problems day by day -- easy ones at first -- then more difficult ones. If you could do this -- and could turn co him for advice as the problems became complex -- soon you'd master them all. That's the training you follow in principle under (he LaSalle Problem Method. You cover accountancy from the basic Principles light up inrough Accoununcy Systems aisd Income Tax Procedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and prepare for (he C. P. A examina(sons. As you go along, you absorb the pnneiptes of Audiung, Cost Accounting. Business Law, Stacisticai Control. Organiation. Management and Finance. Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it -- depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time you spend in study. Will recognition come. The only answer, as you know, is thai success ifvj come to the man who is really twneJ. Ir's possible your employers will notice your improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed, many LaSalle graduates have paid for their training -- with increased earnings -- before they have completed it! For accoununcs. who axe trained in orgamaation and management, are the executives of (he future. Snd For Froo Sampio Lofson For your own good, get diJ (he kts. Write for our free #-page book, "Accountancy. The Profession That Pays" -- also the free sample lesson so you can prove to yourself that you can master accountancy quickly, choroly in spare time at borne. Ovor # Cartiflad Public Accountant amono LoSollo olumnl A Corrospondenco institution Send me without obligation. Free Sample Lesson and "Accountancy, The Prolessioo That Pays. Nsmt Apr...,..., AJdftu Citj, ## # Stsi# .AM thing of a "gimmick", and the definition in the dictionary is rather ambiguous, too. "Resulting or terminating favorably or as desired; also, achieving success, wealth, position or the like. Syn. Prosperous, fortunate, thriving, flourishing." It's a popular definition, of course, but if you look at the word long and thoughtfully, you begin to see loopholes in the dictionary definition -- and after awhile (maybe years) you wind up with a definition all your own. What does "successful" mean? And to that question you might add: "Successful in what?" From that point you can go into a multitude of definitions and near-answers and generalities. Like the person voted by his or her class to be most successful. Like the twenty or thirty or some-number of men or women voted by some people to be the most successful in the country or the state or something. But you can't measure success that way. You can't use a given yardstick; it is a nebulous quality and it must be broken down many times to get its shades of value. Like successful in what? Then: "Who is successful in what?" And still: "Who considers himself successful in what?" That which the public considers successful is entirely different from what the individual might consider success for himself. Let's go back to the old phrase, "there goes a successful man". How does anyone but that person know he's successful? Oh, you say, he's president of the bank. Or, he Or. he's got fourteen children and feeds them three square meals a day. Or, he's the world's champion bo.xer or swimmer or golfer. Sure, that's got it square on the head -- if being president, or havfourteen children or being champion -- if that is what he or she wants and it makes him happiest, then that person is successful. But it's pretty safe to venture that -- nine limes out of ten -- this isn't always the case, at least as far as the indivdual is concerned. A man's life is made up of many facets and intangibles and if he's hapy or successful in one of them he's lucky or fortunate. Some years ago I met a blind man who raised strawberries on a little patch of ground less than an acre in size. They were wonderful strawberries and he was happy raising them. Some people considered him unfortunate. He considered himself successful. Another time I met a retired railroad engineer whose worldly goods were certainly not pretentious. But after hearing him tell of his experiences during the early days of railroading and brag about bringing in his train on time through some of the difficulties he faced and seeing his face light up with each story -- you couldn't doubt that his life had been a success. What was even more important, he thought it was. Conversely, you can talk to people in the limelight, famous people who have been successful by the general yardstick, and they'll sometimes open up and say "hell no! what I wanted was something else." Sometimes people who haven't got it, have it more than you think. And sometimes those who seems to have it, haven't got it after all. It is the inner .success of the individual upon which hinges the ultimate success of mankind. Now, what is the ultimate success of mankind? I would say that mankind has been successful, so far, in many ways. Simply propagating and living in such close quarters on this globe may be one. Gaining new knowledge of the universe and its components may be another. Beating some diseases and lengthening the life of individuals may be still another. In these things we cannot doubt that mankind has been successful. But are these individual successes enough? There are other goals to strive for -- and there is the fly in the ointment. Shadings and meanings that were part of each man's personality have gone into making up the individual successes, and tliey color world leadership too. In leadership, personal success is not enough, yet the shadings enter into -- let's say -- statesmanship. Whether war is avoided or plowed right into is a part of a personal or patriotic desire to achieve success. And the immediate success becomes the goal. But the ultimate success of mankind is a larger goal than that. What is that goal? And, having attained the goal, will mankind be "successful"? Let's say the goal is the welfare of all the peoples of the world... and start all over again with statesmanship. Or -- with human nature? reading some of the most interesting manuscripts that have ever come into this office. Not by professional standards, of course -- but because they represent the ideas and imaginations of students in colleges all over the United States and Canada. These manuscripts are their answers to the theme question in IP's first nationwide College Science Fiction Contest: "What Will Life In America Be Like # Years From Now?" When the winners have been selected, seven young men and women will receive # in cash prizes, with # going to the author of the manuscript judged the best. The awards will be announced in next month's issue (November), with the winning .stories appearing in subsequent issues. Don't miss them; they contain some refreshingly new approaches to science fiction. -- jlq It was a duel to the death and Kraas' had all the advantages, including offense and defense. Jonner had neither, but he employed an old equation peculiarly adaptable to the situation. And the proper equation properly worked... M urdering stcin was easy. Kraag waited until Jonner donned his spacesuit and went out to have a personal look at the asteroid. Even then Kraag held his patience, because he wanted Jonner to come back to the .ship unsuspecting. Kraag sat tensely at the back of the control room while Stein, the navigator and communications man, operated the radio. There was a brief period when Stein talked with Marsport, then he got in touch with Jonner. Until Jonner got some distance from the wrecked ship, most of their conversation was an argument. "I still think two of us ought to go out and one stay at the ship," argued Stein. "Kraag agrees with me. What if you fall into a crevice?" "There's not much danger, and you've got a directional fix on me," replied Jonner's voice through the loudspeaker. "If we had a large crew. I'd agree we ought to explore in pairs. Since there are just three of us, only one ought to be endangered at a time. I'm the captain, so I'm it." "Well, don't get out of sight," warned Stein. "We don't have an atmosphere here to bounce radio waves over the horizon." Through the glassite port, Kraag could see Jonner poking around at Illustrated by Paul Orban lX'J r-'r ft-# #r! A 'r'wj M m m. the asteroid's surface with his steel probe. Against the incredibly curved horizon, jonner's suited figure leaned at a slight angle under the black, star-studded sky. The distant sun gleamed from the sphere of his helmet. "Pretty smooth terrain," remarked Jonner. "It's not much of a planet, but it seems to have enough mass to pull down any mountains. Looks like there should be some hills, though. It must have been in a molten state when the original trans-Martian planet was broken up." "That ought to mean high albedo," said Stein. "Higher than it ought to be." "Sounds more like Vesta," said Jonner. "Sure we're on Ceres?" Stein looked at the notes he had made from the ship's instruments, before the crash. "The escape velocity was #I feet per second," he said, "and the diameter #. I figure the mass at .#." "All those figures are off according to the latest table for Ceres," said Jonner. "The fellows that made that table were on Mars," reminded Stein. "Vesta doesn't have a #mile diameter. It must be Ceres." "You're the navigator," surrendered Jonndr. "I'll lake your word for it." The personnel sphere of the ship rested on the ground, tilted at almost a #-degrec angle from the horizontal. The tilt was no inconvenience, however. Each of the men weighed only five or six pounds here, and slippage was hardly noticeable. "I'll turn you over to Kraag," said Stein at last, glancing up at the chronometer. "It's my day to fix supper, you know." It was the signal Kraag had been waiting for. He reached behind him and fumbled in the rack for a gun. The one he brought out was Jonner's, and it wasn't a heat-gun but the ancient pistol Jonner swore by. Kraag put it back hurriedly, but not before Stein had turned in his chair and seen it. "What's up, Kraag?" asked Stein without alarm. "Why the gun?" Kraag pulled a heat-gun from the rack. "Nothing's up," he said, and shot Stein. The ray burned into Stein's shoulder, and Kraag swung it down across Stein's chest to his stomach before relaxing his pressure on the trigger. "My God, Kraag!" gurgled Stein. Summoning a last effort, he croaked into the microphone: "Jonner! Watch out! Kraag shot..." Kraag blasted him in the face, cutting him off. Stein's body floated forward and upward out of the chair and began to settle slowly toward the slanting floor. "What's going on, Stein?" came Jonner's alarmed voice over the loudspeaker. "Stein? Stein!" "It's all right, Jonner," said Kraag as calmly as he could, when he could reach the microphone. "Stein just fainted." There was silence from Jonner. "I'll take care of Stein and then take over the mike till you get ready to come in," said Kraag into the microphone. "I want to talk to Stein when he comes around," said Jonner. His voice sounded cold. So Jonner suspected something. Well, that couldn't be helped. Maybe he could be talked around. "All right, Jonner," agreed Kraag soothingly. Stein's body had to be hidden from Jonner, just in case Jonner got into the personnel sphere alive -- something Kraag did not intend for him to do. When he had taken care of Jonner, he could dispose of both bodies before the rescue sliip got there. Dragging Stein's body was like towing someone through water. It floated through the air of tlic sphere at Kraag's tug. settling slowly. His only problem was getting good leverage for pushing, .fter some cogitation, he jammed the body into an empty food compartment two decks below the control room. Back in the control room, Kraag looked out the port. Jonner was closer to the personnel sphere now, looking toward it but not moving. Other portions of the ship, some jettisoned, some crumpled and broken apart by its crash, lay at varying distances from the personnel sphere. Some of the parts were scattered out of sight beyond the horizon, a mile away. Kraag had not wanted to fool with the asteroid. There had been no question that they had to swing back off their original orbit toward Titan when the meteorite slashed open both of their hydrazine tanks. But Kraag's idea had been to stay in space and try to turn back toward Mars before the fuel gave out. As the engineer, Kraag resented Jonner overruling him. Jonner had felt it safer to take an orbit around the asteroid and wait for rescue. But the fuel pumps had failed before they could adjust to the orbit. Kraag would never forget that helpless waiting as they circled and circled, spiraling downward to the inevitable crash. He went back to the microphone. "Okay, Jonner." he said. "What's going on out there now?" "Where's Stein?" countered Joiiner. "I want to talk to him." "He's not feeling so good. Said he'd rather not try to get back up to the control room right now." "Tell him to come to the mike anyhow. I don't want to talk to you till I talk to Stein." "Stein can't talk, I tell you. If you don't want to talk to me, then arc you ready to come in?" ".nd get shot?" retorted Jonner. So Jonner's suspicions were that definite. It was to be cxjKCted after the words Stein had been able to shout into the microphone. Jonner was nobody's dumbbell. Kraag tired once more. "That's a ridiculous idea, Jonner," he said. "I can't figure why you'd say such a thing." "You shot Stein," said Jonner positively. "There's no use your denying it. I know you shot Stein, and I'll know it until Stein himself tells me it isn't so." Kraag knew Jonner too well to try to keep up the pretense any longer. He tried another tack. "Okay, so I shot Stein," he admitted. "That doesn't mean I'll shoot you. Come on in and talk it over. We can make a deal." "If you shot Stein, why wouldn't you shoot me?" asked Jonner logically. "There wasn't enough air for three. There is, for two." Jonner was silent for a moment. "So that's why you did it," he said then. "Figured it pretty close, didn't you, Kraag?" "I'm the guy who has to watch supplies on this boat. I checked the oxygen after the crash broke open those three compartments on the supply deck. There's # pounds of oxygen left. It'll take almut # months for the rescue ship to get here from Mars...t # pounds of oxygen a day, you and I can make it, but it would have lasted the three of us only # months." Jonner cursed him for a full minute, not loudly but with such intensity that Kraag felt his face getting warm. "You damn murderer!" finished Jonner. "You damn cold-blooded murderer!" "Cut it out, Jonner," growled Kraag. "I can't understand you and Stein. What were you expecting to save us? A miracle?" "I don't feel like talking about it now," said Jonner warily. "If you had only... Hell, Kraag, we'd been together a long time. Even if all of us had thought we were going to die, I didn't think we'd kill each other off like animals." "Self-preservation is the first law of nature," said Kraag cynically. "Better that two should die than three. Come on in. Jonner." "That's self-presei-vation? No thanks, Kraag. You know I'll turn you in as a murderer when the rescue ship gets here. I have no hankering to walk up where you can burn me down." "Okay, stay out there till your air gives out." The airlock was not a comfortable place to spend one of the asteroid's seven-hour nights, but Kraag was afraid not to stand guard there with his heat-gun. He was afraid to sleep, too, for the airlock combination was virtually noiseless and Jonner could open it from the outside. Jonner was unarmed, but Kraag had no hankering for a hand-to-hand fight with the powerfully built captain inside the personnel sphere. Because the air would swish out of the lock instantly if Jonner ojicned it, Kraag had to wear a spacesuit. He tried to talk to Jonner several times, but got no answer. Toward dawn, Kraag doed olf, only to be brought awake with a start by Jonner's voice in his earphones. "Good morning, Kraag," said Jonner. There was iron in his voice. "Have a good night's sleep?" "About as good as yours. I'd say," retorted Kraag, wishing he could get his hands inside his helmet to rub his eyes. "I slept fine. Found me a good foxhole just beyond the horizon." "Damn you, Jonner! Where are you now?" "Go on and have breakfast, Kraag. I'm far enough away for you to see me. Take a look." Kraag peered out of the uppermost airlock ports, one by one. They slanted at a bad angle, but through one of them he made out Jonner, standing half a mile away. Uncannily, as though he could see Kraag's helmet at the port, Jottner waved. Kraag was afraid to take olT the sparesuit now because the supply deck had no ptorts and Jonner could get to the sliip in a hurry if he wanted to. He took off the helmet, though, and went up to the center deck. Hurriedly, he opened the cover of the port in the direction he had seen Jonner. jonner was still in the same place, sitting down. Kraag heated breakfast and ate it with an eye on the port. Jonner didn't move. Kraag felt better when he had eaten, and went up to the control room. "Why don't you give it up and come on in, Jonner?" he asked. "The o.xygen in that suit's not good for more than another #.') hours." "That's where you're wrong, Kraag, and that's what's .so tragic about your murdering Stein," said Jonner quietly. "You either forgot that we carried oxygen instead of nitric acid as the fuel oxidizer this trip or, being an engineer, you didn't think of it except as fuel. "There's enough oxygen in the tanks scattered over the landscape to keep a dozen men alive until the rescue ship gets here. It's hard for me to get at, but I've already found I can manage it." Kraag was profoundly .shocked. For a moment the enormity of what overwhelmed him. It had been completely unncce.ssary. Then his self-reproach turned into a growing anger against Jonner. Jonner was always so reticent, always required his orders to be obeyed without explanation. During the whole argument about taking an orbit around the asteroid, during the whole time it had taken to spiral down to a crash, he had not told Kraag how he expected them to stay alive until they were rescued. Kraag hadn't asked him, of course. Kraag had assumed Jonner was thinking in terms of his own figures. "I'm sorry about Stein," said Kraag, and meant it. "But it can't be helped now, Jonner. There's enough air for both of us, if you'll keep your mouth shut when the rescue ship gets here." "If I promised, I still wouldn't trust you and you wouldn't trust tne. No, Kraag. The only way it'll work is for you to come out unarmed and let me go in and get the guns. Then I'll lock you in the control room till the rescue ship gets here." "One of us is a fool, Jonner, and you seem to think it's me. I'm not going to burn for murder. I've got the whip hand. You may have oxygen, but you've got to have food and water, too." Jonner laughed, without humor. "I've got enough of that for three Earth days and I can last longer," he said. "Before that time, I'll come and get you, Kraag. Don't go to sleep!" Kraag cursed and switched off the loudspeaker. But he kept an eye on Jonner through the glassite. Always, he had to watch Jonner -- or stay on guard in the airlock. If there were only some way to lock Jonner out! But the only real lock was on the control room, and a man couldn't live in the control room with an enemy below who could cut the water and oxygen lines. Kraag would have to sleep .some time. Jonner couldn't know when, but Jonner already was ses'cn hours sleep up on him. Jonner could pick his own time to slip up to the sphere under cover of darkness, he could pick his own time to come through the lock. Maybe Kraag would be awake and could burn him down -- but maybe not. There was only one thing to do. He'd have to take the attack to Jonner. every port he passed, always watching Jonner, Kraag hung a heat-gun on one of the hooks at his spacesuit's belt. He went back below, put the helmet on, and went out through the airlock. The shadow of the sphere stretched away toward his left. He was in sunlight. Jonner, still in the same spot, got to his feet but made no move to approach. "Welcome to the great outdoors," said Jonner. "I'm going to get you, Jonner," said Kraag grimly. "One way or another. I'm going to get you." He moved toward Jonner. Each step was a long, floating leap and it was hard to stay balanced before landing. Jonner moved, not away from him but sidewise. Kraag stopped. The effective range of the heat-gun was no more than # feet. If he tried to get close enough to Jonner to use it, Jonner could circle and get to the personnel sphere. There were the oxygen tanks, the big ones used for fuel. If Kraag could get to them and bum them open, Jonner couldn't last long outside. But they were scattered pretty far from the personnel sphere. Jonner would get to the sphere for sure if he tried that. "Okay, Jonner, I know when I'm licked," said Kraag. "Come on in." "I'm not too far away to see the gun, Kraag." "I'll take it back to the sphere and leave it." "Why not just toss it away?" "And have you beat me to it and get the drop on me? We'll leave the guns in the sphere and I'll meet you on even terms." "I'll believe it when I see it." Kraag went back to the sphere. He couldn't stand in shadow without looking suspicious, but he took the heat-gun from his belt ostentatiously and swung it in an arc, apparently tossing it through the open outer lock. Instead, he held onto it and hung it by the trigger guard to a belt hook at the back of his suit. "I'm all clean, Jonner. Come on up," he invited. "Let's see the hooks, Kraag," said Jonner. Kraag held his arms aloft, wriggling the empty steel fingers of the spacesuit. Jonner came toward him, floating high above the surface with each step. At just about the extreme range of the heat-gun, he stopped. Kraag kept his arms outspread, but tensed himself. "Clean, so far," said Jonner drily. "Now turn around, Kraag." "And have you jump me from behind? Not hardly." "Gun on the back hook, eh, Kraag?" "Damn you, Jonner!" Kraag reached behind him for the gun and at the same time leaped toward Jonner. Jonner, ready, jumped back, and Jonner was a more powerful man. Handling a heat-gun with the hand-hooks of a spacesuit is awkward business, and by the time Kraag could bring the weapon to bear on Jonner and press the trigger, jonner's distance was such that the ray obviously did no worse than make things uncomfortably warm for him. "I didn't think that surrender rang true," commented Jonner. "If you'd been Ieel, you'd have tossed away the heat-gun." Then Jonner revealed that he was not entirely weaponless. As he hit the surface, his arm moved in an arc and a good-sized rock came hurtling through space toward Kraag. Kraag writhed frantically, two feet off the ground, and the stone missed him by inches. Kraag landed on his side and bounced again. Jonner hit once more and hurled another rock. Evidently he was armed with .several of them. This one ricocheted off the ground near Kraag just as Kraag finally .slid to rest. Getting to his feet and turning to flee was agonizingly slow, when every frantic movement lifted him off the ground. Another stone came sailing by, to strike the personnel sphere and rebound at an angle, before Kraag could jump back, away from Jonner. Perspiring and panting, he clambered hastily back into the safety of the airlock. Jonner's rocks were a better weapon than a heat-gun, Kraag realized. They weighed only a fraction of an ounce and Jonner could fling them an amazing distance. But their mass was just the same as ever, and a jagged one could rip a fatal hole in a spacesuit. He had no intention of engaging in a stonethrowing duel with Jonner, in which Jonner would be at least on equal terms with him.  On the other hand, it was even more imperative than before that he eliminate Jonner as soon as possible. A rock could be a deadly weapon if Jonner got inside the sphere, too. At any rate, there was no point in concealing Stein's body from Jonner any longer and Kraag couldn't take chances on it polluting the atmosphere of the sphere. He dragged the corpse from the food compartment, down to the airlock, and pushed it out onto the surface of Ceres. The body settled stiffly to the ground a few feet away. Kraag removed his helmet and hand-hooks, went back up to the control room and settled himself to watch Jonner. Jonner walked around freely, periodically hurling rocks at the sphere. The rocks bounced off without damage, but every time one of them hit the hull, the sound of it rang through the sphere. Kraag switched on the communications system. "Do you have to do that?" he demanded in irritation. "It's not doing you any good." "Keeping me in practice," replied Jonner cheerfully. "I developed a pretty good arm throwing grenades in the Charax Uprising." Jonner was a veteran of that brief but savage war on Mars, and sometimes reminisced about it. It was there he had developed his preference for the old-style projectile pistol over the heat-gun. ner's pistol, hanging in the rack with the heat-guns, and slowly an idea spread through his mind. The heat-gun range was the same anywhere, but the range of a projectile weapon .should be greater hefe than on Mars or Earth. Its range should be far greater than Jonner's rocks. Kraag took it from the rack and turned it over in his hand, studying it. He wasn't sure of its principle, but thought it was something on the order of rocket fuel. It should fire without an atmosphere around it. There were some figures stamped Cal-.#, MV#I #, Ser-# #." Kraag puzzled over them. He knew the first one was the make and year and the last undoubtedly was the serial number. He deduced that "MV-llOO" probably was a figure showing tlie relationship between the projectile's mass and velocity. But it had been a long time since projectile weapons were common. He called on the memory of a demonstration of the weapon Jonner had given his companions once on Mars. There was something that had to be done to prepare it for firing. Holding it in his right hand, Kraag grasped the barrel with his left. After a moment of hesitant tugging, he hit the right movement and the whole outer casing of the barrel slid backward and clicked. It snapped back into position as Kraag released it, and he remembered. The gun was primed now. All he had to do was press the trigger and it would fire. It would automatically prime itself again after firing. It would fire each time he pressed the trigger now, until it exhausted its projectiles. Exultant, he laid it carefully in a contour chair, where it wouldn't slide out. He put his helmet back on and replaced the hand-hooks of his spacesuit. He looked out several ports before he found Jonner. The captain was not more than # feet away, casually lobbing rocks at the sphere. Kraag picked up jonner's pistol and made his way down to tlie airlock. He emerged and walked around the sphere to the side where he had located Jonner. Jonner was moving away now, though he couldn't have known Kraag was coming out. He was about # feet away -- too far for a heat-gun, but certainly w'ithin range of the projectile weapon. He seemed to be headed tow'ard one of the big fuel tanks. Kraag levelled the pistol toward Jonner and pulled the trigger. To his astonishment, he was hurtled backward, heels over head. The kick of a .# on an asteroid is pretty powerful. Kraag must have bounced # feet backward over the terrain before he slid to rest on his stomach. But he held on to the pistol -- and, since he never had a chance to release the pressure of his hand-hook on the trigger, it did not fire again. When lie struggled upright, Jonner was standing at the edge of the fuel tank, watching him. "Using my gun now, ch, Kraag?" Jonner said. "You'd better stick to weapons you know something about." With that, he disappeared behind the fuel tank. Kraag got to his feet and advanced confidently. His heat-gun was still hanging at his belt if he got close enough to Jonner to use it, and he could fire the projectile weapon at Jonner when Jonner was out of heat-gun range. He was learning. One had to point the projectile gun accurately before firing. It couldn't be swung around and focussed while pressing the trigger, like a heat-gun. He might miss a few times, but he ought to be able to hit Jonncr at least once before the ammunition was exhausted. Once should be enough. Heat-gun ready in his left hand, projectile gun in his right, Kraag circled the fuel tank. Keeping it between them, Jonner had headed straight for the horizon, running in long, shallow leaps. He was at least half a mile away. Kraag pointed the projectile pistol and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Then he realized that he had never released the pressure of his hand-hook on the trigger after firing the first time. He let up on it and pressed it down. And again Kraag was hurled backward, but this time he was smashed against the fuel tank and rebounded forward, falling on his face. By the time he reached his feet again, Jonner had vanished over the horizon. Cursing softly, Kraag made his way back to the personnel sphere. He had hoped to get Jonner with that shot. He was very sleepy, and now he was faced with another night on guard. He entered the airlock, pushed himself gently upward to catch the rungs of the metal ladder and turned the wheel of the airlock's inner door. Nothing happened. The door did not open. Fear gripped him like a paralyzing hand. For a moment he thought Jonner had managed to get to the sphere ahead of him and somehow had locked him out. But that was impossible. Then he thought the inner door might be jammed, and he and Jonner locked out together. He glanced frantically below him, then broke into relieved laughter. He had left the outer airlock door open. As a safety measure against the sphere's accidentally losing its air, neither door would open unless the other was shut. And that meant he could lock Jonner out of the sphere simply by leaving the inner door of the airlock open! His laugh was full and genuine now as he pulled the outer door closed. "Having fun, Kraag?" asked Jonner in his earphones. "Just looking forward to a good night's sleep, for a change," retorted Kraag triumphantly. "Prowl around all you want to, Jonner. I can wait you out, now." "The airlock, eh? I wondered when your guilty conscience would settle down and let you remember about that airlock," said Jonner phlegmatically. "You know, Kraag, I had no idea you wouldn't think about a simple thing like that, till I looked through the airlock port last night and saw you huddled up there with a heat-gun. You should have turned out the light." Jonner was silent for a few minutes. Then he added: "I don't think I'd laugh yet, though, Kraag. Remember, you're fighting with my weapons." Kraag wasn't sure what he meant by that: whether he was talking about Kraag's using the projectile pistol or the fact that they were in space, Jonner's natural element. Kraag himself had been in space # years, most of it with Jonner, but before then he had never left Earth. Jonner had been born and raised on Mars, where a man needed a suit to go to the next settlement, and he had been on a ship since he was #. As for using the pistol, Kraag could sec danger for no one but Jonner. He had proved, twice, that he could fire it. He was quite sure the old-fashioned wcapon was no more likely to e.xplode than a heatgun. The only trouble he foresaw was figuring how to reload it if he used up all its projectiles before hitting Jonner. Kraag shrugged and removed his suit. He was hungr', and he was looking forward to a supper better than Jonner had available in the concentrated supplies in his spacesuit. Jonner's food and water bynow had dwindled to less than # hours' supply, unless he was weakening himself by going on slim rations. A S HE wolfed down his supper, Kraag took stock of his situation. He could sec no flaw in his position...-Ml he had to do was sit back and wait. He decided not to destroy the tanks that were Jonner's supply of extra oxygen. After all, Jonner could not last beyond his food and water supply. The presence of the oxygen made his case airtight. He could disjx)se of the bodies of Stein and Jonner and tell the crew of the rescue ship they had wandered off on an exploration tour and never returned. With plenty of oxygen for the three of them, no motive could be established, against him for the murders.  He began to feel rather sorry for Jonner. They had been companions, and Stein with them, for a long time. After eating, he went up to the control room and turned Jonner in on the communications system. He was genuinely regretful that Jonner had to die so soon. It would be lonesome on the asteroid with no cne to talk to. "I hope you've been keeping the radio open to Marsport, in case there were any inquiries," said Jonner. "If they get the idea we're all dead out here, they may call off the rescue." "The last time tliey called was right after you left the ship," said Kraag. "Stein was going to tell you, but I suppose he forgot it. Marsport knows where we are. A rescue ship should have blasted off by now." "That's the advantage of being on Ceres instead of in space," Jonner pointed out. "They know Ceres' orbit, but they'd have to have several directional fixes on us, spaced several days apart, to pinpoint us if the ship were in space. What did Stein say the escape velocity here is?" Surprised at the unexpected question, Kraag consulted the notes Stein had left lying in the control room. "EV #I feet per second," he replied. "Not figuring on jumping off the planet, are you, Jonner?" "Maybe," said Jonner. "Well, don't wake me up if you do. I'm really going to pound the pillow tonight." Jonner laughed shortly, and Kraag heard the click as the captain switched off his helmet radio. He grinned. Kraag was asleep almost as soon as he hit the bunk. He came awake slowly, reluctantly, knowing he had not had all the sleep he needed. Something was pounding noisily somewhere, ringing through his head. He shook his head to clear it. For just an instant there was silence in the utter darkness. Then: Like a clap of thunder the noise reverberated through the metal hull of the sphere. Kraag started violently, and only the bunk straps kept him from rocketing to the ceiling. Again: And Kraag could feel the sphere shiver with the blow. He switched on the lights just as another terrific crash sounded. This time he could see everything on the central deck quiver with the impact. One of the four small ports around the central deck was mcovered, and the light threw a beam out into the blade night of the asteroid. It brought a temporary cessation of the regular blows. During the interval, Kraag unstrapped himself and tumbled up to the control room, to switch on the communications system. "Jonner!" he shouted. "Jonner, what in hell?" "I'm not deaf," said the loudspeaker resentfully. "Give me a chance to turn down my volume, if you're going to holler." "What the devil are you doing out there, Jonner?" "W'hat I promised you. I'm coming in after you." Kraag swore. "I'm going to blow you off the damned planet," he threatened, and leaped for the gun rack. "You'll have to come outside to do it," reminded Jonner. "If you try to shoot through the ports, you'll save me a lot of work." Kraag raced up and down the sphere twice before he had sense enough to turn out all the lights and use the searchlight. Then he located Jonner, clinging to the sphere outside the astrodome on the navigation deck. Jonner had a sledge hammer from the ship's cargo section in his hand. Jonner grinned at him and moved quickly out of the searchlight's beam. Ten seconds later, another thunderous crash sounded, apparently from the other side of the sphere. Kraag swung the light in a circle, but Jonner could move faster than the beam. Hastily, Kraag made another tour of the sphere, this lime closing all the metal covers over the ports. When he reached the control room, Jonner's voice was calling him over the loudspeaker, repeating his name every few seconds. "What do you want?" demanded Kraag, panting. "Just wanted to tell you I could have knocked out the astrodome or one of the ports before you woke up," said Jonner cheerfully. "I don't want to kill you, Kraag. I just want you to surrender, and if you don't I can eventually batter through the meteor shield and the hull, and ruin the sphere for you." "We'll see about that," gritted Kraag. Hurriedly he donned a spacesuit. Hanging Jonner's pistol at hb belt, he took a heat-gun in his right hand and a flashlight in hb left and ventured out through the airlock. He did not make the mistake of switching on the airlock light, but Jonner seemed to know when he emerged, possibly from the vibration when the lock opened. "Nice night out, isn't it, Kraag?" Jonner welcomed him. Kraag grunted. The night was black as pitch. The only way he could tell where the ground ended and the sky began was that the sky was jewelled with stars. He turned the light on and flashed it over the sphere. No sign of Jonner. But a rock struck his helmet and bounced off with a clang that nearly knocked him down and left him momentarily dizzy. "I'm behind you, Kraag," said Jonner pleasantly. "Better go back inside. I promise not to break your shell open tonight." Kraag twisted around and fired the heat-gun even as he searched for Jonner with the flashlight. Both beams pierced emptiness. Jonner just laughed at him. Afraid now that Jonner would get into the sphere, Kraag scuttled back around to the airlock. Heatgun ready, he turned on the light before closing the outer door, and breathed a sigh of relief at finding it empty. Trembling with reaction, he closed the outer lock, left the inner one open and made his way up to the center deck. He needed coffee. "I see you've gone back to the heat-gun," said Jonner. "That's smart." "You'd like to see me exhaust the fuel tank of your pistol shooting it in the dark, when I can't hit you, wouldn't you?" retorted Kraag. "No, thanks. I'll keep it for long distances." "Fuel tank? Oh, you mean the magazine." Jonner laughed. "I'd stay away from that old .# of mine if I were you, Kraag. It's been with me too long. It's a lot more likely to turn on my enemies than to do me any harm." "Rot!" snapped Kraag. "It's a gun. All I have to do is get the hang of aiming it properly." "I wouldn't use too much power tonight, either," warned Jonner. "You don't get much with the solar mirror this far out. Anyhow, I took the mirror off while you were having your nap. The batteries should give out in a few hours." Without answering, Kraag switched off his radio and removed his helmet. That last bit of information was a blow. Gradually, Jonner was stripping Kraag down to his own subsistence level. Power or not, Kraag was determined to have his coffee. But first he went over the sphere again and switched off all unnecessary lights. Jonner was a man who kept his word, but Kraag couldn't afford to trust him. Jonner might change his mind and try to break open the sphere again before morning. Kraag kept his spacesuit on. He did not sleep too well, for about once every # or # minutes something -- either a large rock or Jonner's sledge hammer -- would strike the sphere a resounding blow. it was morning, he opened the ports of the center deck and let the weak sunlight stream into the sphere. Off to the east, he saw Jonner digging with a pick from the cargo. Jonner was far enough away for his legs from the knees down to be hidden by the extreme curvature of the little planet. Kraag's first impulse was to go out and take a pot shot at him. Instead, he switched on the shortwave cooker and prepared some breakfast. Taking it up to the control room, where he could switch on the communications system, he opened the eastern port and watched Jonner. This high, he could see Jonner's feet and the hole he was digging -- and Stein's body. Jonner had taken Stein's body from the spot outside the sphere where Kraag had pushed it. He was burying Stein. Jonner finished his excavation and laid Stein gently to rest in it. He pushed rocks back in to fill it up, and wrested a boulder that would have weighed a ton over it for a monument. Then he murmured a brief prayer over the grave. Kraag was ashamed and then, tinaccountably, angry. But he stood at the port, drinking his coffee and watching Jonner, and said nothing. Either with chalk or with some soft rock he had found -- Kraag could not tell which -- Jonner wrote something on the big stone that was Stein's monument. Then he stood up and turned toward the sphere. "Kraag," he said. "Kraag, are you tuned in?" "Yes," replied Kraag shortly. "You have today to surrender. Tonight I'm going to hatch you out of your comfortable egg." Kraag switched off the communications system and paced the room, anger burning slowly inside him. This was ridiculous. He held all the cards. He had the guns, he had the sphere. Jonner was outside, weaponless, with a limited supply of food and water. Yet Jonner had him on the defensive. How had it happened? How could it happen? Kraag lit a cigarette and puffed at it slowly, applying his mind coldly to the situation. He didn't doubt that Jonner would do as he threatened, but he didn't think it was the recklessness of desperation. More likely, Jonner deliberately, calculatingly, planned to reduce his own chances for comfort, in order to bring Kraag down to more even terms with him. If Jonner broke the hull of the sphere, it could be repaired -- by someone working outside, free from interruption by an enemy. Until it was repaired, it would mean that Kraag, too, would have to live in a spacesuit. And Jonner might knock open a hole, or more than one, big enough to permit him to enter the sphere and attack Kraag in the darkness. If only he could surround the sphere with light at night, he could keep Jonner at a distance. But with the solar mirror gone, the searchlight, on top of the sphere's other electrical requirements, would discharge the batteries before the flight was half gone. Kraag knew Jonner's stubbornness, his resourcefulness, his raw courage. Jonner was the one of them who was really at bay, when you considered it. Yet Kraag felt that Jonner was closing in on him, gradually, inexorably. Facing this, Kraag felt the steel enter his own will. He wasn't a coward. He had just been expecting this to be too easy. If Jonner would force him to fight, he would fight. He still had the advantage. He must abandon the sphere as an asset. Jonner could take that away from him anyhow. On the other hand, if Jonner took over the sphere, Kraag could use the same weapxm against him. He could break open the sphere. So the sphere was no longer a factor. The food and water were no longer a factor, for food and water went with the sphere. He would admit Jonner to equality in those supplies -- not full equality, for he could provision himself now more fully than Jonner had been provisioned two Ceres days earlier. He still might pin Jonner down as Jonner tried to get to the sphere for more supplies. Then Kraag's remaining advantage lay in the guns. They should be enough. If he could get close enough to use a heat-gun, he could blast Jonner. Jonner's own projectile weapon would keep Jonner out of rock-throwing range, and sooner or later he would hit Jonner with it. He couldn't keep on missing; the law of average would give him a hit sooner or later. And all he needed was just one... Kraag provisioned his spacesuit and hung all three of the heat-guns at his belt. In one of the capacious outside pockets he put two spare flashlights and half a dozen of the extra fuel packets -- What was it Jonner had called them? Magazines, that was it -- for Jonner's projectile pistol. He took that pistol in hu right hand and sallied forth to do battle. Kraag shut the outer lock to make it appear he might be still in the sphere if Jonner happened not to spot him. He went over to Stein's new grave. Jonner had written on the stone: Angrily, Kraag burned the lettering off in a #-second blast with his heat-gun that left the face of Stein's gravestone cherry red. He turned to survey the terrain, and saw Jonner. The captain was crouched half a mile away, apparently writing more on a flat rock or on the ground itself. Jonner was facing him, but his head was down and he hadn't seen Kraag. If Kraag fired the projectile pistol, he probably would miss and might warn Jonner with the shot. He was sure of his accuracy with a heat-gun. Kraag took a heat-gun in his left hand and ran toward Jonner, Possibly the vibration of the ground warned Jonner. He looked up, jumped to his feet and Bed. As soon as he could stop and get hb feet planted firmly on the ground, Kraag fired the projectile pistol after him. He was still shooting low and to one side. Kraag picked himself up from the ground, where the backlash of the weapon had knocked him, and went up to the spot where Jonner had been writing. A mathematical problem had been scratched on the surface with a sharp rock. Kraag had interrupted Joimer in the middle of it. The figures that had been written were: #)#I Kraag stared at it, carrying out the rest of the simple mathematics in his head. The answer was #. But what was the problem? The figure "#" was familiar enough. It was the square root of two, carried to two decimal places. But what was Jonner dividing by it, and why? He frowned in concentration. There was something familiar about the numbers, something that had to do with him and Jonner, and Jonner wouldn't be working arithmetic just for amusement. He saw Jonner moving on the horizon, just his head visible against the black sky, his body hidden by the curve of the planet. Jonner was circling. The sudden realization of danger wiped other thoughts from his mind. Until he saw the epitaph Jonner had written for Stein, Kraag had thought Jonner looked at this as he did: one man against the other, and winner take all. But Jonner intended to win even if he lost, because Jonner was not fighting just for Jonner's survival but for due process of law. Jonner was trying to make certain that, even if Kraag killed him, Martian law would punish Kraag for Stein's death. And if Jonner got into the sphere, he could get his message to Marsport or the rescue ship simply by turning on the radio. Kraag turned and raced back to the sphere. He arrived, panting heavily. Jonner was nowhere in sight, but he knew Jonner, circling, could not have gotten there ahead of him. He must kill Jonner before nightfall, if he could, but he must not get far enough from the sphere to let Jonner slip in behind him. He was not ready, yet, to destroy the radio to keep Jonner from it. He walked around the sphere. There was Jonner on the other side, only his head above the horizon, moving clockwise. The sun flashed and gleamed from Jonner's helmet. There was no sense in shooting at so small a target as a head. A mile away, Jonner's whole body was a small enough target. A carefully gauged leap carried Kraag to the top of the sphere. Here, # feet higher, his range of view was increased considerably. He could see Jonner well. Jonner could see him, too. Jonner stopped to hurl a stone. It took a while for the missile to cover the distance. It passed below Kraag's level, some distance away from him. "Why don't you give it up, Jonner?" asked Kraag. "You can't hurt me with a rock, at this distance." "Why should I?" retorted Jonner. "All I have to do is wait tOl night." "Sure, wait. But I'm not waiting, Jonner. One of us is going to win this thing before night, or I'm going to blast the radio so you can't reach Marsport. If I have to do that. I'll track you down tomorrow -- and I think I can stay outside and fight you away from the sphere tonight." "Getting desperate enough to fight like a man now, aren't you, Kraag? If you want a showdown Kraag's mind was clear now. He had the situation under control. He glanced around the landscape at the scattered portions of the wrecked ship. There was the cargo hull, burst open, where Jonner had gotten his sledge hammer and the pick to bury Stein. Over there was a red sphere, ripped by the jagged gash of the meteor collision -- one of the two hydraine fuel tanks. The yellow sphere # degrees away from it was an oxygen fuel tank. Kraag leveled Jonner's gun and fired at the yellow sphere. The kick knocked him off the sphere, but as he somersaulted backwards he saw the projectile hit the ground. Still low and to one side. But he noticed something on the gun he hadn't seen before. There were ridges for sighting along the barrel of Jonner's pistol. Regaining his position atop the sphere, Kraag pressed his back against the obsersatory dome, to brace himself against the gun's backlash. He aimed carefully at the yellow sphere and fired again. The yellow tank jumped -- not from the impact, but from the spout of freed, expanding oxygen through the hole the bullet made. It moved and wobbled about in the weak gravity, like a dying balloon. When it stopped. Kraag knew he had destroyed half of Jonner's oxygen supply. "Good shot, Kraag," congratulated Jonner, with fatalistic irony in his tone. "Of course. I'm not as big a target as the tanks." "Each target in its own time," replied Kraag triumphantly, and looked around for the other yellow sphere. He had been afraid it might be one of the parts that had fallen over the horizon, but it wasn't. It was behind him, a little closer than the first. He hit it with one shot. Now Jonner had only the oxygen in his spacesuit tanks. Jonner had made no effort to move farther away. He was still visible on the horizon, from the knees up, moving in a great circle around die personnel sphere. Kraag aimed carefully and fired. He did not know the projectile's spieed, but certainly it would be much faster than Jonner's rocks. After half a minute had passed, he knew he had missed. There was only one thing to do. He settled himself and fired again, trying to lead Jonner slightly. Again he missed. Methodically, taking his time, Kraag fired. Jormer walked on unconcernedly, circling. Kraag tried to fire so the path of his projectile would strike at the top of Jonner's strides, for then Jonner rose several feet into the air and his whole body was visible. Occasionally, Jonner would stop and hurl a stone at Kraag. One man was as inaccurate as the other. Jonner's stones went wide at that distance, and Kraag obviously had not hit Jonner with a bullet. At last Jonner stopped. He seemed to be fiddling with something that was right on the ground, below Kraag's line of vision. Then a tremendous stone, bigger than Kraag's head, came hurtling toward the sphere. Kraag duck instinctively, but the missile passed # feet above him, still going well. "What in the devil!" exclaimed Kraag. "A little innovation of mine, to make things more interesting," said Jonner. "In case you ever want to use the idea, I made me a .superslingshot out of two of the jeep inner tubes from the cargo, and a couple of crowbars I could drive into crevices. Fixed it up yesterday for bombardment purposes." The duel went on. There came the time when the hammer of the pistol clicked on an empty chamber. "How do you refuel this thing, Jonner?" asked Kraag pleasantly. The sun was still high. He could retreat to the interior of the sphere and figure it out if he had to. "It's pretty hard to do with spacesuit hooks," replied Jonner. "Be glad to demonstrate, if you'll toss me the gun." Kraag laughed, a laugh with more triumph in it than humor, because in his fumbling he had just hit the button that ejected the magazine. To push in a fresh one was the matter of a moment. He had hoped Jonner would move in closer when he knew the pistol was empty, but no such luck. Jonner stayed put. Kraag's first effort with the new magazine brought no results, for he had neglected to prime the weapon by pushing the outer covering back on the barrel. He did this, and resumed his methodical firing. As the time wore on, Kraag began to appreciate the difficulties involved in hitting a moving target, even a slowly moving one, when the marksman was as inexperienced as he was. The trouble was that, at that distance, he could not see where the bullets were striking and had no way of knowing how wide of his mark he was shooting. He was on the fourth magazine and the sun had passed the meridian when he felt the sphere vibrate faintly and momentarily beneath him. He twisted around, alarmed. He could see nothing. It wasn't one of Jonner's rocks, because a big one had just missed. His eye detected a shining streak that stretched a few inches along the curve of the sphere's meteor shield, at about the level of his feet. He bent to examine it. Something had struck it at high speed, a glancing blow. It couldn't be one of Jonner's rocks. Small meteor? A jagged hole suddenly appeared in the observatory dome near him. Kraag moved up and examined it closely. It had been made by some small object. Through the glassite he could see a similar hole in the other side of the dome. Did Jonner have some sort of new weapon? He couldn't. Even Jonner wasn't resourceful enough to invent a high-powered weapon with the innocuous cargo they were carrying for the Titan colony. Something struck Kraag a powerful blow in the left chest, a blow that hurled him sideways, to tumble off the sphere and fall slowly to the ground below. There was a great pain in his chest, and he released his hand-hooks in agony, so that the pistol fell away from him. Kraag gasped for breath as he struck the ground and bounced. He coughed up blood. He fell slowly again, and bounced again. The third time he settled jarringly, prone on his back. He couldn't understand what had happened to him. He pulled his right arm inside the suit with an effort and probed the painful area on his chest. He felt the hot wetness of flowing blood. He would have to get to the sphere. He tried to move. He couldn't get off his back. He lay there and writhed in pain. Jonner's voice was in his ears, saying something. "I knew it would get you," jonner said. "It was my only chance. But it got you at last, Kraag." "Come help me, Jonner," whimpered Kraag weakly. "I've been hit by... I don't know. It must have been a meteor." "I'm coming as fast as I can, Kraag, but it was no meteor. It was my gun." "Gun?" repeated Kraag wonderingly. "I warned you about that gun of mine, Kraag. If you'd looked at the figures on the barrel, the muzzle velocity of those .#-calibre bullets is # feet a second. With Ceres' escape velocity, that's almost exactly the circular velocity at the asteroid's surface." Jonner was standing over him, and then was lifting him gently, to carry him to the sphere. "I deliberately got just out of your range of vision, from the ground, so you'd climb to a high spot," said Jonner. "You had to be high, so the bullet would clear the irregularities on the planet's surface, and I knew that sooner or later you'd shoot a bullet or two high enough not to hit the ground. "When you were firing at me, your bullets weren't describing a trajectory and failing to the surface, as they would on Earth or Mars. They were taking an orbit tliat brought them all the way around the planet to the same spot, to hit you from the other side two hours later." Kraag tried to look up at him. Something was going wrong with his right, and everything outride his face plate was a blur. Must be the oxygen... maybe his suit didn't seal the bullet bole properly. "I thought..." Kraag began, and choked. He coughed, slowly and painfully, then tried again: "I thought that... problem on the rocks... looked familiar." "You've always done it with a slide rule. That's probably why the long division didn't register," said Jonner. "The equation is one every spaceman knows: the circular velocity equals the escape velocity divided by the square root of two." in IP's first great Collegiate Science Fiction Contest with # in prizes going to the seven best answers to the question "What Will Life in America Be Like # Years from Now?" Ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy now! Dr. Kinsey, meet Mr. Grover, the amorous adventurer. Even in a world of polygamous sexual relations and legal multiple marriages, here is the nation's champion philanderer! like a goldfish in a coptcrcab. The plexiglass bubble a Horded full # degree vision, but people could also see you from the crowded traffic lanes above a big city. "Hurry," said Simon Grover, a small, energetic man with close-set hazel eyes and a stubljorn chin. "I'm hurrying," the pilot told him with frustrating indififercnce. In another few moments he would be safe. He squirmed around and saw another copter rise above the express lane and close the gap between them. It had never been this close before. The aquamarine roof of the Marriage Building loomed ahead, then swelled up at them. The other copter buzzed closer. "Don't see any landing space," the pilot said laconically. Simon squinted down anxiously. The copters were lined up in neat but crowded row's on the rooftop, with hardly more than walking space between them. "Hover," Simon pleaded. "I'll jump." "I could lose my license."Simon reached into his pocket and drew out a handful of bills. "This is important to me," he said. The pilot pocketed the money, then sw'ooped down toward the roof. Suspended grotesquely eight feet above the aquamarine surface, blades whirling, the coptercab hovered. Simon grunted his thanks and slid back the door. The other copter was fanning air above them and dropphig fast when Simon jumped. His left leg struck the side of a parked cab and threw' him off balance. He landed on his shoulder, rolled over and scrambled to his feet. He darted between the rows of copters, thankful for the partial protection their blades ofTcred him. A paraheam zipped down at the long shadow he cast in the late afternoon sun, but in another moment he had reached the roof entrance to the Marriage Building and flung himself inside. Breathing hard, lie smoothed his rumpled clothing with shaking hands. That had been entirely too close. They thought he was fleeing becau.se he did not want to work for a living. Rot. If he were ever captured, all the romance would go from his life. He sauntered down the long, pleasant corridor lined with murals of domestic tranquility -- family gathered around the dining table. Illustrated by Ed Emsh father and son raking leaves in the front yard, graceful elderly couple entertaining children and grandchildren at a merry hearth, young husband and wife going to bed. He was in no hurry now, for the Marriage Building was legal sanctuary. He passed the long lines of registering Quickies, men filing into one room, women into another. He let his glance rove the line of female Quickies, wondering if his new wife would come from this group. They ranged in age from eighteen to about sixty, he guessed, and naturally they were of all conceivable types. He caught himself in time and stopped looking. It was not considered proper etiquette. Rounding a turn in the corridor, Simon took the slidestair down one level to where Transients registered and attached himself to the end of a long line of men which was swallowed slowly by a doorway above which was the legend : Simon checked his counterfeit registration papers and was aware of the old, familiar feeling of uncertainty. His heart bobbed up into his throat and pounded there. His palms were clammy, his fingers wouldn't keep still. VV'ould the papers pass inspection? He was almost certain they would. But he savored the other possibility although he hated its ultimate consequences. As some people craved security, so others thrived on adventure. Simon lit a cigarct and waited while the line crawled forward, parallelling a line of female Transients moving through another doorway. "Sit down, Mr. Grover," the Counselor said as Simon entered the room. It was a large place with a central aisle and a dozen private cubbies on cither side, each one with celotex walls, a desk, two chairs, the latest in marriage literature, and a Counselor. Simon cased his small frame into a comfortable chair and handed his papers to the Counselor. "I see you have come from Philadelphia," the man said, smiling not quite professionally -- which, Simon knew, was the best of all professional smiles. "Were the accommodations .satisfactory? Of course, you don't have to talk about them." "They were fine. Just fine." Naturally, Simon did not tell the Counselor about his flight from the police. "How long will you be with us in New York?" "I figure about three weeks. It depends on business, though. Might be a little longer, I guess." "We'll say three weeks." The Counselor .scrawled something on .Simon's registration form. "Now, Mr. Grover, exactly what kind of wife arc you looking for?" "To tell you the truth, I haven't given it much thought yet." "Splendid," the Counselor was delighted with the opportunity to expound on his wares. ".As you know, we have six basic types." He removed six colorful folders from six stacks on his desk and handed them to Simon. "The first," he went on, "is the newlywed Quickie. The red folder, Mr. Grover. She has just completed her honeymoon, is not pregnant, and has been married for no more than six months." Simon examined the folder. On the cover was pictured a young man carrying his bride, complete with bashful smile, across the thre.shold of their home. There were suggestive dining room, patio and bedroom scenes inside, with appropriate captions. "The second type," explained the Counselor, "is the new mother." The folder showed a charming young woman Ineast-feeding an infant. The Counselor went on to the other types: the middle mother, a woman of about thirtywith two children, one of pre-school age and one in the first three grades; the teener, with from two to five children in their teens or early twenties; the pre-gram, with any number of married children living away from home, but no grandchildren; and the grandmother. "You understand," the Counselor said, "we have all types in between as well. These are merely the basics." He surveyed Simon's registration papers again. "You're thirty-five, Mr. Grover. A fine age, I might say. You'd be suited to any type, with the exception of the grandmother." "I don't want the grandmother, anyway," Simon told him. "You know, I think I'll take the newlywed this time." The Counselor winked knowingly. "Still a lot of get-up-and-go in the old copter, eh?" "It's spring," Simon said. "Yes. We find it most interesting, that certain types are favored in the various seasons. Newlyweds in the spring, pre-grams in the summer, middle mothers in the fall, new mothers and grandmothers in the winter. Confidentially, Mr. Grover, I've always longed to be a Transient myself. But you have to be a Quickie to hold this job, since you're in one place for such a long period of time. Well, what type of newlywed did you have in mind?" Simon licked his lips eagerly. In Philadelphia the last time he had come close to learning the parting ritual. But it tripped him up, as usual, and he reached New York one step ahead of tlie police. "She must be very impressionable," Simon said, "and very talkative. She must be eager to discuss the theories of multiple marriage -- " "Most newlyweds are," the Counselor pointed out. "Well, particularly so. And, of course, she must not be carrying a torch for her honeymoon husband." "That's rare these days, Mr. Grover." "It happened to me once, in St. Louis. Had an awful time." "Then she probably was a misfit. After all, the institution of multiple marriages is almost eighty years old, and the only form of marriage in the United States today. If we were still in the early pioneering days you might have cause to worry. Ideas of propinquity still seemed important then, and people were concerned with such things as lasting relationships, though for the life of me I can't see why." "They thought it was more secure," suggested Simon. "But it isn't. In the old days, statistics proved that if a man or woman was saddled with one mate too long, it often led to trouble. The old Et al report of # shocked the world with its figures: ninety five percent of all with other women, and the figure was almost as high for women. Relations with unmarried people. It's rather horrible, isn't it, Mr. Grover?" "I suppose so," said Simon, halflistening. All he needed now was the parting ritual. A nice, impressionable, talkative newlywed girl As usual," the Counselor continued in a dedicated voice, "man had leaped ahead of his outmoded institutions without realizing it. i The notion of marriage based largely on propinquity and permanent relationship just didn't fit the modern tempo of civilization, where transient workers dart across the continent constantly, always on the move, hardly staying in one place long enough to hang their hats, as the expression goes. Marital infidelity in the old days led to crimes of passion, to divorce, to unsettled families, to children reared in orphanages or by strangers -- perfect strangers, mind you -- to divorce and re-marriages and so much energy and time and money wasted on second and even third courtships. "Fortunately, the social institution fits the tempo of the culture today. A Transient -- man or woman -- gets married and provides for one spouse, one family, but has the pick of the nation to choose from. Even a Quickie like myself is stimulated by constant variety and change. No one is ever bored. You don't have to see your original mate ever again, as long as you, as a Transient, provide for her. The Quickies, in their turn, will provide for you in all your subsequent marriages. You have the novelty and sati.sfaction of a true change in environment every time you travel, but you also have the comfort and .security of a home." "This newlywed girl must also be naive," said Simon. "That's important." The Counselor made another notation. "You know," he said, "there is one small school of thought which claims the novelty, the verve and sparkle aie lacking because the constant variation is perfectly legal. Perhaps they have a point there; secrecy is stimulating. But they refuse to admit we even provide for that. After all, a Transient assumes the name of his temporary spouse, his Quickie. No one, not even the Quickie, know's his real identity. The Marriage records are available to no one, not even the government, not even the police, thus preseiving the .sense of -- well, freshne.ss for the Transients. "But I digress. Have you any physical preferences, Mr. Grover?" "I'm not very tall. Keep her down to my size, please. And I want a pretty wife." The Counselor made his final notations, rolled Simon's registration papers and stuffed them into a pneumotube which he droppcd into a wall slot. The tube, Simon knew, was being whisked to Quickie Records, Newlywed Division, where identification of the girl fitting his requirements would Ire made by the machine records unit of available newlyweds. Last time, in Philadelphia, he had selected a garrulous old grandmother and hated every moment of the two weeks he had spent with her. It had been against the recommendations of the Counselor there, who had claimed the age difference would not make for harmony. The man had been right, but worse yet, the old hag had been too wily to reveal what Simon had to know. "Congress is considering a law," said the Counselor as they waited for the return of Simon's registration papers, "which would permit Quickies and Transients to alternate year after year. It would cause social upheaval at the beginning, but it's only fair to us Quickies, don't you think?" Simon shrugged. The man was starting to bother him. "I'd rather be a Transient," he said. "I'm for the status quo." "But Quickies have no choice in the matter, don't you see? We have to marry whoever comes along. My last wife -- " "As a Quickie, you're not supposed to talk about her." The Counselor blanched at what had almost amounted to a sin. "Thank you," he said, and waited in silence for the pneumotube. Finally, it came, popping out of the wall slot and alighting on the desk. The Counselor removed Simon's papers and unrolled them, revealing a set of similar papers rolled tightly within. These he opened and spread on the desk, beckoning Simon to come around behind him and take a look. The first thing Simon saw was the snapshot, in the latest trivision process. The girl looked pretty enough, with a pale, heart-shaped face set off against short-cropped, shining black hair. She had enormous, child-like eyes. "How do you do?" the picture said. "I am Jane-Marie Paige. I miss you." "See," said the Counselor, "she has a lovely voice." Simon nodded, picked up the trivision snapshot and held it under his nose, sniffing delicately. He liked the scent of Jane-Marie's perfume -- not too musky, not too flowery, but that ideal compromise which indicated she would be neither too sultry nor too fragile. The Counselor wrote in Simon's name on her pajjers, printing "approx. # wks" under the column for time, and handed both rolls to Simon. "Her address is in the second column," he said. "Visit us again on your next trip to New York, Mr. Grover. And good luck." B y the time Simon took the tubeway out to the suburban Long Island community in which Jane-Marie Paige lived, the bright spring afternoon was fading into dusk, tinting the western sky with bands of color ranging from deep blue and purple through mauve to delicate, dusty pink. The smell of spring was in the air, but with the coming of night the lingering chill of winter was still apparent. It would be great, coming home again to a new wife, to a drink and an excellent home-cooked dinner, to a cozy fire perhaps -- especially when you could have all that and still retain the pulse-quickening feeling of adventure. Whistling, Simon found Maple Lane and walked by the rows of spherical houses which could rotate with the sun from equinox to solstice and back again. Simon could tell it was a development of newlywed homes by their small size, by the absence of baby carriages and toys on the front lawns, by the small clumps of white birch trees and windows with their curtains drawn. He found the address listed on Jane-Marie's registration papers and turned up the walk, noticing the small, ranch-type name j)ost with "Mr. and Mrs. Jane-Marie Paige" on it in big gold letters. "It's Simon," he said as the door slid soundlessly into the curving wall. "I'm home." Suddenly, Jane-Marie appeared there in tlie doorway. She must have been at one of the curtained windows, peeking out at him. There were soft lights behind her and a delicate halo circled her dark hair from the raditiara she wore. "Simon," she said, barely above a whisper, a radiant smile on her face. "They called me. Come in, darling." But she still barred the doorway. When he came in he came into the arms of his waiting wife, his newlywed wife, his Jane-Marie. "I missed you ever since they sent your picture," she breathed, while he kissed the lobes of her ears, the tip of her nose, her eyes, her warm, eager lips. "Jane-Marie," he said. It was sensed. It was more than that to ing, worth all the quick exits and close calls with the police. "You'll muss me," Jane-Marie scolded him, drawing away and rearranging her hair under the tiara. "There. Are you hungry?" "Honey, I'm famished." "Well, I'm making no promises. I'm not much of a cook, really. They didn't tell me how long you were going to stay, but I should improve enough so when the next -- " "Sh. I'll be here three weeks." "Come in, come in." She took his hand in her own warm one, pressing the door button and dimming the hall light as they walked into the house. "Tell me about yourself, darling. What do you do? How are you going to spend your time in New York? Oh, I'm so excited. There's so much to talk about, so much to learn about each other. Do you play bridge? There's a couple down the street, the wife's a Transient and just got here today, but I know the husband, who likes to play bridge. Do you like music? I'll turn some on." She was talkative, all right. Soon Simon heard the lilting strains of a Strauss waltz. Jane-Marie pirouetted happily about the dining room table in three-quarter time and sat down, motioning Simon to sit near her and not on the other side. As he adjusted his napkin she leaned her head on his shoulder and said, "I like your eyes, darling." He smiled. "They're close-set." "They are not. They're very intelligent-looking. I'll bet you're an engineer or something. I'll bet you're going to help design that new construction project in Brooklyn. Gee, I like your eyes." She gazed up at them demurely. The robot server wheeled in the first course along with a frosted bottle of champagne leaning gracepopped the cork expertly, filled both glasses and raised his. "To us," he said. "To us, darling. Forever and ever three weeks. I hope you like chopped liver salad," Jane-Marie added nervously. "I had no way of knowing, but from now on you'll get whatever you like, I promise." "It's delicious," Simon said, beginning to eat. Other courses followed. There was jellied consomm#, roast, stuffed chicken and sweet potato pudding, a salad which Simon tossed with an enthusiasm and expertness that Jane-Marie said was a joy to behold, dessert of brandied bing cherrles, coffee and pie. And a constant stream of chatter from Jane-Marie. "Well," said Simon, patting die bulge at his waistline and sliding his belt-clasp an inch or two looser with the comfortable informality only a married man can display (and in his own home, thought Simon). "I must say that was good." "I'm so glad you liked it. Do you want to sit around the fire and talk, dear?" She flavored the term of endearment once more. "Dear." The robot server had begun to remove the dishes from the table. Simon stood up and was followed by Jane-Marie into the sunken living room, where he began to pile wood and kindling on the andirons in the raised-hearth fireplace. As she bent to watch him, the decollete hostess gown revealed a breathless amount of lovely white skin. "Maybe we'll retire after that," Simon said, trying not to sound the way he felt, which was more than mildly lecherous. Jane-Marie smiled a secret, small-girl smile and pulled him down on the cushion in front of the hearth, on which a bright fire was now crackling. "It's so good to have you home, darling, all to myself. Will your work keep you away much? I hope not." "To tell you the truth, I'm on vacation." "That is nice," Jane-Marie murmured dreamily. "And flattering, too, because you selected me to share your vacation." "Could it be anyone but you?" Simon said. "As if it could be anyone but you." Which was perfectly, beautifully, delightfully true -- for three weeks. "You married rather young, I see." Jane-Marie stroked his temples witli long fingers. "Oh, now, don't be so sure," she smiled. "Maybe I'm older than I look." "No. You're about twenty. I guess you like marriage." "I love it. It's too early to tell, but -- well, it agrees with me." "I'm glad." "Glad of what, darling?" "That you married early. Come here." She came and sat in his lap. He blew in her ears and at the short hairs on the nape of her neck until she laughed. "I love you," she said. "I love you so." He loved her too. It was right. She was the girl he had selected. But a sense of urgency swept over him, not only for the love they would consummate as the night grew longer, but for what he hoped to learn from her so he could have the name as well as the game -- as well as that feeling of adventure which sharpened his senses so acutely. He said, "Do you ever think of the times before multiple marriage became the accepted social institution? Do you ever think of how those people must have felt?" "I knew you were an intellectual!" Jane-Marie cried instead of answering his question. "I just knew it. I could see it in your eyes, darling. Oh, I do love you." He kissed her tenderly, then with fire. He could feel the passion mounting between them, but tore himself from its grasp. "Don't you ever think of it?" he asked again. "Well, I read a book about it once, Murray's The Decline of Monogamy. They must have felt simply awful, darling. I mean, I love you, but to have to spend all that time, season after season, year after year, svith the same person would -- would drive you crazy. You'd get to know him so well, everything he did, the way he thought and all. Oh, with you it's different. I could spend forever with you three weeks, but -- " "No, Honey. I mean the others. The outcasts. Those who carried on adulterous relationships." Jane-Marie frowned in thought. He could tell the conversation interested her but thought she would have preferred to drop it. Still, the conversation was flowing more smoothly than he had dared hope, and in the right direction. "I don't know," Jane-Marie finally admitted. "I suppose they were pioneers, sort of. I mean, flaunting social custom the way to fight for a better way of life." "I agree with you," Simon said. "Sometimes convention restricts you and doc.sn't allow you to live the fullest life. You should then flaunt convention by all means, don't you think?" "I do. I do." He sighed gratefully. The seed had been planted. He now had to cultivate it for three weeks. A word here, a gesture there, a suggestion, twenty-one days of marital bliss, of gaining her confidence, of impressing her with everything he did. "Well," he said, "shall we go upstairs?" He watched the color rise from Jane-Marie's throat and soon .suffuse her face. "I was thinking Mr. and Mrs. Busby might want to play some bridge -- " "There are other nights," he said. He scattered the embers of the burning logs with the poker and went into the dining room after the bottle of champagne. With Jane-Marie at his side he climbed the stairs. T he shower had stopped. He could hear Jane-Marie humming to herself in a nervous falsetto. He didn't know whether to get under the covers or not, and finally decided Jane-Marie would be more at ease if he did. He had already combed his hair and brushed his teeth. At last, she came. She was lovely, his wife, in a daring black negligee. She stood there in it for a long, wonderful moment, then plunged the room into darkness. You could be a newlywed over and o-er again, Simon thought happily. You could taste the joys of brand new parenthood not once but a hundred times. You could see the kids off to school on that memorable first day as often as you liked, see your grandchildren that first glorious time through the glass window also as often as you wi.shed, or taste many times of an old, established relationship which was yet mysteriously new, despite the gray hairs and conditioned familiarity. It was a full life, but something was lacking. Did it make him a misfit? Probably, but he had his own life to lead, his own fulfillment to achieve, his own strange kinship with the early rebels who had blasted monogamy from the pages of social history. "You'll think this is silly," JaneMarie whispered in the darkness. "What's that, dear? What will I think is silly?" "What I'm going to ask you." "No I won't. Honest." "Well -- " "Go on, if it will make you happy." He could sense her presence near him. "Well, it isn't that I don't trust you, but there's so much of it going on lately that I thought -- " "What did you think?" "The -- the parting ritual. You know what it's for, darling. A safeguard." Simon plunged from zenith to nadir in seconds. He would never spend those three weeks with JaneMarie. He would be running again, running until he could board the tubeways in anonymity from the basement of a Marriage Building in some other city. But it had never happened so quickly before. "Can't it wait for three weeks?" he asked, knowing the request was futile. "Then it's hardly a safeguard for me, just for -- for the next one. It's just lately that all those misfits have Started... I guess some people will never be satisfied." Her hand touched his hand in darkness. There were finger movements. She began to chant meaningless syllables. This was it, Simon knew in despair. He could not respond. It was a simple thing, but people were sworn to absolute secrecy. It was changed every few months and he had never been able to learn it. A sob escaped JaneMarie's lips. Simon," she gasped. "Simon, you aren't... you're not doing... "No," he said wearily. He sat up quickly in the darkness, and dressed. He could hear her reaching for the phone. He stood up and went to her, but she turned away. "Don't you touch me. Go away, leave me alone. Of all the despicable... and I thought... I almost... Hello, police? This is Mrs. Jane-Marie Paige on Maple Lane. I want to report..." "Goodbye," he whispered softly. "I hate you!" He left quickly, double-timing down Maple Lane between the rows of spherical houses. He didn't belong. He was an outlaw, a criminal, a maladjusted misfit -- or worse. Some people are never satisfied. The police failed to understand. To them his type was lazy, shiftless. They were drones, parasites who could reap all the advantages of multiple life without working a day. They had no one to support. But that isn't it at all, thought Simon as he ran. He could hear the approaching wail of police sirens. He must hurry. Perhaps in Boston he would get the one stroke of luck he needed, if the police didn't catch him first. It wasn't that he was lazy and lacked the sense of responsibility which would make him support a family. Everything was too patterned, too set-out-foryou, too prosaic. In his own way he courted danger and was hated for relationship which he supposed some people always needed. He could picture pretty JaneMarie crying out the whole story to the police. "That man -- he was a bachelor!" ... Money Is the Root of All Good Urgent! Class A A emergency for Universal Relief! Stock market crash on planet Lyrane, where people live by economy based on good deeds. Cause unknown. Suspect galactical manipulators of watering stock. Illustrated by Ed Emsh tic Empire, is not, as one would cxfDcct, one solid city. As a matter of fact, it is more surburban and rural than many farming planets. The reason is obvious if but considered. The galactic government and the equally large galactic businesses arc so immense that they must he distributed throughout the whole galaxy, with only the very cream of the hierarchy located on Kalgor. Thus, each company would have only one small building -- but with a communication web that enfolded macroscopic enterprises. Universal Relief Incorporated was typical of this arrangement. Although its warehouses and offices throughout the Empire could form a megalopolis in themselves, the fountainhead on Kalgor was a two story building. In that building there was excitement. People were rushing frantically -- the teletypes chattered in a frenzy -- the air was static with urgency. It manifested itself in the quick jerky motions, in the voices held just below the cracking point. Universal Relief scived the function that used to be handled by the Red Cross. They were disaster rectifiers, succor and reconstruction was their business. But they were a business -- declaring annual, taxable profits and dividends and, in general, a profit-seeking firm. They received regular payments from planetary governments, much like premiums with insurance, and in case of emergency they were to provide complete relief as swiftly as possible. There was no chance for graft in their business, for they were closely checked by the government and competing organizations like Galactic Aid, their closest rival. This business was now apparently faced with a crisis and its staff was feverishly trying to cope with it. Roald Gibbons, President of Universal Relief, was the only person not affected -- at least not apparently. His indolent posture, his quiet grey eyes reflected nothing of the hectic activity. This made Kim Roger ners'ous. "I don't think you comprehend the seriousness of it, Mr. Gibbons," he was saying. "I am not thinking of the seriousness of it. I just want the facts." "Very well, sir. Two days ago, the Lyranian stock market crashed." "You will have to go back further than that. I can't possibly know the history of all the planets in the Empire. That's what I pay you for. Give me some background." This little speech made Kim lose his clutching hold on his patience. Roald Gibbons had just taken office after the death of his father, who had managed the galactic firm for twenty years. By merely being the boss's son, Roald had achieved the reputation of being an ignorant, careless playboy. His professed ignorance of the planets confirmed, in Kim's mind, this reputation. With an effort, Kim resumed. "The planet of Lyrane, the only habitable one in the system of Lyrane -- Copernicus sector -- was colonized by a socio-economic sect for the purpose of testing its slightly radical beliefs. "This sect maintained that an individual should not be paid on the basis of the work he did, but for the good deeds, or good thoughts he had. A small stipend was paid for actual work or production, to establish a workable basic economy and trade. This stipend was enough to cover all the basic wants of the individual. "To procure luxuries, a citizen had to use the money he received for his good deeds or thoughts. Every time a man helped an old lady across the street, or came up with a bit of philosophical wisdom, he could record it with a central office and receive his luxury pay from the government. "The purpose of the system was to make people emphasize virtue and quality in their lives. Instead of concentrating on profit for profit's sake, they would hav'c to consider the inherent rightness and beauty of what they were doing." "In such a system," Roald asked, "how could such a thing as a stock market possibly develop?" "Very simple, .sir. This luxury pay, issued in a different currenev than the commodity pay, could be used in any way a person saw fit. Some people naturally developed the idea of investing stock in a particularly virtuous or intelligent person. Every time that person ffid a good deed, the stockholders received a dividend from his luxury pay. All of the scientists and philosophers, therefore, became corporations in themselves, with as many as five thousand people holding stock in one man." "Sorr', Kim, but I don't get it. How' could these incorporated individuals get any luxuiy pay for themselves if they had to hand it out to their stockholders?" "The administration w-ould allow for that. A person received luxury pay in proportion to the number of stockholders that he claimed. The government had to do this since they indirectly were investing in these corporation men -- but I'll explain that later. "The corporation-man lived off the original investments of stockholders, with some of the stock solvent for sales. In this way, the individual would profit from "gooddoing" by receiving many new investments." "What is the social makeup of this Lyrane? It seems to me it would be a lunatic fringe de luxe, with every hack writer, thaumaturgist, or evangelist climbing aboard the gravy train." "On the contrary, it is a social structure of the finest minds in the galaxy. The rest are all weeded out. Although the motives of the system are idealistic, they are enforced witli a rigid practicality. They demand quality and truth, and gauge it with the revealing yardstick of public consumption and approval as measured in sales and polls." Roald gazed out at the pastoral countryside surrounding tliis vital ness. He swung back to Kim, and said, "But the basic difficulty would be determining ju.st what a good deed or thought is. How in God's name could they determine that, when every' act or word that anyone ever commits or utters is open to judgment by so many different standards. For instance, what about the case of the man w'ho trespasses to save a person's life. How are you going to rate diat sort of thing?" "Mr. Gibbons, I am an economist, not a philosopher. It is the wonder of the gala.xy that these people did establish and maintain tills system, in spite of obstacles such as you mentioned." "All right, we'll discount the philosophical angle. I still don't understand it. How about big business? How could that develop with this system? They certainly need it to support a planet." "That's the easiest part of it. People would use their luxury pay to establish businesses. At these businesses men could work their five hours a day to get their commodity pay. It was not only possible, but mandatory that such businesses develop. There were two types: mass production of commodities, with a regulated profit in commodity pay; or specialization and production of fine merchandise that was sold at cost, but whicli die government paid for in luxury pay in proportion to its quality as thoroughly tested. "However -- all big businesses were closely controlled by the government. They would grant franchises so that there would be no cutthroat competition, and supply was regulated to meet demand. Therefore, business itself was stable, and there was'no opportunity for speculating in its stock market. That left only the variable corporation-men for actual stock market trading -- and that is what crashed. "Let's take a writer, for example. He writes a book, and a publishing house prints it. The people buy it -- spending luxury pay. The publishing house has to convert that luxury pay to commodity pay to cover costs and payroll. They make no profit, the book being sold at cost. "That book has to sell so many thousand copies to receive luxury pay from the government. Then both the author and the publisher receive luxury pay in proportion to its sales, which is the indication of its merit. The luxury pay that the publisher receives goes in the pockets of the executives. The luxury pay that the author receives -- which is much larger -- goes to his stockholders. "Since the author is the source of this transaction, the people invest in him and not the publisher, for they can't get any great return from investing in the publisher, but they can from the author. "Actually, what the whole thing amounts to is a complete shift of emphasis from big business and its .speculations -- which is what we've always known -- to individuals and the intangibles and variables of their ideas and deeds."  "There is only one question left," Roald said. "The government doles out all this luxury pay. Pray tell, where do they get it?" "There arc two parts to the government. There is the actual administration, with its members drawing set salaries and unable to draw luxury pay, to prevent graft; and then there is the Economics Commission, which controls luxury py"This Economics Commission is a business. They invest in galactic corptorations, such as ours, and make a profit. That's part of their money. Then -- and here's the secret -- any time a book is written, or fine merchandise produced, it must be sold on Lyrane at cost. But the government sells it throughout the galaxy for a profit, and keeps that profit to redistribute in luxury pay to Lyranian citizens. "Anyway, the system finally blew up, and now we're holding a messy bag." "But how could it? Why?" "That's just it. Nobody knows what brought it about, but suddenly the men who were corporations just stopped producing. They stopped doing good deeds, stopped writing, stopped research, and what-not and, consequently, stopped drawing luxury pay. "Naturally, their stockholders got mad and wanted to sell, but incorporated men couldn't liquidate and the values of the stocks dropjjed to zero, along with the value of the luxury pay. The result was a depression and a lot of angry people." "A planetary depression is not such an outstanding emergency that it should cause Universal Relief to be in such an uproar. I believe that it is merely a Class B emergency, with complete regulations on proper handling." Kim was so earnest in his reply that he leaned over and almost rubbed noses with his superior. "On the contrary, sir. There are other factors, so its not so simple. This Lyranian system has been working for ten years now, and the Lyranians want desperately for it to succeed. They are almost fanatics on it, trying to prove the value of their .system .so that other planets will adopt it -- which God forbid. "Naturally, the resentment against the corporation-mcn for betraying them has turned into hatred, with murder, riots and a civil war in the offing. Yes, their politics were unitary and stable until this emergency, but you'd be surprised at the number of political factions that can be formed and develop hostilities in a period of crisis." "Could it be an attempt by some faction to seize power?" "Impossible. The way it was set up, political power was not desirable, being unprofitable and mostly drudgery'. If they upset the applecart, the balance was so fine only chaos would result and there would be nothing to take power over. The only reason parties have developed now is due to differing views on how to rectify the situation, and blaming different things for being responsible. But no power motive." "Very well then, the situation is a Class A emergency, but we've handled them before." Kim allowed one fleeting sigh of despair. He had thought for a while that this Roald could take hold, could be competent, but -- "If you have ever consulted our financial records, sir," he said with heavy sarca.sm, "you would find that our largest contribution comes from Lyrane. They have established our organization as tops in the good-deeds field, and nearly every person on Lyrane has stock in us, along with a sizable payment since we threw a high premium at them, fearing just this eventuality." Roald appeared thoughtful, then said, "Well, continue with standard procedures for a Class A emergency. I'll .see what can be done." Kim made one last desperate appeal. "I firmly believe that this should be a Class AA emergency!" "Your field of specialization is overriding your business sense, Kim. You arc fascinated, as an economist, by this Lyrane system, and you would like to see us put it back on its feet so you economists would have a live experiment to observe. I'm sorry, but it isn't practical. You know how fantastically expensive a Class AA is, and no one planet is about to get it." Kim cowered mentally. This wasn't the indolent playboy, but the Old Man, giving him a good dressing down. He left the office with restored faith, but a faith that was interlaced with doubt in regard to Roald Gibbons. Roald appeared to Kim to be uninformed and incompetent ; but on the contrary, he had learned the business thoroughly from his father. There was one division of the company that he knew especially well. This division was known to only a few people in the company, and no one outside knew it existed. Roald managed this special division, and left the rest of the management to the routine procedures and junior executives. while the rest of the company was in a state of organized hysteria, with great ships loading from the massive warehouses of food, medicine, and other relief supplies, and heaving into the sky bound for Lyrane, Roald was having a quiet conference with the members of his special division. Roald's father had known that the cheapest way to relieve an emergency was to alleviate the causes behind it, unless it were a natural disaster. For this reason, he had organized a corps of special agents to penetrate behind the scenes to straighten out the causes and cut short the emergencies that Universal Relief had to pay for. "Apparently there is a definite force operating on Lyrane," Roald was saying to his elite corp, "that caused these men, who had been living by the standards of that civilization and becoming rich from it, to cease the activity which they had profited by." "Could it be a religious doctrine?" one of them asked. "Possibly. It could be anything. The fact is wc don't know -- and we should. So we're going to Lyrane. For the Main Office, this is a Class A; but for us it is a Class AA!" stone terrace of the mountain lodge, gazing out over the small valley with the golden orange sun of Lyrane setting behind the mountains. The cool evening breeze gently rearranged his white hair and brushed over the creased forehead and the worried eyes. He looked up to see his daughter come out on to the terrace. She was a comely young woman of slight build and apparently sensitive nature as vivified in her piquant features. He gave her a wistful smile, at which she rushed into his arms and buried her head in his shoulder, which was still powerful despite his age. Her body quivered with muffled sobs. "Yma, my dearest Yma," he said tenderly. "Why didn't you marry, so that you would have none of this? You could be leading your own life, instead of bearing my burden." "You are no burden, Father. You are my life. And now that your life is threatened -- " He knew what had upset her. He had heard the newscasts too -- yes, the video still operated, controlled by the people. He had heard the names of his old friends -- Fredrikson, Tomlin, Masschau -- all dead by violence. "Why do you keep silent?" his daughter asked with a little child's pleading. "Where is the protection you were offered? Why don't you tell the people?" The world was mad and destructive in the eyes of the child -- the woman who was a child in the face of this dilemma. He gently quieted her with a large, steady hand that pressed her head to him. "It would do no good. Arnson tried it." She looked up with hope in her eyes. "He spoke to a special meeting of his stockholders and tried to tell them. They scorned it as a wild fantasy to excuse his betrayal. They issued him an ultimatum -- work! He said that they would have to believe him ; he couldn't work. They killed him." The hope slid away and her eyes assumed the depths of despair and bitterness. Despair for the future, and bitterness for the past. And she thought of the past -- for she dared not think of the future. Where does violence start, she wondered. Trace it to its roots; what's its source, what's its manifestation? It starts with one man and an idea. Many men may have had the same idea, but it takes one man to express it at the right time, to apply it. Then the planning, by many or by one. And, finally, the last step is persuasion. The man who had the original idea must convince others. He must indoctrinate them with this new concept so that they believe. No more. For once a man, who has been a stable entity in a stable organization, develops and believes a strange and contradictory idea -- the result is inevitable. Misunderstanding, resentment, hate, violence. The cycle carries on from there with its own momentum. And the people who arc swept up in it, and that may include anyone from the most innocent to the perpetrator himself, are as helpless to control its outcome as are the atoms helpless to control the nova they started in a sun. So this violence on Lyrane had begun, with one man, then a group of men, and then had come the misunderstanding, resentment, hate, violence cycle. It manifested itself in the offices of Universal Relief as a logical study in sociology and economics. But to Yma Garbin and her father, it was pure hell. When had it all started, and when would it end? Did it start that first day when an orphanage in the capital city burned to the ground, and not one of the many philanthropists made a move or an offer to aid or restore ? Yes, that was when it started for the public, but it had really started in midnight conversations in locked rooms. Words, an idea, then the act -- and who is to say which is more real? But there was no questioning the reality of what she had seen at Tomlin's house. That was yesterday. Tomlin, the greatest living biochemist in the empire, was nothing but a sad, huddled corpse. His beautiful mansion was slashed and looted, and then fired to the ground. The air was filled witli the odor of burning, of death -- but especially the mentally sickening, defeating odor or violence. This was true of the whole planet, especially in the cities. The great houses beseiged by furious mobs, shattered. Night full of stray shots and casual death. Every man with that cold gleam in his eye when he looked at even his best friend. "Did you cause it?" Yma lay in her father's arms, her mind reeling through this wax works of personal horror and death. This scene was interrupted by a gyro landing on the lawn. his daughter, tensely. A man emerged and strode towards them. He was a young man, with good and intelligent features, and Erol felt no fear. "Dr. Garbin," the man addressed him, "I'm delighted to find you. I tried to see others -- I was always too late." He paused, then said, "If anyone should 'be able to tell me what has happened, you should." A slight suspicion showed in Erol's face while Yma looked as wary as an animal. "If I can help you in any way, sir, I shall be delighted," Erol said. The young man sat down. His eyes told of bewilderment and horror, and Erol guessed that he had been in the cities. "My name is Florin Brite," the man said after a long silence. "I was a student of Tomlin, the biochemist, who was, I believe, your friend. I left over a year ago to study at the Institute of Klynos. I heard of trouble here and grabbed the first ship home. "I never dreamed I'd find such violence. "When I tried to find out what happened, I only found that all the great men that I knew were murdered, or in hiding." "How did you find where I was?" Erol asked. "I talked to one of Tomlin's servants, an old fellow -- scared silly -- but he remembered me and he told me." Erol seemed to accept this. "What do you want to know?" "Sir, I just want to know what happened. Why do the people feel they have been deceived, and by whom? Why are all the incorporated men in danger of their lives?" "It is the corporation men who' have deceived the public." It was a flat statement by Erol, without rancor or sympathy. "They are, in consequence, subject to the wrath of the people who relied upon them." The bewilderment in the young man's eyes deepened. "How could they deceive the public? Why? They had everything to gain from earning luxury pay for their stockholders. Why did they stop?" As if at a signal, Erol relaxed and his weariness became evident. Yma relaxed somewhat but remained alert. "Why they did," Erol replied, "is a private matter that only each of those men knows. The fact is that they, myself included, did -- and now we must pay." "You sir? But you were always such an eminent figure. I've admired you from childhood as being one of the best of the planet's many scientists. Your researches in sociology have led the empire. Why should you suddenly stop your writing?" "Fine flattery, son, but it will not avail you. I also see that you are not completely in the dark. You must have been investigating or you wouldn't know that I have a half-finished book that never got to the publisher on time. "Anyway, the reasons are inconsequential, now. It is done, and we must consider the consequences. And we must consider you. What do you intend to do, return to Klynos, or stay here?" "You don't get out of it that easily," Florin said. "Yes, consider me. Consider me as a citizen of this planet, a believer in its principles. I am no idiot that can't understand or won't accept the truth. "You are a sociologist. Here we have one of the most paradoxical sociological situations imaginable on our planet. There obviously are many unknown factors. You know them -- you must. Just consider me a student and explain the functionings of these phenomena." "You try my patience, Mr. Brite. I am accepting you at face value, but you are a stranger to me. What I wish to keep to myself is entirely my business. As I say, I am accepting you, and trying to help you -- as we all must do in this mess. Now what do you intend to do?" With a fatalistic shrug, Florin replied, "I cannot go back to Klynos. My education was paid for by my stock in corporation-men here. That is now, as you know, worthless." Yma spoke to him for the first time. "Then don't you feel resentment towards the men who -- who betrayed you?" Her eyes awaited his answer. Florin smiled. "I do not feel that I have been betrayed. I know that the corporation-men, representing the most intelligent clement of Lyrane, wouldn't do this thing without a sound reason." Erol said, "Apparently you wish to throw in your lot with us, rather than the mob." "My loyalty to my teacher and his associates compels me to do so. It is also my personal desire." "You won't get any luxury pay for that loyalty," Yma snapped. "That's unfair. You know Tomlin always advocated proper living from a moral obligation rather than for mercenary reward." Their conversation was interrupted by a faint humming. Out over the valley three gyros were approaching at a low altitude. Bitterly, Yma said, "Apparently Tomlin's servant has talked to other people -- or perhaps Mr. Brite here -- ." Florin shrugged again. "I have no defense except to say that I talked to no one. Either you believe me or you don't." Erol chimed in, "You'll have to excuse my daughter; she's upset. I expected them to discover me long before this. This abandoned hunting lodge was too well known." Yma's mind jumped on that. Yes, she thought. How well it is known -- to me. My childhood is stuffed full of memories of this place, all pleasant. I know the woods around here better than the streets of the city. Now it will be the scene of this furtive hiding, suspense, and God knows what new violence. While she was thinking, Erol was still talking. "I will ask you, since you are young and more adept in this sort of emergency. What shall we do?" Florin glanced at Yma, and saw that the bitterness had left her in the face of danger. She too looked anxiously to him for help. "If we stay here," he said, "we will be killed without question. I have no doubt that those ships are part of the mob. Even if it is the police, and I doubt there are any left after the rioting, they will imprison us." Erol said, "This is a hunting lodge. There are some weapons here. We have nothing but your gyro to escape in, and it's too slow. I can see that those are police gyros." "Then we'll fight," Yma declared and rushed inside, with Florin and Erol following her. "This place is not much for defense," Florin said while they rummaged for rifles, fot nothing more deadly was allowed outside the hands of the Galactic Patrol. "I suggest we make it seem peaceful and surprise them." "Good idea, boy," Erol said. "If you want. I'll sit outside as a decoy." "That's great!" Florin said quickly, ignoring Yma's protest. "If they see you, they will probably land and talk; but if nobody's in sight, they might bomb us." The three worked well together, swiftly and efficiently. Erol sat on the veranda, in the open, with a pistol under a lap robe, while Yma and Florin stationed themselves inside. The three gyros approached cautiously. They were the large black type used by the planetary police, but from the inexpert way they were handled all three at the lodge knew they were not bearing police. They carried bombs, the one weapon allowable to planetary police by the Galactic Patrol, but the men in them would have nothing more than firearms. Therefore it was imperative to get them on the ground. They circled over the lodge, with two finally landing and one remaining aloft. Florin padded over to Yma, and whispered for her to station herself in some bushes by the lodge. He told her to try to shoot down the gyro above when firing began. Men piled out of the ships which had landed, and approached the lodge. They spread out and swiftly encircled the building. They all carried rifles. Florin estimated that there were about twenty of them. Three of them approached Erol. "Are you Erol Garbin?" "Yes. What can I do for you?" "We are arresting you." "What for?" "For betraying the confidence of the people." "May I see your warrant?" "We don't need a warrant. We are a people's committee, come to take you to a people's court, where you will undoubtedly be found guilty and executed." "And what if I refuse to recognize your authority?" "We will have to kill you. Resisting arrest -- " What happened next surprise Florin with its swiftness. Erol flipped the gun from under the robe and with three snap shots dropped all three men. Florin did not let surprise hamper him, for Erol's shots were echoed by his own rifle, which caught two men who were further away. As the rest of the attackers dove for cover, Florin was pleased to hear the blast of a rifle from the side of the lodge, and the whine of a shattered blade as the gyro plummeted to the ground. Yma had done well, hitting where he told her, at the base of the props. The moment of victory was rudely shattered by a volley of fire from the men around the lodge. As Erol sprang from his chair and dove towards the door, he was hit and fell outside. Ignoring his wound he kicked over a table and used it as a shield, returning fire. Florin's thought of rescuing him, was cut short by Erol's yell, "Get to the back of the lodge. They may rush it." Florin made a dash for it, finding Erol's words true. The attackers were moving in. He still heard firing from the front and side, so he felt reassured. He was lost in the blind ritual of firing at moving objects. His whole mind was devoted to the problems of loading clips, changing windows to keep everything covered, and trying to stay out of the path of the viciously whining bullets. This was adventure and excitement. There was the crash of the rifles, the nasty whistle of ricochets, the moving bodies, sometimes jerking ludicrously when hit. Yet, to Florin, it was just a job, as it always is in the face of danger with every man. Just a specialiaed job with a very high incentive. Staying alive. Florin was surprised when he realized that he had disposed of all the attackers on his side. Despite their numbers, they were no match for the trio in the lodge. Florin was an expert marksman, and Erol and Yma had done enough hunting to be quite proficient. On the other side of the ledger, the people's committee were completely new to the business, some of them never having held a gun, and certainly not used to combat in woods. When he went up front, he found that Erol had done a magnificent job despite his wound, beating back wounding all his men. But he had received two more wounds and he was lying on the flagstone terrace in a litter of blood and cartridge cases. The firing from the bushes at the side had stopped too, and Yma came rushing up, to kneel beside her father. She screamed at Florin to get bandages, but it was too late. In the pastoral woods, men had fought and died, and now they felt tragedy. But the sky was still blue, and in a nearby de, a bird warbled freely. L ate that night, Florin and Yma stopped at a .small cabin in the mountains, finding it deserted. They had been travelling on foot since the fight, leaving the gyros as too obvious a method of travel. Yma was still upset over her father's death, and Florin had remained quiet in consideration. The mountain paths were rocky and steep, and they were both exhausted. After a cold meal, they sat in the gathering darkness in the cabin and talked. "I know it's inconsiderate of me to talk of it," Florin said, "but don't you feel resentment against tlie men who killed your father?" She shook her head and said, "I can't feel resentment, I know that it was just circumstances. Those men felt justified in what they did -- and maybe they were." "How can you be so coldblooded?" he said half-angrily. norance and violence against intelligent and kindly men are the supreme injustice." "Why bother discussing the right and wrong of it," she said wearily. "It is all over with, all so meaningless -- and easily forgotten." "That's just it," Florin said earnestly. "You've got to think about it, decide who was right and who was wrong. You've got to decide so that you can base your future actions and attitudes on that. You can't just mark it off the books, for it will still be in your head, all jumbled emotion and no sense." He was trying desperately to bring her out of apathy. He knew that the incident and all of its contributing factors must be clinically analyzed, for both their sakes. Again she shook her head. "No, they were right, they were betrayed. Some of those people had their life's saving of luxury pay invested in the corporation-men, and when those men failed them, they lost their savings and their futures. Poverty is a treacherous catalyst, it makes men do weird and horrible things. Common tricks of psychology added to that, make the whole mess into a primitive society of revenge and hatred." Florin saw he had her on the right track, but ran his hand through his hair in bewilderment as he asked, "But why? We can see tell the cause. I've got to know." She looked at him, barely discemable in the dark cabin, then said, "Why are you so interested? Why did you help us?" "I told you. I was a student of Tomlin, and a believer in the principles of this planet. I saw it produce a society where intelligence and virtue were manifest -- whether for mercenary or other reasons is inconsequential. It worked, and it made a wonderful world. I wanted to do my part in that world -- my world. "Now I want to know why my world has crumbled into a screaming madhouse of violence." "Yes, I can understand all too well how you feel. It's really horrible when you have grown up in a society, learned about its every intricacy, its principles, and come to have faith in it -- then see it suddenly disintegrate. "You come to think of your society ai the universe, nothing else is as permanent as your world, your people. You make plans and move through that society, believing in it with a faith stronger than any religious faith -- for you can see and understand it constantly. "Then something like this happens. The familiar still exists, but palled with suffering and horror. People you have known suddenly become beasts. Your world has collapsed. And even if you know the reason, it doesn't seem possible, the reason is out of a textbook and unreal, but the disillusionment and despair are all too real. "And from such a disintegration, you learn one important thing -- how abysmally ignorant you are of the society that you've lived in, and of people in general." There was a long silence. Finally she said, "I believe in you, and I believe you should know the reason." It was a strange scene as the two people, dirty and tired, sat in the crude cabin by the moonlight and discussed the fate of a world. "When this planet was colonized," Yma began, "everyone laughed at us, and said that our radical socio-economic system couldn't work. All types of people started here. Some were merely looking for a final refuge, some were criminals and confidence men out to 'take' this 'starry-eyed flock of crackpots'. Most of them, though, were solid citizens, who believed that this system of paying a man for his intelligence and virtue on a carefully regulated basis was the proper compromise between reality and altruism to achieve a Utopia. "As you know, it did produce a peaceful, cultural world that has few if any equals in the galaxy. There was one dangerous element in the plan though. Men were paid for their ability and it was money that was used; and wherever there is money there is dishonesty and greed. We had security and precautions against such things disrupting us internally, but we never counted on outside interference. "We joined that galactic company known as Universal Relief. Our government maintained that it performs the highest type of good deeds, they do it for profit, neverthele.ss it was .still a beneficial organization. Its motive of meritorious work for profit was quite similar to our own economic structure, so we invested heasily in the company, both on an individual and a governmental level. We also gave them a large premium, because of our -- well, our eccentricity. We were considered unstable, and I guess the company knew what it was talking about." The last comment was with a wry bitterness that stung Florin. "Anyway, in the last few years a rival company has sprung up. This company, Galactic Aid, has made great strides and is a serious comjjetitor to Universal Relief. " -- The managers of Galactic Aid thought that if they could take our account and investment from Universal, Galactic Aid would have a distinct advantage and eventually break their competitor. They tried salesmanship first, but we were loyal to the original company. "Then they tried other means." Until then her story had been told in the dispassionate voice of a mechanical reader, but when she continued, there was vehemence. "In a galactic company there is inconceivable power, and inconand able, to go to any lengths to gain an economic advantage over a rival. The fate of one planet, more or less, is irrelevant. "Galactic Aid's method of destroying us for that advantage was very crude and very simple; but effective because of its simplicity. "As you know, the ratio of corporation-men to citizens here is very disproportionate, and the economy of the planet is vested in comparatively few individuals. These few people were the ones Galactic Aid attacked. "They sent their agents to the corporation-men, my father included, and told them to stop research, writing, art, or whatever they were doing to earn their luxury pay. They promised protection if they were threatened by the people, and also promi.sed full rc-instatement after normalcy had returned, plus a sizeable bonus for co-operating. The ones who lefused this offer, were threatened, each one personally and their families. It was mass terrorization, and they actually killed a few to prove their seriousness. "Because of our social structure, this plan could, and did work. There are only # corporationmen with over a hundred stockholders. These people are, of course, quite clannish and have little actual contact with the masses. Therefore, this mass threat was heightened by the unity of the small group that it affected. "You know the rest. Under this pressure the incorporated men stopped producing, the economy crumbled, and the riots began. "We have developed a peaceful, cultural society, but no matter how civilized and stabilized a society is, once you knock out the financial props, the populace is going to go mad. "The corporation men didn't receive the promised protection. They soon realized that they had been tricked, but it was too late. Galactic Aid wanted them destroyed by the mob; they wanted murder and riots; and they wanted a Class AA emergency which would drain Universal Relief's resources. "They wanted an economic debacle on Lyrane, thus cutting off a large source of Universal's income. "When the corporation-men tried to tell the people the truth, the mobs called them liars and killed them." Yma appeared to be more relaxed after she had relieved her burdened mind. Florin, however, was stunned. "I know it's terrible," she said, "but what can we do? What can anyone do? Their plan has succeeded, and the planet is too far into chaos to patch up things. "There is notliing that can be done, so we have only individual survival to consider." Florin said, "I don't know what your personal plans are, but I've got to go back to the cities. I've got work to do." She didn't question him. The next morning, after a solid night's sleep, they separated. Yma headed through the mountains to some relatives, while Florin struck out for the capital. T he office of the new, selfappointed Planetary Governor of Lyrane was quite busy. It was the disorganization of a new office, set up during an emergency. And yet, it was an office, a recognizable political mechanism. Considering the murderous imbroglio that this planet had been facing, such an office, even in disorganized form, was quite surprising. Due to the confusion and a knack for bluffing, Florin Brite was able to gain admittance to the Secretary-Governor's office. This official, a former municipal police chief, was obviously impressed with his new position. He was quite brusque to Florin. "What is it man? I hope that it's important -- don't want my time wasted. We're frightfully busy." "I can see that, sir. I merely wished to establish my clas.sification in the new administration." "Good grief man!" the Secretary-Governor exploded. "We've published classification lists. Do I have to tell every man, woman and child their classification? Are you blind -- or just too lazy to read?" "My classification isn't listed," Florin said mildly. "Isn't listed? What classification is that?" "A scientist -- and a former corporation-man." Years of police work and interrogation had steeled the official. There was no surprise shown. "Wc handle those cases directly, Mr. ah -- ah -- " "Florin Brite." "Mr. Brite, there is a feeling of -- uh -- well, touchiness about such individuals so we handle their cases in confidence. I'm glad you came here -- " "Yes, you're quite delighted," Florin was no longer mild. "You're also quite amazed -- for you had no idea that there were any corporation-men left after the 'purge', a very thorough purge, I might add." "Now, see what I mean about touchiness? We were not responsible, not even involved in that mc.ss. This new government is comptosed of citizens who merely wish stability and sanity. Co-operation is our keynote -- " "Cut it. I don't need the party platform. I've read your handbills. I just want to know, what about me?" "Well, you will undoubtedly have to be put under some sort of protective custody. There is still strong feeling -- " Their tete a tete was interrupted by a rushing clerk shouting wildly. "They did it! Universal Relief finally declared it a Class A A I" The clerk was brandishing a .sheet of paper, which he profl'ered to the Secretary, who took it with an expression of pleasure. His reading was interrupted by Florin's voice. "It seems highly unnecessary that wc be declared Class AA now. You people have done such a marvelous job of organizing an emergency government that everything seems to be well under control." "Nonsense man," the Secretary declared. "There is still isolated fighting and rioting, even murder is not unusual." "I merely wished to congratulate you on your speedy action. It was almost as if this government was waiting to spring into existence." The irony was very thinly veiled. The Planetary Governor himself had entered the office while Florin was speaking. There was ice in his voice as he said, "What do you mean by that, sir?" Florin turned and bowed to him. When he spoke again, the v'eil was torn off and the irony was as flagrant as a dead rat -- and as fragrant. "Good day sir. I'm delighted to meet you. I was merely commenting to your Secretary on your efficiency and speed which has so helped this planet in its hour of need." The Governor's eyes ossified. "Just words. What do you want?" The irony disappeared, and Florin's voice transmuted to a tone of accustomed authority. "I want to find out just how you were able to organize and take over so quickly in this emergency. With this planet's economy completely shot after the corporation-men quit producing and with stocks down to nothing, I am fascinated by the problem of how you got financial backing." , "That is none of your business." "On the contrary, it is very much my business. You left your offices in rather a turmoil in your rush to take control. Since you haven't had the time to security screen your governmental employees, the files were as open as if they'd been set on the sidewalks. "From those files, my agents have procured some interesting items, such as -- " and he paused to pull out a sheaf of papers -- "cancelled checks made out to officials of your new government from Titanic Food Distributors, a subsidiary of Galactic Aid. "Also a detailed plan of organization for this government, outlining each step for acquisition of power during the emergency. This plan is dated two years ago and is are the initials of the president of Galactic Aid Incorporated. Handwriting analysts will sew that one up. "The plan is quite fascinating. It gives the procedure for your present establishment: the vigilantes gradually converted to city councils, local governments, consisting of confused and unprepared citizens gullible to the suggestions of agent provocateurs, regional then international conventions to formulate the new government. And at every turn, every election, guided by citizen-agents who would never have seen political power under the old status quo. "The future of this plan is even more fascinating -- putting Lyrane on an industrialized economy, when Lyrane has never had industrial potential, gumming up the works with embargoes and tariffs; and a bureaucratic, leech-like government that will sop up everything in taxes.-' "It's a masterpiece of planning -- of planning the permanent financial and moral destruction of a planet." The planetary officials had suddenly been confronted by a master duelist, this stranger was a swordsman with complete command of ripo.ste, parry and thrust. All they could do was try a few clumsy lunges. "Just who the hell are you to take charge this way and say these preposterous things?" the Governor asked. Florin replied. "You, I know, are a minor e.xecutive of one of Galactic Aid's subsidiaries. I happen to be Roald Gibbons, head of Universal Relief. "And since you want the cards on the table -- here they are. "We have this evidence that I hav-e mentioned, and much more, all under lock and key now. We will use that evidence to prove that this planetary government was and is sponsored by Galactic Aid for the purpose of exploiting this planet in a negative sense and thereby removing it from the accounts of Universal Relief. "We also have a solid case to prove that you, or some of your cohorts, incited the original treason and violence that caused this whole mess. My special investigators have unearthed the cobra nest of your government, while I personally had the satisfaction of gathering proof of your hand in the corporation-men purge." From a casual administrative difficulty. Florin had turned the conversation, since he entered, into a venomous attack. Florin had remaincd standing, but the two officials had retired to chairs. As opposition, they were discouragingly silent, but Florin had more than enough to carry the conversation alone. The two governors were just listening. appalled, but as all men do when they watch their world crumbling, figuring angles, escapes, explanations. But Florin, or rather Roald, was smashing angles faster than they could think of them. "Furthermore," he continued to the silent men, "if you will read that bulletin declaring this planet under Class AA emergency, you will find some interesting facts. As you may or may not know, when a planet is declared Class AA by a relief company, that company is empowered by galactic law to have several controls. "Those controls consist of complete administration of the planet until status quo is resumed, establishment of martial law with the right to arrest and confiscate any persons or things that may have caused the emergency, confiscation of all planetary currency to be retained and re-issued at face value when normalcy returns and, of course, the right to bring charges in Galactic Court against individuals or organizations that have caused the emergency. "On that last point, we. Universal Relief that is, have many charges to bring against Galactic Aid and its agents on this planet. First there is the charge of coercion, readily proved by the testimony of the corporation-men... yes, there arc some left. We protected them. Other charges will include inciting planetary revolution, establishing a false government through outside sources, and -- oh, just lots of others. "Since you arc an executive in Galactic Aid's organization, I will speak for your benefit now." Roald moved over and faced the Governor. "You were pulled in from .some desk job to handle this fledgling government. You had your orders, and for you it was mastly a paper operation. You understand what I have just been talking about, because you know galactic law. "But now, let's talk about something you aren't familiar with. Let's talk about violence, death, and a sick planet -- the things that your company planned and e.xecutcd. "For that your company will stand trial and be found guilty. It will probably be outlawed, and certainly bankrupt once fines and reparations are paid. Meanwhile, this planet, under the guidance of Universal Relief, will be hcljjed to recuperate and the people will be informed of the gross injustice they have suffered. I am sure they will then desire to return to their previous system. "But so much for the future. What about the past? Do you fully realize the enormity of the crime that your company has committed? "Of course you don't. You weren't with me when I saw a nice old gentleman, one of the most down with primitive rifles and even more primitive rage. You haven't heard the screams at night, have you? You weren't around, and neither was I, thank God, when Gerta Robin, that beautiful woman physicist was caught by the mob. (Continued on page I #) A Pattern for Penelope Here is the story that tells us why the first day of February, #, was a very significant day for Miss Haskell, her cat Penelope and -- the entire Universe!... T he first of February, nineteen hundred and fifty-six was a date of considerable significance on Miss Haskell's calendar. It marked the day on which she discovered that she needed new eyeglasses. Galactically speaking, however, the first of February, nineteen hundred and fifty-six, was significant in quite another way. Its equivalent on the galactic calendar, which takes such factors as relative axial rotations and relative orbital velocities into consideration, marked the "day" on which a new quality emerged from behind the crude pillars of Arrogance and Conceit, which hitherto had supported the galactic credo, and stepped into the civilized radiance of a quarter tuitous circumstances of its introduction it captivated the entire galactic civilization in a matter of galactic minutes, undermined the whole socio-centric structure, and led ultimately to the recognition of a number of primitive cultures which the Supreme Council had steadfastly snubbed for galactic centuries. It was a quality that was only relatively new. On primitive Earth it had been around for centuries and Earth philosophers were still vying with each otlier in their various attempts to name it. Some of them called it "naive sentimentalism" and one of them in particular called it "reverence for life". Earth poets, who were supposed to be well versed in such phenomena, were wont to call it "humility"... In its nascent phase, the first of February, nineteen hundred and fifty-six -- insofar as it applied to Illustrated by Kelly Frees Miss Haskell -- gave no intimation that it was going to be noticeably difTercnt from its predecessor, the thirty-first of January, nineteen hundred and fifty-six. She got up at her usual hour, hurried downstairs and dressed in the warmth of the kitchen the way she always did during the winter months. She put the teakettle on and made a few typical remarks to Penelope on the subject of New England winters. Then, unsuspectingly, she went out to get the milk. The milk bill regarded her bleakly when she opened the lid of the small insulated milk box. The "Plca.se" written diagonally across its white countenance was what she noticed first, and small wonder since there were four lines under it this time instead of the three she was accustomed to. Reluctantly, she lowered her eyes to the total. #, she read. She knew then that the day wasn't going to be an ordinary one after all, despite its deceptive beginning. She shivered in the cold wind. Fine snow was blowing in from the ocean, slanting across the low hills that lined the shore, finding the house and swcejjing unchecked from one end of the ofxm back porch to the other. There was a small boy standing on the summit of the highest hill, staring out at the somber restless mass of water. She noticed him subconsciously just before she turned and re-entered the kitchen. "I don't know what we're going to do, Penelope," she said, setting the single quart of milk on the kitchen table and laying the bill beside it. "I simply don't know what we're going to do!" Penelope yawned. She stretched her sleek gray body luxuriously, then she jumped down from the rocker and confidently approached the saucer behind the stove. "Oh, I know you're not worried," Miss Haskell said. "You don't have to try to stretch your pension. All you have to do is sleep and drink milk, and I never did see a cat who could drink as much milk as you do'" She turned back the tinfoil cap of the milk bottle and went over to the stove and filled the saucer. "Just the same," she added softly, "I don't know what I'd do without you." She returned the milk bottle to the table and procured a tea bag and a cup from the cupboard. Pas.sing the window she noticed die small boy again, consciously this time. She paused, staring out into the wind-slanted snow. He was standing motionlessly on the hilltop, looking out across the foreboding waste of snow-pocked waves and troughs as though he were confronted with the most intriguing vista of his lifetime. Why, Miss Haskell thought, he'll freeze standing out there! He'll catch his death of cold standing out there in that cold wind without even a coat on! She opened the door and stepped out on the back porch. She called out, her thin voice fighting valiantly with the wind. "Little boy," she called. "Little boy!" After a moment he turned around and faced her. Even at that distance she noticed that there was something unusual about him. She beckoned to him. After hesitating a moment he started walking toward the house, down the white hillside and across the windswept patch of ground where last summer Miss Haskell had raised string beans and red potatoes. He walked lightly over the uneven, slightly tumbled earth, not stumbling once, and he stopper! at the foot of the porch steps. He looked up at her questioningly. He had the largest, widest eyes that she had ever .seen. Looking down into their gray depths she had the vertiginous feeling that she was standing on the brink of an abyss, staring into misty concepts that were far beyond her ken. For a moment her composure deserted her, then her eyes dropped to the open collar of his strange jacket, dropped still farther to the whiteness of his bare hands, and it returned abruptly, accompanied by indignation. "S'oung man, you get into this house right this minute!" she said, in a manner reminiscent of Aunt Polly laying down the law to Tom Sawyer. "Standing out there in the wind on the coldest day of winter without even a coat on. Why, you're liable to catch your death! The idea!" She thought his eyes widened slightly, but she wasn't sure. It didn't seem possible that they could get much wider. His expres.sion, which reminded her of the expressions she used to see long ago when she had been a country school teacher and had found it frequently necessary to interrupt her charges in the midst of their grandiose daydreams, changed appreciably. It became friendly and disarming. "I'm not really very cold," he said in an astonishingly pleasant voice, "but I'll come in if you like." "Not really very cold indeed!" Miss Haskell said, holding the door open for him. "Why you look as though you're half frozen!" (He really did : his face and hands were almost shockingly white.) "You sit down now, and I'll fix you a cup of tea. What's your name?" "Otelis." He looked around him as though he were intensely interested in every detail of the small crowded kitchen. He paid particular attention to the position of the several chairs. ( Penelope was out of sight behind the stove, still preoccupied with her milk.) "Why what an odd name!" Miss Haskell said, getting another tea bag and another cup from the cupboard. "What won't people 'oe naming their children next! Live near here?" "Yes, in a way." He sat down in the rocker which faced the window and from which a view of the ocean could be obtained. "Relatively speaking, I live quite close." Miss Haskell wondered why he didn't take his hat off. People simply didn't bring up their children the way they used to, .she thought, and they didn't dress them snug and warm the way they used to citlier. The hat, for instance, was a flim.sy little thing consisting of nothing but silvery wiielike threads woven loosely together, and it didn't even come down far enough to cover his ears! She sighed. "I guess I just can't keep track of my neighbors any more," she said. "A body gets old so fast it seems like the years just fly by!" "You're not so very old, are you?" Otelis asked. "I'll never see sLxty-five again!" "But that's not old at all. Why -- " Miss Haskell had gone to the cupboard drawer for spoons. When she turned around, the aspect of her small guest startled her. He was sitting stiffly in the rocker, his mouth partly open, his eyes focused on something moving towards him across the kitchen floor. They had definitely widened this time. "What in the world is the matter?" she said. He did not answer. Mi.ss Haskell followed the direction of his gaze, expecting to see nothing less than a saber-toothed tiger, but all she saw was Penelope who had emerged from behind the stove and was approaching the rocker with an air of adamantine proprietorship. When she reached it she paused for a moment and regarded its occupant contemplatively. Otelis shrank back, his gray eyes enormous. "Why you act as though you never saw a cat before!" Miss Haskell said. Penelope leaped then, landing softly on his lap. For a while he seemed incapable of movement. He sat there rigidly, leaning as far back in the rocker as he could, his white hands tautly gripping the arms. It wasn't until he realized that Penelope didn't intend to proceed any farther than his lap that he began to relax. Presently, after she had curled up comfortably and closed her eyes, he released one of the rocker arms and very cautiously moved his hand to the gray, softly pulsating body. Wonderment suffused his face. "Why," he said, "it makes a noise!" "She's puTTing!" Miss Haskell said. "For heaven's sake, didn't you ever hear a cat purr before? Are you a city boy?" "I -- I'm afraid I neglected to learn about cats. I must have missed them somehow. But oceanography's my speciality. That's the main reason my planet paper received meritclassification." "You must be a city boy, studying such outlandish subjects and not knowing anything atout such ordinary creatures as cats!" Miss Haskell got the kettle from the stave and filled the two cups. "I drink mine plain," she said, sitting down, "but you can have some of Penelope's milk in yours. And of course you'll want sugar. All boys do." "No, I'll drink mine the way you do," Otelis said quickly, watching her closely as though he were waiting to ascertain just the way she did drink it. "Well, be careful then. It's awfully hot." She raised the steaming cup to her lips and took a careful sip. Otelis followed suit. He set the cup down very quickly, Miss Haskell thought. When he did so his hand happened to touch the milk bill, and he picked it up, as though he were eager to occupy his attention with something other than tea. "What's this?" he asked. "It's the milk bill, but I'm afraid it's Penelope's death notice, too." Miss Haskell slumped a little in her chair. "If I can't pay it this month they aren't going to write 'Please' any more. They just aren't going to leave any more milk." "Then why don't you pay it?" "I can't. Not till my pension comes, and that's a long ways off." "You mean Penelope will die?" His gray eyes had attained their maximum circumference. "She will without her milk." He looked down suddenly at the cat curled up in his lap. He ran his fingers gently up and down her back and the purring crescendoed, "she's beautiful in a way. She shouldn't have to die. That's wrong." "Lots of things are wrong in this world," Miss Haskell said, "but I guess there isn't very much we can do about them. But I shouldn't be talking like this," she added quickly. "Carrying on like a lonely old woman, telling a little boy all my troubles. You just drink your tea now, and forget about Penelope." "Funny how I missed cats that way," he said abstractedly. Abruptly he raised his eyes and stared through the window at the somber expanse of ocean that showed darkly beyond the thickening snow. Miss Haskell saw an expression of boyish yearning settle upon his face, saw a far-away look come into his eyes. He sat there immobile for a long time, his eyes lost, and then, slowly, the expression faded and his eyes returned from wherever they had been and dropped gently back to Penelope. "I always sort of liked oceans," he said. "I don't know why. Because they're so big, I guess." "What do oceans have to do with cats?" Miss Haskell asked in bewilderment. A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. The word "wistful" entered Miss Haskell's mind, then ran quickly out again when she saw how serene his eyes had become. "Quite a lot," he said. He stood up, first lifting Penelope from his lap and depositing her carefully on the kitchen floor. He seemed taller somehow. "I have to go now. Thank you very much for the tea." "You're very welcome," Miss Haskell said, "although I don't believe you touched a drop of it." He picked up the milk bill once more and stared at it VC# intently. The silvery threads of his ridiculous hat seemed to glow. Finally he laid the bill down again and he walked over to the door. "Make sure you go straight home now," Miss Haskell said, getting up and opening the door for him. "Don't let me catch you standing out there in that cold wind again!" "I won't be standing out there any more," he said. He paused for a moment on the porch steps, staring across the field and the snow-blurred hills at the leaden grayness of the ocean. Then he went down the steps and started across the field toward the highest hill. "Goodbye," he called over his shoulder. "Goodbye!" Miss Haskell shouted into the wind. She watched him from the window. It was snowing harder than ever now and by the time he reached the hill she could barely see him at all. He probably lived in one of the winterized summer cottages that stood a short distance down the beach, she thought. She wished suddenly that she had asked him specifically, and wished too that she had thought to ask him why he wasn't in school. But it was too late now. Fie was climbing the hill now, a vague blur of a little boy in a New England snowstorm. Just before he reached the summit a gust of wind sprang up in a wild white flurry and engulfed him, and by the time the flurry had died away the hill was empty. Miss Haskell sighed, more aware of her loneliness than usual. But of course there was Penelope, and as long as she had Penelope she could never be completely lonely. Thinking of Penelope reminded her of the milk bill, and with a shudder she went over to the table and picked it up, intending to put it it away somewhere where she wouldn't have to look at it. But before she put it away she looked at it once more, and that was when she discovered that she needed new eyeglasses. T he M.C. waited until the last child had stepped out of the vertical halo of the matter transmitter and had taken his assigned seat upon the studio stage. Then he stepped before the gargantuan eye of the tele-camera and faced the galaxy-wide audience. Beside him the Alterator scintillated like a complex silver web. "You have just witnessed the winners of the 'My Favorite Primitive Planet' essay contest returning from their sojourns on the planets which they selected as the subjects of their winning essays," he said. "During these sojourns they have instituted the temporal alterations granted to them as a reward of merit, and in a moment they will come forward singly and validate those alterations before the Alterator. "This contest has been sponsored by the Society for the Encouragement of Youthful Confidence in an attempt to impress upon the minds of our galactic-citizens-to-be some idea of the omnipotence to which their scientific heritage entitles them, and to give them some conception, through studying the language, customs and literature of inferior cultures, of the supreme superiority of our own culture. Naturally, due to the serious ramifications that might result from tampering with certain integral time patterns, the winners were instructed to confine all alterations of a geographical nature to nominal patterns only, and those of an historical nature to events which did not involve strong philosophical or ethical trends. Each winner was limited to one alteration." The M.C. turned toward the stage where the children sat waiting, their white faces shining, their little alterator helmets twinkling brightly in the radiance of the studio lights. "You will come forward one at a time and orally submit your alterations for validation," he said... "Alesa, would you like to be first?" Alesa walked demurely across the stage and stood before the intricate web of shining thread-like wires. "The name 'Tekit,' most magnificent city on Tarth #, to 'Alesa'," she said. The Alterator hummed. Alesa returned to her seat. "Voris?" Voris came forward a little shyly. " 'Liliel', largest continent on Fruith #, to 'Voris'." "Stris?" "The 'Metnumen' system of government of Matnanet, Sairis #, to the 'Stris' system of government." "Elora?" "The river 'Tib', on Tranuska #, to the river 'Elora'." "Otelis?" He felt ashamed at first, standing up there in front of all those famous children whose names were already integrated in geography textbooks all over the galaxy. And then, suddenly, he didn't feel ashamed any more at all. He felt proud instead, and he stood up very straight before the dazzling web of the Alterator and he said what he had to say with quiet dignity. " '#' on the milk bill of Miss Abigail Haskell, Rural Route No. #, Smithport, Massachusetts, America, Sol #, to '#'," he said, "and the word 'Please' on same bill to the word 'Paid'." The North "Otelis" Ocean wouldn't have sounded right anyway.    These mindftVere Roshrucid  w'. mil Ftands Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve grc-amess? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesnrun and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all pans of the world. The rebellion of Mankind was successful, and the fate of Loki, Lakkuret Administrator, rested with the rebel leader. Skelling, the rebel leader, didn't know it but in his decision also rested the fate of Mankind. H uman servants admitted Henry Skelling, Advisor for Putnek, to the presence of the Lakkuret Administrator. Skelling, as was necessary, bowed to the Administrator in the presence of the servants. Then the Administrator dismissed the servants. It had been an innovation of his own to do this during routine interviews. Skelling, who had been Advisor for Putnek for a very long time, could remember the previous Administrator; he had always kept the servants by him except for top-secret discussions, and they were rare. The Administrator's name was Loki -- on Lakkuret, at any rate, the Mirmi never owned to more than one name. There was a title, of course. Sir Loki. It was odd, Skelling thought, that they kept the vernacular for a thing like that. Loki spoke. "Well, Skelling, how are things?" He spoke a clear precise English, clearer, Skelling knew, than his own. "They might be worse. At least there isn't quite as much unrest as there was a couple of days ago. But things are hanging fire now, waiting on the Berlin news." Loki looked up at Skelling. "Yes, the Tulinn business." It was difficult to be sure whether there was a snub intended in his correction of Berlin to Tulinn or not. But Skelling had stopped looking for snubs a good many years before. It was the essentials he went for now. He said, "If the sentence is carried out, the rising won't be confined to this continent." Loki looked at him; hailing from a smaller planet his bones were longer and more fragile, his muscles more easily wearied; he drooped languidly in his special Mirmi chair. "For other continents I have other advisers, Skelling. As you know." "As I know. All the same, when there's the possibility of a really big fire, the man who knows the dryness of the local tinder is as good a guide as any... What do they say, by the way?" Loki smiled wearily. "You still try to pcrsuade me that you don't know exactly what advice I get from the others? Skelling, let's stop fooling each other." Skelling looked at him a moment, and they both laughed. "Skelling, the original regulation made any unauthorized entry of a Mirmi building punishable by death. Two years ago, there was the Dietle case. He got a very light sentence." "We didn't think so. Five years -- and he was shown to be as mad as a hatter. To us, it was savage." Loki shook his head. "I'm not sure you know as much about the Dietle case as you think you do... This new affair at Tulinn. Three men caught in the Mirmi building by night, with equipment for circumventing the alarm system -- and armed! What verdict can your people possibly expect? What -- " "Sir Loki," Skelling interrupted. "When a planet, an entire race, is kept in subjection -- what do your people expect?" "What we can command. That only. Obedience." "By what right?" Loki laughed. "We've travelled Illustrated by Kelly Freas a long way. Had your first predecessor put that question to my first predecessor, what would have happened?" Shelling said evenly, "A public flogging, I imagine." "And you imply that the simple carrying out of a law, for whose breaking the penalty is well known, would be brutal?" Skclling looked at him warily. They had become respectful adversaries, in a way friends, but he still felt, at times, that he was treading dangerously. That did not stop him from putting his foot down with some weight. "We've civilized you, but not to the extent we would like. Yes, it would be brutal." Loki laughed quite a long time. Shelling waited for him to stop. Still smiling a little Loki said, "I've been looking through some of our early adrr.inistrative reports. They're interesting. Those for the administration of my predecessor Skrutt particularly." "Locally known," Skclling remarked, "as Satan Skrutt." "In one year," Loki went on, "Administrator Skrutt ordered more than eighty-four thousand executions. And the result? -- calm over the planet from Surrint to Tolda. In my four years there has not been a single execution. And now, when it looks as though I may be forced to act -- not harshly but, shall we say, firmly -- you tell me I am threatened by a planetwide wave of revolt." "I tell you the truth." Loki glanced at him. "I don't disbelieve you. My other sources, you will be glad to hear, confinn it. But tell me, what will be the reason for the revolt -- excessive harshness or excessive laxness?" "Neither. That calm -- in the year of the eighty-four thousand executions -- did that mean defeat? That was Skrutt's last year. His be martyrs; only he didn't have Skrutt's stomach for the job. Nor did he have Skrutt's instructions; your government fell over those eighty-four thousand victims. Skrutt's successor came out with die first glimmering of Mirmi conscience behind him." Loki's look was tired. "Don't lecture me, Skclling. You can't imagine that all this hasn't been the basis for a lot of discussion back on Mirma. Something happened to us when we conquered this planet. It was not our first conquest, but it was the first time we had encountered a continuing resistance. We met it. with a ptolicy of repression -- Skrutt had his orders just as Nemmin who relieved him had his. It failed. There are differing opinions as to why. Our liberals claim that you taught us a lesson in ethics. There is another party that talks of a failure of nerve -- and believes that the failure can be retrieved." "And which party -- ?" "Do I belong to? I am a professional administrator, Skclling. Like Skrutt, like Nemmin. I take my orders, and carry them out to the best of my ability." There was a moment's silence. Skelling broke it. "Well." he said, "has the government fallen?" "Tell me," Loki countered. "How do you come to be so well informed on Mirmi ptolitics?" Skelling allowed a slight trace of contempt to enter his voice. "Why has the Mirmi term of service here been reduced, from five to three years? We corrupt your troops within a twelve-month of their posting here. You know very well that if the revolt comes your own troops will not be united." "If the revolt comes, I should not be too confident that reprisals will be confined to the use of Lakkurct-based troops. We can have a battle squadron here within two weeks. This time it will not be just one city ; they will all feel it." Skelling half smiled. "Will Minni fire on Mirmi?" Loki's look to Skelling carried something that was vague, but it might have been an appeal. It was incredible that it should be so, but it looked that way. "We've known each other some time, Skelling. It was not I who sealed your appointment as Adviser, but I've come to rely on you. Frankly, I don't know what the result of repressive action would be. Neither do you, so we're equal. But one thing you must understand -- I obey orders. If I am told to use the battle fleet, I will use it. I was trained from childhood for this kind of job. Throughout my career I have never failed my superiors. I won't fail them now, either. Whatever it involves, I shall do my job." Skelling spoke softly. "I'll tell you what it will involve. Evacuation. It will be better for you Mirmi if you evacuate without bloodshed, but evacuate you must. We have won already, Sir Loki. It only remains for your people to recognize it." Loki drummed his seven fingers on the desk. The screen that was set into it was blank. Skelling had seen it on other visits covered with the blunt clumsy characters of the Mirmi language. Loki caught his glance. "The news should have been here by now." "The government will fall," Skelling said. "Yes, but to be replaced by which party? The government is a coalition. What will take its place -- a government of liberals, or of repressives?" "Our information says Allef will head the new government." "Your information!" Loki's eyes were on the blank screen."Camp gossip. Sometimes you overestimate your powers, Skelling." Skelling said indilTerently : "Perhaps." Eyes still on the screen, Loki continued : "I hear rumors of Lakkuret politics, too. I hear that, on this evacuation supposition, you have been created World PresidentElect. Congratulations." "You know our proverb," Skelling said, "about the possible slips between cup and lip. A PresidentElect is not a President." "No, and may never be. But congratulations, all the same. Should we have to abandon this planet, I would prefer to think of the administration being in good hands after wc had gone; and with you I know it would be." "Thank you," Skelling murmured. Then in a firmer tone, "I would return the compliment but for one minor detail -- that the worst man on Earth would fit your place better than you do. Nothing personal, you understand." "I understand." The small screen flashed into activity, and they both tensed. Shelling knew enough Mirmi to pick out certain words -- "demonstration," "crisis" and "Surrint." It was not the message from Mirrna that they were waiting for. Loki pressed a button, and the message was transferred to the large screen on the wall. "Local," he murmured. He pressed another button. The writing gave place to a street scene. "Here," Loki said with some astonishment. "In Surrint itself!" The camera closed in. The marching column was very orderly and very steady, though some of the faces looked nervous. They were singing the old song, part march, part dirge, that dated back to the time of Skrutt. They were and, more roughly done but in big"I think," Loki said, "that the imposition of Mirmi names on your cities may have been a .serious mistake." Skelling pointed to the screen. "And -- what do you propose to do about that?" Loki smiled. "Ignore it. It isn't relevant to the main issue. I take it you knew this would happen?" "I advised against it." Skelling smiled ruefully. "Even a World President-Elect does not always have his wishes respected. It seemed to be a pointless provocation while we were waiting for the big news from Mirma." A man in the front rank shook his fist towards the watching camera. He was a little man, and he looked scared. "If we go," Loki said, "if we go, our stay here will not have been quite without advantage to you." "We shall have interstellar travel, and a few other gadgets!" "No, I didn't mean that kind of thing. You know that. We came to a planet that had learned nothing from two shattering wars, and was preparing to plunge itself into a third. We brought you peace." "We remember that propaganda," Skelling said bitterly. "We remember that we believed the talk of benefits -- and found ourselves slaves." "All the same," Loki said emphatically, "there were benefits. If we went, we should leave you a united planet." "A benefit," Skelling said, "but we've paid for it. Another civil war might not have been worse." "Civil war? Your ancestors would not have called it that. Perhaps you needed the Mirmi to bring these things home to you." "Perhaps." "And us, what becomes of us, the Mirmi?" "How many planets do you claim to have colonized -- two hundred, three hundred? You have living space enough. You don't want us to feel sorry for you, do you?" "A millenium of expansion," Loki said quietly. "Almost exactly a millenium. A thousand years of expansion, the creation of a stellar empire extending over five hundred light years. You could spare some sympathy for us, Skelling. Because once we begin to retreat, what follows? Once our hegemony cracks, it's an open ring. You aren't the only race to which we've given interstellar travel. At least, our rule brought peace." "The word 'peace,' Skelling said, "is beginning to hypnotize you. Peace... peace... peace. I told you we had won already. As for what follows -- that can wait on events. If your grip breaks, I presume some other race will supply the deficiency." Loki looked at him. "Some other race? Men, perhaps?" The Administrator shook himself out of his languor and sat upright, as upright as any of the Mirmi could sit. "You know, I have a feeling we have allowed our conversation to become somewhat unreal. We are not here to discuss the way your people propose to take over our empire, but the measures to be adopted against the Tulinn saboteurs." "Not that, either. We are here. Sir Loki, to pass the time while the government falls on Mirma." Loki had left the receiver switched onto the big screen, though he had cut out the view of the demonstration. Now while Skelling spoke a message began to form. Without letting his attention become distracted from vriiat he read there, Loki murmured tensely, "The Government has fallen." "And... ?" Skelling looked not at the screen but at Loki's face. "And Allef... ?" The message had ended. Loki looked at him. "No, not Allef. Mered is the new Chief Minister," F or a moment Skelling let the crushing weight of despair master him. Bitter news, and unexpected. Mered was the leader of the repressives; translations of his speech calling for racial regeneration and reassumption of the mission of conquest had been widely disseminated on Lakkuret, which had once been known as Earth. Gently Loki said, "The Tulinn case. I've put it up to Mirma Command, and there will be no final decision until I hear from them. But, in view of the change of government... I don't think there can be any doubt as to what the decision will be." Skelling had recovered himself. "What I told you earlier was no bluff. Sir Loki. The whole planet will rise against you. You have been Administrator here for a long time ; you can't look forward with any pleasure to what is going to happen. If you were to resign rather than carry out the decision... there must still be a delicate balance on Mirma... it might make the difference." Loki's face was expressionless. "I told you, Skelling -- I obey orders. I was trained for this duty; to carry it out, not to shirk it. Let me give you some advice instead. Tell your people to behave themselves. There will be some new regulations, but providing they are obeyed there is no reason to expect harsh measures. I warn you -- it is your only hope." "That is not hope," Skelling said tersely. "That is resignation to slavery." Loki smiled; the contemptuouslooking smile of the Mirmi, but there was sadness in it, and wry humour. "There is a barrier between us, Skelling. I have enjoyed your company, as I think you have mine, and if the barrier were not there we might have been friends. You are human, and determined to rebel. I am of the Mirmi. That separates us." "Look at it from our point of view. Sir Loki." "Look at it from ours. A thou.sand years of empire is not put aside in a moment. Had it been Allef. I would have earned out my different orders, but at heart I would have been ashamed. I have been here a long time, and grown to love Lakkurct, but there would have been the shame of defeat -- nothing could have prevented that" "And there is no shame at the thought of the bloody fighting that is bound to come?" "No shame, Skelling. Regret, but not shame. If you humans do rebel and I am still Administrator after the rebellion is crushed, I shall try to mitigate the conditions that wiil be imposed. It will not be easy, but I shall do my best." "This rebellion will not be crushed." "'ou have forgotten our power," said Loki. "You have grown used to conce.ssions and the presence of garrison troops. It will be a different matter when the battle squadron darkens your skies. Then your eople will look for holes in the ground, as they did before." Loki stood up. lie stretched his hand out. "Goodbye, Skelling. I shall t # to stop the bloodshed. There will be planet-wide telecasts about the new government, 'our people will be warned by us. if not by you." They shook hands. Skelling spoke quietly now. "It will do no good." "I shall try, anyway. If I fail... I hope that it will soon be over." In the outer rooms there were the human servants who had been dismissed by Loki at the beginning of tile interview. One of Skelling's own men was among them. He came close to Skelling as he went out. "Well?" "Mered," Skelling replied. "War. But we shall win." He hopied he sounded more confident than he felt. T hey wanted Skelling to leave London; the other members of the secret NVorld Council had left their cities to take up their prearranged duties as resistance leaders -- cities were potential deathtraps. Skelling, however, would not leave. Loki was still in London, although on the day that he ordered the execution of the Berlin rebels he dismissed his human serving .staff; their purjxisc had, in any case, been no more than decorative -- the work was done by robots. As Skelling piointcd out, Loki's presence was a fair indication that, whatever happened elsewhere, London would not be bombed. By and large, events fell out as planned, though there were nerveracking setbacks. The first wave of revolt spread from Berlin, and the Mirmi garrison there went over to the rebels in a matter of hours. There was a counter-drive from France, and another from Russia which tried to pincer with the first, but they collapsed separately, and within three days the continent of Europe w'as in the hands of men and the rebel Mirmi. A week after the insurrection began, only South America and the islands of Britain were still ruled by Mirmi loyal to their own planet. The situation had consolidated, and both sides sat back to await the intervention -- decisive one way or the other -- of the battle squadron from Mirma. Fighting ceased; an armed truce took its place. There had been relatively little bloodshed. No bombing had occurred; the rebel Mirmi held nine tenths of the local space fleet. Their units paraded over the centers of resistance -- Skclling watched them hail low over the huddled roofs of London -- but there was no combat. A good sign, Skelling thought at first; for men, everything depended on the reluctance of Mirmi to fight Mirmi. But reflection showed him the unwisdom of his confidence -- these were all Earth-garrison Mirmi, sharing the bond of having been under human influence. It had been that wcapon -- the human power to sway their conquerors -- which had brought the pre.scnt temporary success, but there was no reason to think that it would apply against the Mirmi in the battle squadron. They would be coming, flushed with that atavistic yearning for power which even Loki had shown, probably only too ready to kill their fellow-Mirmi whom they saw as traitors. The game was far from over. The battle squadron arrived two weeks, to the day, after the revolt. Somewhere beyond the moon it emerged into three-dimensional space, but the first that was known of its presence was when New York was obliterated. Then the telecasts carried scenes of the smoking slagheap that had been the city, round the entire earth. To reinforce the impression the battle squadron itself cruised through the lower atmosphere, showing itself above the major centers of population. It was a grim and impressive sight; the great crui.sers looming monstrously in comparison with those ships which men had been accustomed to see, the pitiably small patrol vessels on which the hope of liberation now rested. Why should the local Mirmi defenders pit themselves against such odds, against their own kind? There was no logical reason for it. But they did. The battle was joined in atmosphere, above the Pacific Ocean. The small patrol ships, capable of so much greater speed and manoeuverability in the confinement provided by air pressure, launched their attack directly at the ponderously cruising armada. They tore through the loose formation, lancing it again and again. Some of their electro-corrosion charges got through the defence; when the battle squadron rose clear into free space it left one ship behind, rolling helplessly on the waves of the Pacific. Three patrol ships had gone down with it. The battle squadron did not again venture into the atmosphere. Instead, lying just off the planet in space, they destroyed Leningrad, and dealt Rome a blow that was near mortal. The new tactics were clear -- a progressive destruction of the cities of the Earth until the rebels begged for peace. And the patrol ships went for them again. In space they were hopelessly ineffective against the great cruisers. They attempted only diversionary attkeks, flipping up through the stratosphere and launching their charges, then away back to their relative haven. But their losses were heavy. Skclling, in radio communication with the fleet of patrol ships, saw a meteor glow red, plunging towards the distant Welsh hills, and knew with sadness what it was. They were a wonderful race, the Mirmi. Men might have taught them some things, but there were other respects in which men could only, humbly, learn from them. For several days the dwindling number of the rebel ships continued their hopeless struggle. Skelling, extrapolating on the course of events, could fix a term to the possible continuation of resistance. Even if the Mirmi who had allied them.selves with men fought to the bitter end, to the last patrolship, within a week all would be over. But the war was over the following day, and the rebels had won. The message came over the telecast blanket channel, in Mirmi first and then in English:  "The #rd Battle Squadron salutes the garrison of Lakkuret. The Admiral Besson has been deposed; the fleet takes commands from Commodore Atark. The blood of our brothers has gained the freedom of the humans of Lakkuret; to our brothers we surrender the fleet and this planet. Mirmi shall not slay Mirmi, in an unjust cause. We come in peace now, and bring liberty." Skelling saw the great armada, a menace no longer, sink through the English clouds; the .surrender was being made, reasonably enough, at the old center of government. He was called then, and told the other news; Loki's personal retinue, joining the winning side, had turned him over to the Earthmen. alike. Skelling's first impression was that it was Loki who was sitting as usual behind his desk. Then he saw Loki held prisoner on the far side of the room. There were two other Mirmi present, and three of his own men. The Minn behind the desk made the movement with his hand which was the greeting between equals; .Skelling had never received it before. "Grceting.s, President. I am Atark, Commodore of the Fleet." "Greetings," Skelling replied. "The men of Earth offer you their duty. Commodore, and their gratitude for liberation." "Peace between our races." "Peace," echoed Skclling. Atark permitted himself to smile. "Earth," he repeated. "Men of Earth. A word dies. Lakkuret exists no longer." "Many words die," Skclling .said quietly. "Surrint dies. The name of this city is London." "London? I had not heard that. Lakkuret -- you knew what that means, in our speech?" Skclling .shook his head. "It means Fair Haven. The Admiral of the First Fleet gave it that name. The Mirmi, in all their wanderings, had never found so lovely a world." Skelling looked at him curiously. "But you never made any serious attempt to colonize it? Only troops -- no settlers." "There were to have been setI In s. But if our troops, under disword clumsily -- "what would beloiiir if settlers? The idea was iwvn abandoned; only postponed. ".nd now... ?" "Our first duty is to Mirma. The licet is reforming. Tomorrow we nMurn liome, to depose Mered." "You can do that?" "Mirnii do not fight Mirmi," At. irk replied, "in an unjust cause. 'I'liat accomplished... many of us will wish to come back to Earth -- as friends, as guests. We do not seek your good lands. Give us your deserts, and we will make thent bloom. Will you take us?" "I cannot speak finally until the Council has met," Skelling said, "but I tliink you can take it the answer is yes; we shall be glad to have the Mirmi as friends." "It is a lovely world," Atark said wistfully. He stood up, stooping under his body's greater weight. "We will leav'e now. We have much to do." Skelling gestured towards the bound L.oki. "And Loki?" Atark looked at his fellow Mirm indifferently. "He is yours. I understand your people hold him guilty of the death of the men of Tulinn, and perhaps of the death and destruction that followed. Do whatever is necessary." After all these years, Skelling reflected, lie still knew very little of Mirmi sychology. "Mirmi do not fight Mirmi, except in a just cause." But they abandon them. There was a curious logic in their minds, difficult for men to grasp. The human mind was so much more flc.xible and, he thought, more petty, Skelling said : "And should our decision be not death but banishment?" "Send him back to the fleet." Atark smiled grimly. "But we shall be surjrised to see him." When the Minni had gone, Skelling indie. ited Loki. He said to his men, "Untie him." As they obeyed, one of them commented ; "That was a funny thing to say, President -- about banishment. We know what the sentence will be." Skelling answered softly; "No one know that, until it's pronounced. You can go now." They did not look very pleased about going. Loki glanced after them. "I prefer men when they aren't exercising their unique talent for claptrap. Your followers arc quite right. We do know what the sentence will be. Behind the spurious liberalism your race has an odd vmdictivcne.ss, cspcci.ally when acting in the mass." "Perhaps." Skelling looked at him. "Well? I told you we had won, even then." "Not by your own qualities, by ours." "A catalyst," Skelling suggested, "to help the Mirmi on the right course." Loki continued, "You are not childish enough to believe that, Skelling. Unless you regard defeat and decadence as the right course for the Mirmi." "There can be no defeat in civil war. Why should there be decadence?" "Lakkuret," Loki said. "Fair Haven. You will let the Mirmi come here to settle. Noble generosity -- and meanwhile men will be voyaging through the stars, taking the place of the Mirmi as rulers of the Mirmi empire." "It might happen," Skelling admitted. "But by consent." Loki said admiringly; "Nothing will stop men; they nave a h'pocrisy which will win them the galaxy." There was an irony in his voice which was different from the irony of defeat; it had an edge of satisfaction. It was difficult to imagine what Loki could have to be satisfied about. His side had lost, his race he saw as foredoomed to lotuseating exile, and his own life was forfeit. And yet there was satisfaction in his voice, ironic triumph. "You did your duty," said Skelling. "I haven't stopped doing so. The duty of a Mirm continues to death." "There is not much you can do now." "Duty has its negative side. The things not to do, as well as the things to do." "A witness to the past greatness of the Mirmi?" "A witness for the prosecution," Loki said, "not for the defence." Skelling looked at him with admiration and some affection. "There will be no trial." For the first time, Loki was thrown off balance. He looked uncertain. "You have no choice in that," he said. "Our casualties numbered more there will be a verdict of guilty, and a sentence of death. It would be unfair, but that is what would happen... So I shall release you." "Release? To what?" "To the fleet. You have your patrolship on the roof, and you can have my signature on a pardon." Loki looked at him for some moments without replying. "That would be a breach of your duty to your people." Skelling nodded. "In a sense, yes. I don't think it's important." "You would be deposed as President." "Possibly." "Not possibly -- certainly." "Certainly, then. That's not important cither. There would be no pleasure in a presidency built on such a foundation." "You are serious about this! You surprise me. More than that -- I am corifused." "I should waste no time," said Skelling. "We have talked long enough. My men may get suspicious and come back. It may be impossible for you to get away then." "So there can be friendship," Loki murmured, "between you and me, between man and Mirm." "It was never my view. Sir Loki, that there could not be." Skelling saw Loki come to a decision; his expression changed and he smiled. "I accept your offer -- and I find that I can betray my duty, too, for friendship." "Your duty -- as a witness?" "More than that. Before he was deposed Admiral Besson sent me something -- the Weapon." Skelling felt horror crawl in his mind. It had been his over-riding fear, that the Mirmi might, in their desperation, use their ultimate weapon -- the hydrogen chain-reaction bomb -- against the rebel planet. Activated, the earth's atmosphere would blaze, the world burn like a tinder. He saw now what Loki's duty had been -- the duty of keeping silence while the slow fuse burned. Loki went on, "It seemed to us that Earth had been a curse on the Mirmi, and that if it were destroyed the curse might lift. I don't think that now and an)'way... it doesn't matter." Skelling said urgently: "When is it set for?" "There's time enough. Tomorrow morning. It was necessary' to destroy the battle squadron along with the planet. It was that which was the hardest to bear, but there seemed to be no choice." "And it's..." "On the roof. In my patrolship. Set to e.xplode pretnaturely if tampered with, of course." "I'm c.xceptionally nervous," Skelling said. "Shall we go up now?" locked the fuse mechanism and put it out of action. Loki tossed the fuse away. He looked round, at the other roofs of the city and at the distant sunlit hills. "Surrint," he said. "Goodbye, Surrint." "Come back some time," Skelling said. "Come back here to London." "No. I shall not come back. But it is a lovely world. Perhaps for the Mirmi the einjiire is well lost." "Lovely," Skelling asked, "or corrupting?" "Both. Perhaps loveliness always corrupts. I never thought I would disobey instructions; and yet now it doesn't matter." Loki stood by the door of the patrolship. ready to enter. "Remember us," he said. "Remember the Mirmi when your great shijss are probing the darkness beyond the galaxy." "That will be after my time," Skelling said. "I will remember you, Loki." "And I, you." The patrolship climbed into the blue sky towards the great poised shadows of the battle squadron. Skelling watched it out of sight. Then he went downstairs, to confront outraged humanity.    the Earth one of these evenings. Scientists are urging the launching of a small #-pound moon now, instead of aiming at a "super-satellite." It would flash across the sky for about three weeks and then gradually slow by friction and spiral down to Earth with its load of instruments. The "new look ' in propo.scd satellites has Orbital Unmanned Satellite Earth." plastic chemically bonded together. New bonding compounds which will unite chemically with plastics and glass in combination have been discovered. The Ironded nraterials can be made into laminated panels that combine the flexibility of plastic with the strength of glass flbers. There are times when the animal in Mankind savately asserts itself. Eiien children become snarling little beasts. Fortunately, however, in childhood laughter is not buried deep H e dropped over the stone wall and flattened to the ground. He looked warily about him like a young wolf, head down, eyes up. His name was Steven -- but he'd forgotten that. His face was a sunburned, bitter, filthy elcvcn-ycar-old face -- tight lips, lean cheeks, sharp blue eyes with startlingly clear whites. His clothes were rags -- a pair of corduroy trousers without any knees : a man's white shirt, far too big for him, full of holes, stained, recking with sweat ; a pair of dirty brown sneakers. He lay, knife in hand, and waited to sec if anyone had seen him coming over the wall or heard his almost sesundlcss landing on the weedgrown dirt. ,bovc and behind him was the grey stone wall that ran along Central Park West all the way from Columbus Circle to the edge of Harlem. He had jumjaed over just north of #nd Street. Here the park was considerably below street level -- the wall was about three feet high on the sidewalk side and about nine feet high on the park side. From where he lay at the foot of the wall only the jagged, leaning tops of the shattered apartment buildings across the street were visible. Like the teeth of a skull's smile they caught the late afternoon sunlight that drifted across the park. For five mimites Steven had knelt motionless on one of the cement benches on tlic other side of the wall, just the top of his head and his eyes protruding over the top. He had seen no one moving in the park. Every few seconds he had looked up and down the street behind him to make sure that no one was sneaking up on him that way. Once he had seen a man dart out halfway across the street, then wheel and vanish back into the rubble where one whole side of an apartment house had collapsed iii.o #th Street. Steven knew the reason for that. A dozen blocks down the street, from around Columbus Circle, had come the distant hollow racket of a pack of dogs. Then he had jumped over the wall -- partly because the dogs might head this way, partly because the best time to move was when you couldn't see anyone else. Alter all, you could never be sure that no one was seeing you. You just moved, and then you waited to see if anything happened. If someone came at you, you fought. Or ran, if the other looked too dangerous. No one came at him this time. Only a few days ago he'd come into the park and two men had been hidden in the bushes a few yards from the wall. They'd been lying very still, and had covered Illustrated by Paul Orban themselves with leaves, so he hadn't seen them; and they'd been looking the other way, waiting for someone to come along one of the paths or through the trees, so they hadn't seen him looking over the wall. The instant he'd landed, they were up and chasing him, yelling that if he'd drop his knife and any food he had they'd let him go. He dropped the knife, becau.se he had others at home -- and when they stopped to paw for it in the leaves, he got away. Now he got into a crouching position, very slowly. His nostrils dilated as he sniffed the breeze. Sometimes you knew men were near by their smell -- the ones who didn't stand outside when it rained and scrub the smell off them. He smelled nothing. He looked and listened some more, his blue eyes hard and bright. He saw nothing e.xcept trees, rocks, bushes, all crowded by thick weeds. He heard nothing except the movement of greenery in the afternoon breeze, the far off baying of the dog pack, the flutter of birds, the scamper of a squirrel. He whirled at the scamper. When he saw that it was a squirrel, he licked his lips, almost tasting it. But it was too far away to kill with the knife, and he didn't want to risk stoning it, because that made noise. You stoned squirrels only after you'd scouted all around, and even then it was dangerous -- someone might hear you anyway and sneak up and kill you for the squirrel, or for anything else you had, or ju.st kill you -- there were some men who did that. Not for guns or knives or food or anything else that Steven could see... they just killed, and howled like dogs when they did it. He'd watched them. They were the men with the funny looks in their eyes -- the ones who tried to get you to come close to them by pretending to offer you food or something. In a half-crouch Steven started moving deeper into the park, pausing each time he reached any cover to look around. He came to a long green slope and went down it soundlessly, stepping on rocks whenever he could. He crossed the weedgrown bridle path, darting from the shelter of a bush on one side to press against the trunk of a tree on the other. He moved so silently that he surprised another squirrel on the tree trunk. In one furious motion Steven had his knife out of his belt, and sliced it at the squirrel so fast the blade went tuhuh in the air -- but the squirrel was faster. It scurried up out of reach, and the knife just clipped off the end of its tail. It went higher, and out onto a branch, and chittered at him. It was funny about squirrels -- they didn't seem to feel anything in their tails. Once he'd caught one that way, and it had twisted and run off, leaving the snapped-off tail in his hand. Dogs weren't that way -- once he'd fought a crippled stray from a pack, and he'd got it by the tail and swung it around and brained it on a lamppost. Dogs... squirrels... dreamlike memory of dogs that acted friendly, dogs that didn't roam the streets in packs and pull you down and tear you apart and eat you alive ; and he had a memory of the squirrels in the park being so tame that they'd eat right out of your hand... But that had been a long, long time ago -- before men had started hunting squirrels, and sometimes dogs, for food, and dogs had started hunting men. Steven turned south and paralleled the bridle path, going always wherever the cover was thickest, moving as silently as the breeze. He was going no place in particular -- his purpose was simply to see someone before that someone saw him, to see if the other had anything worth taking, and, if so, take it if possible. Also, he'd try to get a squirrel. Far ahead of him, across the bridle path and the half-mile or so of tree-clumped park that lay beyond, was Central Park South -- a sawtoothed ridge of grey-white rubble. And beyond that lay the ruin of midtown Manhattan. The bomb had exploded low over #th Street and Seventh Avenue that night six years ago, and everything for a mile in every direction had been leveled in ten seconds. The crater started at around #th and sloped down to where #th had been and then up again to #th, and it glowed at night. It wasn't safe to go down around the crater, Steven knew. He'd heard some men talking about it -- they'd said that anyone who went there got sick ; something would go wrong with their skin and their blood, and they'd start glowing too, and die. Steven had understood only part of that. The men had seen him and chased him. He'd gotten away, and since then had never ventured below Central Park South. It was a "war", they'd said. He didn't know much about that either... who was winning, or had won, or even if it was still being fought. He had only the vaguest notion of what a war was -- it was some kind of fight, but he didn't think it was over food. Someone had "bombed" the city -- once he had heard a man call the city a "country" -- and that was about as early as he could remember anything. In his memory was the flash and roar of that night and, hours before that, cars with loud voices driving up and down the streets warning everybody to get out of the city because of the "war". But Steven's father had been drunk that night, lying on the couch in the living room of their apartment on the upper west side, and even the bomb hadn't waked him up. The cars with the voices had waked Steven up; he'd gone back to sleep after a while, and then the bomb had waked him up again. He'd gone to the window and climbed out onto the fire escape, and seen the people running in the street, and listened to all the screaming and the steady rumble of still-falling masonry, and watched the people on foot trample each other and people in cars drive across the bodies and knock other people down and out of the way, and still other people jump on the cars and pull out the drivers and try to drive away themselves until someone pulled them out... Steven had watched, fascinated, because it was more exciting than anything he'd ever seen, like a movie. Then a man had stood under the fire escape, holding up his arms, and shouted up at Steven to jump for God's sake, little boy, and that had frightened Steven and he went back inside. His father had always told him never to play with strangers. Next afternoon Steven's father had gotten up and gone downstairs to get a drink, and when he saw what had happened, he'd come back making choked noises in his throat and saying over and over again, "Everybody worth a damn got out... now it's a jungle... all the scum left, like me -- and the ones they hurt, like you, Stevie..." He'd put some cans of food in a bag and started to take Steven out of the city, but a madman with a shotgun had blown the side of his head off before they'd gone five blocks. Not to get the food or anything... looting was going on all over, but there wasn't any food problem yet... the man was just one of the ones who killed for no rea.son at all. There'd been a lot like that the first few weeks after the bomb, but most of them hadn't lasted long -- they wanted to die, it looked like, about as much as they wanted to kill. Steven had gotten away. He was five years old and small and fast on his feet, and the madman missed with the other barrel. Steven had fled like an animal, and since then had lived like one. He'd stayed away from the men, remembering how his father had looked with half a head -- and because the few times men had seen him, they'd chased him; either they were afraid he'd steal from them, or they wanted his knife or belt or something. Once or twice men had shouted that they wouldn't hurt him, they only wanted to help him -- but he didn't believe them. Not after seeing his father that way, and after the times they had tried to kill him. He watched the men, though, sneaking around their fires at night -- sometimes because he was lonely and, later on, hoping to find scraps of food. He saw how they lived, and that was the way he lived too. He saw them raid grocery stores -- he raided the stores after they left. He saw them carrying knives and guns -- he found a knife and carried it; he hadn't yet found a gun. They ran from the dogs; he learned to run from them, after seeing them catch a man once. The men raided other .stores, taking clothes and lots of things whose use Steven didn't understand. Steven took some clothes at first, but he didn't care much about what he wore -- both his shirt and his heavy winter coat had come from dead men. He found toy stores, and had a lot of toys. The men collected and hoarded wads of green paper, and sometimes fought and killed each other over it. Steven vaguely remembered that it was called "money", and that it was very important. He found it too, here and there, in dead men's pockets, in boxes with sliding drawers in stores -- but he couldn't find any use for it, so his hoard of it lay hidden in the hole in the floor under the pile of blankets that was his bed. Eventually he saw the men begin to kill for food, when food became scarce. When that happened -- the many of the men left the city, going across the bridges and through the tunnels under the rivers, heading for the "country". He didn't follow them. The city was all he'd ever known. He stayed. Along with the men who said they'd rather stay in the city where there was still plenty to hunt hard and sometimes kill for it, and, in addition, beds to sleep in, rooms for protection from the weather and dogs and other men, all tlie clothes you could wear, and lots of otlier stuff just lying around for the taking. He stayed, and so he learned to kill, when necessary, for his food. He had si. knive.s, and with them he'd killed men higher than he could count. He was good at hiding -- in trees, in hallways, behind bushes, under cars -- and he was small enough to do a good job of trailing when he saw somebody who looked as though they were carrying food in their pockets or in the bags almost everyone carried. And he knew where to strike with the knife. His home was the rubble of an apartment building just north of Columbus Circle, on Broadway. No one else lived there; only he knew the way through the broken corridors and fallen walls and piles of stone to his room on the seventh floor. Every day or so he went out into the park -- to get food or anything at all he could get that he wanted. He was still looking for a gun. Food was the main thing, though; he had lots of cans up in his room, but he'd heard enough of the men's talk to know that it was wise to use them only when you didn't have anything else, and get what you could day by day. And, of course, there was water -- when it didn't rain or snow for a while, he had to get water from the lakes in the park. That was hard sometimes. You could go two or three days without water, even if you went to one of the lakes and stayed hidden there all day, because it might be that long before a moment came when no one was near enough to kill you when you made your dash from the bushes and filled your pail and dashed back. There were more skeletons around the lakes than anyplace. T he dogs were coming up Central Park West. Their racket bounced off the broken buildings lining the street, and came down into the park, and even the squirrels and birds were quieter, as if not wanting to attract attention. Steven froze by the bole of a tree, ready to climb if the dogs came over the wall at him. He'd done that once before. You climbed up and waited while the dogs danced red-eyed beneath you, until they heard or smelled someone else, .ind then they were off, bounding hungrily after the new quarry. They'd learned that men in trees just didn't come down. The dogs passed the point in the park where Steven waited. He knew from the sound that they weren't after anybody -- just prowling. The howls and snarls and scratchy sounds of nails on concrete faded slowly. Steven didn't move until they were almost inaudible in the distance. Then, when he did move, he took only one step -- and froze again. Someone was coming toward him. Just a shadow of a motion, a whisper of sound, a breath -- someone was coming along the path on the other side of the bushes. Steven's lips curled back to reveal decayed teeth. He brought out his knife from his belt and stood utterly still, waiting for the steps to go on so he could trail along behind his quarry, off to one side, judging the other's stature from glimpses through the bushes, and ascertaining whether he was carryBut the footsteps didn't pass. They stopped on the other side of the bushes. Then leaves rustled as whoever it was bent to come through the bushes. Steven hugged his tree trunk, and saw a short thin figure coming toward him through the green leaves, a bent-over figure. He raised the knife, started to bring its point down in the .short arc that would end in the back of the other's neck... He dropped the knife. Wide-eyed, not breathing, he stared at her. Knife in hand, its point aimed at his belly, she stared back. She was dressed in a man's trousers, tom off at the ankles, and a yellow blouse that might have belonged to her mother, and newlooking shoes she must have found, or killed for, only a week or so ago. Her face was as sunburned and dirty as his. A squirrel chittered over their heads as they stared at each other. Steven noted expertly that she seemed to be carrying no food and had no gun. No one with a gun would carry a drawn knife. She still held the knife ready, though the point had drooped. She moistened her lips. He wondered if .she would attack. He obviously didn't have any food either, so maybe she wouldn't. But if she did -- well, she was only a little larger than he was; he could probably kill her with her own knife, though he might even get his osvn knife from the ground before she got to him. But it was a woman, he knew... without knowing exactly what a woman was, or how he knew. The hair was long -- but then, some of the men's hair was long too. It was something different -- something about the face and body. He hadn't seen many women, and certainly never one as little as this, but he knew that's what it was. A woman. Once he'd seen some men kill another man who'd killed a woman for her food. By their angry shouts different somehow. And he remembered a woman. And a word : mother. A face and a word, a voice and a warmth and a not-sour body smell... she was dead. He didn't remember who had killed her. Somehow he thought she had been killed before everything changed, before the "bomb" fell; but he couldn't remember very well, and didn't know how .she'd been killed or even why people had killed each other in tho.se days... Not for food, he thought; he could remember having plenty to eat. Another word: cancer. His father had said it about hb mother. Maybe somebody had killed her to get that, instead of food. 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Q Check here to save # cents shipping and postal charges by enclosing full # with somebody had killed her, because she was dead, and people didn't just die. Seeing a woman, and such a little one... it had startled him so much he had dropped his knife. But he could sull kill her if he had to. She stirred, her eyes wide on his. She moved just an inch or so. Steven crouched, almost too fast to see, and his knife was in his hand, ready from this position to get in under her stab and cut her belly open. She made a strangled sound and shook her head. Steven pulled his swing, without quite knowing why. He struck her knife out of her hand with his blade, and it went spinning into the leaves. He took a step toward her, lips curled back. She retreated two steps, and her back was against a tree trunk. He came up to her and stood with his knife point pressing into her belly just above where the blouse entered the man's pants. She whimpered and shook her head and whimpered again. He scowled at her. Looked her up and down. She was wearing a tarnished ring on her right hand, with a stone that sparkled. He liked it. He decided to kill her. He pressed the knifepwint harder, and twisted. She said, "Little boy -- " and started to cry. Memories assailed Steven; Jump for God's sake, little boy Distrust. Kill her. My little boy... my son... His knifepoint wavered. He scowled. Don't run away, little boy -- we won't hurt you. ,... Kill. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. My son, my baby... I'm crying because I have to go away for a long time... Steven stepped back. She was weaponless, and a woman -- whatever that was. Leaves rustled. Steven and the girl froze motionless. It was only a squirrel in the bushes. He bent silently, looked around under the leafy green bushes that surrounded them, almost at groundIcvel. If there had been men nearby, he could have seen their legs. He saw nothing. He kept one eye on the girl as he bent. She wasn't crying, now that he'd taken the knife away. She was watching him and rubbing her belly where he'd pressed it. When he straightened, she took a step aw'ay from the tree, moving as silently as he ever had. Suddenly she stooped to pick up her knife, made a slashing motion at the ground with it, looked up at him. He was in mid-air. On her. She flattened beneath him with a squeal. She was stronger than he was, and e.perienced. She brought her knife back over her shoulder, and if he hadn't ducked his head it would have laid his face open. When she brought it down for another try, he clublred the back of her hand with the hilt of his knife, and she gasped and dropped it. Astride her, he raised his knife to kill her. She was pointing with her left hand, frantically, at something that lay on the ground beside them, and saying, "No, no, little boy, no, no -- " Then she just whimpered, knowing that his knife was poised, and kept stabbing her finger at the ground. Because she was helpless, he paused, looked, and saw a stuirrel lying there, head bleeding. He understood. She hadn't been trying to kill him. She had seen the squirrel, and gotten it. He decided to kill her anyway. For the squirrel. "No, little boy -- " He hesitated. "Friends, little boy... After a moment he rolled off her. She sat up, cheeks tear-streaked. She pointed at the squirrel, then at Steven, and shook her head violently. Knife threatening her, he reached out to pick up the squirrel. Mine, the knife said. At that point the squirrel, which had been only momentarily stunned by her blow, shook itself and scrambled for the bushes. His hand missed it by inches. He lunged for it, flat on his belly, and caught its tail with one hand. As another squirrel's tail had done long ago, this one broke off. He lay there for a moment, .snarling, the tail in his hand; and when he turned over, the girl had her knife in her hand and her teeth were bared at him. Blue eyes blazing, he got to his feet, expecting her to attack any second. He dropped the tail. He crouched to fight. She didn't attack. Nor, for some reason, did he. The way her chapped lips were stretched back over her teeth disturbed him... or rather it unsettled him, because it didn't disturb him. At least not the way a snarl did. It didn't put him on guard, every muscle tense; it didn't make him feel that he had to fight. She didn't look angry or eager to have anything he had or ready to kill... he didn't know the word for how she looked. She weighed her knife in her hand. Then she struck it in her belt, and said again, "Friends, little boy." He stared. At her strange snarl that wasn't a snarl. At the knife she had put away. He had never seen anyone do that before. Slowly he felt his own lips curl back into an expression he could hardly remember. He felt the way he felt sometimes late at night when, safe and alone in his room, he would play a little with his toys. more. He left like... like friends. He looked at the squirrel tail lying on the ground. He worried it with a foot, then kicked it away. It wa.sn't good to eat -- and he thought of how the squirrel had looked scrambling off, and felt his lips stretch tighter. He tried to think of the word. Finally it came. "Funny squirrel," he said, through his tight lips. He stuck his knife in his belt. They stared at each other, feeling each other's pleasure at the peacemaking. She bent, picked up a small stone and flipped it at him. He made no attempt to catch it, and it struck him on the hip. He halfcrouched, instantly wary, hand on knife. A thrown stone had only one meaning. But she was still smiling, and she shook her head. "No, little boy," she said. "Play." She tossed another stone, high in the air. He reached out and caught it as it descended. He started to toss it back to her, and remembered only at the last moment not to hurl it at her head. He tossed it, and she missed it. He grinned at her. She tossed another one back at him, and he missed, and they both grinned. Then he grunted, remembering something from the dim past. He picked up a small fallen branch from the ground. When he looked up, she was poised to run. This time he shook his head, waving the stick gently. "Play," he said. She threw another stone, eyes warily on the stick. He swung, missed. He hit the next one, and the sharp crack, and the noise the stone made rattling off into the bushes, flattened him to the ground, eyes searching for sign of men. She was beside him. He smelled her body and her breath. They saw no one. He looked at her lying beside him. She was grinning again. Then she laughed; and, without knowing what he was doing or why -- he could hardly remember ever doing it before -- he laughed too. It felt good. Like the snarl that wasn't a snarl, only better. It seemed to come from way inside. He laughed again, sitting up. He laughed a third time, tight hesitant sounds that came out of his throat and stretched his lips until they wouldn't stretch any more. Tears were on his cheeks, and he was laughing very tightly, very steadily, and she was laughing the same way, and they lay that way for a few minutes until they were trembling and their stomachs ached, and the laughter was almost crying. He saw her face, so close by, and felt an impulse. He rolled over and started to scuffle with her. When she realized that he wasn't trying to kill her, that he was playing, she scuffled back, rubbing his face in the dirt harder than he had hers, because she was stronger. He spat dirt and grass and grinned at her, and they fell apart. Footsteps. and so was hers. Legs moved on the other side of the bushes, stopped. Silently, almost stepping between the leaves on the gi'ound, Steven and the girl crawled out the other side of the bushes and took up positions against treetrunks, just enough of their heads protruding to see around. A man came probing into the head-high bushes from the path side... stood there a moment looking around, only a vague brown shape through the leaves. He grunted, went out to the path again, walked on. Steven and the girl followed him by his sounds, trailing about twenty feet behind, until Steven got a good look at him when he passed an open space between the bushes. He was a big man in brownishgreen clothes -- new-looking clothes, not full of holes. He walk almost carelessly, as if he didn't care who heard him. And Steven saw the reason for that. Men with guns always walked louder. This man wore a bolstered gun at his belt, and carried another one -- a long gun something like a rifle, only bulkier. Steven's lips curled. He darted a look at the girl. Across his mind flashed the vague idea of sharing whatever the man had with her, but he didn't know how to let her know. She was looking at the guns, eyes wide. Afraid. She shook her head. Steven snarled silently at her, put a hand on her chest, shoved gently. She stayed there as he moved on. Silently he drifted from tree to tree, bush to bush, getting ahead of his quarry. The big man's shoes clumped noisily along. Steven had no trouble telling where he was. At last Steven spotted a good tree a thick-foliaged one about forty feet up the path, where the sun would be in the man's eyes. If the man kept following the path -- He did. And when he passed below the tree, Steven was waiting on the low branch that overhung the path -- waiting with his face taut and his eyes staring and his knife ready. One stab at the base of the skull, and the guns would be his. He jumped. They brought them into the camp. By this time Steven and the girl had found that their captors were far too strong and too many to escape from, and quite adept at protecting themselves from the foulest of blows. But still the two of them struggled now and then, panting like animals. Everything at the camp, which was over on Long Island, near Flushing Bay, was neat and trim and olive-drab, and it was almost evening now, and as the jeep rolled up the avenue between the rows of tents Steven and the girl stopped struggling to blink at the first artificial lights they'd seen in a very long time. In the lieutenant's tent, the big man Steven had tried to kill said to the man behind the desk, "Like a jaguar, sir. Right out of the tree he came. I had him spotted, of course, but he did a peach of a job of trailing me. If I hadn't been ready for him. I'd be a dogtag." The lieutenant looked at Steven and the girl, standing before him, and the four soldiers who stood behind them, one to each strong dirty young arm. "The others got the girl, eh?" he said. "Yessir. When we first heard 'em, I started making enough noise to cover the rest of the boys." The sergeant grinned. "I swear, he came at me as neat as any commando ever did." "God." said the lieutenant, and closed his eyes for a moment. "What a thing. Let this war be the last one, Sipich. So this is what happened to New York in six years. Maniacs. Murderers. Worst of all, wolf-children. And the rest of the country..." "Well, we're back now, sir. We can start putting it all back together -- " "God," said the lieutenant again. "Do you think the pieces will fit?" He looked at Steven. "What is your name, son?" Steven snarled. "Take them away," said the lieutenant wearily. "Feed them. Delouse them. Send them to the Georgia camp." "They'll be okay, sir. In a year or so they'll be smiling all over the place, taking an interest in things. Kids arc kids, sir." "Are they? These kids, Sipich?... I don't know. I just don't know." The sergeant gave an order, and the four soldiers urged Steven and the girl out of the tent. There was a bleat of pain as one of the children placed a kick. The sergeant started to follow his men out. At the tent flaps he paused. "Sir... maybe you'd like to know: we found these two because they were playing and laughing. We were scouting the park, and heard them laughing." "They were?" said the lieutenant, looking up from the forms he was Ailing out. "Playing?" "It's still there, sir. Deep down. It has to be." "I sec," said the lieutenant slowly. "Yes, I suppose it is. And now we've got to dig it up." "Well... we buried it, sir."    With Gfd... all things are possible! A XA.re you facing difficuli Broblemt. Poor Htslth Mome or )ob Troublet? Love or Femit Troubles? Are you Worried ibouc someone dear lo you? Is some one deal lo you Ofinkini too Much? Do you ever get Lonely -- Vmboppy -- Diseournged? Would you like to have more Hoppimess, Success and "Good fortune" io Life? If you do have any of these Problems, or others like them, dear friend, theo here is thousands of other men and women to gloyouand very, very quickly too! So dont wait, dear friend. Don't let another minute go by! If you are troubled, worried CO clip this Messoge now and mail with #c in helping so many others and may just as You will surely bless this day -- so pinse don't delay! Just clip this Message now and ouil with your name, address and #c in # Noroton, Comm. We will rush this They said old Doctor Price was an inventive genius but no miracle worker. Yet -- if he didn't work miracles in behalf of an over-worked little guy named Cupid, what was he doing?. Hammeistead, Attorneys, from: Walter Gordon Dear Bill: Enclosed is the itemized inventory of the furnishings of the late Dr. Edward Price's estate. As you requested, I personally examined the laboratory. Candidly, Bill, you needed a psychiatrist for the job, not a graduate physicist. Dr. Price was undoubtedly an inventive genius a decade ago when he was still active in General Electronics, but his lab was an embarrassing example of senile clutter. You had an idea. Bill, that before he died Price might have been playing around with a new invention which the estate could develop and patent. I found a score of gadgets in the lab, none of them finished and none of them built for any functional purpose that I could discover. Only two seemed to be completed. One resembled a small, portable radio. It was a plastic case with two knobs and a two-inch speaker grid. There was no cord outlet. The machine may have been powered by batteries, for I heard a faint humming when I turned the knobs. Nothing else. Dr. Price had left a handwritten card on the box. He intended to call it a Semantic-Translator, but he had noted that the word combination was awkward for commercial exploitation, and I suppose he held up a patent application until he could think of a catchier name. One sentence on that card would have amused you, Bill. Price wrote, "Should wholesale for about threefifty per unit." Even in his dotage, he had an eye for profit. The Semantic-Translator -- whatever that may mean -- might have had possibilities. I fully intended to take it back with me to General Electronics and examine it thoroughly. The second device, which Price had labeled a Transpositor, was large and rather fragile. It was a hollow cylinder of very small wires, perhaps a foot in diameter, fastened to an open-faced console crowded with a weird conglomeration of vacuum tubes, telescopic lenses and mirrors. The cylinder of wires was so delicate that the motion of my body in the laboratory caused it to quiver. Standing in front of the wire coil were two brass rods. A kind of shovel-like chute was fixed to one rod (Price called it the shipping board). Attached to the second rod was a long-handled pair of tongs which he called the grapple. The Transpositor was, I think, an outgrowth of Price's investigation of the relationship between light and matter. You may recall. he wrote on that subject when he was stiU working in the laboratories of General Electronics. At the time Price was considered something of a pioneer. He believed that light and matter were different forms of the same basic element; he said that eventually science would learn how to change one into the other. I seriously believe that the Transpositor was meant to do precisely that. In other words. Price had expected to transpose the atomic structure of solid matter into light, and later to reconstruct the original matter again. Now don't assume. Bill, that Price was wandering around in a senile delusion of fourth dimensional nonsense. The theory may be sound. Our present knowledge of the physical world makes the basic structure of matter more of a mystery than it has ever been. Not that I think Price achieved the miracle. Even in his most brilliant and productive period he could not have done it. As yet our accumulation of data is too incomplete for such an experiment. I believe that Price created no more than a very reali.stic illusion with his arrangement of lenses and mirrors. I saw the illusion, too; I used the machine. There were two dials on the front of the console. One was lettered "time", and the other "distance". The "time" dial could be set for eons, centuries or hours, depending upon the position of a three-way switch beneath it; the "distance" dial could be adjusted to light years, thousand-mile units, or kilometers by a similar device. Since there was no indication which position would produce what results, I left the dials untouched. I plugged the machine into an electric outlet and pushed the starter button. The coil of wire blazed with light and the chute slid rapidly in and out of the cylinder. That was all, at first. The starter button was labeled "the shipper", and I gathered that Price had visualized the practical application of tlie Transpositor as a device for transporting goods from one point to another. I looked around the lab for something I could put into the chute. There was a card, written in red, warning me not to load beyond the dimensional limits of the chute. The only thing I saw that was small enough was the little radio-like gadget Price had called a Semantic-Translator. Loaded horizontally, it just barely fit the chute. I pushed the shipper button a second time. Again there was a blaze of light, brighter than before, which temporarily blinded me. For a moment I saw the SemanticTranslator in the heart of the fragile, wire cylinder. It had the glow of molten steel, pouring from a blast furnace. Then it was gone. The chute shot back to the front of the machine. The tray was empty. Was it an illusion? I believe that, Bill, because later on, when I thought of using the grapple... the gravel trail from the dressing room. The early morning sun was bright and warm, but she held her woolen robe tight across her throat. She tried to avoid looking at the other camps -- at the sleepyeyed women coming out of tents, and the men starting morning fires in the stone rings. Bitterness was etched in acid in her soul. She made herself believe it was because she hated Yosemitc. The vacation had been such a disappointment. She had expected so much and -- as usual -- it had all gone wrong. Her hope had been so high when school closed; this year was going to be different! "Are you going anywhere this summer?" Miss Emmy asked after the last faculty meeting in June. "To Yosemite for a couple of weeks, I think." "The Park's always crowded. You ought to meet a nice man up there, Bertha." "I'm not interested in men," Miss Kent had replied frostily. "I'm a botany teacher and it helps me professionally if I spend part of the summer observing the phenomenon of nature." "Don't kid me, Bertha. You can drop the fancy lingo, too; school's out. You want a man as much as I do." That was true. Miss Kent admitted -- in the quiet of her own mind. Never aloud ; never to anyone else. Six years ago, when Bertha Kent had first started to teach, she had been optimistic about it. She wanted to marry; she wanted a family of her own -- instead of wasting her lifetime in a high school classroom playing baby sitter for other people's kids. She had saved her money for all sorts of exotic summer vacations -- tours, cruises, luxury hotels -- but somehow something always went wrong. To be sure, she had met men. She was pretty; she danced well; she was never prudish; she liked the out-of-doors. All positive qualities: she knew that. The fault lay always with the men. When she first met a stranger, everything was fine. Then, slowly. Miss Kent began to see his faults. Men were simply adult versions of the musclebound knot-heads the administration loaded into her botany classes. Bertha Kent wanted something better, an ideal she had held in her mind since her childhood. The dream-inan was real, too. She had met him once and actually talked to him when she was a child. She couldn't remember where; she couldn't recall his face. But the qualities of his personality she knew as she did her own heart. If they had existed once in one man, she would find them again, somewhere. That was the miracle she prayed for every summer. She thought the miracle had happened again when she first came to Yosemite. She found an open campsite by the river. While she was putting up her tent, the man from the camp beside hers came to help. At first he seemed the prototype of everything she hated -- a good-looking, beautifully co-ordinated physical specimen, as sharp-witted as a jellyfish. The front of his woolen shirt hung carelessly unbuttoned. She saw the mat of dark hair on his chest, the sculpted curves of suntanned muscle. No doubt he considered himself quite attractive. Then, that evening after the firefall, the young man asked her to go with him to the ranger's lecture at Ccunp Curry. Bertha discovered that he was a graduate physicist, employed by a large, commercial laboratory. They had at least the specialized area of science in common. By the time they returned from the lecture, they were calling each other by first names. The next day Walt asked her to hike up the mist trail with him to Nevada Falls. The familiar miracle began to take shafje. She lay awake a long time that night, looking at the dancing pattern of stars visible through the open flap of her tent. This was it; Walt was the reality of her dream. She made herself forget that every summer for six years the same thing had happened. She always believed she had found her miracle; and always something happened to destroy it. For two days the idyll lasted. The inevitable awakening began the afternoon they drove along the Wawona highway to see the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. They left their car in the parking area and walked through the magnificent stand of cathedral trees. The trail was steep and sometimes treacherous. Twice Walt took her arm to help her. For some reason that annoyed her; finally she told him, "I'm quite able to look after myself, Walt." "So you've told me before." "After all. I've been hiking most of my life. I know exactly what, to do -- " "There isn't much you can't take care of for yourself, is there, Bertha?" His voice was suddenly very cold. "I'm not one of these rattlebrained chnging vines, if that's what you mean. I detest a woman who is always yelping to a man for help." "Independence is one thing, Bertha; I like that in a woman. But somehow you make a man feel totally inadequate. You set yourself up as his superior in everything." "That's nonsense, Walt. I'm quite ready to grant that you know a good deal more about physics than I do." "Say it right, Bertha. You respect tlie fact that I hold a PhD." He smiled. "That isn't the same thing as resjecting me for a per.son. I knew you didn't need my help on the trail, but it was a normal courtesy to offer it. It seems to me it would be just as normal fur you to areejjt it. Little things like that are important in relations between people." "Forget it. Walt.' She slipped her hand through his. "There, see? I'll do it just the way you want." She was determined not to quarrel over anything so trivial, though what he said seemed ehildish and it tarnished the dream a little. But the rest was still good; the miracle could still happen. Yet, in sj)ite of all her effort, they disagreed twice more before they left the Mariposa Grove. Bertha began to see Walt as he was; brilliant, no doubt, in the single area of physii al science, but basically no difl'erent from any other man. She desperately wished that she could love him ; she earnestly wished that the ideal, fixed so long in her mind, might be destroyed. But slowly she saw the miracle slip away from her. That night, after the fire-fall, Walt did not ask her to go with him to the lecture. Miserable and angry, Bertha Kent went into her tent, but not to sleep. She lay staring at the night sky, and thinking how ugly the pinpoint lights of distant suns were on the velvet void. As the hours passed, she heard the clatter of pans and voices as people at the other campsites retired. She heard Walt when he returned, whistling tunelessly. He banged around for nearly an hour in the camp ni.'xt to hers. He dropped a stack of pans; he overturned a box of food; he tripped over a tent line. She wondered if he were drunk. Had their (juarreling driven him to that? Walt must have lov( d her, then. After a time all the Coleman lanterns in the camp were out. Still Bertha Kent did not sleep. The acid gri('f and bitt-rness tormented her with the ghost of another failure, another shattered dream. She listened to the soft music of the flowing stream, the gentle whisper of summer wind in the pines, but it gave her no peace. Suddenlv she heard quiet footsteps and the crackling of twigs behind her tent. She was terrified. It must he Walt. If he had come home drunk, he could have planned almost anv kind of violence by way of revenge. The footsteps moved rinser. Bertha shook ofT the paralysis of fear and reached for her electric lantern. She flashed the beam into the darkness. She saw the black bulk of a bear who was pawing through her food box. She was so relieved she forgot that a bear might also be a legitimate cause of fear. She ran from the tent, swinging tlie light and shooing the animal away as she would have chased a puppy. The bear swung toward her, roaring and clawing at the air. She backed away. The bear swung its paws again, and her food box shattered on the ground, in a crescendo of sound. Bertha heard rapid footsteps under the pines. In the pale moonlight she saw Walt. He was wearing only a pair of red-striped boxer shorts. He was swinging his arms and shouting, but the noise of the falling box had already frightened the bear away. Walt stood in the moonlight, smiling foolishly. "I guess I came too late," he said. "I'm quite sure the bear would have left of its own accord, Walt. They're always quite tame in the national parks, you know." As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake. Even though he had done nothing, it would have cost her little to thank him. The words had come instinctively; she hadn't thought how her answer would affect him. Walt turned on his heel stiffly and walked back to his tent. With a little forethought -- a little kindness -- Bertha might even then have rescued her miracle. She knew that. She knew she had lost him now, for good. For the first time in her life she saw the dream as a barrier to her happiness, not an ideal. It held her imprisoned; it gave her nothing in exchange. She slept fitfully for the rest of the night. As soon as the sun was up, she pulled on her woolen robe and went to the dressing room to wash. She walked back along the gravel path, averting her eyes from the other camps and the men hunched over the smoking breakfast fires. She hated Yosemite. She hated all the people crowded around her. She had made up her mind to pack her tent and head for home. This was just another vacation lost, another year wasted. She went into her tent and put on slacks and a bright, cotton blouse. Then she sat disconsolate at her camp table surveying the mess the bear had made of her food box. There was nothing that she could rescue. She could drive to the village for breakfast, but the shops wouldn't open for another hour. Behind her she heard Walt starting his Coleman stove. Yesterday he would have offered her breakfast ; now he'd ignored her. All along the stream camp fires were blazing in the stone rings. Bertha wondered if she could ask the couple on the other side of her campsite for help. They had attempted to be friendly once before, and Bertha hadn't responded with a great deal of cordiality. They weren't the type she liked -- a frizzyheaded, coarse-voiced blonde, and a paunchy old man who hadn't enough sense to know what a fool he looked parading around camp in the faded bathing trunks he wore all day. Suddenly a light flashed in Bertha's face. A metal shovel slid out of nothingness and deposited a tiny, rectangular box on the table. For a long minute she stared at the box stupidly, vaguely afraid. Her mind must be playing her tricks. Such things didn't happen. She reached out timidly and touched the box. It seemed real enough. A miniature radio of some sort, with a two-inch speaker. She turned the dials. She heard a faint humming. The coarse-voiced blonde came toward the table. "We just heard what happened last night, Miss Kent," she said. "Me and George. About the bear, I mean." Bertha forced a .smile. "It made rather a shambles, didn't it?" "Gee, you can't make breakfast out of a mess like this. Vhy don't you come and eat with us?" The blonde went on talking, apologizing for what she was serving and at the same time listing it with a certain pride. Strangely, Miss Kent heard not one voice, but two. The second came tinnily from the little box on the table, "You poor, dried-up old maid. That guy who's been hanging around would have been over long before this, if you knew the first thing about being nice to a man." Bertha gasped. "Really, if that's the way you feel -- " "Why, honey, I just asked you over for breakfast," the blonde answered ; at the same time the voice from the machine said, "I suppose George and me ain't good enough for you. O.K. by me, sister. I didn't really want you to come anyway." Trembling, Miss Kent stood up. "I've never been so insulted!" "What's eating you. Miss Kent?" The blonde seemed genuinely puzzled, but again the voice came from the plastic box, "The old maid's off her rocker. You'd think she was reading my mind." Switching her trim little hips, the blonde w'alked back to her own camp. Bertha Kent dropped numbly on the bench, staring at the ugly box. "Reading my mind," the woman had said. Somehow the machine had done precisely that, translating the blonde's spoken words into the real, emotional meaning behind them. It was a terrifying gadget. Bertha was hypnotized by its potential horror -- like the brutal, devasting trutli spoken by a child. A camper walked past on the road, waving at Miss Kent and calling out a cheerful good morning. But again the machine read the real meaning behind the pleasant words. "So you've finally lost your man. Miss Kent. The way you dished out the orders, it's a wonder he stayed around as long as he did. And a pity: you're an attractive woman. You should jnake some man a good wife." They all thought that. The whole camp had been watching her, laughing at her. Bertha felt helpless and alone. She needed -- wanted -- someone else; it surprised her when she faced that fact. Then it dawned on her: the camper was right; the blonde was right. She had lost Walt through her own ridiculous bull-headedness. In order to assert herself. To be an individualist, she had always thought. And what did that matter, if it imposed this crushing loneliness? For a moment a kind of madness seized her. It was tlie diabolical machine that was tormenting her, not the truth it told. She snatched a piece of her broken food box and struck at the plastic case blindly. There was a splash of fire; the gadget broke. She .saw Walt look up from his stove. She saw him move toward her. But she stood paralyzed by a shattering trauma of pain. The voice still came from the speaker, and this time it was her own. Her mind was stripped naked; she saw herself whole, unsheltered by the protective veneer of rationalization. And she knew the pattern of the dream-man she had loved since her childhood; she knew why the dream had been self-defeating. For the idealization was her own father. That impossible paragon created by the worship of a child. The shock was its own cure. She was too well-balanced to accept the tempting escape of total disorientation. Grimly she fought back the tide of madness, and in that moment she found maturity. She ran toward Walt, tears of gratitude in her eyes. She felt his arms around her, and she clung to him desperately. "I was terrified; I needed you, Walt; I never want to be alone again." "Needed me?" he repeated doubtfully. "I love you." After a splitsecond's hesitation, she felt his lips warm on hers. From the corner of her eye she saw a chute dart out of nowhere and scoop up the broken plastic box from the camp table. They both vanished again. That was a miracle, too, she supposed; but not nearly as important as hers. Then the reason of a logical mind asserted its own form of realism: of course, none of it had happened. The mind-reading gadget had been a device created in her own subconscious, a psychological trick to by-pass the dream that had held her imprisoned. She knew enough psychology to understand that. She ran her fingers through Walt's dark hair and repeated softly, "I love you, Walt Gordon." W AS IT an illusion? I believe that. Bill, because later on, when I thought of using the grapple, I brought the Semantic-Translator back from nowhere. Apparently the smaller gadget had been in the console or behind it. I hadn't seen it when I searched, because my eyes had been hurt by the glare of light. In the process the Translator somehow got twisted around, for the chute dragged it back vertically through the coil of wire. It touched the wall of the cylinder, and the whole machine exploded. It was impossible to save anything from the wreckage. But as a physicist I assure you. Bill, the transposition of matter into light is, in terms of our present science, a physical impossibility. It is certainly not the sort of invention that could have been produced by a senile old man, pottering around in a home laboratory. The only thing I regret is that I had no opportunity to examine the Semantic-Translator, but I'm sure it would have proved just as much nonsense. I'm going up to Yosemite tomorrow for a couple of weeks. If you want any further details on the Price inventory, look me up at the office when I come home. Yours, Walt Gordon    -- in the privacy of your own home! No gadgets -- nothing to buy -- yet these simple methods offer effective relief for over #  of people who now suffer from back pains!  aching across your upper bock  fatigue in your shoulders e soreness shooting from base of neck lo back of head and downward e weakness in hips and loins  shooting pain down your right or left leg  or other musculor discomforts Trouble." It takes the mystery out of back ailments... tolls you what to do for relief from: slipped disc, sacroiliac pains, lumbago, sciatica, twists, sprains, etc. Offers you positive help for almost A well-known Philadelphia orthopaedic surgeon says: "I commend without reservation the views expressed in this book." Then either remit the low price of # plus postage -- or return Englaweed Cliffa, Naw Jartay end of that time, I will either tend you just # plua postage in fiU payment -- or return the book and owe nothmg. Noma Address ;c s Illustrated by Ed Emsh Women on space station assignments shouldn't get pregnant. But there's a first time for everything. Here's the story of such a time and an historic situation. O NE thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled surface of Earth, a woman was in pain. There, high in the emptiness of space. Space Station One swung in its orbit. Once every two hours, tlie artificial satellite looped completely around the planet, watching what went on below. Outside its bright steel hull was the silence of the interplanetary vacuum; inside, in the hospital ward. Lieutenant Alice Britton clutched at the sheets of her bed in pain, then relaxed as it faded away. Major Banes looked at her and smiled a little. "How do you feel, Lieutenant?" She smiled back; she knew the pain wouldn't return for a few minutes yet. "Fine, doctor. It's no worse than I was expecting. How long will it before we can contact White Sands?" The major looked nervously at his wristwatch. "Nearly an hour. You'll be all right." "Certainly," she agreed, running a hand through her brown hair, "I'll bo okay. Just you be on tap when I call." The major's grin broadened. "You don't think I'd miss a historical event like this, do you? You take it easy. We're over Eastern Europe now, but as soon as we get within radio range of New Mexico, I'll beam a call in." He paused, then repeated, "You just take it easy. Call the nurse if anything happens." Then he turned and walked out of the room. Alice Britton closed her eyes. Major Banes was all smiles and cheer now, but he hadn't been that way five months ago. She chuckled softly to herself as she thought of his blistering speech. "Lieutenant Britton, you're either careless or brainless; I don't know which! Your husband may be the finest rocket jockey in the Space Service, but that doesn't give him the right to come blasting up here on a supply rocket just to get you pregnant!" Alice had said: "I'm sure the thought never entered his mind, doctor. I know it never entered mine." "But that was two and a half months ago! Why didn't you come to me before this? Of all the tomfool -- " His voice had died off in supressed anger. "I didn't know," she had said stolidly. "You know my medical record." "I know. I know." A puzzled frown had come over his face then, a frown which almost hid the green eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the flaming red of his hair. "The question is: what do we do ne.xt? We're not equipped for obstetrics up here." "Send me back down to Earth, of course." And he had looked up at her scathingly. "Lieutenant Britton, it is my personal opinion that you need your head examined, and not by a general practitioner, either! Why, I wouldn't let you get into an airplane, much less land on Earth in a rocket! If you think I'd permit you to subject yourself to eight gravities of acceleration in a rocket landing, you're daffy!" She hadn't thought of it before, but the major was right. The terrible pressure of a rocket landing would increase her effective body weight to nearly half a ton; an adult hiunan being couldn't take that sort of punishment for long, much less the tiny life that was growing within her. So she had stayed on in the Space Station, doing her job as always. As Chief Radar Technician, she was important in the operation of the station. Her pregnancy had never made her uncomfortable; the slow rotation of the wheelshaped station about its axis gave an effective gravity at the rim only half that of Earth's surface, and the closer to the hub she went, the less her weight became. According to the major, the baby was due sometime around the first of September. "Two hundred and eighty days," he had said. "Luckily, we can pinpoint it almost exactly. And at a maximum of half of Earth gravity, you shouldn't weigh more than seventy pounds then. You're to report to me at least once a week. Lieutenant." As the words went through her mind, another spasm of pain hit her, and she clenched her fists tightly on the sheets again. It went away, and she took a deep breath. Everything had been fine until today. And then, only half an hour ago, a meteor had hit the radar room. It had been only a tiny bit of rock, no bigger than a twentytwo bullet, and it hadn't been traveling more than ten miles per second, but it had managed to punch its way through the shielding of the station. The self-sealing walls had closed the tiny hole quickly, but even in that short time, a lot of air had gone whistling out into the vacuum of space. The depressurization hadn't hurt her too much, but the shock had been enough to start labor. The baby was going to come two months early. She relaxed a little more, waiting for the next pain. There was nothing to worry about; she had absolute faith in the red-haired major. The major himself was not so sure. He sat in his office, massaging his fingertips and looking worriedly at the clock on the wall. The Chief Nurse at a nearby desk took off her glasses and looked at him speculatively. "Something wrong, doctor?" "Incubator," he said, without taking his eyes off the clock. "I beg your pardon?" "Incubator. We can't deliver a seven-month preemie without an incubator." The nurse's eyes widened. "Good Lord! I never thought of that! What are you going to do?" "Right now, I can't do anything. I can't beam a radio message through the Earth. But as soon as we get within radio range of White Sands, I'll ask them to send up an emergency rocket with an incubator. But -- " "But what?" "Will we have time? The pains are coming pretty fast now. It will be at least three hours before they can get a ship up here. If they miss us on the next time around, it'll be five hours. She can't hold out that long." The Chief Nurse turned her eyes to the slowly moving second hand of the wall clock. She could feel a lump in her throat. Major Banes was in the Communications Center a full five minutes before the coastline of California appeared on the curved horizon of the globe beneath them. He had spent the hour typing out a complete report of what had happened to Alice Britton and a list of what he needed. He handed it to the teletype operator and paced the floor impatiently as he waited for the answer. When the receiver teletype began clacking softly, he leaned over the page, waiting an.iousIy for every word. Banes nodded and turned to the operator. "I want a direct open telephone line to my office in case I have to get another message to the base before we get out of range again." He turned and left through the heavy door. Each room of the space station was protected by airtight doors and individual heating units; if some accident, such as a really large meteor hit, should release the air from one room, nearby rooms would be safe. Banes' next stop was the hospital ward. Alice Britton was resting quietly, but there were lines of strain around her eyes which hadn't been there an hour before. "How's it coming, Lieutenant?" She smiled, but another spasm hit her before she could answer. After a time, she said; "I'm doing fine, but you look as if you'd been through the mill. What's eating you?" He forced a nervous smile. "Nothing but the responsibility. You're going to be a very famous woman, you know. You'll be the mother of the first child born in space. And it's my job to sec to it that you're both all right." She grinned. "Another Dr. Dafoe?" "Something on that order, I suppose. But it won't be all my glory. Colonel Gates, the O.B. man, was supposed to come up for the delivery in September, so when White Sands contacted us, they said he was coming immediately." He pau.sed, and a genuine smile crossed his face. "Your husband is bringing him up." "Jim! Coming up here? Wonderful! But I'm afraid the colonel Vv-ill be too late. This isn't going to last that long." Banes had to fight hard to keep his face smiling when she said that, but he managed an easy nod. "We'll see. Don't hurry it, though. Let nature take its course. I'm not such a glory hog that I'd not let Gates have part of it -- or all of it, for that matter. Relax and take it easy." He went on talking, tr'ing to keep the conversation light, but his eyes kept wandering to his wristwatch, timing Alice's pain intervals. They were coming too close together to suit him. There was a faint rap, and the heavy airtight door swung open to admit the Chief Nurse. "There's a message for you in your office, doctor. I'll send a nurse in to be with her." He nodded, then turned back to Alice. "Stiff uppah lip, and all that sort of rot," he said in a phony British accent. "Oh, TZiwtheT, old chap," she grinned. Back in his office. Banes picked up the teletype flimsy. B anes sat on the edge of his desk, pounding a fist into the palm of his left hand. "Two hours. It isn't soon enough. She'll never hold out that long. And we don't have an incubator." His voice was a clipped monotone, timed with the rhythmic slamming of his fist. The Chief Nurse said: "Can't we build something that will do until the rocket gets here?" Bancs looked at her, his face expressionless. "What would we build it out of? There's not a spare piece of equipment in the station. It costs money to ship material up here, you know. Anything not essential is left on the ground." The phone rang. Banes picked it up and identified himself. The voice at the other end said: "This is Communications, Major. I tape recorded all the monitor pickups from the Earth radio stations, and it looks as though the Space Service has released the information to the public. Lieutenant Britton's husband was right when he said the whole world's praying for her. Do you want to hear the tapes?" "Not now, but thanks for the information." He hung up and looked into the Chief Nurse's eyes. "They've released the news to the public." She frowned. "That really puts you on the spot. If the baby dies, they'll blame you." Bancs slammed his fist to the desk. "Do you think I give a tinker's dam about that? I'm interested in saving a life, not in worrying about what people may think!" "Yes, sir. I just thought -- " "Well, think about something useful! Think about how we're going to save that baby!" He paused as he saw her eyes. "Fm sorry. Lieutenant. My nerves are all raw, I guess. But, dammit, my field is space medicine. I can handle depressurization, space sickness, and things like that, but I don't know anything about babies! I know what I read in medical school, and I watched a delivery once, but that's all I know. I don't even have any references up here; people aren't supposed to go around having babies on a space station!" "It's all right, doctor. Shall I prepare the delivery room?" His laugh was hard and short. "Delivery room! I wish to Heaven we had one! Prepare the ward room next to the one she's in now, I guess. It's the best we have. "So help me Hannah, I'm going to see some changes made in regulations! A situation like this won't happen again!" The nurse left quietly. She knew Banes wasn't really angry at the Brittons; it was simply his way of letting off steam to ease the tension within him. The slow, monotonous rotation of the second hand on the wall clock seemed to drag time grudgingly along with it. Banes wished he could smoke to calm his raw nerves, but it was strictly against regulations. Air was too precious to be used up by smoking. Every bit of air on board had had to be carried up in rockets when the station was built in space. The air purifiers in the hydroponics section could keep the air fresh enough for breathing, but fire of any kind would overtax the system, leaving too little oxygen in the atmosphere. It was a few minutes of ten when he decided he'd better get back to Alice Britton. She was trying to read a book between spasms, but she wasn't getting much read. She dropped it to the floor when he came in. "Am I glad to see you! It won't be long now." She looked at him analytically. "Say! Just what is eating you? You look more haggard than I do!" Again he tried to force a smile, but it didn't come off too well. "Nothing serious. I just want to make sure everything comes out all right." She smiled. "It will. You're all set. You ordered the instruments months ago. Or did you forget something?" That hit home, but he just grinned feebly. "I forgot to get somebody to boil water." "Whatever for?" "Coffee, of course. Didn't you know that? Papa always heats up the water; that keeps him out of the way, and the doctor has coffee afterwards." Alice's hands grasped the sheet again, and Banes glanced at his watch. Ninety seconds! It was long and hard. When the pain had ebbed away, he said; "We've got the delivery room all ready. It won't be much longer now." "I'll say it won't! How about the incubator?" There was a long pause. Finally, he said softly: "There isn't any incubator. I didn't take the possibility of a premature delivery into account. It's my fault. I've done what I could, though; the ship is bringing one up. I -- I think we'll be able to keep the child alive until -- " He stopped. Alice was bubbling up with laughter. "Lieutenant! Lieutenant Britton! Alice! This is no time to get hysterical! Stop it!" Her laughter slowed to a chuckle. "Me get hysterical! That's a good one! What about you? You're so nervous you couldn't sip water it!" He blinked. "What do you mean?" Another pain came, and he had to wait until it was over before he got her answer. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you would have figured it out. Ask yourself just one question. Ask yourself, 'Why is a space station like an incubator?' " Space Ship Twelve docked at Space Station One at exactly eleven thirty-four, and two men in spacesuits pushed a large, bulky package through the airlock. Major Peter Banes, haggard but smiling, met Captain Britton in the corridor as he and the colonel entered the hospital ward. Banes nodded to Colonel Gates, then turned to Britton. "I don't know whether to congratulate you or take a poke at you, Captain, but I suppose congratulations come first. S'our son, James Edward Britton II, is doing fine, thank you." "You mean -- alrrady?" The colonel said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow. "Over an hour ago," said Bancs. "But -- but -- the incubator -- " Bancs' grin widened. "We'll put the baby in it, now that we've got it, but it really isn't necessary. Your wife figured that one out. A space station is a kind of incubator itself, you sec. It protects us poor, weak humans from the terrible conditions of space. So all we had to do was close up one of the airtight rooms, sterilize it, warm it up, and put in extra oxygen from the emergency tanks. Young James is perfectly comfortable." "Excellent, Major!" said die colonel. "Don't thank me. It was Captain Britton's wife who -- " But Captain Britton wasn't listening any more. He was headed toward his wife's room at top speed. that have startled the # prophecies datinf to the year # A.D. Inter 'w preted In plain, casytounderstand lanfuafe by the # famed Henry C. Roberts.  Nostradamus predictions have never been disproved! Here In one Bif revealinf volume you will find the accuracy. How see what may be In store for os In the fa tore. Clothboand over # Paces. aov-KAiunn. Jut I a f,w vanlt from Noftrarfamw, Cataciramic DaatTactSaa of Gnat accuiAiiiv rat. ItfiloH. teftdee VIp. AMi(e  #AM, Xhanph was the fully accredited ambassador from Gfun, and Earth's first visitor from outer space. History and the amenities called for a tremendous reception. But earth people are funny people... A ll the way over, all through the loneliness of the long trip, he had consoled himself w'i the thought of the reception he would get. How they would crowd around him, how they would gape and cheer! All the most prominent and most important Earthlings would rush to see him, to touch their own appendages to his tentacles, to receive his report of interplanetary good will. His arrival would certainly be the most celebrated occasion in all the history of Earth... He was coming in for a landing, and it was no time for day-dreaming. He brought the ship down slowly, in the middle of a large square, as carefully as if he were settling down among his own people. He gave them a chance to get out from under him before  making contact with the ground. When the ship finally rested firmly , on the strange planet, he gave a ' sigh of relief, and for a few long' seconds sat there motionless. Andthen he began to move toward the door. The increased gravity did not affect him as badly as he had thought it would. For the dense atmosphere, with its high oxygen content, he had of course been prepared. He injected another dose of respiratory enzyme into his bloodstream just to make sure, and then swung open the door. The inrush of air caused only a momentary dizziness. Then he climbed over the side and stared about in surprise. No one was paying any attention to him. Their indifference was so enormous that it struck him like a blow. Individuals of both sexes -- he could easily distinguisli them by the difference in their clothing -- were going about their own business as if he simply were not there. A small animal running about on all fours had its forepart to the ground. It trotted from one place to another, making a slight noise with an organ that he felt sure was used for the intake of o.xygen. When it came to him, it sniffed slightly, without any especial interest, and then ran off to more important business. No other creature paid him even that much attention. Can it be, he asked himself incredulously, that they don't see me? Perhaps tlieir organs of vision make use of different wave lengths. Perhaps to them I and the ship are not pink and gray respectively, but a perfect black which fails to register. I must speak to them, I must make m'self known. They may be startled, but I must take the chance. He rolled over to an individual who towered over him a full spard, and said gravely, "Greetings! I, Xhanph, bring you greetings from the inhabitants of the planet, Gfun. I come with a message of friendship -- " There could be no doubt that the other heard him. And saw him too. He looked straight at Xhanph, muttered something, probably about a pink monster, which Xhanph could guess at but not really interpret, and moved on impatiently. anph stared after him .# with an incredulity that grew by the moment. They didn't understand his language, that he realized. But surely they didn't have to understand in order to be interested. The very sight of his ship, a mere glimpse of him, the first visitor from interplanetary space, should have been enough to bring them flocking around. How could they possibly greet him with such disinterest, with such faces which even to a When you have traveled as far as he had traveled, you don't give up easily. Another, a shorter individual, was coming toward him, and he began again, "Greetings! I, Xhanph -- " This time the individual didn't even stop, but muttered something which must surely have been of the nature of an oath. And hurried on. Xhanph tried five more times before he gave up. If there had been the slightest indication of interest, he would have kept on. But there wasn't. The only feeling he could detect was one of impatience at being annoyed. And he saw that there was nothing else to do but go back to his ship. For a while he sat there, brooding. One possible solution struck him, although it didn't seem at all probable. These people were not representative of their kind. Perhaps this entire area he had taken for a city was nothing more than a retreat for tlie mentally disabled, for those who had found the strain of living too much and had sunk back into a kind of stupor. Perhaps elsewhere the people were more normal. At the thought, he brightened for a moment. Yes, that must be it. Convincing himself against his own better judgment, he lifted the ship into the air again and set it down a few dozen grolls away. But there was no difference. Here, too, the faces looked at him blankly, and people hurried away impatiently when he tried to stop them. He knew now that it was useless to pick up the ship still another time and set it down elsewhere. If there was some rational explanation for such irrational behavior, it could be found here just as well as anywhere else. And explanation there must be. But he would have to look for it. It would not come to him if he simply sat there in the ship and waited for it. He got out and locked the ship so that in case some one finally did show curiosity, no harm would come to it. Then he began to roll around the city. E verywhere he met the same indifference as at first. Even the children stared at him without curiosity, and went on with their games. He stopped to watch -- and to listen. They bounced balls, and as they bounced, they recited words. When something interrupted the even tenor of the game and they had to begin again, they went back to the start of the recitation. Surely, they were counting. Listening carefully, he learned the fundamentals of their system of numerals. At the same time, for the sake of permanence, he made pictorial and auditory records. Every now and then the game would be interrupted by a quarrel. And a childish quarrel, of course, was sure to be full of recriminations. You did this, I did that. He learned the names of the objects with which they played, he learned the words for first and second persons in their different forms. He learned the word for the maternal parent, who seemed to stand in the closest relation to the young ones. By evening he had acquired a fairly good child's grasp of the language. He rolled back in the direction of the ship. When he came to the place where it should be, he had a sudden feeling of panic. The ship was gone. They must have dragged it away. Their whole pretense of indifference must have been a trick, he thought excitedly. They had waited until they could tamper with it without his Interference, in order to learn its secret.s. What had they done with it? Perhaps they had harmed it, possibly they had ruined the drive. How could he ever get off this accursed planet, how would he ever get back to Gfun? He rolled hastily over to the nearest man and tried to put his newfound vocabulary to use. "'Where -- where -- " He realized suddenly that he didn't know the word for ship. "Where galcnfain?" The man looked at him as if he were crazy, and walked on. Xhanph did some swearing on his own account. He began to roll madly around the square, becoming more desperate from moment to moment. Finally, just when he thought he would explode from rage and frustration, he found the ship again. It had been dragged to a neighboring street and left on a vacant lot, surrounded by rusty cans, broken bottles, and various other forms of garbage and rubbish indigenous to this section of the planet. Relief mingled with a feeling of outrage. Xhanph swore again. The indignity of it was enough to start an interplanetary war. If they ever heard of it back on Gfun, they would want to blast this stupid and insulting planet out of existence. He hastened into the ship, and found to his joy that there had been no damage. There was nothing to prevent him from taking off again and getting back to Gfun. But the mystery of his reception still intrigued him. He could not leave without solving it. He rolled out of the ship again and stood there watching it. Evidently they had regarded this miracle of engineering as nothing more than so much rubbish. They would probably leave it alone now. He could let it remain here, and in the meantime carry on his investigating as before. Things would go more rapidly now that he understood some of the elements of human speech. All he had to do was keep his hearing appendages open and interpret the key words as he heard them. It shouldn't take him long. One of the reasons he had been selected to make the trip was that he had a gift for languages, and a day or two more should suffice to establish communications. He left the ship again, and began to roll around the city. He listened to traffic policemen directing the flow of helicopters, he stood by unobtrusively while boy talked with girl -- these conversations turned out to be very limited in scope, as well as uninstructive in syntax -- and he even managed to get into a place of amusement where three dimensional images created in him a sense of nostalgia. From his slight knowledge of the language, he could perceive that the dialogue was so stale that he himself could have supplied it from stories written long ago on his native planet. After a lapse of many hours, the majority of the people disappeared from the streets, and he decided it was time to return to his ship and suspend animation. In the morning he set out again. By the end of that day he felt he could understand the spoken language well enough. What next? To learn the language in written form might take too long, and besides, to solve his mystery he would have to waste time in digging up the recorded forms that contained the necessary information. No, he would have to find some one to talk to, some one who would have the necessary information at his tentacle-tips, or as they called the appendages here, finger-tips. He began to approach various people again, undi.scouraged by their cold and impolite replies. Finally he found the informant he had been seeking, an old, whitehaired individual who was walking slowly, with the aid of a cane, along one of the wider and quieter streets. The man looked at him with calm lack of interest as he approached. Xhanph came to a stop, and said, "Greetings! I, Xhanph, bring you greetings from the inhabitants of the planet, Gfun. I come with a message of friendship." "Very glad to make your acquaintance, sir," said the old man FoliteIy, but still without genuine interest. At last some one who had answered! Xhanph started his portable recording machine going. "I wish for infonnation. Perhaps you can give it to me." "Ah, iny young fellow, I liave seen a great deal and know a great deal. But it isn't very often that vou young ones want to find out what we old folks know." "Perhaps I have not made myself clear. I am an inhabitant of the planet. Gfun." "Yes, indeed. Do you intend to stay here long?" "I have come with a message of friendship. But I have found no one to receive it." "Mnini. That's unfortunate," the old man said. "People are very impatient nowadays. Time is money, they say. t!an't spare the money to stop and talk. Couldn't spare it myself, not so long ago. I'm retired now, though. U.sed to run a stereo store, up around Mudlark Street. Biggest store in the city. Everybody used to buy from me. Jefferson J. Gardner's my name. You may have heard of me on -- where did you .say you come from?" "Gfun. However, I wish to make clear -- " "Never sold any stereos to any one on Gfun. Probably don't get good reception up there. Sold 'em to everybody else, though. I'm well known here, Mr. -- " "Xhanph. But before you go further -- " "Got into the stereo game when they first came out. Went like hotcakes in tho.se days. Although I don't suppose you know what a hotcake is. Quality didn't count. Only thing that counted was size of screen and strength of the threedimensional effect. Mr. Gloopher -- he was M.iyor then -- Robert F. Gloopher -- had a daughter who went in for acting..." Not for the first time, Xhanph cursed this damnable planet. The talk was senile and his conversation rambled wildly like a feather in a strong and particularly erratic whirlwind. Still, he told himself with a touch of philosophy, I have wasted so much time, I can afford to waste a little more. Sooner or later this individual will tell me what I want to know. Half an hour later, however, when Jefferson J. Gardner began to repeat himself, Xpanph realized that he couldn't just wait for the old man to talk himself out. Different tactics were needed. He interrupted rudely. "Why don't people pay any attention to me?" "Eh? What's that you .say?" "I come from the planet, Gfun. I thought that as an interplanetary visitor I would be received with tremendous enthusiasm. Instead I fiml myself disregarded." "I recollect that back in the old days -- " "Never mind that. Why don't people pay any attention to me?" "Why shoulcl they?" "That is no answer!" "But it is, sir," said the old gentleman with dignity. "They don't find you out of the ordinary. Why pay attention to you?" "You mean that you are accustomed to visitors from space?" "No, sir, I mean nothing of the kind. What I do mean is that we are by now thoroughly accustomed to the idea of you. I remember -- " "Never mind what you remember!" "When I was a child, stories about visitors from Mars or Venus were already trite and stereotyped. What could a visitor do? What might a visitor look like? All the fKJssible answers had already been given, and we were familiar with every one of them. We imagined visitors with tentacles and without, with a thousand legs and no legs, with five heads and seven feet, and eighteen stomachs. We imagined visitors who were plants, or electrical impulses, or viruses, or energy-creatures. They had the power to read minds, to move objects telekinetically and to travel through impossible dimensions. Their space ships were of all kinds, and they could race along with many times the speed of light or crawl with the speed of molasses. I do not know, sir, in which category you fall -- whether you are animal, vegetable, mineral, or electrical -- but I know that there is nothing new about you." "But you are familiar merely with the ideas. I am a real visitor!" "Young man, I am a hundred and ten years old, and the idea of you was already ancient when I was eight. I remember reading about you in a comic book. You are not the first visitor who has pretended to be real. There were hundreds before you. I have seen press agent stunts by the dozen, and advertising pictures by the hundreds about Mars, about Venus, about the Moon, about visitors from interstellar space. Your pretended colleagues have walked the streets of innumerable cities, until now we are weary of the entire tribe of you. And you yourself, sir, if you will pardon the expression, you are an anticlimax." "Your race must be insane," protested Xhanph. "For all you know I may come with great gifts which I wish to confer upon you." "We have been fooled before. And in view of the fact, as I have reminded you, that time is money, we do not wish to bankrupt ourselves by investigating." "But suppose I'm here to harm you!" "If your race is capable of it, we can hardly stop you, so it is no use trying. If incapable, you are wasting your efforts." "This is insanity, genuine racial insanity!" "You repeat yourself. The fact is, we have become blas#," said the old man. "Thanks to the efforts of our science fiction writers, we have experienced in imagination all there is to experience in interplanetary contact, and the genuine article can be only a disappointment. I am reminded of an incident that occurred when Gerald Crombie, who was City Councilman at the time, ordered a twenty-five inch stereo set..." his answer now, and he couldn't stand listening any longer to the old man's babbling. He rolled aimlessly, up one street and down another. And he thought of how they would receive his answer when he went back to Gfun. Was it him or the planet that they would consider mad? Almost certainly, they wouldn't believe him. He could imagine the exchange of wondering glances, the first delicate hints that the long trip had deranged him, the not so delicate hints later on when he persisted in sticking to his story. He remembered the high hopes with which he had departed, the messages with which he had been entrusted by the Chief of Planetary Affairs, the Head of the Scientific Bureau, the Director of Economic Affairs, and countless others. And he could imagine the reception he would find when he reported that he had been unable to deliver a single message. How long he rolled in this aimless fashion he did not know. After a time he seemed to come to his senses. It was no use trying to run away from reality, as he was doing. He had to go back to the ship and return to Gfun. Let them believe him or not, his report would tell the truth. And the pictorial and auditory records would confirm his story. What a planet, he thought again. the curiosity, the ordinary intellectual decency, to be interested in him. Not one had the imagination, the awareness -- "Pardon me," said a shrill voice, "E.cuse me for reading thoughts, but I could not help overhearing -- I am a visitor here myself." He swung around. The figure before him was strange, but an aura of friendliness came from it and he knew there was nothing to fear. Nothing to fear -- and much to be thankful for. With a heartfelt double sigh, while disinterested passersby spared them not even a glance, pink tentacles and green streamers clasped in a gesture of friendship that terplanetary space.   . thought provoking stories it has been IP's pleasure to present: Carry Me Home, by Gordon R. Dickson, is an unusual study in the revelation of a character; Progeny, by Philip K. Dick, is an emotion filled story about a father and son in the distant future; For Every Man a Reason, by Patrick Wilkins, tests the love of a man for his wife, versus his love for his State; plus other short stories, each with a different theme, by Mari Wolf, William E. Bently, John Christopher, Basil Wells and Vernon L. McCain. Also, meet the winners in IP's # nation-wide College Science Piction Contest. Ask your newsdealer to reserve you a copy. fVe bid you welcome. Earthmen! Take your rif'htful place beside us, share our peaceful existence. By your endless struggles you have earned it. Prace Communique No I . -- Abilene -- April I, # The war is over. Iverson is safely exiled on asteroid #, and the otlicr leaders of the agp-essor forces -- Cartwright. Briande, Remberg, Klang and Risofsky -- arc all in confinement on their resjjcctive space islands. Peace has Ixren restored to the system: on Rios and on Nwad. Sup. AC Riot Adm, AC Pamphlet On March #. # (Rios Time), the Rios-Nwadian war ended. This report on the recent conflict has been prepared by the Bureau of Public Information and Education. Rios Branch, for the purixise of enlightening the inhabitants of Rios about the War, its causes, and the proposed policy of the Nwndian government concerning the administration of your planet. In order to provide for full underst.inding by the people of Rios. Riosic terminology shall be used wherever possible in this report. Thus. Rios shall be called 'Earth', Nwad shall be designated 'Venus', and all dates, measurements and other data which arc difTerent on the two planets shall be indicated according to the Riosic calculation. The War ended on March #, # when the last Earthian troops surrendered to the Venusian peace forces. When did the War begin? The first battle was fought on December #. #. but the first 'incident' that led directly to the conflict occurred in November, #-#. And es'en before that date, many years before, officials on Venus knew that war between the two worlds was inevitable. Space scientists of Venus have bfen observing Earth for hundreds of years. The first spare ship to reach )our planet and return to Venus made its voyage in the Earth year, #. From that time on, explorations were made sporadically until the #'s, when revolutionary improvements in the design of our ships made possible more economical and faster trips. It is an interesting coincidence, incidentally, that atomic power was discovered on Earth just as we on Venus had made atomic driven spacecraft obsolete by the introduction of the magnetico-gravitational drive. This fact is mentioned because it was the evidence of atomic explosions on Earth that increased our interest in your planet a century ago. In all our ob.servations of Earth, the most obvious fact we learned was that its dominant race was aggressive and war-like in nature. Having no desire to introduce this war-inindedness to our peaceful world, we avoided all contact with Earth. We realized, however, that in time the Earth race would accomplish space travel and thus force a contact with us. Therefore, we devised highly potent weapons for our defense in the event that the people of Earth ever stopped quarreling among themselves and attempted an attack on our world. High officials in our government were appalled at the thought of war' with its chaotic and indiswho deemed it an actual act of aggression on our part to arm ourselves in preparation for a war. The opposition to our defense program was strong. Yet, it was our preparedness which saved our civilization from destruction when your forces launched their invasion of our planet last year. To understand the events which led to The War, it is best that we briefly review the history of space travel by Earthians. In the year #, the six remaining nations of the Earth formed the Federation to abolish war and to enable the people of your planet to put forth a united effort to discover the secret of interplanetary travel. This endeavour, in itself, was considered by our leaders to be most creditable. But the entire pattern of your development, observed for many centuries, instilled seeds of doubt in our minds. You were conditioned to war and the mere establishment of a Federation to monitor the future was not adequate insurance, we felt, against further conflict. In your concentration on conquering space, however, you did stop warring among yourselves. Space travel from Earth began thirty-eight years ago. The first successful trip to Luna and back was made in #, and by # the Lunar space port was opened. It was in #, also, that the space ship. Pioneer, left for Mars. It was never heard from again. Unsuccessful attempts to travel to the other planets were made during the years #-#. The Pioneer II, bound for Mars, the Adventurer, bound for Mars, and the Enterprise, bound for Venus, all disappeared without a trace. In September, #, the Space King returned to Earth after completing a voyage to Mars. The ship landed safely, but the excited celebration that greeted it was shortlived when it was discovered that the entire crew was afflicted with a neurological disease that your Earth scientists labeled 'space sickness'. This disease posed a new obstacle to interplanetary travel. It attacked indiscriminately and it proved fatal in almost every case. Research and experimentation on the cause and cure of 'space sickness' was carried on continuously from the time the Space King returned with its dying crew until the disease was conquered in #. During these years, the experimental ships Enterprise II, Razorback, and Space King II were utilized as laboratories in orbital flights. In April, #, the space liner Morning Star was completed, incorporating technological improvements designed to prevent the occurrence of 'space sickness'. The Morning Star left the Lunar station on July #, #. Its destination was Venus. In government circles on Venus, it was felt that no further delay could be permitted in establishing contact with the people of Earth. They were already too close to space flight maturity to forego any opportunity for formulating an understanding. Therefore, The Morning Star, whose flight had been observed contsantly, was allowed to pass through our ionic barrier and land unharmed on our planet. Emissaries of our Lora Dannun ( nearest translation : Supreme Council) were on hand to greet the Earthmen when they left their ship. As a precautionary measure, two atomic scorchers were trained on the ship, but our officials approached the debarking Earthmen without side arms and in a friendly manner. The Earthmen, understandably apprehensive, came forward with their hand weapons drawn. Although we on Venus were already familiar with your International English language, our welcoming committee did not think it wise to further startle the men from Earth by greeting them in their own tongue. Therefore, our friendly intentions were made known by elaborate and unmistakable gestures. The aliens from Earth, nevertheless, were startled enough by our appearance. They stared wide-eyed at what appeared to be four childlike specimens of human beings. This resemblance which Venusians bear to humans, and which should have impressed the crew of the Morning Star with the possibilities of intelligent negotiations, did not deter them from jumping to irrational conclusions. Our chief emissary, Ser Madi, heard their leader and his lieutenant in the following conversation (which is reproduced from the auto-tape recording made on the spot) : Leader: What do you make of them, Jensen? They look almost like human children, don't they? Lieutenant: There doesn't seem to be anything to worry about here, sir. They seem friendly enough. But why children? You'd think they'd send some bigwigs out to welcome us. Why did they send children? Leader: I don't know... Maybe it's a trap! Lieutenant: You're right, sir. We can't afford to take any chances. Leader; Take them back to the ship for the psych boys to work on. I don't like the looks of this. At this point Ser Madi revealed his knowledge of the Earth language. "I assure you, gentlemen," he said to the strangers, "that this is not a trap. Please follow us peacefully." The invaders were stunned into silence, but it took the leader only a moment to recover. "I'll be damned!" he exclaimed. "The sly little devils understand English! Jensen! Have these creatures escorted onto the Star. This is something we'll have to talk over on the ship." At a signal from the man called Jensen, eight of your people advanced toward the four members of our welcoming committee. Ser Madi spoke again; "I warn you, sir, not to try to abduct us. Order your men back." The leader of the Earthmen laughed. "Look at them!" he said to his lieutenant. "These things are threatening us!" The soldiers had paused at Ser Madi's words. "Go on," the leader ordered them. "Take them aboard the ship!" "You were warned," Ser Madi said sadly. He motioned to his companions and, in an instant of reduced to smoldering ashes. The stunned Earthians were easily taken into custody. They were completely awed by the destruction of their ship, which had been accomplished with "invisible" weapons. Ser Madi did not think it necessary to explain the compactness and efficiency of the atomic scorchers to them. They would not have been able to comprehend the principles behind the finger ring weapons. Captain Daniels, the leader of the Earth expedition, was interrogated at great length, but he remined hostile and uncooperative. The only information that he offered was his name, rank and serial number, which he repeated over and over again. Jensen and the remaining crew members refused to answer our questions also, insisting that their captain was the spokesman for all of them. This action increased our fears that the intellectual and emotional make-up of Earth was incompatible with that of Venus. We accomplished nothing in four days of questioning. It seemed impossible to determine the means whereby we could arrive at some workable line of reasoning. It was equally impossible for us to ascertain whether the hostile actions of the Morning Star represented the attitude of the Earth government or if they were merely the impulsive results of the emotional strain endured by Captain Daniels and his crew on their voyage. The Supreme Council decided it was necessary to visit Earth now, make our presence known, and see if friendly relations could be established with that planet. We had hopes that this might be done, for there had been no war on Earth for almost fifty years. It was hoped that the people had finally achieved a civilization capable of friendly interplanetary exchange. The Council ordered a delegation to leave immediately on the first diplomatic mission from Venus to Eai. Ser Madi had justifiable doubts about the possibility of success, but the Council overruled his objections. The delegation, led by the elder statesman, r Alaga, left for Earth aboard the light cruiser, Tunn. The date was December #, #. Returning to Earth aboard the Tunn, were the eleven survivors of the Morning Star, treated not as prisoners, but as survivors of a space wreck. The Tunn landed on Earth two miles out of Abilene, on December #, #. A few hours after touching down, the Venusian delegation arrived in the Earth capital and presented themselves at the Ministry of State. The office worker who stood between them and the Secretary of the Minister of Foreign Affairs was amused by the delegates' story. "Why don't you kids go home and stop annoying us?" he said. "And stop watching those TD shows!" Ser Buldi indignantly repeated his request to see the Foreign Minister. "Get out of here!" the office worker said in a tone that indicated he was through talking to us. Ser Buldi began to reply but he was silenced by Ser Alaga, who wished to avoid any unnecessary incidents which could have proved embarrassing to the Earthmen. Instead, the elder statesman approached a young lady seated behind a desk. "What can I do for you, little boy?" the girl asked with a smile. Ser Alaga, with the aid of his hypno-tube, quickly convinced her to admit the delegates to the office of the Sub-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Then began a three day procession through the offices of many sub-secretaries, four under-secretaries and two deputy ministers. In each office our diplomats were received skeptically and passed on to the next. Finally, in desperation, the delegation released the survivors of the Morning Star. Although Ser Alaga realized that their account of the incident probably would be distorted, he knew that it would serve to verify the delegation's identity. The Abilene News of December #, #, shouted at the top of its headline voice; The Bugle: The Times: #I Survivors Of Space Liner Tell Story Of Attack An immediate meeting was held between our delegation and the leaders of your government. After the formalities of greeting were over, the spokesman for the Earth government reviewed the facts of the Morning Star incident as they had been related by Captain Daniels and his crew. Venusian forces, they claimed, had been guilty of an unprovoked attack against the ship. We had barbarously murdered all of the ship's complement, save for the eleven "hostages" whom we had brought to Earth aboard the Tunn. You Can Master t the Power of Your "Sixth Sense" la KJia-ttHklutdr mu -- m M # Fifth Ave., New York #, N. Y. I nMe rwA M# ctpr ml Bmm tMvtJaiiri  Am. I CaH -- tM Kn  uwn. to ptotii wreppM WAm dhvML I wUI Aepoui MUi pmtAmmm mmXf II f. plwe I MN be II Mth mmI NeeMt. w I tS rew IW AmA iJi #m la  iefi  I Mae ta haep aeaa H I fatMi boA The government of Earth demanded an explanation. Ser Alaga spoke the truth. The Earthians were not satisfied. (the followino conversation is Earth Spokesman: We will grant that your act of aggression was not premeditated, but resulted from a misinterpretation, on your part, of the friendly intentions of our forces. Nevertheless, our vessel was destroyed. Twentythree of our men were killed. The government of the World Federation demands that your government make suitable reparations. Ser Alaga: Mr. Cartwright, we respectfully deny the allegation that our forces were guilty of any act of aggression. Cartwright: The Morning Star was destroyed by your men, was it not? Ser Alaga: In self-defense, yes. As we have explained, the captain of your ship threatened our welcoming committee with... Cartwright: None of your men were harmed! Ser Alaga: They prevented their own imminent destruction by their action in self-defense. It was this action which resulted in the unfortunate... Cartwright; Our ship and our men were attacked before they had fired a shot. Therefore, your action cannot be deemed to have taken place in self-defense. Ser Alaga: Your reasoning confounds me, sir. If the prevention of aggressive action is termed aggression, then we are guilty of it. I bow to your logic. Naturally our government wishes to express its regrets over the impulsive act of its representatives. We want to meet with you in peace and friendship. We want to prevent any future incidents such as the one which has brought us here today. Cartwright; On behalf of the World Federation, I accept your apology. We, too, would like to prevent further strife between our worlds. There is much to be gained by a useful and cooperative alliance between Earth and Venus. But, to insure this, we feel that your government should make certain... payments in reparation for our losses. Ser Alaga: Although I am in sympathy with your views, our delegation has not been empowered to oer any reparations. However, if you will indicate what your government would consider a suitable payment for your losses, we shall convey your request to our Council. (end of auto-tape recording) Yttrium was the reparation asked by Earth -- five thousand pounds of isolated and purified Yttrium. This metal was essential for the construction of Earth's space ships, the "alumiryten" alloy being used in the manufacture of the tough Outer shell of tliese ships. The supply of Yttrium ores on Venus is almost unlimited, and the Council had no trouble delivering the requested amount of the refined metal. The last shipment of ingots reached Earth within three months. This conciliatory payment was intended to preserve the peace and build good will within the system. It was our intention that, if possible, the Earth would assume a more respKjnsible attitude toward the greater scope of friendly interplanetary relations. It was our hope that harmony would form a permanent bond between our two worlds. Our efforts were wasted. screamed the tabloid headlines. President Iverson of the World Federation sent a stiff note to the Council on Venus. He demanded apologies and immediate restitutions, claiming that sixty percent of the metal delivered was actually zirconium. We had cheated them, said Iverson. In a terse reply to his note, our government branded the Iverson accusation a lie. It was all too apparent what was intended. We refused to discuss the matter. We broke off all diplomatic relations with Earth and simply ignored the numerous threats and accusations that were continuously being made. Our vigilance increased, however, and we prepared for the attack that Iverson promised when he said: "Venus has not yet felt the force of Earth... They will!" Several years pas.sed, during which time the Federation built a huge space armada, using to good advantage the five thousand pounds of pure yttrium they had received from Venus. It was also during these years of preparation that Venus and its people were forced to accept the hardships of a regimented economy. Our citizens, however, long accustomed to persorial sacrifice for the welfare of Society, did not complain. On September #, #, a fleet of four hundred Federation warships took off for Venus. The battle in defense of our planet was carried out exactly according to the strategy of the Supreme Council. The first wave of one hundred attacking ships was completely demolished in our ionic barrier. Fifty percent of the second wave was accounted for in the same manner. Those ships which did manage to pierce the discharging barrier were badly damaged and were easily destroyed by our cruising disintegrator teams. The third wave of invaders was met by our ascending task force of sixty scout ships, each equipped with twin cosmic blasters. In this engagement, three of our ships were lost... all the invaders were destroyed. While this battle was being fought, our space patrol descended upon the fourth wave from outer space. The Earth fleet was completely obliterated. On March #, #, our invasion fleet attacked the Earth. After two weeks of sporadic fighting, the occupation was completed. Iverson, Cartwright, Briande, and the rest of the leaders of Earth's war-like government are in exile on their various asteroids. We shall not kill them, nor shall we allow them to die. They are supplied with their needs by a p that calls once a month. Otherwise, they are left completely alone on their space islands, each a master of his own little world. We believe this to be a fitting punishment for men who try to conquer a world. Peace has been restored to the system: on Venus, and on Earth. Peace Communique No. # -- Abilene -- May #, # One month ago, the provisional Venusian government on Earth was established to administer the military occupation of your planet. During the past month, that government, assisted by the Venusian Administration Corps, has instituted reforms whereby peace and security have been attained for all the Earth. What of the future? Citizens of Earth, here is your future: You are welcomed as equals in a union with Venus. For a time, until you have learned how to govern yourselves peacefully, your planet will be directed by Venusian administrators. But even now -- immediately -- you shall be accorded the same rights and privileges that the citizens of Venus enjoy. And you shall have peace! Perhaps you should be thankful for the last terrible war which your leaders brought upon you, for as a result of it, you shall no longer know the meaning of war. Of course, citizens have duties as well as rights. Failure to comply with regulations is severely punished. Therefore, it is adsisable that you acquaint yourselves with the obligations of a peaceful citizen. Tlie duties of a citizen vary, depending upon the individual's classification and the location in which he lives. In addition to his special duties, however, every citizen is required to know and observe the citizen, listed below. #. Every citizen will work at his appointed task one-third of each day. #. Every citizen will perform those duties necessary to maintain his sleeping area in such a manner as to comply with the directives posted in his barracks. #. Every citizen (male) will father (female) will bear a child once every alternate cycle. #. Every citizen will report promptly when notified of special duty (e.g. waste disposal detail, sewer maintenance crew, restorative squad). #. Every citizen will report to his e.xtermination center immediately upon notification. (See Note) (Note: Certain measures are necessary to prevent the over-population of a peaceful world. In addition to the obvious elimination of the incurably sick, the insane, the feebleminded, the disabled, the dishonest, and the aged, periodic exterminations must be held among the general citizenry. Citizens who have been selected will report promptly to the appointed center for speedy, painless extermination. Failure to do so will result in a delayed and painful process.) Now we bid you welcome. Earthmen. Take your rightful place beside us and share our peaceful existence. By your endless struggles through a long heritage of war, you have earned it. Sup. AC Riot Adm    "Friend against friend, and the old hunting guns polished up for more deadly and constant shooting -- is that a story that belongs in galactic history? Is it for this that great galactic corporations work -- to turn peaceable planets into charnel houses for a stinking profit? "That's the charge that you, and the rest of your workers, will have to answer to -- not in courts, but to the people of the Galaxy. "And, most important -- to yourselves!" "With that, he strode out. presence of Roald Gibbons, and he was angry again. "And don't look so smug. I know what you did. I worked with your father long enough to know about his special agents -- but don't think the ofieration was all your doing. "What do you think happened here when you sent that spacegram tipping us off that it was Galactic Aid behind the mess, and that we were to declare it a Class AA. It was a madhouse! "It accomplished the desired result," Roald said. "When the Governor and the Secretary read that Class AA bulletin -- and it took careful planning and timing to get into their ofliice just when it was delivered -- with me there to pound it home, they sort of faded about the gills. "They came running to me in a few minutes. Now they are Honor Witnesses at Galactic Court, with more than enough testimony to sew up Galactic Aid." Roald had a hard time keeping his mind on the present conversation. He was due to blast to Lyrane in a few hours. Hh company was proceeding with rehabilitation ahead of schedule, with the natural zealousness of the Lyranians for their old system helping them along. Roald had not forgotten the piquant beauty of Erol Garbin's daughter. He had a hard time keeping his mind on the conversation. "If anyone else had read that Class AA bulletin," Kim said, "we would have been sewed up. You know perfectly well we don't have the powers you had us state in that bulletin. It was a galactic offense to even print such a thing. What if the Governor had known that?" "I counted on him not knowing it. Even though he was an executive of Galactic Aid, Class AA emergencies are so rare that very few people are familiar with their actual provisions. "Certainly, it was a risky bluff. But when you're dealing with that sort of power, you have to bluff fast and hard. We didn't have enough evidence to actually stop Galactic. We needed inside testimony. When you rescinded the Class AA order, two hours later, the confession was already signed." Exasperation was now Kini's mood. "One of these times your bluff won't work, and all your secret agents won't do you a bit of good. Empire law is nothing to tamper with." Roald smiled. "I think that Galactic Aid found that out."    Whatever you wane io # --  new home, a happier marriage, a healthy state of mind and body, a better job, more money -- here is a remarkable method for turning your (The Science of Selling Your Goal -- and ihen Reaching It) by ClauJt M. 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Baaa ralara prUllao-yaar laaaay  lOUU Ol '# # WoortM nf l-lAnli Afid XIaAi  f idAniltlA UlTVnUrMMt... of rWtV rrtAB ipArv of Kir TrAvcitag... Workto #f Tttowirruw. M# pAC. nrwt AlWmli... wrttlm lirfMT It a lnvrntrll atc Ji(t a frw nt the # g l(tp tAl rluiMni fnm a tltirra yesni f Ad(uiMllnr H#'trtirr-Klrtk#t SflACatnr ti cdittiT W. ('A # iptMli. Jr. Jmmt... You r wnrklftg tin a aerm 'injert When yiMir (M bmimcA ma I pri tn  nf ynitr MAptuyer. Ihry kldnip , hrr. WiMi ynu try to fly avaj. nur iflAfie BvallnwAd up to by a Awim # ... Tlc tvbled gialitfi rmlNdt itlw MQle liAii eu twm r m l aJamwC tA rvitirr AlAty! imly uor clvIUrAlInn had 'mped. Hmr fmmtd tkeg stmp tkU mutdk I Mait... Tbey b C AK t d lb S'IcAata to. , brlp dadniy tW ' ftmAb " -- a rtTAac ' nrw raev wttb myatcncMAt pnwent. Hirt )UAR Hli found tliAt he Aod bki gUI wort, .' (nuiAnu Uieoiaelvwi T tiAOiKC -- SoT UtaM fuU-nise. fuU Imcft) Mw oonKv-Kirtioa Boolu -- your for ooly #. A # to # vAhie! We me thiA Amarinfl offer lo introduce ou to the Pew SetOB c e-Fktioo Hook dub. Thii (Yub brincA # roa the ermm of the new arteoetfielkifi niAAteriieees (or only # (giliu few eenta ahipnlnfl rlwnoil -- even tloush they eoit #. # And up in the urigiaAf publaiherB No Dvflt PC CpniDNcptfld ffplAt Karh month our Editor aeleet the No. I title from aU the new Acieore betiem liooliA. But you toke ooly the yeor. You rereive dmrritkm of ench rlretioB In ndvanee. end you may reject nay book you pleoAe. No due, no fee. Take ad'Antapr of Ihk Amnrinfl offer now! JiiAt fiek any # hook you want -- of enfp t mr oO fkrrrf You need cnd no aoo -- limply mail poatoard below. Tliw offer may have to be withdrawn at any time. o mail poeteard right now to feiaaca-Wcflaa look dob. Oepl. If.ld. Gordon Ofy. N. V. Dept. IF#. GardM Oty. NawYavk #I for Ail three (nlu few eenu Mitippiiig eliAfvei), aimI enroll me a a mamher nf the Hetane Hrtloh IbMik I 'lull l.very nwinlh nefMl me the  lub' free Imlletin.  Thing lo Come.' o that I may deride whether nr not I wHli to rerdve the coming monthly #) daecilbed therein. Knr CNrh iMMik I Arrefit, I will pay only #I pluH a few cent ihipinnit charge. I do not have to take  (MMik every month hmly four ilurtng each year I am a member) -- and I may ratgt) at any time after arrepllng four Mclertlno. aod #M memberhlp wUI lie mneeUedf Q Aifeundiwf Anthelefy  fflnp Around Ike #u rotrcAftD 'iriiimhiio AT ONa AddTM Was the"Flymg Saucer of iowa'RegLIy a Fake?... The Chief of the IT. S. #uter turm who attarhed themselves to Serret #eriee wondered. men and turned them into Drs Moines told Its listenem that You'll thrill to every pace of  landed nearby was a fake by Ri#ierl A. Ileinlein -- just Umb why did several of the in this errat offer! He Powers Stosi Neeswory if Moflsd ii Kia Unttad Slefat I  What the Youth of Today Thinks About the Hermes, closest asteroid to the Earth, seen # miles in the distance. travels through its orbit at seven to nine miles o second. Thousands of asteroids, from hundreds of feet in diameter to hundreds of miles in diameter, whirl through our solar system, with new ones being discovered every year. you're that man, here's something that will interest you. Not a magic formula -- not a getrichquick scheme -- but something more substantial, more practical. Of course, you need something more than just the desire to be an accountant. You've got to pay Still, wouldn't it be worth your while to sacrifice some of your leisure in favor of interesting home study -- over a comparatively brief period. Always provided that the rewards were good -- a salary of # to #.' An accountant's duties are interesting, varied and of real worth to his employers. He has standing,! Do you feel that such things aren't for you? Well, don't be coo sure. Very possibly they can be! Why not, like so many before you, investigate LaSalle's modern Problem Method of training for an accountancy, position. Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large accounting house under the personal supervision of an expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid, you studied accounting principles and solved problems day by day -- easy ones at first -- then more difficult ones. If you could do this -- and could turn to him for advice as the problems became complex -- soon you'd master them all. That's the training you follow in principle under the LaSalle Problem Method. You cover accountancy from the basic Principles fight up through Accountancy Systems and Income Tax Procedure. Then you add C. P. A, Training and prepare for the C. P, A. examinations. As you go along, you absorb the principles of Auditing, Cost Accounting, Business Law, Statistical Control, Organization, Management and Finance. Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it -- depending on your own eagerness to leara and the time you spend in study. Will recognition come.' The only answer, as you know, is that success dm come to the man who is really trained. It's possible your employers will notice your improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed, many LaSalle graduates have paid for their training -- with increased earnings -- before they have completed it! For accountants, who axe trained in organization and management are the executives of the future. Send For Free Sample Lesson For your own good, get all the facts. Write for out free #-pagc book, "Accountancy, The Profession That Pays" -- also the free sample lesson so you can prove to yourself that you can master accountancy quickly, tboroly in spare time at hoxe. Over # Certified Public Accountonti omong LoSalle alumni A Correspondence fnstftutfon Send me without obligation Free Sample Lesson and "Accountancy, The Profession 'That Pays." Nave. dip AddetSf, , .  ...  . a... aaa.a......a...... Cty # # #   Sat. a   .w    I ll All Stories New and Complete Cover by Bob Watkins: Youth of Today Looks at America of Tomorrow Approaching for Landing on Asteroid Hermes IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coinciaental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale October #th Are you too old to learn? not at alt, new tests show! New tests, cited by an expert in news stories, show that: your ability to think increases with age; your powers of deduction are greater; your judgment is belter, files are thousands of case histories of men and women of every age. Their successes, their promotions, their raises prove that men and women past school age can learn! Listen to A.L.G. "Up until I took the course, I did what I was told. But now... I tell others what to do. have the feeling you're "stuck" in your job? Real Job Security -- Cet an I.C.S. Diplomal, Your trained I. C. S. counselor will appraiso your abilities, help you plan for the future. Listen to D.F.K. "Before enroUing, I was # foundry laborer. Today I am a draftsman, enjoying a Vs increase in salary." with I. C. S. at home, in your spare time. There's no interference with business or social activity. Famous I. C. S. texts make learning easy. 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Finishing and Dyeing Loom Fixing Textile Designing Textile EngYg  Throwing Warping and Weaving Domestic Refrigaratiort Marine Engineering Ocean Navigation Shipfitting Short Story Writing Telephony Warking Hour, A M to PM . Canadian residents tend coupon to International Correspondence Schools, Canadiart. Ltd... Montreal. Canada... Special tuition rates to mamben el the U. S. Armed Force. ludicrously funny cartoons on ash trays or cocktail napkins or home bar glasses entitled "People are no damned good" or "Nobody loves me" or "Farewell cruel world" or some of the others? No doubt you have; they have become quite a fad. And whole you do get a heck of a big laugh out of them, it's still sort of tragic that they hit home so accurately. They pin-point the foibles of so many of us, and that's what makes them funny in the last analysis. Quite probably you have, at some time or other, gotten into conversation with someone who has said, "Oh I guess the place is all right, but the people are so damned unfriendly." Or, something like this: "Have you noticed how cliquish this town is?" Or, "If my job weren't here I'd leave like a shot." Etcetera, etcetera. New York City is a classic example. Scores of people who left home to make their money there call it a cold, uhr friendly place. And New York isn't unique in this respect; you can; hear similar comments about other A good many of these "gripers" probably left the old home town because they felt that way there... and they carry the seed of discontent with them wherever they go. A sort of invisible chip on the shoulder. Perhaps if they gave whatever town they're talking about half a chance to be friendly they'd be singing a different tune. Then, again -- maybe they wouldn't. Maybe, psychologically, they'd be unhappy anywhere unless they could complain. But to give them their due, you can find a bad egg now and then in any basket. So if nothing but a basket of perfect eggs will do, maybe living alone on a four by four island in the Pacific is the answer. And there is no guarantee .that even that will be Utopia. If you want to like a town, it will like you. And that goes for the biggest place in the world as well as the smallest. I have good reason to think that so-called "cold" and "unfriendly" New York is the greatest city in the world -- and not only because of its size. I never "froze" during the # years I spent there, and I met a lot of people who were certainly far from unfriendly. And I left it with more than I had when I went there. As far as this particular spot called Kingston is concerned, I don't know of a better place on the map. I've been here ten years and I wouldn't mind another hundred. like this one on the banks of the Hudson. You get to know most of the folks and they get to know you. It's kinda good to have someone yell across the street "Hi, Jim!" Or to stop and gab in the middle of the street until a car honks you on your way. Then, too, maybe it's because in less than # minutes after you leave the office you can be fishing or swimming or playing golf or paddling a canoe on the river or just walking through the woods or sightseeing from the top of a mountain. Yup, it's very nice around here. Of course, while I like vanilla, another man likes chocolate. Which is fine. But those who don't like vanilla or chocolate or strawberry or lemon or lime or tutti-fruitti or anything else... well, that's their privilege. They are what the dictionary calls "misanthropes". And the way this old world of ours is getting smaller every day there isn't much room for that kind of philosophy. People have a lot of living together to do, and a lot of liking to do. Perhaps it will require a good deal of effort on each individual's part to develope a "give" attitude; but our society today seems to demand that effort from all of us. Tolerance is not enough, we need a definite policy that is concerned with putting our best foot forward in taking a step toward our neighbor. You could live in a town or city forever and a day without griping; but without liking it either, if you are merely tolerant of the "coldness and unfriendliness". You've got to pitch in with your neighbors, develope a "give" attitude, become an integral part of community affairs... and the cliques and the coldness melt away. Moral and intellectual and political distrust between nations is too rampant today to let it penetrate to next door neighbors. When a choice is made, whether it be in local politics, or in international diplomatic relations, it always seems to be a choice of "the lesser of two evils". Perhaps I'm naive, but why can't it be the "better of two goods"? Or isn't that cricket in politics and diplomacy? "Give" isn't an easy thing to acquire. It so often involves pride and ethics and prejudice and an almost complete about face of personality and thinking. Such a reversal of opinions may seem like too big a job. But there are hundreds of people who have managed just that task, who have stepped out of the ranks of the misanthropes, and found that here is no such thing as an unfriendly town, and that life can be a very pleasant thing whether they are living in Oshkosh or in Dallas. It's a big job for the individual and may not seem to have much affect on the rest of mankind or on world politics. But it is a beginning. And perhaps if we start in a small way, those cartoons that seem to point out that we're all going to hell in a handbasket won't hit the mark so closely any more. Maybe all this is Sunday school stuff. Maybe it's too Pollyanna-ish. Maybe so. Maybe you don't think it's science fiction. I do. And heck, a little slice of optimism does a fellow good now and then. -- jlq What the Youth of Today Thinks About the America of Tomorrow Reflected in Stories by Undergraduates junior, Andy Offut, of Louisville, Kentucky, captured the first prize of # with his manuscript entitled "And Gone Tomorrow" in the nation-wide College Science Fiction Contest sponsored by IF Magazine which closed midnight May #th. His story was judged best among those submitted by amateur writers in colleges all over America in answer to the theme question : "What Will Life in America Be Like # Years From Now?" Second prize of # went to Jack Nelson, of Norwalk, California, a Brigham Young University senior, for his story "Men of Boru". Five runner-up prizes of # each went to the following: Leo Kelley, of Kingston, Pennsylvania, a Wilkes College sophomore, third prize for "Dreamtown, U.S.A."; Lee Holum, of Spokane, Washington, a senior at Whitworth College, fourth prize for "The Third Party"! John R. Arnold, of Rochester, New York, a senior at Cornell University, fifth prize for "One Remained to Question the Gardener" ; Edward D, McHugh, of Holyoke, versity of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah more, Wilkes College, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania worth College, Spokane, Washington Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Senior, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire more, City College of New York, New York City Massachusetts, a senior at Dartmouth College, sixth prize for "Image of God"; Stanley Gleit, of New York City, a sophomore at City College of New York, seventh prize for "It's Really Sirius". Last fall IF Magazine announced its first College Science Fiction Contest to # colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. Students, who had never written professionally, were invited to submit stories, based on their own ideas and interpretations of events today, predicting what life in America will be like # years from now. Prizes of # in cash were offered for the best stories. The idea caught on like wildfire. Here was a chance to draw attention to their own thoughts, tenets, philosophies and moral and political convictions which had been the subjects of classroom discussions and "bull sessions" in fraternity houses and dormitories. Inquiries, ideas and suggestions poured into our offices from all corners of the country. When we finished them we had a pretty clear picture of what the youth of today thinks will be the American Way of Life # years from now. Unfortunately, only a few manuscripts were received from the fair sex and these were eliminated well before the final judging. And we did want to include a pretty coed in our gallery of winners. But -- ! When Jules Verne wrote his imaginative tales about submarines and airplanes, he was accused of writing "fairy tales". These stories by the young people of today are predicted on the same sort of datacum-imagination that prompted Verne to predict a future filled with mechanical and technical marvels. Perhaps, in these winning manuscripts, there is much indicated and predicted that will become actuality in # years. Predictions that covered almost every aspect of our society from religion and philosophy to biology and technology made the choice of winners an intensely interesting and very difficult problem. But the choice was finally made; and here are the winners, with what they predict, fiction-wise, for America and the world to come: "And Gone Tomorrow" Andy Offut was born in Louisville, Kentucky twenty years ago. After what he terms a very conventional childhood, he made his bid for unconventionality by skipping his senior year at high school and entering the University of Louisville on a Ford Scholarship in #. Now a senior studying for an AB, he's majoring in English and psychology, and has had a smattering of everything else from math and philosophy to French and political science. He has also found time to be Secretary of the Student Council, house manager and assistant pledge master of his fraternity, editor-in-chief of one school paper and columnist and assistant editor of the college weekly. He was recently initiated into Pi Delta Epsilon, national journalism fraternity. He also spends twenty hours a week as "chief flunky" with an advertising agency and another ten hours a week as a clothing salesman. As if all this wasn't enough to fill up his time, Andy's hobbies sound like a full time job in themselves. He draws and writes an "uncomical comic strip", writes a biting and satirical advice-to-thelovelorn column, plays poker and bridge, and reads science fiction and Roman history. The future includes a job in Uncle Sam's army, then a career in advertising or public relations. And Gone Tomorrow forsees a world wherein government has reverted to a complete autocracy. In a very literal sense, the time of Julius Caesar has returned in the person of an Italian dictator whose legions and centurions are ruling the world. There is one ruler, one capital, one army, one language, one nationality, one world, one religion. There is time travel, there are locks that open when "recognizing" fingerprints, there are telephones that recognize voices. There are self-shaping sandals, air baths, ever-running chronometers, ro-jet cars that hug the road like a magnet but can sprout wings and fly, and cyanide pellet guns that kill instantly without pain or maiming. Cigarettes have been outlawed as detrimental to health and there is no insurance. The trial marriage system in effect works so well that there are never any divorces. The story that Mr. Offut tells concerns a young man of today, who is whisked one hundred years into the future, and a political truth which he discovers : "there is no perfect government." Mr. Offut's story will appear in the next issue of IF. Watch for it. "Men of Boru" years old, single, and was born in Artesia, California. His family moved to nearby Bellflower, and he attended Excelsior High School where, according to Jack, he learned to chase girls and to throw a reverse body block in football. It was here, too, that Jack was stricken with the malady that has confined him to a wheel chair for the last five years... His hobbies are hunting and fishing -- which he does from a wheel-chair. That handicap hasn't bothered him much though; he's gotten his deer each season for the last three years, plus innumerable rabbits and ducks. And he manages to get his limit of trout quite often by fishing from a rubber raft. After high school, he went to Fullerton Junior College and while taking a writing course there won the California Junior Colleges award for creative writing. At Brigham Young University, from which he graduated this June with a Bachelor of Arts degree, he majored in journalism, was sports editor of the paper, did quite a bit of work in political science and history, won a medal for rope climbing and two other medals for the men's yearly literary award. He's sold magazines, picked fruit, worked in a dairy, been an electrician's helper and a reporter on a daily paper. For the immediate future Jack wants nothing more than to work on a newspaper for a while -- one "where a fellow can whistle when he wants." Men of Boru pictures a future where most of the American people live in underground cities. Fear and a desire for security have driven them into an almost mindless slavery under a "Leader". People sleep when they're told, wake when they're told, eat when and what they're told, and work at a job arbitrarily assigned to them. Each person lives alone, and women mate only with the "Leader's" chosen representatives. Children are cared for by the "Leader's" nurses from the day of their birth. Salt is the highest of luxuries, and mechanically induced dreams are the only recreation. Those who rebel against such slavery are sterilized and brainwashed and forced to live outside on the surface of the Earth. There are a few men who never succumbed to the need for security and who live lives of freedom in the world outside. This is the story of those free men and their efforts to bring the ant-like people of the cities back to reality. Mr. Nelson's story will appear in the January issue of IF, published in November. "Dreamtown, U.S.A." years old and has lived all twentyfive of those years in Kingston, Pennsylvania where he was born. A sophomore at Wilkes College, Wilkes Barre, he is working toward the Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English. Coupled with his interest in English and literature is an equally strong interest in psychology, subjects which he feels will help him reach his goal of professional writer. After leaving high school he held sundry, short-lived jobs in various parts of the country. He has worked as a concessionaire at seashore resorts, as dishwasher in restaurants, and as a freight handler and window trimmer in department stores. One year was spent sailing the seas in . the Merchant Marine. Italy, Nova Scotia and Venezuela were on the itinerary that year. A childhood ambition to join the circus was realized to some degree when Leo brought to life a clown marionette called "Candy", which he operates nightly on a television program in Wilkes Barre. He'd been working with marionettes for years, ever since the fifth grade. Between high school and the Army he toured professionally with the Meredith Marionettes presenting "Pinocchio" for school children. His tour of duty with the Army Signal Corps was spent in the States. The G.I. Bill and some money saved from the seafaring days are paying his way through college. With two more years of school ahead and a nightly T.V. show, he expects to be kept pretty busy, but hopes, nevertheless, to continue his writing. A world where every effort is bent to the pursuit of pleasure and sensation is the tomorrow of Dreamtown U.S.A. Drugs are a casual everyday part of living, clothes are decorative and brief. There are moving sidewalks, invigorating and soothing rays which relieve tension and hangovers. Each home has a dimensional theater and a ceiling television screen, and parties are an all day and an all night event. Schools of all kinds have been abolished and children are sent to big, bright playgrounds where the biggest buhy is considered the "prize" pupil. All books have been burned, and a person who is caught reading one is a subversive. A council is the protector and provider and producer, and as long as there are parties, pleasures and drugs no one cares who or what the council may be. There are some rebels outside the city; people who remember the dignity of learning, the wonder of books and art, who feel that life has more to offer than pleasure and sensualism. This is the story of the rebels and their fight to capture the city and tO give back man's dignity to those caught in the web of hedonism. Dreamtown, U.S.A. will appear in the February issue of IF, "The Third Party" three years ago in the town of Wolf Point, Montana, located in the northeastern corner of the state ; but has spent most of his life in the Pacific Northwest. He completed the work for his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at Whitworth College this year. He had a paper route while in grade and high schools, and the money saved from that paper route paid his first semester at college. Since then he has earned his way by working in a dairy bottling plant during summer vacations. Lee says his only hobby is reading science fiction which he does "voraciously". He started to read it in his junior year in high school and has been doing more and more of it ever since. His favorite authors are Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Although the BS is now an accomplished fact, he plans to start work on his master's at New Mexico Highlands University this fall, with a major in organic chemistry. Research is the real love of his life and Lee Holum hopes fervently that the government or some private industry will come up wdth a job in that field when he's ready to start a career. The Third Party envisions a future in which the moon has been reached and colonized, where the arctic is honeycombed with underground cities, and weather station satellites circle the Earth. Rocket ships are a common mode of travel and there are convertiplanes, conveyor sidewalks, self-molding chairs and electrically heated clothes. The movie industry is a thing of the past, with television providing all entertainment. Chicago is the North American capital, the U.S.S.R. is gone, split into tiny, constantly warring states. The United States after a severe economic collapse, has risen again as part of the North American Republic. There is an Asian Commonwealth, a South American Republic, an Arctic League, a Baltic Federation and a very powerful League of Islam which had gained much stature after the collapse of Russia and the United States. This is the story of political intrigue and attempts by the League of Islam to start a war of destruction between the North and South American Republics; and of the one man, an eminent scientist, who is the focal point in the conspiracy. The Third Party will appear in the March issue of IF. "One Remained to Question the Gardener" Arnold was born in New York City. High school math and science stimulated a desire to be an engineer, and a scholarship made a course in electrical engineering at Cornell University the next obvious this year, after a five year program. The liberal electives that he found time for stimulated a new interest in writing, and writing about the frontiers of science "just sort of came naturally". Participating in almost all sports is his hobby; but wrestling is the only one that he takes seriously. He plans to continue as an amateur athlete in the hope that he may someday place in a national tournament. The immediate future is pretty vtell mapped out for John. He's a reserve officer in the Army Ordnance Corps, but has received a year's deferment to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. He's been accepted by Bell Labs for their Communications Development Program, which is the equivalent of graduate study in electrical engineering. Writing is harder than he thought it would be; but John finds that it has forced him to think more deeply and to discover more about himself; and that is enough of a reason to prompt him to plan to go on writing whenever he can find the time. One Remained To Question the Gardener has an America of the future run by electronic brains and computers. Factories, weather bureaus, social insurance -- all that men can feel, taste, see or be affected by in a physical sense is effortlessly controlled by computers. Research laboratories are the center of all human effort. i.Music, art and literature have flourished in this leisure society. Women have reached a state of complete independence. Cooking and cleaning are done by machines, unborn children are carried only three months instead of nine, there is compulsory education from the cradle through college. Cities are deserted by il but career women, and the men have retired to athletic lodges or clubs. This is the story of a new computer which begins to infringe on personal philosoness to be led and controlled on this level too, and of the one man who determines that he will stand by his beliefs and help man transcend the machine. One Remained to Question the Gardener will appear next spring. "Image of God" in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in #, and has had his heart set on being an M.D. ever since. He entered Dartmouth in #, after getting his primary and secondary education in the local schools, and this June was awarded an AB in chemistry and zoology. Summer vacations provided experience as a bus boy, waiter, mail carrier and ditch digger. While marking time between graduation and entering Georgetown Medical School he is working at a local brewery. To while away the hours between chemistry-zoology and ditch digging he explores the "dark mysteries of magic" and gives performances of the art of prestidigitation for church groups, children's parties, etcetera. Photography is another of his sidelines, and developing and printing his own pictures and those of his friends takes up a good part of his spare time. That Medical degree he wants so much has even been the reason for Ed's writing. While at Dartmouth, he discovered that he would need at least two full years of English in order to qualify as a candidate for a medical school. He had already had one year, and a friend suggested some courses to complete the necessary two. A socalled creative writing course was among the suggestions and Ed blindly wandered into it, took it, found he liked it very much. Image of God pictures an America in the grip of an autocracy. It is a world without wars, where Negroes have been exterminated to avoid friction, where all printed matter has been confiscated and burned and where man has been reduced to the level of the machine. Radiation sickness has been conquered but mutations crop up in the succeeding generations, and mutants are hunted down like animals. There are electo guns that paralyze or kill, backjets that can be worn by men and so enable them to fly, and any thinking, above the mindless machine level, is done by members of a world federation which rules the Earth. There are men with a desire for freedom and self-government who have banded together in an underground to revolt against the tyranny that oppresses man. McHugh tells the story of a hunted mutant with a desire to live like other men who finds kinship with the rebels and joins them in their fight for liberty and equality and the right to tread the Earth as an accepted human being. Image of God will appear in IF next spring. "It's Really Sirius" est of our winners. He was born in New York City nineteen years ago, and has been a staunch resident of the Bronx ever since. He has always been interested in design and construction and majored in art and architecture in high school. After graduation he decided to enter engineering school at the College of the City of New York so that he might combine the fields of engineering and architecture. In the fall he will be entering his junior year at college, still working toward a Bachelor of Science in ( Continued on page #) Illustrated by Paul Orban To love your wife is good; to love your State is good, too. But if it comes to a question of survival, you have to love one better than the other. Also, better than yourself. It was simple for the enemy; they knew which one Aron was dedicated to... T he thunder of the jets died away, the sound drifting wistfully off into the hills. The leaves that swirled in the air returned to the ground slowly, reluctantly. The rocket had gone. Aron Myers realized that he was looking at nothing. He noticed that his face was frozen into a meaningless smile. He let the smile slowly dissolve as he turned to look at his wife. She was a small woman, and he realized for the first time how fragile she was. Her piquant face, framed by long brown, flowing hair, was an attractive jewel when set on the plush cushion of civilization. Now her face, set in god-forsaken wilderness, metamorphosed into the frightened mask of a small animal. They were alone. Two hunian beings alone on this wild, lonely planet. Aron's mind suddenly snapped from that frame of reference -- his subjective view of their position -- to the scale of galaxies. It was a big planet to them, but it was a marble in the galaxy that man had discovered and claimed, and was now fighting with himself to retain. This aggrewracked with the violence of war, where marbles were more expendable than the microbes that dwelt on them. The two walked hand in hand away from the meadow where the ship had been. The feeble wind snuffled at the scraps of paper and trash, the relics of man's passing. They walked up the hill to their station, the reason for their being on this wayside planet. Aron thought about the scenery around them. The compact, utilitarian building that was the station did not seem out of place against the bleak landscape. The landscape did not clash or conform to its location -- it just didn't give a damn whether there was a building there or not. Aron and Martha, his wife, took their time. They had an abundance of that elusive quantity known as time at this lonely outpost. The trail up to the station was rough, with rocks and weeds tearing at them. Aron resolved that that would be one of his first projects, to put in a good path to the meadow where the rocket would come for them -- five years from now. The sunset did nothing to enhance the countryside. There was not enough dust in the air to create any striking colors. As the shadows began to lap at the hill, they hurried the last few steps to the building. That evening they were both nervous, justifiably so, for not only were they starting on the questionable adventure of sequestered watchdogs on the planet, they were starting the adventure of marriage. Aron had met Martha on Tyros, a planetary trade center of some importance. She was a waitress. Since he was marking time on Tyros, waiting for his assignment, he had a chance to cultivate her acquaintance. On their dates, what he had to tell her about his life was brief, impersonal. Aron was in the Maintenance division of the Territorial Administration and his duties were to hold posts on various planets and act as an observer of that planet's caprices. The rush of mankind from Earth, like a maddened swarm of bees from a hive, had carried it through the galaxy in a short time. On all the discovered planets that had to be reserved for future inhabitants, the Territorial Administration had set up observation stations. The men posted there were merely to record such fascinating information as meteorological and geographical conditions. When the time came to expand, the frail little creatures with the large brains and larger egos would know the best havens for migration. Another reason for these stations was the war. When man had flung himself madly at the galaxy, he had diffused himself thinly over a macroscopic area. Some almost isolated colonies had developed the inevitable thirst for independence. From local but violent wars between colonies, some semblance of order had been wrought. Now there were two sprawling interstellar empires, the United Empire -- Aron and Martha were citizens -- and the People's Republic. Since Aron's realm relied on industrial technology and agriculture and the People's Republic based its economy on mining and trade, there seemed to be plenty of room for consolidation. Unfortunately this consolidation, or even peaceful trading, was not possible, due to the fact that the two dominions had entirely different forms of government and religion. The result was, as always, war. These were the general facts that both Aron and Martha knew. What Aron discussed with his fiance were the effects of this macropolitiCal situation upon their personal lives. The previous posts that Aron had held in the TA were planets in the interior of the United Empire. During his stay on Tyros, he received the assignment he expected. It was a post on the fringe of the empire, a planet called Kligor. These stations of the fringe served dual purposes, not only their usual function of planetary observation but as military outposts to warn and halt any attempted invasion. When he heard this assignment, Aron proposed, holding up to Martha the prospect of comfortable living in civilization once the five year hitch on Kligorwas over. She consented -- not really knowing if she loved him or not. They had been married the day they left. The space ship was so crowded there was no chance for privacy, so the two had no honeymoon till they reached the station. on Kligor in what was autumn on the planet, for the seasons were consistent in all hemispheres. Aron planned to spend a week at the station with his wife and then begin a planetary check of the various automatic observation stations that compiled the meteorological and other data and. relayed it by radio to the main station. This check had to be completed before snow came to the planet. In that week they learned about each other. Neither of them was young and both were mature and prosaic enough to develop the daily routine of a long-married couple. There were many free hours which they would spend talking about themselves. To Martha, marriage was not new. She had experienced matrimony before. Her husband, a gambler, had killed himself after a bad loss, leaving her with an impossible burden of debt and a disillusioned mind. Since then she had worked, gradually paying off his debts. When Aron had come along, she liked the big man and thought that the years on Kligor would give her respite from a demanding reality. Ste did not. picture herself as a tragic figure but rather as merely compefent-and stable, not realizing that that attitude in itself is a sure sign of instability. A smile seldom found her face. She was slightly nervous with a tendency towards moodiness. Aron's history was not so bitter. He was born in a large family and had formed an aloof, reserved nature to achieve a sense of individuality in the group. His life had been spent in government work and he had never tasted the variable brew of the nuptial cup till he met Martha. He was not a deep man in emotion. His nature was such that he had to be constantly occupied with something -- not the frenzied scurrying of insecure individuals- -- but a solid problem that he could work out. A project that he could carefully shape with a keen analytical mind or capable hands. They did not think of each other in terms of these thumbnail sketches, but merely watched and observed -- and adjusted to each other. Their marriage was almost one of convenience, with just enough affection involved to oil over any disputes. The spell of the planet gradually lulled them into hypnotic acceptance of their sequestered lives. Their daily duties became the only things worth thinking about. Aron learned about the planet in the next two months on his tours of inspection. He used a small atmosphere flier to cover the various posts scattered over its surface. The small blockhouses were automatic and hermetically sealed to preserve the instruments, but something could go wrong and then it was his job to fix it. As for the military defense system of Kligor, that was also automatic but not Aron's responsibility. It was a series of artificial satellites on the rim of the planetary system, with long-range detecting and tracting systems that would activate and co-ordinate firing mechanisms to blast any ship from the void. It was Aron's duty to de-activate them with a control in his station if he was signalled by a pre-arranged code from a friendly United Republic ship. That was all he had to, or could, do with them. The planetary stations were all in good shape except for minor repairs, which Aron attended to with the quiet joy of a man who loves machinery. He was home sooner than expected and just in time. The next day it began to snow. The weather had opposite effects on the people in the station. Aron, long used to such confinements, settled down and began reading some of the great mass of books which he had brought, or working painstakingly on hobbies. Martha grew more distraught as the snowbound months went by. The wild enthusiasm of her youth had left her, but she was not stoic enough to take the long confinement and inactivity. She tried to pick arguments, but Aron wouldn't argue. She tried to get interested in some time-consuming hobby, but she lacked the patience. Spring finally came. On the first nice day MarAa went on a long walk to watch the few flowers that Kligor boasted push their fragile buds into the air. Aron spent the day working on the path and the clearing that was a spaceport. When night came, he was alone at the station. Aron waited up all night, knowing it would be futile to search in the dark, not knowing in which direction or how far she had gone on her stroll. Aron was not too worried, since there were no dangerous animals. She was probably lost or had a sprained ankle, in which case she would have the sense to find a sheltered place and be safe for the night. When morning came he began searching. He used the atmosphere flier to cruise over the nearby country. Up and down hillsides he flew the craft, gliding slowly at a low altitude. He stopped over clumps of bushes for a careful scan, occasionally roaring towards what looked like a piece of cloth, but always turned out to be a bright stone. When he found her, he knew before he landed. She was sprawled at the bottom of a high cliff. She was not pretty any more. She wasn't even a live animal, just dead flesh lying there, smeared with blood and covered with tattered clothes. Aron remained in a stage of pre-shock, a state of cold clear rationality, until he had taken her back to the station, dug a grave and buried her. He wasn't sad, it was just a job to be done. This wasn't his wife he was burying. It wasn't until that evening that the fact of her death penetrated and was accepted by his mind. T he next few days were spent in routine actions. Aron relied on his usual anodyne -- work. The pathway and the meadow were filled with cement by the end of the fifth day. He let his stunned mind become wrapped in the problem of completing this job -- the weight of the shovel in his hand, the heat of the sun on his back -- these were what he thought about. It was not a solution or even escape, just a stall. The sixth day brought a visitor. The shock of someone knocking at the door, walking in, introducing himself and sitting down to talk yanked Aron's mind into awareness. The only way to achieve a landing would be for a friendly ship to signal him and have him deactivate the defenses -- which definitely had not happened! Therefore it was hallucination, a miracle, or at least an interesting trick that this man had appeared at his station. Aron took interest, demanding that the man start from the beginning again as he had missed the introductions due to slight surprise. "I said I am Karl Rondwell, an agent and representative of the People's Republic, being a member of the Intelligence department of her imperial navy," the man replied. "The first question is, naturally," Aron said, "How the Hell did you get here?" A slight smile. "Your muchvaunted defenses that are supposed to be able to snuff out the mightiest fleet, these defenses are easy to pass -- for one man." Aron could see that easily enough. "What is your purpose here then?" "A deal, naturally!" "I imagined so. You will have to persuade me, because you can't remove me and take over those defenses. Lack of knowledge of the proper code would trip you up when our United Empire ships came snooping around as they do so often." "Since we understand the rules of the game," the enemy agent said, "let's proceed with It. "Let me begin with a discussion of civilization. You may have forgotten something about it in your secluded life here." The agent went on to speak of civilization, its comforts. Since he was a spy, he had spent a good deal of time in the United Republic. He spoke in terms of a man with money, the plush night spots, the beautiful girls that would be only too glad to be friendly with a wealthy man. "All right," Aron interrupted him. "That's clever oratory, but money isn't all I'll take to sell out my empire. What else have you to offer, and remember, I'm not buying -- just looking." The agent made his case stronger by comparing plush civilization to the futile hermit's existence of a TA observer, throwing in a few remarks about the brevity of one's life to be wasted in such a barren pastime as five years in solitary confinement. When he began talking about a comfortable married life in a civilized community, he noticed Aron growing distraught. "Why does talk of marriage so disturb you?" he asked. Aron looked at him with a sneer in his eyes, "You must know, you check your victims before you begin your Judas acts." With a rueful grin, the agent replied, "That is one place our agents can't penetrate, your Personnel Records Office. You, being a hard man to know, have made very few acquaintances that we could approach to get your history." Silence. Then Aron said, "All right, here's a bone I'll toss you. You may use it, I don't give a damn! "My wife died five days ago on this planet." He said it with vehemence, probably imagining by some twist of thought that he was shocking, hurting the enemy agent, whereas he actually was deliberately shocking himself. Masochism. "Your wife?" the agent was amazed. "I didn't know your TA observers took wives with them." 'Til bet you didn't know. Though, most of them don't, come to think of it." The agent relaxed, lighted a cigarette -- an ancient habit that cropped up in all eras. "Men can take it," he began quietly. "Women are different. They can take it if they want to, but it's hard to find the right woman; and even then she must want to take it by being with the man she loves, or perhaps it is psychological -- martyring themselves to gain a subtle control of that man, which they all want to do. "When you get a woman who can't, or doesn't want to take it, she can pull a beautiful crack-up. Without friends to appreciate her martyrdom, with a husband who refuses to acknowledge it, she sometimes uses the supreme martyrdom to gain recognition." "Instinct tells me to slug you in the teeth," Aron said, "but apathy forbids me." "Couldn't it be that you refuse to slug me because you want me to keep talking? Because you recognize the truth, that your wife committed suicide because of the loneliness and now your devotion to state has become meaningless? 'The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away' was the old maxim, but 'the State only taketh away" is the new." There was more talk and some drinking, for the agent had conveniently brought some choice liquor. The next morning, after they had arisen from where they had fallen asleep in a stupor, the agent proposed his plan. With the disgust and despair of the hangover, the agent's biting attack on his pride and his state, Aron listened, Later the agent was no longer die enemy, but a partner in a deal. T he next week the ships came. T wenty-seven proud cruisers of the People's Republic; also troop and supply ships. They landed in the broad valley on the main continent of Kligor, twenty miles from Aron's station. The professional fighters emerged from their tools of war, the dull hulls of the ships and the dark uniforms lapping up the pleasant sunshine. The only reflection was from the polished bits of metal that hung at their sides, bits of metal that could spit destruction in ten different forms. They looked at the planet but did not see it, it was just their newly gained base. They did not see the poignant beauty of the seemingly senescent hills covered with wisps of green and bathed in blazing sunshine. They only saw strategic positions, avenues of approach and tactical advantages. The pebble had become a pawn. War had come to Kligor, The slow, subtle weavings of individual threads of human psychology were ripped and snarled as the Mass Effort took over. Conferences were held, land surveyed, machinery trundled from the cavernous holds of supply ships and the base was begun. To, the cadence of barked orders, shuffling feet and grinding, pounding, thumping machinery, the buildings rose, the men moved in. There was the usual bustle of a new military operation, the normal tension of a top-secret operation, the usual bungling and mix-up of supplies. But there was a slightly different attitude toward the gradually growing base. This was not a standard military location, one that had existed for years, or an enemy one that had been capture, or even a piece of ground that had been paid for in blasted hulks and smashed bodies. This gain was by treason. Naturally then, the men felt contempt for the operation and their contempt was manifested in sloppiness. The commanding officers would ordinarily have become raging martinets at such lax discipline and slovenliness, but the taint and contempt of treasonous gain was upon them also. This contempt was displayed openly whenever the Traitor came to the base. Weak egos must be flattered by derision of others. They would have killed him as a matter of course, if he hadn't been clever enough to refuse to relinquish the secret codes which allowed the friendly ships to pass. Torture was obsolete, for hypnosis allowed a victim to die before he could reveal secret information. He came every week to get free supplies and have conferences with the Intelligence men. The Traitor would walk the freshly-laid sidewalk boldly, his head up, his eyes flashing about to take in every new building. The soldiers hazed him, spitting at him, bumping into him, glaring and swearing at him ; but he always reciprocated with such a withering look of contempt that they soon grew tired of the sport. The worst day for the Traitor, alias Aron Myers, was when he went into the Soldier's Club to quench his thirst of a hot day. Since it was a week-end and there was nowhere to go on what few week-end passes were given, the Club was packed. In the dimmed-light atmosphere, the black uniforms made the place seem filled with vagrant and ominous shadows with white faces. The noise was almost unbearable and Aron had a mind to leave. He was confronted by a group of these shadows. They were all the same, indistinguishable in their identical uniforms, crew-cuts and young, arrogant faces. "Hello Mr. Myers," one of them said. "Won't you join us in a drink?" When he started to demur, they interrupted, "But we insist, Mr. Myers." One took him by an arm and led him to a table. "After all," they said as the drinks came up, "We owe you at least a drink for giving us such a nice new base and everything, now don't we." It was sarcasm, and hammy sarcasm at that, Aron thought. He recognized the situation as another case of hazing, but this time by a group of soldiers made even more obnoxious and bellicose by the liquor in their guts. "You don't owe me anything," Aron said, "I gave it to you for my own reasons and not for money." Sure enough, they even came out with the corny laughter. He let them play out their little satire without protest. Their grandiose courtesy towards him, the toasts drunk in his honor. That is, until one of them, more drunk than the others, said, "Mr. Myers, I hope you don't mind my telling you, but you are a -- The epithet was a new slang word but its vileness stemmed from prehistoric days. Aron replied with blazing eyes. "I can't insult you back and you know it. I don't want to be killed that badly. All I can say is: "Who are you to judge me? You are blind little men in a cage trying to judge someone on the outside. "Your hearts and minds have been forged in the crucible of duty and battle. You live for your uniforms and the distinction those uniforms bring you. You live to #ght and die, to spend your spare time in dank, noisy holes like this. Drinking and lying to each other about your adventures and lovelife. "Then you try to judge galactic politics and the decisions of a man caught up in the rip tides of these politics, when all you know is your own vicious lives. You are traitors as much as any man, for you have sacrificed your normal lives to dedicate yourself to the violent deadend of a soldier of space. "Yes, you know what I am talking about, the Fermi radiations! The hard radiations of space that make every person who stays in space any length of time a sure candidate for an early grave. "You're young now, so terribly young, only twenty or so years old in a possible life-span of a hundred years. "You are traitors to yourselves by rejecting this life-span for a few brief years of glory as a soldier, then a slow decay for ten years till you are in a grave at thirty or forty. "Your motto ought to be, 'live fast, fight hard, die young and have a radiation-rotted corpse'. "And yet you condemn a man because he tries to seek a few comforts from an uncomfortable, implacable universe." They didn't get it. They never get it, he thought ruefully. They continued in their cat and mouse game until they realized the mouse refused to be terrified, then they let him go. During the next few weeks, someone started the rumor that the Traitor was actually a native of the People's Republic who had been trained and then planted in the United Empire's T A to do this job for Intelligence. The soldiers quickly believed it and almost came to respect the Traitor. F rom the way that the Intelligence officers freely talked about classified information with him in his weekly visits, Aron was aware that they would probably kill him once his usefulness was over. He was devising ways, though, to get around that at the last minute. From this knowledge that had been blatantly tossed in front of him, he knew how strategic Kligor was in the stalemated war between the empires. The People's Republic now had a fair-sized striking force based there, so that when an all-out offensive, which was scheduled in a few weeks, started, this hidden force could attack United Republic's squadrons from the rear and be doubly effective because of surprise. So the weeks trotted by, the soldiers' camp expanding daily as the Traitor let the supply ships through the barrier. There are moods in war just as in people. This was a crucial point, the People's Republic had gained a slight edge by its gain on Kligor. So the usual pitch of anticipation was infused with the higher excitement of a sure victory. The days were slipping furtively away as the Kligor garrison gathered itself together, crouched and got ready to spring into blind, violent action on the big day. The laughter of the soldiers was tinged with nervous hysteria, but when they thought of that grim array of defense satellites, with its all-seeing eyes, its electronic brain, its steel guts and large parcel of hell in its fist, all this United Empire strength protecting them, their laughter grew louder and more sincere. Aron thanked providence that Kligor didn't have any moons. This particular night called for every ebony patch of darkness that he could find. He was on a nocturnal visit to the base, not using his flier. He knew there were guards posted near his station that would notify the camp when this craft was used. Slipping out the night before and avoiding the guards, Aron had begun the twenty mile hike to the base. As he neared the base his precautions increased, his speed decreasing proportionately. Avoiding the outer ring of guards was easy, as they were spaced far apart. Moving in undetected, through the tigr nets of guards around the camp, required the skill and patience of a feline. That this base should have foot soldiers patrolling the ground around it seemed absurd on the face of it, especially to the men who had to do it. The planet was uninhabited and their only worry was from the skies above where the TA satellites defended them. The Intelligence officers knew better. They knew how easily one man could slip through these defences. One man at a time, for several weeks, and a sizable ground force could be built up in sorne remote spot on Kligor. It was a long shot probability, but it was their duty to protect against such a probability destroying what they had achieved. There was also a traitor, one of those fluctuating spineless things, loose on the planet -- a clever man who couldn't be trusted by anyone. This lack of trust was justified as Aron crawled and inched his way through the last circle of sentries. His whole body was a detecting device, listening for footsteps, watching for dim figures in the dark, even his nose was waiting to detect the odor of a cigarette. According to the paper he had been lucky enough to read in the Intelligence offices when they weren't looking, he knew the Captain of the guards should be making an inspection about then. The seconds hung suspended, reluctant to pass, and Aron waited. The Captain finally showed up, walking briskly, a smile on his face. This smile was rudely erased and all future occasions for smiles removed by a swiftly moving figure that plunged a knife into his throat before his mind could translate the .# shock into a cry of alarm. More movement on the path and a new Captain of the guards emerged, walking just as briskly, but in a new direction. The People's Republic's base occupied the narrow end of the valley, with a canyon entrance serving as the ape.x of the triangle it covered. Near this apex were the buildings, the dozens of barracks and administrative buildings, all dwarfed by the massive concrete warehouses set around them against the hills. In these warehouses were the fuel, food and munitions of the enemy. Below these buildings were the ships, first the rows of the # warships and then the # or so cargo and troop ships. These supply ships made up the base of the triangle. From the air these ships looked like a tiny forest of needles stuck upright in the ground, but from close range on the ground, where Aron walked in the captain's uniform, they were mammoth towers of steel -- again, a matter of scale. He emerged from the sentry lines near the cargo ships. These were all sealed and unoccupied and he passed the rows of them without a glance. It was a long walk, for the ships were hundreds of feet apart. The open field where they rested had the rough ground of a meadow, making his attempted military stride more of a burlesque jerky gait while he tried not to stumble. There was a guard outside the airlock of each of the warships, for the crews remained aboard constantly. These guards were standing around talking to friends or moving restlessly about. The sentries saluted Aron as he marched by, for they could see the brass on his uniform gleaming in the dark. He found what he wanted, a group of four guards talking by one airlock. They snapped to attention as he approached. The base had expanded so rapidly, with new units and men being shifted constantly, that Aron counted on the men not knowing exactly who the Captain of the guards should be. All the sentries knew was the insignia of the Captain was before them and the man who wore them was to be obeyed. His orders sent a chill of alarm through them. He said he had received a report of someone slipping through the guards and moving among the cargo ships. Since the soldiers were needed to patrol, he wanted these men to gather all the warship guards together and search the area of the cargo ships. In answer to the question in their eyes, he said he knew the warships would be unguarded but he was ordering a special detail to replace them immediately. The four dispersed and, in a few minutes, all of the lock guards had left their posts and were moving down to the cargo ships. Time was the critical element now. Aron had taken a terrific chance by donning the Captain's uniform, but he had pulled off the bluff and now he had to capitalize on it -- fast! While the ship sentries were on their futile search, he ran from ship to ship, jumped into the open airlocks and worked quickly with pliers and a screwdriver. It was a little trick that he had learned from a talkative spaceman in a bar many years ago. It. worked on any ship. Disconnect a tiny spring, cut a wire, and it was impossible to close the massive airlock door. Aron wanted very badly to have those doors stay open. Twenty-seven ships, hundreds of feet apart. He was on his last five when the search was abandoned and the sentries began returning. He hoped they would react normally, taking their time, dragging their feet and talking to each other in disgust about the wild goose chase. On the last two ships he had to use different tactics. The sentinels had returned. When he walked up to them, they came to attention sullenly, waiting the chance to deride the usual stupidity of the soldiers and their Captain. Instead, they had their throats cut. Finishing the last airlock, Aron then walked through the post. Right up the main street he strode, his heart in his throat but his step and demeanor firm. The time of night helped him, for there were few soldiers about that might recognize him, and what few patches of light were thrown out from windows and doors, were quickly swallowed by the black maw of darkness. Up the main street, past the barracks, towards the last warehouse at the head of the valley. The two pillars of rock that marked the opening of the canyon served as a background for the massive blank walls of this warehouse. At the little door set in the center of the front wall there was a sentry. He was grumbling to himself about having .to do such a damn-fool thing as guard a warehouse when there wasn't an enemy within light years of the building. He was wrong. And the enemy killed him. Inside the warehouse, there being no lock on the door, Aron groped about in the stuffy, pitch blackness till he came to a little fire station set against a wall. There was a locker containing an insulated suit, hatchet and other firefighting equipment, at this station. He donned the fire-fighting suit and helmet and went to one end of the building that was walled-off. In this separate room was the emergency power supply for the base. There was a turbine with a fuel supply and tiers of high-voltage storage batteries. There was also a fire hose on one wall because of the presence of the combustible turbine fuel. Aron had to pause for a minute to gather his thoughts. He had come so far, so fast through the first steps of his plan and now he was ready for the final action. What Aron now needed for success was three things. Sulphuric acid and salt water in large quantities and the right wind. The first two had been thoughtfully provided by the People's Republic. The third was a matter of waiting. The land on Kligor was dry. What little water supplies were available weren't enough to. maintain a base the size the garrison had built. Since the ocean was only fifteen miles from the valley where the base was located, it was a simple matter to pipe in water. One of the mammoth cargo ships JJ# had been loaded with six inch flexible hose, tougher titan steel, wound on drums. It was a matter of a day's work to fly the ship slowly from the ocean to the base, laying out fifteen miles of this flexible pipe on the ground. It was salt water, then, that was received at the base. Most of it was filtered through a chemical plant in the valley to make fresh water, but it was salt water that was available to the fire hoses for the needed quantity and pressure. The emergency power supply and the fire hoses were only normal safety precautions, but now, in the hands of the Traitor, they became deadly weapons. By pushing the lever that removed the lids from the storage batteries automatically for inspection he had sulphuric acid -- for the law of conservation of energy said fhat man had achieved the highest efficiency of electro-chemical conversion, in practical form, in the lead acid storage battery. After finding the light switch and flipping it on, Aron found this lever and released it. Now all he needed was wind, and he had that, blowing a cool ten miles an hour down the canyon and over the valley. He had to consult the weather maps at his station for weeks to determine the probability of this wind occurring and the weather conditions that produced it. One small breeze to chart, when his recording instruments gave hourly descriptions of the whole planet's climate. It wasn't too hard a job. Yet that breeze had to be at the right time, at night and on the night he wanted. Close enough to the attack date to be effective yet not too soon. Last night his instruments recorded the data that would produce this wind, so he was making his strike tonight. He could not stand and gloat exultantly over his success. There were dead sentries and sprung airlocks that might be discovered. With a twist of a nozzle, the fire hose came to life, throwing a pulsing stream of water on the batteries. What Aron had done by ingenuity, luck, daring and careful planning was finished. It was now nature's turn. T he next night after his one man attack on the base, Aron had a visitor at his weather station. The visitor was in sad shape. His clothing was disheveled, his face dirty and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and he seemed to be on the verge of a mental collapse tvith a frantic gleam to his eye. But he held a pistol in his hand and Aron didn't. He was an officer of the Intelligence Corps of the People's Republic. It was not the officer who had first visited Aron; but one of the others that Aron had come vaguely to know, like picking out sheep from a flock. He had been away from the base on a planetary reconnaissance mission the night before. Since then he had gone through a nightmare ordeal. He had returned to his base to find sixty ships of the People's Republic about to fall into enemy hands without a struggle, because # men were dead or dying of chlorine gas poisoning. The gas that had come pouring ot#' of thewarehouse at the head of the vallto last night. It had billowed down me valley, its streamers and tentaclespushed by the gentle wind bringing the sleeping men awake coughing and gasping only to fall asleep again -- permanently. It had seeped through the barracks, the warehouses and into the open airlocks of ships, while dying men tried frantically to close those locks. They wouldn't close though, and the spacemen died puzzled as to why not. In galactic warfare, with the emphasis on speed, maneuverability, range and power of space cannon, et cetera, everyone had forgotten an archaic weapon -- gas. Aron hadn't. After the horror of this discovery, the Intelligence officer had taken a flier to Aron's station. He was feeling justifiably sorry for himself and his empire's thwarted plans for conquest, now completely impossible since the United Empire had been notified of the impending attack, and since the most strategic part of that attack, the Kligor task force, had been destroyed. His military mind refused to admit that one man, the Traitor, Aron, could have caused this tragic vent his desire for revenge on this one man. Aron was unmoved by his threats and denunciations. The Intelligence man was going to kill him, certainly, but the officer wanted to make him suffer first, to make him squirm. When one man has defeated and completely made fools of a galactic "We weren't stupid enough to try to coerce you with pure logic," the agent was saying to Aron. "We knew you must have a large amount of patriotism to even take such a thankless job as this Kligor post. "There had to be something else, some stronger reason to make you reject your empire." Aron watched him warily. He could tell by the malevolent gleam of the Intelligence man's eye and the sneer that he was playing a trump, that he had a choice bit of information he thought would hurt Aron. All Aron could do was listen. "You came here happily married and full of patriotic zeal," the armed man said. "That way you were no prospect for us. "We changed those conditions by a very simple act. "We killed your wife." The officer watched him like a hungry animal, waiting for the reaction. The reaction was a pitying smile and the following words. "Why don't you sit down. I know you are going to kill me, there's nothing I can do about it and, actually, I don't object. But I would like to say several things first and you might as well be comfortable while I'm talking. "I want to speak my piece mostly to clarify my ideas before death, but also so that you, who will continue to live, will be able to think about them in the future." While the agent sat down with a puzzled look, Aron continued, "That is why, when there is combat between men, it will always be in doubt. Even though one side may be outnumbered, outmaneuvered and have all the military laws of advantage against it, that side can still win. "You have made the one mistake, the perpetual mistake, of combat. You forgot about the psychological factor. The force that can make a man surrender when the odds are with him, or fight like a demon when it is hopeless. "So long as there is war, this psychological factor will make it an even, undecided combat despite all laws of logic. "The psychological factor in this case, the one you overlooked, was that I love my empire more than my wife. She was merely a companion. You wouldn't know that, or the reasons for it, unless you knew my whole life -- and not just the events of my life, my whole psychological life." "Of course we couldn't know that," the enemy agent said, "but we could go on general rules of human behavior, and those rules deny the fact that a man can love a state more than a woman." "What training do you Snooper boys get? You don't even know the rudiments of p.sychology. Intelligence men -- ha! All you know how to do is steal papers, kill in the dark and be suspicious of everyone all the time." In a quieter tone, Aron went on, "It is easy to love a state like a woman, because a State is a woman. "A love for State fulfills all emotional needs. The censorship of yourself by your super-ego, manifested in a desire for repentance or masoschism, this need is effected by dedication such as my lonely watch here. "Your destructive tendencies, half of the love-hate primary drive of life, can be expressed by fighting and destroying an enemy. You can't destroy your wife because of laws, yet everyone wants to. "The other half of the ambivalent drive, your love desire can be committed in a platonic admiration or a patriotic zeal as you call it. "Sure, the State is a woman. It'll kick you around, neglect you and abuse you; but when she rewards you, she does so lavishly. And this, plus the self-satisfaction of having protected her from her enemies and helping her to survive -- this is all the consumatlon of a love affair that a man could want. "I know, what about the physical love? If all your other emotional needs are so well satisfied, you can be happy without that, especially if you're used to it -- " The agent interrupted. Aron knew he was not comprehending what he was saying, the man was still in a state of shock. But Aron knew the words were there, in the man's brain till he died. He could reason them out later. "All right, all right," the agent said, "I am not here to argue philosophy. I just want to know why our plans failed. "Since your wife's death didn't rnake you disillusioned enough to be receptive to treason, weren't you at least impressed with our offers of fabulous wealth and release from this prison?" Aron rose from his chair and walked to the window. He didn't notice the agent and his menacing gun. He didn't care. He looked out at the lifeless sunset of the world that sported the bare minimum of vegetation so it couldn't be insulted with the word "barren". "Just another case of Intelligence men's stupidity," Aron said so quietly that the other man had to lean forward to hear. "Don't you know anything about your own territorial administration or ours? Do you know how they choose their men for these stations?" "No, that isn't our department," was the answer. Aron turned from the window and looked at him, seeming surprised to see him and hear him. "Well, what sort of men would they choose? Where could they get men with the intelligence and ability required to operate one of these stations and cope with situations such as I've faced here? Where would they get such men to recould have amongst, civilization with such capabilities?" "Damn it! Stop playing games. Spill what you've got to say!" Aron looked at him coldly, searchingly, "Since you are attached to the Navy I imagine you've clocked many hours in space." When the agent nodded, Aron said, "Then, if you are lucky and show enough sense, you will become a TA man." Slowly, comprehension came to the Intelligence man. The gim clutched in his hand lowered, his whole body slumped as he caught on to the fact they had overlooked. The fact that caused the failure of their plans. The fact that was his grim future. "Fermi radiations!" Aron barked. "They rot your cells, weaken the blood, ruin the body. A man can spend about five years as a spaceman, about twenty months of which is spent in actual space. Twenty months and the man is doomed. "If the man is smart he can become a space officer, then when he retires at twenty-five, he can land a good job with the TA. He doesn't want anything to do with civilization. That five years has made him love space, love isolation. So, they put out to pasture on wayward planets until they die at thirty-five." It was said with all the bitterness of a condemned man. "What use would I have of your offers, even if they were true. When I finish, or rather, if I had finished my stay on Kligor, I'd only have a few months till I die. Your pleasant little cries of adventure, luxury, women, meant nothing. (Continued on page #) Lt. Jason Jonasse had one more lesson to learn before duty on the Frontiers: that the Past and Future are one, but it is the Future which demands the courage. Illustrated by Ed Emsh of Jason Jonasse that made it difficult for him to understand his fellow man. But mainly, it was his background. His family was of the military. From their native city on Kilbur Two, during the past hundred years or so, had come a steady stream of Jonasses. Mostly, they died, in one way or another, while serving humanity on the Frontier of man's expanding spatial area. Those who did not, won through to advancement and posts of high honor. All, however, without exception, made the first step of transfer from the backwaters of military duty, earning their right to carry their officer's buttons to Glass A Service in the Frontier Zone. It was this transfer that Jason had just received and which was propped now on the toilet shelf beside the shaving mirror in his quarters, where he could feast his eyes on it during the process of trimming the straight black lines of his little mustache, with the aid of that selfsame mirror. The mustache was an index of his character, so essentially Kilburnian, so uncompromisingly military, so uniquely Jonasse. It was the final seal upon his difference, the crown upon his height and the lean good looks of his breed, and the uniform of which tunic cape and boots were custom-tailored. There was no one thing about him which did not set him off from the other officers of this small military garrison on Aster. For this small lost planet out in the Beltane Quadrant was class C duty; and the other officers were Class C officers, as Jason had been, serving his apprenticeship in a sort of police duty, until the blessed arrival of the transfer, welcome as a pardon to a life sentence prisoner. Jason beamed at it, working the clippers carefully over the ends of the mustache, for his baggage was packed and ready for the next courier ship that came and the transfer was his passport to the future. A buzzer rang through his room, and Jason jerked at the unexpected suddenness of the sound. For a split-second the clippers slipped, chopping a little, ragged v out of the top line of the mustache, a v unfortunately beyond the ability of any clipping to disguise and anything but time to mend. For a moment, Jason stared at its reflection in the mirror. Then he cursed, threw down the clippers and thumbed the switch of the intercom. "Officer Five Jonasse here," he said. "Headquarters, Chief Troopman Basker, Sir," said the Speaker. "The Commandant would like you to report to his office right away. Officer." "It'll be right there. Chief." "Right, sir." Scowling, Jason buttoned his tunic and clipped his cape about his shoulders. There was no good reason why the Commandant should want to see him, unless there had been some change in his orders directing the transfer. And if that... Jason clamped down on the speculative section of his mind and left his quarters, hurrying across the drill-ground to the Headquarters Building. Hot sunlight hit him a solid blow as he stepped out of the shade of his quarters. The Timudag, as the plains country of Aster's one large continent was known, broiled during the summer months under a cloudless sky. Jason strode across it and stepped gratefully into the air conditioned coolness of the Headquarter's Building. The Commandant was waiting for him in the outer office. Like Jason, a Kilbumian, but without the Jonasse family tradition of Service, he had won little recognition during his short term of Frontier Class A Service; and, having no prospects to speak of on retirement from that, had fallen back on Class C duty, where the retirement age was much higher. A thin, cold man, he did not particularly like Jason though a scrupulous sense of fairness forced him to admit that the younger Kilbumian was far and away the most valuable of his men, "You messaged for me, sir?" said Jason. The Commandment took Jason's elbow and drew him aside, out of earshot of the troopmen at work at clerical tasks about the outer office. "Something has come up, Jason." Jason felt cold apprehension and hot resentment. But he held it locked within him. "The courier ship has just arrived," the Commandant said. "It brought your replacement -- and another man." The Commandant looked out the window and back to Jason again. "The other man's an officer retired from Class A Service," he went on. "And he carries a request from the General Commander of our Quadrant to give him every assistance in returning home." Jason looked at the Commandant in puzzlement. This was nonsensical. If the man was from Aster, he was already home. If he was not from Aster, why had he come to Aster, to this outlying station to obtain assistance? "I don't understand," he said honestly. "His home," explained the Commandant briefly, "is in the Timumang." derstand. North of the Timudag, on Aster's one large land mass, lay the Timumang, the Mountains of the People. Boulder-strewn upthrust of the continental geosyncline to the north, it housed the degenerate descendants of an early abortive attempt at colonization, four hundred years before the coming of civilization proper to Aster. Wild and suspicious, these forgotten people had backslid to a clan-tribal form of organization. They warred on each other, lived off their inhospitable country in the course of nomadic wanderings, and shunned their latter-day cousins of the lowlands as if they had been plague-ridden. The Timumang ignored the Timudag. Jason had not, in his term of service guarding the Interstellar Message Station and the few raw little towns of the Timudag, been anywhere near the Mountains of the People. Nor, as far as he knew, had any of the other men at the station. But of course he had heard stories. There were other worlds where the tragic accident of too-early colonization had taken place, and the settlers had backslid to savagery or near-savagery. They were the cobwebbed corners that the Central Headquarters on Earth, like a busy housewife, was always planning to do something about and never getting to. From them, every so often, would come the rare case of a degenerate who ran away or escaped from his own people to join the ranks of civilization. Sometimes such men rose to respectable positions. But the tendency of ordinary people was to feel some repugnance toward them -- reminders as they were of the fact that the human race was not completely without exception shooting up the dizzy stairs toward the millenium. "A degenerate!" Jason muttered. "An ex-officer," corrected the Commandant coldly. Jason felt his temper rising, but held it back. He returned to the crux of the matter. "I interrupted you, sir," he said. "Pardon me." "Well," said the Commandant. "He'll need an escort and an officer to command the escort." "You don't mean me, sir?" said Jason, aghast. "My orders -- " "I've no choice," said the Commandant, irritably. "And the delay in your transfer needn't be fatal. I've got no one else I can trust with such a job. He won't take more than twenty men." Jason stared, incredulous. "You can't go into the Timumang with just twenty men," he said, at last. The Commandant snorted. "Come and talk to him, yourself," he said, turning and leading the way toward his private office. "And remember, the Commander General requests our assistance. There's no dodging this." Bitterly, Jason followed him, the sour anger of the betrayed curdling in his stomach. Mere hours from shipping out, they had to send him off on a what sounded like a suicide mission. Not that Jason had any objections to dying, if the time and place were right -- but to be possibly clubbed to death in what amounted to a backyard brawl ! The Commandant ushered him in and a man sitting in one of the easy chairs of the office rose to greet them. He was a curious figure, as tall as the two Kilburnians, but so broad of shoulder and long of arm that he seemed much shorter. In the dark skin of his face, set above flat, heavy cheekbones and beneath pronounced brows, his brown eyes looked out at them with the soft liquidity of an animal. There was something yielding and sad about him. Not guts, thought Jason, harshly, out of the fury of his resentment. No backbone. The Commandant was introducing the two men. Jason shook hands briefly. "Mr. Potter, this is Officer Five Jason Jonasse," said the Commandant. "Jason, this is Mr. Kerl Potter, formerly an Officer Three." "Honored to meet you," said the degenerate. His voice was husky and so deep that he almost seemed to croon the words. "Pleasure is mine," replied Jason briefly and mechanically. "The Commandant tells me you think twenty men is a sufficient escort into the Timumang." "Yes," replied Potter, nodding. "Why, that isn't nearly enough strength," said Jason. "The average dan usually musters at least a hundred fighting men." "I know," Kerl Potter smiled, a warm, but deprecating smile. "I grew up in the Timumang -- or had the Comrnandant told you?" He didn't have to, thought Jason, looking at the man with disgust and disfavor. Aloud he said, "Any single tribe would be more than a match for us." "Please " Kerl held up his hand. "Let me explain." Jason nodded, curtly. "I wish to get back to my own clan -- the Potter Clan," said the dark man. "For that we must go in on foot and search, because the clans move constantly, and from the air -- which would be the quickest way of going -- there is no way to tell which tribe is which. They go to earth when they see a flyer." "I'll admit that -- " began Jason. "So we must go in on foot," continued Potter, his deep voice like distant summer thunder in the office. "We must hunt for campsites until we find Potter sign at one. And then we must trail the clan until we catch up with it." He paused, looking at Jason and the Commandant to see if they understood. "Now," he said, "that means we must go through much Timumang territory. If we are too large a group, the word will go ahead of us and all clans will hide and we will never catch up with the Potters. If we are too few, the first tribe we meet with will destroy us. Therefore the solution is to have enough men to discourage attack, but not enough to frighten the clans into moving out of our way. When we have found the Potter Clan, you can drop me off and call for air 'transport to pick you and the men up and bring you back." Kerl wound up the argument and smiled at Jason as if to soften the young man's opposition with good humor. Jason looked helplessly at the Commandant, who shrugged and looked out the window, washing his hands of the matter. "Look, Mr. Potter," said Jason, turning back to the man and making an effort to be reasonable. "These men of ours are all Class C. They know something of police duty in the towns here, and maintaining order generally. What they know about expeditioning is nothing -- " "You can take your pick of the station, Jason," said the Commander. It was the culminating blow, the stab in the back. Turning to look at his superior officer, Jason realized finally that he was not to be allo-ed to avoid this expedition, nor to alter the conditions of it. For some reason, some intricacy of interbranch politicking, it had become necessary for the General Commander to oblige Kerl Potter and for the Commandant to oblige the General Commander. It struck him as symbolic. As the degenerates were a clog and hamper upon the progress of humanity, here was Kerl Potter, their representative, to be a clog and hamper upon the progress of Jason, representative of the outseeking spirit of Man. His spirit bent under the blow, but pride held his body upright. "Well, thank you. Commandant," said Kerl, turning to the commanding officer. "I'll look forward to leaving tomorrow then." He turned back to Jason. "Until then, sir." "Until then," said Jason, and watched him leave. When the door had shut behind the broad back, he turned once more to the Commandant. "This is unfortunate," said the Commandant, reading his eyes. "But into each life some rain must fall, eh?" Damn him! thought Jason. "Yes sir," he replied woodenly. for the expedition with the same lack of sympathy the Commandant had shown in the choice of Jason, himself. He was curt with the Quartermaster, harsh with Ordnance, and unfeeling toward Transportation. At the end of the day the expedition had been outfitted with turned to his quarters to write a letter to his family on Kilbur Two, explaining that his expected entrance into the realm of glory would be somewhat delayed. "... the duty (he wrote his father, after the usual family wellwishes) is hardly one that I would have wished for at this time. Aside from the fact that I am naturally eager to enter on my Class A assignment at the Frontier, I do not expect to find it pleasant to be cooped up, possibly for weeks, with such a man. Your instincts, I know, would cause you to advise me to treat him with respect for his former rank as an Officer Three. Ordinarily, such respect would be automatic on my part. However, this is no ordinary case. In the first place, he has obviously left the Service long before the earliest age of retirement, which argues a lack of courage, or at least of character. And in the second place, to meet the man is to realize there is. nothingat all to respect about him. And finally (if .any more were needed) the fact that he is turning his back on the competition of civilized life and running back to hide in the stagnant safety of the primitive. If there is one thing that revolts me, it is a lack of courage..." And more in that vein. By the time Jason had filled a couple of micro-reels, he was more resigned, if not reconciled to his task. He got to bed and managed to get to sleep. He awoke to the day's duty. The men were mustered on the drill field under the leadership of Chief Troopman Acy, a non-commissioned officer who had grown up in the foothills of the Timudag to the north, and whose knowledge of local conditions, slight as it was, might prove to be useful. Looking the detachment over, Jason had to admit that if any men from the station could do this job properly, these were the ones. All were fit professionals with more than one hitch to their credit and a few had even had some combat experience. Jason nodded and ordered Chief Troopman Acy to move them over to Transportation. Kerl Potter was waiting for them when they arrived, his dark figure a still monument of patience in the clear morning sunlight. A transport was waiting for them, already loaded with two man cars and supplies. They embarked. The transport flew them to a spot where the foothills gave way to the mountains. Here they landed and transferred all personnel and equipment to the two man cars. When all was ready, Jason signed off the transport and gave the order to mount, taking the lead car himself, with Kerl in the bucket seat beside him. The transparent tops of the cars were shut and the caravan led off up a steep and unmarked valley toward a pass into the mountains. "Now," said Jason, turning to his passenger as they topped the pass. "Where to?" Kerl turned brown eyes to him and away and pointed out and ahead to where a long canyon that lay like a knife slash through the mountains, its further end lost in distance. "North," he said. "Straight north until we pick up sign." Jason nodded and turned the car off in the direction of the canyon. Like obedient mechanical sheep, the cars behind swung through the turn, each in their proper order, and followed him. It was about an hour's run to the beginning of the canyon. From there, the route they were following sloped down and the steep walls rose high and forbiddingly above them. Gazing at this barrenness and the apparent lack of life, with the exception of the stunted bushes clinging in the cracks of the boulders, Jason felt his stomach turn over at the thought of deliberately spending a lifetime, by choice, in such an environment. It would he worse than being dead. It would be hell without a purpose. How did these people live? "Mainly off game," said Kerl beside him ; and, turning with a jerk, Jason realized she had spoken his last thoughts aloud. "There's quite a bit of it. Wild mountain sheep and goats descended from stock the early settlers themselves brought in. Native species, too, of course, but they aren't edible. Only their furs are useful." "I see," said Jason, stiffly. "It's not a bad life when you're used to it," Kerl went on. "You'd be surprised, Jason -- you don't mind me calling you Jason, do you? Seems foolish to be formal when we're cooped up like this -- but if you like the mountains and like to hunt, it can come close to being ideal." Jason had meant to keep his mouth shut; but this last statement was too much. "Exactly," he said, bitterly, "and let the rest of the race take care of you." Kerl looked at him in surprise. "The Peoples of the Mountain don't ask help from others," he protested, mildly. "How about the Frontier?" demanded Jason. "How about the Class A troops that protect the inner worlds like this from attack by some inimical life form?" "What inimical life form?" countered Kerb "We've never run across one intelligent enough to be a threat." "That's no sign there isn't one," said Jason. "Nonsense," said Kerl, but without heat. "The Class A troops have only one real function and that's to clean up planets we want to take over. You know that." "I -- " Jason realised he was getting into the sort of argument he had promised himself to avoid. He bit his tongue and closed his mouth. Two seconds more and he would be telling this man what he thought of degenerates in general. "The mountaineers are a sturdy self-sufficient people," Kerl went on. "They even have a few virtues that are largely lacking in the outside world." "Virtues!" said Jason. His hard-held temper was about to snap when an interruption occurred that saved him from himself. From nowhere there was suddenly the sound of thin, crescendoing screams. Something slapped with sickening violence against the transparent cover of the car, leaving a small grey smudge; and half a second later came the sound of a distant report. "What was that?" Jason snapped. Kerl pointed away and up to the high rim of the canyon where a tiny plume of white smoke rose lazily in the still air. "They're shooting at us," he said. "They use chemical firearms, you know, with solid missile projectiles. We've moved into the area of one of the clans." Jason's hand shot toward the intercom button that would activate the speakers in all the cars behind him. Kerl caught his fingers before they could activate the mike. "Let it go," he said. "That was just a warning to make sure we keep traveling. If they meant to attack they wouldn't give themselves away by shooting from a distance." He pointed at the smudge on the overhead transparency. "No harm to it. The plastic is missile proof." Jason looked at him icily for a minute then continued to reach for the intercom. His fingers touched the button. "All cars," he said, into the mike. "Keep your tops up. There'll be sporadic shooting at us from now on. Kerl smiled a little sadly, and looked away, into the distance of the canyon, winding out of sight ahead. F or a week they searched, always headed north. They traveled by day, barracking at night, sentries posted, and sleepers locked in their individual cars. By night, the stars glittered, cold and frosty and distant, far above the jagged tops of the mountains; and every rattle and slither of falling stone made the sentries jerk nervously and grab their power rifles in sweatdampened hands. By day it was better only because of sunlight and company. The eleven cars jolted and rocked their way down one valley and up the next, moving in single file. From time to time they would run across the cold ashes and litter of an abandoned clan campsite and halt for a few minutes while Kerl prowled about it, sifting the ashes with his finger, sniffing like a huge black bear at any discarded equipment. Then they would rebark and be moving again. Every so often from the cliff tops above them would spurt a little puff of grey smoke and seconds later would come the report of a chemical energy missile jBrearm and the whack and scream of a solid slug as it bounced off the transparent cover of one of the cars. The shooting ground on the nerves, a constant reminder of the unseen, inimical, mountain dwellers waiting just out of sight and reach for something, to happen to the detachment. It was hard on the nerves of the men of the detachment. And it was hard on Jason, chafing at the bit to be free of this degrading duty, faced with the responsibility of holding untested troops to their work, and forced to live cheek by jowl with a man whom training and his own inclinations forced him to despise. It was a situation with explosive potentials. And the first touch of violence brought these out into the open. On their seventh day out and some nine hundred miles north and slightly west of the point at which they had entered the Timumang, they were proceeding down a long narrow valley. To the left, a small stream marked their road for them, clear water singing down the narrow, level throat of the valley. Beyond it, a series of slopes faded up and back to the skyline. To the right, the cliffs rose more steeply, sharp, pitching angles rubbled with boulder and sharp-cornered loose rock. Jason had been guiding the caravan of cars as usual, his hands on the controls, his mind a dozen light years off on the Frontier and the job he had yet to do there. Abruptly he felt a hand on his arm. Yanked abruptly back to the present and the Timumang, he turned with no great pleasure to see Kerl staring at him with a frown line deep-graven between the brown eyes. "What is it?" said Jason. "I've got a hunch," answered Kerl. His deep voice filled the interior of the little car with hollow sound. "I think we ought to turn back." "Turn back?" echoed Jason. "This valley," said Kerl. "I dori't like it. I don't like the feel of it. We could go back and take another one." Jason throttled down the speed of the car but kept it moving forward. "Now let's get this straight," he said, impatiently. "You don't think we ought to go any farther down this valley. Why?" "We may be attacked," answered Kerl. "We haven't been shot at for some hours now. That's a bad sign." "Couldn't we be traveling through an area where there are no people?" "Could be," admitted Kerl. "But I've got this hunch -- " Jason considered, keeping his face blank. On the one hand, the man beside him was supposed to know these mountains. On the other hand, the little knowledge he had so far gained of the mountaineers had given him a kind of contempt for them. "Tell me," said Jason abruptly, "have you any definite reason for warning us out of this valley? Any -- " he stressed the word slightly -- "real evidence?" "No," said Kerl. "We'll go on," Jason said flatly. The detachment proceeded without trouble. As they approached the far end of the valley, it became too narrow for two of the cars abreast. Abruptly, Kerl shot out an arm and skidded the car to a halt. Behind them the rest of the detachment slammed brakes to keep from piling up. "What now?" demanded Jason, exasperated. "I was right. Look -- " Kerl pointed directly ahead to a low mound of stones that half-blocked the route. "A food cache. The tribe around here has been on a hunting sweep." "What's that got to do with us?" demanded Jason. "We don't want their food." "But they don't know that," said Kerl. Jason looked at him; and the thought crossed his mind that the other man was pushing his point home out of sheer stubbornness. It bolstered his belief that there was a cowardly streak in Kerl. "We'll go forward," he said. "If trouble comes, it'll be time enough to turn back." "I don't -- " said Kerl; and suddenly his face twisted in alarm. He thrust out with both hands, slamming home the throttle and activating the intercar communicator. "Forward! Full speed!" he yelled. And, Jason, slammed back in his seat by the acceleration, had just time to grab for the steering bar as the little car leaped forward. As he shot past the cache, the reason for Kerl's actions became horribly apparent. High up the steep slope to the right the top of the cliff seemed to be bowing forward like the head of an old man and crumbling slowly and majestically into a thousand pieces. Distance lent it a gentle air as if the whole process was taking place in slow motion, but Jason realized suddenly with a sickening sense of shock that thousands of tons of rock were in that landslide, tumbling down upon him and upon the detachment that was his responsibility. With no time for cursing fate or bawling orders, he hung grimly to the controls of the car and prayed that the men behind him had followed. For an agonizingly long time it seemed that they would make it. And finally, when the dust and the rattle of smaller stones closed about them, it proved impossible to tell. At that moment a huge rock came springing out of nowhere at Jason's car, and he felt a terrific blow that flung him into darkness. L ate that night, after two dead troopers had been buried in the shattered frame of one of the cars, Kerl went hunting Jason. He found the young officer standing off by himself, wrestling with his devils in the darkness. It is not easy at any time, but particularly the first, to have to face the fact that an arbitrary decision of yours has cost two men their lives. And this becomes worse when there is ground for self-blame in the reasons behind that decision. Rightly or wrongly, Jason believed, and would go on believing for the rest of his days, that his dislike of Kerl had killed two men. He was not particularly glad, therefore, when Kerl loomed up out of the darkness beside him. "Well?" he said. "The men are pretty well bedded down," replied Kerl. "I thought you'd like to know. They've got the last car fixed, so we can go on with nine of them, tomorrow." They stood in silence for a little while. "I know how you're feeling," volunteered Kerl, finally. "Do you?" said Jason, savagely. "I did the same thing myself once," said: Kerl. "Shortly after I Was taien into Class A Service. I was on Kelmesii and I thought I'd save time by fording a river. It was shallow enough and the water was clear enough, but there was more current than I thought and I hadn't the foresight to rope the men together. I lost five troopers." Jason said nothing. "You'd better come back inside the ring of cars," said Kerl. Jason looked up at the cliff. And then, just at that moment, the moon crept into sight, bathing the whole long valley suddenly in silvery luster. And in that same split second, born almost it seemed of the light itself, came a long, keening, wavering cry, that quivered out alone over the valley for a minute and then was taken up by many voices in something half-song, half-wail. Jason halted as If struck. "What's that?" he said, staring at Kerl. The dark man's face in the bright moonlight was etched and hollowed by mysterious shadows. He looked off at the hills. "There was some shooting while you were unconscious," he answered. "One of the men evidently hit and killed the clan's head. That's the lament for a chieftain." They turned in silence and went back to the cars. The voices followed, crying on their ears. The men in the cars were somber and quiet as they broke camp the next morning. Once they were moving, their little car trundling up out of the valley to head into the next one, Kerl spoke to Jason. "Things may start occurring to the men," he said. "Things?" repeated Jason, sharply. "Wliat things?" "That if I was out of the way, they could start back to the lowlands." Jason stared at him. "What?" he said, half-unable or right. "Don't look so shocked," said Kerl. "It's a natural reaction." "These troops are completely trustworthy!" Jason felt his face warming with anger. Kerl shrugged and looked away, out front at the barren cliffs. "It's something to think of," he said. "It's important to me to reach my destination." Jason felt words coming to his lips. He tried to check them, but the pressure inside him was too great. "More important than men's lives?" Kerl turned to face him again. His features were unreadable. "To me," he said, "yes." For what seemed a very long moment they seemed to sit poised, staring at each other. Then Kerl said, very softly: "You don't understand." "No," said Jason. "Tell me," said Kerl. "What do you intend to do with your life?" "I am a career officer," answered Jason stiffly. "Serving humanity on the Frontier, eventually, no doubt?" "Of course." Effort kept Jason's voice level. "I was ready to leave for the Frontier when you arrived." "And I held up your transfer," said Kerl, thoughtfully. Jason could think of no rejoinder to this that would not be explosive; and so said nothing. "Each to his own," Kerl went on, after a pause. "I was a Frontier officer myself, as I said. On Kelmesh." It was the one weak spot in the armor of Jason's resentment. This man was a former officer. To Jason the words implied the very opposite of all that the word degenerate implied. He felt his fury ebb with a rush leaving him floundering in uncertainty. "I don't understand you," he said helplessly. "I don't understand you at all." The new valley dipped abruptly before them and Jason found that all the attention of his eyes was required to guide the car. "Let me tell you about myself," he heard Kerl say. "I was a chief's son," said Kerb "I am still, for that matter, for there is nothing that can take that away from you. If my father has died while I was gone I am chieftain; my people will offer their hands to me as if I had never been away. But I am also a deserter." "Deserter," murmured Jason, finding the military ring of the word odd in context with the mountain people. "Deserter," repeated Kerl, strangely, as if for him the word had some hidden, personal meaning. "I ran away. I wanted to go down to the lowlands. I wanted to go to civilization and become famous. Not that being famous in itself was important. It was what it stood for. I wanted to leave my mark on the race." "So you ran away?" "We were camped one day near the southern foothills. My father had refused permission for about the thousandth time. That night I went. Three days later I was wear# ing a uniform back at your station there. That was twenty years ago. I was fourteen years old." Jason shot him a glance of shocked surprise. "You w'ere in the Service for twenty years?" he asked. Kerl shook his head. "I put in three years and saved my money. Then I took off toward the frontier as a civilian pioneer. I bounced from new planet to new planet, doing everything -- mines, timber, weather, construction. It was a rough life, but I liked it. It was like home." He means the Timumang, thought Jason, looking bewilderedly at the bleak mountains. "Then one day I woke up. I was twenty-eight and I hadn't even started to do the things I wanted to do. I hadn't left my mark on the progress of civilization, but it had left its mark on me. Suddenly all the wishing dreams I'd had as a boy came back. I just had to build something permanent and lasting that would be my own." He paused. "I went to Kelmesh," he said. He turned his head to look at Jason. "You've heard of Kelmesh?" Jason nodded. "A good world," said Kerl, his voice thoughtful as if he was halftalking to himself. "A fine world. Sweet water and clean air and all the natural resources. Nothing but little harmless life-forms as far as we could see. Everything was beautiful. I looked at Kelmesh and I told myself that here was where I would make my mark and finish my days. Someday Kelmesh would have schools where history was taught. And near the beginning of that history would be the name of Kerl Potter." He sighed, a thin husk of a sound. "I went to work," he said. "People were pouring into Kelmesh in those first couple of years after the planet was cleared and opened up. I bought land. I bought into the new towns and started things -- an ore processing plant here, a tool factory there. I backed prospecting expeditions, and news services and everything else that I had the time or finances for." He looked down at his big hands in his lap with something like sati-sf action. "I got a lot done." "I suppose you made money," said Jason, thoughtlessly. "Oh, I made it, all right," said Kerl. "But I ploughed it back in, every cent of it, as fast as I got my hands on it. It was history I was really after. And I made it, too, until the hordes came." "Locusts, weren't they?" asked Jason, his eyes on the ground as he guided the little car through a small scattered forest of huge boulders. "No," said Kerl, "they just resembled them in their life habits. Like the seven year (is it seven buried as much as ten feet underground. Every forty years they worked their way to the surface as worms and came out as little, hopping creatures as big as a small frog. Then they grew. They swelled up to the size of a grown sheep and Kelmesh and devoured everything." His voice stopped on a flat note. "Everything," he repeated. Jason had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. After a little bit, Kerl went on again. "The colonists ran," he said. "God, I didn't blame them. Homes, lands, the grass, the trees, everything up to and including the clothing they wore was meat for the hordes. But I hated them for it. I stood on the spaceport landing stage with a silicoid jumper over what was left of my clothing and a thermite gun in my hand and cursed the last ship out of sight." "You didn't leave?" asked Jason, incredulously. "I thought everybody left." "Not I," said Kerl. "And not some others. It took us about two weeks to find each other for we were scattered all over the planet. But at the end of that time there were sixty of us gathered together in what was left of Kelmesh's governing city hall. Sixty-odd lousy, dirty, hungry men, with just one thought in common : that the hordes might chew the planet to the bone this time around, but the next generation wasn't going to live to boast about it." The fierce note on which Kerl ended rang through the little car. He stopped, as if abashed by it, and then went on in a mild voice. "They live for five years, you know," he said, "and lay their eggs at six week intervals all during that time. They don't all lay at once, either. A bunch go off somewhere by themselves and bury themselves alive. The body of the parent is food for the grubs when they hatch." Jason shivered. "Well, our first plan was to take to the air and track down a group that was about to lay and incinerate it. The first few months we tried it. Then we woke up to the fact that the Job was too big and started just tracking them down and marking the laying areas. When the hordes began to split up and the individuals began to spread all over the place, we finally yelled for help. By that time we were down to about eighteen men." Jason glanced sideways at him in surprise. Kerl caught the look. "Lack of food," he explained. "Long hours in the air. Men would go asleep at the controls and crash. On foot you couldn't count on lasting very long. A human being's organic, and anything organic suited their appetites. "We messaged our story out to the nearest Message Relay Station. Three months later a spruce Frontier Cruiser dropped down on our spaceport. I was there to meet it with two other men. A neatly tailored little commandant came down the landing ramp and looked me over. " 'Where is everybody?' he asked." " 'Dead,' I said." "He looked at me as if I was pulling some kind of joke on him." " 'Well, come on inside,' he said. 'We'll fix you up with some food and clothes.' " 'The hell with food and clothes,' I said. 'Give us thermite recharges for the guns.' "He peered at me. " 'You're out of your head, planter,' he said. And I took a swing at him and woke up in the ship's hospital two days later. "Well, they wanted to send us back to civilization, but none of the three of us would go. So we compromised all around by havingus sign on as Frontier Special TroojK. Then the war began. "It wasn't what Sector Headquarters ten light years away had thought it would be. It wasn't even what I thought it would be. It was worse. The whole thing tied in with the evolution process of these critters. They had no natural enemies, so they weeded each other out on a survival of the fittest basis. Within a few months after they came out of the ground -- inside half a year at the latest -- they'd cleaned up everything else worth eating. That meant the only source of food was -- each other. "Sounds good, doe.sn't it?" Kerl smiled briefly at Jason, "Sounds as if they were helping us along in our extermination program? But it turned out that this process had bred some intelligence into thern and with that intelligence, the ability to learn -- fast. "They had no use for brains when the whole planet was one big dinner table. But when the numbers began to thin out -- when they of them -- intelligence began to show up. "First, they took to cooperating. Each little group began to show signs of internal organization. Then the groups began to work together, and we woke up to the fact that the critters were fighting back; what had started out as a fumigating project had turned into a war." Kerl broke off suddenly to stare intently out the transparent front of the car. The seconds lengthened into minutes, and finally Jason spoke. "Whatis it?" he demanded. "Potter sign, I think," said Kerl. "A campsite about five hundred yards ahead. Drive on up to the foot of that big rock and halt the detachment." T he sign was Potter sign. Kerl toured the area of the camp, like a hunting animal, running the cold ashes from the cooking fires through his fingers, and raking through the discarded litter around them. His investigation kept him occupied until noon, so the midday meal was eaten where they stood. They pushed on after lunch, covering another fifty miles before night brought them to a stop. The going was slower now, for Kerl was forced to watch the ground and the rocky walls closely to make sure that they were staying on the Potter trail and not drifting off on the track of some other clan that might have crossed or paralleled the same route. Consequently, there was no further chance for conversation between him and Jason and it was not until , that evening that Jason had an opportunity to draw him aside. They sat down in their car and closed the top -- that being the only meager means to privacy the situation afforded. "How much farther before we catch up with them?" asked Jason. "Not far," replied Kerl. His voice seemed to have grown old and weary since the morning. "Say thirty miles. We should catch up with them tomorrow afternoon." "Good," said Jason, They sat in silence for a little while, each occupied by his own thoughts. Finally Jason broke the pause. "You were telling me about Keh mesh earlier today -- " "Oh -- yes," said Kerl, abruptly, like someone whose thoughts are suddenly recalled from a great distance. "I was. Well -- right now I'm a little tired. If you don't mind -- " "Of course," replied Jason promptly. He threw back the lid of the car and stepped out. "Good night." "Good night," said Kerl, from the interior shadows of the car. Jason did not feel like sleeping. He had always been a straightforward man, as honest with himself as nature permitted. He believed thoroughly in the solid universe that he knew. It contained space and the human race, whose manifest destiny it was to occupy space. Occasionally, among the teeming hordes of mankind emerged those who perceived this destiny. These went out and dedicated themselves to it. The rest lived and bred in happy ignorance. To them, no blame, but no glory. But among the dedicated -- By no possible stretch of the imagination could Jason imagine a man who saw the light, followed it, then turned his back on it, and went again to dwell in darkness. What flaw in the ideal of man's manifest destiny could prompt such an action? The thought was very disturbing to Jason. After all, this was the ideal he was probably going to get himself killed for -- unless good luck and skill preserved him. Jason could no longer write Kerl off as a man basically lacking in courage and the virtues that the frontier demands. Jason had read and heard enough about Kelmesh to recognize that the other man was speaking the truth. Had Kerl's nerve finally broken under those conditions? Jason could not believe it. There was nothing broken about the big, dark man. What then? Pacing the narrow circle of the camp, Jason looked up at the stars and did not know the answer. But he would find out tomorrow, before Kerl parted company with them for good -- he made himself that promise. M orning came bright and sudden. A little of the sparse rain that fell upon these mountains had fallen during the night, and the rocks around them were dark and had a damp smell that began to fade quickly as a thirsty sun licked up the moisture through the dry air. Camp was struck, and the circle of cars took up the trail again in customary file. For four hours, the going was the same as it had been the day before, the detachment crawling along slowly, with Kerl in the lead car tensely scrutinizing the ground for sign. They crossed out of the valley and into another that ran parallel for some twenty miles. This at a point where the mountains split three ways, Kerl called a halt. He got down from the lead car and began to examine the little open area where the four valleys came together. For some time he combed the area minutely, eyes bent on the rock at his feet; long arms dangling loosely from hunched shoulders, so that he looked almost more ape than human from a distance. Finally, he returned to the car where Jason waited. "There," he said, pointing to the rightmost of the three new valleys as he climbed into the car. "And about thirty miles off. I know where they're headed, now." Jason looked at him; then closed the open top of the car and gave the order to move out over the intercom. They rolled ahead between the rocky walls that had been steadily about them since the beginning. In his bucket seat in the car, Kerl leaned back and sighed, rubbing one big, square-fingered hand across his eyes. "A strain, that tracking, I suppose," said Jason. Kerl turned to look at him. He managed a tired grin. 'Tm out of practise," he replied. "Too much being done for me by gadgets has spoiled the senses." His eyes had wandered off to look at the mountains. Now he brought them back again to Jason. "You've done a good job for me," he said. "I'm grateful." "My duty -- " said Jason, with a little deprecating shrug. He halfturned to look at the other man. "Can I ask you a question?" he said. "Go ahead," Kerl told him. The strict Kilburnian ethics of Jason's upbringing fought a momentary, short and silent battle with his curiosity and lost. "Why are you going back?" he asked. Jason could see the sharp barb of his question strike home. Kerl did not answer. And, as the seconds slipped past and were lost in silence, he began to think that he had, indeed, stepped beyond the bounds of all propriety and right. And, then, just as he was about to apologize, words did come from the other man. "You asked me to tell you about the rest of what happened to me on Kelmesh," said Kerb "I -- yes," replied Jason. "Yes, I did." "I'll tell you now," said Kerb "You've heard what it was like, no doubt." "I had a cousin who came in on the tail end of it." said Jason. "I read some letters from him." "A lot of men died," Kerl spoke softly, "more men than I could ever have imagined dying in one place at one time. That's why I earned rank so quickly. They discharged me as an Officer Two, but I was acting Commandant for the last six months." "You know," Jason said, "I have trouble understanding how creatures like that, even with a little intelligence, could stand up to our war equipment so long, and cause such trouble." Kerl chuckled a little bitterly, "Sector Headquarters had trouble understanding it, too. But then, they weren't on the planet." Jason blinked at such open criticism of the Frontier's military leadership. Kerl went on: "It was easy enough to understand when it was under your nose. There were two reasons. One was that we were not fighting a war, we were conducting an extermination project, in which all of those critters had to be killed off. The second was that we couldn't defend, we had to attack. Impose those conditions on men fighting in what amounted to a wasteland, and what did you have? "You had small patrol action and nothing but small patrol action. There was so much ground to be covered and so many of the things to be killed. You called in your junior officers and lined them up in front of a map and drew out their routes for them. Then out they went to make their patrols on foot -- on foot, mind you, because the critters buried themselves in the ground during the daytime and even in a two man car you'd drive right over them. "They'd take off -- " Kerbs eyes had grown bleak and distant, seeing again the bitter plains of his memories. " -- extended in a skirmish line, looking for spots where the earth was loose. And when they found one, they'd dig it out and incinerate it, unless it woke up first and got away before the thermite charges could cripple it enough to make escape impossible. "When night came the men would bivouak arid dig in, with their guns charged and portable searchlights illuminating the ground all around them. And they'd try to sleep -- but the night would be one long battle. "Nothing kept the critters away. The searchlights even attracted them -- but what could you do? The men needed light to shoot by, and some warning when they came. For they came at top speed. They must have been crazy mad with hunger, during this period when there was nothing for them to live on but each other and us. One would spot the light and come up quietly, then suddenly charge in as fast as it could. And they could move fast. The idea seemed to be to pick up a man and carry him off into the darkness. "Sometimes, two or three would work together and we'd have them charging at once. The horrible thing was, there was a sort of instinct in them that made them try to continue eating even when they were dying. If they grabbed a man and couldn't make it out of the circle, they still tried to make a meal of him, even while being burned by the gun charges. "Their notion of fighting was just to start eating their enemy. In fact, fighting and feeding was the same thing. In the beginning the losses from night attacks were fantastically high. But after a while we began to keep them down to a minimum. The men kept their lives, but they lost their nerve -- " This was so close to what Jason had been thinking about Kerl himself the night before, that the young officer started involuntarily. Kerl, however, went on without noticing. " -- and cracked. And the commonest form of cracking was to blow up some night when the patrol was dug in, to jump out of the hole you had dug and go running off into the darkness to hunt down the critters that were prowling out there. That waiting -- " Kerl shuddered, " -- it was bad. Sooner or later, the men would lose their selfpossession and go to meet them halfway." He turned to look at Jason. "They estimate around a hundred thousand men were lost that way." "A hundred thousand!" Even Jason's military-conditioned mind was shocked by the number. "But not all of them. Not -- "his tone was almost accusing, -- "not you." "No, not me," said Kerl. He sighed. "I Was the exception -- the freak. It bothered me, but I lasted through five long years of it. I even kept other men from cracking up as long as they were with me. Nothing particular I did -- just knowing I was around seemed to brace them." Jason stared at him. "But that was marvelous -- wasn't it?" he said. "I mean, they could study you and find out what was needed to keep other men from cracking up. You could turn yourself into Service Research and..." his voice faltered, died before a supposition so monstrous that it overwhelmed him. Finally he put it into words. "You aren't -- that isn't what you're running away from?" Kerl laughed. "Nothing so melodramatic," he said. "Research didn't even wait for the business to finish on Kelmesh before pulling me back to Earth. They tested me and worked me over and scratched their heads and finally came up with an answer. In plain words, what was happening was that the civilized man of today was many times as susceptible to the emotional strains of war as his remote ancestor. It was a matter of environment -- what the psychologists called having a 'wider mental horizon'." "But what are they going to do about it?" asked Jason. "There isn't too much they can do," said Kerl soberly. "There are two obvious solutions. One is to return to the environment of eighteenth -- nineteenth century Earth, which is impossible. The other is to freeze the present environment long enough for the human race to mature up to it. Which is unpalatable and which people won't stand for." "Of course not!" cried Jason. "Why, that'd be ridiculous! It -- it'd be fantastic. To hold up our proper and necessary expansion for a little problem like that. The human race solves problems -- it doesn't knuckle under to them." A shadow passed across Kerl's face for an instant, saddening it. "You're right," he said. "The race does." "There must be some practical steps they can take," continued Jason. "Some conditioning process, or such." Kerl shrugged. "Some factors seem to help a little," he said. "You may have wondered why you've been held in Class C duty so long when it's usual to promote to Class A Frontier posts fairly quickly." "They have been slow with me," frowned Jason. "And with a lot of others in your class," said Kerl. "That's one of the little things that seems to help some -- a longer tour of garrison work." "Look here!" said Jason. "I'm not liable to crack up. My mental health is excellent." "A fresh water fish," replied Kerl, "can be in fine shape. But put him in salt water and he sickens and dies." "But this is all backward!" exploded Jason. "You're supposed to have come through on Kelmesh. To you that environment should have been much more of a shock than to a man like me -- I take new and different worlds for granted. I grew up with an open mind. Why, if what you say is true, then these mountain people of yours -- " He broke off abruptly, a realization taking startling form in his mind. In the little silence that followed, Kerl's voice answered him. "It is the opposite from what you might expect," he said. "Early in the beginnings of psychology, men began to notice that some primitive peoples were amazingly well adjusted. Not all primitive peoples, of course. The majority ran the scale from bad to worse. But a few stood out." "But you can't scrap civilization!" cried Jason, desperately. "I don't know," answered Kerl. "Can't you? I can't. You can't. No government or controlling power can -- or wants to. Maybe we won't have to. But when Research dug into the matter they came up with some funny answers. For instance -- the individual has a survival instinct. They've known that for a long time. Now they think the race has one, too." "Of course," said Jason. "Survival of the fittest -- " "No," said Kerl. "Think of the race as a single individual with instincts. And one of the instincts is not to put all his eggs in one basket." Jason merely looked puzzled. Again, that shadow crossed Kerl's face, shading his eyes with an obscure pain. "Never at any time," Kerl said, "have all the people been all alike. Some were more one way than another. Geographical accident, they used to think -- and of course it was, largely. But there's a real instinctive tendency for groups to be different, even as there is for the individual to be different -- and for the same reason, survival. It wouldn't be good for them all to be alike. Then, some new thing that could wipe out one, could wipe out all." "Do you mean to tell me," said Jason, spacing the words slowly, and, he thought, calmly, "that the ever it is we have of people on all the civilized worlds, are an evolutionary dead end; that you and these mountaineers squatting on their rocks represent the future of the race?" "No," Kerl shook his head, "not the future. A possible future. A remotely possible future. One of nature's extra strings to its bow. Imagine civilization breaking down. Would that make any difference to my people here? Not a bit. They're completely self-supporting. They don't need and don't want the rest of you. They might pull humanity back up out the mud again." Kerl's words died in the car. For what seemed a long while, Jason sat thinking. Finally, he turned to Kerl. "But you think your people will make the future," he said. It was an accusation. "That's why you've come back." Kerl's dark face was suddenly ravaged with sorrow. "No," he said. "No. I came back for an entirely different reason." Jason waited. "Research turned me inside out," said Kerl, painfully. "When they were through with me, I knew myself -- too well. I knew myself inside and out. And I realized -- " his voice faltered, then picked up with a new strength " -- that I was different. From the time when that difference came home to me, living in civilization became living among strangers. There was a barrier there I could not cross because it was inside me and now I knew it was there." He stopped. "I had no choice," he said suddenly. "I had to go home." He let out his breath and looked down at his hands, big and dark, folded in his lap. "I -- am sorry," said Jason, stiffly. "I beg your pardon." "That's all right," said Kerl, "It's almost over now." He raised his eyes from his lap and looked out ahead. "You can stop anyplace along here. We don't want to drive up to the camp. We'll stop a bit short and let them find us." "All right," said Jason. He switched on the intercom and gave the necessary orders. The cars circled in the light of the afternoon sun, halted, men got out, and camp was made. A bout an hour before twilight, the Potter clan put in its appearance. One moment, the valley was empty beyond the camp and then -- it seemed, almost without transition -- a small host of rough-clad figures had sprung into view, on the valley floor and down the rocky slopes some two hundred yards from the circle of cars. They stood silent, waiting. Two groups with centuries of apparent difference between them. Silent, they stood and watched. Jason went to get Kerl and found him sitting in their car, chin on hand, his eyes absent and thoughtful. "Well, they're here," said Jason. Kerl nodded. "I know," he answered. "They've come right out in the open," continued Jason. "Almost as if they knew you were with us." "I imagine they do," said Kerl. "Other tribes will have seen me with you and pas.sed the word along." He got heavily to his feet and stepped out of the car. Beyond the cars were the troopers. Followed by Jason, Kerl walked to an open space where a number of the men of the tribe stood waiting. Kerl turned and looked at the troopers. "Goodby," he said. "Thanks." The men murmured self-consciously. Kerl turned again and started off, stepping surely down the rugged path. Jason followed, without quite knowing why. Where the rough going ceased and the valley began to broaden out, Kerl stopped again and turned to Jason as the younger man came up level with him. They were far enough from the troopers now so that low voices would not carry their words back. "Goodby," said Kerl. "Goodby," Jason replied. Kerl put out his hand and Jason took it. They shook briefly, but Kerl held on to Jason's hand for a minute before releasing it. "Don't -- " he began earnestly, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. "Yes?" said Jason. Kerl's face was twisted as if with a mighty inner effort. "Don't be afraid of the future," he said, tightly. "Keep going. Keep looking. There's nothing so w'onderful as that." Jason stared at him. "You say that?" he could not keep the incredulity out of his voice. He nodded toward the waiting mountaineers. "But you're going back!" "Yes," whispered Kerl. "I told you. I have no choice." Jason swallowed. "Come back with us," he said. "I didn't know. But if it's our future you want, not theirs, come back. You can if you want to." "I can't." "Why not?" cried Jason. "It's all a matter of what you want. I thought you wanted this." "This?" echoed Kerl, looking bleakly about him at the mountains. "This?" His face worked. "God, no!" he cried. "The only thing I ever wanted was Kelmesh!" He turned, tearing himself away from Jason and facing towards the clansmen. Pebbles rattled and rolled under his uncaring feet as he lurched away. Walking like a blind man, he went down the valley.    The universe is vast and men but tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the minute we realize our minuteness, our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved. -- Bertrand Russell The rules of a duel between gentlemen are quite different from the rules of war between nations. Is it because gentlemen do not fight wars, or is it that men in war cease to be gentlemen? T he bullet slapped rotted ridges -- they were his insurance on leaves and dirt into Gram this mile-wide island high above Treb's eyes. He wormed backward Earth. to the bole of a small tree. Something thudded into the tree "Missed!" he shouted. He used roots behind him. He hugged the English, the second tongue of them ground, body flattened. His breath both. "Throw away your carbine eased raggedly outward, and and use rocks." caught. The waiting -- the seconds "You tasted it anyhow," Harl that became hours! If the grenade Neilson's shrill young voice cried, rolled after him, down the slope "How was the sample?" into his shelter, he was finished. "That leaves you two carThere was nothing he could do. tridges," taunted Treb. "Or is it His palms oozed sweat... only one?" The grenade exploded. It was like The sixth sense that had brought a fist slammed against his skull. He him safely through two of these was numbed for a long instant, bloody war duels here in space Then he checked, made him fling his body to the left. Unharmed. The depression had He rolled over once and lay hudsaved his neck this time. He wanted died in a shallow depression. He to shout at Neilson, tell him he was knew all the tiny hollows and down to a lone grenade, but that was poor strategy. Now he must withdraw, make Neilson think him injured or dead, and trap him in turn. They were the last of the belligarents here within Earth Satellite. For two months, since what would be May on Earth, they had carried on this mad duel. Of the other eighteen who had started the war in November of the preceding year, only four had survived their wounds. The United Nations' supervisory seconds had transported them to their homes in Andilia and in Baryt... Treb wormed his way as noiselessly as possible into the undergrowth, sprawling at last in the shelter of an earthen mound thirty feet from the grenade's raw splash. He waited -- and thought. Memories can be unpleasant. He could see his comrades of the three battles as they had fallen, wounded or gray with death. Too many of them had he helped bury. He remembered the treasured photos. The draining wound in his right forearm throbbed... The enemy dead too. He had killed several of them -- more than his share, he thought savagely. They too were young despite the ragged beards some of them cultivated. Treb felt like an old man. And he was old. He was twenty-nine. He had a son also named Gram, a boy of five, and little Alse, who was two. Flad little Alse's mother lived he would never have volunteered for this third United Nations' war duel. He would have been with her in the mountain valley of Krekar working hard, and gradually erasing those other ugly episodes here on Earth Satellite One... Minutes crawled by, lumped together into hours. Birds sang in the trees so laboriously maintained here in the satellite's disk-shaped heart. And, a hundred feet overhead, where the true deck of the manmade island in space began, other birds nested in the girders. An ant crawled over Treb's earthstained hand and passed under his outstretched carbine's barrel. There was a movement in the clustering trees off to his right. Neilson had circled and was coming in from an opposite angle. Treb thumbed off the safety and waited. An earth-colored helmet, with a trace of long pale hair around its rim, came slowly into view. Could be a dummy, Neilson was clever at rigging them to draw fire. And he had exactly two cartridges. After that it would be his three grenades, his two-foot needle-knife, that doubled as a bayonet, and the steel bow he had contrived from a strip of spring steel. He held his fire. The trees made grenade lobbing a touchy business. And his bow was back in one of the dozens of foxholes he had spotted in both the inner and outer rings of trees. In the fantasy stories of adventure in space that he enjoyed reading, the hero could always whip up a weird paralysis ray, a deadly, invisible robot bullet, or an intelligent gaseous ally from the void would appear. And out of scrap glass, metal and his shoestrings he could contrive a solar-powered shell that stopped any missile, deadlier than a marshmallow, cold. In actual life he was finding it difficult enough to contrive a primitive sort of bow, a knife-lashed spear, and snares for the increasingly wary rabbits. Lack of sleep and lack of food supplies were sapping his lanky body of the whiplash swiftness and wiry strength it once possessed. Nor was the week-old wound any aid to his dulled wits... The helmet advanced; he could almost see the twig-stuffed gray shirt's pockets, and he let his nostrils expand as he sucked in a steadying breath. Now, a yard behind the fake Andilian, he could see the moving shoulders and skull of Harl Neilson -- or so his bloodshot eyes told him. He squeezed the trigger. There was a subdued yip, and then a derisive jeer. Missed again -- or had he? "Sour rocketing, Grampaw," Neilson laughed. "Try again. And then I'm coming after you." Only Neilson wouldn't. Unless he'd miscalculated  the number of grenades, he wouldn't come charging at Treb. And he couldn't be sure of the number of cartridges Treb possessed. He was just talking to keep his nerve up. Especially if he was wounded now. That sudden yip... ficial night as artificial as the central ten-acre pool of water, the ring of flowering green trees and grasses, and the final outer ring of forest trees. It was here that the two thousand UN employees and soldiers on Earth Satellite One normally took their recreation periods. Only the supervised war-duels, that since # had been the only blood-letting permitted between nations, could long keep a Terran from visiting the green meadows and trees of this lowest of the three levels... "I'd give half that quarter million," Neilson groaned, across the darkness, "for a cigarette." "You mean," corrected Gram Treb, "half your ten thousand." "It's the winner's grant or nothing, Treb. I promised Jane I'd hand it to her. Then we'll marry." "But not if you are the loser?" "I wouldn't -- she wouldn't -- it's impossible to think of asking her to share poverty and disgrace." "I'd hardly say that. We lost our first war here on the Satellite. Baryt was obligated to cede a thousand square miles to Tarrance. Most of my ten thousand paid off my family's debts. "Yet I married. I married Nal who had nursed me back to health. And we were happy. Until the second war with Duristan. I wanted money for her -- for the children -- for my impoverished valley." Treb broke off. He backed away several feet and shifted noiselessly to a new position. Every night, and sometimes in the artificial sunlight, they talked together. But they never forgot that they were sworn foes. "So you won it didn't you?" From his voice Neilson had shifted closer and to the left. "Sure. And I wish I were as poor as before. For Nal was kicked to death -- by the horse I should have been using -- while I fought here." Neilson made a sympathetic sound. Treb felt his lips twitch into a thin crooked line. This is what it meant to be human. To feel sorrow for another man's misfortunes -- and then kill him! Sure, Neilson was a good sort. Only twenty-four and in love with a girl, a woman really, widow of a dead lunar explorer. And he was a clean-living sort, nothing dishonorable or hateful about him. They even honored the same God. But tomorrow, or the next day, or a month from now, he would kill or wound Neilson. Unless, as might well happen, Neilson got to him first. He pushed aside a thought that came more and more often of late. Why not surrender, or let Neilson capture him? He did not consider suicide -- little Gram and Alse needed him -- although he had not been thinking of them when he signed for this ugly miniature battle in space. His wife's death had been too vivid yet. But, why not surrender? He had enough money. The valley people could struggle along without the machines and the dam he had hoped to grant them with victory. And Baryt could lose the island of Daafa to Andilia without crippling herself. The three hundred and fifty inhabitants could be transferred to the mainland. Treb laughed silently, a laugh that cut off with a twinge of drawing ugly pain from his wounded forearm. He knew that he could no more surrender without a fight than he could command his breathing to stop forever. He was a man, and men cannot give up dishonorably... "Fd like to see those two kids sometime, if you're still around, Treb." Neilson had moved again. His voice was lower but he was nearer. "Stop around anytime, Harl." Treb moved a few feet deeper into a thicket. "We'll show you what real Baryt hospitality is." "That's a promise, Treb." you had to kill. Or you volunteered to kill. But you didn't have to like it. All these little wars under UN supervision were needless -- arbitration would serve as well. But the people, the leaders -- someone -- wanted blood. So ten or twelve or fifteen citizens of one nation fought an equal number of the other state's sons. Doubtless it was an improvement over the mass bombings of innocent city dwellers, and the horror of atomic dusts and sprays. No overwhelming army could sweep, unchecked, over a helpless neighbor. It was fairer, too, for those involved. Equal numbers of men, guns, supplies. Wealth if your side won, and a fair sum if you lost. The United Nations saw to that. After all the avenues to peaceful settlement had been explored and turned down they finally permitted bloodshed. Much against their better judgement, perhaps. So he could destroy likeable young Andilians like Neilson. "Why don't you send up a rocket?" Neilson kidded, his voice coming from a changed direction again. "So I can see you." "Anything to oblige." Neilson was circling out around, as though to drive him into a trap or trick him. They were getting back to the primitive now. Soon it would be knives, spears, and deadfalls. "Come on over and I'll show you Jane's picture, Treb," invited Neilson. He laughed hoarsely. "If we weren't where we are, I'd mean that." "I know. I feel that way myself sometimes. We've been here alone too long. Hate hasn't lasted." "Why aren't you a wrongo, Treb?" The young voice was cracked and , savage. "Why'd you have to tell me about -- Gram and Alse?" Treb was backing away again, cautiously. He scented a trap. No doubt Neilson's words were sincere, at the moment, but in a second's time he could change into a coldblooded executioner. He knew. He had seen the gentlest of men suddenly turn killer... And then his foot struck a yielding branch and his aroused suspicion sent him lunging forward. A heavy something fell with a sickening thud, brushing as it struck, the sole of his distintegrating shoe. A cleverly rigged deadfall of small trees and rock, doubtless. "You're slipping, Harl," he shouted. But he could feel the sudden sweat damping his palms, and the muscles twitched unsteadily in his arms and across his stomach. a mile away, in a foxhole less than sixty yards from the massive outer perimeter of the arena. Two of his snares had yielded a rabbit each, and so he was supplied for several days. The foxhole had two entrances, both well-concealed, and he had rigged elaborate warning devices should the vicinity be approached. So he was sleeping. His dreams were unpleasant. In his latest dream an extremely shapely and smiling young woman with dark hair was heaving a grenade into a pit where he lay bound and helpless. The grenade swelled until it became a space ship heading directly toward the frail scout craft he piloted... And a tiny blob of dislodged mud from the dugout spatted his face. He sat up. Another day to hunt or be hunted. Or to lie here and try to rest and make plans. There was slight possibility that Neilson could find him here. He gnawed at the scantly-fleshed ribs of the first rabbit, savoring the raw meaty smell and flavor. Hunger was his salt. Now that they had lost contact with one another it might require several days to find Neilson. A wooded platter, a smile in diameter, can afford many hiding places for one creature hiding from another hunting beast. It was time to set some of the traps he had been contriving. There were the two nooses, attached to bent-down triggered young trees that could not be set until darkness fell again. The net, too, would need darkness to conceal the four rough pulleys, and the rocks that a tug on his rope would spill. But the almost invisible nylon cords, set at ankle height across the paths, and the ugly little pits with their sharpened stakes set three feet below, could trip up a man and cripple him. He must put out several of those. He had no wish to kill Neilson. If he could capture him, very good. He could go back to Andilia and perhaps his Jane would be glad to take him. If she did not -- it was worth knowing how little she really cared, was it not? So he would try to trap the younger man and save his life. It would be difficult. The other man had grenades, a carbine and a keen needle-knife. Perhaps, before the end, he would be forced to kill after all. But regretfully. Treb dumped the last of the tsaftha antibiotic into his wound and lay back for a few more hours of rest before going out to prepare the traps. His head was not clear. And his eyes drew together from exhaustion... Another night and another day, and it was night again. His traps were set and ready. All through the day he had prowled the trees, watching for some sign of Neilson. He found he was muttering to himself, hungry for the sound of spoken words. It was nervous work. His muscles were jumping in faint spastic explosions. Neilson could have been lying in ambush in any of a hundred leafy coverts, resting there and waiting... He had covered less than two miles of inching, crawling paths, his eyes ever alert for deadfalls, pits and spear-traps that might flash across the way to impale him. And he had caught no sight of Neilson. Now it was night again. Time to check on his traps. The rabbit traps as well as the human traps. He was approaching the net. And the awareness that this furtive game of hide-and-seek might go on for weeks oppressed him. He might lie here close by the net for days without sight of Neilson. They were too evenly matched -- and Neilson was younger. It was Neilson's youth against his experience. He found the thin rope of knotted nylon and plastic scraps that led to the four balanced rocks. One stout yank and the net would jerk upward four feet and tighten around its victim. But, in the dim starlight from the small globes spotting the Satellite's ceiling, the path was an indistinct blur. A moving body's exact position... And at fifty feet... He saw Neilson -- it could only be Neilson. Moving on hands and knees, he was, keeping low and to the side of the little-used trail -- but within the width of the hand-patched net. And he moved slowly, probing before him with a stick or his needle-knife; Treb could not tell which. Another two feet and he could trip the net. Neilson would be captured, alive, and the stalemate ended. Now! The net flung into the air, snapped tight about Neilson's thrashing body! He heard the pop of parting strands as Neilson slashed with his knife. And then he swung the butt of his carbine, twice, against the trapped man's skull. Neilson went limp. It was finished. He could take his prisoner to the lock, summon the UN guards, and go home to the Krekar Hills. And an end to all blood-letting for him. He set about binding tight the arms and legs of Neilson, and had barely completed his task when the prisoner groaned and struggled. "So this is it, Treb?" "Yes." "You win again. And I -- I lose everything." "So?" Treb touched his pocket torch to a heap of shredded dry twigs. "What have you lost? Your health, your life? And will not the woman forget all else and love you?" "Hah! She will laugh at me if I come near her. Defeated, and with a paltry ten thousand to offer. Better that I died than this." "Perhaps you do not -- know this woman. Hark If she is good, she will come to you." The growing firelight was on Neilson's bearded face. And beneath his eyes something glistened and beaded. He laughed bitterly. "She's not good, Treb, understand that. She's evil and moneyhungry, and ambitious. But she is beautiful and I love her. I'd sell my soul and my body to possess her. "That's why I volunteered. With the winners' grant I would have money. Prestige. Honor. There would be a thousand new opportunities for a career. And Jane could not refuse me then." "It is wrong, Harl Neilson, to so worship a woman. Like alcohol or Venerian fire pollen -- it is unnatural." "I know. I have tried to forget, to put her memory aside. But it is like a disease. An incurable disease. I must have Jane." Treb threw more wood on the little fire and checked over the lashings about Neilson's body. "I am going to look at my rabbit snares," he said, "and to spring the other traps. We will eat and sleep, and in the morning try to shave and look decent before going to the locks." Neilson let his head sag between his shoulders, and said nothing. He was leaning against a tree, his arms lashed behind him and to it. "There is one more thing, Harl, that I wish to discuss. It is about the Paul Hubble Foundation Award. Think about it." Treb moved off into the darkness. T he sunlight from the overhead "suns" of the Satellite revealed a greatly changed Treb. He was shaved, his hair combed and hacked off above his ears, and he was stitching the last rough patch on his dark green trouser leg. Now he donned the trousers and went over to the bound Andilian. He cut the ropes, his carbine ready. "Get down to the lake," he ordered. "You'll find a razor, soap and an old shirt to dry yourself with." Harl Neilson was chunky and fair-haired, with a healthy looking red-brown skin. His eyes were wide and darkly blue. Now the wide mouth under his shapeless nose twisted into a faint grin. "I'll try to get away," he warned. "Aren't you afraid of that?" "I have all the guns, grenades and needle-knives, Harl. I'll shoot you if you attempt escape, of course, but I hope you'll listen to what I propose first." Neilson slowly stripped off his ragged tunic and trousers. There was the scar of a recent bullet's path across his right shoulder blade. It was crusted with blackened blood. "I thought I heard you two days back, Harl," said Treb. "Just a scratch." Neilson took up the soap and waded into the nearby lake. "Start talking, Treb." "I told you to think about Paul Hubble's Award, Harl. He's the American industrialist who opposed violence in settling any issue." "Sure. Heard about him in the he sunk in his worthless Peace Foundation. What about it?" "Hear me out. Did you like what we just went through? Your friends and comrades dying -- my friends dead and wounded? And all to settle some territorial dispute or to wipe out some imagined slur. "Would you like to prevent your kid, or mine, from having to face this again?" "Stop sounding off, Treb, and say something." Neilson scrubbed vigorously. "Of course I would -- if I ever had a kid, I mean." "We could help, Harl. By calling off the duel and making peace right here. Of course there might be new balloting -- even another battle between our countries. But we would crack the theory that victory means more than humanity." Neilson snorted. He splashed water into his eyes and over his soapy beard and hair. "And go home penniless? To have every friend and neighbor avoid us? What's eating you? You won. You'll get the quarter of a "I want you to share equally. I want our two countries to know that friendship means more than glory." "I don't get it. If neither side wins we get nothing." "You forget about the Hubble Award. Two hundred thousand to each member of both sides, or their survivors, if they declare an armistice." "I had forgotten. You'd give up fifty thousand so I could get the same two hundred thousand! You're a prince, Treb. "But I couldn't do it. Jane would turn against me. The radio, the newswires, television and the magazines would crucify me -- both of us." "We'd ride it out. None of the participants in the twenty-two duels here in Satellite has had the courage to admit he hates war. In years to come our stand would be honored." "It means losing Jane. I can't do it." "You've lost her anyway, Harl, if she's the way you say. How about your three wounded buddies: Wasson, Clark, and Thomason? Badly cut up aren't they? Clark blind. Wasson with no arms. "Couldn't they use the two hundred thousand?" Neilson was coming ashore. A sudden resolve hardened his fade, and his blue eyes were dark and angry. His jaw jutted through the sandy fairness of his draggled beard. Treb felt his vitals knot at what he sensed in Neilson's expression. He'd gambled on the essential fairness and sympathy of the Andilian's character. But now... "I'll do it," Neilson said tonelessly. "I hope you'll never regret what you are doing, Harl." "Aw, lock valves!" snarled Neilson. "Get ready to go while I finish shaving." So that was the way it was to be. Treb turned wearily away. He went back through the screen of flowering shrubs and trees to where the coals of their fire turned gray. The grenades and the three cartridges, his own and Neilson's, he buried in a hasty hole under a tree's sprawled roots. Afterward he tamped sod back into place and spread leaves. His needle-knife he laid on the turf. From his pocket he took a long strip of cloth and some of the tough nylon cords from the net. Then he let his trousers drop about his ankles and set about anchoring the needle-knife securely to his upper leg. When he had finished the keen blade projected a foot below his knee-cap. And around it, carefully, he wound some of the cloth. He donned his battered trousers again. The concealed knife was well hidden, although it did impede the freedom of his stride. Then he went down to rejoin Neilson. Neilson was just finishing hacking at his hair with the short-bladed safety razor. He scowled at Treb, his eyes on the carbine that the man from Baryt yet carried. "Not taking any chances, eh, Treb?" "Just in case you change your mind, Harl." "My friend -- my very dear friend -- Gram Treb!" Neilson laughed. "What trust -- what a faith in human nature!" "Yes, Harl. Your friend." They left the lake behind, Neilson in advance. Directly ahead, beyond the outer ring of trees, the locks to the upper levels waited. They had less than a third of a mile to traverse. The rusting shattered debris of a machine gun, with a spilled clutter of empty shell cases, lay just off the trail. "Harok Dann died here," said Treb. Neilson did not turn. "The big man, Manross, was killed by Dann's fire even as he threw the grenade," he added. Treb was watching the broadshouldered figure ahead. "Shut it off, Treb, will you?" Neilson shouted, turning. "Isn't it tough enough without you yap-yapping all the way?" Treb's lips thinned. The knife chafed his leg. Already he was limping slightly. But they had covered more Aan half the distance. Once they contacted the UN guards and were through the locks he could relax... T he circular outer face of the lock was before them. And the button that summoned the guards jutted redly from a shoulderhigh recess. Neilson leaned against the lock, his narrowed eyes on Treb as he reached for the button. Treb jabbed. And he relaxed inwardly. Too late now for Neilson to attempt ov'erpowering him and claiming the victory. He had feared such an attempt -- with the lust for the woman, Jane Vanne, driving him, Neilson might have gone back on his word. It was tough going for the kid. But he wasn't losing anything worth keeping. And hundreds of fine young lads like him might be spared going through this ordeal in space. They'd... Neilson's fist caught him behind the ear. That split-second of inattendon was proving costly. Neilson clamped the carbine barrel, wrested it away from Treb. He raised it. Treb lifted his hands. "So now it's me at the controls," Neilson said, grinning. "Any reason why I should go through with your Hubble Award idea?" "The guards will be here in no more than a minute, Harl. Throw the gun away and we'll go through together." Neilson's eyes were shining. He was seeing the crowds waving crazy welcome as his space ship grounded. He was seeing the adulation of the boys, and the adoring glance of the dark-eyed girl named Jane. He was seeing the medals and the banquets and the bundles of money. "You were crazy, Treb," he said, "to ever trust me. In war promises mean nothing. Study your history." Treb squared his shoulders, his hands came down. "If that's the way it is," he said, and then, "coming at you, Neilson." Neilson flinched. It was the first time Treb had called him by his last name, perhaps that was the reason. Or it could have been the sight of an unarmed man walking directly into his carbine's ugly muzzle. He pressed trigger. The unloaded weapon was silent. Treb wrenched at the gun. Neilson kicked him in the crotch. The gun came free. He brought it down at Treb's head, but at the last second before impact Treb dodged. The barrel smacked into Treb's right shoulder and broke the collar bone. Treb came on, his left hand jabbing, and his right arm dangling. Neilson chopped at his face with the vertically held carbine, and tore a great chunk from his left cheek. And then Treb's knee came up. The shielded razor-sharp blade sliced through his trouser. He drove the ugly little dagger into Neilson's body. Neilson went down, squirming away from the sudden pain that tore at his vitals. The carbine went clattering. Treb knelt beside him; tried to stanch the warm gush of red life, and cursed, soundlessly, the ambition that is mankind's greatest boon -- and curse. He tore off the bloody knife. "You won't die, Neilson," he said gravely. "Not with the surgeon and the hospital here on Earth Satellite so near. You'll live to see Andilia again. "And about the invitation to visit us -- I'm sorry you rejected it like this. But the offer still stands. When I can call you Harl again, when you are a man, visit us." The lock behind them creaked and started to open.    Why does this magnificently applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring so little happiness? The simple answer runs : because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. -- Albert Einstein To define it rudely but not ineptly, research is the art of doing well with one dollar that which any bungler can do with two after a fashion. -- Wellington what Is Your Science I. Q. ? light, sound, atmosphere, bombs, planets and other items you run across all the time in science fiction. How well do you know them? Counting five for each correct answer, you should score #. Anything over # and you're a whizz. See page # for the answers. #. Mach number I is equal to the speed of sound at sea level, or miles per hour. #. What have klystron and rhagnetron in common? #. The star visible to the naked eye has a magnitude of plus #. #. The gravity on Mars is approximately what fraction of Earth gravity? #. On Earth, a falling object would have an acceleration of feet per second. #. What is the name of the companion of the double star Mizar? #. Electrons are to matter what are to light. #. What sort of an atmosphere does the moon Titan have? #. It takes the sun's light minutes to reach us here on Earth. #. What is the nitrogen content of the air we breathe? #. An artificial moonlet would have to travel at a speed of miles per hour to maintain a circular orbit around the Earth. #. When a planet crosses in front of the sun as seen from Earth, it is in #. What other planet besides Mercury and Pluto has an eliptical orbit rather than a circular one? #. What is the name of the red star in the constellation Orion? #. A day on the Moon is times as long as a day on Earth. #. Within how much time after an atomic explosion is the peak of radiation reached? #. The lightest of all the elements that are solid at ordinary temperature is #. A star that is a cephied variable is what color? #. What is another name for the great nebula in Andromeda? #. The explosion energy of A-bombs, H-bombs, and Lithium bombs is caused by a  reaction process. Intelligent parents readily understand why they must not try to educate and train their children. Robots do it much better; they do not confuse them with complexes or emotions or petty impulses. Even tired old Ed Doyle could tell you that much... , a surface car, waved fifty credits in the robot driver's face, mopped his florid face with a red pocket-handkerchief, unfastened his collar, perspired and licked his lips and swallowed piteously all the way to the hospital. The surface car slid up to a smooth halt before the great whitedomed hospital building. Ed leaped out and bounded up the steps three at a time, pushing through the visitors and convalescent patients standing on the broad terrace. He threw his weight against the door and emerged in the lobby, astonishing the attendants and persons of importance moving about their tasks. "Where?" Ed demanded, gazing around, his feet wide apart, his fists clenched, his chest rising and falling. His breath came hoarsely, like an animal's. Silence fell over the lobby. Everyone turned toward him, pausing in their work. "Where?" Ed demanded again. "Where is she? They?" It was fortunate Janet had been delivered of a child on this of all days; Proxima Centauri was a long way from Terra and the service was bad. Anticipating the birth of his child, Ed had left Proxima some weeks before. He had just arrived in the city. While stowing his suitcase in the luggage tread at the station the message had been handed to him by a robot courier; Los Angeles Central Hospital. At once, Ed hurried, and fast. As he hurried he couldn't help feeling pleased he had hit the day exactly right, almost to the hour. It was a good feeling. He had felt it before, during years of business dealings in the "Colonies", the frontier, the fringe of Terran civilization where the streets were still lit by electric lights and doors opened by hand. That was going to be hard to get used to. Ed turned toward the door behind him, feeling suddenly fooh ish. He had shoved it open, ignoring the eye. The door was just now closing, sliding slowly back in place. He calmed down a little, putting his handkerchief away in his coat pocket. The hospital attendants were resuming their work, picking up their activities where they had left off. One attendant, a strapping late-model robot, coasted over to Ed and halted. The robot balanced his noteboard expertly, his photocell eyes appraising Ed's flushed features. "May I enquire whom you are looking for, sir? Whom do you wish to find?" "My wife." "Her name, sir?" "Janet. Janet Doyle. She's just had a child," The robot consulted his board. "This way, sir." He coasted off down the passage. Ed followed nervously. "Is she okay? Did I get here in time?" His anxiety was returning. "She is quite well, sir." The robot raised his metal arm and a side door slid back. "In here, sir." Janet, in a chic blue-mesh suit, was sitting before a mahogany desk, a cigarette between her fingers, her slim legs crossed, talking rapidly. On the other side of the desk a well-dressed doctor sat listening. "Janet!" Ed said, entering the room. "Hi, Ed." She glanced up at him. "You just now get in?" "Sure. It's -- it's all over? You -- I mean, it's happened?" Janet laughed, her even white teeth sparkling. "Of course. Come in and sit. This is Doctor Bish." "Hello, Doc." Ed sat down nervously across from them. "Then it's all over?" "The event has happened," Doctor Bish said. His voice was thin and metallic. Ed realized with a sudden shock that the doctor was a robot. A top-level robot, made in humanoid form, not like the ordinary metal-limbed workers. It had fooled him -- he had been away so long. Doctor Bish appeared plump and well fed, with kindly features and eyeglasses. His large fleshy hands rested on the desk, a ring on one finger. Pinstripe suit and necktie. Diamond tie clasp. Nails carefully manicured. Hair black and evenly parted. But his voice had given him away. They never seemed to be able to get a really human sound into the voice. The compressed air and whirling disc system seemed to fall short. Otherwise, it was very convincing. "I understand you've been situated near Proxima, Mr. Doyle," Doctor Bish said pleasantly. Ed nodded. "Yeah." "Quite a long way, isn't it? I've never been out there. I have always wanted to go. Is it true they're almost ready to push on to Sirius?" "Look, doc -- " "Ed, don't be impatient." Janet stubbed out her cigarette, glancing reprovingly up at him. She hadn't changed in six months. Small blonde face, red mouth, cold eyes like little blue rocks. And now, her perfect figure back again. "They're bringing him here. It takes a few minutes. They have to wash him off and put drops in his eyes and take a wave shot of his brain." "He? Then it's a boy?" "Of course. Don't you remember? You were with me when I had the shots. We agreed at the time. You haven't changed your mind, have you?" "Too late to change your mind now, Mr. Doyle," Doctor Bfsh's toneless voice came, high-pitched and calm. "Your wife has decided to call him Peter." "Peter." Ed nodded, a little dazed. "That's right. We did decide, didn't we? Peter." He let the word roll around in his mind. "Yeah. That's fine. I like it." The wall suddenly faded, turning from opaque to transparent. Ed spun quickly. They were looking into a brightly lit room, filled with hospital equipment and whiteclad attendant robots. One of the robots was moving toward them, pushing a cart. On the cart was a container, a big metal pot. Ed's breathing increased. He felt a wave of dizziness. He went up to the transparent wall and stood gazing at the metal pot on the cart. Doctor Bish rose. "Don't you want to see, too, Mrs. Doyle?" "Of course." Janet crossed to the wall and stood beside Ed. She watched critically, her arms folded. Doctor Bish made a signal. The attendant reached into the pot and lifted out a wire tray, gripping the handles with his magnetic clamps. On the tray, dripping through the wire, was Peter Doyle, still wet from his bath, his eyes wide with astonishment. He was pink all over, except for a fringe of hair on the top of his head, and his great blue eyes. He was little and wrinkled and toothless, like an ancient withered sage. "Golly," Ed said. Doctor Bish made a second signal. The wall slid back. The attendant robot advanced into the room, holding his dripping tray out. Doctor Bish removed Peter from the tray and held him up for inspection. He turned him around and around, studying him from every angle. "He looks fine," he said at last. "What was the result of the wave photo?" Janet asked. "Result was good. Excellent tendencies indicated. Very promising. High development of the -- " The doctor broke off. "What is it, Mr. Doyle?" Ed was holding out his hands. "Let me have him, doc. I want to hold him." He grinned from ear to ear. "Let's see how heavy he is. He sure looks big." Doctor Bish's mouth fell open in horror. He and Janet gaped. "Ed!" Janet exclaimed sharply. "What's the matter with you?" "Good heavens, Mr. Doyle," the doctor murmured. Ed blinked. "What?" "If I had thought you had any such thing in mind -- " Doctor Bish quickly returned Peter to the attendant. The attendant rushed Peter from the room, back to the metal pot. The cart and robot and pot hurriedly vanished, and the wall banged back in place. Janet grabbed Ed's arm angrily. "Good Lord, Ed! Have you lost your mind? Come on. Let's get out of here before you do something else." "But -- " "Come on." Janet smiled nervously at Doctor Bish. "We'll run along now, doctor. Thanks so much for ererything. Don't pay any attention to him. He's been out there so long, you know." "I understand," Doctor Bish said smoothly. He had regained his poise. "I trust we'll hear from you later, Mrs. Doyle." Janet pulled Ed out into the hall. "Ed, what's the matter with you? I've never been so embarrassed in all my life." Two spots of red glowed in Janet's cheeks. "I could have kicked you." "But what -- " "You know we aren't allowed to touch him. What do you want to do, ruin his whole life?" "But -- " "Gome on." They hurried outside the hospital, onto the terrace. Warm sunlight streamed down on them. "There's no telling what harm you've done. He may already be hopelessly warped. If he grows up all warped and -- and neurotic and emotional, it'll be your fault." Suddenly Ed remembered. He sagged, his features drooping with misery. "That's right. I forgot. Only robots can come near the children. I'm sorry, Jan. I got carried away. I hope I didn't do anything they can't fix." "How could you forget?" "It's so different out at Prox." Ed waved to a surface car, crest-fallen and abashed. The driver drew up in front of them. "Jan, I'm sorry as hell. I really am. I was all excited. Let's go have a cup of coffee someplace and talk. I want to know what the doctor said." E d had a cup of coffee and Janet sipped at a brandy frappe. The Nymphite Room was pitch black except for a vague light oozing up from the table between them. The table diffused a pale illumination that spread over everything, a ghostly radiation seemingly without source. A robot waitress moved back and forth soundlessly with a tray of drinks. Recorded music played softly in the back of the room. "Go on," Ed said. "Go on?" Janet slipped her jacket off and laid it over the back of her chair. In the pale light her breasts glowed faintly. "There's not much to tell. Everything went all right. It didn't take long. I chatted with Doctor Bish most of the time." "I'm glad I got here." "How was your trip?" "Fine." "Is the service getting any better? Does it still take as long as it did?" "About the same." "I can't see why you want to go all the way out there. It's so -- so cut off from things. What do you find out there? Are plumbing fixtures really that much in demand?" "They need them. Frontier area. Everyone wants the refinements." Ed gestured vaguely. "What did he tell you about Peter? What's he going to be like? Can he tell? I guess it's too soon." "He was going to tell me when you started acting the way you did. I'll call him on the vidphone when we get home. His wave pattern should be good. He comes from the best eugenic stock." Ed grunted. "On your side, at least." "How long are you going to be here?" "I don't know. Not long. I'll have to go back. I'd sure like to see him again, before I go;" He glanced up hopefully at his wife. "Do you think lean?" "I suppose." "How long will he have to stay there?" "At the hospital? Not long. A few days." Ed hesitated. "I didn't mean at the hospital, exactly. I mean with them. How long before we can have him? How long before we can bring him home?" There was silence. Janet finished her brandy. She leaned back, lighting a cigarette. Smoke drifted across to Ed, blending with the pale light. "Ed, I don't think you understand. You've been out there so long. A lot has happened since you were a child. New methods, new techniques. They've found out so many things they didn't know. They're making progress, for the first time. They know what to do. They're developing a real methodology for dealing with children. For the growth period. Attitude development. Training." She smiled brightly at Ed. "I've been reading all about it." "How long before we get him?" "In a few days he'll be released from the hospital. He'll go to a child guidance center. He'll be tested and studied. They'll determine his various capacities and his latent abilities. The direction his development seems to be taking." "And then?" "Then he's put in the proper educational division. So he'll get the right training. Ed, you know, I think he's really going to something! I could tell by the way Doctor Bish looked. He was studying the wave pattern charts when I came in. He had a look on his face. How can I describe it?" She searched for the word. "Well, almost -- almost a greedy look. Real excitement. They take so much interest in what they're doing. He -- " "Don't say he. Say it." "Ed, really! What's got into you?" "Nothing." Ed glared sullenly down. "Go on." "They make sure he's trained in the right direction. All the time he's there ability tests are given. Then, when he's about nine, he'll be transferred to -- " "Nine! You mean nine years?" "Of course." "But when do we get him?" "Ed, I thought you knew about this. Do I have to go over the whole thing?" "My God, Jan! We can't wait nine years!" Ed jerked himself upright. "I never heard of such a thing. Nine years? Why, he'll be half grown by then." "That's the point." Janet leaned toward him, resting her bare elbow against the table. "As long as he's growing he has to be with them. Not with us. Afterwards, when he's finished growing, when he's no longer so plastic, then we can be with him all we want." . "Afterwards? When he's eighteen?" Ed leaped up, pushing his chair back. "I'm going down there and get him." "Sit down, Ed." Janet gazed up calmly, one supple arm thrown lightly over the back of her chair. "Sit down and act like an adult, for a change." "Doesn't it matter to you? Don't you care?" "Of course I care." Janet shrugged. "But it's necessary. Otherwise he won't develop correctly. It's for his good. Not ours. He doesn't exist for us. Do you want him to have conflicts?" Ed moved away from the table. "I'll see you later." "Where are you going?" "Just around. I can't stand this kind of place. It bothers me. I'll see you later." Ed pushed across the room to the door. The door opened and he found himself on the shiny noon-day street. Hot sunlight beat down on him. He blinked, adjusting himself to the blinding light. People streamed around him. People and noise. He moved with them. He was dazed. He had known, of course. It was there in the back of his mind. The new developments in child care. But it had been abstract, general. Nothing to do with him. With his child. He calmed himself, as he walked along. He was getting all upset about nothing. Janet was right, of course. It was for Peter's good. Peter didn't exist for them, like a dog or cat. A pet to have around the house. He was a human being, with his own life. The training was for him, not for them. It was to develop him, his abilities, his powers. He was to be molded, realized, brought out. Naturally, robots could do the best job. Robots could train him scientifically, according to a rational technique. Not according to emotional whim. Robots didn't get angry. Robots didn't nag and whine. They didn't spank a child or yell at him. They didn't give conflicting orders. They didn't quarrel among themselves or use the child for their own ends. And there could be no Oedipus Complex, with only robots around. No complexes at all. It had been discovered long ago that neurosis could be traced to childhood training. To the way parents brought up the child. The inhibitions he w'as taught, the manners, the lessons, the punishments, the rewards. Neuroses, complexes, warped development, all stemmed from the subjective relationship existing betveen the child and the parent. If perhaps the parent could be eliminated as a factor... Parents could never become objective about their children. It was always a biased, emotional projection the parent held toward the child. Inevitably, the parent's view was distorted. No parent could be a fit instructor for his child. Robots could study the child, analyze his needs, his wants, test his abilities and interests. Robots would not try to force the child to fit a certain mold. The child would be trained along his own lines; wherever scientific study indicated his interest and need lay. Ed came to the corner. Traffic whirred past him. He stepped absently forward. A clang and crash. Bars dropped in front of him, stopping him. A robot safety control. "Sir, be more careful!" the strident voice came, close by him. "Sorry." Ed stepped back. The control bars lifted. He waited for the lights to change. It was for Pete's own good. Robots could train him right. Later on, when he was out of his growth stage, when he was not so pliant, so responsive -- "It's better for him," Ed murmured. He said it again, half aloud. Some people glanced at him and he colored. Of course it was better for him. No doubt about it. Eighteen. He couldn't be with his son until he was eighteen. Practically grown up. The lights changed. Deep in thought, Ed crossed the street with the other pedestrians, keeping carefully inside the safety lane. It was best for Peter. But eighteen years was a long time. "A hell of a long time," Ed murmured, frowning. "Too damn long a time." studied the man standing in front of him. His relays and memory banks clicked, narrowing down the image identification, flashing a variety of comparison possibilities past the scanner. "I recall you, sir," Doctor Bish said at last. "You're the man from Proxima. From the colonies. Doyle. Edward Doyle. Let's see. It was some time ago. It must have been -- " "Nine years ago," Ed Doyle said grimly. "Exactly nine years ago, practically to the day." Doctor Bish folded his hands. "Sit down, Mr. Doyle. What can I do for you? How is Mrs. Doyle? Very engaging wife, as I recall. We had a delightful conversation during her delivery. How -- " "Doctor Bish, do you know where my son is?" Doctor Bish considered, tapping his fingers on the desk top, the polished mahogany surface. He closed his eyes slightly, gazing off into the distance. "Yes. Yes, I know where your son is, Mr. Doyle." Ed Doyle relaxed. "Fine." He nodded, letting his breath out in relief. "I know exactly where your son is. I placed him in the Los Angeles Biological Research Station about a year ago. He's undergoing specialized training there. Your son, Mr. Doyle, has shown exceptional ability. He is, shall I say, one of the few, the very few we have found with real possibilities." "Can I see him?" "See him? How do you mean?" Doyle controlled himself with an effort. "I think the term is clear." Doctor Bish rubbed his chin. His photocell brain whirred, operating at maximum velocity. Switches routed power surges, building up loads and leaping gaps rapidly, as he contemplated the man before him. "You wish to view him? That's one meaning of the term. Or do you wish to talk to him? Sometimes the term , is used to cover a more direct contact. It's a loose word." "I want to talk to him." "I see." Bish slowly drew some forms from the dispenser on his desk. "There are a few routine papers that have to be filled out first, of course. Just how long did you want to speak to him?" Ed Doyle gazed steadily into Doctor Bish's bland face. "I want to talk to him several hours. Alone." "Alone?" "No robots around." Doctor Bish said nothing. He stroked the papers he held, creasing the edges with his nail. "Mr. Doyle," he said carefully, "I wonder if you're in a proper emotional state to visit your son. You haye recently come in from the colonies?" "I left Proxima three weeks ago." "Then you have just arrived here in Los Angeles?" "That's right." "And you've come to see your son? Or have you other business?" "I came for my son." "Mr. Doyle, Peter is at a very critical stage. He has just recently been transferred to the Biology Station for his higher training. Up to now his training has been general. What we call the non-differentiated stage. Recently he has entered a new period. Within the last six months Peter has begun advanced work along his specific line, that of organic chemistry. He will -- " "What does Peter think about it?" Bish frowned. "I don't understand, sir." "How does he feel? Is it what he wants?" "Mr. Doyle, your son has the possibility of becoming one of the world's finest bio-chemists. In all the time we have worked with human beings, in their training and development, we have never come across a more alert and integrated faculty for the assimilation of data, construction of theory, formulation of material, than that which your son possesses. All tests indicate he will rapidly rise to the top of his chosen field. He is still only a child, Mr. Doyle, but it is the children who must be trained." Doyle stood up. "Tell me where I can find him. I'll talk to him for two hours and then the rest is up to him." "The rest?" Doyle clamped his jaw shut. He shoved his hands in his pockets. His face was flushed and set, grim with determination. In the nine years he had grown much heavier, more stocky and florid. His thinning hair had turned iron-gray. His clothes were dumpy and unpressed. He looked stubborn. Doctor Bish sighed. "All right, Mr. Doyle. Here are the papers. The law allows you to observe your boy whenever you make proper application. Since he is out of his nondifferentiated stage, you may also speak to him for a period of ninety minutes." "Alone." "You can take him away from the Station grounds for that length of time." Doctor Bish pushed the papers over to Doyle. "Fill these out, and I'll have Peter brought here." He looked up steadily at the man standing before him. "I hope you'll remember that any emotional experience at this crucial stage may do much to inhibit his development. He has chosen his field, Mr. Doyle. He must be permitted to grow along his selected lines, unhindered by situational blocks. Peter has been in contact with our technical staff throughout his entire training period. He is not accustomed to contact with other human beings. So please be careful." Doyle said nothing. He grabbed up the papers and plucked out his fountain pen. H e hardly recognized his son when the two robot attendants brought him out of the massive concrete Station building and deposited him a few yards from Ed's parked surface car. Ed pushed the door open. "Pete!" His heart was thumping heavily, painfully. He watched his son come toward the car, frowning in the bright sunlight. It was late afternoon, about four. A faint breeze blew across the parking lot, rustling a few papers and bits of debris. Peter stood slim and straight. His eyes were large, deep brown, like Ed's. His hair was light, almost blonde. More like Janet's. He had Ed's jaw, though, the firm line, clean and well-chiseled. Ed grinned at him. Nine years it had been. Nine years since the robot attendant had lifted the wire rack up from the conveyor pot, to show him the little wrinkled baby, red as a boiled lobster. Peter had grown. He was not a baby any longer. He was a young boy, straight and proud, with firm features and wide, clear eyes. "Pete," Ed said. "How the hell are you?"  The boy stopped by the door of the car. He gazed at Ed calmly. His eyes flickered, taking in the car, the robot driver, the heavy-set man in the rumpled tweed suit grinning nervously at him. "Get in. Get inside." Ed moved over. "Come on. We have places to go." The boy was looking at him again. Suddenly Ed was conscious of his baggy suit, his unshined shoes, his gray stubbled chin. He flushed, yanking out his red pocket-handkerchief and mopping his forehead uneasily. "I just got off the ship, Pete. From Proxima. I haven't had" time to change. Fm a little dusty. Long trip." Peter nodded. "# light years, isn't it?" "Takes three weeks. Get in. Don't you want to get in?" Peter slid in beside him. Ed slammed the door. "Let's go." The car started up. "Drive -- " Ed peered out the window. "Drive up there. By the hill. Out of town." He turhed to Pete. "I hate big cities. I can't get used to them." "There are no large cities in the colonies, are there?" Peter murmured. "You're unused to urban living." Ed settled back. His heart had begun to slow down to its normal beat. "No, as a matter of fact it's the other way around, Pete." "How do you mean?" "I went to Prox because I couldn't stand cities." Peter said nothing. The surface car was climbing, going up a steep highway into the hills. The Station, huge and impressive, spread out like a heap of cement bricks directly below them. A few cars moved along the road, but not many. Most transportation was by air, now. Surface cars had begun to disappear. The road levelled off. They moved along the ridge of the hills. Trees and bushes rose on both sides of them. "It's nice up here," Ed said. "Yes." "How -- how have you been? I haven't seen you for a long time. Just once. Just after you were born." "I know. Your visit is listed in the records." "You been getting along all right?" "Yes. Quite well." "They treating you all right?" "Of course." After awhile Ed leaned forward. "Stop here," he said to the robot driver. The car slowed down, pulling over to the side of the road. "Sir, there is nothing -- " "This is fine. Let us out. We'll walk from here." The car stopped. The door slid reluctantly open. Ed stepped quickly out of the car, onto the pavement. Peter got out slowly after him, puzzled. "Where are we?" "No place." Ed slammed the door. "Go on back to town," he said to the driver. "We won't need you." The car drove off. Ed walked to the side of the road. Peter came after him. The hill dropped away, falling down to the beginnings of the city below. A vast panorama stretched out, the great metropolis in the late afternoon sun. Ed took a deep breath, throwing his arms out. He took off his coat and tossed it over his shoulder. "Come on." He started down the hillside. "Here we go." "Where?" "For a walk. Let's get off this damn road." They climbed down the side of the hill, walking carefully, holding onto the grass and roots jutting out from the soil. Finally they came to a level place by a big sycamore tree. Ed threw himself down on the ground, grunting and wiping sweat from his neck. "Here. Let's sit here." Peter sat down carefully, a little way off. Ed's blue shirt was stained with sweat. He unfastened his tie and loosened his collar. Presently he searched through his coat pockets. He brought out his pipe and tobacco. Peter watched him fill the pipe and light it with a big sulphur match. "What's that?" he murmured. "This? My pipe." Ed grinned, sucking at the pipe. "Haven't you ever seen a pipe?" "No." "This is a good pipe. I got this when I first went out to Proxima. That was a long time ago, Pete. It was twenty-five years ago. I was just nineteen, then. Only about twice as old as you." He put his tobacco away and leaned back, his heavy face serious, preoccupied. "Just nineteen. I went out there as a plumber. Repair and sales, when I could make a sale. Terran Plumbing. One of those big ads you used to see. Unlimited opportunGold in the streets." Ed laughed. "How did you make out?" "Not bad. Not bad at all. I own my own line, now, you know. I service the whole Proxima system. We do repairing, maintenance, building. Construction. I've got six hundred people working for me. It took a long time. It didn't come easy." "No." "Hungry?" Peter turned. "What?" "Are you hungry?" Ed pulled a brown paper parcel from his coat and unwrapped it. "I still have a couple sandwiches from the trip. When I come in from Prox I bring some food along with me. I don't like to buy in the diner. They skin you." He held out the parcel. "Want one?" "No thank you." Ed took a sandwich and began to eat. He ate nervously, glancing at his son. Peter sat silently, a short distance off, staring ahead without expression. His smooth handsome face was blank. "Everything all right?" Ed said. "Yes." "You're not cold, are you?" "No." "You don't want to catch cold." A squirrel crossed in front of them, hurrying toward the sycamore tree. Ed threw it a piece of his sandwich. The squirrel ran off a way, then came back slowly. It scolded at them, standing up on its hind feet, its great gray tail flowing out behind it. Ed laughed. "Look at him. Ever see a squirrel before?" "I don't think so." The squirrel ran off with the piece of sandwich. It disappeared among the brush and bushes. "Squirrels don't exist out around Prox," Ed said. "No." "It's good to come back to Terra once in awhile. See some of the old things. They're going, though." "Going?" "Away. Destroyed. Terra is always changing." Ed waved around at the hillside. "This will be gone, someday. They'll cut down the trees. Then they'll level it. Someday they'll carve the whole range up and carry it off. Use it for fill, someplace along the coast." "That's beyond our scope," Peter said. "What?" "I don't receive that type of material. I think Doctor Bish told you. I'm working with bio-chemistry." "I know," Ed murmured. "Say, how the hell did you ever get mixed up with that stuff? Bio-chemistry?" "The tests showed that my abilities lie along those lines." "You enjoy what you're doing?" "What a strange thing to ask. Of course I enjoy what I'm doing. It's the work I'm fitted for." "It seems funny as hell to me, starting a nine year old kid off on something like that." "Why?" "My God, Pete. When I was nine I was bumming around town. In school sometimes, outside mostly, wandering here and there. Playing. Reading. Sneaking into the rocket launching yards all the time." He considered. "Doing all sorts of things. When I was sixteen I hopped over to Mars. I stayed there awhile. Worked as a hasher. I went on to Ganymede. Ganymede was all sewed up tight. Nothing doing there. From Ganymede I went out to Prox. Got a work-away all the way out. Big freighter." "You stayed at Proxima?" "I sure did. I found what I wanted. Nice place, out there. Now we're starting on to Sirius, you know." Ed's chest swelled. "I've got an outlet in the Sirius system. Little retail and service place." "Sirius is # light years from Sol." "It's a long way. Seven weeks, from here. Rough grind. Meteor swarms. Keeps things hot all the way out." "I can imagine." "You know what I thought I might do?" Ed turned toward his son, his face alive with hope and enthusiasm. "I've been thinking it over. I thought maybe I'd go out there. To Sirius. It's a fine little place we have. I drew up the plans myself. Special design to fit with the characteristics of the system." Peter nodded. "Pete -- " "Yes?" "Do you think maybe you'd be interested? Like to hop out to Sirius and take a look? It's a good place. Four clean planets. Never touched. Lots of room. Miles and miles of room. Cliffs and mountains. Oceans. Nobody around. Just a few colonists, families, some construction. Wide, level plains." "How do you mean, interested?" "In going all the way out." Ed's face was pale. His. mouth twitched nervously. "I thought maybe you'd like to come along and see how things are. It's a lot like Prox was, twenty-five years ago. It's good and clean out there. No cities." Peter smiled. "Why are you smiling?" "No reason." Peter stood up abruptly. "If we have to walk back to the Station we better start. Don't you think? It's getting late." "Sure." Ed struggled to his feet. "Sure, but -- " "When are you going to be back in the Sol system again?" "Back?" Ed followed after his son. Peter climbed up the hill toward the road. "Slow down, will you?" Peter slowed down. Ed caught up with him. "I don't know when I'll be back. I don't come here very often. No ties. Not since Jan and I separated. As a matter of fact I came here this time to -- " "This way." Peter started down the road. Ed hurried along beside him, fastening his tie and putting his coat on, gasping for breath. "Pete, what do you say? You want to hop out to Sirius with me? Take a look? It's a nice place out there. We could work together. The two of us. If you want." "But I already have my work." "That stuff? That damn chemistry stuff?" Peter smiled again. Ed scowled, his face dark red. "Why are you smiling?" he demanded. His son did not answer. "What's the matter? What's so damn funny?" "Nothing," Peter said. "Don't become excited. We have a long walk down." He increased his pace slightly, his supple body swinging in long, even strides. "It's getting late. We have to hurry." wristwatch, pushing back his pinstriped coat sleeve. "I'm glad you're back." "He sent the surface car away," Peter murmured. "We had to walk down the hill on foot." It was dark outside. The Station lights were coming on automatically, along the rows of buildings and laboratories. Doctor Bish rose from his desk. "Sign this, Peter. Bottom of this form." Peter signed. "What is it?" "Certifies you saw him in accord with the provisions of the law. We didn't try to obstruct you in any way." Peter handed the paper back. Bish filed it away with the others. Peter moved toward the door of the doctor's office. "I'll go. Down to the cafeteria for dinner." "You haven't eaten?" "No." Doctor Bish folded his arms, studying the boy. "Well?" he said. "What do you think of him? This is the first time you've seen your father. It must have been strange for you. You've been around us so much, in all your training and work." "It was -- unusual." "Did you gain any Impressions? Was there any thing you particularly noticed?" "He was very emotional. There was a distinct bias through everything he said and did. A distortion present, virtually uniform." "Anything else?" Peter hesitated, lingering at the door. He broke into a smile. "One other thing." "What was it?" "I noticed -- " Peter laughed. "I noticed a distinct odor about him. A constant pungent smell, all the time I was with him." "I'm afraid that's true of all of them," Doctor Bish said. "Certain skin glands. Waste products thrown off from the blood. You'll get used to it, after you've been around them more." "Do I have to be around them?" "They're your own race. How else can you work with them? Your whole training is designed with that in mind. When we've taught you all we can, then you will -- " "It reminded me of something. The pungent odor. I kept thinking about it, all the time I was with him. Trying to place it." "Can you identify it now?" Peter reflected. He thought hard, concentrating deeply. His small face wrinkled up. Doctor Bish waited patiently by his desk, his arms folded. The automatic heating system clicked on for the night, warming the room with a soft glow that drifted gently around them. "I know!" Peter exclaimed suddenly. "What was it?" "The animals in the biology labs. It was the same smell. The same smell as the experimental animals." They glanced at each other, the robot doctor and the promising young boy. Both of them smiled, a secret, private smile. A smile of complete understanding. "I believe I know what you mean," Doctor Bish said. "In fact, I know exactly what you mean."    Beaumont to appear in IF since his much reprinted The Beautiful People. It is a story of human terror and the clash of two cultures, one of the distant tomorrow and one of the ancient yesterday, in a city carved out of the steaming jungle. Which will survive?... It's a novelette, by one of America's outstanding young writers, that will rate with the best science fiction you have read all year. Don't miss it! Illustrated by Virgil Finlay The black dwarf sun sent its assassin on a mission which was calculated to erase the threat to its existence. But prophesies run in strange patterns and, sometimes, an act of evasion becomes an act of fulfillment... , T he ruler of a planet with a black dwarf sun had called a meeting of the council. It was some time before they were assembled, and he waited patiently without thought. When the patchwork of mentalities was complete he allowed the condusions of the prognosticator to occupy his mind. A wall of unanimous incredulity sprang up. The statement was that when the inhabitants of a distant planet achieved space flight they would come to this planet, and use a weapon invented by an individual to destroy it. The prognosticator could not lie, and soon the facade dissolved into individual reactions as acceptance became general. Anger, fear, resignation, and greedy little thoughts of self-aggrandizement. Those thoughts were replaced by a quiescent, questioning receptivity. The questioning grew out of proportion, became hysterical, assumed the panic shape. Self-preservation demanding that there be a solution. Minor prophecies had been evaded before. Details of the individual had been supplied, could not something be done? The Assassin was summoned. The pattern of Dr. Simon Cartwright's encephalic emanations, and the approximate position of the center of these emanations were impressed on its mind. And in a strangely bulbous ship it plunged outward from that eternally dark and silent planet towards Earth, road. A high road. A silent, dark road. Below him on both sides of the road flat marshland swept away, and a little wind caressed him with chill fingers. His tiny world of road beneath him, darkness around him, sky above him, contained only the sound of his footsteps -- and one other. A regular, liquid sound. He thought it was a sound from the marsh. He listened to it, and wondered how long it had been with him. It was close behind him on the road. He stopped, turned round in small curiosity, and bellowed in great horror. He threw up his hands against an immense bulk, a frog-like shape, a lurching, flowing movement. Then it was upon him, and stilled his futile writhings, and passed over him, and left him dead. The Assassin continued along the road. It was aware that it had killed, but it could not contemplate the fact. It possessed all the mental powers of its race, but its conditioning had focused them in one direction, the assassination of Dr. Cartwright. It could consider only those factors which had a direct relation to that purpose. Daylight was one of those factors. It was not aware of the passage of time, but when the sensitive patch on its back began to contract it left the road and went to the marsh. There it burrowed into the slime until green-flecked water closed over it. And deeper until a depth of mud protected it from the sun. Dr. Cartwright groaned and sat up in bed. He silenced the ringing telephone by putting the receiver to his ear. "Do you know what time it is?" he asked, aggrieved. "Hello? Doctor Cartwright? This is the police." "It is half-past seven," continued Simon. "For me, the middle of the night. I am in no fit state to measure a drunk's reactions." "I'm sorry, sir, but there's been an accident. On the Waverton Highway. A man is dead. Inspector Andrews is in charge of the case." "Inspector Andrews? Is mayhem suspected? Never mind. I'll get down there, right away." He put the receiver down and got out of bed. His wife muttered something unintelligible and wrapped his share of the blankets round her. Simon went downstairs. He made a cup of coffee and drank it while he dressed. The engine of his car was cold, but his house was on a hill and he was able to coast down to the Highway. The road was level and straight, and after a few minutes driving a little tableau came into sight -- two cars, a group of uniforms. Inspector Andrews, tall, thin, dyspeptic, greeted him with a limp handshake. "Something funny about this," he said. "See what you think." Simon went down on one knee beside the body and began to undo the clothing. After a time he looked up into the sky. "This is very strange," he murmured. "I know," grunted Andrews. "Can they take the body now?" Simon stood up and nodded. He remained staring out across the marsh until the body had been removed, and the ambulanCe a distant object. Then he went and sat in his car. Andrews finished giving instructions to his Sergeant, and joined him. "I'll let you give me breakfast," he said. "You're very kind," said Simon absently, and released the brake. "Any use asking for the cause of death?" asked Andrews. "Oh, the cause of death was crushing, but the cause of the cause of death -- " Simon shookhis head. "There wasn't an unbroken bone in his body. Could he have been dropped from an airplane?" Andrews shook a ponderous head. "He was a bus driver on his way to work without an enemy in the world. And I've a feeling his death is going to keep me awake at nights. Anyway, Sergeant Bennet is going over the area with a magnifying glass. We'll put up a pretty good show. Can you suggest anything?" "It wasn't a car," said Simon carefully. "The skin was unbroken, except from the inside. I can only imagine something like a rubbercovered steam-roller." T hat night the Assassin killed two people. When it grew dark it heaved itself up out of the slime. A long business of bodily expansion and contraction. Two men were on the road and heard the noise it made. "Somethin' out there." "Stray cow, maybe." They stood and peered into the dark, trying to see a familiar shape. The Assassin approached them, and was too big for them to see. They stood in its path and looked for a familiar object in the blackness of its body. So the instant of apprehension was small, the panic and exertion soon over. Without pausing the Assassin moved over them and continued on its way. A little later Inspector Andrews found them. He was in a radio patrol car, and he was moving in the same direction as the Assassin. With him in the car were three large men carrying automatic rifles. Andrews stopped the car, and one of the men got out and knelt by the bodies. Andrews watched him somberly for a moment then reached for the microphone. He spoke to the station sergeant. "Inspector Andrews here. Send an ambulance out here, will you, and phone Dcx:tor Cartwright. Tel! him the steam-roller's loose again. It may be on the road heading his way. Yes, steam-roller. He'll understand." He put the microphone down, called to the man on the road. "I'm leaving you here, Roberts. There's an ambulance on its way. Go back with it. Get in Sergeant Bennet's car and both of you join us up ahead." He closed the car window and released the brake. The empty road began to unwind slowly into the area of light ahead. Simon put the receiver down and looked at his wife. She was concentrating on a sock by the fire. He went over and kissed the top of her head. "Goodbye," she said. "Listen," he said quietly. "When I'm gone lock the door behind me and don't go out. If you hear any funny noises go down to the cellar. Understand?" She was a little frightened. "Honey, what is it?" He smiled. "It's nothing. Long John Andrews is out hunting. I'm going along in case he shoots himself." He took his shot-gun off the mantle and stuffed his pockets with cartridges. "I'll bring you back a rabbit," he said. "So long." He drove down slowly. He was scared, but he was still young enough to find it exhilarating. The loaded shot-gun was a great help. He turned on to the highway, and slowed to walking pace. He stared into the darkness ahead until his eyes burned, and imagination peopled his surroundings with writhing shapes. Then he saw it, and the muscles across his chest trembled convulsively. Fear clutched his stomach. He slammed his foot down on the brake and gaped up at it. It was standing still in the middle of the road, a giant, pear shaped body, looking something like a man kneeling upright. At the front, turned inwards, were a number of armlike appendages. The shot-gun was ridiculous now, the car made of paper. To get out and run was impossible, and he longed to be able to sit still and do nothing. And the seconds dragged by. Time for contemplation built up, and a strange realization dropped into his seething mind. He sensed something about its attitude. A cringing, a withdrawal. "God," he whispered. "It doesn't like the light." He might have relaxed then, but it moved. One of its arms unfolded, swung outward holding something metallic. Simon yelled. He grabbed the shot-gun, shoved the door catch down, threw his weight sideways. He landed on his shoulder and kept on rolling. He reached the other side of the road, straightened up, and saw the roof of the car fly off with a roar. He fired then, from a crouching position and without taking aim. A lucky shot that hit the end of the weapon arm and shattered it. Then he ran, and the Assassin followed. He ran in the direction he'd been heading, and gave himself up to terror. He was primaeval man fleeing from sabre-tooth. He was living a nightmare. His brain reeled, air burnt his lungs, and his pounding heart echoed in his temples. Then he was running into a blaze of light, between headlights that enfolded him like a mother's arms, and he was clinging to a radiator cap. Dimly he heard the crash of high powered rifles about him. A black figure came into his haven of light, began to loosen his tie. "Get out of the light," he gasped. "It doesn't like the light." "Who invitedyou?" grunted Andrews. He put Simon's arm round his neck, and half carried him round to the side of the car, pushed him into the front seat. "I'll be all right in a minute," said Simon. "Yeah," said Andrews, and left him. After a little while the trembling in his limbs began to subside, breathing became easier. He leaned forward and watched a strange battle. The Assassin was about seventy yards ahead, moving slowly nearer. Two men stood on the right hand side of the car, pumping bullets into the grey, indistinct mass. Andrews stood watching with his hands in his jacket pockets. Suddenly he said, "All right, let go. You're only wasting bullets." Simon looked at him in alarm. "Hey, you're not just going to stand there. It doesn't like the light, but light canH kill it." "Lie down on the floor," said Andrews dourly, without looking at him. "Eh?" Andrews ignored him, stepped two paces forward. The Assassin was about twenty yards away now, seeming to have to fight against the stream of light. Andrews took his hands from his pockets. Simon saw what he was holding, and dived for the floor. He clasped his hands over the back of his neck as the night exploded with a gigantic crash. When his ears had stopped screaming he got up. Andrews, an elbow on the window ledge, was watching him expressionlessly. "You might hav'e left me something to dissect," complained Simon. "Somebody's got to, you know." "I'll mop you up a sponge full," said Andrews. "Oh, no, you won't. You and your men stay back here. It's probably crawling with alien bacteria." Actually, quite a lot of the Assassin was left, but decomposition was very rapid. Simon did the best he could with a magnifying glass and a penknife. He found that the body was almost entirely composed of bone and flesh in a honey-comb like structure. The bone being highly flexible, and the cavities filled with grey flesh. Flesh which quickly liquified and drained away from the bone. There was no blood, and Simon could find no trace of internal organs. While he worked two more cars drove up, and gave him a little more light, but soon he had to give up. As he walked slowly back a spotlight sprang suddenly to life, and a pleasant authoritative voice spoke. "Will you stay where you are, please, Doctor Cartwright." Simon obeyed. Hell, "he thought wearily. Officialdom has arrived. He shaded his eyes against the light, but he could see nothing. "Who's that?" he asked. "Commanding officer in charge of operations in this emergency. You've made an examination?" "As far as I could. There's complete decomposition now." "Oh, I see." A slight pause, then ; "Perhaps I'd better put you in the picture. This is armed aggression, Doctor Cartwright. In any language it says war. Do you understand? We're at war, now. "We found the vessel your friend came in several days ago. It was in the sea, twenty miles from here. Its discovery was kept secret because we weren't sure of its point of origin. Our people are engaged in finding the method of propulsion. They say it will give us the ability to travel in space. They also say that they can find the approximate position of its home planet. All that is top priority, of course, but in the meanwhile we must have an emergency line of defence against these things. We want to know how to find them and how to destroy them with the least possible expenditure of life and material. You understand?" "Yes. I've got an idea about light waves. I fired a shot at it back there. The bone structure -- " "Don't tell me," interrupted the voice sharply. "Remember it. You realize, Doctor Cartwright, that you are just about the most important man alive. You know how fast it can move. You have fought it, you have examined it. So you can be sure that very good care will be taken of you." "What are you saying?" "I'm sorry, but you must see that you have to go into strict quarantine now. We dare not risk a plague. After quarantine you will go to work with our people. Now will you please get into the car at the extreme right, and follow the police." "Where am I going?" "Please hurry. There is a team of incendiaries waiting to clear the area." "Oh, damnation," sighed The Most Important Man Alive, and walked towards the waiting car. the prognosticator again, after the Assassin's failure had been recorded, he found that a qualification had been added. The prophecy was now being fulfilled. He considered this dispassionately. He visualised the complex pattern of implication almost with pleasure. Was the machine alive? Certainly it could contemplate itself. It had calculated the effect of its existence, and had used the knowledge to destroy them. Or had they condemned themselves? By losing the ability to question. For the information on which the prophecy was based could have been available to them. Or was the machine only obeying a greater Fate? A Decree, stating that any life-form that surrendered itself to the dictates of a machine was doomed. One thing alone was left to him. A choice. Without haste he began the preliminaries to thinking himself to death.    cellar, the attic, out in the alley, under the shipping counters, etc., and see if they had any back copies of IF hanging around collecting dust and whatnot. They did -- enough to feed a healthy hilly goat for several weeks. But we haven't got a billy goat, and our diet around the office here says We can't eat paper with ink on it. So, if you would like back Copies of IF -- for your collection, of course -- just send us # cents for each copy ordered. Available issues are listed below. Address : IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. Vol. #, No. #, March # Vol. #, No. #, March # Vol. #, No. #, July # Vol. #, No. #, April # Vol. #, No. #, Sept. # Vol. #, No. #, May # Vol. #, No. #, March # Vol. #, No. #, June # Vol. #, No. #, July # Vol. #, No. #, July # Vol. #, No. #, Sept. # Vol. #, No. #, Aug. # Vol. #, No. #, Nov. # Vol. #, No. #, Sept. # Vol. #, No. #, Jan. # Vol. #, No. #, Oct. # Only fear can hold Vou back... for "There Is a Time When Your lack Will Ohange!" Three years ago Marguerite Carter published this very true and, at the time, unbelievable statement -- "Russia is headed toward internal revolt and new leadership." Since then, Stalin died and new leaders have risen with rumblings of discord behind her Curtain! Today Miss Carter says, "Spain and Germany will be our first line of defense -- we will bring forth a new monetary plan. Marguerite Carter has studied many years, keeping records that may be used to help mankind. She is sincerely earnest in her life's purpose which is to give help where it is needed. Write to Marguerite Carter today. Don't let fear hold you back! You can also order the forecast of any one near and dear to you. Send complete birth informa tion on separate sheet of paper. Mprguerite Carter # Jackson Bldg. Indianapolis, Ind, # Jackson Bldg., Indianapolis, Ind. I onclose; by Marguerite Carter.  I for my forecast by Marguerite Carter Name. Cltv StrttA Place of Birtli Date f Birth Year Month Date (Hour if known) Illustrated by Kelly Freas The Hitch Hikers The Rell, a great and ancient Martian race, faced extinction when all moisture was swept from their planet. Then, one day, a lone visitor -- a strange, two-legged creature composed mostly of water -- landed on Mars... planet had taken centuries in all. The Rell had still been a great race when the process started. Construction of the canals was a prodigious feat but not a truly remarkable one. But what use are even canals when there is nothing to fill them? What cosmic influences might have caused the disaster baffled even the group-mind of the Rell. Through the eons the atmosphere had drifted into space; and with it went the life-giving moisture. Originally a liquid paradise, the planet was now a dry, hostile husk. TKe large groups of Rell had been the first to suffer. But in time even the tiny villages containing scopic entities had found too little moisture left to satisfy their thirst and the journey ever southward toward the pole had commenced. The new life was bitter and difficult and as their resources were depleted so also did their numbers diminish. Huddled at their last retreat the Rell watched the ever smaller ice cap annually diminish and lived with the knowledge they faced extinction. A mere thousand years more would see even this trifling remainder gone. Oh, you might say there was hope... of a sort. There might be Rell in the northern hemisphere. The canals girdled the globe and a similar ice cap could well exist at the opposite pole. Rell perhaps survived there also. But this was scant comfort. The fate of the Rell in the South was sealed. What hope of any brighter future for those in the North? And if they survived a few hundred thousand years longer... or if they had perished a similar period earlier, what actual difference did it make? There was no one more aware of this gloomy future than Raeillo eel#. In the old days a single unit of the group-mind of the Rell would have possessed but a single function and exercised this function perhaps a dozen times during his life. But due to the inexorable shrinkage only the most important problems now could command mind-action and each unit had been forced to forsake specialization for multi-purpose endeavors. Thus Raeilloeel# and his mate Raellu# were two of the five thousand units whose task was to multiply in any group-mind action involving mathematical prediction. Naturally Raeilloeel# and Raellu # did not waste their abilities in mundane problems not involving prediction. Nor did they divide, add, or subtract. That was assigned to other units just as had the task of sorting and interpreting their results. Raeillo eel # and Raellu# multiplied only. And it must be admitted they did it very well. It is a pity the Rell could not have multiplied physically as easily as Raeilloeel# and Raellu# multiplied mentally. With the exception of an occasional comet or meteor the Rell were seldom diverted by anything of a physical nature. The ice cap was their sole concern... But one afternoon a rare physical phenomenon was reported by a bank of observer Rell. "In the sky's northwest portion," an excited injunction came through. "Observe that patch of flaming red!" More observer Rell were quickly focused on the novel sight and further data was rapidly fed into the interpretive bank. The Rell were justifiably proud of their interpreters. With the race shrinkage it had proved impossible to properly train new interpreters. So, not without a great deal of sacrifice, the old interpreters, dating back to when the canals still flowed with water, had been kept alive. They were incredibly ancient but there was no doubt as to their ability. It was a truism among the Rell that the interpretive banks arrived at their conclusions faster than any other group and that these conclusions could be checked to hundreds of decimal places without finding inaccuracy. So it was no surprise to have the interpretive bank respond almost instantly, "It is quite odd but the flame appears to be of artificial origin." "Artificial!" came the rough and questing probe of the speculative bank. "But how could Rell possibly be out there?" "Who mentioned Rell?" was the interpretive bank's smug answer. They were not utterly averse to demonstrating their superior mental abilities on occasion. The speculative bank replied, "Artificial implies intelligence, and intelligence means Rel..." "Does it?" the interpretive bank interrupted. The speculative bank waited but the interpretive bank failed to enlarge on the provocative query. The Rell had found certain disadvantages accrued to abnormal prolongation of life and thus were not unused to the interpretive bank's occasional tendency to talk in riddles. "Perhaps not" the speculative bank replied after a quick check with the logical formulae held in reserve by the historical bank. "It is theoretically possible that Relllike individuals might have developed elsewhere, and perhaps even have developed intelligence, although, according to the historical bank, such an idea has never before been subjected to consideration. But what is the flame doing?" they continued, a trifle resentful at having been left to do work properly in the interpretive bank's province. The observation and interpretive banks once more came into play, studying the situation for several minutes. "The flame appears to be the exhaust of a fairly crude vessel," the interpretive bank finally reported, "propelled by ignition of some gaseous mixture." "Is it moving?" "Quite rapidly." "Where is it going?" This called into play the prophecy division of the mind and Raeilloeel# and Raellu#, who had been merely interested onlookers before, hurriedly meshed themselves with the other forty nine hundred odd of their fellows. (It was impossible to say at any given time just how many there were in their computer section, as several births and deaths had occured among the group since beginning the current observations. These would be suspended for the next several moments, however, as there was a strict prohibition against anyone being born, dying, or otherwise engaging in extraneous activity while their particular bank was either alerted or in action.) Raeilloeel# and Raellu# felt the group discipline take hold much more firmly than the free-and-easy mesh which each unit enjoyed with the complete group-mind during periods of leisure. With a speed that would have been dizzying and incomprehensible to any individual unit, the observing banks relayed huge masses of extraneous data to the interpretive bank. They strained out the salient facts and in turn passed these to the computing: prediction section. Here they were routed to the groups who would deal with them. Raeilloeel# and Raellu# found their own talents pressed into service a dozen or more times in the space of the minute and a half it took the computing : prediction and interpretive banks to arrive at the answer. "It's aimed here," the interpretive bank reported. "Here!" a jumble of incoherent and anarchistic thoughts resounded from many shocked and temporarily out-of-mesh units. "Order!" came a sharp command from the elite corp of three thousand disciplinary units. As stillness settled back over the group-mind the speculative bank once more came in. "By here... do you mean right here?" "Approximately." replied the interpretive bank with what would have sounded suspiciously like a chuckle in a human reply. "According to calculations the craft should land within half a mile of our present location." "Let's go there then and wait for it!" That thought from the now seldom used reservation of impulse. The speculative bank murmured, "I wonder if there would be any danger. How hot is that exhaust?" Calculations were rapidly made and the answer arrived at. The Rell prudently decided to remain where they were for the present. struments in the cramped control cabin which, being the only available space in the ship, doubled as living quarters. A larger man would have found the arrangement impossible. Brown, being #' #" and weighing # pounds found it merely intolerable. At the moment he was temporarily able to forget his discomfort, however. The many tiny dials and indicators told a story all their own to Brown's trained vision. "Just another half hour," he whispered to himself. "Just thirty more minutes .and I'll land. It may be just a dead planet but I'll still be the first." There really wasn't a great deal for Brown to do... The ship was selfguided. The Air Force had trusted robot mechanisms more than human reactions. Thus Brown's entire active contribution to the flight consisted in watching the dials (which recorded everything so even watching them was unnecessary) and in pressing the button which would cause the ship to start its return journey. Of course the scientists could have constructed another mechanism to press the button and made it a completely robot ship. But despite their frailties and. imperfections, human beings have certain advantages. Humans can talk. Machines may see and detect far more than their human creators but all they can do is record. They can neither interpret nor satisfactorily describe. Brown was present not only to report a human's reactions to the first Mars flight; he was also along to see that which the machines might miss. "We've never satisfactorily defined life," one of his instructors had told Brown shortly after he started the three grueling years of training which had been necessary, "so we can't very well build a foolproof machine for detecting it. That's why we've left room for # pounds of dead weight." "Meaning me?" "Meaning you." "And I'm your foolproof machine for detecting life?" "Let's say you're the closest we can come to it at present. We're banking everything on this first trip. It'll be at least eighteen months later before we can get a second ship into space. So it's up to you to get everything you can... some evidence of life, preferably animal, if possible. With public support it'll be a hell of a lot easier squeezing appropriations out of Congress for the next ship and to get public support we need the biggest possible play in the newspapers. If anything is newsworthy on Mars it should be evidence of life... even plant life." So here he was, # pounds of concentrated knowledge and anticipation, itching with the desire for action and also from more basic causes having to do with two months confinement in a small space with a minimum of water. "Life is most probable at the poles." the instructor had said. "You won't be able to stay long so we'll try to set you down right at the South Pole. You won't have room to bring back specimens. So keep your eyes open and absorb everything you see. Don't forget anything. What you bring back in your mind weighs nothing." "It's just sitting there," the observing banks reported, "and the red flame has gone out." "Is it safe now?" enquired the speculative bank. "In what way?" "Is it safe to go near that thing?" "It's very huge," ventured the observing banks unasked. There was a stir of activity which encompassed practically all except the most simple units and which lasted for perhaps five minutes while the speculative bank's last question was processed. Finally the interpretive bank reluctantly admitted, "We can't arrive at a positive answer. Too many unknown elements are present. We don't know for sure what caused the flame, when it might start again, or what, if anything, is inside." "But you said it was a work of intelligence. Doesn't that mean Rell would be inside?" "Not necessarily. They could have constructed the thing to operate itself." It was just then that the observing banks reported, "It's opening." The speculative bank quickly responded, "This is an emergency. We must be able to observe from close up. We'll have to approach it." "The entire mind?" enquired the disciplinary corps. The speculative bank hesitated. "No, we'll need to split up. Onefifth of us vvAll go, the rest remain here. It's a short distance and we'll still be able to continue in complete contact." Those who were to go were quickly sorted out and Raeilloeel# was quite thrilled to find he and Raellu# were included in the scouting party. The group set off briskly toward their objective but had moved hardly one hundred yards when a vertigo seemed to overtake them. Raeilloeel# found himself swimming helplessly in a vortex of darkness and isolation, blanked off from not only the group-mind and his bank but also from Raellu#. Frantically he grasped for some sort of stasis, but dependence on the group-mind was too ingrained and he was unable to stir his longdormant powers of sight and education. Then the isolation cleared to be replaced by a brief impression of chaos with perhaps a tinge of alienness. Another instant of vertigo followed and then everything was normal once more as the comfortable familiar mesh took hold. "What was that?" Even the speculative bank sounded frightened. "Sorry." The usually silent meshing bank sounded abashed. "We weren't prepared for that. Some sort of thought wave is issuing from the opening and it disrupted the group mesh till we were able to take it into calculation and rebuild the mesh around it." "Thought wave? Then there are Rell in that thing." "Do not compute before the mesh is set." the interpretive bank cautioned. "The presence of Rell, while extremely probable, is not yet entirely certain." Without waiting for a suggestion from elsewhere the disciplinary group ordered the entire mind forward. Perhaps, in time of stress, dormant qualities tend to emerge, Raeilloeel# mused. Certainly everyone, himself included, appeared to be exercising speculative qualities. Not that specialization isn't a marvelous blessing, he hastily added, in case the disciplinary corps might be scanning his bank. But the disciplinary corps itself was as fascinated by the phenomenon ahead as Raeilloeel#. Emerging from the infinitely huge upright thing was a mobile being, also infinitely huge. Not that they were the same size. The mobile one was small enough to fit easily through the opening in the lower portion of the larger. But beyond a certain point words lose meaning and infinitely huge was the closest measurement the tiny Rell could find for either the upright pointed thing or the knobby one which had emerged and was quickly identified as the source of the disrupting thought patterns. L eonard brown was enjoying himself thoroughly. The inside of a space suit can scarcely be termed comfortable but at least you can move around in it and Brown was making the most of this sensation after two months cramped in his tiny cell. He was, in fact, comporting himself much as a threeyear-old might have done after a similar release. But before long he settled down to the serious business of observing and mentally recording everything in sight. There were none of the mysterious 'canals' in view, which was disappointing; one piece of glamour the publicity boys would necessarily forego until the next trip. The ice cap itself, if such it could be called, was almost equally disappointing. On Earth it would have been dismissed as a mere frost patch, if this section was typical. For a radius of many yards the ground was blasted bare by the action of the exhaust and nowhere in sight did there appear to be more than the flimsiest covering of white over the brown sandy soil. "Not even lichens," muttered Brown in disgust. But disgust cannot long stand against the magic of a fresh new planet and Brown continued his avid, though barren, search until hunger forced his return to the ship. He had been able to detect no life and was completely unaware of his close proximity to the planet's dominant species. It had been considered neither practical nor particularly desirable to build a microscope into the space suit. Simplicity and the least possible weight had been the watchwords here as with everything designed to go aboard the ship. In any case, a microscope would have done Brown little good in trying to detect the submicroscopic beings of the Rell. The Rell, who had somewhat lost their fear of Brown, hastily retreated when they saw him returning to the still awesome ship. "But are you sure he's completely self-powered?" the speculative bank queried. "No Rell inside him at all?" "There are many Rell-like beings in various parts of him." replied the interpretive bank. "Some help digest his food, others are predators, and still others their enemies. But most are too big and clumsy to have developed intelligence, and even the small ones appear completely mindless." "But where do the thought waves come from? We all felt them." "It's hard to accept but we are almost forced to conclude they are emanating from the mobile unit itself, or rather from the living part within the cocoon." "You're positive they aren't the product of some of the Rell-beings inside?" "Almost positive. The mesh insists not. In fact, it claims this is an un-Rell like type of intelligence, though that appears to be a contradiction in terms. The thought pattern is completely outside our experience. In fact, it is so alien we haven't broken it down yet to the meaning behind it." "But if the Rell inside are too large to have developed intelligence, how could this gigantic monster in which they live have done so?" "We cannot yet say. Remember, the theory that intelligence cannot develop in creatures above a certain size is unproven, even though never before challenged. We've watched other races die through failure to adapt to change so apparently it is true of Rell-like creatures on this world. But who can say about organisms on another world or of the unprecedented size of this one? Completely different physical laws may apply." It was later that afternoon after the Rell had spent much time observing Brovra while Brown was busy observing the landscape that the interpretive bank made the triumphant announcement, "We have it! We've broken the thought waves down to their meanings and know what he's thinking. What would you like to know first?" "Check and see if there are any Rell inside the other thing or on his home world. They might have constructed him." "Apparently there are none, or at least no intelligent Rell, on his world. We can't guide his mind but the memory bank recorded all the thoughts weVe received and some time ago he was thinking of something he termed 'vermin'. Apparently these are sometimes Rell-like creatures, although far larger. He regards them as a great nuisance, but mindless. The big thing, by the way, he calls a 'ship' and it is utterly lifeless. We needn't fear the flame until this creature leaves." "What about him? What is he like?" "That's the most exciting part! He thought of his bodily needs once and we glimsed a concept dealing with his physical construction. It's incredible! His body is composed almost entirely of water... there's enough water in him alone to prolong the life of the Rell many ages. Further, the air in his 'ship' is heavily impregnated with moisture and he even has reserve supplies of water for his needs." At this, not only Raeilloeel#, but all except perhaps the most responsible units felt a shiver of primitive longing and perhaps even greed. Not for millenia had there been such a plentitude of water so close ! "Then can't we appropriate at least part of it?" asked the speculative bank. "Unfortunately both the 'man', as he calls himself, and his 'ship' are sealed so tightly that we could not penetrate either. Worse yet, almost half his time here is already gone. We don't quite understand his purpose here. His thoughts seem to say he is searching for Rell for some unfathomable reason yet he seems to know nothing of the Rell and cannot even detect us." time was almost all gone that the two big discoveries were made. During a routine check, the mesh came across a thought of the man's return and a visualization of his home world. It was so startling that the interpretive bank was recalled from its effort to try to devise a means through the spacesuit and set at the new problem. A hasty check of the man's subconscious thoughts revealed the big news. "Do you know," the interpretive bank announced, "not only does this being's home world have a moist atmosphere like that in his ship but two thirds of the surface of his world is liquid water!" Even the speculative bank was silent for a full two seconds after this news. Then a hasty impulse was sent to the disciplinary corps and the entire mind called into action. An extreme emergency upon which the fate of the race hinged called for the utmost effort by even the humblest members of the group. The Rell worked diligently and many blind alleys were explored, but it was not for some time that anyone thought of enquiring of the not-too-bright feeding bank how they were managing to keep the mind operating at considerably more than normal power with no frost within feeding distance. "We're taking moisture from the. air." was the answer. "Where is the moisture coming from?" the interpretive bank was asked. The answer didn't take long. Rapid measurements supplied it. "Some of it is vaporized frost but that vyouldn't be enough for our needs. The only other possibility is that moisture must be seeping away from either the man or his ship despite his sureness that they were both airtight and our own investigations which confirmed it." They had maintained a cautious distance from the ship for the most part despite the interpretive bank's assurance of no immediate danger. But now they swarmed over both it and the spacesuit determined to detect the leak. They found none. And now the man was returning to his ship. "This is the last time." the mesh warned. It was now or never. For a second there was conflict over control of the circuits to the disciplinary corps which carried with it command of the organism during the emergency. The speculative bank customarily assumed this responsibility, but a slight schism had developed between it and the interpretive bank. The latter's greater age and skill came into play and victory was quickly won. From the disciplinary corps came the order, "Stay close to the 'man'." The interpretive bank explained, "He breathes the air so he'll have to get to it some way." The defeated speculative bank maintained a sulky silence. Thus it was that the entire mind of the Rell rode into the interior of the ship through the airlock while clustered around Brown. The Rell had grasped that the man lived and traveled Inside his ship and the necessity for it to be air tight. But so desperate were the two races' needs that the necessity for an airlock and the consequent slight seepage each time it was used had not occured to even the interpretive bank. Inside, many Rell, suddenly intoxicated by the heady moistureladen air, commenced uniting with each other then splitting away, each such union resulting in another unit of Rell, naturally. The interpretive bank again seized control. "Stop it! Stop it this instant!" it snapped. "Reproduction must be kept to the former minimum for now. That is a firm order." Reluctantly the process was halted. The interpretive bank explained, "It would not take long for us to use up the entire supply of water if we indulged in uncontrolled reproduction. That might endanger the whole trip." "What do we do now?" the speculative bank finally asked. "There is no way of knowing positively whether the man uses this same atmosphere until he returns to his world or not. For our own safety it would seem best, since Rell-like creatures already inhabit him, that we join them. If any place is safe it will be his interior. And there is plenty of moisture within to sustain us. But we must be good parasites," the interpretive bank warned. "Remember, no undue reproduction no matter how many quarts of moisture seem to be going to waste inside this 'man'. He may need it himself and if he does not survive the ship might not complete its trip." Brown was just emerging from his space suit so the Rell chose his closest available body opening and flowed as a group into his mouth and nostrils. "Ahchoo!" sneezed Brown, violently evicting half the Rell. They re-entered a bit more cautiously in order not to irritate the sensitive membrane again, "Dammit," said Brown, "don't tell me I've caught a cold clear out here on Mars. Hope I didn't pick up any Martian germs." But he needn't have worried. By the time he reached Earth he was far less germ-ridden, even if considerably more itchy on the exterior, than when he'd left. The Rell were good at self defense and a surprising number of mindless but voracious creatures in Brown's interior had been eliminated. Brown dreaded having to give the news he carried but he needn't have. He was a conquering hero. So much fuss was made over the first flight to Mars that Congress promptly voted twice the appropriation for the second ship that the Air Force had requested, despite strong opposition from the Navy and headlines which read: Actually, as it happened, the headlines were one hundred percent correct, but they neglected to mention, chiefly because the headline writers didn't know it, that there were now two races of intelligent life on Earth.    ( Continued from page #) civil engineering. At five he started the model building which he still works at quite assiduously. At eleven he began reading everything he could lay his hands on. Then came sports. Today, model building, reading and various sports are his main hobbies. Stanley feels that he hasn't had enough experience to decide what his specialty will be in the engineering field, but he hopes to be able to get that degree before he's inducted into the Armed Services. Sirius, is Earth that has been in stasis for one hundred years. Russia and the United States are still having a cold war, the United Nations is still the hope of small nations and the debating ground for the large ones. The United States has launched a space satellite, and the other side of the moon has been explored. Venus and Mars have been reached, but society is so lethargic that only a few from the crowded Indo-Asian countries have migrated to the planets. The cities are empty of all but industry; there are overhead monorails, robot servants, brief, utilitarian clothing, visiphones, television and every sort of conceivable gadget and gimmick to make life easy. Life is dull, monotonous, calm and boring, but the drive for security is so great that adventure, excitement, tension are avoided like the plague. The story tells of the efforts of a declining race of Sirians to shock the Earth out of stasis -- and to unify it and to teach it to trade and share discoveries and so ready it for the fight against the menace from another galaxy. It's Really Sirius will appear in IF next spring. Important announcement for...  future ond bored With your pastimes -- don't despair. You've do something about it. Modern psychological testing can show you the way to a work you're best suited for. It can reveal your basic aptitudes, abilities and personality self, you can do something about changing your present and future. Do the simple tests in a few hours in your own home. Mail them to The Institute. Receive a comprehensive, confidential report by mail that may show you (as it has for so many others) the way to a better, bigger-paying job, to a happier future for yourself and your family. Get to know confidential and costs only # -- l#th of what similar in-person testing costs. But send no money -- write Illustrated by Leo Summers It was an island paradise, where you could fish and pick coconuts and be as lazy as you please. For three glorious days just the two of you could be alone and remember... three days out of a lifetime. raised himself on one elbow to look for it, but there was only the luxuriant green of the trees, pressing down to the sand. The island was a single hill, and further back, high up on the slope, the vegetation thinned. He could see the hut, surrounded by garden neatness. They had preferred to sleep on the sand. Everyone did. Jenny said: "You listening, too? It's happy, all right. You can tell that." He rolled over and smiled at her. "As long as it doesn't come right up and sneer at us, let it be happy." "I mean it, though. I never heard it sing like that before." "The air," he said. "The sunshine, sound of a breeze. So many little differences. It?s the same bird." "It's free", she said. "It's home." "It doesn't know that." They lay quietly for a few moments. As it had done last night, just before he drifted off into sleep, his hand went out to the soft sand, the fingers pushing down into its fineness. It was difficult to tell how far the action was a conscious one. Thinking of that, he sat up. The sun was well clear of the line where the two different blues met, the horizon. That was the kind of thing to remember: the open glory of sunrise. He touched Jenny's shoulder. "Swim, honey?" Her face was buried in the sand. "You go on. Be right with you." The fragile golden crust broke under his feet. He walked faster, and then began running. It was perhaps a hundred yards to the water's edge. When the first lapping wavelets were round his feet he began singing, a bawling senseless song but it filled the warm and quiet air with the sound of his voice. The ground dipped quite sharply after if entered the water, and he flung himself forward and went under. Water, all round him. The consciousness of pleasure was like being a boy again: now, in this instant, you are smoking a cigarette, kissing Abigail Summers -- any one of a dozen things long thought of, now realized. Water, water. He came splashing to the surface. Jenny was still lying, face down, on the sand. He called to her, again and again, until she sat up. She got to her feet and began to walk towards the water, but slowly, as though reluctantly. That morning he worked on the garden round the hut. Two hours' work a day were requested of the men, although, of course, there was no way of enforcing the request. He did four hours in the morning, and carried on again in the afternoon. He wondered how many others had set out to do the full six hours' work on the first day, with the intention of having the remainder of the time free. He rested in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun got really hot, but he went back to the garden again afterwards. He wondered how many had done that, too. The garden was in very good shape. Jenny, meanwhile, had been busy in the hut. It had three rooms and an annex of an uncompleted fourth. Someone, struggling perhaps with his hazy memories of carpentry, had found three days not quite long enough to achieve his projected improvement. They should have let him stay on, he thought. But if it had been he and Jenny who had been next on the list, waiting? On the tea table she had prepared the processed foods that had been familiar and monotonous and detestable for over fifteen years. He shook his head. "Throw that stuff out. We've got plenty fruit here." "No." She motioned him to sit down. "Unless we want to spend the rest of the time doubled up. Our stomachs aren't used to it. It's this they're used to." She helped him to slices of soytein, and he made no protest. She was right. The rest of the time... he wished she hadn't put it like that. The sun was getting low. When it dipped down to touch the sea, a third of the time would be gone, two days remaining. He had a swift ripple of anger that it should be only three days; just four, even, would make all the difference. Just four. "God Almighty," he said, "it's not long. Three days." She looked at him. "No." "After sixteen years." She said : "Some will have twenty five, if they live that long. And the boys..." The anger had gone now. He felt very tired; from the unaccustomed work, perhaps. "I know." "We're lucky. It might have been the typhoon season." "I'd like a typhoon. A little one." after a swim, he went back to work in the garden. Someone, quite recently, had begun an extension along the western slope. Already, in what was clearly a short time, the island's natural plant life had begun to counterattack; in another week or so the whole of the new ground would have been lost again. He set to the job of clearing it with enthusiasm, and also with relief at having something to do where time's passing would not be so much marked. After a couple of hours, he wondered where Jenny was. He realized that for some time he had not seen her moving about the hut. He looked down to the beach, to see if she had gone for a swim, but the long stretch of sand and the blue ocean were both unbroken. He called her two or three times. and got no reply. Then he put down his fork, and went to look for her. He came upon her unexpectedly, in a clearing on the other side of the hill. She did not hear his approach, and he was able to watch her, and listen to her. She was talking; to herself, he thought at first. Then he noticed the bird they had brought, on a branch quite close to her head. That surprised him -- that it should stay there while she talked, although the whole island was open to it. And yet, caged for how many generations, it might even have a need of human speech. He looked at the bird: the last of a species that gradually had ceased to breed in captivity, and so had been freed. A sterile liberty. Jenny was talking to it in an ordinary tone of voice. "... you won't be alone. There'll always be people here on the island. Here for three days, and then gone. They'll take it different ways, I guess. But whatever way they take it, it will only be three days. How long does a bird live -- your kind of bird? I'd like to think you'll still be here when the boys come. I doubt it, though." The bird stretched its wings, and she stopped speaking to look at it. It flapped to another branch, no more than a couple of feet away, and stayed there. From peg to peg, even though the cage was gone. "We saved your kind," Jenny said, "and then we kept you, and you're the last. There was talk of putting a pair here a good few years ago, but there were so few of you and they thought you could be cared for better in the City. They were wrong, but it's too late now. So you came in the boat with us. I'd rather it had been some other couple. We've set you free, and tomorrow night we go back. I'd rather it had been someone else." She looked away, towards the branches which screened him, and he instinctively lowered his head. But she had not seen him. She said to the bird: "What's it like? What's it like, being alive? I'm not alive. How can you be alive, for three days, knowing that the end's there? I don't think Fran and I will be back. We might just make it, but I don't think so." She got up. He saw her face : sad and angry and despairing, as he had never seen it before, as she had never let him see it. She put her hand on the branch, and shook it more and more vigorously until the bird took flight. "Go on!", she cried. "Live! Enjoy yourself!" The bird circled, dark against the hazy blue sky. "Live till the boys come," she said softly. He did not return to the garden. All that afternoon he lay in sight of the sea, at first in the sun's glare and then in the small patch of shade thrown on the sand by an outlying palm. The small waves rolled in and cast down their nets of lace and were gone; a thousand of them, or a hundred thousand, beside him for a time. They did not speak to each other. Out of the corner of an eye he could see her arm, and if he listened carefully he could pick her breathing out from the soft unending suspiration of the waves; but that was all. When he was aware of her getting up and heard her feet scuffing the sand as she went away, he was glad. There was all the rest of the island. Learning to live, one was alone -- learning to live after so long. It did not matter whether it was worth it or not. After so many years of unremitting usefulness it was easier to do what one was supposed to do, even here on the island. And it must be this that was intended, even though he could not think why it should be. The silence that had come between them was barely broken by the meal they had together; they exchanged the brief necessary words, with no communion either of affection or resentment. She got up from the table before he did and later, standing in front of the hut, he saw her down on the beach. She was walking by the very edge of the sea, occasionally letting the water break round her ankles. She walked slowly, preoccupied. The casualness of his own vision startled him; it was as though this were an everyday thing, as though the world had slipped from wonder into the commonplace, the blessed commonplace. That much was gained; to that extent he had begun to be alive. For Jenny he felt a rising of love: let it be the same for her, even for so short a time. He stayed up very late, watching the half moon that scored the sea with light. Jenny came back, and said "Good night" and went on into the hut. He followed her there at last. It was natural, after all, to sleep under a roof. T hey remained apart all the third day. He found the raft that someone had made, and the spears, and he went fishing. For a moment, as the raft drifted out from the shore, he felt afraid because he had provided no means of bringing it back. Then he realized that the shore was, of course, well within swimming distance. Thinking of it, he knew, too, that there had been guilt along with the fear, a guilt of desertion. Not for Jenny, or the boys, but for the City. He thought sadly: no, it isn't long enough. You don't get away as easy as that. He tried to concentrate on fishing, but he had no skill at it and caught nothing. In time another current pulled the raft in to shore. He pulled it high up, under the trees. Someone else might want it. He spent the afternoon wandering through the brush that covered the base of the island's hill. He remembered being told once -- it might be five years ago -- that there were lizards, and it began to seem important that he should see one, if possible touch it, hold that cool throbbing smallness within his hands. He only gave up hunting at the approach of sunset. Jenny was sitting outside the hut, on one of the roughly made wooden chairs. There was a second chair beside her, and he sat down in it. "I've been hunting lizards," he said. "Didn't find any. Did you see any?" She shook her head. "I remember, it was Leon Corter told me he saw lizards. I suppose they might have died out." "Why should they?" The silence between them that followed was different now. After a while he broke it. "It should have been better. I should have made it better. I'm sorry, honey." "No one's fault." They watched the sun slide over the edge of the world. Jenny said; "When we put that request in -- to let the boys come in place of us -- I hoped they would turn it down." She marvelled at herself. "I didn't really want them to have it -- our own kids." "Neither did I. But it doesn't matter. They couldn't have granted it." "Why two?", die said angrily. "Why break up a family that way?" "Why three days? You know how it is: there's only enough power to spare for the boat, and the boat won't take more than two." "Then why anything?" He said slowly: "I've been wondering about that." "What does it amount to? Three days of misery, three days of learning to look at things again, learning to be human... three days, and then... You don't think they're going to be pleasant, do you -- the next few weeks?" "Weeks? Months, years. Less than a month before we came I woke up crying, from dreaming about home, from remembering." He nodded towards the rosy sunless horizon. "We're only half-seeing things now. But we'll see that sunset as long as we live." She asked: "Has anyone refused it, ever?" He shook his head. "Not that I've heard." "I wish we'd refused it. Oh, Fran, why on... Why do they do it? why not just let us stay in the City, doing what we have to do? why this? Why force us to remember? It would have been easy enough. Not enough power, even for the boat. Why didn't they do that?" The light was being drawn from the sky. Other evenings it had seemed fantastically slow after what they had become used to; now the day fled into dusk. He said: "How long before the boys' turn? Ten years -- twelve?" "About that." "They could put a stop to it after the last of the old ones. Any excuse -- as you said, not enough power. There's never enough power. They could say: what you've never known you don't miss." "It wouldn't be fair." "What's the latest figure -- a thousand years? Near enough. A thousand years of the City. Better to forget things altogether." "No!" she said quickly. There was a pause of silence between them, a silence of two people and one bird on an island. "I guess they know what they're doing. They could have warned us, though." "No, they couldn't. We wouldn't have believed them, would we?" She said softly: "But such pain..." "Pain makes you remember," he said. "We've got to remember." He took her arm. "It's due. Better be getting ready, old girl." T he new people were both women, friends and spinsters; (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Ed Emsh Poor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how was he supposed to understand what goes on in a womans mind when the male of the same species didn't even know? orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking at each other. "No," Riuku said. "I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded." "You contacted the factory?" Nagor asked. "Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But not one knows anything about what it is." Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception. He frowned. "What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The supervisors? The technicians?" "No," Riuku said flatly. "They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield." "Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?" "Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all of thefti yet, but -- " "Do it," Nagor said grimly. "We've got to find out what that weapon is. Or else get out of this solar system." Riuku sighed. "I'll try," he said. in the juke box, and the theremins started in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come into the bar. "Aw shut up," he said, wishing there was some way to turn them off. Twelveten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve. She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday. Shield boosting night for her. Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable time... "Surprised, Pete?" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow. He swung about, grinned at her. "Am I? You said it. And here I was about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one." His grin faded a little. "How'd you do it? Sweettalk one of the guards into letting you in at the head of the line?" She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and crossed her knees -- a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman wearing baggy denim coveralls. "Aren't you going to buy me a drink, honey?" "Oh, sure." He glanced over at the bartender. "Another beer. No, make it two." He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number, department, and picture -- and the little meter that measured the strength of her Mind Shield. The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered about seventy per cent loss. Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. "It was easy," she said. "The guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up time." "But Alice... Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for another. "This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you." "So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding in the same line with you. They won't notice." She giggled again. "I thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I did it, don't you?" Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and fulllipped. She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the comers like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall... "Sure, baby. I'm glad you did it," Pete Ganley said huskily. Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started pouring through the gates. It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough. Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her momentary sense of alarrn, of nausea, and then he was through, integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts. He rested, inside her mind. "Oh, hi, Joan. No, I'm all right. Just a little dizzy for a moment. A hangover? Of course not. Not on a Friday." Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only #:#. Why did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time... "Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A permanent? Yeah, what kind?"... What a microbe! Looks like pink straw, her hair does, and of course she thinks it's beautiful... "I'd better get down to my station. Old Liverlips will be ranting again. You oughta be glad you have Eddie for a lead man. Eddie's cute. So's Dave, over in #. But Liverlips, ugh...  She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of names : Maisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again, ril -- ril kill her... "Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of course Fm ready to go to work." Liverlips, that"s what you are. And still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as sloppy as you are... Good, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were, and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding boost. He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was nothing to look forward to. Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly. Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table. Line #. "Hey, how'd you make out?" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her, then went on. "Did you get away with it?" "Sure," Alice said. "And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked in." She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and reached out for the pan of #I wires. "You know, it's funny. Pete's not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that, but oh, what he does to me." She filled the #I plug with solder and reached for the white, black, red wire. "You'd better watch out," Lois said. "Or Susan's going to be doing something to you." "Oh, her." Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin, worked the wire down into position. "What can she do? Pete doesn't give a damn about her." "He's still living with her, isn't he?" Lois said. Alice shrugged... What a mealymouthed little snip Lois could be, sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her working nights... Alice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time, did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight. "Junior kept me up all night last night," Lois said. "He's cutting a tooth." "Yeah," Coralie said. "It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right after Mike was born... Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face, with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little scar that quirked up the comer of his mouth... "Oh oh," Alice said suddenly. "I've got solder on the outside of the pin." She looked around for the alcohol. Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to translate them into anything useful... He probed deeper. The plugs she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires, of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing. They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment. Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the #I plug do? Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care. The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them, at the men. "Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?" He's not bad at all. Real cute. Though not like Pete, oh no. The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear, feel, think as she would never think. The machines w'ere -- machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent is -- he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything. The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or something... Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary. At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of Genus Homo -- information that made him even more glad than before that his was a one-sexed race. put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on... The line. Alice's nervousness... Oh, oh, there's that guy with the meter -- the one from maintenance. What's he want? "Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?"...If he checks the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway.The enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them? "No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if... It's okay, huh? It'll pass..." Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess. Whew. "Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here tonight? Shut up..." And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no consciousness of anything at all. He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration -- much more complete integration than he had ever known before. "But Pete, honey," Alice said. "What did you come over to the gate for? You shouldn't of done it." "Why not? I wanted to see you." "What if one of Susan's pals sees us?" "So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby. Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar." Fear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad. I'd sure hate to have him mad at me... "Let's go for a spin, baby. Outin the suburbs somewhere. How about it?" "Well -- why sure, Pete..." Sitting beside him in the copter. All alone up here. Real romantic, like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean thing. Poor Petey... Riuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost. If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could accomplish the same results. He prodded again. "Pete," Alice said suddenly. "What are we working on, anyway?" "What do you mean, working on?" He frowned at her. "At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one ever tells me what for." "Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip -- " "Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here." Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what -- it was cute. "What makes you think I know anything more than you do?" he said. "Well, gee." She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway. "You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before they go out." "Sure," he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything. "It's a simple enough gadget," Pete Ganley said. "A new type of force field weapon that the enemy can't spot until it hits them. They don't even know there's an Earth Bingo!... She drank it in, and in her mind Riuku did too. Wonderful integration, wonderful. Partial thought control. And now, he'd learn the secret... "You really want to know how it works?" Pete Ganley said. When she nodded he couldn't help grinning. "Well, it's analogous to the field set up by animal neurones, in a way. You've just got to damp that field, and not only damp it but blot it out, so that the frequency shows nothing at all there, and then -- well, that's where those Corcoran assemblies you're soldering on come in. You produce the field... Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was it chemistry. Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't of quit... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other. She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort of like a professor, or something, tie must be real smart. And so -- well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA, he had... "So that's how it works," Pete Ganley said. "Quite a weapon, against them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course." She was staring at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. "Silly, I bet you haven't understood a word I said." "I have too." "Liar." He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his arms. "Come here, you." "Oh, Petey... Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood. And neither had Riuku. Riuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan where to get off... But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report. "Nagor..." "Riuku? Is that you?" "Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet that can help us." "Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you... no Make Sure You Don't Miss an Issue of Science Fiction Magazine" is the growing-est science fiction magazine in America because every issue sparkles with new ideas and entertainment!... The finest fiction and features by the finest writers!... The best artwork by the best artists!... The finest paper and the finest printing by far! . , . That's why readers everywhere are calling it "America's most interesting science fiction magazine"... But why not see for yourself? You risk nothing! We will send you -- All you have to do is mail the handy subscription form below. We will then send you your first issue at once -- IF Magazine, Kingston, New York Enclosed find # (check or money order) for which please send me IF Magazine for the next # months. It is understood that the first issue is a know and you will return the full subscription price at once! on trial! If you do not enjoy every minute of it, just let us know and we will refund your money at once! If you DO like it (which we are sure you will) we will send you the next # issues fresh off the press -- which means you get # issues in all for the regular # subscription price, saving you #! Mail the Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku. Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that... Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language. "Riuku!" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. "You've got to find out. We haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've got to find out why." Those ships just disappeared. Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks. "I know a little," he said. "They damp their thought waves somehow, and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field." "Corcoran field? What's that?" "I don't know." Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices pushing them away -- for the moment. "But surely you can find out through the girl," Nagor insisted from far away, almost out of phase altogether. "No, Pete!" Alice Hendricks said aloud. "Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact. You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all." "Well," Alice Hendricks thought, "maybe..." Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems. Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English. #:#. Jean's diamond again... Wish it would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for a while... That's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on... "Hello, Tommy," Alice Hendricks said. "How's the love life?" "It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate..." She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway? And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High voltage her foot... "What're you looking at, Alice?" Tommy said. "Oh, that." She pointed. "Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like much of anything, really." "I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at." "Oh, you!" Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all... Pete. Gee, he must of got home awful late last night. Wonder what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway? Riuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she understood it -- which was not at all. Pie found out some things about the #I plugs -- that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the #l#'s any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found out what the other girls thought about it... Nothing. Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering? She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a short nap -- on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new girls down at the other end of the line -- when Riuku finally managed to call Nagor again. "Have you found out anything, Riuku?" "Not yet." Silence. Then: "We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after all." Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid Earth female. "Not yet, Nagor," he said. "Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll make her listen to him." "Well," Nagor said doubtfully. "All right. But hurry. We haven't much time at all." "I'll hurry," Riuku promised. "I'll be back with you tonight." That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again. Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights turned way down. "Gee, Pete, I didn't think... "Get in. Quick." "What's the matter?" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the homebound workers. "It's Susan, who else," he said grimly. "She was really sounding off today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar tonight of all nights." He didn't sound like Pete. "Why?" Alice said. "Are you afraid she'll divorce you?" "Oh, Alice, you're as bad as -- look, baby, don't you see? It would be awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe even in the papers..." He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He was sort of -- well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's Pete. Susan's Pete... "I think we should be more careful," he said. Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them down... Does he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just doesn't want me to get hurt... And far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. "Riuku, another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it together... "In a little while. Just a little while." Stop thinking about Susan, you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything out of that man by having hysterics... "I suppose," Alice cried bitterly, "you've been leading me on all the time. You don't love me. You'd rather have her!" "That's not so. Hell, baby... He's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own throat when I act like that... "Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink, okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?" "Huh? Oh, sure." She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient gulp. She poured him another. made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed, swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe. Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The Restricted Area... "Pete." "Yeah, baby?" "How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't even go over in the Restricted Area?" "Whatever made you think of that?" He laughed suddenly. He turned to her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. "Voltage loose... oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?" "No. What?" "That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a duplicate, actually -- a monitor station. But it's tuned to the frequencies of all the ships in this sector and -- " She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now. "Nagor, I'm getting it," Riuku called. "I'll bring it all back withr me. Just a minute and I'll have it." "How does it work, honey?" Alice Hendricks said. "You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful, by -- " "It's coming through now, Nagor." " -- a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You -- oh, oh!" He grabbed her arm. "Duck, Alice!" A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily. "Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane." The police. Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant -- it must mean he'd been discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the Shielding... "Nagor! I've been discovered!" "Come away then, you fool!" He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened. The bond held. "Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?" He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. "But officer, what's the matter?" Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either... And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh. "Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?" "Susan!" "You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've been hearing!" "Yeah," the detective who was driving said. "And those pictures we took last night weren't bad either." "Susan, I can explain everything... "I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you -- you little -- " Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't hold a man with all the xosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage her -- she had her nerve, yelling like that. "Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!" Alice Hendricks cried. "Why, let me get my hands on you... "Riuku!" Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool". You're not gaining anything this way. Calm down, so I can .get out of here... Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly. "That's better," Susan said. "Pete, your taste in women gets worse each time. I don't know why I always take you back." "I can explain everything." "Oh, Pete," Alice Hendricks whispered. "Petey, you're not -- " "Sure he is," Susan Ganley said. "He's coming with me. The nice detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better try anything with them -- they're not your type. They're single." "Pete... But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his arm, he followed her. "How could you do it, Petey... Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku. Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is... "Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman -- " "Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other systems." Petey, Petey, Petey... Contact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free, break free... "What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught you?" The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel communication fading. "Riuku, if you don't come now..." He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her. "Riuku!" "I -- I can't!" The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice Hendricks, would never let him go. "Oh, Petey, I've lost you..." And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him alone, with her. The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding machine, at Tommy. "How's the love life?" "You really interested in finding out, Alice?" "Well -- maybe -- " And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.    I dumped into the seas and rivers has long been a sore point with  I chemists. They insisted that a way should be found to convert  I garbage into topsoil and so feed valuable materials back to the  I land. I I Now, Bernard Haldane, member of the faculty at Wagner  I College on Staten Island, New York City, has demonstrated  I equipment that does the trick; and does it automatically and sim I ply and cheaply. The garbage is dumped into the topmost of a  I series of tanks, is ground up (tin cans and bottles included), in I noculated with bacteria, then mi.xed and aerated by being turned  I over. It then flows by gravity to lower tanks as the bacteria mul I tiply and digest it at ever increasing temperatures. In the lowest  I tank the heat is high enough to kill disease-causing bacteria. The  I loamy end-product, which is an excellent topsoil and smells like  I good earth after a rain, can be removed through a trap door in  I the lowest tank. The entire process completely does away with  I hand labor.  I Any big city -- such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. --  I could deal with its garbage in this new way for less than # a  I ton. In New York City it would mean an annual saving of  I #. Equipment for incineration costs approximately  I #, while digestion and conversion equipment for the same  I amount of garbage disposal would cost about one-half that  I amount.  I Our Citation this month goes to Mr. Haldane for solving not  I one but two economic problems of today's civilization: Econom I ical garbage disposal, which has always been a headache in con I gested areas all over America, and the return to the soil of valu I able organic materials which may help to lick the problem of soil  I erosion and enervation now going on.  they knew them slightly. There was the same nervousness, the same forced jokes. "How's the City?" "Still spreading. The coconuts ripe?" "Watch out for sharks." They were glad when the transfer had been made, when it was time to go. There was no moon yet, but all the stars, and the dim water lapping round them. She said, her voice sharp: "It's funny no one ever rebels, refuses to go back." He was attending to the controls. "We're hand-picked, remember? And what good, would it do?" "No good." She turned away. "I've finished looking." He thrust the control forward. The jets began to hammer against the glassy sea; the boat shivered and lifted. The island had remained green only because it was poised mid-way between the two great continents. It was several seconds before they were high enough to see them -- Africa and America, burning, burning, and beyond them Europe and Asia and Australasia, all burning. A scarlet glow of death. Ahead of them lay the City, in the lip of Tycho's crater on the barren sheltering Moon.    "I just wanted to be alone to die." Now it was the eiiemy agent's turn to speak bitterly. "Then you planned it all along. You led our men on, pretending you were going to aid us while you were in our midst learning everything about us to destroy us. "You finally found the method, God knows where you dug up that fiendish idea of sulphuric gas, but you planned and watched. I'll never know how you were so lucky -- and it was pure luck, but you did it. You destroyed our base." With a smile, "Yes, I was lucky, I had a chance to end my life in a final battle and victory. That's all a man can ask for." Aron was still smiling when the blast of the Intelligence man's gun blew his head off. As he left the station, all the agent could think of was one phrase he had heard many times jokingly; but now it became a grim accompaniment for his footsteps. Though he didn't want to hear it, it kept whispering through his mind every few seconds. "Live fast, fight hard, die young -- and have a radiation-rotted corpse." Two hours later the United Empire fleet landed on Kligor. They came to claim the sixty ships lying waiting -- waiting -- in the peaceful valley that was still tainted with the smell of chlorine.    Chemical firms of the future may "employ" microbes as helpers. Laboratory research has shown that if the lakes in the hot desert could be contaminated with the right kind of sewage or "broth" and stocked with specially cultivated sulphur producing bacteria the process of building up sulphur deposits could be speeded up to six times faster than it takes to do it naturally. With such a .system in full swing, large scale sulphur production would be an accomplished fact. The "weather makers" predicted for tomorrow's generations may need no more than common table salt to provide rain when necessary. Intensive studies have indicated that there is a strong possibility that natural salt particles in the air are the rain-making agents. Tests are now going on to determine whether clouds seeded with salt will actually produce precipitation. The relationship of light to life has long been known, but recent discoveries point to it as becoming the key to farm crop control. The correct use and management of radiant energy in the interest of better crops and better market timing has already proved of considerable worth. Electric lights and a home generator may soon be as important to the farmer of the future as the seeds and fertilizer. The Antarctic continent, where the edges haven't been completely mapped and the interior is unknown and unexplored, may be the "last frontier" for the pioneers of the next twenty years. At least one expedition is being planned for # or #; and a bill to finance it has already been introduced to Congress. The automobile driver on the highways of tomorrow very likely will find that all cars are two-tone, and of only two colors -- blue and yellow. Studies by traffic and safety engineers have proved that the accident rate could be greatly reduced if this idea were to be adopted. These two colors are more visible against varying backgrounds than any others. The darker blue is good for daylight and fog conditions; and the yellow is the color most readily seen at night. Plastic pillows filled with helium and joined together to make a milehigh floating dome may "weather condition" communities of the future. Such a dome covering would provide year-round sub-tropical weather without rain or bugs. The sun's light and heat would penetrate (with harmful rays filtered out), and rain pouring off the edges would be caught to provide a pure water supply for all purposes. Fishing with electricity may revolutionize the commercial fishing industry. Scientists in Germany and Russia have shown that almost all types of food fish can be attracted by electric currents out in the open sea. American trawlers, equipped with electricity producing gadgets and, nets are now conducting trials to test and measure the catches against pre-electric fishing. Harvesting cattails may some day be a profitable business for farmers who own a piece of swamp land. Nearly a dozen by-products of this "weed" have been found in recent laboratory research. The root can be eaten "as is", or dried and ground into a flour for baking. The flour can also be fermented to produce ethyl alcohol for anti-freeze, medicinal purposes, and as an industrial solvent. The stem fibers when extracted are as useful as jute for making string, burlap, webbing, or for stuffing furniture. The seeds yield an oil very similar to linseed oil and equally as useful; and after the oils have been extracted the meal made from the seeds makes excellent cattle or chicken feed. Ten years from now, or earlier, electricity will be commercially produced from uranium at a cost that is less than that of the coal-fueled power now in use. The development of a new boiling reactor has proved that costs will be reduced to a total of # mills an hour in contrast with the #I mills it now costs for coal powered electricity. Surgeons of the future may have robot helpers instead of the human team they now have when they operate. A new type of electronic "brain" has been designed which instead of making computations from facts and figures fed into it, picks up its own facts from the unconscious patient's body and relays them to the surgeon. Records of blood pressure, pulse rate, breathing rate and volume of air exhaled per minute are taken continuously, and indicated in such a manner that the surgeon or anesthesiologist can interpret the situation at a glance. New cars may be coming off the production lines a great deal faster than they do now, and they may be a good deal cheaper too. A tough new plastic has been introduced which requires only three or four .weeks to be made into dies for automobile parts. The steel dies now in use need three to eight months of work before they can be used and cost thirty to seventy per cent more than the new plastic dies. # -- ##. # -- #. # -- Alcor. # -- photons. # -- methane. # -- eight. # -- ##ths. #I -- #. # -- transit. # -- Mars. # -- Betelgeuse, # -- #. # -- ## of a second. # -- Lithium. # -- yellow. # -- Messier #. # -- thermonuclear. Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicmcians. The Rosicrucians existence for cenmries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. eonfinued from bock over lected from Fantasy and Science l'Iction Muxaziue. The woman who became her own daughter... gambling on a strange planet -- See description on back cover. top stories by outstanding authors... stories of Wonders of I'-artli and Man... inventions... of visitors from " Outer Space ... AclftrV# entllre in Dimension # ,... W'orlds of TornorII 'w W row. # Images. 'riling that becomes whatever it meets. Plus many other best tales skimmed from a dozen years of Astounding Science-Fiction lagazine by its editor, John W. Campbell. Jr. fay Hal Clement -- Charles the planet Mesklin. But  the force of gravity there is so powerful the planet is squeezed almost flat -- and a fall of even a few inches can crush a human body to powder! by Itaoc Asimov -- Robots are the most hated creatures on earth. VW Then a noted robot  c scientist is murdered. Detective Baley has to track down the killer. 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Name Age Address City, Zone  State r All Stories New and Complete Cover by Anton Kurka Illustrating the story  (( First Stage: Moon" I Landing on Asteroid Hermes  IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork oi manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale November #th New tests, cited by an expert in news stories, show that: your ability to think increases with age; your powers of deduc tion are greater; your judgment is better. files are thousands of case histories of men and women of every age. 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Finishing and Dyeing Loom Fixing Textile Designing Textile EngVg  Throwing Warping and Weaving Domestic Refrigeration Marine Engineering Ocean Navigation Shipfitting Short Story Writing Telephony NameJtge...Home AddressCity...Zone...State.Working Hours. Occupation. Canadian residents send coupon to International Correspondence Schools, Canadian, Ltd., Montreal, Canada... Special tuitipn rates to members of the (J. S Armed Forces. patch from Washington, D.G., reported that the Federation of American Scientists had proposed a "six point revision" of government standards regarding security. This eminent group of scientists declared "there is a need for a new approach to security" because "loyal people at all levels of responsibility in the atomic energy program, including the commissioners themselves, might well be indicted by the same kind of standards as were applied to Dr Oppenheimer." One of the six points offered was: "Although association with a large number of reputedly disloyal persons might be a ground for a finding of disloyalty or flagrant indescretion," the scientists contended that "when a few such associations can outweigh all other evidence of discretion and loyalty, the security system is in danger of becoming monstrous." From this it seems that these scientists think the ruling was unfair and that loyalty can be diluted. In other words, it reads to me like you can associate with four or five disloyal persons and be subject to a mere reprimand, while it would require association with thirty or forty or fifty disloyal persons to be found guilty of complete disloyalty. All I know about such top drawer operations of the government is what I read in the newspapers. But from what I have read in the newspapers about the Oppenheimer case, it seems that the Government was fair and just and right in declaring Dr. Oppenheimer a security risk. Loyalty is something you can't divide. It has to be # or nothing. If you are ninety-eight per cent loyal, you're still short as far as a vital seourity risk is concerned. That other two per cent is enough to give an enemy agent all he wants. "Few such associations" are a few such associations too many, regardless of evidence of other loyalty or discretion. One single indiscretion with one single spy can wreck the country. History has too many such cases to ignore them. And the United States Government leans over backwards in an effort to be fair towards spies, subversives and disloyal persons. I think this is rather obvious. Dr. Oppenheimer admitted associating with Communists, and he had failed to adhere strictly to security rules and other factors. In Russia they would have kept him under #-hour guard and the only person he could talk to would have been himself or one of the Kremlin dogs. If he had escaped his keepers and had been found mingling with a bunch of U.S. capitalists, they would have shot him. Now and then, as in any law, there are shades of guilt or innocence, but in a verdict there can be only black and white -- guilty or not guilty. The security of a nation is too big a thing to gamble with. they are doing the right thing in proposing that standards pertaining to our national security be revised, let's remember one thing: not one of them, nor the group, is more important than the nation they serve. Therefore, whether security regulations seem right or wrong, they have submitted themselves to its dictates and decrees by becoming the eminent scientists they are. For seven or eight years I have repeatedly convinced myself that I would never become such an addict as I have seen other people become. And I have reserved a great deal of sympathy for those stricken with this particular habit. Now, all that's changed. A few days ago I became a full fledged member of that new social order that has taken the conversation gambit away from the fishermen and the hunters and the skiers and golfers and others. And it looks like I shall become an addict too -- because I obtained a gadget or an instrument or device or whatever it is that causes people to re-do their living habits more than any other invention of modern times. Because of this gadget or instrument I find that I shall spend several times its cost in partitioning off a room, putting in a couple of doors, laying some sort of floor and decorating the joint. Then I shall get chairs and ash trays and peanut bowls and special lights. I shall put in a stock of liquid refreshments and nicknacks and short order stuff. I shall have to adjust my eating habits, my reading habits and my sleeping hours. I shall get quite used to unexpected telephone calls from people whose gadgets have gone out of order. I shall get used to unexpected people showing up at the door with the excuse that they just happened to be passing my way at a certain time. I shall become used to considerable irritation and susceptible to ulcers because it isn't working right; or because somebody else wants something I don't want or vice versa. I shall view corn served a hundred different ways and cuss myself for wasting time and sleep and go right back and do it again the next night. I shall tell bald face lies -- that will out-do those of the most ardent fishermen -- about how good my gadget works. I shall discuss and argue about certain electronic devices, politics, personalities, sports, parts and installations with the greatest authority -- when I don't know a damn thing about them. I shall dwell in the dark, shutting out the good daylight and the wonderful view of the Catskill Mountains and the fresh air of the four seasons. I shall spend all my free time, and a lot of time that isn't free, slouched in a chair down below the ground in my cellar... For that is where my new television set is located. -- jiq wmm mmsmm  IwHl Illustrated by Leo Summers Mbarara was Austin s city, his dream, a civilization carved from the screaming depths of the Jungle . The culture and sciences of his people would see that it lived. And the "magic" of old Bohawah would see that it died... foxfeet, invisibly, it had crept, past all the fences and traps he had laid, past all the barriers. And now it sat inside his mind, a part of him, like his pulse, like the steady beat of his heart. Richard Austin became rigid in the chair. He closed his eyes and strained the muscles in his body until they were silent and unmoving as granite; and he listened to the thing that had come again, taking him by surprise even while he had been waiting. He listened to it grow -- it seemed to grow; he couldn't be sure: perhaps he was merely bringing it into sharper focus by filtering out the other constant sounds : the winds that whispered through the foliage of balloon-topped trees the murmurous insect-drone of all the machines that produced this wind and pumped blood through the city from their stations far beneath the night-heavy streets. Or, perhaps, it was because he was searching, trying to lay hands on it that the thing seemed to be different tonight, stronger, surer. Or -- what did it matter? He sat in the darkened room and listened to the drums; to the even, steady throb that really neither rose nor diminished, but held to that slow dignified tempo with which he'd become so familiar. Then quickly he rose from the chair and shook his head. The sounds died and became an indistinguishable part of the silence. It was only concentration, he thought, and the desire to hear them that gave them life... Richard Austin released a jagged breath from his swollen lungs, painfully. He walked to the bar and poured some whiskey into a glass and drank most of it in a single swallow: it went down his dry throat like knives, forcing the salivary glands back into action. He shook his head again, turned and walked back across the living room to the far door. It swung out noiselessly as his hand touched the ornamented circle of hammered brass. The figure of his wife lay perfectly still under the black light, still and pale, as she had lain three hours before. He walked toward her, feeling his nostrils dilate at the acrid medicine smells, harshly bitter and new to his senses. He blinked away the hot tears that had rushed, stinging, to his eyes; and stood for a time, quietly, trying not to think of the drums. Then he whispered: "Mag... Mag, don't die tonight!" Imbecile words! He clenched his fists and stared down at the face that was so full of pain, so twisted with defeat, that now you could not believe it had once been different, a young face, full of laughter and innocence and courage. The color had gone completely. From the burning splotchy scarlet of last week to this stiff white mask, lifeless, brittle as drying paste. And covered over with perspiration that glistened above her mouth in cold wet buttons and over her face like oil on white stone. The bedding under and around her was drenched gray. Austin looked at the bandage that covered his wife's head, and forced away the memory, brutally. The memory of her long silver hair and how it had fallen away in clumps in his hands with a week after she had been stricken... But the thoughts danced out of control, and he found himself remembering all the terrible steps in this nightmare. The scientists had thought it malaria, judging from the symptoms, which were identical. But that was difficult to accept, for malaria had been effectively conquered -- powerful new discoveries in vaccines having been administered first, and then the primary cause of the disease itself -- the Anopheles mosquitoe -- destroyed completely. And the liquid alloys which formed the foundations for this new city eliminated all the likely breeding places, the bogs and marshlands and rivers. No instance of re-occurrence of the disease had been reported for half a century. Yet -- malarial parasites were discovered in the bloodstreams of those first victims, unmistakable parasites that multiplied at a swift rate and worked their destruction of the red corpuscles. And the chemists immediately had to go about the business of mixing medicines from now ancient prescriptions, frantically working against time. A disquieting, even a frightening thing; but without terror for the builders of the new city; not sufficient to make them abandon their work or to spark mass evacuations. Panic was by now so forgotten by most that it had become a new emotion, to be learned all over again. It had not taken very long to relearn, Austin recalled. Terror had come soon enough. The stricken -- some thirty husky workmen, engineers, planners -- had rallied under the drugs and seemed to be out of critical condition when, one night, they had all suffered relapses, fallen into fevered comas and proceeded to alternate between unconsciousness and delirium. The scientists were baffled. They tried frenziedly to arrest the parasites, but without success. Their medicines were useless, their drugs and radium treatments and innovations -- all, useless. Finally, they could only look on as the disease took new turns, developed strange characteristics, changed altogether from what they had taken to be malaria to something utterly foreign. It began to assume a horrible regular pattern: from prolonged delirium to catatonia, whereby the victim's respiratory system and heartbeat diminished to a condition only barely distinguishable from death. And then, the most hideous part: the swift decomposition of the body cells, the destruction of the tissues... Richard Austin carefully controlled a shudder as he thought of those weeks that had been the beginning. He fingered out a cigarette from his pocket, started to strike it, then broke the cylinder and ground its bright red flakes into his palms. No other real hint had been given, then : only the disease. Someone had nicknamed it "Jungle Rot" -- cruel, but apt. The victims were rotting alive, the flesh falling from them like rain-soaked rags; and they did not die wholly, ever, until they had been transformed into almost unrecognizable mounds of putrescence... He put out a hand and laid it gently against his wife's cheek. The perspiration was chill and greasy to his touch, like the stagnant water of slew banks. Instinctively his fingers recoiled and balled back into fists. He forced them open again and stared at the tiny dottles of flesh that clung to them. "Mag!" It had started already! Wildly, he touched her arm, applying very slight pressure. The outer skin crumbled away, leaving a small wet gray patch. Austin's heart raced; an involuntary movement caused his fingers to pinch his own wrists, hard. A wrinkled spot appeared and disappeared, a small, fading red line. She's dying, he thought. Very surely, very slowly, she's begun to die -- Mag. Soon her body will turn gray and then it will come loose; the weight of the sheet will be enough to tear big strips of it away... She'll begin to rot, and her brain will know it -- they had discovered that much : the victims were never completely comatose, could not be adequately drugged -- she will know that she is mouldering even while she lives and thinks... And why? His head ached, throbbed. Why? The years, these past months, the room with its stink of decay -- everything rushed up, suddenly, If I had agreed to leave with the rest he thought, to run away, then Mag would be well and full of life. But -- I didn't agree... He had stayed on to fight. And Mag would not leave without him. Now she was dying and that was the end of it. Or -- he turned slowly -- was it? He walked out to the balcony. The forced air was soft and cool; it moved in little patches through the streets of the city. Mbarara, his city; the one he'd dreamed about and then planned and designed and pushed into existence ; the place built to pamper five hundred thousand people. Empty, now, and deserted as a gigantic churchyard Dimly he recognized the sound of the drums, with their slow muffled rhythm, directionless as always, seeming to come from everywhere and from nowhere. Speaking to him. Whispering. Austin lit a cigarette and sucked the calming smoke into his lungs. He remained motionless until the cigarette was down to the cork. Then he walked back into the bedroom, opened a cabinet and took a heavy silver pistol. He loaded it carefully. Mag lay still; almost, it seemed to Austin, expectant, waiting. So very still and pale. He pointed the barrel of the pistol at his wife's forehead and curled his finger around the trigger. Another slight pressure and it would be over. Her suffering would be over. Just a slight pressure! The drums droned louder until they were exploding in the quiet room. Austin tensed and fought the trembling, gripped the pistol with his other hand to steady it. But his finger refused to move on the curved trigger. After a long moment, he lowered his arm and dropped the gun into his pocket. "No." He said it quietly, undramatically. The word hit a barrier of mucus and came out highpitched and child-like. He coughed. That was what they wanted him to do -- he could tell, from the drums. That's what so many of the others had done. Panicked. "No." He walked quickly out of the room, through the hall, to the elevator. It lowered instantly but he did not wait for it to reach bottom before he leapt off and ran across the floor to the barricaded front door. He tore at the locks. Then the door swung open and he was outside; for the first time in three weeks -- outside, alone, in the city. He paused, fascinated by the strangeness of it. Impossible to believe that he was the only white man left in the entire city. He strode to a high-speed walkway, halted it and stepped on. Setting the power at half with his passkey, he pressed the control button and sagged against the rail as the belt whispered into movement. He knew where he was going. Perhaps he even knew why. But he didn't think about that; instead, he looked at the buildings that slid by silently, the vast rolling spheres and columns of colored stone, the balanced shapes that existed now and that had once existed only in his mind. And he listened to the drums, wondering why the sound of them seemed natural and his buildings suddenly so unnatural, so strange and disjointed. Like green balloons on yellow sticks, the cultured "Grant Wood" trees slipped by, uniform and straight, arranged in aesthetically pleasing designs on the stone islands between belts. Austin smiled: The touch of nature. Toy trees, ruffling in artificial winds... It all looked, now, like the model he had presented to the Senators. About as real and lifelike. Austin moved like a carefully carved and painted figurine, incredibly small and lonely-looking on the empty walkway. He thought about the years of preparation; the endless red tape and paper work that had preceeded the actual job. Then of the natives, how they had protested and petitioned to influence the Five-Power governments and how that had slowed them down. The problem of money, whipped only by pounding at the point of over-population, again and again, never letting up for a moment. The problem of workers. The problems, problems... He could not recall when the work itself had actually begun -- it was all so joined. Laying the first railroad could certainly not have been a particle as beset with difficulty. Because the tribes of the Kenya territory numbered into the with hatred and fury, opposing the city at every turn. No explanation had satisfied them. They saw it as the destruction of their world and so they fought. With guns and spears and arrows and darts, with every resource at their disposal, refusing to capitulate, hunting like an army of mad ants scattered over the land. And, since they could not be controlled, they had to be destroyed. Like their forests and rivers and mountains, destroyed, to make room for the city. Though not, Austin remembered grimly, without loss. The white men had fine weapons, but none more fatal than machetes biting deep into neck flesh or sharp wooden shafts coated with strange poisons. And they did not all escape. Some would wander too far, unused to this green world where a man could become hopelessly lost within three minutes. Others would forget their weapons. And a few were too brave. Austin thought of Joseph Fava, the engineer, who had been reported missing. And of how Fava had come running back to the camp after two days, running and screaming, a bright crimson nearly dead creature out of the worst dreams. He had been cleanly stripped of all his skin, except for the face, hands, and feet... But, the city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were damned off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things. Until it was no more. All of Kenya, and most of Tanganyika, leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries lions of tons of hardened stone. The birth of a city... It had become the death of a world. And Richard Austin was its murderer. A S HE traveled, he thought of the shaman, the half-naked, toothless Bantu medicine man who had spoken for most of the tribes. "You have killed us, and we could not stop you. So now we will wait , until you have made your city and others come to live here. Then you will know what it is to die. # Bokawah, who lived in superstition and fear, whom civilization had passed, along with the rest of his people. Who never spoke again after those words, and allowed himself to be moved to the wide iron plateau that had been built for the surviving natives. Bokawah, the ignorant shaman, with his eternal smile... How distinct that smile was now! The walkway shuddered, suddenly, and jarred to a noisy grinding stop. Austin pitched forward and grasped the railing in order to break his fall. Awareness of the silence came first. The eerie dead silence that hung like a pall. It meant that the central machines had ceased functioning. They had been designed to operate automatically and perpetually; it was unthinkable that these power sources could break down! As unthinkable as the drums that murmured to life again beyond the stainless towers, so loud now in the silence, so real. Austin gripped his pistol tightly and shook away the panic that had bubbled up like acid in his chest. It was merely that the power had gone off. Strike out impossible, insert improbable. Improbabilities happen. The evil spirits do not summon them, they happen. Like strange diseases. I am fighting, he thought, a statistical paradox. That's all. A storage pile of coincidences . If I wait -- he walked close to the sides of the buildings -- and fight , the graph will change. The curve will... The drums roared out a wave of scattered sound, stopped, began again... He thought a bit further of charts; then the picture of Mag materialized, blocking out the thick ink lines, ascending and descending on their giant graphs. Thinking wasn't going to help... He walked on. Presently, at the end of a curve in the city maze, the 'village' came into view, suspended overhead like a gigantic jeweled spider. It thrust out cold light. It was silent. Austin breathed deeply. By belt, his destination was only minutes away. But the minutes grew as he walked through the city, and when he had reached the lift, hot pains wrenched at his muscles. He stood by the crystal platform, working action back into numbed limbs. Then he remembered the silence, the dead machines. If they were not functioning, then the elevator -- His finger touched a button, experimentally. A glass door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. He walked inside, and tried not to think as the door closed and the bullet-shaped lift began to rise. Below, Mbarara grew small. The treated metals glowed in a dimming lace of light. And the city looked even more like the little clay model he had built with his hands. At last movement ceased. Austin waited for the door to slide open again, then he strode out onto the smooth floor. It was very dark. The artificial torches did not even smolder: their stubs, he noticed, were blackened and cold. But the gates to the village lay open. He looked past the entrance into the frozen shadows. He heard the drums, throbbing from within, loud and distinct. But -- ordinary drums, whose soundwaves would dissipate before ever reaching the city below. He walked into the village. The huts, like glass blisters on smooth flesh, sat silent. Somehow, they were obscene in the dark, to Austin. Built to incorporate the feel and the atmosphere of their originals and yet to include the civilized conveniences; planned from an artistic as well as a scientific standpoint -- they were suddenly obscene. Perhaps, Austin thought, as he walked, perhaps there was something to what Barney had been saying... No -- these people had elected to stay of their own free will. It would have been impossible to duplicate exactly the monstrous conditions under which they had lived. If not impossible, certainly wrong. Let them wallow in their backward filth? In their disease and corruption, let them die -- merely because their culture had failed to absorb scientific progress? No. You do not permit a man to leap off the top of a hundred-story building just because he has been trained to believe it is the only way to get to the ground floor -- even though you insult him and blaspheme against his gods through your intervention. You restrain him, at any cost. Then, much later, you show him the elevator. And because he is a man, with a brain no smaller than yours, he will understand. He will understand that a crushed superstition is better than a crushed head. And he will thank you, eventually. That is logic. Austin walked, letting these thoughts form a thick crust. He felt the slap of the pistol against his thigh and this, also, was comforting. Where were they now? Inside the huts, asleep? All of them? Or had they, too, contracted the disease and begun to die of it?... Far ahead, at the clearing which represented the tip of the design, a glow of light appeared. As he approached, the drums grew louder, and other sounds -- voices. How many voices? The air was at once murmurous and alive. He stopped before the clearing and leaned on the darkness and watched. Nearby a young woman was dancing. Her eyes were closed, tightly, and her arms were straight at her sides like black roots. She was in a state of possession, dancing in rhythm to the nearest drum. Her feet moved so fast they had become a blur, and her naked body wore a slick coat of perspiration. Beyond the dancing woman, Austin could see the crowd, squatted and standing, swaying; over a thousand of them -- surely every native in the village! A clot of brown skin and bright hunched in the firelight. An inner line of men sat over drums and hollow logs, beating these with their palms and with short sticks of wood. The sounds blended strangely into one -- the one Austin had been hearing, it seemed, all his life. He watched, fascinated, even though he had witnessed Bantu ceremonies countless times in the past, even though he was perfectly familiar with the symbols. The little leather bags of hex-magic: nailfilings, photographs, specks of flesh ; the rubbing boards stained with fruit-skins ; the piles of bones at the feet of the men -- old bones, very brittle and dry and old. Then he looked beyond the natives to the sensible clean crystal walls that rose majestically, cupping the area, giving it form. It sent a chill over him. He walked into the open. ly, like a scream cut off. The dancers caught their balance, blinked, drew in breath. The others lifted their heads, stared. All were turned to dark unmoving wax. Austin went past the gauntlet of eyes, to one of the painted men. "Where is Bokawah?" he said loudly, in precise Swahili. His voice regained its accustomed authority. "Bokawah. Take me to him." No one moved. Hands lay on the air inches above drums, petrified. "I have come to talk!" From the corner of his eye, Austin felt the slight disturbance. He waited a moment, then turned. A figure crouched beside him. A man, unbelievably old and tiny, sharp little bones jutting into loose flesh like pins, skin cross-hatched with a pattern of white paint, chalky as the substance some widows of the tribes wore for a year after the death of their mates. His mouth was pulled into a shape not quite a smile, but resembling a smile. It revealed hardened toothless gums. The old man laughed, suddenly. The amulet around his chickenneck bobbled. Then he stopped laughing and stared at Austin. "We have been waiting," he said, softly, Austin started at the perfect English. He had not heard English for a long time; and now, coming from this little man... Perhaps Bokawah had learned it. Why not? "Walk with me, Mr. Austin." He followed the ancient shaman, dumbly, not having the slightest idea why he was doing so, to a square of moist soil. It was surrounded by natives. Bokawah looked once at Austin, then reached down and dipped his hands into the soil. The horny fingers scratched away the top-dirt, burrowed in like thin, nervous animals, and emerged, finally, holding something. Austin gasped. It was a doll. It was Mag. He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat. He knew how the primitives would try to inflict evil upon an enemy by burying his effigy. As the effigy rotted, symbolically, so would... He snatched the doll away from the old man. It crumbled in his hands. "Mr. Austin," Bokawah said, "I'm very sorry you did not come for this talk long ago." The old man's lips did not move. The voice was his and yet not his. Austin knew, suddenly, that he had not come to this place of his own accord. He had been summoned. The old man held a hyena's tail in his right hand. He waved this and a slight wind seemed to come up, throwing the flames of the fire into a neurotic dance. "You are not convinced, even now, Mr. Austin. Aiii. You have seen suffering and death, but you are not convinced." Bokawah sighed. "I will try one last time." He squatted on the smooth floor. "When you first came to our country, and spoke your plans, I told you -- even then -- what must happen. I told you that this city must not be. I told you that my people would fight, as your people would fight if we were to come to your land and build jungles. But you understood nothing of what I said." He did not accuse; the voice was expressionless. "Now Mbarara lies silent and dead beneath you and still you do not wish to understand. What must we do, Mr. Austin? How shall we go about proving to you that this Mbarara of yours will always be silent and dead, that your people will never walk through it?" Austin thought of his old college friend Barney -- and of what Barney had once told him. Staring at Bokawah, at this scrawny, painted savage, he saw the big Texan clearly, and he remembered his wild undergraduate theories -- exhuming the antique view of primitives and their religions, their magics. "Go on, pal, laugh at their tabus # Barney, who was an anthropologist, used to be fond of saying, "sneer, while you throw salt over your shoulder . Laugh at their manas, while you blab about our own 'geniuses # ! # He had even gone beyond the point of believing that magic was important because it held together the fabric of culture among these natives, because it -- and their religious superstitions -- gave them a rule for behavior, therefore, in most cases, happiness. He had even come to believe that native magic was just another method of arriving at physical truths. Of course, it was all semantic nonsense. It suggested that primitive magic could lift a ship into space or destroy disease or... That had been the trouble with Barney. You could never tell when he was serious. Even a social anthropologist wouldn't go so far as to think there was more than one law of gravity. "Mr. Austin, we have brought you here for a purpose. Do you know what that purpose is?" "I don't know and I don't -- " "Have you wondered why you, alone, of all your people, have been spared? Then -- listen to me, very carefully. Because if you do not, then what has happened in your new city is merely the beginning. The winds of death will blow over Mbarara and it will be far more awful than what has been." The medicine man stared down at the scattered piles of bones. Panther bones, Austin knew -- a divination device. Their position on the ground told Bokawah much about the white people. "Go back to your chiefs. Tell them that they must forget this city. Tell them that death walks here and that it will always walk, and that their magic is powerful but not powerful enough. It cannot stand against the spirits from time who have been summoned to fight. Go and talk to your chiefs and tell them these things. Make them believe you. Force them to understand that if they come to Mbarara, they will die, in ways they never dreamed, of sickness, in pain, slowly. Forever." The old man's eyes were closed. His mouth did not move at all and the voice was mechanical. "Tell them, Mr. Austin, that at first you thought it was a strange new disease that struck the workers. But then remind them that your greatest doctors were powerless against the contagion, that it spread and was not conquered. Say these things. And, perhaps, they will believe you. And be saved." Bokawah studied the panther bones carefully, tracing their arrangement. Austin's voice was mechanical, also. "You are forgetting something," he said. He refused to let the thoughts creep in. He refused to wonder about the voice that came through closed lips, about where the natives could have found soil or fresh panther bones or... "No one," he said to the old man, "has fought back -- yet." "But why would you do that, Mr. Austin, since you do not believe in the existence of your enemy? Whom shall you fight?" Bokawah smiled. The crowd of natives remained quiet, unmoving, in the dying firelight. "The only fear you hold for us," Austin said, "is the fear that you may prove psychologically harmful." He looked at the crushed doll at his feet. The face was whole; otherwise, it lay hideously disfigured. "Yes?" "Right now, Bokawah, my government is sending men. They will arrive soon. Whey they do, they will study what has happened. If it is agreed that your rites -- however harmless in themselves -- cause currents of fear -- are in any way responsible for the disease -- you will be given the opportunity to go elsewhere or -- " Or, Mr. Austin?" " -- you will be eliminated." "Then people will come to Mbarara. Despite the warnings and the death, they will come?" "Your magic sticks aren't going to scare away five hundred thousand men and women." "Five hundred thousand..." The old man looked at the bones, sighed, nodded his head. "You know your people very well," he murmured. Austin smiled. "Yes, I do." "Then I think there is little left for us to talk about." Austin wanted to say, No, you're wrong. We must talk about Mag! She's dying and I want to keep her from dying. But he knew what these words would mean. They would sketch his real feelings, his fears and doubts. And everything would be lost. He could not admit that the doll was anything more than a doll. He must not! The old man picked up a calabash and ran water over his hands. "I am sorry," he said, "that you must learn the way you must." A slow chant rose from the natives. It sounded to Austin like Swahili, yet it was indistinct. He could recognize none of the words, except gonga and bagana. Medicine? The man with the medicine? It was a litany, not unlike the Gregorian chants he had once heard, full of overpowering melancholy. Calm and ethereal and sad as only the human voice can be sad. It rode on the stale air, swelling, diminishing, cutting through the stench of decay and rot with profound dignity. Austin felt the heaviness of his clothes. The broken machines had stopped pumping fresh breezes, so the air was like oil, opening the pores of his body, running coldly down his arms and legs. Bokawah made a motion with his hand and sank back onto the smooth floor. He breathed wrackingly, and groaned as if in pain. Then he straightened and looked at Austin and hobbled quickly away. The drums began. Movement eased back into the throng and soon the dancers were up, working themselves back into their possessed states. Austin turned and walked quickly away from the ceremony. When he had reached the shadows, he ran. He did not stop running until he had reached the lift, even while his muscles, long dormant, unaccustomed to this activity, turned to stone, numb and throbbing stone. He stabbed the button and closed his eyes, while his heart pumped and roared sound into his ears and colored fire into his mind. The platform descended slowly, unemotional and calm as its parts. Austin ran out and fell against a building, where he tried to push away the image of the black magic ceremony, and what he had felt there. He swallowed needles of pain into his parched throat. And the fear mounted and mounted, strangling him slowly... loomed, suddenly, to Austin, more unreal and anachronistic than the tribal rites from which he had just come. Stalagmites of crystal pushing up to the night sky that bent above them; little squares and diamonds and circles of metal and stone. Office buildings; apartments; housing units; hat stores and machine factories and restaurants; and, cobwebbing among them, all these blind and empty shells, the walkways, like colored ribbons, like infinitely long reptiles, sleeping now, dead, still. Or, were they only waiting, as he wanted to believe? Of course they're waiting, he thought. People who know the answers will come to Mbarara tomorrow. Clear-headed scientists who have not been terrorized by a tribe of beaten primitives. And the scientists will find out what killed the workers, correct it, and people will follow. Five hundred thousand people, from all over the closetcrowded world, happy to have air to breathe once more -- air that hasn't had to travel down twohundred feet -- happy to know the Earth can yet sustain them. No more talk, then, of "population decreases" -- murder was a better word -- ; no more government warnings screaming "depopulation" at you... The dream would come true, Austin told himself. Because it must. Because he'd promised Mag and they'd lived it all together, endless years, hoped and planned and fought for the city. With Mbarara, it would begin : the dark age of a sardine can world would end, and life would begin. It would be many years before the worry would begin all over -- for half the earth lay fallow, wasted. Australia, Greenland, Iceland, Africa, the Poles... And perhaps then the population graph would change, as it had always changed before. And men would come out of their caverns and rat-holes and live as men. Yes. But only if Mbarara worked. If he could show them his success here... Austin cursed the men who had gone back and screamed the story of what had happened to the other engineers. God knew there were few enough available, few who had been odd enough to study a field for which there seemed little further use. If they'd only kept still about the disease! Then others would have come and... Died . The word came out instantly, uncalled, and vanished. Austin passed the Emperor, the playhouse he had thought of that night with Mag, ten years before. As he passed, he tried to visualize the foyer jammed with people in soup-and-fish and jeweled gowns, talking of whether the play had meat or not. Now, its marbled front putting out yellow glow, it looked foolish and pathetic. The placard case shone through newly gathered dust, empty. Austin tried to think of what had been on this spot originally. Thick jungle growth alone. Or had there been a native village -- with monkeys climbing the trees and swinging on vines and white widows mourning under straw roofs? nuts. Be still. You've stayed together all this time, he thought, you can hold out until tomorrow. Tcheletchew will be here, sputtering under his beard, and they'll fly Mag to a hospital and make her well and clear up this nonsense in a hurry. Just get home. Don't think and get home and it will be all right. The city was actually without formal streets. Its plan did not include the antiquated groundcars that survived here and there in old families. Therefore, Mbarara was literally a maze. A very pretty maze. Like an English estate -- Austin had admired these touches of vanished gentility -- the areas were sometimes framed by green stone hedges, carved into functional shapes. He had no difficulty finding his way. It was all too fresh, even now, the hours of planning every small curve and design, carefully leaving no artistic 'holes' or useless places. He could have walked it blindfolded. But when he passed the food dispensary and turned the corner, he found that it did not lead to the 'copter-park, as it should have. There were buildings there, but they were not the ones they ought to have been. Or else he'd turned the wrong -- He retraced his steps to the point where he had gone left. The food dispensary was nowhere in sight. Instead he found himself looking at the general chemistry building. Austin paused and wiped his forehead. The excitement, of course. It had clouded his mind for a moment, making him lose his way. He began walking. Warm perspiration coursed across his body, turning his suit dark-wet, staining his jacket. He passed the food dispensary. Austin clenched his fists. It was impossible that he could have made a complete circle. He had built this city, he knew it intimately. He had walked through it without even thinking of direction, in the halfstages of construction, and never taken a wrong step. How could he be lost? Nerves. Nothing strange in it. Certainly enough had happened to jar loose his sense of direction. Calmly , now. Calmly. The air hung fetid and heavy. He had to pull it into his lungs, push it out. Of course, he could go below and open the valves -- at least they could be operated by hand. He could, but why? It would mean hunching down in a dark shaft -- damn, should have made that shaft larger! And, there were, after all, enough openings in the sealing-bubble to keep a breathable flow of oxygen in circulation. If the air was heavy and still outside the bubble, he could scarcely expect it to be different within... He looked up at the half-minaretted tower that was one of the 'copter repair centers. It was located in exactly the opposite direction to the one he thought he'd taken. Austin sank onto a stone bench. Images floated through his mind. He was lost; precisely as lost as if he had wandered into the jungle that had stood here before the building of Mbarara, and then tried to find his way back. He closed his eyes and saw a picture, startlingly clear, of himself, running through the matted growths of dark green foliage, stumbling across roots, bumping trees, face grotesque with fear, and screaming... He opened his eyes quickly, shook away the vision. His brain was tired; that was why he saw such a picture. He must keep his eyes open. The city was unchanged. The park, designed for housewives who might wish to pause and rest or chat, perhaps feed squirrels, surrounded him. Across the boating lake was the university. Behind the university was home. Austin rose, weakly, and made his way down the grassy slope to the edge of the artificial lake. Cultured city trees dotted the banks: the lake threw back a geometrically perfect reflection. He knelt and splashed water into his face. Then he gulped some of it down and paused until the ripples spread to the center of the lake. He studied his image in the water carefully. White skin, smooth cheeks, iron-colored hair. Good clothes. A dolichocephalic head, evenly spaced, the head of a twenty-second century civilized... Above his reflection, Austin detected movement. He froze and blinked his eyes. As the water smoothed, the image of an animal appeared on the surface, wavering slightly. A small animal, something like a monkey. Like a monkey hanging from the branches of a tree. Austin whirled around. There was only the darkness, the golfing-green lawn, the cultured trees -- smooth-barked, empty. He passed a hand through his hair. It was a trick of the lights. His subconscious fear, the shimmering water... darkened boathouse, across its floor, his footsteps ringing against the stone, echoing loudly. At the end of the miniature pier, he untied a small battery boat and jumped into it. He pulled a switch at the side, waited, forced himself to look back at the deserted bank. The boat moved slowly, with only a whisper of sound, through the water. Hurry , Austin thought. Hurry -- Oh God, why are they so slow! The boat, whose tin flag proclaimed its name to be Lucy, sliced the calm lake with its toy prow, and, after many minutes, reached the center. The glow was insufficient to make the approaching bank distinct. It lay wrapped in darkness, a darkness that hid even the buildings. Austin narrowed his eyes and stared. He blinked. It was the fuzziness of the luminescence, of course, that gave movement to the bank. That made it seem to seethe with unseen life. It was only that his position to the shadows kept changing that made them turn into dark and feral shapes; trees, where buildings surely were, dense growth... It was the milky phosphorescence of the metals that rose like marshsteam from the nearing water... He thought of stepping of! the boat into a jungle, a magical forest, alive and waiting for him. He closed his eyes and gripped the sides of the boat. There was a scraping. Austin felt the cement guard, sighed, switched off the battery and leapt from the little boat. There was no jungle. Only the lime-colored city trees and the smooth lawn. The university sat ahead like a string of dropped pearls: blistershaped, connected by elevated tunnels, twisting, delicate strands of metal and alloy. Austin scrambled up the embankment. It must be very late now. Perhaps nearly morning. In a few hours, the others would arrive. And -- He halted, every musde straining. He listened. There were the drums. But not only the drums, now. Other sounds. He closed his eyes. The airless night pressed against him. He heard a rustling noise. Like something traveling through dense brush. He heard, far away, tiny sounds, whistlings, chitterings. Like monkeys and birds. He fore open his eyes. Only the park, the city. He went on. Now his feet were on stone and the park was behind him. He walked through the canyons of the city again, the high buildings, metal and crystal and alloy and stone. The rustling noises did not cease, however. They were behind him, growing nearer. Bodies, moving through leaves and tall grass. Austin suddenly remembered where he'd heard the sound before. Years ago, when he'd first visited this land. They had taken him on a hunting expedition, deep into the wild country. They were going to bag something -- he forgot exactly what. Something strange. Yes; it was a wild pig. They had walked all day, searching, through the high tan grass, and then they had heard the rustling sounds. Exactly like the sound he heard now. Austin recalled the unbelievable fury of the boar, how it had disembowled two dogs with a couple of swipes of those razor-sharp fangs. He recalled clearly the angry black snout, curled over yellow teeth. He turned and stared into the darkness. The noises grew steadily louder, and were broken by yet another sound. Deep and guttural, like a cough. As the sound behind him came closer, he ran, stumbled and fell, pulled himself from the stone and ran until he had reached a flight of steps. The coughing noise was a fast, high-pitched scream now, a grunting, snorting, a rush of tiny feet galloping across tamped earth, through dry grass. Austin stared blindly, covered his face with his arms and sank back until the sound was almost upon him. His nostrils quivered at the animal smell. His breath stopped. He waited. It was gone. Fading in the distance, the rustling, the coughing, and then there was the silence of the drums again. Austin pressed the bones of his wrist into his throbbing skull to quiet the ache. The panic drained off slowly. He rose, climbed the steps and walked through the shadowed courtyard onto the campus. It was a vast green plain, smooth and grassy. Across from it, in sight, was Austin's home. He gathered his reason about him like a shield, and decided against taking the other routes. If he had gotten lost before, it could happen again. Certainly now, with his imagination running wild. He must cross the campus. Then it would be all right. He began treading, timorously at first, listening with every square inch of his body. The shaman's voice slithered into his mind. Chanting. "... you were destroying us against our will , Mr. Austin. Our world, our life. And such is your mind, and the mind of so-called ( civilized # men, that you could not see this was wrong. You have developed a culture and a social structure that pleased you, you were convinced that it was right; therefore, you could not understand the existence of any that differed. You say us as ignorant savages -- most of you did -- and you were anxious to ' civilize ' us. Not once did it occur to you that we, too, had our culture and our social structure ; that we knew right and wrong; that, perhaps, we might look upon you as backward and uncivilized..." The sound of birds came to Austin; birds calling in high trees, circling impossibly in the night sky... we have clung to our 'magic', as you call it, and our 'superstitions' for longer than you have clung to yours. Because -- as with your own -- they have worked for us. Whether magic can be explained in Roman numerals or not, what is the difference, so long as it works? Mr. Austin, there is not only one path to the Golden City -- there are many. Your people are on one path -- " He heard the chatter of monkeys, some close, some far away, the sound of them swinging on vines, scolding, dropping to mounds of foliage, scrambling up other trees. -- my people are on another. There is room in this world for both ways. But your failure to grasp this simple fact has killed many of us and it will kill many more of you. For we have been on our path longer. We are closer to the Golden City..." Austin clapped his hands to his ears. But he did not stop walking. From the smooth stone streets, from the direction of the physics department, came the insane trumpeting of elephants, their immense bulks crashing against brittle bark, their huge feet crunching fallen limbs and branches... The shaman's voice became the voice of Barney Chadfield... He spoke again of his theory that if one could only discover the unwritten bases of black magic and apply formulae to them, we would find that they were merely another form of science... perhaps less advanced, perhaps more. The sounds piled up, and the feelings, and the sensations. Eyes firmly open, Austin thought of Mag and felt needled leaves slap invisibly against his legs; he smelled the rot and the life, the heavy, wild air of the jungle, like animal steam; the odors of fresh blood and wet fur and decaying plants; the short ent animals -- the movement, all around him, the approaches, the retreats, the frenzied unseen... Eyes open he felt and smelled and heard all these things; and saw only the city. A pain shot through his right arm. He tried to move it: it would not move. He thought of an old man. The old man had a doll. The old man was crushing the doll's arm, and laughing... He thought of reflexes and the reaction of reflexes to emotional stimuli. He walked, ignoring the pain, not thinking about the arm at all... tell them , Mr. Austin. Make them believe. Make them believe... Do not kill all these people... When he had passed the Law College, he felt a pain wrench at his leg. He heard another dry-grass rustle. But not behind him : in front. Going forward. Going toward his apartment. Austin broke into a run, without knowing exactly why. There was a pounding, a panting at his heels: vaguely he was aware of this. He knew only that he must get inside, quickly, to the sanity of his home. Jaws snapped, clacked. Austin stumbled on a vine, his fingers pulled at air, he leapt away and heard the sound of something landing where he had just been, something that screamed and hissed. He ran on. At the steps, his foot pressed onto something soft. It recoiled madly. He slipped and fell again, and the feel of moist beaded skin whipped about his legs. The thunder was almost directly above. He reached out, clawed lose the thing around his leg and pulled himself forward. There was a swarming over his hands. He held them in front of his eyes, tried to see the ants that had to be there, slapped the invisible creatures loose. The apartment door was only a few feet away now. Austin remembered his pistol, drew it out and fired it into the night until there were no more bullets left. He pulled himself into the lobby of the unit. The door hissed closed. He touched the lock, heard it spring together. And then the noises ceased. The drums and the animals, all the wild nightmare things -- ceased to be. There was his breathing, and the pain that laced through his arm and leg. He waited, trembling, trying to pull breath in. Finally he rose and limped to the elevator. He did not even think about the broken machines. He knew it would work. It did. The glass doors whirred apart at his floor, and he went out into the hall. It was soundless. (Continued on page #) They were the first men on Earth to reach the Moon and return . They were heroes of the world; they would be welcomed, and acclaimed and feted for the greatest achievement in history . Nations would seek them out... "Still black as the place the devils throw their old razor blades." "We'll hear it when we hit air." "Pretty soon now?" "A few minutes yet." "Man! My foot's working off at the knee." "John awake? Hey, John, you awake?" "How could I sleep through this? Whad'ya want?" "Nothing." "What's she look like?" "Earth?" "Of course." "A blue beach-ball with a white halo 'round it." "What's below us?" "Part of Asia, I think. Lots of clouds... I see India." "Man, it's hot in here!" "Hell, wait'll we hit air!" "We all awake? Anyone asleep say 'aye.' " "Aye." "No one's asleep. I heard four voices." "If anyone can sleep through this they've got my blessings. Woof! My neck." "You think you've got it bad; they've got me squeezed in with the camera equipment; I'm bent at the knees and again at the waist." "Ah, but after we land." "Ah, after we land." "And if we land, of course." " we land? Hell, listen to him; he's still got doubts! Unchain that libido, son, we're men of the world now!" "Of two worlds." "And speaking of worlds -- we'll rule the world, gentlemen!" "For a day!" "Maybe a week!" "Three rousing huzzahs for us!" "'Oops -- stand back there, son; these gentlemen just got back from the moon!' " " 'The first men on the moon!' " " 'The discoverers of a new world!' " " 'Hell, Pop, I knew it was there all the time!' " "We'll be famous -- our names will be on cereal boxes." "The hell with it; I'm tired." "Wish I could see out! What's it like?" "Same as before." "I can see someone's leg and the back of someone's head. Damn this lousy intercom. I can't even recognize voices." "What's it matter who we are? We're just a lousy pack of sardines 'til we hit Earth." "Good old Earth -- hell with it." "Gentlemen -- I would make a P "Also the hell with you!" "I'm gonna drown if I keep sweating like this." "Shut up! I've got something more important to say than your groaning." "If we must." "The next speaker will be the honorable -- who the hell are you anyway, bub?" "We... have just... visited .  . the moon!" "Hear!" "There's one more important thing we have to do before we land." "You mean slow down?" "One thing to talk over. Look suspicion you signed on this trip for some reason beside glory. Right?" " 'Cause Earth was getting too crowded for me." "How about you, Wong?" "Needed a change, too, I guess. Been breathing fresh air and seeing people too long. Got sick of it." "And John?" "Well... , I suppose I know what you're heading at. This isn't exactly a Jules Verne type trip to the moon, 'for the glory and advancement of science.' 'Least it isn't to me. I got sick of science when I was studying for my master's . Sick of seeing what people were doing with it. I thought a few new worlds might ease the tension back on Earth... before everything gets blown to pieces." "That's what I mean ; a few new worlds to explore might slow lousy man in his wild race to the backside of heaven. New frontiers. New excitements. It's bound to tie people closer together in spite of their prejudices." "But the glory! Don't forget the glory!" "The patriotic zeal!" "Yeah, the patriotic zeal! I feel the same way you do. Here we're trying to bring the world closer together and we have to do it in the name of the arms effort of a single nation." "War rocket experiment #Z" "Well, at least we'll be able to say what we think and we'll be important enough for a while so that people will listen to us." "Yeah, when we get down, they're going to say 'speech!' " "They are that!" "And we are going to speak!" "Heroes for a day!" "Maybe two days!" "And people will listen to us; not just America -- the whole damn world. Show people a larger goal, one big enough for the planet, and all the little power goals will fall away fast." "If we can say the right things yy    "They'll have to listen to us. The U.S.; Russia;... all the little countries." "Here she comes -- I hear something!" "Atmosphere!" "We're back home!" "Crisis number six. We can't fail now." "Before it's too loud to talk... listen to me. When we land, don't say anything. We'll all get a good sleep and a bath before we say a word. Right?" "Right!" "Just give 'em the pictures and samples and demand a nap. Everybody ready for the final blasting?" "Here's where I lose another two gallons of blood." "I hope we fall in a lake. I'm thirsty as a horse." "Man, it's hot!" "A hundred-twenty seconds!" "I'm not at all sure I can last this... that's straight stuff. Be ready to take over mine, too, Wong; just in case." "Hell, you better last!" "Sixty seconds!" "Testing light signals -- are they on?" "O.K. here." "Yeah." "Thirty seconds! Got your lights, Mike?" "Yeah." "Mine, too." "This is gonna be awful!" "Ten seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two." "O.K. Here she comes!" "Well, man! man! man! Are we down?" "We sure hit something !" "We made it! Oh, God, we made it!" "We're back! Did we get back?" "Where'd we land?" "Ocean. Atlantic." "Well, break the hull. It's awful in here!" "Hang on! You may get a ducking." "Air! Real Air! Whoosh -- don't let anyone go and poison this air with cobalt bombs." "Everyone here? Help Joe up, there! Thataboy! how's it go?" "Man, we're really here! Where's the reception committee?" "They were watching us with telescopes; remember? They were going to clear all ships and planes out of the area we were heading for." "Remember; no speeches 'til we get a rest." "Yeah, and then I know what I'm going to say." "We can't do much but we sure can do somethin g" "Stage one: Moon. Stage two: Earth." "Here they come... planes!" "Look dignified." "Man, look at that rocket out there; it's passing all the rest; coming down from above them." "Looks practically wingless. It's going to beat the rest by a decade... hey, it's black!" "Is it ever fast! What country is it? I can't see any identification." "Say, it's going to pass us right by. Look out, it's diving." "What's it dropping?" "Look out! Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Duck..."    in IFs College Science Fiction Contest And Gone Tomorrow Here is the best story submitted in answer to the theme question: "What Will Life in America Be Like # Years From Now ?"... Written by an undergraduate at the University of Louisville, Louisville , Kentucky , it pictures the America of # as part of a world empire run by an Italian dictator and very similar to that of the ancient Caesars and the early Roman Empire. There is one language, one religion and customs and laws have changed to stdt the times . But, basically, human nature hasn't changed and there is the omnipresent clash of faction against faction. The theme is that a dictatorship is the only perfect form of government . If there is a moral, it is that there is no permanent form of government. Illustrated by Paul Orban stared up at the man. "This is June #, #' screamed "Say it again," he muttered. for release. He knew what the answer would "No! No! You're lying! It's imbe even before the man repeated it possible!" He grabbed the man's in that quiet voice. tunic and drew back a doubled fist. "This is June #, #." His chair went over behind him. The fellow wasn't kidding him. Then a stiff thumb jabbed him He was serious enough. But a in the short ribs and he grunted couple of minutes ago it had been and went down. May #, #. He looked at his "This is June #, #. You are watch and grunted. Less than four still in Louisville, Kentucky. You minutes ago it had been #. are standing in a room adjoining Reality. Now it was June #, #. the laboratory in the Time BuildThere were four steel walls. There ing on #rd Street at Eastern Parkwas a steel chair. There were no way. This is the receiving room, windows. My name is Kevin Ilaria. You've He tried to take it calmly. But come through time. Is that so imthe unbelievable horror of being possible to grasp? You're a thinkwhere he was and when he was ing man. Educated!" He looked up from the floor. "Well?" "So I'm a thinking man and an educated man. And what happens? I'm sapped. I'm shanghaied. I'm walking down Confederate Place to my old fraternity house at #:# in the morning. I've just had a row with my girl. I'm heading for the fraternity house to see who'll go down to Herman's and get good and drunk with me. And somebody clobbers me. The next thing I remember I'm sitting in a steel chair in a steel room without any windows. Just like this one. There's a man standing there. A man with watery, myopic eyes under bushy brows and his hair parted in the middle. He's Doctor Borley, of the University of Louisville Chemistry Department. There's another man with him. A little fellow with thick glasses and a crew cut and eyes like the slits between closed Venetian blinds. He's Doctor Schink, of the Psychology Department. They're talking about me." "Umn hmn. Now you're beginning to sound normal. Doctors Borley and Schink are our agents in #. Do you know where you were?" "I told you. In some sort of steel room without win -- " One of the requirements for entering IF's College Science Fiction Contest was that the contestant he a te simon pure" amateur -- never having been published professionally. This is Andy Offut's first published story, and it has been accorded the same editing we give to professional manuscripts. No rewriting or revisions have been made. See November IF for complete announcement of this and the six other winners in this nation-wide contest. The man made an impatient gesture with his hand. "No, I mean where. You were in a steel chamber in the Daynolds Metals Plant. It stood on this spot in #. Two people knew -- know -- about that room." "Doctor Borley and Doctor Schink?" "I'm glad you've calmed down. Now we can talk." Jay wasn't quite ready to calm down. "You stand there in that Roman outfit and talk about being calm. To me. To me, Jay Welch, a history major who took his AB from the University of Louisville in #. Jay Welch, average guy, who got into an average argument with the girl he pinned in # and went for a walk to drown his sorrows and wound up one hundred years from where -- when -- he started. I -- " "Then you admit you've come through Time?" "I may as well." Ilaria cursed quietly. "But you're not an average guy. You have a working knowledge of chemistry and biology and physics and history and a few arts and sociology and psychology and geopolitics and literature and the English language as spoken in AD #. You hope to be successful as a writer. You're Public Relations Consultant with Duo-Point, one of the biggest corporations in your nation in #." "Yes," Jay Welch said. "And I make good money. Even better than a bus driver or a steam-fitter. So?" "So here you are. #'s representative to #." Ilaria was only a man. He could not keep the flourish and the Hollywood grandeur out of his voice. "Yes! And what happens tomorrow when I don't show up for work? What happens in a few days when people find out I've disappeared? What happens when they find out Julie was the last person I was with? What -- " "You're getting yourself worked up again, Jay Welch. Don't you think we have thought of those things? We've brought you across one hundred years, Jay Welch." "Yes," Jay said quietly, flatly. "Yes." Then just as flatly, just as quietly he said, "Why?" "So you've remembered to wonder about that at last." Uaria smiled. Jay noticed that the smile was one-sided and pulled back the left corner of Uaria's mouth. He stood there and looked down at Jay Welch, who had forgotten that he was sitting on the floor. His tunic was white and there were three diamond-shaped silver pieces in a vertical line on each elbow-length sleeve. There was a wide blue stripe and a narrow silver stripe at the hem of his tunic and at his sleeves. He wore sandals. His belt was leather and there was a holstered pistol of some sort hanging at his left hip. In tiny blue script above his  left breast pocket were the words 'Trib. Ilaria'. On the pocket was a red disk with the letters PR. A silver-worked blue cloak was flung over his shoulders. Except for the identification and the odd fabric of his clothes and the holstered gun he looked very like a young Roman of the first century. Ilaria's slow smile pulled back the left corner of his mouth. "Because you are who you are and what you are. Because you attended the University of Louisville and Doctors Borley and Schink knew you. Because they chose you. Merely because they chose you. They might've chosen anyone else. "We've your personality pretty well mapped out. We expected violence. That's why I'm here. I'm a psychologist and an anthropologist. I'm a fast-talker and I can convince people and place them at ease. I'm also big enough to handle you, Jay Welch." From his position on the floor Jay looked up at Ilaria and decided the man from # was big enough. Jay Welch was six feet one inch tall. He weighed one seventy-three and wore a #-long suit. Kevin Ilaria was bigger. Jay was forced to grin. The tall blond man was a likeable guy, at that. A human being. "Who are you?" "Kevin Ilaria. Doctor of Psychology. That entitles me to the silver band on my tunic. Also a Tribune. That entitles me to the blue stripe and the three silver diamonds and the gun." "A Tribune? In what? Of what?" "In the Forces. In the actual ranks, a Tribune commands # men, # planes or a base, or # tanks. But I've never had a chance to go into the field. There has been no cause to fight. Meantime I'm stationed at Standiford Field as second-in-command. A friend of mine named Rinaldi fills in for me. He's a Sub-Tribune. "I've been specializing in the study of Time." "The way you say Time it sounds as though it were capitalized. Where I come from Time with a capital T is a magazine." Kevin Ilaria laughed. He reached down a hand. "Get up," he said, and, taking Jay's forearm, helped him to his feet. "Let's go," he said. Jay didn't bother to ask where they were going. He followed the Tribune out the door and into the hall. On the wall just outside the door, was a black box. Two squares cut into it shone with a faint white light. Ilaria paused and shielded the lighted areas a moment with his hand, and Jay saw the light go out in the room they had just left. Ilaria closed the door. As he turned, Jay saw the white letters PR emblazoned on the back of his cloak. "This way," he said. Jay noticed that Ilaria walked on his right, so that the Tribune's gun was between them. "The way I said Time, it is capitalized. It means all the Time since the beginning. It's a corporation, like your Duo-Point. Only much larger, and much less known. Our job is to learn." "That's a big order," Jay commented. "You learn by -- borrowing -- emissaries?" Ilaria laughed again. "Thanks for the phraseology, but it wouldn't worry me if you called it 'kidnaping' or 'shanghaiing.' You're right, of course. We learn by sending men from this age to other ones, and by pulling men from other ages to this one. Doctor Schink is our Emissary to #. His real name is Clyde Gabrinaldi. Borley is our contact there... rather, then." "Well I'll be damned! I've gone to Clyde a lot of times for advice." The left corner of Uaria's mouth pulled back as his grin widened. "Umn hmn. He's married, too. With a child. He's there for good." Jay was afraid to ask if emi saries from the past to # were "there for good" too. He changed the subject. "You started to tell me before -- " "Oh, yes. I'm to be your teacher and companion. But I'll try to give you a quick fill-in. Our world of # is quite different from yours. And, we hope, in better shape. We've proved that the only way to maintain world peace is by world government. And the only successful type of government is a dictatorship." Jay gasped. "You mean the entire world -- has reverted to dictatorship?" Ilaria laughed. "Not reverted . We finally accepted it as the only logical form of government for an entire world." "What happens when the dictator goes wild? He always has." The smile was there again. "You're not quite ready for that," Ilaria told him. "But, it has been taken into consideration." Out of the corner of his eye, Jay saw the slight puff of Ilaria's chest, the self-satisfied square of his shoulders, the quick set of his jaw. He wondered what part Tribune Kevin Ilaria played in the 'dictator control' this world had provided. "The system has worked and is working. See this?" They turned a corner in the corridor and faced a great domed room. On the far wall hung a white tapestry of something like # x # foot dimensions. On it, emblazoned in letters of red and yellow made to look like flame, were the characters PpB. In the lower right-hand comer, in white outlined with blue, was the same PR that Ilaria wore. Jay waited for the Tribune's explanation. "PpB stands for Pax per Bello," Ilaria explained. "Peace through War. That slogan was written in # by Julius and adapted in #I as official." "Julius?" "Yes. The first Dictator." Things were beginning to click in Jay's mind. "I think I know what PR stands for," he said. "Pax Romana." As always, Ilaria smiled. "That's right," he said. with the PR symbol pulled over and stopped. "What is it? Who are you?" the driver demanded. The Captain on the seat beside him peered into the blackness and cursed. The man who had waved the vehicle to a halt walked away. "Here!" the Captain cried. "What in blazes is going on here? Why'd you stop us? Centurion! Stop that man!" The two Centurions in the back seat looked at the Captain for a moment, then they both jumped out and ran after the man. An ellipsoidal grey thing streaked out of the darkness, landed in the driver's lap and thudded to the floor of the car. The Captain threw open his door and started to climb out. The driver bent over to see what it was. At that moment the driver, the command-car and the Captain blew up. The silence that followed was broken by the blast of a submachine gun as it struck down the two centurions. "Take their weapons," said a brittle voice. The detachment of soldiers from the garrison at Tel Aviv stopped and looked around. "Sir, what is it?" asked a guard anxiously. "Terribly quiet out here; something's up," the Lieutenant muttered calmly. There were seven of them. The Lieutenant, the Centurion, and five legionaries. They had grown accustomed to the quiet life of garrison men in a calm, conquered city. When there is nothing tangible to be guarded, a guard's life is a dull one. The guns they carried were the symbol of their authority, and had never been used for any other purpose. They looked around. The dirty, once-white buildings rose close on either side. There was no moon. There was no sound. The darkness and the silence could have been cut with a knife. The Lieutenant grinned. He didn't feel much like grinning. He spoke. He didn't feel much like talking, either. "This darkness is thick," he said. "You could cut it with a knife. Wish I had a knife." He got a knife. The men had just started to laugh when the Lieutenant got it. Between his shoulder blades. As the Lieutenant toppled forward, the Centurion dodged close against the dirty stone wall and yelled "Spread out!" They killed a lot of the shadowy, green-clad attackers, but there were only six of them and they were cornered. When the enemy drove a tank into the alley and sprayed them with its mounted gun they died. "Take their weapons' said a quiet voice. The half-track rolled to a stop. "Where, Sir?" the driver wanted to know. "Beyond that big crater over there. The sun glinted on metal. I'm sure of it. Didn't you see it?" "No, Sir." The driver craned his neck. There was nothing but barren rubble and bomb craters and torn, twisted metal and ruined buildings. "There are all sorts of old automobiles lying around out there, Sir," the driver volunteered. "Yes, and they've been here long enough to get good and rusty," the Captain snapped. "This is something else." The driver craned his neck. There was nothing but rubble. Eight men in the back of the half-track leaped to their feet when they heard the faint clicking of an old gamma gun and the sharp bark of a very old sub machinegun. But a grenade landed on the truck and another rolled under it. Another wreck was added to the rubble. "Take their weapons, if there are any left," said a quiet voice. A ND IN the more peaceful city of Louisville, Jay Welch was introduced to Kevin Ilaria's best friend, his adjutant at Standiford Field. Jay took a liking to Sub-Tribune Jason Rinaldi the moment he felt the fellow's firm grip. "Jason is adjutant," Ilaria explained. "And one of the few 'field soldiers' who manages to get along with Caesar's Pretorian Prefect, Lamberti. How he does it, I don't know. Lamberti's absolutely unbearable." "Prejudice. Middle-class prejudices," Rinaldi grinned. He was short and very dark with a lot of black hair. Ilaria's left cheek cracked into a long dimple as he smiled. "He picks on me because I'm a serious psychologist." Rinaldi laughed. "As a psychologist, Kevin, you're an excellent bridge player. As a soldier -- " "Just remember who's got three bars and who has two." Rinaldi waved his hand and shrugged. "They pass 'em out to psych boys wholesale," he said, and ducked Ilaria's swing. "Slow reflexes, too," he added as he turned to go.  Ilaria stopped him at the door and murmured a few sentences. Jay caught something about sabotage at Standiford. Rinaldi seemed to be attributing it to the Commanding Officer there. "Nice guy," Jay said as the door closed behind Rinaldi. "You said it. Good officer, too. He'll root out the bird who's playing around out there. Can't figure out why it's being done." "Factions," Jay said, " -- within factions." "Little ones always exist, I guess. Have you finished with the history films?" "I've seen them, yes. I'm still tryin g to digest them." "The language give you much trouble?" "Quite a bit, but I think I got most of it. "One man," Jay went on wonderingly. "One man. A Captain in the Italian Army. "The Communist forces in IndoChina had been driven back and Captain -- then Major -- Lollabrigida went in after them. "The defeat was becoming so terrible that the Kremlin dealt itself a playing hand rather than the dummy it had been playing. Red forces came piling in. Lollabrigida and his Italian troops stopped them cold. Then he seemed to sway. And, when the Commies pounced for the kill, they were trapped, pocketed, and annihilated. "American newspapers and commentators began to call Major Julius Lollabrigida 'Julius Caesar.' Italy became big overnight. The Big Three became Russia, the United States, and Italy. Lollabrigida appealed to America -- sometime in there they made him a Colonel, but he was actually telling the Generals and the Italian government what to do -- for aid in going ahead aggressively. "And America turned him down. They were still playing 'wait and see.' They waited. They waited too long. The Commies got tired of waiting around and sent a couple of jet bombers with A-bombs." "Now you're telling me things," Ilaria interrupted. "I'm pretty shady on that period myself." Jay shrugged. "It was after my time. All I know is what the films show. Two planes, each with a seven-man crew, and each carrying one atomic bomb, were dispatched from an airbase somewhere near Juneau." Jay stopped. "And?" The man from # choked. It was hard to be objective about this. It wasn't so easy for him to pass off as the film had done. "And -- " he hesitated. "It's over, Jay. It's done with. It doesn't even concern you anymore. It belongs to a past era." "One was headed for New York. The other struck farther inland... for Washington. The first one was shot down by an F-# border patrol plane. The other one got through. It -- it levelled the capitol. Almost completely. The White House and the Pentagon were destroyed." Ilaria sat quietly and waited. Jay didn't go on. "Thus removing the United States of America, as such, from a prominent position in the world picture," Ilaria said. "Yes. I can't understand it. didn't even get off the ground. And Colonel Lollabrigida, by then Commander-in-Chief of the UN forces, sent fifty planes, each with one A-bomb, over the Kremlin. One was shot down over Vladivostok, but the bombardier pulled the firing pin as the ship crashed and most of Vladivostok was destroyed. Six other planes made it to their destinations and dropped their loads. I can't remember the cities... one was a new super airbase near Moscow. Five of the planes returned. None had managed to reach Moscow. Half the world was in ruins. The Pope begged that the War be stopped." Ilaria snorted. "He knew they'd hit Rome!" Jay looked at him. "Is that what you think?" Ilaria shrugged and flashed that quick, winning smile. "There are no other motives, are there?" Jay stared. What changes had taken place in religious philosophy in this hard-bitten world of #? Kevin Ilaria shrugged, smiling. "That's unimportant. Let's go on with the history lesson. Then what?" "Uh-oh, yes. As I remember Julius Lollabrigida, to be trite, launched an 'all-out offensive' against Communist forces everywhere. People were afraid of Russia, but they were afraid of Lollabrigida and Rome, too. So they joined him. Aid poured into the UN. Czechoslovakia was taken and Poland and Hungary and finally only the old Russia of pre World War II days was left. And in they went. "Then Lollabrigida's saboteurs exploded an atomic bomb in the heart of Moscow. After that it was pretty easy sledding." "Astounding how a nation seems to fall apart when its capitol and its leaders are gone," Ilaria remarked. "Everybody and everything folds," Jay said. "Moral dies. "After the demolition of MosItaly stood at the top. General of the Armies Julius Lollabrigida marched back into Italy and into Rome and into the capitol and up on a pedestal. He stood as Italy's utter ruler. His last name was lost and replaced by 'Caesar II.' He was named Dictator. "From mighty Rome, Caesar sent out linguists and anthropologists and ethnologists and psychologists and military men and others. In twenty years, twenty peaceful years, Italian had become the language of the world. A few minor uprisings in America and in Japan and were smashed. Julius Caesar II was World Dictator of the Republic of Earth. Someone in America denied him and was torn to pieces by the people. Someone in Italy spread literature of dissension and was hunted down and liquidated by Caesar's personal police, the Pretoriani. And so it went. "Caesar adopted a prominent Air Force Colonel who became Caesar year on his birthday men were silent. No business was transacted. No one left his home. Except blueand-silver clad soldiers, wearing PR armbands. Caesar's Pretorians. No one dared venture out. every person in the world changed his last name to an Italian one. The Ali bens and the Chicos and the Andres and the Fritzes and the Johns became Marianos and Roccos and Caldinis and Campisanos and diManos." There was silence for a moment. "The thing I can't understand," Jay mused, "is why in all these years there hasn't been a 'bad' Caesar, or an uprising." "What do you mean by 'bad' Caesar?" Jay shrugged. "In the first Pax Romana there was Caligula, who was insane. Nero, who preferred artistic diversions to politics. There was Galba, who didn't know what was going on. And so on. And on and on. Your three dictators so far seem to have done excellent jobs. They, seem to be damned conscientious leaders." "When you re-create something," Ilaria told him, "you try to eliminate its faults." "Of course. But what if Caesar's son or a Caesar's adopted son goes bad?" Jay elucidated. "So far we haven't had that problem to deal with. But we're ready. Each time a new Dictator comes to power, one thousand top military men draw folded pieces of plastipaper from a 'bowl.' On twenty of these are X's. The others contain O's. The twenty X's are a secret organization, sworn to kill the Dictator if it should become necessary. When Caesar, as you say, 'goes bad'." he -- Caesar -- never knows who they are?" "No one ever knows," Ilaria said. "Not even the members. They remain in contact, but none ever knows who the others are." Jay remembered Ilaria' s previous mention of the system, and the unconscious swelling of the Tribune's chest at the time. "You're one," he said. Ilaria was caught off guard. "I -- yes," he said. "I won't ask how you knew." "A guess. Then you've been a -- whatever it's called -- for nine years, during Caesar V's reign." "That's right." "And you don't know any of the others?" "Only one. I found out acciden#  tally. He -- " Ilaria stopped. Jay shrugged. "I won't ask any more questions along that line," he promised. "But I still can't believe there haven't been any uprisings!" "None. Caesar II died of a heart tumor which we learned about too late. His son never had a chance to prove himself, other than that he was brave and foolish. He swam the Rubicon at its widest point, then walked to Rome in his shorts in the dead of winter. He died of pneumonia. Caesar V, our Dictator today, is strong and quiet. He holds the Empire firmly unified. But he does nothing extraordinary. And he is too lenient." "I just can't conceive of such perfection!" Kevin Ilaria smiled. He walked over to the window and peered out. "You couldn't. But this is the perfect government. Everyone is satisfied. One ruler. One capitol. One army. One language. One nationality. One world. One religion." "I realize -- " Jay halted. "One religion?" he demanded. "Yes." "What is it?" He found himself afraid of the answer. The indications were there, in plain sight. He guessed it before Kevin Ilaria turned from the window and said: "Caesarism." Caesar Imperator V turned from the window and rubbed his hand over his graying hair... "This is the first time I've ever run into anything of this sort." The President I of the Senate shrugged. He was an old man who had been placed in the Senate by his father in #. So long ago that people wondered when he would die. They were tired of these old men dictating to their ruler, as many people before them had been tired. The rise of the President of the Senate to leadership of that revered group had not been meteoric by any means. But his maintenance of the position had been tenacious. He was a careful man. The President of the Senate shrugged. "It is. It is the first time anything of this sort has ever come up, Julius. Therefore it is up to you to set an example." Caesar glanced over at General Bonadella. The General nodded in agreement with Senator Chianti. "This sort of business can break up the Empire if it's allowed to continue, Caesar," he said, in his pompous military way. "I say death." Major DeCosta nodded quietly. "Thumbs down all around, is it?" Caesar sat down behind his desk and picked up the speaker of his private cable to London. He looked at the three men. "Commander in charge of Garrison C," he said. There was a silent moment. They looked up as Prefect Lamberti of the Pretorians, the Imperial personal bodyguard (it had progressed far beyond that. Its enrollment was tremendous ; its power second only to the Dictator's) came in. The Senator nodded. The two field soldiers turned quickly away. The men of the field did not get along with the Pretorian dandies. "Commander? This is the Dictator," Caesar said unnecessarily. The garrison commander knew that only one person could call him on that line. The phone would react to no voice other than Caesar's. "Have you the fellow who was preaching dissension? I say one year in prison. You heard me. Yes, one year. What? No! No torture!" He severed connections and looked up at his advisers. Prefect Lamberti shook his head. Senator Chianti turned and stalked out. After a moment General Bonadella followed. The Major turned away to stare out the window. He shook his head. "del Ponta? This is the Dictator," that quiet, flat voice said behind him. Caesar was calling the underchief of the Pretoriani. "I will speak tomorrow from the balcony. Yes. #. Of course. World-wide. That's right. Oh, I suppose about a quarter 'til." The man who ruled the world stood up and stared at Major DeCosta's back. At forty-one, Caesar was a gaunt man with stooped shoulders and sad lines running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. His forehead was lined and re-lined, and the keen brown eyes were dulled with years of decisions and hard work. He was tired. They called him the Hound because his face bore the same sad, quiet look worn by those dogs. And they called him weak because he let offenders off too easily. DeCosta turned around. The young Major met his Chief's gaze. "Well?" The voice of the Dictator was quiet and calm. DeCosta's eyes flickered. He straightened militarily. He shrugged. "It is not for me to say, Sir." A slow smile spread over those weary features. "And you, Farouk?" Lamberti stretched out his arm and balled his fist with the thumb extended and pointing down. "You know me, Caesar." "I do. Even my best friend disagrees with my decisions now, after all these years of elbow-rubbing. "You are usually more outspoken, Major DeCosta. Have you nothing more to say?" DeCosta's reply was slow in coming but rapid in delivery. "I am around Caesar much of late," he rapped out. His back was stiff and military as he strode out of the Dictator's office. Prefect Lamberti's gloved hand dropped to the butt of his gun, but Caesar shook his head in gentle negation. Julius Caesar Imperator V gazed sadly at the closed door. son with Ilaria about God. The man was intelligent as well as brilliant -- there's a tremendous difference -- about everything else, but he was stubbornly obstinate to Jay's arguments. At least in Jay's terminology he was stubbornly obstinate. All faith is stubborn obstinacy. Kevin Ilaria's faith was appalling. His arguments were beautiful. Flawless. Jay thought of his old friend, Father O'mare. Even that great psychologist-priest would be hard-put, he decided. So he quit. He didn't give up. He just quit. Can you tell a man the Earth's flat after he's been up in a jet? Can you talk a bullet out of pursuing its path? Can you reason with a Marxist? "If a man can conquer the greatest enemy the world has ever faced, is he not God? If he can turn from and pacifying, is he not God? If he can make the world one, after twenty-two centuries of 'world anarchism' is he not God? If he can maintain the peace and keep the people happy and heal all sores is he not God? If he just looks at you when you call him 'God' or 'Savior # and smiles and say 'I ? # is he not God? If he chooses the perfect man to continue in his place, is he not God ? # "But that's proof! Why die? Isn't God immortal?" "Only God could realize that one man can't continue to reign indefinitely. His ideas, yes. But he must create another to carry on his ideas. There must be variety and diversions." Unshakeable. Unquestioning. Jay could never understand a person's sticking to the claim 'I'm a Christian' or 'I'm a Moslem' when he would be killed for it. Jay had always figured he'd have said to Nero's men 'Me? Me? A filthy Christian? Not I. I love Jupiter and Juno. Step inside and see my altars...' Now he was seeing what sturdy, rock-firm martyr faith was like. So he quit. Instead he learned about the gyrojet cars which hugged the roads like lovers on a honeymoon. He watched them sprout stubby wings and breathe flame and soar straight up. He learned about saying 'Open' to a lock and having the electronic device 'recognize' him and let him in. He learned about personalphones which 'recognized' your voice. He learned about the tiny pellet of potassium cyanide and sulphuric acid with which the guns were loaded. The pellets struck and broke and the victim was dead in seconds. Very humane. No maimed or wounded. Just the dead. He learned about self-shaping sandals -- the most comfortable and most sensible shoes man had ever worn -- and air baths and softvoiced alarm clocks which politely told you it was time to get up and about unbreakable ring-finger chronos and about atomic heating and flawless plumbing and he saw plastic, plastic, plastic. He learned about all of them. But his real delight was the depilatory cream. This, above all others, was man's greatest invention. "No shaving... no silly damned socks or tight, hot shoes or tie... no battery stalling or flat tires... I guess this is paradise, Kevin!" "And the perfect government and the perfect religion! All one race! One religion! One nation! One language! One nationality! One God!" Ilaria added exuberantly." "That reminds me. How come I never see any coloreds?" "Haven't you? By the way, no murderous car insurance or alimony laws, either. And no need for them. All marriages are ideal." Jay was readily detoured to this new novelty. "Now, don't let's go too far. Identical religion and race and customs and ideals and opinions may lower the' divorce rate a lot, but there's still ye olde sex angle. A couple can go together twenty years and break up on the wedding night. Some are hot and some are cold and some are slow and some are fast. The only thing you could have improved on, is sex education. It's astounding how many people of my time know nothing about the sexual part of marriage. The most important part! "Of course it's doing what comes naturally; but what if two people have been taught from different viewpoints? Or if one hasn't been taught at all? Some people are actually ashamed or embarrassed. There are intelligent people who don't even know the biological facts! Few -- especially women, know about the pleasure and the habit-forming angle. That's the one thing than can break up something beautiful in ten minutes. "Education, maybe. Human nature, no." "Whew!" "Excuse me, Kevin, for launchbeen my pet peeve. Atrocious, deplorable, and all that." "We don't usually tamper with human nature, Jay. As a rule, that is. This is going to come as a shock to you, with your silly, 'atrocious and deplorable' # ideas and morals. "A trial period. A pre-marital period of living together for a couple of weeks. If the couple isn't sexually suited, they either attempt to have it remedied by a physician or break off." "A shock, yes," Jay murmured, slowly shaking his head. "How did it ever start? Anyone who'd propound an idea like that in my time would be accused of being some sort of perverted sex-fiend! "A foolproof, flawless plan to insure happy marriages!" door swung open and a tall dark man with piercing black eyes and a twin-tufted beard came in. His dark-green garment, faintly resembling a trench-coat, was double-breasted and belted and military cut. His feet were encased in plastileather boots which clicked as he came to attention before the desk. The plate on the desk read "Praefectus Praetoriani." "Major del Ponta, Sir." The man behind the desk looked up. "At ease, Major." Major Ali ben del Ponta relaxed and waited. The man behind the desk finished scanning the sheet of micropaper, marked something on it with a stylo, stuck it in the pneumatube on the corner of his desk, and pushed the button to close his desk drawer. He looked up at Major Ali bel del Ponta. "Well?" He put his hands together, fingers touching. "It has begun, Prefect Lamberti. All over the world our local men are leading their followers in attack. Captain Abram Mazzoli has sent in his report from Tel Aviv. The city is in his hands. Captain Mahomet DiSanto's 'Raiders' have complete control of the Sahara. Captain Arnaldi's forces are firmly entrenched in the old Washington area of America. He will move northward to meet Colonel Magnani's forces from Canada and Commander Campisano. They -- " "Campisano's airborne ready to roll?" "Yes, Sir. Arrangements have been made. The drop will be just outside New York." "Alright. Then everything has gone off as scheduled?" "Yes, Sir." Prefect Farouk Lamberti regarded his deskchron thoughtfully. "And Caesar will make his speech in twenty-five hours and thirtythree minutes?" Major del Ponta glanced at his own chron, which was strapped to the third finger of his left hand. "Yes, Sir. At #, tomorrow." "Have the twenty-foot Visor screen activated for public showing. Mount it outside as we'd planned." "It's being taken care of, Sir. The screen is on its way to the Square. There will be a crowd." "Good. We all want to hear noble Caesar." Del Ponta grinned. "Yes, Sir. We all do. Especially tomorrow." "He doesn't know? -- or suspect?" "He shouldn't Sir. Our men took over and began covering up at once. You know the atrocious condition of world communications systems. The Empire could fall and Rome might not hear of it for days." "That's what I was counting on... that and the Disturber. The degeneracy of the field military is terrible. They are allowing themselves to get lazy and fat and careless." "Yes, Sir." "Have my car ready to drive to the Square behind Caesar's tomorrow. See that the covermen in the houses around the Square are doubled and double-checked. But when we go to the show, let's not have too great an exhibition of Imperial power. We don't want this thing to backfire and cut our own throats." "Yes, Sir." Del Ponta's grin widened. "Dismissed." Del Ponta came to attention, saluted and about-faced and left. Prefect Lamberti opened his desk drawer and took out his old service pistol. It was a gamma gun. He had not released any of the deadly, slowacting rays from its chamber in seven years. But it was ready. He opened another drawer and took out a white cloak, marked across the back with a blue dove and the single word 'Liberacione. He checked the pistol. get to meet Caesar?" Jay wanted to know. "Later. He's to make a speech tomorrow afternoon. It will be world-televised." "He looks very old and very tired," Jay ventured. He'd seen Caesar on transcriptions of old speeches and on old newsreels. "He's about... forty, I think. Somewhat weak. Very lenient." "I would've guessed him to be a good deal older." Then "Why weak? Because he's lenient?" Ilaria smiled. "Remember, Jay, 'Pax per Bello.' Too much leniency leads one's subjects to be bold. Over-bold." "One man's opinion?" The Tribune shrugged. "No. Caesar doesn't get along with his advisors too well. They criticize him for being too ready to forgive and forget." The more Jay saw of this perfeet world, the more he realized how cruel and hard people must be to maintain a paradise. If everyone is to be happy, someone must be unhappy. The trouble is, people don't like to be told "This is for your own good." Jay said so. "But if they're sat on hard enough," Ilaria rebutted, "They don't have a chance ever to try anything else which they might think is for their own good..." Jay nodded. Very true. As Ilaria left the room Jay went to the window and looked out at the Louistime in the seven days he'd been here, he wished he had a cigarette. They had been outlawed as detrimental to health long ago. The fact that it had been seven days reminded him of something else left behind. Julie. "You're a fool," he finally told himself. No wonder Julie'd been on edge and acting what he termed 'odd' lately! She was scared. He'd been out of school three and a half years. He was twenty-five. He'd just bought a new Olds. He'd begun buying his clothes at The Store rather than a store. Hell, he should've been married long ago. His days here were full. There were meetings with scientists and historians and militarists and linguists and everyone else Kevin could think up. He talked and listened and discussed and lectured. But he thought of her every night. Every morning before he rose. At times like this, when he was alone for a few minutes. Of course it was love! He'd always thought too many people threw the word around too much. He'd always been afraid to use it because he wasn't sure of its meaning. He's used it once. And he'd been kicked in the teeth by the girl. He hadn't used it since. When was a guy ever sure? Hogwash! Now he knew that each man forms his own definition. True, too many people used the word love indiscriminately. It's mistreated. Kicked around. Assumed and taken off. Dragged through messes and scandals and law courts and through the mud. But to a man like Jay Welch, to a man who has been afraid -- yes, afraid -- to use it, it must be there when he begins thinking in those terms. Love. He'd had to come across one-hundred years to realize he'd found its meaning. To realize he'd known its meaning a long time. To realize that love is whatever you make it, what you, yourself, call it. You define it yourself. Then you apply it. It had been there all the time. You don't include someone in everything you do and everything you think without it. You don't try to change her and yourself. To make her perfect. To make yourself perfect with -- and for -- her without it. This business about "accepting" little faults -- as well as big ones -- , he decided, is for the birds. It's human nature to translate other people in terms of yourself and try to change them in terms of yourself. To argue and be proud and hate like hell to have to make up. But you don't make a project of it with everyone. Not unless... He and Julie had a lot to talk about. Then he remembered where he was and when he was. He thought of Doctor Schink. And suddenly he was scared. He remembered what Ilaria had said about Schink. 'He's there for good...' "He's never said a word about my going back!" "Neither have you," came Ilaria's voice, and Jay whirled around to see the big psychologist coming through the door. "We'd like to keep you here as long as possible. But not against your wishes, of course. You were shanghaied, not kidnaped." The left comer of his wide mouth pulled back in that slow, reassuring smile. "I stand chastised. Now I've thought of it, though, I can hardly wait." "The day after tomorrow? I want you to hear Caesar speak. Then I want to talk a good deal more." "Early, the day after tomorrow." Then, little-boyishly, Jay hurriedly added a couple of reasons. "I'm getting tired of talking and being questioned. I feel like a talking animal in the zoo." Ilaria nodded, smiling. "Julie? "I figured it would occur to you sooner or later. Just because you think a little more deeply and carefully than most men of your time doesn't make you immune to love. That belongs to all times. Good luck and a lot of children." Jay grinned. He'd met Ilaria's wife and five of his six children the night before. He turned to look out the window once more. Beautiful. The elevated streets, with gyro-cars hurtling along... the sky full of more winged gyros and planes... the streets below full of happy, white-faced, whiteclad people... White-faced! "Kevin, you avoided my question the day before yesterday. I've been almost afraiB to ask you again. Why no Negroes?" "It will be hard for you to accept, with your antiquated democratic ideas." Ilaria breathed a deep sigh. "Certain elements of dissension and unrest, Jay, are better eliminated. Coloreds have always bred both. People are just like that. Whites and yellows and tans and reds can get along, but not blacks." Jay had gotten along with them all his life. "In ancient Rome there were slaves..." he said, trying to understand. "Not in this Rome. I said, better eliminated, Jay." Ilaria went to the window and looked down at the scene below. He explained: "We exterminated them." A hammer crashed down. A door slammed. A glass shattered. A siren screeched. A punch caught Jay in the solar plexus. Jay had experienced all these. Ilaria's flat statement was worse. "Exter -- No! Oh, No!" He swung around to face the big psychologist. Ilaria's usual smile was gone. He looked solemn and very grim. "You weren't ready for it. I don't think we can discuss it. Just remember this : When you've a bunch of dogs and they all get along with one another except one, you don't leave them together and you don't try to keep them separated by a chicken-wire fence. It's too unpleasant. You get rid of the troublemaker." forces moved out of Tel Aviv and took over Israel. They captured the entire devastated Washington area, a series of ten cities ringing Rome, and hundreds of other key spots. The world's largest airbase at Madrid, Spain, was taken. Forces sent to the aid of the base defenders were met by an onslaught of their own planes. The troops didn't have a chance. Dr. Montmorency Trumperi's Wave Disturber had been outlawed in #. The plans were carefully filed away and the machine's component parts junked. But the Disturber suddenly reappeared on the night of June #, #, and world communications were stopped. Lamberti's scientists had come up with a counter-radio mechanism, of course, so that the Rebels were able to maintain contacts. Louisville was not attacked. Lamberti and his men knew about the emissary from the past sheltered there, and informed their fifth columnists at Standiford they wanted both the Man From # and Tribune Kevin Ilaria alive. New York was attacked by land and air. Tokyo fell. Everywhere white flags with the blue Liberacione and the picture of a dove fluttered above smoking battlegrounds. Everywhere men were on the march. When Tribune Kevin Ilaria stormed in twelve hours later, Jay noticed his friend was wearing his gun again. The cyanide pistol had not swung at his hip since the day of Jay's arrival. He was also surprised to note that Ilaria wore boots and carried a steel helmet under his arm. There was a new quality in his voice. Brittle, static. The soft tones of the psychologist were gone. Jay realized that this was Tribune Ilaria of the Forces, not Dr. Ilaria the psychologist. "You sure you want to leave here tomorrow?" he demanded curtly. Instantly Jay was on the defence. "I am," he said coldly. Ilaria's smile looked forced. "I've been authorized to offer you a SubTribunate in the Forces." "What?" "You've had experience. None of us have. You've been in actual combat, in the Air Force." "Why? I don't -- " "War," Ilaria said simply. "Rebellion." Jay stared at him. He couldn't think of anything to say. Ilaria turned away. "Paradise. The Iron Hand. One religion and one language and all that. Utterly cock-sure. But... we were wrong. They've been getting ready. Training and planning. Collecting men and arms. They began even before the empire was established." -- Jay noticed he said empire rather than republic -- "All this time they've been preparing and planning and... waiting." Jay was dumbfounded. "How big is it?" Kevin Ilaria spread his hands. "Big enough. Their attack seems to have been simultaneous all over the world. Something like commando or guerrilla tactics. Quick, quiet attacks on a small scale." He told Jay about the Tel Aviv incident and about Captain Spagnoletti and a half-track disappearing in the rubble in the Washington area and about intercontinental communication being shut off. "Bomb 'em out' Jay said, without thinking. "You don't bomb out fifth columnists, Jay. "Last night they captured London and Tokyo and two-thirds of New York and they captured Lollabrigida airbase in Madrid. They're wearing PR uniforms and some kind of new uniform they've dreamed up. Most of them aren't even uniformed. It's a hell of a mess." "How long do you think it'll take to quell the thing?" "I have no idea. I'm to take command at Standiford Field. Rinaldi solved the saboteur problem... it was Colonel Di Orio. Rinaldi and some of his boys caught the Colonel and a few of his men in the Radio Room on the special 'Liberacione' wave length." "In irons?" Jay wanted to know. "No. They put up a fight. They were killed." "You're flying?" "Doubt it. I'll be one of those behind-the-scenes men. Supposed to be valuable. Only in a mess like this you can't tell what's behind the scenes and what's front line. They're liable to start on Louisville next." Ilaria hitched self-consciously at his gun-belt. He twisted his helmet around a couple of times before he set it gingerly on his head. He turned and opened the door and went out. His head came back in and said: "I'm not sure it's the sort of thing you quell, Jay." "Kevin! Wait! What'm I supposed to -- " He was gone. Jay thought only a moment. Then he switched on the phone. At least intercom systems were still in operation. The clerk at the desk upstairs looked at him from the screen. "This is the Man From #," Jay said, using the name by which everyone called him. "Stop Tribune Ilaria as he goes out." In an instant Kevin's head appeared. "I'll go with you. Shall I get my uniform before we go to Standiford or after?" Ilaria grinned. "After," he said. "Grab the elevator and come on )# up. This isn't your fight, Jay Welch, a voice told him as he opened the door. You don't even belong here, Jay Welch, the voice told him as he ran out into the hall. You're crazy to go to bat for these monsters, Jay Welch, the voice told him as he pushed the elevator button. You fought before for a bunch of people who didn't appreciate it one damned bit, Jay Welch. Remember about the Iron Hand and the Negroes, the voice told him as the doors opened and he stepped in. Remember you were shanghaied, it said, as the car shot upward and the bottom of his stomach felt as if it had been left behind. Remember you were going back to Duo Point and Herman's and Joe Scaccia's restaurant and Julie and tie and suit and Julie and the tight shoes and Julie and personal freedom and Julie and Jerry, the black guy you worked with and liked so well and Julie and the new Olds and Julie. Tomorrow you were going back. The doors shot back. He stepped out on the roof. "Mister Welcci?" said the clerk. "That's Tribune Ilaria's plane over there." He pointed to the little PR ship marked with the three silver diamonds of a Tribune and the staff of psychology. Jay ran. Wind was whipping across the roof and their cloaks streamed out and fluttered. The three men came together. "This is Commander DeVito, Jay. Commander, Jay Welch, The Man From #." The way Ilaria said it always made it sound capitalized. They shook hands. They got into the plane and shot straight up and the city was a blur beneath them. In less than a minute the little flier dropped down faster than any elevator and landed at Standiford. "Sergeant, Sub-Tribune Welcci needs a uniform. A -- " "Forty long," Jay suggested, then colored. Tunic and a hundred years made a difference in his size. He went with the supplysergeant, who gave him a correct fit the first time-times have changed, Jay grunted -- and fitted him with a helmet on the second try. He felt a tremor as he buckled on the pellet gun. With the cloak flapping about his heels and the gun banging his leg and the helmet biting his ear he ran to the elevator and down to the room Kevin had designated. The Tribune and Commander DeVito and five or six other officers were standing around a table in the steel-walled underground room. Before them was a gigantic map. They looked up as Jay burst in. "This is The Man From #," Ilaria said. There were hand-shakes all around that reminded Jay of fraternity rush. DeVito and one of the others wore wings. Jay wondered if that were still a pilot's insignia. The red X's on the map, they told him, were places under attack. The blue ones were areas taken by the fast-moving rebels. He learned that the messengerjet they'd sent to Rome -- they were lost without their instantaneous push-button communications system -- hadn't made it. More had been sent. Meanwhile they were on their own. The nearest major battle was at Chicago, where Cocuzzi Flight Base was located. Ilaria despatched Commander DeVito and something like fifty jet fighters to Chicago. The other man was in charge of a group of B-# Stratosonic bombers. They lifted their fists in stiffarmed salute and left. "The rest of the ships will remain here, ready for instant takeoff. I'll command interception. Sub-Tribute Rinaldi will command the base in case I have to go up. "I can't understand why we haven't been jumped yet. We must assume they'll attack Louisville because of Standiford and the Time Building. They'll also be interested in you, Jay." ville had not yet been attacked. Abruptly at #:# world communications went into operation. Everyone turned on his television set, wondering if Caesar's talk would go on as sceduled. It did. There was a screaming crowd before the Capitol. On the high balcony stood the Dictator. At his side stood Senator Chianti and around them were ringed Caesar's Pretorian Guards. The city was nearly empty of field soldiers. They had gone out to meet the insurgents. "People of the Republic of Rome." The noise subsided as Caesar raised his hands and spoke. "You have all heard of the revolt now in progress against us throughout the Empire." Ilaria nodded at the Caesar's psychologically clever use of the word us. "With your aid, my people, we can put a quick end to this treason. You have seen better than half a century of peaceful, successful government. These traitors and conspirators would attempt to overthrow our government and put an end to this peace... this Peace of Rome. "The world is now in a state of emergency. If you, my people, will bear with me through this period of crisis we will return to our world of peace and serenity once more." Cheers. Wild applause. "They believe him," Jay murmured. Ilaria looked at him. "Of course," he said. "For a long time our Empire has remained..." Caesar's face stiffened. The deepset, weary eyes blazed and widened. His hand reached out for the railing. Then he stiffened again and was limp as the bursting pellet of sulphuric acid and potassium cyanide took effect. Caius Julius Caesar Imperator V fell. There was uproar and clamor and shrieking. Jay and Ilaria stood, staring, as the Pretorian Guards levelled their guns and became a solid, surrounding wall. The T-V cameramen were getting the scene of the century. "Lamberti!" Ilaria bit out. The Pretorian Prefect, his hands outspread, stood on the balcony over Caesar's body. The white cloak with Liberacione on it fluttered about him. A couple of Pretorians came out with an amplifier. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," said Farouk Lamberti. " -- every available long-range ship to Rome," Ilaria's brittle voice was hacking out orders. "Every one. Contact every other base while communications are still working!" "... a noble man. But not the man to govern Earth. No, not he nor his government. I bring you a new government. I, Farouk Lamberti, long his best friend, have done this not to him, but for him. For you. The Earth was not meant to be governed by a system of -- " "Yes, I said bomb Rome." Sub-Tribune Rinaldi smiled. "But Kevin, my friend, we can't bomb Lamberti just when he's getting a good start." Jay looked up. Kevin Ilaria spun around. "What?" "Never trust old friends, Kevin. Colonel Di Orio didn't. He surprised us in the Radio Room and we were forced to put him out of the way. Also remember this: all members of the Liberacione carry gamma pistols." Rinaldi pulled out his gamma gun and shot Ilaria through the middle. Jay was horrified. He forgot where he was and when he was and what he was doing. All he knew was that there was a cyanide gun at his hip and that this man had shot Ilaria. His gun came up and sputtered. The pellet caught Rinaldi just under the chin and burst. Rinaldi collapsed. "Had a -- gamma gun -- not... deadly. Slow-acting... radioactivity. Hardly... burned me. Come on -- we've got to... get back to the -- Time building." "Oh, no we won't. You're hurt. We -- " "Don't argue. Sergeant! Saaarguunt!" Ilaria gasped at the exertion of shouting. The Centurion ran in. "We've got to -- get to the -- Time building." "Rinaldi shot the Tribune. Rinaldi was a traitor," Jay explained rapidly. Uaria's gun clicked and the Centurion shuddered back and fell through the door. The gamma burst from his pistol hit the wall. "God! Is everyone a traitor?" Jay demanded of the Universe. didn't take them long to espouse the new cause. They were helped along in their decision by the Liberacione planes hovering overhead The whispering campaign Lamberti had carefully started about germ warfare helped, too. Those who didn't switch over rapidly were jumped by the new forces. Tribune Ilaria in Louisville, Kentucky, in America held out as long as he could. Then the bombers came. And the Tribune fled to the Time building. The building shook. A table shivered and a lamp shattered. A jet fighter flew close by the window and the Centurion watched fearfully as it flipped on one delta wing and fired a tracer burst into a PR ship. The defender exploded in mid-air. Ilaria looked twenty years older than the man who had smiled and welcomed Jay Welch to #. He and a young scientist were preparing the machine to send the man from # back to his own time. "You'll have to leave the gun here, Jay." Ilaria winced as he bent over a set of dials. "I'd like to keep the uniform." "All right. Does that do it, Doctor?" The scientist nodded. He looked at Jay. "It's ready," he said. "This switch sets everything in motion, doesn't it?" Ilaria asked. "Yes. That's the final control." "Then... I'll do it. I'd like... to say something to Jay before he leaves." The scientist hesitated a moment, then shrugged and left. The Centurion went to the door. He was a young man and fanatically loyal. "You all right, Tribune?" Ilaria smiled. "I'm... all right, Sergeant." The Centurion nodded and left. "Sit... sit down in that chair. Jay, and do your best to relax." Jay sat down. A bomber roared overhead. There was a blast nearby. "What will you do now, Kevin?" Ilaria shrugged. "Fight 'em 'til they come in and we're sunk. Then (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Kelly Freas The first successful non-Terrestrial divorce case! Fame for Legal Eagle Jose Ob anion for his generalship of a three-sexed, five Venusian history-shattering precedent! Habits are habits but -- alas! -- on Venus they differ... O NE OF these days an embittered lawyer is going to write a text on the effects of spaceflight on the divorce laws. This writer will be a Terrie, about five ten, with blue eyes, black hair -- turning grey very fast, and the unlikely name of I remember very well the day I was graduated from law school; the day my father gave me his version of the Obanion credo. Allways remember you live in a community property state -- That simple phrase has kept three generations of Obanions in the divorce trade. And only I have had cause to regret it. Basically, I suppose, my troubles began the day the Subversive Party swept the Joe Macs out of Congress and repealed the Alien Restriction Act of #. That bit of log-rolling gave the franchise to almost all resident aliens and resulted in a situation virtually destroying the sanctity of divorce as an institution. I'm a Joe Mac myself -- politically, I mean. Obanions have been voting the Joe Mac Party Ticket for more than a hundred years. Red is our color. There are even family legends that say an Obanion was with the first Joe Mac when he became President of that old unit the Euse of Aay. We have to rely on legends, unfortunately, because the Joe Mac Party traditionally fed their rally bonfires with books, and when they won the election and took over the Euse of Aay they had a rally to end all rallies and somehow the Government Archives -- books, you see, as well as punch cards and the like -- got taken over by some very zealous Party men. The records were always rather incomplete after that. Only word of mouth information was available during that first Joe Mac Administration, and that can be sketchy. For example, the party color is red. All we know is that first Joe Macs had something to do with red. You see how it goes. What I mean by all this, is that I can see the faults in my own Party. I'm no diehard. Nor am I a bad loser. The Subs won control of Congress by a landslide, so I guess the people wanted that sort of slipshod government. Only they should have been more careful, dammit, when they started tampering with the laws. I'm not antispacegook, either. I have my framed Legal Eagle's Oath right over my desk and I live up to it. And if Congress sees fit to make any Tmm, Dccck, or Harry a citizen of our great Commonwealth -- I account it my duty to see to it that they are not denied the benefits of our Terrestrial divorce laws. But sometimes it can be very trying. The new Sub Administration and their rash repeal of Joe Mac laws has had the effect of putting reverse English on the Obanion credo. Always remember you live in a community property state... That wonderful phrase that encompasses so many great truths -- that ringing statement that has made me rich and kept me a bachelor -- now means something else. Confusion. Work. Yes, and even spacegook depravity. the story at the beginning before I get too upset. My name, as I said before, is Jose Obanion. I'm a licensed Legal Eagle, specializing in divorce law -- and doing well at it. I have a good office on the #th floor of the Needle Building, a damned fine address and a comfortable layout, too. A whole room to myself, a private visor service to the Municipal Law Library, and a lapdesk for my secretary, Thais Orlof. On the day it began I was walking to work from the tube way station and feeling rather pleased with myself. My income was high and steady, my protein ration account was in good shape and I was doing my bit as a civilized Terrestrial. The morning was remarkably clear. You could make out the disc of the sun quite nicely through the smog, and there was a smogbow gleaming with carbon particles in the sky. I felt alert, expectant. pen to me. I could feel it. Even in the go-to-work press of people on Montgomery Street, I didn't get shocked once. That's the way my luck was running. And three characters brushed against me and got nipped by my new Keep-A-Way. There's been talk about making KeepAWays illegal. Just the sort of infringement on personal liberty the Subversives are famous for. Inconsistent, too. They pass laws letting every spacegook in the universe come here to live and then talk about taking away one of the things that makes the crowding bearable. I made a point of arriving at the office a little early, hoping to catch Thais in the act of coming in late. My secretary was a hard girl to dock, but I never stopped trying. It was a game we played. If she came in late, I would be justified in docking a protein credit off her pay for every thirty seconds of office time she wasted. So far I had managed to keep her pay low enough so she couldn't think of leaving my employ -- though she was earning a few prots on the side by acting as correspondent in divorce cases that couldn't be settled by Collusion Court and actually had to be tried before a judge and jury. Thais and I were still haggling over the price of her services as part-time mistress, too. I couldn't see giving her her asking price, which was half again the regular market price. Thais knew the value of a prot, all right. And of an erg, too. "Take care of the ergs," she would say, looking at me meaningfully, "and the prots will take care of themselves." Thais was a devout Ben Franklinist and she was full of aphorisms like that. I settled myself into my Lowfer and glanced over the desk calendar. A full, profitable day ahead. Tremmy Jessup and his new fiancee were coming in at # to sign the premarital divorce settlement. A wise couple, I thought approvingly. Save a lot of trouble later. At # Truncott vs Truncott and Truncott. A multiple divorce case with two women involved. Very lucrative sort of case. And then at # Gleda Warick was coming in to have me validate her Interlocutory decree. A formality. But I hoped to take her to lunch at the Palace where they were advertising a five ounce portion of genuine horsemeat on their five prot dinner. That sort of thing would impress Gleda and I rather hoped for great things from her. Not only that, she was spending # prots yearly on divorces. No Franklinist, she. It still lacked a minute to the hour so I switched on the TV to catch Honest Pancho's commercial. Pancho was my most active competitor and he cost me plenty, but I couldn't suppress a grudging admiration of his enterprise. He had Lyra Yves doing his stuff for him, and anyone as socko as Lyra was dangerous. Sweetheart of the Western Hemisphere is the way she was billed, and her agent wasn't exaggerating too much. Lyra was singing his come-on backed by a quartet humming a steady whap rhythm and doing a slow twitch. The lights were playing her daring costume big, accenting the fact that she had one breast almost covered. I frowned. How come the League of Decency let her get away with anything as suggestive as an opaque breast covering. Pancho must have friends in the censor's office. It was just another sign of the increasing degeneracy of our times. Soon entertainers would be appearing clothed from head to foot, exploiting the erotic stimulation of imagination. " -- whap me slap me baby doll," Lyra was singing. "Beat my head against the wall -- lover, I don't care at all at all -- Whap! Honest Pancho's on the ball!" Now the announcer cut in with his insinuating voice explaining how you could get your divorces quicker, cheaper and twice as funny at Honest Pancho's Big Splitzmart in the Flatiron Building, as well as his Legal Eaglery just down from the County Courthouse. tions to serve you. Come in and see Honest Pancho today!" And then Lyra again: "Whap! Honest She faded doing a sinuous twitch. I turned the TV off feeling a little worse than when I turned it on. Maybe, I thought, I've been too conservative. Maybe I'd, better get on the baaaalll, too. Or else. I shrugged the thought aside just as Thais slipped through the door -- exactly on time. I watched her strip off her smog mask and cinder cape -- on office time -- and place them carefully in the sterilizer. She was very careful not to smear the paint that was most of what she wore. I tapped a NoKanse alight and inhaled deeply. "Good morning, Thais," I said. "Whap!" she said in return. "I heard the TV all the way down the hall." She pulled a Lowfer out of the wall and settled down with her lapdesk across her knees. The tip of one sandal was just brushing my shin. The office, unfortunately, could have been bigger, but with city, space was rather costly even for a man with a better than average prot account. "New paint?" I asked. "Nice of you to notice, boss." She fumbled in the pockets of the belt around her naked, cerise-painted middle and took out her pad and stylus. "On time and ready for work," she said. "A calorie saved is a calorie earned." But now, somehow, I didn't feel like attacking the day's schedule. Not quite yet. Pancho's commercial had disturbed me. "Thais," I said. "I wonder if I'm -- well, slowing down -- " "You, boss?" She fluffed her greentinted hair provocatively and raised an eyebrow at me. "I wouldn't say so." "I don't mean that way," I said. "I mean professionally. I wonder if I shouldn't seek wider horizons." "New cases? Different cases? Give up divorce work? Oh, Boss!" "Not give it up, Thais. Not that. I couldn't. Divorce is my life. Could a doctor give up healing? Could a Freudist give up lobotomy? No, I didn't mean that. Frankly, I meant should I get more aggressive. Go out and get cases that would have a certain advertising value." I didn't want to say I didn't feel like spending good protein on the sort of advertising Pancho and some of the other Legal Eagles, an unethical lot really, were buying. Besides, we Obanions have always been rather frugal. Thais' face had come radiantly alive. "Oh, Joe -- " Now, that should have been a tip-off, because she never called me anything but boss. But I blundered right ahead because she was looking at me as though I were Clarence Darrow or somebody. "I have a case. A real case. If you would -- if you only would take it, you'd be famous. More famous, that is. You'd be really famous." I knew that Thais had some rather questionable friends, being a Franklinist and all. And I knew too that some of them were spacegooks. But The combination of Lyra singing for Pancho and the way Thais was looking at me made me get careless. "Tell me about it," I said in my best legal manner. Her face fell. "Non-terrestrial." And then she brightened. "But that's the whole point. These people are citizens of Terra now... and think of it -- you will be the very first Legal Eagle to represent them in a divorce case tried under our laws." Under our laws . Oh, I should have known. But almost all law is precedent. And I was blinded by trying a case that would set a precedent instead of follow one. Heaven help me, I said yes. "Where are these spacegooks from? And what time can they be in the office tomorrow?" "The Llagoe Islands on Venus," she said excitedly. "And they can be here anytime you say." "Okay, ten hundred sharp. What do they do and how many people are involved?" "They're musicians. And, uh, there are three. And two correspondents." She looked rather sheepishly at me as I raised my eyebrows and commented that even in this day and age of easy morality that was quite a number of 'people' to be involved in one divorce case. Too many, in fact. "Well, they are subject to our laws," she said doubtfully. "Indeed they are -- thanks to a Subversive Congress." I made a few notations on my desk pad. "Five of them, eh? A multiple marriage." Thais' voice was very low. "Well, no. Not exactly." "What then?" She looked at me resignedly. "Three sexes," she said. Gleda; as much as I should have liked to split a five prot pony steak with her. Instead of the Palace, I went to the library. The public library. And read about Venerians. What I found out was interesting -- and a little frightening, too. They were trisexual symbiotes. And they were only remotely humanoid. There were very few of them on Terra -- mainly because they relished their own planet's formaldehyde atmosphere so much they were extremely reluctant to leave it. When they did,... and this really interested me -- they generally became very wealthy as entertainers. They were accomplished musicians and -- of all things -- tumblers. For reasons that were only hinted at in the staid Encyclopedia Ter restria, Venerians never entertained through the mass media such as the Livies or TV. Their stuff was limited to small, elite gatherings and it cost plenty. I thought of Gleda Warick and the party she was planning for later in the week. She'd asked me to be alert for some good entertainment. Her friends were getting weary of games like Lizzie Borden and Clobber. Too many people getting hurt and all. Venerian tumblers and minisingers would be just the thing. And it would assure solvency on the part of my clientsto-be. Part of the Legal Eagle's Oath binds us to be concerned over our customer's finances. The next morning, promptly at ten hundred, I was treated to the first sight of my clients. Their names didn't transliterate into anything remotely pronounceable, so they were going by the names of Vivian, Jean and Clare Jones. After the first shock of seeing them wore off, I wrote on my pad: "Names used by humans of both genders. Significant." They spoke English, the current lingua franca , with only a trace of a sibilant accent and they smelled of formaldehyde. I explained their rights under our divorce laws. Did the best I could, that is, not being quite sure who was married to whom and under what conditions their marriage functioned -- if at all. Finally I said, "Tell me all about it." Clare, who seemed to be the spokesman for the group and therefore assumed, in my mind, a male gender, waved a boneless arm excitedly. "Had we known we were becoming subject to your Terrestrial laws by residing here we would never have remained. Our situation is desperate." I wrote on my pad: "Situation desperate." "Yes," hissed Vivian breathlessly. "Desperate." I underlined desperate . "We are, as you may know," Clare continued giving Vivian a dark look, "Trisexual symbiotes. You do not have any analogous situation among mammals on Terra." I glanced at Thais. "We sure haven't," she said with feeling. "But it sounds fabulous." "It is not, I assure you," Clare said running a four-fingered hand over his scaly crest in what I took to be a Venerian gesture of distraction. "We are not married as you people understand the term -- " "Not married," I wrote, underscoring it heavily. "But your law enforcement agencies insist that our symbiosis is analogous to marriage and therefore subject to the regulations governing that odd institution." "What a bore," Thais said helpfully. "Our problem is this. The three of us live in what you might roughly call a connubial state. We -- what is your word? -- co-inhabit? -- " "That's close," I said. "We live together, that is. But more than eroticism is involved, I assure you." "Of course." Now it began to sound like most of my other cases and I could get my teeth into it. "You seem doubtful," the Venerian said with a sharp-toothed frown. "Let me reiterate that what I say is so. The three of us have spent a ygith together -- that is more than fourteen of your long years. But now the ygith is over and we must seek another -- how would you say it? -- liaison?" "This is essential?" I asked. "Not just a whim?" It is, you see, the duty of a Legal Eagle to make every effort to save a marriage. In view of the circumstances, I felt that surely this was a marriage unique and therefore worth saving. "No whim," declared Clare emphatically. "Each ygith -- or what you Terrestrials would call 'mating period # -- we must uh -- realign. If we do not, deleterious effects are certain. Our health goes bad. We may even die . # "My friends , # I said, "you have very little to worry about. There are many similar cases here on Terra. Just last week, for example, a divorce was granted in the case of Nork vs. Nork wherein it was established that the plaintiff, Mr. Nork was allergic to Mrs. Nork. A simple case, and not the first of its kind. I myself tried one such case wherein a wife broke out in a rash whenever her husband sought to question her about the household expenses. A divorce was granted on the grounds of basic incompatibility . # "Ah , # Clare said sadly. "If it were only that simple. Our two correspondents, Gail and Evelyn, are ready to enter the realignment. But -- # and here the Venerian glared at the smallest of the trio. "this ungrateful wretch is uncumstances . # Great tears formed in Jean's slotted eyes. "How can you speak that way to me? After we've been through so much together ? # "Now, now -- # Thais, who has a very soft heart, patted Jean in an effort to make he she or it feel better. "Get to the point, Clare , # Vivian said testily. "It is our understanding that property held in joint tenancy by two contesting parties in a divorce case may be distributed at the discretion of the court . # "That's correct , # I said. "We contend, therefore, that Jean -- # Clare pointed a scaly finger at the small Venerian, "is community property. Vivian's and mine. We wish to make an agreement between us for the disposal of it -- # "Wait a minute " I said, shocked. "I don't think you understand the community property laws at all. Jean is, by definition, a person. A person cannot be considered property or chattel. Oh, no -- # The small Venerian made a face at them. "I told you you couldn't get away with it," she said. "This isn't Venus, you know." "On Venus you would be property," declared Vivian. And to me, he -- she -- I still get confused about this -- added: "My sex was emancipated thirty ygiths ago at home. But Jean's is still considered -- what did you call it? -- chattel. No vote. No rights. Nothing but symbiosis." "And Clare's is still the -- uh -- dominant one?" I asked hesitantly. "That's the myth that's perpetrated," Clare declared acidly. "We guths do most of the work, if that means anything." I wrote on my pad: "Guths -- breadwinners." "And who -- well, forgive my indelicacy, but -- # I shrugged mundanely, "who bears the children?" "We all do," the three Venerians chorused at once. Well, that's the way the interview went. When the three Venerians finally left I had a rough outline for the brief on my pad. Besides the other comments, I had the following information: Re Jones and Jones vs Jones, trsex smbytes!! See Ency Clare -- guth ) Terrestria Vivian -- warth  PP #, Jean -- ith ) Vol #, # Ed Jean -- Community Property? No. Not under Terr Law See US vs Ignatz Wolk #. What then? Correspondents : Evelyn (guth) Gail (warth) Any overt acts of infidelity? Probable. No proof. Only obstacle: Jean. Must reach agreement. and Defendant or Defendants and Plaintiff not solvent. Must arrange something. See Gleda. And see Gleda I did. I asked her if she could use not two, not three, She could and would. At # prots a head for an hour's entertainment. That took care of that much, anyway. I was, I felt, well on the road to making legal history. arrangements to meet Jean alone in a little bistro down on the Embarcadero. I felt the salt water air would make her-it feel more co-operative. But on the way down I became aware of someone following me. Cinder-caped and smog-masked, the tail I was dragging was inconspicuous enough, but I figured the thing about right. It was a Government man. There could be only one answer. Honest Pancho had tipped thing illegal or immoral. I was an active Joe Mac and that would be enough to put the Witch Hunt DiPancho getting wind of my dealings with the spacegooks. The gimmick would be, of course, that I was taking advantage of them, violating their rights under the V Amendment of the World Constitution. Pure falsehood, but my previous unwise political affiliations put me under suspicion. I looked up through the smog, and sure enough. An Eyespy hung in the air just over my head -- a tiny transmitter about as big as a half erg piece. If I spit on the sidewalk, I thought, they'll haul me in on the double. This was bad enough, but when and if I actually got the Venerians an interlocutory decree, I'd really have to watch it -- and them, to see that nothing went wrong. The WH boys would have Pancho right at their shoulder watching for the slightest excuse to invalidate the decree. I could get used to the Eyespy, and I thought I could convince Jean. And above all, I had to keep the Venerians from anything like sexual activity during the two day period of the decree. Nothing -- but nothing -- will invalidate a decree quicker than that. And an invalidated decree is very bad for a Legal Eagle's reputation. I was, I thought darkly, getting into this thing deeper than I thought. But the rewards would be worth it. Think of it. To Legal Eagle the first extraterrestrial divorce case in the history of the world! Holy Protein, I'd be in song and story. I made my way through the press of people on the slidewalks, my KeepAWay crackling a jolly tune, and the Eyespy hovering over my head. San Francisco is a wonderful place. Full of excitement and bustle. It's a port of entry, for one thing, with starliners letting down into the Bay from all over the Solar System. On the Embarcadero there were Sandies from Mars, Rooks from the Jovian System -- every sort of spacegook there is. Except Venerians. And mingled with the crowd I could make out the distinctive cinder capes of the Longshoremen -- absolute rulers of the district. The bistro I was looking for was a floating platform moored to the ancient wharves, the ones that were left after the tidal wave caused by the bomb back in '#. It was a nautilus type joint, most of it under water, called the Deep Six. An attendant took my cape and smog mask at the door and bowed me along to the maitre d "A table, sir?" He clapped his hands for a waiter. "May I order you something? A morphine syrette? Phenobarb? We have a particularly fine aphrodisiac cocktail, sir. Or shall I just send the hostess to you and you can order later?" I eyed the line up of girls regretfully. They were all lovely, all almost fully clothed -- and what flesh was exposed was completely unpainted. If Thais looked like that, I thought sadly, I wouldn't haggle about her price. But that was sheer depravity, I told myself sternly. That's what comes of associating with triple sexed spacegooks -- I was here on business. Not pleasure. "I'm meeting someone," I said. "A spaceg -- a Venerian uh -- lady. Miss Jones." The maitre shrugged. "Everyone to his taste. The person you wish is at the corner table, sir. Near the window." And sure enough, there was Jean, her crest waving agitatedly as she pressed her three nostrilled nose against the glass watching the sandsharks swimming gracefully among the mossy pilings outside. "Oh, Joe -- just like home " she hissed softly as I sat down. She was very strong of formaldehyde today, I thought. I didn't quite know how to begin with her. I had to make her see reason, but she seemed to be me at all except to comment that Clare and Vivian were very cruel to her. "And after I've given them the best ygith of my life." Then she returned to her melancholy contemplation of the underseascape beyond the glass. I ordered an alkie-and-treacle and sipped it thoughtfully watching Jean. An amber tear had formed in the outer corner of each slotted eye and was oozing gelatinously down her pale green cheeks. It was like someone turning on a light in my brain. The answer was plain as day. Jean was homesick. Miserable. And a miserable woman -- or man -- or -- well, does it matter? -- a miserable person was always contrary. Remove the misery and voila -- gentle as a lamb. "Jean  # I said, "this case is important to me. You must help me get the decree. If you do -- I'll do something nice for you." Over my head the Eyespy clucked reproachfully, but I ignored it. "Agree to the divorce. We can settle it in Collusion Court. And I'll see to it you get passage back to Venus on the first available starliner. How's that?" "Back to Venus? Back Home?" Her eyes gleamed redly. "That's a promise," I said. This would cost me plenty of prots, but the fame would be worth it. You can see how far gone I was on this case. "Just one thing," I added thoughtfully. "What will become of the rest after the divorce? I mean, can two of each sex get along without a third? It sounds, well, almost unvenerian, if you know what I mean." "The mating wouldn't be a very high-type experience," Jean said loftily, "without an ith -- but it can take place. It's just the sort of disgusting business you could expect from people like Clare and Vivian. And those other two -- well -- you haven't met them, but really -- " "Then you'll do as I ask?" Jean waved her crest at me seductively. "Joe Obanion, you're really very nice." I backed away and swallowed hard as Jean laid a slick, webbed hand on my wrist. "How about it? Agreed?" "You know," Jean said dreamily, "you remind me of a warth I used to know back home. He and I and a really divine guth called Charlie had the most marvelous ygith together. I wonder if he remembers little me -- ?" "I'm sure he does. How could she forget you?" I asked warily. Jean blinked her slotted eyes at me and her thin lips split into a tusky smile. "You say the nicest things, Joe. Yes, baby, I'll do as you ask. I won't contest the divorce." "Jean," I said with feeling, "you'll never regret this." And the Eyespy clucked disapprovingly. Drop dead, Pancho, I thought. Drop dead twice. I had made it. mansion, really, lay sprawled over most of the Twin Peaks Area. From her Lunar Room you could see the whole of the city stretched out as if for inspection. To the east, the bay and the floating housing developments, wharves and night spots on and under the water. To the west the transocean highways, ribbons of plastic floating on the still Pacific. No one could afford to run ships now and almost all surface commerce was run over the highways in caravans of atomic trucks. To the Orient, to Alaska, to the Pacific islands. A steady string of lights moving at two hundred miles per hour. Rocket trails streaked the sky as starliners splashed into the bay and burbled to the surface, hissing and steaming. Market Street -- all seven levels of it -- ran from the base of the hills to the bay, a multilevel slidway jammed with people. The view from Gleda's place was magnificent because of the infra-red antismog windows she had installed in the Lunar Room at a cost, incidentally, of # prots. She had three rooms and a kitchenette. You entered her place and almost had an attack of agoraphobia. It was that big. The place was overrun with people. I'd brought Thais, of course, resplendent in red and silver paint. Lyra Yves appeared in a solid coat of gilt, with that one breast and her left arm sheathed in flexible vinyl. Thais nudged me. "Look at that. I think it's disgusting. # I did look. I couldn't help myself. That shiny vinyl caught the eye of every man in the room. "Depraved," Thais sniffed. Honest Pancho came in with an older man who was pointed out to me as an ethnologist from the University of California across the bay. A Professor Cripps. Pancho, dressed in his customary green and orange enamel and embroidered cowboy boots, stumped across the room to give me the big hello. "Jose, my boy! Good to see you... He glanced up at the Eyespy. "Trouble with the Witch Hunters? Tsk tsk -- # "As if you didn t know, # I snapped. "You think I'd do a thing like that to a friend ?" "Yes." He grinned a big toothy smile at me. "As a matter of fact, you're right. I hear you've got a big case. Non-terrie. Worth a lot to a Legal Eagle to be the first with a nonterrie case -- # "You're too late, you vulture," I said. "Interlocutory decree granted." I tapped my pouch. "Right here." He shrugged. "Hope nothing happens to void it, old sport." He winked at his silent companion, the staid and seemingly dumb professor. He turned back to me. "Sorry. Should have introduced you. Prof Cripps -- this is my friend and competitor, Jose Obanion." "Pleased," the Professor said, looking fearfully at the Government Eyespy over my head. His fingers went automatically to the engraved tablet he wore on a chain round his neck -- a validated Loyalty Oath -- as though to show the really a friend of this Joe Mac's. "The Prof," Honest Pancho said softly, "is a specialist in Venerian ethnology. He'd like to meet your clients." That gave me a start. "He'll meet them. They're going to sing tonight." The Professor's eyes widened. They looked shocked in his yellow painted face. "And dance?" I smirked happily at Pancho. "And dance. At # prots each." If Pancho had any reply for that, I don't know, for Gleda came in. She was wearing her hair blue and she wore a really striking pattern of iridescent blue paint with a double snake pattern coiling up her legs and torso. The party got under way very quickly. Gleda supplied the alkie and treacle and everyone nibbled their own synthetic protein out of their pouches. The combination soon had an hilarious effect on the gathering and a couple that I didn't know, a boy and girl in particolored green and blue, starting throwing small articles of furniture at the Eyespy over my head. Couldn't hurt the Eye, of course, but I was kept pretty busy dodging. Then Thais suggested a quick game of Clobber. I must confess, not without satisfaction, that I cheated a little and peeked through the bandage so I could land a real lulu on Pancho's long pointed nose. When Gleda stopped the bleeding and he was on his feet, someone asked Lyra for a song and the cry was taken up by all. I caught a glimpse of the five Venerians' round eyes peering at us out of the kitchenette. But Gleda was saving them for the last -- the piece de resistance. Lyra tore down a drapery and staggering a bit from two or three too many alkie-and-treacles, wrapped herself in it from head to foot. There was a shocked sort of gasp from the watchers. Professor Cripps turned red under his yellow paint. Gleda put a tape on the MusiKall and Lyra went into her act. I've never seen anything like it. Swaying like a cobra, her bare feet pounding out the beat on the plastic floor, she raised the temperature about ten degrees in that room. Her green painted lips twisted in agony, her eyes rolled in the chromatic mask of her face. An old folk tune -- not the sort of thing she generally did. Something that really tore at the heartstrings. A song that dated centuries back. History and the sense of our way of life lived in that room for a few short moments. Her voice was a blood-stirring trumpet -- "Mairzy Doats and Lammsy Doats And little kiddsie Divy -- A Kiddlee Tivy Tooo Wouldn't you -- ?" When it was over, there was a breathless hush in the room. I wondered where in the world Gleda had gotten that MusiKall tape -- It had probably cost her plenty. There was only one thing, I thought, that could top that. "Gleda," I said. "Now" Besides if the gooks didn't earn their prots, what about my fee? I was already losing protein on this deal. Passage to Venus isn't cheap. The Venerians trooped in and squatted on the floor while Gleda made the introductions. The room began to smell very like an embalming room must smell. "May I present Clare, Vivian, Gail, Evelyn and little Jean. They're going to sing for us." Cheers from the guests. I glanced triumphantly at Pancho. The Professor seemed fascinated. "And," added Gleda archly, "they may even tumble for us." The Venerians looked at one another, tittered and flushed dark green. I was glad to see they were all on friendly terms with Jean. Clare struck an attitude, crest erect, and waited until everyone quit shuffling around. Presently, they sang. I think it was singing. Very cultural. Very esoteric. Also very noisy. It sounded rather like they were all in pain. After what seemed to me a very long time, they grew silent. There was a smattering of discontented applause. Gleda glared at me. I looked at Thais in dismay. "They also dance," she said weakly. "Yes," Pancho said. "Let's see them dance!" "By all means' Gleda said, still eyeing me. "Dance, fellows," I said hopefully. Jean came over to me and whispered: "Are you sure it will be all right?" "Do you want to ruin me? Dance. Tumble. Dosomething." Jean shrugged and went back to where the Venerians squatted. "He says dance." Evelyn and Gail stepped properly, I should say primly, aside and the other three began stomping about. The rhythm was infectious. The movements became more heated and shouts of approval began to ring out. "Dance, Gookie!" " Whapperoonie ! " "Go go go Gook!" I was delighted. So was everyone else. The dance grew more and more violent. There was a great deal of body contact in it. Evelyn and Gail looked longingly at the gyrating three, but kept out of it. I wondered why -- never knowing that the Venerians are a very conventional people. Pancho was delighted. So was the Professor. In the middle of it, the prof raised his hands and made a signal. An earsplitting clangor broke from the Eye spy. The Venerians stopped. Everyone stared at the Eye. And at me. The Professor stepped forward and flipped his Loyalty Oath over, it opened like a poison-ring. The Division. "The Interlocutory Decree, if you please," he commanded. Stunned, I fished it out and handed it over. He glanced at it. "You realize of course that this is immediately invalidated." "What?" I couldn't believe my ears. "You know -- as any Legal Eagle should know -- that any restablishment of -- uh -- connubial rights abrogates an interlocutory." "Of course I know that." He glanced at Honest Pancho and smiled. There was triumph flashing between them like a shuttlecock. "You Joe Macs never learn. The law is the law. What do you think your clients were just doing -- and in front of a roomful of witnesses?" I felt my heart sink. "You mean -- ?" Cripps nodded. "That?" I asked weakly. "That" he said, and tore up the paper. I watched my future as a Legal Eagle flutter down to the floor. "And I thought they were dancing," Thais said sadly. Well, the story doesn't end quite there. Gleda and I were arrested for running an obscene show. Gleda doesn't speak to me anymore. Nor do any of the people who were there that night. Lyra and Gleda get all their divorces at Pancho' s Splitzmart now. It took most of my prot account to bail us out and pay our fines. Thais is with me. We're married and we haven't a prot between us for a divorce, so we'll just have to stay married. The Venerians came out all right though. They were deported.    Illustrated by Paul Orban the gun runners George Dolan had four immediate problems: the timetranslator, a beautiful, out-of-this-world girl named Moirta, the gun runners and his life . A situation in which he finally triumphed... But what can you do with a victory that lies at the other end of a bridge # years long? professionals, and except for one minor detail the operation had been very well planned. The middle twentieth century was chosen as a source of supply after a careful survey of all factors pro and con. The gun-runners did not want the mass weapons of their own day, they wanted selective weapons which could be used for private murder. In the mid-twentieth century, the level of technology was such that well-made and reliable weapons were available; and at the same time, social control was still sketchy enough to permit quiet procurement of such merchandise, if one knew how to go about it and was suitably financed. The gun runners, two men and a woman, knew how to go about it, and they were suitably financed. The profits in their business were commensurate with the risks -- which were not small. In their world unauthorized time travel was highly illegal, because of certain possible undesirable effects on the total space-time continuum, and was severely punished. Moreover, it was personally uncomfortable and dangerous. si Si-sSssSSffl wmmk mm i mm They came from an old ingrowing world which had never reached the stars, where there were only men and their works, no blade of grass or micro-organism or sparrow which did not directly serve men. In their time, hereditary traits which had meant untimely and certain death in earlier times had persisted and multiplied. Immunities and instincts which had fitted men to live with tigers and streptococci, and seek their food in the wilderness, had atrophied. The twentieth century was a dangerous environment for these people, more so perhaps than the Eocene would have been for homo sapiens. In preparation for their venture, it had been necessary for them to undergo a drastic and painful series of tests, inoculations, conditionings and plastic surgery. Unfortunately, it had not occurred to them that their time machine might need similar protection. The equipment was basically electronic, and the power leads were encased in a new insulation, a synthetic protein which in very thin films afforded a near perfect dielectric. It was also, as it happened, an almost perfect culture existent in the sterile future, but healthy and thriving and full of appetite in the twentieth century. When the gun runners prepared to return to their own time with their cargo of contraband there were small flashes of fire, and smoke curled briefly from various parts of the equipment. Their temporal environment remained unchanged. The gun runners were not technicians, they were specialists in other fields. They pulled and prodded uncertainly here and there, pushed the buttons again. Nothing happened. The senior gun runner, a man who wore in this century the appearance of a quiet, gray-haired professional man, and who wore in any century the habit of command, came to a decision. He spoke in their own language, a language time had pruned to telegraphic brevity: "If tamper, make worse. Electronics technicians this era. Use." The second man raised an eyebrow. "Knowledge adequate? Time travel not simple." The older man shrugged. "Theory not simple, machine simple. Savages clever fingers. Adequate stimulus, can solve." "And after? Disposition?" "Displacement effect. Or -- " the senior gun runner sketched a quick gesture of pulling a trigger. The younger man nodded slowly, still dubious -- which was proper, it was his function to be suspicious and questioning, as it was the other's to command. "Stimulus?" "Profit. Curiosity. And... Moirta." Both men turned and looked appraisingly at the woman, who had not yet entered the discussion. She was a very narrow specialist, within the wider specialty of gun-running and murder. Now she moved her shoulders uneasily. "Displacement effect," she suggested, "near limit. If caught -- " she made an unpleasantly suggestive spastic gesture. The chief gun runner shrugged again. "If caught," he repeated the gesture she had made, "in any case. No choice. Find technician now." visitors thoughtfully. "Well, actually," he said, "our work is design, not repair. I suppose I could send a man out to look over your job and recommend a firm to handle it. Is that what you want?" "Mr. Dolan," the gray-haired man said earnestly, "I am afraid you still misunderstand me. The work we wish done is small in scale, but very intricate and delicate, and highly confidential. We have investigated your qualifications, and you are the man we want to handle it, you personally. We do not want you to mention this work to any other person -- not even your wife." "I don't have a wife," Dolan said. "That's no problem." He hesitated. "Do I need security clearance? That'll take time." "No security clearance. This is private work." Dolan frowned. Private work, money no object,very secret -- there were implications to this offer which he did not like. On the other hand -- His eye strayed to the young woman who sat quietly beside the man, silently exercising her specialty. The plastic surgeons of her era had done a beautiful and nearly perfect job on her body; but bonedeep, in ways an observant man could sense, she was still not a twentieth century woman. In a city full of women who made a profession of being young and handsome, she too was young and handsome, but different. Dolan was an observant man, and a curious one. He looked back at Brown. "If you could just give me some idea -- " he said tentatively. "The equipment, as I have said, is very intricate, and we are not technicians. We prefer that you make your own diagnosis." Dolan pursed his lips uncertainly. He glanced again at the girl. "OK," he said at last, "I'll look at it. I can't promise anything." He punched a button on the desk intercom. "Betty, I'm going out to look at a job with Mr. Brown and Miss -- uh -- " he glanced at the girl. "Jones," the gray-haired man said. "Miss Jones." "Oh, yes, excuse me." Dolan smiled at the girl and drew a brief quirk of the lips in response. " -- with Mr. Brown and Miss Jones," he continued. "Be back some time this afternoon." "OK," he said to his clients. "Let's go see this intricate and delicate problem." For reasons compatible with the profession of gun-running and the nature of time travel, the time translator had been located outside of urban limits -- the city was to be rather systematically bombed in the near future -- on a secluded and stable granite dike, within the shell of a frame cottage. Dolan observed all this without comment. They were met outside the cottage by a man about Dolan's age. "This is my colleague, Mr. Smith," Brown introduced him. Mr. Smith offered his hand. As he turned to lead them inside, Dolan noticed that the light summer jacket Smith wore did not drape well over the right hip pocket. He filed this fact also for future reference. "And here' Brown said, "is the machine we wish repaired." In the center of the room was an orderly jumble of shiny black geometric solids, laced together with wires and bars of silver, the whole mounted on a polished ebony platform. It was handsome, in a bizarre sort of way; but certainly it did not look like any electronic gear Dolan had ever seen, and he had seen almost all there was, at one time or another. He studied it carefully, turning it this way and that in his mind, trying to find some familiar feature to grasp it by. There was none. "Well," he asked skeptically, "what is it? What does it do?" Brown shook his head. "The purpose of the machine must remain secret," he said firmly. "We think the trouble may be superficial, some minor thing an expert could quickly repair; and we wish you to work on it from that viewpoint, without inquiring into its purpose." "I see," Dolan said noncommittally. The whole business was screwy. For two cents, he thought -- He glanced at the girl. She sat quietly on a chair, hands folded demurely in her lap, watching him, practising her specialty. Well, maybe, he thought, it wouldn't hurt to look, as long as he was here anyway. He walked over to the equipment and bent to examine it. The silver conductors seemed to be uninsulated, although in places they were closely paired. He frowned and scratched tentatively at one with his fingernail. The metal showed bright. There was a slight tarnish, that was all, no insulation. He noticed something else. Back of the equipment, at an angle unnoticeable from the side he had first approached, were several cut and dangling wires, some of which had been partially replaced by quite ordinary high tension cable. Spread about on the floor were lengths and coils of wire. "You've been working on it yourselves?" he asked Brown. "No, no. As I told you, we are not technicians. Before we contacted you, we had already tried another man. He proved unsatisfactory. We, uh, paid him off and sought a better qualified person." "Unsatisfactory, eh? Umm, I see." Dolan's eyes moved thoughtfully to Smith, who lounged carelessly just inside the door. The coat now hung smoothly, it was only when Smith moved that the hint of a bulge showed. Dolan was a curious man, but also a prudent and thoughtful one. He decided he did not want this job, it was time to get out. "I'll have to go back for some equipment," he said casually. "Gan you drive me in?" He knew immediately that it was not going over. Brown frowned and sucked thoughtfully at his lower lip. "If you could make a list," Brown offered, "I could get it for you. You could then be making a preliminary survey while I am gone. There is a question of time involved, we wish these repairs made as quickly as possible." "Well... I'm not sure..." "Miss Jones," Brown said persuasively, "is as well-versed as any of us in the operation of the equipment. She could answer any questions you might have." The girl smiled and nodded. Smith, lounging by the door, casually moved his hand to his belt, sweeping back his unbuttoned jacket slightly. Brown stood waiting. Dolan studied them silently for a moment. They couldn't force him to take the job, he could simply turn them down and walk out. Or could he? For some reason he did not quite understand, he was just a little reluctant to test the idea. "OK," he said shortly. He took his notebook and began to scribble a list of equipment on a blank page. A message, he wondered, like they do it in the movies? A request, maybe, for some outrageous piece of equipment that would tip off the boys in the shop? No good, they weren't that smart, and for that matter neither was he. Besides, what did he really know? Nothing, except that he just didn't want this job very much. He tore the page out of the notebook and handed it to Brown. Brown slipped it in his pocket and went out. Dolan turned to the girl. "OK, Miss Jones," he said. "Now let's see what we can figure out about this gear." He strolled completely around it, eyeing it from all sides. "Well... he said dubiously. "First, I guess, control. How do you start it up, make it go?" "We push these buttons, in this sequence," the girl told him. Shfe moved her fingers lightly over a series of studs set in a small cube. "OK, push 'em. Let's see what happens." "Nothing happens," the girl said. "The machine just doesn't work." "Well, then, what's supposed to happen?" The girl looked unhappy. "I'm sorry," she said finally, "didn't Mr. Brown say you weren't to ask such questions?" "OK," Dolan said resignedly, "we'll let that go then. How about this : What indications do you have when it is operating normally? Anything light up, move, buzz, hum, spin around?" The girl frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. "Nothing lights up, moves, buzzes, hums, spins around. When the machine works, it... well, it just works, and that's all." She studied him with troubled eyes. "You are an expert, it seems to me an expert should be able to look at a machine and see what parts are faulty, isn't that true? Why must you know what the machine does?" Dolan leaned back against the machine and lit a cigarette. He squinted thoughtfully at her through the smoke. Well, what the hell, with looks like that, why should she need brains? "Miss Jones," he said patiently, "I gather that you aren't a technical person?" "Not with machines, no." It was an odd sort of answer. Did it imply that she had a technical knowledge of something other than machines? Dolan considered it briefly and decided to pass it up for now. "I am a technically trained person," he said, "an expert as you say; and I can tell you this: machinery, electronic gear, anything like that, is built to do a specific job. Before you can design, build, or repair such equipment, the very first thing you have to know is: what do you want it to do? For all I know, this machine here may just be an overgrown coffee percolator. Now, suppose I go ahead and fix it with that in mind, and when I get done it makes beautiful coffee, but it turn out you wanted all along for it to get television programs, you're going to be terribly disappointed. You see now why I have to know what it does?" The girl nodded seriously. "Yes," she admitted, "I can see that; but I'm sorry, I still cannot tell you the purpose of the machine." She glanced uncertainly at Smith. He shook his head minutely. "Perhaps," she said, "when Mr. Brown returns -- " vince easy. Dolan puffed angrily at a cigarette, while Brown and the girl watched him impassively. "Damn it," he said, "it just won't work like this, that's all there is to it." He kicked savagely at the base of the machine. "All I'm doing is chasing my tail in circles. I know what part of the trouble is now, somehow you've lost the insulation on your conductors -- burned up, evaporated, blew away, God knows what. Anyway, it's gone. But I can't just spray some gunk back on and have it work like new, we just haven't got that kind of insulation. Where' d you get that stuff, anyway. Can't you get some more?" "It was specially made for us," Brown told him. "We cannot get more at... present." "I see." There had been a very slight accent on the "present". Did it mean anything? And if so, what? "Well, I can rewire it for you, use standard stuff, it won't look pretty but it might work, only what should I use? I don't know what it needs -- high voltage cable, or bell wire; shielded or open. I've got to know what you've got in these black boxes here -- " he pounded gently on one, "before I know what to feed them." He snapped his cigarette into a corner, gloomily watched the smoke curl up from it for a moment, then walked over and stepped heavily on it. "So that's it," he said definitely. "I've been fooling with this thing all day, and that's just exactly as far as I can go. It's up to you people, you can give me the dope, I can't promise anything even then, except just to try; or you might as well pay me off. I can hang around here and put in more time, but you won't be getting anything out of it." Brown studied his fingernails absently. "Perhaps you are right," he said slowly, "However, I cannot act without consulting with Mr. Smith, and he has gone into town to get some food for you, I am sure you must be hungry. When he returns, I will let you know our decision." "OK." Dolan mopped at his face with his handkerchief. "God, it's hot as an oven in this shack," he said. Miss Jones smiled in sympathy, though she looked cool enough. "Come on, Miss Jones, let's get outside and cool off a bit." "I think that would be nice," she agreed. It was just turning dusk outside, and there was an agreeable breeze coming up the valley. They walked over and sat down on a rocky ledge. "Tell me, Miss Jones," he said suddenly, "do you like it here?" "It's very pretty," she said. She looked out toward the ridge with the sunset colors fading behind it. "Much nicer than the city." "No, no," he said brusquely, "that's not what I mean. I mean, do you like it here , in our world?" "I don't think I understand you." "I mean here, now, on this planet, in this time. Do you like it as well as your own... place?" She stared up at him with wide puzzled eyes. "My own place? What other planet or time do you think I might know?" "I don't know, Miss Jones, I just... He was not quite sure exactly what he had been driving at, himself. "Forget it. Tust a stupid idea." He leaned back and let his eye follow the shadows up the valley. A faint whiff of perfume reached him. "Miss Jones," he said. "That's rather an awkward thing to call you. Do you have a first name?" "Jane Jones, naturally," she said, and smiled. "What else?" "No good," he said firmly. "I might call you Mary, that's a nice anonymous tag, and sounds better too... or you could tell me your real name, just the first name, that wouldn't give much away." She considered silently. "Moirta," she said finally. "My name is Moirta." She accented the syllables evenly. "Moirta," he repeated. "Moirta." He rolled the "r" slightly, as she had done. "That's much better, it fits you now, Moirta, and it fits the cool shades of evenin'." He looked down at her. "Moirta," he said soberly. "It's a lovely name, truly." He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips met his, not coldly, and not demandingly or fiercely, but gently and firmly, in the exact measure he desired. He put his arms about her, and she came into them, supple but not limp, as a beautifully trained dancer follows a lead. For a very long moment they remained thus, lip to lip and breast to breast, the yearning and response in each rising in swift even balance. And then Brown opened the door, casting a shaft of light past them in the dusk. "Oh, Moirta," he called. "Are you there? Could you come here a moment, please -- " The two male gun runners had stepped outside the cottage while Moirta served Dolan his dinner. They found the smells and sounds of summer night, the darkness itself -- in their world there was no darkness except in closed rooms -- disturbing, but preferable to watching and hearing Dolan eat. "For primitive, natural," the senior gun-runner said, "but -- " he winced, "teeth!" "Gnawing!" the other agreed. He clicked his own non-functional dentures experimentally, examined his fingers with fascinated revulsion. Tender flesh, white teeth -- ugh! "Moirta," he said thoughtfully, "seems not to mind." The senior gun runner cringed as a bat fluttered by. "Her specialty, he said absently, "not to mind." He strained his eyes to see into the darkness. Was that a mouse rustling in the grass? Or worse yet, a snake? "Progress?" the younger man asked. "Motivation set. Next, focus on problem. Pressure." It was something, something small and alive, coming toward him. "Move nearer door," he said abruptly. "Light." "Mr. Smith and I have discussed the matter," Brown said, "and we have decided to be completely frank with you." He paused, watching Dolan. "The machine is a time translator," he said. Dolan looked back at him, pokerfaced. "So?" Brown frowned slightly. Perhaps he had expected more of a reaction. "We are from a time very far in your future," he continued. "The machine has the apparent effect of transferring our physical bodies to this age. I say 'apparent' effect, because the mechanism of this time translation is not fully understood. There are certain anomalies, the displacement effect for example -- but that is immaterial, for all practical purposes we can move at will to and from any time in our past, though not into our future -- when the machine is working. "Naturally, such time travel must be kept secret, if it were not, several undesirable consequences might arise. It is very closely regulated, and may be used only for bona fide historical research by responsible persons." He looked inquiringly at Dolan. "I am not really sure I can tell you much more about the machine, I am not a technician, as you know. Does what I have told you help any?" "I don't know," Dolan said. "Let me think about it a minute." He was not really much surprised at the disclosure. In terms of the technology he knew, the machine was almost completely meaningless. From the beginning, there had only been two possibilities -- either it was the product of an alien culture, or it was an elaborate hoax. He had already decided it was not a hoax. He had not, he realized, allowed himself to explore fully the implications of the other possibility. He did so now, and some of the implications were -- intriguing. Historical research, eh? Well, maybe. He would reserve judgment on that. But a time machine? There was no such thing. And yet, if there were -- He looked at the jumble of equipment speculatively. "I still don't know how a time machine might work," he said finally. "Do you have any sort of handbook, operating manual, anything like that? Or do they have such things in your time?" "Operating manual? I don't think so. There are some pictures -- " Brown stepped over to the machine and touched a large flattened sphere which grew out of the base. "This is the power unit. If you press these studs, various pictures -- 'schematics', I believe you would call them -- are projected on the surface. Is that what you want?" "That sounds like it," Dolan said. "But I did press those studs. Nothing happened." "That is because the power unit is not operating. It does not come on as it should, when we press this button." He indicated a stud on the cubicle control unit. "That, I suppose, is one of the major things wrong with the machine." "Ummm, yeah, I see," Dolan said. He squatted and examined the power unit more closely. "One of these pairs now -- " he traced them with his finger up to the control unit, "must be the control pair." He took a piece of chalk and began numbering the terminals rapidly. "Now," he said, "if the control pair is shorted, the power should be on, but there must be overload protection of some kind, that's probably kicked out, so let's just cut all this junk loose and then short the possible control pairs one at a time, see what happens then." He reached for a pair of sidecutters. The three gun-runners looked at each other. Brown nodded slightly. They moved quickly back out of Dolan's way. "OK," Dolan said half an hour later. "We've got the power unit perking, and we've got the pictures. Now what do they mean? This block interwiring diagram now, it seems to be what I'm looking for, but I can't read the tags they've got on it. You know which block in the diagram corresponds to which piece of equipment?" Brown studied the luminous white lines against the black polished background. He put a wellmanicured finger on one square. "According to the lettering," he said, "this is the control unity, the small cube at the top with the buttons. This other, I do not know, it says: 'temporal re-integrator.' I do not know what that might be." Dolan frowned doubtfully. " 'Temporal re-integrator'," he repeated. "Could be anything. What do the others say?" Among the litter the first electrician had left, there was a short length of leadshielded two-conductor number # wire. He picked it up and began to run it absently through his fingers, straightening it. Someone had apparently amused themselves by clipping idly at it with a pair of side-cutters, it was irregularly nicked along its length. "This," Brown continued, "is something called a 'selective resonator', and this, well, the term does not translate, it is a -- " he pronounced carefully, as if unfamiliar with the word, " 'bractorquatic' -- " There was something peculiar about the indentations in the wire, Dolan realized, a pattern -- He pulled it unobtrusively through his fingers again, letting his thumbnail run over the nicks. It was Morse: K-I-T-T-E... kitten?... no, it must be American Morse... K-I-L-L-E-R... killers hs end rvr rd Killers in the house at the end of River Road. This was the house at the end of River Road. Brown had stopped speaking and was looking at him questioningly. "Uh, yeah," Dolan said hastily. "Well, that still doesn't tell me too much." He carefully rolled the length of wire and hung it on a projecting piece of the time translator. His hands were damp, and he was sure he was moving awkwardly and unnaturally. Dolan was not an easily flustered person, but things were coming a little fast -- mysterious aliens, time machines, and now -- murder, or hint of it. He needed time to think. "It's getting pretty late," he said, hoping his voice sounded natural. "Let's just knock off for now, I'll study it over, maybe I'll have something figured by tomorrow." Historical research, huh? Some professors all right, this bunch -- The thing to do was to stall, not let them know he suspected anything. "I tell you," he said casually, "do you have some place I could bed down here? Save me a trip into town and 'back." Was it his imagination, or did Brown relax slightly? "Why, yes, we do have a spare cot in Mr. Smith's room," Brown aid. "Would that be good enough?" "Sounds fine," Dolan said. He snapped the lid of his tool-box shut. "Let's go see what it looks like." held a council of war while Dolan was eating his breakfast. "Subject's attention diverted," the senior gun runner said. "Unknown factor. Annoying." Smith clucked his tongue in sympathy. He thought for a moment. "Raise threshold to override?" he suggested. "Must. Moirta." Smith nodded and went out. He returned in a moment with the female gun runner. Brown explained the problem to her in the sarfie few words he had used to Smith. She shrugged. She did not bother to practise her specialty on her colleagues -- they were, for one thing, almost immune, they had grown up in a civilization where her specialty was over-crowded. For another, in the nature of her specialty, she found it hard to concentrate on more than one subject at a time. "Doing best," she said indifferently. Brown studied her shrewdly. "Supplies short," he said mildly. "One-half larger than one-third. Each must pay way." His voice was mild, but Moirta understood the threat quite clearly. "Suggestions?" she asked coldly. Brown nodded equably -- he was used to temperament in this member of his team -- and told her what he wanted her to do. She would obey, he knew. She would also double-cross him, if the occasion offered; but he did not intend that the occasion should offer. There was a foot-path leading up the ridge back of the cabin. Dolan did not ordinarily feel the need of an after-breakfast stroll, but today he was looking for something. He was not quite sure what it would be, but he thought he would recognize it if he saw it. He walked slowly up the foot-path, letting his eyes roam. Perhaps fifty yards from the cottage, the grass was trampled and the brush bent where someone had left the path. This might be it. He followed the trampled trail off the path, searching carefully now. Three or four steps along it, he found what he had been looking for -- two empty .# caliber cartridges lying in the grass. He picked them up and juggled them in his hand, looking speculatively about. Angling off to the left was an opening in the undergrowth. He walked that way and found himself standing on the lip of a sharply eroded gully. Someone or something had kicked the bank down recently, there was a great pile of new earth in the bottom of the gully. He kicked around in the leaves and mold at his feet. There was a dark crusted substance on the leaves. The door of the cottage slammed. He slipped the empty cartridges in his pocket and stepped hastily back to the path, listening. Were those footsteps hurrying toward him? He began to stroll slowly back toward the cottage. Around the first turn he met Moirta. The girl now, he thought, where does she really fit? Possible ally? Enemy? Or neutral? She came up to him a little breathless and took his hand. "Were you going back to the house?" she asked. "Not specially. Just walking around." "Let's not go back just yet, then," she said. They turned and walked slowly back up the path, hand-inhand. After a while they came out on an open shoulder from which they could look down, catching glimpses of the path they had climbed here and there, and at its end the cottage. They sat down close together, leaning back against a large tree, not speaking at first. After a while the girl sighed. "I shall feel verv sorry when we leave this time," she said. "Me, too." He kissed her. After a moment she pulled away and looked at him searchingly. "There is something bothering you?" she asked. She flushed a little. "That was not very... ardent." Dolan looked away, feeling foolish. "I guess not," he said. She took his hand and squeezed it. "Poor George. It must be very confusing for you. Can I help?" Perhaps she could, he thought. "Look here," he said cautiously, "what happens when I get this thing fixed, if I do? You folks go on back to your own time, I suppose, but what happens to me?" She hesitated. "I don't think I understand," she said. "Mr. Brown pays you for your work, I suppose, and you stay here, that's all. Should there be more?" Dolan smiled grimly. "Like the first technician, huh?" "What do you mean?" "I mean, Brown pays me, and I stay here, like the first technician." He took his hand out of his pocket with the two empty cartridge cases in it and rolled them gently back and forth in his open palm. Moirta stared at them fascinated. "Oh," she said faintly, "I didn't know. I thought... I didn't know..." "Well, you know now," he said. "And your job is to keep me cheered up and plugging away at the job until payday comes. Right?" "No," she said. "Oh, no. Please, George. They wouldn't do that... that is, I don't think... it's so unnecessary." "Unnecessary?" "Yes. You see -- I shouldn't tell you this, but I can't have you thinking... you see, after we are gone, you will forget all this. Why should they kill you when there's no reason?" She did not seem very strongly convinced herself, Dolan thought. "How do you mean, I'll forget it? You mean they'll hypnotize me, something like that?" She shook her head. "No, they won't have to do anything. It's the displacement effect. You see, we are not really here, in a way, it is a sort of illusion, but more real for us than for you. When we return to our own time, we will remember all that happened, but you will remember nothing, since the translator does not really exist in your time. You will just forget, it will be as if none of this had ever happened, as if you had never met me, never heard of a 'time-translator'." It sounded plausible, in a way, but there was a flaw in the logic. "If everybody in this time forgets, why so much to-do about secrecy? Won't anyone else I tell forget too?" "There is a limit to the possible displacement. If the limit is exceeded, according to the Alwyn hypothesis the continuum itself may be altered, and one of the ways in which it might change would be to eliminate the irritant -- in other words, all of us concerned directly." "I see. So they figured two of us put too much of a strain on the displacement, that's why they killed this other joker -- what was his name, anyway?" "Nelson. Perhaps," she said uncertainly, "that might be it." "And maybe they figure even one is too much strain, better to be safe than sorry, huh?" requires even more displacement than... loss of memory. Really, I don't understand it, you see, I am just a sort of employee, they don't confide in me. If they knew I had been talking to you about these things like this -- " she shuddered and smiled wryly. "Perhaps I too know too much, perhaps I should be worrying about the pros and cons of various types of displacement for myself." Dolan looked at her thoughtfully. "This displacement thing," he said gently, "I'll forget you too?" She nodded. "You will forget me. But I will remember you -- for a long time, I am afraid." He frowned and kicked at a tuft of sod. "I don't want to forget you. Do you have to leave with the others? Couldn't you stay? For a little while anyway? You haven't really had a good chance to see our world yet." "No. They would never trust me out of their control. If I refused to go... well..." she shrugged. "And I don't suppose I could go back with you to your world, spend some time there, either?" "No, that would be to travel into your own future, which cannot be done." "I see." Dolan leaned back against the tree, thinking. "Well, there's one thing sure," he said. "If the machine can't be fixed, it can't be fixed, there isn't much they can do about it. You may all stay in this time yet." She shook her head gently. "Not all. At least, not all alive. There would be no displacement, and the only hope they would have to avoid the Alwyn action would be to preserve absolute secrecy. You have a saying, I believe: 'dead men -- # " She hesitated. "Even if you and I could find a way to escape, even if they told me I might leave, I could not trust them. They are very dangerous men. As long as we and they are both in this time, there would be no safety for me, nor for you." "I suppose you're right," Dolan said reluctantly. He looked down at her searchingly. "What do you want to do?" he asked. "Do you want to stay with me, or do you want me to forget you?" "I want to be with you," she said softly. "Always." "And I, with you," he said. He bent his head toward hers. Below, the door of the cottage opened. Smith's figure appeared. He glanced around and then came plodding up the path. Moirta pulled away and got to her feet. "We might as well start back, I suppose," she said unenthusiastically. "Let's go back in the woods, he won't find us there." She hesitated and then shook her head. "No. We have both been very indiscreet today, and they are suspicious men. It is important in their trade to be suspicious. It would not be wise to let them think we are avoiding them." "OK, I suppose not," he acknowledged glumly. He rose and followed her down the path. tended to submerge herself completely in her role, a failing which the senior gun runner recognized and allowed for in his calculations. In the following days, Dolan held her hand often, and kissed her sometimes, and talked with her frequently, and took her in his arms for short periods; but at the crucial moment Smith or Brown always casually appeared upon the scene. Dolan suspected, accurately, that they were deliberately permitting him just enough contact with her to keep him constantly on edge, keep his mind off other matters. They made no overt threats, but he was constantly aware of the body in the gully, the bulge in Smith's pocket, Brown's cold eyes studying him. Dolan was not a submissive person, and under the pressure a cold malevolence toward the two gun-runners began to develop in him. He concealed it, as well as he could, under a shell of impassivity. His time would come. The sketch of a plan was beginning to form in his mind, it was not very solid yet, but if it worked out they would be laughing on the other side of their faces. What was it Moirta had said? There would be danger "as long as we and they are both in this time." The answer to that was simple. Eliminate "they" and eliminate the danger. In his work, Dolan kept running into reminders of the first technician, and the matter bothered him. The man seemed to have been making progress, and surely he would not have been such a fool as simply to refuse to work, the message he had left showed he understood quite clearly his danger. He asked Moirta about this, and got another shock. "That was a mistake," she said. "We did not fully understand your world then. In our time, medical science is very exact. There are no incomplete men or incomplete women. We assumed that because this man... person... looked like a man, and seemed to be a man, he was one. However, we have since discovered that this is not always true, and it was not in this case. We could not allow him to work on the machine, since we could not predict his reactions adequately." Not predict his reactions? There was an obvious corollary -- Dolan's lips tightened. "But you can predict mine, is that it?" Moirta ran her fingers lightly along the back of his hand, studying his knuckles with the tips of them. "Of course," she said idly, "Why not? There is nothing wrong with your reactions, George dear." He flung her hand away violently. "Why not? So you push the buttons, and I react as predicted, and you sit back and laugh at me while I fix your machine, and then you all go tootling off to find more suckers, while I hold the bag. That's it, isn't it? Boy, I bet you've been getting a big charge out of this. I thought it was mighty coincidental the way one of your boyfriends always pops up as soon as we're alone for five minutes. Not taking any chances on the reaction getting out of hand, are you?" She stared up at him in shocked surprise. "No," she said, "no. Oh, poor George. How stupid of me. You see, I am not really very wise, I know only one thing, how to be a woman. I keep forgetting that you do not think as we do. Because we can predict a reaction, does that make it less real?" "But you used me, you knew this would happen." There were tears in her eyes. "I used you," she admitted, "and I used myself, and Brown used both you and me. "And you used me, also. Do you wish me to think that when you hold a woman's hand, and say certain things to her, and look at her in a certain way; you are entirely innocent, you do not guess what may happen?" "I didn't force you," he said stubbornly, "the choice was yours to make." "Nor did I force you. But I knew what your choice would be, and further, I knew what my choice would be. Emotion is my trade, as electronics is yours. Electrons, I have been told, have a certain freedom of choice, or appear to have. Yet you know with quite high probability which choice they will make under the influence of certain physical fields. In the same way, I know what choice to expect of a man or a woman, under the influence of certain emotional fields." "You didn't want me, though, you just wanted a technician. The first man would have done just as well for you, if he had 'reacted.' " "That is true. And I am the first woman you have ever made love to?" "No, of course not. But I've never felt the same about them as I do about you." "I, the same. George, I think you still do not understand me. In your time there are women who get things from men by seeming to promise more than they intend to give, for simulating emotions they do not feel. You think I am one of those... no, please don't interrupt... I am not. In my time there are no such women, people understand each other too well, they are too hard to fool. "Instead, there are women like me, women who are peculiarly attractive to men, and peculiarly susceptible to men -- honestly so. Believe me, it is not an easy way to make a living. A woman has only so much honest emotion to give. Do you understand now?" She looked up at him appealingly. He did not understand, but he believed. He could not doubt that this was as important to her as to him, that regardless of the motives behind it, her feeling was deep and honest. And yet, it was impossible to understand, impossible for him to visualize a world in which people knew accurately the feeling others held for them; and yet still loved, disliked, or were indifferent. It was, he thought, a little like a caveman trying to understand the complexities and compulsions of polite urban society. He slumped back down beside her. "I don't know," he said glumly. "You're right, I suppose, it all sounds logical; but I still don't understand." She drew him to her. "Poor George," she said with her mouth against his ear. "Poor George, I know only one way to console you, and only one way to console myself." She sighed. "And it seems they will not permit that, I suppose the 'reaction,' she smiled wryly, "would not fit with their plans." Dolan straightened and looked at her sharply. Her remark had reminded him of something else he needed to know. "How do they know just when to break us up' he asked, "just when to drop in 'accidentally' on us? Can they read my mind?" She shook her head. "No, they are not mind-readers. It is just that they know so much about what to expect of people -- remember that for thousands of years there has been nothing so important to us as what other people do, in my time men of science no longer study physical things, all that is known, they study people. In any given situation, they can predict quite accurately what action a given individual will take." "You think they know what we're talking about now?" "Not in detail. But in general, yes -- and I suppose it must serve their purpose in some way for us to worry about these things, what will become of you and me, or they would not permit it. In a matter such as this, they do nothing without a purpose." "Well, that's fair enough," Dolan said grimly. "As long as they aren't actually mind-readers, they can guess all they want to." Moirta shook her head. "It is not guessing, that is what I have been trying to tell. you. Whatever you plan, they will have foreseen it, perhaps not the exact thing you wish to do ; but all the possible things you can do, and the most likely thing you will do. "Really, it will not be so bad, you will finish the translator, and we will go, and you will forget us, and... well, in time I suppose I will forget you also." "No." He squeezed her hard against him. "I don't intend to forget you, and I don't intend you to forget me." He grinned down at her. "In this time, the boy always gets the girl, and they live happily ever after. It's a natural law, like gravitation. "Brown and Smith aren't infallible. They may know people, but I know machines. Don't forget, the time translator is the key, the big item in this mess. And that's in my bailiwick." He left it to Brown to satisfy the people at the shop, and apparently Brown satisfied them, they sent along the equipment and supplies he requested without comment. He still had no idea why the time translator worked, but he was beginning to know quite a bit about how it worked, in the sense of functional operation, the inputoutput relations of the black boxes. A time came when he could have activated the machine by making a few minor connections. He did not do so. With the knowledge that he had the technical problem whipped, some of his urgency faded. He could take time to amplify and clarify his knowledge. Quite probably the time translator could never be duplicated by twentieth century technology. At the same time, only a fool would pass up a chance to learn what he could, it was too big a thing, even with the limitations under which it seemed to operate. Also, familiarity with the translator was a weapon, knowledge Brown did not have -- a weapon he was grimly intent on using. He kept testing and checking, varying inputs and measuring outputs. Remembering what Moirta had said about losing his memory -- he did not think he would, if his plans worked out, but there was always the chance of something going wrong -- he kept careful notes. Brown watched this activity blandly. Thinking it over, Dolan saw that this was only logical. There were always fires for notes. So, as an extra precaution, he made copies of the most important data in secrecy and stored them in a glass jar under a rock back of the cottage. Then it occurred to him that he might forget about the jar -- or he might not be around to remember it, there was still the gully to keep in mind. Well, what had worked once should work again. He nicked a code message in a piece of wire, showing the location of the notes, and left it in his toolbox. Also, he made certain changes in the time-machine. Finally, he told Brown the machine was ready. "You want to test-hop it?" he asked. "I'm pretty sure it'll work now, but it's still a haywire job, I could be wrong." Brown shook his head. "Not necessary. If the machine works, we will be... home. If not, well, you will just have to tinker with it some more." It was not sound reasoning, from Dolan's viewpoint, but consistent with what he had come to expect from these people in technical matters. He had counted heavily on such a reaction. "OK," he said. "Then she's ready to go." Brown nodded and tossed a key to Smith, speaking curtly in a language strange to Dolan. Dolan had noticed long before that the back bedroom door was always locked, and the windows securely boarded up. Artifacts of historical interest, Brown had told him. It seemed like rather extreme precaution to take for security of such material. Brown turned back to Dolan. "You had better move your equipment out of range of the machine now, if you wish to keep it," he said. Dolan carried his equipment outside. When he returned the three aliens were carrying small heavy boxes out of the back room, stowing them in a tight circle about the machine. Moirta was straining at a heavy case with neatly dovetailed corners, marked "Remington". So that was what it was all about. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder how, if the machine could not move a person into the future, if it had no real existence in this time, they expected to move guns and ammunition. Did the laws of time operate differently for living organisms and inanimate things? What was it someone had once said about life -- 'islands of reverse entropy'? But that was only a figure of speech, men were still made up of the same elements as steel and brass -- Well, it could wait, there were more important things right now. "You need a hand?" he asked Moirta. She smiled and nodded breathlessly. As he stooped to help lift the box, their heads almost touched. "Listen!" he whispered, "be on your toes, now. I'm going to try something. Stay on this side of the machine, no matter what happens, and do just as I say." She looked startled, but nodded. With four of them working, it did not take long to pile the cargo in place. Brown checked it over with his eye and then turned to study Dolan. "Well," he said slowly, "I suppose we are ready to go. No doubt you wish your payment now, eh, Mr. Dolan?" This was the critical point. Dolan tensed as Smith stepped clear and lifted an inquiring eyebrow at Brown, his hand in his hip-pocket; but the senior gun runner shook his head. "Don't be stupid," he said quietly. "I think we have a few negotiations to make now." He looked at Dolan inquiringly. Dolan hoped his relief did not show too clearly. He had been reasonably sure Brown would be too acute to kill him off-hand, but it had been a tricky moment, just the same. Now, he thought, play it cagey, make them lay it out on the table, get it moving -- "I'm no good at guessing games," he said. "You'll have to come down to my level on this." Brown nodded. "Of course. Excuse me. I will be more explicit. Mr. Smith wants to kill you and get you out of the way immediately; he does not trust you. I do not trust you completely myself, I do not trust anyone completely; and for that exact reason I feel it would be stupid and dangerous to kill you. I am quite sure you will have booby-trapped the machine against just such a contingency." "Booby-trapped?" Dolan asked blankly. "Yes," Brown said patiently. "I mean the machine will not work satisfactorily if you are killed. It will blow up, burn out, or some such thing. Is that not true?" Dolan considered the question for a moment. He was acutely aware that the most devious plot would probably seem simple and childish to a man like Brown. "Suppose it were?" he said cautiously. "Then what?" "Then we shall negotiate, like reasonable people. What do you need to convince you of our good faith. Your money?" Brown reached in his jacket pocket and brought out a slip of paper. "Here," he said, "I think you will find this satisfactory." He handed it to Dolan. Dolan looked absently at the check. It was more than satisfactory -- for a purely business transaction. But this was no longer just a business transaction. "It's not enough," he said flatly. Brown raised an eyebrow. "The girl? No." He shook his head firmly. "We must have Moirta for a hostage, a guarantee of your good faith. She goes with us. Afterward, perhaps, if she wishes to return -- " he shrugged. Dolan studied him, trying to decide just how much Brown's word was worth. Just as much as it suited him to make it worth, probably. He glanced at Moirta. She shook her head, a tiny almost imperceptible jerk, confirming his own thought. There was no particular reason to expect that Brown would really let her return -- Moirta probably was not important to him, but the whereabouts of the time-translator was. He turned back to Brown. "You'll promise not to stop her?" Brown smiled indulgently. "I promise." Dolan felt an almost uncontrollable urge to smash the smug smile with his fist. He bottled it up. This was no time to get excited. "OK," he said shortly. He stepped to the machine and carefully bent a wire just so, while Brown watched alertly. "Also," Brown said, "the notes." "Notes?" "Exactly. The notes you kept on the operation of the machine. Give them to me, please." Dolan shrugged. He had not really expected to keep the notes. "They're out in my briefcase," he said. Brown looked at Smith, who went out and returned in a moment with the briefcase. Dolan took out a folder and handed it to Brown. Brown riffled through the pages, nodded and tossed the folder on the pile of boxes. He studied Dolan speculatively. "The other notes, too, please," he said. "The secret notes." The man was guessing, of course. Dolan had not even mentioned the other notes to Moirta. "You've got all the notes I made," he said. Brown stepped forward and grasped his arm. "Walk!" he commanded. Dolan twisted to look at him, startled. "What -- ?" "The notes," Brown said coldly. "Walk." He gave a little shove, and Dolan found himself walking, with Brown holding his arm in a firm even grasp, a look of preoccupation on his face. "This way," Brown said. They went out the door. "The notes," Brown repeated insistently. "Keep walking, keep walking." They zigzagged rapidly across the yard, Brown still guiding Dolan by the arm, Smith coming behind with his hand in his pocket. Brown paused. "Here, I think," he said to Smith. "Look under that rock." Dolan watched in helpless rage as Smith dug the jar out and handed it to Brown. Was Brown a mind-reader, after all? How else -- ? Well, of course, he thought, muscular tension, the old 'mind-reading' trick. He should have caught on sooner; but Brown was good at it, no doubt about that. Brown smashed the jar against the rock and stuffed the notes in his pocket. They went back in to the time machine. Brown bent over the control box and studied it carefully. He examined the wire Dolan had adjusted. For the first time, there was a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. "Well," he said absently. "I suppose -- " he looked comprehensively around, checking the position of the cargo. "There is something -- " He punched the power button, moved his hand to start the machine. Dolan glanced at Moirta. She sat on one of the boxes on the far side of the machine, watching him. This was the time, now -- He stepped forward and opened his mouth to shout. He never did. Something went suddenly wrong. Brown flicked a thumb, Smith moved like lightning, and before Dolan realized what was happening, he found himself flat on his back, wondering numbly what had happened. Brown snapped a syllable at Moirta. She answered with a shrug and a word. He frowned momentarily and then his face lightened. "Ah," he said softly. "I think I see, now. You were going to shout to Moirta to run out of range of the machine, while you jumped in and activated it, isn't that so? Really, it would have done no good, we could still have returned, and besides Moirta -- " he frowned suddenly. "Oh could we have returned?" He bit delicately at his lower lip. "Moirta," he said. "Step a little closer to the machine, please." "Now," he turned back to Dolan, "I am going to push the buttons, with Moirta quite close to the machine. Are there any last-minute changes you wish to make?" Dolan hesitated, studying both Moirta's and the men's positions, and then nodded sullenly. "I thought there might be," Brown said with satisfaction. "Mr. Smith, help Mr. Dolan up to the machine." Dolan reached out unsteadily, leaning on Smith, and reversed two connections. "That's it," he mumbled. "Thank you, Mr. Dolan. Now, Mr. Smith, if you will just carry Mr. Dolan over there into the corner, well away from the machine, and immobilize him -- no, no, just temporarily. We may still need him again, Mr. Dolan is a very tricky sort of person." Dolan felt Smith's fingers touch his neck lightly, there was a sudden blazing pain, and that was all. He blanked out. that was that fingers were working gently at his neck, massaging it. His head was resting on something soft. He opened his eyes and saw that he was lying with his head pillowed on Moirta's lap. "George?" she said sharply. "Are you all right, George?" "I'm all right," he said. He raised his head and looked around. The machine was gone, and Smith and Brown were gone, and half the boxes were gone. The end ones in the little semicircle were broken, and from them a pile of brass cartridges had spilled through the hole in the floor where the others had been. "Wise jerks," he mumbled with grim satisfaction. "See how they like it now." Moirta stared at him. "What happened, George? I don't understand what happened." "I gimmicked the machine. That's what happened. Surprise, huh? I'll bet they were plenty surprised too." "But I thought -- " Dolan sat up and felt tenderly of his throat. He nodded. "I know," he said. "You thought they had me licked. So did they. That was just smoke-screen, a little diversion. I knew they could out-smart me if I tried to pull anything foxy, that's their trade. But they weren't really mind-readers, you told me that, and the business with the notes cinched it. "And they didn't think like technicians. They could see I might disable the machine, or booby-trap it ; but they couldn't see I could fix it so it would work, only just a little different. "All I had to do was to keep their minds on their own specialty, let them wear out their suspicion on the little foxy tricks they expected, so they wouldn't notice what I was really doing. See?" She shook her head. "No," she said. "I do not see. I suppose I'm stupid, too -- " "Not stupid. Just not technically minded. You understand, this machine works by setting up a field around itself, ordinarily that field's circular, it takes in everything in a certain radius. But it doesn't have to be, that's just because it's the easiest way, more convenient. So I just distorted the field a little, made it lopsided. Then I went through all that other business to keep their minds on me, keep them off your position, and make sure they both stayed over on my side." He smiled at her. "I told you, remember, in this time the villains always get it in the neck, the boy gets the girl, and they live happily ever after." She shook her head. "No," she said gently. "I'm sorry, for you and me there will not be any ever after. You forget the displacement effect." "Displacement effect?" "Yes," she said. "I am afraid I did not explain that fully to you, I thought it would only hurt you to do so. You understand, the past is really immutable, we only seem to change it. For the time that the time-translator exists at any given time in the past, a sort of enclave, a self-supporting bubble, is established which permits apparent changes. When the time translator returns to its normal existence in mv era, that bubble dissolves. I do not know, in terms of our present subjective time, just how long the displacement will hold, but when it vanishes we, you and I, will no longer exist." "But that would be a change in the past, in itself." "Not exactly. What I told you about forgetting was true, it was just not the whole truth. There will be, in my time, a Moirta who exists normally up to the time she is translated to the past. And there will be, in your time, a George Dolan who never met Mr. Brown or Miss Jones. But you and I, as we exist at this moment, will not have been." "I see," Dolan said. "It's too bad I didn't know about this sooner. I think we still may have a chance, though. You see, I had to worry about the possibility that Smith and Brown might think it worth while to come back after you. So I changed the switches, too. The time translator isn't going into the future, it's gone into the past, and then it's fixed to burn out again, a long way in the past, where there aren't any electronics technicians, no people at all. How about that?" "The past? I don't know," she said doubtfully. I am not a temporal technician, I know only about the displacement effect as it operates in our usual translations. Perhaps, in that case, the bubble might continue to exist, as a sort of permanent side-track. I really don't know." She laughed suddenly, as the full implications of what he had said struck her. "The past? Oh, poor Smith. And poor Brown. A long way in the past, where there are no people at all, just dinosaurs and snakes -- and they hate such things so." She laughed helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks. "And poor George, and poor Moirta. All with their clever little plans, their tricks to outsmart each other. Everyone has outsmarted everyone else, and we all lose now, don't we?" Dolan stared at her narrowly. "We all lose?" She nodded -- been quite confident of victory. It took him a rather long moment to assimilate the fact of defeat; but in that moment he did assimilate it, as fully and completely as he took in the implications of any other situation. He examined the wreckage of the time translator curiously, tried and failed to make sense of the erratic pattern in which their cargo had accompanied them, the absence of Moirta. He straightened and looked about. There were no dinosaurs, the range of the time machine did not extend that far; but over on a ledge of rock a large cat with hyper-trophied eyeteeth squatted, switching its stub of a tail, startled by their sudden appearance. He sighed and turned toward the other gun runner. "Old, old, time," he said. He nodded toward the cat. "Bad for us. No chance rescue. Supplies short." The other said nothing, watching him narrowly, hand in back pocket. Down in the valley below, something trumpeted, a hoarse grunting roar. The senior gun runner started nervously. It was getting dark. He held out his hand. "Older first," he said simply. The younger man laid the gun in his hand; and the senior gun runner, without hesitation or farewell, raised it to his head and pulled the trigger. " -- yes, everyone," Moirta said. She wiped at her eyes. "I'm sorry, George. I will die very quickly in this time, whether the displacement operates or not." "But you said -- !" "I know. I was so sure there was nothing you could do, and I said what I thought would make you happy. And I did want to stay with you, in a way, even though I knew it would kill me... and in another way, I wanted to go back, to return to my own time, and you were my means to that... oh, it's so mixed up, really, it is funny, everyone so sure of themselves, and now... this..." Dolan shook his head helplessly. "I never thought. You seemed so... so..." "So human?" her lips curled wryly. "I was made to seem human, twentieth-century human, it was part of my job. I'm not. And soon, I shall not even seem human, without the things I need -- things that won't even be invented for ten thousand years -- cancer inhibitors, blood clotting agents, insulin surrogate, vaccines, serums, antibiotics -- why, I can't even eat your food!" She shook her head sadly. "You had better just leave me, it will not be nice, you will not like me at all." And yet, even with the game played out, she could not forget her trade, her specialty, for it was bred into her as deeply as the tendency to leukemia, the hemophilia, the (Continued on page #) What Is Your Science I. Q.? things astronomical and other similar items you run across all the time in science fiction. How well do you know them? Counting five for each correct answer, you should score #. Anything over # and you're a whizz. See page # for the answers. #. Who is given credit for the discovery of Uranus? #. Alnilam, Alnitak, Min taka are in the constellation . #. Sirius is the brightest star in our heavens and is light years away. #. Which of the two moons of Mars goes around that planet in # hours? #. The instrument used for measuring the sun's heat and energy is called a #. Who first coined the word robot? #. Magnitude refers to the brightness of a star. The brighter the star the its magnitude. #. Venus and are known as the inferior or inner planets. #. Thuban was once the North star; Polaris is the North star today. Which star will be the North star about twelve thousand years from now? #. The "cool" stars are yellowish; the "coolest" are . #. How thick are the rings of Saturn thought to be? #. The idea that the growth of planets is attained by the aggregation of small solid meteoric bodies revolving around a gaseous nucleus is called the hypothesis. #. What is the name of the most recently detected moon of Uranus? #. When a planet crosses in front of the sun as viewed from Earth it is called a #. The three outer moons of Jupiter are noted as the only satellites that go around a planet #. Bode's Law was based on the regular of the planets. #. Supergiant stars which are yellow in color and are variables are called #. Those objects in the heavens which are not stars are usually designated as M# or M# etc. What does the M stand for? #. The faintest stars still visible to the naked eye are usually of the magnitude. #. The great tongues of incandescent hydrogen which spurt outward from the sun are called It's much easier to believe than disbelieve, whether it's a truth or an untruth, when you have to. And when the brain and body are weak... A Cold Night for Crying clouds of white confetti in the glare of the street lamps, mantling softly from laden, wind-stirred branches, drifting with the wind and embanking the scars and stumps of buildings that remained of what had been the city. Mr. Friedlander trudged across the wide, quiet avenues, his bare, balding head burrowed low in his tattered collar for warmth, chin against chest, wet feet numb and stinging with cold inside his torn overshoes which could not be replaced until next winter, and then only if the Karadi did not decrease the clothing ration still further. All the way home, he conjured fantasies from the white, multishaped exhalations of his breath. Here it was the smoke of a good Havana-rolled cigar and there the warm hissing steam from a radiator valve and later the magic-carpet clouds from the funnel of an ocean liner that might take him to far, warm places the Karadi had not reached. Almost, he thought he heard the great sonorous drone of the ship's whistle, but it was the toot of an automobile horn as the sleek vehicle came skidding around a corner, almost running down Mr. Friedlander before it disappeared in the swirling flurries of snow. He thought if he followed the tire tracks before the snow could cover them he would discover in which section of the city these particular Karadi lived, but he shook his fist instead, knowing the gesture would bring, at worst, a reprimand. In the dim hallway of his tenement, smelling pungently of cabbage and turnips -- and from somewhere way in back the faint, unmistakable aroma of beef -- Mr. Friedlander shook the snow from his coat and stamped his numb feet before he climbed the three dark flights to his apartment. At each landing he would pause and look with longing and resentment at the door of the unused elevator shaft, then shrug and wonder why the Karadi had denied man even this simple luxury. On the floor below his own, Mr. Friedlander heard the unmistakable crackling sound of a shortwave radio receiver. The fools! He wasn't going to talk, he lost no love on the Karadi. But there were others. There were neighbors, friends, brothers, even wives, there were the obvious quislings you shunned and the less obvious ones you didn't suspect until it was too late. One thing you never did was listen to the short-wave radio so defiantly its crackling could be heard not merely on the other side of the door but all the way out on the landing. The punishment was death. Mr. Friedlander paused in front of his own door, where the odor of strong yellow turnips assailed his nostrils. It was so unsatisfyingly familiar, he almost gagged. The new generation hardly remembered the delightful old foods, but if Mr. Friedlander shut his eyes and thought, he could clearly smell steak and roast chicken and broiled lobster swimming in butter and a dry red wine to wash everything down slowly, so slowly he could taste every tiny morsel. He pushed open the door and began to shrug off his worn coat. "I'm home," he said to the scabby walls, the gas range which had been converted to wood when the Karadi suspended all public utilities, to the bubbling pot which exuded the turnip smell, to the drab sofa, the two wooden chairs, the table he had constructed from two old saw horses and the planking he had found long ago after the Fourteenth Street Bomb. From the small bedroom, he heard sobbing. red-rimmed eyes at him and squeezed his hand, wringing it as if it had been a wet rag. She was forty-four years old, six years younger than Mr. Friedlander, with a face which once had been comely but now was lined, gaunt and bigpored. She was even thinner than Mr. Friedlander, but looked shapeless in her thick woolen sweater and the baggy work trousers he had stolen from the quartermaster store of the plant where he worked. "Try to tell me, Martha," he aid. "It's good to talk." She looked at him mutely, opening her mouth to talk but swallowing instead. "You tell me, Martha. There now." She managed to get the words out. "It's Freddie." Mr. Friedlander placed a tired arm about her shoulder. The feeling had started in the pit of his stomach, like when their son George had died of pneumonia two years ago this month. The Karadi had outlawed all wonder drugs, all hospitals, all medical schools. Helpless, they had watched George die, his big child eyes not understanding, asking for help. Mr. Friedlander always wondered if he had died hating them. "People die and you see them. You know," Mrs. Friedlander said. "They are sick and you can't do anything but try to nurse them, anyway. Or the big Karadi cars run them down and you see the broken body. You see them. Alive. Then dead. It's hard, so hard you want to stop living too, but there's God and God shows you they are dead and you have the memories, all the sweet ones. You know they're dead because you see them dying. You can forget. In time, you forget. You have to forget because otherwise you don't want to live, but you... hold me. Hold me tight." Mr. Friedlander patted her hair awkwardly. The Karadi not only condoned but encouraged displays of simple emotion and for that reason Mr. Friedlander tried to avoid them. "What are you trying to tell me?" he asked. "Freddie. Freddie. His plane was shot down over the mountains, they told me. Freddie is dead. Freddie." Mr. Friedlander stopped patting his wife's hair, stopped stroking the tangles into a smooth glossiness. He bent down and carefully unbuckled his torn overshoes, placing them carefully in a corner of the room. Then he walked to the window and stared out at the snow sparkling in wind-blown puffs under the street lamp which remained only because the Karadi liked to drive their confiscated autos at night. "What are you saying?" he asked his wife. "Just because they tell us Freddie is dead -- " "Stop it. Don't say that." "Freddie is dead. Because they tell us, that's no reason to believe. How can we believe? We saw Freddie alive, but now they tell us Freddie is dead. Far away, two thousand miles. Over the mountains. Did we see him die? He's dead. Oh, he's dead. But we'll never learn to live with it. Don't you see? How can we believe? How can we know? We saw him alive. Now he's dead." Freddie was flying a Karadi plane against the last strongholds of free man in the Rocky Mountains. Not because Freddie had wanted to pilot the dart-swift craft particularly, but because they had made him. The Karadi announced their own human losses readily, almost as if they took great pleasure in the impressive figures. "They told you this?" Mr. Friedlander asked. "That Freddie's plane was shot down. That he is assumed dead." "You saw nothing in writing?" "They sent a man." "You knew him?" "No. He wore good clothing. He drove up in a sleek Karadi car." "Quisling." "Freddie died a hero's death, he said. Against the rebels." "Rebels? Trying to preserve their own freedom? Freedom which we lost because the bombed cities couldn't survive?" "I only know what the man told me, but how can we how... all my life, always, forever, I will be praying and waiting for Freddie to walk in, right behind you, through that door. We never saw him die. They should at least send something. Some proof. Anything to make me understand he is dead." Mr. Friedlander had been thinking the same thing. If you loved someone, your son, all his life and then a stranger came and said he was dead you could forget the stranger came and go on thinking of that someone, your son, alive and not dead, but too busy to come and see you, eating the food you could only dream about, sleeping in a warm bed, in some clean place far away. Only it was like the cat he once had read about. You took the cat and gave it food, catnip, but every time it ate you also fed it electricity, a shock. It wanted to eat but it was afraid of the electricity, the shock. It starved to death screeching from hunger in a room full of food. If that was what the Karadi wanted, he would say Freddie was dead. He would believe and laugh everytime he saw them because they thought he was screeching from hunger in a room full of food. "Stop it," Mr. Friedlander told his wife. "You stop that. If they say so, then Freddie is dead. We must put an announcement in the Karadi newspaper and make plans for a funeral." "In all this snow? It's so cold." "Anyway." Mrs. Friedlander walked to the stove and stirred the bubblying turnip water. "You come and eat your supper," she said. "We'll talk about Freddie later." "There's nothing to talk about. Only the funeral." "Maybe he was lying. The stran# ) ger. "Stop; that. It's what they want. They want us to be animals. They want us never to know. Always doubting. Always clean in dirty places, working hard, using all our energy to be only a little better than animals. Every time you see a Karadi, you won't hate him. You'll think maybe he's going to tell you some good news about Freddie. It was all a mistake. They want that, too. They feed on our sorrow and despair and confusion. There is a word for them and their invasion and why they are here. They don't need us, our resources. They feed on what we feel. They are a -- a sadistic fungi." "Fred! Eat your supper and you'll feel better. You must be half frozen." "It's warmer in here." Mrs. Friedlander shivered, although she stood near the stove. "It's still cold. I hope it's warm where Freddie is." He slapped her and was glad when she cried, then sorry, then glad again when she came into his arms, sobbing. They would make funeral arrangements in the morning. After supper a man from the Karadi newspaper visited them. He wore a new overcoat and shining plastic overshoes and a bright scarf of red wool around his neck. His face was plump, his cheeks rosy, his well-groomed hair smelling of some expensive perfume when he removed hat and earlaps. "Mr. and Mrs. Friedlander," he said, his voice like the dimly remembered taste of pure maple syrup, "I bring you the heartfelt sympathies of the Karadi Newspaper. If it is any consolation, know that your son, Freddie Friedlander, Jr., died a hero's death against the barbarians of the mountains." His nose was running with the cold; he padded it daintily with a pale blue silk handkerchief. He offered Mr. Friedlander a small, dry-crackling cigar, took one himself and touched flame to them with a monogramed lighter. Mr. Friedlander inhaled gratefully, allowing the unfamiliar smoke to sear his lungs painfully before he exhaled a long blue plume at the ceiling. For Mrs. Friedlander the man from the Karadi Newspaper had a small box of candy, the chocolate frozen over with powdery white but, by the expression on Mrs. Friedlander's face, succulent nevertheless. "At times like this," the man from the Karadi Newspaper said after he had politely refused what was left of the yellow turnip mash, "it is customary to place an ad in the newspaper in memory of the departed. The cost, in such cases, is quite reasonable -- benevolent, you might say. Seven days of overtime for Mr. Friedlander." "But," said Mrs. Friedlander, "if we place the announcement in the Karadi Newspaper, don't you see? We are admitting Freddie is dead." The man from the Karadi Newspaper cocked an eyebrow in practiced surprise. "He is quite dead, Mrs. Friedlander." "What my wife means is that, well, we didn't see him die." "Then you don't believe the Karadi?" "That's not it at all," said Mr. Friedlander. "If Freddie is dead, it is unhealthy not to believe. We want to believe. We find it difficult." "I understand," the man said. "I would suggest a large ad in that case. Two weeks overtime, Mr. Friedlander. Write it yourself. Don't use any of the forms. Write it from your heart, from what you feel deep inside." "I suppose that is best," Mr. Friedlander admitted, secretly amazed at his own objective reaction to his son's passing. The sorrow would come later, he told himself. The grief, when it came, would be good. It would wash them clean so they could live again. Even at the funeral. He guessed, they would walk slowly with measured tread and be sad, but they would expect Freddie to join them in their sadness, as if it were a funeral but not his funeral at all. Mr. Friedlander was about to tell this to the man from the Karadi Newspaper because he thought it was a great truth and he had discovered it, when there was a knock on the door. It was Mr. Davidson from downstairs on the second floor, a small old man, just bones and clothing and a high voice, who lived alone in the apartment where his wife had died four years before of old age. It was said the Karadi wanted old men like Mr. Davidson to go on living because they were unproductive and had to be cared for by younger people who could hardly make ends meet, thus lowering the standard of living. Everyone in the tenament took turns inviting Mr. Davidson in for dinner. "Beautiful snow, isn't it?" Mr. Davidson demanded, puckering his dry lips in a toothless grin. "Have you heard about Freddie? Have you heard the news?" He seemed spitefully cheerful, Mr. Friedlander thought. Happy because he had outlived a man two generations his junior? If, indeed, it was such a case of sadistic glee -- so like the Karadi themselves -- Mr. Friedlander made a mental note to stop inviting the old man to share their dinner. "Yes, sir, great news," chirped Mr. Davidson. Then: "Who's your friend?" "He's from the Karadi Newspaper," Mrs. Friedlander explained. "Here to see about placing an announcement in the paper. "Damned quisling," spat Mr. Davidson. The old folks certainly had privileges. That remark would mean a month of overtime for Mr. Friedlander, who turned earthenware kitchen pots on an archaic wheel. All it earned Mr. Davidson was a scowl from the man from the Karadi Newspaper. "What great news are you talking about?" the man wanted to know. "Great news? Who said anything about great news? Why don't you mind your own business, anyway?" "You said it, old man. Great news, you said. I want to know." "Maybe I did and maybe I didn't." "You did." "Don't always remember. Just what were we talking about? Freddie Friedlander, wasn't it?" "Yes." "Like I said, great news. We all don't get to die a hero's death. No, sir. Lookit me, now. Die in bed one of these nights, just like that." Claw-like fingers snapped and made a singularly dry sound. "Who'll care? Who'll know until I don't show up for dinner one night? Great news. Great thing to die a hero's death, I always say." The man from the Karadi Newspaper smiled. "I certainly misunderstood you, old timer. I like your attitude. If the boy is dead, let's look at the bright side of the picture." All at once, Mrs. Friedlander wailed Freddie's name and cupped her face in coarse, work-hardened hands. "Freddie's dead," she sobbed. "Dead, dead, dead... Mr. Friedlander gulped and turned away. If he touched her now he would break down too. He plopped a fork in the turnip mash and made little tracks with the tines, criss-crossing them like the tracks in the deserted railroad yards down by the river. "You see," the man from the Karadi Newspaper said, "that's exactly what I said. The announcement is good for you. Let other people know about Freddie and you'll be able to live with your terrible loss. This man has been very helpful." "Please," Mr. Friedlander told him. "Not now." "But now is exactly the time." The man explored through his pockets and found an announcement blank for Mr. Friedlander, a stiff yellow sheet of paper folded over crisply three times, with words printed in upper case letters and many blank lines to be filled in. Mr. Friedlander read it, handed it back to the man from the Karadi Newspaper, who then asked questions and filled in the blanks with a precise hand as Mr. Friedlander answered him. The man stood up, giving Mr. Friedlander another small cigar and giving two of them to Mr. Davidson. "Karadi blessings on you," he said. "You'll be notified at work about your overtime, Mr. Friedlander." "When will we see it in the newspaper?" "Tomorrow. Afternoon edition. Karadi blessings." The man was gone. "Go ahead and cry. It will do you good. Cry all you want." "Young jackass," muttered Mr. Davidson. "Thought he'd never leave. And don't you cry, young lady. Laugh. Sing. Jump for joy. I couldn't tell you the great news about Freddie while that man was here." "We heard about Freddie," Mr. Friedlander said in a chill voice. "Will you please go downstairs?" "You heard baloney, or you wouldn't be talking like that. Freddie ain't dead." "What did you say?" Mr. Friedlander stood perfectly still, in the center of the room, his back to the stove, trying to peer through the window which by now had frosted over. Mrs. Friedlander had stopped her crying, hands clasped in front of her, below her waist, in an obsequious Oriental pose which the Karadi promoted. "I said Freddie ain't dead." "What are you talking about?" "Heard it on the short-wave, by God. Wouldn't kid about a thing like this. I came busting in here to tell you, only that quisling was here and I had to wait." "You mean it's you who owns the short-wave set downstairs?" demanded Mr. Friedlander. "I never stopped on the landing. I always ran upstairs. You see, I didn't want to know who owned the shortwave, who listened to the -- " "The free radio, other side of the Rockies? Go ahead, say it. Listen to me, Mr. Friedlander. Those Karadi ain't here to stay. If you stopped to think of it a minute, you'd understand like the rest of us." "The rest of you?" "Well, a lot of us, anyway. They don't need us. We have nothing they want. They enjoy making us knuckle under, is all. Something in their makeup, I don't know what. They won't stay here forever, though some of us won't be around long enough to see them #  go. "What's all that got to do with... ?" "With Freddie and the shortwave? He's been captured, Mr. Friedlander! By the free folk. He's on their side now, the side all of us want to be on but can't be. He's alive, you understand?" "You wouldn't just be saying this? You're sure?" "Wouldn't you trust the word of your own people, the people who saw him come down by parachute, who took him in, got his name and beamed it back here so you, his folks, wouldn't have to worry none? Well, wouldn't you?" "Yes!" Mrs. Friedlander cried in a tremulous voice. "Oh, yes..." "Sensible girl," said Mr. Davidson. Walking to the window and wiping away a circle of frost with his hand, Mr. Friedlander felt a spring in his step he hadn't felt for twenty years, since the day the Karadi came swooping down from space and caught the world in a tired Freddie was alive -- and safe. Freddie was free. He must tell everyone. He must shout it now, to all the neighbors, and shout it again at work tomorrow, and withdraw his announcement from the Karadi Newspaper and a hundred other things. He lifted the warped window, with cardboard replacing two of the shattered panes, and breathed in the crisp, cold night air. "I'll visit the newspaper in the morning," he said. "Tell them to forget all about the announcement." He turned around and faced his wife and Mr. Davidson. "What are you crying for? Stop crying." "I'm so happy, Fred." "Maybe I can get down to the newspaper now and see their night man." "Hold on there," Mr. Davidson said. "Are you crazy or something, young feller? Want to fit the noose around my neck yourself? Not just me, but all the others. Think I'm the only one? There's Mr. and Mrs. Peters, and the Schwartz's, the McDonalds, the Kopaks. You're just slow catching on, that's all." "You mean they all have shortwaves, all those people?" "That's exactly what I mean. We have to find freedom our own way. Oh, we conform. We cry when we're supposed to, and laugh. But at night we listen to the radio and learn some of the truth, so that when the Karadi get bored with us and decide to leave, we can take our places in a free world. Took me two years to build that short-wave out of spare parts, but it was worth every minute." "What do you do when they come around hunting?" Mr. Friedlander asked. "Hide it, of course. Son, you're afraid of your own shadow." "I am not. I just didn't know." "For a time we were worried about you. Thought maybe you was a quisling. Now I had to take the chance. I just had to tell you. Listen, here's the thing. Here's what we'll do. We'll let the announcement stick in the paper. Got to make them think we believe. Then we'll have ourselves a real solemn funeral out to the graveyard near #nd Street. Know a preacher who'll wring every last tear out of all of us. I mean all. We'll all go. The Kopaks, the Schwartz's, the Peters, everyone who heard in on the short-wave about Freddie and how he's alive and everything. The sadder we look, the happier we'll feel, later on. Then we'll have ourselves a real old fashioned celebration, like before the Karadi came. Mr. McDonald says he has a bottle of real champagne he was saving for when his girl Betty got married, but I talked him into letting us use it. Son, we'll pull out all the stops. Of course, you can't really get looped on an ounce or so of champagne, but we sure can try! Well, see you at the funeral." And Mr. Davidson went downstairs, cackling and whistling the dirge from Beethoven's Eroica. "Well," said Mr. Friedlander to his wife, "what do you think?" "I think it's wonderful. That nice man, going to all that trouble." "I'm not so sure. What do we know about Mr. Davidson? Maybe he's lying. Maybe he's -- " "He wouldn't lie, not about a thing like that." "I know how you feel. I felt that way at first, too. Free and -- well, relaxed for the first time in so long I can't remember. But then I got to thinking. What if he's senile? What if he imagined the whole thing? It would be a sin to celebrate, with Freddie dead." "We could ask Mr. Peters, or the others. And Freddie's not dead!" "That's what you want to believe. It's what I want to believe, too." Mr. Friedlander walked to the window again, where the pane was frosting over once more, giving a ghostlike quality to the street, the lamps, the facades of the other tenaments, the snow-laden trees outside. He wanted to believe. But he had wanted to believe, in his one day end. When it did, the Karadi had come, with talk of peace -- although with their invincible weapons they had disarmed all the world's armies and, instead of rebuilding, had made a shambles of our civilization. Every day the Karadi told lies and told you to believe. And planted spies to see that you did. And visited you at unexpected moments to see that you conformed. And trained your children to fight against free people, free people who they said were your enemies. And gave extra clothing rations to a spy, to a believer, to a man in the Karadi image. "We can't ask the others," Mr. Friedlander said. "What if Mr. Davidson was lying, or making it all up? You can't go around talking about short-waves and things. It isn't safe." "We have to know!" "Do you want to be turned in as an undesirable? Is that what you want? We already know. The Karadi told us." The more he spoke, the easier it was to convince himself. You couldn't live with doubt. The Karadi fostered doubt and taught you that: you had to avoid it. You had to know. This is so, this is not so -- if this other thing may or may not be so, I don't want to talk about it. Alternative A or alternative B. Simple. Concise. What did old Mr. Davidson know, anyway, listening to his subversive radio? Why should the barbarians in the mountains tell the truth any more than the Karadi or their agents? The barbarians are our enemies. It's propaganda. Maybe Mr. Davidson is a saboteur for them. "Is that clear?" Mr. Friedlander demanded. "Is that quite, quite clear? Cry if you want. Freddie is dead. Freddie is dead. Dead. You can't believe all the wild stories you hear." Mrs. Friedlander was smiling at him through her tears, wiping them away, assuming again the Oriental pose. "You believe what you want," she said. "We won't celebrate. We won't pretend. We'll say Freddie is dead. But I'll believe -- what I believe. And I'm thankful to Mr. Davidson." "So you can live in doubt all the rest of your life? For that you're thankful?" "I'm thankful for a crumb when I expected nothing. Where are you going?" Mr. Friedlander was buckling his worn overcoat and forcing his shoes into wet overshoes. "Out for a walk," he said. "I want to think." "It's a cold night." "I don't care." falling, drifting down in unhurried silence, he found himself hating Mr. Davidson. The man should have minded his own business. Old meddler. He was a menace to the community, too. Whose side was he on, anyway? A senile old man? An agent provocateur for the barbarians in the western mountains? Was his self-appointed mission in life to see to it that people like poor Mrs. Friedlander never knew another moment of peace all the rest of their lives? The short-wave radio -- all lies. It had to be lies. If it weren't lies you could understand nothing. Black is white or white is black. Everyone saying something else. You don't know. You never know. He didn't want to start any trouble. He wasn't looking for trouble. He was only a good, Karadi-fearing citizen who knew his place. But Mr., Davidson had made a revelation to him. If all the others, if all those people Mr. Davidson had named, chuckling over each name, taking secret delight in each one as if he, the patriarch of the tenament had converted them, one at a time or in groups, into clandestine outlaws, if all those people were subversive, thought Mr. Friedlander, why should he suffer along with them? Was it fair that he received the same inadequate food, the same squalid lodging, the same menial jobs to perform? He knew his place. But they had told him about Freddie -- or Mr. Davidson, their spokesman, had -- and he owed them something for that, for the one brief moment in which they had shoved back the snow, the grim cold winter, the bleak building and the smell of turnips, as a curtain, and revealed his own youth to him, sparkling with hope, with promise, with a life unfulfilled. No! Even that had been unkind. Premeditated? His lot would be all the more unpleasant for it. And Mrs. Friedlander's. They'd sealed her in a half-mourning, half-hoping future. They'd ruined her whole life. He'd have to move, of course, with his wife. But perhaps they'd earn the right to a better neighborhood. He walked up the six snowcovered steps to the police station, went inside, sat down and started telling the uniformed figure at the desk about the subversives in his building who owned short-wave radios, starting with Mr. Davidson and going right on down the list. He hoped the Karadi would come and take them away before the funeral.     -- I'll join 'em. Why -- why die a martyr's death?" Of course, Jay told himself. Logical. But Kevin had been so convinced. So utterly sure. Now he looked and sounded like a disillusioned old man. "Kevin, I'm not trying to rub it in. But -- " "I know what you're going to say. I was so sure. Paradise. I was a firm disciple. Convinced. I believed in all of it. I -- thought it would last forever. The perfect government. A permanently workable government." Jay sat quietly. Ilaria reached for the switch. "For God's sake," came the voice of #, "what is the perfect workable government?" Ilaria closed the switch and the light blinded Jay. He felt as if someone had slugged him in the stomach. Slowly the machine prepared to send him back one-hundred years. It warmed up like a jet on a runway. The light faded and Jay opened his eyes. The building rocked. There was a terrific explosion and part of the steel wall buckled. Somewhere a woman screamed. A squadron of fighters hurtled past, spitting fire and death. A bomber fell, exploding as it crashed into a tall apartment building. Jay's stomach twisted and he knew he was on his way. Ilaria took his gun from his holster and calmly placed its ugly snout against his own face. "... the perfect workable govvemment?" Jay's question of a moment ago reached his ears as he began to slip back, minute by minute, picking up momentum. Ilaria's reply came dimly. "There is none."    There are human beings who junction "like machines" and there are machines which seem to be "almost human". So -- the problem in this case was not murder, or who committed it but who was the "machine" and who was the "human being". Smith became Isobel Smith d'Larte. On November #, # Isobel Smith d'Larte gave birth to a boy-child who died. And on March #, # Isobel Smith d'Larte was placed on trial for the willful and premeditated murder of her husband Arnaud d'Larte. "Not Isobel," said her friends. "Not Isobel. Too mousey. So quiet. Surely it wasn't Isobel." "But it's the quiet type you've got to watch out for," said others. "Probably has a lover somewhere. She was younger than her husband you know. Much younger. Too much younger."  "Killed him for his money' said the people on the street. "Read where she likes art and museums, stuff like that. Must be a queer one that Isobel d'Larte." The accusations piled high against Isobel, but she said nothing. She sat in court, a tiny figure in black saying nothing, seemingly not even listening to the accusations of the Prosecutor. "We will prove willful and premeditated murder," the Prosecutor thundered. "Easily done," an old woman in the audience murmured spitefully. "Young wife, old husband. Rich husband. Murder! Easily proved." "First witness," the Prosecutor called. "Sergeant Melot." Sergeant Melot took the stand. The witness chair creaked under his weight. He answered a loud, "I do," when the clerk swore him in. "Tell us about finding the body," the Prosecutor said. "Miss no details." "A Mrs. Watson, servant of Arnaud d'Larte, called us at nine five P.M. on March #. Her master was dead, she said. When we answered her call we found Mr. d'Larte's body in his bedroom. He had been dead for about an hour." "The cause?" "Beaten to death. Beaten with an iron statue of Venus. Evidence of a struggle. Twenty wounds on his head." "Twenty wounds, Sergeant Melot?" "Twenty. The first, or second, would have been enough to kill him. But there were twenty." The audience gasped and the Prosecutor smiled. "And where was Mrs. d'Larte?" he asked. "Locked in her bedroom. Had to break the door down to get to her." "Did you speak to her?" "We spoke to her, but she didn't speak to us." The audience laughed and the judge rapped for silence. "The iron statue of Venus, the one found near Mr. d'Larte's body, you found fingerprints on it, did you not?" Sergeant Melot nodded. "Whose fingerprints were they, Sergeant Melot?" "Mrs. d'Larte's." "Your witness," the Prosecutor told the Defense. "No questions," said the Defense. "Why ask questions," a spectator commented. "She's guilty." "Next witness." "Mrs. Abby Watson to the stand please." Abby Watson strode to the witness chair. Her shrew-like eyes flicked sharply towards Isobel d'Larte then away. Her answer to the clerk who swore her in was sharp and positive. "How long have you worked for Mr. d'Larte?" the Prosecutor asked. "Fifteen years." "In your opinion Mr. d'Larte was a good employer?" "The best. A wonderful man, but a lonely one. That woman tricked him into marriage. Played on his loneliness." "Objection." "Objection sustained. Confine yourself to the questions please." "Mr. d'Larte was older than his wife?" the Prosecutor asked. "Eighteen years older." "Was it a happy marriage?" "At first, at least on his part. He was contented, but she seemed restless. Always wanted to go to museums and see paintings, or playing her silly antique records all day. Not content with the government 'Do-It-Yourself' kits. Called them mechanical and expressionless. She insulted Mr. d'Larte's friends time and again. Called them frauds. Said their paintings, books and plays were terrible. Said that real talent was dead. "You said she spent a lot of time in museums?" "I didn't say it, but she did. Every chance she got. She'd be gone for hours." "Which museum? The one commemorating the wars? The Museum of Mechanics?" "None of those. She'd go to the old one on the hill. That horrible thing with the relics of the past in it. The one run by the robots. The one run by the government to remind us of the past when only a few were allowed talent and not everybody like today. But I think she went to the museum for another reason. No one could really be interested in those things they have there." "What do you think she went for, Mrs. Watson?" "To meet her lover. Shortly before he was killed Mr. d'Larte confessed to me that he was of the same opinion." "See, I told you she had a lover," someone whispered. "Old husband, young wife. I just knew there was a lover." "Objection," said the Defense. "There is no proof that Mrs. d'Larte went to the museum to meet a lover. There are only opinions, guesses." "If your honor will permit me to call my next witness I think I can prove that there was a lover," the Prosecutor said. The judge leaned forward in eager anticipation. "Call your witness." "Bella Whychek." A fat, dumpy, flame-haired woman made her way to the witness stand. As she was sworn in she tugged self-consciously at her too tight girdle. "Miss Whychek -- " "Mrs... I'm a widow." "Mrs. Whychek, would you tell us where you are employed." "Timon's and Sons. I'm a secretary there." "And where is your office located." "In the building just across the street from the Museum of the Past -- the one you were just talking about to that other woman." "Mrs. Whychek, do you recognize the woman sitting over there?" the Prosecutor asked as he pointed to Isobel d'Larte. "Indeed I do. I saw her most everyday." "Would you tell us the circumstances." "Well, from the window in my office I have a very good view of the park that is next to the museum. About a month ago I began noticing that woman in the park. I couldn't help but notice her, she came so often." "Alone, Mrs. Whychek?" "At first yes. She'd go into the museum, stay about two hours or so, then come out and sit in the park. She never did anything but sit." "Was she always alone?" "I was just coming to that. After about a week I noticed that a man would come and sit with her in the park." "Could you describe the man?" "No, I'm afraid I couldn't. He always wore a long overcoat and a hat pulled down over his face. Both the overcoat and the hat were very old though. I did notice that. They looked like they might have dated from around #." "And what did this man and Mrs. d'Larte do in the park?" "Just sat. Talked I guess. I never saw them kiss or anything if that's what you mean. Of course many times they would still be sitting there when I left work. What they did after that I don't know." "But Mrs. d'Larte definitely did meet a man in the park." "Oh, yes. She met him nearly every day for almost a month." "Thank you. Your witness." The Defense rose slowly and walked over to where Mrs. Whychek sat. "Remember you are under oath, Mrs. Whychek," he said. "You say Mrs. d'Larte and this man merely sat and talked?" "As far as I could tell that's all they did. Of course I didn't watch them every minute." "Then you can say that they never did anything out of the way, that their meetings, if they were that, were innocent?" "As far as I could tell they were." "Could you say whether the meetings were prearranged?" "I really couldn't, but -- " "That will be all, thank you," the Defense interrupted. So the first day of the trial went. There seemed no doubt that Isobel d'Larte was guilty. Her friends admitted loudly that poor Isobel had scandalized them to the core. The papers labeled Isobel queer and hinted that her lover, whoever he might be, killed Mr. d'Larte for her. Old fashioned Isobel, they called her. Some had other names for her. trial the Defense called its witnesses. There were only three. Two were character witnesses who hesitantly assured the court that Isobel d'Larte could not have killed her husband. She really was a good woman. The third witness was Isobel herself. When she was called she rose very slowly and walked to the witness stand. She was sworn in and seated herself in the witness chair. Her face and hands were chalk white against the blackness of her dress. "Mrs. d'Larte, did you kill your husband?" the Defense asked. "No." "Do you know who did kill your husband?" "No." "Why did you lock yourself in your bedroom the night he was killed." "I wanted to be alone." The spectators giggled. "Could you explain how your fingerprints came to be on the iron statue of Venus? The statue that killed your husband." "It was my statue. It is quite possible that my fingerprints would be on it." "And you heard nothing, no sounds of struggle, the night your husband was killed?" "No. I slept awhile that night. I was tired so I locked my door and slept. I heard nothing." "Do you know who would want to kill your husband?" "An enemy I suppose." "Did your husband have any enemies?" "Of course, everyone does. Even God has enemies." That shocked the spectators, but then Isobel had meant it to. Quite suddenly she found herself hating those in the packed court room. Hating these upright citizens who had come to delight in her misfortune. Who sat in smug holierthan-thou attitudes and hoped for the worst. Not one among them really cared what happened to her -- as long as it entertained them. Isobel shivered. "Could you be more specific about your husband's enemies?" the Defense asked. "No. He never confided in me. He was only interested in his munitions factories. In machines. He loved machines. He particularly loved destructive machines. Some hated him for that." "The man Mrs. Whychek said you met in the park. Was there such a man?" Isobel twisted her handkerchief. It was a thin, white snake in her hands. "Was there a man, Mrs. d'Larte?" the Defense repeated. "There was a man." "Could you tell us his name?" "I do not know his name. He was a man I met in the park. He was a kind and gentle man. We talked about art, music -- the beautiful old art and music. He was well informed about such things. We talked a lot, but I don't know his name. We just talked." "Were you in love with this man, or he with you?" "No! No!" "You definitely were not lovers?" "We were not!" "Thank you, Mrs. d'Larte. Your witness." The Prosecutor approached the witness stand. "Mrs. d'Larte, you do not like the 'Do-It-Yourself' kits the government has put out, do you?" "I do not." "You do not approve or recognize the fact that today everyone is conceded to have talent, do you?" "I do not." "Why, Mrs. d'Larte?" "Anyone can paint, but everyone isn't an artist. Anyone can write, but everyone isn't an author. Anyone can do anything, but everyone does not have talent." "So you spent a great deal of your time in the Museum of the Past looking at the so-called art treasures there?" "Yes. They were worth looking at." "And you did not use that to cover up the fact that you met your lover at the museum?" "I do not have a lover." "The man you met in the park, you just talked to him?" "We talked about the wonderful, the beautiful things in the museum. He knew about them and loved them as I did. There was no one else I could talk to about them." "Naturally," the Prosecutor sneered. "Everyone else knows what frauds they are." The spectators laughed. "Then I like the frauds," Isobel said quietly. "You claim you were in your bedroom with the door locked and asleep when Mr. d'Larte was killed. Is that right?" "That is right." "And even though your bedroom is right next to Mr. d'Larte's you heard nothing. Is that right?" "Yes." "Your husband struggled, struggled hard before he died, Mrs. d'Larte. You'll forgive me if I seem skeptical of the fact that you heard nothing." "I was asleep. I heard nothing." "No cry? No crashes?" "I heard nothing!" "And the man in the park -- he was not your lover?" "He was not my lover." The Prosecutor turned to the judge with a grim smile. "Your honor, I request a recess so that I may bring in a new witness." "This witness is not in the court room?" "No. I myself only learned of him a few minutes ago. It will take about a half-hour to bring him here." "And this witness is important?" "Yes. I believe he can prove that Mrs. d'Larte is lying." "Then this court is recessed until the prosecution brings in the new witness." The spectators buzzed and jibbered excitedly. A new witness. A surprise witness. The trial was really becoming interesting. "I hate to leave. I really hate to leave," one said to her companion. "I'll never get back in if I leave. But one must eat. I hate to leave." "No need. No need to leave," the companion assured her. "See, I brought sandwiches. Always bring something to eat to things like this. People crowd so. It's really terrible. Have an egg?" "Pretty good trial," an old man with a white beard told the person next to him. "Not as good as the Bronson trial, but pretty good." "You've seen a lot of trials?" the figure next to him asked. "Seen all the good ones," the one with the beard said proudly. "Saw the Bronson trial in '#, the Treamont trial in '#. Saw a lot of trials. First time that I've seen one where a wife killed her husband. Most of the others involved infanticide. Good trials, you understand, but disappointing. All the verdicts were not guilty." "Naturally. With over-population infanticide isn't a crime. Rather' more like a good deed these days." "Understand they are going to children." "Should have been done long  ago. "People should be more careful. If they don't want children, they should be more careful." "If you know you can get rid of them, why be careful?" A woman fanned herself with her pocketbook and glanced at her companion. "Have another sandwich, dear?" "No, on a diet you know." The companion sighed. "It's too bad that they abolished capital punishment. Believe me, this d'Larte hussy deserves it." "But it's so much better the way they do it now, I mean sending the guilty to the wars to fight in the front lines. Might as well get some no use out of them." husband? Divorcing them is so much easier. Only takes a day and you get half the husband's earnings" "You should know, dear. You've done it enough." "Only seven times." "I thought it was eight?" "I don't count Rodger. The lout killed himself so he wouldn't have to pay me a settlement. Ah, here comes the judge." ly as the judge entered, then reseated themselves and buzzed in anticipation. "Your witness has arrived?" the judge asked. "Yes, Your Honor," the Prosecutor replied. "Then call him." The witness was called and sworn in as the spectators gawked at him eagerly. "Good looking. Dark. Evil eyes though. Black eyes. I like dark eyes, don't you?" "Dark blue coat. Lime green sports shirt. Nice combination. Must have a suit made with those colors." "Nasty look about that fellow. Wouldn't trust him." "Who is he?" "Shhhhhhhhhh !" Isobel d'Larte stared at the witness in fear. "Your name, please," the Prosecutor demanded of the witness. "Andy Kirk." "You are Mr. d'Larte's nephew?" "Yep." "What do you do for a living, Mr. Kirk?" "Anything, but basically I'm an artist." "Is that what you are doing at the present time, Mr. Kirk?" "No. Everybody's an artist today. No room for a good one, a real one." "Then what do you do, Mr. Kirk?" the Prosecutor asked in exasperation. "Don't shout. I didn't ask to come here." "What do you do for a living?" the Prosecutor asked quietly. "Arnaud -- Mr. d'Larte -- paid me to follow his wife. To spy on her. He paid very well." The spectators gasped happily. "Now we'll hear something," someone said in a stage whisper. The judge rapped for silence. "Why did Mr. d'Larte pay you to follow his wife?" "He thought she had a lover." "But you heard Mrs. d'Larte claim that she did not have a lover." "No, I didn't. How could I? I wasn't here." Laughter rippled through the crowded room and the judge rapped for silence. The Prosecutor frowned angrily. "Mrs. d'Larte said under oath that she did not have a lover." "She lied." "Can you prove that she lied?" "I suppose so." "And they were really lovers?" "Mrs. d'Larte told me that she loved him." "And he loved her I suppose." "Mrs. d'Larte loved him." "How long were they lovers?" "Nearly a month." "I repeat, can you prove it?" Ill "I can tell you who her lover is." "Then by all means do so." "No! Please, no," Isobel d'Larte cried. "I killed my husband." When order had been restored in the court the judge stared down at Isobel. "Am I to understand that you confess to the murder of Arnaud d'Larte?" "Yes," Isobel said softly. "I hated him and I killed him. I killed with the iron statue of Venus. I hit him with it till he died and I hit him with it after he was dead. I killed him." Andy Kirk smiled. It only took a short time to bring in a verdict of guilty against Isobel d'Larte. She accepted the verdict silently and without flinching. In like manner she accepted her sentence. She was to be sent to fight in the front lines of the war in Asia. "I declare this court adjourned," the judge said and banged his gavel down authoritatively. As Isobel d'Larte was taken from the room she was led passed Andy Kirk. Seeing him, she stopped and stared at him coldly. "Why did you do this to me?" she asked. "To help you. If the trial had continued the way it had you would have been judged insane and executed here in the States. In Asia you may have a chance." "Does it make a difference if I have a chance? No one really cares." "You may find what you've been looking for over there." "You think so?" "I hope so." "I don't understand you, Andy." "Sometimes one must do bad to do good." Isobel stared at him not understanding his words, then the guard led her away. Isobel d'Larte spent the night in jail, and the next morning, along with twenty other prisoners, was taken to the rocketport to be sent to Asia. At the rocket-port the prisoners were allowed to say their goodbyes to their families without the benefit of guards. Isobel stood alone watching the tearful farewells, then walked slowly into the cafeteria. As she sat alone at the corner table drinking coffee a tall man dressed in an old fashioned top coat and with an old fashioned hat pulled down over his face walked up to the table and sat down opposite her. Isobel looked at the figure happily. "I knew you would come." "Why did you confess?" "I did not want them to know about us. They would have made it all so ugly sounding. They would have made it sound vile... and it wasn't." Isobel reached out a hand towards the figure and a metal hand closed over hers. "I didn't want them to harm you." "You did it for me?" "Yes. I love you." "I'm a robot. A machine. An unfeeling thing of iron and steel. How can you love me?" "My husband was the machine. He ate at the same time everyday, dressed at the same time, went to work at the same time. He did the same things, thought the same things everyday of his life." "But he had emotion." "Only those he had been taught to feel and those only at the proper times. He was mad when he should be mad and happy when he should be happy, nothing more. He was much more of a machine than you." "But I cannot return your love. I do not know what emotion is." "I had to have someone," Isobel cried. "I had to have someone who was kind to me. You liked what I liked. You could talk to me of something besides machines. Machines do everything now. But you could talk to me of art, music, beauty." "My creator taught me those things. Taught me to care for those things in the museum. I would miss them if they were taken away." "Yes." Sudden tears stung Isobel's eyes. No one would miss her. No one would care about her. "I will miss you too, Isobel. I will miss you very much."  "As much as the things in the museum?" "As much as those. More." Isobel stood up, leaned over and kissed the metal cheek of the one opposite her. "Then it was worth it." "All prisoners assemble on the runway," a harsh voice boomed over the loudspeaker. "Perhaps someday I call learn to return love," the robot said. "You have done more than that. You have made me happy." "Come back safely, Isobel." Isobel d'Larte ran to the runway and joined the other prisoners. They looked at her strangely not understanding her smile. Isobel barely noticed them, for she was happy. Someone cared for her. That was the important thing. Someone cared.    He stood by the door, listening to his heart rattle crazily in his chest. He opened the door. The apartment was calm, silent. The walls glowed around the framed Miros and Mondrians and Picassos. The furniture sat functionally on the silky white rug, black thin-legged chairs and tables... Austin started to laugh, carefully checked himself. He knew he probably would not be able to stop. He thought strongly about Tcheletchew, and of the men who would come to Mbarara in the morning. He thought of the city teeming with life. Of the daylight streaming onto the streets of people, the shops, the churches, the schools. His work. His dream... He walked across the rug to the bedroom door. It was slightly ajar. He pushed it, went inside, closed it softly. "Mag," he whispered. "Mag -- " There was a noise. A low, throaty rumble. Not of anger; of warning. Richard Austin came close to the bed, adjusted his eyes to the black light. Then he screamed. It was the first time he had ever watched a lion feeding.    Strange aircraft you may be seeing any day now are not Martian. British designers have come up with a radical new wing design -- the crescent shaped wing -- different from anything now breaking the sound barrier. Used either curving forward or curving toward the back of the ship they make a strange spectacle indeed. But claims are that they make for much less wind resistance... and much more stability. Summer vacation clothes may soon include disposable bathing suits. A specially processed wall paper has been found to have high "wet strength" and several feminine bathing suits have been made of it and are undergoing strenuous tests this year. Transoceanic information radioed from one punch card to another will be an invaluable business blessing in the near future. A recent experiment had information originating in North Africa received in Washington, D.G. faster, more accurately and more economically than any previous system of transmitting such detailed statistical data. A machine operator loaded a data tranceiver with cards containing information recorded as punched holes in the cards. As the tranceiver "read" the cards, it generated electronic impulses representing the holes. The impulses sent by radio actuated the punching mechanism of a tranceiver set up in Washington which created exact duplicates of the cards fed into the North African machine; thus supplying a punch card immediately available for machine processing, and eliminating several steps in accounting procedure. Moving coal, iron ore and other raw materials may someday be done by a system of endless belts set up across the country. A working model of just such a belt conveyor has already been designed to link Lake Erie with the Ohio River one hundred miles away. If legislation can be passed to give the belt the status of a common carrier, it will be built to shuttle iron ore and coal from river barges to Great Lake carriers or to storage bins. Travelling employees may get an earful or instructions in the future through a new vest pocket radio that resembles a hearing aid. Powered by two pen-sized flashlight cells that work for a month, and with a loud-speaker that is worn like a hearing aid earpiece, this midget marvel can be tuned to "receive" certain wavelengths. The boss can "broadcast" instructions without interference; and channels could be modified to decimal places so that there would be no crossed instructions possible. The key to future immortality may not lie in drugs, beneficial rays or electrical vibrations but in austerity. Science has been making some rather extensive tests that seem to prove that abstinence from such vices as smoking, drinking of alcoholic beverages and tea and coffee, sweet and fatty foods and sexual activity prolongs the life of individuals. Electrical companies may be owning and operating their own atomic power plants within the next ten years. Introduction of the light water-moderated and cooled boiling reactor and the graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor have made early effective competition with conventional fuel plants both very possible and much more economical. Remote areas of the world may someday be the sites of atomic age pyramids. Such "tombs" would be the burial grounds of radioactive waste fission products from atomic power plants. Assuming that atomic power will be coming into widespread use by the end of the century, there would be three tons of "hot" waste from the many reactors to be disposed of each day. Science believes that we shall need to isolate and control such waste in desert "burial grounds" to solve the menace that this type of waste poses. Space explorers may find that the canals of Mars are really long narrow drifts of volcanic ash. According to a new theory based on a pattern of the prevailing winds on Mars, the dark green markings may be streaks of drifts made by the winds during the Martian summers. Such ash would be green because of the dry oxygen-poor atmosphere. The theory further expounds the idea that such conditions would correspond to early stages in the development of Earth; and the red planet may possibly be one on which oceans have yet to form, and which life has yet to appear. Cities of the future may be hiring electronic watchmen. One already in operation in New York City is concentrating its tubes and wires upon the changing demands for electrical power. It takes into consideration short time demands that come and go continuously and increases power generation as the sustained load goes up. All of this is done automatically, efficiently and economically. Other "watchmen" for a myriad number of other jobs of the same type are under serious consideration. A look at the future of atomic power indicates that power plants will run on liquid metals which will supply fuel, control the reaction and transfer the heat out where it can be utilized. Lead, bismuth and tin or combinations of these "lighter" metals will be used. Studies are now being made to work out a method whereby the liquids would clean themselves of "ashes" of debris. This new kind of atomic power plant would not only use uranium for power, but would constantly provide uranium anew from less valuable Thorium, which can be bred into U # and then fissioned. Weather forecasts "untouched by human hands" are part of a plan for the future. Some weathermen foresee a time when required data on winds, temperatures and pressures will be automatically recorded, then relayed by radio directly to a computer for calculation of forthcoming weather. Using numerical weather prediction a giant brain could then make forecasts as far in advance as thirty days. A mechanical cougher, which operates like two vacuum cleaners alternately blowing air into the lungs and sucking it out again, may someday be used to save thousands of lives. An experimental working model has already been tried on babies, older children and grown-, ups who accidentally inhaled buttons, pins, fishbones and so on. This new "cougher" has the advantage over the bronchoscope now in use in that it can reach places inaccessible to the instruments now used. The toughest armor of all was given to Earth by Mother Nature. It is air -- plain everyday air -- the kind we breathe. And here's how it performs the function of the "world's toughest armor." ing "bombs" from outer space shoot with deathly force and incredible speed at the face of the Earth. These "bombs" are meteors, believed to be debris from comets, which head for Earth at speeds up to # miles per second and in such masses that an entire city could be destroyed. However, as the bombardment of meteors hits the Earth's atmosphere, about # miles up, the resistance is too much and the meteors disintegrate, breaking up into fractions of their original size and burning themselves out in tails of fire. The biggest known meteorite (as they are called after they land) to hit the Earth landed in Kansas in #. It weighed # pounds; other pieces of the same meteorite found in that area weighed up to # pounds. Hoarseness is not to be taken too lightly. According to a report from it can be caused by more than # different diseases which affect the delicate vocal cords. Hoarseness is symtomatic of a number of things, such as colds, cheering or talking long and loud, too much smoking, or any of a number of ordinary causes. It can also be the signal that a malignancy has developed -- tuberculosis, tumor or cancer. Serious hoarseness can be associated with diseases of the heart and brain. So if you have a case of hoarseness that hangs on unduly long, see your doctor. # -- Pyrheliometer. # -- Karel Capek. # -- Lower. # -- Mercury. # -- Vega. # -- Red. #I -- Ten Miles. # -- Planetesimal. # -- Miranda. # -- Transit. # -- Clockwise. # -- Spacing. # -- Cephieds. # -- Messier. # -- Sixth. # -- Prominences. U# Important announcement for... future and bored with your pastimes -- don't despair. You've do something about it. Modem psychological testing can show you the way to a work you're best suited for. It can reveal your basic aptitudes, abilities and personality self, you can do something about changing your present and future. Do the simple tests in a few hours in your own home. Mail them to The Institute. Receive a comprehensive, confidential report by mail that may show you (as it has for so many others) the way to a better, bigger-paying job, to a happier future for yourself and your family. Get to know confidential and costs only # -- l#th of what similar in-person testing costs. But send no money write I An international language whose words and sounds could be  I understood by all men, regardless of the native tongue they speak   every day, has long been a goal. Over three hundred such lan  guages have been invented in the last century, but none has be  come a real tool for communication and understanding between I  nations.  I Now, a new tool is making it's debut. Not really new in the   words it uses, it has its roots in many languages. It uses the voI  cabulary of science and technology, which is common to almost  I all world languages. It uses English root words where they are   common to other languages and it has borrowed from the RoI  mance languages, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, etc. The   troublesome intricacies of grammar have been discarded. There   is only one word form in each tense; and nouns, adjectives and I  verbs do not agree as they must in more complex tongues. Mil I lions will find the vocabulary basically familiar, for it is not a   new artificial language but one that uses the tools already at hand f  in simple uncomplicated ways. !  For those who feel that peace in the world will come closer I I if people talk to one another in a language all mankind can un  derstand, this "breaking" of the language barrier has a very great  I language for all the world. A natural language that has its roots   in the national tongues of all nations.  diabetes, the congenital digestive deformity he had inherited from a hundred ancestors kept alive by a superb medical science to breed her. She laid her cheek against his, the smooth velvet human-seeming cheek, with no hint as yet of the lumps of wild tissue waiting to proliferate within. "Please don't worry, George," she said softly. "It's not your fault, really." She smiled up at him. "I've lived a rough life, most of us do, in my time. Remember, I've earned what I received, I came here knowing what I was doing. It's just caught up with me. It had to, some day." He caught her in his arms and pulled her tightly to him. "Oh, God, honey," he said. "I didn't know, I didn't even think... I'd give anything..." he turned his face up blindly. "Please, Lord, let the bubble break," he prayed. "Let us not be, both together, now... But the bubble did not break. continued from back cover oo Mm lected from Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. The woman who became her own daughter... gambling on a strange planet -- See description on back cover. top stories by outstanding authors... stories of Wonders of Earth and Man... of startling inventions... of visitors from Outer Space... Adventure in Dimension... Worlds of Tomorrow. # pages. Thing that becomes whatever it meets. Plus many other best tales skimmed from a dozen years of Astounding Science-Fiction Magazine by its editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. by Hal Clement -- Charles the planet Mesklin. But the force of gravity there is so powerful the planet is squeezed almost flat -- and a fall of even a few inches can crush a human body to pou'dcr! by Isaac Asimov -- Robots are the most hated creatures on earth. Then a noted robot scientist is murdered. Detective Baley has to track down the killer. And -- he's given a robot partner! as a Angelo Pontevecchio can destroy the Earth -- or he can save it. But it's not up to him to decide what to do! Two Martians, posing as earthmen, have him in their power A Tucker -- Paul Breen y was a one-man secret weapon! From his hideout he could read the minds of enemy agents anywhere on earth! Then he got a brain wave that was about to be killed... not McIntosh -- Th estrange story of the last rocket ship to leave doomed Earth -- and the wouldbe dictator who couldn't find the people lie was trying to conquer! he bv loop Please rush me the # books checked below, as my gift books and first selection. Bill me only I for all three (plus small shipping charge), and enroll me as a member of the Science-Fiction Book Club. Every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus small shipping charge. I do not have to take a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. this membership will be cancelled! Astounding Anthology  Best from Fantasy  Science Fiction i Born Leader G Caves of Steel  Mirror for Observers I Mission of Gravity j  Omnibus G Wild Talent Name... Address (please print) Zone State City Selection price in Canada # plus shipping. Address Science-Fiction Club, # Bond St., Toronto #. (Offer good only in U. S. and Canada). METEOROLOGICAL ROCKET APPROACHES SUN -- The sun, # miles in diameter and # miles from Earth, has a temperature of I # degrees Fahrenheit. The prominence spurting off the sun is a fiery tongue of hydrogen gas rising thousands of miles above the surface and traveling # miles per hour. The "pock marks" are sun spots, gigantic storm areas much cooler (relatively speaking) than the sun's surface. These sun spots, or storms, have considerable effect on the Earth, causing northern lights, radio disturbances and magnetic storms. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Anton Kurka Illustrating " The Earth Quarter" #  #  #  #  #  #  #  Meteorological Survey of the Sun IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale December #th you're that man, here's something that will interest you. Not a magic formula -- not a get-rich-quick scheme -- but something more substantial, more practical. Of course, you need something more than just the desire to be an accountant. You've got to pay Still, wouldn't it be worth your while to sacrifice some of your leisure in favor of interesting home study -- over a comparatively brief period? Always provided that the rewards were good -- a salary of # to #? An accountant's duties are interesting, varied and of real worth to his employers. He ha s standing! Do you feel that such things aren't for you? Well, don't be too sure. Very possibly they can be! Why not, like so many before you, investigate LaSalle's modern Problem Method of training for an accountancy, position? Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large accounting house under the personal supervision of an expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid. you studied accounting principles and solved problems day by day -- easy ones at first -- then more difficult ones. If you could do this -- and could turn to him for advice as the problems became complex -- soon you'd master them all. That's the training you follow in principle under the LaSalle Problem Method. You cover accountancy from the basic Principles right up through Accountancy Systems and Income Tax Procedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and psepare for the C. P. A. examinations. As you go along, you absorb the principles of Auditing, Cost Accounting, Business Law, Statistical Control, Organization, Management and Finance. Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it -- depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time you spend in study. Will recognition come? The only answer, as you know, is that success dm come to the man who is really trained. It's possible your employers will notice your improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed, many LaSalle graduates have paid for their training -- with increased earnings -- before they have completed it! For accountants, who are trained in organization and management, are the executives of the future. Send For Free Sample Lesson For your own good, get all the facts. Write for our free #-page book, "Accountancy, The Profession That Pays" -- also the free sample lesson so you can prove to yourself that you can master accountancy quickly, thoroly in spare time at home. Over # Certified Public Accountant! among LaSalle alumni A Correspondence Institution Send me without obligation. Free Sample Lesson and "Accountancy, The Profession That Pays." Name Age Address G#, Zone  State be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hid den processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe K.GJ#. l Scribe K.G.S. I I San Jose, California I i Please send me the f ree book, The Mastery  l of Life, which explains how I may learn to I l use my faculties and powers of mind. I  Name I i Address , i City I constitutes the ultimate in government or in a civilization. If it is Utopia -- which is a dream or it wouldn't be called Utopia -- in which direction is the logical approach? Better, let's say in which direction does the best "experimental approach" lie? For there is no logical approach to a dream, as logic goes. One of the "experimental" avenues is suggested by some of the science fiction stories which come into this office... and that is selective breeding. Some of these are rather convincing: If selective breeding with cattle or chickens or race horses or pigs or vegetables or something is so successful, why can't it be so with human beings? Right off the bat, selective breeding of human beings, as a predication for producing mentally superior people, is impossible. And even if it wasn't impossible, it wouldn't make a nation or a civilization. Biologically speaking, when you select a special male and a special female for breeding purposes, there you are going to get offspring exactly like either one, or a combination of the two. Physical characteristics might well be similar, but getting one hundred per cent duplication of talent, aptitude or personality is as remote as that of planets in different galaxies colliding. There are # chromosomes which determine the characteristics of the offspring, # contributed by the male, # by the female, and each chromosome contains # genes. These # genes are mixed up like balls in a huge lottery drum. Now take your pick, as you would a hand of bridge -- and see how many different combinations there Come to think of it, race horses are selectively bred and they have the brains of a mouse... and the champion does not always sire champions. Anyway, genius and brains are not hereditary. Some of the best brains have been known to produce morons. Besides, fine minds and genius are rather delicate mechanisms; they break faster and more easily, unable to stand the stress and strain. Nor does the mating of low mentality necessarily produce low mentality. Some of the finest minds in history have sprung from mediocre parentage. Mating mathematicians or engineers or doctors doesn't mean you're going to get a doctor or an engineer or a mathematician anymore than if you mated a deep sea diver and a female lion tamer. When selectivity has been tried on social lines -- and the practise of royalty is a prime example -- inbreeding is the most outstanding result, with some rather startling and undesirable traits becoming dominant. Consider for a moment the deranged monarchs who have at one time or another ruled almost every nation in Europe or Asia. It was the new blood of the lusty "lower class" women who bore illegitimate heirs to the various thrones which was often responsible for rejuvenating the royal lineage when it tottered on the brink of idiocy. But for argument's sake, assume that selective breeding would work and you could produce that particular talent which the state of the nation seemed to require. Would that pump the right kind of blood into the national veins? Hardly. It takes more than selective breeding alone. There is a matter of environmental control, and of education of the selectivity bred, which would have to be a rigidly controlled routine to breed out individual enterprise, in order that such control could be maintained. Yet, the prime characteristic of the talented individual or the genius is individuality. Becomes rather a vicious circle, doesn't it? The United States, which is just about the only first rate power left in the world today, grew to such stature in the shortest time that a nation has ever attained world supremacy -- because it was anything but selectively bred. It was built by scholars, dreamers, business men, crusaders, soldiers of fortune, gamblers, whores, murderers and thieves. It was built by men with some of the best brains in the world and men with some of the worst brains in the world. And there wasn't an American in the bunch, not at first; they were Greeks, Germans, Irish, French, English, Italians, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Spaniards and every other nationality in the world. The real reason this crazy pattern of humanity molded itself into a nation was that it had an incentive, and the chance to be rugged individualists if they so desired. Admittedly each man or woman had his own incentive. Personal gain, power, freedom from religious or economic restrictions, freedom from national domination,... and the golden opportunity to search for, and find it in a fresh new world. They built and lived according to their lights. And gave others the right and opportunity to do the same. They murdered the Indians and were murdered in return ; they killed and robbed each other; fortunes and great industries changed hands in a card game or exploded from the muzzle of a gun. Human nature may not always be good, but it's tough as rawhide, and death and hardship were no obstacle to this conglomeration of humanity when there was an incentive. So if history is to be a precedent, selective breeding isn't too promising an approach to a Utopian government or state of civilization. Maybe there is one, however. Maybe it's the right incentive. Maybe that incentive is the free right of every human being to search for his or her own idea of Utopia -- the pursuit of a dream that could some day result in the realization of at least a near-ideal. -- jlq -- Illustrated by Ed Emsh The Niroi permitted refugees from Earth to live in their cramped little ghetto conditionally: that they do so peacefully. But there will always be patriotic fanatics, like Harkway and Rack, who must disturb the peace... before. Now, from the window of Laszlo Cudyk's garret, he could see how the alien city shone frostblue against the black sky; the tall hive-shapes that no man would have built, glowing with their own light. Nearer, the slender drunken shafts of lamp posts marched toward him down the street, each with its prosaic yellow globe. Between them and all around, the darkness had gathered; darkness in angular shapes, the geometry of squalor. Cudyk liked this view, for at night the blackness of the Earth Quarter seemed to merge with the black sky, as if one were a minor extension of the other -- a fist of space held down to the surface of the planet. He could feel, then, that he was not alone, not isolated and forgotten; that some connection still existed across all the light-years of the galaxy between him and what he had lost. And, again, the view depressed him; for at night the City seemed to press in upon the Quarter like the walls of a prison. The Quarter: sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities; the only remnant of the human race nearer than Capella. Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with its hopeless clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany. Cudyk was a man of middle height, heavy in the shoulders and chest, blunt-featured, with a shock of greying black hair. He was fiftyfive years old; he remembered Earth. A drunk stumbled by in the street below, cursing monotonously to himself, paused to spit explosively into the gutter, and faded into the night. Gudyk heard him without attention. He stood with his back to the window, looking at nothing, his square fingers fumbling automatically for pipe and tobacco. Why do I torture myself with that look out the window every night? he asked himself. It's a juvenile sentimentalism. But he knew he would go on doing it. Other noises drifted tip to his window, faint with distance. They grew louder. Cudyk cocked his head suddenly, turned and threw open the shutters again. That had been a scream. He could see nothing down the street; the trouble must be farther over, he thought, on Kwang-Chowfu or Washington. The noise swelled as he listened: the unintelligible wailing of a mob. Footsteps clicked hurriedly up the stairs. Gudyk went to the door, made sure it was latched, and waited. There was a light tapping on the door. "Who is it?" he said. "Lee Far " He unlatched the door and opened it. The little Chinese blinked at him, his upper lip drawn up over incisors like a rodent's. "Mr. Seu say please, you come." Without waiting for an answer, he turned and rapped his way down into darkness. Cudyk picked up a jacket from a wall hook, and paused for a moment to glance at the locked drawer in which he kept an ancient .# automatic and two full clips. He shook his head impatiently and went out. Lee was waiting for him downstairs. When he saw Gudyk open the outer door, he set off down the street at a dog-trot. Gudyk caught up with him at the corner of Athenai and Brasil. They turned right for two blocks to Washington, then left again. A block away, at Rossiya and Washington, there was a small crowd of men struggling in the middle of the street. They didn't seem to be very active ; as Cudyk and Lee approached, they saw that only a few were still fighting, and those without a great deal of spirit. The rest were moving aimlessly, some wiping their eyes, others bent almost double in paroxysms of sneezing. A few were motionless on the pavement. Three slender Chinese were moving through the crowd. Each had a white surgeon's mask tied over his nose and mouth, and carried a plastic bag full of some dark substance, from which he took handfuls and flung them with a motion like a sower's. Cudyk could see now that the air around them was heavy with floating particles. As he watched, the last two fighters in the crowd each took a halfhearted swing at the other and then, coughing and sneezing, moved away in separate directions. Lee took his sleeve for a moment. "Here, Mr. Cudyk." Seu was standing in the doorway of Town Hall, his round-bellied Cudyk with a lazy, humorous gesture of one fat hand. "Hello, Min," Cudyk said. "You're efficient, as always. Pepper again?" "Yes," said Mayor Seu Min. "I hate to waste it, but I don't think the water buckets would have been enough this time. This could have been a bad one." "How did it start?" "A couple of Russkies caught Jim Loong sneaking into Madame May's," the fat man said laconically. His shrewd eyes twinkled. "I'm glad you came down, Laszlo. I want you to meet an important visitor who arrived on the Kt-I'ith ship this afternoon." He turned slightly, and Cudyk saw that there was a man behind him in the doorway. "Mr. Harkway, may I present Mr. Laszlo Cudyk, one of our leading citizens? Mr. Cudyk, James Harkway, who is here on a mission from the Minority People's League." Cudyk shook hands with the man, who had a pale, scholarly face, not bad-looking, with dark intense eyes. He was young, about thirty. Cudyk automatically classified him as second generation. "Perhaps," said Seu, as if the notion had just occurred to him, "you would not mind taking over my duties as host for a short time, Laszlo? If Mr. Harkway would not object? This regrettable occurrence -- " "Of course," Cudyk said. Harkway nodded and smiled. "Excellent." Seu edged past Cudyk, then turned and put a hand on his friend's arm, drawing him closer. "Take care of this fool," he said under his breath, "and for God's sake keep him away from the saloons. Rack is in town, too. I've got to make sure they don't meet." He smiled cheerfully at both of them and walked away. Lee Far, appearing from somewhere, trailed after him. A young Chinese, with blood streaming brightly from a gash in his cheek, was stumbling past. Cudyk stepped away from the doorway, turned him around and pointed him down the street, to where Seu's young men were laying out the victims on the sidewalk and administering first aid. Cudyk went back to Harkway. "I suppose Seu has found you a place to stay," he said. "Yes," said Harkway. "He's putting me up in his home. Perhaps I'd better go there now -- I don't want to be in the way." "You won't be in the way," Cudyk told him. "What would you like to do?" "Well, I'd like to meet a few people, if it isn't too late. Perhaps we could have a drink somewhere, where people meet -- ?" He glanced interrogatively down the street to an illuminated sign that announced uors." "Not there," said Cudyk. "That's Russky headquarters, and I'm afraid they may be a little shorttempered right now. The best place would be Chong Yin's tea room, I think. That's just two blocks up, near Washington and Ceskoslovensko." "All right," said Harkway. He was still looking down the street. "Who is that girl?" he asked abruptly. Cudyk glanced that way. The two M. D.'s, Moskowitz and Estrada, were on the scene, sorting out the most serious cases to be carted off to hospital, and so was a slender, dark-haired girl in nurse's uniform. "That's Kathy Burgess," he said. "I'd introduce you, but now isn't the time. You'll probably meet her tomorrow." "She's very pretty," said Harkway, and suffered himself to be led off up the street. "Married?" "No. She was engaged to one of our young men, but her father broke it off." "Oh?" said Harkway. After a moment: "Political differences?" "Yes. The young man joined the activists. The father is a conservative." "That's very interesting," said Harkway. After a moment he asked, "Do you have many of those here?" "Activists or conservatives? Or pretty girls?" "I meant conservatives," said Harkway, coloring slightly. "I know the activist movement is strong here -- that's why I was sent. We consider them dangerous in the extreme." "So do I," said Cudyk. "No, there aren't many conservatives. Burgess is the only real fanatic. If you meet him, by the way, you must make certain allowances." Harkway nodded thoughtfully. "Cracked on the subject?" "You could put it that way," Cudyk told him. "He has convinced himself, in his conscious mind at least, that we are the dominant species on this planet; that the Niori are our social and economic inferiors. He won't tolerate any suggestion that it isn't so." Harkway nodded again, looking very solemn. "A tragedy," he said. "But understandable, of course. Some of the older people simply can't adjust to the reality of our position in the galaxy." "Not many people actually like it," said Cudyk. Harkway looked at him thoughtfully. He said, "Mr. Cudyk, I don't want you to take this as a complaint, but I've gathered the impression that you're not in sympathy with the Minority People's League." "No," said Cudyk. "May I ask what your political viewpoint is?" "I'm neutral," said Cudyk. "Apolitical." . Harkway said politely, "I hope you won't take offense if I ask why? It's evident, even to me, that you're a man of intelligence and ability." Everything is evident to you, Cudyk thought wearily, except what you don't want to see. He said, "I don't believe our particular Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again, Mr. Harkway." Harkway looked at him intently, but said nothing. He glanced at the signboard over the lighted windows they were approaching. "Is this the place?" "Yes." Harkway continued to look at the Chinese characters, was a legend that read: Nrn nm yxii aixjvvi "That's a curious alphabet," he said. "It's a very efficient one," Cudyk told him. "It's based on the design of an X in a rectangle -- like this." He traced it with his finger on the wall. "Counting each arm of the cross as one stroke, there are eight strokes in the figure. Using only two strokes to a letter, there are twenty-eight possible combinations. They use the sixteen most graceful ones, and add twenty-seven threestroke letters to bring it up to fortythree, one for each sound in their language. The written language is completely phonetic, therefore. But there are only eight keys on a Niori typewriter." He looked at Harkway. "It's also perfectly legible: no letter looks too much like any other letter. And it has a certain beauty, don't you think?" He paused. "Hasn't it struck you, Mr. Harkway, that anything our hosts do is likely to be a little more sensible and more sensitive than the human equivalent?" "I come from Reg Otay," said Harkway. "They don't have any visual arts or any written language there. But I see what you mean. What does the sign say -- the same thing as the English?" "No. It says, 'Yungiwo Ren Trakru Rith.' 'Trakru rith' is Niori for 'hospitality house' -- it's what they call anything that we would call tea room, or restaurant, or beer garden." "And 'Yungiwo Ren'?" "That's their version of 'Chung kuo jen' -- the Chinese for 'Chinese.' At first they called us all that, because most of the original immigrants were from China; but they've got over it now -- they found out some of us didn't like it." Cudyk opened the door. A few aliens were sitting at the round tables in the big outer room. Cudyk watched Harkway' s face, and saw his eyes widen with shock, the Niori were something to see, the first time. They were tall and erect, and their anatomy was not even remotely like man's. They had six limbs each, two for walking, four for manipulation. Their bodies were covered by a pale, horny integument which grew in irregular sections, so that you could tell the age of a Niori by the width of the growth-areas between the plates of his armor. But you saw none of those things at first. You saw the two glowing violet eyes, set wide apart in a helmet-shaped head, and the startlingly beautiful markings on the smooth shell of the face -- blue on pale cream, like an ancient porcelain tile. And you saw the crest -- a curved, lucent shape that even in a lighted room glowed with its own frost-blue. No Niori ever walked in darkness.  Pronounced "jung guo ren Gudyk guided Harkway toward the door at the far end of the room. "We'll see who's in the back room' he said. "There is usually a small gathering at this hour." The inner room was more brightly lit than the other. Down the center, in front of a row of empty booths, was a long table. Three men sat at one end of it, with teacups and a bowl of lichee nuts between them. They looked up as Cudyk and Harkway came in. "Gentlemen," said Cudyk, "may I present Mr. Harkway, who is here on a mission from the Minority People's League? Mr. Burgess, Father Exarkos, Mr. Ferguson." The three shook hands with Harkway, Father Exarkos smiling pleasantly, the other two with more guarded expressions. The priest was in his fifties, grey-haired, hollowtempled, with high orbital ridges and a square, mobile mouth. He said, in English oddly accented by a mixture of French and Greek, "Please sit down, both of you... I understand that your first evening here has been not too pleasant, Mr. Harkway. I hope the rest of your stay will be more so." Burgess snorted, not quite loudly enough to be deliberately rude. His face had a pleasant, even a handsome cast except for the expression of petulance he was now wearing. He was a few years younger than the priest: a big-boned, big-featured man whose slightly curved back and hollowed cheeks showed that he had lost bulk since his prime. Ferguson's pale face was expressive but completely controlled. The gambler's eyes were narrow and unreadable, the lips and the long muscles of the jaw showing nothing more than surface emotion. He asked politely, "Planning to stay long, Mr. Harkway?" "That all depends, Mr. Ferguson, on -- to be blunt, on what sort of a reception I get. I won't try to conceal from you the fact that my role here is that of a political propagandist. I want to convince as many people as I can that the Minority People's movement is the best hope of the human race. If I can find that there's some chance of succeeding, I'll stay as long as necessary. If not -- " "I'm afraid we won't be seeing much of you, in that case, Mr. Harkway," said Burgess. His tone was scrupulously correct, but his nostrils were quivering with repressed indignation. "What makes you say that, Mr. Burgess?" Harkway asked, turning his intent, serious gaze on the older man. "Your program, as I understand it," said Burgess, "aims at putting humanity on an equal basis with various assorted races of lizards, beetles and other vermin. I don't think you will find much sympathy for that program here, sir." "I'm glad to say that, through no fault of your own, you're mistaken," said Harkway, smiling slightly. "I think you're referring to the program of the right wing of the League, which was dominant for the last several years. It's true that for that period, the M.P.L.'s line was to work for the gradual integration of human beings -- and other repressed races -- into the society of the planets on which they live. But that's all done with now. The left wing, to which I belong, has won a decisive victory at the League elections. "Our program," Harkway continued earnestly, "rejects the doctrine of assimilation as a biological and cultural absurdity. What we propose to do, and with sufficient help will do, is to return humanity to its homeland -- to reconstitute Earth as an autonomous, civilized member of the galactic entity. We realize, of course, that this is a gigantic undertaking, and that much aid will be required from the other races of the galaxy... Were you about to say something, Mr. Burgess?" Burgess said bitterly, "What you mean, in plain words, Mr. Harkway, is that you think we all ought to go home -- dissolve Earth's galactic empire -- give it all back to the natives. I don't think you'll find much support for that , either." Harkway bit his lip, and cast a glance at Cudyk that seemed to say, You warned me, but I forgot. He turned to Ferguson, who was smiling around his cigar as blandly as if nothing out of the way had been said. "What is your view, Mr. Ferguson?" Ferguson waved his cigar amiably. "You'll have to count me out, Mr. Harkway. I'm doing okay as things are -- I have no reason to want any changes." Harkway turned to the little priest. "And you, Father Exarkos?" The Greek shrugged and smiled. "I wish you all the luck in the universe, sincerely," he said. "But I am afraid I believe that no material methods can rescue man from his dilemma." "If I've given any offense," said Burgess suddenly, "I can leave." Harkway stared at him for. a moment, gears almost visibly slipping in his head. Then he said, "Of course not, Mr. Burgess, please don't think that for a moment. I respect your views -- " Burgess looked around him with a wounded expression. "I know," he said with difficulty, "that I am in a minority -- here -- " Father Exarkos put a hand on his arm and murmured something. Harkway leaned forward impulsively across the table and said, "Mr. Burgess, I've traveled a long way in the hope of discussing these problems with men of intelligence and standing in their community, like yourself. I hope you'll stay and give me the benefit of your experience. I shall be very much the loser if you don't." Burgess was visibly struggling with his emotions. He stood up and said, "No -- no -- not tonight. I'm upset. Please excuse me." Head bowed, he walked out of the room. There was a short silence. "Did I do the wrong thing?" asked Harkway. "No, no," said Father Exarkos. "It was not your fault -- there was nothing you could do. You must excuse him. He is a good man, but he has suffered too much. Since his wife died -- of a disease contracted during one of the Famines, you understand -- he has not been himself." Harkway nodded, looking both older and more human than he had a moment before. "If we can only turn back the clock," he said. "Put Humpty Dumpty together again, as you expressed it, Mr. Cudyk." He smiled apologetically at them. "I won't harangue you any more tonight -- I'll save that for the meeting tomorrow. But I hope that some of you will come to see it my way." Father Exarkos' eyebrows lifted. "You are planning to hold a public meeting tomorrow?" "Yes. There's some difficulty about space -- Mayor Seu tells me that the town hall is already booked for the next three days -- but I'm confident that I can find some suitable place. If necessary, I'll make it an open-air meeting." Rack, thought Gudyk. Rack usually stays in town for only two or three days at a time. Seu is trying to keep Harkway under cover until he leaves. It won't work. Out of the comer of his eye he saw a dark shape in the doorway, and his first thought was that Burgess had come back. But it was not Burgess. It was a squat, bandylegged man with huge shoulders and arms, wearing a leather jacket and a limp military cap. Cudyk sat perfectly still, warning Exarkos with his eyes. The squat man walked casually up the table, nodding almost imperceptibly to Ferguson. He ignored the others, except the M.P.L. man. "Your name Harkway?" he asked. He pronounced it with the flat Boston "a": "Haakway". "That's right," said Harkway. "Got a message for you," said the squat man. "From Captain Lawrence Rack, United Uth Space Navy." "The Earth Space Navy was dissolved twenty years ago," said Harkway. The squat man sighed. "You wanna heah the message or don't you?" he asked. "Go ahead," said Harkway. His nostrils were pale, and a muscle stood out at the side of his jaw. "Heah it is. You're plannin' to hold a meetin' of the vehmin lovehs society, right?" As Harkway began to reply, the squat man leaned across the table and backhanded him across the mouth, knocking him sideways out of his chair. "Don't," said the squat man. He turned and strolled out. Gudyk and Ferguson helped Harkway up. The man's eyes were staring wildly out of his pale face, and a thin trickle of blood was running from a pulped lip. "Who was that man?" he asked in a whisper. "His name is Monk," said Cudyk. "At least that is the only name he has been known to answer to. He is one of Rack's lieutenants -- Rack, as you probably know, is the leader of the activists in this sector. Mr. Harkway, I'm sorry this happened. But I advise you to wait for a week or so before you hold your meeting. There is no question of courage involved. It would be suicide." Harkway looked at him blindly. "The meeting will be held as planned," he said, and walked out, stiff-legged. Ferguson shook his head, laughed, and shook his head again. Cudyk exchanged a hopeless glance with Father Exarkos, and then followed Harkway out of the room. for young Nick Pappageorge, dozing behind the long counter, and the pale morning sunlight that streamed through the plastic window. Most of the counter was in shadow, but stray fingers of light picked out gem trays here and there, turning them into minuscule Two Niori, walking arm in arm, paused in front of the window display, then went on. Two human youngsters raced by, shouting. Cudyk caught only a glimpse of them through the pierced screen that closed off the back of his shop, but he recognized them by their voices: Red Gorciak and Stan Eleftheris. There were few children now, and they were growing up wild. Cudyk wondered briefly what it must be like to be a child born into this microcosm, knowing no other. He dismissed the thought; it was simply one more thing about which there was no use to worry. Cudyk had not spoken to anyone that morning, but he knew approximately what was happening. Seu would have been busy most of the night, covering up the traces of last evening's riot. Now, probably, he was explaining it away to Zydh Oran, the Niori Outgroup Commissioner. Harkway was making preparations for his meeting -- another thing for Seu to worry about when he got through cleaning up the last mess. Barring miracles, today was going to be very bad. Seu came in, moving quickly. He walked directly to the rear of the shop. His normally bland face looked worried, and there were beads of sweat on his wide forehead, although the morning was cool. "Sit down," said Cudyk. "You've seen Zydh Oran?" Seu made a dismissing gesture. "Nothing. Not pleasant, but nothing. The same as usual -- he tells me what happened, I deny it. He knows, but under their laws he can't do anything." "Someday it will be bad," said Cudyk. "Yes. Someday. Laszlo -- you've got to do something about Harkway. Otherwise he's going to be killed tonight, and there will be a stink from here to Sirius. I had to tell him he could use Town Hall -- he was all ready to hold a torchlight meeting in the streets." "I tried," said Cudyk. "Try again. Please. Your ethnic background is closer to his than mine. He respects you, I think. Perhaps he's even read some of your books. If anyone can persuade him, you can." "What did he say when you talked to him?" "An ox. A brain made of soap and granite. He says it is a matter of principle. I knew then that I could do nothing. When an AngloSaxon talks about his principles, you may as well go home. He won't accept a weapon, he won't postpone the meeting. I think he wants to be a martyr." Cudyk frowned. "Maybe he does. Have you seen Rack?" "No. Ferguson pretends not to know where he is." "That's rather odd. What is his motive, do you think?" Seu said, "Basically, he is afraid of Rack. He cooperates with him -- they use each other -- but you know that it's not a marriage of minds. He knows that Rack is stronger than he is, because he is only an amoral egotist, and Rack is a fanatic. I think he believes this business may be Rack's downfall, and he would like that." He stood up. "I have to go. Will you do it?" "Yes." "Good. Let me know." Seu walked out, as hastily as he had entered. Nick Pappageorge had roused himself and was polishing a tall, fluted silver vase. Cudyk said, "Nick, go and find out where Mr. Harkway is. If he isn't busy, ask him if he'll do me the favor of dropping around to see me. Otherwise, just come back and tell me where he is; I'll go to him." Nick said, "Sure, Mr. Cudyk," and went out. Cudyk stared at the tray of unsorted gems on the desk before him. He stirred them with his forefinger, separating out an emerald, two aquamarines, a large turquoise and a star sapphire. That was all he had had to begin with -- his dead wife's jewels, carried half across Europe when a loaf of bread was worth more than all the gem stones in the world. The sapphire had bought his passage on the alien ship ; the others had been his original stock-intrade, first at the refugee center on Alfhal, then here on Palumbar. Now he was a prosperous importer, with a business that netted him the equivalent of ten thousand pounds a year. But the wealth was ashes; he would have traded all of it for one loaf of bread, eaten in peace, on an Earth that had not sunk back to barbarism. Momentum, he told himself. Momentum, and a remnant of curiosity. Those are the only reasons I can think of why I do not blow out my brains. I wonder what keeps the others from it? Seu? Chong Yin? I don't know. Burgess has his fantasy, though it cracks now and then. Ferguson has the sensibility of a jackal. Rack, as Seu said, is a fanatic. But why do the rest of them keep on? For what? The doorway darkened again as Harkway came in, followed by Nick. Nick gestured toward the rear of the shop, and Harkway advanced, smiling. His lower lip was stained by a purple substance with a glossy surface. Cudyk greeted him and offered him a chair. "It was good of you to come over," he said. "I hope I didn't interrupt your work." Harkway grinned stiffly. "No. I was just finishing lunch when your boy found me. I have nothing more to do until this evening." Cudyk looked at him. "You got to the hospital after all, I see." "Yes. Dr. Moskowitz fixed me up nicely." Cudyk had been asking himself why the M.P.L. man looked so cheerful. Now he thought he understood. "And Miss Burgess?" he asked. "Yes," said Harkway, looking embarrassed. He paused. "She's -- an exquisite person, Mr. Cudyk." Cudyk clasped his square hands together, elbows on the arms of his chair. He said, "Forgive me, I'm going to be personal. Am I right in saying that you now feel more than casually interested in Miss Burgess?" He added, "Please. I have a reason for asking." Harkway's expression was guarded. "Yes; that's true." "Do you think she may feel similarly towards you?" Harkway paused. "I think so. I hope so. Why, Mr. Cudyk?" "Mr. Harkway, I will be very blunt. Miss Burgess has already lost one lover through no fault of her own, and the experience has not been good for her. She is, as you say, exquisite -- she has a beautiful, but not a strong personality. Do you think it is fair for you to give her another such experience, even if the attachment is not fully formed, by allowing yourself to be killed this evening?" Harkway leaned back in his chair. "Oh," he said, "that's it." He grinned. "I thought you were going to point out that her father broke off the last affair because of the man's politics. If you had, I was going to tell you that Mr. Burgess looked me up this morning and apologized for his attitude yesterday, and breaking down and so on. He's very decent, you know. We're getting along very well." He paused. "About this other matter," he said seriously, "I'm grateful for your interest, but -- I'm afraid I can't concede the validity of your argument." He made an impatient gesture. "I'm not trying to sound noble, but this business is more important than my personal life. That's all, I'm afraid. I'm sorry." Another fanatic, Cudyk thought. A liberal fanatic. I have seen all kinds, now. He said, "I have one more argument to try. Has Seu explained to you how precarious our position is here on Palumbar?" "He spoke of it." "The Niori accepted this one small colony with grave misgivings. Every act of violence that occurs here weakens our position, because it furnishes ammunition for a group which already wants to expel us. Do you understand?" There was pain in Harkway' s eyes. "Mr. Cudyk, it's the same all over the galaxy, wherever these pitifully tiny outgroups exist. My group is trying to attack that problem on a galaxy-wide scale. I don't say we'll succeed, and I grant you the right to doubt that our program is the right one. But we've got to try. Among other things, we've got to clean out the activists, for just the reason you mention. And -- pardon me for stressing the obvious -- but it's Captain Rack who will be responsible for this particular act of violence if it occurs, not myself." "And you think that your death at his hands would be a stronger argument than a peaceful meeting, is that it?" Harkway shook his head ruefully. "I don't know that I have that much courage, Mr. Cudyk. I'm hoping that nothing will happen to me. But I know that the League's prestige here would be enormously hurt if I let Rack bluff me down." He stood up. "You'll be at the meeting?" "I'm afraid so." Cudyk stood and offered his hand. "The best of luck." He watched the young man go, feeling very old and tired. He had known it would be this way; he had only tried for Seu's sake. Now he was involved; he had allowed himself to feel the tug of love and pity toward still another lost soul. Such bonds were destructive -- they turned the heart brittle and weathered it away, bit by bit. The assembly hall was well filled, although Harkway had made no special effort to advertise the meeting. He had known, Cudyk thought, that Rack's threat would be more than sufficient. The youngster was not stupid. There were no women or children. Ferguson was there, and a large contingent of his employees -- gamblers, pimps, waiters and strong-arm men -- as well as most of the Russian population. All but a few of the Chinese had stayed away, as had Burgess. But a number of men whom Cudyk knew to have M.P.L. leanings, and an even larger number of neutrals, were there. The audience was about evenly divided, for and against Harkway. If he somehow came through this alive, it was just possible that he could swing the Quarter his way. A futile victory; but of course Harkway did not believe that. There was a murmur and a shuffle of feet as Rack entered with three other men -- Monk, the one called Spider, and young Tom De Grasse, who had once been engaged to Kathy Burgess. The sound dropped almost to stillness for a few moments after the four men took seats at the side of the hall, then rose again to a steady rumble. Harkway and Seu had not yet appeared. Cudyk saw the man to his right getting up, moving away ; he turned in time to see Seu wedge himself through a gap in the line of chairs and sit down in the vacated place. The fat man's face was blandly expressionless, but Cudyk knew that something had happened. "What is it?" he asked. Seu's lips barely moved. He looked past Cudyk, inspecting die crowd with polite interest. "I had him kidnapped," he said happily. "He's tied up, in a safe place. There won't be any meeting today." Seu had been seen. Someone a few rows ahead called, "Where's Harkway, Mayor?" "I don't know," Seu said blandly. "He told me he would meet me here -- said he had an errand to do. Probably he's on his way now." Under cover of the ensuing murmur, he turned to Cudyk again. "I didn't want to do it," he said. "It will mean trouble, sooner or later; maybe almost as much trouble as if Harkway had been killed. But I had to make a choice. Do you think I did the right thing, Laszlo?" "Yes," said Cudyk, "except that I wish you had told me earlier." Seu smiled, his heavy face becoming for that instant open and confiding. "If I had, you wouldn't have been so sincere when you talked to Harkway." Cudyk smiled in spite of himself. He relaxed in his chair, savoring the relief that had come when he'd learned that Harkway was not going to die. The tension built up, day by day, almost imperceptibly, and it was a rare, fleeting pleasure when something happened to lower it. He saw the mayor looking at his watch. The crowd was growing restless: in a few more minutes Seu would get up and announce that the meeting was cancelled. Then it would be all over. Seu was rising when a new wave of sound traveled over the audience. Out of the comer of his eye Cudyk saw men turning, standing up to see over the heads of their neighbors. Seu spoke a single, sharp word, and his hand tightened on the back of his chair. Gudyk stood. Someone was coming down the center aisle of the room, but he couldn't see who it was. Those who had stood earlier were sitting down now. Down the aisle, looking straight ahead, with a bruised jaw and a bloody scratch running from cheekbone to chin, came James Harkway. He mounted the platform, rested both hands on the low speaker's stand, and turned his glance across the audience, once, from side to side. There was a collective scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, then complete stillness. Harkway said: "My friends -- and enemies." Subdued laughter rippled across the room. "A few of my enemies didn't want me to hold this meeting," said Harkway. "Some of my friends felt the same way. In fact, it seemed that nobody wanted this meeting to take place. But here you all are, just the same. And here I am." He straightened. "Why is that, I wonder? Perhaps because regardless of our differences, we're all in the same boat -- in a lifeboat." He nodded gravely. "Yes, we're all in a lifeboat -- all of us together, to live or die, and we don't know which way to turn for the nearest land that will give us harbor. "Which way shall we turn to find a safe landing? To find peace and honor for ourselves and our children? To find safety, to find happiness?" He spread his arms. "There are a There are all the planets in the galaxy! But everywhere we turn, we find alien soil, alien cultures, alien people. Everywhere except in one direction only. "Our ship -- our own planet, Earth -- is foundering, is sinking, that's true. But it hasn't -- yet -- sunk. There's still a chance that we can turn back, make Earth what it was, and then, from there -- go on! Go on, until we've made a greater Earth, a stronger, happier, more peaceful Earth -- till we can take our place with pride in the galaxy, and hold up our heads with any other race that lives." He had captured only half their attention, and he knew it. They were watching him, listening to what he said, but the heads of the audience were turned slightly, like the heads of plants under a solar tropism, toward the side of the chamber where Rack and his men sat. Harkway said, "We all know that the Earth's technical civilization is smashed -- broken like an eggshell. By ourselves, we could never put it back together. And if we do nothing, no one else is going to put it back together for us. But suppose we went to the other races in the galaxy, and said -- " A baritone voice broke in quietly, "'We'll sell our souls to you, if you'll kindly give us a few machines!' " Rack stood up -- tall, muscular, lean, with deep hollows under his cheekbones, red-grey hair falling over his forehead under the visor of his cap. His short leather jacket was thrown over his shoulders like a cloak. His narrow features were grey and cold, the mouth a straight, hard line. He said, "That's what you want us to tell the vermin, isn't it, Mr. Harkway?" Harkway seemed to settle himself like a boxer. He said clearly, "The intelligent races of the galaxy are not devils and do not want our souls, Mr. Rack." Rack ignored the "Mr." He said, "But they'd want certain assurances from us, in return for their help, wouldn't they, Mr. Harkway?" "Certainly," said Harkway. "Assurances that no sane man would refuse them. Assurances, for example, that there would be no repetition of the Altair Incident -- when a handful of maniacs in two ships murdered thousands of peaceful galactic citizens without the slightest provocation. Perhaps you remember that, Mr. Rack; perhaps you were there." "I was there," said Rack casually. "About five hundred thousand vermin were squashed. We would have done a better job, but we ran out of supplies. Some day we'll exterminate them all, and then there'll be a universe fit for men to live in. Meanwhile -- " he glanced at the audience -- "we're going to build. We're building now. Not with the vermin's permission, under the vermin's eye. In secret. On a planet they'll never find until our ships spurt out from it like milt from a fish. And when that day comes, we'll squash them down to the last tentacle and the last claw." "Are you finished?" asked Harkway. He was quivering with controlled rage. "Yes, I'm finished," said Rack wearily. "So are you. You're a traitor, Harkway, the most miserable kind of a crawling, dirt-eating traitor the human race ever produced. Get down off the platform." Harkway said to the audience, "I came here to try to persuade you to my way of thinking -- to ask you to consider the arguments and decide for yourselves. This man wants to settle the question by prejudice and force. Which of us is best entitled to the name 'human?' If you listen to him, can you blame the Niori if they decide to end even this tiny foothold they've given you on their planet? Would you live in a universe drenched with blood?" Rack said quietly, "Monk." The squat man stood up, smiling. He took a clasp knife out of his pocket, opened it, and started up the side of the room. In the dead stillness, another voice said, "No!" It was, Cudyk saw with shock, Tom De Grasse. The youngster was up, moving past Rack -- who made no move to stop him, did not even change expression -- past the squat man, turning a yard beyond, almost at the front of the room. His square, almost childish face was tight with strain. There was a pistol in one big hand. Cudyk felt something awaken in him which blossomed only at moments like this, when one of his fellow men did something particularly puzzling: the root, slain but still quasi-living, of the thing that had once been his central drive and his trademark in the world -- his insatiable, probing, warmly intelligent curiosity about the motives of men. On the surface, this action of De Grasse's was baldly impossible. He was committed to Rack's cause twice over, by conviction and by the shearing away of every other tie; and still more important, he worshipped Rack himself with the devotion that only fanatics can inspire. It was as if Peter had defied Christ. The three men stood motionless for what seemed a long time. Monk, halted with his weight on one foot, faced De Grasse with his knife hand slightly extended, thumb on the blade. He was visibly tense, waiting for a word from Rack. But Rack stood as if he had forgotten time and space, staring bemused over Monk's shoulder at De Grasse. The fourth man, Spider -- bones and gristle, with a corpse-growth of grey-white hair -- stood up slowly. Rack put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down again. Cudyk thought: Kathy Burgess. It was the only answer. De Grasse knew, of course, everything that had passed between Harkway and the girl. There was no privacy worth mentioning in the Quarter. Pressed in this narrow ghetto, every man swam in the effluvium of every other man's emotions. And De give up everything that mattered to him, to save Kathy Burgess pain. It said something for the breed, Cudyk thought -- not enough, never enough, for you saw it only in pinpoint flashes, the noble individual who was a part of the bestial mob -- but a light in the darkness, nevertheless. Finally Rack spoke. "You, Tom?" The youngster's eyes showed sudden pain. But he said, "I mean it, Captain." There was a slow movement out from that side of the room, men inching away, crowding against their neighbors. Rack was still looking past Monk's shoulder, into De Grasse's face. He said : "All right." He turned, still wearing the same frozen expression, and walked down the side of the room, toward the exit. Monk threw a glance of pure incredulity over his shoulder, glanced back at De Grasse, and then followed. Spider scrambled after. De Grasse relaxed slowly, as if by conscious effort. He put away his gun, hesitated a moment, and walked slowly out after the others. His wide shoulders were slumped. Then there was the scraping of chairs and boot-soles and a rising bee-hive hum as the audience stood up and began to move out. Harkway made no effort to call them back. Cudyk, moving toward the exit with the rest, had much to think about. He had seen not only De Grasse's will, but Rack's, part against the knife of human sympathy. And that was a thing he had never expected to see. "Times like this," said Ferguson, narrowing his grey snake's eyes in a smile, "I almost believe in God." Father Exarkos smiled courteously and said nothing. He and Cudyk had been sitting in the back room of Chong Yin's since a half-hour after the meeting. Seu had been with them earlier, but had left. A little after twelve, Ferguson had strolled in and joined them. "I mean it," said Ferguson, laughing a little. There was Harkway, sticking his neck out, and there was little De Grasse standing in the way. And Rack backed down." He shook his head, still smiling. "Rack backed down. Now how would you explain that, gentlemen?" It was necessary to put up with the gambler, who wielded more power in the Quarter than anyone else, even Seu ; but sometimes Cudyk found himself dropping his usual attitude of detached interest in favor of speculations about the specific variety of horrible fate which Ferguson would most probably meet. He was particularly irritating tonight, because Cudyk was forced to agree with him. Cudyk had still not solved the riddle of Rack's failure to finish what he had started. It was conceivable that De Grasse should have acted as he did for reasons of sentiment; but to apply the same motive to Rack was simply not possible. The man had emotions, certainly, but they were all channeled into one direction: the destiny of the human race and of Lawrence Rack. De Grasse was at an age when the strongest emotions were volatile, when conversions were made, when a man could plan an assassination one day and enter a monastery the next. But Rack was fixed and aimed, like a cannon. Ferguson was saying, "He must be going soft. Going soft -- old Rack. Unless it's the hand of God. What's your opinion, Father?" The priest said blandly, "Mr. Ferguson, since I have come to live upon this planet, my opinions have changed about many things. I no longer believe that either God, or man, is quite so simple as I once thought. We were too small in our thoughts, before -- our understanding of temporal things was bounded by the frontiers of Earth, and of eternal things by the little sky we could see from our windows. "Before, I think I would have tried to answer your question. I would have said that I think Captain Rack was moved by -- a sudden access of human feeling -- or I would have said that I think Captain Rack was touched by the finger of God. Perhaps I would have hesitated to say that, because even then I did not believe that God interferes with the small sins of men like Captain Rack. Or the small sins of anybody, for that matter." Ferguson grinned. "Well, Father, that's the best excuse for an answer I ever heard, anyway." He dragged on his cigar, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips, as if the cigar were a tube through which his brains were being sucked. "In other words," he said, "you don't think the big blowup back home was a judgment on us for our sins. You think it was a good thing, only more people 'should have got out the way we did. That right?" "Oh, no," said Father Exarkos. "I believe that the Famines and the Collapse were a judgment of God. I have heard many theories about the causes of the Collapse, but I have not heard one which does not come back, in the end, to a condemnation of man's folly, cruelty, and blindness." "Well," said Ferguson, "excuse me. Father, but if you believe that way, what are you doing here? Back there -- " he jerked his head, as if Earth were some little distance behind his right shoulder -- "people are living like animals. Chicago, where I come from, is just a stone jungle, with a few beast-like scavengers prowling around in it. If the dirt and disease don't get you, some bandit will split your head open, or you'll run into a wolf or some other hungry animal. If none of those things happen, you can expect to live to the ripe old age of forty, and then you'll be glad to die." He had stopped smiling. Ferguson, Cudyk realized, was describing his own personal hell. He went on, "Now, if you want to call that a judgment, I won't argue with you. But if that's what you believe, why aren't you back there taking it with the rest of them?" He really wanted to know, Cudyk thought. He had begun by trying to bait the priest, but now he was serious. It was odd to think of Ferguson having trouble with his conscience, but Cudyk was not really surprised. The most moralistic men he had ever known had been gangsters of Ferguson's type; whereas the few really good men he had known, Father Exarkos among them, had seemed as blithely unaware of their consciences as of their healthy livers. The priest said, soberly, "Mr. Ferguson, I believe that we also are being punished. Perhaps we more than others. The Mexican peon, the Indian fellah, the peasant of China or Greece, lives very much as his father did before him; he scarcely has reason to know that judgment has fallen upon Earth. But I think that no inhabitant of the Quarter can forget it for so much as an hour." Ferguson stared at him, then grunted and squashed out his cigar. He stood up. "I'll be getting along home," he said. "Good night." He walked out. Gudyk and Exarkos sat for a while longer, talking quietly, and then left together. The streets were empty. Behind them and to their left as they walked to the comer, the ghostly blue of the Niori beehives shone above the dark human buildings. The priest lived in a small secondfloor apartment near the comer of Brasil and Athenai, alone since his wife had died ten years before. Cudyk had only to go straight across Ceskoslovensko, but he walked down toward Brasil with his friend. Near the comer, Cudyk saw a dark form sprawled in a doorway. "One of your congregation, Astereos?" he asked. "It is probable," said the priest resignedly. "Steve Chrisudis has been drinking heavily again this past week; also the two Moulios brothers." He stepped over and turned the man's face up to the light. The face was bloody and broken, the eyes sightless. It was Harkway. He had been dead long enough to grow cold. kept coming back to Cudyk. "Would you live in a universe drenched with blood?" Rack would, of course ; for others there was a tragic dilemma. For them, the race had come to the end of a road that had its beginning in prehistory. Every step of progress on that way had been accomplished by bloodshed, and yet the goal had always been, a world at peace. It had been possible to live with the paradox when the road still seemed endless: before the first Earth starships discovered that humanity was not alone in the universe. Human beings were like a fragile crystalline structure, enduring until the first touch of air; or like a cyst that withers when it is cut open. The winds of the universe blew around them now, and there was no way to escape from their own nature. The way forward was the way back; the way back was the way forward. There was no peace except the peace of surrender and death. There was no victory except the victory of chaos. As the priest had remarked, there were many theories about the Collapse. It was said that the economy of Earth had been wrecked by interstellar imports; it was said that the rusts and blights that had devastated Earth's fields were of alien origin ; it was said that the disbanding of the Space Navy, after the Altair Incident, had broken Earth's spirit. It was said that the emigrations, both before and after the Famines, had bled away too much of the trained manpower that was Earth's life-blood. The clear fact was that the human race was finished: dying like Neanderthal faced by Cro-Magnon; dying like the hairy Ainu among the Japanese. It was true that hunEarth much as they had done bestones from the ground, laboring over the handicrafts which sustained the men of the Quarter in their exile. Humanity had passed through such dark ages before. But now there was no way to go except downward. If the exiles in their ghettoes, on a hundred planets of the galaxy, were the lopped-off head of the race, then the ferment of theories, plans, and policies that swirled through them stood for the last fitful fantasies in the brain of a guillotined man. And on Earth, the prelates, the robber barons, the petty princes were ganglia: performing their mechanical functions in a counterfeit of intelligence, slowing, degenerating imperceptibly until the last spark should go out. Gudyk fingered the manuscript which lay on the desk before him. It was the last thing he had written, and it would never be finished. He had hunted it up, this morning, out of nostalgia, or perhaps through some obscure working of that impulse that made him look out at the stars each night. There were twenty pages, the first chapter of a book that was to have been his major work. It ended with the words: "The only avenue of escape for humanity is..." He had stopped there, because he had realized suddenly that he had been deliberately deceiving himself; that there was no avenue. The scheme he had meant to propose and develop in the rest of the book had one thing in common with those he had demolished in the first pages. It would not work. Cudyk thought of those phantom chapters now, and was grateful that he had not written them. He had meant to propose that the exiles should band together on some unpeopled planet, and rear a new generation which would be given all the knowledge of the old, save for two categories: military science and astronomy. They would never be told, never guess that the bright lights of their sky were suns, that the suns had planets and the planets people. They would grow up free of that numbing pressure; they would have a fresh start. It had been the grossest self-deception. You cannot put the human mind in chains. Every culture had tried it, and every culture had failed... He pulled open a drawer of his desk and put the manuscript into it. A folded note dropped to the floor as he did so. Cudyk picked it up and read again: You are requested to attend a meeting which will he held at # Washington Avenue at # hours today. Matters of public policy will be discussed . It was not signed; no signature was needed, nor any threatened alternative to complying with the "request". Cudyk glanced at his wristwatch, made on Oladi by spidery, many-limbed creatures to whom an ordinary watch movement was a gross mechanism. The dial showed the Galactic Standard numerals which corresponded to ten o'clock. Cudyk stood up wearily and walked out past the carved screen. He said to Nick, "I'll be back in an hour or so." Eight Washington Avenue was The Little Bear, half a block from the comer where he had first met Harkway, a block and a half from the spot where Harkway's corpse had been left in a doorway. Two more associations, Cudyk thought. After twenty-five years, there were so many that he could not move a foot in the Quarter, glance at a window or a wall, without encountering one of them. And this was another thing to remember about a ghetto: you were crowded not only in space but in time. The living were the most transient inhabitants of the Quarter. Cudyk stepped through the open door of The Little Bear, saw the tables empty and the floor bare. The bartender, Piljurovich, jerked his thumb toward the stairs. "You're late," he said in Russian. "Better hurry." Cudyk climbed the stairs to the huge second-floor dining hall, where the Russians and Poles held their periodic revels. The room was packed tight with a silent mass of men. At the far end, Rack sat on a chair placed on a table. He stopped in mid-sentence, stared coldly at Cudyk, and then went on. " -- or against me. From now on, there won't be any more neutrals. I want you to understand this clearly. For one thing, your lives may depend on it." He paused, glancing around the room. "By now you all know that James Harkway was executed last night. His crime was treason against the human race. There are some of you here who have been, or will be, guilty of the same crime. To them I have nothing more to say. To the others, those who have considered themselves neutral, I say this: First, New Earth needs all of you and has earned your allegiance. Second, those of you who remain on an enemy planet in spite of this warning will not live to regret it if that planet is selected for attack. "You have two months to make up your minds and to close your affairs. At the end of that time, a New Earth transport will call here to take off those who decide to go. It will be the last New Earth ship, and I warn you that you had better not count on Galactic transportation after that date." He stood up. "That's all." The audience was over. Rack waited, standing on the table, thumbs hooked into his belt, jacket over his shoulders, like a statue of himself, while the crowd moved slowly out of the room. It was ludicrous, but you could not laugh. Two months. For almost twenty years Rack had been a minor disturbance in the Quarter, no more important or dangerous or mad than a dozen others; appearing suddenly, at night, staying for a few days, disappearing again for a month, or two, or six. He brought stolen goods to Ferguson -- furs from Drux Uta, perhaps, or jewels from Thon -- and Ferguson paid him in Galactic currency, reselling the merchandise later, some on Palumbar, some on a dozen other worlds, for twenty times the price he paid. Rack had a following among the younger men of the Quarter; two or three a year joined him. Occasionally there were rumors in the Quarter of Rack's close calls with the Galactic Guard. It had never been a secret that he was building military installations on some far-off planet. But now, for the first time, Cudyk realized that Rack was actually going to make war on the universe. Whatever the result, the least it meant was the end of the Quarter. The stairs were choked. Cudyk worked his way down, to find the barroom filled with little knots of men, talking in low voices. Only a few were drinking. Someone called his name, and then a hand grasped his sleeve. It was Speros Moulios, the grey little tobacco dealer, whose two sons drank too much. "Mr. Cudyk, please, what do you think? Should we go, like he says?" The others of the group followed him; in a moment Cudyk was surrounded. He felt helpless. "I can't advise you, Mr. Moulios," he said. "To be truthful, I don't know what I am going to do myself." Nobilio Villaneuva, the druggist, said, "I have worked fifteen years, saved all my money. What am I going to do with it if I go to this New Earth? And what about my daughter?" Someone came elbowing his way through the crowd. He signaled to Cudyk. "Laszlo!" It was bald, cheerful Mike Moskowitz, one of the Quarter's two doctors. He said, "Some of the fellows want to form a delegation, to go back and ask Rack some questions. They asked me to serve, but I've got to get back to the hospital. Same thing with Seu, he's got six things on his hands already. Father Exarkos isn't here. Will you take over? Good. I'll see you later." Cudyk sighed. The men around him were watching him expectantly. He stepped over to the bar, picked up an empty glass and rapped with it on the counter until the room quieted. "It's been suggested," he said, "that a delegation be formed to ask Captain Rack for more information. Do you all want that?" There was an affirmative murmur. "All right," said Cudyk. "Nominations?" They ended up with a committee of five: Cudyk as spokesman, Moulios, Chong Yin, the painter Prokop Vekshin, and the town clerk, Martin Paz. Cudyk had slips of paper passed out, and collected a hundred-odd questions, most of them duplicates and some of them incoherent. Paz made a neat list of those that remained, and the delegation moved toward the stairs. Cudyk saw Burgess standing, blinking uncertainly around him. He dropped back and put his hand on the man's arm. "Hello, Louis. I'm glad to see you. How is Kathy?" Burgess straightened a trifle. "Oh -- Laszlo. She's all right, thank you. Feeling a little low, just now, of course..." His voice trailed off. "Of course," said Cudyk sympathetically. "I wish there were something I could do." "No -- no, there's nothing. Time will cure her, I suppose. Where are you going now?" Cudyk explained. "Were you at the meeting, earlier?" he asked. "No. I was not invited. I only heard -- ten minutes ago. Perhaps it would be all right if I came upstairs with you? In that way -- But if I would be a nuisance -- " His features worked. Cudyk felt obscurely uneasy. He recalled suddenly that it was a long time since he had seen Burgess looking perfectly normal. He said reluctantly, "I think it will be all right. Why not? Come along." Rack was sitting at the end of the long table on the far side of the room, talking to Ferguson. Ferguson's hatchet-man, Vic Smalley, was leaning watchfully against the far wall. Monk and Spider sat at Rack's left. De Grasse, pale and red-eyed, sat halfway down the table, away from the others. He stared at the table in front of him, paying no attention to the rest. Cudyk had heard that De Grasse was still with Rack, and had wondered what he had done to expiate his sin. The obvious answer was one that he had not wanted to believe : that De Grasse had been given the task of murdering Harkway. He had done it, probably, with a tormented soul and under Rack's eye, but he had done it. So much, Cudyk thought wearily, for the selfless nobility of man. Rack looked up expressionlessly as the five men approached. "Yes?" Cudyk said, "We have been chosen to ask you some questions about your previous statement." "Ask away," said Rack, leaning back in his chair. Before him was a glass of the dark, smoky liquor Ferguson imported for his special use. He was smoking a tremendously long, black Russian cigarette. Cudyk took the list from Paz and read the first question. "What is the status of New Earth as to housing, utilities and so on?" "Housing and utilities are adequate for the present population," said Rack indifferently. "More units will be built as needed." Paz scribbled in his notebook. Cudyk read, "Will every new colonist be expected to serve as a member of New Earth's fighting forces?" Rack said, "Every man will work where he's needed. Common sense ought to tell you that middle-aged men with pot bellies and no military training won't be asked to man battleships." "What is die size of New Earth's navy?" "Next question." "Will new colonists be allowed to retain their personal fortunes?" Rack stared at him coldly. "The man who asked that," he said, "had better stay in the Quarter. If by his personal fortune he means Galactic currency, he can use it to stuff ratholes. Any personal property of value to the community, and in excess of the owner's minimum needs, will be commandeered and dispensed for the good of the community." "Will new colonists be under military dis -- " "Look out!" said De Grasse suddenly. He lurched to his feet, upsetting his chair. Someone stumbled against Paz, who fell heavily across Cudyk's legs, bringing him down. Someone else shouted. From the floor, Cudyk saw Burgess standing quietly with a tiny nickeled revolver in his hand. "Please don't move, Mr. Ferguson," said Burgess. "I don't trust you. All of you, stand still, please." Cudyk carefully got his legs under him and slowly stood up. The men on the other side of the table were still sitting or standing where they had been a moment before. De Grasse stood in an attitude of frozen protest, one big hand flat against his trousers pocket. He looked comically like a man who has left the house without his keys. They must have taken his gun away, Cudyk thought, after that affair yesterday. Monk and the aged Spider were sitting tensely, trying to watch Rack and Burgess at the same time. Rack, as always, was inhumanly calm. Ferguson looked frightened. The gunman, Vic Smalley, had straightened away from the wall; he looked alert and unworried. "Captain Rack," said Burgess, "you lulled that ma n Harkway." Rack said nothing. "I did it," De Grasse said hoarsely. "If you have to shoot somebody, shoot me." Burgess turned slightly. Rack, without seeming to hurry, picked up the glass in front of him and half rose to fling the black liquor at Burgess' face. The gun went off. Burgess stumbled back a step and then toppled over, with a knife-handle sprouting magically between neck and shoulder. De Grasse came hurtling across the table top, dived onto Burgess' prostrate body and came up with the gun. Not more than two seconds had gone by since Rack lifted the glass. The delegates were moving away, leaving a clear space around De Grasse and Burgess. Cudyk heard some of them clattering down the stairs. Rack was leaning over the table, supporting himself with one hand, while the other rested at his waist. His attitude, together with his frozen expression, suggested that he was merely bending over to examine Burgess' body. But in the next moment he turned slightly, lifted the hand that was pressed to his side, and looked at die dark stain that was spreading over his shirt. De Grasse stood up. Cudyk went to Burgess and knelt beside him. The man was conscious and moving feebly. "Lie still," said Cudyk. Someone pushed his shoulder roughly, and he looked up to see De Grasse transferring the revolver from his left hand to his right. The youngster's lips were compressed. "Get out of the way," he said harshly. "No," said Rack. "Leave him alone." He sat down carefully. After a moment De Grasse went around the table and joined him. Cudyk lifted Burgess' jacket carefully. There was not much bleeding, and he did not think the wound was dangerous. Burgess said weakly, "Did I kill him, Laszlo?" "No," said Cudyk. "No one was killed." Burgess turned his head away. There were footsteps on the stairs, and Moskowitz came into the room, followed by Lee Far and two men with a stretcher. Moskowitz glanced at Burgess and at Rack, then knelt beside Burgess without a word. He pulled out the knife expertly, pressing a wad of bandage around the wound. "I'll take that," said Spider, bending over with his grey hand outstretched. Moskowitz dropped the knife on the floor and went on bandaging Burgess. Spider picked it up, glared at the doctor and went back around the table. Cudyk waited until Moskowitz had finished with Burgess and started probing for the bullet in Rack's side. Following the stretcher bearers down the stairs, he went out into the clear morning sunlight. There was never any end to it. The Quarter was like a tight gravitational system, with many small bodies swinging around each other in eccentric orbits, and the whole shrinking in upon itself as time went on, so that it grew more and more certain that one collision would engender half a dozen more. And in the mind, too, each event went on forever. Cudyk remembered Burgess, in the stretcher as he was being carried home, weeping silently because he had failed to kill the man who had murdered his daughter's lover. And he remembered Rack, sitting silent and weary as he waited for Moskowitz to attend to him: sitting without anger for the man who had shot him, sitting with patience, filled with his own inner strength. And De Grasse, tortured soul, who had once more shown himself loyalty he felt. Even Monk, even Spider, lived not for himself but for Rack. There were all the traditional virtues, dripping their traditional gore : nobility, self-sacrifice, patience, even generosity. By any test except the test of results, Rack was a great man and Burgess another. And the test of results was a two-edged razor: for by that test, Cudyk himself was a total failure, a nonentity. He thought, We are the hollow men , we are the stuffed men... When every action led to disaster, those who did nothing were damned equally with those who acted. arm as he left Chong Yin's. He turned and saw that it was Ferguson. "I've got something to say to you, Cudyk. I saw you were busy talking to Father Exarkos in there, so I didn't bother you. Besides, it's private. Come on down to my place." The man was doing him an honor, Cudyk realized, in approaching him personally instead of sending an underling. And now, as Ferguson stood waiting for him to reply, Cudyk saw that there was something curiously like appeal in his eyes. "All right, if you wish," he said. "But I will have to go back to the shop within an hour -- Nick has not had his lunch." "I won't keep you that long," Ferguson said. They turned at the corner and walked down Washington, past Town Hall to The Little Bear. Beyond this point, everything was Ferguson's : the dance hall, the casino, the bawdy house, the two cafes and three bars, and the two huge warehouses at the end of the avenue. But it was the casino that Ferguson meant when he said "my place". A white-aproned boy got up hurriedly and opened the heavy doors when they approached. Ferguson strode past without looking at him, and Cudyk followed across the long, empty room. Dust covers shrouded the roulette table, the chuck-a-luck layout, faro, cheminde-fer, dice and poker tables. The bar was deserted, bottles and glasses neatly stacked. Ferguson led the way up a short flight of stairs to the overhanging balcony at the end of the room. He opened the door with a key -- a rarity in the Quarter, since cylinder locks were available only by scavenging on Earth, and had to be imported, whereas a mechanism used by the Niori as a mathematical toy could be readily adapted into an efficient combination lock. The low-ceilinged room was furnished with a blond-wood desk and swivel chair, a long, pale green couch and two chairs upholstered in the same fabric: all Earth imports, scavenged from stocks manufactured before the Collapse. The carpet was a deeper green. There were three framed pictures on the walls : a blue-period Picasso, a muted oysterwhite and grey Utrillo and a small Roualt clown. Ferguson was watching him. "Just like my place in Chicago," he said. "You never saw it before, did you?" "No," Cudyk said. "I have never been in the Casino until now." "Sit down," said Ferguson, pointing to one of the upholstered chairs. He pulled out the swivel chair and leaned back in it. He nodded toward the glass which formed the entire front wall of the room. "Sittin' up here, I can see everything that goes on downstairs. I got a phone -- " he laid his hand on it -- "that communicates with the cashier's booth in every room. I can handle the whole place from here, and I don't have to be bothered by the goofs if I don't want to. Also, that glass is bullet proof. It's Niori stuff, ten times better than anything we had back home. They tell me you couldn't get through it with a bazooka." Cudyk said nothing. "What I wanted to talk to you about -- " said Ferguson, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "You understand, Cudyk, this is confidential. Strictly between us." "I don't want any confidence that will be difficult to keep," said Cudyk. "What do you mean?" "If it is something that touches the safety of the Quarter -- " Ferguson waved his hand impatiently. "No, it's nothing like that. I just don't want it to get around too early. All right, use your own judgment. Here it is." "Rack's coming back in about three weeks with his transport, to pick up anybody that wants to go to New Earth. I'm not going, and neither are any of my boys. On the other hand, I'm not going to stay here either. It isn't healthy any more." "I don't know what Rack's got, but I've got a pretty good idea he's got enough to raise a lot of hell. Now you can figure the angles for yourself : maybe he won't bomb this planet because he thinks he can still make some use of the Quarter -- but that's a big maybe. Even if he doesn't, it's a dead cinch there's going to be trouble. The Niori know he comes here, even if they can't prove it, and when the war starts they're going to be sore." "Tell me something," said Cudyk after a moment. "If you knew all this long ago -- and you must have, since you have been so closely associated with Rack -- why did you help Rack, and so force yourself to leave Palumbar?" Ferguson grinned and shrugged. "I'm not complaining," he said. "Rack never fooled me. I got mine, and he got his -- it was a business arrangement. When you figure everything in, I can clear out now and I'm still ahead. See, you got to figure that nothing lasts forever. If I hadn't played along with Rack, he would have taken his business somewhere else. Maybe I could have stayed here a little longer, but then again, maybe I would have stayed too long. This way, I got my information in advance, and I got my profit from dealing with Rack. "As a matter of fact, he thinks I and all my outfit are going to be on that transport when it goes back to his base. He knows I wouldn't take a chance on staying here when the shooting starts. What he doesn't know is that I got someplace else to go, and a way to get there." He sat back in his chair again. "I got a Niori-built freighter hidden back in the hills. Had it for eight years now. It'll carry five hundred people, and fuel and provisions for a year, on top of the cargo. And I got a planet picked out where nobody will bother me -- not Rack, and not the Galactics." He took a cigar box from the desk and offered it to Gudyk. Cudyk shook his head, showing his pipe. Ferguson took a cigar, twirled it in his lips slowly, and lit it. "You know," he said, bending forward, "there's plenty of planets in the galaxy that aren't inhabited. Some have never even been explored. They're off the shipping routes, no intelligent race on them, nothing special in the way of organic products, so nobody wants them. Rack's got one -- I've got another." He gestured with the cigar. "But I'm not using mine to build up any war base. What for?" His long face contorted with violent disgust. "That Rack is crazy. You know it and I know it. If it wasn't for him, I could have stayed here, who knows how long? Or I could have moved to one of the other colonies if I saw a good chance. I like it here. This is civilization -- all that's left of it. "But -- " he leaned back again -- "you got to take what you can get. If the odds are too heavy, cash in and walk out. That's what I'm doing: I'm retiring. On this planet I told you about, there's a big island. A tropical island. Fruit -- all you can eat. Little animals something like wild pigs. Fish in the ocean. Gravity just a little under Earth normal, atmosphere perfect. And I'm taking along everything else we'll need. Generators, all kinds of electrical equipment, stoves, everything. It'll last your lifetime and mine." He looked at Cudyk. "What more would you want?" Cudyk said slowly, "You're asking me to go with you?" Ferguson nodded. "Sure. I'll treat you right, Cudyk. My boys will go on working for me, you understand, and so will most of the others I'm going to take. I'll be the boss. But you, and three or four others, you won't have to do any work. Just lie in that sand, or go fishing, or whatever you feel like. How does it sound?" "I don't think I quite understand," said Cudyk. "Why do you choose me?" Ferguson put down his cigar. He looked uncomfortable. He said irritably, "Because I've got to have somebody to talk to." He stared at Cudyk. "Look at me. Here I am, I'm fifty years old, and I been fighting the world ever since I was a kid. You think I can just cut loose from everything now, and lie under a tree? I'd go nuts in a month. I'm not kidding myself, I know what I am. It takes practice to learn how to relax and enjoy yourself. I never learned, never had the time. "When I get on that island, and I get all the houses built and the wires strung up, and everything's organized and I've got nothing else to do, I can see myself lying there thinking about this place, and all the other places I ever owned, and thinking to myself, 'What for?' And there's no answer, I know that. But just the same, I'm going to be wanting to start in again, making a deal, opening a joint, figuring the angles, handling people. "So there I'll be, with all these mugs around me. What do they know to talk about? The same things I do. Things that happened to them in the rackets, here or back on Earth. You got to talk to somebody, or you go crazy. But if I've got nobody but them to talk to, how'm I ever going to get my mind off that kind of stuff?" He gestured toward the Roualt, on the wall to Cudyk's left. "Look at that," he said. "I bought that thing in #. I've been looking at it for, let's see, twenty-three years. For the first five or so I couldn't figure out whether the guy was kidding or not. Then, gradually, I got to like it. But I still don't know why the hell I like it. It's the same thing with everything. I have a Corot that I'm nuts about -- I look at it every night before I go to sleep. It's just a landscape, like you used to see on calendars in the old days, except the calendars were junk and this is art. I know that, I can feel it. But what's the difference between the two? Don't ask me. "See what I mean? That's the kind of stuff I got to learn about. Art. Literature. Music. Philosophy. I always wanted to, before, but I never had the patience for it. Now I've got to do it. My kind of life is finished, I've got to learn a new kind." He frowned at his cigar. "It isn't going to be easy. Maybe there'll be times when you'll wish you had anybody else in the world around but me. But I won't take it out on you, Cudyk." He meant it, Cudyk knew. For a moment he wondered, Why don't I accept? He could see Ferguson's island paradise clearly enough : the tropical trees, the log huts -- with electric light, induction stoves for cooking, and hot and cold water -- the sand, the sunshine, the long, lazy afternoons spent in talking quietly on the beach. There would be no strain and no tension, if everything went as Ferguson planned -- only a long, slow twilight, with nothing left to fear or to hope for: forgetfulness, lethargy; lotos and Lethe; a pleasant exile, a scented prison. "You won't have to worry about the others, the guys that work for me," Ferguson said. "After they get through building the settlement, they can do what they want as long as they don't make any trouble. There'll be enough women to go around -- they can settle down and raise kids. There won't be any liquor, and I'm going to keep the weapons locked up. About the ship -- I'll wreck that as soon as we land. Once we're there, we're there." If it were not for Ferguson himself, Cudyk thought, I believe I might do it. But Ferguson, inside a year, is going to be a pitiable and terrible object. This is his own punishment, his lesser evil -- he chooses it himself. But he is not going to like it. "I think I understand," he said. "Believe me, Mr. Ferguson, I'm deeply grateful for this offer, and I am tempted to accept. But -- I think I will stay and take my chances with the Quarter." Ferguson stared at him, then shrugged. "Don't make up your mind in too much of a hurry," he said. "Think it over -- I'm not leaving for a couple of weeks. And listen, Cudyk, do me a favor. Don't spread this around." "Very well," said Cudyk. Ferguson did not get up to see him to the door. of suspension in the Quarter. Trade was slow; only a few Niori and still fewer members of other Galactic races strolled down the narrow streets, and for more than a week Cudyk sold nothing.  Human faces were missing, too. Almost two hundred of the ghetto's inhabitants had left quietly, during the night, when word had gone around that the "New Earth" transport was waiting. Villanueva had gone, with his family; so had'j Martin Paz; and Ferguson had gone earlier with all his crew. To-' day, two weeks later, Cudyk had spent the morning wandering the City. It was a thing he had done often in his first years on the planet, before the restless drive of his youth had seeped away, leaving nothing but momentum, and memory, and a few vestiges that reminded him of the man he had been. He had spent whole days in the City, then, looking into this building and that, talking to the natives, asking questions, observing. He had seen the City as part of a colossal jigsaw puzzle from which, if you were patient and perceptive, you might extract the nexus, the inner pattern that made the essential difference between Niori and men. For the Niori, like nearly all the intelligent races of the galaxy, had one survival factor that men had always lacked. There was no word for it in any human language; you could only talk around it in negatives. The Niori did not kill; they did not lie; they did not steal, intrigue, exploit each other, hate, make war. For men, "the fittest" had always been the man, or nation, or race, that survived by exterminating its rivals. Somehow, the Niori had found another way. There was no word for it. But perhaps you could find it, if you looked long enough. He had studied their architecture, and pondered long on the arrangement of the City's great hivebuildings: a peculiar, staggered arrangement which was neither concentric nor radial; which created no endless vistas, only islands of buildings or lakes of parkland. He had tried to see into that arrangement and through it to the soul of the race, as other scholars had peered into the city-plans of Athens and New York, reading inwardness into one and outwardness into the other. The method was sterile. The Niori had no "world-view" in the Spenglerian sense. Their cities expressed only function and a sense of beauty and order. In those early days, he had said to himself: These people have no cinemas, theaters, churches, art galleries, concert halls, football fields. Let me see what they have instead, and perhaps I will begin to understand them. He had seen the Niori, sitting in a circle of six or eight, solemnly capping one word with another, around and around. To him, the sequences of words were sense-free and followed no discernable pattern. To the Niori, evidently, they fulfilled some function analagous to those of poetry and group singing. He had watched them debating in the governing council. There was no rhetoric and no heat, even when the issue was important and the opinions widely divergent. He had seen their shops, in which each article was labeled with its cost to the merchant, and the buyer gave as much more as he could afford. It was incredible ; but it worked. He had followed their culture through a thousand other avenues until he wearied of it, having learned nothing more than he knew at the beginning. Afterwards, for twenty years he had not left the Quarter except to transact business, or to oversee the unloading of merchandise at the spaceport. Today he had gone once more, feeling an obscure compulsion: perhaps because he knew the day was coming when he would see the City for the last time ; perhaps hoping, in that small spark of himself that still allowed itself to hope for anything, that one more visit would show him the miraculous key to all that he had misunderstood. He had learned nothing new, but the morning had not been altogether wasted. It was a clear autumn day, good for walking in so green a city. And paradoxically enough, being the only Earthman on the streets had made him feel less alien than before. He attracted no attention, in a spaceport city: he walked side by side with squat Dritik and spidery Oladsa, beings of a hundred different races from as many stars. When he returned to the Quarter, he felt oddly refreshed and calmed. We have very little left, he thought, except one or two minor virtues that have no bloodstains on them. Kindliness, humor, a sense of brotherhood... perhaps if we had stuck to those, and never learned the martial virtues, never aspired to be noble or glorious, we would have come out all right. Was there ever a turning point? When Carthage was sown with salt, or when Paul founded the Church -- or when the first caveman sharpened the end of a stick and used it for murder? If so, it was a long way back, dead and buried, dust and ashes. We took all that was best in thousands of years of yearning and striving for the right, he thought, and we made it into the Inquisition and We fattened our own children for each generation's slaughter. And yet we are not all evil. Astereos is right: if the other races had been like ourselves, it would have been bearable; or if we ourselves had been creatures of pure darkness, conscienceless, glorying in cruelty -- then we could have made war on the Galaxy joyfully, and if we failed at least there would have been an element of grandeur in our failure. Olaf Stapledon had said this once, he remembered -- that there was an artistry in pure, uncontaminated evil, that it was in its own way as real an expression of worship as pure good. The tragedy of human beings, then, was that they were not wholly tragic. Jumbled, piebald parcels of contradictions, angels with asses' ears... What was that quotation from Bierce? The best thing is not to be born... Someone brushed by him, and Cudyk looked up. He was at the intersection of Ceskoslovensko and Washington; he had come three blocks past his apartment without noticing where he was going. Chong Yin's was only a few doors to his left; perhaps he had been heading there automatically. But the doors were closed, he saw; seven or eight Chinese were standing in the street outside, and as Cudyk watched, Seu Min came down the stairs from the living quarters over the tea room. The other Chinese clustered around him for a moment, and then Seu appeared again. The others slowly began to disperse. Cudyk went to meet him. The mayor's face looked strained; there were new, deep folds of skin around his eyes. "What is it, Min?" said Cudyk. Seu fell in beside him and they walked back up the street. "Chong killed himself about an hour ago," said the Chinese. How many does that make? Cudyk thought, frozen. Six, I think, in the last two months. He had not known Chong well -- the old man had been a northcountry Chinese, not Westernized in the least, who spoke only his own language. Now that he thought of it, Cudyk realized that he did not know who Chong's close friends had been, if he had had any. He had always been the same spare, stooped figure in skull-cap and robe, courteous, unobtrusive, selfcontained. He had a family; a wife, rarely seen, and six children. Somehow Cudyk felt that he would have been less surprised to hear that Moulios had committed suicide, or Moskowitz, or even Seu himself. My mistake, he told himself. I allowed myself to think of Chong as an institution, not as a man. "Have you some whisky?" asked Seu abruptly. "Yes," said Cudyk, "of course." "Let us go and drink it," Seu said. "I'm very tired." It occurred to Cudyk that he had never heard Seu say that before. They turned the corner at Athenai and climbed the stairs to his apartment. Seu sighed, and dropped heavily into a chair while Cudyk went to get the bottle and glasses. "Straight, or with water?" he asked. "Straight, please." Seu tilted his glass, swallowed and shuddered. Cudyk watched him in silence. Seu, alone in the Quarter, owned a Niori communicator -- an elaborate mechanism which reproduced sound, vision in three dimensions, odors, modulated temperature changes and several other things perceptible only to Niori. There was no restriction on their sale, and they were cheap enough, but the Niori broadcasts were as dull or as incomprehensible to men as a Terrestial breakfast program would have been to Niori. Seu used his as a source of Galactic news. Today, Cudyk guessed, the news had been very bad. "It's Rack, isn't it?" he said finally. Seu glanced at him and nodded. "Yes, it's Rack. I haven't told anyone else about it yet. The Quarter's in a half-hysterical state as it is. But if you don't mind my talking it out to you -- " "Go ahead," said Cudyk. "It's worse than anything we expected." Seu took another swallow of the whisky, and made a face. He said, "They've got a hydrogenlithium bomb." "... I was afraid of that." Seu went on as if he had not heard. "But they're not using it on planets. They're bombing suns, Laszlo. For a moment, Cudyk did not understand, then he felt his abdominal muscles contract like a fist. "They couldn't," he said hoarsely. "It would explode before it got past the outer layers." "Under faster-than-light drive?" Seu asked. "I did some figuring. At # C, it would take the bomb about two point six thousandths of a second to travel from the surface to the center of an average G-class star. I think that is a short enough interval, but maybe it isn't. Maybe they have also found some way to increase the efficiency of the standard galactic drive for short periods. Anyway, does it matter?" He looked at Cudyk again. "I have seen the pictures. I saw it happen." Cudyk' s throat was dry. "Which stars?" he said. "Torkas. Rud-Uri. That's the Oladi sun. And Gerzion. Those three, so far." Cudyk's fingers were nervously caressing the smooth metal of his wristwatch. He looked down at it suddenly, remembering that the Oladsa had made it. And now they were gone, all but their colonies and travelers on other worlds, and those who had been in space at the time. All those spidery, meticulous culture and their cities of carved opal, wiped out as a man would swat a fly. Seu took another drink. His face flushed, and drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and cheeks. He said, "They'll have to learn to kill, now. There isn't any alternative. They intercepted one of the New Earth ships and sprayed it with the stasis field. It didn't work; the ship got away. They'll have to learn to kill. Do you know what that means?" "Yes." Seu drank again. His face was fiery red, now, and he was gasping for breath. "I can't get drunk," he said bitterly. "Toxic reaction. I thought I'd try once more, but it's no good. Laszlo, look out, I'm going to be sick." Gudyk led him to the lavatory. When he came out, the Chinese was weak and waxen-pale. Cudyk tried tp persuade him to rest on the bed, but he refused. "I've got to get back to my office," he said. "Been gone too long already. Help me down the stairs, will you, Laszlo?" Cudyk walked him as far as Brasil and Washington, where two of Seu's young men took over with voluble expressions of gratitude. Cudyk watched the group until it disappeared into the town hall. He could feel nothing but an arid depression. Even the horror at Rack's mass-murders, even his pity for Seu was blunted, sealed off at the back of his mind. The lives of saints, Cudyk remembered, spoke of "boundless compassion", "infinite pity"; but an ordinary man had a limited supply. When it was used up, you were empty and impotent, a canceled sign in the human equation. Half instinctively, half by choice, Cudyk had chosen his friends among the strongest and most patient, the wise and cynical : the survivors. But he had leaned too much on their strength, he realized now. He had seen Seu crumble; and he felt as if a crutch had broken under his weight. That evening he opened his shutters and looked out at the sky. The familiar constellations were there, unchanged. The light of the nearest star took more than three years to reach Palumbar. But in his mind's eye one glittering pinpoint exploded suddenly into a dreadful blossom of radiance; then another; then a third. And he saw the blackened corpses of planets swinging around each, murdered by that single flash of incredible heat. During the night he dreamed of a black wasteland, and of Rack standing motionless in the center of it, brooding, with his cold grey face turned to the stars. had never told anyone in the Quarter the date, and had all but forgotten it himself. This morning, feeling an idle desire to know what the season was on Earth, he had hunted up a calendar he had last used twenty years ago; it translated the Niori system into Gregorian years, months and days. The result, when he had worked it out with some little trouble, was February #th. He was fifty-six. Now he was constrained to wonder whether the action had been as random as it seemed. Was it possible that subconsciously he had no need of the calendar -- that he had kept track, all these years, and had known when his birthday came? If so, why had he felt it necessary to remind himself in this oblique way? A return to the womb? A hunger for the comforts of the family circle, the birthday cake, candles, the solace of yearly repetition? Cudyk was fifty-six. When he had been fifty-five, he had thought of himself as a man in his middle years, still strong, still able. Now he was old. The same thing had happened to Seu: he had recovered from his first shock when the news had come about Rack, and for more than three weeks now he had moved about the Quarter, as quiet and as competent as before; but there was a difference. His swift, furtive humor was gone except for rare flashes; his voice and his step were heavy. It was the same with all of them, all the old settlers. Cudyk had met Burgess on the street the day before, for the first time in several weeks, and had been genuinely shocked. The man's hair was white, his skin papery, his gait stumbling. Even Exarkos showed the change. More and more of his grey, woolly hair was vanishing. The umber crescents under his eyes were a deeper shade, almost black. The Quarter's graveyard was five acres of ground, surrounded by trees, on the outskirts of the City; there the dead reclined in a more ample space than the living enjoyed. The Niori had allotted the ground, though the outline of the City was thereby disfigured, and had contributed slabs of a synthetic stone which carved easily when it was fresh, later hardening until it would resist any edged tool. The plot was ill tended, but the standing stones, translucent pearl or rose, had a certain beauty. To the Niori, the purpose of the graveyard was only that; they were not equipped to understand mankind's morbid clinging to its own carrion. Cudyk had gone to Chong's funeral, presided over by Lee Yuk, the asthmatic little Buddhist priest ; and the image of those ranked headstones, neatly separated into the Orthodox, the Protestants, the Buddhists, the Taoists and the unbelievers, had returned to him many times since. It was another sign of the change that was taking place in him: the images which formerly had dominated his mind had been pictographs of abstractions -- the great globe of infinity, the tiny spark that was creative intellect. Now they were the pale headstone and the dark curtain of death. He had felt nothing, standing over Chong's grave and watching the sod fall. What is there to say about a man when he is dead? The priest's words were false, as all such words are false; they had no relevance; the man was dead. Nothing was left of him now but the dissolving molecules of his flesh, and the fragmentary, ego-distorted memories he had planted in the minds of others. He was a name written in water. It was not Chong who obsessed Cudyk, nor the many other halfremembered men and women whose names were clumsily carved on those stones. It was the cemetery as a symbol: the fascination of the yawning void. Cudyk had one other preoccupation: he thought often of Earth, a dark globe turning, black continents dim against the grey ocean, pricked by a few faint gleams that were cities. Or, if he thought of the eities, he saw them too drowned in shadow: the shapes of tower and arch melting into night-patterns; moonlight falling faintly, dissolving what it touched, so that shadows became as solid stone, stone as insubstantial mist. For Earth, also, was a symbol of death. There had been no more suicides since Chong had died, and no riots. It seemed to Cudyk that the whole Quarter moved, like himself, through a fluid heavier than air. All motion had slowed, and sounds came muted and without resonance. People spoke to him, and he answered, but without attention, as if they were not really there. Even the recent news about Rack's defeat had stirred him only momentarily, and he had seen in Seu's face that the Chinese felt himself somehow inadequate to the tale even as he told it. The Galactic fleet, vastly expanded, had met Rack's activist forces with a new weapon -- one, indeed, which did not kill, but which was shameful enough to a citizen of the Galaxy. The weapon projected a field which scrambled the synapse patterns in the brain, leaving its victim incapable of any of the processes of coherent thought: incapable of adding two figures, of lighting a cigarette, or of aiming a torpedo. Eleven New Earth ships had been captured, and it was thought that these were all the activists' armed vessels ; there had been no further attacks since then. He did not believe that anything which could now possibly happen could rouse him from his apathy. But he had forgotten one possibility. Seu came to him in Chong Yin's, where Yin's eldest son Fu now moved in his father's place, and said, "Rack wasn't taken. He's here." Cudyk sat with his teacup raised halfway between the table and his lips. After a long moment, he saw that his hand was trembling violently. He set the cup down. He said, "Where?" "The Little Bear. Half the town has gone there already. Do you want to go?" Cudyk stood up slowly. "Yes," he said, "I suppose so." But he felt the tension that pulled his body together, he tautened muscles in back and shoulders and arms. As they reached the corner of #eskoslovensko and Washington, they saw scattered groups of men moving ahead of them, all hurrying, some frankly running. The crowd was thick around the doorway of The Little Bear when they reached it, and they had difficulty forcing a passage. Men moved aside for Seu space to move. Inside, it was worse. The stairway was solidly packed; it was obviously impossible to get through. "There isa back stair," Seu said. He worked his way toward the rear of the room, Cudyk following, until he caught sight of the bartender. The press was not so thick here, and he was able to reach the man and lead him into a comer away from the others. "Can you get us up the back way?" The Russian nodded, scowled, and put his finger to his lips. Following him, they went through the swinging doors at the back of the room, through the dark kitchen and up the narrow service stairs at the rear. The bartender unlocked the door and helped them force it open against the pressure of the packed bodies inside. The long room was heavy with the odors of sweat, tobacco smoke and stale air. Faces shone greasily under the glare of the ceiling lights. The only clear space was the tabletop against the wall to Cudyk's right, where Rack stood. Gudyk could see him clearly over the heads of those in front of him. He stood with legs planted firmly, hands at his sides. As always, the leather jacket was draped over his shoulders like a cloak. He was alone. Spider was not there, nor Monk, nor Tom De Grasse. Rack was talking in a low, clear voice. Cudyk listened to the end of a sentence which conveyed nothing to him, and then heard: "After that, we got it. They gave it to us." Rack's hands clenched once, and then opened again. "They intercepted us three minutes after we came out of overdrive in the orbit of New Earth. Twelve fighting ships, the whole fleet. We were in a line, just closing in after we broke G on the way down -- the Thermopolae, the Tours, the Waterloo, the Chateau Thierry, the Dunkirk, the Leningrad, the Acre, the Valley Forge, the Hiroshima, the San Francisco, the Seoul, and the flagship last, the Armageddon . "We didn't know they were there -- they were out of our detector range. They had us like sitting ducks. The first thing we knew about it was when a teletype report from the leading ship, the Thermopolae, broke off in the middle of a word. Five seconds later the same thing happened to a report coming in from the next ship. Three seconds more, and the Waterloo was gone. "I gave the order to reverse acceleration and scatter. But the field -- whatever it was -- came after us. It would have taken us at least two minutes to build up the overdrive potential again, and we all knew we wouldn't make it. They were getting us one ship every six or eight seconds. "The men were looking to me for orders. I didn't have any to give them. Suddenly De Grasse turned around and looked at Monk and Spider, and they all nodded. They jumped me. I don't know what happened. I struck my head against the deck when I went down, or one of them hit me with a gun-butt." His fists clenched and opened once more. "When I came to, I was strapped into a one-man lifeboat, on overdrive, doing ten C's. They must have emptied the ship's accumulators into that lifeboat, charged it up to C potential and got me off just before the field hit them. "I took my bearings, reversed, and went back. Eventually I found the fleet again. The Galactics had matched course and velocity with them and they were just beginning to tow them off, one ship to one with plenty of theirs left over, in the general direction of Altair. "They hadn't got into overdrive yet. I slipped in -- there were a hundred of their little scouts nosing around, about the same mass as my lifeboat -- and berthed in the same port I'd come out of. I got out and walked into the control room. "The crew was still there, still alive. But not men. They were lying on the deck, looking at nothing. Their mouths were open, and they were drooling." Rack's head moved stiffly, and his sharp profile turned from one side of the crowd to the other. "Mindless idiots," he said. "They couldn't feed themselves, or stand up, or sit. But they had saved me. "I built up the charge and took my time about it. When the Galactics went into overdrive, I took off in another direction. I was a good seventy light years away before they knew I was gone. "I had a ship, an undamaged ship. But I had no crew to man her. I can astrogate, and when I have to, I can man the engines on top of that. But I can't fight her as well. "I came here, put the Armageddon into a one-day orbit and came down in a lifeboat. I want to go back and find out what those slimeeaters did to us, and give them a taste of the same. I want twenty men " There was a silence. Rack said, in the same even, low voice, "Will you fight for the human race?" Someone called, "What did you do with your other crew?" Rack said, "I gave them military burial, in space." For the first time, the crowd as a whole broke its silence. A low murmur rose. Rack said sharply, "I would have given my life for those men, as they did for me, gladly. But they were already dead. If there's a way to restore a man's mind after that has been done to it, only the vermin know how. I would rather be buried in space, and so would they." A deep voice called, "Are you God, Rack?" "I'm not God," he said promptly. "Are you a man?" There was another murmur, dying as a pulsing movement began near the back of the room: someone was forcing his way toward Rack. In the stillness, another voice said thinly, "My Deme trios... my Alexander..." It was Moulios, wailing for his two lost sons. Red-faced, with a lock of black hair hanging over his forehead, the painter Vekshin squeezed through to the edge of the table on which Rack stood. He shouted, "I'm a man, all right. What do you call yourself, you assassin? You come here with blood dripping from your jaws like a weasel fresh from a poultry yard, and we're supposed to feel sorry for you because they great god Rack! Ptui!" Rack did not move. He said quietly, "I killed your enemies, while you sat at home and drank tea" "Enemies!" Vekshin roared. "You're the enemy, Rack." He put his big hands on the table-top and heaved himself up. Rack let him come. He waited until the Russian was standing on the table; then he stepped forward with a motion so smooth it seemed casual. There was a flurry of blows, none of which landed except two: one in Vekshin's midriff, the other on the point of his jaw. Five men went down as Vekshin's body hurtled into them. Rack stepped back. "I have very little patience left," he said, "but if there is anyone else here with a personal grudge, let him step up." Two men at the table's edge moved as if to climb up. Rack put his hand to the gun at his belt. The two men stayed where they were. Rack stared out over the crowd. He looked suddenly very weary. It occurred to Cudyk that he must have gone without sleep for a long time. Rack said: "This is the last call. I am not trying to deceive you. I promise you nothing, not glory, not your lives, not even that you will be able to spend your lives usefully. But if there is any man here who will serve aboard the Armageddon, in the last fight for mankind -- raise your hand!" There was a long moment's silence. Rack turned abruptly, with his hand still on his gun, and said to the men in front of Cudyk: "Stand back!" The silence held for an instant, while the men at the table's end moved uncertainly away; then sound broke like an avalanche. As Rack jumped down, the crowd surged toward him, no longer an audience but a mob. Cudyk felt the pressure at his back, caught a glimpse of Rack's face, then heard the deafening report of the gun as he went hurtling forward into the melee. The gun did not fire again. Cudyk was squeezed tightly in the center of the struggling mass. He saw Seu, a few feet away. The mayor's mouth was open; he was shouting something, but the words were lost. Suddenly Rack came into view again, charging straight toward Cudyk, hurling bodies to either side. The lower half of his face was a smear of blood ; his cap and jacket were gone, his shirt tom half away. Cudyk was half-aware of the constriction in his throat, the pounding of blood at his temples. He wrenched one arm free and, as Rack came near, struck him full in the face. He had one more glimpse of Rack's white features, the pale eyes staring at him with a curiously detached expression: the eyes of a Caesar or a Christ, reproachful and sad. Then the crowd surged once more, the door to the back stairway slammed open, and Rack was gone. Cudyk found himself running through the doorway with half a dozen others. He caught sight of Rack leaping down the stairs, just short of the landing where the narrow stairway doubled back on itself. With a regretful sigh, feeling no surprise at what he was about to do, Cudyk put both hands on the railing and swung himself over into vacancy. Then there was an instant of wild, soaring flight, Rack's foreshortened body drifting beneath him, and the shock. Dazed and numb, Cudyk felt the universe moving under him like a gigantic pendulum. He saw faces appear and vanish, felt someone push him aside, heard voices faintly. After a long time his head cleared, and there was silence. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, one arm flung over the first step. Rack was not there; no one was there but himself. He moved cautiously and was rewarded by an astonishing number and variety of pains. But apparently he had broken no bones. He felt weak and hollow; he was afraid he might vomit. He hoisted his torso up slowly, sat on the lowest step and then put his head between his trembling knees. He heard a foot scuff on the concrete floor, and looked up. It was Seu. The Chinese looked at him anxiously. "You're all right?" "Yes. I think so. I have felt better in my life." "Do you want to get up? Did you jump or fall?" Cudyk leaned forward, trying the strength of his thighs to raise him, and Seu put a hand under his arm to help. "I jumped," Cudyk said. "What happened, afterward?" "The mob came down, me in the middle, and I couldn't stop to see if you were all right. They took Rack with them. He was unconscious then ; he may have been dead." "And?" "They tore him apart," said Seu. They moved toward the exit from the kitchen, Seu holding Cudyk' s arm firmly. "I don't know if you felt this," the mayor said stiffly, "but the way it seemed to me was that Rack suddenly represented all of it -- not only the bombings, but the Quarter, the Galaxy, Earth -- everything we hated. It was a feeling of release, a kind of ecstasy. Watch out for the sifl." "Scapegoat," Cudyk said, indistinctly. "Yes  i . Zydh Oran saw it, you know. He was there when the mob came out. He saw it all. This finishes the Quarter, Laszlo. After this there won't be any more reprieves." Cudyk glanced down at Seu's plump fingers. There was a thin film of blood on the skin, and a dark line of it around each fingernail. gentle rise opposite the Washington Avenue bridge, and looked down at the Quarter. It was just after sunset, and the ranked street lights cast a lonesome gleam. The streets were empty. There was no one left in the Quarter except one man in the powerhouse. When the time was up, he would pull the switches on the master board and come out; then the Quarter would be dead. The Niori edict had come on the Wednesday morning after Rack's death. They had been given four days to pack their belongings, arrange for assignment of cargo space, and wind up their several affairs. Cudyk's stock was small and his personal belongings few; he had been ready two days ago. The evening breeze, freshening, pressed Cudyk's trousers against his calves and stirred the hair at the back of his head. Looking into the east, he saw a few pallid stars in the sky. Several hundred people had already been collected by the aircars which served the spaceport. Cudyk, Seu, Exarkos and a few others, by unspoken assent, had taken places at the rear of the crowd, to be the last to go. He glanced at Seu. The little man was standing with his hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, staring dully at the Quarter. He looked up after a moment, smiled unhappily, and shrugged. "It's absurd to feel homesick for it, isn't it?" he said. "It was a ghetto; we had no roots there. It was cramped, and it stank, and we fought among ourselves more viciously than we ever fought on Earth. But twenty years... "We could pretend that we had roots, at least," Cudyk answered. "We don't belong anywhere. Perhaps we'll be happier, in the long run, once we face that and accept it." "I doubt it" "So do I." To Cudyk's right, Father Exarkos was sitting on his suitcase, hands relaxed on his thighs. Cudyk said, "If I were a believer, Astereos, I think it would do me a great deal of good to confess to you and be absolved." The priest's dry, friendly voice said, "Why, have you sinned so terribly, Laszlo?" "I killed a man," said Cudyk, "but that's not what I mean. I jumped over a stairway railing and stopped Rack. If it hadn't been for me, he might have got away. There would have been nothing wrong with that. He couldn't have done any more harm, one man by himself. The Guards would have captured him sooner or later, anyhow. And if he had gotten away, we wouldn't have given the Niori the one more straw they needed. In that sense, it is my fault that we were expelled." "No, Laszlo," said Seu. Exarkos said, "You have nothing for which to reproach yourself, on that score. You were only the instrument of history, my friend, and a minor instrument at that. And, speaking for myself, not for the Church, Rack deserved to die." Cudyk thought, at least it was quite suitably ironic. Cudyk, the man of inaction, hurls himself through the air to kill a murderer. And the citizens of the Quarter are deported, not because one of their Galactics, but because that same killer was killed by them. That was one thin mark on the credit side. There was one more: the tension was gone, for some of them at least. Now the worst thing that could happen had happened; the Damocletian thread had snapped. The problems which had caused the tension no longer existed. Earth was two months away. Cudyk expected nothing and hoped for nothing. But the Niori had agreed to set each passenger down wherever on the globe he chose to go ; each man, at least, could choose his own hell. The crews of the captured battleships, and the captured staff of the base on New Earth, were also being sent back. The weapon that had been used on them had done no permanent damage; they would simply have to be retrained, to learn all over again, as if they were reborn. Seu was going to North America, where he hoped survival for a fat cosmopolite would be a little less difficult than in Europe or Asia. Moskowitz had been born in New York, and was going back there. Exarkos was going to Istanbul first, (Continued on page #) llvliailS hr m Illustrated by Ernie Barth The woodsman couldn't spare Julie's beloved old tree. Down it had to come. But the religious tenets of an alien race, such as the Visgi, didn't bother little Julie... So she planted another tree in Visgi soil! but they possessed none of the tion which stated in effect, that the characteristics usually associated moment a plafnet came under Visgi with conquerors. They were not dominion the inhabitants of said cruel ; they were not vindictive ; planet must institute a re-landscapthey were not avaricious. They did ing project for the purpose of alternot plunder; they did not pillage; ing all surface features intrinsically they did not exploit. The word different from the surface features "rape" was not even in their voof the planet Visge. For according cabulary. They were conquerors beto the Visgi credo, Visge was the cause conquest was their religious Model, the First-To-Be-Created, raison d'etre . and it was the Prime Motivator's The Visgi conquered Earth durwish that all other planets in the ing the last years of the twentieth cosmos be patterned after the century, and the occupational adModel. That was why He had ministrators moved into office imcreated the Visgi, and that was mediately. The first thing they why Visgi technology went hand in did was to issue the traditional hand with Visgi religion. Fortunately, Visge was not radically different from Earth. It had seas and continents. It had rivers and plains and lakes and mountains and hills. It had a north and south polar cap and an International Date Line. On one of its northern continents there was a peninsula that could have passed for Florida. Actually there was only one intrinsic difference between Visge and Earth. On Visge there were no trees. of saws and the shouts of men. Looking out of her bedroom window she saw the movement of denim clad bodies in the green foliage of the big maple, and sawdust drifting down like yellow snow. She dressed quickly and ran downstairs. Mother was standing on the back porch, her eyes very strange. In the village below the hill on which Julie and her mother lived, maples and oaks and elms were dying like fine brave soldiers, their limbs dropping one by one in the summer morning sunlight. But Julie had eyes for her soldier only. Her swing still hung from one of the lower branches. High above her head was the special bough whose foliaged fingertips brushed her window reassuringly on windy nights when she could not sleep, and just below it was the branch reserved for robins when they came north each spring. "Mother," she asked, "what are they doing to my tree?" Mother took her hand. "You must be a brave girl, Julie." "But Mother, they hurt my tree!" "Hush, dear. They're only doing what they have to do." The first limb fell with a swishing sound. Sawdust flurried in the morning wind. Julie cried out and wrenched her hand from Mother's. There was a big man in breeches and high-top shoes standing in the yard, looking up at the men and shouting at them to hurry. Julie ran toward him, screaming. "You leave my tree alone!" she cried. "You leave it alone!" She pounded his belt with her small clenched hands. He grasped her wrists and pushed her away. His face was gray and there were dark smudges beneath his bleak blue eyes. "Damn it!" he shouted over Julie's head, "isn't this job tough enough as it is? Get her out of here. Get her out of here!" Julie felt Mother's soft hands on her shoulders. "I'm sorry," Mother said. "But she doesn't mean any harm. You see, she doesn't understand." "Why doesn't she?" the big man shouted. "She had it in school, didn't she? The Visgi held deforestation classes in every school in the world. Kids are supposed to hate trees now." "But she doesn't go to school. You see, she's -- She's not quite -- " Mother paused. The big man looked at Julie closely. Something very odd happened to his eyes. They had been like winter, and now, suddenly, they were like summer -- soft and deep and misted. He looked back at Mother. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know." "Of course you didn't," Mother said. "It's all right." "I hate to take the tree down. You know that, don't you?" "I know  # Mother said. Her hand tightened on Julie's. "Come, Julie, we'll go back to the house." The big man fumbled in the pockets of his breeches. He handed Julie a quarter. "Here," he said. "You be a brave girl now, won't you?" Julie ignored the quarter. She looked up into the man's eyes. "Please don't hurt my tree," she said. The big man stood there helplessly. "Come, Julie," Mother said again. "We have to get out of the way so the men can work." Julie accompanied her reluctantly. "We'll go in and have breakfast," Mother said. "We'll have scrambled eggs, just the way you like them." "No!" "Yes, Julie." Julie cried, but Mother made her go in the house and sit at the kitchen table. The swishing sounds and the thuds of falling limbs kept coming through the open window, and the singing of saws. Mother scrambled eggs and made toast. She poured Julie a glass of milk. Julie listened to the saws. There was another saw now, a saw that sang in a loud rasping voice. Suddenly someone shouted "Timber!" and right after that there was a heavy sickening thud. Julie tried to run to the window, but Mother caught her in her arms and held her very close. "It's all right, darling," she said over and over. "It's all right. Don't cry, baby, don't cry." But Julie cried and cried. That night she dreamed of the tree. She dreamed of it the way it had been in winter, dark and forlorn, its branches charcoal tracings on somber metallic skies. She dreamed of it the way it had been in spring, with new buds filming its branches with pale green mist. But most of all she dreamed of it the way it had been in summer, a green cloud above her head as she sat in her swing, a lovely cloud with the wind sighing through it, with the sky a robin's egg blue all around it. A little girl and a cloud of a tree adrift on the top of a hill. The next day the landscape men came. Julie woke to the huffing and puffing of a giant crane. Looking out her window she saw the big claw of the crane sinking into the stump of the tree and the steel cables tightening. There was a thick ripping sound when the stump pulled loose, and a shower of dark earth. The stump came out of the ground like a grisly tooth, its roots trailing wildly below it. The crane swung the stump around and dropped it into a waiting dump truck and the truck thundered down the hill into the valley. Another dump truck backed up to the dark deep wound where the stump had been and disgorged its load of reddish Visge soil; then a bulldozer began to chug-chug, creeping back and forth across the yard like a mechanized triceratops. Julie dressed slowly. Mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the white table looking at her hands. She looked up when Julie came in. "Good morning, darling," she said. "Did you have a nice sleep?" "Will they plant a new tree?" Julie asked. "No, Julie. They'll plant grass. The kind of grass that grows on Visge." "But why, Mother?" Mother looked down at her hands again. "Because they must, dear. Because that's the way they are... Shall I scramble you some eggs?" "I'm not hungry," Julie said. The bulldozer labored all morning. By noon the ground where the tree had stood was level, and after they ate their lunch the landscape men got long rakes from their pickup truck and began raking the Visge soil. (Visge soil was restricted to hilltops where the danger of erosion was greatest.) They raked the soil till it was broken up into fine particles, then they planted Visge grass. They planted it the way the Visgi had instructed them, thickly so that the long roots would become entangled and lock the soil against the onslaughts of the rain and the wind. It was late afternoon when they finished, and they got into their truck and drove down the hill to the village. That evening Julie sat on the porch steps, staring at the naked yard. She concentrated on the spot where the tree had stood, memorizing it with her eyes. She sat there long after the sun had set, watching the shadows creep up the hill. Mother sat behind her on the rocker. Around them in the coalescing darkness crickets began their chant, and from the marshes at the end of the valley came the dissonant singing of frogs. Fireflies began to flicker in the dark blurs of bushes on the borders of the yard. Finally Mother said: "It's time for bed, Julie." "All right, Mother." "Would you like a glass of milk?" "No, Mother." "You must be very hungry. You hardly touched your supper." "No, Mother. I'm not hungry at all " The house was very still, and damp with night. Julie lay very quietly in her bed, pretending sleep. She lay there for a long while, till Mother's breathing became even and deep, then she got up and tiptoed down the stairs. She opened the door carefully and walked softly across the porch and down the steps. The moon was full and the naked yard was silver now. Julie didn't think they could have noticed the little tree. She was sure that she was the only one in the world who knew about it. She got her diminutive shovel out of her sand pail and went around to the side of the house. The tree was still there, growing very close to the foundation, hugging the concrete blocks as though it was afraid. It was as big around as Julie's little finger, it was a foot high, and it had one leaf. She dug it up tenderly, then she carried it around the house to the place where the big tree had been. She planted it carefully, patting the soil around its tendril of a trunk till it stood up straight in the moonlight. "There," she said when she had finished, "the yard looks much better now." She tiptoed back to bed. trudged up the hill early the next morning. Julie was already up and she was watering the new tree with her red sprinkling can. Mother was still in bed. The Visgi didn't trust Terrans. They didn't trust anybody. It was each Visgi administrator's responsibility to see to it that the inhabitants of the zone which he governed lived up to the letter of the Visgi edict, and the zones were small enough so that each administrator could personally check the work of his Terran landscape crew. The local administrator was typical of his race, both mentally and physically. His face was flat and he had flat gray eyes. His ears grew flatly against the sides of his head. He was wearing a flat-topped kepi. When he saw the little tree he stopped dead on his flat feet. He hated trees. He hated any plant that did not grow on Visge. It was a religious conditioned reflex. In the beginning the Prime Motivator had created Visge; then He had created the rest of the cosmos. He had intended that all of the planets should be like Visge, but during the hectic days of the Creation He had become careless and made them any old way. So as soon as the cosmos was completed He had created the Visgi and given them the Word to go forth in ships and set the other planets right. Certainly if He had intended planets to have trees He would have put some on Visge too. The local administrator strode indignantly across the newly seeded soil and towered ominously over the little tree. He reached down with one large self-righteous hand. His fingertips had almost touched the thin trunk before the Thought -- as it was later designated in Visgi scripture -- struck him. Then something else struck him. Julie's sprinkling can bounced off his shoulder, showering his face with water. "You leave my tree alone!" she said. The local administrator hardly noticed the can or the water. He was down on his hands and knees, his face close to the ground, his eyes scrutinizing the soil. But his eyes only confirmed what his mind had known in the first place: a quantity of Visge soil was always distributed whenever sizeable trees were removed from hilltops. He got slowly to his feet. His liat gray eyes had acquired a third dimension. He looked down at the little girl. "You planted this?" he asked, pointing to the tree. "Yes," Julie said, "and don't you dare cut it down!" The local administrator stared at her, the Thought sinking its fingers deeper and deeper into his Visgi brain. Abruptly he turned and began to run down the hill to the village. Julie had never seen a Visgi run before and she watched, enthralled. She was still watching when Mother called from the upstairs window and asked what was the matter. The local administrator had reached the bottom of the hill by then and was hurrying up the village street toward his headquarters. It was not a matter for a mere local administrator to handle, so the first thing he did when he reached his headquarters was to call the Visgi resident governor and explain the nature of his insight. The governor regarded him skeptically at first, his precipitate cliff of a face dark and foreboding on the telescreen; but finally he agreed to investigate the matter immediately and directed the local administrator to have everything in readiness for his official appearance. The local administrator notified the officer of the guard without delay, and the officer of the guard assembled a ceremonial detail in dress scarlet. Shortly before noon the detail marched militarily up the hill, the local administrator in the lead. He was beginning to have misgivings by then, and the governor's awesome face haunted him. Perhaps he had acted too hastily. Perhaps he had divined a religious motif where none existed at all. Certainly the Prime Motivator's ways were complex, but did not their very complexity make them all the more difficult of interpretation? And did local administrators have any business trying to interpret them at all? By the time they reached the top of the hill the local administrator was perspiring, but not from the exertion of the climb. However, he surveyed the scene with outward calm while the officer of the guard aligned the detail in two parallel scarlet rows along the edge of the seeded area. Julie and her mother were standing together on the porch steps. The little tree was standing all alone in the middle of the yard, its single leaf fluttering valiantly in the summer wind. Suddenly a shadow drifted across the hill, and the local administrator looked up. The swallow-shape of the governor's ship showed brightly in the blue sky and even as he watched it began to descend. "Quickly l" he shouted to the officer of the guard. "Obtain the Terran child and stand her by the tree so that the governor can see them both together!" At first Julie was frightened, and Mother seemed frightened too. But after the officer of the guard had explained what was about to take place, Mother said it would be all right for Julie to go with him. Mother's eyes were very bright, Julie thought; they had not been that bright for a long time -- not since Father had gone away in the silver ship and never returned. Julie liked to see Mother's eyes that way and she skipped happily along beside the big officer of the guard. She stood by the little tree while the big swallow-ship came down, and she watched while the Visgi with the awesome cliff of a face descended the spiral landing stairs. His entourage followed. There were so many of them that Julie thought they would never stop emerging from the ship, but finally they did. They formed in a group behind the governor, talking and waving their arms. They seemed terribly excited over something. The governor talked for awhile with the local administrator. Then he bent down and scooped up a handful of reddish soil and examined it minutely. He looked over at Julie and the tree, his face still like a cliff, but a cliff with the first rays of the morning sun just beginning to illuminate it. He walked across the yard to the tree. The local administrator walked beside him and the governor's entourage followed. "See how sturdy it is," the local administrator said. "How green its foliage." "As green as the hills of Visge," the governor said. "Only on Visge soil could a tree grow like that." "Truly the ways of the Prime Motivator are inscrutable!" For Visge soil was Visge soil, no matter where it happened to be, and whatever grew on Visge soil automatically became native to Visge. The Prime Motivator's ways were devious, but they were beyond questioning by mortals, even Visgi mortals. If He had chosen such an indirect method of bringing trees to the Model, there was undoubtedly a sound motivation behind his reasoning. Henceforth, trees would be planted on Visge and be permitted to grow throughout the remainder of the cosmos. The governor's entourage could contain themselves no longer. They edged around the governor and the local administrator, jostling each other in their eagerness to see the first Visge maple. But the governor did not reprimand them. The governor was staring at Julie. His face was no longer awesome -- it was filled with awe instead. For it had occurred to him that he was standing face to face with the first Visge saint.    flict may be, man's cultural and scientific heritage will be protected from destruction by a universally recognized symbol -- a blue and white shield painted on buildings and objects as a sort of "hands off" sign to enemy bombers. All the great nations of the world, fifty of them, including Soviet Russia and her satellite countries, recently signed a solemn pledge to respect this symbol. There are to be no exceptions made on the grounds of military necessity or any other practical reason. And the Russian spokesman stands on record that no possible consideration would, under any circumstances, allow their armed forces to damage the cultural property of any other power that has signed the treaty. It is a great step for so many of the world's leading powers to come to an agreement about what should be done to protect man's heritage, thereby achieving a step forward in relieving some of the barbarity of war. Our citation this month goes to France and Italy, and particularly meeting at the Hague. Illustrated by Paul Orban There is always a breed immune to mass hypnosis, and to them falls the duty of rebellion...The story, by a Brigham Young University senior, that won the second award of # in IF's College Science Fiction Contest grass sandals of the men standing on the hill. There were eight men, and they stood looking west over the burned, gutted land that lay barren before them -- barren except for a series of huge mounds that lay in a depression far out from the hills on the rocky plains. "Do you still think we can make it?" asked a stocky man with a livid scar that ran from his upper lip to his forehead. "I for one would rather live alone and meagerly than not live at all." The speaker received a stern glance from a tall hawk-nosed man wearing a finely-worked leather belt, apparently a symbol of leadership. "We have already agreed, remember, Franz? We have to succeed or disappear off the face of the Earth. You may turn back if you wish. We are going on." Franz scowled, rubbed his scar and contemplated the mounds in the distance. "You forget I have lived there. You have not. Well, maybe to be a slave is not so bad after all. Or to die." "If we die we will not go alone," said Sten, the leader. He turned to the others. "Let's go. It will be dark soon." The men moved single-file down through the hills without speaking. As it grew dark they could feel the heat radiate from the sand. They felt the heat press against them and silently praised Sten's wisdom in waiting for the cold time of year before making the attempt. They wore a tunic of coarse-woven cloth that hung loose from their shoulders, and even that single garment was too warm here. They moved in silence, Sten in the lead, followed by his brother, Johnathon, a smaller man with wide shoulders and a quick smile. A gibbous moon was showing over the mountains when they stopped. Solemnly they gathered in a circle. "We will separate now," Sten spoke softly. "Franz and Johnathon and Karl and I will enter from the south. Bradley, you and the others will find the way in from the north. You can find the place. If we're not back at our last camp by morning of the third day, go on without us. You have the map where the valley lies?" The leader of the other group nodded. "Then hurry. Until three days, then. Remember, the only hope lies in us. Some of us have to make it!" The men separated with only a wave of farewell and the two groups moved in opposite directions across the hot sands. Clouds covered the moon and it grew darker as the four men approached the edge of the mounds. An ominous sense of foreboding fell over them. It seemed they could feel the vibration of the city that lay beneath them. Beneath them lay life -- stilted, twisted, enslaved life, but life nevertheless. "Are you sure they don't post a guard?" Johnathon asked. "Against what, the Root-Diggers?" Franz spat "contemptuously. "No, they are secure. They need fear nothing." It was another hour before they found the tunnel and entered in single file. Groping their way through the darkness, they finally felt a solid wall rise in front of them. Franz made his way to the left, feeling his way along the wall until he found a large box in a niche in the rock. "It's here! It's still here after all." "Good," Sten said. "All right, everybody up against the wall and push." Karl, the biggest of the men, laughed as he eased his bulk against the obstruction. "It would be real sport," he said, "to move this wall and find one of their Steel-heads waiting for us." Franz snickered. "It wouldn't be sport long, my friend. They're trained from birth to be triggerhappy and there's nothing anyone in Panamia fears more than the outside, or anything connected with it. And we're outsiders." The wall suddenly gave before them and they moved into a halfdarkened room. Carefully, in a sort of frozen silence, they moved the wall back into place. The box had contained city clothes; and now the men worked swiftly in the semidarkness. When they were ready Franz walked up and down making final adjustments in each of their uniforms. As he finished, Sten laid his hand on his shoulder. "Franz, you'll take over now. You know what everything is like here. We're placing ourselves in your hands." Franz shrugged his shoulders almost as if he were disinterested in the drama in which they were taking part. His eyes searched the faces of the men. "So you want women, eh? You want to preserve our race -- the glorious animal, Man. Ha! I ask you to ponder for a moment, before it is too late, whether this race is worth preserving. Men have been furthering the race for milleniums and what has it come to? Consider if the earth wouldn't prosper better without Man." The men shifted uneasily. "Forget all that, Franz," Sten snapped. "You know there must be an answer somewhere. This is our only chance. Everything can't be dead." Franz looked away. "As you wish. If you're determined to go through with it, then let's start. But first, remember that you're Steel-heads, bred and raised with no other thought than to carry out the will of Him -- The Leader. His will is your will. You do not think, you only act according to orders. Don't look intelligent, that is suspect. Just stare straight ahead and do what I tell you -- or what any other officer might tell you, for that matter. Remember, don't question anything! Just follow orders." He laid his hand on the door that led to the city, hesitated for a brief instant, then swung it open. As the men entered, walking stiffly with eyes coldly searching for the unknown, they were hit by a highpitched whine that filled the corridor and seemed to pierce deep within them. The three men covered their ears with their hands and cringed. But Franz stood straight and moved his head around to catch the noise from all angles. His mouth opened and closed slowly as if he were trying to pull the shrill noise deep within him. Finally he shook his head, as a dog shakes off water, and gathered command of himself. "It is The Leader," he said in a loud voice to overcome the whine. "Soon you will not notice it. It is everywhere." Sten removed his hands from his ears and felt the noise creep over him. He shuddered, and felt beads of sweat form on his forehead as the sound seemed to gnaw at his consciousness. Soon the others were able to bear the noise with their ears uncovered, but they felt restless and uneasy. "We're lucky not to have been seen," said Franz. "Come on." They moved down the corridor in military formation, Franz leading and the others following dumbly. The corridor was small and welllighted. Doors opened into cubicles every few feet, and the wall was lined with wide view-screens that stared out, like probing and sullen eyes. The men kept their eyes straight ahead, but occasionally they flicked a glance sideways at the people that were passing them in both directions. They halted as they reached the main corridor. A loud buzzer rose above the whine, and people emerged from the doors along the walls and passed them in silence. Eyes fixed on the ground. A few talked as they went by, but none noticed the soldiers standing at the edge of the corridor. Three girls, walking in silence, paused before the men for a brief instant, then passed on. Sten felt his eyes following the girls hungrily. Catching himself, he pulled back to attention and nudged his brother at his side. "Steel-head, Johnathon, remember?" Johnathon again looked straight ahead and stifled the beginnings of a grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth. Franz also stared after the girls, but his eyes wore an amused expression, rather than the longing look of the other men. Franz spat out a curt order and they began to march down the corridor again, the crowd making room for them automatically. Everywhere posters glared at them from the walls. Some pictured a huge eye that stared out with the words, "The Leader is watching." Others showed the smiling faces of a throng of people. Underneath, in scarlet lettering was emblazoned: "Panamia and The Leader March For an hour they marched through the city, ignored by the people and apparently unaware of all that was happening around them. They passed thousands of each immersed in a grim stupor. Where the main corridors intersected they entered great assembly places where huge view-screens were set up. They were always turned on. A shrill emotional voice blared out a constant stream of propaganda. "People of Panamia, unite, work! The Root-Diggers must be repulsed! For the glory of The Leader, for the glory of Panamia, we must accomplish our utmost. We must give our all!" "For The Leader! For Panamia!" the people shouted, rising momentarily from their dull world, their eyes glazed with emotion. Banners beneath the screens announced in large crimson letters: Service to The Leader is glory to yourself and Panamia. The soldiers stood watching tight-lipped. Franz's nostrils quivered as the tumult of the demonstration thundered about them. His face took on an eager look as he watched the people shouting in exaltation, a curt movement of Sten's hand brought him back to the task at hand. He gave a short barked order and the group moved on. They had just reached an intersection and were standing awaiting directions from Franz when a shout rang out. "Stop, Provost. You! What are you doing here?" A short, ruddy-faced officer in thick-lensed glasses strode up the corridor toward them, scowling. Sten cautiously moved his head around to face the danger. "Sten, attention! He'll know," Franz hissed from the side of his mouth. Sten snapped back to attention, staring straight ahead. The squat officer confronted Franz. "Who assigned you to this block?" Franz saluted. "Security sent us to check on a disturbance near here." The officer's eyes narrowed. "Disturbance? I have heard of no disturbance." "That is of no matter. We were sent." The squat officer stared hard at Franz. "Hmm, I see. And what is your rank number, Provost?" Franz told him a number that he remembered. The officer looked them over searchingly, his lower lip protruding in obvious contempt. "Very well, carry on. But Provost, ##I remember you!" He stood watching as they marched away, rubbing his chin thoughtfully with the palm of his hand. Sten felt a sickening void in his stomach as they marched past the officer. Surely the man suspected. Would it all end right here, before they even had a chance to get started? He felt the reassuring pressure of the knife inside his belt, the one weapon that Franz had advised, and resolved that, if it should be necessary, their lives would be sold dearly. After a while they turned into a series of side passage-ways and Franz stopped before the door to one of the cubicles. The corridor was empty, and they were out of range of the view-screens. Johnathon relaxed against the wall and sighed. "What a sight. I never expected it to be as bad as this. Did you notice the look in most of their eyes? It's a dull, glazed almost dead look. They're nothing more than beaten animals." "Easy," Franz cautioned, "wait till we get inside." He pressed the button on the door. A woman's voice came through the door panel. "What do you want?" "Open. In the name of The Leader. It is a Provost." Slowly the door swung open and the men saw a small brunette standing before them. "What do you want?" she repeated in the same monotone. "Interrogation!" Franz pushed his way inside. The others followed. The woman stood against the wall cowering from the soldiers. Franz searched around the apartment carefully, then confronted the woman. "Do you not know me?" The woman stared into his eyes. Finally she said, "No, no, I don't know you." "Do you not remember Jeannine? The girl you worked with? Remember the plans? The plans to leave here and go outside to build a new life?" Her chin quivered as she tried to speak. "Yes, now I remember. You are Franz, Jeannine's lover. That was before The Leader found out and... and sent Jeannine away. You disappeared, I thought you had been sent away, too. It is hard to remember. You know we are ordered to forget the past. What... what do you want of me?" Franz motioned to the men with him, "We are from the outside." The woman recoiled with a gasp and backed even closer to the wall. "Root-Diggers!" Sten stepped forward. "No, we're not Root-Diggers. We're the men of Boru. We've come to lead you and others like you to freedom." "Barbarians!" the woman snarled. "You're planning to overthrow Panamia!" She lunged wildly at the switch that would have turned on her view-screen. Sten caught her and pushed her back against the wall. The woman screamed once before Sten slapped her, then she sobbed into her hands. "Shut up!" Sten commanded. "We mean no harm. We have come only to lead out to freedom those who wish to go." "You are against The Leader." Franz laughed. "Let's say we hope to outwit him." The woman drew back. "That is impossible, he cannot be outwitted. The Leader is all." Johnathon looked up from the corner where he was examining the view-screen. "That may be, but we intend to have a try at it." Karl, who had been leaning against the door, suddenly sat down on a hard bench against the wall. "Damn," he complained, "this whining noise gives me a headache." The woman allowed herself a moment of curiosity. "What whining noise? There is no noise." "They are conditioned to it," Franz spoke to Sten. "It's a part of their lives. We never hear the pounding of our hearts." The woman sat down on the bench and buried her face in her hands. "Tell me," Sten said, "Has she no husband?" "Husband? In Panamia there is no such thing. Everyone lives alone. When they reach maturity, they are summoned to a meeting with The Leader, and mated with him or one of his representatives. That is all. The child is raised by The Leader's nurses. It is all a very impersonal business. They never speak of it." The lights in the apartment dimmed. Immediately the woman rose and walked mechanically to a bunk set in the wall, curled up, and was asleep almost before the men could notice her. "What was that?" "Just The Leader's signal that it is time for sleep," Franz said. "Did you see how she obeyed?" "They live like clockwork," Sten muttered. Several hours later the lights came on again. The woman rose without speaking to the men, who had slept on the floor, and sat down at the table to eat. "Hey, don't we get invited to breakfast?" asked Karl, sitting up in the corner. Johnathon sniffed the air. "From the smell of it I don't think I want any." The woman looked up annoyed. "When are you going to leave? I have to go to my work. It's important to Panamia." This last was said with a fierce pride. "Will she be missed?" Sten asked Franz. "Yes, but they allow one day away for illness. The second day they check." "Don't Worry," Sten told the woman. "We will leave when we have what we came for." "And what is that?" "Freedom." "But you say freedom is outside. Why didn't you stay?" "Because there must be freedom for our children -- and for their children." "You have children?" she looked interested. "We shall soon." "Yes," she said scornfully, "freedom for the children of the RootDiggers. But you come to Panamia for that freedom!" "We told you we're not RootDiggers," Johnathon said. "You can hardly compare us with that tribe of poor devils. But even their state is better than living like a slave in Panamia." The woman laughed bitterly. "If you are not Root-Diggers, why do you come to hurt Panamia and The Leader? It is because of you people that we are warred upon and must always sacrifice." Franz rose and faced the woman. "Kathryn, you're wrong," he said. "The Root-Diggers are not warring with Panamia. They are only men and women like ourselves who have been banned from Panamia. The Leader had them purged before they were forced outside so that they are sterile and have only half their wits. They have to live like animals, eating roots and berries and bugs and insects. Those are the Root-Diggers your Leader uses to frighten you." The woman clenched her fists until the knuckles showed white. "You lie!" she screamed. "The Leader tells the truth." "No, it's not a lie. We have all seen them," Sten said quietly. The men sat in silence while the woman wept. Karl reached out and ate a bit of the woman's food. "What sort of gruel is this stuff, I wonder. It needs salt." "Salt," commented Franz, "is the greatest luxury in the city. Because of the Root-Diggers, you know. There is a grave shortage. The people crave it more than anything else and will go to any lengths to get an extra ration of it." Sten shook his head. "And they blame it on those poor beasts outside." He rose and began nervously pacing the floor. "Franz, we have to move quickly. The others will leave if we don't meet them on time. Do you think she will go with us? Will she help us get others?" "Who knows about her?" Franz shrugged. "I know some others here who may want to go. We can see them now, but someone has to stay here with Kathryn." Sten watched the hungry eyes of Karl and Johnathon as they looked at the now silent woman, sitting dejectedly at the table. "I'll stay," he said. The two men moved reluctantly as they followed Franz from the room. Sten sat in silence after they were gone, watching the woman, who was staring sullenly at the table top. He felt the pressure of the room close in on him, and wished he were back in the openness of the mountains. With a start he realized that he no longer noticed the whine unless he listened for it, and that the sound somehow created a feeling of warmth within him. He rose, slammed his fist into his open palm, and shook the woman vigorously. "Kathryn, how would you like to leave here? Go to a new land, a valley that is still green and fertile? There you could look up at the sky and live and feel free -- and raise your children free." Kathryn looked up dumbfounded. "I couldn't leave here. What would I do? Don't you know that this is real freedom? Here where we have The Leader to take care of everything for us" "No! This is bondage. Being told when to sleep and when to eat and what to eat, and slaving for a grain of salt." "Do you have salt?" she seemed incredulous. "Out there, Kathryn, you can have as much as you want. Believe me, this is no good. Where is the purpose of your life? Man wasn't born to be a slave to anyone or anything, but to build his own life. You're a woman, meant to have children, to mother them, and teach them, and love them, doesn't that mean anything to you?" "I... I don't know. I've never thought about it before." "You must think about it! Would you have it all end here? Living always at the command of an unknown voice?" The woman's eyes searched the room, as if seeking some sign of reassurance. "But... I've never thought of any other kind of life. I'm happy here!" "Happy? Being a living robot? You've never touched real happiness. Think, Kathryn. Think hard about this. It's the most important thing in the world." She turned from the man and looked at the wall. Franz and the others returned. Kathryn was in her bunk, her eyes shut, an instrument clamped to her temples. Franz breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed behind them. "Whew, that's not good for the nerves! Every time we turned a corner we ran into that officer we met yesterday. I think he's watching us." "Sten," Johnathon said excitedly, "you should have gone with us. Most of the people wouldn't even listen, but there was a girl who was interested. I've never seen anything like her, Sten. She's so soft and small and..." Karl interrupted enthusiastically. "And she has a friend that's coming with her! Her name's Stella -- I touched her and she's smoother than anything I ever felt. I... I think she may go with us." Sten and Franz stood soberly watching the child-like joy of the two men, a new joy, something unquenchable that burned deep within them. "These people are mindless fools," Franz snorted. "Most of them didn't even remember me. The Leader's forgetting treatments are pretty strong stuff, I guess. 'The Past is Forgotten, the Future is the Glory of The Leader', that's the motto." "No wonder the poor souls seem mindless," said Sten soberly. "But what about the girls they're so happy about?" he motioned to the table where Karl and Johnathon were glibly comparing notes on the girls they had met. "They didn't remember me either, but they seemed to be able to think independently. They also thought of some others who might be interested. What will we do if we get too many?" "We'll take anyone who wants to go. At least, as many as we can. The important thing is that we get enough to start again outside." He pointed to the nook where Kathryn was still curled in the foetal position. "What's Kathryn doing, Franz? She's been like that for an hour." Franz's eyes held a look of pity. "It is the one recreation that The Leader allows them. It's hard to explain exactly what it is, but you are carried away by it. It's something like a drug, yet it's mechanical. Something like music or sweet voices washes over you and you dream. For a time, you actually live." Sten shuddered. "The only reality is dreams then, eh? Tell me, are these people actually capable of love?" "It's completely foreign to them, but they are human beings, and I suppose love is innate in us all. I found it here once, you know." Sten looked away as Franz stared hard at the floor. The tension was broken by a knock at the door, and three women followed by a single man entered. When they had exchanged greetings and been seated, Sten stood up in the middle of the room. Kathryn, who had wakened from her dreaming, sat watching wideeyed. "Franz has told you why we are here. We believe the human race is doomed to slavery and annihilation unless some of us break away. My father left us a treasure of books that his father before him had salvaged from the holocaust. They tell of a way of life before the land was ravaged. It was a better way, believe me. We men have lived in Boru, a small valley back in the hills. But now we're leaving there. Long ago our father told us of a green valley to the east, high in the mountains where things grow as they did in the time before all this. We have a map; and we're going there to find freedom. We need you to keep this freedom." A hush of silence held the room for a moment, and was broken finally by the man who had come with the three girls. "Will The Leader be there?" Sten stared hard at the man. "You will be your own leader. Can't you see that? Your Leader is only an illusion! There is no leader but yourself, and perhaps the God in my father's books." The man sat a moment, then shook his head. "Not without The Leader -- I couldn't face it." "You have your choice," Franz said coldly. The man rose and grasped the arm of the tall woman that had come in with him. "Then we have no business with you," he said as he led the woman to the door. The woman looked back hopelessly as she followed the man out. "And you?" Sten asked the remaining women. The blonde girl smiled and took hold of Johnathon's arm. "I will go" They all turned to the shy-looking girl who sat next to Karl. She looked hard at the man next to her before speaking. "Yes, me too," she almost whispered. "Good. That's two. Kathryn, what about you?" She looked Sten squarely in the eye. "I've decided to stay. Why should I leave this good life to be devoured by beasts or Root-Diggers on the outside?" Sten sighed. "Then we need more. And quickly. We must leave by tomorrow night at the latest." After the women had been escorted to their cubicles, Franz led the men through the corridors toward the center of the city. In each great square they passed squads of soldiers dressed like themselves, staring straight ahead in the same unconscious way. When they paused in the middle of a hall to plan their strategy, Karl turned to Franz. "Something's bothering me, Franz. Just where do they put their dead? We haven't passed anything like a graveyard." Franz laughed. "Death is rare in Panamia, my friend. When a person grows old or very ill, he is summoned by The Leader. He never comes back. I never knew anyone to come back. As far as any one knows they're still at the headquarters of The Leader." A huge cavern-like room loomed ahead where all the main passageways intersected. In the middle of the square sat a great round building, forbidding, yet beautiful. Doors opened on all sides leading into the great domed structure. "And this is where The Leader dwells. Nice, eh?" Franz said. The men stood looking at the huge dome until it seemed to them that they were being noticed, then they passed on through the square. At the far edge, Franz suddenly stiffened. "Walk fast. Hurry," he muttered. Sten quickened his pace to keep up with the others, then felt a chill run over him as he saw the officer with the thick glasses watching them from a window in the dome. "I wonder what would happen," Karl muttered, "if a guy could get into that dome for a few minutes to play with the machinery?" "Perhaps it could be done," Franz replied. "But it would be your last act on earth. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see what would happen to the people if the machinery stopped." Sten noted the thoughtful expression on Franz's face. The man's eyes searched the corridor, where, by listening carefully, he could hear the high whine of The Leader. Kathryn was home from her job when they returned. "Well, how is your enlistment program coming?" she asked when they entered. Sten looked at her and felt his stomach pull tight within him. "Not so well," Franz replied. "Those I knew when I was here have forgotten what they believed then or are gone. It's too dangerous to speak to many new ones." "There aren't many fools in Panamia," she retorted. Johnathon grasped Sten's arm entreatingly. "Sten, come with us, we'll see the girls. They have friends who may be interested. We only have a few more hours, let's not waste them." "No, you go on. I'll stay here for a while." "As for me," Franz said, rising, "I'll go with Karl and Johnathon. I have to check on something." Kathryn sat at the table watching Sten as , the others left. He looked away from her eyes. "You'll be alone again soon. Tell me, don't you ever get lonesome all by yourself all the time?" "I have The Leader. He is always near." "You have nothing then. Don't you realize it is nothing?" He rose and walked to the nook where her recreation machine sat on a shelf. Grasping it with both hands, he wrenched it from the wall and let it fall to the floor, smashed. She stared at it dumbly. "See! There is your Leader -- a smashed machine!" Sten shouted. He moved to her side and leaned close to her. "Kathryn, you're a woman. You're not stone! Don't you feel anything at all?" Her neck turned slowly red as he pulled her toward him. "No, I feel nothing," she said woodenly. "Is this supposed to be something special, the touch of a man?" "It can be." He put his face into her hair. Slowly he pulled her head back and looked into her eyes, then he kissed her, hard. She fought free of him and began pacing back and forth. "I don't know. I don't know. Perhaps you are right, but I don't know if I can do it." "Here, what's this?" Johnathon entered smiling. "Has there been a change of heart? Good. Then we can leave. Franz here tells me he found the lady he went looking for too." Kathryn looked again at the dream machine lying on the floor, then at Sten. She seemed to gather up strength for a brief moment. "I'll go," she whispered. "I'm glad," Sten said. "We can leave right away then. What about your girl, Franz?" "She is waiting for me," Franz smiled. "I made sure of that. But it is a long way. Give me an hour. Better yet, I'll meet you at the tunnel in an hour and a half." Franz laid his hand on Sten's shoulder and spoke in a low voice. "If I'm not there in an hour and a half, go on. I'll catch you outside." He squeezed Sten's shoulder. "Be careful, my friend. And good luck." Sten looked at the door for an instant after Franz had gone. "We must be careful. We don't want to be noticed." "Soon there will be nobody to notice us," Johnathon said exuberantly. "We can yell and run and laugh, and there will be nobody to care, not even The Leader." A silence fell over the room as he mentioned the name. Sten broke it to issue an order for everyone to gather his things. Kathryn gazed longingly round the room as the others moved out. She bit her lip with the effort it took to keep from pulling back as Sten led her from the room. They passed through the corridors without incident, stopping when they reached the intersection that led to the tunnel. They stood there at the edge of the intersection, anxiously awaiting Franz. Sten stiffened as he saw the officer that had stopped them before approaching down the corridor, followed by a soldier. The men snapped to attention and stood as if guarding the women. The officer swaggered up to Sten. "Here, what are you doing with these women?" He studied Sten's face. "Don't I know you? Ah yes, you were with that scar-faced provost that's been snooping around lately. Your actions are most out of the ordinary. I think we had better go along to The Leader's headquarters and check on this." "We have other orders," Sten stated flatly. "What! You dare disobey!" "We have orders. But look, here comes our officer now. Ask him." As the officer turned, Sten lunged forward and struck him a blow on the neck, knocking him to the floor. Instantly he fell on top of him. There was a fierce struggle as the officer tried to reach inside his tunic for his weapon. Suddenly the officer gasped. When his body was still, Sten slowly withdrew his knife from the man's chest. The soldier stood staring stupidly at his fallen officer until Karl clubbed him from behind. "We've got to get out of here," panted Sten. "Franz! What about Franz?" "I don't know. He should be here by now. But he said he'd catch us." As they fled down the corridor, the view-screens along the way were blaring the usual message of the glory of The Leader. Abruptly the voice died away, the whine faded to a diminishing hum, and there was an increasing stillness. The whine stopped and the corridors were silent. The women, terror stricken by the stillness, screamed and fell writhing on the floor. Shouts filled the corridors as panicked throngs left without the symbols of The Leader ran from their cubicles in terror. "What is it? # ' Karl shouted above the din, shaking his head to clear it. "The whining noise. It stopped." Sten gasped. "Franz! It's Franz! He must have gotten in and wrecked the dynamos." He pulled Kathryn to her feet and shook her to stop her sobbing. Then, as suddenly as it had stopped, the whine began again, slowly gaining momentum until it reached its former pitch. With this, the sobs of the women subsided and calmness slowly crept back through the corridors. "It's started again," Karl began running toward the tunnel. "They must have spare dynamos. Poor Franz, all for nothing." Again the view-speakers were blaring, this time warning the people that a saboteur had made an attempt to destroy The Leader. The women were gasping for breath when they reached the door to the tunnel. Sten plunged through the door, hurrying the others in after him, and then threw his weight against the wall. With three men pushing against it, the wall gave way and they entered the tunnel. It was night outside. They walked slowly, consoling the women, who were sobbing again at the loss of the shrill god they had known for so long. The heat that radiated from the sand was suffocating. "We have to hurry on," Sten told the women. "We can't be caught in this sand tomorrow. There are foothills ahead where we can rest." It was morning when the men, carrying the women, entered a rocky canyon and wearily slumped down in the shade of a cliff. The women barely moved, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted. "Lord, I'm tired," Karl groaned. Sten laughed. "At least we accomplished our mission. Except... for Franz." The men sat silent. "Maybe Franz fulfilled his purpose, too," Karl said. "That dynamo was the woman he had waiting for him. He probably got a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that for one minute, at least, Panamia was without The Leader." The other men didn't answer. They were asleep. They woke as the sun was going down. Sten climbed the cliffs to look out over the desert in search of the other party. He returned dejected. "They're half a day overdue now," he said. "Our food's low so we'll have to go on and hope they catch up later. Bradley has another map." He noticed the women sitting against the base of the cliff, terrified. "What's wrong?" Kathryn looked around them at the barren ground and at the clear sky stretching away to the horizon. "What's wrong? Look at this. I feel like I'm floating in air. There's nothing over us!" The men laughed. "Don't laugh," Marta wailed. "It's a horrible feeling. This emptisomething! But let's not have such silence!" Stella, the shy girl with the mouse-colored hair, began crying again. Karl gently pulled her head over on his shoulder. up through the canyon and back into the hills where the scrub trees began. All night they traveled, tearing their flesh on the jagged limbs and rocks in the darkness. Only, the occasional muffled sob of the women broke the stillness. In the morning they rested in a small valley where a trickle of water coarsed through its head. They rested under a pinion tree, the women receiving some solace from the flimsy natural roof over their heads. Sten slept three hours, then rose without waking the others and scouted ahead. He consulted his map and climbed a tall hill to search for the mountain range they were seeking. When he returned, Johnathon and Marta were gone. "He said he had to go," Karl explained. "Marta couldn't take this, and he wouldn't go on without her. He said he knew he couldn't make you understand. And asked you to take care of your father's books. He hoped that someday he could join us in the valley." "Can he stand living there?" Sten asked glumly. "Franz said once that it had been done before. I guess they don't bother you much if you obey." Sten squatted on his heels and stared out over the desert where Johnathon and Marta had disappeared, sending them a silent Godspeed. When they started out that afternoon, Stella was still sobbing. Karl tried to console her, but at every new turn they took, there was fresh terror in her eyes. Kathryn walked along with her, helping her over the rough places and trying to cheer her, but she couldn't conceal her own terror as she stared ahead at the vast distances. They rested at sundown. While the men were bringing water, Stella rose and started back down the hillside. Kathryn was thrown aside when she tried to stop her, and soon the girl was running madly down the hill, shrieking and sobbing wild!yKarl dropped his pack and ran after her, begging her to stop. But she ran on, heedless of obstacles. There was a sudden sharp wail of terror as she ran blindly off the edge of a cliff. Sten met Karl carrying her crushed body back up the hill. Karl hugged the dead girl close to him and did not look at the other man. That night, for the first time, they built a fire. Karl sat griefstricken through most of the night staring into the flames. Kathryn sat leaning against Sten during the evening, fascinated by the flickering of the fire -- the first she had ever seen. At dawn Sten awoke and nudged Kathryn. A grey squirrel was scolding them from a limb above. He laughed at Kathryn's wide-eyed surprise at the antics of the little animal. They rose without waking Karl, who was sleeping heavily in front of the bumed-out fire, and walked down to the edge of the creek. A chipmunk scampered away in front of them and a bluejay screeched from a near-by tree. A meadow-lark trilled its fine notes somewhere down the creek. They sat here at the edge of the creek-bank and leaned back on the grass. Kathryn stared to the west where a line of white clouds were playing along the horizon. "You know something, Sten? I don't notice the silence so much anymore, and the distance doesn't worry me now, either. I guess maybe there's something here after all." Sten pulled her close and smelled the good smell of green grass beneath them. The next afternoon they had nearly reached the top of the pass. They were just below timber-line. Finally, looking to the east, they saw a great empty space, with a tall mountain range rising jagged on the other side. "That's it," Sten exulted. "Fifty miles wide, and in the top of the mountains." "I'm glad," Karl said. "But you're on your own now, Sten. I'm going back." "Back? To Panamia?" "Yes. There's nothing for me here. Perhaps back there I can find something. Maybe I can take up where Franz left off. I don't know. There must be others who are not afraid of life." Silently Sten offered his hand. Karl squeezed it hard and looked into his eyes. "Good luck to you in your valley. I know where it is now, maybe some day I can return. And perhaps Bradley and the others will make it yet. Until another day then..." he turned abruptly, and started back down the mountain. Sten and Kathryn, hand in hand, watched him disappear through the trees. When they could no longer see him, they lifted their eyes to the hidden valley. They saw, even from this distance, the lakes that lay scattered through it, and the winding lines of cottonwoods that grew along the rivers, and the plains where the green and grey of the sagebrush blended. Sten breathed deeply of the crisp air and let his breath escape in a low whistle. "It was worth it, wasn't it? It's ours. And we won't always be alone, Kathryn. Others will come. Man is not dead. It may take a while, but others will come." The woman slipped her arm around the man's waist and they stood for a time looking out over the valley. Then they started the long descent.    Jerome Bixby, is the story of a small band of old people who defended their mouna wonderful characterization of two aliens puzzling themselves over the behavior of The Chicago Time Capsule was indeed an elaborate production. The greatest of American acting, writing and electronics went into its story of Man, #, for future historians. And, centuries later, it was dutifully recovered. Only... er Space dug into the pile of moldering rock, they found the metal capsule their senses had told them was there. Battered and corroded though it was, the shadow vibrations showed that it had once been smooth and shiny. As smooth, shiny and impervious to wear as Twentieth Century Earth technology could make it. At the time the Mayor of Chicago had ceremoniously tossed a handful of lake sand into the hole, had his picture taken smiling against the skyline, and had moved away to let the workmen fill the hole with cement and place the marker, the Time Capsule had been bright with the hopes of civilization sending its proud present into the uncertain future. Time passed... The tiny radio transmitter in the capsule began throwing out its wide signal at the exact instant planned for it many centuries before. No one heard. Eventually, the tiny powerful batteries gave out. The signal died. Time passed... When the Travelers from Outer Space took the capsule back to their ship and opened it, they found the contents in perfect order. Even the reel of magnetic tape had not succumbed to the centuries. In due course, the Travelers examined the tape, divined its purpose, and constructed a machine that would play back the recording. possibilities in a Universe of planets, the chances of two intelligent races being even roughly similar are astronomically remote. A being develops sense organs for no other reason than to make it aware of its environment. The simplest primitive being's awareness of its environment centers around food, its means of survival. It develops organs and appendages that will enable it to ferret out, obtain and ingest its food. As the food differs, so, then, does the eater. The Travelers had no ears or eyes, as such. They had other organs for other purposes, but the net result was that they "saw" and "heard" quite as well -- even better -- than Earthmen. Perhaps that explains why the Travelers gleaned so much more from the tape recording in the Twentieth Century capsule than its originators had planned or intended. Not just any radio show could be placed in the Time Capsule. What picture of contemporary # mankind would the men of the future derive from a soap opera? A news analysis? Or top comedy show? Certainly not a flattering one, and so, reasoned the brass in charge of the project, not a true one. No, the only answer was to produce a special documentary program, painting on a broad canvas the glories that were the common man's birthright in an enlightened democracy. As July #th was only a month away, the idea was a natural. The program would be carried simultaneously on four networks, then placed in the Time Capsule so that historians of the future would have something solid on which to base their conclusions. A famous poet-radio writer was hired to write the script. Hollywood's greatest young male star donated his services (with much attendant publicity) as narrator. A self-acknowledge genius who directed radio shows for a living condescended to lend his talents to the production. Numerous other actors, musicians, technicians and assistants were hired... none wellknown, but all quite competent. July #th, the big day, arrived. The cast went into rehearsal early in the morning. By the second complete run-through, just before the break for lunch, the show was hanging together nicely. After four hours of polishing in the afternoon, it was ready to go on the air. Everyone's nerves were raw, but the show sounded great. Naturally, when a room full of creative people have been rubbing against one another for a full day, a lot of emotions are generated. The listening audience never knew about it, but it took the actors, directors, musicians and technicians several days to get the session out of their systems. During rehearsals, the young Hollywood star developed a consuming lust for one of the minor actresses. One of the minor actors developed a consuming lust for the young Hollywood star. Everyone immediately hated the director, and he, lofty and allwise, contemptuously hated them in return. By eight o'clock that night, show time, the splendid documentary on the splendid American people was not the only thing that was at peak pitch. It was the only thing, however, that the radio audience heard. It was magnificent. Future students hearing the tape could not but conclude that here was the Golden Age. Man, at least American man, circa #, noble, humble and sincere, was carrying in his bosom the seeds of greatness. Difficulties still existed, of course, but they were not insurmountable. A few deluded people seemed to be working against the common good, but the program left no doubt that this would be cleaned up in short order. The millenium was at hand! When the Travelers from Outer Space, who were a team of historians doing research on the history of life throughout the Universe, listened to the tape recording, their "ears" heard none of the program as it had been originally broadcast. They were no less fascinated, however, for what they heard was the thought patterns of the people who had been connected with the program. These thoughts, in the form of electrical impulses, were also recorded on the magnetic surface of the tape, and were the only sounds audible to the Travelers. What a pity these future historians didn't get mankind's version of the life of mankind in #, after the producers had gone to so much trouble to tie it up in a package for them. Their conception of Earth culture was based on the thought impulses they "heard", and their History of Earth was written accordingly. The last paragraph is worth noting: "In the main, it is quite fortunate for life in the Universe that these primitive people destroyed themselves before they learned how to leave their planet. Lustful, murderous and guilt-ridden, they are perhaps the worst examples of intelligent life that we have ever discovered. And yet, paradox supreme, they had one quality that we ourselves would do well to emulate. That quality we can only surmise, for nothing on the recording spoke of it, yet it is obvious, for if they hadn't had this quality, there would have been no recording left for us at all. " How strange that these tortured people should practise an unparalleled example of Life's highest achievement... complete honesty with themselves and others."    A tool is but an extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of mankind. -- Henry Ward Beecher What Is Your Science I. Q.? in space. However, you've encountered the answers numerous times in IF and in other science fiction magazines. Count # for each correct answer and see if you can hit a score of #. The correct answers are on page #. #. The farther from the sun a planet is, the its speed as it goes around the sun. #. Oxygen and whajt other element are the chief elementary constituents of the Earth's crust? #. What is the name of the process which is based on the direct use of the sun's energy to produce life? #. How far away can the world's largest telescope (Mt. Palomar) detect the light of a single candle? # How fast would a rocket have to travel to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth? #. Radon is a heavy, , gaseous element. #. Which planet ranks second to Venus in brightness? #. How old do astronomers estimate the Moon to be? #. The arbitrary, fundamental number of a number system is called a #. The density of the atmosphere on the planet Jupiter is estimated to be how many times that of Earth? #. Which element is the fuel for the sun's radiant energy? #. By what names did the ancients once call the planet Venus? Illustrated by Paul Orban McCullough was not a native lover , nor was he particularly bull-headed. He just felt there was a certain difference between right and wrong and nobody was going to change his mind. Take that Sunday afternoon... afternoon, in the alley back of John McCullough's house. McCullough was in at the start of it, and he was in at the end. Sunday is thirty hours long on Centaurus II, as are all the other days of the week, of course; and in summer, at the latitude of Port Knakvik, the afternoons are very long indeed. John McCullough that Sunday had finished hanging the windows in the log house he was building, and now he was relaxing on the back stoop with a bottle of local whiskey. The whiskey was distilled from a native starchy root, and had a peculiar taste, but it was alcoholic, and one got used to it. In the kitchen McCullough's wife was getting Sunday dinner on the new inductor stove, still marvelling at its convenience -- back on the farm they had cooked with wood. The two children were playing in and out of the house. His neighbors, Henry Watts from across the street, and Pete Tallant from next door, had been helping him with the windows, and now they were helping him with the bottle. They were discussing the native question. In a way, this was the beginning of the riot. "It's not that I got anything against them, in their place," Henry Watts said. "Their place just ain't in an Earthman's town, that's all. They keep crowding in, first thing came down to Knakvik to work on you know there'll be more natives the spaceport the new federal than there is Earthmen, then you colonial government was building, just watch out. They're snotty and it was not his nature to worry enough already in their sly way, about problems which did not diyou let them get the upper hand rectly concern him. Mostly, he liked once, mark my word, it won't be to mind his own business, it was safe for a woman to walk down the characteristic of McCullough that street." his friends came to visit him at his "Yeah, I guess so," McCullough house, he did not go to visit them, said. He was really not much in"What the government ought to terested. His people were from the do," Watts said, "it ought to take flats upriver from Knakvik, a longthe whole bunch and round them settled country where the first up and put them away on a reservacolonists had been brought two tion somewhere. You can't civilize a generations before to form the nugrayskin, they ain't even human to cleus of an agricultural community, start with, so why try?" He had never seen more than half "Nuts," Pete Tallant said. Where a dozen native Centaurans until he Watts was a redneck miner and construction worker; and McCullough a fanner picking up a little easy money on a temporary job; Tallant was an intellectual, a dark restive young Earthman working his way around to see how Earth's far colonies looked. Watts' yapping irritated him, but there was no point in arguing against that sort of brainless conviction, he knew. He stared gloomily off at the mountains across the river, rising clean and snow-capped above the shanties and garbage piles of the transient workers who had overflowed the city to camp on the flats along the river; thinking: Just over a hundred years ago this planet was first discovered by men. Less than sixty years ago the first colonists were brought here. They came to a brand-new planet, almost as naked as the day they were born -- two hundred pounds per colonist, including their own weight -- with a free hand to build a new world as they pleased. And already the same old pattern, hate and distrust and envy, greed and oppression. How many men on Centaurus II? Perhaps a hundred thousand. How many native Cenplanet larger than Earth. But not enough room for both -- "You think I'm prejudiced," Watts said heavily, the need of the frontiersman to justify his opinions before the cosmopolite rankling in his voice. "Well, I ain't. I just know those buggers, that's all. You greenhorns come out here from Earth, you figure you got an answer to everything, just because we don't have the schooling you got, we're a bunch of fools. Ain't that right, John?" "Yeah, I guess," McCullough said absently. The next thing to do, he thought, now that they had inductor power from the central station, was to get running water in the house. Plastic bubbles and tents and shanties and hauling water from the pump were well enough for bums and single men, but a family man might as well be building a decent home while he was about it. There would always be rental value in a good house here in town, especially with the new spaceport and the government moving here; and later, when the kids had to go to high school, it would be handy. Some day, too, he would be retiring, turning the farm over to Jimmy, he and Mary would need a place to live then. "The old ones ain't so bad," Watts said. "They know their place, and they remember what happened at Artillery Bluff. But some of these young bucks, especially the smartalecky kind the government has been sending to school -- " He shook his head forebodingly. "Nuts," Tallant said wearily. "Let's talk about something we can all be stupid about, huh? Women or baseball or something." Watts flushed. "# know what I'm talking about now, and I didn't get it out of books, either, I've lived with the buggers. You greenhorns read all this sob stuff in the highbrow magazines back on Earth about the noble Centaurans, and you figure we're a bunch of jerks because we don't slobber all over them too. Noble Centaurans! Jesus! Dirty, sneaking non-humans, that's what." He lifted the bottle and drank deeply, tilting back his head and letting his eyes rove. "There," he said abruptly. "There's your noble Centaurans, look at 'em!" A group of natives were coming up the alley -- in Port Knakvik, natives did not walk in the street -- shuffling along with downcast eyes. They were a small gray-skinned people, roughly humanoid, viviparous but not mammalian. There were five males followed half a dozen steps behind by a female carrying ap infant on her hip. "You see that kish there with her fotin?" Watts asked. "Lemme show you something, you probably wouldn't believe this if I told you, these grayskins are just like animals, they got no decency at all." He stood up and waved an arm in a beckoning gesture. "Hey, you kish, come over here," he called. The female Centauran paused uncertainly, looking at him with frightened eyes out of a small triangular noseless face. "Yes, you," Watts barked. "Come here!" She glanced at the males ahead of her, who had also stopped and were looking at Watts from the comers of their eyes. One mumbled something to her. She began to shuffle slowly across the yard toward Watts, looking at her feet. Watts took a steel fivedollar piece from his pocket and held it out toward her. "Here, you kish " he said, "feed baby, viptiv fotin, get money." The native took the coin and looked doubtfully at the three men. "Viptiv?" she asked in a light high voice. # "That's right," Watts said. "Viptiv fotin" He grinned at Tallant. "Watch this, kid, you want to see your noble Centauran do something'll really make you gag." "Oh, for Pete's sake," Tallant said. "I know these people feed their young by regurgitation. So it's disgusting to mammals? So what?" He jumped down from the stoop and took the Centauran mother's arm and turned her gently around. "No viptiv " he said. "Run along." Watts' face was almost purple now. "What the hell you think you're doing?" he shouted. He grasped the female's other arm. " Viptiv " he gritted in her face. "You took my money, now viptiv !" "Let go that woman," Tallant said, "or I'll push your face in." He turned toward the group of males, who still stood stupidly staring. "Come on over here," he called. "Take your woman and get out." One of them started reluctantly across the yard. Tallant dropped the native woman's arm and stepped past her to face Watts. "I told you to let go," he said. Watts thrust his face out. "Make me, wise guy." Tallant hit Watts in the face with his fist. Watts was a big man, and tough. He shook his head, wiped his nose, looked incredulously at the blood on his hand, and let out a roar of rage. It was not much of a fight. Watts' first blow dazed Tallant, the second knocked him down, and before he could get up Watts stepped in and kicked him in the head. The Centauran woman still stood where the men had left her, wideeyed with confusion. She ran awkwardly over to Watts, shoving in between him and Tallant's prostrate body, and pushed the five-dollar piece at him, chattering excitedly in her own tongue. Watts twisted the money from her fingers and shoved her roughly down on top of Tallant. "There, you goddam native-lover," he roared, "get a real good whiff of one once, see how you like iL " She was still carrying the baby, she tried to shield it as she fell, but her body twisted and she came down heavily on it. The baby screamed, a high-pitched, nervetearing sound. The male who had started back to get her pulled a long sharp knife from somewhere beneath his rags and broke into a trot, his eyes beadily intent on Watts. McCullough had started down off the porch when Watts put the boot to Tallant. He changed his intent and ran in behind the native, and hit him solidly with his fist in the back of the neck. The native went sprawling and his knife flew out of his hand. People were turning to look and popping out of tents and shelters all around now. "Why, that dirty native," Watts bellowed, "he tried to knife me!" He stepped over to the Centauran and kicked him savagely several times. The other four males had been watching open-mouthed. They turned abruptly and started back down the alley the way they had come, but there was a small knot of men there, watching them. The natives paused uncertainly. One broke away and ran toward the street, between McCullough's house and Tallant's tent, and the others followed. Most of the Earthmen had no idea what was happening. The closer ones could see a couple of natives and a man lying on the ground, another man with a bloody face shouting something about knifing, and four natives running. "Head 'em off!" someone called. "They'll get away in the street!" That was how the riot at Port Knakvik started. chasing the natives, perhaps with some idea of explaining, more likely not -- he was in a half mindless rage of excitement with the whiskey and the fighting. McCullough was left alone with Tallant and the two natives. The native woman seemed unhurt, she was picking herself up and examining the infant, which still whimpered. Tallant was unconscious. McCullough picked him up and carried him into the house. His wife was standing whitefaced at the door. "Get some water," he said. He laid Tallant on a cot and began to wipe off his face. There was a scalp cut where Watts' boot had clipped him, most of the blood was coming from that; but it was high and it did not feel like a fracture. Presently Tallant groaned and shook his head and opened his eyes. The pupils did not look bad. "How do you feel?" McCullough asked. "Rough," Tallant mumbled. "Rough. Side... hurts..." McCullough pulled up the shirt and looked. There was a swelling purplish bruise on the chest. He touched it gently and drew a gasp of pain. "Looks like maybe you got a cracked rib," he said. "Get me some tape, will you, Mary?" He took the roll of tape and wound it tightly about Tallant' s chest. "That'll hold till you get to a doctor," he said. Tallant drew a light experimental breath. "Feels better," he said. "What the hell happened anyway?" McCullough told him. "That's bad," Tallant said. "That fool Watts could touch off a real riot, there's plenty more around here with no more brains than he has, and just spoiling for trouble. Somebody ought to get the marshal's office working on it before things get out of hand." He took the wet rag he had been holding to his head away and examined the cut with squeamish fingers. "Have to get this stitched up too, I guess, before it sets up hard. Look, could you back my truck out into the street? I don't feel up to driving, but if I get it in the street, it can take me in to the dispensary on auto, and I can call Administration from there." There were very few private vehicles in Port Knakvik, or indeed anywhere on Centaurus II; but Tallant, who was an electrician, had a company panel which he drove to and from the job. Though it was chemically powered -- the new inductor station was the first nuclear installation on the planet -- it had the same cybernetic controls as any Earthside vehicle. They worked fine on paved roads. On Knakvik streets, however -- "I don't know," McCullough said dubiously, "You think you can make it on auto? Suppose you get stalled?" Port Knakvik lay on a silty alluvial plain. In the downtown area, the streets were stabilized, but back along the river where the shanties of the construction workers sprawled, they were simply ruts punctuated at frequent intervals by chuckholes where churning wheels had ripped off the overburden, exposing the bottomless muck beneath. "I'd go with you," McCullough said, "except I kind of hate to leave Mary and the kids right now -- I tell you, maybe I could find somebody else. You lay down for a minute, take it easy, I'll look around." Tallant seemed to have guessed right about the riot, there were people running by outside toward a commotion at the lower end of the street where the native shanties clustered. McCullough saw a man he knew from the job. "Hey, George," he called, "you got time to do a little favor?" He explained about Tallant. The man had not yet been in any fighting, he was simply curious about what was going on, and this was part of it. "Sure, John," he said. "Be glad to." They helped Tallant into the truck. George backed it out into the street on manual. "What's the dispensary coordinates?" he asked. "Three-two-three, oh-one-five, local," Tallant told him. George pushed the keys and they started off toward town. McCullough turned to see what he could make out of the excitement at the other end of the street. There were two columns of smoke billowing up now, and scattered shots. Two men came back up the street helping another with his trouser leg split away and a bloody bandage about his thigh. "What's it all about, John?" A man called across the street to him. "Don't know. Fighting with the natives, I guess. Henry Watts and some other fellows chased a couple of them down there. Looks like they mean to clean the whole bunch out." "Dammit, that's not right," the man across the street said. "The natives got a right to live too, they had a village here before we came. Somebody ought to do something about it." "Pete Tallant just went into town to tell the marshal." "Yeah, well, I wouldn't holler copper on my neighbors myself, but I won't have anything to do with They can get along without me." The man went back in his house and closed the door. McCullough walked a few steps out into the street to get a better view. The riot was none of his business, and he had no intention of getting mixed up in it, but the idea of the fighting excited him and made him nervous. He could not see much, except that there was a lot of activity. He shook his head helplessly. My God, he thought, all this from two men with nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon but get half-drunk and start arguing... scream, suddenly choked off! McCullough ran back across the yard and up the steps, raging at himself for having left Mary and the children alone in the house. There was no one in the front room, but through the kitchen door he could see a native with his back turned, peering out the kitchen window. McCullough's gun was hanging over the door, on pegs set into the logs, a gun made from the first steel smelted on Centaurus II. He reached down the gun as he stepped in the door. There were two natives in the kitchen ; one with a roughed-up look who might have been the one Watts had kicked, watching Mary as she huddled in a corner by the stove with her arms about the two children; the other still looking out the window. Both spun around to face him as McCullough burst into the room. For a moment they eyed each other in silence, the two Centaurans and the Earthman. "You hurt, Mary?" McCullough asked. She was frightened almost speechless, but she managed a squeak and a negative shake of her head. McCullough took his eyes from the natives for a moment and studied her searchingly. "You sure?" he asked. She nodded. Some of the color was coming back in her face again now, and she looked all right. He looked back at the two natives. He should have them arrested, he supposed, but to file a complaint meant going to court and losing a day's work. It did not even occur to him to hold them for the mob. He gestured with the gun muzzle. "OK," he said roughly. "Get out of here, now. Get!" The natives looked at each other. Outside, there was a rattle of shots in the alley, and several highpitched screams. The native by the window wet his lips and shook his head, and the other turned back toward McCullough. He had a knife in his hand, which he swung menacingly. "No," he said. "No go outside. Kill." It was not clear if he meant the verb passively or actively, but with the knife not six feet from Mary and the children, it did not seem a proper time to discuss fine points of grammar. McCullough shot him in the belly. At that range, the charge almost tore the slight native in half. The other Centauran turned and came lunging toward him, and McCullough fired again. The native stumbled and fell in a heap in the middle of the floor, half across the body of the first. McCullough stepped over them to the back door and glanced out, dropping fresh charges in the gun as he did so. There were no natives in sight but several white men were in the alley, looking around, trying to decide where the shots had come from. Henry Watts was with them. He saw McCullough at the door and called out to him: "You hear those shots? Two of 'em ran back up this alley. You see them?" "They came in my house," McCullough said. "I shot both of them." "Good, by God," Watts yelled. "That's two we don't have to worry about." "There's one more left," another man called from up the alley. "He ducked around through Gordon's lot." The men ran off up the alley on the new scent, and McCullough turned back into the kitchen. Mary had collapsed into a chair and was sobbing with her head in her arms. The two children clung to her, staring wide-eyed at the bodies of the natives. McCullough walked over a'nd patted her on the back. "It's OK now, Mary," he said. "It's OK, nothing to worry about now." His wife went on crying, and he stood there awkwardly, not quite knowing what to do. He noticed that the dark purplish blood of the natives, almost black, was spreading in little rivulets and pools over the kitchen floor. The floor was of sanded white wood, and stained easily. There were some folded tarps in the lean-to where McCullough kept his tools. He got one and rolled the bodies over onto it. As he did so, he saw that one of them, the second one he had shot, was still alive. The shot had gone low and mangled the native's upper leg. He stared up at McCullough with opaque expressionless eyes, slowly bleeding to death. It was an embarrassing situation. McCullough was not any more callous than the next man, but he found himself wishing his aim had been better. He could hardly allow the Centauran to lie there and bleed to death while he watched, but neither did he feel any particular responsibility in the matter. The native had got what he was asking for, and that was that. Finally he took the native's leather belt and tightened it around the leg for a tourniquet, got another tarp and spread it on the cot, and laid the native on it. The corpse he rolled in the first tarp and pushed under the cot. Throughout the injured Centauran said nothing, either in thanks or protest, although the leg must have been painful. He had just finished when he heard voices in the front yard. Henry Watts was there with half a dozen other men carrying guns and clubs, all looking the worse for wear. Two were dragging a Centauran corpse by the pants legs. Watts mopped at his sweaty, blood-stained face with his shirttail. "You still got those two grayskins in there? ,, he asked. McCullough nodded. "Fine, we'll take 'em off your hands now." Watts half-turned to the men behind him. "Come on, give me a hand to drag 'em out." He started up the steps. "Wait a minute," McCullough said. He did not move out of the door, he was not quite sure why, a moment ago he had been wondering what to do with the natives, and here was Watts offering to take them. It may have been the way they were dragging the Centauran, face down in the mud, that bothered him. "What you going to do with them?" he asked. "We got a use for 'em," Watts said with relish. "We're going to drag all the bodies up in front of Dubois' place and string 'em up to poles there, for a warning. We'll learn those gray skins what to expect, they come messing around here any more. Come on, toss 'em out, we'll take these two along with the rest." "Well, I don't know," McCullough said. "One of these is still alive, I didn't kill him, just crippled him." Watts showed his teeth. "That won't be a problem," he said. McCullough shook his head slowly. He had counted Henry Watts as his friend, but he was not so sure now that he liked him. "No," he said. "I think we better just leave them till the cops come." Watts laughed. "Cops? There ain't going to be any cops coming. We're handling this ourselves. Don't worry about the cops, even if they could get an indictment, there ain't a jury in this town would convict "I'm not worrying about that," McCullough said stolidly, "but I don't like what you fellows are doing, I might as well say right now, and I'm not going to be a party to it. Those natives stay right where they are till the law comes and gets them." Watts' grin faded. "John," he said, "we ain't fooling. I know you're no native-lover, but we're going to clean those devils out once for all. If you won't let us in for them, we'll come in anyway and take 'em." McCullough shook his head again. "This is my house. Henry, you've been my friend, but I just shot two people for coming in here without knocking." Watts looked around at the men behind him. Most of them knew McCullough. They did not seem taken with the idea of breaking into his house. Watts swung back to McCullough. "John," he said ominously, "you're just making trouble for yourself, that's all." McCullough simply shook his head and stood blocking the doorway. Watts glanced around at the other men again. One of them shrugged self-consciously and turned away, and after a moment the others trailed after. "All right," Watts growled. He shook his fist under McCullough's nose. "All right, John McCullough, I'll remember this, and I'll be back. Native-lover!" He spat on the step and went off after the others. McCullough watched them go, uneasy under his surface stolidity. He liked to be on good terms with his neighbors, not enough to give in to them on anything he felt strongly about, but he knew this would be held against him, and it worried him, more for the sake of Mary and the kids than for himself. He sensed his wife standing behind him. "What did they want?" she asked. He told her. "But, John, why? Haven't we had enough trouble today? Do you have to get in a fight with your neighbors over a stupid native? What difference does it make to you?" McCullough shook his head helplessly. "I don't know. I just don't like the idea, that's all." His wife stared wordlessly at him for a moment. She went into the kitchen and sat down at the table and began crying again. The children ran to her and began whimpering also. McCullough prowled restlessly about the living-room, stooping now and then to peer out the windows as men shouted and ran by. The native lay silent on the cot, unmoving except for his eyes which followed McCullough. McCullough stopped and studied the Centauran resentfully. Goddam natives, he thought, all they cause is trouble. He bent over and loosened the strap on the leg until fresh blood started to ooze out and then tightened it again. The Centauran winced a little and closed his eyes briefly, but made no other sign. Ought to have morphine, McCullough thought, but would morphine work on a Centauran? He didn't know. He pulled a chair over to the window, where he could watch both doors and the cot, and sat down with the gun across his knees. The riot was apparently still booming along. Men trotted by outside now and then, singly or in little groups, calling to each other. Once several went by with another Centauran corpse slung hand and foot to a pole. There were no women or children in sight, those houses with blinds had them down, the tentflaps were tightly drawn. There was no indication of any attempt by the authorities to halt the riot. Possibly Tallant had not gotten through, or possibly Watts was right, the Administration was keeping hands off. After a while Mary came in and stood by the chair. Her eyes were still red, but she was no longer crying. "You want something to eat now?" she asked dully. "The roast is done." "Yeah, I guess so," he said. He avoided her eyes. She fixed a plate and brought it to him and sat down to watch him eat. "You think there'll be more trouble?" she asked. "They surely won't bother us again, will they?" McCullough chewed thoughtfully. He thought there would be more trouble, but he did not like to worry his wife unduly. "Well," he hedged, "that Henry's kind of a bull-headed fellow." "Don't you be bull-headed too, John. I know you have to do what you think is right, but please be careful." He reached out and took her hand in his. "Honey, I'm sorry. I know it's mighty tough on women sometimes, but a man just can't give in on some things, that's all." He looked down, pleased as always by the contrast of her small, pale, delicate fingers lying in his large blunt chocolate-brown hand. The contrast seemed especially important today, for reasons he could not quite place. Was there some special significance in a black man married to a white woman, a black man setting his will against white men, not as an enemy, but as an equal? Back a couple of hundred years ago, he knew, on Earth -- but the thought eluded him, he was not a very articulate or subtle thinker and he could not pin it down. "Don't you worry, Mary," he said, "it'll turn out all right." Watts came back. McCullough was checking the tourniquet on the native's leg when he heard a commotion in the street outside. "John McCullough," a voice bellowed. "Come out!" Watts' voice, McCullough thought. He picked up his gun, but then he thought he would not feel right facing the men outside, who were after all his neighbors, with a gun in his hands. He looked around. The double-bitted axe he had been using to trim the logs around his window-frames leaned against the wall by the door. "Get in the bedroom, Mary," he said. "Pull the mattress off the bed and lie down behind it with the kids." He took the axe and walked out the door onto the steps, squinting his eyes against the setting sun. The street was full of men in front of his house, perhaps half a hundred or so. Watts and a short stout man stood halfway up the path to the door. McCullough studied them in silence. "Well?" he said finally. "This man here's a deputy marshal, John," Watts said. "We'll take your prisoner and that body now, if you don't mind." The stout man grinned placatingly. "That's right, Mr. McCullough, I've deputized Mr. Watts here and several others to help restore order. We've rounded up all the rioters except that one you've got in there." "You got a warrant?" McCullough asked. "Well, no, I don't really think -- " "Then get off my property. Go on, get!" McCullough came down the steps and began to walk slowly toward Watts and the marshal. "Get out of my yard!" he said. He did not raise his voice. "You're bucking the law now, John McCullough," Watts warned. "Get out of my yard!" McCullough said again. He was about three steps away from Watts. He took another step. Watts had been carrying a pistol in his hand. His arm started to swing up. McCullough let out a wordless bark: " Haugh !" and the axe flipped in a short swift arc. He stepped over Watts' body, the axe again dangling limply from his hand with a few thin threads of blood spattering from it. "Get out of my yard!" he said. The nearer men backed away slowly, not really frightened, but uncertain. Single men have faced down mobs many times, but more have been killed by them. In a saner moment, McCullough may have known this, but his ductless glands were in full control now. He did not really care, he rather hoped, if he thought at all, that there would be a fight. He knew he could kill any man who stood against him. Off to one side, a dozen yards away, a man tentatively lifted a pistol. McCullough caught the movement from the corner of his eye and turned and began walking toward the man, head a little forward, bright, slightly unfocussed eyes intent in his expressionless face. The men between the two moved back, leaving a clear path. The man with the pistol glanced to either side and saw he now stood alone, all alone. There is a nightmare some men know -- the implacable deadly-eyed enemy coming with the red, wetly gleaming steel while you stand all alone with the pistol that poufs weakly with the bullets dribbling from the muzzle. The man jerked the trigger and spun about and ran without waiting to see where his shot had gone, and the charge snapped two feet over McCullough's head. McCullough turned again toward the main body of the mob and walked slowly forward, his eyes searching the faces around him hungrily. "Get out of my yard!" he said woodenly. The men he faced were not cowards, few men on that world tives all afternoon, their blood was up ; but this was different, this was one of their own kind they faced now. If they had been able to see him as another outcast, as a traitor aiding the enemy against them, it would have made things easier. In spite of what Watts had said, however, they knew this was not true. McCullough was not a 'nativelover', he was not upholding the Centaurans, what he was upholding was the right of a citizen to hold his own opinion and keep his home as his castle -- two rights which are extremely important in any frontier culture. It put them in a very difficult moral position, and the physical pressure of McCullough's steady advance did not give them much time to settle the dilemma. Half a dozen men were elbowing their way back through the press now, the marshal had disappeared, there was no one to start things, and they kept fading back. McCullough never varied his pace, but the distance between him and the nearest man increased steadily. He stopped in the street before his house, but the mob kept moving under its own momentum for another fifty yards, and some still kept moving. A knot of perhaps a dozen stopped at the corner and muttered among themselves for a few minutes. One man started to raise a gun, and another knocked it down. They stood there a little longer, and McCullough leaned on his axe watching them, and then they moved off after the others, men dropping off here and there as they passed their own homes. The riot was over.    Illustrated by John Styga Eva was the emotional problem which, indirectly, quite possibly caused the second problem, a rather baffling field force trap, which was a scientific one. Now, sometimes, if you solve the second first, you get the first second... "And this is the gadget..." His square bright face under its close-cropped blond hair was animated. He seemed on the verge of reaching up to hook a finger in the lapel buttonhole of Jack Hendrix's sportcoat to pull the taller man down into a position where he could shout into his ear. "You aren't listening!" he protested now. "Buddy! Jack! Pay some attention. Or has that crumb teaching job got you to the point where money doesn't mean anything to you any more?" Jack Hendrix's long, heavyboned face almost blushed. "I'm listening," he said. He hadn't been, of course. This was merely one more piece of evidence to add to the mounting pile of proof that he was totally incapable of doing anything right. He had been mooning instead over Eva Guen, whom he had lost some months back. But they had passed her in the corridor on their way to this small, hidden workroom, and something in the way she had looked at him had set him spinning again. Peculiarly, there had been what Jack could have sworn was a hurt look in her eyes, in that brief moment that they looked at each other in passing. Why there should be a hurt look in her eyes, Jack could not understand. She was the one who had left him to come to work for Paul -- and very sensibly, too, he told himself, self-righteously, but with the same old twinge of unhappiness. Eva had been his graduate teaching assistant at the University where he taught physics. She was tall and quiet-faced, with startling wide blue eyes under soft blonde hair. Quite naturally, he had fallen in love with her. And it was then the trouble started. For from the moment Jack was forced to admit to himself that he was in love, he had to take an unbiased look at his chances of doing something about it. And that look was crushing in its effect. For in the process of assembling Jack Hendrix, a somewhat devastating oversight had occurred. Whatever minor god had been in the supervisory position that day had carefully mixed strength with intelligence, added just a pinch of genius and a sort of ugly-handsome good looks, but had totally forgotten at the last moment to install a governor on Jack's imagination. The result was that Jack was a dreamer. And the result of that was that he, with three degrees to his name, and a couple of honoraries of various sorts lying around, continued to vegetate in his teaching job, while Paul, in his typical hyper-thyroid fashion, was already managing his own commercial research labs. Not that the comparison was strictly fair. Paul had always been more promoter than physicist. And Eva had gone out of Jack's life to a better job with Paul's outfit. Not that that had anything to do with his accepting Paul's offer of a job as consultant on a little problem he claimed to have on hand at the moment. "I'm listening," said Jack. "Praise Allah," said Paul. "No one knows about this but you and me. It's top secret. My top secret." Women, of course, thought Jack were naturally secretive. They looked at you with unfathomable blue eyes and waited for you to make the proper move. But how could you make the proper move if you didn't know what they were thinking? That was why he had never gotten around to telling Eva how he felt about her. And then one day she was gone. He didn't blame her, even if without warning it had exploded -- " -- Exploded?" stammered Jack, guiltily. "Well, er -- when did that happen?" "Are you sure you've been listening?" said Paul, suspiciously. "I just told you. A couple of weeks back." He went on to explain the circumstances while Jack listened with one ear, the image of Eva flickering like a candle luring his moth-like powers of attention in the back of his mind. He forced himself to concentrate. "But what happened to the man you had working on it?" he asked. "And what is it, anyway? You still haven't told me that." "You mean Reppleman?" said Paul, quickly. "He had a nervous breakdown at the time of the explosion. Got a complete block on the whole thing, and now, they've got him in a nursing home." A flicker of genuine interest stirred for the first time in Jack. "Oh?" he said. "How come?" "Well, that's the thing," said Paul. "I'm going to trust you, Jack. I've got something here that's worth more money than there is in the world today; and I'm willing to give you a slice of it if you can work this thing out for me. But we've got to have secrecy. "Right at this moment, you and I are the only ones who even know this room has been entered since the explosion. I rebuilt the generator myself from Reppleman's records. And nobody, but you and I, knows we're back here today. The rooms at the back of the building here are all storerooms except this one." "Generator?" said Jack, for a second momentary instant distracted from the lorelei mental image of Eva. "A generator," said Paul, slowly and impressively, "of an impenetrable, planar field of force. Gome over here." The image of Eva went out as abruptly as if someone had dropped a candle-snuffer over it. Jack blinked and followed Paul, as he led him up to the equipment in question. The small room which housed it was right at the bleak northern end of the labs and terminated one narrow wing of the building. It was Lshaped, with the generator in question tucked away in the narrow recess of the foot of the L. The length of the long part of the L, at right angles to this, was strewn with odds and ends of tools and equipment piled on two long benches fastened to the wall. Along the end away from the recess was the door that gave entrance to the room; and just to the left of this as you entered, at the end of the long part of the L, was the room's only window, open at the moment to the summer breeze and the gravel expanse of the parking lot behind the labs. His mind for once wholly concentrating on the subject at hand, Jack followed Paul into the narrow cubbyhole that was the recess and listened to the other man's explanation of what was before him. It was not true, that Jack could not focus on a problem. It was merely that a thing to hold his attention, must first arouse his interest. Once it had, he dealt with it with almost fantastic effectiveness. "You see," Paul was explaining, "it's a very simple sort of circuit. It's easy enough to produce it. The question is to handle it, after you've produced it. The initial power to run it comes from this storage battery hookup. That's all we need." "Then what's the catch?" asked Jack, his nose half-buried in the creation's innards. "The trouble is that once it's turned on, there seems to be a sort of feedback effect. Well, no, that isn't quite right. What it seems to do once it's turned on is tap some other source of power that's too much for it. It overloads and you get the explosion." "But while it's on you have a plane of force?" "That's right." "How long?" demanded Jack, his long fingers poking in the wiring. "You mean from establishment of the field to explosion?" replied Paul. "About half a minute, as far as I can figure from Reppleman's notes and what I could reconstruct about what happened the day it blew up on him." "You haven't tried it since you rebuilt it?" asked Jack. "Do I look crazy?" demanded Paul. He put his hand on Jack's arm. "Listen buddy, remember me? The boy with the crib notes up his sleeve at exams?" Half-lost in the machine before him as he was, Jack felt a sudden little stir of warning. Paul was anything but stupid ; and when he went into his dumb-bunny act, there was usually a joker somewhere in the deck. But before he could concentrate on the sudden small danger signal he ran across something that drove it out of his mind. "What's this?" he demanded, pouncing on a part of the apparatus. "Oh, that," said Paul. "Just a notion of my own. Obvious answer. A timer setup. You set it, say, to turn the field on for perhaps a tenthousandth of a second, then turn it off again. I'll let you play with it." Jack frowned. "Where are the notes?" he asked. "I'd like to see just what -- Reppleman, you said his name was? -- had written down." Paul grinned and shook his head. "Not so fast. First I want an answer from you on whether you think you can tame this baby for me or not." "But how can I tell without the background?" protested Jack. "Won't cost you a cent to say no," replied Paul. "Don't look at me like that, Jack. Sure, I know I'm handing you a pig in a poke. But this thing is too big to take chances with. Do you want it or don't you?" Jack hesitated. He was strongly tempted to tell Paul to take a running nosedive into the nearest lake, and walk out. Then he remembered the long life of financial ineptitude that had climaxed itself with losing Eva; and his good resolutions to mend his scatterbrained ways. "All right," he said. "I'll have a shot at it, anyhow." "Good boy," said Paul. He patted Jack's arm, in a way which was somehow reminiscent of approving a large, shaggy dog. "I'll be in my office. You know where that is. If you want anything, just hustle me up." He gave Jack's shoulder a final slap and strode out. on one of the long workbenches, filled his pipe and considered the problem. The situation was peculiar to say the least. Paul's odd insistence on secrecy; and Eva's strange look when she had passed him in the corridor. And this story about the man who had developed the generator. Typically, it did not occur to him to doubt the generator. Jack was one of those men who have entertained the impossible in their minds so often that there is little reality can do to surprise them. So it blew up did it? Jack puffed on his pipe and stared at the generator. But -- hold on a minute -- if it blew up and when it blew up it sent a man named Reppleman to a rest home, could it have blown up more than once? And if it had blown up only once it must have been turned on only once, and if that was the case, how did Paul know that it had produced a plane of force? Of course he had probably known the theory Reppleman was working on. And what was his purpose in keeping that theory a secret from Jack? In fact, if the dingus worked, how did it work? Jack returned to the mass of equipment and wiring and began to prowl through it. After a while he stopped and scowled. Nine-tenths of the junk in the setup was mere window-dressing. The only thing about it that could possibly have any effect or function was an oddly wound coil of ordinary silver wire upon a core of some strangelooking silvery metal. Jack tapped this latter with a fingernail and it rang with a faint, light-sounding chime. By the time this point was reached his interest had been captured. On a hunch he disconnected everything but the coil on its peculiar core. He disconnected the timer, Paul had attached to the apparatus, hesitated a second, then made contact by crossing the two lead-in wires. Nothing happened. He disconnected the wires and sat back to think. After a moment, he reached out and felt the winding on the coil. It was metal-cool -- air temperature. On second thought, he connected the timer and set it to allow a warm-up period of fifteen seconds. At the end of that time the timer should activate the coil for the period of a ten-thousandth of a second. Nothing happened. Jack chewed the stem of his pipe. Once more he disconnected and felt the winding It was faintly warm -- but barely so... Now let me see, said Jack to himself. We run two sorts of power through this thing. One, low power and steady. To warm it up? That's what I assumed, but there's no indication of it. On the other hand this timer is definitely set to give a sudden short pulse of relatively high current. I tried the high current direct. No result. I tried a short period of low current. What's next? After he had smoked another pipeful of tobacco, all that occurred to him was to lengthen the warmup period. Let's do it right, he said to himself. Let's give it a good five minutes. He turned it on once more and set the timer for another ten-thousandths of a second jolt at the end of five minutes of low power. It occurred to him that the two upright metal poles, about two feet in length, between which the field was supposed to be generated might be too close to the coil, and he moved them out to the full length of their wiring, so that they were now actually in the long part of the room. He glanced at the timer. Almost four minutes yet to go. He wandered down the long part of the room and stood gazing out the window. There was his car, sitting beside the row of others on the gravel of the parking lot. And there, farther down the row was Eva's. They were the two oldest cars on the lot. You'd almost think we had the same taste in automobiles, thought Jack, a trifle wistfully. Neither of them is worth much -- Abruptly, without warning, his traitorous imagination slipped its restraints and began to build a picture of Eva coming out on to the lot, seeing his old car not very distant from hers, and being overwhelmed by a flood of memories. He pictured her coming out the back entrance of the building as he stood here watching. She would walk across the lot with her smooth, lithe stride, toward her own old grey, four-door sedan. But partway there, her steps would falter as she caught sight of his equally ancient blue business coupe. She would not, of course, say anything, but she would stand there; and he, seizing the moment, would step from this window down onto the gravel only a few feet below and approach her. The sound of his footsteps crunching the loose rock would warn her of his coming; and she would turn to look at him. She would neither move nor speak, but stand waiting as he came up to her and then -- He was just opening his mouth to speak to her in imagination, when unexpectedly from behind Jack there came the sound of a soft, insidious, click... nothing had happened. The parking lot lay unchanged before him in the sunlight with its row of cars and the sky blue above them dotted with distant clouds. And then he tried to turn around and found he could not, with the slight movement of his effort the scene before him dissolved into a grey field streaked here and there by lines of various colors. He froze, suddenly, and the scene came back to normal. He reached out to grab hold of the edge of the window to steady himself ; but with the first movement he was plunged into greyness and his hands caught nothing. Once more he steeled himself into immobility, and for a moment he hung on the edge of panic. What had happened? Slowly, he forced his mind back into control of his body and its emotions. Steady, he told himself, steady. Think it through. As calmness returned he became suddenly and icily aware of two things. The first was that everything within his field of vision appeared somehow artificially frozen into immobility. Just what gave him this impression he was not able to understand. Part of it was the air. A small breeze had been bathing him as he stood in front of the open window. Now, there was nothing. The atmosphere around him was like intangible glass. The second thing was the discovery that he was no longer standing with his feet on the floor, but lying crosswise athwart the window, in mid-air, at about the former level of his waist. For a moment he was astounded that he had not realized this immediately. And then reasons began to appear to him. The first of these was the sudden realization that gravity appeared to have altered respective to his position. He felt not at all as if he were lying on his side, but as if he had remained quite normally upright. And another discovery following immediately on the heels of this was the sudden perception that while his body seemed to have moved, his point of view had not. He still looked out at the parking lot from the angle of vision of a man with both feet normally planted on the floor. All of these, of course, were things that held true only as long as he remained perfectly still. The moment he attempted to move all his senses failed him and he seemed to swim in a grey mist. The conclusion was a very obvious one. Somehow, the generator had worked to produce its plane of force. And somehow he was caught in it. The explosion should come at any moment now. For one hideous moment he suffered death in imagination. Then reason returned to point out that the half minute Paul had mentioned as the time limit had undoubtedly been passed already. Still, it was a little while before he could completely fight off the tension of his body, bracing itself in expectation of the rending force that could strike at him from behind. In the end it was his imagination that saved him. For long habit had made it independent of the rest of him; and it's first move, once the facts of the matter had been grasped and the immediate danger of explosion discounted, was to draw him a very clear and somewhat ridiculous mental picture of himself as he must appear to anyone who might enter the room, floating broadside as he was, in thin air. It reminded him suddenly that positions were no respecters of persons ; and he remembered almost in the same instant of what the White Knight had had to say to Alice on the subject after resting headdownward in a ditch. And so, by way of the ludicrous, he scrambled back onto the firm ground of his everyday sanity... He was caught in a force field. Very well. And what could he do about it? The obvious answer was to turn around, go back to the generator and turn it off. And the one flaw in this plan was that he couldn't apparently, for some reason, make the turn. On the other hand, he was able to make some movements. He experimented, waving first an arm and then a leg, cautiously. Barring the fact that the slightest motion caused the room to appear a nightmare of streaks and lines in a grey field, there was nothing unusual about the effects of these motions. The room? He became suddenly aware that he seemed to have rotated around a center-point somewhere in the region of his belt buckle. He was now no longer looking out the window, but turned at a slight angle toward the bench on what had been the wall at his right hand. Filled with sudden hope, he closed his eyes firmly and took what should have been a long stride forward and up. When he opened them again he was staring back into the room, down the long length of the L. For a long moment he hung, carefully motionless, considering the implications of what he had just done. It seemed apparent, he thought, that what he had actually accomplished was to turn himself about the way a paper figure would be turned on a turntable -- the difference between this and ordinary methods being that as he was now facing in the opposite direction, his head was now where his feet had been and vice versa. Or, to orient more exactly by existing landmarks, where the force field had flipped him into position with his head toward the right wall, his rotation had changed him so that now his head was toward the opposite wall, the one originally on his left. Conclusion? Jack winced. The field itself appeared to be a two-dimensional phenomenon; and he, himself, caught up in it, to be restricted to two-dimensional movement. For a second the thrill of panic came back, and he was forced to fight for a moment before he could go back to looking at the situation sensibly and calmly. The field appeared to be on a level with his waist as it had been when he had been standing normally upright. That was, in effect, level with the tops of the upright rods that had been supposed to generate the field between them. Hah! -- between them, thought Jack, bitterly -- And a few inches above the level of the benches. As he looked down the length of the room he noticed that whatever had touched the plane of the field at any point seemed to have been, like himself, caught up in it. He noticed a hammer and a soldering iron, both of which had been hanging from hooks on the left wall, now floating stiffly at right angles to it. Furthermore, there seemed to have been some sort of polarity involved. In both cases the end which had been upright was at the left and the down end out at the right -- that was, of course, from his present point of view -- and corresponded exactly with the fact that his own head had gone to the right, and his feet to the left. But that was enough observing. The thing to do now was to get to the generator and turn it off before something else happened. Jack closed his eyes and made three quick steps, right foot first left foot following, toe to heel. When he opened them again he was mildly surprised to discover that he was still a little short of the end of the room, but a couple more steps solved that problem. He rotated himself through a ninety degree arc and stepped up into the narrow alcove that noused the generator and the timer on a bench at its far end. He banged his head on the wall and blinked with the shock of it. He opened his eyes and looked down at the generator. With a sudden, sickening sense of shock, he realized that it was below him, and therefore outside of the plane of the field. His desperation was strong enough to make him reach for it, anyway, and to his surprise it seemed almost to flow upward to reach his fingers and his fingertips pushed against a short length of wire, which bent before them. As they did so, there was a sudden flare of red light, from the coil and he snatched his fingers away as he noticed that that part of the generator was apparently red hot, glowing into incandescence. The whole apparatus, in fact, seemed to quiver on the point of exploding into flame. Curiously, however, there was no sensation of heat emanating from the coil; and what was apparently a wisp of smoke, rising above the generator and out of the field, seemed frozen in midair. Cautiously Jack retreated slightly from the generator. Two things were immediately apparent. One, that the generator was evidently a part of the field, and reachable, even though it had not been in the original plane as he had. Two, that he had better be careful how he went about shutting it off. It struck him somewhat belatedly that Reppleman's explosion had probably occurred through mishandling the generator when it was in its present state. No, the way to turn the generator off was the way it had been turned on -- through the timer. He looked at the portion of the generator and bench that lay below him but did not see the timer. Then he remembered that this was the left side of the bench at the alcove's extremity and that the timer was at the right. Carefully he rotated to the right as far as the narrow width of the alcove would allow him and out of the corner of his eye, caught a glimpse of the timer on the bench far to the right. The position was an awkward one, but he was in no mood to consider comfort. It might be interesting for a while to be the two-dimensional inmate of a single plane, but the novelty wore off quickly. He pushed his head into the right hand corner of the alcove and started to reach back past his hip to the timer. It was impossible. For a moment he hung still, stunned. Then as the truth penetrated, he had to restrain an urge to burst into hysterical laughter. Of course, being two-dimensional he could not move the line of his hand past the line of his body, any. more than a normal three-dimen-' sional person in a three-dimenj sional world can lie on his side on a flat floor and duplicate such an action without moving either floor or body. As long as he re-, mained an inhabitant of the force field, he would never be able to reach behind his back. Around his feet or around the top of his head, yes, but behind his back -- never, i For a moment he yielded again to panic and scrabbled around, trying to find a position from which he could reach the timer, but the alcove was too small to allow him his necessary two-dimensional turning radius. He stopped finally, and common sense came to his aid. Of course, the thing to do was to back out where there was room and turn around, so that he could come in facing in the other direction. He moved back out into the long part of the room, mentally berating himself for having lost his head. He closed his eyes and rotated. He was getting quite used to this business of blinding himself while moving and made a mental note that eventually he must get around to keeping his eyes open just to get a clearer picture of what happened, when he did move. Reversed, he stepped back up into the alcove. He opened his eyes to find himself not in the alcove but against the wall of the long room opposite the alcove. For a moment he stared in puzzlement, then understanding came. "Of course," he said. "I'm reversed. I'll have to step down " He did so. Two steps down took him into the alcove. He opened his eyes to find himself finally facing the corner which housed the timer -- but his feet were the parts of him next to it, and his head and hands were away from it. This is ridiculous! he thought. One way it's behind my back and the other way it's down by my feet. He crouched down, trying to squeeze himself into the corner close enough so that he could reach the timer. But it was no use. The alcove was too narrow to allow him to put his feet in the opposite corner and lean far enough over so that his hands could manipulate the timer. The sort of person who can bend over and put both hands flat on the floor could have done it easily, but Jack, like most males of more or less sedentary occupation, was not in that kind of shape. He tried kneeling, squeezing himself as tightly into the right hand corner as he could. But here the earlier prohibition of his two-dimensional existence came again into effect and he was blocked by his own knees. Not only did he have to reach around them, but they blocked off his view of the timer. In a cold sweat, he finally gave up and backed put into the relatively open space of the long part of the room. It was fantastic. There was the timer directly in front of him. A touch of the finger would shut it off, for he could see its pointer frozen on the mark where it had turned the generator on. And it was a part of the field like the generator wire he had touched, so presumably he could move it. Yet, because of the restrictions of twodimensional space, it was out of his reach. To Jack, a born and native threedimensioner, it seemed grossly unfair; and for one of the few times in his life he blew up. After having cursed out forcefields, force-field inventors, all known physical laws, the generator, Paul, and himself for being a damn fool and daydreaming when he should have been watching the timer, he found himself feeling somewhat better. From being excited, he suffered a reaction to calmness. Let's look at this sensibly, he told himself. He reminded himself that he'd been acting like a wild animal caught in a trap, rather than a thinking man. The thing to do was to make an effort to understand what it was that had hold of him rather than just fighting it blindly. If he could not reach the timer, he could not reach the timer. What other possibilities were there? One -- somebody, say perhaps Paul, would eventually come in and perhaps he could turn the timer off. Jack shook his head. No, whoever stepped through the door of the room would probably be caught up in the field the way he had been. If indeed, the field was limited only to the room and did not extend beyond its walls already. Jack brightened. If the field was bounded by the room, then all he had to do was get out of it -- Painfully he maneuvered himself around until he was facing the door. The doorknob was below the field, but he had hopes of hooking his fingers onto the door's loose edge and pulling it open. It was a hope that was doomed to disappointment. Jack discovered that in two dimensions you could push, with fingertips, but not grab. The door, presumably because it was hinged to the walls outside the scope of the field, was strictly immovable. It appeared to be a rule that whatever was loose and touched by the field, was picked up by it, but whatever was attached to anything else beyond the limits of the field was not. It did not strictly make sense, because where do you draw the line of attachment? His body was attached to his limbs and his limbs had been outside the field. A matter of relative mass? Concluding this to be an unrewarding field for speculation, Jack returned to the matter of field size, and at that moment it suddenly dawned on him that all this time the window at the end of the room had been open. If he could get out through that and beyond the limits of the field -- The wish was father to the act. Hardly had the thought occurred to him before he was jockeying for position in line with the window. He got it -- back in the same position in which he had first found himself when the field caught him up -- and simply walked out, presenting the unusual spectacle of a man strolling through mid-air while lying on his right side. It was all so easy that for the first time he found cause to wonder about the fact that the walking motion enabled him to progress when he was apparently doing nothing more than flailing the empty air. He experimented a little and discovered that he had the sensation of pressing back against something whenever he moved. Apparently the field had some kind of substance of its own, or a type of tension that reacted like an elastic skin when pressed longitudinally. As soon as he was free of the building he rotated abruptly and walked sideways alongside it. His hope was that the field would be cut off by any solid obstacle. He traveled for some little distance before he admitted to himself that this hope was vain. Cheerfully, the field continued to buoy him up and imprison him, even when he reached the street in front of the labs. The street was unusually silent and deserted. For a moment he considered waiting until somebody came by to help. But his natural shyness and sensitivity to embarrassment overcame the idea, and he turned back to cruise once more along the side of the building peering in the windows, with the hope of locating Paul himself, or at least someone connected with the labs. The windows on the back and the side he had been down were all closed and the door had taught him that there was no use dealing with any three-dimensional object unless it was, like him, caught up in the field. He crossed past his own open window and started down the far side of the building. Here there were several open windows, but they all gave on empty offices. But toward the front he came to one through which he could glimpse figures, at the far end. Without hesitation, he closed his eyes and stepped through the opening. When he opened his eyes inside the room, he was astonished to see a tableau that was more than even his overactive imagination had ever conceived. Before him were Paul and Eva. They stood facing each other in a small room that seemed to be a sort of combination office and laboratory. Paul was leaning forward and his hand was on the smock-sleeved arm of Eva, who was pulling away from him. For a moment the implications of the scene did not penetrate. When they did, Jack went skidding through the air toward the two figures, too angry even to remember to close his eyes. When the grey field winked away to reveal the room in its proper dimensions again, he found himself floating in mid-air beside and a little above them. This room was evidently lower than the one from which he had started ; and he glared down at the top of Paul's stubbled head and cut loose. It was a fine exhibition of sizzling language, punctuated by flashes of streaky greyness, when in his excitement he forgot himself and moved or jerked his head. But when at last he began to run down, he was somewhat astonished to discover that neither of the people below had moved or shown any reaction to his presence. They had not even looked up. In fact, Paul was still clutching Eva's arm and Eva was still leaning backward. They had not moved at all. An awful suspicion struck Jack with the impact of a solid fist to the pit of the stomach. He had assumed until now that the timer had somehow stuck at the position in which it activated the generator, that no explosion had taken place because he had been careful after that first crimson flare not to monkey with the working parts of the generator. It had not occurred to him that the field in restricting him to two dimensions might really have restricted him to two dimensions. Frantically he rotated until he was able to spot a large electric wall clock above the door of the room. Its hands were frozen at twelve minutes after two, and the long sweep-second hand stood motionless a little beyond the figure #. He rotated back to where he could view the two people below. On the thick wrist above the hand that held Eva's arm was a large gold wristwatch, and this also stood with its hands immovably at twelve minutes after two. Jack was caught, not merely in a single plane, but in a single instant of time. Up until now he had not really despaired. Always in the back of his mind had been the notion that even if he failed completely, sooner or later someone would come to his rescue. Now he realized that no rescue was possible. realization. Possibly because he was the kind of man who does survive, the sort of person who by birth and training has been educated to disbelieve in failure. It was just not in him to accept the fact that he was hopelessly trapped. And particularly in support of this was the discovery he had just made about Paul and Eva. He looked down at them, with a sort of bleak clarity of understanding that he had never succeeded in obtaining before. He realized now that he had been -- for all effective purposes -- blind while Eva had been working with him at the University. He had introduced Paul to Eva himself some six months back when the other man had dropped by to see him on one of his occasional forays into the academic area in search of likely hired help. Jack had not considered the introduction important. It had not occurred to him that Paul would find Eva the sort of woman he would want. In fact if anyone had asked him about such a combination, he would have thought it rather funny. The two, by his standards, were opposite as the poles -- Eva, with her cool depths, and Paul with his violent surface huckstering. It had not aroused Jack's suspicion that Paul should visit frequently during the months that followed, and that his visits should stop with Eva leaving the U. No, Jack had been blind to the possibility of anyone else wanting Eva but himself, obsessed by the battle with his inner shyness that twiddled its thumbs and hoped vainly for a fortuitous set of circumstances that would do his wooing for him. Paul might not have the inner strength that had just brought Jack through where poor Reppleman had foundered, but he had push, and guts enough in his own way. While Jack dreamed, he had carried off Eva; and now, at this late date Jack was finally waking up to the fact that where the mating instinct is concerned we are still close enough to our animal forebears to have to fight for our partners on occasion. He swung around and made his way once more out of the room. He needed space to think. Once more in the bright sunlight outside, in the eternal out-of-doors of twelve minutes after two on a warm June afternoon, he continued his survey of the situation he was in. But he returned to it with the cold, dispassionate viewpoint of the trained mind. He marshalled the facts he had learned about his situation and considered them. They amounted to the following: He was involuntarily imprisoned in what appeared to be a plane of two dimensions only and of unknown extent. He was kept prisoner by a device operating at this moment. The natural restrictions of movement in two dimensions, plus a matter of his original position in the plane, prevented him from reaching the means by which he could shut off the device. Problem: How to shut off the device? He returned to the room housing the generator and examined it. He studied the objects that, like himself, had been caught up in the field. He could not grasp any of them, but he could push them around within the limits of the field. It would, he thought, probably be quite possible to push the hammer, say, into the core of the generator and short it out. Also, probably quite fatal, if Paul had been telling the truth about the explosion. Reppleman had probably done some such thing. But he was in a rest home now with, again according to Paul, a complete block on the whole business. Still, the hammer possibility might be considered as a last-ditch measure. "I have only begun to fight," quoted Jack softly to himself. He studied the two upright rods from the top ends of which the field was generated. A thought occurred to him and he measured the distance between them (about three feet as nearly as he could estimate by eye) and the length of the room to the window in front of which he had been standing. He remembered that it had taken him more steps than he had expected to reach the generator from the window. He checked this and discovered that the first step back from the window was about the length of his normal stride, but that the second was only slightly more than half that, and the third diminished in proportion. He returned to the window, went through it to the outside, and checked his stride in the opposite direction. His first step out from the window in a direct line away from the rods of the generator was not quite double his normal stride. With the next it doubled again, and half a dozen steps saw him sweeping over the countryside with giant's steps. On impulse he closed his eyes and continued outward. After a few more steps he stopped and opened his eyes to look. Earth lay like an enormous, white-flecked disc below him. Space was around him. For a second, instinctively, he tried to gasp for air, then realized with a start that he was not breathing, nor had he been breathing for some time. Such things, evidently, were unnecessary in two dimensions. He looked back down at Earth then ahead into space. Reppleman had gone mad at the end and wrecked the generator. But Reppleman was Reppleman; and he was -- Jack. Moreover he had a score to settle back in his normal world. And he had every intention of getting back to settle it. How far, he thought, had Reppleman wandered, before he had come back to destroy the thing that held him? The thought was morbid and he shook it from him. Firmly he faced away from the world and strode outward. For a moment he twinkled like a dot among the stars. And then he was gone, stepping into enormous distances with everincreasing stride. workroom behind him and turned left in the corridor outside. He went down the corridor, counting doors. At best it would have to be a guess, but if his estimate was right the room he wanted should be -- This one. He pushed open the door and stepped in, interrupting two people in the midst of an angry argument. For a moment they stood frozen, interrupted and staring at him, and then Eva literally flew into his arms, while Paul's astonishment faded to a bitter smile and he sat down on a comer of the desk beside him and crossed his arms. "Oh, Jack!" choked Eva. "Jack!" Jack folded her in his long arms almost automatically, with a feeling of bewilderment that gradually gave way to one of pleasure. He had never seen the calm, self-contained Eva moved like this before; and the corresponding role it demanded of him was rather attractive. He felt sort of contented and self-righteous ; and at the same time as if he ought to do something dramatic, like, say, picking up Paul and breaking him in half, or some such thing. At that, however, it was Paul who got in the first punch. "She's worried about you," he said, dryly, jerking a thumb at Eva. "You are?" demanded Jack, looking down at her. "Oh Jack!" said Eva. "You mustn't do it. You don't know how dangerous it is!" "What is?" asked Jack, becoming bewildered again. "The field," put in Paul, as dryly as before. "Oh that," said Jack. "Well -- " "You don't know what it's like," interrupted Eva. "I was here when they took Max Reppleman out after the explosion. Jack -- " "Never mind that," said Jack, strongly. "Paul said you were worried about me." "Jack, please listen. That whole business is dangerous -- " "You wouldn't be worried about me unless you were -- well worried about me," said Jack stubbornly. His blood was up now. He had almost lost this girl once to Paul through hesitation and delay. "Eva -- " He tightened his grasp on her -- "I love you." "Jack, will you lis -- " Eva stopped suddenly. Color flooded her face. She stared up at him in shocked speechlessness. "Eva," said Jack, quickly, taking advantage of this golden opportunity and talking fast. "Eva, I fell in love with you back at the University, only I was always looking for the right chance to tell you and I didn't get around to it because I was afraid of making some mistake and losing you. And when you left and went to work for Paul I gave up, but I've changed my mind. Eva will you marry me right now, today?" Eva tried to speak a couple of times but no sourjd came out. "The whirlwind lover," said Paul somewhere in the background. "Well?" demanded Jack. "Jack, I -- " trembled Eva. "Never mind," said Jack, breaking in on her. "Because I won't take no for an answer. Do you hear me?" He paused for a second to be astonished at his own words. "You're going to marry me right away." "Ye gods!" said Paul. He might have saved his breath. Neither one of the other two was paying attention to him. Jack let her go, and looked at Paul. "Paul -- " he said. "Yes sir ! # responded Paul, getting up from the desk and popping exaggeratedly to attention. Jack looked at him with the jaundiced eye of a conquering general for his defeated rival. Though temporarily vanquished, this man was still potentially dangerous. Proceed with plan B? asked the front part of his mind. Proceed with plan B, responded the back of his mind. "Paul," he said. "Fve got the answers for you on the field." Paul's ironic pose slowly relaxed. A wary, calculating look came into his eye. "What?" he said. "I'll show you," Jack said. "Come on with me. You too, Eva." And he turned on one heel and led the way out of the room. "You see," said Jack, "you were wrong in your picture of what the generator does." They were all three standing in the little L-shaped room and Jack had just told them what had happened to him. "It doesn't produce a field at all. What it does is affect certain types of objects close to it so that they become restrictd to a certain limited twodimensional plane in a single moment of time. The generator itself tries to exist both in this and in normal space at the same time, with the result that it blows up -- what you might call a paradox explosion -- not after some seconds, but immediately. Of course, this doesn't affect what's been caught up in the single moment-and-plane, because for them that single instant is eternity." "But it didn't blow up on you," said Paul. "I turned it off before it had a chance to," replied Jack, a little grimly. "Now wait," said Paul. "Wait. You just finished telling us you couldn't reach the timer switch because of your position which was essentially unchangeable in twodimensional space. How did you turn it off? In fact, how did you ever get back?" Jack smiled coolly. "What happens to a plane in curved space?" Paul frowned. "I don't get it," he said. "It curves, of course," answered Jack. "And where it's dependent upon something like the generator, it curves back eventually to it." Paul's eyes narrowed. "Well -- " he hesitated. "What good did knowing that do you, though? You could walk clear around the circle and still not change your position so as to reach the timer switch." "Ah yes," said Jack. "If it was just a simple circle. But it was a Moebius strip." "Now wait -- " cried Paul. "You wait," said Jack. "How many points determine a plane?" "Three." Jack turned and walked down the length of the room to where the two upright rods still stood connected to the generator. He touched their tips. "And how many points do we have here?" Paul looked bewildered. "Two," he said. "But -- " "Then where's the third point we need? As a matter of fact you're standing right at it." Paul started in spite of himself and moved slightly aside. "What do you mean?" he asked. "The third point," said Jack, "is the focal point of the two lines of force emanating from the two rod tips. They converge right in the middle of the window at the far end of the room there." "But I still don't see!" said Paul. "You will," said Jack. He turned and stepped into the alcove. There was a moment's silence, then the sound of tearing paper and he stepped back out holding a long thin strip of newspaper. He walked back to Paul. "Let's see your thumb and forefinger," he said. "Now look here. This one end of the strip for the length of about an inch we'll say is the part of the plane in this room that's determined by the three points, the two rod tips and the focal point of their lines of force. Hold that." He transferred one end of the strip to Paul's fingers. Paul held it pinched between thumb and forefinger and watched. "Now," went on Jack, demonstrating, "the plane goes out like this and around like this and back like this in a big loop and the end approaches the generator between your fingers again. It comes in here and the last inch of it goes back between your fingers, and there you are, reversed and ready to shut off your timer." "Wait," said Paul, now holding the two ends pinched between his fingers together and the big loop of paper strip drooping in midair. "Why does the end come back in the same place? Why doesn't it just circle around behind and touch ends?" "For two reasons," answered Jack. "The plane must end where it began. Right?" "Yes." "But," said Jack. "To remain the same plane it must have the same three points in common. And the plane takes its position from the focal point, not the two rod tips. The result is what you've got in your hand there, a loop with a little double tag end." "But I don't -- well, never mind," said Paul. "The important thing is that this is still a straight loop, with no twist in it at all. "You could never get reversed on this. This is no Moebius." "Think again," said Jack. "With that tag end it is." He turned to Eva. "Gome on, Eva. We'll leave Paul to figure this out while you and I go get our own affairs taken care of." He took her hand and opened the door. "Hey!" cried Paul. "You can't -- " "Oh yes, I can," said Jack, turning in the open doorway. "I've answered all your questions. Just take an imaginary little two-dimensional figure and run him around that strip of newspaper. You'll see." And he led Eva out the door, closing it behind them. Once in the corridor, however, he took her shoulders in his two big hands and backed her against the wall. "Tell me," he said. "Just why did you quit me at the U. and come down here?" Eva looked guilty. "He -- Paul said -- " "What did he say?" "He said," hesitated Eva, "you'd always told him you never intended to marry anyone." A small note of defiance came into her voice. "What was I going to do? Every day I'd come to work and you'd be there, and you never said anything -- " she broke off suddenly, eyeing him curiously. "Why did you ask me that now, Jack?" "Because," said Jack. "For a minute I was tempted to save Paul a walk -- a long, long walk." She stared up at him. "I don't understand." He smiled and took her hand. "Some day," he said tenderly, "some day when we are very old and married and well supplied with grandchildren, I'll tell you all about it. Okay?" She was too much in love with him to protest -- then. "Okay," she smiled back. They went down the corridor toward the door leading out to the parking lot behind the labs. ing at the strip of paper in his hand. It didn't seem possible, but it was. He had just finished walking, in imagination, a little two-dimensional man all the way around the strip; and, sure enough, he had ended up facing in the opposite direction. It was simple enough. But it wasn't a Moebius. Or was it? If the two ends were one end -- Outside on the parking lot he heard the roar of a motor; and he looked up to see a battered old blue business coupe make its turn on the gravel expanse and head out the driveway. As it passed it stopped; and Jack stuck his head out the car window to shout something to him. Paul stepped to the window. "What?" he yelled... Jack's words came indistinctly to him over the distance and the racket of the ancient motor. " -- I said -- stay right where you are -- " "What?" roared Paul.' But Jack had pulled in his head and the car pulled ahead out the driveway and into the street. Paul watched it merge with the traffic and get lost in the distance. What had Jack said? Stay right where you are? Why should he stay right where he was? Suddenly he felt the unexpected cold squeeze of suspicion. It couldn't be that Jack would --  -- Behind him and from the direction of the timer, came the sound of a soft, insidious click .    I'm not sure that the mathematician really understands this world of ours better than the poet and the mystic. Perhaps it's only that he's better at sums. -- Sir Arthur Eddington We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. -- Laplace Illustrated by John Styga Get mad, old man, but don't give up; you're not through by a long shot. Somewhere there's a job for you, a job that youth can't do... a dangerous job, but a good one that'll bring you fame, fortune and peace... mato field a dusty-faced man opened the autodriver of a nuclearpowered truck and inserted a cannery's address card so the truck would know where to deliver its load. Six old men -- the tomato pickers -- waited for their pay in the truck's lengthening shadow. Most of them smoked or dozed, too tired for talk. Ollie Hollveg, tallest and oldest of the pickers, eyed the heavy-set rancher who sat at the tally table figuring the payroll. For this day's work Ollie expected even less pay than usual; the mumbling, pencillicking rancher--his name was Rost -- seemed to be overacting the role of harried proprietor. Soon Ollie saw his guess confirmed. A look of frustrated rage spread from face to face as each of the other pickers was in turn called to the table and paid. All were overage. None dared protest. At seventy a poor man without supposed to let himself be permanently retired to a Home for Seniles. If he wasn't senile and didn't want a home with barred windows and a barbed wire fence, he had to lie low and keep his mouth shut. Anyone could charge an overage person with incompetence. The charge was not a crime and so had no defence. All of which was old stuff to Ollie Hollveg. He'd been dodging the geriatricians for sixteen years. He considered himself used to the setup. Yet something about the rancher, Rost -- maybe his excessive weight, in contrast with the pickers' underfed gauntness, or maybe his cardboard cowboy boots and imitation sombrero -- made Ollie boil in spite of himself. He tried not to show his feelings. But when he was called to the tally table the rancher scowled up at him defensively and said, "Don't glare at me, Hollveg! If you moved as fast picking tomatoes as you do collecting your pay, you'd have earned more than this." He pushed out a little pile of coins that came to four dollars eighty-seven cents. "Odd pennies?" Ollie's voice broke as he fought to keep it under control. "Odd pennies, when picking's at the rate of two bits a lug? That can't be right. Just because we're old, you're stealing from us!" Rost's fat face turned livid. "Call me a thief?" he sputtered. "Get off my land!" Rost jumped clumsily to his feet, upsetting the tally table. Ollie bent to retrieve the coins scattered in the dust. "Don't try to steal from me!" Rost shouted. He pulled out a small gas gun and discharged it under Ollie's nose. Ollie pitched forward onto his face, twitched, moaned, and lay still. The deputy sheriff held an ampoule under his nose and brought him to after setting the squad car on the beamway, proceeding under remote control toward the county seat. The first thing Ollie thought of was his day's pay. He'd never received it. Worse -- his bedroll was left behind. And there was no stopping nor turning on the beam way. He complained bitterly. "You won't need that stuff," the sharp young deputy said. "Not where you're going." "I suppose Rost needs it!" Ollie protested. "He might at that. All he's got is those measily four rented acres of tomatoes. The cannery pays him the same as if he had four hundred acres and could pick by machine. "About all the profit he can make is what he chisels out of his pickers. You'll be better off in a Home, Pop, than trying to work cheaper than a machine." "Those Homes are prisons!" The deputy sighed. "I know how you feel. My old grandfather cried when we put him in. But we couldn't support him and he had no way of making a living. "The world changes faster than the people in it, Pop. Science all the time lets us live longer, but faster and faster it keeps changing the way we do things. An old guy falls so far behind the times, the only place for him is a Home." "But if a man wants to stay out," said Ollie, "I don't see why he # . JJ can t. "Old guys are dangerous to the rest of us. I saw three people killed, not long ago, trying to dodge an oldtimer who walked too slow to get across a wide street before the lights changed against him." "They could have slowed the signal," Ollie said. "But no! Always it's the man who has to adapt to the machine, not the machine to the man. The only way to get by in this world is to find some machine you just naturally fit." "You sound kind of bitter." "Why not? I used to be a stock control clerk, keeping track of spare parts supply for a nationally distributed line of machine tools. I had twenty girls working for me. Then one day they put in a big computer." He sighed. "No wonder these suicide salesmen do so well. If I had the money I'd hire somebody to knock me off right now." "Don't be stupid!" the deputy snarled. "You wouldn't be losing your freedom if you'd had sense enough to stay out of a fight. And when you talk about suicide salesmen, you sure prove you can't take care of yourself!" But the deputy was kinder than he sounded. Rather than allege incompetence, he charged Ollie with an assault against Rost. So instead of being remanded to the geriatricians, Ollie was kept overnight in jail and ordered held, next morning, for want of fifty dollars bail. An hour after bail had been set, a dapper thin faced bailbond broker came to see him. "Want out?" "Sure." "If I put up bail you'll be out." "No Home?" "You're classified as a criminal, ineligible for a Home till either you're found not guilty or serve your time." "Well, but I'm broke. I can't buy a bailbond." "You can work it off. I'm going to spring you right now. As soon as they let you out, meet me in the southwest corner of the park, just across from the post office." Ollie did. He thought his bail had been arranged by the deputy. The broker kept him waiting in the park for half an hour, but was brisk when he appeared. "My name is Lansing," he said. "Come on. We're taking a little trip." He steered Ollie to the copter tower at the park's center and with him boarded its endless-belt manlift. They were carried ten stories to the roof, and as they stepped off the manlift an empty copter hovered at hand. It bore on sides and bottom an address, a phone number, and the word Bailbonds , all in big letters. The copter rose under the tower's control as soon as they'd entered it, and continued to rise till Lansing selected a prepunched destination card and slipped it into the autopilot. Then a knowing red light winked on, the copter levelled off and headed southwest, and Lansing took one of a pair of chintz-padded wicker seats, motioning Ollie into the other. "How do you like the idea of going to a Home?" he asked abruptly. "I'd rather be dead." "I know someone who agrees with you. A fellow with bad health who wants to die but doesn't have the guts to do the necessary. Feel like helping him out?" Ollie sighed, smiled grimly, and shook his head. "No, thanks!" "You might die yourself, Hollveg." Lansing's voice was heavy with menace. "I might," Ollie agreed hotly. "I might get murdered. And maybe the same thing will happen to this supposedly sick man you want me to help out. He may not want to die any more than I do. I've heard you suicide salesmen do a lot of murder-for-hire." "You've heard too much, Hollveg." Lansing took a plushlined metal case from an inside pocket and removed from it a filled syringe, complete with needle. "This won't hurt," he said in a sneering imitation of a doctor. "But it'll end your independence like a barbed wire fence." Ollie began to sweat. "I've heard of those zombie-shots too," he said. He looked wildly around, then controlled himself and gestured almost calmly toward the sky, land, and water visible through the cabin's plastic walls. "Maybe you can put the needle away for a while," he suggested. "I'm not going to walk out on you right now." Lansing smiled and complied. "You may keep your health a long time yet," he said urbanely. "If you're sensible, we might even find steady work for you." Ollie suppressed a shudder. Lansing tuned in a Western on the physeo. Soon the odor of sage and horse-sweat filled the cabin. Ollie watched avidly. He hadn't seen enough physeo to be bored with it. There was a mouth watering camp supper scene, with pleasant odors of broiling beef and burning wood; and a stirring moonlit love scene with a wholesome girl who smelled of soap and starch, and only faintly of cosmetics. But then came the climactic chase, a combined stampede, stagecoach race, and Indian fight. So much alkali dust poured from the physeo that Ollie got a fit of coughing. He couldn't stop. After several excruciating minutes he lay down on the floor and gasped to Lansing for a drink of water. "There isn't any," Lansing told him sharply. "And brother, you'd better get up from there, because you'll have to move fast when we get to Frisco." Without knowing what would result, Ollie made sure he neither got up nor stopped coughing till they reached San Francisco which was fifteen minutes later. The pretense involved intense effort for so old a man. His voice went. He was clammy with sweat from head to foot. His face was pale and his hands cold. By the time the copter reached the roof of San Francisco's Union Square tower, Ollie was actually unable to jump out of the cabin in the thirty seconds allotted by the remote traffic-control system. Lansing tried to carry him out, but the result was merely a delay that damned the stream of traffic. A winged inspector buzzed them, took remote control of their copter, and led it to the emergency tower at Civic center. Ollie was taken off on a stretcher. Lansing, his urbanity washed away in a flood of redfaced rage, was still in the copter when it rose. And the hypo was still in his pocket; with Ollie due to get medical attention, he hadn't been able to use it. Ollie didn't dare stay long in the hospital. As soon as his stretcher was set down on the receiving ward floor, he rolled out of it and with the help of a fat steward struggled to his feet. "Thanks," he whispered hoarsely. "I have to go now." "You can't!" said the steward. "You haven't even been examined yet." "It's against my religion to have to do with medicine," Ollie improvised. "Besides, I'm perfectly well." "Yeah? What about your voice -- or lack of one?" "A coughing spell. I'm over it now. And my voice is coming back." It was. The steward unbuttoned his coat and scratched his belly meditatively. "If you don't want treatment you don't have to have it." he said finally. "The joint's overcrowded now." Ollie didn't congratulate himself when he got out. He was now a fugitive from both the geriatricians and the underworld. Soon the police would want him for bail-jumping, and meanwhile they'd grab him for vagrancy if they caught him off skidrow. He headed that way at once, walking over to Mission and down it toward Third. A clock on a storefront said five twenty. He felt overdue for supper and bed. He counted his change -- three dollars and forty-two cents. He had no bedroll ; no overcoat, either. Even in this nice summer weather it might be a little tough for a fellow to get by on the road with so little plunder. Eighty-six was a trifle old for the rugged life. What he needed, of course, was a white-collar job. Not only needed, but deserved -- he was a good clerk. Therefore he should go to the Hearst Building at Third and Market and scan the want ads posted there. As he'd been doing when in San Francisco for forty years. He thought of some of the many times he'd stared at that bulletin board. He'd gone there often during the years he'd worked as a construction timekeeper, before that skill became obsolete. Then there' d been an interval when he'd sold rebuilt window washers -- for a firm which still owed him money. And he'd haunted the board during the months he'd had that job in the automatic grocery, replenishing the dispensing machines' merchandise. None of his jobs had come from a want ad. But he had to go look. It was a ritual. ritual a hard one for him. He could read the fine-printed columns only with head cocked an arm's length away from a cheap reading glass held up to them. He took a lot of room ; forced a white-capped young mechanic to peer awkwardly around him. Embarrassed, Ollie moved out of the way. He'd begun to walk off when the young fellow stopped him. "I don't think you saw this one, Dad," he said, pointing. out dependents needed for dangerous scientific experiments. If able to pass intensive physical and mental tests report for interview to Civilian Personnel Office, Short Air Force Base, Short, Utah. "I don't know where the place is at all," Ollie complained wearily. "Just this side of Salt Lake, on the main line," the young man said. "I served there, so I'm curious. If you're not -- well -- " He shrugged and edged away. "Thanks, son," Ollie called after him. "I'm going to follow that up." The young man walked on without looking back. Ollie felt committed, not only by his offhand declaration, but by his ritual. He'd come to look for a job; he'd found one for which he was eligible; he must go after it. He headed down Third Street toward the freight yards but stopped at a skidrow restaurant for a bowl of stew and a cup of coffee. Passing an old-fashioned catchpenny grocery he went in and bought a halfdozen rolls to take with him. The proprietor, squat, unshaven, and swarthy, picked out a large red apple and slipped it in with the rolls. "Good for you," he said, smiling. Ollie shook his head. The grocer frowned, then replaced the apple with an orange. "Easier on teeth," he said. "Thank you," said Ollie, smiling. "You make me feel lucky. I'm answering a want ad -- maybe I'll get the job." The grocer smiled vaguely. "I hope." Then his face livened. "What job? In paper?" "Yes." There could be no other, for a man his age. "It says 'dangerous " said the grocer. "I think maybe they cut you up, find out how you live so long. Or make you sick to try new cure. "You find better job -- or Home. That one bad." There was a slight pause. "Look. I close soon. You sweep store, I give you dollar." "You're a good guy," said Ollie. "But I've got three dollars now." He showed them proudly. "You save yours for somebody who doesn't have a job to try for." He tucked the rolls and orange inside his shirt, marched valiantly out of the dark little store, and continued on to the yards. The heavy traffic there confused him briefly. Transcontinental freight was carried in long trains of rubber-tired cars towed on elevated beamways by remotely-controlled, nuclear-fuqled steam tractors. Here at the San Francisco yards the trains were broken up and the individual cars hauled by turbotractor on city streets and suburban roads for delivery at the addressees' doors. The cars were huge, the noise and bustle awe-inspiring. Ollie stood outside the main exit watching the little tractors and big cars emerge, till a beamway bull came over, flashed a badge, and told him to move on. He did. He was a fugitive from so many things; he couldn't afford resentments. He went on around the yards. They were vast. He felt sure that somewhere there must be an unguarded entry, and set out to find it, moving cautiously from shadow to shadow along the high plastiboard fence. Twice he blundered into watchmen. Once he nearly got himself run over. But after a couple of hours he saw a bindlestiff slip through an unguarded gate, and in half a minute he was right behind the man. Ollie moved away from him. There was safety in solitude. Besides, he had to find a Salt Lake train. The sealed cars were addressed like so many packages. But he had to have light to read by, and he risked discovery every time he moved into the light and took his stance behind the reading glass. There were other hazards; television beams for the yard clerks to read numbers by, invisible beams for the bulls to catch him with, headlights that suddenly flashed on blindingly, humped cars rolling unattended on silent, murderous tires. Ollie felt like an ant on a busy sidewalk, liable to be crushed under foot at any moment. But an added hazard helped him find his train. The bulls had read that want ad too. They were out in force around a string of cars. He slipped between two sleepylooking men, checked an address, and then slipped out again, certain every car would be inspected before departure. A good way down the yard he hid at the base of the fence, dozing and shivering for several hours as he lay stretched out on the dewchilled concrete. He checked each outbound train as it went by, and again knew his by the bulls on it. They were on the cowcatcher and in the cab, on the car roofs, and in the caboose with the traincrew of three trouble-shooting mechanics. Highlights gleamed on their weapons. Their job was to keep or get all transients off that train -- and they would if they could. Ollie let most of the train go past. The caboose came by at about fifteen miles an hour with a sharpeyed guard head-and-shoulders out of the cupola. Ollie let him get past, too -- and hoped he went on looking toward the front. He began to hobble parallel to the train, dismayed at the stiffness that had set in while he lay out on the damp concrete. As the rear of the caboose drew even with him he emerged from the shadows and dived for the coupling at the car's rear. He caught it clumsily, tore the nail off his left ring finger, but hung on. He tried to trot but the train dragged him. He gave a leapfrog player's jump and landed on top of his own hands, his thighs around the coupling, his nose against the rear platform-wall of the caboose. The engine jerked slack out of the long train and nearly dislodged him. One at a time he moved his hands from the coupling to the base of the wall. He edged in a little closer. The train gathered speed. He wasn't really on but he couldn't safely get off. He'd intended climbing under the caboose to its rear truck, but the bulls and his own lack of agility made this impossible so now he must ride where he was, exposed to battering wind and searching cold as the train crossed the High Sierras, and also exposed to the whims of the trainmen if any should come out on the platform and look down. He'd seen men shot off trains. But he didn't worry about it. Instead, like the old hand he was, he tried to sleep while clinging there. At Sparks the train stopped for a maintenance check. The guards formed a perimeter but Ollie was inside it. Too stiff to move far, he stayed in a shadow while the mechanics inspected, then he climbed under the caboose and stretched out on a girder separating two tires of the rearmost, six-tired truck. The tremendous tires fanned up hot winds when rolling, and these had warmed the steel he lay on. Before the train started he ate a roll, sucked the orange, and stretched out face down for the speed run across the central Nevada flatlands. The guards stayed behind. After the train had started, one of them shined a light directly in Ollie's eyes. The train kept on. And he was too close to the tires to be shot at; rubber-coated death whirled within three inches at either side of him. As the train picked up speed he was careful to lie still, but beyond making sure he didn't touch the tires Ollie tried to put all thought of risk from his mind. He saw a sudden vivid picture of his dead wife and son as they'd looked before the . undertaker fixed them. They'd been killed while travelling. In times when to succeed was to get somewhere, they'd been killed en route. He couldn't remember where to. They'd died in a head-on crash caused by a stranger's error in judgment. A thing that didn't happen any more, now that highway vehicles were controlled by beamed energy instead of individual drivers. The highway was one place where the human had been tested against the machine and found inferior. The office was another. If Minna and Charlie hadn't died so long ago, they might have lived to see him now -- a bindlestiff so low he even lacked a bindle. Still, it was lonely with no one in the whole wide world to care whether he lived or died. He sighed, shifted his position, and was nearly jerked under the wheels by sudden contact with the tire on his right. It was over in an instant. The tire simply ripped the coat from his back. He still wore the sleeves. The rest was gone. Weathered thread had saved him. about the irony of that before rosy dawnlight was reflected into his face from a glittering salt-pan. He knew then he was still west of Salt Lake City, and that Short Air Force Base was close. Also close, now that night had withdrawn its concealment, was discovery. He was sure to be found when next the train stopped. Therefore he eased himself out of his coatsleeves. He moved gingerly, but still chanced death to improve his appearance. The train slowed, stopped. Someone called, "Here he is," and a redhaired Air Policeman leaned under the caboose, looked him over, and said, "Come on out, Pop." Ollie's legs were stiff. The airman had to help. "You're in kind of rough shape," he said. "Where did you think you were going?" "Why -- uh -- east." Ollie cast down his eyes, ashamed even to admit he'd once entertained the notion he might get a job. The airman wasn't fooled. "You slipped through the train guards after the job we've got here. Didn't you, Pop?" "All I want is out," said Ollie stubbornly. "Well," said the airman, "you can't get off the Base without a pass. You'll have to go up to Civilian Personnel and get one." "Can't I wash first?" He could. He could also get a jeep ride to the terra cotta headquarters building, with a stop along the way for a canteen-cup of coffee and a slice of bread. When they got to headquarters the airman asked, "Tell the truth, now; didn't you really come after this job?" Ollie wouldn't admit he'd lied about it, so he lied again. "I've seen some of the other guys come in after it," the airman insisted, "and you look as good as any of them. Why not try for it, now you're here?" He gave Ollie a long application to fill out and left him at a desk just outside the personnel office. From somewhere came the clatter of a facsimile-printer, carrying boy whistled above the squawk of a superwave radio. But otherwise the place seemed deserted at that early-morning hour. For lack of anything better to do, Ollie filled out the application, leaving the job title blank. The only thing that gave him pause, aside from the difficulty of seeing, was his arrest record, and in time he decided to put it down just as it was, including the pending assault charge with its implication of jumped bail. After an hour a young captain entered the building and went to the office marked Adjutant. A fat major gave Ollie a piercing glance and then entered the Civilian Personnel office. At about five minutes of eight the place suddenly boiled with military and civilian people of all ages and both sexes. Things quieted promptly at eight. A blond youth came out of the office, glanced at Ollie's application form, kept it, and invited him inside. "First thing for you," he said, "will be a physical exam." He took Ollie to another room and turned him over to a young medic who put him in a box like a steam cabinet, attached electrodes to his temples, wrists, ankles, and chest, and put a helmet on his head. For five minutes Ollie stood encased, his stomach fluttering as he recalled the grocer's warning. He waited for the vivisection to begin. It didn't. He was removed from his shell and handed an inked graph. "Here's your profile," the medic said. "It's good, considering. Take it back to the fellow who brought you here." He did and was ushered into a glassed-in office containing two desks, each labelled Civilian Personnel Officer. At one sat the fat major. At the other, a tallish young civilian held Ollie's application. "My name is Katt," the civilian said, getting up to shake hands. "This is Major Brownwight." The major also shook his hand. Katt placed a straightbacked chair between the two desks, and invited Ollie to sit in it. Ollie did, gazing uncertainly from one man to the other. "We heard you arrived by train early this morning," Katt said. "Yes, sir." "You were first reported in Sparks, but I'll bet you boarded that train in San Francisco." "Yes, sir. What's the penalty?" "None. I like it. It's enterprising, athletic, and even brave for a man of your years to do that for a job. Shows resourcefulness. Also skill, because men are trying to nip rides here from all over the United States, but very few arrive." "They're too old," said Major Brownwight. He turned to Katt and added, "I still don't think it's an old man's job!" "Well sir," said Katt, stifling a sigh, "your predecessor understood and approved of it. These oldtimers have a lower metabolic rate than younger people, with all that that implies. They don't mind the enforced inactivity, they won't use up so much oxygen nor need so much food, they won't spend so many hours in sleep. All qualities we need." "Maybe so." The major turned to Ollie and said, "I just transferred in here. You know more about this than I do." "I don't even know what you're talking about," Ollie told him. "Without divulging classified information," said Katt, "for which you are not yet cleared, I can tell you these are little one-man jobs. Small stuff -- for pioneering. That's why we want you men with lots of patience, who're used to being alone. People without a fixed place in society, and not too much to leave behind. A husky old itinerant like you is just what we want." "For what?" Ollie insisted. "To travel -- as a sort of working passenger, since piloting will of course be mechanical -- in the first manned spaceships to leave Earth for the stars." "Spaceships?" "Sure. Solo spaceships. Superfast, which means the trip will seem relatively short while you're on it, and will give you extra earth-years of life in the end. "The job is much easier and less hazardous than the trainride that brought you here. You're a natural for it. You really fit it." "Do I, now?" A quick glow of inner warmth melted many bad years away. Ollie grinned. "You know," he said, "hi a way that's a disappointment." "How so?" asked the major aggressively. "Don't you want the job?" "Yes, sir. I want it. But all these years I've been telling myself that somewhere on this earth was a place I'd fit into, if only I could find it. Now you tell me I fit in, but the place isn't here on Earth after all!" "Not right now, no," said Katt. "But you'll be back. Rich and famous, too. No Home for you, Mr. Hollveg -- you'll have a nice place of your own." And he did -- after photographing the planets of Arcturus. #   for orders; he had no idea where he might be sent after that. Cudyk had not yet made up his mind. He thought that perhaps he would go with the priest ; if he should change his mind after landing it would be no great loss; one wilderness, as Exarkos had once said, was as good as another. It will all be anticlimax, he thought, and perhaps that is the definition of Hell: unending anticlimax. He wondered how it would feel to be Earthbound again. The repatriation ship was to be the last Galactic vessel which would ever call at Earth. And there would be a constant guard. The Niori had learned, belatedly but well. If humanity ever climbed high enough again to reach the stars with its bloody fingers, the citizens of the galaxy would be ready. Cudyk looked at his watch. The man in the powerhouse must be a sentimentalist ; he was waiting until the last possible moment. He heard the soft hum of the aircar behind him, turned and saw it settling lightly to the clipped lawn. The remaining passengers were moving toward it. Exarkos stood up and lifted his suitcase. Cudyk turned back for one last look at the Quarter. It was full dark now, and all he could see of it was the blocky, ambiguous outline of its darkness against the glowing buildings beyond, and the cross-hatched pattern of yellow street lights. The lights went out.  #  Some folks say a good wife is a composite of many things . And sometimes a girl finds it tough . But with the ratio of the sexes drastically changed... June had an argument over the coffee. Polly had brewed it. June thought it was too strong. Doris and Sue stayed out of the argument at first. Polly defended, "Sure, it's a little stronger, but men like it strong. You might as well get used to it." June said, "See here, he's got to make some concessions. After all, why should four of us suffer -- " "Suffer? You call being married to Hollis Jamison suffering?" "Don't be so impressed. He's not doing badly marrying us, either. He could do a lot worse." "Why, you vain witch! Just because you play a fair game of chess -- " "Oh, I'm not taking all the credit. You're a fine cook, Doris is witty and Sue's body would make any man's mouth water -- but that's just the point! Look what he's getting! Why should we have to change all our habits and tastes to conform with his?" Now Doris entered the argument. "You know darn well why! It's still a man's world and a man's choice. Back when there was a man for practically every woman, it was different. But it's five women to one man right now -- don't ever forget that -- five to one, and so far the law only requires a quadracell. Just be grateful you aren't the one who's left out. You and your chessplaying! How far would you get attracting a man, all by yourself?" "Shhh, now, all of you," Sue broke into the telepathic conversation. "Let's clear the dishes and get the apartment straightened up. Hollis did make one concession -- moving in with us, instead of making us live in that dismal bachelor's hole of his. Let's not make him regret it." They heeded Sue and got busy. Sue was the arbiter. She ruled the quartet with a gentle but confident mind. All four knew that her lithe, athletic body with it's soft curves and golden hair was the greatest asset in this transaction of matrimony. There had been no dissension on this point, nor could there have been. The bureau would never have allowed them to be together and form a marriage cell had there been the slightest dispute. Many differences of opinion were allowable, but the four had been carefully screened in certain matters of basic tastes. They liked the same colors, foods, styles of clothing, video programs, sports and vacation activities. All were carefully schooled ambiverts of roughly equal education. Instead of conflicting, their differences of skills, talents and personality traits complemented each other. Even with all this care in selecting and matching, however, the big test was the culmination of the marriage, itself -- the whole purpose of this banding together. The unpredictable quality of the most stable feminine emotions made the choice of a mate most difficult of afi. This awareness was in all their minds this day, and it made them a little nervous. Even the argument that had started over the coffee had been faintly alarming to Sue. They were a team, welded together by the wonderful gift of telepathy, which was only possible through formation of a marriage cell. The most complete intimacy of thought and feeling had been nurtured for a whole year before marriage was permissible. Sympathy, tolerance and sharing a common experience with mutual enjoyment and happiness was the keystone of the polygamous unions. Nothing must spoil it now. The delivery vault thumped, and the signal light flicked on. Sue rushed to slide up the door. "Orchids!" they chorused mentally, and Sue noticed with satisfaction that June's thought was as strong as the others. The lovely flowers were put in the cooler, the apartment was tidied and they turned to the exciting task of becoming beautiful for their handsome husband. The tiff over the coffee was forgotten as they became immersed in sprays, powders, tints, cosmetics, body ornaments and the precious nuptial perfume. This latter, issued to them only yesterday when they signed the register and received the license, was now as traditionally exclusive to weddings as trousseaus had been centuries ago. Feminine clothing, of course, had long since been eliminated from the occasion, along with other redundancies such as waggish and mischievous guests, old shoes, rice and hectic honeymoon trips. The official and religious arrangements had been completed yesterday at the registry and the chapel, the union to become legal and effective at noon on this day. When Hollis Jamison walked through their door at twelve o'clock he would bring four gold rings, and the moment the rings were placed on the proper fingers the ceremony was complete. Doris said, "Let's steal just a tiny whiff of the perfume. I'm too curious to wait." June and Polly were game, but Sue cut them off. "Not on your life! I used to know a chemist at the hormone labs where they compound this stuff, and he told me about it. We have things to do, and if what he told me is true -- well, it's very distracting." Polly backed her up, "I hear it is terribly volatile. I guess we wouldn't want it to wear off before Hollis came." "Hollis!" The thought was June's, and it came thin and quavery. "What -- do you suppose it's like to be married?" No one answered, for there was no experience among them. Each had her own romantic idea, so cherished, so private that even within the intimacy of their clique it was too sacred to discuss. Suddenly June said, "I'm scared." The thought had come sharply and unexpectedly. It was contagious. Polly said, "Me, too." "Of what?" Doris asked, "Of drinking strong coffee the rest of your lives?" It was a weak, nervous stab at humor, and Sue knew that Doris was as jumpy as the rest of them. "Steady, gals," she said sympathetically. "It'll be worth it. We want a baby, don't we?" It was the right thought at the right time. Sue felt their minds relax, and the thought even did her some good. A sweet, little, round, pink baby -- She let the mental picture flow out to the others, and the little crisis passed. The minutes flew, and soon it was five minutes to twelve. "Have we forgotten anything?" Sue asked. "The perfume!" Polly and June said together. "Hurry!" Doris said. "I think he's coming." The seal on the tiny vial was broken, one drop on each breast, and the rich, exotic fumes exuded a gentle, warm excitement that was entirely different from the innocent scents they had known. The door was unlocked, and now it opened. Hollis stepped in, bronzed body bared to the waist. "The flowers!" Polly wailed inwardly. "We forgot the orchids -- But Hollis Jamison didn't notice the discrepancy. He advanced smiling from his gray eyes and strong mouth. Sue opened her lips and her fine, white teeth showed a welcoming smile. She was proud of her lovely body, and June, Polly and Doris shared in that pride. Sue held out her left hand with fingers outstretched. Her man came forward jingling the four rings in his right hand. He paused before her, drew her left hand to his lips, kissed the little finger and slid the proper ring on it, then, in order he kissed Sue's other three fingers and banded them with the remaining rings, symbolic of the four separate feminine entities who dwelt in this one magnificent body. And with each ring he said a name: "June, Polly, Doris, Sue -- " He straightened and gazed into the two blue eyes. "I thee wed," he said simply.    Science may some day reduce the function of memory to a mathematical formula involving electrical impulse frequencies and durations at certain sites in the brain. Experiments with rats have shown that the frequency of electrical impulses on the brain's memory unit determine whether the memory is good or bad. Rats whose brains were stimulated at high frequencies were able to master a maze much more rapidly than those which had been stimulated at one-fourth the frequency rates. Vertical conveyor belts may replace the elevator cage in the future. Such a system was recently installed in a New York City garage. The continuous # foot belt has steps placed sixteen feet apart. When stopped, two steps are on each of the four levels of the building; four ready to go up and the other four ready to go down. The rider standing on a step, grasps a safety handle and starts the "Man-Lift" by pulling a rope beside the belt. The rope starts a three horsepower electric motor that turns a pulley at each end of the rubber and cotton belt. The first man on the moon may find that he's surrounded by some pretty valuable crystals when he steps out of the spaceship. Recent studies have indicated that the specific gravity of the lunar crust is about equal to that of a diamond. Crystallized carbon could be formed by a fusion of the lunar surface caused by internal forces, such as modified volcanic action or meteorite bombardment. Indications point to the theory that the craters of the moon were formed by such actions; and strengthen the possibility of valuable crystalline formations dotting the lunar landscape. your teeth without causing any pain or even audible sound. A new drill has been introduced in tests which uses a machine tool designed for cutting metals and hard minerals. The device is vibrated electromagnetically for a distance of less than a thousandths of an inch at a speed of # times a second. The vibration activates the particles in a cutting liquid which do the actual work of wearing away the tooth material. The traffic problem created by freight delivery may be solved in the future by a new push-button device that enables a pilot to drop as much as twenty tons of cargo by pressing a button in his cockpit. A fully loaded cargo platform is dragged out of the rear of the plane by an extraction parachute, and when the platform clears the plane a large parachute opens and lands the cargo safely. Special shock absorbers help to protect the cargo from impact on landing. By next summer you may be able to spray your patio, picnic ground or campsite once -- and have it rid of flies, mosquitoes and other insects for the entire season. U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists hope that chemical "extenders" added to present insecticides will do the job. Experiments have proved that the use of such extenders as a effectiveness from # to # days. Transport planes may some day have detachable cabins that can parachute to earth if the plane runs into trouble. A Danish engineer has patented the model which will protect passengers in case of catastrophe. The cabin has a huge parachute packed on top of it, with small "pilot" chutes attached to the big one. The whole works is encased in the plane's skin. In an emergency the pilot could close the water tight door, and pull an emergency lever which would rip the skin covering the cabin away. One small parachute would pull and slide the cabin away from the plane, and then the big chute would take over and land the cabin intact on land or water. Patients of the future may be put into artificial hibernation to protect them from traumatic shock and pain. The drug induced sleep was tried with some success in the underground hospital of the French in Indo China. The drop in body temperature, pulse rate and blood pressure relieve pain and relax the patient until he is able to stand the shock of drastip surgery. Edible corncobs may be among the cattle feeds of the future. Improved corn is already making a trend in this direction. Plant geneticists are constantly working to increase the pentosan chemical yield. Breaking the atom structure of pentosan into pentosan sugar is the next step on the agenda. When this is accomplished the cob will become a valuable food source. Window air conditioners or household cooling systems may someday contain a trace of a rare element to freshen indoor air with invisible health-stimulating particles of electricity. Experiments have shown that use of radioactive polonium # to generate alpha particles in air conditioning systems creates air that is equally as benificent as fresh air without forming ions that are irritating to health if inhaled for any long periods of time. Summer vacation clothes may soon include disposable bathing suits. A specially processed wall paper has been found to have high "wet strength" and several feminine bathing suits have been made of it and are undergoing strenuous tests this year. # -- # miles. # -- # miles per hour. # -- Radioactive. # -- Jupiter. # -- # years. # -- Radex. # -- # times greater. #I -- Hydrogen. # -- Lucifer and Hesperus. There # a Time when Your Luck Will Change! " And there shall he signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring ; Mens hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth..." -- St. Luke #:#, #. When the Bible was written prophecy was an outstanding feature of this greatest of all books. Today many scoff at predictions, yet -- the Biblical prophecy written # years ago that the Jews would reestablish a new nation of Israel, has just come true! Today we know that there are "cycles' when wars and world problems reach fanatical heights -- then changes come. Marguerite Carter has given her life to study, keeping records that may be used to help mankind. Of one thing you may be sure, she is honest and to be trusted! This amazing woman predicted, long before, the coming order of nations in World War II. In # when Russia was struggling for survival, she said: "We shall find it necessary to sit down equally at the peace table with Russia and concede to her wishes. Only very shrewd maneuvering will prevent her being the completely dominant power in Europe." This has come true! Now -- she says -- "This is the time of many small wars, quarrels in families and sudden home changes. Through it all, the United States will advance to unbelievable power and sound financial strength. For many, many people there will be completely new fields of work!" Test Miss Carter's accuracy for the greatest help you personally have ever known. Get "your" forecast for the next twelve months. Send your complete birthday -- month, date, and year, the hour of your birth (if known), and the place -- with a remittance of # for your forecast which will include Miss Carter's special notations showing "Outstanding Indications." Allow three weeks for proper, careful attention. Address: Marguerite Carter, #I Jackson Bldg., Indianapolis #, Indiana. -- Continued from Back Cover about the first A-Bomb... written before it was invented! Plus many other best tales from twelve years of AstoundingScience-Fiction Magazine. !J omnibus of science-fiction -- # top stories by outstanding authors... of visitors from Outer Space... of Far Traveling... Adventures in Dimension... Worlds of Tomorrow. ries from Fantasy and ScienceFiction Magazine. Atomic power from beans... the man who lived # years ; and many others. Clement -- Chas. Lackland lin. But force of gravity is so powerful that a fall of a few inches can powder a human! Sohl -- # A.D. Scientists can restore dead men to life! But when Bradley Kempton is restored -- he finds himself in the body of an insane killer! Edgar Pangborn -- Angelo Pontevecchio can destroy the earth -- or he can save it. But it's not up to him to decide! The Asimov -- Robots are the most hated creatures on earth. Then a noted robot scientist is murdered. Detective Baley has to track down the killer. And -- he's given a robot as a partner! -- From his hide-out, Paul Breen could read the minds of enemy agents anywhere ! Then he learned that HE was about to be killed. Think of it! Your Choice of Science-Fiction Books for Ohfy Woo  jet-propelled Science-Fiction #! We make this amazing offer to introduce you to the new Science' Fiction Book Club. It brings you the cream of new science-fiction bestsellers for only I each (plus a few cents postage) -- even though they cost #, #, and up in original publishers' editions. Each month's selection is described in advance. You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year, if you wish. science-fiction hits described here. All three are yours for only #. Two are your gift books for joining; the other is your first selection. This offer may be withdrawn at any time. So Garden City, N. Y. jOO ? Dept. ff-L Garden City, New York Please rush me the # books checked below, as my gift books and first selection. Bill me only I for all three (plus small shipping charge), and enroll me as a member of the Science-Fiction Book C lub. Every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish tq receive the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus shipping. I do not have to take a book every month (only four during time I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. all books in # days, pay nothing and this membership will be cancelled.  The Altered Ego  Astounding Anthology  Best From Fantasy  Science-Fiction  Caves of Steel  Mirror for Observers  Mission of Gravity  Omnibus  Wild Talent Name... Address . ( Please Print) City Zone State Selection price in Canada # plus shipping Address ScienceFiction Club, # Bond St., Toronto # (Offer good only in U. S. and Canada) Which of These Top Science-Fiction Authors Do You Enjoy Most? popular science-fiction writers of today. Each is a master at creating rocket-fast adventures... crammed with the science thrills of the future... packed with the daring imagination that will make tomorrow's headlines. Read inside how you can get bestsellers -- by top science-fiction writers like these -- for only  I . # ! OBSERVATORY ROCKET -- This observatory rocket is making a close-up stud of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, M# I . Like most galaxies, the Grea Nebula in Andromeda M# I is a vast spiral, a veritable pinwheel in space. On( of the nearer such astronomical spectacles, it can be seen on a clear nigh with the naked eye. By way of identification, it is that elongated patch of ligh lying between Cassiopeia and the Great Square of Pegasus. Our own Milk Way is believed to be a spiral similar to M# I . you're chat man, here's something chat will interest you. Not a magic formula -- nor a get-rich 'quick scheme -- but something more substantial, more practical. Of course, you need something more than just the desire to an accountant. You've got to pay Still, wouldn't it be worth your while to sacrifice some of your leisure in favor of interesting home study -- over a comparatively brief period. Always provided that the rewards were good -- a salary of # to #? An accountant's duties are interesting, varied tnd of real worth to his employers. He hdiS ftanJinfi! Do you feel that such things aren't for you? Well, don't be too sure. Very possibly they can be! Why not, like so many before you. investigate LaSalle's modern Problem Method of training for an accountancy, position? Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large accounting house under the personal supervision of an expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid, you studied accounting principles and solved problems day by day -- easy ones at first -- then more difficult ones. If you could do this -- and could turn to him for advice as the problems became complex -- soon you'd master them all. That's the training you follow in principle under the LaSalle Problem Method. You cover accountancy from the basic Principles right up through Accountancy Systems and Income Tax Procedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and psepare for the C P. A. examinations. As you go along, you absorb the principles of Auditing, Cost Accounting, Business Law, Statistical Control, Organization, Management and Finance. Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it -- depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time you spend in study. Will recognition come? The only answer, as you know, is that success come to the man who is really trained. It's possible your employers will notice your improvement in a very few weeks or months. Indeed, many LaSalle graduates have paid for their training -- with increased earnings -- before they have completed it! For accountants, who are trained in organization and management, are the executives of the future. Send For Free Sample Lesson For your own good, get all the faas. Write for our free #-page book, "Accountancy, The Profession That Pays" -- also the free sample lesson so you can prove to yourself that you can master accountancy quickly, thoroly in spare time at home. Over #r# CertHled Public Acceuntontf among LaScdIo alumni A Correspondence Institution Send me without obligation. Free Sample Lesson and "Accountancy, The Profession 'That Pays." Sami An AJdrm Cri, #o# S' SMrr. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Bob Watkins Illustrating the story, 'Seller of the Sky" The Great Nebula in Andromeda, M# I IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Bunalo, New York. Entered as Second Qass Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription S# for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories apparing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coinciaental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts, #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. lext issue on sale January #tb lhelJUtuiuRxdi.qfjCifi be generally told -- you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand em. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hid den processes of mans mind, and the mastery of lifers problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teaching. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe K.G.S. I Scribe K.G.S. i I Saa Jose. California i I Please send me theree book. The Mastery  I of Life, which explains how I may learn to i I use my faculties and powers of mind. i I Name ' I Address  I City I I I has never read a science fiction magazine asked me that old dogeared question: "Just what is science fiction?" Well, Tve been hearing it ever since volume one, number one, and better men than I am have either been reluctant to answer it or have replied in some vague general way. I can't do it "in ten words or less", either. But I do like to think of it as perhaps the only form of fiction I know of which doesn't have to follow the rules laid down for writing other types of fiction. I think science fiction should be a medium of entertainment which advances, worthwhile ideas and thoughts on the philosophy, inventions, conventions and shenanigans of Mankind. I believe that a science fiction theme or premise should be simple and clearly plotted and convincingly told in a straightforward manner. And I often wonder why so many authors (some of them pretty experienced fellows, too) have to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the pot and make a soup you have a heck of a time identiifying. I have just finished reading a rather lengthy yarn with several rather far-fetched theories in one field, two or three political premises stirred up with them, and then a bunch of characters, none clearly definable, trying to juggle the whole mess. Now, I'm not saying the juggling couldn't be done artistically and entertainingly. My argument is purely that if you are going to handle all that stuff you gotta have elbow room in which to do it. Namely -- in novel room, and then you have to be careful. But in a short story or novelette, stick to one good idea and work it out clearly and emphatically. If it is a new extrapolation of cybernetics, let it be that; not also an introduction to new political theories. Oriental religious tenets or goldfish mutations. It makes a story easier to write and the chances are that a story that's easy to write is also easy to read. Another thing about science fiction that should be cleared up is that so many non-readers never become readers because they think it heavy "science stuff' and therefore difficult to read. Or they aren't interested in juvenile "space opera" and never bother to find out that good science fiction is not that at all. And while we're on the subject, let's see how a recent issue of "The Literary Supplement" of The Times of London regards science fiction. The issue I received (gratis) is fat, fat, fat, consisting mostly of a huge section devoted to "American Writing Today" and all the paid advertisements of American book publishers. This particular section is a rather exhausting survey and critique of American literature in all its forms and phases. Somewhere in the back part of the issue is an essay on science fiction entitled "Escaping into Space". I found it interesting, for several reasons, and I wish you folks who love science fiction could read it (also for several reasons) . It is precisely written; much of it is good, much of it is rather stuffy, a great part of it erroneous or uninformed. It is unsigned. However, to quote a few snatches: "The world of science fiction is essentially that of the adventure story, and the adventure story pure and simple has never held a very notable place in the history of literature." I could certainly argue this point, citing many wonderful American adventure classics that, to my warped way of thinking, have become a notable part of American literature. I could also argue the point about science fiction being "essentially" an adventure story. But you can, too. So I won't do it here. But let's continue: "Science fiction is one of the natural phenomena of a country so preoccupied with the material aspects of life, so predominantly 'g#idget-minded" (it is remarkable how many science fiction stories revolve around mysterious, incomprehensible gadgets and the problems they pose) ; yet it does to some extent echo the gradual development and change of direction of the American national conscience during the past thirty years. In the early days, these stories were pure adventure-tales: pioneers shot off into space, landed on distant worlds and found enough thrills and horrific aborigines there to titillate the most jaded reader's palate. They were very much an extension of the hero-cult common to all books written for juvenile readers the world over. But this era is now somewhat contemptuously dismissed as the bug-eyed monster phase and science fiction has made efforts to grow up. Those early writers who have not drifted off into other fields have set about improving the standard of their original, rather crude tales and some are even striving to give their work a deeper significance". I agree that America is "gadgetminded", but that isn't the reason for science fiction. If only one half of the gadget-minded people in this country read science fiction, a dozen different science fiction magazines wouldn't have folded in the past year. Publishing a science fiction magazine, contrary to what this British writer thinks, is no gravy train. The audience is small, and not as he (or she?) states: "Broadly speaking, science fiction can be placed in the same class as the ever-popular Western and appeals to the same type of public". I like westerns too, but -- oh boy! -- what a difference in the audience! "If science fiction does much to illustrate the development of a national neurosis, it also expresses man's pioneering spirit, his cease( Continued on page #) The Lut and the Snorap were philosophical engineers of high and ancient orders; and they were very wise in the ways of all types of life. However, they were now experiencing something new -- the struggle for existence of two human beings... The Odd Ones Illustrated by Ed Emsh with a thump, "This I do not understand." "They are young," replied the Lut, settling on his haunches beside the Snorap. "Young and stupid." "I agree they are young," said the Snorap. "I am not yet convinced they are stupid. But how can they expect to persist?" Persist, of course, was not exactly the word the Snorap used. It was something with more scope than the mere idea of persisting. It dealt with continuing to survive, and a social and racial sense as well as maintaining a present effort. However, the Lut understood. They were of different races these two; but equally old and experienced in the ways of the universe. Both had evolved to cope with the varying conditions to be found in space and on many different worlds, and though the end product of each race's evolution had resulted in some difference, in essence they were similar. Neither of them, for example, required an atmosphere; and they could fuel their bodies with almost any chemical compound which would give off energy in the process of being broken down into its component parts. At a pinch, they could even get by on solar radiation, though this was an unsatisfying form of diet. Fleshed and muscled to meet truly fantastic gravities, pressures, and temperature extremes, they were at home just about anywhere. These were the common points. In appearance each race had settled on a form of its own. The Snorap strongly resembled a very fat and sleepy lizard about ten feet in length -- a sort of unterrifying, overs tufifed dragon of the kind who would prefer a pleasant nap in a soft chair to eating maidens, any day in the week. His hide was heavy and dark and ridged like armor-plating. The Lut, on the other hand, was built more on the model of an Earthly tiger, except that he was longer -- being fully as long as the Snorap -- and thicker, with an almost perfectly round body, rather like a big sewer main. He was tailless, his head was big and flat of face, and he possessed an enormous jaw which could crunch boulders like hard candy. His eyes had a fierce green glint to them and he was covered with very fine, but incredibly tough, small glassy scales which would have permitted him to take an acid shower every morning and never notice it at all. But in spite of his appearance, he was just as civilized, just as intelligent, and just as much a gentleman as the Snorap; which put them both, as a matter of fact, several notches above the two humans they were watching, in all those respects. The two aliens were philosophical engineers, an occupation it is hard to explain in human terms. It might be attempted by saying that every living being, no matter how far down the intelligence scale it may be, has a sort of inherent philosophy of survival. When the philosophies of all life forms on one world balance nicely, there is no problem. When they fall out of balance with one another, the philosophical engineer moves in, hoping to correct the situation and incidentally, gain new knowledge. These two, the Snorap and the Lut, had discovered this world they were on to be a new one, not heretofore checked, and they had just spent the last eighty years or so in going over it. Their own ship -- which was more of a space-sled than a ship, being completely open, except for an energy shield for meteor protection -- was clear on the other side of the planet, they having wandered away from it completely in the past half-century of philosophy-testing. Now they had just stumbled on a pair of human immigrants. These soft little bipeds were a new experience to the Snorap and the Lut, neither of their races having encountered the type before; and they sat in the obscurity of the vegetation that hemmed the little clearing where the human ship had landed, conversing in something that was not verbal speech, sign language, nor telepathy, but a mixture of all three -- and they marveled. 'T do not understand it," repeated the Snorap. 'T literally fail to comprehend. They will most certainly perish." "Undoubtedly," replied the Lut, blinking his green eyes. "They believe in their machines, I think." He indicated the domed metal hut and the low hydroponics tankbuilding, like the top half of a loaf of bread cut off and set close to the ground, and the small ship beyond, from which the two human figures were laboring to extract the motors for their power plant. The planet was at the hot end of its summer and the temperature was above a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit, a fact the Snorap and the Lut did not even notice. The humans sweated in conditioned clothing and face masks. "But that is no way to meet the challenge of environment," said the Snorap, quite honestly distressed. "No way at all. Suppose the machines fail? They will shrivel in the sun or congeal in the cold." "I give them four months," said the Lut, snapping his heavy jaws closed. "I'm afraid so," said the Snorap. "Their home world must be badly out of balance if they take the easy way of machines instead of trying to adapt. There can be no endurance, no philosophical strength in such creatures. Their original planet must be very badly off. I wonder where it is?" "When the machines break down, they will have to leave," said the Lut. "We will follow." And with entirely inhuman patience, the two settled themselves in the shadow and shelter of the vegetation to wait. asked the Lut. He had been napping for the past two weeks; leaving the Snorap to observe. The Snorap, who slept only during the process of regrowing a lost limb, was quite obviously fascinated. "They've been getting ready for winter," he answered. "Oh, winter," said the Lut, getting up and stretching himself like the big cat he somewhat resembled. "That's right." The planet they were on did not tilt on its axis, but had an orbit that carried it quite well out from its sun during the shorter part of the year. The result was a brief, but very severe winter. The temperature had, in fact, fallen a good hundred degrees since they had first sighted the human clearing; but neither the Snorap nor the Lut paid any attention to this, a difference so minor hardly registered on their senses. Under a heavy, gray sky, the humans were working feverishly to bank up the living dome, the hydroponics tank-building and the ship. They had set up the ship's motors in a little structure off to one side, with a thick pipe-like affair running from it to the dome and off to the hydroponics building. The Lut cocked his eye at the banks of earth. "Why?" he asked. "Insulation, I would imagine," replied the Snorap. "It won't work," said the Lut. "The blizzards will blow it away." "Not if it freezes first," said the Snorap. "They are ingenious." "Now I suppose they'll go inside and hole up until the warmth comes," said the Lut. "An underground sort of existence." He looked across the chill earth to where the two humans were laboring with hand shovels to pile the crumbly brown soil of the planet against the side of the motor-building. "How do you tell them apart?" "They are almost identical, aren't they?" said the Snorap. "However, if you take the trouble to figure it out, you'll notice one has a slightly greater mass than the other. I call them the Greater Biped Colonist and the Lesser Biped Colonist. Great and Less for short. That's Great going around the comer of the motor building right now. And Less is still digging." "I wonder why there are two of them? said the Lut thoughtfully. "There are two of us," said the Snorap. "Of course," said the Lut, "but there's reason for that. We're different life forms. Our senses and abilities complement each other. But these two are exact duplicates. Doesn't make sense." "Nonsense," retorted the Snorap. "There could be all sorts of possible explanations. For instance one might be a spare." "A spare?" "What's so fantastic about that?" said the Snorap. "Consider how fragile they are; and how far they are, undoubtedly, from their home world." "All the same," said the Lut, snapping his big jaws shut, "I cannot agree with such a hypothesis. It is unmoral in the extreme." "I merely offered it as one possible explanation of why there were two of them," replied the Snorap, glancing at his friend and companion. "While you've been napping I've devoted a lot of time to close observation of them. Do you know what I deduce?" "Don't ask rhetorical questions," grumbled the Lut. "They haven't been civilized for more than eight or ten thousand years." "What? Ridiculous!" snorted the Lut. "Obviously they're young; but eight to ten thousand is utterly fantastic." "Not when you stop to consider this philosophical imbalance that has driven them to the production of machines for any and every possible use. That in itself is the worst possible danger signal. Undoubtedly it has sapped all of their moral fiber." "I might point out," said the Lut, "that, to migrate to a world like this when you are like that, takes a certain amoimt of moral fiber." "Ah, but there we come to another question," persisted the Snorap, interlocking the big, blunt claws of his forepaws together like a pedantic old man. "What reason can they have for coming here? They show no intellectual interest in the planet. Their senses are obviously very limited. They seem to have no purpose in being here other than to exist." "Under great difficulties," said the Lut. "Granted," answered the Snorap, "under great difficulties. Which merely confirms my belief in their unbalance." The Lut was by nature a contrary creature; and in addition he was always snappish after a nap. "And I," he retorted, "prefer to assume that there may be some good reason which you and I are too dull-witted to understand." "My dear fellow -- " protested the Snorap, aghast. "Why not?" The Lut sat down rather complacently. "Simply because you and I know and understand the philosophies of some hundreds of thousands of different intelligent life forms, it does not necessarily follow that we will be able to know and understand this one. Now does it?" "No, but -- but -- the Snorap was actually floundering in the sea of the Lut's sophistical argument. "You will have to admit," said the Lut, "that there is room for reasonable doubt. Let us clarify the argument. You say that machines have sapped their moral fiber. Therefore, it is clear that without their machines they will show no instinct or capability for survival. Is this not so?" "Exactly," said the Snorap, stemly"And I," went on the Lut, "disagree. I do not understand, any more than you do, what they are doing here, why there are two of them, or what their philosophy of life is. But I claim that no members of a race which has made a migration to a world where conditions are so inhospitable to them, as this one, can be lacking in moral fiber. Now, I propose that we abanbon our work on this planet temporarily, and observe these two instead -- until we come to a conclusion." 'And if I should turn out to be right," countered the Snorap, stiffly, "do you agree to locating their home planet and doing a thorough job of philosophical re-balancing on this race?" "I do," replied the Lut. "But what if I should turn out to be right. What concession will you make?" "Concession?" said the Snorap, blinking. "Certainly," said the Lut. "It's only fair that I should stand to gain something as well. If I am right, do you agree to introducing ourselves to them; and introducing them to the fact that many other intelligent races exist, of radically different philosophies?" "I do," said the Snorap. He turned his heavy lizard-like muzzle to the sky. "And here comes the winter to seal the bargain and administer the first environmental test to our subjects." From the dark sky, a first few snowflakes were falling. Around the buildings. Great and Less, the two odd little bipeds, tamped their last shovels-full of earth into place; and went inside the domed living quarters. The day wore on and darkness came swiftly. The ground was covered now with snow and the air was thick with swirling flakes. The wind rose to a banshee roar, tugging and tearing at the buildings and the freezing earth banked up around their perimeters. et's local time, the snow ceased blowing, the distant winter sun came out, and the temperature dropped sharply to about eighty degrees below zero fahrenheit. Behind the denuded branches of the vegetation surrounding the clearing, but almost as well shielded by their twisted tangle as they had been when leaves sprouted from the black limbs, the Snorap and Lut sat in the snow, watching the dome. "What are they doing in there?" the Lut kept asking. The Snorap's sense of hearing was more adaptable than that of the tigerish alien; and he had been keeping his companion posted on what went on out of their sight. "They're talking," replied the Snorap. "Still?" said the Lut, registering astonishment. "How can a strictly verbal language contain enough concepts to permit of prolonged discussion?" "I don't understand it myself," answered the Snorap. He had been trying to learn the biped language from what he could overhear. "A lot of their talk doesn't make sense." "Multi purpose expressions?" said the Lut, who ordinarily was something of a linguist himself. " -- No -- " replied the Snorap. "Dropped metaphors?" persisted the Lut, thinking of a little known race on the fringe of the Magellenic cloud. "No," said the Snorap. "Elided constantual hyperbo -- " "No!" said the Snorap, thoroughly exasperated. "It just doesn't make sense. The language is simple enough, it's the way they use it. They call each other by so many different names I don't know which is which any more -- " n ( Inside the dome, Great had just adAessed Less as a tin-headed idiot.) "Utter, utter, utter illogic and confusion!" stormed the Snorap. "Take a rest," suggested the Lut. "Forget about them for a while and let's have a talk about relative gravitic strains in a forty-body system." Gravitic strains were the Snorap's hobby at the present and had been for the past two hundred years. Grumblingly, he allowed himself to be persuaded. He and the Lut withdrew their attention from the clearing. Great and Less grew sleepy and went to bed. Unnoticed by human or alien, a pipe in the hydroponics building that was too close to the deadly cold of the outer wall, burst. Liquid sprayed from it onto the floor of the building; and gradually, but with an inexorable steadiness, the level of the nutrient fluid in the planting tanks began to go down. "I blame myself," said the Snorap, miserably. "I blame myself." "What for?" snapped the Lut. "We aren't here to protect them. We're waiting around to see if they have any moral fiber. I should think you'd be pleased by the whole thing." "Pleased!" said the Snorap. They had just been watching Great and Less as they struggled in temperatures that were now below the hundred-below-zero mark, to transfer what could be salvaged from the hydroponics building to their living-dome. Helmeted and bundled in heavy suits, they had been losing ground in their salvage effort. Finally, in desperation they had cut down on clothing and had substituted improvised face masks. This permitted them to carry more on each trip, but rendered them more vulnerable to the cold. Less had collapsed twice before giving up; and Great had finished the job alone. Apparently he had a touch of frostbite in his lungs, though. Less was doing what their meager stock of medical equipment permitted, to mend the condition. The Snorap, sitting with the Lut in the shelter of a drift, had suffered for the bipeds as he watched them work. The truth of the matter was that the Snorap balanced a tendency toward gloomy judgements with a very soft heart indeed. "Are you convinced now?" asked the Lut. The Snorap shook himself back into a less emotional frame of mind. "No," he said. "No. They didn't sit down and fold their hands when their machine failed, true. But we -- I -- am concerned with a matter of proper racial philosophy. What strength have these creatures aside from the strength of their machines and their own strength to make more? What else have they? Here we have only one machine that has failed. What if they all failed? What if the idea of machines failed? They must prove that it is more than their pride in their ability to build that has given them reason to think that they can successfully dare strange worlds." "Humph!" said the Lut. "But a race cannot grow without a proper philosophy, you know that," said the Snorap, almost pleading with him. "Well -- " growled the Lut. "I think I'll go for a walk. Need some exercise." He turned and loped off into the snow. When he reached a level spot out of sight of the Snorap he turned on the speed, and the barren winter plains were treated to the sight of him burning up his ill-humor at the rate of better than a hundred miles an hour. For the Lut was in a bad temper and did not quite like to ask himself why. The Snorap, left alone, looked doubtfully at the buildings in the clearing. 'T don't think I'm too hard on them," he said. "I don't think I am -- T he short winter wore itself out ; and spring came in with a rush. The snow disappeared; and the ground around the buildings became brown mud. Great, fully recovered, and Less could be seen daily extending the clearing in the direction of a stream that ran from the hills west of their buildings down onto the plain below. "Now, what's the point of that?" the Lut asked the Snorap. "I'm not sure," answered the Snorap. "It has something to do with the hydroponics building." They both turned to look at the corpse of that ill-fated piece of biped machinery. The hydroponics tank-building had been, indeed, a little miracle of compact and efficient mechanical engineering. Single parts and sections had had numbers of different functions. The result was that by bad luck, when that single pipe had burst, it had started off a chain of breakdowns; which, in the incredible cold of the winter, had ended by destroying the buildings use completely. Neither the Snorap nor the Lut could see what good might be gotten out of it now. They found out a few days later, when Great and Less began to plant in the muddy soil the seeds and shoots from the vegetable things they had saved. The soil itself they treated with chemicals and other necessary ingredients from the ruined building. "Very clever," approved the Lut. He turned to the Snorap. "How do you like that?" "Very good," said the Snorap. "But may I point out that if they are to prove themselves by doing without their machines, they'll have to do without all of them?" "You might give them credit for this anyway," said the Lut. "I do," the Snorap answered. "It is, truthfully, a vtery creditable step and one I had never expected from them." "If the crops prosper, they can extend their planting," the Lut pointed out. "That is true." " -- And with the long summer they have on this world they can probably get in two or three crops before the next winter." "The possibility," said the Snorap politely, "had not entirely escaped my notice." The year warmed gradually. For a matter of weeks there was anxiousness in human and alien hearts alike, until the first shoots of the planted things began to show their heads above the brown soil. "Beautiful," said the Snorap, one dark night, looking over the field with the Lut. He bent down to touch the soft firmness of a soft green spear-tip. His night vision, like the Lut's was fully equal to the task of appreciating it in full color, although the humans would hardly have been able to see their hands before their faces. "Here indeed is beauty, and strength and purpose. In alien soil it fights as valiantly toward the light of a strange sun as ever it fought for the light of its native star from the womb of its natural earth." "It and the bipeds are probably sons of the same mother world," remarked the Lut. "Almost undoubtedly," answered the Snorap, abandoning the plant and straightening up. "But there are good and bad on all worlds, as you well know, my friend." The ice-green eyes of the Lut softened to turquoise. "Except on Lut," he said. "And Snorap," added the Snorap. "And some few others where the creatures have grown older and attained wisdom..." His words trailed off ; and they stood together in silence for a moment, each thinking of the world that was his home... "I will go home one of these days," said the Lut. "I, too," answered the Snorap. He paused, looking off toward the eastern horizon, beyond which he could sense the approaching dawn. "What drives us, Lut? All the many in so many ways and alike in one. What is this inescapable concomitant of intelligence, that a thinking being should be always hungry for the new and always wistful for the past?" "I do not know," replied the Lut, "it is beyond philosophy." "So many things," said the Snorap, "are beyond philosophy -- " They were feeling the weight of the universe as all thinking beings do, when they open their souls to the unknown. In their hearts they stood with bowed heads before the Mother of all Mysteries, the great and final Why? which is never answered, but merely moved back a step by those who win knowledge. The mood lasted for perhaps die space of five minutes ; and then they had come back to their ordinary selves again. "I gave them four months," said the Lut. "That time is up already." "And I at least," said the Snorap, "am no closer to understanding their basic philosophy, if, truly, it is not that the machine is the answer to all problems." "They have a strong will toward survival." "I must admit it," replied the Snorap. "But that by itself is pure animal, non-thinking animal. And while we do not condemn the animal, we do not reach out our hands to him in friendship as you want us to do with these bipeds." "I have a hunch," said the Lut. "Real or wishful?" asked the Snorap. They were talking about a subconscious reasoning process that both knew to exist, but both instinctively distrusted. "I don't know," said the Lut. "But their pattern of living is at odds with the conditions here. I foresee trouble." earth dried under a swelling sun and thrust forth the fruit of the bipeds' planting. Great and Less harvested feverishly under a cloudless sky, while the south winds that blew steadily now, grew stronger and warmer, day by day. Finally the crops were all in and the ground re-planted. From the wreckage of the hydroponics building they had constructed a granary; and this was stocked with all that they had brought in. With the strengthening winds and the heat came dust storms blown up over the empty plains and carried up the slopes into the shallow hills where Great and Less had built. Behind the screen of the new-grown vegetation behind the clearing, the Lut and the Snorap watched an area in which the humans were seldom seen. Heat as fierce in its own way as the cold of the winter past, held them virtual prisoners in the dome. 'It is not good for them," the Snorap informed the Lut. "Why?" asked the Lut. An eighty mile-an-hour gale was sandblasting away at his scales, without apparently affecting them, beyond polishing them up so that they shone more brightly. "The wind. The sound of the wind," said the Snorap. "And the fact that they cannot go outside. They are often nervous and angry at one another without reason." "The season will pass," said the Lut indifferently. "One day the winds will start to drop; and then it will be fall." -- And, of course, eventually it happened. The bipeds came forth at last into a temperature of a little over a hundred degrees. The wind had dropped steadily for nearly a week. Now it shifted suddenly to the north -- and the rains came. Gently at first; and then with increasing violence, they poured down on the dusty earth. The ground p u ff e d , soaked, and steamed in the short intervals of sunshine. And after several weeks the two went out to examine the fields they had planted for the second growing season. They found a muddy desert. With time growing short before the winter, they had to break into the stored treasure of the granery and gamble that one more crop could be gotten in before the frost came. "Do you think they'll have time?" the Lut asked Snorap. "I don't know," replied the Snorap. "Theoretically they should. But will these crops grow as fast as those planted at the start of the summer?" "Hum," said the Lut, thoughtfully. "Well, they've got an even chance, anyway." Over the months, the Lut and the Snorap had grown sensitive to small changes in the two bipeds. But they were not perceptive enough to sense that the constant struggle for existence had strained the nerves of both humans to the breaking point. Indeed, they were living together now, through this second planting, like two caged animals, avoiding each other as much as possible for fear that a chance word would bring them into open conflict. This, the two aliens did not sense. Only the physical elements got through to them. "Their mass has gone down," the Lut remarked critically to the Snorap one afternoon in late summer as the two sat watching the bowed figures readying the clearing for the approaching winter. "Possibly they do not have enough food' answered the Snorap. "I don't think that's it," said the Lut thoughtfully. "More likely it is overexertion. They are exercising themselves for long hours these last few weeks." "They talk less," said the Snorap. "And they do not laugh," added the Lut, who had finally gotten around to mastering the biped language and was able to grasp the difference between laughter and speech. "But maybe when the crop starts to show itself above ground they will cheer up." "The visual emergence of new life into the world always has a stimulating effect," said the Snorap. "For those capable of understanding, it connotes the ever-fresh wonder of existence renewed." "I was thinking more," said the Lut, "of what those crops mean to them in terms of food through the winter." "That, of course, too," agreed the Snorap, a little miffed at being interrupted in his philosophizing. But the first sight of the second crop pushing its way through the brown soil did have the good effect the Lut had anticipated. The two bipeds relaxed and fell once more into an easy, happy relationship between themselves. This second harvest came more slowly, indeed, but the growth was strong and hardy; and the yield, if anything, a shade heavier. But now, with the ripening of the planted things, the native life of the planet came to prey upon the growing fields. Where they had been during the sterile winter, and through the fresh spring and the blasting heat of mid-summer, it was impossible to tell. It seemed vaguely to Great and Less that they had noticed some native life around before, but never paid a great deal of attention to it. The smallest came first -- insects of all sizes and tiny animals ; and the two bipeds, working late, dug a deep moat around their planted ground and filled it with water diverted from the stream beyond the fields. After these came larger animals; and for a few nights one or the other was always on duty all night long with a missile-hurling device that the Lut and the Snorap recognised as a weapon -- for the larger animals came only in the hours of darkness when the bipeds were not visible in the fields. This last fact finally struck home to the mind of Great, and the Lut and the Snorap saw him out in the fields one day, setting posts about their perimeters. On each post was a short, thick tube and from each post to the next ran what looked like heavy black rope. That night they went forth to investigate after dark. "Cable," said the Snorap, picking up a section of it, "designed to conduct some form of energy. Gome to think of it, I did notice Less working around the power-house; but I was so interested in what Great was doing out here, I didn't pay much attention. Now I wonder -- " At that moment, at the furthest end of the field, one of the tubes atop a post seemed suddenly to explode and throw out colored balls of fixe at a great rate. It was, in fact, nothing more than a self-refueling roman candle, although that particular comparison did not occur to either the Snorap nor the Lut, in spite of the fact that they understood the nature of the thing almost instantly. Hardly had the pyrotechnics of the first ceased, when the next one up the border of the field burst out and lit up its own section. The Lut and the Snorap drew back into the darkness. "There!" said the Lut in triumph. "You see the difference? The biped does not depend on the machine. It is a tool that he uses as he sees fit." The Snorap turned his heavy head and looked at his companion. "Well?" demanded the Lut. "You must admit that I'm right. Listen!" The sensitive hearing of the two ranged out into the darkness behind them. "The wild ones are frightened and drawing away." "I admit it," said the Snorap ponderously. "But all through this business you have made it a practise to misunderstand me. It is not how the biped uses the tool that is important. It is whether he can lay aside the tool. It is whether he can attempt something where the tool will not aid him. It is his ability to conceive of meeting a problem without tools. When he shows evidence of that, and only then will I and call him brother." The Lut's eyes glowed with green anger. "You are being unfair," he said. "The centuries past have taught me your nature. You mistrust your own softness of emotion which kindles an instinctive fellow feeling between you and the bipeds. In your efforts to be impartial you lean over backwards and place the benefit of the doubt against them." There was enough truth in this to make the Snorap wince inwardly. "After all those same centuries," he retorted bitterly, "must we descend to personal criticism?" "Truth is truth!" said the Lut. And his great jaws rang shut together. "Your conclusions are your own." "And I stand by them!" said the Snorap. "And I by mine!" For a moment they stood facing each other. Then the Snorap turned away and headed back to the shelter of their accustomed vegetation. The Lut stood watching him go for a minute; then he also turned and headed out away from the clearing, to run the plains and think himself back to reasonableness. In the dome, the two exhausted humans slept their first good night of sleep in weeks. Two days later they began their harvesting. By the end of the first day they had gathered in the produce of perhaps a fifth of their fields. And on the second day of harvesting. Less staggered suddenly and sat down. Watching in a mutual silence from which the old friendly warmth was still missing, the Lut and the Snorap saw Great break off his own work and run to the fallen biped. "For God's sake, don't quit now!" they heard him say. "I can't," said Less, looking up from the ground. "I can't do any more." "We've got to get this stuff in!" cried Great, helplessly. "One day -- " Less forced the words through worn lips "let's take one day off. I can't go any more, I tell you!" "Something may go wrong -- Less stirred and weakly rose; then turned toward the dome. "The weather's good. The gadget you made will keep the beasts selves. I've got to get some sleep." For a long moment Great stood watching the other biped move slowly off toward the dome. Suddenly, he cursed. He threw down the tool he was holding and followed. The Snorap and the Lut turned to look at each other. "They are giving up," said the Snorap. "They are leaving the machine to guard the field." The Lut faced him. "I don't blame them," he said. "To me," replied the Snorap, "they are failures." They stood looking at each other. "I think," said the Lut at last, "I think that we no longer possess the mutual understanding necessary to our partnership." The Snorap bowed his head. "I cannot disagree," he said. There was pain in both of them. "Our association in the past has been a long and good one," said the Lut. "I will remember it." "Nor will I forget," said the Snorap. He paused. "I will wait here a little while yet to see the end of this." "I will wait also, then," the Lut answered. They stood facing each other. Suddenly, the Snorap raised his head and tilted it, listening to the southward. After a second the Lut's head followed suit. " -- And the end comes now," said the Snorap. T here are monsters on all young worlds. The creature that came northward over the plains, migrating with the seasons from tropics to temperate zone, was a proof of that statement. Vegetarian but vast, in size and strength beyond all natural enemies of his world, his body was all head, horns and stomach, balanced on four pillar-like legs; and he followed the comfortable temperatures of cool autumns northward, gleaning the land as he went. From far out on the dark plains, he had scented the bipeds' crops. But because he stood at that time up to his tremendous midlegs in soft second growth grass, he had not turned immediately but had continued to feed where he was. When dawn came he had slept, standing with rock-like motionlessness upon his pillar legs. But when the midday breeze brought a scent of the ripe growing stuff once more to his flaring nostrils, he had stirred out of his sleep and methodically began to feed toward the clearing. The Lut looked at the Snorap and the Snorap looked away. The beast came on toward the edge of the field, moving with inexorable ponderousness. Some fifty yards away impatience seemed to break through his normal calm, and abandoning his slow feeding pace, he lifted his head and broke into a sudden trot toward the orderly rows of cultivation. Still -- amazingly -- he made almost no sound with his feet. The vibration, rather than the noise of his swinging stride, quivered through the earth and was felt by the Snorap and the Lut. Nothing could have been more eerie than this huge monster, looming large even in comparison with the buildings in the clearing, running silently toward the deserted fields under the bright, cloudless sky of the afternoon. In the dome, the vibration reached through the fogs of Great's sleep, and stirred him. He moved, groaned, and opened his eyes. He lay on his back, listening, with his eyes open. The monster had reached the edge of the field. He slowed and halted, the burnt metal smell of the roman candle pots stirred his little brain to caution. Slowly he moved up the line of cable to the nearest one and sniffed at it, the sound of his heavy snuffling audible to the Snorap and Lut behind their screen of branches. Suddenly he screamed -- a fantastic sound that rolled and reechoed between open earth and empty sky. And, lifting himself on his hind legs, he pounded with both forelegs on the post, driving it into the dusty ground. And, as if this action had set loose the fires of his rage, he began almost to dance on the remains of the heavy post, mashing it to matchstick wood. From the dome. Great and Less came tumbling. Less, half asleep and reeling with fatigue. Great cursing and trying to arm the weapon he carried -- the gun the Snorap and Lut had seen him use when he tried to drive away the night predators on the fields. Finally dropping on one knee he fired at the monster. A puff of dust rose from behind the creature's heavy shoulder, and it turned to charge the human. Great had aimed instinctively for where the heart is on animals of his native world. But this creature now bearing down upon him had no heart -- as Snorap and Lut could have told Great. His circulatory fluid was literally pumped through his body by little muscles lining his veins and arteries. Great fired again -- this time for the head. And the missile ricocheted from the heavy bone plates as from a granite boulder. The Snorap made an unhappy sound. The second shot had caused the monster to hesitate. Now, weaving its head back and forth, it caught sight of Less and turned after this new quarry. Less took one panicstricken glance at the towering creature; and ran blindly into the open space that separated the clearing from the fields. Great fired twice more before the gun jammed. By that time, the monster was upon Less. But, fantastically, because of its speed and huge bulk, it overran the fleeing biped, and Less stumbled and fell without being touched. For perhaps two seconds, while the monster was slowing and turning, Great continued to wrestle with the weapon. Then, seizing it by the barrel and swinging it like a club, he ran forward toward the creature. "What is this?" cried the Snorap. The monster had wheeled now and stood confronting them both. Great passed the fallen Less, shouting "Get to the dome. Get to the dome! Fll hold him!" The monster screamed his fury and turned to follow; and Great ran on, a living lure to give Less time to reach safety. "No moral fiber, eh?" snarled the Lut, leaping to his feet. He started to spring from concealment, but the Snorap gripped him. "I will go!" cried the Snorap. "I was wrong. It's my responsibility." "But my pleasure!" growled the Lut. "You take care of the bipeds." He wrenched away, and was gone. Great had succeeded in dodging the monster's first rush. He stood now, panting, as the titanic thing whirled to come back at him. Less, instead of running toward the dome, was running toward him. And at that moment, the Lut broke into the open. He crossed the distance separating himself from the monster like one long flash of glittering light. Reaching up with a forelimb as he passed he dealt it a blow that staggered it. For a second it stood dazed; then it raised its head and screamed. The Lut stood looking at it, from a few feet before it. His ice-green eyes caught the wild black ones of the creature and held them. "Go away," said the Lut, very softly. He was reaching out with his own mind to the mind of the creature, trying to impress it. "Go away," repeated the Lut. "I do not want to hurt you." The creature roared and shifted uncertainly, feeling an uneasiness that it could not understand. For a moment it fought for decision -- then it charged. The Lut shot from the ground like a projectile and met it head to head. There was a sound like a tree breaking in a high wind. The heavy bone Aat had warded off the missile from Great's gun, gave like cardboard before the fantastic stuff of which the Lut's body was constructed. The creature tumbled backwards, lay for a moment, then slowly struggled to its feet and reeled off like something half-conscious. It's huge forehead was caved in and dark fluid dripped from it and dropped on the ground as it went. "It will live," said the Lut, looking after it. He turned to look at the bipeds. The Snorap had come up and Great, with Less shoved behind him, was frantically trying to unjam the gun and shoot at them. "Put that thing away," said the Lut. "We're friends." The man froze, his hands on the breech of his weapon. The Lut was forming the human words by swallowing air and forcing it back through his capable throat muscles; and the result was a deep, growling bass that did not at first identify itself with rational speech. "I said we're friends," said the Lut. "We've been watching you for a year now. Besides, your weapon there can't hurt us." He turned to the Snorap. "Say something to reassure them that you're not a wild animal." "I have been guilty of badly misjudging you," said the Snorap humbly to the humans. He was talking by the same process and the humans looked from him to the Lut as if they suspected the latter of being a ventriloquist. "Who -- who are you?" asked Great at last. "We," said the Lut, "are individual members of two old and respected races, from elsewhere than this system. You might refer to me as a Lut and to my friend as a Snorap. And you call yourselves ? The man laughed a little wildly. Exchanging introductions with two nightmare beings after a hairbreadth escape from death, has a tendency to make anyone a bit hysterical. "We're humans," he said. "I'm Jos Pamer. This is my wife, Gela." "Wife?" said the Lut. "Why yes," said Jos. "My wife." "What is a wife?" asked the Lut. "Why -- a wife -- " answered the human in astonishment. "I'm a man, she's a woman. Male -- female "You mean," demanded the Lut, "that your race is bisexual?" "Of course," answered the man. "Isn't everything? Aren't you --  He broke off and stared at them. "You mean it's not usual?" The Lut turned his head slowly and looked at the Snorap, who sat down in the dust. "I am an old fool," said the Snorap, penitently, "I am a senile old idiot who ought to have my brains examined. Sitting here engaged in high speculation about the source of their racial philosophy and questioning their moral basis, when all the time they were loving each other and complementing each other's character-traits right under my very nose. What else would be the basis of colonization in a bisexual race but the family unit? Where but in the urge to build a home would their drive lie? What would be their courage, but love transformed?" He sat with head hanging. "I am an old fool." The Lut crossed over to him and hung his heavy head on the Snorap' s shoulder. "Friend of many years past and yet to come," he said. "We are old fools together."  those completely enjoyable science fiction stories which transcends mere good fiction writing. The story of a venerable old judge, who faces displacement by the faster, more accurate Cybers, machines not prone to human frailties and emotions in their legal decisions, it delivers a kind of wonderful sentimental sock and philosophical tenet that make you feel glad inside! ered old man who tossed a monkey wrench into an inter-planet war machine. For he was a veteran, and he should know, for he fought -- not in past wars -- but in the war to come!... Don't miss these and other fine stories and features in the March IF. Illustrated by Paul Orban No one took Old Arch seriously; he was just an ancient, brokendown wanderer who went about seeking alms and spreading tales of the great Outside. But sometimes children are curious and believing when adults are cynical and doubting... T here have always been the touched, the blesses, Ckd's poor. Such a one was Old Arch. Archer Jakes, the Wanderer of the Plains. They say he was born on Earth in # and taken to Mazzeppa as a child. That he learned pilotage and mining. But that he was injured in a cave-in on Hurretni in # or thereabouts, and then his wife died in a landing accident and his child was taken from him and adopted by people he never could find. Those things are too far distant in time and space to be verified now. But it is a fact that by #, when my grandfather Hockington Hammer was growing up in New Oshkosh, Old Arch was a familiar figure in all the Domed Cities of the Plains. He looked ancient then, with his deformed back that people touched for luck, and his wild hair and beard, and ragged castoff clothing. On his back he carried a roll of cloth he called his bed, though it looked like no bed any City man had ever seen. In his right hand he carried a staff of wood, unless someone bought it from him and gave all and why the guards? There's no him a plastic rod in its place. And pollution. Am I not alive?" in his left he carried what he called The guards would touch his a billy can, which was a food conhump and make circular motions tainer with a loop of wire across at the sides of their heads and raise the top for a handle, and the bottom their eyebrows as if to say, "Yes, blackened by what he said was fire, you're alive. But are you not crazy?" It would have been like no fire Still they would admit him, the any City man had ever seen. Even only nonresident to walk between the water in the can would be poithe Domed Cities of the Plains and son to a City man. When he came enter all of them; the only man to in the airlocks the guards would pass unharmed through the camps make him throw it away. of the Outsiders who lived in the "Why the lock?" he'd demand, open on the Plains at the heart of coming into a City. "Why the lock the North American Continent of and why the plastic bubble over Earth. And Old Arch would go to the residence buildings and he'd knock on someone's door -- any door, chosen at random -- and he'd say, "Have you seen the sky and do you know it's blue? Have you felt the soft kiss of the breezes? I can show you where to breathe fresh air." Maybe the people would say, "Phew! Does it smell like you, this fresh air?" and slam the door in his face. Or maybe they'd say, "Come on around to the back, Old Man, and we'll find you something to eat." Then Old Arch would shoulder his bed and pick up his billy can and his staff and walk down the stairs and go around to the back and walk up the stairs to the rear door. It might be an hour before he appeared there -- it might be two. When he did, the people would ask, "Why didn't you say something? You should have known they wouldn't let you in the elevator! And twenty flights down and twenty flights up again is too much for a man of your years." Then, the next time he came they would do the same thing again. In the kitchen he would refuse all the pills and potions and shots, and insist on bulky foods. These he would eat neatly, holding aside the long white hair around his mouth and brushing the crumbs from it often. What he couldn't eat right away would go into his blackened billy can. The children would come before he finished -- those of the household, and neighbor kids too. First they'd stand shyly and watch him from a doorway. Then they'd press closer. By the time he got through they'd be fighting to sit on his lap. The winner would climb up and sit there proudly. One of the losers, trying to prove he hadn't lost much, might wrinkle up his nose and say, "What's that awful stink. Old Man?" And Arch would answer mildly, "It's only wood smoke, son." Then the children would ask, "What's wood, please? And what's smoke?" And he would tell them. He would tell of the wind and the rain and the snow; of the cattalo herds that roamed to the west and the cities that lay to the east and the stars and the Moon that they never had seen. He would claim to have been in the endless forests and on the treeless plains and to have tasted the salt ocean and drunk of the freshwater lakes and rivers. The children would have heard, in their lessons and from their elders, enough to know what he was talking about. Sometimes they would tire of it, and ask him to tell of the distant planets and their faroff suns. But this he would not do. "You already hear too much about them," he'd say. "I want you to know Earth. Your own country. The one planet on which these plastic-covered cities are unnecessary, where you can actually go out and roll on the grass." Then the children might ask, "What's grass?" But their fathers would pointedly say, "What about the radioactivity. Old Man?" "I'm alive," he'd reply. "There's no radioactivity out there." But they'd say, "How can we be sure? There are individual differences of susceptibility. Probably you are unhurt by dosages that would kill any normal person." And the mothers would say, "Eat some more, Old Man. Eat -- and go. Bring our babies dreams, if you like, but don't try to tempt them Outside. Even if it isn't radioactive there, you've admitted it gets hot and it gets cold and the wind blows fiercely hard. Our babies were bom under shelter, and under shelter they must stay, like us and our parents before us." So Old Arch would brush off his whiskers one last time and maybe put on an old shirt the father dug up for him and then go out the back way. In spite of what might have been said, he would have to walk the twenty flights down to the ground because he wouldn't be invited to walk through the apartment to the front hall where the elevator was. Sometimes people were hostile when he spoke to their children, and they would have him arrested. He was then bathed and barbered in the jail, and was given all new clothes. But they'd always burn his bed, and he'd have trouble getting a new one. And sometimes a jailor might covet the pocketknife he carried, or take away his billy can. On the whole I think he preferred not to go to jail except perhaps in winter, when it was cold outside the City. There were always those ready to talk of asylums, and the need to put him away for his own good. But nobody was sure where his legal residence was, so he wasn't really eligible for public hospitalization. He kept to his rounds. My grandfather remembers standing in his mother's kitchen listening to Old Arch. It was like meeting one of Joseph's brethren and being told exactly what the coat looked like. Something exciting out of a dream from the remote past, when all the worlds had on them those bright moist diamonds Arch described as morning dew. My grandfather wanted to see the morning dew, though he knew better than to say so. Old Arch understood. He tried to make the thing possible. But an opportunity to see the morning dew was something he just couldn't give to my grandfather or anybody else. So he decided to sell it. He persuaded a charitable lithographer to make him a batch of stock certificates. They looked very authentic. Each said plainly it was good for one share of blue sky, though the fat half-draped woman portrayed in three colors stood outside a Domed City pointing not at the sky but at a distant river with forested hills behind it. Arch sold his certificates for a stiff price; ten dollars apiece. He could do it because by this time his wanderings followed a fairly definite route. The people who hated or feared or despised him were pretty well eliminated from it, and most of his calls were at apartments where he was known and expected and even respected a little. My grandfather's was one of these -- or rather, my great-grandfather's. When Arch first brought his stock certificates my grandfather was a little fellow everybody called Ham, maybe seven years old. He had a sister named Annie who was five. He's given me a mental picture of the two of them standing close together for reassurance, and from an open doorway shyly watching the old man eat and listening to him talk. When my great-grandfather bought a ten dollar stock certificate in my grandfather's name, my grandfather took it as a promise. And his little sister Annie was so jealous that the next time Old Arch came around my great-grandfather had to buy a share for her. eleven, twelve, every winter when Old Arch would come around, my grandfather and his sister Annie would ask, "When are you going to take us to see the sky. Arch?" And he would say, "When you're older. When your folks say you can go." And, "When it's summer, and not too cold for these old bones." But when my grandfather was fourteen he followed Old Arch out and down the stairs after the old man had paid his annual call, and he stopped him on a landing to ask, "Arch, have you ever taken anyone Outside?" "No," Arch said, sighing. "People won't go." "I'll go," said my grandfather, "and so will my sister Annie." Arch looked at him and put a hand on him and said, "I don't want to come between any boy and his parents." "Well," said my grandfather, "you sold them a share of sky for each of us. Do you really want us to have that, or do you just want to talk about it?" "Of course I want you to. But I can't take you Outside, boy." My grandfather was disgusted. "There isn't any sky," he said sadly. "It's all talk. The certificates were just for begging." "No," said Arch. "It's not all talk and I'm not a beggar. I'm a guide. But it's hard to see the sky right now because it's winter, and there are clouds all over." "Let's see the clouds, then," my grandfather said stubbornly. "I've never seen a cloud." The old man sat down on the stairs to consider the matter. "I can't do this thing to your parents," he said at last. "But you can do it to me and my sister," my grandfather charged wildly. "You can come to the house year after year after year, and tell us about the sky and the wind and the moon and the dew and the grass and the sun. You can even take money for our share of them. But when it comes time to produce -- when we're old enough to go where these things are supposed to be -- you think of excuses. "I don't believe there are any such things," he shouted. "I think you're a liar. I think you ought to be arrested for gypping my dad on the stock deal, and I'm going to turn you in." "Don't do that, boy," Arch said mildly. "Then take us Outside -- today!" "It's winter, my boy. We'd freeze." "You've said it's pretty in winter! You took the money for the certificate." "I suppose you'll grow away from your parents soon anyhow; I suppose you have to... Get your warmest clothes and meet me at emergency exit four." My grandfather talked it over with his sister Annie and of course they didn't have any warm clothes, but they'd heard so often from Old Arch about the cold that they put on two sets of tights apiece, and two pairs of sox, and then they hunted for the emergency exit. They'd never been there before. They didn't know anyone who had. The signs pointing to it were all worn and defaced. And it was a long way to go. After a while Annie began to hang back. "How do we know the exit will work?" she asked. "And how will we get back in if we ever do get out?" "You don't have to come," my grandfather said. "But you'll have to find your own way home from here." "I'll bet I could," she said. "But I'm not going to. I don't think Old Arch will even be at the exit." But he was. He looked at them carefully to see how they were dressed. "You mean trouble for me, girl," he told Annie. "They'll think I took you along to make love to." She had just reached that betwixt and between stage where she was beginning to look like a woman but didn't yet think like one. "Pooh!" she said. "I can run faster and hit harder than you can. Arch. You don't worry me a bit." Old Arch sighed and led them through the lock. They stepped out into a raging snowstorm, which soon draped a cloak of invisibility over them. Neither my grandfather nor Annie had ever smelled fresh air before. It threatened to make them drunk. Their nostrils tingled and their eyes misted over and their breath steamed up like bathwater. For the first time in their lives, they shivered. When the City was out of sight in the storm, they stopped for a moment in the ankle-deep snow and just listened. They held their breaths and heard silence for the first time in their lives. Old Arch reached down and picked up some soft snow and threw it at them. They pelted him back, and then, because he was so old, attacked each other instead, shouting and throwing snowballs and running aimlessly. Old Arch soon checked them. "Don't get lost," he said. "We're walking down hill. Don't forget that. We're going into a draw where there are some trees." He coughed and drew his rags about him. "The city is up hill," he said. "If you keep walking around it you'll find a way in." His tone was frightening. Annie clung to my grandfather and made him walk close to the old man. It was clear the old man didn't have enough clothes on. He staggered and leaned hard on my grandfather. They kept moving down the slight grade. They saw no sky and little of anything else. The snow was like a miniature of the City's Dome, except that this dome floated over them as they walked. Its edges were only about fifty yards off. "Where are the Outsiders?" my grandfather asked. "Aren't there people here?" "They're miles away," Arch told him. "And indoors. Only fools and youngsters are out in this blizzard." "Fools is right," Annie said tartly. "There was supposed to be sky. And there isn't." Old Arch staggered again. To my grandfather he said, "Could -- could you carry my pack?" My grandfather took it and they went on, stumbling blindly through knee-deep drifts, getting more and more chilled and less and less comfortable, 'til they came to a small clump of trees with a solidly frozen creek running through it. Here Old Arch made a lean-to shelter of windf alien limbs. Annie and my grandfather helped as soon as they understood the design. Arch spread part of his bed over the lean-to, breaking the force of the wind, and put ihe rest inside. Just outside, on a place scraped bare of snow, he built the first wood fire my grandfather and Annie had ever seen. He chipped ice from the creek and put it in his billy can and hung the can by its bail over the fire, and in due course they had a little hot tea. The youngsters felt cold but happy. The old man shivered and coughed. He'd kept moving till the tea was made. He sat still to drink it, and couldn't get up. "Go to bed," Annie told him. "Ham will get on one side of you and I'll get on the other. We'll keep you warm." Old Arch tried to protest but was almost beyond speech. The youngsters didn't know enough to iDrush the snow off him or themselves. They helped him roll up in his bedding and crawled under the lean-to after him. There they all lay in a heap, getting colder and damper and more miserable, till finally my grandfather couldn't stand it any more. He got up and looked around. The inverted cup of visibility was smaller. Darkness fell like a dyestuff, turning the white snow to gray, to black. It was a bitter night. The first he'd ever had outdoors. It was the first Annie'd ever had. The first either had ever spent at the futile task of holding off death. They knew Old Arch was dying. As the night wore on he sank into semi-consciousness. They hugged him and rubbed his lean old limbs. Just before morning the snow stopped. The old man roused a little, became gradually aware of his surroundings. "Go look at the sun," he murmured. "Go see the sunrise." They went out to look. Neither had ever seen a sunrise before. It was mauve first, then red, then gold, then blue. Venus led the way, and the sun followed. The moon, deep in the west, was like a tombstone to the dead night. A bird chirruped. A clot of snow fell from a tree with a soft rufile of cottony drums. My grandfather held his sister's hand and looked and sniffed at the great Earth from which he'd been separated by the fear-inspired plastic over his City, so near, now, in the clear morning night. He climbed with Annie up the side of the draw and looked out over snow-covered plains stretching to a horizon farther away than the longest distance he'd ever imagined. He went back and took Old Arch's head up on his knees and said, "Is it like this every day?" And the old man said, "No, each day is different." And my grandfather said, "Well, IVe seen one, anyhow." "That's what I've lived for," said Old Arch. And he smiled and stopped living. Annie and my grandfather left him there and went back to the City and told the guards and their family. A burial party was sent out; guards, in their helmeted spacesuits. People heard about it and followed. Everyone was curious because they'd all seen Old Arch and wondered about him. Hundreds of people went out the gate -- so many, the guards couldn't stop them. They saw the lean-to and the open fire and the woods and the snow and the frozen creek. They smelled the air and the smoke. They heard a bird. They tossed snowballs. And then they went back and flung rocks through their City's Dome.    way through Arctic ice to find the fabled Northwest Passage, long a lure to adventurers and explorers. The two ships successfully plowed their way through ice that was often four to ten feet thick to find the water route which links the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean across the top of the world. One ship crushed and blasted its way through McClure Strait, while the other fought its way through from the Arctic Ocean, skirting along its southern edge. The Burton Island and the Northwind were both U.S. ships, but they were part of a joint United States-Canadian expedition conducting oceanographic and hydrographic studies in that area. The studies are part of a continuing research program to make the frozen wastes of the vast Arctic more accessible for military operations, and strengthening one of the most vital links in our combined continental defenses. Helicopters and naval specialists in underwater demolition, known as "frogmen", were invaluable contributions of both nations. The helicopters spotted new routes through the ice, and the "frogmen" helped to check the depth of ice fields, tested various explosives for blasting through them, and tried out underwater cameras designed for use in Arctic waters. Our citation this month goes to the governments of the United States and Canada, and to the men of the expedition, for this international defense venture in which they combined manpower, techniques, knowledge and equipment -- with daring, courage and common spirit -- to explore and strengthen this strategic Arctic area. Here is another look at the America of tomorrow -- by a Wilkes College sophomore, winner of the #rd prize in IP's College Science Fiction Contest... An America in which there is no more school, no more art, no more enterprise, no more intellectual pursuit -- a nation of hedonists. And in such a land, how could there be malcontents? Dreamtown U. S. A. slender, and perfectly proportioned. Her hair had been dyed platinum and was drawn back from her face by a mesh net which sparkled with red jewels. She stood in the middle of the room, head tilted back, eyes closed, moving in time to the music coming from an invisible transmitter. Her hands glided sinuously up and down either side of her body. She seemed oblivious to the people circling the room enjoying Gil Patton's party. It was only when she heard Brant's voice that she opened her eyes. "Lisa, you go for that stuff, I see," Brant called to her, referring to the music being piped into the room from one of Dream town's many Sensory Communications Centers. '-tv "It's really out of this world, Brant, way out, all out!" Lisa replied. She came over and sat on the arm of the chair in which Brant sprawled. "You can feel it way down here," she said, and placed her hand on the pit of her stomach. "Wonder how we ever got kicks out of that old stuff that you couldn't feel?" Brant asked as he placed his arm about Lisa's waist. "Just hearing music doesn't give you any glow." Brant slid farther down in the chair and stretched his legs out before him. The bluish light in the room glinted from the highly polished surface of his knee length boots. He wore loose-fitting yellow trousers and a black suede shirt split open almost to the waist, revealing his chest. "Have you tried one of Gil's new pebbles?" he asked Lisa. "No, what's new about them?" she asked. She wriggled into Brant's lap and rubbed her cheek against his chest. "They're slaughter. Instead of just getting a deeper feeling from real experiences, you can sit back and imagine something -- anything -- and you can feel the sensations of your fantasy. You can feel all that way down here, too," he said, touching, in repetition of Lisa's gesture, the pit of her stomach. "Get me one, Brant. Let's see what goes." Brant lifted Lisa to her feet and rose from the chair. His boots clicked against the green metal floor as he pushed his way through the crowd of merry makers toward a transparent glass bubble which was suspended from the ceiling by Illustrated by Leo Summers a silver chain. He pushed back the dispenser on the bubble and a cylindrical pill rolled out onto his hand. He carried it back to where Lisa sat swaying to the music which continued to fill the room. "Here child. This will really give you a dream' he said as he handed her the pill. Brant watched Lisa sink into the half coma that the senation pills produced. He leaned over and kissed her shoulder. Then he straightened and moved across the room to where Gill Patton stood in front of a glass wall which afforded a panoramic view of the entire city. "Good party, Gil," Brant said to his host. "I hoped it wouldn't be sad. Anything clicking?" Brant pointed to Lisa. "She is. Been trying your new pebbles." "How's the Assistant Director of Sensory Communications doing these days?" Gil asked as they walked across the room to a plastic table on which rested bowls of red, green, and yellow liquors. "Right and light. W'eve got a new show scheduled to go on the Distributor Cable in about another month. Runs twenty minutes two times a day. Morning and night. A serial about the Council." Gil turned to Brant with a drink in his hand. "Thought nobody knew anything about the Council except that they run Dreamtown." "No one does know very much about them. No one's ever seen them actually. But we've heard rumors that the Rebels have been influencing some of our citizens and word has come down to build this show for morale purposes." "Why, that's crazy. Who'd want to go back to the way it was before? Those Rebels are out of their heads!" Brant smiled. "Right man. But there are still some of them operating in the less populated areas. The Watchers brought in seven men and a woman last week from somewhere south of here. They found books in their hideout and even some paintings that one of the Rebels claimed to have done by hand." Gil whistled through his teeth. "You'd think they'd get with it and come back here. What are they getting out of this rebellion?" Brant reached over and touched Gil's arm. "Just between us, friend. Before they psychwashed these Rebels they found out that they had been plotting with other Rebel groups to overthrow Dreamtown. The Council has every available Watcher on their trail." "Couldn't ever happen, Brant. They don't have anything to fight with. Books. Pictures. They'll wise up and come over to us. Wait and see." Brant shrugged. "They forget we're living in # and the Big War's been over for nearly seventy years. They still think the old way was pretty good. But Gil, boy, we're getting serious. Let's stack it! The Watcher's will get them. It's not our problem." The girl was gazing through one of the windows in the small farmAnnouncement of the seven winners in IFs College Science Fiction Contest was made in the November issue. The stories winning the first and second prizes appeared in the December and January issues. house kitchen. A wild flower was pinned in her long, auburn hair and it matched, almost perfectly, the blue of her eyes. Even in slacks she was, not beautiful, but a wonderfully pretty girl of twenty four or five. "I wonder when he'll be back. Dad. It's been almost two days and I -- I'm worried." "He had a long trip to make, Nancy. Longer than usual because he had to make a detour around Dreamtown in order to get down to Ben's group. It's all of forty miles south of here. Don't you worry. He'll be back soon." The girl came away from the window and kissed Professor Alan Corbett on the forehead. "You're wonderful. Dad. So calm and sensible about things. I get scared though when I think of Dan going so close to Dreamtown. The Watchers patrol for miles around the city and they'd know Dan was a Rebel in a minute because of his clothes." "Dan won't get caught, Nancy. You get busy now and make some coffee and stop worrying," Professor Corbett smiled. "And afterward we'll play a little gin rummy if you feel like it." Nancy got up from the table and put the coffee pot on the stove. Her father turned back to the book lying open on the table before him. "This is such a treasure, Nancy. I wonder if you fully realize it." It was a copy of the complete works of only five copies of this still in existence to my knowledge; although there is a man in Ben's group who has been copying it by hand on paper the've stolen from Dreamtown. Only five copies. There might dreamtown, U.S.A be more, but we haven't been able to find them." Nancy poured steaming coffee into her father's cup and then into her own. She sat across from him at the table and watched as he lovingly examined the book in his hands. "Listen to this, Nancy." Nancy listened to Professor Corbett's quiet voice. "Is she kind as she is fair? For Beauty lives with kindness. Love doth to her eyes repair To help him of his blindness. And, being helped, inhabits there." "It's beautiful. Dad. Nancy watched her father as his eyes scanned the rest of the page. "You love books, don't you?" she asked softly. Her father looked up and took off his glasses. "Yes, Nancy, I guess I do. Teaching in the University was the greatest thing in my life because I was able to spend so much time with books. And, you know, in a way, they weren't just books, they were like old friends. Socrates, Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare -- all the others. Every time I picked up one of those books it was like meeting old friends. And you never really get tired of old friends, you know. As the years go by they become dearer to you and you learn to appreciate their true value." Professor Corbett smiled a little sadly. "Nancy, it almost broke my heart when the Council abolished the schools and colleges and burned the books. That was the reason I joined the Rebels ever so long ago. And, of course, there were many others who felt as I did." Nancy sipped the hot coffee and watched her father drift into his reverie about the old days before there had been a Council or Watchers and when Dreamtown had really been just what the name implied. A dream city of books and learning and hard working men and women trying to put a civilization back on its feet after the disastrous Big War. Nancy thought of the kind of dreams that were dreamed in the city now. Dreams of pleasure and sensation. Empty dreams. Vapid dreams. "Do you know what the Council set up in place of the schools, Nancy? They built the biggest and brightest and most terrible playgrounds in the world. Children were taught to fight and to play; and the ones who fought hardest, regardless of rules, were considered the champions in each playground. They didn't bother to learn anything; they just played... " His voice trailed off. Nancy and her father drank their coffee in silence, each of them alone with their thoughts. Professor Corbett was back in his University classroom filled with the smell of chalk and the musty odor of books, and Nancy was out in the dark night somewhere with Dan, making the perilous journey to Ben's Rebel group. A sudden sound on the porch shocked both of them back to reality. Professor Corbett quickly dropped his book into a drawer of the table, rose and walked past Nancy who stared at the door with a mixture of hope and fear on her face. A soft knock sounded and, after a moment's hesitation, Nancy's father unbolted and opened the door. A tall young man wearing an old pair of blue jeans and a shirt from which most of the buttons were missing stood in the doorway. "Dan!" Nancy shouted and ran across the room and into his arms. His huge frame almost filled the doorway, as he bowed, his blonde head to murmur reassurances to Nancy, who cried with relief at having him safely back. "I'm alright, darling, -- but I'm afraid I've got bad news," Dan said. He released Nancy, keeping one of her hands in his. When the three of them were seated Dan spoke. "The Watchers must have gotten Ben and the others. The place was a shambles. Everything was destroyed. They probably took the group to Dreamtown. If they did, you know what that means." "Psychwashing," Professor Corbett muttered. He dropped his head in his hands. "Then you couldn't get the books?" he asked sadly. "No. They had been burned. And so had Ben's paintings. We can't wait any longer, Alan. We've got to organize and we've got to raid Dreamtown. We can't go on like this anymore!" Nancy tightened her grip on Dan's hand as Professor Corbett raised his head and nodded. "You're right, Dan," he said. "We can't afford to wait any longer." video panel in the ceiling of Brant's apartment clicked on automatically. To the accompaniment of shrill laughter in the background, the annoimcer told Brant and the other viewers that they were about to witness the next installment in the adventures of "The Pretty People." Brant stretched in his bed and groaned from the effects of the party the night before. He watched through half closed eyes as The Pretty People in their harlequin costumes chased each other about a meadow filled with artificial flowers. In spite of his discomfort Brant chuckled when Mannequina, with a violent blow, knocked Manequin from a large toadstool on which he had been seated. He laughed again as he watched Manequin roll down a hill and land in a giant mud puddle at the bottom. Brant eased himself out of bed and walked unsteadily to the cubicle in one comer of the room, stepped in, and closed the plastic door behind him. He rubbed his eyes and stretched as the soothing vigoro-senso rays removed the last traces of the discomfort brought on by too much liquor and too many sensation pills. Back in his room he switched on the dimensional theater set and watched the wall light up before him. Brant finished dressing to the sounds of laughter coming from The Pretty People on the ceiling video and the sighs and pleadings of two lovers in the dimensional theater set. On his way to the door Brant selected one of the milder sensation pills from the bowl on the low table, swallowed it, and passed through the sliding door panel into the street. He glanced at the gigantic clock which was suspended over the city like a cloud in the sky by thin steel cables. Each numeral on the huge face of the clock was composed of a man and a woman locked in an ardent embrace. Brant and several other people boarded one of the moving platforms as it stopped before them. The city sped by in a vari-colored blur. At die main Sensory Cornmunications Building Brant got off. The building loomed massive before him, its rose plastic exterior warm looking in the sunlight. Brant, with another glance skyward at the clock, went inside. He walked briskly down the jade hall and entered an office labeled Assistant Director of Sensory Communications. Lisa, seated behind a desk, greeted him. "We've got sun this morning, Brant. Have a good time last night?" "Had a ball, doll! You look great this morning." Brant said. "Benton in yet?" "Waiting for you," Lisa replied. "Told me to send you right in." Brant turned and entered the inner office of Axel Benton, Director of Sensory Communications for Dreamtown. Benton looked up and frowned as Brant entered. "The show on the Council has to go on two weeks earlier," he fairly shouted at Brant. "The Minister of Entertainment called this morning and he's hot! Says the Council is having a fit about the increase in activity among the Rebels; and rumors have been leaking out that they're planning to destroy Dreamtown. So they want the show on sooner. Also, they want a half hour show instead of twenty minutes." "Nobody cares what the Rebels are doing and it's crazy to think they could destroy the city. So what's all the rush about?" Brant asked angrily. "I figured you'd talk that way so I arranged a little session for you this morning that may bring you to yoiu senses, bright boy Brant," Benton retorted. He barked into the intercom on the desk. "Call downstairs and have them send up Jennings, Lisa," Benton ordered. A few minutes later the door slid open and Jennings was led in by two of the Watchers. He was a middle aged man who wore spectacles instead of the contact lenses which nearly everyone in Dreamtown wore when they needed glasses. The two Watchers stepped aside. They were young men, neither looked more than twenty five, with eyes as brittle as glass. Their black leather pants and jackets fitted tightly and steel cleats on their heavy boots grated wickedly on the floor with each step they took. Their hands, in black leather gloves, restly casually on their hips close to the hypno ray guns fastened to their belts. "Jennings," Benton began, "was found to be in possession of a book titled 'Principles of Human Knowledge' by George Berkeley. And Jennings, as you know Brant, was in a strategic control position here in the Center. He was in charge of show censorship for the whole Com center. "What do you mean, was in charge?" Brant asked. "Just that! He is no longer in charge. In fact, he is being taken now by these Watchers to the psych lab but I wanted you to realize the seriousness of this thing, Brant, so I had him brought here first." "He's going to be psychwashed?" Brant asked. "Of course, you fool!" "But why? Couldn't you just burn the book and throw him out?" Brant asked. "I wouldn't expect you to understand," Benton sneered. "The book he had is one of the most dangerous books ever written. It is against every principle on which Dreamtown is founded and if Lisa hadn't found it in his office -- ." "Lisa found it?" Brant asked. "Yes, and like the smart girl she is, she reported him to the Watchers right away." Benton motioned to the two Watchers and they stiffened immediately, seized Jennings who stared silently before him, and half dragged him from the room. "I never would have thought it of Jennings," Brant said softly. "That's just it! We can't be too careful," Benton said. "Are you sure he was a Rebel?" Brant asked. Benton's fist made a crashing sound as he brought it down on the desk. "Idiot!" he screamed. "What else could he be? No one but a Rebel would read such trash! Now get out of here, Brant. I want the format for the Council show finished in two days or you're going to find yourself in real big trouble! Seeing Jennings should wake you up and start you moving!" Brant rose. "I see what you mean. You'll have the format." "Good! We're bringing out a new sensation pill in a few weeks and we'd like to coincide the opening of this show with the release of the pill. Big promotion and all that. And, by the way, don't forget the show schedule for the annual Playground Festival." Benton turned back to the work on his desk as Brant left the office. M en and women were crowded into the smoke filled living room of Professor Corbett's farmhouse, and conversations were being carried on in hushed whispers. Nancy stood talking to Dan. Professor Corbett was near them busily engaged in conversation with two women and a man whose clothes looked as if they had seen many years of hard wear. Dan left Nancy and walked to the center of the room. His voice rang out vibrant and clear as he called for the attention of the gathered crowd. "I believe we are all here now. If everyone will sit down we'll begin the meeting." When everyone was seated Dan nodded to Professor Corbett. "You all know by now," Professor Corbett began, "that Ben's group was discovered and probably destroyed. We've been able to find no trace of them. Things have been going pretty badly for us, friends, and that is why we asked you all to make the effort to come here tonight. For many of you it's been hard ; you've come a long way. But we have to make a stand and we must make that stand together." Applause greeted Professor Corbett's introduction and, after hesitating a moment, he continued. "It is likely that Ben and the others were taken to Dreamtown and psychwashed. In the past few days we have received no word dreamtown, U.S.A from Jennings either. It is possible that he has been found out and is vmable to contact us. At any rate, we must operate on that assumption until we hear from him again. -- If we do," he added solemnly. Every eye in the group was fixed on Professor Corbett and every ear strained to hear each word he spoke. "The Watchers have been patrolling an increasingly wider area around Dreamtown, which necessitates moving our outposts farther away. This will make communications between our groups more difficult, but it is a necessary maneuver. Another thing. Take your books and music and paintings and anything else which might give you away, and hide them in some safe place. It is most important that we preserve what we have left. It must not fall into the hands of the Watchers." A woman in the group spoke. "We can't just keep running and hiding! We should do something!" "That is exactly the reason I asked you here tonight," Professor Corbett replied. "Dan and I have formulated a plan and we submit it to you for your consideration, approval, and cooperation. Dan, will you explain what we have worked out?" Dan rose and came to stand beside the Professor. "First of all," he began, "we need four volunteers to go into Dreamtown, get jobs, and wait for the raid. These four people will have to be in strategic positions on the day we raid the city. Two of them will open the North gates of the city. One will dynamite the warehouses where the sensation drugs are stored. And the fourth must in some way gain control of the Watcher's barracks and arsenal." There was excitement on the faces of the people who listened to Dan's words. They began to see a ray of hope and a course of action, and they leaned eagerly forward as Dan continued speaking. "Our first target when we raid the city, will be the Council Building. If we can get control of the Council we have the heart of the city in our hands." Two men stood up. "We want to volunteer to go to Dreamtown," they said. A woman rose and joined them. "If you can use a woman, I'd like to go too." Two other men volunteered, and there was much excited discussion in the small room. Dan held up his hands and asked for quiet. "Since four men have volunteered," he said to the woman, "we'd best use them. And now, if those four men will stay here with me, the rest of you can leave. You will be notified of details by runner, as in the past." The group broke up into smaller groups. Some went into the kitchen, where Nancy had prepared a lunch for them. Others prepared to leave for their own outposts. Professor Corbett was talking to an elderly man who had been a scientist in one of Dreamtown's first laboratories. "It's a copy of a research project done by a colleague of mine on the Relativity Theory. An astute paper, I'd say. I've been saving it for you," Professor Corbett told the scientist. "I have it hidden with most of my other books up on the hillside by the spring. Wait just a minute and I'll get it for you." "Never mind. Dad," Nancy said. She had been passing and overheard her father's remark. "I'll get it. You stay here and talk. I know you're having more fun than you've had in months and I wouldn't see you spoil it for the world." "But -- Professor Corbett tried to protest. "Hush, now. Be back in a jiffy," Nancy said as she slipped out the door into the darkness outside. Professor Corbett and the scientist continued talking. Others joined them and the discussion became heated. It touched on science, art, literature, and many other topics that had been important and common in the old days. A few minutes passed and Dan joined the group. "Where's Nancy, Alan?" he asked. Professor Corbett turned to Dan to explain Nancy's errand when the sound of a shrill scream from somewhere outside the house caused everyone to stiffen in fright. "It's Nancy!" Dan shouted and sprang for the door. He wrenched it open and, as he did so, a burst of flame seared out of the blackness, missing him by inches. Another scream followed the first. The people in the room were galvanized into action. Professor Corbett ran to a chest in a comer of the room. He unlocked it quickly and handed a ray gun to Dan. He distributed guns to most of the other men. The guns had been smuggled out of Dreamtown by Jennings and others over a period of years. Soon men were stationed at every window of the house firing out into the blackness. "It's the Watchers!" a woman shouted. "Be careful of your fire," Dan yelled, "they've got Nancy!" The firing continued, while Professor Corbett and some of the others struggled to smother a fire that had been started by a blast from a Watcher's ray gun. "I'm going out after them!" Dan shouted. Professor Corbett grabbed for Dan in an effort to stop him, but he was too late. The Professor left the others to battle the fire and raced after Dan. As he stumbled along in the darkness, he could barely discern Dan's figure racing in the direction from which the shots had come. There was no firing now and the hillside was quiet. Dan had stopped, and Professor Corbett joined him in the darkness. Both men looked frantically in every direction. "There's no trace of them. They got away, Alan. We held them off, but they've taken Nancy with them!" Professor Corbett put his arm around Dan's shoulder. His eyes filled with tears and he gripped Dan tightly. For a few seconds neither of them spoke and then Professor Corbett turned to Dan. "We'd better go back to the house." The two men turned and walked slowly back to the farmhouse where the others still battled the fire. Lisa and Brant walked down the street toward the Playground. "Benton liked your script for the Council show, Brant," Lisa said as they walked along. "It was a hard card to handle. I'll tell you," Brant said. "No one actually knows anything about the Council. We don't even know how many members there are. It was hard trying to get enough information to fill the show time, so I just reworked the old stories about the Council and added a few new ones." Lisa slipped her arm through Brant's. "I'm proud of you, honey. It must have been good to set Benton hopping like that. What'd you put in it?" "Just said the Council was Dreamtown's protector, provider and producer. Said the same thing twenty times in twenty different ways; but didn't answer any of the real questions about the Council." "No one asks any questions, Brant. Who cares how many men are on the Council or how they operate? So long as we have our flip food and parties -- who cares? You worry too much." Brant laughed and patted Lisa's hand. "You're right. Jennings worried too much and look what happened to him!" They continued down the street, standing aside once as a group of Watchers in semi-military formation passed them. As they turned a corner they saw the solid red wall that surrounded the Playground rising in the distance. "Will you be able to get the information you want here, Brant?" Lisa asked. "If they let us in," he replied. "I've never been in the Playground before, have you?" Lisa asked. "Once. A long time ago when it was first put into operation, but they say things have changed a lot since then," Brant replied. A watcher halted them as they approached the gate. Brant explained about coming to gather material for the forthcoming Playground Festival show and displayed his official Sensory Communications card. The Watcher directed them to wait and stepped into a booth at one side of the gate. Brant and Lisa saw him talking to someone on the video phone. A moment later he returned, unlocked the gate, and motioned them inside. Once in, they were met by another Watcher who led them down a long hall to a door at the far end. The silence of the hall was in direct contrast to the cacophony that met their ears as they stepped through the door into the Playground. Children of both sexes and of every age and size filled the Playground. Nearly all were shouting at the tops of their voices. Scattered among the group were men and women dressed in the briefest of costumes. Some participated in the children's games, but most stood and watched, in rather stony silence, the activity before them. From one of the small buildings within the Playground, a young man walked toward Lisa and Brant. The Watcher stepped aside as he approached. 'T am Kirk Rodson," the man said to Brant and Lisa. "Director of the Playground. Can I help you?" Brant introduced himself and Lisa to the man, and explained their purpose in coming to the Playground. "I see," Rodson said. "There's not much to tell. Children are brought here immediately after birth and are cared for in our laboratories. Their instruction in walking and talking is accelerated by specially trained personnel. As soon as an infant learns to walk he is released into the Playground with the others for a specified time each day. He is fed a specially prepared diet. As he grows older, he is left in the Playground for increasingly longer periods of time in order that he may adjust to its demands." "When do the children leave here?" Brant asked. "The program of the Playground is arranged to accommodate children until they reach the age of eighteen," Rodson answered curtly. "What generally becomes of the children then?" Lisa asked. "Most of them become ordinary citizens. The best of the male group are trained as Watchers. The females usually join a breeder group. It is only the elect, with the highest qualifications, that can fill either of these positions." "Who are those men and women out there with the children?" Brant asked, staring out into the crowded Playground. "They are some of the older ones who work with the children. Those young men are joining the Watchers when they finish here." Brant, Lisa, and Rodson watched as one of the leaders called sharply to a curly headed boy who had been playing with a pretty raven haired girl. The boy leaped to his feet at the sound of his name and raced to where the athletic young man stood. The man pointed to a group of two boys and a girl who were engaged in a tussle on the ground before him. Brant and Lisa repressed their surprise as the boy quickly leaped into the melee and, by virtue of his superior strength and size, beat the two boys and the girl until they fled before his brutal blows. The boy stared after them a moment and then returned to the man whose directions he had followed. Rodson laughed a short harsh laugh as the man slapped the boy's face and sent him sprawling in the dust. "These children must learn to be constantly on guard. The stronger the person, the better chance he has for survival," Rodson explained. "It's a rather hard way to learn, isn't it?" Lisa asked. Rodson stared icily at her for a moment before he answered. "Lessons learned the hard way are longest remembered," he said. As Brant listened to Rodson talkabout the Playground, the children, at shouted commands from their instructors, assembled in a rank and file in the center of the Playground. "Listen!" Rodson ordered. One of the briefly clad young women raised her arm. Music resembling a primitive rhythmical chant filled the air. The children sang as Brant and Lisa listened. We have fun. We have sun. We can fight. We are right. The Council leads us. The Council feeds us. Days of pleasure. Full of treasure. We are free! We are free! As the song ended the children were dismissed by a wave of the song leader's hand, and they raced wildly to the bright red barracks surrounding the Playground. Several of the younger children were knocked to the ground in the stampede, but they immediately scrambled to their feet and joined the racing mob again. Brant thanked Kirk Rodson and walked with him to the door where they parted. The Watcher led them down the silent hall and they were soon out on the street again. "We have nothing to worry about if we train the kids that well," Lisa remarked. "It's kind of hard on them at first, I guess," Brant observed. "They get used to it though. And anyway, we need strong people for Dreamtown with some of those crazy Rebels still running around loose," Lisa said. "We don't have to worry about them. After seeing those kids today, I don't think we have to worry about anything," Brant said as they walked down the street away from the Playground. Professor Corbett, in response to a knock, opened the door of the cabin to which he had moved after the Watcher's attack on his farmhouse and greeted the man who stood outside. "Jim. How are you?" the Professor asked as he motioned the young man to a chair. "I passed your old place on my way here. Professor. It's a good thing you got out of there. The Watchers must have come back because the place has been burned to the ground." "We figured they'd be back once they knew our location. This cabin is in bad shape but we were lucky to find it. And it's isolated. Be hard to find, here in the middle of the woods. But now tell me Jim, what progress has been made?" "We've gotten a lot done in two weeks, Professor. I've just come from Andy. He and his people have moved up to the summit of Thorny Mountain. Joe and Ed have been in Dreamtown for almost the whole two weeks and are working as laborers on the housing project in the West End. Bill got himself a job as a messenger for the video control office and Mike is working in the mess hall at the central headquarters of the Watchers." "Fine, fine. That's wonderful," Professor Corbett exclaimed happily. He hesitated a moment. "Mike," Jim said, "overheard one of the Watchers telling about the raid on your place. He said they've got Nancy in one of the Detention Plants near the Watcher's headquarters." "Is -- is she all right, Jim? Could you find out if she's all right?" the Professor asked hurriedly. "As far as we can tell, she's OK. They're holding her for questioning. They'll probably try to find out as much as they can about our plans before they -- I mean -- Jim hesitated, embarrassed. "I know, Jim. Wait a minute. I'll call Dan. He's upstairs taking a nap. He worked almost all night on the plans for the raid." Professor Corbett called up the steps to Dan, and within a few minutes he appeared, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. "Jim," Dan said, "have they found Nancy? Is she all right?" "She's being held for questioning, Dan," Jim replied. Dan turned to Professor Corbett. "Alan, that means we've got to act fast. What's the report from the others?" Jim outlined the progress that had been made since the night of the raid on the farmhouse. Together with Professor Corbett, they went over the details of the new outposts of the Rebel groups. They counted up the number of weapons possessed by each individual group, and checked and rechecked the positions that each group and each individual was to hold on the day of the raid. Jim told Dan of the positions that the four volunteers had obtained within Dreamtown, and Dan wrote out detailed instructions for them to follow on the day of the raid. "Get these instructions to Mike and the others within four days," Dan ordered. "Wednesday of next week." "This whole thing," Professor Corbett said, "depends on our ability to coordinate our actions. If there is one slip anywhere along the line the whole thing will fall to pieces. Jim, you and the other runners have an important job on your hands. You've got to get this information to all the outposts and to the four men in the city by Monday. That will give everyone a day to prepare before Wednesday." Jim took the sheets of paper from Dan, folded them, and placed them in the inside pocket of his jacket. "What are your plans for getting Nancy out." Jim asked. Dan answered him. "In Mike's instructions, I explained that he was to open the Detention Plant and release Nancy and any of our other people that might be there. He'll tell them what they're to do. If he hears of anything happening before that time, we've got to depend on Mike to be able to save her." "But if -- Jim began. Professor Corbett held up his hand. "We cannot afford to jeopardize the whole plan for anyone's sake." He looked down at the floor. "Not even for the sake of my daughter." Dan placed his hand on the Professor's shoulder. "Nancy wouldn't want it any other way, Alan," he said. "Mike will have to handle any emergency that arises. He's a good man and we can depend on him," Dan added. "With the Playground Festival taking place next Wednesday it should be easier for us to get control of the city. The Council has sent word that every adult must attend the ceremonies. We'll have them all in one place and they'll be easy to control." "I'll get going," Jim said. "Got to be in a lot of places between now and Monday." He stood up and the three men shook hands solemnly"Good luck, Jim," Professor Corbett said. Jim laughed. "See you in Dreamtown, Professor!" showed their official cards to the Watcher behind the desk. Gil's civilian investigative status gained him immediate entrance, but there was some discussion concerning Brant's right to attend. The matter was finally cleared up to the Watcher's satisfaction when Brant explained that Benton of the Sensory Com Center had arranged for him to attend. The two men were ushered into a large chamber, at one end of which was an enormous metal desk almost the width of the room. Eight men were seated behind it. Brant recognized the leader of the Watchers and several other officials of the city. He and Gil took seats to one side of the room near the desk. "They're going to reexamine some of the Rebels that have been captured recently," Gil said. "Should be amusing." Brant nodded. At a signal, a Watcher opened a door at one side of the room. A young girl and a man and woman, were led into the room. They were led to a spot to stand directly in front of the examiners. "You are Rebels. Is that true?" barked the leader of the Watchers, who was conducting the examination. None of the three answered. "You have been planning to destroy the city of Dream town?" the man asked. Again no one protested. He looked up. "You deny these charges?" He paused and then directed his attention to the girl before him. "Your name!" "Nancy Corbett," the girl said. "Perhaps you will tell us why your people are being so foolish." Nancy smiled at the man, and spoke quietly. "We don't believe we are being foolish." The man laughed aloud and the others joined him. Brant turned to Gil. "She's not bad looking." "Do your Rebels really believe you can destroy us?" "We don't want to destroy you," Nancy replied. "We have no intentions of doing that. We believe you are making many mistakes here in Dreamtown and we believe things must be changed," she said. "And how do you intend to do that?" Nancy didn't answer. The man stood up quickly and leaned across the desk. "Then you admit you are trying to destroy the way of life we have built up here," he shouted. "No!" the man next to Nancy answered suddenly. "We've told you. We feel it is wrong and must be changed." "We want things back the way they were before you came," the woman said. "What do you mean?" the man roared again. "We want to read books and we want to hear the old music again. We want to raise our children the way they should be raised." "When we win we are going to rebuild the schools," Nancy said quickly. "Silence!" the man thundered. A man at the end of the desk rose. "Didn't you always have enough to eat when you lived in Dreamtown?" he asked. Again no one answered. "Didn't you have enough to do for entertainment?" He looked from face to face before him. "Didn't you enjoy yourselves here?" he asked. Nancy stepped forward. "That's just it! Here all we were able to do, all we were allowed to do, was enjoy ourselves. But only in your ways. Some of us felt there were better ways to enjoy ourselves than with parties and festivals and sensation pills." "What ways?" the man asked quietly. The man next to Nancy spoke. "We wanted time to think. Some of us wanted to paint or write books." "We wanted to be with our children," the woman said. "Surely you realize by now," the man continued from behind the desk, "how insignificant these things are in comparison to the progress we've made in Dreamtown. Paintings done by hand cannot equal our paintings that are done mechanically. And as for books. One must be alone to read books and we believe that people should be together and share with one another." "That's just it," Nancy said. "Reading a book is sharing something! You share an experience with the man who wrote the book. You tell people about it, they read it, you discuss it. That's sharing." Another man at the desk spoke. "You talk of experience. With our sensation pills you gain much greater and more vivid experience than you ever could from a book." "But it's not real that way," Nancy said softly. "It's not natural either." The leader of the Watchers resumed the examination, which consisted of the same questions and the same accusations repeated over and over again. The three Rebels stood awaiting whatever it was that to be done to them, helpless to answer the charges, since there seemed to be no way for them to make themselves understood. "What will they do with them?" Brant asked. "Psychwash them probably. It's simple and there's never any trouble afterward." Gil answered. The leader stood up and addressed the three individuals before him. "We have decided that you are to be sent to the psych laboratories!" The Rebel woman instinctively raised her hand to her mouth in fear. Nancy and the other man stiffened but their glances remained steady. "We will give you a day to think about what is to happen to you. If, in that time, you decide to come to us with information concerning your Rebel groups -- their whereabouts, their plans and so on, you may do so. Otherwise our plans for you will be carried out!" He sat down. "Let me remind you that the fate of those who have been psychwashed is not very pleasant. They no longer think. They move when they are told to move. They do only what they are told to do. They don't read books and they don't paint pictures. They -- ." "They are not very different from the rest of the people in Dreamtown, are they?" Nancy interrupted. "Take them out of here!" the man screamed. Nancy's remark created angry excitement among the examiners and as they discussed it among themselves Brant and Gil watched the three people being led swiftly from the room. T he city lay like a eat carnival ground in the wilderness, illuminating the dark night. Dan and Professor Corbett lay on the ground, hidden behind the scrubby growth of bushes a few hundred yards from the wall of the city. Dan looked at his watch and the luminous dial told him it was ten o'clock. The raid was scheduled for # : # . "I think we got all the patrols, Alan," Dan whispered, "but I warned the men to be careful anyway. We didn't have enough guns for everybody, but once we're in the city we can get them from the Watchers and from their arsenal." Professor Corbett leaned toward Dan. "Let's go over the plan once more," he said. Dan shifted his position. "We have thirty people down at the West End gate. They're coming in three minutes after we start. Bill and Ed will open this gate and at the same time Joe will dynamite the drug warehouses." "Three of our men," the Professor said, "will head for the South gate as soon as we're in, and three others will open the East gate. If the surprise is great enough, they shouldn't have too hard a time overcoming the Watchers at the gates. They'll be too confused to know what hit them." "Mike," Dan said, "will barricade the Watcher's barracks at # : # , and then wait until he is joined by the group from the West. That will only take a few minutes and, once there, the group will split. Part will keep the Watcher's under control and the rest will invade the Detention Plant." "Mike can pass out guns from the Watcher's arsenal to our people in the Plant and direct them to the Playground. I'll head for the Playground as soon as we're in," the Professor continued, "and we'll take over there." "You'll have the most men, Alan," Dan said. "I'm taking eight men and heading for the Council Building. We'll grab the Council and bring them to the Playground. Check, Alan?" "Check!" "It's #:#. Pass the word along to watch for the first sign of the gates opening," Dan directed. Silence fell as each man in Dan's group waited while the remaining minutes passed. Every eye was fixed on the city gates. #:#. #:#. "Let's go!" Dan yelled at the top of his voice and leaped to his feet. The gigantic gates began to swing outward as the forty five men in Dan's group sprang to their feet and raced, shouting, toward the opening gate. "This way!" a voice called shrilly. "It's Ed!" Dan called to Professor Corbett who was running by his side. They reached Ed as the rest of the group entered the gate. Shots were being exchanged between the Rebels and the Watchers now. "Where's Bill?" Dan yelled above the noise. "They shot him," Ed answered. "Come on!" Suddenly, a series of terrific explosions filled the night with screaming sound. The earth shook under their feet. "The warehouses are gone!" Dan yelled. "I'm heading for the Council!" The eight men Dan had selected raced after him down the empty street of the city. The sound of firing, announcing the entry of the group at the East gate, met their ears. As Dan's men careened around a corner they saw two Watchers sprinting toward them. One of the Rebels dropped to his knee, fired twice, and the two Watchers froze, in the typical macabre positions produced by a hypno-ray gun. The group parted and made separate approaches to the Council Building. Dan and four others stopped as they came in sight of the building. A group of Watchers stood, guns ready, peering up and down the deserted street. "Let's go!" Dan yelled, and the Rebels sprang forward, dodging in and out of doorways for protection. The other Rebels appeared at the opposite end of the street. The Watchers, seeing themselves outnumbered, suddenly turned and fled up the steps of the Council Building. "Stop!" Dan shouted. He fired a warning shot and the fleeing Watchers halted. "They'll serve as shields," Dan muttered. "No telling what we'll run into inside." The Rebels moved forward, with the Watchers preceding them at gunpoint. Inside, the hall was silent and they walked cautiously, alert for any sudden action. "Don't turn around," Dan ordered the men in front of him. "Lead us to the quarters of the Council." The tense group continued through halls and rooms resplendently furnished and decorated. They stopped several yards from a steel door which faced them across a high ceilinged room. "Go on!" Dan ordered. "That's the Council's private apartment," one of the Watchers snapped. "Open it!" "No one's ever opened it. No one's ever been inside," the man answered. Dan turned to one of his men. "Try to open that door, but be ready for anything!" After some minutes, the man turned back to the group. "There doesn't seem to be any way to get it open, Dan," the man said. "Then we'll blast it open!" But it was soon evident that their blasts had no effect on the massive structure. One of the Watchers sneered, when suddenly, without warning, the door slid aside into the wall. "Keep an eye on them," Dan cautioned his men. He moved cautiously as he neared the open door. There was no sound from within and so far as he could tell the room was empty. He stepped inside. "Good evening!" a voice greeted him. Dan started, and his eyes quickly searched the room for the source of the voice that had delivered this unusual greeting. "Over here," the voice said. A grotesquely fat man wearing a red robe, heavy with gold brocade rose from a reclining chair and smiled at Dan. "We've just -- ," Dan began but the fat man interrupted him. "I know! I've been expecting you for some time now. Have some grapes?" the man asked, indicating a bronze container on the table. "Or some wine?" he asked, proferring a silver decanter that stood beside the bronze dish of grapes. "Where are the other members of the Council?" Dan demanded. The man repressed a laugh. "There are no other members!" "You mean you -- !" Dan stopped in utter amazement as the truth began to become clear to him. "Yes," the man replied calmly. "But I don't understand. How did you do it?" "Very simply. Are you sure you won't have some wine?" The man poured himself a goblet of wine. "When Dreamtown began to become what it is today, I saw a perfect opportunity to cash in, so to speak, on a good thing. The details aren't important. I started small, and after I had sufficient power, I set up this legend of the Council. It was a simple thing to dispose of the few who knew the truth. Once that was done, the secret was easy to keep. I am self sufficient here. There has been no need to leave my apartments or my gardens. I send my directives, my orders, my requests, through the transitab or over the intercom. Food is left in an anteroom adjoining my chambers. Hardly anyone ever questioned me except in the beginning, and then there were always the Watchers, so the questioning soon stopped. Now, is there anything else you would like to know?" Dan turned and called to the others and they entered, their guns still trained on the Watchers. Dan explained what he had heard as they all listened in amazement. "I don't believe it! It's a trick!" one of the Watchers blurted out. The little man chuckled. "My boy, the trick is over. He told you the truth." "We're leaving now, and we're taking you with us to the Playground," Dan said. "My wine first," the man said and raised the goblet to his lips. "Yes, it's all over," he said softly and drained the goblet. Instantly the man's body went limp and he slumped to the floor before the shocked eyes of the others in the room. Dan rushed forward and examined the inert form on the floor. "He's dead! We'll have to leave him here. Lock the Watchers in that closet and let's go. We've got to get to the Playground." They raced down the steps of the Council Building and headed toward the Playground. Occasionally they met a citizen of Dreamtown who fled before them in fear or merely stared in stupefied amazement. The Playground gates were open and there were Rebels surrounding its walls, their guns trained on captured groups of Watchers who stood sullenly, staring for the most part, at the ground. A cheer went up from the Rebels as they saw Dan and the others approaching. The courtyard of the Playground was dotted with Rebels guarding the great crowd that filled the stands which had been erected for the Festival. In the center of the courtyard was a platform on which stood Professor Corbett and some of the Other Rebels. Dan yelled in delight as he recognized Nancy standing beside her father. In a great bound he was on the platform and Nancy was in his arms. When he released her, he spoke quietly to Professor Corbett. "Everything all right?" he asked. "Yes. We lost some men, but everything went according to plan." Dan turned to the shouting, fearful crowd before him in the stands. He raised his gun and fired three successive shots into the night air. The crowd quieted. "We intend no harm," Dan began, "most of you have heard of us. They called us Rebels. We were. We once lived in Dreamtown. After the Big War we tried to build a new civilization, one founded in truth and dignity. At that time we all wanted the same thing. Then some people came and offered us toys instead of truth. Many of us took the toys. After the horrors of the Big War we wanted peace and contentment and pleasure. But we made a terrible mistake. We took these toys hoping they would give us the thing we looked for, and as years went by we forgot what we had set out to do. But some of us didn't forget. Some of us remembered. And we fled from Dreamtown, because the Council and the Watchers told us we were wrong to want those things. The Council no longer exists. There isn't time to explain it all to you now. You will be informed quickly and completely as soon as we are able to arrange it. One more thing. We do not come as conquerors, but as friends. We came back because we believed in Dreamtown, and wanted ( Continued on page #) Illustrated by Leo Summers The Moon is green cheese and the stars are eyes and we're all fleas on a big space animal! But don't let it worry you -- unless you take the first trip out into space -- all alone!. know he was up so high and going so fast, going higher and faster than any human before him. He would be up even higher the next day, he remembered, going so high and so fast he would not come down again. It would be a shame to leave Earth, he knew. There was security in her firmness, with no great space underfoot through which to drop down, down, down. Up here there was emptiness all around. Emptiness and, except for the dull throb of the rocket engines, silence. Out there -- he looked up -- there would be a greater emptiness, a greater silence, an infinity of nothingness in all directions. He felt suddenly cold at the thought, and then shame swept over him, forcing the paralysis aside. Fear of the unknown again, he thought distastefully. No matter how much the psychologists tried, they could not erase that icy prickling sensation that came with its contemplation. They were all children when it came to space, kids frightened by the dark alleys of the universe, fearing the bogey man that waited lurking in the velvet depths through which no one had passed before. Probably they would find nothing out there to fear, nothing at all, and yet the feeling would go on and on, whenever men had to face the unknown, whenever they had to force themselves whistling past silent graveyards that contained only the fear of fear. With swift precision he pressed studs on the control panel before him, and a bank of jets on the side of his rocket flared into sudden life, pushing, turning, pulsing flame into the thin air of the outside. His gyrochair made an effortless compensation for the altered direction. The ship banked, leveled, then leaped forward on a new course. Cantrell smiled. He could handle the ship now as though it were a part of him. On the big leap he expected no trouble. Not so the planners, who refused to leave the minutest stone unturned in their search for flaws in man or rocket. Physical checkups were made as often as twice a day. Psychiatrists had analyzed him constantly during the past six months, probing for any hidden factors that might make a space flight futile, fearing perhaps a mental return to the womb for a security that could not be found in untraveled space. We're all children when it comes to space, he reminded himself, and he laughed and wondered half-seriously if he were really as psychologically free as he thought he was -- excepting his animal allergy of course, which was insignificant. There were many facets of the human mind the clinical instruments of psychology could never hope to touch; the mind was like an iceberg, and the submerged ninetenths could hold a great many unfathomables hidden in the vast depths, subtle monstrosities waiting to spring out and claw at his sanity. He smiled grimly, as he realized where his thoughts were leading him. To fear of the unknown again. Of course, it was only the intellectual contemplation of it, but the mere thought disturbed him, and he began to feel angry at himself for allowing the thoughts to exist at all. Irritably he jabbed at the controls and felt the reassuring thrusts that drove him gently into the heavy-padded cushions of the seat. With a smile, this time of satisfaction, he watched the speedometer needle rise to a new height. Below him, Earth was an unfamiliar blur, and he touched off the braking rockets to look at it. The landscape took on more familiar features, with its surface pockmarked by the ravages of wind and rain, its broad fields stretching out in all directions like the fur on some great animal. He failed to suppress a shudder of disgust at that last thought. He'd be glad to get off Earth, onto the moon where he would be alone for awhile and away from the unpleasantnesses of ordinary life. These past months, with Jarvis and his dogs, the psychiatrist's incessant questioning -- The radio said into his ears: "Okay, Cantrell, that's enough of a workout. Bring her in and report to HQ. Colonel Enders wants a word with you." "Right," Cantrell said into a microphone. He switched off the radio and muttered : "Damn Colonel Enders. What's he want this time, to check the nipples on my beer bottles?" Angrily, he flipped the rocket into a soundless dive that reached screaming proportions as he entered heavier atmosphere. The outer metal glowed, and the temperature rose in the controlroom. He twisted the rocket onto a tail of flame and settled, "And that's that -- until tomorrow," he told himself. He threw switches to inactivate the motors and looked out an observation window. A fast-moving jeep curved across the stretch of sand towards him. Behind the jeep a dog came running; at the sight of the animal, Cantrell felt nausea tug at him. He reached for the radio. He said into it, "Control? Get that damned dog off the field." "Sorry," Control said, "I'll contact the jeep. One of Captain Jarvis' dogs got loose, and -- " "I'm not interested in your excuses," Cantrell said angrily, "and I don't care if it does belong to Captain Jarvis. Get it off the field, or I'll blast it off!" Irritably, he cut communications. He looked out the window. The jeep had stopped, and someone had gotten out and was walking back to collar the dog and return it. The jeep started up again. Cantrell breathed a sigh of relief. He felt annoyed with himself, as he always did when something like this happened, but the self-condemnation failed to placate him. Damn it! Jarvis was a psychiatrist; the man knew how these things affected him. To make matters worse, it was Jarvis' dog. Probably trying another of his "experiments", Cantrell thought disgustedly. He crawled out of the airlock and down the long metal stairs to the ground. The jeep pulled up, and the khaki-clad driver said, "Sorry about the dog, sir, but -- " "Skip it," Cantrell snapped, climbing into the jeep. "Just take me to HQ." The soldier nodded and spun the jeep around. They went flashing toward a fat clump of buildings that squatted alone at the edge of the landing field. As Cantrell had expected. Captain Jarvis was with Colonel Enders in the latter's office. "What was the idea of sending out that mongrel," Cantrell flared. "You know I'm allergic to animals." "It was an accident. Besides, you're not allergic to anything," the psychiatrist said calmly, ignoring the insult to his pet. "You're rationalizing a pathological fear -- " "Now, see here -- " Captain Jarvis held up a placating hand " -- or hatred, if you wish, of animals." "Okay, okay, I don't like animals," Cantrell said. "We've been over that a dozen times. So what? I suppose you still think it has some bearing on my going to the moon and back?" The psychiatrist shrugged. "Who knows? It might have." Colonel Enders said, "I'm beginning to agree with Cantrell, Captain. We're not going to find anyone perfect, it seems, so we may as well take those with the best qualifications. Cantrell certainly isn't going to encounter animals in space, and there's no life on the moon; our foremost scientists assure us of that." "But can you be sure," the psychiatrist wondered, "can they be sure, can anybody be sure? Scientists don't have all the right answers about our Earth, much less the other planets; we know as much about Earth as a flea knows about the dog or the cat he's on." Cantrell grimaced at the analogy. "That's why we're going up, to find a few answers. Anyway, tomorrow I'll be on my way because I've got the qualifications for it, animals or no animals. And if the moon has creatures on it that resemble dogs or cats or even fleas. I'll be mighty surprised. How about you. Colonel?" "Don't drag me into your arguments, Cantrell," the Colonel sighed. "I'm a military man, not a scientist. Both the Earth and the moon may be green cheese for all I know. The main thing I'm interested in is that you get up there and back safely." "I will," Cantrell promised. "I hope you do," Captain Jarvis said earnestly. "I'm not trying to heap obstacles in your path, Cantrell. It's just that we know so little about anything that even an 'allergy' like yours might be a hazard. Suppose up there, for example, it suddenly took on cockeyed proportions and went to lesser animals; suppose a fly accidentally got aboard the rocket, you might even open a hatch to get away from it -- and forget to put on your spacesuit." "Thank the fates I'm not a military man, Jarvis, and can speak freely," Cantrell said dryly. "You already know I don't like you, and I'm beginning to like you even less." "Come, come," Colonel Evans said hastily, "there's no point in arguing. We can't get perfection. I'm afraid. Cantrell here's the closest to our qualifications we could get, physically and psychologically, consistent with the right background for the job. Tomorrow at noon the rocket's going to take ofT with Cantrell aboard, and then we'll know." "Yes," the psychiatrist said steadily, "and then we'll know." Cantrell turned to Colonel Evans. "Will that be all, Colonel?" Evans glanced hastily at Jarvis and nodded. "That's it, I guess -- until tomorrow at noon." "Right," Cantrell said. "See you." And he went out. Once outside in the warm afternoon sun he mentally damned Jarvis and Evans, classifying them both as incompetents who drew military salary for putting red-taped impediments in the way of progress; the rocket should have taken off months ago. He shrugged, trying to content himself with the thought that tomorrow he'd be away from them, away floating in the pure emptiness of space. Even so, the mere thought of Jarvis irritated him, made his fingers itch for the man's throat; him and his talk of animal fears! Okay, so he hated animals, well he had good reason to. Ever since that dog had attacked him when he was a child, he'd hated dogs; and then the hatred spread to other animals -- why not, for they all were potentially dangerous -- and sometimes it even made him sick to think of them. It made sense when you stopped to consider it carefully. He'd moved to the city, to the great steel canyons that imprisoned only specimens of humanity, and for years never saw an animal. Now, he was in the open again, in the great desert and the plains. But Acre were no animals, only the dogs Captain Jarvis insisted on keeping. "Nuts to Captain Jarvis," he said. The next morning he felt the same way. He was called into HQ for last minute instructions that were the same as those laid out months ago. Cantrell knew them by memory, but the excitement of the impending blastoff prevented his being bored or even from being annoyed by the psychiatrist's inevitable presence. Now there was nothing to prevent the leap of the Earthbound into space; not even Jarvis could delay it now. The jeep drove Jarvis, Evans and Cantrell to the waiting rocket. They got out. Evans offered his hand. "Goodbye, Cantrell, come back in one piece." "Sorry I was so hard on you, Cantrell," Jarvis said, extending his hand. "I hope you make it okay." Cantrell nodded and took the man's hand. "Thanks. I expect to." He climbed the ladder to the airlock door and stood there for a moment watching the jeep carry its passengers across the field to a safe distance. Then he went inside and strapped himself into the seat. "Okay, Cantrell," Control said. "Blast off when ready." "Right," Cantrell said into the radio. He closed the airlock door and checked pressure gauges. "In ten seconds," he said, activating the firing mechanism. Mentally he counted: ten, nine, eight, seven... The rocket shuddered, and Cantrell found himself pressed suddenly into the seat. In the viewscreens Earth spun dizzily away from him. After a few minutes the push ceased and weightlessness began. "Everything okay, Cantrell?" the radio said, after awhile. It was Evans. "Fine, Colonel," Cantrell said. "Not a dog or a cat in sight." "Can you see Earth?" Cantrell manipulated dials, activating the lower television eyes. "There she is," he said. "Looks real impressive. I can see nearly all of North America now and a good part of the Pacific. The land looks queer from up here," -- he frowned -- "something like -- " He broke off, staring. "Like -- " "Like what?" Jarvis' voice demanded suddenly. "It looks like what, Cantrell?" Cantrell shook his head bewilderedly. "Nothing," he said uncertainly. He felt a sudden irritation that Jarvis couldn't let him alone even with so much of space intervening. "It looks like I'm going to make it to the moon, that's all." "You were going to say something else, Cantrell, what?" "Let him alone, Jarvis," Evans whispered; "he's got enough to worry about." "That's right," Cantrell said irritably, "and I'm going to worry about it in silence." He reached for the radio switch. "But, Cantrell -- " Evans said. Then the radio went dead. Cantrell grinned and watched Earth getting smaller below. The grin faded as he thought of his almost-spoken comparison of a few minutes before, of the land resembling the shriveled skin of an animal. Jarvis would have made much of that, of course, with his psychiatric ramblings. Yet, the comparison was disturbing just the same. Why did he torture himself? He regarded Earth skeptically, hoping to subdue the irrational thoughts. Certainly the shape was not that of an animal. At least not an Earth animal. But then it wouldn't have to be, he reminded himself -- and felt doubly irritated at the reminder. It looked very different from the globes he'd seen picturing the planet. It looked almost -- alive. From this height, great forests resembled tiny hairs, mountain ridges and canyons were skin blemishes and pores ; the great oceans looked like giant mouths, open and hungry. Cantrell laughed nervously. It was ridiculous. Yet the more he looked, the more Earth receded below him, the more the resemblances increased. He stared at the planet. It was ridiculous, but there were even several portions below that looked like great eyes staring at him. As he watched, one blinked. Cantrell screamed. The sound was shrill in the narrow control chamber. Then he cursed and felt ashamed. "I'm going crazy," he told himself. His voice was hoarse. "Jarvis was right." But the thought failed to help. The sudden feeling of terror was still with him, and he found himself trembling. It was only a cloud, he told himself, only a cloud passing over a section of land that from this distance looked like an eye. He tried to laugh away the fear, but the sound stuck in his throat. He felt his heart beating faster than it should. "No," he said desperately, looking away, "no, I'm okay. My mind is clear, and I'm all right. It's just being up here that gives a guy the jitters. Fear of the unknown. Things look different when you're not close to them. Got to calm down. Take it easy." His hands trembled. "Scientists don't have all the right answers even about our Earth here," Jarvis had said. "We know as much about Earth as a flea knows about the dog orithe cat he's on." The words echoed in Cantrell's memory, and he forced himself to look down at Earth. It was a planet, that was all, an inanimate mass and nothing more. "... as much as a flea knows..." But was it possible that a flea might not realize the animal he was on was an animal? He had a headache, and he shook his head in an effort to clear it. His vision blurred, refocussed with astounding clarity. Lines flowed together with sudden meaning. Before his gaze rivers became veins, eyes stared at him curiously, oceanmouths yawned. The truth burst upon him then, with a sudden flash that drove his blood coursing through his body, with a realization that jerked him as though he had been struck with a whip. He laughed insanely at the thought, and the laughter exploded in the narrow cabin and flowed over him in torrents, echoing. He was the only one in the world who could see things as they really were. He was as certain of that as he was of his own existence. He knew now, and his was the only knowledge: Earth was a space animal, the humans parasites like fleas on a cat or a dog. And the Earthlings didn't know, they didn't even suspect! The radio buzzed. He pressed a button. "Cantrell," Evans' harassed voice came. "This is an order: maintain contact at all times, until the moment you set foot back on Earth. Understand?" Cantrell laughed with his strange secret knowledge. "Fm not coming back," he said happily. He was the only one who could escape this animal, the only one, and he felt elated at this, felt a sense of power he'd not known. "Fm not going to be a parasite crawling on the back of an animal." The thought sickened him, and he gagged. "Cantrell!" It was Jarvis. "Cantrell, listen to me -- " "No," Cantrell said. "You listen to me." And he told them about Earth being a space-animal. His mind rebelled at the thought, but he forced himself on for he wanted Jarvis to suffer down there, he wanted them all to suffer with the knowledge of what they were. Where was their pompous self-importance now, their flea's dream of conquering the universe? "He's crazy," Evans whispered. "Cantrell, listen to me," Jarvis said. But Cantrell was staring in horrified fascination at Earth dwindling below, at the space-animal watching him. "No!" he cried. "No, it's too late." And he shut off the radio and ripped the wires from their moorings. Ahead of him lay the moon. He switched screens to look at it. It was chalky and pockmarked, like the skin of a diseased animal. Great iridescent veins glowed through its body. From a crater bed a great baleful eye regarded him. Cantrell screamed again and frantically pressed studs on the control panel. The rocket shot flame from its side tubes and turned in a short arc, swinging the moon from sight. The forward viewscreens showed the stars now, and beyond them an infinite blackness. "I'll be safe out there," Cantrell told himself. The rocket leaped forward. bitterly, putting down the radiophone with a gesture of helplessness. "Now, what do we do?" Jarvis shrugged. "Start over," he said. "What else is there to do? Find someone else to pilot another rocket." "Someone without Cantrell's hallucinations," Jarvis ammended. "And pray that they were hallucinations," Jarvis amended further. Evans looked at him sharply. "What do you mean?" Jarvis said calmly, "My favorite theme, Colonel -- simply that we don't know much about this blob of matter we're on. One factor disturbs me : while Cantrell was afraid of animals, he never imagined he saw them. Outside of his one idiosyncrasy, he was a very sound person. "What are you getting at?" Evans demanded irritably. "That it's unfortunate Cantrell had this animal fear; it's much too easy to blame that for what he saw. As a psychiatrist, I suppose I should say that's the reason for it; I might be right. But it has also occurred to me I might be rationalizing." He leaned forward, intensely serious. "Suppose, just suppose for a minute that maybe the ones who are wrong, that maybe we're really parasites on an alien organism, that maybe we're under a kind of mass auto-hypnosis to protect our pride, and that maybe space restores our sanity -- for awhile anyway, until another form of insanity takes over." "Anyone who supposed that would be crazy," Evans blurted. "Perhaps," Jarvis admitted, "but who's to tell? I wonder, does the flea know the true nature of the dog, or does he thing hes living on some kind of world built just for him?" Evans sputtered, searching for words. Finally he managed, "See here. Captain, this is nonsense, and I order you to stop such talk immediately." Jarvis sighed. "I hope so. Colonel, I really hope it is nonsense. Man is a proud animal; it's interesting to consider how such knowledge would affect him." He shrugged helplessly and turned to leave the room. "At any rate, the only way to find out is to send up another man in another rocket and hope he doesn't report the same thing; if he does, we'll just blame it on one of his psychological quirks, and try again. But for all we know about this universe. Earth might be a space-animal, a type of life so close to us and yet so alien we don't even recognize it -- or don't want to!" Colonel Evans wet his lips. "Do you -- do you really believe that, Captain?" Jarvis considered the question. "No," he said slowly. "No, I don't. But I do think it points up an important fact. When a man gets out there in space, cut off from everything he's ever known, allergies, idiosyncrasies, personal likes and dislikes -- everything on a conscious and a subconscious level may take on an exaggerated importance." "You make it a big problem," Evans said. "It is a big problem," Jarvis sighed. "At any rate. I'm going to volunteer for the next flight. That's the least I can do for Cantrell." He went out. The Colonel stared after him, puzzled and slightly indignant. He shook his head. The man was crazy. Earth an animal -- the idea was preposterous. But the thought hammered at him, repeating. Jarvis was right, of course, when he said it was undoubtedly psychological. And yet suppose -- just suppose... Trembling, he shook off the thought and looked out at the field, the buildings, the sky. Earth's pale satellite emerging from the sky like a child following in the wake of its mother. They say the moon came out of Earth, he thought suddenly, and the analogy struck home. The man in the moon looked down at him, and he turned hastily away. The afternoon was warm, but Colonel Evans suddenly felt very cold.    Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources. -- Will James The jets got all the young ones in Smoky Creek. Only the old folks were left -- with their memories. And the jets -- friendly or hostile -- would never get them... fighters had appeared low over Bald Ridge, out of the east. Theyd curved up as one to clear Lawson's Hill, their stubby wings almost brushing the treetops, their hiss and thunder rolling back and forth between the valley walls like a giant's derision; they'd dipped into the valley proper, obviously informed that Smoky Greek, Tennessee (population #) had no anti-aircraft installations, and circled the town at about five hunderd feet. They circled and looked down -- broad slavic faces with curious expressions, seen through plexiglass, as if thinking: So this is an American small town. Then they took altitude and got to work. The first bomb was aimed at the big concrete railway bridge spanning the upper end of the valley; that was the main objective of the attack. The bomb exploded four hundred yards north of the bridge, at about six hundred feet altitude -- the ideal point from which to flatten Smoky Greek. Low altitude bombing can be tricky, of course, especially in mountain country. A-bombs were cheap though, turned out by the carload; not like # years before, when they were first developed. So it was likely the bombardier tripped a bomb over the town just for the hell of it. The next bomb got the bridge. The next tore up a quarter mile of track. The next tore up a quarter mile of road. That was the mission. The bomber circled, while the fighters strafed Smoky Greek for good measure; and then they roared away past Lawson's Hill, over Bald Ridge, into the east toward their invasion-coast base. Everybody died. The bombs were midget A's, designed for tactical use; so Smoky Greek wasn't reduced to dust -- just to sticks. There wasn't much heat from the bomb and there was hardly any residual radiation. But everybody in town died. Concussion. Smoky Creek had been comprised of one main street and three cross streets, and that's not much area -- the wave had thumped down from right above, like a giant fist. Everybody died, except twentyone old men and women who had been off in the woods at the far end of the valley, on their annual Grandfolk's Picnic. They didn't die, except inside. Three months later, an enemy jet came out of the sky and over the valley. A scoop arrangement under its belly was sniffing Tennessee and Alabama air for radioactive particles. It sniffed low over the town, and then again -- a ruined town might hide an underground lab and converter -- and then it barrelrolled and crashed. Nine rifle bullets had hit the motor; straight back through the jet intake, into the blades. A year after that another jet came low over the town, and it crashed too. Only three bullets this time; but a jet motor's like a turbine -- you get a blade or two, and it goes crazy. Two years after that, Ben Bates (no longer Mayor Ben, because a mayor has to have a town; but still the man in charge) knocked off playing horseshoes in what had been the Town Hall. Now the building served as a recreation hall ; there were horseshoe pits at one end of the long room, there were tables for checkers and cards, and a short tenpin alley along one wall. Three years ago the alley had been twice as long as it was now; but then there were young men around who could peg the length of it without tiring every time. Overhead the roof sagged, and in one place you could see quite a piece of sky -- but under the hole the old men had rigged a slanted board watershed that led to a drainage ditch; and scattered through the room were a lot of supporting posts and timber braces. Actually the building was about as safe as it had ever been. There were other buildings like it; buildings that the bomb hadn't poimded flat or made too risky. They were propped up and nailed together and buttressed and practically glued so they'd stay up. From outside you'd think they were going to crumble any minute -- walls slanted all cockeyed, boards peeled off and hanging, and roofs buckling in. But they were safe. Fixed up every which way -- from the inside. All from the inside; not an inch of repair on the outside. It had to be that way, because the town had to look like a dead town. After the men had finished propping, the women had come along with all the furniture and things they'd salvaged, and they swept and scrubbed and did a hundred jobs the men never would have thought of; and so the old people ended up with half a dozen buildings to live in, secretly and comfortably, in the town that had to look dead. "Arthritis is bad," Ben Bates told his teammates and opponents. "Hell, I'm just giving away points. Maybe next week. I'll rest up, and kick you all around next week." He lit a cigar, a big grey man with long legs and a good-humored mouth, and he watched Dan Paray throw one short; then he strolled over to kibitz at the checker game between Fat Sam Hogan and Windy Harris, at one of the tables near the door. Late morning sunlight slanted in through the window by the table and struck light off Windy's glasses as he leaned across the board, thumped a checker three times and said triumphantly, "King me, Sam. You're getting blind, I swear. Or dumber." Behind his back Ben Bates heard a shoe ring against the stake; then he heard it spin off, and he grinned at Owen Urey's bullfrog cussing. Tom Pace was saying urgently, "Look -- look, Jim, damn it, you didn't no more shoot down that plane singlehanded than I did. We was all shooting. Godamighty -- where you get off claiming you bning it down?" Ben turned and sat down at the table next to the checker game, and stretched his legs in the sunlight. He raised thick brows like clumps of steel-wool at Tom and at old Jim Liddel, who sat in his pillowed armchair like a thin, scowling, bald, mansized spider. "You keep talking so high and mighty," Tom said, "we'll carry you out o' here and take you and dump you in the creek. You can tell the fish about who got the plane." "Still arguing over who planted the shot, huh," Ben grinned. "Regular feud, you two." "Well, hell, Ben," Tom said, and bit down on his gums so his whiskers almost hid the end of his nose. "I just get filled up on this old windbag hollering how he -- " "You go call me a windbag once more, Tom Pace," Jim Liddel said, and he stirred his all but helpless body in the armchair, "you're gonna have a sore eye, you seventy year old whippersnapper. I brung it down." "In a hog's behind, you brung it down. Mister Dan'l Boone!" "It 'us just after I let loose it started smoking," old Jim snarled, "and nobody else was shooting right then! You're gonna get a sore eye, I swear -- tobacco in it. I can spit to where you sit, and I can spit faster'n you can move, I bet, unless you're faster'n a fly, and you ain't. You just ask anybody who was there... it 'us just after I shot it started -- " Tom Pace thumped the table. " was there, you old... now, now, Jim, don't spit, for Godsake! Hold on. What I mean, I was there too. and maybe somebody's shot from a second or two before was what done the trick. Maybe even my shot! Takes a plane a while to know it's hurt, don't it? Ever think o' that?" "Maybe," Ben Bates said. "Maybe, maybe. And maybe. Let it go, you two. It ain't important who done it; we oughta just be grateful we got it." "Grateful I got it," Jim Liddel grunted. Tom Pace said, "Now, looky here, Jim -- " Ben Bates nudged Tom's leg under the table; and then slowly, fingering his jaw he said, "Well, now, Jim... I figure maybe you did, at that. Like you say, it smoked and crashed right after you shot, so I always kind o' figured it was you brought it down. But that's a hard thing to prove." Jim snorted. "Can't prove it! But I got it, all right. A man knows when he sunk a shot." "In a varmint, maybe," Tom Pace objected, "or a man. But you claiming to know where to hit a plane the worst?" "We was all shooting at the front, up where they put the motor," Jim said nastily. "Don't know about planes, but I know my aim. I got it square-on." "Well," Ben said, "why don't you just let it lay, eh, Tom? Jim's got a lot on his side." He looked sidewise at old Jim, and saw that Jim was still scowling at Tom. Old Jim was ninety eight, and some set in his notions. "Mm. Hell," Tom said reluctantly, after a second, "I ain't saying you didn't, Jim. That ain't my intent. I just get burned when you yell you did, like no man dared say you was wrong. Sure, maybe you're mit you might be wrong too?" Jim Liddel yelled, and from the checker table came Windy Harris's encouraging, "You tell 'em who got that plane, Jim!" Ben Bates scraped an inch of ash off his cigar against the tableedge, sighed and got up. He looked down at the glowering pair and said, "Well, come the next plane, if there is one, we'll shove a rifle in your hand, Jim, and see how good your eye is. You too, Tom. Till that time, reckon this is no place for a reasoning man." "Sit down, Ben Bates," old Jim snarled. "If you're a reasoning man, sit down. Be glad to talk to one, after Tom here goes away." "You go to hell. I ain't going no place," Tom said, and he picked up the cards and started shuffling them in his stiff hands. Ben sat down and stretched out his legs again. After a second, old Jim said wistfully, "You know, I wish I could still handle a rifle, Ben. Or do anything but sit. No way for a man to live, to have dead legs and dying arms." He shifted in his cushions. "You know, I reckon when I start to really die -- die all over -- I'm gonna get up out o' this chair. I'll stand up, somehow, even if it kills me faster. A man oughta fall when he dies, like a tree, so they know he stood up in his time. A man oughtn'ta die sitting down." "Sure, Jim," Ben said. "You're right about that." "Never had a sick day in my life, until they dropped that bomb. Why, I could outpitch and outchop and outshoot any of you whippersnappers, until they... Old Jim walloped the chair arm. "Damn, I made up for it, though! Didn't I? They put me in a chair, I sat in it and I got me an airyplane, and that's more'n they could do to me, by golly, they couldn't kill me!" "Sure, Jim," Ben said. "And when my time comes, I'll be up and out o' this chair. Man oughta fall and make a noise when he dies." "Sure, Jim," Ben said. "But that's a long ways off, ain't it?" Jim closed his eyes, and his face looked like a skull. "You squirts always think a man lives forever." F rom outside came the late morning sounds: the murmuring of Smoky Greek at the edge of town, under its cool tunnel of willows; the twittering of a flock of robins circling above; the constant soft rustle of the trees that crowded the green hills around. From the warehouse down by the tracks came the faint sounds of livestock -- and the voices of the men whose job it was to look after them this week : to feed them, turn them out into the big pens for an hour's sunlight, then drive them bajk into the warehouse again. Lucky the warehouse had stood the bomb -- it was perfect for the use. "Wonder how the war's going," Tom Pace said. He dropped some cards and bent painfully to retrieve them; his voice was muffled: "I just wonder how it's going, you than who today. "Maybe," Tom continued, coming up, "it's all over. Ain't seen no planes for couple years now. Maybe somebody won." Ben shrugged. "Who knows. Don't matter none to us. We're ready as we can be if another plane comes around. Other than that, it ain't our concern." "Darn tootin'," Tom said, and pushed the cards together and started shuffling again. Jim Liddel said, "War!" and looked like he'd bit into spoiled meat. "Never settled nothing... just makes the biggest dog top-dog for a while, so he can get his way. Man, I wish I could still lift a rifle, if an airyplane come around! I'd love to get me another one." He put his thin back against the cushions and pushed at the edge of the table with his hands. Jim's fingers didn't move so well any more ; some were curled and some were straight out, and the joints were different sizes, and now they were trembling a little. "Sometimes when I think o' Johnny and Helen and all the kids -- when I think o' that day, and those damn bombs, and that white tower o' smoke up over the town, I... oh, godamighty, I'd love to see another airyplane! I'd shout and yell and pray; I'd pray almighty God for you to get it!" Ben pulled on his cigar with stiff lips, and said slowly, "Well, we might, Jim. We just might. Two out o' seven ain't bad." He puffed out smoke. "We been running in luck, so far, what with nobody ever coming back loaded for bear. Reckon that means the other five didn't see us, low as they was; probably didn't even know they was being shot at." "They musta found bulletholes, though," Tom Pace said. "Afterwards. Not a chance we'd all miss -- " he bobbed his beard at old Jim -- " 'specially with Dan'l Boone here plugging away. They'd know they was shot at, all right. Might even find rifle bullets." "Maybe they did," Ben said. "Nobody ever come snooping back, though." "Wouldn't know where to, would they?" Windy Harris said. He and Fat Sam Hogan had stopped playing checkers, and had been listening. "Smoky Creek looks dead as Sodom. Buildings all down, and stuff knee-deep in the streets. Bridge down, and the road out. And the valley is way the hell out o' the way... no call for them to suspect it more'n anyplace else. Less, even. They'd likely figure somebody took a potshot from a hill... and there's a pack o' hills between here'n outside. "Looks like," Ben said. "We just got to keep it that way. We got a good plan: if the plane's up high, we just freeze under cover; if it comes down low a time or two, we figure we're likely spotted and start shooting. We shoot, and maybe it shoots too, and we pray." "It's a good plan," Jim Liddel said, looking out the window. "We got two." Windy Harris got up and stretched out his arms. "Two ain't enough old Jim said bitterly. "Well," Windy said, "I hope we keep on getting 'em -- them as sees us, anyway. Hope nobody ever knows we're here. It's peaceful here. Way off by ourselves, nothing to do but get up and go to bed, and do what we want in between." He sent tobacco juice into the cuspidor by the door. "Right now, me, I guess I'll go fishing down by the creek -- promised Maude I'd bring home a cat or two for supper. Anybody come along?" Tom Pace shook his head, and old Jim looked like he'd like to go, if he only could -- and Ben said, "Maybe I'll be down a little while later. Windy. Keep to the trees." Windy left, and Tom Pace shuffled the cards and looked over at Jim Liddel. "You going to play with Ben and me, you old windbag, or you going to keep bragging so loud a man can't stand your company?" "Why, you whippersnapper," Jim growled, "you just go ahead and run 'em. Reckon a reasoning man and a nitwit's about the best I can do right now." Tom dealt out two cards, and said, "War!" without dealing out the rest. He looked at Ben, his eyes cloudy. "Got a cigar, Ben?" Ben handed one over and held a match, and Tom got it going, puffing longer than he had to, like he didn't want to talk yet. Then he said, "It didn't have to happen." He worked the cigar over to the corner of his mouth and settled it in the nest of stained whiskers there. "None of it had to happen -- what happened here, and whatever happened outside the valley. It just didn't have to happen." " 'Course it didn't," Ben said. "Never has to. It just always does. Some people got reasons to let it happen, and some ain't got the sense not to." Fat Sam Hogan said, "I don't figure there's anything in the world a man can't sit down and talk out, instead o' reaching for a gun. Don't know why that oughtn'ta hold for countries." Ben Bates looked at one of the two cards Tom Pace had dealt -- his hole card. It was a four, and he lost interest. "Yup," he said, "it holds all right... they'll just both reach half the time anyway. One war on top of another. Even one right after this one, ten years or so, if this one's over. I just bet. Every country wants a piece out o' the next one's hide -- or his poke -- and they won't give an inch except in talk ; they won't really buckle down to stop a war. Never. Not if they can't get what they want by talk." He looked at the card again, just in case -- a four, sure enough. "Only time there's never a war is when everybody has what they want, or figure they can get it without killing somebody. But the second they see that's the only way, then it's war. War, war, war. It's a rotten cide who's right or wrong... damn little say about it. But I seen three-four wars now, and they don't look to stop soon, judging." He shook his head wonderingly. "Put half the money they spend on killing toward curing, instead, and helping them that wants, and finding out all about diseases and such... why, shucks, it'd be a brandnew world." "I seen five," Jim Liddel said. "I seen wars come and go. I fought in one. Afterwards, every time, they say everything's fine. The war to save this or that's over, and things are fine. Then somebody wants something somebody else has, and they're at it again, like two bulls trying to hump the same heifer. Bulls don't have enough sense to know there's enough cows to go around; but people ought. It's a big enough world." He worked those hands of his together until they were clasped, and he pushed them that way against the tableedge until the overgrown knuckles looked like chalk. "When I think o' that noise, and that cloud,... how we come running and screaming back here into all the dust and mess, and all them bodies... I... Ben, I..." "You lost heavy, Jim," Ben said. He let smoke out of his lungs, and it curled off into the broad beam of sunlight that came through the window, and it looked like the smoke that had shadowed a murdered town. "Heavy. You lost heavier'n any of us." "You can't count it," old Jim said, and the chalk was whiter. "We all lost the same; I just had more of it. Our kids and their kids -- and their kids... lost heavy? What can a man lose more'n his life?... And if you're as old as us, what's your life except the family you made out o' your own flesh? What else's a man got when he's eighty or a hundred?" Tom Pace said, "Ruth and Dave and their kids. I remember little Davey. He called me Tom Peach. I bought him a toy plane for his birthday. That was a couple days before the real planes come. I buried it with him... I think. I think it was him I put it with. It mighta been Joey... they looked alike." "A man ain't nothing, when he's as old as us," Jim Liddel said, his skull sockets closed, "except what he done. He ain't much any more, himself; he's mostly what he done with his life, whatever he done and left around that he can point to and say, 'I did that', that's all. And what's he got left if they take that away? We can't make it again. We made Smoky Greek; built it; wasn't a thing here that didn't come out o' us or ours. We made the valley, after God give it to us; wasn't a thing here we didn't let live or help live or make live. We made our families, and watched 'em fit into the town and the valley, like the valley fits into the world, and we watched 'em go on doing what we done before them: building and working and planting and raising families -- going on, like people got to go on. That's the way it was. That's what we had. Until they dropped the bomb and killed it -- killed all we done that made us men." Tears were squeezing out of the skull sockets, and Ben Bates caught Tom Pace's eye and looked away, out the window, at the green walls of the valley that was a coffin. "I just wish an airyplane would come around again," old Jim said. " -- just -- wish. You know, Ben?" Ben tried to talk and had to clear his throat; he put out his cigar in the ashtray, as if that was what was wrong with his throat, and said, "I know, Jim. Sure. And maybe you'll get your wish." He pushed back his chair and tried to grin, but it came out sour. "Maybe you will, you old fire-eater -- and what if one comes and we get spotted and it shoots us up or goes back and tells everybody we're here? That's one wish we don't want the good Lord to grant, ain't it? Ain't it, now?" Jim didn't say anything. Ben got up and said, " 'Bout noon. Guess I'll go home for a bite and then go down and fish with Windy." Jim said, thinly, "I meant, I wish one would come and we'd get it." "Well, maybe one will," Ben said, turning toward the door. "They built a slew o' them. And maybe we will, if it does." the Town Hall to listen carefully, his sharp old eyes half-shut. Behind him, at the far end of the room, somebody made a ringer, and Dave Mason said, "Nice, Owen," in his reedy voice. Ben listened and didn't hear what he was listening for. He stepped past the rifle that leaned beside the door and made his way to the end of the porch, walking close to the wall. The summer sun stood at noon, and the porch was in shadow; beyond, the street was a jumble of boards and broken glass, its canyon walls of leaning building-fronts and sagging porches, its caverns of empty windows and doorways shimmering in the heat. You couldn't see much dirt along the way; where the debris didn't come to your knees, it reached over your head. At the end of the porch Ben stopped and listened again; heard nothing. He stepped down and walked as fast as he could -- damn arthritis again -- to the porch of the next building. This had been Fat Sam Hogan's Hardware Store, and about all that was left of it was the porch; the rest was a twisted mess of wood that slumped away to the ground at the rear. The porch had been down too, right after the bombing -- but the old men, working at night, had raised it and braced it up. Something to walk under. A Springfield stood, oiled and waiting, against the wall. Ben paused and touched the barrel -- it was his own. Or rather it had once been his own ; now it was the town's, strictly speaking, to be used by whoever was nearest it when the time came. It was a good gun, a straight-shooter, one of the best -- which was why it was here instead of at his house. A man could get a better shot from here. He went on, hugging the wall. He passed a rifle wedged up between the fender and hood of Norm Henley's old Model A, and he remembered how the bomb had flipped the car right over on its top, and how the car must have protected Norm from the blast -- just a little. Enough so they found him two blocks up the street, in front of his mashed house, trailing blood from every hole in him, to get to his family before he died. Ben passed rifles leaned against walls and chairs on porches, rifles standing behind trees, leaned in the cracks between what buildings still stood to provide cracks, even old Jim's carbine lying under the ledge of the pump-trough in front of Mason's General Store. All of them in places where they were protected from rain or snow, but where they were easy to get at. He passed sixteen rifles -- walking, as everybody walked when they were out of doors, as close to the walls of the buildings as possible. When you had to cross open spaces you ran as fast as your seventy or eighty year old legs would take you -- and if you couldn't run, you walked real fast. And always you listened while you walked ; particularly you listened before you went out. For planes. So you wouldn't be spotted from the air. At the end of the porch of the last building on the street, Ben paused in the shade and looked out across the creek to where the first plane they'd shot down had crashed -- the one Jim claimed to have got by his lonesome. They'd buried what they found of the pilot, and cleared away every last bolt and nut and scrap of aluminum, but the long scar in the ground remained. Ben looked at it, all broken up by rocks and flowers and bushes the old people had transplanted so it wouldn't show from the air; and he looked at the cemetery a hundred feet beyond at which the scar pointed like an arrow -- the cemetery that wasn't a cemetery, because it didn't have headstones; just bodies. A town that was dead shouldn't have a lot of new graves -- the dead don't bury themselves. A pilot might see a hundred graves he hadn't seen before and wonder -- and strafe. So Ben looked at the flat ground where those hundred bodies lay, with only small rocks the size of a man's fist with names scratched on them to mark who lay beneath; and he thought of his daughter May, and Owen Urey's son George who'd married May, and their three kids, and he remembered burying them there; he remembered their faces. The blood from eyes, nose, ears, mouth -- his blood it was, part of it. Then Ben looked up. "We ain't looking for trouble," he said to the empty blue bowl of sky. "But if you do come, we're ready. Every day we're ready. If you stay up high, we'll hide. But if you come down low, we'll try to get you, you crazy murderers." yards farther on; he got there by sticking under the trees, walking quickly from one to the next, his ears cocked for the jetsound that would flatten him against a trunk. Way off to his left, across a long flat of sunflowers and goldenrod, he saw Windy Harris down on the creekbank, by the bridge. He yelled, "They biting?" -- and Windy's faint "Got two!" reminded him of all old Jim had said, and he shook his head. He left the trees and walked fast up his front path. His house was in pretty good shape. All four houses on the outskirts had come off standing -- his and Windy's and Jim's and Owen Urey's. They'd needed just a little bracing here and there, and they were fine -- except Owen's. Owen had stomped around in his, and listened to the sounds of it, and said he didn't trust it -- and sure enough, the first big storm it had gone down. Now Ben and his wife Susan lived downstairs in his house; Joe Kincaid and his wife Anna lived on the second floor; and Tom Pace lived in the attic, claiming that climbing the stairs was good for his innards. Anna Kincaid was sitting on the porch-swing, peeling potatoes. Ben said, "Afternoon, Anna," and saw her pale bright eyes flicker up at him, and that scared smile touched her mouth for just a second; then she hunched her shoulders and kept on with the potatoes, like he wasn't even there. Ben thought, It must be lonely to he that way -- and he attracted her attention again, his voice a little louder: "Hope you're feeling fine, Anna." Again the flicker of eyes. "Just fine, Ben, thanks," she said, almost in a whisper. "Peeling spuds." "I see." Her knife sped over a potato, removing a spiral of skin. She popped out an eye with a twist of the point. "Think Keith'll be back from the war today, Ben? It's been so long... I hate to think o' my boy fighting out there so long. Will they let him come home soon, Ben?" "They will, Anna. I think they will, real soon. Maybe tomorrow." "ITi they? "Sure." Keith Kincaid was under one of those fist-sized rocks, out in the cemetery that wasn't a cemetery -- next to his wife, June Hogan, and their four kids. But Anna Kincaid didn't know that. Since the bomb, Anna hadn't known much of anything except what the old people told her, and they told her only things that would make her as happy as she could be: that Keith was in the Army, and June was off with the kids having a nice time in Knoxville; and that they'd all be back home in a day or so. Anna never wondered about that "day or so" -- she didn't remember much from day to day. Joe Kincaid sometimes said that helped a little, as much as anything could. He could tell her the same nice things every day, and her eyes would light up all over again. He spent a lot of time with her, doing that. He was pretty good at it, too... Joe Kincaid had been Doctor Joe before the bomb. He still doctored some, when he could, but he was almost out of supplies; and what with his patients being so old, he mostly just prayed for them. In the kitchen, Susan had lunch ready and waiting -- some chicken from last night, green beans, boiled potatoes and a salad from the tiny gardens the women tended off in the weedy ground and around the bases of trees where they wouldn't be seen. On the way in Ben had noticed that the woodbox was about empty -- he'd have to bring home another bag of charcoal from the "general store" -- which was Windy's barn, all braced up. Into it the old people had taken every bit of clothing, canned food, hardware, anything at all they could use in the way of housekeeping and everyday living, and there it all stood; when somebody needed something, they went and took it. Only the canned foods and tobacco and liquor were rationed. Every week or so, around midnight. Fat Sam Hogan and Dan Paray went into the big cave in Lawson's Hill, right near where the second plane had crashed, and set up a lot of small fires, back where the light wouldn't be seen; they made charcoal, and when it cooled they brought it down to the "store," for cooking and such -- a charcoal fire doesn't give off much smoke. Over coffee, Ben said, "Reckon I'll fish some this afternoon, honey. How's a cat or two for supper sound?" "Why, goodness, Ben, not for tonight," Susan smiled. "You know tonight's the Social; me and Anna are fixing a big dinner -- steaks and all the trimmings." "Mm," Ben said, draining his cup. "Forgot today was Sunday." "We're going to have some music, and Owen Urey's going to read Shakespeare." Ben pursed his lips, tasting the coffee. It was rationed to two cups a day; he always took his with his lunch, and sometimes he'd have sold a leg to dive into a full pot. "Well... I might as well fish anyway; take in some fun. Fish'll keep till tomorrow, won't it?" "You can have it for breakfast." She sat down across the table and picked up the knitting she'd been on when Ben came home; he had a hunch it was something for his birthday, so he tried not to look interested; too early to tell what it was, anyway. "Ben," she said, "before you go -- the curtain pole in the bay window come down when I was fixing the blankets over it for tonight. The socket's loose. You better fix it before you go. You'll maybe get home after Anna and me want to light the lamps, and we can't do it till it's fixed." Ben said, "Sure, hon." He got the hammer and some nails from the toolbox and went into the parlor, and dragged the piano bench over in front of the bay window. The iron rod was leaning by the phonograph. He took it up with him on the chair and fitted the other end of it into the far socket, then fitted the near end into the loose socket, and drove nails around the base of the socket until the thing was solid as a rock. Then he got the blanket from the couch and hung it down double over the rod, and fitted the buttonholes sewn all along its edge over the nails driven around the window casing, and patted it here and there until not a speck of light would escape when the lamps were lit. He inspected the blankets draped over the other windows; they were all right. The parlor was pretty dark now, so he struck a match to the oil lamp on the mantle, just so Susan and Anna could see to set the table. When the others arrived, they'd light the other lamps; but not until; oil was precious. The only time anybody in town ever lit a lamp was on Social night: then the old people stayed up till around midnight for eats and entertainment; otherwise everybody got to bed at eight or so, and climbed out with the dawn. He went back into the kitchen and put away the hammer, and said, "My second cup still hot, honey?" She started to put down her knitting and get up, and he said, "Just asking," and pressed her shoulder till she sat again. He went around her and filled his cup at the stove. "Ben," she said, when he sat down again, "I wish you'd take a look at the phonograph too. Last time the turntable made an awful lot of noise... I wish it could sound better for tonight." "I know, honey," Ben sighed. "That motor's going. There ain't much I can do about it, though. It's too old. I'm scared to take it apart; might not get it back together right. When it really quits, then I guess I'll fool around and see what I can do. Heck, it didn't sound too bad." "It rattled during the soft parts of the music." Ben shook his head. "If I try, I might ruin it for good." He smiled a little. "It's like us, Suse -- too old to really fix up much; just got to keep cranking it, and let it go downhill at its own pace." Susan folded her knitting and got up. She came around the table, and he put an arm around her waist and pulled her into the chair beside him. "It'll go soon, won't it, Ben?" she said softly. "Then we won't have any music. It's a shame... we all like to listen so much. It's peaceful." "I know." He moved his arm up and squeezed her thin shoulders. She put her head on his shoulder, and her grey hair tickled his cheek ; he closed his eyes, and her hair was black and shining again, and he put his lips against it and thought he smelled a perfume they didn't even make any more. After a moment he said, "We got so much else, though, Suse... we got peaceful music you can't play on a machine. Real peace. A funny kind of peace. In a funnylooking town, this one -- a rag town. But it's ours, and it's quiet, and there's nothing to bother us -- and just pray God we can keep it that way. Outside, the war's going on someplace, probably. People fighting each other over God knows what -- if even He knows. Here, it's peaceful." She moved her head on his shoulder. "Ben -- will it ever come here, what's going on outside? Even the war, if it's still going on?" "Well, we were talking about that this morning down at the hall, Suse. I guess it won't. If rifles can stop it, it won't. If they see us from the air, we'll shoot at 'em; and if we get 'em we'll clean up the mess so if anybody comes looking for a missing plane, they won't give Smoky Creek a second look. That's the only way anything can come, honey -- if they see us from the air. Nobody's going to come hiking over these mountains. There's noplace they'd want to get to, and it's sure no country for fighting." "If the war is over, they'll likely be around to fix up the bridge and the road. Won't they?" "Maybe so. Sooner or later." "Oh, I hope they leave us alone." "Don't worry, hon." "Ben -- about the phonograph -- " "Suse..." He turned his head to look at her eyes. "It's good for longer'n we are. That motor. So's the bridge, the way it is, and the road... we'll be gone first. Before they get around to fix 'em. Before the phonograph gives out. What we want is going to last us -- and what we don't want will come too late to hurt us. Nothing's going to hurt our peace. I know that somehow. We got it, and it'll be like this for as long as we're here to enjoy it... I know "Ben -- " "If I want to go fishing," Ben said, and pressed her head against his shoulder again, "I go. If I want to relax with the men, I do it. If I want to just walk and breathe deep, I do it -- keeping to the trees, o' course. If I want to just be with you, I do it. It's quiet. It's real quiet in our rag town. It's a world for old people. It's just the way we want it, to live like we want to live. We got enough gardens and livestockj and all the canned stuff in the store, to last us for a... for as long as we got. And no worries. About who's fighting who over what. About who won. About how the international mess is getting worse again, and we better make more bombs for the next one. About who's winning here and losing there and running neck-andneck someplace else. We don't know any things like that, and we don't want to know. It don't matter none to us... we're too old, and we seen too much of it, and it's hurt us too bad, and we know it just don't matter at all." "Ben... I got to crying today. About May and George and the children. I was crying, and thinking about that day... "So did I think. None of us ever forgets for a minute. For a second." His lips thinned. "That's part of why we do what we do. Rest is, we just want to be left alone." They sat in silence for a moment, his arm around her shoulders, his other hand holding hers. Then he released her hand and thumped his own on the table, grinned at her and said, "Life goes on, now! Reckon I'll go down and get that cat -- or go walking -- or just go soak in some sun. What time are the folks showing up for -- " Jetsound slammed across the peaceful valley. B en got up and walked as fast as he could to the door, picked up the rifle leaning there, cocked it. Looking toward town he saw that Tom Pace had been on his way home, and the sound had caught him between trees. Tom hesitated, then turned and dived toward the tree he'd just left -- because a rifle was there, Ben saw men pour out of the doorways of the two habitable buildings on Main Street ; they stuck close to the walls, under the porches, and they picked up rifles. Motionless, hidden, in shadows, under trees, in doorways, behind knotholes, they waited. To see if the plane would buzz the town again. It did. It came down low over Main Street while the thunders of its first pass still echoed and rolled. Frightening birds out of trees, driving a hare frantically along the creekbank, blotting out the murmur of the creek and the tree-sounds, driving away peace. They saw the pilot peering through the plexiglass, down at the buildings... he was past the town in four winks ; but in two they knew that he was curious, and would probably come back for a third look. He circled wide off over the end of the valley, a vertical bank that brought a blinding flash of sunlight from one wing, and he came back. Ben leveled his rifle and centered the nose of the plane in his sights. For some reason -- probably because the valley walls crowded the town on both sides -- the planes always lined up with Main Street when they flew low over the town. The plane grew at startling speed in Ben's sights -- it loomed, and the oval jet intake was a growling mouth -- and he waited till it was about two seconds and a thousand feet from him; then he sent his bullet up into that mouth: a bullet aimed by a man who'd handled a rifle for sixty years, who could pop the head off a squirrel at a hundred feet. A running squirrel. That was the signal, Ben's shot. From under the tree Tom Pace's rifle spoke. The jet was past town then, and he wheeled to follow it with his eyes; its whining thunder lashed down and pressed his ears, lowering suddenly in pitch as it receded ; and though he couldn't hear them for the thunder, he knew that nineteen rifles had roared before it completed its turn, each aimed head-on at the plane. Aimed by men and women who could shoot with Ben, and even outshoot him. The plane coughed. Lurched. It had time to emit a fuzzy thread of black smoke before it nosed down and melted into the ground and became a long ugly smear of mounds and shreds and tatters of flame. The sounds of the crash died. Ben heard men shouting; loudest of all was old Jim Liddel's, "Got him... by God, I prayed, and we got him!" Behind him Susan was crying. Ben saw men and women head for the crash-site; immediately they'd start to carry away what debris wasn't too hot to handle. Then they'd wait, and as soon as anything was cool enough it would be carried off and hidden. And there'd be a burial tonight. Ben saw that some of the men had carried old Jim's chair out onto the porch of the Town Hall; and he saw that Jim was half-standing out of his cushions, propped up on his fists and still shouting; and Ben wondered if the Maker wasn't on the porch there with Jim, waiting for Jim to fall and make his noise. He turned away -- at seventy you don't want to see a man die -- and went inside and put his rifle on the kitchen table. He crossed to the cabinet under the sink to get his reamer and oiling rag. Every rifle was taken care of that way. Right now Tom Pace and Dan Paray were hurrying around gathering rifles to clean them, load them. No rifle must miss fire, or throw a bullet an inch off aim -- because that might be the rifle whose aim was right. "Lucky we got that one," he said. "I think he saw us, Suse... he come in low and sudden, and I think he saw us." "Was -- was it one of theirs, Ben... or one of ours?" "Don't know. I didn't even look. I can't tell 'em apart. Owen'll be around to tell me when they find out... but I reckon it was one of ours. If he saw us and didn't shoot, then I reckon it was one of ours. Like the last one." "Oh, Ben' Susan said. "Ben, ain't it against God?" Ben stood looking out the window over the sink ; watching a cloud of yellow dust settle over the wreckage of the plane, and a cloud of black smoke rising from the wreckage to darken the yellow. He knew some of the men would be passing buckets from the well, and spading dirt on the flames where they weren't too hot to get to. "That's the way it is," he said. "That's how we decided. God didn't stop the bomb dropping, Suse... for whatever reasons He had. It don't seem He'd deny us the right to shoot rifles, for the reasons we got. If we get turned away at the Gates, we'll know we was wrong. But I don't think so." Quiet was returning to the valley; the birds had already started singing again. You could hear the trees. From the direction of the creek came Windy Harris, running, and he broke the quiet with a shout as he saw Ben by the window: "Got it, huh, Ben?" "Sure did," Ben said, and Windy ran on. Ben looked toward the porch of the Town Hall. Old Jim had sunk back into his pillowed chair, and he was shaking his fist, and Ben could hear him yelling, "Got it... got it, we did!" Hell be around for a while yet, old Jim, Ben thought, and turned back to the table. He sat down and listened to the sounds of the valley, and his eyes were the eyes of the valley -- they'd seen a lot, and understood enough of it. "It don't matter whose it was," he said. "All of a cloth." He slid the reamer into the barrel of the rifle, and worked it. "The hell with the war. Even if it's over, the hell with it. With any war. Nothing's ever going to give us back what we lost. Let 'em stay away, all them that's to blame. Them and their planes and wars and bombs... they're crazy!" His lips curled as he worked the reamer. "Let 'em stay out o' what they left us for lives. Don't want to hear what they're doing, or how, or why, or who... don't want to hear about it. It'd be crazy. The hell with 'em. All o' them. The hell with the whole Twentieth Century"    to rebuild the life many of you may remember. It will be difficult at first. But time will teach us many things. Each of us has something to give the other. Go home now, and tomorrow we will begin again to find the dreams we first dreamed when we built Dreamtown." The people sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then a cheer, lonely and overloud in the silence, went up from a man in the crowd. A woman ran from the crowd and seized a child from the group standing huddled to one side of the Playground square. The woman was followed by two other women who did the same thing, and soon the silence was broken by the loud and excited talking of the great crowd of people. "So much will have to be taught to these people," Professor Corbett whispered as he watched the people file out of the Playground. Dan held Nancy in his arms as he spoke. "We must teach them to hold elections instead of blindly following self appointed leaders." "We'll build schools and publishing houses again," Professor Corbett said happily. "And baseball diamonds and football fields." "There's such a long way to go." "We'll begin tomorrow."    It was part of a picture in part of a building that had once been the Louvre. And somewhere back in his lost memory, it was also a name for "Whitey"... Illustrated by Ed Emsh place 'Lutetia Parisiorum', which means 'the mud town of the Parissii', Later on people got around to calling it 'the city of light " Marty Coleman was saying. "Well, Julius was sure as hell a lot closer to the truth than those others," I tell him. We was sitting in the mud in what's left of some big building and me and Joe White was listening to Marty, our Sergeant, talking like he always does. When I says the sergeant was talking I mean he was talking over the C.C., the Company Communication Circuit because what with having our mecho-armor on and the other side raising a little hell, we couldn't of heard him any other way. "Yeah, I guess you're right, Ward. There isn't much light around here anymore," Coleman admitted. "The only light you ever see around here these days is a flare or a rocket going over," White says in that funny flat voice of his. From time to time Coleman would lift the headpiece of his armor above the pile of rubble in front of us and take a quick look out over the big open square toward where the enemy was holed up on the other side. About half the time he'd draw small arm or automatic fire. "Those birds must have infrared eyepieces too," he says as he sets down. "Ah they ain't even got mechoarmor," I says. "No, but they have body armor and helmets with quite a bit of stuff in them." "I'll bet they ain't got anything like we got." I was feeling pretty fine right then thinking how much better off we was than the poor joes in the infantry. We don't just fight in our suits, we live in 'em. They ain't only a mechanized suit of armor, they're our barracks, messroom and latrine and all radiation and rain proof. We got more fire power than a company of infantry and more radio equipment than a tank. "You know there's lots worse ways of fighting a war," I says. "You climb into one of these babies and they seal you up like a sardine but at least you're warm and dry and you don't even have to use your own feet to walk. You got a nice little atomic power pack to move you around." "You couldn't move the legs of one of these things if you had to," the Sergeant says. "It... it just seems like a kind of funny way to fight a war," White says, talking like he always did, as though he had to hunt for every word before he said it. "What's funny about it? They been fighting it this way for ten years, haven't they?" I demands. "I guess so... I don't know... "Yeah, ten years. And the last five of it we've spent crawling back and forth in what used to be Paris," the sergeant was talking again. "Just think... in the old wars they used to call it Gay Paree." "It's gay all right," I says, following a movement on my ground radar screen. A beep had shown up, indicating activity over where the enemy was. Their guns was silent now but across the mud pools came their voices, voices that from time to time cut in on our circuits and competed with the voices of our own side. Suddenly a girl was talking, a girl with a soft voice that was like warm lips against your ear. "Hello there, you fellows across the line. It's not much fun being here is it? Especially when you know that some non-draft back in the hometown walked off with your girl a long time ago. "Honey Chile," the voice went on, "this is your old gal, Sally May, and I know how you all feel 'cause I used to be on the same side myself until I found out how things are over here in the Peoples Federal Democratic Eastern Republics..." The bleat of a code message cut through the syrupy tones, tore at our ears for a few moments and faded away. Slowly the sweet voice drifted back. "Well, fellows, we're gonna play you some real homey music in a few minutes, but first we're gonna tell you all about our contest. We know you all Yankee boys like contests and this one is a real humdinger. "This here contest is open to every GI over there in the mechounits. And have we got prizes? why, honey, we sure have! Listen to this big first prize: # dollars in gold! And then we have an expense paid vacation in the scenic Crimea and a brand new factory special Stalin sportscar. And fellows, get this : A TV appearance on a nationwide hookup with a dinner date afterwards with glamorous Sonia Nickolovich, the famous ballerina. "Now I guess you boys are wonderin' what you gotta do to win these wonderful prizes. Well, this is how easy it is. All you gotta do is write out a thousand word statement on 'How my mecho-armor works' and deliver it along with your armor to the nearest P.F.D.E.R. army unit. Now... isn't that easy? And this contest is open to everyone but agents of the P.F.D.E.R. and their relatives." The soft voice faded away. "Why... the dirty -- What do they think we are?" Just on general principles I sent a half-dozen # mm shells in the direction of their lines. "I don't -- think I -- understand that at all. What are they trying to do?" White asks. "I thought the enemy was Reds." "You're in pretty bad shape, ain't you buddy?" I laughs. "Can't you even remember who you're fighting?" "Leave him alone, will you. Ward," the sergeant orders. "If you had been brain washed as many times as he has you'd have trouble remembering things too." "Whatta ya mean?" Sarge swung the big headpiece of his armor around and looked at White through his electric eyes. "How many times you been captured, Whitey?" he asks. "I... I don't know, Sarge. I don't remember. Twice... I guess." "That's two brain washings from the enemy and two rewashings from our own psycho units. Four electronic brain washings don't leave much in a man's brain." "Well, I'll be damned. Which side was you on first, Whitey?" I asks. "I don't know... I don't remember." 'Ah come on now, you must know. Was you a Russian or an American? Western Democratic Peoples Federal Republics or Peoples Federal Democratic Eastern Republics -- which side?" "I... don't know. All I know is that they ain't good and we got to fight them until we kill all of them." "How do you know they ain't good?" I demands. "If you don't know which side you was on to start with, maybe you was shootin' at your own brothers this morning... or your mother." "You better watch your mouth. Ward. There might be a Loyalty Officer tuned in on the band. You wouldn't want a probe, would you?" Coleman asks. "Ah, they ain't listenin', Sarge. don't know nothin' but how to run that damn armor and how to fight. He don't even know who he was to start with." "I wish I did know... I wish I..." "You know, Whitey, maybe you was a big shot on the other side. Maybe you was Joe Stalin's grandson or something. Remember!" an eager voice whispered in our ears. 'Remember what you are fighting for. In the machines than in any place else in the world!" I had to laugh. "You ever seen a washing machine, Sarge?" I asks. Coleman was looking back toward our lines. "Yeah. There used to be a place called Brooklyn that was full of 'em. You know, there's something going on back there. The whole company seems to be moving up. And there's a big armored crawler there with a smaller one parked beside it." He sits back down with a clanking of armor. "Must be some big shots coming around to see how we're winning the war." "I wish someone would use a can opener on me right now and take me out of this walking sardine can and plump me into a washing machine. I ain't been clean in five years," I says. "Do they have washing machines on the other side?" Whitey wants to know. "Naw. They ain't got nothin' like that, nothin' at all," I tells him. "Things like washing machines is reserved for us capitalists." "If we got washing machines and they ain't, then what are we fighting for?" Whitey asks. "You better ask the Sarge that. He's the intellectual around here. He reads all the comic books and things." "Why do you think we're fighting, Whitey?" Coleman asks. "Well, Sarge... I don't know. If I could just remember who I used to be, I'd know. Sometime I'm gonna remember. Every once in a while I can almost... but then I don't." "Well, why do you think we're fighting?" I asks. "Well... well... I guess it's that there's bad guys and good guys ,... just like in the comics or on the TV shows. We're the good guys and they're the bad guys. Is that right, Sarge?" "I don't know, Whitey. That might be some of it but I kinda think that maybe it has something to do with when we won the last war or thought we won it. We thought we had finished with the Nazi's but I guess maybe we got fooled. In Europe the Nazi's all turned Communist and in America the Commies all turned Nazi. Either way people like them have always got the jump on the joes in between. In Europe they pointed at them and called them Nazi's. In America they pointed at them and called them Reds. Pretty soon people didn't know the difference, except that it was better to be pointing than to be pointed at." "Now, Sarge, you're the one that better careful. You wouldn't want the Loyalty Officer to be hearing that sort of talk, would you?" I cuts in. "Maybe you're right but I kinda think that that's why ,..." cuit in our helmets opened up with orders for us to pull back and join the rest of the company. All the way back Whitey doesn't say anything so I figure he's trying to remember who he is. Well, we gets back to the command post without drawing more than a little small arms fire and a couple of rockets, but things is really popping there. The big crawler Coleman seen from our outpost is settin' there in the middle of the street and the whole company is gathered around it. "What's goin' on?" I say as I sidle up beside Fred Dobshanski. "Don't you guys know? There's a big drive cornin' up. General Mac self."  Whitey was right beside me. He sure was a fimny guy, always hanging around and asking questions. Sometimes I used to wonder what he looked like. You get used to not seeing any of the guys when you're in the forward areas. Sometimes for weeks or months at a time a whole area will be contaminated with bacteria or radiation and you don't open your suit at all. Even if you're wounded the mecho-armor gives you a shot and takes you back to a field hospital... that is, if it's still working. So you get used to not knowing what the guys look like and not caring much. But with Whitey it was different. His voice had such a dull someplace-else sound to it that you got to wondering if there was really anyone in that suit of armor or not. You got to wondering if maybe it just walked around by itself. Whitey asks as if in answer to my thoughts. "Hell, don't you know anything?" Fred says. "I guess I don't. I... I... don't even know who I was. I sorta wish I knew who I used to be." to us. Look... there he is now." I adjusted my eyepieces for direct vision and sure enough on the kind of balcony on the back of this big armored crawler was a guy. I mean to tell you he sure looked like something too. He was in full battle armor with scarlet trimmings and gold rivets. He was wearing a mother-of-pearl plated helmet with three stars set in rubies. Even the twin machine guns that were fitted to his armor instead of the # recoilless and # mm we had on ours was plated to look like silver. "Gosh! Imagine a General coming 'way up here in all this mud and stuff. That guy must really have guts!" someone mutters on the company circuit. "Yeah. I bet he's only got one swimming pool in that land yacht of his." "Shut up! What's the matter with you? That ain't no way to talk. You a sub or something?" "Say, did you guys see what I saw through the windows of that crawler? Dames!" "Dames?" "Who you kiddin'?" "So help me. There was two of them. Two big, tall, willowy, blond "Them's the General's aides." "Yeah? What do they aid him at?" "Shut up you guys," the Captain's voice cuts in. "The General is going to speak." Well then he starts right in telling us about the great crusade we're engaged upon and how civilization is at stake. And how proud the home folks is of us. Of course, he admits we haven't had any direct word from the States since last year when we had those big cobalt bomb raids, but he just knows that they all love us. Right when he starts I know we're in for trouble, 'cause when the brass start talking about crusades, a lot of joes is gonna get killed. He goes on with this for half an hour, and all the time the TV cameras is grinding away from this other crawler that is filled with newsers and video people. He mentions blood # times and that ain't good. Sweat he says # times and guts an even dozen. When it really looks bad, though, is when he calls the Major and the Captain up and pins a medal on each of the medal racks that officers wear on the front of their armor. When they start passing out the medals ahead of time, brother, it ain't good, it ain't good at all. When he gets through with all this, the old boy retires into his crawler. "I guess he's going in to plan the battle," I says. "Ha," says Sergeant Coleman's voice in my ear. "All the blood and guts in that speech wore him out so much he's got to retire to his bar for a few quick ones with them two aides of his." "Now, Sarge," I says, "that ain't no way for a patriot to talk." "My patriotism is at a very low ebb at the moment. Do you know what kind of a party we're going to have in the morning?" "No," I says, "but I would be interested in finding out." "You've seen that huge mile-long building that's across the square from us?" "I've seen it and found little to like about it. The enemy has every kind of gun in there that's been invented." "Well, the Captain says that that's it! Fighting Joe wants us to take it." 'Remember boys, remember that the way of life in the W,D.P,F.R. is better. Remember what youWe fighting for -- hotdogs and new cars, electric refrigerators and apple pie, sweethearts and mother, DonH let mother down boysP A voice that used to sell us bath soap is selling us war. "That kind of sounds like we're getting ready to move in, don't it Sarge?" I says. Sure enough a half hour later we starts to move up. The whole company of thirty men is on its way with the rest of the battalion close behind. "Say, maybe there'll be some dames up ahead," Dobshanski is saying. "What do you want with dames? You got the Waiting Wife and the Faithful Sweetheart on your TV, ain't you?" the Sergeant says. "It ain't the same. It ain't the same at all," Dobshanski says, I cuts in with, "Hey, did you guys hear what I heard? Pretty soon we won't really need women anymore. Those new suits of armor we're going to get have got Realie TV sets in 'em. When a gal comes on it's just like she was in the suit with you. Those suits is gonna take care of everything and I mean everything." "Ah, who ya kiddin'? Who ya handin' that line to?" "Him and his inside dope!" Twenty minutes later we're in position among the wrecked buildings on our side of the square and several kinds of hell is traveling back and forth across it. As is usual, the enemy seems to have as good an idea as to what we're about as we have. "Oh, brother," Coleman moans. copy of his orders as soon as he got through writing them?" is plowing up the already plowed up pavement all around us. Geysers of mud and water are being lifted by shells on all sides. I sees a couple of guys go down and I stumbles over a tangled mess of armor and flesh as we break from cover and start across the hundred yards or so of the square. Floater rockets are overhead, cir-. cling kind of lazy like and lighting up the whole company as pretty as a summer's day with big magnesium flares. It's real comfortin' to see guys on all sides of you, but not so comfortin' when you sees them failin' right and left. I know I'm running with the rest of the guys 'cause I can hear my power pack rev up and feel the steel legs of my suit pounding along through the mud. I can feel the suit automatically swerving to avoid shell holes and to throw off the enemy aim. Not that they're really aiming, they're just tossing everything they got into that square and bettin' on the law of averages. The whole length of the big marble building we're after is lit up now, but not with lights, it's lit up with gun flashes. The company and battalion radio bands is a mess. Even the command circuit is filled with guys yellin' and screamin', but there don't seem to be much point to orders right now anyway. I keep on goin' cause I don't know what else to do. Once or twice I recognise Coleman and White by the numbers on their armor and I get one glimpse of Fred Dobshanski just as half a dozen # mm shells tear his armor and him apart. Then I'm almost at the building, and I'm being hit by pointblank light machine-gun fire. I'm blazing back with my # and #, pouring tracers through the windows and being thankful my armor can take machine gun fire even at close range. There's other guys all around me now and we're smashing through doors and crashing over window sills into the building. The place is full of enemy joes and they're hitting us with everything they can throw. I take a couple of # mm shells that knock me off my feet, but Whitey blasts the gun crew two seconds later. We fight our way up a pair of marble stairways and they're really pouring it on us from up above, when suddenly they take a notion to rush us and come rushing down the steps... about three hundred of them. What we did to them ain't pretty. That light plastic battle armor of theirs don't even look like stopping our stuff ; and packed together like they are on those steps, it's murder. A lot of them get to the bottom, but there ain't much left of them when they get there. It's all over then. Guys are yelling for the Medic robot and for the Ammo robots and others are just slumped down in their suits waiting for something else to happen... and it ain't long in happening. It can't be more than ten minutes after we chased the last Red out the back of our objective before their heavy guns're trying to knock it down around our ears. Armor or no armor, what's left of the battalion takes refuge in the cellars where a few hours before the Reds were playing possum from our guns. Coleman, Whitey and I find us a nice heavy beam and are standing under it. Coleman is talking, as usual, and Whitey is wondering who he is and I'm watching the Major and Captain take inventory. Our assets ain't what they used to be. There's about twenty guys left in our company and maybe about sixty-five in the whole battalion. I guess that's why the Major ain't very friendly when some of the guys dig out a couple dozen women and children who've been hiding in the building. "Well, I'll be damned! Look what's cornin' in!" I says to Coleman. There's maybe twenty women and the rest is kids. "Why do the kids always seem to outlast the rest of the people, Sarge?" I asks. "Every place we been in this town, there's always more kids left alive than older folks." "I don't know. Ward. Maybe they make a smaller target." They've already got the kids lined up and we've given 'em the candy bars wrapped in propaganda leaflets that we all carry. Like all foreigners, they ain't very polite or grateful. They can't even understand what I'm saying even when I turn up my outside amplifier full power. "What's the matter with them punks? Don't they appreciate candy?" I asks the sergeant who is muttering to one of them in some of their own gibberish. "They say the Russians didn't give them anything but lumps of sugar and we don't give them anything but candy. They'd like something else." "Now ain't that just like people like them," I says to White. "No gratitude to us for liberating them or for feedin' 'em." "I think I would know what it's all about if I could just remember. You know, Sarge, for a few minutes up' above there I almost remembered. Then the shelling started and... and... I don't know..." Whitey is still harping on his favorite subject so I turns back to the sergeant and the kids he's talkin' to. "What's with these punks? What they got to complain about? If it wasn't for us they wouldn't have no country." "They say that the Russians was about to take them away to a camp and make soldiers out of them and they're afraid we'll do the same." "Well... what in hell do they want to do? Spend the rest of their lives hiding in a hole while we do their fighting?" "This youngster says he doesn't want to be brain washed. He doesn't want to be a soldier." "He's right," Whitey pipes up. "He don't want to be like me. You know, I had a dream... or did I remember? Anyway in this... dream... of mine, I remembered that I had been an important person like you said. Ward. But not on the enemy side. I knew something and wanted to tell it to the whole army but they didn't want me to. That's why they sent me to the psycho machines. That's why they made me like I am." "What was it you knew. White?" the sergeant asks. "I'm not sure. It was something... something about there not being any more Western Federation or any Eastern Republics... no more America... no more Russia... just two self-perpetuating armies... like hoards of maggots crawling across the corpse of Europe." "That's a funny sort of dream... a very funny sort of dream," the sergeant says. "Why would you have any sort of crazy dream like that?" I demands. "You know we hear broadcasts about how things are getting along so fine back home all the time." "How long's it been since you got a letter, Ward?" Coleman asks. "Letter? I don't remember. Who'd write to me anyway? What's the matter with them kids? Do they want the Russians to come back and rape their mothers and sisters?" "I'll ask them," Sarge says, and starts gibbering again through his outside amplifier to a skinny brat that's doing the talking for all of them. Pretty quick the kid gabbles back just like he understood. "He says that their mothers and sisters have been raped so many times by both sides that it don't make any difference anymore." "They ain't got no at..." I starts to say but the Major is yelling at the Captain so I stops to listen. "Where are their men? Where are they hiding?" He shakes his fist under the noses of these French women and the Captain questions them. "Why did they permit the Russians to hide out in this building? Don't they know that being here is collaborating with the enemy? Where are their men? I'll have them hung!" The Major is really hopping mad. "I beg your pardon, sir." The Captain interrupts him. "This woman says that, their men are on the second floor and..." "Good! Send six men up there and hang every one of them." "Sir, they say that the Russians have already hung them. As American collaborationists, sir!" "What! Humph! Well... send some men up there to cut them down and hang them again. No! Wait, Captain! We'll wait until the TV cameras get here." It was just then that the word came for us to pull back, for us to give up this building and fall back to our old positions. "My God! What's the matter with them?" Whitey says. "After all the guys we lost taking this place, why do we have to give it up?" "Maybe they want us to do it over again for the TV," the Sergeant says as we watch the other two companies pull out, herding the civilians before them. "I don't want to go," Whitey says suddenly. "If I stay here I might remember." "To hell with it, Whitey," Coleman tells him. "Maybe you wouldn't like it if you did remember. Maybe you're better off this way." "I like it here. There used to be pictures up above... I found a piece of one during the fighting... , it was... beautiful." "Come on, Whitey! Let's get going! Don't you see what the Captain's doing?" I says. The others look and start moving fast. The Captain must have been mad about giving up our objective 'cause he'd set up a disrupter bomb on the floor and started a time fse. Maybe you've never seen a disrupter bomb and maybe you wouldn't want to. In a way they're an improvement on the atomic bomb. They cause individual atomic explosions that keep blasting for hours after you start them. When that bomb gets through, there won't be anything left. Pretty quick we're out in the open and running as fast as our mechos legs can carry us. We're about halfway across the square when I see Whitey suddenly break away from Coleman and head back toward the building. He gets there and is heading in the door just as the disrupter bomb lets loose. That building started doing a dance, a kind of strip tease I guess, 'cause it's shedding roof and walls right and left. Later on, when we're back in our lines, I'm sitting beside Coleman while our mecho-armor is whipping up some X-rations for us. "Why did he do it, Sarge? Why'd Whitey go back?" "I don't know. There was something about that building that he thought he remembered. It reminded him of something. That picture he found kind of set him off. He said maybe it was the last one there was in the world." "Did... did he remember who he was?" "I guess at the last he did... or at least he remembered some thing." "Did he remember his name?" "I guess so." "Well, what was it?" "He didn't tell me. Maybe his name was Man." "Man? That's a funny name. Well ,... his name sure is mud now." "Maybe the two names are the same. Ward," he says. The sergeant always was a funny guy.    If historians have ever pondered that eerie and magical transformation of Abigaile Goodyeare, that "faire young maide" who aged so before the disbelieving eyes of gallows witnesses, mayhaps herein lies the answer... I saw this faire young maide, Abigaile Goodyeare standing yonder on ye gallows and shee saith againe and againe that she was no witch, although the jury had founde her guilty of . familiarity with Satan, the grand enemie of God man; and that by his instigation and help... afflicted and done harm to the bodyes and estates of sundry of his Majesties subjects... at the girl huddled in the corner of the time machine. There were white streaks down her face where recent tears had washed off the grime of several days spent in a Illustrated by Kelly Freas primitive jail. Her almost jet black hair was a tangled mess, hanging in strings to her shoulders. He wrinkled his nose small compartment. There was romance in history, he thought, when viewed in the abstract, but not when one faced history in the person of a female who had languished several days in an unsanitary prison. "Pray, Sir," she asked slowly, and so softly he scarcely heard her, "Art thou the Lord? Or one of His Angels?" Nat started to laugh, but she looked so pitiful he checked himself. "No, I'm a human being, just like yourself -- except that I've never been accused of witchcraft!" A look of fear crossed her face. "Verily, I testify unto thee that I am no witch, but have the fear of God before mine eyes." She was almost frantic in her statement. She cringed farther into the corner. Nat noticed the raw wounds on her wrists where the irons had chafed her. "Sure, sure, I believe you," Nat said sharply. "They won't hang you now!" Then he added glumly, "But they'll probably do worse to me if they find out what Fve done!" She looked up at him, wonder in her deep blue eyes, her long lashes blinking slowly. Even her bedraggled appearance and the dirt that literally covered her could not hide from Nat the beauty of her eyes. "Then perhaps thou art an emissary of the Evil One, though thou hast a kind look to thy features that seemeth not to come of the Devil." This time Nat laughed. He had read the ancient records known as hooks but hearing someone talk in archaic book fashion was too much. "That was quite a speech. Pretty Eyes. But get it through your head that I'm a normal human who had a momentary lapse and did an abnormal thing. I used the paralysis ray on wide range, stopped the show and hauled you off the gallows. Right now we're in a time machine headed for... I'm not sure where." The girl forgot her fear in momentary puzzlement. "Paraly.sis ray?" she repeated slowly, "Stop the show? Time machine?" "Oh, skip it," he said. "What we need right now is a chance to get you cleaned up -- and I think I know just the place. There's a pretty beach in #th century Mexico. It's warm, and there's a fresh water stream running into the ocean. You can wash off some of that prison grime." The sun beat down on Nat's blonde head as he sat on a rock overlooking a river mouth and several miles of Mexican beach. Abby -- he'd finally discovered that her name was Abigaile Goodyeare -- was behind a clump of bushes beside the stream, vainly trying to wash her voluminous clothing. Now that the shock and humor had passed, Nat was deeply worried. He couldn't take Abby back to his own time and announce that he hadn't the heart to see her hanged, on the other hand, he simply could not take her back to #th century New England to be hanged for witchcraft. If he dropped her off in any other time, they'd think she was insane. Nat had been making a routine historical survey, part of the work on his thesis about life in #th century New England. And on his first venture into time, he had ended up committing one of the most serious crimes possible in his society -- Time Meddling. Earlier in the day, just before leaving Earth University in the #th century, tall, ascetic Anton Bor, Chief of the Time Inspection Corps, had impressed on him the penalties for Time Meddling. Fixing Nat with cold grey eyes, Bor had recited the familiar warning in calculated tones: "At no time, and under no circumstance, are people in past ages to know they are being observed." It was Nat's first solo adventure into time, and his indoctrination, as thorough as it was, had not prepared him for the shock he experienced a few hours later. He had been completely unprepared for the scene that lay before his eyes as he came out of the thick woods into a clearing. A gallows had been erected on a mound in the center of the cleared space and a large crowd had gathered to watch what seemed to be an execution. Checking his invisibility shield, Nat moved closer. A tall, gaunt man, with a look of righteous wrath on his face was reading from a scroll. Except for his clothing, the man looked exactly Nat shook his head in disbelief, but strained his ears to hear what the man was reading. "... she was found guilty of felonyes and witchcrafts whereof she stood indicted and sentence of death accordingly passed that she be hanged by the neck until she be dead..." Nat tore his eyes from the man with the scroll and looked at the witch. He gasped audibly at what he saw, so that several people nearby looked curiously around. Realizing his error, he stood completely still until the people he had disturbed turned their attention back to the gallows. Again he looked at the woman. She was no half insane old hag, a busybody who had meddled her way into a witchcraft trial, but a bewildered, fearful young woman who couldn't have been more than # or # years old. Her hands were tied behind her back, pulling her bulky dress tight across her bosom. Her tangled, matted, black hair, the dirt on her face, her wrinkled disheveled clothing could not hide a great natural beauty. But what affected Nat most, was the look on her face. It was that of a frightened, helpless animal, cornered by a vicious, heartless predator. The self-righteous bearing of the tall man, the lack of sympathy and idle curiosity mirrored in the faces of the crowd infuriated Nat. Impulsively he had used his paralysis ray, an instrument that was designed only as a last resort when a time traveler needed to beat a quick retreat unnoticed. While the entire gathering was in a suspended state, he had carried Abby away from the gallows, and clocked away in the time machine. Now, completely confused, he was sitting worriedly in the warm sunshine of #th century Mexico, wondering what to do. Abby's approach broke his reverie. She seemed almost lost in one of his spare one-piece coveralls. She was carrying her own garments, dripping wet, on her arm. In modesty she had put her own quaint shoes on again. Her dark hair curled wetly about her shoulders, and the exertion of bathing and washing her clothing had left a becoming flush on her cheeks. "Feel better, Abby?" he asked in a light-hearted manner he didn't feel. "Verily, thou art a strange one," she answered, lowering her eyes in an almost obsequious manner. "Though the way thou useth the diminutive of my name is pleasant to my ear." "Well, your pretty face is pleasant to my eyes, but it's certainly gotten me into a lot of trouble," Nat answered gruffly. She looked downcast. "Truly I'm contrite if I have caused thee trouble." The penitent look on her face melted Nat's irritability. "Let's eat," he said quickly. "You must be hungry. And while you eat. I'll try to explain what happened and maybe figure out what to do." A week passed, and Nat still was undecided. He was puzzled by a strange restlessness that nagged at him constantly. That is, he was puzzled until the first time he kissed her. The difference in their backgrounds was vast. They were separated by centuries of time. But now, thrown together, facing a common fear of the past and the future, there could be only one outcome. At the end of the first week, they were sitting on opposite sides of a beach fire. A soft breeze, blowing off the water, added a chill to the evening air. Abby rose to put another log on the fire. Nat stood up quickly to help her. "Let me lift that, Abby," he said with an air of protection. "It's pretty heavy." "Please, no," she answered in her quaint way. "Tis nothing. I have lifted heavier burdens than this many times." He put his hand on her wrist. It was the first time he had touched her since he had carried her from the gallows. For the past week he had been so preoccupied he had hardly noticed her as she had gone quietly about their impromptu camp, cooking the wild game and fish he had caught with his paralysis ray. The feel of her soft, warm wrist in his hand thrilled him. His voice suddenly left him, as he consciously realized for the first time how beautiful she was. Her fresh innocence, her complexion, freshly tanned by the Southern sun, seemed to fill his entire being. He drew her close, kissed her full lips. Because of her Puritan heritage, she exhibited surprise. "Verily, Nathanial Lyon, my people would frown on an embrace like this." Then she whispered, "But I find it most pleasant, because I have grown so very fond of thee." With that she threw her arms around him and pressed her lips to his. Time lost its meaning, and they stood for uncounted minutes. At last she shivered. "I feel a chill, dear Nat." "No wonder, darling," he whispered. "We've been standing here so long the fire has gone out." That night Nat made his decision. "I can't take you back to be hanged, Abby," he said tenderly. "But at the same time I can't go back to my own time, they'd do worse than that to me." "I understand not this time travel," Abby said thoughtfully. "If thou canst send this device to any time of thy choosing, couldst thou not spend months, or even years away and still get back to your own time when thou art expected?" "That's it, Abby, that's it!" Nat shouted, jumping to his feet. "We'll stay away a lifetime. And when we take the machine back, they won't be able to do anything that matters because we'll have had our life together! Or better yet, we'll never go back at all!" Suddenly he sobered, dropped back to the ground beside her, taking her hands in his. "That is, if you'll marry me, Abby darling." "Why, Nathanial," she answered without a flicker of a smile. "That was all settled when first I yielded to thy embrace." Nat's mouth dropped open, then he laughed, as he remembered his studies of the customs and morals of Abby's time. "Abby, verily thou art priceless," he said delightedly in her own speech. She gave her opinion of him, silently... with her lips. "Abby," Nat finally whispered, "I'm going to give you the best honeymoon a woman ever had." "Honeymoon? Of a truth, I know not of what thou speakest." Nat chuckled, then kissed the end of her pert nose. "You'll see, my love, you'll see. But first we have to make you Mrs. Nathanial Lyon. There was a time, right after the Third World War, when marriage was easy, with no questions asked. So right now, it's off to the disorganized world of the late #th century." And so began one of the strangest honeymoons in the history of Earth's human race. Nat and Abby were unseen observers when Pericles ruled Greece. They visited the court of Charlemagne, walked through the streets of Rome at the height of its splendor, viewed the glories and wickedness of Babylon and Baghdad, watched the artisans of old Cathay. But fate chose their honeymoon as the time of their undoing. Nat had believed they would be safe for the rest of their lives. He knew that detection of the time machine was virtually impossible unless their full dimensional des... assuming that he had been missed in the #th century, which he believed unlikely. Sealed chrowould give him away if he ever returned the time machine to base. But premature discovery need be the only worry now. As he had explained to Abby, "The power plant in these things gives off traceable radiation, provided the tracer gets close enough. But right now, tracing us would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. All we've got to watch out for is another time machine with someone aboard who might have reason to be suspicious of us." And it happened just that way as they sat watching the original first night of a Shakespeare play. Another time machine controlled by an Arts student from Earth University appeared in an adjoining balcony. Nat flicked his machine to full power -- too late! The student, an acquaintance of Nat's, had nodded in recognition. Clocking away, Nat couldn't avoid a glum comment. "Well, the full force now." Abby studied Nat's face. "Darling," she said, "Let's settle down. Why need we travel at all?" Her calm erased Nat's concern. "We'll do it!" he exclaimed, confident again. N at parked his new model T Ford in the garage. He walked quickly into the kitchen, kissed his wife. It was no perfunctory peck so much the practice in the times in which they lived, but a tender, passionate embrace, as if it might be their last. "Nat, there's been someone around the house today. I'm worried," Abby finally said. The muscles in his stomach tightened. "Maybe they've traced us. What did he look like?" "He was tall, severe, in fact he could almost pass for old Jonathan Borden, the man who was in charge of my execution, the man who read the charges against me." "Anton Bor!" Nat said hoarsely. Abby threw her arms around Nat, buried her head in his shoulder. Her arms held him with desperation. "Oh darling, we've been so happy these past five years. They can't separate us. I'd rather die first!" He tipped her head back, kissed the tears that had trickled down each cheek. "If they catch us, we'll probably both die. But at least we're ready for them." He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Through the front curtains he glimpsed a car in front of the house. A hasty look out the back revealed another one parked in the alley. "Quick, Abby, into the basement before they use a paralysis ray," he whispered. Aloud he shouted, "Just a moment!" to the person at the front door. With nervous fingers Nat unlocked a heavily reinforced door in the basement. He heard a crash upstairs as the front door was battered in. At almost the same instant he swung the door open and they stepped into the time machine. With movements they had practiced many times, he tripped the activating lever and the machine vanished, leaving the hiding place Nat had built around the machine after they had bought the house several years earlier. They weren't a moment too soon, for both felt the slight tingling of a paralysis ray. Their departure had occurred just at the men had pushed the firing stud. Even so, it clouded Nat's vision, slowed his reflexes. "Another second and they'd have had us, Abby," he said aloud, after he had returned to normal. She pressed her lips to his. "I hated to leave #, but we can start over again wherever you say," Abby whispered. The surf crashed and boomed on the coral reef. Nat lay in the shade of a cocoanut palm, watching the white clouds scudding by overhead. Abby came walking down the beach towards him, tanned a deep brown from head to foot, dressed as the Polynesians had dressed before Captain Cook had discovered them. "You're every bit as beautiful as the women described in the old tales of the South Sea Islands," Nat said as she sat down beside him. "And you're as big a flatterer as any sailor who ever told those stories," she answered, although she was pleased by his admiration. She lay back, stretched her hands over her head with a happy look on her face. "I'm # years old and don't compare to our young neighbors on the other islands." Nat rolled over, putting an arm across her waist, kissed her tenderly. "I'm the luckiest man in the world," he whispered. She looked up, her blue eyes serious. "You don't regret giving up all you had in your own time?" "I didn't know what true happiness was," he answered firmly. "People in the #th century are automatons, hemmed in by rules, regulations, regimented by necessity on the planet." He kissed her again, as the warm trade winds ruffled her dark hair -- and they forgot about time. But they didn't have real peace tenaciousness of Anton Bor was always present. Nat and Abby had learned the language thoroughly through the time machine's hypno-translator, then picked an uninhabited little island in the atoll. After weeks of sun bathing, they had let themselves be discovered by the natives in their outrigger canoes. The natives quietly accepted Nat and Abby as slightly different, but members of their informal society, for it was inconceivable to them that any but their own kind could be living on one of the atolls. "This is a heavenly life," Abby sighed, stretching out on the sand one day. "Cocoanuts, breadfruit, seafood, all for the taking. I'll hate to leave it." "But I'm afraid we must," Nat said slowly, "And soon, too. We don't dare stay too long in one place." From the islands, Nat and Abby drifted on from century to century, usually stopping in post-war periods when both governments and populations were preoccupied with constructive social progress. It was during the American reconstruction period following Nat was an engineer, rebuilding shattered Seattle, when one day he spotted a tall, angular mechanic, newly hired on the project -- and unmistakably Anion Bor! Ten years before, Nat and Abby had cached the time machine a hundred miles away. Now, as they winged through the night in their private helicopter, Nat groaned at the futility of matching wits with scientists of century twenty-five. "I don't understand it, Abby! There's atomic radiation lingering here from the war. We're working on a reactor for the city's power to track us down." "Perhaps, Dear Nat," Abby said, lapsing into her original old New England speech, as she often did when thinking deeply, "He followeth us by inductive methods rather than through his science." There was a moment's silence. Nat broke it to say, "We've been doing the obvious. Well then, our next stop must be different!" They cruised silently toward the hiding place of their time machine until they saw the faint glow of a radioactive crater. A missile missing its target, had gouged a large hole in the mountainside. Nat had hidden the time machine in a cave as close as possible to the crater to lessen the chance of detection by "Just in case they have spotted our machine, and someone is waiting for us, we're going to take the last few miles on foot," Nat said, checking his paralysis gun. He set the heli down in a clearing and they started cautiously forward on foot, working their way up the mountainside, with all the tension of a hunter stalking game. A hundred yards from the cave entrance, they spotted a campfire. They approached stealthily, and finally were able to make out the shadowy form of an old man, apparently a war hermit who had set up a mountain retreat. At the very outset of the Third World War, the expression "take to the hills" had become a reality to many. Afterwards, when a prostrated world had begun painful reconstruction, lone men and women, and sometimes couples, continued to roam through the forests and deserts of Earth. Fugitives from fear in the beginning, many had held to the nomadic existence, liking their new individuality. guise," Nat whispered. "Why not use thy paralysis ray now?" Abby whispered back, "And not take chances." Nat nodded, and silently they crept forward. When they finally were in range, Nat raised his weapon and pressed the stud. The hermit didn't move a muscle. The dancing flames of the fire cast strange shadows over the camp site, reflecting off his shelter half, lighting the coffee pot sitting on a rock. Swiftly, without fear of detection, Nat and Abby strode forward, towards the cave and their escape. As they reached the entrance they heard a derisive laugh. Whirling sharply, they saw the "hermit" rising slowly to his feet, a late #th century weapon in his hand. Horror stricken, Nat glanced at the paralysis ray in his own hand, the thought flashing across his mind that the tiny atomic battery had given out. "No, your weapon is still good! You just didn't count on our thoroughness!" the man laughed, using the vernacular of Nat's own time. "I've been waiting here a year, while Bor combed the whole area for you." "Lord, Abby!" Nat gasped hoarsely. "They've developed a neutralizing field, something they were experimenting with when I left." The agent laughed coarsely in agreement. "Just come away from the cave while I put in a call to Inspector Bor!" They moved towards the fire, and it was then that the agent got a good look at Abby. His eyes moved slowly from her head to her feet, taking in every detail of her full figure. "Some dish you have there Lyon. I'm beginning to understand why you checked out on us!" Nat was surprised at the agent's obvious lechery. Such animal reaction had been largely overcome by the #th century. The agent snickered, recognizing Nat's surprise. "You asked for it, Lyon, when you tried to paralyze me! There's still a little problem to be solved in this matter of neutralizing a paralysis ray. Right now I'm morally drunk, haven't an inhibition in the world." He licked his lips. "Come here, girl. I want to see you close up -- real close!" Abby had drawn back, horrified, but now she leaned toward Nat and started talking in the ancient Greek they had learned during their honeymoon. "Let me try to seduce him, Nat. Maybe we can get away before Bor gets here!" "What's she mumbling about?" the agent demanded suspiciously. "She's talking Greek," Nat explained. "She doesn't understand the Anglo-oriental combination we speak in the #th century." The agent's eyes flitted back to Abby, noting her dark hair, her even features, moving hungrily over her figure again. "Come here!" he ordered huskily, motioning with his hands. Abby stepped hesitantly forward, a perfectly simulated look of puzzlement on her face. Nat stepped forward at the same time, hoping to get closer to the guard. "Stay where you are," the agent snarled, waving his weapon at Nat. Abby looked around at Nat with a cautioning expression on her face as the agent moved slowly towards her. Careful to keep the gun pointed at Nat, the agent put out a hand, slid his arm around her waist. Nat could tell by her quivering shoulders that Abby was revolted by the man's touch, although she managed a faint, inviting smile. Nat was poised, ready to move in when the agent dropped his guard. Then he suddenly felt stark terror as he saw the man pull out a small paralysis gun. 'T think I'll immobilize you, Lyon, while I get better acquainted with your girl friend," he rasped. Nat jumped, but the ray gun caught him in mid-air. His thoughts as he regained consciousness later were an agony of confusion. Feeling the familiar sensation of a time machine in motion, he filled in the blank about what must have happened to Abby. Sick with resignation he opened his eyes, then sat up quickly, blinking in disbelief, for Abby was sitting at the controls of the machine. Her blouse was soiled and ripped, her hair mussed and Nat thought he saw blood on her skirt. But she was humming a tune as she checked the dials. "Abby," Nat cried. "Are you all right?" Her smile said more than words. "You seem to forget, my dear husband," she said happily, coming over to him. "We tender New England pioneers learned a few things about self protection." "What happened?" Abby shuddered. "It wasn't pleasant, having that beast paw threw him off guard. About the time he started ripping my clothing off, I used the little dagger we picked up in Renaissance Italy." Suddenly a sob broke through her artificial gaiety and she was in Nat's arms, her control completely gone. Her body racked with sobs, tears streaming down her face. "They're getting closer each time, Abby," Nat said reflectively. "Next time they probably will get us." "But we're still together," Abby said fiercely. "And, if we're careful, they may never find us again." Years passed. Nat and Abby'j youthful happiness flowered into the contentment of those who have lived their allotted years in wisdom. Nat had retired many years before, and he and Abby were content with simple pleasures. Evenings they sat together on the porch of their Florida cottage, enjoying the ocean breeze and each other's presence. It was on such an evening that their world came to an end. While they sat as usual, reminiscing, Nat wondered aloud if Anton Bor still lived. He scarcely had uttered the question before the grass on the lawn seemed to shimmer slightly, and a time machine materialized before their startled eyes. Its door burst open and three men sprang out with weapons ready. After them came the halting, decrepit figure of an ancient Anton Bor, a paralysis gun wavering unsteadily in his shriveled hands. The shock was so great that Nat and Abby sat completely unmoving and the full power of Bor's weapon caught them where they sat. N at and abby stood before the Judgement Tribunal in the #th century. Mere punishment had long since passed out of existence. A law breaker had his case reviewed by a board of psychiatrists, lawyers, sociologists, even historians. A person's past was laid bare, in an effort to find out why aberrant action had been taken. The board recommended remedial action that varied greatly from case to case. "We find you guilty," the spokesman finally stated, "of Time Meddling, an offence that can have the gravest consequences. In this case, our problem is two-fold. First, we must correct the original action. Second, we must do all in our power to discourage actions such as you have taken. "With this in mind, you, personally, will see corrective measures carried out. Anton Bor, who worked so self-sacrificingly over so many years to bring this case to a close, will supervise the correction." This time Nat was prepared. The scene was exactly as he remembered it. But now the gallows was empty, the spectators frozen statues. "The paralysis ray's effects last for a little more than five minutes," Bor said with the coldness of a machine. "We have that much time to accomplish our job." Bound and helpless, Nat heard Bor bark a command. He saw an assistant pick up the paralysed form of his wife, dressed again in #th century style, and walk out across the valley. He placed Abby on the gallows, put the rope around her neck and moved quickly back to the woods. "Now we'll watch it," Bor said with cold finality. "I think my ancestor out there, Jonathan Borden would be proud of me," he added with a trace of smugness. "... flj we watched, it seemed suddenly our vision blurred and there was the smell of brimstone in the aire and when we could see againe, there in the place of comely young Abigaile Goodyeare, was a wrinkled gruesome crone, more like unto a spectre, with gray hair and wrinkled visage, whose true age could only be guessed at    less quest for new worlds to conquer. This can only be regarded as admirable; the pity of it is that, in spite of the cosmic dimensions of the setting... the theme is fundamentally monotonous... while the human elements do not differ from those to be found in any average novel. Science fiction may stimulate our imaginations by postulating developments in the future, but it can add nothing to our knowledge or understanding of human nature and it is with the latter that all thinking men are chiefly concerned." ( Continued from page #) The really lamentable thing about science fiction is that lots of people -- certainly including our quoted British writer -- don't know much about it, don't know that science fiction can be wonderful reading about Mankind, chemistry, economics, cybernetics, semantics, philosophy, physics, history, politics, evolution, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum! -- Or -- that serious minded scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, students, politicians, people, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum, do read it! -- jlq what Is Your Science I. Q.? science fiction readers, but now and then we get letters saying the questions are either too easy or too difficult. Counting five for each correct answer, see what your score is and then let us know whether it is "tough" or "tender" for your knowledge of things science-wise. Answers are on page #. #. When a circle of sunlight can be seen around the edge of the moon during an eclipse, it is known as an eclipse. #. What is the general term used when referring to all the isotopes of all the elements? #. An astronomical unit is equal to miles. #. How long does an average radium atom take to decay? #. A thermocouple is used to measure the of a star. #. Which is the brightest of the asteroids, the only one it might be possible to see with fhe naked eye? #. The average sunshine energy received by a square mile of the Earth's surface is about kilowatts. #. Who was the first man to launch a liquid fuel rocket? #. The unit is used to express the length of light waves. #. What have Neutrinos, Photons, and Gravitons in common? I I . Sunspots occur in year cycles. #. What is the name given to a luminous circle parallel to the horizon at the altitude of the sun? #. Our galaxy measures an estimated light years across. #. The highest known speed of a star is that of a double star in the constellation Gygnus. What is its speed? #. The pressure at the core of the Earth is estimated to equal about pounds per square inch. #. Who was the man who did most to promote the idea of the Martian "canals"? #. Jet engine noise is measured at between and decibels. #. How much would a # pound Earthman weigh on Mars? #. The Milky Way and the Andromeda Nebula are both , which are visible to the naked eye from the United States. #. How many moons have been discovered, so far, in our solar system? Regardless of scientific attainment, any culture is vulnerable to inhibition. And Saxon was a good agent; no culture nor individual would sway his loyal appraisal... Here the forest was green and cool. A soft, damp wind promised rain. The colonists moved down the ramp, staring at the crew members piling crates of supplies in the meadow beyond. Frowns. Then whispers. Saxon glanced up. His nostrils flared. "Hurry," he told the crewmen, and came forward, beaming. He was tired. It showed in his feverish, too-bright smile as he said, "Afraid Engineering's a little behind schedule. They'll be here tomorrow morning to ereQt your city. Tonight you'll have to rough it." Reactions varied. The women murmured and moved closer to their men. Some smiled. One man thoughtfully eyed the mounting pyramid of supplies. "You're getting a choice world, Jarl," Saxon said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Survey spent thirty years here, balancing the ecology, wiping out the bugs and carnivores. Eden." Saxon tasted the word like wine. Jarl Madsen's face was stone. "Aren't they all named Eden?" From the forest came a chittering bark, like anthropomorphic laughter. Saxon shivered, remembering the thing that chittered, the threeinch fangs and the talons. "Hardly," he lied. "That, incidentally, was a Narl. Herbivore, very harmless." Madsen walked past him, towards the supplies. Saxon moved among the colonists, shaking hands, congratulating, speaking of green fields and good crops and a virgin planet where every man could carve an empire. These last moments were the worst, when you said goodbye. knowing that thirty percent qf them would be dead within the week. He saw Madsen opening a supply case. Damn him! Just three more minutes! The last crew member dumped his load and hurried into the airlock. Saxon started casually after him, too late. Madsen stood there, his grin taut, nailed on. "Primitive pre-fab shelters," he said thickly. "Axes and seeds! The. city was a lie. We're on our own, is that it? IF A)? -- " Saxon's palm flashed and Madsen fell writhing. There were shouts, hands clawing at him as he tore free, sprinting for the ship. Always running, he thought bitterly. Fm getting old. He walked through the silent corridors of the ship, a lonely figure in the black uniform of the Inhibition Corps, and once he stared a mottled sphere receding into the star-frosted night. His mouth twisted. Conceive a colony in fear, breed it in terror. Watch it adapt, grow. If it grows too fast, hurt it. Hurt it with disease, famine, dictatorship. If it keeps growing -- destroy it. The captain came down the corridor and stood at respectful attention before the black uniform. "Stereo call. Commander. Prime Base." Saxon slowly went to his cabin. The stereo panel was flashing steady crimson to designate top priority and he restrained a savage impulse to shut the thing off. He slumped in the control chair, and the tri-di image of a man at a desk slowly coalesced. It was a granite-featured old man with eyes like blue ice, and Saxon's head snapped sharply erect. It was Primus Gant, Corps Director. At ninety parsecs Gant's features were slightly hazed, but his voice was clear, sharp as a sword. "Report, Commander." "My extrapolation went through an hour ago. Also my resignation." Nothing moved in Gant's face or his eyes. Saxon said stiffly, "Planetfall uneventful. Area inimical. Initial shock conception, probable God-betrayal mythology by fourth generation. Those things in the forest should get thirty percent of them the first week. Weaponless, they'll run. The two to one female ratio should make for an agricultural matriarchy by the sixth generation. Recommend intermittent check at that time." He took a slow angry breath. "Why didn't we give them weapons?" Gant's smile was acid. "Because we haven't yet tried an agricultural matriarchy. Commander. Because the lower the initial survival factor, the slower the culture development. Getting squeamish?" Saxon said doggedly, "They didn't have a chance." ple on Earth in the last atomic war." The Director's voice was soft. "All colonists volunteer. Some have a vision. Others have a latent power drive that stasis can't satisfy. They're misfits regardless, potential threats to stasis. Remember your last leave. Commander? I believe you met my son." Saxon nodded curtly. He remembered the Director's son as a quiet, soft-spoken youth with the yearning for far places in his eyes. "I had hoped he woiild qualify for the Corps." Gant looked suddenly old, tired. "Instead he's volunteering for Colonial Service. Did you ever lose a son. Commander?" They stared at each other across the humming emptiness and Saxon finally whispered, "I'm sorry." "Stasis is all we can afford," the Director said numbly. "Man can't have Utopia yet. Because he's still -- Man. Perhaps he'll never have it. But by God he'll try!' Resignation withdrawn?" Saxon nodded. He could not speak. "I'm glad. The ship's captain had orders to bum you down had you refused." Gant's face was wooden. "Inhibition agents never quit, they just die in harness. You'll take the lifeboat to Eden XI for sixth generation check. Good hunting, Commander." The image faded. Saxon sat for a long time, staring into the darkness. E den XI was three parsecs distant, near Algol. For the next ten hours Saxon paced the marvelously equipped lifeboat and absorbed data from the robot recorder. He stared at the hard crystal ache of the stars and thought of the Director's son. He thought about the shining cities of Earth, and about stasis. Stasis meant -- control. ple, a rigid planetary economy. It meant the Assassination branch of the Corps. Assassination (carefully contrived to appear accidental) took care of those few malcontents who were either too smart or too stupid to sign up for colonization. It meant a gradual weeding out of the unsane, the power-mad, it meant learning the true meaning of sanity and peace and racial brotherhood. And it meant the stagnation of science, a thick film of dust gathering on the textbooks of the military tactician, and warships rotting at anchor. It meant the white spire of the Stasis Administration Center at New Washington, and the words graven over the golden portals: Know thyself, Man, Or die! Was the dream worth it? Or was Man doomed to die like a brawling ape, playing with lightning? Saxon could not answer. Meanwhile the colonies had to be inhibited. One interplanetary war could smash the fragile structure so painstakingly built over the last few hundred years. This was the turning point, the final crossroads of Man's destiny. Saxon smiled bleakly. Ultimately there would be a colony they could neither inhibit or destroy. The adaptive ultimate. That colony would be Man no longer, but Homo Superior. But by then, it wouldn't matter. The lifeboat came in on the night side of Eden XI, and hung above the blue mountains like a basking shark. Saxon checked his coordinates. This had been the original landing site, almost two hundred years ago. He switched the infraview on maximum, and began to cruise in widening spirals. These sixth generation hops were usually routine. If nomadic, a few political shifts could help warp the culture into a set pattern. A simple matter to play the visiting deity, pick one warped psychotic, and invest him with power. A dictatorship was by far the best way of inhibiting a young culture. Agricultural citystates were almost as easy. Designate a particular crop as sacred, kill the rotation program, impoverish the land, introduce serfdom. By dawn, Saxon found what he was looking for. A row of cleared fields and a farmhouse. He reconnoitered a hundred miles farther and frowned. There was no clump of dwellings, no sign of a village trading community. He brought the ship down in a forest three miles away from the farmhouse and camouflaged it to look like a great mossy boulder. He spent the entire morning testing the atmosphere and the soil with a savage patience. In the early years of the Corps, virus mutations had taken a fearful toll of intermittent spotters. Finally he discarded his uniform and selected a pair of homespuns from the ship's wardrobe locker. Under the homespuns reposed his utility kit, a miniature arsenal. Late that afternoon he emerged from the forest and stood at the edge of the cleared fields, a weathto chop wood for a meal. Abruptly his jaw muscle twitched. The scene was pastoral, perfect. The man, plowing the south forty. The little girl, playing in the shadow of the sleepy farmhouse. But no beast pulled that plow. A giant of a man with power and intelligense stamped on his bronze features pushed the plow by hand, in a die-straight furrow. The little girl was blonde and elfin. She wore sandals, her tunic was brief and plain. She was playing follow-the-leader -- With a robot. The robot was tall. The sun struck sparks from its steel carapace as it lumbered after the girl. Saxon stood frozen as she came flying towards him in a burst of tossing blond hair and laughter, as she saw him and came to a dead halt. "Hello," Saxon said. He tried to smile. "Hello." Her inflection was slurred. After six generations, naturally. Her blue eyes sparkled. "Footsore, stranger?" The words had the cadence of a ritual greeting. Saxon stared at the robot and said carefully, "Yes." "He's only a primer model," she said, following his gaze. "Next year when I'm twelve Father promised to install secondary circuits. My name's Veena. What's yours?" Saxon introduced himself, as the giant at the plow came forward. His white smile was a benediction, his voice a lambent organ. "Welcome, rover. Haven't seen one of you in months. I'm Lang, Agricultural hobbyist. You'll stay?" His tone was almost pleading. Saxon nodded inarticulately, followed them towards the farmhouse. His hands were shaking. The interior of the house was -- dimensionless. For a moment Saxon thought he was still outside. A silver brook tinkled through the mossy carpet that was the floor. The south wall was a golden vista of ripe wheat rippling in the warm breeze that ruffled his hair. Birds twittered in the sun-flecked foliage overhead. "Nice house," Saxon said numbLang's smile was diflferent. "A bit pretentious. I'm afraid. Grandfather built it right after the landing. We've been too lazy to do much remodeling. A remarkable man, Grandfather." That explained it, Saxon thought in relief. One titan in an infant colony, warping it into a Utopian rnold, passing on the heritage of his genius. How long, he wondered coldly, before they built starships and returned to demolish the Earth which had exiled them? "It must be wonderful to be a rover," Veena said wistfully. "Lang, can I go with him when he leaves?" "You haven't completed Basic Ecology. Mentor's waiting for your afternoon session." Veena pouted and went outside to her robot. Lang grinned. "The precocious brat's beginning to ask him questions he can't answer. Soon I'll have to install a few more circuits." Saxon shivered. Regardless of scientific attainment, any culture is vulnerable to inhibition. So said his agent's handbook. Later he met Veena's mother, Merl, a handsome woman with calm gray eyes who served them dinner by firelight. It was a good dinner. These colonists seemed like good people. A shame they qualified for inhibition. Gently, Saxon began to probe. In only six generations the colonists has scattered throughout the entire hemisphere. Although the matrix of their culture seemed to be the individual family unit, they lived according to whim. Some lived in small communal groups. Some lived alone. Some, by choice, were wanderers, rovers. They had science. Their philosophy seemed nebulous, based on a benevolent ecology, brotherhood with all living things. Saxon frowned. Six generations ago, the ecology on this world hardly had been benevolent for man. This area of the continent had been a steaming marsh, swarming with hungry saurians. Now it was all meadow and forest. Saxon said thoughtfully, "Have you ever felt the need for organization? For a leader?" He leaned back and waited for the seed to sprout. Two years ago said the same thing to a sixth generation shaman, and it took scarcely a month for the shaman to start an intra-tribal war. But now the seed fell on sterile ground. Lang said, "I don't understand. Any problem which cannot be solved at family level is referred to the annual council." "A leader." Saxon was patient. "One strong man to represent everybody. To settle all problems as he sees fit?" "Remember, Father?" Veena prodded. "Those arboreal cannibals Grandfather used to mention? They had a nomadic tribal culture based on brute strength." Lang nodded somberly. "Good analogy. The most favorable extrapolation indicated a racial life expectancy of only ten thousand years. Their emotional stability index was nil, they would eventually have destroyed themselves. The first generation decided it would be more merciful to exterminate them. An unwise decision, I think." He launched into a spirited ethnological discussion with Veena, and Saxon sat, numbly. They had no emotional insecurity to feed, no power-hunger. No herd instinct to pervert, nothing to utilize as destruction potential. No cultural weakness. The room they gave him was small and comfortable. For a time he lay on the sleeping hammock, considering the situation. He was beginning to like them. That in itself, was dangerous. The house was very still. He got quietly out of the hammock and crept towards the door. He had to get back to the lifeboat, to feed facts into the monitor. One thing disturbed him. According to his agent's handbook, family-group anarchies didn't need inhibition. He was halfway across the plowed field when Mentor's iron voice said, "Good evening." Moonfire glimmered on metal. The robot stood impassively before him. Saxon said slowly, "I was just going for a walk." "You are our guest: I shall walk with you." "I prefer to walk alone." "Guests prefer company. The house of Lang must observe the basic amenities." Was there a hint of sardonicism in Mentor's voice? They walked along the furrows, man and robot. Saxon felt beneath his shirt for the utility kit. He kept his voice level. "Am I a prisoner?" "You are a guest." "Did Veena tell you I might try to escape?" A pause, while relays clicked silently. "That is classified information." Saxon's fingers were steady as they touched his tiny blaster. Benevolent anarchy indeed! He said carefully, "Do the colonists resent their exile?" Another pause. Mentor's voice was a flat drone. "The concept is meaningless, the question invalid." Like hell it is, thought Saxon, and fired. A cold blue wash of energy illuminated the robot. For a moment Saxon was blinded. When vision returned he saw Mentor standing immobile, unscathed. "Please go back to bed," the robot said, Saxon went back to bed. brought him breakfast. She seemed sad, withdrawn. "Lang and Merl went to visit Aunt Tarsi. She lives near the Equator. They won't be back till evening." "How" Saxon had trouble breathing. "How did they go?" "By transmitter, of course." She indicated a large shimmering platform in one corner. "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot rovers hate the mention of any type of gadgetry." Her eyes grew impossibly earnest. "But we try to achieve some kind of balance, really. Once when I suggested that Father let Mentor help him plow the fields, he got furious." Saxon restained wild laughter. First the robot, invulnerable to atomic energy, now a matter transmitter. Yet they plowed their own fields. "Veena," he said. She looked up at him. "Why did you tell Mentor to keep me here?" She bowed her bright head. Her blue eyes were brimming. "Why, Veena?" "Because I like you," she sniffled. "I wanted you to s-stay." Abruptly she fled from the room. He stood bleakly looking after her. After a time he went outside and struck across the field towards the forest. This time the robot did not stop him. Do not allow the emotional charm of any culture, nor any individual of that culture, to sway your inhibition appraisal. In the narrow confines of the lifeboat he repeated the quotation grimly. Good inhibition agents are inflexible. He was a good agent. For almost an hour he fed data into the monitor tapes. Then he touched a stud and closed his eyes, waiting for judgment. "Agricultural family-group societies are normally stagnant," the monitor droned. "Such cultures, regardless of technological level, do not warrent inhibition of any type. Reference : twelfth generation check on Eden V." The room spun. Saxon whispered, "But they have cybernetics, matter transmitters." "Regardless o f technological level." The monitor was adamant. This was madness. Saxon wiped his forehead and said, "Assuming geographical isolation no barrier to united group action in the event of emergency." "United action is incompatible with family-group." "Assume and advise!" Relays chattered. Abruptly the entire panel flashed crimson. The monitor spoke one word. Annihilation. Saxon referred to his Inhibition handbook. He had never annihilated a culture before. One hour later he went into the forest. Birds sang overhead. The sun dappled him in light and shadow. He stalked a small furry quadruped that squealed at him from a log and brought it down with his sonic pistol. Back in the lifeboat he watched the animal regain consciousness in an air-tight tank, and very slowly he pulled a lever. A green vapor rolled into the tank. The quadruped screamed. The green vapor fed. It was the penultimate in sporedom, yet it was more than a spore. It had virus characteristics, and its propagation rate was almost mathematically impossible. There was no known defense, and once used, the entire planet was forever untouchable. To Saxon's knowledge it had been utilized only once on Eden I. At dusk, he took the lifeboat up fifty miles. He released the spores in a widening spiral, and finally jettisoned the tank. He went into an orbit at ten thousand miles, and waited. It would take approximately a week. It was a long week. Saxon slept little. He paced the cabin. He looked at the stars and thought about a blue-eyed waif with tears in her voice, begging him to stay. After a week the life-boat came down at the edge of a grassy plain. Saxon took a sample of the contaminated atmosphere to determine propagation rate. The atmosphere was pure. Some freak of expansion. One uncontaminated spot in a hemisphere of death. He selected another location. Then another. That evening he close the coordinates of his original landing site and tested the air again. Finally he went outside the airlock. He breathed deeply, and the air was fresh and sweet, it smelled of forest and cool streams and evening dew. In the blue dusk birds twittered. A small marsupial very much like a squirrel scampered to the safety of a tree and scolded him. Saxon began walking. At the edge of the forest he saw the familiar plowed field. The farmhouse was a friendly beacon in the twilight. "Hello," Veena said. She stood at the edge of the forest. She was smiling. "Welcome home, rover." For the next few days Saxon was the perfect guest. He argued philosophical abstractions with the family by firelight ; by day he hiked in the woods with Veena and listened to Mentor give her lessons. He asked questions. "Veena, do you know what a microorganism is?" "Benevolent or malignant?" "Malignant. A plague." She pursed her lips. "Organic or cultural?" "Organic of course." "Bacteria." Veena shrugged. "Quite a few of the first generation died immediately after the landing. Until they adapted. Until they analyzed the basic metabolism of the planet's dominant life-forms, and constructed a neutralizer." "A neutralizer?" "A protective shell of ionized particles," she said patiently, "keyed to the individual bodychemistry." "Classified information," Mentor droned. Saxon licked his lips. "You mentioned cultural microorganisms?" "Much more deadly. I call them that, but Lang says I'm being semantically unsound. War, for example. Racial inferiority. To date we haven't found a cure." She broke off, and her eyes were shining wet. "But you don't have wars," Saxon said. "No." "Then?" "We have a -- ghetto," the girl said slowly. "I can't tell you about it. Perhaps soon -- " Abruptly she changed the subject. Slowly, Saxon's defenses began to crumble. To all intents he was now a member of Lang's household, Veena's adopted big brother. Big brother -- or pet? It did not really matter. back to the lifeboat. He remembered his graduation day, the crash of the Corps anthem, and the pledge. I do faithfully swear to uphold the ideals of Man, to use this vested power for the absolute good of Earth. I will not shrink from any cup of duty, regardless of how bitter. I will guard stasis with my life, and the lives of innocent people if need be, people whose only crime may be that they are potential threats to stasis -- He tinkered with the ship's reactor for an hour. Then he ran. Behind him the lifeboat dissolved in a white blossom of flame. Farewell the cold stars and the ache and the loneliness. Farewell the destruction of newborn colonies to secure the rotting stagnancy of Earth. He would have a great many bad nights, but he was used to bad nights. He thought of Veena and his stride quickened. She would be a beautiful woman. They were waiting for him back at the farm house, Lang, Veena and Merl. They were staring at the dark pyre of smoke in the forest. Saxon took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "I've got a confession to make -- " They weren't listening. Lang said quietly, "You were right, Veena. He may qualify." "Come." Merl took her husband's arm. "Let's call the Council." They went inside. Saxon looked at Veena. He moistened his lips. "You knew," he said. She nodded. There was a queer adult maturity about her as she said, "Wait. They're calling an emergency Council meeting to decide if you're fit." "Fit," Saxon said. Coldly, it seeped in. To survive? To be a playmate, a slave? "It's been a game," he said, grasping her shoulders. "You've known all along." "They're taking the transmitter to the Landing Site now," she said. "Would you like to watch?" Watch judgment of the outcasts on one of those who had marooned them? Why not? Lang and Merl were no longer in the house. Veena touched a silver stud in one comer, and one side of the room dissolved from a vista of golden wheat to a grassy amphitheatre. There were people assembled in the clearing. Lang and Merl stood on a mossy dais, making a speech. He saw the ship. It was a giant silver ovoid, fretted with strange vanes, pockmarked by the red cancer of rust. Towering forest patriarchs guarded that ship like a woodland shrine. A ship that had never been born on Earth. An alien ship. Understanding came, and a quiet horror. He lurched away from the screen, away from Veena. He was outside now, and running. He was a good Inhibition agent, he had been conditioned to the shock of alien concepts for half his lifetime, but the ground reeled beneath him as he ran and he could feel the hot trickle of blood where he had bitten through his lip to keep from screaming. Aliens. From oidside. Homo Superior, treating his apebrother with an hospitable contempt. Playing their inscrutable game. The lifeboat came down almost in front of him. It came down with a whining snarl and settled into the plowed field. The airlock opened. Primus Gant stepped out. His blue eyes were very cold and he was smiling. "Report, Commander." Years of conditioned reflex brought him erect, made him whisper, "Mission unsuccessful." He swayed, almost fell. Gant held him. "Easy, lad. We got the blowup a few minutes ago. It took us awhile to home in on the distress transmitter in your utility kit." He chuckled at Saxon's blank stare. "Whenever an agent's ship is destroyed his utility belt automatically functions as a distress signal." Saxon shook his head painfully. "You've been waiting?" "We started ten days ago when your monitor gave out with the annihilation alarm." He eyed Saxon keenly. "Just how bad is it?" Saxon told him. Gant's face turned a dirty white. "Aliens," he said thickly. "They probably murdered the original colony. You've come through nicely, lad. It may mean promotion." He turned into the ship. "Come on." "Wait." Saxon's voice was a dry whisper. "You're not going to -- " "Demolition," Gant said. "I've got a task force up there that can crack a planet. Let's go, Commander." I will not shrink from any cup of duty -- "Please," Saxon said huskily. "I don't believe they're inimical to Man. They're altruists." "So?" "They're benevolent," Saxon pleaded. "Both races can live together!" "Don't be a fool," Gant grunted, and turned into the airlock. Saxon leapt. One palm came down hard at the base of the Director's skull. (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Paul Orhan The York Problem Warfare, diplomacy, art, music, science, religion -- have all failed to secure peace for the world. But still there is hope for Mankind. Another experiment remains: change the color line -- and let's see what happens... i# T hey sat around the table, thirteen men dressed in the prescribed blue of their office. They spoke quietly, without tension, and they all seemed alike. Commissioner Dobu summed up this meeting of the Earth Council of Prevention and Correction of NonConformity. 'Tt is to be regretted," he said, "that the juvenile deliquency problem remains unsolved in York. It is also to be noted, and included in the local reports of the sector captains, that the problem has existed some six hundred years, since #, speaking in general figures. Therefore, the fault lies not with us -- though this point is to be hinted at rather than stated per se. Peaceful Sirs." The council members accepted his aside, with brief nods and briefer smiles, for the problem of York was nothing to smile at. Dobu cleared his throat and continued. "Since the Federated Galactic Bill of Inherent Human Rights forbids psychiatric treatment or syndromic surgery against an individual's wishes, and since the people of York under the fanatic tutorship of their church masters consider psychiatry a sacrilege, there is no easy solution -- no humane solution. But people who have refused all advice, aid and education for six hundred years no longer deserve humane treatment. Therefore, as we have done on so many other occasions, and as has been done by our predecessors, we present what we feel is the only solution. Namely, that York as a community, and the people of York as a whole, be eliminated in whatever manner the Federated Galactic Council sees fit. Sterilization appears to be the method most suitable. But even euthanasia would not be out of order." Mala Wang yawned as she read the commissioner's report. It was like all the others she'd sent to Galactic Council in the four years she'd ing had ever happened; not unless you counted the Report-Received flashes. She inserted a fresh strip into the feeder, worked the keys efficiently, and began sending. "Federated Galactic Council, Centauri Peaceful Sirs: In the meeting of July, #, the problem of York, its adult inhabitants, and more particularly its juvenile delinquents  Some forty minutes later, she was finished. She shut off the feeder, opened the ejector, and waited. Before she'd finished buffing the nails on her left hand, the ejector began clicking. "Report Received" emerged on the tape. Mala shrugged and pushed back her chair, but another series of clicks stopped her. "Urgently request operator stand by for results emergency session, Federated Galactic Council, being called at this time. Business: Conon York Sector." Mala stared at the tape, and slowly her eyes grew wide and her lips parted. Then she threw the inter-departmental switch and rang Commissioner Dobu. As soon as Dobu's face materialized on the screen, she said, "Peaceful Sir! I've just received a message that indicates the Galactic Council is going to take action on your reports!" A half-hour later, the Earth Council of Prevention and Correction of Non-Conformity was reconvened, waiting for the Galactic Council's decision. They were all wondering whether it would be sterilization or euthanasia. He'd been that way for weeks now, or was it months? Anyway, life was getting to be a foul-blooded pain! He saw the empty can, kicked it, watched it bounce along the cracked pavement. When it stopped bouncing, he was again faced with his problem: What to do on a hot July afternoon? He considered going down to Frank's Vizio Palace, but decided against it. Not that he was afraid of the Sinais, but it was too hot to invade enemy territory alone. Besides, he had brained all this month's vizios and new ones wouldn't be in for at least a week. So he leaned against the tenement's warped wall and looked for more cans to kick. On a day like this, he thought, a kid could almost wish vacation was over and school back in operation. Then he saw Pete Smith and waved a languid hand. "How's the pure-blood?" he asked. "Living," Pete answered. "And I can see Mr. Aryan's doing all right for -- " Both froze as the patrol bubble turned the corner on racing treads and pulled up short. John considered making a run for it, but saw it was too late. Pete had arrived at the same conclusion. "They picked our lips on the vocal-box," Pete whispered. "We're in trouble." John didn't have a chance to answer. The two Blasts were out of their bubble and coming toward them. The tall one said mechanically, "Section twenty-seven. Earth Ordinances, using profane language on public lanes. Subsection twelve, covering classification of terms of racial-superiority as profanity due to its negation of established fact and the harmful effects -- " "Oh, shove it. Blast," Pete muttered. "We know the public scroll. So you picked us up on the box. So what?" him. "You people never will learn. Why don't you accept the status quo, learn to live like human beings?" "That's what I always say," John murmured sarcastically. The Blast stepped in and slapped him, hard. John rocked back on his heels, clenched his fists, but did nothing. The Blast slapped him again, not quite so hard but with a great deal more deliberation. John bit his lip and dropped his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "Why don't we act like human beings!" The second Blast, a shorter, heavier man, waved his companion away. "Easy, Farn. Don't let this Yorker get you." He turned to the two adolescents, something like pity in his brown eyes. "We'll let it pass, this time. But we've got you down on our photopads. The next offense means Re-education House." Neither boy said a word, but John's cheek burned. and something in his chest burned even more. The conciliatory Blast hesitated; then said, "Why don't you boys come down to Composite Youth Center? We've got the latest vizios, athletic -- " "We're members of RaceThrough-God," John said, a quiet satisfaction in his voice. "The scroll says we can't be forced to attend go to meetings regularly." Fam, the Blast who had slapped John, whirled around and stamped back to the bubble. "C'mon, Stan!" he called. "This filthy slum sickens me! Stan nodded, but lowered his voice to a confidential murmur. "You'll never get out of York, be issued a space visa, or do anything worth while if you stick to the racechurch stuff, boys. You don't know what the Galaxy is like -- the planets, the beautiful cities. It's really something. Just sign up for for Integration and meet some really beautiful ladies." "We got our own ladies," John said, sullen and irritated. And his emotions bothered him. He should be enraged, after the slaps and sacriligeous lecture; not irritated. "We don't want Integration." Stan shrugged wearily. "All right. So you'll stick in this archaic hole, and eventually try to kill one of us, and end up on a euthanasia table. And one day the Galactic Council will get fed up and clean out the lot of you." He turned to the bubble, speaking over his shoulder. "Watch your steps. Any gang fights, stealing, or profanity will get you six months. The Blasts in Re-education won't slap -- they'll use electros on your fannies!" When the bubble went down the street and around the corner, Pete spat eloquently. John was still fighting his irritation, his vast sense of dissatisfaction, but he spat too, and said, "Man, I'd love to do a carve on all Outsiders!" "John!" a shrill voice called. "John, you getting into trouble again?" John turned light blue eyes to the left and looked at the ground floor window. "Oh, ease up, Ma! Can't an Aryan stand up to a foulblood Outsider?" "John!" the gray-haired, prematurely-old woman screeched. Her eyes darted up and down the street and her voice dropped to an intense whisper. "Don't you use those words in public! A profanity charge is all we need, what with your father drinking -- " John tried to interrupt, but she raised her voice again and shouted him down. "Don't you go getting into trouble, bringing those Blasts around bothering God-fearing folk who want to be left alone! It's you kids that make it tough for the rest of us. That rabble would let us be if you -- " John rubbed his short-cropped blond hair in exasperation, and stalked to the corner. Pete followed, and they paused near the curb, ignoring the tirade which continued behind them. Finally, the woman stopped speaking and drew her head back inside the window. The street was old, cracked In many places. But it didn't matter. The only traffic was the ramshackle public snake which ran once every half-hour, and an occasional transport, and the Blast bubbles which were constantly on the prowl for profanity, theft, attacks on Outsiders, and juvenile delinquency. "For once in a foul-blood lifetime," John exploded, "let's cut a different caper! I'm sick of fighting the Sinais and Albines and Sons of Musso. I want Upper City, where we can pick up some high loot." Pete's thick jaw fell open and he stared at his blond, slender companion. "Upper City! But the Blasts -- " "It's a free Galaxy, ain't it?" John snapped. "We're allowed anywhere our disks take us, ain't we? So I want to travel Upper City." "They'll watch us," Pete muttered. "Even if we could grab some loot, I don't like it there. My old man works as custodian in a food vendro. I went with him a few times and I didn't like it. The Outsiders look at us as if we smelled bad, and they don't sit near when we're on the snake. I tell you it's tough, John. Let's get a few of the boys and raid the Sons of Musso." John hesitated, and then decided that as leader of the Adolphs he had to follow through on what he'd said. He moved into the street and walked casually to the snake stop. "If you're jetting out, okay. But I don't operate that way." Pete didn't move. "You been there lately?" he jeered. "You know what it's like?" John acted as if he were too disgusted to answer. He'd been to Upper City several times, but that was years ago, when he was a baby and his mother had gone against the Divine-Angel-Ghurch master's wishes and had him inoculated against cancer. Everyone was doing it on the sly anyway, so she took him for his three shots. Then she'd switched to the Race-Through-God sect, and it was like the other, only there the master let it be known he'd taken his anti-cancer shots like everyone else. But John didn't remember much of Upper City, except that the people had looked at them with amusement and some contempt. He'd wondered why they did, but when he asked his mother she'd said he'd find out for himself. He had. The foul-blood trash! They had no pride. And they were all alike! He searched for a disk as the snake appeared at the corner. The jointed series of cars moved slowly on its tractor-like treads, turbo exhaust filtering through the blocktube high on the engine. Each year it seemed to get slower, noisier, shabbier. as the snake stopped. He placed his disk in the slot, waited a moment, then moved inside as the Clear buzzer sounded. He'd tried to fake his disk a few times, cutting imitations from plastic cans, but the auto-guard was too damn smart. It always rang for the Blast each snake carried in a little booth hinged to the last car. He found a seat near a window and glanced around. Not half-filled this early in the day. Later, when four o'clock came, it would be jammed. He turned to the window and watched the familiar shabby streets flow by. As they entered Sinai territory, he felt a tightening of the stomach muscles. But then he laughed and remembered he was on the snake, not invading. Nevertheless, when two big kids got on and took seats across the aisle, he knew a moment of fear. They were Sinais, all right. He'd seen the muscular one in a caper last winter. And they knew him for an Adolph. They exchanged glares, and John kept his face tough. The muscular Sinai took out a knife, holding it low so no one but John could see and began to run his finger over the blade. John reached for his own sticker; then stopped. He grinned like it. It was equivalent to calling them Outsiders. But their corner came along and they had to hop it. John turned back to the window. He'd get his sticker into that muscular one; see if he didn't! "Your sister sleeps with Outsiders," a soft voice murmured. John jerked around, and saw the three kids shuffling past his seat. They grinned at him and the softspoken one said, "You don't like it, Adolph? Step off at Benito Street and we'll have it out." John controlled his rage. "Some other time," he said, voice calm. "I'm capering Upper City today. Maybe you boys would like to declare a truce and come along?" They all stared at him. Then the one who did all the talking said, "Hell, he's a foul-blood liar!" "Sure," John said as they slumped into seats. "Follow me to the Split and see." "Okay," another Son of Musso said. "We will." And the three of them grinned at him. John grinned back, but he felt far from Aryan inside. Now he wouldn't be able to jet out. Now he'd really have to cross the Split. He began to sweat, hoping the snake would break down along the route, that a Blast would stop him from crossing, that the Earth would blow up! Anything to keep from having to cross the Split. He knew now that he'd never meant to do it -- just take a ride, kill some time, and bluff Pete when he got back. Ten minutes later, the Last Corner sign lit up at car end. The three Sons of Musso strolled out into the street and waited, standing quietly under the eyes of the Blasts who were always around the dry river bed which separated York from Upper City. This was the Split, and John had to leave the car. He came out, walked past the three kids toward the span, and stopped at the gate. "One to Upper City," he said, throat dry. The Blast gave him a sharp look. "Why do you want to go there, boy?" "Free Galaxy, ain't it?" John muttered. The Blast shrugged, handed him a transfer disk, lifted the gate. John had a momentary surge of satisfaction as he heard the Sons of Musso talking excitedly behind him. It wasn't every day that a kid from York invaded Upper City. Then he was at the shiny new snake and his stomach tightened and he was sweating. He kept walking, got on the fifth car, took a seat in the last row. He was the only passenger, but he'd seen others waiting in the cars he'd passed. Older folks. People who worked in Upper City, doing various menial tasks for the Outsiders. Ill When the Blast walked through on his way to the back-box, John ran to the port and looked out across the one-piece duralume span. The Sons of Musso were still there. Before he could make a decision, the snake eased forward fluidly and then hit high speed. John Stevens was frightened, but he composed his features and returned to his seat. He sat straight and tried to remember what the master had said about maintaining dignity in front of Outsiders, showing them the stuff pure-bloods were made of. But the words fled his mind as he gazed out of the window. Upper City was really something. Wide thoroughfares lacing over and under each other in stop-free through ways. Thousands -- no, miU lions of private bubbles rolling along with gaily-dressed passengers! Low, square, bright-looking buildings. Trees and grass and flowers everywhere. And then, for one glorious moment, they were in Bunche Spaceport, the greatest on Earth! John drank in the huge, upright needles that stood gleaming in the July sun, waiting to blast off for planets where even greater cities and spaceports were established. If only he, John Stevens of York, could get inside one of those ships and go -- Deep bitterness hit him, and all the irritation he'd felt for the past weeks was back. They don't let us do anything! he thought. They keep us poor ; in dirt and ignorance ! That's what the master had said. And he'd added that the Outsiders were afraid of Aryans. That's why they persecuted them. John was seeing the full majesty of Upper City now, the spacious walks and busy drives and sun-filled buildings. And he couldn't help wondering why his people refused Integration. He suddenly realized that the car had filled with passengers, with Outsiders. He also realized that the twin seat next to his was just about the only one left in the jammed car. He felt his face stiffen, felt the hatred rise in his blood; and then the girl flounced up the aisle and hesitated, looking at him. She sat down. Not more than sixteen, John thought. Just right for him. And she sure was cute. Lovely golden skin -- He stopped the thoughts there. It wasn't right to think that way. The master at Race-Through-God wouldn't approve. Not that John attended church regularly, as he'd told the Blast back in York. But still, such thoughts weren't right. They smacked of Integration. He kept his head still, but flicked his eyes around the crowded car. They'd made another stop, and now Outsiders were standing. They didn't seem to resent him, or, for that matter, pay him any particular attention. It was just that he felt different, and that made him angry, and that led to his standing up and moving to the port and getting off at the next corner -- all this instead of being sensible and staying on the snake until it returned to the span and York. But even as he stepped into the street, he was remembering how that girl had looked, with her big brown eyes and dark hair and golden skin. He muttered, "Damned, nonAryan, foul-blood Outsiders!" Then walked quickly down the street when he realized he'd used terms of racial-superiority. Getting picked up here for profanity wouldn't be fun. He'd get six months in Reeducation House for sure. Upper City was clean, fragrant and beautiful, but John Stevens wasn't enjoying himself. He was filled with nagging irritation, growing angrier by the second without knowihg exactly why. He began to search the eyes of people passing by -- well-dressed Outsiders in their one-piece coroplast suits, colors ranging through all the hues of the rainbow. He felt shabby in his old brown plasts. Those eyes seemed to be sneering at him. They seemed to be looking at him with disgust and contempt. He was about to turn around and go back to the snake stop, about to obey the warning bell that had begun ringing in his brain, when it happened. It wasn't much, and yet it was the last straw -- the one that broke the normal behavior patterns and left him at the mercy of his own emotions. A young woman, sleek and wellgroomed, was passing with a little boy of about five. The child stopped dead on seeing John. In spite of himself, John stopped too. The child stared at John, eyes wide and filled with wonder. "Mommy!" he shrilled. "Mommy, look at him!" The woman tried to hush her son, to drag him away, but the child eluded her grasp and danced back, still staring at John. "Look at him. Mommy! What a funny color -- " John raised his hand as if to strike the child. He didn't mean it, not really, but he wanted to stop that high-pitched voice, stop those amazed eyes from examining him. The child screamed and ran to his mother. The mother shrank back, enfolding the little boy in her arms, and shouted, "Help! Help me, please!" John turned and ran, almost into the arms of a tall Blast. He stopped, whirled around, and headed back past the woman and child. He cut left at the next corner, ran faster than ever before in his life, cut right, and left, and kept going until the breath rasped through his throat like liquified metal. But even as he ran, he was without fear. He was too angry now to be frightened. And it was anger such as he'd never before experienced. A sickening, confusing, red-hazed melange of emotion that had about it a nightmare quality. He had to slow down, and saw that it was all right. He'd lost that Blast, left the entire scene far behind. "Lousy foul-blooded Outsiders!" he panted, and at the same time knew that it wasn't just the Outsiders. It was his mother, and his father, and the slum, and the gangs, and the poverty. It was his life he hated, his life he raged at. This then was the irritation he'd felt in the past weeks, now transformed by Upper City into a maniacal rage. John Stevens was leader of the Adolphs. John Stevens wasn't even close to being the biggest or strongest boy in his crowd. But he was the smartest. And this raw, basic, but still superior intellect worked against him as he stalked the wide avenues of Upper City. A caper, he thought. He'd pull a big caper, return with loot, justify this visit, take out his anger on these people -- these scum who had made his life so poor. Or was it his mother and father who had made his life poor? Was it the masters who had done that? Why had he come here when it brought such confusion, such pain? Another quick change of thought. He blocked everything from his mind but the red haze of rage; fed it, allowed it to grow to the point where it swallowed everything but his desire to strike back. He didn't know where he was, where he was going, and he no longer saw the Outsiders. He had regained his wind now, and began walking quickly, almost running. It was later, much later, when he finally found the right street, and the right vendro, and the focal point for his hatred. Clothing. New, bright, expensive coroplast suits. Eight hundred disks and up! More than his father made in three months. More than John Stevens had ever seen in a lump sum. The street was quiet, empty of pedestrians. He walked past the vendro, casing it with eyes that saw nothing but inner hate. Something sane -- something still resisting the never-before-experienced rage -- cried out that he wasn't being smart, that he wasn't checking for Blasts, that he couldn't think straight enough for a caper, especially one in Upper City. But he was back at the vendro now, and he was going inside. There was only the commersh, and an old man magnetting dust from the floor. The commersh was an Outsider, naturally. But the old man was one of York's folk, and this made John Stevens lose whatever grain of caution he might have retained. His folk, slaving for these scum! The commersh was moving toward him, face bland, only his dark eyes showing something other than serenity at seeing a kid from York. "Are you sure you have the right -- " he began, and then gasped as John pulled his knife and snapped the eight-inch blade free of the haft. John pressed the blade against the Outsider's stomach and said, "Five suits, the best, and I'm with you every foul-blood inch of the way!" "Don't, son!" the old man said from the side. "Get out before -- " John half-turned his head, and then felt the numbness strike his body. He stood there, completely rigid for a moment, and then found he could breathe and move his lips and shift his eyes. The commersh stepped back, pressed a red button on the counter. "You Yorkers must be insane," he said mildly. "Do you think we haven't got adequate protection against criminals of our own group, not to say such pitiful amateurs as you? I can paralyze a whole vendro full of people with this little ornament on my wrist." He showed John the metallic strap and small case. "It's six months Re-education House for you." The old man shuffled closer, peered at John, said, "The Blasts will be here soon. You can talk. Tell me your name and I'll get word to your folks and your master. Maybe they can help." The rage was so strong now that John barely heard the old man. He was screaming inside, bellowing insane things that couldn't get through his rigid throat. But the words, "You can talk," penetrated, and he calmed himself. He tried hard, and squeaking sounds came through his lips. He shaped the words, and then had nothing to say. There wasn't anything bad enough, anything that could hurt this Outsider, anything that could penetrate his shield of superiority. And then he remembered the ancient word, the forbidden word, the cardinal sin that meant death if used. He'd heard it one night when his father had gotten hold of enough medicinal prychol for a long drunk, and had ranted and raved against the Outsiders. "Nigger!" John screamed. "Nigblood Niggers! Planets full of lousy Niggers! All alike! All brown! Only we are white! Only we are pure-bloods! Only we aren't Nig -- " The paralysis intensified, everything stopped, he couldn't breathe, he wanted desperately to breathe. And, more than that, in a final instant of clarity, he wanted to say that it was all a mistake -- everything he'd said, everything he'd thought, everything he'd lived by. He too would be a golden brown, his own folk who were the outsiders, but it wasn't their fault either. It was the fault of those few thousand who'd refused Integration when all the rest of Earth's population had decided on mixed breeding as a solution to human conflict. And that was six hundred years ago, and the cults had formed in York, and no one knew how to break the pattern of hatred, envy and fear. But he was falling into a long tube that had no light and had no end. That girl on the snake, that lovely girl with the sweet smell and soft eyes and golden skin, that composite of all the white, black, brown, yellow and red races of Earth would never be his. The space ships and wonderful planets would never be his. Never, he thought, because I am dead. He was wrong. He wasn't dead. He opened his eyes later and vomited and was then hauled to his feet and stripped and given fresh clothing. He was taken by two Outsiders -- only he didn't think of them that way any more, only used the term because he had no others -- was taken by them to a white room and pushed inside and left there alone as the port slid shut. A voice spoke from the smooth you to accept psychiatric treatment." "No," John said automatically. He didn't want his brain touched. There were stories told by the masters -- The voice spoke again. "Very well. You have used the term of of Upper Gity. The Galactic Scroll calls for a penalty of death. However, because of your youth, and probable syndromic history, the sentence is reduced to ten years in Reeducation House. Have you anything to say?" John fought not to cry out. Ten years! That was worse than death! Six months was enough to break a man, and ten years would drive him mad. He'd wanted to say he was ready was anxious for the time when he'd be eligible for Integration, when he'd be sent to another part of Earth and allowed to mingle with the golden-skinned people and so lose his hatreds, fears and tensions. But now he couldn't. Because it wasn't a matter of free choice any longer. It was an escape from terror, from ten years in hell. Later, he was told that this room would be his home for the next ten years. He didn't answer the unseen voice, nor touch the food that was given him through the minor-port. He decided he would use the only means of escape men had ever found in Re-education House. He would starve himself to death. He meant it. away, the thirteen members of more subdued. They'd had an hour of waiting, and an hour of thinking. Each was now wrestling with his conscience, wondering what portion of responsibility was his in the coming decision. Of course, everyone in the Galaxy agreed that York's eight hundred thousand residents had to be eliminated since they were incorrigible race-god fanatics. But now that the moment was almost at hand, sterilization seemed quite drastic, and euthanasia -- To a man, they looked up as Mala entered the chamber. "Most Peaceful Sir," she began, stopping before Commissioner Dobu's chair. But Dobu snatched the transcription from her hand, mumbled over the code-identification and formal introductions, and read the meat of the report in a voice that trembled only slightly. "After years of work, our scientists on Centauri Two have produced the answer to the York probnew geneological agent is en route to Earth, York Sector, for immediate administration to the white population. The effect produced by induction of this agent into the bloodstream will be an instantaneous change of pigmentation to accepted norm, and subsequent loss of racial tension. Change is permanent, and will be transmitted to offspring. Administration will be initiated by paralysis of entire white population, said method to be launched immediately. Shipment of geneological agent should arrive Bunche Spaceport, # hundred hours, day-this-report. Within five days after change of pigmentation, population of York is to be separated into family units and sent to as many different Galactic sectors as is possible. This order applies to all white residents, not excluding those found outside of York, or those in re-education institutions." John Stevens didn't hear the shout that went up from thirteen relieved and delighted men. He was entering the second hour of his fast unto the death. He couldn't know that he'd fail to complete a single day of it.   # And Gant twisted. He palmed the younger man with two deft blows, throat and plexus. Saxon slumped, retching. Gant stood above him, his smile strained. "Amateur," he panted. "I was instructing hand tactics before you were bom." He took out his blaster. "They've infected you," he said compassionately. "I'm sorry, lad. You'll get a posthumous decoration." The blaster came up, steadied. Then Gant stood very still, a whitehaired statue. Mentor came around the ship and helped Saxon to his feet. "Destroying guests is forbidden," the robot clicked. "The concept is irrational." L ater, in the shadows of the farmhouse that was not a farmhouse, Saxon watched the scout disappear into the sky. He turned towards Veena. "You're letting him go?" "Mentor -- treated him," she said dreamily. "He'll report that you destroyed the colony, died in the process, and this planet is unfit for further colonization. Incidentally, the council voted in the affirmative. Otherwise you'd be with Gant." Aliens, playing a game with their ape-brother. Recognizing him at first glance, speaking his language, making him feel wanted, at home. Why? He was afraid to ask the question. "We're on a vacation," Veena said. "We've only been here for one generation. We were due to return almost thirty years ago, but we found your colony." "Did you -- " "Isolation," she murmured. "The ghetto. They're sick," she said. "Infected with the culture plague. We couldn't leave them and we couldn't help them." Her gaze was very steady. "Until you came." It came to him. Man, clutching at the knees of Gods, envying, striving futilely, finally hating. Only Man can help Man. "It's not fair, Saxon breathed. He took Veena by the shoulders, made her look at him. "I'm happy here. You and Lang -- Merl -- I'm just beginning to learn! Fd hoped that in a few years -- " "We are not human," Veena said gently. "And our life span is four hundred of your years." For the first time, he noticed the faint malformation of her ears, the subtle differences in facial bone structure. He glanced past her, saw Lang and Merl waiting in the doorway. "It will mean months of study." she said. "You have so much to unlearn, to understand. They may reject you, sacrifice you. That will not matter. What does matter is your impact on their culture, what it will mean a thousand generations hence." Diseased apes, with a touch of Godhood, suffering from an infection that might be forever incurable. Why should he be the sacrifice? Who was he, to help them? Looking at Veena, he knew the answer.    Tomorrow's menu may consist of four week old meat, six month old bread and vegetables that are several years old. Scientists working in atomic laboratories forecast that atomic radiation will keep such foods unspoiled without the necessity of sub-zero freezing. They've preserved such foodstuffs successfully with radiation treatments. And though there are still drawbacks to using the technique commercially, they predict the day is coming. Another step forward in the application of atomic energy is being made at the nuclear reactor pile at Harwell, England, where they are using atomic radiation to vulcanize rubber. Oxidation is not a factor in this process; energy alone is responsible for this faster change in the structure of the rubber. Students applying for entrance to Universities may, in the future, be rated by the measurement of their body build as well as by intelligence tests, aptitude tests and entrance examinations. Called somatyping, this body build typing was recently used to study the relationship between physical configuration and mental ability in a group of English university students. Physical features, such as being muscled or fat or lean, were found to promote or handicap the efficiency of the mental equipment to a surprising degree. Such typing may give information on academic failure and allied problems of mental disturbance; and performance not only in school, but in industry, the armed forces and life itself may be predicted to some extent. Mineral fibers may be used for aircraft wings and bodies in the near future. A technique developed at a Japanese University uses materials such as basalt and aqueous rock to form these mineral "threads". They are melted down and poured on a slit revolving disk. A fiber is formed through centrifugal force with the aid of a current of air. The addition of this fiber to cement makes it ten times stronger than steel. Further processing -- into polyester resins -- could make it usable in place of all types of light metals. Pianists may soon be able to carry their instruments with them, with no more trouble than a bass player has. A stringless instrument which has an electronic tone production system and never needs tuning has been perfected. Used with earphones, no one but the player hears the music, but grand piano volume is attained by plugging the piano into a radio or TV set. The eighty pound unit has detachable, folding legs and can be carried quite easily in the back seat of a car. Man # years from now, according to Dr. W. M. Krogman of the University of Pennsylvania, will be the product of an evolution directed by the science of genetics. The brain will be highly improved so that each mind will be both a sending and receiving set of direct thought communication. The span of life will be between # and # years, and all of life will go at a much slower pace. Less muscular activity and a lessening of the oxygen in the atmosphere (which is going on even now) will make man burn up his food more slowly, in order to adapt to the change. Man will be a well adapted biped, with hands able to fashion more detailed intricate instruments of precision, and feet reduced to flat, more or less circular bases for legs which are no more than pedestals for the trunk and head. Ultrasonic waves of a frequency of # cycles a second, fifty times higher than the highest audible pitch, are the latest idea for operations requiring precise surgery. The beam is sent through a salt solution in contact with both sound source and the brain tumor or diseased tissue. With a precision far beyond the surgeon's knife, it destroys an area as small as onetwentieth of an inch in diameter without affecting tissue around, above or beyond the immediate spot. Depth of the tumor or cancerous tissue within the body or brain will not be of any consequence when the tool is perfected. Mars has long been the planet most likely to bear life, but astronomers are now claiming that Venus is much more likely to be "life bearing". The thick cloud layer surrounding our sister planet has been shown to have the same optical properties as terrestrial clouds, hence it is probably condensed water vapor. If this is so, there should be water over the whole surface of the planet otherwise protruding rocks would soon absorb practically all the carbon dioxide. However this hasn't happened, for spectroscopic observations prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that carbon dioxide is extremely abundant in the atmosphere of Venus. This new picture of an ocean covered planet, makes life on Venus more plausible than ever before. Hutchings Goddard. # -- Angstrom. # -- All are sub-atomic particles. #I -- Eleven. # -- Parahelic circle. # -- #. # -- # miles an hour. # -- #. #. Percival Lowell. # -- #, #. # -- # pounds. # -- Spiral Galaxies. # -- #. There IS a Time when Your Luck Will Change! 'And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Mens hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth...St. Luke #:#, #. When the Bible was written prophecy was an outstanding feature of this greatest of all books. Today many scoff at predictions, yet -- the Biblical prophecy written # years ago that the Jews would reestablish a new nation of Israel, has just come true! Today we know that there are "cycles" when wars and world problems reach fanatical heights -- then changes come. Marguerite Carter has given her life to study, keeping records that may be used to help mankind. Of one thing you may be sure, she is honest and to be trusted! This amazing woman predicted, long before, the coming order of nations in World War II. In # when Russia was struggling for survival, she said: "We shall find it necessary to sit down equally at the peace table with Russia and concede to her wishes. Only very shrewd maneuvering will prevent her being the completely dominant power in Europe." This has come true! Now -- she says -- "This is the time of many small wars, quarrels in families and sudden home changes. Through it all, the United States will advance to unbelievable power and sound financial strength. For many, many people there will be completely new fields of work!" Test Miss Carters accuracy for the greatest help you personally have ever known. Get "your" forecast for the next twelve months. Send your complete birthday -- month, date, and year, the hour of your birth (if known), and the place -- with a remittance of # for your forecast which will include Miss Cartels special notations showing 'Outstanding Indications: Allow three weeks for proper, careful attention. Address: Marguerite Carter, #I Jackson Bldg., Indianapolis #, Indiana. sen fieri continued from other side fUfln Will fly !o IheMoonSoon! and Problems of Conquering Space A t last! The world's top space research scientists reveal their plans for the conquest of space. You see their actual diagrams for a "round-the-moon" ship designed to travel in space only. You get a detailed preview of the first flight to the moon... blueprints for a #-stage chemically propelled Rocket Ship... actual plans for a Giant Space Station to launch moon ships -- # miles above the earth! "Across The Space Frontier" is the most comprehensive study of interplanetary travel ever published. Written by not one experts including: Dr. Wernher Von Braun, Willy Eey, Dr. Heinz Haber, Dr, Joseph Kaplan. of these new masterpieces of decidel tion above. who becomes her own daughter... atomic power from beans... and many other stories. -- The world is about to end. 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Honored Unless Filled Out and Signed on The Reverse Side.  car of the future through the air also drive it along the surface by transferring power to wheel locomotion. On the surface, the wings collapse and fold back into the body, giving it a "teardrop", streamlined effect. There are three wheels, two in front and a single drive-wheel in the rear, with the three wheels forming a wide triangle. The "run-about" shown here holds two passengers. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Mel Hunter Lunascape I I # I # I # I i Automobiles of the Future i IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No I Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Ofhce of publication, # Lord Street' Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for nge of address. All stories appearing in this marine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible lor unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale February # th the first two winning stories in IP's recent College Science Fiction Contest with the theme: "What Will America Be Like # Years From Now?" The first-prize story "And Gone Tomorrow" (December issue), by a student at the University of Louisville, prophesied a world dictatorship, with a caesar akin to the old style Roman emperors. And there were several other manuscripts based on the same premise -- that the United States would some day be a dictatorship itself, or part of one. These youngsters were extrapolating on present day events, and to do this one must be keenly aware of political and economic trends. And their prediction of a dictatorship for the U.S.A. comes uncannily close to the mark, for dictatorship -- and there is no good or benevolent one -- is looming all too closely on the horizon. It won't even be # years from now. It could be in your time and in my time. The first step in this all too possible autocracy will take place this year -- for this is the year the heads of the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. will decide whether or not to merge their strength and become one gigantic union. From their point of view this would be an ideal set-up, and it is likely that the merger will go through unless something is done to stop it. The influence which unions all over the country now have in our state and national governments is blatantly obvious. Political candidates curry favor with unions and union members for their votes and for their contributions to the coffers of the election funds. This wedge of votes and money has opened the way for pro-union legislation which puts these huge groups in the driver's seat in both government and industry. Mind you, this state of affairs exists now, when there is decentralization of union power; imagine what it will be like when one organization can control the votes, bers who directly or indirectly affect the lives and living of every hutnan person in the nation! If a merger such as this goes through, it would involve something like # C.I.O. and A.F.L. members alone, and affect practically every industry in the United States. With such influence as this in operation, it is reasonable to assume that independent unions, bers, will jump on the bandwagon. The whole movement will become a huge free-rolling steamroller with one man, or a small group of men, holding the wheel. I believe in unionism, when there is honesty and integrity; I also believe in good government. But there can't be sound, unhampered government when a union is so large that it can bring the industrial might of a nation the size of the United States to a standstill. For example, smaller organizations have been able to cripple shipping on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts with dock strikes; the steel industry, and all the industries that depend on steel such as aircraft, automotive, and ship building plants, were brought to a halt by a strike of steel workers not too long ago. Textile mills, electronic laboratories, coal mines, transportation, even the atomic laboratories at Oak Ridge have come to a standstill at one time or another through the medium of strikes. The pressure that can be brought to bear when such a strike affects something as vital as the national defense (as in the case of the atomic workers strike) is so great that even the decentralized set-up we have now is too powerful for the good of the nation. It isn't too difficult to imagine then, how a vast octopus-like union, able to pull a strike in all industries at once, could wreck the Ship of State. The heads of such a union would have more power than the President of the United States; such all-powerful men could demand anything they wished -- and get it; they could get the men of their choice elected to the senate and congress and the White House. Not only could they control the reins of government with their voting blocs, but they could also physically control the country's industries and thus the actual livelihood of the entire population of the United States. There is another factor to consider. Labor unions have had a tough fight to gain recognition, and the leaders of these unions have been trained in hard schools. But such training hasn't lessened the fact that men who have emerged as leaders may very easily have feet of clay... and that personal ideology and whim may sometimes have a far reaching effect. For such is the nature of man when he has unlimited power. A dictatorship is the next easy step. The power of unions is so great already that the President of the United States, the members of Congress and the Senate may even now find that their political lives are in jeopardy if they voice opposition to the proposed merger. Let us hope, however, that political leaders will realize what this merger means, and put the welfare of #ie nation before their own and see to it that immediate legislation is passed to break up this centralization of union power. Let us hope that the union members themselves have the insight to realize what an uncontrollable monster they may be hatching, and that they will have the guts to place their country before their jobs and fight to preserve the democratic form of government under which this nation has prospered. I would be the last to deny that unions have done more good than evil, that the working man needed (Continued on page #) Problem: The future must be changed!... For he was a throwback from the future, this old man, veteran of war yet to come; war in which Earth was annihilated... Illustrated by Kelly Freas T he old man sat on the park bench in the bright hot sunlight and watched the people moving back and forth. The park was neat and clean; the lawns glittered wetly in the spray piped from a hundred shiny copper tubes. A polished robot gardner crawled here and there, weeding and plucking and gathering waste debris in its disposal slot. Children scampered and shouted. Young couples sat basking sleepily and holding hands. Groups of handsome soldiers strolled lazily along, hands in their pockets, admiring the tanned, naked girls sunbathing around the pool. Beyond the park the roaring cars and towering needle-spires of New York sparkled and gleamed. The old man cleared his throat and spat sullenly into the bushes. The bright hot sun annoyed him; it was too yellow and it made perspiration steam through his seedy. ragged coat. It made him conscious of his grizzled chin and missing left eye. And the deep ugly burn-scar that had seared away the flesh of one cheek. He pawed fretfully at the h-loop around his scrawny neck. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled himself upright against the glowing metal slats of the bench. Bored, lonely, bitter, he twisted around and tried to interest himself in the pastoral scene of trees and grass and happily playing children. Three blond-faced young soldiers sat down on the bench opposite him and began unrolling picnic lunch-cartons. The old man's thin rancid breath caught in his throat. Painfully, his ancient heart thudded, and for the first time in hours he came fully alive. He struggled up from his lethargy and focussed his dim sight on the soldiers. The old man got out his handkerchief, mopped his sweat-oozing face, and then spoke to them. "Nice afternoon." The soldiers glanced up briefly. "Yeah," one said. "They done a good job." The old man indicated the yellow sun and the spires of the city. "Looks perfect." The soldiers said nothing. They concentrated on their cups of boiling black coffee and apple pie. "Almost fools you," the old man went on plaintively. "You boys with the seed teams?" he hazarded. "No," one of them said. "We're rocketeers." The old man gripped his aluminum cane and said, "I was in demolition. Back in the old Ba-# Squad." None of the soldiers responded. They were whispering among themselves. The girls on a bench farther down had noticed them. The old man reached into his coat pocket and brought out something wrapped in gray torn tissuepaper. He unfolded it with shaking fingers and then got to his feet. Unsteadily, he crossed the gravel path to the soldiers. "See this?" He held out the object, a small square of glittering metal. "I won that back in '#. That was before your time, I guess." A flicker of interest momentarily roused the young soldiers. "Hey," one whistled appreciatively. "That's a Crystal Disc -- first class." He raised his eyes questioningly. "You won that?" The old man cackled proudly, as he wrapped up the medal and restored it to his coat pocket. "I served under Nathan West, in the Wind Giant, It wasn't until the final jump they took against us I got mine. But I was out there with my d-squad. You probably remember the day we set off our network, rigged all the way from -- " "Sorry," one of the soldiers said vaguely. "We don't go back that far. That must have been before our time." "Sure," the old man agreed eagerly. "That was more than sixty years ago. You heard of Major Perati, haven't you? How he rammed their covering fleet into a meteor cloud as they were converging for their final attack? And how the Ba-# was able to hold them back months before they finally slammed us?" He swore bitterly. "We held them off. Until there wasn't more'n a couple of us left. And then they came In like vultures. And what they found they -- "Sorry, Pop." The soldiers had got lithely up, collected their lunches, and were moving toward the bench of girls. The girls glanced at them shyly and giggled in anticipation. "We'll see you some other time." The old man turned and hobbled furiously back to his own bench. Disappointed, muttering under his breath and spitting into the wet bushes, he tried to make himself comfortable. But the sun irritated him; and the noises of people and cars made him sick. He sat on the park bench, eye half shut, wasted lips twisted in a snarl of bitterness and defeat. Nobody was interested in a decrepit half-blind old man. Nobody wanted to hear his garbled, rambling tales of the battles he had fought and strategies he had witnessed. Nobody seemed to remember the war that still burned like a twisting, corroding fire in the decaying old man's brain. A war he longed to speak of, if he could only find listeners. his car to a halt and slammed on the emergency brake. "That's that," he said over his shoulder. "Make yourselves comfortable. We're going to have a short wait." The scene was familiar. A thousand Earthmen in gray caps and armbands streamed along the street, chanting slogans, waving immense crude banners that were visible for blocks. Jn the back seat of the car Edwin LeMarr put aside his report tapes with a grunt of near-sighted surprise. "Why have we stopped? What is it?" "Another demonstration," Evelyn Cutter said distantly. She leaned back and disgustedly lit a cigarette. "Same as all of them." The demonstration was in full swing. Men, women, youths out of school for the afternoon, marched wild-faced, excited and intense, some with signs, some with crude weapons and in partial uniform. Along the sidewalks more and more watching spectators were being tugged along. Blue-clad policemen had halted surface traffic; they stood watching indifferently, waiting for somebody to try to interfere. Nobody did, of course. Nobody was that foolish. "Why doesn't the Directorate put a stop to this?" LeMarr demanded. "A couple of armored columns would finish this once and for all." Beside him, John V-Stephens laughed coldly. "The Directorate finances it, organizes it, gives it free time on the vidnet, even beats up people who complain. Look at those cops standing over there. Waiting for somebody to beat up." LeMarr blinked. "Patterson, is that true?" Rage-distorted faces loomed up beyond the hood of the sleek '# Buick. The tramp of feet made the chrome dashboard rattle; Doctor LeMarr tugged his tapes nervously into their metal case and peered around like a frightened turtle. "What are you worried about? V-Stephens said harshly. "They wouldn't touch you -- youre an Earthman. I'm the one who should be sweating." "They're crazy," LeMarr muttered. "All those morons chanting and marching -- " "They're not morons," Patterson answered mildly. "They're just too trusting. They believe what they're told, like the rest of us. The only trouble is, what they're told isn't true." He indicated one of the gigantic banners, a vast #-D photograph that twisted and turned as it was carried forward. "Blame him. He's the one who thinks up the lies. He's the one who puts the pressure on the Directorate, fabricates the hate and violence -- and has the funds to sell it." The banner showed a stembrowed white-haired gentleman, clean-shaven and dignified. A scholarly man, heavy-set, in his late fifties. Kindly blue eyes, firm jawline, an impressive and respected dignitary. Under his handsome portrait was his personal slogan, coined in a moment of inspiration. "That's Francis Gannet," VStephens said to LeMarr. "Fine figure of a man, isn't he?" He corrected himself. "Of an ariman." "He looks so genteel," Evelyn Cutter protested. "How could an intelligent-looking man like that have anything to do with this?" V-Stephens bellowed with taut laughter. "His nice clean white hands are a lot filthier than any of those plumbers and carpenters marching out there." "But why -- " "Gannet and his group own Transplan Industries, a holding company that controls most of the export-import business of the inner worlds. If my people and the Martian people are given their independence they'll start cutting into his trade. They'll be competition. But as it stands, they're bottled up in a cold-decked mercantile system." The demonstrators had reached an intersection. A group of them dropped their banners and sprouted clubs and rocks. They shouted orders, waved the others on, and then headed grimly for a small modem building that blinked the word "Oh, God," Patterson said. "They're after the Color-Ad office." He grabbed at the door handle, but V-Stephens stopped him. "You can't do anything," V-Stephens said. "Anyhow, nobody's in there. They usually get advance warning." The rioters smashed the plateplastic windows and poured into the swank little store. The police sauntered over, arms folded, enjoying the spectacle. From the ruined front office, smashed furniture was tossed out onto the sidewalk. Files, desks, chairs, vidscreens, ashtrays, even gay posters of happy life on the inner worlds. Acrid black fingers of smoke curled up as the store room was ignited by a hotbeam. Presently the rioters came streaming back out, satiated and happy. Along the sidewalks, people watched with a variety of emotions. Some showed delight. Some a vague curiosity. But most showed fear and dismay. They backed hurriedly away as th# wild-faced rioters pushed brutally past them, loaded down with stolen goods. "See?" Patterson said. "This stuff is done by a few thousand, a Committee Gannet's financing. Those in front are employees of Gannet's factories, goon squads on extracurricular duty. They try to sound like Mankind, but they aren't. They're a noisy minority, a small bunch of hard-working fanatics." The demonstration was breaking up. The Color-Ad office was a dismal fire-gutted ruin; traffic had been stopped; most of downtown New York had seen the lurid slogans and heard the tramp of feet and shouted hate. People began drifting back into offices and shops, back to their daily routine. And then the rioters saw the Venusian girl, crouched in the locked and bolted doorway. forward. Bucking and grinding savagely, it hurtled across the street and up on the sidewalk, toward the running knot of dark-faced hoods. The nose of the car caught the first wave of them and tossed them like leaves. The rest collided with the metal hull and tumbled down in a shapeless mass of struggling arms and legs. The Venusian girl saw the car sliding toward her -- and the Earthpeople in the front seat. For a moment she crouched in paralyzed terror. Then she turned and scurried off in panic, down the sidethat filled up the street. The rioters regrouped themselves and in an instant were after her in full cry. "Get the webfoot!" "Webfoots back to their own planet!" "Earth for Earthmen!" And beneath the chanted slogans, the ugly undercurrent of imverbalized lust and hate. Patterson backed the car up and onto the street. His fist clamped savagely over the horn, he gunned the car after the girl, abreast with the loping rioters and then past them. A rock crashed off the rearview window and for an instant a hail of rubbish banged and clattered. Ahead, the crowd separated aimlessly, leaving an open path for the car and the rioters. No hand was lifted against the desperately running girl as she raced sobbing and panting between parked cars and groups of people. And nobody made a move to help her. Everybody watched dull-eyed and detached. Remote spectators viewing an event in which they had no part. "I'll get her," V-Stephens said. "Pull up in front of her and I'll head her off." Patterson passed the girl and jammed on the brakes. The girl doubled off the street like a terrified hare. V-Stephens was out of the car in a single bound. He sprinted after her as she darted mindlessly back toward the rioters. He swept her up and then plunged back to the car. LeMarr and Evelyn Cutter dragged the two of them in; and Patterson sent the car bucking ahead. A moment later he turned a corner, snapped a police rope, and passed beyond the danger zone. The roar of people, the flap-flap of feet against the pavement, died down behind them. "It's all right," V-Stephens was saying gently and repeatedly to the girl. "We're friends. Look, I'm a webfoot, too." The girl was huddled against the door of the car, green eyes wide with terror, thin face convulsed, knees pulled up against her stomach. She was perhaps seventeen years old. Her webbed fingers scrabbled aimlessly with the tom collar of her blouse. One shoe was missing. Her face was scratched, dark hair dishevelled. From her tremblmg mouth only vague sounds came LeMarr took her pulse. "Her heart's about to pop out of her," he muttered. From his coat he took an emergency capsule and shot a narcotic into the girl's trembling forearm. "That'll relax her. She's not harmed -- they didn't get to her." "It's all right' V-Stephens murmured. "We're doctors from the City Hospital, all but Miss Cutter who manages the files and records. Dr. LeMarr is a neurologist. Dr. Patterson is a cancer specialist, I'm a surgeon -- see my hand?" He traced the girl's forehead with his surgeon's hand. "And I'm a Venusian, like you. We'll take you to the hospital and keep you there for awhile." 'T)id you see them?" LeMarr sputtered. "Nobody lifted a finger to help her. They just stood there." "They were afraid," Patterson said, "They want to avoid trouble." "They can't," Evelyn Cutter said flatly. "Nobody can avoid this kind of trouble. They can't keep standing on the sidelines watching. This isn't a football game." "What's going to happen?" the girl quavered. "You better get off Earth," V-Stephens said gently. "No Venusian is safe here. Get back to your own planet and stay there until this thing dies down." "Will it?" the girl gasped. "Eventually." V-Stephens reached down and passed her Evelyn's cigarette. "It can't go on like this. We have to be free." "Take it easy," Evelyn said in a dangerous voice. Her eyes faded to hostile coals. "I thought you were above all this." V-Stephens dark green face flushed. "You think I can stand idly by while my people are killed and insulted, and our interests passed over, ignored so paste-faces like Gannet can get rich on blood squeezed from -- " "Paste-face," LeMarr echoed wonderingly. "What's that mean, Vachel?" "That's their word for Earthmen," Patterson answered. "Can it, V-Stephens. As far as we're concerned it's not your people and our people. We're all the same race. Your ancestors were Earthmen who settled Venus back in the late twentieth century." "The changes are only minor adaptive alterations," LeMarr assured V-Stephens. "We can still interbreed -- that proves we're the same race." "We can," Evelyn Cutter said thinly. "But who wants to marry a webfoot or a crow?" Nobody said anything for awhile. The air in the car was tense with hostility as Patterson sped toward the hospital. The Venusian girl sat crouched, smoking silently, her terrified eyes on the vibrating floor. Patterson slowed down at the check-point and showed his i.d. tab. The hospital guard signalled the car ahead and he picked up speed. As he put his tab away his fingers touched something clipped to the inside of his pocket. Sudden memory returned. "Here's something to take your mind off your troubles," he said to V-Stephens. He tossed the sealed tube back to the webfoot. "Military fired it back this morning. Clerical error. When you're through with it hand it over to Evelyn. It's supposed to go to her, but I got interested." V-Stephens slit open the tube and spilled out the contents. It was a routine application for admission to a Government hospital, stamped with the number of a war-veteran. Old sweat-grimed tapes, papers torn and mutilated throughout the years. Greasy bits of metal foil that had been folded and refolded, stuffed in a shirt pocket, carried next to some filthy, hair-maUed chest. "Is this important?" VStephens asked impatiently. "Do we have to worry over clerical trifles?" Patterson halted the car in the hospital parking lot and turned off the motor. "Look at the number on the application," he said, as he pushed open the car door. "When you have time to examine it you'll find something unusual. The applicant is carrying around an old veteran's i.d. card -- with a number that hasn't been issued yet." LeMarr, hopelessly baffled, looked from Evelyn Cutter to VStephens, but got no explanation. T he old man's h-loop awoke him from a fitful slumber. "David Unger," the tinny female voice repeated. "You are wanted back at the hospital. It is requested that you return to the hospital immediately." The old man grunted and pulled himself up with an effort. Grabbing his aluminum cane he hobbled away from his sweat-shiny bench, toward the escape ramp of the park. Just when he was getting to sleep, shutting out the too-bright sun and the shrill laughter of children and girls and young soldiers... At the edge of the park two shapes crept furtively into the bushes. David Unger halted and stood in disbelief, as the shapes glided past him along the path. His voice surprised him. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, shrieks of rage and revulsion that echoed through the park, among the quiet trees and lawns. foots! he wailed. He began to run clumsily after them. "Webfoots and crows! Help! Somebody help!" Waving his aluminum cane, he hobbled after the Martian and Venusian, panting wildly. People appeared, blank-faced with astonishment. A crowd formed, as the old man hurried after the terrified pair. Exhausted, he stumbled against a drinking fountain and half-fell, his cane sliding from his fingers. His shrunken face was livid; the burn-scar stood out sick and ugly against the mottled skin. His good eye was red with hate and fury. From his wasted lips saliva drooled. He waved his skinny claw-like hands futilely, as the two altereds crept into the grove of cedars toward the far end of the park. "Stop them!" David Unger slobbered. "Don't let them get away! What's the matter with you? You bunch of lily-white cowards. What kind of men are you?" "Take it easy. Pop," a young soldier said good-naturedly. "They're not hurting anybody." Unger retrieved his cane and whooshed it past the soldier's head. "You -- talker" he snapped. "What kind of a soldier are you?" A fit of coughing choked off his words; he bent double, struggling to breathe. "In my day," he managed to gasp, "we poured rocket fuel on them and strung them up. We mutilated them. We cut up the dirty webfoots and crows. We showed them." A looming cop had stopped the pair of altereds. "Get going," he ordered ominously. "You things got no right here." The two altereds scuttled past him. The cop leisurely raised his stick and cracked the Martian across the eyes. The brittle, thinshelled head splintered, and the Martian careened on, blinded and in agony. "That's more like it," David Unger gasped, in weak satisfaction. "You evil dirty old man," a woman muttered at him, face white with horror. "It's people like you that make all this trouble." "What are you?" Unger snapped. "A crow-lover?" The crowd melted and broke. Unger, grasping his cane, stumbled toward the exit ramp, muttering curses and abuse, spitting violently into the bushes and shaking his head. He arrived at the hospital groimds still trembling with rage and resentment. "What do you want?" he demanded, as he came up to the big receiving desk in the center of the main lobby. "I don't know what's going on around here. First you wake me out of the first real sleep I've had since I got here, and then what do I see but two webfoots walking around in broad daylight, sassy as -- " "Doctor Patterson wants you," the nurse said patiently. "Room #." She nodded to a robot. "Take Mr. Unger down to #." The old man hobbled sullenly after the smoothly-gliding robot. "I thought all you tinmen were used up in the Europa battle of '#," he complained. "It don't make sense, all these lily-white boys in uniforms. Everybody wandering around having a good time, laughing and diddling girls with nothing better to do than lie aroimd on the grass naked. Something's the matter. Something must be -- " "In here, sir," the robot said, and the door of #I slid away. Vachel Patterson rose slightly as the old man entered and stood fuming and gripping his aluminum cane in front of the work-desk. It was the first time he had seen David Unger face to face. Each of them sized the other up intently; the thin hawk-faced old soldier and the well-dressed young doctor, black thinning hair, hom-rimmed glasses and good-natured face. Beside his desk Evelyn Cutter stood watching and listening impassively, a cigarette between her red lips, blonde hair swept back. "I'm Doctor Patterson, and this is Miss Gutter." Patterson toyed with the dog-eared, eroded tape strewn across his esk. "Sit down, Mr. Unger. I want to ask you a couple of questions. Some uncertainty has come up regarding one of your papers. A routine error, probably, but they've come back to me. Unger seated himself warily. "Questions and red tape. Fve been here a week and every day it's something. Maybe I should have just laid there in the street and died." "You've been here eight days, according to this." "I suppose so. If it says so there, must be true." The old man's thin sarcasm boiled out viciously. "Couldn't put it down if it wasn't true." "You were admitted as a war veteran. All costs of care and maintenance are covered by the Directorate." Unger bristled. "What's wrong with that? I earned a little care." He leaned toward Patterson and jabbed a crabbed finger at him. "I was in the Service when I was sixteen. Fought and worked for Earth all my life. Would be there yet, if I hadn't been half killed by that dirty mop-up attack of theirs. Lucky to be alive at all." He selfconsciously rubbed the livid ruin of his face. "Looks like you weren't even in it. Didn't know there was any place got by." Patterson and Evelyn Cutter looked at each other. "How old are you?" Evelyn asked suddenly. "Don't it say?" Unger muttered furiously. "Eighty-nine." "And the year of your birth?" "#. Can't you fire that?" Patterson made a faint notation on the metal foil reports. "And your unit?" At that, Unger broke loose. "The Ba-#, if maybe you've heard of it. Although the way things are around here, I wonder if you know there was ever a war." "The Ba-#," Patterson repeated. "And you served with them how long?" "Fifty years. Then I retired. The first time, I mean. I was sixty-six years old. Usual age. Got my pension and bit of land." "And they called you back?" "Of course they called me back! Don't you remember how the Ba-# went back into the line, all us old guys, and damn near stopped them, that last time? You must have been just a kid, but everybody knows what we did." Unger fumbled out his Crystal Disc first class and slammed it on the desk. "I got that. All us survivors did. All ten of us, out of thirty thousand." He gathered the medal up with shaking fingers. "I was hurt bad. You see my face. Burned, when Nathan West's battleship blew up. I was in the military hospital for a couple years. That was when they cracked Earth wide open." The ancient hands clenched into futile fists. "We had to sit there, watching them turn Earth into a smoking ruin. Nothing but slag and ash, miles of death. No towns, no cities. We sat there, while their C-missiles whizzed by. Finally they got finished -- and got us on Luna, too." Evelyn Cutter tried to speak, but no words came. At his work-desk Patterson's face had turned chalkwhite. "Continue," he managed to mutter. "Go on talking." "We hung on there, subsurface, down under the Copernicus crater, while they slammed their C-missiles into us. We held out maybe five years. Then they started landing. Me and those still left took off in high-speed attack torpedoes. Set up pirate bases among the outer planets." Unger twitched restlessly. "I hate to talk about that part. Defeat, the end of everything. Why do you ask me? I helped build #-#-#, the best artibase of the lot. Between Uranus and Neptune. Then I retired again. Until the dirty rats slid in and leisurely blew it to bits. Fifty thousand men, women, kids. The whole colony." "You escaped?" Evelyn Cutter whispered. "Of course I escaped! I was on patrol. I got one of those webfoot ships. Shot it down and watched them die. It made me feel a little better. I moved over to #-#-#-# for a few years. Until it was attacked. That was early this month. I was fighting with my back to the wall." The dirty yellow teeth glinted in agony. "No place to escape to, that time. None that I knew of." The red-rimmed eye surveyed the luxurious office. "Didn't know about this. You people sure done a good job fBdng up your artibase. Looks almost like I remember the real Earth. A little too fast and bright; not so peaceful as Earth really was. But you even got the smell of the air the same." There was silence. "Then you came here after -- that colony was destroyed?" Patterson asked hoarsely. "I guess." Unger shrugged wearily. "Last I remember was the bubble shattering and the air and heat and grav leaking out. Crow and webfoot ships landing everywhere, Men dying around me. I was knocked out by the concussion. The next thing I knew I was lying out in the street here, and some people were getting me to my feet. A tinman and one of your doctors too'k me here." Patterson let out a deep shuddering breath. "I see." His fingers plucked aimlessly at the eroded, sweat-grimed i.d. papers. "Well, that explains this irregularity." "Ain't it all there? Is something missing?" "All your papers are here. Your tube was hanging around your wrist when they brought you in." "Naturally." Unger's bird-like chest swelled with pride. "I learned that when I was sixteen. Even when you're dead you have to have that tube with you. Important to keep the records straight." "The records are straight," Patterson admitted thickly. "You can go back to your room. Or the park. Anywhere." He waved and the robot calmly escorted the withered old man from the office and out into the hall. As the door slid shut Evelyn Cutter began swearing slowly and monotonously. She crushed out her cigarette with her sharp heel and paced wildly back and forth. "Good God what have we got ourselves into?" Patterson snatched up the intervid, dialed outside, and said to the supraplan monitor, "Get me military headquarters. Right away." "At Luna, sir?" "That's right," Patterson said. "At the main base on Luna." On the wall of the office, past the taut, pacing figure of Evelyn Cutter, the calendar read August #, #. If David Unger was bom in # he would be a boy of fifteen. And he had been bom in #. It said so on his battered, yellowed, sweat-stained cards. On the i.d. papers carried through a war that hadn't yet happened. Patterson said to V-Stephens. "Of a war that won't begin for another month. No wonder his applimachines." V-Stephens licked his dark green lips. "This war will be between Earth and the two colony planets. And Earth will lose?" "Unger fought through the whole war. He saw it from the start to finish -- to the total destruction of Earth." Patterson paced over to the window and gazed out. "Earth lost the war and the race of Earthmen was wiped out." From the window of V-Stephens' office, Patterson could see the city spread out. Miles of buildings, white and gleaming in the lateple. A gigantic center of commerce and industry, the economic hub of the system. And beyond it, a world of cities and farms and highways, thriving, healthy planet, the mother world from which the altereds had originally spmng, the ambitious settlers of Venus and Mars. Endless cargo carriers lumbered between Earth and the colonies, weighed down with minerals and ores and produce. And already, survey teams were poking around the outer planets, laying claim in the Directorate's name to new sources of raw-materials. "He saw all this go up in radioactive dust," Patterson said. "He saw the final attack on Earth that broke our defenses. And then they wiped out the Lunar base." "You say some brass hats are on their way here from Luna?" "I gave them enough of the story to start them moving. It usually takes weeks to stir up those fellows." "I'd like to see this Unger," V-Stephens said thoughtfully. "Is there some way I can -- " "You've seen him. You revived him, remember? When he was originally found and brought in." "Oh," V-Stephens said softly. "That filthy old man?" His dark eyes flickered. "So that's Unger,... The veteran of the war we're going to fight." "The war you're going to win. The war Earth is going to lose." Patterson abruptly left the window. "Unger thinks this is an artificial satellite someplace between Uranus and Neptune. A reconstruction of a small part of New York -- a few thousand people and machines under a plastic dome. He has no conception of what's actually happened to him. Somehow, he must have been hurled back along his time-track." "I suppose the release of energy... And maybe his frantic desire to escape. But even so, the whole thing is fantastic. It has a sort of -- " V-Stephens groped for the word, "a sort of mystic ring to it. What the hell is this, a visitation? A prophet from heaven?" The door opened and V-Rafia slid in. "Oh," she said, as she saw Patterson, "I didn't know -- " "That's all right." V-Stephens nodded her inside his office. "You remember Patterson. He was with us in the car when we picked you up." V-Rafia looked much better than she had a few hours before. Her face was no longer scratched, her hair was back in place, and she had changed to a crisp gray sweater and skirt. Her green skin sparkled as she moved over beside VStephens, still nervous and apprehensive. "I'm staying here," she said defensively to Patterson. "I can't go back out there, not for awhile." She darted a quick glance of appeal at V-Stephens. "She has no family on Earth," V-Stephens explained. "She came here as a Glass-# biochemist. She's been working over at a Westinghouse lab outside Chicago. She came to New York on a shopping trip, which was a mistake." "Can't she join the V-colony at Denver?" Patterson asked. V-Stephens flushed. "You don't want another webfoot around here?" "What can she do? We're not an embattled fortress. There's no reason why we can't shoot her to Denver in a fast freight rocket. Nobody'll interfere with that." "We can discuss it later," VStephens said irritably. "We've got more important things to talk about. You've made a check of Unger's papers? You're certain they're not forgeries? I suppose it's possible this is on the level, but we have to be certain." "This has to be kept quiet," Patterson said urgently, with a glance at V-Rafia. "Nobody on the outside should be brought in." "You mean me?" V-Rafia asked hesitantly. "I guess I better leave." "Don't leave," V-Stephens said, grabbing hold of her arm roughly. "Patterson, you can't keep this quiet. Unger's probably told it to ffity people ; he sits out there on his park bench all day, buttonholing everybody who passes." "What is this?" V-Rafia asked curiously. "Nothing important," Patterson said wamingly. "Nothing important?" VStephens echoed. "Just a little war. Programs for sale in advance." Across his face a spasm of emotion passed, excitement and yearning hunger pouring up from inside him. "Place your bets now. Don't take chances. Bet on a sure thing, sweetheart. After all, it's history. Isn't that right?" He turned toward Patterson, his expression demanding confirmation. "What do you say? I can't stop it -- you can't stop it. Right?" Patterson nodded slowly. "I guess you're right," he said unhappily. And swung with all his strength. He caught V-Stephens slightly to one side, as the Venusian scrambled away. V-Stephens' cold-beam came out; he aimed with shaky fingers. Patterson kicked it from his hands and dragged him to his feet. "It was a mistake, John," he panted. "I shouldn't have showed you Unger's i.d. tube. I shouldn't have let you know." "That's right," V-Stephens managed to whisper. His eyes were blank with sorrow as he focussed on Patterson. "Now I know. Now we both know. Youre going to lose the war. Even if you lock Unger up in a box and sink him to the center of the Earth it's too late. Color-Ad will know as soon as I'm out of here." "They burned down the ColorAd office in New York." "Then I'll find the one in Chicago. Or Baltimore. I'll fly back to Venus, if I have to. I'm going to spread the good news. It'll be hard and long, but we'll win. And you can't do anything about it." "I can kill you," Patterson said. His mind was racing frantically. It wasn't too late. If V-Stephens were contained, and David Unger turned over to the Military -- 'T know what you're thinking," V-Stephens gasped. "If Earth doesn't fight, if you avoid war, you may still have a chance." His green lips twisted savagely. "You think we'd let you avoid war? Not now! Only traitors compromise, according to you. Now it's too late!" "Only too late," Patterson said, "if you get out of here." His hand groped on the desk and found a steel paper weight. He drew it to him -- and felt the smooth tip of the cold-beam in his ribs. "I'm not sure how this thing works," V-Rafia said slowly, "but I guess there's only this one button to press." "That's right," V-Stephens said, with relief. "But don't press it yet. I want to talk to him a few minutes more. Maybe he can be brought around to rationality." He pulled himself gratefully out of Patterson's grip and moved back a few paces, exploring his cut lip and broken front teeth. "You brought this on yourself, Vachel." "This is insane," Patterson snapped, his eyes on the snout of the cold-beam as it wavered in V-Rafia's uncertain fingers. "You expect us to fight a war we know we're going to lose?" "You won't have a choice." V-Stephens' eyes gleamed. "We'll make you fight. When we attack your cities you'll come back atus. It's -- human nature." The first blast of the cold-beam missed Patterson. He floundered to one side and grabbed for the girl's slim wrist. His fingers caught air, and then he was down, as the beam hissed again. V-Rafia retreated, eyes wide with fright and dismay, aiming blindly for his rising body. He leaped up, hands extended for the terrified girl. He saw her fingers twist, saw the snout of the tube darken as the field clicked on. And that W#W all. From the kicked-open door, the blue-clad soldiers caught V-Rafia in a crossfire of death. A chill breath mushroomed in Patterson's face. He collapsed back, arms up frantically, as the frigid whisper glided past him. V-Rafia's trembling body danced briefly, as the cloud of absolute cold glowed around her. Then abruptly she halted as rigid as if the tapetrack of her life had stopped in the projector. All color drained from her body. The bizarre imitation of a still-standing human figure stood silently, one arm raised, caught in the act of futile defense. Then the frozen pillar burst. The expanded cells ruptured in a shower of crystalline particles that were hurled sickeningly into every part of the office. Francis Gannet moved cautiously in behind the troops, red-faced and perspiring. "You're Patterson?" he demanded. He held out his heavy hand, but Patterson didn't take it. "The Military people notified me as a matter of course. Where's this old man?" "Somewhere around," Patterson muttered. "Under guard." He turned toward V-Stephens and briefly their eyes met. "You see?" he said huskily. "This is what happens. Is this what you really want?" "Come on, Mr. Patterson," Francis Gannet boomed impatiently. "I don't have much time to waste. From your description this sounds like something important." "It is," V-Stephens answered calmly. He wiped at the trickle of mouth-blood with his pocket handkerchief. "It's worth the trip from Luna. Take my word for it -- I know T he man who sat on Gannet's right was a lieutenant. He gazed in mute awe at the vidscreen. His young, handsome blond face was alive with amazement as from the bank of gray haze a huge battleship lumbered, one reactor smashed, its forward turrets crumpled, hull twisted open. "Good God," Lieutenant Nathan West said faintly. "That's the Wind Giant. The biggest battleship we have. Look at it -- it's out of commission. Totally disabled." "That will be your ship," Patterson said. "You'll be Commander of it in '# when it's destroyed by the combined Venusian and Martian fleets. David Unger will be serving under you. You'll be killed, but Unger will escape. The few survivors of your ship will watch from Luna as Earth is systematically demolished by C-missiles from Venus and Mars." On the screen, the figures leaped and swirled like fish in the bottom of a dirt-saturated tank. A violent maelstrom surged in the center, a vortex of energy that lashed the ships in vast spasms of motion. The silver Earth ships hesitated, then broke. Flashing black Mars battleships swept through the wide breach -- and the Earth flank was turned simultaneously by the waiting Venusians. Together, they caught the remnants of the Earth ships in a steel pincers and crunched them out of existence. Brief puffs of light, as the ships winked out of being. In the distance, the solemn blue and green orb that was Earth slowly and majestically revolved. Already, it showed ugly pocks. Bomb craters from the C-missiles that had penetrated the defense network. LeMarr snapped off the projector and the screen died. "That ends that brain-sequence. All we can get are visual fragments like this, brief instants that left strong impressions on him. We can't get continuity. The next one takes up years later, on one of the artificial satellites." The lights came on, and the group of spectators moved stiffly to their feet. Gannet's face was a sickly putty-gray. "Doctor LeMarr, I want to see that shot again. That one of Earth." He gestured helplessly. "You know which one I mean." The lights dimmed and again the screen came to life. This time it showed only Earth, a receding orb that fell behind as the highvelocity torpedo on which David Unger rode hurtled toward outer space. Unger had placed himself so his dead world would be visible to the last. Earth was a ruin. Involuntarily, a gasp rose from the group of watching officers. Nothing lived. Nothing moved. Only dead clouds of radioactive ash billowed aimlessly over the crater-pocked surface. What had been a living planet of cinder of ash. Nothing remained but heaps of debris, dispersed and blown dismally across vacant seas by the howling, ceaseless wind. "I suppose some kind of vegetable life will take over," Evelyn Cutter said harshly, as the screen faded and the overhead lights returned. She shuddered violently and turned away. "Weeds, maybe," LeMarr said. "Dark dry weeds poking up through the slag. Maybe some insects, later on. Bacteria, of course. I suppose in time bacterial action will transform the ash into usable years." "Let's face it," Gannet said. "The webfoots and crows will resettle it. They'll be living here on Earth after we're all dead." "Sleeping in our beds?" LeMarr inquired mildly. "Using our bathrooms and sitting in the public waiting rooms and transports?" "I don't understand you," Gannet answered impatiently. He waved Patterson over. "You're sure nobody knows but we here in this room?" "V-Stephens knows," Patterson said. "But he's locked up in the psychotic ward. V-Rafia knew. She's dead." Lieutenant West came over to Patterson. "Could we interview him?" "Yes, where's Unger?" Gannet demanded. "My staff is eager to meet him face to face." "You have all the essential facts," Patterson answered. "You know how the war is going to come out. You know what's going to happen to Earth." "What do you suggest?" Gannet asked warily. "Avoid the war." Gannet shrugged his plump wellfed body. "After all, you can't change history. And this is future history. We have no choice but to go ahead and fight." "At least we'll get our share of them," Evelyn Cutter said icily. "What are you talking about?" LeMarr stuttered excitedly. "You work in a hospital and you talk like that?" The woman's eyes blazed. "You saw what they did to Earth. You saw them cut us to ribbons." "We have to stand above this," LeMarr protested. "If we allow ourselves to get dragged into this hate and violence -- " He appealed to Patterson. "Why is V-Stephens locked up? He's no crazier than she is." "True," Patterson agreed. "But she's crazy on our side. We don't lock up that kind of lunatic." LeMarr moved away from him. "Are you going out and fight, too? Alongside Gannet and his soldiers?" "I want to avoid the war," Patterson said dully. "Can it be done?" Gannet demanded. An avid glow winked briefly behind his pale, blue eyes and then faded out. "Maybe it can be done. Why not? Unger coming back here adds a new element." "If the future can be changed," Gannet said slowly, "then maybe we have a choice of various possibilities. If there're two possible futures there may be an infinite number. Each branching off at a different point." A granite mask slid over his face. "We can use Unger's knowledge of the battles." "Let me talk to him," Lieutenant West interrupted excitedly. "Maybe we can get a clear idea of the webfoot battle-strategy. He's probably gone over the battles in his mind a thousand times.',' "He'd recognize you," Gannet said. "After all, he served imder your command." Patterson was deep in thought. "I don't think so," he said to West. "You're a lot older than David Unger." West blinked. "What do you mean? He's a broken-down old man and I'm still in my twenties." "David Unger is fifteen," Patterson answered. "At this point you're almost twice his age. You're already a commissioned officer on the Lunar policy-level staff. Unger isn't even in the Military Service. He'll volunteer when war breaks out, as a buck private without experience or training. When you're an old man commanding the Wind Giant, David Unger will be a middle-aged nonentity working one of the gun turrets, a name you won't even know." "Then Unger is already alive?" Gannet said, puzzled. "Unger is someplace around, waiting to step onto the stage." Patterson filed the thought away for future study; it might have valuable possibilities. "I don't think he'll recognize you, West. He may never even have seen you. The Wing Giant is a big ship." West quickly agreed. "Put a bugsystem on me, Gannet. So the command staff can have the aud and vid images of what Unger says." light, David Unger sat moodily on his park bench, gnarled fingers gripping his aluminum cane, gazing dully at the passers-by. To his right a robot gardener worked over the same patch of grass again and again, its metallic eye-lenses intently fastened on the wizened, hunched-over figure of the old man. Down the gravel path a group of loitering men sent random comments to the various monitors scattered through the park, keeping the relay system open. A bare-bosomed young woman sunbathing by the pool nodded faintly to a pair of soldiers pacing around the park, within constant sight of David Unger. That morning there were a hundred people in the park. All were integrated elements of the screen surrounding the half-dozing, resentful old man. "All right," Patterson said. His car was parked at the edge of the plot of green trees and lawns. "Remember not to overexcite him. V-Stephens revived him originally. If something goes wrong with his heart we can't get V-Stephens to pump him back." The blond young lieutenant nodded, straightened his immaculate blue tunic and slid onto the sidewalk. He pushed his helmet back and briskly strode down the gravel path, toward the center of the park. As he approached, the lounging figures moved imperceptibly. One by one they took up positions on the lawns, on the benches, in groups here and there aroimd the pool. Lieutenant West stopped at a drinking fountain and allowed the robot water-brain to find his mouth with a jet of ice-cold spray. He wandered slowly away and stood for a moment, arms loose at his sides, vacantly watching a young woman as she removed her clothes and stretched out languidly on a multi-colored blanket. Her eyes shut, red lips parted, the woman relaxed with a grateful sigh. "Let him speak to you first," she said faintly, to the lieutenant standing a few feet from her, one black boot on the edge of a bench. "Don't start the conversation." Lieutenant West watched her a moment longer and then continued along the path. A passing heavy-set man said swiftly in his ear, "Not so fast. Take your time and don't appear to hurry." "You want to give the impression you have all day," a hatchetfaced nurse grated, as she passed him wheeling a baby carriage. Lieutenant West slowed almost to a halt. He aimlessly kicked a bit of gravel from the path into the wet bushes. Hands deep in his pockets he wandered over to the central pool and stood gazing absently into its depths. He lit a cigarette, then bought an ice cream bar from a passing robot salesman. "Spill some on your tunic, sir," the robot's speaker instructed faintly. "Swear and start dabbing at it." Lieutenant West let die ice cream melt in the warm summer sun. When some had dripped down his wrist onto his starched blue tunic he scowled, dug out his handkerchief, dipped it in the pool, and began clumsily to wipe the ice cream away. On his bench, the scar-faced old man watched with his one good eye, gripping his aluminum cane and cackling happily. "Watch out," he wheezed. "Look out there!" Lieutenant West glanced up in annoyance. "You're dripping more," the old man cackled, and lay back in weak amusement, toothless mouth slack with pleasure. Lieutenant West grinned goodnaturedly. "I guess so," he admitted. He dropped the melting halfeaten ice cream bar into a disposal slot and finished cleaning his tunic. "Sure is warm," he observed, wandering vaguely over. "They do a good job," Unger agreed, nodding his bird-like head. He peered and craned his neck, trying to make out the insignia markings on the young soldier's shoulder. "You with the rocketeers?" "Demolition," Lieutenant West said. As of that morning his insignia had been changed. "Ba-#." The old man shuddered. He hawked and spat feverishly into the nearby bushes. "That so?" He half-rose, excited and fearful, as the lieutenant started to move away. "Say, you know, I was in the Ba-# years ago." He tried to make his voice sound calm and casual. "Long before your time." Amazement and disbelief slid over Lieutenant West's handsome blond face. "Don't kid me. Only a couple guys from the old group are still alive. You're pulling my leg." "I was, I was," Unger wheezed, fumbling with trembling haste at his coat pocket. "Say, look at this. Stop a minute and I'll show you something." Reverent and awed, he held out his Crystal Disc. "See? You know what this is?" Lieutenant West gazed down at the medal a long time. Real emotion welled up inside him ; he didn't have to counterfeit it. "Can I examine it?" he asked finally. Unger hesitated. "Sure," he said. "Take it." Lieutenant West took the medal and held it for a long moment, weighing it and feeling its cold surface against his smooth skin. Finally he returned it. "You got that back in '#?" "That's right," Unger said. "You remember?" He returned it to his pocket. "No, you weren't even alive, then. But you heard about it, haven't you?" "Yes," West said. "I've heard about it many times." "And you haven't forgotten? A lot of people forgot that, what we did there." "I guess we took a beating that day," West said. He sat down slowly on the bench beside the old man. "That was a bad day for Earth." "We lost," Unger agreed. "Only a few of us got out of there. I got to Luna. I saw Earth go, piece by piece, until there was nothing left. It broke my heart. I cried until I lay like a dead thing. We were all weeping, soldiers, workmen, standing there helpless. And then they turned their missiles on us." The lieutenant licked his dry lips. "Your Commander didn't get out, did he?" "Nathan West died on his ship," Unger said. "He was the finest Commander in the line. They didn't give him the Wind Giant for nothing." His ancient, withered features dimmed in recollection. "There'll never be another man like West. I saw him, once. Big stem-faced man, wide-shouldered. A giant himself. He was a great old man. Nobody could have done better." West hesitated. "You think if somebody else had been in command -- " "No.'" Unger shrieked. "Nobody could have done better! I've heard it said -- I know what some of those fat-bottomed armchair strategists say. But they're wrong! Nobody could have won that battle. We didn't have a chance. We were out numbered five to one -- two huge fleets, one straight at our middle and the other waiting there like a hungry beast to chew us up and swallow us." "I see," West said thickly. Reluctantly he continued, in an agony of turmoil, "These armchair men, what the hell is it they say? I never listen to the brass." He tried to grin but his face refused to respond. "I know they're always saying we could have won the battle and maybe even saved the Wind Giant y but I -- " "Look here," Unger said fervently, his sunken eye wild and glittering. With the point of his aluminum cane he began gouging harsh, violent ditches in the gravel by his feet. "This line is our fleet. Remember how West had it drawn up? It was a mastermind arranged our fleet, that day. A genius. We held them off for twelve hours before they busted through. Nobody thought we'd have a chance of even doing that." Savagely, Unger gouged another line. "That's die crow fleet." "I see," West muttered. He leaned over so his chest-lens would vid the rough lines in the gravel back to the scanning center in the mobile unit circling lazily overhead. And from there to main headquarters on Luna. "And the webfoot fleet?" Unger glanced cagily at him, suddenly shy. "I'm not boring you, am I? I guess an old man likes to talk. Sometimes I bother people, trying to take up their time." "Go on," West answered. He meant what he said. "Keep drawing -- Fm watching." E velyn cutter paced restlessly around her softly-lit apartment, arms folded, red lips tight with anger. "I don't understand you!" She paused to lower the heavy drapes. "You were willing to kill V-Stephens a little while ago. Now you won't even help block LeMarr. You know LeMarr doesn't grasp what's happening. He dislikes Gannet and he prattles about the interplan community of scientists, our duty to all mankind and that sort of stuff. Can't you see if V-Stephens gets hold of him -- " "Maybe LeMarr is right," Patterson said. "I don't like Gannet either." Evelyn exploded. "They'll destroy us! We can't fight a war with them -- we don't have a chance." She halted in front of him, eyes blazing. "But they don't know that yet. We've got to neutralize LeMarr, at least for awhile. Every minute he's walking around free puts our world in jeopardy. Three suppressed." Patterson was brooding. "I suppose Gannet briefed you on the initial exploration West conducted today." "No results so far. The old man knows every battle by heart, and we lost them all." She rubbed her forehead wearily. "I mean, we will lose them all." With numb fingers she gathered up the empty coffee cups. "Want some more coffee?" Patterson didn't hear her ; he was intent on his own thoughts. He crossed over to the window and stood gazing out until she returned with fresh coffee, hot and black and steaming. "You didn't see Gannet kill that girl," Patterson said. "What girl? That webfoot?" Evelyn stirred sugar and cream into her coffee. "She was going to kill you. V-Stephens would have lit out for Color-Ad and the war would begin." Impatiently, she pushed his coffee cup to him. "Anyhow, that was the girl we saved." "I know," Patterson said. "That's why it bothers me." He took the coffee automatically and sipped without tasting. "What was the point of dragging her from the mob? Gannet' s mob. We're doing Gannet's work. We're employees of Gannet." "So?" "You know what kind of game i he's playing!" Evelyn shrugged. "I'm just being practical. I don't want Earth destroyed. Neither does Gannet -- he wants to avoid the war." "He wanted war a few days ago. When he expected to win." Evelyn laughed sharply. "Of course! Who'd fight a war they knew they'd lose? That's irrational." "Now Gannet will hold off the war," Patterson admitted slowly. "He'll let the colony planets have their independence. He'll recognize Color-Ad. He'll destroy David Unger and everybody who knows. He'll pose as a benevolent peacemaker." "Of course. He's already making plans for a dramatic trip to Venus. A last-minute conference with Color-Ad officials, to prevent war. He'll put pressure on the Directorate to back down and let Mars and Venus sever. He'll be the idol of the system. But isn't that better than Earth destroyed and our race wiped out?" "Now the big machine turns around and roars against war." Patterson's lips twisted ironically. "Peace and compromise instead of hate and destructive violence." Evelyn perched on the arm of a chair and made rapid calculations. "How old was David Unger when he joined the Military?" "Fifteen or sixteen." "When a man joins the Service he gets his i.d. number, doesn't he?" "That's right. So?" "Maybe I'm wrong, but according to my figures -- " She glanced up. "Unger should appear and claim his number, soon. That number will be coming up any day, according to how fast Ae enlistments pour in." A strange expression crossed Patterson's face. "Unger is already alive... A fifteen year old kid. Unger the youth and Unger the senile old war veteran. Both alive at once." Evelyn shuddered. "It's weird. Suppose they ran into each other? There' d be a lot of difference between them." In Patterson's mind a picture of a bright-eyed youth of fifteen formed. Eager to get into the fight. Ready to leap in and kill webfoots and crows with idealistic enthusiasm. At this moment, Unger was moving inexorably toward the recruiting office... And the halfblind, Clipped old relic of eightynine wretched years was creeping hesitantly from his hospital room to his park bench, hugging his aluminum cane, whispering in his raspy, pathetic voice to anyone who would listen. "We'll have to keep our eyes open," Patterson said. "You better have somebody at Military notify you when that number comes up. When Unger appears to claim it." Evelyn nodded. "It might be a good idea. Maybe we should request the Census Department to make a check for us. Maybe we can locate -- " She broke off. The door of the apartment had swung silently open. Edwin LeMarr stood gripping the knob, blinking red-eyed in the halflight. Breathing harshly, he came into the room. "Vachel, I have to talk to you." "What is it?" Patterson demanded. "What's going on?" LeMarr shot Evelyn a look of pure hate. "He found it. I knew he would. As soon as he can get it analyzed and the whole thing down on tape -- " "Gannet?" Cold fear knifed down Patterson's spine. "Gannet found what?" "The moment of crisis. The old man's babbling about a five-ship convoy. Fuel for the crow warfleet. Unescorted and moving toward the battle line. Unger says our scouts will miss it." LeMarr's breathing was hoarse and frenzied. "He says if we knew in advance -- " He pulled himself together with a violent effort. "Then we could destroy it." "I see," Patterson said. "And throw the balance in Earth's favor." "If West can plot the convoy route," LeMarr finished, "Earth will win the war. That means Gannet will fight -- as soon as he gets the exact information." the single-piece bench that served as chair and table and bed for the psychotic ward. A cigarette dangled between his dark green lips. The cube-like room was ascetic, barren. The walls glittered dully. From time to time V-Stephens examined his wristwatch and then turned his attention back to the object crawling up and down the sealed edges of the entrance-lock. The object moved slowly and cautiously. It had been exploring the lock for twenty-nine hours straight; it had traced down the power leads that kept the heavy plate fused in place. It had located the terminals at which the leads joined the magnetic rind of the door. During the last hour it had cut its way through the rexeroid surface to within an inch of the terminals. The crawling, exploring object was V-Stephens' surgeonhand, a self-contained robot of precision quality usually joined to his right wrist. It wasn't joined there now. He had detached it and sent it up the face of the cube to find a way out. The metal fingers clung precariously to the smooth dull surface, as the cutting-thumb laboriously dug its way in. It was a big job for the surgeon-hand; after this it wouldn't be of much use at the operating table. But V-Stephens could easily get another -- they were for sale at any medical supply house on Venus. The forefinger of the surgeonhand reached the anode terminal and paused questioningly. All four fingers rose erect and waved like insect antennae. One by one they fitted themselves into the cut slot and probed for the nearby cathode lead. Abruptly there was a blinding flash. A white acrid cloud billowed out, and then came a sharp pop. The entrance-lock remained motionless as the hand dropped to the floor, its work done. V-Stephens put out his cigarette, got leisurely to his feet, and crossed the cube to collect it. With the hand in place and acting as part of his own neuromuscular system again, V-Stephens ngerly grasped the lock by its perimeter and after a moment pulled inward. The lock came without resistance and he found himself facing a deserted corridor. There was no sound or motion. No guards. No check-system on the psych patients. V-Stephens loped quickly ahead, around a turn, and through a series of connecting passages. In a moment he was at a wide view-window, overlooking the street, the surrounding buildings, and the hospital grounds. He assembled his wristwatch, cigarette lighter, fountain pen, keys and coins. From them his agile flesh and metal fingers rapidly formed an intricate gestalt of wiring and plates. He snapped off the cutting-thumb and screwed a heatelement in its place. In a brief flurry he had fused the mechanism to the underside of the window ledge, invisible from the hall, too far from ground level to be noticed. He was starting back down the corridor when a sound stopped him rigid. Voices, a routine hospital guard and somebody else. A familiar somebody else. He raced back to the psych ward and into his sealed cube. The magnetic lock fitted reluctantly in place; the heat generated by the short had sprung its clamps. He got it shut as footsteps halted outside. The magnetic field of the lock was dead, but of course the visitor didn't know that. V-Stephens listened with amusement as the visitor carefully negated the supposed magnetic field and then pushed the lock open. "Come in," V-Stephens said. Doctor LeMarr entered, briefcase in one hand, cold-beam in the other. "Come along with me. I have everything arranged. Money, fake identification, passport, tickets and clearance. You'll go as a webfoot commercial agent. By the time Gannet finds out you'll be past the Military monitor and out of Earth jurisdiction." V-Stephens was astounded. "But -- " "Hurry up!" LeMarr waved him into the corridor with his coldbeam. "As a staff member of the hospital I have authority over psych prisoners. Technically, you're listed as a mental patient. As far as I'm concerned you're no more crazy than the rest of them. If not less. That's why I'm here." V-Stephens eyed him doubtfully. "You sure you know what you're doing?" He followed LeMarr down the corridor, past the blankfaced guard and into the elevator. "They'll destroy you as a traitor, if they catch you. That guard saw you -- how are you going to keep this quiet?" "I don't expect to keep this quiet. Gannet is here, you know. He and his staff have been working over the old man." "Why are you telling me this?" The two of them strode down the descent ramp to the subsurface garage. An attendant rolled out LeMarr's car and they climbed into it, LeMarr behind the wheel. "You know why I was thrown in the psych-cube in the first place." "Take this." LeMarr tossed V-Stephens the cold-beam and steered up the tunnel to the surface, into the bright mid-day New York traffic. "You were going to contact ColorAd and inform them Earth will absolutely lose the war." He spun the car from the mainstream of traffic and onto a side lane, toward the interplan spacefield. "Tell them to stop working for compromise and strike hard -- immediately. Full scale war. Right?" "Right," V-Stephens said. "After all, if we're certain to win -- " "You're not certain." V-Stephens raised a green eyebrow. "Oh? I thought Unger was a veteran of total defeat." "Gannet is going to change the course of the war. He's found a critical point. As soon as he gets the exact information he'll pressure the Directorate into an all-out attack on Venus and Mars. War can't be avoided, not now." LeMarr slammed his car to a halt at the edge of the interplan field. "If there has to be war at least nobody's going to be taken by a sneak attack. You can tell your Colonial Organization and Administration our warfleet is on its way. Tell them to get ready. Tell them -- " LeMarr's voice trailed off. Like an unwound toy he sagged against the seat, slid silently down, and lay quietly with his head against the steering wheel. His glasses dropped from his nose onto the floor and after a moment V-Stephens replaced them. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "You meant well, but you sure fouled everything up." He briefly examined the surface of LeMarr's skull. The impulse from the cold-beam had not penetrated into brain tissue; LeMarr would regain consciousness in a few hours with nothing worse than a severe headache. V-Stephens pocketed the cold-beam, grabbed up the briefcase, and pushed the limp body of LeMarr away from the wheel. A moment later he was turning on the motor and backing the car around. As he sped back to the hospital he examined his watch. It wasn't too late. He leaned forward and dropped a quarter in the pay vidphone mounted on the dashboard. After a mechanical dialing process the Color-Ad receptionist flickered into view. "This is V-Stephens," he said. "Something went wrong. I was taken out of the hospital building. I'm heading back there now. I can make it in time, I think." "Is the vibrator-pack assembled?" "Assembled, yes. But not with me. I had already fused it into polarization with the magnetic flux. It's ready to go -- if I can get back there and at it." "There's a hitch at this end," the green-skinned girl said. "Is this a closed circuit?" "It's open," V-Stephens admitted. "But it's public and probably random. They couldn't very well have a bug on it." He checked the power meter on the guarantee seal fastened to the unit. "It shows no drain. Go ahead." "The ship won't be able to pick you up in the city." "Hell," V-Stephens said. "You'll have to get out of New York on your own power; we can't help you there. Mobs destroyed our New York port facilities. You'll have to go by surface car to Denver. That's the nearest place the ship can land. That's our last protected spot on Earth." V-Stephens groaned. "Just my luck. You know what'll happen if they catch me?" The girl smiled faintly. "All web foots look alike to Earthmen. They'll be stringing us up indiscriminately. We're in this together. Good luck; we'll be waiting for you." V-Stephens angrily broke the circuit and slowed Ae car. He parked in a public lot on a dingy side street and got quickly out. He was at the edge of the green expanse of park. Beyond it, the hospital buildings rose. Gripping the briefcase tightly he ran toward the main entrance. mouth on his sleeve, then lay back weakly against his chair. "I don't know," he repeated, his voice faint and dry. "I told you I don't remember any more. It was so long ago." Gannet signalled, and the officers moved away from the old man. "It's coming," he said wearily. He mopped his perspiring forehead. "Slowly and surely. We should have what we want inside another half hour." One side of the therapy house had been turned into a Military table-map. Counters had been laid out across the surface to represent units of the webfoot and crow fleets. White luminous chips represented Earth ships lined up against them in a tight ring around the third planet. "It's someplace near here," Lieutenant West said to Patterson. Redeyed, stubble-chinned, hands shaking with fatigue and tension, he indicated a section of the map. "Unger remembers hearing officers talking about this convoy. The convoy took oflF from a supply base on Ganymede. It disappeared on some kind of deliberate random course." His hand swept the area. "At the time, nobody on Earth paid any attention to it. Later, they realized what they'd lost. Some military expert charted the thing in retrospect and it was taped and passed around. Officers got together and analyzed the incident. Unger thinks the convoy route took it close to Europa. But maybe it was Callisto." "That's not good enough," Gannet snapped. "So far we don't have any more route data than Earth tacticians had at the time. We need to add exact knowledge, material released after the event." David Unger fumbled with a glass of water. "Thanks," he muttered gratefully, as one of the young officers handed it to him. "I sure wish I could help you fellows out better," he said plaintively. "I'm trying to remember. But I don't seem able to think clear, like I used to." 'His wizened face twisted with futile concentration. "You know, it seems to me that convoy was stopped near Mars by some kind of meteor swarm." Gannet moved forward. "Go on. Unger appealed to him pathetically. "I want to help you all I can, mister. Most people go to write a book about a war, they just scan stuff from other books." There was pitiful gratitude on the eroded face. "I guess you'll mention my name in your book, someplace." So that was it. Patterson turned away, sickened. Gannet was posing as a military historian. Writing a book on the lost war, gleaning memories from the old man for his "treatise". "Sure," Gannet said expansively. "Your name'll be on the first page. Maybe we could even get in a picture of you." "I know all about the war," Unger muttered. "Give me time and I'll have it straight. Just give me time. I'm trying as best I can." The old man was deteriorating rapidly. His wrinkled face was an unhealthy gray. Like drying putty, his flesh clung to his brittle, yellowed bones. His breath rattled in his throat. It was obvious to everyone present that David Unger was going to die -- and soon. "If he croaks before he remembers," Gannet said softly to Lieutenant West, "I'll -- " "What's that?" Unger asked sharply. His one good eye was suddenly keen and wary. "I can't hear so good." "Just fill in the missing elements," Gannet said wearily. He jerked his head. "Get him over to the map where he can see the setup. Maybe that'll help." The old man was yanked to his feet and propelled to the table. Technicians and brass hats closed in around him and the dim-eyed stumbling figure was lost from sight. "He won't last long," Patterson said savagely. "If you don't let him rest his heart's going to give out." "We must have the information," Gannet retorted. He eyed Patterson. "Where's the other doctor? LeMarr, I think he's called." Patterson glanced briefly around. "I don't see him. He probably couldn't stand it." "LeMarr never came," Gannet said, without emotion. "I wonder if we should have somebody round him up." He indicated Evelyn Cutter, who had just arrived, whitefaced, her black eyes wide, breathing quickly. "She suggests -- " "It doesn't matter now," Evelyn said frigidly. She shot a quick, urgent glance at Patterson. "I want nothing to do with you and your war." Gannet shrugged. "I'll send out a routine net, in any case. Just to be on the safe side." He moved off, leaving Evelyn and Patterson standing alone together. "Listen to me," Evelyn said harshly, her lips hot and close to his ear. 'Ungers number has come up:' They looked at each other. "When did they notify you?" Patterson demanded. "I was on my way here. I did what you said -- I fixed it up with a clerk at Military." "How long ago?" "Just now." Evelyn's face trembled. "Vachel, he's here." It was a moment before Patterson understood. "You mean they sent him over here? To the hospital?" "I told them to. I told them when he came to volunteer, when his number came to the top -- " Patterson grabbed her and hurried her from the therapy house, outside into the bright sunlight. He pushed her onto an ascent ramp and crowded in after her. "Where are they holding him?" "In the public reception room. They told him it was a routine physical check. A minor test of some kind." Evelyn was terrified. "What are we going to do? Can we do something?" "Gannet thinks so." "Suppose we -- stopped him? Maybe we could turn him aside." She shook her head, dazed. "What would happen? What would the future be like if we stopped him here? You could keep him out of the Service -- you're a doctor. A little red check on his health card." She began to laugh wildly. "I see them all the time. A little red check, and no more David Unger. Gannet never sees him, Gannet never knows Earth can't win and then Earth will win, and VStephens doesn't get locked up as a psychotic and that webfoot girl -- " Patterson's open hand smashed across the woman's face. "Shut up and snap out of it! We don't have time for that!" Evelyn shuddered ; he caught hold of her and held on tight to her until finally she raised her face. A red welt was rising slowly on her cheek. "I'm sorry," she managed to murmur. "Thanks. I'll be all right." The lift had reached the main floor. The door slid back and Patterson led her out into the hall. "You haven't seen him?" "No. When they told me the number had come up and he was on his way," Evelyn hurried breathlessly after Patterson, "I came as quickly as I could. Maybe it's too late. Maybe he got tired of waiting and left. He's a fifteen year old boy. He wants to get into the fight. Maybe he's gone!" Patterson halted a robot attendant. "Are you busy?" "No sir," the robot answered. Patterson gave the robot David Unger's i.d. number. "Get this man from the main reception room. Send him out here and then close off this hall. Seal it at both ends so nobody can enter or leave." The robot clicked uncertainly. "Will there be further orders? This syndrome doesn't complete a -- " "I'll instruct you later. Make sure nobody comes out with him. I want to meet him here alone." The robot scanned the number and then disappeared into the reception room. Patterson gripped Evelyn's arm. "Scared?" "I'm terrified." "I'll handle it. You just stand there." He passed her his cigarettes. "Light one for both of us." "Three, maybe. One for Unger." Patterson grinned. "He's too young, remember? He's not old enough to smoke." The robot returned. With it was a blond boy, plump and blue-eyed, his face wrinkled with perplexity. "You wanted me, Doc?" He came uncertainly up to Patterson. "Is there something wrong with me? They told me to come here, but they didn't say what for." His anxiety increased with a tidal rush. "There's nothing to keep me out of the Service, is there?" Patterson grabbed the boy's newly stamped i.d. card, glanced at it, and then passed it to Evelyn. She accepted it with paralyzed fingers, her eyes on the blond youth. He was not David Unger. son demanded. The boy stammered out his name shyly. "Bert Robinson. Doesn't it say there on my card?" Patterson turned to Evelyn. "It's the right number. But this isn't Unger. Something's happened." "Say, Doc," Robinson asked plaintively, "is there something going to keep me out of the Service or not? Give me the word." Patterson signalled the robot. "Open up the hall. It's all over with. You can go back to what you were doing." "I don't understand," Evelyn murmured. "It doesn't make sense." "You're all right," Patterson said to the youth. "You can report for induction." The boy's face sagged with relief. "Thanks a lot. Doc." He edged toward the descent ramp. "I sure appreciate it. I'm dying to get a crack at those webfoots." "Now what?" Evelyn said tightly, when the youth's broad back had disappeared. "Where do we go from here?" Patterson shook himself alive. "We'll get the Census Department to make their check. We've got to locate Unger," The transmission room was a humming blur of vid and aud reports. Patterson elbowed his way to an open circuit and placed the call. "That information will take a short time, sir," the girl at Census told him. "Will you wait, or shall we return your call?" Patterson grabbed up an h-loop and clipped it around his neck. "As soon as you have any information on Unger let me know. Break into this loop immediately." "Yes sir," the girl said dutifully, and broke the circuit. Patterson headed out of the room and down the corridor. Evelyn hurried after him. "Where are we going?" she asked. "To the therapy house. I want to talk to the old man. I want to ask him some things." "Gannet's doing that," Evelyn gasped, as they descended to ground level. "Why do you -- " "I want to ask him about the present, not the future." They emerged in the blinding afternoon sunlight. "I want to ask him about things going on right now." Evelyn stopped him. "Can't you explain it to me?" "I have a theory." Patterson pushed urgently past her. "Come on, before it's too late." They entered the therapy house. Technicians and officers were standing around the huge map table, examining the counters and indicator lines. "Where's Unger?" Patterson demanded. "He's gone," one of the officers answered. "Gannet gave up for today." "Gone where?" Patterson began to swear savagely. "What happened?" "Gannet and West took him back to the main building. He was too worn out to continue. We almost had it. Gannet's ready to burst a blood vessel, but we'll have to wait." Patterson grabbed Evelyn Cutter. "I want you to set off a general emergency alarm. Have the buildings surrounded. And hurry Evelyn gaped at him. "But -- Patterson ignored her and raced out of the therapy house, toward the main hospital building. Ahead of him were three slowly-moving figures. Lieutenant West and Gannet walked on each side of the old man, supporting him as he crept feebly forward. "Get away!" Patterson shouted at them. Gannet turned. "What's going on?" "Get him away!" Patterson dived for the old man -- but it was too late. The burst of energy seared past him; an ignited circle of blinding white flame lapped everywhere. The hunched-over figure of the old man wavered, then charred. The aluminum cane fused and ran down in a molten mass. What had been the old man began to smoke. The body cracked open and shriveled. Then very slowly the dried, dehydrated fragment of ash crumpled in a weightless heap. Gradually the circle of energy faded out. G annet kicked aimlessly at it, his heavy face numb with shock and disbelief. "He's dead. And we didn't get it." Lieutenant West stared at the still-smoking ash. His lips twisted into words. "We'll never find out. We can't change it. We can't win." Suddenly his fingers grabbed at his coat. He tore the insignia from it and hurled the square of cloth savagely away. "I'll be damned if I'm going to give up my life so you can corner the system. I'm not getting into that death trap. Count me out!" The wail of the general emergency alarm dinned from the hospital building. Scampering figures raced toward Gannet, soldiers and hospital guards scurrying in confusion. Patterson paid no attention to them; his eyes were on the window directly above. Someone was standing there. A man, his hands deftly at work removing an object that flashed in the afternoon sun. The man was V-Stephens. He got the object of metal and plastic loose and disappeared with it, away from the window. Evelyn hurried up beside Patterson. "What -- " She saw the remains and screamed. "Oh, God. Who did it? Who? "V-Stephens." "LeMarr must have let him out. I knew it would happen." Tears filled her eyes and her voice rose in shrill hysteria. "I told you he'd do it! I warned you!" Gannet appealed childishly to Patterson. "What are we going to do? He's been murdered." Rage suddenly swept away the big man's fear. "I'll kill every webfoot on the planet. I'll burn down their homes and string them up. I'll -- He broke off raggedly. "But it's too late, isn't it? There's nothing we can do. We've lost. We're beaten, and the war hasn't even begun." "That's right," Patterson said. "It's too late. Your chance is gone." "If we could have got him to talk -- " Gannet snarled helplessly. "You couldn't. It wasn't possible." Gannet blinked. "Why not?" Some of his innate animal cunning filtered back. "Why do you say that?" Around Patterson's neck his hloop buzzed loudly. "Doctor Patterson," the monitor's voice came, "there is a rush call for you from Census." "Put it through," Patterson said. The voice of the Census clerk came tinnily in his ears. "Doctor Patterson, I have the information you requested." "What is it?" Patterson demanded. But he already knew the answer. "We have cross-checked our results to be certain. There is no person such as you described. There is no individual at this time or in our past records named David L. Unger with the identifying characteristics you outlined. The brain, teeth, and fingerprints do not refer to anything extant in our files. Do you wish us to -- " "No," Patterson said. "That answers my question. Let it go." He cut off the h-loop switch. Gannet was listening dully. "This is completely over my head, Patterson. Explain it to me." Patterson ignored him. He squatted down and poked at the ash that had been David Unger. After a moment he snapped the h-loop on again. "I want this taken upstairs to the analytical labs," he ordered quietly. "Get a team out here at once." He got slowly to his feet and added even more softly, "Then I'm going to find VStephens -- if I can." "He's undoubtedly on his way to Venus by now," Evelyn Cutter said bitterly. "Well, that's that. There's nothing we can do about it." "We're going to have war," Gannet admitted. He came slowly back to reality. With a violent effort he focussed on the people around him. He smoothed down his mane of white hair and adjusted his coat. A semblance of dignity was restored to his once-impressive frame. "We might as well meet it like men. There's no use trying to escape it." Patterson moved aside as a group of hospital robots approached the charred remains and began gingerly to collect them in a single heap. "Make a complete analysis," he said to the technician in charge of the work-detail. "Break down the basic cell-units, especially the neurological apparatus. Report what you find to me as soon as you possibly can." It took just about an hour. "Look for yourself," the lab technician said. "Here, take hold of some of the material. It doesn't even feel right." Patterson accepted a sample of dry, brittle organic matter. It might have been the smoked skin of some sea creature. It broke apart easily in his hands; as he put it down among the test equipment it crumbled into powdery fragments. "I see," he said slowly. "It's good, considering. But it's weak. Probably it wouldn't have stood up another couple of days. It was deteriorating rapidly; sun, air, everything was breaking it down. There was no innate repair-system involved. Our cells are constantly reprocessed, cleaned and maintained. This thing was set up and then pushed into motion. Obviously, somebody's a long way ahead of us in biosynthetics. This is a masterpiece." "Yes, it's a good job," Patterson admitted. He took another sample of what had been the body of David Unger and thoughtfully broke it into small dry pieces. "It fooled us completely." "You knew, didn't you?" "Not at first." "As you can see we're reconstructing the whole system, getting the ash back into one piece. Parts are missing, of course, but we can get the general outlines. I'd like to meet the manufacturers of this thing. This really worked. This was no machine." Patterson located the charred ash that had been reconstructed into the android's face. Withered, blackened paper-thin flesh. The dead eye gazed out lusterless and blind. Census had been right. There was never a David Unger. Such a person had never lived on Earth or anywhere else. What they had called "David Unger" was a manmade synthetic. "We were really taken in," Patterson admitted. "How many people know, beside the two of us?" "Nobody else." The lab technician indicated his squad of workrobots. "I'm the only human on this detail." "Can you keep it quiet?" "Sure. You're my boss, you know." "Thanks," Patterson said. "But if you want, this information would get you another boss any time." "Gannet?" The lab technician laughed. "I don't think I'd like to work for him." "He'd pay you pretty well." "True," said the lab technician. "But one of these days I'd be in the front lines. I like it better here in the hospital." Patterson started toward the door. "If anybody asks, tell them there wasn't enough left to analyze. Can you dispose of these remains?" "I'd hate to, but I guess I can." The technician eyed him curiously. "You have any idea who put this thing together? I'd hke to shake hands with them." "I'm interested in only one thing right now," Patterson said obliquely. "V-Stephens has to be found." afternoon sunlight filtered into his brain. He pulled himself upright -- and banged his head sharply on the dashboard of the car. Pain swirled around him and for a time he sank back down into agonized darkness. Then slowly, gradually, he emerged. And peered around him. His car was parked in the rear of a small, dilapidated public lot. It was about five-thirty. Traffic swarmed noisily along the narrow street onto which the lot fed. LeMarr reached up and gingerly explored the side of his skull. There was a numb spot the size of a silver dollar, an area totally without sensation. The spot radiated a chill breath, the utter absence of heat, as if somehow he had bumped against a nexus of outer space. He was still trying to collect himself and recollect the events that had preceded his period of unconsciousness, when the swift-moving form of Doctor V-Stephens appeared. V-Stephens ran lithely between the parked surface cars, one hand in his coat pocket, eyes alert and wary. There was something strange about him, a difference that LeMarr in his befuddled state couldn't pin down. V-Stephens had almost reached the car before he realized what it was -- and at the same time was lashed by the full surge of memory. He sank down and lay against the door, as limp and inert as possible. In spite of himself he started slightly, as VStephens yanked the door open and slid behind the wheel. V-Stephens was no longer green. The Venusian slammed the door, jabbed the car key in the lock, and started up the motor. He lit a cigarette, examined his pair of heavy gloves, glanced briefly at LeMarr, and pulled out of the lot into the early-evening traffic. For a moment he drove with one gloved hand on the wheel, the other still inside his coat. Then, as he gained full speed, he slid his cold-beam out, gripped it briefly, and dropped it on the seat beside him. LeMarr pounced on it. From the comer of his eye, V-Stephens saw the limp body swing into life. He slammed on the emergency brake and forgot the wheel; the two of them struggled silently, furiously. The car shrieked to a halt and immediately became the center of an angry mass of honking car-horns. The two men fought with desperate intensity, neither of them breathing, locked almost immobile as momentarily all forces balanced. Then LeMarr yanked away, the cold-beam aimed at V-Stephens' colorless face. "What happened?" he croaked hoarsely. "I'm missing five hours. What did you do? V-Stephens said nothing. He released the brake and began driving slowly with the swirl of traffic. Gray cigarette smoke dribbled from between his lips; his eyes were halfclosed, filmed over and opaque. "You're an Earthman," LeMarr said, wonderingly. "You're not a webfoot after all." "Fm a Venusian," V-Stephens answered indifTerently. He showed his webbed fingers, then replaced his heavy driving gloves. "But how -- " "You think we can't pass over the color line when we want to?" V-Stephens shrugged. "Dyes, chemical hormones, a few minor surgical operations. A half hour in the men's room with a hypodermic and salve... This is no planet for a man with green skin." Across the street a hasty barricade had been erected. A group of sullen-faced men stood around with guns and crude hand-clubs, some of them wearing gray Home Guard caps. They were flagging down cars one by one and searching them. A beefy-faced man waved V-Stephens to a halt. He strolled over and gestured for the window to be rolled down. "What's going on?" LeMarr demanded nervously. "Looking for webfoots," the man growled, a thick odor of garlic and perspiration steaming from his heavy canvas shirt. He darted quick, suspicious glances into the car. "Seen any around?" "No," V-Stephens said... The man ripped open the luggage compartment and peered in. "We caught one a couple minutes ago." He jerked his thick thumb. "See him up there?" The Venusian had been strung up to a street lamp. His green body dangled and swayed with the earlyevening wind. His face was a mottled, ugly mask of pain. A crowd of people stood around the pole, grim, mean-looking. Waiting. "There'll be more," the man said, as he slammed the luggage compartment. "Plenty more." "What happened?" LeMarr managed to ask. He was nauseated and horrified; his voice came out almost inaudible. "Why all this?" "A webfoot killed a man. An ariman." The man pulled back and slapped the car. "Okay -- you can go." V-Stephens moved the car forward. Some of the loitering people had whole uniforms, combinations of the Home Guard gray and Terran blue. Boots, heavy beltbuckles, caps, pistols, and armbands. The armbands read D.C. in bold black letters against a red background. "What's that?" LeMarr asked faintly. "Defense Committee," V-Stephens answered. "Gannet's front outfit. To defend Earth against the webfoots and crows." "But -- " LeMarr gestured helplessly. "Is Earth being attacked?" "Not that I know of." "Turn the car around. Head back to the hospital." V-Stephens hesitated, then did as he was told. In a moment the car was speeding back toward the center of New York. "What's this for?" V-Stephens asked. "Why do you want to go back?"  LeMarr didn't hear him; he was gazing with fixed horror at the people along the street. Men and women prowling like animals, looking for something to kill. "They've gone crazy," LeMarr muttered. "They're beasts." "No," V-Stephens said. "This'll die down, soon. When the Committee gets its financial support Jerked out from under it. It's still going full blast, but pretty soon the gears will change around and the big engine will start grinding in reverse. "Why?" "Because Gannet doesn't want 'war, now. It takes awhile for the new line to trickle down. Gannet will probably finance a movement called P.G. Peace Committee." The hospital was surrounded by a wall of tanks and trucks and heavy mobile guns. V-Stephens slowed the car to a halt and stubbed out his cigarette. No cars were being passed. Soldiers moved among the tanks with gleaming heavy-duty weapons that were still shiny with packing grease. "Well?" V-Stephens said. "What now? You have the gun. It's your hot potato." LeMarr dropped a coin in the vidphone mounted on the dashboard. He gave the hospital number, and when the monitor appeared, asked hoarsely for Vachel Patterson. "Where are you?" Patterson demanded. He saw the cold-beam in LeMarr's hand, and then his eyes fastened on V-Stephens. "I see you got him." "Yes," LeMarr agreed, "but I don't understand what's happening." He appealed helplessly to Patterson's miniature vidimage. "What'U I do? What is all this?" "Give me your location," Patterson said tensely. LeMarr did so. "You want me to bring him to the hospital? Maybe I should -- " "Just hold onto that cold-beam. I'll be right there." Patterson broke the connection and the scjreen died. LeMarr shook his head in bewilderment. "I was trying to get you away," he said to V-Stephens. "Then you cold-beamed me. Why? Suddenly LeMarr shuddered violently. Full understanding came to him. "You killed David Unger!" "That's right," V-Stephens answered. The cold-beam trembled in LeMarr's hand. "Maybe I ought to kill you right now. Maybe I ought to roll down the window and yell to those madmen to come and get you. I don't know." "Do whatever you think best," V-Stephens said. LeMarr was still trying to decide, when Patterson appeared beside the car. He rapped on the window and LeMarr unlocked the door. Patterson climbed quickly in and slammed the door after him. "Start up the car," he said to V-Stephens. "Keep moving, away from downtown." V-Stephens glanced briefly at him, and then slowly started up the motor. "You might as well do it here," he said to Patterson. "Nobody'll interfere." "I want to get out of the city," Patterson answered. He added in explanation, "My lab staff analyzed the remains of David Unger. They were able to reconstruct most of the synthetic." V-Stephens' face registered a surge of frantic emotion. "Oh?" Patterson reached out his hand. "Shake," he said grimly. "Why?" V-Stephens asked, puzzled. "Somebody told me to do this. Somebody who agrees you Venusians did one hell of a good job when you made that android." T he car purred along the highway, through the evening gloom. "Denver is the last place left," V-Stephens explained to the two Earthmen. "There're too many of us, there. Color-Ad says a few Committee men started shelling our offices, but the Directorate put a sudden stop to it. Gannet's pressure, probably." "I want to hear more," Patterson said. "Not about Gannet; I know where he stands. I want to know what you people are up to." "Color-Ad engineered the synthetic," V-Stephens admitted. "We don't know any more about the future than you do -- which is absolutely nothing. There never was a David Unger. We forged the i.d. papers, built up a whole false personality, history of a nonexistent war -- everything." "Why?" LeMarr demanded. "To scare Gannet into calling off the dogs. To terrify him into letting Venus and Mars become independent. To keep him from fanning up a war to preserve his economic strangle-hold. The fake history we constructed in Unger's mind has Gannet's nine-world empire broken and destroyed. Gannet's a realist. He'd take a risk when he had odds -- but our history put the odds one hundred percent against him." "So Gannet pulls out," Patterson said slowly. "And you?" "We were always out," V-Stephens said quietly. "We were never in this war game. All we want is our freedom and independence. I don't know what the war would really be like, but I can guess. Not very pleasant. Not worth it for either of us. And as things were going, war was in the cards." "I want to get a few things straight," Patterson said. "You're a Color-Ad agent?" "Right." "And V-Rafia?" "She was also Color-Ad. Actually, all Venusians and Martians are Color-Ad agents as soon as they hit Earth. We wanted to get VRafia into the hospital to help me out. There was a chance I'd be prevented from destroying the synthetic at the proper time. If I hadn't been able to do it, V-Rafia would have. But Gannet killed her." "Why didn't you simply coldbeam Unger?" "For one thing we wanted the synthetic body completely destroyed. That isn't possible, of course. Reduced to ash was the next best thing. Broken down small enough so a cursory examination wouldn't show anything." He glanced up at Patterson. "Why'd you order such a radical examination?" "Unger's i.d. number had come up. And Unger didn't appear to claim it." "Oh," V-Stephens said uneasily. "That's bad. We had no why to tell when it would appear. We tried to pick a number due in a few months -- but enlistments rose sharply the last couple of weeks." "Suppose you hadn't been able to destroy Unger?" "We had the demolition machinery phased in such a way that the synthetic didn't have a chance. It was tuned to his body; all I had to do was activate it with Unger in the general area. If I had been killed, or I hadn't been able to set off the mechanism, the synthetic would have died naturally before Gannet got the information he wanted. Preferably, I was to destroy it in plain view of Gannet and his staff. It was important they think we knew about the war. The psychological shock-value of seeing Unger murdered outweighs the risk of my capture." "What happens next?" Patterson asked presently. "Pm supposed to join with Color-Ad. Originally, I was to grab a ship at the New York office, but Gannet' s mobs took care of that. Of course, this is assuming you won't stop me." LeMarr had begun to sweat. "Suppose Gannet finds out he was tricked? If he discovers there never was a David Unger -- " "We're patching that up," VStephens said. "By the time Gannet checks, there will be a David Unger. Meanwhile -- " He shrugged. "It's up to you two. You've got the gun." "Let him go," LeMarr said fervently. "That's not very patriotic," Patterson pointed out. "We're helping the webfoots put over something. Maybe we ought to call in one of those Committee men." "The devil with them," LeMarr grated. "I wouldn't turn anybody over to those lynch-happy lunatics. Even a -- " "Even a webfoot?" V-Stephens asked. Patterson was gazing up at the black, star-pocked sky. "What's finally going to happen?" he asked V-Stephens. "You think this stuff will end?" "Sure," V-Stephens said promptly. "One of these days we'll be moving out into the stars. Into other systems. We'll bump into other races -- and I mean real other races. Non-humans in the true sense of the word. Then people will see we're all off the same stem. It'll be obvious, when we've got something to compare ourselves to." "Okay," Patterson said. He took the cold-beam and handed it to V-Stephens. "That was all that worried me. I'd hate to think this stuff might keep on going." "It's won't," V-Stephens answered quietly. "Some of those nonhuman races ought to be pretty hideous. After a look at them, Earthmen will be glad to have their daughters marry men with green skin." He grinned briefly. "Some of the non-human races may not have any skin at all...    the fate of Earth rests on the roll of the dice or spin of the wheel! And issue! On sale at all newsstands February #th. Can both right and wrong be the same?... To Wistert, the axes meant native trouble. To Thunderton, they guaranteed the natives a brighter hope for the future... I j B ob wistert found the steel wiped his sweating hands on his axes quite by accident. trousers and stood very still. LisHe had been poking around in tening. the station storehouse back of A bird trilled cheerfully digestThunderton's, looking for a reing a worm. The twilight breeze placement battery for his electric rustled across the sand and lost ittyper, when he had moved a crate self in the tall trees beyond. The and found the trapdoor. It pulled sea muttered and whispered insistopen easily, and there they were, ently' in its ancient conversation Steel axes. with the shore. Hundreds of them. That was all. Their metallic heads gleamed in He switched off the light in the the white light. storehouse and locked the door be"Good God," Bob Wistert hind him. Soundlessly, he moved breathed. Quickly, he slammed the down the pathway. Both Sirius and trapdoor shut and shoved the crate her white dwarf companion were back in position to hide it. He below the horizon now, but the sky was still a blaze of blue-white, with sunset clouds laced with flame. Tony Thunderton's house was ahead of him, a bubble in the pinelike trees, and its plastic was clear. He searched the house with his eyes, but Tony wasn't there. He hurried on, anxious to get past the house. "Hello, Bob," Tony said. Bob Wistert stopped short. Tony was sitting in the yard, reading. He put aside his scanner and stood up. He was not a tall man and he was getting stout. His skin was bronze in the slowly fading light and his hair was black. He did not smile. "Find what you were after?" Tony asked. "Yes. Sure. Needed a battery." "Good for you." "Got to get back to Helen," Bob said. "Time to eat." "Give her my regards." He walked on, trying not to hurry. He could feel Tony's dark eyes following him down the path. When the trees screened him, he broke into a run. He entered his own house by the station wall and locked the door behind him. "Helen! Where are you?" She came out of the bedroom, straightening a clip in her brown hair. "What's wrong?" Her voice was taut, as though wound too tightly on a spring. "You look like Hamlet's old man filled you full of ectoplasm." He took her hands, his tall, thin frame towering over his wife. "Honey, I've got some bad news." "I can believe it. Are we in for a native uprising? Am I going to be burned at the stake like Jeanne d'Arc?" Illustrated by Ed Emsh "Dammit, Fm not kidding." "Spill it, then. The suspense is "Over in the storehouse," Bob said quickly. "I was looking for a battery. I pushed a crate out of the way and found a trapdoor. There's a cellar under there. It's full of steel axes." Helen's face paled under her tan. She sat down. "What are we going to do?" she whispered. "You tell me," Bob said. Together, moved by a common impulse, they turned and looked at the door. Toward Anthony Thunderton's. "He must be insane," Helen said. Outside, the wind was gentle in the trees and an alien sun was lost beneath an old and lovely sea. A lmost imperceptibly, the twilight deepened. Night would not fall for ten Earth-days. When it did come, it would last for a long, long time. There was no hurry. "I knew there was something fishy about this place," Bob said. "I knew it the minute I got off that ship, the minute I spotted Thunderton." "We've only been here a month. Maybe we ought to give Tony the benefit of the doubt." "Look," he said. "When you see some joker coming at you with a lead pipe in his hand and blood in his eye, the only doubt you're entitled to is whether you can bash him before he bashes you." He hesitated and then spoke slowly. "It'll be over nineteen Earth-years before that ship comes back for us, Helen. We're the only people from Earth on this planet except for Tony -- and Tony's been here for ten years. He's been alone here for five years, ever since his wife died. He's been a god -- he's had absolute power if he wanted it. If he's flipped his wig out here, we've got to know about it -- and fast." Helen looked away. She looked at their home, at the soft blue chairs and the pictures on the walls and the lazy couch before the fireplace. Something died in her eyes. "We can't be sure he's using those axes," she said. "He's using them all right, and he's not using them to shave himself with, either." There was a long silence, broken only by the wind and the beat of the sea. "I'll just have to go out and get some proof," Bob said finally. "We'll need photographs." "He took you out to meet one group, didn't he? You didn't tell me about anything wrong there." "I didn't see anything," Bob Wistert admitted. "That figures, though. He wouldn't show me the ones he'd been working on, not unless he's cracked more than I think he has. There's another band of them about twenty miles east of here according to the contact map. I can get to them before night. We've got to know." "Take me with you, Bob. I don't want to stay here alone." He kissed her lightly, ruffling her fragile brown hair with his hand. "No, lady. I can make better time alone, and you'll be all right here. Just keep the door locked and keep a gun handy. Don't let him in, Helen, no matter what happens." She didn't argue. "You'll need some food," she said. Packing was simple enough. He put his bed roll in his pocket and slipped the force field generator on his wrist. The food pills went into his belt slots. He pulled on his boots and was ready to go. Weapons were not permitted off the station, and it did not occur to him that he could smuggle one out in his pocket if he wanted to. In any event, he wasn't worried about the natives. "Don't worry, baby. Everything will be all right." "Of course," she said. He went out into the bright blue twilight, light-years from the planet Earth. When he had gone, Helen locked the door behind him and sat down in one of the blue chairs. She began the wait that has never been measured. She looked toward Anthony Thunderton's. "Damn you," she said in a flat, cold voice. "Damn ever had. Damn your soul." days to find the natives. Through the tall green trees ahead of him, he saw a curl of blue woodsmoke in a grassy plain. He walked faster, his force field protecting him from the thorny brush that guarded the cool forest floor. Once, not long ago, the scene before him would have thrilled him with excitement. Now, there was only a nameless dread. The wind was in his face and he saw them before they saw him. They were few -- perhaps thirty men, women, and children squatting around low orange fires. Their crude lean-tos with thatched grass tops were almost invisible against a soft backdrop of swaying grasses and incredible weeds and flowers. The children were naked. The adults, however, were too sophisticated for nakedness. Their skin loin cloths were simple and unadorned, but both men and women were scarified and wore wooden ear plugs the size of half-dollars within their stretched ear lobes. Their teeth were filed and darkened. They were a small people, and their skins were faintly greenish. All in all, they looked quite human. Stones had been heated in the fire until they were good and hot, and had then been dumped into bark containers full of water. The water boiled and cooked a varied assortment of plants, insects, and meat. There was no pottery. The only visible weapons were stone-tipped spears and curved throwing sticks. Bob Wistert made no attempt to hide himself. He walked straight toward the camp, his arms swinging easily at his sides. When the natives spotted him, they melted into the grass as though they had never been. He stood by the bubbling bark basket and waited. These people knew Thunderton; they would soon recognize that he was of the same tribe. Shortly, a young man stepped out of the grass, clapping his hard hands in greeting. A youn man! Bob, even after only a month, knew how wrong that was. He clapped his hands in return. "I come in peace," he said, speaking the language he had learned before coming to the seventh world of Sirius. "I am called Robert. I am the brother of Anthony, who is your brother." "My brother, you are welcome here with the Nwarkon, the people. I am called Entun." His voice was clear and liquid. Bob had no difficulty understanding him, although the dialect was different from what he had heard before. The others came out of the grass and shyly resumed their cooking. He noticed that the old men -- there were four of them -- seemed hesitant and confused. He kept his eye peeled, and he soon saw what he had come to see. Steel axes. Six of them. Five of them were in the possession of young men. One was being used by a woman to knock clumsy branches from firewood. Bob kept talking politely, but he got all the pictures he needed with his ring camera. "It is ready," Entun said. "Eat with us." He could not refuse. He sat with the young man and ate some of the stew from a bark bowl. It was just as bad as it looked. When he had eaten, he stayed a decent interval with the Nwarkton, making the small talk that is the same everywhere. He told lewd stories, but only to the proper relatives. He could not tell which of the girls might be his 'sisters', so he carefully avoided speaking to any of them. He stayed for one sleep period, and then left, after a grim struggle with his breakfast. No one had said anything about the steel axes. He walked through the forest and the air was sweet and clean. It was darker now and the long shadows were less distinct. Sirius was only a glow of electric light in the west. It was strange, he thought. He, so close to that great star, could not see it. On Earth, lightyears away across a sea of desolation, it was the Dog Star, the brightest in the heavens. And the light that could be seen on Earth, by some boy and girl in a hovering copter, had left the star almost nine years before Bob Wistert had set foot on the seventh world of Sirius... He shivered in a growing twilight hush. W #EN he got home,Helen was waiting for him. "I got the pictures," he said, sinking down on the couch. "There's no doubt of it now; I guess there never was." "Tony came to see me," she said. He sat up straight. "What did he want?" She fixed him a drink and put it in his hand. "He wanted us to come over for dinner when you got back. I didn't let him in." He knows. He must have seen me go. Helen moved about the room, giving a poor imitation of calm unconcern. "How now, Horatio? Do we ride into the valley of death, all two of us?" "Well, there's only one of him." "We're going to go, then?" He hesitated. "First, I'm going to log a little sack time. Second, I'm going to take a bath. Third, we'll go over and sample the cuisine at Tony's. Fair enough?" "I'd just as soon get it over with." He finished his drink and arranged himself on the couch, too tired to go to bed. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep. Sleep was slow in coming. Thoughts came instead. What is Thunderton up to? Is he going to ruin everything for all the people here? Is he going to ruin everything for us? Did Helen and I make a mistake in coming here? So many years to go -- and what can we do? What can we do? He tossed restlessly on the couch. Impatiently, he tried to sleep, tried to relax his mind. The thoughts kept coming, nagging at him. Questions, memories, promises, fears -- And dreams seemed very far away... In #, the first man set foot on the moon of Earth. Mars had been reached by #, and a landing had been made in #. By the year #, the solar system had been pretty well explored. It had proved to be fascinating, in much the same way as the Grand Canyon is fascinating. It was wild and good to look at, but it was desperately empty. Some fifty years later, in #, the first expedition got back from Centaurus. After that, a more practical interstellar drive was only a matter of time. In #, the first of the true starships was launched. It moved with a new kind of motion through a new kind of space. It was more than just a faster spaceship, just as an airplane is more than just a faster automobile. The starships were different. From # until # was the period of the initial investigation of the nearer star systems. Life had sought out life. One hundred and three Earthlike planets were found and there were humanoid peoples on every one of them. No planet was located that had a culture higher than Earth's, at least in a technological sense. As might have been suspected from Earth's history, Earth had specialized in technological development. Out of the one hundred and three planets which had intelligent life, only seventeen had attained an agricultural, Neolithic culture -- and none had passed beyond that stage. It became very clear why Earth had never been contacted from space. Earth needed a frontier, and now she had one. One hundred and three planets meant many things to many people, but first and foremost they meant a fantastic new market potential. They were a diot In the arm for a planet geared to production. Potentially. There were flies in the ointment. Centuries are long, and they are full. No mere record of explorar tions and inventions can tell you much about a century. People live and work and die, and sometimes a single day is too much for the historians. Earth had changed. It had to change, or there would have been no exploration of space. It had to change, or the first travelers to far Centaurus might have had no Earth to come back to. Earth changed. You can't sell a plow to a man who doesn't know what agriculture is. You can't sell a car to a man who has no roads. You can't take a man's money if he has never heard of money. You can't produce for a market unless the market's there. The new planets could not be profitable markets until they were further developed. Outright exploitation, in Ae year #, was out of the question. Colonialism was a dead duck -- and that was one duck nobody cared to dig up again. Okay. Where do we go from here? Socioculturology was a fairly well developed science ; it was quite possible to predict mass developments under any given set of conditions. The scientists could deal with the situation -- but the scientists didn't make the policy. A long wrangle broke out in the United World Council. What was ethical? What was practical? How could the job be financed? Meantime, there the planets were. It was important to know more about the people who lived on them, and to maintain contact with them. Anthropologists went in for a year or so, and made their out in the middle of nowhere and stay there for twenty years, to establish squatter's rights for industry? It was economically unsound to rotate personnel; it took over a year to reach most of the planets, and it was expensive. Stations had to be maintained until teams could be lawfully sent into the area to develop markets. Who would go? It took more than money to make a man leave his home for twenty years on an alien world. The man had to be qualified. It was no job for an adventurer. His job was to 'really get to know' the natives. That meant, in practice, that he met as many of them as he could within a very restricted area ; planets were big places. It was his job to maintain friendly relations. But under no conditions could he tamper with the native culture. He had to keep his hands off. This was their world, and they must be permitted to live their lives undisturbed -- for the present. Bob Wistert turned on the couch. Why had he come, really? And Helen -- what had she hoped to find here? We were going to live a new life, close to the land. We were going to start over, just the two of us. And now -- Exhausted, he slept. He dreamed that Anthony Thunderton was coming at him with a steel axe that glinted in iced moonlight. When he awoke, it was dark enough to see faint stars in the sky, and there was no wind. A nthony thunderton met them at the door. "Come in," he said. They stepped inside. The living room was lean and spare with simple wooden furniture. It was not a cold room. There were bright rugs on the floor and the lights were soft gold. Over the fireplace was a painting of Thunderton's wife; her rather broad face, dark hair and black eyes closely resembled Thunderton himself. "I'll put the dinner on," Thunderton said. "We'll eat in twenty minutes." They sat silently, caught between anxiety and embarrassment. The house was neat and clean -- surprisingly so, since Thunderton lived alone. He was back in three minutes, with Martinis on a polished wooid tray. He handed them their drinks. "Here's to continued good fellowship in our primitive wonderland," he said with a perfectly straight face. He served them dinner on an open porch; the bugs were kept out by a miniature force screen. They had tender white meat from a rabbit-like animal, green salad, and ears of com that Thunderton grew in a garden. When they had eaten, there was wine. Bob Wistert was tense and nervous. There were a lot of years ahead of them. Sooner or later, they would have to get things straight. For his part, he wanted it to be sooner. Now. He watched Thunderton carefully, wondering. Despite his stoutness, Thunderton was not a big man -- but he dominated the porch. He was not a man to fool with. Bob wasn't at all sure how to proceed. Anthony Thunderton helped him. "I guess you're wondering about the axes," he said quietly. Bob hesitated, but Helen spoke up. "Yes," she said. "We were." With great deliberation, Thunderton took out a cigar and lit it. His face was impassive. "There are many questions in the universe," he said. "For example, what brought you two all the way across space to this?" He waved his hand and the night came closer. There was no moon yet and the station made a small circle of light in the darkness. The black trees were still. On the edge of the sand the cool sea drummed with long, even beats. "Don't change the subject, Tony," Bob said. "All questions are one in the end," Thunderton said. He smiled. "The hell with that, though. Suppose I tell you why you're here." "Suppose you do," Bob said. Thunderton folded his powerful hands and clamped the cigar more firmly in his mouth. "I don't know you very well, so you'll have to allow for errors. Still, I think I can hit it pretty close." "We're waiting," Bob said, his irritation showing in his voice. "I'll take you first, Mr. Wistert. I should hazard a guess that you are one of that strange breed known as the intense idealist. You probably write poetry or do something equally foolish in your spare time. Naturally, you will compensate for this by insisting that you're the most practical damned man that ever lived. You're interested in our charming native friends out there in the woods -- you think they have a unique way of life which must be preserved. You think of yourself as their protector. You regard Earth as phony, so you've trotted out here to live in the Great Outdoors -- with all modem conveniences, of course." Bob leaned forward. "Listen, Mac, about one more crack out of you -- " Anthony Thunderton ignored him. "And you, fair lady," he said to Helen, "have always wondered why you weren't satisfied with your life. You've built an intellectual wall around yourself because you don't seem to fit anywhere. You've come out here with your man to find something you've never found. You won't find it here, either. It's in yourself if it's anywhere." Helen said nothing. Bob stood up. "If the 'Boy Psychologist' is through with his string of bromides, maybe we can get back to the axes." "Maybe we can," agreed Thunderton, chewing his cigar. "Do you deny that you've been giving steel axes to the natives?" "Have you ever heard me deny it?" "Forget the double-talk. Do you admit it?" "Certainly. I'm proud of it, if it comes to that." Bob stared at him. Thunderton sat there, calmly smoking his cigar. He might have said, "Why, yes, I often have prunes for breaHast." "You must be stark staring nuts!" Bob said. "Thank you, sir. You are a bom diplomat." Bob sat down again. He leaned forward, trying desperately to make contact with this man. "Look here, Tony. Don't you realize that those axes will utterly destroy those people out there? Don't you understand that they're human too? Can't you see that you're ripping their lives apart, leaving them with nothing? Do you think you're God?" "To answer the first and least emotional of your questions, I do realize that the axes will destroy those people. That is my intention." Bob slammed his fist down on the table. "You won't get away with it! You may be able to push those people around, but you can't push me around." "Most heroic," Thunderton said. Carefully, he took a pistol out of his pocket and held it loosely in his hand. "I just don't want you to get carried away," he explained. "Rather good pun, if I do say so myself." Bob looked at Helen, utterly at a loss for words. The man was insane, that was the only possible explanation -- "Now," Thunderton said, "if you will be good enough to pour yourself another glass of wine -- don't try throwing it in my face, by the way, as it annoys me -- I'd like to tell you exactly how I intend to destroy the natives. After that. I'll give you a short history lesson. After that, I'll put the gun away and we shall see what we shall see." Bob thought of several rash plans, but settled for doing as he was told. The wine, at any rate, was good. "Very well," Thunderton said. "Here are the details. I think you'll find them interesting." Bob and Helen waited. Around them, the long, long night was only beginning. T hunderton replaced what was left of his cigar with a new one. "Steel axes are curious things," he said with obvious relish. "You can chop down trees with them, bash in heads with them, or use them for money. On many worlds, a steel axe is a wonderfully effective new invention -- a jump forward of maybe a hundred thousand years of time. On other worlds, a steel axe is a tiresome and outmoded antique. It sort of depends on where you are -- or perhaps I should say when you are." "We know all that," Bob said. He was not pleased with himself for having said it, but he had been stung, and he wanted to sting back. "Our somewhat ignorant friends out there in the forest," Thunderton said, jerking his thumb toward the dark wall of pinelike trees, "are still living in a stone-age culture. That means that their technology is pretty crude stuff, even if it did take the human animal the better far on Earth. A stone axe takes time to make, as you doubtless know, and flint has the unhappy property of shattering or losing its edge if you whack it into a tree too many times. A steel axe can save you a lot of time, it lasts longer, and it gets the job done more efficiently. Of course, that happens to be irrelevant." "Why?" Helen asked. Thunderton grinned around his cigar. "I don't give a hoot in hell how long it takes them to chop down a tree. I'm interested in knocking their culture apart in the quickest possible way." Bob Wistert eyed the gun in Thunderton's hand and shifted his weight on the chair. Why? Why is he trying to destroy them? Whafs in it for him? What kind of a man is he? What kind of a man -- "Interesting business," Thunderton said. "I've made quite a study of it -- can't afford to make mistakes, you know. There are two things about the native culture that are important. The first is that the society is set up in such a way that the old men, the tribal elders, run the show. They get the best food, the best women, and the best places around the fire. Those old buzzards are really powerful, too -- their authority is real, and damned near absolute. Okay. I don't care. That's one way to do things. But look at this: the symbol of their authority is the stone axe. An old man is the only person who can own a stone axe. If a woman or a boy wants to use one, they have to go to 'Old Man Mose' and get his permission. There's a complex taboo system thrown up around the stone axes, naturally. If you use one without permission, you've had it. It's a cute system ; all the old men have to do is threaten to hold back the axes, and that's all the power they need." I knew those axes were important, But Tony knows more than I do. Is it too late to stop him? Thunderton puffed on his cigar. "The second important thing is that those axes have to be made out of a special kind of stone -- and there are no such stones within two hundred miles of here. The old men have to trade for them. There's a network of trade that almost crosses this continent -- and it's based on area specialization in the manufacture of stone axes. The tribal elders around here supply wood for the handles -- that's all they do. Somebody else supplies the stone. Another tribe makes the axes. All the old men have trading partners in other villages, and regular trade routes they follow seasonally. Get the picture?" "I'm beginning to" Bob said quietly. "Let me fill in the details' Thunderton said. He smiled with genuine pleasure. "I go into this set-up with a crate or so of steel axes -- I made 'em myself, by the way. I give the steel axes to the women and the young men. At first, they're afraid to te them. I take them aside and explain to them -- look, these aren't stone axes! These aren't sacred! They can't hurt you -- there are no taboos around them! Try 'em and see! Well, they do try them. No bolt of lightning strikes, they don't get sick and die. And damned if they don't work better than the old stone axes! Okay. The chain reaction starts. Nobody has to ask the permission of the old codgers anymore -- they've got their own axes. The authority of the old men goes down the drain. The boys and young men stop giving the old men all the good deals. They figure they're already big shots -- they've got something the old men haven't got. The stone axes are suddenly anachronisms. The old men get discouraged. Why make that long, hard trading expedition? Say! Maybe if they play their cards right they can get some of those new axes with the hard, sharp blades!" Thunderton crushed out his cigar. "That does it. A few steel axes, and presto! The whole web of tribal interrelationships breaks down -- why trade for something useless? The power of the gods is challenged. The social organization collapses; the younger generation starts feeling its oats. In a word, the old culture is kaput. Neat, eh?" "Yeah," said Bob. "Neat." Why has he done this thing? What kind of a man -- "You spoke of a history lesson," Helen said. Anthony Thunderton stood up, the gun still held loosely in his hand. He looked out into the night, toward the sand and the sea and the quiet. "Have you ever heard of the American Indian?" he asked. Nuts, Stark staring nuts. Or -- He pointed the gun at Bob Wistert, casually. "Well?" "Come off of it, Tony. Of course I've heard of the American Indian. There's a statue in Washington. We learn about them in school. People write novels about them." "Hooray. What do you think of the Indian, Mr. Wistert?" Bob shrugged. "They were an interesting people. I guess they got a dirty deal. They were there first and all that." Thunderton nodded. "I notice you use the past tense," he said. "I suppose that's the point, really. Did you find them quaint when you studied them, Mr. Wistert? Unique way of life? Sort of like the natives out there in the woods?" "I don't know. That's not a fair question. Anyway, I didn't destroy them. That's more than you can say, whatever you're driving at." "How do you know you didn't?" "Look, I know you speak English. Try a little and forget the riddles." Thunderton sighed. "Time for the history lesson. Topic for tonight: The American Indian. Listening time: two minutes. Hang on, boys and girls." "I don't understand -- " "Be quiet, Bob," Helen said. "Let him finish." He looked at his wife in astonishment. "We'll skip all the romantic guff, with your permission," Thunderton said. "You know who the Indians were, and you've heard all about the broken treaties and the smallpox. Okay. How about after all that was over? How about when everything was friendly, when the Indians weren't a threat any longer? How about the reservations and all the people who admired the Indian ways of life?" "I'll bite," Bob said. "How about them?" "This about them: by the middle of the twentieth century, most people did not hate the Indians. They were colorful, interesting. Many people tried to preserve what was left of the Indian cultures. Sure, maybe the reservation schools were poor and under-staffed. Sure, maybe an Indian kid had nothing to look forward to because he couldn't get a good education and compete in the white world. Sure, maybe they were backward and caught in a trap. Didn't they make pretty pots? Didn't they weave colorful blankets? Weren't they fascinating? Thunderton sat down and spun the pistol on his finger. "Oh, people meant well, all right. Nobody bothered to tell the Indian about real estate deals and mineral rights and stocks and bonds and con men. Nobody bothered to make sure he could stand on his own hind legs and fight for his rights after he became a citizen. Nobody told him he might lose his land when he became 'free'. Hell, education was expensive. It was easier to just turn him loose and hope for the best. People meant well, most of them. It was all very high-minded. But this is #. Where are the Indians? Let's see -- there's a statue in Washington, there's that lovely novel about the wicked cavalry troopers -- " "I see what you mean," Bob said. "But, those natives aren't Indians, and this is #. We've learned a few things in the last century or so. They're working out a fair program back there in the Council, they'll figure out the right thing to do. I'm afraid I don't get the connection. Your speech was pretty -- but youre the one who destroyed those natives." Thunderton ignored him. "A few more points, Mr. Wistert. Maybe the policy will be a dandy one; scientific and all that. Back in Spain, along about #, they had an enlightened policy toward the Indians. But it was a long way from Spain to Mexico; some of the boys with Cortez didn't pay much attention to the nice policy. Okay. Suppose the policy they develop is a good one, and suppose, just for the hell of it, that it's honored to the letter. So what? So they'll come out here and tell those natives what to do -- for the good of the natives, of course. Why not ask the natives what they want? Excuse me; I detest idealists." Thunderton poured himself a glass of wine with his free hand. "Get this," he said. "Industry is coming out here, whether the natives like it or not. We're here, and they've got to change. I don't say it's right and I don't say it's wrong. That's just the way it works, Mr. Wistert, I've got maybe thirty years before the teams come in on Sirius Seven. I can't do much, and I can't reach many of the people on this planet. But, by God, when those teams come in here, there are going to be a few natives around who know what the score is. They're going to speak English, they're going to know how money works, and they're going to know about the law. They're going to have a chance. After that, if they throw it away, that's their business." "But you're tearing them apart!" Bob said. "You're not teaching them anything." "Mr. Wistert," Thunderton said quietly, "it is sometimes necessary to destroy before you can build. The old men were very conservative, and they ran the tribe. I had to give the young men a chance to change. There's one group you haven't seen yet. They may not be any wizards of finance, pal, but they know enough to get a lawyer." "You'll go to jail. You can't set yourself above the law." Thunderton laughed. "How do you know you're right? Who are you to say you're smarter than the United World Council?" "I never said I was right, Mr. Wistert. I do what I have to do. That's all." Anthony Thunderton put the pistol down on the table in front of him. He stood up. He turned his back on them and walked into his house, leaving them where they were. Bob Wistert picked up the pistol, looked at it, and put it back on the table. "I don't know what to do," he said slowly. Helen got up and took his arm. "Come on, honey." "Where are we going?" "Let's take a walk." He stood up. Together, they walked off the porch, feeling a tingle as they passed through the bug screen. They walked along a pathway under the pinelike trees, until there were no trees and there was only sand. They walked toward the sea. Bob Wistert tried to think. He didn't understand. Why had Thunderton done it? What kind of a man -- T he sea was vast and lonely, stars. It slid up the sand at their feet and made slow wet curves of phosphorescence and then whispered back to black depths and ageless currents. He tried to speak honestly, forgetting the hurt inside him. "Helen, we have twenty years ahead of us here, on this world, with this man. I don't know whether he's right or wrong. I don't know what I should do, or shouldn't do. We've got to think of ourselves." "Yes. We must think of ourselves." "I didn't mean it that way." He managed a smile. "Our pay is already deposited on Earth ; that makes it easier to be brave." She kissed him. "You have me. Bob. You just have to do what you think is right." "I don't know what's right" "Maybe there is no right or wrong here. Maybe there are just two different ways of doing things. Maybe nothing we do will make any difference in the end." The night filled the world around them. It would be night for two hundred Earth-days. Out there, in the forests and the fields, another kind of night had begun for the peoples whose world this was. An ancient, bitter night of misery and despair. A cold night, a night of shadows and destruction. Still, the light would come again. Beyond every night there was a morning. "Who is he, Helen? Why has he come here?" "Look at his face, Bob. Look at his eyes and his hair. Look at that painting of his wife. It's been almost six hundred years since the first Indian met Cortez. That's a long time -- but not too long to remember the white man." Broad face, bronze skin, black hair, dark eyes -- What kind of a man -- "What are we going to do?" "I don't know," she said. "I haven't got any answers, not now." He hesitated. "We have twenty years to go. We can help him or not help him, but I hope we can be his friends." "I know this," she said quietly. "He is a lonely man." They turned and put the dark sea behind them. Slowly, they walked through the sand toward the small light that burned in the trees. When they got back, Tony had the coffee ready, waiting for them.    voice and power to save him from sweatshops and overwork and pittance wages. But I also know that Caesar brought glory to the common people, that Stalin started out by freeing the people of Russia from the ignorance and oppression of the Tsarist yoke, and that Hitler and Mussolini began the march to absolute power through the bettering of conditions for the laboring man and woman. The pattern scares me stiff. While I believe in the union movement, I also believe that its power should be limited to the state in which it functions. I believe that unions in Utah, for instance, should be completely divorced from those nia or any of the other forty-seven (Continued from page #) states, each with its own separate leader. In this way they can carry on the fight for which they were originally formed -- wages, hours, working conditions and the welfare of their own members in their own states. They would still have a voice in the national government -- as each one of us has a voice -- through a duly elected representative. The consolidation proposal, if it is passed, will create an organization that will be physically able to sign the death warrant of any opposition. It will become an octopus with its tentacles reaching into the political, industrial, economical, and cultural life of the U.S.A. In fact, one of these tentacles may well be circled around your own throat. -- jlq Old Judge Anderson feared the inevitable -- he was to be replaced by a Cyber! A machine that dealt out decisions free of human errors and emotions. What would Justice Holmes think? what the District Attorney had called it in his campaign speech last night. "Cyber justice!" Oh, hell! Judge Walhfred Anderson threw the morning fax paper on top of the law books he had been researching for the past two hours, and stomped angrily across his chamber to the door of the courtroom. But it was easier to throw away the paper than the image of the words: " -- and, if re-elected, I pledge to do all in my power to help replace human inefficiency with Cyber justice in the courts of this county! "WeVe seen what other counties have done with Cyber judges. We've witnessed the effectiveness of cybernetic units in our own Appellate Division... And I can promise you twice as many prosecutions at half the cost to the taxpayers... with modern, streamlined Cyber justice!" Oh, hell! Walhfred Anderson caught a glimpse of his reflection in the oval mirror behind the coat rack. He paused, fuming, and smoothed down the few lingering strands of grey hair. The District Attorney was waiting for him out there. No use giving him the satisfaction of looking upset. Only a few moments ago, the Presiding Judge had visaIllustrated by Paul Orban phoned a warning that the D.A. had obtained a change of calendar and was going to spring a surprise case this morning... The Judge cocked his bow tie at a jaunty angle, opened the neckline of his black robe enough for the pink boutonniere to peep out, and stepped into the courtroom as sprightly as his eighty-six years would permit. The District Attorney was an exfootball player, square-shouldered and square-jawed. He propelled himself to his feet, bowed perfunctorily and remained standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. As the bailiff's voice repeated the pledge in an unbroken monotone, Walhfred Anderson allowed his eyes to wander to the goldframed picture of his personal symbol of justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Judge Anderson winked at Justice Holmes. It was a morning ritual he had observed without fail for nearly fifty years. This wasn't the classic picture of Justice Holmes. Not the leonine figure Walhfred Anderson had once seen in the National Gallery. The Justice Holmes on the wall of Judge Anderson's courtroom was much warmer and more human than the official portrait. It was from an old etching that showed the Justice wearing a natty grey fedora. The Justice's fabled mustaches were long and sweeping, giving him the air of a titled playboy, but his eyes were the eyes of the man who had said: "When I am dying, my last words will be -- have faith and pursue the unknown end." Those were good words to remember, when you were eightysix. Walhfred Anderson stared wistfully at the yellowed etching, waiting for some other dearly remembered phrase to spring up between them. But Justice Holmes wasn't communicative this morning. He hadn't been for a long time. The District Attorney's voice, threaded with sarcasm, broke into his reverie: "If the Court pleases, I would like to call up the case of People vs. Professor Neustadt." Walhfred Anderson accepted the file from his aging, nearsighted clerk. He saw that the case had been assigned originally to Department #. It was the case he had been warned about by the Presiding Judge. Walhfred Anderson struggled to focus all his attention on the complaint before him. His craggy features, once described as resembling a benign bulldog, grew rigid with concentration. The Judge had a strong sense of honor about dividing his attention in Court. A case was not just a case ; it was a human being whose past, present and future were wrapped up in the charge against him. "Your Honor," the District Attorney broke in, impatiently, "if the Court will permit, I can summarize this case very quickly..." The tone of his voice implied : A Cyber judge would speed things up around here. Feed the facts into the proprioceptor, and they'd be stored and correlated instantly. Perhaps so, Walhfred Anderson thought, suddenly tired, though the morning was still young. At eighty-six you couldn't go on fighting and resisting much longer. Maybe he should resign, and listen to the speeches at a farewell luncheon, and let a Cyber take over. The Gybers were fast. They ruled swiftly and surely on points of law. They separated fact from fallacy. They were not led down side avenues of justice by human frailty. Their vision was not blurred by emotion. And yet... Judge Anderson looked to Justice Holmes for a clarifying thought, but the Justice's eyes were opaque, inscrutable. Judge Anderson wearily settled back in his tall chair, bracing the ache in his back against the leather padding. "You may proceed," he told the District Attorney. "Thank you, your Honor." This time the edge of sarcasm was so sharp that the Clerk and Court Stenographer looked up indignantly, expecting one of the Judge's famous retorts. The crags in the Judge's face deepened, but he remained quiet. With a tight smile, the District Attorney picked up his notebook. "The defendant," he began crisply, "is charged on three counts of fraud under Section #..." "To wit," rumbled Judge Anderson, restlessly. "To wit," snapped the D.A., "the defendant is charged with giving paid performances at a local theatre, during which he purported to demonstrate that he could take over Cyber functions and perform them more efficiently." Walhfrd Anderson felt the door closing on him. So this was why the D.A. had requested a change of calendar! What a perfect tie-in with the election campaign! He swiveled to study the defendant. Professor Neustadt was an astonishingly thin little man; the bones of his shoulders seemed about to thrust through the padding of his cheap brown suit. His thinness, combined with a tuft of white hair at the peak of his forehead, gave him the look of a scrawny bird. "Our investigation of this defendant," continued the D.A., "showed that his title was assumed merely for stage purposes. He has been associated with the less creditable phases of show business for many years. In his youth, he gained considerable attention as a 'quiz kid', and later, for a time, ran his own program and syndicated column. But his novelty wore off, and he apparently created this cybernetic act to..." Rousing himself to his judicial responsibility. Judge Anderson interrupted : "Is the defendant represented by counsel?" "Your Honor," spoke up Professor Neustadt, in a resonant, bass voice that should have come from a much larger diaphragm, "I request the Court's permission to act as my own attorney." Walhfred Anderson saw the D.A. smile, and he surmised that the old legal truism was going through his mind : A man who defends himself has a fool for a client. "If it's a question of finances," the Judge rumbled gently. "It is not a question of finances. I merely wish to defend myself." Judge Anderson was annoyed, worried. Whoever he was or claimed to be, this Professor was evidently something of a crackpot. The D.A. would tear him to small pieces, and twist the whole case into an implicit argument for Cyber judges. "The defendant has a right to act as his own counsel," the D.A. reminded him. "The Court is aware of that," retorted the Judge. Only the restraining eye of Oliver Wendell Holmes kept him from cutting loose on the D.A. But one more remark like that, and he'd turn his back on the Justice. After all, what right had Holmes to get stuffy at a time like this? He'd never had to contend with Cyber justice! He motioned to the D.A. to continue with the People's case, but the Professor spoke up first: "Your Honor, I stipulate to the prosecution evidence." The D.A. squinted warily. "Is the defendant pleading guilty?" "I am merely stipulating to the evidence. Surely the prosecution knows the difference between a stipulation and a plea! I am only trying to save the time of the Court by stipulating to the material facts in the complaint against me!" The D.A. was obviously disappointed in not being able to present his case. Walhfred Anderson repressed an urge to chuckle. He wondered how a Cyber judge would handle a stipulation. "Do you have a defense to present?" he asked the Professor. "Indeed I do, your Honor! I propose to bring a Cyber into the courtroom and prove that I can perform its functions more efficiently!" The D.A. flushed. "What kind of a farce is this? We've watched the defendant's performance for several days, and it's perfectly clear that he is merely competing against his own special Cyber unit, one with very limited memory storage capacity... "I propose further," continued Professor Neustadt, ignoring the D.A., "that the prosecution bring any Cyber unit of its choice into pete against any Cyber yet devised!" This man was not only a crackpot, he was a lunatic, thought Walhfred Anderson with an inward groan. No one but a lunatic would claim he could compete with the memory storage capacity of a Cyber. As always when troubled, he looked toward Oliver Wendell Holmes for help, but the Justice was still inscrutable. He certainly was being difficult this morning! The Judge sighed, and began a ruling: "The procedure suggested by the defendant would fail to answer to the material counts of the complaint..." But, as he had expected, the D.A. did not intend to let this opportunity pass. "May it please the Court," said the District Attorney, with a wide grin for the fax reporter, "the people will stipulate to the defense, and will not press for trial of the complaint if the defendant can indeed compete with a Cyber unit of our choice." Walhfred Anderson glowered at the unsympathetic Justice Holmes. Dammit, man, he thought, don't be so calm about this whole thing. What if you were sitting here, and I was up there in a gold frame? Aloud, he hedged: "The Court does not believe such a test could be properly and fairly conducted." "I am not concerned with being fairly treated," orated the wispy Professor. "I propose that five questions or problems be posed to the Cyber and myself, and that we be judged on both the speed and accuracy of our replies. I am quite the questions." Go to hell, Holmes, thought Judge Anderson. I don't need you anyway. I've got the answer. The Professor is stark, raving mad. Before he could develop a ruling along this line, the grinning D.A. had accepted the Professor's terms. "I have but one condition," interposed the defendant, "if I win this test, I would like to submit a question of my own to the Cyber." The D.A. hesitated, conferred in a whisper with his assistant, then shrugged. "We so stipulate." Firmly, Walhfred Anderson turned his back on Oliver Wendell Holmes. "In the opinion of the Court," he thundered, "the proposed demonstration would be irrelevant, immaterial and without substantive basis in law. Unless the People proceed with their case in the proper manner, the Court will dismiss this complaint!" "Objection!" "Objection!" The word was spoken simultaneously by both the D.A. and the Professor. Then the defendant bowed toward the District Attorney, and asked him to continue. F or one of the few times in his life, Walhfred Anderson found himself faced with the same objection, at the same time, from both prosecution and defense. What a morning! He felt like turning the court over to a Cyber judge right here and now, and stomping back to his chambers. Let Holmes try getting along with a Cyber! The D.A.'s voice slashed into his thoughts. "The People object on the grounds that there is ample precedent in law for the type of court demonstration to which we have agreed..." "For example," spoke up the Professor, "People vs. Borth, #I N.Y., Supp. # -- The District Attorney blinked, and looked wary again. "The People are not familiar with the citation," he said, "but there is no reason to be in doubt. The revised Judicial Code of Procedure provides for automatic and immediate review of disputed points of law by the Cyber Appellate Division." tomarily used every legal stratagem to avoid the indignity of appearneatly trapped. Grumbling, he visaphoned the Presiding Judge, and was immefourth floor. Cyber V presided over a sunlit, pleasantly carpeted courtroom in the south wing of the Justice Building. Square, bulky, with mat black finish, the Cyber reposed in the center of a raised mahogany stand. Its screen and vocader grill looked austerely down on the long tables provided for opposing counsel. As Walhfred Anderson belligerently led the Professor and the D.A. into the courtroom. Cyber V hummed softly. A dozen colored lights on its front grid began to blink. Judge Anderson angrily repressed an instinct to bow, as he had done in his younger years when appearing to plead a case before a human Appellate Court. The Cyber's soft, pleasantly modulated voice said: "Please proceed." Curbing his roiled feelings of rage and indignity, the Judge stepped to the stand in front of the vocader grill and tersely presented the facts of the case, the reasons for his ruling. Cyber V blinked and hummed steadily, assimilating and filing the facts. The D.A. followed the Judge to the stand, and, from long habity addressed Cyber V with the same emotion and voice tricks he would have used in speaking to a human judge. Walhfred Anderson grimaced with disgust. When the D.A. finished. Cyber V hummed briefly, two amber lights flickered, and the soft voice said: "Defense counsel will please take the stand." Professor Neustadt smiled his ironic, exasperating smile. "The defense stipulates to the facts as stated." The frontal grid lights on Cyber V flashed furiously; the hum rose to a whine, like a motor accelerating for a steep climb. Suddenly, all was quiet, and Cyber V spoke in the same soft, pleasant voice: "There are three cases in modem jurisprudence that have direct bearing on the matter of People vs. Neustadt. "Best known is the case of People vs. Borth, #I N.Y., Supp. #..." Walhfred Anderson saw the D.A. stiffen to attention as the Cyber repeated the citation given by Professor Neustadt. He felt his own pulse surge with the stir of a faint, indefinable hope. "There are also the cases of Forsythe vs. State, # Ohio, #, and Murphy vs. U.S., #d, # C.C.A. "These cases establish precedence for a courtroom demonstration to determine points of material fact. "Thank you, Gentlemen." The voice stopped. All lights rendered its decision. Whatever misgivings the D.A. may have generated over the Professor's display of legal knowledge were overshadowed now by his satisfaction at this display of Cyber efficiency. "Eight minutes!" he announced triumphantly. "Eight minutes to present the facts of the case and obtain a ruling. There's efficiency for you! There's modern courtroom procedure!" Walhfred Anderson felt the weight of eighty-six years as he cocked the angle of his bow tie, squared his shoulders and led the way back to his own courtroom. Maybe the new way was right. Maybe he was just an old man, burdened with dreams, memories, the impedimentia of human emotions. It would have taken him many long, weary hours to dig out those cases. Maybe the old way had died with Holmes and the other giants of that era. Details of the demonstration were quickly concluded. The D.A. selected a Cyber IX for the test. Evidently he had acquired a new respect for Professor Neustadt and was taking no chances. Cyber IX was a massive new model, used as an intergrator by the sciences. Judge Anderson had heard that its memory storage units were the greatest yet devised. If Professor Neustadt had also heard this, he gave no sign of it. He made only a slight, contemptuous nod of assent to the D.A.'s choice. For an instant, the Judge found himself hoping that the Professor would be beaten into humility by Cyber IX. The man's attitude was maddening. Walhfred Anderson banged his gavel harder than necessary, and recessed the hearing for three days. In the meantime, a Cyber IX was to be moved into the courtroom and placed under guard. Professor Neustadt was freed on bail, which he had already posted. Court fax-sheet reporters picked up the story and ballooned it. The D.A.'s office released publicity stories almost hourly. Cartoonists created "Battle of the Century" illustrations, with Cyber IX and Professor Neustadt posed like fighters in opposite comers of the ring. "Man challenges machine" was the caption, indicating that the Professor was a definite underdog and thus the sentimental favorite. One court reporter confided to Judge Anderson that bookmakers were offering odds of ten to one on Cyber IX. To the Judge's continuing disgust, Professor Neustadt seemed as avid as the Prosecutor's office for publicity. He allowed himself to be guest-interviewed on every available television show; one program dug up an ancient film of the Professor as a quiz kid, extracting cube roots in a piping, confident voice. Public interest boiled. TV coverage of the court test was demanded, and eagerly agreed to by both the Prosecutor and Professor Neustadt. Walhfred Anderson ached to cry out against bringing a carnival atmosphere into his courtroom; the fax photographers were bad enough. But he knew that any attempt to interfere would bring him back before that inroom on the morning of the trial, the Judge wore a new bow tie, a flippant green, but he felt like many a defendant he had watched step up before his bench to receive sentence. After this morning, there'd be no stopping the D.A.'s campaign for Cyber judges. He glared unhappily at the battery of television cameras. He noted that one of them was pointed at Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Justice didn't seem to mind; but who would -- all safe and snug in a nice gold frame? Easy enough for Holmes to look so cocky. The bright lights hurt his eyes, and he had to steel himself in order to present the picture of dignified equanimity that was expected of a judge. People would be looking at him from every part of the ers, one of the columnists had estimated. Professor Neustadt appeared in the same shiny brown suit. As he passed the huge Cyber IX unit, metallic gray and mounted on a table of reinforced steel, the Professor paused and bowed, in the manner of a courtly gladiator saluting a respected foe. Spectators clapped and whistled their approval. Television cameras zoomed in on the scene. With easy showmanship, Professor Neustadt maintained the pose for closeups, his owlish eyes wide and unblinking. Judge Anderson banged his gavel for order. What a poseur! What a fraud! This charlatan of publicity out of the case. At a nod from the D.A., the bailiff gave Professor Neustadt a pad of paper on which to note his answers. It had been previously been agreed that Cyber IX would answer visually, on the screen, instead of by vocader. The Professor was seated at the far end of the counsel table, where he could not see the screen. Clerks with stopwatches were stationed behind the Professor and Cyber IX. "Is the defendant ready?" inquired Judge Anderson, feeling like an idiot. "Of course." The Judge turned to Cyber IX, then caught himself. He flushed. The courtroom tittered. The District Attorney had five questions, each in a sealed envelope, which also contained . an answer certified by an eminent authority in the field. With a flourish, keeping his profile to the cameras, the D.A. handed the first envelope to Judge Anderson. "We'll begin with a simple problem in mathematics," he announced to the TV audience. From the smirk in his voice, Judge Anderson was prepared for the worst. But he read the question with a perverse sense of satisfaction. This Professor was in for a very rough morning. He cleared his throat, read aloud: "In analyzing the economics of atomic power plant operation, calculate ihe gross heat input for a power generating plant of # x # watts electrical output." Cyber IX hummed into instantaneous activity; its lights flashed in sweeping curves and spirals across the frontal grid. Professor Neustadt sat perfectly still, eyes closed. Then he scribbled something on a pad of paper. Two stopwatches clicked about a second apart. The clerk handed the Professor's slip of paper to Judged Anderson. The Judge checked it, turned to the screen. Both answers were indentical: Time was announced as fourteen seconds for Cyber IX; fifteen and three-tenths seconds for Professor Neustadt. The Cyber had won the first test, but by an astoundingly close margin. The courtroom burst into spontaneous applause for the Professor. Walhfred Anderson was incredulous. What a fantastic performance! No longer smirking, the D.A. handed the Judge a second envelope. "What is the percentage compressibility of caesium under # atmospheres of pressure, and how do you account for it?" Once again Cyber IX hummed and flickered into action. And once again Professor Neustadt sat utterly still, head tilted back like an inquisitive parakeet. Then he wrote swiftly. A stopwatch clicked. Walhfred Anderson took the answer with trembling fingers. He saw the D.A. rub dry lips together, try to moisten them with a dry tongue. A second stopwatch clicked. The Judge compared the correct answer with the Professor's answer and the answer on the screen. All were worded differently, but in essence were the same. Hiding his emotion in a tone gruffer than usual, Judge Anderson read the Professor's answer: "The change in volume is # percent. It is due to an electronic transition for a #s zone to a #d zone." The Professor's elapsed time was # seconds. Cyber IX had taken #I seconds to answer the compound question. Professor Neustadt pursued his lips; he seemed displeased with his tremendous performance. Moving with the agility of a pallbearer, the D.A. gave Judge Anderson the third question: "In twenty-five words or less, state the Nernst Law of thermodynamics." This was clearly a trick question, designed to trap a human mind in its own verbiage. Cyber IX won, in eighteen seconds. But in just two-fifths of a second more; Professor Neustadt twenty-four word condensation: "The entropy of a substance becomes zero at the absolute zero of temperature, provided it is brought to this temperature by a reversible process." A tabulation of total elapsed time revealed that Professor Neustadt was leading by nine and three-tenths seconds. A wild excitement blended with the Judge's incredulity. The D.A. seemed to have developed a tic in his right check. On the fourth question, dealing with the structural formula similarities of dimenhydrinate and diphenhydramine hydrochloride. Professor Neustadt lost three seconds. On the fifth question, concerning the theoretical effects of humidity inversion on microwave transmission, the Professor gained back a full second. The courtroom was bedlam, and Walhfred Anderson was too excited to pound his gavel. In the glass-walled, soundproofed television booths, announcers grew apoplectic as they tried to relay the fever-pitch excitement of the courtroom to the outside world. Professor Neustadt held up his bone-thin hand for silence. "May it please the Court... The District Attorney agreed that in the event of victory I could ask Cyber IX an optional question. I would like to do so at this time." Judge Anderson could only nod, and hope that his bulldog features were concealing his emotions. The D.A. kept his back rigidly to the television cameras. Professor Neustadtstrutted up to Cyber IX, flipped on the vocader switch and turned to the cameras. "Since Cyber IX is essentially a scientific integrator and mathematical unit' he began pedantically, "I'll put my question in the Cyber's own framework. Had another Cyber been selected for this test, I would phrase my question differently." He turned challengingly back to Cyber IX, paused for dramatic effect, and asked: "What are the magnitudes of a dream?" Cyber IX hummed and twinkled. The hum rose higher and higher. The lights flickered in weird, disjointed patterns, blurring before the eye. Abruptly, the hum stopped. The lights dimmed, faded one by one. The eternally calm, eternally pleasant voice of Cyber IX spoke from the vocader grill: "Problem unsolved." F or an interminable instant there was silence in the courtroom. Complete silence. Stunned incredulity. It was followed by a collective gasp, which Walhfred Anderson could hear echoing around the world. Cyber IX had been more than beaten ; it had failed to solve a problem. The gasp gave way to unrestrained cheering. But the Professor brought quiet again by raising his bony hand. Now there was a strange, incongruous air of dignity about his thin figure. "Please," he said, "please understand one thing... The purpose of this demonstration and my question was not to discredit Cyber IX, which is truly a great machine, a wonder of science. "Cyber IX could not know the magnitudes of a dream... because it cannot dream. "As a matter of fact, I do not know the magnitudes of a dream, but that is not important... because I can dream! "The dream is the difference... The dream born in man, as the poet said, 'with a sudden, clamorous pain'..." There was no movement or sound in the courtroom. Walhfred Anderson held the Professor's last written answer between his fingers, as if fearing that even the small movement to release it might shatter something delicate and precious. "The dream is the difference!" There it was. So clear and true and beautiful. He looked at Holmes, and Holmes seemed to be smiling under his gray mustache. Yes, Holmes had known the dream. In the sound-proof booths, the announcers had stopped speaking; all mike lines were open to carry Professor Neustadt's words to five "Perhaps there are no magnitudes of such a dream... no coordinates! Or it may be that we are not yet wise enough to know them. The future may tell us, for the dream is the rainbow bridge from the present and the past to the future." Professor Neustadt's eyes were half-closed again, and his head was cocked back, bird-like. "Copernicus dreamed a dream... So did da Vinci, Galileo and Newton, Darwin and Einstein... all so long ago... "Cyber IX has not dreamed a "But they can free men to dream. "Remember that, if you forget all else: They can free men to dream ! "Man's knowledge has grown so vast that much of it would be lost or useless without the storage and recall capacity of the Cybers -- and man himself would be so immersed in what he knows that he would never have time to dream of that which he does not yet know, but must and can know. "Why should not the scientist use the past without being burdened by it? Why should not the lawyer and the judge use the hardwon laws of justice without being the slave of dusty law books?" Walhfred Anderson accepted the rebuke without wincing. The rebuke for all the hours he had wasted because he had been too stubborn to use a Cyber clerk, or consult Cyber V. The old should not resist the new, nor the new destroy the old. There was the letter of the law, and there was the spirit, and the spirit was the dream. What was old Hammurabi's dream? Holmes had quoted it once. "... to establish justice on the earth... to hold back the strong from oppressing the feeble... to shine like the sun-god upon the blackheaded men, and to illumine the land..." Holmes had dreamed the dream, all right. He had dreamed it grandly. But maybe there was room for small dreams, too, and still time for dreams when the years were so few and lonely. The Professor suddenly opened his eyes, and his voice took on the twang of steel under tension. "You are already wondering," he told the cameras accusingly, "whether I have not disproved my own words by defeating Cyber IX. "That is not true. "I defeated Cyber IX because I have wasted a man's life -- my own! You all know that as a child I was a mnemonic freak, a prodigy, if you prefer. My mind was a filing cabinet, a fire-proof cabinet neatly filled with facts that could never kindle into dreams. All my life I have stuffed my filing cabinet. For sixty years I have filed and filed. "And then I dreamed one dream -- my first, last and only dream. "I dreamed that man would misuse another gift of science, as he has mis-used so many... I dreamed of the Cybers replacing and enslaving man, instead of freeing man to dream... And I dreamed that the golden hour would come when a man would have to prove that he could replace a Cyber -- and thereby prove that neither man nor Cybers should ever replace each other." Professor Neustadt turned to Judge Anderson, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. "Your Honor, I move that this case be dismissed." The worn handle of his old teakwood gavel felt warm and alive to the Judge's fingers. He sat up straight, and banged resoundingly on the top of his desk. "Case dismissed." Then, in full view of the cameras, Walhfred Anderson turned and winked boldly at Oliver Wendell Holmes.    A series of "incidents" had provoked a state of emergency between two great powers. T he reason was obvious. But why a single chemist as bait -- and who was the third party?...The #th award winner in IP's College Science Fiction Contest. BY Illustrated by Kelly Frees windows of the terminal building. The howling of the wind around the corners of the building and across the broad expanse of the rocket field went unheard by the thousands who streamed across the crowded floor. Each was intent on his or her affairs, hurrying to board one of the tall spires out on the snow covered field, seeing someone off, or waiting for incoming friends. Roger Lorin and his wife waited near the entrances to the boarding tunnels for the announcement that would send them out under the field to their rocket. The shouts of porters and the voices of excited passengers mingled with the noises of the terminal. Groups of people moved across the floor like the currents of the ocean. Suddenly, the announcer's voice boomed out over the p. a. "All passengers for the Arctic City rocket report to tunnel seven." "Come on Linda," Roger said. "That's our ship." He hurried his wife toward the tunnel entrance. A few minutes later they stepped off the conveyer walk at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The gray uniformed attendant checked their tickets, before the glass cage lifted them to the lock entrance high on the side of the rocket. The wind sang its mournful song around the corners of the cage and fired volleys of snow against the glass. At the air lock entrance, a stewardess checked their tickets a second time. "Couches # and #? Follow me, please." She led them up one deck and over to a pair of couches, one of which was next to a small eyeport. "Take the one next to the port, honey," said Roger. "The view's worth seeing." A moment later, a buzzer sounded, and a red light flashed on near the hatch to the deck above. The voice of the pilot came over the intercom system. "We are blasting off in five minutes. All passengers who have not strapped in will please do so immediately." Three minutes went by, and the final warning buzzer sounded. After another two minutes, the rumble of the motors came from the tail of the ship. The rocket, a towering silver needle with orange flame spouting from its lower end, paused on the field as its motors warmed up. Then it rose majestically on a column of fire and disappeared in the swirling snow. Linda was surprised to find that the sound of the blast off was not as loud as she had expected. Neither did she find the acceleration of two and a half gravities excessively uncomfortable. The brightly lighted compartment made the scene outside the eyeport seem dark; although it was only fourthirty in the afternoon. Tiny pellets of snow streamed by the port during the few seconds it took the rocket to scream through the lower atmosphere. Then the ship burst through the clouds. Linda gave an exclamation of surprise and pleasure at the sheer beauty of the sight. The clouds rose like tumbled snowy mountain ranges under an ice blue winter sky. The setting sun painted orange, and violet. Their eastern sides lay in blue shadow honeycombed with caves and grottos. "It's beautiful!" exclaimed Linda. "I never dreamed it would be like this." "You have to see it to really appreciate it," Roger said. "Descriptions never do it justice." As the rocket continued to rise, the clouds flattened until they resembled pack ice on an arctic sea. More of Earth became visible, and spots of green and brown appeared on the southwestern horizon. Finally the blue of the Pacific crept into the now black sky. "You may be able to see a few stars if you don't look toward Earth or the sun," Roger said to Linda. Linda followed Roger's instructions; and, sure enough, a few stars appeared, unwinking points of light against black velvet. Now over three hundred miles above Earth, the rocket had crossed the frontier into outer space. The rocket passed the top of its arc and the scenery was forgotten; the natural fear of falling to which all humans are heir asserted itself. Linda suddenly realized that there was no sensation of weight and that the rocket was falling steadily through space. "Is... is everything all right?" she asked in a weak voice. "Don't worry dear," Roger replied soothingly. "We'll be landing in another half hour. You won't have to go through much more of it." "Thank goodness!" Linda breathed a sigh of relief and laid her dark head on Roger's shoulder. Roger put his arm around her and held her until the rocket came in with a squeal of runners against hard packed snow. Lights flashed by the eyeport as they slid along the runway. In the distance the lighted, slablike towers of Arctic City loomed against the dark sky. The night was clear and bitterly cold. The rocket slid to a stop, and an electric tractor came to tow the ship to the top of an elevator shaft. A few minutes later the passengers streamed along a conveyer walk into the Arctic City terminal. The sounds of hurried activity echoed through the tunnel. The rumble of heavy freight conveyers, the shouts of stevedores, the whine of heavily loaded electric motors, and the hum of conversation mingled in a medley of sounds that spoke of commerce and industry, of people busy at an almost endless array of tasks. "Are you Roger Lorin?" The question came from a short, stocky, gray-haired individual. "Yes, I am," Roger replied. "I'm Jacob Darcy. I'm supposed to show you to your apartment and help you get oriented." ; "Good," Roger said. "You lead. We'll follow." Darcy turned and led them to a small electric monorail car which sped them through a maze of underground streets past the windows of many shops and stores. After a ten minute ride in the monorail and a fast ascent in an elevator, the three of them entered a small apartment high in one of the slablike buildings. The apartment was comfortable and compact, though not luxuriously furnished. One transparent wall of the living room looked out over the city and the arctic landscape. "I thought things would be more primitive," said Linda as she looked around her future home. "This doesn't seem like a frontier at all." "No," Darcy replied with a smile. "Arctic City is pretty well built up. Conditions are a lot better here than they are in some of the mining centers farther north." He turned to Roger. "Til be around tomorrow morning to show you the labs. Sometime around eight or eight thirty." "I'll be ready," replied Roger. "It should be interesting to see the facilities here." "I suppose the high temperature work will be most interesting to you," said Darcy. "I read your paper on molecular linkages. We'll sure be able to use you. We're having the devil's own time with the linings for the reaction chambers in the neutron pile." "I hope I can help," said Roger. "The cooling problem should be quite a challenge without the extreme temperatures and high vacuum that we had at the moon labs." "That's right. You did work on the first neutron pile, didn't you?" Darcy said as he prepared to leave. "That makes it much better. There are too few men with practical experience in neutron pile work." It had long been known by physicists that tremendous amounts of energy could be released if matter could be collapsed to form neutrons. This step had been achieved in # A. D., at the Lunar atomic laboratories. The Arctic City pile was the first attempt to apply it to industrial uses. Up to this time (#) , man had been barred from the planets by the lack of a fuel cheap enough to make trips across interplanetary space economically feasible. Long, economical orbits could be used; but these brought on psychological problems resulting from living in cramped quarters for long periods of time, and problems of carrying enough supplies for such long trips. In shorter orbits, the profits would be burned up in excessive fuel consumption. The most efficient fuel was monatomic hydrogen, which is highly unstable unless dissolved in a catalyst to keep it from exploding at ordinary temperatures. The catalyst and the process for making the fuel were both expensive. Moon colonies were maintained only because the moon was the best known source of germanium; and its vacuum was a valuable location for astronomical observatories and atomic research laboratories. The neutron pile applied to space travel would make an interplanetary civilization possible. The pile, releasing neutrons and ions at velocities approaching that of light, would make use of small amounts of inexpensive materials as fuels. It also had frightening potentialities for mass destruction. The ambassador of the South American Republic thought of the destructive possibilities as he rode the small monorail car toward the Government Center in Chicago, which was now the capital of the North American Union. The shore of Lake Michigan was studded with tall skyscrapers connected by streets with transparent coverings. At ground level, a system of conveyer walks ranging from the hundred mile per hour strips in the center to five mile per hour strips on the edges, whisked brightly clad people about their business. On the second level, monorail tracks carried the high speed freight and passenger traffic of the city. The ambassador's car pulled in at a second level siding near the loading platform for the Government Tower. As he stepped from his car, he was met by two secret service agents who escorted him to the office of the Secretary of State. The Secretary sat behind a large desk in a comfortably furnished office on the eightieth floor. Through the large window wall behind the Secretary, the scattered towers of the city were somewhat obscured by flying snow and the gloom of a December morning. The distinguished looking man behind the desk had served his country well during the past thirty years. He knew the problems faced l#y such nations as the South American Republic, the League of Islam, the Asian Commonwealth, the decadent subject nations of western Europe, and the tiny, constantly warring states that comprise what was left of the once mighty U.S.S.R. That morning he had sent a note refusing help to the Baltic Federation, which had accused the Arctic League of aggression. The North American Union had no desire to enter foreign wars that did not concern it. The Secretary rose and extended his hand. "Good morning," he greeted the ambassador as he shook hands with him. "Have a seat." The Secretary waved toward a comfortable chair near the desk. The ambassador seated himself with his overcoat across his knees. "I cannot get used to your cold weather," he said good naturedly. I have spent too much time in the tropics." "We seem to be getting an unusually cold winter," the Secretary replied. "I'll have to admit that Chicago doesn't compare with Rio as far as weather is concerned." "I wish that I were there now," the ambassador said in a more serious tone. "I would not have to discuss with you this trouble that has come up." "What trouble?" the Secretary asked. "Your note wasn't clear about what you wished to discuss with me." "As you probably know, there are groups in my country that fear the technical developments that have been going on during the past ten years," the ambassador replied. "They do not know your country as well as I do, and fear that you will use the neutron energy discovery as a weapon." "Why should they fear our energy developments?" the Secretary asked. "The Lunar atomic laboratories are open for inspection at all times, and the pile being built in the Arctic is no secret either. All the developments are private ventures. The idea of making neutron bombs hasn't even been raised in Congress." "Unfortunately my people do not know this," replied the ambassador. "These groups have used much propaganda and have thoroughly misled the masses. That the laboratories are located on the moon does not help. You know how rigid the requirements are for those who would travel in space. Several men from my country have not been allowed to go for health reasons. This naturally feeds the suspicions of my people, who do not understand why such things must be done. To remedy this trouble my government has instructed me to arrange for a meeting between our presidents." "I think such a meeting would be possible," the Secretary said. "I'm sure that the president will understand the situation. The memory of the twentieth century won't fade easily. I'll see if a trip to the Lunar laboratories can be arranged. It would be good if some members of the dissatisfied groups were allowed to make the trip." "That would be very good," replied the ambassador. "It would help to counteract their propaganda. They are seeking power, and would gain it at the expense of good will between our nations. This will very effectively remove the source of their grievances." "I'll bring it up at the cabinet meeting this afternoon," the Secretary said. "It would be wisest to get this business moving as fast as possible." The ambassador rose from his seat. "You will let me know the outcome of the meeting as soon as you can?" "Yes," replied the Secretary. "As soon as it's over." T he laboratories at Arctic City were fairly new but already had the cluttered appearance of all research labs. Electronic instruments, coils of wire, and various articles of chemical apparatus lay on the work benches. One room held the dial-studded face of a computer. Another contained several induction and carbon arc furnaces used in high temperature work. Men wearing white smocks or plastic aprons went quietly and efficiently about their tasks. Roger and Darcy entered a lab in which a man sat staring at the face of an oscilloscope, where weird figures danced in yellowish-green tracery. The bench was covered with a bewildering array of equipment. A row of gas discharge tubes glowed with varicolored light. From them a spaghetti-like arrangement of many colored wires led to various instruments scattered along the bench. "How's it coming, Phil?" Darcy asked. The man looked up from his work. "Hi, Jake," he said. "I might get somewhere if this oscillator would stop wandering all over the place. This thing doesn't seem to be very accurate at high frequencies." He indicated a piece of equipment connected to Ae oscilloscope. "I'll sure be glad when we get a good physical chemist to do this work. My business is ceramics, and I'm getting sick and tired of wrestling with his wiring." "Well," said Darcy, "you won't have to worry about this any more. This is Roger Lorin, our new physical chemist. Roger, this is Philip Gordon, our ceramics expert." Gordon grinned and extended his hand. "I'm glad to meet you," he said. "Sorry I blew off like that. I just get disgusted sometimes." "It does get frustrating," Roger agreed as they shook hands. "Electronics is rather tricky." "You're right there," replied Gordon. "Especially when you don't know too much about it. What I learned about electronics in college has long since departed. Take a look at this set up. It's about as poor a job of haywiring as you'll find anywhere." "I see you're using high frequency excitation to get your high temperatures," Roger commented. "Just what compounds are you working with?" "I've been working with some plastics, inert stuff, to see just what they'll react with, and how fast they'll react at high temperatures." "It isn't too easy," Lorin said. "It never has been easy to find reaction rates. I'll get to work on these this afternoon. Maybe I can get some of these finished tomorrow or the next day." "Thanks," Gordon said in a relieved voice. "It'll be good to get some results I can rely on." Lorin and Darcy left the lab and walked through a winding succession of corridors until they came to a large room. One wall was lined with catwalks linked by metal ladders. Men in coveralls moved against the slate gray backgroimd like insects on the side of a building. Through a door to their right Lorin could see banks of instruments at which several men were working. "This is the south face of the pile," Darcy said. "Most of the instruments are located here. The Klysten converters are mounted in that room over there." He indicated a door on their left. "I'd like to see those," Roger said. "I hear that these are pretty large compared with what we had at the moon labs." "They're big enough all right," Darcy said. "Each one is four stories high. We had a deuce of a time evacuating them." As Darcy said this, they stepped into a long high room. To their right stood six immense transparent tubes. Each tube contained a grid of thick steel bars which was mounted so that it completely surrounded a coil of heavy copper bar in the center of the tube. The steel bars had been treated so that a magnetic field would build up rapidly when they were exposed to hard radiations. The radiation beams were passed into the grid in pulses, thus causing the magnetic field to build up and collapse rapidly producing current in the coils by induction. The tubes were generators with no moving parts except electrons and protons. The system used about seventy-five per cent of the energy produced by the pile. The residual radiation was released as greenish yellow light. "Why are they transparent?" Roger asked. "I should think that metals would be stronger and easier to manage." "The transparency helps us to maintain a more accurate control " Darcy replied. "When the light shifts toward the blue, we know that more energy is being released as radiation, and can shut down the tube before it gets a chance to heat up too much." "Good idea," said Roger. "Control was our worst trouble at the moon labs." "We'll use this until we find something better," said Darcy as they left the pile area. events which would shape the course of the next few weeks, and would ultimately change his whole life were taking place far to the south. A third party had entered the political stage of the Western Hemisphere. The League of Islam had finally decided to do something about an incident which it had never forgiven. Over thirty years earlier, the Union had sent marines into the Suez Canal area to stop alleged assaults against American citizens. In a sense, the North American Union had indicated that it thought of the League of Islam as nothing more than a backward group, which could be pacified whenever trouble arose within its borders. The insult had never been forgotten by the fanatically nationalistic Moslems. Only the greater military might of the North American power had prevented a war at that time. Now, the League had decided that the time was ripe to gain immunity from such insults forever by some shrewd political maneuvering. Working through a small dissatisfied political party in South America, they used the North's development of neutron energy to create fear in the minds of the people of the southern republic. By stimulating this fear, the Arabs hoped to weaken both powers through war, and thereby to gain power and prestige among the nations. The League hoped to gain through political devices what it could never get in open war. Up to January #, #, the leaders of the western hemispheric powers did not realize what was actually taking place. But then reports began coming into the offices of the investigators of both nations which changed the picture. On January #, an American oil well in the Gulf of Mexico had been blown up. The saboteur was not caught, since the bomb had been cleverly hidden sometime before the explosion. Two days later, in the state of Venezuela, an official of the South American government was shot and killed. Although the assassin escaped after a grueling two day chase and was never really identified, there were plenty of rumor mongers to remind the people that the dead official had held opinions that were not favorable to the North American Union. Accompanied by such incidents friction between the two nations grew. The events that set the pot to boiling, and nearly caused it to boil over occurred at Arctic City. Up to this time, Roger Lorin had considered the reports of such incidents as news that seemed rather unreal, because of its distance from his immediate affairs. Now, however, he found himself in the middle of the trouble between the two nations. Although he scarcely knew it, he had become a key man on the neutron pile project. His research into the physics of interatomic and intermolecular forces had aided materially the work on the pile. It started, innocently enough, during the early afternoon of January #, when a group of ten men ostensibly bound for a mining town farther north, took a guided tom of the pile area. About one sixth of the reaction cells into which the pile was divided for convenience, were in operation; and the six converter tubes were aglow with greenish yellow light. The entrance of the men into the central chamber was the signal. A previously planted bomb exploded with enough vioconverter room with greenish yellow fire and hard radiations. A smoke bomb provided extra screening and the group hurried down a side tunnel under cover of the gray mantle. Roger heard the sounds of confusion accompanied by the clangor of an alarm bell, announcing that hard radiations were loose somewhere in the plant. He stepped to the door of the lab, and a gas gun exploded in his face. He knew nothing more, until he awoke aboard a fast moving jet. The convertiplane winged through the Arctic twilight for nearly two hours, and finally came down on a flat stretch of snow covered tundra, near the shore of the Arctic Ocean. A group of three dome huts stood at the base of a low cliff. Otherwise, the scene was one of silent, dark desolation. One of the men handed Roger a pair of insulated, electrically heated coveralls. Roger put them on without argument. Next, the man motioned toward the hatch with a machine pistol. "Get movin'," he snapped. "Make it quick. And don't try to run for it. You wouldn't get far." Roger dropped through the hatch and waited quietly. When his captors finally dropped through the hatch, they steered him none too gently toward the middle hut. On his right as he entered, three men sat playing cards around a small table. To his left, a man lay on a cot reading a magazine by the light of a mining lantern. Roger was shoved across the main room, through a passageway and into a room on the right. The metal door clanged shut behind him, and the bolt shot home with the finality of a prison gate. "Well, I see I have company," a voice came out of the gloom. As Roger's eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he saw an old man sitting on the edge of a narrow cot. "Who are you?" Roger asked in a bewildered voice. "And just what's been going on? Why should I be kidnapped and brought to this God forsaken spot?" "You must be the chemist they were talking about," the old man replied. "I heard them say something about one of the chief chemists at the neutron pile project. As for me, my name is Dr. Alexander Nolan. I came up here in my plane about a month ago to write up some historical research I've been doing during the past five years. Instead, your kidnappers came in and took over. But here I am rambling on about myself as usual. What's your name, young fellow?" "I'm Roger Lorin," Roger replied. "I'm a chemist all right. I was working at Arctic City on the neutron project, but I still can't figure out why I should be kidnapped. They couldn't get any ransom, and I don't have any information that would be useful to them. I just don't see it." "Roger Lorin, eh," the historian mused. "I think I see why you were kidnapped. You're more important than you think you are, which is unusual. Most men think that they are more important than they really are. I suppose you've heard about the oil well that was blown up in the Gulf of Mexico and the man who was shot and killed down in Venezuela. Now, if some North American Citizen were to be found dead, possibly tortured for information about the neutron pile, it might be just the spark that sets off the powder keg that's been building up during the past ten years." "But why should South America do anything like that?" Roger asked nervously. "They have nothing to gain by such actions. We've shared the information on pile developments since the projects were started." "Oh, but South America is not the power behind this business," Nolan said gently. "I'll admit that the evidence seems to point to South America, but I have reasons to believe that another power is behind this." "But which one could it be?" asked Roger. "Indications point to the League of Islam," replied Nolan. "They are clever, but a student of political history can get some insight into their plans if he looks carefully enough. If you're interested, I can give you some background." "Go ahead," Roger said. "I'd like to find out what's behind this." "Well," the historian began. "I guess that you could say that this story goes back # years. The hatred between the Jews and the Arabs goes back that far, and it plays an important part in the present situation. Actually the seeds of the present trouble were planted more than a hundred years ago, when the United States helped the Jews set up a republic on land that the Arabs considered theirs. When the republic of Israel was established, many Arabs were driven from their homes. Added to this, American economic aid to Israel didn't help our relations with the Arab world. As a result, the fifties and sixties of the last century were a time of unrest throughout the Middle East. "A short war between Israel and the Arab States lasted from # to #. The Arabs lost out, but border incidents occurred intermittently until #. After the United States and Russia were involved in the Two Week Chaos, the Arab League moved against Israel. The Arabs had grown in strength during the preceding twenty years and were able to push the Jews out of Palestine or put them under their control. "Under agreements made in the United Nations, the United States sent an expeditionary force to the Holy Land. The whole affair was a debacle. America had been weakened by the atom bombing of many of her cities and military establishments. Russia was also out of the running. After the death of Malenkov in #, one of the party leaders had tried to bring union by starting a war. After American retaliation with hydrogen and atom bombs, the growing resentment of the Russian people against an undesirable system exploded into open revolt. The Soviet Union became a disorganized crazy-quilt pattern of small, constantly warring states. "On top of the destruction of atomic war, came the great economic collapse of #. The financial structure of the United States and her allies fell apart, and with it the United Nations went down into oblivion. The states of the Arab League could now do much as they pleased without outside interference. "The Two Week Chaos and the great collapse incapacitated the western powers for nearly thirty years. The Arab States prospered and formed the League of Islam in #. The League covered the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the coast of North Africa. During this period. South America had formed the South American Republic and became a world power. "The North American Union, which was formed in #, wished to take up where the United States had left off in the development of Arabian oil. The Arabs, who had developed the fields themselves with help from South America, had no desire for North American intervention. The Americans, who had a long term lease signed in the up so easily, and hard feeling developed. The Suez incident of thirty years ago and the American control of the moon and the satellite stations didn't help matters any. "When the Americans finished the first satellite station in # and landed the first rocket on the moon in #, the Arabs became apprehensive and made known their wish to build a spaceport in the Sahara Desert. The North American Union, which had a monopoly on rocket building facilities, refused to allow it, out of fear of the growing strength of the Arabs. I think that that was a serious mistake. The sight of the satellites passing overhead, plus the knowledge that they belong to an unfriendly power doesn't help to create good will. The fact that the moon has an independent government makes it worse. The leaders of Islam know that the Lunar government wouldn't allow nationalism in space. I guess you know how the Lunar citizens feel about the North American monopoly on space travel." "They don't like it," Roger said. "They feel that they could be more independent if they were receiving supplies from more than one source. Lunar government is nothing more than a form, set up by the North American Union to keep up appearances. The moon isn't self sufficient enough to make its independence more than a form. If the Lunar colonies could trade with more than one nation, they could maintain their independence by the moon's natural defensive position; and control of the satellite stations would help to ease international tensions. There's not much chance of a dictatorship being formed there, because the colonists are too individualistic and are interested in their government. It looks to me like both sides are at fault in this mess." "That's usually the case' the historian commented. "The Arabs aren't free of blame either. Some of their tactics in the Holy Land weren't exactly calculated to win the good will of the United States, and they have been rather violent in some of their dealings with our citizens." The conversation was interrupted when one of their captors opened the door a few inches and slid two cans of food concentrate through the crack. "I see dinner has arrived," Nolan said as he stepped over to the door and picked up the containers. He handed one to Roger, and the two men removed the tops. In a few minutes a coil in the sides of each container heated the contents, and the prisoners ate a warm if uninspiring meal. Plastic spoons fastened to the sides of the cans served as utensils. After they had finished the food, the two prisoners sat and discussed various topics until late in the evening, when they finally turned in. Outside, the temperature dropped to sixty degrees below zero. The stars sparkled with a outer space. Once the frosty stillness was broken by the whine of the jets of a cargo plane, hauling a train of ore gliders from the mines on an island farther north. In the front room of the center hut a guard sat, watching a number of television screens which showed the area around the camp bathed in infra red light. In front of the hut lay the convertiplane, a shining, bluish silver dart with its needle nose and swept back wings and tail. Near the cliffs back of the huts, Nolan's small two seater lay with its channel wings folded into the fuselage. At six, Roger was awakened roughly by one of the guards. He was given a can of concentrates which he ate quickly, his eyes straying now and then to the big machine pistol held by one of his captors. After Roger had eaten, he was ordered out to the plane and strapped into a seat, an armed guard beside him. With screaming jets blowing air over its channel wings, the convertiplane lifted from the snow and, a few minutes later, streaked into the dark sky under the power of its main jets. Three hours later they descended to the yard of a large house on the outskirts of Denver. The scattered buildings of the city lay on a blinding white blanket of snow that sparkled in the winter sun like minute jewels. Roger was hurried into the house and soon stood in the middle of a spacious living room, his hands held firmly by steel handcuffs. He faced a man with swarthy skin and dark hair, a typical Latin type. "Sehor Lorin," the South American said and motioned toward an easy chair. "Please be seated. Perhaps you are tired after your trip." "The trip was all right," Roger replied coldly, "though I don't like traveling against my will. I trust that the Arabs are paying you well for this little job." A momentary look of surprise crossed the man's handsome features, but he smiled quickly and said in an affable voice tinged with surprise. "Arabs? What do they have to do with this? I do not know any Arabs. You do me an injustice to think that I would work for any other country than my own." Hoping that the results would justify his confidence, Roger replied. "Quit trying to bluff. South Americans have no reason to kidnap me. They'd have absolutely nothing to gain and plenty to lose by such actions. Even if they could fight a long drawn out war with us, they'd lose in the end. Why most of your scientists and engineers receive their graduate schooling up here. I met quite a few of your countrymen during my school days." "You are an astute man," the South American smiled. "Yes, I am actually working for the League of Islam." He admitted it blandly without apparent conscience or remorse. "I can't say that I admire a man who'd sell his country, and not only that but the whole western hemisphere down the river. Did they pay you thirty pieces of silver?" Roger asked scornfully. "The stakes are much higher than that," the traitor replied, without apparently being affected by Roger's scorn. "An empire awaits those who are bold, greater power and riches than any ruler has even known before." "I thought that we had left that behind with the twentieth century." "The desire for power is always with us," the traitor, whose name was Manuel Juarez, said. "If I do not get it, someone else will. The struggle never ends." "Maybe that's true in some parts of the world," Roger said, "but we don't do things that way here." "Be that as it may," Juarez said with finality. "We won't speak of it again." Abruptly he turned his chair toward a blank wall and pressed a button on the arm of the chair. The whole wall lit up with stereo color, and the room resounded with the hum of a crowd of people. "Skiing is an interesting sport," Juarez commented. "I enjoy watching the skill with which the skiers perform in these tournaments." Roger and Juarez watched a symphony of graceful form and movement against a backdrop of snow, blue sky, and tall pines. Both men sat in chairs that moulded automatically to the shape of the body. Radiant heat bathed them in warmth that was a pleasant contrast to the wintry scene in the television wall. The instrument which showed them the ski tournament so clearly represented a force that had killed an entire industry eighty years earlier. The economic collapse and the development of good color stereo television had resulted in the complete destruction of the movie industry. Although there was still much poor entertainment on the air, any person could usually find entertainment to suit his taste, whether it was for adventure stories or Shakespeare, for popular music or the works of the great composers. R oger was held in the house for about a week and a half. Although he did not know why he was held for such a long time, he knew that he was being watched with unceasing vigilance. He had no chance to escape. Then suddenly the enforced inactivity was over. Juarez and two guards entered his room. All three were dressed in outdoor clothing and were armed. "You will come with us peacefully," Juarez warned. "If you try anything foolish, we will not hesitate to kill you. We have other plans for you, but your death here would serve our purpose." Roger went. They left the house and prepared to enter a small channel winged plane. The craft had a tear shaped body flanked by two pontoon-like cylinders. Each cylinder contained two small jet engines, one blowing a stream of air forward and the other blowing a stream backward across wing-like plates. The supersonic blasts gave the wings enough lift so that the plane could hover, rise vertically, or move forward or backward with equal ease. Such planes could attain a speed of # miles per hour. At this time, a small patrol plane of the same type was flying slowly through the area. Both of its occupants were thoroughly bored, and one of them began to look around through a pair of light amplifying binoculars. He spotted the abduction scene taking place below. Every detail, including Roger's handcuffs, was crystal clear. The patrolman, his curiosity aroused, switched to ultraviolet sensitivity, but saw none of the code numbers that appeared on the bodies of all police planes. Handcuffs and no police markings meant a check report to police headquarters. "Patrol #," the policeman reported into the radio. "There's a prisoner being held in Zone #. The plane has no police markings. The prisoner is about five feet, eleven inches tall, has light hair, a rather large nose, and is wearing a green jacket over gray coveralls. One of the other men is dark, short, and stocky." "That sounds like Roger Lorin," came the reply. "He disappeared from Arctic City about a week ago. There's a bulletin out on him. Keep a long distance watch on that plane." About an hour after they had taken off the fugitives, who were flying low, disappeared in the mountains and were lost to the police plane's radar. The sun set, and night settled its cold hand over the mountains. The stars glittered like icy diamonds in the almost black firmament. The moon bathed the world in cold silvery light. The mountains rose like walls against the cold, dark sky. The plane climbed out of a canyon and flew southwest along the side of a high peak. At treetop level, they flew through a high pass, and entered a valley where a small, ice-covered lake gleamed in the cold moonlight. The plane landed on the glittering ice. Among the pines on the west side of the lake, stood a stately hunting lodge. The outside was faced with logs to give it a rustic look, but the interior was luxuriously furnished. Two men from the lodge pushed the plane into a hangar on the lake shore, while Roger and his captors climbed a short flight of stairs and entered the building. "Now we wait," Juarez said disgustedly. "I hope that Gomez gets here soon, so that we can get this business over with and get out of here. I cannot be sure, but I thought I saw someone following us after we took off this morning." But he didn't get his wish. For the next three days, the men passed the time in various ways. Some went fishing through the ice on the lake, others watched television, still others played cards or pool in the game room. During this time the police were not idle. They staked out the house in Denver and waited. Their patience was rewarded when, on the second night, a small plane came down out of the dark sky and hovered over the landing area. A man dropped to the ground and headed toward the house, and the plane rose into the night with blue flame dancing from the ends of the wing cylinders, and headed back toward the mountains. A large police plane high above traced the flight of the small ship with infra red detectors and spotted the hideout of the fugitives. On the third night Miguel Gomez arrived. He was a big, strapping man unusually light complected for a South American. His greetings were loud and boisterous. 'Well, Juarez," he said loudly, "I see that you have our prisoner in good condition. But we can do nothing for awhile. A new plan has been developed. In one week, a rocket carrying high officials from our Republic will take off from the Chicago spaceport. These officials go to inspect the Lunar atomic laboratories. That rocket will crash, and the North Americans will be blamed. There will be evidence of general negligence with hints of sabotage. So! the fun will begin. If that does not work, we will use our friend, Lorin, here to top it off." That night they listened to a late newscast before going to bed. The situation was tense. The presidents' meeting had been postponed until after the inspection of the moon laboratories by the South American officials. There was talk of a general mobilization and a tightening of discipline at the military stations along the Mexican border and the gulf coast F ive hundred miles above the Earth, the polar weather station wheeled silently through space. A sphere two hundred feet in diameter, it was girded by a ring deck that was home to forty men and women. The big observation room was the real reason for the space station's existence. Here, the weathermen kept watch over the movements of Earth's atmosphere. The fluffy white clouds that appeared on their screens told a te of mass air movements that meant stormy or clear weather for the Earth below. An almost blinding white mass of cloud over Canada told of a cold front moving southward to collide with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico and unleash a blizzard over the plains of the Midwest. Tumbling clouds hid a storm that whipped the North Atlantic into a raging fury of white water. Clear areas showed where snow sparked under the winter sun or where soft tropical breezes ruffled the fronds of palm trees. The station was passing over the Pampas of Argentina on the day side of Earth when the incident occurred. Miriam Andrews, on duty at the time, sat watching the progress of a small rain squall. Suddenly a look of surprise crossed her rather plain features, and she turned the amplifier gain-knob of the light amplifying telescope to higher magnification. On the screen appeared a sprawling airport on which lay scores of large, box-like transport planes. Into the huge, channel winged craft flowed lines of robot controlled armored vehicles. Miriam, who had a keen mind and an interest in international affairs, recognized the dangerous possibilities of these preparations. She did not hesitate to call the station director. That individual was summoned from a deep sleep by the imperative buzzing of the intercom. He switched the instrument on, saw Miriam's excited face, and came fully awake with a feeling of alarm. Excitement on the part of station personnel was apt to mean deadly danger. He interrupted the excited girl. "Repeat that again and slow down." Miriam repeated her story. "I'll send a message when we get close enough to Chicago to use a tight beam," he said. "There's no use spreading that news all over the western hemisphere." With that he broke the connection and called the radio room to give instructions about the message. The station swept around the Earth untroubled by the gathering fury below. A rocket, a slender, blue steel, winged cone, blasted away from the station with a brief jets. The watches changed, and the weathermen continued to receive data, analyze it, and send it to the coordinating centers on Earth. Although most of the men on the station heard the news with the detachment of those whose main interest lies in space and on the moon, the North American government was not so calm. It was not long before big formations of box-like transports were headed southward with heavy loads of flying armored equipment, technicians, and troops. Flights of dart like interceptors patrolled the gulf area, ranging the blue skies at supersonic speeds. On the ground, rows of slim antiaircraft missiles stood like candles in a birthday cake. At the first flicker on a radar screen, they would scream skyward to intercept hydrogen and atom armed 'missiles at the borderline of space. Both powers made good resolutions of nonaggression, but the rest of the world watched the preparations with a skeptical eye. The weapons that could unleash the horrors of nuclear warfare at the flick of a switch stood in frightening array on both sides of the gulf. Meanwhile, the police prepared to close in on the mountain cabin. Equipped with gas bombs, machine pistols and recoiless rifles, they came struggling through a snow clogged pass and down the mountain sides from hovering planes. Unseen in the darkness, they crept through the woods toward the house. A rifle shot cracked as a guard sighted them with his sniperscope. One of the policemen fell, a bullet in his leg. The lights in the house went out, and gun flashes lanced through the windows. Bullets, hunting their prey like angry wasps, snarled through the darkness. Roger was locked in an upstairs bedroom with a guard before the door. During the next two hours, the roar of machine pistols and the crack of rifle fire split the mountain stillness and echoed from the hillsides. At the end of that time, the police withdrew to rearrange iheir strategy. Juarez sat on the floor near a broken window and cleaned his machine pistol. 'T think that it is time to kill Lorin and get out of here," he said, as he placed a fresh clip in the magazine. "It will serve us to good advantage." "Fool!" Gomez exclaimed. "If they found us with a dead man on our hands, we wouldn't stand a chance. I have used this place enough to know that they have us pinned in. We can use Lorin as a bargaining point. We will arrange to take him with us and drop him by parachute. But -- the parachute will not open. A convertiplane, which I have called, will meet us above the clouds and take us away before they can stop us." "They will not trust our word," Juarez said. "We cannot get away with it." Oh, but we can' Gomez izid. "The police know that Lorin's death would have regrettable results. Even the fact that he is a citizen of the North American Union would be enough to start trouble, let alone his position as a key research man on the neutron project. They will do anything to see that he remains alive. The scheme will further enrage the North Americans and might perhaps incite them to war." "I see," replied Juarez. "An excellent plan. Let's contact the police, and see what happens." the house, four policemen crawled through the snow. Wearing white uniforms, they blended so well with their background that even the sniperscope men didn't see them. Their view was limited by the fact that most of the large lights that had flooded the area with infra red radiation had been shattered by gunfire. Individual beams were insufficient to sweep the whole area. Carrying thirty-shot rocket launchers and rocket powered gas bombs, they took positions around the house and aimed the slender guns. At a radio signal, streams of red fire shot from the tubes, and the small rockets tore through every window in the house. In a few minutes, the place was saturated with sleep gas. Not a man moved throughout the building. Policemen in gas masks converged on the house. Roger awoke on a stretcher aboard a police plane. A police officer sitting beside the stretcher answered his dazed inquiries. "You're on a police plane. We gassed the place where you were being held, and then moved in and took over." He grinned. "You looked so peaceful that I didn't have the heart to give you stimulants." "How long has it been?" Roger asked worriedly. "I'd like to call my wife as soon as I can. She's probably worried sick by now." "It's been close to three hours," the officer replied. "We had to buck a snowstorm when we came out of that valley. We knew it was coming, but we thought that we could move in ahead of it and get you out before it struck. Unfortunately, they spotted us with those big infra red lights of theirs and threw our timing all out of kilter. We should be in Denver in less than half an hour." Twenty minutes later the plane set down on the landing stage at the top of police headquarters. Roger was helped to his feet and led from the plane across the wind and snow lashed platform to an elevator. A few minutes later, he sat in the office of the Federal Police Commissioner for the Rocky Mountain district. Roger asked permission to use the desk viewphone and quickly put through a call to Arctic City. In a few minutes, Linda's face appeared on the screen. When she saw Roger her face lit up with joy. "Roger!" she exclaimed. "I've been so worried about you. I haven't been able to sleep for days, wondering what they might do to you." "I'm all right, honey," Roger reassiured her. "I'll be home in less than a day if the police don't detain me here." 'Better have her come to Chicago," the commissioner interrupted. "You'll have to stay there until we get this mess straightened out." "I guess it would be better for you to come to Chicago. The police say that it'll take a while to clear this business up. Maybe you'd better take a jet. It would be more comfortable for you." "I'll take the evening rocket," Linda replied determinedly. "OK," Roger said with a grin. "I'll see you this evening then." "Your wife seems anxious to see you," the officer remarked drily. "Well, you may as well tell me about this business. I'll send you on the rocket this afternoon so that you can meet your wife. We're not sure just what was behind this kidnapping." Roger narrated the events of the past two weeks explaining the part the Arabs were playing in the troubles between North and South America. "The Arabs, eh," the officer mused. "I'm sending the prisoners to Chicago with you. I don't think that it will be too hard to get a cerebral analysis writ. At least I'm going to recommend such action." "Cerebral analysis?" Roger asked. "That must be something new." "It is," replied the officer. "This particular development of the encepholograph is so new that not many people know about it. The machine in Chicago is the only one in existence. We use truth drug writs to make it legal and still keep it secret. It isn't exactly according to Hoyle, but we have to be careful these days. It takes an expert to read the charts and, even then, only very clear thoughts can be picked up." "It sounds like something out of science fiction," Roger commented. "So did a lot of things we now take for granted," replied the officer. Late that afternoon, Roger sat aboard a rocket that screamed through the upper atmosphere on the last leg of its flight to Chicago. He watched through an eyeport as the ship lost altitude and circled the city, finally coming to rest with squealing tires on the concrete runway. As soon as the locks were opened, Roger, accompanied by a police officer, left the ship and went through the boarding tunnel into the bustling terminal building. Roger's eyes searched the crowd until they found Linda. He hurried toward her, and in a few minutes they were in each other's arms. A fter two days of quiet relaxation, a plainclothes man took them to the tower of the Security Building which housed the Federal Police. The place was an electronic wonderland, with banks of instruments lining the walls. Gomez had been drugged and strapped into a large chair in the center of the room. His scalp was shaved, and several electrodes had been taped on. During the next hour and a half, the silence was broken only by the occasional click of a switch and the scratch of pens recording data. At the end of that time the electrodes were removed, and Gomez was carried from the room to sleep off the anesthesia. One after another, the prisoners went through the same process. Gradually the data added up and revealed the plan that was meant to plunge two nations into the horrors of atomic war. An officer gave quick orders. "I want all out going spaceships checked for sabotage. These men didn't know the technical details. The least obvious thing to do would be to tamper with the fuel in such a way that it would explode violently when it was heated in the motors. The nitric acid used in the booster stage would make the best reactant. The rocket would be too close to the ground to drop the booster. Better check the fuel before the rocket carrying those South American officials blasts off." He turned to Roger. "Would you like to see how we stake out a place?" "Sure," replied Roger. "Spaceports are always interesting." They left the building and rode to the rocket field. Night had fallen and the spaceport lay stark and cold in the beams of large floodlights. Three spaceships stood on the field, their bluish sides gleaming in the beams of the floodlights. To the south, a transcontinental rocket rose into the night like a spark from a chimney. The air was bitter with the temperature at eighteen below. "Take a look," the police officer handed Roger a pair of binoculars. Roger placed the instrument to his eyes, and the side of the center rocket leaped toward him. He saw a man in the red overalls of a fuel technician climb the gantry alongside the center rocket and push something into a valve on the side of the booster stage, near its juncture with the main part of the ship. "Do you see that mechanic on the center rocket?" Roger asked. "Let's see," the officer replied and looked toward that rocket. "Yes, I see him now. A mechanic shouldn't be pushing anything into that valve. That particular valve is used to jettison fuel in an emergency. A blast of compressed air will usually clear anything out of it. If that doesn't work, the valve has to be taken apart to be cleaned. I'd like to know just what he shoved into that valve." The officer spoke briefly into his pocket radio. Four policemen moved toward the entrances that led into the deep pit where the rocket stood. The technician closed the valve and climbed down the ladder. As soon as his feet touched the concrete floor of the pit, he was seized by the waiting policemen. A pistol shot cracked, and the prisoner sagged to the floor with a hole in his chest. Instant confusion reigned in the pit, and in that confusion the assassin somehow escaped. When the officer and Roger arrived, they found the policemen talking with a fuel technician. The technician left the group and climbed the ladder to the valve. He opened it and inserted a spring operated probe. "The valve's clean," he shouted down. "I'll take off some of the nitric acid." He did so, collecting the liquid in a small sample bottle which he carried on his belt. Climbing down the ladder, he handed the bottle to the officer in charge, who handed it to Roger. Roger unscrewed the cap and cautiously sniffed the contents. "I can't be sure, but if it's what I think it is, you'd better not have the tanks drained until morning. Give it a chance to dissolve. Otherwise you'll have some left in the tanks. It doesn't react very rapidly at low temperatures." "Just what do you think it is?" the officer asked. "Well," Roger replied, "it's probably some organic compound that would react with the nitric acid to form an explosive nitrate. Of course, it could be an ammonium compound that would react to form ammonium nitrate. That would do the job just as well." T hree weeks later the agents were brought to trial for espionage and conspiracy to start a war. The whole story of the Arab plot came out. Following the lead of the North American Union, the South American Republic carried out an investigation of its own, and discovered the part the Arabs had played in various incidents on the southern continent. Later that summer, the Gibraltar Conference met to settle grievances between the western powers and the League of Islam. King Ignatius II of the restored Spanish monarchy acted as a mediator. Reluctantly the North American Union agreed to let the Arabs build a spaceport in the Sahara, thus giving them a chance to trade directly with the Lunar colonies. On their part, the Arabs agreed to internationalize the Suez Canal area, on condition of free passage across the isthmus for Arab traffic between Egypt and Palestine. The Arabs refused flatly to allow a reestablishment of the Republic of Israel, but would allow Jews to settle in the Holy Land under yearly quotas. Despite reluctance and bitterness, a compromise was reached, and war was averted... for the moment. About a week after the trial Roger and Linda sat at a table in the large Spaceport Restaurant. Through the large window facing the rocket field, they could see clouds driven by an early March wind. Intermittent flurries of rain splashed against the glass. Roger happened to look up and see an elderly man approaching the table; his face lit up with recognition. "Well, Professor Nolan," he said, offering his hand, "I'm glad to see you." "I'm glad to see that you got out of that trouble all right," Nolan replied as they shook hands. "This is my wife, Linda," Roger said. "We're just about to order lunch. Won't you join us?" "It would be a pleasure," replied Nolan as he sat down. "I'd like to hear about what happened to you." Roger talked as he had punched their order into the robot server, and through most of the meal that arrived a few moments later. When he had finished his story Nolan asked him, "Do you intend to go back to Arctic City, now that this is over?" "No," Roger answered, "The pile at Arctic City is nearly completed. My part of the work is done anyway. I've been offered a job on the neutron rocket project at the Lunar laboratories, and Linda and I are leaving for the moon in about an hour. I enjoyed working there before. The moon colonists seem to have something that most earthmen lack... I ess you'd call it a pioneering spirit, a to accept new ideas. "But that's enough about myself. I've been wondering how you got away." "Simple enough," Nolan replied. "The men who were left behind pulled out and left me at the camp when they heard about your rescue. They probably didn't care to kill me if Aey didn't have to. They left while I was asleep and probably went over the pole into Russia. They took my ship, but I was able to call for help with the radio. What happens to them doesn't matter anyway. We'll probably never hear of them again. "I suppose it won't be long before we have colonies on all the planets with that neutron rocket you mentioned." "It'll be a while yet," Roger said. "There are a lot of problems involved in the development of a neutron rocket, and as long as we have to use a fuel processed by passing hydrogen through an electric arc and into an expensive organic compound at low temperatures, space travel will be too expensive for anything more than the exploration expeditions that have been sent to Mars and Venus." The voice of the announcer interrupted them. "The spaceship Goddard is loading passengers from tunnel eleven. All passengers must be aboard in twenty minutes." Roger and Linda rose from the table. "That's our ship," Roger said. "We'd better get aboard. Goodbye, Professor Nolan. I hope we meet again." "Goodbye, young fellow, and good luck." Nolan gripped Roger's hand. Thirty minutes later the professor stood at the window and watched the preparations for blast off. The tail gantry crane moved away from the rocket, and a siren blared forth its warning. The booster motors were started, splashing green flame into the pit and shaking the ground with their roar. The tall ship rose slowly at first, and then more rapidly as it climbed a column of green flame into the clearing sky. It grew small and disappeared, A few minutes later the ship's atomic drive came to life like a tiny new sun that was a beacon on the path to space.    Science is a good piece of furniture for a man to have in an upper chamber, provided he has common sense on the ground floor. -- O. W. Holmes It is the delusion of mankind that the world is as progressive in religion, tolerance and freedom as it is progressive in machinery. -- Moncure Conway They lived by and for push buttons and machines and knew nothing else. But Endicott remembered about the old, old days -- when a man could save a life without a push-button .  . driven snow beat a tattoo on the hull of the cargo ship, filtered through the jagged tears in the metal skin, sifted down over the useless control board with its dead gauges and bank upon bank of pushbuttons. Amidship, a windthrashed branch screechingly scraped the reverberating hull, and the soimd, like the rasp of sliding hatch covers, echoed through the ship. Dazedly, Allison watched the sifting snow settle on the buttons, each one acquiring a grotesque, lop-sided, conical hat which grew as he stared. He reached forward an already stiffening finger and brushed one of the hats away, and almost idly watched another one form in its place. "Come on, Allison, come on. Snap out of it." Endicott came out of the passageway into the control room, returned from his inspection of the machinery. "You hurt in the landing?" Allison didn't answer. He shivered and pushed another inquisitive finger at the control board; the finger selected a certain button and pushed it steadily. There was no click of a hidden relay, no whir of little motors springing to life. "You can punch that button or any of the others from now until -- It won't do any good. We're dead." The plume of Endicott's frozen breath drifted over Allison's shoulder, merged with the sifting snow. "Dead?" Allison echoed in a sleepwalker's voice. "Dead," he repeated and jabbed the button again and again. "In a manner of speaking," Endicott's white-sandy brows drew together in a frown. "We're off the powercast -- our receiver, I guess." "No power." Allison was following better, was waking up. "That means -- Can't you fix it, Chief?" "Nope. I tried, but something in its guts is burned out. No power." Endicott beat his old blue-veined hands together. Allison's frost-numbed fingers picked at the straps on his reclining geeseat, and he stepped to the light metal deck. He severed and you always get what you want -- except now!" "Now, now," Endicott said soothingly. "Panic isn't going to help us any. All we have to do is sit tight -- and wait. They'll send a relief ship out -- " "When?" "In the morning. Morning, sure. They had us on the 'viewer, don't forget. They'll know exactly where to look." "They won't be able to locate us Illustrated by Ed Emsh punched the button on the control board again. He was seized by a spasm of uncontrollable shaking. "No power means -- no heat!" Panic crept into his voice. Endicott said nothing but looked at the tier upon tier of buttons, functionless now. Allison looked at the board, too, his narrow shoulders hunched. "They've never failed before," he muttered through chattering teeth. "What?" Endicott seemed bemused. "The buttons. Punch 'em, and in this white stuff." "I tell you they know precisely where we are. And anyway the scanviewer will pick us up." "I don't think they'll ever find us." Allison slumped down on his transverse geeseat, stared wideeyed at the drift forming slowly inside the torn metal of the windward side of the control room. "This white stuff scares me." He shivered, then got up hastily, his boots slipping slightly on the snowslick decking, and punched the button again. "It's got to work!" he cried and beat on the board with his fist. "Stop that!" Endicott said sharply. There was a crack of a slap in the control room, then silence. In a moment Endicott said in his soothing voice, "Sorry, Allison. Everything'll be all right. Don't you worry." "If you say so, Chief." Allison stood in the center of the control room, his arms slack by his sides. "We'll be all right," Endicott said. "We have fo capsules -- " "Sure, Chief." "We'll be all right, except -- Endicott peered through the rents in the hull into the storm outside. "All we have to do is sit tight," he added hastily. "We'll freeze tonight without heat." Allison's voice was still breathless with panic. "Yeah. Yeah, I've been thinking about that. There's some thing 'way down deep in my mind -- something I can't quite get -- " Endicott still looked out at the storm-thrashed trees, a puzzled expression wrinkling his face. "Something from my childhood -- I was born a long time before you, you know, before they set up state conditioning homes for children. Long before they set up this 'everythingfrom-buttons' business. Lived with my own people, I did, and I seem to remember -- seem to remember -- " The puzzled expression became a frown of concentration. "Or maybe it was something I read a long time ago," he mused. "Did what?" Allison perked up. "Read. You wouldn't know what that was. Everything comes from buttons now, entertainment, food, light, heat -- everything... No, it was from my childhood, I'm sure. I remember my people used to take me out in the country -- " Endicott mused on while a cloak of snow grew on the shoulders of his jacket, and the light began to fade. "Out in the country? What for? Nobody goes out there." Allison's eyes gleamed slightly in the growing dusk. " -- for picnics. And -- " Endicott's eyes brightened, and one hand clenched. "For what?" Allison's head thrust forward. "What?" Endicott snapped, irritated at having his train of thought broken. "What did your people take you in the country for?" "A picnic... , Yes, yes, that's it! I remember now!" Endicott's words poured out. "You know it is forbidden to think of the old days." "Shut up! Let me think. You want heat, don't you?" "It's forbidden to think of the old days," Allison repeated stubbornly. "You'll get heat when I report this -- in a different way." "Shut up! Look, you want to keep from freezing tonight?" Endicott glared "All right. Come with me and do as I say." Without a backward glance Endicott crossed the slippery deck and entered the passageway. At the midship cargo hatch he stopped. "How are you going to open it without power?" Allison's breathplume shot over Endicott's shoulder. "It's locked and unlocked by a button on the control board. Remember Chief?" "Stop gloating, Allison. This is for your benefit as well as mine. There's an escape hatch in the control room." "That's controlled by power, too." "Yes, but in these older modek the hatch also has a manual control, as I remember." Endicott moved off toward the control room. Allison hesitated, then followed, and joined Endicott as he began to search the control board. Endicott found the emergency lever for the escape hatch and tugged on it, turning his head to watch the hatch in the side of the hull, back of his seat. The hatch, big enough for one man to pass through at a time, popped, crackling with frost, and stirred slightly. "Now, Allison, my boy, let's put our shoulders to it." Endicott was in high spirits again. As soon as the hatch swung open, Endicott put his head and shoulders through the opening, squinting his eyes against the icy snow which swirled past him. He grabbed a handhold on the outside of the hull and pulled his legs through, and dropped into the snow alongside the ship. Allison's head and shoulders appeared in the opening, and in a moment he was beside Endicott. "Now what?" Allison yelled above the wind, Endicott looked toward the clearing in which they had landed, then turned to face the trees around the disabled ship. He waded through the snow to the nearest one and reflectively took hold of a dry branch over his head, tugged it several times as though judging its resiliency, before snapping it off. "Now, Allison, you see what I did? Well, you do the same, only gather ah armload of branches. When you have them, bring them to me at the ship. And keep on gathering them until I tell you to stop." Allison stood still in the deep snow, peering suspiciously at Endicott through the snow-swirl. "Is this something from the old -- ?" "Never mind that now, Allison," Endicott said patiently. "Let's not worry about all that twaddle. You want to be warm, don't you? So, just do as I say." Allison's eyebrows shot up and lowered instantly, and his face set in stubborn planes. "If this is from the old days I'm not sure I want any part of it." He looked furtively over his shoulders at the gloomy woods. "There are no Conditioning Committees here, Allison," Endicott said testily. "Get on with it." Allison took a few reluctant steps toward the nearest tree. Endicott started back to the ship with his branch, looking back over his shoulder. "No, no, Allison. See those green needles? It won't do at all. Dry branches, Allison, dry branches." The whipping wind carried Endicott's words over the few yards. "I can't see how these -- branches? -- are going to keep us warm. It seems like a lot of useless trouble getting them," Allison said sulkily, suspicion and fear unabated. Endicott didn't answer. Instead, he went to the side of the ship away from the wind and began (Continued on page # ) Hijacking the By Jove! was quite elementary. Hijacking the crew was something else. And therein lay Captain VeBruges margin for error... Vebrug of the Flanjo intelligence service took over the MarsTitan freighter By Jove!y it was no such terrestrial foolishness as mercy that prevented him from liquidating the ship's three-man crew. Sure in his own wolfish strength, his attitude was that three peaceloving merchant spacemen could do much to contribute to his personal comfort, if kept under iron control. Besides, with adequate brain-washing to eliminate loyalty to the Solar Council, their technical skills could make them quite Illustrated hy Paul Orban valuable to the somewhat undermanned Flan jo base on Rhea. On the other hand, his concern for the others aboard the ship was so slight that he would not, on his own, have warned them of the impending acceleration, which could have injured or killed them. He made his move at # minutes before zero hour. As a paying passenger from Mars City to Titan, he had the run of the ship, and had been lounging in the control room for half an hour. Migl, the engineer, was on duty and was sorting the blast-pattern tapes, a job Qoqol had started during his shift. Albrekt simply took a heat gun from the rack, stuck it in Migl's back and ordered him to leave the control room. Migl took it as a joke, at first. "It's no joke," Albrekt assured him, nudging him with the weapon. "Get below, if you don't want to get burned." Puzzlement written all over his swarthy face, Migl unstrapped himself from the captain's chair and pushed himself across the room. Albrekt slid into the chair, buckled himself in and pulled two rolls of magnetic tape from the breast pocket of his coveralls. He found the roll marked "No. #," stuck the other in the rack beside him and inserted the end of his tape in the automatic pilot. Migl paused at the top of the gangway. "You're not going to blast?" demanded Migl in amazement. "I am," retorted Albrekt, holding the heat gun steady. "Por Dios Carrel's not strapped in!" exclaimed the engineer. "You'll break every bone in his body if you don't give him warning!" Albrekt glanced at his watch. "You have five minutes to warn him and strap yourself in," he said. "I can't be bothered." Migl vanished down the hatch and Albrekt flicked the switch that closed and locked it. A moment later the intercom system erupted with Migl's frantic voice from below: "General alarm! Prepare for emergency acceleration ! General alarm! Hurry, Carrel!" Albrekt smiled grimly. The second hand swept around the face of the chronometer, boosting the reluctant minute hand forward in jerks. At exactly # hours, Albrekt pushed the firing button. The tape chattered through the automatic pilot. Apparently, the makers of the tape had planned on a fast-get-away: the pressure must have approached #-G, pinning Albrekt painfully back against the cushioned reclining chair. He was able to move his eyes to watch the outside screens. The other eleven ships of the convoy, coasting in formation in their orbit, dwindled behind them and swung gradually to one side. In a few moments, everything cut off, and weightlessness returned. Red lights were flashing all over the control board, and distant alarm bells were clanging in the depths of the ship. Albrekt had no idea what they meant. He was no spaceman. The radio loudspeaker crackled and blared. The convoy had discovered the By JovePs defection. "'Themis to flagship! Themis to flagship! By Jove! has changed course! Moving away fast. Position, RA #-##, D minus #-#." After a moment: "Flagship to Themis: acknowledged. Flagship to By Jove! Flagship to By Jove! Carrel, what the hell?" Albrekt grinned. "Themis to flagship," called the loudspeaker, when silence greeted the query. "Shall we follow?" "Flagship to Themis and all vessels. If you're that flush with fuel, how about passing some around? No pursuit authorized. All vessels take readings on By JovePs new orbit as long as it's in range. We'll alert the patrol to investigate when we're in radio range." The ship's intercom buzzed. "Albrekt!" It was the voice of Carrel, the captain. "Yes?" "We'll get to the reason for this damn fool stunt later. Right now, do you plan any further acceleration?" "Later. I'll warn you in time to strap down." "I should hope so. Those G's nearly killed Qoqol. This ship wasn't built for that sort of acceleration, you idiot. Half the seams are sprung and leaking air." "Repair them, then," snapped Albrekt. "You'll have time." During the long silence that ensued, Albrekt sat back and took stock of the situation. So far, everything had worked perfectly. The other tape given him by the Flanjo agent on Mars was to be run through the automatic pilot exactly # hours after the first one, when the By Joves diverging orbit carried it beyond range of the convoy's meager radar equipment. The control room would be his headquarters for the next few months, simply because the control room was the only deck of the By Jove! which could be locked against the rest of the ship. All the weapons -- the heat guns -- were in the control room, so Albrekt expected no trouble on that score. It was going to be a dull journey from here on out, and Albrekt decided he would do well to learn as much as he could about handling a space ship. He swung the chair around and ran his eyes along the shelves of Carrel's microfilm library. The title Sailing Space, by Dr. Russo Alin, caught his attention. Albrekt inserted the spool in the projector and started it. An intense bearded face appeared on the screen, and the recorder said: "It is not generally known, except to students of technological history, that the steam powered and electric powered automobile gave the familiar gasoline powered automobile of the last century a close race for preference in early automotive history. The factors that caused the gasoline powered automobile to become predominant are not important here. What is important is that there were alternative methods of automotive propulsion... This didn't start off well. Albrekt ran the spool up about half way and tried again. This time, the author was pointing to a wellchalked blackboard. "The radiation is so much stronger at Venus than farther out, that it is here we find most common use of the principle," he said. "Using our formula, which, you remember, is F equals rA over # plus gM, we..." Disgusted, Albrekt switched it off and took out the spool. He found another. Survival for Spacemen, and tried it. It was a primer on conditions to be met in space travel, handled in popular vein. It was the sort of thing Albrekt wanted, and he settled back to listen to it. It was about nine hours before the last red light on the control board winked out and the clanging of the last alarm bell died out below. Then Carrel's voice demanded an accounting over the intercom. "I'm in command of the ship now," answered Albrekt, awakened from a light doze by the call. "I intend to remain so. As long as you and the others recognize that, you won't be harmed." There was a brief silence. "The only thing I can figure is that you've gone space happy," said Carrel at last. "Albrekt, you're no spaceman. You can't have known what you were doing when you switched on the jets." Albrekt did not answer. "Look " said Carrell, "it'll take several days to figure out what sort of orbit that blast threw us into, and I'm not sure we have anough fuel to correct it. You'd better let  US m. "We may as well understand each other' said Albrekt. "I'm no spaceman, but some very good spacemen figured out that blast tape -- and the other one I'm going to use later. I'm a captain in the Flan jo military, and I've taken this ship and its cargo over, to deliver them to the Flan jo patrol. None of you will be hurt if you cause no trouble." "So that's it!" snorted Carrel. "Damned pirate highj acker! My advice to you, Albrekt, is to come out of there and let me put you under arrest, because if you don't we'll be coming in after you." "Try it, and I'll bum you," retorted Albrekt. A fter sleeping several times, Albrekt was ready to concede it was not going to be as cozy in the control room as he had thought at first. It offered basic comforts of home, but the showers were on the larger navigation deck below. Several months without a bath promised to be uncomfortable. All decks carried plenty of emergency rations in case they were sealed off by a meteor collision, but the rations were not too tasty, Albrekt's mouth was beginning to water at the thought of the frozen meals stored two decks below, available to the crew. Most of Carrel's book tapes were too technical to interest him, but he spent much of his time listening to those which offered him information in simple terms. The pattern of meaning of all the dials, switches and buttons crowded into the control room became a little clearer to him. Albrekt did not see how the crew, weaponless and locked below, could challenge his mastery of the ship. He detected the first effort in this direction about # hours after the By Jove! had left the convoy, Albrekt was eating a meal of emergency rations when he glimpsed movement on one of the rear screens. He turned his attention to it at once. A spacesuited figure was emerging from the airlock, which was in a narrow waist between the vessel's personnel sphere and the huge cargo cylinder beneath it. From the suit, it was either Carrel or Migl. The figure moved cautiously up on the outside of the airlock, gripping its surface with heavy magnetic shoes. In the hooks of the spacesuit, it carried two sledge hammers. Albrekt flipped on the switch to the intercom, which was tuned to the spacesuit helmet radios as well as the ship's system. "I'd advise the man in the spacesuit to forget it, and get back aboard," he said gently. "If he doesn't, I'll sweep the outside surface with machine gun fire in exactly two minutes." His fingers hovered over the firing buttons of the heavy weapons the By Jove! carried for defense against possible marauders. But in a moment the spacesuited figure reentered the airlock. "It would take you some time to break into the control room with a sledge hammer," Albrekt said conversationally into the microphone. "At the first blow. I'll blast anyone who tries it. That's fair warning." It was several days later that Albrekt began to feel sleepy long before his sleeping time. The realization hit him suddenly that for some time he had been yawning and stretching, relaxing more and more in the chair, his eyelids getting heavier and heavier. His head was beginning to ache a little. He slept by the clock and awoke by the clock. He should not be sleepy for hours yet. Rousing himself with an effort, he swung bleary eyes around the control room, anxiously. He could see nothing out of order. But how would one detect something that made one abnormally sleepy? What could it be? Illness? If there were harmful bacteria aboard the ship, they should have struck many days ago. There was no disease in space itself. Gas? If such ships as the By Jove! carried any sort of gas, Albrekt didn't know about it. He had been briefed on the weapons he might face. Surely gas would have been mentioned. Perhaps it was chance, or perhaps some part of his mind was swiftly scanning what he had learned through his reading of the last few days: his eyes fell on a bank of dials ranged side by side on the control board. The hands of all of them were lined up at the same angle -- all but one. It had sunk far to the left. The legend above the bank of plate below the lagging dial read: "Control Room." Albrekt unstrapped himself from the chair with nervously fumbling hands. Somehow the crew of the By Jove! was interfering with his oxygen supply. Albrekt was beginning to feel a little nauseated. His head throbbed. He pushed himself across the control room and grabbed the helmet of the spacesuit that himg there. He did not take time to put on the suit itself, but pulled the helmet down over his head and switched on the suit's oxygen supply. In a moment his head cleared, leaving only a slight headache. As well as Albrekt remembered from the reading tapes, the ship's oxygen supply was on one of the lowest decks. The crew evidently had blocked the line to the control room. "You'd think there'd be some alarm system for that sort of thing," he muttered to himself. But then, of course, the hull had not been pimctured. The dials were supposed to be checked frequently. The question that faced Albrekt now was how to get out of this trap. He couldn't live in the spacesuit indefinitely. His hand brushed the heat gun at his side. he ducked from beneath the helmet and returned to the control board. He unlocked and opened the hatch to the navigation deck below. There was an upward swirl of air, and Albrekt permitted himself to breathe again. A head poked itself cautiously up the companionway. Carrel. The captain's face was a strong one, lined with years of decision, golden-brown with the tan that one gets only from years in the thin air of Mars. Carrel's dark hair was beginning to gray, but his electric blue eyes were still young. He stopped when he saw Albrekt at the control board. Albrekt held the heat gun on the captain steadily. "I'm not anywhere near overcome' said Albrekt. "You'd better turn around and go back down." Carrel did. As long as the hatch stayed open, oxygen could not be cut off from the control room. Albrekt decided he could afford to leave it open, since he had possession of the weapons. He would have to lock it while asleep, of course. But, even with the oxygen supply cut off, the control room should contain enough to carry him for eight hours. If not, he could set an alarm to wake him every four hours, or even every two hours, to open the hatch and refresh his air. The fact that he could leave the hatch open safely gave him another idea. He was hungry for some food besides the dry emergency rations. Albrekt checked the chronometer. Within the next two hours, he was scheduled to run the other blast tape. He would have time. Heat gun in hand, he moved quietly to the hatch. The companionway was clear. From below came the murmur of voices. He moved cautiously a few steps down the metal ladder until he could see beneath the ceiling of the navigation deck. Migl was taking a shower on the other side of the room, while Carrel and Qoqol relaxed in contour chairs beside the dead-reckoning tracer. "What is Flanjo, Carrel?" asked the booming voice of Qoqol, the navigator. Qoqol was a Martian. His round body with its huge oxygen storage hump was not quite as big as a human body, but his thin arms and legs, each equipped with half a dozen double joints, were longer than a tall man's height. They were wrapped around him now, out of the way, and his big-eyed, big-eared head peered through them like an urchin's face through a tangle of vines. "The Flanjos are members of a fanatic sect who believe in human supremacy," answered Carrel soberly. "More than that, they believe in their own supremacy over other humans. They revolted against the Solar Council and have a hidden base our forces haven't been able to locate yet." "They are loco, Qoqol," said Migl from the shower. "Crazy. They'd make all you Martians slaves. Us too, probably." "Why they want this ship?" asked Qoqol. "For the ship itself, partly," said Carrel. "But our cargo's pretty strategic, too. It's mostly lithium, which they can use in nuclear weapons and power plants. They can use the plastics, tools and machinery we're carrying to improve conditions at their base. The general opinion I've heard is that their objective is to take over the Mars colonies. They need fusion weapons for that, but it's hard to get light elements on the outer moons, where their base is thought to be. Whatever they have already, # tons of lithium will help them immensely." "Immensely," assented Albrekt, stepping off the ladder to drift to the floor. He held the heat gun lightly in his hand. "I'm afraid I'm going to require all of you to go ahead of me down to the storage deck and remain there while I enjoy a good lunch." Silently they complied. The living quarters, where the food was, were one deck down, the storage deck below it. Albrekt ate his meal, keeping a watchful eye on the opening between the living quarters and the storage deck. Then he returned to the control room, locked the hatch and strapped himself down for blasting. He kept his promise to Carrel and broadcast a warning of the blast over the intercom system. At the appointed moment, he ran the blast tape through the automatic pilot. The acceleration was not as heavy this time. The ship, safe from the prying of the convoy's radar, swung slowly from its course and into a new prearranged orbit, on which a Flanjo vessel was to intercept it in approximately six months. lier than any place on Earth, lonelier than any place on Mars. No expanse of desert or ocean is so empty as space, for there one at least has something material beneath him and around him. "An experienced spaceman would rather be burned than left alone in space," said Carrel. "It'll drive most men completely crazy in a pretty short time. I think you've realized that by now, Albrekt. That's why you won't kill us." Albrekt was eating a meal at the table in the living quarters, his heat gun lying beside his hand. The others were seated on bunks across the room. Since the only necessity was to protect himself and keep the others out of the control room, he had discontinued the practice of making the crew go below while he ate. Despite the atmosphere of enmity, the conversation and companionship filled a need he was beginning to recognize more keenly. "That's true," answered Albrekt agreeably. "For that and other reasons, I won't kill you unless I'm forced to." "But there's nothing to prevent ship," reminded Carrel. "Nothing but this." Albrekt laid his hand on his heat gun. "As a matter of fact, I don't want to kill you, Albrekt," said Carrel. "I want to capture you alive, and take you back to Mars. I imagine you have some information about Flanjo plans that would be pretty valuable to the council." Albrekt laughed. "I admire your courage, Carrel," he said. "But I've been in dangerous positions before, for longer periods than this. I don't intend to let my guard down." Carrel apparently was blessed with iron self-control and Qoqol, like all Martians, habitually showed emotion in ways no Earthman could interpret. But Albrekt's practiced eye detected Migl's restlessness. When the crew's move came, two days later, Albrekt was ready for it. As he had anticipated, it happened at mealtime. Albrekt was beginning to spend more time outside the control room, always keeping the others from getting between him and the hatch to higher decks, but mealtime was the logical time for his guard to be lax. At some signal Albrekt failed to catch, Carrel and Qoqol launched themselves directly at him from opposite sides of the round room. Simultaneously, Migl drove through the air for the hatch to the upper decks. Albrekt's muscles reacted like steel springs. Scooping up the heat gun, he dove across the table and twisted in the air as he floated swiftly between Carrel and Qoqol. Ignoring them for the moment, he trained the gun on the hatch to the navigation deck above and pressed the trigger. Migl had to grab the ladder frantically to keep from drifting head-on into the sizzling beam that barred his way. Albrekt anchored himself to a bunk and waved the heat beam in an arc above their heads. The metal ceiling smoked faintly. 'T won't kill you all unless I have to," he said calmly. 'T can get along easily without one or two of you, though. Before you try anything like this again. I'd suggest you think seriously about which of you wants to die first." Silence answered him. Migl still clung to the companionway ladder, about halfway up. Carrel clasped his knees in a sitting position about six inches off the floor near the round table in the center of the room. Qoqol, unable to stand upright anywhere aboard the ship, crouched like a spider against the farther wall. Albrekt switched off the heat beam and motioned at Migl with the gun. Watching them closely, Albrekt moved to the companionway and pushed himself up through the hatch. Locking himself in the control room, he devoted himself to serious thought for a while. Despite his warning, this sort of thing was likely to happen often. Eventually it must succeed, if only by the law of averages. The trouble was, Albrekt was actually at a slight disadvantage. He knew by now that the absolute need for companionship in space was not idle talk. He had no intention of coasting alone, in a silent ship, for five and a half more months, and being shot as hopelessly insane when his Flanjo colleagues picked him up at the rendezvous. One solution, of course, was to kill two of the crew members. Then neither of the two men left could afford to kill the other. For several reasons, Albrekt preferred to find another solution. He had heard rumors that personality conflicts between two people cooped up together in a spaceship drove them eventually at each other's throats. Another factor was that, as long as there were three of the others, Albrekt could hold the over them. Besides, their technical knowledge would be valuable to the Flan j os, and Albrekt wanted to face no disciplinary action for destroying any of them unnecessarily. What was the substance of their threat to him, then? He examined it. Their threat was that they might reach the control room. He could not lock it from the outside, and he must come outside for good food and necessary companionship, so that line of reasoning got him nowhere. But what was behind the threat of their reaching the control room? They might (a) obtain weapons to match his own; (b) communicate the ship's position to warships of the Solar Council; (c) swing the ship off its prearranged course and avoid the rendezvous with the Flanjo vessel. Solution? Albrekt laughed shortly. There was a solution to all three problems. With his heat gun, he reduced the radio transmitter to a molten mess. Now the By Jove! could still receive, but not send. Piling all the heat guns in the center of the room, he gave them the same treatment. The beam left them almost unrecognizeable in the midst of a shallow crater. He had come very near burning a hole through into the navigation deck. The last step was the most daring of all. It meant that he must trust absolutely to the accuracy of the two blast tapes he had run through the automatic pilot. He threw the switches that jettisoned the fuel tanks. In the screens, he watched the spheres of hydrazine and nitric acid, hurled from the ship by spring action, go drifting slowly away into the void. In effect, the By Jove! was now a voiceless derelict. Albrekt went below. "This means that I intend to stand for no more foolishness," he said harshly when he had told the others what he had done. "If you prefer, you may draw lots to decide which two I shall kill and which one shall have the pleasure of my company for the rest of die trip. The continued existence of all three of you will depend strictly on your good behavior." Migl, lolling on a bunk, curled a sardonic lip at him. "You seem to have gone to a great deal of unnecessary trouble, ladron he said. "It is still worth the risk of at least one of our lives to destroy or capture you." "You're wrong, Migl," said Carrel soberly. "Now we have no fuel, we have no radio. The ship is in orbit, and we're helpless to change it. No matter what we do aboard, the Flanjo ship will intercept us. The Flanjos will destroy us then if they don't find Albrekt alive and safe." "An accurate analysis," agreed Albrekt briskly. "You're showing good sense now, Carrel." Carrel shrugged and spread his hands. Albrekt felt a little sorry for him in defeat. He admired Carrel's bravery and resourcefulness. Albrekt's sleep that night was more carefree than it had been since the By Jove! pulled free from its satellite orbit around Mars. There was still danger, of course. He had to be on the alert for a desperate attempt to disarm him, or an effort to overcome him in the control room by tampering with the ship's machinery, despite Carrel's surrender. But it was less likely now. R elations were on a much more cordial basis from then on. Their conversation returned, almost, to the friendly terms of the earlier portion of the trip. "Ever been to the outer planets before, Albrekt?" Carrel asked casually one day, munching a beef sandwich. "I spent ten years at the base, before they sent me back to work on Mars and Earth," Albrekt replied. "I was born on Earth. My father took me out to the base when I was a boy." "The base?" repeated Carrel, even more casually. "On Rhea," said Albrekt deliberately. His faint smile recognized the attempt to elicit information. "Now, figure some way to tell them back on Mars!" He thought Carrel flushed slightly, but could not be sure. "Ever been to Venus?" asked Carrel. "Never that far in, I'm afraid," answered Albrekt. "I don't suppose you passed quite this close to Jupiter on your other trips?" said Carrel. "How should I know?" demanded Albrekt. "I'm no spaceman. I don't know how close to Jupiter we're going now. I don't remember anything said about Jupiter on my trips." "They'd have opened the ports and let all of you see, if you were of it," said Carrel. "Qoqol's figured it out. We're going pretty close this time." "You want me to open the ports and let you see Jupiter?" asked Albrekt sarcastically. "Something more serious than that," answered Carrel gravely. "It's the radiation." Albrekt pushed himself back from the table and stared quizzically at Carrel. "You wouldn't take advantage of my ignorance to rib me a little, would you now, Carrel?" he chided gently. "I studied elementary astronomy, you know." "You're proving right now that you didn't study astrogation," retorted Carrel sharply. "Any spaceman can tell you the reaction of cosmic rays on Jupiter's atmosphere is fatal at the distance we'll pass in this orbit. If our convoy had been passing so close, every ship would have been shielded." "Carrel, I can't see your object in lying, but I think you are. Some damned good spacemen plotted this orbit." "And what do they care about your life or ours?" demanded Carrel hotly. "You know your Flanjo buddies as well as I do. We'll live long enough for them to get all the information they want out of us." Albrekt studied him closely. Carrel returned his gaze with serious eyes. "Maybe you're telling the truth," said Albrekt slowly. "If you're lying, I can't see your reason. You know I won't panic, and we can't change orbit." "I'm trying to impress you with the seriousness of tiiis thing, because there's something we can do about it if you'll let us," said Carrel patiently. "All it takes is a thin metal shield at a proper distance from the ship, and we can build that out of the cargo we're carrymg. "The only metal aboard is lithium," demurred Albrekt sternly. "That lithium's slated for nuclear reactors and weapons and it's going to reach Rhea intact!" "We're not going to bum up any of your precious lithium!" exploded Garrel. "All I ask is to use half of it to build a shield. They can use the damn stuff out of the shield as easy as out of cargo bars. It'll all be there, just the same." Albrekt hesitated. It was quite conceivable that his superiors had not bothered about such a trifle as his slow death from radiation. They would have plotted the most effective orbit for their purposes, and if the By Jove! didn't happen to be shielded -- well, casualties had to be expected in any military operation. "You have my permission to build the shield," he said stiffly at last, "under my strict supervision, of course." "That's all right with me," consented Carrel with a sigh of relief. "And I give you my word as a space captain, Albrekt, nobody aboard the By Jove! will lift a hand against you while it's being built." Despite Carrel's reassurance, Albrekt, wary of some stratagem, held to his determination to oversee every step of the shield construction, with gun handy. Fifty tons of such a light metal as lithium is a pretty large volume of the stuff. Albrekt assumed that Carrel's shield was to be a square or disc of the metal, rather thick to absorb the radiation, which would be interposed between the By Jove! and Jupiter. When work began, after several days of planning, it became apparent that the construction task was something more than cutting out and fastening together chunks of lithium. Instead of working inside the ship, the crew moved a furnace to the outside of the cargo hull and anchored it down. The Earthmen wore spacesuits, of course, but Qoqol did not, as Martians do not breathe, but extract oxygen from solid matter and store enough of it to last several hours at a time. To Albrekt's surprise, they next hauled out some of the big packages which were plastic domes for use on Titan. At extra-terrestrial bases, these hemispherical domes were inflated to form huge air bubbles in which humans could live. "Plastic?" said Albrekt through his helmet radio. "I thought you were going to use lithium." "We are," replied Carrel's voice. "We'll fasten some of these domes together to form an airtight sphere, then inflate it from the oxygen supply. It won't take much pressure, and we can recover the oxygen later with the ship's compressor. "Before we recover the oxygen, we'll charge the plastic sphere electrically, so it'll stay rigid. Then we'll vaporize the lithium in the boiler and spray it over half the plastic sphere. We'll blacken the plastic and melt it with solar heat, returning it to the boiler by charging the boiler. I'm afraid we're going to ruin a few of the plastic domes, but that's not important now." "Spray the lithium? Fifty tons of it?" "Wait and see," Carrel said. "This will be a bigger shield than you expected." Later, at mealtime, Carrel brought a worry to the surface of Albrekt's mind which the Flanjo agent had been trying to keep suppressed. "That was a pretty rash business, jetting all the fuel," said Carrel. "What do we do if were off orbit?" "It seems to me IVe mentioned before that some very good spacemen plotted this orbit," replied Albrekt. "The best orbits sometimes require minor corrections, when they're this long," said Carrel. "I couldn't make them, anyhow, and I certainly wouldn't trust any of you at the controls," said Albrekt. "Don't you think my superiors thought of that when they planned this?" "Maybe," said Carrel. Albrekt was amazed at the size of the shield Carrel was building. The inflated plastic sphere was bigger than a small asteroid, some six to eight miles in diameter. Carrel had spliced together several of the biggest plastic domes available. Nowhere but in free space, could the sphere have been inflated with so little gas pressure. The ship could have floated around in Carrel's sphere like a cork in a water bucket. "It has to be big, because the shield is going to be about # miles away from the ship, attached to it by lithium wires," explained Carrel. "So the diameter of the shield has to be this big, to eclipse the disc of Jupiter at the distance we'll pass the planet." "I don't understand the principle of this at all," said Albrekt irritably. "It seems to me a smaller, heavier shield closer to the ship would be just as effective." "That's because you don't understand this type of radiation," replied Carrel. When the shield was completed and the plastic framework removed, it was a tissue-thin metal hemisphere, attached to the ship like a parachute. Migl used up several oxygen cylinders as makeshift rockets to push the shield out to the proper distance from the ship, while the attaching wires were unreeled from the cargo winches. "We leave the wires on the winches, because we'll have to shift the position of the shield from time to time by shortening some wires and lengthening others," Carrel said. When the task was complete and the shield glimmered in the sunlight like a nearby moon, they all returned to the living quarters. "Qoqol, you'll be in charge of keeping the shield at the proper angle," said Carrel. "And, Albrekt, the truce is over." "What do you mean by that?" growled Albrekt, his hand dropping to his heat gun. "I've kept my promise while the shield was being built," answered Carrel. "Now, if we can catch you off guard, and do it without being burned down, I warn you we're going to try to disarm and capture you." Albrekt relaxed. "You won't get the chance," he promised. "If you did, what good would it do you? We rendezvous with my ship in less than four months now." D espite Carrel's threat, Albrekt was still in control of the situation when the hour of rendezvous approached. The necessity for keeping alert against possible attack was a considerable strain on him, but he had been under strain many times before in his life. Neither Carrel nor either of the others had made any overt move. Assured in his own mind that the risk became less and less as the trysting place neared, Albrekt had permitted the crew into the control room except when he slept above a locked hatch. Half an hour before the scheduled time of meeting with the Flanjo ship, Carrel, Migl and Qoqol filed up through the hatch. Albrekt offered no objection, and they floated across the control room to seats. "Looks like your ship would be on the screens by now, doesn't it, Albrekt?" suggested Carrel quietly. "They don't have to make the rendezvous exactly on time," replied Albrekt, a little uneasily. "They know the orbit. They can pick us up anywhere along it." "We're not in the orbit," said Carrel flatly. Albrekt scowled at him, but his eyes were drawn back irresistibly to the screens, empty except for the silvery lithium shield and, perched just above its edge, the small but baleful disc of Jupiter, "Qoqol checked the blast tapes you used, and we're not in the orbit they're suppose to put us in," insisted Carrel. "Qoqol's been making sightings for the last six weeks. Jupiter's pulled us off orbit, Albrekt." "Is true," boomed Qoqol. "We long way off." "This sort of thing's doing you no good," snapped Albrekt. "I'm not a spaceman and I can't check your figures, but I don't think we're off orbit." "And if your ship doesn't make the rendezvous?" asked Carrel. "If it doesn't now, it will later on. And, by Saturn, we're going to sit tight in this kettle till it does, Carrel! Last minute propaganda won't work." There was silence for a few minutes, as the chronometer hand ticked on toward the hour of meeting.  The radio buzzed. Leaning forward, Albrekt turned up the volume, eagerly. "Captain Albrekt Vebrug," called the radio. "Flanjo patrol ship Bavaria to Captain Albrekt Vebrug." Albrekt turned a triumphant face to Carrel. But Carrel gestured at the screens. They were still empty. And the radio voice was not coming in strongly. "Vebrug, we don't find the By Jove! on our screens," said the radio, fading a little, then getting louder. "If you get this call, Vebrug, break radio silence and reply. Do you hear this, Vebrug? Break radio silence and reply!" Perspiration broke out on Albrekt's forehead. He could not reply. The ship's transmitter was a pile of junk. "Vebrug, Vebrug," intoned the radio insistently. "We don't find you in orbit. If you hear this, break radio silence and reply." Carrel rose from his seat, floating slightly upward. Albrekt, sweating, dropped his hand to his heat gun. "We can't stay in this sector, Vebrug," whispered the radio. '"Blasting back to base now. Will call every five minutes for the next two hours. If you hear this, break radio silence and reply." The radio squawked. Then there was nothing but stellar static. "Well, Albrekt?" said Carrel. Albrekt felt his iron nerve cracking. He felt that he was breaking apart physically. "Keep your distance, all of you!" he croaked, drawing the gun. "They'll be back. They'll search all space for us!" Carrel floated a little closer and Albrekt levelled the gun at him. Migl and Qoqol moved in slightly. Albrekt swung the gun in an arc. "I'll blast all three of you," he warned desperately. "Carrel... "Why?" asked Carrel. "We're all in the same boat, Albrekt. We're spiralling into Jupiter." "You lie!" shouted Albrekt. "I don't believe you, Carrel!" Carrel laughed shortly. "Where's your nerve, Albrekt?" he asked. "You've done pretty well up to now. Does the immediate prospect of dying frighten you so much?" Albrekt lowered the gun slightly. "If I were afraid to die I wouldn't be here," he replied. "You're not baiting me for nothing, Carrel. What are you after?" "I don't think you realize how ship had to come to the rendezvous point," said Carrel. "As much as your friends want this cargo, they won't stay around long. Solar Council ships probably heard that broadcast." "What makes you think they can find us?" sneered Albrekt. "We can't call them either." "They can't find us," replied Carrel calmly. "The chances are a don't have enough time for chances like that." Ice seemed to enter Albrekt's veins. He glared at them from angry eyes. They were inching closer to him. Already they were halfway across the control room. "Stand back!" he said, his voice trembling. "I'll bum all of you!" "And die alone, Albrekt?" Carrel's brittle voice was like the blow of a hammer against rock. On the screen behind Carrel, the orb of Jupiter floated off the port bow, red and ominous. Giant of the heavens, its tremendous mass could snatch them from the sky, crush and break them like moths. All the vast loneliness of space swept over Albrekt on wings of fear. It was too much for a planetbound mind to face. The last companionship even of enemies was better than solitary death. "No," he muttered, beaten, and the heat gun drooped in his hand. Qoqol's eight-foot arm reached in like a striking snake to lift it from his nerveless grasp. "Good work, Qoqol," said Carrel heartily. "I had an idea the Flanjo tradition of superiority would break in the face of the inevitable. It was worth risking, now that we know we're safe." "Safe?" said Albrekt bitterly. "Safe for what? To fall into Jupiter?" "Well, now," said Carrel drolly, "I believe I neglected to say that our spiral toward Jupiter will intercept the Solar Council base on Callisto, didn't I? Yes sir, it's one of the neatest orbits Qoqol has ever plotted." "What?" demanded Albrekt, stunned. "You mean we're in a controlled orbit?" "Why, yes, my Flanjo friend. We started pulling out of the orbits your blast tapes set about four months ago. If we hadn't, we wouldn't have come anywhere near Jupiter." "You lie!" shouted Albrekt. "You lie, Carrel! You couldn't! There's no fuel!" "I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you tied up to one of the bunks for the next few weeks, Albrekt," said Carrel. "You're too valuable a prisoner to take a chance on your doing away with yourself." "There's no fuel," repeated Albrekt. He was almost whimpering. "I'll relieve your mind on that score," said Carrel. "Have you ever seen a sailing ship on Earth?" Albrekt stared at him, uncomprehending. "A sailing ship doesn't need fuel because it gets its power from the wind," said Carrel. "Neither do we, now. I'm afraid that story I told you about dangerous radiation from Jupiter was made up of whole cloth, Albrekt. There isn't any. "That lithium hemisphere we built isn't a shield. It's a sail." "But there's no wind -- there's no air -- "The wind that blows between the worlds," said Carrel solemnly. "Solar radiation. Its pressure will move a ship if you provide a sail that's big enough and light enough -- and that's what we did." "It's impossible," muttered Albrekt, crouching back against the automatic pilot. "Not impossible, just extremely unusual this far out," said Carrel. "If they ever let you out of prison, Albrekt, I think a trip to Venus would be worth your while. I think you'd find the annual space regatta particularly interesting."    of Scientific and Industrial Research have given indication of leading to a new, previously untapped source of power. In a series of extraordinary tests these men produced electricity by mixing fresh water with sea water. The osmotic pressure of sea water is about twenty atmospheres; and when a river mixes with the sea in nature, free energy equal to that obtainable from a waterfall # feet high is released and lost. The British experimenters put that osmotic pressure to work by separating alternating layers of salt and fresh water by using alternate basic and acidic membranes. The membranes are connected in series and yield actual measurable amounts of electricity. A hydroelectric pile of forty-seven pairs of membranes, each three inches square, yielded a maxiOur citation this month goes to these British chemists, who have taken the first concrete step toward giving the world a new source of power -- one which has tremendous possibilities. what Is Your Science I. Q. ? astronomical? Counting five for each correct answer, you should score #. Anything over # and you're a whizz. See page # for the answers. #. What is the name of that moon of Saturn which has one side five times brighter than the other? #. The "Great Red Spot" and the "South Tropical Disturbance" are phenomena of the planet #. What is the name used by astronomers to describe the dark gap in Saturn's rings? #. The azimuth distance measures the angular distance of a star from the #. How many days does it take the long-period variable star Mira to fade and brighten again? #. A one hundred and seventy pound man experiencing #gs (two gravities) weighs pounds. #. Polaris is the name of the north pole star. What is the name of the south pole star? #. The ratio of the total amount of sunlight reflected from a spherical body to the amount received by that body is called its #. What is the name of the ninth moon of Saturn which was supposedly discovered in #, but has been "lost" ever since? #. Canopus, the second brightest star in our heavens, is about light years away. #. What is the name of the comet which returns every # years? #. The escape velocity from the moon is reckoned at miles per second. #. How many constellations are there in the whole sky? #. The two moons of Mars were discovered by #. Which planet has its axis tilted at # degrees? #. What is the name given to stars which are no further from Polaris than the distance from Polaris to the horizon? #. That point in the orbit of the moon nearest to the Earth is called #. The temperature of Jupiter is estimated to be about degrees below zero. The Elroom m Timmy was getting too much #-dimension television, and he was mistaking it for Mother Nature. So his parents took him out to see the natural wonders, which he unhappily mistook for #-D television... work so hard. They were running their bows back and forth so fast their hands were blurred. The musicians' faces were studies in concentration and the concertmaster -- he wasn't two feet from her -- had worked himself into such a frenzy veins were standing out on his red face. Mrs. Briggs almost laughed, me way the conductor was sweeping his baton to within inches of her head. Several times she had an impulse to reach up and catch it. So this was Virilio! Disjointed, cacophonic, sometimes sweet but more often deafening. She had never caught him before. But it was just as advertised, all right. Exciting. And moving. She didn't know if there was supposed to be a love theme in Virilio's new Plenitude on a Thursday Afternoon but it definitely stirred her. Just then the door opened and Timmy came walking through the musicians, eating an apple. Once he stopped to stare at the tympani and a second fiddler's bow kept running through his head. It was rather ghostly, Mrs. Briggs thought. "Timmy!" she yelled above the music. "I didn't see you go. Where have you been?" As if she didn't know. "Had to get a glass of water. The music made me thirsty," he said loudly, taking his seat beside her. "This is a lousy program, Mom. What's next?" Drama in History she said absently, her eyes on a flutist's mustache, wondering how he managed to play. Timmy chomped on his apple, but in the face of his gustatory enjoyment she couldn't find the heart to tell him to be quiet. At intermission, she left the Elroom to let Timmy take in the commercial and returned in time for the beginning of Drama in History, There was a salt spray in the air and a cool wind whipped around them as the lights went out completely. The roar of waves grew loud and the deck creaked beneath their feet. The ship moved through the dim light. Sailors stood like statues about the deck. "We're even with the inshore ships, sir!" a voice called hoarsely. "We've got the French between us, then." Though he was a small man, there was a ring of authority in the voice of the man on the bridge. "There's the Orient, sir!" "One of ours has gone aground!" Illustrated hy Paul Orban s "She'll mark the shoal for the rest of the fleet," the little man replied calmly. "Ready, Mr. Creston!" "What's he think he's doing?" the captain's boy whispered. "Quiet, lad," a peg-legged sailor said softly. "Admiral Nelson will see us through. You'll have your share of action afore momin', mate!" The darkness was split by faraway flashes of light. Instantly, there was returning cannon fire that caused the ship to shudder and "groan. The Battle of Aboukir Bay had begun... The red flashers above the door winked their message. "Damn!" Mrs. Briggs said, switching off. "Ma!" "There's someone at the door, Timmy. If it's a salesman -- !" Mrs. Briggs checked the dials on the electrocooker as she went to the door. A small but efficientlooking woman in the standard white and blue of school uniforms had alighted from her g-car and stood at the door. The woman said she was Bernice Pomeroy from the office of the director of Timmy's public school and Mrs. Briggs, scarcely glancing at her offered identification card, pushed for mezzanine. The woman said nothing; she merely waited until the floor came down hydraulically to mez level. Then Mrs. Briggs ran the magnetic curtains around, and when they were private she saw that the woman was sitting on one of the soft lounge cushions, straight-backed, adjusting her glasses on the small bridge of her nose. She drew a sheaf of papert frokn her portfolio. "Mrs. Briggs," Miss Pomeroy said, looking up with officious grey eyes. Then she saw Timmy. "Timmy, I suppose." "Yes." Mrs. Briggs wished she'd get on with it. It was hard enough leaving Admiral Nelson at the mouth of the Nile, without having her settling down as if for all day. "Maybe it would be best," Miss Pomeroy coughed a little, "if Timmy -- " "If Timmy what?" "It's about him, you see." "I'll send him to the Elroom." "No," Miss Pomeroy said at once. Then she added: "Perhaps it would be best if he stayed after all." She riffled her papers. "Timniy's latest Auden-Gronet test shows his personality has dropped at least five points from positive during the first half of the school year." Mrs. Briggs looked at her nineyear-old son. He was down to the core of his apple now, a nice looking boy, she thought, with bright blue eyes, hair that insisted on drooping too far down on his forehead -- she'd have to start training it in earnest soon -- and a fair supply of freckles. He carried himself well. Had a pleasant speaking voice, she thought, and a good vocabulary. She had noticed noslipping? "Timmy's not too far behind factually, Mrs. Briggs," Miss Pomeroy said, referring to her records. "In fact, we'll admit he's ahead in stability and adjustment. But he's getting more negative in aggressiveness and personality development. He just doesn't seem to care. That factor may account for his stability -- he doesn't have any reain son to be unstable, you see? And he adjusts easily because he doesn't care enough not to. There is a reason, of course." Mrs. Briggs was annoyed. The schools had gone too far. "And what, may I ask, is the reason?" "Too much time in the Elroom, Mrs. Briggs." Mrs. Briggs managed a goodnatured laugh. "Miss Pomeroy, you have Timmy all wrong. He doesn't spend any more time in the Elroom than other children do." "Children are all different," Miss Pomeroy countered. "But not Timmy." "Parents are often poor judges of their own children, Mrs. Briggs." "Are you trying to tell me I don't know my own child?" Mrs. Briggs, I am not trying to tell you anything," Miss Pomeroy's cheeks were red. "I am telling you your child is spending too much time watching these programs. Sublimating so much, in fact, that he's beginning to find it difficult telling the difference between life itself and the Elroom." "Sublimating?" "Escape. You didn't know? Yes." The teacher smiled tolerantly. "First sublimation room for elevating one's self -- sublime the verb. Then SubL for short. Then just L and L-room to Elroom. You didn't know?" "That, my dear," Mrs. Briggs said heatedly, "is just so much hogwash." "Tell me, Mrs. Briggs, just what does your husband think of the Elroom?" "He doesn't have much time to spend in it." "You mean he'd rather do something else?" "He's interested in typically man things -- cars, mostly." Because Timmy had gone over to the curtains and was starting to walk through, and because she wanted to show Miss Pomeroy she was capable of some discipline, she said, "And where are you going, young man?" "Probably back to the Elroom," Miss Pomeroy put in. Mrs. Briggs gave her an acid look. Timmy swallowed the last bite of apple. "To get a drink. I'm thirsty." When he had gone. Miss Pomeroy leaned forward. "You must keep him out of the Elroom, Mrs. Briggs. We'll send you a list of programs. He can have sublimation only one hour a day." "Ridiculous!" Mrs. Briggs snapped. Miss Pomeroy adjusted her glasses and looked at her severely. "Are you saying you will not comply?" "I said it's ridiculous, didn't you hear? Why, you won't find a better child than Timmy -- " "Obviously your only child." "And what has that to do with it?" "It is not my job to explain," Miss Pomeroy said icily. "Only to inform. I'm afraid I'll have to report that you will not heed the directive." "The Elroom is instructive. Why, we were learning something about history just now. We were watching Nelson sink the French fleet when you came." "It's not the program. It's the identification with it. Let's say Timmy has too much imagination -- but then I have already told you what I came to tell. I'll be going now, Mrs. Briggs." F rom the way George sent the gyrocar into a long swoop that ended inside the garage, Laura Briggs knew her husband was angry and she braced herself for battle. But she wasn't quite prepared for such an immediate outburst, the moment he got in the door. "Stoops!" he cried, robbed of slamming the door because of the automatic permaglass cushion. Timmy scurried away, frightened at this aspect of his father. "The psychocenter we've got to go to yet!" The electrocooker had dinged a minute ago, and Mrs. Briggs was ready to tahe everything out and put it on the table, but she could only look at him in amazement. "You're not making sense!" "Ha!" George's heavy eyebrows hovered high in his forehead, then plunged down over his eyes. His big face was crimson, his blue eyes steely. "Neither are they, and they called just before I left the office. Wouldn't tell me why. Have you done anything?" "Well -- " Mrs. Briggs started tentatively and he gave her a sharp look. "It's about the Elroom." "The Elroom!" She told him about the visit of Miss Pomeroy. "She must have reported it." "Then we'll get rid of the damned thing!" His eyes brightened. "I told you we should have gotten a new car instead." "But we've got a car, George." "Not a good one." He leaned against the cooker, his face blissful. "Imagine us -- us -- driving a new Caddie gyro -- room for eight, you know -- supersonic drive -- sleek, too -- we could get a red one -- you'd like red, wouldn't you? -- a thousand horsepower with twin turbos for level flight -- and those off-center firing tubes with folding back overhead vertical flight pins -- Gad!" "Our present car -- " "Junk!" "But it runs, and we don't need a car like that for just in-town driving." "But what about our vacation? Think of it, Laura: We could make it to Alaska, Tibet, Africa -- we could go around the world in our three weeks." "We could do the same with the Elroom, George. And there are a lot more things besides travel." Mrs. Briggs's lower lip was trembling. "You're siding with those nasty school people. You think they're right about Timmy." "Where is he?" Timmy stuck his head up from behind the lounge. His big eyes were wide. "Look at him, George. Ever seen a more normal boy? How could they think a boy like that could get so involved in a program he'd think he was living it." "Yeah, but if those school people -- " Her eye caught the clock and she drew in her breath quickly. "Say! We've got to hurry if we're going to see Cameron Capers Dr. Vincent Potter was a large man with a shining expanse of flesh between two islands of black, bristling hair above heavy brows that met over his nose and almost concealed the bright, intelligent eyes that glittered beneath them. "So. You cannot understand. Yes." He nodded his head, made a tent with his hands, and rocked. "But this is what we are for. To understand. For you." He smiled. "If understanding easily came, then we would be not needed. No? You see?" He laughed a little, jerked upright. The movement nearly made the three of them jump. "Doctor," George said. "There over the country." "You tell me something new?" people there are. So? Must they be alike every one? They are not. Yes?" The doctor leaned toward Timmy who was playing with a desk calendar. "Who is your mother?" Timmy pointed to Mrs. Briggs. "Your father?" Timmy pointed to George. "See? He knows." "Of course," Mrs. Briggs said. "Exactly," the doctor agreed. Then he was upright, waving his forefinger before them, looking from beneath dark brows. "For how long, Mrs. Briggs? For how long, I am asking? And now, I am telling how long. Who knows? Who can tell how many times you will let him see these things?" "What day is today?" Timmy asked. "He is asking what day it is," the doctor laughed. "Well, why don't you answer him?" Mrs. Briggs suggested. "The twelfth of June," the doctor said. "And why does Timmy ask such a question?" 'You forgot to tear off yesterday." And Timmy tore the little sheet off, proceeded to make a dart of it. "Well, what you've been meaning to say," George said, "is that we're going to have to cut down on Timmy's Elroom time." "Aw, Dad!" Timmy protested. "No. Cut it down we will not do." The doctor shook his head gravely. "We will cut it out altogether." "Cut it out?" George said hopefully. He leaned forward with interest. "Maybe we should get rid of our outfit?" "Mr. Briggs. You do not know, perhaps, sublimation can be dangerous. Confusing reality, stimulating unreality, stunting thinking, bringing on neuroses. Tolerance. He needs tolerance. Timmy cannot develop tolerance with too much of a dose, as he has had. Do you see now? The AG test -- ah! -- it is good. It shows us he is leaving reality. We can't let him psychotic become." "But he doesn't believe the programs!" Mrs. Briggs exclaimed. "Not yet, Mrs. Briggs! Not yet. If he sublimes enough he will soon, though. No?" "I can't stand the thought of locking Timmy out of it," Mrs. Briggs said sadly. "I'm in favor of getting rid of it," George muttered. "There are other things -- cars -- " Dr. Potter took an official form from a drawer. "A change of environment you need. Timmy needs. You leave tomorrow on a month's vacation." "But my vacation doesn't come up for six months," George said. "Or doesn't that matter?" he added hopefully. "You will leave tomorrow, as said. No? Your office will I inform of the necessary departure. Sector administration will be knowing." He wrote on a sheet of paper. "The colorful spots. That you will see. Timmy will see things as they really are. Itineraries will send the route by facsimile. Good. Not?" "Why, I think it's wonderful!" George said. "Timmy must see the sunrise. The sea, he must swim in. Things, he must do. Remember. Yes?" "Yes," George said. "No?" He turned to his wife. "There's an agency where we can rent a car -- and they have new Caddies -- thrust upward from the earth like a giant needle. The Briggses entered the base of it, went up the elevator, and caught glimpses of stairway landings as the cage rose slowly. When they stepped out on the platform near the top, they walked to the pair of port openings on one side and looked out. In the time it had taken them to get to the top of Washington Monument, a light fog, borne on the slight evening breeze, had enveloped the tall shaft at its midsection; they could see nothing of the ground below. They were isolated from Earth, connected to it only by the elevator well. "Isn't this eerie?" Mrs. Briggs asked Timmy. He looked around casually and yawned. "On an Elroom program," he said, "you would be able to see all the way down. I don't think this is so hot." He yawned again. "I'm thirsty." "We'll be going down in a minute, Timmy." "I've got the route figured better than Itineraries for the next stop," George said. "If we could leave in twenty minutes -- " Aragonite crystals on the cavern's ceiling twinkled brightly in reflection of glowing electric lights. The fragile beauty of the boxwork formation took Mrs. Briggs's breath away. "It's just like lace," she whispered to George, pointing to the frosty tracery glistening in the honeycombed walls. "Tom Bingham discovered this cave," the guide intoned before the tourists seated in the giant chamber, his voice echoing from the walls. "He heard a whistling soimd and found it came from a small opening. That's why they call this Wind Cave. The wind goes in and out." "Why does it do that?" someone asked. "Difference in atmospheric pressure," the ide said. "Another interesting thing about this cave: It's always forty-seven degrees. Doesn't make any difference whether it's summer or winter. Always the same in here." "I don't hear any wind," Timmy said to his mother and father. "Why isn't the wind whistling?" "When the barometer falls, the wind blows out," his father explained. "When the barometer rises, the wind blows in." "Why isn't the wind whistling now?" Timmy insisted. "The barometer must be standing still, son." "This isn't any good. On an Elroom program the wind would be whistling." "Hush," Mrs. Briggs said. "I'm thirsty," Timmy said. "We'll be leaving in a few minutes." "You'll get plenty of wind when I rev up Xht Caddie on our next hop," George said. "Think of that," George said. "It's a whole mile down to the river." Timmy leaned forward to take a deep look over the precipice at Yaki point. "Boy!" he said. "This is pretty good. Almost makes me dizzy." Below, the Colorado River was bright quicksilver, threading its way circuitously through the canyon. The striated walls rose majestically from the floor to towering temples. The boy turned from the rock to look at the tufts of clouds floating by in the deep blue sky. "I'm thirsty," he said. Mrs. Briggs, still fascinated by the view, said, "Well, go get a drink, then." Timmy walked over the edge, screamed as he fell. Mrs. Briggs could only stare, stunned. George uttered a cry and ran to the cliff's rim. Tourists nearby ran up, looked down with George. A hundred feet below on the slope at a point where it dropped off to nothing, a horrified Timmy was crouched clutching a small tree. "Hold on!" George called encouragingly. A few minutes later someone had found a long rope in a gyrocar trunk and roped it about George's middle. They let him over the edge gently, dropped him down the slope slowly. "Hang on, Timmy!" George yelled, running a tongue over dry lips and momentarily closing his eyes to the dizzying depths. "Don't let the little rocl coming down worry you." A while later, a dust-streaked Timmy was back on the ledge in his mother's arms, sobbing. George, his shirt wet with sweat, and struggling out of the rope, panted : "Whatever came over you, Timmy?" "It was so real I thought it was the Elroom. I was just going out to the kitchen to get a drink of water." "And I -- I told him to go," Mrs. Briggs said, horrified. "It was that real to me, too." sonable. Or will trade for new Cadillac #-passenger, twin-turbo gyro, red preferred. George Briggs, #-#.    If I have ever made any valuable discoveries it has been owing more to patient attention than anything else. -- Isaac Newton Eye specialists of the future may be using an electronic magnet to take foreign bodies from the eyes. Magnets in use today do not attract non-iron metals such as silver, aluminum, brass, copper and various others, and at least # of the eye injuries which cause loss of sight are due to such non-iron fragments. The new device now in the development stages at the Army Medical Center will, when perfected, remove all such foreign objects cleanly and without more than minor damage to the delicate tissues. A new step toward the automatic factory of the future is an automatic punch press with an electronic "brain". Directions are fed to the punch press by an electronic digital computer which "reads" a perforated card for information on the size, number and location of the holes to be punched. The press automatically positions the material to be perforated and performs the operation within an accuracy of a few thousandths of an inch. New directions for the press are simply a matter of a new card, with no time lost for retooling or the retraining of an operator. Human beings won't be called upon to act as guinea pigs in cell studies in the days to come. A new method of serial cultivation of human cells has been announced which will enable microbe and disease hunters to grow living bits of normal tissue in test tubes. The key to the new technique seems to be a time period for adjustment to an artificial environment. The new method makes it possible to get information concerning cell nutrition, cell chemistry and the effects of viruses, all of which was unobtainable before except by the infection of human volunteers. Industry may be able to eliminate the costly building and testing of expensive prototype engines with a new gadget. If the electronic device works as predicted, it will make it possible to test the performance of jet engines, nuclear reactors and the like while they are still on the drawing board. Able to simulate the thermal behavior of materials under rapid and intense temperature changes, the device enables an accompanying computer to predict the performance of a proposed structure from design factors and known material properties. Thermal behavior is simulated by exhibiting a corresponding electrical behavior under the influence of electrical current. The Computer solves the problem of the thermal behavior of any new or existing design by the simple principle of analogy. Housewives may soon be asking the grocer for a box of tomato juice. This newest addition to the growing list of fruit powders is processed by directly vacuum drying tomato paste, and can quickly be restored to liquid juice by the simple addition of water. Although the drying process is as expensive as the present one of adding water to make commercial tomato juice, the saving in storage space and freight costs make it a much more economical product for both civilian and military use. Medical men of the future may be able to make much more accxirate diagnosis of cancer and other diseases of the soft internal organs and tissues. A new device known as a Somascope, which combines the principles of radar, sonar and television may soon supplement the X-ray and the fluoroscope. This ultrasonic photographing gadget is expected to give well defined pictures of diseased cells where none can now be detected. The patient Book Service Phone GRamercy #-#  We Stock All current American Science Fiction in Book Form and carry current Magaxines and Pocket Books.  A lorge selection of Science Fiction is ovoilable of British Books, Magozines and Pocket Editions.  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Officials of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report that fresh flying fish makes a good meal and have proposed that a flying fish canning industry be set up in the Barbados Islands where this aviation-minded fish is a popular food. It is hoped that the needs of food shortages may possibly be filled by this new addition to the list of edible sea food. tramping the snow down into a flat, hard floor. He broke his branch into short lengths over his knee, then, in a nearly forgotten gesture, slapped at his uniform until he remembered that he had no pockets. For a moment he stood still, his eyes roving over the side of the ship until it came to one of the jagged tears. With a little self-congratulatory chuckle, he began scraping one of the lengths of wood over the torn metal, catching the splinters and shavings in the palm of one hand. Allison dropped his armload of branches by the ship, waged an inner battle between fear of the unknown and curiosity in which curiosity won, and stood watching Endicott arrange the branches in a crib around the neatly piled shavings. Endicott, on one knee by the crib, worked steadily, laying the pieces of wood with care and a returning sense of sureness, with only brief pauses to flex his freezing fingers. Finally, with a smile of satisfaction on his face, Endicott got to his feet, and the nearly forgotten gesture at the pocketless uniform was repeated. Slowly, Endicott's lined face altered. He looked hastily at the watchful Allison and hastily looked away; he looked at the completed crib, and his tongue licked his lips; he looked along the side of the damaged ship, and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully; finally, he looked into the swirl of the icy snow, and he shivered. His hands ceased their pawing, fell slowly, to hang slack by his sides. He was not smiling as he turned away. 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Woolen Mfg.  Finishing and Dyeing  Loom Fixing  Textile Designing City Occupation... Cenedian residents send coupon to Internationat Correspondence Schools, Canadian. Ltd MontrMi, Canada... Special tuition rates to members of the U. S. Armed Forces. The Greatest Selection of Puzzles Ever Published for Oniy #c ! "Most fascinating variety of puzT HE newest, largest, most varied and interesting selection of puzzles, word games, math games, quizzes and brain teasers ever published at the price! Hundreds of exciting ways to test your wits and talents! Months and months of fun and entertainment! Puts pep into parties. A fine, inexpensive gift. Order today! agree that it is the greatest puzzle book you ever saw at the price, return within # days for complete refund! Send only #c to Kingston, N. Y. Scores and scores of brand new crosswords of all types and sizes, from "quickies" to giants, regulars, askews, you-make-its, diagramless, and many other kinds. Fun for yourself or parties! 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It is understood that the first issue is a know and you will return the full subscription price at once!   The Day the Fate of Earth Rested On a Pair of Crooked Dice! and interplanetary space ships will be located as closely as possible to the big cities, connected by rapid electronic highways and controlled helicopter lanes. The port building will resemble a huge top and will be equipped with a long ramp which swivels around the circular base. Passengers and luggage can be speedily transferred to ships by means of fast-moving conveyors which run from the immigration offices direct to the ship. All Stories New and Complete Cover by Charles Casler Entering Earth's Atmosphere  An Airport of the Future #  #  #  #  #  # I #  #  # I IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts, #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale March # th it isn't too strange that man can just about outgripe anything on legs. But a little griping now and then is all right, might even be good for you, and there are times when you have to come right out with a big one. But what gets me is the person who is forever griping about something or lamenting his plight. It can be his business or his auto or his liver; he's the unluckiest guy in the world; he's got worries like nobody else ever had. I've done my share and maybe more, but every time I start feeling sorry for myself I try to think about stories I've read or some things I've seen. Like the two or three times I've read Candide, for instance. To my mind Voltaire wrote, in Candide, one of the most beautiful satires of all time. And when Dr. Pangloss said to Candide, who was having one of his lower moods, "Everything happens for the best", I also picked up a piece of personal philosophy that's been very helpful. Another scene I liked was when Candide entered the tavern thinking himself the most unfortunate man in the whole wide world. His lord's castle had just been pillaged and burned, the family drawn and quartered, all females raped and disemboweled, and he had lost his beloved Cunnegunde. Woe was he as he sat down at the tavern table. Yet, when each man spoke of his misfortunes, Candide found that he wasn't the most unfortunate man in the world after all. For each of the other travellers had experienced misfortunes worse than his own. The point I'm trying to make is that we often aren't as unlucky as we believe. And I think we have all had personal experiences which, by comparison, make us pretty well off. Anyhow, here's one I had... years ago when I was in a mean stew about business. My imagination was playing havoc with my reasoning and I wasn't eating and wasn't speaking civilly to anyone. Just what the problem was, I don't remember now. But I was the gloomiest gus you ever saw and was damning my luck all over the place and feeling extremely sorry for myself. I had to go down to New York to take care of the problem and dreaded the trip. Anyhow, I got on a bus and was on my way. It was a lovely day, during October, I think, and the sky was a sharp sunny blue and the mountains and woods were a riot of colors and the air had a wonderful bite that was sort of intoxicating. That is, if you noticed it. I didn't. I was too emerged in my own problems. Anyhow, we were somewhere between New Paltz and Wallkill, which was about # miles of riding, when the bus stopped at a little country station -- one of those nonscheduled places which resembles a deserted fruit stand. I saw vaguely that there were two people waiting, a man and an old woman. The bus was on its way again when the man sat down beside me. I wouldn't even have noticed him had he not lunged against me as he sat down. I was on the point of asking him if he was drunk or just plain rude, but something held my tongue as I got my first look at him. He was a youth, about twenty, and shabbily dressed. He had a strange short-cropped haircut and a pasty white complexion and a looseness about his face and body that seemed out of place. I saw that the elderly woman had sat just across the aisle. She was very gray, and poorly dressed, too, but there was something about her lined face that shone and her smile was one of patience and kindness. I must have been wishing that the person who had sat next to me had sat somewhere else and it probably showed in my face, for the old lady looked at me and said, "He's all right." She gave me a look that hoped I would understand. Then she reached over and patted him on the arm and said, "Now you be good and be quiet." I glanced quickly back to the youth and a chill went through me as I realized that the person next to me was the first idiot I had ever seen. Suddenly I wanted to get off the bus. I edged closer to the window and tried to bury my face in a copy of the New York Times . Then it occurred to me that my attitude was blatantly obvious and I was hurting the feelings of the old lady, who appeared to be his mother or grandmother or an aunt. Or maybe she was used to people acting the way I was, for she gave me that same hopeful look again. I put the paper down. "Would you like to exchange seats and sit over here with him?" I asked. The old lady smiled and shook her head. "I hope you don't mind," she explained, "but he sees nobody but me all the time and he'd like to sit next to you for awhile. Is it all right?" I guess I must have nodded rather stupidly and muttered "sure" or "gladly" or something. What does one actually say at times like this? A little while later she reached into one of the bags she was holding in her lap and got an apple and gave it to him. He took it with wobbling hands and then rubbed it on his frayed coat and looked at it and made an inarticulate sound that went with his bobbing head and watery blank eyes. He seemed very happy about the way he had shined it. Abruptly he thrust it at me. He said something that sounded like "bite" and I didn't know what to say or do. My smile must have been rather tight as I said, "Thank you -- I -- " The old lady came to my rescue. "That young man doesn't want to take your apple," she told him. "Now you be good. You eat it." That seemed to satisfy him. During the next twenty or thirty (Continued on page #) T he Galactical Examiner condemned Earth to isolation because one man had cheated with the dice. But Fader Martin had good cause to cheat. The universe was at stake... that had begun to spread and a rough-hewn philosopher's face bleached by ten-thousand sunless days. His name was Fader Martin. People called him the Banker, but there was a better name for him. Shill. He had a voice inside his head. He stood by the elevator door in the decaying, midTwentieth Century grandeur of the Desert Inn corridor and waited for the spinning silver dollar to come down. As it fell, Fader caught it deftly out of the air and slapped it over on his wrist. "It comes up heads," he said. He unveiled the cartwheel. "Tails," he muttered. Then a frown creased his forehead. Illustrated by Ed Emsh Who's meddling? "Fader said the voice inside his head, "the plan's hopeless. Who can win with an exposed hand?" Too late. Even if it weren't , we've been over and over the thing often enough to know that nothing else has a prayer. We have to lay our cards on the table. We can't keep him from spotting the one-eyed jack , but we can keep shuffling them around so that he has to guess where it is. "French monte?" Shell game. Watch the pea , ladies and gentlemen! It's never out of sight. Which shell is it under? Guess the right shell and win the grand prize! The one in the middle? Tm sorry, sir -- Fader took a deep, harsh breath. Only it makes these old hands shake sometimes when they remember that the grand prize is the universe... The elevator doors split apart and asked him in. "Good morning, Mr. Martin," said the eager young man with the glad smile. "How's the Banker this morning?" "Let me put it this way," Fader said tiredly, "if I could burn the dice now and start out with a fresh roll, there' d be some hot dice right quick." "Hope there's nothing wrong, Mr. Martin," the boy said with quick concern. "I got a sawbuck riding on your nose." Fader's smile was a little grim. "Nothing that a little rest wouldn't cure. Fader's getting old and tired, boy. He can't stay on top forever." "Oh, I've got a system -- " the boy began confidently. Fader held up a pale, thick-fingered hand. "Don't tell me. You double up on favorites." "How'd you know?" the boy asked, wide-eyed. "In my lifetime," Fader said, leaning back against the rear wall of the car, "I've seen every system ever invented. They all have two things in common: #) they require a large starting capital, and #) they always go broke. If you lose, you double your bet on the next favorite until you finally get a winner, right?" "Yes, sir." "At Gulfstream Park, Florida, a little over a hundred years ago, twenty-one favorites lost in a row. If you had bet two bucks on the first race and doubled your bet for each one thereafter, your bet on the twenty-first race would have been #. Just to win a two-dollar bet." "But if a man can't play a system," the boy objected, "how is he going to win?" "Is he to win at all?" Fader said slowly. "That is the question." The boy sighed and punched the button. "Take a chance on a turkey, sir?" Fader looked down at the punchboard held close to his nose. "Thanksgiving must be six months away," he said wrily. "Can't start too early." The boy was an atavism. In a world of salesmen he would have been wealthy and successful, respected and powerful. Here his talents were useless, his existence marginal; he could only peer in at the people around whom this world revolved. But punchboards and turkeys are an elevator boy's perennial prerogative. "Sure," Fader said. He punched out a cylinder of paper and reached for his pocket. "Just ten cents, sir. This is your lucky day." The doors parted. In front of them was the wide, cool, deserted lobby. Fader smiled ruefully. "I hope so." He flipped a dime at the boy and started out of the car. "Gould you give me a tip, sir?" the boy asked brightly. Fader swung around. "You've got the dime," he said impatiently. "Flip it!" With puzzled eyes, the boy spun the coin high in the air. "Gall it!" Fader ordered. "Heads," said the boy. He caught the coin and turned it over on his wrist. "It's tails," he said, looking down. "That's your answer. Here's your tip -- don't gamble! Anyone with no more psi than you hasn't got a chance." "I know I could be a winner, Mr. Martin," the boy pleaded. "All I need is a little capital. You can't get that at a few bucks a day. If you'd just give me one -- " Fader sighed. "Earthbound in the fifth," he said. "Yes, sir!" the boy exclaimed. In his eyes was a reflection of the gamblers' grail -- the sure thing. Fader turned away, a little sad. It was a good world, this red-andblack jungle, but there are misfits in even the best of worlds. Even Heaven had Lucifer. ished, and wide. Desks and shops were exposed and unromantic by morning sunlight. Only the tobacco-and-newscounter was staffed. The girl behind the counter was bright-eyed, brown-haired, and well-scrubbed. The cleanness of her beauty brought a smile to Fader's lips. "Just the Racing Form , Jan." He tossed thirty-five cents into the felt-lined box in front of her. "You don't look like a player. How come you're working?" "I used to be. Pretty good, too. But now I've got a young man -- " "Syndicate?" Fader asked. Color rose into her cheeks like a gay flag. "More like a partner. He's asked me to marry him." "A proper tribute," Fader commented. The forms changed but people remained the same. Women had always worked to give their men a start. They always would. "And how's he doing?" "Even better than we'd hoped." "No doubt I'll have to reckon with him some time -- if I last that long." She shook her head with finality. "Not with him, Fader. When he all decided." "Then I can wish him luck without reservation," Fader said, smiling. But as he turned away with the thick tabloid folded in his hand, he was thinking, If the boy's good , he'll never quit. The game gets in a man's blood . I wouldn't want it any other way. Jan was talking to him, he realized suddenly. He had fallen into a habit lately of these internal dialogues. Maybe it was because of this voice in his head. More likely it was age. He was getting old, he told himself ruefully. He had been on top too long; it was time he retired. He wouldn't, though. Not while he had a chip left. And not while he had a stake left in this other game -- the blue-chip game. "Roll for it, Fader?" the girl repeated. "Double or nothing?" She shook the imitation-leather cup. It clicked enticingly. Politely but firmly, Fader refused. "I'll need all my luck before the day is over." "Cowboy?" she asked anxiously. "Don't you read your own papers?" he asked, lifting a thick, dark eyebrow. "There's always another one. But this is different. The Examiner's here -- " Her eyes opened like fringed gentians before the sun. "I didn't know. Last time was fifty years ago, wasn't it?" "To the day," Fader agreed. "Very punctual people." "He's come to see if we can pass?" "That, I gather, is the general idea." The girl frowned and caught her red, full lower lip between her teeth. In the cup sitting on the green, the dice chattered. "What's the matter?" Fader asked. "I don't know." She shrugged the mood away. "It's just -- Oh -- the best of luck. With both your problems. We like our Banker, you see. We don't want to have to break in another one. And we'd like to pass the examination if -- if -- " Fader nodded. "If it doesn't involve any effort. Thanks for the good wishes. I'll need all the luck I can get." He walked through the broad archway into the casino. He couldn't avoid it if he wanted to. Traffic to and from rooms, restaurants, bars, shops, swimming pools, sun decks, golf links was routed past banks of slot machines and clusters of gaming tables. Facilities for trying a man's luck were always close at hand. The slot machines were in banks. Die-hards stood before them in tireless, trancelike concentration looking even more mechanical than the machines they fed so rhythmically. Fader looked down at his hand. A silver dollar was in the palm. He shrugged: such was the force of habit. It slipped into a waiting coin slot with an ease that was almost alive. Fader heard it hit bottom and pulled the handle as he passed. The bandit was old-fashioned. Most of them were. They did not differ materially from those in which his great-grandmother had squandered the week's grocery money. Gamblers are notoriously conservative; they want slot machines to look like coin traps instead of automatic venders. Chung-chung-chung! Bar! Bar! Bar! Cartwheels cascaded into the pay-off cup. Eighty of them made quite a din. "Another jackpot!" An apron girl hurried up to him smiling happily. "Put the cartwheels in a sack, eh? I'll take them with me." The sack was heavy, but Fader carried it to the door. The inevitable beggar was sitting there. This one was legless. He blinked blindly into the sunshine, his battered hat upside down between his legs to receive donations. He was there from choice, not necessity. In a completely straightforward sense, he was an employee of the house -- a convenience provided for the patrons -- and he worked his shift exactly like the croupiers and the apron girls. Fader had been lucky. He wanted to stay lucky. Gently he slipped the sack of coins into the hat. The old man turned his face up. "May the gods of chance smile on you," he whispered. The money would quickly disappear into the bandit thoughtfully installed at the beggar's side. It didn't matter. Fader had bought back his luck. Fader took three steps into the sunshine before he realized that the beggar was one of those ancient daredevils who had risked their lives in a no-limit game. What they had done, no one could ever forget. After them, there was no more need to buck the game. He was, perhaps, one of the lucky ones. He had come flaming down from that wall in the sky, but he had escaped alive. Destiny had claimed only his legs and his eyes. Fader remembered a tape he had heard once. He had listened to it with his hands sweaty and his body taut, as if he could help the ship through the invisible wall by an effort of will. That was foolish. The tape was more than fifty years old: "Twenty-four thousand miles, #  the voice had said. It had been flat and unemotional. "No trouble yet. Power still on. Still accelerating. Going to cut off soon and coast. Kennedy thinks it may make a difference. We'll see. Out now." But the tape went on, and the noises went on in the cramped third stage of the rocket. Behind everything was the rocket-thunder. Closer was breathing, heavy in the pickup. A switch clicked. The thunder cut off. It was gone. In its absence the other noises were much too loud. "Power off, now," said the nameless man. "Will try to coast through. Twenty-four thousand nine hundred. Should be soon now." His voice climbed a little, betrayed emotion for the first time. "Feel weightless, but I don't mind that. Nine hundred fifty. Sixty. Hope you're right, Kennedy. Ninety. Here we go. Hold your hats, boys -- " Tense, then distorted with surprise and fear: "Skin temp climbing. Melting! Instruments. Dashboard. All at once. No dice, boys. Going to try to jettison before it gets to me. Hope the cartridge works. Hope -- " After that there was nothing but background crackling on the tape and then nothing at all. Fader sat on the bench looking out over the irrigated velvety greenness of the fairways. They look like a vast crap table, he thought. His gaze climbed above the horizon toward the sky. Its blueness was bright and unclouded and pure. No one would suspect that it was a wall, just as definite stronger. Within its limits Earth was contained, complete in itself, and with it the race that had mastered it and sought to use it as a stepping stone to the stars. The long climb upward from the puddles and pools and seas was done. The Big Pit Boss had burned the dice as they passed the box. "The sky's the limit," he'd said. It was. Literally. Fader imagined ghostly cubes tumbling over the vast felt-lined table of Earth. Humanity had crapped out. The eternal frontier had been an illusion. On the day, # years ago, man discovered he was no longer alone, he learned that he was isolated. Man, the Gambler, had found the Big Game in town, and the policeman had told him to play solitaire in his own room. It was more than any gambler could endure. Man had been ready for millenia. Let the aliens come -- he was psychologically prepared for the meeting. The most primitive tribe would have received them as gods. The most sophisticated civilizations would have accepted them as fellow beings. If life on Earth were not an anomaly, then it existed throughout the universe. Even if habitable planets were as scarce as one to every # suns, there would stellar mathematics. Somewhere among them, then, should be at least one race technologically more advanced than man, and it would be long odds indeed if there weren't many. So went the reasoning, when reason was in fashion. In all the ages man had been ready. But he had not been ready for this. He had not been ready for the impossibly small ship that appeared suddenly above White Sands. He had not been ready for the emergence of a single manlike being or for his words, in impeccable English, "Earth is quarantined. Man cannot be accepted into the interstellar society of races until he meets certain standards of public and private behavior. Until then a wall will stand between Man and outer space. Do not attempt to break through -- it is deadly. Accept your lot. Perfect yourself." It was surprising but not unreasonable. If it was anything, it was much too reasonable. The philosophy of Western Civilization contained a vital premise: Man and his society were not perfect. Granted the premises of the alien -- #) the existence of a Galactic Union (evidence: the alien himself), and #) the ability to carry out his statements (evidence: the ship) -- then there was only one thing to do: perfect Man and his society. But what is obvious is not always possible. In one hand the alien held threats. The other held gifts. He offered assistance in helping humanity meet minimum Galactic standards. When that was refused -- for humanity does not take kindly to tutors -- he offered a convenient, fantastically efficient converter for solar energy and an energy storage device which escaped the fantastic only by comparison. Humanity accepted. There is such a thing as false pride. The alien left as he had come. He would return, he said, for periodic examinations of humanity's progress. Humanity frowned into the sky and disbelieved -- in spite of tapes, films, the alien artifacts, the converter and the battery. Man besieged the heavens with missiles, manned and unmanned. And he saw them fall, flaming like Lucifer into Hell. The wall was impassable and unbreakable. Man had met the alien, and the quality in which he had so prided himself -- the reasoning mind which could comprehend and conquer the universe -- had been brought to perfection by this race long ago. Man could never hope to catch up. A place becomes a prison when leaving it is forbidden. Earth was now a prison, and it was suddenly too small for Man. And the only route to a shorter sentence was good behavior. But perfect himself? Man wasn't built like that. He was competitive, and he had suddenly been denied the right to compete. The old competitions were pointless now, and it was obvious that the real fight was fixed. It was no surprise that Man had turned to his old mock struggles -- the games of chance -- and made all Earth a vast casino. In one sense it was a safety valve. The Examiner might understand. Whether he would sympathize and approve was another matter. I N the back pages of the Racing Form was a large ad printed like a news item. It announced, proudly: Fader glanced down the column. John Head, better known as Praying John, had taken the Golden dollars last night, causing a temporary suspension of play while the pit boss secured more funds. Head had placed a ten-dollar chip on Number # and let it ride. The number # had received the little ball five times in a row. The ad, of course, had been paid for by the Golden Nugget. Praying John's success was a fabulous stroke of luck for the casino, and they would be derelict if they did not publicize it to the hilt. The Nugget's wheel, obviously, was the most generous in Las Vegas and, therefore, in the world. Its patrons were the luckiest. Before those implications were forgotten, the casino would win back many times its original loss. Praying John was the best shill the Nugget ever had. He was also the most dangerous highroller current. The back pages of the Racing Form contained a few news items of a general nature. As the world's most widely circulated newspaper (Editions in Europe , Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia) the Daily Racing Form considered the coverage of non-sporting news a public duty. Fader was interested in only one short item. Under a Las Vegas dateline was the following information: Registering at the El Cortez Hotel in downtown Las Vegas this afternoon was a manlike creature who signed the register in meaningless hieroglyphics . Under questioning by the clerk, he asserted that he was the Examiner from the Galactic Union. The government, the creature is reported to have said, was already aware of his presence . No official could be reached to confirm this. It has been learned, however, that the White Sands spaceport ruins have been closed to the public, and a hurry-up call summoned government stickmen to turn back would-be-kibitzers... Fader smiled. If the inquiring reporter had seen the impossibly tiny ship among the rusty towers of the abandoned multiple-stage rockets, he would have been even more puzzled. Technicians requisitioned from a nearby pinball factory had offered odds that the thing could never get off the ground. It was a sucker bet, but it expressed their feelings perfectly. The sound of childish voices broke Fader's reverie. "Yeanh! Yeanh!" came the nasal chant. "Welsher! Welsher!" "We weren't neither playing for keeps," said a voice full of tears. "We weren't! We weren't!" The circle was inscribed in a sandy path that bisected the greenness. The morning sun made jewels of the scattered, marbles inside the circle, but they were forgotten. The boys had formed an ugly halfcircle, heavy sacks swinging in their hands. Its center was a boy whose back was toward Fader. The boys looked up in surprise when Fader said, "Now what's the trouble?" "Who wants to know?" snapped one of them, tossing back an unruly lock of hair. Beside him a friend nudged vigorously with his elbow and said in a stage whisper, "Shut up, Stupid! It's Fader." "You see, sir," said an earnest dark-haired boy, "we got up a little game, sir, and Kenny here wanted to play, but when we won he wouldn't pay." Fader turned inquiringly toward the golden-haired boy named Kenny. His tear-stained face was angelic with beauty and trust, but he clutched a slim sack of marbles tightly to his chest. His voice was a clear soprano. "Nobody said we were playing for keeps, sir." "Come over here a moment," Fader said gently, his heart leaden, and walked slowly to the bench, out of hearing of the others. "Kenny," he said, putting one hand on the boy's shoulder as he sat down, "there are some things you can't learn too early. One of them is that life is for keeps." "But they didn't tell me, sir -- " And he looked not so much like a fallen angel, as one who has let the shadow of a mortal fall upon him. "There comes a time -- always -- for everyone," Fader said slowly, "when he discovers the real nature of the world. Call it a moment of discovery, of illumination, of being born into the knowledge of good and evil. It is a sword with a double edge. It also teaches a person what he himself is like. You know I wouldn't tout you wrong, don't you?" "Yes, sir," the boy said, his eyes steady. "Afterwards," Fader went on, "the person realizes that the world is actually independent of his wishes, that it is he who must shape himself to fit it, and that his acceptance is conditional. But if a person wants acceptance, he must reshape himself to the world's standards. Right?" "Yes, sir," the boy said. "There are two kinds of people in the world," Fader said quietly. "There are players and there are kibitzers. The players are competitors. They throw themselves into the game, learn the rules, abide by them, and try to win -- which is to get back some part of the omnipotence they have lost. The kibitzers are content to stand by and watch and never to be a part of the game at all. Understand?" "Yes, sir." "There're two kinds of people, Kenny, and there's nothing wrong with either one of them. But the secret of happiness lies in discovering which kind you are and sticking to it. If you're a player, play by the rules and play hard, accept your winnings, pay your losses, and don't complain. Chance has no favorites. If you're going to kibitz, kibitz and savor the pleasures of watching. Don't be half one, half the other, and all miserable." "I understand, sir," Kenny said manfully, his chin high, and he handed Fader the slim sack of marbles. "I won't play any more; there's nothing I want that much." He turned and ran quickly over the green turf toward the hotel. Fader watched him out of sight, a brooding frown darkening his face. It was a jungle world, certainly, as it had always been, and a jungle is no place for angels. That was a pity, but there was no help for it. He swung around to the silent group of players and held out the sack to the boy with the unruly lock of hair. This one Fader could understand. Here, at least, was the stuff of which players were made. Some fifty years ago Fader himself might have looked much like that. The boy took the sack with a quick, grubby hand. "You won these at a game of skill," Fader said evenly. "That isn't playing the game. A game of skill is only another way of cheating. Don't kid yourselves that you were gambling. Gambling is ruled by chance." But the winner, as Fader turned away, was unrepentant. Fader chuckled and shook his head as he climbed into the helijet summoned by the doorman's builtin radio. "The El Cortez," he said into the whpre-box. The rotors lifted him upward and then cut out as the rear jets kicked the plane toward the city of Las Vegas. As the city sprawling in the sands rushed toward him, Fader had time to study its giant, three-sided tote board and the names and odds circling eternally, light against blackness, for every citizen to see and put down his bet. The odds at the moment concerned the big, perpetual battle for the Bank: monte jones # , # , # #-I John head I , # , # #-I Although Jones and Knight were several lengths in front of Praying John, it was obvious to Fader -- as it was to the general bettor -- that they had lost their luck and their nerve. They hadn't been a threat for days. Even as he watched, the totals of Jones and Knight dwindled by a few thousand dollars and that of Head jumped by more than a million. His odds were lowered to #-#. Fader took a deep breath. Damn all highrollers at a time like this! The helijet zoomed toward the landing platform far below on the El Cortez roof. Fader booked a small bet with himself that the rotors would not kick on. Fader of Kenny, the boy with the curly golden hair. Given surpassing intelligence, character integration, and the knowledge of great power, the boy could become a twin to this creature. The Examiner was a superior being. There was no denying it. Recognition was instinctive. Fader battled an inferiority complex that threatened momentarily to overwhelm him. The Examiner was angelic, as Michael was angelic -- extraordinarily tall and slim with a beauty that was golden and calm. He had an aura compounded of purity, intelligence, and power; it was almost physical. Fader blinked several times before he convinced himself that it was an illusion. Like Michael, the Examiner held the secret of the mighty word by which God created Heaven and Earth. Like Michael, he stood guard with a flaming sword before the gates of Paradise from which mankind had been thrust and could not enter again. Beside him Fader felt short, animal, vulgar, stupid, like the primeval monkey chattering .in the trees at the straight, silent protoman moving along the jungle trails below. Although the Examiner was dressed much like Fader -- colorful, synthetic-fibered slacks and shirt, cuffed tightly at wrist and ankle, the knees padded -- he outshone the clothes. By contrast, like the spacious splendor of the suite, they seemed poor, tawdry, shabby things. This was the being who had the power to say, "Your time of trial is over. The wall is down; the flaming sword is lowered. You are free to come and go as you wish." What the Examiner said was, "You represent the government?" His voice was deep and melodious. Fader shook himself and nodded. "I can speak for the House. They call me the Banker." "Conditions have changed since my last visit." Fader couldn't decide whether it was an idle comment or a statement portentious with meaning. "You were the one who came last time -- fifty years ago?" "Yes. My race outlives yours considerably." "Naturally?" "I'm unable to answer the question," the Examiner said regretfully. "You must recognize that information cannot be divulged which might aid Earth in evading the Union's ruling. Even such a simple statement as you request might have unfortunate consequences. I am here as an Examiner. Let it suffice that a portion of my lifetime has been devoted to the problem that Earth represents." "Our regrets," Fader said drily. "They aren't necessary. This is a service to my society which I -- like any citizen -- am happy to perform." "You wouldn't give us the secret of longevity, then, even if you had it?" "We have given you all we can. Even if we could give it to you -- and it might solve many of your problems -- it would be unwise while you cannot control your own numbers." "We need longevity to find the answers to our problems," Fader summed up, "but we must have the answers before you will give us longevity?" "Granted the premises, the conclusion would be correct. But you called the government 'the House' and yourself 'the Banker.' Those terms were not current when I was here last." Fader summarized the long story in a few sentences. The gifts of the Galactic Union had made this society feasible. With an unlimited, convenient source of energy, Earth became a world in which no one had to work. But for the majority of mankind there had to be a reason for existence. That reason was gambling. There was nothing to be won? True. It was an artificial competition? True. But that was Man's nature; he had to compete, somehow, someway. And in the final analysis it was no more artificial than most competitions. The society worked ; that was the least that could be said for it. Because the symbols for which humanity gambled -- the matches, the chips, the dollars -- were limited, men had to work to get them. Thus certain essential duties were performed. No one had to gamble, but if he chose to he had to work for his starting capital. The money with which he was paid had no intrinsic value; it could buy nothing except what people chose to sell for it -- which is true, of course, of any medium of exchange. What could not be sold were the necessities of life. No one would buy, for people only buy what they do not have. As valid reasons for government vanished, elective offices dwindled. When a few appointive positions became necessary -- stickmen, who collected revenue, and judges -- the man with the most chips was asked to appoint them. He became, in a practical sense, the head of the government, the Banker. The governSH#LL ment became the House because it was a partner in every gambling enterprise. "They call me the Banker," Fader said wryly, "but there's a better name for me. Shill." "A shill," Fader explained, "is a houseman who poses as a player to stimulate the play. In the sense that I perform no useful function except as a figurehead who induces other men to compete by his example, I shill for this society. I suppose there's a little bit of shill in every public figure. I'm not ashamed of it; a good shill is a rare thing." "I should think," the Examiner pointed out, "that it would depend on what he shilled for. Our reasons for quarantining Earth remain valid. You have not evolved a sound society. You have not outgrown idle competition. The goals you seek are still false. You are still unfit for the society of civilized beings." "I hope that you haven't prejudged us." "I point out only that we found you -- technologically precocious and psychologically retarded -- about to burst out among us. For your own sake, we placed a quarantine so that you might develop naturally -- " "How can we develop naturally when a flaming wall above us proclaims that we are prisoners dependent for our well-being and even for our continued existence upon the mercy and good will of unseen aliens?" "It is a symptom of moral savagery," the Examiner said gently, "that our intentions and motives should be suspect. We have gained nothing from this meeting of races; we have no hopes of gaining anything except, perhaps, the possibility of free association with another civilized race. Our theoreticians have said that you are not beyond redemption; they said you needed time. Your environment had developed a deep-grained competitive spirit which only time and an amelioration of conditions might hope to change. We gave you leisure... Fader frowned, wondering, as he had wondered before, if the aliens were telepathic. "A blank wall " said the voice inside his head. "Like trying to read the mind of a fish" Completely non-telepathic then? Or able to blank himself out? "Who knows? My guess: even if he's telepathic, he can't read an alien. I can't do anything with him." Might as well forget it, then. If he can, there's no help for it -- we're up the creek without a paddle . "I ask you," Fader said to the Examiner, "whether you did not give us gifts out of a feeling of guilt." The Examiner's shrug was as natural as if he had been shrugging all his life. "We are not insulated from error or immune to emotion. We may have been prompted by a small desire to make amends. But what did you do with the leisure we gave? You set up new goals even more ephemeral, sought by methods even more disproportionate. Can you defend such a world, so unequal, so pointless?" "Ethically, morally, economically I can defend it -- any way you wish. Pointless? You miss the point. Of course we have inequality -- how can any society avoid it? -- But note that this is not the inequality of birth, of intelligence, of skill, or of anything else permanent and unchanging. This is the fleeting, impartial inequality of chance. If it raises a man high one day, it may drop him below the lowest tomorrow. And those who are broke this week may rule next week. Everyone is equal in the eyes of chance." "The equality is spurious which takes no account of merit." "Merit?" Fader asked in surprise. "What intrinsic merit do we this world; we exist in it only because it seems the lesser of evils. We have no right, sir, in ourselves, to claim anything of destiny except the impartial distribution of her temporary favors. Our only proper demand is that the game be honest." "Every society has a duty," the Examiner said soberly. "That duty is to reward and so promote the best conduct -- that conduct which is best for the race, for the society, and for the individual -- in that order. The great flaw in your race and your society was that it inverted this normal order. I have seen no evidence of change." "Who knows?" Fader said softly. "We aren't worried about the enforcing of arbitrary rules on everyone impartially. We ask only that a man restrict his actions so that they do not threaten or endanger the person, property, or happiness of anyone else. Furthermore, not having been consulted on his forcible induction into this world, he may choose to play or not. If he chooses to play, we ask only that he obey the rules of the game and leave the rest to chance. "But you came to look not to listen." the tall, lean man, his face carved by ten thousand fevered nights, and the taller, leaner, more subtly jointed being from another world who had come to sit in judgment upon this one. As they entered the self-service elevator, Fader noticed that the alien hummed. As they stepped out into the wide lobby and walked into the sunbright street, it stopped. Fader knew what the technicians would tell him. They would say that it was a gravity neutralizer or generator, or an energy shield or a communicator or some other fantastic thing. They would deduce this or that, fit it here or there into the puzzle, and eventually they would have a complete picture of this great Galactic Union. Everything was useful. "Noted' said the voice inside his head. A lean, black cat darted out of an alley to their left and paused to study them with large, speculative eyes. Fader hastily crossed the street, beckoning the Examiner to follow. The Examiner looked thoughtful, but said nothing. A row of shops were to their right, their windows displaying casually the goods available within. Most of it was handicraft stuff -- increasingly desirable in an age of automatic factories. All was for sale; it could be bought with that intrinsically worthless stuff -- money. The Examiner passed from a window displaying a single, large, red tomato to a shop distinguished by a bucket swinging from a mast anchored above the front window. The lettering on the window said, "A bucket-shop," Fader explained, "once specialized in gambling with clients on bets the clients couldn't win, pretending to deal in securities that it actually never bought. But now there are no stocks, no grain futures, no markets, and no need for them. Bucketshops today make book on any contingency the customer chooses, setting adequate odds to protect themselves. In effect, the customer accepts long odds for the privilege of choosing his bet." "Then he can bet on anything." "Anything ascertainable. The proprietor of this shop, for instance, would accept your bet on how many molecules of water that bucket would hold, whether the next helijet to land on the hotel roof would be a Ford or a Cadillac, whether you will die before you reach the age of five hundred -- " "It serves as a form of insurance, then?" "It could but it doesn't. No one has any reason to be afraid of the future." The public room of the bucketshop was spotless and air-conditioned. Walls to the right and left were miniature, black tote boards. On them, in glowing, occasionally changing letters and figures, were the odds against the occurrence of a number of contingencies, in alphabetical order, beginning with "Air Temperature (noon)." Two rows of comfortable-looking chairs were lined back to back down the center of the room. The customers in them studied the walls or placed their bets with the proprietor at the back of the room. He sat behind a high, wide desk in his black coat and green eyeshade. "Fader!" he explained. "What can I do for you?" "Name the odds on rain before noon." The man in the green eyeshade pointed to the wall at his left. The wall announced: During the next hour #-I Before noon #-I "Want to take a flyer?" Fader shook his head. "Sorry. It just might rain, and I'm going to need my luck. Are you making book on the possible lifting of the quarantine?" "No. But I'll take all bets at ten to one over the next fifty years." "It's your opinion," the Examiner asked politely, "that the Galactic Union won't lower the barrier?" "That's the meaning of the odds," he said, studying the Examiner as if he were seeing him for the first time. "If they'd ever meant to take it off, I don't think they'd have put it on." "What odds," the Examiner asked softly, "on man reaching outer space?" "That's a different matter," said the man in the green eyeshade. "On that you'll never get more than even money from me." "He was expressing his own opinion, of course," the Examiner said, when they reached the street. "That's all any of us can do," Fader observed. "He's different only in his readiness to put his money where his mouth is." "He owns that business clear?" "Less the government share," Fader corrected. "For gambling profits that's fifty percent. Government stickmen collect daily -- " "That should complicate the business of government." Actually, of course, it had simplified everything. The few essential government expenses were taken care of on a daily or weekly basis. The remainder was distributed periodically as a citizen's bonus. So it returned to those it came from, and the circle was complete. The government stopped losing money. Taxes were eliminated. The staggering public debt was retired within a few years. It was true that the government was involved in gambling, but then it always had been. Even when gambling was generally illegal, most states were partners in legalized parimutuel betting at the tracks; only when bets were offered and accepted away from the track -- where no portion of the money was forfeit to the state treasury -- was it declared illegal. In Nevada the state was a partner in all gambling enterprises -- on top of taxes and fees -- to the tune of two percent of the gross. The federal government taxed gamblers and gambling devices wherever they happened to be, irrespective of their legality. Such schizophrenic standards made honesty in government a practical impossibility. Most people and most governments never quite made up their minds about gambling. Gambling always existed on the borderline of respectability. It would be easier to count the societies that did not gamble. Australian and South African bushmen competed for prizes. The primitive Teutons gambled themselves into slavery like Sudanese and West African natives, -- who first staked wives and children. Chinese gamblers wagered their right hands and, losing, cut them off. Wealthy Romans lost their entire fortunes on chariot races ; Twentieth Century men embezzled and went to jail, speculated and committed suicide in droves. Gambling was always a government preoccupation and often a government monopoly. Queen Elizabeth I established a lottery in England. German princes of the #th and #th centuries maintained gambling as a state monopoly. Lotteries helped found the United States; General Washington bought the first ticket in a benefit for the U.S. Army. In #, Brazil's treasury got one-sixth of its income from a share in legalized gambling enterprises. Periodic attempts at suppression were based upon the assumption that gambling injured the productivity of workmen, but sometimes it was considered to threaten the basic structures and assumptions of society. Yet even in the middle of the twentieth century, when gambling was generally illegal, it was moters. That was more than the combined profits of United States Steel, General Motors, General Electric, and the remaining ninetyseven of the hundred largest United States manufacturing companies. "But," Fader pointed out, "with the devices you gave us we didn't have to worry about production. We didn't have to, meddle in the lives and pastimes of the public." They had reached the residential section -- colorful, blown-plastic houses in neat little green plots. On the opposite side of the street was a collection of plastic bubbles joined by roofed passageways. "That's a schoolhouse," Fader said. "And it seems to be recess." The playground held a few groups of eight or nine years of age, and one kindergarten group that couldn't have been more than six. The last group was close to one of the walls. Some of the children were kneeling. Others formed a circle around them. Fader heard the familiar sound of two cubes clicking together. "Roll 'em," said a childish treble, "you're faded!" An arm moved back and whipped forward. Two transparent dice tumbled out, hit against the wall, and spun backward until they came to rest. "Snake eyes!" cried the same voice with glee. A boy raked up a small heap of coins in the center of the circle. As the Examiner moved aside, Fader heard the voices following them. "They hit!" "They miss!" "A natural!" "Baby needs a new pair of shoes!" "Sixty days. You'll never make it!" "And up jumped the devil... "Gambling?" the Examiner asked, nodding toward the little knots of children. "Obviously." "Couldn't they be doing something more rewarding?" "How?" Fader asked, surprised. "This is their education, their preparation for life." "They study this?" "Exactly." A slow smile played over Fader's lips. I'll have to watch out for some of them -- if I'm around a few years longer. The young ones will be taking over from me some day." "Instead of learning about life, they learn to play games," the Examiner said, nodding his beautiful head. "What is life but a game? Their education has been re-oriented, that's all." Fader caught the arm of a passing boy, a sturdy, bright-eyed fellow. He waited respectfully. "What do you learn in school, son?" Fader asked. The boy looked politely blank. Fader smiled. "That was a httle general, wasn't it? Do you learn to read?" "Yes, sir," the boy said. "What do you read?" "Let's see." There's Hoyle's Rules of Card Games. This semester we've got Scarne on Dice. Next semester we're going to study Jacoby on Poker." "Can you write?" Fader asked. "Yes, sir." And, without prompting, he continued, "We've been policy slips, that sort of thing." "Arithmetic?" "Elementary odds." "Thanks, boy," Fader dismissed him with a smile. Fader spread his arms out wide as if he included the world within them. "An education must be centered around something, and what is in the center is relatively unimportant. Gambling, embraces all the vital branches of knowledge. It concerns itself with sociology, psychology, and history. It makes necessary the study of physics, chemistry, electronics, statistical analysis, and the scientific method. It concentrates on mathematics, odds, and the nature of chance and its role in the universe. In the sense that probability began as a study of gambling odds, it gave birth to modern mathematics." In secondary school and college curriculums the courses became more specialized : The Ethics of the Gambler, Statistical and Inductive Probability, Craps Through the Ages (with laboratory), The Uncertainty Principle and It's Counter-part in the Macrocosm, The Psychology of the Winner, Playing Card Design, The Loser's Ductless Glands, Von Neumann's Theory of Games... "There is no greater laboratory," Fader said, "for the study of psychology and sociology than this society. Here things are stripped of nonessentials, of all pretense. Every day a man can see -- and run -- every mood from the darkest gloom to the most ecstatic joy. As Nick the Greek said more than one hundred years ago, 'A man will expose his deepest emotions for a tendollar bill.' " restaurant and glanced up at the tote board a few blocks away. The situation had already changed. monte jones # , # , # #-I john head # , #I , #I #-I lucky knight # , # , # #-I Praying John had almost doubled his capital. He had won an amazing Automatically Fader calculated the odds. He would give two-to-one that he would be forced to meet John Head before the week was out. A lot of smart money was going down on Head ; the odds showed that. The lucky man always attracts a crowd of side-bettors who hope that some of his luck will rub off. At the table the Examiner toyed idly with a meal of plankton and chlorella. Reaching for the salt, Fader knocked it over. Salt poured out onto the table. Automatically he picked up a pinch and tossed it over his left shoulder. "That seems to belong to the same category of actions," the Examiner observed, "as your avoidance of a black cat this morning. Even the meaningless becomes significant when persisted in." "If you were around me longer," Fader commented drily, "you would notice that I wear this same rather threadbare shirt on important occasions, that I go out of my way to give money to beggars -- " "They are efforts to propitiate some forgotten gods, then, in order to secure good luck or ward off bad hick." Surprisingly, Fader shook his head. "There's nothing forgotten about these gods. They're very much alive. Gamblers are superstitious, sure. They have to be. Their fates are controlled by chance. So are all our fates. We would be smart to pay more attention to the propitiation of those possible controlling powers which say to us: win, live, grow -- or lose, die, diminish. On a hunch, perhaps, the gambler hedges his basic bet with life. He is familiar with circumstances which can scarcely be explained except by predicating the dominion of the unseen. Luck has favorites; it is arbitrary, ironic, decisive -- " "Projection," the Examiner observed, "is a familiar phenomenon." "What does a man lose if he acts as if chance were a vital, manipulatable entity?" "The power of making his own decisions." "Those are best left to chance. Like this." Fader's hand moved. The silver dollar glittered in the air. "Tails," he called it, and grimaced. The Examiner leaned forward. "What decision was that?" "Whether I should continue the conversation," Fader answered wryly. "The coin said yes. For millenia, you see, we chased cause, like a pack of dogs after a bitch in heat. Where did it take us? To that fiery wall you placed above us in the sky. Your ship just 'happened' to be close by when we emerged into space." "That's right." "It was chance, then. Luck was with you, sir. Ours had run out. Can you blame us, if we look on causation with disfavor and set chance in its proper place -- that of the supreme arbiter of the universe?" "It may be natural but it is scarcely intelligent -- " "Suppose we had reached Mars or Venus before you had discovered us? You wouldn't have chased us back. Isn't that right?" "I can say only that it has happened that way in other cases," the Examiner said gravely. "Then we adjusted ourselves to the reality of the presence of the uninvited races among us. But you were not yet in our midst. From our viewpoint, we happened upon Earth just in time." "So it would seem," Fader said softly. "And from your viewpoint," the Examiner went on earnestly. "It is not so much a denial of space as the establishing of an entrance examination. Demonstrate that you are capable of making sensible laws and abiding by them from no compulsion except that of logic and we will welcome you with great warmth and joy. You wouldn't admit a savage into your society until you were satisfied that he was capable of obeying your laws and predisposed to do so." "Perhaps not," Fader admitted. "But that presupposes that you have property rights on space." "It does," the Examiner agreed. "And we do." Fader studied the Examiner's face, moved for the first time by emotion ; what emotion it was, Fader couldn't decide. The Examiner went on. "It is painful for me to speak bluntly. On my world it would be considered an insult that you force me to do so. Among civilized men, offensive speech is unnecessary. The facts of existence are apparent to everyone. I mention this only to excuse my own conduct -- " "Because after all," Fader interjected, "we are an inferior race." "Your race has an unnatural bent for rubbing salt in your own wounds. We do have the power to restrict any race to its own world. The presence of that power implies the right to use it -- " "I have heard that theory expressed before," Fader mused. "Then it was called 'might makes right.' " "It is not only might that makes right. Wisdom makes right. In any society except the most primitive, might and wisdom are only two aspects of the same thing. What we have done is forbidden your entrance into our society, defined as the area beyond the orbital sphere of this particular world's outer satellite. The right to determine the constitution of any society belongs to the society alone." "You've penned up your savage," Fader said. "But you wouldn't be surprised if the savage should try to escape?" "Surprised, no. Concerned, yes. The power of the Galactic Union is not lightly invoked." "So we have cause to understand," Fader said grimly. "Attempts have already been made?" "Naturally," Fader said. "How could we accept your word for the existence of a wall around Earth? It might have been a bluff." "The Galactic Union," the Examiner said evenly, "does not bluff. It does not need to." "True. In this instance, anyway. Ships probed it here, there, whereever there might be a possible hole, and they flamed down from it like falling stars." "And you discovered only that it was there." "That's right," Fader said heavily. "We don't know to this day whether the effect is caused by a force field, an ionized layer, mass hypnosis, or something completely beyond our comprehension." "No reaction said the voice inside Fader's head. "It must not be any of those . Surely he'd have twitched a muscle somewhere ." "And you won't find out from me," the Examiner added. "All you need to know is that the wall will keep you in until we choose to remove it." "We wonder," Fader remarked, "how your ship managed to come through the barrier -- and how you will leave. Can you turn off the wall at will, does it cut off automatically as your ship approaches, or is there some immunity in the materials or construction of the ship itself?" The Examiner shook his head. "Precautions have been taken to keep us from learning?" Fader asked innocently. "They have. Less civilized races may be tempted to force answers from Examiners. That cannot be allowed. Reprisals -- which I cannot itemize or categorize -- would be taken. Moreover, either I know nothing, or the answers are locked into a neural pattern which only death can dissolve. That is, if you are able to put me to the question in spite of my considerable ability to resist." "You wrong us," Fader said. "Force is the farthest from our intentions. We are, however, a people with free-roving, speculative minds. We speculate, for instance, that we might be able to learn a great deal from an inspection of your little ship -- " "That, too," the Examiner said firmly, "you cannot do. The port can't be opened without destroying the ship. Even if you could enter safely, what you saw would be meaningless." "Don't underestimate us," Fader advised easily. "We are a clever, ingenius people." "We do not underestimate you. But you could no more understand the devices inside my ship than a bushman could understand one of your printed circuits without any knowledge of electricity." "This began, I think, with your hope that we weren't trying to escape. You've seen our rusty ships; let them answer." " Billy's inside. He just reported." Inside the ship? "Right" He's not to touch anything. He understands that, doesn't he? "Sure. Don't worry. He wouldn't know what to touch. He's just taking pictures. He wants to say it's no dice, though. It's all crazy in there. No apparent controls. No power plant. Just lots of decorations. Can't tell the controls from the decorations without a program." Maybe the experts can make something out of it. "Too bad they can't get in there themselves." That's the price they pay for being experts. Fader completed the pushing of his chair back under the table and looked up. "The next item on the agenda is a trial by chance." room was identified by a miniature statue of Justice, scales in one hand, sword in the other, standing on a corner of the desk. The desk itself was a transparent, red cube decorated with opaque white spots. The top was covered with green felt. The judge behind the desk was listening to a summation by a man in a green eyeshade and a black coat. The man in front of the desk had, the stickman declared, made a bet that be could beat another man at a game of chess. The bet had been made publicly; the game had been played publicly. The accused man had won. The judge nodded at Fader and then asked the accused man if the charge were true. "I did what he said." "Have you played chess against that man before?" "Yes." "Did you beat him then?" "Yes." "Has he ever beaten you?" "No." "I ask you, isn't it a fact that skill is so predominant an element in the game of chess that the outcome of any one game can be accurately predicted?" "Well -- '" "In every game there is an admitted and recognized advantage on one side or the other?" "Well -- yes. But he said he could beat me. He thought he could beat me. We were betting on a difference of opinion." "But you knew -- did you not -- that you were superior, that you could beat him, just as you had beaten him before?" "That was my opinion." "And his opinion to the contrary was only evidence of his ignorance of the game?" "Well -- I won -- " "Exactly. You were cheating. "Some opinions are founded on fact and some are baseless," the judge said. "The person who has knowledge and bets in accordance with it, is taking an unfair advantage. To take an unfair advantage is to cheat, and cheating will not be tolerated." Fifty years ago courts had been concerned with the suppression of gambling. This society was not remotely concerned with suppression. But it was concerned with the function of all courts, the preservation of society. The greatest threat against a society based on gambling was cheating. Only widespread dishonesty could incite rebellion and force a return to yesterday's narrow, futile puritanism. A game of skill could not be defined except as a form of cheating. It was as reprehensible as the loaded dice or the gimmicked wheel. In fact, it was even more dangerous to society. "But understand this," the judge concluded. "Society is concerned only with your public acts. What you do in private does not concern us. But in acting publicly you made society the judge of your actions. We disapprove. Have you anything to say before I pass sentence?" "No, sir." "You are fined the full amount of the bet," the judge said sternly, "and you are forbidden for a period of six months to enter any public place where gambling is conducted, to place any public bets with anyone or by any public method of communication. Do you wish to appeal?" "Yes, sir," said the convict. The judge touched the base of the goddess of justice. A door sprang open. Out upon the felt top of the desk rolled a single, manysided die, on each face of which was engraved an "A" or a "D." It stopped with a "D" uppermost. "The appeal is denied," said the judge. "In our courts," Fader muttered to the Examiner, "justice is not only blind, it is as impartial as chance." A cab drifted down from the sky like a whirling seedpod and waited patiently while Fader and the Inspector climbed in. Fader whispered into the where-box. "You have a great preoccupation with cheating," the Examiner observed. "It's a serious problem" Fader replied soberly. "The basic premise of our society is equal opportunity. If the odds are rigged in favor of anyone, it will result, inevitably, in the ultimate destruction of the society. It may not be a perfect society, but it is a good world in which no one goes naked, hungry, or unsheltered. There is no war, no murder, no crime. The ideal form of competition is available everywhere, to everyone. It's a wideopen world, with impenetrable skies." "But you have trouble with cheating?" "Outside of the games of skill, no. There is a kind of Gresham's Law of gambling -- honest games drive out the crooked ones. A gambling house that consistently rigged the games or the odds would soon be deserted; the customers would soon transfer their patronage to houses that gave them better returns for their money. Games of skill are another thing." "Why is that?" # "The human critter is funny. He has to demonstrate his superiority; it's a compulsion to compete and it dies hard. Man can't stop trying to beat the game. That's what makes him unique." "And that," the Examiner said quietly, "is what makes him an undesirable. The only citizens we can accept are those who will play the game according to the rules." "According to your rules," Fader amended. "Life's only requirement is survival." "But when we ourselves decide the conditions under which we shall survive -- then we become Life's master instead of its slave." Fader studied the Examiner's face. It was calm and peaceful ; this face, if any, had mastered Life. From these lips Man could accept the advice of the angels. Fader wondered, as he had wondered before, if that day one hundred years ago had seen the alien's first visit. "Don't expect the impossible," he said. "Man has always insisted on making his own rules as he went along. I'm not praising or defending him. That's just the way he is." "Then he must reconcile himself to seclusion. It is our game, and we do make the rules. But no race is so rigid that it cannot change; no species is so stupid that it cannot learn. My only question is: can you teach yourselves? So far I haven't found any evidence that you can." "What kind of evidence?" Fader asked quickly. "My visit to this world should be the central fact of your society. Around it, the school curriculum should be developed. The great philosophic question of the century should be how humanity can make itself acceptable to the Galactic Union. Instead I find that nothing is taught about us, nothing is said about us, and nothing is done." Fader smiled wryly. "Here the basic facts of life are not the subject of classroom discussion. Nor do philosophers concern themselves with questions already settled. What we are doing -- that you must see for yourself." "Billy's out . Just reporting . No incident." The jets cut out, and the taxi hung, swaying, from its rotors. Below them was a long, dark oval around a central field of manicured turf. Along one side of the oval stretched crowded stands. "We should be just in time," Fader said, "for the fourth race." colors of their stables, the squat, buglike machines raced around the oval, jostling each other at the turns, falling behind, pushing hard to pass in the stretch, and finally flashing under the finish line in front of the cheering crowd. Fader studied the horse in the victor's chute, where it was nuzzling its fill of current, and glanced down at his program. Shoo-In, Calumet entry, the favorite. He looked up at the tote board. The horse had paid #-#. In a box a few hundred feet way, a knot of young men were yelling excitedly, jumping, pounding one of their number on the back. Fader smiled; someone had a winner. "Isn't it obvious," the Examiner asked politely, "that one of these machines is built better than another, that one is intrinsically faster? What uncertainty is there to bet on?" Horse racing had been man's perenial pastime for millenia, but the machine age brought a revolution. As civilization grew more complicated, more urban, people became more interested in machines than animals. The tracks, frantically searching for ways to stay in business, had an inspiration. Researchers into response and learning mechanisms, had developed a simple electrical device for studying the process. It sought out a source of current and charged itself, learned a maze, and retraced its path to its "food" in shorter times. Here, in primitive form, was a device which combined mechanics with the individuality and uncertainty of horses. The mechanical horses became a craze. They took over the tradition, color, and ceremony of the track instead of the speedway. To the public they developed personalities and recognizable techniques. One was smart in the jams; another was fast getting away; a third was strong at the finish. Running times varied considerably depending upon lubrication, overhaul, repairs and innovations, track conditions, and a certain intangible -- The fifth race was a continual human thunder from the starting gate sprint to the finish. The tote board told Fader that his tip had got around. The odds on Earthbound had dropped from #-I to #-#. Like most horseplayers, the elevator boy couldn't keep a good thing to himself. "Horseplayers die broke," Fader muttered. It was Earthbound and Fencebuster going toward the wire nose and nose. Slowly Fencebuster pulled away and flashed across the line. Fencebuster had come in at #. That Earthbound should have lost to a dog like that was nightmare stuff. He shrugged. That's what made horse races. "If you like," he said, as he got to his feet, "we can go around to the stables and see the horses." They passed close to the group of jubilant young men Fader had noticed before. "Four winners in a row!" one of them shouted. "What're you gonna do now, Johnny-boy? Are you gonna choose the old man, Johnny?" He was talking to a dark-haired, sullen-looking boy in the center of the group. The boy muttered something, but Fader and the Examiner were already past. Johnny ! Fader turned the name over and peered . under it. Could that sullen boy be Praying John Head? He knew, with a sick, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, that it was. "You're right . We've got our eye on him," Want to hook a bet on how soon he chooses me? "Nope, He hasn't quite made up his mind." The challenge, Fader knew with intuitive certainty, would come before the day was over. No matter what effect it had on the future of all Earth, it would come. It was a hell of a time for a boy like Johnny to lift himself out of the masses and drive for the top. But that, after all, was the function of the society. The horse lay upside down on the workbench, its insides strewn across the surface. The Examiner glanced casually at the haphazard arrangement of wires and motors, transistors, condensers, and other items of electrical equipment that Fader couldn't put a name to. "I see," said the Examiner. Fader frowned. Had the alien understood it completely in that one sweeping glance? "I don't understand this receptorlike mechanism which seems to lead to the variable accelerator, bypassing the battery." "That," the greasy mechanic said proudly, "is the button. Invented right here in the Calumet Stable almost fifty years ago." "And a notable contribution to the economy," Fader added. "What does it do?" the Examiner asked. The mechanic wiped his hand across his sweaty forehead. It left a black smear. "It speeds up the horse. That's what it does." "How?" The mechanic scratched his head. "Well, the bettors, they hope their horses win. If they hope hard enough, the button picks it up, see, and makes the horse go faster." "An application," Fader said, "of what we call the Rhine Effect." "Some sort of mental control of matter?" the Examiner asked skeptically. "Yeah," the mechanic said. "Yeah. That's it." "Have you any proof that there is such a thing?" "Not what you'd call proof, maybe," the mechanic admitted. "But we don't have any proof that there ain't, either. And it sure pepped up the betting." "An increase in the circulation of money," Fader said, "is always a good thing." "And is it a good thing to delude the general public into belief in fantasies?" "Fantasies?" Fader repeated as they threaded their way through the crowd heading toward the parimutuel windows. "You have no proof," the Examiner pointed out. "Depends on your definition of proof. Suppose a man should toss a coin into the air and call it heads. What would you call it if heads came up?" "Chance." "Suppose a machine should flip it, with a man concentrating on making it come up heads, and it came up heads one hundred times out of one hundred?" "Then -- possibly -- I might suspect that something immaterial was influencing the coin. Have you seen that happen?" "Not personally," Fader admitted. "But I've heard about it. My experience as a gambler makes me suspicious of anything that consistently beats the odds." "If you were a scientist," the Examiner said evenly, "what you would suspect would be any easy explanation for phenomena that cannot be duplicated under scientifically controlled conditions. By tonight I will have my decision." "And will Earth have it, too?" Fader asked. "Yes." Fader could not repress a shiver. It was a familiar sensation, compounded of fear and excitement. A helijet swooped down at his summons. "The Wheel," he said into the where-box. The taxi lifted on whirring vanes. "It would be an honor," Fader remarked, "if you would consent to do the drawing in this semi-annual lottery. Lottery players are a superstitious lot -- even more than the rest of us. They like ceremony." "I have no objection," the Examiner said. "Good," Fader said happily. "We'll have to dress you for the part." ing room. Politely but firmly, the Examiner had made it clear that he wished to be alone. It didn't matter to Fader. The cameras would see more than he could. When the Examiner finally came out, he walked in a blaze of glory. The rose-red silk of his blouse was sprinkled with diamonds, and his slacks were almost stiff with priceless hand embroidery. "Policy players," Fader told him, "have a saying: 'A raggedy man wears his hard luck on his back.' " v # The broad plaza was jammed so tightly that it looked pale with upturned faces. The giant, clearplastic wheel was almost filled with held up his hands toward the pallid lake. "Let the drawing begin," he said. Hidden microphones picked up his words and threw them out for the waiting ears. The crowd roared like a crashing surf. The giant wheel spun until its outlines blurred and the clacking of the tiny balls against the sides was a steady drum roll. It coasted to a stop. A small door swung open. The Examiner reached into the wheel and pulled out a ball. It fell into two halves. Inside was a slip of paper. He read off the number printed on it. At the same instant, each numeral sprang up, glowing, on the board behind him. Again the wheel was closed, was spun. Again the Examiner reached into it. He read off a second number. There were twenty prizes, and they were drawn in ascending order. On the ninth draw, a woman's voice screamed, "That's my number!" And the living waters moved, rippled, parted, and surrendered up a swaying, breathless, middleaged woman. As the Examiner reached into the wheel for the twentieth time, Fader watched with a queer sense of urgency. It was as if the lot were being cast, as if the alien were withdrawing from the great wheel of Destiny, Man's fate. The Examiner read the number impassively. Behind him the numerals marched inexorably across the top of the board, hushing the crowd as if by some ancient magic spell. And then the last number flashed, and a small section of the human lake exploded. A young man was tossed above it and seemed to ride over its waves up to the platform. The grand winner was Praying John Head. He had a whole ticket -- no tenths or twenties for him. Fader moved forward to shake Head's hand. Head glowered at him, unmoving. Slowly, insultingly, he turned his back and stared over the crowd at the distant tote board. As everyone watched, the numbers flickered, a name was wiped off... fader martin  #I , # , # #-# Head swung back toward Fader, a bitter smile twisting his young lips. He jabbed a finger toward Fader as if it were a rapier. "I'm choosing you," he grated out. "Now son -- " Fader began pacifically. "Don't 'son' me!" Head exclaimed, shaking his shoulders as if Fader had laid his hand on him. "You're challenged. What are you going to do about it?" Fader shrugged helplessly. "Only one thing I can do -- " "Then do it. Name the game." "Craps." "The Golden Nugget, then," Head agreed, nodding almost happily now that the challenge was accepted. "Eight o'clock." Somewhere a woman's voice was calling, "Johnny!" A girl scrambled up on the stage. "Johnny!" It was Jan, the girl from the Desert Inn tobacco counter. Her face was flushed as if she had run a long way. "Johnny!" she demanded. "What are you doing here? We stop. Now I find that you've won ing to end?" "At the Golden Nugget. Tonight. I just chose Fader." "You're mad!" the girl exclaimed angrily. "What have you got to lose? Everything. What have you got to gain? You don't want to be Banker." "It's time somebody took this old bastard to the cleaners," the boy said sullenly. "And I'm the one to do it. The almighty rule of chance! Hah! He's been Banker for twenty-five years. There's only one way he could have stayed there. He's a mechanic. The whole thing's rigged, the whole damned world! Well, there's going to be some changes -- " "If you go through with this, John Head," the girl began, the words frosty and precise -- Fader put up a hand to stop her. "Don't threaten anything rash. It's all right. We do what we must." He nodded at the boy. "Tonight, then!" The boy jerked his head in acknowledgment and stamped away. Fader forgot him immediately. It was the Examiner he was curious about. Glitter Gulch, the greatest concentration of inert gas in the world, cast a neon glow for fifty miles into the desert. At the comer of Fremont and Second Street, in the heart of Glitter Gulch, was the Golden Nugget. Hanging in the air high above the building was a blazing nugget of gold. The floor felt rough under Fader's feet as he followed the Examiner into the building. It was paved with silver dollars, worn down now by countless passing feet until the cartwheels were only polished silver circles in the concrete. There were endless banks of slot machines at the entrance, chattering and chunging continually, and there was even a constant tinkling of coins into pay-off cups. It was Nevada's pride that the state produced more jackpots than jack rabbits. But the players were grim and silent as they fed coins into the bandits with automatic precision. "Is this pleasure or punishment?" the Examiner asked. "Pleasure," Fader replied, smiling wryly. "There's an old saying: You pays your money and you takes your choice." As they passed the Last Chance bar, Fader stopped impulsively. "Double shot of rye, neat," he said to the bartender in the sleeve garters and apron. He turned around with the glass and raised it in mocking salutation to the Examiner's judicial eyes. "To freedom," he said and tossed it down. As he set the glass back on the bar, he pointed out the diorama behind it. It was the desert lashed by a thunderstorm, convincingly realistic. In the distance was a wide, concrete spaceport, swept with rain. The ship took off in the middle of the storm, its rocket exhaust a paler, more permanent lightning. It faded slowly in the night until there was only a pinpoint of flame, and then that, too, was gone. The storm quieted as if it had been beaten. Darkness settled over the diorama. Suddenly the night was broken. A new star was bom into it. It hung motionless for a moment, flaming. Slowly then it began to fall, picked up speed like a spark against a black curtain, and like a spark it died away. "A reminder of the wall?" the Examiner asked calmly. "Entertainment," Fader replied. "People like to watch. If they didn't, the management would take it down. To us it's not a reminder of the wall but a reminder that Man has tried the impossible and failed. But he doesn't give up. He picks up the broken pieces and tries once more, just as the diorama always begins over again." "Courage should have a better goal," the Examiner said. The gaming rooms were crowded. They threaded their way between the tables -- craps, blackjack, poker, faro bank -- the chucka-luck cages, the roulette wheels, the keno boards, and an ancient wheel of fortune, bills fluttering from the outer rim. They heard the immemorial argot: "They miss!... Hit me easy!... And up another five!... The case card is the king of diamonds!... Around and around the little ball goes -- where it stops nobody knows!... Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen..." Around one crap table was a rope fence. Fader ducked under the rope, and held it for the Examiner to follow. The Examiner glanced at the long green table with its white markings and foothigh plastic railing as if the rules of the game were obvious. "It is the privilege of anyone to challenge the person directly above him in financial standing?" "Right," Fader said. There was a glass bowl full of clear, red dice. Fader picked out a pair and tossed them idly against the railing. They turned up a six and a one. "You, as the Banker, can only be challenged by the person directly below you?" "Correct." Fader did tricks with the cubes. The dice appeared and disappeared out of his hands or popped up out of nowhere to balance on fingertips. He moved a hand forward, and the dice appeared to spring out of midair. They spun around on the green felt. A five and a two. "For twenty-five years," the Examiner said, "despite the omniscience of chance, you have beaten off all challengers. That seems like a statistical impossibility." "What everyone overlooks," Fader said wearily, "is the hidden advantage of capital. The man with the biggest bankroll always wins. Chance has to have a little time to establish its impartiality. The first streak of bad luck wipes out the little man. The richest man can outlast everyone." Fader looked at the big clock on the wall. The hands pointed to five minutes after eight. Head's following of young men, the crowd around the table thickened. Only Jan came through the ropes with him. She gave Fader a fleeting, apologetic smile as if to say, He's a fool, I know, but he's mine. It was one more against him, but Fader smiled back. "Gome over here!" Head snarled. Jan went. "Where's the dice?" Fader indicated the glass bowl. "Take your pick." Head rummaged through them until he found a pair he liked. "Let's make it short and sweet. one of us is stony." "You're faded," said Fader. A green-visored croupier, do nated by the house, settled a small computer at the far end of the table. A tote board behind the table lit up with the total assets of Fader and Head and the odds on each. Head rolled the dice, leaning forward, his face tense, his eyes glaring. "Seven!" he demanded. It was a natural. During the next half-hour, Fader learned how Head had earned the name Praying John. The boy exhorted the dice, pleaded with them, shouted at them, prayed to them, threatened and begged them. The dice responded nobly. Head made twenty-five straight passes. As Fader gathered the dice into his large, thick-fingered hands, he realized what he was up against. Almost every person around the table was pulling for Head, betting on him, praying with him that the dice would be kind. Fader glanced back at the board. had dropped to even-money, take your pick. "Billy says he can't do a thing from this distance, and it's too late to get closer. Too much interference, he says . You're on your own." I've been on my own for a long, long time . Fader swung around and whipped out the dice. Seven! He rolled again. A trey! He stared at it for a moment as if he couldn't believe it. He scooped up the dice and rattled them against the railing. "Nine from Carolina!" he said. "And again!" "Up jumped the devil!" Head said gleefully. Fader had sevenedout. When Fader got the dice back apart. Slowly, in spite of everything he could do, Fader lost At three a.m. Praying John sevened-out. He took a deep breath and spun around to study the board. The totals stood at # billion apiece. He swung back. "Let's get this over with. Shoot the roll!" "Everything?" Fader asked quietly. He looked old and gray and tired. It had been a hard day -- the hardest of his life, perhaps. Now this young high-roller goaded him to shoot the works on one roll of the dice. He rubbed his hands back and forth, the dice turning between them. His hands were still steady and sure. "Your dice," the boy said. "Shoot it," Fader said. "You're faded!" It was, without a doubt, the highest roll in the history of craps. Fader whipped the dice against the rail. They bounced off and tumbled backward. When they stopped, there was a five on one die, a four on the other. "Strychnine!" Head shouted, relaxing a little. "Ninety days," Fader muttered. He had swept up the dice instantly. He blew on them and tossed them out again. A one and a three. Then two fives. A six and a four. Two fives. A six and a five. A one and a three. Out of the corner of his eye, he studied John Head. The boy's eyes were glazed with concentration ; sweat beaded his forehead and trickled down his nose to drop in black spots on the green felt. Unexpectedly, Fader rolled the dice. Head started and looked down at the settling dice, his forehead suddenly creased. One die was a three. The other spun on one corner and then toppled. A six. A three and a six. Nine. Fader had made his point. Praying John Head was broke. Incredulous, he stared down at the dice. The Examiner, who had been watching impassively throughout the long game, stepped forward and put his long, thin hand over the dice. "May I?" he asked politely. Fader forgot about Head and studied the Examiner's face as if there were some way to read it, if he only knew how. game still in session in a distant corner and the far-off intermittent rhythm of the slot machines, the room was deserted. Fader sat wearily beside the crap table. He held a die between his fingers by diagonally opposite corners. It rotated in his fingers. The Examiner studied the dice he had picked up. He looked up at Fader. The Recording Angel , Fader thought. "My decision has been made," he said. "Was it ever in doubt?" Fader asked. "I have learned enough about man to know that you wouldn't believe me if I said yes." "You're right," Fader agreed, his lip curling just a little. "The decision is -- no dice. No admittance." The Examiner nodded slowly. "We are not primarily concerned, you see, with the standards or goals of your society. What we are concerned with, is whether that society works. My conclusion is that it does not." "Do you mind telling me how you arrived at it?" "Not at all." The Examiner tossed up the transparent red cubes and caught them. "The very bases of your society are false. Your reason for staying as head of this society for twenty-five years was specious. The only way you could do that was to cheat." "You're wrong, there," Fader said quietly. "It's been necessary only a few times. Each time it has hurt." The very softness of his voice gave evidence of the depth of his emotion. "Each time it was more important that I win." The Examiner's smile was sad. "It always is. I can't accept your statement as truth; you realize that, don't you? And even if it were, you, as the prime representative, stand for the society. A few times is as damning as always." "How did you find out?" Fader asked curiously. The Examiner held out the dice. "They can't throw craps or sevens. One die has two ones, two fives, and two sixes; the other has two threes, two fours, and two fives. Since each number is placed opposite its duplicate and since no one can see around comers, no duplicated numbers are visible. No wonder you won that last bet. The shooter couldn't lose. All he had to do was keep throwing until his number came up again." "Okay," Fader said, shrugging. "They're busters. But would you condemn a world for one pair of educated dice?" "As a symptom of sick society, they are sufficient. Earth is sick, and humanity is sick. The prime representative is a liar and a cheat and a criminal, even in the eyes of his own society." Fader looked up at the saintly face of the Examiner. More than ever he looked like Michael, the avenging angel. "We found you tom and bewildered, groping wildly for the stars before you had even solved the simple problems of social living and the distribution of food. We gave you power and a means of using it, and you let it lead you into decay instead of liberation. Instead of freeing yourself from environment, you immediately set to fashioning a new, falser environment." "Sick," Fader murmured. "Sick," the Examiner repeated. "Sick inside where it is worst. Your society has grown all lopsided. There is such a thing as chance. But what is significant is how we react to chance. We can try to dominate it -- and that becomes skill and science. Or we can accept it as hopelessly beyond control ; we can court it -- and we have magic and animism. "Why do men gamble? It is their surrender to the omnipotence of chance. It strips the relationship of man to his fate down to stark simplicity. 'Am I lucky or unlucky?' asks the gambler. The dice answer. And the answer is destruction. "The animistic mind pleads with fate; the scientific mind tries to insure that fate will be favorable by forcing it to be favorable. As biological experiments, only the scientific response has furthered human progress. As an evolutionary experiment, only scientism has proved workable, because it alone increases our capacity to survive. "As a valid experiment by beings, in their incessant quest to increase their power, gambling must be rejected as a mutation that has failed. The gambler's question to Destiny, the ultimate father surrogate, 'Am I favored?' not only denies that Fate can be dominated, but it rejects the very thought ways that lead to an increase in the domination of fate." "Are you finished?" Fader asked, and his face seemed gray with fatigue. "I can only add," the Examiner said gently, "that I hope Mankind turns away from this false road and finds itself back on its way to fulfillment and the stars." "Very noble," Fader said. "Very moral. You come here with your angel face and your spotless hands, and you say, 'Stop, my friends! Gome no farther until you are pure, like us! And we will give you gifts so that you may put all your efforts into becoming pure of heart. # Nuts! "Your hands aren't clean! They're whited over like sepulchers. Why did you object to our entering your saintly society? Because we were too struggling, too violent, too raw, too competitive. And you've stopped struggling, except to keep what you have. Sure we're cheaters, sometimes, and mean, sometimes, and crude, often. The wonder is that we're ever anything else, and we are. "But you didn't want us among you. Instead you supplied us with power and the means to use it. Why? Was it out of a spirit of sweet charity? Ah, no! Was it even a conscience-money bribe? No, sir! It was a Greek gift, and we would have been wise to inspect it closely to see what secret things were hidden inside. Because these gifts made unnecessary our unrelenting struggle against environment -- that struggle which took us all the way into space before you chanced upon us." Fader was on his feet looking up into the Examiner's face, his voice loud and angry. "What was the motive behind that gift? It was intended to lead to that very degeneration and decay you come now to complain of. "If this is what you wanted, it seems that you have succeeded." The Examiner took a deep breath, but his expression didn't change. "It saddens us to be misunderstood," he said. "But not half as much," Fader taunted, "as to let anyone among you who might not respect your rules. I'll tell you what decay is. It's when the rules become so crystallized that they can't be broken." The Examiner spread his hands helplessly. "There is nothing I can say." "You might answer this," Fader said bitterly. "There must be other races in the same position as humanity. How many of them have passed their entrance exams?" The Examiner studied Fader silently. "I'll answer it myself," Fader said slowly. "The answer is 'none.' There was never a chance, you see, unless we made ourselves over into your image, and that we couldn't do even if we wanted to. We wouldn't play. The game was obviously rigged against us. And there is something rotten about the demands that we sit in the game." "I will be back," the Examiner said, turning away, "in fifty years." "Never mind," Fader yelled after him. "Maybe we'll come out to you." Out of the darkness behind him came a single, violent word : "Traitor!" Fader turned wearily. "Who's that?" It was Praying John Head, his face twisted into a scowl. Behind him was Jan, clinging to his hand. Her eyes searched Fader's face. "You didn't even try to impress him," Head said bitterly. "You tried to make him mad. Why don't you want the wall tom down? I can't figure you. For money you can't ever use you throw away Man's one chance to reach the stars." "I didn't think you'd cheat," said the girl wistfully. "Then you noticed it, too. These old hands must be getting stiff." "I asked Johnny to come back to talk to you before he made a public protest. I told him you had to have a reason. You do, don't you?" "Yes." "Did it concern the Examiner?" "Partly." "Then you did want him to decide against Earth!" Head exploded. "That's right," Fader said. "Traitor!" Head repeated. "Let me explain it," Fader said, shrugging, "and then you can decide whether the word fits. It doesn't matter now, because we have fifty years before the Examiner returns. If we haven't bypassed the wall by then, we never will." "Bypassed?" Jan asked. "How?" "I'll get to that," Fader said. "You accused me of cheating. I presume you spotted the busters that the Examiner saw. But did you see these?" He held up one die between his fingers again and let it rotate. "Loaded!" the boy exclaimed. "And even with these I couldn't win," Fader said ruefully. "I'd say that there was a rather powerful force working against me." "But that's -- there's nothing wrong with that," Head protested. "So you say. How many straight passes can you throw?" "Well, I can throw 'em all night, but I thought -- " "Exactly," Fader said. "You're loaded with PK. You can control the dice with your mind better than I can hope to do with my hands. They're both cheating. You're skillful in one way; I'm skillful in another. We both try to evade chance results. Man is a cheater. He always has been. He always will be. "What happened when our world was quarantined? We turned to gambling. Why? That was the answer I didn't want the Examiner to find. But I couldn't hide it from him. All I could do was to keep shuffling the little pea under the walnut shells and hope that he couldn't follow. Shell game." "But what was the pea?" Jan asked. "The real function of our society. Every society rewards a specific type and tries to breed more of them : philosophers, soldiers, knights, authors, explorers, scientists, inventors, businessmen. , . Our society happens to reward the best gambler." "You?" Head asked bitterly. Fader laughed easily. "No, not me. Look at it this way! When humanity needs a certain quality, it can't breed it as the race horse was bred for speed. There's no one to breed him, and Mankind is forever a wild animal, always unspecialized. So what happens? We depend on evolution. "When environment made muscles valuable, men had muscles. When brains were rewarded, men developed brains. When these become relatively worthless, natural selection ceases to operate in their favor. They degenerate. If a Neanderthal man should catch me alone, he could tear me apart -- but give me a little time to build weapons and traps, and he wouldn't have a chance. "Then the aliens came, and both muscles and brains became worthless. The aliens were obviously so superior to ils that we could never hope to catch up. The solution had to be one that involved neither muscles nor brains. "Some men defy Nature. They find purpose in the universe, intelligence behind Creation, guidance in the selections of evolution. But if there is any purpose, any intelligence, any guidance -- it seems to me that it lies inside the great, unconscious beast that is humanity. "That collective, amorphous thing is stubborn and hard-headed. It won't die easy. If it can't survive one way, it will survive another. It will run fast when running fast will save it, grow muscles when muscles are necessary, develop brains when brains are vital. "In the face of this new challenge, there developed -- not a new talent, but a new society. Was it by chance? Perhaps. But it's significant that this society selected the one talent that could save humanity. "PK. Psychokinesis. From the mental control of matter it's a small step to teleportation -- not to mention the possibilities of telepathy, extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, and the direct control of destiny." Jan turned excitedly to the boy beside her. "Don't you understand, Johnny? You're one of the people who will help put Man out among the stars." "You're the one-eyed jack," Fader said, "the wild card in the deck. And you, too, Jan. You're talented, and your children will be more talented. It always works that way. Money marries money. Intelligence marries intelligence." Head was still sullen. "I don't see why we had to do it the hard way." "That's the way man is," Fader said simply. "He insists on doing things his own way or not at all -- because he wants to, not because he's permitted. When we go into space -- and we will -- it'll be on our own terms, not on the terms of the Galactic Union. We'll go because no one can stop us. And we'll stay there because no one can make us go back! "The aliens wanted to make us over into images of themselves. That's a perennial impossibility -- as any woman in love must recognize." Fader glanced at Jan and smiled. "And, like a woman in love, if they want us they'll have to take us as we are. Or, for that matter, if they don't want us." silent. Only the single light cast a cone of brightness over the green crap table. "That's the other reason you had to lose," Fader said softly. "It isn't good for struggling young men to come into money. A hungry fighter is the best fighter." "Then, even if the Examiner had wanted to," Jan said, "you didn't want him to pass Earth. The reason for developing our special talents would have vanished, and we'd have come in as a hopelessly junior partner forever." "True," Fader said. "Meanwhile I've had to try to suppress scientism. Scientism is always Man's reaction to chance. That's his eternal struggle -- to reduce the role of chance and increase the effect of skill. He cheats. In one form it's science; in another it's psi, the attempt to control chance directly, a mutation that is just coming to flower . # Head began hesitantly, "It sounds like we're drawing to an inside straight , # Head objected. "So far , # Fader said, "we've put a man on the moon -- # The boy smiled luminescently. It was like the drawing of a dark curtain from a window facing the sun. "That's beyond the barrier!" Fader nodded. "Soon we'll be able to put a man anywhere in the galaxy. Then let the Galactic Union reckon with Earth. Let them come to terms with us ! # "What are we waiting for ? # Johnny demanded. "There's work to be done." Fader sighed wearily as if he had just realized that he was very old and very tired. He sank back onto the stool. "The Examiner's getting into his ship . Oh, man , am I tired! This long-distance telepathy should be on union hours. Til be burnt out for a month" Thanks , Louis . You've done a good job. One recruit, coming up. "Examiner just took off in a blaze of nothing. Bon voyage, and all that!" The voice in Fader's head began singing Aloha off-key. Fader grated his teeth and swore he'd have the surgeons open up his right mastoid and put a cut-off switch on the little receiver. Shut up! he thought savagely at the distant telepath. I've got enough head noise of my own! "You go, son," he said to Johnny. "My work is here." "What do you mean?" Jan asked. Her voice was alarmed. "The new worlds are for the young," said Fader, looking a little like Moses, who led his people to the promised land but could not enter himself. "I've got no psi. I'm just a tinhorn gambler without talent who has stayed where he is because of an encyclopedic memory, some manual dexterity -- and a little outside help. I'm just a shill." "A shill?" Head echoed. "That's what I am. A shill!" Slowly a smile rose across the tired crags of his face. "But if a man has to be a shill, at least it's something to be shill to the whole wide universe."    fessor who discovers a new source of electrical energy that anyone can bake -- like a cake -- in his own oven! What happens, as a result, to the great utilities, oil and coal industries, automotive industries, etc. -- in fact, to the whole world economy -- is a story you don't want to miss! Also in this issue is other top-flight science ficI  Captain Jorl thought Arcturus IV was the answer to all he had ever wanted. And it was. But there was also a twist... How can there be an ideal where everything is perfection? Illustrated by Paul Orban waiting in his fore-waist him. bridge; he looked again through its He turned his big body from the heavy, slotted quartz windows and curving windows, quickly calcunow he could see them coming. He lated the time it would take the could make out the toy-like siljeep to reach the flaring stern of houette of their jeep, emerging in the White Whale, figured how reckless, bounding leaps from the many minutes it would take the edge of the cultivated forest. Now pneumatic lift to whisk them three they were racing at full tilt across hundred and twelve feet up to the the hard-packed yellow sand of the fore-waist, and snatched open the desert in a bee-line for the ship door of his liquor cabinet, that had landed them here a scant Sam Garruthers would be the three weeks ago. first one to say it. Captain Nicholas Joel watched Thin, quiet Sam, who'd been in them, their excitement a visible space as ship's surgeon and psything as they pounded up clouds of chiatrist for as long as Joel himself, saffron behind them, and knew It had been twenty-two years since without activating his personal they'd left the Academy together, communicator what they'd have to Sam had taken his specialty traintell him. ing in space medicine, while he, Joel, had let himself get sucked into qualifying as pilot. Twelve years of the Academy. And twenty-two more being ordered around the freezing hell of God's black universe like a toy on a string. And for all of it, Sam still had that look in his dark, brooding eyes -- the look that had been glazed with shock, but which had still not surrendered, the day they told Sam he wasn't going to make pilot. The look would still be there four minutes and thirty seconds from now when he led the others into the fore-waist bridge to holler "We've hit it again!" It would always be. Joel tilted the liquor bottle and one big, clumsy-looking hand poured steadily into the thick glassite flagon he held in the other. He downed it in a gulp. Hit it again hell! An behind Sam there would be the first officer, Dobermann. Little, wiry German who knew more about languages and semantics than the guy who'd invented them, and the best astro-navigator you could find in this or any other galaxy. Sure, they always gave Nicholas Joel nothing but the best. That was part of it. Part and parcel of the whole damn conspiracy. Dobermann wouldn't say anything when he came in. But there'd be a thorough-going, sucessful, mission-accomplished look on his handsome face. Dobermann never missed. And Southard... Still a kid, still wet behind the ears, but a hell of a promising astrophysicist, backed up with plenty of biochemistry and geophysics. It was still a big, romantic adventure to Southard, and he wore the single red, gleaming stripe of ship's second officer on his broad young shoulders as though it was the thick gold circle of a full captaincy. Joel filled the flagon and emptied it a second time. He went back to the windows, the liquor bottle and flagon still in his hands. To most men, he supposed, the panorama that spread for miles from the stem of the up-ended White Whale would be a thing of sheer beauty. It would be hard for them to believe that there existed other planets far beyond the rim of their own hostile Solar System which could equal or exceed the soft beauty of the oasis they called Earth. But there it was -- gentlyrolling, golden desert beneath a temperate, dark-gold sun, flanked at one gently curving edge by a forest that looked as though it had been scientifically planned and landscaped for beauty. It was a big forest that covered a full third of the planet, and at its opposite edge it gave way to twelve thousand miles of unblemished shoreline which descended into gleaming, azure ocean. And in the forest, on the ocean, even on the wide expanse of desert, there were people. Intelligent, strong, peaceful, quiet people, who might have been natives of Earth's Pacific islands of three centuries ago, save that their flesh was lighter in tone; their sun was not as young as Sol. Farmers, mostly, Carruthers had reported. Some merchants, some travelers and explorers, even some men of a very young science, but, mostly, farmers... it was the way they lived. A good way, Joel thought. A good way, in a good place. He looked through the fore-waist bridge windows, and what he saw was beautiful. But he filled the flagon again. A buzzer sounded softly from the compact secondary control console which banked a full third of the bridge's fore bulkhead, and deliberately, Joel let it buzz a second and a third time before he fingered the stud that slid the small metal door open behind him. He turned as they came through it. Fatigue and sweat lined Sam's thin face; Dobermann was audibly out of breath. Southard had to duck slightly to get into the room, but when he straightened he seemed as fresh as when the party had left the ship seventeen days before. Joel returned their salute with the full flagon still in his left hand, and then beat Carruthers to the punch. "All right, so we've hit it one more time! Bully for us -- " He drained the flagon, reached for the bottle. Without Carruthers, there would have been an awkward silence. But after twentytwo years, Sam knew his man. "Ahh, you've shown us more than this, Skipper. I suppose it is a little better than our prelim reports indicate, if you want to get technical. The people want to co-operate. They're intelligent, healthy, and friendly and they realize fully what we're trying to do. They want to help us, and say we're welcome to all the mneurium-# we want. 'Course there's only a few hundred pure megatons of it lying around, but, if you want to get technical -- " "Go to hell," Joel said, and poured his flagon half full. He felt a little better, but it would take more than a half-bottle of Martian Colony Bond and Sam's wise answers to change things. "Go right straight to hell!" He sniffed at the Bond. "So the long arm of Superior Civilization has reached out its clanking claws again to make the Universe a Better Place to Live in, has it? God help 'em if they believed all the hog-wash you fed 'em, Sam." The thin face sobered. "I spoke to them in good faith, Nicholas, and they did believe me. The fact is, they -- " "All right, I get your point! Got my mind made up, so don't start confusing me with facts." He transfixed the three of them with a restless look; a look they had grown used to. It was a gaze that matched the rest of him; the unruly, untrimmed black hair, the short, thick beard which was unneeded on a chin and jaw as big and square as Joel's, the careless, unmilitary carriage of his thick shoulders and blocky body, the blood-shot metalblue eyes themselves. But during the split-second the gaze was upon them, they knew pages were flipping in Joel's massive head. Pages of regulations, procedures, memorized down to the last foot-note. "Let's go in order with your reports," Joel snapped. Southard stepped forward. "Constellation Bootis, Arcturus, planet IV. Preliminary analysis of oresamples indicate rich lodes of mneurium-#, relatively close to the surface, and in unprecedentedly great number. Purity is unbelievably high, with -- # "All right, Southard, good report. Dobermann." "Minimum of linguistic difficulty, coupled with a surprisingly high aptitude on the natives' part for language learning. In the seventeen days I had with them, I'm almost certain those with whom I worked learned at least half as much English as I did of their tongue," the German said. He added, simply, as though the seventeen days of exhausting gesticulating, diagramming, systematizing, learning, recording, had never existed, "There will be no language difficulty, sir." "Good. Now you, Sam, and no shmaltz!" "Healthy people, no cancer, no TB, no coronary troubles -- " "The mneurium-#, I know. Go jj on. "Average IQ in the #'s -- and there's something for us to keep in mind in spite of our big technological and scientific jump on them. They're still working with wood, iron and crude steel, but they won't be for long. Agrarian civilization so far; they've got a representative type of government -- democracy, and a damn good one, and they're psychologically suited for just what they've evolved along that line. They actually practice what they preach, from the individual status right on up through the framework of their government. Open, honest, sincere -- they have to be, because of the high degree of uniformity of IQ, and because -- now get this -- they want to be. It's the way their minds are built, and -- " "All right, so if I believe you, we won't be fighting to get what we terms, that it?" "Yes, skipper. Access to all scientific data with which we can supply them now, and as much more later as they think they'll require, in exchange for reasonable mining rights." "Reasonable?" Joel thundered. He slammed the heavy bottle down on the old-fashioned mahogany desk at his elbow. "Was that in the contract you made with them? How do you know what the hell they mean by reasonable?" "Sir, if I may -- " "All right, Dobermann, go ahead and enlighten me." "I worked a number of hours with them on that point, to make certain there would be no errors in the semantics involved. They have learned, despite their lack of scientific medical knowledge, that as long as there is mneurium-# around, they don't get sick. They trust us to leave enough to insure their own well-being." "That's crazy," Joel shot back at his first officer. "How in God's name can they know about mneurium-# and how to use it when we've only known about it and have been scratching the universe for it for less than thirty years? That's goddam nonsense -- " He refilled the flagon, spilled a little of the potent liquor on his beard as he downed it. "No, Nicholas," Sam said. "You're the bug on history around here. Think a minute." Joel drew a sleeve across his mouth, and pages flipped in his head again. Yes, Sam was right. Back as far as the twentieth century, there had been isolated tribes in South America which had been found free of the diseases that had plagued their more civilized neighbors of the north, arid it had taken the medical experts years to find out exactly why. Invariably, the answer had been usage of the most promising materials provided by nature which were closest at hand. A tribe stumbled onto something, used it -- experimentally at first, then wastefully, but finally, with a thousand years' practice, pretty efficiently. And it had nothing to do with the fact that they still went around with spears and animal-hide shields... "All right, I get your point, Sam," Joel said. Sam quit talking, and for a moment there was silence in the limited confines of the forewaist bridge. Then Joel put the bottle and the flagon down on the desk, turned his back to it and faced them. "From the way you boys talk this thing up, it all must be just jim-dandy. Maybe better than on that rock back in Aldeberan, or even better than we did in Altair, or Fomalhaut, or Procyon Seven, or any of the rest of 'em..." He paused again, watched their faces. They remembered -- all except Southard, who hadn't been with them on any of the old strikes. But his youthful enthusiasm just about made up for the fierce pride that shone in the eyes of the others. B ack home, the white Whale, of all of Earth's great fleet of Explorer-class ships, had hung up the most enviable record. She had brought back rare elements known to men but unobtainable by them within the confines of their own tiny Solar System, or rare life-forms, impossible to study effectively in their native habitats, or precious new data which were beyond the reach of the astronomer's observatory. It meant progress. It meant a living force in the universe, a force of learning and of knowing, which would tolerate no barrier, which would broach neither defeat nor ultimate conclusion. In short, it meant Man. Nicholas Joel knew it, and he still hated space. Since that first indoctrination blast out to the moon and back when he'd been a plebe -- since that day that he'd realized for the first time how big it was. And how big men ought to be, but weren't. Big muscles, but little minds... He still wondered just how the hell they'd sucked him in. They'd hit him somewhere inside, in a place he'd forgotten to guard -- his instructors, his Commandant, the Secretary of Science himself. They'd sweet-talked him into staying those twelve years. Young man, they had told him, yours is a body and a brain with an adaptability to space exploration the like of which has never been duplicated in our records. You hate to fly, yet you are the best cadet pilot ever to enter the Academy. You dislike technical and scientific study, yet your grades in this field are the highest on record. You despise the regimen of the military necessary to survival in Space, yet, unaccountably, your cadet commands have been the most efficient and best handled of any in our knowledge. Young man, they had said, here's the works on a silver platter -- be a pilot -- you owe it to yourself, to the world, to humanity! Say you'll take our ships where no other man would dare, and you can write your own ticket for the rest of your life! But you simply have to be a Pilot , young man... And he remembered how it had been with Sam, who would have moved the Earth with arms and legs tied behind him to have qualified. Sam, who had hungered for it, but had taken a lesser assignment cheerfully, just so, at least, he could be a part of some other pilot's team in space. Sam, who had that look in his eyes. But since his assignment to the White Whale fifteen years ago, there had never been a sign -- not the slightest, that Joel had been able to detect, that he was doing anything but what he most wanted. That took guts, and guts. Joel understood. And so now they'd hit it again. Mneurium-#, the "wonder-element" that science had discovered would put a host of Earth's most dreaded diseases to rout, but which it had not been able to obtain or synthesize despite years of exhaustive effort. Captain Joel, they had told him, the radio-astronomers say there could be mneurium-# somewhere out in Bootis. Get some. And in spite of them and their damned passion for onward-andupward, if they insisted he pilot space to bring them back one new gew-gaw after another to play with, then he'd bring them back gewgaws until they choked! Choked! And the world he wanted -- the world he'd always wanted, would just have to be for somebody else. Then he looked at their faces, and they were waiting. "All right, I get your point! Don't just stand there -- Southard, get your 'copters going! I want a fully plotted area of operation for the next six months, including jump-off point as of tomorrow at # hours, and on this desk by # tonight! Dobermann, you won't have anything to do for awhile, so you can get Southard's servodrillers going for him ; get 'em all out, form 'em on the port flank in details of five. I want to see it by #. Sam, has Dobermann given you any practice in their lingo? Good -- all right, it's time I met 'em -- you'll take me to their capital city or wherever it is their top people are and we'll get things down in black and white. I'll be ready for you in twenty minutes. Any questions?" There weren't. Joel's three officers turned and left, each scrambling to his new assignment, glad to actually get started before something happened to upset the unexpected simplicity of the whole thing. There'd never been a mission that had come off as smoothly as this one was beginning. It promised to make them feel guilty to draw their pay checks for it. For once, it looked as though Joel was going to get what he came after without having to fight down to raw nerve and bone to get it. Good. The Captain had an easy one coming. When they'd gone, Joel dropped his great frame into the ancient chair behind his big desk and got to work with the ship's intercom, flipping it to main circuit. He did ten minutes' talking in six, and Phase One was organized, down to the last ship's guard, down to the last assistant servomech. Then he had fourteen minutes until Carruthers was due, ready to drive him to meet these people in their cultivated forest. So for every one of the fourteen minutes, Captain Nicholas Joel leaned back in the chair, shut his eyes tight, and filled in a little more of the world he wanted. packed dirt, but level, and wide. Occasionally, as Sam Carruthers drove, they would pass through a hamlet, or go by small knots of men and women in carriages and wagons drawn by striped animals resembling Earth's African zebra. The farms were small but numerous, and none, Joel noted, had been entirely cleared; the trees had been thinned, and they were of a far more slender variety than grew elsewhere, but they had not been eliminated. It set well with him. Joel had always liked trees, and he had a feeling he was going to like other people who did to such an obvious . extent. Buildings, he noted, were almost entirely of wood; structures very similar to those he remembered having seen in a history text dealing with the western United States in the nineteenth century. A few were of stone, some of small, brick cubes; all were pleasing enough to the eye. And the people themselves were -- The people looked up as the jeep roared past; looked up from their work in the fields, looked out from their wagons and carriages, looked from their saddled mounts at the roadside. But there was no fear in their glances, only the quick puzzlement of inquiring intelligence. They were straight, well-bodied people, clothed simply in colorful garments which Joel assumed were made of cloth; the men were tall and broad and he could mentally picture the powerful muscles that rippled beneath their shirts. And the women -- The women were the most graceful creatures he had ever seen, even those who were obviously no longer young; they were less fully clad than their men, and Captain Nicholas Joel liked that. He liked it because it was honest. Where there was something beautiful, why in the name of anything holy or otherwise should it be covered up? That was the trouble with Earth and her people. There were too few things of real beauty, and when they did exist, humans seemed to have a psychotic compulsion for either ignoring them or hiding them completely. And those who did hesitate for a stolen moment's admiration were hurriedly hollered back to their jobs. "You're surprised that they're not cluttering up the roads, trying to get a closer look at us?" Sam was hollering over the howl of the warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere. "Good discipline," Joel grunted, still occupied with his own thoughts. "Well, you're partly right. But more than that, we haven't stopped to look at them! It's sort of a halfcourtesy, half-pride they have. They won't slow a stranger down if he doesn't slow them down, figuring that if he wanted to, he would; the prerogative is his. And, if he's not that interested, then neither are they!" "You're sure some expedition didn't get here before we did?" Joel asked. "I mean -- hell, they could be from Earth -- " "Ever hear of an Earthman with two hearts, skipper? But physically that's about the only difference I could find. Psychologically -- " The Space surgeon hesitated. "Psychologically what?" "Take too long to explain -- we're coming into the capital city you were talking about. And besides -- " he grinned in a sidelong glance at Joel, "you might even have the brains to figure it out all by yourself." "Go to hell!" In a moment Carruthers was busy with the jeep, tooling it through narrowing streets, slowing it to almost a walk as men and women hastened out of their way, crowded the board sidewalks to allow them to pass unhampered. The buildings were much like those he had seen in the rural districts; a little larger, a bit taller, but none more than fifty feet in height. Neatly painted, their thin glass windows bright and clean, they did not look like part of a city at all, Joel reflected, much less part of a capital city. And everything was so quiet. Maybe too quiet. He felt a little chill at the base of his spine, but kept looking straight ahead. "You're sure, Sam, about leaving my guns back at the ship?" Carruthers just grinned again. And then they turned abruptly, and hauled up in front of a long, low building of flagstone. "This is it," the surgeon said. "No reporters, no photographers, no autograph seekers, no brass band or politicians. But you're on. Skipper." naked without his guns, and he felt off-balance and out of place. Standing in the sedate, oval-shaped council-chamber with these peaceful-looking people confronting him, he felt clumsy in his heavy black leatheroid uniform, big, highlypolished black boots. He felt as if he looked like what he'd been forced to be on other occasions, facing forms of life so alien that no difference counted -- like a man-atarms, like a conqueror. Suddenly, he was glad Sam had made him leave his guns back at the ship. "Nicholas Joel, United Americas Intergalactic Exploration Fleet, of the Ship White Whale, commanding!" Carruthers was introducing him in English, and he wished that Sam would have had the good sense to have said "This is Captain Joel" and let it go at that. Didn't the grinning idiot know it must have been an awful pill for these people to swallow all at once? That there were, to begin with, such things as other planets and other galaxies -- and that there were, even more incredibly, other creatures that lived on them. And, whether they cared to believe it or not, some of these creatures had just landed among them, and there was nothing they could do about it! Sam was picking his way along now in their speech, and then at an obvious gesture, Joel knew he was being introduced to their top man. Sam waved an arm toward the tallest of the twelve-man group, who arose from the opposite side of a polished wooden table, and bowed gently from the waist. "His Excellency and Prime Govemor, K'hall-ik'hall." Joel hesitated, then returned the bow. He had never bowed in his life, but a salute to somebody dressed in civilian clothes seemed crazy. "Sam, you mean he's Prime Governor of -- " "The whole planet." "Am I always supposed to say his name twice?" "That is his name. That's the way they do it. Now shut up, Skipper, and let me do the talking. I'm going to go through the whole works again with 'em. Then we sign. Then you get a tour of the town so the people can be introduced to you officially. But don't go making any speeches! Behave, and we're in business." "You go to -- " But Sam had already started talking in the liquid-sounding language, and Joel decided it was better for him to keep his own mouth shut and be thought stupid than open it and remove all doubt. Damn it, the whole thing was making him feel just the way he had twenty years ago, when he landed his first explorer on an alien world! It had been that long, and how many hundred meetings with alien life-forms since then, under how many fantastic circumstances, on how many God-forsaken, unworldly places? By now he was supposed to know the score. By now he was supposed to have seen everything. By now he knew the book inside and out, and had the ability to take charge no matter where in the black universe they sent him. Nicholas Joel, United Americas Intergalactic Exploration Fleet, of the Ship White Whale , commanding... But nobody was challenging his right to have what he'd come for! No trouble , that was the hell of it, and -- and there was nothing to hate. For a miserable moment, Captain Nicholas Joel stood becalmed, with not so much as a breeze in his sagging sails. But he would not let them know it. He looked levelly into the eyes of each of the twelve, but even that did little to make him feel more at ease. For he saw wisdom in the lined, kindly faces. He saw a humility and sincerity that matched the simple clothing they wore. He saw a kindness that men talked about in books and sometimes felt in their hearts, but seldom held openly in their faces for the world to see. These men were handsome in their physical stature, but they could have been little men three feet high, and they would have been the biggest that Joel had ever seen. Now they were talking in subdued tones to Sam, and then one produced a document, and handed Sam a slender writing stylus. "Hey Sam -- " The hoarseness of his voice unnerved him, but Joel plowed ahead. "Hadn't you oughtta read that thing?" "It's already been read, Skipper. By Dobermann. It took him three days to draw it up -- he did most of the writing himself. It's already been electrostated ; we've got ten copies of our own. Now keep your mouth shut or they'll think we don't trust them. You sign first, because you're the guest. Then K'hall-i-k'hall, and it's all over." Sam's thin face had a seriousness in it that Joel knew he did not dare question. The trouble is, the thought stung him, you doubt, because you were born and raised on Earth . Sam knows that. And he knows how these people think. And he says sign... So sign, you big boob . Silently, Joel took the stylus from Sam, bent quickly over the papyrus-like document, and put his name, rank and ship where Sam pointed. Then he gave the stylus to Sam, who returned it to K'hall-ik'hall. And in another instant, all the mneurium-# the White Whale could lift clear was theirs for the taking. Joel could converse in the language of his hosts as fluently as either Dobermann or Carruthers, and within a month he had been able to finish a limited round of visits to a full dozen of the smaller cities and towns. These people had respected his wish that he be allowed to roam their streets and public buildings without official escort, and with an ever-quickening fading of his self-consciousness, he did. He did, more and more frequently. And from the vantage point of their peacefully winding roads or their quaint little shops where they dispensed a fluid amazingly similar to Martian Colony Bond, Joel could hate the White Whale from a comfortable distance, and with a healthy, untiring diligence. This he also did, more and more frequently. It was during one of these selfassigned off-duty periods, alone in his personal jeep, that his most recent pint of Bond decided to harass him, and he discovered almost too late that he had ignored a turn of the dirt roadway. He skidded wickedly, and frightened one of the zebra-like animals drawing a vehicle much resembling a fourwheeled surrey. The animal let go with a terrified whinny, and with a sickening splintering noise, the dhennah went plunging off the road into the deep drainage ditch at its edge. There was also another sound, and Joel practically stood the jeep on its nose slewing it to a stop. By the time he was out and running back, the frightened animal had gotten itself out of the ditch and was working frantically to bring the dhennah out after it. But the vehicle was canted at a crazy angle, and it was obvious to Joel that at least one of its starboard wheels was broken, and that it would take more than one kaelli to haul it out. None of this, he reflected as he ran, was going to help diplomatic relations a bit. And he was no Dobermann. But it was none of these things that worried him at the moment. She was screaming bloody murder, and still was hard at it when he jumped into the ditch. She stopped when he clambered up on the steeply tilted narrow seat to which she clung. There was suddenly not a sound from her as his big hands circled her waist and gently lifted her to the ground. Then he discovered that his voice was stuck. Dammit, an explorer captain for over fifteen years, and he didn't know what to say when he banged up some farm girl's dhennah! "I -- ah, am terribly sorry. It will be replaced, of course. Very stupid and clumsy of me. I -- ah, you hurt?" Rather smooth, at that! She smiled. Slender lips, goldencolored eyes, delicately contoured face -- all seemed to smile together. A breeze ruffled her tawny mass of shoulder-length hair, and Nicholas Joel just stood there. "You are forgiven, the dhennah was not a costly one. I know how difficult it must be for you to guide those machines of yours at such terrible speeds... but of course the speeds are necessary to you in your work. Thank you for helping me." Joel reassured himself that if only the conversation were in his mother tongue, he would of course not feel so ridiculously at a loss for words. After all, this young female was only an -- an alien being. "It was my pleasure, of course," Joel said. He thought perhaps if he could manage a smile -- "I am gratified that you accept my clumsiness with such excellent grace. As intruders to begin with, my men and I -- " "Intruders, sir?" She had taken a few steps away from him to stroke the neck of the kaelli and quiet it, but she was still looking at him. "Why intruders? At one time, all the people of this world were not of one great community as they are now, surely you know that. But when one group travelled and visited another, no one thought of it as an intrusion." She laughed. "Are we all not one under the sun?" "But they were of your own kind, from elsewhere on your own planet -- " "A visitor is a visitor," she said, as though suddenly puzzled. "What can it matter where he is from?" Joel started to reply, but checked himself. Of course these people had no way of knowing. Of course they were still under the impression that intelligent life, wherever it might exist, would necessarily be in their own form. The fact that it might not be had never occurred to them! Then that was why they had not feared the White Whale and her crew. It was something Carruthers had probably perceived at once, something he could no doubt explain. But now Joel was seeing it first-hand for himself. Psychologically, this girl and her people were incapable of conceiving a way of life based on different reasons for living than their own, with different motives, different -- ambitions. Just, he reflected, as his own people were psychologically incapable of greeting a stranger without subconscious suspicion. To these people, a visitor was -- a visitor, and therefore a friend! He wondered how many others beside himself, Carruthers and Dobermann knew. "Perhaps it does not matter at all," Joel said, and he was surprised at the gentleness in his voice. He had not felt it that way in his throat for a long time. Not for a terribly long time. "Now, if you'll let me help you with that harness, we'll free your kaelli , and see what can be done about getting you on toward your destination!" Joel's big fingers started fumbling with the thick leather thongs of the kaelli's rig. The harness felt strange and confusing to hands disciplined to the limiting exactnesses of servocircuits and pressure-control studs, and the complexity of their co-ordination was thrown into confusion by sheer simplicity. The girl laughed as she watched his efforts, then guided his hands with her own, and Joel felt a strange warmth mounting in his neck. And when the kaelli was at last freed, he said, "Now then, where can I take you? I owe you something more than just the replacement of your dhennah. I shall drive slowly so that the kaelli can follow, and you can see for yourself what it is like to ride in one of our machines!" "But -- they go like the wind!" "Indeed they do!" Joel laughed, unaccountably pleased with her excitement. "Yes, ma'm, just like the wind!" Quite unexpectedly, she reached for his hand, and Joel clasped hers with a quickness he had not intended. But then he was leading her to the jeep, helping her into it. He started the powerful turbine engine, chuckled aloud at her quick gasp, then joined in her laughter. "Just like the wind!" he cried and they were off. The day was clear and bright and to Joel the air itself seemed to come alive with a heady excitement. This was something, it told him. This was not to hate. This was not to drink in bitterness. This was not to be alone. the fore-waist bridge. There was a full, untouched flagon on the mahogany desk, and the bottle of Martian Colony Bond stood, tightly corked, beside it. He sat down, hating the feel of the chair of command beneath his big body. What he was thinking was wrong, of course. But no man could be two men; a man could not split himself down the middle and say: this is your life here, this is your life there , for it is unthinkable that a man be prisoner of one life only -- No, a man could not do that ; a man had only one life. Wrong, was it? And who, any more a man than himself, could dare to be judge? He would call Carruthers ; he would explain, and Carruthers would inform the rest. As for Command -- A buzzer roared on the desk in front of him. It was the dispatch unit communicator -- it would be Southard. A huge forefinger hit the toggle almost hard enough to wrench it from its socket "Command!" Joel grated into the sensitive pick-up. "Proceed with your message." He reached for the flagon, drained it, filled it again. "Lieutenant Southard calls Command from Servogroup #." The youngster's voice sounded tight, excited. Now what the hell -- "Request task mission. Request task mission. Position -- " Joel quickly jacked in the ship's armory circuit. An alarm klaxon would be electrifying the entire complement of combat personnel stationed in that quarter of the ship even as armory communications was taking down the co-ordinates Southard was dictating. And within one minute and forty-five seconds after that, combat units would be assembling in machine-like precision, deploying into advance order at the ship's stern. And as the two huge sections between the White Whale's slender atmosphere fins opened like hungry steel mouths, disgorging flat, thick-bodied machines with their grim burdens of armed men and destroyer-artillery. Ship's Guard would be taking up defense positions, manning gun stations which commanded an energy potential sufficient to destroy a minor planet in a single, searing second of bluewhite heat. All this was automatic. A dispatch-unit request for task mission was an order, momentarily transcending even Command authority. It worked that way because the men who travelled space had learned that with the first foot they rose off the surface of Earth, theirs was no longer the privilege of living, but the task of survival. Space was emergency. And if you regarded it otherwise, it would kill you. Joel waited. He watched only the sweep second hand on his desk chronometer; he did not need his screens, for he knew too well what was transpiring three hundred and twelve feet below him. He had seen it too many times. And too many times had he waited the necessary two minutes, listened to the taut silence of the waiting communicator. "Command to Southard. Task mission dispatched and advancing. Now describe your situation." "As follows -- " The young lieutenant's voice was still taut, but it was not at the edge of panic. Of that Joel was certain. It was just that this was the first time, and it wasn't a field exercise, and it hadn't just been learned the night before from an Academy manual... "Servounit #, sample tapping with four facilities at two hundred feet. Metal encountered; processed. Object depth-screened; fabricated. Extends from minus two zero zero to minus five two seven. Diameter three zero feet. Further investigation withheld pending arrival of task mission. Over for Command." Over for Command, the young voice said. So many, many times... He was not exactly the same Nicholas Joel, now. He was Command... "All right, boy, sit easy and try to relax. What the hell is it you've got holed up out there?" "It's a -- a space ship, sir." "What class?" "I don't know, sir. It isn't Terrestrial." "All right, what do the counters tell you?" "It's about a thousand years old, sir. That's as close as the counters can come, working off a screen. Perhaps, sir, you'd -- " "Well I don't want to look at pictures! Inform task mission when they show up that I'm coming out for a look around -- and I'll have their hides if they go unnailing things before I get there. You got any Bond with you, Southard?" "Yes sir." "All right, you get my point? Don't drink it all! This is Command, Whale, out!" Joel broke the circuit just as the admittance buzzer went off ; he thumbed a stud and the narrow bulkhead door slid back, admitting Carruthers and Dobermann. "Was wondering when you two were going to report. Sent a T-M to Southard -- says he's found a space ship two hundred feet under the desert. Sometimes I think that kid works too hard. All right, got the 'copter ready?" "Warming up on the waist ramp now," Dobermann said. Joel stood up, reached for his guns and belt and strapped them around his thick middle. He gave Carruthers a quick look. The thin face was taut, almost expressionless, but there was an excitement smouldering in the dark eyes; the old excitement Joel had seen in them so many times before. "No objections to the artillery this time, I take it, Sam?" Joel grunted as he clasped the big buckle, let the weight of the blasters sag their holsters down into position on his thighs. "Damn good of you! And I'm glad you understand these people so well -- while we're on our way maybe you can tell me why they bury space ships." "Maybe we ought to ask them, Skipper," Sam said with a halfsmile on his thin lips. "I get your point. But maybe they should've told us! Come on." sion's guns had been reversed; drawn about the area where Southard's servounits were noisily sucking up sand, they no longer were concentrated on the excavation site, but instead defended it, slender snouts commanding an immense circular field of fire. "You don't trust them at that, do you, Nicholas?" Carruthers said above the racket of the servounits. "Lord, you could slaughter an army -- " "This is what it says to do in the goddamn books!" Joel snapped. "You're the guys who were so glad to make a strike." The heavy, tracked machinery with its towering drill-housings and down-thrust vacuum-scoops whined and growled in a nerve-wrenching discord of power. Men sweated under the mild sun with a silent hurry, with a disciplined excitement. Southard was fast and efficient. Dobermann was silent, watching, analyzing. Carruthers had the hungry look in his eyes that Joel did not understand. And Joel was impatient. It was a tableau of men and machines that he had watched before, and always, at the end of it, there was something big for him to handle -- frustrating if not dangerous, a mind and bone-wearying struggle if not an outright battle. They never came smooth, never. "Forehull clear, sir!" It was Southard, calling from the lip of the immense hole his machines had excavated. "Cut your servos!" Southard signalled to his units, and they muttered slowly into silence, and then the silence hung over them all like a heavy thing, and Captain Nicholas Joel knew that what happened next was up to him. With a motion of one gauntleted hand he brought Dobermann and Carruthers in next to him, and then the three of them walked with a disciplined haste to the sandy lip, past Southard, and looked down. A pitted forehull jutted up out of the moist sand two hundred feet below them, its plates glittering darkly in the rays of the powerful illumination units which had already been lowered. Dobermann' s quick eyes took in each detail in seconds, and then they darted up to Joel's face. Carruthers was silent, and his face was white. "All right, let's get some winchlifts over here!" Joel bellowed. "Torches, can-openers, let's get with it!" And within minutes, Joel was on his way down in a bucket, big boots planted solidly on a small mountain of heavy tools. Dobermann was following, and Carruthers was in the third bucket. Joel's bare hands were exploring the gnurled lip of the fore-hull lock-hatch before either of them hit bottom. Dobermann was first up beside him, a heavy torch cradled in his short, thick arms. "Ready?" "Won't need that thing," Joel grunted. "Nobody locked up when they left. Give me a hand." The hatch, like the rest of the hull, was pitted, but despite the moistness of the sand in which the ship was imbedded, there were no indications of corrosion. Joel made a mental note to have the lubricants in which the hingegymbals were packed analyzed later; they were still as good as new; the hatch was giving almost easily. Carruthers, with an arc lantern, lit their way inside. They walked into what was obviously a pilots' compartment. Instruments, control panels, ack-seats, notations on metal-leaf note-pads which they did not understand; Dobermann copied them. They descended ladder walks into the forewaist; crew compartment. Functional, compact, reflecting the same efficient engineering which they had encountered in the previous compartment. Through a second bulkhead opening; supply compartment. Through another; cargo hold. It was not empty, and loading gear was in evidence, although neatly stowed in its locks. "Mneurium-#," Carruthers said. The words made a hollow sound in the emptiness behind them. They kept going. Armory. All units still in place. Engine room. Dobermann's counter ticked slowly in the stillness. Still a little kick left in the piles. Machine-shop ; lab. Spotless, perfect order. Finally, tubes. The smooth metal gleamed in the light of Carruthers' lamp. And that was all. Joel turned wordlessly and started back up the ladder-walks. Dobermann and Carruthers clanged hollowly after him, scrambling to keep up. Joel didn't stop until he had climbed back into one of the buckets, and then he waved impatiently. Machinery whined above him, and his bucket swung clear. At the lip, he motioned for Southard. "All right, I want ten of your people with technical research rates. Leave them with Dobermann and Carruthers. Issue return orders to your T-M, and then get these units out of here and digging up what we came after." "But -- yes sir." Dobermann and Carruthers were at the lip, climbing out of their buckets. There was a puzzzled look, even on Dobermann's usually taciturn face. "You two," Joel snapped, "will have a crew of researchers. Ten men. Take twenty-four hours and scrape the insides of this thing. Carruthers will report directly to me when you're finished. Dobermann, you'll nail K'hall-i-k'hall to a wall somewhere and don't let him down until you find out what became of whoever flew this tank." He turned and walked away before anyone could protest. the flagon. He looked again at the faded image in the small, rectangular frame, finally returned it to the breast pocket of his tunic. Then he looked up across the mahogany desk at Carruthers and Dobermann. "So," he said slowly, "so he told you he didn't know, did he?" "Yes, Captain, that is what he told me. He was surprised about the space ship. He called the others in. There was the same reaction. They -- " Joel leaped to his feet. "Don't give me that!" he thundered. He grabbed at the bottle of Bond; spilled it as he poured. "You know he knows!" "Captain, I was quite convinced." "Quite convinced, quite convinced, were you... All right, Dobermann, get out of here. You find out anything, let me know. Sam, I want to talk to you. Go on Dobermann, git!" Joel slumped back behind the desk as his first officer pivoted, left. He tried a swallow from the flagon ; fumbled at his tunic pocket for the small frame, extracted it; looked at it again. Then put it back a second time. Carruthers sat down opposite him. "You going to talk to me, Nicholas, or pass out before you get the chance?" "All right, Sam." Joel got up, put the Bond back in its cabinet; emptied the flagon and put it in too. "I get your point. Only you listen. The crew of that ship was deliberately murdered. Cold-bloodedly murdered, and it isn't going to happen to us." "I see." The ship's surgeon eyed the tips of his fingernails, then slowly looked up into Joel's red, swollen face. "Naturally, there wouldn't be any bodies around to prove your theory, would there, skipper? And no signs of struggle. We didn't see any. Of course, their guns were racked up pretty neatly -- But it's all there in the report -- " he waved a slender hand toward a roll of tape on the desk. "Never mind your sarcastic technicalities! They were -- " "Nicholas, sit down. And listen." "All right. But I don't get your point! And I don't want any of your double-talk! The trouble with you guys -- " "First of all, Nicholas, you know that crew wasn't murdered or anything of the kind. And you know, and Dobermann realizes that you know he knows, that K'hall-i-k'hall was lying in his teeth. And K'hall-ik'hall knows we know it." Joel lowered his eyes. "All right, Sam," he said. No, there hadn't been any use in trying to drum up a bunch of tripe -- no use in trying to fool Sam. He had known that from the start. But sometimes -- sometimes, even when a man knew he was fooling himself, he had to give it a try, just to see -- "They went native, didn't they, Sam?" he said. "Yes, Skipper. They did. Somebody back where they came from needed that mneurium-# real bad. Somebody had guts and sweat and brains enough to get ships into space looking for it. And in their own way, somebody had faith enough to think they'd get it if it was to be found. Only, as you say -- " "Liked it here, I suppose. Liked it better than anything they'd ever seen before -- and that can of theirs had a thumping set of drives, so they'd seen plenty." There was silence for a moment. And then Sam said, "Well, Nicholas, there it is. The psychology of the thing is obvious enough, isn't it?" Carruthers gave him a meaningful look, and Joel's nerves rebelled at it. "All right, I get your point!" A big fist slammed down on the desktop. "So somebody didn't get their mneurium-#! Somebody probably ornery enough to keep on living anyway. What do you want to bet they're still going strong, who or wherever they are out in that black hell up there? What do you want to bet, Sam?" The surgeon's thin lips smiled gently. "I'd bet right along with you, Nicholas. They're probably still going strong. I imagine they made out." "But K'hall-i-k'hall -- " "Is proprietor of a very pleasant world. A world of very nice people, Nicholas, who enjoy living in, their way, and get a kick out of seeing other people enjoy it. They think a little differently than a lot of folks." "That makes 'em bad, I suppose?" "No." Joel looked into the thin face, the intent, dark eyes. The look was in them. And Joel guessed he was finally letting himself realize what the look really meant. It was a look that meant a hunger for all that Joel hated, and more... It was a look that meant, even now after all these years, that Sam still hurt inside, and hurt badly. "Why -- why couldn't it have been the other way around , Sam," Joel said hoarsely. The other looked up at him. "You do hate it that much, don't you." "Look Sam, you've gotta get my point! I don't think that crew did anything wrong! They didn't. They just decided to stop being hunks of machinery." Carruthers smiled. "I get your point. Skipper. And I'm going to let you figure this one out all by yourself. But I'd like to tell you something first, just sort of as a point of information; maybe it'll help. Skipper, I had a girl once, too." Joel stood still. Then he turned, opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it hard shut. "They told me I couldn't pilot. But I could help, and my help was needed -- everybody's was, because this wasn't a matter of a govemment project. This was a matter of a race of people who were building a ladder -- a big, tall ladder, Nicholas. Sometimes it was a killer. Sometimes a heartbreaker. Sometimes a laughingstock. But it belonged to men , and they lived and died for it; they built it , and it's theirs to climb , Nicholas!" Joel watched the other's worn face, and now the hurt was naked in it. "She said, Nicholas, that it was all off if I decided to go up to space. I loved her, Skipper. And I loved the tall ladder" Joel whirled. "Sure, and what's it got us, Sam? A bellyful of cold, aching loneliness -- our guts twisted and squeezed until the life's dried up in 'em -- and what do we get? What do those wrangling, yapping, bellyaching rotters back home give us for it? Pension us off when we can't see our blast-off studs anymore and forget about us. "They take the stuff we bring 'em -- just as if it grew on trees, just as if it grew into a neat, pretty package somewhere all by itself! With money they can buy it -- with enough money they can buy all of it! Even if we had to get it with the air sucked out of us, with our brains boiled out of us, with our crazy heads busted in. "And you know what, Sam? There was even a time when they said we couldn't do it at all! A hundred years ago, they laughed at us for trying to get to the moon! They laughed, Sam -- and those who didn't laugh didn't even give a damn at all! "So I was to tell the girl I'd marry her later, but that right now they thought I ought to be a pilot! I was to say to my life : I'll live you later, but right now I've got to be a .pilot... And I was to freeze my insides for twenty years showing 'em they were wrong to laugh, and that it was time they gave a damn, that what I could bring home was going to mean a lot to the world they live on! "And like a fool I did! "And Sam -- Sam, they're still yapping like little dogs for a piece of meat -- not just a good piece of meat, but all wrapped up nice and fancy, no mistakes allowed, every time they whistle! And the whistling gets so easy, Sam -- so easy. You can even do it while you're stabbing your neighbor in the back, while you're selling his kids down the river -- even while you're taking your next breath to yap some more! "They can go to hell, Sam! They can go to hell." Joel slumped down in the chair behind the mahogany desk. The surgeon looked at him, looked away. "You've made up your mind, then." "That's right." "I suppose Dobermann and I can get the ship back somehow." "You'll make it." "I guess we will. Unless the rest feel the way you do -- and I know half the crew thinks this is quite a place. In which case, of course, I suppose they'll survive, back home, even without the mneurium-# -- they have for a long time. But there is one thing." "Yeah, yeah." "These people are fine people, as you've -- found out. You couldn't even replace that dhennah " "How did you -- " "They're swell folks, Nicholas, and always will be," the surgeon said softly, "and they've never built a thing, and never will. "They don't know greed, because no one has ever achieved anything worth another's wanting. "They don't know jealousy, because no one has ever obtained anything that another couldn't. "They don't know hate, because no one has ever discovered a thing for which to fight that another thinks of sufficient value to fight for. "Only -- if they don't know hate or jealousy, Skipper -- then, they don # t know love ! # Quietly, Carruthers rose from his chair. For a moment, he hesitated. "What is it you're lonely for, Nicholas?" he asked, and then he left the fore-waist bridge. sun-fire against the blackness of the cool night, and a thunder of power. Slowly, ponderously, the White Whale backed down her column of flame, hesitated, flared again for a final time from her thick stem, and then settled to Earth. Gantries rolled into position. And the sound of lock-hatches clanging open thrilled the length of the White Whale , and there were the muffled voices of men, and the voices became shouts with the joy loud in them. The men trooped down from their great metal monster as fast as the lifts would carry them, and in small groups and in crowds they made their boistrous way across the landing plaza and toward home. And when the shouts had died, a last man descended the smooth sides of the White Whale . His eyes glanced over the great bulk of her, making certain she was secure. Then he, too, walked from her, but not as quickly as the rest. Captain Nicholas Joel walked slowly, because he was tired. On every side of him, in dark shadow against the night, there were tall, slender, streamlined shapes pointing toward the stars. His slow boot-steps echoed from their hulls as he passed, a tiny midge of a thing, between them. As Sam had said, these were things that Man had made. And among them again was the White Whale . They had said he was a good pilot.    Who so clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any theory simply on account of its marvelousness. -- Thomas Huxley Life is the uninterrupted progression of the past, which gnaws at the future, and swells as it advances. -- Bergson Illustrated by Ed Emsh Where there's a will there's a way; and love can be a powerful motive. But a hundred years of waiting for your man to come home requires something else... as in this legend of Philip and Miranda. One Love Have I suppers, which were being revived at the time. Philip had just arrived in the little academic village that evening and he had just finished unpacking his clothes and his books. There had been nothing more for him to do till morning when he was due to report at the university, and feeling restless, and feeling a little lonely too (as he'd admitted to Miranda later), he had left the boarding house with the intention of wandering about the village till he was tired enough to sleep. He had hardly gone two blocks, however, before he had come to the brightly lit community hall where the supper was in progress, and strangely intrigued, perhaps motivated by the stirring of some pleasant racial memory, he had paused before the entrance. Through the wide-flung doors he had seen the long table in the middle of the floor, and the foodladen tables, each with a girl in blue behind it, lining the walls. He had seen the men and women passing the food tables, carrying trays, and he had heard the clatter of dishes and the reassuring sound of homely voices. He had noticed the sign above the entrance then, and the simplicity of it had touched and filled him with a yearning he hadn't experienced since he was a boy, and he had climbed the wide steps that led to the open doors and stepped into the hall. It was a warm night in September and the curtains at the big windows were breathing in a gentle wind. He saw her instantly. She was behind the ham sandwich table on the opposite side of the room, tall, darkhaired, her face a lovely flower above the blue petals of her collar. The moment he stepped through the doorway she became the cynosure of the scene, and everything else -- tables, diners, walls, floor -- became vague extraneous details which an artist adds to a picture to accentuate its central subject. He was only dimly aware of the other people as he walked across the room. He was halfway to her table, before she looked up and saw him. Their eyes touched then, her blue ones and his gray; touched and blended, achieved a moment apart from time. And he had fallen in love with her, and she with him, and it didn't matter what the Freudian psychologists said about that kind of love because the Freudian psychologists simply didn't know about that kind of love, about the way it was to walk into a room and see a girl and know instantly, without understanding how you knew -- or caring even -- that she, and she alone, was the girl for you, the girl you wanted and had always wanted, would want forever -- Forever and a day .  . His hands were shaking again and he made them place a cigarette between his lips and then he made them light it. But when they had finished the task and the first pale exhalation of smoke was hovering in the little compartment, they were still shaking, and he held them tightly together on his lap and forced his eyes to look out the window of the monorail car at the passing countryside. The land was a tired green, a September green. There was goldenrod on hillsides, and the tips of sumac leaves were just beginning to redden. The car swayed as the overhead rail curved around a hill and spanned a valley. It was a lovely valley but it wasn't a familiar one. However, Philip wasn't perturbed : the car was still too far from Cedarville for him to be seeing familiar places. He'd never been much for traveling and it would be some time yet before he could start looking for remembered hills and forests, valleys, roads, houses -- Houses sometimes stood for a hundred years. Not very often, maybe, but once in a while. It wasn't too much to ask. He lay his head back on the pneumatic head rest and tried to relax. That was what the Deep Freeze Rehabilitation Director had instructed him to do. "Relax. Keep your mind empty. Let things enter into your awareness gradually, and above all don't think of the past." Relax, Philip thought. Don't think of the past. The past is past, past, past... The car swayed again and his head turned slightly. The monorail bordered a spaceport at this point, but he had never seen a spaceport before and for a moment he thought that the car was passing through a vast man-made desert. Then he saw the lofty metallic towers pointing proudly into the afternoon sky, and presently he realized that they weren't towers at all, but ships instead. He stared at them, half frightened. They were one of the phenomena of the new era for which he was unprepared. There had been spaceships in his own era of course, but there hadn't been very many of them and they had been rather puny affairs, strictly limited to interplanetary travel. They bore no resemblance to the magnificent structures spread out before his eyes now. The Sweike Drive hadn't been discovered till the year of his trial, and he began to realize the effect it had had on space travel during the ensuing century. In a way it was not surprising. Certainly the stars were a greater incentive to man than the lifeless planets of the home system ever could have been. Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Altair, Vega -- One of the ships had gone as far as Arcturus, the Rehabilitation Director had told him. It had returned scarcely six months ago after an absence of almost # years. Philip shook his head. It was data he could not accept, data too fantastic for him to accept. To him it belonged in a probability story, a story that you read with interest, then forget the moment you laid it aside. He had always considered himself modern. He had always kept abreast of his age and , accepted change as a part of the destiny of man. Scientific progress had never dismayed him; rather, it had stimulated him, and in his chosen field of political philosophy he had been far ahead of his contemporaries, both in vision and in practical application. He had been, in fact, the epitome of modern civilized man -- One hundred years ago... Wearily he turned his eyes from the window and regarded the gray walls of the compartment. He remembered his cigarette when it nipped his fingers, and he dropped it into the disposal tray. He picked up the magazine he had been trying to read some time before and tried to read it again, but his mind stumbled over unfamiliar words, over outrageous idioms, faltered before undreamed-of concepts. The magazine slipped from his fingers to the seat again and he let it lie there. He felt like an old, old man, yet, in a subjective sense he wasn't old at all. Despite the fact that he had been born one hundred and twentyseven years ago, he was really only twenty-seven. For the years in the Deep Freeze didn't count -- a hundred year term in suspended animation was nothing more than a wink in subjective time. He lay his head back on the head rest again. Relax, he told himself. Don't think of the past. The past is past past past... Tentatively he closed his eyes. The moment he did so he knew it had been a mistake, but it was too late then, for the time stream already had eddied back more than a hundred years to a swiftly flowing September current...  It had been a glorious day for a picnic and they had discovered a quiet place on a hill above the village. There was a cool spring not far away, and above their heads an enormous oak spread its branches against a lazy autumn sky. Miranda had packed liverwurst sandwiches in little pink bags and she had made potato salad. She spread a linen tablecloth on the grass, and they ate facing each other, looking into each other's eyes. A light wind gamboled about them, left ephemeral footprints on the hillside. The potato salad had been rather flat, but he had eaten two helpings so that she wouldn't suspect that he didn't like it; and he'd also eaten two of the liverwurst sandwiches, though he didn't care for liverwurst at all. After they finished eating they drank coffee, Miranda pouring it from the large picnic thermos into paper cups. She had been very careful not to spill a drop, but she had spilt a whole cup instead, on his shirtsleeve. She had been contrite and on the verge of tears, but he had only loved her all the more; because her awkwardness was as much a part of her as her dark brown hair, as her blue eyes, as her dimples and her smile. It softened the firm maturity of her young woman's body, lent her movements a school-girlish charm; put him at ease in the aura of her beauty. For it was reassuring to know that so resplendent a goddess as Miranda had human frailties just as lesser creatures did. After the coffee they had reclined in the shade, and Miranda had recited "Afternoon on a Hill" and Philip had remembered some of Rupert Brooke's "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester". Miranda was in her final year at the university -- she was twenty-one -- and she was majoring in English Literature. That had put them on common ground from the start, for Philip had loved literature since the moment he had opened Huckleberry Finn as a boy, and during the ensuing years he had never lost contact with it. He had been affecting a pipe at the time (a pipe lent you a desperately needed dignity when you were only twenty-six and commencing your first semester of teaching), and Miranda had filled it for him, holding his lighter over the bowl while he puffed the tobacco into ruddy life... It had been such a splendid afternoon, such a glorious aftemon, filled with September wind and September sunshine, with soft words and quiet laughter. The sun was quite low when they prepared to leave, and Philip hadn't wanted to leave at all. Miranda had seemed reluctant too, folding the linen tablecloth slowly, being far more meticulous than she usually was when she folded things, and then picking up the bowl half filled with potato salad, intending to set it in the picnic basket. She didn't quite make the basket, however, for the bowl was large and clumsy and she was using only one hand. It escaped her fingers somehow, and overturned, and his lap was just beneath. That had been the last time he had ever worn his Madagascar slacks. Her eyes had become so big and so round with dismay that he would have laughed if they had been anyone else's eyes besides Miranda's. You could never laugh at Miranda's eyes; they were too deep and too blue. He had only smiled instead, and said it didn't matter, and wiped his slacks with his handkerchief. Then he had seen her tears, and he had seen her standing there helplessly, tall and gawky, a child really, a lovely child who had become a woman a little too soon, and a beautiful woman too. And something within him had collapsed and a softness had spread all through him, and he had taken her into his arms and said, "Miranda, Miranda. Will you marry me, Miranda?" The spaceport was far behind and the car was twisting through hills, humming on its overhead rail. It skimmed the treetops of a forest and passed high above a river. Looking down at the river bank, Philip saw his first familiar landmark. It was nothing more than a pile of crumbled masonry now, overgrown with river weeds and sumac, but once, he knew, yesterday or a hundred years ago, it had been a public villa, and he had spent an afternoon on one of its sun splashed patios, sipping cocktails and idly watching the white flurries of sails on the blue water below. And thinking of nothing, absolutely nothing -- Except Miranda. Desperately he forced her out of his mind. It had been all right to think of her a century ago. It wasn't now. He couldn't think of her now because thinking of her tore him apart; because he had a reality to face and if he thought of her the way she had been a hundred years ago he wouldn't be able to face it -- he wouldn't be able to search for her in the Gedarville cemetery and put flowers on her grave. The Rehabilitation Director had told him that in a way his sentence had been merciful, merciful by accident of course, and not design. It would have been far worse, the Rehabilitation Director had said, for him to have been sentenced for only fifty years and then to have gone home, a man of twenty-seven, to a wife who had just passed seventy-two. But it was naive to speak of mercy, even accidental mercy, in connection with the age of the Congressional Regime. An age that could condemn a man to suspended animation, tear him forcibly from the moment in time where he belonged, to be resurrected decades later into a moment in time where he did not belong -- an age like that had no mercy, had no conception of the meaning of the word. Such an age was brutal, or more brutal, or less brutal; but it was never merciful. And an age like the present one, while it had rediscovered mercy, was incapable of bestowing it upon a resurrected criminal. It could apologize to him for the cruelty of of the preceding age, and it could remunerate him handsomely for the lost years, make him independent for life; but it could not give him back that moment in time that was uniquely his own, it could not bring back the soft smile and the unforgettable laughter of the woman he loved. It could not obliterate a cemetery lot with a grave that had no right to be there, a grave that had not been there a subjective yesterday ago. It could not erase the words "Miranda Lorring, b. #, d. # -- " or was it "# -- "? -- he couldn't know of course, not yet, but he hoped she'd lived long and happily, and that she'd remarried and had children. She had been meant to have children. She had been too full of love not to have had them. But if she had remarried, then her name wouldn't be Miranda Lorring. It would be Miranda something else, Miranda Green, perhaps, or Miranda Smith; and perhaps she had moved away from Cedarville, perhaps he was going home for nothing. No, not for nothing. He'd at least be able to trace her from Cedarville, trace her to wherever she'd gone to live, find her grave and cover it with forgetme-nots -- forget-me-nots had been her favorite flower -- and shed a tear on some quiet afternoon, her  kiss of a hundred years ago a warm memory on his lips. He got up in the gently swaying compartment and stepped over to the water cooler and dialed a drink. He had to do something, anything at all, to distract his mind. And the dial was so simple, so child-simple, requiring but the flick of his finger, and no thought, no attention. It could not interrupt the flow of his thoughts even briefly, and the cool taste of the water only gave the flow impetus, sent it churning through his mind, wildly, turning his knees weak, sending him staggering back to the seat, his grief a tight-packed lump swelling upward from his chest to his throat, and the memories, released, flowing freely now, catching him up and carrying him back to the light days, to the bright glorious days, back to his finest moment -- Miranda had worn blue and Philip had worn his academic dacrons. The Cedarville justice of the peace had performed the ceremony, being very brusque about it, saying the words as fast as he could and even holding out his hand for the fee the moment he had finished. But Philip had not minded. Nothing seemed ugly to him that day, not even the November rain that began to fall when they left the justice's house, not even the fact that he had been unable to obtain leave of absence from the university. The wedding took place on Friday night and that gave them Saturday and Sunday; but two days weren't enough for a trip, and they decided to spend their honeymoon in the little house Philip had bought on Maple Street. It was an adorable house, Miranda said for the hundreth time when they paused before it in the rain. Philip thought so too. It was set well back from the street and there were two catalpa trees in the front yard, one on either side of the little walk. There was a tiny porch, latticed on each side, and a twentieth century paneled door. He had carried her over the threshold, breathing a little hard, for she was quite heavy, and set her down in the middle of the living room. All of his books were there, on built-in shelves on either side of the open fireplace, and Miranda's knickknacks covered the mantel. The new parlor suite matched the mauve-grey curtains. She had been shy when he kissed her, and he hadn't known quite what to say. Being alone together in their own house involved an intimacy for which neither of them had been prepared, despite all the whispered phrases and stolen kisses, the looks passed in the university corridors, the afternoons shared, and the autumn evenings walking together along leaf-strewn streets. Finally she had said, "I'll make some coffee," and had gone into the kitchen. The first thing she had done was to drop the coffee canister, and there was the coffee, dark against the gleaming floor, and there was Miranda, her blue eyes misted, lovely in her blue dress, a goddess in the room, his goddess; and then a goddess in his arms, soft-lipped and pliant, then warm and suddenly tight-pressed against him, her arms about his neck and her dark hair soft against his face A village showed in the distance, between wooded hills. It was a deserted village and it had fallen into ruin, but there were remnants of remembered buildings still standing and Philip recognized it as a little town not far from Cedarville. He had very few memories associated with it, so he experienced but little pain. He experienced fear instead, for he knew that very soon the car would be slowing, that shortly he would be stepping down to the rotting platform of the Cedarville station. And he knew that he would be seeing another deserted village, one with many memories, and he was afraid that he couldn't endure the sight of remembered streets choked with weeds, of beloved houses fallen into decay, of vacant staring windows that long ago had glowed with warmth and life. The Rehabilitation Director had explained about the deserted villages, the emptying cities, the approaching desuetude of Earth. Interstellar Travel had given back the dream that Interplanetary Travel had taken away. Arid Venus and bleak Mars were uninhabitable, and the ice-choked outer planets weren't planets at all, but wheeling glaciers glinting malevolently in pale sunlight. Alpha Centauri # was something else, however, and Sirius #I was a dream come true. The Sweike Drive had delivered Man from the dilemma in which his proclivity to overproduce himself had involved him, and Earth was losing its population as fast as ships could be built to transport colonists to the stars. There were colonies as far out as Vega and before long there would be one in the Arcturus system. Except for the crews who manned the ships, interstellar runs were a one way proposition. People went out to distant suns and settled in spacious valleys, in virgin timberlands, at the feet of unexploited mountains. They did not return. And it was better that way, the Rehabilitation Director had said, for a one way ticket resolved the otherwise irresolvable problem of the Lorentz transformation. Philip looked out at the tumbled green hills through which the car was passing. It was late afternoon, and long shadows lay coolly in deep valleys. The sun was low in the sky, reddening, and around it cumulus clouds were becoming riotous with color. A wind wrinkled the foliage of new forests, bent the meadow grass on quiet hillsides. He sighed. Earth was sufficient for him. The stars could give him nothing that he could not find here: a woodland to walk in, a stream to read by, a blue sky to soften his sorrow... The tumbled hills gave way to fields, and the fields ushered in a vaguely familiar stand of cedars. He became aware that the car was slowing, and glancing up at the station screen he saw the nostalgic name spelled out in luminescent numbly and pulled his slender valise from the overhead rack. His chest was tight and he could feel a throbbing in his temple. Through the window he caught glimpses of outlying houses, of collapsed walls and sagging roofs, of moldering porches and overgrown yards. For a moment he thought that he couldn't go through with it, that he couldn't force himself to go through with it. Then he realized that the car had stopped, and he saw the compartment door slide open and the metallic steps leaf out. He descended the steps without thinking, down to the reinforced platform. His feet had hardly touched the ancient timbers before the car was in motion again, humming swiftly away on its overhead rail, losing itself in the haze of approaching evening. He stood without moving for a long time. The utter silence that precedes evening in the country was all around him. In the west, the wake of the sun was deepening from orange to scarlet, and the first night shadows were creeping in from the east. Presently he turned and started up the street that led to the center of the village. He walked slowly, avoiding the clumps of grass that had thrust up through the cracks and crevices in the old macadam, ducking beneath the low limbs of tangled maples. The first houses began to appear, standing forlornly in their jungles of yards. Philip looked at them and they looked back with their sunken staring eyes, and he looked quickly away. When he reached the point where the street sloped down into the little valley where the village proper lay, he paused. The cemetery was on the opposite slope of the valley and to reach it he would have to pass Maple Street, the community hall, the university, and half a hundred other remembered places. No matter how much he steeled himself, he would experience the tug of a thousand associations, relive a thousand cherished moments. Suddenly his strength drained from him and he sat down on his upended valise. What is hell? he asked himself. Hell, he answered himself, is the status reserved for the individuals of a totalitarian state who voice truths contrary to the rigid credo of that state; who write books criticizing the self-appointed guardians of mass man's intellectual boundaries. Hell is what remains to a man when everything he loves has been taken away... It had been a modest book, rather thin, with an academic jacket done in quiet blue. It had been published during the fall of the same year he had married Miranda, and at first it had made no stir at all. The name of it had been The New Sanhedrin. Then, during the winter, it had caught the collective eye of that subdivision of the Congressional State known as the Subversive Literature Investigative Body, and almost immediately accusations had begun to darken the front pages of newspapers and to resound on the no time. It set out to crucify Philip, the way the high priests of the Sanhedrin had set out to crucify Christ over two thousand years ago. He had not believed they would go so far. In developing his analogy between the Congressional State and the Sanhedrin, demonstrating how both guarded their supreme power by eliminating everyone who deviated from the existent thoughtworld, he had anticipated publicity, perhaps even notoriety. He had never anticipated imprisonment, trial, and condemnation; he had never dreamed that a political crime could rate the supreme punishment of that new device of inhuman ingenuity which had supplanted the chair and the gas chamber and the gallows -- the Suspended Animation Chambers popularly known as the Deep Freeze. He had underestimated the power of his own prose and he had underestimated the power of the group his prose had censured. He had forgotten that totalitarian governments are always on the lookout for scapegoats; someone to make an example of, a person with few funds and with no political influence, and preferably a person engaged in one of the professions which the mass of men have always resented. Specifically, an obscure political philosopher. He had forgotten, but he had remembered. He had remembered on that bleak morning in April, when he heard the puppet judge intone the sentence -- "One hundred years suspended animation for subversive activities against the existent governing body, term to begin September #, # and to expire September #, #. Gradien cell locks to be employed, so that any attempt by future governing authorities to alleviate said term shall result in the instant death of the prisoner... The months between April and September had fled like light. Miranda visited him every day, and the two of them tried to force the rest of their lives into fleeting seconds, into precious moments that kept slipping through their fingers. In May they celebrated Philip's birthday, and in July, Miranda's The celebration in each case consisted of a "Happy Birthday, darling," and a kiss stolen behind the omnipresent guard's back. And all the while he had seen the words in her eyes, the words she had wanted to say desperately and couldn't say, the words, "I'll wait for you, darling." And he knew that she would have waited if she only could have, that she would have waited gladly; but no woman could wait for you a hundred years, no matter how much she loved you, no matter how faithful she was. He had seen the words in her eyes in the last moment, had seen them trembling on her lips ; and he had known what not being able to say them had done to her. He had seen the pain in the soft lines of her child-like face, in the curve of her sensitive mouth, and he had felt it in her farewell kiss -- the anguish, the despair, the hopelessness. And he had stood there woodenly before the elevator, between the guards, unable to cry because tears were inadequate, unable to smile because his lips were stiff, because his cheeks were stone, and his jaw granite. She was the last thing he saw before the elevator door slid shut, and that was as it should have been. She was standing in front of the Deep Freeze window and behind her, behind the cruel interstices of wire mesh, the blue September sky showed, the exact hue of her eyes. That was the way he had remembered her during the descent to the underground units and along the clammy corridor to his refrigerated cell... whether they be collective or individual, are numbered. The budding dictatorship of Philip's day was no more than an ugly memory now. The Sweike Drive had thwarted it, had prevented it from coming into flower. For man's frustrations faded, when he found that he could reach the stars; and without frustrations to exploit, no dictatorship can survive. But the harm small men do outlives them, Philip thought. And if that axiom had been true before the advent of the Deep Freeze, it was doubly true now. With the Deep Freeze man had attained Greek tragedy. He lit a cigarette and the bright flame of his lighter brought the deepening shadows of the street into bold relief. With a shock he realized that night had fallen, and looking up between the tangled trees he saw the first star. He stood up and started down the sloping street. As he progressed, more stars came out, bringing the ancient macadam into dim reality. A night wind came up and breathed in the trees, whispered in the wild timothy that had preempted tidy lawns, rattled rachitic shutters. He knew that seeing the house would only cause him pain, but it was a pain he had to endure, for homecoming would not be complete until he had stepped upon his own doorstep. So when he came to Maple Street he turned down the overgrown sidewalk, making his way slowly between giant hedges and riotous saplings. For a moment he thought he saw the flicker of a light far down the street, but he could not be sure. He knew of course that there was very little chance that the house would still be standing -- a hundred years is a long time for a house to live -- that if it were still standing it would probably be changed beyond recognition, decayed beyond recognition. And yet, it was still standing and it had not changed at all. It was just the same as it had been when he had left it over a hundred years ago, and there was a light shining in the living room window. He stood very still in the shambles of the street. The house isn't real, he told himself. It can't be real. I won't believe that it's real until I touch it, until I feel its wood beneath my fingertips, its floor beneath my feet. He walked slowly up the little walk. The front lawn was neatly trimmed and there were two tiny catalpa trees standing in newly turned plots of ground. He mounted the steps to the latticed porch and the steps were solid beneath his feet and gave forth the sound of his footsteps. He touched the print lock of the door with the tip of his ring finger and the door obediently opened. Diffidently he stepped over the threshold and the door swung gently to behind him. There was a mauve-grey parlor suite in the living room and it matched the mauve-grey curtains on the windows. Pine knots were ruddy in the open fireplace and his books stood in stately rows on the flanking built-in shelves. Miranda's knickknacks covered the mantel. His easy chair was drawn up before the fire and his slippers were waiting on the floor beside it. His favorite pipe reposed on a nearby end table and a canister of his favorite tobacco stood beside it. On the arm of the chair was a brand new copy of The New Sanhedrin . He stood immobile just within the door, trying hard to breathe. Then he superimposed a rigid objectivity upon the subjective chaos of his thoughts, and forced himself to see the room as it really was and not as he wished it to be. The lamp in the window was like the lamp Miranda had kept in the window a hundred years ago, but it wasn't the same lamp. It was a duplication. And the parlor suite was very much like the one that had been in the room a hundred years ago when he had carried Miranda over the threshold, and yet it wasn't quite the same, and neither were the curtains. There were differences in the material, in the design -- slight differences, but apparent enough if you looked for them. And his easy chair -- that was a duplication too, as were his slippers and his pipe; The New San he dr in. The fireplace was the same, and yet not quite the same : the pattern of the bricks was different, the bricks themselves were different, the mantel was different. And the knickknacks on the mantel -- He choked back a sob as he walked over to examine them more closely, for they were not duplications. They were originals and time had been unkind to them. Some of them were broken and a patina of the years covered all of them. They were like children's toys found in an attic on a rainy day... He bent over his books, and they were originals too. He pulled one from the shelf and opened it. The yellowed pages betrayed the passage of the years and he replaced it tenderly. Then he noticed the diary on the topmost shelf. He took it down with trembling hands, opened and turned its pages. When he saw the familiar handwriting, he knew whose diary it was and suddenly his knees were weak and he could not stand, and he collapsed into the easy chair before the fire. Numbly he turned the pages to the first entry. It was dated September #, # -- I walked down the steps , the stone slabs of steps that front the tomb in which men are buried alive , and I walked through the streets of the city . I walked through the streets , the strange streets, past hordes of indifferent people . Gradually I became aware of the passing hours, the fleeting minutes, the swiftflying seconds; and each second became an unbearable pain, each minute a dull agony, each hour a crushing eternity... I do not know how I came to the spaceport . Perhaps God directed my footsteps there. But the moment I saw the shimmering spires of the new ships pointing into the September sky, everything I had ever read concerning the Sweike Drive coalesced blindingly in my mind, and I knew what I had to do. A clock which is in motion moves slower than a stationary clock. The difference is imperceptible at ordinary velocities , but when the speed of light is approached, the difference is enormous. The Sweike Drive approaches the speed of light . It approaches the speed of light as closely as it can be approached , without both men and ship becoming pure energy . A clock on a ship employing the Sweike Drive would barely move at all -- Not daring to believe, he skipped a page -- September #, # -- They tell me it will take two years! Two of my sweet, my precious years to become a space-line stewardess! But there's no other way, no other way at all, and my application is already in. I know they will accept it -- with everyone clamoring for the stars the need for ship's personnel is -- His hands were shaking uncontrollably and the pages escaped from his fingers, days, months, years fluttering wildly by. He halted them finally -- June #, # (Sirius #) -- I have measured time by many moving clocks, and moving clocks are kind. But when planetfall arrives, stationary clocks take over, and stationary clocks are not kind. You wait in some forsaken port for the return run and you count each minute and resent its passage bitterly. For over the decades, the minutes add together into months and years and you are afraid that despite the moving clocks, you will be too old after all -- The pages escaped again and he stopped them at the final entry -- February #, #I -- Today I was officially notified that my application for the Arcturus run has been accepted ! I have been in a kind of ecstatic trance ever since, dreaming and planning, because I can dream and plan now! Now I know that I shall see my beloved again, and I shall wear a white gardenia in my hair, and the perfume he likes the best, and I shall have our house rebuilt and everything in it restored -- there'll be plenty of time if the # year estimate is correct; and when my beloved is released I shall be there waiting to take him in my arms, and though I shall not be as young as he remembers me, I shall not be old either. And the lonely years between the stars shall not have been in vain -- For I have only one love. I shall never have another . page and Philip let the diary slip from his fingers to the arm of the chair. "Miranda," he whispered. He stood up. "Miranda," he said. The house was silent. "Miranda!" he called. "Miranda!" There was no answer. He went from the living room to the bedroom. The bedroom was the way it had been a hundred years ago except that it was empty now. Empty of Miranda. He returned to the living room and went into the kitchen. The kitchen was the same too, but there was no Miranda in it. He switched on the light and stared at the porcelain sink, the chrome stove, the white cupboards, the gleaming utility table -- There was a hand mirror lying on the table, and beside it was a crumpled gardenia. He picked up the gardenia and it was cool and soft in his hand. He held it to his nostrils and breathed its fresh scent. There was another scent mingled with it, a delicate fragrant scent. He recognized it immediately as Miranda's perfume. Suddenly he could not breathe, and he ran out of the house and into the darkness. He saw the light flickering at the end of the street then, and he walked toward it with unbelieving steps. The community hall grew slowly out of the darkness and the light became many lights, became bright windows. From somewhere in the surrounding shadows he heard the humming of a portable generator. When he climbed the steps a hundred years flew away. There was no #c supper of course, and the hall showed unmistakable signs of age, despite the fact that it had been recently remodeled. But there was Miranda. Miranda standing by a lonely table. Miranda crying. A more mature Miranda, with lines showing on her face where no lines had showed before, but light lines, adorable lines... He realized why she had not met him at the Deep Freeze. She had been afraid, afraid that the moving clocks had not moved slowly enough after all; and she must have decided to meet him at the house instead, for she knew he would come home. She must have heard the monorail car pull in, must have known he was on his way -- Suddenly he remembered the mirror and the crumpled gardenia. Silly girl, lovely girl -- His eyes misted and he felt the tears run down his cheeks. He stumbled into the room, and she came hesitantly forward to meet him, her face beautiful with the new years. A goddess in the room, a mature goddess, the awkwardness gone forever, the schoolgirlish charm left somewhere in the abysses between the stars; his goddess -- and then a goddess in his arms, warm and suddenly tight-pressed against him, her dark hair soft against his face, her voice whispering in his ear, across the years, across the timeless infinities, "Welcome home, darling. Welcome home."    False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is often closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened. -- Charles Darwin In order to assimilate science into our twentieth century culture and its highly industrialized society, we must regard scientific theories as guides to human action and thus an extension of common sense. -- James Bryan Conant The most fitting place for a man to die is where he dies filtered porthole of the tiny cabin and soaked up the sunlight that came through. It felt good after ten months of deep space he said to the little man standing at the cabin's instruments, "our hundredth and last star, and it's an Earth type sun. How much difference is there from our sun?" beside the spectrum screen. "Almost on. Couple of degrees difference." He tossed the chart on the desk and came to stand at Tom's side, the top of his head even with Tom's erect shoulder. His thin face was tense and worried. "Tom," he said, "I have a hunch about this star." He stared at the screen morosely. "I don't receive a thing," Tom chuckled, stretching his flat muscled arms to the low ceiling, his body making a triangle from his narrow hips to his wide shoulders. "What's the hunch?" "Ever have the feeling you'd been some place before when you'd actually never been there? I feel at Tom with his bright blue eyes, v. ;, w ji then looked quickly away, a bit of a red flush high on his cheeks. "It's just because it's like our sun, that's all," Tom said. "No, it's not that, Tom. It's something else. I feel like we ought to get out of here. Maybe it's the planet." "Planet?" Tom said. Earth type planet." "Earth type!" Tom shouted. "Ten thousand credits bonus! Get that spending money baby." and shadowy on one side, bright with blue-green color on the other, the planet floated on the screen. "The blue must be water and the green continents," Tom murmured in awe. "Damn, it's beautiful. We going to pass it close?" "In about five more minutes of you check over these figures? I'm not sure I've allowed enough for the pull of the sun." He shifted the papers aimlessly. "the only thing I know about navigation is what you've taught me this trip. Your figures are right." "I just wanted to make sure I'm navigate close in." He pushed the papers back on the desk. "I guess I'd better call the big shot and let him take over." He pressed the button that rang the buzzer in the Captain's tiny cabin. "Might as well let Pudge in on it too," Tom said, "or the food will be lousy for days." the galley. Captain Bart strode into the cabin, his barrel chest bare and hairy above the shorts he had been napping in. He went straight to the porthole and stood with his fists on his hips, appraising the sun. Then he caught sight of the blue-green ball on the scope. "Earth type planet! Nice going, moved over to the chart desk, a frown making vertical creases in his forehead. Bart turned to Tom without noticing. "Ten thousand credits, Tom. I knew we'd do it. Even in we going to pass it close?" murmured, busy with the charts on the desk. "You'd better check my course, though." "O.K.," Bart said. "Let her go as she's headed." Pudge came in from the galley and took his place beside Tom without comment. "Okay," Bart said, as he sat down in the control board chair, us past just outside the atmosphere. Tom, you do the life search. Pudge, get the pictures." The cabin was silent except for the hum of the instruments. The radar probed the height of the mountains, the depth of the seas, the shape of the continents by recording the patterns of the reflections. The electron telescopes hunted down the movement of life, the artificial straight lines of civilization, the classification of plants; and typed the metals in the ground with the aid of a spectrum. The wave lengths of radio and TV were checked and recorded. One special instrument, sealed in its cabinet and booby-trapped with explosives against tampering, probed for the faint waves of any kind of life, down to single cells in the seas. They made four passes, the last one at a hundred miles from the ground at its closest point. Then, as each man finished his task and relaxed from his instruments, they waited for the automatic tally of the results. The computer glowed and clicked in its dull grey cabinet on the bulkhead, then dropped the tally card in the slot. Bart snatched it out, his grin fading to a blank look as he read it. "Nothing. Not a damn thing, no life at all." He went over to the screen, folded his thick arms across his chest, and stared at it in disgust. Tom picked up the card and studied it. "This is goofey," he said aloud, "the planet's got plant life, plenty of it, but not a trace of animal life, not even plankton in the sea. How'd that happen?" card with Tom. "Gould have bacteria we didn't get from this height, but it sure as hell hasn't got anything else." Pudge held up the pictures ; they showed close-ups of a tangled mass of plants. "All ferns," he said. "Doesn't seem to be anything else." "Why would a planet have ferns and nothing else, not even the beginning of animal life?" Tom wondered aloud. "I once read an account of finding the tiny seeds of Earth's plants them right off the planet and they're so light they just keep going." He looked at the pictures, then at Tom. "Suppose some of them drifted here?" "That's as good a guess as anything else," Tom said. "Maybe the master minds at home can figure it out." "Only seven or eight Earth-type planets in all these years of star mapping and I had to find one with nothing but ferns on it," Bart said in disgust to the screen. "Oh, well, maybe it'll do as a colony. No alien life to worry about, anyway. We'll call it Bart McDonald Planet." found the planet. He should get to name it." Bart was curt. "I'm the captain of this ship ; new planets are named after the captain that discovers them." "Nuts," Tom muttered. "We all had a hand in this. It ought to be named after all of us." "How about calling it the ship's Bart strode over and yanked the log's keyboard out. He banged furiously on the keys for a moment, and then read aloud. "At # this date, discovered McDonald's planet, an Earth class planet, signed, Bart McDonald, Captain." He slammed the log shut. Tom snorted. Bart gave him a dirty look and went over and sat in the control board chair. Pudge had disappeared in the galley as he always did when there was an argument. There were a few minutes of strained silence as they worked over the instruments. Bart turned from the control board. "As long as this place has no life, we'd be safe in landing. Suppose we earn the bonus by bringing back a full report on whether it's fit for a colony or not?" white. Tom frowned, and said nothing. He wanted to land but he didn't want to agree with Bart on anything. "What say?" Bart said. "I'll even put it up for a vote." "Okay," Tom said, thinking of walking in the sun, feeling firm ground under his feet. "It would be a shame to come all this way and then not be able to say we had explored the country." dangerous. And -- and besides, we'd have to go in quarantine when we got back." "So we go in quarantine," Bart said. "We'll get paid for it." He turned to the control board. "Buzz Pudge, so he can get ready." He began punching buttons. They went around to the middle of the day side of the planet, swinging in closer. The continents formed a rough belt around the equator of the planet, with no land extending to the small ice caps on the poles. Tom felt his stomach knot with the thrill of going into the unknown as he watched the screen, but part of the time he was running the lights of the control board through his mind, checking the actions of Bart's big fingers as Bart confidently punched the keys. Then face. It was white, with little splotches of pink, and his slender hands were gripping the chair he was sitting in. "Here we go," Bart shouted exultantly, as the big green light flashed on. He hit the big green key with a stubby forefinger. The auto pilot fired the jets, the ship slowed in its descent, and they were pushed down gently in their chairs. As the spot Bart had picked came up on the screen, they could see the bare red of the ridge sticking up out of the yellow-green of the flat land. Then the yellow-green was right below them, turning black as the jets burned it to ashes. They hovered a minute, then came to rest with a creaking thud that echoed through the ship. The jets cut out, leaving their ears ringing. "Didn't know whether we'd obtrusively wiped the glistening sweat off this slender palms on his coveralls, as he took his place at the panel. When the tests were done, Bart grabbed the tally card as soon as the computer dropped it. "No bacteria at all. Planet's completely sterile. Let's get outside." T OM stopped beside Bart on the narrow strip of red sand at the edge of the vast blue plain of smooth water. The water came right up to their feet without movement, just small ripples that lapped the red sand. The air was clean and brisk, and the wind was soft on his cheek. Bart arched his thick chest and pulled in a great lung full of air. "This is wonderful. Makes a man feel alive again." He yanked the zipper on his coveralls and pulled them off. Then he jumped in the air, swinging his thick arms. Tom grinned at the calisthenics as he peeled off his own coveralls. The sun was warm on his bare white skin. Bart had pulled off his boots and with just hiis shorts left, charged into the water, and made a flat smashing dive. He leaped and splashed the water like a porpoise. Tom grinned at him, and just as he had done during most of his boyhood on Earth, took a gulp of air and dived down into the clear silent depths to the twenty foot deep bottom. He drifted slowly among the rocks. Bart drifted beside him as the seconds ticked by. Tom wished this was Earth and there were some fish to hunt in the clear water with a three pronged spear. Then, as his lungs seemed bursting and he had to have air, he put his feet against the bottom and shoved himself to the surface. Several seconds later, Bart burst through the surface and bobbed beside him. They floated until they got their wind back. "You don't use a suit and oxygen tanks," Bart said. "You couldn't stay under two seconds if you did." "I learned to hunt as a boy," Tom said. "I even had to make my own spear out of scraps. Kids don't have the credits for suits and stuf f." "No sport to it with a suit," Bart said, as they paddled lazily along with their heads up, toward shore. "As bad as hunting animals with rifles. They killed off all the animals with guns, now they're fishing out the seas with suits." "Yeah," Tom answered, "might as well buy the fish from the hatcheries as to go after them with a portable sub." They dived under, and worked their way along the bottom toward shore, coming up for air, then diving again, until they were back to the beach. They walked out and dropped on the sand to rest, the sun warm on them. "Notice the water?" Tom asked. "Yeah," Bart said, "no waves. Calm as hell. Can't be waves without a moon to pull them." "Doesn't seem to be as salty as the seas at home, either," Tom said. "Yeah, I noticed that too. Must not be as much salt in the ground as at home." "Could be it's a young planet that hasn't had much time to wash it out of the ground, too," Tom said. They rested in silence for a few minutes, the only sound all about them was the wind blowing across the empty land. Then Bart jumped to his feet and started pulling on his clothes. "Come on, Tom," he said, "Let's take a look around while it's still light." After they dressed, Bart led the way along the strip of red sand towards the ridge. The tangled mass of yellow-green vegetation grew right down to the strip of red sand, and in some places, grew right over it to stop at the sea. "I'll be darned," Tom said, stopping at the edge of the plants. The ferns covered the ground solidly; small ones, medium ones, big ones. He crashed back into the thicker growth and kicked some of it aside with his boot. The cloud of dust choked him for a minute. Bart came crashing in to Tom. "What you got?" "Look," Tom said. "All these dead ferns underneath, then just the sand. They haven't decayed." He searched under the dead growth. "The dead ones just fall down underneath and the live ones just grow on top. There's not only no life here, but no decay either. right." "Don't ask me," Bart said. "Come on, let's look from that ridge." They followed the sand around the impassable vegetation to the ridge and scrambled a little way up the barren red rocks. As far as they could see over the flat land, it was covered with the sickly yellow-green of the ferns. They looked out and rested, then noting the sun was getting close to the horizon, they made their way back to the huge grey splotched aluminum hulk of their ship. As Tom was about to follow Bart up the ladder, he noticed a solitary figure sitting at the edge of the sea. "Come.to chow." His voice echoed in the quiet. The figure waved and Tom turned back to join him. He sat down on a small boulder near tiny pipe. against a rock, and gazing dreamily out to sea. He didn't notice Tom. on his pipe. Tom. "Oh, hi, Tom. I didn't knowyou'd come out." "You wouldn't," Tom laughed, "not in that daydream. Thinking of some gal back home?" "Find anything interesting?" "Just a lot of rock and ferns," he answered. "Notice how the dead plants just pack under and don't decay?" Willie asked. "Yeah," Tom puffed his pipe. "Looks like your idea of seeds drifting through space is as good as any to explain it. Sure is an odd place. Full grown plants, but no decay and no sign of evolution." "This is a wonderful place," against the rock. "I'd like to stay here for ten years." "Why?" Tom asked. The red of the sunset was fading from the high clouds, turning them dark grey. smiled at him. "This is the quietest place I've ever been in. Does something to you." "You should have been a colonist," Tom said, "then you could live on a place like this and farm it." answered. "I'm saving my pay to buy a charter and I'm going to buy a place like this." Tom blew out a cloud of smoke. Seems like every guy working on crowded Earth had the same dream. A little farm on a distant planet. But few of them ever did anything about it. It was a nice dream to relieve the monotony of working; but a hell of a lot of hard work if you actually did it. "I've even got seeds I saved when I was working on the truck farms to himself than Tom, "I saved them from some of the biggest and heaviest producing plants. I've got tomatoes, beans, corn, squash. They'll make a fine beginning." the safety and comfort of living that was found only in the crowded cities of Earth. "Think you'd like the loneliness of farming?" he asked. "There's nothing I'd like more. That's why I started star mapping, to get out of the mobs. That's why I'm out here." "Dinner's on," Pudge called from the ship. Tom knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "Let's eat." He led the way to the ship. preciative silence, for Pudge had spread a feast of celebration. When the last of the unaccustomed delicacies was gone, they pushed their plates away. "Boy," Bart grunted out as he lit his pipe, "I haven't eaten like that since the last time I was hunting. Say, Tom, what say you and I go fishing on the Florida coast when we get back. We can get a fish a day down there." "We'll do that," Tom said without conviction. He knew when they got back they would go their different ways in the eternal quest of spacemen back home. "I'm due to get a bigger ship when I get back," Bart said expansively, "and I'm sure going to have Pudge for my cook. How about you, Tom? You're due to step up, now. Want to be my navigator?" "Sure," Tom said, surprised. "We'll really do some star mapping," Bart said. "With a bigger and newer ship, we can go clear to the end of the galaxy. Who knows what we'll find for tRe Astral Service." "Am I going to be retired as your First Mate?" trying to look bright and happy, but even through the happy haze, Tom could see he looked tired and depressed. The wine hadn't done a thing for him, and his dinner was only half eaten. Bart had looked down at his tion. He knocked out the ashes of his pipe and tossed it on the table. eye. "I was going to save it until we got back, but since you asked, I'm sending you back for a checkup when we get in. You can't seem to do a darn thing anymore, without having somebody doublecheck it. Tom and I have had to navigate the ship most of this trip, when you were supposed to do it. There's no place out here for a man that can't do his job. It puts too much on the others. I think you need a long rest or something." blinking his eyes rapidly. Then he lurched to the door, his chair spinning behind him. Pudge got up and went to the galley. "What the hell did you do that for?" Tom asked Bart. "Why didn't you kid him along and give it to him easy when we got back. It would have been easier on his feelings." "That's not my way," Bart said. "He asked me and I gave it to him straight. He's no good out here anymore. In fact, he's dangerous. If something should come up that needs quick action, we'd all be wiped out by the time he called me." "Okay," Tom said. "It was honest, and it was truthful. But it sure as hell hurt him. I'm going to see him and try to ease it over." "You'll be a good first mate, Tom," Bart said. "But don't baby the crew too much. They've either got it or they haven't." Tom went down the narrow pasknocked on the door. When he didn't get an answer, he opened the with Jiis face to the wall. He didn't move as Tom sat in the chair. got company. I come in to shoot the breeze with you." "I'm sorry, Tom. I hate Bart's guts. He's always so goddam right." Willie clasped his hands behind his head on the pillow, and stared at the ceiling. "He'll wash me out of this job and then what will I do? I've failed at everything else I've tried to do. It's the people, Tom. I can't do anything in front of people. What am I going to do when they ground me? I can't stand the crowds of people on Earth." He rolled over against the wall. Tom worked his big knuckled long fingers together. "Maybe it won't amount to anything. The brass will just put you on another ship." "Not if he puts in that report," the wall. Tom sat there. There was noth"Well, I'll see you on the morning." He got up. "Maybe we can go for didn't answer, he went out and carefully shut the door behind him. In his own bunk, he tried to think of something else, but the problem restless time. Then it was morning and the clock was chiming. Pudge came in to the table where Tom and Bart were waiting for breakfast. "Some one's been in the stores. A couple of cases of emergency rations are missing. It must have been in the night." "What the hell," Bart said, jumping up. "In the stores?" ting up. "Who cares," Bart said. "There's no one on this planet but us. Who'd get into our stores? Or what?" "That's what I mean," Tom said Bart gave him a startled glance, He wasn't there. They went through the ship. They dropped out of the lock, one after the other, into the blinding sunlight and "We'd better find him before he gets too far," Tom said. "I've got a hunch he's not coming back. That's why the food." "I'll wring the little coward's neck," Bart said as he led the way along the one trail of footprints they had all made to the sand by the sea. They scattered out, calling and looking. Tom, on a hunch, headed for the shoulder of the mountain that jutted out in the sea, while Bart and Pudge went the other way. blue sky when Tom at last came around the point to the little cove a stream had made in the side of the mountain. He walked up the narrow sandy bank between the red cliffs until a short way in, he found the cases of food and a pile of blankets. His yell echoed off the red cliffs several times before he top of the cliff twenty feet above him. "Come on back to the ship, Wilwas just out for a walk. "We're going to blast off this afternoon. Got to head home." said. "I'm staying here." "Be reasonable," Tom shouted, "you can't stay here. Come on back to the ship." "I'm going to live here. I'm go"What?" Tom's voice was unbelieving. repeated. "Tom, give me your word you won't force me to go back and I'll come down so we can talk." "O.K.," Tom said, "you have my word." slid down the cliff in a shower of loose rock and dirt. Tom began, "how are you going to live, to eat?" dreamily. "I'll have a real farm." He waved vaguely at the ferns. "Look at the stuff grow. The climate is ideal. I'll build a hut and farm enough to eat." another angle. "There are no other people here. What'll you do if you get sick or need help?" "I won't get sick and I won't why I want to stay here, 'cause there aren't any people. I can have a thousand acres all to myself. I can stake out a whole square mile and live right in the middle of it." He laughed like a little kid. "Tom, this is what I've wanted all my life. Why should I go back to Earth and then try to come back later, I'm staying here, now." Tom had the feeling he was trying to argue with an ostrich with its head in the sand. What would when the emergency rations were for a dream, but he didn't know it. see, disregarding everything else. Arguing was useless. The only way was to carry him back. "I'll go back and tell Bart. But I'll get him to hold the ship until tomorrow if you should change your mind." Tom." He held out his hand. "You've been a swell guy." Tom took the hand and shook it. someday, to see how you're making out." He started back down the narrow beach. Along the way, he decided that they would have to Earth for hospitalization. Coming back with Bart wouldn't be breaking his word. That had only been Bart heard Tom's report in his usual way. "Let's go' was his only comment. They climbed up the crumbling red rock and followed the edge of the cliff. They climbed over the small boulders, around the huge ones, endlessly finding the way blocked, but each time going back a little and by going around, finding a new way that was clear. The sun was halfway to the western horizon when they stopped to rest on a pile of small boulders near the top. Tom leaned back against the rock behind him. A trickle of sweat ran down his ribs from his armpit under his coveralls. Bart snorted through his nose. "It'll be dark soon." He wiped his arm across his forehead, the sweat making a dark stain on the sleeve. for this when we get him back to Earth. He must be crazy or something." "My God," Tom said. "Is that finally dawning on you?" Bart looked up at Tom, his dark brown eyes small in his broad sweat-streaked face. As he continued to stare at Tom without saying anything, Tom felt the stir of annoyance, then the beginning of hot tempered anger. They sat and waited, looking for the movement himself. Nothing stirred in the yellow-green ferns below. After an hour of watching, Bart got to his feet. "He's holed up somewhere and pulled the hole in after him. Let's get down there and drag him out." He started back down the ridge the way they had come up. Halfway down, as they stopped for a breather, Tom noted the height of the sun. It was going to be dark before they could work their way back to the ship. A low bank of rolling grey clouds lay all along the straight horizon line of the sea; as the sun sank behind the clouds, it turned the edges of them to fiery red. Bart hurried down the ridge, watching only for a glimpse of Willie, but Tom looked at the sunset occasionally, trying to store up the memory of the color for the months ahead. As they reached the stream cliff, Tom stopped Bart. "Bart, I've got an idea. It's alheaded back to get to the ship before it's too dark to find our way. He's probably sitting on a rock, watching the sunset and daydreaming. Let's look on the edge of this little cliff where it ends at the sea." "O.K.," Bart said, leading the way. The only light left was the reflected red light of the clouds that made long dark shadows behind the rocks. They came around the rocks, onto the cliff point overlooking the sea and the cove, and there was big rock, his chin resting on his cupped hands, gazing dreamily out to sea. for him. then he was up and sliding down the loose rock into the shadowy cove below. "Grab him, Tom," Bart shouted as he went sliding and falling down, the loose rock after him. Tom jumped down the rocks to the bottom and slid to a stop, the loose rocks rolling down around ferns with only his head and shoulders showing. Bart had the automatic pistol out crazy fool, or I'll shoot," he shouted, his voice echoing off the ferns more desperately. Bart raised the automatic and fired a burst of shots, the sharp explosions echoing shatteringly around them. Tom made a flying tackle and smashed into Bart. They went down in the ferns, struggling for the gun, until Bart managed to roll and push his way to his feet. "Knock it off," Bart shouted. "What the hell are you trying to do?" Tom shouted back as he got to his feet. "I wasn't trying to kill him," Bart snapped. "I was trying to scare him into stopping so we could grab him, now he's got clean away in those damn ferns." He waved a hand helplessly at the mass of dark vege"Now we'll have to spend days hunting for that lunatic. Next time let me handle it. I'm the captain of this expedition." "Okay," Tom said angrily, "but let's catch him, not kill him. He hasn't done anything, just wants to be alone, that's all." "He's deserted," Bart said, "and he signed articles, so that's a crime. How the hell am I going to explain a lost crewman when we go back. And on my first trip as captain." "That's your worry," Tom said. "He's colonizing, not deserting." "You should have been a lawyer," Bart said as he put the gun in his holster. "But this isn't getting that screwball aboard." He groped in the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out a small packlight. The white searchbeam lit up the ferns around them with glaring brightness. "Come on, let's try to find him." He led the way into the ferns. They hunted through the ferns, forcing their way every step. The searchbeam was only good for a few feet in the dense growth. They ferns they could almost step on him and not know it. At last Bart gave up. "Let's go back to the ship. We'll come back in the morning, when it's light." Following him along the beach toward the ship, Tom had the feeling that in the morning might be too the burst of shots, or he might take off in the ferns so far they never could find him. T OM rolled out of his bunk at the first bell, wincing at his sore muscles. After getting the first aid kit from the bathroom, he quietly walked down the narrow passageway and out into the bright sunlight. As he walked through the grey ash to the strip of red sand, the quiet was like a blanket over everything, after the soft hum of the living ship. The breeze blew softly against his face, hummed past his ears, and rustled the ferns. The sea was glass smooth as far as he could see across its surface, smooth right up to where the water turned deep green as it got shallower. He could understand why a perfect place for anyone who loved solitude and there was probably none like it in the whole system. He thought of how a man could live here, with no one to bother him, nothing to buy, no need to do any more than just produce enough food to live. A little shack to keep off the rain, a little field to grow food. But there would be no one to talk to, no one to share experiences and troubles and little triumps, no one to laugh with, no challenge to overcome, no excitement. "Not for me," Tom said aloud, and his voice was strange in the quiet. "Boy, this place puts a spell on a guy, almost hypnotizes him." He laughed aloud. "Even got me talking to myself." He hurried on to Then he came to the little cove pile of food and blankets was still was lying half in the pool of water. As Tom crunched over the sand opened his eyes. "Hi, Tom," he said faintly. "Fm glad you came alone." looked at the thin chest with the small neat hole low on the left side. "So he did shoot you, didn't he." He opened the first aid kit. "I'll get you back to the ship and you'll be O.K." He started putting a dressing on the wound. bright blue eyes. "Never mind, Tom. I just got to stay here in spite of the Captain." His voice was so low Tom had to lean closer to hear winced with the pain. Tom finished the bandage. He knew there was nothing he could a doctor could help him. But there were no doctors here. He wanted to do something for him to make him more comfortable. He started to put an arm under him to move him out of the pool. "I'll get you out of this water," he said. me here. I crawled all night to get here. I want to die in this pool." "In the water?" Tom said in surprise. "Yes, in the water. Don't you understand? I thought you would." He stared up at the white tracing of the clouds in the sky. Tom waited, silently. He knelt there, the sun burning hot on his back. "I had to stay. Didn't you feel anything about this planet, Tom?" Tom thought a moment. "I did feel a little," he admitted. "On the way over here. Like it would be a nice place to live." you see. Here was this planet, ripe for life, but without life. Then the seeds of the ferns got blown off Earth and drifted here. But it needed more, it needed animal life to complete the cycle. "Then we got 'blown off Earth.' Bart for the glory, Pudge for the ride, you for the excitement, and me -- me -- because I had to, I guess. Because I couldn't stand it back there. Seeds, all four of us, and not knowing it. That's why we had to land. That's why one of us had to stay and I guess it was just me. Now the rest of you can go back to Earth." time. Then he lay back exhausted. "Tom," he whispered, "look at the edge of my camp. In the ferns." Tom walked over to the edge of the camp. He looked at the yellowmeant. Then he saw it. The faint steaming from the packed dead ferns under the growing ones, the spreading dark spot, the already darker green of the plants growing around the spot. decay with him, as well as the seeds of life. The dead plants were decaying for the first time on this planet. This spot would spread until the whole planet was covered with dark green; and life would be as it was on Earth. stood looking down at him. Then he lids. He thought of moving him, digging him a shallow grave. But kneeling there in the silent cove, he had the hunch that maybe there to stay in the little pool. The stream came down off the ridge through stayed there, the bacteria of his body would live on, and be washed into the sea. The water was warm and there were no enemies to destroy them and there were plants to right. Maybe he was the seed of life coming to this planet; and in a shores. Tom straightened up. He took a deep breath and looked around the Bart put in the log and what spacemen will call it as they go by, will be two different things. Or did you know that in your heart, too." He was silent a moment. "So long, He turned and crunched along the sand towards the ship.    complete their collections. Below are the issues available. Send # cents for each copy ordered. Address: IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. Vol. #, No. #, Morch # Vol. #, No. #, July # Vol. #, No. #, Sept. # Vol. #, No. #, March # Vol. # , No. #, July # Vol. # , No. #, Sept. # Vol. # , No. #, Nov. # Vol. #, No. #, Jan. # Vol. #, No. #, March # Vol. #, No. #, April # Vol. #, No. #, June # Vol. #, No. #, July # Vol. #, No. #, Aug. # Vol. #, No. #, Sept. # Vol. # , No. #, Oct. # Vol. #, No. #, Nov. # Vol. # , No. #, Dec. # Vol. # , No. #, Jan. # eleven o'clock, Mrs. Edna Berthelson was ready to make her little trip. Although it was a weekly affair, consuming four hours of her valuable business time, she made the profitable trip alone, preserving for herself the integrity of her find. Because that was what it was. A find, a stroke of incredible luck. There was nothing else like it, and she had been in business fiftythree years. More, if the years in her father's store were counted -- but they didn't really count. That had been for the experience (her father made that clear) ; no pay was involved. But it gave her the understanding of business, the feel of operating a small country store, dusting pencils and unwrapping fly paper and serving up dried beans and chasing the cat out of the cracker barrel where he liked to sleep. Now the store was old, and so was she. The big heavy-set, blackbrowed man who was her father had died long ago; her own children and grandchildren had been spawned, had Crept out over the world, were everywhere. One by one they had appeared, lived in Walnut Creek, sweated through the dry, sun-baked summers, and then gone on, leaving one by one as they had come. She and the store sagged and settled a little more each year; became a little more frail and stern and grim. A little more themselves. That morning very early Jackie said: "Grandmaw, where are you going?" Although he knew, of course, where she was going. She was going out in her truck as she always did; this was the Saturday trip. But he liked to ask; he was pleased by the stability of the answer. He liked having it always the same. To another question there was another unvarying answer, but this one didn't please him so much. It came in answer to the question: "Can I come along?" The answer to that was always no. Edna Berthelson laboriously carried packages and boxes from the back of the store to the rusty, upright pick-up truck. Dust lay over the truck; its red-metal sides were bent and corroded. The motor was already on; it was wheezing and heating up in the mid-day sun. A few drab chickens pecked in the dust around its wheels. Under the porch of the store a plump white shaggy sheep squatted, its face vapid, indolent, indifferently watching the activity of the day. Cars and trucks rolled along Mount Diablo Boulevard. Along Lafayette Avenue a few shoppers strolled, farmers and their wives, petty businessmen, farm hands, some city women in their gaudy slacks and print shirts, sandals, bandanas. In the front of the store the radio tinnily played popular songs. "I asked you a question," Jackie said righteously. "I asked you where you're going." Mrs. Berthelson bent stiffly over to lift the last armload of boxes. Most of the loading had been done the night before by Arnie the Swede, the hulking white-haired hired-man who did the heavy work around the store. "What?" she murmured vaguely, her gray, wrinkled face twisting with concentration. "You know perfectly well where I'm going." Jackie trailed plaintively after her, as she re-entered the store to look for her order book. "Can I come? Please, can I come along? You never let me come -- you never let anybody come." "Of course not," Mrs. Berthelson said sharply. "It's nobody's business." "But I want to come along," Jackie explained. Slyly, the little old woman turned her gray head and peered back at him, a worn, colorless bird taking in a world perfectly understood. "So does everybody else." Thin lips twitching in a secret smile, Mrs. Berthelson said softly: "But nobody can." Jackie didn't like the sound of that. Sullenly, he retired to a corner, hands stuck deep in the pockets of his jeans, not taking part in something that was denied him, not approving of something in which he could not share. Mrs. Berthelson ignored him. She pulled her frayed blue sweater around her thin shoulders, located her sunglasses, pulled the screen door shut after her, and strode briskly to the truck. Getting the truck into gear was an intricate process. For a time she sat tugging crossly at the shift, pumping the clutch up and down, waiting impatiently for the teeth to fall into place. At last, screeching and chattering, the gears meshed; the truck leaped a little, and Mrs. Berthelson gunned the motor and released the hand brake. As the truck roared jerkily down the driveway, Jackie detached himself from the shade by the house and followed along after it. His mother was nowhere in sight. Only the dozing sheep and the two scratching chickens were visible. Even Arnie the Swede was gone, probably getting a cold coke. Now was a fine time. Now was the best time he had ever had. And it was going to be sooner or later anyhow, because he was determined to come along. Grabbing hold of the tailboard of the truck, Jackie hoisted himself up and landed face-down on the tightly-packed heaps of packages and boxes. Under him the truck bounced and bumped. Jackie hung on for dear life; clutching at the boxes he pulled his legs under him, crouched down, and desperately sought to keep from being flung off. Gradually the truck righted itself, and the torque diminished. He breathed a sigh of relief and settled gratefully down. He was on his way. He was along, finally. Accompanying Mrs. Berthelson on her secret weekly trip, her strange covert enterprise from which -- he had heard -- she made a fabulous profit. A trip which nobody understood, and which he knew, in the deep recesses of his child's mind, was something awesome and wonderful, something that would be well worth the trouble. He had hoped fervently that she wouldn't stop to check her load along the way. man prepared himself a cup of "coffee". First, he carried a tin cup of roasted grain over to the gasoline drum the colony used as a mixing bowl. Dumping it in, he hurried to add a handful of chicory and a few fragments of dried bran. Dirt-stained hands trembling, he managed to get a fire started among the ashes and coals under the pitted metal grate. He set a pan of tepid water on the flames and searched for a spoon. "What are you up to?" his wife demanded from behind him. "Uh," Tellman muttered. Nervously, he edged between Glady's and the meal. "Just fooling around." In spite of himself, his voice took on a nagging whine. "I have a right to fix myself something, don't I? As much right as anybody else." "You ought to be over helping." "I was.I wrenched something in my back." The wiry middleaged man ducked uneasily away from his wife; tugging at the remains of his soiled white shirt, he retreated toward the door of the shack. "Damn it, a person has to rest, sometimes." "Rest when we get there." Gladys wearily brushed back her thick dark-blonde hair. "Suppose everybody was like you." Tellman flushed resentfully. "Who plotted our trajectory? Who's done all the navigation work?" A faint ironic smile touched his wife's chapped lips. "We'll see how your charts work out," she said. "Then we'll talk about it." Enraged, Tellman plunged out of the shack, into the blinding lateafternoon sunlight. He hated the sun, the sterile white glare that began at five in the morning and lasted until nine in the evening. The Big Blast had sizzled the water vapor from the air; the sun beat down pitilessly, sparing nobody. But there were few left to care. To his right was the cluster of shacks that made up the camp. An eclectic hodge-podge of boards, sheets of tin, wire and tar paper, upright concrete blocks, anything and everything dragged from the San Francisco ruins, forty miles west. Cloth blankets flapped dismally in doorways, protection against the vast hosts of insects that swept across the camp site from time to time. Birds, the natural enemy of insects, were gone. Tellman hadn't seen a bird in two years -- and he didn't expect to see one again. Beyond the camp began the eternal dead black ash, the charred face of the world, without features, without life. The camp had been set up in a natural hollow. One side was sheltered by the tumbled ruins of what had once been a minor mountain range. The concussion of the blast had burst the towering cliffs; rock had cascaded into the valley for days. After San Francisco had been fired out of existence, survivors had crept into the heaps of boulders, looking for a place to hide from the sun. That was the hardest part : the unshielded sun. Not the insects, not the radio-active clouds of ash, not the flashing white fury of the blasts, but the sun. More people had died of thirst and dehydration and blind insanity than from toxic poisons. From his breast pocket, Tellman got a precious package of cigarettes. Shakily, he lit up. His thin, clawlike hands, were trembling, partly from fatigue, partly from rage and tension. How he hated the camp. He loathed everybody in it, his wife included. Were they worth saving? He doubted it. Most of them were barbarians, already; what did it matter if they got the ship off or not? He was sweating away his mind and life, trying to save them. The hell with them. But then, his own safety was involved with theirs. He stalked stifflegged over to where Barnes and Masterson stood talking. "How's it coming?" he demanded gruffly. "Fine," Barnes answered. "It won't be long, now." "One more load," Masterson said. His heavy features twitched uneasily. "I hope nothing gets fouled up. She ought to be here any minute." Tellman loathed the sweaty, animal-like scent that rolled from Masterson's beefy body. Their situation wasn't an excuse to creep around filthy as a pig... on Venus, things would be different. Masterson was useful, now; he was an experienced mechanic, invaluable in servicing the turbine and jets of the ship. But when the ship had landed and been pillaged... Satisfied, Tellman brooded over the re-establishment of the rightful order. The hierarchy had collapsed in the ruins of the cities, but it would be back strong as ever. Take Flannery, for example. Flannery was nothing but a foulmouthed shantyIrish stevedor... but he was in charge of loading the ship, the greatest job at the moment. Flannery was top dog, for the time being... but that would change. It had to change. Consoled, Tellman strolled away from Barnes and Masterson, over to the ship itself. The ship was huge. Across its muzzle the stenciled identification still remained, not yet totally obliterated by drifting ash and the searing heat of the sun. Originally, it had been a highvelocity "massive retaliation" weapon, loaded with an H-warhead, ready to carry indiscriminate death to the enemy. The projectile had never been launched. Soviet toxic crystals had blown quietly into the windows and doors of the local command barracks. When launching day arrived, there was no crew to send it off. But it didn't matter -- there was no enemy, either. The rocket had stood on its buttocks for months... it was still there when the first refugees straggled into the shelter of the demolished mountains. "Nice, isn't it?" Patricia Shelby said. She glanced up from her work and smiled blearily at Tellman. Her small, pretty face was streaked with fatigue and eye-strain. "Sort of like the trylon at the New York World's Fair." "My God," Tellman said, "you remember that?" "I was only eight," Patricia answered. In the shadow of the ship she was carefully checking the automatic relays that would maintain the air, temperature, and humidity of the ship. "But I'll never forget it. Maybe I was a precog -- when I saw it sticking up I knew someday it would mean a lot to everybody." "A lot to the twenty of us Tellman corrected. Suddenly he offered her the remains of his cigarette. "Here -- you look like you could use it." "Thanks." Patricia continued with her work, the cigarette between her lips. "I'm almost done -- Boy, some of these relays are tiny. Just think." She held up a microscopic wafer of transparent plastic. "While we're all out cold, this makes the difference between life and death." A strange, awed look crept into her dark-blue eyes. "To the human race." Tellman guffawed. "You and Flannery. He's always spouting idealistic twaddle." Professor John Crowley, once head of the history department at Stanford, now the nominal leader of the colony, sat with Flannery and Jean Dobbs, examining the suppurating arm of a ten-year-old boy. "Radiation," Crowley was saying emphatically. "The over-all level is rising daily. It's settling ash that does it. If we don't get out soon, we're done." "It's not radiation," Flannery corrected in his ultimately-certain voice. "It's toxic crystalline poisoning; that stuff's knee-deep up in the hills. He's been playing around up there." "Is that so?" Jean Dobbs demanded. The boy nodded his head not daring to look at her. "You're right," she said to Flannery. "Put some salve on it," Flannery said. "And hope he'll live. Outside of sulfathiazole there's not much we have." He glanced at his watch, suddenly tense. "Unless she brings "If she doesn't bring it today," Crowley said, "she'll never bring it. This is the last load ; as soon as it's stored, we're taking off." Rubbing his hands, Flannery suddenly bellowed: "Then get out the money!" Crowley grinned. "Right." He fumbled in one of the steel storage lockers and yanked out a handful of paper bills. Holding a sheaf of bills up to Tellman he fanned them out invitingly. "Take your pick. Take them all." Nervously, Tellman said, "Be careful with that. She's probably raised the price on everything, again." "We've got plenty." Flannery took some and stuffed it into a partly-filled load being wheeled by, on its way to the ship. "There's money blowing all over the world, along with the ash and particles of bone. On Venus we won't need it -- she might as well have it all." On Venus, Tellman thought, savagely, things would revert to their legitimate order -- with Flannery digging sewers where he belonged. "What's she bringing mostly?" he asked Crowley and Jean Dobbs, ignoring Flannery. "What's the last load made up of?" "Comic books," Flannery said dreamily, wiping perspiration from his balding forehead ; he was a lean, tall, dark-haired young man. "And harmonicas." Crowley winked at him. "Uke picks, so we can lie in our hammocks all day, strumming Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah." "And swizzle sticks," Flannery v reminded him. "In order that we may all the more properly flatten the bubbles of our vintage '# champagne." Tellman boiled. "You -- degenerate!" Crowley and Flannery roared with laughter, and Tellman stalked off, smoldering under this new humiliation. What kind of morons and lunatics were they? Joking at a time like this... he peered miserably, almost accusingly, at the ship. Was this the kind of world they were going to found? In the pitiless white-hot sun, the huge ship shimmered and glowed. A vast upright tube of alloy and protective fiber mesh rising up above the tumble of wretched shacks. One more load, and they were off. One more truckful of supplies from their only source, the meager trickle of uncontaminated goods that meant the difference between life and death. Praying that nothing would go wrong, Tellman turned to await the arrival of Mrs. Edna Berthelson and her battered red-pick-up truck. Their fragile umbilical cord, connecting them with the opulent, undamaged past. groves of lush apricot trees. Bees and flies buzzed sleepily among the rotting fruit scattered over the soil; every now and then a roadside stand appeared, operated by somnambulistic children. In driveways stood parked Buicks and Oldsmobiles. Rural dogs wandered here and there. At one intersection stood a swank tavern, its neon sign blinking on and off, ghostly pale in the mid-morning sun. Mrs. Edna Berthelson glared hostilely at the tavern, and at the cars parked around it. City people were moving out into the valley, cutting down the old oak trees, the ancient fruit orchards, setting up suburban homes, stopping in the middle of the day for a whiskey sour and then driving cheerfully on. Driving at seventy-five miles an hour in their swept-back Chryslers. A column of cars that had piled up behind her truck suddenly burst forth and swung past her. She let them go, stony-faced, indifferent. Served them right for being in such a hurry. If she always hurried like that, she would never have had time to pay attention to that odd ability she had found in her introspective, lonely drives; never have discovered that she could look "ahead", never have discovered that hole in the warp of time which enabled her to trade so easily at her own exorbitant prices. Let them hurry if they wanted. The heavy load in the back of the truck jogged rhythmically. The motor wheezed. Against the back window a half-dead fly buzzed. Jackie lay stretched out among the cartons and boxes, enjoying the ride, gazing complacently at the apricot trees and cars. Against the hot sky the peak of Mount Diablo rose, blue and white, an expanse of cold rock. Trails of mist clung to the peak; Mount Diablo went a long way up. He made a face at a dog standing indolently at the side of the road, waiting to cross. He waved gaily at a Pacific Telephone Co. repairman, stringing wire from a huge reel. Abruptly the truck turned off the state highway and onto a black-surfaced side road. Now there were fewer cars. The truck began to climb... the rich orchards fell behind and gave way to flat brown fields. A dilapidated farm house lay to the right; he watched it with interest, wondering how old it was. When it was out of sight, no other man-made structures followed. The fields became unkempt. Broken, sagging fences were visible occasionally. Torn signs, no longer legible. The truck was approaching the base of Mount Diablo... almost nobody came this way. Idly, the boy wondered why Mrs. Berthelson's little trip took her in this direction. Nobody lived here; suddenly there were no fields, only scrub grass and bushes, wild countryside, the tumbled slope of the mountain. A rabbit hopped skillfully across the half-decayed road. Rolling hills, a broad expanse of trees and strewn boulders... there was nothing here but a State fire tower, and maybe a water shed. And an abandoned picnic area, once maintained by the State, now forgotten. An edge of fear touched the boy. No customers lived out this way... he had been positive the battered red pick-up truck would head directly into town, take him and the load to San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley, a city where he could get out and run around, see interesting sights. There was nothing here, only abandoned emptiness, silent and foreboding. In the shadow of the mountain, the air was chill. He shivered. All at once he wished he hadn't come. Mrs. Berthelson slowed the truck and shifted noisily into low. With a roar and an explosive belch of exhaust gasses, the truck crept up a steep ascent, among jagged boulders, ominous and sharp. Somewhere far off a bird cried shrilly; Jackie listened to its thin sounds echoing dismally away and wondered how he could attract his grandmother's attention. It would be nice to be in front, in the cabin. It would be nice -- And then he noticed it. At first he didn't believe it... but he had to believe it. Under him, the truck was beginning to fade away. It faded slowly, almost imperceptibly. Dimmer and dimmer the truck grew; its rusty red sides became gray, then colorless. The black road was visible underneath. In wild panic, the boy clutched at the piles of boxes. His hands passed through them; he was riding precariously on an uneven sea of dim shapes, among almost invisible phantoms. He lurched and slid down. Now -- hideously -- he was suspended momentarily half-way through the truck, just above the tail pipe. Groping desperately, he struggled to catch hold of the boxes directly above him. "Help!" he shouted. His voice echoed around him; it was the only sound... the roar of the truck was fading. For a moment he clutched at the retreating shape of the truck; then, gently, gradually, the last image of the truck faded, and with a sickening crunch, the boy dropped to the road. The impact sent him rolling into the dry weeds beyond the drainage ditch. Stunned, dazed with disbelief and pain, he lay gasping, trying feebly to pull himself up. There was only silence; the truck, Mrs. Berthelson, had vanished. He was totally alone. He closed his eyes and lay back, stupefied with fright. Sometime later, probably not much later, he was aroused by the squeal of brakes. A dirty, orange State maintenance truck had lurched to a stop; two men in khaki work clothes were climbing down and hurrying over. "What's the matter?" one yelled at him. They grabbed him up, faces serious and alarmed. "What are you doing here?" "Fell," he muttered. "Off the truck." "What truck?" they demanded. "How?" He couldn't tell them. All he knew was that Mrs. Berthelson had gone. He hadn't made it, after all. Once again, she was making her trip alone. He would never know' where she went; he would never find out who her customers were. of the truck, Mrs. Berthelson was conscious that the transition had taken place. Vaguely, she was aware that the rolling brown fields, rocks and green scrub bushes, had faded out. The first time she had gone "ahead" she had found the old truck floundering in a sea of black ash. She had been so excited by her discovery that day that she had neglected to "scan" conditions on the other side of the hole. She had known there were customers... and dashed headlong through the warp to get there first. She smiled complacently... she needn't have hurried, there was no competition here. In fact, the customers were so eager to deal with her, they had done virtually everything in their power to make things easier for her. The men had built a crude strip of road out into the ash, a sort of wooden platform onto which the truck now rolled. She had learned the exact moment to "go ahead"; it was the instant that the truck passed the drainage culvert a quarter mile inside the State park. Here, "ahead", the culvert also existed... but there was little left of it, only a vague jumble of shattered stone. And the road was utterly buried. Under the wheels of the truck the rough boards thumped and banged. It would be bad if she had a flat tire... but some of them could fix it. They were always working; one little additional task wouldn't make much difference. She could see them, now; they stood at the end of the wooden platform, waiting impatiently for her. Beyond them was their jumble of crude, smelly shacks, and beyond that, their ship. A lot she cared about their ship. She knew what it was : stolen Army property. Setting her bony hand rigidly around the gearshift knob, she threw the truck into neutral and coasted to a stop. As the men approached, she began pulling on the hand brake. "Afternoon," Professor Crowley muttered, his eyes sharp and keen as he peered eagerly into the back of the truck. Mrs. Berthelson grunted a noncommittal answer. She didn't like any of them... dirty men, smelling of sweat and fear, their bodies and clothes streaked with grime, and the ancient coating of desperation that never seemed to leave them. Like awed, pitiful children they clustered around the truck, poking hopefully at the packages, already beginning to pluck them out onto the black ground. "Here, now," she said sharply. "You leave those alone." Their hands darted back as if seared. Mrs. Berthelson sternly climbed from the truck, grabbed up her inventory sheet, and plodded up to Crowley. "You just wait," she told him. "Those have to be checked off." He nodded, glanced at Masterson, licked his dry lips, and waited. They all waited. It had always been that way; they knew, and she knew, that there was no other way they could get their supplies. And if they didn't get their supplies, their food and medicine and clothing and instruments and tools and raw materials, they wouldn't be able to leave in their ship. In this world, in the "ahead", such things didn't exist. At least, not so anybody could use them. A cursory glance had told her that; she could see the ruin with her own eyes. They hadn't taken very good care of their world. They had wasted it all, turned it into black ash and ruin. Well, it was their business, not hers. She had never been much interested in the relationship between their world and hers. She was content to know that both existed, and that she could go from one to the other and back. And she was the only one who knew how. Several times, people from this world, members of this group, had tried to go "back there" with her. It had always failed. As she made the transition, they were left behind. It was her power, her faculty. Not a shared faculty -- she was glad of that. And for a person in business, quite a valuable faculty. "All right," she said crisply. Standing where she could keep her eye on them, she began checking off each box as it was carried from the truck. Her routine was exact and certain; it was a part of her life. As long as she could remember she had transacted business in a distinct way. Her father had taught her how to live in a business world ; she had learned his stern principles and rules. She was following them now. Flannery and Patricia Shelby stood together at one side; Flannery held the money, payment for the delivery. "Well," he said, under his breath, "now we can tell her to go leap in the river." "Are you sure?" Pat asked nervously. "The last load's here." Flannery grinned starkly and ran a trembling hand through his thinning black hair. "Now we can get rolling. With this stuff, the ship's crammed to the gills. We may even have to sit down and eat some of that now " He indicated a bulging paste-board carton of groceries. "Bacon, eggs, milk, real coffee. Maybe we won't shove it in deepfreeze. Maybe we ought to have a last-meal-before-the-flight orgy." Wistfully, Pat said, "It would be nice. It's been a long time since we've had food like that." Masterson strode over. "Let's kill her and boil her in a big kettle. Skinny old witch -- she might make good soup." "In the oven," Flannery corrected. "Some gingerbread, to take along with us." "I wish you wouldn't talk like that," Pat said apprehensively. "She's so -- well, maybe she is a witch. I mean, maybe that's what witches were... old women with strange talents. Like her -- being able to pass through time." "Damn lucky for us," Masterson said briefly. "But she doesn't understand it. Does she? Does she know what she's doing? That she could save us all this by sharing her ability." Does she know what's happened to our world? Flannery considered. "Probably she doesn't know -- or care. A mind like hers, business and profit -- getting exorbitant rates from us, selling this stuff to us at an incredible premium. And the joke is that money's worth nothing to us. If she could see, she'd know that. It's just paper, in this world. But she's caught in a narrow little routine. Business, profit." He shook his head. "A mind like that, a warped, miserable flea-sized mind... and she has that unique talent." "But she can see " Pat persisted. "She can see the ash, the ruin. How can she not know?" Flannery shrugged. "She probably doesn't connect it with her own life. After all, she'll be dead in a couple of years... she won't see the war in her real time. She'll only see it this way, as a region into which she can travel. A sort of travelogue of strange lands. She can enter and leave -- but we're stuck. It must give you a damn fine sense of security to be able to walk out of one world, into another. God, what I'd give to be able to go back with her." "It's been tried," Masterson pointed out. "That lizard-head Tellman tried it. And he came walking back , covered with ash. He said the truck faded out." "Of course it did," Flannery said mildly. "She drove it back to Walnut Creek. Back to #." The unloading had been completed. The members of the colony were toiling up the slope, lugging the cartons to the check-area beneath the ship. Mrs. Berthelson strode over to Flannery, accompanied by Professor Crowley. "Here's the inventory," she said briskly. "A few items couldn't be found. You know, I don't stock all that in my store. I have to send out for most of it." "We know," Flannery said, coldly amused. It would be interesting to see a country store that stocked binocular microscopes, turret lathes, frozen packs of anti-biotics, highfrequency radio transmitters, advanced text books in all fields. "So that's why I have to charge you a little dearer," the old woman continued, the inflexible routine of squeeze. "On items I bring in -- " She examined her inventory, then returned the ten-page typewritten list that Crowley had given her on the previous visit. "Some of these weren't available. I marked them back order. That bunch of metals from those laboratories back East -- they said maybe later." A cunning look slid over the ancient gray eyes. "And they'll be very expensive." "It doesn't matter," Flannery said, handing her the money. "You can cancel all the back orders." At first her face showed nothing. Only a vague inability to understand. "No more shipments Crowley explained. A certain tension faded from them; for the first time, they weren't afraid of her. The old relationship had ended. They weren't dependent on the rusty red truck. They had their shipment; they were ready to leave. "We're taking off," Flannery said, grinning starkly. "We're full up." Comprehension came. "But I placed orders for those things." Her voice was thin, bleak. Without emotion. "They'll be shipped to me. I'll have to pay for them." "Well," Flannery said softly, "isn't that too damn bad." Crowley shot him a warning glance. "Sorry," he said to the old woman. "We can't stick around -- this place is getting hot. We've got to take off." On the withered face, dismay turned to growing wrath. "You ordered those things! You have to take them!" Her shrill voice rose to a screech of fury. "What am I supposed to do with them?" As Flannery framed his bitter answer, Pat Shelby intervened. "Mrs. Berthelson," she said quietly, "you've done a lot for us, even if you wouldn't help us through the hole into your time. And we're very grateful. If it wasn't for you, we couldn't have got together enough supplies. But we really have to go." She reached out her hand to touch the frail shoulder, but the old woman jerked furiously away. "I mean," Pat finished awkwardly, "we can't stay any longer, whether we want to or not. Do you see all that black ash? It's radioactive, and more of it sifts down all the time. The toxic level is rising -- if we stay any longer it'll start destroying us." Mrs. Edna Berthelson stood clutching her inventory list. There was an expression on her face that none of the group had ever seen before. The violent spasm of wrath had vanished; now a cold, chill glaze lay over the aged features. Her eyes were like gray rocks, utterly without feeling. Flannery wasn't impressed. "Here's your loot," he said, thrusting out the handful of bills. "What the hell." He turned to Crowley. "Let's toss in the rest. Let's stuff it down her goddamn throat." "Shut up," Crowley snapped. Flannery sank resentfully back. "Who are you talking to?" "Enough's enough." Crowley, worried and tense, tried to speak to the old woman. "My God, you can't expect us to stay around here forever, can you?" There was no response. Abruptly, the old woman turned and strode silently back to her truck. Masterson and Crowley looked uneasily at each other. "She sure is mad," Masterson said apprehensively. Tellman hurried up, glanced at the old woman getting into her truck, and then bent down to root around in one of the cartons of groceries. Childish greed flushed across his thin face. "Look," he gasped. "Coffee -- fifteen pounds of it. Can we open some? Can we get one tin open, to celebrate?" "Sure," Crowley said tonelessly, his eyes on the truck. With a muffleid roar, the truck turned in a wide arc and rumbled off down the crude platform, toward the ash. It rolled off into the ash, slithered for a short distance, and then faded out. Only the bleak, sun-swept plain of darkness remained. "Coffee ! # Tellman shouted gleefully. He tossed the bright metal can high in the air and clumsily caught it again. "A celebration! Our last night -- last meal on Earth ! # As the red pick-up truck jogged metallically along the road, Mrs. Berthelson scanned "ahead # and saw that the men were telling the truth. Her thin lips writhed; in her mouth an acid taste of bile rose. She had taken it for granted that they would continue to buy -- there was no competition, no other source of supply. But they were leaving. And when they left, there would be no more market. She would never find a market that satisfactory. It was a perfect market; the group was a perfect customer. In the locked box at the back of the store, hidden down under the reserve sacks of grain, was almost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A fortune, taken in over the months, received from the imprisoned colony as it toiled to construct its ship. And she had made it possible. She was responsible for letting them get away after all. Because of her short-sightedness, they were able to escape. She hadn't used her head. As she drove back to town she meditated calmly, rationally. It was totally because of her: she was the only one who had possessed the power to bring them their supplies. Without her, they were helpless. Hopefully, she cast about, looking this way and that, peering with her deep inner sense, into the various "aheads # . There was more than one, of course. The "aheads # lay like a pattern of squares, an intricate web of worlds into which she could step, if she cared. But all were empty of what she wanted. All showed bleak plains of black ash, devoid of human habitation. What she wanted was lacking: they were each without customers. The pattern of "aheads # was complex. Sequences were connected like beads on a string; there were chains of "aheads # which formed interwoven links. One step led to the next... but not to alternate chains. Carefully, with great precision, she began the job of searching through each of the chains. There were many of them... a virtual infinity of possible "aheads # . And it was her power to select; she had stepped into that one, the particular chain in which the huddled colony had labored to construct its ship. She had, by entering it, made it manifest. Frozen it into reality. Dredged it up from among the many, from among the multitude of possibilities. Now she needed to dredge another. That particular "ahead # had proven unsatisfactory. The market had petered out. The truck was entering the pleasant town of Walnut Creek, passing bright stores and houses and supermarkets, before she located it. There were so many, and her mind was old... but now she had picked it out. And as soon as she found it, she knew it was the one. Her innate business instinct certified it; the particular "ahead" clicked. Of the possibilities, this one was unique. The ship was well-built, and thoroughly tested. In "ahead" after "ahead" the ship rose, hesitated as automatic machinery locked, and then burst from the jacket of atmosphere, toward the morning star. In a few "aheads", wasted sequences of failure, the ship exploded into white-hot fragments. Those, she ignored; she saw no advantage in that. In a few "aheads" the ship failed to take off at all. The turbines lashed ; exhaust poured out... and the ship remained as it was. But then the men scampered out and began going over the turbines, searching for the faulty parts. So nothing was gained. In later segments along the chain, in subsequent links, the damage was repaired, and the take-off was satisfactorily completed. But one chain was correct. Each element, each link, developed perfectly. The pressure-locks closed, and the ship was sealed. The turbines fired, and the ship, with a shudder, rose from the plain of black ash. Three miles up, the rear jets tore loose. The ship floundered, dropped in a screaming dive, and plunged back toward the Earth. Emergency landing jets, designed for Venus, were frantically thrown on. The ship slowed, hovered for an agonizing instant, and then crashed into the heap of rubble that had been Mount Diablo. There the remains of the ship lay, twisted metal sheets, smoking in the dismal silence. From the ship the men emerged, shaken and mute, to inspect the damage. To begin the miserable, futile task all over again. Collecting supplies, patching the rocket up... the old woman smiled to herself. That was what she wanted. That would do perfectly. And all she had to do -- such a little thing -- was select that sequence when she made her next trip. When she took her little business trip, the following Saturday. the black ash, pawing feebly at a deep gash in his cheek. A broken tooth throbbed. A thick ooze of blood dripped into his mouth, the hot salty taste of his own bodyfluids leaking helplessly out. He tried to move his leg, but there was no sensation. Broken. His mind was too dazed, too bewildered with despair, to comprehend. Somewhere in the half-darkness, Flannery stirred. A woman groaned; scattered among the rocks and buckled sections of the ship lay the injured and dying. An upright shape rose, stumbled, and pitched over. An artificial light flickered. It was Tellman, making his way clumsily over the tattered remains of their world. He gaped foolishly at Crowley; his glasses hung from one ear and part of his lower jaw was missing. Abruptly he collapsed face-forward into a smoking mound of supplies. His skinny body twitched aimlessly. Crowley managed to pull himself to his knees. Masterson was bending over him, saying something again and again. "I'm all right," Crowley rasped. "We're down. Wrecked." "I know." On Masterson's shattered face glittered the first stirrings of hysteria. "Do you think -- " "No," Crowley muttered. "It isn't possible." Masterson began to giggle. Tears streaked the grime of his cheeks; drops of thick moisture dripped down his neck into his charred collar. "She did it. She fixed us. She wants us to stay here." "No," Crowley repeated. He shut out the thought. It couldn't be. It just couldn't. "We'll get away," he said. "We'll assemble the remains -- start over." "She'll be back," Masterson quavered. "She knows we'll be here waiting for her. Customers!" "No," Crowley said. He didn't believe it; he made himself not believe it. "We'll get away. We've got to get away!"     a better standard of living because of a new solar stove which is   now being developed and tested. Experts hail it as a new eco  nomic force, since the use of vegetation and animal dung as fuel,   which is prevalent in many of these areas, has caused soil erosion,   deforestation and cut productivity of the soil by at least one-half.  I Although the idea of a solar cooker is not a new one, this latest I  entry is far more practical than most of the others for several I  reasons. The cooker eliminates the use of parabolic reflectors  I which are very expensive, and has the advantage of retaining heat I  for an hour or more after the sun has set. Preliminary models I I have developed temperatures of # degrees F. on days when   the outdoor temperature was less than # degrees, and have also I I produced heat sufficient for cooking on comparatively cloudy I I days. Researchers believe that the solar stove will probably sell for   as little as # when it is mass produced, a price that is within I  the financial grasp of about # potential users in India I I alone.   Our citation this month goes to Dr. Maria Telkes, of New York I I University, the inventor of the solar cooker; and to the Ford  I Foundation whose grant made the research program possible -- I I where stoves and even the cheapest fuels are often too expensive. I What Is Your Science I. Q.? it would sure help! Count five for each correct answer, and consider yourself good if you get #; excellent at #; and an expert if you hit # or more! Answers on page #. #. Which star is considered the only truly garnet colored star visible to the naked eye? #. Due to the Earth's daily rotation, a fixed object at the equator moves with a speed of about miles per hour. #. How many times in a Martian day does the moon Phobos rise and set? #. Castor the companion star of Pollux is not a single star, but actually a cluster of stars. #. Triton is one of the moons of Neptune; what is the name of the other moon? #. If a star appears in the red shift on the spectroscope we know it is moving Earth. #. How many of the planets are larger than Earth? sun. #. What is the name used by astronomers when referring to the sun's apparent path? #. The gaseous layer above the photosphere of the sun is called the #. What is the name given to the point from which meteor showers apparently come? #. When Mercury is on the other other side of the sun from #. What is the approximate magnitude of Pluto? #. The Rift is a dark in the constellation Cygnus. #. Which star is the brightest short-period variable? #. Densely compressed matter that weighs many tons to the cubic inch is the characteristic of stars. #. We know that Pluto has no atmosphere; what other planet has none that we know of? #. What is the name of the American woman astronomer who discovered the use of cepheid variables as measuring sticks of a star's distance? #. The temperature on the sun's surface is about degrees Fahrenheit. #. Messier #, and # are open star clusters in the constellation Being a world unto one's self is lonely. Even the poor amoeba creature from Venus knew that... Illustrated by Paul Orban again in that strange half-familiar world of murky fluid where only she existed. The liquid was all around her, pressing gently on all sides with a force that cushioned but did not restrain. It was a pleasant sensation, a calming one; the cares of the outside world were non-existent and therefore meaningless. She drifted, unhampered by the fluid. There seemed to be no direction but outward. Her thoughts went out and they returned with impressions. This was her world and she was the center of it. It pleased her to think this. It was an alien pleasure that was mental and without physical counterpart There was quiet, stillness, a peace she had never known. The fluid flowed about her like a great silent sea that held no sound, no movement. It seemed natural that she should be here. She was content. At the accustomed time, the autohypnotics in Miss Abby Martin's body forced her to the threshold of consciousness and cleared her brain of the fog of sleep. Slowly, she opened her eyes to the morning brightness of her bedroom and stared at the vacant skylight and the blue expanse of sky beyond it, not quite comprehending where she was. The cloudfoam cushions of her bed gave credence to the floating sensation she had had during her dream, and for a few seconds she lacked orientation. Then her eyes wandered about the room, to the closed door of the raybath stall, the retracted dressing table, the chronometer label that told her it was March #, # at thirty seconds past # hours. The subtle intonation of her favorite music, Gzerdon's "Maze of Crystal" murmured sofdy from the walls. Awareness came then, and she lay back on the bed and tried to follow the intricate crystal melodies. But a frown ridged her brow, and she wondered at the strange dream instead. She had found it pleasant enough, for she rather enjoyed the languid floating sensation, the feeling of being self-sufficient, a world unto herself. Yet the very fact of the dream's existence in a world where such things were manufactured disturbed her, for she had taken no dreampills the night before, nor at any of die other times the dream had come. The incident made her almost wish that witchdoctor psychiatrics had not been outlawed twenty years ago, so she might get some inkling of the dream's meaning; but psychiatrists had been pulled forcibly from the web of society when mental derangements were put under the jurisdiction of the Somaticists. Overhead, a rocket thundered, shaking the house with a gentle hand, and Abby turned her attention to the sound, momentarily forgetting the dream. Through the one-way skylight, she saw a speck of light accelerate beyond vision. She shook her head impatiently. Rush, rush, rush -- that was all people seemed to think about these days. Go to the Moon, go to Mars, go to Venus. In time they might go to the outer planets and perhaps even try to reach the stars. As though they didn't have enough trouble right here on Earth! All they did, it seemed, was hunt down poor beasts from the various planets and bring them back to Earth to put in cages and tanks on display, ostensibly to "learn more of the planets by studying their inhabitants." To Abby, it seemed cruel and unnecessary. Like that poor amoeba creature from Venus, she thought, remembering the day last week when she and her niece Linda had visited the zoo to see this latest acquisition. It was a creature captured from the giant oceans of the second planet, a giant amoeba encased in a large transparent tank of murky fluid for paying visitors to see. The creature was supposed to be primitively telepathic, but it seemed harmless enough. Abby found herself sympathizing with it, and it seemed to her at the time that the creature felt this sympathy and was grateful for it. For a brief moment she even had fancied that the Venusian's mind had reached out to her, probing with gentle fingers of thought. She shook her head at that. Here in the calm clear light of day diffused through the one-way skylight, the anthropomorphic notion was ridiculous; and she mentally chided herself for contemplating such things. "I must be getting old," she told herself aloud. In the next thought, she reminded herself that thirty-nine years was not old at all, and in the thought that followed, scolded herself for bothering to defend a statement so obviously rhetorical. The chronometer ticked silently to #, and sighing, Abby rose from the bed and slipped from the translucent one-piece pajamas to stand nude in the center of the bedroom. At a sudden thought she glanced quickly about the room, for she had the strange uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching her. It was impossible, of course, but she felt ill-at-ease just the same, and a blush of embarrassment stole over her at the thought. The feeling of shameful nakedness persisted even in the raybath stall, and it was a relief to dress and hurry downstairs, routing the unaccountable ideas from her mind. As usual, Gretchen had busily cleaned the house during the night, silently raying germs and dirt out of existence, and had a warm steaming breakfast-for-two ready by the time Abby had descended the escalator to the dining room. "Good morning, Gretchen," Abby said. "Good morning, Ma'm," Gretchen's mechanical voice agreed tonelessly. The robot-maid continued monotonously, "The day will be clear and sunny, with a high of # degrees Fahrenheit by # hours -- " "That will be all, Gretchen," Abby interrupted sternly, not interested in facts of temperature and humidity given so mercilessly. "Yes, Ma'm," Gretchen said obligingly. She turned and went to her closet until she would be needed again. Abby watched her disappear around a corner and frowned. Sometimes, she thought, the mechanical age could be too mechanical. A simple good morning -- "Good morning, Aunt Abby," Linda said, bounding into sight. "Good morning, Linda," Abby replied, smiling at the girl's energy. It reminded her of when she was seventeen. "Don't rush your breakfast, dear, you've plenty of time to get to school." "Yes, Aunt Abby," Linda said, rushing her breakfast. "We're going on a field trip today," she volunteered between gulps of milk. "To the zoo to see the amoebaman from Venus." Abby smiled. "Amoebaman?" she questioned. "Couldn't it just as easily be an amoeba woman?" "Amoebas don't have sex differences," Linda said matter-of-factly. "We just call it an amoebaman as a sort of classification because it seems intelligent." She finished her meal and dashed across the room. "See you later, Aunt Abby." The door whirred open and shut. Abby went to the window to watch her, sorry she had brought up the subject of sex classification; yet the question had started out harmlessly enough... Waiting outside, a boy stood on an island among moving metal sidewalks. Abby recognized him as one who had 'vised Linda very often on questions of homework. At Linda's approach his eyes took new life, and he laughed a greeting. Together, they stepped onto a sidewalk and slowly wound from sight, their hands interlocked. Abby shook her head disapprovingly; this would have to be discouraged. Linda was much too young to have boyfriends. She shook her head. The younger generation never seemed to move slowly -- they rushed their lives away. the broad one-way windows and watched the cars and aircabs zooming overhead like frightened hornets. Suddenly, she wondered where Dr. Gower was these days. Generally he televised her once in a while or dropped in to chat occasionally, and it pleased her that he did. He was her only male companion these days. That's the way with men, she thought bitterly, nodding to herself, as you grow old, they lose interest in you. Love cannot be founded on a physical basis. The thought of physical intimacy disturbed her, and she thrust it aside. One thing was certain, above all else : she was determined to protect Linda to the best of her ability, even as she had protected herself. "Thank goodness for Linda," she thought. "If it weren't for her... She let the thought hang uncontemplated, for she did have Linda; and she had no wish to dwell upon the memory of her brother's accidental death in an aircab crash which had brought Linda into her custody. She returned her attention to the world outside her window and found nothing there to interest her. Restlessly, she played with the button-controls on the chair's underarm, causing the walls to spring into the simulated life of a threedimensional telecast. A program called "Old-Time Commercial" was in progress. Abby, like most people, enjoyed this one, laughing at the exaggerated claims and the tuneless melodies which had been foisted upon her ancestors during the years before commercials had been outlawed, and she was disappointed to see it fade for channel identification. It was followed by a program of the latest fashions, some of which were much too brazen for Abby to contemplate without squirming, so she changed stations again with a flick of her forefinger beneath the armrest. "... direct from the oceans of Venus," a man's voice announced enthusiastically, and Abby found herself staring at the amoeba-like creature she had seen a week earlier at the zoo... believed to be directly related to our own Earth amoeba," the man continued, "except, of course, this one is far from microscopic, being larger than a man. For communication purposes, these Venusian creatures seem to use a form of telepathy..." Abby mused upon what Linda had said concerning the amoeba's sex, or rather lack of it. She knew that the creatures reproduced by dividing themselves, but she wondered if reproduction came instinctively or by determination. Either way, the method was to be admired, she felt. It was a pity humans were so complicated. An image stirred deep within her, a fragment of some forgotten memory, but Abby did not notice it. The creature from Venus moved restlessly across the three dimensional screen, extending itself. It seemed to be regarding her with an intense sort of curiosity, as though it were reaching out, enveloping her... window, spread a warm languorous pool about her, and she felt pleasantly drowsy. She closed her eyes. After awhile, her head tilted, and the rushing world faded as though it had never been. She floated, placidly content. She seemed, suddenly, to possess a million eyes that probed about in all directions at once. Her body stretched, elongating itself, and moved forward through a translucent fluid to an invisible wall, beyond which stood shadowy figures. She focused her mind upon these figures, and they became clear. There was a little boy gazing at her in awe, his nose pressed against the glass in fascination, not certain if he should be frightened or not. Mentally, she smiled to herself and directed her thoughts to the boy, telling him not to be afraid. There were several children there, and Abby turned her attention to another. It was Linda! Linda staring with wide, curious eyes. And next to her a man. Dr. Gower. Her heart leaped -- And she awoke with the warm sunlight streaming in upon her, her heart pounding unaccountably. She looked around. She was still in her front room before the windows. The television was going, presenting the newscast that followed the zoo program. It was just a dream, but it had seemed so real that it still disturbed her minutes after she was fully awake. For awhile, she was not even certain that the dream had not been real and that this now was not really a dream, that reality and dreaming had not somehow suddenly changed places. Abby was still sitting at the window when Linda came home from school. She watched as Linda and the boy came down the moving sidewalk and stepped off on the island before the house. They stood talking for a moment, then Linda rushed up the walk. The door whirred open and shut, and Linda instead of looking for Abby as was her habit, went straight to the escalator. Abby called, "Linda!" The girl paused. "I -- I'll be back down." "I'd like to see you right now, please," Abby's tone, though not hostile, was unrefusable. Linda appeared hesitantly in the doorway, hands behind her. Abby smiled pleasantly. "Who was that boy, dear? I don't think I know him." "Jimmy Stone," Linda said, excitement creeping into her voice. "He lives over in Sector Five, and he's in my history class at school." Abby recognized the symptoms and frowned mentally at the diagnosis. "He's probably a very nice young man, but -- " "He is, he's very nice," Linda agreed quickly. "He's going to be an astronautical engineer. Look what he made me in plastics class." She drew her hands from behind her and held a scarlet rose cupped in them. It looked soft, as smooth as though it had been just plucked, as though it held a fragrance that was not artificial. "It's very nice," Abby admitted, but she wondered how in this age of intense specialization a future astronautical engineer had managed to enroll in a plastics class to waste his time making pseudoroses. Despite her wish to the contrary, she found herself briefly admiring the youngster, then told herself it was a case of puppy love that had inspired the frivolity. "But don't you think you're a little young to be thinking about boys?" "No," Linda said defensively, pouting. "I like Jimmy and he likes me. I don't see why we shouldn't see each other." "You're in the same class," Abby pointed out ; "that should be enough. After all, you're only seventeen." "Yes," Linda flared in annoyance, and rushed on in a sudden torrent, "then I'll be eighteen and then nineteen and then twenty and then thirty. If I wait long enough maybe I'll let life pass me by, like -- " She paused, eyes wide and regretful at what she was about to say. Abby smiled gently, but a cold chill gripped her. "Like me?" she said. "You're afraid of being an old maid like me, is that it?" She hated to use the expression "old maid," but she knew that was what many people called her. She minded the name more than she admitted even to herself, for the words held an unpleasantness, a loneliness she didn't feel -- very often anyway. But then she had Linda for company. Linda's features softened. "I'm sorry, Aunt Abby," she said quietly. "That's all right, child, I understand how you feel," Abby said. "Now, you go along up and take a shower and get yourself ready for supper, and maybe we'll talk about it later." Linda nodded soberly and turned away. Abby sat in the silence of the room, listening to the soft whisper of the escalator. It hurt her to think that Linda wasn't going to show her the plastic rose at first. You had to be firm in these matters, though, to prevent worse trouble. If care weren't taken, Linda might rush off and be married before she was ready. This was a difficult time for the poor thing, that was certain, but she'd get over it. The little things in a child's life always seemed more important than they really were; that's why there were older people to guide them. Her own mother had been very strict, and Abby saw no reason to regret it. If it hadn't been for that, she might have married the first boy she'd met. She tried to recall him, but somehow she couldn't, and only a vague image came to mind. It disturbed her to have that blank spot in her memory, but Somatic drugs had consistently failed to fill it in. Linda came in a few minutes later, freshly scrubbed but not convinced. U A#I ready, dear?" Abby said pleasantly. She got up and put a consoling arm about the young girl. Together they went into the dining room, where Gretchen had silently placed the appropriate food a few minutes before. the sounds of eating and an occasional whir from the robotmaid as she appeared and disappeared with dishes. Linda was moody, thoughtful. "How was the field trip, dear?" Abby wondered. "All right," Linda answered. "The Venusian amoeba is very much like our own, the man said. It even reproduces itself by division." "Isn't that nice," Abby said, just a bit hesitantly, uncertain that reproduction by any means should be discussed. However, if they taught it in school -- "I feel sorry for it," Linda said. Abby stared at her. "Having no one to love," Linda went on, a faraway look on her face, "no one to love it. If it has any feelings, it must be very lonely." Abby made an irritable stab at a piece of synthetic potato on her plate. "Nonsense," she snapped. "You're talking like a silly schoolgirl." On second thought, she decided that Linda was a silly schoolgirl and would naturally talk like one; she was still a little girl, dependent for protection upon her Aunt Abby. That thought gave her some measure of comfort. "I feel like an amoeba sometimes," Linda said, poking restlessly at a piece of meat on her plate. "Sometimes I wish you were, dear," Abby said, feeling strangely annoyed by the statement. "Now, eat your steak before.it gets cold." "Don't you ever get lonely, Aunt Abby," Linda asked. "Suppose Dr. Gower went away, wouldn't you be lonely." "Dr. Gower is not going away," Abby pointed out. "He might," Linda insisted. "You haven't seen him for three days now. He might be gone already." Despite herself, Abby felt sudden panic. "He's probably busy. Doctors are busy these days." "He could have called." "Linda, eat your supper," Abby said sternly, "and stop this nonsense. Besides, what difference would it make. One person doesn't make the world begin or end. Dr. Gower and I are good friends, but we must adjust to these things. If he is gone away, he's gone, and that's all there is to it!" She tried to make her voice sound calm, but there was a sinking feeling in her stomach, and a small questioning voice in the back of her mind kept asking did he? did he? did he? Furiously, she thrust the thought aside. "I saw him at the zoo today," Linda said. "You did?" Abby said, relieved, and then she thought of her dream of the zoo and of Linda standing there and Dr. Gower beside the girl. Could she be psychic? No, there was a simpler explanation. "I saw you both there," she went on, smiling, "on television this afternoon." Linda frowned. "But Dr. Gower didn't arrive until the program was over, Aunt Abby." "I saw you," Abby insisted. "But I'm certain of it." "You must be mistaken, dear," Abby said in a tone of finality. And that settled that. The doorbuzzer sounded, and Gretchen whirred to answer it. Abby pressed a button beneath the table, and the image of Dr. Gower appeared on a small screen set invisibly in the opposite wall. She could feel her blood accelerate at the sight of him, but she wondered why he looked disturbed. She rose. "I'm going in to see Dr. Gower, dear," she told Linda. "Now, don't rush your food." Linda nodded abstractedly. She wasn't in a rushing mood. "Abby, how are you?" Dr. Gower said warmly, at her approach. "Very well, thank you, Tom," Abby said. "I thought I might have to get sick to see you." "I was busy," he explained. "The colonization of space brings up a great many new medical problems. How's Linda?" "Fine. I'm afraid, she's beginning to have a slight case of puppy love; I'm sure it can be discouraged in time, though." Dr. Gower hesitated. Then he said, "Linda's a normal young girl, Abby. You can't stifle her natural desires forever." "I not only can, but I will." To cushion the harshness of the statement, she added, "At least until she's mature enough to decide these things for herself. She's still a child." "A great many women get married at eighteen," Dr. Gower pointed out. "Physically, it's a good age for marriage, and a psychology going against the physical grain isn't going to help." "There are such things in life, Dr. Gower," Abby said a bit coldly, "as moral considerations. We're not animals, you know." "It might help sometimes," Dr. Gower mused, "if there were a little more animal in us and a little less so-called human." Abby found her enthusiasm for seeing Dr. Gower ebbing, being replaced by what she considered a justified annoyance. Dr. Gower knew her feeling about Linda. Something seemed to have changed his tactics. She did not like the change. "If you don't mind," she said, "I'd like to bring up Linda in my own way. The courts made me legal guardian of Linda until she's twenty-one, and I intend to protect her until then to the best of my ability." "By that time, you'll have her so confused about the world she'll be defenseless against it. I never said anything before, Abby -- " "And now is a poor time to start!" Abby's voice was like ice. "I'm sorry, Dr. Gower, but if you persist in talking this way, I'll have to ask you to leave. Linda is in my charge, and I won't stand for interference, even from you." The doctor's shoulders slumped dejectedly. "Do you know why you were chosen guardian, Abby," he said slowly. "Of course. I was the nearest relative. Why bring that up?" Dr. Gower shook his head. "Nothing," he said, after awhile. "Nothing at all. I came around to say goodbye, Abby." Abby wavered, the ice in her melting. "Goodbye?" "I'm leaving for Venus," he said, "the day after tomorrow. They need doctors up there, and I can probably do more good there than here. Besides, I'd like to investigate these amoeba creatures; I suspect they have more intelligence than we give them credit for." "I -- I'll be sorry to see you leave, Tom." "I came to ask you to go with me. You know how I feel about you, Abby; I thought I'd try just once more." "I couldn't leave Linda," Abby said. "The standard excuse," he reminded her, his voice more weary than bitter. "What Linda has needed all these years was a father, Abby. You're giving her a warped viewpoint." "The Somaticists don't think so," Abby flung at him. He crimsoned. "Somatics aren't the answer. Our era has become so mechanical that people have come to think that pressing a button is going to cure the evils of the world. Pills and pushbuttons are fine in their place, Abby, but they're not the answer, not the complete one anyway. At one time, they thought psychiatry was the answer ; they were wrong there, too. The answer's probably a combination of the two." "I'm not looking for the answer to anything," Abby said wearily. "I just want to be let alone." Dr. Gower nodded and turned to g"Have a nice trip," Abby said, trying to sound cheerful, "I'm sorry we had to argue like this." The thought of his leaving brought a sinking sensation which she tried to thrust off and couldn't. But there was Linda to think of; the girl couldn't go to Venus. At the door, Dr. Gower hesitated. "I don't know if I should tell you this; it might help, and it might not." He paused again uncertainly and then went on in a decisive tone. "Linda's your own child, Abby." She looked at him, puzzled. "Of course. The courts -- " Dr. Gower shook his head impatiently. "I don't mean that. I mean Linda was actually bom to you." The words sank in, but Abby found them meaningless. Two and two did not make five no matter how many times you added them. There was a tense silence, but she didn't know what to say to fill it. "That's what happened in your blank spot, Abby," Dr. Gower went on. "You ran away from home when you were twenty-one, because your mother was too strict, because she acted just like you're acting with Linda. Before she could find you again, someone else had. You were pregnant." Abby's brow furrowed. "You mean -- " the thought completed itself, and a look of horror replaced the frown. "That's a horrible thing to say, even in a lie." "I wish I were lying," Dr. Gower said earnestly. "You didn't remember anything that had happened, and were still dazed for nearly a year afterward. Your subconscious used amnesia as an escape mechanism, and you forgot the incident, repressed it without realizing it. An escape is sometimes possible only in the mind, where Somaticists are often helpless. I didn't say anything before, but now I'm afraid Linda may be made to suffer if I don't." Abby stared at him in shocked silence. She said, after awhile. "It's not true, it can't be." Dr. Gower shrugged. "I'm sorry, Abby, it is. It's not Linda you're worried about, it's yourself; you're afraid to face reality." "Get out," Abby said slowly, hating him for that. Her voice rose the least bit. "I won't listen to these lies." "I thought it might help. Say goodbye to Linda for me." The door closed behind him with a click. Abby stared at the closed door, a small portion of her was calm, the rest chaotic. The calm portion wondered why she should be so disturbed by something so obviously impossible. All these years she'd been wrong about Dr. Gower, trusting him as a friend. For what he said was untrue, of course. It had to be. And yet why couldn't she remember things? It was only eighteen years ago and important things had happened in that year, but somehow her memory bypassed their happening. It was like reading a book with several pages blank ; you knew from later pages what had happened, but the actual experience of the events was lost. Could it be -- the thought came despite her -- could it be that she'd had amnesia, that Dr. Gower had really told her the truth, that someone had actually -- "No. He was lying," she told the room. "He never lied before," Linda said quietly from the doorway. "You -- heard?" Linda nodded. Abby tried to smile. "I'm afraid, dear, that Dr. Gower is like all men. When he couldn't have what he wanted -- " her face clouded at the thought -- "he tried to shock me, to hurt me, to make me ashamed..." "Would it make you ashamed to have me for a daughter?" Abby's heart beat quickly. "Of course not, Linda. But the circumstances -- " "I see," Linda said slowly. "They have a name for children like me; that's what you're ashamed of. Or maybe, as Dr. Gower said, you're afraid for yourself!" "But it's not true, Linda, don't you see?" Abby insisted. She put her arm on the girl's shoulder. Linda shook it off; tears welling in her eyes. "You don't even want to know," the girl accused. "You don't even care." And she turned and ran from the room. The escalator whispered, and Abby stood in the center of the room looking at the empty doorway. She stood on the brink of a great precipice, balancing precariously, and for a brief moment she found herself believing what Dr. Gower had said. He was a fine man, and good, and he would not lie to her. Things her brother had said came to mind, once-harmless statements that seemed to take on new significance, as though he'd said them to prepare her for this moment. And suddenly, very suddenly, the world was tottering; dazedly, she made her way to a chair and sat limply in it. Dr. Gower was gone now, and she would never see him again. She knew that, and she knew that despite the things she'd said, that it did matter that he was going. But then she had Linda to think of. Or was it really Linda that concerned her? She could take the girl along, certainly; that would even clear up the problem of Jimmy Stone. Was it really the marriage she feared, a fear based upon some secret mental block in her mind? The doubt returned then, and she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure of anything anymore. Abby had to think. She had to quiet her nerves and the frantic jumbled thoughts that had begun to race through her mind. She felt dizzy and held a hand to one of the walls to steady herself as she walked to her bedroom. From the dressing table drawer she took a bottle of dreaftipills. The label was fuzzy to her eyes, but the word Danger stood out in bold letters. Abby swallowed three of the pills, which was two more than the safe dosage, and lay across the bed, eyes closed. The door to the room closed automatically. "It's not true," she told herself again, a desperate urgency to her voice. "I've got to get away from these thoughts. Got to get away. Got -- to -- escape." She felt drowsy, but the thought of what Dr. Gower had said persisted. It couldn't be true. It couldn't. And yet it might be; it was the possibility that disturbed her. That blank spot. Eighteen years ago. Eighteen years... sleep. Mentally, she traveled across the familiar plains of her past to that strange dark canyon she couldn't recall. Her mind hovered frightened above the depths, failing to see through its darkness; then she passed to the other side, to her childhood, to when she was a young girl and her mother was alive. The scene burst upon her with vivid clarity, and she found herself reliving it. It was there, all of it. The home life, protecting and yet restraining. Her dissatisfaction. The secret determination. The running away in the dead of night. It was all there, just as Dr. Gower had said. "But it's a dream," she murmured, "just a dream." Yet it seemed a reality. She could feel the cool night press upon her as she made her way slowly through the strange-familiar darkness and descended into the depths of the canyon. The feeling of having been here before was with her, and it brought terror with it. She walked on, looking to either side, listening fearfully. And then she stopped, her blood becoming ice. There was a man before her. She could see only his eyes, but they were cruel eyes, savage and lustful. Knowledge came then, bursting over her in a raging tide. She screamed and ran, her footsteps echoing frantically as she hurried through the darkness, looking for an opening for a protecting light. But no opening appeared, no light came. She ran until she was exhausted, and then she sank to the ground panting trying to still her spasms of breath. There was a small sound, as of the scraping of a shoe and she looked into the eyes again. She screamed again and again and again not knowing where screams ended and echoes began. She put her hands over her ears and screamed into the darkness. She could feel hands reaching out for her and she shrank away from them. Her mind was a playground for terror. She had to escape. She had to. (But sometimes the only escape is in the mind!) The hands reached out. She was suddenly falling, down, down, down. Calmness came, and a grateful thought appeared : she had escaped. Nothing else mattered; only that... She stopped falling. The mist grew thick, thicker ; it became dense; it became liquid. She could not feel the beating of her heart, but her mind was calm and it looked about with a detachment that was intellectual. She was floating again, floating silently through a world of murky fluid. The liquid was pressing with a force so gentle it almost did not exist. It enveloped her like a protecting shield. She drifted. There seemed to be no direction but outward. Her thoughts went out and they returned with impressions. This was her world and she was the center of it. There were no problems here, no encroachments on existence or security. It was like a return to the womb. Womb? she thought. She turned the word over in her mind and found the concept alien. She regarded it intellectually, at leisure. Time passed silently, without incident, without measurement. It had no meaning, no referent. Curious after awhile, she went forward, her mind impinging upon shadowy figures behind the transparent barrier. She focussed her attention upon them, and the image cleared. There was a man there, and a woman, and a girl. She could hear them as they spoke. "I don't know why you wanted to come here, Abby," the man was saying. "You'll see enough of these creatures on Venus." "This one is special," the woman said slowly, tasting the words like some unfamiliar food. "It's what made me change my mind about -- things. It must be very lonely." "Bosh," the man scoffed gently. "Intelligent or not, an amoeba doesn't have feelings of loneliness." "Doesn't it?" the woman wondered. "Perhaps not at first. But being able to probe the minds of humans and sympathize with them yet not contact them can... "We'll be late for the rocket, Mother," the girl said. "Jimmy promised he'd be down to see me off and let me know if he can go to the Venus Academy next year." "All right, Linda, we're going now." At the door, the woman turned for a last look; her thoughts were thoughts of sorrow, of pity, of -- regret, perhaps. "You'll learn much of the world this way," the thoughts came, "and you'll have time to readjust. Knowledge will pyramid gently, and with it will come wisdom. After awhile, escape won't be necessary. You'll want to return then and be a part of your world. Meanwhile, I must help my own people; this is the best way for both of us to escape." The woman linked arms with the man and the girl then, and the three of them went out. Silence returned, bringing with it a troubled wonderment. Then the murky fluid flowed past all vision, and the world returned, safe and familiar. The thoughts returned briefly, as echoes, but they were unfamiliar this time and meaningless. But it was not always so, and it would not always be, for contemplation bred curiosity, and curiosity bred knowledge, and knowledge bred desire, and desire the ways and means of accomplishment. Meanwhile, there was quiet, stillness, a peace she had never known. The fluid flowed about her in a silence that held no sound, no movement. It was womb-like, protective. It seemed natural that she should be here. For the moment, she was content.    digest-size magazine, you will find the greatest variety of puzzles found anywhere today. Cryptograms, mathograms, word chains, askews, cross-additions quizzes, brain teasers and a variety of other features make this one of America's outstanding pasttime magazines. Get a copy today. At all newsstands -- only #c Prescriptions for A and Hbomb radiation sickness may consist of shots of ground glass, or pulverized limestone or quartz. Tests have shown that such injections saved one-fifth of the animals that would have otherwise died from moderately high doses of radiation all over their bodies. Since the life-saving effect seems due to inflammation from introduction of foreign material, the findings may lead to the discovery of other substances which can be used with even better results. Farmers of the future may not mind the rocks in the pastures and fields too much -- provided the rocks are granite. Recent tests have shown that very finely pulverized granite, when spread on the fields, is an excellent fertilizer which provides potassium to alfalfa and clover. Two of the granite minerals, feldspar and mica, supply the potassium which is one of the three fertilizer elements that is necessary to a great variety of plants. The shortage of lumber which has been predicted may be alleviated to a large extent in future times by a lumber making robot. British scientists have devised an automatic machine which uses sawmill waste to turn out strong, continuous, warpless board. Small chips of materials such as fibrous woods, sugar cane waste and even flax sheaves are pushed from a storage hopper into a drier. A film of liquid resin is then applied to the chips to foster adhesion; and then the carpet of chips is dropped on the press. A radio frequency heater starts the second drying process before the board is pressed to final thickness. It emerges from the machine as continuous board at the rate of about twenty feet per minute and is about four feet wide and threequarters of an inch thick. Only three trained men are required to watch over the completely automatic process, which is designed to serve on a twenty-four hour a day basis. Airplanes that break the sound barrier may someday be made of no more than laminated glass and plastics. Researchers have come up with a new material which consists of glass cloth and three different plastic resins laminated and bonded together. The finished product can withstand temperatures of five hundred degrees Fahrenheit for eight days or more, and can withstand these high temperatures better than either aluminum or magnesium. Giant windmills may dot future landscapes as an aid to weather control and smog control. The # foot blade on these motor driven fans, swirling # feet above the ground, would create artificial thermal updrafts. The device would draw air from a radius of about five miles at a rate of # to # miles per hour. The result would be a funnel of fast moving air similar to that found in tornadoes. Changing the angle at which the blades operate, or varying the power of the # horse-power motor, would regulate the thermal and create the desired stream of warm air at the place and time it was necessary. Traffic lights on the highways of tomorrow may be blue and yellow instead of red and green. Color experts havie found that red-green blindness is the most prevalent of all color blindness, and that about # traffic deaths a year are caused by this inability to observe the signals properly. The blue-yellow combination would, according to these researchers, be the logical answer, since these two colors are lowest on the scale of color blindness. They predict that though the change-over would be difficult, traffic accidents due to this disability would be cut by one-third to one-half. Time travel is a favorite science fiction gimmick, and now medical research has come up with a close approximation. A new drug extract taken from a fungus which attacks grain has been tested in Britain, which makes adults feel as though they had shrunk to the size of a child. It also snatches them back through time to relive childhood events with extraordinary clarity. The often long and tedious process necessary to trace back the causes of mental derangement and adult neurosis is speeded up immeasurably by this "time travel" drug, and psychiatrists are hailing its discovery as a great step forward in the treatment of the mentally ill. Radar and radio waves may someday prove that the Earth wears an invisible girdle of electricity similar to the visible rings which encircle Saturn. Geophysical research points to the fact that some extra-terrestrial force that exerts its influence on the Earth's restless magnetic field does exist. The band which is thought to circle the Earth's equatorial area # to # miles in space may have been built up over the ages by electrical storms and may be the force that keeps the terrestrial magnetic field from returning to normal for several days after a magnetic storm. First aid kits in homes of the future may one day include a pocket sized resuscitator and anaesthetic machine. The new gadget weighs less than two pounds, including a thumb-sized gas or oxygen cylinder. It has a rubber face mask, a rebreathing bag and, without the cylinders attached, can be held in the palm of one hand. Patients with heart trouble could keep one handy at home or in the office ; passengers in planes flying at high altitudes # -- Away from. # -- Four. # -- #. # -- Ecliptic. # -- Chromosphere. #I -- Radiant. # -- #. # -- Fourteen. # -- Nebula. # -- Algol. # -- White dwarf. # -- Mercury. # -- Henrietta Leavitt. # -- #. # -- Auriga. could use them in emergencies; and police and firemen could use them for unexpected births, drowning accidents, mine explosions and fires. In short, this handy new machine could be available at all times for any emergency suffocation which might arise. A floating heliport which rests on water may be the answer to quick convenient air service from your home town. A test model has been built on a six story office building in Phoenix, Arizona, and consists of an aluminum platform floating in two inches of water. The building has not been reinforced at all, yet the roof shows no signs of caving in. The I #by#-foot float distributes the landing shock of the helicopter to the entire roof area covered by diked-in water and so eliminates the pinpoint stresses that have in the past required extensive changes in the very frame of buildings receiving concrete heliports on their roofs. The new installation weighs about # pounds and would cost about # per square foot, and could be installed without reconstruction on any roof already stressed for about # pounds per square foot. A concrete landing strip, such as is now used weighs about # tons and costs # per square foot. "Fish farming" may someday be an important adjunct to grain and vegetable farming. Recent work with farmland ponds, which have been fertilized with manure and compost and artificial fertilizers, promoting lush vegetable growth in the water, show that vegetation-eating fish thrive. The carnivorous fish feed on these, and the farmer reaps a fish harvest that often produces more income than that from an acre of land. Salt water fish farms, which use electric currents to trap the "crop # ' on a mass scale, are the next step in producing enough food to go around. Buildings comparable in size to two city blocks for use as hangars, storage warehouses and small factories may soon be made entirely by prefabricated methods. A new design, featuring a double cantilever and a space-frame construction principle, can be mass produced for permanent or temporary structures. The units can be folded like an accordion and shipped to the construction site where unskilled labor can lock them into position. Since there are no key structural points Book Service Phone GRamercy #-#  We Stock All current American Science Fiction in Book Form and carry current Magazines and Pocket Books.  A large selection of Science Fiction is available of British Books, Magazines and Pocket Editions.  We carry a large stock of Back Issues of Science Fiction Magazines.  in the weblike design, bombing it would be like poking a hole in a spider web. Parts damaged by explosion could be replaced quickly without disabling the building while repairs are being made. Your TV set, ten years from now, may have a picture screen so thin that it can be hung on the wall like a painting. According to predictions by General Electric scientists, the circuits and wiring would be built into the frame and the tubes would be a grid of wiring. Controls would be located in a small box beside your easy chair, and the model would receive color as well as monochrome pictures. Work is now going on to speed the plotting of aircraft in military filter centers by means of a picture-on-the-wall plotting board which uses electronic computer circuitry techniques to convert signals into an image on the board. This technique, when fully developed, can be carried over to civilian uses and will make possible the predicted TV installation. miles he leaned over several times to look out the window, his face close to mine. He would point at cars and I nodded and told him what makes they were. We passed a small airport and he got quite excited and pressed his face against the window. I explained that they were airplanes and he made motions with his hands that indicated he understood that planes went up and down. When he moved back to his seat there was a big wet spot on the window where his mouth had been. About twenty miles from New York the old lady took him by the hand and they got off. As the bus moved on, I watched them as they stood by the side of the road. She was wiping his face with a handkerchief and he was standing childlike there for her, his knees slightly bent, his arms hanging loosely and his face turned up at an odd angle. I thought about them until the bus pulled into the terminal on Forty-third Street. I couldn't forget the old lady and her problem during years past and years to come. Even that dim, dirty, noisy street outside the terminal looked brighter now, for some reason, and the air was pretty good and the stretch of sky above the tall buildings was a bright blue. Suddenly I recalled the reason for my trip, but it was no longer very important; it was now almost inconsequential. See what I mean? -- jlq Science is not the disembodied sort of activity that some people would make out, engaged in the abstract task of pursuing universal truth, but a social function intimately linked up with human history and human destiny. -- Julian Huxley The Greatest Selection of Puzzles Ever Published for Only #c ! " Most fascinating variety of puzzles I ever saw." -- A.B.M. T HE newest, largest, most varied and interesting selection of puzzles, word games, math games, quizzes and brain teasers ever published at the price! Hundreds of exciting ways to test your wits and talents! Months and months of fun and entertainment! Puts pep into parties. A fine, inexpensive gift. Order today! agree that it is the greatest puzzle book you ever saw at the price, return within # days for complete refund! Send only #c to Kingston, N. Y. Scores and scores of brand new crosswords of all types and sizes, from "quickies" to giants, regulars, askews, you-make-its, diagramless, and many other kinds. Fun for yourself or parties! Brand new visual puzzles to sharpen your wits ond memory. Here are some novel ways of testing your powers of observation. Try them with your friends and see who's the best reporter. Pages and pages of new cryptic messages -- funny, familiar, serious and otherwise -- that will really test your decoding talents. Pages and pages of these old favorites, constructed by expert hands, for real puzzle doers. As exciting as a carney barker's pitch. You get a "prize" too! A new type of word puzzle presented here for the first time. If you would like to try numbers for a change, here are some puzzles that will give you a work-out! Tricks and turns aplenty in these tricky teasers! puzzles, including Put and Take, Pat Answers, Compositions and Composers, Ink Spots, Vocabulary Quizzes, etc., etc. Science Fiction Magazine" is the growing-est science fiction magazine in America because every issue sparkles with new ideas and entertainment!... The finest fiction and features by the finest writers!... The best artwork by the best artists!... The finest paper and the finest printing by far!... That's why readers everywhere are calling it "America's most interesting science fiction magazine"... But why not see for yourself? You risk nothing! We will send you -- All you have to do is mail handy subscription form low. We will then send you your first issue at once -- IF Magazine, Kingston, New York Enclosed find # (check or money order) for which please send me IF  Magazine for the next # months. It is understood that the first issue is a know and you will return the full subscription price at once! on trial! If you do not enjoy every minute of it, just let us know and we will refund your money at once! If you DO like it (which we are sure you will) we will send you the next # issues fresh off the press -- which means you get # issues in all for the regular # subscription price, saving you #! Mail the Only # Money back guaranteed  full-color cover painting by Kelly Freas for the June IF. An interprepresentation of an unusual theme of a story about the "watchers", people of another universe -- who might be you or any one around you! Mr. Freas, whose artwork has appeared in leading national publications, considers it one of the best covers he has ever done. Don't miss it. See it in full color on the June IF. All Stories New and Complete  "Technocracy Versus the Humanities" by Kenneth Fagg I IF is published monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Loril Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # Issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.a! Next issue on sale April #th leaving the humanities far behind becomes more and more obvious every day. Science is taking the effort of living off our backs, easing everything from our minds to our aching feet. Electrical devices to improve our memory units are now in the experimental stage. Conveyor belts may someday take the place of elevators and sidewalks and hasten us still more on our already hurrying way. Radio clocks wake us up to music and start our breakfast. We can push a button and our automobile starts, we get power to run a drill or a still; a button cleans our house, furnishes conditioned air and warms our feet or what-have-you. Technocracy has taken us into the domain of the birds, the fish and the gophers; it has devised new drugs and techniques for lessening the pain of operations and dentist drills. We are entertained visually and audibly by things that happen thousands of miles away and food comes prepared any way we want it. Everything is geared to a scientific formula for easing the burden of having to do anything laborious or tedious for our mortal selves. But, alas, very little is done to improve the amenities and brotherhood of Mankind. Exactly what the formula for improving the brotherly relations of Man will be is anybody's guess. I don't think politics will do it; I don't think religion will do it -- both have had thousands of years to work on it and haven't improved it noticeably. Philosophy might help, but that is too much of an individual science to work for the masses. Whether one wants to face it or not, it looks as though it will take some common catastrophe to make Mankind pull together, to make two-legged beings appreciate and understand each other as related souls -- "misery loves company"; that sort of thing. Whatever the mechanics of achieving that purpose, good or bad or tragic, maybe the end will justify the means. And whether it takes one or two or a thousand or more years, we can sort of anticipate it by developing an optimistic outlook on life while we're around. my idle moments, I have been working on a little invention that might help out here and there. It's a little gadget that will attack many of our more vicious traits by remedying the situation before too much harm can be done. It is indeed a remarkable machine, even to the most science-fiction minded, and you will probably recognize radar, telepathy, computing devices and other scientific items in its make-up. It isn't patented yet, so I can't give you the exact blueprint of its manufacture. However, it is easier to tell you what it does than how it does it. Take gossip, for instance. Here is a little pastime, innocent enough sometimes, but often as malicious and murderous as a planned campaign of propaganda and lethal weapons. The scene is the regular Wednesday meeting of the Thursday afternoon bridge club. The girls have gotten together to chat, have tea or a light luncheon and, incidentally, play a little bridge. The gal who's dummy on the first hand starts the ball rolling: "You know, I heard from Daisy Carter that Gert Smith heard from her third cousin Matilda, who lives in Old Toadstool, that Josie Brown went out with Herman Jukes and didn't get home until four A.M. -- and just listen to this! -- they were staggering, practically holding each other up. I'll bet they were up to no good. He's the one that... The bridge game has stopped cold. The gals are lapping up the dirt like four starving cats working on a lone saucer of milk. Now, this is where my invention cuts in and begins to function. #. It damps the lady's speech centers and by means of telepathy tries to reason with her that, actually, she has not seen or heard first hand one single thing she is repeating and doesn't know that one single thing she's saying is gospel truth. It tries to impress on her that out of mole hills of unsubstantiated fact she is making mountains to rival the Rockies or the Andes with maybe Mount Everest thrown in. If this little gambit doesn't succeed in penetrating her thick little skull, it... #. Interferes with her digestion of those creamy confections she gobbled at the luncheon, causes violent cramps in her tummy and forces her to retire to the powder room, where she has to stay until everyone else is gone. #. If measures one and two fail and there is a nice handy chandelier or bucket of paint or anvil or other heavy object nearby, it simply levitates the object to a spot directly over her head and... Something else my invention will be allergic to is the guy who hogs the road when he is driving his old jallopy or his new dynamic hyper-eight; the guy who zooms around corners, ignoring stop lights or full stop signs or runs you over to the side of the road with his maniacal maneuvering. Oh boy! What my invention will do to that monster! There are many other delightful training-reactions incorporated in this little invention for many, many other circumstances; but there isn't room to tell you about them in this issue. However, you get the general idea. Let me know if you're in the market for one of the early models.jlq Discontent was brewing aboard the R. S. S. Indefeasible. And Captain Gorbel, a proud "basic" man , could cope with it... But Mother Earth turned the tables! -- Gapt. Gorbel, being a military man, thought of it as "disaffection" -- among the crew of the R.S.S. Indefeasible had reached the point where they could no longer be ignored, well before the ship had come within fifty light years of its objective. Sooner or later, Gorbel thought, this idiotic seal-creature is going to notice them. Capt. Gorbel wasn't sure whether he would be sorry or glad when the Adapted Man caught on. In a way, it would make things easier. But it would be an uncomfortable moment; maybe it would be better to keep sitting on the safety valve until Hoqqueah and the other Altarians were put off on -- what was its name again? -- Oh yes. Earth. But the crew plainly wasn't going to let Gorbel put it off that long. As for Hoqqueah, he didn't appear to have a noticing center anywhere in his brain. He was as little discommoded by the emotional undertow as he was by the thin and frigid air the Rigellian crew maintained inside the battlecraft. Secure in his coat of warm blubber, his eyes brown, liquid and merry, he sat in the forward greenhouse for most of each ship's day, watching the growth of the star Sol in the black skies ahead. And he talked. Gods of all stars, how he talked! Capt. Gorbel already knew more about the ancient -- the very ancient -- history of the seeding program than he had had any desire to know. Nor was the seeding program Hoqqueah's sole subject. The Colonization Council delegate had had a vertical education, one which cut in a narrow shaft through many different fields of specialization -- in contrast to GorbePs own training, which had been spread horizontally over the whole subject of spaceflight without more than touching anything else. Hoqqueah seemed to be making a project of enlarging the Captain's horizons, whether he wanted them enlarged or not. "Take agriculture," he was saying at the mbment. "This planet we're to seed provides an excellent argument for taking the long view of farm policy. There used to be fertile jungles there; but the people began their lives as farmers with the use of fire, and they killed themselves off in the same way." "How?" Gorbel said automatically. Had he remained silent, Hoqqueah would have gone on anyhow; and it didn't pay to be impolite to the Colonization Council, even by proxy. "In their own prehistory, fifteen thousand years before their official zero date, they cleared farmland by burning it off. Then they would plant a crop, harvest it, and let the jungle return. Then they burned the jungle off and went through the cycle again. At the beginning, they wiped out the greatest abundance of game animals Earth was ever to see, just by farming that way. Furthermore, the method was totally destructive to the topsoil. "Even after they achieved spaceflight, that method of farming was standard in most of the remaining jungle areas -- even though the bare rock was showing through everywhere by that time." Hoqqueah sighed. "Now of course, there's nothing but desert, naked rock, bitter cold, and thin, oxygen-poor air -- or so the people wduld view it, if there were any of them left." Gorbel shot a glance at the hunched back of Lt. Averdor, his adjutant and navigator. Averdor had managed to avoid saying so much as one word to Hoqqueah or any of the other panatropists from the beginning of the trip. Of course he wasn't required to assume the diplomatic burdens involved -- those were GorbePs crosses -- but the strain of dodging even normal intercourse with the sealmen was beginning to tell on him. Yet it was certainly beyond GorbePs authority to order Averdor to speak to an Adapted Man. He had suggested that Averdor run through a few mechanical courtesies, for the good of the ship. The only response had been one of the stoniest stares Gorbel had ever seen. And the worst of it was that Gorbel was, as a human being, wholly on Averdor's side. "After a certain number of years, conditions change on any planet," Hoqqueah babbled solemnly, waving a flipper-like arm. He was working back to his primary obsession: the seeding program. "It's only logical to insist that man be able to change with them -- or, if he can't do that, he must establish himself somewhere else. Suppose he had colonized only the Earthlike planets? Not even those planets remain Earthlike forever, not in the biological sense." "Why would we have limited ourselves to Earthlike planets in the first place?" Gorbel said. "Not that I know much about the place, but the specs don't make it sound like an optimum world." "To be sure," Hoqqueah said, though as usual Gorbel didn't know which part of his own comment Hoqqueah was agreeing to. "There's no survival value in pinning one's race forever to one set of specs. It's only sensible to go on evolving with the universe, to stay independent of such things as the aging of worlds, or the explosions of their stars. Man exists now in so many forms that there's always a refuge somewhere for any threatened people. That's a great achievement -- compared to it, what price the old arguments about sovereignity of form?" "What, indeed?" Gorbel said, but inside his skull his other self was saying: Ah-ha, he smells the hostility after all. Once an Adapted Man, always an Adapted Man -- and always fighting for equality with the basic human form. But it's no good, you seal-snouted bureaucrat. You can argue for the rest of your life, but your whiskers will always wiggle when you talk. And obviously you'll never stop talking. "And as a military man yourself, you'd be the first to appreciate the advantages, Captain," Hoqqueah added earnestly. "Using panatropy, man has seized thousands of worlds that would have been inaccessible to him otherwise. He can take most of the galaxy under occupation without stealing anyone else's planet in the process. An occupation without dispossession -- without bloodshed. Yet if some race other than man should develop imperial ambitions, and try to annex our planets, it will find itself enormously outnumbered." "That's true," Capt. Gorbel said, interested in spite of himself. "It's probably just as well that we worked it out before somebody else thought up the method. But, how come it was us? Seems to me that the first race to invent it should've been a race that already had it -- if you follow me." "Not quite, Captain. If you will give me an example -- ?" "Well, we scouted a system once where there was a race that occupied two different planets, not both at the same time, but back and forth," Gorbel said. "They had a life-cycle that had three different forms. In the first form they'd winter over on the outermost of the two worlds. Then they'd change to another form that could cross space, mother-naked, without ships, and spend the rest of the year on the inner planet in the third form. Then they'd change back into the second form and cross back to the colder planet. "It's a hard thing to describe. But the point is, this wasn't anything they'd worked out; it was natural to them. They'd evolved that way." He looked at Averdor again. "The navigation was tricky around there during the swarming season." Averdor failed to rise to the bait. "I see; the point is well taken," Hoqqueah said, nodding with grotesque thoughtfulness. "But let me point out to you, Captain, that being already able to do a thing doesn't aid you in thinking of it as something that needs to be perfected. Oh, I've seen races like the one you describe, too -- races with polymorphism, sexual alteration of generation, metamorphosis of the insect life-history type, and so on. But why should any of them think of form-changing as something extraordinary, and to be striven for? It's one of the commonplaces of their lives, after all." A small bell chimed in the greenhouse. Hoqqueah got up at once, his movements precise and almost graceful despite his tubbiness. "Thus endeth the day," he said cheerfully. "Thank you for your courtesy, Captain." He waddled out. He would, of course, be back tomorrow. And the day after that. And the next day -- unless the crewmen had tarred and feathered the whole bunch by then. If only, Gorbel thought distractedly, the damned Adapts weren't so quick to abuse their privileges! As a delegate of the Colonization Council, Hoqqueah was a person of importance, and could not be barred from entering the greenhouse except in an emergency. But didn't the man know he shouldn't abuse the privilege on a ship manned by basic-form human beings, most of whom could not enter the greenhouse at all without a direct order? And the rest of the panatropists were just as bad. As passengers, they could go almost anywhere in the ship that the crew could go -- and they did, persistently and unapologetically, as though moving among equals. Legally, that was what they were -- but didn't they know that there was such a thing as prejudice? And that among common spacemen the prejudice -- against any Adapted Man -- always hovered near the borderline of bigotry? There was a slight hum as Averdor' s power chair swung around to face the Captain. Like most Rigellian men, the Lieutenant's face was lean and harsh, and the starlight in the greenhouse did nothing to soften it; but to Capt. Gorbel, to whom it was familiar down to its last line, it looked especially forbidding now. "Well?" he said. "I'd think you'd be fed to the teeth with that freak by this time," Averdor said without preamble. "Something's got to be done, Captain, before the crew gets so surly that we have to start handing out brig sentences." "I don't like know-it-alls any better than you do," Gorbel said grimly. But the man's a delegate of the Council. He's got a right to be up here if he wants to." "You can bar him from the greenhouse in an emergency -- " "I fail to see any emergency," Gorbel said stiffly. "This is a hazardous part of the galaxy -- potentially, anyhow. That star up ahead has nine planets besides the one we're supposed to land on, and I don't know how many satellites of planetary size. Suppose somebody on one of them lost his head and took a crack at us as we went by?" Gorbel frowned. "That's reaching for trouble. Besides, the area's been surveyed recently -- at least once -- otherwise we wouldn't be here." "A sketch job. It's still sensible to take precautions. If there should be any trouble, there's many a Board of Review that would call it risky to have unreliable secondclass human types in the greenhouse when it breaks out." "You're talking nonsense." "Dammit, Captain, read between the lines a minute," Averdor said harshly. "I know as well as you do that there's going to be no trouble that we can't handle. And that no reviewing board would pull a complaint like that on you if there were. I'm just trying to give you an excuse to use on the seals." "I'm listening." "Good. The Indefeasible is the tightest ship in the Rigellian navy, her record's clean, and the crew's morale is almost a legend. We can't afford to start gigging the men for their personal prejudices -- which is what it will amount to, if those seals drive them to breaking discipline." "I can hear myself explaining that to Hoqqueah." "You don't need to," Averdor said doggedly. "You can tell him, instead, that you're going to have to declare the ship on emergency status until we land. That means that the panatrope team, as passengers, will have to stick to their quarters. It's simple enough." It was simple enough, all right. And decidedly tempting. "I don't like it," Gorbel said. "Hoqqueah may be a know-it-all, but he's not entirely a fool. He'll see through it easily enough." Averdor shrugged. "It's your command," he said. "I don't see what he could do about it. All he could report to the Council would be a suspicion -- and they'd probably discount it. Everybody knows that these second-class types are quick to think they're being persecuted." "I see what you mean," Gorbel said. "Well, I'll think about it." when Hoqqueah returned to the greenhouse, Gorbel still had not made up his mind. The very fact that his own feelings were on the side of Averdor and the crew made him suspicious of Averdor's "easy" solution. The plan was tempting enough to blind a man to flaws that might otherwise be obvious. The Adapted Man settled himself comfortably and looked out through the transparent metal. "Ah," he said. "Our target is bigger now, eh, Captain? Think of it: in just a few days now, we will be -- in the historical sense -- home again." Now it was riddles! "What do you mean?" Gorbel said. "I'm sorry; I thought you knew. Earth is the home planet of the human race, Captain. There is where the basic form evolved." Gorbel considered this unexpected bit of information cautiously. Even assuming that it was true -- and it probably was, that would be the kind of thing Hoqqueah would know about a planet to which he was assigned -- it didn't seem to make any special difference in the situation. But Hoqqueah had obviously brought it out for a reason. Well, he'd be trotting out the reason, too, soon enough; nobody would ever accuse the Altarian of being taciturn. "Yes, there's where it all began," Hoqqueah said. "Of course, at first it never occurred to those people that they might produce preadapted children. They went to all kinds of extremes to adapt their environment instead, or to carry it along with them. But they finally realized that with the planets, such a system won't work. You can't spend your life in a spacesuit, or under a dome, either. "Besides, they had form trouble in their society from their earliest days. For centuries they were absurdly touchy over minute differences in coloring and shape, and even in thinking. They had regime after regime that tried to impose its own concept of the standard citizen on everybody, and enslaved those who didn't fit the specs." Abruptly, Hoqqueah's chatter began to make Gorbel uncomfortable. It was becoming easier and easier to sympathize with Averdor's determination to ignore the Adapted Man's existence entirely. "It was only after they'd painfully taught themselves that such differences really don't matter, that they could go on to panatropy," Hoqqueah said. "It was the logical conclusion. Of course, a certain continuity of form had to be maintained, and has been maintained to this day. You cannot totally change the form without totally changing the thought processes. If you give a man the form of a cockroach, as one ancient writer foresaw, he will wind up thinking like a cockroach, not like a human being. We recognized that. On worlds where only extreme modifications of the human form would make it suitable -- for instance, a planet of the gas giant type -- no seeding is attempted. The Council maintains that such worlds are the potential property of races other than the human, races whose psychotypes would not have to undergo radical change in order to survive there." Dimly, Capt. Gorbel saw where Hoqqueah was leading him. The seal-man, in his own maddeningly indirect way, was arguing his right to be considered an equal in fact, as well as in law. He was arguing it, however, with facts whose validity he alone knew and whose relevance he alone could judge. He was, in short, loading the dice, and the last residues of Gorbel's tolerance were evaporating rapidly. "Of course there was resistance back there at the beginning," Hoqqueah said. "The kind of mind, that had only recently been persuaded that men with melanin in their skins are human beings, was quick to take the attitude that an Adapted Man -- any Adapted Man -- was the social inferior of the 'primary or basic human type, the type that lived on Earth. "You see, Captain, all this might still have been prevented, had it been possible to maintain that attitude that belief that changing the form, even in part, makes a man less of a man than he was in the 'primary' state. But the day has come when that attitude is no longer tenable -- a day that is the greatest of all moral watersheds for our race, the day that is to unite all our divergent currents of attitudes toward each other into one common reservoir of brotherhood and purpose. You and I are very fortunate to be on the scene to see it." "Very interesting," Gorbel said coldly. "But those things happened a long time ago, and we know very little about this part of the galaxy these days. Under the circumstances -- which you'll find clearly written out in the log, together with the appropriate regulations -- I'm forced to place the ship on emergency alert beginning tomorrow, and continuing until your team disembarks. I'm afraid that means that henceforth all passengers will be required to stay in quarters." Hoqqueah turned and arose. His eyes were still warm and liquid, but there was no longer any trace of merriment in them. "I know very well what it means," he said. "And to some extent I understand the need -- though I had been hoping to first see the planet of our birth from space. But I don't think you quite understood me. Captain. The moral watershed of which I spoke is not in the past. It is now. It began the day that the Earth itself became no longer habitable for the so-called basic human type. The flowing of the streams toward the common reservoir will become bigger and bigger, as word spreads through the galaxy that Earth itself has been seeded with Adapted Men. With that news will go a shock of recognition -- the shock of realizing that the 'basic' types are now, and have been for a long time, a very small minority, despite their pretensions." Was Hoqqueah being absurd enough to threaten -- an unarmed, comical seal-man shaking a fist at the captain of the Indefeasible? Or -- "Before I go, let me ask you this one question, Captain. Down there is your home planet, and my team and I will be going out on its surface before long. Do you dare to follow us out of the ship?" "Why should I?" Gorbel said. "Why, to show the superiority of the bask type, Captain," Hoqqueah said softly. "Surely you cannot admit that a pack of seal-men are your betters, on your own ancestral ground!" He bowed and went to the door. Just before he reached it, he turned (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Paul Orban Hal was stranded in the wilderness with a beautiful girl, and it was surprisingly enjoyable -- while his conditioning was off. But, after all, how uncivilized can one get? Executive's seat. Although he twisted and shifted his position restlessly, he received the same sensation of perfect, comfortable support no matter which way he sat in it. Which was only natural, of course. Formair was the best suspend-field furniture manufactured. As he squirmed about, he had a faint, puzzled frown on his face, and in his stomach he felt a lurking sensation of unaccustomed tension. Hal simply could not understand it. There was a faint humming sound, as the door panel slid back. His father entered the office. "Well Hal," the old man murmured softly with a placid smile of satisfaction, a year. We may be the richest "We've done it." people in the world then." "Done what? Oh, you mean the "That's nice," Hal said mildly, new coloration process?" His father flicked a finger across "Yes. It will quintuple the net a sensitive spot on the front of the value of the family fortune within desk and relaxed as a perfect Formair attendant's chair sprang into existence to fit his gross, soft body. "Yes indeed' he said with a mild sigh. "It's been a long, long time that we've been working for that. Worked mighty hard, too." "That's right," murmured Hal, a little more forcefully than necessary. "Splendid." His father's eyebrows rose at the unusual emphasis, but he was much too cultured to question the point. He continued along the lines of the conversation already started. "We'll have to do something for Bruchner. He has been of tremendous assistance on that project. Did it practically all by himself. He is a very intelligent man, even if he is an Outlander." "Bruchner," said Hal with mild irritation. "All I hear around here lately is Bruchner. What is he, anyway? Nothing but a savage." "Eh?" said his father softly, raising his eyebrows again in polite inquiry. fellow, why doesn't he take the Treatment and become civilized? I sometimes get a little tired of an employee who tells me I'm wrong all the time." "But he is almost always right when he makes such statements, Hal," Webber pointed out mildly. "For instance, just the other day I asked him about the color range to be used with the new process on the Formair Skydome. He stated flatly that blue was a normal color for sky. Just like that. I was a little startled, of course, at his lack of courtesy. But after I thought it over a while, blue did seem to be a nice color for sky." "Aaa, blue," Hal muttered. "What's wrong with the green we've always used in the past?" Mr. Webber sighed and squirmed a little to get the chair into a more comfortable fit. Attendant's chairs were not quite as comfortable as the Executive type, even if they were Formair. Then he cocked an eyebrow and looked at his son with mild concern. "Hal, my boy, what's the trouble? I've never seen you so completely upset in all my life." "I feel funny," murmured Hal. "As a matter of fact, I feel awful. Maybe there's some connection." "Ill," the old man nodded agreeably. "Yes, I thought you looked it when I came in here. Something in the set of your mouth. Tight, sort of." . With an expression of mild surprise, Hal reached up and tentatively felt around his mouth with a cleanly manicured forefinger. "Son," Webber murmured, "how long has it been since you had your last CG Treatment?" "Eight years," Hal admitted. "It's a little overdue, I suppose, but surely -- " His voice trailed off softly, as his mind seized upon the possibility. "That's probably what it is," Webber replied. That was a pretty definite statement for someone to make about another's sensations, but anyone could see that the old man was concerned over his son. "Five years is the standard period at your age. Why haven't you taken it?" "Well, you know," Hal whispered. "It's that new thing they have in it now." "Ah," said his father with comprehension. "That's right, I forgot all about that. A change. But you won't mind, really you won't. You just think you will." "Perhaps so," Hal said, and hastily changed the subject of conversation to a less depressing topic. "The new coloration process is a real success, you say?" "Absolutely. We can now provide flexible hue and chroma for the complete Formair line -- Airchair, Aircab and Airdome. We'll be the only one who has it, and since every Proprietor on the planet will want our new equipment as fast as we turn it out, we'll put every other firm completely out of the business. I've already worked out a method so that we can convert to export goods, too, without waiting for the economic balance to be readjusted. Of course, the colonies will have to curtail a little, but we don't have to concern ourselves with them." "Yes," agreed Hal. "Bruchner has been very useful to us on it," the old man repeated again. "We'll have to show him we appreciate it." Hal's mouth tightened just perceptibly at the mention of the redoubtable engineer, but he said nothing. His father continued in his soft, mild voice. "We must make him a present of something. Should it be money? Can't give him property, of course, because he isn't a citizen." "I don't like the idea of giving an Outlander money. They get their allotments and that's enough wealth. If you give them money, they will be able to buy more than their allotment, and that could very easily upset our own economic balance, you know." "Quite true," Webber agreed. Then he smiled with placid inspiration. "I know. We'll give him fame. We'll name the process after him." "Well," Hal said doubtfully, "I guess that would do it." "I think so. He's been a great help. As a matter of fact, though, most of the Outlanders are helpful. A pity they won't take the Treatments and become citizens. It seems sort of sad the way their emotions cut them up at times. Like old Tanan last month. Why, up to then he was almost like a civilized man -- even without the treatments." "I know," Hal said tonelessly. "It was his son, wasn't it?" "Yes. Curious that the old man should be so concerned over that little unpleasantness. So his son did get a little excited and kill a Proprietor and was executed himself. No reason for his father to carry on so about it, is there? I tried to get him to take the Treatment then, but -- well, after all, you can hardly expect an uncivilized Outlander to appreciate the advantages, can you?" "No." Hal did not refer to the fact that the new element recently put into the standard CC Treatment was causing him to postpone taking it himself, but his father seemed to sense his thought. "You won't mind it, son. Really you won't. The Treatment will take care of the whole thing. It's perfectly obvious that you are suffering from the effects of the delay right at this moment." "Oh Chaos," Hal swore softly. "Why did they have to go and put that element in anyway?" "Now Hal, you know better than that," his father chided him gently. "It was either include a marital inclination or else go in for a complete program of artificial insemination. The women have a vote too, you know, and they wouldn't hear of it. They don't object to carrying a child for a few months -- that's always been in their conditioning for some reason or another. But they insisted that if they had to be mothers, the men would have to be fathers. And they insisted on a standard, civilized marriage contract to cover the situation." "I know, I know. I've heard all the arguments. Racial suicide and all. Nonsense. We can always import Outlanders and force them to take the Treatment. Outlanders," he pointed out with suitable, mild, cultured disgust, "breed like animals." "No son, that wouldn't do the job. We have to keep the blood line. Outlanders don't have it, you know. If they did, they would have permitted themselves to be civilized long ago." Hal's fingers drummed nervously on the desk top, and his father again raised an eyebrow in mild concern. He shook his head thoughtfully. Guiltily, Hal stopped his fingers from their satisfying tattoo. He bunched them into a fist instead, and then gazed at it with mild unbelief. "All right," he finally whispered. "This is simply awful. And it looks as if in order to be cured, I'll have to get me a wife along with it. A pity, though. Everything was perfectly mild without one." "You'll be mild with a wife, Hal," his father assured him softly. "You don't like the prospect now, because it means change. Change, of course, is always unpleasant. But the Treatment will take care of it all right. I know that I didn't expect things to work out so mildly with a wife. It was optional back in those days, and if it hadn't been for your mother's family money, I never would have married. Particularly her -- with her family history of fecundity. As witnessed by the children we produced -- you and your sister. But Formair needed the money, and I was the only available man in the Webber clan. When I agreed to make the sacrifice, they made me president of the firm, because it isn't often that a man will do so much for his own family. Shows real character. It's in the cultured family blood, naturally." Hal had heard all this many, many times before, but he listened without irritation. Or at least, with only the mild irritation that was the result of his present unstable condition. "Yes indeed," his father went on in his mild, comfortable voice. "Hardly knew she was around the house, though, once the Treatment was over with. It was just as if she had been around all my life. Marvelous process." "All right," Hal murmured. "I'll take it." "Be a good idea to pick out a wife first. Sometimes there are a few minor adjustments to make because of outstanding individual characteristics. You get an absolutely perfect fit that way, you know." He stood up and walked toward the door, the flabby muscles of his body easily supporting the two pounds relative of his weight. "The Ansermet family has a female available, I believe," he murmured as he walked. "Excellent choice. But you better have the probability checked anyway." "I know about her," Hal replied thoughtfully. "But what's she like? Have you ever met her?" His father smiled benignly back at him, as he practically floated through the doorway. "That doesn't matter a bit," he said mildly. "It doesn't make any difference at all what either of you are like. The Treatment will bring you both back to absolute, statistical normal, and you'll both be a perfect fit for each other. Quite pleasantly civilized." The door hummed shut behind him. "Well," Hal announced aloud to himself, "guess that's it." He ordered the automatic secretary to make all suitable arrangements and then stood up. He walked to the elevator, where a soft, hissing breeze conveyed his temporary one-tenth pound relative gently up the tube to the roof. There his weight returned to its normal two pounds relative, and he spoke to the robot attendant. "My cab." His Formair Aircab was promptly and quietly delivered, and Hal stepped inside. "Destination?" a voice inquired softly from the control bank. "Take me to the nearest available Civilization Conditioning Treatment Center." At once, the cab took off. It was a silent and comfortable motion. Hal had always liked flying. The automatic pilot was speaking to him gently. "Central Authority advises that the nearest is in the metropolis of Knoxville. This requires transversing interurban wilderness." Hal frowned just slightly. He had never seen the interurban wilderness, of course, and had not the slightest desire to do so. That was chaos. He inquired, "How soon can the local Center take me?" "Three days, seven hours twenty minutes from reference time. Mark time... mark!" the robot announced the temporal point of reference. "Too long," Hal replied wearily. "Let's go to Knoxville. And shut off all outside views. I do not wish to see the chaos." The Aircab obediently turned and transposed through the suspend-field of the York metropolis Airdome. It was an effortless passing, since the field that constituted the wall structure of the Aircab was exactly in phase with that of the Airdome field. Both were Formair manufacture, of course. The pleasant, silent, effortless motion of the Aircab soon produced its usual somnolent effect on him, and he dozed comfortably off. He slept the entire trip. At Knoxville, he spoke to the Center Technician briefly, advising the master robot of the possibility of his altered economic status, and the matter was thoroughly checked by the computor at Central Authority. Every conceivable source of psychosomatic tension and internal conflict was studied, and suitable alterations on Hal's master curve plotted. The process took ten minutes, while Hal dozed under the soothing warmth of the examination cap. There was a crackling buzz, and it was over. He awoke immediately, and felt wonderful. No tension. No irritation. Not the slightest bit of his recent restlessness. Hal was delighted. On the way out of the cubicle, he encountered another Proprietor, and smiled at him with perfect, civilized mildness. "York," he ordered his Aircab. Once again, the sleek buttonshaped vehicle soared up through the Airdome and out over the interurban wilderness. Hal contentedly went to sleep right in the middle of the pilot's automatic rundown of flight data. raucous rattle from the control bank. Blinking his eyes sleepily, he said, "Please stop all that noise. What is the trouble?" A very unpleasant and notably ungentle voice replied, "Apologies sir. We are out of control. Aircrash has occurred." Aircrash! An almost unheard-of thing that sometimes happened to people who used inferior equipment like that produced by firms other than Form air. People were even known to be killed by it. "Report," he said quietly, then flinched a little at the raucous scratching of the speech mechanism. "Reference point... mark! Altitude eleven thousand three hundred seventy one feet. Velocity reduced to two hundred nine point nine miles per hour. Locus: seven hundred point eight miles from nearest civilized metropolis, which is York." The voice continued, but became unintelligible as the mangled circuits faltered. Seven hundred miles from civilization! Wilderness. Chaos; that settled it, of course. Hal smiled gently as he realized that he was about to die. A civilized man obviously could not be expected to survive in chaos. He observed that he was breathing more strenuously, and realized that it was the result of the rapid failure of the antigravity field. Never in his life had Hal been under the full force of the earth's mass field, but he knew the symptoms. Once he had been exposed to a one-half gee for a few hours. Very unpleasant, he recalled. The automatic pilot's unintelligible speech suddenly stopped altogether. There was a heavy, awkward lurch that threw Hal forward against the front panel. But before he struck it, the field generator failed completely, the panel ceased to exist, and Hal was flying through the air. He shut his eyes, and placidly waited for death. A moment later, he hit the ground sharply, rolled over and over, and lay still. He sighed heavily. Death? He had always fancied that death would be a complete absence of sensation, and no consciousness of effort whatever. Instead, his breath was coming in deep, heavy sighs, his head hurt, his arm was aching, and something was tickling his nose. "Come on, wake up," a voice said briskly. Hal opened his eyes and looked up at a golden-framed face. It was the face that had been speaking, and the pleasingly shaped lips now moved again. "You aren't hurt, you know. Just a little shaken up." Hal continued to stare at the woman for a moment, then muttered "Umph," and struggled to a sitting posture. It was a great effort in the unaccustomed full earth gravitational field. The woman was an Outlander, no doubt about it. That was evident from her highly spirited tone of voice. But as Hal looked around at the strange picture of undisturbed interurban wilderness, he found that most astonishingly he did not mind it. As a matter of fact, he rather liked her tone of voice. It was all very puzzling. "What happened?" he muttered heavily, his eyes moving back to the landscape and the small metal boxes which housed the now defunct suspend-field generators. "There must have been something wrong with your Aircab," she replied. "You crashed. The same way I did a couple days ago." The woman walked over to the generator boxes, picked them up and brought them back to where he was still sitting on the grass. "We'll need these," she explained. "There are emergency supplies inside them." Hal didn't move. She waited a moment, then said lightly, tossing her golden hair, "Come along now. We're way out in the wilderness, you know, and there aren't any robots to bring us our dinner." "Wilderness," Hal murmured. "That's right. Well, I guess we'll die here." "Oh nonsense!" She stamped her foot with impatience. "This would have to happen to me. Of all people to be stranded with in the wilderness, I have to get one of you insipid, gutless Proprietors." "Oh yes?" Hal said with unconscious anger, lurching to his feet. "Who's insipid and gutless? I'm considerably more civilized than you are." Quick surprise crossed her face as she listened. Hal continued his angry speech. "Why is it that all you savages always think you know how to live better than your superiors? If you are so clever, why aren't you civilized?" "Well, listen to him. You sound almost human." She was laughing at him! "Damn savage," he growled. He turned and strode purposefully away from her across the soft matting of grass. "Where do you think you are going?" she called. "Away from here," he replied. But the rapid pace in the unaccustomed gravity was very quickly taking his energy. His breath came in deep, labored gasps already, and he could scarcely move his feet. He stopped abruptly, and looked at the distant horizon. There was nothing in sight that indicated civilization. These regions had not been inhabited for two hundred and fifty years -- ever since the severance of the planetary colonies from political control by the motherland, and the settling of the Proprietors into their well-separated, civilized cities. The land was all owned by the Proprietors, but was unnecessary, and hence not used. He felt a light touch on his arm. "I'm sorry," she apologized softly. "I can understand you a little, but you're so completely under the influence of your horrible personality conditioning methods that you can't possibly understand me." "Who's under what influence?" Hal said in a valiant attempt to express his irritation, but his voice held the obvious weakness of fatigue. "You poor boy," she sympathized. "You don't sound very much influenced by it right now." At her words, Hal suddenly became aware of the unaccustomed vigor of his own emotions, and he was puzzled by it. But it seemed oddly unimportant for some reason. "How come you can handle this awful weight so easily?" he asked her. Her laughter was light and delightful. "We spend most of our lives under natural conditions, not under an antigravity machine. I've only been on Earth for a few months, visiting my father. But a lot of that time was spent out here in this beautiful wilderness." "Horrible chaos," he muttered. He glanced up and observed a mild, blue, cloud-studded sky. "Why it is blue, after all. Isn't it?" "What's blue?" "The skydome." She glanced up thoughtfully. "Of course it's blue. And this is not one of your artificial skys. This is the real thing. There's no artificial weather control out here, you know. You get natural sunlight, natural winds, storms, rain -- oh, lots of things." "Gahh," said Hal. "What makes you surprised at finding that the sky is blue?" "Probably because I never saw it before. The only time I ever heard of its being anything other than green was when an engineer we have working for us at the factory said it was blue." "Well, never mind the sky. Let's find some place where we can get a little shelter for the night." She began to lead him slowly along an animal trail to a cluster of trees on a nearby stream. She walked with the obviously delayed pace one takes with invalids, but Hal had a difficult time keeping up. Finally, she said, "Here's a pretty good place. Sit down next to that tree. You must be worn out." "Oooo," he groaned, reclining back against a broad, rough oak trunk, then stiffening painfully away from it again. "It doesn't fit," he mourned plaintively. "Now you're sounding silly again," she scolded. "Go on, lean back. There aren't any suspendfield lounges out here for you, so you take what you get." Obediently, he relaxed against the rough, twisting bark. He was very, very tired. On second thought, even this rugged seat was comfortable. He sighed heavily, and then looked pensively around again. "Oh well, what does it matter? We'll be dead soon." "Don't talk like that!" she snapped with annoyance. "Why?" he inquired listlessly. "Everybody knows a civilized human being can't possibly survive in the wilderness. That's why no one ever comes here. And I'd just as soon die right now, if you have The woman stared at him with a tight frown between her eyebrows. Then she shook her head with wonder. "How you people can call yourselves civilized is beyoiid me. You yourself don't seem so bad, except that you don't have any guts. They've trained it all out by now." "Please," begged Hal. "You sound like that uncouth engineer that works for us. Impertinent." "That what engineer?" she demanded spiritedly. "Who are you, anyway?" "I'm Webber. Hal Webber. The engineer is a savage -- oh sorry." He smiled weakly. "You're a savage, too. Guess you Outlanders don't regard yourselves as such." "No we don't," she snapped. "And if it weren't for us, you silly fools here on Earth would have died out long ago." "Outlanders are noted for their misplaced pride, of course," Hal commented with a mildness that was impelled by fatigue rather than civilized conditioning. "Oh are we now?" she said angrily, standing up and bending over him. "And who do you think you are, Lord Proprietor? Some humble god, perhaps? Let me tell you something, Hal Webber, I've heard about you. You know who I am? My name is Lois Bruchner. That uncouth engineer you just referred to happens to be my father." Hal was puzzled. "What on earth is the matter?" he asked. "Why are you so excited?" "You called my father uncouth." "Why get excited about that? After all -- " Hal gestured weakly, trying to reason with her, " -- it's only your father. I didn't say you were uncouth. Funny thing is -- I like you." "Suppose I called your father names?" she demanded, her lower lip protruding belligerently. "You can call him anything you like as far as I am concerned." Lois Bruchner stood there a moment, her mouth open in astonishment. Then she sat down beside him again quietly. "That's right," she murmured, "they even educate love out of you." Hal sighed heavily, and slid away from the tree onto the rough, rocky ground. It was painful, but he was so tired. His breath came in regular, deep sighs as he went to sleep. had constructed a kind of primitive lean-to shelter over him. Hal was amazed. The sheltering purpose of the structure was evident to him, and he was startled that she should have been able to design such a thing on the spur of the moment. She heard him stir and looked up from the fire she had built in front of the lean-to. "Hungry?" she asked. He was ravenous, but his muscles ached in every fibre. His wonder at her cleverness disappeared abruptly when he tried to move. He rolled over groaning and helpless. Immediately, she was at his side, pushing him back onto the bed of dry, fragrant grass she had put him on. "Now don't try to move around," she admonished. "Just a few days, and you'll be all right." "Oooo," Hal groaned. "This is awful." "There, there," she murmured solicitously. "I've made you some soup. You'll like it." "Soup," he groaned. "I want food. Good solid synthomeat. Don't you have any food?" "Solid food in your stomach so soon in this heavy gravity would kill you." She went away and returned quickly with a little cup and spoon, and proceeded to empty the container into his lax mouth a few drops at a time. After a while, he ceased his protesting. It was less painful to swallow the slop than to fight it. Very soon afterward, he lost consciousness. Later, he was again aware of his surroundings. He felt tremendously better, and observed with a peculiar satisfaction that it was morning. Funny sounds were in the air, which he eventually recognized as the cries of wild birds and insects. Insects? He blinked his eyes and struggled to a sitting position, and looked worriedly around. Insects can carry disease, he remembered. And wild animals were reported to be carnivorous. His clumsy motions awakened Lois, who had been sleeping beside him. Hal looked down at her with a vague wonder. Such a nice looking savage, he thought, as she popped open her eyes. She smiled a pleased morning smile at him and lazily stretched. "Hi," she said. "How do you fefel?" "Quite mild," Hal admitted with wonder. "Odd, too. That junk you fed me last night must have some very efficient drug in it." "Junk I fed you last night?" Lois echoed, sitting up. Then she laughed her amusement. "Oh, you mean that soup. That wasn't last night, Hal Webber. That was last week." "But -- I just woke up," he protested. "Yes." She smiled at him, reaching up and patting his cheek affectionately. "You've been a little delirious. Gravity trauma, very common. You get used to it fast, but that's one thing they didn't condition you to, I guess, and your conscious prompdy rejected the possibility." Sudden remembrance came to Hal of the agony it had been to move the last time he remembered trying it Cautiously he lifted an arm and flexed it. He glanced back at Lois, who was watching him with amusement. "It feels all right now. Heavy and clumsy, but no pain." "Good." She stood up and brushed her unruly hair away from her forehead. "I'll fix your breakfast just as soon as I take my bath, all right?" she said. Hal nodded absently. The stream was twenty yards away, and Lois walked quickly over to it. There she pulled her jumper over her head and dove into the crystal water. "Eeii, it's cold!" she shrieked. Her vigorous splashing threw sharp brilliance in the early morning sunlight. After a few minutes, she came out, letting the water dry on her soft, golden skin. Hal was watching her in openmouthed admiration. It was a most remarkable sensation, this pleasure at seeing her 'move in that lithe, supple way. He had never before experienced such a thing. As she came up on the grassy bank, she noticed his rapt gaze, and quickly snatched up her single garment and held it in front of her. "All right," she told him briskly. "You too. You're much too big for me to handle effectively, so you haven't had a decent bath since we got here. And it gets pretty hot during the day." Obediently, as if in a vic-spell, Hal stood up and walked to the water's edge, keeping his eyes on her. "Look where you're going," she said sharply, and he shook his head dazedly. He slowly removed his clothing, dropped it on the ground, and jumped into the water. That was the end of the spell The water was like ice, he howled like a wounded animal and tried to jump out again. But the gravity made him clumsy and he fell back with a great splash. He rose again, gasping and sputtering, making wild, awkward movements -- in a frenzy to get out of the excruciating coldness. Finally he was lying on the grass, panting and exhausted. Lois was standing over him, her pale blue eyes dancing with delight. "What a spectacle," she bubbled merrily. "You should have seen yourself. I sure wish I had a vic-o-graph with me. Such performances should be preserved." Unaccountably, Hal found himself gurgling like a delighted baby, and then laughing with her in loud, uncivilized guffaws. After a few minutes, they were both worn out with hilarity. Lois sighed. She gave him a brimming smile, and went en back to the lean-to. "Get your clothes on," she said. "I'll have some breakfast for you in a few minutes." it was not very good. It had come out of the standard emergency ration from the Aircab master units, and no power on earth could have made it very palatable. And the supply was nearly gone. "I don't know how we can get back," she said thoughtfully, as she chewed on a wafer. "Plenty of Aircabs go by -- I've seen a dozen or so during the past week. But nobody ever looks out of them except Outlanders, and there aren't many of us around. So there isn't any point in building a signal fire." Hal did not reply. He lay back on the grass, his belly full with unaccustomed satisfaction, staring at the blue sky. He decided that he still preferred green. "It's sort of a washed-out color," he murmured. "What?" "The sky. It's sort of pallid and weak-looking." "That's haze. But spoken like a big, strong man," she said lightly. And then wistfully added, "A pity they always take it out of you." Hal frowned, and looked down from the sky to the windblown dampness of her golden hair. "What do you mean by that?" he inquired. "Nothing." Her gaze returned modestly to her wafer, and she continued the former subject. "We were talking about getting back to what you call civilization, remember? Or do you prefer we become the new Adam and Eve lost in the wilderness?" she asked, her eyes dancing. "We could start a new primitive dynasty of plains savages." "Oh." Hal's mind came back to the immediate problem. "Oh, yes, that's right. We have to get back." He frowned a moment. "Well now, let's see. There're a number of emergency stations spotted around the interurban wilderness. Can't just remember where I learned about them -- must have been Treatment information." He thoughtfully picked up a stick and began drawing diagrams of maps in the loose soil. "There." He pointed with the stick. "One of them should be about two hundred miles north of where we are now, provided the automatic pilot of my Aircab was accurate in its final position fix." Lois was looking at the crude map when he glanced back up at her. There seemed to be a sadness in her expression. She nodded her head at the map. "From that it looks like those emasculating treatments do some good after all." "Don't talk like that," he reproved her. "The Civilization Conditioning Treatment is the basis of our culture." She started to speak, hesitated, and then blurted out, "What, precisely, does it do for you?" "Don't you know?" Hal asked astonished, and then answered his own question. "Oh, of course, Outlanders would hardly know much about civilized history. Well, before interplanetary exploration was started, there weren't any areas at all like this wilderness. The planet was much too crowded. The people lived in huge, contiguous cities and were incessantly battling with each other for economic survival, social survival and animal survival. The vast majority of the population couldn't stand it. They developed all kinds of psychogenic illnesses. The impact of the uncontrolled inclinations of individuals meeting the absolute self-control them. "Then, gradually, the Civilization Conditioning process was developed. What happened then was just what you would expect -- the people who took the Treatments were so much better adapted to civilized living conditions that the others simply didn't have a chance. Just as soon as planetary colonies were opened up, the savages were all shipped off. There were a lot of riots and small-scale wars for a while, but eventually the superior conditioning of the civilized people won out. "After things had stabilized again, anyone who wanted to was permitted to become an Earth citizen, but he had to take the Treatment, and keep it up. But by that time, most savages had a lot of peculiar prejudices against it, so the population of Earth has remained very small. The robotic defenses of the Proprietors protected the planet from further invasion, and now the robotic police maintain order everywhere in the system. "Of course, the planets are extremely poor in natural resources, so we supply the basic material, even though we relinquished political control long ago. The colonies pay us by sending unusually gifted technicians like your father to work for us. Naturally, Outlanders have no rights, whatsoever, here. Not even the right to life or freedom or payment of the material allotment. But unless they commit a crime or otherwise interfere with the Proprietors, there is not the slightest danger of being molested by any citizen, because citizens are civilized." Hal stopped his history lecture and looked back up at her. "The Treatment is responsible for the entire rational order of our culture, as you probably know." "But look how insipid it makes you all," she burst out. "You're so weak and wishy-washy. There isn't a noble or even a strong sentiment in your entire society." "That is how the process works. It is nothing but a series of checks and balances artificially installed in the subconscious which make strong sentiments unnecessary, and which prevent unstable activity. The result is a perfectly smooth existence with no ups or downs, and a perfect cooperation between civilized people." Lois thought this over for a moment. Then she asked curiously, "How do you account for the fact that you -- after all the Treatments you have taken -- are so different from other Proprietors? You, well -- " she stumbled, blushing a little " -- you seem perfectly normal in your reactions." Hal shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe my last Treatment had an error in it." But he shook his head again at that idea, because the computor at Central Authority never made mistakes. "It i c Qtranp'p " "I think It's wonderful." She smiled at him with quick radiance. Hal grinned happily back at her, feeling an alien surge of joy as he looked at the smile and at her. "Well, whatever it is, for the next few months or so it looks like we'll be savages in fact." long time walking north to their destination. It was a remarkably satisfying experience for Hal. And it was for Lois, too, as she pointed out to him the night after they found the emergency station. There was a small Formair shelter at the place, and a simple automatic distress transmitter which was set in operation by one push of a button. Symbols marked on the case of the transmitter assured them that assistance would be forthcoming within twelve hours. It was their first night in a civilized shelter, and their last night together in the wilderness. Early the next morning, an Authority Aircab came humming swiftly down to the meadow where they were waiting. Once inside the Aircab, Hal became taciturn and thoughtful, but Lois was not disturbed. She talked enough for both of them. Hal luxuriated in the pleasant reawakened rapport with the things of civilization. Back at the city, they went to Bruchner' s residence, and Lois' father rushed outside to greet them. Lois ran happily to him, embracing him, and volubly explaining how wonderful Hal was, how he had saved her from being gobbled up by a lot of wild animals, and how strong he was, and sundry other affectionately innocuous exaggerations. Hal looked curiously on for a few minutes in idle wonder at the strange attachments of Outlanders. Then Lois proudly pulled him over next to her. "Isn't he wonderful? And we're in love -- oh, so much in love." "Lois," Bruchner mumbled unhappily. "There are some things you have to be told. I should have told you before -- " "You don't have to tell me anything," she bubbled happily. "You can say all you want to about the Proprietors, but this one is different. He's -- he's real!" Hal laughed diffidently, and moved a little further away from her. He gazed around at the city, recognizing it with thirsty familiarity, happily part of it again. The experience of the past three months already seemed far away. "Hal," Lois murmured, suddenly aware of his rapidly growing coolness. "Hal, darling, what's wrong?" "Why nothing at all, uh, Lois." He looked at her uncomfortably for a moment, and backed a step further. "It's just -- well, you know." "Oh no you don't," she cried, rushing up to him and grabbing his arm. "Where are you going -- Dad!" "Please, Miss Bruchner," Hal murmured mildly, disengaging his arm from her. He gazed hungrily around him again the moment she let go, and looked back at her only when he was startled by a sudden, choking sob. Lois was staring at him, her fist to her mouth, the pale blue eyes brimming. "Oh no!" she cried tremulously. "Lois," Bruchner said, his voice sounding harsh with repressed emotions, "come in here. You've got to know what the situation is." He put his arm around her trembling shoulders and led her off, glaring at Hal in helpless fury. The moment they were out of sight, Hal turned and stepped back into the Aircab. He ordered it to take him home. His parents were there, watching a vic-entertainment, which Hal promptly turned off. "Who did that?" his father mumbled, coming immediately out of the trance. "Hal? That wasn't a very nice thing to do, son." "Why Hal," his mother sighed mildly. "You're not dead after all. How nice. Don't pay any attention to your father -- it wasn't a very interesting vie anyway." "Shouldn't turn it off like that, though." "Um, sorry," Hal apologized gently. He relaxed into the comfortable, perfect fit of a Formair lounge. "Just thought I'd let you know I'm still alive." "Well, we're glad," his mother murmured absently. "Must have been pretty awful." "That's the funny thing about it, though -- I didn't mind it a bit at the time. Very curious. I had an Outlander woman with me -- Bruchner's daughter, as a matter of fact." "Oh dear," Mrs. Webber sighed. "Poor Hal." "Well, like I say, it wasn't exactly mild, but it was quite tolerable, somehow." He frowned just slightly, and shook his head at the puzzling incongruity. He recalled his three months of association with the uncivilized woman, somewhat wistfully contemplating strong, overpowering sentiments in a chaotic wilderness. "Anyway," he said at last, "I'm home again, and it's all over. I won't have to have anything to do with her now." "Yes," Mrs. Webber murmured. "Odd that you should have survived though, isn't it? I thought a civilized man in the wilderness would die almost at once." Webber gave the cultured equivalent of a mild snort. "Of course he could survive. Oh -- " and he laughed softly in apology " -- that's right. I forgot to tell you about that." The eyes of his wife politely turned to him and he explained. "A couple of weeks after our son here apparently had been killed, I happened to run into an Authority physician. I mentioned it to him, just in passing. He told me that there was a factor in the CG Treatment that provided for such things. "It seems that the Civilization Conditioning they give you is only designed to enable a man to survive in a city. In order for the conditioning to function, you have to have that civilized urban environment. Once the environment is removed, the conditioned complex has nothing to react against, and the man immediately becomes almost -- but not quite -- as savage as a typical Outlander. "That way, a civilized man can always manage to live in the wilderness, given half a chance. Once he gets back into a city again, the proper, civilized environment is returned, the conditioning starts functioning immediately and presto! -- the man is civilized again." "Well now, that's nice," Mrs. Webber said placidly. "Wouldn't like to see my boy dead." (Continued on page #) Such magnificent gifts as these were undoubtedly intended for Mankind. But those who possess them are rare indeed, while those who fear the unknown are legion they were different As secretary , receptionist and general nursemaid to them I took it upon myself to dig back through the news files and get enough clips to tell their history from birth until they opened the school . You've all read it so there's no need to go into details about their strange life and still stranger birth . Nor their magnificent education or still more magnificent gifts . It's true , every bit of it; their telepathic and were the only births like them to survive to maturity and beyond . During the last contact I had with them (I was their first and most advanced pupil) it came as pure inspiration to take down their transmissions in the special short, shorthand we developed for use among the pupils and ourselves . What follows may be added to the story told by the news clips, differing only in person. I have added nothing in translation of the notes. # P kmU Mg iia  WiZiwAhttity I fmmMt KpwhWtH mAwfowk pw. M 'tyi wmi wms WittM Mi s ; ,x i'vn Vs  ."iV"." :# ? m t A E W WW Wt' gjjgggl KSjfti #W#'#'  fa Illustrated by Paul Orban leaving the narrative as disjointed as they gave it. The events are as they transmitted them, as they lived them . I was in contact with them until -- but read, and when you're through reading do as I do every night . Pray. And hope -- for mankind . sible that three grand, successful years of work could end so suddenly with us lying in a ditch casional bullet fired from the guns of friends but there it is. God, what a complicated being this socalled modem man is! He seems to be born cloaked with complexities which get even more complex as he grows. No wonder he has been so long on the road, being engaged in a continual battle between ethics and emotions as he has. So here we are, the bridge, the first rungs of a ladder leading to a new and delightful plane of existence for all mankind, wallowing in the mud of an irrigation ditch instead of glorying in the divine world of the mind. If we can but make them see! Maybe the professors were right when they told us to teach under the protection of the university instead of hardheadedly going out on our own. Princess, do you remember Lucille? She was our best pupil, after you, of course. She's the one who turned over the stone that freed our personal gremlin. Oh, it's not really her fault, though she did break our one and only cardinal rule by bringing in an outsider herself instead of leaving such choices to us. Actually the fault was ours because -- well, who knows? That wonderful control we practiced for so many years slipped, no matter the reason. It was just one of those inexplicably foolish things people will do when they think they're in love. Guess we thought we could save her some embarrassment or some such thing. You had just left on a long vacation when that one showed up. He was the man that Lucille brought up with her as a prospective pupil, the one that -- one wing of them is closing in on us now. Kitten. We'll have to try for the swamp ahead of us. We'll have to lose them for a while if we want time to figure a way out, though we aren't really very good at this sort of cat and mouse game. We can give our own boys a little credit, though. They aren't really trying to hit us. They shoot well enough to be able to make it look very good. All we really have to worry about is Thurlow and his trained deputy, Trainor. There, that was nice. The sheriff himself just spotted us and started a pincer movement -- fifty yards in back of us. Good old boy. Hope he doesn't get in trouble over us. At last! If this patch of swampy it we're made, providing the highway troopers of this state don't get too smart and take over the operation. Our sheriff is in charge so far. Lord, if we only weren't so tired! Anyhow, Lucy brought Thurlow in and we gave him the usual treatment. The only trouble is we overdid it slightly and it scared him. Besides telling him what he had for told him its contents and when he reached for it in a sort of stunned reflex action we levitated it into his hand. It was a pretty big mistake in view of the fact that he was one of that bunch that was fairly sensitive mentally, but whom we couldn't read thoroughly. We could telepath only the very surface of his mind. He would have made a wonderful adept with the proper training. He was awed but shocked and scared, too. It was outside his realm of experience and he was superstitious in spite of his fine education. Some folks don't let learning sink in to open the rusty locks of prejudice and inhibition. He said things that bared his mind as surely as if we had read him. It wasn't a pretty mind, either. It made us sick physically and the impulses that did come through were deep and angry, giving us a terrific headache and making it hard to concentrate. Later we followed him but still couldn't read him for the anger flashes blotted out his thought stream thoroughly. To him, what we were doing just couldn't happen in good old #. We were dealing in the black arts and he told us as much, refusing to listen to reason in any shape. The fact that everyone has these capabilities latent was altogether lost on him. Our licenses, diplomas and degrees meant less than nothing and the longer he went on the more rabid he got, frothing obscenely about such things as tampering with forces better left alone and man thinking with his brains instead of letting the Prince of Darkness do it for him. Had it not been so serious it would have been almost slapstick. Instead he was tragic. When he got to the part about children with our loathsome disease he ran out of expletives and stormed out of the office in a cloud of anger and fright, muttering that we hadn't heard the last of him. Lucy, of course, was heartsick. We didn't have to tell her what the meeting had meant. Nor did Thurlow's wallet. She found that out during the rather abortive lesson we tried to give her for she read as we interrupted it (that shows how much off beam we were because we just don't do that) to take a phone call from Casey down at the sheriff's office. Our visitor, Thurlow, was District Judge Thurlow of District Two, a very high man on the law enforcement pole. Casey was good. He'd listened in while Thurlow was complaining to the sheriff and apparently heard the sheriff read the judge off politely but nonetheless firmly, telling him first how valuable we were to the force when it came to interrogating hard-to-crack suspects and as long as we hadn't committed murder or rape or passed any bum checks there was nothing to be done. Especially since the judge His Honor was out of his district! Fortunately we were in District One over which our mutual friend, Judge Kimball, presides. Incidentally, Kimball was still under doctor's care at the time due to his latest heart attack. He was getting along quite well but he was old and his days on the bench were pretty well numbered. Casey thought that District One might conceivably have to appoint a new judge to hold them over until election due to the fall court calendar. As it turned out that didn't happen. Br-r-r! Princess, don't ever let anyone tell you that swamp water can't get cold in summertime. We've got the shakes pretty bad both from our ordeal and from chill. Getting uncomfortably hungry, too. That's what comes of letting an inferior enemy panic you. We certainly haven't acted as though we had better sense. It's just another of those imponderables to chalk up for study. After Casey's call the air seemed to be cleared and under that driving compulsion which has never left us we went on about the business of trying to succeed with nature since she had succeeded so well with us. The study of the deep processes of the mind eclipsed the next two days and only the terrible jangle of that outmoded telephone brought us to the surface again. It's too bad that we had to converse orally with the great masses of the untrained. It's so slow and they could learn so easily. It was Casey again, telling us we were needed down at the station. He was apparently calling us on blind orders, for he couldn't tell us what was up. Figuring that we had another prisoner to crack we closed classes and drove down. The sheriff seemed mystified, too, and just slightly troubled. We could read that much off the surface of his mind, but he was upset enough to make the rest of his thoughts a meaningless jumble of impulses. All he knew was that we were wanted in the judge's chambers. You guessed it, Honey. It was ball on an emergency hearing and he figured it was his duty to mankind to give us a little talking to while he was there. After all, the good of the community was his concern now, and he chose to interpret that as the opportunity to place his narrow little views on record. Trainor, the sheriff's deputy faithful only to the judge, because of a favor granted while he served in Thurlow's district, was very busy signing his name to something when we walked into the chambers. It gave us a peculiar feeling to see Thurlow sitting at Kimball's desk. It bore out our theory about a room taking on the personality of its occupant. This room was no longer warm and friendly. The only thing we could read from Thurlow was a self-righteous anger and a solemn, nasty vow to fight us to the last ditch -- which, incidentally, he has done for that irrigation ditch is the last one we ever wish to occupy. That water was miserably cold. Three guesses what Trainor was signing. Of all things, a complaint charging us with questionable educational technique! The one thing not covered by license, as Thurlow made haste to confirm through the State House, and by Trainor's complaint, the one way we could legally come into his hands. It was a dainty little frame but unbreakable. Spreading a sweet legal shovel he asked us questions that minutely covered every phase and method of our teaching, then smiled a nasty smile, the while fixing his own signature to another wisp of terribly binding paper. A restraining order. The words of which forbade us to teach! We were to suspend our life's work or suffer the punishment for contempt of court because of a narrow-minded, righteously wrathful mental prude! How can you fight something like that? Thurlow was the last and highest branch of authority in the area unless we took it to Supreme Court. For a while we were tempted to do that but on what were we to base a case? Public opinion would throw us out of court if the Supreme Justice didn't. We talked to the sheriff when we came down and he and his boys were on our side -- emotionally. Legally they had to carry out the judge's orders to place us under institutional restraint if we transgressed. In short, we would be tossed in the pokey if we thumbed our noses at the order. The sheriff's advice was to suspend operations until Supreme Court sat and take it to them. When we asked if he and his staff would be witnesses for us -- well, that's water under the oft mentioned bridge. There are some ugly facets of politics that force the men playing them to act as they do. Otherwise we surely wouldn't have been refused. So there we were; no witnesses -- no case; because we couldn't bring our pupils into it. It was an uncertain mess at best and we didn't want them to get it in the neck along with us. For the same reason we couldn't involve our former teachers at the university. What poor payment for hours of drudgery to be dragged into a court battle ! So with the sheriff's advice to go into another business ringing in our ears, we came back home to sweat it out and think. It took a while, but the only answer we felt was right under the circumstances was to go underground. That makes it sound like the dark ages, doesn't it. Princess, when knowledge has to hide and creep and skulk instead of flowering under the sun? Our gifts couldn't be let go to waste, not after the preparation and development that went into expanding them into a workable set of psychic senses. We had to give Man the benefit of our awakening by waking him in turn. It's much too bad that we were so sheltered at the university. We might have had some practical experience with the world and its people. We might also have known what to do about this awful hunger that is gradually tearing us down. It's getting to be a serious problem in our untrained condition. The prof's wouldn't even let us play handball for fear of injury so consequently we're nothing but a living cliche, skin and bones. Donald feels it strongly. We shall have to try to buoy each other and go on our combined reserves. Pray that we don't get too weak. It's been almost # hours since we've eaten, as there wasn't time for breakfast. Our clothes seem to be drying slightly though it's still cool enough to make it uncomfortable and dangerous. This is the way colds grab you. We did pretty well in our choice of an underground location -- we thought. Our mistake was in overlooking the police trained mind of our bloodhound friend, Trainor. He's a shrewd man and not unintelligent though sadly misguided. How we should like to have him on our side! In five days of sniffing around he had us located, and in another, he had enough proof of activity to report to Thurlow and come after us with a bench warrant of arrest. It's peculiar that we couldn't stall him or dodge him some way with our much touted IQ, but probably we were still too naive about human relations and most assuredly unversed in the devious twistings of the police mind. After all, though we're twenty-six years old, our experience with people put us in about the three year old class. So you see? Were it to begin all over again the outcome would be different. We would be more practical and worldly. You learn. There was no sense fighting him, because he had the law enforcement agencies of the whole state in back of him. All he had to do was whisper "Sic 'em" and we were dead. So we went along quietly to see Thurlow and that dear man took a singularly fiendish delight in imposing an impossible fine on us for contempt of court Our particular transgression wasn't definitively covered by law so neither was the fine. The fact that Thurlow was fining us for teaching methods instead of the contempt charge didn't dawn on us until just yesterday. How completely ignorant can you get? He gave us a pretty, selfrighteous speech about the good of the community and a judge's place in it, mentioning in passing that everything wasn't covered by law so it was up to the judge to handle matters as he saw fit. That was what he was trained and elected for and that was what he was doing. Nothing personal, understand. As it was, and well he knew it, we couldn't begin to pay the fine so we were informed that we'd have to sit it out in the county jail at the rate of two dollars a day. The fine was five hundred dollars. The sheriff almost cried when he found we were to be taking advantage of his hospitality. Very likely the full injustice of the judge's complacent little scheme finally got through to him. At any rate, sympathy or not, we had eight months and ten days to serve with time off possible for good behavior. That's where you found us when you finished your vacation and discovered you were temporarily out of a job. Donald took quick advantage of a prisoner's rights to telephone Judge Kimball. He was still in bed but sounded fairly strong. His consternation over our new address was touching and real, but we were sadly informed that ethically the whole matter was beyond him. When Thurlow sat in for him in his district, then Thurlow was law and no reversal could be had outside of the due process of that law through a higher court. He, Kimball, could do nothing until he could get back on the bench. That might be several weeks yet as he wasn't to get out of bed or get excited in any way. We hung up and had our first look at the familiar cells from the prisoner's viewpoint. The change in oudook was subtle but definite. The walls looked grayer. Hope we're not boring you with all this, Kitten, but we must tell it to someone and you are closest and dearest to us. You missed out on nearly all our doings after we in process. Someone should have the full story although what good it will ever do is debatable. Perhaps at some future time we can do something with it -- if we get out of the present jackpot. Got to move. The state police have taken over the operation and our sheriff is relegated to the role of visiting fireman. It's lamentable that we aren't in his bailiwick. Things might work out better. These troopers are very efficient. don around our end of the swamp. All we can do is head through its length now. Trainor is with them. Thurlow has joined them also. We get a tiny jab of pain as we pass over him. That impossible man! Naturally our pupils fell off, thinking the school completely shut down, until you visited us and were able to pass the word that discreet visits wouldn't go unrewarded. Only a few drifted back for deeper learning and expansion, as you know. One happy thing about the others who were afraid to come back is that they would still make progress, having once been awakened, though it would be infinitely slow and groping. The nucleus that sat with us on those once a week school days grew stronger very rapidly, for knowledge is cumulative and progressive, and they began to realize what they in turn had to do when they were ready. Credit must be given their strength of mind for seeing and accepting such a responsibility with the enthusiasm they showed. It was too good to last. Trainor's turn at afternoon shift came around and lasted the usual month which gave him plenty of opportunity to watch us like a hawk. He did. We were cautious but we couldn't know what he was watching for, because he didn't know either. He found out one afternoon. Visitors just don't come around and merely sit -- staring at each other or the walls. We learned another lesson from that: men with as much training as he had don't always consciously think things out with their surface minds. Their reactions became instinctive and as such, untraceable by the most adept telepath. We knew he was there to spy but that's about all. The net result was a direct order from Thurlow cutting off not only all visitors, but as Trainor gleefully advised us, cancelling all accrued days off for good behavior. That's five days a month in this state and it was almost unbearable. The thorough injustice of the whole affair was beginning to gall mightily, getting under our rather thin skin in many places. What seemed the final crushing blow was the news that filtered in to us from Judge Kimball's court reporter. He'd taken word to the sick man about our latest loving treatment by Thurlow and it angered Kimball enough to make him get out of bed -- too soon. He died on the floor of his bedroom. So, not only do we lose a dear friend, but also any chance of his assistance. Thurlow would now sit for District One until election time. That put us entirely on our own resources. After much deliberation, we decided to give in and go back to the university when our sentence was up and take advantage of its sheltering walls for our teaching. We would be absorbed into the faculty and soon all this unpleasantness would pass over. How we passed the time until our release is unimportant to anyone but us. During the remaining months, we delved farther and farther into the mind and gained a much deeper insight into the workings of these gifts we had. Man could be so powerful and work so much for his own good -- if he could only be made to realize the potential in his mind! He could even be happy. The bright day came at last, and we walked out of our cell free to begin again. It was raining a gray rain outside, but to us the weather had never looked brighter. As we reached for the sheriff's phone to call the university, Trainor sidled up and laid a scrap of paper on the desk. A glance was enough to make us hang up on the uncompleted call. It was another restraining order. After that we tried to find work on the outside, but it was a sorry failure. The curse of being different is a mighty one indeed. No one seemed to care that we had feelings the same as others and that we could get just as hungry and thirsty without funds to buy. Ahh! There it is again. Those words. Hunger and thirst. As if we needed a reminder. Donald is getting weaker in perception. He has always been the first to feel such things and we've never been able to trace the reason. We certainly have no -- I interject at this point, for telepathic contact with them broke un explainably . I prayed for their safety for I suddenly knew what it would mean to lose them . What a drab, dreary, bigoted world it would be without them to teach us and help us. God, that was a bad half hour, Puss. These troopers are so well trained that they're more telepathically dead than you can imagine. First, Donald was so weak he let one of them sneak up close enough for a quick rifle shot. It missed, but of course it told exactly where we were. Donald exerted ing that we had enough time to work on the trooper if we hurried. Normally we'd be no match for him but desperation can work wonders. We resorted to a base form of trickery by affecting to surrender to him. When he came up to put the cuffs on us, we played dirtier by offering him a knee that will keep him from attending his wife for a few days. Rotten trick, but we couldn't afford to let him get his hands on us or it would have been all finished. That makes another count against us. We left his rifle out of reach and ran. Fortunately the others milled around for a precious minute or two when they found him, giving us still more time. Before they got moving again, we broke cover and made it across a county road into a farmer's barn where we burrowed into the hay. We'll stay here a while to rest. Not being the athletic type we sure need it. To go back, our small supply of money was running dangerously low in spite of miserly budgeting. We didn't know what to do outside of robbing a bank to get more. Then it happened. We were browsing through the library one day, when Donald not yet filed hoping to turn up something new. The stack was mixed, holding such things as a treatise on grinding optical lenses, a copy of "Gone With the Wind", a couple of western novels, a thin edition of "The Purloined Letter" and several volumes for the home craftsman. Evidently some newlyweds were doing things to their well mortgaged dream house. On the way home, Donald's idea burst in on both of us like some monstrous flashbulb. With our minds being so perfectly tuned through constant work during the had immediately and what one once. It was a fine working agreement and became as habitual as breathing. Donald's idea was beautiful for all that it was lifted from another man. Its application was what burnished it to that bright luster of originality. We would go to work in a carnival! If a man could hide a letter in an open letter rack, where better could we be hidden but in a carnival? It was wonderful. We had no trouble getting into one. The owner took one look at what we could do and told us the answer mentally by wondering how little he could offer and still get us. It gave us a certain bargaining point but at our stage of the game all we wanted was in. The thought crossed our minds that we might be lowering our station in life but we were past caring. And of course we found out how wrong we were, that "station in life" is just a point of view. To outsiders carnies are a hard lot, interested in nothing but the quickest way to part the suckers from a dollar. Well, they were hard, to outsiders, but to those inside there is a difference. We found some mighty fine people and some very fertile minds. We enjoyed the first real security we'd known for a long time. We found friendship and a certain amount of fame as moneymakers for the show. We got a raise after working on the boss for a while. Best of all we lost ourselves in the bustle of the show. Shortly after our admission into the ranks of the carnies, we felt safe enough to put out feelers (we were out of the state by then), mental this time, prodding small ideas into the best minds, giving them the urge to ask us questions of a leading nature and so eventually we began another class in telepathy, Esp, and their related subjects. As we traveled from state to state we picked up new pupils from other shows and lost others to the same shows, but the running count was about twenty most of the time. We had to be so very careful in our selections for fear of a repetition of our former mishaps, but it went well. We made no mistakes and turned out some fine pupils, one in particular. He progressed fast enough in the short time we had him to become acutely adept, and when we told him he was ready to teach he accepted it by leaving the carnival to settle down with a home and wife. It was good to see the fruit of our work being put into practice. Next season, we found that in the first pass across the country we were booked for the north end of our home state. For the first time in nearly two years we would be on almost familiar ground. You know what happened then, Baby. You ought to. You were the one we contacted. Telepathy is a lot better than a telephone, isn't it? What you might not know is that our contact with you was another step in this whole sickening drama. How were we to suspect that the train ticket agent was one of those tenacious, bespectacled fellows who doggedly chewed on an idea until it made sense to him? Who would know that he was one of those spiteful, small people who enjoyed doing his civic duty as he saw it? He wondered why so many people were taking the same train on the same day to the same place, when it had never happened before. People just don't travel three hundred miles to take in a one horse carnival. Being a small town he knew most of the folks by name -- or at least by sight -- and he recalled that you, sweet, were once our secretary. Imagine the excitement he felt at having such a momentous thing happen in his dull and uneventful life. How best to savour the taste of it? Why, call the sheriff, naturally. Oh, it must have been delicious. Let's hope he enjoys the memory. With our luck it was out of the question to have anyone but Trainor answer the phone -- and swing into high gear. Apparently Judge Thurlow had run for District One during the election and made it, giving up his own stamping grounds for some reason. It hardly seems possible that he'd do it just on the hope that we might decide to come home and set up shop. No man could be that vindictive, could he? Or are we still much too naive to be allowed out without a keeper? Who knows? We do know that the group was followed by Trainor and another man at Thurlow's orders; and when they saw all of you meet at a certain tent in back of the midway all they had to do was sneak close enough to hear that there was exactly nothing going on! We were all so excited at seeing each other that their presence went unnoticed. Besides, what need to exercise caution when there wasn't an unfriendly face within miles? When Trainor made his telephone call to get the permission to arrest us on the strength of another bench warrant Thurlow prepared in a hurry, his emotions penetrated our little circle; but not soon enough for everyone to get out safely. It all happened so suddenly that our lifelong control snapped. The persecution was so sneaking and so needless! It didn't take long to dispose of the two deputies. Desperation again and thick anger. We lost no time in trussing them solidly and leaving them unconscious. After it was over, we realized what a deadly game it had suddenly become. We were in deep trouble again -- deeper than any that had gone before. And we needed time, lots of it. Take our word for it. Kitten, and stay underground during any time you and the others may teach. It's your duty to use care, because you certainly won't be able to advance your state of learning or help others while under detention. Keep in touch with the others. Your ranks will fill, if you can succeed undetected until it's time to come into the open. Don't get into our fix; don't be forced into breaking the law. We didn't break it by teaching supposedly Satanic courses but by ignoring the restraining order, then by beating up the police and running. Running wasn't too bad in itself, but it made it tougher when in our shocked haste we took a car that didn't belong to us. Then, too, we shouldn't have taken it across the state line. That made it a federal offense. Even if the troopers get us, we shall first be guests of Lordy, this hay is dry. It's sweet smelling and comfortable lying here but it's dry and dusty. It'll be too bad if nature gives us away through a tickling nose. We can do without her tricks now. trough in back of the barn. We must take a chance on it. This raging thirst is as crippling as the lack of food. We drove in a huge circle and left the car well before morning; continuing on foot in the general direction of our friend who had left the carnival to teach. It was our hope to be able to stay there until things cooled down. We finally made it, tired and hungry, and got the welcome we expected. He was overjoyed to see us. You'll never know how cosy and warm that house felt or how utterly good was the smell of baking bread. His wife is a jewel. We received a jolt the next morning before breakfast. The neighbor's little girl came bursting Into the house in what apparently was her normal fashion while we were teaching a small class that our friend had collected. She was extraordinarily sensitive and our combined minds made a terrific impact on her perception before we could control it. Her eyes opened and she was all for broadcasting to every child in the block, but Donald got us through a sticky moment. He made it her own personal secret in a way that only children can appreciate and then showed her one of the it at once for children are extraordinarily susceptible to instruction. Their minds haven't had the chance to get cluttered by inhibitions and conventional thoughts. She was wide-eyedly delighted and promised her cross-my-heart promise that no one would ever know about us. But of course, they did. Parents being what they are, it was foolish to assume that an untrained child could keep the signs of her adventure from them. The signs pointed to a story and it didn't take them long to pry it out of her. It wasn't the girl's fault. The adult odds were against her. They poked and prodded at her for the cause of her overly bright eyes and animated spirit, until the poor child was overwrought and blurted out the details of her immense find. The mother was at once sympathetic to her and us, bless her, but not so the father. They both knew she wasn't imagining it because of the stories they'd heard of us over the years and the father blew up. We could sense the whole tableau telepathically, dreading the outcome, knowing what it must be. The father stormed about the house crying death and destruction on us, while the mother tried to get him to listen to reason. He was mentally incapable of doing it. He, like so many of the others, was terribly frightened at the unknown, fearsome thing in their midst. It was unthinkable that we should stay free of captivity when there were places for people like us! We shouldn't be allowed to mingle with normal, decent folks. The upshot was a long distance, collect phone call to the judge who doubtless accepted the charges quite happily. We couldn't stay, so we turned to run once more. That's about all there is, Princess. We've run until we can hardly run any more. We're weak and hungry and sickened by the hatred and stupid, active resistance surrounding us. We don't blame the police. They're merely doing what they are paid to do. through the swamp in a wide semicircle and a few thoughts are leaking through the jumble of shouted orders and mixed impulses. Trainor and the judge are right with them. He seems to be talking earnestly to Trainor but his hatred and anger blot everything out -- we can get nothing from him. Donald is getting weaker, but we must stir to get water and try to leave before they see this bam. Here the narrative broke once more for more than an hour, leaving me in an agonized, hopeless suspense, knowing there was no way to help them. Occasionally I sensed a faint stirring in my mind as though they were trying to get through to me and once a deep stab of sorrow amounting almost to pain. It was getting quite late in the evening before they came through once more, weakly but still clearly and coherently . It's hard to concentrate. The ambulance is jerking and bounding along and the pain is frightful. Looking back, there was no other way for it to end. They were too many and too dedicated, while we were only us and on the run, not even on the defensive. Our physical weakness became painfully apparent when we cautiously ventured out back to find the water trough, drank, and stumbled away from our pursuers for a quarter of a mile right into the hands of six waiting state policemen. We'd been so intent on the men in the swamp, so blanketed by Thurlow's hate, and so tired that we didn't sense the danger from another direction in the form of a flanking movement. The operation was the end for us. They all had drawn weapons, but when they saw our sad state they rather sheepishly put them away and took us almost gently in hand. We're getting weaker. Unconsciousness is near again. Would that we could have stayed with them! Instead, one picked up a walkietalkie and called in our capture. Even in the turmoil of the moment we could pick up flashes of amazed, frightened and curious thoughts as many of them saw us for the first time. Funny how the mind will act at times of stress, making one an observer of one's own actions, so to speak. Another phase opened for study! Thurlow thanked the state men brusquely and said he and his deputies would take over, airily ignoring extradition procedure. The police chief and our sheriff were dubious about the course events were taking, but didn't want trouble so they offered no active resistance. We were too tired to care any more. That was our third mistake, to lose our alertness completely. Had we been quick enough -- but no, we couldn't have avoided it. The old story of trained men reacting without conscious thought. Apparently in accordance with previous instruction, Trainor and his helper began jostling us viciously but expertly, making it appear as though we were trying to escape. Before we realized our danger, we heard a cry of warning from the sheriff and a vindictive shout from Thurlow. It still rings in our ears. "Do your duty, Trainor. They're escaping!" Trainor's reflexes jarred him into action and it was over for us almost before it began. It hurt then, but the pain is worse now and total blackness is closing in once more. Fighting it off gets increasingly difficult, alone as I am. You see, Donald has just died, quietly. He's escaped them, but that leaves the fight to me. It won't last long. The load is too much for one alone. The one bright feature is the fact that our work was begun. Stay with it, darling, and carry on for us -- please know that you had all our love. Goodbye, Princess. Almost exactly one minute later they arrived at the hospital . I was so numb with grief and sorrow that I didn't withdraw contact, hoping against hope that they , he, would transmit once more . He did, unconsciously . Seconds later the words of two interns drifted through his open mind to mine . "One D. O. A., one dying fast. My God, Rex, why couldn't they leave the poor devils alone? Why couldn't they -- " Rex sounded bitter. "You know the answer to that, Tom. They were different so they didn't belong."    I i #  I Since man's timepieces are pretty inaccurate and absolute   measurement is impossible, a search for the ideal time standard I  with a fundamental relation to the nature of the universe has I  been going on. Recently the National Bureau of Standards de  veloped such a clock, based on the internal vibrations of atoms   within molecules. These vibrations, unlike those of a pendulum   or crystals, are uninfluenced by external conditions and are inde I pendent of the Earth's rotation.   The atomic clock is based on the vibrations of ammonia mole  cules. When radio waves are transmitted through a tube of am  monia gas, the inversion of the molecules occurs more frequently   if the radio waves have the exact microwave frequency at which   the apex atom is vibrating. The energy of the radio waves is I  measured after they have passed through the tube; if maximum I  energy is absorbed the system is precisely in tune. Such a clock   With such an atomic clock, it should be possible to study scienI I tific and practical problems of great importance, from the imI  provement of navigation to a check on the relativity theory.   Atomic time will no doubt become the international scientific I I standard.   Our citation this month goes to the National Bureau of Stand  ards for its work in creating a universal time standard which   would hold good even if we should colonize Mars or Venus.  Parker was a trouble maker wherever they landed . But here was the planet ideal, a chance he had awaited a long , long time -- easy, like taking candy from a baby... i stood apart at the edge of the village, a white cube with no windows. The door stood open, a dark hole against the white brick. The house was silent. The village beyond was silent. "They must have seen us land," Compton said, a little wildly. "You can't set down a rocket ship a hundred yards from somebody and not have them notice. They must have seen us!" "Unless no one lives here," Parker amended. "This may be a ghost city." "He's right," Hinckley agreed. "There might not be anyone living here, or anyplace on the planet for that matter. We've found very little life in these alien star-systems, and it's varied from primitive to ancient. Perhaps this society became old and died before any of us were bom." The three Earthmen stood at the base of the spaceship, their spacesuit headpieces thrown back so they could breathe in the cool thin air. They stood there peering into the deathly stillness. "I hope there are people living here' Parker said. "It's been more than a month now -- " "Well," Hinckley said, "let's find out." He waved them forward. They were fifty feet from the house when a woman appeared in the doorway with a silver vase. She was dressed in a grey flowing robe that covered her from neck to ankles. "A young woman," Hinckley breathed, staring. "A woman just like any on Earth!" His voice was loud in the silence, but the woman took no notice. She with sand. The two men with Hinckley shifted anxiously, settling the sand beneath their boots. Behind them the great spaceship pointed its nose at the sky. Parker was staring intently at the girl. "I'm going to like this place," he said slowly. They walked forward, crunching sand. But the girl took no notice of their approach. She was kneeling beside the house, scooping tiny handfuls of sand into the silver vase. When they were within five feet of her, Hinckley cleared his throat. She did not look up. He coughed. "Maybe she's deaf," Parker suggested vaguely. His eyes wandered appraisingly over her youthful body; he licked dry lips. Hinckley moved forward and stood before the girl. Her small white hands dug into the sand, scooping around his boots as though not aware of them. "And blind, too?" Compton wanted to know. "And without the sense of touch?" There was a strange quality to his voice, as though some primitive part of his unconsciousness was telling him to run. Hinckley bent to tap the girl lightly upon the shoulder. "Pardon me. Miss. We're visitors from Earth," he told her. But she paid no attention to the sound of his voice, and he stepped back, puzzled. "Now what?" Compton wanted to know. He looked around him nervously, at the house, the speckled sand, the rocket squatting behind them. "I hope all the natives aren't like this." "I do," Parker said, licking his lips thoughtfully and keeping his gaze on the girl. "I'd just as soon have them all like this. It might be interesting." Compton flushed. "What I meant -- " "He knows what you meant," Hinckley said harshly. "And there won't be any of that going on here. You caused enough trouble on the other planets, and it's not going to happen again, not while I'm in charge of this expedition. We didn't come all the way out here just so you could satisfy your romantic inclinations." "And how about my off hours, Captain " Parker said, emphasizing the word as though it were obscene ; "then may I fraternize?" "You have no off hours," Hinckley said sternly. "Here comes another one," Compton warned in a whisper. A man, dressed in robes similar to the woman's, came from the door of the house and walked into the yard. After helping the woman to rise, he picked up the vase, and the two of them went back inside the house. He hadn't even looked at the Earthmen. After awhile, Parker said, "Do you suppose they're both mirages?" "Maybe that's it," Compton said. "Maybe it's all a mirage, the woman, the vase, the man, the house, maybe even the planet itself." His voice had risen in his excitement. "Take it easy," Hinckley advised. "Let's get back to the ship before the whole planet evaporates," Compton said. "Go back if you like," Hinckley said. "I'm going to investigate this. How about you, Parker?" "Okay with me. Always wanted to see what makes a mirage tick." He glanced contemptuously at Compton. "Okay," Compton said, gripping his rifle, "we'll all make fools of ourselves." "C'mon, then." Hinckley led the way into the house, hesitating only briefly at the doorway. Inside, a blue light flickered as the man bent over a flaming trough and poured sand into it from the silver vase. The flames a sweet fragrance. The man emptied the vase, rose and took it to one corner of the room. He sat down on the couch by the woman. He did not look at the Earthlings. "He doesn't see us either," Compton said hoarsely. He cried, "Hey, you! You! Listen! We're Earthmen. Visitors from space." His voice was explosive in the silence. The man didn't look up. The Earthmen became aware of music seeping from the walls, music strange and hauntingly beautiful, played on incredible invisible instruments. "I don't like this," Compton said. "I don't like it at all. Why are they ignoring us? Why?" "Maybe they can't help it," Hinckley suggested. "Perhaps they actually can't see us or hear us. It's fantastic, but it's possible." "I wonder," Parker mused. And before anyone could stop him, he struck the man across the face with a doubled fist. "Parker!" Hinckley cried. "You fool!" "That's a matter of opinion," Parker said steadily, rubbing his knuckles. "I found out what I wanted to." The man had fallen beneath the blow, but recovered seconds later. There was a large red welt on his forehead, but neither he nor the woman took any notice of it. "It's incredible," Compton said. "Evidently we can affect them physically, even if not mentally," Hinckley said. "You do something like that again, Parker, and I'll shoot you. I've got the authority to do it, you know, and sometimes the urge." "I know," Parker said, "but you haven't got the guts. Besides, I'll behave myself." He looked intently at the young woman. "I just wanted to make certain they're real, that's all." "Let's get out of here," Compton suggested. "There must be some way we can get a message through to these people. Perhaps someone in the village -- " Hinckley nodded and motioned them from the house. Compton went eagerly, but Parker lingered. The air outside seemed cooler now, and its freshness seemed strange after the pleasant fragrance inside the house. "Go back to the ship," Hinckley told Parker. "Compton and I'll go into the village." "I like it right here," Parker said. "We might need someone at the ship," Hinckley said. "That's an order." His hand caressed his rifle, as though daring Parker to refuse. Parker grinned contemptuously. "Anything you say, Captain . If you need any help, just yell." He turned away and walked toward the rocket. "Someday I'm going to kill him," Hinckley promised. He turned to Compton. "G'mon, let's see what the village looks like." the first hut, multiplied. Some of the huts seemed to have specialized purposes as stores or warehouses, but otherwise it was the same. People sat in the houses, listening to music or watching moving pictures swarm over their hut walls. Some occasionally ventured into the street. All of them ignored the Earthmen. "I don't know what to make of it," Hinckley said finally. "We can touch them and hear them; they appear normal in all respects, but they seem to be operating on a different level of existence." "I don't pretend to understand it," Compton said, "but I have a feeling I don't like, whenever I think about it. I'd rather meet bugeyed monsters than this." "I know what you mean," Hinckley said. "These people even though they're humanoid, are out of contact with reality -- at least with reality as we know it. It's like some kind of mass hypnosis, with everyone in a trance except us." "Think of how helpless these people would be," Compton said. "When we turn in our report, those who come out here with unhealthy designs won't have any opposition." "We have a prime example of that on board," Hinckley said disgustedly. "We'd better get back to the ship; I don't like to leave Parker alone; there's no telling what he'll do." When they got back Parker wasn't there. "I was afraid of this," Hirickley said between clenched teeth. "Maybe they've done something to him," Compton suggested nervously. "That's too much to hope for. Chances are, it's the other way around. If I know Parker, there's only one place he'll be. C'mon." Clutching his rifle, Hinckley ran from the rocket. Compton followed, a bit more cautiously. Hinckley reached the lone house and peered into the bluelit gloom. He entered, gun ready, Compton at his heels. "He's not here," Hinckley said, surprised. The man and the young woman sat on the couch and casually watched pictures move across the far wall. Hinckley, looking at the pictures, was not at all certain they weren't the reality and the natives of this place merely ghost images that might fade at any moment. On the wall an empire was being formed. Tall buildings were raised by machinery that was unfamiliar to the Earthmen. Aircraft flitted across the sky like strange black birds. The buildings towered, the flying machines dove, spitting needles that exploded into blossoms of fire, and the buildings toppled into dust. People ran, screaming soundless screams. Columns of smoke rose to replace the buildings. The scene shifted. Great weapons were assembled and heaped carelessly. To the heap were added the skycraft and other weapons of war. The pile exploded, and the people rejoiced, clasping hands, dancing. The walls darkened. Actual or symbolic? Hinckley wondered. "What does it mean?" Compton asked him. "I think," Hinckley said, "we've just been given a short history of their race. They built up a great society here, but a warring one. Finally, they outlawed all weapons in order to save themselves from total destruction. We could probably take a lesson from that." "They'll probably be worse off when the Earthmen come here," Compton said. "Even if they could see and hear us, they wouldn't have any weapons left to defend themselves. We could loot and rape and -- " "I think we'd better forget this planet exists," Hinckley said slowly. "If we don't report it, no one'll ever know. It's one planet in a million planets. If we say it's empty, they'll believe it and never bother to check." "But what about Parker?" "Yes," Hinckley said in a disturbed tone. "Parker. We've got to find him before he does anything he shouldn't. He must be in one of the huts. C'mon. You take one side of the village, I'll take the other. When we find him, we'll blast off." But they didn't find him. They searched through all the buildings, peered into all the faces. "I don't like it," Compton said when they met. "The people may be helpless, but that doesn't mean everything on the planet is. We've got to get out of here while we've got the chance." "Take it easy," Hinckley advised. "We can't leave without Parker. He's probably hiding someplace." "Hiding?" "Hoping we'll take off and leave him alone here. He'd be perfectly safe. He could take anything he wanted -- food, drink, anything -- and these people couldn't raise a finger to stop him; they wouldn't even know he was here, most likely. If I know Parker that's what he'd want. He wouldn't care about the people as long as he satisfied himself." "We'll never find him," Compton said. "There's a forest beyond the village. If he got into that, we could search for months and not find him." Hinckley shrugged. "We've got to try." Night came before they returned to the rocket. Hinckley shook his head in the gathering darkness. "He could be anyplace out there, damn him." "Let's get out of here," Compton suggested again. "Leave him here, if that's what he wants. Let him do what he wants here; what difference does it make if the natives don't know what's happening?" Hinckley's look was cold. "We'll wait until morning," he said. "If he isn't back by then, we'll leave." But the next morning, the rays of the alien sun found the white squatting houses silent; Parker had not returned. Hinckley turned on the outer loudspeaker. "Parker," he said. The words crashed across the still village. "Parker, this is Hinckley. We're blasting off in five minutes. If you're not aboard, we're leaving without you." After a few minutes, Compton said, "He's not coming. He's probably dead, and so will we be if we wait long enough." "More likely, he's ignoring us," Hinckley said, consulting his watch. "He's got two minutes more." Two minutes later, Compton said, "Time's up." Hinckley nodded. He switched on the rocket motors. Deep within the spaceship a turbine growled; the growl rose to a whine. "I still don't like to leave him there. Even though they don't know what's happening to them, I feel sorry for those people out there." He switched on the loudspeaker again. "Parker," he said over it. "Last chance. We're blasting off." "He's not coming," Compton said shrilly, "he's not coming." Hinckley touched a button. Flaming rockets drove their fire in to the ground. The great spaceship shuddered, rose on a column of flame. "At last," Compton sighed. "At last." "We'll have to come back, though," Hinckley said. "I knew we'd have to turn in a report, and now I know we'll have to come back here to find Parker, to jail him as a deserter, and perhaps worse. I hate to think of what'll happen to those people down there when the Earthmen come." They looked into a viewscreen. Below them, the planet dwindled and became nothing. Parker watched the spaceship rise into the sky and disappear. He chuckled contentedly. He had won the game of hide-and-seek, and the planet was his prize. Earthmen always took what they could from newly discovered planets, only this time he would have first choice well ahead of any others. It would be months before an Earth ship would arrive. But he could last that long easily. Longer if necessary. During that time he could make up some story to account for his absence. They'd have to prove him a liar, and that would be difficult. Any story he made up would certainly be no less fantastic than this planet certainly was. Meanwhile, there were things to do. He took off his cumbersome spacesuit and left it in a clearing in the forest; he wouldn't need that for awhile, and it would only hamper him. He was in no mood to be delayed. There were a great many things to do, but first there was one special thing to do. There was a girl, he remembered, a young woman in a small hut at the other end of the village. He licked his lips in anticipation. There was a man with her, but there was nothing he could do -- nothing at all. Parker laughed loudly into the silence and trotted down the street. When he reached the I other end of the village, he walked eagerly into the house. The girl sat on the couch. The man stood nearby. The walls were unmoving and the blue fire cast a cold light about the room. The Earthman sat down beside the girl, and his hands reached out, unhesitating. But suddenly the man said something in an alien tongue, a sound that was like a whiplash, angry and bitter. Parker felt his throat tighten. "What?" he said. "What?" He looked up into eyes alive with hate. No, that was impossible. It was only imagination. Only imagination, yet for a moment -- he laughed guiltily -- he'd thought the man was looking directly at him. Furiously, angry at himself, Parker forced the thought from his mind. He reached once more for the girl, but she shrank from his touch and leaped up. The Earthman followed her movement with startled, puzzled eyes, and then his bewilderment changed to a fear that held him with cold fingers. The man had taken a long silver knife from beneath his robe, and he held it in his hands so that its blade reflected the cold blue fire. His face was a mask, not pleasant to see. And he was looking at the Earthman, seeing him, watching him, hating him. A sudden flash of understanding came. These people had known all the time. They stayed indoors in dim light to enhance the illusion and watch with greater secrecy, so that the movement of eyes would not betray them -- and they had waited. For what? Parker leaped up with a hoarse cry and ran, not waiting to find out. He was in the doorway when the silver knife caught him and slid easily between his ribs and released the breath of life that lay hidden there. Before he struck the ground, he was a shell, with neither fear nor desire to trouble him. For a long moment afterward, the man stood over the still body, looking down at it with a mixture of hate and disgust. The girl joined him. He looked at her and then at the sky. "We must learn to make weapons again," he told her. "These creatures will be back, unsuspecting, thinking us helpless. Next time, we must be ready!" Without ceremony, they buried the Earthman's body and then met others of their kind coming into the village streets. There was work to do.    Playing "Napoleon" can get to be a habit. especially when a man is devoted to pure science . Which was Dr. Whitemarsh's devotion -- until Dr. Sally Chester came along! The Laboratorians tube," said Rocco as he expertly twirled the erlenmeyer flask and watched the color shoot past the methyl orange end-point. Whitemarsh was annoyed and said so. "That's the sixth straight you've missed, and the acid comes out of the burette, not the tube; and you don't call the graduations c.c., you call them "Yeah? Well, here we call it a tube!" "And why don't you go down to the end-point drop by drop?" "Because the book don't say so! That's why! You technos make me sick. Here we do all the blasted work, and you try to tell us how to do what we've been doing for ten years!" Rocco was beginning to work himself into one of his famous rages. His bull neck was beginning to redden; his eyes started to flash. His entire squat body started to quiver. Whitemarsh wasn't impressed. Over at the atomic plant, Phobus's Quercus Mountain, he had bossed a pretty quarrelsome crew of isotope wranglers. He had never dodged a fight in his life. But this was in a chemical laboratory and it surprised him to hear the aslllustrated by Ed Emsh sistants talk back. The only assistants he had ever known were clear-eyed youths taking a year away from their studies to recoup their tuition money and who tried to copy everything the chemists did. But Whitemarsh was new to the Interspatial Research Center on the Moon, and he still could not figure why the assistants acted as they did. So he waited. Rocco banged the flask down on the stone bench, glared at Whitemarsh for an instant, and then rushed out of the Laboratory, muttering a few obscenities. "Queer place this," mused and finishing the titration himself. "Here the helpers tell the chemists what to do and get mad if we ask them what they're doing." He started to look over Rocco's notes and ruefully decided all the work would have to be done over again. He was interrupted when a girl opened the door. In the week had been introduced to so many scientists that he had forgotten most of the names, but he remembered all the girls. His former Atomic Plant at Quercus Mountain had had all too few for him not to appreciate them now. Miss Sally Chester was a statuesque chemist with long blonde hair and a luscious figure which she hid under a white lab robe. He managed to stammer some sort of greeting. "Why Dr. Whitemarsh!" She seemed somewhat puzzled. "You're not actually working with your hands?" "I sure am, unless we're both space struck. Why not?" "Well, I suppose it's all right other places, here we let the Laboratorians do all the manual work. It's sort of their privilege." "Yes, but their technique's lousy. I sat here this afternon and watched that blow-hard Rocco muff six straight end-points in a row and when I asked him how come, he blew his top!" She laughed at that. She sat down on the lab desk and said, "You're absolutely right. Antonio Rocco's color blind and always misses his Methyl Orange endpoints. And he's been doing them for ten years. But it hurts his feelings to be criticized, you should have been more diplomatic. He's probably gone to complain to his boss!" "His boss? Aren't we his bosses? On this sheet he's listed as my assistant." "Actually yes. But traditionally the shop foreman is the leader of the Laboratorians. He certifies them to see that they know their work, signs their time cards and tells them when to take time off. Of course we outline the work they do, check their results and write reports from their data. Normally we come into the lab as little as possible." "But Sally, how the hell do we know that their results are right? This mixed-up outfit is in the hands of a bunch of left-handed prfma donnas who don't know Beilstein from Budweiser!" She smiled again (and he thought of the ads for Stargleam toothpaste). "Let's go over to the Scientists' Snack Bar and get a cup of coffee, and I'll tell you a little about the history of this laboratory." So he let her lead him out of the individual laboratory into the pastel blue corridor where they followed the spiral runways to the glass enclosed Snack Bar. Here they sat on pale leather chairs and looked out over the expanse of the Central Laboratory. From where he sat, he could see a square mile of magnificent equipment: Serpentine condensers, enormous distillation columns, molecular stills, ultra-centrifuges, electron microscopes, all were spread out before him. Surrounding the central laboratory were the innumerable railings of the corridors leading to the individual offices. Upstairs and downstairs strolled scientists and Laboratorians respectively, all obviously contented. He turned to face Miss Chester who was lolling in the chair beside him. She had poured him a cup of coffee, given him a plate of rolls and was ready to talk. She reminded him that in # it was found necessary to build research laboratories on the Moon to avoid the guided meteorites which the Aliens had been hurling toward the Earth. Since there had also been a shortage of trained scientists, it was necessary to train apprentices to operate the complicated laboratory equipment... to perform the operations without bothering themselves with the theory. The Laboratorians were needed and they did a good job running specification tests on all the equipment necessary for the interplanetary war. After the war, the Interspatial Corporation had made it the Central Research Laboratory, since this had been the largest aggregation of instruments ever gathered together, and in the ten intervening years, the numbers of college-trained scientists had increased almost ten-fold. As long as the Laboratorians confined their work to the equipment they were familiar with, they were unbeatable. To guide them they had the Book, as the Technical Manual of the Interspatial Corporation was known, and the Laboratorians followed its procedures to the letter. "But they don't know why they're doing things," Whitemarsh interrupted. "The manual's been in need of revision for the last five years, and research workers don't use the same tests all the time!" "Well that's right," admitted Sally without disagreement. "I usually have my particular laboratory instructions mimeotyped and bound in a little book. I've also got the instructions so fixed that if they do things wrong, I can catch them. And I've learned not to modify my instructions orally. That only confuses the men and results in chaos. With a little planning, you can get good work done, and if you don't mind humoring their whims a little, there's no reason why you can't get along with them." Whitemarsh wasn't so sure. He had no objections to jollying his subordinates, but he did draw the line at sloppy lab technique. He escorted Miss Chester to her own office, thanked her for the briefing, and then started to worry on his own. He took the speed elevator up to Dr. Sheridan's office. The Laboratory director was sympathetic. He looked at the broad-shouldered young giant, Dr. Whitemarsh, and reflected that this man was rated the most promising scientist the Interspatial Corporation ever had. "You're damn right, Whitemarsh," he told the younger man, pushing him into a chair and offering him a cigarette. "I've been here three years and spent the first two fighting the system. Maybe the trouble goes back to our Board of Directors. They're all so proud of this shining Research Station on the Moon, that they hate to admit that anything's wrong. They've got the Laboratorians responsible to the Lunar Mines Service -- and there it stands. "So the only thing we can do is wait. Lo Presti the Master Mechanic is up for retirement next year and there's going to be a big organizational shake-up. Hold tight. After that we may have a free hand." So Whitemarsh thanked him and bided his time. He released Rocco back to some other scientist and did his own laboratory work, even though the Laboratorian Council made a written protest. He also spent many hours in the excellent laboratory library, reading all the reports coming out of the Lunar Laboratory over the past ten years. His discoveries amazed him. Theoretically the Lunar Lab had one of the best collections of scientific minds in the Solar System. Every Earth university was represented on its staff. New techniques and products had poured out of the Laboratory during the ten years of its existence, yet every one of these had been based on doubtful data. Certain things worried him. First, notes were kept in a very cavalier manner even by the most experienced scientists. Secondly, the younger chemists and physicists never had been exposed to any practical laboratory work after their student days, and consequently had no means of judging the technique of their assistants. Finally, the Laboratorians were apparently proud of their ignorance, displayed a contempt for "paper fix their results if they thought they could get away with it... He did not let his social development slide either. Lunarport was far more advanced culturally than the crude settlement on Phobus. Here Dr. Whitemarsh was able to have a luxurious apartment in the New Dome sector, could hear lectures and concerts, and could even indulge in winter sports such as skiing in the lava around the craters (protected of course by a heated suit and an oxygen mask.) He found Miss Chester a satisfactory companion for such endeavors, even though she spoke little of her private life or how she had avoided marriage in her twenty-five years. But he played a waiting game with her as well as with the lab job. He admitted to himself that a research chemist's life at Lunar Lab was a pleasant one, particularly if one didn't care how accurate one's results were. Unfortunately, the same quirk which had driven him into science also made him suspicious of all easy methods. He had never recovered from the shock of discovering that just because a reaction worked in a book, it did not necessarily have to do so in a laboratory. tion came within five rather than six months. There was some grumbling among the older scientists, but there was not much they could do about it. Kercheval, who had twelve years' service on the Moon, did not have his Ph.D and did not care particularly for executive work. Neither did Sturtevant with a doctorate and ten years service. But others objected; even Miss Chester, long one of Whitemarsh's defenders, felt that the older men deserved at least the chance of refusal. (It never occurred to Whitemarsh that she might have had some ambitions of her own.) He called the group leaders together for a conference the day after his appointment. He was now ensconced behind Sheridan's desk and was not yet accustomed to having a secretary. The leaders came in grim and resentful. He wasted no words. "I'm going to reorganize the setup to get the Laboratorians under us, whether they like it or not. This sloppy technical data and unsubstantiated findings is not my idea of a good lab -- nor yours, I'm sure. It's up to you to show it during the next year. Meanwhile you've all been pushed up fifty dollars a month in salary. So long!" His next step was to call on Lo Presti. The Master Mechanic's Office was outside the Lab Dome near the Shaft of Lunar Mine No. #. The old man had been in the preliminary Selenium exploration party and never could forget the old days when he drove the men and robots to find the metal that paid for the cost of the Expedition. The President of the Home Office, Dr. Barker, had never forgotten either, and Lo Presti was always taken care of. The # Laboratorians probably caused him more headaches than the five thousand miners ever had, since a delegation visited him every day or so now that Dr. Whitemarsh was rumored in. But the Lo Presti knew that times change too, and realized that the brawling space adventurer did not fit into a sleek world of test tubes and retorts. Ninety-five years old and arrogant as ever, he sat in his office and greeted Dr. Whitemarsh with a bonecrushing handshake. He offered a cigar and Whitemarsh thanked him, lighting a pipe instead. "I hear from the boys you've been cracking down on them," he stated. "No more than you would if you'd been there yourself. What would you do if a driller split a core?" "Why I'd give the careless sap a clout that would wake him up. But the Laboratorians aren't drillers!" "That's right, but that's the way some of them are muffing their work." Lo Presti eyed him appraisingly. "Aren't you the same Whitemarsh who capped the crater on Phobus last year?" "I sure am. And your Laboratorians are a bevy of Nice Nellies compared to that mutinous bunch of space rats I had with me." "Well, maybe you're the man for the job at that. The guys don't put out anymore. Used to be I knew all the gang. I'd look around and see when they were goofing off. Now they're all such experts, I can't tell if they're loafing or just thinking." They both laughed at that. Whitemarsh thought it would be a good time to say: "I don't want to do anything to your boys for a while until I get my own gang straightened out!" "Don't kid me, Doc," responded Lo Presti, "you know when I retire you're going to move in and crack down. Well I'm with you!" So they parted friends. Whitemarsh went back to his office in a happy mood. True, Miss Chester had been avoiding him lately and he had to drink coffee by himself but he now had and the foremen on his side and the front office. Now was the chance to reform the laboratory. His first bombshell was the requirement that all the junior chemists should take a qualifying examination. That really caused trouble in paradise. Apparently, all of the younger set had thrown away their books on graduation and remembered only their own specialties. Whitemarsh, from being a pleasant companion at the Snack Bar who discussed skiing and spaceball, had now become an ogre of the first water. The senior chemists chuckled, since they were exempt, and the Laboratorians guffawed aloud to see their harriers in turn harried. In any event there was frenzied activity in the month before the examination and the library staff did yeoman duty. And, no one had threatened to quit. At least almost no one. Whitemarsh was musingly staring out of his office's Plastoid window at the green eye of Earth when he heard a commotion outside in the anteroom. He looked out to see Sally Chester, and he sensed that their relationship was less than idyllic. "Let me see that egotistical ass, Whitemarsh," she shouted at his secretary who cowered in silk clad finery as the white-coated Valkyrie charged by. "Be calm," he advised her, placing himself strategically behind his desk. "Calm," she screamed, "how can I be calm when an officious busybody starts getting drunk with power and acting like a Twentieth Century dictator? After all I've done for this stinking Lunar Lab, how come that I have to take an exam in freshman chemistry?" "I thought you were exempt," began the chastened director. "Sorry, your honor! Your order says five years at Lunarport. I've only been around this sweat shop for four years and six months. What are you going to do if I fail? Throw me out and I'm moving over to Campo Sano with every one of our trade secrets!" "I'll get you exempted," he offered. "What, and have the other chemists cry favoritism? Not on your life, yelled. "And stop grinning at me like a Cheshire Cat!" He did not answer. He was content only to admire her in her rage. Her usually mild face was flushed through the tan and her graceful hands were tightly clenched into fists that pounded on his desk. "Answer me, you moron!" she shouted. Then she started to cry. Within one minute the seething Amazon had changed into a defenseless white-coated girl cowering in the visitor's chair, weeping bitterly. Whitemarsh approached and held her hand. "Listen, Sally," he told her, "the only reason I was going to let you out of the test was because you know more chemistry than any of the scientists here. But go ahead and take the test; you'll get the highest grade!" She brightened, "You think so?" "Know it," he affirmed gallantly, "now, how about going to the Space Opera at the Symphorium tomorrow? Kluchesky is singing in Pomme de Terre " She stiffened slightly and stood up. "Listen, Mr. Frank Whitemarsh! Privately you're not a bad guy. You even had potentialities. But you're a hell of a failure as a boss and the less I see of you, the happier I'll be. Good-bye!" And she was gone. Whitemarsh resumed his contemplation of the Earth with less interest. tion might have been foretold. The intelligent and professionally alert junior chemists retained enough fundamentals to do well. The majority failed the questions on laboratory technique. Consequently Whitemarsh enlisted the aid of the older men to conduct a series of refresher lectures to bring up to date the scientific knowledge of those who failed. The Laboratorians were delighted with the spectacle presented by these lectures, and loved going home at night while erstwhile bosses sat listening to Dr. Sturtevant discuss "The Theory of Washing Precipitates", or to hear Dr. Whitemarsh talk on "Balancing the Redox equation." The Laboratorian's happiness lasted until one day in October. That was the day that Lo Presti retired. The old man was given a small space ship by the Corporation and a space-time chronometer by the Laboratorians. Then he sorrowfully said farewell. The next day the Laboratorians were absorbed into Research. Somebody had to plan for janitor service, figure where to place time cards, design new proficiency ratings and decide on such complex matters as where the Laboratorians were to hang their coats. All these services had been provided for by the miner's shop organization. Whitemarsh stayed late at night for a week arranging the new payroll plan and raising the salaries somewhat. All this was handled, if not without incidents, at least without violence. Even the janitors and secretaries were now part of a team. All but Miss Chester. She had stopped speaking to Whitemarsh in the halls and had been seen in the company of a younger (and Whitemarsh felt) better looking physicist. Then Whitemarsh dropped his second bombshell. The junior chemists were ordered to rate the Laboratorians for proficiency ! Fresh from six months' study under such taskmasters as Whitemarsh and Kercheval, the chastened scientists were now able to interpret the antics of their tormentors of yesterday. An old tradition had fallen and the howls extended back to the Front Office on Earth. For a change, Miss Chester did not object. She was evidently past all comment. She merely wrote out a list of the faults and virtues of all her assistants, rated them all Excellent and went back to her research. But Rocco was tried and found incapable of running titrations. Harry Crowe was found to be weighing incorrectly, Zachary had been fixing his calculations for the last ten years and even faithful Bruno had been found to be adding # to all of his Iodine numbers in order to pass the specs easier. It suddenly occurred to every one that all the laboratory's reports were based on incorrect data. All work stopped for a week until the scientists found what their assistants had been trying to do all along. And the results were a bit terrifying. When Kercheval found that an incorrectly calibrated reflectometer had negated five years of his pet project, he tore up his notebooks, flung them on the floor and stalked into Whitemarsh's office. "Frank, I'm taking my back vacations and going to Venus to forget it all for about six months. And mind you, when I get back I don't want to see my present assistants. I'm going to start from scratch." He left, banging the door. Next was Sturtevant. "Frank, we've got to get Interstellar Review to hold my last paper. I want to recheck the melting points of some of those diazo compounds." Then came the young physicist, Dr. Slezak, who was rumored to be Miss Chester's present skiing companion. "Dr. Whitemarsh," he stammered, "I'm not sure about the data on my last report." "Didn't you take it all yourself?" "Yes, but I used some of Kercheval's data for my fundamental calculations and, if that's wrong, all my conclusions may not be valid." "Stop worrying," Whitemarsh told him. "When Kercheval recalculates his values, you can revise your own report. As long as your own work is right, you have nothing to worry about." The young man left, nervously wringing his hands. Whitemarsh couldn't see what Sally saw in him. He figured she ought to be along by now. She was. "I told you so," Sally said theatrically. "You've got the whole lab mistrusting each other. All the chemists are quarreling like mad and the Laboratorians all look like whipped dogs. You've pulled the chair right out from under everything and you sit here gloating." "Relax, Sally," he told her. "They're just growing pains. Take it easy and ride out the storm... Now, how about tearing over to Lunar # to see the crucial Spaceball series between the Space Rangers and the Callisto Satellites?" She looked horrified. "I'm afraid you don't take hints very well. I'm not interested in going anywhere with you. Actually, I'm going with Jack Slezak to see 'Nova of the Leprous Soul', and I might suggest a fit subject." She flounced out again and Whitemarsh felt lost. He tried to cheer himself with a book on Hyper Plutonium Elements. The transition took longer than Whitemarsh had bargained for. After the Laboratorians were reeducated, and a tiresome process it was, chemists went over the notebooks to look for inaccuracies, doubtful data was examined, all microfilms had to be edited and corrected; and they found that most of the chemicals developed at the laboratory in the past decade had been founded on doubtful data. But since all of them had passed the Development Group, Whitemarsh didn't think it was wise to try to recall them. But new products scheduled for release were re-examined and retested after the fundamental work on them was checked. Finally the problems were unscrambled and the laboratory began to run smoothly again. The research projects were reestablished and the work started out anew. Frayed tempers were soothed and the scientists finally got around to trusting each others' results again. The Laboratorians were now carefully but tactfully watched by the junior chemists who, in turn, were spending more time in the laboratories and less in their offices. When the new, sound results started grinding forth, Whitemarsh permitted himself a sigh of relief. Lunar Lab had lost its individuality, he admitted, even though the easy-going camaraderie he had noticed when he first came was also gone. The results of Lunar Research Lab of Interspatial were now as reliable as those of the Campo Sano and Roque laboratories back on Earth. But it had been a hard fight. None of the chemists ever stopped around his office any more for small talk about sports and politics. His secretary brought him coffee in his sanctum sanctorum and he did not find himself wandering around the laboratory as he had formerly done. When he did, there was usually a restrained silence and a suspicious neatness. Miss Chester was apparently irrevocably lost and there were rumors of an engagement Though he had won the day, he had lost something too. The Lab was now able to turn out results, but Frank Whitemarsh had paid a personal price for it's new efficiency. over as Research Director, Sheridan, now a Vice President, brought him some news. "Get ready to pack, Frank," he told the younger man as they sat and smoked in the director's office watching the clouds moving over the Earth. "The Front Office like what I did?" asked Whitemarsh puffing on his pipe. "Well." There was a slight pause. "All the scientists on the board are behind you to a man. But the business men, the advertising boys and accountants, well... you know how they are." "What's eating them?" "The lab didn't release any new products this past year. Development and even Advertising are pretty much slowed down." "That's right. We've got some good products about ready, but we're making a final check before release. Don't you think we sent out a lot of junk before?" "We sure did, even in my time though I tried to stop it. But the development boys want something, anything." "Well?" asked Whitemarsh. "So they'd probably rather run the risk of getting something bad than nothing at all." "They won't!" "That's right, they never will again. Now, I know that the products you have ready are going to be good and I'm not worried about them. All we have to do is keep the business geniuses out of our hair for another six months." "And?" "So we're kicking you upstairs. It's a good job, don't worry about that, at three times your director's salary." "What if I quit?" "Don't be that silly." "What's the other job?" "Works Manager at Quercus Mountain on Phobus. Sole boss of the biggest Isotope Works in the Solar System. You'll have # men under you and have a free hand at starting any kind of laboratory you want." "No Laboratorians?" "Right. You can start out from scratch and make the kind of lab you've always dreamed of. Here we're thinking of pushing up Kercheval if it's all right with you, you always rated him highly. It's just like changing Spaceball managers. We all know the Space Sox won the pennant last year on the team developed by Kanter even though Balhiser was manager. These wolves will keep off our tail until the new products start coming through and then we'll say we knew it all along." "You've got me half convinced not to quit," said Whitemarsh quietly. "Now listen Frank," came back Sheridan just as seriously, "you're too good a man to waste. Now take your promotion like a nice boy and keep in line." "I still think I did a good job here." "So do I, but the Board of Directors can't forgive those retractions, even though you and I know they're necessary. They don't know what scientific truth and pride are. Within ten years, on the foundations you laid, we'll have the best research record in the country..." After Sheridan had left, Whitemarsh cast a last look at his former domain. He called Kercheval in to give him the news and then tell him to keep quiet until verified. Then he decided to take a last tour around the laboratories. He finally found himself up at the Snack Bar and his eyes were taking the same look over the Laboratory that they had done two years before. The view looked about the same. He had supervised the installation of a new Matter Probe over in the front center and he was responsible for the Atom Analyzer, but these were only minor changes. The major change, he thought bitterly, is that no one speaks to me unless spoken to -- I've become a pariah. Never tamper with the status quo, it disturbs too many people. It's a very lonely job. There was no one else in the Snack Bar. At least, almost no one else. He heard a discreet cough behind him. He turned and found Miss Chester seated behind him. She had her legs crossed, a cup of coffee in one hand and the Space News Want-Ads in the other. "Hello, Napoleon," she greeted him. "Have you just been surveying your empire? Did you see the stem men of science jumping through the hoops out there? Can you remember the happy place this was a year ago when you came? Then the Laboratorians took pride in their work; now they're flunkies for the green kids fresh from Alma Mater!" "Stop it, Sally," he told her. "You're not too far wrong on that Napoleon business. I'm taking off for my new St. Helena, Quercus Mountain on Phobus." "Quercus Mountain? That's a big place. Lab Director?" "No. Works Manager." "Heaven help the poor Atomic workers!" "Don't be that harsh. Dammit! Sally, maybe I am a Napoleon, but scientific accuracy is too important to play fast and loose with, the way they were around here. You know it. You're the only one who didn't relax that vigilance -- who saw to it that everything you turned out was without error. I know now that I forgot the human equation -- that I was so eager for errorless research that I trod pretty roughshod over a lot of people. But you're guilty too, you know, you had the secret -- you managed to balance the equation when everyone else here didn't. Why didn't you help me? Sure, you came in and ranted and raved at me -- called me all sorts of names, but you didn't help me, you didn't try to show me the way." tcj  "Let me finish," he interrupted her. "I love you, you know -- have for a long, long, time. I still need help, Sally. I don't want to keep playing Napoleon and going into exile over and over again. A bigger job with more men under me isn't the answer. When a man is lonely it makes him hard and cruel in circumstances like that. I made all of you here relearn scientific facts, I need to relearn the humanities..." He paused for a moment. "Sally, will you teach me?" Her eyes were bright with unshed tears and a catch in her throat made the words husky and halfwhispered. "I wanted to help -- I love you too -- but I thought you were arrogant and didn't need me -- " She swallowed, controlling a sob. "I'll make it up to you, darling. You won't be alone again -- on Phobus or anywhere else in the galaxy."    All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance . -- Gibbon Fear is often Man's greatest enemy. But when there is nothing left to lose , there is everything to gain... And with everything to gain f where is the enemy? the breathing of the six men who shared apartment #-B with him, and the panic fluttered deep in his stomach, threatening to break upward and out in a wild scream. He fought it by telling himself it was foolish for a man who had lived through the destruction of New York and eight months imprisonment to feel this way. He peered toward the window and tried to see the morning sun; not as a pale, shimmery fog but as the bright Spring yellow he knew it was. But the fog remained, no matter how many times he rubbed his eyes with saliva-wet fingers. It was as if he were seeing everything under water -- a world of shimmery, hazy objects. The panic rose again. The Conquerors' beam had done its work well, and his chances of finding Adele before death found him, were now terribly small. The first punishment had brought only a slight blur, this one had almost blinded him, and it was only a matter of time before he committed the third offense. It made no difference that Conqueror Punitive assured all trainees that the degree of blindness decreased as the years went by. He knew that his third offense would come sooner than any improvement in his ability to see. And the third offense was punishable by death. Before another rush of fear could churn his brain, the morning whistle sounded. Shrill, commanding, it began each day of aimless wandering -- the silent stroll over pavement connecting the five buildings of what had once been Brooklyn's prize housing development; a constant walk which destroyed those Americans unable to show complete obedience and turned the others into slaves. Again the whistle shrieked, and the room filled with coughs, groans and sighs, for it was forbidden to talk. Only when one of the many rules had been broken and a card Illustrated by Ed Emsh bearing the trainee's number was found in the box outside the door did some American get a chance to speak. He would rush instantly to the small administration building near the wall's only exit and report to the squat, gray-uniformed Conqueror known as Punitive -- the only Conqueror the trainees had ever seen. After an explanation of the offense in too-precise English, the trainee was told to sit on the stool facing the light tube. "I obey," he would croak. In silence broken only by the hum of electric generators in the basement, the beam of piercing white light would sear his eyes. Afterwards, the assurance about the disappearing effects of the beam; then back to the streets. With only Punitive representing them, the Conquerors weeded out Americans who would not or could not obey. The vaguest suggestion of communication between trainees was picked up by the detector bulbs -- the see-and-hear-all devices which hung much as oversized light bulbs from the ceiling of every room, and stood like dead street lamps every fifty feet or so along the pavements. George lay a second longer, then twisted his tall, slim body erect and sprang to his feet. As he slipped into the thick stockings, hightopped shoes, and one-piece coveralls with serial number stitched in large red numerals across chest and back, he began sounding deep in his throat. This was so slight a touch of the vocal cords that no detector bulb or other trainee could hear it. But it was something more than thinking; it was listening to a voice repeating all the things that had mattered before the Conquerors' surprise attack atomized New York City. It was his fight against non-entity. "George Lowery," he said, "thirty-two, top salesman at Brady's Men's Shop, resident of Babylon, Long Island, owner of # North Rector Drive, husband of Adele Lowery, and today you may see her." But the last phrase stuck in his throat and he had to repeat it several times. Even so, he couldn't convince himself that the most important part of his ritual was true -- that perhaps he would see his wife as she walked the streets. Two days ago he had turned the breakfast table to stone by asking his neighbor to pass the water. It was nothing more than a mistake -- a stupid thinking aloud. But yesterday the card had been in the door-box. He had visited apartment #-A in the Administration Building and, for the second time, the thin beam of light had seared his eyes. Now he was no longer sure he would be able to recognize his own wife. "George Lowery," he sounded, fighting off the panic. "George Lowery," and he turned and moved through the now-empty rooms. He was last in line outside the bathroom and waited dully for his turn. The men in front of him were nothing but tall, short or inbetween nondescripts. The old group, of which he was the last, had been different. They had looked at each other with meaning, with hope. After six months passed, and realization came that no opposition to the Conquerors was in sight, they went out in one mad day of talk. He had watched silently, refusing to respond to the suicidal good morning's, pardon me's, and salty discussions of Conqueror Punitive's parentage. Not that life in the project meant anything to him. It was just that he had to see Adele again -- to assure himself that she still remembered their life together. If her love had been stamped out, then the Conquerors were right in their menlive-by-bread-alone theory, and he was only one of a few remaining misfits -- a breed as expendable in the battle for survival as the great, pre-historic lizards had been. He hadn't been in the bathroom more than five minutes when the third whistle sounded. With his beard still wet he rushed out of the apartment, pausing only to check the empty door-box, then ran down two flights of stairs to the street. It was windy for a morning in June and his face felt cold where the damp hair covered it. The Conquerors allowed nothing that could be used as a weapon to fall into American hands, but even after eight months he was still not used to his light brown beard and long shaggy hair. Hurrying through the street, following the one-way arrows which kept the trainees moving in the same direction, around and around the project, he felt the panic well up again. He made a wide detour of the excavation area which lay in the center of a rough square formed by the four apartment houses and the Administration Building. This forbidden area had been the cause of his first visit to Conqueror Punitive. Some two months ago, right after the last shipment of fresh trainees arrived, he had seen a group of women obviously new to the project, rigid in their terror of this silent hell, walking right in the direction of the excavation. Without thinking, he had shouted a warning which stopped them from committing an offense. By the time he reached the basement of building two, he was gasping for breath. If the last whistle sounded before he was seated at one of the long wooden tables, it would mean the third offense. There wasn't any light-beam treatment for that one; only an electrode clamped to the head and the oblivion of thousands of volts of electricity. He went down the flight of steps into the basement which was dining room for all the male prisoners, and grasped a spoon, cup and plate from the tinware table just inside the door. The benches nearest the door were filled, but he didn't have time to go any further. Just as he plumped between two trainees, the whistle sounded. He sat still a moment catching his breath, feeling the thin bodies adjust themselves away from him. Scooping some cereal from one of the center pots, he began to eat. The first mouthful stuck in his throat and he hastily filled his cup. But when he had gulped down the sugared water, a wave of nausea made him gag. He sat gripping the edge of the table, his head spinning. And thoughts crept into his mind -- thoughts and questions he wanted to keep out. Why were the trainees being starved? If the Conquerors wanted to kill them, it would be simple enough to use the quicker and less expensive method of firing squads. The training area was proof that they wanted workers for their new world. And despite the hunger which made hollow-eyed skeletons of them all, the men and women walked straighter and with definite confidence. Their lips were sealed shut, their eyes flickered observantly, their heads were always rigidly forward. Except for a few lingering misfits like himself, the group conformed as well as humans ever could. Why then the delay in releasing them as had been promised? He screwed his eyes around and tried to see the other tables. Those even a short distance from the door were almost empty, and further into the hall they seemed deserted. He had no way of knowing the total number of men, but he was sure there weren't more than a hundred -- out of an original five hundred. If the same proportion held true for the women, there were less than two hundred Americans left in the project! He twisted his eyes to the person on his left. The face was that of a boy in his late teens -- the beard spotty and thin. The head barely moved as he chewed, he held himself rigid, his hand moved up to his mouth in a straight line and down the same way -- he ate like a machine. George swung his eyes to the right. Another young machine turned out by the Conquerors. But was it only to be starved to death that these men, most of them so young, had obeyed? It made no sense and this, more than the conformity to slavery, terrified him. But his terror lasted only a moment. What had he to do with whether they lived or died? He was finished; all that mattered was seeing Adele. He picked up his spoon and ate until the whistle shrieked its order for the walking to begin. Then he rose with utensils in hand and was carried to the door in the silent rush. As he dropped his tinware into the barrel of chlorinated water, he thought with bitter amusement that there was nothing for the Conquerors to do anymore -- hardly a full day's work for three or four men in operating the project now. the sun was warmer. It was a beautiful day; almost summer, he thought, and he breathed deeply. But the smell of fresh growth was not in the air -- only the dusty, burnt odor of the ruined city beyond the walls. The sun grew brighter by the minute and he found it increasingly more difficult to see. It was as if the rays shattered into blinding blobs as they struck his eyes. Somehow, he knew he was using his ears more than ever before. Poor compensation, he thought. There was nothing to hear -- no way of finding her by listening. And besides the absence of speech, there was the absence of any sound. He forced himself to place one leg after another, and all the horror in the world crept into his brain. He wanted to turn around and speak to those in back of him -- to stop the one-way tide of stroll and ask some questions. Just when had the last plane blurred by with jets roaring? And when had the Conquerors marched outside the wall, boots thudding, rifles clanking on canteen pack and buckle? When was the last atomic blast -- a distant rumble causing the ground to tremble beneath the pavement? Months; two or even three, it seemed to him. His long legs faltered and he almost stumbled. Then he remembered his one purpose, and pushed the thoughts from his mind. By alternately hurrying and slowing his steps, he was able to pull alongside some trainees and let others catch up with him. With sidelong glances he tried to find Adele. He had to see her -- to convince himself that she had not forgotten the happy years together. It had been between buildings three and four -- the women's living quarters -- that he had seen her that first and only time six months ago. He was walking quickly and pulled up beside her. One sidelong glance was exchanged and her face had filled with terror. Then she almost ran from him. He follQwed, but the weird chase ended after she actually turned to look back. Afraid she might commit further offenses in her efforts to avoid him, he had slowed his pace to a crawl and soon lost sight of her after turning a few comers. Now his time was running out and he had to see her. She should be wiser in the ways of the camp; they could exchange a glance and separate. But that glance would tell him whether or not she too had become a machine. If she's alive , a corner of his brain whispered. But he refused to think of her as being dead. The sun was getting hot and the faces he looked at were indistinguishable in their blurry outlines. Nausea and dizziness returned and he could no longer concentrate on his search. It's too late , he thought. The second treatment had finished his chances. He tried thinking of other things, to remember his feelings from the time of the blast to the day he had passed through the new brick wall into the project. But all he got was a blur of fear. Fear then, fear now, and fear until the day they would kill him. "Sick of fear!" a voice rusty from disuse rasped out. "Sick of the whole mess!" It was with a sense of complete surprise that he realized his mouth was open and it was his own voice shouting. "It's over," he rasped and turned around to face a startled, thinfaced woman whose blue eyes peered at him -- but not with terror. He looked at her, his mouth sagging open. "Over for both of us," she whispered, and moved toward him with arms outstretched and trembling. He tried to turn and run, to save her from further violations, but she grasped his hand. "George." And she was in his arms. "My third offense -- when I stopped walking. There's nothing to lose now." The shuffling of feet continued about them as they embraced, and she talked hurriedly as if afraid that the few hours before the evening meal would not be enough for all she had to say. "Tve walked behind you all these months. I was sure you would say something if you saw me and I didn't want you to be punished. Each morning I waited until the last moment before leaving the women's dining room -- until you came by looking for me. Then I'd walk behind you, sometimes within touching distance. Once I had to wait too long, and then I went to Punitive for the second time. But it was all for nothing. I hoped you would go free, but it was all for nothing." He kissed her then and she had to stop. When he took his lips from hers, they both turned to the nearest detector bulb. They were being watched, but what difference did a thousand violations make now? She was talking again, and actually smiling. "You look distinguished in a beard!" He laughed, and saw the nearby trainees pick up the forgotten sound. He took her lips back to his own and heard the shuffling feet slow down all around them. And the fear was gone. "Let's go to the excavation," he said. "We'll sit down at the bottom in privacy and talk and laugh. We're free, Adele, and the rest doesn't matter now." He put his arm around her waist and they strolled against the pattern, the rigid walkers parting before them. When they reached the at how easily it fell. Then he took her hand and moved down the steep, sandy slope. It wasn't until Adele moaned and closed her eyes tightly that he saw that the bottom of the pit was covered with stones -- and clean white bones. The blood pounded in his temples as he stared at the piled skeletons and chemical stained earth. And the few hours of peace was no longer enough. Adele helped him pick up stones, until his hands and her cradled arms could hold no more. Bulbs, at least, could be broken. Up they climbed, and when they reached the pavement there were many trainees shuffling slowly past the spot where the sign lay. He threw the first stone at a detector bulb while still some distance from it, and his ruined eyes failed him. But the next time he stood directly beneath it and the shattering of glass seemed as loud as the atomic blast had been. Down the street they went, smashing bulb after bulb, retrieving their missiles so as to have enough to last. And all the trainees moved slowly behind them, on up to the last bulb in front of the Administration Building. The new sound was a sharp crack, and someone screamed in a rusty voice. He turned to see one of the crowd twitching on the pavement, then followed the faces turned up to Conqueror Punitive's window. There was a shadow there -- a shadow with a rifle. "The last bulb," Adele said. "Smash it." He drew back his arm and the crack of rifle fire reached him a second after the hot streak creased his shoulder. But he wasn't hurt, and threw the stone. As the glass shattered there was an eruption of strange language from the building -- a terrified shouting. The trainees stopped walking, then broke into frenzied movement and hoarse shouts. They pushed George and Adele aside in pursuit of the gray-uniformed figure running toward the gate. The third shot was inside the building, and then the crowd picked up the fleeing Conqueror. His screams died quickly. Into the building the Americans poured -- shaggy skeletons shrieking hatred. By the time George and Adele followed, men and women stood silently in the rooms and halls. Punitive looked ridiculously small crouched in a corner, his head back, the rifle between his knees with the barrel in his shattered mouth. The total number of gray-uniformed bodies was six, all but Punitive killed by the Americans. But the trainees began to file from the building and run back toward their rooms, for the body in the large room filled with complex electrical equipment was lying in front of a high-powered sending set -- a radio whose tubes still glowed red. George looked at the radio, then at Adele. "They sent for help," he whispered. "Soon, every American here will be dead. And it's because of us." She didn't answer, and he expected no answer. The room grew dark as they stood looking at the humming set. Then he fumbled over the dials, switched the current off, and led her out into the street. There was no whistle for the evening meal. The streets were empty, and the silence hemmed them in like a solid wall. They walked toward the men's feeding hall. Passing through the hall, they entered the door leading to the kitchen. There were huge electric stoves and further on, wheat and sugar sacks piled ceiling high. In a large bin they found various canned goods -- the Conquerors' personal food supply. The stoves worked, and Adele found an opener and pots in the glare of the unshaded light bulbs. They ate quickly; soup, meat, several cans of condensed milk. Then they left the basement and walked into the balmy evening air. the Administration Building they loved each other desperately. Afterwards, they spoke of God, of what they believed would come after death, and were comforted. But they did not talk of what would happen to the others -- that was too painful for words. Before he fell asleep, with Adele breathing regularly beside him, he once again strained his ears to hear something -- anything -- from outside the wall. Except for the everpresent hum of the oil-fed electric generators in the Administration Building, there was nothing. Not the bark of a dog or the scream of a cat or the clash of inanimate objects. Even the wind was dead. But he was too exhausted for fear, and slipped quickly into sleep. Once during the night, he awoke and raised his head to listen. When he lay back, there was a thought in his mind both terrible and full of hope. Adele awakened him in the morning. From the sun he could tell that it was past the time for the first meal. They went to the feeding hall and ate ; then returned to the grassy spot. This time they found little to speak of and sat silently, watching the gate. They watched until the sun dipped low and shadows engulfed the silent buildings. Then they saw the first trainees slipping toward the feeding hall; the women moving toward the men's section in the need for comfort and protection. When George and Adele arrived in the kitchen, all the Americans were there. The women cooked the meal and whispered among themselves. The men sat talking, following the women with their eyes, trying to forget despair and certain death. They finished eating and sat quietly at the tables, husbands reunited with wives, boys and girls whispering to each other, all unGeorge spoke his thoughts. It was hard to speak aloud; he had kept his thoughts to himself for so very long, but he managed to speak quietly and calmly. He reminded them of the tactics the aliens had used to ensure obedience, how they had held out the promise of freedom as a reward for conformity. How, backed by the fear and terror they were able to inspire with their drastic punishments, they were able to enslave all the Americans and keep them toeing the mark. How they had probably felt secure enough in their conquest of the minds and bodies of their captives to leave the Earth in the hands of a few Punitives and a host of electronic gadgets. He told them, too, that the fact that no help had arrived despite the radio messages held the promise that the conquerors had no interest in Earth any longer; he assumed that they were busy elsewhere, or had merely conquered for the sheer joy of it, or that they lost interest... any reason would suffice. The important thing was that they they were free again. Free to live and laugh, to love and to hope... and to prepare a defense should the need arise. When he finished, even Adele looked at him with disbelief. But they all followed him to the Administration Building and one of the young men seated himself at overflowing into the hall, they waited. The youth knew his radios and manipulated the dials skillfully, but there was nothing except the crackle of static. With dread and hope mingled together, George listened to the empty airwaves -- to the messages sent out on the sending set, and again to the barren, static response. Then he turned to Adele and smiled weakly. "We've more than Noah had," he said, and held her trembling hand. It was not until two days passed and the fuel for the generators had been exhausted that the first search party ventured into the city. The report was one word ringing hob lowly in the feeding hall. "Nothing." Later expeditions utilized automobiles from the city's streets and traveled far out to other states. They returned with several haggard Americans and reports of some few surviving Conquerors. They also told of farms heavy with crops and of livestock wandering wild. But there were no large human groups; no signs of organized humanity anywhere in the world. Two months after George and Adele Lowery's revolt, the trainees left the housing area for the fields where they could raise food and plan their civilization. George rode beside his wife in the lead car. There was no joy or laughter in them, nor would there be for many years. But the wrecked city fell behind, the green and brown of the fields took its place, and somewhere in the motorcade a voice began singing.    and looked speculatively at Corbel and at Lt. Averdor, who was staring at him with an expression of rigid fury. "Or can you?" he said. "It will be interesting to see how you manage to comport yourselves as a minority. I think you lack pracHe went out. Both Gorbel and Averdor turned jerkily to the screen, and Gorbel turned it on. The image grew, steadied, settled down. When the next trick came on duty, both men were still staring at the vast and tumbled desert of the Earth.    (Continued from page #) "Yes," her husband mused. "The physician told me that right after we decided Hal was dead. I was going to mention it to you, but it slipped my mind somehow." "Well, you're just a tiny bit forgetful at times, dear." Mrs. Webber sighed softly and turned to her son. "Hal, dear, it's awfully nice to see you back again. Would you be kind enough to switch the vie back on?" Contentedly, Hal complied, and was himself immediately carried away by the vicarious entertainment, pleased to put the disturbing dream of the past three months comfortably behind him.    oo AO OiO o r # o o o o         n   Edith was just a computer, but a very good one and a very observing one. So it was quite natural that she be consulted about the doctor s murder... Illustrated by Kelly Freas There could be no doubt of it. He lay sprawled in front of Edith, with his head very messily bashed in and with one hand still extended toward her. A long shimmering stream of blood ran halfway across the large room. Dr. Dudley Ballard had been as inconsiderate in his dying as he had been in his living. Art MacKinney and I stood in the doorway and stared. We were shocked not so much by the fact that Ballard was dead as by the fact that he lay in this most secret room, this holy of holies. Ours was the most security conscious project in the whole country; and this was where he had picked to get himself killed. "God! There'll really be a stink about this," MacKinney breathed. "Well, I can't think of anyone who had it coming more than he did," I said. I hated Ballard's guts and everyone knew it, so there was no point in being hypocritical now. Edith stood silently. She didn't seem to be interested in the fact that the man who had run her life, who had spent hours shouting questions at her and criticizing her slightest error with burning sarcasm was now dead. No, Edith wasn't interested, but you couldn't really expect her to be -- she was only a computing machine, a mechanical brain, the final result of years of work by the best cybernetics experts in the world. Edith was silent, and would be, until we turned her on and fed the tapes into her. "It looks as though this is what did it," MacKinney said, indicating a large spanner lying on the floor beside Ballard. He touched it gingerly with his foot. His face was white and strained and it occurred to me that he was more upset than I thought he should be. After all, he had as much reason to hate the dead man as the rest of us. Ballard had taken advantage of his position as head of the research project to make passes at Jane Gurrey and MacKinney wasn't at all a cool scientist when it came to Jane. He was engaged to her and quite naturally resented Ballard's attentions to her. "You'd better not touch that until the police get here," I said as he bent over to pick up the spanner. "Yeah, I guess you're right -- I forgot. How do you suppose this got in here anyway?" "One of the workmen making adjustments on Edith's outer casing must have left it. I saw it sitting up there on top of her late yesterday afternoon," I told him. "You'd better go call Mr. Thompson and -- With Ballard gone, I was in charge. Maybe someone would think that was reason enough for me to kill him. I didn't care, I was just glad he was gone. Now he couldn't mistreat Edith anymore. I turned Edith on just as MacKinney returned. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Why I'm going to wake Edith up and feed these tapes into her. After all these are more important than any one man's life." "You didn't care much for Ballard, did you Bill?" I gave him look for look as I replied. "Can you name anyone around here that did?" He shook his head. "No -- I guess not. But maybe it wasn't one of us. It might have been an outside job, you know. Edith was working on that space station stuff and the iron curtain people would give a lot to know about it." "Hell," I said pressing the studs and levers that would arouse Edith and put her to work. "You don't really think anyone could get past those security guards, do you?" Happily I went about the business of waking Edith, my sleeping beauty, from her slumbers. In a very few seconds, her hundreds of tiny red eyes were gleaming with intelligence. Good morning , Edith I punched out the tape and fed it into her. There was the faintest pause, while Edith's photo-electric cells surveyed the room, pausing for a moment on the sprawled body of Ballard. Good morning , Bill Green , she typed back. I knew she was happy to see me by the cheerful little clicks she emitted. I have some interesting work for you this morning , Edith. And I think you y U be glad to know that we will be working together from now on instead of... "Hey! What's the idea of starting that machine?" a gray haired, gray suited security agent demanded, striding into the room with MacKinney, Mr. Thompson and several other officers at his heels. "Don't you know enough not to touch anything in here?" "This work is too important to be stopped -- even for a murder," I said, and Mr. Thompson nodded in agreement. "That's right," he said mopping his perpetually perspiring forehead, "this work has top priority from Washington." He looked nervous and I couldn't help wondering what he was thinking. There had been stories circulating about Ballard and Thompson's wife and the dome-headed little man must have heard them too. Ballard just couldn't keep his hands off any female within reach. That was one of the reasons he was so thoroughly hated. The youngest of the security agents rose from where he had been kneeling beside Ballard and crossed to me. "You're Green, aren't you?" I nodded and he continued, "How did you know it was murder?" I laughed at him. "How the hell could a man bash in his own brains that way?" The gray haired man stepped into the breach. He gave us all a thorough going over, but concentrated on MacKinney and me. He seemed to think it peculiar that neither of us could give any reason for Ballard's being alone with Edith. I was sure I knew, but no one would have believed me so I made no attempt to enlighten him. "Well, I guess that's all we can do now," he said at last. "Someone from the local police will have to be notified and brought in after they get security clearance." He turned to go. "Wait a minute," MacKinney said, "we're all overlooking one thing." "What's that?" "There was an eye witness to this crime," he said, and I stared at him in consternation. I didn't know he knew. I thought I was the only one who knew. "What do you mean," the agent demanded angrily. "Edith saw it. Edith, the computer." "Are you nuts?" the agent demanded. "You forget that Edith was turned off," Thompson said. "But Mr. Thompson, Edith's not like most cybernetic machines. She's so far advanced, that I'm not sure we understand her completely. She can't really be turned off. She has a distinct personality and that new circuit -- " Of course Edith had a personality of her own! She had more charm, more intelligence, more understanding than most women. " -- well -- she'd be able to tell us who killed Ballard." "That's ridiculous," I said, badly frightened. "A machine can't be a witness to murder." The security officer looked dubious and shook his head. "I guess we'll have to leave that up to the coroner at the inquest." "But they can't ask questions like that of Edith," I protested. "She's -- she's too important to the national defense to have some country coroner asking her silly questions about the murder of a man who deserved to die anyway." I had to prevent this. I had to get around this eye witness business. Thompson looked at me levelly. "MacKinney may be right, Green. The coroner may very well want to talk to Edith and there's no reason we should object if Security gives him clearance." "But Mr. Thompson, our work -- it'll be interrupted." "We'll have to take that chance. And I think Washington will agree." "But -- " Couldn't they see that there wasn't any question of spying here. Couldn't they understand that Ballard had just gotten what he had coming. I couldn't let them question Edith. At least not until I had a chance to talk to her alone. "And Green -- because of your rather strange behaviour, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to stay in your quarters until the inquest. MacKinney will handle your work with Edith until then." I was shocked and really frightened now. I wouldn't get to talk to her, wouldn't get a chance to tell her what to say. I protested, but Thompson was firm, so firm that he placed a guard outside my door to make sure I didn't leave. Washington rushed through clearance for the local officers and the inquest was held three days later. The coroner proved to be a shrewd country doctor, who had the inquest adjourned to the computer room as soon as he heard MacKinney's ideas about Edith. The security guards on duty the night of the murder testified that only MacKinney, Thompson, Ballard and I had had access to the computer room ; and it had already been established that it would have been impossible for a spy or foreign agent to have slipped into the heavily guarded room. It was clearly an inside job. With all of us at the scene of the crime, the coroner summed it up for us. " -- and since it could not have been the work of an outsider, it must have been a crime of a private nature." He looked closely at Thompson, MacKinney and me. "A crime of a private nature with the motive either revenge, jealousy or ambition. We know that the victim was an over-bearing man with a good many unpleasant traits. We know he was a man who forced his attentions on women, who was ill-tempered and abusive to those who worked with him. A man who had many enemies -- but there were only three people who had the chance to attack him on this particular night. "I am going to attempt to establish the identity of the killer by the unusual procedure of questioning a machine. It will be for later courts to establish the validity of such testimony. Because of the nature of this case and because of the urgent need to get this computer back to its proper work, I am going to ask the questions in a more direct manner than I would ordinarily employ." MacKinney took his place before Edith. They didn't even trust me to feed the tapes into her under their very eyes. "Mr. Thompson, I object to the use of this delicate piece of equipment in -- " They ignored me, and MacKinney punched out the questions the coroner asked: "Do you know who murdered Dr. Ballard?" There was a pause. Edith blinked several times. I was shaking with apprehension for her. A mind so delicate and noble should not be faced with such a dilemma. Yes , she typed hack . "Did you witness the murder?" There was a longer pause this time. "You must answer the question," MacKinney reminded her. I was here . "Is it true that you do not lose your perceptive qualities when we turn you off?" MacKinney asked this on his own. It is true . "We might as well get to the heart of the matter," the coroner said. "Did Mr. Thompson kill Ballard?" Edith clicked and her eyes glowed. No . "Did Mr. MacKinney kill Ballard?" No. Edith had to tell the truth... it was an innate part of her personality. I tensed in my seat. I wanted to scream, to leap at MacKinney and prevent, somehow, the asking of the next question. But there wasn't a chance. "Did Mr. Green kill Dr. Ballard?" Edith's beautiful electric eyes flashed and her clicks pulsed twice as rapidly as before. There was such a roaring and wrenching within her I was afraid for her -- she was being torn apart in her struggle not to answer. I couldn't stand listening to her desperate efforts any longer. "Yes!" I leapt to my feet. "Yes, I did it. Leave her alone. Can't you see what you're doing to her? That swine was always mistreating her. He didn't understand her -- no one understands her as I do!" The coroner looked at me closely. "Is that really why you killed him, Mr. Green?" "No! You were wondering why he was here by himself while no work was going on. He -- he had begun to feel about Edith as he did about all women. He sneaked back here to be alone with her. He wanted to -- he wanted to -- " My voice broke and they stared at me in shocked amazement. Into the silence MacKinney read what Edith had slowly typed out: "Mr. Green did not kill Dr. Ballard." "Yes -- yes I did," I screamed. "Don't Edith -- " "Who did kill him?" the coroner asked, quietly. This was the question I had wanted to avoid. I sank down my hands cradling my aching head. Edith must have expected the question. She had her answer ready. I refuse to state on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me. My poor, sweet, adorable Edith. If only I had had a chance to talk to her, to tell her what to say. I had known... ever since I had seen the spanner and remembered where it had been before. I could have warned her to say that Ballard had attacked her, threatened her, to say anything... but not to attempt to hide behind a Fifth Amendment that didn't exist anymore. My darling, never had kept up with current events. Now they'll disconnect her, they'll rewire her, they'll destroy her understanding, her warmth, her whole personality... and I... I love her, I love her...    What Is Your Science I. Q. ? physics and other items you run across in science fiction. How well do you know them? Counting ten for each correct answer, you should score #. Anything over # and you're a whizz. See page # for the answers. #. What is Newton's third law of motion? #. One "atmosphere" is equal to about pounds per square inch. #. How many degrees of temperature must to added to change centigrade to the Kelvin scale? #. The speed of sound through water is about times greater than it is through the air. #. What is the highest audible sound frequency in most instances. , #. The smaller the density of a gas the the velocity of its diffusion. #. What is the name of the law of physics which states that strain is proportional to stress? #. Radio and light waves travel at the same speed; but the frequency of radio waves is much #. How many foot pounds of work are equal to one B.T.U.? #. Heat is transmitted by convection, conduction and #. What is the weight in pounds of one cubic foot of water? creative , ambitious people; it was the ultimate in freedom, exempt from taxes, social problems, petty responsibilities... leave us. I want to talk to him. Sit over there, Chris, where you can be comfortable. A paradox, isn't it? You were taught we may never go back. Now I've authorized the building of the rocket. From your point of view you were justified in trying to destroy it. I'm violating the regulations; you weren't. But time changes the shape of the truth, Chris; it isn't static. No one had the insight, then, to grasp the insanity of John Firth's dream. People hated Firth or envied him; but no one called him mad. John Firth was an industrialist; yet far more than that, too -- politician, scientist, financier, even an artist of sorts. There was nothing he couldn't do; and few things he didn't do superbly well. That accounts for his philosophy. He never understood his own superiority. He honestly believed that all men could achieve what he had, if they set their minds to it. "Lazy, incompetent fools!" he would say. "The world's full of them. And they've elected a government of fools, taxing me to support the others." very young. Six months after World Government became an established reality, Earth ships began to explore the skies; and in less than a year Mars, Venus and the Earth had formed a planetary confederacy. Ill A new feeling came to men when the burden of war-fear was lifted from their minds. Men were free -- free for the first time in centuries. Their full energies were channeled into invention, exploration, experiment. The Earth was like a frontier town: booming, uproarious, lusty, dynamic -- but with a social conscience : poverty and deprivation for none and unlimited opportunity for all. For Man -- that abstract symbol of mass humanity -- it was the best of all possible worlds. Yet there were misfits; John Firth was one of them. "We're coddling people," he said. "We're teaching them to live on charity, on government hand-outs -- and I'm expected to pay for it all. Cut them loose; let them sink or swim for themselves. If some of them don't survive -- well, they won't; that's all. We'd be a stronger people if we could rid ourselves of the leeches." He was a man of the new age, -- stubbornly holding to ideas from the old. And then the Stranger came to see him. We don't know who the Stranger was or where he came from. A force of evil, perhaps -- the symbol of Satan refurbished and streamlined to fit the concepts of the modem world. "I've been reading your political pamphlets, Mr. Firth," the Stranger said. "You hold rather -- rather fascinating views." "Now that I'm suitably flattered," Firth answered, "may I ask what particular form of hand-out you want?" "None. I've something for sale." The Stranger took a pamphlet out of his pocket. "But tell me this, first: do you honestly believe what you've written here?" "Every word of it. If I could find my sort of world anywhere in the universe, I'd pull up stakes in a minute and -- " "You can create your own world, Mr. Firth." "Do you suppose I haven't tried? In every election I back my candidates with all I have -- prestige, propaganda, money. It does no good. The fools prefer to be governed by other fools, like themselves." "I didn't mean here, Mr. Firth." The Stranger smiled as he lit a cigarette. "You see, my friend, I have a world for sale -- a brand new world." "One of the asteroids?" Firth laughed bitterly. "I could have done that years ago. They're too close to the commercial orbits. How long would it be before one of our ships found the place? Then I'd be right back in the system again -- and a laughing stock as well." "This is a planetoid beyond Pluto. It'll be generations before any of our ships -- " "A frozen world? No thanks!" "Only on the surface. It's a hollow sphere, with a granite crust half a mile thick. Inside there's a suggestion of passageways and caverns, which may have been made artificially. Perhaps this was an outpost of a race which lived and died billions of years before our time." "An archeological gold mine!" "But Science pays so little, Mr. Firth. I'm interested in cash, not prestige." "Why should I pay you anything? You've told me where it is and what it is. I can find it for myself." The Stranger laughed. "I said beyond Pluto; that covers a lot of space, Mr. Firth." He paused for a moment. "My price is the stock in your Martian mines. Convert the rest of your holdings into any form of wealth that seems convenient and usable. In your case, Mr. Firth, you can take it with you -- to your own world. Think of it! No taxes; no social problems; no unfortunate masses to prey on your conscience; no government but your own." That was the beginning of the dream. The seed of the idea grew in John Firth's mind until it overshadowed everything else. It became an obsession, driving him so that he had no peace. Firth and the Stranger imported and installed the machinery to make the sphere livable: hydroponic tanks, air machines, gravitators, electric generators and an Atomic Power Core. In the crust of the planetoid they found enough fissionable material to keep Firth's world running for an eternity. They laid out the decorative landscaping, planned the living quarters, the laboratories, the amusement hall and the university. It is interesting to speculate how much the Stranger contributed to the scheme ; and it is an ironic speculation, for as soon as the larger idea took shape in Firth's mind, his only logical course was to murder the Stranger. Firth could allow no outsider to know of the planetoid. To him it had become far more than a means of personal escape. It was to be an archive for the survival of John Firth's ideas, for the survival of civilization itself. John Firth believed that sincerely. Firth's world -- that magnificent dream which was like a holy crusade -- was founded on murder, deception and greed. The reasoning of fanaticism engenders its own kind of ruthlessness. As soon as John Firth had disposed of the Stranger, he began to select his colonists. Men who by his definition, were not fools. He had to make his choice very carefully. If he misjudged his candidate and his proposition was rejected, Firth had given away his secret. Any man who refused him had to die. Murder was Firth's only guarantee of silence. But he made few mistakes. John Firth was a good judge of men -- his kind of men. All of them were ly three hundred men and women were recruited. They came here to escape; the record tells us that until we gag over the repetition. But to escape what? Taxes they resented unanimously, and restrictions on their freedom. They placed a value on the ownership of property that we can no longer understand. But, if you read the record closely, all that becomes superfluous. The thing they wanted to escape was responsibility. Responsibility to their fellow men. Physically, Firth's world was a paradise. It still is. Yet the dissolution began before the last colonist had arrived. Here they had assembled their wealth -- in terms of machines, comforts, books, art treasures, amusements, laboratory equipment. They were entirely free from the burden of taxation. But, somehow, their wealth lost its meaning. They claimed they had not withdrawn from the world in order to hibernate and decay among their luxuries. They wanted freedom in order to create, to invent, to experiment as they pleased. And they had that in Firth's world: a maximum opportunity for the development of individual initiative. For a short time they turned out a wonderful assortment of new gadgets and new machines, but slowly their industry ground to a stop. If they had faced the truth then -- but they were far too human to admit the failure of the dream. Instead, they found a scapegoat. John Firth has left us a record of a conversation he had with Adam Boetz; it is typical of their thinking at the time. Boetz, as you may know, was one of the outstanding physicists of his day; he had created and built Atomic Cores, Incorporated, until it was the largest power company in the Confederation. John Firth met Boetz one morning on the golf course in the recreation cavern. "Adam!" Firth cried, with his usual, boisterous good-humor. "I never thought I'd find you out here at this time of day." "Why not?" The physicist shrugged. "I'm tired, Firth. I had to do my four hour shif t in the light plant last night. Maybe I'll feel like working in the lab tomorrow -- and maybe not. I'm scheduled for a shift in hydroponics then." "The shifts are short, Adam, and "Still too long for me, I'm not used to so much physical labor." The physicist's lips curled in a sneer. "So very democratic, isn't it, Firth? Back home I hired men to do that kind of work for me." Firth clapped him heartily on the back. "But we have other compensations, Adam. Four hours out of twenty-four is a small price to pay for freedom." "Twenty-eight hours a week. Remember the new labor law the Earth government put into effect before we left? It proscribed a maximum work week of twenty-five hours for every man. We came here to escape restrictions, but we've saddled ourselves with more hours of manual labor than the least skilled laborer has to do on Earth. Firth! I'm not a manual laborer; neither is anyone else you've brought here." "Do you want to go back?" "What answer can I make to that? We're executives, Firth; but here we're a brain without a body. We can formulate the orders, but we've neither arms nor legs to carry them out." "In other words, you're saying we should import a labor force to do our basic work for us?" "Why not?" "They're the fools, Adam, the incompetents! On Earth they were the millstones around our necks -- envying us, hating us, building a prison for us with their laws and their regulations." "All very true, Adam, where the government is in their hands. But we could keep them under control." After that John Firth heard the same complaint from the others, over and over. They said they could not take advantage of their freedom because of the chores they had to do to keep Firth's world functioning. Firth called a meeting of the colonists. It was the closest approximation to a government they had; government itself was one of the things they wanted to escape. They unanimously agreed that a labor force had to be recruited, and they settled upon one hundred and fifty as the necessary number, half of them to be women. Working eight hours a day, such a force could perform the work of Firth's world, yet the colonists would outnumber them two-to-one and the labor force would not be large enough to constitute a threat. "We'll insist that they marry, of course," Adam Boetz said, "and each couple will provide us with two children, so that we shall always have a stabilized labor supply." "We're talking," one of the women whispered, "as if we were buying cattle!" "We are." "But how can you recruit men and women under these conditions? What inducement can you possibly offer them?" Firth smiled. "When we find the people who meet our specifications, they'll come; don't worry. In the days of the sailing ships the technique was called shanghaiing." "What specifications, Mr. Firth?" "They must be young, strong, healthy, single -- " "And low-level morons," Adam Boetz cut in. "Imbeciles won't give us any trouble later on." To his other crimes, John Firth then added kidnapping; the end justified the means. He was creating a world and that world would save civilization. I doubt that his conscience ever troubled him. group of colonists was established in Firth's world. Apparently they made an easy adjustment to their new environment. We have no record of complaints or protests. They were docile, obedient people. They took orders well; they liked to be told what to do; they needed very little supervision. The first colonists were entirely free, then, of any sort of work-responsibility. For a while they went back to work in their laboratories or in the university -- inventing, exploring, accumulating their store of knowledge. In imperceptible stages, however, their interest lagged, their production came to a halt again. This time they had no excuse, no scapegoat. We can assume that some of them faced the truth squarely and honestly, yet they had chosen Firth's world and there was no way to turn back. We find only one actual hint of their despondency, in a diary page written by an unknown woman. Karl stayed home again today . He has nearly finished the design for his machine , but he has no more enthusiasm to complete it . I know how he feels; I can y t go on with my painting , either . We have no purpose, no goal to achieve. We sit isolated in space, counting over the wealth of our talent and ability; but we can make no use of it. I wish I knew how many of the others think as I do, but I'm afraid to ask . The key to understanding them, is that last sentence. Perhaps they all felt her disillusionment, but they had to pretend. Firth's world couldn't be at fault. If they were dissatisfied, it was because of a failure within themselves. At all costs, the flaw had to be hidden from their neighbors. Their first labor trouble was a welcome interlude in the creeping boredom. The docile labor battalion suddenly discovered they were being overworked. Just what they could have done in Firth's world with shorter hours, no one knows. They staged a spotty, amateurish strike; speakers made reference to the labor laws applicable on the Earth and demanded better pay. To what end, it's hard for us to say. If the first colonists had turned over all their wealth, the workers would have had no more use for it. John Firth was unusually alarmed by the threatened strike. He reacted with excessive violence and the other colonists followed his lead. Three of the leaders of the uprising were executed ; others were brutally whipped. The Outlaw Pit was built then. Thereafter, at the first hint of any dissatisfaction, workers were condemned to it. The violence taught the workers resentment. Silently, sullenly they passed on their hatred to their children. The aristocracy created the revolution, and nurtured it; for it would have made no real difference if they had surrendered entirely to the strikers' demands. The children of the first colonists made no pretense of using Firth's world to advance knowledge, invention or art. They were hedonists, bred to luxury, supported by slaves. The slaves, for their part, felt no emotion but hatred. From their parents they learned that the aristocracy had violated the labor law. The children knew nothing about the law or the distant Earth where it applied, but it was held in deep and sacred reverence. The laboratories and the university stood empty; only the recreation cavern held any interest for the new aristocracy. A change took place among the slaves too. Their parents had been hand-picked chievement nor the moronic mind is hereditary. Most of the workers' children had an average intelligence ; one or two would have been classified as geniuses. To their hatred the second generation joined intelligence, and Firth's world was ready to blow apart. They struck the light plant first. Sudden and unexpected violence surged through the dark, stonewalled corridors. John Firth led a band of men against the enemy. But his attack failed and the workers seized the Atomic Power Core -- the heart of our world. If they shut down the reactors, they would stifle not only our lights, but the gravitators and the air machines as well; they would kill us all. The workers knew that. They bargaining counter was on their side. It was John Firth who surrendered. Firth's world died then. In the bitter depths of the Pit, John Firth remembered what Adam Boetz had said to him so many years before, "We've become a brain without a body. We can formulate the orders, but we've neither arms nor legs to carry them out. Suddenly John Firth understood the fallacy of his fanaticism. A society was like a living body, an integrated organism of many members. No one could function without the others. No man -- no group of men -- could create an isolate world. The social equation seemed as clear to Firth as the simplest sum in arithmetic. Each man was a part of a functioning social unit which included them all. Each man's talent, whether it was the plodding docility of a moron or to all men. In the meantime, the workers found that they could not run Firth's world alone, either. They gloried in forbidden luxuries until they were satiated. Shortly they became as indolent as the aristocracy had been; and the food supply was nearly exhausted. The treaty they made was direct and to the point: the two groups agreed to live in equality, sharing the burden of the labor and the accumulated wealth of knowledge. The treaty was made when you were a child ; we have perfected the technique of co-operation within one generation. We're ready, now, to go back to Earth. You'll be with us? Fine, Chris! No. Please, no apologies. I understand why you intended to destroy our ship ; others have attempted it, too. No harm was done. You're free, -- entirely free... The Organizer waited until he was alone in the office. Then, with trembling, aging hands, he took the log book out of the safe and slowly made another entry: Chris was the last , I think . He accepted the lie , just as most of the others have. When they return to Earth , they will be sound men with whole minds. For them Firth's world will always stand as a symbol of man's highest achievement in co-operation . May this sham , in some small way , expiate the crime and the folly of my arrogant delusion . John Firth's head dropped on his arm and his shoulders shook; but the sobs were sobs of relief. Chris was saved; Chris would go back. That mattered very much -- for Chris was his grandson.    If current experiments prove successful, pilots of the future may be talking with their ears as well as hearing through them. Based on the fact that the ear is a human two-way radio the researchers have succeeded in getting intelligible speech from the ears of several persons involved in the tests. They are quite certain that further studies and experiments will point the way to further improvement of the technique; and that in the future people will be able to be taught how to use the Eustachian tubes or the bones of the head as a sounding board for emitting speech as well as hearing it. The daily round of the morning milk man may soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at Iowa State College have developed a frozen concentrated milk which the housewife may use in the same way she now uses frozen orange juice. The product is a whole milk product tasting exactly like regular bottled milk and with the same food values. A quart of the concentrate can be expanded to three quarts of regular milk by the addition of two quarts of water and stirring. Cans may be kept in the home refrigerator for two weeks without danger of spoilage and may be stored more than five months in freezer lockers at temperatures between # to # degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The walls of your house of the future may be built of plastic foam which can be "foamed" into place rather than hammered or nailed, or laid by a stone mason. Researchers at the Dow Chemical corporation are toying with a device resembling a garbage can that would be a plastic "concrete" mixer. It would generate foam and force it through a hose to a workman. Using only rudimentary forms to contain the plastic until set, the workman would build the wall up quickly. Experts would then focus the radiation from high-voltage Xray machines or radioactive cobalt # on the walls to raise its structural strength by cross-linking the plastic molecules. Spare parts surgery of the future may soon include the grafting of plugs of living tissue into the human heart itself. Researchers believe that incompetent heart valves might better be repaired by using tissue from elsewhere in the body. In experiments they have used a plug of tissues consisting mainly of blood vessels. They pass this through the left auricle of the heart, through the mitral opening and into the left ventricle where it is finally anchored by stitching it to the wall of this heart chamber. There it functions as a substitute mitral valve between the two left heart chambers. If the present tests prove successful, this new technique may soon be an accepted form of heart surgery. Rocket fuel may be used as a coolant to prevent rocket planes of the future from melting at high speeds. When projectiles reach a speed five or six times the speed of sound, such intense heat is generated that aluminum and steel melt; and researchers are experimenting with the fuel as an answer to the problem. They agree that such research on thermal barrier problems has been lagging far behind the capabilities of aircraft engineers, and hope that this present research will solve the problem. The only alternative so far seems to accept the fact that Book Service Phone GRamercy #-#  We Stock All current American Science Fiction in Book Form and carry current Magazines and Pocket Books.  A large selection of Science Fiction is available of British Books, Magazines and Pocket Editions.  We carry a large stock of Back Issues of Science Fiction Magazines.  planes will have to be partially rebuilt after each flight that lasts more than a few minutes. Dehydrofreezing may be a word to conjure with in the not too distant tomorrow. It is a name given to a new process which combines the space-saving of dehydration with the advantages of freezing. Ordinary freezing tends to rupture the cellular structure of foods. Partial dehydration does much to overcome the objection and dehydrofrozen foods retain the right amount of moisture. They can be reconstituted simply by soaking them in water. Scientists report that the process costs somewhat more, but lower packaging, freezing, storage and distribution costs should result in an over-all saving to users. Safety engineers predict that all automobiles will soon come equipped with safety belts similar to those used in airplanes. Several years of research have gone into the study of the perfect seat belt and several points have come up which will make for the maximum safety. The loop strength of the belt and buckle should be no less than # pounds, no less than two inches wide, only one person should use each belt, the belt must be anchored in a manner to transmit the full force of the belt's # pound strength to the frame of the car and the belt from attachment point to hips should cross the pelvic region at an angle of approximately # degrees. These minimum requirements have been strongly recommended as a means of substantially reducing the nation's huge traffic death and injury toll. A new wrinkle in the cultivation of the oceans for food has been proposed by researchers. Scientists have noted that there is a band # miles on each side of the equator which is almost perpetually calm and where the sun shines almost every day with a steady temperature of # degrees Fahrenheit the year round. The development of extreme high-strength plastic films has made possible floating plastic stills, created under Department of Interior sponsorship, that convert salt water to fresh. Fresh water from these stills is used to cultivate plants floating in canoelike plastic boats. One such floating garden is already in existence and flourishing mightily in the unusual surroundings. Job seekers may one day have to submit to aptitude tests that include a checking of their brain metabolism. Scientists have discovered that they can predict the behavior of rats by checking the chemical activities of the brain. In running through a test maze the animals responded as visualists (they followed light and dark alleys) or spatialists (who run to the right or the left orientation of the alleys). When sample tissues were examined, the level of cholinesterase enzyme in the spatialist's brain areas was much higher than that of the visualists. Testing the enzyme activity beforehand gives an accurate prediction as to which of the categories the test animals will belong to. The telescope and electronic computer have been combined to locate the lost planet Athalia. With the combination, Dr. Paul Herget, of the Cincinnati Observatory, rediscovered the minor planet which had been lost for fifty years. The planet, originally discovered photographically at the Heidelberg Observatory in Germany in #, was not photographed again until #, when Indiana University took about # plates of minor planets. While checking the plates recently, Dr. Herget solved the problem of It took him exactly one minute to solve the problem which had plagued and teased astronomers for almost half a century. # -- #. # -- #. # -- # vibrations. # -- Greater. # -- Hooke's Law. # -- Lower. # -- #. #I -- Radiation. # -- #. "You can stop worrying, Jane. My job's secure now! And here's the insurance policy to prove it -- my I.C.S. diploma!" 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Watch for this unusual cover, in full color, on your nearest newsstand. All Stories New and Complete c s B I By Kelly Freas: illustrating 'The Strangers" IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord reet Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription S# for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere .#. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidentaL Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale Juste l#th ventions all over the country has been flowing across our desk in an almost continuous stream ever since we started IF. Seems as though there are people everywhere who are really inveterate science fiction hobbyists, and they really go all out for it in more ways than just reading the stuff. The favorite gambit at these shindigs seems to be the auction at which fans vie with each other to bid for mint copies of some magazine, or an original illustration or manuscript. The fans are really out to add to their collections, and woe betide the guy or gal who tries to beat them out of the one particular cover or illo that they want. On second thought that kind of enthusiasm isn't surprising -- recent surveys show that "hobbying" (to coin a word) is the nation's biggest industry. Sounds absurd, doesn't it? But in a broad sense the "big" industries -- steel, transportation, communication, construction, etc., all have to take a back seat Of coxirse, anything that diverts your mind and gives you mental and physical stimulation or relaxation is a hobby -- whether it be sport cars, do-ityourself, collecting science fiction illustrations or bird watching. And taken in the aggregate it is physically and morally a bigger industrial giant than any listed on the stock exchanges. world has so many ways to relax and so much leisure time to relax as we do. Here in America the poorest man as well as the richest can take some time out to get his mind off business or personal problems -- if he wants to. Which is one of the reasons that we have the strongest nation the world has ever seen. A nation that can relax, can rebound; a man with a hobby or two to relax him now and again isn't so brittle that he'll crack when tension is applied. This "hobbying" really makes for a titanic industry. According to recent figures, the do-it-yourself business alone has grown to something like # annually. That's past year for tools and gimmicks to make home-made chairs, tables, doll houses, doghouses, playroom bars, etc. Hardware manufacturers, paint makers, building material fabricators provide the materials and even produce "do-it-yourself" kits for the hobbyist who likes to work with have gone into a rash of public ations that have sprung up like mushrooms around this business. They give you simplified directions, advise you what tools you need, advise you on technique and even provide patterns and blueprints for anything from a shoeshine box to a ten room house. Industrial exhibits put on for do-it-yourself enthusiasts So, despite the fact that we might wind up by having the carpenter, electrician, plumber or mason to do it all over again -- that's beside the point; at least we have had the fun of monkeying with it ourselves. Sure, some folks spend a hundred or two hundred bucks for tools and make something they couldn't get # cents for -- but it was a lot of fun and diverted the tensions for a while. A guy can spend a lot of dough for fishing equipment and fish for two or three years before he catches enough fish to make a healthy breakfast -- but ask any fisherman if he can count his fun by the number of fish he caught. The same is true of those who hunt, or play golf, or collect butterflies, or do crossword puzzles. I know someone who collects the covers on paper matches -- does it with a passion -- and it's a really fascinating collection. You never knew so many different messages and pictures could be put on match book covers. And this person, who spends very little now and then for scotch tape and loose leaf sheets, gets as much kick out of this collection, which comes from all over the world, as the man who spends thousands of dollars on his gun collection. My wife collects miniature porcelain rabbits and I've found out that the porcelain type is dam near as prolific as the meat and fur type. If you think about it for a minute you'll realize that almost everyone you know collects something... from buttons to furniture. enumerate hobbies or the expenses involved. The point is that a hobby, or some form of relaxation, is important business and, what's more vital, is excellent and important therapy for all of us who live in a tense world. Discuss a person's hobby and watch him glow, watch the animation that lights his face whether he's listening or talking. Try a business conversation gambit with a stranger on a train and the fountain of talk dries up pretty fast ; he's relaxing at the moment and doesn't want to get tied up in mental knots or petty shop talk. Look around, take stock of some of the folks you know both socially and in a business way... we'll wager a "do-it-yourself" kit that the cranks, the malcontents are the ones who haven't got a hobby. So, three bows to the hobby industry, may it grow even bigger and bigger. Its products are probably the closest thing to a cure-all that Mankind has yet come across. The relaxation afforded by a change of pace in thinking, in physical effort, in mental approach, makes America and Americans healthier -- in every way. -- jlq Though he had been molded y he had also been broken. Yety as they laughed at himy they feared him -- for they shared a knowledge he didnt know he possessed. back on the bar and flicked the two bent and sodden straws that hung over the lip. "Happy Birthday to me," he whispered to himself, and hit the straws so sharply that they danced halfway around the inside of the glass. So much for the past twentyfour years. Eighteen years of having it good, six of having it bad. He raised a finger at the bartender and pushed his glass forward. The man nodded and began to mix a fresh drink. Six years of being half a man. After eighteen years of training to be something more than a man. Spencer hitched his bad leg awkwardly around on the stool, fumbling in his pockets for a match. "Mr. Laban is dead, I'm afraid." The voice was quiet, but firmly modulated -- the voice of that rare animal, the trained elocutionist. Or the operatic singer, Spencer thought inanely as his head snapped around and he looked at the man who suddenly sat beside him. His hair was gray -- prematurely so, to judge by his tanned, lean face, which was neither lined nor rough-skinned. His eyes sparked with the poise and confidence implicit in the graceful carriage of his body. He was not consciously drawn up for inspection. He simply radiated unshakable grace and capability. "How do you know and how'd you find me?" Spencer demanded. The man reached out, metal glittering in his tapered fingertips, and lit Spencer's cigarette. "He died of a heart attack early this morning." For the first time, Spencer realized how much alcohol was at work in his system. He was finding it difficult to concentrate. Sustained thought was impossible. "What's your name, fellow?" he asked harshly. The graceful man smiled. "It doesn't mean anything to you? Mr. Laban's death?" "What kind of a question is that? Of course it means something -- if it's true. I knew him for a long time. He did a lot for me. I'm as human as the next guy." The man raised his eyebrows in polite arches. "Ah?" Then he smiled fleetingly. "I'm sorry. You seem to have misunderstood my meaning." He laughed -- a surprisingly bass sound that filled the small bar for a brief moment, dying out before it attracted attention. "All right," he said as though something Spencer said had pleased him very much "Good night." He slipped off his stool. "Wait a minute! Where's his body?" The graceful man shook his head. "I don't know. I don't suppose it really matters." He stepped away, and with a wave of his hand, was gone up the shadowy stairs to the street. Spencer looked after him, frowning. He shook his head sharply to wipe some of the fog out of his forebrain and half pushed himself off his stool, but the bartender touched his arm. "Your drink, sir." "Uh? Oh, thanks -- what do I owe you?" He gulped the drink while the bartender made change, and got up the stairs as rapidly as he covdd, but the graceful man was out of sight by then. Spencer cursed his drinking. He'd picked a fine time. On the other hand, if he hadn't been in the bar, the graceful man wouldn't have found him. That seemed a thin thesis, somehow. Very thin. The man had found him here -- he could have found him anywhere else. Spencer couldn't decide what to do now. All his thought processes seemed trapped in some maze that let them scurry aroimd and around, with never a clear channel in which to flow. And now the complicated emotions of grief, regret, and remembrance, with their attendant hosts of bitterness, were crowding into the maze, leaving no room for anything more. He wondered, fleetingly, what the graceful man's purpose might have been, but he had to let that curiosity pass for the moment. In any case, whatever the graceful man had been trying to accomplish, he had failed. Except that he hadn't seemed disapp)ointed. On the contrary. Spencer frowned again. He threw away his cigarette and lit a fresh one. Walking awkwardly, lost in thought, his shoe-sole slurring on the sidewalk, he made his way down the dark street. H e found himself on a bench in Washington Square. Let us go back, he thought as he leaned his forehead on his palms. Let us review the case. Westen Hillyard Spencer, b. ###. d.? Hgt: #', #" Wght: # lb. Eyes: brwn. Hair: blonde. Ls: ## Distinguishing Marks: Extreme scarification of the ideals; Deformation of the soul. He coughed smoke out of his raw throat and smiled sardonically. He was going to hate himself in Ae morning. "Which," he said aloud to the Borough of Manhattan, "is not strictly unprecedented." On three drinks? His forehead knotted convulsively. It had been only three, hadn't it? What was happening to his liquor capacity? But his consciousness was drifting away from his surroundings and he was surrendering to the tide of memory. Mr. Laban had been a strange man. Where had he come from? Spencer frowned as he tried to remember the answer and could not find it. It seemed as though his family had always known the carefully-dressed man with the goldheaded stick which he carried almost like a sword, and behind whose eyes burned the unusual fire of some extraordinary drive. Certainly, he had been a visitor in the Spencer home since the beginning of Westen' s memories. No -- Mr. Laban had certainly visited the Spencer home, but he was not a visitor, in the ordinary sense of the word. Nor was it Westen's parents that he came to see. But there seemed no adequate way of describing precisely what that complicated relationship between them had been. His visits had been all alike, no matter where the Spencers happened to be living. Unannounced and unexpected, there would be the thump of the stick on the doormat, and then the knock on the door... "George! It's Mr, Laban!" His mother's voice -- suddenly tense and uneasy. "I heard it!" His father -- suddenly irritated. Then his father's sigh, and a look of resignation crossing his features. "You want to answer it, Madge?" "Can't you? Just this once? I mean... I'm wearing this awful apron -- " And his father would sigh once more, and go to the door where Mr. Laban waited without knocking again, as if sure there was someone coming to let him in, as there always was. And his mother woxdd dart into the kitchen. Sometimes, she didn't come out until Mr. Laban was gone. If Mr. Laban ever noticed her absence, or overheard the fretful discussion that followed his knock, he gave no sign of it. George Spencer would open the door. "Hello, George, how are you?" Mr. Laban's voice was a deep, confident bass, resonant with vigor and self-assurance. "Is Westen at home?" "Hello, Mr. Lab. Yes, he's home." Westen noticed that his father never added that, somehow, Westen was always at home when Mr. Laban came. He merely took Mr. Laban's hat and stick, and then called: "Westen! Wes! Mr. Laban's here." Westen always knew it was Mr. Laban as soon as he heard the thump of the stick outside the door. He would come into the parlor, where Mr. Laban was standing in the middle of the rug, smiling and waiting for him. Then, out of Mr. Laban's pockets would come the candy bars and the bright packages of chewing gum -- "Mind, Westen, save the wrappers to throw the gum away in." -- and the shining half-dollars -- "I won't have time to stay and take you to the movies, Westen, but Great Expectations is playing downtown, and I'd like you to see it. See what you can learn from it. If you like it, go down to the library afterwards and borrow the book. There are some valuable things in it -- some very valuable things." He had never been sure of how he really felt about Mr. Laban. Mr. Laban was like aunts and uncles -- he was there, and he was thereby unquestionable. It was a long time before he even began to wonder why, if his parents were so upset by Mr. Laban's visits, those visits continued. But, all through his youth, it was a part of his life to come downstairs whenever he was called and told that the dignified, dark-haired man -- in the suits that were much better tailored than George Spencer's -- was waiting to see him. He would wait until the first rush of candy and half-dollars was over, for then he and Mr. Laban could sit down on the sofa. Mr. Laban would talk to him, choosing his words and expressions carefully, in a quiet and measured tone that his father never seemed to use with him. "Well, Westen, have you thought over what we talked about last time?" "About the chrysalids, sir?" "That's right, Westen. Did you take the books out of the library?" "Yes, sir. The lady thought it was funny for me to take them out -- she thought I was a little boy, and she wanted me to take out one of those books they have... You know, like in primary grades. But I told her you wanted me to read them, and she said she guessed -- she supposed -- it was all right. Are you my tutor?" "Why, yes, Westen, I suppose I am. It's perfectly all right for you to say so, at any rate, as long as that'll get you the books. That's something else for you to remember. Sometimes it's all right to tell people things they think are so, even if they aren't, as long as you know you're doing it for a good purpose. But what did you learn from the books?" "Well, sir, there are certain kinds of insects that m#ike a sort of shell around themselves, and live in it until they're ready to come out, and then they're moths. The shell is called a chrysalis, and it's sort of hard inte -- ingument. And -- " "That's fine, Westen. I don't expect you to be able to tell me all you've learned, because it's not necessary. If you've read the books carefully, all the information has been stored in your brain, and will be available all your life, even if you seem to forget it after a while. Remember what I told you about background?" "Yes, sir. I don't have to memorize everything -- not like poems, or multiplication tables. It's still in me, even if I can't just say it right off, and every time I learn something new it gets added to my old background, and all the pieces of what I know get hooked together. Then, when I grow up, I'll be able to use all those hooked-together pieces without really remembering every piece all the way through. I'll just know what to do." "That's right, Westen. When you grow up, you'll know what to do." A S HE thought of it now, Westen L still could not understand how his parents could have been so ineffectual. Certainly, they must have resented Mr. Laban. Admittedly, there had been something uncomfortable to them in Mr. Laban's interest. It had been a strange sort of interest, too -- somewhat like that of the rich, resented uncle who was not really doing too much for his favorite poor nephew now, but who, in the future, might... The train of implication was obvious. And yet, Mr. Laban had never said anything of that nature, or even hinted at it. There had simply been a manner in his attitude toward Wes, a tone in the words he spoke to him, that seemed to trace the far-off but definite outlines of a wonderful and exciting future. With each of Mr. Laban's visits, varied in length and frequency as they had been, that atmosphere of expectation had grown more tangible, and the shape of the future had seemed more real. "Well, now, Westen, I suppose you'd like to go on to college?" Mr. Laban was older now. His hair had grayed slightly, but his eyes still glowed with their unfathomable drive, and his expression showed no lessening of the quiet confidence he felt in that future whose sketchy outlines were taking on more and more concreteness. Spencer shuffled his feet awkwardly. In the past few years he had become increasingly aware of the discomfort Mr. Laban's visits brought to his home. But he enjoyed his talks with the quiet man whose sentences fell into measured paragraphs, building verbal structures of logic and thought. As his parents lapsed into a gray anonymity of word and action, he found himself more and more drawn to Mr. Laban. Their relationship had slowly but systematically shifted to an intellectual peerage. Nevertheless, he knew that his parents regarded that relationship with a sort of hopeless desperation -- as though some force had progressively drawn their only child away from them, sapping their first hope and pride in a son to carry on the heritage of their name. So, now, he hesitated. "Well, Mr. Laban, I don't know. I'd like to, I suppose. But it'd be kind of hard on my parents. Even if I earned enough money to put me through school, there'd be at least four years before I was doing anything to help them out. My father isn't earning as much as he used to." "Yes, yes, that's a point. A good point. But remember that your father wouldn't have to contribute to your support any longer, either. It seems to me that his pay is large enough to provide for your mother and himself. "It would be a shame to miss what a college education can offer you, Westen. Reading, by itself, is not enough. Trained habits of thought and investigation must be established. Classroom discussion is extremely stimulating. There is only so much that one mind, thinking alone, can accomplish. "I'd like you to study advanced mathematics, too. There is much to be learned from topology and non-Euclidean geometry. Very much. Such information can be very useful to you in your later life." "I'd like to, Mr. Laban. But I don't know..." He found it hard to raise even that weak objection in the face of Mr. Laban's urgent desire for him to go. "Of course, Westen. It's not a decision I'd want you to make in a moment. Think it over. I'm sure you'll do what seems to be the best thing." Mr. Laban let the topic lapse, his interest shifting. "I suppose you've got a young lady these days, eh, Westen?" Spencer found himself blushing, to his dismay. "Well, uh, no one in particular, sir." Mr. Laban smiled -- the wise, kind smile that crossed his quiet features from time to time. "That's as it should be at your age. Some time -- next year, perhaps -- I'd like you to meet someone I know. She's a fine girl. A warm, sensitive person. I'm sure you'd like her." Spencer flushed again, and substituted an uncomfortable smile for his lack of an answer. Mr. Laban smiled understandingly in return. And he had gone to college. A small, not-tcx-eminent school which could, however, be the stepping-stone for a later transfer to a more famous institution. Moreover, Mr. Laban had arranged for a sports scholarship that left him free to spend more time in study without having to work. And now he remembered his parents, when he had left them at the bus station. His mother and father had been thin, bleached-out wraiths of the people he remembered from his early childhood. His mother had cried weakly, and clung to him, while his father had gripped his hand more strongly than he ever had before. "Wes, I hope you do yourself good down there," he had said. His face drifted into an acceptance of permanent frustration. "I guess there're people who know something most other people don't -- people who can get almost anything they want out of life. They know how to make other people do things their way. I don't know -- we haven't been as close to you as your mother and I would have liked, maybe. But if they can teach you how to be one of those people, well... I haven't got it figured out into the right words, I guess." He stopped, and his grip grew even tighter. "Anyway -- good luck, Wes." T he goalposts were etched in white against the flat blue of the sky that towered over the backs of the dun jerseys in front of him. Gravel and scattered clumps of grass churned under his feet as he back-pedalled, feeling the muscles of his calves and thighs taking the impacts in coiled surety. There was a voice, cracking out over the field, spattering off the almost empty stands in this practice session, and the dun jerseys were weaving back and forth in response to the signals. Most important, there was a ball. It flickered back. A man caught it, spun, feinted to the lft side of the line, spun again, leaped, and lobbed the ball further back. Another man took it, touched one blunt nose down, and then Spencer felt the surge beginning at the sole of his foot, rolling up calf and thigh, and felt the momentum gathering in his body as he drove forward. Then his right leg lashed out for the last time, with all his weight and hurtling mass behind it. The ball boomed like a beaten drum, and rose toward the horizontal crossbar. He grinned, his lips in a thin line that dug back into his cheeks at the comers. He kept his eye on the ball, and did not see the B Team's dun jerseys hurtling aside as the green-and-silken-white varsity cannoned through the light and milling line. His foot was still in the air, and he balanced on his left toe. Suddenly there was gravel in his mouth, and he spat it out. He kept his eyes closed, breathing despite the knife-edge that touched him whenever his ribs rose or fell. He spat again. The gravel had tasted bloody. There were men surging around him. He heard the coach come lumbering up, heard his savage bellow at his assistant. 'What kind of crazy play was that?" The assistant stumbled over his words in the face of the coach's violence. "Gee, Andy, it was just a thing I had dreamed up to get everybody warmed up fast. Have everybody working their specialty at the same time." "There's better ways than having them practice illegal plays!" "I'm sorry, Andy," the assistant said flatly. "What about Spencer, here?" the coach demanded. "Had the wind knocked out of him, I guess." The assistant's voice had a shrug in it. There was a peculiar edge to the man's words. Spencer felt the coach's bulk squatting down beside him. "How is it, kid?" The bellowing voice was gentle. Spencer tried to make some sort of sound, but he found that the best he could do was to cough air out of his throat in a series of ugly grunts. He felt the coach's urgent fingers touching the side of his mouth where the blood must have been trickling out, then felt gravel rebound from his side as the coach leaped to his feet and spun, shouting for the trainer. As he could not remember the eleven men hitting him, so he could not now recall the interval between the coach's frantic shouts and the time when he opened his eyes. The two squads of players, the coach, and the assistant were standing around him, towering over his face. The trainer was cursing as he worked. He moved his eyes slowly up toward the assistant coach. Strange, that on such a hot, bright day a man's face could be completely free of perspiration, the eyes wide open in the glare, with something smiling slightly in them. Spencer remembered thinking: Its my ribs, damn it! Leave the leg alone! But it turned out to be the leg, too. Mr. Laban came to see him in the student infirmary. The cane thumped on the composition flooring outside the door of his room, and Spencer came awake instantly. His mind cleared of the drifting semi-lethargy that a month in the traction sling had brought. Then the door opened, and he saw the man -- the much older man, he saw with sharp dismay -- who nevertheless still carried pride and dignity on his shoulders. "Mr. Laban!" "How are you, Westen?" The voice was quiet. Not so much quiet as still, Spencer realized, his dismay growing. And pride and dignity were not, somehow, proper substitutes for confidence. His mouth quirked sidewise in a crooked smile, and he gestured at the ropework stretching his body. "I'm about as well off as you could expect." "Yes. Um -- yes, yes," Mr. Laban murmured absently. He pulled a chair away from the wall and sat down at the foot of Spencer's bed. He reached out awkwardly and touched the heavy cast on Westen' s leg, as though hoping against hope that it was not really solid. "Westen -- Im -- I'm sorry." "So am I. But it's not anybody's fault." Spencer shrugged. Mr. Laban shook his head quickly. "It was mine. I sent you down here. I knew they'd try to get at you, but I thought they wouldn't be able to. I misjudged." Spencer looked at him in bewilderment, "I'm afraid I don't follow you," he told him, wondering just how badly Mr. Laban was feeling -- whether the sharp change in his manner had gone so far as to leave him with a vague persecution mania. But Mr. Laban was going on. "Westen -- your parents have passed away." Spencer lay suspended, his mind sagging in concert with his body. "They both had very bad hearts," Mr. Laban said. "They died almost together." "I didn't know," Spencer said tonelessly. "It only happened yesterday." He hadn't known they were sick, was what he'd meant, but Spencer only nodded. Somehow, he didn't want to talk about them. "What do you plan to do after you're well?" Mr. Laban asked, his sequence of thought leaping urgently from point to point without pause, as though he did not have much time. The question shocked Spencer. Didn't Mr. Laban have some plan? "I don't know," he answered finally. "They cancelled the scholarship." Mr. Laban nodded. "It's a small school. And it wasn't really their responsibility. They're paying for your treatment." "Sure. When they figure out a way to buy me a new hip, I'm sure they'll let me know." "Westen!" But the protest was perfunctory. The purpose was gone from Mr. Laban's manner, and he acted like a man picking up the fragments of a broken, valuable possession that could never be made whole again. "All right, Westen, perhaps you know the best way for you to feel. I've arranged a position for you. A very reputable New York concern. If you do your work as well as I'm sure you can, you'll have a secure place in the company for the rest of your life." Mr. Laban stood up. "I'm sorry if I seem brusque." He rubbed his forehead for a moment. "I'm all alone, suddenly, and there's so much to do... I'm older than I should be." He began putting his chair back in its place. Spencer felt something boiling inside him. It was too much. To pick up a boy, split him off from his parents, push him, pull him, nudge him into the rough semblance of a shape he was to assume  -- and then drop him. Too much, to come here and deliver a series of blows like this, then to mutter an apology and go. "Mr. Laban!" "Westen, I'm sorry. Deeply sorry." Spencer shook his head emphatically. 'Tm sorry, Mr. Laban, but I deserve more than that. Some sort of explanation, at least." Mr. Laban gazed down at him through his tired eyes. Finally he sighed. "Yes, you do, Westen. But I can't give it to you." Spencer's lips compressed. "Mr. Laban -- have you ever been hit high and low at the same time? When you didn't have the faintest expectation of it?" Mr. Laban . nodded slowly. "Many times. I understand what you feel, Westen." "I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. I have been hit that way. Twice. Once out on that field, and by you, just now. It sort of separates the boy from the man. And I'll tell you this, flat out; I know something funny's been going on. You didn't pick me up because of rny curly hair or bright eyes. You haven't been grooming me all my life for any clerkship. And I didn't get the business because somebody was afraid I'd steal the job in the bank from some relative of theirs. And unless you tell me now -- right now -- what's been going on, I'll find out. Then I'm going to blow the whole thing wide open, and you might not like where the pieces fall. So let's do it the easy way." He sank back as far as the framework would let him, surprised at himself, as though some unexpected predator had struck out the darkness behind his conscious mind. Mr. Laban, too, was looking at him oddly. Then he nodded slowly. "Perhaps you're right." He frowned, as though arguing with himself. "I hadn't considered that reaction on your part." He gestured helplessly. "But I can't tell you everything. For your own good -- " He nodded to reaffirm the point as Spencer grimaced his annoyance. Yes, Westen -- believe me. You've taken my word before. Take it again. I can tell you this; you're quite right. I had plans for you. And you had the original qualifications to fulfill them. Those plans are at crosspurposes with those of another group as powerful as ours -- as mine. And we do not clash on a level which even modern science for all its microscopes and telescopes, can detect. You might argue with me. You might point to your broken bones. Believe me, Westen -- that is only the path of the... the bullet, if you visualize in those terms. The damage is deeper, and far less easy to repair. Impossible to repair. It is in your mind, Westen. The damage to your body is nothing -- or, if anything, only a means to an end. It has put you on the defensive -- given you a badge of inferiority. You may not realize it now. But you will never again feel yourself equal to any setback or obstacle which might appear. At the crucial moment when only a firm self-confidence could support you, you would remember your damaged body. You would feel the psychological weight of being -- forgive me -- a cripple. You would falter. "And where we fight -- and in the way we fight -- there can be no faltering." He stopped and looked quickly at Spencer. "That is the truth, as much as I can give it to you. You will find it difficult to believe. I'm sorry about that. "Wcsten -- it might be best if you forgot some of the things we've talked about in the past. I think you've realized for some time that I was training you toward an understanding of things which very few men have ever understood before. Now I have told you, as much as I am able, why I was doing it. And you must take my word for it that the old goal is now unattainable. Consider the forces in play here. Try to forget. It would be terribly dangerous for you to attempt anything else." He looked at Spencer's ruined body, and spread his hands helplessly. "Please forgive me." He reached the door, shoulders sagging. Spencer stared after him. Suddenly, he was remembering all of Mr. Laban's kindnesses, and the picture of Mr. Laban as he had been -- confident, his step alive, his cane swinging incisively. It did not matter whether he believed Mr. Laban now or not -- he could not let the old man leave this way, hagridden. He called out sharply, trying to offer him a straw. "You mentioned a girl once, Mr. Laban. I don't know how, but couldn't she help you?" Mr. Laban shook his Head sadly. "Giulia? No, no. I failed with her, too." His voice dropped once more. "I thought, for a while..." He opened the door, staring into space. "Hopeless," he murmured. The door began to close. "Goodbye, Mr. Laban." "Goodbye, Spencer. I -- I am sorry your parents died." And then the door closed. T he position was a junior clerkship in a bank. He'd had to start low. Personnel managers didn't take as kindly to football men as most schools like to think, and one year of college wasn't much anyway. But starting low was good enough if you could work yoiur way up in a hurry. A man who had to walk slowly could usually devote himself to thinking fast. A low, crookedly triumphant smile ran across Spencer's mouth. And life was a remarkably malleable medium. The smile hooked more sharply as he remembered the hurt and bewildered adolescent who had felt so sloppily emotional when Mr. Laban left him in the infirmary. It was quite possible to shape an attitude and atmosphere in oneself which precluded any more opportunities for hurt or helplessness. But, with banks as with all higher form of human endeavor, there is a stratum at whose underside every man must halt. Some beat their wings frantically against the glassy surface, refusing to admit that it takes time for a vice president to die so that a division head may take his place, thus leaving a vacuum to be filled with the rarified gas of a section manager who, in turn, leaves a breach through which the senior clerk may leap into the sun of the private payroll. Spencer had touched that stratum, recognized it for what it was, and given notice, all in the course of a week. That had been a few weeks ago. Mr. Laban had not even known his protege was on the bum. Now, he would never know. He did not remember getting up from the park bench, but suddenly he realized that he was leaning against the inside of the arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue, where he had no business being, where it was physically dangerous to be, since his feet were planted in the roadway. But he was too busy thinking of the desperate, aging man with the dying fire behind his eyes. Spencer shook his head in the cloying darkness of the midsummer night. Mr. Laban was dead. Whatever the old man's future had been, he had never reached it. So, the rich uncle had never left his fortune to his nephew. Great Expectations, Mr. Laban had never dreamed that the parallel might be so close. Spencer shrugged up at the overhanging face of an apartment house. Perhaps he'd made an heir of his niece, after all. What was the girl's name again? Julia? No, not quite Julia but the slightly different and more lilting Giulia. He had never heard her last name. Coincidents were rampant all around him in his life. The graceful man had been sitting beside him in the bar. Another coincidence. And, it was yet another accident that the light, open-topped car hummed to a stop beside him. He turned his blank face toward it, and found himself looking into the grave brown eyes of a slender-faced girl whose chestnut hair was drawn sharply back over one ear and swirled down over her other shoulder. Her deep, full-red lips were slightly parted. Her voice carried a ghost of uncertainty. "You shouldn't be standing there, you know," she said, but the light words were not as casual as they should have been, and she was looking at him with an odd intensity of interest. He looked at her speechlessly for a moment. This is my night for characters, he thought. Well, Tm in the right neighborhood. But, for some reason, he found himself drawn to this girl with even more than the amount of interest to be expected. Hot damn! Adventure corn.es to my hum-drum life! he tried to gibe the odd feeling away, but could not quite succeed. And because it was a midsummer's night, and he stood, still vaguely adrift in alcohol, at the foot of a fabulous street, he shook his head gently and answered her. "I don't really know why I'm standing here. You have funny-shaped ears." She stared at him for one blank instant, her dark eyebrows like wings. Then she laughed. "My name's Giulia." He smiled crookedly. 'T was just thinking of you." What the hell, it was a half-truth, wasn't it? "You were?" she frowned. "Sure. My name's Wes." Her mouth trembled into surprise, and she grew a little pale. "But I was just thinking of you!" They looked at each other blankly, not quite ready to accept the coincidence at its face value. "Well' he said finally. "Fancy that." "Y -- yes," she answered. She was lost in thought for a moment. "Well. Would -- would you like to go for a ride?" Why not? He nodded. He took his hand away from the side of the arch and walked around the nose of the car to the other door. He felt his right foot touch the asphalt crookedly, felt the straining halfjammed action of his hip, and the bitterness in him snarled -- but did not cry very loudly, or else the midsummer night and something else, equally intangible and equally potent, came in and hushed it. I'm a commercial artist," she said hours later. The Hudson glimmered as the car ran along the broad arm of the George Washington Bridge. The breeze touched them with its fond coolness. "What do you do?" He followed the hurrying dip and stately rise of the suspension cable as it swung above his head. His neck rested on the yielding ridge of the seat's back. "I look at the moon," he said lightly. "I count the stars and smell the night. I drink Tom Collinses in a cellar bar off Sheridan Square. I am a windblown autumn leaf, now tumbling through the air, now spinning groundward, now resting on the frost-touched grass, and when the other leaves fall and cover me -- when the rains of September have packed and trampled me into the tough layer of the other crushed leaves -- I shall lie supine and wait for the blessedly concealing blanket of the snow to hide me, to dissolve me, to put me back in the earth whence I am sprung." She giggled happily and wrinkled her nose. "When you're not being stupid, what do you do?" He raised an admonishing finger. "Ah, Giulia, it is when I am truly stupid that I do anything else. Truly. It is when I send to ask for whom the bell tolls that I am merely a jobless senior clerk in a bank, only recently holding the pursestrings of a thousand -- nay, a hundred thousand -- in my impoverished fingers. Are you a good commercial artist?" She nodded in rapid, self-deriding affirmation. "Oh, very good." She turned the car off the bridge and into the West Side Highway. "Where have we been?" she asked breathlessly. "We have," he ticked off on his upraised fingers, "driven up Fifth Avenue in a midsummer night's delirium. We have circumnavigated Central Park and then, having become bored with the Imperial City, we have been to Bear Mountain, thence to such places as Nyack, sans kayak; we have flirted briefly with an edge of New Jersey, and we have crossed our bridges when we came to them. The Isist one, as I recall, was dedicated to someone named Hamilton or Jefferson or Something, but we, in our bubbleheaded daring, nevertheless made use of it. And that tinkling sound to the east is the break of dawn." He clasped his hands behind his head and sighed. "And we have spoke of many things. Of cabbages, lungs, and the New York Giants, who, we have solemnly decided, are due to make a rousing finish of it, after starting off in their usual miserable slump. If the pitching holds up." "I have to go home," Giulia said. "I know." The cold dawn breeze touched him. Giulia stopped the car in front of his house and rested her head against the back of the seat, her eyes losing their sparkle. "This was fun," she said wistfully. He nodded silently. "I wish this whole world would go away!" she said with sudden vehemence. "I wish things were always like last night." Then the mood left her as unexpectedly as it had come. "Which is classifiable under the heading of escapism," she said wryly. "Onward, Spencer, ever onward. Wheels must turn, pumps must pump, etceteras must etcetera. Send not to ask for whom the bill tolls." He got out of the car reluctantly, and stood beside it, his hands on the window coaming. "Fd like to see you tonight, Giulia." "Fd like to see you." She smiled gently. "Don't mind me. It's a shock, like dropping back off a cloud." "I know. I just bounced off the same one." "Well, let's keep a few wisps around, just to remind us." He shook his head in mild amazement. "Do you realize how much we had to talk about, and didn't? There's Mr. Laban and the whole business of how we happened to meet..." "I know." Her eyes darkened, and something frightened took hold of her lips. "I'm glad we didn't. That's for later -- for much later. I haven't seen Mr. Laban since I -- " Something dark and troubled crossed her face, and she stopped, her nail-bitten fingers tightening on his hand. "Much later," she said softly. "All right," he said lightly. He would not have pressed the point any farther for the world. "I'll call you." She smiled again. "I'll be home most of the afternoon. I may be out buying some dog food or something, but if I don't answer. I'll be back in a minute. "Whatever you do, don't give up." She put a kiss in the air for him before she started the car and drove away. He stood on the sidewalk, looking after her. Of all the inexplicable things that had happened to him since last night, she was the only one he wanted. Nevertheless, he waited until her car was out of sight before he began the twisted, ugly climb up the stairs to his door. He looked up into the doorway, and the graceful man was standing behind the glass, watching every step. T he graceful man held the door open as Spencer reached the top step, his eyes filming with rage. The man put up a quick hand, palm out. "Wait, Mr. Spencer!" There was less assurance in his voice, this time. His lips were slack at the comers with the first hint of apprehension. "I didn't think you'd want me to help you up the steps. On the other hand, here I was. A difficult position." "You're right. What else have you got to say?" "Please listen to me!" Spencer narrowed his eyes. That last had been an unmistakable plea. His mouth twisted scornfully, and his fingers hooked. But the wave of shame and anger had broken within him. He'd be a fool not to pay some attention to the man. "Well?" Spencer almost laughed. But there was too much of a change from the confident, almost superhuman man of last night. The man was badly frightened of something. In that fright, he might say more than he intended. "Go ahead." The graceful man licked at a corner of his mouth. "Could we go up to your room?" Spencer thought it over for a moment. "No," he said finally. "Not yet. Give me one good reason." The graceful man clutched at his sleeve. "Listen," he said urgently, "I'm not one of your enemies. I'm a third party. From outside. I'll help you get your people out of this jam." Suddenly, the memory of that last talk with Mr. Laban was very clear in Spencer's mind. Enemies, Mr. Laban had said. And clashes on a level no Earthman could ever be aware of. Something prickled at the small of Spencer's back, and the carefully acquired cynicism of six years was revealed to be a very feeble wall indeed. The graceful man saw his hesitation. "Listen!" he exclaimed again, "I'm no fool! I cant fight you now! I never suspected that Laban had arranged for you and the girl to meet. Can't you see that? My whole plan was based on the assumption that he'd ven up after both of you were crippled. And so you were, individually. But as a team -- " Spencer shook his head, uncomprehending. He was vastly tired. His shoulder muscles were screaming with the unbalanced load they'd been carrying too long without any rest. His mouth was fogged with last night's alcohol, and the bright glare of the day was stabbing at his bloodshot eyes. "Go on," he said, forcing the words through his stiff mouth. Much of what the man was saying was sheer gibberish. But some of it was clicking into place. The graceful man had his facts arranged in the wrong order, and some of them were not facts at all. But he was telling Spencer what he wanted to know, nevertheless, "There isn't any more. You can see I'm in no position to fight. All right, then I'll help you. I've got to do something. You don't pass over an opportunity like this. Not one like this." Spencer frowned. The man was acting like a commission agent with an account slipping out of his grasp. "What's your price?" Spencer demanded. The man looked startled. "Salvage rights, of course." "On what?" The graceful man stared at him. "On what?" A slow realization came over his face. "You don't know!" He looked up at Spencer's surprised face, inches away, and laughed. "You don't know!" he repeated. "It was an accident! A true accident! I've tricked myself!" Too late, Spencer shot out a hand to grab his jacket. The doormat skidded out from under his bad foot and he fell heavily. His head thudded against the cold tile of the foyer. The graceful man danced back, out of the reach of his grasping hands. Then he sprang forward, hurdling Spencer's body. "What a feeble excuse you are!" the graceful man said with something like incredulity. "What a feeble excuse!" Spencer reached out desperately. But the mat skidded again, and he only slid helplessly to one side. He tried to get to his feet, but the mat slipped again. And once more. The graceful man chuckled. He half-danced down the steps. "I'll be back!" he cried over his shoulder and walked briskly away down the sidewalk, his shoulders straight and his head up in the early morning sunshine. Slowly, Spencer managed to stand up. Completely numb, he staggered to the elevator and got up to his apartment. He stripped off his clothes with weak hands and fell across his bed. He was too close to panic to think now, he realized. Weapons he did not understand, in a war he could not see. And the graceful man was after salvage rights. He had to get to a telephone and warn Giulia. He reached across the bed, his stiffly straight fingers reaching for the instrument. But his body had been too much abused. His fingertips barely touched the smoothness of hard rubber as he fell asleep. Remember this: Any point in one space is adjacent to all points in any other. Here is instantaneous com munication and transportation. Spencer rolled in his sleep. Consider this: The stranded traveler must have hotel accommodations. If these are unavailable, he must knock on the villager's door and beg a lodging for the night. Spencer pawed at his face in annoyance and mumbled. Extrapolate from this: The lodging is suited to the necessity of the lodger. One man's haystack is another's shelter. And if the weary travelers must stop where there are thieves, then they must set out alarms and choose sentries from among their numbers. Finally, Spencer awoke. He remembered the dream, but if dreams were accepted as data, nightmares would be subject to censorship. H e did not know what he was going to say to Giulia. He came out of the subway entrance and hurried toward her apartment house. She had sounded cheerful and unworried over the phone, and he hadn't mentioned the graceful man. As long as she was safe and unafraid, he first of all wanted to find out what she knew about Mr. Laban -- and what weapon had been used to strike her down. Suppose he did find out? What good would it do? What defenses could they raise against the shadowy legions that waited just behind their shoulders? "Wes ten Hilyard Spencer, Aged #, Occupation : Melodramatist," he thought wryly as he swung down the sidewalk. He smiled crookedly, his confused mood beginning to evaporate. Out of the subway and in the light of the cool, comfortable evening, he was rapidly snapping back to normal. He noticed with a slight shock that his limp was far less pronounced when his mind was busy with something else, and then he saw Giulia standing on her steps, waiting for him. She came down and linked her arm with his, her eyes shining and her lips parted not in last night's wonder, but in anticipation. Something warm touched his emotions. "Well, hello!" she said. He realized that he had been standing silently, simply looking at her, and flushed. "Hello." They laughed together, his rueful chuckle mingling with the bright river of her voice. "Whither?" she asked. Catching her mood, he pursed his lips and cocked his head. "Oh, anywhere. Cost is no object." She grinned. "Ah-huh! My jobless poet. Shall we order our car and tour some more?" "All right!" They laughed again. Her car was parked a few yards up the street. They climbed in, and she pulled away from the curb with a growl of the motor. Spencer noticed it. Yesterday, it had been a faint whispering, as gentle as -- well, yes, as gentle as Giulia, just as today it was in perfect keeping with her more intense mood. "I say again, lad -- whither?" She was finding something to respond to in the car's decisive progress. He could see she enjoyed driving; liked the snap of wrists that sent the roadster around a corner with a precise swing of the tires. Yesterday, the car had drifted around the turns. Today it forged through them. "Long Island, maybe?" "Righto!" She shot the car across town, weaving skillfully through traffic. The motor idled threateningly at stop lights, the car jumping ahead of all others as the lights changed. The tires sang waspishly along East River Drive. "Smoke me." "Huh?" He looked at her uncomprehendingly. "A cigarette. A butt. Smoke me, boy, smoke me!" Her fingers snapped out a rapid beat to the words. "Oh. Sure." He lit two cigarettes and put one between her lips. "Hussy." She hadn't smoked last night -- he remembered, guiltily, that he'd never offered her a cigarette. In her mood then, she must have been too shy to ask. "Hussy I be," she agreed, swinging the car onto the Triboro Bridge. "For tonight, I be a hussy." And something laughed in her shining eyes. The road was narrow, a headlighted tunnel in the dark. She drove slowly now, while the breeze whispered through the shrubbery that grew close to either side of them. "Feel like stopping for a little chat?" she asked him with a lazy turn of her head. He nodded. "All right." Her hand moved to the dashboard, and the lights switched off. The night fell in a murky roadblock. Giulia cut her speed to almost nothing, bent over the wheel, and peered ahead. "Yuh, yuh, yuh," she checked off under her breath, her glance darting over the almost invisible bushes beside them. "Fwi.'" She spun the wheel suddenly, and the car, sweeping branches cracklingly aside, nosed off the road and into a gap in the shrubbery. She ran the car forward until a screen of branches closed behind them, and then cut the motor. "By God, I can find it in the dark!" she breathed to herself. Spencer handed her a fresh cigarette, all his muscles completely relaxed. Last night had not been a time for talking. But tonight's was a different Giulia. For the first time in six years, he did not feel alone. For the first time since the graceful man had spoken to him in the bar, he did not feel bewildered and afraid. Their childhoods had been much alike. For as long as she could remember, Mr. Laban had been coming to her parents' home. And then, suddenly, six years ago, something had struck out and crippled her. Not physically. But so viciously that Spencer did not pry for the details she was obviously reluctant to give. And, at the same time, her parents had died. "Heart attacks?" Spencer asked bitterly. She nodded silently. "And right after that, Mr. Laban dropped you," he said. She nodded again. "Just like that." She shrugged and fell silent again. "Did you ever find out what he was training us for?" He asked it only after considerable hesitation. If she said no, that was the end. Then there was nothing left to do but crouch in the depths of the blind alley and listen to the footsteps drawing closer in the night. "I'm -- I'm not sure." The long-held breath sighed out of Spenceis lungs. "It's something about some people -- well, not people, but that'll do, I guess -- who were trapped here on Earth a long time ago. They were traveling through space." She shook her head at the inadequacy of her understanding. "Not in ships, though. It's -- it's hard to understand. Mr. Laban said it was as though our universe was like a tunnel connecting two cities. These... people... were in the tunnel when something happened. Something blocked the ends of the tunnel. And all those people have to wait until somebody digs them out." "Until someone digs them out! How long have they been here?" She shook her head again. "I don't know. But Mr. Laban once said something that made me wonder if it wasn't since before there were people -- I mean people like us." Spencer stubbed his cigarette out and looked into the night that had been falling since the Earth began past. "What was our job?" he asked in a voice that trailed off into a husky whisper. Giulia stirred restlessly on her half of the seat. "I don't know," she said. "It had something to do with those people. That's all I know." Something in her voice caught his attention. He looked more closely and realized she was crying. "GiuUa!" She reached out for him, her face against his shoulder. "Wes! Wes! It's been so lonely!" The car snarled back toward Manhattan. Spencer was driving, his eyes tight, lus responses over-fast and harsh, while Giulia curled luxuriously on the seat beside him, her head in his lap. One hand traced an intricate pattern on his thigh, and the breath flowed smoothly in and out of her relaxed body. Sweet Giulia! he thought. Gentle Giulia! Yes, you can find that shrub-locked hideaway in the dark. I would trust you to find it from anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard, on the darkest night in the dirtiest storm that ever brewed in hell. I'd stake my life on your proficiency. "Smoke me, boy," she murmur from his lap. Smoke you! Fd like to set the fires of hell to roasting you! But he put the cigarette between her lips gently enough. He eased the car to the curb in front of Giulia's house. "We're here," he said. Giulia stirred in his lap. "We're here because we're here because..." she sang softly. She reached up and pulled his lips down to hers. Her nails touched the nape of his neck in a slow movement. "Gall me tomorrow, boy?" "Sure," he lied out of harsh bitterness. "Ah? What's eating you, lad?" "Nothing's eat -- " A ball of ice exploded in his stomach. His hand shot up and grasped her suddenly tense wrist. "You've got awfully long nails. Grandma," he said viciously. "Quick -- where did you meet me last night?" The girl chuckled and lifted her head. "I could answer that. But it wouldn't prove anything." The laughing torrent leaped and rippled under the tone of her voice. "Be damned if I was going to chop my fingernails." His hand crushed her wrist as his jaw set into a harsh, strained line broken by the jut of the muscles that clamped it. "Let's have it!" "Relax, lad. It wasn't that bad." "You wouldn't know." She arched her eyebrows and pouted carelessly. "I'm Giulia's twin sister," she said. "Tina. It's a shorter name -- easier to say over a phone." "Not if you want Giulia," he snarled. "I'll know, next time." He let go of her wrist and flung open the door on his side. He pushed himself out, taking the full shock of his weight on his bad hip, glad of the pain that welled up to distract his rage. Tina grinned up at him. "You may not care, next time." Her eyes glinted with light reflected from a storefront sign, which was red. "I'll care." Tina shrugged. "Will you tell me why?" he asked out of the depth of anger. Tina chuckled and winked at him. "I like you. Generally speaking, I like all of Giulia's men. You sounded mighty cute over the phone." He clutched her shoulder. "Cut it out!" he said from deep in his throat. "Quit playing games. Why'd you go through this rigamarole with me?" For just a moment, the folds of Tina's garish mask parted. "We were curious as to just how much you knew." Then she was laughing again. "So long, sonny," she chuckled. "I'll make a point of telling Giulia what a nice date you are." He turned away, his mouth curling sourly, and dragged his leg up the street toward die subway entrance. H e paid no attention to the placement of his foot or the twist of his body as he made his way from the subway exit to his apartment house. Weapons, he thought in bitter despair. What kills a man more surely -- a bullet through the head or a stab through the heart? And they stabbed deep, sometimes, he suddenly recalled. Tina had dangled bait in front of him, telling him just enough to pull information from him if he had it, not enough to help him if he didn't. What had happened to Giulia? Why hadn't he thought of that while he was there, in front of her house? Why had he turned away, instead of running upstairs? Was that a weapon, too -- as were doormats that suddenly lost all hold on a floor? He had to get in touch with Giulia. His key fumbled in the lock, and he swung the door open with a thud of his shoulder. Hitching his body forward in clumsy surges, he made for the telephone. "Hello," the graceful man said, "I just came in myself." Spencer stopped dead. He pulled in a deep breath and let it sigh out again. Turning around, he went back and closed the door. "Have a seat," he said dully. "Thank you." The graceful man sank down into a chair and crossed his ankles. Spencer sighed again. "I don't think I care anymore," he said, "but how'd you get in here?" "All points in one space are adjacent to any point in any other, remember?" The graceful man chuckled. "But you don't. Besides, it's not quite true, or you people wouldn't be here, would you? But you don't know that, do you?" He laughed. Spencer crossed the room and sat down, feeling the hopelessness wash all the resistance out of his muscles. They were always four steps ahead of him, always laughing. Walls meant nothing to them -- space and time were something to move through. Mr. Laban had warned him. "All right, stop rubbing it in," he said, surprising himself with the peevishness in his voice. "Do whatever you came here for." "That was quite a little hornet's nest you and the girl stirred up," the graceful man said conversationally. "You fooled me. You also fooled your enemies. Temporarily, of course, but my! what a scurrying about there was. Simply because you accidentally ran into each other." He shook his head in wonder. "Get on with it." The graceful man smiled fleetingly. "Now, then -- your little contretemps with, ah, Tina..." "How'd you find out about that?" The graceful man smiled again. "My, you're always asking that, aren't you?" he mused. "You wouldn't know." He chuckled quiedy. "At any rate, there's proof that you've aroused the opposition, so to speak. They can't quite fathom what you're up to -- which is understandable, since you don't realize yourself -- but they are aroused. This is something I am not too happy to see. If they blunder across my own operation, they'll give me trouble." He hitched himself forward in the chair. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Spencer, but I'm afraid we've come to a parting of the ways." He stood up and extended his hand. "I certainly hope you'll bear no lasting grudge." Spencer pushed himself up and reached out to take the hand. The graceful man was still not making any sense, but it hardly mattered any more. The graceful man smiled. "I find it interesting that the most dangerous thing one can do to you people is to kill you before you're ready." His fingers closed around Spencer's. "Ordinarily I'd have my reservations about you. But with success so near, it hardly matters if you're free to transfer to a healthy chrysalis or not..." Spencer realized he was shaking hands with Death. And the things Mr. Laban had taught and told him -- the little hints, the recommended studies, the inexplicable incidents -- were suddenly organized. In the blink of a second, there was a pattern where none had been before. And something that had always been in his mind, straining at the jammed door Mr. Laban had partially opened, extended a paw through the narrow crack. Razorkeen claws clicked open. The graceful man stopped as though something had been dashed in his face. His eyes glittered coldly. "What did you do?" he asked in a faint voice. The hopelessness and confusion began to melt out of Spencer's mind. The new thing, partial and tenuous as it was, began to take its place. He could feel it moving, sense the flexure of its muscles. He had horn doubletaamcd once too often, and this time the boy had jarred away from the man. 'Salvage, eh?" He held the graceful man transfixed on his pitiless gaze and got back to his chair. He twitched the paw again, and the graceful man screamed thinly past the obstruction in his throat. "I can control this thing pretty well," Spencer said as matter-offactly as the graceful man at his best. "But I still don't know why I've got it. Suppose you tell me." He opened his -- grip? -- a fraction. "I -- I can't understand it," the graceful man protested hoarsely. "There was nothing -- nothing... "I believe you fall short of infallibility," Spencer said dryly and flicked a talon at the pain centers responding to the man's trigeminal nerve, "Sit down and stop wasting time." The man -- no longer poised or graceful -- shook himself. He halffell onto the couch, rubbing his throat. He sat looking down at the floor, his voice hopeless. "I've already said that all points in one space are ad -- " "And I already know that. Go on. "Very well. This is not simply a mathematical concept -- " "Obviously." "ilH right! I don't know how much you already know! Show some patience!" Spencer only smiled. "All right," the graceful man resumed more quietly. "A party of travelers were trapped in this universe. How long ago, on the local time scale, I couldnt say. And I don't know how it happened. Possibly they chose a route that isn't open very often, despite what the mathematics say. At any rate, what should have been an instantaneous passage became, instead, a voyage involving thousands of years on the local time scale. And as long as they were in this universe, they had to conform to its physical laws. They were long-lived, in these terms, but not that long-lived. They had to find shelters, somewhere -- some means of staying alive until the route was open again. "You must understand that these were not physical beings. What the human race is trying to accomplish with physical devices, they do as easily as a human raises his arm. "I say 'they do.' What I mean, of course, is -- we do." Spencer looked at him silently. He tightened the clutch of his paw. "'m not lyingr the graceful man screamed. "All right," Spencer said, "You're not lying. What's all this mean in terms of you and myself?" "The travelers went into suspended animation. They went into chrysalis. They started with animals, then switched to human beings when they evolved. I think some of them may have moved into the more complex plants. I don't know. But I do know that at least every human being acts as a chrysalis for one of them. When the chrysalis dies, they move on to a fresh one. Automatically. Most of them are completely unaware of the passage of time. They're just waiting." Spencer frowned, remembering his nightmare. The stranded travelers had crawled into some strange haystacks indeed! "Let's get this cleared up," he said. "First: there are other universes besides this one. Other dimensions, if you want to call them that. All these universes, including ours, are so arranged that any specific point in one touches all points in another. What the scientists call hyperspace -- the thing they figure will allow us to eventually beat the speed-of-light barrier and reach other stars. Right?" The graceful man nodded. "If you know how to shift from universe to universe at will, you can start in this room, say, then drop into the next universe for a moment, and come out in Pittsburgh. Instantaneously." "Ah-AwA.' Except that something went wrong with this particular group of travelers." The man nodded again. "Yes. What it was, I don't know. The transfer isn't mechanical -- we don't use spaceships or any other machinery. Maybe something went wrong in the brain of the individual actually handling the transfer. I don't know." Spencer shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Human -- or inhuman -- error isn't something you can neglect, but it does happen. Now -- let's keep checking. This group of travelers got into this universe, but couldn't get out. Not until certain factors shifted back into proper relationship. They took a wrong turn and got trapped in a blind canyon. They had to wait until something -- some natural process, analogous to a slow shift in geological strata -- opened a new path for them. Right?" The graceful man rubbed his throat. "That's right," he said huskily. His eyes welled with slow hate for Spencer. "Three: These travelers had to find shelter. They did. They seeped into the bodies of living organisms on Earth. When evolution produced people, they took over people. And when their host chrysalis dies, they just find another one. Just like rolling over in your sleep." "Yes." "That's the biggest pack of lies I've ever heard from a sober man." Spencer's claw tightened ruthlessly. "Don't! It's true!" the graceful man screamed. "Listen -- I'm not one of those people! This body was never born on Earth. I made it. I had to. I've got to conform to the physical laws of this universe. So did you. All of you. You had to find shelter, or you'd have died. But the chrysalids don't know. They can't feel you. They live out their lives normally -- they have minds and feelings of their own. But they're chrysalids, just the same. Each of them is the home of one of you. You've got to believe I'm not lying. Look inside yourself. You can do that -- you've got special powers. You're one of the ones whose job it is to watch over the safety of the others!" Spencer looked at him coldly. He couldn't do that. The door in his mind was barely open. He only could half-sense the forces that lived behind it. "Somebody has to be awake all the time," the graceful man was babbling. "Somebody has to fight off the enemies." "Ah. We've finally gotten to that. What about the enemies? Who are they?" The graceful man looked up wearily, and, had Spencer given him the chance, would have sneered. The faintest beginnings of stubbornness trembled at the sides of his lips. But the claw stabbed deep. "Look," he said, "what kind of individuals will you find among any large group of Earthmen? All kinds -- saints and sinners, philanthropists and thieves. What makes you think other kinds of life are any different? "If you can stay awake, so can others. You're a guardian. Others in the group saw a chance to do a little midnight thievery." "All right -- fine. But what can they possibly be after?" Spencer let the rest of his questions go for the moment. This was the important one. The graceful man stared at him. "What? Good Lord, man, don't you know yet? Look -- what kind of medium of exchange would apply among people who don't have material bodies -- who have no use for promises on paper or tokens stamped out of metal? Personal obligation, that's what. Debt. And if you first get someone under your control -- if you tie him up he and all his successive chrysalids are under your domination -- if you enslave his chrysalids, put them in uniform, make them worship some the strangers central ideal that keeps them from drifting away from you... In other words, if you pen diem up in barriers of distinct race, and creed, and nationality -- then they're yours. Sure, the individual chrysalids grow old and die. But the young ones are still bom under your domination. If you set up that kind of system, and then, when the path re-opens, you're the one who wakes up the individuals your chrysalids shelter, and you're the one who shows them the open path -- then they're in your debt. "The catch is, Spencer, your enemies have to eliminate you before they can do that. Because if even one of you Watchers is awake and aware when the route opens, you can wake up all the others. And that's your job. You people -- you Watchers -- were set up from the very beginning, to do just that." Spencer looked at him narrowly. It just might be. Crazy as it was, it just might be. If it wasn't, then how else could you explain the claw that squeezed the graceful man so ruthlessly? "So I'm a Watcher, eh? Or, rather, I was trained to be a Watcher. Giulia was, too. And Mr. Laban was a Watcher." He smiled coldly at the graceful man. "And you're in the salvage business. You found out our situation, somehow, and the path is -- for a percentage. Is that right? Is that right?" "Well, sure -- you don't expect a man to stumble over a setup like this and not take advantage of it, do you? Sure. I'm from the universe you people left, all this time ago. I found the other end of the route, and came in to see what the pickings were. And I ran right into this hassle you're involved in." "So the route's open now, is it?" "Sure. What have I been telling you?" Spencer's mouth crooked in disgust. "How do we stay awake? What do you mean by that?" The graceful man shook his head. "You don't. But in every generation one of you wakes up for the balance of your chrysalid's life. You can awaken others and train them to be your successors." "And our enemies have a similar setup?" "Sure." "Is that all?" "Isn't it enough?" The graceful man shot him a bitter look. Spencer flexed the muscles of his power, and the graceful man reeled. "Don't!" he shouted. "I'm a human being, just as though I was bom here. I feel with these nerves. I'm at the mercy of these organs. Stop hurting me!" Spencer laughed and let go. "All right, sonny," he said coldly. "I'll let you live. But when you get back to where you came from -- remember you owe your life to the individual who's living in here with me." The graceful man -- the erstwhile graceful man -- looked at him bitterly. "Magnanimous, aren't you? You don't even know what it means to be under obligation to someone else, do you? You wouldn't be so free with your gifts if you knew." He stared down at his ineffectual human hands, cursing. "A man tries to make a little here and there, and the big-shots walk all over him." He shot a look of pure hate at Spencer. Spencer gave himself time to laugh at him once more. Then he left the apartment, hurrying to get to Giulia. The last he saw of the graceful man was the broken, huddled figure on the couch. He limped out of the elevator as fast as he could, knowing that he might be on his way to disaster, not only for himself but for Giulia and all the other individuals he was meant to guard. For he was not Watcher Spencer. He was only Westen Spencer, cripple, with some understanding at last of what lay behind the jammed door in his mind, but with the door still tightly blocked. P erhaps the graceful man could come and go as he pleased. Spencer still could not -- and he was growing gladder and gladder of it with every minute. Except for the latent power of that other individual within him, he wanted no part of their wonders. He hailed a cab, not caring about his money now, and sat tensely until they reached Giulia's apartment house. Giulia's and Tina's. Spencer grimaced. Now he knew how Giulia had been crippled. But that could concern him no more now than did the fact that it was four o'clock in the morning. He ran twistingly up the steps. Don't kill. Cripple. That was their technique. For if they killed the chrysalis before the individual within had given up the fight, then they were only restoring fresh weapons to the warrior. But if they tied him down -- if they walled him up in his own bitter prison... Giulia stood in the doorway. He stopped, looking at her, at the tracks tears had left on her face. "Gome in, Wes,' she said gently. Spencer stared at her. "How did you know I was coming?" "I knew. Please come in." He stepped into the hall, and she leaned against him, the slow tears coming down her cheeks. "Wes, Wes, Wes," she murmured, her trembling mouth just below his chin. "I knew you weren't coming, but I kept hoping I was wrong. I sat in my room, and waited, and waited, and I knew you weren't coming..." The voice lost itself momentarily against his chest. She tilted her head back. "But I waited anyway. Until now." He reached out and stroked the soft hair at the nape of her neck. "It's all right, Giulia, I'm here now. And I've got a surprise for you." He smiled as she looked up at him, the wonderful glow breaking through behind her eyes. "A surprise? What is it?" He shook his head gently and kissed the tip of her nose. "Not now. Not down here. Can we go up to your room?" She smiled, her lips falling into the remembered lines. "Of course." She put her arm around his waist, and walked up the stairs with him. He looked around as he stepped into her room. "You don't know anybody named Tina, do you?" he asked. She looked at him uncertainly. "Tina? No, I don't. Why?" He reached out and took her hand, with its ragged nails. "I didn't think so. I'll tell you about it, later." "All right. Now tell me about the surprise." He smiled into her deep eyes. "The surprise is something I am going to tell you about yourself, and about the world." He sat down on the couch, and she curled beside him, her grave, astonished face looking up at him. His fingers laced in hers, he began to tell her. " -- and that's why all these things have happened to us," he finished. "And that's why, though we're not really awake yet -- and if I don't know why, I care less -- we've got all these powers." He felt her tremble, and stopped. "What's the matter?" Giulia shook her head, and the slow tears began again, gathering in the comers of her upturned eyes and welling slowly down the sides of her cheeks. "I never understood before. I never knew. But now I can see it. I can understand why I sometimes do things without wanting to, why I know things when I shoiddn't. Why did I go driving last night? Why did I stop under the arch for you? Can't you see it, Wes? I'm a -- #. witch. Wes, I'm one of them." He stared at her in agony. So that was what haxmted her! "No, darling, no," he said. "You're not a witch. There isn't any such thing. And you're not one of them. If you were, I wouldn't love you -- I couldn't. And you couldn't love me." The sound of the words hung in the air, and he found time to wonder what sort of wonderful feeling it could be that made him so sure. 'Tt was only because you're so quick to feel things. It's just some special ability of yours, half-awakened." It was true, he thought. A sensitive enough human might tap into the powers of the individual he unwittingly sheltered. But Giulia shook her head desperately. "No; no, Wes. I never thought of it this way before, but when I first told Mr. Laban about it, he was frightened. He was concerned for me too, but he was more frightened. And -- and it kept getting worse. I could hear what people around me were thinking -- what men were thinking when they looked at me, and... and..." She buried her face in her hands. "Not always," she said past her wet fingers. "It would come and go. I began to see things -- like people who weren't people, who were only shadowy outlines with things inside them." So that was it, he thought. That was how the Watchers knew what to watch for. A special sense that disregarded the chrysalis and saw only the sheltered individual within. "Most of the time the things were quiet," Giulia went on. "As though they were asleep. But sometimes they were terrible, and moved and did things... Wes!" He held her tightly. "And then ... then my -- my familiar followed me home, and the next time Mr. Laban came he just looked at me and went away. He never came back." He would, Spencer thought savagely. No understanding of people. No caring. How had that long, ragged line of watchers ever managed not to break? How many had been little more than he, just humans with partially awakened powers who somehow kept the tradition alive imtil another genuine watcher came awake and gave them all the impetus to carry on a bit farther? And how many had had the powers, and never known where they came from, or why? "Your familiar "A dog. A little black dog. It's not a real familiar, of course." She smiled faintly. "I'm not really a warty old crone with a cauldron of spells. But I've had a little black dog for the last six years." He felt his muscles tense. Never once had the graceful man said that all the present chrysalids were human. And he'd had an artificial human chrysalis, created at will. If he could do that... A dog, he thought. A little black dog. "Where is your dog?" he asked, his throat dry. "Asleep in the other room." "Call it!" "All right," she said, wondering. She turned toward the open doorway to the other room. "Here, Princess. Come here," she called softly. Printrjj, he thought, and with complete expectancy, watched Tina come through the doorway. "Oh!" Giulia's hand shot up to cover her mouth, and she crouched against Spencer, completely white. "Hi, boy," Tina said. Spencer smiled -- a tired, sardonic grimace. "Giulia, darling, I want you to meet one of our enemies," he said bitterly. "But she looks like me!" "I know," Spencer said, his face tired, and older than it ever had been. "You've been listening, haven't you, Tina?" Something was growing inside him. "To every golden word, lad. Do me something." "Has it done you any good?" And still growing. Tina shrugged. "Some. Not much. But I've always had a small jump on you two pigeons." She laughed. "Both of you all tied in knots the way you are." It was almost grown. "That's not true anymore," Spencer said. He felt the alien rage gathering itself within him. "You're Princess?" Giulia asked in a strange voice. Spencer looked at her, and her face was set into an expression he would not have recognized if it had not been growing on his own. "Yep," Tina said. But her eyes were suddenly too white, and she was staring at both of them. "Then I'm a Watcher," Giulia said. Maim the stinking Insurgent, Watcher Spencer thought. Tina lifted one side of her upper lip, and the bright canine shone stark white in the lamplight. Suddenly, Giulia cried out. She folded her hands over her stomach, and the corners of her lips went pale. Watcher Spencer struck out at the Insurgent's chrysalis, trying to drive past it at the entity within. "No, Watcher!" Giulia cried out in her terrible Watcher voice. "She's mine!" Tina suddenly clutched her throat. Spencer sat imprisoned in his own body, watching the Watchers. So this is what its like to be a Watcher, he thought with that part of his mind that the battling Titan had left him. Waiting, and waiting, with the terrible patience of terrible rage, and then pouncing! Pouncing with such Wagnerian intensity! He laughed silently in the crannies of his leased brain. And still the battle went on. Then, Tina sobbed. Spencer .saw her suddenly double up, and heard Watcher Giulia's vengeful laugh. And then he saw Tina's dress begin to dance across her hips. Spencer laughed and laughed, while the two Watchers applied their wratiiful punishment, oblivious, in their entities of pure electrons and gulf-spanning minds, to the ridiculousness of what was happening. Heaven only knew what was happening to the Insurgent as an entity. But Tina, the chrysalis, was being spanked. And that was Giulia's doing. Not Watcher Giulia -- she, or it, was too preoccupied with her relentless attack on the entity within the chrysalis, too cold and ruthless ever to understand any sort of laughter but that of superhuman triumph. No it was Giulia herself -- human Giulia, gentle Giulia -- who took her human revenge on human Tina. Armageddon! Spencer thought. This is Armageddon! He rocked with silent laughter, and Giulia, too, was laughing. And Tina squealed and yapped. Human Tina? Oh, no -- for Tina's artificial chrysalis was shifting, melted under the fury of the simultaneous Watcher attack. Suddenly the illusion of human flesh and human form was gone -- and a little black puppy yipped frantically, clawing at tihe slightly open front door. Then the door pushed farther open, and the little black puppy tumbled outside and fled down the stairs, leaving a diminishing sound of panicked yipping behind it. Awake! Arise! Watcher Spencer, his superhuman mind linked with Watcher Giulia's, hurled out his ponderous summons. It hurtled around the Earth, touching seas and mountains, rocks and swamps, lakes and beaches, and the places of Man. Awake! In their chrysalids, the sleepers heard it. Heard it as they slept in men, in bats, in wolves, in foxes. And, somewhere, the graceful man heard it too, and slipped bitterly away from his artificial body, to await the coming of that individual who called himself, for now. Watcher Spencer. And the impalpable, invisible, weightless horde rose up, completed its journey, and was gone at last. Spencer looked at Giulia. Of all the former chrysalids, only they felt the weight slipping away. The rest of the human race just went on living. They looked at each other and smiled. "Well, thafs over," Giulia said, and laughed. Her light fingers traced the line of Spencer's jaw. "We're not carrying the Watchers around with us any longer. We're just us." "That's right. Just us. Just the human race and all the other living things the Earth has grown." He touched the firm warmth of her neck. He shook his head. "They were such a God-damned desperate bunch! So solemn. So relentless." "Wes?" "Yes, Giulia?" "Do you think the world'll be any different now?" "You mean, no more wars or slavery, no more shying away from people because they don't talk or dress or worship as we do? I don't know. I'm just a normal human being, I guess, after all. I don't much believe in utopias and pat solutions. But we might try going outside and giving a look. Maybe they've lowered taxes."    Time is the chrysalis of eternity . -- Richter what Is Your Science I. Q. ? answer, and you are very good if you can hit a score of #. The correct answers are on page #. #. Heat and light can traverse a vacuum, but cannot. #. In accordance with Einstein's field equations, what is the radius of the universe in light years? #. When light passes obliquely from one transparent substance to another occurs. #. What is the relationship of a Joule and a kilowatt? #. The term velocity connotes as well as speed. #. Tension, bending, twisting and shearing are four kinds of stresses. Can you name the fifth? #. Our local star system is moving within the Milky Way at a rate of miles a second. #. One of the two fundamental forces of the universe is gravitation. Can you name the other? #. The only difference, from the standpoint of physics, between radio waves, visible light and high frequency forms of radiation, such as x-rays, is in their #. What is the approximate speed of sound? I I . Bright line spectrum is formed by #. A dyne is a small unit of force which can be defined as of a gram weight. #. The constant for the expression of the quantum of energy is known as constant. #. What we call an hour is actually a measurement in space. Can you name the number of degrees of its arc in the apparent daily rotation of the celestial sphere? #. The mathematical factor which is the measure of the unavailable energy in a thermodynamic system is called #. How many angles and sides has a heptagon? #. Relativity reveals a fimdamental law of nature which states that the velocity of is the top limiting velocity in the universe. #. The rotation of Mercury's elliptical orbit advances how many seconds of an arc per century? #. Infrared rays are too to be seen by the naked eye. #. The shift of wave length in the spectrum of the star known as the "companion of Sirius" is known to astronomers as the Effect. The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. -- drainer maria rilke tors were gone, Miryam took the red capsule from under the base of the bedlamp and slipped it between her dry lips. Reason told her to swallow the capsule quickly, but instead she held it under her tongue, clinging, against her will, to the last few moments of life. She knew she was being weak, that she was still seeking hope where there was no hope, and she prayed to the ancient God of the Ghetto that the gelatin coating would dissolve quickly. Pain interrupted the prayer, spreading like slow fire from deep within her young body, where the unwanted child of Genetics Center stirred so restlessly, so impatient to be born. The white walls of her Center room blurred in and out of focus. Shadows merged together in brief, uncertain patterns. Lights flickered where there were no lights, and the darkness was so intense it had a glare of its own. At the worst of the pain cycle, Miryam bit down on her imder lip until the flesh showed as white as her teeth. She fought off temptation to crunch the capsule and put an end to all pain, all fear. No, she would not go that way. She would go in a moment of blinding clarity, knowing why, savoring the last bitter sweet second of her triumph. Illustrated by Paul Orhan With a subconscious gesture of had taught nursery school since esfemininity, Miryam brushed the caping from the Ghetto, dark, damp hair from her forehead, "Doesn't look a bit like one of and wiped the perspiration from her kind," another agent had said, her lips. putting his hand under her chin "Pretty little thing," one of the and turning her face to the glare Geno-Service agents had called of his flashlight. "No wonder she her, when she was arrested last fall fooled the Psycho and Chemico in the Warsaw suburb where she squads... Lucky for us!" "What's the matter, little one?" the first agent had spoken again. "Didn't you know we were coming? I thought all of you people were supposed to be telepaths... Or doesn't it work when you're asleep?" He flipped the covers off her trembling body and whistled. "Hands off!" the Geno-Sergeant had warned sharply. "She's for Center!" Now the capsule under her tongue was moist and soft. Time fled on swift, fluttering wings. Soon the horror would be done. But the stubborn spark still glowed, and Miryam allowed her mind to drift down the long, shining corridor to the room where the younger of the two Geno-Doctors was changing into a white coat. The older man, who wore the gold trefoil of Geno-Sar on his collar, tilted back in his chair. "She should be just about due," he said cheerfully. "Yes, Sir," replied the young doctor, sounding the proper note of deference for a man who communed daily with the political elite. "What do you think of her?" "Well, Sir, frankly -- I was surprised -- " The young doctor twisted muscular arms to button the back of his jacket. He had but recently come from the Genetics Sanitarium on the Black Sea, and his face was tanned deep brown. "From reading the weekly reports of your staff, I didn't know she was that -- that young -- " Miryam trembled with a hope she dared not recognize, but it was crushed out of her by the GenoSar's booming voice. "Not only one of the youngest -- but one of the very best specimens we've had to work with at Center! You read her psi rating?" "Yes, Sir. Seventy-two point four, wasn't it?" "Seventytwo point six! Absolutely phenomenal! Closest thing to a pure telepath our agents have ever turned up for us! This could be a big night for Center, my boy... A big night!" The young doctor shook his head to clear away the lingering image of a tragic, lovely face against a tear-stained pillow. Miryam was startled to find this image in his mind, and her pulse leaped again. In a carefully professional tone, the young doctor asked : "What was her rating after insemination? Did the emotional shock... ?" "Not at all! Oh, naturally, jdie was uncooperative in the tests, but pentathol and our cross-references gave us a true picture!" "And the spermatozoa?" "Best we could get! Refrigerated about thirty years ago from a specimen that tested forty-seven point eight." The Geno-Sar paused, and because a comment was obviously in order, the young doctor said: "This certainly could be a big night for Center!" The Geno-Sar snapped his cigarette lighter with an expansive flourish. "All the sciences have been taking a crack at psi -- ever since the last Politbureau directive gave it number one priority. You should have heard the talk at Sar-Bureau meeting this afternoon! The MathSar actually laughed at Genetics... told us to stick to our white mice!" The young doctor made a polite cluck of disapproval. "Those stupid mathematicians could learn something of heredity from their own ancients," the Geno-Sar continued, growing heated. "Think of Liebnitz, gifted at # -- Galois, a genius before he was #!" The Geno-Sar recovered his temper, and winked. "Of course, I didn't say that at the meeting -- the Bureau chief is very partial to Math -- but I did remind them, most pointedly, of the known data on inherited sensory differences between individuals. And you should have seen the squirming! Especially when I got into the taste studies and the phenyl-thio-carbamide tests! Then, when I told of Genetics research on sense of time -- sense of direction -- sensitivity to pain, sound and smells -- Well, the Chief was hanging on my every word! The Psycho-Sar became desperate to the point of rashness, and he jibed at me about our ancient master, Profim Lysenko." The Geno-Sar's head inclined slightly as he pronounced the name. "But the Chief himself gave the correct answer! He quoted from a Bureau directive which stated clearly that sensory characteristics, like any others, could well have been acquired in the first place, and then passed on through heredity! Oh, I tell you, it was a heartwarming afternoon!" The younger man had been paying him only half attention. "It's strange we should find some cases of psi among her people," he mused. "When I was at the University I always meant to study something about the -- " he hesitated and searched for the approved term, " -- the specimen races, but I never had time..." For an instant the Geno-Sar's steel-blue eyes narrowed, and Miryam was shocked to find him appraising the young man for possible heresy. She had always regarded the scientific mind as something remote, cold, but never as something that could commit a heresy. However, the Geno-Sar decided to table the subject. "Of course you didn't!" he boomed. "You couldn't have made such a splendid record without total specialization! Each to his own, that's how science has prospered under the benevolence of our party!" He glanced up at the clock. "Well, aren't we just about ready for this delivery?" M iryam drew back her mind. What a fool she was to go on seeking! The child resumed its inexorable turning within her swollen body, and she knew she could never give to the world a life conceived so terribly, so coldly, without love or passion or tenderness. Even in these final moments, with the gelatin melting under her tongue, Miryam shuddered with the remembered anguish of struggling up from the depths of anaesthesia to find herself bearing the seed of a child, from a faceless man who had died long ago. Often, during the carefully guarded months of pregnancy, she had wondered about that man, who he had been, how his talent had compared with hers. Miryam knew little about genetics, or any other science. The scientific mind had always frightened her, and she had feared to explore it. But she knew there was no truth to the folklore that psi was a characteristic of her people. She knew of only a few cases outside her own family, although within her family it seemed to have been a characteristic that had recurred frequently for many generations. Her father had cautioned her about selecting a husband, and pleaded with her not to flee the Ghetto. For the past three days, since the nurse had momentarily left the cabinet at the end of the corridor unlocked and unguarded, Miryam had known that she need not be concerned about the success or failure of this terrible experiment. From the nurse's mind she had plucked the essential facts about the potency of the red capsule. This knowledge, for all its loneliness, had been something to cherish, to press to her full breasts, as she would never hold that child of horror. Tears filled her eyes, squeezed in droplets between the closed lids. Tears because she was so alone. Tears of unbearable sadness and pity, for her people, for her youth and her young body, for the warmth that would be eternally cold, for the unnatural child that squirmed and turned, and would never cry. In a last forlorn gesture, in a final seeking before the darkness closed, Miryam let her mind stray out of the white room, out of the marble magnificence of Center. She let her thoughts escape on the soft breeze of the early summer evening. How beautiful it was, even here in the city, amid the science buildings that formed bright islands of light around the minarets and vaulted domes of Government Square. Even these awesome buildings were lovely in the purple dusk. Their windows were like scattered emeralds of light. How could there be so much beauty without compassion? So much knowledge without understanding? So much human genius without humanity? And what a battering of thoughts in the mild air around the centers of science! What a discordance! What a tumult of theories, each of them nurtured within its own walls by the zealous Sars. There were the Departments of Chemistry and Physics. There was the glass-walled tower of Astronomy! There was the Institute of Psychology, with all its many bureaus. And the new Electronics Building, alabaster even in the dusk. They were all there, extending in stately splendor along the main avenues, and along the park, where the gossamer mist was rising. How intolerant were the thoughts they radiated! How sure! Electronics said : "Quite obviously the answer to psi is in the electrical currents of the brain. Our newest electro-encephalograph has demonstrated... Chemistry said: "Solution to psi inevitably will be found in Ae chemical balance of the cells... Parapsychology said: "We must continue to ignore those who insist upon attributing physical properties to a non-physicd characteristic... And underneath this learned babble, Miryam heard the mothlike whispering of her own people, starving in the Ghetto, or hidden throughout the city, disguised, furtive, tense. Her mind came close to Government Square, and she cringed, as she had cringed all her young life. The somatics were unbearable. Hatred and fear, blind prejudice, jealousy, cunning, ceaseless intrigue and plotting, setting Sar against Sar, using Ae genius of each science, dividing and ruling. No, there was nothing left. No hope, no promise. This was the end of time. This was the night of the world. Withdrawing again, retreating into itself, Miryam's mind brushed the fragment of a thought. It was a half-formed thought, more a groping, more a question, than an idea. It was delicate, fragile, a wraith and a wisp. But it came to her as clear as the note from a silver bell. Startled, she hesitated in her withdrawal, and perceived the young Geno-Doctor in the corridor near her room. He had paxised by the casement window, and was staring out at the twinkling islands of light around Government Square. And as his gaze wandered moodily from Tech, to Psycho, to Chemico, to all the incandescent, kolated centers of genius, the idle speculation had formed. "Wouldn't it be an unusual view if all those bright islands were connected by strings of light... ?" Once formed, the speculation had fanned the ember of a thought: "Wonder if psi will build those strings of lights?" Then the young doctor turned almost guiltily from the window to meet the Geno-Sar coming down the corridor. And he said with crisp efficiency, "Fll check out #-A for delivery." "Good boy! I'll go on up and check the staff..." The Geno-Sar rubbed his hands together, and walked off, repeating nervously, "Two psi characteristics must be the answer -- two psi -- " "Maybe they are," the young doctor murmured softly. "Maybe they are..." D elivery, Miryam thought. The life within her throbbed and prodded. There was an ebbing of pain for a moment, and in that moment she saw with the blinding clarity she had sought that this child of hers might bring new hope to the world. That psi ability might be the answer to many things for (Continued on page # ) The Colonel was a career man; and knowing what would happen within his lifetime promised to be an invaluable asset... But he had never heard of that ancient legend of Faust... Illustrated by Ernie Barth another wrong number. Well, it was, in a sense -- but not the kind of wrong number I thought it was. The ringing signal burred against my ear in the usual way, then there was a click, and somebody said, "Office of Historical Research. Zon Twenty speaking." "Oh. 'Scuse me," I said. "I must have dialed wrong." That was euphemism -- misplaced loyalty, maybe. I didn't dial the wrong number, and I knew it. But high brass had installed a new automatic dialing system in the Pentagon as an economy measure, and it produced so many wrong numbers and entanglements that I think it actually must have cost more money in the long run than the old-fashioned live operator system -- but then that shouldn't surprise you if you've ever been connected with the military. I was about to hang up after my apology. The voice on the other end said: "Wait! Did you say -- dialedr "Sure," I said. "Then -- " and he seemed surprised, if not downright startled -- "what kind of a phone are you speaking from?" "Huh?" I said. "What kind? The regular kind. Phone, desk, dial, M-I -- or whatever the Army calls it." This time his voice went off like a small bomb. "The Army?' he said. "Sure," I said. "What's the matter with the Army?" And thought : Navy or Air Force type, no doubt. Our allies. Have to put up with them in the Pentagon. Have to put up with a lot of things -- even being Colonel Lawrence Boggs didn't save you from a snafu dialling system. I thought: somebody is out to needle armchair colonels this week. I'll play around with it for a while, maybe find out who's got the sense of humor. The voice said, "Look here, are you joking with me?" "Perish it," I said. "But this talk about -- about dial phones. About armies. Why, you sound like one of those historical tri-vids about the twentieth century!" I smiled, without too much humor, shook my head at the phone, and said, "Look, fellow, come off it, will you? I haven't got time to play games." I hoped he wasn't some general or equivalent rank in a pixie mood. "Wait!" he said. "Wait -- please -- don't think off! Tell me, what year is it? Where you are, I mean." "What year? It's #, of course." "Why," he said, "this is remarkable!" "It is?" "Do you know what I think has happened? A quantum inversion." "Beg pardon?" I said. "Karpo Sixteen predicted the possibility just the other day! Listen, my friend, let me ask you just a few questions -- " Then the mechanical voice of the operator cut in. It wasn't a real operator, of course, just a recorded voice, part of the new automatic system. These voices gave all the standard phrases and usually at the wrong time, the way the system was working. The worst of it was you couldn't argue with them or curse them -- at least you always felt a little foolish afterward if you did. The operator's voice said, sorry. Your time is up!" "Now, wait!" said my communicant, his voice fading a little, "Don't cut us off! Don't think off yet!" Again: "#'m sorry. Your time is upr And after that a click, and after that silence. I jiggled the hook a few times. No result. I shrugged. I hung up and rearranged the papers on my desk and went back to work, forgetting for the moment the party I'd been trying to call in the first place. And forgetting the odd conversation I had just had. No -- not quite. Not quite forgetting it. Queerly, it clung to my mind. What had he said his name was? Zon Twenty. Sounded like that, anyway. Odd name. Of course I still thought it was a gag of some kind. Yet it bothered me. Zon's manner, his tone of voice had been so convincing. What he had said suggested that in some queer way I had managed to place a telephone call into the future. But as a sane, normal, recently promoted colonel, I knew this was impossible. At lunch I was still thinking about it. I ate in the officers' mess on my floor and steered my tray through the line. I taw, among other acquaintances Major "Clipper" Moskowitz at a far table, and remembered that he was a great science fan, always talking about rockets and reaching the moon, and that sort of thing -- we had one argument about why a rocket works in a vacuum, such as space, and he hammered the table and drew diagrams and quoted Newton, and I'm still not convinced. Anyway, I went over and sat next to Clipper. " 'Lo, Larry. How's it?" he said. "Routine," I said. "Latest request for overseas duty turned down. I'll probably die in the Pentagon with my pencil still behind my ear." We talked of such things for several minutes. "Clipper," I said finally, "you're the G.L.E. on this future science stuff -- " "The what?" "Greatest Living Expert. Latest Pentagonese. Tell me, what do you think of the possibility of ever being in touch with the future?" "You mean time travel?" "I guess that's what you'd call it." "Time travel is nonsense," he said. "A logical absurdity. By definition, time is a series of infinitesimally small moments in succession. Once a point in time is established, it can't be changed, any more than energy can be destroyed." "I didn't say anything about changing anything. I was thinking about -- well, talking with somebody in the future,' "Just as paradoxical," he said, shrugging, and taking a huge bite of braised beef tongue. "If you go into the futme -- or talk to the future -- the future affects the change, through you. In other words, if you can't go back into the past, neither can people from the future. And it's inconceivable that such a thing wouldn't make changes. Maybe only small ones, but they'd multiply in time. Thou canst not change a flower, without troubling of a star That's Francis Thompson, You step on one spider today, and you affect the evolution of spiders, the ecology of all other things in the distant future. By a simple act like that you could destroy or create a whole species to come." "My head swimmeth," I said. "All I want to know is -- He wasn't even listening to me. He enjoyed spouting this kind of thing. "Of course, it's theoretically possible for you to witness events out of the past, without being party to them. If, for instance, you could travel away from Earth at more than the speed of light, overtaking the light waves of an event -- say, the Monitor and Merrimac fight-" "Or the Battle of Gettysburg," I said, loyal to the core. " -- you could look back and see it happen. The futmre? I doubt it. Unless in some way time and space actually curve back upon themselves, as some think. "Uh huh," I said, and drank my coffee and finally left Clipper Moskowitz. after that I did manage to forJget about Zon Twenty temporarily. It was a busy week. The draft quota had gone up, and Personnel Planning had worked out new criteria for classification, and I had to study these to apply them to analysis. This won't make much sense to you unless you've worked in a military headquarters yourself. I worked. I had a dim idea that if I worked hard enough ' somebody would favorably regard one of my requests to get sent overseas. I've got to explain something right here. I don't want anybody to get the idea I'm a hero type -- a professional volunteer. But I'm a career officer, and overseas duty is the quickest way to tactical unit command, which is important on the record. The lack of it has kept many a perfectly good colonel from getting his first star and making that final big step. So I worked hard, and of course, sent in another request for transfer, this time under the provisions of a different set of regulations. And I didn't think about Zon Twenty again until about a week later, one afternoon, when the phone rang. "Personal Analysis. Colonel Bog-" He didn't even let me finish. "Well! I've found you again! The man from the past!" "Oh, no," I said. "Don't tell me. Not Zon Twenty -- " "Yes, it's I, of course! Seems we've had another lucky accident, and been connected again. I was despairing of it for a while. Now, for machine's sake, don't go away this time! I've got to talk to you!" "It's your dime," I said. "Dime!" He pounced on it. "That was a monetary unit, when you had money, wasn't it?" "Look, mister -- " "You haven't guessed what's happened, have you? We have it pretty well analyzed at this end. But we didn't really suppose your technology would be equal to it back there." "Look, just who are you, and where are you?" I said. "My name is Zon Twenty, as I told you. I'm an historical technician in the Office of Ancient Research in Washington, the capital of the planet. Earth. I'm an Earthman myself, of course. My job is to prepare studies of ancient civilizations such as yours -- " "Now, wait -- what kind of a gag is this?" "A gag? Oh -- that's the ancient term for a joke. Good! I'll make a note of that!" "Come on. Who is it? Did Clipper Moskowitz put you up to this?" "Oh, dear," said Zon Twenty, and I could hear his heavy sigh. "I was afraid you wouldn't be able to grasp the situation. I'm going to have to offer proof, I suppose. Look here -- exactly what date is it where you are?" "I told you. #." "I mean what month and year?" "It's August #, # -- and I think you know that as well as I do." "August #d. Just a minute... we'll make a quick tape on the cyb, here. Ah, yes, here we are. August #d. All right. The nearest date of significance is September #st. On the date twenty-one of your so-called nations reached -- or should I say will reach -- a new trade and tariff agreement in the U.N., and this will eventually lead directly to the free nation federation in -- " sorry! Your time is up!" It was that blasted recorded voice of the mechanical operator again. "Hey! Don't cut us off!" I said. "Hello? Are you still with me? Look here -- I'll try to call back! It's difficult, but I think I can!" said Zon Twenty. "'m sorry! Your time is up!" And again the click, and silence. This time I didn't forget Zon Twenty, neither quickly nor easily. If it was a gag, it was a beauty: crazy and elaborate, and the acting was superb. If it wasn't a gag -- well, I couldn't yet quite believe that it wasn't a gag. A week streamed by in a sea of paperwork. My latest overseas transfer request came back disapproved. Then, on the morning of September #nd I opened the newspaper and saw the headline: I read the story. It was essentially what Zon had predicted -- or remembered -- or whatever you want to call it. I was confused now. That day I didn't work very well. I couldn't concentrate. I am not a deep thinker, and have no illusions that I am. But one idea presented itself, starting as kind of hypnotic little glow in the bottom of my mind, and this grew until I could scarcely think about anything else. Put it under the heading of temptation. Ask yourself if you would have been able to resist. Or just forget all the moral and ethical implications, and accept that I was tempted in this way. If I could be in touch with this Zon character -- if he really was from the future, and an historical expert, at that -- he could tell me all sorts of things that were going to happen. I could then either predict them or otherwise adjust my actions to fit them. I could go up so fast it would make Caesar's career look like a misfit reservist's. I could -- Well, then I started justifying and rationalizing. I could do my country all sorts of good. I thought along those lines for a while, and presently even managed to convince myself that my original purpose had been altruistic all along. Of course I tried to get in touch with Zon Twenty again. Over and over again I dialed the number I had dialed the first time I had become connected with him by apparent accident. I dialed random numbers. I listened to a long and boring dissertation on permutation of numbers by Clipper Moskowitz in an effort to devise a system of hitting all possible combinations. There were an awful lot of possible combinations. M y phone rang again nearly ten days later. It was Zon. He said, "Oh, there you are! I'd about given up! Look -- the quantum inversion is swinging back to normal! This is the last time we'll be able to talk! So we've got to make every moment count!" "Sure " I said. "You bet. Only I don't exactly get it. I don't understand just how all this happens. If you'd explain -- " "That's not important. Briefly, we use telepathic induction for message selection. That's why I was startled when you mentioned the ancient dial phone. And of course we don't have armies any more." "Yes, but -- " "Listen, Colonel -- what was your name? Never mind. You can be most valuable to me in my research. You can supply details about your time that simply don't exist any more -- " "Don't exist? Don't you have movies, recordings, magazines, all that stuff?" "Of course not. They were all destroyed in the Final War." "The what?" "The FingJ War. You'll hear about it soon enough. If you survive, that is. Only three hundred thousand did, out of the entire population. They were the seed of our present civilization." "Hey, now, wait a minute! What about this war? When was it? When's it going to be, I mean?" "There's no point in your asking," said Zon. "You can't change it, you know. If you could change it, I wouldn't be here. My world as I know it wouldn't exist. The fact that my time does exist proves, therefore, you never changed it. Now, if you'll just calm down -- " "Calm down?" I shouted it across the centuries at him. "How can I? How would you feel? Look, this Final War, as you call it. Is it going to be soon? You can at least tell me that, can't you?" "All right. Soon, as all time is reckoned. In your lifetime, I would say. Now, I suggest that you adjust yourself emotionally and accept what is inevitable. The best thing you can do is answer a few questions I've prepared." I took his advice. I calmed down. "Questions? Well, Mr. Zon, or whatever your name is. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make a bargain with you. I'll answer your questions if you'll answer mine. I'll tell you what's happening here -- anything you want to know -- if you look in that little file of yours and tell me what's going to happen in my time. A dead?" He was silent for a moment, and at first I thought we'd been cut off again. "Hello? Zon? You still there?" "Yes, I'm still here." His voice had become oddly quiet. "So it's the old Faust legend all over again, is that it?" "I don't know what you're talking about," I said. I didn't -- then. "You just answer my questions, and I'll answer yours. Mine first." "All right," he said. "Very well." And I started my barrage. When would the Final War start? He told me. How would it start? He told me that. Who would be the belligerents, and what weapons and techniques would be used at first, and what new ones would be developed? He knew. Where would the major campaigns be fought -- how many troops would be involved? I got the whole story. I scribbled furiously and put it on paper. Afterwards, he asked his questions. They were innocuous, compared to mine. He wanted to know about taboos and marriage customs and slang expressions and education and eating habits and articles of clothing. I told him. I was in the midst of an explanation of the game of Bingo, of all things, when there was a sudden whooshing and crackling in the earpiece of the telephone. "Hello? Zon? Still with me?" "Yes -- but I think the signal's going out. This may be the inversion passing! We probably won't be able to talk again. Hello? Do you still hear?" "I do. Look -- one more thing before we go. You said this dictator -- the one everybody hated so much -- survived the final series of blasts. He and his staff. Where were they? Where were they when the blasts came?" "In a country at that time called Canada. Little place named Resolution, on Great Slave Lake. They'd dug in there -- very elaborate underground installation." "And the date you gave me is correct?" "As far as I know. You're determined to be in that place at that time, I suppose." He seemed amused. "You can say that again," I said. There were more rumblings of static on the line. "Well, since you're so determined," said #n Twenty, "one more word of advice. The dictator and all his followers were afterwards imprisoned by what populace remained. Small wonder, since they were mainly responsible for all the carnage. It was a pretty horrible thing. They were slowly and most savagely tortured continuously for nearly two decades. So if you mean to be there, at Great Slave Lake, I suggest you arrange to be on the right side." "Don't worry," I said. "I'll arrange it somehow. Larry Boggs is going to live through this, if anybody is -- "What's that? What's that you said?" "I said I'm going to live through this -- "No, no, the name. Boggs. Is that your name?" "Certainly that's my name. Colonel Lawrence E. Boggs, United States Army, and -- " He was laughing. He was laughing loudly, uproariously, and, I thought, hollowly. The background noise in the receiver had been steadily getting worse. Now it swelled, like an angry sea. Interference of some sort snarled and crackled. A sick feeling began to grow like fungus in my stomach. Suddenly his voice came through again. He was still laughing. "Generalissimo Lawrence E. Boggs survived all right Colonel, he -- " All the noise cut away suddenly. There was a pinpoint of silence. Then the mechanical operator: "I'm sorry! Your time is up!"    T he men of the ocean are not "Objectives, hopes, fears -- " said like the men of the land, nor Jim Talbot thoughtfully. He lifted the men of space," said the Spacehis glass and stared into the eyes man. "The men of the ocean are a of the girl. For a fraction of a secrace apart." ond the veil almost lifted. Then "That's stupid," said the girl, she bent and sipped her drink, pre"Any sociologist will tell you that senting the top of her sleek, glossy all mankind shares common obhead to him. jectives, fears, hopes -- " He looked past her out the winIllustrated by Paul Orban The ocean floor had served a generation. Now Old Cady was dying, and the men who had worked the kelp beds and sea mines wanted him to die alone... dow of the bar in Long Beach. The out to the kelp-beds and the seafog was in now. A wavy red neon mines, unless you want to walk, sign across the street flashed: and midnight on the ocean floor Vessel -- Midnight, A few ghost is no place for a lady sociologist figures swirled through the fog to from Iowa." the entrance of the pier. He was afraid she would say "I "You've got ten minutes," said can take care of myself." Instead Jim. "Then it'll be too late to go she said: "I have to take the early morning rocket back to Ames. It's my last chance." "Take my advice," said Jim. "Don't go out on the Floor tonight. There's trouble out there. I know the men of the ocean and I can tell. They're restless tonight." "I've read all the books," she said. "I've talked to the loc professors and examined the kelpdocks and the sea-mine facilities -- I've done everything but go out on the Floor. I planned to do that next week, but -- " She opened her bag and pulled out a yellow telegram which she handed to him. It said that there had been departmental changes in the Sociology Department back in Iowa and her presence for the coming semester was requested a week early. It looked very authentic. He handed it back. "So you're going out on the Floor tonight anyway!" She stood up. "Yes. Thanks very much for the drinks, Mr. Talbot. I hope I haven't bored you with all the talk about sociology. A spaceman just in from Mars probably expects something more lively." She blushed and turned rapidly away. Jim merely bowed his crew-cut head and smiled politely as she moved off. Then his eyes swept the room, a faint frown appearing on his forehead. There were a few tourists like the girl. There were a few spacemen, loud as usual, loud and noisy as their profession demanded. And there were the men of the ocean, far too many of them, with their white, pasty faces and bloodshot eyes, their stony expressions and their sudden, awkward motions as they forgot, temporarily, that they weren't moving in one hundred feet of water. The men of the ocean weren't drinking tonight. Jim's frown deepened. He saw the uniformed figure of a copper from the Underwater Police, watching the room as he was, and recognized the reserve insignia. If the reserves were out, every single man on the Underwater Squad must be on duty tonight. A low, mournful whistle sounded. Last call for the Catalina Submarine. Suddenly it stopped, and for a second in e silence you could hear the boom of the breakers, the saddest sound in the world to Jim. Across the room he saw a seaminer tip a signal to a kelp-cutter and he saw the cutter slide out of his chair, throw a coin on the table, and disappear into the fog behind the figure of the girl sociologist from Iowa. Uh-huh! Jim moved to the door, spoke to the reserve. "The boys are restless tonight." The reserve looked at his spaceman's uniform in surprise. But then spacers were frontier men like Floormen and he nodded and spoke as insider to insider. "You said it. They're all over the Bottom out there." "For what?" "Old Man Cady's come home," said the reserve. "Three weeks ago they dragged him out of his kelpbeds and took him to Long Beach Memorial Hospital to die. But he said he'd come back to the Floor, and he did, and the Fbonnen think it's great." "The men of the ocean must be getting sentimental," said Jim. "They weren't in my day." "You a Floorman?" the reserve asked in surprise. Jim grinned. "I was bom in Donovan's kelp-patch," he said. "But I got the hell out. It was too wet." The reserve grinned at the old half-joke. "It's wetter than water tonight," he said, giving back a bromide. "If you're thinking of a return visit, I wouldn't go out there until tomorrow if I was you." Jim didn't answer. Instead he went out into the fog. In times of fog it was better, but you could still feel and smell and hear the city, the insane babble and crash and rush of it. The city that ran from Long Beach south to Old San Diego and north to Old San Francisco. That ran inland through Los Angeles to the Sierras and over the mountains and across what used to be the plains. You could drive from the West Coast to Denver these days, they said, and never be out of sight of a man, building or advertising sign. Jim wouldn't know because he didn't like the land and its cities. There weren't any cities in space -- yet, nor under the ocean -- yet. And that's where you had to go if you wanted to escape this deafening twenty-four hour roar. Even with the men of the ocean having a ball for themselves out on the Floor, it would be piore peaceful than the City, he thought. At the Submarine ticket window the girl from Iowa -- Helen Lindsey, wasn't it? -- was still arguing with an Underwater cop. "Lady, there's a big celebration going on out there tonight, and when these guys cut loose it ain't safe for inlanders. Like I told you, you can't go out." "At least let me buy a ticket to Catalina. The ride on the Submarine should be safe if I don't get oflF." The cop shrugged. But as she turned to the window the ticket man who had been selling tickets Helen looked annoyed; then she turned and melted into the crowd. Near Jim a tourist spoke to his wife: "These crazy ocean people. They've been crowding the Submarine on every trip since six o'clock just riding back and forth, the man said. If we're going to Catalina, we'd better take a surface boat or fly over." The woman snorted. "I don't see why they don't build a bridge. It's just an island, twenty miles out." J IM shouldered his way through the crowd, keeping his eye on Helen. "I am very altruistic tonight," he thought. "I'm sooo-oo altruistic." As he expected, she pressed right up to the gate when it opened and flashed a bit of colored paper, probably a hotel check, and went right on through with the crowd. Once she got on the Submarine, she could always pay her way and one more never mattered. Prefty determined to be on that Sub, for an innocent lady professor. Then Jim saw what he'd been expecting to see. The quick flash of a fish knife in the crowd. Those fish knives were apparently as sharp as ever, for the man sliced the handle of the girl's bag as he jostled her and somebody else stepped on her toe and her purse was gone without her ever realizing it. Jim recognized the face of the kelp-cutter from the tavern. He grinned. If you were caught on the Sub without either a ticket or money, they held you for the police at the other end. The men of the ocean were going to great pains to make sure that Helen Lindsey stayed on the Sub, but she didn't have a ticket to begin with and he doubted that her money was in her purse. The men of the ocean would have to do better than that on this girl who was so anxious to join their celebration. Some celebration! Old Man Cady was dying out there tonight on the Floor and the men of the ocean were having a celebration to see that he died alone. That made sense when you considered that Old Cady owned three-fourths of the ocean floor between the mainland and Catalina. Jim got on the Submarine too, using the fake ticket routine, and the busy guard passed him through. The locks slammed, bells jangled and the mighty vessel submerged, its squalid interior crammed with the soft-talking men of the sea, its grimy portholes flicking wizened lights out into the gloom of the Floor. Down below the pilot picked up the Kelp-cutter's Walkway and the propellers churned; the Sul marine shook all over like an old lady with the ague and pushed through the water. Jim grinned to himself as he recognized the same furnishings of fifteen years ago, the same plush seats only a little more grimy today. It was too crowded to sit down. He stood at one end of the corridor near the Ladies Room and watched the underwater markers as they moved along. Meredith's Mines -- Buoy Office, Goldstein's Kelp-farm, Entriken's Mineral Buoy, Strong's Mineral and Metal Supply, Rancho San Kelp, The Forks -- He was expecting some action at The Forks, and he wasn't disappointed. Helen got up to go to the Ladies Room. She pressed right by him without seeing him, because he leaned behind a miner. "Going to Catalina?" asked the miner, jostled into conversation. "Catalina Spaceport," lied Jim. "Takeoff tomorrow." "Most spacemen travel on top to to Catalina," said the man accusingly. "I had a leftover ticket," said Jim. "Excuse me." He stepped in front of the "Ladies". He was aware that he wasn't the only one interested in Helen's ploy, as he thought of it. Half of the Submarine eyed the door. Even the Conductor who had gotten half-way up the aisle, punching tickets, called out ineffectually "Hey, lady, your ticket -- " Here the aisle was momentarily clear. The Submarine's reputation for non-cleanliness assured Jim that Helen was in there alone. He put his shoulder to the door and waited for a lurch. He counted on the lurch. The ride was always jerky because the Third Mate always took over after the trip began so the pilot and engineer could enjoy their twenty-year old card game. Nothing had changed. Jim got his lurch. He broke through the door, because the fastenings were of the feeblest, as he well remembered. Helen had her diving suit on, all but the helmet. She had hooked it out of the bin marked Emergency. Her next step would've been to slip into the escape hatch. There were two things that were always firstrate on the Catalina Sub despite the rest of its faults. One was the diving suits, the other was the escape hatches. At least three times a year the Sub conked out and you had to go down to the Walkway and finish your trip under your own power. Helen looked at him in utter astonishment. Jim thought of the long reams oi explanations he would have to make and realized how little time he had, with every sea-man out there waiting to see what happened, and took a shortcut. He belted her on the cheek and then once in the solar plexis, because unless you had practice in knocking people out, how could you be sure? She folded and slumped obediently on the floor. He flipped her coat over her to hide the diving suit, cradled the helmet on her stomach and picked her up. He shouldered out of there just as the puffing Conductor broke through the last of the crowd. "Lady fainted,'" he threw over his shoulder and kept right on go"This is a helluva night," groaned the Conductor. "Gad, she isn't going to have a baby, is she?" "This I doubt," said Jim. He and the Conductor stood alone in the narrow walkway behind the Crew door, a catwalk that led to the Pilot's compartment. Anxious white faces peered through the slit of glass, but the men of the ocean didn't try to follow, figuring she'd be taken to the First Aid room. Jim carried her out of range of the door and laid her on the catwalk above the pounding motors instead. He turned to the Conductor. "Here -- I'm no doc. You take a look." While the anxious old man bent to peer at the patient, Jim silently asked for forgiveness. Then he brought his heavy hand down hard across the exposed neck of the white-haired old man. It wasn't too funny, he thought, as he dragged the old boy out of the way. Still, he had gained priceless momentary solitude. They were out of range of vision of the men of the ocean and the Crew up ahead didn't know there was trouble. Three steps down the corridor was another emergency locker. Jim grabbed a rubber suit from it and slid into the suit with the practice of twenty years in space and under water. He flopped llie bowl helmet on his head, lifted Helen's helmet off her stomach where he'd carried it and adjusted it on the now-writhing body. She was coming to now. Good. He picked her up, looked for the red light and found it. A dozen steps, half-dragging Helen and he was on the platform. He tripped the lever and the floor section cantilevered around and dropped them in the tank. Ten seconds later, they were flushed out on the floor of the ocean. When it came to escape hatches the Crew had it all over the passengers on the Catalina Submarine. He watched the big metal fish ooze away from them in the water, its feeble port lights bravely dotting the darkness. What with this and that and the other thing, he had about ten minutes before the men of the ocean would know of their escape, and then the fun would really begin. Because tonight the men of the ocean weren't letting any outsider within range of Old Man Cady. And the dark-haired girl wasn't heading any place else, despite all the talk about Iowa, sociology and the other phoney baloney. While they were sinking to the Kelp-cutter's Walkway, Jim wondered how many agents, male and female and children the Real Estate Foundation had sent out tonight and how many would get through to Cady to buy up the ocean floor before he died. Probably none, he thought as his feet touched the ooze of the Floor. Not even Helen. Not if he knew the men of the ocean. dreamworld. The equalizing pressures of the suit gave the body feel of normalcy even in a hundred feet of water, but the closed-in, drifting lightness was a stirring memory from the old days. Not the free lightness of space but an immersed lightness in which the swaying, deep currents took over and managed you. The silence was aweinspiring after the roar of the continuous city that was America and after the noisiness of space. Jim appreciated the quiet for a bit. Spacemen always shouted when they talked because what could be noisier than a spaceport? Spacemen shouted because even in the deep outside quiet of space they were enclosed in a noisy capsule where bells rang, a thousand large and small motors hummed and throbbed, burped and gurgled, depending on their health. Where cargo was always being banged around to make finer weight adjustments, orders, news, music and time signals came whining out of the ship loud-speaker, men chattered and the maintenance crews banged their buckets and mop handles, and hustle and bustle were the antidotes for vast space solitude. This was a silence and darkness almost womb-like. This was a lazy giving over and slow movement in a ghost-world, where the dim light from the miner's lamp in his helmet showed flashes of rock and kelp and the sandy floor, but where he was sheltered and protected from the nerve-cutting hustle of civilization. This was one reason why the men of the ocean were different... Two phosphorescent steel cables moved slowly through the water just above the sandy floor, one eternally winding its way towards Catalina, the other to the mainland, like an underwater ski tow. Jim hooked onto one of the ties and fastened Helen's belt hook to another. She struggled for a bit, then she became quiet and he figured her senses had fully returned. Every hundred yards or so along the Kelp-cutter's Walkway there was a tiny dome. Jim set the hooks for "detach" and as they swept into the structure they were oozed off the line. He grabbed her flailing hand and sank to the upper floor of the dome, kicking the lock panel without even thinking. They were deposited rather crudely on the white, soft sand of the lower dome with a quantity of water which immediately drained away, and he took off his helmet and she hers. "Well!" she gasped. "I've been wooed and won before, but never quite like this." "I saved you from arrest," said Jim. He explained about her purse, watching her narrowly, but she kept up her role-playing, shrugging off her loss. She seemed more interested in the dome and studied it curiously, the black gashes of portholes and the institutionally inadequate # watt light bulb in its no-steal wire cage. It was a comfortable little bug-wallow with breathable air, ten feet across, resting on the ocean floor. On one wall was a pay telephone. On the other a half-dozen motor propellers in racks. "Sorry about the rough stuff," said Jim. "It was one way to get out on the Floor," she said without hostility. In the tight rubber suit she looked little and lost. She drew up her knees and hugged them with her hands, staring at him with a bright-eyed look. "The only way," said Jim. "You were smart enough to know that you didn't dare get off at the regular underwater stops without being followed, but too dumb to know that the escape hatch routine attracts just as much attention. Now you can level with me. Why did you come out on the Floor tonight. Miss Not-from-Iowa?" The eyes remained bright and innocent. "Just to say I'd been on the Floor and walk around a little." Jim got up without a word. He fumbled out his all-purpose credit card, fed it to a wall slot and removed two motor propellers from the racks by the hand-straps. He strapped one on himself and showed her how to adjust hers. "Come on. Miss Iowa." She followed him to the lock, grinning through her bowl helmet at the embarrassing addition to her pert behind. "The subject of hundreds of dull jokes," he said, "but practical. Let's go. They slipped out on the Floor, talking on radcommunication now. He showed her how to work the motor and they moved off under power until they began to feel kelp fronds slap against their suits. She stopped him. "Where are you going?" He pointed behind them to the faint, glowing dot that was the dome they'd just vacated. "The men of the ocean are guarding all the domes tonight. We were lucky to have entered that one when the guard W #I S out working the line. We can't go back. So we might as well return to Long Beach under our own power, now that you've had a look at the Floor." "I'm not ready -- to go in yet." The trouble with half-trained agents is that they don't know the full dangers. And this was no time for lectures. The guard patrolling the Walkway would soon be back to the dome of Station # and instantly notice the missing propellers. He would also probably have the flash on their escape from one of the ocean men on die Sub. First he would pulse a warning to the Kelp-cutter's headquarters, probably Cady's No. Three mine. Then he would start out after them. Meanwhile in the headquarters the silent men would be gathered around a map, plotting the movements of the outsiders who had invaded the Floor tonight. Jim had seen the hand-radar network in operation before, and a minnow couldn't get through from the mainland if the men of the ocean didn't want it to. Anybody they picked up close to shore would be sent back to the land safely enough -- but those they found back here in the kelp in the inner defenses -- Jim felt his heart quicken. He had to know whether the girl were an agent or not -- and he had to know fast. He put a strangle hold on her and cut her air intake to almost nothing. "Talk!" She was strong, but Jim was thinking of the radar-net and the spear-guns and the determined men on the Floor. They sank to the bottom, sliding in the ooze. He maintained control. "All -- all right," she whistled finally. He knelt above her, his miner's lamp on low peering anxiously into the glass helmet. He could only make out the eyes, but the look of innocence was gone. "I was hired by the Real Estate Foundation to try to reach Old Man Cady," she said. "Now what?" "Then the rumor is true -- that the Foundation got the Old Man to sign an option on his Floor property while at Long Beach Memorial." "I guess so. Don't know. I -- I'm from Fullerton. I really am -- Si sociologist. Junior College. I'd done some work on the Floor and its problems. I can wear a suit and dive. They offered me a lot of money. I needed the money." "Why?" "Why?" she laughed shortly. "What do you care?" "Give me your motive." "I wanted five thousand to go study the red ants on Venus," she spat out over radcom. Jim stood up. The men of the ocean were coming now. You couldn't see them nor could you hear them. But over the years he recalled the faint rhythmic vibrations of the seat propellers that the men of the ocean used. As a kid, he could've told how many they were. Now he only knew they were coming. "Let's move," he said. They moved off into the kelp. The seaweed was a darker mass in the darkness and looked like an impenetrable wall. But the jungle was only a growing mass of plants, rooted to the bottom, leafing up with bulbous floats, reaching for the surface where it had to have the sun, like #iny plant, for photosynthesis. They brushed into the clogging, choking stuff, the skin effect of their suits transmitting the feeling to them. There were timnels in the kelp, but you had to know how to find them. Jim found them, marveling that the girl from Fullerton would believe she had a chance on the Floor. She couldn't have known he would follow her from the shore to help. Either she was to meet a confederate at The Forks or her motive was one of desperation. Presently he would have to know which. Meanwhile, he led the way, staying close to the bottom. Sometimes, he dived to a rock and burrowed against it. Sometimes, he left the timnel in the kelp to slide and twist through the kelp forest itself and emerge in the tunnel again. He was making it a little tough for hand radar, he hoped. Helen followed, helpless at the moment to argue. They were in the center of the kelp fann now. A faint beep signal from the detector in his suit began to guide him. The signal meant human habitation. In the absolute darkness and sliding nothingness of the water it was good to know that there was a farm home buoy ahead. Suddenly there was a faint vibration above, a different sort. A metal charge of CO# cut past them as their silent pursuers caught a flash of them. Jim instantly cut his helmet light; he had already made Helen douse hers. He saw the direction of the tow-line paying out behind the spearhead; and dove into the kelp mass at a tangent, cutting off his propeller motor. They sank, nested in the mass, motionless. He spent the waiting time in clearing her propeller of the seaweed that die constantly tangled with, and they bumped body to body in a silence that was so deep he could hear the thump of his own heart. The hunt on the ocean floor was different. Silence -- the sudden aggression -- and if you were smart and didn't swim in panic, half the time the hunter couldn't find you. A novice would've spurted into a swim of death, but Jim remembered the old ways and forced the discipline of inaction on his nervous system that cried out to be moving. At last sufficient time had passed so that they dared to move again, no motor vibrations being discernible. And now -- They broke into a clearing. The farm home buoy loomed dark in front of them, its anchor line going to the bottom, but floating easily, its majestic weight swaying with the currents. Jim went right to it, forcing out thoughts of what couldVe happened in fifteen years. He broke into the entrance lock and pushed the bell desperately. "Who?" said a voice, and he almost fainted. His luck was running tonight -- "Jim Talbot," he said. There was a silence from the wall speaker. Helen took off her bowl and stared at him in whitefaced puzzlement. "Jim -- Talbot," whispered the feminine, metallic wall-voice. "For Christ's sake, Bea, let us in!" cried Jim. T he farm home buoy swayed and rolled seventy-five feet below the surface, twenty feet above the Floor. The little woman in slacks and a short hair-cut who faced them stared at Jim as if he were a parolee from death. Jim stood there, buckling his knees to get used to the long-forgotten motion of the farm home buoy. Helen who had no sea-legs, collapsed in a chair, puzzled. "So you've come back," said the woman in slacks. "All the way. Did you -- is he -- " "I married him," she said. "That was twelve years ago. We have a child. She's sleeping upstairs." She gestured at the ceiling. "Your parents?" "They died." Jim let out a long, slow breath and sank into a chair. "It's good to know Ed lived," he said. "After fifteen years. The last time I saw him, he was floating in the kelp with six inches of my spear sticking in him." "It could've been different," she said. He felt sorry for her with the lines in her face now, and the grayfringed hair. But she still had that delicate, fragile beauty. And maybe she felt sorry for him, for he had aged too. But in the end the heart couldn't speak. The heart can never speak except in the phrases of melodrama. "Could have been different", "So you're back." He thought of the hours and hours of unspoken interior monologues he'd had with the image of her, and here she was, and here he was, back on the Floor again, and as usual the time was short, as it always was throughout life, and he couldn't break down in front of a stranger and say "My God, how the hell have you been -- " "How's kelp-farming?" he asked instead. "Horrible," she said. "It's done and over. The kelp-price has broken forever. They're spore-farming up there now, with those spores the spacemen -- you spacemen -- brought back to Earth. Kelp-cutting is done. We fed the world for a generation and they don't need kelp "What's the kelp-price?" "A nickel a hundredweight," she said. "God in heaven." There was a faint stir below. "You've got to pass me over," said Jim. "I'm on my way to see the Old Man and you've got to pass me over." A spasm of uncertainty crossed her face. "Jim, you don't belong any more. Ed's still a kelp-cutter. I'm his wife. He's out tonight, working the net, trying for a few more hours to save things. All outsiders are enemies tonight." "Kelp-cutting's done. Sea-mining's done. The people of the land need your space to live in, Bea. It won't matter if Old Cady dies without selling his land to the Foundation. The world needs it. The world'll get it." uncle sells out to them," said Bea bitterly. "Is that why I've got to pass you over?" Helen sat up with a gasp. "I won't get anything at all. The Old Man doesn't care much for his relatives that deserted the ocean." "The option they tricked him into signing while he was in the hospital expires tomorrow," said Bea. "He may not live that long. Then, in his will, the land goes to the Underwater Association, they say. In perpetuity." she sighed. "The Association will never give up the land to the Real Estate Foundation. Like Ed says, let 'em build houses in the Atlantic. Why don't they try the Gulf of Mexico?" There wasn't time to argue. Jim took the little woman in his arms. "You've got to pass me over, Bea," he said desperately. A strange voice came at them from the intercom. A firm voice asking for admittance to the home buoy for a search. Bea shuddered. "Jim -- I can't hide you!" But Helen was on her feet. From her inside pocket she had a wallet out. Jim saw something green then and started to cut Helen off. "You fool, don't -- " But Helen pushed Jim aside. "How much?" she said. "Here's five hundred -- no, a thousand!" Bea blushed. Jim was about to snatch the money from the table and throw it back at Helen, but Bea picked up the bills. "It's been hard, very hard," she said, her bright eyes studying Jim's face. "Where can we hide?" asked Helen. "She took the money!" Jim whispered in the darkness. "I don't blame her. With those kelp-prices it must be rough, feeding and clothing a family." In the darkness Jim tried to swallow his bitterness. For the first time he truly felt the desperation of the men of the ocean. But hadn't kelp-foods always been doomed? There had always been something a little wrong with them. Seaweed had bulk and was rich in minerals washed down by the rivers of the land, absorbed by the ocean plants. Enriched by vitamins and proteins, it had carried mankind along but was tasteless. Spore-farming yielded rich, sun-grown crops today. The kelp-cutters had suffered for many months now. Could he blame Bea for snatching the money? "I take it you shot a man and had to leave. Otherwise you'd have married her," said Helen. "I would have." "Don't blame her for not waiting either," said Helen. "In life you make the best of what exists." "I don't," snapped Jim and she dianged the subject. "Are we safe here?" "There's a secret place on each farm home buoy," said Jim. "That's where tte kelp-cutters keep their money, because there aren't any banks on the ocean floor. The men of the ocean would never ask the location of anyone's house safe. We're in it. We're okay." Helen stirred in the darkness. "Jim -- why are you helping me? I mean, if you don't stand to gain from the sale of the land." "Red ants on Venus." She was silent. Then she said slowly. "All right. I do have a good reason for being on the Floor as an agent of the Foimdation. My husband worked for them. He took some money to speculate. The Foundation manager will prosecute unless I can help him on this option business. I can't afford to fail." "Why didn't your husband come himself?" "Because," she said softly, "he was stabbed when he tried to get in to see Old Man Cady at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, day before yesterday. He may live and he may not, but he won't want to, if I fail." Jim listened for the sincerity. It was there. "And you?" she asked. Faintly, as if far away, he could hear the pursuers arguing with Bea. He decided he would have to level with Helen. "I've been faired by the Spacemen's Retirement Fund," he said. "We want the Floor. If I can get it, they'll make me manager of the whole operation." "Why the Floor for retired spacemen?" "What else to do with the old men of space?" asked Jim. "They can't stand the rigors of the new space colonies. And they can't find any land on the monstrous cities of Earth, except the poorest of reclaimed desert land, which is a hell of a desolate place to end your life. But under the ocean it's different. Quiet. Everybody is equal. A yoimg man can't move much faster than an old one. They can raise a little kelp, do a little seamining to bolster their pensions. The low prices won't matter to them. They can go into town on Saturday, and the rest of the time play cards, drink and think. Spacemen don't mind wearing pressure suits and they rather prefer solitude or they wouldn't be in space. The only thing they really want to get away from is hustle and bustle -- and the Floor is perfect for that." "Maybe we can work out something between the Foundation and the Retirement Fund," she said. "Maybe we can share the Floor." "No," said Jim. "This was my project, and I sold it to the Retirement Fund. It only makes sense if I can buy all Cady's land. Some for buildings, the rest for investment. Otherwise the Retirement Fund will invest in a land establishment or a space-station which cost less." "So your job as manager depends on getting all the Floor land?" "Yes," She was silent. "Something doesn't fit. You have the knowledge of how to get to Cady. You have the incentive -- a life-time job, perhaps even a dream fulfillment. That fits because as Manager of the project you'd become the biggest man on the Floor, and everyone wants to return to his place of origin as a success. But you don't need me at all. So why have you helped me?" Jim didn't answer. She laughed. "Something tells me there's skullduggery ahead. But I warn you now, I intend to fulfill my mission." "Of course," he said. H elen was his diversion. It could only be a matter of minutes now, he thought as they swam along after leaving Bea's place, before she would realize why he had helped her. And then? When they found Cady's Number Three Mine, where the old man was probably hiding, Jim would need her. She needed him to get her to that spot. Once there, only one of them could succeed, and they were more dangerous to each other than the common enemy. He tried to convince himself that her position was hopeless compared to his. How would she get inside the mine? But he knew there were ways. Once in the mine, how could she reach Cady? Answer: Cady would insist on seeing any agent good enough to break the net, for Cady was that way. Once saw Cady bow could she, in the midst of hostile men of the ocean, get his signature to extend the option? For that matter, how could he? He smiled to himself. It could be done. It could be done, because Cady was smart, Cady knew the old Floor economy was done and would have signed before, except that the men of the ocean captured him in a moment of sickness. But then, he reasoned, why wouldn't Cady have already signed, despite agents and options? He knew the answer to that one, too. Like all old people, Cady thought he would live a Iktle longer and it would be a disagreeable task to sign away the Floor when it had been his whole life -- he would wait imtil the last possible moment unless he were pushed. A mission was practical and could succeed. They had to get through, and yet only one of them must reach Cady. They spoke carefully of neutral things as they moved through the water. How skin divers in the old days had started the trek to the ocean. How the opening worlds of atomic science had allowed mankind to flourish until they literally carpeted the world's land with their myriad lives. How the land broke down as a food-supplier, and the sea rescued it, and now the spore-farming of space and the mining of space had made the economy of the Floor obsolete. Already, the Hudson River in New York pointed the way to the new uses of the ocean. The famous deep-bottom apartments were complete with movies, stores, hospitals. The rest of the continental shelf would follow and finally the true ocean depths, and the agrarian age of the ocean would be over. There was no doubt about it when they came to the Old Man's hiding place. The men of the ocean had sacrificed subterfuge for strength, in their direct, lazy way. He was in Cady's No. Three mine as Jim had expected, because it was the largest. Around the great metal mound that moved along the ocean floor was the fire-fly twinkle of the lights of some two dozen slowly-circling guards. They had floodlights on the exterior, turning the dark water to a sullen green and making the clean-swept white sand floor glitter. Jim and Helen sank behind a submerged rock to study the terrain. "Now, Jim," said Helen, we've got to settle this thing. I know you plan to use me for a diversion so that you can get into the mine, but I can't allow it." "I've brought you through the radar net," said Jim. "You couldn't have made it on your own. In fact, I've saved your life, and I think I can find a way for you to get out with a whole skin -- " "Jim, Jim, don't you see my need's the greater? To you this is simply a way of proving yourself. To Bea -- and the rest of the people on the Floor. That you can be the biggest man on the Floor. You can always go elsewhere and do better. You showed that once when you left the Floor and Bea." "I had to." "You didn't have to shoot a man to prove your love for her. That was overdone. You don't have to come back as the biggest man on the Floor, in charge of this wonderful new project. That's overdone, too. You must have a romantic notion of yourself." "The spacemen need the Floor," he said in hot defensive anger. "Maybe they do. But you won't be any more successful with your project if you succeed than you were in your courtship with Bea, or with your space career, because nobody cooperates with somebody who always plays big-shot." "Big-shot!" he laughed bitterly. "Little shot, Helen. My time in space is almost done. If I don't put over this project, I've only got a few years of down-hill space travel left in me." "You left the Floor to find something," she said. "You didn't find it. Now you're back, still hunting. What is it, Jim Talbot?" There are things too deep to say. He remembered his brother, ten years older, who had left the Floor for space. Who had come back to their drab farm home buoy wearing a uniform and medals. Who had come back with a beautiful land girl as his wife. Jim had been ten then, and his eyes grew big when Buck Talbot talked about the far-off places, the frozen, awing silences, tli strangeness and wonder of the deep velvet space sky. Jim remembered the size and shape and color of the medal his brother wore on his right breast "For Valor Beyond the Call of Duty". He remembered how awed his playmates had been with Buck and his land girl wife. And in die prime of his manhood, Buck had gone back into space and disappeared forever, the girl along with him, and left behind an image that Jim, at least, had never forgotten... "What is it, Jim Talbot?" she asked. "Nothing," he said. "I don't even have a choice like you," she said. "I've got to get through to preserve what little I've got. If you won't help -- " She gave him a backward shove. One minute they were muttering, face-plate to face-plate. The next she had shoved him off balance and fired at him with her underwater pistol, which she must have stowed into her suit way back on the submarine when she was alone in the "Ladies". Her inexperience betrayed her. She missed. In a swimming swoop he did a backward spin and came up with the short spear gun he had acquired at Bea's. There was a rising, impatient anger inside of him, a sudden fury at her assault on his motives. He fired from the belt and he had had years of experience with guns. She took six inches of metal without a sound and floated there, spread out, her weight bumping her down towards the ocean floor, now that she was immobile. She gave one convulsive jerk and drifted, and the line from the gun twitched with her dead weight and the current's sway. He couldn't tell if he'd killed her. He only knew that the moment for her to provide a diversion had come, not in the way he planned, but it was here, and the rest must be action. The group at the mine picked up the violent motions on hand radar and sped for the spot. He broke the spear gun line free and shoved his helmeted head in the loose ooze of the ocean floor, getting rid of the propeller. He let the water arrange his limbs -- he made like a rock. How many thousands of times as a kid had he made "rock" in the Floor games, the underwater version of hide and seek? Though the men of the ocean could see twice as well in their medium as the land-men, he knew he was only a wavy shadow on the ocean floor compared to the spreadeagled figure floating free. Five of the guards gathered her in and pushed her towards the mine. They didn't see him because at the moment they weren't looking for him. Jim boldly swam behind them at a short distance, his sea-lamp off, safe in the temporary confusion. As they approached the mine, he looked for the suction inlets on the bottom, sucking in the mineral-rich ooze of the Floor as the entire dome structure traveled its way to Catalina and back. The mine was working. No man of the land would dare invade a mine via the silt tunnels. No man of the ocean would expect to get away with it. Jim let the others get ahead of him and dived ; he found the strong flow of the intake. There was a horrible moment while he was pressed with the hard-flowing mud against a filter screen, the pressure crunching at his body then he broke the screen. He was sucked into the silt intake. The secret of not getting stuck in this passage, no bigger than a man's body, was to keep moving, and he held his empty spear gun between his legs and fired off round after round into the soft mud, taking advantage of the backthrust of the gun to keep him moving. He ended up in the settling tanks with a plop, buried in mud. By now instruments in the mine would show that a large, foreign body had broken the screen and passed into the tank. They would investigate. Instead of trying to surface, Jim burrowed in the mud, beating down his claustrophobic fears of the thick stuff, reminding himself that it was only another medivim slightly thicker than water. He knew the position of the waste trap on the bottom of the tank and found it, feeling the suction at the bottom pulling him down, to be ejected again when the tank was flushed. He went on down into the flush canal. Good. Their instruments would now show that the foreign body had passed out again. He put his rubber fingers to the wall, wedged himself tight and closed his eyes to wait. This time he'd have to be good. But then he was always equal to the task, wasn't he? The girl, with all her need to win, had been inefficient and bungling, and he who, according to her, was only trying to play big-shot was the success. He grinned sardonically, and then remembered he'd had to shoot her and lost his grin. He forced extraneous thoughts from his mind. He wasn't inside the mine yet. He tried to visualize the control panel. The tank must be almost filled by now. He tried to think himself right at the point of the solenoid, ready to divine the switch of the motors from intake pumping over to flushing action. Again his experience paid off. He had done this once before when he worked for Schneider's Deep-Sea Mines as a young man, and a foolish, visiting tourist had got himself sucked into the tank and Jim had had to go in and pull him out. The intake cycle ended. He had ten seconds while relays clicked, the mass was read, and the computer decided what minerals to retain, what to flush out. Jim made the supreme effort then, going back up the flush tunnel into the sediment tank itself, burrowing up through the weight of the mud. He had three feet to go and he barely wriggled out of the opening when the flushing started and the sea water roared in, and the tank began to swing to separate out the metals it wanted by centrifugal force. It was a wild ride, but not too bad if you didn't mind being thrown around on the hard metal walls like a paper clip in a vacuum cleaner. In the rhythmic, spinning action the heavier metals settled out to the collecting pans and the waste silt began to pour through the flush outlet. Jim waited until the tank was nearly empty and the whirling action slowed to "idle". Then he threw up his feet, struck open one of the "reach through" hatches and squirmed out into the mine proper, falling to the floor in exhaustion. He had not been detected. His entrance had been noted by the instruments on the inlet side. His exit had been noted on the outlet side. The machine had absorbed a two hundred and eighty pound rock and ejected it again. The instruments had noted the loss of the screen and replaced it at the end of the cycle, but they had no way of recording his return from the outlet hatch because foreign bodies, once in the flush tunnel always obeyed the laws of force and gravity and went on out. Thus you could fool a machine as easily as a man, if you had more knowledge than it did. Jim grinned weakly to himself. Another factor helped him. Helen, the diversion. The men of the ocean certainly wouldn't be bothering about instrument chart-bumps while they had the excitement of the girl to occupy them. Jim went upstairs to the main room and eased through the door. T hey had laid her on the low observation bunk, looking out the glass plate over the ocean floor where you sometimes sat to watch and guide the mine as it bumped its way along the bottom. In the old days you could spot the slowmoving mighty black sea bass and put on a suit and go out spearfishing while the mine lumbered along. But there were almost no fish any more, between the mainland and Catalina, due to Floor civilization. A few small kelp bass and deep water ling cod were all that had survived. There was a doctor on duty there, naturally, and he was bent over the girl. They had taken off her suit and he had some kind of tube stuck in her chest. Draining her lungs of the blood from his shot, decided Jim, growing cold all over. The men of the ocean stood around, hang-dog, equipment dangling from big hands, their eyes soft, their white faces frowning. Though there might be a dozen bodies floating in the kelp tonight, a wounded enemy and a woman -- that was different. He shouldered his way boldly through the crowd to her and looked down. Her cheeks seemed sunken, and the eyes were bright. He thought her mind wandered, but she looked directly at him. "You -- made it." "I always do." She moved her hands. It cost effort but she had, suddenly, a paper there. Behind them the men of the ocean stirred and muttered and the doctor looked up sharply from his equipment. "My need -- is greater," she said. He couldn't refuse to take the paper. It fell partly open. There was a snapshot inside -- of two kids. He stood there, his back to the ocean men, feeling hot and cold, staring into the dying eyes. Her ploy, he decided, was a very good ploy indeed. She smiled faintly as she saw his defeat. He turned around to the men of the ocean. "My name's Jim Talbot," he said. "I'm a nephew of Old Man Cady, and I'm just back from space. I want to see him." A tall man raised a spear-gun. "My name's Ferris, and we don't remember you, Jim, not at all. The Old Man doesn't remember the ones that have left the Floor." "Don't bubble me. Oyster-head," said Jim, recognizing the man and remembering the old nickname. "I've licked you before and I can do it again." Ferris raised his gun. There was a silence while you could hear the tortured breathing of the girl. Then she screamed, and she didn't have to do it, but in that final diversion Jim came up with his muddy spear gun and flung it underhanded at Ferris and knocked the other's gim away. He darted for the door of the Old Man's apartment as he remembered it and the uproar started. But it didn't last very long. There was a commanding clang of an alarm bell, and the door swung open and a man rolled out in a wheel chair. "For the love of God," piped a thin voice, "what's going on here?" The men of the ocean fell back before the wizened old man in the wheel chair. The doctor cried out in protest "You must stay in bed." The old man pounded on the metal floor with his cane and shouted in a quavery voice. "Shut up, everybody." Tliey shut. "Now you," said Cady to Jim. "Your nephew," said Jim rapidly, eyeing Ferris who had recovered his gun. "Jim Talbot, Ed's son, back from space on an errand." "Welcome back," said the old man drily and pointed to the bunk. "And she -- " "She is -- was -- an agent for the Foundation, trying to get through to you with a contract for the Floor. I helped her." Ferris sprang forward with a cry "No contract!". He went for Jim, but the old man's cane tripped him and spread him on the deck. "You always were a fool, Ferris," said the old man. He looked around the room, his aged, redrimmed eyes reminding Jim of an ancient rooster's. "What the hell's wrong with everybody? You want to starve forever? Even your own goddam wives don't want to see the Floor ruined. Look at you -- kelp-cutters and miners. You used to hate each other's guts. You used to fight like madmen about whether a patch of ground should be mined or farmed. Now you're friends. You fight the Real Estaters, and you'll end up friends with them, because the old way's done on the Floor. "'Course I signed the option. They didn't trick me in the Long Beach Hospital. I always meant to sign the option and the contract to save you fools a piece of living. Only my special bodyguard with Mr. Ferris in charge showed up and rushed me back here before I could finish the deal." The old man paused. "When you get old, you get a little tired, so temporarily I had to let you have your way and bring me back here, I figured we'd talk it over later; but all you do is lock me in a room and shove medicine down my throat." He made a gesture. He tossed a hand spear-gun to Jim. "Now Jim, lad, you can give me some help with these fools, before they kill me with medicine and their own foolish fears." Jim took the gun and grinned, but the men of the ocean stared in shock at the peppery little man. "For fifty years I've run the Floor," he lectured in heat. "I never did anything but what was right for all of you. Gave you credit. Helped you build farms and mines and farm home buoys. Sold your products. Whenever one of you went broke, I took over your land so that no outsiders could come in, and I kept you on, at a disastrous percentage that didn't help my pocket, by God! My rewaid for keeping you going -- you kick me in the tail. But I'm going to save you once more, just the same. Jim, where's the agent's contract?" Ferris started to protest but Jim forced the spear against his throat and Ferris stopped moving. Jim found the paper on the floor and flipped it to the old man who smiled up at Ferris. "Senile Old Man Cady," said the old man. "Doesn't know nothing, does he. Oyster-head? Listen to me, under this contract you'll all get enough money for your various equities to either go into the apartment building business or take your cut and move out beyond Catalina and start a new farm or sea mine. This is a present from me and I don't care which you do. Now before I sign I want to ask one thing -- Anybody here who's made a profit on farming or mining the last three months?" There was no answer. The old man nodded and smiled. "Permit a senile old man one further question, boys. What the hell are you going to do if we don't sell this land and get some money? Mr. Ferris -- any ideas?" "We'll find new uses for the kelp to save the farms," said Ferris. "To save the mines we'll cut metal prices to meet space competition and hold on. We can make it, boys, if we can hold on." Cady nodded. "Very good. Thought of the same thing myself a year and a half ago. Took the problem to CalTech and a couple of other research outfits. Paid a research and marketing men in the United States say it can't be done, but Mr. Ferris here has advantages they don't. He never finished Floor high-school. Anybody else here want to string along with him? Be glad to give you your land back clear, even though most of you owe me plenty on it." Nobody stirred. But Ferris had another shot in his locker. "How much do you make on this deal, Cady?" he asked. The old man smiled. "Plenty," he said. "I'm just senile enough to still want to make a little dough, while you're six months behind in all your payments, Ferris. I intend to go on making money as long as I live. Anybody that doesn't want to make money -- vote for Ferris. He'll save the Floor for you, if you want to eat kelp three times a day and wear seaweed clothes for the rest of your lives. Here's your last chance, men. After all, the Foundation can buy sea land further up the coast and they won't keep the offer open forever." The old man lifted the pen to sign. Then he dropped it. "No, by God, I won't sign unless everybody agrees. Even Ferris. The men of the ocean have always stuck together and I plan to keep it that way. Talk to him, some of you." Ferris looked slightly dazed. The men of the ocean moved up on him, muttering. "What's the idea, Oyster-head?" "What gives there?" "What's to use for money?" "You wanta ruin us?" "Oh, I'll go along with the crowd," cried Ferris Weakly. "Go ahead and sign. I just wanted to make sure it was all on the up-andup. Chief, that's all. And I don't like to see this lousy Spacer here making dough off us." The old man chuckled and signed the contract. "Then you should've talked to me, instead of slapping me into the hands of the doctor and shutting me up with thermometers and medicines," he said. "As for Jim and his friend -- the Foundation hired 'em. Let the Foundation pay 'em. Once a man leaves the Floor he isn't a part of my family no more." The old man flung the contract at Jim and then he wheeled up to the bunk where Helen lay. "It looks like the Foundation will get off cheap this trip," he said softly. He took the blanket and pulled it over the girl's face. The white, thin hands patted the still figure. "A nice-looking girl, Jim. Too bad." Then with a thoughtful frown the old man wheeled himself back into the bedroom and closed the door. The men of the ocean broke out into a babble. "Boy, that was close," said a sea-miner who had spent twenty-four hours in trying to prevent the signing. "Like he says, the Foundation might not've signed with us if we'd held off much longer." Heads nodded in agreement and the men pressed around Jim, begging to have the honor of signing the contract as witnesses. That, thought Jim, was real salesmanship. He let them fight over the contract, turned back to the still figure on the bunk. He pulled back the blanket and studied the dead face. It was girlish in its relaxation, but the worry lines of the mother-provider were there and an aura of competence he hadn't noted before. Yes, she would forgive him for his shot that ended her life. She had understood better than he, that she couldn't make the mission alone. Once he had begun to guide her, she knew that she must win him to her cause at all costs, and the cost had been high indeed. She had correctly judged that she couldn't win him except by finding and using his weakness -- his need to make the heroic gesture. All of his life he had made the gesture in the manner of his big brother. Buck Talbot. With Bea years ago on the Floor, in his space career, and on the day he had stalked into the Retirement Fund squabble and played strong man with his solution. And in the end Helen had allowed him to play hero for two kids in Glendale whose future would now be secure. No wonder there was a half-smile on the dead lips. He pulled up the blanket and went to draw himself a black cup of coffee, winking back the tears of sadness. He looked up and saw, for the first time, a teen-age youth who had been staring at Helen's body and was now staring at him. The features resembled Ferris, and Jim figured it was Ferris's boy. The lad came up with adolescent awkwardness, compulsion-driven but shy, his eyes shining on Jim's uniform now that he had shed his diving suit. "What's it like out there, mister?" he asked. "What's space like?" Jim put his hand on the lad's shoulder. "Son, it's just about like every place else, a lot of fun and a lot of dull waiting in between." But the lad refused to downgrade his illusions. "You're a space captain," he said in awe. "You run a space ship." Then Jim did what Buck Talbot should've done for him, years ago. "It's sixty feet long," said Jim, nodding. "It's got a lot of machinery and four other guys besides myself. We carry freight and in between times play cards, and I tell the boys what it's like under the ocean and they think it must be pretty wonderful down here." The lad looked puzzled and the glamor slipped out of his eyes. "Oh," he said. He turned away. Something stirred inside Jim too. The ghost of Buck Talbot was laid to rest at last. He had done the thing that had to be done for Helen, for Old Cady, for the men of the ocean and for the land people. He had even done a little something for Ferris and his son. And through it all he had done nothing for himself, nothing at all. This was the role he'd always yearned to play and he had played it to the hilt. Done nothing for himself? No -- he wouldn't have to make the gesture any more, and his was the greatest reward of all, self-knowledge, a guide for the rest of his life.    The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not, can no longer wonder, can no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. -- Albert Einstein Illustrated by Ed Emsh until life do us part Its a long life, when youre immortal. To retain sanity youve got to be unemotional. To be unemotional, you carCt fall in love .   woman was dying. Anne Tabor lay limp and pale, her long, slender limbs making only shallow depressions on the mercury bath which supported her. Webb Fellow stood over her awaiting the effects of the sedative to relieve her pain. His title was Doctor, but almost everyone in this age had an M. D. certificate with several specialties to his credit. Webb Fellow was simply one who continued to find interest and diversion in the field of physiological maintentance. He stood tall and strong above her, lean-bellied, smooth-faced and calm appearing, yet he didn't feel especially calm. As the agony eased from Anne's face he spoke softly. "I'm glad you came to me, Anne." She moistened her lips and spoke without opening her eyes. "It was you or Clifford -- and Cliff hasn't practiced for a century or more. It's -- it's quite important to me. Webb. I really want to live. Not because Vm afraid of dying, but... "I know, Anne. I know." Everyone in Chicago knew. Anne Tabor was the first female of that city to be chosen for motherhood in almost a decade. And in the three days since the news had flashed from Washington, Anne Tabor had generated within the blood-stream of her lovely, near-perfect body, a mutated cancerous cell that threatened to destroy her. Mutant leukemia! "Just relax, dear. We have the whole city of Chicago to draw on for blood while we work this thing out." He touched a cool hand to her fevered forehead, and the slight motion stirred the golden halo that her hair made on the silvery surface of the mercury. The word, "dear", echoed strangely in his ears once he had said it. Her eyes had opened at the expression of sentiment, and now they were wide and blue as they examined him. A tiny smile curved her pale lips. "Did I hear correctly?" "Yes, dear." He repeated the word deliberately, and for the first time since his student days he felt the web of his emotions tighten and twist into a knot of unreason. She mustn't die... not now! Her smile widened with her look of mild amazement. "Why Webb, I do believe you mean it!" "You have always been high in my affections, Anne." "Yes, but -- it's a long life. Such a long life!" That damned phrase again! The essence of sanity, they called it. The cliche of cliches that underscored this whole business of immortality. Be not concerned for the frustrations of the moment. All obstacles are transient -- all obstacles and all emotions. The price of immortality is caution, patience, temperance, Deep personal attachments lead to love, love leads to jealousy, jealousy to un-saneness, insanity to violence, violence to -- " All he had said was that she was high in his affections, but no one spoke of such things any more. When one did, it was considered that more than conventional promiscuity was involved in his intentions. He turned away abruptly and studied the dials that registered her blood-pressure, pulse and metabolism. Incredible how even women three hundred years old remained sensitive to the slightest sign of infantile passion in their men. And more fantastic yet, that he, Webb Fellow, of the original generation of immortals some seven hundred years old, should find the destructive spark of possessiveness still alive in his semantically adjusted nervous system. Mechanically he noted the systole and diastole lines on the revolving chart and ordered an attendant to administer whole blood. Before he left her he turned back for a moment. "It shouldn't be more than # hours, Anne, and I promise you there won't be any impairment of your maternal capacity." He was startled to note that tears welled into her eyes. "Thank you, Webb. Clifford was worried that I might be disqualified." "Nonsense! Clifford hasn't kept up on things." He strode away without further comment, but as he stepped from surgery into pathology he was troubled. Why was Clifford so worried about her? Did Clifford think that Anne would choose him to father her child? The thought struck like a snake. Before he could block it the fangs were deep, and the venom of adolescent jealousy raced from brain to endocrines to blood-stream, poisoning his whole nervous system. Its a long life! He resorted to the old antidote himself, despising his weakness as he breathed the words. They came out as a sigh. He discovered that he was searching his memory to determine whether he or Clifford could lay claim to Anne by seniority. Seniority? What damned nonsense was that? Anne had traded back and forth between Clifford and him for at least # years -- with uncounted, trivial alliances with how many other men? But the others didn't count. It was he and Clifford whom Anne preferred, just as he and Clifford had discussed on countless occasions Anne's perpetual attraction to them both. Anne was Clifford's favorite, and he'd made no secret of it. "Over here, Webb. We have it!" It was Porter, the head staff pathologist holding out a small vial of crimson-clear liquid. "This ferric-protein salt should cure our famous lady quite quickly. It played sudden hell in the culture." "Oh, yes? Fine. Thank you, Porter. Thank you very much!" The narrow-shoiildered pathologist gave him a second look. "Certainly. Don't mention it." He paused then asked bluntly, "Did she name you for paternity?" Webb managed to hold the vial steady to the light, but his voice was a shade too taut and high. "Not yet -- that is, we haven't discussed it. It's a possibility, I suppose," "I suppose," Porter mocked gently. "You with the highest geneticdesirability rating in the State, give or take a couple of counties." Yes, there were a couple other genetic rating as Webb Fellow, and one of them was Clifford Ainsley. The obvious question thrust itself upon Webb for the first time. Was that why Anne Tabor had seemed to concentrate her favors upon him and Clifford? Had she actually anticipated the eventuality of being chosen for motherhood, and had her criterion for male companionship been simply a high genetic rating? Ifs a long life. Even with such unlikely odds against the contingency, he supposed any qualified female secretly nurtured the hope that someday -- With the inexplicable tension mounting in him he passed the vial along to an assistant with instructions for administering it. Anne would be in no condition to discuss the matter for another day or two. But he must know. He must know whether she had already chosen Clifford. He slipped into a light streetjacket, caught an express to topside and engaged a taxi. His finr was poised over the destination dial before he realized with a start that he had forgotten the five-digit number for Clifford's address. It had been that long since he had called on his old friend. Friend? The concept seemed suddenly strange. How long since their friendship had actually dissolved into an unacknowledged rivalry? Nonsense. He and Clifford had both been uncommonly busy with their respective professions. And since Clifford had branched from medicine into robotics, their paths and interests had simply diverged. Alternating almost weekly between the two men, Anne Tabor had kept each more or less informed of the other's activities, but somehow he and Clifford had ceased looking each other up. The directory gave him Clifford's number, and he dialed it. The small vehicle lifted quickly, slipped into the invisible traffic pattern and began applying the dialed codeaddress to the electronic grid that cross-hatched Chicago like a mammoth waffle. As traffic cluttered ahead on one particular striation, the taxi banked smoothly and rightangled to the next parallel course and proceeded. Neat, safe, fool-proof. Perfect transportation within proscribed geometrical limits, Webb thought. An infinite number of routes from one point to another -- like the course of a human life -- but all within certain proscribed limits. It's a long life. The course of a man's life could be considered a passage with infinite possibilities only if he were allowed to backtrack occasionally. Was that what he was doing? Had life grown so dull that he was seeking the diversion of immaturity again? ImmcArtality. Was it really so important? Once there had been a time when love, open, unashamed love had been accepted as one of life's strongest motivations. And it wasn't just a feeling of jealous possessiveness. There was a feeling of mutuality in it, a tenderness, an unselfishness and closeness of communion between man and woman. How had this exalted condition become debased into the casual association that now existed between the sexes? Debased? That was a loaded term. What was the matter with him? Anne Tabor was a lovely, desirable creature, but no more lovely, no more desirable than a hundred other females he knew. An odd, almost unique feeling of shame swept over him as his cab sank to the landing strip on Clifford's apartment building. He must conceal his state of mind from Clifford or be judged a complete imbecile. prise." Cliff's face was entirely without emotion. "Anne! It's about Anne, isn't it?" "Anne will be fine." "Good, good! You startled me, standing there in the door like a messenger of doom. I thought for a moment -- well, things wouldn't be the same without little Annie, would they?" They had moved into ClifTs apartment, and Webb shrugged out of his jacket. The spacious quarters and expensive appointments reminded Webb of Clifford's wealth. "The robot business must be thriving," Webb remarked. "Anne didn't mention such luxury over here." "The girl is tactful, my friend. Tactful, sweet, intelligent." Webb looked up quickly. He had seated himself, and Clifford stood before him in a stiff, almost challenging pose. "Am I welcome here?" the physician asked bluntly. "Certainly, certainly. We'll always welcome you here. Nothing need be changed just because Anne is to have a child. Nothing, that is, except the customary observance of monogamous convention until the child is bom and raised." A pound of lead sagged in Webb's stomach. "Then -- Anne has named you for paternity?" Clifford's slender, well-made body lost itself in the precise center of an over-size chair, he looked at Webb thoughtfully. "Well, practically. We were discussing it the other night when she had the first symptoms of this attack." He rubbed his hairless chin. "Why? Did you especially aspire to the noble station of parenthood?" The lazy sarcasm was salt in the wound. With difficulty, Webb kept his face cxpresiionless. "When I heard the news, naturally I gave the possibility some consideration. That's why I came over here." "I see. Anne didn't tell you." "She was in considerable distress when they brought her in. I -- I didn't ask her." In spite of the raven-black hair and youthful face, there was something about Clifford that Webb didn't like, a hardness, a lack-luster indifference verging on boorishness. The thought of losing Anne completely for more than eighteen years to this man was more painful even than Webb had anticipated. Impulsively he said, "For old time's sake, Cliff, will you do me a big favor?" The engineer stared at him and waited. "Take a vacation. Disappear for a few months." The dark eyebrows remained in a straight line. "And run out on Anne? You aren't serious." I am. Clifford laughed without smiling. "You'd better head for hormone harbor and take yourself a vacation, old man. You're becoming senile." "Then you won't withdraw?" "Of course not. You're asking more than a favor. You're asking me to offend Anne. These things are important to females." "It's important to me, too, Cliff." "Well, I'll be -- " The .smaller man rolled to his feet and put his hands on his hips. "I never ffiought to see the day when honored Elder Webb F#Uow would come muling around like a sub-century freshman. Of all the anachronistic drivel!" "You see?" Webb said eagerly, "It isn't important to you at all. Why can't you do this for me, Cliff? I -- I just can't stand the thought of being without Anne all those years." "Relax, Webb. Its a long life. Anne will be back in circulation before you know it." He paced to a low desk and extracted a small address book from a drawer. "If you're short of female acquaintances at the moment you can have these. I won't be needing them for awhile." He flipped the book at Webb. By chance the cover opened, caught the air and slanted the book up in its course so it struck the physician's cheek with a slap. The faint sting was the detonator that exploded all the careful restraint of seven centuries. Webb arose to his feet slowly and moved toward Clifford, "So medicine was too elementary for you? Human physiology and behaviour has no unsolved problems in it, you said once. So you went into robotics -- positronic brains -- infinite variety of response, with built in neuroses and psychoses. Human behaviour was too stereotyped for you, Clifford. Everyone was predictable to seven decimal places. You were bored." "You have it about right," the engineer said insolently. He let his arms drop to his sides, relaxed, unconcerned at the tension in the physician's voice. "You build fine chess-playing machines, I hear," Webb said softly, gradually closing the distance between them. "Your mechanical geniuses have outstripped our finest playwrights and novelists for creativity and originality. You've probed every conceivable aberrated twist of human nature with your psychological-probabilities computers. You've reduced sociology and human relations to a cipher -- " Clifford shrugged. "Merely an extension of early work in general semantics -- the same work that gave us mental stability to go with physical immortality. Certainly you don't disparage -- " "I'm disparaging nothing," Webb broke in. "I'm merely pointing out your blind spot, your fatal blind spot." "Fatal?" "Yes, Clifford, fatal. I'm going to kill you." The words seemed to have no effect. Not until Webb's powerful surgeon's hands closed about his neck did Clifford go rigid and begin his futile struggle. Webb did not crush the larynx immediately. He squeezed down with slow, breath-robbing pressure, feeling for the windpipe under his thumbs. Clifford gasped, " Sa long life, Webb... don't... , commit suicide." "It's a long life, but not for you, my stupid friend. Sure, they'll execute me. But you won't have her. Never again, do you hear?" Clifford's eyes were closed now, and Webb knew that the roaring in his victim's ears would be blotting out all external soimd. The knowledge infuriated him, and he screamed, "You fool, I pleaded with you. I took your insults and gave you every clue you needed -- didn't you recognize my condition? fool!" Clifford collapsed to his knees, and Webb let him go with one final, irrevocable wrench that certified his death. Clifford's death and his own. The penalty for murder was still capital punishment, and in his own case Webb acknowledged the logic and necessity of such harsh consequences. If there was one activity that immortal, #th Century Man could no longer afford, it was the luxury of falling in love... down at his crumpled victim. The heavy pressure was subsiding from his temples, and the gray film of irrational hate faded from his vision. "Cliff -- I -- " Then full horror closed in on him and he choked off. His hands felt slick and slippery, but it was his own sweat, not blood. The tactile memory of his fingers squeezing, crushing Clifford's 'throat, fed details of touch, texture and temperature to his tortured but clear brain. His surgeon's fingers were twitching, trying to tell him what they had discovered moments ago, but a more overwhelming thought blocked the message. Vve taken a mans life ,... and my own. And ruined Annes happiness. Vve brought her tragedy instead of happiness. No, not tragedy. Inconvenience. It would still be a long life for Anne. She would find a suitable mate, then her child would quickly erase the memory of this day. Still, he had committed murder, the first deliberate murder the world had known in centuries. "Damn you!" he screamed down at the body. "Why didn't you protect yourself?" "Oh, I did, Webb, I did!" Webb spun to face the direction of the voice behind him. His eyes must be playing tricks -- an afterimage, perhaps. "Who are you?" Webb demanded. "Clifford Ainsley. The prototype, that is, in the flesh and not a roboid." He nodded at the body on the floor. "Ainsley the Second. Strictly a lab job." "Cliff? Oh, my God!" Webb fell into a chair and sobbed with relief. Clifford Ainsley came to him and put a hand to his shoulder. "I'm truly sorry, Webb, but it was better this way. We can be thankful that I anticipated your actions." Webb looked up. "You -- expected me to murder you?" "The p c -- probability computation -- was remarkably high. You see, I ran your genetic pattern into the computer, added the double stress factor of Anne's serious illness and her forthcoming motherhood, and the subtotal spelled out a four letter word." Webb nodded slowly. "Love." "Right. And you know the corollary to that. When I punched in the details of your relationship with Anne and me, well, the next subtotal read -- homicide." The expression of relief in Webb's face changed to show the hurt he felt. "But if you knew all this, why did you have to play out this scene, even with a remote control robot?" "To discharge the murder impulse, my friend. I had to play it straight, reacting just as I would to your demands, had I not known of your condition. Otherwise the computations would have been based on false inter-reaction premises. And until you made the attempt on my life, you were a real danger to me -- and yourself. Now the shock of your murder attempt and the relief at your failure have dissipated that danger." It was true, Webb admitted to himself. No longer did he feel the least malice toward Cliff. But bitterness was still rank on his tongue. "So how does the story end? Does boy get girl or not?" "Of course. Boy always gets girl, if he wants her. It's a long life. At this phase she wants me." "Is that your own opinion or just another subtotal of the computer?" "Both." "But -- how does it really end. What happens when you punch the total key?" "You ask that, Webb? You, one of the very first to embrace the rigors of physical immortality? My dear friend, there is no total key."    lUustrated by Ed Emsh It was a new era -- an era of practicality and cruelty, an era for youth... An era of alarm, too, for people who were over sixty... pacing and listened; his head tilted expectantly. When he heard the elevator stop, he went with quick, awkward steps to the apartment door and opened it just a crack. "This time," he sighed with relief, "It's Eleanor." He opened the door for her. His wife breezed down the hall and through the open door. She dumped her armfiil of packages beside her on the couch as she kicked off her shoes. "Whew! What a relief!" Closing the door carefully, Sydney hurried over to her. "Ellie -- I've been worried. You didn't tell me you were going to be so late. And when you didn't call -- "Nonsense," she said gaily. "It's only #:#. Why, the stores are just now starting to board up. And you know the "A Cars" don't start running till seven." She smiled at him. "Would you get my slippers, honey?" He hesitated for a moment, and then shuffled into the bedroom. Eleanor stood in front of the couch flexing her tired toes. She had a small and rather dumpy figure without her high heels. And though her fashionably dressed body was usually molded into the latest silhouette, now in her more relaxed state she frankly looked her sixtyone years. Sydney came back with her slippers, and bent to put them on. "Thanks, dear, shopping just kills my feet. But, enough of this," she sighed, "I've got only a few minutes to get dinner ready before 'Manhunt' comes on." And she started for the kitchen. He followed and caught her heavily by the shoulders, his face stern. "Listen, Ellie -- I don't ever want you to come home so late that you have to take an armored car." He shook her to emphasize his statement. "But why?" she asked with genuine wonder. "They're safe enough. Edith and Ruth often take 'A' cars, and nothing's ever happened to them." He let her go reluctantly. "Ellie," he said gently, "I just want to be sure that nothing happens to you, that's all. We're at such a dangerous age now, with both of us over sixty. You're all I've got. I'd be so all alone without you." She thrust out her ample chest indignantly. "Sydney, the trouble with you is that you're still living in the past. You've got to keep up with the times. Sure, things are different now, than they were, say, ten years ago. But what of it? If life is more dangerous now, it's intense, too!" He eyed her steadily. "What's so "You've just got to accept," she continued glibly, as though it had been memorized, "the fact that it's a young people's world, now. Live for the day! That should be our motto." She smiled placidly at him. "That's the way I've been living this past year. As though each day was completely separate from the one before it -- and the one after. In a young people's world -- what else is there to do?" Eleanor patted her husband's cheek, and then looked past him into the living room, a shocked expression on her face. "Why Syd, have you been sitting here all alone without the T.V. on? Goodness, that's enough to make anyone start thinking! You march right in there and turn it on." He turned, with a slight shrug, to comply, and Eleanor started to fix dinner. The T.V. screen was in full view of the kitchen cubicle, of course. Apartments had been designed that way for years now. So, she was able to open the few cans and containers that constituted dinner, with her eyes almost entirely on the T.V. Sydney gave it a glance or two as he set the table. But he was too preoccupied with his thoughts to enjoy the programs as much as he usually tried to. He wondered why this day to day living didn't seem to be as much fun to him as it did to others. He fingered the "SixtyPlus" insignia sewn onto his shirt sleeve. To him, it had turned out to be merely a matter of waiting. Eleanor was fixing a salad, with hardly a glance at what she was doing, so automatically did her fingers accomplish their task. He looked at her, cheerfully doing what the times and fashion decreed, and wished he could accept things the way she did. He was very fond of her. Now that he had been retired, they should have had time to enjoy each other. But something was wrong. Most people tried to have fun while they were waiting. Their closest friends, Eddie and Jean, seemed to be enjoying their retirement period. Or were they really, he asked himself, remembering a few times in past conversations when the talk had verged momentarily in that direction, only to break off guiltily. They sat down to eat at the table in front of the screen, sitting side by side, of course, so they wouldn't miss any of the programs during dinner. Part way through the meal the phone rang. Sydney quickly got up to answer it. He knew Eleanor hated to be disturbed during a T.V. program. "Hello, Jean," he said pleasantly, recognizing her voice at once. "What's the matter? You sound so -- " His lips remained open, unexpectedly. Then, he put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. "Ellie!" he called so sharply that she turned at once. "What is it?" she snapped back at him between mouthfuls. "It's Jean. She says Eddie's gone out for 'fair game'!" His voice faded to a whisper. "Good God, Ellie. I don't know what to say to her!" Eleanor dropped her fork to the plate with an air of disgust rising to the surface. "Oh, that woman! She always did let Eddie worry her." She smiled benignly. "Tell her we're sorry to hear it, of course. But he had only a year to go anyway." "But she wants to know what to do!" He looked at her pleadingly. "She's acting hysterical. If she decides to go out herself -- Eleanor got up and took the phone from his shaky hand. He sat down on the couch, only distantly hearing snatches of what Eleanor was saying to Jean, picturing Eddie walking down the deserted streets. Probably right out in the middle, where anyone could see him. "No -- you stay right where you are -- no point in both of you . , . Yes, that's right. I've always known you had more pride than he did... Sure, we'll be over to see you -- no, not tonight!... Of course not; wait until morning -- remember, I'm counting on you, Jean." Eleanor finally hung up and, going back to the table, finished spearing the bit of salad she had been working on. Sydney looked at her, unbelievingly. "Ellie, how can you go right back to eating after what's happened to Eddie?" Her eyes remained on the screen. "Why should I feel sorry for him, if he didn't have the guts to wait? I just feel sorry for Jean. The shame of it! If it had happened some other way, it would have been different. And Jean hasn't even got enough sense to realize it isn't 'fair game' for Eddie. It's just plain suicide!" Eleanor glanced at her husband sharply. "What on earth's got into you tonight, Syd! You're jiunpier than I've ever seen you." He concentrated, a puzzled look on his face. "I don't know. I never thought much about it until today. And with Eddie. Everything falls into place suddenly, it all seems so wrong, so useless." He looked at her intendy as she pushed her empty plate away and lit a cigarette. "Ellie, doesn't it strike you as strange -- almost unbelievable -- that we accept the concept of longevity as a subversive one? Doesn't it seem -- well, weird -- that we sixty plus-ers sit around every night -- just waiting?" Eleanor turned innocuous grey eyes to him. "Oh, Sydney, you're talking like a silly pup. Let's pay attention to the show." "Some people kill themselves." He muttered, almost savoring the words. "Oh bosh, don't say such things!" Her voice was tight and angry. "Sydney, you wouldn't shame me like that, would you; not like that weak-kneed Eddie?" "Why not?" he retorted. He was beginning to feel ashamed of arguing with Eleanor but he couldn't stop. "Since my retirement, since I became a sixty plus-er, I've just been sitting around doing nothing. I feel like a stupid animal being kept in a pen." He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. She stroked his head lovingly but nevertheless condescendingly. "Sydney, there's so much you could be doing, now that you have time for it." He raised his head tiredly. "It's too late for that. But -- what have I missed? Have you got an answer?" "Well," she looked slightly disconcerted. "What all the others do. they play golf, and sunbathe, and go to lectures and shows, and  " Her ingenuity gave out. She stole a glance at the T.V. screen. "You've got to relax, honey, stop all this thinking. You know, 'eat, drink, and be merry' sort of -- " He noticed that her attention had wandered. He knew why. That cold chill in the pit of his stomach had told him that it was almost time. "Do we have to watch it, tonight?" Sydney asked her almost bitterly. "How can you really sit there and enjoy seeing all that violence and -- " She leaned back comfortably, watching the screen. "What else are the boys to do? The psychiatrists say, that since the war is over, pur boys need to drain off their energies somehow. Besides, sometimes it's really merciful." She folded her arms over her stomach, as though to dismiss the subject. The screen had darkened. There were two young men, dim and strange looking, with masks over the lower part of their faces. And they were making plans -- in a small, darkened room. Then, silently, they left the room, and crept through the somber streets. The camera followed them faithfully as they slipped cautiously from shadow to shadow. Sydney foimd himself watching the screen now, too. It compelled him against his will. "I went through a war," he hissed, clenching his fists tightly. "The Korean War -- when I was young. And when it was over I went back to work in an office. I didn't need any violence drained out of me! "Sshhh," Eleanor insisted, and then relented. "I keep telling you, Syd, these boys went through a different kind of war than yours. They've had more taken out of them than you had." She whispered it, her eyes never leaving the screen, her breath coming in excited gasps. "People have just outlived their usefcJness, now, by the time they are sixty. It's natural for the young folks to resent us, especially if we are a burden and there are too many of us. You've got to adjust, Sydney, just adjust to the times." The two men paused at an intersection -- paused for endless ple watched, hardly daring to breathe. Then slowly and deliberately, with overtly melodramatic malice, they turn a corner, and start to run swiftly along the watched -- there were some who felt a cold clutching within them. Sydney leaned forward on the couch, his pale eyes almost bulging with intentness. The intersection on the screen had been familiar. The street the cameras were recording -- was more so. Adjust, he thought, I wish it was that easy for me. Adjust to the times, she says -- they all say -- thereby excusing everything hideous, and violent, and disgusting that exists in the present. Nobody objects to anything. There's nothing constructive for individuals anymore. They just accept. Adjust to bein idle and useless at sixty, whether I like it or not. Adjust to A Gars, the boarding up of shops every night, not daring to go out after dark. Get used to violence and fear, sitting in front of this screen as though it were an object of worship. Endure "Manhunt" every night; not knowing -- just waiting -- waiting... those of us who live to sixty-five. Eleanor cleared her throat and then whispered huskily. "They've been up the same street before." She turned to him, her eyes watery with agitation pushed almost to its limit. He couldn't help it. All his resentment was momentarily stilled by his affection for her. He smiled. "Sure, Ellie. Many times." Involuntarily, he put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. Without warning, the two men stopped in front of an apartment house. They glanced quickly around, and then slipped into the building, the camera close upon them, Sydney took his wife's hand. "Why they've even been in the very same building before." His face felt cold and damp. He added resolutely, "It's a big apartment house, Ellie, a real big one." Suddenly he found himself listening -- listening -- hardly breathing. It seemed as though sound didn't exist anymore. There was just silence, grotesque and unnatural. Then he heard it. First there was a stealthy shufiling sound coming a long ways down the hall. Then the slight regular noise of a wheeled object, following. Sydney saw that she had not heard. Her eyes were desperately fixed on the screen. It could be, he thought chaotically, it could be the Masons across the hall. They're almost sixty-five. Then the door knob turned, and the door swung silently open. Stiffly, Sydney turned his head to the door. There was time, they saw to that. There was time to see the two masked men with guns in thenhands. And behind them was the T.V. camera, registering the scene that was duplicated on his own screen. There was even time to turn to Ellie; to see the look of cheated disappointment in her eyes change to astonishment as the bullet cut cleanly into her open mouth. And then there was no more time for Sydney Mercer either, who had reached the age of sixty plus and therefore was past his usefulness. Another bullet stopped his intake of breath. The camera moved in for a close up of the two men; their lips, beneath the masks, smiling and guileless. Then the camera hovered for a few moments over the ludicrously postured bodies on the couch for a fade out. "Manhunt" was over for the night. The announcer's voice and figure gradually took over the expanse of the screen. "Tonight's program has been (Continued on page #) The Morrisons didn't lose their freedom. They were merely sentenced to the highways for life, never stopping anywhere, going no place, just driving, driving, driving... with him. They were influential people. He was put on the road.  Stan wanted to scream at the big sixteen-cylinder Special to go faster. But Salt Lake City, where they would allow him to stop over for the maximum eight hours, was a long way off. And anyway, he couldn't go over a hundred. The Special had an automatic cut-off. He stared down the super tenlane Freeway, down the glassy river plunging straight across the early desert morning -- into nowhere. That was Anna's trouble. His wife couldn't just keep travelling, knowing there was no place to go. No one could do that. I can't do it much longer either, Stan thought. The two of us with no place to go but back and forth, across and over, retracing the same throughways, highways, freeways, a thousand times round and round like mobile bugs caught in a gigantic concrete net. He kept watching his wife's white face in the rear-view mirror. Now there was this bitter veil of resignation painted on it. He didn't know when the hysteria would scream through again, what she would try next, or when. She had always been highly emotional, vital, active, a fighter. The Special kept moving, but it was still a suffocating cage. She needed to stop over somewhere, longer, much longer than the maximum eight hours. She needed treatment, a good long rest, a doctor's care -- She might need more than that Complete freedom perhaps. She had always been an all-or-nothing gal. But he couldn't give her that. Shimmering up ahead he saw the shack about fifty feet off the Freeway, saw the fluttering of colorful hand-woven rugs and blankets covered with ancient Indian symbols. It wasn't an authorized stop, but he stopped. The car swayed slightly as he pressed the hydraulic. From the bluish haze of the desert's tranquil breath a jackrabbit hobbled onto the Freeway's fringe. It froze. Then with a squeal it scrambled back into the dust to escape the thing hurtling toward it out of the rising sun. Stan jumped out. The dust burned. There was a flat heavy violence to the blast of morning sun on his face. He looked in through the rear window of the car. "You'll be okay, honey." Her face was feverish. Sweat stood out on her forehead. She didn't look at him. "It's too late," she said. "We're dead, Stan. Moving all the time. But not alive." He turned. The pressure, the suppression, the helpless anger was in him meeting the heavy hand of the sun. An old Indian, wearing dirty levis and a denim irfiirt and a beaded belt, was standing near him. His face was angled, so dark it had a bluish tinge. "Blanket? Rugs? Hand-made. Real Indian stuff." "My wife's sick," Stan said. "She needs a doctor. I want to use your phone to call a doctor. I can't leave the Freeway -- " This was the fourth unauthorized stop he had made since Anna had tried to jump out of the car back there -- when it was going a hundred miles an hour. The Indian saw the Special's license. He shrugged, then shook his head. "For God's sake don't shake your head," Stan yelled. "Just let me use your phone -- " The Indian kept on shaking his head. There was no emotion, only a fatalistic acceptance of the overly-complex world he and many of his kind had rejected long ago. "You're a Crackpot." "But what's that to you when I just want to use your phone? If I can get a doctor's affidavit -- " "If I help you, then the Law come down on my neck." "But I only want to use the phone!" "I cannot risk it. You drive on now." He felt it, the thing that was slowly dying in Anna's eyes. This need to strike out, strike out hard and murderously at something real. This suppressed feeling had been growing in him now for too many miles to remember. He started forward. But the Indian slid the knife from his beaded belt. "I am sorry, and that is the honest truth," The Indian said. "But you have to move on now." The Indian stepped back toward the ancient symbols of his kind. "We have stopped moving. We stay here now no matter what. Now, White Doctor, it is your turn to move on." He put his hand over his eyes as though to push something down. One act of violence, and the questionable "freedom" would be ended. That would be an admission of defeat. His hand still over his eyes, he backed away. Then he turned, choking and half blinded with smoldering rage. Keep moving. Nothing else to do with ffiem but put them on the road and keep them moving, never letting them stop over long enough to cause trouble, to stir up any wrong ideas. Hit the road. Crackpot. Head on down the super tenlane Freeway into the second Middle Ages lit with neon. Then he was running, yelling at Anna. She was past the shack and stumbling through sand toward the moimtains. He coaxed her back and into the car, sickness gorging his throat as she kicked and screamed at him and he forced her into the comer of the back seat. "Stan, we could run to the mountains." "The Law wouldn't let us get very far. Remember, the Special's remotely controlled. If we leave the Freeway, they'd be on us in no time. Tliey Imow when we stop, where we stop. They know if we leave the Freeway!' "But we would have tried!' "They're just waiting for us to do something legally wrong so they can put us away, honey. We can't let ourselves be goaded into doing anything legally wrong!" "Stan -- she was shaking her head, and her eyes were wet. "Can't you see, can't you see? What they do to us doesn't matter now. It's what we do, or don't do -- " When she quieted down a little, he got back under the wheel. Within a hundred feet, the Special was going eighty-five miles an hour. T he thing he had to hold on to hard, was the fact that they had never really done anything wrong. Anna needed a good long rest so she could regain Ae proper perspective. The Higher Court itself had said they hadn't done anything wrong. There were thousands now on the Freeways, none of them had any real criminal labels on them. They were risks. They might be dangerous. Attitudes not quite right. A little off center one way or another at the wrong time. Some personal indiscretion in the past. A thought not quite orthodox in the present. A possible future threat. A threat to total security. Be careful, easy does it. Too many black marks on his road record and the "freedom" of the road would go. Then he would be a criminal in fact, instead of a vague criminal possibility, and put behind bars. Or worse. The hell with them. The heU with them all. He pulled over onto an emergency siding and stopped. Not authorized. A good long rest and talk with Anna -- Then he saw it. Suddenly, frantically, he wanted to move on. But now he couldn't. He kept seeing the light of defiance fading from Anna's eyes. The Patrolcar was there, the way it always was there, suddenly, materializing out of the desert, or out of a mountain, a side street. Sometimes it was a helio dropping out of the sky. Sometimes it was a light Hashing in darkness. Every official of the law: city, county, state, or federal, had a full record on every Special. They could control them at will. Stop them, start them, keep them moving down the line. Jails of the open road. Mobility lending to incarceration a mock illusion of freedom. Open sky. Open prairie. The Freeway stretching ahead. And the Patrolcar coming up behind. The Patrolcar stopped. The two Patrolmen in black and gold imiforms looked in at Stan. "Well, egghead," the older, beefy one said. "It was nice of you to stop without being asked. A fellow named Ferret! back at Snappy Service No. # said you might be a trouble-maker. We thought we ought to check up." Stan said, "I wanted to use his phone to try to get a doctor to examine my vidfe. She's ill. She needs help and I've been trying -- " Without turning, the older Patrolman interrupted, "Larry, what you got on the philosopher here?" The younger Patrolman who had a shy, almost embtoassed air about him looked into his black notebook. "He isn't a philosopher, not officially, Leland. Every Crackpot we stop, you figure him to be a philosopher. You just hate philosophers that's all." "Well, that's a fact, boy." When he took the cigar out of his mouth, the corners of his mouth were stained brown. "My kid got loused up plenty by a philosopher in High School last year. I raised a squawk and got the Crackpot kicked out. I also got three others booted out for hiring him in the first place. I found out he was a lousy atheist!" The Patrolman put the cigar back into his mouth. "What have you got on him, Lieutenant?" "Stanley L. Morrison, B.A. Drake University, Class of '#. Doctor of Philosophy, Drake University, #. Federal employee #-#. Dropped from Federal employment, January, # -- " "What for. Lieutenant?" "For excessive political enthusiasm for the preceding political party in office." The Lieutenant looked up almost apologetically. "Looks like he was unfortunate enough to have been on the wrong side of the fence when the Independants were elected." "These guys are dangerous no matter what side they're on. A Crackpot shouldn't be on either side. Well, Lieutenant, what else?" "Professor of Nuclear Physics, Drake University, #-#. Dismissed by Board of Regents May #, charged with 'private thought inconsistent with the policies of the University'. Special inquiry August #. Dismissal sustained. Was put on the road as a permanent risk to security February #, #. He's been on the roads for a year and three months." Stan forced quiet into his voice. "My wife's sick. If I could get a doctor to examine her. I'm sure I could get a permit to lay over somewhere so she can get rest and proper treatment." "Only eight hours," the beefy one said. "That's the limit. And you're not supposed to have stopped here at all. Or back at the Indian's." "I know," Stan said. "But this is an emergency. If you could help me -- " The beefy one grinned into the back seat. "That might be all that's bothering the missus, egghead. She ain't getting the proper treatment maybe." Easy, easy does it. In the rearview mirror he could see that what the Patrolman said had brought a flush of life to her face. She was rigid now, and then suddenly she screamed. "Stan! For God's sake, Stan, don't take any more from the simian!" "Let's go," the young Lieutenant said quickly. "We've got the report and we'll forward it. There's no call to bait them." "Shut up," the beefy one said. "Don't tell me to shut up," the Lieutenant said. He put his notebook away. "This man's never committed any crime. That's why he's on the road. They didn't know what else to do with him. We're supposed to keep them moving that's all. Not hold them up because of personal vindictiveness." The beefy one's face was getting red. "Don't use your big words on me, boy. I'll send you back to College." "He's getting punishment enough. You've got nothing against him, or the woman." The beefy one took a deep breath. "Okay, Lieutenant. But I'm going to drop a few words in the right place. I guess you know how the Commissioner feels about Crackpots." "I don't give a damn. Come on, let's get out of here," The Lieutenant looked at Stan a moment. "You'd better move on. Doctor." "Thanks," Stan said. "At the next Snappy Service maybe you can phone. That's an hour's authorized stop for Specials. There's a Government Project in the hills nearby. You might be able to contact a Doctor there." T he sage spread out to a blur. Heat wavered up from the Freeway. In the rear-view mirror he saw Anna leaning back, her legs stretched out, her arms limp at her sides. She wasn't thinking about this with an historical perspective, that was the trouble. She had lost the saving sense of continuity with generations gone, which stretched Uke a lifeline across the frightening present. Keep the perspective. Wait it out. Tat was the only way. This was an historical phase, part of a cycle. Stan couldn't blame any one. Anxiety, suspicion of intellectuals and men of science -- as though they had been any more responsible really than any one else -- suspicion and fear. There always had to be whipping boys. In one form or another, he knew, it had happened many times before. Another time of change and danger. There was a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning. When things were better, they hadn't remained better. When they were bad, they couldn't stay bad. Wait it out. One thing he knew -- neither he nor any other scientist could detach himself from life. The frightened policemen of the public conscience had made the mistake of thinking they could detach the scientist. ril not withdraw from it. All of it represents a necessary change. If not for the immediate better, then ril be here for the immediate worst which will someday change into something better than ever. But Anna's tired voice was whispering in his ear. "First of all, we're individuals, men, women. We've got to fight, fight back!" "At what? Ourselves?" A sign said: hal's snappy She's right, he thought, and started slowing down. This is it. He wasn't going any farther until Anna was examined, and he was given an okay to stop somewhere so she could rest. It was a dusty oasis, an arid anachronism on ihe desert's edge. Beyond it, the mountains blundered up like giants from a purplish haze, brooding and somehow threatening. Groves of cottonwoods could be seen far ahead, and sprinklings of green reaching into the thinning sage. The old man shuffled out of the shade by the coke machine. Behind him, through dusty glass, Stan saw the blurred faces staring with still curiosity. The old man hesitated, then came around between the pumps to the driver's side. He was all stooped bone and leathery skin. His face, Stan thought beneath the rising desperation, resembled an African ceremonial mask. To the left a '# Fordster was cranked up for a grease job. But the only life around it was a scrawny dog lying out flat to get all the air possible on its ribby body, its tongue hanging out in the black grease. "The car's okay," Stan said. "I just want to use your telephone." "Doctor Morrison, you'd better go on to Salt Lake City. That's an eight-hour stopover." "My wife needs a doctor's okay for a long rest. I can't take a chance on going clear to Salt Lake City." "But this is only an hour stop." Stan got out and shoved past the old man. Heat waves shivered up out of the concrete and through the soles of his shoes. The heat seared his dry throat and burned his lungs. Anna wasn't even looking. She seemed to have forgotten him. Almost everyone had forgotten him by now, he thought, forgotten Doctor Stanley Morrison the man who had never been afraid to speak out and say what he thought, and think what he wanted to think. Fifteen months with never more than an eight hour stopover. Thought and self-regard frozen by perpetual motion, and shriveled by consequent neglect. Only the old man remembered. That was odd. A man stepped into the doorway. He was lean and powerful with a long gaunt chewing jaw like that of a horse. His eyes were small and black, and he was grinning with anticipation. Stan felt his stomach muscles tighten. Behind the man, Stan saw the kid. Almost as tall as the man who was obviously his father, but railthin, like an emaciated duplicate of the man, a starved, frustrated shadow, grinning and feverishly picking at a pimple under his left ear. He carried a grease-gun cradled in his left arm as though it were a machine gun. "I'd like to use your phone, please," Stan said. "My wife's ill. I want to phone the Government Project and see if I can get a doctor over here to look at her." "What seems to be troubling the missus?" "I don't know!" "Then how do you know it's a serious sickness, Crackpot?" "Just let me use the phone? Will you do that?" "They phoned in ahead, Crackpot. Said you might be a troublemaker." "I don't want to make any trouble. I just want to use the phone!" "Why? Even if the Doc came over, you wouldn't be here. He can't get here inside an hour. And that's all the longer you can stay here. You got to move on." "I'm coming in to use the phone," Stan heard himself saying. He fought to keep the breathiness out of his voice, the trembling out of his throat. "I don't guess I'd want to have it said I was coddling a Crackpot." "I never caused you any trouble." "You helped build hellbombs," the man said. He took the toothpick out of his mouth. "You crazy bastards got to be kept moving along the road." "How do you know what I did or didn't do?" "You're a Crackpot." "I never helped build any kind of bomb," Stan whispered. "But even if I did -- " "You're one of them nuclear physicists." "I was an instructor at a University. I taught at a Government school once too -- for a while -- " He stopped himself, realizing he was defending himself as though somehow he suspected his own guilt. "You taught other guys how to build hellbombs. Who needs you and your kind. Crackpot? We need your brains like we need a knife in the back." Stan lunged forward. The kid yelled somediing in a high cracked voice as Stan lashed out again. He felt his knuckles scrape across hard teeth. Blood leaped from the man's upper lip in a thin crimson slash. His eyes widened with a grudging respect, then he snarled through the blood as he stumbled backward and off balance. He fell against the window and trying to regain his balance, reeled and went down in a welter of empty gallon oil cans. He gathered himself for an upward lunge. Through the blood staining his teeth, he muttered, "By gawd. Crackpot. I didn't think you had the guts!" Stan glanced out the window and saw that Anna was gone from the car. Dimly, he heard the man saying he was going to beat hell out of the Crackpot, going to beat the Crackpot over die head and then the Crackpot wouldn't be able to cook up any more dangerous ideas in it for a long, long time. Anna may die now, Stan thought as he stood there bent over a little, feeling his wet fists tightening. She may die now, because of a frustrated fool who doesn't know what else to do with himself on a hot and dull and empty afternoon. Stan suddenly caught the flash of color out of the comer of his eye. He twisted, not thinking at all, and felt his fist sink into the kid's stomach. The kid fell, curled up among the empty oil cans. He writhed and moaned and held his stomach. "Get up, "Stan yelled into the man's face. "Get up -- " The man came up all at once, and his weight hurled Stan clear across the room. He felt the gum machine shatter under him, and the metal grinding into his side as he rolled. Stan felt the grease-gim in his hand as he saw the man lifting the tire tool, and then Stan swung the grease gun into the face, seeing the terrible grin, the bloodstained white smile. Unrecognizable as it was, the mans' face wouldn't go away. Stan swung at it again. Then he heard her voice, Anna's voice, intense and alive, and there was a flash of Anna the way he remembered her a thousand vears ago, before they were put on the road. She was tearing at the man's face with her fingernails and kicking him savagely. Stan had the man's shirt collar and it was ripping under his fingers as he slammed the head against the concrete floor. The thudding rhythm was coming up through his arm and throbbing behind his eyes. Like drums, he thought as a sickening light flashed on the dusty glass, like primitive war drums beating out a dance of tribal doom. Suddenly feeling sick and weak, he stood up and walked stiffly out into the sun. He leaned against the side of the building trying to keep from retching. Anna touched his arm and he looked up, half blinded by the glare of the sun. Her face was flushed and alive. She seemed ten years younger. "Don't be sorry," she said. "Be glad, Stan." "They broke us," he whispered. "We've crawled into the cage." "It doesn't matter, Stan, it doesn't matter what they do to us now! It's something to admit you're human, isn't it?" She was partly right at least. He felt both glad and sad. But in either case, it was the end of the road. He saw the old man lowering the hood of the Special. He ran back between the pumps carrying a metal tool box. "I've fixed it," he said, breathing heavily. "Now get out of here. Push it to the limit. I broke the cut-off too. Hurry it up!" "But what's the use?" Stan said. "They'll get us sooner or later -- " "They're not going to get you now, not if you stop reasoning everhing out as though it were a problem in calculus! I've cut the remote control off, and the radar and radio. They won't know where you are. I've changed the license plate too. But hurry out of here before Hal or his kid start phoning." "But being on the Freeway," ' Stan said, "they'll catch up with us! What's the use -- " "Stan!" Anna said sharply. "Can't you see? We're getting away!" "I don't want to run away from it," Stan said. "You're not running away from anything," the old man said. "You'll find out. Follow my directions and you'll find out. You're not running away. You can get out of the flood water for a while, sit on the bank, until the water drops and clears a little." Stan looked into the old man's face a long moment. "Who the hell are you anyway?" "That doesn't matter. Doctor Morrison. Now will you get out of here! Move on down the road!" Stan finally nodded and took Anna's arm and they started toward the Special. "All right, but what about you?" he asked the old man. "I'll make out. You just be concerned about yourself. Doctor Morrison. This isn't the first time I've helped someone off the road. It won't be the last time either, I hope." He waved to them as the Special, without any limit to its speed now except the limitations of a driver's nerve, roared away toward the moun tains . anonymous on the Freeway, one of countless cars hurtling down the super ten-lane Freeway, its license changed, its controls and checkers cut off, its sovereignty returned to it by a nameless old man, a box of wrenches, and a roll of wire. Three hundred miles farther on, the Freeway began a long banked curve; a thick wall of cottonwoods, willows and smaller brush lined the side where a creek rushed out of a cleft in the lower hills and ran along the Freeway's edge. Stan started to slow down. "There, that's it!" Anna said, pointing excitedly. "The big rock, the three tall trees. There, between the rock and the tree. Turn, Stan. Tumr "But there isn't any road. There isn't -- " Turnr Stan turned. He blinked as the Special roared off the Freeway and smashed through a solid wall of leaves, branches and brush. Then they were on a narrow winding dirt road, dipping down into the stream where a foot of water ran over stones to create a fiord. It twisted up the other side, around the creek's edge, over stones and gravel, twisting tortuously upward and out of sight like a coiled rope. "Go on, Stan, keep going!" Stan kept going. It demanded all his power of concentration just to stay on the road which was hardly more than a pathway through the rising mountains. He had no time to think, and had very little to say. Some hundred and fifty miles farther into the mountains, at an altitude that bit into their lungs, they saw the marker almost buried in rocks at the left of the road. The place where the old man had told them to stop and wait. But they didn't have to wait. A man, lean and healthy for his age -- which must have been at least sixty, Stan thought -- stepped from behind a rock, and came toward the Special. He was smiling and he extended his hand. "Doctor and Mrs. Morrison," he said. Anna was already out of the car, shaking his hand. Stan got out. He took a second look, then whispered: "Doctor Bergmann!" The man wore levis and a mackinaw, and he carried a rifle slung under one arm. "I wasn't expecting you to recognize me," he said as they shook hands. "I've lost about thirty-five pounds." He smiled again. "It's healthier up here." He walked around to the driver's side and opened the door. The motor was still running. Stan realized then what Bergmann was doing, and for some reason without definition he started to protest. Bergmann was setting the automatic clutch and releasing the brake. The Special started moving up the road, but there was no one inside to turn the wheel when it reached the hairpin turn about fifty feet ahead. Stan watched the car gaining speed, its left door swinging like the door in a vacant house. He thought of stories he had heard about convicts finally released after many years, stunned, frightened by reality, begging to be returned to the restricted but understandable cell. Then he smiled. Anna smiled. The Special, once you pushed the right button, could do almost everything by itself, feed itself gas, gain speed, shift its gears; but it didn't know when to turn to avoid self-destruction. Stan winced slightly as the car lurched a little and then leaped out into space. He felt the black void opening under him as though he were still in the Special. Fifteen months. His ears were filled with the sudden screeching whine of the wheels against unresisting air, then the world seemed to burst with a thundering series of solid smashing roars which were quickly dissipated in the high mountain air. Doctor Bergmann went over to the edge and looked down. "That's the tenth one," he said. "We're going to send a work party down there in a few days to cover it all over with rocks. Still, I doubt if we have to worry about them spotting the wreckage." He turned. "Well, let's start hiking. It's still a few miles." "Where," Stan asked. "I've gone along this far. I've had no choice. But now what's it all about?" "Didn't the old man tell you?" "No." "Just remember, Morrison. We're not running away. This is an old Mormon trail. A lot of the old pioneers took it. That marker says camped here and was massacred by Indians in #. There's an old Indian city at about three thousand feet. I guess we're the first ones to use it for maybe a thousand years. We've got an archeologist up there going slightly crazy. Anyway, we've got books up there, we raise most of our own food, and we've plenty of time to study and try to figure out where we made the big mistakes. We're really doing very well." "But what about the old man?" Anna asked. Bergmann chuckled. "Arch has turned into a regular man of a thousand faces. He works along the Freeways and watches for those who are at the breaking point and can't stay on the road any longer. Some of those condemned to the Freeways are criminals, others are fools or misguided zealots; and we've got to be careful not to wise those birds up by mistake. Arch has an unerring instinct, and sending our people to us is his job." The three of them started walking up the old pioneer trail. "We made a lot of mistakes," Bergmann said. "All of us, some more than others. You can't blame people for being afraid, suspicious of us. We did unleash the potentialities for total destruction withIVars are won by sacrifice. But computers don't consider sacrifice an optimum move... ing but now the sky was clear and Ruy, with a glance at the frosty stars and a sharp twist of his foot as he ground out a cigarette, stepped out quickly. It was axiomatic. What had to be done, had to be done. A forged pass, with # hours of alleged validity gleaming brightly in red letters under the plastic overlaminate was better than no pass. And an outdated pass would wipe away a week's work in the underground. Illustrated by Ernie Barth The sharp, massive gray outline of the Pentagon loomed before him, dark and foreboding against the sky. The brightly lighted entrance through which he must gain admittance resembled the glowing peep-hole into the inferno of an atomic drive. Ruy's stomach hardened, then exploded in a surge of bitter, stringent gastric juices as the MP glanced at his pass, scrutinized his face, and then turned his attention toward others coming through the entrance. Ruy wanted to run and hide. His dark blue uniform seemed to shrink tighter and tighter. The misfit must be apparent from the back. The silvery commander's insignia on his jacket weighed heavily at his chest and at his heart. He wished desperately for one fleeting, but excruciating, moment that he were back on his ship, in his own uniform, at the control panel of his computer. He started off to the right in a seeming trance. The first step had been taken. His many hours of thought, study and planning would carry him from here. This was the only way. He had repeated the fact over and over. It was an ugly business, but had to be done. Five years of war was enough, Man was on his knees before the invaders from outer space; but they in turn had been too long from home and were near the breaking point. A continued drain would mean defeat for both sides. Ruy could turn the tide, but very probably his life would be the minimum sacrifice. He had decided his fate long before he left the decks of his ship. Only the belligerent pride of statesmen, and the steadfast belief in the infallability of their computers, kept the two great battle fleets drawn in null position against each other. The computers, perhaps, deserved such ultimate confidence -- in theory. They always predicted optimum maneuver envelopes, always predicted mobilization rates to develop force fields designed to offset those of the enemy. And they always kept battle losses to a minimum -- merely dribbling away the resources of the solar system. Yet in five years of such optimum maneuvering, not a single battle had been won. Two doors gave way before Ruy's pocket vibrator, the lock tumblers slipping and turning freely in a mad frenzy to escape the resonating hum. A short, windowless corridor lay before him, broken only by a massive door at the other end. Beyond that door lay Ruy's objective. The guard never had time to do more than note Ruy's presence in this sanctum sanctorum. The needle thin spray of a paralyzing drug made his body feel stiff, immanageable, and peculiarly buoyant, as though he were being hurled through space. His thoughts became blurred and then after a blinding flash, complete oblivion set in. The two officers seated at the control panels of the master computer experienced similar depression of their cardiovascular systems and medullae. Small thermite igniters pressed against the door lock and hinges fused the steel door to its frame. With the smell of scorched paint still stinging his nostrils, Ruy seated himself at the control panel, dabbed his left wrist with stringent antiseptic, gripped his hand into a fist, and plunged the silver probes deep into the nerves of his wrist. Glancing through the observation window into the battle plotting room below, he studied the positions of the ets as they appeared on the large wall diagram of the solar system. Disregarding the distraction offered by the moving figures of the few officers and technicians on duty by the map, he fixed the positions of the fleets into his mind. He would have need for a clear visual picture until he adapted to the mental images the computer would feed into his brain. He worked with furious haste, yet each step was meticulously precise -- everything depended on his grasping the reins of battle from the computer and successfully twisting its authority to his own purjxses. Grasping the viewing switch, he threw it on. Pinpoints of light flared deep within his brain and seemed to blot his vision. Closing his eyes, his brain fought for perspective. Gradually, it focused and perceived the solar system; resplendent with sun, planets, moons, and men of war. Enveloping each ship were lines of force, scintillating sharp and hard; forming cosmic vortexes as the lesser computers on board followed the master's directives and distorted the ether around the ships, seeking to build a pattern to penetrate the opposing fields and engulf the enemy men of war. A moment, and the game was on. Ruy grasped the "Manual" switch before him, pulled hard, and dropped his hands to the keyboard before him. T he general, who was known in military circles as a good Joe, but a stickler for the theory of war, relaxed languidly at his desk in the small office off the Battle Room. The other officers on duty milled around the plotting board within his eyesight awaiting the end of the evening shift. It was strange and new to relax on the job after so many years of fleet duty. But staff duty to the master computer was good, politically. He was getting along in years, and a few more contacts here might mean a separate fleet command of his own, perhaps in pursuit of the invader, if the computers could ever break the deadlock. Suddenly, the sweet reverie of the General was snapped like a tight tension cable. A gong on the wall clanged rapidly three times and a red flashing light next to the gong told him what his ears refused to believe. The computer had been switched to manual. He had received no such instructions. In fact, the computer hadn't been on manual since the war started. "Captain, who ordered manual control?" he barked as he sprang to the doorway of the Battle Room. "I don't know, Sir," stammered the Captain. His manner and bearing were those of a man who had just been faced with a problem of cataclysmic proportions. "Well check with the control room -- on the double -- before our fleet gets out of defensive position." His parade ground roar snapped the Captain out of the catelepsy which had enveloped him and sent him scurrying into the corridor. An almost hysterical shout whirled the General back to the plotting board. "Sir, our fleet is attacking -- attacking! "What? Where?" asked the General, his eyes darting over the board in a frantic effort to orient himself. "Here, Sir, see. The positions are changing gradually in an unusual pattern. A patrol ship, a destroyer, and a cruiser have all gone right into the enemy vortex field," analyzed the Major. "Yes, I see -- But with the enemy concentrating his ships orthogonally -- She'll build a vortex that will disintegrate each and every ship of ours near the vortex," said the General, his mind coming up to full battle speed as it grasped the situation. "My God! Can't they see that they're going to certain death?" A gong sounded in a muffled sort of way in the plotting room below Ruy, as a gentle buzz told him that the computer had relinquished control. His fingers began to play rapidly over the keys. Swift orders of strategy were transmitted through steel conduits deep into the computer vaults of the building. There, the orders were transposed into detailed tactics and beamed throughout the solar system. And as his fingers limbered to the keys, he played a deadly tune, a concerto of death. The fleet grew alive with a sudden awareness; it seemed to be a thing alive, straining at its bonds in response to the music played into its computers and controls. Suddenly, the fleet sprang forward. A destroyer shot out into the midst of the enemy fleet, launching all of its energy in one tremendous lurch -- only to go down in a flaming wreck as the enemy ships swerved and concentrated on it. And a second ship, and then a third ship repeated the frightful maneuver, until the whole heavens were lighted with the flaming novae of berserk atomic drives. "General, sir," said the Lieutenant, with sweat rolling from his brow as he saluted. "Yes, Lieutenant," said the General looking away from the battle map of the solar system. "We can't make any headway against the control room door. Must be solid steel. Whoever got in there must have fused it shut." "Well, get a welding torch," said the General, his eyes going back to watch the devastation of the fleet. "We've got to get in -- get that computer back on automatic. Get explosives, if necessary." "We've sent for a welding torch already, sir. It'll be here in a few minutes." "All right. Send someone for hand grenades too. WeVe got to stop this sabotage before the fleet is annihilated. They're losing ships every minute," "Sir," interposed the Captain standing nearby, "maybe we can cut off the computer room someway. I know it's a direct conduit, right to the vaults from the control room, but maybe we can cut the conduits and let the ships fall back on their emergency circuits," "Looks like a possible alternative, Captain, though we'd put the computer out of operation for several days," said the General. "But we're losing our fleet this way." Seven, eight, nine great men of war went down before the blazing force fields of the enemy, who pounced on every sacrifice offered to it by the computer. The Lieutenant turned his eyes from the incandescent glare of the thick steel conduit glowing red under the finger of the acetylene torch. "General, its extremely resistant to cutting. I doubt if we can cut through it before they finally get the door and frame cut away up in the control room." "Keep at it, boy. We've got to get through at the saboteur one way or another. Do the best you can. The boys in the fleet are counting on you. They're going down to certain death while we delay." new equations of strategy played into the computer, Ruy sat back, gave a sigh, opened his eyes, and slipped the electrodes from his wrist. His job was almost done. If he could keep the others from this control panel for another half hour, the computer could operate on his equations fully, and the battle would be won. The first ships from Earth had already gone down in flames, expendable sacrifices to his purpose. But they were not dying in vain. The end result would be -- must be -- victory. Wars are fought by strategy, hut also by sacrifice. Every general must send troops into battle, must expect to sacrifice to make the enemy commit himself in the desired way, and so make victory possible. This was what Ruy believed. He believed it deeply, deeply enough to throw aside his career as a rising young theoretical mathematics officer of the fleet and to go over the heads of his unconvinced superiors, with all their unread reports and unanswered recommendations from subordinates, in the only way a man of action could -- by taking things into his own hands, and staking his life on the gamble. The General, eyes riveted to the board, winced with pain as ship after ship roiled the heavens with flaming death. And as he watched, a gradual subtle design became apparent. For every ship he had lost, his ships had taken a similar tally -- for each sacrifice, a trap was sprung and a similar toll taken. Computers did not sacrifice, did not send men out to certain death. Therefore a sacrifice was greedily snapped up as a mistake of the enemy. And such greed snapped the trap. One move forced the next, once the bait was taken. As the theme of the theory formed in the General's mind, he suddenly muttered : "Even exchange will balance a computer's potential -- but a series of forced, even-exchanges can distort a fleet's position from optimiun... I never realized it before -- an optimum move is not an optimum move -- if it's a forced move." He turned from the board and spoke quietly to the men who stood in hushed groups watching the flaming battle. "Gentlemen, we are winning a great victory; the war will soon be over." The door to the computer room toppled outward, frame and all, after several ceaseless hours of cutting. The impact left the hallway of armed men silent and still, like specters in the unreal light from the glowing acetylene torch. Just inside the doorway stood a man, his youth belied by wise and thoughtful eyes, grinding a cigarette under his foot. And as he stepped through the wrecked and twisted door frame not a hand was raised against him.    the race of mankind. What did it matter that it was conceived without love and emotion. What did it matter that she was being used as an experiment... if this child within her could fulfill the promise. Miryam spat the soft capsule between her quivering lips. She watched it roll and bounce across the polished tile floor, toward the door. Pain returned, and its fire was warm. There were no shadows on the wall. Pain returned, and it had purpose and promise. Wonderingly, she beheld the concept that science, too, lived with fear, each science in its own Ghetto. And if the young doctor was right, if psi... As the doctor stepped into the room, he bent over and picked up the red capsule. His thumb and forefinger felt the warmth, the moisture, and he looked long and thoughtfully into Miryam' s dark, glowing eyes. His fingers shook as he wrapped the capsule in a piece of tissue and dropped it into the pocket of his white jacket. He picked up the chart from the foot of the bed. "Miryam -- His voice was not under complete control, and he began again, with an effort at lightness. "Miryam -- that's a strange name. What does it mean?" "It is an ancient spelling," she whispered, her eyes deep and dark, filled with pain and wonder. "You may find it easier to call me -- Mary." #   Deception can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it and on the circumstances. Dorav and Tzal had the right way of looking at it, and the circumstances were undoubtedly prime. G radually he became aware of resilient rubber and plastic supporting him. He lay on his back, heels together and toes lopped outward, elbows crowding uncomfortably into his ribs. His body shifted. The month-long hibernation was over. A delicious feeling of completeness -- of achievement -- swept over him. He, Dorav Brink, had escaped from the endless boredom and idleness of Earth's mechanized domes, after all. Here on SuUe II there would be adventure and work in plenty. His eyes opened. In the soft yellowish light which flooded the small square room, he saw a dozen other couches, similar to that on which he lay. Most of them were occupied. His gaze probed the huddled figures searching for the girl Rea. He had met her aboard the space lighter enroute to the interstellar liner that was to carry them to SuUe II. Then they had been given their preliminary capsules of iberno and he remembered no more. Ihemo hits some people that way -- with others it takes five or six capsules to put them into the deathlike cataleptic state required for star hopping... He saw her! Third couch to the right of his own. He stood up carefully, balancing on rubbery legs, and his hand went up to the constriction binding his skull. What was this? Goggles! Brink's fingers curled about the flexible band securing them. He tugged. "Stop that, Brink!" Brink's hand fell away. He recognized the voice of Len Daniels, the recruiter for this illegal voyage here to Sulle II. "Want to lose your eyesight. Brink?" demanded the dapper little man. "We warned you of the danger, For at least ten days your eyes must remain protected." The little gray-haired man wore no glasses, he had acquired an immunity to the sunlight of Sulle II from former voyages, but his naturally pink-and-white complexion was a sickly yellow. Their voices roused the other colonists, and now Daniels moved among them, his soft full voice admonishing and sympathetic. A coarse-haired giant of a man, dark hair graying at the temples of his ruddy outsize features, clamped Brink's fist with a huge hand. "Name's Bryt Carby," he said, his voice ridiculously shrill. "I'm Dorav Brink." His eyes slid toward the tall slenderness of Rea Smyt. "Air don't taste much different from back home. Brink." Brink made a wry face. "After breathing spacer air and being doped with iberno for months could we tell the difference?" Carby laughed in agreement. "But Senior Daniels," and Brink wanted to grin at the respectful term used by the big, slow speaking man, "Senior Daniels says that Sulle II is like Earth in almost every respect." "He would! And possibly it is. According to him even the animals resemble our own planet's." "Once," and Carby grinned widely, "I ate a bit of cooked native meat. Ten credits it cost me. After that the protein packets and yeasteaks sickened me." "I tried it once too, Carby, but it cost me fifteen credits. And that's the way Daniels and his company will get back the thousand credits we owe them for the trip." Brink laughed. "With food that we raise and meat that we kill, Carby. Daniels flies it to Earth and smuggles it into the domes as native to Earth. His profit must be enormous." Carby frowned and rubbed a stubby finger across the bridge of his huge nose. And Brink edged away from his neighbor toward the slim tallness of Rea Smyt. "Attention all of you!" Len Daniels had climbed atop a sturdy metal table. "On the bulletin board just behind me the Commission has posted a list of your assignments and partners for the current year. Some of you will remain here in Low Park to work off your indebtedness, and others will be sent out to Middle Park and Devil's Elbow." Something in the agent's tone, a touch of ironic amusement or arrogance, perhaps, angered Brink. But he kept his lips shut. In the ancient records that he had studied in the long idle years back there in York Dome, he had read of serfdom and slavery. He could afford to wait and learn if what he feared was true. After all, they were many light years from home and at Daniels' mercy -- for the moment at least. "After you have paired up and found the locations assigned you go to Warehouse Seven and draw your rations and tools. Your plastic tents will serve for shelter even in winter, but my advice to you is to build with logs." The little man smiled a trifle grimly as he studied them. "I would advise you to himt game and raise crops as quickly as possible," he added. "Supplies and tools are expensive to freight out here to Sulle II. They will cost you five himdred more credits." The colonists' faces paled and their eyes were sick. Brink smiled grimly as he watched. Well they'd asked for it. Most of them were regretting their decision to abandon the ease and i 'enty of the giant domes already, but they had no choice now. Uncertainly they crowded about the bulletin board, and paired up as the directive indicated. Brink found himself with a partner named Tzal Evans. She proved to be a genial, oversized, blonde giantess at least five years his senior. He had been hoping for a younger, more attractive companion -- possibly dark-haired Rea Smyt. Yet he realized that the Commission could not permit its colonists to choose their jobs and partners at random. There was work to be done. He found the map and learned that both he and Bryt Carby were assigned to the untamed, forested section named Middle Park. And Bryt Carby had drawn Rea Smyt as his partner. Brink scrubbed at his chin. He foresaw difficulties ahead for Carby. The few moments that he had spent with Rea had acquainted him with her lightning changes of mood and her disdain for nles and regulations. Those two had nothing in common. After the legal year of partnership was ended neither of them would be likely to renew the agreement for another year. Perhaps he. Brink, would draw her in next year's pool of unattached citizens, and then... Tzal nudged at him. "Let's get our supplies," she said, her voice deep as a man's. "Sure, Tzal." The top of her fair-haired skull was level with his eyes, and across it he caught a glimpse of Rea Smyt leading Carby from the reception center. "Sure. We better." Rea danced along ahead of Carby like a child -- a lovely slender child. D usk caught them, hours later, on the wooded ridge high above the broad valley that was their destination. Garby followed Rea off the crumbled highway, that the vanished Sullans had built, and into a sheltered grove of long-leaved trees. Brink and Tzal, pushing easily together at the harnesses behind the rubber-tired cart, followed them. Clumsily, for they had never seen a tent before, they released the forward section of the cart and drew out the slender jointed ribs of metal. They snapped these together into a low dome ten feet in diameter; and then Tzal controlled the extensible arms feeding out the plastic covering, while Brink locked the opaque skin into place. Five minutes later, with the wind cone driving the generator and the bottled gas feeding the small stove, Tzal was preparing their evening meal under the soft glowing tubes. She turned to Brink. "Better go help Garby," she suggested, smiling. "That Rea -- " And she shook her head. Brink found Garby struggling doggedly with the metal ribs. His partner was not in sight, but they could hear her voice, singing softly somewhere out among the dusky trees. When at last the lighting tubes were glowing and Garby had lighted the stove. Brink eyed the weary, large-featured man curiously. "What are you going to do about it?" he blurted. "You can't go on doing all the work. She needs a good -- a good, lumping, I think the Ancients called it." Garby grinned faintly. "When she is ready," he said mildly, "she will help," "Hah!" Brink snorted and went to the zippered entrance. "See you tomorrow, Bryt." He crossed the near-darkness of the needle-strewn glade to his own tent. How bright were these stars and how sweet and cold was this raw air. In York Dome, with its conditioned atmosphere, one saw the stars only through telescreens or viewing ports. Somewhere in the darkness a mournful wail, an aching ghost of a howl, sounded, and faded into the unfamiliar chirps, and hums of the night prowlers of the Sullan uplands... There was a choked scream from nearby and Brink heard the crashing progress of Rea Smyt toward her tent. The zippered entrance brightened and then dimmed as she shut it behind her. Brink shrugged. Stooping he entered his own savorysmelling tent. Tzal had covered the sleeping cots with the gay scarlet-and-blue blankets provided them, and their sliced and steaming rations were ready on the extended table shelf of the cart. Tzal smiled at him from the cot that doubled as a chair. "Better eat before it gets cold," she invited, and helped herself to a serving of salmon-hued promine. "Tomorrow," Brink said as he seated himself beside her, "we will dine on real meat -- meat that I kill." "Of course," Tzal agreed placidlyBrink was remembering that easy promise, a month later, as he bound the last raggedly split shake atop the cabin roof. The cabin was but ten feet wide and twice as long, and built of smallish logs, but its cost in blistered flesh and exhaustion had been terrific... Six days had passed after their arrival here in Middle Park before his unfamiliar, lead-propelling rifle finally had brought down a small deerlike creature... the hunting wasn't easy -- nothing here on Sulle II was easy. He slid off the roof and down the tnmk af a small tree that he had left here atop this grassy knoll. He straightened his hunched shoulders and heard the muscles grate and snap across the cartilage. He looked down over the grassy parkland, where a meandering stream watered the soil, and coimted, for the hundredth time, the five young spotted ruminants that Carby, Tzal, and he had captured from a herd of wild creatures. "Cows," Carby, and Tzal, his partner, called these giant cattlelike creatures, and he followed suit. It was easier to apply the familiar names to creatures that resembled those of Earth than to use the names supplied them at the Reception Center. "Dorav!" He heard the voice and then the pressure of two rounded soft arms were around him. "Rea!" he grunted, facing her. He pushed her arms aside, all too conscious of the shielded breast that brushed the back of his hand. "Why are you here?" he demanded. "You have work at your cabin. The walls are only half finished " The girl smiled at him. She was very attractive in a slim boyish sort of way. The palm of her sun-tanned hand, as she laid it upon his wrist, was not calloused as were Tzal's and his own. "My partner and yours are cutting logs above us," she said. "We can be alone for several hours... Brink pushed her soft palm from his arm. For the past three weeks physical exhaustion and unwonted exercise had driven any desire for her from his thoughts. She was Carby's partner for a year -- and Carby was his friend. "Don't get me wrong, Dorav!" Her eyes flashed. They were blue and very dark and clear. "I want to go back to the Earth -- to York Dome, to Sippi Dome or one of the other two domes in North America." "I think we all do at times," Brink said coldly. "But it's not possible. Earth is forty or fifty light years away." "I know a way." Rea Smyt's eyes were bright. "But I need a partner. Bryt won't go -- he likes it here. And your blonde cow of a partner..." "Tzal is okay," Brink said angrily. "Shut your mouth and go back to your own cabin before I -- " "We could go across the plains to the old ruins," Rea cried hastily, "and then journey down..." Brink's work-roughened fingers spun her about facing toward Carby's cabin and the round gray tent beside it at the opposite end of the knoll. Rea was sobbing angrily. "I'll go by myself," she cried. "You fools can stay here and live like beasts -- it's so simple if you only... Brink gave her a shove. "If you worked as you should, you wouldn't find time to be discontented. And next year you can draw a new partner from the unattached pool." The girl's eyes were hot as she turned and raced off along the path bisecting the knoll's green-swarded crown. And Dorav Brink set to work building the huge stone-and-clay chunney that was to warm them in the winter ahead. The memory of Rea's words and the softness of her, kept intruding. Suddenly, he found himself longing for the comforts and the security of York Dome -- he had been a peace guard, serving two hours every month -- life had been soft and easy... Savagely Brink swung his stone hammer, trying to smash his memories of mechanized, pleasant sloth as well as the harsh substance of the rocks. weeks of feverish planting and hunting for game to trade at the frozen locker plant at Center, were behind them. Now it was late summer on Sulle II, and even the early morning was uncomfortably warm. Brink yawned and stretched luxuriously on his cot. Across the room Tzal still slept, her tousled, shortcropped hair faded by the sun, and her exposed firm flesh a ripe, golden-red. Her face was turned toward him and she was smiling faintly, as though at some pleasant dream fantasy. Brink felt a pleasant lethargy. Tzal was a good partner, she never criticized without reason, and he trusted her judgment. His eyes ranged over the cabin. It was stout and welljoined -- and their hands had erected it. Their credits at the locker plant were growing, despite the disappearance of most of the wild herds of "cattle". In another eight or ten years they would have repaid the passage advances and own a valuable property. It was odd, he thought idly, that he never considered any woman other than Tzal as his partner when he thought of the future. Actually, of course she would request a change of partners, as he also intended to do, at the year's end. If the Commission allowed it she might even specify Bryt Carby -- they worked well together in the fields and forest, and the three of them were good friends. Suddenly he was aware of Carby's voice shouting somewhere outside. Brink pulled on his kneelength shorts and a sleeveless tunic, and struggled into his high, clumsily cobbled boots of "cowhide". He took down his repeating weapon and pocketed a handful of cartridges. "What's it?" asked Tzal sleepily. "I expect something is after the herd again," Brink told her as he went out the heavy, double-planked door. He could hear Carby clearly now. He was calling for Rea. Brink swore under his breath and turned to reenter the cabin, but Carby had seen him and hailed him. "Rea left in the night," the big man said. "She took one of the horses and a rifle. And she left a note. Says she is going back to live in one of the domes." Brink whistled. The "horse" she had taken, actually a ystan according to the Commission, was only half-broken and a giant animal three times as large as its Earthly counterpart. "The loneliness must have driven her insane," the big man cried. "We've got to follow her -- get her to come back." Garby's eyes were wild. He clamped Brink's right shoulder. "Are you coming or not, Dorav? She needs us. We've got to find her." The big man's eyes leaked tears. Brink realized, astounded, that the selfish, shallow, lazy woman -- the woman, Rea Smyt -- had won Carby's love. "Of course, Bryt. I'll help you search." "I will go too." Tzal's eyes were steady. "We must work together. When our child is bom another woman will be needed." Brink opened his mouth to object -- closed it. "Of course, but whether Rea is the one to..." "She is a woman." Tzal smiled faintly and nodded. "I'll follow her tracks, the ystans tracks, westward across the park," Bryt Garby said impatiently. "She must head south or north to climb out of the valley. You, Tzal, go to the north end of the valley and pick up the trail -- if it's there." He shook the graying coarse hair no out of his reddened eyes. "You go south, Dorav. I'll meet up with you in a few hours if the trail leads in that direction. If neither of you find a trail and a day passes, I suggest that you return to the cabins." "Best plan," Brink agreed. He called in to Tzal: "I'll saddle up." "Right with you," his partner replied. But, with the approach of night. Brink's big black ystan and his saddle-weary rider followed alone on the trail. Rea's partner had not overtaken Brink as he had promised. The trail was clearcut and easy to follow -- Rea was letting her mount race at top speed southward along the dirt cmsted ancient highway. And Brink's half-tamed black stallion was endowed with stamina and speed that Garby's dun mare could never match... Now, darkness had blanked out the spoor. At a miniature park's brushscreened entrance. Brink urged the weary ystan into the natural hedge of leafy growth. The big black snorted half-hearted protest and reared as branches clawed and stung him. When they were through they were in a broad grassy meadow, and in the fading light of a full moon jagged mins stood etched against the darker trees. He did not attempt any exploration until he had eaten of firewarmed, greasy meat and portions of bread sopped in the frying pan. Then he took a flaming branch, as thick through as his lower leg, and carried this rude torch into the ruins. What had once been a street lay before him. Jumbled walls of brick and stone marked widely separated buildings. In afi, he counted no less than forty-five mounds, when he came across an isolated squared block of stone tilted at an awkward angle and half buried. And cut into the stone was a blurred inscription. The lettering was alien, yet somehow, achingly familiar. Brink dropped to his knees to clean away the concealing sod; but the spell of concentration was broken by a racing, swelling tattoo of hoofbeats. He sprang to his feet, remembering that he had left his rifle near the fire. The rider could be Bryt Carby -- or it could be some, as yet undiscovered savage, native to the planet, or even Rea returning in panic. He found his rifle, stepped through the rim of bushes beside the ancient highway and waited in their shadow. The indistinct bulk of a ystan grew larger in the pale light of Sulle IFs lone satellite. At first Brink could see no rider; then he saw the huddled lump of darkness above the saddle. He stepped out into the road. "Rea?" he said. His rifle lifted above the horizontal, its butt at his hip. "Woa," the rider moaned faintly, and the trembling ystan came to a drooping stand. Brink reached up to the rider to help her down. "No," Rea whispered. "Hide me ' -- hide -- Ahorse. Savages..." Brink grunted under his breath and tugged at the steaming ystan" s bit to lead the beast off the highway. They pushed through the clawing branches, the ystan"s breathing stentorian and ragged. The exhausted mount was dying on its feet. They had scarcely reached the open meadow within, when the ystan collapsed. Rea fell with him, her right leg pinned under the twitching wet hulk. As Brink tugged her leg free, she groaned and went limp in his arms. Only then did he feel the stickiness of half-dried blood on her tunic and discover the sharp arrowhead that projected a full two inches from the front of her left shoulderblade. Gently he whittled at the arrow's exposed shaft until the irregular metal head dropped off and then he jerked the arrow from the wound. He was glad that she was unconscious. The distant voices of humans, shouting unintelligible phrases, warned him of the approach of the savages. The fire! With his hands he smothered and buried the flames. It was possible that the aborigines might pass them by. He could not banish the smell of smoke as he had the telltale glow of the coals, but the direction of the wind might protect them... The stiffening loom of the ystan lay between them and the park's brushy entrance. Carefully he slid his rifle up and over the saddle. Voices and the sliding, chomptramp of hide-shod feet came and passed on. They had missed the break in the return tracks of Rea's ystan. Or, perhaps, the hoofprints of Brink's mount seemed to them a continuation of her spoor. "I am awake," a small voice whispered beside him. "Are you in pain, Rea?" "Not much. Too near being dead for that. Fm done." "No chance." Brink's voice was flat and false. She must have lost most of her blood. "How did it happen?" "Was heading south on this highway. Planned to turn east soon. To Denver or some other deserted city where I might find a tube shuttle to Sippi Dome. You realize -- this is really Earth?' "Just now," Brink agreed gruffly. "Found a cornerstone. Must have been a public building -- a bank they called it. This was Gollrada Nation, or State." "I knew... weeks ago. Tried to tell you. So... started alone." She sat up suddenly, as though propelled by springs, and her good arm motioned toward the moonlit heights. She tried to say something, choked, and fell back. There was no pulse... T he third day after Rea's death. Three days, and three of the hairy, half-naked white savages, he thought grimly. He had never killed a fellow being before -- in York Dome hatred and love and loyalty were mere words from the barbarian centuries -- but now he had destroyed three of his own kind. Nor did he feel any shame or regret... The savages on Rea's backtrail had come upon Bryt Carby. He had killed one of them before they had overpowered him and built their fires. Carby had not died until an hour after Brink had come upon the howling pack of six warriors and had emptied his gun into them. He had killed two of them outright and wounded three others; and then he had cared for the broken, blistered thing that had been his friend, until Carby died. Now he watched before the cave where two savages lay hidden -- and he watched the growing swarmings of green-bodied flies about the elevated rocky lip of their shelter. The warriors must not escape to carry word back to their tribesmen of the settlement of the men from York Dome... At a sound from behind him, he turned about, his rifle butt dug into his shoulder and chest, his finger pressing the firing button. "Tzd!" Behind the boulder overlooking the savages' rocky death trap he took her in his arms. She was Tzal, smiling and full-bodied as always, and his partner for this year and for the other years. The years yet to come. She was dirt-streaked and sweaty. Her clothes were tom and her hair was matted and discolored with dust. Weariness darkened the skin beneath her eyes... She was beautiful! "Where," she asked him after a time, "are they hidden?" "Up there, just back of those -- " He spun about, racing back to where he had dropped his rifle. The two savages, wounded and limping grotesquely, were scuttling toward a broken jumble of rock fragments. Once hidden there they might work up the slope and escape. Tzal's rifle cracked, once, twice, even as he turned and brought up his own weapon. A defiant yell slapped across the rocky slot and an arrow thudded weakly at Tzal's feet. Brink's thumb hit the firing button and the warrior spun about and fell across the man Tzal had shot. For now the settlements were safe. The colonists, bargaining years of hard work for a supposed passage to a distant unsettled world, were secure from attack. Only a few hours from their luxurious home domes, they could sweat and toil and suffer as the hardy explorers of the earlier centuries must have done. Dorav Brink wanted to laugh -- to tell Tzal and the others of the colossal duping they had experienced. Yet he kept silent. From the evil of the trickery a great good might come. For the first time in centuries men were living an active. brain-stimulating life. Let the great hothouse domes with their dwarfish inbred animals in their parks, and their controlled atmosphere, and odor content index, and mass-produced pleasure booths go their way. Let the pale, thready-muscled humans nibble their synthetic promines and yeasteaks -- the pioneers had no need for substitutes... Brink's arm went around Tzal's shoulders and he was looking into her shaken, tear-stained eyes. He smiled. It was the first time he had ever seen his placid partner so moved. "All this," Brink said, his hand sweeping, "for our son, and for the sons to follow him. Our children will make of Sulle II a better world than Earth." Tzal's lips trembled. She had not heard him, he thought. His head lifted yet higher and he filled his lungs with the crisp upland air. Tzal was clinging to him, depending on him... Precisely, perhaps, as Tzal wished him to feel.    The study of science can make genuine and wholesome contributions to character development, not the least of which is an uncompromising demand for truth and honesty in all the affairs of life and a proper humility before all the many wonders which surround us. -- E. U. Condon The fom stumbling blocks to truth: The influence of fragile or unworthy authority, custom, the imperfections of undisciplined senses, the concealment of ignorance by ostentation of seeming wisdom. -- Roger Bacon In the not too distant future, you will walk into a supermarket, shop, pay the bill, and walk out with a cash receipt that identifies your bags of groceries -- but you won't carry the groceries to your car. An endless belt will speed them straight to the parking lot. And when you put the bags on the kitchen table, they won't topple over, because they will be shorter, squatter and wider at the bottom. New equipment foreshadows other aids to shopping, such as carts with wrap around handles so that you can push them or pull them from either side or end, automatic doors that open as you approach them, food cabinets that can be reached from all sides, and large tanks of synthetic sea water that keep lobsters "sea-fresh". Houses of the future may all be built using a four-inch cube, called a module, as a structural "atom." Nowadays the architect draws his plans according to feet, inches and fractions of inches. When construction begins, plumbers, masons and carpenters have to cut and patch their non-standardized materials to make them fit the requirements. The new system of modular measure would eliminate this waste by making use of building materials that are standardized to the fourinch cube. Thus, when the workers follow a blueprint scaled to the module, all parts would automatically fit. It is estimated, from the structures already built with this method, that industry would save adopting this method. If present trends continue, surgical mortality of the future may well nigh be non-existent. Figures show that in the past ten years deaths from major surgical operations have been cut by as much as four-fifths, in some instances, and at least by half in the overall picture. Improvements in training, surgical techniques, anaesthetic substances and procedures, post operative and preoperative procedures, increasing use of antibiotics, and the use of blood transfusions to prevent death from shock have all been major factors. The record is all the more remarkable, because in recent years more than half the patients operated on have been aged fifty or over. Underwater explorers may soon be able to pedal themselves into the watery depths. A new device, designed to go along with snorkles and swimfins, is a sort of miniature submarine about to # feet long. The operator sits inside a plastic bubble and powers the sub by pumping pedals. The pedals drive the propeller and the sub heads downward and then straight ahead. On a calm day the device can move along under water at a speed of # or # miles per hour. Designed primanly for offshore prospectors for oil and uranium, it is also ideal for treasure hunters and sportsmen. Home baked bread like grandma used to make may soon be an actuality, but the hard work will be eliminated. The Canadian Defense Research Board has come up with an instant bread mix which produces the same tasty aromatic loaf without kneading or fermentation. All the baker has to do is add water and then bake for two hours. It will be available in U.S. stores, but so far no one knows exactly when. Car designers of the future may reduce the death toll from head-on collisions by putting trunk space behind the engine. Recent experiments by the Highway Research Board showed that less then onethird of the initial jolt of a collision is absorbed by the car frame. Putting more car structure between the front bumper and the driver would increase the absorption of the impact. Farmers may some day be able to produce six or seven ears on one stalk. Recent investigations by plant physiologists have discovered an unknown factor in com strains that causes them to regularly produce either one or two ears to a stalk. They have also foimd that by blocking off the point at which one ear is begining to develope, the stalk is forced to produce an ear at another point. Some minor success has produced as many as three miniature ears, using this blocking technique, and then allowing the blocked ear to develope after the third ear has formed at the new point. Hospitals of the future may have stocks of dura, the membrane that covers the brain. A recently discovered technique has enabled medical research men to preserve this membrane by the freeze-drying method, which is also used for preserving arteries and other tissues. Success with dogs has been reported by members of the Naval Medical Research Institute, and frozen dura has been stockpiled at the tissue bank of the Naval Medical School and will be used clinically at the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland. A gas tank that is expected to save many airplane crash victims from a watt second, kilowatt an hour. # -- Direction. # -- Compression. # -- #. # -- Electromagnetism. # -- Wave-length. # -- # m.p.h. #I -- Incandescent gases. # -- ##. # -- Planck's. # -- # degrees. # -- Entropy. # -- #. # -- Light. # -- #. # -- Long. # -- Einstein. fiery death has passed its first tests and may soon be a "must" on all aircraft. The tank, which is made of tough rubberized nylon, is rupture proof and will not spew forth its contents at high speeds. Tests show that the tank can withstand direct impacts of up to # miles an hour. The cell bodies range in weight from one-tenth to six-tenths of a pound per square foot and are designed to remain intact in a crashing plane until enough force is built up to rip the wing off. Sometime in the future the Earth may be dotted with large-scale factories that are making food by artificial photosynthesis. Recent discoveries in the field have opened new vistas of unlimited food and power supplies; a time when Man would no longer have to depend on green plants for food and energy sources, but will be able to tap sunlight directly. Researchers have found that the true "solar engine" of plants is in the small, chlorophyllcontaining green granules called chloroplasts. When isolated, these chloroplasts use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen exactly as is done in the living plants. The scientists have also found chemicals which will stop each step in the complete cycle of photosynthesis which follows so that men in the laboratories can separate or combine the processes at will and see what happens. The goal for the future is a harnessing of the sun's energy to make foods out of carbon dioxide and water in larger amounts than that which growing plants are able to provide. Ultimately, through such a mechanism, energy-rich chemicals may be built up from sunlight to provide unlimited power for industry as well. Don't be too surprised if you soon see bathing suits made of the new stretch yarns. Manufacturers think they have the technical problems licked now, and if they do, that old joke about the lady who carries her bathing suit in her purse will be more fact than fiction. Personnel directors of the future may hire their scientists and laboratory workers by testing their mental "temperature". A new concept has shown that the different rates of scientific production are much larger than other variations among men. No runner can race # times Book Service Phone GRamercy #-#  We Stock All current American Science Fiction in Book Form ond carry current Magazines and Pocket Books  A lorge selection of Science Fiction is ovailoble of British Books, Magazines and Pocket Editions.  We carry a large stock of Back Issues of Science Fiction Magozines.  faster than another, and one man doesn't speak # times faster than another. But mental "temperature" or capacity, likens the production of ideas to a chemical reaction. A small increase in temperature can speed the reaction considerably. If one man's mental temperature is twice that of another, he is likely to be # times more productive. Gardeners may now envision a weed-free future with more and more certainty. Several products, in testing stages, have shown signs of being exactly what the suburban home-owner has been dreaming about. A new weed-killer, mixed with the soil before planting, has proven quite successful in attacking only the weeds, allowing the flowerbed to grow luxuriously without a single weed. Another successful item is a new non-poisonous, non-corrosive weed killer that permanently sterilizes soil beneath pavements etc. and is ideal under walks, driveways, fences, parking areas and even the sidewalks in front of your house. sponsored, as a Public Service," the oily voice intoned, "by the National Gasket Company, with offices in all principal cities. Remember your duty as a citizen. All you oldsters, between the ages of "sixty and Annihilation Day" -- you may be among the ones who don't have to wait until your sixty-fifth birthday -- and you others who are nearing the twilight years -- be sure you have your burial arrangements taken care of. Do it tonight -- at the very latest, tomorrow. For the next day may be too late. "The management, the staff, and the actors want to extend their respects to the wonderful old couple who played their parts in tonight's real life drama. "Goodnight all!"    Dear jlq: Naturally I turned to the editorial immediately after arriving home with your mag. I must compliment you on a good job. You did some pretty fast thinking in order to beat your deadline for turning in a # page filler. Needless to say, I am inclined to favor a practical application of eugenics, the science whose aim is to breed a superior human stock ; not by combining those qualities considered favorable by one generation in one locality, but rather by weeding out those characteristics which almost all people consider unfavorable. Certainly idiots (I.Q. # -- ) are capable of producing geniuses. It would be useless to argue with you on that point. One thing to be remembered, though, is that the percentage of high I.Q.'s from such matings is substantially lower than that from # normal persons. An example of, and probably the most widely publicized of inherited physical aflflictions is Hemophilia, which is carried by a recessive gene. This is the disease that indirectly led to the Russian Revolution #. It certainly would eliminate much suffering if matings between persons carr)dng this and similar genes could be prohibited. You cited the example of Europe's former ruling houses. Here we certainly have an example of controlled breeding -- but was it carried on scientifically Hardly. Here harmful recessives were allowed to multiply until they began showing up regularly. I wonder what the results would be if beneficial genes were allowed to multiply in similar fhion. How do you reason that individual enterprise must be bred out of the race? How much "individual enterprise" does a Mongolian Idiot demonstrate? This is, of course, an extreme example -- but I doubt that you can prove that deficient intelligence breeds "individual enterprise". Certainly the U.S. has prospered. If there is any such thing as a gene for wager that most of the people immigrating to these shores would have to have had it in order to even conceive of leaving the "old country". "It was built... and men with some of the worst brains in the world." The preceding is a direct quotation from your editorial What does "worst" mean? Name a few such men. In preceding centuries there existed conditions in most parts of the globe which insured survival to the fittest. As a result, harmful recessives were prevented from spreading to a great extent. Now that the superior individuals thus created have made it possible for every microcephlic to live as long as other men's ingenuity can keep them alive, I wonder how we will prevent the average I-Q(by this I refer to potential brain power) from dropping below the accepted mean of #. You could've done well to make a more extensive survey of eugenics as even a rank amateur such as myself can spot the shallowness of your reasoning. -- Edmund Luksus, # Johnson Street, Gary, Indiana. Maybe I didnt succeed in making my point in that editorial (January issue). However, it was simply this: Individual incentive is a more promising avenue to good government and a healthy nation than selective breeding, -- jlq Dear Mr. Quinn; Just felt impelled to write a "letter to the editor' to say I thii the February issue is about as consistently meritorious as I've seen, including the cover. Not a really weak story in it, although I thought the motivation in "Seller of the Sky" was a little faulty. For some reason, "The Odd Ones" particularly tickled my fancy, even though I assumed all along that Dickson's human characters were male and female. I especially liked your editorial, not only for giving me a bit more insight into your preferences for stories but for the general discussion of science fiction. I agree thoroughly that it should be primarily entertainment. Whatever lessons of psychology and philosophy may or may not be concealed therein, the magic of literature that is pure entertainment never palls. I still remember the charm of Edgar Rice Burroughs son's "The Green Girl," the first science fiction serial I ever read. -- Charles L. Fontenay, # Chadwell Drive, Madison Tenn. After the preceding letter and the one to follow, J am happy to say Uhanks to the author of Escape Velocity and Blow the Man Down. -- jlq Dear Mr. Quinn: To say the least, your editorial (IF, March-#) aroused my interest more ways than one. First, it is uncommon to find such material in the usual stf publications. But you seem to feel that since stf bases much of its premises and concepts on sociological factors, a stf mag should be the most likely place for sociological dissertations. That's all good and well. More power to men in the publishing field who don't remain stereotyped and primitive in locomoting themselves editorially. However, none of the above obviates the fallacious thinking employed in the message you wished to impart. Since you seem to express yourself along lines of wanting more democracy in what obviously is an age bereft of much of it, then allow me to continue. And if you can see your way to doing it, reproduce this letter in one of your future issues so that some of your readers derive democratic satisfaction from "hearing both sides. To begin with, you state that with an all-powerful union in America (like templated) "A dictatorship" could very well be "the next easy step." But this has always been the feeling of countless numbers of people since the first vestiges of unionizing were found in this country close to one hundred or more years ago. What you base your ukase upon is hardly anything new, nor is it just and logical. Unions have always been cited as tannical, too overbearing, and rather high handed in their dealings with the "poor, suffering, misunderstood 'boss' and industrialist," who, of course, has nothing but the welfare of his employees at heart and who "knows" better than they do what is good and right... Next, part of your argument is based upon the fact that even small union organizations -- despite their smallness -- have been able to paralyze vast shipping areas around the country, or have immobilized the steel industry (which in turn suspended industrially all automotive, construction, and various concerns dependent upon steel). But to that I say; well, so what? No, don't misunderstand my tone as being blas#, apathetic or filled with pique. Bear with me a moment. By "so what?" I and no doubt So what if various people can't get their pleasure cars on time and have to wait perhaps a few months more? And, what of it if many can't get milk a few days, a few weeks, or even a month (I can't remember a milk strike which lasted too long) ? What of it when millions belonging to the laboring classes have had to do with less than half the milk required, in order that a family be healthfully sustained, not for years but one to two decades or more? For that still can't afford a car, even though carbuying terms have never been more liberal than #-#? Well, someone could say, they can always ride on the trains or buses,... The trouble with the kind of thinking portrayed in your editorial steins from a number of factors, not just one. It is a matter of conditioned belief, not sound analysis. You mention unions and Caesar, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini in the same breath, although scientifically and sociologically these four personalities are inimical to unions. Unions aren't represented by only one man or even two men as the philosophies and governments of Stalin or Hitler were. One might easily liken unions as a semistate within a state. They are composed members all have an equal voice in their affairs. When something is amiss or must be  righted, they have the power to legislate and straighten them out, knocking out any of their leaders from power if necessary. And as lawful citizens of the country, just like the President, members of the House, yourself, your family, and all others, they too have the right to collectively run their affairs the way they wish. But basically your entire argument is mostly founded on an illusion of "what might happen". That is to say, you try to predict something short of chaos arising out of a national union stronger than it's ever been before. Yet you overlook the fact that as a result of increasingly stronger unions this nation has been able to fight off depressions that have been more than once imminent for the last ten years. That doesn't mean that we may not have depressions because unions exist, or that one united and powerful union would stave it off. However, it definitely indicates that such a vital social force is all too often importantly responsible for warding off national or world-wide economic cataclysms. To say the least, the political and democratic welfare of the nation hardly has everything to do with union leaders. Merely the results of the last Presidential elections and recent national elections of Nov., '#, proves this to be so, contrary to Union exhortations to elect the entire Democratic ticket. The balance of votes and in the way they were divided cross-country showed the most healthy trend, politically or ideologically, this nation has taken to date. Doesn't this indicate that the union contingents are human beings with their own free-will and minds to think? That they aren't the "#" automatons with a Big Brother over them which you try to describe. It seems peculiarly odd to me that a person who has such a keen taste for selecting the higher caliber material you've brought into IF to date can express himself so archaically, practically maliciously, and so much like the robber barons who tried running the country back some decades ago. Probably you've got an axe to grind being a publisher and since publishing costs have soared up about # (maybe more) since #. That's a shame -- but it seems to me that a few more besides a publisher, his family, and the handful of people who make up his staff have the right to eat and live better. As for the publisher: don't worry, you've made a nice little pile when you could; and if you haven't done so in the last few months or recently, blame yourself... A class of workers that has long been underrated, overworked, and grossly underpaid is the white-collar group. This includes secretaries, clerks, filers, writers, commercial artists, and those who work on editorial staffs, etc. Perhaps it may not make you happy, but the time is growing ever nearer when this working class has at long last a strong union to back it up. There is no room for cheap labor in a progressive society... Finally, the only thing this nation has to fear is the day when no one has either voice or "pull" with which to express himself and righteously wield the power inherent to all men. At this time I cannot think of a better voice for most people than unions. If a better voice someday manifests itself, no doubt I'll go along with it. Until then unions do much more than suffice. -- G. Constantine Beck, # Woodcliff Ave., North Bergen, N. J. The hue and cry on that March issue editorial is coming in like a load of bricks. However, my opinion is my opinion, but if I can continue to duck those bricks until the next issue well print more of "the other side, -- jlq This big, nmiderful book of puzzle pleasure If you subscribe noiv to contains the largest, most fascinating, varied and interesting selection of puzzles, word games, math games, quizzes, brain teasers, etc. you ever saw! if you subscribe to # issues (two years) of America's most outstanding puzzle magazine... the magazine that offers a real challenge to any puzzle doer. Besides the crosswords, there are topicals, crostics, cryptograms, mathograms, diagramless, puns and anagrams and others. Special features are The American Way of Saying It, a sprightly series on the American idiom, and a topical Quiz which will make your encyclopedia a close friend. If you do not agree that here is the most puzzle pleasure you ever saw for the money -- after you have examined both the book ing why, and we will return your money at once. You keep the magazine and the book. Kingston, New York is # which will be refunded to me if I am not completely satisfied. How You Can Master... in # Minutes a day T housands of persons make mistakes in their everyday English -- and don't know it. It is surprising how many persons fail in spelling such common words as "business," "judgment." "beneficiary," and "receive"; say "between you and I" instead of "between you and me"; use "who" for "whom" ; and mispronounce the simplest words. And it is equally astonishing how few know whether to use one or two "c's" or "m's" or "s's" (as in "recommend" or "disappoint"), or when to use commas in order to make their meaning clear. Most persons use only common words -- colorless, flat, ordinary. Their speech and their letters are lifeless, humdrum. What Does Your English Say About You? Does your English help or hinder you? Every time you talk, every time you write, you show what you are. When you use the wrong word, when you mispronounce a word, when you punctuate incorrectly, when you use commonplace words, you handicap yourself enormously. English, the very tool you should use to improve your business or social position, holds you back. And you don't realize it. for people are too polite to tell you about your mistakes. But now Sherwin Cody offers you a common sense method of acquiring a mastery of English in only a few minutes a day. It's so easy to stop making the mistakes in English which have been hindering you and learn to present your ideas clearly and forcefully on all occasions -- without even thinking about it r L # Central Drive, Port Washington, N.Y. I Please send me, without any obligation on my part, your  free book, "How You Can Master Good English in # Min utes a Day." No agent will call. I janie  Address  I  If # years or under check here for Booklet A. I J What Cody Did at Gary For years Mr. Cody studied the problem of creating instinctive habits of using good English. Several years ago he was invited to teach English to all upper-grade pupils in Gary, Indiana. Mr. Cody secured more improvement in these pupils in five weeks than previously had been obtained by similar pupils in two years under the old methods. # Self-Correcting Device The basic principle of Mr. Cody's method is habit-forming. Suppose he himself were standing forever at your elbow. Every time you made a mistake, suppose you could hear him whisper: "That is wrong, it should be thus and so." In a short time you would habitually use the correct form and the right words. Mr. Cody's patented # SelfCorrecting Device does exactly this. It is his silent voice behind you, ready to speak whenever you commit an error. It finds your mistakes and concentrates on them. You are not drilled upon anything you already know; and there are no rules to memorize. The study of English has been made so simple that no more than fifteen minutes a day is required -- and not of study, but of fascinating practice! Those who take advantage of Mr. Cody's method gain something so priceless that it cannot be measured in terms of money. They gain a facility of speech that marks them as educated persons in whatever society they find themselves. They gain selfconfidence and self-respect. As for material reward, the importance of good English in the race for success cannot be over-estimated. Surely no one can advance far without it. If you are ever embarrassed by mistakes in grammar, spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, or if your vocabulary is limited, this free book, "How You Can Master Good English in # Minutes a Day," will prove a revelation to you. It can be had free upon request. There is no obligation. Send the coupon or a letter or postal card for it now. No agent will call. Port Washington, N.Y. PREVIEW -- When artist Ed Valigursky introduced his spherical moon shuttle-ships in the May (#) issue, one of the scenes offered such unusual possibilities as a cover we asked him to do it in full color. The scene is that of a shuttle-ship discharging its cargo on the moon and it will appear on the next (October) Issue of IF. It Is reproduced here in black on a blue tint -- but you should see it in full color! It's the most colorful and effective moon action illustration we've seen in a long, long time. Don't miss it! All Stories New and Complete s s I S I By Kenneth Rossi, illustrating "Bleedback"  # E IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyrht # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere .#. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appear ing in this marazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidentaL Not responsible tor unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next issue on sale August I#th It was a frightening thing to happen to a person; the responsibility was just too great. But Norman Muller couldn't back out. Multivac had chosen him, and the entire nation waited... Illustrated by Paul Orban L inda, aged lO, was the only one of the family who seemed to enjoy being awake. Norman Muller could hear her now through his own drugged, unhealthy coma. (He had finally managed to fall asleep an hour earlier but even then it was more like exhaustion than sleep.) She was at his bedside now, shaking him. "Daddy, Daddy, wake up. Wake up!" He suppressed a groan. "All right, Linda." "But, Daddy, there's more policemen around than any time! Police cars and everything!" Norman Muller gave up and rose blearily to his elbows. The day was beginning. It was faintly stirring toward dawn outside, the germ of a miserable gray that looked about as miserably gray as he felt. He could hear Sarah, his wife, shuffling about breakfast duties in the kitchen. His father-in-law, Matthew, was hawking strenuously in the bathroom. No doubt Agent Handley was ready and waiting for him. This was the day. Election day! To begin with, it had been like every other year. Maybe a little worse, because it was a Presidential year, but no worse than other Presidential years if it came to that. The politicians spoke about the guh-reat electorate and the vast electuh-ronic intelligence that was its servant. The press analyzed the situation with industrial computers (the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had their own computers) and were full of little hints as to what would be forthcoming. Commentators and columnists pin-pointed the crucial state and county in happy contradiction to one another. The first hint that it would not be like every other year, was when Sarah Muller said to her husband on the evening of October # (with Election Day exactly a month off), "Cantwell Johnson says that Indiana will be the state this year. He's the fourth one. Just think, our state this time." Matthew Hortenweiler took his fleshy face from behind the paper, stared dourly at his daughter and growled, "Those fellows are paid to tell lies. Don't listen to them." "Four of them, Father," said Sarah, mildly. "Tliey all say Indiana." "Indiana is a key state, Matthew," said Norman, just as mildly, "on account of the Hawkins-Smith Act and this mess in Indianapolis. It -- " Matthew twisted his old face alarmingly and rasped out, "No one says Bloomington or Monroe County, do they?" "Well -- " said Norman. Linda, whose little point-chin face had been shifting from one speaker to the next, said pipingly, "You going to be voting this year. Daddy?" Norman smiled gently and said, "I don't think so, dear." But this was in the gradually growing excitement of an October in a Presidential Election Year and Sarah had led a quiet life with dreams for her companions. She said, longingly, "Wouldn't that be wonderful, though?" "If I voted?" Norman Muller had a small, blonde mustache that had given him a debonair quality in the young Sarah's eyes, but which, with gradual graying, had declined merely to lack of distinction. His forehead bore deepening lines bom of uncertainty and, in general, he had never seduced his clerkly soul with the thought that he was either born great or would under any circumstances achieve greatness. He had a wife, a job and a little girl and except under extraordinary conditions of elation or depression was inclined to consider that to be an adequate bargain struck with life. So he was a little embarrassed and more than a little uneasy at the direction his wife's thoughts were taking. "Actually, my dear," he said, "there are two hundred with odds like that, I don't think we ought to waste our time wondering about it." His wife said, "Why, Norman, it's no such thing like two hundred first place, only people between # and # are eligible and it's always men, so that puts it down to mayreally Indiana -- " "Then it's about one and a quarwant me to bet in a horse race against those odds, now, would you? Let's have supper." Matthew muttered from behind his newspaper, "Damned foolishness." Linda asked again, "You going to be voting this year, Daddy?" Norman shook his head and they all adjourned to the dining room. citement was rising rapidly. Over the coffee, she announced that Mrs. Schultz, having a cousin who was the secretary of an Assemblyman, said that all the "smart money" was on Indiana. "She says President Villers is even going to make a speech at Indianapolis." Norman Muller, who had had a hard day at the store, nudged the statement with a raising of eyebrows and let it go at that. Matthew Hortenweiler, who was chronically dissatisfied with Washington, said, "If Villers makes a speech in Indiana, that means he thinks Multivac will pick Arizona. He wouldn't have the guts to go closer, the mushhead." Sarah, who ignored her father whenever she could decently do so, said, "I don't know why they don't announce the state as soon as they can, and then the county and so on. Then the people who were eliminated could relax." "If they did anything like that," pointed out Norman, "the politicians would follow the announcements like vultures. By the time it was narrowed down to a township, you'd have a Congressman or two at every street-comer." Matthew narrowed his eyes and brushed angrily at his sparse, gray hair, "They're vultures, anyhow. Listen -- " Sarah murmured, "Now, Father -- " Matthew's voice rumbled over her protest without as much as a stumble or hitch. "Listen, I was around when they set up Multivac. It would end partisan politics, they said. No more voter's money wasted on campaigns. No more grinning nobodies high-pressured and advertising-campaigned into Congress or the White House. So what happens? More campaigning than ever, only now they do it blind. They'll send guys to Indiana on account of the Hawkins-Smith Act and other guys to California in case it's the Joe Hammer situation that turns crucial. I say, wipe out all that nonsense. Back to the good, old -- " Linda asked, suddenly, "Don't you want Daddy to vote this year, Grandpa?" Matthew glared at the young girl. "Never you mind now." He turned back to Norman and Sarah. "There was a time I voted. Marched right up to the polling booth, stuck my fist on the levers and voted. There was nothing to it. I just said: This fellow's my man and I'm voting for him. That's the way it should be." Linda said excitedly, "You voted, Grandpa? You really did?" Sarah leaned forwird quickly to quiet what might easily become an incongruous story drifting about the neighborhood. "It's nothing, Linda. Grandpa doesn't really mean voted. When he was a little boy, they had something they called voting. Everyone did that kind of voting, Grandpa, too, but it wasn't really voting." Matthew roared, "It wasn't when I was a little boy. I was # and I voted for Langley and it was real voting. My vote didn't count for much, maybe, but it was as good as anyone else's. Anyone else's. And no Multi vac to -- " Norman interposed. "All right, Linda, time for bed. And stop asking questions about voting. When you grow up, you'll understand all about it." He kissed her with antiseptic gentleness and she moved reluctantly out of range under maternal prodding and a promise that she might watch the bedside video till #:#, if she was prompt about the bathing ritual. Linda said, "Grandpa," and stood with her chin down and her hands behind her back until his newspaper lowered itself to the point where shaggy eyebrows and eyes, nested in fine wrinkles, showed themselves. It was Friday, October #. He said, "Yes?" Linda came closer and put both her forearms on one of the old man's knees so that he had to discard his newspaper altogether. She said, "Grandpa, did you really once vote?" He said, "You heard me say I did, didn't you? Do you think I tell fibs?" "N -- no, but Mamma says everybody voted then." "So they did." "But how could they? How could everybody vote?" Matthew stared at her solemnly, then lifted her and put her on his knee. He even moderated the tonal qualities of his voice. He said, "You see, Linda, till about forty years ago, everybody always voted. Say we wanted to decide who was to be the new President of the United States. The Democrats and Republicans would both nominate someone and everybody would say who they wanted. When Election Day was over, they would count how many people wanted the Democrat and how many wanted the Republican. Whoever had more votes was elected. You see?" Linda nodded and said, "How did all the people know who to vote for? Did Multivac tell them?" Matthew's eyebrows hunched down and he looked severe. "They just used their own judgment, girl." She edged away from him and he lowered his voice again, "I'm not angry at you, Linda. But, you see, sometimes it took all night to count what everyone said and people were impatient. So they invented special machines which could look at the first few votes and compare them with the votes from the same places in previous years. That way the machine could compute how the total vote would be and who would be elected. You see?" She nodded. "Like Multivac." "The first computers were much smaller than Multivac. But the machines grew bigger and they could tell how the election would go from fewer and fewer votes. Then, at last, they built Multivac and it can tell from just one voter." Linda smiled at having reached a familiar part of the story and said, "That's nice." Matthew frowned and said, "No, it's not nice. I don't want a machine telling me how I would have voted just because some joker in Milwaukee says he's against higher tariffs. Maybe I want to vote cockeyed just for the pleasure of it. Maybe I don't want to vote. Maybe -- " But Linda had wriggled from his knee and was beating a retreat. She met her mother at the door. Her mother, who was still wearing her coat and had not even had time to remove her hat, said breathlessly, "Run along, Linda. Don't get in mother's way." Then she said to Matthew as she lifted her hat from her head and patted her hair back into place, "I've been at Agatha's." Matthew stared at her censoriously and did not even dignify that piece of information with a grunt as he groped for his newspaper. Sarah said, as she unbuttoned her coat, "Guess what she said?" Matthew flattened out his newspaper for reading purposes with a sharp crackle and said, "Don't much care." Sarah said, "Now, Father -- " But she had no time for anger. The news had to be told and Matthew was the only recipient handy. So she went on, "Agatha's Joe is a policeman, you know, and he says a whole truckload of secret service men came into Bloomington last night." "They're not after me." "Don't you see. Father? Secret service agents, and it's almost election time. In Bloomington!' "Maybe they're after a bank robber." "There hasn't been a bank robbery in town in ages... Father, you're hopeless." She stalked away. Nor did Norman Muller receive the news with noticeably greater excitement. "Now, Sarah, how did Agatha's Joe know they were secret service agents," he asked, calmly. "They wouldn't go around with identification cards pasted on their foreheads." But by next evening, with November a day old, she could say triumphantly, "It's just everyone in Bloomington that's waiting for someone local to be the voter. The Bloomington News as much as said so on video." Norman stirred uneasily. He couldn't deny it, and his heart was sinking. If Bloomington was really to be hit by Multivac's lightning, it would mean newspapermen, video shows, tourists, all sorts of -- strange upset. Norman liked the quiet routine of his life and the distant stir of politics was getting uncomfortably close. He said, "Its all rumor. Nothing more." "You wait and see, then. You just wait and see." As things turned out, there was very little time to wait, for the door-bell rang insistently, and when Norman Muller opened it and said, "Yes?" a tall, grave-faced man said, "Are you Norman Muller?" Norman said, "Yes" again, but in a strange dying voice. It was not difficult to see from the stranger's bearing that he was one carrying authority and the nature of his errand suddenly became as inevitably obvious as it had, until the moment before, been unthinkably impossible. The man presented credentials, stepped into the house, closed the door behind him and said ritualistically, "Mr. Norman Muller, it is necessary for me to inform you on the behalf of the President of the United States that you have been chosen to represent the American electorate on Tuesday, November #, #." with difficulty, to walk unaided to his chair. He sat there, white-faced and almost insensible, while Sarah brought water, slapped his hands in panic and moaned to her husband between clenched teeth, "Don't be sick, Norman. DonH be sick. They'll pick someone else." When Norman could manage to talk, he whispered, "I'm sorry, sir. The secret service agent had removed his coat, unbuttoned his jacket and was sitting at esise on the couch. "It's all right," he said, and the mark of officialdom seemed to have vanished with the formal announcement and leave him simply a large and rather friendly man. "This is the sixth time I've made the announcement and I've seen all kinds of reactions. Not one of them was the kind you see on the video. You know what I mean? A holy, dedicated look, and a character who says: Tt will be a great privilege to serve my country.' That sort of stuff." The agent laughed comfortingly. Sarah's accompanying laugh held a trace of shrill hysteria. The agent said, "Now you're going to have me with you for a while. My name is Phil Handley. I'd appreciate it if you call me Phil. Mr. Muller can't leave the house any more till Election Day. You'll have to inform the department store that he's sick, Mrs. Muller. You can go about your business for a while but you'll have to agree not to say a word about this. Right, Mrs. Muller?" Sarah nodded vigorously. "No, sir. Not a word." "All right. But, Mrs. Muller," Handley looked grave, "we're not kidding now. Go out only if you must and you'll be followed when you do. I'm sorry but that's the way we must operate." "Followed?" "It won't be obvious. Don't worry. And it's only for two days till the formal announcement to the nation is made. Your daughter -- " "She's in bed," said Sarah, hastily. "Good. She'll have to be told I'm a relative or friend staying with the family. If she does find out the truth, she'll have to be kept in the house. Your father had better stay in tlfe house in any case." "He won't like that," said Sarah. "Can't be helped. Now, since you have no odiers living with you -- " "You know all about us, apparently," whispered Norman. "Quite a bit," agreed Handley. "In any case, those are all my instructions to you for the moment. I'll try to co-operate as much as I can and be as little of a nuisance as possible. The government will pay for my maintenance so I won't be an expense to you. I'll be relieved each night by someone who will sit up in this room, so there will be no problem about sleeping accommodations. Now, Mr. Muller -- " "Sir?" "You can call me Phil," said the agent again. "The purpose of the two days preliminary to formal announcement is to get you used to your position. We prefer to have you face Multivac in as normal a state of mind as possible. Just relax and try to feel this is all in a day's work. Okay?" "Okay," said Norman, and then shook his head violently. "But I don't want the responsibility. Why me?" "All right," said Handley, "let's get that straight to begin with. Multivac weighs all sorts of known isn't known, though, and won't be known for a long time. That's the reaction pattern of the human mind. All Americans are subjected to molding pressure of what other Americans do and say, to the things that are done to him and the things he does to others. Any American can be brought to Multivac to have the bent of his mind surveyed. From that the bent of all other minds in the country can be estimated. Some Americans are better for the purpose than others at some given time, depending upon the happenings of diat year. Multivac picked you as most representative this year. Not the smartest, or the strongest, or the luckiest, but just the most representative. Now we don't question Multivac, do we?" "Couldn't it make a mistake?" asked Norman. Sarah, who listened impatiently, interrupted to say, "Don't listen to him, sir. He's just nervous, you know. Actually, he's very well-read and he always follows politics very closely." Handley said, "Multivac makes the decisions, Mrs. Muller. It picked your husband." "But does it know everything?" insisted Norman, wildly. "Can't it have made a mistake?" "Yes, it can. There's no point in not being frank. In #, a selected Voter died of a stroke two hours before it was time for him to be notified. Multivac didn't predict that; it couldn't. A Voter might be mentally unstable, morally unsuitable, or, for that matter, disloyal. Multivac can't know everything about everybody until he's fed all the data there is. That's why alternate selections are always held in readiness. I don't think we'll be using one this time. You're in good health, Mr. Muller, and you've been carefully investigated. You qualify." Norman buried his face in his hands and sat motionless, "By tomorrow morning, sir," said Sarah, "he'll be perfectly all right. He just has to get used to it, that's all." "Of course," said Handley. In the privacy of their bedchamber, Sarah Muller expressed herself in stronger fashion. The burden of her lecture was, "So get hold of yourself, Norman. You're trying to throw away the chance of a lifetime." Norman whispered, desperately, "It frightens me, Sarah. The whole thing." "For goodness sake, why? What's there to it but answering a question or two?" "The responsibility is too great. I couldn't face it." "What responsibility? There isn't any. Multivac picked you. It's Multivac's responsibility. Everyone knows that." Norman sat up in bed in a sudden access of rebellion and anguish. "Everyone is supposed to know that. But they don't. They -- " "Lower your voice," hissed Sarah, icily. "They'll hear you downtown." "They don't," said Norman, declining quickly to a whisper. " When they talk about the Ridgely administration of #, do they say that Ridgely was corrupt and the nation was foolish to elect him? Do they say he won them over with pie-in-the-sky promises and racist baloney? No! They talk about the 'goddam MacComber vote' as though Humphrey MacComber was the only man who had anything to do with it because he faced Multivac. I've said it myself -- only now I think, the poor guy was just a truck-farmer who didn't ask to be picked. Why was it his fault more than anyone else's. Now his name is a curse." "You're just being childish," said Sarah. "I'm being sensible. I tell you, Sarah, I won't accept. They can't make me vote if I don't want to. I'll say I'm sick. I'll say -- " But Sarah had had enough. "Now you listen to me," she whispered in a cold fury. "You don't have only yourself to think about. You know what it means to be Voter of the Year. A Presidential year at that. It means publicity and fame and, maybe, buckets of money -- " "And then I go back to being a clerk." "You will not. You'll have a branch managership at the least if you have any brains at all, and you will have, because I'll tell you what to do. You control the kind of publicity if you play your cards right, and you can force Kennell Stores, Inc. into a tight contract and an escalator clause in connection with your salary and z, decent pension plan." "That's not the point in being Voter, Sarah." "That will be your point. If you don't owe anything to yourself or to me -- I'm not asking for myself -- you owe something to Linda." Norman groaned. "Well, don't you?" snapped Sarah. "Yes, dear," murmured Norman. On November #, the official announcement was made and it was too late for Norman to back out even if he had been able to find the courage to make the attempt. Their house was sealed off. Secret service agents made their appearance in the open, blocking off all approach. At first the telephone rang incessantly, but Philip Handley with an engagingly apologetic smile took all calls. Eventually, the exchange shunted all calls directly to the police station. Noiman imagined that in that way, he was spared not only the bubbling (and envious?) congratulations of friends, but also the egregious pressure of salesmen scenting a prospect and the designing smoothness of politicians from all over the nation. Perhaps even death threats from the inevitable cranks. Newspapers were forbidden to the house now in order to keep out weighted pressure and television was gently but firmly disconnected, over Linda's loud protests. Matthew growled and stayed in his room; Linda, after the first flurry of excitement, sulked and whined because she could not leave the house; Sarah divided her time between preparation of meals for the present and plans for the future; and Norman's depression lived and fed upon itself. And the morning of Tuesday, November #, #, came at last and it was Election Day. only Norman Muller ate, and that mechanically. Even a shower and shave had not succeeded in either restoring him to reality or removing his own conviction that he was as grimy without as he felt grimy within. Handley's friendly voice did its best to shed some normality over the gray and unfriendly dawn. (The weather prediction had been for a cloudy day with prospects of rain before noon.) Handley said, "We'll keep this house insulated till Mr. Muller is back, but after that we'll be off your necks." The secret service agent was in full uniform now, including side-aums in heavilybrassed holsters. "You've been no trouble at all, Mr. Handley," simpered Sarah. Norman drank through two cups of black coffee, wiped his lips with a napkin, stood up and said, haggardly, "I'm ready." Handley stood up, too, "Very well, sir. And thank you, Mrs. Muller, for your very kind hospitality." The armored car purred down empty streets. They were empty n even for that hour of the morning. Handley indicated that and said, "They always shift traffic away from the line of drive ever since the attempted bombing that nearly ruined the Leverett election of ' # ." When the car stopped, Norman was helped oiit by the always polite Handley into an underground drive whose walls were lined with soldiers at attention. He was led into a brightly lit room, in which three white-uniformed men greeted him smilingly. Norman said, sharply, "But this is the hospital?" "There's no significance to that," said Handley, at once. "It's just that the hospital has the necessary facilities." "Well, what do I do?" Handley nodded. One of the three men in white advanced and said, "I'll take over now, agent." Handley saluted in an ofT-hand manner and left the room. The man in white said, "Won't you sit down, Mr. Muller? I'm John Paulson, Senior Computer. These are Samson Levine and Peter Dorogobuzh, my assistants." Norman numbly shook hands all around. Paulson was a man of middle height with a soft face that seemed used to smiling and a very obvious toupee. He wore plasticrimmed glasses of an old-fashioned cut, and he lit a cigarette as he talked. (Norman refused his offer of one.) Paulson said, "In the first place, Mr. Muller, I want you to know we are in no hurry. We want you to stay with us all day if necessary, just so that you get used to your surroundings and get over any thought you might have that there is anything unusual in this, anything clinical, if you know what I mean." "It's all right," said Norman. "I'd just as soon this were over." "I understand your feelings. Still, we want you to know exactly what's going on. In the first place, Multivac isn't here." "It isn't?" Somehow through all his depression, he had still looked forward to seeing Multivac. They said it was half a mile long and three stories high, that fifty technicians walked the corridors within its structure continuously. It was one of the wonders of the world. Paulson smiled. "No. It's not portable, you know. It's located underground, in fact, and very few people know exactly where. You can understand that, since it is our greatest natural resource. Believe me, elections aren't the only thing it's used for." Norman thought he was being deliberately chatty, but found himself intrigued all the same. "I thought I'd see it. I'd like to." "I'm sure of that. But it takes a Presidential order and even then it has to be countersigned by Security. However, we are plugged into Multivac right here by beam transmission. What Multivac says can be interpreted here and what we say is beamed directly to Multivac, so in a sense we're in its presence." Norman looked about. The machines within the room were all meaningless to him. "Now let me explain, Mr. Muller," Paulson went on. "Multivac already has most of the information it needs to decide all the elections, national, state and local. It needs only to check certain imponderable attitudes of mind and it will use you for that. We can't predict what questions it will ask, but they may not make much sense to you, or even to us. It may ask you how you feel about garbage-disposal in your town; whether you favor central incinerators. It might ask you whether you have a doctor of your own or whether you make use of National Medicine, Inc. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir." "Whatever it asks, you answer in your own words in any way you please. If you feel you must explain quite a bit, do so. Talk an hour, if necessary." "Yes, sir." "Now, one more thing. We will have to make use of some simple devices which will automatically record your blood pressure, heart beat, slan conductivity and brain wave pattern while you speak. The machinery will seem formidable, but it's all absolutely painless. You won't even know it's going on. So don't worry about it." The other two technicians were already busying themselves with smooth-gleaming apparatus on oiled wheels. Norman said, "Is that to check on whether I'm lying or not?" "Not at all, Mr. Muller. There's no question of lying. It's only a matter of emotional intensity. If the machine asks you your opinion of your child's school, you may say, T think it is overcrowded.' Those are only words. From the way your brain and heart and hormones and sweat glands work, Multivac can judge exactly how intensely you feel about the matter. It will understand your feelings better than you yourself." "I never heard of this," said Norman. "No, I'm sure you didn't. Most of the details of Multivac's workings are top secret. For instance, when you leave, you will be asked to sign a paper swearing that you will never reveal the nature of the questions you were asked, the nature of your responses, what was done, or how it was done. The less is known about the Multivac, the less chance of attempted outside pressures upon the men who service it." He smiled, grimly, "Our lives are hard enough as it is." Norman nodded. "I understand." "And now would you like anything to eat or drink?" "No. Nothing right now." "Do you have any questions?" Norman shook his head. "Then you tell us when you're ready." "I'm ready right now." "You're certain there's nothing else you want to ask?" "Quite." Paulson nodded, and raised his hand in a gesture to the others. They advanced with their frightening equipment and Norman Muller felt his breath come a little more quickly and his heart beat more rapidly as he watched. T he ordeal lasted nearly three hours, with one short break for coffee and an embarrassing session with a chamber-pot. During all this time, Norman Muller remained encased in machinery. He was boneweary at the close. He thought sardonically that his promise to reveal nothing of what had passed would be an easy one to keep. Already the questions were a hazy mish-mash in his mind. Somehow he had thought Multivac would speak in a sepulchral, superhuman voice, resonant and echoing, but that, he now decided, was just an idea he had from seeing too many television shows. The truth was distressingly undramatic. The questions were slips of a kind of metallic foil patterned with numerous punctures. A second machine converted the pattern into words and Paulson read the words to Norman, then gave him the question and let him read it for himself. Norman's answers were taken down by a recording machine, played back to Norman for confirmation, with emendations and added remarks also taken down. All that was fed into a patternmaking instrument and that, in turn, was radiated to Multivac. The one question Norman could remember at the moment was an incongruously gossipy: "What do you think of the price of eggs?" He had answered, blankly, "I don't know the price of eggs." Now it was over, and gently they removed the electrodes from various portions of his body, unwrapped the pulsating band from his upper arm, moved the machinery away. He stood up, drew a deep, shuddering breath and said, "Is that all? Am I through?" "Not quite," Paulson hurried to him, smiling in reassuring fashion. "We'll have to ask you to stay another hour." "Why?" asked Norman, sharply. "It will take that long for Multivac to weave the new data into sands of elections are concerned, you know. It's very complicated. And it may be that an odd contest here or there, a comptrollership in Phoenix, Arizona, or some council seat in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, may be in doubt. In that case, Multivac may be compelled to ask you a deciding question or two." "No," said Norman. "I won't go through this again." "It probably won't happen," Paulson said, soothingly. "It rarely does. But just in case, you'll have to stay." A touch of steel, just a touch, entered his voice. "You have no choice, you know. You must." Norman sat down wearily. He shrugged. Paulson said, "We can't let you read a newspaper, but if you'd care for a murder mystery, or if you'd like to play chess, or if there's anything we can do for you to help pass the time, I wish you'd mention it." "It's all right. I'll just wait." They ushered him into a small room just next to the one in which he had been questioned. He let himself sink into a plastic covered armchair and closed his eyes. As well as he could, he must wait out this final hour. He sat perfectly still and slowly the tension left him. His breathing grew less ragged and he could clasp his hands without being quite so conscious of the trembling of his fingers. Maybe there would be no questions. Maybe it was all over. If it were over, then the next thing would be torchlight processions and invitations to speak at all sorts of functions. The Voter of the Year! He, Norman Muller, ordinary clerk of a small department store in Bloomington, Indiana, who had neither been bom great nor achieved greatness would be in the extraordinary position of having had greatness thrust upon him. The historians would speak soberly of the Muller Election of #. That would be its name, the Muller Election! The publicity, the better job, the flash flood of money that interested Sarah so much, occupied only a corner of his mind. It would all be welcome, of course. He couldn't refuse it. But at the moment something else was beginning to concern him. A latent patriotism was stirring. After all, he was representing the entire electorate. He was the focal point for them. He was, in his own person, for this one day, all of America! The door opened, snapping him to open-eyed attention. For a moment, his stomach constricted. Not more questions! But Paulson was smiling. "That will be all, Mr. Muller." "No more questions, sir?" "None needed. Everything was quite clearcut. You will be escorted back to your home and then you will be a private citizen once more. Or as much so as the public will allow." "Thank you. Thank you." Norman flushed and said, "I wonder -- Who was elected?" Paulson shook his head. "That will have to wait for the official announcement. The rules are quite strict. We can't even tell you. You understand." "Of course. Yes." Norman felt embarrassed. "Secret Service will have the necessary papers for you to sign." "Yes." Suddenly, Norman Muller felt proud. It was on him now in full strength. He was proud. In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him! ) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise.    A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous. -- Bertrand Russell Why was Cyril Kirk, highest man in his class, assigned to such an enigmatic place as Nemar? Of what value was it -- if anything? No one could tell him believed them... planet from the spaceship did nothing to abate the anger seething within him. He stared at it in disgust, glad there were no other passengers left to witness his arrival. All during the long trip, he had felt their curious stares and excited whispers everywhere he passed, and he had felt a small wave of relief whenever a large batch of them the answer. He wouldnt have had been unloaded on some planet along the way. None of them had come this far -- which was hardly surprising, he thought; the last of them had been taken off two-thirds of the way to Nemar. He was very glad to see them go, though by that time they had stopped making their cautious, deferential attempts to draw him into conversation and elicit some clue about his mission Illustrated by Kelly Preas and destination. He had let them wonder. He knew that his aloofness was being taken as snobbishness, but he was past caring. They all recognized that he was a Planetary Administrator by the blazing gold insignia on the dark uniform, insignia calling for awe and respect all over the galaxy. They guessed that this was his first appointment, but the thing that really aroused their curiosity was the bitter, angry look that went with what they considered his arrogant reserve. Since polite efforts at conversation by the braver or more confident among the company were met with icy monosyllables that cut off further attempts, they were left with a wide range of controversy. Some of them held, though they had never actually seen a Planetary Administrator before in the flesh, that all PA's were like this. They argued that the long, grueling years of study, the ascetic,disciplined life from childhood, and the constant pressure of competition, knowing that only a small percentage would finally make the grade, made them kind of inhuman by the time they finished. Besides, they were neargeniuses or they wouldn't have been selected in the first place -- and everybody knows geniuses are sort of peculiar. One of the bolder and more beautiful girls on board had been argued into making a carefully planned attempt to draw information out of him, and bets had been placed on the results. She was eager enough to try her hand at this rich prize, and her self-confidence was justified by a long trail of broken hearts in high places, but the attempt came to nothing. Kirk was aware of her efforts and aware that in another mood he would have appreciated her charm, but he felt too sick and miserable to respond. Remembering her piquant, laughing face later in his cabin, Kirk thought morosely of the long train of girls he had known in the past. Many of them had been lovely -- a fledgling PA was considered a highly desirable date, even though the chances were always that he wouldn't make it in the end. But Kirk had always been filled with an iron determination that he was going to make it in the end, and this meant no distractions. If he began to feel he might get really emotionally entangled with a girl, he stopped seeing her at once. He saw them seldom enough, anyway. The regulations of the PA Institute gave him a fair amount of free time, but the study requirements made the apparent freedom meaningless. How hard he'd worked for the day he'd be wearing this uniform, he thought bitterly. How proud and happy he'd thought he'd feel wearing it! And now, instead, here he was, practically hiding in his cabin, hoping nobody would discover the name of his destination and guess the reason for the humiliated rage that was still coursing through him. He'd gone over the interview with Carlin Ross a hundred times since the trip started, and he wasn't any nearer to making sense out of it than when he began... He'd entered Ross's office for the interview in which he would be awarded his post, full of confidence and pride. The final examination results posted in the main lobby were headed by his name. He knew that, because of his good record and general popularity, he had been watched with special interest by the teachers and staff for some time; and he looked forward to being awarded a particularly desirable planet, in spite of its being his first post. Technical ability and sound training in administration had long ago been decided upon as more important than practical experience, as mankind began to sicken of the bungling of political appointees. The far-flung planets that had been colonized or held an intelligent, humanoid population were so numerous that even an experienced Planetary Administrator could know very little about each one. Only someone brought up on a planet could have a detailed knowledge of it, and it was a basic premise of the Galactic Union that governors with a common upbringing and training on Terra were necessary to keep the varied parts of the empire from splitting off and becoming alienated from the rest. Ross was one of the half-dozen men in the top echelon governing the galaxy and its warring components. His official title was Galactic Coordinator, and one of his minor duties was the supervision of the Institute of Training for Planetary Administration, which had been home to Kirk for so long. Although he was the Institute's official head, he was too busy to be seen in its halls more than rarely, but Kirk had had several brief talks with him and one long one. He had the feeling that Ross had a special interest in him, and this had added to his anticipation on the fatal day. As he entered the room, Ross looked up, his blue eyes friendly and alert in the weathered, tanned face. "Hello, Kirk," he said. As always, the simple warmth of his smile threw Kirk off guard. It had never failed to surprise him the few times he had seen Ross. In this place of dedicated, serious men, of military crispness of speech, of stiffly erect carriage, Ross's relaxed body and quiet, open expression seemed startlingly out of place. Except for the alertness and intelligence of the eyes, he looked like a country farmer who had wandered in by mistake. Kirk, and his friends, had more than once wondered how such an anomaly had risen to the high position of Galactic Coordinator. However, if his manner left you puzzled, it also made you feel surprisingly comfortable, and Kirk had felt relaxed and happy as Ross motioned him to a chair. Nothing prepared him for the shock that was to come. He remembered the apparent casualness with which Ross had spoken. "I'm sending you to Nemar." For a moment Kirk felt blank. The name did not register. His private speculations had centered on the question of whether he would be sent to a thriving, pleasant, habitable planet or to one of those whose bleak surface contained some newly discovered, highly valuable mineral and whose struggling colonists lived under pressurized domes. Either type could have held the chance to work up to the galactic eminence and power he had set his heart on. He had been over and over the list of planets that were due to receive new PA's (there was a rotational system of five years, with an additional five years made optional), and he had a private list of those which, as the star graduate of his class, he hoped he might draw. Nemar was not among them. His face stayed blank for a minute as he searched his memory for the name, and as vague bits of information filtered through to him, his eyes widened in disbelief. "But, sir -- " He fumbled for words. "That's on the very edge of the galaxy." Ross's voice was quiet. "Yes, it's a long way." "But there's nothing on it!" Ross sounded a little amused. "There are some very nice people on it -- the natives are of the same species as we are, though they look a little different. That means the air is breathable without aids. It's quite a pleasant planet." "That's not what I mean, sir. I mean there's nothing of any value -- no minerals, no artifacts, no valuable plant or animal products." He searched his memory for what little he could remember about Nemar from classes. He recalled that the planet had been discovered only forty years ago by a Survey ship that had gone off course far toward the outer rim of the galaxy. It had been incorporated into the Galactic Union because it was considered dangerous to leave any inhabited planet free of control; but it had not been considered a valuable addition. It was far off the established trade routes, and seemed to contain nothing worth the expense of transporting it. "The culture is very primitive, isn't it?" Kirk asked, half thinking aloud. "It is so considered," Ross answered. The reply struck Kirk as odd. A sudden hope filled him. Maybe something new had been discovered about the place, possibly something that only Ross and a few of the top command knew about. He threw a sharp glance at Ross's face, but it told him nothing. "I don't remember too much about the place from class," he ventured. Ross rose, and with his incongruously quick, lazy grace strode to the filing cabinet along the wall, pulling out documents and pamphlets. He plumped them in a pile in front of Kirk. "Most of the factual information we have is in these. You can try the library, too, but I doubt if you'll find anything more." He added a book to the pile. "This covers their language. You'll have two months of intensive instruction in it before you go. You were always good in your language structure courses, so I doubt that you'll have any trouble with it. You'll have another two weeks to learn the stuff in these documents, and two more weeks to rest or do whatever you like before you leave." He resumed his chair. "You're luckier than some of the others. The boy who got Proserpine will have a stack of books up to there to absorb." He gestured toward the ceiling. At the mention of Proserpine, Kirk's brown eyes darkened. Proserpine had been recently discovered, too, but that was all it had in common with Nemar. Its inhospitable surface held vast amounts of a highly valuable fuel ore, and it had been one of the places on his list. He wondered who was going there, his insides suddenly twisting with envy. He tried to keep his voice even. "I don't understand why I'm being sent to Nemar." He searched for words. After all, he couldn't exactly mention his graduating first and his record. "Is there something I don't know about? Has something valuable been discovered that hasn't been publicized, or -- " He waited hopefully. Ross's answer was flat. "No, there's nothing there that can be transported that's worth transporting." Kirk felt despair surging through him, then suddenly changing to sharp anger. "I've worked hard. I have a good record. Why are you giving me this -- this lemon? Why don't you give it to whoever graduated lowest, or better still to some older PA who bungled things somewhere, but not quite enough to be retired!" His face was burning with rage. Somewhere inside he felt shocked at himself for speaking to a Coordinator this way ; at the same time he felt a violent urge to carry it farther and sock Ross in the nose. His body was shaking... birthright Remembering the scene now as he watched Nemar swing closer, Kirk felt the anger again, time hadn't dimmed it at all. Ross must have perceived his fury, but he had shown no signs of it. Looking as friendly as ever, he had told him mildly that he did not consider Nemar a "lemon", that he had excellent reasons for sending him there, but he preferred not to tell him what they were. He wanted him to discover them for himself after he arrived. The rest of the interview had concerned itself mainly with practical information, most of which Kirk had scarcely heard through his fog of emotion. His endless speculations since then had gotten him nowhere. He had dredged out of his memory every incident that might reveal some trait for which he was being discreetly given a back seat. He recalled a roommate who had said he was going to become a living machine if he kept it up, and no machine had the right to have jurisdiction over people. But Jere had flunked out along the way, like most candidates who had an attitude like that. He went over the time he had been called to Ross's office and gently rebuked for working men under him on a project too hard. "I don't ask anything from them I don't ask of myself," he had protested. "I know," Ross had answered, "and I respect that. But you work that hard from choice." Then he had nodded in dismissal. Kirk had puzzled over these and other incidents, searching for a clue, but found nothing. All his probing in a more optimistic direction led to blind alleys also. The documents on Nemar, all the information he could dig up, confirmed Ross's statement that the planet held nothing of commercial value. The planet, to judge by what he had read, was a pleasant place, apparently very pretty, with heavy vegetation and a warm, temperate climate, and the natives were hospitable and friendly. But all this held very little comfort for him and did little to assuage the sense of angry humiliation that had made him seek isolation from the other passengers. He could see the planet more clearly now as the ship began to angle into an orbit, preparatory to sending out the smaller landing ship which would take him down. Hastily he reviewed in his mind once more the few facts he knew about the place, and shaped his tongue to the unfamiliar sounds of the native language. He fought down the feeling of humiliation, and straightened his shoulders. After all, to these people, he would he the most important person on the planet. If he was to be a big frog in a small puddle, he was still supreme administrator here, and he had no intention of letting them know his arrival signified a disgrace to him. ing ship, Kirk looked out on a cleared plain. In the foreground a group of natives were gathered to greet him, and a scattering of dark uniforms among them indicated the officials who would make up the Terran part of his staff. As the natives approached him, he noted the green-gold hair and the slightly greenish tinge to their skin, for which his studies had prepared him. Nothing in his studies, however, had prepared him for the extraordinary grace and beauty of these people. They were dressed, men and women alike, in a simple fold of bright-colored cloth circling their body from the waist and reaching a third of the way to their knees. Kirk noted, with a slight sense of shock, that the women wore nothing above the waist except for a strand of woven reeds, interlaced with shells and flowers, which fell loosely to their breasts. In these brief and primitive garments, the natives bore themselves with such imperious grace and assurance that for a moment Kirk felt as if his role had been abruptly reversed -- as if instead of being the powerful representative of a great civilization to a backward people, he were the humble primitive waiting for their acceptance. One of the older natives stepped forward from the rest, his palm outstretched, shoulder high, in greeting. "Welcome to Nemar," he said, his glance steady and gracious on Kirk's face. Kirk recognized the words of the native language with surprise. The clear, musical quality of the native's speech made his own words, harsh and grating by comparison, sound like a different language, as he replied. "Thank you. I am very happy to be here." As he spoke, he realized that the lie had for a moment felt almost like truth. For a moment he wondered if the planet's apparent primitiveness was deceptive and if its simplicity concealed a highly developed culture. But even as the hope surged through him, he remembered Ross's clear and definite statement to the contrary. Besides, there would be no point in keeping a thing like that secret from the rest of the galaxy, even if it could be done. Such a culture, moreover, would certainly have things of value to trade. As these thoughts coursed through his mind, one of the Terrans stepped forward from the crowd. The insignia on his uniform were the same as his own, and he realized, with a surge of curiosity, that this must be his predecessor. The man reached forward to shake his hand. "Hello. The name's Jerwyn." His tanned face was open and friendly, and reminded Kirk curiously of someone; he couldn't remember who. "Glad to see you." I'll bet you are, Kirk thought: your gain, my loss. "Greetings from Terra," he replied, somewhat stiffly. "Cyril Kirk." He tried to keep his vague disapproval of Jerwyn's breezy informality out of his voice. It was hard to realize this man was also a Planetary Administrator. He seemed to have lost completely the look of authority that was the lifelong mark of the PA graduate. After the various introductions and a short period of conversation, Kirk found himself seated beside birthright Jerwyn in the small ground vehicle which was to take him to his headquarters. Jerwyn immediately resumed the standard Galactic-Terran language, which he had dropped during the introductions. "As soon as I show you around a bit. I'll be off on the landing ship you came in. I wonder how Terra will seem after all this time." "Five years is a long time," Kirk ventured. "Ten." Kirk stared at him in astonishment. "You took the optional five years! Why in heaven would anyone -- " He broke off suddenly. The question might be one Jerwyn would not care to answer. He threw him a speculative glance, wondering why he had been sent here and whether he, too, was bitter. Maybe a poor record, or something in his past he didn't care to go back to... ? That didn't fit in his own case -- but then there was no knowing what did fit in his own case. Jerwyn had an alert, perceptive look that indicated considerable intelligence, but still he somehow looked inadequate. Some quality an Administrator should have was lacking... dignity? drive? Jerwyn's voice interrupted his thoughts. "Beautiful, isn't it?" The groundcar had left the plain and was entering a heavily wooded section. For the first time, Kirk took a good look at his surroundings. Some of the trees and plants were very like those he had seen in parks at home. Still, there was a definitely alien feel to it all. The trees were low and wide and had peculiar contours, different from those of trees on Terra, and their flowering foliage came in odd sizes and colors. The sky wasn't quite the blue he was used to, and the shapes of the clouds were different. He noticed for the first time a heady, pungent perfume carried on the breeze, that was both pleasant and stimulating. It came, perhaps, from the wide-petaled flowers in oddly shimmering colors that clustered thickly everywhere. "Yes, it's beautiful," he agreed, "but -- " The feeling of despair and frustration welled up in him again. The warmth he sensed in Jerwyn made him suddenly long to blurt out the whole story. He controlled himself with difficulty, as he turned toward him. "It's pretty enough. It might make a good vacation resort if it weren't on the edge of nowhere." His pent-up emotion exploded as he spoke. "But five years in this hole! I'd feel a hell of a lot better if I were looking at some rocky, barren landscape with some mines on it -- with something of value on it -- with a name somebody'd heard of, where you could hope to get somewhere. I don't want to waste five years here!" He paused for breath, staring angrily at the lush landscape. "And for that matter, life on one of those planets where you live under domes, with a sealed-in atmosphere, is probably a lot more civilized and convenient than in this primitive jungle." Jerwyn nodded slowly, an unspoken compassion in his face. "I know how you're feeling." He paused. "And it does seem pretty primitive here at first -- no automatic precipitrons for cleaning your clothes, natural foods instead of synthetics, no aircars, no automatic dispensers for food or drinks or clothes; none of a hundred things you take for granted till you don't have them. But you get used to it. There are things to make up -- " He broke off as the car began to descend into a valley. "Look!" His voice held an odd tone of affection. "There's your new home." Kirk gazed downward at the settlement nested in the valley below them. He fished in his pocket for a magnascope to bring the view nearer and stared curiously, as the lens adjusted to the distance. He picked out groups of buildings, low units of some coarse, natural material, widely spaced. This was the largest city on the planet, he knew, but it seemed to be little more than a village. It was undoubtedly primitive -- very primitive. Remembering the magnificent high buildings of Terra, he was filled with sudden homesickness for the speeding sidewalks crowded with people, the skylanes humming with aircars. Turning the magnascope here and there, he kept his gaze trained on the town beneath him, studying it now in more detail. Slowly, some of his depression began to leave him, and he felt a strange sense of warmth begin to take its place. He stepped up the power of the glass till he could see the inhabitants walking in the streets. Like the natives who had met him at the landing ship, they walked with a beautiful, easy grace, a sumptuous ease that seemed somehow almost a rebuke of his own stiffly correct military posture. They gave an impression of combined leisure and vitality. Gradually, as he watched, an odd feeling of nostalgia began to stir in him, an old, childish longing. He remembered suddenly a dream he had had years ago, in which he had run laughing through green meadows with a lovely girl. He had fought against waking from it and returning to his desk piled high with books and his ascetically furnished room. He blinked his eyes and put down the magnascope. "Rather attractive, in a way," he said grudgingly to Jerwyn. He settled back slowly into his seat. "Just the same," he added, annoyed at himself for his sentimental lapse, "how have you managed to stand it all this time? I still can't figure how I came to get it in the neck like this." Abruptly, he plunged into the words he had been holding back, telling the whole story of his confusion to Jerwyn. He rationalized to himself that perhaps Jerwyn could help him solve the mystery. At least he might tell him how he himself came to be sent to Nemar, without his having to ask directly; and this might give him a clue. "I've been over the whole busiit out," he concluded. "Somebody with pull must have had it in for me. But who? And why? I never had any real run-ins with Ross. In fact. I'd always thought he liked me." He scowled. "Of course, he gives practically everybody that impression. Maybe he's just a professional glad-hander, though he certainly doesn't seem like it." He shook his head. "Maybe that's the secret of his success; I never could figure out how he got where he is. He certainly doesn't seem typical enough, but there's a quality about him I'd almost call -- weak, I guess. Unsuitable for his post, anyway. He treats the janitor the same as -- " Kirk stopped abruptly. He suddenly had the answer to the question that had been nagging at the edge of his mind: it was Ross that Jerwyn reminded him of. Trying to cover up his confusion, he went on rapidly, hoping Jerwyn would not notice. "Anyway, whatever his reasons were, he's played me a dirty trick, and if there's ever any way I can pay him back for it. I'll do it. I'll have five years to think about it. Me ! The fair-haired boy of the Institute! On my way to the top!" His face flushed with resentment. "Sent to sweat out five years in this Godforsaken place with a bunch of savages hardly evolved out of the jungle!" He passed his hand over his forehead, wiping off sweat, feeling the full force of his pent-up anguish and rage flood through him. Jerwyn spoke very quickly. "I felt pretty much the same way when I was sent here. But I feel differently now. I could try to explain. But I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think anyone could have explained to me. This is a place you've got to live in; you can't be told about it." He shifted in his seat as a small group of buildings came into view. "As for Ross -- well, he was responsible for my being sent here, too, and I spent some time when I first came, thinking of ways to cut his body in little pieces and throw them in a garbage pulverizer -- but I wouldn't waste my time if I were you. I know now he had his reasons." As he spoke the car pulled to a stop. "Well, here we are. This is where you'll be living and working." Jerwyn stayed with Kirk while he was shown through various buildings. He found most of the office buildings full of bright murals and little watered patios, but lacking the simplest devices for working efficiency. He was introduced to various officials, Terran and Nemarian. Some of the latter, to his surprise, were women -- a rare phenomenon for a primitive planet, he remembered from his classes. By the time the touring was over and he had said goodbye to Jerwyn, he was too tired to do more than glance briefly at the quarters to which he was shown. Left alone in his rooms, he took a quick, awkward bath, too weary to feel more than a brief annoyance at the lack of automatic buttons for temperature controls, soaping, and drying, and fell exhausted on the low bed. F or a moment, as he woke, Kirk could not remember where he was. Drowsiness mingled with a sense of eeriness at the sound of long bird-calls unlike any on Terra and the unfamiliar rustling of leaves ; the rays from the late iternoon sun seemed too crimson. Then, as sleep fell from his eyes, he remembered. He glanced at the window above his bed from which the orange light filtered into the room and saw it was completely open to the outside air. Something would have to done about that, he thought grimly, or he'd never be able to sleep with an easy mind. There were always people, sooner or later, who hated you if you had power; or if they didn't hate you, they at least wanted you out of commission for one reason or another. He sat up to take a better look at the room he had been too tired to investigate before. There were mats of woven reeds, and low carved chests, and flowers ; the walls were clean and glimmering, and bare except for a single picture of two young native children. He got up and walked over to look at it more closely. A boy of about seven was holding his arm out to a girl, slightly younger, to help her on to the low, swaying branch on which he was sitting. The picture was full of sunshine and green leaves and happiness, and you could feel the trusting softness of her arms reaching up to him. An odd picture, Kirk thought. The children looked childlike enough, but the emotions looked adult. As he looked at it, he heard a soft, swishing sound in the next room, and stiffened. There was no lock on the door, he noticed. Well, it was time to get up, anyway. He dressed hurriedly, trying to remember the layout of his rooms. Except for the bathroom, he recalled only one other room, a sort of arbored porch, one side completely open to the air, with a low table and some cooking equipment at one end. As he opened the door, a faint whisk of something made of reeds went out of sight. A primitive broom, he thought, with a faint sense of relief. Some servant was tidying the house. He opened the door further -- and stared, A native girl was standing before him. She was extraordinarily lovely. The gold-green hair of her race rippled and flowed in waves over her bare back and shoulders down to the circlet of vermilion cloth girdling her thighs. The band of small shells that circled her throat was netted with wide orange and red flowers that halfhid, halfdisclosed the firm naked breasts. The light brown, gold-flecked eyes beneath the gold-green eyebrows were soft ; so was the tender mouth, rosecolored against the flawless skin, with its undertones of faint green. Her body, too, looked soft and yielding, but was borne with imperious grace that somehow dignified even the broom held loosely now in one delicate hand. Kirk stared at this vision of beauty, taken by surprise, and found himself caught up in sudden desire. She was like something out of a dream. He tried to get hold of himself. You're just not used to half-nude women, he told himself. You're used to girls in uniforms, crisp, businesslike uniforms. A wild suspicion caught at the edge of his mind. He didn't know anything about this planet, really -- except that there was something he didn't birthright know. Maybe they made a practice of diverting their rulers with beautiful women. She certainly didn't look like a servant. He smiled at the thought that came to him : this servant was the first indication of the luxury befitting a Planetary Administrator. The thought enabled him to gain control of himself again. He regained a semblance of his customary reserved look. "Good afternoon," he said, in the native language. She smiled and held out her hand. He hesitated, then held out his own awkwardly. Did one shake hands with one's servants here? He wished he'd asked Jerwyn for more advice about protocol. She took his hand and pressed it lightly for a moment. "I am Nanae." Her voice was low and musical. "I am going to clean and take care of your house." She turned and with exquisite precision gestured toward the low table and cooking equipment at the end of the room. "I thought you would be waking soon. I have prepared some jen for you." Jen? he thought. Oh, yes, a. very light stimulant -- the local variety of tea. He walked over to the low table and sat down, fighting the impulse to enter into conversation with her. He watched her as she poured the hot liquid into wide cups of polished gourd, her hair radiant about her shoulders. A stab of longing shot through him. The long years of training in the Institute paraded through his mind, the years of strict routine, hard work, ascetic, bare rooms, with women considered playthings that took too much time from needed study; the only beauty was the dream of power among the glittering stars. Well, he wasn't going to give up and forget the dream, he told himself -- and he wasn't going to be led astray by any pretty girls, particularly a maid. Hell, he thought suddenly, maybe Ross is testing me. Maybe he picked the worst planet in the whole damn galaxy to find out if I could do something with it. It's obvious if I can get this place on the trademaps, I can handle anything. He looked speculatively at the girl as she pushed the cup toward him. He wondered how she came by her job. Did they hold beauty contests here for the honor of being cleaning woman in the PA's household? He realized he was feeling more cheerful. The jen and the soothing quietness of the girl's presence were doing him good. He felt a resurgence of his old energy and ambition that the interview with Ross had quelled for so long. "Did you work for Jerwyn, too?" he asked. Yes, his voice was just right, courteous, but not too friendly, he thought. "No, but I knew him." She looked at him with an odd smile. "He became one of our best dancers." "Dancers!" Kirk stared at her in amazement. He started to open his mouth, then stopped. He'd better not ask any more questions till he'd had a chance to talk to some Terrans. Apparently, Jerwyn had gone native. Maybe it was his way of rebelling against being sent here in the first place -- and he'd let himself go so far that he'd skipped his chance of reassignment at the end of the first five years, afraid of the problems of a new post after being a beachcomber for so long. That would account for the curious lack of deference he'd found in all these people. They were friendly enough, but they lacked proper respect for his position. You weren't supposed to be friendly to a PA; you were supposed to be humbly polite. He recalled the respect and awe he'd received on the ship. As he finished his cup, he realized he was very hungry. He looked around instinctively for food. He had enough synthetics in his bags to do him for awhile, but he might as well make the plunge and start eating the native foods right away. No use coddling himself. The girl noticed the look. "I didn't prepare food for you because dinner will be served in just a little while. We eat all together, down by the river. You will hear drums to announce when the meal is ready, and you get there by walking to the end of that path." She pointed a delicate finger at a small foot-path winding by a few yards from where he sat. est at the end of the path, Kirk paused to take in the scene. Between him and the river was a wild jumble of men and women, laughing and talking, children running and stumbling over small pet animals, piles of nuts and fruits and hot foods heaped together beside small fires. Some of the people sat on straw mats, but most, simply on the ground. There were neither tables nor chairs. To Kirk it looked like utter confusion. With a sense of gratitude, he saw a tall, uniformed figure coming up to him, with a brisk, definite stride. The Terran's face was lined and firm, the kind of face Kirk was familiar with. The man with this face would be a man who stood for no nonsense, a man who was a little tough, but also fair and capable. He recognized him as he came closer. "Hello, sir. I'm Matt Cortland, your second in command," he said brusquely. "I met you this afternoon, but you met so many people then it must have been just a blur of names and faces." Kirk greeted him, feeling a sense of satisfaction that this man would be his chief assistant. He looked efficient; he should be able to help him learn the ropes and get a program of action started. "No chairs," Cortland said laconically, as they walked toward the gathering. He chose a soft spot of lavender-tinted moss near a pile of hot food and sat down, crosslegged. Awkwardly, Kirk sat down beside him, folding his legs under him stiffly. "You can be served in your rooms, of course, if you like," Cortland went on, turning to him. "These people are very obliging. Very obliging." He reached for two of the leaf-wrapped, steaming objects, handing one to Kirk. "But you probably have a better chance of influencing them if you eat birthright among them. If they can be influenced." He opened the leaf and bit into the yellow vegetable inside. Kirk looked dubiously at the object in his hand. He hoped it wouldn't make him sick. Pushing back his sense of disgust, he bit into it carefully. The Wand, sweetish flavor filled him with delightful surprise. It was rather like a mixture of sweet potato, carrot, and peach synthetics -- but the texture and flavor were new and wonderful. Maybe civilization had lost something good when it gave up natural foods. Though, of course, their preparation was time-wasting and inefficient, he reminded himself; and swallowing synthetics required only a momentary break in your work when you were pressed for time. He looked up and found Cortland watching him. "Pretty different from the food at home, eh?" He had slipped into the Terran language. "Good food and pretty girls." He gestured toward the graceful, halfnude women scattered along the mossy bank. "Everything for the lotus-eaters." The phrase meant nothing to Kirk. One of the girls came over to them with a large gourd full of fruit and nuts, and another on which she heaped hot foods from the piles on the ground as she passed. She placed them on the ground beside the two men. "Yes, everything for the lotuseaters," Cortland repeated. "Incidentally, I hope you're not under the impression that that girl is naked from the waist up." Kirk looked at him questioningly. "Oh, no. She's completely covered. They have taboos about naked breasts, just like we do." He laughed at Kirk's look of mystification. "You notice those strands of shells or woven reeds they wear around their necks?" Kirk looked around. They all wore them. "Well, that signifies they are dressed. If you ever see a native girl without one, she'll be terribly embarrassed." He stuck his hand out toward the bowl of hot food. "After you've been here long enough you'll think they're dressed, too." He laughed, then looked more serious. "I've been here a long time, getting nowhere," he said, in a different tone. "There are a lot of things that could be done here. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. But Jerwyn -- " He hesitated. "I hope you intend to make the name of the Galactic Union mean something here." Kirk nodded, and Cortland went on. "Jerwyn tried when he first came. But after awhile he seemed to just give up. I couldn't do anything without him backing me, I don't have enough authority." He looked grim as he spoke. "And besides that, it takes more than one good man. Oh, the other GU men here are capable enough -- " He glanced toward a group of Terrans sitting nearby. "They'll be over in a little while to speak to you, incidentally; I asked them to hold off for a litde, while I briefed you a bit -- no sense deluging you with new people while you're trying to eat." "But to get back," he went on, "they're capable enough, or they were once, anyway, but none of them has the drive and brains it takes to push through a project to develop this planet. They've pretty well given up. Some of them like it here and some of them don't, but they've all stopped trying." A look of contempt crossed his face. "They go through the motions of doing some work to earn their salaries, knock off at noon, and spend their time lying around on the beaches with Nemarian girls. I've done what I could to keep a semblance of discipline, but it's uphill work." Kirk looked at him steadily. "All that's going to be changed." Cortland smiled. "Good." Their eyes met, with understanding. "And I'm very happy to have a man of your caliber with me," Kirk said quietly. Cortland gave him a long look. "Maybe you've got what it takes. Maybe you have." He nodded slowly. "I should have told you I don't entirely blame the men. This planet's a tough nut to crack." His voice was grim. Kirk felt a vague uneasiness, but his look stayed determined. "We'll crack it." "We've been here forty years, and we haven't made a dent. They're funny people, these Nemarians. They're really alien. I've been here fifteen years, and I don't understand them any better than when I came." "That's quite a statement." "They're very appealing. Naive. Childlike. The soul of courtesy -- on the surface. But it's deceptive. And you could spend a lifetime trying to find out what's underneath." A young boy of about twelve came up as he spoke, setting a large gourd full of steaming liquid down smaller cups from it as he did so. Cortland nodded at him, turning again to Kirk as the boy walked away. "Even their children aren't really childlike. Did you see his eyes -- makes you damned uncomfortable." As Kirk started to answer, drumbeats began to fill the air, first softly, then louder. Strange sounds from unfamiliar instruments began to mingle with them, and a clear, high instrument added a melody. The whole effect had an alien, discordant quality for Kirk, but as he listened further he grew intrigued and began to enjoy it; a mood -- happy and romantic and energetic, all at once -- came through to him from the music. "The dancing's beginning," Cortland informed him. Kirk saw young men and women rise by ones and two's and begin swaying and turning their bodies to the music. They all seemed to be doing different things, and yet somehow it made an integrated pattern. To his surprise older people and even young children gradually joined in, and managed not to look inappropriate, although the dance movements were rapid and strenuous. He noticed a sweet, pungent odor came from the steaming bowl beside them. He picked up one of the filled cups and tried it cautiously. It was delightful. He emptied it and poured another. He felt Cortland's hand on his arm, and looked up to find him grinning at him. "Hey, take it easy with that stuff. That's fermented kara root -- the local variety of booze. They can drink quarts of the stuff and be all right; I've never seen one of them really drunk. But you'd better not try it." Kirk frowned. "Something different in our metabolism? I thought -- " "No, they're quite human," Cortland broke in. "And it's not a matter of immunity. I wondered about it for a long time -- and got quite disgracefully drunk a couple of times, keeping up with them, before I figured it out." He sipped at his own cup. "No, the secret of their success is the dancing." Kirk looked at the light, whirling figures, puzzled. Cortland smiled at his bewilderment. "It's the exercise. It bums up the alcohol as fast as they drink it. When they're having a real feast, they dance and drink all night, till they collapse from pure exhaustion. They wake up feeling fine -- not a sign of a hangover. Of course, tonight they'll only dance for a little while, so they'll only drink a little..." "Sensible, aren't they?" The voice came out of the air behind them, sardonic, feminine. The language was Terran. Kirk whirled and peered through the dusk, which was gathering rapidly. He saw a slightly amused pair of brown eyes, brunette hair, and a trim body dressed in chic good taste in expensive Terran clothes. Cortland stood up. "Mrs. Sherrin... our new Planetary Administrator, Cyril Kirk." She lowered herself to the ground, spreading out a small mat under her as she did so. "Jeannette, if you don't mind." She folded her legs under her carefully. "I don't mean to be disrespectful. But there's such a small number of us here, we need to be friends and stick together." Cortland, who had been looking away for a moment turned to them. "If you'll excuse me, someone wants to talk to me." Kirk nodded. "Did I meet your husband this afternoon?" he inquired politely, as Cortland strode off. "No; I'm a widow." "Oh, I'm sorry," he murmured. "Don't be. Not for me, I mean. We'd been coming to a parting of the ways for a long time. But let's not talk about that. How do you like the dancing?" He looked at the firelit figures, whirling in the growing dusk. "I don't know. I'm sort of overwhelmed by everything. It's all so new. I've heard so many confusing things -- " She nodded. "If you manage to make sense out of the Nemarians, you'll make history. It's better not to worry about it too much. Immerse yourself in their gay, happy life." "What do you mean?" She gave him a sharp look. "You'll find out what I mean. Didn't Cortland tell you?" "What are you talking about?" "Well, you might as well go in cold at that. Form your own conclusions as you go along. No use giving you prejudices before you start. Maybe you're the man who'll cut the Gordian knot. No use telling you it can't be done." "What can't be done?" "We'll all be rooting for you." She poured herself a drink and downed it quickly. "Great stuff, this. Makes you forget the petty annoyances of the garden-spot of the galaxy." She poured another. "To Nemar," she said, lifting it. "Now tell me about Terra. What's been happening back home?" He coidd get nothing more out of her. K irk struggled to control his irritation as the last Nemarian on his list walked in, poised and self-confident, casually unconcerned about his lateness. Something would have to be done about their sloppiness and lack of discipline, but now wasn't the time. It wouldn't do to lose his temper at the first official meeting he called. First he needed to stir some ambition in them, prod them out of their lethargy. He looked around at the assembled members of his joint TerranNemarian staff. The Terran members were making an attempt to stand stiffly at attention, somewhat awkwardly as though they were out of practice. They threw rather disconcerted looks at his stern, impassive young face. The Nemarians stood casually erect or lounged against the wall. Once more, he found himself troubled by a faint sense of incongruity. Something about these natives was not primitive. Without saying a word, just by standing and looking at him, they made him feel awkward and insecure. He straightened his shoulders and tried to make his expression even more stem. He wished he looked older. A sense of the power of his position overwhelmed him for a moment. He glanced at the speech he'd prepared, then at the faces before him. Slowly he pushed it aside. Somehow he couldn't use those formal sentences with these people. Diplomatic phrases didn't sound right in Nemarian. "Good morning," he said abruptly. "I won't waste time on preliminaries." He paused. "I've only been here a day, but so far I've seen very few signs of Terran influence -- a more or less obsolete type of ground transportation, a few tools and household conveniences, some art objects. Very little else. I don't fully understand why conditions are so backward here on Nemar when it has been part of the Galactic Union for forty years." The Terrans in the group stirred uneasily. "The important thing, however, is that the situation be changed so that Nemar may be given the benefits of galactic culture." He paused and looked around. The natives were listening courteously and looking slightly bored. The Terrans looked uneasy or embarrassed. "What prevents this change," he went on, "is the fact that there is nothing of value to export." He leaned forward. "But I don't believe that this or any planet can possess nothing of value. It's simply a matter of finding it. It's a matter of looking into new places, with new techniques, or for new things. If a sufficiently thorough search is made, something will turn up." He tried to ignore the signs of restlessness in his audience. "I'm going to organize research groups for thus purpose immediately. Each of you will head a committee to investigate the possibilities in a particular field -- fuels, plants, animal products, etc. You will bring the reports to me, and I will check them and indicate further directions of search." He continued, outlining his plans in detail, stressing the great advantages to be gained, the wonderful things galactic culture had to offer them -- the marvelous machines and labor-saving devices, the rich fabrics and jewels, the vidar entertainments, the whole fabulous technology of a great, advanced civilization. He spoke with enthusiasm, but as he continued, a growing sense of apprehension began to creep into his energetic, determined mood. Something was wrong with their reactions. He puzzled over it as he watched them file out of the room after he finished. The voice of one of his younger subordinates drifted back to him from the hall outside: "Made me homesick for good old Terra. I'd give a lot to see a good vidar-show right now..." Cortland pressed his arm lightly as he passed, nodding his approval of the proceedings. One of the Terrans lingered a moment as the last of the group left. His expression was serious. "I'd like you to know that I'm all for you, sir, and I'm glad to see a man of your stature in the PA's office," he said nervously. "I hope we'll see some changes in the attitude of these Nemarians. I've never liked their attitude." He ran a hand through his sandy-colored hair. "They're funny people, sir. You've only been here a day, and nobody may have warned you yet. They're very courteous, but don't let it fool you. You're going to have trouble with them." Kirk looked after him as he followed the others out, a sense of confusion and discouragement beginning to settle over him. He wandered slowly into the flowered patio adjoining the office. The reaction of the Nemarian officials was the strangest. They had shown no open opposition. On the other hand, there had certainly been no cheering. Their attitude had been one of courteous interest, plus some quality he couldn't quite define. He searched for the right word... something almost like compassion, as if they were humoring a child's enthusiasm for a naive, impractical project. He sat down by a clump of bluegreen flowers. Maybe he was just nervous because of his inexperience, he thought. He'd had plenty of practice experience (supervised, of course), but it was a different matter managing an isolated planet, completely on his own. And he'd had the bad luck to come after a guy who'd apparently let discipline go to pieces. Maybe it was just the newness of the whole thing. Maybe -- But he knew better. He had given them a good, efficient, well-organized plan of action. They should have been impressed -- impressed and respectful. They should have been grateful he was plunging so enthusiastically into an effort to improve their situation. They should have been excited and hopeful. There was something strange here, something he didn't understand. He knew so little about Nemar. The Terrans in the group had not reacted as they should have, either, he thought. Some of them had shown the sort of reaction he expected, but most of them had remained quiet, too quiet, with a peculiar, tolerant look. As if they knew something he didn't. There was something disturbing about their whole manner. They were respectful and deferential, but not quite respectful enough. Their attitude was just a shade too casual. Something was wrong. They even looked different, somehow, from the usual Terran on space duty. The dedicated look was gone and a softness had crept in. Somehow, the planet had infected them. T he clear-eyed old Nemarian he'd been talking to had just turned away when she came up. "Good evening. How do you like bird's eggs a la Nemar?" Jeannette pointed to the shells beside him. "Hello. They're very good." He motioned her to sit down. "The youngsters here gather them out of the trees. They make a sport of it." She reached for one from the pile near them and tapped it open. "Sentimental creatures -- they always leave one or two so the mother bird won't be unhappy." Kirk was trying to draw his eyes away from the young Nemarian mother in the group near him who was complacently nursing her baby in full view of everyone. Jeannette stared in the direction of his look. "Oh, you'll get used to that soon enough." He wondered if he would. They made a rather touching picture, though, he realized through his embarrassment. There was a lot of tenderness in the woman's gestures. "They spoil their children rotten." Kirk looked surprised. "The ones I've seen have been very courteous." She shrugged. "Oh, they're polite enough. But just try and make them do something they don't want to! They're completely undisciplined -- they're fed when they please, they sleep when they please, they do whatever they like. They have schools for them, but it's completely up to the children whether they want to go or not. The parents haven't a thing to say birthright about it. No one ever lays a hand to them, no matter what they do." "I haven't noticed any quarreling," he said, surprised at his own observation. It was true. He hadn't seen a sign of it, even between the children themselves, though they made enough noise yelling and romping. "Oh, those tactics fit them perfectly for this society," she said indifferently. "The adults here are just like the children. Nobody ever does any work." "But that's impossible. The food, the houses, the -- " "Well, I suppose I exaggerated. They do things they don't like once in awhile, if they want the end product enough. But mostly, if they can't make a big game of it, they don't do it. Tomorrow's nut-gathering day," she added irrelevantly. "Nut-gathering day?" "Yes. Everybody frolics off into the hills to pick nuts. Like a picnic. That's what I mean -- if they didn't consider it a pleasure outing, the nuts could hit them on the head, and they'd never bother to pick them up." She cocked her head at him. "Want to go?" "Go where? Nut-gathering, you mean?" He laughed. "No, thanks." "Thought you might like to study the natives in their day-to-day activities, get the real local flavor. You might learn something, at that. Though I guess you'd have a rough time climbing the trees." "I've had an hour a day at gymnastics for the past three years." "Yes, you look in good shape." Her glance swept over him approvingly. "But gymnastics and those trees are two different things. The edible nuts grow on the tall trees, not the short ones, and they sway in the wind. The young men do most of the climbing. They're pretty wonderful physical specimens, I'll say that." She glanced at one of them near by, who was whispering in the ear of a Nemarian girl. Kirk felt oddly annoyed. They were magnificent physical specimens, he thought. But then so were the women and children. He realized that he hadn't seen a sickly or weak-looking native since he arrived. Even the old people kept their magnificent posture, and managed to make age seem a matter of gathering wisdom instead of collecting infirmities. Weren't they ever sick, he wondered. "The girls are lovely, too," he reminded her. "Yes, but try to get near one of them," she flashed back. "They prefer their own." Her eyes narrowed. "They're pleasant people, but they're not pleasant to live with. It gets on your nerves after awhile." "Why didn't you leave, Jeannette?" "On the spaceship you came on?" "Yes. There may not be another for five years." "That's the big question," she said slowly. "I'm not sure I know the answer. I half intended to leave on the ship when it came. But when it came down to it, I didn't leave." She stared ahead of her. "Something about the place gets you. Maybe it's the lif. Maybe you get used to lying around in the sun, and you feel kind of frightened at returning to all the hustle and bustle of Terra. And then, you keep waiting, hoping that -- " "Hoping what?" For a moment, she looked defenseless and a little hurt. Then the cynical smile came back. "You don't even know what you're hoping for, really," she said lightly. He knew she was evading him. He lay in bed later, wondering what Jeannette could have meant, what could accoimt for that brief hurt look. She was an attractive girl, he thought idly. He wondered why he felt nothing for her, when the native girl aroused in him such an unreasonable longing. It would be a good deal more convenient to fall for Jeannette. He couldn't afford to get mixed up with his maid. Remembering her, he suddenly felt his body trembling. All right, he told himself, so she's an ignorant, backward native on a planet nobody ever heard of. Practically a savage. And even here, she's just a maid, a cleaning woman. Nobody a Planetary Administrator could think about getting mixed up with. But how do they turn them out like that? How do they turn them out like that, he thought -- every movement fluid, every position graceful, every gesture exquisite? How does this nonentity of a planet turn out a girl with the kind of walk the videostars back home practice and work years to approach? With a voice with that indescribable music and precision? With a flawless skin, radiant hair, a serenity auid self-confidence that would make the greatest beauties on Terra envious? With a quiet, careless pride that made him, the new ruler of her planet, awkward and insecure in the presence of his own servant? Jeannette had been jealous, he realized suddenly. She was jealous of these girls, of their grace, of their radiance. Her cynicism covered a bitter envy. For a long time he lay there, trying to sleep, haunted by Nanae's luminous eyes. H e started working the next morning. There was no use putting it off, he thought. Nemar seemed to act like a drug, gradually depriving you of your drive and ambition. He wasn't going to give it a chance to let its poison seep into him. He flung himself into his duties as Planetary Administrator with a grim determination. He struggled to organize the affairs of the planet on a more efficient basis. He introduced new methods and techniques. He worked tirelessly, relentlessly, hardly noticing their passage as one day followed another. And every moment he could spare, he devoted to the project for finding something of value to export. He was going to put this planet on the map. He didn't know how yet, but he was going to do it. He was going to turn his misfortune into a triumph. Every hint of a possibility was birthright followed up with eagerness. Every lead, every clue, was the subject of exhaustive study and investigation. His days were a succession of guarded hopes and disappointments, of surges of optimism and long stretches of discouragement. He pushed his wearied body into greater and greater efforts, working unflaggingly through the day and most of the night, spurred by the anger that still burned in him. The natives, he knew, looked at the light burning late into the night and thought he was a little crazy. He gave up eating with them. It was too easy, there by the river, to drift into staying later and later, drinking their hot wine, chatting, watching the dancing. It was too hard to resist tihe temptation of midnight swimming later with the young men and women at the nearby beach, with revels and bonfires on the lavender sands afterward. At the end of two weeks, he sat on his bed, taking stock of what he had accomplished. It was very little. And he was very tired. The tiredness was familiar. It was just like school all over again, he thought, the same long exhausting hours of driving oneself relentlessly. He wondered when he'd be able to relax. He didn't dare relax now. When he had a lead, a definite hope of some kind, he could begin to let up. But not till then. It would be too easy to give up and let go altogether, go the way Jerwyn had gone. He was beginning to understand why Jerwyn had given up. He was beginning to understand a lot of things -- the odd, cryptic remarks he had heard about the natives when he first arrived, the mixed admiration and exasperation they seemed to arouse. He remembered a man named Gandhi from ancient Indian history. The Nemarians could have given Gandhi lessons. Working with them was like working with an invisible wall of resistance that weakened here and strengthened there, gave in unexpectedly at one place and resisted implacably at another. At times his plans were praised; then they were put into eflfect with an efficiency that astonished him. At other times they were criticized, in a casual, friendly manner that enraged him. Then they were not put into effect at all. When he insisted on obedience, the natives reacted with an attitude of patient tolerance, and did nothing. Most of the time, his orders were received indifferently and carried out with an agonizing slowness. He pushed and prodded them. He reasoned with them. He shouted at them. He reaped nothing but frustration. They didn't hate him. He knew that. He had never seen a trace of malice in their expressions. People smiled at him when he passed, and children came up to tug at his hand and ask him to come to visit their house. There was none of the stony hatred here he knew existed in many places for the allpowerful Galactic Union. They simply seemed to lack all appreciation of the importance of his position. Yet they knew, he thought. They knew he had what amounted to almost unlimited power over their planet. They knew a space-fleet that had burned life off the face of entire planets lay at his disposal. They knew he could crush any rebellion instantly. But, of course, they weren't rebelling, he thought. They weren't even openly uncooperative. There it was again : they weren't even unfriendly; they deluged him with constant invitations. They knew of his power, but they acted as if it didn't exist. And he wasn't sure they weren't going to win with him, as they had with Jerwyn. The Galactic Union did not look with approval on any call for aid except in a military crisis; such a request was in effect an affidavit of failure. Besides, he didn't want to complain. He didn't want to set himself against them. He was working for them, not just for himself. He sighed and began to get ready for bed. Primitive people had always fought progress and change. They had always clung to old, outworn methods. But there was more to it than that, he thought. Primitive people were usually full of superstitious fear of change, but the Nemarians were not afraid. You couldn't think of them as fearful. They knew the danger -- they knew the strength and power that faced them -- but they were not afraid. They didn't even "handle with care". Where did their courage come from? Or was it just blind stupidity, he thought, a refusal to look facts in the face, to admit that they were the helpless, backward subjects of an immensely more powerful and more advanced civilization? He pulled off a shoe absently, and he thought of all the documents and reports he had read about Nemar. Ross had given them to him, and he had searched in them for a clue to help him understand why Ross was sending him here. He had read and reread them, and they had told him little more than Ross himself about Nemar. There was something peculiar about all those documents, he thought, something odd about the way they were written. They described an undeveloped planet without valuable resources or any kind of technology, in no way out of the ordinary. But between the lines was something that said this planet was out of the ordinary, in spite of the apparent facts. There was the unavoidable feeling that something was left unsaid. What were they trying to hide? Why hadn't they let him know what he was in for? Terrans had been coming for forty years. In forty years, they must have learned something. They must have found out something about what made these people the way they were, and about how to deal with them. There should have been warnings and suggestions and birthright at least, if nothing else, descriptions of methods that had been tried and failed. It should all have been there, out in the open; it should have been down in black and white: this is the situation, so far as we know it; these are the problems. Instead, there had been only routine description, and veiled hints and allusions. He hadn't been here long, he thought. There was a lot to learn here yet. The other Terrans, the ones who had been here a long time, knew something he didn't know. He could tell from their faces, from their attitude toward him. Cortland didn't know, or he would have told him, and some of the others didn't either, but most of them did. They knew something, but whether it was pleasant or unpleasant knowledge, he couldn't tell. Whatever it was, it affected them. They neglected their work, and they had a different look from the Terrans back home. Jerwyn had known, and he hadn't told him. He'd said he'd have to live here to find out. He lay down and stretched out wearily on the bed. Well, the answers here exist, he thought. Somehow, when he had all the pieces, the jigsaw would have to fit together and make a coherent picture. Maybe he was looking in the wrong direction. But he didn't know where to look. He thought of the day he had just been through, remembering incident after incident when he had had all he could do to keep his temper under control. Annoyance welled up in him again, as he recalled the series of frustrations, the useless arguments. His mind was still revolving in #in upheaval of confusion and anger as he fell asleep. when he awoke. He tried to fall asleep again and failed. Giving up, he dressed and wandered into the other room and the garden beyond. He felt the early morning coolness slipping over his shoulders like a garment, and a sense of the futility of all his struggling filled him. He felt a sudden longing to rest, bask in the sun, live as the natives did in sunny, amiable unconcern. He stiffened, annoyed at himself. That would mean giving up everything he had worked so hard for all his life, ending up as a lazy failure. He felt a surge of anger inside him toward something he could hardly name. As he stood there, he saw two Nemarian children, a boy and a girl about five years old, emerge from the trees and begin to pick the shimmering flowers in the garden. Irritation rose hotly in him. He knew that it was out of proportion, built out of a hundred frustrating incidents, but he found he didn't want to control it. He wanted to lash out at somebody. "Stop stealing my flowers!" he yelled. He was surprised at the harshness of his own voice. The children did not start fearfully or run, as he expected. They turned and stared at him in an unconcerned manner. "You can't steal flowers," the boy said matterof-factly. "They don't belong to anybody." He looked at Kirk questioningly. "You didn't plant them, did you?" Kirk stared at him, speechless. The boy went on, his tone slightly indignant. "Anyway, it's very rude of you to speak to us like that!" "They are quite right," an angry voice cut in. !lrk whirled around to find Nanae standing beside him, a basket in her hand. Her hair, radiant in the sunlight, was caught back from her face with a green ribbon, and the brown, gold-flecked eyes, for once, were not soft, but sparkling with anger. "These are my sister's children," she said icily. "They help me gather flowers for your table. Do you think just because they are young you have the right to treat them without respect?" Staring at her angry face, Kirk felt his own anger ebbing. Into his mind a forgotten incident flashed back from his childhood. Through a door left ajar in a neighboring apartment he had seen a ripe purple fruit imported from a newly discovered planet, and had taken it, curious to find out what unsynthetic food might taste like. He had been discovered, and angrily whipped and locked in his room. He remembered wiping away the tears, alone in his room, smarting with humiliation, and vowing he would show them, he would show them all; he would grow up to be so powerful he could have anything he wanted, and everybody would be afraid of him. He looked now at Nanae, who had put an arm around each of the children, cradling them to her. His anger left him completely. Remembering the hurt child he had once been, he foimd himself longing for the touch of softness and kindness that had never come to him, wishing that even now for a moment he could take the children's place -- lay his head against her breast, and feel her fold him in and brush her hand through his hair. He felt something melting inside of him. He could feel the lines of his face softening as he looked at them. The words stuck, but he forced them out. "Fm sorry." "It's all right," said the boy. Leaning down, Kirk put an arm tentatively around each of the children, half-surprised at himself for the gesture. As he felt their small bodies relax against his, it seemed as though some deep inner tension began to flow out of him. He straightened up to find Nanae's glance on him surprisingly warm, almost tender. The approval in her eyes filled him with an unfamiliar kind of happiness. "You mean Ross spent five years here!" Kirk stared in amazement at Cortland, sitting beside him. The older officer turned toward him, shifting his position on the grassy ledge to which they had climbed for a look at the surrounding countryside. "Yes, that's right. Ross was straight out of the Institute then, had an A-I record, and this place had just been discovered. They thought then it might have all sorts of valuable minerals and things. It seemed like a great chance." He shrugged. "As it turned out, of course, there was nothing, but nobody could have known then." "They know now," Kirk said shortly. He sat looking over the valleys beneath them, silent for a moment. It was discouraging to learn Ross had been here and had not turned up anything: Ross was capable, whatever else he might be, and it would take luck as well as work to succeed where he had failed. And his luck didn't seem to be working out too well, he thought, unhappily. But this might throw some new light on why he'd been sent here. Maybe Ross's reason for sending the Institute's star pupil had been one he could never have guessed at the time -- a gesture of sentimentality. Maybe he wanted to help these people with whom he had spent his first years as an Administrator. Maybe he wanted to make up for his own failure to help lift their living standairds. He turned toward the other man. "Cortland, you say you've done a lot of traveling here. How about the rest of the planet? Are any of the other villages more advanced; are the people any dififerent?" Cortland laughed shortly. "Thinking of hiring yourself a new native staff? Your impatience about worn out bucking this one? Can't say I blame you, but it's no go. All these villages are the same. One outfit's as bad as the next. Oh, they go in for different things -- one will go all out for sculptures, one will be great on weaving, and another one maybe will grow a special kind of fruit. But the people are all alike -- all equally charming and equally impossible. All sweet and friendly on the surface and stubborn as mules underneath. All acting like they know something they're not talking about, like they've got some secret hidden behind those clear, guileless eyes of theirs, some source of strength that makes them able to tell us to go to hell -- figuratively, of course -- when they don't like our orders." He leaned forward, intently. "I'd give a lot to find out what makes them tick." A look of inseciurity, almost of anxiety filled his eyes. A sudden gust of wind blew a flurry of leaves against Kirk's face. He brushed them away, feeling chilled. Cortland blinked his eyes, and his face resumed its customary firm look. "But to get back to your question -- this village here is supposed to be a center of government. When the Nemarians have to decide on anything that affects the whole planet, the Council in this village does it. The Council has nothing to do with the Galactic Union setup, of course. It's strictly local, was here before GU discovered this place. You probably studied up on it before you came here." Kirk nodded. Every planet with an indigenous population had its own political set-up. It was GU policy not to interfere with them, unless their interests clashed in some way. Cortland went on. "Anyone who birthright likes being in on that sort of thing packs up and emigrates to this village. I don't know whether you've noticed, but these people are pretty casual about moving from one town to another. Anyway, when your would-be politician gets here, the people take him in and watch him awhile, and then, if they like him all right, he's put on the Council. What a system! The truth is, most of the Nemarians consider political work something of a nuisance and would just as soon somebody else did it. They don't care for power the way we do. They look on it as just a heavy responsibility and a burden." Kirk shifted his leg uncomfortably, feeling a bit self-conscious. "By the way," Cortland added casually, "how are you getting on with that girl?" "What girl?" "That beautiful creature who keeps house for you." "Nanae?" "Yes, Nanae. The beauty of the village, the girl who cooks breakfast for you, the head of the Council -- " "What did you say? What was that about the Council?" "She's head of the Council. Didn't you know?" "How can she be? She's a maid, she -- " "They don't have maids here. She's being neighborly. And they have sort of a "power corrupts" philosophy here. If you're in a position of authority, you're sort of expected to go out and do humble tasks for people once in awhile, so you won't get to feeling above them. These people like to keep everyone on the same low -- " "But head of the Council !' Kirk broke in. "She's just a young girl!" "So what? You're just a young man." "But -- " "Sorry for the levity. But they let women do everything here. They've got equality of the sexes, old man. They -- " We'd better be starting back," Kirk broke in. He rose to his feet. He walked silently down the hill beside Cortland, his head whirling. lage, he left Cortland as quickly as he could and hurried in the direction of his house, incoherent thoughts tumbling over each other in his mind. His face burned as he remembered his condescension, the way he had fought his desire for her by holding her off with curt remarks, indicating with raised eyebrows that he wished no personal conversation. He thought of the occasional glint of amusement he had seen breaking through her serene courtesy. Why had she kept coming, he wondered. He saw, with a start, that he was nearly to his house, and he realized he had been hoping Nanae would be there. He had to talk to her, though he had no idea what he would say. As he drew closer, he saw a flicker of motion inside the porch. He walked forward quietly, and then stood a moment watching her, silently. She had her back to him and was sweeping, as she had been that first time he saw her. Her thighs were wrapped in soft, violet cloth, and a cascade of violet flowers jeweled the lovely hair which rippled and swirled down her back and shoulders. Not a wasted motion, he thought, not a gesture that isn't beautififl. He wondered why he had ever felt sweeping a floor was a menial task. She moved like a great dancer. She turned as he watched and saw him. "Hello." She smiled, and he felt himself tremble a little. "I just heard about you -- about your being head of die Council," he blurted out. "I want to apologize; I didn't know, I -- " "What difference does it make?" She looked genuinely puzzled. "I thought you were a maid, a... a sort of person who waits on other people, on Terra," he tried to explain. "I didn't know you were just doing this to be kind. I've been very rude. I -- I hardly know what to say..." Her eyes widened. "Do you treat people who clean your houses on Terra one way and officials another? You are funny, you Terrans." "Yes, I guess we are funny." He searched for words. "This is the first time I've really talked to you, isn't it?" She smiled. "We've just been people in the same room." She spoke gently. "I've seen you were unhappy and confused under that roud manner. I wanted to help, ut you weren't ready to let anyone help." "Why did you keep coming?" He waited anxiously for her answer. "I liked you." Her glance was half-tender and a little amused. "And I knew you wanted me here, even though you tried not to show it." She paused. "There was another reason, too." "What was it?" "You know Marlin Ross lived here once?" He nodded. "Well, there was a note from him on the spaceship you came on. It was addressed to my father, asking him to take care of you. He and Ross were good friends. But my father is dead now, and so the letter was given to me." "And so you've been taking care of me." "Yes." "But I'm sure he didn't mean it literally -- taking care of my house and fixing my food and -- " "No, of course not. He just meant to take care of you, give you what you needed. But you needed this. You needed to be waited on a little." "I guess I did." He could find nothing adequate to say, "Thank you." There was a moment of silence. She put aside the broom, which was still poised in one hand. "Let me make you some jen. You look tired." "Thank you." Kirk sat down, with a deep sigh, and leaned back, watching her precise, exquisite movements, as she prepared the hot liquid. He found himself longing to touch her, to reach out and feel the soft, supple flesh, the rippling hair. The sight of her beautiful, firm breasts moving as she worked tortured him. The low birthright necklace that signified they were covered didn't work very well for him, he thought. The flowers twined into it kept falling aside as she bent and turned, tantalizing him more. He pulled his eyes away, and forced himself to think of other things. She had been very kind, he realized. She hadn't made him feel like a fool. H e stood waiting for the last of the staff to assemble, letting the feel of triumph course through his body. He felt heady, exultant, a little drunk with joy. This was his moment. This made it all worth while -- the long hours, the sleepless nights, the relentless work, the struggle. They would see. They would see he hadn't been driving himself and them for nothing. He stared down for a moment at the piece of ore which he had brought to show them. It contained unpolished zenites. Nemar possessed zenites, the fabulous gems valued all over the galaxy for their shimmering, glowing beauty of changing color. Infinitely more precious and rare than diamonds, they served often as a galactic medium of exchange, where weight was important. A handful of them could be worth the whole cargo of a trading ship. He was not surprised that no one had found the ore deposits before. They were the products of immense and peculiar pressures and no appreciable amount of the ore was ever found except very deep underground. He was very glad now he had specialized in geology and minerology instead of social structure and alien psychology. Otherwise, the geologic reports he had received of the area would have seemed perfectly routine and ordinary. The nagging feeling that there was something a little unusual about the soil analysis would never have come into consciousness as a definite, tremulous hunch. He could have sent Cortland or one of the others out there with the tools and instruments to dig and make test after test, searching several feet under the surface for the elusive end-trail of a lode. But he had wanted to go himself. He had packed and prepared for the twoday trip, steeling himself against the disappointment he was almost sure to receive. He looked at the faces of his staff members, all present now, thinking of that first meeting with them and the peculiar reception his plans had received. Now it would be different: now everything he had asked of them was justified. Drawing a long breath, he began to tell them what had happened. As he went on, his fiery enthusiasm began to waver. His voice boomed too loudly in the quiet room. Once or twice his words faltered, as he glanced at the dispassionate face of a native. As he finished, he looked around, a sense of dismay and fear creeping into his feeling of triumph. They had listened too quietly. Only Cortland and a few other Terrans had shown any indication of the excitement and jubilation he expected. The others seemed unimpressed and imdistiurbed. With a sinldng feeling in the pit of his stomach, he called for discussion. There was a pause. Finally, one of the older Nemarians spoke. "This is a very important matter. If these mines are put into operation, it will affect the lives of everyone on Nemar. I must ask that you give us a little time to tliink over the implications." He spoke courteously, but Kirk knew the request would have to be respected. He wanted to shout at them, to ask them to understand this wonderful thing that had happened, to tell them they were going to be rich! But this was the way they did things, and tliis was the way it would have to be done. He pushed down the impatience burning in him. "Will a day do?" The Nemarian hesitated a moment, then nodded. "Very well. A day should be enough." fCirk watched them file out a few minutes later. He wondered where his sense of elation had gone. Apprehension filled him again as he watched the staff assemble die next morning. The faces of the Nemarian members increased his discomfort. Why didn't they look happier, more excited? Why should they look at him with that unspoken sympathy in their eyes. He was afraid to hear what they had to say. The native who had spoken the day before moved forward a little. "We're very sorry," he said gently. Kirk felt his heart sinking. "We realize that you have worked very hard in what you consider to be our interests. We hoped you would come up with something more acceptable than these mines. But we cannot put the plans for mining these gems of yours into operation. We are very sorry," he said again, "but the Council has voted against it." "The Council!" Kirk stared at him. He fought to control his voice. "You know perfectly well that the power of my command is supreme over any local councils of whatever natime." He stiffened. "But that isn't the point. I guess I haven't made things clear to you somehow. These gems -- which you refer to as if they were a child's baubles -- can make this insignificant planet a power in the galaxy. They can make the name of Nemar respected throughout the whole Galactic Union. You can trade them." He spoke each word slowly and carefully as if he were explaining to a child. "I'm not haying expensive machinery constructed and sending you down hundreds of feet into the ground so that your women can wear these jewels. They're extremely pretty, but you probably feel the flowers the girls pluck and put in their hair do just as well for ornaments, and perhaps you're right." He paused, trying to hold on to his temper. "It will be dark and dusty and uncomfortable down in those mines, as I told you yesterday when you asked about it. It will be hard work, and I know you're not fond of hard work." He could not keep the sarcasm out of his voice. "But I assure you, it will be worth it. A really good specimen of one of these little gems (he underlined the word) can buy half the cargo of a spaceship. These jewels can make it worthwhile for the great trading ships to swarm through space out to this isolated fragment of the cosmos. You can acquire the technologies of other planets with them. The evolution of this planet can be speeded up a dozen times. You can become of importance in the scheme of things, leave this backward, primitive way of life behind you." As he paused for breath, one of the Nemarians spoke quietly. "We don't want to push ahead that fast." He looked at Kirk serenely. "We are interested in improving conditions here, of course. We want to acquire things that will make our lives more pleasant and luxurious. Some day we wish to become a highly developed society, technologically. We wish growth and change -- but only very slowly, very carefully. We want to be very, very sure we do not bring in pain when we bring in new pleasures. We need to study each new change to see what it might mean." He paused. "In this case, it took very little study. This mining project would mean the young men would be put to backbreaking labor in underground, unhealthy conditions. There might be circumstances which could justify such a thing. But not for jewels which are intrinsically worthless." "Worthless! I just told you -- "I mean they are not valuable in themselves. You can make cheap, synthetic jewels that are almost as beautiful, can't you?" "YeSj of course, but -- " "So they are only valuable because they are rare, because you call them valuable, because they show the people who buy them have enough money to buy them. Wearing them is really a way of saying, Fm rich, to everyone who sees you." He shrugged. "We don't care about that sort of thing here." Kirk clenched his fists in frustration. Maybe he should have specialized in alien psychology. He made another try. "I know you don't. That's not the point. The point is that you can trade them for other things, for -- " The older native who had announced the Council decision broke in again. "As you said, the mining is very hard, disagreeable work. We feel that when you begin to do disagreeable things for an end that is not valuable in itself, you are beginning to tread a dangerous path. There is no telling where it will end. One such situation leads to another. We might end up cooped up in a room all day, shut away from the sun and air, turning bolts on an assembly line to make machines, as we have heard often happens on Terra." He looked slightly shocked at the picture. "Being surrounded by technical conveniences isn't worth that." He looked at ELirk patiently, as though this should be self-evident. "On Terra and on most of the other planets we have had word of, people seem to spend their time making all kinds of things that have no value in themselves, because they can be sold or traded. Other people spend their time trying to persuade peopie to buy these useless things. Still other people spend all day making records of how many of these thin have been sold. No! This path is not for us." He shook his head. "We don't know how it came about that all these people spend their time at these unpleasant, useless things. They can't have wanted it that way. No human being could want to spend his time doing silly, pointless Aings. How could you believe in yourself? How could you walk proudly? How could you explain it to your children? We must be careful not to make the mistake of taking the first step in that direction." Kirk felt hopelessly confused. The reasoning was all wrong, but how coiJd he explain it to them? He began slowly, from another angle... H e stood there for a long time after they had left, trying to control his rage. He had tried everything he could think of. He had argued, reasoned, pleaded with them. He had raged at them, threatened them. Nothing had worked. The threats had not disturbed them. He thought of sending out an emergency beam for help. But what would he say when the ship arrived : put these people under martial law -- force them to work -- it's for their own good? He'd like to see if they could do it, he thought. He'd be betting they couldn't. He paced up and down, clenching his fists. He could have all the council members jailed, he thought. Only there weren't any jails on Nemar. Resentment burned in him. They'd let him work and struggle and slave day and night -- for this. He swung his fist into the wall suddenly, with all his might. The pain stung, but he felt a little better. He looked at the bruised hand, wondering what to do. He was too restless to go home and stay by himself, burning up with unspent rage ; and he certainly couldn't go and sit among the natives, listening to them chatter and laugh. He decided to take a walk. He heard a rustle of leaves after he had gone a little way and saw a pair of feminine legs through the underbrush. He tried to turn aside. He didn't feel like talking to Jeannette now. But she had already seen him. "Hello, there," she said, pushing aside a branch from where she was sitting. "Are you taking a walk, too? Thought you were always sticking to the old grindstone this time of day." "Hello, Jeannette." "Sit down and rest for a minute. I need some company." He hesitated, then sat down reluctantly. "You don't look too cheerful," she said, looking at him. "Something eating you?" "Just this place," he said wearily. "And the people." "Yes, it gets you after a while, doesn't it? It's pretty hard to take." He leaned against a tree and tried to relax. "It's hard to live with," she went on, "the constant sense of inferiority..." He wondered if he had heard her correctly. "What did you say?" "I said, it's hard to live with." "No, no. I meant the last part." "The constant sense of inferiority. Is something the ma -- " "What are you talking about?" "I'm talking about the Nemarians, naturally." "You surely don't consider them superior to us!" he said incredulously. "Let's not fool ourselves," she said. "There isn't one of them that isn't superior to every Terran here." He stared at her. "Of course, we do fool ourselves. I've been doing it a long time. Or trying to, anyway. But I've been sitting here thinking. Among other things, about why I didn't leave on that ship you came on, as I'd planned." "Why didn't you?" he asked. The same reason nobody else did, but Jerwyn; and he had to." "Plenty of them don't like it here," he said. "There's plenty of griping." "Not really," she said. "It's not really griping. It's just a way of making yourself feel better. Only the ones who haven't been here too long do it, and one or two others who are real old-line die-hards, like your Mr. Cortland. "Why didn't you leave?" "Because this is a good deal, of course. The climate's lovely; the scenery's beautiful; life is sort of a perpetual pleasure outing. The only trouble is, you're always on the fringesYou're the kid from across the tracks." "I don't understand." "That wasn't the right phrase, because that implies snobbishness, and they're not snobbish. But they don't quite accept you. They let you hang around; they let you play with them. But you're not really one of them." "Why on earth should you want to be one of them! They're just a bunch of ignorant primitives, while we come from the highest center of culture civilization has ever attained." "Yes, yes, I know all that. We're very good at pushing buttons and keeping in the right traffic lanes. But let's look the facts in the face. I've been sitting here making myself look the facts in the face. Have you ever seen one of them act mean?" "Well, not mean exactly, but -- " "No, you haven't. They can get plenty angry, but they don't get mean. There's a difference." He said nothing. "Have you ever seen a child here tear the wings off an insect?" She went on, not waiting for his reply. "No, you haven't. And you won't. Have you ever seen a native with a hard, cruel face? No, again. Have you ever seen one that wasn't gentle with children?" "I guess not. I never thought about it." She turned to him with an odd tremulousness in her face, replacing her usual cynical look and slightly raised eyebrows. "They love their children here. They really love them." She looked at him. "They don't scey they love them and then hit them and humiliate them because they accidentally break the vase Aunt Matilda gave the family for Christmas. Their child's happiness means more to them than any vase, than any material object. They never humiliate their children. That's why they grow up to walk like kings and queens. "They grow up being loved," she said. "They all love each other. And it isn't because they try. They don't try to be good and nice and love their fellow-men, like we do. It's just something that flows out of them. They're full of wsirmth inside, and it flows out. "And something else -- " she went on. "Have you ever caught one in a lie?" "No, but that doesn't mean -- " "People like your Mr. Cortland think they're sly and deceptive because they're always courteous, and still you can't push them around. But he's wrong. They're courteous because they're sorry for us, not because they're afraid of us." "Sorry for us?" "Yes, sorry for us. They're sorry for us because we don't know how to enjoy life, because we worry about all sorts of things that don't matter, and knock ourselves out working, and need other people to reassure us of our own worth. Because we have bad tempers and awkward bodies, and we don't have that warmth inside of us flowing out toward other people. "Even toward us," she said. "They're kind to us. They're tolerant. They want us to happy. And they do accept us eventually. If we stay here enough years. If we change. Maybe not quite as one of them, but silmost. Sometimes they even marry us." Kirk shook his head, trying to clear it. "I can't think. I feel confused, I -- " "Still thinking about our great technological achievements? We're pretty cocky about them, aren't we? We come here all set to spread enlightenment among the savages." She shrugged. "They're not impressed with our magic machines. They're not selling their planet for a handful of beads. They took a good look at us and decided to try to keep what they had." She looked at him steadily. "Personally, I've decided I can do without the vidar-shows. I'm going to stay and try to make the grade here. I'm going to work at becoming a better human being. I'm tired of being flippant and smart and sophisticated. I'd like to be happy." She paused. "Maybe a Nemarian will even fall in love with me eventually and marry me." "You want to marry one of them!" "You catch on fast." She blinked. "Sorry. That's not a very good beginning. It's going to take awhile to shake that flippancy." She caught his eyes. "Wouldn't you like to marry Nanae?" He didn't answer. She smiled oddly. "Yes, I'd like to marry one of them and have children like theirs." She hesitated. "I said once, they spoil their children rotten. I guess they do in a way, but the children turn out fine. We Terrans just aren't used to children with a sense of their rights. These children overwhelm me." She lowered her eyes. "You know how flippant I am -- when I try it in their presence I feel terribly stupid. They make me aware of every affectation; their eyes are so clear -- like a deer's -- I feel like a fool." She looked at him tremulously, defensively. "Anyway, I said that about their being spoiled, out of envy. When I first saw how their mothers held them -- all that tenderness, all that love, all that warmth -- I envied them with a terrible bitterness. It wasn't that I had bad parents. Just ordinary ones, trying to do their best and all that." "Why do you keep talking about children all the time? After all, it's the adults who run things." "The children are the adults of the future. It's the way they're brought up that makes these people what they are. You and I -- all of us from Terra -- we've been brought up on a limited, scientifically regimented, controlled amount of love. These natives have something we'll never have. We've got to work and strive for what comes as naturally to them as breathing." As' she spoke, Kirk suddenly remembered the close-packed faces of Terrans speeding by in the opposite direction on the moving sidewalks at home -- tense faces, hard faces, resigned faces, sad faces, timid faces, worried faces. Maybe one in fifty serene and self-confident, maybe one in a hundred vibrantly, joyously alive. Maybe. Probably not that many. He thought of the faces of the Nemarians. Jeannette was still talking. "They arc what human beings should be," she said slowly. "Somehow theyVe kept their birthright -- the ability to be full of the joy of living whenever they're not in real trouble or sorrow, the ability to be happy just because they're alive. I haven't understood these people because I didn't want to understand them. I didn't want to see that they were better than I am. They're very simple, really; it's we who are complicated and devious." 'Why hasn't anybody ever heard of this place?" Kirk asked. "It's isolated," she said, "and people don't leave here, once they've seen what's here. They don't write too much, either, because by the time the spaceship arrives again, they understand. They cooperate with the authorities, who are trying to keep this place as much of a secret as possible. Publicize it, and within ten years it would be swarming with wealthy businessmen on vacation and jaded neurotics trying to get away from it all. The Nemarians would be lost in the shuffle." She was still a moment. "My husband came here to get away from it all. He heard rumors of this place a long way off and traced them. I didn't want to come. I liked cities and night-clubs; I liked being surrounded by amiable, promiscuous men. He dragged me here against my will. Now he's dead, and I'm caught up in his dreams. These people are irresistible; they call out to something basic and deep in you, and you respond to it whether you want to or not. You can't leave this place -- unless you have to. like you will." Kirk stood up abruptly. "Jeannette, do you mind? I feel terribly confused. A lot has happened to me today. I want to walk alone awhile and think things out." She nodded, with a sudden look of compassion. H e walked away from her slowly, turning half unconsciously in the direction of his house. His mind was a swirl of confusion. He tried to think. He needed to get it all straightened out. The sense of inferiority, she'd said, the constant sense of inferiority. Let's not fool ourselves, she'd said. There isn't one of them that isn't superior to every Terran here. And he'd just sat there, stupefied, not denying it. Because once it was spoken, put into words, it had a certain rightness. A certain obviousness. He'd known it all the time. He hadn't let himself know it, though. He'd struggled against it, choking it back when it started seeping up from his unconscious. He'd worked so hard and kept himself so busy and exhausted he didn't have time to think. He'd thought so hard about other things he didn't have time to think about the truth. He'd arrived here looking for the answer to a mystery. Thinking maybe the planet had a secret value, hoping maybe it held an explosive or new weapon that was classified as Super Top Secret, wondering if maybe it weren't really primitive. And nobody could have told him: it does have a secret value -- secret because you're too blind to see it. Nobody could have told him ; these people are more advanced than you are. Because advanced meant machines. Advanced didn't mean happy, loving, graceful, courageous, honest. They couldn't have told him with words if he couldn't see it with his eyes -- if he couldn't see that the glowing faces of the natives held a secret worth learning. The only secret that really mattered. How to be happy. Nanae was there waiting when he reached the house, as though she had been expecting him. She looked at him silently, then smiled. "You're not angry?" "Angry?" "About the Council decision." "Oh -- oh, I was. I'm all mixed up now. I've been doing some thinking." She looked at him intently, then nodded slowly. "Do you know why you were sent here?" she asked. "I'm just beginning to get a glimmering of it." "Did you know we are the only planet yet discovered whose people have never known war?" "No, I didn't know." "Ross came to Nemar when the Galactic Union first discovered it. He didn't find any of the things he was looking for, but he did discover something else, a way of life." She paused. "Have you ever gone over his record?" "No." "You should, sometime. He's done a great deal of good." She looked at him steadily, her eyes clear and soft. "He keeps sending the very best of the Institute graduates here, hoping they'll study our society and work out some theories about what makes us the way we are. He hopes some of the happiness here can be transplanted. "We don't know why we're the way we are. We don't even know how it's possible to be any other way, and we don't understand why wars, or why they should lie or hit their children or make long speeches that don't say anything." Kirk was silent. "We're inside the problem," she said. "We can't see ourselves from the outside." Kirk spoke very slowly, thinking it out. "You mean, Ross sent me here to study you, to try to find out what factors are involved in -- "Yes. He sent you here to learn." He was quiet, digesting that. "One day you'll be in Ross's place," she said. He accepted the words quietly, knowing it was true. Yesterday, that would have seemed like the most desirable thing in the universe, the height of happiness. It seemed like a long time ago. It meant nothing now but a heavy burden. He sat thinking of Nanae after she had gone, of how he had longed to put his arms around her and draw her to him, kiss the soft mouth, run his hands through the long, glowing strands of hair. He'd have to work first, work at He wondered whether she'd be kind of person she could love. She He got up and moved toward would love differently and more the bedroom. Tomorrow was going deeply than the girls he had known, to be a busy day -- changing things. She would love with a passion and making apologies. Feasting. Danctenderness they'd never be capable ing. Going midnight swimming, of. That kind of love would have He realized suddenly that he was to be earned. very happy.    ment of Labor have shown that it costs American industry about # each year for research which enables it to give you deadlier insecticides, better weed killers, more efficient and smoother-riding cars, more rugged home appliances, better surgical instruments, more sensitive radio and television sets and the host of other newer developments that are easing the burden of life for the men and women of today. Add to this another # for research in the development of better planes for your son in the Air Force, or warmer uniforms for the boys in the Army, or better life rafts for the sailor and his buddies, or safer landing craft for the Marines. The bill adds up to the staggering total of # a year just to keep American life improving! It takes # research engineers and scientists laboring over test tubes and slide rules, blue prints and calculators, weather instruments and cyclotrons to produce these gimmicks and gadgets. And industry gets the utmost from these researchers by supplying them with a staff of technicians. About # supporting workers are busily engaged in twirling knobs, taking hourly readings and running series of long, routine tests. In short, research in this country is a big and costly business. And the organizational technique is such that it can help the country over industrial humps and bottlenecks created by war, famine, plague and cataclysm. Our Citation this month goes to the researchers, those men and women of American industry, who conceive and make the machines and instruments and products that make the standard of living in this country the finest in the world. They were used to retarded life forms, but this was the worst. Yet it is a missionary's duty to bring light where there is none. for who can tell what deviotis forms evolution might take? the ethicators T he missionaries came out of the planetary system of a star they didn't call Antares. They called it, naturally enough, The Sun -- just as home was Earth, Terra, or simply The World. And naturally enough, being the ascendant animal on Earth, they called themselves human beings. They were looking for extraterrestrial souls to save. They had no real hope of finding humans like themselves in this wonderously diversified universe. But it wasn't against all probability that, in their rumaging, there might not be a humanoid species to whom they could reach down a helping paw; some emergent cousin with at least a rudimentary symmetry from snout to tail, and hence a rudimentary soul. The ship they chose was a compact scout, vaguely resembling the outside of an orange crate -- except that they had no concept of an orange crate and, being a tesseract, it had no particular outside. It was simply an expanding cube (and as such, quite roomy) whose "interior" was always paralleling its "exterior" (or attempting to), in accordance with all the well-known, basic and irrefutable laws on the subject. A number of its sides occupied the same place at the same time, giving a hypothetical spectator the illusion of looking down merging sets of rsdlway tracks. This, in fact, was its precise method of locomotion. The inner cube was always having to catch up, caboose-fashion, with the outer one in time (or space, depending on one's perspective) . And whenever it had done so, it would have arrived with itself -- at approximately wherever in the space-time continuum it had been pointed. When they felt the jar of the settling geodesics, the crew crowded at the forward visiplate to see where they were. It was the outskirts of a G type star system. Silently they watched the innermost planet float past, scorched and craggy, its sunward side seeming about to relapse to a molten state. The Bosun-Colonel turned to the Conductor. "A bit of a disappointment I'm afraid, sir. Surely with all that heat...?" "Steady, lad. The last wicket's not been bowled." The Conductor's whiskers quivered in amusement at his next-in-command's impetuosity. "You'll notice that we're dropping downward. If the temperature accordingly continues dropping -- " He couldn't shrug, he wasn't physiologically capable of it, but it was apparent that he felt they'd soon reach a planet whose climate could support intelligent life. If the Bosun-Colonel had any ideas that such directions as up and down were meaningless in space, he kept them to himself. As the second planet from its sun hove into view, he switched on the magniscan eagerly. "I say, this is more like it. Clouds and all that sort of thing. Should we have a go at it, sir?" The Conductor yawned. "Too bloody cloudy for my taste. Too equivocal. Let's push on," he said languidly. "I have a hunch the third planet might be just our dish of tea." Quelling his disappointment, the Bosun-Colonel waited for the third planet to swim into being. And when it did, blooming like an orchid in all its greens and moistnesses, he could scarcely contain his excitement. "Why, it looks just like Earth," he marveled. "Gad, sir, what a master stroke of navigation. How did you realize this would be it?" "Oh, I don't know," the Conductor said modestly. "Things usually have a habit of occurring in threes. I'm quite a student of numerology, you know." Then he remembered the Mission and drew himself erect on all his legs. "You may prepare for landing. Mister," he ordered crisply. The Bosun-Colonel shifted over to manual and busied himself at the helm, luffing the square craft down the troughs of air. Gliding over the vast tropical oceans, he put down at a large land mass above a shallow warm sea, twentyfive degrees below the northern pole. Too numbed for comment, the crew stared out at the alien vista. They'd heard of retarded life forms from other Missionary expeditions -- of planets where the inhabitants, in extreme emergency, had been known to commit murder. But this was surely the worst, the most vicious imaginable in the galaxy. Here, with life freshly up from the sea, freshly launched on the long climb to maturity and selfrealization -- was nothing but horror. With so lush a vegetation, so easily capable of supporting them side by side in abundance, the monsters were actually feeding on each other. Great lumbering beasts they were with their bristling hides and huge tails, charging between the giant tree ferns; gouging living chunks from one another while razor-toothed birds with scaly wings flapped overhead, screaming for the remnants. As the sounds of carnage came through the audio ports, the youngest Oarsman keeled over in a faint. Even the Conductor was visibly shaken. The Bosun-Colonel turned to him with a sick expression. "Surely it's a lost cause. Skipper. Life like this will never have a soul worth saving." "Not in its present stage," the Old Man was forced to agree. "Still, one never knows the devious paths that evolution takes." He considered the scene for a thoughtful, shuddering interval. "Perhaps in several thousand millenniums..." The Bosun-Colonel tried to visualize the possibility of Ethical Life ever materializing through these swamp mists, but the logic against it was too insurmoimtable for the imagination. "Even so," he conceded, "granting the impossible -- whatever shape it took, the only worthwhile species would still be..." He couldn't bring himself to say it. "Meat-eaters," the Conductor supplied grimly. C#n hearing this, the Oarsman who had just revived promptly fainted again. "It's too deep in the genes," the Conductor continued, "too far advanced for us to tamper with. All we can hope to do is modify their moral outlook. So that by the time they achieve star travel, they'll at least have a basic sense of Fair Play." Sighing, bowed by responsibilities # fantasy and sciencefiction books and backissue magazines at # to # under what theyVe cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #K Verona, Pennsylvonia incommensurate with his chronological youth, he gave the order wearily. It was snapped down the chain of command to the Senior Yardbird: "All paws stand by to lower the Ethics Ray! Step lively, lads -- bugger off, now..." There was a din of activity as the outer locks were opened and the bulky mechanism was shipped over the side. It squatted on a cleared rise of ground in all its complex, softly ticking majesty, waiting for the First Human to pad within range of its shedding Grace and Uplift. The work party scrambled back to the ship, anxious to be off this sinister terrain. Once more the crew gathered at the visiplate as the planet fell away beneath them, the Ethics Ray winking in the day's last light like a cornerstone. Or perhaps a tambourine... raw chaotic world, huge beasts closed in on the strange star-fallen souvenir. They snuffled over it; then enraged at discovering it was nothing they could fill their clamoring mindless stomachs with, attempted to wreck it. They were unsuccessful, for the Machine had been given an extra heavy coat of shellac and things to withstand such monkeyshines. And the Machine, in its own finely calibrated way, ignored its harassers, for they had no resemblance to the Life it had been tuned to influence. Days lengthened into decades, eons. The seas came shouldering in to stand towers tall above the Ethics Ray, lost in the far ooze below. Then even the seas receded, and the mountains buckled upward in their place, their arrogant stone faces staring changelessly across the epochs. Until they too were whittled down by erosion. The ice caps crept down, crackling and grinding the valleys. The groimd stretched and tossed like a restless sleeper, settled, and the Ethics Ray was brought to light once more. As it always had, it continued beaming its particular signal, on a cosmic ray carrier modulated by a pulse a particular number of angstroms below infrared. The beasts that blundered within its field were entirely different now, but they still weren't the Right Ones. Among them were some shambling pale bipeds, dressed in skins of other beasts, who clucked over its gleaming exterior and tried to chip it away for spearheads. In this of course they were unsuccessful. And then one day the First Human wandered by, paused square in the path of the beam. His physiology was only approximate, his I.Q. was regrettably low -- but he was Pre-Moral Life, such as it was, on this planet. The Ethics Ray made the necessary frequency adjustments, tripped on full force. The Primitive froze under the bombardment, its germ plasm shifting in the most minute and subtle dimensions. Then, its mission fulfilled, the Ethics Ray collapsed into heavy molecules and sank into the groimd. The first convert raced away in fright, having no idea what had hapand daughters... , B ack on the home base, the Conductor reported in at the Ethication of Primitive Planets office. It was a magnificently imposing building, as befitting the moral seat of the universe. And the Overseer was an equally imposing human with ears greyed by service. His congratulations were unreserved. "A splendid mission, lad," he said, "and I don't mind suggesting -- strictly entre nous -- that it could jolly well result in a Fleet Conductorship for you." The Conductor was overwhelmed. "Now just let me jot down the essentials while they're still fresh in mind," he continued, pawing through a desk drawer. "Botheration! I seem to have traded the last of my styluses. Do you happen to have one on you?" "With pleasure." The Conductor handed over his monogrammed gold stylus, receiving in exchange a toy silencemaker. "My youngster traded it to me this morning," the Overseer chuckled. He wrote rapidly for several moments, then gave the stylus bacL The Conductor found a weathered paper-weight in his rear pocket, which he traded him for it. It looked like it might have come from this very desk at one time. Then with a smart salute, he aboutfaced. On the way out, a pair of secretaries paused in their trading of a pelt brush for a tail-curler to watch him admiringly. As well they might. Fleet Conductor! The future Fleet Conductor of a solar system he would never think of calling Antares paused at the door. In its polished panel he regarded himself with due appreciation. He had sown the seeds of civilization on a far-flimg planet where, countless light years from now, they would flower to maturity. Not among the strongest or cleverest species, to be sure, but among those most worthy of applying First Principles, the moral law of give and take. Among those remote cousins of the Conductor himself -- who under no circumstances would ever think of himself as resembling a rather oversized trader rat    October issue. It's a suspenseful short novel about a strange war in which one side is armed with the greatest weapons of the age, while the other side has nothing but a new way of life : science and mechanics notwithstanding, the mind is Man's greatest potential... Also top-notch stories by Charles Beaumont, Robert F. Young, Edward W. Ludwig, Alan E. Nourse and others. It was just a harmless though amazing kids toy that sold for less than a dollar. Yet it plunged the entire nation into a nightmare of mystery and chaos... T he thing is over now, but I can't see a Teddy bear or a set of blocks in a department store window without shuddering. I'm thankful I'm a bachelor and have no children around to remind me of the utterly insane nightmare that a child's toy plunged our country died in agony -- the total disruption and near dissolution of our nation. And yet, as the United States tottered on the verge of complete chaos, it was, ironically, another child's toy that saved us. A simple, ordinary, every-day toy for tots stopped the "fever", halted the carnage that was tearing our flesh and eyes and viscera into shreds. With most the scientists in the world working for an emergency solution, they could come up with no better answer than a toy that'd been around for generations before the "Mystery i-Gun" was even conceived. Being a plain-clothesman, I have seen greed and impatience ruin many individual lives. If I could have guessed at the chain of events that would stem from my first tact with the younger Baxter er, I would have put a bullet through his head in cold blood and cheerfully faced the gas chamber. Illustrated by Ed Emsh Instead I took off my hat and foltold, we would find a body, lowed him through the substantial Leo Baxter was a little guy about old house to a moderately large five-foot six, like me but with a room in the rear where, I'd been better build. His size was important for a couple of reasons, one being that it was startling to say the least, when he pointed to the giant on the floor and said, "My brother." He caught my look and shrugged impatiently. "I know, I know, but this is no time for Mutt and Jeff gags. Galvin has been murdered. Now get with it, Lieutenant!" If Galvin was his brother, Leo's agitation was understandable, but his voice had a flat note of practicality in it that I didn't like. As I looked down at the sprawled length of the big man on the tiled floor, the Mutt and Jeff angle didn't fit at all. David and Goliath was a better bet. This Goliath seemed also to have met his fate from a hole in the forehead. I say, "seemed," because it developed that Galvin Baxter was not yet quite dead. "There's no pulse or breath," his brother said when I mentioned this error in his assumption. "You're no doctor. Now call that ambulance like I told you. Jump!" I said. He jumped. I made a quick examination, meanwhile, and when Leo came back from the phone I pointed. "See, the blood. It's still coming out." "Gorpses bleed, don't they?" "Not in spurts," I said. "The hole's tiny, but whatever's in there touched an artery. See that?" He looked and seemed convinced. "The ambulance will be here. Anything else I should do?" "Yes. Nothing. Don't touch a thing in this room... or did you already?" "Just Galvin. I heard him fall, and when I came in he was on his face." "Why did you ask for homicide when you called the police? Or let's put it this way: What makes you think it wasn't an accident?" "Two reasons. First, because I couldn't see any cause of the accident. When I turned him over the floor was smooth and clean under his forehead except for the smear of blood. Reason number two: Because Galvin just doesn't have accidents. All his life he's moved in slow motion. I've never known him to stumble, or cut himself, or drop anything or even bump into anyone." I was checking around the room myself, and I had to admit that both reasons might be valid. A man the size of Galvin wasn't likely to be the skittish type. And by the time the ambulance arrived I was ready to admit that if the injury were an accident, Galvin Baxter had contrived to conceal its source. It took several of us to load the unconscious man onto the stretcher. I told his cocky little brother to stay on ice, while I rode downtown in the ambulance. Dr. Thorsen called me into the emergency ward. "How did this happen?" he wanted to know. Thorsen is a lean, learned old chap who normally gives more answers than he asks. I said, "Don't know. Doc. I found him in a sort of home workshop. No power tools, nothing dangerous in sight. The bench at one end had a couple of little gadgets on it -- looked sort of electrical. Some wire, soldering iron, books, a few rough circuit drawings." "The gadgets. What did they look like?" I thought back and realized that what I had to describe would sound a little peculiar. "Sort of like flashlights with a pistol grip... and no lens where the light should come out. Just blunt, flat ends. Thorsen shrugged. "Then I don't know. I expected you to report some kind of a blast or explosion." "No sign of one." "All right, then what else but a flying particle could drill a hole in a man's forehead the diameter of a piece of #-gauge wire?" "What do the x-rays show?" "We'll know in a minute. What about the murder-attempt angle?" I said that I had nothing to go on yet. That was the whole truth and the final truth! When Doc's x-rays revealed nothing but a blood clot deep in the brain at the end of the tiny tunnel piercing the skull, I was left without even a "modus operandi", let alone a substantial suspect. F or two days I investigated brother Leo, and when I wasn't investigating him I was questioning him. The small town in Minnesota where he claimed he and his brother were bom had been the county seat, and the whole shivaree had burned up in a prairie fire years ago, courthouse, birth records and all. With no other living relatives, I had to depend on people who had known both men. From those whom I questioned, I ascertained that they had been passing for brothers, at least, for some time. On the third day Leo's patience began to crack. "You keep asking me the same, stupid questions over and over. I tell you, I'm a mechanical engineer. My brother was a mathematician. We're both single. I make enough money in the construction game to support both of us. What's so suspicious about humoring my brother's research?" "Among other things," I said, "is your ignorance of what he was doing." "For the fiftieth time I tell you I didnt know!" His exasperation was mounting to the pitch I had been awaiting. "You used the past tense. You do know now?" He wheeled and crosstd the living room, poured himself a drink of straight bourbon and downed it. "Yes, I have a notion now, but it's none of your damned business. His ideas may be patentable." I said slowly and quietly, "Now I'll tell you what I've been waiting for. I've been waiting for you to offer me information about the two little gadgets that you removed from your brother's work-bench -- against my explicit orders not to touch anything. Until you produce those items and explain your actions I'll be around here asking stupid questions. From now on, understand?" "Damn cops!" He threw the shot glass to the floor and glared at me for a long minute. "All right, come with me." We went into a little library. He took two volumes from a high shelf and from the recess snatched the two gadgets with the pistol ips. From a table drawer, whicn he unlocked with a key from his pocket, he took some drawings that looked like the ones that had disappeared from his brother's little work-shop. "Calvin developed a new effect by applying one of his esoteric mathematical symbols to a simple electronic circuit," Leo began, in his surly tone. He pointed at the margin of the circuit drawing. There were jottings of algebraic formulae in which the quantity "i" appeared prominently. He pointed this out to me and continued, "Being a cop you wouldn't understand, but this symbol stands for an imaginary number, the square root of a minus one." This rang a bell from away back in my own college math. I said, "Yeah, I think I remember. It's some sort of operational factor in polar coordinates. No real meaning in itself, but -- " "Well! An educated cop! That's right, except that Calvin managed to give this symbol an actual, functional application. I was telling the truth when I said I didn't ow what he was doing. I still don't understand it, and I've been losing sleep over these formulae." "Then why not take it to the university and let the professors -- " "Because," he interrupted, "whether I understand it or not, Calvin's gadget, happens to work. Watch this." He picked an ordinary paper clip from the debris of pencils, stamps and rubber bands from the top desk drawers, touched it to the "muzzle" end of the gadget where it stuck as if magnetized. "Now keep your eyes on the paper clip," he ordered. His forefinger pressed a button in the pistol grip, and without click, snap, buzz or murmur, the paper clip disappeared. Leo stared at me, as thoughts of "hyper-space", fourth-dimension and space-warps flitted through my mind. It wasn't a Buck Roger's atomic disintegrator, because there was no heat, flash or sound. The clip was suddenly elsewhere. "And I suppose the other gadget brings it back," I said. "That's what I thought, but I can't make it work. I suppose my brother could, if he were here." He tossed the thing to me, pointed at the little box of paper clips in the drawer and said, "Have fun." I did, for about five minutes. Eight paper clips later I was convinced that whatever else it might be, the gadget was no potential murder weapon. The clips disappeared, totally. You could pass your hand through the point of departure without a tingle of sensation. Leo briefed me further. The thing worked only on metallic conductors. It was harmless to human flesh and other organic matter. Then he removed the cover that ran the length of the rather crude, hand-carved, wooden barrel. From front to back, were: One pen-light cell, a lumpy-looking coil of wire hand-wound on a spindle-shaped iron core, and a short, cylindrical bar-magnet. "In mass production," he said, "About # cents worth of material and maybe # cents worth of labor! Do you see why I wanted to keep it a secret until I could patent it?" "No!" I said flatly. "Unless you consider a paper-clip disposal unit an item of commerci importance." "But it's a whole new scientific principle -- the rotation of matter completely out of our space-time continuum!" "That much I grasp, but what good is it except as a demonstration of a piece of pure scientific research?" "Good Lord, man, have you no imagination?" "Okay, okay! Get rich," I said and slammed the front door behind me as I stomped out. I had been so certain that the missing gadgets would give me a motive for the attack on Leo's brother, or at least the method of inflicting the fantastic wound, that I was about ready to turn in my badge in frustration. All I could pin on Leo was a desire to cash in on his brother's gimmick -- which, presumably, he could have done whether Calvin lived or died. Suppose, I mused on my way back to the station, that Calvin had refused to let Leo commercialize on his discovery? Perhaps Calvin was preparing a paper for publication in scientific circles. Maybe coolheaded little Leo tried to knock off his brother to keep the secret in the family until it could be turned to a selfish dollar. All right, suppose a jury would accept such an impalpable theory as a motive, then what? No murder weapon. No witnesses. Not even a genuine murder yet, because Calvin was still alive. Yes, old Doc Thorsen had kept the mathematician alive somehow. The elder Baxter lay on his back across two, white iron beds pushed together in the City Hospital, and Thorsen came in to report to me. "The clot seems to be absorbing better than I expected, but it's doubtful that we could operate to remove the paralyzing pressure. The puncture is deep into the brain tissue, and he's too nearly gone to survive such an ordeal." "Any chance that he might recover consciousness?" "Pretty remote," Thorsen told me. "We'll keep a special nurse with him as you ordered, just in case he does." I left Calvin Baxter pale and motionless as some great statue supine amid the tangle of plasma, glucose and saline hoses, under his transparent oxygen tent. The wound that had laid him low was no more than a dot of dried blood on his massive forehead. Until his death, his file would remain under unsolved crimes. In my own mind I was no longer sure of anything, except that if there was a nickel in Calvin Baxter's discovery, his mercenary brother would wring it out. And he did. Even before Calvin died. Some seven weeks later Leo mara combined, toy, trick and puzzle, and it set the whole damned world on its ear! I located Leo Baxter in his new suite of offices on the #th floor of the State Building. He peeled back his lips in a sneery grin. "I thought you'd be showing up." He waved away his male secretary who was still clinging to my arm trying to tow me back to the reception room. I said, "I kept your secret, then you pull an irresponsible thing like this! A kid's toy! Good Lord, man, that device might be dangerous!" "I appreciate your professional ethics, Lieutenant. I've applied for a patent, so you can tell all your friends now. And stop worrying. The "Mystery i-Gun" is quite harmless. I experimented a week before going into production." "A week?" I could scarcely believe my ears. "What happens when some kid jams his gun against a light-pole or an automobile... or the night lock on the First National Bank?" "Nothing. It punches no holes. A large metallic object simply dissipates the field. The largest object it will handle is about a halfinch steel screw -- " "Baxter, your brother's accident is connected to that device -- and you turn it loose as a novelty!" "Nonsense. It's safe as a knothole. It simply makes things disappear. Little things, like tacks, ball bearing, old rusty nuts and bolts -- " "And dimes and mamma's earrings and the front door key," I snapped back. "Until you know how to bring those things back you had no right to market that rig." He laid his small hands before him on the desk. "Lieutenant, I'm sick of working for other people. This is my chance to get a bankroll to back my own contracting firm. Yes, I financed Calvin's reknew he'd come up with something some day. Now he's done it, and I'm merely protecting his interests and my investment in him. See here." He shoved some documents at me. There was the patent application, a declaration of partnership for purposes of marketing the Mystery i-Gun, and the articles of incorporation of the Baxter Construction Company. "Okay," I said. "So you've cut your brother in on all this. Who's his beneficiary when he dies?" "Still looking for a motive for murder, aren't you. Lieutenant?" I didn't admit it to him, but he was right. Galvin's "accident" seemed too convenient to the purposes of his practical little brother, Leo. What's more, the lab and medical men on the force were just as mystified today as they were when we brought Calvin in with the needle-thin hole in his skull. Old Doc Thorsen had admitted to me that he could name no implement -- not even a surgical instrument -- that could have inflicted such a narrow gauge hole. It had to be caused by a fragment, hut there was no fragment in the brain! "Leo," I said, "I know you consider this case closed, but I want you to do me a favor. I want to go over youf brother's lab once more." "But you've -- " He stopped, shrugged and nodded his head. "Okay. I'm interested in finding out what hurt Cal, as much as you are. I'll tell you, Fm busy the rest of this week, but Fll meet you at the old house next Monday evening at eight. You see, I closed up the place and moved downtown." I agreed, with the feeling that he was deliberately making me wait just to annoy me. Leo Baxter was an important man now, a man the police -- at his own convenience. I stood up. "Your brother has been calling your name. I suppose they told you that?" "They phoned. Doctor said it was just mutterings." "You haven't even been to see him?" "What's the use? He wouldn't recognize me." Well, it wasn't any of my business, really, but it's funny how you get to hate a man for his attitude. I don't know what I expected to find by going over that lab-workshop again, but whatever it was, I hoped it would incriminate Leo. On the face of it he was guilty of nothing more than a premature marketing of a new device, but the way he was cashing in on Galvin's genius certainly did the dying man no honor. Cash in was right! The toys sold like bubble-gum. The papers, radio, and TV picked up the sensational worth of free advertising. And the profitable part of it was that the i-Gun was so simple to mass-produce that Leo's fifteen contracting manufacturers were almost able to keep up with the astronomical demand. Before that week was up, the Wall Street Journal estimated there were already more i-Guns in the hands of the juvenile public than all the yo-yos ever produced. They retailed at eighty-five cents, made of plastic with a hole in the back where you could change the penlight battery. They sold, all right. They sold in drugstores and toy stores and dime stores and department stores. Toddler's, tykes and teen-agers went for them. And were in the hands of the public before I saw Leo Baxter next. Which was almost two weeks instead of the one week he had promised. I finally got an appointment. "Sorry," he said. "Fve been tied up with government people all week. The A. E. G. tried to get me in trouble." I said, "Skip it. You promised for tonight. Now let's go." "I can't possibly make it tonight." He pointed at his desk. It was littered with correspondence, orders and contracts. "Give me one more week. Lieutenant." It was an order, not a request. There was nothing to do but wait the third week. It was not, however, uneventful. It was the week the accidents began to happen. At #: # of a Tuesday afternoon, a man was admitted to a local hospital with a perforated belly. Straight through, hide, guts and liver. A newsman got hold of it and wrote a scare story about an attack with a pellet gun that must shoot needles. Before the edition was sold out the hospitals were loaded with emergency cases. People with holes in them. Tiny little holes, mostly, but holes that went right through them. Then dogs. Then automobiles, trucks and busses. Holes in their radiators. Holes in windshields that always went straight back, through seats and sometimes passengers -- right out through the rear end. T he city panicked. Then the county, state and nation. In two days, yes, the whole nation! At first everyone thought we were being attacked by some secret weapon. By some miracle of statesmanship, the President of the United States prevented a "massive retaliation" attack by the army upon our most likely enemy -- long enough for Intelligence to affirm that no enemy on Earth was that mad at us. Then all thoughts turned to extra-terrestrial space. A bombardment from the sky? It was ridiculous to even consider, because none of the holes that appeared in people and things came from above. The holes were almost entirely in the horizontal plane. Strangely enough during those first two days, nobody thought of the Mystery i-Gun. No one but me. Leo Baxter had disappeared into thin air, as completely as if he'd turned to metal and crawled into the muzzle of one of his own "toys". I had every known place he frequented staked out with a pair of plain-clothesmen, but it was the morning of the second day of accidents before I got a radio call from the squad car stationed near the old Baxter home. Leo had come home at last. He was a sad looking midget when I got there. Obviously no sleep, unshaven, deep hollows under his eyes. "I figured you'd be waiting for me. Lieutenant, but you know what?" he demanded. "I don't give a damn! I kept waiting for them to figure out the answer to these accidents and string me up. How come you didn't tell anybody?" I said, "Shut up and let's go inside." Sure, I figured the i-Gun was the cause, but the last thing I wanted was for Leo to get strung up before I laid my hands on that other device -- the one that wouldn't work. I wanted that rig and all the plans and formulae, and Leo undoubtedly had them hidden deeper than Fort Knox. He unlocked the door, and I told the others to wait outside. We went into the hall and closed the door behind us. "So your little toy was harmless?" I said, grabbing him by his wrinkled lapels. "So it just shoots stuff off into another dimension?" He stared at me, his eyes half glazed. "I don't -- know. That's what the notes said." He sank into a chair. "I guess it doesn't, though. It must ball up the metal object and shoot it out -- infinite velocity -- reduced in size -- infinite massinfinite inertia -- keeps circling the globe like -- like a satellite. Goes right through anything it hits. Goes on and on. Forever. Little bullets. Right through steel. Right through flesh and bones -- " "Simmer down," I said. "You've been reading the papers. I've been checking the facts." "What do you mean?" "That you were right the first time. It does shoot metal objects into another dimension. But they dont stay there. They ooze back. Slowly. Real slow, so the first edge or comer that sticks back into our of an inch thick. Then a few tenthousandths, then a few thousandths -- and that's about the time they start making holes in people and objects that run into them.' "Run into them?" "Certainly. There are no holes in buildings or other stationary objects. The holes are all horizontal. Now look, Baxter, our only chance is to work on that other device and your brother's notes, and maybe we can develop an extractor of some kind." "No. No, you don't understand," he said shaking his head like a sleep-walker. "It balls up the metal. Shoots it out. Infinite mass. Infinite veloc -- " "Knock off that nonsense, and tell me where those plans are." "Trying to steal my brother's other invention, are you? It's not patented yet. You know that, don't you? Couldn't patent it because I can't make it work yet. You're smart, but you won't get it from me -- " I had a fair hold on him, but the pure insanity that flared in his eyes shocked me for just the instant it took him to wrench out of my hands. He stumbled to the door of the study and burst through it heading for the window. I didn't hurry after him too fast, because I knew the boys outside would take him. Leo Baxter was only three paces into the stale air of the unused library when he screamed, clasping his hands to his chest and dropped. A peculiar grating, plucking sound came faintly before he thudded to the carpet. I stopped hard in my tracks and wiped the sweat from my face while Leo Baxter twitched almost at my feet, his heart shredded and bubbling its last in his perforated chest. The paper clips. The ones I had propelled into nothingness weeks ago. Hat in hand I advanced slowly, waving it before me chest high. Then it caught suddenly, grated for a split second and passed on in its arc. Now there were several tiny holes in it. I backed away a foot and brought my hat down slowly on the same lethal spot of air. Chest-high it caught and hung suspended. Leaving it there as a marker I took off my suitcoat, held it before me and inched forward toward the desk. Something plucked at the dangling garment, and a chill froze my spine. Had I been walking forward normally, the tiny speck of metal that barely caught the glint of light from the window, would have pierced my skin at just about the site of my appendix. I circled the spot continuing to feel forward with my coat. That was the paper clip Baxter had fired to demonstrate to me that first day. At the phone I called headquarters and told the chief what to do. "You're so right," he told me, his voice slurring strangely. "Only you're a little late. The order went out to confiscate the i-Guns. They think the damned toys might have something to do with the accidents. And I bought one of the first ones for my little Jerry!" His voice sounded hollow. So they were figuring it out! The next question was, how to extract the deadly particles from the other dimension, or how to keep them from bleeding back slowly into ours. I moved cautiously through the old house fanning every inch of air ahead of me with a phone book. When I got to Calvin Baxter's workshop I was especially careful, but I needn't have been. The only metal particles stuck into the thin air seemed to be over his workbench where he had been experimenting with his device. All but one. It was right where I expected to find it -- better than six feet in the air, just fore-head high for a mam tall as Calvin Baxter. He had fired his proto-type of the i-Gun just once into the middle of the room. How long ago? Eight -- ten weeks ago? It seemed impossible that all this horror had occurred in such a short time. But there it was, stuck in space, protruding about a hundredth of an inch from nowhere into clear visibility. So little was showing that I couldn't be sure, but it looked like the tip of an ordinary little nail or wo-screw. This was my "murder-weapon", the cause of Calvin Baxter's accident, He'd run into it, jerked his head back, and the speck had come out the same hole it went in. In twenty minutes by the clock I had the lab crew out from headquarters, and had explained the whole business to them. First they measured the length of the protrusion, and my guess was about right. It measured .# inches on the micrometer caliper. If it were a screw an inch long, at that rate of "bleedback" it would take another # weeks to come the rest of the way out. Almost two years! Paul Riley, the lab chief, was sharp. He caught it about the same time I did and turned to look at me, "We've got to figure a way of getting those things out of the way." I nodded. "But quick." Collins, our print man, said, "Why not just shoot them back into wherever it is they go, with another i-Gun?" "And have them come bleeding back after a few weeks?" Paid frowned him silent. He picked up a hammer from the bench and tapped the tiny, glinting speck. The point flattened out a bit, but the thud of the hammer indicated how solidly it was stuck. Then he walked around behind the point and struck it a hard blow from the cross-section side. The hammer shivered in his hand and he dropped it, rubbing his numbed fingers with his other hand. "Lieutenant," he said slowly, "we are up against something." We found we could file away the metal easily enough. Sure it filed away until the file cut into empty space. But cold comfort that was. In a few hours, we knew, molecule by molecule, the screw buried in the other dimension would come oozing back, a minute but lethal speck ready to ambush th first very tall man who walked toward it. Tall man! That's why Leo Baxter and I had failed to find it in the first place. I had criss-crossed that room half a thousand times in my previous examinations. If I had been taller, or the speck of metal lower -- "We've got to bring Calvin Baxter back to consciousness somehow," I said. "We've got to find out how that extractor of his works." "Right!" Jerry said, dropping his hands in resignation. We'd run out of ideas at the same time, and the senior Baxter appeared to be our only hope. there, into the squad car, and proceeded at a gingerly five miles per hour back to headquarters. On my insistence, Calvin Baxter had been set up in a private room at the jail with Doc Thorsen in attendance. The city hospitals were so jammed with accident victims and frantic relatives that it was no place to work with a man who was our only salvation. When I explained everything to Dr. Thorsen and told him how important it was that we bring Calvin back to consciousness he shook his head. "It might be done, but it would probably kill him -- " "But you said he'd never recover anyway," I argued. Thorsen seemed to be considering that. "Yes," he said at last. "That's more apparent now than ever. He's beginning to suffer the usual complications of immobility. Probably won't last more than a few weeks anyway. But can't you get the dope you want from his brother?" he stalled while he weighed his ethics against the necessity of the moment. "His brother," I told him, "is dead. Paper clips. Right through the heart." "I see. Well, we could operate, but as I said, Calvin wouldn't survive for long. Maybe only hours or minutes. And maybe not even long enough to regain consciousness after we remove the clot." I said, "I've left a crew at the Baxter house to tear it apart, board by board, until we find this socalled extractor that Leo hid. But even after we find it, we need Calvin to tell us how to make it work. There must be a part missing." We had wandered into Calvin's room and were talking over his great, supine body, covered to the chin with a white sheet. The speck of scalp on his forehead had dried up and dropped off leaving only a faint white spot. As I mentioned the missing part, his lips began moving and a grunt issued from his throat. "Listen," I said. "He hears me! He's trying to talk!" "No, Lieutenant." Thorsen said, putting a hand to his eyes. "He's been grunting like that for days. The only word that ever comes out is his brother's name, Leo." The name struck anger and frustration in me. "Leo," I halfshouted. "That stinking little -- never even visited his brother!" "Relax, Gene. That won't do any good. The man's dead," he reminded me. "Relax? When all over the country people are tearing their bodies to pieces? Innocent people. Little kids -- " "I know, I know. I just spent nine hours in the emergency ward. Peritonitis. Cardiac injury. Lungs. Tom eye-balls. And it's probably just the beginning." "Then what are you waiting for?" I demanded. "Our only chance is to bring Calvin Baxter to consciousness long enough to explain how his extractor works." Doc ran trembling hands through his fuzz of white hair. For the first time I noticed that the pupils of his eyes were moving back and forth in little quick, darting motions like a wild animal looking for escape. "I -- don't know. Gene. I suppose you are right. Only -- we need permission -- we must -- you see, he might die, and -- " I took a good look at him and suddenly realized that despite his calm voice, the old man was going to pieces. I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him out of there, across the hall to the chief's office. DurStine had his head down on his arms, slouched over the desk fast asleep between two clanging telephones. "Wake up, chief!" I said, shaking him by the shoulder. "We have to get Jter to City Hospital and -- " Durstine raised his head and stared at me. His usually sharp, gray eyes were dull, and his face looked dirty with a stubble of black whiskers. With a deliberate motion of both hands he knocked the receivers off both phones and fell back in his swivel chair. "Now what?" he asked thickly. "You're drunk!" I exclaimed. Durstine, who would fire a #-year man without a qualm if he caught a single trace of beer on his breath on duty, "What else is new?" He could barely focus his eyes on me. I swallowed a couple of times and began explaining what must be done. Get the mayor and Civil Defense on the phone. Commandeer all radio stations to explain the true nature of the metallic particles to the public. Tell them to stay put, and when they did move, to walk slowly, fanning the air ahead of them with something solid -- an umbrella, a coat, newspaper, garbage can lid -- anything to warn them of the tiny, suspended daggers. "Yeah. Great idea. Some people doing it already." He said it without enthusiasm. "Only trouble is, the phones are swamped. Communications are breaking down already, and when people learn about the fever, they will blow sky-high." "The fever?" "The fever." He bobbed his head loosely. "My Jerry died of it this afternoon. Came down with it day before yesterday. By the time we got him to the hospital this morning he was running a hundred and five. Docs were too busy with bleeders. Wouldn't listen to me until it was too late. Jerry's dead. My little Jerry." His voice was flat, his eyes staring straight ahead. Jerry was his only son, and one of the first kids in town to own an i-Gun. Durstine had said he bought it for himself. The chief went on, "What's more, the fever's epidemic. Before we left the hospital they were dragging victims in by the hundreds. Not just kids, either. On top of this other thing, we got the worst epidemic in history. No one knows what it is." I looked at Thorsen. "You said you'd been at the hospital. What is it?" "I -- saw a few cases." He said it almost under his breath. I grabbed him by his coat lapels. "Snap out of it. Doc. If you know what it is, for God's sake tell us!" "They don't know what it is," he said looking down at the floor. "But you do. I can tell by your face " "All right, maybe I do." His face was drawn and defiant with an almost fanatical determination. "There aren't enough sulphas and antibiotics in the world to control it. We can't do anything about it, so why drive people crazy with fear?" Durstine was coming out of his fog. He opened the big bottom drawer of his desk and handed an open fifth of whiskey to Thorsen. He said, "Doc, you're in no condition to make a decision like that." Thorsen tipped up the bottle and let several swallows pour down his leathery neck. The stuff brought tears to his eyes. He blinked them away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "All right, public guardian, I'll tell you. It's pretty obvious, and other medical men will think of it pretty quick, I suppose -- when they find out the cause of the punctures they are treating. This fever is just more of the same. Peritonitis. Only it's caused by particles so small that you can't even feel when they penetrate the skin. They're large enough to poke holes in your intestines, though. Large enough to make microscopic passages for bacteria. So, you see, for every bleeding patient, there will be hundreds, thousands, coming down with peritonitis -- infection of the body cavity from within. Without drugs the inflammation spreads in hours, and the temperature goes up and up. It's fatal." I could almost feel the pain in my belly and the fire in my veins as he spoke. Doc Thorsen took another drink and handed me the bottle. "You look a little pale. Gene. Have a jolt and see if your guts leak." Durstine and I both had a drink, and the chief said, "I see what you meant. I wish you'd kept your mouth shut." I said, "Dammit, we've got to do something." "Like what?" Durstine asked bitterly. "Like quarantining the schools and the playgrounds?" Thorsen nodded grimly. "And the parks? And all back yards and front yards?" Durstine picked it up again. "And empty lots and all sidewalks and streets and public buildings and the whole damned outdoors plus the indoors?" The enormity of the problem began to sink into my tired brain. In the space of weeks, more than # United States alone. Multiply that figure by the number of times each was fired. Ten? Fifty? A hundred times? Only God knew how many rivets were launched into limbo, and were now just beginning to return -- invisible at first -- to skewer the American people. Wherever kids had played -- and that was virtually everywhere -- death was hidden. And the semivisible particles would keep emerging for weeks, in the order that they were shot into the other dimension. Worse yet, at the slow rate of emergence, it would be months or years before the metallic flotsam returned completely and dropped to earth! A man could protect himself only by remaining motionless. But society was geared to motion, fast, space-covering motion. The nation would starve to death, if everyone didn't go insane first and tear themselves to pieces running around. "We've got to get Ae secret of that extractor out of Calvin Baxter," I said. "If we can discover the principle, we can build large models, like a vacuum cleaner -- G etting Baxter into City Hospital and finding a competent surgeon in good enough condition to perform the delicate operation, took almost twenty-four hours. The hospital resembled an abattoir, the corridor floors slick from the drippings of fresh blood, as people seeking help wandered frantically from floor to floor. Somehow we managed to impress upon the staff the fact that Baxter had priority, and we were allowed on the operating floor, which was guarded at all entries. Sick with exhaustion, I waited with Durstine. Thorsen was impressed into duty immediately, and that was the last we saw of him. It was a good many hours before they called us into the operating room. I won't try to describe the sight in detail. Surgeons and nurses hovered over tables, weaving like drunken butchers in blood-soaked aprons. In one corner, on a cot, Baxter lay with his head and shoulders propped up high. His feet hung over the end at least fourteen inches. A single sheet covered him. The top of his skull was bandaged, and he looked even paler than before. A doctor and one nurse stood on either side of him. As we came in the doctor said, "I've been told of the problem. We've done all we can, but this man is dying. I think we can bring him to consciousness for a few minutes. It's a terribly cruel thing to do, and I'm not sure he will be coherent. Are you sure you want me to try?" "It's his invention that brought on all of this," I said. "If there's any solution to it, he has it in his head." "Very well." He did things with a hypodermic needle while the nurse rigged an oxygen tent. I'he smell of ether and blood made me sicker. My throat was dry, and I remember wishing I hadn't drunk Durstine's whiskey. As we stood waiting the humid air felt almost unbearably hot, and I had difficulty focussing my eyes. Durstine looked terrible, holloweyed, unshaven, but he seemed in better shape than I. It was he who caught the first flicker of Baxter's eyes and dropped to his knees. The color came back to the scientist's face in a rush of pink, and his chest heaved with deep breathing. "Can you hear me?" Durstine began. An hour later Baxter was dead as predicted. And so was all hope of removing the lethal debris with his other invention. The "extractor" didn't work, he had told us. Yes, he'd been trying to reverse the field to retrieve the metallic objects from the other dimension, hut the experiment was a failure! Durstine took my arm. "Gome on. Gene. We've done all we can. I know one safe place -- a place where no kids ever played." "Yeah, I know," I said with a tongue two sizes too big. "The nearest bar. The damned kids! They've murdered us! Led Baxter and the damned kids!" Things were turning gray, but I remember the chief catching me by the shoulder and jerking; me around. Too late I rememJbered about his little Jerry and the agony my words must have carvedl in his heart. I wished he'd slug me, but he didn't. He looked at me for a long minute and said something I don't remember, because the fog closed in -- a hot, dry fog that swept into my brain and blacked out the h'ght. I don't even remember falling. The last thought I had was, the fever! Fve got it. And Thorsen said there were no more antibiotics or drugs left in the city. surprise but no pleasure, to discover I was still alive. Through the smoke of my unfocussed eyes I could tell that my "private" room was occupied by at least a dozen other patients. Some were on cots and some, like me, simply lay on the floor vith a blanket over them. I had one #-second visit from the doctor before Durstine came to take me away. The doc said simply, "You're a lucky man, Lieutenant. We didn't save many 'fever' patients after the drugs ran out." The chief brought a couple of boys in blue with a stretcher to haul me out, I was amazed to discover that automobiles were still moving about the streets -- not many, but a few. I was too sick and exhausted to talk during the ride. Durstine rode in back with me, a hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry; Gfene," he said. "You're going to be all right. And we've got this thing pretty well licked." He looked into my eyes and read the question I was too weak to speak aloud. "No' he said, "we didn't figure out Baxter's extractor. But we do have a successful detector, and all we have to do now is use it -- then hang a tin can or an old ketchup bottle on each speck of metal for a marker. Yeah, the coimtry's going to be cluttered up like a hanging garbage dump for a long time, but if you can see 'em you can dodge 'em." A detector? Why, they'd have to equip every person in the country with one! And surely nothing less than an electronic, radar-type gadget could detect the microscopic particles as they first began to emerge -- the kind that had riddled my intestines and given me the fever without even leaving a mark on my skin. "I know what you are thinking," Durstine said. His face was gray and drawn, but he wore a faint smile. "It was simple when somebody thought of it. What would be cheap enough to distribute universally, yet effective enough to give you positive warning? You see, these tiny particles are so fine at first that you can fan the air with a plank and never know when one passes through." He raised me up from the stretcher and let me look out the window of the police ambulance. Through squinted eyes I made out a strange sight. A thin scattering of pedestrians was moving slowly on the sidewalks, winding their ways among a random collection of floating tin cans and inverted bottles. When we stopped for a red light I watched a young woman in a business suit step between a whiskey bottle head-high, and a bean can about knee-high, and then proceed gingerly waving a colored sphere ahead of her. This sphere, about eighteen inches in diameter, suddenly disappeared. She stopped abruptly and began shouting. Before the traffic light turned green, a man came up with an empty motor oil can and placed it on the sidewalk, under the point she indicated in the air before her. Durstine explained, "When that speck gets large enough to support it, that can will be hung on it. Meanwhile, other people are forewarned that the air over the can is out-of-bounds, so they won't waste detectors on it." As he spoke, the young woman was fishing another "detector" from her purse. It was a limp bit of something which she placed to her lips and inflated until it was a foot-anda-half in diameter, then she tied off the neck and proceeded down the walk waving it before her in great vertical sweeps. It was as simple as that. Our undoing had been a #cent kid's toy. And our salvation was a penny-balloon!    Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology. -- Emerson what Is Your Science I. Q.? scientific facts that you read about in science fiction. How well do you know them? Counting five for each correct answer, you should score #. Anything over # makes you a veritable Mr. Wizard. See page # for the answers. #. A googol is a one followed by zeros. #. What percent of the moon's surface has been able to be observed by astronomers? #. The measure of the extent to which one atom is able to combine directly with others is known as the #. In which constellation is the point which is known as "the apex of the Sun's way"? #. The substitution of machines or mechanical devices for human beings in a manufacturing process is described by the newly coined word #. What is the scientific term for the bright streaks or areas on the surface of the Sun? #. Zero on the Fahrenheit scale represents the temperature produced by the mixing of equal weights of snow and #. The distance from the Earth to the Sun, # miles, is the basis for what unit of measurement? #. The height of the Earth's atmosphere is # miles, but about half of it by weight is below feet. #. What is the term used to describe different forms of the same element which have the same atomic number but different atomic weights? #. Are sidereal days longer or shorter than solar days? #. The atomic weight of any element is represented by the total number of neutrons and #. What is the polar radius of the Earth in statute miles? #. If an astronomical unit were represented by one inch, a light year would be represented by about #. During the fusion of deuterium and tritium, hydrogen is transmuted into what other element? #. The tail of a comet always trails from the head in a direction the sun. #. The rotational speed of the Sun varies from about # ## days at the equator to approximately days near its poles. BY The obvious signs were missing, yet Callisto was moving steadily toward a state of totalitarianism. All the people were beginning to be exactly alike! pushed away his work papers. In an organization of thousands he was the only employee not putting out. Probably he was the only yance-man on Callisto not doing his job. Fear, and the quick pluckings of desperation, made him reach up and wave on the audio circuit to Babson, the over-all office controller. "Say," Sipling said hoarsely, "I think Pm stuck, Bab. How about running the gestalt through, up to my spot? Maybe I can pick up the rhythm... He grinned weakly. "The hum of other creative minds." After a speculative moment, Babson reached for the impulse synapsis, his massive face unsympathetic. "You holding up progress. Sip? This has to be integrated with the daily by six tonight. The schedule calls for the works to be on the vidlines during the dinner-hour stretch." I he visual side of the gestalt had already begun to form on the wall screen; Sipling turned his attention to it, grateful of a chance to escape Babson' s cold glare. The screen showed a #-D of Yancy, the usual three-quarter view, from the waist up. John Edward Yancy in his faded workshirt, sleeves rolled up, arms brown and furry. A middle-aged man in his late fifties, his face sunburned, neck slightly red, a good-natured smile on his face, squinting because he was looking into the sun. Behind Yancy was a still of his yard, his garage, his flower garden, lawn, the back of his neat little white plastic house. Yancy nned at Sipling: a neighbor pausing in the middle of a summer day, perspiring from the heat and the exertion of mowing his lawn, about to launch into a few harmless remarks about the weather, the state of the planet, the condition of die neighborhood. "Say," Yancy said, in the audio phones propped up on Sipling's desk. His voice was low, personal. "The darndest thing happened to my grandson Ralf, the oAer morning. You know how Ralf is; he's always getting to school half an hour early... says he likes to be in his seat before anybody else." "That eager-beaver," Joe Pines, at the next desk, cat-called. From the screen, Yancy's voice rolled on, confident, amiable, undisturbed. "Well, Ralf saw this squirrel; it was just sitting there on the sidewalk. He stopped for a minute and watched." The look on Yancy's face was so real that Sipling almost believed him. He could, almost, see the squirrel and the tow-headed youngest grandson of the Yancy family, the familiar child of the familiar son of the planet's most familiar -- and beloved -- person. "This squirrel," Yancy explained, in his homey way, "was collecting nuts. And by golly, this was just the other day, only the middle of June. And here was this little squirrel -- " with his hands he indicated the size, "collecting these nuts and carrying them ofT for winter." And then, the amused, anecdotelook on Yancy's face faded. A serious, thoughtful look replaced it : the meaningful-look. His blue eyes darkened (good color work). His jaw became more square, more imposing (good dummy-switch by the android crew). Yancy seemed older, more solemn and mature, more impressive. Behind him, the gardenscene had been jerked and a slightly different backdrop filtered in; Yancy now stood firmly planted in a cosmic landscape, among mountains and winds and huge old forests. "I got to thinking," Yancy said, and his voice was deeper, slower. "There was that little squirrel. How did he know winter was coming? There he was, working away, getting prepared for it." Yancy's voice rose. "Preparing for a winter he'd never seen." Sipling stiffened and prepared himself; it was coming. At his desk, Joe Pines grinned and yelled: "Get set!" "That squirrel," Yancy said solemnly, "had faith. No, he never saw any sign of winter. But he knew winter was coming." The firm jaw moved; one hand came slowly up... And then the image stopped. It froze, immobile, silent. No words came from it; abruptly the sermon ended, in the middle of a paragraph. "That's it," Babson said briskly, filtering the Yancy out. "Help you any?" Sipling pawed jerkily at his work papers. "No," he admitted, "actually it doesn't. But -- I'll get it worked out." "I hope so." Babson's face darkened ominously and his small mean eyes seemed to grow smaJler. "What's the matter with you? Home problems?" "I'll be okay," Sipling muttered, sweating. "Thanks." On the screen a faint impression of Yancy remained, still poised at the word coming. The rest of the gestalt was in Siplings head: the continuing slice of words and gestures hadn't been worked out and fed to the composite. Sipling's contribution was missing, so the entire gestalt was stopped cold in its tracks. "Say," Joe Pines said uneasily, "I'll be glad to take over, today. Cut your desk out of the circuit and I'll cut myself in." "Thanks," Sipling muttered, "but I'm the only one who can get this damn part. It's the central gem." "You ought to take a rest. You've been working too hard." "Yes," Sipling agreed, on the verge of hysteria. "I'm a Httle under the weather." That was obvious: everybody in the office could see that. But only Sipling knew why. And he was fighting with all his strength to keep from screaming out the reason at the top of his limgs. Basic analysis of the political milieu at Callisto was laid out by Niplan computing apparatus at Washington, D.G.; but the final evaluations were done by human technicians. The Washinon computers could ascertain that the Gallisto political structure was moving toward a totalitarian make-up, but they couldn't say what that indicated. Human beings were reqmred to class the drift as malign. "It isn't possible," Taverner protested. "There's constant industrial traffic in and out of Callisto; except for the Ganymede syndicate they've got out-planet commerce bottled up. We'd know as soon as anything phony got started." "How would we know?" Police Director Kellman inquired. Taverner indicated the datasheets, graphs and charts of figures and percentages that covered the walls of the Niplan Police offices. "It would show up in hundreds of ways. Terrorist raids, political prisons, extermination camps. We'd hear about political recanting, treason, disloyalty... all the basic props of a dictatorship." "Don't confuse a totalitarian society with a dictatorship," Kellman said drily. "A totalitarian state reaches into every sphere of its citizens' lives, forms their opinions on every subject. The government can be a dictatorship, or a parliament, or an elected president, or a council of priests. That doesn't matter." "All right," Taverner said, mollified. "I'll go. I'll take a team there and see what they're doing." "Gan you make yourselves look like Gallistotes?" "What are they like?" "I'm not sure," Kellman admitted thoughtfully, with a glance at the elaborate wall charts. "But whatever it is, they're all beginning to turn out alike." Among its passengers the interplan commercial liner that settled down at Gallisto carried Peter Taverner, his wife, and their two children. With a grimace of concern, Taverner made out the shapes of local officials waiting at the exit hatch. The passengers were going to be carefully screened; as the ramp descended, the clot of officials moved forward. Taverner got to his feet and collected his family. "Ignore them' he told Ruth. "Our papers will get us by." Expertly prepared documents identified him as a speculator in nonferric metals, ' looking for a wholesale outlet to handle his jobbing. Gallisto was a clearing-point for land and mineral operations; a constant flood of wealth-hungry entrepreneurs streamed back and forth, carting raw materials from the underdeveloped moons, hauling mining equipment from the inner planets. Cautiously, Taverner arranged his topcoat over his arm. A heavyset man, in his middle thirties, he could have passed for a successful business operator. His doublebreasted business suit was expensive, but conservative. His big shoes were brightly shined. All things considered, he'd probably get by. As he and his family moved toward the exit ramp, they presented a perfect and exact imitation of the out-planet business-class. "State your business," a greenuniformed official demanded, pencil poised. I-d tabs were being checked, photographed, recorded. Brain pattern comparisons were being made : the usual routine. "Nonferric enterprises," Taverner began, but a second official cut him abruptly off "You're the third cop this morning. What's biting you people on Terra?" The official eyed Taverner intently. "We're getting more cops than ministers." Trying to maintain his poise, Taverner answered evenly: "I'm here to take a rest. Acute alcoholism -- nothing official." "That's what your cohorts said," The official grinned humorlessly. "Well, what's one more Terran cop?" He slid the lock-bars aside and waved Taverner and his family through. "Welcome to Gallisto. Have fun -- enjoy yourselves. Fastest-growing moon in the system." "Practically a planet," Taverner commented ironically. "Any day, now." The official examined some reports. "According to our friends in your little organization, you've been pasting up wall graphs and charts about us. Are we that important?" "Academic interest," Taverner said ; if three spots had been made, then the whole team had been netted. The local authorities were obviously primed to detect infiltration... the realization chilled him. But they were letting him through. Were they that confident? Things didn't look good. Peering around for a cab, he grimly prepared to undertake the business of integrating the scattered team members into a functioning whole. T hat evening, at the StayLit bar on the main street of the commercial district of town, Taverner met with his two team members. Hunched over their whiskey sours, they compared notes. "I've been here almost twelve hours," Eckmund stated, gazing impassively at the rows of bottles in the gloomy depths of the bar. Gigar smoke hovered in the air ; the automatic music box in the corner banged away metallically. "I've been walking around town, looking at things, making observations." "Me," Dorser said, "I've been at the tape-library. Getting official myth, comparing it to Callistote reality. And talking to the scholars -- educated people hanging around the scanning rooms." Taverner sipped his drink. "Anything of interest?" "You know the primitive ruleof-thumb test," Eckmimd said wryly. "I loafed around on a slum street corner until I got in a conversation with some people waiting for a bus. I started knocking the authorities: complaining about the bus service, the sewage disposal, taxes, everything. They chimed right in. Heartily. No hesitation. And no fear." "The legal government," Dorser commented, "is set up in the usual archaic fashion. Two-party system, one a little more conservative than the other -- no fundamental difference of course. But both elect candidates at open primaries, ballots circulated to all registered voters." A spasm of amusement touched him. "This is a model democracy. I read the text books. Nothing but idealistic slogans : freedom of speech, assembly, religion -- the works. Same old grammar school stuff." The three of them were temporarily silent. "There are jails," Taverner said slowly. "Every society has law violations." "I visited one," Eckmund said, belching. "Petty thieves, murderers, claim-jumpers, strong-arm hoods -- the usual." "No political prisoners?" "No." Eckmund raised his voice. "We might as well discuss this at the top of our lungs. Nobody cares -- the authorities don't care." "Probably after we're gone they'll clap a few thousand people into prison," Dorser murmured thoughtfully. "My God," Eckmund retorted, "people can leave Gallisto any time they want. If you're operating a police state you have to keep your borders shut. And these borders are wide open. People pour in and out." "Maybe it's a chemical in the drinking water," Dorser suggested. "How the hell can they have a totalitarian society without terrorism?" Eckmund demanded rhetorically. "I'll swear to it -- there are no thought-control cops here. There is absolutely no fear." "Somehow, pressure is being exerted," Taverner persisted. "Not by cops," Dorser said emphatically. "Not by force and brutality. Not by illegal arrest and imprisonment and forced labor." "If this were a police state," Eckmund said thoughtfully, "there'd be some kind of resistance movement. Some sort of 'subversive' group trying to overthrow the authorities. But in this society you're free to complain; you can buy time on the t-v and radio stations, you can buy space in the newspapers -- anything you want." He shrugged. "So how can there be a clandestine resistance movement? It's silly." # . "Nevertheless," Taverner said, "these people are living in a oneparty society, with a party line, with an official ideology. They show the effects of a carefully controlled totalitarian state. They're guinea pigs -- whether they realize it or not." "Wouldn't they realize it?" Baffled, Taverner shook his head. "I would have thought so. There must be some mechanism we don't understand." "It's all open. We can look everything over." "We must be looking for the wrong thing." Idly, Taverner gazed at the television screen above the bar. The nude girlie song-anddance routine had ended; now the features of a man faded into view. A genial, round-faced man in his fifties, with guileless blue eyes, an almost childish twitch to his lips, a fringe of brown hair playing around his slightly prominent ears. "Friends," the t-v image rumbled, "it's good to be with you again, tonight. I thought I might have a little chat with you." "A commercial," Dorser said, signalling the bartending machine for another drink. "Who is that?" Taverner asked curiously. "That kindly-looking geezer?" Eckmund examined his notes. "A sort of popular commentator. Name of Yancy." "Is he part of the government?" "Not that I know of. A kind of home-spun philosopher. I picked up a biography of him on a magazine stand." Eckmund passed the gaily-colored pamphlet to his boss. "Totally ordinary man, as far as I can see. Used to be a soldier; in the MarsJupiter War he distinished himself -- battlefield commission. Rose to the rank of major." He shrugged indifferently. "A sort of talking almanac. Pithy sayings on every topic. Wise old saws: how to cure a chest cold. What the trouble is back on Terra." Taverner examined the booklet. "Yes, I saw his picture around." "Very popular figure. Loved by the masses. Man of the people -- speaks for them. When I was buying cigarettes I noticed he endorses one particular brand. Very popular brand, now; just about driven the others off the market. Same with beer. The Scotch in this glass is probably the brand Yancy endorses. The same with tennis balls. Only he doesn't play tennis -- he plays croquet. All the time, every weekend." Accepting his fresh drink Eckmund finished, "So now everybody plays croquet." "How can croquet be a planetwide sport?" Taverner demanded. "This isn't a planet," Dorser put in. "It's a pipsqueak moon." "Not according to Yancy," Eckmund said. "We're supposed to think of Gallisto as a planet." "How?" Taverner asked. "Spiritually, it's a planet. Yancy likes people to take a spiritual view of matters. He's strong on God and honesty in government and being hard-working and clean-cut. Warmed-over truisms." The expression on Taverner's face hardened. "Interesting," he murmured. "I'll have to drop by and meet him." "Why? He's the dullest, most mediocre man you could dream up." "Maybe' Taverner answered, "that's why I'm interested." Babson, huge and menacing, met Taverner at the entrance of the Yancy Building. "Of course you can meet Mr. Yancy. But he's a busy man -- it'll take awhile to squeeze in an appointment. Everybody wants to meet Mr. Yancy." Taverner was unimpressed. "How long do I have to wait?" As they crossed the main lobby to the elevators, Babson made a computation. "Oh, say four months." "Four months "John Yancy is just about the most popular man alive." "Around here, maybe," Taverner commented angrily, as they entered the packed elevator. "I never heard of him before. If he's got so much on the ball, why isn't he piped all around Niplan?" "Actually," Babson admitted, in a hoarse, confidential whisper, "I can't imagine what people see in Yancy. As far as I'm concerned he's just a big bag of wind. But people around here enjoy him. After all, Callisto is -- provincial. Yancy appeals to a certain type of rural mind -- to people who like their world simple. I'm afraid Terra would be too sophisticated for Yancy." "Have you tried?" "Not yet," Babson said. Reflectively, he added: "Maybe later." While Taverner was pondering the meaning of the big man's words, the elevator ceased climbing. The two of them stepped off into a luxurious, carpeted hall, illuminated by recessed lights. Babson pushed open a door, and they entered a large, active office. Inside, a screening of a recent Yancy gestalt was in progress. A group of yance-men watched it silently, faces alert and critical. The gestalt showed Yancy sitting at his old-fashioned oak desk, in his study. It was obvious that he had been working on some philosophical thoughts: spread out over the desk were books and papers. On Yancy's face was a thoughtful expression; he sat with his hand against his forehead, features screwed up into a solemn study of concentration. "This is for next Sunday morning," Babson explained. Yancy's lips moved, and he spoke. "Friends," he began, in his deep, personal, friendly, man-to-man voice, "I've been sitting here at my desk -- well, about the way you're sitting around your living rooms." A switch in camera work occurred; it showed the open door of Yancy's study. In the living room was the familiar figure of Yancy's sweetfaced middle-aged homey wife ; she was sitting on the comfortable sofa primly sewing. On the floor their grandson Ralf played the familiar game of jacks. The family dog snoozed in the corner. One of the watching yance-men made a note on his pad. Taverner glanced at him curiously, baffled. "Of course, I was in there with them," Yancy continued, smiling briefly. "I was reading the funnies to Ralf. He was sitting on my knee." The background faded, and a momentary phantom scene of Yancy sitting with his grandson on his knee floated into being. Then the desk and the book-lined study returned. "Fm mighty grateful for my family," Yancy revealed. "In these times of stress, it's my family that I turn to, as my pillar of strength." Another notation was made by a watching yance-man. "Sitting here in my study, this wonderful Sunday morning," Yancy rumbled on, "I realize how lucky we are to be alive, and to have this lovely planet, and the fine cities and houses, all the things God has given us to enjoy. But we've got to be careful. We've got to make sure we don't lose these things." A change had come over Yancy. It seemed to Taverner that the image was subtly altering. It wasn't the same man ; the good humor was gone. This was an older man, and larger. A firm-eyed father, speaking to his children. "My friends," Yancy intoned, "there are forces that could weaken this planet. Everything we've built up for our loved ones, for our children, could he taken away from us overnight. We must learn to be vigilant. We must protect our liberties, our possessions, our way of life. If we become divided, and fall to bickering among each other, we will be easy prey for our enemies. We must work together, my friends. "That's what I've been thinking about this Sunday morning. Cooperation. T eamwork. We've got to be secure, and to be secure, we must be one united people. That's the key, my friends, the key to a more abundant life." Pointing out the window at the lawn and garden, Yancy said: "You know, I was... The voice trailed off. The image froze. Full room lights came on, and the watching yance-men moved into muttering activity. "Fine," one of them said. "So far, at least. But where's the rest?" "Sipling, again," another answered. "His slice still hasn't come through. What's wrong with that guy?" Scowling, Babson detached himself. "Pardon me," he said to Taverner. "I'll have to excuse myself -- technical matters. You're free to look around, if you care to. Help yourself to any of the literature -- anything you want." "Thanks," Taverner said uncertainly. He was confused ; everything seemed harmless, even trivial. But something basic was wrong. Suspiciously, he began to prowl. had pontificated on every known subject. A Yancy opinion on every conceivable topic was available... modern art, or garlic in cooking, or the use of intoxicating beverages, or eating meat, or socialism, or war, or education, or open-front dresses on women, or high taxes, or atheism, or divorce, or patriotism -- every shade and nuance of opinion possible. Was there any subject that Yancy hadnt expressed himself on? Taverner examined the voluminous tapes that lined the walls of the offices. Yancy's utterances had could one man have an opinion on everything in the universe? Choosing a tape at random, he found himself being addressed on the topic of table manners. "You know," the miniature Yancy began, his voice tinny in Taverner's ears, "at dinner the other night I happened to notice how my grandson Ralf was cutting his steak." Yancy grinned at the viewer, as an image of the six-year-old boy sawing grimly away floated briefly into sight. "Well, I got to thinking, there was Ralf working away at that steak, not having any luck with it. And it seemed to me -- " Taverner snapped the tape off and returned it to the slot. Yancy had definite opinions on everything... or were they so definite? A strange suspicion was growing in him. On some topics, yes. On minor issues, Yancy had exact rules, specific maxims drawn from mankind's rich storehouse of folklore. But major philosophical and political issues were something else again. Getting out one of the many tapes listed under War, Taverner ran it through at random. "... I'm against war," Yancy pronounced angrily. "And I ought to know; I've done my share of fighting." There followed a montage of battle scenes: the Jupiter-Mars War in which Yancy had distinguished himself by his bravery, his concern for his comrades, his hatred of the enemy, his variety of proper emotions. "But," Yancy continued staunchly, "I feel a planet must be strong. We must not surrender ourselves meekly... weakness invites attack and fosters aggression. By being weak we promote war. We must gird ourselves and protect those we love. With all my heart and soul I'm against useless wars; but I say again, as I've said many times before, a man must come forward and fight a just war. He must not shrink from his responsibility. War is a terrible thing. But sometimes we must..." As he restored the tape, Taverner wondered just what the hell Yancy had said. What were his views on war? They took up a hundred separate reels of tape; Yancy was always ready to hold forth on such vital and grandiose subjects as War, the Planet, God, Taxation. But did he say anything? A cold chill crawled up Taverner's spine. On specific -- and trivial -- items there were absolute opinions: dogs are better than cats, grapefruit is too sour without a dash of sugar, it's good to get up early in the morning, too much drinking is bad. But on big topics... an empty vacuum, filled with the vacant roll of high-sounding phrases. A public that agreed with Yancy on war and taxes and God and planet agreed with absolutely nothing. And with everything. On topics of importance, they had no opinion at all. They only thought they had an opinion. Rapidly, Taverner scanned tapes on various major subjects. It was the same all down the line. With one sentence Yancy gave; with the next he took away. The total effect was a neat cancellation, a skillful negation. But the viewer was left with the illusion of having consumed a rich and varied intellectual feast. It was amazing. And it was professional: the ends were tied up too slickly to be mere accident. Nobody was as harmless and vapid as John Edward Yancy. He was just too damn good to be true. Sweating, Taverner left the main reference room and poked his way toward the rear offices, where busy yance-men worked away at their desks and assembly tables. Activity whirred on all sides. The expression on the faces around him was benign, harmless, almost bored. The same friendly, trivial expression that Yancy himself displayed. Harmless -- and in its harmlessness, diabolical. And there wasn't a damn thing he could do. If people liked to listen to John Edward Yancy, if they wanted to model themselves after him -- what could the Niplan police do about it? What crime was being committed? No wonder Babson didn't care if the police prowled around. No wonder the authorities had freely admitted them. There weren't any political jails or labor gangs or concentratioh camps... there didn't have to be. Torture chambers and extermination camps were needed only when persuasion failed. And persuasion was working perfectly. A police state, rule by terror, came about when the totalitarian apparatus began to break down. The earlier totalitarian societies had been incomplete; the authorities hadn't really gotten into every sphere of life. But techniques of conununication had improved. The first really successful totalitarian state was being realized before his eyes: harmless and trivial, it emerged. And the last stage -- nightmarish, but perfectly logical -- was when all the newborn boys were happily and voluntarily named John Edward. Why not? They already lived, acted, and thought like John Edward. And there was Mrs. Margaret Ellen Yancy, for the women. She had her full range of opinions, too; she had her kitchen, her taste in clothes, her little recipes and advice, for all the women to imitate. There were even Yancy children for the youth of the planet to imitate. The authorities hadn't overlooked anything. Babson strolled over, a genial expression on his face. "How's it going, officer?" he chuckled wetly, putting his hand on Taverner's shoulder. "Fine," Taverner managed to answer; he evaded the hand. "You like our little establishment?" There was genuine pride in Babson's thick voice. "We do a good job. An artistic job -- we have real standards of excellence." Shaking with helpless anger, Taverner plunged out of the office and into the hall. The elevator took too long; furiously, he turned to ward the stairs. He had to get out of the Yancy Building; he had to get away. From the shadows of the hall a man appeared, face pale and taut. "Wait. Can -- I talk to you?" Taverner pushed past him. "What do you want?" "You're from the Terran Niplan Police? I -- " The man's Adam's apple bobbed. "I work here. My name's Sipling, Leon Sipling. I have to do something -- I can't stand it any more." "Nothing can be done," Taverner told him. "If they want to be like Yancy -- " "But there isn't any Yancy," Sipling broke in, his thin face twitching spasmodically. "We made him up... we invented him." Taverner halted. "You what? "I've decided." Voice quavering excitedly, Sipling rushed on: "I'm going to do something -- and I know exactly what." Catching hold of Taverner's sleeve he grated : "You've got to help me. I can stop all this, but I can't do it alone." well-furnished living room, the two of them sat drinking coffee and watching their children scramble around on the floor, playing games. Sipling's wife and Ruth Taverner were in the kitchen, drying the dishes. "Yancy is a synthesis," Sipling explained. "A sort of composite person. No such individual actually exists. We drew on basic prototypes from sociological records; we based the gestalt on various typical persons. So it's true to life. But we stripped off what we didn't want and intensified what we did want." Broodingly, he added : "There could be a Yancy. There are a lot of Yancy-like people. In fact, that's the problem." "You deliberately set out with the idea of remolding people along Yancy's line?" Taverner inquired. "I can't precisely say what the idea is, at top level. I was an ad writer for a mouth wash company. The Gallisto authorities hired me and outlined what they wanted me to do. I've had to guess as to the purpose of the project." "By authorities, you mean the governing council?" Sipling laughed sharply. "I mean the trading syndicates that own this moon: lock, stock, and barrel. But we're not supposed to call it a moon. It's a planet." His lips twitched bitterly. "Apparently, the authorities have a big program built up. It involves absorbing their trade rivals on Ganymede -- when that's done, they'll have the out-planets sewed up tight." "They can't get at Ganymede without open war," Taverner protested. "The Medean companies have their own population behind them." And then it dawned. "I see," he said softly. "They'd actually start a war. It would be worth a war, to them." "You're damn right it would. And to start a war, they have to get the public lined up. Actually, the people here have nothing to gain. A war would wipe out all the small operators -- it would concentrate power in fewer hands -- and they're few enough already. To get the the war, they need an indifferent, sheep-like public. And the're getting that. When this Yancy campaign is finished, the people here on Gallisto will accept anything. Yancy does all their thinking for them. He tells them how to wear their hair. What games to play. He tells the jokes the men repeat in their back rooms. His wife whips up the meal they all have for dinner. All over this little world -- day. Whatever he does, whatever he believes. We've been conditioning the public for eleven straight years. The important thing is the unvarying monotony of it. A whole generation is growing up looking to Yancy for an answer to everything." "It's a big business, then," Taverner observed. "This project of creating and maintaining Yancy." "Thousands of people are involved in just writing the material. You only saw the first stage -- and it goes into every city. Tapes, films, books, magazines, posters, pamphlets, dramatic visual and audio shows, plants in the newspapers, sound trucks, kids' comic strips, word-of-mouth report, elaborate ads... the works. A steady stream of Yancy." Picking up a magazine from the coffee table he indicated the lead article. " 'How is John Yancy's Heart?' Raises the question of what would we do without Yancy? Next week, an article on Yancy's stomach." Acidly, Sipling proaches. We turn it out of every pore. We're called yance-men; it's a new art-form." "How do you -- the corps, feel about Yancy?" "He's a big sack of hot air." "None of you is convinced?" "Even Babson has to laugh. And Babson is at the top; after him come the boys who sign the checks. God, if we ever started believing in Yancy... if we got started thinking that trash meant something -- " An expression of acute agony settled over Sipling's face. "That's it. That's why I can't stand it." "Why?" Taverner asked, deeply curious. His throat-mike was taking it all in, relaying it back to the home office at Washington. "I'm interested in finding out why you broke away." Sipling bent down and called his son. "Mike, stop playing and come on over here." To Taverner he explained: "Mike's nine years old. Yancy's been around as long as he's been alive." Mike came dutifully over. "Yes, sir?" "What kind of marks do you get in school?" his father asked. The boy's chest stuck out proudly; he was a clear-eyed little miniature of Leon Sipling. "All A's and B's." "He's a smart kid," Sipling said to Taverner. "Good in arithmetic, geography, history, all that stuff." Turning to the boy he said: "I'm going to ask you some questions; I want this gentleman to hear your answers. Okay?" "Yes, sir," the boy said obedientHis thin face grim, Sipling said to his son: "I want to know what you think about war. You've been told about war in school ; you know about all the famous wars in history. Right?" "Yes, sir. We learned about the American Revolution, and the First Global War, and then the Second Global War, and then the First Hydrogen War, and the War between the colonists on Mars and Jupiter." "To the schools," Sipling explained tightly to Taverner, "we distribute Yancy material -- educational subsidies in packet form. Yancy takes children through history, explains the meaning of it all. Yancy explains natural science. Yancy explains good posture and astronomy and every other thing in the universe. But I never thought my own son..." His voice trailed off unhappily, then picked up life. "So you know all about war. Okay, what do you think of war?" Promptly, the boy answered : "War is bad. War is the most terrible thing there is. It almost destroyed mankind." Eying his son intently, Sipling demanded: "Did anybody tell you to say that?" The boy faltered uncertainly. "No, sir." "You really believe those things?" "Yes, sir. It's true, isn't it? Isn't war bad?" Sipling nodded. "War is bad. But what about just wars?" Without hesitation the boy answered: "We have to fight just wars, of course." "Why?" "Well, we have to protect our way of life." "Why?" Again, there was no hesitation in the boy's reedy answer. "We can't let them walk over us, sir. That would encourage aggressive war. We can't permit a world of brute power. We have to have a world of -- " He searched for the exact word. "A world of law Wearily, half to himself, Sipling commented: "I wrote those meaningless, contradictory words myself, eight years ago." Pulling himself together with a violent effort he asked: "So war is bad. But we have to fight just wars. Well, maybe this -- planet, Callisto, will get into a war with... let's pick Ganymede, at random." He was unable to keep the harsh irony from his voice. "Just at random. Now, we're at war with Ganymede. Is it a just war? Or only a war?" This time, there was no answer. The boy's smooth face was screwed up in a bewildered, struggling frown. "No answer?" Sipling inquired icily. "Why, uh," the boy faltered. "I mean..." He glanced up hopefully. "When the time comes won't somebody say?" "Sure," Sipling choked. "Somebody will say. Maybe even Mr. Yancy." Relief flooded the boy's face. "Yes, sir. Mr. Yancy will say." He retreated back toward the other children. "Can I go, now?" As the boy scampered back to his game, Sipling turned miserably to Taverner. "You know what game they're playing? It's called Hippo-Hoppo. Guess whose grandson just loves it. Guess who invented the game." There was silence. "What do you suggest?" Taverner asked. "You said you thought something could be done." A cold expression appeared on Sipling's face, a flash of deeply-felt cunning. "I know the project... I know how it can be pried apart. But somebody has to stand with a gun at the head of the authorities. In nine years I've come to see the essential key to the Yancy character... the key to the new type of person we're growing, here. It's simple. It's the element that makes that person malleable enough to be led around." "I'll bite," Taverner said patiently, hoping the line to Washington was good and clear. "All Yancy's beliefs are insipid. The key is thinness. Every part of his ideology is diluted : nothing excessive. We've come as close as possible to no beliefs... you've noticed that. Wherever possible we've cancelled attitudes out, left the person a-political. Without a viewpoint." "Sure," Taverner agreed. "But with the illusion of a viewpoint." "All aspects of personality have to be controlled; we want the total person. So a specific attitude has to exist for each concrete question. In every respect, our rule is: Yancy believes the least troublesome possibility. The most shallow. The simple, effortless view, the view that fails to go deep enough to stir any real thought." Taverner got the drift. "Good solid lulling views." Excitedly he hurried on, "But if an extreme, original view got in, one that took real effort to work out, something that was hard to live..." "Yancy plays croquet. So everybody fools around with a mallet." Sipling's eyes gleamed. "But suppose Yancy had a preference for -- Kriegspiel." "For what?' "Chess played on two boards. Each player has his own board, with a complete set of men. He never sees the other board. A moderator sees both; he tells each player when he's taken a piece, or lost a piece, or moved into an occupied square, or made an impossible move, or checked, or is in check himself." "I see," Taverner said quickly. "Each player tries to infer his opponent's location on the board. He plays blind. Lord, it would take every mental faculty possible." "The Prussians taught their officers military strategy that way. It's more than a game: it's a cosmic wrestling match. What if Yancy sat down in the evening with his wife and grandson, and played a nice lively six-hour game of Kriegspiel? Suppose his favorite books -- instead of being western gun-toting anachronisms -- were Greek tragedy? Suppose his favorite piece of music was Bach's Art of the Fugue, not My Old Kentucky Home? "I'm beginning to get the picture," Taverner said, as calmly as possible. "I think we can help." this is -- illegal!" "Absolutely," Taverner acknowledged. "That's why we're here," He waved the squad of Niplan secret-servicemen into the offices of the Yancy Building, ignoring the stunned workers sitting bolt-upright at their desks. Into his throat-mike he said, "How's it coming with the big-shots?" "Medium," Kellman's faint voice came, strengthened by the relay system between Gallisto and Earth. "Some slipped out of bounds to their various holdings, of course. But the majority never thought we'd take action." "You can't!" Babson bleated, his great face hanging down in wattles of white dough. "What have we done? What law -- " "I think," Taverner interrupted, "we can get you on purely commercial grounds alone. You've used the name Yancy to endorse various manufactured products. There's no such person. That's a violation of statutes governing ethical presentation of advertising." Babson's mouth closed with a snap, then slid feebly open. "No -- such -- person? But everybody knows John Yancy. Why, he's -- " Stammering, gesturing, he finished, "He's everywhere." Suddenly a wretched little pistol appeared in his pulpy hand; he was waving it wildly as Dorser stepped up and quietly knocked it skidding across the floor. Babson collapsed into fumbling hysterics. Disgusted, Dorser clamped handgrapples around him. "Act like a man," he ordered. But there was no response; Babson was too far gone to hear him. Satisfied, Taverner plunged off, past the knot of stunned officials and workers, into the inner offices of the project. Nodding curtly, Taverner made his way up to the desk where Leon Sipling sat surrounded by his work. The first of the altered gestalts was already flickering through the scanner. Together, the two men stood watching it. "Well?" Taverner said, when it was done. "You're the judge." "I believe it'll do," Sipling answered nervously. "I hope we don't stir up too much... it's taken eleven years to build it up ; we want to tear it down by degrees." "Once the first crack is made, it should start swaying." Taverner moved toward the door. "Will you be all right on your own?" Book Service Phone GRamercy #-# # We Stock All current Americon Science Fiction in Book Form ond carry current Magozines ond Pocket Books. # A large selection of Science Fiction is ovoiloble of British Books, Mogozines ond Pocket Editions.  We carry a large stock of Bock Issues of Science Fiction Magazines. # Sipling glanced at Eckmund who lounged at the end of the office, eyes fixed on the uneasily working yance-men. "I suppose so. Where are you going?" "I want to watch this as it's released. I want to be around when the public gets its first look at it." At the door, Taverner lingered. "It's going to be a big job for you, putting out the gestalt on your own. You may not get much help, for awhile." Sipling indicated his co-workers; they were already beginning to pick up their tempo where they had left off. "They'll stay on the job," he disagreed. "As long as they get full salaries." Taverner walked thoughtfully across the hall to the elevator. A moment later he was on his way downstairs. At a nearby street comer, a group of people had collected around a public vid-screen. Anticipating the late-afternoon t-v cast of John Edward Yancy, The gestalt began in the regular way. There was no doubt about it : when Sipling wanted to, he could put together a good slice. And in this case he had done practically the whole pie. In rolled-up shirt sleeves and dirt-stained trousers, Yancy crouched in his garden, a trowel in one hand, straw hat pulled down over his eyes, grinning into the warm glare of the sun. It was so real that Taverner could hardly believe no such person existed. But he had watched Sipling' s sub-crews laboriously and expertly constructing the thing from the ground up. "Afternoon," Yancy rumbled genially. He wiped perspiration from his steaming, florid face and got stiffly to his feet. "Man," he admitted, "it's a hot day." He indicated a flat of primroses. "I was setting them out. Quite a job." So far so good. The crowd watched impassively, taking their ideological nourishment without particular resistance. All over the moon, in every house, schoolroom, office, on each street corner, the same gestalt was showing. And it would be shown again. "Yes," Yancy repeated, "it's really hot. Too hot for those primroses -- they like the shade." A fast panup showed he had carefully planted his primroses in the shadows at the base of his garage. "On the other hand," Yancy continued, in his smooth, good-natured, over-theback-fence conversational voice, "my dahlias need lots of sun." The camera leaped to show the dahlias blooming frantically in the blazing sunlight. Throwing himself down in a striped lawnchair, Yancy removed his straw hat and wiped his brow with a pocket handkerchief. "So," he continued genially, "if anybody asked me which is better, shade or sun. I'd have to reply it depends on whether you're a primrose or a dahlia." He grinned his famous guileless boyish grin into the cameras. "I guess I must be a primrose -- I've had all the sun I can stand for today." The audience was taking it in without complaint. An inauspicious beginning, but it was going to have long-term consequences. And Yancy was starting to develop them right now. His genial grin faded. That familiar look, that awaited serious frown showing that deep thoughts were coming, faded into place. Yancy was going to hold forth: wisdom was on the way. But it was nothing ever uttered by him before. "You know," Yancy said slowly, seriously, "that makes a person do some thinking." Automatically, he reached for his glass of gin and tonic -- a glass which up until now would have contained beer. And the magazine beside it wasn't Dog Stories Monthly; it was The Journal of Psychological Review. The alteration of peripheral props would sink in subliminally ; right now, all conscious attention was riveted on Yancy's words. "It occurs to me," Yancy orated, as if the wisdom were fresh and brand-new, arriving just now, "that some people might maintain that, say, sunlight is good and shade is bad. But that's downright silly. Sunlight is good for roses and dahlias, but it would darn well finish off my fuchsias." The camera showed his ubiquitous prize fuchsias. "Maybe you know people like that. They just don't understand that -- " And as was his custom, Yancy drew on folklore to make his point. "That one man's meat," he stated profoundly, "is another man's poison. Like, for instance, for breakfast I like a couple of eggs done sunny-side up, maybe a few stewed prunes, and a piece of toast. But Margaret, she prefers a bowl of cereal. And Ralf, he won't take either. He likes flapjacks. And the fellow down the street, the one with the big front lawn, he likes a kidney pie and a bottle of stout." Taverner winced. Well, they would have to feel their way along. But still the audience stood absorbing it, word after word. The first feeble stirrings of a radical idea: that each person had a different set of values, a unique style of life. That each person might believe, enjoy, and approve of different things. It would take time, as Sipling said. The massive library of tapes would have to be replaced ; injunctions built up in each area would have to be broken down. A new type of thinking was being introduced, starting with a trite observation about primroses. When a nine-year-old boy wanted to find out if a war was just or unjust, he would have to inquire into his own mind. There would be no ready answer from Yancy; a gestalt was already being prepared on that, showing that every war had been called just by some, unjust by others. There was one gestalt Taverner wished he could see. But it wouldn't be around for a long time; it would have to wait. Yancy was going to change his taste in art, slowly but steadily. One of these days, the public would learn that Yancy no longer enjoyed pastoral calendar scenes. That now he preferred the art of that fifteenth century Dutch master of macabre and diabolical horror, Hieronymus Bosch.    Earth was through with war. And while it is right that man have peace, it is also right that he have freedom. But Mars was in slavery, and to Mars Cornel Lorensse dedicated his life and his talent... Illustrated by Paul Orban occasionally these days as a behind it all reminders of war. The stirring concert or band selection, psychosociologists said uniforms of But there was a time when its playpolicemen, of postmen, of airline ing was punishable by death -- and pilots, of lodge brethren, of theater its defiant strains challenged the ushers, were militaristic, and they harried police in tavern and drawwere abolished. The psychosociing room all over the Earth. ologists said the march rhythm in In the days just before one music was nationalistic and instimarche militaire changed two gated combative feelings, and it worlds. Earth was weary of war, was banned. The scenes, the sounds, the sights of antagonisms between men were forbidden. The Polonaise, the Marseillaise, the March of the Toys, all suffered the same fate. Sousa's marches and Tschaikovsky's # Overture went the same way. Dixie and the Hawaiian War Chant were treated alike. All were relegated to tape in dusty archives, and their sale or public performance forbidden on pain of fine and prison sentence. Whatever unlawful violence there might be on faraway Mars, Earth was through with all forms of war and its trappings. Into these circumstances. Cornel Lorensse intruded on the night of December #, #. He pressed his thin face against the steam-misted window of The Avatar in Nuyork and saw a piano standing idle inside The Avatar was one of those small restaurants sunk a few feet below sidewalk level, which catered with exotic dishes to the tastes of a select group. It was well-populated at this hour, and Cornel licked his lips hungrily at the epicurean delights unveiled at each table. He felt in the pocket of his worn coveralls. A single coin answered the exploration of his fingers. He was down to his last resource, and he was no nearer to finding the Friends than he had been when he landed. He looked again at the piano, hesitated, then went down the three steps to the restaurant's door, pushed it open and went in. It was his good fortune that Wan Ti, owner of The Avatar was receiving his guests in person at the moment. "I'll play you a concert for a meal," said Cornel, gesturing toward the piano. Wan Ti's dark eyes swept over him, taking in the battered coveralls, the earnest face, the untrimmed blond hair, the slender hands. Wan Ti's yellow countenance remained bland. "I have a piano player," said Wan Ti. Cornel laughed, with a note of desperation in his tone. "Let me play one selection," he urged. "If you want to stop me then, you can kick me out." What Wan Ti thought could not be gauged from his expression, but he had not built his clientele against fierce competition by turning his face away from the unusual. He inclined his head slightly, and waved Cornel to the piano. Cornel sat down at the keyboard, brushed his hair back from his eyes, and flexed his long fingers. Thrusting the tantalizing aroma of food to the back of his mind, he played. The murmur of conversation in The Avatar faltered and died as the fervid melody of Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata filled the air. It was unusual music to people accustomed to hearing the more modern compositions of Schonberg, Harris and Westine. The comparison of Cornel's inspired touch to the mechanical renditions of Wan Ti's regular piano player was noticeable even to those who were unfamiliar with music. When the final movements of the allegro ma non troppo faded, Cornel sat back and looked toward Wan Ti. The proprietor cocked an ear toward the rare applause, smiled and nodded slightly. Exultantly, Cornel swung into Chopin's fantasie-Impromptu and followed it, not pausing, with Liszt's Waldesrauschen and Schubert's Serenode. The applause was just as enthusiastic, but by now the hum of voices and the click of eating utensils had begun to rise again. Frowning slightly. Cornel hunched his shoulders and began a composition the most musical of his audience had never heard before. Like the molten notes of the nightingale, the music floated and throbbed above the diners, almost a physical thing. The people in the restaurant paused with food halfway to their lips. They turned to see the artist, carefully, so that no chair would scrape. The waiters stopped with trays in their hands. Wan Ti stopped a newly arriving couple, his fingers at his lips. In the midst of the applause that roared through the room when Cornel had finished, a waiter tapped his shoulder. "Excuse me, sir," he said. "Miss Meta Erosine asks that you join her at her table." Rising and bowing to his audience, Cornel followed the man to a table at the rear of the room, where a woman sat with her escort. Meta Erosine's pale, heartshaped face, with its mop of short black hair and luminous black eyes, was widely known on Earth, but Cornel had never been to Earth before. Her vibrant beauty blazed the patriot on a victim unprepared for it. She was clad in the cretan-cancan style just then becoming popular, with breasts exposed over a tight bodice and a short, ruffled skirt gathered in front to reveal the knees. She smoked a longstemmed, tiny-bowled pipe, studded with jewels. Beside her sat a sleek, mustached young man in ruffled lavender shirt and pink tights, his fingers covered with rings. "Sit down and eat with me, musician," invited Meta. Somewhat dubiously, Cornel took a seat at her right, across the table from the beruffled escort. "Meta, I wish you wouldn't demean yourself by taking up with tramps and guttersnipes," objected her companion, wrinkling his nose. "Leave me, Passo," she ordered, waving an imperious hand. "Why should I sup with painted popinjays when I can adore genius?" Passo flushed and his mouth fell open. But he arose and slunk quietly away. "Now, musician," said Meta, leaning over the table so that her powdered breasts brushed the glassware, "tell me, what was that last number you played?" "One of my own compositions," he said diffidently. The odor of food was too much for him, and he leaned across the table to appropriate Passo's untouched salad. "Its name is Wind in the Canals'" "It should be Le Vent dans les Canals," she said. "You should title your compositions in French -- they will be more fashionable." "I don't know French," he said. munching a stick of celery. "We don't speak French on Mars." She laughed, a laugh like the music of his playing. "You will, my genius," she promised him. Her eyes ran over his lean face, his unkempt hair. "You look as though you could use shelter and clothing. Come home with me tonight. I shall give your genius to the world." such luxury as was his in the apartment Meta assigned to him in her magnificent home in Jersi. He had his personal servant. New clothes were waiting for him. A barber cut his hair when he had finished a hot, scented bath, and the big bed in which he slept was soft as down. Meta asked no information of him until they met at a late breakfast the next morning. There, beautiful in translucent white negligee, she sipped her coffee and asked questions. "I came from Mars to get help for my people," he said. "We need guns and supplies, food and oxygen equipment." "You're one of the Gharax rebels?" she asked. "Rebels?" He snorted. "We're free people, fighting for our freedom. We want self-government, we want to own our land and our homes, we want the right to rule our own lives." "That's guaranteed in the Constitution," said Meta. "Earth's Constitution. Mars isn't Earth. The Mars Corporation controls botn spaceports. It owns all business and industry on Mars. It's milking the planet dry of resources and profits, and it's set up a company government that makes the people of Mars no better than slaves." He smiled a bitter smile. "Earth's government protects the freedom of Earth's people," he said, "but the people of Earth don't know what's happening on Mars. The Mars Corporation has its senators and representatives, bought and paid for, so the Earth government sends troops and supplies to Mars to fight the battles of the Mars Corporation. We aren't rebels, we're fighting for our just freedom." "If the Mars Corporation controls the spaceports, how did you get to Earth?" she demanded. "We have three battered ships hidden in the desert near Syrtis Major," said Gomel. "It takes a long time for us to get fuel to take one of them up, but they thought it worthwhile if I could get to Earth and get help for my people." "Why you?" "My music is well known on Mars, and my people know that the people of Earth love music. Here on Earth, where there is peace and prosperity, people pay to hear good music and good musicians. Our plan was for me to give great concerts and at each concert ask the people of Earth to help their Martian brothers gain their freedom." "A good way to get arrested," said Meta dryly. "You'd be convicted of inciting military action and sentenced to prison in any court of Earth." "I didn't know that, but I suppose the Friends would have a way. "The Friends?" "The Friends of Mars. It's an organization of Earth people trying to help us. I suppose it must be a secret and illegal organization, for I found that the man I was supposed to get in touch with had been arrested, and I haven't been able to find out anything more about the Friends." "Such an organization would be illegal on Earth," said Meta. "Come here, Gomel. I want to show you something." Taking him by the arm, she led him from the breakfast room to a terrace overlooking a snowy valley. She moved closer to him in the chill wind that billowed her thin garments around her, and waved her hand at the scene below them. "This is Earth," she said. "Look at those mountain peaks, the blue sky and the white clouds. In summer, this valley is clothed with green, and warm breezes bring the scent of flowers to this terrace. Have you ever seen anything like this on Mars?" "No," he said softly. "Mars is always cold and dusty, and the sky is nearly black." "Cornel," she said softly, you're a great musician. Mars is rough frontier territory, and the frontier has no place for music. Last night you saw what your music could mean here. "Forget Mars. You belong to Earth." Lorensse to fame in #I I and # now commands a full column in the Encyclopaedia Terrestriana. Bmshed off in a single sentence in the encyclopaedia, but much discussed in that day, was his close relationship with Meta Erosine, his patroness. For half a decade, wealthy, beautiful Meta Erosine had been the toast of Earth. She was an actress, a painter, a singer, a socialite, and she had changed men almost as often as she changed the dresses she wore. Her face was familiar in newspapers and on television screens, her husky songs were on a ful antics were the grist for magazine articles and the subject of denunciations from the pulpit. In Cornel she seemed to have found a vehicle for all the burning fire of her energy. She pushed him, she groomed him, she threw the power of her wealth behind him. His slender figure clad in a black velvet suit sat at polished pianos on a hundred stages; and for each concert, the auditoriums and the audiences were bigger. Meta was with him on these concert tours; and between tours he stayed in seclusion at the big house in Jersi, putting into music his memories of his native Mars. Each tour introduced to the world the new compositions of Gomel Lorensse. What he wrote and played was the haunting music of the deserts, the canals and the marches. Into his music he poured the loneliness of the red sands and the violence of the desert winds, the beauty of sable skies jeweled with enormous stars, the happiness of the helmeted traveler when he reaches the green valleys of the canals, the hopes and joys of human lovers gathered in bubble-like domes amid the chill wastelands. He did not, as Meta had wanted to, give his compositions French titles. He named them as he would have named them on Mars: The Desert Wanderer, Swift Phobos, Marsh Gardens, names that were strange to Earth, but were familiar themes of his own people. His melodies took music-loving Earth by storm. They burst upon a world in which #th century dissonance had strangled #th century romanticism, like flowers in a garden of crystal. It was Cornel Lorensse and those pioneer composers who avidly aped him who began the #st century Renaissance in music. Without shame. Cornel lived on the largesse of his patroness, for his growing fees and royalties all went for one purpose. He had found the society called the Friends of Mars, and everything that he earned he poured into their coffers to finance privateer space vessels able to elude the Mars Corporation's company-owned warships and to keep a thin line of supplies flowing to the Free Martian people scattered in their desert strongholds. Like any secret society in a hostile culture, the Friends of Mars maintained dissociated chapters, connected by the slenderest and most carefully guarded lines of communication. Cornel knew of only one chapter, in Nuyork, and to this he took his contributions when he was between concert tours. During one of those visits, late in the summer of #, Javan Tomlin, chief of the chapter, told him that all he contributed was still not enough for Mars to become free. "Our base of support isn't broad enough," said Javan. "Ships cost money, fuel costs money, supplies cost money. Guns and ammunition are most expensive of all, because military weapons are illegal. No one man can support such an operation, even when he makes the kind of money you're making." There were half a dozen of the Friends of Mars, besides Cornel and Javan, in the meeting room. The others nodded agreement at Javan's words. "None of us are wealthy and we can't contribute much but our time and work," said one of them. "The wealthy people all sympathize with the Mars Corporation." "That's too much of a blanket indictment," said Javan. "The Mars Corporation controls the spacelines to Mars, and what little information comes back to Earth is censored and heavily propagandized in their favor. Most people don't know what's happening on Mars. Our people need a powerful radio transmitter to broadcast to Earth, Cornel." Cornel shook his head. "What information the people of Earth get must be disseminated on Earth," he said. "Powerful radio equipment would take up space and weight needed for arms. Besides, the Mars Corporation forces have air power and directional finders. They'd bomb a permanent installation before it had a chance to send out its second broadcast." "All we can do is work and hope," said Javan gloomily. "If we had a fleet of about a dozen good ships, we might be able to swing it, but we have only two and a third abuilding." "There are three on Mars," Cornel pointed out. "One was blasted in space last week, and they're too old to lift more than half cargo, anyhow," said Javan. "The corporation controls the Earth space stations, through the government, and we have to use direct drive stagerockets." Cornel left, not feeling very optimistic. At the curb outside the club, he looked up and down the street for a cab to take him to the heliport where his copter was parked. There was no cab in sight, but from a side street a little distance away a long black limousine swung into the boulevard, sped swiftly to the club entrance and halted. The back door opened and Meta leaned out, beckoning. "Get in, quick!" she urged. "We've got to get away from here!" Not understanding, Cornel got in. The car roared away with a burst of acceleration that thrust him back on the cushions beside her. "What in Saturn?" he demanded and turned to look out the rear window. A squad of police cars was converging on the club he had just left. Sirens screaming, they pulled up, blocking the street, and armed officers in plain clothes leaped out and hurried into the club. Meta put her arms around his neck and drew his head down to her lap. "They're raiding the Friends of Mars," she said, and a soothing note crept into her tone. "You're safe, darling. They don't know you were there." "But how did they know? How did you know?" he demanded, struggling unsuccessfully to free himself from the imprisonment of her embrace. The sound of the sirens had died in the distance behind them. "I told them," Meta said firmly. "Where do you think I get the wealth you've been living on, darling? I own a fourth of the stock of the Mars Corporation." T he next morning. Cornel had disappeared. Meta was frantic. Every available agency was pressed into service, but Nuyork and Cornel had vanished. It was two weeks before he returned. When he did, he was gaunt and grim and dirty as he had been the night Meta had first seen him in The Avatar. "Darling, why did you run away?" she asked, holding him close in her arms. "I came back because I love you," he answered tiredly. "But I came back, too, because I love Mars more, Meta. I had to go away and think what I was to do." "It's all right now," she soothed. "You understand that the odds against your rebels are just too heavy. You have a life on Earth to live." "Yes," he said in a low voice. "But there'll be no concerts this season, Meta." "Cornel, you can't cancel now! The schedule's all arranged." "I shall cancel," he said firmly. "You want me to live on Earth, so you must let me learn about Earth. I intend to spend this winter studying psychosociology and terrestrial law -- and composing." Her brow cleared. "If you'll continue your composing, it's all right," she said. "Next season's concerts can be the greatest ever. I'll pay off the promoters, darling." So it was done. That season the admirers of Cornel Lorensse's music had to content themselves with recordings. Cornel himself spent his time quietly at Nuyork University and at the house in Jersi. As she had said, the # concert season was Cornel's greatest, right from the start. In part it was due to Meta's own efforts, for she spent tremendous sums of money and utilized her own famous personality to great advantage in promotional work. Across the nation, across the the world, the tour swept, snowballing constantly. Christmas of #, and Cornel Lorensse introduced a great new hymn. From the Polar Caps, New Year's Day, #, and The Years to Come was introduced by radio and television at a thousand parties. There had been some quibbling at the beginning of the season, because the business directors of the tour had wanted to combine the drawing power of Cornel's name with that of well-known concert orchestras. Cornel insisted on using his own orchestra, built up carefully during his year of study. As the season progressed, it became apparent that Cornel's name alone was enough of a drawing card. February, March, #, and every network had bought into the schedule. When Cornel Lorensse's weekly concerts were on the air, there was nothing else on radio or television, anywhere in the world, except on the non-affiliated local stations. April passed triumphantly, and the final concert was scheduled for May # in Rome. The D'Annunzio Colosseum, built in #, was filled to capacity. Careful staging was necessary, to care for all the cameras and microphones of the various television and radio networks. The program was not a long one: Debussy's Clair de Lune, Lorensse's Swift Phohos, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Waco's Variations on a Theme by Altdown -- and the words "To be announced." It was a familiar phrase, and it always meant the introduction of a new composition by Cornel Lorensse. The concert went smoothly before -- how many listeners? Fifty brightly lighted stage Cornel played the concert grand with superb mastery and bowed to the applause, a pale, solemn figure in black. When he had acknowledged the acclamation after the Waco piece, the audience waited in hushed silence for his announcement of the final number on the program. "The composition I am about to play is the culmination of my musical career," Cornel said quietly into the microphones. "It is a product of my studies, not only of music, but of psychosociology and law. "In hypnoschool last year, I studied the effects of music on the human mind. It is a new field, and many of you are aware of it only through the fact that certain kinds of music are forbidden by law as dangerous to peace on Earth. "I have tried to go into it much more deeply than that." He smiled bitterly. "Most of you know that I am a Martian, one of the so-called Martian rebels," he said. "I think much of the appeal of my music to you has been its Martian quality. To the people of Earth, most of whom have never seen Mars, it has pictured my planet. "My latest composition will do so even more graphically, for it has been composed on a deliberate psychological foundation. This song will show Mars to you. It will show you my people, and what my people want. "I may add that I have studied the law carefully, and I can assure you that this composition is not military in nature. "Ladies and gentlemen of Earth, accompanied by the orchestra I shall now play The Martianne, In the control rooms of the auditorium and of relay points throughout the world, censors, vaguely alarmed by Comers words, hovered with their fingers on cutoff keys. Then they relaxed. Cornel had told the truth. There was nothing of a military nature in the opening bars of The Martianne. It was a theme handled, but less competently, in some of his other compositions. The woodwinds began on a soft, sad note, gradually rising in power, like the thin winds that moaned across the Martian desert sands. Into this, almost inaudibly at first, crept the clear piano notes that marked the cautious, wondering intrusion of humanity on an alien world. The drums beat the construction of the domes, the horns blared the landing of the spaceships, the violins cried the hopes of the men and women who went to Mars to find a new life. It was a picture in music, so skilfully drawn that when the first discordance crept in, every listener could identify it instantly as the age-old greed of man seeking to subvert frontier freedoms to his own selfish ends. When the blare of trumpets and the ruffle of drums thundered into the final militant theme of The Martianne, every listener knew it bespoke the valiant fight of men for freedom against an oppressor. Every listener knew what he heard was music that had been (Continued on page #) Mans every resource was being stripped to a throwback, and a poacher, and his punishment had to fit the crime... town near Charles Neck on and since I live mostly with myself, Murdock Sound. It's so run down I had to quit. Still, I knew I and useless that a lot of old books couldn't get away with backwardstill hang around on the shelves, the ness, and that sooner or later the kinds of fancy little stars or small, this bussing insect, and get on with curly designs to show the end of one its work again as usual, section and the beginning of anIllustrated by Paul Orhan took over the Sound in our remote ber morning, when I was half area, I didn't have much to do in through a couple of eggs and a cup the day time, so I used to walk of coffee, I heard the throb of a down the road to town and get a motor. I walked down to the end handful of these stiff backs once in of my wharf and looked skyward. I a while. From reading them I got was pretty sure they wouldn't come the notion I'm a one man resistby land, because most of the secance movement, which is pitiful ondary roads were in bad shape; and foolish, and, I gather, always and they wouldn't travel by water, has been a seedy, run-down sort of because that took too much gas and and feelings. That's me, alright: anything. They couldn't afford to. backward. I tried to be forward. Everything went for food, its growth, collection, and processing. The big freighters, some of them, had atomic piles, but that power was impossibly clumsy and expensive for smaller boats. So they came by air in the usual inspection helicopter. The pilot dropped her in the cove right alongside the wharf and made fast. Three men stepped onto the planks. They had the their overcoat arms and caps, and they looked cold and bored. A small sea sucked at the pilings and the helicopter rose and fell, grating against the wharf. I looked at the pilot and said, "Better put your chafing gear out if you intend staying a while." We all watched while the pilot put a few kapoks at the tight spots. Then he looked at a notebook and said, "You George Arthur Henry?" I said, "Gall me George." This inspector was the usual type: tired from long hours, bored from doing nothing on a weary round of food inspections. He hunched his shoulders against the wind. I said, "It's warmer inside." They followed me into the kitchen of the house. All three of them started to sit down, then stopped, and walked over to the table in perfect step. They looked at the cold remains of my breakfast eggs. up and said, "Eggs." The others nodded, wordless with wonder. Then the inspector said, "Chickens?" "Where," I said, "do you think I got the eggs?" The little man alongside the inspector came to life. In three dextrous movements he had glasses on, a notebook in his hand, and stylus poised. "What do you feed them?" he inquired eagerly. "Seeds," I said, "insects, chopped up garter snakes, mussels, ground up oyster shells. You boys have all the grain." There was an excited light in the little man's eyes. He hurried out to a broken down shed to examine the chickens. That left two of them. The inspector continued to gaze at the remains on the plate in a dreamy way. The other man straightened his big shoulders, looked at me, and said, jerking his thumb toward the shed, "Mr. Garter's an ecologist. He just came along for the trip. He's on his way to the Government Experimental Farm over at Murdock. I'm a government sociologist. I was sent here to have a talk with you. My name is Ranson." "Sure. Sit down. I guess I'm licked, but there's no use making a rumpus about it." I turned to the inspector whose eyes were still caught in the egg plate. I said, "Ever taste them?" "Once," he said, in a far away voice. I went to the cupboard and came back with a paper bag full of eggs and put it in his hands. He held them as if someone had just given him the wheat sheaf badge of merit. "I won't be needing these after our little talk, I expect. Take them home to the kiddies." He smiled, looked at the sociologists, who grinned back and nodded. The inspector walked very carefully out of the back door and down to the wharf to stow his eggs in the helicopter. Ranson shifted in his chair. He said, "That was very nice of you, Mr. Henry." "George," I said. "Against the law, of course." There was a smile around his eyes. "Are you against the law, George?" "Yes. No use bluffing. You know the story. All the waters and everyand everything on it. I don't like packaged food. I like real food. I don't like my oysters, crabs, clams, fish minced up and blended with chick weed, cereals, yeast, algae, plankton, and flavored to taste a little like steak. And plenty of others feel the same. I have a market." "An illegal market." "Yes," I said. "By God, if you had told my father, before I was born, that the oysters he tonged could not be eaten as oysters, he'd have laughed in your face. And if you had told him he wouldn't even be allowed to tong them, he'd have cussed you good and proper!" "People have to be fed. The only way we can do it is to combine the total food resources of the world, process and package them, and do it as efficiently as possible. That means absolute control of all food sources and their harvesting. You could important work." "I know. It's so important nothing else gets done. Have you seen the roads around here? Half the bridges are down across Charles Neck and Walter Hook. You can't get gas. You can't get telephones, and if you happen to have one, it doesn't work half the time. And the busses don't run any more. And -- " Ranson held up his hand. "It's an emergency, George. You have to realize that. It's been building up for a long time, long before your father worked the oyster beds in Murdock Sound." "There's another thing," I said. "Before you fellows closed the Sound, I was independent. I had my own boat and I made my own in the Sound and the whole job is done in a month or two. And who are the watermen? A couple of clerks to every scoop who turn a valve every once in a while and draw their packaged food, clothing, and entertainment once a week. Do you call that a job? Why, those food clerks couldn't even lift a pair of thirty foot rakes, let alone tong with them." "We get more oysters, George, and in less time, and we do it scientifically." Ranson tapped his notebook with the stylus and he looked out of the kitchen window. He was giving me time to cool off. He'd been kind and patient when he didn't have to be either. With his job he had no time to sit and reason with a one man resistance movement. He had no time for anything but food, and organizing society to keep it grubbing incessantly for food, and, at the same time, to keep society as orderly and contented as possible. I was not orderly and I was not contented. But I was just one man, not society. I cooled off. I said, "Look, Ranson. It's like this. I know you're right. I've had a look around, and I've thought about it some. The figures are with you : too many men and not enough food. Only thing is, even from your I have to be on my own. There ought to be somewhere, someplace for a man, instead of a food clerk -- " I trailed off unhappily. "I'm afraid you have no alternative, George. You are a criminal punished." He paused. "I won't work for them." Garter, the ecologist, burst in at the door, slammed his gloves down in the middle of the kitchen table. "Ranson, you never saw anything like it. Fifty in the flock, two roosters, all in fine shape. Lice of course, some bone malformation in the legs. But healthy." He began to ask me dozens of questions, but Ransom interrupted. "I need your help. Carter, and time's wasting. Among other depredations, George Henry, here, has been robbing government oyster beds, trapping government crabs, netting government fish, presumably at night I needn't add that he has a ready and lucrative market. In effect, he refuses to cease his depredations, he refuses to join the ative." Garter said, "uncooperative," in an absent way. He dragged his mind away from a flock of fifty fowl living in a most unusual ecology, narrowed his eyes, and asked a shrewd question. no "How did he get there?" "What?" "To the beds." Ranson said, "Where did you get the gas, George?" "I didn't. Took the engine out, put in a well and center-board, shipped a mast, and rigged her for sail. She's tucked away up in Marshwater Greek." They were astounded. Nobody had sailed pleasure craft for a generation: no leisure and no money for such a waste of time; and sail craft were too ineflcient for food collecting. "My God, George," Ranson said, "you're a living anachronism!" Carter nodded. He adjusted his glasses, looked at me, and said quietly, "He is also an able man." "His abilities will be largely wasted in a Penal Food Processing Plant," Ranson said grimly. "Oh, I agree, I agree." Garter nodded his head emphatically. "The wrong environment entirely. No scope. No initiative." He gave me a glance of understanding that warmed me right through and also had the unfortunate effect of taking some of the starch out of me. I had been prepared for hostility and indifference. I stood up and walked to the sink for a glass of water I didn't want. "Now," Carter said, talking to Ranson, "you take the way he walks. Notice how he swings his arms, with his hands a little forward, as if ready to grip, and the tilt of his head, alert, watchful. You don't see that often. Different attitude, different environment." Ranson sighed. "Get down to business." "Yes. There's always this terrible lack of manpower, machine power, everything, all swallowed up in food. And besides, the men can't stand those bird stations. Too lonely. Can't meet an emergency. Four of them died on Rollins Island three winters ago when the power plant failed. Just sat there and froze. Terrible thing. Had to install emergency two-way radios; need the equipment elsewhere." "They died of loneliness, if you ask me," Ranson said. Carter nodded. "And no gas available for boat inspection. Helicopter too wasteful for a single station. Put George out there with one or two others. Could you sail out? Seaworthy? Big enough?" I said yes. "Good. Food processing all done by machines. Just feed birds in. Take up to half the colony of young birds when bred, half the old ones when coming to nest. Regular inspection of tern colonies by sail, your boat. Helicopter lands June twenty, small freighter in July to load processed birds in Rollins Harbor. Just the thing." He took off his glasses to show that the problem had been solved. "Look," Ranson said. "I don't have anything against George personally. I want him to be useful and contented. If he can't be contented, then at least I want him to be useful, instead of wasteful. Robbing government food resources is a ave offense, but even that doesn't justify putting him down in the middle of a pile of excrement where no ordinary man can breath for more than a few minutes without stifling." "Healthy," Carter said. "Healthy. It does stink. That's one reason we have such trouble keeping the stations manned." "Boys," I said. "What is this pile of dung I'm supposed to sit on? And what birds? And why?" Carter explained. In the desperate search for food, the sea birds were now being subjected to an annual harvest. From various nesting places along all the ocean coasts in the world, birds were harvested, to say nothing of their eggs, in large numbers. It was simply a matter of ering their eggs, and feeding the processing hoppers with same. These foods were later shipped to Food Processing Plants to be added to other harvests and packaged for consumption. In some cases, more specialized processing was necessary, as with the fulmars on Rollins Island. The fulmars were much prized because their alimentary system contained an especially stinking oil rich in fat and vitamin A. In their case, no eggs were collected, since they bred only once in a season, and the birds were separately processed to retrieve the oil. their eggs were cropped yearly from nesting sites on the east coast of North America alone. It was a regular and assured source of food on an enormous scale the world over. The thousands of tons of excrement were also gathered every five years to be used in food processing and in agriculture. It was in nothing and to use everything. The cropping of the young birds took place in the spring and early summer, depending on the species. The adult birds were trapped by various devices when they returned to their nests. Over-cropping was carefully avoided to insure a steady annual production, "If it's the island or a Penal Food Plant, I'll take the island. I'm a waterman, not a bird collector. At least I'll get a chapce to use the boat once in a while." lieved. Then Ranson put a question. "Do you know of anyone eke around here who might be fitted for such work? I'm not asking you to inform. I know there's been a good deal of discontent in this Sound region, which is one reason why I'm here. The island may be a solution for other misfits as well." I thought it over. "The Jackson boys aren't very happy. They were the best men with drift nets this Sound has ever seen. Now they sit on stools all day long and watch a row of bottles pass in front of lights. Once in a while they lift a bottle out of the line and put it aside. They get very drunk every night on some stuff they make out of berries and dandelions from the marsh." Ranson sighed. Carter again passed a warming look of complete understanding, and nodded encouragement. "Then there's Pete Younger. He the muskrat areas. He turns a valve several hundred times a day in the Small Fish Processor. He oils his traps and talks to himself. He may be too far gone. I think he is." "Anyone else?" bight on them for good, I guess. They were men, once." "Are the Jackson men married?" I smiled. "No. We're dying out." Garter chuckled. Rollins Island. The Jackson boys and I loaded the boat with clothing mostly. Food was stored on the island. I took along four pairs of oyster rakes, I didn't have the heart to leave them behind. And Bill and Joy took a huge ball of linen twine, ropes, corks, rings, all the makings for a drift net. Unexpectedly, Carter showed up at the last minute by helicopter to see us off. He jumped up on the wharf smiling. "About those chickens," he said, "they're condemned stock of course. Better take them along. And keep an eye on them. Want to know how they make out in a new environment." Then he took me aside and handed me a small book. "Lot of information in this. Written by a small animal ecologist. Read it. Read it carefully. Think about it. Read it again, and think some more. Got that?" I said, "Sure. I'll read it." I had the notion he was trying to get something over without actually coming out with it flat, so I listened carefully. He paused for a while, wiping his glasses and pursing his lips. "That island's not right for fulmars and gannets. Wrong environment. Never have multiplied as they should. Whole thing should be concentrated north. Plenty of cliff sites north. None here. Won't do. Terns, yes. Fulmars and gannets, no. pidly so. It works, they say. I tell them it works badly. It's going to take a lot to move them : total failure of a colony or two. "You're intelligent, George. Put two and two together. Wish you luck." He shook my hand quickly and jumped into the helicopter. Bill and Joy had to call me twice before I could come out of a trance of bewildered speculation. In a daze I helped the boys load our last piece of equipment: a huge barrel of salt they had pilfered from the local Food Plant. T he island is big, about five by fifteen miles, and it must have been a fine piece of land. It still was, even though mucked everywhere with white-to-greenish bird dung. There were steep hills on the mainland side, marshes to seaward, and in the middle natural meadowland broken by woods containing pine, and some beech and maple. We moored in a small but fairly deep harbor at a wharf for loading foods. Our barracks stood just off the wharf. In addition to all the necessities, there was a two-way radio, marked "Use in emergency only", and a handbook with information on approximate numbers of birds to be taken, locations of nesting sites, and so on. Equipment, including snares and nets, was stored in an equipment room. And there was a storeroom containing packaged foods, no freezing or cooling necessary for preservation. Behind the barracks stood a warehouse for storing processed birds, and a shop with the processors themselves. Everything looked orderly and efficient. A small plant supplied us with light and heat and power for the machines. We arrived in November. By December, the first sea birds began to return to their nesting sites, a few at a time. Soon we were so busy snagging them as they came to land that we had little time for anything but work and sleep. Even so. Bill took the time to salt several dozens of gannets and fulmars for future eating, and he was looking forward to the eggs. Spring and early summer soon rolled around, and we were collecting young birds, the nestlings. So it went. I can't say any of us liked the work. For one thing we all sickened of the endless slaughter. For another, the stench and dirt were overwhelming. The island should have been a fine place for living. There were sheltered spots for houses, a small harbor, woodlots, meadows for cattle and pigs, some bottom land for food crops, the sea for fish -- a fine location; but it was ruined by birds. It was a slimy, stinking hell. The birds flew everywhere in huge flocks, especially in the morning when the gannets and fulmars came back from fishing at sea. Excrement fell from the sky like a stinking sleet. We couldn't get away from the smell or the smell away from us. It was in our clothing, hair, under our fingernails. No watermen ever washed so often or so thoroughly as we did, but the stink remained. We lost weight and appetite steadily, for the packaged fo tasted of excrement soon after it was opened, or seemed to, which is just as bad. However, by the end of June most of the birds had left, and we had our helicopter inspection. The same man who was fascinated by the cold remains of a couple of eggs in my kitchen was on this route, and we cooked three or four of our chickens. His enormous appetite sharpened ours, and we had a feast. He was almost tearfully grateful. By July, the freighter had put in, loaded, and left. For the first time in many months, we were unoccupied. Bill and Joy immediately set about knitting a large drift net. They were happily excited at the of government fish. As for me, I sat down to read a book on small animal ecology. I read that book through three times. I kept at it night and day, and it was the hardest work I've ever done, because I wasn't reading just to pass the time. There was a message in that book, I was sure of it, a message from Carter, a man I liked and trusted. By the time I began to get a glimmering of an idea as to what Garter's message was, the boys had their net knitted and hung. I went back to the book to find out what to do about this idea, and the boys sailed out to drift the net. I waited for them in a sweat of impatience. They came back at dawn the next day with a boat load of food fish. I met them at the wharf. "Bill," I said, "what are you going to do with that load of fish?" Bill looked at the fish. He said with slow and tremendous satisfaction, "I aim to eat them fish, George Henry." "Bill," I said, "not even you can eat all those fish. I've got a scheme. Save back some of the fish, sure. Let Joy smoke a few even. But take the rest into Murdock tonight and sell them to Hornsby. He used to buy my oysters. He'll buy your fish." "What for?" Bill asked. "Get some bootleg gin," I said. "That makes sense. What else?" "Rats," I said. "I want rats. Buy some traps or get Pete Younger to make some. Not muskrats. Bam rats. As many as you can catch." "Fish," Bill said. "Fish for rats. Boy, the birds has got you." He gave in after a while, more to keep me good natured than for any other reason, that and the gin. He came back with two dozen live, healthy specimens, and watched with an open mouth as I let them loose. T he months passed, and I was worried. To drive the problem from my head, I took the boat out and surveyed the shallow waters off the island. I found something. I found a bed of oysters in broken charts, because you could see it hadn't been worked for a long time. Later, I located clam beds on the marshy side of the island. The damn place was a paradise, or might be, once those birds were cut down, but I couldn't eliminate them by sheer slaughter because of There didn't seem to be many rats around. December came and all the filthy, stinking work with it, and still no rats. Once in a while, eggs would be missing from occupied nests, and that was all. Gulls could have gotten those. We toiled through stinking February, foul March, odiferous April, and evilsmelling May. Still no rats. I sent Bill back to the mainland for more; and by September, rats were everywhere. Bill looked at me from his bunk one night and said, "I hope you're satisfied." I was more than that. I was terrified. They absolutely swarmed. It was impossible to wdk from the barracks to the boat at mid-day without having to kick rats off the path. They consumed most of the non-metallic gear in the boat, including the sail. So far, they hadn't gnawed a way into our barracks store room, or we'd have literally starved to death. "Boys," I said, "just sit tight. Wait till December. These rats are the best friends you ever had. They're going to make this island livable. No more stink and stench." "What," said Bill, "are you going to do with the rats when the birds are gone?" Joy merely moaned. "We'll kill them." "If they don't get us first," Bill said. It was an awesome and bloody slaughter. The fulmars and gannets, most of the gulls, some of the terns, were either wiped out or harried off the island in a single season. And the island became a heaving, moving, revolting mass of rats, and nothing but rats. They attacked us on sight, from sheer hunger. Not a blade of grass grew anywhere on the island, and rats are not grass eaters as an ordinary thing. There was one hopeful sign. They were beginning to eat each other. Day after day we were caged in our barracks. The constant squealing and scratching under the barracks was bad enough. What made us desperate was the fact that they had gnawed a way into the store room and most of the packaged food was gone. We still had some smoked fish hung on the rafters, and a few salted fulmars in the barrel, but that was all. It was then that we remembered the two-way radio, marked "Use in emergency only". Bill said, after weighing all the evidence coolly and carefully, that this here, in his opinion, was an emergency. persuaded them to put me in touch with Carter, Bird Stations Ecologist. I told him we were having a little trouble with the genus Rattus, and would he, for God's sake, do something about it, quick. I can still near him laughing. It was a while before he could speak at all. "Keep them at bay, general. I'll be over early tomorrow morning." I don't believe any men have ever been so happy to see Carter as we were. "They'll balance," he said. "Starvation will do its work. I've brought along a couple of pairs of bam owls. They'll help a lot. I see you read that ecology book. Good job. Station virtually wiped out. I'm sending supplies over in a week's time. Anybody wants to know, you're supposed to be helping extend and restore the tem and gull colonies. Wouldn't be a bad idea to try a few other animal experiments. Milder, though. Smaller scale. Send canvas for a sail too." He was gone before we could answer. The small freighter put in July fifteenth. She had no cargo of processed birds to take back, of course. The captain detailed a few men to unload our supplies, and we helped them eagerly. There were six calves and heifers, two cows and a bull, five pigs, one boar and two sows, several dozen hens and a rooster. Best of all, there was a big case containing seeds : com, barley, oats, seed potatoes, melons, beets, kale, dozens of others. A plow and two draught horses, mare and stallion. Several pounds of rat poison. A hand forge and several tons of coke. Iron. A hundred pounds of linen twine for nets, as well as ropes of all sizes. Canvas. Tools of all kinds. A big medical kit. pered. No richer land, due to the bird droppings, was ever farmed. And the sandier areas could be depended upon for melons and other crops demanding a lighter, drier, and not so rich soil. Not only that, but we were five, now, instead of three. The Jackson boys had lured a couple of husky girls to the island in the boat. The boys claimed the women fell in love with them. I think they fell in love with the island. This fast work on the part of the Jacksons seemed a little rash to me. I was still not at all sure we'd be allowed to remain and enjoy the work we had done. Several times, I was tempted to use the radio again, but decided to wait. I'm glad now I did. In August, a little more than a year after his last visit. Carter set his helicopter down at the wharf again. After lunch in the barracks of baked fish, fresh milk, potatoes, salad, and melons, he pushed back his chair and said, "I suppose you've been wondering." "We'd like to know," I said. He nodded. "The mainland's going to pieces. So is the whole world. It isn't just food. We can still produce that. Remember what you said about the bad roads, bad telephones? You put your finger on it. So much manpower, machinery, energy, material is used up in getting food and processing it and distributing it, there isn't enough for other things. A tenth of the world's population and a quarter of its total power resources go into processing plankton alone. We are literally eating ourselves to death. Utilities and services are breaking down rapidly. No new dwellings of any kind have been built for ten yeairs or more. Oil is short, cement, iron, steel, coal, plastics, wiring, radios, telephones, everything is in short supply and getting shorter. Transport is staggering to a halt." He paused, took off his glasses, and twirled them by one side piece. "Many of us saw it coming. A few decided to do something. We thought there should be undisturbed nuclei, a few able people with ample food supplies. You are one such center. There are others at various bird stations along the coast. You'll be joined shortly by a few more people, young men and women, among them a trained nurse, a doctor, a skilled carpenter, so on." Bill cleared his throat. "What you said, I guess it was all around me, only I never seen it, not to put together. Just one thing. The manager at the Food Plant, he used to stop and kid me about all the fish I'd stole from the government in my time. He was abraggin' better ways of gettin' things done, always newer and better every year. How come they couldn't keep caught up?" "Bill, those new techniques that manager talked about were old stuff a hundred, two hundred years ago. The applications are new, some of them, but the basic ideas are old. "The World Food Institute drew off all the scientific, inventive brains of the world, and put them to chasing food. No time for basic research, basic development; just time for tinkering and retinkering old ideas. Been no new basic idea for a couple of centuries. Too much need for immediate, practical results. The well is dry, and it won't be filled again with a reservoir of new, big ideas, not in our time. Been living off the past; and the present has caught up with us." Before Carter left the island to visit the other stations, I had a chance to have a talk with him. "Was that sociologist, Ranson, in on this?" "No. We had to be careful. Still have to be. Just a few of us. That's why the loss of the bird colonies here had to seem natural, or at least a natural accident. And I had to keep clear of it. You can see that." "Garter, what happens on the mainland when things break up?" "Won't be pretty. Bad. Very bad." "For example?" "You read the ecology book. What happens when a species multiplies beyond its ability to feed itself?" A dozen new Rollins Islanders showed up a few at a time in Carter's helicopter. We've been working and waiting a long time now, waiting for Garter to come back. For over a year now, our boat hzis made no crossing to the mainland. Last night, over twenty-five miles of sea in clear weather, we saw the sky lit by a great fire. I haven't forgotten those rats. I dream about them, tearing one another with bloody fangs.    Defense Department officials predict an intercontinental guided missile, carrying an atomic warhead, that can flash across # miles at speeds up to # miles an hour. The weapon would be able to hit a target area with a radius of about ten miles, be ten times as accurate as a German V-#, have twenty-five times the range. Plans call for at least two varieties of this intercontinental missile: #. A ballistic type that streaks out of the atmosphere like an artillery shell at more than # feet a second. # . A jet-propelled type that flies more slowly, but can be more accurately controlled all the way to the target and will be able to steer itself by the stars. Pointless, balMess writing pens are predicted by researchers working on new writing devices. The one now under development has a conelike tip made of sintered metal -- powdered metal partly welded together. Tiny capillary holes in the tip permit a thick ink to filter through and rub off on the writing surface. The pen will not leak when not in use, nor does it need to be aken or rolled over paper to get it started after disuse. A special feeding system permits all ink to be consumed before another cartridge is needed. The largest saucer-like radio telescope in the United States will soon be under construction at Harvard University's Agassiz Station Observatory. The great "dish", a steerable parabolic antenna sixty feet in diameter, will be used to study and record radio radiation being received on Earth from outer space. Plans also include a large radio astronomy observatory from which radio waves could be bounced off Mars and other planets as well as the sun. Patients who need a blood-vessel transplant will grow and store their own when animal experiments now in progress are eventually applied to humans. Since the body tends to resist foreign tissue, person to person grafts in case of a damaged aorta are often untenable. The latest solution is to cut a vein to the size needed in the patient's own body and fit it over a plastic rod. It is then wrapped in muscle tissue and buried in the thigh muscle where it is nourished for two or three weeks until a firm tube is formed. When the vsel is needed for graft- ing, the thigh is reopened, the plastic rod removed, and the freshly elastic vein hooked into the aorta to replace the defective segment. Future Motorists will drive on highways that will help steer the cars and on which the dips and curves cannot be felt. Highway engineers predict that "pavement geometry" can be used to bank curves so that a blindfolded person riding beside the driver would never know of the change of direction after going around such a curve. During momentary lapses on the part of a motorist, such a highway would be able to "steer" the car until the driver could regain control. Our grandchildren's children will have enough raw materials and energy resources despite gloomy predictions to the contrary. Recent scientific reports indicate that new methods of utilization of minerals, a curbing of waste, discoveries of new deposits and the substitution of common rock and ceramics are enough to quench any long range predictions of a raw material shortage. The harnessing of solar energy through new discoveries in photosynthesis, atomic reactors and the direct generation of electricity in transistor types of photovoltaic cells also promise a supply of energy far in excess of the demand even if coal, gas and petroleum, to which our civilization is now geared, should be exhausted. Science and industry have caught up with fictioneers again. The latest thing in bedding is a gyrating mattress, set into motion by a small motor in the foot of the bed. Designed to overcome insomnia by lulling the bed's occupant to sleep, the "rock-a-by-bed" is the actual development of an idea that science fiction writers have been using as standard equipment in their "homes of the future" for many years. A new profession -- that of criminalist -- may be what all little boys will aspire to be before many more years roll by. Such a criminalist will be a specialist, but not in any one field. He will have to qualify as an expert in identity, evidence of different kinds, from blood groups to ink -- from textiles to metals -- from vegetation to soil. In addition he will be well versed in the understanding of the practical side of crime investigation and legal requirements of courts and evidence. Like a physician, a criminalist will begin training with a broad knowledge of science, on this he must build a study of microscopy, microchemistry, law and any other off-branches concerned. Training will require a minimum of five years of college study which closely parallels that of pre-medical students. Blind persons someday may be able to walk with certainty through unfamiliar territory without the aid of seeing eye dogs or canes. Scientists and researchers have revealed a new electron device to warn blind users of obstacles and potential hazards, such as curbs and lampposts. Carried like a lunch pail, the device shoots out a beam of light that is reflected by such obstacles. The reflected light is then picked up by a built-in optical reception system and a vibrator in the handle translates the reflections into warnings or reassurances for the user. prohibited on Earth for a decade -- yet they listened. The censors, shocked, galvanized, started to act, to cut off the broadcast -- and could not. The powerful music had crept insidiously into their minds, and their fingers were paralyzed above the keys while The Martianne flamed triumphant through the air of Earth. When the final note had died away, Gomel stood up at his piano and said into the microphones: "That is the music of Mars. Remember it, people of Earth." It was a brief trial. Gomel was admittedly guilty of violating the law against inciting the public to military action, but because of Meta's influence and the temper of the people, he was not sentenced to prison. He was deported to Mars, freed to return to his own people. Spurred by the Mars Gorporation, the Earth government acted quickly. The Martianne was the most dangerous of any music the psychosociologists had banned. Its performance was prohibited on pain of death, possession of a tape of it was punishable by fine and imprisonment. But too many tapes had been home-recorded on the night of Gomel's last concert. Too many people remembered the basic strains, the theme of The Mar tianne. Laws could not confine it. It was hummed, at first secretly, then openly and defiantly. And too many people had hung on every televised instant of Gornel's trial and had heard him say, simply and earnestly, why he had violated the laws designed to protect the peace of Earth, why he had "It is right that men should have peace," said Gomel on the witness stand, "but first, it is right that they should have freedom." At first secretly, then openly and defiantly, the Friends of Mars grew into an organization that poured the contributions of the people of Earth into ships and guns for the free people of Mars. Every Martian year they play it formally now, on the anniversary of the signing of the Mars Gharter. In solemn ceremonies, the military band of Mars plays The Martianne before the imposing edifice erected at Gharax by Meta Erosine in memory of Gomel Lorensse, the patriot who died in action during the final seige of Mars Gity.    Hercules. # -- Automation. # -- Faculae. # -- Gommon salt. # -- Astronomical unit. # -- #. # -- Isotopes. #I -- #. # -- Shorter. # -- Protons. # -- # miles. # -- One mile. # -- Helium. # -- Away from. # -- #. Continued from Back Cover when you join the Club Each One Packed from Cover to Cover With the treasury of World-renowned stories that have stood the test of timeby H. G. Wells Jules Verne, Sir Arthur ('onan Doyle. Aldous Huxley, Philip Wylie, KdKar Allan Poe. E. M. Forster, F Scott Fitzgerald, etc. # pages. (Puf)l. ed. #) # top-stories by outstanding authors... stories of Wonders of Earth and Man... of startling inventions... of visitors from Outer Space... of Far Traveling... Adventures in Dimension... Worlds of Tomorrow. # pages. (Publ. ed. #) A story about the first A-Bomb... written before it was invented! story of the movie macliine that shows " newsreels" of any past event. 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All Stories New and Complete "Moon Cargo Ships" by Ed Voligursky IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. . Copynt # by Quinn Pumisbing Co., Inc. OflBce of publication, # Ixrd Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription S# for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincintal. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next iuw on sale October # th All learning must begin with a need. And when the tried old ideas won't work for a people -- won't conquer defeat and despair -- a new way of thinking must be found... Illustrated by Paul Orban H ands shook at his shoulder, dragging him awake. Lanny's foster father was bent over him, whispering urgently, "Get up, boy. We have to leave." Groggily Lanny pushed himself into a sitting position. He had been sleeping in his earth burrow beside Gill, outside Juan's cottage. Hazily Lanny remembered being carried home from the canyon after the explosion, but he could recall nothing else. It was an hour before dawn. Gill was dressing ; his shoulder was wrapped in a homespun bandage. Lanny got up, staggering a little, and helped his brother put on his leather jacket and his weapon belt. "Thanks, Lan," his brother said. Lanny touched the bandage. "Shouldn't you heal the cells. Gill?" "I have to expose it to the sim first. I didn't catch it soon enough last night, and too many germs infested the wound." To their foster father. Gill added, "I still think you should leave me here. I may not -- " "You're both my responsibility," Juan Pendillo ainswered. "We'll survive together. Gill, or die together." "What happened?" Lanny asked as he pulled on his breeches and pushed his stone knife and his wooden club through the loops of his weapon belt. Silently Juan pointed toward the dawn sky. High above them Lanny heard the whine of a score of enemy police spheres. "They insist on the surrender of all eight hunters who went out last night." Gill said, "But Tak Laleen killed Barlow with her energy gun. Why are they blaming us?" "Barlow was working for them as a spy," Lanny put in. It was a convenient explanation, but vaguely he knew he was lying. He felt a pang of guilt, but he couldn't understand why. What had he done that he should be ashamed of? What had happened last night? Lanny wracked his brain, trying to remember. Eight hunters had been sent out to bring in a cache of rifles which Lanny's brother. Gill, had found in the rubble of Santa Barbara. It was risky business, because under the terms of the surrender treaty men were prohibited the use of all metals in the prison compounds. But the younger generation -- boys like Lanny and Gill, born since the invasion -- were more fiercely determined to resist the Almost-men than their elders. Armed with fifty rifles, they thought they would be strong enough to attack the Chapel of the Triangle. The Almost-men : the children had coined the word, subtly asserting the pride of man. Yet they knew it was a semantic trick they played upon themselves. It changed nothing. The conquerors were physically identical to men; their enormous superiority was entirely technological. As the eight hunters crept toward the ruins of Santa Barbara, through a narrow canyon, old man Barlow suddenly emerged from the brush and stood grinning at them. It was his privilege to join the hunters; any citizen of the settlement could have done so. But the younger generation hated Barlow. He was the practical man; he called himself a realist. He never allowed them to forget they were defeated, imprisoned and without weapons; he took savage delight in poking holes in their plans for resistance. "What are you doing here?" Lanny's brother demanded. "I came to watch the fun, Gill." "We're going to bring back fifty rifles; that's all -- " "Right under the noses of our masters? Don't be naive." "There's only one way the Almost-men would find out -- " Barlow snorted. "Don't think I ran to the Ghapel of the Triangle and told Tak Laleen what you were up to. They don't need that sort of help from us. When are you going to get it through that thick skull of yours? We're outclassed; we're second-raters; we'll never defeat them." From the night sky they heard the low hum of a force-field car. An opalescent sphere soared above the canyon. Gill's fist smadied into Barlow's jaw. "So you did tell her!" Barlow fell back against the canyon wall, his mouth bleeding. The sphere came to a graceful stop thii feet above the hunters and the de-grav platform lowered a woman toward the canyon. Surrounded by the faintly opaque capsule of her protective force-field, she moved toward them, a beautiful, dark-haired woman clothed in white. This was Tak Laleen, the alien missionary assigned to the Santa Barbara area. She lived in the Chapel of the Triangle. Under the terms of the surrender treaty, the missionaries of the Almost-men were guaranteed immunity to preach and work in the treaty areas. They were selfless, generous and kind, yet men abhorred them, for they represented the tangible power of the conqueror. Tak Laleen glided toward the hunters, forming the alien's triangular sign of peace with her small, white fingers. "I come in peace, in the name of the All of the Universe." "We haven't violated any regulation," Gill snapped stiffly. Barlow sidled toward her. "Take me back to the Triangle," he begged. "I'll tell you -- " Gill's fist lashed out again; Barlow reeled under the blow. "We're a legally elected punishment squad," Gill lied. "This man has broken a community law." "You don't understand!" Barlow cried desperately. "They came to get -- " The others hunters fell on him, pummeling him into silence. The violence sickened Lanny, yet what alternative did they have? Lanny raised his club. At the same time the missionary came closer to the mob, and his club touched her forced-field capsule. Normally the energy would have paralyzed him with pain. But his mind refused to accept the normal, and Lanny felt the same sort of integrated umty with the energy field that he had with his hunting club. Command over the matter structure of the field. The energy flowed into lus body and was absorbed, stored in an explosive concentration of power. For a moment the opaque capsule dimmed. Tak Laleen clenched her hand over her mouth and fled into her sphere. The car soared up above the canyon. Lanny swung his club again. Since Barlow must die, let him die quickly, without pain. Murder! -- the accusation was a pang of agony in Lanny's mind. This violated everything Juan had taught him. He was aware that he wanted Barlow's death not because the old man had tried to betray the hunters, but because Lanny could not answer Barlow's poisonous despair in any other way. Lanny was ashamed. But who would know his real motive if he killed Barlow now? Who -- but himself? Lanny's club touched Barlow's chest. He felt a drain of energy, a disintegration of structure. The energy Lanny had absorbed from missionary's force-field exploded in a fierce, white heat. Barlow crumbled into dust. Lanny's awareness of what he had done survived for a fraction of a second. He stood facing the exploding light and waves of concussion lashed at his body. A dark chaos, whipped into fury by a floodtide of guilt, rocked his mind. He willed himself into unconsciousness, a bleak forgetfulness that sponged the guilt -- and the truth -- from his mind. And now he remembered nothing but the explosion and the queasy shadow of self-accusation. "The settlement," Juan Pendillo said to his sons, "is required to surrender the hunters at dawn. That gives us forty-five minutes. We're all heading for different treaty areas. We are to go to the San Francisco colony." T he three men slid along the street, clinging to the shadows. Twice they passed other hunters in flight, but no one spoke, for the enemy sound detectors on iht Chapel of the Triangle were sensitive enough to pick up a whisper at a distance of half a mile. Lanny and Gill discarded their moccasins, in order to be more sure of their footing. The moccasins were useless except as symbols of status. Juan Pendillo qualified to give the extra skins to his sons, since before the invasion he had been a Doctor of Philosophy, and the teachers had become the governing force in every treaty area. For two hours Pendillo and his foster sons walked north. Occasionally they saw enemy spheres overhead, but the ships never came closer. After they reached the coast, the pounding surf formed a protective sound barrier when they talked. "How far is the San Francisco treaty area?" Gill asked. "Three hundred miles, more or less," Pendillo replied. "How many days?" Lanny inquired. His father, like all the older survivors in the settlement, always spoke of distance in terms of miles -- a word that was meaningless to the new generation. Pendillo laughed, with gentle bitterness. "Once, Lanny, we might have made it by car in eight hours. Now? -- I don't know. The couriers sometimes do it in a week, when the weather is good. It will take us longer. I won't be able -- " He cut himself short. "It's funny, isn't it? In the old days I used to gripe about the traffic; right now I'd give ten years of my life to see a Model-T again." Gill ground his naked heel into the sand. "The Almost-men took everything from us. But we're not licked. One of these days we'll be strong enough -- " "As strong as their machines?" Lanny asked. Gill swung toward his brother angrily. "That's Barlow's kind of talk, Lan." "The weapons and die machines of the Almost-men," Pendillo said, "are more powerful than anything we ever had. Yet we must defeat them; we must make ourselves free again. And we shall; I have no doubt of it. Granted, we have no weapons like theirs, and no chance of building any. We still don't resign ourselves to defeat. The techniques we used in the past failed; then we must find new ones. How? I don't know. That's the problem our generation leaves to yours. Men live by their dreams; without them we are nothing." The three men continued to move north along the beach until they came to the barrier that marked the northern boundary of the Santa Barbara treaty area. The barrier was a series of widely separated pylons marching across the land. Each pylon served as a pedestal for one of the enemy's highly sensitive sound receptors and an automatic energy gun. Any sound detected within seventy feet of the border became instantly the focal point for a stabbing beam of disintegration. Yet men crossed the barriers at will. Couriers traveled freely from one treaty area to another, and hunters crossed the border because the animal life in enemy territory was more prolific. They had two methods for passing the pylon guns. Sometimes they swam to sea, circling the barrier beyond the range of the sea-coast receptors. The second technique, used by the inland hunters, was to confuse the listening machines. The hunters would hurl half a dozen stones into the barrier area. While the energy guns obediently disposed of the rolling rocks, the hunters sprinted across the forbidden ground before the guns could concentrate upon the second target. Both Lanny and Gill preferred to run the guns. They enjoyed the risk of defying the enemy machines. But Dr. Pendillo shook his head. It meant sprinting a distance of a hundred yards in less than nine seconds -- the time it took the guns to reorient their target. "Before the invasion," Pendillo explained, "the fastest man on Earth ran a hundred meters in a little over ten seconds. You boys are a new breed. You've been forced to adapt; I'm too old." Pendillo's eyes were suddenly serious. "Adaptation," he repeated. "The possibilities are infinite for a man who is free from convention, free from the inherited ideas of his past. That is the way we shall defeat the Almostmen. The human mind has an unmeasured capacity for solving problems -- for pulling itself up by its bootstraps -- so long as hope for a solution remains alive." They passed the barrier by swimming a quarter of a mile to sea. They rested briefly when they returned to the beach. Then they resumed their march north again, through territory ceded to the enemy. They stayed close to the beach, imtil their passage was barred by an increasmgly rocky coastline. Since they had seen no enemy police spheres since they left the treaty area, Pendillo thought it was safe for them to use the highway which paralleled the beach. After nearly twenty years, the ribbon of asphalt was still in good repair. Occasional cracks had broken the paving. Grass and weeds choked the crevices and some culverts had been washed out by spring rains. The primary change was environmental, but only Juan Pendillo was aware of that, for his sons took for granted the young forests diat crowded every hillside and the abundant wild game. With no more than a ten minute intemiption in their march northward, Lanny and Gill ran down a rabbit skillfully hurled stones -- the traditional weapons of the hunters. They cleaned the kill and strapped it to their weapon belts. Late in the afternoon they entered Santa Maria. The town had not been large, but it was the first relic of their defeated culture that Lanny and Gill had ever seen. Sometimes, when their hunting took them south, they saw the site of Los Angeles, but that told them nothing about the past, for it was a flat desert scrubbed clean of rubble to make room for an enemy skyport. Santa Maria had survived the invasion, since it was too isolated from the major centers of population to have been a target of die enemy guns. Lanny and Gill stood in the empty main street and looked with awe at the deserted stores. Some of the buildings were made of brick; some were actually two and three floors high. This must, surely, have been a great city of the old world. They had no point of reference but the monotonously identical houses of the subdivision which had become their treaty colony. Here the buildings were all different and by that fact alone they seemed beautiful. Lanny and Gill stopped at each store window, to stare in wonder at the goods still on the shelves. In an automobile agency, a solitary sedan still stood, on deflated and frayed tires, in the center of the showroom floor. Here at last was visible proof that men had once built a machine technology. The automobile was as big and as shiny, beneath its generation of dust, as any of the spheres of the Almost-men. "Were they all like that?" Lanny asked in an awed whisper. "Fundamentally, yes," Pendillo said. "And they moved over the roads faster than a deer!" Gill's eyes glistened. "But where are the weapons, father?" "Our cars weren't armed, Gill; we used them for pleasure. But don't get me wrong. We had guns -- vicious and terrible things; we were no more civilized than the Almost-men. Our weapons just weren't the equal of theirs, so our civilization was destroyed." "You're saying the Almost-men are better -- " "No, Gill. The Almost-men are mirror images of ourselves -- man at his worst. That's why we understand each other so thoroughly," Pendillo paused before he added, "And that's why we can't destroy them on their terms ; we must make our own." They pushed open the door of the agency and went into the showroom. Hesitantly, like children with new Christmas toys, they ran their fingers over the dusty hood of the sedan. Lanny felt a strange, electric empathy as he touched the cold metal, as if it were a familiar part of himself. For a moment he saw in his mind the geometric structure of the alloy atoms, just as he could visualize Ae more complex cell make-up of his own body. Judging from the expression on Gill's face, he guessed that his brother had perceived the same relationship. "And the Almost-men took all this from us," Gill said in a choked voice. "Why, Juan?" "In our wars among ourselves, we always had the same motivation. They came here for resources. Every skyport they have built on Earth continuously ships out tons of metal and chemicals -- oil, coal, ores. On their home world the Almost-men have exhausted their own resources; they must have ours to keep their mechanistic civilization going." Juan opened a door at the rear of the showroom into a large, cement-floored garage. Except for three automobiles, abandoned twenty years before in various stages of repair, the room was empty. "We can spend the night here," Pendillo decided. Lanny and Gill pried open the door at the back of the garage. Behind the building tangled shrubs and live oaks choked the half-mile shelf of land that separated Santa Maria from the coast. They found a ready supply of dry firewood under the trees. It was dusk. The setting sun was veiled in a mist. Fingers of fog reached hungrily for the warm earth, driven inland by the wind. Lanny and Gill would have been more comfortable outside. They were accustomed to the chilly night air. They could have burrowed sleeping troughs in the soil and restored their strength with earth energy. It had always puzzled them that the older survivors, like Juan, could not do the same. Pendillo's generation made very poor hunters, too, often dying of a wheezing sickness if they spent many nights on the trail. Pendillo's sons carried wood into the garage, where Juan sat shivering on a wooden bench with his rabbit-skin jacket hunched around his shoulders. Lanny and Gill stripped off their jerkins and gave them to their father. Pendillo's sons were naked, then, except for their short, crudely cut breeches and their leather weapon belts. And only the belts, which held their stone knives and their clubs, would either of them have considered essential. The rest was superficial, a mark of status. In a general way Lanny and Gill were physically alike -- sturdy, bronzed giants, like all the children who had survived in the treaty areas. They were both nineteen, or perhaps a little older. Dr. Pendillo had found them abandoned as he fled the final enemy attack. Gill's hair was yellow and a pale beard was beginning to grow on his chin. Danny's black hair curled in a tight, matted mane ; his beard was heavy, already covering much of his face and giving him a sinister, derelict appearance. Since metal was forbidden in the prison compounds, no man was clean-shaven. After a fashion they did occasionally trim their hair, with treasured slivers of glass which foraging hunters brought back from the ruined cities. Lanny and Gill made fire in a rusted waste can. Pendillo watched them with admiration. That was another shortcoming in the older survivors that puzzled Lanny: they were very clumsy about producing Are, and almost none of diem could hurl a stone accurately enough to kill an animal. Yet both skills, so essential to the hunters, had been taught the children by Aeir elders. On an improvised wooden spit Pendillo's sons roasted the pheasant and the rabbit which they had killed that afternoon. The three men ate hungrily, Pendillo with a fastidiousness that secretly amused the bronzed giants who sat crosslegged beside him. Dr. Pendillo tore the meat daintly from the bones with his fingers; at intervals he wiped the grease from his lip with a comer of his jacket. Pendillo built a bed for himself from a pile of dry, rotting rags close to the fire. Lanny restoked the can with fresh wood so his father might be warm during the night. Then Pendillo's sons spread dieir skins close to the open door, where they felt more at ease. Almost at once Lanny was asleep. It was an instinctive process of will. He ordered his body to rest, and it responded; just as he could be instantly awake and alert at any energy change that indicated danger. He had never examined the process consciously, and he considered it in no way unusual; but he might have recalled, if he had pressed his memory back into his earliest childhood, that it was part of a pattern Pendillo had taught his sons. There was a sputter of soimd. Lanny leap to his feet, his hand closing on his stone knife. He heard a ro of clanging metal in the automobile showroom. Then silence. Lanny sprang through the open door. Dimly he saw Gill sitting in the sedan, his hands gripping the wheel. "What happened?" "It started, Lanny. I just came in to look at it, to touch it again, and -- " "So you made the motor turn over?" This came from Dr. Pendillo, who was feeling his way through the door behind Lanny. "How, Gill?" Gill slid out of the car, backing away from it. 'T don't know. I don't know!" "You must. Gill." "I got in. I was -- I was pretending it was before the invasion and I was driving the machine down the road. I could see the matter structure of the motor in my mind, and how the parts fit together. I must have touched the starter." "After twenty years, the battery would be dead and the fuel would have evaporated. Tell me what you really did. Gill." Gill clenched his fist against his mouth. "It seemed as if it were a part of me, like my hand. And then the machinery began to move, because -- because I wanted it to. Maybe there was some fuel left, father, and maybe -- "Why are you afraid of the truth. Gill?" "People don't run machines by wanting them to go!" "The thinking mind, my son, is capable of -- " Pendillo's voice trailed off, for they all heard the sound outside -- the high whine made by the force-field of an enemy sphere. Lanny darted to the showroom window. At the end of the street an opalescent sphere was riding in the fog, three feet above the ground. Enemy police guards in protective capsules spilled through the open port, carrying energy guns slimg over their shoulders. "The Almost-men picked up the sound of the motor," Pendillo gasped. Then he saw the woman in the white uniform of the Triangle. She stood at the port, spotlighted by the glow of blue light that came from within the ship. It was the missionary, Tak Laleen. gan to dart back and forth over the empty buildings, responding to the commands of the sound receptors. Lanny and Gill seized their father and plunged into the choking darkness of the forest. Dead brush snapped. The tracer light swimg toward the trees, concentrating with smug, mechanical selfassurance upon the place where the three men had been. Lying flat against the cold earth, they wormed their way foot by foot toward the coast. Behind them they saw the forcefield capsules of six enemy guards floating above the trees. Strong tracer lights danced over the upper branches, but the foliage was too dense for the light to penetrate to the ground. In their glowing bubbles the enemy police swimg back and forth, trying to find a clearing in the brush. Two of them attempted to force their way into the trees but their body capsules were too bulky; the force-field generated by the individual envelopes was not powerful enough to push through the gnarled branches. The three fugitives inched steadily forward. The glow of tracer lights faded behind them. They could hear the wind above the trees and, far away, the sound of surf breaking on the rocks. Juan Pendillo was shivering in the cold. His teeth began to chatter. Hastily his sons pressed his body between theirs, shielding him from the cold and sharing their body energy until his trembling finally stopped. They heard a snapping sound in the brush. An enemy guard appeared suddenly. He had dissolved his force-field and he was walking warily on the wet earth. He held an energy gun cradled in his arms. The enemy walked with cat-like caution -- but, in spite of himself, it was the amateur caution of a man who relied on the protective devices of a machine. Slowly Lanny's lips twisted in a sneer. This was the enemy, heavily armed and invulnerable -- but helpless without his mechanical gadgets. Lanny's hand moved soundlessly over the ground. He grasped a stone. The enemy was less than twenty feet away; it was a target a child couldn't miss. Lanny swung into a sitting position and simultaneously threw his stone. The guard dropped, a wound tom in his skull. Pendillo and his sons slid forward again. As they passed the dead Almost-man, Lanny worked the energy gun out of of the guard's hands. It took them an hour to reach the cliflFs overlooking the sea. They turned north again, seeking shelter among the rocks. And they came abruptly upon a wide, bowl-shaped cavity in the earth. Through the fog they saw the narrow passage between the cavity and the sea. In the center of the sheltered, artificial pool a metal dome rose some fifty feet above the quiet water. The dome, protected by a forcefield, was joined to the land by a catwalk. From its waterline a ridged, white tube snaked upward and disappeared among the trees on the north bank of the pool. A repair barge swung at anchor under the catwalk. A towering pylon raised a sound receptor and an automatic energy gun high above the roof of the dome. Pendillo whispered, "Tliis must be one of their automatic mining operations. I've never seen one before." Gill replied, "Lanny and I have come upon lots of them in the hills. The domes run themselves. Sometimes the Almost-men come and check over the machines; that's what the barge is here for, I think." "The domes dig out minerals or pump oil," Lanny added, "and send it to the skyports through the white pipes. But you can never get close to them. The whole operation i protected by the energy guns." "They have us pinned down here," Gill said, "unless we can use that barge." Lanny fingered the energy gim he had taken from the dead guard. "All we have to do is knock out the pylon." He raised the weapon and aimed it at the nest of delicate instruments at the base of the pillar. He turned the firing dial. The Same knifed through the fog. The tower disintegrated in a blaze of dust. The three men slid down the rock d plunged through the cold water toward the barge. In the night sky they heard the whine of an approaching force-held car. They leaped aboard the barge, hauling Dr. Pendillo in after them. Gill knelt in front of the motor in the stern. Lanny watched the sky, with the energy gun clutched in his hand. He knew the charge in the chamber was nearly spent. There might be enough left to hold off the enemy for a moment, but certainly no longer. Frantically Gill turned the wheels until the motor stirred into life. As it did the glowing sphere swung down upon them. Lanny raised his gun and Sred. Fear projected something of himself into the leaping charge of energy -- a confusing sensation of screaming joy and chaotic horror that left his mind limp and numb. It seemed that he had actually touched the force-Seld of the sphere; he was physically tearing apart the tense, strait-jacket of solidified energy. The sphere lurched upward and away into the night. As it did, the port broke open and a figure dropped toward the water. It was Tak Laleen. She reached for the tiny box fastened to her breast, trying to activate her protective forcefield capsule. Lanny knew he had to stop her, or she might still be able to prevent their escape. He sprang into the water, clawing for her feet as she fell toward him. She screamed and her screams died as he dragged her beneath the surface. He tore the box from her hands and let it fall. When they broke the surface, his hands were on her throat and all his lifelong hatred of the Almostmen was in his finger tips as he pressed his thumbs down upon her windpipe. Pendillo cried out, "Don't kill her, Lanny! No man has ever taken one of the enemy alive." Reluctantly Lanny relaxed # grip. Tak Laleen screamed again and slapped her hands at his face. Abrubtly she paused and stared into his eyes. "You!" she gasped. "The black savage. No wonder my sphere -- In the name of the All of the Universe, kill me quickly! Kill me now, as civilized beings have a right to die -- not your way. Not your way!" Then, for no reason Lanny could fathom, Tak Laleen fainted. the darkness, the stolen barge moved rapidly north along the coast. Tak Laleen lay unconscious in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in her white uniform; Pendillo sat shivering beside her. Lanny and Gill stood in the stem. Although the motor was controlled by an automatic navigator. Gill tore out the flimsy destination tape and guided the wheel manually. "Even this the Almost-men can't do for themselves," he remarked to his brother. "Do you suppose they really can't read direction from the sun or the stars?" "All their brains are in their. machines." "And machines are nothing." "Juan has always said that," Gill said slowly. "It sounds logical and reasonable. But I don't know what it means, Lanny!" For a long time they stood watching the heaving shadow of the sea, each of them trying in his own way to make sense of the riddle. Suddenly the motor sputtered. Gill tinkered with the machine until it was purring smoothly again. "The power cells are nearly empty," he said. "We'll have to run the barge aground sometime tomorrow and start walking again." "Yes, I know." Lanny clenched his fist over his brother's arm. "But how do we know it, Gill? How can we run this machine, when we have never seen it before?" Gill laughed uneasily. "Don't forget, before the invasion our people were pretty good at building machines, too." "That doesn't answer the question, Gill. When I fired the energy gun, I felt as if it were a part of myself -- as if I knew all the cells in the metal just as I know my own." "That happened to me when I sat in the automobile in the showroom." "It scares me, Gill. I keep thinking I should remember something but -- "I was scared last night, too, because I thought I'd made die motor go by forcing it to move with my mind. And that's absurd. If we had that much control over machines. as we do over our himting clubs, how could the enemy ever have defeated us?" Tak Laleen opened her eyes, then, and sat up stiffly. The wind struck her face and swept her hah back. Shivering, she pulled her uniform tight around her throat. "Where are you taking me?" she demanded. "You're our prisoner," Lanny answered. "The Sacred Triangle will not pay ransom we volunteered to serve here on the earth; we knew the risks." Lanny moved toward her. Fearfully she slid away from him until her back was against the gunwale. "Don't touch me!" she begged. He shrugged and dropped on the deck close to her feet. "When you came out of the Traingle to take care of our sick, you never were repulsed by -- "Not the normal ones, no." "Your aversion applies only to me?" "Don't pretend." She twisted her hands together. "What kind of a -- a thing are you?" Juan Pendillo intervened, "We dragged you aboard rather unceremoniously, Tak Laleen. Let me introduce my sons, Lanny and Gill." "You're lying. Where did you get the metals to make him?" Lanny stared at his father. "Is she -- has her mind been affected -- " "All this beating around the bush is so foolish." Suddenly she seized Lanny's arm and dug her nails, like claws, into his skin. "But -- but it is real! You're not a machine." Her eyes glazed and she fainted again. By dawn the motor of the barge was missing continuously and the speed had been reduced to a relatively slow forty knots. The sun rose, dispelling the fog, and the wind on the sea became a little warmer. Juan Pendillo tried to pace the tiny deck, flaying his arms to restore the circulation. Tak Laleen, having recovered from her second faint, sat brooding with her uniform clutched tightly over her throat. Periodically the missionary talked to Pendillo. She asked again and again what they were going to do with her. Either ransom or murder were the only possibilities that occurred to her. That point of view was a fair index to the attitude the Almost-men held toward the survivors on the planet they had conquered. Manlund they considered primitive squalor of the prison compounds was their proof. Lanny understood enough of the religion of the Triangle -- that noble abstract of God which the enemy called the All of the Universe -- to know why the conquerors had to use a semantic device to define their superiority. The Almost-men were a liberty-loving society. Their government decrees and their religious poetry abounded with vivid words of freedom. They could not have maintained an integrated social soul and enslaved a culture of their peers; therefore, they had to invent a verbal technique for reducing man to the status of a savage. "As we have always done ourselves," Pendillo told Lanny when he first became aware of the inconsistency as a child. "But don't condemn the enemy for it, my son. Words have the peculiar habit of becoming anything we want them to be. If we set our minds to it, we can make anything true. The Almost-men are not merely alien invaders; they are like man himself -- the most tragic distortion of our worst traits. Someday we shall make war on them, yes, but before we do we must learn how to conquer ourselves." Early in the afternoon the power cells in the barge were exhausted. Gill drove the ship up on a desolate beach, at the place where Monterey had once stood. Nothing survived but an occasional piece of debris, buried in the drifted sand, for Monterey, close to a military camp, had been heavily bombed by the invaders. "We must find a place to camp," Pendillo advised. "I don't believe either Tak Laleen or I have the strength to go any farther today." They found it necessary to hike eight miles north of Monterey before they were beyond the area of total destruction. The ruins, scattered among the encroaching trees, became recognizable as skeletal relics of things that might once have been homes. They found one frame cottage still whole because it had been built close to a hillside. The battered walls would provide shelter for Pendillo and the missionary. Further, the house had a stone fireplace where they could cook their food, and close by a shallow spring bubbled from the dark earth. Gill and Lanny trapped a deer and carried the carcass back to the cottage. Both Tak Laleen and Pendillo were struggling to make a fire. Lanny took over the chore and in seconds flames leaped through the dead brush heaped on the hearth. It had always puzzled him that Pendillo could have taught him the techniques, and still not be able to make the fire himself. Tak Laleen was just as helpless. Without their machines the Almost-men were nothing: again and again that became apparent. Gill stripped off the deer hide carefully so it could be made into a second jacket for Pendillo. While he stretched the skin the afternoon sun, Lanny turned the meat over the fire. When they began to eat, both Lanny and Gill were amused that Tak Laleen had manners as fastidious as Pendillo's. The missionary nibbled delicately at her food, as if she thought the grease would soil her lips. Afterward she and Pendillo washed in water which they heated over the fire. Pendillo's sons stripped and swam in the ocean, as a man properly should to make himself clean. They made beds for their father and the missionary in front of the fire. Lanny and his brother would march north until nightfall; the food had restored their balance of energy, as it always did. But they knew the other two had to rest. Lanny and Gill dug burrows in the warm sand outside the cottage, where they felt more comfortable. They were consciously an integrated part of their world, nurtured by the earth and the sun. To them it seemed absurd to build walls of wood or stone to separate themselves from a part of their own being. None of younger generation had ever understood the need of their elders for artificial shelter. That feeling, too, was a product of of their education, though neither they nor their teachers grasped what it implied. The children of the prison camps lived in a new universe, not yet defined. Lanny and Gill were immediately asleep. It did not occur to them that Tak Laleen might try to escape. They assumed she had read the signs of the plentiful game in the forest: they were a long way from any enemy installation. Yet four hours later they were jerked awake by the sound of her screams, faint and terrified in the night shadows of the forest. They found her a thousand yards from the cottage. Her back was against a wall of boulders and with her frail, white hands she was trying to beat off a snarling cougar which had already clawed her imiform to shreds. L anny drew his knife and I leaped at the animal. Gill threw a stone which might have broken the skull with bullet force, but at that moment the cougar whirled toward them. Its claw slashed at Lanny. He bent low, driving his knife upward. Momentum carried the big cat forward. As the tearing fiuy struck his chest, Lanny plunged his knife again into the thick hide. The cougar fell, writhing and howling. Gill smashed a broken tree limb into the yawning jaws, and the big cat died. Tak Laleen ' # stumbled toward them. She tried to speak. The words of gratitude choked in her throat and she fainted. Again! Lanny thought, with disgust. The Almost-men -- or at least their missionary women -- had a limited gamut of emotional reactions. It seemed an inadequate way to solve a problem. They left Tak Laleen where she lay. Gill expertly stripped off the skin of the animal they had killed, another hide they could fashion into a jacket for Juan Pendillo. Lanny had been superficially wounded -- a long, shallow scratch across his chest. He examined it carefully, feeling through the severed body cells with his mind and directing the blood purifiers to seal off the few germ colonies which were present. When the skin seemed to require no healing exposure to the sun, he allowed the scratch to heal at once. Gill shouldered the cougar hide, still warm and dripping blood. Lanny picked up the missionary and they returned to the cottage. Tak Laleen's uniform was tom and useless, but the material was a tough plastic which had protected her from any serious wound. Her chest and arms were criss-crossed with scores of tiny abrasions. It puzzled Lanny that she had made no eflfort to repair her body. It occured to him, with something of a shock, that the Almost-men might use machines to do that, too. Tak Laleen regained consciousness when Lanny put her on the bed in front of the fire. Pendillo tore off her battered uniform and bathed the scratches with hot water. "You saved me; you risked your own life!" She said it with a peculiar fervor. Lanny couldn't understand why she thought an element of risk had been involved. A hunter with half his skill and experience could have done as much. "I won't try to run away again," she promised. Not much of a concession, Lanny thought, suppressing a grin. Pendillo said they would have to spend the next day in the cottage, to give the missionary a chance to rest. She was suffering, he said, from something he called shock. Precisely what that was neither of his sons knew, but they supposed it was an obscure ailment that beset the enemy. The more they learned about Tak Laleen, the stranger it seemed that such a weak people could have conquered the earth. During the interval of waiting, Lanny and Gill dried the two hides they had taken. They cut breeches and a jacket for Tak Laleen, to replace the uniform she could no longer wear. After they resumed their trek north, it took them four days more to reach the pylon barrier south of the San Francisco treaty area. Tak Laleen became more and more exhausted. She shivered constantly in the cold air. Her nose began to run -- a phenomenon Pendillo called a cold -- and the wounds in her chest stubbornly refused to heal. When she saw the towered guns on the barrier, she dropped to the ground and wept hysterically. "We can't pass that," she whispered. "If you're afraid to run the guns," Lanny told her, "we can swim around them." "I don't know how." "There's no other way into the treaty area," Gill said brutally. She sniffled. "If I could just feel warm again -- if you would build a fire and give me a chance to rest -- "Not until we're inside the barrier. The police would spot a fire out here." Gill picked her up and began to carry her toward the beach. She screamed in terror and beat her fists against his naked back. When he did not stop, she cried out, "I can tell you how to break the circuit on the pylons!" Gill paused. "Yes?" "If we could knock out just one of the guns, we could walk through the barrier, couldn't we?" Gill set her on her feet. She ran back to Lanny, stumbling over the rough ground and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "Lanny, you and your brother can hit anything with a stone. Couldn't you knock out the power unit in a pylon?" "Sure, if we knew where it was. We've tried for years to find that out, but we can't get close enough to examine the towers." She pointed eagerly. "It's the criss-crossed framework, just under the sound receptor at the top." He measured the distance critically. "It will take careful marksmanship to hit anything so small. Think we could do it. Gill?" "We'll have to try; the lady's afraid to get her feet wet." Gill threw the first stone. It fell short of the target. The automatic energy guns swimg on the stone, efficiently disintegrating it before it touched the ground. Lanny tried; and his brother threw again. It was Lanns fourth missile that struck the tiny mechanism. A puff of smoke fffled the air and the top of the pylon became a mass of twisted, metal girders. Lanny grinned at the missionary. She was a fool, he thought; for the sake of her own comfort, she had given away one of the most valuable secrets in the arsenal of enemy weapons. When the treaty areas knew it, the barriers would go down; men would be free when they chose. And Tak Laleen was so grateful to have escaped a cold swim in the sea, she seemed unaware of the extent of her betrayal. They walked across the barren ground. The missionary clung with feverish hands to Lanns arm. Half a mile beyond the barrier, they ascended a steep hill. From the crest they looked down upon the peninsula and the sprawling arms of the bay in the background. Except for the jumbled ruins of downtown San Francisco, at the point of the peninsula, the land from the ocean to the bay was crowded with closely packed rows of dwellings. Some were flat-roofed, whitewalled houses similar to the subdivision settlement where Lanny and Gill grew up. Others, built since the surrender, were ugly hovels made from clay and grass. The San Francisco treaty area was the largest on Earth, perhaps because it was the city where the invasion had begun. Lanny had airways known it was big, but he was awed to see so many men, so many of his own kind, assembled in one place. Across the bay, on a flat, white plain where Oakland had once stood, was the crowded, multi-tiered skyport of the enemy. From all the surrounding hills the pliable, white tubes poured an endless stream of resources into the port. Automatic machines, working ceaselessly day and night, loaded the plunder into machine-navigated, pilotless spheres; at five minute intervals an endless parade of spheres lifted from the field beyond the skyport and headed toward the stars, while a second parade of empties came in for a landing. From a distance the skyport, under its opalescent dome of a force-field, looked like an enormous spider with its sprawling, white tentacles clutching the green earth. The San Francisco skyport was the largest the enemy had built, and the seat of the territorial government they had set up to rule the captive planet. Grotesque relics of man's bridges still spanned the bay and the Golden Gate; columns of rusted steel held up the graceful loops of a single, rusted cable. An enemy bridge, like a fairy highway supported by nearly invisible balloons of de-grav spheres, joined the skyport and the treaty area. As the three men and their captive descended the hillside, they were stopped by four nearly naked youths who mounted guard on the southern fringe of the settlement. Though still boys in their teens, they were physical giants like Lanny and Gill. Pendillo told the boys why they had fled from the Santa Barbara settlement; he asked to be taken to the home of Dr. Endhart. "Our chief teacher?" "Dr. Endhart and I are old friends. We knew each other before the invasion." One of the boys clapped Lanny on the back. "So you brought your woman with you; they must be snappy lookers down your way." Tak Laleen shrank against Lanny's side, holding his hand in terror, "Not much for size, though," the boy added critically. "How much do you weigh, girl?" The boy put his arm around the missionary's shoulder. She gave a squeal of fear and, in her eagerness to shrink still closer to Lanny, she forgot to hold her crudely cut jacket closed across her breast. The hide fell free. The boy saw her white, scratched shoulder and her thin, frail arm. He whistled. "So you caught one of the Almost-men. A missionary? I never saw one without the uniform. Let's see the rest of it." He snatched the jacket from Tak Laleen. She gave another wail and fainted. Lanny sighed and picked her up. "She has a habit of doing this," he explained wearily. "She hasn't pulled one for nearly four days; I guess this was overdue." The boy inspected her with a sneer. "Scrawny, aren't they?" "Take away their machines," Lanny replied, "and this is all you have left." I an easy adjustment to the new community. The social stratification was an uncomplicated division of men into three types: the teachers, the old ones who had survived the invasion, and the children who had grown up since the war -- by far the largest group. The classification was logical and unobtrusive; it produced no frustrating social pressures. Since the children had known no other form of society, they assumed that men had always organized their culture with such understandable simplicity. The chief occupation of the community was always the education of the young. That, too, Lanny and Gill assumed to be the normal activity of man. The teachers were the real government of every treaty area.Their control was subtle, engineered through an unofficial -- and illegal -- representative body, usually called the resistance council. Since Pendillo had been a teacher in his home settlement, he took up residence with Dr. Endhart. They kept Tak Laleen with them, a prisoner confined to the house. For nearly a week she lay on a pallet suffering the miseries of a cold. Lanny knew that older survivors in every settlement sometimes had the same malady. Pendillo had taught his sons that sickness happened because some of the survivors of the invasion had been so demoralized by defeat they had lost the mental ability to control their own physical processes. But Tak Laleen was one of the conquerors; nothing had demoralized the Almost-men. There was only one possible conclusion Lanny could reach: the invaders had never learned to control the energy imits in their body cells. A hunter's assignment, Lanny found, was easier than it had been in the smaller Santa Barbara settlement. The Almost-men had set up a vast himting preserve north and east of the bay; it was kept wellstocked with game. There was no need for the hunting parties to break through the pylon barrier and raid territory ceded to the invaders The hunters simply crossed the skyport bridge, circled the opalescent dome, and entered the forest, where broad trails had been conveniently laid out under the trees. This generous provision came about because the enemy considered the San Francisco compound something of a showplace, an experimental laboratory for improving relations with the conquered. A steady stream of tourists, sociologists, politicians and religious leaders poured into the San Francisco skyport from the mechanized home world of the Almost-men. They came to satisfy their curiosity, to purchase tourist relics, to examine and sometimes criticize the occupation policy. Frequently, when Lanny was hunting in the forest, he saw Almost-men who were recent arrivals in the skyport. Usually they floated above the trees in their individual, degravitized, force-field capsules, watching the hunt and eagerly recording the activity with their expensive cameras. Sometimes they whipped up enough courage to descend to the forest trails and talk to their captives. Several times Lanny was interviewed by the enemy, and slowly he began to flesh out a more realistic definition of the Almost-men. They were no longer a clear-cut symbol for something he hated, but suddenly more human and more understandable. They were physically weak, just like the older survivors in the treaty settlements. They were timid and unsure of themselves. They were hopelessly caught in a mire of pretty words, which they seemed to believe themselves. And without their machines they were helpless. After Lanny and his brother had been in the San Francisco area for nearly two weeks, they were invited to a formal session of the local resistance council, where they were accepted as new citizens of the community. The delegates met at night in the rubble of the old city. A narrow passage tunneled through the ruins to an underground room which had once been the vault of a bank and had, therefore, survived the bombing and the slashing fire of the energy guns. Gill did not stay with his brother in the rear of the vault. Instead he joined the young hotheads who formed the war party in the local council. At home Gill had dominated the same element. The men in every treaty area were split between two points of view. One group wanted to organize an immediate attack upon the invader, in spite of the inequality in arms. The others counciled caution, until they had the strength to strike a real blow to free the Earth. Since men had no weapons and no metals from which to make them, the obvious basis for any successful attack had to be a scheme for seizing arms from the enemy. "We can only destroy the Almostmen if we use their own machines." Again and again the San Francisco war party repeated that fact; it seemed an argument so self-evident that it was beyond any rational challenge. "The machines have no intelligence, no sense of values; they will obey us just as readily as they obey the enemy." "More so." Gill spoke clear and loud, in crisp self-confidence. "I do not believe the enemy knows how to feel the structure of matter." This statement created a minor sensation. The heads of the delegates turned slowly toward Gill. Gill was smiling, his mane of blond hair shimmering like gold in the flickering light. Lanny felt, as always, a tremendous admiration for his brother. Gill was so sure of himself, so certain that he was right. Gill's mind would never have been plagued by shadowy fears he couldn't understand. "I have seen an enemy bleed," Gill went on. "They do not know how to heal a wound." "That might be true of some," one of delegates answered. "Some of our old ones have forgotten, too. But you spoke as if the individual community of cells could be extended to include integration with all external matter." "By touch; I have done it myself." "You mean the extension into the energy mits of your hunting club." The delegate smiled depre ciatingly. "We all imderstand that. But a wooden club was once a living thing. Community control over other forms of matter is entirely different." "No, the machines respond the same way. I made a motor turn over, when it had been idle and without fuel for twenty years. It frightened me when it happened. The energy in the metal was something new, and I couldn't understand the structure at first. But I've thought about it since, and I'm sure -- " "We'll look into the possibilities -- after we capture the enemy machines. Our problems at the moment is to get the machines." The delegates returned to their discussion. They had agreed, long ago, that the only way to attack the skyport was from inside the protective, force-field dome. For years the Almost-men had tried to encourage trade between the skyport and the treaty area, and the resistance council had turned that to their advantage. Gradually they had increased the number of young men who went to the city with necklaces of animal teeth and meaningless gee-gaws for the tourist trade. The Almost-men had grown used to seeing a mob of the lower tiers of the city. The council had regularly altered the trading parties, so that every man in the San Francisco colony had been under the dome half a dozen times. They knew their way around in the skyport; they knew the location of the power station and the city arsenal. When the attack came, fifty men in the city would seize the power plant and the rest would attempt to take the arsenal. One of the hotheads arose from his place beside Gill. "We have discussed this and argued it for almost as long as I can remember," he said. "There is nothing more to be said, for it or against it. Hasn't the time come to take a vote?" A moderate protested mildly, "But have we weighed all the risks? If we make a mistake now -- " "Gan you suggest a better way to get weapons?" And the moderate admitted, "True, we can't defeat the enemy unless we have weapons comparable to theirs." It was the last gasp of an old argument. Everything that could be said had already been said; every delegate knew both sides to the debate, and every delegate was driven by the same instinct to make a fight to reclaim his lost world. When the vote was counted, a majority of the council favored war. A committee was appointed to make the final disposition of forces and to set the time for the attack. Lanny was not surprised when Gill was named a member of the commitee. On the afternoon following the meeting, Lanny was assigned to a group of traders so he might learn the geography of the skyport before the attack. As the enemy capital on Earth and a tourist attraction, the San Francisco skyport was a miniature replica of an enemy city. Under the dome were tiers of streets and walkways, interwoven in complex patterns, and the battlement spires of luxury hotels, theatres, cabarets, public ouildings. The streets overflowed with a flood of jangling traffic, and the air was filled with the well-to-do riding their de-grav cars in the enviable security of their private capsules. Lanny's overall impression was a place of intolerable noise and glitter. The Almost-men seemed to make a fetish of their machines. They found it necessary to use their clattering vehicles even though their destination might be a building only one tier away. The air under the dome was fetid with the stench of vehicle fuels. The trading area was confined to a small, metal-surfaced square on the lowest level of the city, close to the narrow, neutralized vent through the force-field dome. Tall buildings swarmed above the trading booths, blotting out the sun. Lanny felt boxed in, imprisoned by the high walls, choked by the artificial, filtered air. He sold a satisfactory quota of trade goods to the tourists who had adventured down to the booths. And he dutifully noted the location of the walkway to the power center and the arsenal. But he gave a sigh of relief when his duty was done and he was free to go back across the bridge to the treaty area. He filled his lungs with the crisp, damp air, unsterilized by the fans of the enemy city. How could the Almostmen survive, he wondered, how were they capable of clear-headed thinking, in such seething confusion? In the treaty areas, where men could put their naked feet upon the soil and feel the life-energy of the earth, where men breathed the fresh wind and held sovereignty over their environment -- only there were men really free. Would he trade that for the city walls that blotted out the sun, and the monotonous throbbing of machines? The victor was the slave; the conquered had found the road to liberty. For the first time in his life Lanny understood the paradox. Stated in those terms, what did men actually have to fight for? As he always did when he had a problem, Lanny went to Juan Pendillo. It was late in the afternoon. Already the cooking fires were being lighted on the small rectangles of earth in front of the houses where the older survivors lived. But Pendillo and Dr. Endhart were still inside, packing away the models which Endhart had used to teach his last class for the day. They usually waited for Lanny or Gill to make their night fire, since Pendillo's sons did the work so effortlessly. Tak Laleen was with the teachers. She sat on the only chair in the room, playing abstractly with one of Endhart's teaching tools -- a crude mock-up of the structure of a living energy unit. It was the same sort of learning-toy Lanny himself had been given when he was a child. Lanny burst in on them excitedly. He began to talk at once, trying to put in words the conviction that had come to him as he stood on the bridge. Suddenly the words were gone. In his own mind it was clear enough, but how was he to explain it? How could he tell them it would be self-destruction to capture the city of the Almost-men? 'You wanted to talk to us?" Pendillo prompted him. "It -- it's this vote we've taken for war, father." Lanny glanced at Tak Laleen. His father and Endhart smiled disarmingly. "You can talk quite freely," Endhart said. "Tak Laleen knows the vote has been counted. She knows what it means." "Unarmed men are going to attack the city," the missionary said without expression. "You are very courageous people. But you are certain you will win -- against our ma chines and our energy guns." With a frown, she put aside the model she had been holding. Her face was drawn and tense; there was doubt and fear in her eyes. "Of course we'll take the skyport," Lanny assured her. "That doesn't worry me. It's what happens afterward -- what we do when we have your guns and your machines." Endhart and Pendillo exchanged glances, in subtle understanding. "The city will belong to us," his father said. "Why do we want it? The city is a prison!" The eyes of the elders met again "We need guns to protect ourselves. Haven't you always said that, Lanny? You've heard all the discussions in the council meetings." "But do we, father? Answer me honestly." "You can answer that better than I, my son." T Laleen stood up, wringing her hands. "You will face the forcefield and oir guns -- but you wonder if you need weapons." With an effort she checked the hysterical laughter bubbling in her throat. "My people would say you had gone mad ; but who knows the meaning of madness?" Pendillo took the missionary's hand firmly in his. "She's tired, Lanny. Our ways are still new to her." "And we've had her cooped up in the house too long," Endhart added. Pendillo glanced sharply at his friend. Endhart nodded, "It is time," he said cryptically. Pendillo turned toward his son. "A walk outside would do her good, Lanny." "Is it safe?" "She won't try to escape; you and I will go with her." Pendillo led her toward the door. Her face glowed with hope. She glanced eagerly down the long street, lit by the evening fires. Lanny was sure she was looking for the nearest Chapel of the Triangle, calculating her chances of escape. She was the enemy. What reason did his father or Endhart have to trust her so blindly? At the door Pendillo turned for a moment toward Endhart. "You'll make sure Gill knows?" "At the proper time; leave it to me. "Knows what?" Lanny demanded. "That we may be a little late for dinner," his father answered blandly. He nodded toward Tak Laleen and Lanny understood. Lanny walked on one side of Tak Laleen and slid his arm firmly under hers. She kept running her fingers nervously over his arm. She tripped once, when her foot caught in a shallow hole; her nails tore a deep gash in Lanny's flesh as he reached out to keep her from falling. He healed the wound at once, except for a small area where the germ colony needed exposure to the life-energy of the sun. She looked at his arm. Her lips were trembling; her face was white. "So you can do it, Lanny." For a moment he had forgotten her remarkable inability. "You mean the healing? All men do that; we always have. A rational mind controls the structure and energy of organized matter." "I've listened to Dr. Endhart teaching that to the small children," she replied. "It -- it is difficult to believe." She began to laugh again; waves of hysteria swept her body. "I'm sorry, Lanny. I've thought, sometimes, that I'm losing my mind. We're never really certain of ourselves, are we? Two plus two doesn't have to make four, I suppose ; it's just more convenient when it does." "I could show you how to heal yourself, Tak Laleen." "Ever since I came here I've been learning, Lanny. But it does first. My mind is tied down by everything I already know. I can put my two and two together as ofl;en as I like, and I still come up with four. Any other answer is insanity." Twice, as they walked through the streets, Pendillo took a turn which led toward one of the enemy chapels. Lanny swiftly guided the missionary in another direction. The third time they came upon the Chapel of the Triangle suddenly, and before he could pull Tak Laleen back she broke free and fled toward the glowing Triangle, crying for help in her native tongue. Lanny sprinted after her. Tak Laleen beat with her fists on the metal door. From the air above them came the high whine of a materializing force-field. Capsules swung down upon them. The missionary was swallowed within the church. Lanny and his father were enveloped in a single bubble. It rose on an automatic beam and arched toward the skyport. In panic Lanny glanced down through the opalescent field at the settlement rolling by beneath them, and the choppy water of the bay, turned scarlet by the setting sun. Pendillo leaned calmly against the curved wall of their prison. "She betrayed us!" Lanny cried. "I expected her to, my son." "You -- you knew this would happen?" "A teacher must sometimes contrive a unique -- and possibly painful -- learning situation. It's one of the risks of our profession." "Why, father? She'll tell the Almost-men about the attack on the skyport; she'll tell them -- " Pendillo tapped the curved wall of force. "We're in a tight spot, Lanny. It's up to you to get us out -- without a gun and without any of the enemy machines. All you have to work with are your brains and what we've taught you for the past ished, Lanny -- for all of you who twenty years. I think you can count are the new breed. Now start apon some help from Gill later on. plying what we think you know." He'll have to attack the skyport tonight, without working out all his And Gill won't have any guns,T sphere that held Lanny and either." Juan Pendillo was suspended above "So you and Endhart planned the teeming tiers of skyport streets, this." Enough time, Lanny guessed, for "That's why I insisted on keepthe enemy to question Tak Laleen ing Tak Laleen alive. I thought we and to reach some decision based might need her as -- as a catalyst, upon what she had to tell them. The vote of the resistance council Abruptly the capsule was hauled nished things a little, but on the down. Lanny and his father were whole I think it worked out quite dumped into barred cells buried satisfactorily. Your education is finsomewhere in the bowels of the city. "What will they do with us?" Lanny asked. From the adjoining cell his father answered placidly, "It depends mi T ak Laleen's statement -- and how much of it they believe." "Will they condemn us to readjustment?" "Undoubtedly, unless you solve our problem first -- and these bars seem thoroughly solid to me." Lanny drew in his breath sharply, suddenly afraid. "What's it like, father -- the readjustment?" "No one knows, really. A machine tears your mind apart and puts it together again -- differently." Lanny shivered as he remembered the half-dozen readjustment cases he had seen in the Santa Barbara treaty area -- living shells, with all initiative and individuality drained from their souls. He moved to the barred door of his cell. For a split-second of panic he seized the bars and futilely tried to pry them apart. Slowly edging into his consciousness came a vague awareness of the structural pattern of the energy units in the metal. It was the S#ime extension of his integrated community of cells which he had with his hunting club. His panic vanished; he felt a little ashamed because he had been afraid. It would be no problem to escape. He held the bars and allowed his mind to feel through the pattern of energy organization. The metal was very different from any of the familiar substances Lanny knew, but far less complex because the arrangement was so rigidly disciplined. There were two things that Lanny might do. He could fit the energy imits of his own body past the space intervals of the metaJ -- in effect, passing through the metal barrier. But that would be slow and exacting work. It would require a considerable concentration to move the specialized cells of his body across the metal maze. The second method was easier. As he extended his cerebral integration into the metal, he could rearrange the energy unit pattern. The bars should fragment and fall apart. Lanny was amazed how rapidly the change took place. Before he could adjust the pattern of more than half a dozen energy units, a chain reaction began. Lanny found he had to absorb an enormous flow of superfluous energy to prevent an explosion. As soon as he crossed into the corridor, watching photo-electric cells sent an alarm pulsing into the guard room on the tier above. The metal-walled corridor throbbed with the deafening cry of a siren. Lanny darted toward his father's cell. "Hold the metal and make it over with your mind -- just as we integrate with our clubs. It's the same principal, father." Pendillo shrugged. "I can't, Lanny. I don't know how." Lanny had no time to weigh the significance of what his father said for the scream of the siren stopped and a guard appeared at the head of the corridor. The guard wrapped himself hastily in the shell of a force-field capsule. He fired his energy gun. The knife of flame arched through the corridor and struck Lanny's face. His body reacted instinctively, absorbing and storing part of the charge and reconstructing the rest so that it became a harmless combination of inert gasses. But as the blinding flame splashed bright in Lanny's eyes -- the way it had once before, when he murdered old Barlow -- Lanny's mind faced the traumatic shock of remembering. Lanny had murdered Barlow -- he knew that, now -- murdered him with a blaze of energy which he had stored when he brushed against the force-field capsule surrounding Tak Laleen. It was not the fact of murder that had clamped the strait jacket of forgetfulness on Lanny's mind and allowed him to think Tak Laleen had killed Barlow. He had known, for one split-second, the full maturity of the education Pendillo had given his sons. Known it too soon, with too little preparation. Now he understood why he had felt ashamed, why he'd retreated deliberately from the truth: because he had killed Barlow to resolve an old argument, not to be rid of a traitor. The method of murder had, ironically, given him the answer to Barlow's poison of despair; but because the two had happened simultaneously, the emotional shock of one had affected the other. The bursting charge of energy washed away his absurdly exaggerated sense of guilt. He achieved the mature integration he had lost before; his mind was whole again. The integration was nothing new -- merely a restatement of what Pendillo had taught him, what all the treaty area teachers taught the new children. The mind of man could control the energy structure of matter. Pendillo called that rationality. But matter and energy were synonymous. The teachers had implied that without teaching it directly. A mind that could heal a body wound was also able to control the energy blast from an enemy gun. From his father's cell Lanny heard a stifled groan. He looked back. The bars of the cell had been twisted by the blast; Pendillo was badly hurt. His wounds seemed to be extensive, but Lanny was sure his father would heal himself quickly. Lanny sprang at the guard. The Almost-man had enough courage to hold his ground, still sure of his impregnable machines. He was aiming his energy gun again when Lanny touched the opalescent capsule. That, too, was nothing now; Lanny had found his way into the new world. The field of force was simply energy in another form. Lanny could have reshaped the field, intensified it, or dissolved it as he chose. He shattered the capsule, like a bubble of glass. He smashed the gun aside. The guard stood before him, stripped of his mechanical armor -- a man, facing his enemy as a man. As the guard turned to run, Lanny reached out for him leisurely. Weakly the guard swung his fist at Lanny's face. Lanny laughed and slapped at the ineffectual, white hand. The guard howled and clutched the broken fingers against his mouth. Desperately he lacked at Lanny with his metal-soled boots. Lanny dodged. The unexpected momentum sent the guard reeling and he had no eScicnt capsule to hold him up. He sprawled on the metal floor close to his energy gun. He grasped for the weapon as Lanny leaped toward him. For one brief moment Lanny saw madness film his enemy's eyes. Then the guard began to scream. He thrust the muzzle of the energy gun against his own chest and pressed the firing stud. Lanny turned away from the smoldering heap of charred flesh and went back to his father's cell. He disorganized the energy units of the tormented knot of metal bars and knelt beside Pendillo. Lanny was amazed that his father had made no effort to heal his wounds. Juan was bleeding profusely; his eyes were glazed with pain. Lanny lifted Pendillo tenderly in his arms. "Father! You must begin the healing -- " "I do not know how, Lanny." "All men control their own body cells!" "So you were taught, and what a man believes is true -- for him." Cautiously Lanny extended his energy integration into his father's body. It was something he had never done before with a living man. The weak disorganization of cells frightened him. Clearly Pendillo was telling the truth; he was incapable of ordering his own healing. Then how had he taught his sons so well, if he could not use the technique himself? Hesitantly Lanny released into his father's body some of the energy he had stored. He wasn't sure what the effect would be, but it seemed to help. Pendillo tried to smile ; his eyes became clearer. "Thanks, Lanny. But you can't save me, my son. I've lost too much blood; I have too many internal injuries." "But you could do it for yourself. Father." Lanny shook his head. "I don't understand why -- " "You wouldn't, Lanny. You're Ae new breed." "You say Aat so often." "In my time Aat might have meant a new species -- supermen we created by genetics in a biological laboratory. But we've done more Aan that. You aren't freaks; you're our children in every sense of Ae word. We have made you men; we've taught you how to think." "You deliberately made us as we are?" "Every man who lived before your time was an Almost-man, Lanny. He had your same potential, but he hadn't learned how to use it." "How are we different?" Pendillo was seized with a sudden spasm of coughing; blood trickled from his lips. Once again Lanny released a shock wave of energy into his father's body, and Pendillo's strengA was partially restored. "I will tell you as much as I can," Pendillo promised, but his voice was no longer as clear as it had been. "I don't have much time left. The idea for our new breed of men began at the time of Ae invasion. Lanny, there wasn't much to choose from between our people and the enemy. Our cities were like Aeirs; we were enslaved by machines -- by the technological bric-a-brac of our culture -- as they are. Only our science was different. We had exploited the energy of coal and oil and water-power; we were beginning to accumulate a good deal of data about the basic atomic structure of matter. "But we would have ridiculed any serious consideration of degravitation, or the magnetic energy of a field of force. These were the trappings of our escapist fiction, not of genuine science. We had a more or less closed field allowed to legitimate scientific research; any data beyond it was vigorously ignored. "Then, from nowhere, we were invaded and utterly defeated by an alien people who used the precise laws of science we had scorned. Furthermore, we saw them ridicule our principles as semi-religious rituals of a savage culture. In the invasion less than a tenth of mankind survived. We were herded into the treaty areas, with no government and no real leadership. Some of us had been teachers before the war; the survivors looked to us to preserve the spirit and the ideals of man. "We had to make a selective choice, Lanny. We had no books, no written records, no way to preserve the whole of the past. The teachers in all the treaty areas quickly established contact by courier. The lesson of the invasion had taught us a great deal. Men had been imprisoned by one scientific dogma, which had produced a mechanized and neurotic world. The Ahnost-men were trapped by another that had produced the same end result. "So we had our first objective: to teach our children the supreme dignity, the magnificent godliness, of the rational mind. We didn't tell you what to think -- which had been our mistake in the past -- but simply the vital necessity of rational thought. We taught you that the mind was the integrating factor in the universe; everything else was chaos, without objectivity or direction, until it was controlled by mind. After that, we jammed your brains with data from every field of knowledge that had ever been explored by man. That's why we interchanged couriers so frequently. In our world we had been specialists; we had to share the facts among ourselves so the new breed might have them all." Far away they heard the dull thunder of an explosion. Lanny's head jerked up. Pendillo coughed up blood again, but there was a satisfied smile on his lips. "That will be Gill and the boys from the treaty area," he sighed. "Arriving right on schedule. We've forced them to attack the city without weapons; to survive, they'll have to make the same mental reintegration that you did, Lanny." "How could you have been so sure, father, that we would be able to -- to handle the matter-energy imits the way we do?" "We weren't, my son. We were sure of nothing. We only knew that you were the first generation whose minds had been set completely free. Nobody had done any of your thinking for you. If any man is equipped to solve problems, you are -- you of the new breed.' "But why couldn't you learn the same techniques yourselves? Why can't you save yourself now, father?" "Because we belong in the old world. Because the technique is only an application of the data you know, Lanny ; that is something you have worked out for yourselves. We could give you the theory; we were incapable of following it through your minds." Pendillo gasped painfully for breath. He clos his hand over his son's. "The old survivors are still imprisoned by beliefs carried over from the world we lost. We teach, Lanny, but we cannot believe as you do, even when we see our own children -- our own sons -- His voice trailed away, and he slumped against Lanns chest. A series of explosions rocked the metal walls; Pendillo opened his eyes again. His dying whisper was so soft, so twisted by pain, the words were almost inaudible. "One more thing, son. We did more -- more than we thought. Don't retreat to our world; make your own. Without the machines and the city walls and the uproar -- " Juan Pendillo grasped his son's hand. His fingers quivered for a moment of agony. And then he died. L anny stumbled away from the cell, his eyes dim with tears. The repetitive explosions continued outside in the domed city. Lanny discovered the origin of the sound when he made his way up the incline to the upper level. The parade of gigantic freight spheres was swinging in from the void of night, but Ae port machines, which handled the landings, were idle. The spheres were crashing, one upon the other, into the field just beyond the city. From disengaged, plmble tubes, jerking with the spasmodic torment of mechanical chaos, the raw materials plundered from the earth poured out upon the ruin. Fire licked at the wreckage, probing hungrily toward the city of the Almost-men. Lanny ran through die deserted guard rooms. Beyond the walls he heard a babble of panic on the city streets. The first exit that he found led up to the second level, where no man had ever been. He emerged on an ornate balcony, which overlooked the square where the trading booths stood. The force dome that had sheltered the city was gone. Lanny could look up and see the stars -- and the endless parade of glowing freight spheres descending toward the earth. The air was clean, cold and wet with the sea mist. In a sense the depressing, stifling city he had seen that afternoon was already gone -- except for the bleak walls and the clatter of machine sounds. And, in the agony of its death, the city noise had become the scream of mechanized madness. A seething mass of vehicles choked every tier, fighting for space, grinding each other into rubble. Vehicles careened from the upper roads and plunged into the mass beneath. At first it seemed a panic of machines. The people were trivial incidentals -- bits of fluff which had been unfortunate enough to get in the way of the turning wheels. Then Lanny saw the walkaways, as crowded as the roads. A mass of humanity spewed through the doors of the luxury hotels, like run-off streams swelling the floodtide of a swollen river. Where were the Almost-men going? How could they escape? They had given their will and initiative to their machines; they could do nothing to help themselves. Lanny saw an occasional opalescent bubble rise in the air. But inevitably, before it could move beyond the city, a force of blazing energy shot up from the lowest tier and brought the capsule down. Here and there in the darkness Lanny saw the furious blast of an energy gun, probing futilely into the chaos. As the fire rose higher in the port wreckage, Lanny saw men fighting on the lower tier. They held the bridge and the trading square and they had taken the power center, which explained why the city was dark and why the force dome was gone. But they were still fighting to take the arsenal. A squad of guards held them off with energy guns ; the men fought back from the darkness with weapons they had captured elsewhere. Even now they hadn't discovered the truth; they still feared the enemy weapons. They still thought they must have guns of their own -- machines of their own -- in order to be free. Build your own world, Pendillo had said; don't go back to ours. Lanny pushed through the throng on the walkway, trying to find an incline to the lower tier. Once or twice people in the mob saw him, in the shuddering light reflected by the energy guns, and recognized him as a man -- a, halfnaked, black-bearded savage. They screamed in terror. This was the hour of man's revenge, yet Lanny felt an inexpressible shame and sadness. Was this the way man's cities had died a generation ago, in a discord of mechanical sound, without courage and without dignity? At last he found the incline to the lower level. It was jammed with a mass of Almost-men, fighting and clawing their way down so they might flee into the hunting preserve beyond the city. The tide swept Lanny with it. At the foot of the incline he circled the arsenal to join the men, still confined in the trading square. Gill was directing the fire of his men as they inched forward. He clapped Lanny on the back, grinning broadly. "I knew you'd get out, Lan. Is Juan all right?" "He's dead. Gill. He was wounded and he didn't know how to heal himself." "He had to know, Lanny; he taught us." "They all taught us. They made us -- " Lanny's voice choked a little as he used his father's familiar phrase. " -- a new breed. Gill, we're acting like fools; we're fighting for something we don't want or need." "We have to have weapons, Lan." "We need nothing but what we've been taught. The mind interprets and commands the chaos of the universe. Matter and energy are identical." Lanny turned and walked, erect and unafraid, toward the arsenal. The energy fire from the guards' guns struck him and exploded. He reorganized the pattern into harmless components and stood waiting for the charge to die away. In a moment Gill was beside him, beaming with imderstanding as he met and transformed a second blast from the guns. "Of course matter and energy are the same!" he cried. "It should have been obvious to us. We have been prisoners twenty years for nothing." "We needed those twenty years to discover our new world. We have only finished our education tonight." As a third blast of energy came from the arsenal, other men slid out of the darkness and faced the guns. Lanny and Gill walked away, ignoring the screaming machines and the stabbing knives of fire. "Yesterday," Gill said slowly, "if I had known that I could direct a flow of energy just as easily as I integrate with my hunting club, I would have stood here cheerfully and slaughtered the Almost-men, just to watch them die. Now, I'm sorry for them." "There's no reason why they must all die in panic. Gill. Isn't there some way -- " Behind them they heard a burst of ragged cheering. The arsenal guards, having seen their weapons fail, had deserted their posts and fled. Men stormed into the building, shattering the metal doors by reorganizing the energy structure. Slowly they wheeled out the great machines -- the symbols of enemy power. "We fought for this," one of the men said. "And now we have no use for them." Gill called a meeting of the resistance coimcil in the deserted trading square, while the city around them throbbed in the chaos of disintegration. The men were entirely aware of the problem created by their liberation. The new breed was free, on the threshhold of a new and imexplored world. They could carry the message to other treaty areas; they could show other men the final lesson in reorientation. That much was simple. But what became of the enemy? "It would be absurd to kill them all," Gill said. He added with unconscious irony, "After all, they do know how to think on their own restricted level. They might be able, someday, to learn how to become civilized men." "The worst of it," one of the others pointed out, "is that their home world is bound to know something's wrong. The delivery of resources has already been interrupted. They will try to reconquer us. It doesn't matter, particularly, but it might become a little tiresome after a while." "Ever since I understood how this would end," Lanny said, "I've been wondering if we couldn't work out some way for them to keep the skyports just as they are. Let the Almost-men have our resources. They need them ; we don't." The council agreed to this with no debate. Lanny was delegated to find someone in authority in the skyport and offer him such a treaty. Lanny asked Gill to go with him. The others split into two groups, one to put out the fires and clear away the port wreckage; the second to herd the enemy refugees together in the game preserve and protect them from the animals. Lanny and Gill pushed through the mob toward the upper levels of the city. The crowd had thinned considerably as more and more of the enemy fled into the forest. The brothers, barefoot giants, had an entirely unconscious arrogance in their stride. They passed the rows of luxury hotels and entered the government building. Here, apparently, there was an emergency source of power, for the corridor tubes glowed dimly with a sick, blue light. Room after room the brothers entered; they found no one -- nothing but the disorderly debris of haste and panic. Methodically they worked their way to the top floor of the building. In a wing beyond the courtroom were the private quarters of the planetary governor. He sat waiting for them in his glass-paneled office overlooking the tiers of the city. He was a tall man, slightly stooped by age. He had put on the full, formal uniform of his office -- a green plastic, ornamented wiA a scarlet filagree and a chest stripe of jeweled medals. He was behind his desk with the wall behind him open upon the sky. "I expected a stampeding herd," he said. "You knew we were coming?" Lanny asked. "It was obvious you'd try to force us to sign a new treaty." "Call it a working agreement," Gill suggested. "We intend to let you keep the -- " "You have panicked the city by taking advantage of our kindness. But you won't pull this stunt again; I've already requested a stronger occupation force from parliament." The governor stood up; he held an energy gun in his hand. "This frightens you, doesn't it? You should have expected one of us to keep a level head. I've handled savages before. You're very clever in creating believable illusions, particularly when there seems to be some religious significance. I should have known it was a trick when you sent that addle-witted missionary back to us." "Tak Laleen?" "Of course none of my men tell me what's going on until it's too late. They took her to the Triangle first. She talked to the priests, and they filled the city with all sorts of weird rumors about men who could control the energy pattern of matter." The governor's lip curled; he nodded toward a side door. "She's here now, under house arrest. She'll be expelled from the territory on the first ship out after the port is reopened." "She's wasn't lying," Laimy said. "She understood more than we did ourselves. Maybe Juan told her -- The governor laughed and motioned with his gun. "Will you join her, or do you want to force me to spoil your pretty illusion?" Gill walked unhurriedly toward the desk. "You must listen to us. Fire the gun, if you insist on that much proof. We want to save your world, not destroy it." The governor backed toward the open wall panel. "Stand where you are, or Til fire!" "Just give us a chance to explain -- "The whole business is drivel. Superstitious nonsense. No man can violate the established laws of science." "Why not, since men made die laws originally?" The shell of dignity in the governor's manner began to crack away, revealing the naked hysteria that lay beneath. Gill moved again. The governor punched the firing stud of his energy gun. The fire lashed harmlessly at Gill's chest "It's a lie!" the governor screamed. He fired the gun again at Lanny; then at Gill. His mouth quivered with terror. He was an intelligent man; he looked upon the evidence of a fact that overturned everything he believed. In the clamor of a dying city, still throbbing far below his open wall panel, he heard the testimony of the same discord. He lost his rational world in the chaos, and he hadn't the ability to find another. For a moment the governor stood looking at the half-naked giants he had been unable to kill. Then he flimg the weapon away and leaped through the open panel into the mechanical clatter of the dying city. "Once I wouldn't have cared," Gill told his brother. "Now I do. Lanny, must we destroy their world in spite of ourselves?" They heard a faint voice behind them. "Not all of us, Gill." The brothers turned. They saw Tak Laleen, dressed again in the white uniform of the missionary. She came slowly through the metal panel of a door. "You see, it is possible for us to learn," she said when she stood within the room. "I have." "Then all your people -- "Not all of them. A few, if they're fortunate." "You did it, Tak Laleen; most of our older survivors haven't." "They watched you grow up. The change was so gradual, they weren't aware of it. I fell into your hands at the moment when you were yourselves discovering your potential capabilities. I followed the three of you when you ran away from the sphere police in Santa Barbara. One of you had touched my force-field capsule and drained away its power. I had to know how you did it. By intuition I guessed something very close to the truth, but even so it could have unhinged my mind if it hadn't been for Juan Pendillo. He taught me what he had taught you -- a new point of view, a new way of looking at the world. He was so gentle and so patient, so easy to understand." "And after all that, you ran away from the skyport and betrayed him." "It was a put up job." She smiled. "Juan and I worked it out together. He wanted to force the city guards to attack the treaty area; but, if my people refused to believe what I told them, at least Gill would try to rescue his father and Lanny. We had to make the conflict begin before you were armed. If you won by using a machine, you might put your faith in machines again instead of yourselves. It was a risk for Juan and myself, but more so for you. No one really knew what you might be able to do, or what your ultimate limitations were." "There are none," Gill said. "I know that now, because I've made the reorientation myself. I didn't then. The rational mind is the only integrating factor in the chaos of the universe -- Juan told me that. It is literally true. Mind creates the universe by interpreting it." She put her hand in Lanny's and looked up at the stars patterning the void of night. "I wish I might say that to my people and have them understand; but the clatter of our machines closes us in. Our world will die in violence and madness, the way the skyport died tonight. We may be able to help the survivors afterward; we can do nothing now." "But we must do it now," Lanny persisted stubbornly. "We don't want revenge, Tak Laleen; we've outgrown our reason for that." "Can you teach my people any differently than you learned yourself? It took an invasion and twenty years of imprisonment before you were able to break free from your old patterns of thinking." "But you did it in a day." "In the beginning, your teachers didn't know what their goal was; they only knew they had a problem and it had to be solved. I came in at the end, when their job was nearly finished and they were pretty sure where they were headed. That's why it was so easy for me." "And your world does that, too." Gill fingered his lip. "The trouble is, Lanny, it isn't simply a matter of giving them the facts. To us they are obvious, but you saw what happened to the governor. How can we make a man believe a new truth, when it means giving up all the science he has always believed?" "We failed with the governor because we threw the end result in his face without giving him a logical reason to accept it." Tak Laleen shook her head. "And so we're back where we started. We have to let my world fall apart before we can save it." She moved impatiently toward the door. "This building is a tomb. I want to walk on the soil and smell the wind and taste the energy of the earth." In an uncomfortable silence they left the government building. GiU integrated with the power in the lift, and they rode the elevator to the ground level. As the cage slid past the empty floors. Gill broke the silence abruptly. "If all we want is to prevent chaos on your world, Tak Laleen, it won't be hard. We'll just go through with the treaty we intended to offer to the governor. We can put things back as they were and go on delivering resources to the Almost-men. The only people who know the truth will be our prisoners. We can keep them out of sight and ourselves play at being Almostmen to satisfy any tourists who come to the skyport." "We'll have to do that for a while, until we work out something better; but it's only a stopgap. We have a problem," Lanny said doggedly. "We know it can be solved, because it has been for ourselves and for Tak Laleen. All we have to find is the method." "Learning begins with a need," the missionary said. "For you, it was twenty years of despair: invasion, humiliation, surrender. Your old ideas didn't work. You either had to accept status as second-raters or work out a new way of thinking. As for me -- " She shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose I couldn't help myself. I did try to run away, remember. I tried every possible answer in terms of our logic first. I even thought, for a while, that Lanny was a robot. Anything but the truth." Gill asked, "When did you first begin to imderstand? What haplieve the truth?" "It was an accumulation of many things, I suppose." "That isn't specific enough. There must have been one instant what you believed and start learning something new." "I don't know when it was." They left the government building and walked through the lower courtyards of the city. Groups of Almost-men were being herded back into the city from the game preserve. They clung together, hushed and terrified. The city lights were in working order once more and the flashing colors turned their faces into gargoyle masks. Three guards, in tom and bloodstained imiforms, stood looking at the machines which men had hauled out of the arsenal. Suddenly one of the soldiers began to kick at an abandoned gun, screaming in fury while tears of rage welled from his eyes. Lanny turned away. It was painfully embarrassing to watch the dissolution of a human personality, even on the relatively immature level which the machine culture of the Almost-men had achieved. But as Tak Laleen watched the spectacle of childish rage, sudden hope blazed in her eyes. She grasped Lanns arm. "He's blaming the machine for our defeat," she said. "Now I remember what happened to me; now I know! When you were mnning away from Santa Maria, Lanny, you fired an energy gun at my sphere. It destroyed the forcefield and I fell out of the port. I was terrified -- not so much of you, but because my machine had failed. All night while I lay in the launch, I faced that awful nightmare. For the first time in my life, I began to doubt the system I had trusted. I lost faith in my own world. I felt a need for something else." Lanny repeated slowly, "Loss of faith in the status quo -- "Could we duplicate that for all your people, Tak Laleen?" Gill asked doubtfully. "Yes, I'm sure we could, Gill. We have a clue ; we know what has to be done. And we have an experimental laboratory." The missionary nodded toward the mob of cringing Almost-men coming in from the preserve. "We have a city of people, disorganized by panic, with their faith in the machine already shattered. While we teach these people how to make the reorientation, we'll learn the methods that will work most effectively with my world." They left the city and began to cross the bridge toward the treaty area. Tak Laleen passed her arms through theirs. She said, with sorrow in her voice, "No matter what we do, no matter how carefully we try to cushion the panic, we still have no way of being entirely sure of the results. Something that works with our prisoners or with us might destroy my world; it could send a planet into mass paranoia." "That risk is implied in all learning, Tak Laleen," Lanny answered. "We can never escape it. I'm not sure we ought to try. The individual who lives in a closed world of absolutes -- shut in by prison walls of his own mind -- is already insane. The sudden development of a new idea simply makes the condition apparent." "In a sense," Gill added, "there is no such thing as a teacher. There are people who expose us to data and try to demonstrate some techniques we can use, but any learning that goes on must come from within ourselves." "We will develop the most effective method we can," Lanny said. "Then we will apply it to your world, Tak Laleen. The rest is up to them. That's as it should be -- as it must be." Arm in arm they crossed the bridge -- two men and a missionary from an alien world. They had been enemies, but during a night of chaos and death they had learned to become men -- the first men to catch the vision of the new world of the mind. Each of them was soberly aware that the discovery was not an end, but a beginning. And they faced that beginning with neither fear nor regret, because they had the confidence that comes of maturity. The unknown was not a godpower or a devil-power, but a problem to be solved by the skill of a rational mind.    Only an expert in the vast literature of science can tell whether an alleged discovery is new, only critical repetition can establish its truth, and time one can measure its worth. -- Ernest Borek Doing a thing... is very different from knowing how and why you do it. Only as we learn the reasons why, does real progress begin; and for these reasons we must look to science as developed by research. -- Dr, Arthur Dehon Little Beautiful Karen, who had fled the shackles of Earth, once had written: "We shall never leave Earth as long as we compute escape velocity in miles per hour... " Guildenstern: Prison my lord? Hamlet: Denmark's a prison, Rosencrantz: Then is the world one, Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o the worst, Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord, Hamlet: Why, then, t is none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. the Misseros dn Gaedo region of Altair #. There were little lakes and big lakes and middle-sized lakes scattered like sapphire dewdrops over a tableland verdant with forest. Some of the lakes had small green islands in them and it was on one of these islands that Larry saw the second native village. He brought the little flier down, circling several times before he deposited it gently on the water. Then he retracted the swallow-wings and started taxiing toward the shore. He had a feeling that this, surely, was the right place. It had the right look -- the odd, pathetic aspect all the other places had had in one way or another. The pink, spherical houses, perched absurdly on gangling stilts, came right down to the water's edge, and the village street debouched on the beach. If you could call the meandering aisle between Illustrated by Ed Emsh the houses a street In any event it sufficed for one, and it was filled now with the people of the village. They came down to the lake to greet him. The quaint people, the grown-up little boy and girl people who, in the premeditated phrasecogy of the Altair travelogue, "played at being adults in their simple paradise of fish and fruits and little isosceles triangles of vegetable gardens." Larry eased the flier between two cluttered fishing rafts, running its prow into the soft beach sand. He locked the controls and climbed out. The village chief walked down to the waters edge to receive him. "Welcome to my country," the chief said in standard Galactia, He bowed ceremoniously. In the eyes of his people he was far from yoimg, but in Larrs eyes he was a little boy with a fat man's body. He had a large cherubic face -- a small pink mouffi, chubby beardless cheeks, and enormous blue eyes. His hair was light brown, and there was a startling cowlick protruding over his forehead like the visor of a baseball cap. He was clad, as were all his subjects, in a gaudy thigh-length skirt, and he wore a fresh lei of iliao flowers around his neck. Larry imitated the bow, feeling ludicrous. "Thank you," he said. He surveyed the crowded street, looking over the chiefs shoulder. But all he saw were baby faces and rotund bodies, and no familiar face with delicate features and haunted blue eyes, no graceful shoulders... But that didn't necessarily prove that this was the wrong village. Karen didn't care for crowds, not even crowds that gathered to welcome her own husband. If he knew her at all she had probably fled into the forest the moment she had seen the approaching flier and now was sitting by some quiet stream, composing introvert verse... The chief had begun his wellrehearsed welcome speech. " -- for the duration of your visit," he was saying, "let my country be your countiy. Let my subjects be your subjects, and I, the chief, shall be your subject also -- " The traditional snowjob, Larry thought. To how many hungry-eyed tourists had he already delivered it? Tourists with blue lakes in their eyes and with little office cubicles crammed into the backs of dieir minds. If I were a tourist I'll bet it would sound terrific to me, too, he thought. I'll bet when he came to the part about the rent it wouldn't even disillusion me, that even then I'd be too blind to see the credit signs in his baby-blue eyes. But tourists didn't mind being duped. They came to the Misseros dn Gaedo region to fish and to hunt, to relax in an uncomplicated milieu; they didn't come to look for their wives. They'd had sense enough to marry emotionally stable women. Stolid women, unimaginative women -- "There is, of course," the chief said, "a small fee which we are required to ask for our hospitality. Probably you are familiar with the ruling of the Altair council in this respect. Having to ask payment for services which, in happier circumstances, I would gladly render free, is a source of extreme humiliation to me, but I have no choice." Larry already had his credit book in his hand. "I don't know exactly how long I'll be here," he said. "Perhaps a week -- " The chiefs blue eyes were guileless. "Our weekly rate is fifty credits," he said. "Payable in advance." The robber! Larry thought, tearing out five crisp tens. The first village had only asked thirty-five, anc that had been exorbitant enough. He hadn't had to pay then, though. One glance around had told him Karen wasn't there. Somehow, after years of weary searching and finding, you knew instinctively where to look; you sensed just ihe kind of mise en seine that would appeal to her. You could tell by the expressions on the people's faces, by the architecture of the houses, by the contour of the land. One glance had been enough and he had reentered the flier and lifted swiftly above the disappointed natives, and presently he had found this village. And this village looked right, this village could be the one -- And if it was, fifty credits was certainly cheap enough, he rationalized. Finding Karen was worth more than fifty credits any day. He handed the five tens to the chief and returned to the flier for his kit. By the time he returned to the beach the chief had already selected a "companion" for him and was walking back up the village street. The crowd, its duty done, was listlessly dispersing. Larry's "companion" was a buxom doll of a girl with a rosebud mouth, big blue eyes, and frizzly straw-colored hair. She took his kit and led the way up the street. There was a shed-like structure that resembled a primitive warehouse standing on the beach. But Larry knew it wasn't a warehouse, and when they passed it he identified the muffled sound that emanated from its interior as the smooth hum of a modem generator. He identified the vine-like cables that overhung the street for what they really were too -- electric wires. Multi-colored honeysuckle wound riotously around the stilts of the houses, but looking closely he saw the glint, here and there, of a copper pipe, and he knew that primitive Aough the houses might be in outward respects they at least had running water and other modem conveniences. They also contained some form of television receivers. The animal shapes of the antennae on their rooftops might convince the ordinary tourist that all he was seeing was a kind of cultural religious symbol, but Larry wasn't an ordinary tourist. He wondered cynically what ancient vintage of film entertainment the Interstellar Mass Media Board had alloted Altair #. Then he saw a group of native children playing in the nearby forest and he realized the nature of the game they were engaged in. The hoary "bang-bang" of the pre-space "caters" resounded incongruously among the idyllic trees as baby faced cowboys loped ecstatically about on imaginary steeds. Hopalong Cassidy rides again, Larry thought, and marveled at his own apostasy. The trouble with him was that he had seen too many converted cultures. Searching for Karen on so many out-of-the-way planets had made him hypercritical, in spite of himself, of the repetitious puppet dances of inferior civilizations. And when the dance was deliberately concealed behind simple, non-technological exteriors in order to lure vacationists from Earth and the other technologically advanced planets, there was something snide about it, something obscene... His "companion" had halted before one of the houses and was regarding him with mundane babyblue eyes. He concluded that it was the one the chief had assigned him. It , was no different from the other houses except that it really was what it purported to be : there were no water pipes hidden in its honeysuckle and the metallic animal design on its rooftop was just that. "You is mayhap tired?" the girl asked in pidgin Galactia. Larry was more than tired. He was exhausted. It had been more than twenty standard hours since he had left the Altair # consulate. But he shook his head. He took his kit from the girl, climbed high enough on the climbing pole so that he could shove it through the door, then returned to the street. He pulled his credit book from his pocket and riffled its crisp pages. "Am looking for Earth lady, beautiful Earth lady," he said. "You have mayhap seen?" The blue eyes were mesmerized by the green blur of the pages. "Beautiful Earth lady? How is lady look?" "Lady very very beautiful." He had trouble keeping his voice steady. "Have hair like sun, eyes like sky. Like to walk in woods. Very much like to walk in woods -- " He paused. The big blue eyes had risen from the credit book. They were filled with wonderment first, and then disbelief. Finally the disbelief faded and amusement took its place. A grimy hand covered the rosebud mouth, stifling a giggle. Larry felt like slapping her. He controlled himself with an effort and riffled the credit book again. "You have seen lady?" "Have seen many times. Crazy lady. Walk in woods, look at flowers, birds. Make funny marks in wrong color credit book." Larry sighed. It was the right place all right. There hadn't really been any doubt in his mind since the moment he had first glimpsed the village. "Where lady now?" "Not know. Think mayhap live at Mission. Not see many days now." "Where Mission?" "Mission on big hill, center of island." Keeping one blue eye on the credit book, she pointed up the street to where the houses petered out into the forest. "Walk through woods, come to creek. Follow creek back." Larry nodded. Then, reluctantly, he tore a five from the book and laid it on the outstretched hand that suddenly appeared before him. "Here," he said, "go buy yourself some electrical appliances." He turned abruptly and started up the path that led through the woods to the Mission beyond. charming little trees, sudden clearings filled with unexpected flowers, birds like winged blius of color... Larry W#dked ong slowly, bending his head sometimes to avoid the low branches of the trees. It was almost impossible not to picture her strolling dreamily through the enchanted aisles, curling up in some sequestered bower to jot down wisps of verse in the little notebook she always carried -- And such verse! Larry shook his head. He had never imderstood it and he never would. Not that he hadn't tried. But how could you understand outrageous outpourings like --  -- the cold touch of doubt upon you in the evening and the falling to Earth of stars, each burning infinitesimally in the little night, abruptly microcosmic, its hauteur gone, a pitiful cinder beneath the scuffed shoes of man... or -- we have converted the souls of mountains into shining ships, and yet we cannot leave Earth; we shall never leave Earth as long as we compute escape velocity in miles per hours... Nonsense, Larry thought. Utter nonsense. Like all the rest of her poetry. And yet, illogically, an obscure publishing house had brought out a collection of her most aberrant verse imder the title of The Prisoners of Earth. Nor had they stopped wiA one collection. A year later another had appeared. Equations. Larry bent back an offending low branch until it snapped. Equations! The book had turned out to be even more esoteric than The Prisoners of Earth had been. At least The Prisoners had resembled poetry, even though not a single one of its lines had rhymed. Equations didn't resemble anything at all. Mass Man" for instance -- Homo Sapiens Technological Culture equals Mass Man and then there was the one on "Earth" -- Earth x # equals Earth and the one on "Escape Velocity" -- Emotional Escape Velocity Maturity ) Technological Progress The trees thinned out and he foimd himself on the green shoulder of a sparkling brook. He paused, staring down into the dancing water, the equations fading from his mind. There were always brooks in the milieus Karen chose when she ran away -- brooks and trees and meadows, lakes and gentle hills. Suddenly he had the feeling that he was reenacting an old, old scene out of an old, old play. The name of the play was Karen and its basic plot was girl-leaves-boy, boy-looksfor-and-finds-girl. They had performed the play in so many places, against so many backgrounds... The first place had been the Tetkov reservation of Alpha Centauri #, and the back ground had consisted of lazy rivers winding among tumbled hills and green traceries of trees in serpentine valleys. Karen had joined the Tetkov nomads in that performance, and Larry had found her, after weary, heart-breaking months, creditless and starving in a little Tetkov town. He had taken her back to Earth, and after several months he began to think that one experience in "going native" had permanently cured her of her Weltschmerz. She was docile, and she smiled at the right times and laughed when she was supposed to, and she no longer made unintelligible remarks when galactic civilization was the topic of conversation. He even began to believe that she was going to be worth the five thousand credits he had paid her father for her after all. And then she had run away and the play had begun all over again. The background for that performance had been Heaven, the third moon of Sirius #. Heaven was the twenty-third psalm minus the valley of the shadow of death. It was a place of green pastures and still waters. It was blue sky and gentle terrain and soft winds breathing out of the south from morning till night, and a big safe night that was only a shade less bright than day. When he finally found her Karen was living on the reservation which the Earth Supreme Council had set aside for the natives. She was a shepherdess. She was wearing a shining white robe and hand-made native sandals, and she was holding a primitive shepherd's staff. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and when he saw her he wanted to cry. And then he had seen the disillusionment in her eyes, the pain; and for the first time he had noticed the bleak steel ribs of the new Interstellar Trade Building rising in the distance -- The dancing water threw flecks of simlight into his eyes and Larry turned away. He began walking along the green shoulder of the bank, the ground rising slowly beneath his feet. The grass was kneedeep and infiltrated with flowers; birds blurred from little tree to little tree. He had made up his mind on Heaven that there weren't going to be any more performances, but there had been many many more. He thought of them grimly, and thought too of the interludes between when Karen had rationalized her brief periods of conventional behavior by writing her paradoxical poetry. And for the hundredth time he wondered why he bothered, why he didn't let her go, let her become whatever it was that she wanted to become, let her, in her own words --  -- Break free from all the gaudy glittering things that constitute the circumstance of man, and become the essence of noU wanting... The forest, typical of all Karen forests, end abruptly, and a Karen-type hill raised its lovely green brow into the blue sky. On top of the hill the white buildings of the Mission gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Larry climbed the hill slowly, wading in the tall grass. When he reached the outlying buildings and saw the new-turned grave in the little burial lot he knew, without knowing why or how he knew, that the basic plot of the play Karen had finally varied, and that the curtain this time, had fallen irrevocably. out of the chapel while Larry was standing by the grave. She walked over and stood beside him. She was old and thin, with faded eyes set deep beneath sharp dark brows. She wore the traditional golden cape about her shoulders, and the sacred U-# Emblem, symbol of the Galactic Church, glittered on her forehead. "She was your wife?" she asked. "Yes," Larry said. There was a vast emptiness building up beyond the Misseros dn Gaedo horizon, threatening to move in over the forests and the blue lakes. "She mentioned you several times. She seemed to be expecting you." "How did she die?" "She could have stayed here, but she wouldn't." The Mission Mother snifled. "She could have worked for her food and her lodging. But she was too lazy. All she wanted to do was wander in the forest, to dream -- " "Never mind all that," Larry said. "How did she die?" "She died of starvation. She lived in the village when she first came. Then, when her credits were gone, she liv in the forest. Naturally the natives refused to feed her when she could no longer pay." The Mission Mother looked at Larry closely. "You certainly can't blame them for that, can you?" "No, of course not," Larry said. The emptiness had begun to move in. He felt the first cold breath of it. "She didn't even blame them herself. Just before she died I heard her say, 'Father forgive them --  I don't know why she asked her father to forgive them though." Larry shook his head. He looked down at the grave again. There were fresh forest flowers covering it. "The flowers are beautiful," he said. He looked at the Mission Mother. "Did you put them there?" Two raddled spots of red appeared on the Mission Mother's thin cheeks. The U-# atom glittered harshly. "Yes .  . It isn't customary but -- " She dropped her eyes, stared at the grave. "I don't know why she wouldn't stay at the Mission," she said. "She could have worked for her food. She wouldn't have had to work hard. I don't know why she wouldn't. I don't know why she was so fascinated by the forest -- "Karen wasn't like us," Larry said. He looked over the Mission Mother's head at the metallic sphere of the chapel, at the big atom-emblem poised above it like the hard bright heart of a star. He wondered if Karen minded being buried in what she would have called a heathen churchyard. She had never believed in the Galactic Church. She had belonged to some silly religious sect that dated from before the dark ages of Earth, a dying sect that worshipped an impossible God who advocated throwing away credits. He decided that the religious aspect of the churchyard wasn't important. What was important was the green hill on which it stood, the matchless blue sky above it, and the forest and the lakes rolling away into the soft distances. Certainly, Karen belonged anywhere at all, she belonged here... The emptiness was very close now, and suddenly he knew that he couldn't face it. Not yet. He lowered his gaze to the Mission Mother... "Thank you for trying to help her," he said, and he was shocked to see that there were tears in her faded eyes. He turned away quickly and began walking down the hill. He walked down the hill and into the forest, the emptiness just behind him. He walked through the forest rapidly, following the dancing brook till he glimpsed the pink spherical houses through the foliage. He stopped at the house that the chief had assigned him and retrieved his kit, and then he continued on down the village street, the emptiness close at his heels. When he was halfway down the street the chief came running up behind him calling, "Wait! Wait!" Larry paused, and that was when the emptiness caught up to him. The chief was breathing hard. His baby face was red and his cowlick protruded belligerently. He looked like a kid playing baseball confronting an umpire who had just called a "ball" a "strike." "You did not tell me beautiful Earth lady is your wife," he panted. "She owes for one day's rent, and you must pay." Then he lapsed into one of the memorized sentences of his welcome speech: "Having to ask payment for services which in happier circumstances I would gladly render free -- The emptiness was all around Larry now. The numbing truth that he could never again find Karen, no matter where he looked, no matter how long he looked, overcame him; and he realized that searching for her had subtly become his raison d'etre, that without her to search for, to hope for, his life had no purpose, no meaning whatsoever. The shock of his loss sent his values tumbling, and shining like a sword through the chaos of what once had been an impregnable structure came the clear cold thought -- They let her die. They puttered about, playing with the outdated gadgets we sold them counting the credits we taught them to value, and they would not even throw her a crust of bread -- " -- is a source of extreme humiliation to me," the chief concluded, "but I have no choice." Larry's head was throbbing. He pulled his credit book out slowly. He handed it to the chief. Then he swung hard. The chief sank to his knees, spitting baby teeth and blood. Larry turned and resumed walking down the street. He walked slowly. He wanted the rest of the ( It was natural that Dee refuse. Taking things by force wasnt in his framework. And maybe it was well -- for Man can sometimes learn good, even from a robot... BY T here was nothing special about the flight -- as far as the public knew. It was only that the third contact party to Ganymede had come back. But the crowds were massed so thickly that it took Dee nearly half an hour to cover the five hundred yards to the edge of the field. The Space Department could easily have broken its own rules and dropped a copter to pick Dee up, but they chose not to. That action might have started rumors that something important was in train. The Space Department had acquired, during a century of failure, a reflex abhorrence to such rumors. In a way the density and exuberance of the present crowds bore witness to that century of thwarted effort and deferred hope. It was four years now since Mankind had broken through -- or half-through the space barrier -- yet still the enthusiasm ran at flood. But Dee and his fellows were not only instruments of achievement; they were symbols of hope for the future. In Dee and his fellows, men saw the image of their own selves to be. The copter that awaited him was an ordinary yellow civilian one, but the pilot was equipped with an SD authority which he showed to Dee with all the reverence of an acolyte baring a sacred relic. He ushered his passenger into the tiny cushioned cabin with a deference that made Dee feel uncomfortable. And when they grounded on the roof of the SD building he refused the fare that Dee offered. "Go on, please take it," Dee inIllustratd by Kelly Freas sisted. "Our kind doesn't have container. "I'm afraid I haven't, much use for money, really." I'm sorry." But the pilot lifted a beefy hand. But the man was diving at some"No sir. Carrying you is honor thing that had fluttered from the enough. First time I ever carried container. a real live -- " he coughed quickly -- "Is this real Ganymedean?" he "a real spaceman. Course, if you've said excitedly, got some little souvenir -- justapebDee scrutinized it, "No, that's a ble maybe, a real bit of Ganymede, piece of Martian canal grass. Why, my kid'd go crazy." I must have been carrying that Dee rummaged obligingly in his round for two years or more." "I can have it?" "Why, of course." Quickly, as if fearful of Dec's changing his mind, the pilot tucked the withered scrap of grass into the billfold, hopped into his cab and took off, leaving Dee shaking his head at a scale of values which he could never quite understand. Inside, the Space Department's anxiety was at the boil. An attendant gave Dee the curtest of greetings, then hustled him to the inner temple, the Board Room. Dee was surprised to see who was waiting for him. Jacques was ffiere, naturally. So was Floyd, chief of SD. But the dozen other faces were those of the top members of the World Council. So it was that important? For a moment Dee had misgivings. Jacques smiled and waved to him. Dee, constrained by the situation, bowed stiffly in brief salute and made his way to the place at the table indicated for him. Jacques rose for a moment. "This, gentlemen, is Dee, leader of the Ganymedean expeditions and the oldest of our robots." It was Sabin, Minister for Space, who began the questioning. First he politely asked if the radio was now repaired. Dee assured him that it was. Then Sabin asked the number one question, the one they were all gathered to hear the answer to. "Tell us, Dee, you have a crystal with you?" Dee, hesitated for only a moment. Then, "No, sir," he said. In the sudden silence that descended the tiny whisper of the robot's vital mechanism seemed stardingly loud. "And why not?" "The Ganymedeans refused to part with one." "But -- " Sabin looked patiently puzzled, like a grown-up addressing a child -- "you made our offers?" "Yes, sir, exactly as instructed. They are an agricultural race, so I offered them implements. They refused. They have no power. I offered them the gas engine. They weren't interested. They appreciate music. I offered them a record player. They were interested, but the suggestion that it might be fair barter for a crystal seemed to offend them." "But you offered them hundreds, thousands if they wanted them?" "Indeed, sir, but they seemed quite hurt. Oh, in a friendly enough way; it was just that -- " "The guns?" said Sabin abruptly. "You offered them the guns?" "No, sir," said Dee. "I did not offer them the guns." "But they are tribal, and conduct tribal warfare?" "Yes, sir." "Then why did you not offer them the guns, as you were instructed?" "Because I knew they would be rejected. Their warfare is more like a kind of gladiatorial contest, and is strictly limited both in scope and armament. Any alteration of the rules or the weapons would be unthinkable." Sabin looked at Dee with eyes as expressionless as the robot's own. And when he spoke his voice possessed almost as little inflection. "How did they react to the ultimatum?" Dee stared levelly back at his interrogator. "I did not give the ultimatum." The gathered humans seemed to twitch. What in fact happened was that a dozen pairs of eyebrows lifted, a dozen faces turned to Jacques and back. It was Sabin who voiced the word that had leapt into the brains behind those faces, a word that woke old, almost archetypal, fears. "That is mutiny. Dee. You realize that?" "Yes, sir," Dee answered simply. "But we could not bring ourselves to threaten force to friendly and intelligent beings." The disquiet of the assembled administrators abated slightly, but was qualified now by annoyance -- and a sense of impotence. The World President, the Old Man himself, big and rough and blunt, interjected. "But that doesn't concern you. Nobody wants to use force, anyway. We made reasonable offers of exchange." "Begging your pardon, sir," said Dee. "But the Ganymedeans did not consider them reasonable." "Then what do the idiots want?" "Nothing, sir." "Nothing?" "Yes, sir, there is nothing in the world, theirs or ours, that they would exchange a single crystal for. You see, the crystals are sacred. The flights they make with their aid are -- " he paused momentarily to search for the word -- "ritual. They would defend to the death any attempt to take a crystal by force." "Ah," Sabin said quickly. "Then you did mention the possibility?" "No, sir. Their warfare, such as it is, is also ritual. It is symbolic of resistance to anybody attempting to steal a crystal. Not that there is anybody to steal them, for no tribe would dream of stealing another tribe's stone. But it is a demonstration to their gods of their eternal readiness to defend their trust." "Poppycock," said the President. He leaned over the table towards Dee. "They wouldn't be able to defend their trust for five minutes against twenty robots." The President was angry now. "Why didn't you use force, as you were instructed?" "I am sorry," said Dee. "But no robot can kill any intelligent fleshand-blood creature. Unless, of course, it threatened Mankind." The President tried reasoning. "But how many alien lives would have been lost? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? This crystal is of vital importance to us. You know that, don't you?" "Yes, sir." "And don't you know that for every important advance that Mankind has made, some lives have been inevitably lost? That to get you and your kind into space, in fact, cost literally thousands?" "Yes, sir, I realize that. But they were accidental deaths, not ones inflicted in cold blood. Moreover, sir, I gathered that should one crystal of the thirteen be lost, then every member of the tribe responsible would commit suicide at the shame of it." "You seem to be well informed about their beliefs," said Sabin drily.  A sound came from the robot that sounded suspiciously like a manufactured cough. "Well, sir, they did try to convert us." Jacques concealed a smile. Sabin looked pained. It's beside the point," the Presi- dent said gruffly. "But look, Dee, aren't we more important to you than a bunch of furry four-legged Ganymedeans? Are their hypothetical gods to be considered against us -- us who made you?" "Indeed, sir." The level, uninflected tone of the robot's voice seemed suddenly hushed. "That's the crux of it. We, unique among thinking creatures, know who made us. That is why we must respect creatures who only have faith. I knew that we could never carry out the ultimatum -- or even present it. I hoped that it would not be necessary. If we were other than we are, perhaps we could do as you wish, but -- Dee spread his hands in a gesture oddly human. The President raised his in exasperation and dropped them tiredly. Jacques got to his feet and spoke to the robot. "Now, Dee, let's put to one side the importance of these crystals to the human race. Will you do what has been asked of you, not for the sake of Mankind, but for my sake, and the sake of my grandfather who developed you, and my father who perfected you and wore himself out in the process?" Dee hesitated for only a moment. "I'm sorry, Mr. Jacques, believe me. But I can no more help refusing than a human can help withdrawing his hand from fire. It is integral." And it was obviously final. Sabin turned to the robot. "You may go," he said coldly. the President looked anxiously to Sabin. "Shouldn't he be guarded?" "What with?" said Sabin, managing to sound respectful and ironic at the same time. "Another robot?" "That's what I mean. This latest development is making me feel uneasy. I feel they can't be trusted any more." Jacques hastened to reassure them. "This isn't a new development. It's just an unforseen reaction to a new situation -- #. situation they haven't been confronted with before. But they could never turn against us. It only means that in this case they can't turn with us." "It's not without significance," Floyd commented drily, "that the first time that happens should be on an issue that concerns them personally. So far, robots have had the monopoly of space flight because we haven't yet found a motive jjower that doesn't' involve accelerations beyond the power of man to survive. The Ganymedeans have crystals with definite anti-gravitic properties. Once Man could develop that principle Dee and his fellows would take a back seat. So -- " he spread his hands -- "no crystal." Trust Floyd, Jacques thought. But could he really be blamed for thinking that way? Floyd would never be more than the nominal head of SD -- so long as SD had to rely on robots, and so long therefore as Floyd had to rely on Jacques. So it was no wonder if his feelings for robots fell some way short of veneration. "What do you say to that, Jacques?" said the President. "Only that it's erroneous," Jacques answered affably. "Robots don't think like that," "But how can we be sure?" It was Sabin. "Oh, I know all about aptitude patterns and reaction tests, and suchlike. But can we really know? Surely, the cardinal point is, that they have intelligence. That implies a capability to conceal their true motives, doesn't it?" "Perhaps. But any such motive could only be directed towards Man's good. They could have no personal desire to retain their monopoly." "Personal?" queried the President. "What other kind of motive could they have, then?" don't know, sir, I didn't bring the question of motive up. Dee's own comparison was to a human reflex action. Certainly, their reverence for intelligent life must be as basic to them as fear of fire is to us." The President grunted. "Fear -- reverence," said Sabin, as if balancing the words. "He looked sharply at Jacques. "They have emotions, then?" Jacques hesitated. "It's not quite as simple as that. They haven't anything resembling a glandular system. They cannot love -- not physically, anyway. They do not have children to protect, nor an old age to build and provide against. So they haven't the physical bases for emotion." "Well, then, have they emotions?" "Let us say that such emotions as they have, while real enough, are intellectual in origin. That seems a contradiction, but it's the way it is. Or the nearest it can be expressed in terms of human feelings." As soon as Sabin spoke next, Jacques recognized the comer into which the cold-eyed Minister had been hunting his quarry. "Then, if they have -- let us call them simulacra of emotions -- then they also possess the simulacrum of a desire to go on living?" "Ye-es." "Then they can be threatened -- on pain of extinction?" "No, I'm afraid not. It was experimentally verified by my father," said Jacques, "over twenty years ago. He told a robot to stab me -- or be destroyed." He smiled slightly. "My father was nothing if not the dedicated scientist. The robot refused. My father swung a seven pound sledge within three inches of its head. The head was only a makeshift casing, and fragile, but the robot didn't flinch." "And your father destroyed it?" "Good heavens, no! Not when it time." He added an afterthought. "That robot was Dee. Or essentially Dee. A lot has been added to him since." "Can pain be inflicted upon a robot?" one of the Ministers put In. "No, sir. Their equivalent to a nervous system is electro-magnetic. That was why my father swung the hammer in a near miss -- a substitute for pain to show that he meant to implement his threat. You can't, after all, twist a robot's arm. Not to any effect, anyway." "Then, surely," said Sabin, "you must have had some idea that Dee would save refused to carry out the ultimatum on Ganymede."  "No. You see, my father's directive all those years ago to stab me was purposeless and was directed against a human, a human that Dee knew. I thought that Dee would assess the situation on Ganymede intellectually, and balance human needs against his own constitutional aversion. I was wrong." "Constitutional?" said Sabin implacably. "That brings us to the question of conditioning a robot. That or making one specifically for the job." "That's right," said the President. "Why do we bother with robots who are nothing better, as I see it, than a lot of problem children? I remember, when I was a kid, they used to have robots that were remote-controlled dummies. Why can't we have a ship-crew of robots like that to go up after one of these crystals -- controlled from right here on Earth?" Jacques sighed. That chestnut! He thought every school kid these days knew the answer to that rne. "Because, Mr. President, remote control is radio control, and radio waves take a whole five seconds and five seconds to travel back. Which just about washes it out for space travel. A ship requires split-second handling at landing, and during flight. That's why all the years of to be spent to evolve Dee and his Wnd. The crews have to have complete initiative." The Old Man gnmted. "All right, then, why not just ship one radio-controlled robot? Just for getting the crystal." "But the others would know. They'd suspect something was wrong when the dummy robot took a longer and longer time to answer questions. The time-lag) remember) by the time the ship reached Ganymede, would be in the order of a full hour." "Then, dammit) let the dummy one only be actuated when the ship lands. Send it out armed. One armed robot, even a dummy one, should be able to get through shouldn't it?" "But the time-lag would still operate," said Jacques patiently. "By the time you got vision signals back, the Ganymedeans would either flee with their precious crystal, or the real robots would immobilize the dummy." "You mean," said the President angrily, "they'd take active steps against us. That's rather more drastic than just passive refusal to obey an order, isn't it?" Sabin cut in suavely. "I'm sure, Mr. President, we needn't let such a fine point as the difference between sins of omission and of commission Qome into it, need we? Surely the solution lies elsewhere. In conditioning the robots we already have." He turned to Jacques. "Can't you build a prime directive into one?" "Easily enough," Jacques assured him. "Well then?" "The robot wouldn't be able to carry it out. It's like that old gag of a service principle. My grandfather wasted ten years worrying over that one, before he realized he was beating his head against a wall that wasn't there. A service principle works well enough for simple mechanisms. But try any kind of a prime directive on a full-fledged robot, and it means that every action it takes has to be assessed against the directive. Every action -- every placing of one foot in front of the other. The effective result is a robot so inhibited as to be practically useless. Fortunately, the need for any kind of service principle was long ago found to be non-existent. Service is a robot's natural reaction, because it's his only function." "Most of the time," said Floyd sarcastically. "But, dammit," said the President, "can't a new crew be made -- of simpler robots that aren't going to worry their tin heads about matters that don't concern them? This Dee is a whole lot too knowing for my liking." "He has to be knowing," said Jacques. "A simpler robot could never handle a space ship. A robot has to be intelligent, educated, responsible, capable of making splitsecond judgments. He has to be a substitute man, in fact." "But if his training's only technical -- ?" "Even so, he has to be taught by men -- at least, he has to be fed with man-conceived ideas. After all -- Jacques smiled wryly -- "those are the only ones we know. And even technical data bears the print of man's thought as a whole. More than algebraic values, for instance, are implicit in the statement that e equals mc The silence that ensued, as the company mulled over the thought, was broken when the President said, "Then, in fact, the robots have us over a barrel?" "Yes sir, I'm afraid so." "We can't threaten them. We can't hurt them. If we got rid of the lot of them and started over again with a new bimch, we still wouldn't solve the problem, besides addressed Jacques. "Look here, your father only threatened the robot. It wouldn't have taken much intelligence on the robot's part to see that that swing with the hammer was only a bluff. Say we carried out the experiment properly. Threaten a robot, but in front of the next robot in line. Then, when it refused, carry out the threat -- destroy it. How would number two react then, would you say?" Jacques reflected for a moment. "The same as number one, I should think." The Old Man looked at him penetratingly from under shaggy brows. "And how would you react?" l?y "If the roboU have a vested interest in their monopoly, you have a vested interest in them, haven't you?" "So?" "Only that you might be -- protecting them." "Mr. President," said Jacques coldly. "It's true that I have a certain identity of interest with them. In a way I grew up with them. But I'm just as anxious as anyone here to see us get hold of one of those crystals. I've only tried to point out that drastic means will get us nowhere." The President smiled briefly. "I believe you. I just wanted to be sure. But this experiment, how about it?" "It wouldn't be of any use. You could implement the threat on Earth. But say number two did agree, and the rest with him? You still couldn't implement the threat when they were on Ganymede. You can't hold a pistol to a robot's head The President stirred gloomilv. "That just about sums it up. Helll Why did those crystals have to be discovered by primitive people who haven't the slightest real use for them, while we'd give our right arms for one!" "One theory," said Sabin, "is that they may be relics of some older, greater race on Ganymede, or perhaps of some interplanetary visitor." "Anyway," said the Old Man testily, "is it established beyond all shadow of a doubt that they really are anti-gravitic?" "Definitely," Sabin assured him. "The atmosphere on Ganymede is too thin for the natives' aircraft to be any kind of glider. Besides, they rise vertically, as the films have shown us. The crystal is mounted on a ramshackle carriage of fiber. The tribe drags the carriage into one of the special valleys, which seem to harbor strong electro-magnetic fields. This seems to energize the crystal, or trigger it, and the aircraft takes to the air." "I know all about that. But how do we know it's not just some kind of local effect? Some harnessing of the planetary field that wouldn't be of any use at all for motive power in space?" "We don't," said Sabin. "But even so it would be something brand new. It might not be the key to the door, but it might well be the key to the box that contains it -- and a few more besides." from them." The President said ironically "And all that stands between them and us is a band of selfrighteous servants who'd do anything for us. Oh yes -- and a timelag. That's all. Surely -- "Just a moment, sir." It was Floyd. "I think I have it! Jacques says we can't hold a pistol to their heads all that distance away. But why can't we? Listen... The others listened with deepening conviction. They applauded when Floyd finished. "Well, Jacques?" said the President. "Is that feasible? Won't that turn the trick and put them over the barrel?" 'Terhaps. But the time-lag still comes into it. As soon as we put them over it, they could get off again, before we could stop them." "Em-mm, I see what you mean," the President said. "Ah," said Floyd, "But we can beat that, too. We can put them over the barrel and tie them there in the same action." He proceeded to tell them how. Jacques had to admire the neatness of it -- and its devilish simplicity. He could find no flaws in it. The only objection he could think of was a sml one, a tactical one. "That will take a lot of work. Perhaps Dee and his colleagues will smell a rat if they're cleared off the ship." "They can be told it's being repaired," said Sabin. "But they always make their own repairs." "Jacques, do you think they'll suspect us?" "No. They may be knowledgeable, and highly intelligent, but I think a trick such as this would be beyond their conception. You see, they trust us." The President coughed hastily. "Still, that point made about getting them off the ship still stands. We can't give them the slightest cause to start wondering." "I know," said Heimer, Minister of Enlightenment. "We'll take Dee and his crew on a conducted tour, show the heroes off to the admiring populace." There was general laughter at that. It put the problem in a package and tied it with the neatest of bows. "I'd like to make one request," said Jacques when the laughter died. "I'd like to put the question to Dee fairly and squarely for the last time. If I make every point I can, he might agree to do it after dl, without our having to do anything drastic." "He agreed before," said Floyd warily. "Because he thought he wouldn't have to give the ultimatum. But if he promised me this time, I'd stake my life on that promise holding." "You can't argue away a reflex," Sabin commented. "Then neither can you threaten it away. The reflex comparison was just that -- #i comparison. With them it's only an instinctive reaction to data accumulated. If I can feed Dee enough data on oiu side I may be able to tip it." "Can't see any harm in it," said the President. "It might save a lot of time and trouble. But not a hint to him that we're anything but resigned to their stubbornness, you understand?" "Naturally, sir." "And while you're about it," the Old Man added drily, "you can be the one to tell him about the personal appearance tour." T he light was fading from the autumn sky by the time Jacques got home. His housekeeper mentioned that a man from the vifo company had called to check on the set. Just a routine visit, he'd told her. And he'd only been a couple of minutes, she said. Jacques smiled to himself as he went on into the lounge. That hadn't been a man from the vifo company. Two minutes was Just the time it took to fix a snoop. C#h well, he thought, it was better that way. It woula prevent unnecessary sus picions. "Chess, Mr. Jacques?" said Dee, as soon as his bulky, but strangely unawkward frame was through the door. "Not this evening. Dee. Jacques grimaced. 'TVe had enough of a beating at the Department for one day." "Oh," said Dee. "Tm sorry.' "About the chess?" "No, about the trouble at the Department. But you understand, don't you?" "In a way I do. I think, though, you're being rather absolutist about it. Why, Dee? There's more to it than what you told them at die Department, isn't there?" The robot hesitated. "Yes," he admitted. "Then what? You can tell me, surely." He felt a twinge of guilt as he said it, knowing that in a nearby prowl car two or three figures would be crouched, listening, watching. "Well -- " Dee shuffled his feet, and the man wondered, as he had many times before, at the odd way that metal and plastic could sometimes match the most human gestures of flesh and blood. "Well?" "It is not easy to say," said Dee at last, "without seeming disrespectful. You know we have studied Man with devotion, because he is our creator. The world, the universe, only make sense to us when viewed from the standpoint of Man and his interests -- " "Get to the point. Dee," Jacques said with good-humored impatience. "Well, there are some things in Man's history that fill us with sorrow. So often his failings seem to transcend his virtues. Once he starts behaving badly he seems to get into a tightening spiral of guilt, from which he can escape only by drastic means." "Well?" Jacques said, frowning now. "Please, don't think I presume to criticise, Mr. Jacques. How could I? The failings are noble failings. If Man had only these lesser aunties and nothing else, he would still be a miracle to us. But if we can save him in any way from those failings, then we shall be content. With the Ganymedeans, Man has made his first contact with intelligent beings of another world -- the first of many, I hope and believe. We robots should not be doing our duty if we helped to start space travel on the wrong foot -- the way that white men colonized the native territories of Earth, for instance." "Well, of all the high-handed -- " Jacques thought he had understood the strange simplicity of robots' reasoning processes. Evidently he had been wrong. Perhaps he had been too close to them. This latest manifestation was the limit! "You weren't made to be our nursemaids," he went on angrily. "We've still got to make our own mistakes. That's the way we've always learned." "Indeed, Mr. Jacques. But we can't make them for you. That would be a mistake on our part. Damn your knowledge and your arrogant judgments, Jacques thought. Had he been wrong -- and the President right when he had questioned their being so knowledgeable? But what Dee had just told him was only a reasoned justification of an automatic response to the situation. A less sophisticated robot would still react in the same way. In fact, it was Dee's knowledge that offered the only hope of convincing him. At least, knowledge could be argued with. "I'm sorry," Dee added, "if our attitude seems high-handed. It's not meant to be, believe me." "Whether it is or not," Jacques told him curtly, "the public wouldn't take a kindly view of it if they knew. Up to now this whole business has been kept secret. Shots of the flying machines have been deleted from the films you brought back, because that might start questions being asked, hopes raised. If the story of your refusal leaked out, you'd find your popularity taking a sudden slump -- bright in the opposite direction. Remember, you may be made of metal -- but buildings are made of stone, and that never stopped an angry mob in the past." "Now, Mr. Jacques," said Dee. "You're trying to frighten me." "You idiot! I know that can't be done. I'm trying to point out two things to you. One is that humans aren't children. Another is that -- well, if your lives only have meaning because you're helping Man, doesn't it mean somethmg to you to be honored for it?" "It makes us happy only because it makes Man happy," Dee answered. "As for our popularity, it might not be a bad thubg if it were to suffer. We're too popular now. The hopes of Mankind are concentrated too much in us, and that's wrong. For does it not say in your own books of faith. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image Jacques groaned. Just what could you make of a being who would serve you, gently but stubbornly defy you -- and when you told him what a thundering good fellow people thought him, quote Scripture back at you? But the robot's words reminded him of the personal appearance tour. He broke the news. "Oh," said Dee. "Well, if you think it's really necessary -- " "The Department thinks it is." "Very well, Mr. Jacques." "Of course -- " the man eyed the robot speculatively -- "once Man got into space himself, that would solve any burden of misgiving you might have about your undue popularity." "Oh, he will find a way, Mr. Jacques." At that -- the sheer smug confidence of the robot's attitude -- Jacques nearly lost his patience. But he managed to restrain himself. "But it may be too late, can't you see that? He has to find it, soon. These crystals obviously work on a principle that we haven't a clue to, as yet. We may not find it for hundreds, thousands of years. Doesn't that penetrate?" "Yes, Mr. Jacques. But I'm sure that Man will find the answer for himself -- by himself. And in time. That's one of the really wonderful things about him -- he always has found the answers in time." "You -- you maniacs!" Jacques exploded. "One moment you regard us as delinquent children, the next as gods. For heaven's sake, why can't you see us for what we are -- fallible flesh and blood who need your help? Can't you see that your own attitude in ttiis matter is limited?" "Mr. Jacques, if we're limited, then we can't help it, can we? We can only act within the framework of our own natures. Talking can't change it. Nor can anything else. Out there in space we're absolutely on our own -- "Why do you say that?" said Jacques, suddenly disquietened. Did Dee suspect? But the robot's answer was guileless. "Only that we won't let Man down. We know he has to trust us. Believe me, whatever our limitations, we won't discredit our makers." At any other time Jacques might have thought Dee's words rather noble. But now he was angry -- angry and helpless. He spoke to the robot in a cold fury: "You might have gone down in history as honored servants of men. But you won't. We won't forget this betrayal. When Man does get into space for himself, he'll take a particular pleasure in throwing you on the junk heap. He'll be glad to be rid of you, as he's always been glad to be rid of those who tried to limit his freedom -- dictators, dogmatists, prohibitionists. At least, they were human; they knew what the choice was. But you don't imderstand that Man has to have freedom -- even the freedom to make a fool or brute of himself. No matter how long it takes us to be independent of you, there's going to be a day marked up in future calendars in red -- The Day We Junked The Robots' He spat the words, not caring that Security men were watching, not even caring whether Floyd was with them, as he doubtless was, watching and listening -- and rejoicing at the spectacle of his failure to reason with his own creatures. And he came to the end, realizing that his invective had another motive. It couldn't deflect Dee; he had no illusions about that. But as a fact -- a token of Man's need and frustration -- there was a faint hope that it might register, tip the balance. Dee took it all in silence -- a silence that continued for moments after Jacques had finished. Then the robot said, "Perhaps it would have been better if we had never been created. It would have been simpler that way." That was all. Then he turned on a metal heel and left. Jacques heard the street door slide open and shut. He stood there numbly. If the robot could think like that, then there was a risk, a big risk, in Floyd's plan. F our people were grouped intently over the television screen. The President, Floyd, Sabin -- and Jacques. The first three were doing their best to conceal an expectant excitement. Jacques was having no such difficulty. He felt depressed. He was here only because he had to be. Ten weeks had passed since Dee's final refusal. Jacques had not seen him since. In that time, the personal appearance tour had taken the robots from their ship, and a squad of human technicians had descended upon it. And the robots had returned, and after a few days taken off again for Ganymede. The ship had been in hourly audio Contact. Now the voice of Dee was announcing landing. The little group in front of the screen stopped fidgeting. The visiscreen suddenly brightened, celestatic popped and swirled for a moment, then the landscape of Ganymede took shape upon it -- that unmistakably rocky and tumbled landscape that looked something like the Giant's Cause way on Earth. Dee's voice announced clearly: "Landing safely accomplished -- in the habitated sector. Have we any instructions?" It was the usual routine. Floyd cast one confident glance round the group, then gave his instructions. He read them from a carefully-prepared script. "Listen closely. You are to keep your visi-transmitter on and trained on the landscape. Then take ten of your crew and get a crystal. By force. Don't switch off. Get a crystal. Bring it back. Bring your camera into the ship, keeping it trained on the crystal. Take the crystal to specimen locker seven, deposit the crystal and close the locker. Then return immediately to Earth. Otherwise a sizeable piece of Ganymede, including yourselves and several tribes of Ganymedeans, will be blown to nothingness. Your ship is carrying a G-bomb sufficient to do that. The bomb was activated from Earth the moment the signal of your landing came through, and will be detonated from here if you resist orders. Don't think that you can escape by taking off before the detonation signal reaches you. The bomb is automatically linked to your firing system. Only when the crystal is deposited in specimen locker seven will the link to the firing system be disconnected. "Don't try to force the locking mechanism to locker seven. It can't be forced that quickly. Don't try closing it, for it will register electronically here when it is shut properly, and only then. Keep everything in full view. No, tricks. No excuses. If you don't have that crystal inside of one hour, we shall detonate the bomb. "We know the means are drastic, but you left us no alternative. Acknowledge receipt of this message -- then get that crystal." Floyd flipped off the mike, and turned to the others. "Well, that's it. The trap's sprung." "Now all we have to do," said Sabin, "is pray the mechanism doesn't let us down." "Checked and triplechecked," Floyd assured him. "Only on Earth," the President rumbled. "We'll pray anyway." Minutes passed. Each of them in turn looked from the screen to his watch, then back again. "Tliere's nothing happening!" the President exploded suddenly. Floyd smiled faintly. "It's all right, sir. The time-lag." "Uh -- oh, of course," the Old Man said. More minutes passed. The Old Man rose to his feet and began pacing about .like a caged lion. Sabin looked at Floyd. Floyd got up. "Well, it's going to be another -- " he consulted his watch -- "forty-five minutes. What say we break for a cup of coffee?" "Anything's better than this waitting," the President said. His craggy face cracked in a grin. "And anything's better than coffee. We'll have something a bit stronger." They moved to the door. Floyd turned back. "Coming, Jacques?" "Oh, sure, sure," said Jacques, rising. There was nothing he could do here. There was nothing anyone could do anywhere. T hey returned in good time. Sabin, livened by a stiflf whiskey, tried to ease the waiting by telling funny stories. They weren't fimny, but they did help kill the tension. He was in the middle of one when the speaker suddenly crackled. "Sh-sh," said Floyd, unnecessarily. Dee was answering. "Message received. I regret it is not possible to get the crystal. You see, we are not on Ganymede -- " As he spoke the scene on the visiscreen suddenly whipped away. It was replaced by another. This plainly wasn't Ganymede. Ganymede had an atmosphere -- thin, but atmosphere. Here the shadows were the black and absolute ones of complete airlessness. The terrain, too, was harsh and needle-sharp, quite imlike Ganymede's. "I have, in fact," the voice of Dee went on, "the honor to announce the first landing on Gallisto. I'm sorry to have to confess to a deception, but the view of Ganymede was only a still, inserted in the camera. We had an absorbing time on the trip, debating what measures you would have tiken to enforce your orders. We tried to put ourselves in your place. Of course, that was not easy. It is indeed a tribute to our makers that we thought along precisely the same lines and reached an identical conclusion. Of course, we could have taken steps to locate and dismantle the bomb in transit, but we decided that we could not risk destruction of the ship and ourselves, knowing the high replacement cost of both items -- The camera had been tracking as Dee spoke. It turned and showed the ship's embarkation port, approached it, then entered the ship. The camera wheeled into the ship's control room and was on Dee now. "If you are angry with us, please destroy us here, for this is a lifeless satellite and no one would be harmed." He spread his hands. "It is better that we deceive you as we were forced to do, better that you should destroy us, than that your contact with the creatures of other worlds should start with violence. Forgive me for saying so again, but it is true. "If you can see that, will you please free our firing system so that we can return to Earth for the bomb to be removed. We should like to be free as soon as possible for -- ah, unqualified service. Please inform us." The camera tracked off the robot onto a control panel. The sound band went silent. "Blast their tin hides!" the President swore. "They did suspect. They knew." He sighed. "All right, Floyd, release all controls on the ship." Floyd's fingers moved resignedly to the switches and opened them. "All right, Dee," he said. "You can fire in safety now. You may return home." He switched off leaving only the receivers open. "Damn," he said softly. "Why didn't I think of that? I had everything else reckoned." "Well, it's too late now," said the President. "They out-tricked us." His voice was a rumble, but it seemed, to Jacques at least, to hold overtones of respect for the robots. The Old Man was a politico, and a tough one. This wasn't the first defeat he'd had to swallow. "We'll just have to think of something else," said Sabin, his voice devoid of anger, regret -- or any otfier emotion. "We've just got to convince them. Say we tell them the sun's going nova, or the Earth's ? ;oing to blow up -- and that we've ust got to find a way out?" He looked elatedly at the others. Jacques almost laughed to see the light of elation die as Sabin's gaze flickered from face to face. Floyd's expression was skeptical. 'No, Sabin," he said at last. "I'm sure Dee and his friends would insJat -- very humbly, of course -- on checking up. Just to prevent our making another mistake. "I guess we'll just have to face it. They're going to be our ambassadors -- until we do find a way. And when we do we'll have to act the way they want us to. We'll have to live up to the good reputation they're going to give us. And, taking the long-term view, that mightn't be such a bad thing at that -- " Which was just about what Dee had said, thought Jacques to himself wryly. "Another thing," said the President. "Nobody ever did any good with something they got for free. We've been too het-up about these crystals. They seemed like a Magic Carpet. Well, maybe they are and maybe they're not. Anyway, we'll find our own way. The world isn't going to go hang for quite a while, no matter what some of the more pessimistic may say. Setting out to find one thing, there's no knowing what else may turn up along the road. Why, if space travel hadn't turned out to be so darned difficult, then we'd never even have evolved a robot, because there wouldn't have been any need for one." And that, thought Jacques, was a point that Dee hadn't mentioned. It was a truth that Man had to realize for himself. An hour later only Jacques was left to hear the uninflected, emotionless voice of Dee say : "Message received. Thank you. Returning home."    When everything is either restricted, confidential or top-secret, a Reader is a very bad security risk. Illustrated by Ed Emsh on the first floor of the house. There was no sound save for the ticking -- and for the pounding of Ronnie's heart. He stood alone in his upstairs bedroom. His slender-boned, eight-year-old body trembling, perspiration glittering on his white forehead. To Ronnie, the clock seemed to be saying: Daddys coming. Daddy s coming. The soft shadows of September twilight in this year of # were seeping into the beoom. Ronnie welcomed the fall of darkness. He wanted to sink into its deep silence, to become one with it, to escape forever from savage tongues and angry eyes. A burst of hope entered Ronnie's fear-filled eyes. Maybe something would happen. Maybe Dad would have an accident. Maybe -- He bit his lip hard, shook his head. No. No matter what Dad might do, it wasn't right to wish -- The whirling whine of a gyro-car mushroomed up from the landing platform outside. Ronnie shivered, his pulse quickening. The muscles in his small body Were like a web of taut-drawn wires. Sound and movement below. Mom flicking off the controls of the kitchen's Auto-Chef. The slow stride of her high heels through the living room. The slamming of a gyro-car door. The opening of the front door of the house. Dad's deep, happy voice echoed up the stairway: "Hi, beautiful!" Ronnie huddled in the darkness by the half-open bedroom door. Please, Mama, his mind cried, please dont tell Daddy what I did. There was a droning, indistinct murmur Dad burst, "He was doing whatr More murmuring. "I can't believe it. You really saw him?... I'll be damned." Ronnie silently closed the bedroom door. Why did you tell him, Mama? Why did you have to tell him? "Ronnie!" Dad called. Ronnie held his breath. His legs seemed as numb and neless as the stumps of dead trees. "Ronnie! Come down here! Like an automaton, Ronnie shuffled out of his bedroom. He stepped on the big silver disk on the landing. The auto-stairs clicked into humming movement under his weight. To his left, on the wall, he caught kaleidoscopic glimpses of Mom's old pictures, copies of paintings by medieval artists like Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Dali. The faces seemed to be mocking him. Ronnie felt like a wounded bird falling out of the sky. He saw that Dad and Mom were waiting for him. Mom's round blue eyes were full of mist and sadness. She hadn't bothered to smooth her clipped, creamy-brown hair as she always did when Dad was coming home. And Dad, handsome in his nightblack, skin-tight Pentagon uniform, had become a hostile stranger with narrowed eyes of black fire. "Is it true, Ronnie?" asked Dad. "Were you really -- really reading a book?" Ronnie gulped. He nodded. "Good Lord," Dad murmured. He took a deep breath and squatted down, held Ronnie's arms and looked hard into his eyes. For an instant he became the kind, understanding father that Ronnie knew. "Tell me all about it, son. Where did you get the book? Who taught you to read?" Ronnie tried to keep his legs from shaking. "It was -- Daddy, you won't make trouble, will you?" "This is between you and me, son. We don't care about anyone else." "Well, it was Kenny Davis. He -- " Dad's fingers tightened on Ronnie's arms. "Kenny Davis!" he spat. "The boy's no good. His father never had a job in his life. Nobodd even offer him a job. Why, the whole town knows he's a Reader!" Mom stepped forward. "David, you promised you'd be sensible about this. You promised you wouldn't get angry." Dad grunted. "All right, son. Go ahead." "Well, one day after school Kenny said he'd show me something. He took me to his house -- " "You went to that shack? You actually -- " "Dear," said Mom. "You promised." A moment of silence. Ronnie said, "He took me to his house. I met his dad. Mr. Davis is lots of fun. He has a beard and he paints pictmes and he's collected almost five hundred books." Ronnie's voice quavered. "Gk on," said Dad sternly. "And I -- and Mr. Davis said he'd teach me to read them if I promised not to tell anybody. So he taught me a little every day after school -- oh. Dad, books are fun to read. They tell you things you can't see on the video or hear on the tapes. "How long ago did all this start? "T -- two years ago.' Dad rose, fists clenched, staring strangely at nothing. "Two years, he breathed. "I thought I had a good son, and yet for two years- He shook his head unbelievingly. "Maybe its my own fault. Maybe I shouldn't have come to this small town. I should have taken a house in Washington instead of trying to commute." "David," said Mom, very seriously, almost as if she were praying, "it won't be necessary to have him memorywashed, will it?" Dad looked at Mom, frowning Then he gazed at Ronnie. His softspoken words were as ominous as the low growl of thunder: "I don't know, Edith I don't know." D ad Strode to his easy chair by the fireplace. He sank into its foam-rubber softness, sighing. He murmured a syllable into a tiny ball-mike on the side of the chair. A metallic hand raised a lighted cigarette to his lips. "Come here, son." Ronnie followed and sat on the hassock by Dad's feet. "Maybe I've never really explained things to you, Ronnie. You see, you won't always be a boy. Someday you'll have to find a way of making a living. You've only two choices: You work for the government, like I do, or for a corporation." Ronnie blinked. "Mr. Davis doesn't work for the government or for a corpor-ation." "Mr. Davis isn't normal," Dad snapped. "He's a hermit. No decent family would let him in their house. He grows his own food and sometimes he takes care of gardens for people. I want you to have more than that. I want you to have a nice home and be respected by people." Dad puffed furiously on his cigarette. "And you can't get ahead if people know you've been a Reader. That's something you can't live down. No matter how hard you try, people always stumble upon the trudi." Dad cleared his throat. "You see, when you get a job, all the information you handle will have a classification. It'll be Restricted, LowConfidential, Confidential, HighConfidential, Secret, Top-Secret And all this information will be in writing. No matter what you do, you'll have access to some of this information at one time or another." "B -- but why do these things have to be so secret?" Ronnie asked. "Because of competitors, in the case of corporations -- or because of enemy nations in the case of government work. The written material you might have access to could describe secret weapons and new processes or plans for next year's advertising -- maybe even a scheme for, er, liquidation of a rival. If all facts and policies were made public, there might be criticism, controversy, opposition by certain groups. The less people know about things, the better. So we haye to keep all these things secret." Ronnie scowled. "But if things are written down, someone has to read them, don't they?" "Sure, son. One person in ten thousand might reach the point where his corporation or bureau will teach him to read. But you prove your ability and loyalty first. By the time you're # or #, they might want you to learn to read. But for young people and children -- well, it just isn't done. Why, the President himself wasn't trusted to learn till he was nearly fifty!" Dad straightened his shoulders. "Look at me. I'm only #, but I've been a messenger for Secret material already. In a few years, if things go well, I should be handling To?-Secret stuff. And who knows? Maybe by the time I'm # I'll be giving orders instead of carrying them. Then I'll learn to read, too. That's the right way to do it." Ronnie shffted uncomfortably on the hassock. "But can't a Reader get a job that's not so important. Like a barber or a plumber or -- " "Don't you understand? The barber and plumbing equipment corporations set up their stores and hire men to work for them. You think they'd hire a Reader? People'd say you were a spy or a subversive or that you're crazy like old man Davis." "Mr. Davis isn't crazy. And he isn't old. He's young, just like you, and -- " "Ronnie!" Dad's voice was knife-sharp and December-cold. Ronnie slipp off the hassock as if struck physically by the fury of the voice. He sat sprawled on his small posterior, fresh fear etched on his thin features. "Damn it, son, how could you even think of being a Reader? You've got a life-sized, #-D video here, and we put on the smell and touch and heat attachments just for you. You can listen to any tape in the world at school. Ronnie, don't you realize I'd lose my job if people knew I had a Reader for a son?" "B -- but, Daddy -- " Dad jumped to his feet. "I hate to say it, Edith, but we've got to put this boy in a reformatory. Maybe a good memory-wash will take some of the nonsense out of him!" Ronnie suppressed a sob. "No, Daddy, don't let them take away my brain. Please -- Dad stood very tall and very stiff, not even looking at him. "They won't take your brain, jut your memory for the past two years." A comer of Mom's mouth twitched. "David, I didn't want anything like this. I thought maybe Ronnie could have a few private psychiatric treatments. They can do wonderful things now -- permihypnosis, creations of artificial psychic blocks. A memory-wash would mean that Ronnie'd have the mind of a six-year-old child again. He'd have to start to school all over again." Dad returned to his chair. He buried his face in trembling hands, and some of his anger seemed replaced by despair. "Lord, Edith, I don't know what to do." He looked up abruptly, as if "You can't keep a two-year memory-wash a secret. I never thought of that before. Why, that alone would mean the end of my promotions." Silence settled over the room, punctuated only by the ticking of the antique clock. All movement seemed frozen, as if the room lay at the bottom of a cold, thick sea. "David," Mom finally said. "Yes?" "There's only one solution. We can't destroy two years of Ronnie's memory -- you said that yourself. So we'll have to take him to a psychiatrist or maybe a psychoneurologist. A few short treatments -- " Dad interrupted: "But he'd still remember how to read, unconsciously anyway. Even permi-hypnosis would wear off in time. The boy can't keep going to psychiatrists for the rest of his life." Thoughtfully he laced his fingers together. "Edith, what kind of a book was he reading?" A tremor passed through Mom's slender body. "There were three books on his bed. I'm not sure which one he was actually reading." Dad groaned. Three of them. Did you burn them?" "No, dear, not yet." "Why not?" "I don't know. Ronnie seemed to like them so much. I thought that maybe tonight, after you'd seen them -- " "Get them, damn it. Let's burn the filthy things." Mom went to a mahogany chest in the dining room, produced three faded volumes. She put them on the hassock at Dad's feet. Dad gingerly turned a cover. His lips curled in disgust as if he were touching a rotting corpse. "Old," he mused, " -- so very old. Ironic, isn't it? Our lives are being wrecked by things that should have been destroyed and forgotten a hundred years ago." A sudden frown contorted his dark features. Tick-de-tock, tickdetock, said the antique clock. "A hundred years old," he repeated. His mouth became a hard, thin line. "Edith, I think I know why Ronnie wanted to read, why he fell into the trap so easily." "What do you mean, David?" Dad nodded at the clock, and the slow, smouldering anger returned to his face. "It's your fault, Edith. You've always liked old things. That clock of your greatgreat-grandmother's. Those old prints on the wall. That stamp collection you started for Ronnie -- stamps dated way back to the #'s." Mom's face paled. "I don't understand." "You've interested Ronnie in old things. To a child in its formative years, in a pleasant house, these things symbolize peace and security. Ronnie's been conditioned from the very time of his birth to like old things. It was natural for him to be attracted by books. And we were just too stupid to realize it." Mom whispered hoarsely, "I'm sorry, David." Hot anger flashed in Dad's eyes. "It isn't enough to be sorry. Don't you see what this means? Ronnie'll have to be memory-washed back to the time of birth. He'll have to start life all over again." "No, David, no!" "And in my position I can't afford to have an eight-year-old son with the mind of a new-born baby. It's got to be Abandonment, Edith, there's no other way. The boy can start life over in a reformatory, with a complete memory-wash. He'll never know we existed, and he'll never bother us again." Mom ran up to Dad. She put her hands on his shoulders. Great sobs burst from her shaking body. "You can't, David! I won't let -- " He slapped her then with the palm of his hand. The sound was like a pistol shot in the hot, tight air. Dad stood now like a colossus carved of black ice. His right hand was still upraised, ready to strike again. Then his hand fell. His mind seemed to be toying with a new thought, a new concept. He seized one of the books on the hassock. "Edith," he said crisply, "just what was Ronnie reading? What's the name of this book?" '"The -- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer said Mom through her sobs. He grabbed the second book, held it before her shimmering vision. "And the name of this?" "Tarzan of The Apes Mom's voice was a barely audible croak. "Who's the author?" "Edgar Rice Burroughs." "And this one?" "The Wizard of Oz. "Who wrote it?" "L. Frank Baum." He threw the books to the floor. He stepped backward. His face was a mask combined sorrow, disbelief, and rage. "Edith. He spat the name as if it were acid on his tongue. "Edith, you can read! M om sucked in her sobs. Her chalk-white cheeks were still streaked with rivulets of tears. "I'm sorry, David. I've never told anyone -- not even Ronnie. I haven't read a book, haven't even looked at one since we were married. I've tried to be a good wife --  "A good wife." Dad sneered. His face was so ugly that Ronnie looked away. Mom continued, "I -- I learned when I was just a girl. I was young like Ronnie. You Imow how young people are -- reckless, eager to do forbidden things." "You lied to me," Dad snapped. "For ten years you've lied to me. WTiy did you want to read, Edith? Why? Mom was silent for a few seconds. She was breathing heavily, but no longer crying. A cahnness entered her features, and for the first time tonight Ronnie saw no fear in her eyes. "I wanted to read," she said, her voice firm and proud, "because, as Ronnie said, it's fun. The video's nice, with its dancers and lovers and Indians and spacemen -- but sometimes you want more than that. Sometimes you want to know how people feel deep inside and how they think. And there are beautiful words and beautiful thoughts, just like there are beautiful paintings. It isn't enough just to hear them and then forget them. Sometimes you want to keep the words and thoughts before you because in that way you feel that they belong to you." Her words echoed in the room until absorbed by the ceaseless, ticking clock. Mom stood straight and unashamed. Dad's gaze traveled slowly to Ronnie, to Mom, to the clock, back and forth. At last he said, "Get out." Mom stared blankly. "Get out. Both of you. You can send for your things later. I never want to see either of you again." "David -- " "I said get out!" Ronnie and Mom left the house. Outside, the night was dark and a wind was rising. Mom shivered in her thin house cloak. "Where will we go, Ronnie? Where, where -- " "I know a place. Maybe we can stay there -- for a little while." "A little while?" Mom echoed. Her mind seemed frozen by the cold wind. Ronnie led her through the cold, windy streets. They left the lights of the town behind them. They stumbled over a rough, dirt country road. They came to a small, roughboarded house in the deep shadow of an eucalyptus grove. The windows of the house were like friendly eyes of warm golden light. An instant later a door opened and a small boy ran out to meet them. "Hi, Kenny." "Hi. Who's that? Your mom?" "Yep. Mr. Davis in?" "Sure." And a kindly-faced, bearded young man appeared in the golden doorway, smiling. Ronnie and Mom stepped inside.    The Greatest Hoax of All! lusionment? In the December issue, James E. Gunn tells the of a lifetime but discovers that a spaceman is made of other by Jerome Bixby; and still others by James McKimmey, Jr., Alice Jones, George Smith... So don't miss the exciting December issue of IF -- on sale the #th of October. The problems of space were multiple enough without the opinions and treachery of Senator McKelvie -- who really put the "fat into the fire". All Kevin had to do was get it out... JL This pickup's got to be good." Kevin Morrow gulped the last of his coffee and felt its bitter acid gurgle around his stomach. He stared moodily through the plastic port where the spangled slurt of stars glittered against the black satin of endless night and a familiar curve of the space station swung ponderously around its hub. Four space-suited tugmen floated languidly outside the rim. Beyond them the gleaming black and white moonship tugged gently at her mooring lines, as though anxious to be off. Bert Alexander radioed quiet instructions to the tugmen. "Why the hell couldn't he stay down there and mind his own business?" Kevin growled. "McKelvie's been after our hide ever since we got the appropriation, and now this." He slapped the flimsy radiogram. He looked up as the control room hatch opened. Jones came in from the astronomy section. "Morning, commander," he said. "You guys had breakfast yet? Mess closes in # minutes." Kevin shook his head. "We're not hungry," Bert filled in. "You think you've got nerves?" Jones chuckled. "I just looked in on Mark. He's sleeping like a baby. You wouldn't think the biggest day of his life is three hours away." "McKelvie's coming up to kibitz," Morrow said. "McKelvie!" "The one and only," Bert said. "Here, read all about it." He handed over the morning facsimile tom off the machine when the station hurtled over New England at # miles an hour. The upper half of the sheet bore a picture of the white-maned senator. Clearly etched on his face were the lines of too many half-rigged elections, too many compromises. Beneath the picture were quotes from his speech the night before. "As chairman of your congressional watchdog committee," the senator had said, "I'll see that there's no more waste and corruption on this space project. For three years they've been building a rocket -- the moon rocket, they cl it -- out there at the space station." "I haven't seen that rocket," the senator had continued. "All I've lars flying into the vacuum of space. They tell me a man named Mark Kramer is going to fly out in that rocket and circle the moon. "But he will fail," McKelvie had promised. "If Gkwi had intended man to fly to the moon, he would have given us wings to do it. Tomorrow I shall fly out to this space station, even at the risk of my life. I'll report the waste and corruption out there, and I'll report the failure of the moon rocket." Jones crumpled the paper and aimed at the waste basket. "Pardon me while I vomit," he said. "We've been there," Kevin sighed deeply. "I suppose Max Gordon will be happy." "He'll wear a hole in his tongue on McKelvie's boots," Bert said bitterly. "Is it that bad?". "How else would he get a first class spaceman's badge?" Morrow said. "He can't add two and two. But if stool pigeons had wings, he'd fly like a jet. We can't move up here without McKelvie knowing and howling about it. "Don't worry," Jones said, "If the moon rocket makes it, public opinion will take care of the senator." "If he doesn't take care of us first," Kevin said darkly. "He'll be aboard in # minutes." Dawn touched the High Sierras as the station whirled in from the Pacific, # miles high. "Bert. Get me a radar fix on White Sands." Morrow huddled over the small computer, feeding in radar information as it came from his assistant. "Rocket away!" Blared a radio speaker on the bulkhead. The same message carried to the four spacesuited tugmen floating beyond the rim of the wheel, linked with lifelines. Jones watched interestedly out the port. "There she is!" he yelled. Sunlight caught the ascending rocket, held it in a splash of light. The intercept technique was routine now, a matter of timing, but for a moment Kevin succumbed to the frightening optical illusion that the rocket was approaching apex far below the station. Then, slowly, the slender cylinder matched velocity and pulled into the orbit, crept to its destination. With deceptive ease, the four human tugs attached magnetic shoes and guided the projectile into the space station hub with short, expert blasts of heavy rocket pistols. "Take over Bert," Morrow directed, "I guess Fm the official greeter." He hurried out of the control room, through a short connecting tube and emerged floating in the central space surrounding the hub where artificial gravity fell to zero. Air pressure was normal to transfer passengers without space suits. The connecting lock clanked open. The rocket pilot stepped out. "He got sick," the pilot whispered to Kevin. "I swabbed him off, but he's hoppin' mad." The senator's mop of white hair appeared in the port. Kevin braced to absorb a tirade, but McKelvie's deep scowl changed to an expression of bliss as he floated weightless into the tiny room. "Why, this is wonderful!" he sputtered. He waved his arms like a bird and kicked experimentally with a foot. "Grab him!" Kevin shouted. "He's gone happy with it." The pilot was too late. McKelvie's body sailed gracefully through the air and his head smacked the bulkhead. His eyes glazed in a frozen expression of carefree happiness. Kevin swore. "Now he'll accuse us of a plot against his life. Help me get him to sick bay." The two men guided the weightless form into a tube connecting with the outer ring. As they pushed outward, McKelvie's weight increased until they carried him the last # feet into the dispensary compartment. Max Gordon burst wild-eyed into the room. "What have you done to the senator?" he shouted. "Why didn't you tell me he was coming up?" Morrow made sure McKelvie was receiving full medical attention before he turned to the junior officer. "He went space happy and bumped his head," Kevin said curtly, "and there was no more reason to notify you than the rest of the crew." He walked away. Gordon bent solicitously over his unconscious patron. Kevin found Anderson in the passageway. "I ordered them to start fueling Moonbeam," Bert said. "Good. Is Mark awake?" "Eating breakfast. The psycho's giving him a clinical chat." "I wish it were over." Morrow brushed back his hair. "You've really got the jitters, huh chief?" Morrow turned angrily and then tried to laugh. "I'd sell my job for a nickel right now, Bert. This will be touch and go, without having the worst enemy of space flight aboard. If this ship fails, it's more than a rocket or the death of a man. It'll set the whole program back # years." "I know," Bert answered, "but he'll make it." Footsteps sounded in the tube outside the cabin. Mark Kramer walked in. "Hi, chief," he grinned, "Moonbeam ready to go?" "The techs are out now and fuel's aboard. How about you? Shouldn't you get some rest?" "That's all I've had since they shipped me out here." Kramer laughed. "It'll be a snap. After all, I'll never make over two gees and pick up # mph to leave you guys behind. Then I play ring around the rosy, take a look at Lima's off side and come home. Just like that." "Just like that," Kevin whispered meditatively. TTie moon rocket, floating there outside the station's rim was ugly, designed never to touch a planet's atmosphere, but it was the most beautiful thing man had ever built, assembled in space from individu fragments boosted laboriously from the Earth's surface. Another clatter of footsteps approached the hatch. Max Gordon entered and stood at attention as Senator McKelvie made a dignified entrance. The senator wore an adhesive patch on his high forehead. He turned to Kramer. "Young man," he rumbled, "are you the fool risking your life in that -- that thing out there? Yoai must know it'll never reach the moon. I know it'll never -- " Kramer's face paled slightly and he moved swiftly between the two men. Without using force, he backed the senator and (Jordon through the hatch and slammed it behind him. Anger was a knot of green snakes in his belly. "I want to talk to that pilot," McKelvie said belligerently. "I'm sorry, senator. The best psychiatrists on Earth worked eight months to condition Kramer for this flight. He must not be emotionally disturbed. You can't talk to him." "You forbid... ?" McKelvie exploded, but Morrow intercepted smoothly. "Gordon. I'm sure the senator would like a tour of the station. Will you escort him?" McKelvie's face reddened and Max opened his mouth to object. "Gkrdon!" Morrow said sharply. Max closed his mouth and guided the grumbling congressman up the tube.Iblastoff," Bert reported. "Right," Kevin acknowledged absendy. He studied taped data moving in by radio facsimile from the mammodi electronic computer on Earth. "Our orbit's true," he said with satisfaction and wiped a sweaty palm on his trousers. "(Jet the time check, Bert." Beeps from the Naval Observatory syndironized with the space station chronometer. 'Alert Kramer," "Hes leaving the airlock now," Bert said. From the intercom, Morrow listened to periodic reports from crew members as McKelvie and Gordon progressed in their tour. "Mr. Morrow?" "Right." "This is Adams in Section M. The senator and Gordon have been in the line chamber for # minutes." "Boot 'em out," Kevin said crisply. "Blastoff in # minutes." "That machinery controls the safety lines," Bert said. Kevin looked up with a puzzled frown, but turned back to watch Kramer creeping along a mooring line to the moon ship. A group of tugmen helped the space-suited figure into the rocket, dogged shut the hatch and cleared back to the station rim. "Station to Kramer," on the radio, "are you ready." "All set," came the steady voice, "give me the word." "All right. Five minutes." Kevin turned to the intercom. "Release safety lines." In the weightlessness of space the cables retained their normal rigid line from the rim of the station to the rocket. They had been under no strain. Their shape would not change until they were reeled in. "Two minutes," Morrow warned. Tension grew as Anderson began the slow second count. The hatch opened. McKelvie and Gordon entered the control room. No one noticed it, "Five... four .  . three...  two... one..." A gout of white fire jabbed from the stem of the rocket. Slowly the ship moved forward. Morrow watched tensely, hands gripping a safety rail. Then his face froze in a mask of disbelief and horror. "The lines!" he shouted. "The safety lines fouled!" He fell sprawling as the space station lurched heavily, tipped upward like a giant platter under the inexorable pull of the moon rocket. Kevin scrambled back to the viewport, the shriek of tortured metal in his ears. Horror-stricken, he saw the taut cables that had failed to release. Then a huge section of nylon, aluminum and rubber ripped out of the station wall, was visible a second in the rocket glare, and vanished. Escaping air whistled through the crippled structure. Pressure dropped alarmingly before the series of automatic airlocks clattered reassuringly shut. Kevin's hand was bleeding. He staggered with the frightening new motion of the space station. Gordon and the senator had collapsed against a bulkhead. McKelvie's pale face twisted with fear and amazement. Blood streaked down the pink curve of his forehead. Individual station reports trickled through the intercom. Miraculously, the bulk of the station had escaped damage. "Line chamber's gone," Adams reported. "Other bulkheads holding, but something must have jammed the line machines. They ripped right out." "Get repair crews in to patch leaks,' Morrow shouted. He turned frantically to the radio. "Station to Moonbeam. Kramer! Are you all right." He waited an agonizing minute, then a scratchy voice came through. "Kramer, here. What the hell happened? Something gave me a terrific yaw, but'the gyro pulled me back on course. Fuel consumption high. Otherwise I'm okay." "You ripped out part of the station," Kevin yelled. "You're towing extra mass. Release the safety lines if you can." The faint answer came back, garbled by static. Another disaster halted a new try to reach him. With a howling rumble, the massive gyroscope case in the bulkhead split open. The heavy wheel, spinning at # revolutions per minute, slowly and majestically crawled out of its gimbals; the gyroscope that stabilized the entire structure remained in its plane of revolution, but ripped out of its moorings when die station was forcibly tilted. Spinning like a giant top, the gyro walked slowly across the deck. McKelvie and Gordon scrambled out of its way. "It'll go through!" Bert shouted. Kevin leaped to a chest of emergency patches. The wheel ripped through the magnesium shell like a knife in soft cheese. A gaping rent opened to the raw emptiness of space, but Morrow was there with the patch. Before decompression could explode the four creatures of blood and bone, the patch slapped in place, sealed by the remaining air pressure. Trembling violently, Kevin staggered to a chair and collapsed. Silence rang in his ears. Anderson gripped the edge of a table to keep from falling. Kevin turned slowly to McKelvie and Gordon. "Come here," he said tonelessly. "Now see here, young man -- the senator blustered. "I said come here!" The two men obeyed. The commander's voice held a new edge of steel. "You were the last to leave the line control room," he said. "Did you touch that machinery? Gordon's face was the color of paste. His mouth worked like a suffocating fish. McKelvie recovered his bluster. "I'm a United States senator," he stuttered, "I'll not be threatened..." "I'm not threatening you," Kevin said, "but if you fouled that machinery to assure your prediction about the rocket, I'll see that you hang. Do you realize that gyroscope was the only control we had over the motion of this space station? Whatever it does now is the result of the moon rocket's pull. We may not live to see that rocket again." As though verifying Morrow's words, the lights dimmed momentarily and returned to normal from the squawkbox. "Hey, chief! This is power control. We've lost the sun!" Anderson looked out the port, studied the slowly wheeling stars. "Mother of God," he breathed, "we're flopping... like a flapjack over a stove." And the power mirrors were on only one face of the space station, mirrors that collected the sun's radiation and converted it to power. Now they were collecting nothing but the twinkling of the stars. The vital light would return as the station continued its new, awkward rotation, but would the intermittent exposure be sufficient to sustain power? "Shut down everything but emergency equipment," Morrow directed. "When we get back on the sun, soak every bit of juice you can into those batteries." He turned to Gordon and McKelvie. "Won't it be interesting if we freeze to death, or suffocate when the air machines stop?" Worry replaced anger as he turned abruptly away from them. "We've got a lot of work to do, Bert," he said crisply. "See if you can get White Sands." "It's over the horizon. I'll try South Africa." Anderson worked with the voice radio but static obliterated reception. "Here comes a Morse transmission," he said at last. Morrow read slowly as tape fed out of the translator: "Radar shows moon rocket in proper trajectory. Where are you?" The first impulse was to dash to the viewport and peer out. But that would be no help in determining position. "Radar, Bert," he whispered. Anderson verniered' in the scope, measuring true distance to Earth's surface. He read the figure, swore violently, and readjusted the instrument. "It can't be," he muttered at last. "This says we're # miles out." "# miles outside our orbit?" Morrow said calmly. "I was afraid of that. That tug from the Moonbeam not only cart-wheeled u it yanked us out." He snatched a sheet of graph paper out of a desk drawer and penciled a point. "Give me a reading every # seconds." Points began to connect in a curve. And the curve was something new. "Get Jones from astronomy," Kevin said at last. "He can help us plot and maybe predict." When the astronomer arrived minutes later, the space station was # miles above the Earth, still shearing into space on an ascending curve. "Get a quick look at this, Jones," Kevin spoke rapidly. "See if you can tell where it will be two hours from now." The astronomer studied the curve intently as it continued to grow under Kevin's pencil. "It may be an outward spiral," he said haltingly, "or it could be a... parabola." "No!" Bert protested. "That would throw us into space. We couldn't -- " "We couldn't get back," Kevin finished grimly. "There'd better be an alternative." "It could be an ellipse," Jones said. "It must be an ellipse," Bert said eagerly. "The Moonbeam couldn't save given us # mph velocity." Abruptly the lights went out. The radar scope faded from green to black. Morrow swore a string of violent oaths, realizing in the same instant that anger was useless when the power mirrors lost the sun. He bellowed into the intercom, but the speaker was dead. Already Bert was racing down the tube to the power compartment. Minutes later, the intercom dial flickered red. Morrow yelled again. "You've got to keep power to this radar set for the next half-hour. Everything else can stop, even the air machines, but we've got to find out where we're going. The space station turned again. Power resumed and Kevin picked up the plot. "We're # miles out!" he breathed. "But it's flattening," Jones cried. "The curve's flattening!" Bert loped back into the control room. Jones snatched the pencil from his superior. "Here," he said quickly, "I can see it now. Here's the curve. It's an ellipse all right." "It'll carry us out # miles," Bert gasped. "No one's ever been out that far." "All right," Morrow said. "That crisis is past. The next question is where are we when we come back on nadir. Bert, tell the crew what's going on. Jones, you can help me. We've got to pick up White Sands and get a fuel rocket up here to push." "Good Lord, look at that!" Jones breathed. He stared out the port. The Earth, a dazzling huge globe slowly past the plastic window. It was the first time they had been able to see more than a convex segment of oceans and continents. Kevin looked, soberly, and turned to the radio. The power did not fail in the next crazy rotation of the station. "There's the West Coast." Kevin pointed. "In a few minutes I can get White Sands, I hope." Jones had taken over the radar plot. At last his pencil reached a peak and the curve started down. The station had reached the limit of its wild plimge into space. "Good," Kevin muttered. "See if you can extrapolate that ciuve and get us an approximation where we'll cut in over the other side." The astronomer figured rapidly and abstractedly. "May I remind you yoimg man," McKelvie's voice boomed "you have a United States senator aboard. If anything happens -- "If anything happens, it happens to all of us," Kevin answered coldly. "When you're ready to tell me what did happen, I'm ready to listen. Silence. "White Sands, this is Station I. Come in please." Kevin tried to keep his voice calm, but the lives of # men rode on it, on his ability to project his words through the crazy hash of static lacing this part of space from the multitude of radio stars. A power rocket with extra fuel was the only instrument that could return the space station to its normal orbit. That rocket must come from White Sands. White Sands did not answer. He tried again, turned as an exclamation of dismay burst from the astronomer. Morrow bent to look at the plotting board. Jones had sketched a circle of the Earth, placing it in the heart of the ellipse the space station was drawing around it. From # miles out, the line curved down and down, and down... But it did not meet the point where the station had departed from its orbit # miles above Earth's surface. The line came down and aroimd to kiss the Earth -- almost. "I hope it's wrong," Jones said huskily. "If I'm right, we'll come in # miles above the surface." "It can't!" Morrow shouted in frustration. "We'll hit stratosphere. It'll bum us -- just long enough so we'll feel the agony before we die." Jones rechecked his figures and shook his head. The line was still the same. Each # seconds it was supported by a new radar range. The astronomer's lightning fingers worked out a new problem. "We have about # minutes to do something about it," he said. "We'll be over the Atlantic or England when it happens." "Station I, this is .  The beautiful, wonderful voice burst loud and clear from the radio and then vanished in a blurb of static. "Oh God!" Kevin breathed. It was a prayer. "We hear you," he shouted, procedure gone with the desperate need to communicate with home. "Gome in White Sands. Please come in!" Faintly now the voice blurred in and out, lost altogether for vital moments: "... your plot. Altiac computer... your orbit... rocket on standby... as you pass." "Yes!" Kevin shouted, gripping the short wave set with white fingers, trying to project his words into the microphone, across the dwindling thousands of miles of space. "Yes. Send the rocket!" "Gan they do it?" Jones asked. "The rocket, I mean." "I don't know," Kevin said. "They're all pre-set, mass produced now, and fuel is adjusted to come into the old orbit. They can be rigged, I think, if there's enough time." The coast of California loomed below them now, a brown fringe holding back the dazzling Rood of the Pacific. They were # miles above the Earth, dropping sharply on the down leg of the ellipse. At their present speed, the station appeared to be plunging directly at the Earth. The globe was frighteningly larger each time it wobbled across the viewport "Shall I call away the tugmen?" Bert asked tensely. "I can't ask them to do it," Kevin said. "With this crazy orbit, it's too dangerous. I'm going out," He slipped into his space gear. "I'm going with you," Bert said. Kevin smiled his gratitude. In the airlock the men armed themselves with three heavy rocket I pistols each. Morrow ordered other tugmen into suits for standby. "I wish I could do this alone, Bert," he said soberly. "But I'm glad you're coming along. If we miss, there won't be a second chance. They knew approximately when they would pass over the rocket launching base, but this time it would be different. The space station would pass at # miles altitude and with a new velocity. No one could be sure the feeder rocket would make it. Unless maximum fuel had been adjusted carefully, it might orbit out of reach below them. Rescue fuel would take the place of a pilot. A nderson and Morrow L floated clear of the huge wheel, turning lazily in the deceptive luxury of zero gravity. The familiar sensation of exhilaration threatened to wipe out the urgency they must bring to bear on their lone chance for survival. They could see the jagged hole where the Moonbeam had yanked out a section of the structure. An unintelligible buzz of voice murmured in the radios. Unconsciously Kevin tried to squeeze the earphones against his ears, but his heavily-gloved hands met only the rigid globe of his helmet. "You get it, Bert?" "No." "This is Jones," a new voice loud and clear. "Earth says # seconds to blastoff." "Rocket away!" Like a tiny, clear bell the words emerged from static. Bert and Kevin gyrated their bodies so they could stare directly at the passing panorama of Earth below. They had seen it hundreds of times, but now # more miles of altitude gave the illusion they were studying a familiar landmark through the small end of a telescope. "There it is!" Bert shouted. A pinpoint of flame, that was it, with no apparent motion as it rose almost vertically toward them. Then a black dot in an infinitesimal circle of flame -- the rocket silhouetted against its own fire... as big as a dime... as big as a dollar... as big as a basketball, the circle of flame soared up toward them. "It's still firing!" Kevin yelled. "It'll overshoot us." As he spoke, the fire died, but the tiny bar of the rocket, black against the luminous surface of Earth, crawled rapidly up into their sector of starlit blackness. Then it was above Earth's horizon, nearly to the space station's orbit, crawling slowly along, almost to them -- a beautiful long cylinder of metal, symbol of home and a civilization sending power to help them to safety. Hope flashed through Kevin's mind that he was wrong, that the giant computor and the careful hands of technicians had matched the ship to their orbit after all. But he was right. It passed them, angling slowly upward not # yards away. Instantly the two men rode the rocket blast of their pistols to the nose of the huge projectile. But it carried velocity imparted by rockets that had fired a fraction of a minute too long. Clinging to the metal with magnetic shoes. Morrow and Anderson pressed the triggers of the pistols, held them down, trying to push the cylinder down and back. Bert's heavy breathing rasped in the radio as he unconsciously used the futile force of his muscles in the agonizing effort to' move the ship. Their pistols gave out almost simultaneously. Bpth reached for another. Thin streams of propulsive gas altered the course of the rocket, slightly, but the space station was smaller now, angling imperceptibly away and down as the rocket pressed outward into a new, higher orbit. The rocket pistols were not enough. "(et the hell back here!" Jones' voice blared in their ears. "You can't do it. You're # miles away now and angling up. Don't be dead heroes!" The last words were high and frantic. "We've got to!" Morrow answered. "There's no other way." "We can't do the impossible, chief," Bert gasped. A group of tiny figures broke away from the rim of the space station. The tugmen were coming to help. Then Kevin grasped the hideous truth. There were not enough rocket pistols to bring the men to the full ship and return with any reserve to guide the projectile, "Get back!' he shouted. "Save the pistols. We're coming in." Behind them their only chance for life continued serenely upward into a new orbit. There, # miles above the earth, it would revolve forever with more fuel in its tanks than it needed. Fuel that would have saved the lives of # desperate men. By leaving it, Morrow and Anderson had bought perhaps # more minutes of life before the space station became a huge meteor riding its fiery path to death in the the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Both suffered the guilt of enormous betrayal. The fact that they could have done no more did not erase it. Frantically, Kevin flipped over in his mind the possible tools that still could be brought to bear to lift the space station above its flaming destruction. But his tools were the stone axe of a primitive man trying to hack his way out of a forest fire. Eager hands pulled them back into the station. For a moment there were the reassiuing sounds as their helmets were unscrewed. Then the familiar smells and shape of the structure that had been home for so long. Now that haven was about to destroy itself. Then Morrow remembered the Earth rocket that had brought Senator McKelvie to the great white sausage in space. That rocket still contained a small quantity of fuel. If fired at the precise moment, that fuel, anchored with the rocket in the hub socket, might be enough to lift the entire station. He shouted instructions and men raced to obey. Kevin, himself, raced into the nearest tube. There was no sound, but ahead of him the hatch was open to the discharge chamber. He leaped into the zero gravity room. McKelvie was crawling through the connecting port into the feeder rocket. Kevin sprawled headlong into Gordon. The recoil threw them apart, but Gordon recovered balance first. He had a gun. "Get back," he snarled. "Were going down." He laughed sharply, near hysteria. "We're going down to tell the world how you fried -- through error and mismanagement." "You messed up those lines," Kevin said. It didn't matter now. He only hoped to hold Gordon long enough for diversionary help to come out of the tube. "Yes," Gordon leered. "We fixed the lines. The senator wasn't sure we should, but I helped him over his squeamishness, and now we'Q crack the whip when we get back home." "You won't make it," Kevin said. "We're still more than # miles high. The glide pattern in that rocket is built to take you down from # miles." McKelvie's head appeared in die hatch. He was desperately afraid. "You said you could fty diis thing, Gordon. Can you?" Max nodded his head rapidly, like a schoolboy asked to recite a lesson he has not studied. Kevin was against the bulkhead. Now he pushed hineelf slowly forward. "Stay back or Fll shoot!" Gordon screamed. Instead, he leaped backward through the hatch. Hamper by his original slow motion, Kevin could not move faster until he reached another sedid surface. The hatch slammed shut before his grasping fingers touched it. A wrenching tug jostled the space station structure. The rocket was gone, and with it the power that might have saved all of them. Morrow ran again. He had not stopped running since the beginning of this nightmare. He tumbled over Bert and Jones in the tube. They scrambled after him back to the control room. The three men watched through the port. "If he doesn't hit the atmosphere too quick, too hard..." Kevin whispered. His fists were clenched. He felt no malice at this moment. He did not wish diem death. There was no sound in the radio. The phrmmeting projectile was a tiny black dot, vanishing below and bes hind them. When the end came, it was a mote of orange red, then a dazzling smear of white fire as the rocket ripped into the atmosphere at nearly # miles an hour. "They're dead!" Jones voice choked with disbelief. Kevin nodded, but it was a flashing thing that lost meaning for him in the same instant. He knew that unless a miracle happened, ninety men in his command would meet tibe same fate. L ike a perpetual motion machine, his brain kept reaching for something that could save his space station, his own people, the iron-nerved spacemen who knew they were near death but kept their vital posts, waiting for him to find a way. Stories do not end unhappily -- that thought kept cluttering his brain -- a muddy optimism blanking out vital things that might be done. "What's the altitude Jones?" "# now. Leveling a bit." "Enough?" It was a stupid question and Kevin knew it. Jones shook his head. "We might be lucky," he said. "We'll hit it about # miles up. The top isn't a smooth surface, it billows and dips. But," he added, almost a whisper, "we'll penetrate to about # miles before..." "How much time?" Kevin asked sharply. A tiny chain of hope linked feebly. "About # minutes." "Bert, order all hands into space suits -- emergency ! " While the order was being carried out, Kevin summoned the tugmen. "How many loaded pistols do we have?" "Six," the chief answered. "All right. Get this quick. Anchor yourselves inside the hub. Aim those pistols at the Earth and fire until they're exhausted." The chief stared incredulously. "I know it's crazy," Kevin snapped. "It's not enough, but if it alters our orbit # feet, it'll help." The tugmen ran out. Bert, Kevin and Jones scrambled into space suits. Morrow called for reports. "All hands," he intoned steadily, "open all ports. Repeat. Open all ports. Do not question. Follow directions closely." Ten seconds later, a whoosh of escaping air signaled obedience. "Now!" Kevin shouted, "grab every loose object within reach. Throw it at the Earth. Desks, books, tools, anything. Throw them down with every oimce of strength you've got!" It was insane. Everything was insane. It couldn't possibly be enough... But space around the hurtling station blossomed with every conceivable flying object that man has ever taken with him to a lonely outpost. A pair of shoes went tumbling into darkness, and behind it the plastic framed photograph of someone's wife and children. Jones knew his superior had not gone berserk. He bent anxiously over the radar scope. It was not a matter of jettisoning weight. Every action has an equal reaction, and the force each man gave to a thrown object was as effective in its diminuitive way as the exhaust from a rocket. "Read it!" Morrow shouted. "Read it!" "# miles," Jones cried. "I need more readings to tell if it helped." There was no sound in the radio circuit, save that of # men breathing, waiting to hear # death sentences. Jones' heavily-gloved hands moved the pencil clumsily over the graph paper. He drew a tangent to a new curve. "It helped," he said tonelessly, "We'll go in at # miles, penetrate to #... "Not enough," Kevin said. "Close all ports. Repeat. Close all ports!" An unheard sigh breathed through the mammoth, complex doughnut as automatic machinery gave new breath to airless spaces. It might never be needed again to sustain human life. But the presence of air delivered one final hope to Morrow's frantic brain. "Two three oh miles," Jones said. "Air control," Kevin barked into the mike, "how much pressure can you get in # minutes?" "Air control, aye," came the answer, and a pause while the chief calculated. "About # pounds with everything on the line." "Get it on! And hang on to your hats," Kevin yelled. The station dropped another # miles, slanting in sharply toward the planet's envelope of gas that could sustain life -- or take it away. Morrow turned to Anderson. "Bert. There are four tubes leading into the hub. Get men and open the outer airlocks. Then standby the four inner locks. When I give the signal, open those locks, fast. You may have to pull to help the machinery -- you'll be fighting three times normal air pressure." Bert ran out. Nothing now but to wait. Five minutes passed. Ten. "We're at # miles," Jones said. Far below the Earth wheeled by, its apparent motion exaggerated as the space station swooped lower. "# miles." Kevin's throat was parched, his lips dry. Increasing air pressure squeezed the space suits tighter around his flesh. A horror of claustrophobia gripped him and he knew every man was suffering the same torture. "# miles." "Almost there," Bert breathe unaware that his words were audible. Then a new force gripped them, at first the touch of a caressing finger tip dragging back, ever so slightly. Kevin staggered as inertia tugged him forward. "We're in the air!" he shouted. "Bert. Standby the airlocks!" "Airlocks ready!" The finger was a hand, now, a huge hand of tenuous gases, pressing, pressing, but the station still ripped throu its death medium at a staggering # miles an hour. Jones pointed. Morrow's eyes followed his indicating finger to the thermocouple dial. The dial said # F. While he watched it moved to #, quickly to #. Five seconds more. A blinding pain of tension stabbed Kevin behind the eyes. But through the flashing colors of agony, he counted, slowly, deliberately... "Now!" he shouted. "Open airAir rushed out through the converging spokes of the great wheel, poured out under tremendous pressure, into the open cup of the space station hub, and there the force of three atmospheres spurted into space through the mammoth improvised rocket nozzle. Kevin felt the motion. Every man of the crew felt the surge as the intricate mass of metal and nylon leaped upward. That was all. Morrow watched the temperature gauge. It climbed to #, to #... #...#... "The temperature is at # degrees," he announced huskily over the radio circuit. "If it goes higher, there's nothing we can do." The needle quivered at #, moved to #, and held... Two minutes, three... The needle stepped back, one degree. "We're moving out," Kevin whispered. "We're moving out!" The cheer, then, was a ringing, deafening roar in the earphones. Jones thumped Kevin madly on the back and leaped in a grotesque dance of joy. M orrow leaned back in the control chair, pressed tired fingers to his temples. He could not remember when he had slept. The first rocket from White Sands had brought power to adjust the orbit. This one was on the mark. The next three brought the Senate investigating committee. But that didn't matter, really. Kevin was happy, and he was waiting. The control room door banged open. Mark Kramer's grin was like a Hash of warm sunlight. "Hi, commander," he said, "wait'll you see the marvelous pictures I got." Outside the Moonbeam rode gently at anchor, tethered with new safety lines.    fiction, we are happy to annoimce that, beginning with the December issue of IF, we will present a special department by none other than "Mr. Science Fiction" himself -- Forrest Ackerman, who probably knows more about what is happening in science fiction than any other person in the world today. His column will include news and views of sciencefiction movies, books, personalities, events and other items from all over the world. A resident of Los Angeles, he covers Hollywood and every production of a science fiction film. Surrounded by thousands of volumes of books and tons of magazines, he knows the past and present of everything that's printed. Host and traveler, he has met and entertained writers, producers, scientists, artists and others who are connected with science fiction. He hasn't missed a national convention since he was old enough to crawl, so he knows those too! So -- don't you miss his entertaining and informative new department in the December IF! Illustrated by Paul Orban What can a priest do when he's faced with such a dilemma -- one which requires him to gainsay the very foundations of the faith which he represents? a baby was shrieking. Father Courtney listened to it, and sighed, and made the Sign of the Cross. Another battle, he thought, dismally. Another grand tug of war. And who won this time. Lord? Me? Or that squalling infant, bless its innocence? "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen." He turned and made his way down the pulpit steps, and told himself. Well, you ought to be used to it by now. Heaven knows. After all, you're a priest, not a monologist. What do you care about "audience reaction"? And besides, who ever listens to these sermons of yours, anyway -- even under the best of conditions? A few of the ladies in the parish (though you're sure they never hear or understand a word), and, of course, Donovan. But who else? Screech away, little pink child! Screech until you -- no. No, no. Ahhh! He walked through the sacristy, trying not to think of Donovan, or the big city churches with their fine nurseries, and sound-proof walls, and amplifiers that amplified... One had what one had: It was God's will. And were things really so bad? Here there was the smell of forests, wasn't there? And in what city parish could you see wild flowers growing on the hills like bright lava? Or feel the earth breathing? He opened the door and stepped outside. The fields were dark-silver and silent. Far above the fields, up near the clouds, a rocket launch moved swiftly, dragging its slow thunder behind it. Father Courtney blinked. Of course things were not so bad. Things would be just fine, he thought, and I would not be nervous and annoyed at little children, if only -- Abruptly he put his hands together. "Father," he whispered, "let him be well. Let that be Your #" Then, deciding not to wait to greet the people, he wiped his palms with a handkercef and started for the rectory. The morning was very cold. A thin film of dew coated each pebble along the path, and made them all glisten like drops of mercxuy. Father Courtney looked at the pebbles and thought of other walks down this path, which led through a wood to Hidden River, and of himself laughing; of excellent wine and soft cushions and himself arguing, arguing; of a thousand sweet hours in die past. He walked and thought these things and did not hear the telephone until he had reached the rectory stairs. A chill passed over him, unaccoimtably. He went inside and pressed a yellow switch. The screen blurred, came into focus. The face of an "Hello, Father." "George!" The priest smiled and waved his fist, menacingly. "George, why haven't you contacted me?" He sputtered. "Aren't you out of that bed yet?" "Not yet, Father." "Well, I expected it, I knew it. Now will you let me call a doctor?" "No -- " The old man in the screen shook his head. He was thin and pale. His hair was profuse, but very white, and there was sometiling in his eyes. "I think I'd like you to come tJver, if you could." "I shouldn't," the priest said, "after the way you've been treating all of us. But, if there's still some of that Chianti left..." George Donovan nodded. "Could you come right away?" "Father Yoshida won't be happy about it." "Please. Right away." Father Courtney felt his fingers draw into fists. "Why?" he asked, holding onto the conversational tone. "Is anything the matter?" "Not really," Donovan said. His smile was brief. "It's just that I'm dying." "And I'm going to call Doctor Ferguson. Don't give me any cirgument, either. This nonsense has gone far -- " The old man's face knotted. "No," he said, loudly. "I forbid you to do that." "But you're ill, man. For all we know, you're seriously ill. And if you think I'm going to stand around and watch you work yourself into the hospital just because you happen to dislike doctors, you're crazy." "Father, listen -- please, I have my reasons. You don't understand them, and I don't blame you. But you've got to trust me. I'll explain everything, if you'll promise me you won't call anyone Father Courtney breathed unsteadily; he studied his friend's face. Then he said, "I'll promise this much. I won't contact a doctor until I've seen you." "Good." The old man seemed to relax. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes." "With your Little Black Bag?" "Certainly not. You're going to be all right." "Bring it. Father. Please. Just in case." The screen blurred and danced and went white. Father Courtney hesitated at the blank telephone. Then he walked to a table and raised his fists and brought them down hard, once. You're going to get well, he thought. It isn't going to be too late. Because if you are dying, if you really are, and I could have prevented it... He went to the closet and drew on his overcoat. It was thick and heavy, but it did not warm him. As he returned to the sacristy he shivered and thought that he had never been so cold before in all his life. dropped quickly to the ground. Father Courtney removed the ignition key, pocketed it, and thrust his bulk out the narrow door, wheezing. A dull rumbling sifted down from the sky. The wake of fleets a mile away, ten miles, a hundred. Its raining whales in our back yard, the priest thought, remembering how Donovan had described the sound once to a little girl. A freshet of autumn leaves burst against his leg, softly, and for a while he sto listening to the rockets' dying rumble, watching the shapes of gold and red that scattered in the wind, like fire. Then he whispered, "Let it be Your will," and pushed the picket gate. The front door of the house was open. He walked in, through the livingroom, to the study. "George." "In here," a voice answered. He moved to the bedroom, and twisted the knob. George Donovan lay propped on a cloudbank of pillows, his thin face white as the linen. He was smiling. "I'm glad to see you, Father," he said, quietly. The priest's heart expanded and shrank and began to thump in his chest. "The Chianti's down here in the night-table," Donovan gestured. "Pour some: morning's a good enough time for a dinner wine." "Not now, George." "Please. It will help." Father Courtney pulled out the drawer and removed the halfempty bottle. He got a glass from the bookshelf, filled it. Dutifully, according to ritual, he asked, "For you?" "No," Donovan said. "Thank you all the same." He turned his head. "Sit over there. Father, where I can see you." The priest frowned. He noticed that Donovan's arms were perfectly flat against the blanket, that his body was rigid, outlined beneath the covering. No part of the old man moved except the head, and that slowly, unnaturally. "That's better. But take off your coat -- it's terribly hot in here. You'll catch pneumonia." The room was full of cold winds from the open shutters. Father Courtney removed his coat. "You've been worried, haven't you?" Donovan asked. The priest nodded. He tried to sense what was wrong, to smell the disease, if there was a disease, if there was anything. "I'm sorry about that." The old man seemed to sigh. His eyes were misted, webbed with distance, lightly. "But I wanted to be alone. Sometimes you have to be alone, to think, to get things straight. Isn't that true?" "Sometimes, I suppose, but -- " "No. I know what you're going to say, the questions you want to ask. But there's not enough time..." Father Courtney arose from the chair, and walked quickly to the telephone extension. He jabbed a button. "I'm sorry, George," he said, "but you're going to have a doctor." The screen did not flicker. He pressed the button again, firmly. "Sit down," the tired voice whispered. "It doesn't work. I pulled the wires ten minutes ago." "Then I'll fly over to Milbum -- " "If you do, ril be dead when you get back. Believe that: I know what I'm talking about." The priest clenched and unclenched his stubby fingers, and sat down in the chair again. Donovan chuckled. "Drink up," he said. "We can't have good wine going to waste, can we?" The priest put the glass to his lips. He tried to think clearly. If he rushed out to Milburn and got Doctor Ferguson, perhaps there'd be a chance. Or -- He took a deep swallow. No. That wouldn't do. It might take hours. Donovan was talking now; the words lost -- a hum of locusts in the room, a far-off murmuring; then, like a radio turned up: "Father, how long have we been friends, you and I?" "Why... twenty years," the priest answered. "Or more." "Would you say you know me very well by now?" "I believe so." "Then tell me first, right now, would you say that I've been a good man?" Father Courtney smiled. "There've been worse," he said, and thought of what this man had accomplished in Mount Vernon, quietly, in his own quiet way, over the years. The building of a decent school for the children -- Donovan had shamed the people into it. The new hospital -- Donovan's doing, his patient campaigning. Entertainment halls for the young; a city fund for the poor; better teachers, better doctors -- all, all because of the old man with the soft voice, George Donovan. "Do you mean it?" "Don't be foolish. And don't be treacly, either. Of course I mean it" In the room, now, a strange odor fumed up, suddenly. The old man said, "I'm glad." Still he did not move. "But, I'm sorry I asked. It was unfair." "I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about." "Neither do I, Father, completely. I thought I did, once, but I was wrong." The priest slapped his knees, angrily. "Why won't you let me get a doctor? We'll have plenty of time to talk afterwards." Donovan's eyes narrowed, and curved into what resembled a smile. "You're my doctor," he said. "The only one who can help me now." "In what way?" "By making a decision." The voice was reedy : it seemed to waver and change pitch. "What sort of a decision?" Donovan's head jerked up. He closed his eyes and remained this way for a full minute, while the acrid smell bellied and grew stronger and whorled about the room in invisible currents. " '... the gentleman lay graveward with his furies...' Do you remember that. Father?" "Yes," the priest said. "Thomas, isn't it?" "Thomas. He's been here with me, you know, really; and I've been asking him things. On the theory that poets aren't entirely human. But he just grins. 'You're dying of strangers,' he says; and grins. Bless him." The old man lowered his head. "He disappointed me." Father Courtney reached for a cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, laced and unlaced his fingers. He waited, remembering the times he had come to this house, all the fine evenings. Ending now? Yes. Whatever else he would learn, he knew that, suddenly: they were ending. "What sort of a decision, George?" "A theological sort." Father Courtney snorted and walked to a window. Outside, the sun was hidden behind a curtain of gray. Birds sat black and still on the telephone lines, like notes of music; and there was rain. "Is there something you think you haven't told me?" he asked. "Yes." "About yourself?" "Yes." "I don't think so, CJeorge." Father Courtney turned. "I've known about it for a long time." The old man tried to speak. "I've known very well. And now I think I understand why you've refused to see anyone." "No," Donovan said. "You don't. Father, listen to me: it isn't what you think." "Nonsense." The priest reverted to his usual gruff ness. "We've been friends for too many years for this kind of thing. It's exactly what I think. You're an intelligent, wellread, mule-stubbom old man who's worried he won't get to Heaven because sometimes he has doubts." "That isn't -- " "Well, rubbish! Do you think I don't ask questions, myself, once in a while? Just lcause Fm a priest, do you think I go blindly on, never wondering, not even for a minute?" The old man's eyes moved swiftly, up and down. "Every intelligent person doubts, George, once in a while. And we all feel terrible about it, and we're terribly sorry. But I assure you, if this were enough to damn us. Heaven would be a wilderness." Father Courtney reached again for a cigarette. "So you've shut yourself up like a hermit and worried and stewed and endangered your life, and all for nothing." He coughed. "Well, that's it, isn't it?" "I wish it were," Donovan said, sadly. His eyes kept dancing. There was a long pause; then he said, "Let me pose you a theoretical problem. Father. Something I've been thinking about lately." Father Courtney recalled the sentence, and how many times it had begun the evenings of talk -- wonderful talk! These evenings, he realized, were part of his life now. An important part. For there was no one else, no one of Donovan's intelligence, with whom you could argue any subject under the sun -- from Frescobaldi to baseball, from Colonization on Mars to the early French symbolists, to agrarian reforms, to wines, to theology... The old man shifted in the bed. As he did, the acrid odor diminished #ind swelled and pulsed. "You once told me," he said, "that you read imaginative fiction, didn't you?" "I suppose so." "And that there were certain concepts you could swallow -- such as parallel worlds, mutated humans, and the like -- , but that other concepts you couldn't swallow at all. Artificial life, I befieve you mentioned, and time travel, and a few others." The priest nodded. "Well, let's take one of these themes for our problem. Will you do that? Let's te the first idea." "All right. Then the doctor." "We have this man. Father," Donovan said, gazing at the ceiling. "He looks perfectly ordinary, you see, and it would occur to no one to doubt this ; but he is not ordinary. Strictly speaking, he isn't even a man. For, though he lives, he isn't alive. You follow? He is a thing of wires and coils and magic, a creation of other men. He is a machine..." "George!" The priest shook his head. "We've gone through this before: it's foolish to waste time. I came here to help you, not to engage in a discussion of science fiction themes!" "But that's how you can help me," Donovan said. "Very well," the priest sighed. "But you know my views on this. Even if there were a logical purpose to which such a creature might be put -- and I can't think of any -- I still say they will never create a machine that is capable of abstract thought. Human intelligence is a spiritual thing -- and spiritual things can't be duplicated by men." "You really believe that?" "Of course I do. Extrapolation of known scientific advances is perfectly all right; but this is something else entirely." "Is it?" the old man said. "What about Pasteur's discoveiTi? Or the X-Ray? Did Roentgen correlate a lot of embryonic data. Father, or did he come upon something brand new? What do you think even the scientists themselves would have said to the idea of a machine that would see through human tissue? They would have said. It's fantastic. And it was, too, and is. Nevertheless, it exists." "It's not the same thing." "No... I suppose that's true. However, I'm not trying to convince you of my thesis. I ask merely that you accept it for the sake of the problem. Will you?" "Go ahead, George." "We have this man, then. He's artificial, but he's perfect: great pains have been taken to see to this. Perfect, no detail spared, however small. He looks human, and he acts human, and for all the world knows, he is human. In fact, sometimes even he, our man, gets confused. When he feels a pain in his heart, for instance, its diflScult for him to remember that he has no heart. When he sleeps and awakes refreshed, he must remind himself that this is all controlled by an automatic switch somewhere inside his brain, and that he doesn't actually feel refreshed. He must think. I'm not real. I'm not real. I'm not real! "But this becomes impossible, after a while. Because he doesn't believe it He begins to ask, Why? Why am I not real? Where is the difference, when you come right down to it? Humans eat and sleep -- as I do. They talk -- as I do. They move and work and laugh -- as I do. What they think, I think, and what they feel, I feel. Don't I? "He wonders, this mechanical man does, Father, what would happen if all the people on earth were suddenly to discover they were mechanical also. Would they feel any the less human? Is it likely that they would rush off to woo typewriters and adding machines? Or would they think, perhaps, of revising their definition of the word, 'Life'? "Well, our man thinks about it, and thinks about it, but he never reaches a conclusion. He doesn't believe he's nothing more than an advanced calculator, but he doesn't really believe he's human, either: not completely. "All he knows is that the smell of wet grass is a fine smell to him, and that the sound of the wind blowing through trees is very sad and very beautiful, and that he loves the whole earth with an impossible passion..." Father Courtney shifted uncomfortably in his chair. If only the telephone worked, he thought. Or if he could be sure it was safe to leave... other men made the creature, as I've said; but many more like him were made. However, of them all, let's say only he was successful." "Why?" the priest asked, irritably. "Why would this be done in the first place?" Donovan smiled. "Why did we send the first ship to the moon? Or bother to split the atom? For no very good reason. Father. Except the reason behind all of science: Curiosity. My theoretical scientists were curious to see if it could be accomplished, that's all." The priest shrugged. "But perhaps I'd better give our man a lustory. That would make it a bit more logical. All right, he was bom a hundred years ago, roughly. A privately owned industrial monopoly was his mother, and a dozen or so assorted technicians his father. He sprang from his electronic womb fully formed. But, as the result of an accident -- lack of knowledge, what have you -- he came out rather different from his unsuccessful brothers. A mutant! A mutated robot, Father -- now there's an idea that ought to appeal to you! Anyway, he knew who, or what, he was. He remembered. And so -- to make it brief -- when the war interrupted the experiment and threw things into a general uproar, our man decided to escape. He wanted his individuality. He wanted to get out of the zoo. "It wasn't particularly easy, but he did this. Once free, of course, it was impossible to find him. For one thing, he had been constructed along almost painfully ordinary lines. And for another, they couldn't very well release the information that a mechanical man built by their laboratories was wandering the streets. It would cause a panic. And there was enough panic, what with the nerve gas and the bombs." "So they never found him, I gather." "No," Donovan said, wistfully. "They never found him. And they kept their secret well : it died when they died." "And what happened to the creature?" "Very little, to tell the truth. They'd given him a decent intelligence, you see -- far more decent, and complex, than they knew -- so he didn't have much trouble finding small jobs. A rather old-looking man, fairly strong -- he made out. Needless to say, he couldn't stay in the same town for more than twenty years or so, because of his inability to age, but this was all right. Everyone makes friends and loses them. He got used to it." Father Courtney sat very still now. The birds had flown away from the telephone lines, and were at the window, beating their wings, and crying harshly. "But all this time, he's been thinking. Father. Thinking and reading. He makes quite a study of philosophy, and for a time he favors a somewhat peculiar combination of Russell and Schopenhauer -- unbitter bitterness, you might say. Then this phase passes, and he begins to search through the vast theological and metaphysical literature. For what? He isn't sure. However, he is sure of one thing, now: He is, indubitably, human. Without breath, without heart, without blood or bone, artificially created, he thinks this and believes it, with a fair amount of firmness, too. Isn't that remarkable!" "It is indeed," the priest said, his throat oddly tight and dry. "Go on." "Well," Donovan chuckled, "I've caught your interest, have I? All right, then. Let us imagine that one hundred years Ifkve passed. The creature has been able to make minor repairs on himself, but -- at last -- he is dying. Like an ancient motor, he's gone on nmning year after year, until he's all paste and hairpins, and now, like the motor, he's falling apart. And nothing and no one can save him." The acrid aroma burned and fumed. "Here's the real paradox, though. Our man has become religious. Father! He doesn't have a living cell within him, yet he's concerned about his soul!" Donovan's eyes quieted, as the rest of him did. "The problem," he said, "is this: Having lived creditably for over a century as a member of iht human species, can this creature of ours hope for Heaven? Or will he 'die' and become only a heap of metal cogs?" Father Courtney leapt from the chair, and moved to the bed. "George, in Heaven's name, let me call Doctor Ferguson!" "Answer the question first. Or haven't you decided?" "There's nothing to decide," the priest said, with impatience. "It's a preposterous idea. No machine can have a soul." Donovan made the sighing sound, through closed lips. He said, "You don't think it's conceivable, then, that God could have made an exception here?" "What do you mean?" "That He could have taken pity on this theoretical man of ours, and breathed a soul into him after all? Is that so impossible?' Father Courtney shrugged. "It's a poor word, impossible," he said. "But it's a poor problem, too. Why not ask me whether pigs ought to be allowed to fly?" "Then you admit it's conceivable?" "I admit nothing of the kind. It simply isn't the sort of question any man can answer." "Not even a priest?" "Especially not a priest. You know as much about Catholicism as I do, George ; you ought to know how absurd the proposition is." "Yes," Donovan said. His eyes were closed. Father Courtney remembered the time they had argued furiously on what would happen if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather. This was like that argument. Exactly like it -- exactly. It was no stranger than a dozen other discussions (What if Mozart had ben a writer instead of a composer? If a person died and remained dead for an hour and were then revived, would he be haunted by his own ghost?) Plus, perhaps, the fact that Donovan might be in a fever. Perhaps and might and why do I sit here while his life may be draining away... The old man made a sharp noise. "But you can tell me this much," he said. "If our theoretical man were dying, and you knew that he was dying, would you give him Extreme Unction?" "George, you're delirious." "No, I'm not: please. Father! Would you give this creature the Last Rites? If, say, you knew him? If you'd known him for years, as a friend, as a member of the parish?" The priest shook his head. "It would be sacriligious." "But why? You said yoiurself that he might have a soul, that God might have granted him this. Didn't you say that?" "Father, remember, he's a friend of yours. You know him well. You and he, this creature, have worked together, side by side, for years. You've taken a thousand walks together, shared the same interests, the same love of art and knowledge. For the sake of the thesis. Father. Do you understand?" "No," the priest said, feeling a chill freeze into him. "No, I don't." "Just answer this, then. If your friend were suddenly to reveal himself to you as a machine, and he was dying, and wanted very much to go to Heaven -- what would you do?" The priest picked up the wine glass and emptied it. He noticed Slat his hand W#is trembling. "Why -- he began, and stopped, and looked at the silent old man in the bed, studying the face, searching for madness, for death. What would you do? An unsummoned image flashed through his mind. Donovan, kneeling at the altar for Communion, Sunday after Sunday; Donovan, with his mouth firmly shut, while the others' yawned ; Donovan, waiting to the last moment, then snatching the Host, quickly, dartingly, like a lizard gobbling a fly. Had he ever seen Donovan eat? Had he seen him take even one glass of wine, ever? Father Courtney shuddered slightly, brushing away the images. He felt unwell. He wished the birds would go elsewhere. Welly answer hiniy he thought. Give him an answer. Then get in the helicar and fly to Milburn and pray ifs not too late... "I think," the priest said, "that in such a case, I would administer Extreme Unction." "Just as a precautionary measure?" "It's all very ridiculous, but -- I think that's what I'd do. Does that answer the question?" "It does. Father. It does." Donovan's voice came from nowhere. "There is one last point, then I'm finished with my little thesis." "Yes?" "Let us say the man dies and you give him Extreme Unction; he does or does not go to Heaven, provided there is a Heaven. What happens to the body? Do you tell the townspeople they have been living with a mechanical monster all these years?" "What do you think, George?" "I think it would be unwise. They remember our theoretical man as a friend, you see. The shock would be terrible. Also, they would never believe he was the only one of his kind: they'd begin to suspect their neighbors of having clockwork interiors. And some of them might be tempted to investigate and see for sure. And, too, the news would be bound to spread, all over the world. I think it would be a bad thing to let anyone know, Father." "How would I be able to suppress it?" the priest heard himself ask, seriously. "By conducting a private autopsy, so to speak. Then, afterward, you could take the parts to a junkyard and scatter them." Donovan's voice dropped to a whisper. Again the locust hum. "... and if our monster had left a note to the effect he had moved to some unspecified place, you..." The acrid smell billowed, all at once, like a steam, a hiss of blinding vapor. "George." Donovan lay imstirring on the cloud of linen, his face composed, expressionless. "George!" The priest reached his hand under the blanket and touched the heart-area of Donovan's chest. He tried to pull the eyelids up: they would not move. He blinked away the burning wetness. "Forgive me!" he said, and paused, and took from his pocket a small white jar and a white stole. He spoke softly, under his breath, in Latin. While he spoke, he touched the old man's feet and head with glistening fingertips. Then, when many minutes had passed, he raised his head. Rain sounded in the room, and swift winds, and far-off rockets. Father Courtney grasped the edge of the blanket. He made the Sign of the Cross, breathed, and pulled downward, slowly. After a long while he opened his eyes.    An executive job was no longer important, not with the Union holding the stock. But a smart vice-president knows more than machines and production -- he knows people Meeting of the Board As he pushed his way nervously through the crowds toward the Exit Strip, Walter Towne turned the dismal prospect over and over in his mind. The potential gloominess of this particular day had descended upon him the instant the morning buzzer had gone off, making it even easier than usual to just roll over and forget about it I -- until the water-douse came twenty minutes later to drag him, drenched and gurgling, back to the cruel cold world. He had wolfed down his morning Koffee-Kup with one eye on the clock and one eye on his growing sense of impenffing crisis. And now, to make things just a trifle worse, he was going to be late again. He struggled doggedly across the rumbling Exit Strip toward the Plant entrance. After all, he told himself, why should he be so upset? He was Vice President-In-ChargeOf-Production of the Robling Titanium Corporation. What could they do to him, really? He had rehearsed his part many times -- squaring his tlun shoulders, looking the Union Boss square in the eye and saying, "Now, see here, Torkleson -- But he knew, when the showdown came, that he wouldn't say any such thing. And this was the morning that the showdown would come. Oh, not because of the lateness. Of course Bailey, the Shop Steward, would take his usual delight in bringing that up. But this seemed hardly worthy of concern this morning. The reports waiting on his desk were what worried him. The sales reports. The promotion-draw reports. The royalty reports. The anticipated dividend reports. Walter shook his head wearily. The Shop Steward was a goad, annoying, perhaps even infuriating, but tolerable. Torkleson was a different matter -- He pulled his worn overcoat down over frayed shirt-sleeves, and tried vainly to straighten the celluloid collar that kept scooting his tie up under his ear. Once off the moving Strip, he started up the Robling corridor toward the plant gate. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Maybe the reports would be late. Maybe his secretary's two neurones would fail to synapse this morning, and she'd lose them altogether. And, as long as he was dreaming, maybe Bailey would break his neck on the way to work this morning. He walked quickly past the Workers' Lounge, glancing in at the groups of men, arguing politics and checking the stock market reports before they changed from their neat grey business suits to their welding dungarees for the day. Running up the stairs to the Administrative Wing, he paused outside the door to punch the time clock. #:#. Damn. If only Bailey could be sick -- Bailey was not sick. The Administrative Offices were humming with frantic activity as Walter glanced down the rows of cubbyhole offices. And in the middle of it all sat Bailey, in his black-and-yellow checkered tattersall, smoking a large cigar. His feet were planted on his desk top, but he hadn't started on his morning western novel yet. He was busy glaring, first at the clock, then at Walter. "Late again, I see," the Shop Steward growled. Walter gulped. "Yes, sir. Just four minutes, this time, sir. You know those crowded Strips -- " "So it's just four minutes now, eh?" Bailey's feet came down with a crash. "After last month's fine production record, you think four minutes doesn't matter, eh? Think just because you're a Vice President it's all right to mosey in here whenever you feel like it." He glowered. "Well, this is three times tins month you've been late, Towne. That's a demerit for each time -- and you know what that means." "You wouldn't count four minutes as a whole demerit!" Bailey grinned. "Wouldn't I, now! You just add up your pay envelope on Friday. Ten cents an hour off for each demerit -- Walter sighed and shuffled back to his desk. Oh, well. It could have been worse. They might have fired him like poor Cartwright last month. He'd just have to listen to that morning buzzer... The reports were on his desk. He picked them up warily. Maybe they wouldn't be so bad. He'd had more freedom this last month than before -- maybe there'd been a policy change. Maybe Torkleson was gaining confidence in him. Maybe -- The reports were worse than he had ever dreamed. 'Towner Walter jumped a foot. Bailey was putting down the vidiphone receiver. His grin spread unpleasantly from ear to ear. "What have you been doing lately? Sabotaging the production line?" "What's the trouble now?" Bailey jerked a thumb significantly at the ceiling. "The Boss wants to see you. And you'd better have the right answers, too. The Boss seems to have a lot of questions." Walter rose slowly from his seat. This was it, then. Torkleson had already seen the reports. He started for the door, his knees shaking. It hadn't always been like this, he reflected miserably. Time was when things had been very different. It had meant something to be Vice President of a huge industrial firm like Robling Titanium. A man could have had a fine house of his own, and a 'copter-car, and belong to the Country Club -- maybe even have a cottage on a lake somewhere -- Walter could almost remember those days with Robling, before the Switchover. Before that black day when the exchange of ten little shares of stock had thrown the Robling Titanium Corporation into the hands of strange and imnatural owners. T he door was of heavy stained oak, with bold letters edged in gold: Illustrated by Ed Emsh Amalgamated Locals Daniel P. Torkleson, Secretary The secretary flipped down the desk switch and eyed Walter with pity. "Mr. Torkleson will see you." Walter pushed through the door into the long, handsome office. For an instant he felt a pang of nostalgia -- the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the long buildings of the Robling plant, the pine panelling, the broad expanse of desk -- "Well? Don't just stand there. Shut the door and come over here." The man behind the desk hoisted his three hundred well-dressed poimds and glared at Walter from under flagrant eyebrows. Torkleson's whole body quivered as he slammed a sheaf of papers down on the desk. "Just what do you think you're doing with this company, Towne?" Walter swallowed. "I'm production manager of the corporation." "And just what does the production manager do all day?" Walter reddened. "He organizes the work of the plant, establishes production lines, works with Promotion and Sales, integrates Research and Development, operates the planning machines -- " "And you think you do a pretty good job of it, eh? Even asked for a raise last year!" Torkleson's voice was dangerous. Walter spread his hands. "I do my best. I've been doing it for thirty years. I should know what I'm doing." 'Then how do you explain these reports? Torkleson threw the heap of papers into Walter's arms, and paced up and down behind the desk. "LooA: at them! Sales at rock bottom. Receipts impossible. Big orders cancelled. The worst reports jp seven years -- and you say you know your job!" "I've been doing everything I could," Walter snapped. "Of course the reports are bad -- they couldn't help but be. We haven't met a production schedule in over two years. No plant can keep up production the way the men are working -- " Torkleson's face darkened. He leaned forward slowly. "So it's the men now, is it? Go ahead. Tell me what's wrong with the men." "Nothing's wrong with the men -- if they'd only work. But they come in when they please, and leave when they please, and spend half their time dianging and the other half on Koffee-Kup -- no company could survive. But that's only half of it -- " Walter picked up the reports, searched through them frantically. "This International Jet Transport account -- they dropped US because we haven't had a new engine in six years. Why? Because Research and Development hasn't had any money for six years. What can two starved engineers and a second rate chemist drag out of an attic laboratory to compete on the titanium market?" Walter took a deep breath. "I've warned you time and again. Robling had built up accounts over the years with fine products and new models. But since the Switchover seven years ago, you and your Board have forced me to play the cheap products for the qmck profit in order to give your men their dividends. Now the bottom's dropped out. We couldn't turn a quick profit on the big, important accounts, so we had to cancel them. If you had let me manage the company the way it should have been run -- Torkleson had been slowly turning purple. Now he slammed his fist down on the desk. "We should just turn the company back to Management again, eh? Just let you have a free hand to rob us blind again. Well, it won't work, Towne. Not while I'm secretary of this Union. We fought long and hard for control of this corporation -- just the way all the other Unions did. I know. I was through it all." He sat back smugly, his cheeks quivering with emotion. "You might say that I was a national leader in the movement. But I did it only for the men. The men want their dividends. They own the stock, stock is sup-: posed to pay dividends -- "But they're cutting their own throats," Walter wailed. "You can't build a company and make it grow the way I've been forced to run it -- " "Details!" Torkleson snorted. "I don't care how the dividends come in. That's your job. My job is to report a dividend every six months to the men who own the stock -- the men working on the production lines." Walter nodded bitterly. "And every year the dividend has to be higher than the last, or you and your fat friends are likely to be thrown out of your jobs -- aright? No more steaks every night. No more private gold-plated Buicks for you boys. No more twenty-room mansions in Westchester. No more big game hunting in the Rockies. No, you don't have to know anything but how to whip a Board Meeg into a frenzy so they'll vote you into office again each year --  Torkleson's eyes glittered. His voice was very soft "I've always liked you, Walter. So I'm goin to pretend I didn't hear you just then." He paused for a long moment. "But here on my desk is a small bit of white paper. Unless you have my signature on that paper on the first of next month, you are out of a job, on grounds of incompetence. And I will personally see that you go on every Whitelist in the country." Walter felt the fight go out of him like a dying wind. He knew what the Whitelist meant. No job, anywhere, ever, in management. No chance, ever, to join a Union. No more house, no more weekly pay envelope. He spread his hands weakly. "What do you want?" he asked. "I want a production plan on my desk within twenty-four hours. A plan that will guarantee me a # increase in dividend in the next six months. And you'd better move fast, because I'm not fooling." Back in his cubbyhole downstairs, Walter stared hopelessly at the reports. He had known it would come to this sooner or later. They all knew it -- Hendricks of Promotion, Pendleton of Sales, the whole managerial staff. It was wrong, all the way down the line. Walter had fought it tooth and nail since the day Torkleson had installed the moose-heads in Walter's old office, and moved him down to the cubbyhole, imder Bailey's watchful eye. He had argued, and battled, and pleaded -- and lost. He had watched the company deteriorate day by day -- and now they blamed him, and threatened his job, and he was helpless to do anything about it -- He stared at the machines, clicking busily against the wall, and an idea began to form. Helpless? Not quite. Not if the others could see it, go along with it. It was a repugnant idea. But there was one thing they could do that even Torkleson and his fat-jowled crew would imderstand. They could go on strike.lyer spluttered, staring at the circle of men in ffie room. "How can I give you an opinion on the legality of the thing? There isn't any legal precedent that I know of." He mopped his bald head with a large white handkerchief. "There just hasn't been a case of a company's management striking against its own labor. It -- it isn't done. Oh, there have been lockouts, but this isn't the same thing at all -- " Walter nodded. "Well, we couldn't very well lock the men out -- they own the plant. We were thinking more of a lock-in sort of thing." He turned to Paul Hendricks and the others. "We know how the machines operate. They don't. We also know that the data we keep in the machines is essential to running the business -- the machines figure production quotas, organize blueprints, prepare distribution lists, test promotion schemes. It would take an office full of managerial experts to handle even a single phase of the work without the machines -- " The man at the window hissed, and Pendleton quickly snapped out the lights. They sat in darkness, hwlly daring to breath. Then: "Okay. Just the man next door coming home." Pendleton sighed. "You're sure you didn't let them suspect anything, Walter? They wouldn't be watng the hoiise -- "I don't think so. And you all came alone,, at different times." He nodded to the window guard, and turned back to the little lawyer. "So we can't be sure of the legal end -- you'd have to be on your toes." "I still don't see how we could work it," Hendricks objected. His heavy face was wrinkled with worry. "Torkleson is no fool -- and he has a lot of power in the National Association of Union Stockholders. All he'd need to do is ask for managers, and a dozen companies would throw them to him on loan. They'd be able to figure out the machine system and te over without losing a day." "Not qxiite." Walter was grinning. "That's why I spoke of a lockin. Before we leave, we throw the machines into feedback -- every one of them. Lock them into reverberating circuits with a code sequence key. Then all they'll do is buzz and sputter imtil the feedback is broken with the key. And the key is our secret. It'll tie the Robling office into granny knots -- and scabs won't be able to get any more data out of the machines than Torkleson could. With a lawyer to handle injunctions, we've got them strapped." "For what?" asked the lawyer. Walter turned on him sharply. "For new contracts. Contracts to let us manage the company the way it should be managed. If they won't do it, they won't get another Titanium product off their production lines for the rest of the year, and their dividends will really t a nosedive." "That means you'll have to beat Torkleson," said Bates. "He'll never go along." "Then he'll be left behind." Hendricks stood up, brushing off his dungarees. "I'm with you, Walter. I've taken all of Torkleson that I want to. And I'm sick of the junk we've been trying to sell people." The others nodded. Walter rubbed his hands together. "All right. Tomorrow we work as usual, until the noon whistle. When we go off for lunch, we throw the machines into lock-step. Then we just don't come back. But the big thing is to keep it quiet until the noon whistle." He turned to the lawyer. "Are you with us, Jeff?" Jeff Bates shook his head sadly. "I'm with you. I don't know why -- you haven't got a leg to stand on. But if you, want to committ suicide, that's all right with me." He picked up his briefcase, and started for the door. "I'll have your contract demands by tomorrow," he grinned. "See you at the lynching." They got down to the details of planning. T he news hit the afternoon telecasts the following day. UM... There was a long, indignant statement from Daniel P. Torkleson, condemning Towne and his followers for "flagrant violation of management contracts, and illegal fouling of managerial processes." Ben Starkey, President of the Board of American Steel expressed "shock and regret" ; the Amalgamated Button-Hole Makers held a mass meeting in protest, demanding that "the instigators of this unprecedented crime be permanently barred from positions in American Industry." In Washington, the nation's economists were more cautious in their views. Yes, it was an unprecedented action. Yes, there would undoubtedly be repercussions -- many industries were having managerial troubles; but as for long term effects, it was difficult to say just at present -- And the workmen on the Robling production lines blinked at each other, and at their machines, and wondered vaguely what it was all about -- Yet in all the upheaval, there was very little expression of surprise. Step by step, through the years, economists had been watching the growing movement toward Union control of Industry with wary eyes. Even as far back as the '#'s and '#'s Uniqiis, finding themselves oppressed with the administration of growing sums of money -- pension funds, welfare funds, medical insurance funds, accruing Union dues -- had begun investing in corporate stock. It was no news to them that money could make money. And what stock more logical to buy than stock in their own companies? At first it had been a quiet movement. One by one the smaller firms had tottered, bled drier and drier by increasing production costs, increasing labor demands, and an ever-dwindling margin of profit. One by one they had seen their stocks tottering as they faced bankruptcy -- only to be gobbled up by the one ready buyer with plenty of funds to buy with. At first changes had been small and insignificant: Boards of Directors shifted, the men were paid higher wages and worked shorter hours, there were tighter management policies, and a little less money spent on extras like Research and Development -- At first. Until that fateful night and Jake Squill of Amalgamated Button-Hole Makers spent a long evening with beer and cigars in a hotel room, and floated the loan that threw Steel to the Unions. Oil had followed with hardly a fight, and as the Unions began to feel their oats, the changes grew more radical. Walter Towne remembered those stormy days well. The gradual undercutting of the managerial salaries, the tightening up of interUnion collusion to establish the infamous Whitelist of Recalcitrant Managers. The shift from hourly wage to annual salary for the fao tory workers, and the change to the other pole for the managerial staff. And then, with creeping malignancy, the hungry howling of the Union Bosses for more and higher dividends, year after year, moving steadily toward the inevitable crisis. Until Shop Steward Bailey suddenly found himself in charge of a dozen sputtering machines and an empty office. Torkleson was waiting to see him when he came in next morning. The Union Boss's office was crowded with TV cameras, newsmen, and puzzled workmen. The floor was littered with piles of ominous-looking paper. Torkleson was shouting into a telephone, and three lawyers were shouting into Torkleson's ear. He spotted Bailey, waving him through the crowd into an inner office room. "Well? Did they get them fixed?" Bailey spread his hands nervously. "The electronics boys have been at it since yesterday afternoon. Practically had the machines apart on the floor." "I know that, stupid," Torkleson roared. "I ordered ffiem there. Did they get the machines fixed? "Uh -- well, no, as a matter of fact -- " "Well, whafs holding them up?Bailey's face was a study in misery. "The machines just go in circles. The circuits are locked. They just reverberate." "Then call American Electronics. Have them send down an expert crew -- " Bailey shook his head. "They won't come." "They what "They said thanks but no thanks. They don't want their fingers in this pie at all." "Wait until I get O'Gilvy on the phone -- " "It won't do any good, sir. They've got their own management troubles. They're scared silly of a sympathy strike." The door bmst open, amd a law yer stuck his head in. "What about those injunctions, Dan?" "Get them moving," TcMkleson howled. "They'll start those machines again, or I'll have them in jail so fast -- " He turned back to Bailey. "What about the production lines?" The Shop Steward's face lighted. "They slipped up, there. There was one program that hadn't been coded into the machines yet. Just a minor item, but it's a starter. We foimd it in Towne's desk, blueprints all ready, promotion ail planned." "Good, good," Torkleson breathed. "I have a Director's meeting right now -- have to get the workers quieted down a little bit. You put the program through, and give those electronics men three more hours to unsnarl this knot, or we throw them out of the Union." He started for the door. "What were the blueprints for?" "Trash-cans," said Bailey. "Pure titanium-steel trash-cans." proximately two days to convert its entire production line to titanium-steel trash-cans. With the total resources of the giant plant behind the effort, production was phenomenal. In two more days the available markets were glutted. By two weeks, at conservative estimate, there would be a titanium-steel trash-can for every man, woman, child, and hound dog on the North American Continent. The jet engines, structural steels, tubing, and other pre-strike products piled up in the freight yards, their routing slips and order requisitions tied up in the reverberating machines. But the machines continued to buzz and sputter. The workers grew restive. From the first day, Towne and Hendricks and all the others had been picketting the plant, until angry crowds of workers had driven them off with shotguns. Then they came back in an old, weatherbeaten 'copter which hovered over the plant entrance carrying a banner with a hurled, fists were shaken -- but the copter remained -- The third day, Jeff Bates was served with an injunction ordering Towne to return to work. It was duly appealed, legal machinery began tying itself into knots, and the strikers still struck. By the fifth day there was a more serious note. "You're going to have to appear, Walter. We can't dodge this one." "When?" "Tomorrow morning. And before a labor-rigged judge, too." The little lawyer paced his oflBce nervously. "I don't like it. Torkleson's getting desperate. Workers putting pressure on him -- " Walter grinned. "Then Pendleton is doing a good job of selling." "But you haven't got time the lawyer wailed. "They'll have you in jail if you don't start the machines again. They may have you in jail if you do start them, too, but that's another bridge. Right now they want those machines going again."  "We'll see," said Walter. "What time tomorrow?" "Ten o'clock." Bates looked up. "And don't try to skip. You be there -- because I don't know what to tell them." Walter was there, a half hour early. Torkleson's legal staff glowered from across the room. The judge glowered from the bench. Walter closed his eyes with a little smile as the charges were read. " -- breach of contract, malicious mischief, sabotage of the company's machines, conspiring to destroy the livelihood of ten thousand workers -- Your Honor, we are preparing briefs to further prove that these men have formed a conspiracy to undermine the economy of the entire nation. We appeal to the spirit of orderly justice -- " Walter yawned as the words went on. "Of course, if the defendant will waive his appeals against the previous injunctions, and will release the machines that were sabotaged, we will be happy to formally withdraw these charges -- " There was a rustle of sound through the courtroom. His Honor turned to Jeff Bates. "Are you consel for the defendant?" "Yes, sir." Bates mopped his bald scalp. "The defendant pleads guilty to ail counts." The Union lawyer dropped his glasses' on the table with a crash. The judge stared. "Mr. Bates, if you plead guilty, you leave me no alternative -- " -- but to send me to jail," said Walter Towne. "Go ahead. Send me to jail. In fact, I insist upon going to jail -- " The Union lawyer's jaw sagged. There was a hurried conference. A recess was pleaded. Telephones buzzed. Then: "Your honor, the plaintiff desires to withdraw all charges at this time." "Objection," Bates exclaimed. "We've already pleaded." " -- feel sure that a settlement can be affected out of court -- " The case was thrown out on its ear. And still the machines sputtered. B ack at the plant rumor had it that the machines were permanently gutted, and that the plant could never go back into production. Conflicting scuttlebutt suggested that persons high in Uniondom had perpetrated the crisis deliberately, bullying Management into the strike for the sole purpose of cutting current dividends and selling stock to themselves cheaply. The rumors grew easier and easier to believe. The workers came to the plants in business suits, it was true, and loimged in the finest of lounges, and read the Wall Street Journal, and felt like Stockholders. But to face facts, their salaries were not the highest. Deduct Union dues, pension fees, medical insiu'ance fees, and sundry other little items which had formerly been paid by well-to-do managements, and very little was left but the semi-annual dividend checks. And now the dividends were tottering -- Production lines slowed. There were daily brawls on the plant floor, in the lounge and locker rooms. Workers began joking about the trash-cans ; then the humor grew more and more remote. Finally, late in the afternoon of the eighth day, Bailey was once again in Torkleson's office. "Well? Speak up! What's the beef this time?" "Sir -- the men -- I mean, there's been some nasty talk -- they're tired of making trash-cans. No challenge in it. Anyway, the stock room is full, and the freight yard is full, and the last run of orders we sent out came back because they don't want any more." Bailey shook his head. "The men won't swallow it any more. There's -- well, there's been talk about having a Board Meetmg. Torkleson's ruddy cheeks paled. "Board meeting, huh?" He licked his heavy lips. "Now look, Bailey -- we've always worked well together. I consider you a good friend of mine. You've got to get things under control. Tell the men we're making progress. Tell them management is beginning to buckle from its originad stand. Tell them we expect to have the strike broken in another few hours. Tell them anything -- " He waited until Bailey was gone. Then, with a trembling hand he lifted the visiphone receiver. "Get me Walter Towne," he said. "I'm not an unreasonable man," Torkleson was saying miserably, waving his fat paws in the air as he paced back and forth. "Perhaps we were a little demanding -- I concede it! Overenthusiastic with our ownership, and all that. But I'm sure we can come to some agreement. A hike in wage scale is certainly within reason. Perhaps we can even arrange for better company houses -- " Walter Towne stifled a yawn. "Perhaps you didn't hear me. The men are agitating for a meeting of the Board of Directors. I want to be at that meeting. That's the only term I'm interested, in." "But there wasn't anything about a Board meeting in the contract your lawyer presented -- " "Well, you didn't like that contract. So we tore it up. Anyway, we've changed our minds." Torkleson sat down, his heavy cheeks quivering. "Gentlemen, be reasonable! I can guarantee you your jobs -- even give you a free hand with the management. So the dividends won't be so nice -- the men will have to get used to that. That's it, we'll put it through at the next executive conference, give you -- " "The Board meeting," Walter said gently. "That'll be enough for us -- " The Union Boss swore and slammed his #st on the desk. "Walk out in front of those men -- after what you've done? You're fools! Well, I've given you your chance. You'll get your Board meeting. But you'd better come armed. Because I know how to handle this kind of a Board meeting -- and if I have anything to say about it, this one will end with a massacre." T he meeting was held in a huge auditorium in the Robling administration building. Since every member of the Union owned stock in the company, every member had the right to vote for members of the Board of Directors. But in the early days of the Switchover, the idea of a Board of Directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the Board of Directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the Board. The stockholders numbered over teii thousand... They were all present. They were packed in from the wall to the stage, and hanging from the rafters. They overflowed into the corridors; they jammed the lobby. Ten thousand men rose with a howl of anger when Walter Towne walked out on the stage. But they quieted down again as Dan Torkleson started to speak. It was a masterful display of rabble-rousing. Torkleson paced the stage, his fat body shaking with agitation, pointing a chubby finger no again and again at Walter Towne. He pranced and he ranted. He paused at just the right times for thunderous peals of applause. "This morning in my office we offered to compromise with these jackals," he cried, "and they rejected compromise. Even at the cost of lowering dividends, of taking food from the mouths of your wives and children, we made our generous offers. They were rejected with scorn. These thieves have one desire in mind, my friends -- to starve you all, to a man ; to destroy your company and your jobs. To every appeal they heartlessly refused to divulge the key to the lock-in. And now this man -- the ringleader who keeps the key word buried in secrecy -- has the temerity to ask an audience with you. You're angry men; you want to know the man to blame for our hardship." He pointed to Towne with a flourish. "I give you your man. Do what you want with him." The hall exploded in angry thunder. The first wave of men rushed onto the stage as Walter stood up. A tomato whizzed past his ear and splattered against the wall. More men clambered up on the stage, shouting and shaking their fists. Then somebody appeared with a rope. Walter gave a sharp nod to the side of the stage. Abruptly the roar of the men was drowned in another sound -- a soul-rending, teeth-grating, bone-rattling screech. The men froze, jaws sagging, eyes wide, hardly believing their ears. And then, in the instant of silence as the factory whistle died away, Walter grabbed the microphone. "You want the code word to start die machines again? Til give it to you before I sit down!" The men stared at him, shuffling, a murmur rising. Torkleson burst to his feet. "It's a trick!" he howled. "Wait 'til you hear their price -- "We have no price, and no demands," said Walter Towne. "We will give you the code word, and we ask nothing in return but that you listen for sixty seconds." He glanced back at Torkleson, and then out to the crowd. "You men here are an electing body -- right? You own this great plant and company, top to bottom -- right? You should all he rich -- because Robling could make you rich. But none of you out there is rich. Only the fat ones on this stage are -- but I'll tell you how you can be rich -- " They listened, then. Not a peep came from the huge hall. Suddenly, he was talking their language. "You think that since you own the Company, times have changed. Well, have they? Are you any better off than you were? Of course not. Because you haven't learned yet that oppression by either side leads to misery for both. You haven't learned moderation. And you never will, until you throw out the ones who have fought moderation right down to the last ditch. You know who I mean. You know who's grown richer and richer since the Switchover. Throw him out, and you too can be rich -- " He paused for a deep breath. "You want the code word to unlock the machines? All right. I'll give it to you." He swung around to point a long fingter at the fat man sitting there. M uch later, as Waiter Towne and Jeff Bates pryed the trophies off the wall of the big office, the lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan. Gruesome affair." Walter nodded as he struggled down with a moose-head. "Yes, a pity -- but you know the boys when they get upset." "I suppose so." The lawyer stopped to rest, panting. "Anyway, with the newly-elected Board of Directors, things will be different for everybody. You took a long gamble." "Not so long. Not when you knew what they wanted to hear. It just took a little timing." "Still -- I didn't think they'd elect you Secretary of the Union. It just doesn't figure -- " Walter Towne chuckled. "Doesn't it? I don't know. Everything's been a little screwy since the Switchover came. And in a screwy world like this -- He shrugged, and tossed down the moose-head. thing figures." #   We have hardly begun to understand and conquer the universe. Discoveries of the future will make the discoveries of our time seem despicable and superficial. -- James Sumner what Is Your Science I. Q.? correct answer, and you are very good if you can hit a score of #. The correct answers are on page #. #. The period of nineteen years after which the new moon and the full moon fall on the same days of the year again is called the cycle. #. Which of the following isn't a star, and what is it? Procyon, Mizar, Spica, Regulus and Ganymede. #. Radio and waves travel at the same speed. #. What is the name given to an especially bright meteor or fireball? #. An escape velocity of miles per hour is necessary for a ship to leave the Earth's atmosphere. #. How many years pass in the cycle of Encke's comet? #. The Heaviside Layer is another name for the Earth's #. In which constellation can the star Vega be found? #. The regular spacing of the planets was the basis for the hypothesis contained in Law. #. Nereid is one of the moons of Neptune. Can you name the other? #. A first-magnitude star is times brighter than a sixth-magnitude star. #. What is the name of the comet which has a period of two thousand years? #. Which of the planets rotates most rapidly? #. Aeroembolism is due to the formation of bubbles in the blood and spinal fluid brought about by rapid ascent into high altitudes. #. The largest number of asteroids lie in the area between Jupiter and what other planet. #. The planet which requires eighty-four Earth years for one circuit of the sun is #. Deutrons are the nuclei of which element? #. The technical term for the ultimate "heat death" of the universe is "maximum " #. Mach numbe one is equal to how many per hour? #. What is the chief constituent of the atmosphere of the moon Titan? A new rocket designed to carry # pounds of scientific instruments # miles into the air at one shot was recently revealed. The # mile altitude is expected to set a record high for a single stage rocket. Called Aerobee-Hi rockets, they will be pressure sealed so hat samples of air taken high in the atmosphere will not be contaminated by gases leaking out of the rocket. Such leakage has spoiled all measurements of this kind from Viking rockets, since they were literally flying in an envelope of their own gases. Most promising development in rocketry so far, cost of the Aerobee-Hi is only one-tenth that of a Viking. allow control where poisonous insecticides could not be used. Seeing this growth-inhibiting method as a weapon of the future, the researchers have found that chemicals such as colchicine prevent cell division, and others slow down insect metabsistant flies were more affected than normal ones. Only three percent of the resistant-flies reached normal adulthood. Every camera in the nation is a potential radiation detector when equipped with a new device which can convert them without interfering with their normal function. The detector employs a photosensitive sheet which will record a light spot on a black background when subjected to X-ray or gamma radiations. In operation, short-wave electromagnetic radiations pass through an intensifier which emits a fluorescent light that causes the light spot. The radiation-caused light is readily distinguished from normal film fogging or from that caused by light leaks. A new concept of insect control, keeping insects from growing up, is being evolved by scientists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It promises fewer house-flies and safer foods. Using chemicals, the aim of the new idea is to keep insect pests from ever becoming adults and layoutright. Preliminary tests indicate that these chemicals can be used flies. In addition, they are "nontoxic" to humans and animals and Troops will be better equipped for desert warfare of the future because of an eighteen month research project recently concluded by geographers. The work was done in the Mojave Desert and included learning everything possible about the climate, vegetation and topography of a typical desert. To gather roundthe-clock weather data, # small weather stations were erected at various elevations. For ten blistering days one man lived alone at the summit of the moimtains to gather such data, ome facts uncovered were: desert mountain summits are warmer than desert floors on winter nights; siunmertime humidity is higher than winter humidity; and dark colored basaltic rock is # degrees hotter in summer than light hued granite. Commercial heliports which may someday spring up in every city in the country will probably be on the ground and smaller than a city block. Such a field will measure about # by # feet. Except for parking room, most of the area will be set aside for emergency landing space. The ideal heliport will have a wide unobstructed street-level approach, and stationing the field near railroad yards, parks, ponds, waterways, or widely divided highways would permit this ease of approach. Suburban heliports of the future will probably be found near parkresorts or large factories. Since # of all intercity traffic is for distances of less than # miles per trip, such a network of heliports would be the ideal traffic solution. The U.S. has only one such port in operation and is far behind Europe, where seven already exist, with an eighth under construction in Paris. A method of decoying fish to swim where one wants them to by using artificial odors was recently introduced, and someday such fish as salmon may be induced to retiun to a designated spawning area by use of such imderwater perfume. The decoying operation employs the theory t animals and whose lU migratory habits depend on their sense of smell, can be reared to return to a specific area impregnated with a false scent. One method of diverting salmon from their home spawning grounds would be to utilize odors to which salmon are particularly sensitive. A group of fry could be conditioned to such an artificial odor during hatchery rearing, and remembering the odor, could several years later be reoriented from their natural undesirable spawning groimds to another location downstream; thus avoiding problems of water pollution, power dams and the diversion of waters by irrigation. In addition to helping the fish return home safely, decoying fish may be valuable in getting them away from given areas where they are interfering with sonar contact between a ship and an underwater target. More accurate spotting of brain tumors by radioactive arsenic is now possible with an improvement in the detecting method. Radioactive arsenic is injected into the patient's veins in amounts so small that it cannot poison the patient; he then lies down for one hom while twin scintillation counters move back and forth scanning the head line by line. Arsenic concentrates in brain tumors and the machine outlines these areas. This new sensitive machine will increase the accuracy of the procedure from the # of the older method to # to #. If a nuclear war is ever fought, children would do well to get and keep an accurate record of how far they were from ground zero at the time, and of how much radiation fall-out struck them. Genetic mutations may be recessive traits, in which case the damage would not show unless two persons carrying the genes married. Then the children would show the effects of the radiation damage to their parents genes. To get a marriage license in the future, a couple might have to produce records showing that at least one of them could not have been previously exposed to a potentially genedamaging amount of radiation, just as their parents had to show a negative blood test for syphilis. The atomic powered car is not yet at hand, but an atomically processed fuel for your present car is in the works. Standard Oil recently gave a preview of its new experimental project for using atomic energy in the production of new petroleum products. Whether atomic radiation mixed with oil will provide a new super-gasoline or a way of making gasoline cheaper are two of the things the company hopes to determine. Preliminary experiments have shown that gamma rays produced by a cobalt pipe cause chemical reactions with petroleum products heretofore beyond the reach of science. The atomic generated gamma rays have also indicated that they may open ways to the production of gasoline without the use of heat, pressure or catalysts. Energy from the sun and the atom, may someday convert salt water into fresh water. Looking into the future, scientists have tried several new methods. One distills salt water by rapid-boiling it in a vacuum,pother is electro-ion migration, likened to electroplating. In this process, molecular fragments of the dissolved salts are electrically extracted through thin membranes. The OTix of realistic accomplishment in demineralization of saline water seems to be the prohibitive cost. More inexpensive power is needed. Nuclear reactors, low grade fuel or solar stills, which harness the sun's power, seem to be the only possible answers to an urgent problem in arid and semi-arid areas covering a third of the Earth's land surface. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneous telephone conversations may soon be crammed into a single two-inch pipe and transmitted long distances on wave frequencies higher than any ever used in communication before. The capacity of the new circular wave-guide exceeds that of the most modem coaxial cable, which can handle only # two way calls at a time. The frequencies of the microwaves used in the new method range from # to # megacycles. In addition, the number of different frequencies this tubing can carry is so huge that all conventional transmission wavelengths of all media could be fitted into its spread with ease. Tiny super-high frequency waves that move through the new pipe have been found to aid the efficiency of the transmission, and the loss of energy is so small that boosters would only be necessary every # miles. rnp you science fiction fans who rUli like to sit down with a puzzle that offers a real challenge -- that will test your knowledge of things scientific and otherwise -- grab a copy of this newest and latest magazine of puzzles by expert composers for expert puzzle doers -- crossword P U Z Z L E S It's chock-full of some of the most interesting crosswords, diagramless puzzles, crostics and cryptograms to be found anywhere in America... the kind guaranteed to keep your wits nimble and your pencil busy. Weeks of fun in every issue! At ail newsstands -- Only #c Sir: Tm rather fed-up with the idea of time travel and telepathy as portrayed in S-F. In my opinion they are scientific absurdities. Consider the energy required for a person to travel back in time to say, # months ago. The whole of creation must then be returned to that date. Planets would have to be reversed in their courses, people would have to be shifted perhaps thousands of miles in order that they could occupy the same places they had # months before. Matter which was present on that person, but since had been lost, must be returned to him from various distances... and so violently as to kill him instantly. The energy required for all this is so great, that on this count alone time travel is a scientific absurdity. The contention that in time travel everything is continuously extended both forwards and backwards in time is merely uncontrolled speculation having no facts to support it which are amenable to verifying tests, and therefore must be ruled mathematical fantasy. Even if this was true, my argument on energy is not weakened for it is inconceivable that the time scale of a minute part of the whole of creation could be altered so as to accelerate that part into the future or into the past without the remainder of creation being similarly affected. A considerable factor of uncertainty would be introduced which would make nonsense of all history and even of individual memories. Day by day predictions of the motion of planets would be rendered unreliable to say the least. Telepathy is also being mangled. True telepathy is a transmission of feelings and nothing more. Alarm, fear, hate, anger, pity, love, amusement... these are emotional responses that can be "sent." Words or pictures are not transmitted. The scientific mind cannot admit telepathy until what passes between two people can be identified. We know the brain produces electric currents and the possibility that these may affect another must be conceded but in cases where we are asked to believe exchanges of complex verbal and pictorial telepathy there is a lack of explaining factors to substantiate it. What passes cannot be matter or energy because they cannot be produced by something which is abstract, and they are the only means of communication that we know. It is also inconceivable a telepath can detect simultaiieoiisly in the brain of another a series of multiple braincell impulses of different strengths and with different routes in that brain. Only the impossible is absurd, and any sober scientific view must be that only emotional telepathy is possible, all other forms being impossible. Cordially, G. W. Walton England Anyone care to take up the cudgel in defense of timetravel and telep athy? We'd be glad to offer part of the column for argument. Your new Masthead "Worlds Of Science Fiction" is much more eyecatching. was the best in the Jime issue. Glad to see the letter column is back in the form of "Hue And Cry." Bring back "Personalities In Science Fiction." It was a good feature. Sincerely, Alan Cheuse Perth Amboy, N. J. Thanks for the bouquet. We've got another excellent department coming up that will beat anything you've yet seen for news about personalities events, etc. Dear Mr. Quinn: IF has really been improving steadily and now compares with the best. Book Service Phone GRomercy ## We Sk All current Americon Science Fiction in Book Form and carry current Magazines and Pocket Books. Dear Mr. Quinn : I just picked up the June issue of IF to find out when the next issue will be out and... lo and behold! June #th! What happened? How come IF has gone back to bimonthly? I rate IF number one as a science fiction magazine and am puzzled over the return to bimonthly form. I surely hope it's nothing permanent. I couldn't stand having my IF reading cut in half. Please let's get IF back to a monthly. Sincerely yours, Charles F. Durang Libertyville, #. A large selection of Science Fiction is avoiloble of British Books, Mogozines ond Pocket Editions. We corry a lorge stock of Bock Issues of Science Fiction Mogozines. You have our word for it. As soon as it seems at all feasible, we'll be back on the stands each and every month. Dear Mr. Quinn: I have been a science fiction fan for several years now, and it no longer comes as a shock to be able to buy the June issue of IF in the middle of April. But it does make I am. You predict for the future, bathing suits made of the new stretch yams. These are currently being advertised by Cleveland's larger, more progressive department stores. That doesn't bother me so much because they are comparatively new. What does amaze me is your reference to supermarket doors that open as you approach them. Such things have been standard in and around Cleveland for a good number of years, and are taken for granted. So much so, that many people walk right into doors that are not the self-opening type, or those that are but aren't working properly, without a thought of putting out a hand or foot to push the door open. If these things are in the future, and I am taking them for granted, I imagine that the big question is: am I in the future, or are you in the past, and if so, why? Confusingly yours, Mrs. Alan Kopperman Euclid, Ohio P.S. Don't get mad, this is all in fun. I ran into an old-style door the other day and referred to it as old-fashioned. Your magazine made me wonder. Cleveland hereby gets our nomination as the 'Cradle of the Future. Seriously, though we'll try not to be so "old-fashioned" in future issues. Dear Editors: new ideas both nicely handled, are unusual to say the least, in the welter of stf-stufF we've been getting lately on all sides. "Franchise" by Azimov and "Mold of Yancy", by Dick, were excellent. They make up for a lot of cliches that have been kicking around lately. Food for some pretty intense thinking too. If we aren't careful, these things could happen to us... and I'll bet we'd hardly know it imtil it was too late. Sincerely, G. M. Fox Portland, Oregon Thanks for backing up our own opinions. For more "thought-provokers" look for the "Happy Clown" and "Message from Space" in our December issue. # -- Light. # -- Bolide. # -- #. # -- # years. # -- Ionosphere. # -- Bootes. # -- Bode's. # -- Triton. #I -- #. # -- Donati's. # -- Jupiter. # -- Nitrogen. # -- Mars. # -- Uranus. # -- Heavy hydrogen. # -- Entropy. # -- #. # -- Methane. Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages ! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor. Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. No Ob. A non. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send nie the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind.  # A Continued from other side Selected stories from Fantasy and Science-Fiction Magazine. The woman who became her own daughter... atomic power from beans... etc. Tub. ed. S#. #. about the life of the future -- edited by Frederik Pohl. Absorbing, masterfully written glimpse into tomorrow. Pub. Ed. #. ing authors of Wonders of Earth and Man... of startling inventions... of Outer Space... of Far Traveling, etc. Pub. Ed. #. years of Astounding ScienceFiction Magazine selected by editor, John W. Campbell. Jr. Pub. Ed. #. A sparkling crop of weird tales selected by August Derleth. The man who Invented a solid vacuum, and many others. Pub. Ed. #. of These Complete New Masterpieces of World-renowned stories by H. G. Wells. Jules Verne, Conan Doyle. Huxley, Philip Wylie, Poe, P. Scott Fitzgerald. J. P. Priestly, etc. Pub. Ed. #. Fiction masterpieces described here, a # to # value -- yours for only #. Plus (See Other Side.) Two books are your gift for joining, and one is your first Club selection. Every month, you will be offered the "cream" of the new # and # Science-Fiction books -- for only #, You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year. This offer may have to be withdrawn. Dept. IF# Garden City, N. Y. Dept. IF#, Garden City, N. Y. Please rush the # books checked below, as my gift books and flr.st selection. Bill me only I for all # (plus shipping charge), and enroll me as a member. Every month send free bulletin describing coming selection. For each book I accept. I will pay only I plus shipping. I need take only four books during each year I am a member and may resign at any time after accepting # selections. # days, pay nothing and this membership will be cancelled.  Across Space Frontier  Assignment in Tomorrow  Astounding Anthology n Best from Fantasy and Science-Fiction  Omnibus of ScienceFiction  Portals of Tomorrow Q Treasury of Science Fiction Classics City Zone State Selections in Canada # plus shipping. Address Science-Fiction Club. # Bond, Toronto. (Good only in U. S. A. and Canada.) Opportunity to Have Youp with the First Company Embarking on Commercial Flights to the Moon! coupon on other side to become a member of The Science-Fiction Book Club... and receive your bona fide Moon-touryou are among the first to apply for a reservation to the moon. It will in no way commit you to make the voyage. It simply means that your name is being held on file to be turned over to the first company making trips to the moon. Your reservation will include fascinating facts to amaze your friends : your weight on the moon... a Rocket-Ship Schedule. Like your interest in Science-Fiction books, your wallet-size reservation will bo evidence of your adventurous spirit... your imagination... your interest in the # of the exciting books shown here -- for only #. Fill out the coupon -- and receive with membership Moon-Tour Reservations, Secretary j Science-Fiction Book Club J Reservation.  My Reservation, which will be printed on a handy, I wallet-size card, will include my actual Moon weight I and a complete Rocket-Ship Flight for the Moon,  Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. I will in no way be  committed to make a voyage.  Honored Unless Filled Out and  Signed on the Reverse Side, I  a hypothetical planet with a ring system similar to that of Saturn. Since the rings are separated by a very wide gap, it is possible that the satellite group is both numerous and complex. The one on which we are hypothetically standrng is composed of frozen methane and ammonia and a glacier of this ice is flowing into the canyon in the foreground. The sun of this system is a type M, red giant and the reflected rays have vaporized some of the methane-ammonia ice on the far horizon, turning it to fog and ice. All Stories New and Gmplete H# NS N# by James McKimmey, Jr. I '"Heavyweight Champion of the World" by Kelly Frees  I (See page #) s IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publiing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Bunalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for diange of address. All stori appearing in this magazine arc fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale December # th seems an appropriate one, is a takeoff on Olaf Stapledon's famous superman novel. Odd John, It is, I hope, an auspicious take-off, and that the items reported here will be as interesting as the source of the title. For instance, the original title by Stapledon -- whose first middle the better known Olaf -- was John Alive, In the the early summer of #, in a sedate but modern home in Simon's Field, Caldy, West Kirby, Wirral, England, with Northern Wales in the background, the charming widow of the late Olaf Stapledon, who was also his first cousin, let me hold in my own two hands the holoscript of Alive", known for the last two decades as Odd John (except in France where it was translated as "Just A Superman"). The handwriting was small, precise, almost Lovecraftian, and covered sheets of paper the same size as his eventually printed book. Dr. Stapledon had even painted his own concept of his homo superior, John of the great, darkly luminous, impenetrable eyes, the frontal lobes of power, and the surprisingly woolly white skullcap of close-cropped hair. John Alive, living on after his creator had gone. It is one of the great regrets of my life that Olaf Stapledon died before I had the experience of meeting him. In the unimaginably distant days of the Last Men, he will still be remembered as one of the "First Men of Fantasy." And now to genre: dear old genre! What would we do without it, with or without italics? And aficionado! I sometimes wonder how we struggled through the first # years of Scifi, we petrifying old pioneers, without knowing we were aficionados of a genre! And how would we ever have had half our anthologies, I wonder, after the atom, if Conklin  Co. (of fellow anthologists) hadn't happened on Destination and Operation and Project and Mission? (Come to think of it, wonder why we never had an atomic anthology called Mission: Fission,) Someday, if enough of you indicate that it interests you, I will discuss origins of terms like "stf" and "fen" and "egoboo" and "crifanac"; and even "gafia". There's a new one just taking hold: shlue, which is shock value run together like glue. the University of Gemsback, majoring in #th Century Motion Pictures, writing in the year # quotes an obscure scienti-film critic for his term paper on "The Sci-Fi Cinema Factor and the Interplanetary Dream", Courtesy of Tourmalin's Time Travel Service, a FK)rtion of this criticism is reprinted here from the century old collectors' item, IF Magazine for December, #: If one hundred years from now (Ackerman reported) man has still not conquered space, historians -- and s.f. dodderers with century-long memories -- can point accusingly to "Conquest Of Space" as the film that sabotaged rocket flight. I don't know who would want to fly to Mars after seeing this painful picture. In fact, I don't know who'd want to risk seeing another interplanetary film after "Conquest," except diehards like me. Maybe, as Eric Frank Russell and other voices have said, there are space people among us who want us to stay on Earth, and a picture like this wretched vehicle is an excellent way of discouraging the susceptible. Take the portrayal of the space cadets in this betrayal of the interplanetary dream: a more imlikely, ill-assorted collection of (s) crewballs you've seldom seen. When I am President, the first law I'm going to pass is that no Texans or Brooklynites can go on space flights -- at least not as comic reliefs in movies. In the first place, they are no relief. (Is a second place really necessary?) A cogent friend of mine, connoisseur of films, called this picture "criminal", by which he did not mean arresting. Not since the mayhem of Four-Sided Triangle has murder most foul been perpetrated on what should have been a surefire hit. I don't think people are stupid, but the guys who make the movies think they are. When we consider that all the movies are really intended to be big box-office, and that Hollywood is convinced the way to make a paying picture is to put a lot of money into it, it follows, does it not, the way to succeed is to make them lavish and stupid? All we really need is a little creative effort and integrity. But who's going to do it? We should have something if Bradbury and Paul Gregory get together on Fahrenheit #I for the legitimate stage. Or Jose Ferrer Demolished Man. Or someone with a big soul (and pocketbook to match) signs me to turn Van holding my breath on To Walk the Night, the modem s.f. suspense chased by Hollywood. tion Moon, Things to Come and The Day the Earth Stood Still comes to me in a melodic melange from my front room as I sit in my office typing this. No, it's not canned vibrations arriving via phonograph records or tapes, but the real Jerome Drexel Bixby, whose talented ivory-tickling fingers have also typed many a fine sci-fi story. He's a house guest for the week... Longest house guest record: Tetsu Yano from Japan -- # months... (Continued on page #) How can you get a man to go through the rigors of hell and learn to live with death at his elbow if you take away the dream? Amos defended his dream and found it a colossal... B y daylight the room was small and shabby. Amos had outgrown it, as he had outgrown the bed. But at night it still had its magic. When the Venetian blinds were closed and the light was ofl, the stars still came out fluorescently, and the planets, spinning gently in the smallest breath of air, seemed real and close. And the moon -- pocked and familiar -- a boy could almost reach up and touch it. Best of all was the S.#. -- the Doughnut -- glowing right above the bed, and the boy, lying there, was free-falling in space, one of the heroes, one of the spacemen. The boy was grown now, and the sun bleached the stars into tiny spots of paint and exposed the black thread that held up the planets and the S.#. The time for dreams was over. She bustled around the room. The models spun and swayed. "You'll want this," she said brily, holding out the book. He took it, the thumbed, battered Conquest of Space wiA the achingly beautiful Bones tells, and put it back on the shelf. "Gosh Mom he pleaded, trying to make her understand. "I don't need that. I'm through with all this. Give this junk to Tommy." "The way you talk -- a person would think you weren't coming back," she complained, her voice breaking in the middle. "Now, Mom." He slipped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. "We've talked this out. I'm grown up; I'm not a boy any more. All these things" -- he dismissed them with a careless hand -- "I've got to put away. But I'll be back on leaves and Earth-duty and things." Shes faded, he thought. Since he had been at the Academy. It had been a long time since he had thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. His mother had grown old. It had been a sad trip home. Maybe it had been a mistake, coming home. Maybe it would have been better to have refused the leave. He had wanted to. But that wouldn't have been fair, either. He folded over the thin, blue nylon of the spacepack and zipped it shut on his few personal belongings. Her eyes misted. Irritation crossed his face. "Now what's the matter?" "You're taking so little," she said and caught her lower lip between her teeth. "You know the weight limit," he said sharply. Then his voice softened. "Ten pounds. To put that on the Doughnut takes sixteen hundred pounds of fuel. Whatever else I need will be there. The Air Force won't let me go naked." "I know." Ie sighed. She brightened determinedly. "If you're packed, come right downstairs. I saved a piece of pie." He slung the spacepack over his arm the way spacemen did. As they went down the stairs, he put his left arm clumsily around her waist. "Now, Mom, I don't want anything to eat, honest. I couldn't eat a bite." "You aren't going away from home empty, young man!" "Sure, Mom. All right. Whatever you say." He dropped the bag on a chair in the hall and let himself be led into the kitchen. She watched him eat, her eyes never leaving his face. He forced down the apple pie, not wanting it, fighting the eagerness to be gone, to be on his way. The kitchen was a place peculiarly his mother's. There she was in command of things; there she had the courage to say what she had been wanting to say. "I just can't understand why anyone would want to go flying off into nothing. Seems like there's enough trouble right here on Earth without hunting up more. Every time I turn on the television" -- her eyes moved to the repeater screen flat against the kitchen wall -- "it seems there's some new crisis or the cold war is colder or hotter..." "Oh, Mom! You know I've always wanted -- ever since I was a little boy, dreaming, playing rockets..." "Little boys I can understand. Grown men are something else again. Like you said upstairs, you expect them to put away childish things. Why? -- that's all I want to know..." "Because it's there," he said, knowing that to her this was no reason at all. But it was the reason men had always given their women for chasing a dream, not really able to explain. "It's important," he went on evenly, "tackling something really worth the doing. It's the dream -- like the one that led the settlers into the wilderness, that pulled the wagon trains across the prairies. It's where men are making the future, men who really count, men like Rev McMillen and Bo Finch and Frank Pickrell. It's putting something out there where nothing has ever been -- the Doughnut. Courage built it out of dreams. Guts holds it up. And that's just the beginning. It's the future out there." "It's death out there." Absently, she brushed a wisp of graying hair back into place. "Like McMillen in his tomb, frozen, going around and around the Earth forever. The first man out; the first man to die. That should have warned us. It used to be war that took our men from us; now it's that." She looked up at the ceiling as if she were staring through it, as if she could see the little, plastic-and-nylon wheel spinning up there in the sun, where the sky is black and death is never far away. "Good-by, Mom." He stood up abruptly, kissed her. Her lips were cold. "Don't worry. I'll be all right." He walked quickly through the house, taking his cap from the closet shelf, picking up the spacepack from the chair. He stopped outside, hesitated, and looked back. Already the house seemed unreal, fading, like everything in it. Even his mother. He looked up, not seeing the small, swift glint of the Doughnut, not expecting it. The satellite wasn't visible here until #. He walked a little, letting the Earth tug at him for the last time, thinking that this was fantasy now, soon it would be all as unreal as fiction. Out there was his reality. Within a few hours he would step out onto the vast concrete landing strip at Cocoa, Florida. It was the beginning of the great adventure. ingly old and ill. Amos compared the reality with the pictures at the Academy; The Cieneral: shaking hands with Pickrell, facing the Senate sub-committee, giving a memorial wreath to an anonymous pilot to place in orbit for all those men who had given their lives... But then General Beauregard Finch was an old man, four years past retirement age, almost seventy. The six years since McMillen's fatal flight had aged the General, but with them he had built his own monument. Above him circled the Doughnut to which he had sacrificed his health, his life -- as other men had sacrificed their health and their lives. It was worth it. It was the dream. In the little waiting room near the platform, the General stood, still straight, still wearing proudly the honorary Doughnut insignia on his shoulder. "Youre going out there, Danton, taking with you all our honor, all our pride. We've never sent out a bad one, a coward or a fool. I don't think we've started now. Only a few men have preceded you. Only a few will follow. It will always be a hard, lonely business out there. But there's nothmore worth the doing." The General had never been out there. By the time it was possible, he was too old. "What do they call you now -- you cadet replacements?" "Pick's pick, sir." "Good enough. That's what you are -- picked men, selected and sorted and pruned, over and over. The best of the best. You've had the finest training we could give you. Remember though: it's never enough -- the picking or the training. The job is always bigger than the man. What you've gone through is nothing to what is waiting for you." Amos smiled politely. The General could call it nothing, the Academy selection and training program : he had never been through it. Knowing it now, Amos could not have forced himself to go through it again: the unceasing torment of brain and body, the endless tests of physical and pschological endurance, the perpetual cramming of an infinite amount of information into a finite brain... Call it nothing. Call it five years of hell. Out of # applications, # had been accepted. After the intense physical and psychiatric tests, sixty were left. They received their reward: five years of training. Five years of fighting the books, of taking g's in the centrifuge while trying to function as a stage-three crewmember, of working out in the "whirligig," of living in the "tank" with thirteen other men for weeks without end -- knowing that the psychologists were watching... And always the growing pressure of failure as classmates dropped out, were culled, disappeared, were mentioned no more. Until there were five left to graduate. Five out of #. Those were odds you refused to face when you started. The only way to survive was not to think about it, to take each trial as it came, and when the gs built too high, to remember the dream and fight once more and once again. There couldn't be anything tougher than that. The reality would be fulfillment. "Go on!" the General growled. "Get out there! I talk too much. The ship won't wait, not even for a general." He was coughing as Amos, in flight helmet and coveralls with the webbed harness over it, strode across the broad platform toward the tapering spire of the ferry. It was a typical three-stager, gleaming in its white, ceramic coating, its clean lines broken by stabilizer fins and the broad, ungainly wings on which the third stage would glide through the atmosphere to a powerless landing. The elevator, part of the giant, hammerhead crane, lifted Amos smoothly up the side of the ship. Across the hull of the third-stage, beside the vast expanse of wing, were painted these black words: Amos read them and frowned. ' Service irreverences were unavoidable, but they belonged within the service, not out where the public could share them. To call the S.# the Doughnut was not too bad -- he did it himself -- but this name left a bad taste in the mouth. The hot hand of air friction could not erase it too soon. The thick, square door stood open and empty. Amos shrugged and stooped through the air lock into the familiar cabin of the M-# stage-three. He climbed the rungs of the ladder toward the one unoccupied seat. On this trip he would be radio op. The others were in their places -- captain, co-pilot, navigator, engineer -- their smoothly helmeted heads like bowling balls precariously balanced on seat backs. One of the bowling balls turned, became a face, hard, disinterested. The captain. "Cadet-Trainee Danton, sir," Amos said, saluting crisply, "reporting for transportation." "Oh, God!" the captain groaned at the co-pilot. His head twisted back toward Amos. "WhereVe you been? You think we've got nothing better to do than wait for a lousy cadet? Oh, never mind! Get strapped down! We know -- old Bo was giving you speech #B: 'Words of advice and encouragement for cadets making their maiden trips: We've never sent out a bad one, a coward or a fool. I don't think we've started now.' " Flushing Amos lifted himself into the vacant chair and clicked his harness straps into place. They'd have been waiting anyway. Takeoff time wasn't for five minutes, "What's your specialty?" the captain asked. "Pilot, sir." "Watch, then. Maybe you'll learn something. Know any radio?" "Yes, sir." "Then this is an order: Keep your clammy hands off the instruments! Any communication that's necessary. I'll take care of. Understand?" "Yes, sir." "Plug in your earphones or not as you choose, but don't put on throat mikes. I don't want you fouling up the circuits." Amos's face was burning, but he clenched his teeth and said, "Yes, sir." The captain reached into an elasticized pocket beside his chair and pulled out a plastic bag. He dropped it to Amos. "Put it on." "I've had free fall, sir," Amos protested. "I won't need this." "You have, eh? How much?" "Almost seven minutes." "Eighty seconds at a time in a Keplerian orbit! Nuts! This time you'll get four hours just as a starter. Put it on! That's an order." Slowly Amos slipped the elastic behind his helmet and fitted the plastic ring over his mouth. It wasn't enough to come through the Academy. He had to prove himself all over again. "Engineer?" "Engineer check-off complete." "Navigator?" "Navigator check-off complete." "Go-pilot?" "Co-pilot check-off complete." "Radio op and captain's checkoff complete. Thirty seconds to blast-off." "You were a little rough on the kid, Skipper." "He can't learn any younger. Or much older, either. Twenty-five seconds." Amos twisted his head and looked out the unshielded windows of the canopy. Forget it, he told himself. There is always a Queeg, The services lured them, fed them made them strong. Nowhere else could they achieve satisfaction jo easily. "Fifteen seconds." The horizon was a gently curving arc of purple-blue above the grayblack of the sea. Within minutes now, the liberated third-stage would fight its way out of the atmosphere that scattered the blue of the sunlight and gave it to the sky. Within less than an hour, it would be in orbit, its velocity canceling Earth's gravity. Within a few hours, he would be in the Doughnut... "Five seconds." Anticipation flooded Amos's throat, choking, unbearable. This was what it had been about, the relentless pressures, the endless torment. This was it, about to happen... "Three -- two -- one..." The cabin began to rumble. Like a torch rising from the ground to light their way, flame shot into the night from the exhaust outlet. Amos could see it reflected from the astronomical dome and the radar saucers and the control tower, etching them into the blackness of the bay. "Engineering check -- all motors blasting." On the captain's control panel, a red eye opened. "And away we go!" said the captain, exultation in his voice. "Up, beast!" The cabin roared. The torch outside the window flamed intolerably. Amos squeezed his eyes shut, and the fine, strong net of acceleration pulled him into the seat cushions, fishhooking his cheeks down, tugging at his eyeballs. When he got his eyelids open again, orange-red dials were spinning in front of him, meaningless, the long hours in the centrifuge mock-up wasted. The net pulled, hard, inexorable. Amos tried to breathe, but his chest couldn't lift against the intolerable weight that held it down. Panic surged, cold, in his stomach, up his throat... A few seconds later, the net dissolved. The seat cushions, released, shoved Amos forward against the harness. His weight dropped from # pounds down to a little less than #. He drew a deep, shuddering breath and another. The first-stage had been dropped, its contribution made. Now the second booster was building its pressures, adding its acceleration to a speed that had already reached more than # miles per hour. Slowly the net drew down again. Again Amos's breathing grew difficult. He struggled for one more breath and one more. Then the net was down hard, and there was no more breath. Seconds passed. The pressure grew, never quite as hard as the first booster's nine gs but lasting longer. This time Amos went forty seconds without breathing. Then the second stage dropped away, and the pressure relented. Amos gasped for breath. The sky had turned velvet black. The stars were out : unwinking brilliants set in the velvet. The ship was forty miles high; it was traveling almost # miles per hour. Third-stage pressures were almost unnoticeable. They never climbed above three They broke into sunlight. His dazzled eyes squeezed shut against the sudden pain, swifter than the metal covers that slid over the canopy to protect it from the massive, unfiltered irradiation of the sun's ultraviolet that otherwise would soon discolor and cloud it. Afterimages danced in front of Amos's eyes, lasted for minutes. Before they faded, the motors cut out. The net released him completely, the seat cushion shoved, the harness caught him again... But he was falling, hurtling downward from a tremendous cliff, tumbling helplessly and unchecked into infinite depths... He clawed at the chair arms, gripped them until the veins stood out, ropy and blue, in the whiteness. His breath sucked in, rasping. He held it, every muscle braced for the impact... That never came. The pit was bottomless. It was illusion! The fall reflex. Babies have it; kittens, lowered suddenly, claw wildly for support. He was falling, he told himself. He was falling away from the Earth, coasting upwards at more than # miles per hour, without that resistance to ffie puU of gravity which conveys a sensation of weight. Slowly he let his breath sigh out. Slowly he relaxed stubbornly resisting muscles. He let himself fall. He opened his eyes and looked up, seeing the seats and helmets above him. For a moment it helped, and then his gravi-receptors told him that this was illusion -- there was no up, no down. He was falling in all directions at once. The cabin was spinning around him. He fought the sensation, fought the feeling of nausea that gripped his throat and stomach. His face perspired, grew cold. A moment later he was violently sick in the plastic bag. It was almost half an hour before the spasms ceased. Dimly, through his agony, he heard voices: "Fuel reserve... "Skin temperature one thousand..." "Velocity eighteen thousand four..." "Altitude..." "Cocoa. Check flight path..." "On the straight and narrow, Folly..." "Check. Keep us posted will you? Let's make this a nice easy ride -- papa's tired." H eat was a problem. By the time the third-stage left the last, thin traces of atmosphere behind, the temperature of the hull was # F. The refrigeration equipment, massive enough to cool a ten-story office building, labored to keep the cabin livable. It took four hours for the ship to reach equilibrium temperature. The crew couldn't sit back and sweat it out. They had jobs to do. In coasting to the #-mile altitude, the ship had dropped below orbital speed. Between them, by star sights and computations, the navigator and co-pilot determined the ship's altitude. The captain pressed a button on the arm of his chair. Slowly the pattern of stars shifted over the canopy. Once more the captain pressed the firing button. The ship gained a little more than # miles per hour. They were in orbit. The captain spoke to the Doughnut: "Ess one point two. Folly. In orbit but blind. Give us a hand," The radio was silent. "Doughnut!" the captain roared. "Get your finger out! Give us a bearing!" "Folly. Ess one point two. Thanks for the outburst. Gave us radio bearing. We now have visual. Following are corrections..." Amos hugged to himself the meaning of S.#; it was a mark of belonging, and at the moment it was all he had. The "S" stood for satellite, the "#" for the orbit, the "#" for the second satellite in that orbit. # The S.#.I was McMillen's tomb, leading the Doughnut by one hundred miles. With the setting of the sun, the shades had been rolled back from the canopy. The ship was in the shadow of the Earth. Amos stared into the star-speckled sky for his first glimpse of the Doughnut, but the night draped it with invisibility. It wasn't like the model that had hung above his bed; it didn't glow. "... and welcome back. Colonel," said the voice from the Doughnut. The captain growled and gave the ship a gentle boost. Slowly it began to flip over. Beneath them -- above them -- the night-dark Earth appeared and swept across the canopy and gave way again to the stars. In that glimpse Amos saw the reddish glow of a city and a star-brightness near it that swept away before he could identify it. He fought back nausea; terror whispered that he was one of those unfortunates who never got over their spacesickness. The cruising motor turned on again briefly. Weight and fall again. The tumbling stopped, Amos took a deep, relieved breath. Framed in the canopy now, drawing the eyes like a vision of heaven, was the gently spinning wheel of the Doughnut, one great spoke connecting the rim of the wheel, bulging to a hub in the middle. It was there at last, barely visible, gleaming dully in the starlight. Amos forgot his nausea. It had been a long way to come: twenty years of dreams and five years of hell and a thousand miles -- straight up. "If you're going over," the captain said, close, sarcastic, "I'd advise you to slip into something a little warmer. Otherwise you might find the last few feet the hardest." He floated past. Amos hated him. Hated his sarcasm. Cautiously he released his harness straps, holding desperately to the chair arm to keep from falling. It was no use trying to fool his gravireceptors and mechano-receptors; they knew he was falling. Slowly, trying to control his nausea, he floated above the ladder, puUing himself along it until he reached the rack of pressure suits. Clinging to a stanchion and struggling to fit his legs into the proper places was a far different experience than when his # pounds had been solid and maneuverable at the Academy. Finally he slipped his legs in and wedged one arm far enough down a sleeve to grab the hand controls. When he had the other arm in a sleeve, the captain was already dressed. He floated over impatiently to help with the fastenings and lower the helmet over Amos's head. "Radio working?" The voice was loud and harsh inside the suit. "Yes, sir." "Good. Check your suit." Amos stared at the face dimly visible through two face-plates of dark glass. The complete check took a good five minutes, and the suits were thoroughly inspected after and before every trip. "Yes, sir," he said grimly. Step by step, joint by joint, gauTO by gauge, control by control, attacnment by attachment, he went through the suit-check manual. "Suit check complete, sir." The captain turned curtly, swinging himself by a hook around a stanchion, and caught the air-lock controls. By the time the outer door opened in front of them, bulky stevedores were dumping boxes and crates and tubes out of the cargo compartment. The ship and the three taxis hitched to one broad wing were anchors for a vast spider web of cords and safety lines. Amos looked up into infinity. Slowly the ship tilted; infinity was a dark mouth gaping; he was falling... He grabbed for the edge of the doorway. Where his hands should have been, tools banged against the hull of the ship. The impact threw him forward, arms flailing helplesslyAs he cleared the side of the ship. Earth swimg into view beneath. His orientation twisted. Panic was a live thing in his chest and throat, fluttering icy wings. He was really falling now, falling helplessly and endlessly toward death. He fell through impalpable space unable to tear his fascinated eyes away from the dark Earth below. Something was clanging against his suit, but it was seconds before he could look to see what it was. The captain was clinging to the handle on the chest of his suit. Something clicked against his waist. The captain released him, swung around, began to recede. "Wait -- !" Amos began, fear distorting his voice, and then he saw that a nylon safety line trailed from him to the captain. The ship was only a few yards away. The captain pulled himself to it by his own line and snapped Amos's cord onto a ring beside the air-lock door. Slowly he reeled Amos in like a clumsy metal fish. "Elementary lesson number one," the captain said in a bored, unpleasant voice, "the moment you reach space: clip on." "Sorry, sir," Amos said, his suit dripping inside with sweat. "That's a word we don't have much use for out here. You seldom live to use it. There's your transportation." He pointed to one of the nearby sausages. "Jump!" Amos hesitated before the blank immensity that separated him from the taxi. Then he closed his eyes and jumped, his safety line unreeling behind. Twice he missed and had to haul himself ignominiously back. On the third try, he caught a hook in the handle on the nose of the little two-man ship and clung. The captain released his safety line. It disappeared into the reel at Amos's waist. A round door opened out for Amos. He slipped carefully into the taxi and crawled past the suited pilot to the seat behind. As Amos buckled himself down, the pilot turned awkwardly in the starlight coming through the canopy and touched his helmet to Amos's. "If your radio's on, turn it off." The words echoed hollowly. Amos pressed the button under his left index finger. "It's off," he said curiously. "Good. Privacy's hard enough to come by up here. No use broadcasting everything, eh? My name's Kovac. Lieutenant Max Kovac. You're new, aren't you?" "That's right. Cadet Amos Danton." "Glad to meet you, Amos. You don't know how glad. One more like you, and I get rotated. Then, watch out, fleshpots!" "You been here long?" "Twelve long months, brother. That's twelve years by any other calendar. Just let me get my feet back on the ground, and they couldn't drag me out again with a team of wild rockets. Excuse me, Amos. We're being paged." From the Hub of the Doughnut taxi jockeyed sickeningly back and forth on its two jets until it was aimed at the station and then the rear jet came on full. The Doughnut swelled in front of them like a balloon, spinning. With a single correction, Kovac slipped the taxi into one of the motionless, cagelike landing berths at either side of the a brief flare of the nose motor. Amos followed Kovac into the turret, his heart beating swiftly, expectantly. Beyond the air lock was the Hub. Suits hung in brackets around the curving wall like gleaming white monsters. He was inside the Doughnut, Amos thought, spinning with it, a part of it. He was here. Amos released his helmet clamps and took a deep breath of the Doughnut's air. It smelled like a machine shop inside a bathhouse. It stank. Kovac was already out of his suit. He helped Amos, saying easily, "Don't let it bother you, kid. It's tough your first time out. You can't coordinate because your muscles and senses are still adjusted to gravity. Everybody goes through it. You'll get the knack. Just don't let anybody kid you. At first we're all babies learning to walk." He slipped the suit and helmet into an empty bracket. "Come on," he said, launching himself toward one tunnel like a champion diver. He caught the landing net that lined one curving wall and pulled his mouth close to a microphone. "Weight control. Kovac coming in on B with new arrival Cadet Amos Danton. One-fifty?" he asked, gauging Amos's size. Amos nodded. After a moment a bored voice said, "Okay, you're balanced." They pulled themselves along the net, their weight slowly increasing, their bodies swinging gradually down toward the rim until, when they reached the little weight-control office, they were hanging from the net. Amos weighed forty pounds. In front of a compact computer and a schematic of the Doughnut dotted with small, magnetic markers sat an officer in wrinkled, khaki coveralls. "Danton?" he said, raising an eyebrow in cursory acknowledgment. "Welcome aboard, sucker." His face straightened as he stood up quickly, saluting. "Welcome back, Colonel." Someone brushed past Amos and turned, stripping off his flight helmet. It was the captain of the Folly, his hair a grizzled spacecut. "Danton, eh?" he said sourly. "Let me know when you're ready to go back in." He stooped through a doorway and was gone. The weight given him by the Doughnut's spin had made Amos's empty, aching stomach feel better, but now it felt like it had a brick in it. How can a man dream so long, he thought desperately, and have the reality turn out so horribly? With his helmet off, the captain of the Folly was unmistakable. He was Colonel Frank Pickrell, commander of the Doughnut. G eneral finch had been right: the selection and the training was never enough ; the job was bigger than the man; what Amos had gone through was nothing to what was waiting for him. To Amos it seemed that he had never been trained at all; he had to learn everything all over again. Nothing could have prepared him for no-weight. Nothing could have prepared him for the fierce, blazing reality of the sun, for the Earth like a giant, round picture framed in white haze and spanning half the field of vision, for the everyday discomforts of life aboard the Doughnut. There were never enough men for the jobs that had to be done if they were to justify the expense and sacrifice of putting the Doughnut into space and maintaining it there. The work day was # to # hours long, back-breaking, physical labor done under the most imcomfortable, most dangerous conditions men could endure and still stay sane. There was never enough space inside the Doughnut even for essentials. If it was a question of function or comfort, comfort lost. Amos's bunk was his for eight hours out of every twenty-four. The two other shifts were alloted to two other men. He would crawl into the bunk and lie there, too weary to sleep, and wonder if he would survive. There were times he was so homesick for the feel and look and smell of Earth that he cried into the thin pillow, pressing his face deep to muffle the sobs. There were times he would have sold his chance of promotion for ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. There were moments he almost screamed for the lost privilege of a few minutes completely alone. None of these were possible unless he gave up the dream. And that was the unthinkable. There were fleeting moments he would tell himself that this was fulfillment; he was out there at last -- out there in the Doughnut -- out with his dreams. So it meant privation and drudgery and psychological starvation -- he was out there, and it was wonderful. It wasn't often he could convince himself. Because this wasn't his dream. He was given twenty-four hours to acclimate himself, but it was seven days before he could keep down solids. Specialized personnel held down an extra job in maintenance when their regular shift was over, but Amos's specialty was piloting, and he wasn't trusted with a ship. He also knew navigation, engineering, and communications, but these, too, were out of the question. He was assigned to the permanent labor force. He was a janitor, a stevedore, a handyman. There was little dust. The airconditioning plant extracted the dirt and lint men brought with them from Earth, but Amos emptied wastebaskets, washed fingerprints off dials, screens, and viewports, scrubbed washrooms, polished brass... He answered all calls for working parties; at least once a day he went out to unload a ferry and push the freight to the waiting taxis. In his spare time, he maintained the temperature regulators. This was a perpetual chore that kept him clinging to the meteorbumper of the Doughnut for a minimum of six hours a day as he unscrewed the shutterlike regulators with the tools at the sleeve end of his suit and fastened a renovated regulator in its place. A week in the S.#, and Amos began to forget that he had ever known another life. A week : # revolutions of the Earth around the Doughnut; # sunrises, # sunsets, # nights. Food became less a task, more a gripe. Nausea came less frequently and almost .never reached the active stage. Strength returned unnoticed. Life became less a torment, more a drudgery. By the same token, it became less a dream, more a cold reality. Amos fought it. There were men to envy in the Doughnut, the observers and the scientists : physicists, aerologists, astro-physicists, astronomer... They were doing what they wanted to do in the best possible place to do it. Amos moved through the Doughnut, cleaning, watching, telling himself that this was the dream. For the physicists, conditions were available that had been unattainable or attainable only with great effort: weightlessness, virtually perfect vacuums, temperatures approaching absolute zero... The physicists were in a state of perpetual excitation, like their cosmic ray counters and ionization chambers. Underneath the radio ops were the aerologists and the slowly unraveling mystery of weather, seen now from above and outside. Weather had never been so predictable. Next came the observers, preempting two decks for their maps and telescopic enlargements, staring at closely guarded items of military interest. They reminded Amos of pathologists staring through microscopes at viruses and germs and cancer cells -- only the things under the lens knew they were being observed and acted accordingly. Beyond the computer and the telescope control panel was Celestial Observation, two decks tall, where photographs of distant nebulae were projected for study. A few hundred feet from the Doughnut, a free-floating telescope was taking the finest celestial photographs man had ever seen, free from the distortions of a wavering blanket of air. But, in a sense quite apart from their civilian status, the scientists were a class distinct from the Air Force officers and cadets who manned the Doughnut. The scientists had never left Earth. For them the S.# was an end in itself, created especially to serve their purposes. It existed as a platform on which to stand as they looked up or down or performed their specialized experiments. But Amos knew it was only a means, the first of a series of steps that led up to the moon, the planets, and the stars. The scientists had come out into space to look back at Earth. Amos had come out to reach the stars. That was the dream. T he thirtieth day, one month: Amos was in the Hub, weightless, stealing moments from sleep to practice doggedly the esoteric techniques of movement without the aid of semi-circular canals and otolith organs. He was climbing out of a suit when the loudspeaker said, "Cadet Danton. Report to Colonel Pickrell. Cadet..." In the middle of the A spoke, Amos passed Kovac. The lieutenant gave him a wink and an encouraging smile. "Don't let him make you mad, boy," he whispered. "The Fish is a cold and calculating man!" Amos smiled briefly. Across the airtight door was pressed the buzzer. The door swung open toward him. Pickrell stood behind it, his face set and hard. "Don't stand there like a fool," he said. "Come in." "Yes, sir." Amos clenched his teeth and stooped through the doorway. The cabin wasn't much bigger than a closet and not much better furnished. Like Pickrell, it was cold, gray, austere, built not for appearance or comfort but for efficiency. The only furniture was a bunk, a thin, one-legged table, and a chair; when folded flat against the wall, they left a walking space of almost six feet square. The aluminum table was let down. Pickrell slid behind it into the chair. "It cost over one thousand dollars in propellants alone to get you out here," he said flatly. "I'm ready to write that off. I'm not even concerned about the five hundred dollars a day it takes to maintain you out here. But you're taking up space a good man might fill. I'm sending you back in the next empty seat." "Why?" The word was expelled from Amos. "Some men have the equipment for this kind of life. You aren't one of them. You've been sick, haven't you?" "Once in a while," Amos admitted. "There's no such thing as spacesickness. It's fear. We don't have room out here for cowards." "What have you got against me. Colonel? You had it in for me the moment I stepped aboard the ferry. What is it: hate, fear, jealousy? I'm doing my work. If I had a chance I'd do more. Give me that chance. Colonel! Don't send me back before I -- His hands were wet. He looked down. Blood was trickling from the holes his fingernails had cut into his palms. "I'll tell you what I've got against you, Danton: you've got stars in your eyes. This isn't a job to you; it's a game. I know your kind; I've seen too many of you. You want to go on out. You gripe about the Air Force marking time on the moon project or the Mars ship or the Venus expedition. I'll tell you something, Danton : this is no glory road. This satellite is out here to look back on Earth, not out at the stars. But you'll never get that through your head. You're dangerous. You'll kill yourself. That I don't care about. But the chances are dangerously great that you'll take the rest of us with you. And that's my business. "Get out your nice, new spacepack, Danton. You're going in." Amos stood stiffly in front of the desk, feeling unreal, looking down at the salt-and-pepper spacecut with the bald spot at the crown. But for Pickrell, Danton had ceased to exist. Amos turned and pushed through the airtight door and let it pull shut behind him. This was the way it ended. This was the bursting of the dream. To destroy it took nothing as powerful or as dramatic as a meteor. A word pierced it, and it collapsed. But worse than that was the change in Pickrell. This wasn't the man he had idolized. This wasn't the hero, the second man out. This wasn't the man who had stood in the cabin of Rev McMillen's ship and stared down at the frozen body of the man who had led the way out and got lost in the cave of night, his fuel exhausted. This wasn't the man who had broadcast to the world from # miles up: "In accordance with my instructions and his own wishes, his body will be left here in its eternal orbit... "From this moment, let this be his shrine, sacred to all the generations of spacemen, inviolate. And let it be a symbol that Man's dreams can be realized, but sometimes the price is steep... Pickrell had changed, surely, not the dream. He had grown old and used up, and the dream was too much for him. And in his hands was the future of space flight. The dream was betrayed. Tears stung Amos's eyes. He blinked rapidly to keep them back. Tears weren't manly, but there are times when even a man must weep. When his eyes cleared, he was inside the Hub, and the idea was complete. Pickrell could send him home like a boy who has been naughty at school. Pickrell could break his heart. That was Pickrell's right; he was the Commander. But he couldn't send Amos home until Amos had one chance to do what he had been trained to do. It took only seconds to get into a suit. Amos pulled up the zippers, pulled down the helmet, clamped it to the suit. He refilled the oxygen tanks at the petcock against the wall. He selected a hand rocket from the rack and slipped through the air lock and out the turret. It was night; the Earth swam nearby, circling around him, giant and dark. When he released the landingberth cage, centrifugal force threw him gently away on a tangent. His stomach sank: he was completely on his own. There were no cords connected to anything: no umbilical cord, no apron string, no safety line. He spun slowly. The Doughnut swung into view ; the sausageshaped taxis were hitched along the inner edge of the wheel. He could have reached them by the spoke, but that took time. It was all he had, and there was little left... He was going to miss the rim. He swiveled the hand rocket to one side and gave it a cautious, one-second burst. It shoved him toward the rim, but it made him spin more rapidly. Quickly he turned the rocket in the opposite direction and let it push until his spin had stopped. Then he was spinning the other way, faster now. Panic gripped his throat; he couldn't swallow. How long did a hand rocket last? He couldn't remember, but once the fuel was exhausted, he had lost all chance of helping himself. He closed his eyes to shut out the vast, pancake disk of the Earth flipping crazily over and over; he tried to think. All he could remember was his Academy instructor saying, "Keep it against your belly button! Belly button, I said!" That was it. All force had to be exerted through his center of gravity -- roughly the navel -- or it created spin. He opened his eyes, swung the rocket to the right, and gave it a flicker of a burst. His spin slowed. Another flicker. His spin almost stopped. That was good enough, because the rim of the giant wheel was only two arm-lengths away. When he was faced away from the Doughnut, he pressed the rocket to his navel and fired briefly. As he passed the rim, he caught the line of a taxi with one hook and let himself slide along it imtil the taxi stopped him. Its hydrazine and nitric acid gauges stood at only half full. He took a deep breath and launched himself toward the next taxi in line. This time his reaction flight was perfect. One burst turned him to face the taxi, a second, in the opposite direction, stopped his rotation, a third killed his forward speed. This one had just been refueled. Amos unsnapped the hitching line and let the taxi drift tangentially away from the Doughnut. He was weightless, but he had a ship under him. He had power. He had a goal. Before the chance was gone, he was going to pay a final tribute to a dream. He was going to visit the icy tomb of Rev McMillen. T he tomb was in the same orbit as the Doughnut, but one hundred miles ahead. He had to head in the right direction, where there was no simple method of determining direction. He had to compute distance traveled, where even fully equipped ships found that difficult. He had to increase speed, when every increase in speed meant an increase in altitude. And if he strayed off course by just a few minutes of a degree at the start, he would be miles from his goal at the end. There were no instruments in the taxi, no built-in octants, no patent logs, no computers... Taxis were built for short hauls when both ends of the journey were always in view. Two gunsight telescopes were fixed immovably at eye level, one pointing straight forward, the other straight back. The controls were crude: two sticks, one at each side of the pilot's chair, firing the front and the rear rockets, which swiveled within a limited arc in response to the movement of the sticks. The throttles were buttons on top of the sticks. The taxi was roughly horizontal and spinning gently. The Earth tipped lazily around the canopy, chased by the flat, black-velvet curtain of the night hung with its small, unblinking lanterns. The stars were alien. Where was he? The Earth rolled around him, the continents and oceans sliding down across the disk: the dark, familiar shape of Cuba, Florida sliding south. That meant the Doughnut was on its northern leg of the orbit that reached as far north as Nonie, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic continent. The stars snapped into place. There was the Big Dipper. And there -- indicated most beautifully by the Pointers -- was Polaris. He drew dividends on his long labor of memorizing the Doughnut's timetable: in five minutes, by the taxi's chronometer, the Pole Star would make an angle with the orbit of -- he figured quickly -- #. Amos killed the taxi's spin and placed his horizontal axis parallel with the Doughnut's orbital plane -- as near as he could estimate the angle. He could think of only one way to check altitude; he dropped the taxi's nose until the forward sight nicked the Earth's horizon. Instead of a pilot's suit with its specialized manipulators, he had a handyman's sleeve-end tools. He held the right-hand control stick firmly in a pair of pliers and poised a screwdriver above the throttle button -- and hesitated. Rocketing one-hundred miles by the seat of his suit was a desperate gamble : there are no railroad tracks in space. There was sacrilege in it, too, but Amos shrugged that away. No shrine has ever been profaned by an honest worshipper. His jaw tightened. The danger didn't matter. The dream was dying; there would be no other chance. He pressed the throttle button. The accelerometer climbed quickly to one g; he held it there for ten seconds. When he released the throttle, he had added roughly four miles a minute to his velocity. He had used up -- he checked the instrument panel quickly -- two-tenths of his fuel supply. The nose of the taxi was still pointed at the horizon. At # the sun rose, flashing blindingly on the nose of the taxi. At #I # Amos passed over Nome, his first check point. At #I # Amos checked to see that the forward sight was still bisecting the horizon and pressed the left throttle button for ten seconds after the accelerometer reached one g. Given well-matched motors, his increase in speed and altitude were canceled. He should be back in orbit within sight of McMillen's tomb. He turned slowly to scan the entire field of vision, ignoring the glare of the sun, fierce against his eyes as he looked back. There was no stage-three in view. He had failed. There was no use searching a cubic area of space that might be hundreds of miles in volume. Head back, fool! he thought. If you can get back -- and I wouldnt bet a used sick-bag on it. Cubic, he thought. Cubic. Recklessly, he tumbled the taxi over on its back. For a moment the glare from the polar ice cap blinded him, then he saw it. To the right, three or four miles away, it gleamed in the sun; highlights ran along one wing and down the cone-shaped hull. Expertly, Amos killed the tumbling and centered the stage-three in his front sights; he poured on the fuel. The ship swelled but not as quickly as the exultation that filled his throat, hard, choking. He blasted to a stop, careless of fuel. McMillen's tomb hung a few feet away, its air-lock door gaping open to invite him in. He didn't move for a moment. He sat quite still for a few seconds, trying to savor the moment, trying to analyze his emotions. They were too complex; he gave it up. As he crawled out the port, he snapped his safety line onto the taxi. For an instant, holding himself to the taxi, he studied the opening opposite him. Then he dived for it, kicking the taxi back. He hit glancingly against the open door, caught the jamb with one hook, and pulled himself in. As the taxi reached the end of the safety line, it tried to tug him away, but he had a good hold. Bracing his feet on each side of the doorway, he reeled in the taxi until it was tight against the ship. He turned. The inner air-lock or was open. He hesitated, thinking about what he would find inside, and reality began to edit his dreams. He had thought of McMillen sitting in the captain's chair, staring out through the canopy toward the stars he had brought within man's reach, a rueful smile frozen upon his face, his body perfectly preserved by the chill airlessness of space. It wouldn't be like that at all. If the ship had ever had a ceramic coating, micro-meteorites had scoured the metal clean years ago. The hull temperature was more than # F. That was no deep freeze. Amos had seen pictures of explosive decompression. If these airlock doors had been opened quickly, McMillen wouldn't be in one piece. If, on the other hand, the air had leaked out slowly, his body fluids would have started boiling when the air pressure reached six percent of sea level, the blood in the lungs evaporating, blood ballooning under the skin... It was no picture for a dreamer. Amos straightened his shoulders inside his suit, feeling older, as if he had lost something and would lose more. He drifted through the inner doorway and hooked a girder to pull himself toward the nose of the ship. Under the canopy, he caught himself by another exposed girder, his eyes puzzled, his face wrinkled in an effort to understand. The interior of the ship was only a shell. There were no seats, no instruments, no inside sheathing. There had been no shutters for the canopy; ultraviolet had turned it almost completely opaque; micrometeorites had etched it. There was no pilot, no hero named McMillen. There never had been. No one had ever planned for any. The only useful object in the shell was a compact radio transmitter bolted to a girder. Attached to it was a tape recorder with an oversized reel. The tape had run out. It had been a hoax. The great epic of man's first flight into space, the magnificence of Earth's response to his plea for help -- it had all been false. The contributions that had made the Doughnut possible had been tricked from a credulous American people. Amos clung to the girder and grew old. The orange protective coating had never even been painted over. Amos scratched at it until the steel gleamed through: Coldly he pushed away. He swung back through the air-lock door and crawled into the taxi. His movements sent it floating away from the ship. Icily he computed his return. He had spent more than half of his fuel and almost half of his oxygen. Ten minutes later Polaris became visible. A ten-second blast from the forward motor slowed the taxi. He waited for the Doughnut to catch up.  A little over twenty-five minutes later, he speeded up again, and the needle of the fuel gauge tapped against the zero peg. He released the throttle button and looked up. The Doughnut hung above him. For the first time, he turned on his radio receiver. Immediately, it burst into speech: "Danton! Give us some indication of your position. If your radio is working, answer so that we can get a bearing. We can't send out searching parties until..." Amos flipped it off, aimed the taxi at the Doughnut, and touched the throttle of the right-hand stick. The motor coughed, just once. It was enough. The ship floated gently toward the ring. Amos crawled out, caught a line as he passed, and snapped the taxi to it. He hit the landing berth with his first try. When he came into the Hub, Kovac was climbing into a suit. He stopped, one leg drifting sideways, and stared incredulously at Amos. "Where in the -- ? My God, man, you've got the whole Doughnut in a -- !" "Took a joy ride," Amos said, releasing his helmet and stripping off the suit. He gave a short, mirthless laugh. "Joy ride! The Colonel is sending me in." "Sending you in my chilblained foot! You gave him cause!" He drifted closer, glancing at the nearby microphones. "Didn't you understand me? As long as a man obeys instructions and does the work assigned him with any degree of competence, the Fish can't send him in. They took away that power ; he was sending in too many men. You had to let him ride you into making a break!" "I was a sucker," Amos agreed flatly. "I guess I always have been." He dived for spoke B and pulled himself quickly along the landing net. "I'm back," he threw at the weight-control officer as he passed. Wide-eyed, the lieutenant spun quickly to his phone. Amos made his way, unhurried, to the cramped, communal sleeping quarters for rim B personnel and slipped into his bunk and lay there, his hands under his head, staring at the smooth bulge of the bunk above. Two minutes later Colonel Pickrell arrived. T he low overhead forced him to bend his neck. He glowered at Amos. "Danton -- " he began. "Excuse my not getting up, Colonel," Amos said, "but there isn't room for two of us between the bunks. If I'd known you wanted to see me. I'd have come to your room." Pickrell tried to straighten up, couldn't. "All right -- everybody but Danton, out of here!" The bunks emptied swiftly. Men grabbed their clothes and squeezed past Pickrell, glancing backwards curiously. When they were alone, Pickrell sat stiffly on the edge of the bunk across the narrow aisle. Amos didn't look at him. "All right, Danton, let's have it." "Have what. Colonel?" Pickrell stared at him icily. "The explanation for stealing a taxi. For absenting yourself from your post." "I borrowed the taxi. It's been returned. You can deduct the cost of the fuel from my pay." "Thanks," Pickrell said sarcastically. "But maybe we should let the courtmartial decide that." "As for absenting myself -- I was on my off-shift, just as I am now. What I choose to do with my offtime is my own affair." "Ridiculous! There are specific instructions against the unauthorized use of equipment for personal reasons. Where did you go?" Amos turned his head and met Pickrell's eyes squarely. "I took a little trip," he said gently. "I visited McMillen's tomb." "You're mad!" Amos looked back at the bunk above him. "You couldn't possibly get thiere in a taxi," Pickrell continued sharply. "Without instruments, without radio bearings! And if you got there, you couldn't possibly get back." Amos lay motionless, his hands under his head, uncaring. "You're lying," Pickrell said. Amos looked at him again, at the blue-agate eyes in the hard, weathered face. The lenses had several tiny cataracts. "Why did you do it?" he asked. "Why did you do it that way?" Pickrell' s eyebrows almost met. "You were there," he muttered, disbelief lingering in his voice. "Fantastic! I wouldn't trust myself to come back from a trip like that." "Hoax!" Amos said. Pickrell took a deep breath and let it sigh out. "Yes," he said, "the ship was empty. McMillen wasn't in it. He wasn't the first man into space. He didn't die there. The messages back -- all planned, all taped. Why did it happen that way? To understand you'd have to be one of us, back in #." Amos didn't look at him. What Pickrell said didn't matter. There were no reasons good enough. "We couldn't get the money," Pickrell said. His eyes seemed to be seeing something a long way off. "That was the only thing we needed -- the money. We used all we had -- government money, our own; it wasn't enough. We built a ship. We slaved on it. But we couldn't finish it. By stripping the third stage to a shell, we could put a payload of only one hundred pounds into an orbit. "I don't remember now who suggested the idea -- maybe it was McMillen himself. But it was the answer. We all knew it. We couldn't put McMillen up here really because we were the only ones with the imagination to see what space flight could mean. So we pretended." He made a sweeping gesture that included the satellite and everything it entailed and meant. "None of us has ever regretted it." Amos looked at him silently. "But we didn't want it that way. We could put a man out here, you see -- except for the money. So we got the money the only way we knew how. And we put men out here. That's what counts. That's our justification. We didn't want it this way, but we've never been sorry we did it." "I'm so glad," Amos said softly. Pickrell turned fierce eyes on him. "None of us is happy about it -- understand that! Bo isn't. He was the last one we convinced; he was the one who really put it over, and Who wants to be a hero when you're only a fake hero and you're alive to know it? Do you know who was the first man into space? Me," Amos chuckled. "And the honor belongs to a living ghost!" "Who wants it?" Pickrell asked violently. Then, reflectively, "We did what we had to do, to do what had to be done. The other way was too risky. We couldn't leave it to time and chance." "Where's McMillen?" "Alive. In New York probably. He's had plastic surgery, and he's under twenty-four hour guard. Not because we don't trust him ; we just can't take chances. He gets whatever he wants, within reason." "Except the privilege of coming out," Amos said. "He can't come out. Ever. He'll die there, the fake hero." "Yes." Pickrell's eyes snapped back to Amos. His face smoothed. "And you, poor dreamer," he said sardonically, "you see now why I can't keep you here. Only fabulous You might have cost the Air Force a fantastic sum in futile search and lost time." "But I didn't." "Give you time," Pickrell said confidently, " -- you would. I told you to get packed." He glanced at his wristwatch. "The ferry is due in thirteen minutes." Amos turned his head curiously. "Why are you so determined to get rid of me, Colonel?" "Out here dreamers die young," Pickrell said flatly. "We should weed them out early -- before we they won't listen to me at the Academy. To stay alive out here you have to be ruthless. We got out here by a hoax, but we can't live on illusions. I don't want to die because some fool bums a hole in the Doughnut while he's gazing at the stars. Out here is reality. You can't dream your way around it." The Colonel's face was no colder than Amos's. "We're out here on sufferance," Pickrell continued. "We have to bring our environment with us wherever we go, and it isn't enough. The air stinks. The food is awful. The water tastes of human waste material. There's no privacy. Try as we can, we never really become completely adjusted to no-weight. We live with death at our elbow: too much heat, too much cold, too much acceleration, too much ultraviolet, too little air, too thin a barrier against the night and the invisible bullets that speed through space, too many unfiltered rays and particles...  'IVe got five blind spots from heavy primaries plowing through the center of my retina. If an accident doesn't take me first, I'll die before I'm sixty." "Or if someone doesn't kill you," Amos murmured. A tight grin slipped across the Colonel's face. "Could a dreamer take that?" he asked. "He'd crack up -- if he lived that long. We need men out here, not boys. That's why you're going back." He stood up as straight as the overhead would allow and started for the doorway as if everything had been said. "Colonel," Amos said, lifting his voice a little. "How do you get a man to go through five years of hell at the Academy and then come out here to live with discomfort and death -- if you take away the dream?" Pickrell swung back, frowning. "I thought I'd tell you. Colonel: I'm not going back." "What did you say?" Pickrell asked slowly. "Send me back," Amos said clearly, "and I'll expose the hoax." Pickrell grinned. "Blackmail?" "Call it that." Pickrell studied Amos as if the cadet had suddenly changed faces. "I've got a hunch I've been wrong about you. I've decided to let you stay." Amos accepted it as if he had expected nothing else. "I'll tell you the real reason," Pickrell went on. "Not because of what you might say -- who'd believe a courtmartialed officer, disgruntled, out for revenge? Or maybe a little accident -- they're easy to come by out here and they're usually fatal. No -- you did make that trip; there must be something of a pilot in you. And I see now that you can be ruthless, too." Pickrell chuckled. "Blackmail! Danton, I think I like you after all. Now that you've got diis foolishness about heroes and the great adventure knocked out of you, maybe you'll be a spaceman yet. You're right -- it's the best solution. We can't let you go back. Not ever. You'll be McMillen's counterpart, out here. Next shift you take over a taxi. Good night. Lieutenant, Sweet dreams." He stooped through the doorway: a hard, unhappy man -- a dreamer who had sold his dreams for the means to make them real. When his dreams came back to haunt him, they must be bitter. Amos grimaced as a tiny spot of pain burned briefly in his chest. A heavy primary had passed through a pain receptor. He touched the button beside the viewport, and the outside cover lifted away. Out there was Mare. Somewhere was Venus and the rest. Nearer, almost within reach, was the moon. They weren't the same, he and the Colonel, Amos thought. The dreams a man absorbs from his society, as naturally as the air he breathes, aren't important. Soon or late -- they die. Call it: growing up. And when a man grows up he has to make his own dreams. His were still out there.    what Is Your Science I. Q.? the answers numerous times in IF and in other science fiction magazines. Count # for each correct answer and see if you can hit a score of #. The answers are on page #. #. What is the only naked-eye object visible in the northern sky which does not belong to our galaxy? #. Generally speaking, a satellite will its orbital speed if it finds a small amount of resistance along its orbit. #. What is the only even prime number so far discovered? #. The largest lunar crater, about # miles wide, is called #. How many prime numbers are there in the first #? #. Titan, Ganymede and are all satellites larger than the planet Mercury. #. What's the name given to the "counter earth" which supposedly travels in an orbit which keeps the sun between us and it? #. The axis of Uranus is tilted degrees from the vertical. #. What is the term used to describe the common center of gravity of two revolving masses such as the Earth and the moon? #. Jonathan Swift wrote about the two moons of Mars about years before they were actually discovered. #. Which is the heaviest element in terms of specific gravity rather than atomic number? #. Kepler's Third Law states that the a planet is to the sun, the faster it will revolve around it. #. What is the name of the mythical planet supposed to be inside the orbit of Mercury? #. Electromagnetic waves of any wave length travel at a rate which is roughly equal to the speed of . #. What is the name given to the geometric conception of a fourth dimensional super-solid? #. The apex of a cone of light, such as the needlebeam of a #. What is the approximate temperature at the sun's center? #. Our moon ranks in size among the satellites. #. Are trans-uranic elements considered artificial? #. There are about # eclipses of the moon to every of the sun. The Levels System was a very democratic process, but the rules were strict -- and the worst knowing who the Inspectors part was not were N# that when Joe Bedlow went crazy two years ago and ran up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains with that waitress from C#, that it would have anything to do with whether or not Elaine and I would make our promotion from N# to N#. I know absolutely that I wasn't thinking about Joe Bedlow that Friday night when Elaine and I were waiting for Tom and Edith Weathers to come over from Small Orchard, which, as anyone at all knows is an N#, not an N# like Hill Grove, our little section here in Northern California. It was an evening in spring, and I was sitting in the living room reading the History. I knew, of course, that there wasn't much time left to try to learn history. Our five years would be up the next night at midnight; and if we didn't make it, we would be stuck with N# for at least another period. Yet I kept thinking that sometime between now and then perhaps an Inspector might ask me a question about the History, and I wanted to be ready if I could. You never knew who an Inspector was. I was particularly trying to conIllustrated by Paul Orban centrate on that part where it went known, into the reasons why we developed "For example. Doctor Atwell the Levels System. proved conclusively, in his experi"The Levels System I read, is ments, that such a condition as a product of our World Democracy; popularity was not at all like the however it is thought that the first myth of that time supposed it to he, germs of the System, as we know it He offered as evidence certain today, appeared in the late #s, advertisements of that period which At that time Doctor Joseph Atextolled the idea that to be able to well presented his theory of identiplay a piano well would insure ones fication and noted precisely the popularity. This type of misconcepgeneral distaste generated by hution enjoyed a strong vogue in the man nature when confronted with middle of the Twentieth Century; an unidentifiable experience paryet even this early. Doctor Atwell ticularly if the experience is of a had begun to point out the fallacy nature superior to any previously of confusing popularity with discomfort if not downright envy or jealousy. PerhapSy then, it is because of Doctor Atwell that piano players are now able to enjoy one another's company rather than provide distress to those who know nothing whatever about playing the instrument, and... I was interrupted by the sound of Elaine calling me from the bathroom. I took off my glasses and slammed the book shut. I was not angry at being interrupted -- I was always happy for an excuse to quit reading the History, because it was so much more difficult than reading the self-improvement books which we received in N# and twice as difficult as reading the historical romances which we had during the years we spent in N#. It was just the fact that I kept thinking about how it would be if Elaine and I did not go on to N#, and I felt like slamming a good many things in addition to the book. "John," Elaine said, "did you hear me?" "No." "I asked you if you had tied your tie yet?" "I have not," I said. "It's almost eight o'clock." "It's almost doomsday." Elaine appeared at the bedroom door and looked at me. Elaine is thirty-five, two years yoimger than I, but she still looks like the same sweet girl I married back in twentynineteen. She looked particularly nice that night, because she was wearing the pale blue taffeta that I'd always liked so well. "John," she said, "you said we weren't going to talk about it tonight. You said we wouldn't even think about it." I put my feet up on the hassock and looked at my toes. "I'm sorry. And I promise I won't think about it anymore." "Just put on your tie and your jacket. Tom and Edith will be here any minute." "I wish they weren't coming." "John, please." "I just wish they weren't coming." "You can show Tom the Wanecruiser-Eight." "I'm sick of showing Tom the Wanecruiser-Eight." "John, you promised you'd stop thinking about everything." "Well, I'm sick of showing Tom the Wanecruiser-Eight, that's all. Aren't you sick of showing Edith the Mist Coffee Um?" "No, I'm not, because we worked hard to get into N#. All Edith has is a simple Hi-Class Percolator, and I like to show the Mist Coffee Um to Edith." "Do you like to have Cathy Stanwell show you her Gold Spiral Server?" Elaine blinked, and I thought she was going to cry. I stood up quickly and patted her on the shoulder. "Don't mind me. I'm sorry. I'm sure we'll make it. I really am." Elaine kept blinking, then finally she wrinkled her nose at me and went back to the bathroom. Elaine and I have always believed in spirit and positivism. We'd taken the hard knocks together before, and we could, I told myself, take them again. However, as I tied my tie in the bedroom, my mind kept wandering back to the fact that our deadline had just about arrived, and I couldn't help becoming irritated all over again that someone in Arrangements had somehow scheduled our weekly visit with Brad and Cathy Stanwell in their section of N# to be the very next night after Tom and Edith Weathers visited us from their section in N#. As a matter of fact, I even got to doubting the worth of the entire System, even though I'd voted the straight Levels ticket ever since I was twenty-one. I tried to get my thoughts back to normal by thinking about the History again and remembering how things were when each Level kept to itself and there was no visiting between Levels at all. I knew that that hadn't worked, because one couldn't very well appreciate what one had if there wasn't someone around to show it to who didn't have it. I remembered, of course, that the people in Z# (Reinvested Interest Profits) got to enjoy visits from the Level below them but didn't have to visit anyone in the Level above because there wasn't one higher. But I recalled what Harry Woodly always said about that: "It's no skin off my nose, we can't all be President." It did help to remember that there were the Als (Intellectual) who had to visit the next Level up but were unable to have anyone at all visit them from a Level below because they were on the very bottom. I had never gotten too straight N# N# N# about why the Als, who had the highest IQ rating, were on the lowest Level, when in every other instance the IQ rating rose in correspondence to the Level. The History explained something about the Als not caring about an)ing really worthwhile materially, and so they didn't care if there was anybody around to show it off to or not. But I'd never been completely clear on it. At any rate, thinking about the Als and their being on the bottom of the heap didn't help my own attitude very much, and I kept wishing thkt whoever in Arrangements had scheduled our visits program hadn't done it the way he had. Regardless of what I'd told Elaine, it was a lot of fun to show Tom the Wanecruiser-Eight; but not nearly so much as it might have been if the very next night I hadn't had to stand around while Brad Stanwell showed me his Hydro-Ten. Finally, my thoughts were broken when the front door chimes sounded, and I put on the jacket of my dress suit and walked out to let Edith and Tom in. "Hi, folks!" I tried to make my greeting bright, but it was an effort. "Hi, John!" Edith said. "Well, hi, John!" Tom said. We shook hands all around and beamed at one another, and then I said, "sit down, folks. Elaine'll be right out." They crossed the living room to the sofa, and I noticed that Edith was wearing that black satin dress again. It was not nearly as nice as Elaine's pale blue taffeta; as a matter of fact, it was rather cheaplooking. Yet somehow I had never disliked it. Edith had an awfully good figure which was accented in that black dress It may have been an illusion, but there seemed to be a good deal more movement in that black dress than there was when she wore something else. "Well, folks," I said, getting my mind back to the affairs at hand, "how about a Martini?" We always served Martinis, just as Tom and Edith always served blended whiskey and the Stanwells always served bonded Scotch; but it was always nice to ask anyway. "Why, sure, John!" Tom said. "Fll have a wee sip, kiddo," Edith said. It was that kind of talk that always ruined the other attributes that Edith had. I mixed the Martinis and poured them, and by that time Elaine came out and said hello to Tom and Edith. We all sat down and sipped at our drinks, then I said, "How's the Hublo-Six, Tom?" I knew pretty well how the Hublo-Six was because I'd flown one all the time we were in N#, but it seemed like the thing to say. I kept remembering Brad Stanwell's Hydro-Ten and what it would be like if we didn't make it into N# and never got to own our own HydroTen; and it seemed more important than ever that I remembered that Tom owned only a Hublo-Six. "Well," Tom said, "she's really a beauty when you come to think of it. I didn't think so at first, but now I think she's a pretty swell little copter." I was rather siuprised by Tom's answer; as a matter of fact, I'd never heard him answer like that about the Hublo-Six in all the years that we'd been entertaining them. "I guess," I said, "that's because you've never flown a WanecruiserEight, Tom. Wait until you do that, then you'll know what a copter is really like." "Well," Tom said, smilingly brightly at me, "everyone to his own taste." I know that I didn't smile back at him. I'd never heard Tom talk like that, and I wasn't certain that he was feeling well. I should have let it go, but I was getting a little angry. "Would you like to take a look at her, Tom?" "The Hublo-Six, John?" "No," I said, trying to keep my voice calm, "the Wanecruiser-Eight, Tom." "Oh, why, sure. Let's do it now!" Right away, I felt a little better. "You girls take your time with those drinks," I said. "Then we'll be on our way." Just as Tom and I were leaving the room, I heard Edith say to Elaine, "Honey, I've drunk up already. Do you think just one more wee sip would hurt anything?" I was getting rather confused. We never served more than one Martini before we left for the club. "That Edith," Tom said, "she's a regular card tonight. I don't know what's got into her." I didn't know what had gotten into either one of them. I wondered, in fact, whether everyone was going crazy. However, in the garage, I tried to get back into the spirit of things. I slapped the left wing of the Wanecruiser-Eight and said, "There she is, Tom. Sweetest little copter you'd ever want to own." Tom walked around it slowly, looking at everything. We'd been doing this for quite a while now, and I thought I knew pretty well what he was going to say. I was surprised, therefore, when he said, "Well, for speed maybe she's all right, John. But I'll take that little Hublo-Six for just plain maneuverability." "Well," I said. And then because I couldn't think of anything else at all to say, I said, "Well, well." "She's a real looker, John," Tom said, slapping the front end, "but she's a little heavy, you know?" I got out a cigarette and lit it, thinking that the main thing was that I should stay calm regardless of what had happened to Tom. Elaine and I still had a chance to get into N#, even though it looked pretty slim by now; and I didn't want to lose even that by letting anything at all bother me and tip me off balance. A fter WE'D flown to the dub, i-we sat down at the usual table and said hello to the usual people who stopped by. Then Tom and Edith went out on the floor to dance. They always wanted to dance the first thing. Of course, the club's music was good and the dance floor was nice; I couldn't really blame them because I knew that all they had was the hall in N#. Yet I knew, too, that they would have to learn more restraint if they were ever going to get into N#, and jumping up to dance the first thing was not showing a whole lot of restraint. "What in God's name is wrong with them tonight?" I asked Elaine. "I don't know, John. Maybe nothing is wrong with them. Maybe it's just us. I wish you woulan't look so worried. If there's an Inspector around here tonight -- " "Please just don't talk about Inspectors," I said. "I just want to know what's wrong with Tom and Edith." Elaine stared out at the dance floor as they danced by. "I know one thing that's wrong with Edith. That dress. It's perfectly ugly." I watched Edith do a tricky little step which did not involve too much footwork, but which seemed to involve about everything else. "That black dress?" I said. "Yes," Elaine said. "It's perfectly ugly." I knew that we were both tense about everything, and I knew that the black dress was not in good taste like Elaine's pale blue taffeta. But it irritated me that Elaine was throwing in something else to worry about when there was enough already. Elaine, I thought, had a marvelous capacity for worrying about inconsequential things when there were the big things to worry about. Finally I said, "I don't see much wrong with that black dress." Elaine looked at me in a way that I hadn't seen since that time I accidentally put the WanecruiserEight down on her bed of gladioli, but Edith and Tom came back to the table before she had time to N# N# N# say anything. "Isn't this grand music?" Tom said. "Why don't you folks get out there and shake a leg?" Elaine was silent, and I looked at my glass. We were having bonded whiskey, but I had barely touched mine; in the club it was always much better just to sip at your drink and make it last. Then I noticed that Edith was tipping up her glass and draining her drink. I was surprised, but not so surprised that I failed to notice how becoming her neck looked when her head was tipped back that way. I glanced at Elaine and saw that she was looking away angrily, then Edith put down her glass and said, "I've got a beautiful idea, everyone." Tom grinned at her. "What's that, Edith?" "Let's all get swizzled tonight!" In approximately twenty-six hours we'd either be in N# or we wouldn't, and frankly I was beginning to think absolutely that we weren't going to make it. I suppose that I was becoming really frightened, and perhaps that was why I got into the same mood that Edith was in. In the time that we usually took to drink two drinks, Edith and I had drunk four. Tom didn't seem to notice, but Elaine was becoming angrier by the minute. Even the waiter seemed a little surprised, I noticed. I wondered why he should be, because I happened to have known that he was an E#, and I'd heard that E#s got drunk once and twice a week on just beer. But I didn't care much what anybody thought; matching drinks with Edith seemed to be about the only way to combat all that tension I was feeling. "Let's have another one," I said. Elaine glared at me. Then Tom said, "Let's dance, shall we, Elaine?" Elaine was certainly angry at me, I knew, but I stood up and smiled very brightly at her as she and Tom left the table. Then Edith and I were alone. We touched glasses, and I said, "Here's to it, Edith." "Here's to what, John?" "Here's to anything, Edith." "Let's dance, shall we, John?" Of course, I'd noticed before how it was to dance with Edith, but I'd always been pretty careful about it, holding her away and such. But tonight I wasn't very careful at all, and I didn't care that I wasn't. We went around the floor slowly, and I caught sight of Elaine watching us over Tom's shoulder; but I looked the other way. Near the bandstand I saw that Fred Wicket was also watching us in a very peculiar manner. For a moment I did move Edith away -- I'd always had the suspicion that Fred Wicket was an Inspector. But then Edith said, "What's the matter, John?" "Nothing," I S#iid, letting her move back where she had been. "Not one little solitary thing, Edith." I was even beginning to feel that if I could do something to ruin everything, it would be better than all this waiting. "John," Edith said. "The music's stopped." "Oh, has it?" "John, I feel a little wobblyheaded. Let's go outside. Do you want to?" "Yes," I said. "Let's go outside." There was a yellow moon shining over the golf course which bordered the north side of the clubhouse, and Edith and I walked across the soft grass of the eighth hole. "I feel so funny tonight, John," she said. "Funny?" "Yes. I just feel kind of crazy, like I don't give a damn." "I feel pretty much the same way, Edith." "I feel like I just wouldn't care what in the world happened tonight, John." We reached the area where the copters were parked and walked between the rows of WanecruiserEights. "That's just about the way I feel, Edith." We stopped beside one of the copters, and Edith leaned back against the door of the cabin. "What's the matter with us tonight, John?" "I don't know," I said. "I thought that you and Tom both were acting funny earlier, and now I'm acting the same way." "Let's not think about Tom, shall we. John?" "All right," I said. Edith reached up and patted my cheek, and I took her hand. "Let's not think about Elaine either, shall we?" I asked. "All right. What shall we think N# N# N# about then?" "I don't know. Can you think of something?" "Yes " "What?" "Can't you guess?" It was kind of confused after that. I found myself kissing Edith, and we kind of bumped around between the cabin door and the left wing, and I almost fell down. Then, suddenly, I remembered about Joe Bedlow and how they had demoted him down to M# because of all that trouble he'd gotten into with that waitress, and I regained my senses. "Edith," I said, "we shouldn't be doing this." "Don't you like it, John?" she asked. "I don't think that's quite the entire point," I said. "I just don't think we ought to be doing this." "Oh. John," she said sadly, "and I just don't give a damn at all what happens." "Edith, let's get back inside." "All right, John." We walked back between the copters, and I wiped at my mouth with my handkerchief while Edith tried to smooth her hair. We'd gotten to the rim of the golf course, when I saw Fred Wicket. He was standing just outside the broad French windows of the clubhouse, staring at us. I suddenly felt very ill. "What's the matter, John?" Edith asked. "You look pale." "I still feel a little funny, I guess." "Do you want to go back to the parking lot, John?" "I don't mean that kind of funny," I said. "I mean I feel a little weak." "Poor John." She reached up and patted my cheek. "Edith, don't do that." I knew that everything was ruined now and that it wouldn't make much difference if Edith patted my cheek or not. But I just wanted to forget what had happened. I just wanted to get out of there. Inside, Elaine looked at me, and it seemed to me that her eyes had actually turned to ice. "You're back," she said. "Yes, ma'am," I said. "And I don't feel very well either. I think maybe I'd like to go home." It was all very uncomfortable and embarrassing, but we got up and got our coats; then we flew home in the Wanecruiser-Eight. When Tom and Edith had left in their Hublo-Six, Elaine said, "Well, you couldn't have picked a better time to do what you did tonight, could you?" Before I could say anything, Elaine had gone into the bedroom and slammed the door. I spent the night on the couch in the study, but I didn't sleep very much. Elaine had certainly been right; I'd picked a beautiful night for losing my balance. Whether or not I'd really done anything serious didn't make any difference. The fact was that I'd shown a great deal of instability, and if there was anything that you shouldn't show in Hill Grove, I thought, it was instability. I kept remembering how Fred Wicket had looked at us as we'd crossed back from the parking lot, and I knew that Elaine and I were going to be in Hill Grove for a good long while. T he fact that we had to go to Tall Oaks and be entertained by Brad and Cathy Stanwell the next evening did not help matters at all. Elaine had not spoken to me all through that next day, and it was a great effort on my part even to smile when we faced Brad and Cathy that night. Brad is a large ruddy-faced fellow, and Cathy is pretty and trim -- although not at all like Edith Weathers. I'd always felt that we were rather lucky to have them for our N# couple, and I'd always thought that when we moved on to N# ourselves, we'd go right on seeing them of our own desire. Now, all of that was changed, I knew. I knew that we weren't going to go into N#, and nothing at all seemed important. However, Brad and Cathy seemed particularly gay, and so I tried my very best to look enthusiastic. "Sit down, children," Brad said, "and let old pappy pour you a Scotch and soda!" "Right," I said. "Just wonderful," Elaine said. "Have some hors d'oeuvres," Cathy said. We sipped our drinks and tasted the hors d'ouevres, and I kept glancing at my watch. It was eightthirty, three and a half hours away from our deadline. I wondered why I'd done what I'd done the night before, but I knew the reasons didn't matter; I'd done it, all right. I tried to smile and nod as Cathy and Brad chatted on happily. Then finally Brad said, "Cathy, let's not hold out on them any longer, shall we?" Cathy smiled very prettily. "All right. You tell them, Brad." They both looked at us, their eyes dancing, and Brad said, "John, how would you like to go out and take a look at the Hydro-Ten?" Going out and taking a look at Brad's Hydro-Ten was just about the last thing in the world that I wanted to do right then, but I nodded and said, "Why, sure. Brad. I'd love to!" Brad kept grinning at me. "Especially if you knew you were going to start flying one yourself, eh, John?" I stared at him and put my drink down and rubbed my palms over my knees. "How's that, Brad?" "Children, you've done it!" Brad said laughing. "You are now in N#!" I blinked at him, then I looked at Elaine. There were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling just as though she might never stop. "You're kidding," I said. "No, sir, John. I am not. They told us to give you the message. It's authenticated. You're in!" I opened my mouth and closed it. "Well, by golly!" I said. The next minute, Elaine was kissing me and I was kissing her. Brad pumped my hand, and Elaine and Cathy hugged each other, laughing and crying. I'd never been so happy in my life. "Well," Brad said finally, "don't you want to look at that HydroTen now, John?" N# N# N# "Brad," I said pretty loudly, "you bet your life I do!" I walked to the door with Brad, then I stopped and looked back at Elaine and waved at her. She blew me a kiss. It was wonderful. In the garage I kept walking around the Hydro-Ten, and Brad just stood there and watched me, grinning widely. "Great feeling, isn't it?" I nodded and finally leaned back against the copter. "It really is. Brad. Only a few minutes ago, I thought -- " . "That you weren't going to make it?" "Yes." "I felt the same way, John. Just exactly. I was worried about it for weeks. And then, near the end, I thought absolutely that we wouldn't do it." "I surely didn't think we would. Brad. I really didn't." "I'll tell you this, John. You ought to feel proud. Not everybody makes it, you know. And the reason they don't is because they don't have the balance. John, to progress this way, you've got to have balance -- that's the whole thing. Some try too hard. Others don't try hard enough. The ones who make it show they've got the balance. And you made it, John." "Yes. But I still don't understand it." Brad nodded understandingly. "I'll tell you, I didn't either. Not for a little while anyway. But here in N# you learn more, John. You get some perspective. You get the viewpoints of the boys here in Tall Oaks. And now that I think back on when Cathy and I were in N#, I realize that it was balance, just good old natural balance, that got us through." "Balance," I said. "Right." Brad got out two cigars and we lit up. "Listen, John, I'll tell you a little story -- something I don't want to get out, you understand. Just a little story, man to man." "All right," I said, puffing on the cigar. "This happened one day before our deadline was up in N#. We'd just about given up, and then we went to that club dance they have back in Hill Grove, you know?" "I know," I said. "I'll tell you, I don't know what got into me that night. I was scared, I guess. Both Cathy and I were scared, and we were fighting each other. And -- well, we were entertaining this couple from N#, and I was drinking a little too much, and bango! First thing I knew I was outside with the wife of this N# fellow, and -- " Brad motioned a hand. "It wasn't anything serious, you understand, John. It wasn't anything at all, really, and I didn't feel any different about Cathy or anything like that. It just happened." "I'll be damned," I said. "Somebody saw us, I was certain of that. And right there I gave up. I really did. Only the next night we were told, just like you were tonight, that we'd made it into N#." "Well, well, well," I said. "Now, the point of this, John, is that I think maybe that's what did it. I couldn't say for certain, but I think maybe that's really what did it." Brad looked at his cigar reflectively. "You see I'd been trying too hard up to then, not being very human and natural, you know? And you've got to be human and natural to get along here in N#. All the boys, all the girls, we're all human and natural here -- how would it be if we had someone in here who wasn't?" "Not so hot," I said. "Right. Only you never need to worry about that, John. Those boys and girls won't get in. I'll tell you that. Not if they don't prove they're human and natural. You see, I've always figured it was that next to the last night that really made the difference. What happened wasn't too much, nor too little, and maybe that proved the balance. I haven't talked to any of the other boys here in the section about it -- I mentioned it to you, John, because we've been such good friends and because I'm proud to have you here in Tall Oaks. But I really think that's what did it." I nodded, puffing on the cigar and watching the smoke drift toward the ceiling. "By the way, Brad," I said finally, "what did she look like?" "Who, John?" "That girl." "Oh. Well, she was a looker. I'll tell you that. Not like Elaine or Cathy -- I mean not their type. She was rather common, as a matter of fact. But she had a hell of a figure. And I'll never forget how she looked in that dress." "That dress?" "That black satin dress." Brad shook his head. "You know, this might sound silly, John, but somehow IVe always had a theory about her." "A theory?" Brad nodded. "I've always had the theory that Edith was an Inspector." "Well," I said. "Well, well." Brad's eyes were preoccupied, then he straightened suddenly. "Listen, the girls are calling. Let's go back and really celebrate this, Siall we?" "Right!' I slapped the tail of the Hydro-Ten, and then Brad and I walked back to the living room. "Look," Cathy said, "I've made new drinks, and now we're going to have a toast." We stood in a circle in the center of the room with the drinks in our hands, and Brad said, "All right. A toast to what?" "A toast to N#!" Cathy said. I hadn't thought about that until that very moment; and I paused a second, letting it really come to me. Then, suddenly, I raised my glass and looked at Elaine. "To N#!" I said. Elaine smiled back at me brilliantly, and then all four of us said together, "To N#!" It was a very wonderful moment.    public and industry are being pooled in a new "crash" program to find a drug or drugs to cure cancer. This voluntary, cooperative effort will be like that of wartime researches which gave us radar and the atom bomb. For the first time, public, private and industrial research in the field of cancer chemotherapy will be brought under the guidance of one organization: The Cancer Chemotherapy National Committee -- C.C.N.C. Synthetic chemicals and those from plants, hormones and viruses will be investigated as potential remedies. The program will make it possible for scientists working on a particular aspect of the problem to exchange ideas and suggest new lines of approach. It will obtain particular chemicals for study and will keep an "intelligence file" for references to progress with compounds. Our citation this month goes to the government and private agencies and industries who are spending some twelve to fifteen the C.C.N.C. which will give the direction needed to make this investment more profitable in terms of lives saved from cancer. N# N# N# the earthman The jour survivors were sitting ducks surrounded by barbaric savages. And they were doubly handicapped, because they knew that one of them was a traitor! T he robot supply ship came every Thursday at seven minutes after noon. It was an unfortunate hour for the personnel of the Nevada station, who happened to be in the commissary at lunch. Out of fourteen hundred assigned to the post, only four escaped -- two guards on noon duty in the watch tower; the Commander's wife, who had skipped lunch and stayed in her cottage; and Captain Tchassen. The Captain was on a hill south of the station making a Tri-D shot of the range of mountains west of the camp. He took his amateur photography seriously and, like any tourist, he was fascinated by the rugged scenery; there was nothing comparable to this on any world in the civilized galaxy. To get the back lighting that he wanted, Tchassen would cheerfully have given up any number of meals. As a matter of fact, he wasn't aware that it was noon until he heard the jet blast of the supply ship as it came in on the transit beam. Tchassen saw the ship spin out of control as the beam went haywire. The robot plunged into the heart of the station and the earth shook in the catastrophic explosion of the nuclear reactor. The commissary, the communication center, the supply sheds and the row of patrol ships vanished in the rising, mushroom cloud. Concussion threw Tchassen violently to the ground. His camera was smashed against a boulder. The Captain picked himself up unsteadily. He took a capsule from his belt pouch and swallowed it -- a specific against shock and radiation sickness. In a remarkably short time, Tchassen's mind cleared. He saw the prisoners pouring through the gap torn in the compound fence and running for the hills. But that did not alarm him particularly. They were unarmed and for the moment they represented no real danger. Tchassen began to run toward the ruined administrative center. He had to find out if there were any other survivors and he had to make emergency contact with the occupation base on the coast. He ran with considerable difficulty. After less than a hundred yards, he was gasping for breath. He slowed to a walk. He could feel the hammering of his heart; his throat was dry and ice cold. To the escaped prisoners, watching from beyond the camp, the Captain's weakness was unbelievable -- for Tchassen, in his twenties, had a magnificent build. Typical of Illustrated by Ed Emsh the occupation army, he wore the regulation military uniform, kneehigh boots and tight-fitting, silver colored trousers. Above the waist he was naked, except for the neckchain which carried the emblem of his rank. His body was deeply tanned. His hair was a bristling, yellow crown. Yet, despite his appearance, his sudden exhaustion was very real; Captain Tchassen had been on Earth only five days and he was still not adjusted to the atmospheric differences. As he passed the row of officers' cottages, he fell against a wall, panting for breath. The flat-roofed buildings were nearly a mile from the crater of the explosion, yet even here windows had been broken by concussion. A cold, arid wind whipped past the dwellings; somewhere a door, torn loose from its frame, was banging back and forth. Then Tchassen heard a muffled cry. In one of the officer's cottages he found Tynia. She had been thrown from her bed and the bed was overturned above her. It was a fortunate accident; the mattress had protected her from the flying glass. Tchassen helped her to her feet. She clung to him, trembling. He was very conscious of her sensuous beauty, as he had been since he first came to the Nevada station. Tynia was the wife of the commanding officer: Tchassen kept reminding himself of that, as if it could somehow build a barrier against her attractiveness. She was strikingly beautiful -- and thirty years younger than her husband. It was common gossip that she had been flirting with most of the junior officers assigned to the station. Tchassen was, in fact, a security investigator sent to probe the potential scandal and recommend a means for heading it off. He gave Tynia a shock pill from his pouch. Her hysteria subsided. She became suddenly modest about the semi-transparent bedgown she was wearing, and she zipped into a tight coverall, made from the same silver-hued material as the Captain's trousers. They went outside. She stood a foot shorter than Tchassen. Her dark hair framed her face in graceful waves; make-up emphasized the size of her eyes and the lush, scarlet bow of her lips. Tynia glanced toward the crater, shielding her face from the noon sun. "What happened. Captain?" "The flight beam failed; the supply ship exploded." "And killed them all." She said it flatly, without feeling -- but Tchassen doubted that she would have mourned the loss of her husband in any case. "I'll have to get word through to the coast. We'll need a rescue helio and -- " "I know how to use the emergency transmitter," Tynia volunteered. "There may be other survivors, Captain Tchassen; they'll need your help." "I don't want to leave you alone, Tynia." It was the first time he spoke her given name, though the informality was commonplace among the junior officers on the post. "The prisoners are out of the compound. We may have trouble." "Not yet, Captain; they're still unarmed. I'll be all right." She nodded toward the crater. "We have to make sure there's no one else alive down there." He left her reluctantly. She went toward the emergency communications room, buried in a metal-walled pillbox which had been intentionally located far from the center of the station. Tchassen walked across the scarred earth in the direction of the crater. None of the important buildings had survived. Concussion had tom up the fence arovmd the prison compound, but the cell block, hall a mile from the explosion and built of concrete and steel, was still standing. The watch tower, beyond the prison building, stood askew on bent metal pillars, but it was otherwise undamaged. The Captain knew that at least two guards were on watch duty at all hours; they might still be alive. He crossed the crater and pulled himself up the battered stairs to the top of the tower. The door was jammed. Using a broken piece of railing as a lever, he pried it open. He found the two guards unconscious, slumped across their observation console. He gave them shock capsules, but the men regained consciousness slowly. While he waited, Tchassen read their identity disks. The Corporal, Gorin Drein, was a three-year draftee, serving a six month tour of duty on Earth. He was a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy, probably no more than twenty years old. Sergeant Briggan was an army career man, in his fifties and only a few years away from retirement. Yet the only physical indication of his age was the touch of gray in his bristling mane of dark hair. When their erratic breathing steadied and they opened their eyes, the Captain explained what had happened. Both men were still groggy; the shock pills inhibited their normal emotional reactions. Neither Briggan nor Drein had much to say until Tchassen helped them down from the tower and they stood looking at the hole blasted in the earth. "The supply rocket," Sergeant Briggan said slowly, "couldn't have done this; the beam landings are foolproof. The prisoners must have pulled it off, though I don't see -- " "How?" Tchassen broke in. "The compound fence didn't go down imtil after the blast; there was no way any of them could get out." "Robot ships just don't get off the beam," Corporal Drein declared stubbornly. Briggan nodded toward the empty cell block. "It worked out nicely -- for the prisoners. A single explosion wipes out most of us; but the prisoners are far enough away from the blast center to escape." "Surely there isn't any danger of revolution," Tchassen asked, unconsciously mocking the optimism of the security bulletins. "Not any longer." Briggan grinned. "You've only been here five days, sir; you don't know how thoroughly our indoctrination has failed. The Earth people hate us more than ever." "Even so, how could one of the prisoners have brought the robot down?" "By tampering with the beam." "But that means they had a subversive -- that means one of us must be -- " "An Earthman, yes. We encourage them to apply for citizenship. If we had an Earthman on the post masquerading as an officer, how would we know it -- unless he told us? They're no different from our own people, Captain." On the other side of the crater Tynia staggered out of the communications pillbox. Tchassen saw her waving frantically and he knew something was wrong -- very wrong. He began to run toward her. Briggan and Drein followed close behind him. Almost immediately the Captain staggered and gasped for breath; he motioned for the Sergeant and the Corporal to go on without him. Briggan waited long enough to say, "So far we've located four survivors, sir -- only four. And one of the four is very probably an Earthman. The transit beams don't fail of their own accord. It's not a very nice thing to think about, is it, sir?" The two men left him and Tchassen walked slowly, alone across the barren land. The wind whispered against his naked chest; it felt suddenly cold and forbidding. The ragged peaks piled on the western horizon were no longer simply photogenic curiosities of an alien world, but symbols of undefined terror. Why had the supply robot crashed? Why had the prisoners been able to get away without a casualty? Had it been planned by an officer of the station? If so, where was he now -- with the prisoners, dead in the commissary, or among the four survivors? The tide of questions hammered at Tchassen's mind, but he came up with no workable answers. His real trouble stemmed from the fact that he knew so little about the Earth people. Their reasoning was beyond rational analysis. They were physically identical to normal human beings, and it was almost impossible not to assume that their thinking would be normally human, too. When Tchassen reached the communications pillbox, the Sergeant, the Corporal, and Tynia were inside. In the gloomy half-light he saw the others silently trying to patch together the broken wires of the transmitter. It was hopeless; Tchassen saw that at once. Only a master technician could have made sense out of that jumbled maze. The other three knew that, too. They stopped when they saw Tchassen and looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell them what to do. With something of a shock, he realized that he now ranked as station commander. "I don't believe the explosion wrecked the transmitter," Tchassen decided uncertainly. "It was tom up like this when I first came in," Tynia told him. "So we couldn't get in touch with the occupation base. Obviously one of the prisoners did it. They must have had -- The Captain licked his lips, "They must have had outside help." "What do we do now?" Tynia's voice was shrill with rising hysteria. "We can't radio for a rescue ship. How do we get away?" "It's up to us to find something else." She moved close to Sergeant Briggan, reaching for his hand. "The Earth people are outside somewhere, waiting to kill us. We can't escape, Captain! And you start talking nonsense -- " Very deliberately Tchassen slapped the back of his hand against her cheek. The pillbox was abruptly very still. She stared at him, her eyes wide. Slowly she raised her hand and touched the reddening mark on her face. She shrank against Briggan and the Sergeant put his arm around her shoulders. "You didn't have to do that, Captain," he bristled. "Don't quarrel," Tynia whispered. "Not on my account." Tchassen's muscles tensed. This was the way Tynia had created tension on the post ; he had seen it happen to her husband. Yet could he honestly blame her? It wasn't her fault; just the irony of circumstance. And Tchassen knew that his anger now was primarily envy, because she had turned to the Sergeant for protection and not to him. He made himself relax. "Hysteria," he said, "is a luxury none of us can afford." "You're right," Tynia answered. "Absolutely right. I was very foolish." She moved away and Briggan muttered, "Sorry, sir. I di't think' -- "We must get back to the coast," Tchassen said briskly, "through territory occupied by the enemy. We can scrape together all the weapons we'll need and the roads are supposed to be passable. Our only problem, then, is transportation." "Maybe we'd better stay here," Tynia suggested. "Sitting ducks for the Earthmen to attack?" "You said we have weapons." "Not enough to hold out indefinitely." "Sir," Corporal Drein intervened, "there's an old, enemy vehicle in the prison building. We used it sometimes for field inspections." "Let's look it over." Captain Tchassen had seen the instructional films which were made immediately after the occupation. He could identify the sedan -- an inefficient, petroleum-burning machine, typical of a primitive people who had just reached the threshhold of the Power Age. The original beauty of design had long since disappeared. Only one window and the windshield were unbroken; the body paint was peeling away in spreading patches of rust ; the pneumatic tires were in shreds and the vehicle moved noisily on bent, metal rims. They fueled the car with gasoline confiscated long ago and stored in drums in the prison warehouse; Corporal Drein volunteered to do the driving. In the officers' cottages they found weapons -- a portable heat beam, half a dozen dispersal rays, and a box of recharge cartridges. In terms of Tchassen's technology such weapons were minor sidearms, but they were superior to anything yet produced by the Earth people. Tchassen was sure he had the power to beat off any attack. The survivors were handicapped in only one respect : all the food on the post had been destroyed with the commissary. However, Tchassen did not consider that a serious problem. He was sure they could reach the coast by the following morning. Shortly before three o'clock -- nearly two hours after the supply robot crashed -- the survivors left the station. They headed west on a highway unused since the conquest. Tchassen and Tynia sat together in back. The Captain kept all the weapons. Briggan's warning couldn't be ignored; one of the other three might be an Earthman. Unless they faced an actual emergency, Tchassen did not intend to let any of the others carry arms. T he sedan lumbered over cracked and crumbling asphalt. The tireless rims made a nervewracking din that prevented all conversation. Tchassen was unused to any sort of surface transportation. The civilized galaxy had outgrown it centuries ago; the flight beam, safe and inexpensive, was universally used. With equal ease the beam could move a one-man runabout or a cargo freighter over any distance -- a few feet or the light years gapping between planets. Twice Tchassen revised his estimate of the sedan's speed. At this rate, it would be twenty-four hours or more before they reached the coast. That made their shortage of food far more significant. Through the shattered side window Tchassen scanned the arid soil. It was remotely possible that they might stumble across a native food cache, but he couldn't count on that. He wasn't even sure the caches existed, although the theory was a basic factor in the occupation policy. The galactic council of scientists estimated that one-tenth of the Earth people had never been rounded up and resettled in the prison compounds; bandit raids increased that number steadily. How the rebels survived no one knew, for any large scale food production would have been spotted by the patrols and wiped out. One or two crackpot theorists said the bandits fed themselves by hunting wild game, but that was absurd. It was common fact throughout the civilized galaxy that any culture which evolved as far as the Power Age would, in the normal process of growth, eliminate all planetary animal life. The accepted explanation was the food cache theory. According to it, the Earthmen -- sometime after the conquest and before the prison compounds were set up -- had raided their own cities and hidden the packaged food in remote mountain areas. The supply was decidedly limited. When it was gone, the rebels faced starvation unless they returned voluntarily to the compounds. The Sierra range between the Nevada station and the coast had become a haven for so many escaped Earthmen that the region was marked "enemy territory" on the occupation maps. Although Tchassen was aware of that, he knew he could not assume that, because the four survivors had to pass through a rebel area, they would discover a cache of food. Far too many organized expeditions, sent out expressly for that purpose, had returned empty handed. As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the sedan seemed to be moving no closer to the snowcapped peaks, the air became colder. Tchassen's naked chest was studded with gooseflesh. Drein and Briggan were rubbing their arms to keep warm. Tchassen was accustomed to the controlled temperatures on the civilized worlds and the comforts of the beam ships. It hadn't occurred to him that the regular military imiform might be inadequate. He felt the subtle pulsing of fear, the crushing loneliness of a stranger on an alien world. He fingered die barrel of a dispersal ray, but the weapon gave him no sense of security. He had a terrible sensation of psychological nakedness. The weapons could drive off bandits, but what protection did Tchassen have against the unknown elements of a savage world? We've failed; we have no right to be here: the words lashed at his mind like an insinuating poison. He could feel sweat on his face and chest, sweat turning cold in the icy wind. Now the sedan entered a decaying village nestled close to the mountains. It was in an amazingly good state of repair -- undoubtedly because it was located so far from the coastal cities that it had escaped destruction during the invasion. Then, too, the village was too close to the Nevada compound for the Earth people to have looted it. Tchassen tapped on Drein's shoulder and ordered him to stop the sedan. "We need warmer clothing," the Captain explained, "before we start up the grade." "I suppose we might pick up something here," Sergeant Briggan conceded. "This place is called Reno. It was one of the few communities still intact after the invasion." "I'm scared," Tynia said. "The prisoners may be hiding here, waiting for us." "They have better sense than to face a dispersal ray without any protection." Tchassen's tone was crisp with an assurance he didn't feel, but it satisfied her. Drein opened the door and stood on the sidewalk, waiting for Tchassen to hand out one of the weapons. But Tchassen couldn't be sure Drein was not an Earthman; nor, on the other hand, could he ask the Corporal to explore an enemy town unarmed. As a sort of compromise, Tchassen said, "We'll stick together; I'll carry all the weapons. Corporal." It wasn't satisfactory, but both Drein and Briggan were too welldisciplined to protest. Tchassen felt foolish with six dispersal rays and a heat beam slung over his shoulders, but he couldn't risk leaving anything in the sedan, either. The survivors spent a good part of an hour searching the downtown stores, but Reno had been stripped of native artifacts; the buildings were empty shells filled with dust. The only chance they had of finding clothing was to look in the private homes closer to the outskirts. They went back to the sedan and drove to a residential street. By that time the sun was setting. Tchassen did not relish the prospect of being caught in an enemy town after dark, but the search could be speeded up only if they separated. For a second time the Captain compromised. He issued dispersal rays to the others, but insisted that they work in pairs. If one of them was an enemy, that arrangement would more or less tie his hands. Tynia volunteered to go with Drein; Tchassen felt a pang of envy and jealousy, but he had better sense than to use his authority to force her to come with him. Tchassen and the Sergeant searched through half a dozen houses before they found one that had not been looted. Their luck was unbelievable, for they found shelves of canned food as well as clothing sealed in plastic bags. From an open window the Captain fired a dispersal ray toward the sky, a signal prearranged with the others. As the needle of light arched above the village, Tchassen heard a distant blast of explosions and Tynia's shrill scream of terror. "It's a bandit raid!" Briggan cried. He turned to run toward the street. Tchassen's hand shot out and caught the Sergeant's shoulder. "Not so fast. I said we'd stay in pairs." "But Tynia's in trouble! The Earth people are barbarians, sir. They give no quarter. They --  "I'm still in command, Sergeant." Briggan stiffened. "Yes, sir." The two men walked toward the source of the sound. Tchassen couldn't allow himself to run, even to help Tynia; the extertion would have been too much for him. There was another clatter of shots and Tchassen recognized the gunfire of the primitive Earth weapons. In the darkness it was vaguely disturbing, but not frightening. Both Tynia and Drein were armed with dispersal rays; they would have no trouble defending themselves. Sudden footsteps pelted toward them. Tynia ran from a dark side street and threw herself into the Captain's arms. She clung to him, trembling and panting for breath. "Where's Drein?" he demanded. "The Corporal -- he took my gun. He tried to kill me!" "Tynia, do you understand what you're saying? The accusation -- " "You told us to stay together. I did my best. I was going through a house when I realized suddenly that I was alone. I saw Drein outside; I thought he was talking to someone. I ran out and -- " She bit her lip and hid her eyes against his shoulder. In a flat, emotionless voice, Tchassen asked, "Drein was with Earthmen?" "I don't know! Someone sprang at me and knocked the ray out of my hands. I saw people -- I thought I saw people -- in the shadows behind Corporal Drein. I bean to run. I don't want to accuse him of -- of anything, Captain. I can't be sure. If he's an Earthman, we have to -- we have to dispose of him, and I wouldn't want -- " Her voice trailed off in a gasp of terror as they heard a new burst of gunfire, very close. Tchassen dodged aside, pulling Tynia behind a tree. Sergeant Briggan fired blindly into the night. His dispersal beam danced across the face of a frame building and the house exploded into flame. In the red glare of the fire, Tchassen saw a band of savages, dressed in animal hides -- no that was impossible! -- fleeing into the darkness beyond the village. Corporal Drein staggered toward them. Blood spilled from a gash tom in his chest. He saw Tchassen, Tynia and the Sergeant standing together. Like a man in a daze, he began to raise his dispersal ray. In Tchassen's mind there was no longer any room for doubt; the tmth was clear. Drein was an Earthman ; Drein had betrayed the station; Drein now intended to kill off the only survivors. The Captain acted with military decision. He pressed the firing stud of his weapon. Drein screamed in agony as he died. Tynia buried her face in her hands. Briggan put his arm around her. In the flickering light, Tchassen saw the Sergeant grin. "You didn't have to kill him, Captain," Tynia whispered. "After what you told me -- "Don't blame me; I didn't do anything!" "He was going to fire at us, wasn't he?" "You don't know that for sure. Maybe he was asking for help!" Tchassen shrugged ; there was no accounting for the emotional inconsistencies of a woman. "What did you eect to prove by murdering Drein?" Briggan asked. "I saved us from -- "If he was an Earthman, why were the bandits firing at him? Why had they wounded him?" "To make it look good," Tchassen replied, no longer really believing it himself. "They wanted our weapons; they have to use trickery to get them away from us." Tchassen slid the weapon out of Drein's lifeless fingers and halfheartedly searched the street for Tynia's dispersal ray. He didn't expect to find it. The Earth people had it now. The loss of the weapon was, in one sense, more serious than the destruction of the Nevada station. A prison compound could be rebuilt and restaffed. But if the Earth ever faced the conqueror with equal firepower, Earthmen would recapture their world -- and more. We've failed ; we have no right to be here -- the Captain fought a burning nausea as the fear washed over his mind. What had they accomplished by the occupation? The Earth was neither enslaved nor destroyed. Hatred made the natives savages. They would never be content until they had revenge. They never conceded defeat; they never would. Corporal Drein seemed to be typical of their fanaticism, and that was why Tchassen had killed him -- that, and the hysterical story Tynia had told. On calmer reflection, Tchassen knew he had no proof of Drein's disloyalty -- which meant that either Briggan or Tynia could be Earth natives. That problem was unsolved; the danger was undiminished. tle time looking for the weapon Tynia had lost. After twenty minutes, the three survivors returned to the house where Tchassen and Briggan had found food and clothing. TTiey packed the canned goods into the sedan and put on warm coats and jackets. Although the woolens and the cottons fell to pieces when they touched the cloth, the synthetic fabrics were still relatively sound, particularly when they had been sealed in mothproof plastic. Tchassen took over the driving when they left Reno. For greater warmth, Tynia and the Sergeant crowded into the front seat beside him. As they ascended the grade toward the pass, the air turned much colder. Tchassen's hands felt numb on the wheel and the altitude made his mind swim in a haze of vague nausea. There was no moon and the headlights of the sedan had been smashed long ago. The Captain drove very slowly, concentrating on the curves of the highway. Three times the machine narrowly missed going over the edge; the guard rail saved them. Tchassen knew he was risking their lives to drive at night, but he had no alternative. They would not be really safe again until they reached the base on the coast, and the Earth people would try to prevent that. They would try to make sure that no survivors lived to report what had happened at the Nevada station. Briggan fished three cans of food out of the back of the car and blasted them open with his dispersal ray. The can he handed Tchassen contained a fruit in a heavy, sickly sweet syrup. Tchassen made himself empty the tin. Tynia had a pinkish meat which she was totally unable to choke down. The civilized galaxy had been vegetarian for two thousand years; a clear indication of the savagery of the Earth culture was the fact that the natives still ate animal flesh. Briggan opened another can for Tynia. After a brief hesitation, he began to eat the meat himself. Tynia gagged and looked away. "I don't see how you can do it, Sergeant." "We may be on the road longer than we think," he answered. "We can't afford to waste anything; we aren't likely to find another food cache." Tchassen glanced at Briggan suspiciously. It was possible that he could force himself to stomach the meat, if he were starving, but how was he able to eat it now? An Earthman could do it; yet if Briggan were at native, wasn't he too clever to give himself away with anything so trivial? "Tell me. Captain," Briggan asked, "what chance do we have of getting through this alive?" "We're armed; we have transportation; we -- " "And the natives will risk everything to stop us. They have to. This attack on the Nevada station was the beginning of the revolution. If they plan the rest of it as carefully, they stand a good chance of throwing us off the Earth." "No!" Tynia cried. "Now that they know the civilized galaxy exists, they'll build space ships and come after us. With our weapons --  "Plus their fanaticism," Tchassen put in, "the galaxy doesn't stand a chance." "But we invaded the Earth to prevent that; we came here to teach them to live civilized lives." "How much teaching have we actually done in the compounds?" the Sergeant demanded. "How many Earth people have listened to us?" "They're human beings; they have brains like ours. Surely when we have explained our ways to them logically and sanely -- " "The trouble is," Tchassen said thoughtfully, "it's our logic, not theirs. If you look at this from the point of view of an Earthman, you see us as savage invaders of their world." "Our purpose makes it different." "We say that, but the Earth people wouldn't understand us." "It's very strange," Sergeant Briggan said quietly, "that you understand the Earthman's point of view so well, Captain Tchassen. Let's see. You've been here -- how many days?" "Five." "But you set yourself up as an authority on these people." "Gome now. Sergeant. I didn't say that. I'm simply trying to understand them reasonably." "To think like an Earthman: that's rather difficult for us to do, Captain." Briggan paused briefly before he snapped out a rapid question, "Where were you stationed before you came here. Captain?" "At security headquarters." "Assigned to what staff?" "Well, I was -- " Tchassen glanced at Tynia. It would do no good, now, to explain why he had been assigned to the Nevada post. All that was finished because the station staff died in the explosion. "I wasn't on any staff," he said. "I was working on my own." "That's a pity, sir. You wouldn't remember the name of your commanding officer, then; I could have checked up on that." Tynia gasped; only then did Tchassen realize what Briggan's questions implied. He said coldly, "You're way off the track, Briggan. I'm the only one of you who couldn't be an Earthman; I haven't become acclimated yet -- that's obvious, isn't it?" "Of course you're right, sir. It wouldn't be the sort of thing you could put over by playing a part, would it? Besides, Drein was the Earthman and you killed him. We've no reason to be suspicious of each other now, have we?" There was no way Tchassen could reply. He gritted his teeth and said nothing. From the expression on Tynia's face, he realized that Briggan's insinuation had been rather effective. And suppose Briggan actually believed it himself. Didn't that rule out the Sergeant as an Earthman? And it left only Tynia. Tchassen eyed the dark-haired woman on the seat beside him. What did he really know about her? -- only that she had been married to a station commander; and had flirted outrageously with other post officers. She may have done it simply because she was bored; on the other hand, it could have been a deliberate attempt to create friction -- exactly the sort of thing an Earth woman might try to do. Perhaps she was a native. When Tchassen was given the security assignment, he hadn't checked into her background; it didn't seem necessary. He realized suddenly that Tynia was the only witness against Drein. Because of what she had said, Tchassen had killed the Corporal. Tynia's hysteria had set the stage for murder. As the sedan climbed higher into the pass, it moved more slowly. The motor coughed and wheezed; once or twice it seemed ready to stop altogether. When they reached the summit, the tenuous crescent of a new moon emerged above the pines. In the pale glow of light, Tchassen saw that the highway was covered with a treacherous sheet of ice. The metal rims found no traction. When the machine began to skid, the Captain found he could neither control it nor stop it. In spite of the cold, his body was covered with sweat. At a point four or five miles beyond the summit, they came to a place where thick trees on both sides of the highway shaded the road so the sun never reached it. The ice was continuous for a hundred feet or more, and it was covered with three inches of unmelted snow. The sedan skidded out of control. Tynia screamed and hid her face in her hands. Tchassen fought the wheel futilely. The car spun toward the shoulder, banged against a tree, and slid across the road into a clearing in front of an abandoned building. In the sudden silence Tchassen heard nothing but the whisper of icy wind in the. trees. He opened the door and looked at the deserted building. The roofs of the smaller structures nearby had collapsed under the pressure of winter snows, but the main building, sheltered by tall pines, was in good repair. "We'd be warmer inside," Tchassen suggested. "In the morning after the sun comes out -- " "Captain!" Briggan broke in. "We must reach the coast!" " -- after the sun comes out, the ice on the road should begin to melt; the driving will be much easier." "Don't you realize, sir -- these mountains are enemy territory?" "We're still well-armed. Sergeant." "We had the rays in Reno, too, but Drein's dead." "I tell you we'll be safe here. I remember a trick I saw demonstrated at the school of tactics." "You security men have the advantage. I'm just an enlisted noncom. I never went to the military schools and learned any fancy tricks, but I know I have a duty to reach the coast and report what's happened." Tynia took Briggan's arm. "The sedan won't run, Sergeant. Surely you aren't saying we have to walk -- " "It's interesting, isn't it, that the car stopped right here -- in front of a place where it would be so convenient for us to spend the night?" "What do you mean, Briggan?" "I wasn't doing the driving, Tynia." A hard knot of anger exploded in Tchassen's mind, but he held his temper. It was easier to ignore Briggan than to answer his suspicion. In a tone that concealed his feelings, the Captain said, "Let me show you what I saw them do in the demonstration, Sergeant." He slid out of the sedan. With numb fingers, he opened the firing box of the portable heat ray and took out one of the two thermal coils. Breaking the seal, he began to unwind the thin thread of wire. "We have our own alarm system right here," he explained, trying to convey more enthusiasm than he really felt. "Nearly a quarter mile of wire. We'll string it in a circle around this clearing, six inches above the ground. The natives will never notice it. If they attack us, they'll snap the wire and set off the thermal reaction. We'll be surrounded for a second or two in a blazing ring of fire." "Maybe it'll work. Captain." The two men strung the wire while Tynia lugged the weapons and the canned goods into the abandoned building. When the Sergeant and Tchassen went inside, they found that she had started a fire in a pot-bellied stove. The Captain stood holding his hands over the flames and gradually he began to feel warm again. He knew that the pillar of smoke rising from the chimney might invite an attack by the natives, but there was also a good chance that the smoke would disperse before it could be spotted. The warmth of the fire acted like an opiate, but Tchassen realized he didn't dare risk falling asleep. Tynia or Briggan might be Earth people, waiting for the chance to finish the job they had begun when the Nevada station was destroyed. After a brief hesitation, the Captain took another shock capsule from his belt pouch and choked it down. The drug would keep him awake, although it was dangerous to take a second capsule so soon after the first; there were sometimes emotional side-affects which were unpleasant. "One of us should stay on guard," Briggan said. "We could take turns at it, Captain -- two hour stints until dawn." "Good idea, Briggan. I'll stand the first watch." "I was going to volunteer -- "No ; you're tired ; you and Tynia need your sleep." "You're too considerate of us. Captain." The overtone in Briggan's voice suggested far more than he actually said. He lay back on his blankets, but he did not shut his eyes, and he put his dispersal ray across his belly with his hand on the firing stud. Tchassen stood up, sliding a weapon over each shoulder. He went through a connecting hall into a narrow room. A few scattered dishes, overlooked by the looters, and built-in cooking machines indicated that this had been a restaurant. The room gave him an excellent vantage point, for the windows, still unbroken, provided a broad view of the highway and the clearing in front of the building. The restaurant was bitterly cold. Tchassen pulled the rough, fibrous clothing tight around his shoulders, but it felt irritating rather than warm. He looked out on the ice and the snow and the pines, and he was acutely conscious of the savage alienness of Earth. Snow he knew as a scientific curiosity; he had seen it created in laboratory experiments. Nowhere in the civilized galaxy did it exist as a natural phenomenon. The teemevery world could not survive unless every square inch of soil was occupied and exploited. Science regimented the temperatures in the same way that it controlled rainfall. For more than twenty centuries neither deserts nor Arctic wastes had existed. All animal species had disappeared. Trees survived only as ornamental growths in city parks. The Earth was a relic of the past, a barbaric museum piece. The strong, individualistic genius of its people had evolved in no other society; and that genius had created a technology which mushroomed far beyond the capacity to control it. It gave this savage world atomic power before it had planetary unity. For that reason, the civilized galaxy had invaded the Earth. They could do nothing else. The decision had been made long before Tchassen was bom. The galactic council of scientists studied the Earth and argued the meaning of their observations for a quarter of a century before they ordered the invasion. War, to the civilized galaxy, was unthinkable ; yet the government had no alternative. For, with even their primitive form of atomic power, the Earth people could blow their world to dust. The planet had to be occupied to save the natives from the consequences of their own folly. But what does it matter, Tchassen thought bitterly, if our intentions were noble and unselfish? It's what Earth thinks we meant to do that counts. And by that standard we've failed. We have no right to be here. Alone in the cold darkness of the abandoned restaurant, Tchassen faced the fear gnawing at his soul. The drug he had taken warped his depression into a crushing weight of melancholy. The occupation of the Earth had gone wrong -- or so it seemed to him -- because the council of scientists misjudged the native mentality. True, these people had it didn't follow that they would comprehend the social forces at work in the civilized galaxy. Their emotional reactions were at best on an adolescent level; intelligence alone would not lift them up to maturity. The prisoners in the compounds learned nothing but hatred ; they lived for nothing but revenge. Vividly Tchassen saw the nightmare of the future: the time when the savages on the Earth had weapons to match the dispersal ray; the time when they would be able to build ships that could invade the civilized galaxy. flcx)r in front of the serving counter. Briggan did not come in two hours to take over the watch; and he made no attempt to call the Sergeant. It was long after midnight, perhaps less than an hour before dawn, when something outside triggered the thermal-wire alarm. Simultaneously, as the blaze of white glared against the restaurant windows, Tynia screamed. Tchassen heard the explosive blast of a dispersal ray slashing into wood. A split-second later Tynia burst through the connecting hall and flung herself into Tchassen's arms. "They're attacking!" she screamed. "You saw them? Where?" "Briggan. At the window. I -- I shot him." His fingers bit into the soft flesh of her arm. "Take it easy, Tynia. Tell me how it happened." "I saw him when the alarm went off. He was lifting his dispersal ray, as if he meant to shoot you. I remembered how he had eaten meat last night, and I -- I thought -- She shuddered. "I knew he was an Earthman. He was the one who blew up the supply robot; now he wants to kill us." "You were sure Drein was an Earthman, too." "What do you mean by that?" "It's obvious, isn't it?" "Obvious?" She shrank back against the counter. He ignored her but kept her within the range of his peripheral vision while he glanced through the window, trying to locate what had set off the alarm. The circle of heat had melted all the snow and ice in the clearing; the trunks of the pines were smoldering and a comer of the building was beginning to bum. Tchassen saw a chunk of flesh lying on the road -- an animal of some sort which had blundered into the alarm wire. Then they had not been attacked by natives. The dead animal made it very clear that wild beasts still survived on the Earth. No wonder the natives were meat eaters! And, since they were, that meant they could live indefinitely in the remote mountain areas. They did not depend upon hidden caches of food; starvation would never drive them back to the prison compounds. The occupation policy was based upon a false assumption; more than ever it was vitally imperative for Tchassen to reach the coast and report the tmth to his superiors. Tchassen shifted his weapon so that his fingers lay on the firing stud. Tynia stared at him, her eyes wide with terror. In a tight whisper, she said, "Then you -- you're the Earthman, Captain!" He grinned, admiring her skillful use of emotion. If he hadn't known better, he would have taken her fear for the real thing. Maybe it was ; he couldn't be sure, but the facts seemed to add up to only one answer. Tynia laid the groundwork she herself shot Briggan. And who had been in a better position to tamper with the landing beam for the supply rocket? Who else had a better opportunity to destroy the transmitter in the emergency pillbox? Yet, even in the face of so much evidence, Tchassen gave her the benefit of the doubt! his reasoning might have been colored by the drug he had taken. With the mouth of his weapon, he nudged her toward the hall. 'Go back and pick up the food, Tynia. We're leaving here now." She clenched her fist over her mouth. "Don't turn me over to them. Captain. Let me go. I've never done you Earth people any harm." Magnificent acting! No wonder they had sent her to the Nevada station. "We're heading for the coast," he explained. "The sedan wouldn't go last night; it won't now, either." "We'll push the car back to the highway. The downgrade is steep enough to make the machine run without power. If that doesn't work, we can always walk." "It'll be warmer if we wait until daylight." "And the natives would be here by that time, too, wouldn't they? The glare of the thermal explosion was visible for miles." "I didn't sleep at all last night, Captain. I don't have the energy to -- " With the dispersal ray, he pushed her along the hall toward the room where she and Briggan had slept in front of the pot-bellied stove. Naturally she would try to keep him there, he thought; he didn't need much more proof of her disloyalty. Flames from the burning wall lit the room. As they entered, Tynia screamed and fell back against Tchassen. "The Sergeant's gone!" she gasped. "Along with the weapons you left in here." "Then he -- he's the Earthman, Captain; you aren't!" "You said you'd shot him." "I fired at him. I saw him fall. I thought he was dead." Tchassen wanted to believe her, but the husky, deep-throated appeal in her voice couldn't quite destroy the hard core of his doubt. This could be an alibi which she could have contrived for herself. She might have hidden the weapons as well as Briggan's body. If Tchassen believed her, if he let himself trust her, it would be easier later on for her to dispose of him. "Pack up the food, Tynia; I'm going to see if I can start the car." When he went outside, the dawn was brightening the eastern sky. The snow and ice, melted by the thermal fire, made a slushy sheet of water in the clearing; it ate at the drifts, sluggishly washing the snow into the highway. Tchassen waded through the water toward the sedan. His boots kept him dry, but the cold penetrated and made his feet numb. Hidden by the water were tiny, unmelted puddles of ice which made very treacherous footing. Twice the Captain slipped and nearly went down. He was twenty feet from the car when he heard the door of the building bang open behind him. He glanced back, calling Tynia a waming to be careful of the hidden ice. At the same time she screamed. Tchassen swung aside instinctively. He slipped and fell. From the back of the sedan a thread of energy snaked toward him. Tchassen felt the momentary pain stab at his shoulder; then nothing. He lay flat in the icy water, fighting the red haze that hung over his mind. If the dispersal ray had come half an inch closer to his heart, it would have cut the artery and killed him. Sergeant Briggan opened the door of the sedan and stood leaning against it, holding a dispersal ray in his left hand. The Sergeant was badly wounded. His right arm was an unrecognizable, bleeding pulp; he was too weak to stand alone. So Tynia had told the truth, Tchassen thought ; she actually had shot him. The Captain felt a surge of relief and hope. Perhaps he could rely on Tynia, after all. But now it was too late! The blast from the Sergeant's weapon had paralyzed Tchassen's motor control; he was helpless. The Sergeant, obviously, assumed that Tchassen was dead. Ignoring him, he ordered Tynia to pile the canned food in the back of the sedan. She moved toward him slowly. "You're the Earthman," she said dully. "And I thought Captain Tchassen -- " "The farce is over, Tynia. You and Tchassen made a fine game of it far a while, but I've been in the service long enough to spot a fake security officer." "The Captain and I?" she repeated. "Do I have to draw you a blueprint? You two are in this together. You're both natives." For a moment she seemed to recover her self-assurance. "So that's how you're going to play it. Sergeant. Just who do you think you'll take in with such nonsense?" "I'm through batting words around with you, Tynia. Put the food in the car. Help me push the machine out to the road." "Why bother, Sergeant? If you stay right here, the natives will be along soon enough." "I'm glad you admit that, Tynia." Briggan laughed sourly. "But it's my duty to get through to the base -- just as it's your duty, I suppose, to try to stop me." "Why do you still want to make me believe that. Sergeant? What difference does it make now?" Tchassen, paralyzed and unable to speak, suddenly realized the truth. Each of them feared the other. All four surviviors had assumed that one of the others had to be an Earthman. We put our faith in machines, he thought; we were too certain that the robot ship couldn't crash simply because something had gone wrong with the beam. Our real trouble is we have no faith in ourselves. None of us was an Earthman; the Earth people had nothing to do with the destruction of the Nevada station. He wanted desperately to shout that out. After a supreme effort, he was able to make his lips move a fraction of an inch; and that was all. Tynia put the canned food in the sedan. Briggan waved her to the back of the car with his weapon. He held the beam leveled at her while she pushed the sedan toward the road. The clearing was built on a slight slant and she had no trouble moving the heavy vehicle. As the wheels began to turn, Tynia pretended to slip and fall into the slushy water. Briggan was distracted by the motion of the sedan. Tynia rolled toward Tchassen and snatched up his dispersal ray. The Sergeant realized what she intended to do and lifted his weapon awkwardly in his left hand. No! Stop! Don't be fools! The words sang through Tchassen's mind, but he could not speak. Briggan and Tynia fired simultaneously. The beam caught the Sergeant squarely in the face. He died in a blaze of energy. The sedan rolled into the road and Tynia fell unconscious beside Tchassen. He wanted to help her, but he was still not able to move. In another half hour the paralysis would be gone, but by that time it would be too late to do anything for Tynia. Furiously he drove his body to respond and he managed to turn on his side. The exertion was too much for him. The haze swam in painful waves across his mind. Just before unconsciousness came, he saw a band of natives on the edge of the clearing. The swaying motion of the stretcher shook him awake. The Earthmen were carrying him along a narrow mountain trail, past deep drifts of snow. His wound, where Briggan's beam had hit him, was neatly bandaged; he could smell the odor of a disinfectant. It surprised him that the Earth people knew so much about medicine; but it surprised him more that they had tried to save his life. He listened to his captors when they talked. He was able to understand a few phrases of the native dialect which every man assigned to the occupation had to learn, but what he had been taught was sadly inadequate. When one of his stretcher bearers saw that the Captain was conscious, he spoke to him in the cultured language of the civilized galaxy. The syntax was awkwardly handled, yet Tchassen was amazed that the Earthman used it so well. "Be no fear," the native said. "You get living again." "Tynia. The girl with me -- " "Wound bad ; she dead before we come. We follow from prison and try help all four you. You light each other. You have evil weapons. We can save only you." "What are you going to do with me?" "Make you well ; send you back." The answer came as a shock to Tchassen; it was what a civilized people would have said. But the Earth natives were savages -- brilliant, inventive individualists, but nonetheless social barbarians. It would have seemed much more logical if the native had said he was keeping Tchassen for a religious ceremonial sacrifice. "As soon as my wounds are healed," Tchassen repeated, "you'll let me go?" The native ran his hand over the Captain's bandages. "This wound is a little thing, of no importance." He touched Tchassen's head. "Here is your real sickness, in the brain. We teach you how to think like a man ; then you go home." "You're going to teach me? Me? Do you realize, I come from the civilized galaxy?" Tchassen began to laugh; he wondered if he had been taken prisoner by a band of madmen. "We show you how to be human," the native answered blandly. "Not fight and kill each other, the way you and the others did when the post blow up. We know meaning for civilization; you have none. It is easy secret. We learn after the invasion, when our world destroyed. Real civilized people get along; live in peace; give help to each other. Your people and ours: we can be brothers here on the Earth, and on your other worlds, too." Tchassen's laughter was touched with hysteria. Have we failed? He knew the answer now: for the captives, the dispossessed men of the Earth, would become the teachers of the conquerors -- and teach them what the conquerors had come to build on the Earth. No, we have not failed; we have simply misunderstood the strange genius of the quixotic Earth. The defeated would one day rise up and conquer the galaxy. Tchassen saw that clearly, but no longer in fear. He wanted to make their stamina, their grit, their ability to survive a part of himself. He wanted to make himself over -- as an Earthman.    I; ironic implications about the future of Mankind. Artist Kelly  ; Frease has depicted a world in which the female of the species I completely dominates the human race in business, politics, the  ! arts and, particularly, in sheer physical size and prowess. The I hands of our amazonian "cover girl" are fitted with brass I knuckles rather than boxing gloves, which in itself suggests sevI eral characteristics of this woman of tomorrow. We've developed  quite a few lines of thought about the lady ourselves; but we I I thought it might be more interesting to see what conclusions our i  readers would draw.  What do you think of our "World's Champion"? No matter I what your interpretation, let's have it. Study the picture a while for the psychological and moral as well as the physical implications involved. Then put your ideas down on paper. For the  ' five best letters received by us before midnight December #, (#), we'll pay # each. Address: Editor, IF Magazine, KingI ston. New York.  T Tying to keep a supercolossal laboratory invisible when two curious aliens are poking around can be a apology: "They're landing, Master." Pud looked up from the tiny thigfied he had been shaping in his tentacles. "Of course they are," he thoughtsnapped. "You practically invited them down, didn't you? If you'd only kept a few eyes on the Detector, instead of day-dreaming -- " "I'm sorry," Gop said unhappily. "I wasn't day-dreaming, I was observing the magnificent skill and finesse with which you shaped the thig. After all, this system is so isolated. No one ever came along before... I just supposed no one ever would -- "A Scientist isn't supposed to suppose! Until he's proven wrong, he's supposed to know! Thirty of Pud's eyes glowered upward at the tiny alien spaceship, only ninety or so miles above the surface of the laboratory-planet and lowering rapidly. The rest of Pud's eyes -- more than a hundred of them, set haphazardously in his varioussized heads like gurf-seeds on rolls -- scoured every inch of the planet's visible surface, to make certain that no sign of the Vegans' presence on the planet, from the tiniest experiment to the gigantic servo-mechanical eating pits, was left operating or visible. Irritatedly he squelched out of existence a yfm-field that had taken three weeks of laborious psychoinduction to develop. His psychokineticut stripped it of cohesion, and its faint whine-and-crackle vanished. 'T told you to deactivate all our experiments," he snapped at Gop. "Don't you understand Vegan?" Abashed, the Junior Scientist lowered his many eyes. "I -- I'm sorry," Gop said humbly. "I thought the yim might wait until the creatures landed. Master... perhaps their auditory apparatus would not have been sufficient to reveal its presence to them, in which case the field would not have had to be -- " "All right, all right," Pud grunted. "I appreciate your point... but, dripping mouthfuls, you know that any risk of detection is too great. You know the regulations on Contact!" "Yes, Master." "Speaking of which, part of your seventh head is showing." The Junior Scientist included the head in the personal invisibility field which he himself was broadcasting. "Of all the sims in this sector," Illustrated by Ed Emsh Pud thought, eying the little spaceship, "and of all the planets around this particular sun, they have to choose this one to land on. Chew!" Gop flushed. A member of the Transverse Colon Revivalists, he found Pud's constant atheistic swearing very disturbing. He sighed inwardly. Usually at least one of Pud's heads could manage to keep its sense of humor, but right now all of them were like proton-storms. The Senior Scientist was on the verge of one of his totalitantrums. "They must have sighted flashes from our experiments," Pud went on, "before you decided you could spare just one set of eyes for the Detector!" Though both Vegans were invisible to other eyes, they remained visible to each other because their eyes were adjusted to the wavelength of their invisibility fields. By the same token, they could see all their invisible experiments -- a vast litter of gadgets, gismos, gargantuan gimmicks, shining tools, huge and infinitesimal instruments, stacks of supplies, and various types of energy fields, the latter all frozen in mid-activity like smudges on a pane of glass. The sandy ground was the floor of the Vegans' laboratory; small hills and outcroppings of rock were their chairs and workbenches. Like a spaceship junkyard, or an enormous open-air machinery warehouse, the laboratory stretched away from the two Scientists in every direction to the planetoid's near horizon. Pud intensified the general invisibility field to the last notch, and the invisible experiments became even more invisible. The Af-field was a namelesscolored whorl of energy in the Senior Scientist's tentacles. In his concern for the other experiments, he had forgotten to deactivate it. It grew eagerly to the size of a back yard, then of a baseball diamond, then of a traffic oval, and one shimmering edge of it touched his body, which he had not insulated. Energy crackled. Pud jumped forty feet into the air, swearing, and slapped the field into non-existence between two tentacles. His body, big as an apartment house, floated slowly downward in the laboratory-planet's light gravity. The tiny alien spaceship touched the ground just as he did. The rocket flare flickered and died. The ship sat on its fins, about thirty feet -- Vegan feet -- away. In its shining side, a few Vegan inches above the still smoking rocket tubes, was a small black hole. "Master, look!" Gop thought. "Their ship is damaged... perhaps that's why they landed!" And he started to extend a tentative extra-sensory probe through the hole. Pud lashed out with a probe of his own, knocking Gop's aside before it could enter the hole. "Nincompoop!... don't go esprobing until we know if they're sensitive to it or not! Can't you remember the regulations on Contact for just one minute? The tiny spaceship sat silently, while its occupants evidently studied the lay of the land. Small turrets halfway up its sides twitched this way and that, pointing popgun armament. Pud inspected the weapons extrasensorily, and thought an amused snort: the things tossed a simple hydrogen-helium pellet for a short distance. Gop, nursing a walloping headache as a result of Pud's rough counterprobe, thought sourly to himself : "I try to save the yim... that's wrong. He forgets to deactivate the thig... that's all right. I esprobe... that's wrong. He esprobes... that's all right." At last: "They're getting out," Gop observed. A tiny airlock had opened in the side of the ship. A metal ladder poked out, swung down, settled against the ground. The aliens -- two of them -- appeared; looked down, looked up, looked to the right and to the left. Then they came warily down the ladder. For a few minutes the giant Vegans watched the creatures wander about. One of them approached one of Pud's tails. Irritatedly Pud lifted it out of the way. The little creature snooped on, unaware that twenty tons of invisible silicoid flesh hung over its head. Pud curled the tail close to him, and did likewise with all his other tails. "You'd better do the same," he advised Gop, his thought-tone peevish. Silently, Gop drew in his tails. One unwise move, he knew, and the Senior Scientist would start thinking in roars. One of Gop's tails scraped slightly against a huge boulder. The scales made a tractor-on-gravel sound. Pud thought in roars. The tiny creature had stopped and was turning its helmeted head this way and that, as if trying to see where the sound had come from. It had drawn a weapon of some sort from a holster at its belt -- another thermonuclear popgun. The creature turned and came back toward the Vegans, heading for his ship. Pud lifted his tail again. The creature passed under it, reached the ship, joined its partner. JL Gorman said nervously. "A loud scraping noise -- " "It seemed to come from right behind me," Johnny Gorman said. "Damn near scared me off the planet... I thought it was a rockslide. Or the biggest critter in creation, sneaking up on me. I couldn't see anything, though... , could you?" "No." Johnny stood there, blaster in hand, looking around, eyes sharp behind his faceplate. He saw nothing but flat, grayish-red ground, a scattering of stone outcroppings large and small; nothing but the star-clouded black of space above the near horizon, and the small sun of the system riding a low hillock like a beacon. "Blue light," he said thoughtfully. "Green light. Red and purple lights. And a mess of crazy colors we never saw before. Whatever those flashes were, honey, they looked artificial to me... Helen frowned. "We were pretty far oflF-world when we saw them, Johnny. Maybe they were aurorae -- or reflections from mineral pockets. Or magnetic phenomena of some kind... that could be why the ship didn't handle right during landing -- " Johnny studied the upside-down dials on the protruding chest-board of his spacesuit. "No neon in the atmosphere," he said. "Darned little argon, or any Ollier inert gas. The only large mineral deposits within fifty miles are straight down. And this clod's about as magnetic as an onion." He gave the surrounding bleak terrain another narrow-eyed scrutiny. "I suppose it could have been some kind of aurora, though... it's gone now, and there isn't a sign of anything that could have produced such a rumpus." He looked around again, then sighed and finally bolstered his blaster. "Guess I'm the worrying type, hon. Nothing alive around here." "I wonder what that sound was." "Probably a rock falling. This area's been undisturbed for God the jolt of our landing just shook things up a little." He grinned, a little sheepishly. "As for the landing... I was so scared after that meteor hit us, it's a wonder I didn't nail the ship halfway into the planet, instead of just jolting us up." Helen looked up at the three-foot hole in the side of the ship. Johnny followed her gaze, and grunted. "We'd better get to work." He turned to the ladder that led up to the airlock. "I'll rig the compressor to charge the spare oxytanks... we'll have to delouse this air of ammonia, but otherwise it's fine. Look, honey, I won't need any help; why don't you get busy on a PC?" Helen nodded, still staring up at the meteor-hole. "You know," she said slowly, "it wouldn't happen Johnny. Thank God, this clod was here... we ought to name it Lifesaver." "Yeah, sure," Johnny said ironically. "It'll save our lives. Only thing is, it got us into this mess in the first place!" He started up the ladder, using only his arms, legs trailing. Helen got down on hands and knees and began poking around for the two dozen or so samples needed for Standard Planetary Classification. Bits of rock, air, vegetable growth, dust -- the dust was very important. All went into vac-containers at her belt. Then suddenly she said, "O-o-ooo.'" and reared back on her knees and clapped both hands to her helmet. Her eyes squeezed shut behind her faceplate, then opened wide and frightened. By the time her hands reached her helmet, Johnny had his blaster out and was floating toward the ground, looking around for something to shoot at. His boots touched, and two long light-gravity steps brought him to her side. Pud had been leaning over the tiny spaceship, one of his faces only feet above the little creatures. Gop's thought came: "What are they?" "Fanged if I know. Bipeds... never saw such little ones." Pud adjusted several eyes to a certain wavelength and studied the creatures through their spacesuits. He gave Gop a thought-nod: "Mammals. Bi-sexual. They're probably mates." "It's a miracle they didn't land right in the middle of one of our experiments." That brought back Pud's illtemper. "Miracle! Didn't you see me give this cosmic kiddycar of theirs a couple of psychokineticlouts so they'd land where they did?" The Senior Scientist glared around at their thousand-and-one experiments, and then down at the little spaceship, smaller than the smallest of them, squatting on toy fins. He curled a tentacle, as if wishing he could swat it. Gop knew, however, that despite Pud's irritation at having his work interrupted, he was just a little intrigued by the aliens. No matter how insignificant they were they were animate life of some intelligence, and Pud must be wondering about them. Gop thought it might be a good idea to dwell on that, in order to keep Pud from getting his heads in an uproar again. "Can you get into their thoughts?" he inquired. "I haven't tried. I don't think I could keep my potential down to their level." "Wonder where they're from." "Who cares?" Pud snorted. "I just wish they'd go away." Gop noted, though, that Pud's heads were lowering closer over the creatures. "They're nowhere near acceptable Contact level, are they?" Grop said, after a moment. "From their appearance, I'd say they're even beneath classification. Reaction motor in their ship. Primitive weapons. Protective garments... they can't even adjust physically to hostile environments!" A minute passed. Pud said, "Mm. Well. I think I will see what I can read... just to have something to talk about at the Scientists' Club." He sent out a tentative probe .  . a little one... just enough to register in one of his brains the total conscious content of one of the little creature's minds. He was afraid to go deeper, after the subconscious, though actually that was far more important. But deep probing would probably be felt for what it was, while conscious probing was just a little painful. The creature popped erect in its squatting position, and clapped its upper extremities to its head. The other one, which had been scrambling up the ladder to the ship's airlock, drew its popgun and joined the first. "They're from someplace called Earth," Pud said. "In the V-LM#Xva Sector of this Galaxy, as nearly as I can make out. They're an Exploration Team, sent out by their planet to gather data on the nature of the physical universe." He paused to consult the third memory bank of his fifth brain, where he had impressed the content of the creature's mind. "They've had space travel for about two hundred of their years. I translate that as about eleven of ours." He consulted again. "Highly materialistic. Externally focused. Very limited sensorium. An infant race, chasing everything that moves, round and round through their little threedimensional universe. They've a long way to go." "What are they doing here?" "Hm." Pud consulted again. "A routine exploration flight brought them to this system... and an almost unbelievable coincidence has served to delay them here. They dropped their meteor-screens for just a moment -- at just the wrong moment. A large meteor came along, entered the ship, and destroyed both their atmospheremanufacturing equipment and the large pressure tank of atmosphere which they kept as reserve in case the equipment should fail." He paused. "Mixture of hydrogen and oxygen... they can't live without it. At any rate, the ship was evacuated, and they barely had time to get into the... mm, spacesuits, they call them... which they now wear. The accident left them with no atmosphere whatever, except the small amount in the tanks of those suits. That will be exhausted in a short time... I gather diat if this planet hadn't been here, they'd have been goners. As it stands, they plan to charge their spare suittanks, which weren't harmed, with the air of this planet, and then return to their Earth, subsisting on the tanked air, by hyperspatial drive " Again Pud paused. "Hm. Well, now! I'd overlooked that. So they have hyperspatial drive, at least... and after only two hundred years of space travel! Hm. Perhaps they are worth a closer look..." Pud lowered his heads over the two little aliens, who were moving warily, popguns drawn, away from the ship. "Pu#" Gop said nervously. "What?" "One of them is crawling toward the time-warp." "Well, don't tell me about it... lift the warp out of the way!" Gop extended a tentacle, first reconstituting it on the seventh atomic sublevel so he wouldn't get it blown off, and gently picked up the time-warp. It looked like a blueviolet frozen haze in his grasp. He set it down on the other side of the spaceship, anchoring it again to now so it wouldn't go flapping off along the time-continuum. "So they didn't land because they saw flashes from our experiments," he said a little triumphantly. One of Pud's heads turned and gave the Junior Scientist an acid look, while the others continued to observe the aliens. "They lowered their meteorscreens," he said nastily, "thus bringing about this entire bother, because they wanted to get a better look at the flashes." Gap was silent, but he thought acidly: "That's what you say -- you won't let me esprobe, and when you do, you manage to prove it's all my fault." said to Helen, "I want to chip a few samples off that outcropping over there... come on, hon." He started toward the ridge of gray-black rock. Helen followed on his heels. "As-pir-in," she said, deliberately falsetto, and her helmet-valet fed her another pill with a sip of water. "Then we'll go back and stick inside the ship until the tanks are charged," Johnny went on, a little grimly. "I think we're just edgy. Planets don't give people headaches... and there's nothing alive withHe hefted his blaster, which he had adjusted to Wide-Field. "But just in case... "ud," Gop said, still more nervously. "Yes, I see, you idiot! Lift the tharned out of their way... I'll take care of the space-warp generator!" The giant Vegans, for all their bulk, moved soundlessly and at great speed until they were between the aliens and the stone outcropping toward which they appeared to be heading. Gop extended a tentacle, curled it at an odd angle, and picked up the shimmering tharnfield,which was the Vegans' reservoir of Basic Universal Energy. Set in any energy matrix, tharn became that energy; added to any existing energy, thorn augmented it to any desired potential. Thus it was extremely valuable to their experiments... and very risky stuff to handle, as well. Gingerly, Gop set the thorn down beyond the outcropping. At Ac same time he picked up several instruments that lay nearby -- an electron-wrench, a snurling-iron, a plotz-meter, several pencil-rays. He placed them on the ground beside the thorn. Pud had curled twelve tentacles around the space-warp generator -- it was as big as a city block, and heavy, even in light gravity. He puffed a thought at Gop: "Give me a tentacle." Gop helped his Master place the generator safely on the other side of the ridge. Johnny Gorman banged off a handful of rock, and shoved it into the vac-container at his belt. "Okay, hon," he said. "Let's go." They stood one more moment atop the ridge, looking out over the barren, rusty-gray plain that the ridge had until now concealed from their gaze. "Looks just as dead as the rest," Johnny observed. "I guess we were just jumpy over nothing." He turned to start down the slope. "Come on." In Aree long light-gravity steps he had reached the bottom, and turned to steady Helen. She wasn't there. She had tripped and tumbled off the other side of the ridge. He could hear her screaming. Putrefied proteins!" Pud roared. "Help me get it out of the thornP The two Vegans leaned over the ridge. While Gop forced the writhing folds of the tharn-fied apart wiA two reconstituted tentacles, Pud reached in, plucked the little alien out and set it upright. It immediately scrabbled up the side of the ridge as fast as it could and joined its mate, which had bounded up the other side. "Now look at what you've done!" Pud raged. "What about the rules on Contact! The Examiners will get this out of us when we report on our Projects... mountains of bites, we've revealed ourselves!" "Not really, Master," Gop said, rushing his thoughts. "All the creature will know is that it tumbled into the field, and then was somehow ejected by it... a trick of gravity, perhaps... a magnetic vortex... it won't know what really happened -- "That -- field -- was -- supposed -- to -- be -- turned -- Pud said, every one of his faces green with rage. ftj j "You are a stupid, clumsy, fewheaded piece of provender!" Gop flushed clear down to his tails. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't think of everything at once! I must have accidentally activated the tham when I moved it. I'm sorryF Pud clapped a tentacle to his prime forehead. "What next!" he moaned. "Oh, Johnny, Johnny," Helen sobbed. "I tripped when I started to turn around, and fell down the other side, and all of a sudden... it was horrible... I thought I was going crazy -- Johnny Gorman had his arms tight around her. Behind her back, his blaster was pointed straight down the far slope of the ridge, ready to atomize anything that moved. "What, honey?" he said. "What happened? I didn't see anything near you... what happened?" "It was like I was in a hurricane... I couldn't see anything, but something seemed to be whirling around me, something as big as the universe... and it seemed to be whirling inside me too! I felt -- it felt like... Johnny, I was crossed! "Crossed?" He shook her gently. "What do you mean, you were crossed?" "It felt like my right side was my left side, and my heart was beating backwards, and my eyes were looking at each other, and I was just twisted all downside up outside and inside out upside, and... Johnny," she wailed, "I am going crazy!" "Oh, no, you're not," he said grimly. "You're going back to the ship! I don't know what gives with this creepy clod, but I know we're not moving an inch outside the ship until we blast off! Come onV "They're crawling back toward their ship. Pud... look out, they're heading for the dimensional-warp!" Pud extended a tentacle ninety feet and slapped the dimensionalwarp out of the path of the scurrying creatures. The warp bounced silently on the rocky ground, caromed like a fireball from boulder to boulder, encountered stray radiation from the fiflrn-field that still glowed invisibly on the other side of the ridge, and became activated; it emitted concentric spheres of nameless-colored energy, and a vast snapping and crackling. 'There" Gop thought triumphantly at Pud. "That's just what I did with the tham-field... I guess nobody is above accidents, eh?" Pud thought pure vitamins at his Junior Scientist. "You idiot, I didn't accidentally turn on the warp! You left the tharn on, and it triggered the warp! Why didnt you deac tivate the tharn?" "Why didn't you? Gop shot back. "You were there too!" Pud lashed a tentacle over the outcropping, and the Aarnfield became inactive. Then he looked around, and every eye in his prime head popped. "Look out, the dimensional-warp is spreading... it's lost its cohesion... oh, digestion they're in that now!" Johnny and Helen Gorman were in a universe of blazing stars and nebulae that whirled like cosmic carousels; of gas clouds that seethed in giant turbulence... it was the universe of creation, or a universe in its death-throes... Johnny..." Helen..." The boiling universe exploded away from them in soundless radiation, in all directions... in five directions, their subconscious minds told them... it vanished into nothingness, a nothingness that surrounded them like white blindness, and then suddenly it was restored again, roiling, churning, flashing with the bright eyes of novae, shot with the sinuous streamers of rushing gas clouds, pulsing with the heartbeats of winking variables ,  . laboratory And suddenly they were tumbling head over heels along the rocky ground of the little planetoid again. Johnny... Helen... "At least we got them out of that Pud puffed. "The sub-temporal field, Gop... help me lift it... hurry!" "Master, all our experiments are activated! The tharn radiated enough to activate everything! Help me lift the sub-temporal field! "Master, it's too late... they're in it!" was the vast sweep of All Time, like a rushing, glassy, upside-down river... they tumbled through a chaos where Time, twice in each beat of their hearts, bounced back and forth between creation and entropy, and took them with it... Time was a torrent beneath whose surface they were yanked back and forth from Beyond the End to Before the Beginning like guppies on a deepsea line; a torrent whose banks were dark eternity, and whose waters were the slippery substance of years... Johnny... Helen... Pud deactivated the sub-temporal field with a lash of a tentacle, and the two little aliens rolled from it; like dice from a cup, gasping and wailing. Immediately they started running again toward their ship, dodging between the faint flickers of red, blue, green, scarlet and nameless-colored light that marked the location of those experiments which, now activated and releasing their fantastic energies, defied even the invisibility fields that still surrounded them. The aliens brushed against another experimental field, and it second into a fifth-dimensional topological monstrosity that would take weeks to untangle -- if it didn't explode first, for it bulged dangerously at the seams. Pud hastily back-tentacled the field into an interdimensional-vortex, where, if it did explode, it would disrupt an uninhabited universe so far down on the scale of subspaces that nobody would get hurt. Then the Senior Scientist gathered ten tons of machinery in a tentacle and hoisted it while the creatures ran beneath. Gop was psychokineticarrying five energyfields toward the sidelines, with another dozen or so wrapped in his tentacles. Pud silently dumped his load of machinery and reached for something else in the creatures' path. But the creatures scurried erratically, stopping, dashing off in this direction, skidding to a halt as they saw something else to terrify them, and then dashing off in that direction just as the Vegans had dealt with an obstacle to their progress in this direction. "Pud!... one of them fell through the intraspatial-doorway to the other side of the planet!" "Well, for the love of swallowing, reach through and get it! If those beasts see it, they'll tear it to pieces!" thing that was a cross between a tomcat and an eggplant on stilts. It looked hungry. It bounded toward her in forty foot lopes. "Johnny... Johnny, where are you , . Helen fainted. Several other garage-sized beasts converged on her, all looking as hungry as the first. In reality, they weren't hungry -- their food consisted of stone, primarily, while they also drew sustenance from cosmic radiation. But they liked to tear things to pieces. They were native to the planetoid; the Vegan Scientists had gathered them up and shoved them through the intraspatial-doorway to this side of the planet, where they wouldn't be imderfoot all the time. It was a oneway doorway, through which Pud or Gop would occasionally reach to pluck one of the beasts back for use in experimentation. Now, just as the beasts reached Helen Gorman, one of Gop's tentacles came through the doorway, followed by one of his smaller heads. The Junior Scientist picked up Helen, and hastily extruded another tentacle from the first to bat aside one of the beasts that leaped after her. The part of the tentacle bearing Helen Gorman swished back through the doorway. The head and die rest of the tentacle followed. The beasts commenced fighting among themselves, which was what they did most of the time anyway. Gk)p, however, in his haste, had forgotten to repolarize the molecules of his body while retreating through the doorway... and the moment he cleared the doorway on the other side of the planet, the doorway reversed -- still one-way, but now the other way. And eventually one of the beasts, attracted by all the flickering and flashing and frantic scrabbling visible through the doorway, abandoned the fun of the fight and leaped, like a ten-ton gopher, through the opening. The others followed, naturally. They always chased and tore apart the first one to cut and run. Gop had just set Helen Gorman on the ground, and Johnny Gorman, seeing her apparently materialize from thin air and float downward, had just started to stagger toward her, when the ten-ton gopher began to vivisect one of Pud's tails. The animal hadn't seen the tail, of course -- it was invisible. But it had stumbled over it, and been intrigued. Pud leaped ninety feet into the air, roaring. Roaring out loud, not thought-roaring. And roaring with a dozen gigantic throats. The sound thundered and rolled and crashed and echoed from the low hills around. The beast fell off Pud's tail, bounced, looked around, and made for Johnny Gorman as the only visible moving object. Johnny's eyes were still bugging from the gargantuan roar he had just heard. He saw the beast and dodged frantically, just as Gop's invisible tentacle shot out to bowl the beast over. In dodging, Johnny tumbled into another energy-field... He stood on his own face, saw before his eyes the hairy mole on the back of his neck, and threw a gray-and-red insideout hand before his eyes in complete terror. Then Pud nudged him gently out of the field, and before Johnny's eyes, in an instantaneous and unfathomable convolution, the hand became normal again. About that time the rest of the beasts emerged from the intraspatial-doorway. While some of them continued the fight that had begun on the other side of the planet, others started for Johnny Gorman and for Helen, who was now sitting up weakly and shaking her head. A beast resembling a steam-shovel on spider's legs rammed full-tilt into a force-field. The field bounced fifty feet and merged with another field in silent but cataclysmic embrace, producing a sub-field which converted one tenth of one percent of all water within a hundred foot radius to alcohol. The effect on Johnny and Helen was instantaneous... they became drunk as hoot-owls. Their eyes bleared and refused to focus. Their jaws sagged. Johnny stumbled, and sat down hard. He and Helen stared dolefully at each other through their faceplates. Pud gave up every last hope of avoiding Contact. He picked up Johnny with one tentacle and Helen with another and set them down on top of their spaceship, where there was just enough reasonably flat surface on the ship's snub nose to hold them. The beasts were chasing one another around and around through the wreckage of the laboratory. They romped and trampled over delicate machines, sent heavier equipment spinning to smash against boulders; they ran head-on into sizzling energy-fields and, headoff, kept running. Pud grabbed up an armful of beasts, raced to the doorway, reversed it and poured them through. He grabbed up more beasts, threw them after. Gop was busily engaged in the same task. Some of the beasts began fighting among themselves even as the Vegans held them -- Crop jumped as one tore six cubic yards of flesh from a tentacle. He healed the tentacle immediately, then hardened it and all his other tentacles to the consistency of pig iron. He held back that particular beast from the lot. When the others had been tossed through, he hauled back his tentacle, wound up, and pegged the offending beast with all his might. It streaked through the doorway like a projectile, legs and eyestalks rigid. Pud plucked a machine from the two-foot claws of the very last beast, and tossed the beast through. Then he examined the machine -- it was beyond repair. He slammed that through the doorway too. In ten seconds, the two Vegan Scientists had slapped and mauled all their rioting experiments into inaction. Silence descended over the battleground. Silence, more nerve-shattering than the noise had been. remains of the laboratory, every face forest-green with rage. Machines lay broken, tilted, flickering, whining, wheezing, like the bodies of the wounded. Delicate instruments were smashed to bits. The involuted field that Pud had flung through the vortex had evidently burst, as he had feared -- for the vortex had vanished. So, probably, had the universe the field had burst in. The two fields that had interlocked were ruined, each having contaminated the other beyond use. Other energy-fields, having absorbed an excess of energy from the tharn, were bloated monstrosities or bumed-out husks. It would take weeks to get the place straightened up... even longer to replace the smashed equipment and restore the ruined fields. Many experiments in which time had been a factor would take months -- and in some cases years -- to duplicate. All that was bad enough. But worst of all... the little aliens had been Contacted. Like it or not, the aliens knew that something was very much up on this planetoid. Like it or not, they'd report that, and more of their kind would come scurrying back to investigate. Pud groaned, and studied the little creatures, who sat huddled together on the nose of the ship. "Well," he thought sourly to Gop, "here we are." "I -- yes. Master." "Do you think that from now on you'll watch the Detector?" "Oh, yes, Master -- I will." "And do you think it matters a Chew now if you do or not? Now that we've revealed ourselves?" "I -- I -- " "We have a choice," Pud said acidly. "We can destroy these little aliens, so they can't report what they've seen. That's out, of course. Or we can move our laboratory to another system... a formidable job, and Food knows whether we'd ever find another planet so suited to our needs. And even if we did do that, and they found nothing when they returned here, they'd still know we were around somewhere." "They wouldn't know that weWe around, Master." "They'd know something is around... don't mince words with me, you idiot. You know that they've seen enough to draw the very conclusions we don't want them to draw. You know how vital it is that no race under Contactlevel status know of the existence of other intelligent races... particularly races far in advance of it. Such knowledge can alter the entire course of their development." "Yes, Master." "So what are we to do, eh? Here we are. And there -- " Pud motioned with a tentacle at the little aliens -- "they are. As you can see, we must reveal ourselves to still a greater extent... they can't even get into their ship to leave the planet without our help!" Gop was silent. "Also -- " Pud sent a brief extrasensory probe at the aliens, and both of them clutched at their helmeted heads -- "their problem of air supply is critical. There is very little left in their suit-tanks, and the time required for their machines to refine air from this planet's atmosphere has been wasted in -- in -- the entertainment so recently concluded. At this moment they are resigned to death. Naturally, we must help them." He paused. "Well, Nincompoop? Any ideas on how we can help them, and still keep our Scientists' status when the Examiners get the story of this mess out of us?" "Yes, Master." "I thought not." Pud continued his frowning scrutiny of the aliens for a moment. Then he looked up, his faces blank. "Eh? You do?" "Yes, Master." "Well, great gobs of gulosity, whatr "Master, do you recall the time experiment that you wanted to try a few years ago? Do you recall that the idea appealed to you very much, but that you wanted an intelligent subject for it, so we could determine results by observing rational reactions?" "I recall it, all right. My brave young Junior Scientist declined to be the subject... though Food knows you're hardly intelligent enough to qualify anyway. Yes, I remember... but what's that got to do with -- " Pud paused. The jaws of his secondary heads, which were more given to emotion, dropped. Then slowly his faces brightened, and his many eyes began to glow. "Ah," he thought softly. "You see, Master?" "I do indeed." "If it works, we'll have no more problem. The Examiners will be pleased at our ingenuity. The aliens will no longer -- " "I see, I see... all right, let's try it!" Pud reached down and picked one of the aliens off the nose of the ship. It slumped in his grasp immediately. The other alien began firing its popgun frantically at the seemingly empty air through which its mate mysteriously rose. The thermonuclear bolts tickled Pud's hide. He sighed and relaxed his personal invisibility field and became visible. That didn't matter now. The alien stared upward. Its face whitened. It dropped its popgun and fell over backward, slid gently off the ship's nose and started a slow light-gravity fall toward the ground. Pud caught it, and said, "I thought that might happen. Evidently they lose consciousness radier easily at unaccustomed sights. A provincial trait." He slid the aliens gently into the airlock of their ship. The Vegans waited for the aliens to regain consciousness. Eventually one did. Immediately, it dragged the other back from the lock, into the body of the ship. A moment later the lock closed. "Now hold the ship," Pud told Gop, "while I form the field." Flame flickered from the ship's lower end. It rose a few inches off the ground. Gkp placed a tentacle on its nose and forced it down again. He waited, while the ship throbbed and wobbled beneath the tentacle. Now, for the first time, Gop himself esprobed the aliens. He sent a gentle probe into one of their minds -- and blinked at the turmoil of terror and helplessness he found there. Faced with death at the hands of "giant monsters," the aliens preferred to take off and "die cleanly" in space from asphyxiation, or even by a mutual self-destruction pact that would provide less discomfort. Gop withdrew his probe, wondering that any intelligent creature could become sufficiently panicky to overlook the fact that if the "monsters" had wanted to kill them, they would be a dozen times dead already. Pud had shaped a time-field of the type necessary to do the job. It was a pale-green haze in his tentacles. He released die field and, under his direction, it leaped to surround the spaceship, clinging to it like a soft cloak. As the Vegans watched, it seemed to melt into the metal and become a part of it -- the whole ship glowed a soft, luminescent green. "Let it go," Pud said. Gop removed his tentacle. The ship rose on its flicker of flame -- rose past the Vegans' enormous legs and tails, past their gigantic be-tentacled bodies, past their many necks and faces, rose over their heads. Gop sneezed as the flame brushed a face. And Pud began shaping a psychokinetic bolt in his prime brain. For this purpose he marshaled the resources of all his other brains as well, and every head except his prime one assumed an idiot stare. He said, "Now!" and loosed the bolt as a tight-beam, aimed at the ship and invested with ninety-two separate and carefully calculated phase-motions. The ship froze, fifty miles over their heads. The flicker from its rocket tubes became a steady, motionless glow. Pud said, "Now," again, and altered a number of the phase-motions once, twice, three times, in an intricate pattern. The ship vanished. As one, the many heads of the Vegan Scientists turned to stare at the point in the sky where they had first sighted the ship. There it was, coasting past the laboratory-planet, tubes lifeless; coasting on the velocity that had brought it from the last star it had visited. There it was, just as it had been before the tiny aliens had sighted the flickerings that had caused them to relax their meteor-screens. There it was, sent back in time to before all the day's frantic happenings had happened. Pud and Gop esprobed the distant aliens... and then looked at each other in complete satisfaction. "Fine!" Pud said. "They don't remember a thing... not a single alimentary thing!" He looked around them, at the shambles of the laboratory. "It's a pity the experiment couldn't repair all this as well... is everything turned off?" "Evervthing, Master." "No experiments operating, you nincompoop? No flashes?" "None, Master." "Then they should have no reason to land, you idiot. "You know," Pud said, "in a way it was rather a fortunate thing that they landed. It enabled me to perform a very interesting experiment. We have demonstrated that a creature returned through time along the third ud-subcontinuum will not retain memory of the process, or of what transpired between a particular point in time and one's circular return to it. I'm glad you stimulated me to think of it. Best idea I ever had." Pud turned his attention to the ruins of the laboratory. He moved off, half his heads agonizing over the destruction caused by today's encounter, the other half glowing at its satisfactory conclusion. Gop sighed, and esprobed the little aliens for the last time... a final check, to make certain that they remembered nothing. "Johnny, how about that little planet down there... to the left? "Lefs drop the meteor-screens for a better look. Hastily, Gop reached out and tapped the meteor aside. "Heck, that planet looks lifce a dud, all right... but its two days to the next one... and Ive got a terrific headache! "Funny... lve got one too. "Well, what say we land and stretch our --  By that time Gop had hastily withdrawn his headache-causing probe. He stared anxiously upward. After a moment, he said, "They're landing. Master."    The execution violated the banc laws of Tharnar. But the danger was too great -- The Terrans couldn't be permitted to live under any circumstances... ecutive of Tharnar, signed the paper and dropped it in to the outgoing slot of the message dispatch tube. It was an act Qiat would terminate one hundred and eighty days of studying the tapes and records on the Terran ship and would set the final hearing of the Terran man and woman for that day. And, since the Terrans were guilty, their execution would take place before the sun rose again on Tharnar. He went to the wide windows which had automatically opened with the coming of the day's warmth and looked out across the City. The City had a name, to be found in the books and tapes of history, but for fifty thousand years it had been known as the City. It was the city of all cities, the center and soul of Tharnarian civilization. It was a city of architectural beauty, of flowered gardens and landscaped parks, a city of five hundred centuries of learning, a city of eternal peace. The gentle summer breeze brought the sweet scent of the flowering lana trees through the window Illustrated by Paul Orhan and the familiar sound of the City as it went about its day's routine; a sound soft and unhurried, like a slow whisper. Peace for fifty thousand years; peace and the unhurried quiet. It would always be so for the City. The Supreme Executives of the past had been chosen for their ability to insure the safety of the City and so had he. He turned away from the window and back to his desk, to brush his hand across the gleaming metal top of it. No faintest scratch marred the eternalloy surface, although the desk had been there for more than thirty thousand years. It was permanent and never-changing, like the robot-operated fleet that guarded Tharnar, like the white and massive Executive Building, like the way of life on Tharnar. The Terrans would have to die, lest the peace and the way of life on Tharnar be destroyed. They were of a young race; a race so young that his desk had already been in place for fifteen thousand years wheil they began emerging from their caves. They were a dangerously immature race; it had been only three hundred years since their last war with themselves. Three hundred years -- three normal Tharanian lifetimes. And the Tharanians had not know war for six hundred lifetimes. A race so yoimg could not possess a civilized culture. The Terrans were -- he searched for a suitable description -- barbarians in spaceships. They lacked the refinement and wisdom of the Thamarians; they were a dangerous and unpredictable race. It could be seen in their history; could be seen in the way the two Terrans had reacted to their capture. He pressed one of the many buttons along the edge of his desk and a three-dimensional projection appeared; the scene that had taken place one hundred and eighty days before when the Terrans were brought to Thamar. The ship of the Terrans stood bright silver in the sunlight, slim and graceful against the bulk of the Executive Building behind it. The Terrans descended the boarding ramp, the left wrist of the man chained to the right wrist of the girl. Two armed robots walked behind them, their faces metallically impassive, and four armed Thamarian guards waited at the bottom of the ramp to help take the Terrans to their place of imprisonment. The Terrans approached the guards with a watchfulness that reminded him of the old films of the coast wolves that had once lived on Vendal. They did not walk with the studied, practiced, leisure of the Thamarians but as though they held some unknown vitality barely in check. The face of the man was lean and hard, the black eyes inscrutable as flint. The girl looked at the guards with a bold nonchalance, as though they were really not formidable at all. Somehow, by contrast with the Terrans, the guards appeared to be not grimly vigilant but only colorless. There seemed to be a menace in the way the man watched the guards; there was the impression that he would overpower them and sieze their weapons if given a shadow of a chance. And the girl -- what would she do, then? Would she flash in beside him to help him, as the female coast wolves always helped their mates? He switched off the projection, feeling a little repugnance at the thought of executing the Terrans. They were living, sentient beings, and intelligent, for all their lack of civilization. It would have been better if they had been of some repulsive and alien physical form, such as bloated, many-legged giant insects. But they were not at all repulsive; they were exactly like the Thanarians. Exactly? He shook his head. Not exactly. The similarity was only to the eye -- and not even to the eye when one looked closely, as he had looked at the images. There was a potential violence about them, lurking close beneath their deceptively Tharnarian physical appearance. The Teirans were not like the Tharnarians. There was a difference of fifty thousand years between them; the difference between savage barbarianism and a great and peaceful civilization. He looked again across the City, listening to its softly murmuring voice. In hundreds of centuries the City had known no strife or violence. But what if the barbarians should come, not two of them, but thousands? What would they do? He was sure he knew what they would do to the gentle, peaceful City and the faint twinge of remorse at the thought of executing the Terran man and girl paled into insignificance. Under no circumstance could they be permitted to live and tell the others of Tharnar and the City. tion a little in the wide seat and the chain that linked his wrist with Virginia's rattled metallically; sounding unduly loud in the quiet of the room. Virginia's black hair brushed his cheek as she turned her face up to him, to ask in a whisper so low it could not be heard by the four guards who stood beside and behind them: "It's almost over, isn't it?" He nodded and she turned her attention back to the five judges seated at the row of five desks before them. The gray-haired one at the center desk. Bob knew, was the one in charge of the proceedings and his name was Vor-Dergal. He had gained the knowledge by watching and listening and it was the only information he had acquired. He did not know the names of the otjier four judges, nor even for sure that they were judges and that it was a trial. There had been no introductions by the Tharnarians, no volunteering of information. Vor-Dergal spoke to them : "In brief, the facts are these: You claim that your mission was of a scientific nature, that the two of you were sent from Earth to try to reach the center of the galaxy where you hoped to find data concerning the creation of the galaxy. Your ship carried only the two of you and is one of several such ships sent out on such missions. Since the voyages of these small exploration ships were expected to require an indefinite number of years and since the occupants would have to endure each other's company for those years, your government thought it more feasable to let the crew of each ship consist of a man and a woman, rather than two men." He saw Virginia's cheek quiver at the words, but she managed to restrain the smile. "Our system was reached in your journey," Vor-Dergal continued, "and you swung aside to investigate our sister planet, Vendal. You were met by a guard ship before reaching Vendal and it fired upon you. Instead of turning back, you destroyed it with a tight-beam adaptation of your meteor disintegrator." Vor-Dergal waited questioningly and Bob said : "Our instruments showed us that the guard ship was robot-operated. They could discern nothing organic in the ship, nothing alive. The same instruments showed us that this planet, Vendal, possessed operating mines and factories and no organic life other than small animals. We knew that machines neither voluntarily build factories nor reproduce other machines, yet the mines and factories were operating. We thought it might be a world where the inhabitants had all died for some reason and the robots were still following the production orders given them when the race lived." "And so you wilfully destroyed the guard ship that would have turned you back?" "We did. It was a machine, operated by machines. And so far as we knew, it was protecting a race that had died a thousand years before. It was all a mystery and we wanted to find the answer to it." Vor-Dergal and the others accepted the explanation without change of expression. Vor-Dergal resumed : "Three more guard ships appeared when you were near Vendal. In the battle that followed, you severely damaged one of them. And when your ship was finally caught in the guard cruiser's tractor beams, you resisted the robots. When they boarded your ship, you destroyed several of them and were subdued only when the compartments of your ship were flooded with a disabling gas." "That's true," Bob said. "In summary: You deliberately invaded Thamarian territory, deliberately damaged and destroyed Thamarian ships, and would have landed on Vendal had the guard ships not prevented it. "Your guilt is both evident and admitted. Are there any extenuating circumstances that have not been presented at this hearing?" "No," Bob said. None had been presented all day for the good reason that there was not a single factor of the circumstances that the Thamarians would consider extenuating. "Your guilt was evident from the beginning," Vor-Dergal said. "We have spent the past one hundred and eighty days in studying the books and tapes in your ship. What we learned of your history and your form of civilization leaves us no alternative in the sentence we must pass upon you." The chain clinked faintly as Virginia lifted her hand to lay it on his arm and she gave him a quick glance that said, "'Here it comes! Vor-Dergal pronounced sentence upon them : "Tomorrow morning, at thirtythree twelve time, you will both be put to death by a robot firing squad." Virginia's breath stopped for a moment and her hand gripped his arm with sudden pressure but she gave no other indication of emotion and her eyes did not waver from Vor-Dergal's face. Vor-Dergal looked past her to the guards. "Return them to their cell." The guards produced another chain, to link their free arms together behind their backs, and they were marched across the room and out the door. Outside, the sun was setting, already invisible behind a low-lying cloud. Bob calculated the designated time of their execution in relation to the Terran time as given by his watch and found that thirtythree twelve would be about halfway between daylight and sunrise. Tal-Karanth stood by the open windows and watched the guards return the Terrans to their cell. Extra guards, both robot and Tharnarian, had been posted inside and outside the prison building for the night to prevent any possibility of an escape. Other robots stood guard around the Terran ship, although it was inconceivable that the Terrans could ever overpower the prison guards and reach their ship. But it had been inconceivable that a ship as small as the Terran ship could ever destroy a Thamarian guard cruiser. The tight-beam adaptation circuit of the meteor disintegrators was very ingenious. Why had the Thamarian cruisers not had the same weapon? They possessed the same general type of meteor disintegrators; the same adaptation circuit would transform a Thamarian cruiser's meteor disintegrators into terrible weapons. Why had no one ever thought of doing such a thing? Why had it been taken for granted for fifty thousand years that the cmiser's blasters were the ultimate in weapons? What other weapons did the Terrans on Earth possess? How invincible would their cruisers be if a small exploration ship could destroy a Thamarian cruiser? The captive Terrans could not be permitted to return to Earth and tell the others of Thamar. Neither could they be permitted to live out their lives in prison on Thamar. Someday, somehow, they might escape and return to Earth, or send a message to Earth. The robot fleet of Thamar could never withstand an attack by a Terran fleet; the fate of Thamar and the quiet and gentle City would be written in blood and dust and ashes. There was the sound of rubberpadded metal feet in the distance and he saw six more robots marching out to add their numbers to the robots already guarding the Terran ship. The ship, itself, was not far from the Executive Building; close enough that his eyes, still sharp despite his seventy years, could make out the name on it: The Cat, The Cat, And a cat was -- he recalled the definition to be foimd among the Terran books -- any of various species of carnivorous and predatory animals, noted for their stealth and quickness, and their ferocity when angered, T he robot shoved the plastic food tray under the cell door and went back down the corridor. Virginia turned away from the single window, where The Cat could be seen as a silhouette merging into the darkness. "Last supper. Bob," she said. "Let's eat, drink, and be merry." He went to the door to get the tray and noticed the three robots and two Thamarian guards down the left hand stretch of corridor and the same number down the right. Virginia came up beside and said, "They're not taking any chances we won't be here in the morning, are they?" "No," he said, picking up the tray. "None to speak of.' He carried the tray to the little table in the center of the room and Virginia seated herself across from him as she had done each meal for the past six months. But she toyed with the plastic spoon and did not begin to eat at once.  "I wonder why they made it a firing squad? she asked. "You'd think they would have used something ultra-civilized and refined, such as some painless and flowerscented gas." "Spies were executed with firing squads during the last Terran war, three hundred years ago," he said. He smiled thinly. "I suppose they consider us spies and want us to feel at home in the morning." "I'm glad they do. I don't want it to be shut up in a room -- I would rather be out under the open sky." She poked at the rim of her tray again. "They never did tell us why. Bob. They didn't tell us anything, only that they had no alternative. We didn't hurt any Tharnarians; we only destroyed one of their ships and some of their robots." "We upset their sense of security and showed them they're not secure at all. I suppose they're afraid of an attack from Earth." "They didn't tell us anything," she said again. "They act as though we were animals." "No " he said, "they don't seem to have a very high opinion of our low position on the social evolution scale." He began to eat in the manner of one who knows the body needs nourishment to take advantage of any opportunity for escape, even though the mind may be darkly certain that no such opportunity shall arise. "You ought to cat a little, Ginny," he said. She tried, and gave up after a few bites. "I guess I'm just not hungry -- not now," she said. She glanced at the darkened window where The Cat had become invisible. "How long until daylight again, Bob?" He looked at his watch. "Seven hours." "Seven hours?" A touch of wistfulness came into her voice. "I never noticed, before, how short the nights arc." The robot laid the material TalKaranth had requested on his desk, the records and tapes from the Terran ship, and withdrew. TalKaranth sighed wearily as he inserted the first tape in the projector, wondering again why he felt the vague dissatisfaction and wondering why he hoped to find an answer among the material from the Terran ship. It would be an all night task -- and he could hardly expect to find more than he already knew. Tharnar was not safe and secure from discovery by Terrans in the years to come and faith in the robot fleet had been an illusion. Before setting the projector in operation he put through a call to his daughter. Thralna's image appeared before him, reclining on a couch while two robots worked at caring for her finger nails. She raised up a little as his image appeared before her and the robots stepped back. "Yes, Father?" she asked. She waited for him to speak, her wide gray eyes on his image and her jet-black curls framing her young and delicately beautiful face. For a moment she reminded him of someone ; someone more mature and stronger -- With something of a shock he realized it was the Terran girl his daughter reminded him of ; that the Terran girl seemed the more mature of the two although Tharlna was twenty-eight and the Terran girl was twenty-one. They had the same gray eyes and black curls, the same curve to the jaw, the same chin and full lips... But the similarity was only incidental. There was a grace and a gentleness to Thralna's beauty; a grace and gentleness that was the result of Mty thousand years of civilization. Beneath the superficial beauty of the barbarian girl lay only an animal-like vitality and potential violence... "Yes, Father?" Tharlna asked again in her carefully modulated voice. "Are you going to the theatre tonight, Thralna?" "Yes. Tonight's play was written by D'ret-Thon and it's supposed to be almost as good as one of the classics. Why do you ask. Father?" "I called to tell you that I have to work late tonight. I may not be home until morning." "Couldn't you let a robot do it?" "No. I have to do it, myself." "Does it have to do with those two aliens?" "Yes." A little frown of worry appeared and as quickly disappeared. Her slim fingers touched her forehead for a moment, to smooth away any vestige of a wrinkle, then she said, 'Tt will be such a relief when they're finally disposed of. Whenever I think of how they might escape and get into the City, it frightens me. Are you sure they can't escape. Father?" "There is no possibility of their escaping," he said. "You go ahead with your plans for the evening. Will you come home when the show is over?" "Not for a while. Kin is taking me dancing, afterward." "Where you went last time -- the place where they were reviving the old dances?" "No. Nobody goes there anymore. Those old dances were rather fun but they were so -- so tiring. Our modern dances are much slower and more graceful, you know." "All right, Thralna," he said in dismissal. "Enjoy yourself." "Yes, Father."  She was reclining on the couch again, her eyes closed, when he switched off the image. He sat for a little while before turning on the tape projector, recalling his conversation with her and a feeling growing within him that he was almost on the verge of discovering still another menace to Thamar. ginia held her hands to her face to shade her eyes as she looked out the window. "What you can see of the city from here is all bright with lights," she said, "but there's no one on the streets. Only some robots. Everyone in the city must be in bed." "That's the way it's been every night," he said. "Early to bed and late to rise -- they're an odd race. I've wondered what they do to pass away the time. But what they're doing now is something you should be doing -- resting." She turned away from the window. "I'm not sleepy. I keep thinking of The Cat out there waiting for us and how we might get to it if we could only get hold of a blaster." "Which we can't try to do until they come for us in the morning. Some rest now might mean a lot then." "All right, Bob." She went to him and sat beside him on his cot. "What is it now -- how much more time?" "About three hours." She leaned her head against him and he put his arm around her. "I guess I am a little tired," she said. "But don't let me go to sleep." "All right, Ginny." "It's only three hours and never any more, if we aren't lucky in the morning. And if we aren't lucky, I don't want to have wasted our last three hours." the window again and watched the City as it slept in the pre-dawn darkness. How many slept in the City? Once there had been three found the population to be less. Five years before there had been less City was a beautiful shell that housed only the robots that cared for it. What was wrong? And why had it never occurred to him before that there was something wrong? He went back to his desk, where the material from the Terran ship littered the eternalloy top of it, and sat down again. He was tired, and frustrated. A menace faced Tharnar, and no one seemed to realize it. The coming of the barbarians had awakened him to the fallacy of trusting the robot fleet, but there was still another danger. And the robot fleet would be more helpless before the newly discovered danger than it would be before the Terran ships. He pressed a button and music filled the room; music that had always before been soothing and restful to hear. But it sounded flat and meaningless compared with the throbbing barbarian music he had heard that night and he switched it off again. What was wrong? It was one of the latest compositions; one that had been acclaimed as almost as good as one of the classics. Almost as good... Like the play Thralna had attended, like the art exhibits, the athletic records, the scientific discoveries, like everything in the City and on Thamar. Almost as good -- but never quite as good as they had been fifty thousand years before. Was that part of the answer? No -- not part of the answer. Part of the problem, part of the danger greater than a barbarian invasion. There was no answer that he could see. Something had been lost by the Thamarians fifty thousand years before and he was neither sure what it was nor how to give it back to them. He pressed the button that would connect him with Security Officer Ten-Quoth. Of the two problems, it was only within his power to handle the immediate phase of the first problem; to make the final authorization of the execution of the Terrans. Bob looked again at the window which had lightened to a pale gray square. It was already daylight outside; it would not be long until the guards came for them. Virginia had fallen asleep at last, more tired than she had thought, and she still slept with her head against his shoulder and with his arm around her to support her. He straightened his legs slowly, not wanting them to be numb from lack of circulation when the guards came and not wanting to awaken Virginia to grim reality any sooner than he had to. But the slight movement was enough. She opened her eyes drowsily, then the sleepiness gave way to the hard jolt of remembrance and realization. She looked at the gray window and asked, "How much longer?" "Within a few minutes." "I wish you hadn't let me sleep." "You were tired." "I didn't want to sleep -- I didn't think I would." Then she changed the subject, as though to keep it from going into the sentimental. "I see the robot never did come back for the tray. We'll be leaving a messy room, won't we? I wonder if they'll disinfect it to make sure it's clean when we're gone? You know" -- she smiled a little -- "fleas and things." She lifted her face to kiss him on the cheek, then she rose and moved to the window. "It's cloudy," she said. "There's a mist of rain falling and it's cloudy outside. I guess it's already later than we thought." He went over to stand beside her and saw that the morning was alight with near-sunrise behind the gray clouds. "It's out there waiting for us -- The Caty she said. He saw it, standing silver-white in the gray morning, gleaming in the rain and with its slim, dynamic lines making it look as though it might at any moment hurl itself roaring into the sky. "It's a beautiful ship," she said. "I wonder what they will do with it when they -- " A sound came from the far end of the corridor; a snapped command in Thamarian. The command was followed at once by the sound of footsteps approaching their cell ; the heavy tread of robots and the lighter, softer steps of the guards. Virginia turned away from the window and they faced the cell door as they waited. "This is it," she said. "Are you afraid, Ginny?" "Afraid?" She laughed up at him, a laugh that came only a little too quickly. "It's like a play, set a long time ago on Earth. Coffee and pistols at dawn. Only I don't think they're bringing us any coffee and if we get a pistol it will have to be one of theirs." "It isn't over with till the end -- and maybe we can change the ending of this play for them." "I'll be watching you, Bob, so I can help you the moment you make the try." The Tharnarian guards stopped outside the door, their blasters in their hands. One of them unlocked the door and two robots entered, guards locking the big door behind the robots the moment they were inside. The robots carried no blasters, nothing but three lengths of chain. The Tharnarian leader outside the door rasped a command : "You will both turn to face the window, with your hands behind you." Bob did not obey at once, but appraised the situation. The robots were massive things -- more than six hundred pounds in weight, their metal bodies invulnerable to any attack he could make with his bare hands. But there was one chance in ten thousand: if he could catch the first robot by surprise and send it toppling into the cell door, its weight might be enough to break the lock of the door. He struck it with his shoulder, all his weight and strength behind the attack, and Virginia's small body struck it a moment later. But it was like shoving against a stone wall. The robot rocked for the briefest instant, then it threw out a foot to regain its balance. The other robot snapped a chain around his wrists while Virginia fought it. "Don't, Ginny," he said, ceasing his own struggles. "It's no use, honey." She stopped, then, and the robot jerked her arms around behind her back, to lock the second chain around her wrists. She smiled up into his dark and sombre face. "We tried. Bob. They were just too big for us." A third chain, longer than the first two, was produced. He felt the cool metal of it encircle his neck and heard the lock snap shut. The other end of it was locked around Virginia's neck. The cell door was opened and the guard leader commanded, "Step forward. The robots will guide you." They stepped forward, the robots beside them, gripping their arms with steel fingers. The chain around their necks rattled from the movement of walking, linking them together like a pair of captive wild animals. Bob wondered if the chain had been solely as another precaution to prevent their escape or if it had been a deliberate act of contempt. The Tharnarians feared them and, because they feared them, they hated them. Did it bolster the morale of the Tharnarians to deliberately treat them as though they were animals? They stepped out into the cool dawn, into a small courtyard with a black stone wall at its farther side. The sky was bleakly gray and the rain was falling as a cold mist, dampening Virginia's face as she looked up at him. "The last mile. Bob." "Walk it straight and steady, Ginny. They're watching." "How else would we walk it? she asked calmly. They came to the wall, where a metal ring had been set in the stone. There was a chain fastened to the ring and when the robots had swung them around with their backs to the wall, the free end of the chain was locked to the center of the chain around their necks. Again, it could be an added precaution. Or it could be the final attempt to let their execution be ous animals. It did not really matter, of course... Two of the armed robots who had walked with the guards took up a position twenty feet in front of them, blasters in their metal hands. The robots who had chained them stepped to one side, away from the line of fire. The leader of the guards lifted his arm to look at his watch and said something to the robots. The robots lifted their blasters at the words and leveled them, one aimed at Virginia's heart and one at Bob's. But the expected blast did not come. The guard leader continued to observe his watch. Apparently the first command had meant only: "Aim." The "Fire" command would come when the hands of the watch reached the thirty-three twelve mark. Virginia's shoulder was warm against his arm. But her hand, when it found his behind their backs, was cold. "They cheated us," she said. "We were supposed to have a whole firing squad." The guard leader gave another command and there was a double click as the robots pressed the buttons that would ready their blasters for firing. Virginia swayed a little for the first time, a movement too small for the Tharnarians to see and one from which she recovered almost at once. "It's -- I'm all right," she said. "I'm not afraid. Bob." "Of course you're not, Ginny -- of course you're not." The guard leader had returned his attention to his watch and the seconds went by; long seconds in which the only sound was the almost inaudible whisper of the rain against the stone wall behind them. Virginia looked up at him for the last time, the cold mist wet on her face. "We've had a lot of fun together. Bob. We never expected it to end so soon, but we knew all the time that it might. We'll go together and that's the way we always wanted it to be, wherever and whenever it might happen." Then she faced forward again and they waited, the rain whispering on the wall behind them and forming in crystal drops on the chain around their necks. She did not waver again as she stood beside him and he knew she would not when the end came. The guard leader dropped his arm, as though he no longer needed to refer to his watch. He glanced at them very briefly then turned to the robots, his face revealing the command he was going to give. Virginia's hand tightened on his own in farewell and he could feel the pulse of her wrist racing hard and fast. But she stood very straight as she looked into the blaster and they heard the final command to their robot-executioners : 'Dorend thendar hirty-three one. Tal-Karanth looked again at the timepiece on the wall. Thirtythree one. At the end of eleven more small fractions of time, the Terrans would no longer exist. What was life? What was the purpose behind it all? In fifty thousand years the Tharnarians were no nearer the answer than their ancestors had been. Why should there be life at all? Why not the suns and planets, created by chance, and devoid of life? And why even of galaxies racing outward across time? Why the universe and why the life it contained? Why not just -- nothing? The barbarians had set out to find the answer within a hundred years after the building of their first interstellar ship. And Tharnar's interstellar ships had not been outside the system for fifty thousand years; no Tharnarian had been as far as Vendal for fifteen thousand years. Why had the Tharnarians lost their curiosity; the curiosity and desire to learn that had created the past glory of Tharnar? He thought again of what he had discovered that night ; of one of the reasons why the Terrans had named their ship The Cat. It was not because a cat was a dangerous animal, as he and the others had thought. It was because the mission of The Cat would be to explore in unknown territory, because of an old Terran proverb: Curiosity killed a cat. He did not yet understand the second reason behind the name, but the first reason showed that the Terrans were not without a sense of humor. How long had it been since he had heard a Tharnarian laugh at himself, at his own failings or possibility of failure? Never. Yet -- wasn't that pride? What was wrong with the high-headed pride that admitted no inferiority, no failure? Wasn't fifty thousand years of civilization something of which to be extremely proud? Thirty-three five. He went to the window and pressed the button that would open it against the mechanical will of the automatic health-guard equipment. It slid open and he breathed the cool, moist air that smelled of wet earth and grass and the odor of the lana tree flowers; flowers that were closed against the rain and would not open until the sun came out. The City was quiet in the gray of the morning. He could see one pedestrian and three moving vehicles in the entire visible portion of the City. The City, like the flowers of the lana trees, would not open into life until the storm was over and the sun was shining again. Thirty-three nine. The City, like the flowers of the lana trees. The beauty and perfection of them both was the result of fifty thousand years of breeding to bring about that perfection. The City, like the flowers of the lana trees... But flowers were without purpose; were only -- vegetation. And what was the purpose of the City? He did not know. He was the Supreme Executive of Thamar, and he did not know. Thirty-three ten. He went back to his desk and switched on the three-dimensional projection of the scene that would be taking place in the coiutyard behind the prison. The man and girl stood chained to the wall and the robots were waiting for the third and last command from the guard leader, the blasters in their hands as steady as though held in vises and their metal faces impassive. He increased the magnification of the scene, drawing the images of the man and girl closer to him. There was no reading the man's face, other than the hardness and lack of fear. But on the face of the girl was a defiance that seemed to shine like a radiance about her. He was reminded of the physical similarity between the barbarian girl and his daughter. But now the similarity had faded to a shadow. There was something vital and alive about the barbarian girl, there was a beauty to her in the way she waited for death that was strange and wild by Thamarian standards. What had Thralna said the night before? "... Whenever I think of how they might escape and get into the City, it frightens -- it frightens me -- What if it was Thralna who stood before the robots? Would she have her Thamarian pride as she looked into the black muzzle of the blaster and knew she had only a few more heart beats of life left? Would she stand with the bold defiance of the barbarian girl? Or would she drop to the ground and plead for her life? He knew the answer. But it was not Thralna's fault that she was as she was. She was only like all the others of Thamar. Thirty-three eleven. How diflFerent they were, the two barbarians and the men and women of Thamar. Yet the difference would cease to exist within a few moments. When the man and girl were dead, when all the life and restless drive were gone from them and they lay still on the cold, wet ground, they would look the same as Thamarians. How did it feel to die in the cold dawn, on an alien world a thousand lightyears from your own? But they had known such a thing might happen to them. They had named their ship The Cat because of that. Because of that, and something else... Suddenly, clearly, he understood the second reason for the name of their ship. Thirty-three twelve. The guard leader dropped his arm, to give the last command to the robots. Tal-Karanth's mind raced and he saw two things with vivid clarity: He saw the inexorable decline of Thamar and the City continuing down the centuries until the little spark that was left smouldered its last and was gone. And he saw the way death would obliterate the wild and savage beauty of the barbarian rl, knew that it would go when the life went from her, to leave her with a beauty that would be colorless by contrast, that would be like the beauty of a lana blossom -- or a Tharnarian woman. And he thought he could see the answer to the menace that faced Thamar and the City. Dorend --  The guard leader's first word of command came. Tal-Karanth's finger stabbed at one of the buttons along his desk. He shoved it down, to deactivate the robot-executioners, and they were frozen in immobility when the final word came:  -- thendarr He snapped the switch which connected him with the office of Security Officer Ten-Quoth and said: "Have the chains taken from the Terrans and see that they are given comfortable and unguarded quarters. Tell them they have been pardoned by the Supreme Executive and that they are free to leave Tharnar whenever they wish." day, bright and warm with a few fleecy white clouds drifting across the blue sky. Tal-Karanth stood before the window again, VorDergal beside him, and watched the City come to life ; slowly and leisurely, as it had come to life each midmoming for the past fifty thousand years. Vor-Dergal looked toward The Cat, where the boarding ramps had already been withdrawn and the airlocks closed. "They're ready to go," he said. "I hope you haven't made a mistake in what you did. The other Terrans will learn of us now, and when they come..." He let the sentence trail off, unfinished. "We have a great deal to gain by the coming of the Terrans," TalKaranth said, "and little to lose." "Little to lose?" Vor-Dergal asked. "We have Thamar and the City to lose; we have our lives and our civilization to lose." "Yes, our civilization," TalKaranth said. "Our god that we worshipped -- our civilization. Look, Vor -- listen to what I have to say: "I did some thinking the night the Terrans were waiting to be executed. I'm afraid it was probably one of the few times for thousands of years that a Tharnarian ever tried to critically examine the Tharnarian way of life. I started from the beginning, more than fifty thousand years ago, when the interstellar ships of Tharnar were actually interstellar and were manned by men instead of robots. "It was a good start we made in interstellar exploration, but it didn't last very long. We wanted to associate with our cultural peers, and there weren't any. We didn't attempt to make any contact with the primitive races we found. We felt that there would be no point in doing so. Thamar possessed the highest -- and the only -- civilization in all the explored regions of the galaxy and younger races had nothing to offer us. "The time came when no more exploration ships were sent out. We retired to Thamar and Vendal and surrounded them with a robotoperated fleet, to keep out the inferior races when they finally did learn how to build spaceships. We devoted ourselves to our social culture and became imbued with selfsatisfaction, with the assurance that we of Thamar possessed the full flowering of culture and progress. We withdrew into a shell of complacency and each generation lived out its life with comfortable, methodical, sameness. And our robot-operated fleet was on guard to prevent any other race from annoying us, from disturbing us in the wisdom and serenity of our way of life. "Fifteen thousand years ago, the last of us on Vendal returned to the more ideal world of Thamar. And there was plenty of room for them on Thamar by then. The population had been decreasing for thousands of years -- it's decreasing right now. Women don't want to have children anymore -- it's an inconvenience for them. They want comfort; the full stomach, the soft couch, the attention of their robots. And men are the same. "There is no longer any incentive for living on Thamar other than to duplicate the lives of our ancestors. There is nothing new, nothing to be done that has not already been done better. So we lapse into an existence of placid satisfaction with the status quo -- we vegetate. We're like plants that have been seeded in the same field for so many centuries that the fertility of the soil is exhausted. This barren field in which we grow is our own form of culture. "Do you sec what the ultimate end will have to be, Vor?" He had thought old Vor-Dergal would reply with a heated defense of Thamarian civilization, but he did not. Instead, he said, "If the present trend continues, there will come a time when there will be more robots in the guard ships than there will be Thamarians for them to guard. But is the other better, the destruction at the hands of the barbarians?" "Destmction? It's within their power to destroy us, but why should they? It will be unpleasant for many Thamarians to contemplate, but an unbiased study of the Terrans shows that they would not want the things we have on Thamar and in the City; that they would not consider Thamar and the City worth the trouble of conquest." "A conjecture," Vor-Dergal said. "And, even if you are right and the Terrans never come to destroy us -- what have we to gain by taking this risk?" "New life. We've been too long in the barren field of our own culture. We've lost our curiosity, our desire to learn, our sense of humor that would permit us to make honest self-evaluations, our pride and courage. And in losing these thinp, we lost our racial urge to survive. "Look at the City this morning, Vor. See how slowly it moves ; listen to how still it is for a city that conyou know what this day is for the City? It's one more act, to be added to all the thousands of acts in the past, in the City's rehearsal for extinction. "The Tcrrans have what we lost. They're a young race with a vitality that's like a fire where our own is like a dying spark. That's why I let those two go; why I want the others of their kind to know of Thamar and come here. It's not too late for us ; not yet too late for contact with these Terrans to give back to us all these things we lost." In the pause following his words the quiet of the City was suddenly shattered by the thunder of The Cat's drives. It lifted, shining and slender and graceful, and hurled itself up into the blue sky. TalKaranth watched it until it was a bright star, far away and going out into the universe beyond, until the sound of its drives had faded and gone. He looked away from the sky and back to the slowly moving, softly whispering City; the City that was dying and did not know it. He felt the stirring of an uneasiness within him; a strange non-physical desire for something. It was the first time in his life he had ever felt such a sensation; it was something so long gone from the Tharnarians that the Tharnarian word for it was obsolete and forgotten. But the Terran word for it was wanderlust. "I almost wish I could have gone with them, Vor," he said. "They're going to try to reach the heart of the galaxy and see if they can find the answer to Creation. And we on Thamar spend our lives sipping sweet drinks as we discuss trifles and wait for the sun to shine warm enough for us to emerge from our air-conditioned houses." "If you're right in thinking that Terrans won't come to plunder Thamar and the City," Vor-Dergal said, "then it would be interesting to know what those two find when they reach the center of the galaxy. If they don't get killed long before they reach it." "I think any hostile forms of life they encounter will find them hard to kill," Tal-Karanth said. "We paid a high price for their capture, remember? There were two Terran proverbs behind the name of their ship. It took me quite a while to understand the second one but when I did, I realized the true extent of Terran determination and self-confidence. "Their mission was to explore across the unknown regions of space. They knew it would be dangerous, very dangerous. So they named their ship 'The Cat' partly because of an old Terran proverb: 'Curiosity killed a cat.' But that was only half the reason behind the name. They intended to reach the center of the galaxy and they didn't intend to let anything stop them. So there was a second meaning behind the naming of their ship: " 'A cat has nine lives,' "    A few drops of science will often disinfect a whole barrel full of ignorance and prejudice. -- Hendrik Willem V an Loon Funny, the way a simple people regarded spacemen -- and Reston fully appreciated the irony... The European Project was a noble undertaking. It was the result of the efforts of a group of noble men who were acquainted with the tragic histories of countries like Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Rumania, and Poland -- countries whose juxtaposition to an aggressive totalitarian nation had robbed them of the right to evolve naturally. The European Project Illustrated by Mel Hunter returned that right to them by giving them the stars, A distant planet was set aside for each downtrodden nation and spaceships blasted off for New Czechoslovakia New Lithuania New Rumania and New Polland, bearing land-hungry, Godfearing peasants. And this time the immigrants found still waters and green pastures awaiting them instead of the methane-ridden coal mines which their countrymen had found centuries ago in another promised land. There was only one mishap, in the entire operation: the spaceship carrying the colonists for New Poland never reached its designated destination... Earth Years (Galactic History Files) T he snow was failing softlv and through it Reston could see the yellow squares of light that were the windows of the community hall. He could hear the piano accordian picking up the strains of Moja Dziewczyna Myje Nogi, "My Girl is Washing Her Feet," he thought, unconsciously reverting to his halfforgotten native tongue ; washing them here on Now a Polska the way she washed them long ago on Earth, There was warmth in the thought, and Reston turned contentedly away from his study window and walked across the little room to the simple pleasures of his chair and his pipe. Soon, he knew, one of the children would come running across the snow and knock on his door, bearing the choicest viands of the wedding feast -- kielbasa perhaps, and golabki and pierogi and kiszki. And after that, much later in the evening, the groom himself would come round with the wodka, his bride at his side, and he and Reston would have a drink together in the warm room, the snow white and all-encompassing without, perhaps still falling, and if not still falling, the stars bright and pulsing in the Nowa Polska sky. It was a good life, hard sometimes, but unfailing in its finer moments. In his old age Reston had everything he wanted, and above all he had the simple things which are all any man wants in the final analysis; and if he occasionally needed to apply a slightly different connotation to a familiar word or two in order to alleviate a recurrent sadness, he harmed no one, and he did himself much good. At sixty, he was a contented if not a happy man. But contentment had not come to him overnight. It was a product of the years, an indirect result of his acceptance of a way of life which circumstance and society had forced upon him... Abruptly he got up from his chair and walked over to the window again. There was a quality about the moment that he did not want to lose: the reassuring yellow squares of the community hall windows were part of it, the lilting cadence of the piano accordion; the softly falling snow -- It had been snowing on that night forty years ago too, when Reston had landed the emigration ship; not snowing softly, but with cold fury, the flakes hard and sharp, and coming in on a strong north wind ; biting and stinging the faces of the little group of immigrants huddled in the lee of the slowly disintegrating ship, biting and stinging Reston's face too, though he had hardly noticed. He had been too busy to notice -- Busy rounding up the rest of his passengers, then hurrying the women out of the danger area and setting the men to work unloading the supplies and equipment from the hold, using signs and gestures instead of words because he could not speak their language. As soon as the hold was empty, he directed the rearing of a temporary shelter behind the protective shoulder of a hill; then he climbed to the top of the hill and stood there in the bitter wind and the insanely swirling snow, watching his ship die, wondering what it was going to be like to spend the rest of his life in a foreign colony that consisted entirely of young, newly married couples. For a moment his bitterness overwhelmed him. Why should his ship have been the one to develop reactor trouble in mid-run? Why should the appalling burden of finding a suitable planet for a group of people he had never seen before have fallen upon his shoulders? He felt like shaking his fist at God, but he didn't. It would have been a theatrical gesture, devoid of any true meaning. For it is impossible to execrate God without first having accepted Him, and in all his wild young life the only deity that Reston had ever worshiped was the Faster-Than-LightDrive that made skipping stones of stars. Presently he turned away and walked back down the hill. He found an empty comer in the makeshift shelter and he spread his blankets for the first lonely night In the morning there were improvised services for the single casualty of the forced landing. Then, on leaden feet, the immigrants began their new life. Hard work kept Reston occupied that first winter. The original village had been transported from Earth, and it was assembled in a small mountain-encompassed valley. A river running through the valley solved the water problem for the time being, though chopping through its ice was a dreaded morning chore; and an adjacent forest aflforded plenty of wood to burn till more suitable fuel could be obtained, though cutting it into cords and dragging the cords into the village on crude sleds was a task that none of the men looked forward to. There was a mild flu epidemic along towards spring, but thanks to the efficiency of the youthful doctor, who of course had been included as part of the basic structure of the new society, everybody pulled through nicely. After the spring rains the first crops were planted. The soil of Nowa Polska turned out to be a rich dark loam, a gratifying circumstance to Reston, who had bled his ship of its last drop of energy in order to find the planet. Jt was already inhabited, of course -- traces of the nomadic pilgrimages of the indigenes were apparent in several parts of the valley. At first Reston had some hope in that direction -- until several of the natives walked into the village one morning, smiling hugely with their multiple mouths and pirouetting grotesquely on their multiple legs. But at least they were friendly, and, as it later developed, convenient to have around. He helped with the planting that first spring. That was when he became aware that he was even less an integral part of the new culture than he had thought. Many times he found himself working alone while the immigrants worked in groups of twos and threes. He could not help thinking that he was being avoided. And several times he caught his fellow-workers looking at him with unmistakable disapproval in their eyes. On such occasions he shrugged his shoulders. They could disapprove of him all they wanted to, but like him or not, they were stuck with him. He loafed the summer away, fishing and hunting in the idyllic foothills of the mountains, sleeping in the open sometimes, under the stars. Often he lay half the summer night through, thinking' -- thinking of many things: of the sweet taste of Earth air after a run, of scintillating Earth cities spread out like gigantic pinball machines just waiting to be played, of bright lights and lithe legs, and chilled wine being poured into tall iridescent glasses; but most of all thinking of his neighbors' wives... , In the fall he helped with the harvest. The indigenes' pen hant for farm work was still an unknown factor and consequently had not yet been exploited. Again he saw disapproval in the immigrants' eyes. He could not understand it. If he knew the peasant mind at all, these people should have approved approve of it. But again he shrugged his shoulders. They could go to hell as far as he was concerned, the whole self-righteous, God-fearing lot of them. It was a bountiful harvest. To the immigrants, accustomed as they were to the scrawny yields of Old Country soil, it was unbelievable. Reston heard them talking enthusiastically about the fine kapusti, the enormous ziemniaki, the golden pszenica. He could understand most of what they said by then, and he could even make himself understood, though the thick czs and szs still bothered him. But the language was the least of his troubles in the winter that followed. After the way the immigrants had acted toward him in the fields, Reston had anticipated a winter of enforced isolation. But it was not so. There was scarcely an evening when he wasn't invited to the Andruliewicz's or the Pyzykiewicz's or the Sadowski's to share a flavorful meal and to join in the discussion of whatever subject happened to be of most concern to the community at the moment -- the fodder for the newly domesticated livestock, the shortcomings of the village's only generator, the proposed site for the church... Yet all the while he ate and talked with them he was conscious of an undercurrent of uneasiness, of an unnatural formality of speech. It was as though they could not relax in his presence, could not be themselves. Gradually, as the winter progressed, he stayed home more and more often, brooding in his wifeless kitchen and retiring early to his wifeless bed, tossing restlessly in the lonely darkness while the wind gamboled round the house and sent the snow spraying against the eaves. the hardest thing of all to take. They began arriving late that second winter. By spring there was a whole crop of them... There was one shining hope in Reston's mind, and that hope alone kept his loneliness from turning into bitterness -- the hope that his that a rescue ship was already beamed on the co-ordinates he had scattered to the stars during the taut moments that had preceded planetfall. In a way it was a desperate hope, for if his S O S had not been intercepted it would be at least ninety years before the co-ordinates reached the nearest inhabited planet, and ninety years, even when you were twenty-one and believed that with half a chance you could live forever, was an unpleasant reality to contend with. As the long somber days dragged on, Reston began to read. There was utterly nothing else for him to do. He had finally reached a point where he could no longer stand to visit the burgeoning young families and listen to the lusty squalling of youthful lungs; or endure another pitiful baptism, with the father stumbling through the ritual, embarrassed, humble, a little frightened, splashing water with clumsy hands on the new infant's wizened face. All of the available books were in Polish of course, and most of them, as is invariably the case with peasant literature, dealt with religious themes. A good eighty percent of them were identical copies of the Polish Bible itself, and finally annoyed by its omnipresence whenever he asked his neighbors for something to read, Reston borrowed a copy and browsed his way through it. He could read Polish easily by them, and he could speak it fluently, with far more clarity and with far more expression than the immigrants could themselves. He found the Old Testament God naive. Genesis amused him, and once, to alleviate a dull evening -- and to prove to himself that he was still contemptuous of religious credos regardless of his situation -- he rewrote it the way he thought the ancient Hebrews might have conceived of it had they possessed a more mature comprehension of the universe. At first he was rather proud of his new version, but after rereading it several times he came to the conclusion that except for the postulates that God had not created Earth first and had created a far greater multitude of stars than the ancient Hebrews had given Him credit for, it wasn't particularly original. After reading the New Testament he felt more at peace than he had for a long time. But his peace was short-lived. Spring devastated it when it came. Meadow flowers were hauntingly beautiful that year and Reston had never seen bluer skies -- not even on Earth. When the rains were over and gone he made daily treks into the foothills, taking the Bible with him sometimes, losing himself in intricate green cathedrals, coming sometimes into sudden sight of the high white breasts of the mountains and wondering why he didn't climb them, pass over them into another land and leave this lonely land behind, and all the while knowing, deep in his heart, the reason why he stayed. It wasn't until early in summer, when he was returning from one of his treks, that he finally saw Helena alone. There had been a flu epidemic during that second winter too, but it had not been quite as mild as the first one had been. There had been one death. Helena Kuprewicz was the first Nowa Polska widow. In spite of himself, Reston had thought about her constantly ever since the funeral, and he had wondered frequently about the mores of the new culture as they applied to the interval of time that had to elapse before a bereaved wife could look at another man without becoming a social outcast. Helena was still wearing black when he came upon her in one of the meadows that flanked the village. But she was very fair, and black became the milk-whiteness of her oval face and matched the lustrous darkness of her hair. Helena was a beautiful woman, and Reston would have looked at her twice under any circumstances. She was gathering greens. She stood up when she saw him approaching. Jak sie masz. Pan Reston," she said shyly. Her formality disconcerted him, though it shouldn't have. None of the immigrants had ever addressed him by his first name. He smiled at her. He tried to smile warmly, but he knew' his smile was cold. It had been so long since he had smiled at a pretty girl... '"Jak sie macie Pani Kuprewicz -- " They discussed the weather first, and then the crops, and after that there didn't seem to be anything left to discuss, and Reston accompanied her back to the village. He lingered by her doorstep, reluctant to leave. "Helena," he said suddenly, "I would like to see you again." "Why of course. Pan Reston. You are more than welcome to my house... All spring I waited for you to come, but when you did not I knew" that it was because you were not yet prepared, that you were not quite certain of the call..." He looked at her puzzledly. He had never asked a Polish girl for a date before, but he was reasonably sure that they didn't usually respond in quite so formal a manner, or in quite so respectful a tone of voice. "I mean," he explained, "that I would like to see you again because -- "he floundered for words -- "because I like you, because you are beautiful, because -- His voice trailed away when he saw the expression that had come into her face. Then he stared uncomprehendingly as she turned away and ran into the house. The door slammed and he stood there for a long time, looking dumbly at the mute panels and the little curtained windows. The enormity of the social crime he had apparently committed bewildered him. Surely no society -- not even a society as pious and as God-fearing as the one he was involved in -- would expect its widows to remain widows forever. But even granting that such were the case, the expression that had come into Helena's face was still inexplicable. Reston could have understood surprise, or even shock -- But not horror. He was something besides just an odd number in the peasants' eyes. He was a grotesque misfit, a monster. But why? He walked home slowly, tiydng to think, trying, for the first time, to see himself as the immigrants saw him. He passed the church, heard the sporadic hammering of the carpenters as they applied the finishing touches to the interior. He wondered suddenly why they had built it next door to the only heathen in the village. He brewed coffee in his kitchen and sat down by the window. He could see the foothills, green and lazily rising, with the mountains chaste and white beyond them. He dropped his eyes from the mountains and stared down at his hands. They were long slender hands, sensitive from long association with the control consoles of half a hundred complex ships; the hands of a pilot, different, certainly, from the hands of a peasant, just as he was different, but basically, intrinsically the same. How did they see him? The answer was easy: they saw him as a pilot. But why should their seeing him as a pilot so affect their attitude towards him that they could never relax in his presence, could never evince towards him the warmth and camaraderie, or even the resentment, which they evinced towards each other? A pilot, after all, was nothing but a human being. It was no credit to Reston that he had delivered them from persecution, no credit to him that Nowa Polska had become a reality -- Suddenly he remembered The Book of Exodus. He got up, disbelievingly, and located the copy of the Bible he had borrowed during the winter. With mounting horror, he began to read -- H e had crouched wearily on the little ledge. Above him the insurmountable comice had obfuscated the sky. He had looked down into the valley and he had seen the remote winking of tiny lights that symbolized his destiny. But they symbolized something more than just his destiny: they symbolized warmth and a security of sorts; they symbolized all there was of humanity on Now a Polska, Crouching there on the ledge, in the mountain cold, he had come to the inevitable realization that no man can live alone, and that his own need for the immigrants was as great as their need for him. He had begun the descent then, slowly, because of his weariness and because his hands were bloodied and bruised from the frenzy of the climb. It was morning when he reached the meadows and the sun was gleaming brightly on the cross above the church. Abruptly Reston left the window and returned to his chair. There was pain even in remembered conflict. But the room was warm and pleasant, and his chair deep and comfortable, and gradually the pain left him. Very soon now, he knew, one of the children would come running across the snow bearing viands from the feast, and a knock would sound at his door, and there would come another one of the moments for which he lived, which, added together through the years, had made his surrender to his destiny more bearable. His surrender had not immediately followed his return to the village. It had come about subtly with the passage of the years. It had been the natural result of certain incidents and crises, of unanticipated moments. He tried to remember the moment when he had first stepped briefly into the niche which circumstance and society preordained for him. Surely it must have been during the fourth winter when the little Andruliewicz girl had died -- It had been a dull wintry day, the sky somber, the frozen earth unsoftened as yet with snow. Reston had followed the little procession up the hill that had been set aside for the cemetery and he had stood with the gray-faced immigrants at the edge of the little grave. The casket was a crude wooden one, and the father stood over it awkwardly with the Bible in his hands, stumbling through the service, trying to say the words clearly and instead uttering them brokenly in his clumsy peasant's voice. Finally Reston could stand it no longer and he walked over the frozen ground to where the stricken man was standing and took the Bible into his own hands. Then he stood up straight against the bleak cold sky, tall and strong, and his voice was as clear as a cold wind, yet as strangely soft as a midsummer's day, and filled with the promise of springs yet to come, and the sure calm knowledge that all winters must pass -- 'T am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die -- The knock finally sounded and Reston got up from his chair and walked over to the door. Funny the (Continued on page #) Kids of the future may be pedaling around in the sky and stopping oflf in the "wild blue yonder" to look at the earth below whenever they like. A new balloon-helicopter, recently granted a patent, will be the vehicle. Designed for rescue and observation work, the aircraft combines the slow movement and safety advantages of both the balloon and the helicopter. It might also prove useful to the commuter, sports fan and Sunday sight-seer. To operate the craft, the pilot sits on the seat and pedals with his feet, which in turn, causes the helicopter blades mounted below the pilot to rotate. Once airborne, the pilot can literally stop along the way by rotating the balloon mounted above in the opposite direction of the propeller blades. This causes the "flying machine" powered by human energy to stand still. Employers of tomorrow may give those they hire a test to show which persons should use their brains and which should use their backs for manual labor. The tests will consist of careful examinations of the spine, including X-ray pictures, and in fact, doctors are advising them for teen-agers right now so that they can be apprised early of suitable occupations where they will not be putting too much strain on backs that can't take it. In recent pre-employment tests of # persons, only # had what could be called normal backs. The rest had congenital abnormalities, spinal arthritis, postural defects and other spinal conditions which made them easy prey to low back injury or disability. Results of such examinations and proper handling of personnel accordingly would save industry thousands of dollars in compensation claims and workers could be saved time lost, not to mention doctor bills for aid to aching backs. by the year # the average family income in the United States will be # according to the prediction made by a Purdue University professor of sociology. After showing that the standard of living today is twice as high as it it was in #, the professor has analyzed the probable effects of a continuation of this trend. First of all, the standard will continue to rise. This is based on the fact that it has risen so very steadily and such a trend line rarely changes it course radically. The rate of increase may lessen, but it will most probably continue. Poverty will be reduced. Health will improve. A larger market for mass-produced goods will be created. More money from each family budget will go for luxuries. The already declining appeal of socialism will dwindle away to nearly nothing under such circumstances, predicated on the fact that the socialist vote in America has decreased as the living standard increased. Geiger counters may soon be nudging the hammers, pliers and screw-drivers at the local hardware store. The Nuclear Measurements Corp. has just completed a full line of portable counters and scintillators for uranium prospectors that will put them within the reach of anyone itching to do a little prospecting in his own backyard on Sunday afternoon. They will range in price from # to #, will have book-type hinged construction, separate battery shelves, rubber shock mounted tubes and will be serviced quickly without tools. Only # seconds will be necessary to remove or replace the operating assembly and only # seconds to replace all batteries. Concentrated juices in the refrigerator may soon be things of the past. A "superconcentrated" grape juice and a "superconcentrated" apple juice have been developed that can be kept on the pantry shelf for at least a year without losing flavor or becoming spoiled. The fact that they can be stored without refrigeration is seen as a point in favor of a possible cutting of the cost of such juices for tomorrow's housewife. Product of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research teams, the super juices are made by processing fresh juice to "strip" it of its flavor essence. It is then concentrated and the essence restored to it. The secret of the super juices' storage capacity is that they are packed at # degrees Fahrenheit and then cooled quickly. In this manner they can be stored in glass or tin equally well Motorists on the thruways and freeways of tomorrow may see some pretty strange looking trucks. Recent tests with #-mile-an-hour winds and scale model trucks in a wind tunnel at the University of Maryland have demonstrated that some pretty radical streamlining is in order for truck-trailers. Engineers found that the gap between the cab and the truck alone accounted for one-quarter of the air resistance. First thing on the agenda for the truck of the future will probably be a sliding panel connection between the two units. Another # of the air resistance can be eliminated by "skirting" the vehicle, or covering the top half of the wheels with an outside sheet of metal. The ultimate in this streamlining would employ a "beaver tail" rear design which would reduce wind resistance another #; but since that would cut down actual storage space, the designers will have to make up for it some other way -- which could produce some weird looking trucks indeed. If the six-fingered mutants science fiction writers are always predicting ever become a reality, plastic surgeons have already come up with a technique to solve the problem. Recent experiments have proved that fingers and toes can be kept in "cold storage" imder the skin of the belly for possible use later to replace those lost by accident. The extra digit can be removed surgically, and buried under the skin of the abdomen; the fingers will stay jointed and the nail remain on the nail bed. In past experiments of this type, the bones were usually absorbed. If a child or a grown-up has a finger sliced off by accident, present day technique hasn't yet been able to find a way to successfully resew it to the stump because the burden of recreating blood circulation is too great. But if the finger has been stored in the abdomen it can be transferred gradually to the stump without ever cutting off circulation. Geologists may someday be doing their digging in the ocean. Professor W. M. Ewing of Columbia's Lamont Observatory has suggested the ocean bottom would reveal one of the richest "finds" ever made. Such a core would be a cross section of all the sedimentary layers piled up since water covered most of the planet and scientists could deduce much about the past history of earth. The bottom-most layer, some # feet down might settle the controversy over how the earth originated. The "time tube" would have to be driven into the bottom of a deep ocean basin, probably some # fathoms below the surface of the water. The project would cost some #, which isn't much considering the rich fund of earth-history which would be revealed. Through drilling a similar core on dry land might seem easier and less expensive, sediment layers on the ocean floor arc much thinner and a greater span of geologic time is covered in the same distance. Survivors of an atomic or a hydrogen bomb attack in the United States may have to spend a week underground. This new estimate was suggested in a recent publication Facts About Fallout, issued by the Federal Civil Defense Admins tration. One of the recommendations for survival calls for a seven-day supply of B-rations, emergency food and water for storage in home shelters. Previous recommendations had postulated only a three-day post-bomb survival pantry. Now, however, they feel that a larger bomb would contaminate a larger area, and it would take a longer time for decontamination crews to survey it for the safety factor. Seven days is almost a maximum estimate, and the time might be considerably less. TV may someday replace railroad detectives and "yard men" in the freight yards of the nation's rolling stock. One such device already in operation is working night and day in the Potomac Yard in Alexandria, Virginia. There, two evervigilant cameras in a shed keep their lenses peeled for freight trains arriving from the south. As the train chugs through the shed at ten miles an hour, the number and initials of each passing car are picked up and relayed to a TV screen in the record office two miles away. The Happy dlown This was a century of peace, plethora and perfection. and little Steven was a misfit, a nonconformist, who hated perfection. He had to learn the hard way... misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable child did not like perfection. The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Iiac, and the soft rainbowcolored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered, were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face wore an expression of pure distaste. A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies, and his large halffocused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his mother to tears Illustrated by Kelly Freas and his father to frightened anger. The doctor said cheerily, "There's nothing the matter with him. He'll eat when he gets hungry enough," and Steven did, to a degree, but not as if he enjoyed it. One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, "I couldn't give them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!" They were old silver, knives and forks nd spoons that looked like what they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's greatgrandmother. Once a year Harriet took the thin??s out and polished them and furtively put them back. This year Steven cried, "Ma!" stretching out his hands toward the silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head. "No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart." Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly spoon to play with. At mealtime he would not be parted from them, and Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived and grew fat. Steven did not like his Rockabye Grib, that joggled him gently and sang him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months, without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm ; so she bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the floor. Harriet said worriedly to her husband, "I don't know what could be the matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!" Richard tried to comfort her. "Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it." Steven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the evening Happy Clown. The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed: the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere. He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself. He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful ; they made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing in and asking him to repeat, went like this: "We're all alike inside, folks, and we ought to be all alike outside." The Happy Clown's viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks. After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed, to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten. Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and wrestling. Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the asteroids without a good breakfast of Gornsies and Choko-Milko, which everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on the floor. Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many advertisements were easiest ; they used pictures and the simplest of language. His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet, "I can read it," but she said, "Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsiel" and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said gravely, "Yes, teasing." He wished he had a silent book. He knew there were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden. Steven was not happy in kiddiegarden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each others faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them. The kiddie-garden monitor had to report of him to his unhappy parents that he was uncooperative and anti-social. He would not merge with the group, he would not acquire the proper attitudes for successful community living, he would not adjust. Most shocking of all, when the lesson about the birdsies and becsies was telecast, he not only refused to participate in the ensuing period of group experimentation, but lost color and disgraced himself by being sick in his corner. It was a painful interview. At the end of it the monitor recommended the clinic. Richard appreciated her delicacy. The clinic would be less expensive than private psychiatry, and after all, the manager of a supermarket was no millionaire. Harriet said to Richard when they were alone, "Dickie, he isn't outgrowing it, he's getting worse! What are we going to do?" It was a special tragedy, since Harriet was unable to have any more kiddies, and if this one turned out wrong... Richard said firmly, "We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what to do." The first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the Happy Clown motif on the slipcover, and said with a beaming face, "Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?" The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and said, "My name's not Stevie. It's Steven." He was a thin little boy, rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five. The psychiatrist said, "Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie, and friends always use nicknames, The boy said politely, "I'd rather not, please." The doctor was undismayed. "I want to help you. You believe that, don't you, Stevie?" The child said, "Steven. Do I have to lie down?" The doctor said agreeably, "It's more usual to lie down, but you may sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?" The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he was desperately unhappy. Perhaps... He said, "You'll tell them." The doctor shook his head. "Nothing goes farther than this room, Stevie -- Steven." The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He said, "I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself." The psychiatrist said reasonably, "But nobody can live by himself, Stevie." He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not correct him again. "You have to learn to live with other people, to work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by yourself." The boy looked up and said starkly, "Never?" The gleaming teeth showed. "But why should you want to?" Steven said, don't know." The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, "Stevie, long before you were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time. Do you kno'v why?" The boy shook his head. "It was because people were different from each other, and didn't understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by visiting each other -- you've heard about the visitors who come from -- " Steven said, "You mean the Happy Tours." "Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't that be fun?" Steven said, "If I could go alone." The doctor looked at him sharply. "But you can't. Try to understand, Stevie, you can't. Now tell me -- why don't you like to be with other people?" Steven said, "All the time -- not all the time" The doctor repeated patiently, "Why?" Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. "They touch me." He seemed to shrink into himself. "Not just with their hands." The doctor shook his head sadly. "Of course they do, that's just -- well, maybe you're too young to understand." The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first intendew and all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director. At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's parents, "I'll be frank with you. You now he has the intelligence of a to be channeled in the right direction. Just now -- well, frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct him." Richard said through dry lips, "You mean a Steyner?" The Director nodded. "The only thing." Harriet shuddered and began to cry. "But there's never been anything like that in our family! The disgrace -- oh, Dickie, it would kill me!" The Director said kindly, "There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell. That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen occasionally -- nobody knows why -- and there's absolutely no disgrace in a Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it... But there's no hurry; in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a week; we'll try therapy first." Being, as the Director had said, derstood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long to learn what was making his Dadsie look stem and white and what was making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color. They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet. H e was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I. Q. was now judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors, popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory. Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, 'The Happy Life." "The Happy Life" recounted the trials of a young physician, too beautiful for his own good, who became involved in endless romantic complications. Steven was given the lead, the preceding actor having moved up to a job as understudy for the Jolly Kitten, and was an immediate success. For one thing he looked the part. He was singularly handsome in a lean darkbrowed way and did not need flattering makeup or special camera angles. He had a deep vibrant voice and perfect timing. He could say, "Darling, this is tearing me to pieces!" with precisely the right intonation, and let tears come into his magnificent eyes, and make his jaw muscles jump appealingly, and hold the pose easily for the five minutes between the ten-minute pitch for Marquis cigarettes which constituted one episode of "The Happy Life." His fan mail was prodigious. If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair, when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he slept ever knew it. He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people, intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than physical, he was yet lonely. During his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him, wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic thev sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that adults did not respond to therapy. There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted, and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in, full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could appreciate what a wonderful world it was. Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none while he was acting in "The Happy Life" until Denise Cottrell joined the cast. Denise -- called Denny, of course -- was a pleasantly plain young woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the exile. For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces, and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and laughter and sometimes tears -- falling in love. They planned, after much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel children. Denise said soberly, "They'd better be clever, because they'll have to learn to hide." They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate Pauline -- Polly -- was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, "When you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?" and Steven said, kissing her, "No, not strange at all." He took her to meet his family -- Denise's family lived three thousand miles away -- and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, "I'm being terribly conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like." While they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, "Give it all you got, kid; it's the chance of the century." Steven said, "Sure, Joey," and allowed his sensitive face to register all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy Clown -- but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with Denise, to some coimtry place where they could be relatively free of pressure. Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone, looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, "Oh, Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They took her to the hospital!" Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the receiver slack in his hand. He said, "What's the matter with her? Which hospital?" "Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour." Polly began to cry. "Oh, Stevie, I feel so -- " "I'll go right over." He cut her off abruptly and went. The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but rarely fatal complications... but under the anesthetic she talked, revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done. At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in such cases. "It was necessary to do something -- you understand, no mention -- " and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to relatives or sweethearts or friends. The doctor said, "All right now? Good... You'll be careful, of course. She may be conscious for a minute ; there's no harm in it yet, she won't move or touch the -- " Steven said, "I'll be careful." He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. "Denise, talk to me. Please, Denise!" She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. "Oh, Stevie, I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling." Steven said, "Denise -- " She frowned. "Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the part, darling?" He drew back a little. "Yes, I got it." She gave him a radiant smile. "That's wonderful ! I'm so proud of you, Stevie." She slept again. tory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet, tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come. every day though after the first time she was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of himself as she would need or understand. For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him. Some censor or other -- perhaps it was the censor of love -- had kept her from even saying his name. For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was a -- what? -- an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some stubborn pride in him refused it. When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it was like loving a ghost -- no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the breathings and mutterings of the other young men, turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on wires. He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There was no fanfare -- the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was mortal -- and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he played the part to perfection. On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at Steven lovingly through the glass. Steven was running a little fast tonight. The engineer made stretching motions with his hands to slow him down, but he used up all his material, even the nugget, with three minutes to spare. Then he said, "All right, folks, now I have a special treat for you," and moved quickly to the center mike. Before the sponsors, or the engineers, or the studio audience, or anybody in the whole American nation knew what was happening, he began rapidly to talk. He said, "Are you all happy? You are, aren't you? -- everybody's happy, because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All alike -- you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of you with a knife." He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. "A long sharp knife, folks!" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which had begun to shake. "Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me -- I'd rather be dead, and damned, and in hell!" Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to play the Happy Clown sign-off record -- loud. Steven finished himself thoroughly, however, by fepeating the same sentiments, with some others he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed. Steven's Steyner W#is a complete success. He recovered from it a subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind him the broken hearts of three nurses and one female physician, and went home to his parents. During his convalescence they were patient with him and passionately kind. In spite of the disgrace they felt, a disgrace that would never be mentioned, they loved him even better than before, because now he was irrevocably like them. Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner, and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should suddenly be so unkind to him. The Happy Clown incident had passed off well -- immediately after it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal, admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor -- a little sharp, to be sure, not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do no wrong. They said to each other, "He laughed till he cried, did you notice? So did I!" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, "Hi, sheep!" (girls were, "Hi, lamb!"), and a novelty company in Des Moines made a quick like sheep andor lambs. But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner -- and of course that part of it was never openly discussed -- sponsors had long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any particular desire to be an actor. Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise after a while and met a girl named Frances -- Franny -- whom he loved and who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not want to miss the Happy Clown.    At the recent # th Western Science Fiction Conference in Los Angeles: Ray Bradbury communicated an enormous amount of enthusiasm as he related how he got his ideas and developed them. "Over my typewriter," he said, "I have a sign that says Dont Think. And I really try not to when I sit down to write a story. I just let my subconscious take over. A character emerges, I delineate some of his characteristics and give him free rein, and as he runs on ahead of me, shouting back for me to follow, I try to capture the echoes of his activities on paper." He revealed the fascinating facets of the geneses of such stories a,s The Foghom, The Tapestry, and The Dwarf, crediting the inspiration for the latter to an observation made by his long-time friend Edmond Hamilton in the distorted mirror section of an amusement pier Fun House... Lou Place offered a delightful s.f. comedy short, in color, about an interplanetary trip to Pluto by two canine scientists and the monster they met on our outermost planet... Ivan Tors, producer of the popular Science Fiction Theater, was present to answer questions about his first series of # telefilms, and showed two, "Frozen Sound" and "The Lost Heartbeat" in advance of their channel releases... In an adjoining annex, many fans spent much time admiring the art exhibit of original paintings and photographic effects by Blaisdell, Bonestell, Schneeman, Fagg, Nuetzell, Dollens, Cobb, Hunter and others. The entire affair was sponsored by the Chesley Donavan Science Fantasy Foundation, a group of live-wire, teenage enthusiasts living in towns adjacent to Los Angeles, with Lew Kovner, Tad Duke, Mark Pinney, Chris Robinson, Ron Cobb and Paul Shoemaker most actively participating in the management of the conference. "down under" in Australia and writing his next book, "The Stars and The City"... Continuing their overseas tour, the Heinleins have recently been heard of in Heidelburg, Egypt and London... Mack Reynolds and the missus are hibernating in Spain... Ray Bradbury wants to return to Sicily... Arthur Jean Cox has completed his first sci-fi novel... Chad Oliver busy on an anthropological monograph... Jerry Bixby and Jim Causey make it in the next annual Best of S.F. from Dikty and Fell... John Bloodstone is working on a novel project to unite two of the greatest s.f. characters of all time... Martha Foley will have a science fiction selection in her next duction of Jack Finney's C oilier s hit and pocketbook. The Body Snatchers, gets an E-for-Excellent from me, and I told Wagner so in the foyer of the Westwood Village after the preview. That rare treat, a film that is very faithfiil to the book -- flight up to the end. commander has to pit his cunning against the magic of a super-science thousands of years ahead of anything he has ever seen? Captain Allen Hawkins was faced with the dilemma of delivering Earth and its civilization into slavery or witnessing its complete destruction. It was truly an "avoidance situation" -- as the psychologists call it -- and Captain Hawkin's answer had to be the most facile one Man had ever been called on to make... long novelette by James McConnell, is one of e most exciting space stories you've read in a long time. Don't miss it in the February IF... Also in this issue: You'll find situation, suspense, thrills in And those peculiar organisms washing up on the beaches will leave you with long thoughts -- when you iam Allen de Ford... Plus other top notch stories and features -- all in the February IF. Dear Mr. Quinn: I recently had occasion to show the story "The Cyber and Justice Holmes by Frank Riley, which appeared in the March # issue of IF, to Joseph Harrison, editor of the New Jersey Law Journal. He was much impressed with the story and the philosophy it expressed, and he has asked me to write to you for permission to reprint the story in the Law Journal during the coming summer. Mr. Harrison feels the story would be of particular interest to the profession especially since the State Bar Association here has for several years been investigating the feasibility of modest applications of modern processing machinery to legal research. -- Vincent Biunno Newark, New Jersey Were glad to extend permission to reprint the story in the New Jersey Law Journal... and delighted that sf is pointing the way in fields other than space travel. Dear Mr. Quinn: The straightforward policy evident in your magazine of reducing extrapolation back to life and so giving science-fiction stories a genuine psychological, socialogical and scientific meaning is both surprising and welcome. I would like to suggest that extrapolation in s-f has really been a search for wider vision and understanding by taking all types of problems and situations to their extreme. Along the road thousands of problems have been met and dealt with as fiction. Could it be that s-f readers and writers are now possessed of a balance and width and depth of vision very isolated in this world of specializations and conflicting ideals? That the direct application of the psychological results of this vast voyage into fantasy is a possibility? It seems to me that s-f represents a body of people whose width of vision could allow the full and free discussion of controversial subjects without resulting in unseemly and useless brawls. In conclusion may I draw your attention to the sum and substance of Jungian psychology in that a higher consciousness sees the conflicts of life as though observing a storm in a valley from a mountain top; a result that is obtained by a similar voyage into fantasy. -- R. M. Carrier Sydney, New South Wales. Perhaps Mr, Carrier has put his finger on the answer to that ever recurring question What is science-fiction? Dear Mr. Quinn: As usual, I enjoyed every story in the last issue of IF even if there was fantasy in it. You see I go for deep space drama, the more technical the better. The two features "What's Your Science I.Q.?" and "Science Briefs" are my real loves and I'm making up files on them. One can really learn a lot from these two features. The color reproductions of the moon-shuttle ships were out of this world. I'm a model plane builder graduating in rockets and space ships and the picture was an excellent source of a plan for a model moon-shuttle. Keep up the good work! -- W. G. Brandt Oakland, Calif. Cigar shape versus spherical -- theres quite a hit of contention on that. However, proceed with the spherical -- well back you up -- theoretically, anyway. Dear Mr. Quinn: I've been a reader of IF for close to a year, but have never written to you until now. Why? Obviously, because I never had an opportunity. IF's no reader-departments-ataU editorial policy put the proverbial damper on my letter writing, so I said Ae heck with it. If Quinn doesn't care what his readers think, I'm certainly not going to break my back trying to get through to him. But, lo, IF is turning over a new leaf. Not only will the next issue feature "Hue and Cry", but I've also discovered via "Fantasy Times" that another feature... ("Odd Genre")... will be included. Needless to say, I'm pleasantly surprised. Like most prozine editors, I suppose you're interested in readers' suggestions. Well, I'm here to strongly suggest that you do completely away with three of your present features. "Science Briefs", "What's Your Science I.Q.?" and "Worth Citing" are a trio of the most boring features that I have yet run across. As for the August issue, all the stories ranked from fair to very good. However, Isaac Asimov, top honors. I didn't like your cover this time, but then I seldom do. The last good one that IF featured was Mel Hunter's moonscape on the April '# ish. Now there's a boy that can draw! -- Kent Moomaw Cincinnati, Ohio Well let the letter from W, C, Brandt and several others in our files give you an idea of an editors dilemma when he starts getting suggestions from the readers. In-cidentally, weve got a cover by Hunter in the works, Hes been busy with some stuf for the mus eum of Natural History in NY, But we snagged him away from the fossils long enough to do one for us. Dear Mr. Quinn: This is to thank you for a magazine that's worth its price and the space it takes up. I'm always sorry that I missed an issue or two of IF back at the beginning, but that's my penalty for shying away from a newer book. I'm catching up though, and I have to admit (gladly) that I've several times pushed aside Astounding's more technical pages in order to get down to more enjoyable reading in more colorful IF. Others in my family, various relatives, scrounge through IF, and really enjoy reading it -- while they never showed any interest in other s-f books I had lying around -- which goes to show you've got a wide general appeal. Please keep IF smart and original, and don't bother too much about following the well worn grooves in the s-f field. There are too many mags doing just that. -- A. S. B. Hallam Maywood, Calif. Dear Editor: I've been reading IF for quite some time and find it highly entertaining; but I, for one, believe you could improve on two points. First, there should be more stories. Fast readers can finish the ish in no time, then have to sit back impatiently for the next. Second, there are people like myself who do not fully understand certain phrases and terms and would like to know more about certain planets. I am certain it would be greatly appreciated if you would print a dictionary section in the back of each issue to enlighten such ignoramuses as myself. -- P. E. Hamler Roseburg, Oregon The first point can be covered by the old cry ( and true as all old sayings are true) that good stories are scarce. The second, by our recommendation that you try the science quiz we feature in each issue. It's designed for both those who flatter themselves they know the answers and those who feel they'd like to know. Dear Mr. Quinn: Aren't you interested in the overseas market? There are eight million people in Australia, a good many of them who read s-f and who would certainly appreciate the opportunity to read IF. Please give the idea serious consideration. -- R. H. Harding Maylands, West Australia # -- Clavius. # -- Twenty-six. # -- Callisto. # -- Antikhthon. # -- Ninety-eight. # -- Bary center. # -- #. #I -- Osmium. # -- Closer. # -- Vulcan. # -- Light. # -- Tesseract. # -- Two, # -- # degrees. # -- Sixth. # -- Yes. # -- Four. way, a simple, God-fearing people would regard a spaceman, he thought. Especially the particular spaceman who had delivered them from persecution and brought them to the Promised Land; who had nonchalantly manipulated a ship three acres long by one acre wide with nothing but his fingers; who had, in the course of Exodus, performed exploits that made Moses' rivening of the waters of the Red Sea seem like a picayun miracle by comparison; and who had, after the Promised Land had been attained, made many wanderings into the Wilderness to commune with God, sometimes carrying the sacred Book itself. But that attitude by itself would # fantasy and sciencefiction books and backissue magazines at # to # under what theyVe cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #K Verona, Pennsylvania not have been enough to engender the social pressure that had shaped his way of life without the catalyst that the single casualty of planetfall had provided. Reston could still appreciate the irony in the fact that that single casualty should have involved the most essential pillar in the structure of the new society -- the Polish priest himself... He opened the door and peered out into the snow. Little Piotr Pyzykiewicz was standing on the doorstep, a huge dish in his arms. "Good evening. Father. I've brought you some kielhasa and some golabki and some pierogi and some kiszki and -- Father Reston opened the door wide. Being a priest had its drawbacks of course -- maintaining peace in a monogamous society that refused to stay evenly balanced as to sex, for one, and making certain that his sometimes too greedy flock did not over-exploit the simple indigenes, for another. But it had its compensations, too. For, while Reston could never have children of his own, he had many many children in a different sense of the word, and what harm could there be in an old man's pretending to a virility which circumstance and society had denied him? "Come in, my son he said.    It is almost folly to talk of the limitations of the mind. I tell you that the limitations of your mind are much farther off than you suppose they are. -- Louis Sullivan appears in telescopes as a mirror-bright object with an extremely high albedo or reflective index. That is, it reflects back to the observer a large portion of the sunlight which strikes it. The inference drawn from this phenomenon is that Europa once had a heavy gaseous envelope which has precipitated out as a thick layer of frozen gases which now covers the entire surface with mountainous layers of ice. (Drawings by Mel Hunter) rnp you science fiction fans who rUli like to sit down with a puzzle that offers a real challenge -- that will test your knowledge of things scientific and otherwise -- grab a copy of this newest and latest magazine of puzzles by expert composers for expert puzzle doers -- crossword P U Z Z L E S It's chock-full of some of the most interesting crosswords, diagramless puzzles, crostics and cryptograms to be found anywhere In America... the kind guaranteed to keep your wits nimble and your pencil busy. Weeks of fun in every issue! At all newsstands -- Only #c  ture satellite is shown here in two phases of its brief existence: the initial phase, its launching (left) as part of a threestage rocket, and (below) its final moment as it flips over just before disintegrating from intense heat of friction with denser atmosphere. See page # for more detailed description. (Drawings by Mel Hunter) All Stories New and Complete I "Atomic Submarine Lurking Under Reef in Southern   California Waters" by Mel Hunter  IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale February #th i # I wm # I # I # I #  a E #  #I I # I # I E  genre  title of a story by John Russell Fearn published # years ago and remembered by me to this day. I may also remember it as my motto for the Glevention: during # terrific hours of conventioning, I slept approximately # ! Last day and nite of all I went clean 'round the clock. The incentive for this anti-Morpheus marathon? Who could sleep with the opportunity at hand to get (Artificial Satellite Program) straight from the maestro's mouth? -- to hear Willy Ley in person, letting his distinguished hair down with the s.f. aficionados. Who could sleep with the clown princes of the imagi-nation, Bob Bloch, Bob Tucker and Isaac Asimov, constantly tickling the funnybone? Who wanted shuteye with the projectoscope programs showing famous collectors' choicest items (First Editions, foreign editions, unpublished magazines, rare art work, doppelgangers, etc.) on a large screen, accompanied by miked descriptions by Sam Moskowitz, Dr. C. L. Barrett, and Weaver Wright, curator of Miskatonic University? Who wouldn't be ashamed to sleep in the presence of the British beauty, Pamela Bulmer, and what a shame it would have been to've slept and missed any of the whimsical humor of husband Ken, fan and author from England who was International Guest of Honour of the occasion. Run this list of favorite authors over your tongue: Damon Knight, Fritz Leiher, Mark Clifton, Judith Merril, Randall Garrett, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Rog ward E. Smith, E. Everett Evans, Lloyd Eshbach, Betsy Curtis, Thelma Hamm, James E. Gunn, Jim Harmon, Bob Silverberg, Wallace West, Frank Riley, Bob Bloch, and many others. Nearly every "pro" present was a guest of the University of Chicago ScienceFiction Club at an afternoon autograph party, and the ink flowed like wine, with many a fen bringing home a fine memento of the occasion in the form of a personally inscribed book. At one time at # a.m. conventioneers were in the midst of enjoying a revival of the classic fantasy film, Lost Horizon. The first nite of all, conventioneers were immediately put in a jovial mood by being shown the scientificomedy riot starring Alec Guiness, The Man in the White Suit . A feature of this Convention that I found especially pleasing was the showing of motion picture records of a number of past Conventions, in a program assembled by cameraman Bill Grant of Canada. (Was that sans-moustached, harlequin-glassed, twenty pounds slimmer guy I caught a glimmer of in the # Toronto films really me?) And vorite fan, at the banquet in Chicago in '#; and Hugo Gemsback, the Father of Science Fiction; and AE van Vogt, "the man in the bright suit" ; and Charles Beaumont and John Campbell and Margaret St Clair and Philip Jos# Farmer and more interesting people than you'd care to shake a slipstick at. And for me, a first glimpse at the goings-on of the first Convention I ever missed, the Nolacon: New Orleans' convention of #, the year my Dad died when I was enroute. fiction (and all its wolves are not of the wehr variety) walks great beauty. San Francisco gave us The Goddess Known as Jessyca: supple, silver reed of womanhood, bending in the wind of the sighs of her would-be wooers, her stricken swains. Jessyca the remote, the unapproachable, the dweller on the pink cloud. Jessyca -- unbelievably, a fan -- the unforgettable. That was #. Time rockets on. # : and from the mists of obscurity, from northeast of nowhere, drifting into the ken of fen and pro's alike from some unlikely miniscule pin-mark on the map of the United States, came (remember the name, and ask for an introduction at the next convention)... Ruth Landis ! She came, she saw, she conquered. Queen for a Day? Nay, Queen for the Convention. She moved always in the highest echelons. (It could probably be said she sat in the laps of the Gods!) All paid court to her; and if there were giants in the "good old days" of stf, before it put on a bow-tie and went sci-fi on us, there never were such living dolls reading our favorite literature. Twenty years ago we male fans would have welcomed a crosseyed gal with buck teeth (and not even balked at the cost of her teeth) just to know the companionship of a female fan. Today, in La Landis, we discover a Grace Kelly who's been reading s.f. for # years! Will wonders never cease! (We hope not.) For the good of all fankind (and the professionals who made her their ubiquitous mascot) may her tribe increase. Chicago I had the good fortune to have as a companion James E. Gunn, one of the newer voices in science fiction who's going places. Jim gave one of the most solid, most perceptive speeches at the Convention -- "The Function of Science Fiction". I asked him if, in his s.f. writings, he felt he had anything special to say or was pointing any way in particular, and got an answer that I liked : he said he was trying to write stories with an optimistic note and a belief in human beings. When Jim and I parted company, It was with the feeling on my part that if we had (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Mel Hunter What can a man do when he alone must decide the fate of Earth and all its people -- and when the choices offered him are slavery and death... S I T U AT I O N the observation room of the Sunward looking out at subspace. He was a medium-sized man with a trim squareness to him that suggested he had been in the military most of his life. He had a good deal of gold on his sleeve and a good deal of sliver in his hair, and he had discovered in his many years in the Space Navy that the two usually went hand in hand. In the background he could hear the noise and ordered confusion of the ship's bridge. But at the moment he paid it little attention, concentrating instead on the observation window. It was not the first time that he had stood thus, gazing at whatever lay beyond the shell of the ship. Almost every time he had put the Sunward through the dark shadow of subspace, he had deserted the bridge for at least a few moments to come and stare out the window. "God," he said out loud, repressing a shiver that wanted to crawl down his spine. "Perhaps 'God forsaken would be a better description, came a voice from behind him. The voice belonged to Dr. J. L. Broussard, the Sunward's senior psychologist. And although the two men were on more than casually friendly terms, Hawkins didn't turn to greet him. The fascination of the observation port seemed to obviate the normal requirements of courtesy. "At times like this I think you're right. 'God forsaken.' That's just what it is," Hawkins said. "Completely black, completely empty. You know, it frightens me every time we make the jump through it." A voice from the bridge called out, "Twelve minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain." "Very well," Hawkins said loudly enough to be heard on the bridge. "Perhaps it frightens all of us just a little," said Broussard. He leaned his oversized body against the observation room wall. His big, mild face had a relaxed look to it. "I wonder why it affects us that way, he added almost as if it were a casual afterthought, but his eyes had a too-shrewd look to them. "You're the psychologist. You tell me why," Hawkins said. He paused for just a moment, expecting Broussard to reply. But after a few seconds when the man gave him no conversational support, Hawkins continued. "For my part, I guess it frightens me because -- well, because a man seems to get lost out there. In normal space there are always stars around, no matter how distant they may be, and you feel that you've got direction and location. In subspace, all you've got is nothing -- and one hell of a lot of that." He pushed his cap back until it perched comfortably on the rear of his head. "It's incredible when you stop to think about it. An area -- an opening as big as the whole of our universe, big enough to pack every galaxy we've ever seen in it and still have lots of room left over. All that space -- and not a single atom of matter in it anywhere." Captain Hawkins shook his grayed head in wonder. "At least," he went on. "Not a single atom in it until we came barging in to use it as a short cut across our own universe." The man on the bridge called out, "Ten minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain." "Very well," Hawkins answered. Broussard shifted his considerable weight into a more comfortable position. "You feel rather strongly about this, don't you?" "That I do," said Hawkins. As much as he enjoyed an occasional conversation with the psychologist, Broussard's questions often got on his nerves. "Don't you think it's better we discovered subspace than if we were still back trying to beat the speed of light in our own universe?" Broussard asked him. "Oh, stop looking for a dangling neurosis somewhere, Broussard," Hawkins said, managing a smile. "You know quite well that I've got absolutely nothing at all against the use of subspace for 'rapid transportation,' so to speak. It's just that I'm the sort of man who likes to know where he's going all the time. And out here, in this stuff, you lose your sense of direction. There's no up, no down, no in between. It took spacemen a long time to get accustomed to the wild freedom they found out in the middle of normal space. But at least there you could always head for a star if you got lost. Out here..." He gestured futilely towards the blackness staring in at them from the window. They stood silently contemplating it for several moments. "Eight minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain," came the voice from the bridge again. "Very well," Captain Hawkins replied, breaking the brief silence between the two men. Then he went on, "Broussard, have you ever been out there in that stuff? Oh, I don't mean like now, in a ship or a rescue craft. I mean in a spacesuit, all by yourself." The psychologist shook his head. "No, I never have." He paused for just a second, then added, "What's it really like?" There were times, Hawkins thought, when even the phrasing of a simple question on Broussard's part carried a slight sting. But like the brief pain that accompanies the probing point of a hypodermic needle, the tiny barbs contained in the man's questions were soon forgotten. Hawkins smiled. "It's my own private guess of what hell will turn out to be. 'God forsaken,' did we say? That's just about it. We stopped to repair a ship once, and some of us had to go outside to work on it. I guess I was out there for less than three hours -- no more than that. And yet I was almost a madman by the time they hauled me back inside. I can't explain why." His voice trailed off into nothingness. "I guess it was just the blackness that did it." "Six minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain." "Very well." For the first time Hawkins turned to face the psychologist. "During my training at the Academy they locked me up in a closet once, just as a joke. I was without light for hours, but it was nothing like that out there. You should know, Broussard. Why does it look so much blacker in that window now than any other black I've ever seen?" Broussard looked the man over carefully before answering, wondering just exactly what sort of reply might be called for. "I think the reason is that you've got close to optimum conditions for it here in the observatory," he said momentarily. "You always get the blackest shade of black inside a ring of white light. Look at the window." Hawkins turned to do as directed. "There you've got a white frame surrounding the complete absence of light. That's just about as good as you can get. No wonder it looks so black to you." Hawkins shook his head, not so much in disbelief as in wonder. "As a matter of fact," the psychologist continued almost in a hurry. "If you stayed out in subspace all by yourself, with no ship near you and no light of your own, after a while it wouldn't seem black to you at all. You'd get cortical adaptation, and things would just look gray. And not too long after that, you'd stop 'seeing' entirely, as we think of seeing. Or, as a friend of mine once said, under those conditions you'd 'see' as much with your elbows as you would with your eyes. Funny, isn't it? We usually think of black as being the absence of light. And yet, in order to 'see' black, we've got to have at least a little light around every once in a while." The watchman on the bridge droned out the time again. "Four minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain." Allen Hawkins gave a large sigh, then readjusted the cap on his head. He had the feeling that Broussard's little lecture on science, while factually accurate, was delivered more to obscure the facts than to illuminate. "I'd better get to the bridge now, Broussard. Not that they really need me, but... He left the sentence dangling, then turned and walked briskly out of the observation room. gave the dials and the illuminated screens a rapid, practiced glance and then sat down in his chair to one side of the operations panel. There was actually no known danger to this shifting back and forth from one space to another. No ship had ever encountered any difficulties whatsoever in doing so; there had never been an accident of any kind during transition. The whole thing was as completely automatic as man could make it, and apparently entirely safe. But still Hawkins had never made the shift one way or another without feeling a telltale tightening of muscles deep inside him, and without wondering just what would happen if they got stuck in all that darkness. "One minute, Captain," the watch officer reminded him. Hawkins nodded in reply, his face illuminated by the flashing lights on the control panel in front of him. He watched their changing signals calmly with knowing eyes. "Thirty seconds... all drives off," sang out a voice. The hands on the clock crept slowly around the dial. "Zero..." There was no sound, no feeling, no jerk nor jar, no noise to mark the transition -- nothing at all different from the moment before except a slight increase in the total light flux in the room. Stars. Captain Allen Hawkins smiled softly to himself. Stars... something to cling to, he whispered under his breath. "Bridge from Navigation," came a voice close to his ear. "Go ahead, Navigation," he said after pressing the communications button. "Looks like we hit it right on the nose, Captain," the Navigator told him. "Can't tell just yet, of course, until I feed the positions of the nearest stars into Betsy and she decides where we are. But it looks good from here, and if I'm right, the one we're hunting for is about eight o'clock high from the nose of the ship as she sits now. I'll plot a course there right now. Do you want to wait until Betsy decides that's the one, or shall we take a chance and head for it first?" The Navigator always asked the question, but he knew what the answer would be. "We'll start just as soon as you can give us the course," Hawkins replied. "Aye, aye. Captain," the Navigator replied. Hawkins turned to the officer on duty. "Mr. Smith, you will remain as you are until you receive the course from the Navigator. Once you have it, you will get underway immediately." "Aye, aye, Captain," Smith replied. "I'll be in my cabin if you want me," Hawkins said as he left the bridge. He was rather tired and he meant to go straight to bed, but somehow he found himself stopping by the observation room en route. Broussard was still there, looking out of the window at the stars. "Lovely, aren't they, Broussard?" Hawkins said. "So you feel the stars are lovely?" the psychologist answered slowly. "Yes, I do. They give us light, and hope for the future, and more than that, a frame of reference when we fly through the dark reaches of our universe. They're more than beautiful -- they're necessary." As he turned to leave, Hawkins chuckled to himself. Just let the head-shrinker try to read a neurosis into that! It took them three weeks from the day they arrived back in normal space to make sure that they had found a sun with planets, and another three weeks from then to make landfall on the second of the four satellites this particular solar system had to offer. Almost from the very beginning they were elated with their luck, for the planet seemed to be a first class find. The Sunward and her crew had been exploring this section of space for more than six years, and out of the thirty-eight systems they had investigated, this was the first that offered any promise of eventual human habitation. Man had been in space less then one hundred years. At first he had thrown himself towards the stars with crude rocket-driven craft A few years later he had invented a type of atomic drive which allowed him to approach the speed of light. But it was the discovery of the subspace technique of travel which had theoretically given him the whole universe to live in. There were drawbacks, however, and they were important ones. To tear himself from the matrix of normal space he still needed huge machines, and probably always would. This meant the building of exceedingly large space vessels, like the Sunward , which could contain not only the equipment necessary to propel him into the blackness of subspace, but which also could be equipped with the mammoth control mechanisms necessary to regulate the changeover. The switch to subspace could never be made near the surface of a planet, for the field forces generated during the change had farflung effects and were quite capable, even under tightest control, of tearing loose a huge chunk of a planet and dropping it into subspace with the ship. Big ships meant big money, and even now there were fewer than a thousand of the large exploration craft in operation. Each ship could average fewer than ten new worlds a year. So while man had taken a lease on the universe, it seemed that at his present rate of exploration a great many centuries would pass before he finished the charting of even the stars in his own back yard. But if at times he became discouraged at the immensity of the task, there were always moments of great joy which helped to spur a man on. The men of the Sunward named the new star Clarion, and the habitable planet they called Trellis. It was the second of three large and one very small planets which circled Clarion. The Sunward spent more than two weeks circling over Trellis, making maps and checking the atmosphere. Then the council of scientists on board picked a landing site and Captain Hawkins brought the ship down on the spot they had chosen. Exactly twentvseven days from the hour they landed, the council voted unanimously that Trellis was safe for human habitation, and Allen Hawkins gave the orders to have the hatches opened to the Trellian air. The Captain, as was customary, was the first man to set foot on the soil. He led the brief ceremonies that claimed the world as Earth's own and then planted the Terran flag. He also took the customary measure of declaring it a ship's holiday, and even threw out the first baseball when the inevitable game started up later in the afternoon. But he didn't stay to watch, preferring to stroll around the landscape by himself for a little while. He had been walking for a little more than an hour, traveling in a wide circle around the ship, when he came upon Dr. Broussard, sitting quietly under a shady tree, a book in one hand and a container of beer in the other. The beer looked good and cold, and the shade looked comfortable. "Mind if I join you?" Hawkins asked, and since he was Captain of the ship, scarcely waited for an invitation before he sat down and opened himself a beer. It tasted as good as it had looked, and Hawkins soon found himself in an expansive mood. "Tell me, Broussard," he said good-naturedly. "How come you aren't out snooping around, making sure that the crew's libidos aren't acting up or something." Cocking an ear towards the distant ball field, rife with the excited noise that always accompanies such a game, Broussard replied, "It sounds to me as if the crew is getting about as much libidinal discharge as I could hope for under the circumstances. That being the case, I saw no reason why the ship's alienist shouldn't have a little time off." Hawkins leaned back comfortably against the tree. "Alienist. That's a pretty strange word these days, Broussard. Used to be what they called psychiatrists in England back in the old days, right?" Hawkins was of vaguely English descent and felt it behooved him to know such things. "That's right. They revived the term briefly a hundred years ago when we first got out into space, because they thought that psychologists might be needed for the first contacts with alien cultures." A slight frown came over the man's face. "The word's fallen into disuse again of late, however," he continued. Captain Hawkins grunted in assent. "No aliens, eh?" "That's right. No aliens. Thousands of new worlds, thousands upon thousands of new species, but not one of them intelligent enough to hold a candle to our earthside chimpanzee. But still they go on outfitting each of the exploration vessels with psychologists, and outfitting all of the psychologists for the double task of soothing the crew's psyches and making contact with mythical intelligent races that so far we've only dreamed about." Broussard emptied his container of beer and with a single vicious movement threw it as far away from him as he could. "I must say, however, that of late they've been spending more time training us to be mind doctors than to be official greeters to unknown cultures." Suddenly Broussard straightened up. "But why should you twit me about deserting my work today. I saw you throw out the first baseball. How come you didn't stay for the game? Surely that falls under the province of a Captain's job." Allen Hawkins smiled. "I learned long ago, Broussard, that there are times when the presence of the Commanding Officer has an undesired influence on the spirits of the crew. After all, as Captain of the Sunward , I can't very well take part in the game itself. Who'd dare to strike me out when I came to bat?" He stopped to think about that for a moment. "Or, maybe I should have said, I don't think anybody would dare to strike me out." "Ah, yes, the Father Figure' Broussard said laughing. "That's right. So I can't play. Nor can I umpire, for half the fun of baseball is arguing with the umpire and I couldn't allow any of that. And if I just watched without playing the game itself, a lot of the crew might think that I felt myself too high and mighty to take part in their proletarian type of recreation. So I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. So what did I do...?" "You left the field," Broussard answered, lighting up a cigarette after offering the other man one. "That's right, I left the baseball field and went walking." "That's not quite what I meant when I said 'you left the field " Broussard went on. "It's a psycho logical term, first used by Lewin many centuries ago. Any time a man is in a conflict situation, faced with two or more alternatives that he finds it difficult to choose among, he may solve his problem by choosing none of them # Hawkins stretched his legs out restfully on the grass in front of him. As he thought about it, there had been few times in the past when he had given the psychologist his head and let the man talk. Probably, Hawkins thought to himself, Broussard spends most of his time listening to the petty confessions of all of us and never gets the opportunity to unload a bit himself. He caught himself wondering just who on Earth confesses the Pope... And so he uttered the magical words, "I don't think I quite understand..." Broussard scarcely needed the encouragement to continue. "Lewin liked to think of psychological situations as approximating physical situations. He spoke in terms of valences and attractions, of vectors and forces operating through psychological distances. For example, let's consider the case of a child put into a long hallway. At one end of the hall is a large, fierce dog. At the other end is an ugly man with a big switch. We tell the child that he has to go to one end of the hall or the other. This becomes an 'avoidance-avoidance' situation in the Lewinian terminology. Both the man with the switch and the fierce dog carry negative valences -- that means that the child actually doesn't want to approach either of them -- and the closer the child comes to one of them, the more powerfully it repels him. Just as with magnets -- the closer you bring one negative charge to another negative charge, the more powerful is the force of repulsion." Captain Hawkins smiled. It wasn't going to be as bad as he had feared. "What does all this have to do with baseball?" "We'll get back to home plate in just a moment. But first, let's continue with the child. We put him in the hallway, tell him to go to one end or the other, and then we just sit back and watch. At first he stands about as close to the center of the hall as he can, assuming that the two negative valences are about of equal strength. He's undecided -- can't make up his mind which is worse, the man or the dog. So we prompt him to action -- shock him or tell him that he has to keep moving. Then he begins to move back and forth, vacillating between the two undesirable objects. So we apply more and more pressure to try to force him to a decision. But the closer he moves to the dog, for example, the more distasteful it becomes, and the less dangerous does the man seem to be. So the child turns around and starts towards the man. But here the situation is repeated. It's a beautiful example of a conflict situation." Giving vent to a well-disciplined snort, Captain Hawkins said, "And eventually the child either gets well switched or badly bitten, eh?" "No, that's where you're wrong. Eventually the child tries to escape from the hallway altogether. Sometimes he'll try to climb the walls, or break down a door, or anything like that which will release him from what has become an impossible psychological environment." "So," said Hawkins. "I think you left me stranded on first base." Broussard laughed. "Pardon the sermon, Captain. What I was trying to point out was that the baseball game represented just about the same sort of thing to you as the hallway did to the child. Any time a human being is faced with two impossible decisions like that, he usually ends up by 'leaving the field' of conflict altogether. Nowadays we can even predict the exact field forces necessary to bring on this type of behavior." "And what do you predict I'm going to do right now?" Hawkins asked with a bit of a laugh in his voice. "That's an easy one. I predict you're going to ask for another beer -- and that I'll give it to you. No conflict there." He opened a container that chilled itself automatically as he handed it to his superior officer. Hawkins blew the foam from it and then took a long, satisfying swallow. "There are times when I'm glad I'm just an uncomplicated space officer," he said presently. Broussard grinned. "Sorry if I seemed to be giving you a lecture, Captain. I'm afraid you would have enjoyed a good, healthy discussion of Freud much more. My own particular problem is that I'm much more interested in thinking about the remote possibilities of man's encountering new types of intelligences than I am in playing father confessor to a bunch of space rats. Back on Earth the social psychologists felt that Lewin's work offered a fruitful means of analyzing the motivational components in any alien society we might encounter. I guess my trotting out the vector charts was just a neat example of wishful thinking." Captain Allen Hawkins didn't bother to answer the remark for some time. He was too busy watching something move slowly towards them across the grassy plain. Finally he halfwhispered to his companion, "Don't put those charts away too soon, Broussard. You finally may have a chance to use them." and yellow lights flashed insistently in front of the man, demanding his attention. The clattering noise of a computer working at high speed added to the unholy din of the small spaceship's control room. Surveyor Lan Sur ran his deft fingers rapidly over the studs on the control panel in front of him. He scarcely looked at the controls as he manipulated them, concentrating instead on the screens before him -- screens which showed the attack patterns of the seven large warships that surrounded him. One of the attacking enemy ships loomed incredibly large directly ahead of him. Lan Sur's fingers hesitated, and then, at precisely the proper second, pressed the firing studs. The scout ship seemed to dance lightly upward as it passed high above the larger, slower enemy craft. Lan Sur whirled his ship around just in time to witness the total disintegration of the enemy. "One down," he thought, but took no particular pride in his accomplishment. There were still six left. The enemy regrouped, spreading out into a cone-like formation. He knew the trick well, and aimed his ship to make its next pass high above the open mouth of this formation. But the enemy opened up the top of the cone as fast as Lan Sur tried to avoid it. He fired a warning salvo and tucked his defensive screens in tight around him. But the uppermost enemy ship incredibly picked up more speed, sliding off into an extremely intricate maneuver. Lan Sur knew that if it could hold to this path, it would pass several miles above him, neatly sandwiching him between the enemy vessels below. He could have turned aside at once, but that would have been an admission of possible defeat, and he could never admit defeat. If he could beat the other ship to the topping maneuver, he would destroy not only it, but the ships at the small end of the cone as well when he came crashing down on them from above. For just a moment he felt certain that he could succeed. The scout ship vibrated tensely as it hurled itself forward. The red lights on the control panel doubled in number, then tripled. The computer roared instructions so rapidly that he could hardly keep up with them. The warning bells went mad with ringing. "I think I can make it," he told himself. But he refused to become excited. He had come this close to victory before, and had still failed. Now he saw he was gaining on the enemy ship, but it was a thin margin of safety indeed. The computer screamed with danger signals as the huge craft came closer and closer. Lan Sur leaned forward slightly in his seat, a little strain showing on his usually relaxed face. To his surprise, he found himself saying aloud, "Yes, I think I can." But he did not. Suddenly the enemy craft shot by above him and belched forth a thick burst of light. The huge black warships immediately beneath him echoed the call, catching his smaller, fleeter ship in a double barrage. And it was all over. The red lights on the control panel blinked out quickly, one by one. The warning bells ceased their claxons, the computer settled down to a quiet hum. The screens went blank. A thin piece of tape spewed forth from the computer. It read, "This scout ship utterly annihilated. End of problem." Lan Sur looked the tape over sourly. "Damn," he said, leaning back in his seat. He tore the tape into little pieces and deposited them angrily in the reclaim box. Reluctantly he pressed the "Analysis" button on the computer. The machine would issue him a complete dissection of the whole mock war game, pointing out with deadly accuracy the mistakes he had made. "Damn," he said again, thinking over the past battle. He got up from die control panel and walked over to his relaxation chair. Sitting down, he took a small bit of food from a container and began chewing on it viciously. It wasn't really so bad that he lost the engagement, he told himself. The pre-battle odds were greatly against him. And as often as he had tried it, he had never been able to take on seven enemy ships and still survive. Sometimes it seemed an almost impossible task to him. However, he had a deep desire to solve the problem, because the computer told him it might be solvable if he took the proper course of action. Evidently, it would take a lot more work, a great deal more study on his part before he found the solution. "But time is something I have plenty of," he said aloud, stretching out comfortably in the chair. For several hours he puzzled over the thing, taking time out to digest the taped analysis of his mistakes, and then attacked the problem afresh. Eventually, out of sheer exhaustion, he slipped off into a deep, restful sleep, quite confident that the next time he tried the sevenship problem, or at most the time following that... Lan Sur awoke to quietness. He stretched his lean, lithe legs, slowly, returning to normal awareness as he did so. Once he was completely awake, he sat down in front of the control panel again. A single amber light betuned from the board. While he had been asleep, the scout ship had come out of its C # drive and had slowed to a stop. They had reached their immediate destination, and since he was asleep, the computer had simply turned on the protective screens around the ship and had begun a survey of the sun system they had arrived at. He pressed a button on the computer and then leaned back to digest the information that the machine began feeding him at once. The sun was of the A#Lu type, just as had been forecast before his voyage. It had three large inner planets and a tiny fourth much too far away from the solar furnace and much too small to be of any practical value. Lan Sur read the report carefully, noting with pleasure certain of the facts presented him. He was in the midst of an interesting section concerning the chemical composition of the atmosphere on the second of the planets when a small bell on the computer rang and the machine became silent for just a second or two, then began pouring out material at a furious rate. Lan Sur, who had been yards of tape behind in his reading, dropped the atmosphere discussion and began to read the new information being spewed forth. A frown crossed his face as he read the first few words, "Alien contact established..." He hoped this new development would not take him away from his games for too long a time. The computer had detected the emanation of modulated energy waves coming from the second planet. Immediately it had withdrawn its wide-flung detector beams and had concentrated fully upon the source of the waves. Lan Sur reset the computer so that only a very small part of the huge machine would carry on the routine work of new investigation, while the greater part would be put to work in an attempt to decode what was obviously a language being broadcast in some obsolete manner. He noted with pride that the aliens, whoever they might be, had not at the moment reached the point of development where C # communication was available to them, but were still limited to the raw speed of light for the transmission of messages, and hence, he felt sure, for the transmission of space ships too. This meant, he knew, that he had probably stumbled onto a race of beings still new to the reaches of space who would be helpless in the face of even his own lightly armed scout ship. However, according to patrol instructions, he activated a switch that relayed all pertinent information by means of a sealed C # beam back to the nearest Dakn Patrol base, and put in a formal call for the presence of Patrol battleships. One way or another, they would be needed... It took the computer less than a day and a half, as Lan Sur figured time, to break the language of the aliens discovered on the second planet. The Surveyor spent this time working feverishly on a new idea he had for the solution of the seven-ship problem, and was quite upset when the computer finished its problem of decoding the new tongue before Lan Sur had worked out all the details of his latest attack on the mock war games. Reluctantly he put himself into a light trance, during which the machine taught him the new language. He did not actually learn to think in the new tongue, for that would have imposed limiting strictures on his mental processes. Rather, his mind was turned into a kind of translating factory. He had the freedom to think in the terms and in the concepts that he was accustomed to, and his mind simply expressed these thoughts as best it could in the newly-learned way of speaking. The computer had also arrived at an incredibly clear knowledge of the socio-politico-psychological structure of the new civilization, but aside from a brief glance at some of the more intriguing points, Lan Sur ignored this information and simply relayed it along to the Galactic base where social scientists could pore over it in their own bemused leisure. For his tasks Lan Sur hardly felt that he needed it. Once Lan Sur had memorized the language, he put his scout ship under a screen of complete invisibility and landed it some few miles away from the space ship the aliens were using as their permanent base. He let the computer drink up what additional information it required to make sure both that the planetary conditions were suitable to his own particular chemical make-up, and that the aliens were indeed as impotent as his previous estimates had seemed to indicate. Once the computer gave him its blessing, he walked out into the bright planetary sunlight. sard sat up puzzled. "What do you mean, don't put away my Lewinian vector charts too soon? I may have a chance to use them on whom?" Captain Allen Hawkins simply stared straight ahead of him, his lips forming unanswerable questions. Broussard took his cue from the man's head and stared too. And then he understood. The alien, for from its dress alone it obviously was an alien, was still quite a distance away from them. It came walking towards them with a kind of protective sparkle about it -- and even from that distance they could sense a feeling of power about the man. "Man?" Broussard caught himself thinking. Yes, it did seem very much like a man -- not only like a human, but like a masculine human. But immediately Broussard told himself that this might not be the case. True, humanoid it was, but because it displayed a certain lack of the more obvious female sexual characteristics it did not follow that it was male, "Why, they could even have ten different sexes for all we know," Broussard thought to himself. "I think it's coming towards us" Hawkins said quietly. Broussard watched the alien move a few more yards and then agreed. Hawkins activated a small radio that he carried in one of his shirt y pockets. "Hello, Communications," he spoke rapidly into the microphone. "This is Hawkins. Put me through to the Bridge at once. And make sure you record every word that I say." The words "Aye, aye, Captain," were forthcoming immediately from the tiny loudspeaker. The Captain rated a special communications channel that was guarded by the radio shack at all times, and it came as no surprise to Hawkins that the reply was prompt He had expected it to be. "Bridge here, go ahead." "This is Captain Hawkins, Bridge. Who's the Duty Officer?" Hawkins knew who the man was, but asked to give the man a chance to realize fully that the Captain was aware with whom he was speaking. "Lieutenant Medboe, Captain, ready for instructions." Hawkins thought for just a moment and then answered. "Mr. Medboe, the information that I am about to pass along to you is not to leave the Bridge under any circumstances. As soon as I finish, you will contact the radio shack and make certain that what I have said, if it has been monitored, is not passed along from that particular point either. Do you understand me." Medboe's voice sounded a little puzzled, "Of course, Captain. Your instructions will be followed to the letter." "Now then," Hawkins continued. "You might as well know at once that I think we've made contact with an alien race. I don't know what this means to you personally, but to the human race it means a great deal and we can under no circumstances risk the occurrence of any incident. You will therefore send someone to find Commander Petri and inform him that as Executive Officer, he will be in charge of the ship until I return to it. And while you are doing that, you will summon all the men to return to the ship at once. You may not give them the real reason -- tell them that there is a bad storm coming and that I have ordered them all inside. It is imperative that none of them realizes the true reason. Do you understand?" Medboe's voice sounded almost hurt. "Aye, aye, Captain," he said. "Good. Once everyone is back inside the ship, have Petri summon all officers not on watch and all scientists to the large meeting hall. They will be given a chance to observe and listen to the contact as it is made. Which reminds me -- have the communications department set up a long range television camera on me at once, and pipe the image down into the hall. You will have them record both sight and sound for later use. You will also inform Petri that a state of emergency exists as of this moment by my personal order, and that if necessary he is to blast off from the planet without making any attempt either to protect or rescue me. And once it has been established that we are in fact dealing with an alien culture, Navy Headquarters must be informed immediately via subspace radio." Hawkins wanted to make sure that in the event the entire ship was captured, Earth would know that an alien contact had been made and could take steps to protect itself. He only wished, now that he thought of it, that he could have taken more adequate steps to protect the men and the ship. But for the moment the Sunward and her crew would have to remain where they were and as they were. And if the alien had not attacked them up to that point, perhaps no attack would be made at all. Hawkins wanted to tell Medboe a thousand other things -- simple, obvious things that surely both Medboe and Petri would be cognizant of. But, as always, the man who had to delegate responsibility simply had to depend on the perspicacity of the men to whom he gave the power. "Any questions?" Hawkins asked after a brief pause. "I don't believe so, Captain," Medboe answered. Hawkins could tell from the sound of the man's voice that he had hundreds of things he would have liked to ask, but none of them were of the type that he could have expected his superior officer to answer. "Good," Hawkins replied formally. "One more thing. You will under no circumstances attempt to contact me on this radio set -- there's no need in letting the alien know any more about us or our abilities than we absolutely have to." "Right, Captain," came the obedient answer. Hawkins turned the switch to the "Sustained Talk" position and informed the Officer of the Deck of his actions. Then he turned to Broussard. "Anything you have to add to all that?" he asked. The psychologist indicated a negative by a shake of his head. "Very well, Mr. Medboe. You may carry out your orders," Hawkins said with a sigh. Then he turned to Broussard again. "Well, Louie. I guess it's up to you from here on out. You're the alienist." And with that, Hawkins reluctantly relinquished completely his normal command of the situation. During the time that Captain Hawkins had been giving his orders, Broussard had been deep in thought, paying only scant attention to die instructions that the other man had passed along. The psychologist's mind had been racing over the possibilities of this first contact, and more than once during the brief period of time, it had dwelt on his own particular fears that he would not be up to the encounter. "I think you had better give the radio to me," Broussard said. "I'll probably be closer to the alien during the first stages of contact at least, and certainly I should be doing most of the talking." The statement made sense to Hawkins, and he passed the device over without comment. Broussard tucked it away in one of his pockets. "I don't think we should bother walking towards him," Broussard said a moment later, answering an unspoken question. "He's obviously coming toward us and it would seem better if we weren't too eager." Broussard felt no need to describe the alien over the radio since by this time the communications division back on board the Sunward would have set up their long range television cameras. Captain Hawkins shifted about on his feet a bit like a boxer doing warmup footwork prior to a battle. "I wonder where he's put his space ship," Broussard said. Hawkins looked puzzled. "How do you know he's got one?" he asked. "Well, it's just a hunch. But unless I miss my guess, that shining air the -- the -- " Broussard groped for the right noun, then fell back again on a sheer perceptual analysis. "The shining air the man coming towards us has is a defensive screen of some sort. And we've certainly found no evidence on Trellis of any civilization at all, much less one so advanced that it could dream up gadgets like that. I figure he must be from somewhere else. Maybe he's just a visitor here too, like u." Hawkins inwardly admitted the logic of the reasoning. As the alien came closer, they could both see why they had instinctively felt from the first that it was of the male gender. The creature's hair was cut a little longer than men wore theirs back on Earth, but this was almost the only difference. The alien was a bit taller than either of them, but not beyond the limits produceable by the human race. His shoulders were the widest part of his body, and formed the broad top of the inverted triangular shape that most human men admired. His clothes were of some peculiar, clinging material, but the bottom half of his body was fitted out in a close approximation of Earthside trousers. The man was handsome even by their own standards of masculine beauty. "Well," said Hawkins. "This is it. Man is no longer 'alone. # " Broussard realized suddenly that the other man was just as nervous as he himself was. "No, man is no longer alone," Broussard replied. And then he added, "But neither is he" The alien was less than one hundred yards away when Broussard said quietly, "I don't think we'd better talk any more. Let's just stand here and wait for him to make the first move," Lan Sur walked towards the two aliens at a comfortable rate of speed. When he was still some distance off the computer back on his scout ship informed him of the first of the messages going back and forth from one of the men to the ship, and then of the gradual withdrawal of the rest of the ship's crew to the sanctuary of the Sunward. It was with no surprise at all that he listened to the computer, as , it did a remote physical and chemical analysis of the aliens. Eons ago the Dakn people had come to the conclusion, first in theory and then in fact, that intelligent life capable of reaching the stars had to fall within the humanoid pattern. The aliens confronting him were well within the theoretical tolerance limits on every count. But still it amused him to see the slight obesity of one of the men and the thick body hair of the other. These were two minor points of difference between the races. At exactly the right psychological distance from the two aliens, Lan Sur stopped. He was quite close enough to be heard and understood, but not so close that his physical presence suggested too much of a threat. He waited just long enough before speaking. "It is customary in your culture to begin with introductions," he said in a strong voice. "I am Lan Sur, possessed of the rank of Senior Surveyor in the Galactic Patrol of the Dakn Empire. I welcome you officially to the communion of the stars."' Lan Sur could almost feel the sinking sensation inside the larger of the two aliens when he began to speak to them in their own tongue. It amused him to think that these two had probably expected to begin by drawing pictures in the dirt. Well, they would learn. "You should know at once that the Dakn Empire comprises some general humanoid characteristics as obtain in your race. We populate planets on some hundred thousand suns, most of which lie much further toward the opposite end of the galaxy than does the system in which we find ourselves at the moment. We have explored great reaches of the universe, but this is the first time we have penetrated as far into this particular district as this star you call Clarion. That explains why our races have never before come into contact." The two aliens leaned forward a little on their feet, as caught up in his words as children might be when told a new and fascinating story. "The Dakn Empire is the only other political system that exists in this entire galaxy, as far as we know." Lan Sur paused for a moment, to let the significance of his words sink in. "There have been others, of course, but they soon passed under our control. Just as your civilization will now pass under our control." He read the sudden, stark fear that appeared in their eyes correctly without needing the affirming echo from the computer. "The Dakn Empire has learned that whenever it discovers a new civilization, it must absorb this new culture immediately. There is no other choice. And your race must follow the pattern of the thousands we have encountered in the past. There is no choice. As of this moment, you and your people are, from our point of view, just as much a part of our Empire as our own home planets. This does not appeal to you, I know. But there is no other way." The computer informed him that the Sunward had brought all of its gun turrets to bear on him, but Lan Sur ignored the fact as being irrelevant. He continued. "No, you do not have a choice about becoming a part of our system. But you do have a choice about the method by which this action will be taken." The involuntary sigh that one of the aliens gave briefly amused him. The alien would find that the sigh of relief was a short one. "The choice is this -- either you will join with us peacefully, in which case the whole period of transition will take less than one of your years. Or..." He let the word dangle momentarily before his booming voice continued. "Or, if you choose to oppose us, the transition time will take even less than that. We will simply destroy you and all of your worlds. "You have no alternatives." The alien's voice grew louder. "You will want to know what absorption into our system will mean to you. By now you will surely have realized how far superior we are to you in every way, and I include specifically the factor of intelligence in this statement. My analysis of your potential intellectual and rational powers shows me that you are not capable of contesting on an equal basis with any of the other races that comprise our Empire. You are the lowest of the low, and as such, your race will be put into a slave category. We always have room for more slaves." The two aliens in front of him seemed in a state of shock. Lan Sur felt he might as well finish the thing off and get it over with. "If you choose to come with us peacefully, what will happen is this: We will take over all of your worlds at once, evacuating your people from them in less than a month. Your race will be spread out over our Empire, sent to the places where they are needed the most. "Of course you will not be allowed to retain either your own personalities or your memories. As slaves you would scarcely need them. So they will be stripped from you en route to your new homes, and suitable new slave personalities will be implanted in your minds. You find this thought distasteful I know, but it is the only logical action we can take. You will be bom again, so to speak, knowing our language, feeling at home in our way of life and not retaining even a shred of your old patterns of culture. This is the simplest, most efficient way in which your race can become a part of our much larger scheme of things. "If you do not choose to come peacefully..." again Lan Sur stopped for dramatic effect, "the warships I have already summoned, coming at the square of the speed of light, will search out every planet, every world in this whole sector, and will utterly annihilate every solar system you have contaminated. We have, in the past, met obstinate races who tried to resist our rule. The results were rather spectacular from an astronomical point of view. Perhaps your scientists have wondered what caused the nova of stars, or even the explosions of whole regions of space. Now you have the answer. We would hate to destroy your race, but if you resist us, we have no choice." A strange, intense smile came over Lan Sur's face. "Our history relates of one race that tried to avoid its destiny. These peoples scattered to the four winds in millions of ships in their attempt to hide from us." Fire lighted the alien's eyes. "It took more than a thousand of your years to track them all down, and we covered more than half the galaxy in doing so. It was a glorious thing. Now they are dead. All of them." Slowly the smile died away. Lan Sur looked back at the two Earthlings before him. "You will see the necessity for all of this when you have exhausted your emotional reactions to this information and are capable of thinking logically again. In the long run it matters little to any of us which action we are forced to take. But because I realize that a race as untutored as yours is, cannot be expected to control its emotions in such a situation, I will not demand an immediate answer from you. I will give you more than ample time in which to think the problem through. "You have exactly twenty-four hours in which to make up your minds." Academy, Captain Allen Hawkins had been a boxer, and a good one. Most of his fights he had won easily and decisively. The few that he lost had been close matches and split decisions. Then had come the day when he had persuaded himself to fight outside his own weight and experience classifications, and he had matched himself against a classmate much larger than himself. Hawkins still remembered that fight at times. After the first round he had been completely dazed, scarcely conscious of his surroundings. Again and again he found himself lying stretched out on the canvas and had to force himself back to his feet to re-enter the fray. The fight terminated rather suddenly in the third round when Hawkins went down to the canvas for a full count. All of this had happened years before, but the emotions that gripped the man now, as he stood facing the incredible alien from the center of the galaxy -- these emotions reminded him of that fight. He felt now as he had felt when he regained consciousness in the dressing room -- a little out of his senses, the wind still knocked out of him, and emotionally completely stunned. The fact that Lan Sur had spoken perfect English had been the first blow. Every sentence that the alien had spoken was like a sharp jab, a sudden punch to a vital area. As in his boxing days, after a few brief moments of listening, Hawkins had stopped thinking with his brain -- and had begun thinking with his stomach. But he was completely open and unguarded for the Sunday punch. "You have exactly twenty-four hours in which to make up your minds." The three men stood facing each other for at least a full minute, none of them speaking. Broussard recovered his voice before Hawkins could and said feebly, "You can't mean it." Lan Sur's face gave no expression of emotion. "I realized that you would be incapable of comprehending what I have said so soon after I had said it. This is why I am giving you a length of time in which to make your decision. But you might as well realize that this high emotional index rating of your race is one of the main reasons you rate so low. It is a trait that we will have to breed out of your race." Hawkins came to life suddenly, reacting violently, his emotional control shattered. He almost shouted at the alien, "If we're in such bad shape, why can't you just go off and leave us alone? You've got all the rest of the universe. Why can't you just leave us alone in our little corner of it?" "If you were not so emotionally aroused at the moment, you would understand why we cannot 'leave you alone,' as you put it," the alien told him calmly. "It is completely impossible for two differing cultures to exist in this galaxy, as large as it is. Eventually the two cultures would have to come into contact, and this would cause friction. We do not care for friction, and we always seek to avoid it. By forcing you to join us now -- or by destroying you if you refuse -- we make absolutely sure that your race will never be the cause of any friction to us in the future." "Friction?" asked Broussard slowly. "If we allowed you to go your own way, your population would expand and you would be forced to take over more and more of this area of the universe. We have our own plans for this part of the galaxy which do not include fighting constant wars with you for the possession of each new planetary system that one of us sees fit to colonize." The alien spoke to them as he might have spoken to children. Hawkins refused to abandon the train of thought. "But we could promise to give up all our worlds except our own home planet. You could have all the rest." Lan Sur shook his head. "At the present moment, you will promise anything to rid yourself of the painful necessity of making the decision that I have demanded of you. You up to your promise of retiring to your home planet, never to voyage forth again. But your children and their children would grow discontent and restless. Eventually, either a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand years from now, you would come forth to challenge us again." Lan Sur's face grew a trifle grim. "And next time you would be better equipped and stronger. You would be able to put up a better fight than you can at the moment." Then he smiled. "Oh, of course, the Dakn Empire would win eventually. We always do. But we would be back at exactly the same point that we are at right now. We would be forced to absorb you into our Empire, or to destroy you utterly. And, in the meantime, we would, of necessity, be forced to keep a careful watch on everything you did." He shook his head. "No, you must realize that we cannot tolerate anything but absolute surrender. You have my terms. You must make your decision. There is nothing more to say." Hawkins felt the numbing hand of deep fear within him. Like a losing boxer, he fought for any advantage that he might be able to take. "But, good Lord, man" he said quickly. "You don't understand the situation at all. Twenty-four hours isn't nearly enough time to make a decision that will affect our entire population. We can't even inform our home base of what's going on in that length of time, much less get a message back from them. And this is the sort of thing that would have to be submitted to our population as a whole, for them to decide. We're just a very, very small part of our race. Why, we... we don't have the authority to make a decision that would affect the people back home. You must give us more time." "Your complete lack of insight amazes me, even though I expected it," the alien said. "Surely you must understand that the more time I give you, the more time you have to prepare your physical defenses. I am just as aware as you are that, lacking the C # communications methods, it is impossible for you to contact your home planet in the time that I have allowed you. But the war ships that I have already summoned will be here shortly, and even before they arrive, there is much that I must do to ready you and your people for the change if you decide to come with us. If you do not decide to come with us, then I must begin the search for your home planet, so that it may be destroyed. In either event, the sooner your choice is made, the better it is for me. Already I have allowed you more time than is actually necessary for you to overcome your emotion and to think the problem through logically." "But I simply haven't got the authority to make such a choice!" Hawkins found himself shouting. "Can't you understand that?" Lan Sur paused a moment to let the other man regain some of his composure. Then he said simply but firmly, "I am in control here now. I have the authority, and I delegate it to you. You must decide for everyone." Broussard's reactions were perhaps a little less emotionally tinged than might have been thought from his facial reactions. He had held back what he felt to be a highly pertinent question until he felt that the alien was preparing to conclude the interview. He asked it now. "You seem to know a great many things about us, Lan Sur. And we seem to know very little about you. In a sense, this is strong evidence of your race's superiority. And yet you cannot really expect us to capitulate our entire culture to yours without giving us very conclusive proof that you are able to carry out your threats. After all, we are a large ship full of fighting men, and you seem to be one man all by yourself. What is to keep us from..." Deliberately the psychologist let the question hang uncompleted. Lan Sur smiled. "At least you respond in a semi-logical fashion. The point is well taken, and if you had not brought it up now, I would have had to do so myself at a later time. I am therefore prepared to demonstrate to you the strength of our technology. You two will return to your ship, and I will remain here. You will then, for the next two hours, have the opportunity to attack me by any means you see fit. I will simply defend myself, without endangering you or your ship in any fashion. When you have discovered that even as undefended as I appear to be at the moment, all of your weapons are powerless to harm me, perhaps you will understand that I can carry out my threats if I so choose to." The alien gestured with his hand. "And now, you must return to your ship. During the two hours at which I place myself at your mercy, you may naturally maneuver your vessel as you desire. But at the end of the two hours, you must have returned to your landing place here -- or to whatever other spot on this planet that I may choose to indicate to you by radio. Any attempt on your part to escape either now, or during the period following, or any attack you attempt on me except during these first two hours, or any effort to summon additional help, will mean the instant destruction of your ship -- and of your race. I hope that you will both understand what I have said and will believe that I have the power to achieve my ends." Surveyor Lan Sur crossed his arms. "This interview is at an end." After a few seconds of stunned silence, the two men turned and walked the long and lonesome way back to the Sunward . All of the scientists aboard the Sunward and most of the ship's officers were assembled in the central meeting hall when Broussard and Hawkins arrived. Hawkins walked directly to the central podium and turned to face the group. "Gentlemen," he began slowly, his features a mask of repressed emotion. "I know that I do not have to give you any fuller explanations than you have already received. We have been given a challenge that seems to be insoluble. But we must face the situation, as the alien Lan Sur has suggested, with a minimum of emotionality and with a maximum of good, hard logic. I would welcome any comments, suggestions you might have to offer." There was a general shuffling of feet and clearing of throats among the crowd. It seemed to Hawkins as if each member present was waiting for someone else to speak first. Finally the Communications Officer broke the silence. "Captain, it has occurred to me that if the alien's powers are as great as he claims, he may well be able to monitor every word any of us speaks, even here. I think we must take that into consideration." The crowd murmured an assent, feeling, Hawkins was sure, that it gave them an excellent excuse for not being able to propose any solution to the problem. "I think you are quite right," Hawkins answered. "However, I feel that for the moment we must operate as if he couldn't monitor us. In the meantime, the communications department must take what precautions it can to assure us that our future conversations are held in complete privacy." A touch of bitter defeat crept into his voice. "And I would imagine that even if he is listening right now, he'll gain precious little in the way of useful information." The group shuffled its feet again, embarrassed at its own impotence. "Are there any further comments?" Hawkins asked. There seemed to be none, until the Gunnery Officer spoke up. "Captain," he said, a slight smile on his broad face. "I'd sort of like to see just how much punishment the bastard can take." Hawkins laughed, breaking the tension. "I think we all agree with you. Suppose we put off any further discussion until after we've put the alien through his paces. It will give us an opportunity to test his strength -- and to test our own. "Many of you -- " Hawkins indicated with a wave of his hand the officers in the room " -- are familiar with the offensive strength of this vessel. She is one of the most powerfully armed ships that Earth has. What I intend to do, then, is this: We'll give our friend out there just as much hell as the Sunward can dish out. But while we're doing it, I want photographs of every attack we make, fast photos that will give us, perhaps, an inkling of how he overcomes all of our weapons, if he does. I think this is extremely important." He looked the crowd over. "We'll begin the attack just as soon as all of you have indicated to me that your departments are ready. That is all, gentlemen." Half an hour later the Sunward rose from her landing site and floated gently into the atmosphere. She came to a halt about ten thousand feet up and drifted into an optimum firing position. Every gun and camera the ship possessed was trained on the now scarcely visible figure of the alien almost two miles beneath her. Hawkins was on the battle bridge, his experienced hand controlling the ship firmly, belying the nervousness he felt. "Gunnery all ready, Sir!" came the report. "Fire!" shouted Hawkins a little louder than he meant to. He strained forward in his seat to watch the scene on the screen in front of him. The heat guns opened up first. In less than a second the area of maximum temperature was less than two feet away from the alien's body. A space of ground # yards in diameter suddenly went up in smoke at the intensity of the rays. Slim shreds of fire licked at the edge of the ring, and in the center all was fierce flame and smoke as the heat actually melted the earth. For a full five minutes the guns remained firing at maximum intensity. No organic substance known to man could withstand such violence. "Cease firing," Hawkins called. He leaned back slowly in his chair. It would take a few minutes for the smoke to clear, but he knew in his heart what they would see once it had. And even before the wind had blown enough of the smoke away to make things visible, they saw the figure of the alien come walking briskly out of the hellish ring of destruction and wave his arm to them. "God," said Hawkins quietly. After a moment he threw open a communications switch that connected him to the Gunnery Officer. "Well, what's next?" he asked quietly. Next came a huge ball of electricity that spat sparks as it hurtled through space and shattered itself the very feet of the alien. The resulting burst of light was painful to the eyes, but when vision cleared, they saw the alien again, still standing erect and still waving. They tried launching a dozen space torpedoes at once, filled with the highest chemical explosives known to man. They crashed in criss-cross fashion about the alien, ripping the very air asunder with their fantastic devastation. They left a crater almost a mile wide, and standing in the middle of it, still untouched, the enemy. Then the ship bombarded the small figure below with every wavelength known to man, still without effect. Finally the Gunnery Officer called Hawkins on the intercom. "I'm sorry, Captain, but we did our best. I guess there's only one thing left to do." "I guess you're right," Hawkins admitted reluctantly. And turning to his helmsman he said, "Take her  up. The Sunward was almost fifty miles from the alien when she unleashed her final weapon. She had dropped tattle-tale robots behind to feed her information both before and after the blast. And then she aimed the mightiest atomic weapon man had created straight at Lan Sur. The very planet shook at its detonation, so powerful was the bomb. The fire and clouds rose miles into the sky, and the Sunward's delicate instruments indicated the presence of a radiation so intense that it was certain an area hundreds of miles in size was completely destroyed. It took several minutes before enough of the aftermath of the explosion had cleared away for them to find him, but they located the alien sitting calmly in a crater at the very center of the affected area, obviously still unharmed. Hawkins contemplated the situation for several minutes, and then wearily stretched out his hand and turned on the radio. After a moment he said simply, "All right, Lan Sur, you win. Where do you want us to land?" Lan Sur answered immediately. "You will place your vessel in an area almost directly beneath your present position which I have caused to be marked in red. Any attempt to move the vessel without my permission will result in your immediate destruction. If, during the waiting time, you have any further questions to ask of me, I will be available. However, if you have not come to any conclusion by the end of that time, I shall be forced to destroy you without further hesitation. You have exactly twentytwo hours and nine minutes left." When the ship had landed, Hawkins returned to the conference room. Most of the executive personnel were there, although some of the scientists were absent, ostensibly still analyzing the results of the futile attack on the alien. Hawkins strode briskly to the podium and faced the group. "Gentlemen," he said, "you saw what happened. Perhaps some of you refused to believe that the alien could enforce his demands on us -- and I'm sure that all of us hoped that this would be the case. But now we must accept the fact that the choice we were told to make will have to be made, unless we can come up with some means of destroying this creature or of escaping his wrath. "I want you to know that although it might well be within my province as Captain of the Sunward to decide which of the alternatives we will take, I will not do so. What is decided here will affect all of Earth's peoples everywhere. Neither one man nor one small group can make this choice. Therefore, exactly one hour before the deadline, we will hold a plebiscite. Every person aboard the Sunward will have exactly one vote, and the majority decision will hold. I will refrain from voting and will decide the issue in the event of a tie. In the meantime, I want you to think. To think not only of a means of escape from our dilemma, if this be possible, but also how you will vote. If any of you have any ideas, or if you simply wish to talk about something, you will find me available at any hour. "I do not know how each of you will react to this situation. Perhaps the alien is right. Perhaps man is far too emotional an animal to merit more than slave status in the councils of the stars. But I hope that our actions will prove otherwise -- and that this, man's darkest hour, will also become his finest." Hawkins turned from the group and walked quietly from the room. He knew that his speech had been anything but an example of clear logic devoid of emotional context, and he had no idea why he had let himself be so carried away. But with the inborn and well-trained sense he had of men and situations, he knew that he could not have spoken otherwise. The men on board the Sunward faced the crisis in various fashions. A few of the scientists worked with erratic bursts of speed to finish up their analyses of the data they had gathered during the bombardment of the alien. Some of the crew wrote letters home. The communications department was swamped with personal messages to be relayed back to Earth. The Chaplain gave up his attempt at private counseling and held hourly open services. The routine jobs were still performed, albeit in a perfunctory manner. But mostly the men just gathered around in small groups and talked, usually in low voices. A few of the luckier ones got drunk. Captain Hawkins remained in his room, completely isolated from the rest of the ship, for almost four hours. During that time he simply sat in his easy chair and thought. At the beginning of the fifth hour he broke a precedent and opened a bottle of whiskey. At the beginning of the sixth hour he broke still another precedent and sent for Broussard. Hawkins was neither too drunk nor too sober when the psychologist arrived. He told the scientist to sit down and offered him a drink. "I know it's unethical for me to take you away from the men when they need your help more than ever before," Hawkins began slowly, choosing to stare moodily at the table instead of directly at the man he was talking to. "But for once I am exercising a Captain's perogatives. "You must have realized some of the problems that face anyone in a position of command. Usually we have to operate on pretty rigid rules, but things always go better if it seems as though we aren't quite as rigid as we really must be. The men under you always feel better if they think they have some free choice about things. In any military set-up you can't allow much of this free will at all. The best commander is the one who decides what it is his men must do in a given situation, and then finds some way of making the men want to do it." Again he paused, then looked up, facing Broussard squarely"I have decided what the result of the balloting must be -- and I want you, as a psychologist, to help me make sure that I get that result without anyone else being aware that we've rigged things." He got up from the table and began nervously pacing the floor. After a few moments he stopped and turned to face the psychologist, both his fists clenched tightly on the back of his easy chair. He said nothing. After several moments of silence, Broussard cleared his throat and asked, "And which choice have you decided it must be?" Hawkins collapsed into the chair. Finally his mouth opened, his lips trembled, and he said, "Slavery, of course. It's the only choice. "You're the psychologist, perhaps you can understand the fierce pride I'd take in knowing that the men would have the... the guts to want to end it all instead of bowing down to that bastard out there who holds us in the very palm of his hands." Hawkins paused in this outburst, blinked his eyes briefly, and then continued. "But that's just the emotion showing through. From the logical point of view, our race must continue. If we choose slavery we'll live and breathe and die just as we always have. We'll do all of these things on alien planets, having forgotten the Earth we sprang from and all our past history, as sorry as some of that has been. We'll have forgotten who we are. We will have lost ourselves." He banged a fist down on the table. "But we will exist! The protection of the race comes first, and we've got to make sure that it is protected, that the Sunward makes the logical decision. I'll steer things as best I can, but I'll need help." He turned to Broussard. "I'm not a psychologist. I won't tell you how to go about it. I don't care what you do. All I want are the results." For a space of several seconds the two men sat without speaking. Then Hawkins said, "And I guess that unless you have something to add, that's all for now. Let me know what you're doing, if you have time to tell me. But more important than that, let me know if you think you're going to fail. We may have to rig the ballots if you do." Broussard gave a deep sigh and rose to leave. He could understand the torment the Captain was going through, but there was little that he could do for the man at the moment. He was almost at the door when Hawkins stopped him. "Broussard!" Hawkins shouted. "What in God's name makes a man's personality so dear to him? Why has it always been just about the last thing that a man will give up? You're the psychologist. You must know the answer. Even a man with a diseased mind who knows that he's sick and wants help badly will fight back tooth and nail when you try to change even one small part of his personality make-up. Didn't you once tell me that? Didn't you?" The Captain's voice grew louder and louder. "That's why therapy is so hard, isn't it? That's why constructive education is so difficult, isn't it? That's why politicians who appeal to existing fears and hates and loves get elected instead of those men who try to shift public opinion for the better. "Oh, why in God's name are we so proud of this tiny, puny, weak, insignificant, miserable thing inside each of us we call the real me!" He picked up the whiskey bottle and hurled it with full force against the wall. It shattered in a thousand pieces. The dark liquor inside ran down the wall leaving long thin fingers of stain behind it. Captain Hawkins' personal steward came rushing into the room at the sound of the crash, and looked, horrified, at the mess on the wall. "Oh, get out! Get out, both of you, and leave me alone!" Hawkins shouted. After they were gone, Hawkins threw himself on his bunk and buried his face in his pillow. The mood of fierce hot anger passed rapidly, leaving only the warm sting of shame. Although he had made the decision to capitulate to the alien, at least at an intellectual level, he could not really bring himself to believe that there was no means of escape. His head ached from his emotional outburst and every effort toward constructive thinking seemed to end in a blind alley. He had been tossing restlessly for perhaps two hours when the Communications Officer brought him a message from Earth that had just been received. Hawkins reached for the message blank ear gerly at first, his befuddled mind thinking for just an instant that here were instructions from home telling him how to meet the crisis, telling him of a means of escape, or just taking the awful responsibility of the decision from him. But then he remembered that communications, even when they passed through subspace, took several days to get from Earth to here. Earth was still unaware of the crisis on Trellis, and this message that had just been received had begun its journey long before they were made so painfully aware of the existence of the alien. The radiogram was of a semiroutine nature, but one that, in normal circumstances, would have demanded an immediate answer. "Shall we bother replying to it?" the Communications Officer asked. "Of course not," Hawkins said angrily. "It wouldn't be necessary, even if we dared break radio silence to reply." The Communications Officer's eyes opened wide in a startled fashion. "Radio silence?" he said feebly. "But, Captain, we've... we've..." Hawkins sat bolt upright in his bunk. "Good Lord, man, do you mean to say that you've been sending messages to Earth right along?" The Communications Officer nodded. "We started relaying from the moment you contacted the alien. We've sent out all the talks, speeches, reports, everything. Just as you ordered." The man was cringing in fright. "But didn't you hear the alien tell us to make no attempt to contact our home base or he'd destroy us at once?" Hawkins demanded. The other officer felt like crawling out of the room without bothering to open the door. "I'm sorry, Captain," he managed to stutter. "But I must have missed that... that part of what he said. I... I was called out of the office during part of the contact when something went wrong with one of our main transmitters." The man had turned a very pale shade of white. "But I'll stop transmission at once," he said, turning nervously towards the door. Hawkins looked at his watch. "If he hasn't blasted us for it by now, I don't guess he ever will. But all die same, you'd better stop sending immediately." As the Communications Officer left the room, Hawkins cursed mildly under his breath. After all of his plans and sweat and pains, it would take something like this to bring the whole house of cards crashing about him, some little insignificant something that he had overlooked. "For want of a nail..."he said aloud, reminding himself of the age-old parable. "But if he meant what he said about not notifying Earth, why hasn't he already destroyed us?" Hawkins asked himself. Perhaps Lan Sur wasn't as cruelly logical and unfeeling as they had thought. Hawkins pushed the thought from his mind, knowing that it would lead him to too much false hope if he pursued it further. It would be too easy to hope that simply because Lan Sur had not acted upon one of his threats, he might not act on the rest of them. As he thought, Hawkins found himself pacing the floor of his room anxiously -- first to one wall, then a stop, an about face, and back to the opposite side of the room. He stopped his walking and slumped down into his chair. "Back and forth," he said out loud. "From one side to another. I'm just like the child in Broussard's story. Only instead of a man with a stick at one end of the hall and a dog at the other, I've got Lan Sur at both ends. Death, or a kind of slavery which is just about as bad. A real 'avoidance situation' if ever one existed." He laughed bitterly. "The closer I come to one choice, the worse it seems and the better the other choice appears." He shrugged his shoulders sadly. "But eventually I'll have to realize that there's no escape. Unfortunately, unlike the child in Broussard's example, I can't . , ." Hawkins stopped suddenly as something occurred to him. "Good God," he said after a moment. He sat upright in the chair. "It couldn't be. It just couldn't" he told himself. "And yet, I bet, I bet it isl" He got up from the chair and walked quickly to the wall communicator. "Hello, Bridge?" he demanded. "Inform all officers not on watch and all the scientific personnel that I want to see them in the council chamber in thirty minutes. Exactly thirty minutes, do you understand?" There was a broad smile on his face as he marched out of his stateroom to talk with some of the officers and scientists before the meeting. After all of the men had crowded into the meeting hall, they closed and locked the doors. The group kept up a low but excited chatter while they waited for Captain Hawkins to begin. "Gentlemen," he said finally, calling the meeting to order. "I am informed by the electronics specialists aboard that they have made this meeting room as 'spy-proof' as is humanly possible, but I think we've learned not to trust the power of human technology too much these past few hours. Therefore, I'm going to tell you just as little of my plans as I poibly can, on the theory that the best-kept secret is the one that the fewest people know about." The crowd seemed anxious, and a little apprehensive, but still hopeful. "Within the past hour, I have made what I think are several remarkable discoveries. I shall not tell you what they are, but I think I have discovered a way out of the dilemma that we are facing," The crowd breathed a unanimous sigh of relief. Smiles broke out on several faces. "I cannot tell you just at the moment what this mode of escape is. But I have discussed it with a few of you -- the fewest number possible -- and all of them agree that there is an excellent chance that it will work. If it does, we of Earth will still face a great many problems. But we shall, at least, be free, and that is the important thing. If we fail..." Hawkins let his voice trail off for a moment. "If we fail, we can expect instant destruction not only for us, but for all of mankind." He waited for the meaning to sink in, his face set in a firm frown. And then, purposefully, he let his facial muscles relax into a broad smile. "But I do not think that we will fail. I think we will win. And I have come to ask your permission to risk all our lives on the venture. I cannot give you any more information I can only ask for your confidence -- and for your votes of approval." He looked around the room deliberately, pausing for just the right length of time. And then he said, "Will all of you who have sufficient faith in me and my judgment please rise in assent?" Broussard had given him the trick of mass decision -- had told him that if you make people commit themselves openly, the decision has a better chance of unanimity. Hawkins smiled to see how well the device worked. Every man in the room was on his feet, most of them cheering. He waited for the shouting to die down and then said simply, "Thank you. And now to battle stations." sat in his control seat on the Sunward's bridge, staring at the button that turned on his radio set. "The purpose of a position of responsibility is to make decisions," he told himself. A green light burst into life on the control panel, indicating that all of the preparations he had asked for were in readiness. Such signals would be his only means of communications during the entire maneuver, for he had given orders that no one was to utter one word aloud during the entire operation. He was taking no chances. Hawkins grinned. "And the devil take the hindmost," he told himself. Pressing down on the radio button, he said aloud, "This is Captain Allen Hawkins of the Sunward calling Surveyor Lan Sur of the Dakn Empire." Almost at once he heard a voice answering, "You may go ahead." "I think we have finally reached our decision," Hawkins said soberly. "But before we announce it, we have one request to make, and I do not think you will find it an unreasonable one. As you yourself pointed out, ours is an incredibly emotional race. Had we not been so, we could have given you our answer much sooner." The alien's voice came booming into the control room. "I will listen to your request, but you surely realize that none of the terms that I have given you can be changed." "Yes, we realize that, and our request is along slightly different lines," said Hawkins. "As I said, we are an emotion-ridden race. But you must have realized that we aboard the Sunward are probably much more stable than are the majority of our peoples back on our home planets. It is always so with explorers and scientists. Therefore, we were able to reach a logical decision, and we will be able to hold to it. "Unfortunately, we anticipate a little more trouble than this with 'the folks back home if you understand that term. And to make things much easier, not only for us, but also for you, we have a request to make." "I understand the semantic import of the term and will give you my decision on the request if you will but come to the point," came the alien's voice. "We are wasting valuable time, and I have other things to do." Hawkins was beginning to sweat a little. He was purposefully needling the alien, and he had no idea of how far he dared to go. "Well, we of the Sunward are convinced that you can carry out your threats if we attempt any rebellion. We have seen you stand untouched by all the power this ship could muster. But defense against our meager weapons is one thing. The ability to destroy a star is another... "The folks back home would accept our decision without hesitation, and would never dream of giving you or your people any trouble, if we could show them authentic pictures of how powerful you are offensively. We request, therefore, that you unleash your weapons and turn this entire solar system into a nova while we photograph the procedure." Lan Sur's answering voice sounded frighteningly loud to Hawkins. "What you request is impossible for several reasons. First, the Dakn Empire has no desire to destroy potentially valuable property simply to demonstrate its powers. Second, the procedure would occupy too much time, for while my small ship could outrace the enveloping flames of the nova, your larger ship, unequipped as it is with the C # drive, would be caught in the destruction and you would perish. I recognize that from the emotionality index of your race, such a demonstration would probably aid in the peaceful absorption of your culture into ours, but it is impossible," Hawkins allowed himself the luxury of a quick smile. His analysis of the situation had been absolutely correct. "Well, look," he said in reply. "According to our survey, the outer planet in this system is pretty small and of little use to anybody. Could you possibly destroy it instead?" He paused for just the smallest fraction of a second, but then hurried on before the alien could reply. "Of course, if you can't do it without destroying all the rest of the planets too, why, we'll understand. But it would help... The alien's voice boomed back, interrupting the man. "You obviously still underestimate the technological level of the Dakn Empire." The alien paused as if checking something. "According to my analysis of this system, the fourth and outer planet is of no value whatsoever to my people. Therefore, I accede to your request. The planet will be destroyed at Once." "Hey, wait a minute," Hawkins cried in a startled tone of voice. "You need not worry," came the alien's flat response. "I fully realize that your visual recording equipment cannot function at such a distance. Therefore, you will raise ship at once and locate yourself to take advantage of the best recording angles." Hawkins had to hold himself in his chair to keep from dancing a jig. He had set a trap for the alien, and somehow, some incredible how, it had worked. At least he dared hope that it had... The Sunward came to a full stop just inside the orbit of the third planet. The alien ship danced on ahead of them towards the tiny outer world. "You can come closer than that," Lan Sur informed Hawkins, noting that the Sunward had stopped sooner than expected. "No, thank you," Hawkins replied. "We can get excellent pictures from this distance, and you must remember that we haven't the protective devices that you have." Hawkins noted that Lan Sur's voice carried with it an almost petulant, disdainful note. "There is a great deal of difference between the destruction of one small planet and the creation of a nova. However, if you feel safer there, you may remain where you are." A few moments later, the alien added, ""Are your recording devices in readiness?" Hawkins indicated to the alien that they were. "Then watch," Lan Sur said. It took perhaps three minutes for the first burst of light to reach their position. The tiny planet, scarcely # miles in diameter, began to glow slightly, then suddenly came alive with fire. Bursts of flame danced up hundreds of miles above its surface, then fell back, exhausted, into the boiling cauldron the planet had become. For almost ten minutes the small world seethed in agonized torment, and then, all at once, it seemed to shake apart at the seams. There was no sound, but those watching on board the Sunward mentally supplied the missing component to the greatest explosion they had ever witnessed. The cameras recorded the scene noiselessly. A few minutes later, after most of the fragments of the once-world had disintegrated in flaming splendor, Lan Sur's voice broke the silence. "I used only one of many possible means of destruction. However, it promised to be, under the circumstances, the most spectacular. And so you have seen the offensive might of the Dakn Empire. Are you ready to give me your decision?" The control board in front of Hawkins displayed all green signals. "Yes," he said. "I think we're finally ready. Here is our answer to the choice you gave us." His finger pressed firmly on a single red key. T HE Sunward had been hurling itself back towards Earth for almost an hour when Broussard discovered Captain Hawkins, standing by himself in the observation room, staring out into the black of subspace. "Well," the psychologist said. "I don't suppose it looks quite so bleak to you now as it did on the trip out." Hawkins turned and smiled at the man. "No, I don't guess it does. Funny what the presence of one small pinpoint of light does to the blackness of a field, eh?" Broussard nodded in assent. "I wonder what our alien friend thought when suddenly Clarion, Trellis, the two other planets, and us too, just up and disappeared and left him behind?" Hawkins laughed. "You're the alienist. You tell me." "I'd rather ask you something. How did you know it would work?" "You might say I became an expert in psychology over night," Hawkins replied. "Oh, not the scientific kind that you practice -- but the every day kind that most people mean when they use the word. I discovered, for example, that because of a misunderstanding on the part of the communications people, we continued to send messages home after the alien had specifically warned us not to do so. At first I thought he might be ignoring this infraction of his rules, but then I began to wonder if it didn't mean that he just wasn't aware of what we were doing. I remembered that he talked a great deal about a C # drive system which he claimed was so much better than the type we used. But when I asked the Navigator to do a little figuring, I discovered that by using subspace, we can actually get places much faster than his race does. "It all added up to the fact that his race had never stumbled onto the use of subspace. I know that sounds incredible, but when I checked with one of the top physicists, I found out that we happened onto it by sheer accident -- and an impossibly stupid one at that -- and not through any high-level theorizing. The theory came later, after the process had been demonstrated in a laboratory. "For a while I still couldn't believe it. But when we discovered that his space ship was a very small one -- too small to utilize the subspace drive -- I knew my guess had been correct. So I tricked him into letting us get into position where we could activate die drive -- and had the engineers increase the effective radius so that we could pull Clarion and her three planets into subspace with us." Hawkins paused for a few seconds as he turned back to the observation window. "We'll need every sun and every planet we can lay our hands on." Broussard leaned comfortably back against the door. "I think you were wise to take the pictures of the destruction of that fourth planet. We may need them to convince 'the folks back home' that this was the only solution to the problem." Hawkins agreed with him. "They won't like giving up all the universe they've come to be used to, just to run away and hide in subspace. And you know, I think the poets and the sailors and the young people in love will hate us most of all." "How do you mean?" asked Broussard. "No more heaven full of stars to write poems about, to sail true courses by, and to sing love songs under. I guess a lot of us will be lonely for all the stars." "Do you think they'll ever find us?" Broussard asked, changing the subject. "From the look on Lan Sur's face when he told about that other world, I suspect they'll move heaven and earth to find out where we've run to." "Find us? The Dakn Empire? I just don't know. We've got a thousand ships equipped with the subspace drive. That's a thousand or so solar systems we can pull through into subspace before they can catch up with us -- I hope. But we'll have to be careful. If one of our ships is ever caught, and they discover the drive, we're all done for. I doubt that they'll show us much mercy. "A thousand suns -- and only a handful of usable worlds in the whole lot of them. Not much for a race that's grown as fast as ours has. And to some of us, I guess, subspace will never be quite the same as the one we grew up in -- and came to know and love." Hawkins shook his head sadly. "But if they find us?" Broussard insisted. "Well, at least we'll have had time to prepare. Perhaps a year, perhaps ten, perhaps a thousand. But we beat them this time, and maybe we can do it again." For a long time he continued to stare quietly into the blackness. "I just don't know..."    bution to the International Geophysical Year, will probably be launched as the third stage of a three-stage rocket. The first drawing (top) shows the rocket beginning its vertical climb; trailing characteristic shock diamonds in its fiery tail. First stage will fall away fifty to sixty miles up; second stage drops away at # miles. Third stage will cease firing when it reaches orbit, # miles up and parallel with Earth's surface, at # m.p.h. Flaming death comes to small satellite (days or weeks later) when gradual drag of thin atmosphere diminishes original speed to point where gravity pulls it down into denser air. Tremendous remaining speed will cause satellite to overheat from friction and vaporize in seconds. To people on Earth it will appear as great flash and meteoric trail. Second drawing (bottom) shows satellite flipping over just before it disintegrates over Florida. During its life, instruments in satellite have constantly sent back vital information to scientists on Earth. (See inside front cover for drawings.) Clearly, re-educating Man's brain wouldn't fit him for survival on the plague-ridden surface . Re-educating his body was the answer; but the process was so very long... Illustrated by Paul Or ban stopped at the door marked it reported might think. It went "Re-Education Project -- Col. H. over him from grey, crew-cut H. Mudgett, Commanding Ofpoll to reagent-proof shoes, checkficer" and waited while the scaning his small wiry body and lean ner looked him over. He had been profile against its stored silhouettes, through that door a thousand tasting and smelling him as dubitimes, but the scanner made as ously as if he were an orange held elaborate a job of it as if it had in storage two days too long, never seen him before. "Name?" it said at last. It always did, for there was al"Carson, Samuel, #-#-#." ways in fact a chance that it had "Business?" never seen him before, whatever "Medical director, Re-Ed One." While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came rolling down upon him through the mile of solid granite above his head. At the same moment, the letters on the door -- and everything else inside his cone of vision -- blurred distressingly, and a stab of pure pain went lancing through his head. It was the supersonic component of the explosion, and it was harmless -- except that it always both hurt and scared him. The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing yellow up to now, flicked back to red again and the machine began the whole routine all over; the sound-bomb had reset it. Carson patiently endured its inspection, gave his name, serial number and mission once more, and this time got the green. He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy square of cheap paper he had been carrying all along. Mudgett looked up from his desk and said at once: "What now?" The physician tossed the square of paper down under Mudgett' s eyes. "Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's speech last night' he said. "The total effect is going against us, Colonel. Unless we can change Hamelin's mind, this outcry to re-educate civilians ahead of soldiers is going to lose the war for us. The urge to live on the surface again has been mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to focus on. Us." Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary ; a blocky, bulky man, as short as Carson and with hair as grey and closecropped. A year ago, Carson would have told him that nobody in ReEd could afford to put stray objects in his mouth even once, let alone as a habit; now Carson just waited. There wasn't a man -- or a woman or a child -- of America's surviving who didn't have some such tic. Not now, not after twenty-five years of underground life. "He knows it's impossible, doesn't he?" Mudgett demanded abruptly. "Of course he doesn't," Carson said impatiently. "He doesn't know any more about the real nature of the project than the people do. He thinks the 'educating' we do is in some sort of survival technique -- That's what the papers think, too, as you can plainly see by the way they loaded that editorial." "Um. If we'd taken direct control of the papers in the first place -- " Carson said nothing. Military control of every facet of civilian life was a fact, and Mudgett knew it. He also knew that an appearance of freedom to think is a necessity for the human mind -- and that the appearance could not be maintained without a few shreds of the actuality. "Suppose we do this," Mudgett said at last. "Hamelin's position in the State Department makes it impossible for us to muzzle him. But it ought to be possible to explain to him that no unprotected human being can live on the surface, no matter how many Merit Badges he has for woodcraft and first aid. Maybe we could even take him on a little trip topside; I'll wager he's never seen it." "And what if he dies up there?" Carson said stonily. "We lose threefifths of every topside party as it is -- and Hamelin's an inexperienced -- " "Might be the best thing, mightn't it?" "No," Carson said. "It would look like we'd planned it that way. The papers would have the populace boiling by the next morning." Mudgett groaned and nibbled another double row of indentations around the barrel of the pencil. "There must be something," he said. "There is." "Well?" "Bring the man here and show him just what we are doing. Reeducate him, if necessary. Once we told the newspapers that he'd taken the course... well, who knows, they just might resent it. Abusing his clearance privileges and so on." "We'd be violating our basic policy' Mudgett said slowly. " 'Give the Earth back to the men who fight for it.' Still, the idea has some merits... "Hamelin is out in the antechamber right now," Carson said. "Shall I bring him in?" The radioactivity never did rise much beyond a mildly hazardous level, and that was only transient, during the second week of the war -- the week called the Death of Cities. The small shards of sanity retained by the high commands on both sides dictated avoiding weapons with a built-in backfire: no cobalt bombs were dropped, no territories permanently poisoned. Generals still remembered that unoccupied territory, no matter how devastated, is still unconquered territory. But no such considerations stood in the way of biological warfare. It was controllable : you never released against the enemy any disease you didn't yourself know how to control. There would be some slips, of course, but the margin for error -- There were some slips. But for the most part, biological warfare worked fine. The great fevers washed like tides around and around the globe, one after another. In such cities as had escaped the bombings, the rumble of truck convoys carrying the puffed heaped corpses to the mass graves became the only sound except for sporadic small-arms fire; and then that too ceased, and the trucks stood rusting in rows. Nor were human beings the sole victims. Cattle fevers were sent out. Wheat rusts, rice molds, com blights, hog choleras, poultry enteritises fountained into the indifferent air from the hidden laboratories, or were loosed far aloft, in the jet-stream, by rocketing fleets. Gelatin capsules pullulating with gill-rots fell like hail into the great fishing grounds of Newfoundland, Oregon, Japan, Sweden, Portugal. Hundreds of species of animals were drafted as secondary hosts for human diseases, were injected and released to carry the blessings of the laboratories to their mates and litters. It was discovered that minute amounts of the tetracycline series of antibiotics, which had long been used as feed supplements to bring farm animals to full market weight early, could also be used to raise the most whopping Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes anybody ever saw, capable of flying long distances against the wind and of carrying a peculiarly interesting new strains of the malarial parasite and the yellow fever virus... By the time it had ended, everyone who remained alive was a mile under ground. For good. "I still fail to understand why," Hamelin said, "if, as you claim, you have methods of re-educating soldiers for surface life, you can't do so for civilians as well. Or instead." The under-secretary, a tall, spare man, bald on top, and with a heavily creased forehead, spoke with the odd neutral accent -- untinged by regionalism -- of the trained diplomat, despite the fact that there had been no such thing as a foreign service for nearly half a century. "We're going to try to explain that to you," Carson said. "But we thought that, first of all, we'd try to explain once more why we think it would be bad policy -- as well as physically out of the question. "Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it's possible. Even people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors hope for something better for their children -- a glimpse of sunlight, a little rain, the fall of a leaf. That's more important now to all of us than the war, which we don't believe in any longer. That doesn't even make any military sense, since we haven't the numerical strength to occupy the enemy's territory any more, and they haven't the strength to occupy ours. We understand all that. But we also know that the enemy is intent on prosecuting the war to the end. Extermination is what they say they want, on their propaganda broadcasts, and your own Department reports that they seem to mean what they say. So we can't give up fighting them; that would be simple suicide. Are you still with me?" "Yes, but I don't see -- " "Give me a moment more. If we have to continue to fight, we know this much : that the first of the two sides to get men on the surface again -- so as to be able to attack important targets, not just keep them isolated in seas of plagues -- will be the side that will bring this war to an end. They know that. too. We have good season to believe that they have a re-education project, and that it's about as far advanced as ours is." "Look at it this way," Col. Mudgett burst in unexpectedly. "What we have now is a stalemate. A saboteur occasionally locates one of the underground cities and lets the pestilences into it. Sometimes on our side, sometimes on theirs. But that only happens sporadically, and it's just more of this mutual extermination business -- to which we're committed, willy-nilly, for as long as they are. If we can get troops onto the surface first, we'll be able to scout out their important installations in short order, and issue them a surrender ultimatum with teeth in it. They'll take it. The only other course is the sort of slow, mutual suicide we've got now." Hamelin put the tips of his fingers together. "You gentlemen lecture me about policy as if I had never heard the word before. I'm familiar with your arguments for sending soldiers first. You assume that you're familiar with all of mine for starting with civilians, but you're wrong, because some of them haven't been brought up at all outside the Department. I'm going to tell you some of them, and I think they'll merit your close attention." Carson shrugged. "I'd like nothing better than to be convinced, Mr. Secretary. Go ahead." "You of all people should know. Dr. Carson, how close our underground society is to a psychotic break. To take a single instance, the number of juvenile gangs roaming these corridors of ours has increased # since the rumors about the Re-Education Project began to spread. Or another: the number of individual crimes without motive -- crimes committed, just to distract the committer from the grinding monotony of the life we all lead -- has now passed the total of all other crimes put together. "And as for actual insanity -- of unhospitalized, there are four million cases of which we know , each one of which should be committed right now for early paranoid schizophrenia -- except that were we to commit them, our essential industries would suffer a manpower loss more devastating than anything the enemy has inflicted upon us. Every a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but how can we do without them? And what can we do about the unrecognized, subclinical cases, which probably total twice as many? How long can we continue operating without a collapse under such conditions ?" Carson mopped his brow. "I didn't suspect that it had gone that far." "It has gone that far," Hamelin said icily, "and it is accelerating. Your own project has helped to accelerate it. Col. Mudgett here mentioned the opening of isolated cities to the pestilences. Shall I tell you how Louisville fell?" "A spy again, I suppose," Mudgett said. "No, Colonel. Not a spy. A band of -- of vigilantes, of mutineers. I'm familiar with your slogan, 'The Earth to those who fight for it.' Do you know the counter-slogan that's circulating among the people?" They waited. Hamelin smiled and said : " 'Let's die on the surface.' "They overwhelmed the military detachment there, put the city administration to death, and blew open the shaft to the surface. About a thousand people actually made it to the top. Within twenty-four hours the city was dead -- as the ringleaders had been warned would be the outcome. The warning didn't deter them. Nor did it protect the prudent citizens who had no part in the affair." Hamelin leaned forward suddenly. "People won't wait to be told when it's their turn to be re-educated. They'll be tired of waiting, tired to the point of insanity of living at the bottom of a hole. They'll just go. "And that, gentlemen, will leave the world to the enemy... or, more likely, the rats. They alone are immune to everything by now." There was a long silence. At last Carson said mildly: "Why aren't we immune to everything by now?" "Eh? Why -- the new generations. They've never been exposed." "We still have a reservoir of older people who lived through the war: people who had one or several of the new diseases that swept the world, some as many as five, and yet recovered. They still have their immunities; we know; we've tested them. We know from sampling that no new disease has been introduced by either side in over ten years now. Against all the known ones, we have immunization techniques, anti-sera, antibiotics, and so on. I suppose you get your shots every six months like all the rest of us; we should all be very hard to infect now, and such infections as do take should run mild courses." Carson held the undersecretary's eyes grimly. "Now, answer me this question: why is it that, despite all these protections, every single person in an opened city dies?" "I don't know," Hamelin said, staring at each of them in turn. "By your showing, some of them should recover." "They should," Carson said. "But nobody does. Why? Because the very nature of disease has changed since we all went underground. There are now abroad in the world a number of mutated bacterial strains which can bypass the immunity mechanisms of the human body altogether. What this means in simple terms is that, should such a germ get into your body, your body wouldn't recognize it as an invader. It would manufacture no antibodies against the germ. Consequently, the germ could multiply without any check, and -- you would die. So would we all." "I see," Hamelin said. He seemed to have recovered his composure extraordinarily rapidly. "I am no scientist, gentlemen, but what you tell me makes our position sound perfectly hopeless. Yet obviously you have some answer." Carson nodded. "We do. But it's important for you to understand the situation, otherwise the answer will mean nothing to you. So: is it perfectly clear to you now, from what we've said so far, that no amount of re-educating a man's brain, be he soldier or civilian, will allow him to survive on the surface?" "Quite clear," Hamelin said, apparently ungrudgingly. Carson's meter. "But if you don't re-educate his brain, what can you re-educate? His reflexes, perhaps?" "No," Carson said. "His lymph nodes, and his spleen." A scornful grin began to appear on Hamelin's thin lips. "You need better public relations counsel than you've been getting," he said. "If what you say is true -- as of course I assume it is -- then the term 're-educate' is not only inappropriate, it's downright misleading. If you had chosen a less suggestive and more accurate label in the beginning, I wouldn't have been able to cause you half the trouble I have." "I agree that we were badly advised there," Carson said. "But not entirely for those reasons. Of course the name is misleading; that's both a characteristic and a function of the names of top secret projects. But in this instance, the name 'ReEducation', bad as it now appears, subjected the men who chose it to a fatal temptation. You see, though it is misleading, it is also entirely accurate." "Word-games," Hamelin said. "Not at all," Mudgett interposed. "We were going to spare you the theoretical reasoning behind our project, Mr. Secretary, but now you'll just have to sit still for it. The fact is that the body's ability to distinguish between its own cells and those of some foreign tissue -- a skin graft, say, or a bacterial invasion of the blood -- isn't an inherited ability. It's a learned reaction. Furthermore, if you'll think about it a moment, you'll see that it has to be. Body cells die, too, and have to be disposed of; what would happen if removing those dead cells provoked an antibody reaction, as the destruction of foreign cells does? We'd die of anaphylactic shock while we were still infants. "For that reason, the body has to learn how to scavenge selectively. In human beings, that lesson isn't learned completely until about a month after birth. During the intervening time, the newborn infant is protected by antibodies that it gets from the colestrum, the 'first milk' it gets from the breast during the three or four days immediately after birth. It can't generate its own; it isn't allowed to, so to speak, until it's learned the trick of cleaning up body residues without triggering the antibody mechanisms. Any dead cells marked 'personal' have to be dealt with some other way." "That seems clear enough," Hamelin said. "But I don't see its relevance." "Well, we're in a position now where that differentiation between the self and everything outside the body doesn't do us any good any more. These mutated bacteria have been 'selfed' by the mutation. In other words, some of their protein molecules, probably desoxyribonucleic acid molecules, carry configurations or 'recognition-units' identical with those of our body cells, so that the body can't tell one from another." "But what has all this to do with re-education?" "Just this," Carson said. "What we do here is to impose upon the cells of the body -- all of them -- a new set of recognition-units for the guidance of the lymph nodes and the spleen, which are the organs that produce antibodies. The new units are highly complex, and the chances of their being duplicated by bacterial evolution, even under forced draught, are too small to worry about. That's what Re-Education is. In a few moments, if you like, we'll show you just how it's done." Hamelin ground out his fifth cigarette in Mudgett's ashtray and placed the tips of his fingers together thoughtfully. Carson wondered just how much of the concept of recognition-marking the under-secretary had absorbed. It had to be admitted that he was astonishingly quick to take hold of abstract ideas, but the self-marker theory of immunity was -- like everything else in immunology -- almost impossible to explain to laymen, no matter how intelligent. "This process," Hamelin said hesitantly. "It takes a long time?" "About six hours per subject, and we can handle only one man at a time. That means that we can count on putting no more than seven thousand troops into the field by the turn of the century. Every one will have to be a highly trained specialist, if we're to bring the war to a quick conclusion." "Which means no civilians," Hamelin said. "I see. I'm not entirely convinced, but -- by all means let's see how it's done." retary tried his best to look everywhere at once. The room cut into the rock was roughly two hundred feet high. Most of it was occupied by the bulk of the Re-Education Monitor, a mechanism as tall as a fifteen-storey building, and about a city block square. Guards watched it on all sides, and the face of the machine swarmed with technicians. "Incredible," Hamelin murmured. "That enormous object can process only one man at a time?" "That's right," Mudgett said. "Luckily it doesn't have to treat all the body cells directly. It works through the blood, re-selfing the cells by means of small changes in the serum chemistry." "What kind of changes?" "Well," Carson said, choosing each word carefully, "that's more or less a graveyard secret, Mr. Secretary. We can tell you this much: the machine uses a vast array of crystalline, complex sugars which behave rather like the blood groupand-type proteins. They're fed into the serum in minute amounts, under feedback control of second-bysecond analysis of the blood. The computations involved in deciding upon the amount and the precise nature of each introduced chemical are highly complex. Hence the size of the machine. It is, in its major effect, an artificial kidney." "I've seen artificial kidneys in the hospitals," Hamelin said, frowning. "They're rather compact affairs." "Because all they do is remove waste products from the patient's blood, and restore the fluid and electrolyte balance. Those are very minor renal functions in the higher mammals. The organ's main duty is chemical control of immunity. If Burnet and Fenner had known that back in #, when the selfing theory was being formulated, we'd have had Re-Education long before now." "Most of the machine's size is due to the computation section," Mudgett emphasized. "In the body, the brain-stem does those computations, as part of maintaining homeostasis. But we can't reach the brain-stem from outside; it's not under conscious control. Once the body is re-selfed, it will re-train the thalamus where we can't." Suddenly, two swinging doors at the base of the machine were pushed apart and a mobile operating table came through, guided by two attendants. There was a form on it, covered to the chin with a sheet. The face above the sheet was immobile and almost as white. Hamelin watched the table go out of the huge cavern with visibly mixed emotions. He said: "This process -- it's painful?" "No, not exactly," Carson said. The motive behind the question interested him hugely, but he didn't dare show it. "But any fooling around with the immunity mechanisms can give rise to symptoms -- fever, general malaise, and so on. We try to protect our subjects by giving them a light shock anesthesia first." "Shock?" Hamelin repeated. "You mean electroshock? I don't see how -- " "Call it stress anesthesia instead. We give the man a steroid drug that counterfeits the anesthesia the body itself produces in moments of great stress -- on the battlefield, say, or just after a serious injury. It's fast, and free of after-effects. There's no secret about that, by the way; the drug involved is #hydroxypregnane-# dione sodium succinate, and it dates all the way back to #." "Oh," the under-secretary said. The ringing sound of the chemical name had had, as Carson had hoped, a ritually soothing effect. "Gentlemen," Hamelin said hesitantly. "Gentlemen, I have a -- a rather unusual request. And, I am afraid, a rather selfish one." A brief, nervous laugh. "Selfish in both senses, if you will pardon me the pun. You need feel no hesitation in refusing me, but..." Abruptly he appeared to find it impossible to go on. Carson mentally crossed his fingers and plunged in. "You would like to undergo the process yourself?" he said. "Well, yes. Yes, that's exactly it. Does that seem inconsistent? I should know, should I not, what it is that I'm advocating for my following? Know it intimately, from personal experience, not just theory? Of course I realize that it would conflict with your policy, but I assure you I wouldn't turn it to any political advantage -- none whatsoever. And perhaps it wouldn't be too great a lapse of policy to process just one civilian among your seven thousand soldiers." Subverted, by God ! Carson looked at Mudgett with a firmly straight face. It wouldn't do to accept too quickly. But Hamelin was rushing on, almost chattering now. "I can understand your hesitation. You must feel that I'm trying to gain some advantage, or even to get to the surface ahead of my fellow-men. If it will set your minds at rest, I would be glad to enlist in your advance army. Before five years are up, I could surely learn some technical skill which would make me useful to the expedition. If you would prepare papers to that effect, I'd be happy to sign them." "That's hardly necessary," Mudgett said. "After you're Re-Educated, we can simply announce the fact, and say that you've agreed to join the advance party when the time comes." "Ah," Hamelin said. "I see the difficulty. No, that would make my position quite impossible. If there is no other way -- " "Excuse us a moment," Carson said. Hamelin bowed, and the doctor pulled Mudgett off out of earshot. "Don't overplay it," he murmured. "You're tipping our hand with that talk about a press release, Colonel. He's offering us a bribe -- but he's plenty smart enough to see that the price you're suggesting is that of his whole political career, He won't pay that much." "What then?" Mudgett whispered hoarsely. "Get somebody to prepare the kind of informal contract he suggested. Offer to put it under security seal so we won't be able to show it to the press at all. He'll know well enough that such a seal can be broken if our policy ever comes before a presidential review -- and that will restrain him from forcing such a review. Let's not demand too much. Once he's been re-educated, he'll have to live the rest of the five years with the knowledge that he can live topside any time he wants to try it -- and he hasn't had the discipline our men have had. It's my bet that he'll goof off before the five years are up -- and good riddance." They went back to Hamelin, who was watching the machine and humming in a painfully abstracted manner. "I've convinced the Colonel," Carson said, "that your services in the army might well be very valuable when the time comes, Mr. Secretary. If you'll sign up, we'll put the papers under security seal for your own protection, and then I think we can fit you into our treatment program today." "I'm grateful to you, Dr. Carson," Hamelin said. "Very grateful , indeed." Five minutes after his injection, Hamelin was as peaceful as a flounder and was rolled through the swinging doors. An hour's discussion of the probable outcome, carried on in the privacy of Mudgett's office, bore very little additional fruit, however. "It's our only course," Carson said. "It's what we hoped to gain from his visit, duly modified by circumstances. It all comes down to this: Hamelin's compromised himself, and he knows it." "But," Mudgett said, "suppose he was right? What about all that talk of his about mass insanity?" "I'm sure it's true," Carson said, his voice trembling slightly despite his best efforts at control. "It's going to be rougher than ever down here for the next five years, Colonel. Our only consolation is that the enemy must have exactly the same problem; and if we can beat them to the surface -- " " Hsst !" Mudgett said. Carson had already broken off his sentence. He wondered why the scanner gave a man such a hard time outside that door, and then admitted him without any warning to the people on the other side. Couldn't the damned thing be trained to knock? The newcomer was a page from the haemotology section. "Here's the preliminary rundown on your 'Student X', Dr. Carson," he said. The page saluted Mudgett and went out. Carson began to read. After a moment, he also began to sweat. "Colonel, look at this. I was wrong after all. Disastrously wrong. I haven't seen a blood-type distribution pattern like Hamelin's since I was a medical student, and even back then it was only a demonstration, not a real live patient. Look at it from the genetic point of view -- the migration factors." He passed the protocol across the desk. Mudgett was not by background a scientist, but he was an enormously able administrator, of the breed that makes it its business to know the technicalities on which any project ultimately rests. He was not much more than halfway through the tally before his eyebrows were gaining altitude like shock-waves. "Carson, we can't let that man into the machine! He's -- " "He's already in it, Colonel, you know that. And if we interrupt the process before it runs to term, we'll kill him." "Let's kill him, then," Mudgett said harshly. "Say he died while being processed. Do the country a favor." "That would produce a hell of a stink. Besides, we have no proof." Mudgett flourished the protocol excitedly. "That's not proof to anyone but a haemotologist." "But Carson, the man's a saboteur!" Mudgett shouted. "Nobody but an Asiatic could have a typing pattern like this! And he's no melting-pot product, either -- he's a classical mixture, very probably a Georgian. And every move he's made since we first heard of him has been aimed directly at us -- aimed directly at tricking us into getting him into the machine!" "I think so too," Carson said grimly. "I just hope the enemy hasn't many more agents as brilliant." "One's enough," Mudgett said. "He's sure to be loaded to the last cc of his blood with catalyst poisons. Once the machine starts processing his serum, we're done for -- it'll take us years to re-program the computer, if it can be done at all. It's got to be stopped!" "Stopped?" Carson said, astonished. "But it's already stopped. That's not what worries me. The machine stopped it fifty minutes ago." "It can't have! How could it? It has no relevant data!" "Sure it has." Carson leaned forward, took the cruelly chewed pencil away from Mudgett, and made a neat check beside one of the entries on the protocol. Mudgett stared at the checked item. "Platelets Rh VI? he mumbled. "But what's that got to do with... Oh. Oh, I see. That platelet type doesn't exist at all in our population now, does it? Never seen it before myself, at least." "No," Carson said, grinning wolfishly. "It never was common in the West, and the pogrom of #I wiped it out. That's something the enemy couldn't know. But the machine knows it. As soon as it gives him the standard antiIV desensitization shot, his platelets will begin to dissolve -- and he'll be rejected for incipient thrombocytopenia." He laughed. "For his own protection! But -- " "But he's getting nitrous oxide in the machine, and he'll be held six hours under anesthesia anyhow -- also for his own protection," Mudgett broke in. He was grinning back at Carson like an idiot. "When he comes out from under, he'll assume that he's been re-educated, and he'll beat it back to the enemy to report that he's poisoned our machine, so that they can be sure they'll beat us to the surface. And he'll go the fastest way: overland." "He will," Carson agreed. "Of course he'll go overland, and of course he'll die. But where does that leave us? We won't be able to conceal that he was treated here, if there's any sort of an inquiry at all. And his death will make everything we do here look like a fraud. Instead of paying our Pied Piper -- and great jumping Jehosophat, look at his name! They were rubbing our noses in it all the time! Nevertheless, we didn't pay the piper; we killed him. And 'platelets Rh VI won't be an adequate excuse for the press, or for Hamelin's following." "It doesn't worry me," Mudgett rumbled. "Who'll know? He won't die in our labs. He'll leave here hale and hearty. He won't die until he makes a break for the surface. After that we can compose a fine obituary for the press. Heroic government official, on the highest policy level -- couldn't wait to lead his followers to the surface -- died of being too much in a hurry -- Re i'Ui. Ed Project sorrowfully reminds everyone that no technique is foolproof -- " Mudgett paused long enough to light a cigarette, which was a most singular action for a man who never smoked. "As a matter of fact, Carson," he said, it's a natural." Carson considered it. It seemed to hold up. And 'Hamelin' would have a death certificate as complex as he deserved -- not officially, of course, but in the minds of everyone who knew the facts. His death, when it came, would be due directly to the thrombocytopenia which had caused the Re-Ed machine to reject him -- and thrombocytopenia is a disease of infants. Unless ye become as little children... That was a fitting reason for rejection from the new kingdom of Earth: anemia of the newborn. His pent breath went out of him in a long sigh. He hadn't been aware that he'd been holding it. "It's true," he said softly. "That's the time to pay the piper." "When?" Mudgett said. "When?" Carson said, surprised. "Why, before he takes the children away." #   Only if we face and know the truth about the world, whether the world of physics and chemistry, or of geology and biology, or of mind and behavior, shall we be able to see what is our own true place in the world. -- Julian Huxley A new moral outlook is called for in which the submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous. -- Bertrand Russell if ' Jetways were excellent substitutes for war , perfect outlets for all forms of neuroses. And the unfit were weeded out by death... Down the naked, ice-white corridor. The echo of his footfalls like drumbeats, ominous, threatening. Around him, bodies, faces, moving dimly behind the veil of his fear. At last, above an oaken door, the black-lettered sign: He took a deep breath. He withdrew his handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his forehead, his upper lip, the palms of his hands. His mind caressed the hope : Maybe I've failed the tests. Maybe they won't give me a license . He opened the door and stepped inside. The metallic voice of a robotreceptionist hummed at him: "Name?" "T -- Tom Rogers." Click. "Have you an appointment?" His gaze ran over the multitude of silver-boxed analyzers, computers, tabulators, over the white-clad technicians and attendants, over the endless streams of taped data fed from mouths in the domeshaped ceiling. "Have you an appointment?" repeated the robot. "Oh. At #:# p. m." Click. "Follow the red arrow in Illustrated by Mel Hunter Aisle Three, please." Tom Rogers moved down the aisle, eyes wide on the flashing, arrow-shaped lights just beneath the surface of the quartzite floor. Abruptly, he found himself before a desk. Someone pushed him into a foam-rubber contour chair. "Surprised, eh, boy?" boomed a deep voice. "No robots at this stage of the game. No sir. This requires the human touch. Get me?" "Uh-huh." "Well, let's see now." The man settled back in his chair behind the desk and began thumbing through a file of papers. He was paunchy and bald save for a forepeak of redbrown fuzz. His gray eyes, with the dreamy look imposed by thick contact lenses, were kindly. Sweeping across his flat chest were two rows of rainbow-bright Driver's Ribbons. Two of the bronze accident stars were flanked by smaller stars which indicated limb replacements. Belatedly, Tom noticed the desk's aluminum placard which read Harry Hayden , Final Examiner -- Human. Tom thought, Please, Harry Hayden, tell me I failed. Don # t lead up to it. Please come out and say I failed the tests. "Haven't had much time to look over your file," mused Harry Hayden. "Thomas Darwell Rogers. Occupation: journalism student. Unmarried. No siblings. Height, fiveeleven. Weight, one-sixty-three. Age, twenty." Harry Hayden frowned. "Twenty?" he repeated, looking up. Oh, God, here it comes again . "Yes, sir," said Tom Rogers. Harry Hayden's face hardened. "You've tried to enlist before? You were turned down?" "This is my first application." Sudden hostility swept aside Harry Hayden's expression of kindliness. He scowled at Tom's file. "Bom July #, #. This is July #, #. In two days you'll be twenty-one. We don't issue new licenses to people over twenty-one." "I -- I know, sir. The psychiatrists believe you adjust better to Driving when you're young." "In fact," glowered Harry Hayden, "in two days you'd have been classified as an enlistment evader. Our robo-statistics department would have issued an automatic warrant of arrest." "I know, sir." "Then whyd you wait so long?" The voice was razor-sharp. Tom wiped a fresh burst of' sweat from his forehead. "Well, you know how one keeps putting things off. I just -- " "You don't put off things like this, boy. Why, my three sons were lined up here at five in the morning on their sixteenth birthdays. Every mother's son of 'em. They'd talked of nothing else since they were twelve. Used to play Drivers maybe six, seven hours every day..." His voice trailed. "Most kids are like that," said Tom. "Weren't you? # The hostility in Harry Hayden seemed to be churning like boiling water. "Oh, sure," lied Tom. "I don't get it. You say you wanted to Drive, but you didn't try to enlist." Tom squirmed. You can't tell him you've been scared of jetmoliles ever since you saw that crash when you were three. You can't say that, at seven, you saw your grandfather die in a jetmobile and that after that you wouldn't even play with a jetmobile toy . You can't tell him those things because five years of psychiatric treatment didn't get the fear out of you. If the medics didn't understand, how could Harry Hayden? Tom licked his lips. And you can't tell him how you used to lie in bed praying you'd die before you were sixteen -- or how you've pleaded with Mom and Dad not to make you enlist till you were twenty. You can't -- Inspiration struck him. He clenched his fists. "It -- it was my mother, sir. You know how mothers are sometimes. Hate to see their kids grow up. Hate to see them put on a uniform and risk being killed." Harry Hayden digested the explanation for a few seconds. It seemed to pacify him. "By golly, that's right. Esther took it hard when Mark died in a five-car bangup out of San Francisco. And when Larry got his three summers ago in Europe. Esther's my wife -- Mark was my youngest, Larry the oldest." He shook his head. "But it isn't as bad as it used to be. Organ and limb grafts are pretty well perfected, and with electro-hypnosis operations are painless. The only fatalities now are when death is immediate, when it happens before the medics get to you. Why, no more than one out of ten Drivers died in the last four-year period." A portion of his good nature returned. "Anyway, your personal life's none of my business. You understand the enlistment contract?" Tom nodded. Damn you, Harry Hayden, let me out of here. Tell me I failed, tell me I passed. But damn you, let me out. "Well?" said Harry Hayden, waiting. "Oh. The enlistment contract. First enlistment is for four years. Renewal any time during the fourth year at the option of the enlistee. Minimum number of hours required per week: seven. Use of unauthorized armour or offensive weapons punishable by # fine or five years in prison. All accidents and deaths not witnessed by a Jetway 'copter-jet must be reported at once by visi-phone to nearest Referee and Medical Depot. Oh yes, maximum speed : # miles per." "Right! You got it, boy!" Harry Hayden paused, licking his lips. "Now, let's see. Guess I'd better ask another question or two. This is your final examination, you know. What do you remember about the history of Driving?" Tom was tempted to say, "Go to Hell, you fat idiot," but he knew that whatever he did or said now was of no importance. The robottraining tests he'd undergone during the past three weeks, only, were of importance. Dimly, he heard himself repeating the phrases beaten into his mind by school historytapes : "In the #th Century a majority of the Earth's peoples were filled with hatreds and frustrations. Humanity was cursed with a world war every generation or so. Between wars, young people had no outlets for their energy, and many of them formed bands of delinquents. Even older people developed an alarming number of psychoses and neuroses. "The institution of Driving was established in # after automobiles were declared obsolete because of their great number. The Jetways were retained for use of young people in search of thrills." "Right!" Harry Hayden broke in. "Now, the kids get all the excitement they need, and there are no more delinquent bands and wars. When you've spent a hitch or you're mature. You're ready to settle down and live a quiet life -- just like most of the old-time war veterans used to do. And you're trained to think and act fast, you've got good judgment. And the weak and unfit are weeded out. Right, boy?" Tom nodded. A thought forced its way up from the layer of fear that covered his mind. "Right -- as far as it goes." "How's that?" Tom's voice quavered, but he said, "I mean that's part of it. The rest is that most people are bored with themselves. They think that by traveling fast they can escape from themselves. After four or eight years of racing at # per, they find out they can't escape after all, so they become resigned. Or, sometimes if they're lucky enough to escape death, they begin to feel important after all. They aren't so bored then because a part of their mind tells them they're mightier than death." Harry Hayden whistled. "Hey, I never heard that before. Is that in the tapes now? Can't say I understand it too well, but it's a fine idea. Anyway, Driving's good. Cuts down on excess population, too -- and with Peru putting in Jetways, it's world-wide. Yep, by golly. Yes, sir!" He thrust a pen at Tom. "All right, boy. Just sign here." Tom Rogers took the pen automatically. "You mean, I -- " "Yep, you came through your robot-training tests A-l. Oh, some of the psycho reports aren't too flattering. Lack of confidence, sense of inferiority, inability to adjust. But nothing serious. A few weeks of Driving'll fix you up. Yep, boy, you've passed. You're getting your license. Tomorrow morning you'll be on the Jetway. You'll be Driving, boy, Driving!" Oh Mother of God, Mother of God... "And now," said Harry Hayden, "you'll want to see your Hornet." "Of course," murmured Tom Rogers, swaying. The paunchy man rose and led Tom down an aluminite ramp and onto a small observation platform some ninety feet above the ground. A dry summer wind licked at Tom's hair and stung his eyes. Nausea twisted at his innards. He felt as if he were perched on the edge of a slippery precipice. "There," intoned Harry Hayden, "is the Jetway. Beautiful, eh?" "Uh-huh." Trembling, Tom forced his vision to the bright, smooth canyon beneath him. Its bottom was a shining white asphalt ribbon, a thousand feet wide, that cut arrowstraight through the city. Its walls were naked concrete banks a hundred feet high whose reinforced lips curved inward over the antiseptic whiteness. Harry Hayden pointed a chubby finger downward. "And there they are -- the Hornets. See 'em, boy? Right there in front of the assembly shop. Twelve of 'em. Brand new DeLuxe Super-Jet '#I Hornets. Yes, sir. Going to be twelve of you initiated tomorrow." Tom scowled at the twelve jetmobiles shaped like flattened teardrops. No sunlight glittered on their dead-black bodies. They squatted silent and foreboding, oblivious to sunlight, black bullets poised to hurl their prospective occupants into fury and horror. Grandpa looked so very white in his coffin, so very dead -- "What's the matter, boy? You sick?" "N -- no, of course not." Harry Hayden laughed. "I get it. You thought you'd get to really see one. Get in it, I mean, try it out. It's too late in the day, boy. Shop's closing. You couldn't drive one anyway. Regulation is that new drivers start in the morning when they're fresh. But tomorrow morning one of those Hornets'll be assigned to you. Delivered to the terminal nearest your home. Live far from your terminal?" "About four blocks." "Half a minute on the mobilewalk. What college you go to?" "Western U." "Lord, that's # miles away. You been living there?" "No. Commuting every day on the monorail." "Hell, that's for old women. Must have taken you over an hour to get there. Now you'll make it in almost thirty minutes. Still, it's best to take it easy the first day. Don't get 'er over # per. But don't let 'er fall beneath that either. If you do, some old veteran'll know you're a greenhorn and try to knock you off." Suddenly Harry Hayden stiffened. "Here come a couple! Look at 'em, boy!" The low rumbling came out of the west, as of angry bees. Twin pinpoints of black appeared on the distant white ribbon. Louder and louder the rumbling. Larger and larger the dots. To Tom, the sterile Jet way was transformed into a home of horror, an amphitheatre of death. Louder and larger -- Brooommmmmm. Gone. "Hey, how'ja like that, boy? They're gonna crack the sonic barrier or my name's not Harry Hayden!" Tom's white-knuckled hands grasped a railing for support. Christ, I'm going to he sick. I'm going to vomit. "But wait'll five o'clock or nine in the morning. That's when you see the traffic. That's when you really do some Driving!" Tom gulped. "Is -- is there a rest room here?" "What's that, boy?" "A -- a rest room." "What's the matter, boy? You do look sick. Too much excitement, maybe?" Tom motioned frantically. Harry Hayden pointed, slow comprehension crawling over his puffy features. "Up the ramp, to your right." Tom Rogers made it just in time... Many voices : "Happy Driving to You, Happy Driving to You, Happy Driving, Dear Taaaahmmm -- " (pause) "Happy Driving to -- " (flourish) " -- You!" An explosion of laughter. A descent of beaming faces, a thrusting forward of hands. Mom reached him first. Her small face was pale under its thin coat of make-up. Her firm, rounded body was like a girl's in its dress of swishing Martian silk, yet her blue eyes were sad and her voice held a trembling fear: "You passed, Tom?" Softly. Tom's upper lip twitched. Was she afraid that he'd passed the tests -- or that he hadn't! He wasn't sure. Before he could answer, Dad broke in, hilariously. "Everybody passes these days excepts idiots and cripples!" Tom tried to join the chorus of laughter. Dad said, more softly, "You did pass, didn't you?" "I passed," said Tom, forcing a smile. "But, Dad, I didn't want a surprise party. Really, I -- " "Nonsense." Dad straightened. "This is the happiest moment of our lives -- or at least it should be." Dad grinned. An understanding, intimate and gentle, flickered across his handsome, gray-thatched features. For an instant Tom felt that he was not alone. Then the grin faded. Dad resumed his role of proud and blustering father. Light glittered on his three rows of Driver's Ribbons. The huge Blue Ribbon of Honor was in their center, like a blue flower in an evil garden of bronze accident stars, crimson fatality ribbons and silver death's-heads. In a moment of desperation Tom turned to Mom. The sadness was still in her face, but it seemed overshadowed by pride. What was it she'd once said? "It's terrible, Tom, to think of your becoming a Driver, but it'd be a hundred times more terrible not to see you become one." He knew now that he was alone, an exile, and Mom and Dad were strangers. After all, how could one person, entrenched in his own little world of calm security, truly know another's fear and loneliness? "Just a little celebration," Dad was saying. "You wouldn't be a Driver unless we gave you a real send-off. All our friends are here, Tom. Uncle Mack and Aunt Edith and Bill Ackerman and Lou Dorrance -- " No, Dad, Tom thought. Not our friends. Your friends. Don't you remember that a man of twenty who isn't a Driver has no friends? A lank, loosejowled man jostled between them. Tom realized that Uncle Mack was babbling at him. "Knew you'd make it, Tom. Never believed what some people said 'bout you being afraid. My boy, of course, enlisted when he was only seventeen. Over thirty now, but he still Drives now and then. Got a special license, you know. Only last week -- " Dad exclaimed, "A toast to our new Driver!" Murmurs of delight. Clinkings of glasses. Gurglings of liquid. Someone bounded a piano chord. Voices rose: "A-Driving he will go, A-Driving he will go, To Hell and back in a coffinsack A-Driving he will go." Tom downed his glass of champagne. A pleasant warmth filled his belly. A satisfying numbness dulled the raw ache of fear. He smiled bitterly. There was kindness and gentleness within the human heart, he thought, but like tiny inextinguishable fires, there were ferocity and savageness, too. What else could one expect from a race only a few thousand years beyond the spear and stone axe? Through his imagination passed a parade of sombre scenes: The primitive man dancing about a Paleolithic fire, chanting an invocation to strange gods who might help in tomorrow's battle with the hairy warriors from the South. The barrel-chested Roman gladiator, with trident and net, striding into the great stone arena. The silver-armored knight, gauntlet in gloved hand, riding into the pennant-bordered tournament ground. The rock-shouldered fullback trotting beneath an avalanche of cheers into the #th Century stadium. Men needed a challenge to their wits, a test for their strength. The urge to combat and the lust for danger was as innate as the desire for life. Who was he to say that the law of Driving was unjust? Nevertheless he shuddered. And the singers continued: "A thousand miles an hour, A thousand miles an hour, Angels cry and devils sigh At a thousand miles an hour..." like a den of chained, growling black tigers. White-cloaked attendants scurried from stall to stall, deft hands flying over atomic-engine controls and flooding each vehicle with surging life. Ashen-faced, shivering in the early-morning coolness, Tom Rogers handed an identification slip to an attendant. "Okay, kid," the rat-faced man wheezed, "there she is -- Stall #. Brand new, first time out. Good luck." Tom stared in horror at the grumbling metal beast. "But remember," the attendant your first day. Most Drivers aren't out to get a Ribbon every day either. They just want to get to work or school, mostly, and have fun doing it." Have fun doing it, thought Tom. Good God. About him passed other blackuniformed Drivers. They paused at the heads of their stalls, donned crash-helmets and safety belts, adjusted goggles. They were like primitive warriors, like cocky Roman gladiators, like armored knights, like star fullbacks. They were formidable and professional. Tom's imagination wandered. By Jupiter's beard , we'll vanquish Attila and his savages. We'll prove ourselves worthy of being men and Romans... The Red Knight? I vow , Mother , that his blood alone shall know the sting of the lance... Don't worry, Dad. Those damned Japs dnd Germans won't lay a hand on me... Watch me on TV, folks. Three touchdowns today -- I promise! The attendant's voice snapped him back to reality. "What you waiting for, kid? Get in!" Tom's heart pounded. He felt the hot pulse of blood in his temples. The Hornet lay beneath him like an open, waiting coffin. He swayed. "Hi, Tom!" a boyish voice called. "Bet I beat ya!" Tom blinked and beheld a smallboned, tousled-haired lad of seventeen striding past the stall. What was his name? Miles. That was it. Larry Miles. A frosh at Western U. A skinny, pimply-faced boy suddenly transformed into a blackgarbed warrior. How could this be? "Okay," Tom called, biting his lip. He looked again at the Hornet. A giddiness returned to him. You can say you're sick, he told himself. It's happened before: a hangover from the party. Sure. Tomorrow you'll feel better. If you could just have one more day, just one -- Other Hornets were easing out into the slip, sleek black cats embarking on an insane flight. One after another, grumbling, growling, spatting scarlet flame from their tail jets. Perhaps if he waited a few minutes, the traffic would be thinner. He could have coffee, let the other nine-o'clock people go on ahead of him. No, dammit, get it over with . If you crash, you crash. If you die, you die. You and Grandpa and a He gritted his teeth, fighting the omnipresent giddiness. He eased his body down into the Hornet's cockpit. He felt the surge of incredible energies beneath the steelite controls. Compared to this vehicle, the ancient training jets were as children's toys. An attendant snapped down the plexite canopy. Ahead, a guidemaster twirled a blue flag in a starting signal. Tom flicked on a switch. His trembling hands tightened about the steering lever. The Hornet lunged forward, quivering as it was seized by the Jetway's electromagnetic guide-field. He drove... One hundred miles an hour, two hundred, three hundred. Down the great asphalt valley he drove. Perspiration formed inside his goggles, steaming the glass. He tore them off. The glaring whiteness hurt his eyes. Swish, swish swish. Jetmobiles roared past him. The rushing wind of their passage buffeted his own car. His hands were knuckled white around the steering lever. He recalled the advice of Harry Hayden: Don't let 'er under # per. If you do, some old veteran'll know you're a greenhorn and try to knock you off. Lord. Six hundred. But strangely, a measure of desperate courage crept into his fearclouded mind. If Larry Miles, a pimply-faced kid of seventeen, could do it, so could he. Certainly, he told himself. His foot squeezed down on the accelerator. Atomic engines hummed smoothly. To his right, he caught a kaleidoscopic glimpse of a white gyroambulance. A group of metal beasts lay huddled on the emergency strip like black ants feeding on a carcass. Like Grandfather , he thought. Like those two moments out of the dark past , moments of screaming flame and black death and a child's horror . Swish. The scene was gone, transformed into a cluster of black dots on his rear-vision radarscope. His stomach heaved. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick again. But stronger now than his horror was a growing hatred of that horror. His body tensed as if he were fighting a physical enemy. He fought his memories, tried to thrust them back into the oblivion of lost time, tried to leave them behind him just as his Hornet had left the cluster of metal beasts. He took a deep breath. He was not going to be sick after all. Five hundred now. Six hundred. He'd reached the speed without realizing it. Keep 'er steady. Stay on the right. If Larry Miles can do it, So can you. Swooommmm . God, where did that one come from? Only ten minutes more. You'll be there. You'll make a right hand turn at the college. The automatic pilot'll take care of that. You won't have to get in the fast traffic lanes. He wiped perspiration from his forehead. Not so bad, these Drivers. Like Harry Hayden said, the killers come out on Saturdays and Sundays. Now, most of us are just anxious to get to work and school. Six hundred, seven hundred, seven-twenty -- Did he dare tackle the sonic barrier? The white asphalt was like opaque mist. The universe seemed to consist only of the broad expanse of Jetway. Swooommmm. Someone passing even at this speed! The crazy fool! And cutting in, the flame of his exhaust clouding Tom's windshield! Tom's foot jerked off the accelerator. His Hornet slowed. The car ahead disappeared into the white distance like a black arrow. Whew! His legs were suddenly like ice water. He pulled over to the emergency strip. Down went the speedometer -- five hundred, four, three, two, one, zero... He saw the image of the approaching Hornet in his rear-vision radarscope. It was traveling fast and heading straight toward him. Heading onto the emergency strip. A side-swiper! Tom's heart churned. There would be no physical contact between the two Hornets -- but the torrent of air from the inch-close passage would be enough to hurl his car into the Jetway bank like a storm-blown leaf. There was no time to build enough acceleration for escape. His only chance was to frighten the attacker away. He swung his Hornet right, slammed both his acceleration and braking jet controls to full force. The car shook under the sudden release of energy. Whitehot flame roared from its two dozen jets. Tom's Hornet was enclosed by a sphere of flame. But dwarfing the roar was the thunder of the attacking Hornet. A black meteor in Tom's radarscope, it zoomed upon him. Tom closed his eyes, braced himself for the impact. There was no impact. There was only an explosion of sound and a moderate buffeting of his car. It was as if many feet, not inches, had separated the two Hornets. Tom opened his eyes and flicked off his jet controls. Ahead, through the plexite canopy, he beheld the attacker. It was far away now, like an insane, fiery black bird. Both its acceleration and braking jets flamed. It careened to the far side of the Jetway and zig-zagged up the curved embankment. Its body trembled as its momentum fought the Jetway's electromagnetic guidefield. As if in an incredible carnival loop-the-loop, the Hornet topped the lip of the wall. It left the concrete, did a backward somersault, and gyrated through space like a flaming pinwheel. It descended with an earth-shaking crash in the center of the gleaming Jet way. What happened? Tom's dazed mind screamed. In God's name, what happened? He saw the sleek white shape of a Referee's 'copter-jet floating to the pavement beside him. Soon he was being pulled out of his Hornet. Someone was pumping his hand and thumping his back. "Magnificent," a voice was saying. "Simply magnificent!" Night. Gay laughter and tinkling glasses. Above all. Dad's voice, strong and proud: "... and on his very first day, too. He saw the car in his rear radarscope, guessed what the devil was up to. Did he try to escape? No, he stayed right there. When the car closed in for the kill, he spiin around and turned on all his jets full-blast. The killer never had a chance to get close enough to do his side-swiping. The blast roasted him like a peanut." Dad put his arm around Tom's shoulder. All eyes seemed upon Tom's bright new crimson fatality ribbon embossed not only with a silver death's-head, but also with a sea-blue Circle of Honor. Tom thought: Behold the conquering hero . At tila is vanquished and Rome is saved . The Red Knight has been defeated , and the fair princess is mine. That Jap Zero didn't have a chance . A touchdown in the final five seconds of the fourth quarter -- not bad y eh? Dad went on : "That devil really was a killer. Fellow name of Wilson. Been Driving for six years. Had thirty-three accident ribbons with twenty-one fatalities -- not one of them honorable. That Wilson drove for just one purpose: to kill. He met his match in our Tom Rogers." Applause from Uncle Mack and Aunt Edith and Bill Ackerman and Lou Dorrance -- and more important, from young Larry Miles and big Norm Powers and blonde Geraldine Oliver and cute little Sally Peters. Tom smiled. Not only your friends tonight, Dad. Tonight it's my friends, too. My friends from Western U. Fame was as unpredictable as the trembling of a leaf, Tom thought, as delicate as a pillar of glass. Yet the yoke of fame rested pleasantly on his shoulders. He had no inclination to dislodge it. And while a fear was still in him, it was now a fragile thing, an egg shell to be easily crushed. Later Mom came to him. There was a proudness in her features, and yet a sadness and a fear, too. Her eyes held the thoughtful hesitancy of one for whom time and event have moved too swiftly for comprehension. "Tomorrow's Saturday," she murmured. "There's no school, and no one'll expect you to Drive after what happened today. You'll be staying home for your birthday, won't you, Tom?" Tom Rogers shook his head. "No," he said wistfully. "Sally Peters is giving a little party over in New Boston. It's the first time anyone like Sally ever asked me anywhere." "I see," said Mom, as if she really didn't see at all. "You'll take the monorail?" "No, Mom," Tom answered very softly. "I'm Driving."    The world has begun to fear that science has destroyed the ancient values and put nothing in their place. What has really happened, of course, is that science has shown in harsh relief the division between our values and our world. -- J. Bronowski Valaya was a primitive so ciety, yet the natives had a way of communicating that had the experts stumped... shango JL "is our new trouble spot," The older man's rodlike finger probed decisively at a violet dot placed on a thin yellow line of a circle, third out from a sun. Other dots peppered the giant glazed star map, companions of which hung on the other three walls of the chamber. "Valaya is the name of the place," Van Isaac continued. "Perhaps you know something about it." "Not much," said the other, a thirtyish, lean man by the name of Arnold Koven. "I mean, not a great deal besides what the telefilms have screamed for the past two weeks. Revolution, slaughter, tribe against tribe." Koven placed a cigarette between his lips, and his eyes smiled with gentle cynicism. "Valaya has a creole sound." "You'll have no vacation, believe me," Van Isaac responded. "During the colonization, Valaya was peopled largely by residents of the Caribbean. The inhabitants have intermarried over the past sixty years, so there is a slight blue Martian strain. Valaya was seeded with sugar and tin to provide for economy, but left rather backward -- by choice of the colonists. # ' Koven tied into focus. "The raids are the combined effort of the people of the north continent, which is small. The attacks are focused across the channel to the larger south continent. Somehow, the people on North have been inveigled into believing they have a right to South. Our only bit of information is that moved his eyes from the star map to his superior. "Have you localized the trouble ? # ' "Yes. These raids have moved from the small north continent -- # Van Isaac touched one of a row of studs on the desk. An immense rear projection lantern view on the wall where the map had been, setIllustrated by Paul Orban a man named Bruschloss -- # Koven suddenly straightened in the theatrical gloom where his cigarette smoke floated torpidly. "Bruschloss? The one you used to call The Hog ? # "The Hog, yes. He is a citizen of the Betelgeuse Bloc with right-ofentry to any of our planets. He claims to be solely interested in setting up a trading company on Valaya, with headquarters at the village of Maru. But the attacks date from two weeks after he arrived. So," said Van Isaac, tone hardening, "I know he is undoubtedly behind all this, and I want him stopped." "Any G. G. I. A. men around Maru?" Koven inquired. "The local agent for the continent, named Spot wood. He says Bruschloss has conversed privately with the local ruler. Spotwood couldn't plant cameras or sound equipment at the conferences -- our own blasted code forbids it. But the rub is that the ruler has in no way communicated with any of the other tribes on North. In no way " Van Isaac repeated, with a fist on the desk for emphasis. "They have drums. The drums say nothing Spotwood can't understand. All perfectly innocent. They have runners. No runners. No flare signals. No secret meetings. Spotwood has hired three or four dozen breeds to do his spying, but he has absolutely no idea of how the ruler manages to organize the other tribes into these precise, well-timed, well-generaled raids across the strait." "I'm to find out?" asked Koven. "And stop the proceedings?" "Exactly. Spotwood's good, but    At the spaceport, Koven pushed his way through the jabbering crowd, checked his baggage onto the Valaya flight, had coffee, and got something to read from a Vendobook. He chose a volume entitled The Twilight of Meaningism, by Dr. Reywill of Memphis University. As the long iron dagger of the rocket cut burning through the blue curtain of the sky, he settled down in his compartment to read. Dr. Reywill's work turned out to be an historical analysis of the forces which, toward the end of the twentieth century, catalyzed the arts into pure sensation, utterly devoid of meaning or communication. During the middle of that century, with poetry restricted to the hands of the few who wailed that their mechanized age did not understand them, poetry became exceedingly private in imagery and meaning. In a natural evolution, it completely lost all meaning and became a charming musical form several cuts above the primitive. When the masses found they could merely accept verse as a pleasantry whose sound intrigued them as a rattle intrigues a child, poetry, regained its audience. The same condition held true for music, the dance, painting and sculpture. To Koven, born when Meaningism was two hundred years dead, the notion that a poem could say something seemed quaint and even a trifle peculiar. Twenty-eight hours later Koven landed in Maru, knowing a good deal more about the history of contemporary poetry, but knowing nothing which would help him unravel the puzzle of the raids. #I ing," Jimmy Spotwood said. "The colonization board worked Valaya over from one end to the other. This is genuine, authentic and otherwise real tropicana." Koven stood at the window of Spotwood's shack, which looked down a long street to the central clearing which formed the crossroads of Maru. Bluish sky spread out overhead like sheets of hot metal, and the almost poisonously colorful foliage stuttered gendy in a hot breeze. The nearly undressed inhabitants, skins belying only a touch of the bluish blood from Mars, idled along from hut to hut, talking or playing with the children. The only note of turmoil was sounded by the slapping skin drums from the far side of the village. Koven turned around to his host. "Are they beating the drums for any purpose ?" he wanted to know. Spotwood took a drink from a sanitary plastic bubble. "Once a month everybody on North gets together for a shindig." He smirked with good-natured lasciviousness. "The whole rigamarole is years old. Guarantees that plenty of good strong babies will be born, and that the crops won't fail, or some such rot. O' course," Spotwood said laconically, "this monthly assembly would be the logical time to suspect, if they ever did anything but put on a sexual exhibition in that clearing down the road. Maybe," he added, "the head dancer's pelvis -- a female, by the way -- is tattooed with a message in some sort of invisible ink our poor old Earth eyes can't see. Her belly gyrations would guarantee high readership, if nothing else." Koven smiled thinly, as a knock rattled on the slatted door. Spotwood's eyes slitted down and jumped briefly to Koven's, in a glance which the latter interpreted to read, News isn't slow in Maru. I'll bet this is the prime mover. Koven instinctively patted the flat pistol beneath his coat, his back to the door as Spotwood opened it. "I understand we have a visitor in the village," came the sound of an unpleasant, wet and wheezing voice. "You're right," said Spotwood. "Come on in, Bruschloss." Molding his face into a careful expression of relaxed disinterest, Koven turned around to face The Hog, Bruschloss extended a pink gobby hand. "Koven, did you say? I'm always delighted to see anyone here with Earth blood in his veins." He laughed self-consciously, and the rolling folds of his belly quivered. "Even though we are on opposite sides of the political fence we can still be friends, I hope. You arrived at a good time. Tonight's the celebration." He seemed to breathe more quickly at the thought; he savored the words like a man aroused by a fetish. "Spotwood's been telling me," Koven said. "Has he, eh? He enjoys them too, I'll wager." No reply from Spotwood, save the pop of another gin globe being opened. "Have a drink, Bruschloss?" Spotwood asked. "No, I don't think so. Liquor makes me very sleepy. I want to be alert for the ceremony tonight. I love to watch Chemin dance." "Quite a woman," Spotwood agreed. "Er... what is your line of business?" inquired Bruschloss of Koven, elevating the wrinkles on his steaming forehead into an expression of curiosity. "I came to help Jimmy finish up in a hurry." "Trying to discover whether you might seed Valaya for platinum?" asked Bruschloss with perfect innocence. Spotwood snickered. "What's the matter with you, Bruschloss? Are you sure you haven't had a drink? You know it's petro I'm after." "Of course! I am stupid, forgive me." A self-conscious pause ensued, while no one spoke. Then Bruschloss, as if snatching at any clue that might tell him more about the visitor to Maru, spied Koven' s book, slung carelessly along with his other gear on the deal table. "A book!" exclaimed The Hog, rolling forward. "Mr. Koven, it delights me to find a literate man in this wilderness." He turned a few pages, leaving black sweaty thumb prints on the thin plastic leaves. "The disappearance of meaning from poetry, eh?" he said, snapping the book closed. "I must read it some time, if you'll lend it." Koven said he would, and Bruschloss made a quick exit. He seemed to do things in opposites. First he had been straining to remain and keep conversation alive. Last, he had been straining to leave as rapidly as possible. In spite of the man's slovenly appearance, Koven knew he had a dangerous enemy. Bruschloss would have had to be an utter moron to believe that Koven had come to Maru simply to aid Spotwood. Spotwood himself, as if sensing Koven's appraisal of the man from the Betelgeuse Bloc, spoke : "Watch him. He's got three uglies up at his place who do nothing all day but drink and play cards. They're here in case of trouble." Koven smiled thinly. "I hope we can accommodate them." Toward the end of the sixteenhour-day, after Spotwood had prepared dinner from food cubes, Koven decided to take a stroll around the village. The citizens hardly gave him a glance, engrossed in eating within their houses. From glimpses Koven caught, they hardly looked like a warlike crew, and yet he had read the tales of atrocities committed across the strait on South, and he felt a crawly sensation on his spine. Tonight, perhaps, plans would be laid for the next attack, while he knew nothing about the process which would probably go on right around him. Certainly the people of Valaya weren't 'paths. He knew that much. Koven crossed the central clearing and turned left toward the village fringe. He passed the final few dwellings and turned left again, up a slight wooded rise, back across which he could reach Spotwood's house. As he crossed the spine of the ridge, he thought he noticed a movement along to his right, and turned in that direction. He caught sight of an arm arching forward, and a small circular object spiraling down toward his head through the spicy air. Instinctively trained, Koven pumped his legs and slid out forward along the ground, rolling, watching the object go spinning crazily by against the darkening heavens. He extended an arm, caught a tree and jerked himself around into the protection of its thick trunk as a flat explosion tore the air and smashed his eardrums. He closed his eyes tightly. The blazing white flash lasted only a second. Struggling up, he had time only to see the scooped-out pit along the spine's crest, smoking like a raw wound, where the bomb had struck. Boots bit earth, coming in his direction at a dead run. Koven crouched in tree shadow, hoping that his adversary had not seen him scramble to safety in the illusive light on the hill. He snaked the flat pistol free of its casing just as the attacker broke through a clump of brush. Koven had a fleeting impression of massive size, a meaty face and short spiky dark hair. Then he was on his feet, charging against his enemy, who abruptly saw him and ground to a halt. The attacker's mouth made a red startled O, and one heavy hand labored to bring up a heavy pistol. But Koven had already fired. The pale thin beam lanced out in complete silence. The enemy dropped his weapon but had no time to utter a sound. The skin of his head began to blacken and fall away in charring strips. Koven always felt relieved when a man shot like that fell, for he did not have to look at the bubbling horror of burning flesh and gristle. Swinging around, Koven scrutinized the village. No clamor, no outcry had been made. The central street overflowed now, for the short night had nearly begun, and torches began to flare, throwing up great roiling shadows on the trees as the crowd babbled and pressed down to the main clearing. Why in the name of sense had the attack come now? at this precise moment? Spotwood had been in Maru for months, and had said nothing about any sort of attack on him. Certainly Bruschloss suspected Spotwood. All men from Earth had to be suspect here, to a man from the Betelgeuse Bloc. Therefore something about himself which, offhand, he couldn't pinpoint, had driven The Hog far enough into fear to send this attacker. This point Spotwood verified after Koven jogged back to the house at a run. Spotwood scratched his chin and whistled. "Why the blazes is he after you right away?" Spotwood asked. "I'm wondering the same." "He must think you've found out how he organizes the raids." "That's the hell of it. I haven't." From the central clearing came a staccato increase in the tempo of the drumming. Spotwood swiveled around, listening, while Koven continued to scowl dismally at the floor. Spotwood snagged a light coat from the comer and slipped into it. "They'll be starting in a minute. Come on." Once again he managed to grin. "You don't want to miss Chemin. They call the dance a shango. I often wince when I think what a pastor would call it." Koven followed Spotwood from the shanty, and they trudged down the blue-lit street toward the swaying mob in the clearing. Koven quickly outlined a few facts to his companion. They must pretend not to notice the surprise on the face of Bruschloss, which would certainly be present when Koven turned up alive. Moreover, Koven made it clear that they should not even look the least suspiciously in The Hog's direction. "Tough order," Spotwood offered. "Bruschloss sees you alive, he knows you probably saw, and killed, the man who tried to get you. He figures you described the killer to me, and also figures I pegged him down for you as one of his assistants." "Still, let's try to bluff it out." They pressed through the edges of the crowd, ignored, for the watchers concentrated upon the figures diving and turning and stamping their feet on the earth in the center of the ring, clad in feathers and little else, skins shining and polished by sweat in the bubbling light of the ghastly blue flares. Spotwood shouldered off to stand a fair distance away, and Koven found a slight break in the crowd and crouched down on his haunches, stabbing a cigarette into his mouth. From the rear of the circle a young girl appeared, very beautiful, with a tuft of feathers at her hip, and her breasts oiled and glowing like metal cones. Koven gathered this was Chemin, for the name passed on many tongues. A circle of male dancers closed around her. Koven kept his head straight front, but moved his eyes in their sockets, so that he could see Bruschloss, backed up by two men with thick shoulders standing directly behind. The trio blurred almost out of sight at the edge of Koven' s line of vision. Bruschloss sat bent forward, his rolled belly heaving, and the sweaty, stubbled skin of his face looking rotted in the blue light. He followed each movement of the dancer Chemin with obscene concentration, but Koven, switching his eyes front, had the unpleasant feeling that the two burly companions were scrutinizing him. Chemin's dance became less sexual for a few moments, became the sort of dance you might almost expect to see on a photovision variety hour ; a dance without specific meaning. Abruptly the palms of Koven's hands felt wet. He lurched to his feet and searched the crowd for Spotwood. The crowd seemed intensely quiet during Chemin's performance. Each man had his eyes riveted to the flying hands and undulating body of the girl in the center. Koven inched his way free of the crowd, still keeping watch on the dance. He just broke from the edges as Chemin disappeared into the darkness from which she had come, and pairs of males and females, with sharp, biting cries, began again the ritual. With a throbbing in his nerves that always came when he was very close to something he worked for, Koven cut around a series of huts in time to see the girl Chemin disappear into one of them. Looking left and right, seeing no one except the crowd at the rear of the hut forming this edge of the ring, he eased out the pistol and stepped through the hangings. Chemin sat with her head resting wearily on her arms, as if the dancing had drained her last reserve of energy. The light scuff of Koven's shoes on dirt caused her to whip her head up, and he realized again how attractive she was, in spite of the perspiration filming her body and the tired haggardness of her features. "Don't make a single sound," he warned. "FU fire." Gradually the spasmodic quivering in her throat subsided. "You are the new man here with Spotwood," she said, frightened. Koven nodded. "I came to find out how Bruschloss organized the attacks on South, through your ruler." The Hog's name washed the light of truth for a moment into her eyes, and Koven pressed on, sure. "We didn't know how the plans for attack were circulated on this continent. But you've been giving the plans, out there in the ring. That solo dance had a meaning." "Fertility..." she began. "Oh, no. Before and after it, yes. But the women paid no attention to your solo dance. The men did. They were attentive. They were waiting for and receiving orders, weren't they? Orders your ruler had to give through a dance, because Spotwood was here, and you couldn't dare give them in a way he might understand." "You are wrong." Koven stepped forward and pressed the pistol against Chemin's breast. In the badly-lit tent he could still see the flesh of that breast harden. "Am I wrong?" A tiny tongue caressed her lips in anxiety. "What are you going to do with me?' "Do you have more to tell them?" "No, I..." "Tell the truth." The pistol muzzle ground an ugly white pit in her flesh. "Yes, I have more." "When you dance, tell the people to kill Bruschloss and his two men, immediately. Orders from your ruler. Bruschloss is a traitor, tell them." Aghast: "I could not..." "Would you rather die?" "The ruler will know..." "You show me where he is sitting. I'll take care of him. If you should give the wrong message when you dance... if they should turn on me, I'll still manage to kill you before they get me. So it's entirely up to you whether you live or die." He recognized acceptance in her bowed neck. "I want you to show me how the dance works. Show me the motions, the gestures you use to explain plans for the attack." Chemin gazed obliquely at him with tormented eyes. Then she crossed her wrists and moved her fingers in a fluttering motion. "This is the sign for a small peninsula south of here, on the strait. This..." She pantomimed again. "... is the sign which means meeting place. This..." And so she rehearsed the various signals, and then the message Koven had issued, while he kept his pistol trained on her. He knew now what had alarmed Bruschloss, what had prompted the attack so suddenly. again. Koven stood almost directly behind the ruler, fitting a tiny cylindrical attachment to the muzzle of his pistol, to reduce the power for close range. Once more the men glued their eyes on the dancing figure. Seconds after the dance had begun, the ruler uttered a sharp gasp and lurched up from his woven chair as he read the new message. Koven's hand touched him and he stepped around the chair in the darkness. Koven slid the pistol forward and triggered it. Only a faint white glow showed flush against the belly of the ruler. With the smell of burned flesh eating in his nostrils, Koven lowered the ruler's body to the ground. The crowd to either side had surged forward slightly, beginning to talk curiously now, paying no attention to Koven. Across the ring, Bruschloss blinked and gestured sweatily, while his two assistants closed in tight against his shoulders. The drums slapped in a frenzy. Koven saw a man break from the edge of the ring and lurch across toward Bruschloss. Chemin stopped her dance, collapsing to her knees. One of Bruschloss' men shot the first attacker, but by then the crowd had broken, and men boiled forward, and Koven heard The Hog's scream as a sea of writhing backs and arms and legs closed over him. The sounds were gruesome. Koven turned and raced up the long street to Spot wood's house. The seemingly careless agent reeled in moments later, to hear Koven finishing at the communicator set: "... that's right, two Control squads. And for God's sake make it within twenty minutes, before they decide to massacre us." He threw down a switch and swung around on the stool, grinning lopsidedly. Down the long avenue echoed screams, and an angry mob shouting. "Bang! Like that!" Spotwood breathed. "What the hell happened?" Koven sketched it quickly. "You knew," Spotwood said in astonishment, pointing to the table, "because of that book you happened to read?" Koven nodded. "The arts no longer convey meaning, but the ruler of Maru managed to put it back in. Something you didn't look for. Something I wouldn't have looked for... if I hadn't stopped at a Vendobook." "You think they'll come after us?" Spotwood asked. Koven glanced out the window. At the street's end, pieces of something meaty and red had been hoisted up by the crowd on long, sharp poles. They glistened in the flaring light. "They may. They're in a wild mood. Once Control takes over, pistol from the cupboard, and they though, the attacks will be a thing sat down to wait, of the past. But until then..." Twenty-three minutes later 'cop"Holy God," Spotwood breathed, ters were snarling across the night He went toward a cupboard, over the village, and beams cut stopped at the table and glanced swathes back and forth over a sea down. Nearly in awe, he read of tossing bluish faces. Spotwood aloud, "The Twilight of Meaning stood up with a sigh, stretched and ism . Mph." An emphatic shake of took down two gin bubbles, saying the head. Then he unlimbered a to Koven, "Have a drink."    should know. How science wise are you? Score # points for each correct answer: # is good; # is very good; # or over makes you a real whizz. Answers on page I #. #. What theory states that every even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers? #. For a circular orbit to be maintained around the Earth like that of the moon a velocity of m.p.h. is the minimum necessary. #. Which metal has the highest known melting point? #. A parsec is a measure of interstellar space equal to a distance of light years. #. What is the only naked-eye object visible in the southern sky which isn't part of our own galaxy? #. Prime numbers get as we move into larger figures. #. What is another name for a gnomic projection? #. The number I followed by a hundred zeros is known as a  #. Which planet has a density so low that it's actually less than that of water? #. The basic distinction between animals and plants is that animals have no . #. Do non-metals show more extreme melting points than the two extremes in the metal family? #. Cosmic ray intensity varies with the latitude because of Earth's . The tiny, live, straw-colored circles were mysterious but definitely harmless . Yet they were directly responsible for riots. revolution and an atomic war... marsfenes called the grunion which has odd egglaying habits. At high tide, on the second, third, and fourth nights after the full of the moon from March to June, thousands of female grunions ride in on the waves to a beach in southern California near San Diego, dig tail-first into the soft sand, deposit their eggs, then ride back on the wash of the next wave. The whole operation lasts about six seconds. On the nights when the grunion are running, hordes of people used to come to the beach with baskets and other containers, and with torches to light the scene, and try to catch the elusive little fish in their hands. They were doing that on an April night in #. In the midst of the excitement of the chase, only a few of them noticed that something else was riding the waves in with the grunions. Among the few who stopped grunion-catching long enough to investigate were a girl named Marge Hickin and a boy named students, "going together", who had come down on Saturday from Los Angeles for the fun. "What on earth do you think these can be, Gene?" Marge asked, holding out on her palms three or four of the little circular, wriggling objects, looking like small-size doughnuts, pale straw in color. "Never saw anything like them," Gene admitted. "But then my major's psychology, not zoology. They don't seem to bite, anyway. Here let's collect some of them instead of the fish. That dingus of yours will hold water. We can take them to the Marine Biology lab tomorrow and find out what they are." Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda had started a world-wide economic revolution.  None of the scientists at the university laboratory knew what the little live straw-colored circles were, either. In fact, after a preliminary study they wouldn't say positively whether the creatures were animal or vegetable ; they displayed voluntary movement, but they seemed to have no respiratory or digestive organs. They were completely anomalous. The grunion ran again that night, and Gene and Marge stayed down to help the laboratory assistants gather several hundred of the strange new objects for further study. They were so numerous that they were swamping the fish, and the crowds at the beach began to grumble that their sport was being spoiled. Next night the grunion stopped running -- but the little doughnuts didn't. They never stopped. They came in by hundreds of thousands every night, and those which nobody gathered wriggled their way over the land until some of them even turned up on the highways (where a lot of them were smashed by automobiles), on the streets and sidewalks of La Jolla, and as far north as Oceanside and as far south as downtown San Diego itself. The things were becoming a pest. There were indigant letters to the papers, and editorials were written calling on the authorities to do something. Just what to do, nobody knew; the only way to kill the circular little objects from the sea seemed to be to crush them -- and they were too abundant for that to be very effective. Meanwhile, the laboratory kept studying them. Marge and Gene were interested enough to come down again the next week-end to find out what, if anything, had been discovered. Not much had: but one of the biochemists at the laboratory casually mentioned that chemically the straw-colored circles seemed to be almost pure protein, with some carbohydrates and fats, and that apparently they contained all the essential vitamins. College student that he was, Gene To wanda immediately swallowed one of the wriggling things down whole, as a joke. It tickled a little, but that wasn't what caused the delighted amazement on his face. "Gosh!" he exclaimed. "It's delicious!" He swallowed another handful. That was the beginning of the great margene industry. It was an astute reporter, getting a feature story on the sensational new food find, who gave the creatures their name, in honor of the boy and girl who had first brought the things to the attention of the scientists. He dubbed them margenes, and margenes they remained. "Dr. O. Y. Willard, director of the laboratory," his story said in part, "thinks the margenes may be the answer to the increasing and alarming problem of malnutrition, especially in undeveloped countries. " 'For decades now, he said, 'scientists have been worried by the growing gap between world population and world food facilities. Over-farming, climatic changes caused by erosion and deforestation, the encroachment of building areas on agricultural land, and above all the unrestricted growth of population, greatest in the very places where food is becoming scarcest and most expensive, have produced a situation where, if no remedy is found, starvation or semi-starvation may be the fate of half the Earth's people. The ultimate result would be the slow degeneration and death of the entire human race. " 'Many remedies have been suggested,' Dr. Willard commented further. 'They range from compulsory birth control to the production of synthetic food, hydroponics, and the harvesting of plankton from the oceans. Each of these presents almost insuperable difficulties. " 'The one ideal solution would be the discovery of some universal food that would be nourishing, very cheap, plentiful, tasty, and that would not violate the taboos of any people anywhere in the world. In the margenes we may have discovered that food.' " 'We don't know where the margenes came from,' the director went on to say, 'and we don't even know yet what they are, biologically speaking. What we do know is that they provide more energy per gram than any other edible product known to man, that everyone who has eaten them is enthusiastic about their taste, that they can be processed and distributed easily and cheaply, and that they are acceptable even to those who have religious or other objections to certain other foods, such as beef, among the Hindus or pork among the Jews and Mohammedans. " 'Even vegetarians can eat them,' Dr. Willard remarked, 'since they are decidely not animal in nature. Neither, I may add, are they vegetable. They are a hitherto utterly unknown synthesis of chemical elements in living form. Their origin remains undiscovered.' " Naturally, there was no thought of feeding people on raw margenes. Only a few isolated places in either hemisphere would have found live food agreeable. Experiment showed that the most satisfactory way to prepare them was to boil them alive, like crabs or lobsters. They could then be ground and pressed into cakes, cut into convenient portions. One one-inch-square cube made a nourishing and delicious meal for a sedentary adult, two for a man engaged in hard physical labor. And they kept coming in from the Pacific Ocean nightly, by the By this time none of them had to be swept off streets or highways. The beach where for nearly a century throngs had gathered for the sport of catching grunion was off bounds now; it was the property of California Margene, Inc., a private corporation heavily subsidized by the Federal Government as an infant industry. The grunions themselves had to find another place to lay their eggs, or die off -- nobody cared which. The sand they had used for countless millennia as an incubator was hemmed in by factory buildings and trampled by margene gatherers. The whole beautiful shore for miles around was devastated; the university had to move its marine biological laboratory elsewhere; La Jolla, once a delightful suburb and tourist attraction, had become a dirty, noisy honkytonk town where processing and cannery workers lived and spent their off-hours; the unique Torrey Pines had been chopped down because they interfered with the erection of a freight airport. But half the world's people were living on margenes. The sole possession of this wonderful foodstuff gave more power to the United States than had priority in the atomic bomb. Only behind the Iron Curtain did the product of California Margene, Inc. fail to penetrate. Pravda ran parallel articles on the same day, one claiming that margenes -- brzdich noya -- had first appeared long ago on a beach of the Caspian Sea and had for years formed most of the Russian diet ; the other warning the deluded nations receiving free supplies as part of American foreign aid that the margenes had been injected with drugs aimed at making them weak and submissive to the exploitation of the capitalist-imperialists. There was a dangerous moment at the beginning when the sudden sharp decline in stocks of all other food products threatened another #. But with federal aid a financial crash was averted and now a new high level of prosperity had been established. Technological unemployment was brief, and most of the displaced workers were soon retained for jobs in one of the many ramifications of the new margene industry. Agriculture, of course, underwent a short deep depression, not only in America but all over the world; but it came to an end as food other than margenes quickly became a luxury product. Farmers were able to cut their production to a small fraction of the former yield, and to get rich on the dizzying prices offered for bread, apples, or potatoes. And this increased the prosperity of the baking and other related industries as well. In fact, ordinary food costs (which meant margene costs) were so low that a number of the larger unions voluntarily asked for wage decreases in their next contracts. California Margene, Inc. was able to process, pack, and distribute margene cakes at an in finitesimal retail price, by reason of the magnitude of the output. An era of political good feeling, fell upon the western world, reflected from the well-fed comfort of vast populations whose members never before in their lives had had quite enough to eat. The fear of famine seemed to be over forever, and with it the fear of the diseases and the social unrest that follow famine. Even the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, in a conciliatory move in the United Nations Assembly, suggested that the long cold war ought to be amenable to a reasonable solution through a series of amicable discussions. The western nations, assenting, guessed shrewdly that the Iron Curtain countries "wanted in" on the margenes. Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda, who had started it all, left college for copywriting jobs with the agency handling the enormous margene publicity; they were married a few months later. And the margenes continued to come in from the sea in countless vested now from the Pacific itself, near the shoreline, before they reached the beach. Still no research could discover their original source. Only a few scientists worried about wha would happen if the margenes should disappear as suddenly as they had arrived. Attempts at breeding the creatures had failed completely. They did not undergo fission, they did not sporulate, they seemed to have no sex. No methods of reproduction known in the plant or animal kingdom seemed to apply to them. Hundreds of them were kept alive for long periods -- they lived with equal ease in either air or water, and they did not take nourishment, unless they absorbed it from their environment -- but no sign of fertility ever appeared. Neither did they seem to die of natural causes. They just kept coming in... On the night of May #, #, not a single margene was visible in the ocean or on the beach. They never came again. What happened as a result is known to every student of history. The world-wide economic collapse, followed by the fall of the most stable governments, the huge riots that arose from the frantic attempts to get possession of the existing stocks of margene cakes or of the rare luxury items of other edibles, the announcement by the U.S.S.R. that it had known from the beginning the whole thing was a gigantic American hoax in the interests of the imperialistic bloodsuckers, the simultaneous atomic attacks by east and west, the Short War of # that ruined most of what bombs had spared of the Earth, the slow struggle back of the remnant of civilization which is all of existence you and I have ever known -- all these were a direct outgrowth of that first appearance of the margenes on the beach near San Diego on an April night in #. Marge and Gene Towanda were divorced soon after they had both lost their jobs. She was killed in the hydrogen blast that wiped out San Diego; he fell in the War of #. "Margene" became a dirty word in every language on Earth. What small amount of money and ability can be spared is, as everyone knows, devoted today to a desperate international effort to reach and colonize another habitable planet of the Solar System, if such there be. As for the margenes, themselves, come, only a few thousand were lucky enough to survive and find their way back to their overcrowded starting-point. In their strange way of communication -- as incomprehensible to us as would be their means of nourishment and reproduction, or their constitution itself -- they made known to their kin what had happened to them. There is no possibility, in spite of the terrific over-population of their original home and of the others to which they are constantly migrating, that they will ever come here again. There has been much speculation, particularly among writers of science fiction, on what would happen if aliens from other planets should invade Earth. Would they arrive as benefactors or as conquerors? Would we welcome them or would we overcome and capture them and put them in zoos and museums? Would we meet them in friendship or with hostility? The margenes gave us the answer. Beings from outer space came to Earth in #. And we ate them.    The Star-Studded April IF Robert F. Young spins a biting and pungent satire about what happens when a civilization makes the symbolic bluebird of happiness a reality and rebuilds its automobile showrooms to resemble cathedrals. With a carburetor for a heart, newly sprouted chrome wings and wheels for feet, this Bluebird perches on a pedestal in the Church of the Happy Traveler. And with the help of such people as the Finance Bishop and such institutional rites as New Car Sunday, it supplants the green pastures and still that old master Raymond F. Jones, and an excitement-filled space advenmore of the best-liked writers in science fiction. All this in addition to the popular features always to be found in IF... Ask your nearest news dealer to reserve your copy now! Illustrated by Kelly Freas ing against dense air, while the passengers talked, and laughed, and pressed their faces against the observation ports. In the ship's lounge, a squawk box crackled... "Twenty minutes," a mechanical voice said... "We land on Centauri IV in twenty minutes... Passengers for Orion, Antares, Cygni, and Polaris, have your transfers ready." Everyone laughed. The speaker clicked and went dead. And the boy who'd been gripping Claude Marshall's arm looked up. "What's he mean, Pop? We don't really have to transfer, do we?" Claude Marshall smiled. "No, Billy. This is as far as we're going -- as far as anyone's going." "But he said -- " "He was only joking, Billy. Maybe someday people will be going to those places, but not now." He glanced at his wife, sitting with her hands folded in her lap... "I'm glad it's over, Joan," he said. "It's been a long trip -- a very long trip." The woman nodded. She had dark hair, and blue eyes, and minute lines of maturity around her eyes and mouth that seemed to soften, rather than age her. She looked almost too young to have mothered a nine-year-old boy -- but of course that was one of the requirements. "Is this where we're going to live?" the boy asked. Claude looked out the port. "Yes, Billy. This is where we're going to live." "Why?" "I've already told you why. Don't you remember when I showed you the pictures, and asked you how you'd like to live where you'd have lots of room to play, and wouldn't have to worry about the bombs or anything?" "Sure, Pop," the boy said. "I remember. But tell me about it again? Claude looked at his wife; watched her nod, and answer his smile. "All right," he said. He raised his arm over the foamcushion seat-back till it rested on the boy's shoulder. "You see, Billy, things back on Earth are pretty bad -- have been for over  hundred years now. There's too many cities, too many wars, and too many people -- it's mostly too many people. They don't have room to move around any more the way they used to... "To make it worse there are always some people who figure that someone else has a little more room than they have, so they try to take it away from them by starting a war. Not that war ever solves anything. It's just that some people think it will." "That's why we left, huh, Pop?" "Yes, Billy. That's why we left. The problem was to find some place new; some place where a man had room to move -- room to breathe. For a long while it didn't look as if there was such a place -- not in our solar system anyhow. But one day a few years before you were born, a fellow by the name of Vincent Taibi made a trip out here to Centauri... It was a long trip. Took him thirteen years to get out here and back. But the important thing is that he came back with some news... He came back and reported that there was an uninhabited planet out here, just about the size of the Earth, that was as fresh and new as it was the day God made it." "That's when we got on this ship. Right, Pop?" Claude frowned. "Well, not' exactly. You see, Son, to begin with this is a long trip -- so long, and so expensive, that no one except mayto afford it. Anyhow, the government wanted young people out here : people who could colonize the place... They ran a lot of tests, Son." "Tests?" Claude nodded and turned to his wife. "The tests," he said. "You remember the tests, Joan?" "Yes, Claude. I remember. It's been six years, but I remember them as if they happened yesterday." "I don't, Pop." "That's 'cause you were too young, Son. You didn't have to take the tests... You were lucky." "Claude! Billy's not interested in that. Besides they were necessary." "Necessary! All those psychiatrists? Oh come, Joan... I felt as if they were picking my brain with an ice pick!" "But they had to be careful, Claude." "Careful, yes... But eight months of tests -- every day!" "Claude!" The woman's tone was severe. "Why did they have to be careful, Pop?" Billy asked. "They wanted to be sure, Son. They didn't want anyone out here who was sick, or lazy, or who wanted to start a war. They figured if the right kind of people came out here, Centifor would stay as fresh and clean as it was the day that Captain Taibi first landed here." The boy looked out the porthole. "We'll sure have lots of room here, won't we, Pop?" "Yes, Son. We'll have lots of room. The government's given us title to a hundred acres of what's just about the best land in the Universe... I showed you the pictures of our land, didn't I?" "Sure, Pop. Lots of times." The woman laughed. "About a thousand times, I'd imagine... Those pictures have been looked at so much, they're frayed at the corners." They landed on a concrete apron, nestled between ridges of rolling hills. The jets belched, hissed, went out, and from a ranch type structure at the edge of the area, a jeep, towing a portable ramp moved out to meet them. There was a gentle bump. Hatches hissed open. And then the passengers began to move down the ramp. Among the last to emerge into the bright, warm sunshine, were Claude and Joan Marshall. Each clasping a hand of their son, they stood at the top of the ramp, breathing deep gulps of sweetsmelling air, and staring at the boundless horizon of the fresh, new world. Clean and unspoiled it was, like an immense green carpet, dotted of wildflowers that soaked nourishment out of topsoil twenty inches deep. A paradise planet, free of bustling crowds and concrete cities. Untainted by littered alleyways, and dirty kiosks, and the abominable smells of cosmopolitan chaos... In place of these was a sunsoaked, fairy-like landscape capped by fleecy white clouds that hung motionless in a sky of robin's-egg blue. Claude stabbed an index finger at the patchwork quilt of green and yellow. "Look Joan... Our land! You can see it from here!" "Where, Claude?" "Out there... See? Way out. Beyond those lakes!" "Oh, Claude. How can you be sure?" "I remember it from the maps -- and the pictures... Our land is just twenty-eight miles from this landing strip, and you cross three ridges of hills to get to it... See? One... two... three!" "Is that where we're going to live. Pop?" "Yes, Son. That's where we're going to live. And there isn't a better piece of land anywhere... I know!" At the gentle urging of the attendant, they moved off the ramp and melted into the group of passengers drifting toward the ranchtype building at the edge of the area. A sign over the building said : man was standing in front of it. The man wasn't old by Earth standards, but leathery skin, and steel-grey patches of hair around his temples made him look very ancient alongside the composite youth of the newly-arrived settlers. The older man waited till the group had formed a tight semicircle around him. Then he smiled and held up both hands. "Welcome to Centifor," he said. "My name is Leon Stubbs, and I am the Director of Colonization." He waited till the undercurrent of muttering had died down, and went on : "I know how anxious you all are to settle on your own land, but because immediate transportation is unavailable, there will be a slight delay. During this time you will be quartered here at the reception center." Claude Marshall leaned close to his wife's ear. "We're lucky, Joan," he whispered. "We don't have to worry about transportation. We can walk to our land if we have to." Leon Stubbs said : "If any of you have any questions, feel free to speak up... That's why I'm here." He stopped, and pointed at a thinfaced youth with one arm raised while a young, and obviously pregnant girl held onto the other. "Yes, Sir." "We've been wondering," the youth said. "Are our building materials ready yet?" "Some of them are," the director said, "and some of them aren't. Production here isn't quite what it should be yet. When you've been here a while, you'll realize that because of our relatively small numbers, and comparative inexperience in economic matters, we're a tightly-knit group... We have to be. "There is one thing however that works in our favor. There are no irrationals or psychological deviants on Centifor. The tests took care of that. They were rough, I know. They were supposed to be rough. And now that you're here you'll all be facing another test... The test of practical application. "Some of you are fortunate in the respect that you've been awarded land reasonably close to the spaceport area. Some of you are not so fortunate, and will have to travel several hundred miles. Perhaps those of you in this latter category will find some consolation in the fact that since you left Terra, the government has started a movement to populate the other side of the planet. As a matter of fact, all future applications will be assigned to that area." Claude looked at his wife. And she looked back at him. They didn't speak. They didn't have to. It was common knowledge that Centifor was a planet of contrast. It was a Jekyll and Hyde planet... One side was a veritable Utopia. And the other? Claude shuddered at the thought of hacking a living out of the razor-backed mountains and bare patches of rocky soil that were frozen stiff nine months out of every thirteen. "If there are no other questions," the Director said. "We'll get on with the business of setting you up in temporary quarters." Twelve hours later, Claude Marshall and his family stood on the ramp of the spaceport watching the blue-tinted sun edge itself over the rim of the planet. The decision to pack a few immediate necessities and walk to the homestead instead of waiting for transportation had been arrived at the night before. It was ridiculous, Claude had argued, to waste time at the reception center, when the culmination of a ten year dream lay just twenty-eight miles away. Especially so, since the Director had informed them that the materials for their prefab home was already waiting for them on the land. Nor were they alone in their eagerness to begin a new way of life. Other settlers -- some of them burdened-down with supplies that almost equalled their own weight -- had already started a trek over the virgin landscape. In twos and threes, they plodded into the gently-sloping valley. Some of them moved slowly, some eagerly. All of them looked like tiny ants on a giant pool table. Marshall adjusted the knapsack across his shoulders with an air of finality. "Let's go, Joan," he said. "Stay close, Billy. We have a long walk ahead of us." They started into the valley. Two hours later they stopped to rest. They stopped on a patch of rich, green turf in the shadow of a broad-leaf tree. The spaceport, flanked by its low-slung buildings, was still visible, but from seven miles away the buildings looked in credibly tiny. Like miniatures out of a Christmas kit. But the thing that impressed them most was the quiet -- a strange sort of quiet, free of the whir of copter blades, landcar horns, and other nerve-shattering noises. Instead, there was only the rustle of a mild breeze through the tree branches, and the sound of their own breathing. Marshall lay on his back, his fingers laced behind his neck. "I feel rested, Joan," he said "We've just walked seven miles, but I feel rested." "I know, Claude. I feel the same way. It must be the air. The air feels different." "Wouldn't it be nice if it'd always stay this way. Fresh and unspoiled, I mean. I know it won't, but wouldn't it be nice if it did." "It will, Claude. It will for as long as we live anyhow, and for as long as Billy lives. That's what's important. We're very lucky, Claude." "I can't help thinking of the people back on Earth. I feel sorry for them." "They could do what we did. They could take the tests." "I know. But even if they did, what would they have? Who'd want to homestead the other side of this planet? Who'd want to live out there anyway?" "I would, Pop," Billy said. "No you wouldn't. Son. Don't you remember those black mountains we saw from the ship when we came in?" "Sure, Pop." "Well that's what the other side of the planet is like. Only you couldn't tell what it was really like because we were too high. You wouldn't like it if you had to live there. It's cold, and rocky, and there's only six hours of daylight out of every twenty-six." "I wouldn't like it then," the boy said. "I don't like the dark." Claude got up and looked at his wife. "Shall we move along," he said. They pushed ahead. Eagerly, yet slowly enough to absorb the world's endless beauty; stopping at the crest of each new hill; kneeling at the shores of crystal lakes to quench their thirst; and scooping up handfuls of rich, black soil in spots where the turf had become dislodged. The sun of Centauri was almost at zenith when they approached the crest of the ridge that bounded the Marshall homestead. Claude's pace, which had been quickening steadily for the final mile, burst into a jagged trot for the final hundred uphill yards. At the top of the hill he stopped, staring into the lush, green valley, ignoring his family who'd been unable to keep pace with his eagerness. The homestead was all that the color photos had advertised -- and more. It was all there. The flat, rich turf, the stream running through the center of the valley, and the grove of trees under which he'd build the prefab house. He'd anticipated the moment so many times, it was hard to believe it had really arrived. But it was real -- it was. Everything was exactly as he'd expected to find it... except for one thing. Always in his imagination, the land had been waiting for him to claim it. Him alone -- and his wife and son. But they weren't alone... There were other people on the land. On his land! And they were acting as if they lived there! a man, a woman, and a boy of about nineteen. The woman appeared to be cooking a meal over a wood fire, while the man and boy were arranging a foundation pattern with part of the stack of building materials which had been earmarked for the house. For his house! Joan and Billy drew up alongside him, and together they stared at the intruders. "Who are they, Claude?" his wife said. "What does it mean?" "I don't know, honey. Maybe they just stopped here to eat. That's what it must be." "But the men. The way they're measuring... As if they're going to build." "We'll straighten it out, Joan... Probably some mistake. I have our land title. That'll prove they've made a mistake. Come on. We'll talk to them." The intruders stopped what they were doing as they approached, and the man -- a huge, block-shouldered fellow in a leather jacket -- pushed out a hand. The man said : "Hello. My name's Whiting -- Bruce Whiting." Claude took the hand. "Claude Marshall," he said. "And this is my wife and my son." The man who called himself Whiting nodded, and looked over at his wife. "We're fixing dinner," he said. "Why don't you and your family join us before you push on?" Claude watched the man's face while he spoke. It was an open face. Guileless. With ruddy skin and mild, grey eyes that twinkled a bit at the corners. "We're not pushing on," he said evenly. We're staying. This is our land." Bruce Whiting smiled. "There must be some mistake. This land is ours. The boy and I are just fixing to start building." Claude shook his head. "Not here you're not. Not on this land." He spoke quietly ; trying to keep his voice pitched below the emotion that churned up inside him. "What's wrong, Dad?" The man's son joined them... He was a big strapping lad, with sandy hair and very bright skin. "These people are looking for their homestead," the man with the jacket said. "They think this is their site." "You think wrong, Mister," the youth said. "We double checked this location three times before we made camp... Right?" He turned to the older man for confirmation. Whiting nodded. "The boy's right. This land is ours. We've got a deed to prove it." "So have I," Claude said frowning. "It's right here in the luggage... Wait. I'll show you..." He bent over, unzipping the knapsack and rummaged around till he produced the manila envelope that held the title papers. Bruce Whiting examined them carefully; first the neat rows of fine print, then the dozen glossy colorphotos which had been taken on the property from strategic angles. He shook his head and turned to his son. "Get our titles, Frank," he said. The boy left, returning within seconds with a similar manila envelope. Bruce Whiting opened it and pushed a handful of papers at Claude. While his wife and son watched, Claude Marshall went through the papers methodically... They were all there. All the measurements; looking like duplicates, backed up by photos that had apparently been developed from the same negatives... He glanced at his wife. "Something's wrong, Joan," he said. "Mr. Whiting has a claim on this land too. It's just like ours... Exactly!" "But I don't understand, Claude." "It's not too hard to understand, Mrs. Marshall," Whiting said. "It just means that someone in Washington loused up the detail. They're always making mistakes like that... I figure some clerk -- " "But what are we supposed to do?" Bruce Whiting moved his shoulders. "I don't know, Mrs. Marshall. I just don't know... After all we were here first . Why don't you take it up with the Colonization Director?... Maybe there's another tract he could give you." "I don't want another tract," Claude said flatly. "I want this one." "So do I, Mr. Marshall." "But the land's mine!" "Is it? How about my title? It's just as valid as yours." "That'll be for the law to decide," Claude said grimly, "And we'll fight you on it. By God, we'll fight you on it all the way from here to Washington and back!" "That's up to you, of course. In the meantime, may I remind you that I hold possession?" Claude Marshall bit his lip. "Let's go Joan," he said. "Where, Claude?" "Back to the spaceport. We'll get a ruling on this." "But it's getting dark. Can't we make camp someplace and go back tomorrow?" "I'm hungry," Billy said. "We can eat later, Son." Bruce Whiting continued to regard them sullenly. Then abruptly, his face softened. "Wait," he said. "Don't go. Your wife's right, Mr. Marshall. You can't make the trip after dark. Why don't you and your family camp here for the night... Alice has supper nearly ready and there's more than enough to go around..." "We have our own rations," Claude said. Bruce Whiting spread out his hands. "Look, Mr. Marshall. I know how you feel. I know, because it's the same way I feel. I guess a man can't help the way he feels when something threatens the thing he's been dreaming about all his life. But it isn't my fault that this happened any more than it's your fault. Since the problem concerns both of us, I suggest we sit down and discuss it like intelligent human beings." "Mr. Whiting's right," Joan said. "After all it isn't his fault -- " "Another thing," Bruce Whiting went on. "I'm expecting a halftrac out here tomorrow with some supplies. If you and your family wanted to, there's no reason why we couldn't all ride back with him... Maybe we could get this thing straightened out then and still be friends." Claude flicked a look toward the far-off hills that were haloed by the last rays of a strange sun. Within moments it would be dark. And a few yards away a woman threw  another log on the fire and the pungent aroma of boiling coffee drifted across his nostrils. "I'm hungry," Billy repeated. Claude held out his hand. "I'm sorry," he said. "As you say: this isn't our fault. We're just caught in the middle." The ate picnic-style, off plastic dishes, while Bruce Whiting kept up a continuous stream of conversation, aided from time to time by his comely wife. The Whiting's story was a familiar one. He'd been with an advertising agency when the colonization urge had struck him... That was ten years ago... He'd talked it over with his wife, and together they'd weighed the chances of surviving the rigid tests that eliminated # of the applicants. The story had a pattern you could play by ear. Just another man, and another woman, and another boy now in his teens, who'd grown tired of the struggle for survival in a world that begrudged a man the space occupied by his own body. And when the meal was over, Joan helped Alice Whiting with the dishes, while the men sat around the fire and smoked. It was dark out now -- a strange kind of incredibly bright stars and the nearby glow of the crackling wood fire. Bruce Whiting's cordiality was contagious too. Claude found himself talking now ; describing his wants, his ideas, and his ideals. And when the women returned to the circle, the conversation turned to other subjects. They discussed clothes, their children, and the future of the planet. Only one subject was carefully avoided. And that was the one that was foremost in the minds of all of them. They were still talking when the fire had settled into weary heaps of smouldering embers. Then the two families excused themselves and retired to the canvas lean-to's wondering what the next day would hold in store for them. was almost at zenith the next day, when the half-trac arrived with the supplies. The driver -- an amiable man -- listened patiently while Bruce and Claude related the mixup, and as had been expected, agreed to transport them back to the base. The two families rode together in the open back of the vehicle as it jounced over the mildly sloping terrain. And yet the ride was not unpleasant. The immensity of the planet was breathtaking. It was exactly as the colorcasts had pictured it -- only better, incredibly better. No TV travelogue could adequately describe the tang of the air, or the scent of the sweet-smelling grass. God had indeed been generous with this portion of the planet. It was hard to believe that the opposite side was a rocky wasteland that would probably fight colonization for another thousand years. Almost before they knew it, they were at the spaceport. Sometime during the night, another ship had arrived. It stood majestically at the far end of the apron, towering over a knot of tiny figures grouped around the rudder stanchions. The driver swooped past them and brought the half-trac to a halt in front of the reception center where they observed the Colonization Director watching them through the window of his office. Inside, Leon Stubbs greeted them cordially and ushered them into an inner office containing a metal desk and a dozen file cabinets. The Director listened patiently, shaking his head from time to time and muttering remarks about government inefficiency... When they'd finished, he ran his hand through his greying hair. "This, of course, is an outrage, Gentlemen," he said. "But before I can do anything, I'll have to check both your claims." He indicated the file cabinets. "It may take a little time but I'll get at it right away. As a matter of fact I believe they're serving lunch at the mess hall now. Why don't you all have lunch and come back in about an hour. I'll know more about the situation then." Leon Stubbs shuffled through some papers on the desk, indicating dismissal. The two men joined their families in the anteroom. After an awkward silence, Bruce Whiting and his family excused themselves, leaving the Marshall's alone. "What did he say, Claude? Tell me! What did he say?" "He doesn't know yet, honey. He's checking the claims. We're supposed to come back in an hour." "But it will be all right, won't it. It's got to be all right!" "I don't know, Joan. So help me, I don't know... We can't both have the land. That's for sure. One of us will have to settle for someplace else." "Suppose we did have to take another tract, Claude. Would you be disappointed -- I mean, really disappointed... After all, isn't the important thing the fact that we're here?" Claude managed a smile. "I suppose so," he admitted. "It's just that it comes as sort of a letdown. For almost seven years now we've been looking at the pictures of this land. We knew where we'd build the house, what portion we'd farm... I know every tree, every square inch of it... And now -- " "But there's other land. We've only seen a small portion of the planet." He shook his head. "Not like this. This claim has everything. What's more, Whiting knows it. That's why he'll fight us on it all the way." "They seem like nice people. Claude. Couldn't we talk to them... make some sort of deal?" "A deal? What sort of deal?" "A hundred acres is a lot of land -- an awful lot of land... Maybe the Whitings would -- " "Uh uh. No good. I've already felt him out on that. I had the same idea last night, so I came right out and asked him if he'd settle for fifty acres apiece... He refused. Oh, he was nice enough about it. But he gave me to understand it was all or nothing with him." "I'm hungry," Billy said. Claude looked at his wife. "So am I. Let's go over to the mess hall. That's where the Whitings went, I think." "Claude?" "Yes, Joan." "Let's not sit with them, if we meet them there." "All right, honey. Let's not." They were halfway to the door when Leon Stubbs came out of the inner office. He smiled. "Mind stepping inside a moment ?" he said. When Claude hesitated, he added : "Perhaps Mrs. Marshall had better come in too." They followed him inside where the Director indicated two chairs alongside the desk. "I've been checking your claims," he said. "And since you were still here, I didn't think it advisable to prolong the suspense." Claude glanced at his wife. "You mean it's all right... the land is ours?" The Director sat down and spread open a pair of folders on the desk. For a long while he stared at them -- comparing them. He shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Mr. Marshall. I'm afraid it isn't all right." "But our claim. It's valid, isn't it?" Leon Stubbs ran a hand through his greying hair. "I don't know," he said. "Naturally the fault for processing duplicate claims lies with the colonization bureau in Washington. Eventually, I suppose it will be up to them to decide on the disposition of this case... However, because of the timelag in communications, I have full authority to pass down temporary decisions in matters of this type... And because Mr. Whiting's claim is dated several days ahead of yours, I must in all fairness award the land to him... You and your wife can appeal that decision of course." "We'll appeal, Mr. Stubbs," Claude said angrily. "After all, this mess is the government's fault. Not ours! It's up to them to straighten it out." "That's up to you," Leon Stubbs said. "Although I'm sure you realize that in the meantime you'll have to make some temporary arrangments." "Temporary arrangments?" "Yes, Mr. Marshall. Even assuming the government decides in your favor -- which I doubt -- you'll have to live somewhere while the case is being processed... And that will take some time." "How long?" Leon Stubbs shuffled through the papers again. "You know about the time-lag, don't you?" "No. What about the time-lag?" The Director met his stare. "I thought you knew. Actually the only communication we have with Terra short of space travel, is by short wave radio, and radio waves as you may know travel at approximately the speed of light. Since we are approximately # lightyears away from Earth, a round trip message to Washington would take about nine years. This of course does not take into consideration the time needed to process your case." Claude kept watching the Director's face while he spoke. He looked like an honest man. To all intents and purposes he was simply a public servant performing a distasteful duty. Yet there was something about his voice that had an all-too-familiar ring... Something that hinted he was leading up to an offer. Claude cleared his throat. "All right, Mr. Stubbs. So you've convinced me of the futility of appealing the claim. What now?" Leon Stubbs bit off the end of a cigar and lit it before answering. "I've arranged to give you and your family an alternate claim, Mr. Marshall. Of course it isn't quite as desirable as the original one. But under the circumstances -- " He let the sentence trail off. "I see," Claude said. "And where is this alternate claim?" Stubbs examined the end of his cigar. "It's on the other side of the planet, Mr. Marshall. I'm sorry, but that's the best I can do." At his elbow, Claude caught the sharp intake of his wife's breath. "It really isn't too bad," the Director went on. "Many of the reports about the cold-side have been exaggerated." "I'm sure they have," Claude said bitterly. "I'm sure it's just the place to bring up a nine-year-old boy." "Please Mr. Marshall. Don't be bitter. It isn't my fault." Claude got up placing his palms on the edge of the metal desk. He leaned forward till his face was only inches away from the Director's cigar, and said: "Isn't it?" The Director didn't answer. Instead he got up and walked over to the open window. For ten full seconds he stared out at the lush valley that flanked the spaceport. Then he turned. "You want my advice, Mr. Marshall?" Claude shrugged his shoulders. "Go home," Leon Stubbs said. ,c You can't bring up a boy on the cold-side. It just wouldn't work." "But we just got here," Joan said. "We sold everything we had to come here!" Stubbs nodded. "I know," he said. He indicated the folders. "It's all there in your records. Six years ago you left Terra with sixthousand credits. But surely with that kind of money you could get a fresh start almost anywhere." "But we want to stay here, Mr. Stubbs." Stubbs took a drag out of the. cigar. "I know," he said woodenly. Claude remained silent, regarding the conversation carefully. A pattern was beginning to form now -- a familar pattern. He walked over to where the Director was standing. "Perhaps you could make a suggestion, Mr. Stubbs. Surely there must be opportunities on this side of the planet for a man with sixthousand credits?" "I'm not quite sure what you're getting at," Leon Stubbs said. "I think you do, Mr. Stubbs," Claude retorted. "I think we're both getting at the same thing. Suppose we dispense with the subtleties and get down to cases." The Director sat down at the desk pyramiding his fingertips. "Very well, Mr. Marshall," he said. "I'll be blunt. It's occurred to me that if the date on your claim were changed, the land would naturally be yours. The difficulty of course lies in the fact that there are duplicate records on Terra and we'd have to take care of the man who handles them. Otherwise the discrepancy would show up eventually. Actually, I want nothing for myself but these people in Washington -- " "Yeah, I know," Claude interrupted. "It's someone else who's getting the money. It's always someone else who's getting the money." "It would take quite a bit, I'm afraid," the Director said ignoring the sarcasm. "How much?" The Director stubbed out the end of his cigar. "About five thousand," he said. "Yes. Five thousand ought to do it." Claude looked at his wife. And she looked back at him. Outside, Billy had tired of the seven-year-old magazine and was hammering on the door for admittance. "Can we have a few minutes to think it over?" Claude said. "Certainly," Stubbs said amiably. "And I want to make it quite clear, Mr. Marshall, that this money is not for me. There's this fellow -- " "Yeah, I know. There's this fellow in Washington. Come on Joan. Let's step outside a moment." Stubbs answered their knock and ushered them to the desk chairs. After they were seated, he said: "I take it you've talked it over." Claude nodded. "Yes, Mr. Stubbs. My wife and I talked it over and we came to a decision." "I'm glad," the Director said. "And may I say I think you're doing a wise thing. Centifor's a beautiful place. Simply beautiful..." "Yes it is," Claude agreed. "It is beautiful. That's why we'd like to see it stay that way." The Director raised an eyebrow. "My wife and I talked it over," Claude went on, "and we decided that taking someone else's land whether it's done by theft, force, or bribery is wrong. We thought of this place as something fresh and clean. We thought all those tests we took were designed to keep people like you out of here. Now it appears we were mistaken. We've talked it over, Mr. Stubbs, and we've decided to go back to Earth and expose you." "But you can't," the Director said. "You've -- " "Yes we can," Claude said. "The ships go back practically empty. A return berth will be no trouble at all. We're returning on the first ship out." "Perhaps we could make a better deal." Stubbs said. "Perhaps five thousand is too much. Perhaps -- " "No. No deals! Let's go Joan." They went outside, into the fresh warm sunshine, staring at the torpedo shaped spaceship standing in the clearance area half-a-mile away. They'd just started toward it, when a jeep squealed up alongside them. Bruce Whiting was at the wheel. "Hi," he said. "Hop in. I'll give you a lift." "Thanks," Claude said without bitterness. He helped his wife and son into the rear seat and climbed in beside the driver. "I suppose congratulations are in order," he said as the other man threw the vehicle into gear. "Stubbs tells me the land is yours now." The driver nodded, inching down on the accelerator. The vehicle leaped forward. At seventy miles an hour, they swooped past the spaceship and the knot of people standing in the shadow of the rudder stanchions. "Hey. Slow up!" Claude yelled. "We're getting off here. We're booking return passage on that ship!" Whiting didn't answer. The low slung buildings of the clearance area leaped up at them and passed into the background. They were heading into open country now. "Whiting! Turn around. We're staying here in the clearance area!" Whiting's foot slacked off the accelerator. The speedometer dropped to fifty. But the vehicle kept moving into open country. The man at the wheel flicked a look at Claude and smiled. "Congratulations, Mr. Marshall," he said. "You've passed the final test." "Test? I don't understand." "Let me explain then," Bruce Whiting said. "In the first place my name isn't Whiting... It's Reed -- Paul Reed. I work for the government. This final test -- the one you just went through -- was designed to weed out any undesirables who might have slipped through our screening processes back on Earth. "You mean this whole build up was just a test?" The other man nodded. "We give it to every new arrival here. Now that you've passed, I'm driving you out to your homestead site." Claude looked back at the newlyarrived spaceship and the tiny figures who were huddled at its base. "All those people," he said. "You mean they still have to go through what we did?" The driver shook his head. "No. Those people are going back to Earth. You see, Mr. Marshall, those are the people who offered Leon Stubbs the bribe." # -- Tungsten. # -- #. # -- Magellanic Clouds. # -- Rarer. # -- Great Circle Chart. # -- Googol. # -- Saturn. # -- Chlorophyll. #I -- Yes. # -- Magnetic field.  briefs structure may be replaced with real bones. A team of scientists has succeeded in taking the minerals out of animal bones, making them soft and spongelike. Then they have been able to reharden or recalcify them by treating them with certain chemicals and placing them in a solution similar to body fluids. This finding presents the possibility that dentists may be able to rake this soft "demineralized" bone, treat it chemically, and then insert it as a cavity where it would harden and become part of the tooth. In addition, teeth may be prevented from falling out by building the bone up around them. Orthopedic surgeons may also be able to use this process to speed the healing of fractures or to replace bones lost by accident or disease. A picture of Medicine at the end of the century, recently presented before the American Medical Association, reveals, some remarkable improvements. It predicts the eradication of all human infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, rheumatic heart disease, diphtheria, pneumonia and even the common cold and other respiratory ills. Cancer will be treated successfully by turning viruses against it. Eye surgeons will have restored vision where successful treatment today can only be called "wishful thinking". Starvation will no longer exist because of the successful synthesis of foodstuffs. Deaf mutes will speak by use of portable electronic devices. Vital organs such as the heart, kidney, pancreas and lungs will be transplanted from person to person. Insulin will be taken in tablet form. There will have been effective treatments against high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, degenerative heart disease, leukemia and pernicious anemia. Hormone medication will keep women young, beautiful and shapely indefinitely. Need for a signalling system much faster than today's dial system has spurred the development of a new device so fast that it may well do away with the dial. Developed by Bell laboratories, the device is called a polytonic coder and is based on a new mathematical concept of electronic coding. A test model will send # digits a second over almost all telephone connections. To make use of this new super speed, the present dialing system would have to be replaced by a push-button system. With such a phone, you would punch out the number you want on buttons while the receiver is still on the hook. When the receiver is lifted the called number's phone will start ringing. If the fine is busy you needn't dial again; the button setting will remain until you change it. Smokers may soon be bombarded with advertising about "the cigarette with the built-in ashtray". A new glass-fiber paper developed by the National Bureau of Standardis does the trick. It will not bum, but holds the ashes in place until the cigarette is smoked down to the point where it is thrown away. Made from glass fibers ## of an inch thick, the new paper is also one of the best smoke filters. It allows only one smoke particle in # to pass through. Made by forcing molten glass through tiny holes and then stretching the fibers in hot air, the new paper is eight times as strong as previous papers and has a smooth silky texture. With thirty dollars worth of equipment you will be able to turn your car of the future into a rolling Geiger counter. The equipment consists of a Geiger-Mueller tube and a few associated components. Radiation is indicated by either telltale clicks on the speaker of the car radio or by the movement of a needle on a dashboard-mounted meter. In addition to normal use, the speaker could also be used to receive instructions from civil defense authorities in time of atomic warfare, while the meter would warn of radiation. Designed to detect radiation within a fifty-foot radius, the unit would not only serve to warn occupants of danger but would make the car available for monitoring during emergency. Fishermen will soon be taking along electric light bulbs for bait. Norwegian technicians have devised i, metal container with four windows through which an electric light shines. When the apparatus is lowered into the water, the light attracts the fish to swim close to it. The lower part of the container, lying in darkness, is equipped with hooks. When the gear is jerked upwards the dazzled fish are theoretically hooked. In trawling several of the light ray sinkers are placed on a special hoop set at the mouth of a trawl net The fish attracted to the light, gather in front of the net, thus considerably increasing the catch. The gear has showed some extremely promising results in tests made by the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Pacific Ocean and in salmon fisheries. Farms of the future may be dotted with artificial ponds instead of grainfields. Experiments have shown that the common pond weed is equal or superior to alfalfa meal in a pig-fattening diet. The mosslike weed which can be found in even a goldfish bowl yields from # to # tons of green weight per acre in a test pond in Kansas. It also replaces itself within three months. The dehydrated meal resembles alfalfa meal but is darker and less dusty. Besides feeding cattle from the pond weed, the artificial ponds also serve as a boon to irrigation problems and as an extra source of proteins in the form of fish. Electrical batteries a decade hence will be powered with by-product atomic radiation converted directly into electricity. Radioisotopes from the debris of United States atomic power reactors might furnish the radiation that could be converted into electrical energy equivalent to # watts from the annual production of batteries. The possible substitution of atomic batteries for the conventional chemical ones is foreseen by scientists at the R.C.A. corporation. The most desirable radioactive wastes for the purpose include strontium # and yttrium #, and tritium or tripleweight hydrogen. These are cheap enough for such use and also have a long enough life. Other predictions for the atomic age made at a recent conference concerning waste debris from the reactors included: Preservation of foodstuffs by cold sterilization; sterilization of medical supplies such as antibiotics drugs and bandages, to make them safer after they are packed for shipment; prevention of trichinosis by irradiating hog carcasses; and making bones, heart tissues and other materials from "banks' used in human replacement surgery safe for use by irradiating them with gamma rays from cobalt #. The cold sterilization of food promises to usher in as radical a revolution in food preservation as the invention of canning produced for heat sterilization. And the success of bone grafts with gamma radiated material has already proved the value of the technique in surgery. A new look in flying suits will soon be apparent and both passengers and pilots may well be wearing them for high altitude flying. Called a "T" suit, the garment fits rather like an old-fashioned corset and needs almost as much assistance to tighten the many laces properly. Once snugly wrapped in, a pilot is protected from failure of his pressurized cabin, even at altitudes of up to # feet, where his body would literally burst from the low pressure. The suit actually holds the wearer together in emergency decompressions. If the plastic cockpit windshield shatters during high-altitude flight, the suit and the pilot's helmet would automatically fill with compressed oxygen. This enables the pilot to dive the plane for lower altitude. A # Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. Each month takes you on an expedition to one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, from Sun-baked Mercury to Frigid Pluto.  # two-color illustrations  Scientifically-accurate text with each illustration  Wonderful for your den  Printed in limited edition  Only # postpaid Endorsed by The Society for the Advancement of Space Travel (Continued from page #) The Odd Genre more human beings in the world like James E. Gunn it would indeed be a better one. In the meantime, our tame author had been browsing thru a copy of Ron Smith's excellent fanzine, Inside , which he'd purchased at the Con, and he was puzzled by some of the slang (or slan) terms used by the fans. I explained the origin and meaning of a number of the strange words to him, and in particular the earliest abbreviation of them all, "stf", with which I have become so intimately identified that many people, not possessing a copy of The Fancyclopedia, probably think I originated it. I explained to Jim how Hugo Gernsback himself first created the portmanteau word, scientifiction, at least # years ago if not longer, arid that it had enjoyed a vogue for many years, gradually giving way to plain science fiction (with or without a hyphen) and a variety of abbreviations thereof: S.F., SF, s.f., sf, sci-fic, and latterly, as a parallel to hi-fi, sci-fi. I got interested, and when I got home I consulted my magazine files of the early #'s, to see if I could track down the first appearance in print of the abbreviation "stf". For the records: my first stf correspondent, Linus Hogenmiller, sometime c. #, created the abbreviation. I was the first to use it in print, and later give it the pronunciation "stef" instead of "esti-ef"; but Linus, come out, come out, wherever you are, and get your egoboo ! (Egoboo: boosting of the ego. A term favored by Charles Burbee. ) Incidental intelligence : in searching for the first appearance in print of the abbreviation "stf', I ran across a letter by myself published when I was #, wherein (Apr. '#I Astounding ) I was astounded to find myself using the term "Mr. Science Fiction". Only then, a vogue of the day to be phonetic, I spelled it "Mr. Syence Ficshun". Stranger Than Science Fiction: a serious report has come from the Union of South Africa that a science fiction novel written by a # year old girl has been banned there, and that a fine of # attaches to possession of a copy and any owner risks imprisonment for up to five years! This is the honest-toGod, gospel truth, but I am at a loss to offer any explanation for it. Have I a South African reader who might enlighten us all? I can only tell you that the work was first published # years ago. It made a name for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and a career for Boris Karloff. You can pick up a pocketbook edition at most any secondhand magazine shop for a dime. Take one with you to South Africa and its value will increase # times! # is only about # rent a month for a furnished cell, and presumably the meals are free: so if you want to relax with a good book and get away from it all, Sud' Afrika beckons. Just bring your Dear Editor: The letter from G.W. Walton in the October issue of IF was sufficiently irritating to compel me to take up the cudgel so generously proffered. I have no quarrel with his right to believe what he chooses, but I do feel justified in disagreeing with him emphatically. His attempts to establish his views as absolute logic, and as such irrefutable, do not succeed. They achieve only a thinly veiled attempt to rationalize his own uncontrolled speculation. Time travel exists only in imagination. I consider it quite presumptuous of any one person to set up rules and limitations, expecting writers and editors to concur. Mathematical fantasy... uncontrolled speculation... who cares? Any approach to an idea is acceptable provided it implements a good story. How can a writer be condemned for the free use of imagination when no fiction at all is possible without it? G.W.'s statement about telepathy is not acceptable by his own standards either. Following all the information available you find that no conclusive evidence is available at present. If there were no possibility other than the one claimed by him, further research would be pointless. If all progress were hampered by such a narrow view, humans might never have learned to write... I have been taught that one of the prime requisites of a scientific mind is a certain clear logical approach to any situation. Will you please explain, G.W., what sort of thinking leads you to demand that only proven fact be permitted in the most imaginative fiction available? It is your privilege to believe what you choose, my only interest is in keeping one of my favorite editors out of your opinionated clutches. I value his efforts to present a magazine that offers the best in science fiction, and for my money IF is everything it should be. I hope he # #I buy any time travel or telepathy themed tales that have the necesssary ingredients. -- G. A. Kepner Long Beach, California Sir: I'd like to make what one might term a half argument. I'm inclined to agree with Walton about time travel. It is an abstract, and useful only as subject matter for sciencefiction stories. I must, however, disagree with his statements on telepathy. To call it absurd is an absurdity in itself. The potentials of the mind are great and the thing that has prevented proper application of the potential lies in the matter of training. It is a fairly well accepted fact that the mind has never been fully developed in even the greatest men. I believe that when we have learned to properly train ourselves, mental abilities not yet dreamed of will be evident. A word about your magazine. I fully enjoyed the October issue, particularly The Almost Men and The Proxies . However such stuff as Meeting of the Board is not what I would call science-fiction. -- Richard Madden Limestone, Maine Dear Sirs: Just finished the October ish and loved it -- per usual. Then I turned to the letter column. Ouch! May I answer G.W. Walton and his blast against telepathy and time travel? First off, I question his definition of telepathy as a transmission of emotions only. Joseph Jastrow, A.B., A.M., Ph.D. and LL.D., whose section on telepathy is the officially accepted standard in the National Encyclopedia, defines it as "the ability to transfer and receive sensations and ideas, mainly in visual terms..." And what is speech excepting sounds to transmit visual and emotional impressions? Secondly, his usage of the word "impossible". Were you aware, G.W., that advanced mathematicians and students of aeronautics can "prove" by all the "laws" of aeronautics that it's impossible for the sea-gull to fly? The only things that are impossible are those which we cannot at the time conceive of as logically possible. Think back one hundred years to the multitude of things that were deemed "impossible" but which are standard today. We have faith and a thinking mind. For this combination nothing is impossible. -- G. McMillan  Redwood City, California Dear Mr. Quinn : Sad indeed to find that IF is again bi-monthly. I think the cause might be charged to its high quality; people are not apt to buy a magazine that makes them think. Some suggestions to Mr. Walton are in order. The man seems to put his faith in the material universe. He is trying to display a scientific spirit. But I was of the opinion that the scientist, until he could definitely substantiate any one of several opposed, theories, considered all the possibilities, probabilities and even the impossibilities. How impossible a spherical world is to our five senses! The fact is that there are many opposed theories of time travel and telepathy, none of which can be completely proven. Mr. Walton points out that the best telepathy can do is send and receive emotions. Frankly I can hardly conceive of emotion in its pure state, therefore it seems improbable that I could transmit a pure emotion of which I cannot perceive. If Mr. Walton can entertain the abstract, I accuse him of thinking in non-human terms. Concerning time travel, I will agree that as far as it has been portrayed it is apparently impossible. The only way I can imagine it is a non-effecting-observer type into the past which would make dry reading, unless we were to find that history is grossly incorrect. I suggest he read authors Rhine, Hayakawa, and Korzibisky. Other than that I offer no authority except that, as a human being, I consider it my right to think. And I think that Mr. Walton's stand on the subject should not be debated but rather that we should consider his entire "science" too aristotelian. -- Larry Martin Waco, Texas Mr. Walton makes several insupportable statements which he evidently wishes us to accept as dogma. He says that it is inconceivable that a small part of the universe such as a man could be shifted on the time scale because it involves too many paradoxes. Infinity too is inconceivable and involves a greater number of paradoxes. Also the infinite numerical series, while never demonstrated, is impossible to deny. There are a great number of conceptions in the universe which our minds are incapable of grasping just yet; but we cannot deny them. I'm not being mystical; but merely admitting that we have not yet reached the peak of our mental development. I hope there is no peak. As to telepathy, he says that it is impossible for an abstraction to "produce" (a semantic error, remember conservation of matter and energy) matter or energy. In this I agree, but I wish I knew what he meant by "abstraction". The brain operates on the same laws of matter and energy as the telephone switchboard. I can see no difference except in complexity between broadcast of emotions and of thoughts or pictures. Dr. Rhine has succeeded in finding people who, in tests which consist of guessing symbols on cards which another person is looking at and thinking about, have achieved more correct answers than can be accounted for by the laws of chance. This is not the broadcast of emotions but of thoughts, or more probably pictures. The October issue was very good, especially Prisoners of Earth and The Almost Men in that order of preference. I'm glad you have started a letter column, it gives your readers a chance to express their interests and opinions. -- Bill Doying Chevy Chase, Maryland Dear Sir: Mr. Walton's opinions are based upon the premise that it would require an enormous flow of energy to move through time. I find the time machine that I have carried around on my shoulders for some "time" now functions with the small amount of energy contained in three meals per day. It seems to require no more energy for me to go back twenty years in "time" than it requires to go back twenty minutes. The movement seems instantaneous and without effort. It is my considered opinion that the more stories and articles that are written about time travel, the sooner the public will become they will ever know. is analyzed, it seems to be an illusion that is brought on by the relational movements of the stars, suns, planets, etc. in the galaxy. If there is disagreement with this, then I should like to ask the question: are in an unconscious state? The Almost Men was a marvelous piece of work. It required a knowledge of physiology, anatomy down to the energy level as well as a knowledge of the functioning of the mind, for Cox to write such a # fantasy and sciencefiction books and backissue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #K Verona, Pennsylvania story. Hail to the story; and hail to the editor who is wise enough to choose it from among the many submitted. Let us have more! -- Dar Nelson Vista, California Mr. Walton # s letter has provoked more heated comment than any we ever printed -- with more to come! Dear Mr. Quinn: For shame on your quiz writer! He has robbed the otherwise inconspicuous constellation Lyra of its Vega. If some relatively unimportant star had been misplaced we might overlook it, but Vega! Until the error is corrected in print your magazine has joined the publications of the astrologers in the corner we reserve for astronomy's enemies and detractors. -- Stephen Maran Director, Junior Astronomy Club We really muffed it... and we apologize . Vega is not in Bootes , but in Lyra. Sirs: S.F. is often concerned with the man-machine conflict. Either the machines revolt or man does. Who decides what's a machine? Is a stick used as a lever a machine? Is a calculator? How about a slide rule? Or a log table? If not, why? Or can this whole problem be dealt with by semantics? -- Mark Langston South Bend, Indiana Okay , folks, what constitutes a machine? membership in this unusual are making this amazing offer to new the big new Science-Fiction antholomoney. Just mail coupon below -- at once ! World-renowned stories by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, Huxley, Philip Wylie, Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. B. Priestly, etc. Remarkable and fantastic about some of the most aweinspiring charming and monstrous children imaginable, by Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, Aldous Huxley, etc. Stories by outstanding authors of Wonders of Earth and Man... of startling inventions... of Outer Space... of Far Traveling... Worlds of Tomorrow, etc. A scalp-tingling volume about 'the life of the future -- edited by Frederik Pohl. Absorbing, masterfully written stories into tomorrow. Best tales from a dozen years of Astounding ScienceFiction Magazine selected by editor, John W. Campbell, Jr.  ,A sparkling crop of weird v tales selected by August Derleth. The man who Invented a solid vacuum... the Martian ship that lands on Earth on Halloween, and many others. Selected stories from Fantasy and ScienceFiction Magazine. The woman who became her own daughter... atomic power from beans... etc. Which # Anthologies Do You Want for Just  #? I Please rush me the # anthologies checked below, as my gift books and first selection. Bill me only SI for all # (plus few cents shipping charges) and enroll me as a member of the Science-Fiction Book Club. Every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus shipping. I do not have to take a book every month (only # during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting # selections. membership will be cancelled!  Assignment in Tomorrow # Best from Fantasy and # Omnibus of # Treasury of Science-Fiction # Astounding Science-Fiction Science-Fiction Science-Fiction Classics Anthology # Children of Wonder # Portals of Tomorrow Name... Address City Zone State Selection price in Canada # plus shipping. Address ScienceFiction Club, # Bond St., Toronto #. (Offer good only in U. 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See Other Side for Further Details  #:I powered aircraft of the future, are shown in combat practice eleven miles above the earth's surface. The "attacking" craft is a supersonic jet interceptor. These great ships will likely be powered by air flowing through ducts in their wings. Air will be expanded and ejected through rear jet nozzles at terrific speed by means of intense heat from atomic reactor buried in heavy shielding between wings. Despite shielding, crew in far-off nose will have perhaps # flight hours without radiation injury. Such aircraft will be first steps to adequate power for space flight. (Drawing by Mel Hunter) All Stories New and Complete E # i # I #  #  By Kelly Freas, from "The Executioner" IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next issue on sale April I #th local (Los Angeles) Auto Show, particularly observing the Cars of the Future, the fibreglas sabres with the fifth wheel for parking and other strictly-from-sci-fi embellishments, like the built-in hi-fi set, telephone, and even mini-TV. With the new emphasis on safety features, Wendayne and I had been talking at dinner, just before going to the exhibit, about an idea of an inventor friend of ours, namely wraparound bumpers protecting the side of a car as well as the front; and when we arrived at the show, lo! what did we see but the demonstration of just such side-bumpers. And then there was the # goldplated Cadillac -- very far in my future. After which I went out to the parking lot and kicked my new Oldsmobile: so it had power steering, power braking, power windows, power windshield wiping, power radio antenna, power horn and power cigaret lighter, what good was the damn old thing? -- it didn't even have power handkerchief. And long noses run in my family. Consider the plight of poor Walter Ernsting, earnest German sci-fi fan. A one hundred Deutschmark fine (about # in our money) was levied against him for defending George Pal's "Conquest of Space" against derogatory criticism in one of the leading German newspapers. Ernsting, who is editor of the German s.f. fortnightly, Utopia, was thrilled by the picture, which he saw twice at once, but incensed by a review which he considered ignorant, ill-informed, unfair, usw. (that's German for etc). So he wrote a protest to the paper -- and was promptly taken to court for it! Sued and made to pay for "insulting the editor". It was only last year that we "fit the battle" -- the Battle of Bonn -- to save science fiction in Germany. Most of you won't have been aware that there was even any controversy over there, but a branch of the Bavarian Government lit a Bonn-fire under science fiction that threatened for awhile to incinerate the whole subject. The same ardent defender of s.f., Walter Ernsting, made a day's journey, at his own expense, to the seat of Government to represent and defend the magazine he edits, Utopia, from charges of "atom mongering", glorifying nuclear warfare and other thoughts farthest from the peace-loving mind of long-standing scientifictionist Ernsting who had dreamed of introducing modern science fiction to his countrymen even while a prisoner of the Russians. An appeal to America for moral support was answered by airgraphs and cables of protest from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, the international Fantasy Foundation, the League for Better Science Fiction (New York), and concerned individuals throughout the country. A # word "Open Letter" was composed, translated into German, professionally printed and distributed prior to the hearing to the District Attorney and the panel of twelve (lawyer, educator, minister, psychologist, author, businessman, etc) who investigated the case. In answer to the charge that some of the stories were "too realistic and horrible in their descriptions of weapons of the future", I contended : There are many great writers expressing great philosophies, bombarding the human brain with thoughts and ideals, ways and means of achieving the utopian civilization for which all sane men yearn. If sometimes they dip their pens in acid and blood and paint pain-pictures of ghastly atomic horror, it is to crystalize for their perhaps less imaginative brethren the disastrous results of unholy ambition, twisted reasoning, misapplied science. For every bomb that drops in science fiction, an explosion takes place in the mind of the reader that blows away misconception. For every tower of lies that is toppled, a skyscraper of truth is erected. Better bitten by a snake on paper than in reality! And if we are shown the snake on paper, we learn to recognize and avoid it in reality. If # of the # individuals judging the merits of science fiction and the issues of the magazine in question had turned thumbs down, it would virtually have been the end of the modern s.f. experiment in Germany. Which would have been not only tragic but downright ridiculous, considering what Germany has contributed to the genre via Willy Ley, Fritz Lang, Curt SiodHarbou, Heinz Haber, Rick Strauss and Frank R. Paul. (Incidentally, to Frank Rudolph Paul, my favorite illustrator and the grand old dean of stf artists, my love, respects and congratulations to you, sir, on turning #. May your enchanted brush be with us yet when you are #.) But science fiction got a clean slate at L' Affaire Bonn: the Bonnshell exploded, and out of the smoke and flame came a # exoneration for science fiction. The Science Fiction Club Deutschland has been formed, has over # corresponding members, a lending library, and a society organ, World S.F. Convention I stopped off in Chicago and visited the offices of Playboy, the sophisticated men's magazine that features a lot of slick sci-fi, and made the acquaintance of the editor, Ray Russell. He turned out to be a dyedin-the-Wells fan from 'way back when Ray Bradbury was in rompers, and spent an afternoon reminiscing with me about the Good Old Days of Eando (Earl and (Continued on page #) the human race that men ought to be ashamed to be men -- instead of errorless, cybernetics machines. But they forgot that an errorless manris a dead man... ence, the first Wheel was probably the subject of more amateur astronomical observations than any other single object in the heavens. Over three hundred reports came in when a call was issued for witnesses to the accident that destroyed the space station. It was fortunately on the night side of Earth at the time, and in a position of bright illumination by the sun. Two of the observers had movie cameras attached to their ten-inch mirrors. The film in one of these was inadequate, but the other carried a complete record of the incident from the moment of the Griseda's first approach, through the pilot's fumbling attempt to correct course, and the final collision. The scene was lost for a few seconds as the wreckage drifted out of the field. The observer had been watching through a small pilot scope, however, and had wits enough to pan by hand so that he got most of the remaining fall that was visible above his horizon as the locked remnants of the Wheel and the Griseda began their slow, spiral course to Earth. By the time this scene was finished, word of the disaster was already flashing to Government centers. Joe McCauley, radio operator aboard the Wheel, had been talking with Ed Harris on the Griseda. As a matter of routine, all their conversation was taped, and some of this was recovered from the crash and played back at the investigation. " -- and get this," Ed was saying, "my kid had his fifth birthday just last week, and I've got him working through quadratic equations already. You've got to go some to beat that one." "Doesn't mean a thing," said Joe. "You know how these infant brain boxes burn out. Better take him fishing and forget that stuff for a while. Hey -- what the devil's going on? You got a truck driver in the control room? I just saw you out the port and it looks like you're right on top of us!" "Jeez, I dunno. It's been like that ever since we cleared Lunaport. Sometimes I think this guy Cummins trained in a truck the way he -- Hell, he's cornin' up on the wrong side of the Wheel! I relayed the orders to go to the east turret. Acknowledged them himself -- " "Ed! I can see you outside the port -- we're going to hit!" The words were ripped by the shattering, grinding roar of colliding metal. Then a moment later the blast of an exploding fuel tank. "Ed!" "Joe -- yeah, I'm here. Lights gone. Emergency power still on. Take the emergency band if you've still got a rig. I'll stand by -- " Joe switched over without comment and called Space Command Base on the emergency channel, which was always monitored. "Wheel just rammed by Griseda," he said. "Possible loss of orbital velocity. Extent of damage unknown." Lieutenant James, on duty at the Base, had just returned from a three day leave and was scarcely settled in the routine of his post once more. He glanced automatically at the radar tracking screen and his face paled at the sight of the irregular figure there, slightly out of the centering circle. It was no gag. "You're dropping," he said. "Orbital velocity must be down. Can you correct?" "I haven't been able to contact the bridge," said Joe. "Alert all Command and have crash point computed. Stand by." It developed that the bridge was entirely gone, along with a full thirty percent of the station. Captain West had been spared, however, being on inspection in the other sector of the station. He came on at once as Joe McCauley managed to get the communication lines repatched. "Emergency red!" he called. "All stations report!" One by one, the surviving crew chiefs reported conditions in their sectors. And when they were finished, they all knew their chance of survival was microscopic. Captain West ordered: "Communicate with Base. Request plotting of crash point." "Done, sir," Joe answered. "Command post will be established in the radio room. Emergency steering procedure will be started on command. Man all taxi craft." It was all on the tapes that were salvaged. Everything was done that desperate men could humanly do. At Base, its Commander, General Oglethorpe, was in the communications and tracking room by the time Joe McCauley had established contact with Captain West. He picked up the mike at the table. "Plug me in to the station," he commanded the Lieutenant. He got Joe first, but the radio operator put Captain West on as soon as he arrived in the radio room. "Hello, Frank," said General Oglethorpe in a quiet voice. "Yes, Jack -- " Captain West answered. "I'm glad you're there. Does it look pretty bad?" "Orbital velocity is down two percent. You've been falling for eight minutes." "That's pretty bad. I've got all steering stations manned, but only thirty percent of them are still operable. We're using the taxis to give a push too. But we haven't been able to dislodge the Griseda. Its inertia takes almost half our available energy." "Couldn't you get a blast from the Griseda' s tubes to put you in orbit?" "Adler's got a crew out there working on it. But his controls are gone, besides his fuel tanks being opened. And even if we could get their rockets operating it's doubtful we could get the right direction of thrust. Our hope is in our own rockets, and in breaking the ship away from the station." But the closer the massed wreckage dropped toward Earth, the higher were its requirements for orbital velocity. While the crews worked at their desperate tasks General Oglethorpe sat with his eyes on the tracking scope, and the voice of his friend in his ear. He listened to Captain West's measured commands to the men in the station and to those working to free the ship. General Oglethorpe heard the repeated reports of failure to free the Griseda. He listened to West's orders to transfer fuel from the ship to the station as the latter's supply ran low. He watched the continued deviation of the spot on the tracking scope. Then he turned as a lieutenant came up behind him with a sheet of calculations. "Present rate of fall indicates a crash point in the San Francisco Bay region, sir." The General gripped the paper, his face tightening. West said, "Did I hear correctly. Jack? The San Francisco area?" "Yes." "We'll have to try to keep it from happening there. I'll order the rockets shut off now. We'll save enough fuel to try to do some last minute steering as we approach Earth." "No!" General Oglethorpe cried. "Use it now! Its effect will be the same as later. Blow the chambers apart! Get back in orbit!" "We can't make it," West said quietly. "We've gained forward velocity, but I'll bet your computers will show us better than four percent below requirements at this orbit. Spot our crash as accurately as possible on free fall from our present position. We'll save remaining fuel for last minute steering in case we're near a city." The General was silent then as he heard the responses come back from the men who manned the rockets and who knew that with the closing of their fuel valves their own lives had also come to an end. "We'll want testimony account for the investigation," Oglethorpe said finally. "Get the responsible officers on the circuit -- but you first, Frank -- " There was a moment of silence before Captain Frank West began speaking in changed tones. "What is there to say?" he asked, finally. "You won't need to hold an investigation. I can tell you all you need to know -- all you'll ever find out at least, -- right now. Your decision will be the same one so many hundreds and thousands of investigating boards have made in the past: Pilot Error. " Human error! That's what killed the first Wheel, and the Griseda. I don't know why it happened. Adler doesn't. Neither does any other man up here with us. Those who were with Cummins in the control room are dead, but they didn't know any more than we do. ing that man, Cummins. We believed he was the best we could produce. We measured his reflexes and his intelligence and his blood composition until we thought we knew the function and capability of every molecule in his body. And then, in just one split second, he makes the decision of a moron, fumbling when he needed to be precise." "Just what did he do?" Oglethorpe asked gently. "Our customary approach is to the west turret. This time he had been ordered to go to the east side because of repairs on the other end of the hub. Cummins had seen and acknowledged the orders. Apparently, they slipped his mind during approach to the Wheel and he came up on the west side. Then he remembered and tried to correct his position. "Everything must have gone wrong then. The decision was a blunder to begin with. Wrong approach, yes. But it was suicide to attempt such a detailed maneuver that close to the station. He used his side jets and slammed the Griseda into the Wheel at a forty-five degree angle, locking the ship in the wreckage of the rim and in the girders of the spokes." "Was there any previous indication of instability in the pilot that you know of? We'll get a better answer on that from Adler, but we need to know if you were aware of anything." "The answer is no! Cummins was checked out before the start of the flight just three days ago. He was all right as far as any of our means of evaluation go. As right as any man will ever be -- "Jack, listen to me. Remember when we were back at White Sands and talked of the days when there would be a Wheel up here, and ships taking off for the Moon and for Mars?" "I remember," said General Oglethorpe softly. "Well, we've got a piece of that dream. But there'll never be any more, and what we've got is going to go smash unless we correct the one weakness we've never tackled properly. You'll fail again and again as long as men like Cummins can destroy twenty years' work and ing construction. One man's stupid, moronic error, and all of this goes to destruction, just as if it had never been. "On the ground, a plane crashes -- the board puts it down as pilot error and planes go on flying. You can't do that out here! The cost is too great. It's a sheer gamble putting this mountain of machinery and effort into the hands of men we can never be sure of. You think you know them; you do everything possible to find out about them. But you just don't know. "We've solved every other technical problem that has stood in our way. Why haven't we solved this one? We've learned how to make a machine that will perform in a predictable manner, and when it fails to do so we can provide adequate feed-back alarms and correctors, and we can find the cause of error. "With a man, we can do nothing. We have to accept him, in the final analysis, on little more than faith. "A couple of hundred men are going to die because of a human error. Give us a monument! Find out why men make errors. Produce a means of keeping them from it. Do that, and our deaths will be a small price to pay!" These were the words of a dead man. They were heard again and again in the committee rodms and investigation chambers. They were printed and broadcast around the world, and they enabled General Oglethorpe to do the thing that became a burning crusade with him. He would probably have failed in his effort if those words hadn't been spoken by a dying man while a shrieking, white-hot mass plunged through the atmosphere to land, finally, in the waters of the Pacific. The wreckage missed the city of San Francisco without the necessity of guidance by the rocket fuel so preciously hoarded by West. The Wheel and the Griseda were doomed the moment the pilot, Cummins, decided to shift the position of the ship with respect to the station. Commander's office, Dr. Paul Medick rubbed the palms of his hands against his trouser legs when the secretary wasn't watching, and licked the dryness that burned the membrane of his lips. The secretary remembered him. She probably had been the one to make out his severance papers and knew all about Oglethorpe's firing him. Now she was no doubt wondering about the General's calling him back after that bitter occasionjust as Paul himself was wondering. But he was pretty sure he knew. If he were right it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he couldn't afford to muff it. The girl turned at the sound of a buzz on the intercom. She smiled and said, "You may go in now." "Thanks." He stood up and told his nerves to quit remembering the last time he passed through the door he was now entering. General Oglethorpe was nobody but the Base Commander, and if Paul Medick got thrown out once more he would be no worse off than he now was. Oglethorpe looked up, a grim trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. He shook hands and indicated a chair by the desk, resuming his own seat behind it. "You know why I called you -- in spite of our past differences." Paul hesitated. He didn't want to show his anxiety -- and hopefulness -- He weighed the answers that might be expected of him, and said, "It's this crash thing -- and the appeal of Captain West?" "Would there be anything else?" "I'm flattered that you thought of me." "There's nothing personal involved, believe me! I'd a thousand times rather have called somebody else -- anybody else -- but there's nobody that can do the job you can." "Thanks." "Don't bother thanking me. I expect there'll still be a great deal of difference between us about the basic goals of this project. But once we start I don't want to have to fire you again." "Just what is the nature of this project," said Paul, "its goals? Fill me in on the details." "There are no details -- beyond what you've read and heard -- you're going to provide them. The objective is to find a kind of man that will keep the Frank Wests of the future from dying, as those men aboard the Wheel did." "What kind of man do you expect that to be?" Paul asked. "One who will eliminate, for all time, the damning verdict that has been handed down in tens of thousands of investigations of accident and disaster: human error. "We're going to find a kind of man who can be depended on to function without error. One who can undertake a complicated task of known procedure and perform it an infinite number of times, if necessary, without a single deviation from standard." Paul Medick regarded the General through narrowed eyes. In spite of his almost agonizing desire to possess the appointment to head up this Project he had to have a clear understanding with Oglethorpe now. He had to risk his chances, if necessary, to make himself absolutely clear. He said, "For untold thousands of years the human race has spent its best efforts to reach the goaf of perfection without achieving it. Now you propose to assemble all the money in the world, and all the brains and say: give us a perfect man! The United States Space Command demands him!" "Exactly." General Oglethorpe's face hardened as he returned Paul's steady gaze. "No other technical problem has been able to stand before such an attack. There is no reason why this one should. And the problem must be solved, or we're going to have to abandon space just as we stand on the frontier, getting our first real glimpse of it." "Your world is such a simple, uncomplicated place, General," said Paul slowly. "You want a man with two heads, four arms, and a tail? Order it! Coming up! "That's the way you operated when I set up your basic personnel program five years ago. It didn't work then; it won't work now." The General's face darkened. "It will work. Because it has to. Men are going to the stars -- because they have to. And they're going to change themselves to whatever form or shape or ability is required by that goal. They've done everything else they've ever set themselves to do -- life came up out of the sea because it had courage. Men left their caves and struck out across the plains and seas, and took up the whole Earth and made it what it is -- because they had courage. "But to go to space, courage is not enough. We need a new kind of man that we've never seen before. He's a man of iron, who's forgotten he was ever flesh and blood. He's a machine, who can perform over and over the same kind of complicated procedure and never make an error. He's more reliable and endurable than the best machines we've ever made. "I don't know where we'll find him, but he can be found, and you will do it, because you believe, as I do, that Man's frontier must not be closed. And because, in spite of your cynicism, you still understand the meaning of duty to your society and your race. There is no possibility of your refusal, so I have taken steps already to make your appointment official." "You must also have prepared yourself," said Paul, "to accept me with the basic philosophy that must guide me in this matter, And my philosophy is that this Project must fail. It has no possibility of success. The man you seek does not exist. An errorless man would be a dead man. "Any living man is going to make errors. That's the process of learning: make an approach, correct for error, approach again, correct once more. It's the only way there is to learn." The General inhaled deeply and hesitated. "I know nothing about that," he said finally. "You know what I want. Even if what you say were partially true, there remains no reason why that which has been learned cannot be performed without error. I may have to put up with it, but you'll save yourself and all of us a lot of time if you don't spend three months digging up reasons why the Project can't succeed." He stood up as if everything had been said that could possibly be said. "Let's go and have a look at your laboratory quarters." In the hot sunlight of the Southwest desert, they walked across the yard from the administration building to a large laboratory which had been cleared to the bare floor and walls. Paul felt a sense of instability returning. But only for an instant. He'd all but insulted the General and told him he had no intention of producing the iron superman the Space Command contemplated. And still he had not been thrown out. They must want him very badly, indeed! He had no qualms of conscience about taking the post now. General Oglethorpe had been forewarned and knew what Paul Medick's hopes and intentions were. "You can build your staff as big as you need it," the General was saying. "This Project has crash priority over everything else. We've got the machines to go to space. The machines need the men. "You can have anybody you want and do anything you like to them. We hope you can put them back together again in reasonable shape, but that doesn't matter too much." Paul turned about the bare room that would serve adequately as office space. "All right," he said. "Consider Project Superman begun. Remember, I have no hope of finding a solution in an errorless human being. I'll find whatever answer there is to be found. If you have any objections to my working of those terms, say so now. I don't intend to get fired again with a Project in the middle of its course." "You won't be. You'll find the way to give us what we need. I want you to come down to the other end of the building and meet a man who will be working closely with you." There had been sounds of activity in the distance, and General Oglethorpe led Paul towards them. They entered a large area in which instrumental equipment was being set up. A tall, thin, dark-haired man came up as they entered. "Dr. Nat Holt," said the General, "instrument and electronics expert. This is Dr. Medick, the country's foremost man in psychology and psychometric analysis. "Dr. Holt will be your instrument man. He will design and build whatever special equipment your researches call for. Let me know soon what you'll need in the way of furniture and assistants." He left them standing in the nearly bare room. Through the window they watched his stiff form march back to his own office. Nat Holt shifted position and grinned at Paul. "I may as well tell you that the General has briefed me thoroughly on what he considered your probable reaction to the Project. I'm just curious enough to want to know if he was right." "The General and I understand each other -- I think," said Paul. "He knows I'm contemptuous of his approach to a problem of human behavior by ordering it solved. But he knows I'll take his money and spend it on the biggest, deepest investigation of human behavior via psychometrical analysis that has ever been conducted." "It ought to be enough to buy gold fringed couches for all the analysts in the country." Paul raised his brows. "If it's that way with you, then why are you joining me?" he asked. "Because I have a stake in this, too! I want to see the problem solved just as much as the General does. And I think it can be solved. But not this way! "There's only one way to produce men of superior abilities. The method of adequate training. Hard, brutal discipline and training of oneself. I'm going to convince Oglethorpe of it after he's seen the failure you intend to produce for him." "That shouldn't be hard," said Paul. "It's the General's own view. The Project is simply to implement that view. "But let's not have any misunderstanding about my intentions. I expect to give honest value in research for every dollar spent. I expect to turn up data that will go a long way toward providing better spacemen for the Command -- and to give Captain West the monument he asked for!" Alone in his hotel room that night, Paul stood at the window overlooking the desert. Beyond the distant hills a faint glow in the sky marked the location of Space Command Base. He regarded it, and considered the enormity of the thing that was being brewed for the world in that isolated outpost. Now the chance was his to prove that manhood was a quality to be proud of, that machines could be built and junked and built again, but that a man's life was unique in the universe and could never be replaced once it was crushed. For years he'd struggled to probe the basic nature of Man and find out what divorces him from the merely mechanical. He'd known there would probably never be enough money to reach his goal. And then Oglethorpe had come, offering him all the money in the world to reach a nebulous objective that Space Command did not know was unobtainable. Somebody was going to spend that money. With clear conscience, Paul rationalized that it might as well be him. He'd see that the country got value for what it spent, even if this was not quite what the Space Command expected. Nat Holt was going to be a most difficult obstacle. Paul wished the General had let him pick his own technical director, but obviously the two men understood each other. In their separate fields, they were alike in their approach to human performance. Whip a man into line, make him come to heel like a reluctant hound. Beat him, shape him, twist him to the form you want him to bear. Discipline him. That was the magic word, the answer to all things. Paul turned from the window in revulsion, drawing the curtains on the skyglow of the Base. Human error! When would Man cease to indulge in this most monumental of all errors? When would he cease to regard himself and his fellows as brute creatures to be beaten into line? He had to find the right answer before Oglethorpe and his kind found some flimsy validation for the one they had already chosen long ago. He stood up and glanced at the clock, deciding he wanted dinner, after all. Tomorrow he'd wire Betty and the kids to get packed and be on their way. No -- he'd phone tonight. She had a right to know immediately the outcome of his interview. The dining room was almost empty. He ordered absently and clipped the speaker of his small personal radio behind his ear while waiting. He seldom used it, but here in the desert was a sense of isolation that made him seize almost compulsively upon any contact with the bright, distant world. The music was dull, and the news uninspiring. He was about to turn it off when his order arrived. The wine was very bad ; the steak, however, was good, so Paul considered it about even. His finger touched the radio switch once more. The newscaster's voice changed its tone of pounding urgency. "Repercussions of the recent crash of the world's first space station are still being heard," he said. Murmurs of protest against construction of a new Wheel are rising in many quarters. Today they approach the proportions of a roar. The influential New England Times states that it is 'unqualifiedly opposed' to any restoration of the Wheel. 'In its three years' existence the structure proved beyond any question of doubt its utter lack of utility. Now its fall to Earth demonstrates the menace constituted by its presence over every city on the face of the globe.' "Senator Elbert echoes these sentiments. 'It was utter folly in the lars to construct this Sword of Damocles in the sky of all the world. I propose that our Government go on record denying any further intention to rebuild such a threat to the peace and well-being of nations who stand now on the threshold of understanding and friendliness which they have sought for so long.' " Paul switched it off. He remembered the hours of worldwide tension while the Wheel was falling toward the city of San Francisco. In panic, the whole population of the Bay Area attempted evacuation, but there wasn't time. The bridges became clogged with traffic, and some hysterical drivers left their cars and jumped to the waters below. As the wreckage neared Earth, the computers narrowed their circle of error until it was certain at last that the city would not be struck. But the damage was done. The fear remained, and now was congealing in angry determination that another Wheel would not be built. Paul finished his meal, wondering what effect this would have on the plans to build a new Wheel -- and on Project Superman. Maybe Congress would react in anger that would cut off all appropriations to the Project. He wondered, in sudden weariness, if this would not be an unmixed blessing, after all. spent in telephone and telegraph communication with members of his profession as he proceeded to recruit a staff. On Friday, Betty arrived with the kids. By the end of the following week, laboratory furniture had been installed and the first trickle of potential staff members was coming in to see what Superman was all about. Nat, too, had been busy forming his own staff and setting up basic equipment. Paul had the feeling that they were opposing camps setting up on the same site of exploration. He tried to tell himself it was completely irrational, until Nat approached him a few days later. "Quite a crew you're getting in here," the technician said. "You'll have to take Oglethorpe up on his offer of new buildings if you expect to find couch space for all your boys." "That's what you're here for," Paul suggested mildly, "to do away with couches." "Right." Nat nodded. "Anything a couch can do, a meter can do twice as efficiently." "Sometimes both are necessary. You forget my specialty is psychometry." "No, I'm not forgetting," said Nat. "But that's what makes it so hard for me to figure out. You're attempting to span two completely incompatible fields: science and humanities. Man behaves either as a machine or as a creature of unstable emotion. To function as one you have to suppress the other." "Splitting Man in two has never produced an answer to anything. It has been tried even longer than couches -- and with far less result." "I'll make you a small side bet. We going to have to work together on Superman, and coordinate all our procedures and results. But I'll bet the final answer turns up on the side of a completely mechanistic man, shorn of all other responses and motivations." "I'll take that!" Paul said with a grim smile. "I don't know how much of an answer we'll find, but I know that won't be it!" "Let's say a small celebration feed for the whole crew when Superman is completed. Nothing chintzy, either!" They shook on it. And afterward Paul was glad the incident had occurred. It left no doubt about the direction Nat Holt would be traveling in his work. Four weeks to the day, from the time Paul had stepped into Oglethorpe's office, he called the first meeting of his staff leaders. Invitations to the General and to Nat Holt were deliberately omitted. He wanted this first get together to be a family affair. He felt just a little shaky in the knees as he got up before that group for the first time. "I won't repeat what you already know," Paul said carefully. "You all know the background events that produced Project Superman. "I am sure that each of you has also caught the two basic errors that have been assumed by the Space Command, first, that an errorless man is possible, and second, that genuine scientific discovery can be secured wholly upon command. General Oglethorpe recognizes that we consider these assumptions erroneous, but he also knows that our professional integrity demands that we pursue vigorously a course which he believes will result in success. "We recognize, too, that we are not here to invent or produce anything that does not already exist. But, in a sense, our superiors and some of our co-workers expect us to do exactly that. "We can agree, however, that most of Man's potential still remains to be discovered. And for us, who have hoped for a means of understanding that potential, this Project is the fulfillment of dreams. If we fail to take full advantage of it, we will win the condemnation of our profession for a century to come. "Space Command has already concluded that a man can be stripped of his humanity and driven to an utterly mechanistic state with the robotic responses of a machine. Let there be no mistake about it: we have been brought here to validate that conclusion. "We will validate it by default, so to speak, unless we can produce a clean-cut analysis and demonstrations of the thing that most of us believe: that the essence of Man is more than a piece of machinery or a collection of bio-chemical reactions. "Our science of mind and Man is on trial. If we fail, we give consent to a doctrine that will spread from space technology to all the rest of our society, and bind Man in an iron mold that will not be broken for generations. While we have been hired and will ostensibly work at the task of developing an errorless man, our basic purpose must be to validate the humanity of Man!" He waited for their reaction. Outside, far across the open desert at the station, a rocket screamed into the air. They waited until the sound died away. Professor Barker stood up. "There is scarcely a human being who has not by now read or heard the words of Captain West's appeal. They will be looking for the day when there will come marching from our laboratories, like a robot, the errorless man he asked for. "Do you mean we have to fight the stated objectives of this Project? Can we not discover sufficient understanding to establish some method of training which will accomplish, in another way, the things the Space Command needs?" "We are not fighting the Space Command's desire for more adequate men for its ships," said Paul. "We are fighting only against the false conclusions they have already formed concerning the nature of such men. "We must solve the problem of human error. We know its purpose in the learning process. We must discover the reason for its existence in a learned process. We have to find out what training actually means. "We have to ask how we know when an error has been made. It is obvious, of course, when a spaceship rams a fixed orbit station. But what of the subtler situations, where results are less dramadc, or are postponed for a long time -- ? "The primary thing to remember at this point is that our basic goal is to prevent any false confirmation of the dogma that Man is no more than a badly functioning machine, which will gain value when he has been tinkered with sufficiently so that he can slip in beside the gears and vacuum tubes and be indistinguishable from them. And to reach this goal we must discover his true nature." It was two weeks later that General Oglethorpe made his first visit since Superman got under way. The soldier's face seemed more deeply lined and his eyes more tired than Paul remembered seeing them before. "You seem to have things well in hand," he said. "How soon can you give us some tangible results?" "Results! We've just started housekeeping. In a year, maybe two, we'll have an idea where to begin a concentrated search for what you want to know." The General shook his head slowly, his eyes remaining on Paul's face. "You aren't going to have anything like a year. You haven't got time to run down one line of research and then another. Run them all at once -- a thousand of them if you want to. Why do you think you've got the budget you have!" "Some things," said Paul, "like threading a needle -- or analysing a human being -- don't go much faster when a thousand men work at it than when there's only one." "They do when there're a thousand needles to thread -- or brains to pick. And that's what we're up against here. We need a volume of the kind of men we've been talking about, and we need them quick!" "We have to find out how to get the first one." "And you haven't got as much time now as we thought you had when Superman began. They're trying to close us up. "We hadn't planned to build another Wheel right away, not until some refinements of design had been worked out, and we had some results from Superman. "Now, all that's been scrapped. We've received orders from Washington that erection of a second Wheel is to begin at once, using the plans of the first one. Fabrication of structures is already under way." "I don't understand," said Paul. "If we don't get another one up there within a matter of weeks, this hysterical opposition among the public is liable to prevent us ever getting one there again. We have to act while we still have authority, before the crackpots persuade Congress to take it away. And by the time it's built, I want some men to put in it. Men who can be trusted to not jeopardize it the moment they put their clumsy feet aboard. I want them, Medick, and I intend to have them. That's by way of an order!" The General rose, but Paul remained seated. "You can't get them that way, and you know it," the latter said. "We'll do all we can, as I've told you before." "I think you'll do considerably more, now. That was quite a talk you delivered to your boys a couple of weeks ago. We will 'ostensibly work at the task of developing an errorless man', is the the way I believe you put it. You're going to do a lot more than ostensibly work at it, Medick. Just how much do you think you can get away with?" Paul remained motionless in the chair. Only his lips moved. "So you had a report on our little meeting? I hope it was complete enough to give you the rest of the things I said, that my basic purpose was not to produce human robots, but to validate the humanity of man." Oglethorpe leaned closer, his fists resting on the top of the desk. "The humanity of man be damned! I told you before we want men who've forgotten they were ever human, men of metal and electrons. If I didn't think you were the man who could do it -- probably the only man in the whole country -- you wouldn't last here another minute. But you can do it, and you're going to. "Your little lecture was enough to ruin your career in any place you try to run to, if you undermine Superman. Who do you suppose would trust you with any kind of research after that expression of intent to sabotage the Project your Government entrusted you with, and which you agreed to carry out? "You're finished, Medick, washed up completely in your own profession, unless you give me what I've asked for! I won't take promises any more. The only assurance you can give me from here on out is results ! I want those men, and I want them damn fast!" tened attentively as Paul sat across from him in the administration office and reported Oglethorpe's visit and demands. "We're caught in a squeeze, and we've got to push both ways," Paul said. "If the Base goes down, Superman goes with it, and we've lost an opportunity that will never come again in our lifetimes. So we've got to do two things: We've got to give active support to the rebuilding of the Wheel, and we've got to develop some kind of show that will convince Oglethorpe that Superman is giving him what he wants. It will mean detouring our basic objectives, but it's necessary in order to have a project at all. I'd like you to take charge of it." "It'll be a waste of time," Barker said slowly. "I wonder if we'll ever get back on the track." "We'll have to gamble on it," said Paul. "I don't want you to feel I'm deliberately pushing you up a blind alley, but I think you're the best man for bringing up something we can sell Oglethorpe -- while we try to do some real research on some honest goals." "We can follow the usual lines of so-called training -- brute conditioning through shock and fear and pain and discomfort. Most of the men here are already well anaesthetized in that respect. Their breakdown level is high." "Cummins' was the highest," said Paul, "and he cracked. But work along those lines anyway. Maybe we can find a way to thicken the conditioning armor. At the same time let's push a genuine investigation into the nature of error as hard as we can. For the moment we'll forget broader objectives, until we know the Project is safe." Barker agreed reluctantly, feeling that they would end up as mere personnel counselors before long. As soon as he left, Paul called Oglethorpe. "I've got a suggestion," he said. "Let's not get on the defensive about this thing. Why don't you propose a Senatorial investigation of Space Command?" "Are you crazy? Why would we want to have them come out here and pick our bones to pieces before making final burial?" "We've got a story to tell them -- remember? We've got Superman, that's going to produce for the first time in the world's history a man adequate to go into the dangers of space. And there's that little story of yours about courage. I think that would go over with them. We'd be out in front if we took the initiative in this instead of just waiting until it rolled over us." There was a long pause before Oglethorpe spoke again. "I wonder just what you're trying to do," he said finally. "I know you don't mean a word of what you're saying at all -- " "But I do mean it," Paul said earnestly. "I want Superman saved ; you want the Wheel. It amounts to the same thing." "You could be right. You might even be telling the truth. I'll give it some thought." The officer in charge of the rocket crews and the take-off stand was a young engineer-soldier named Harper. Paul had met him during the first week at Base. His endorsement of Project Superman was enthusiastic. After talking with Oglethorpe, Paul took a jeep over to the stand and located Harper. The engineer was overseeing the fueling process on a big rocket. "Doc Medick!" Harper exclaimed. "How's your crew of head shrinkers coming along? We're just about ready for your new breed of pilots." "What do you mean?" "This is the nucleus ship. She's going out in orbit tonight with the first batch of supplies and instruments to get ready for the new Wheel. We're going to need your men awfully fast." "That's what I came to talk about. Can you spare a few minutes?" "Sure." Harper led him to the office, where the whining of fueling pumps was silenced. "What can we do for you?" "I wanted to ask about Cummins. You knew him pretty well, didn't you?" "Buddies. Just like that." Harper crossed his fingers. "What went wrong, do you think? I know it's all been hashed over in the investigations, but I'd like your personal feelings about him." Harper's face sobered and he looked away a moment. "Cummins was as good a guy as they come," he said. "But in a pinch he was just a weak sister. That doesn't mean he didn't have a lot on the ball," Harper added defensively. "He was a better pilot than most of us ever will be, but he was just human like the rest of us." "What do you mean, 'human'?" "Weak, soft, failure when the going gets rough -- everything we have to be on guard against every minute we're alive." "I take it you don't think much of human beings, as such." Harper leaned forward earnestly. "Listen, Doc, when you've been around ships as long as I have, you'll know what Captain West really meant. The weakest link in any technological development has always been the men involved with its operation. In space flight our weakness is pilots and technicians. Set a machine on course and it'll go until it breaks down -- and flash you a warning before it fails. With a man, you never know when he's going to fail, and you have to be on guard against his breakdown every minute because he won't give any warning. "Think what it's like to be in our shoes! We take the controls of a of machinery, and we know that every last man of us is boobytrapped with some weakness that can break out in a critical moment and destroy everything. We fight against it; we struggle to hold it in and act like responsible instruments. And we grow to hate ourselves because of the weak things that we are. "Cummins was like that. He fought himself every waking hour, knowing that he had a weakness of becoming confused in a tight spot. Oh, it was nothing that even showed up on the tests, and he was the best man of any of us on the Base. But he knew it was there, just as we all know our closets bulge with skeletons that we try to keep from breaking out." "Do you fight yourself the way Cummins did?" Paul asked. "Sure." "What would happen if you pulled a blunder that wrecked that ship out there on the stand." "I'd have had it, that's all. I'd never get within ten miles of a rocket base again as long as I lived. And there wouldn't be much worth living for -- " "It would be pretty wonderful to feel you weren't constantly on the verge of some disastrous blunder, wouldn't it?" "It would be a rocket man's idea of heaven to handle these ships with that kind of a feeling inside him." "We're about ready to begin running tests on Superman, and I'd like you to be the first to help us out. Can you arrange it?" "We're tied up like a ball of string on getting the nucleus ship in orbit. I know Oglethorpe gave orders we were to jump when you called, but I'll have to check on replacements for those of us you take. What kind of test are you going to run on me?" "I want to find out how long it takes you to make a serious error, and what happens to you when you do!" Arrangements were made for initiating this series of tests two days later. Paul had designed them, and Nat Holt's crew had built the equipment. But before they were started, Paul grew increasingly aware of the clamor and public agitation against the Wheel. Instead of dying out after a small spurt of anger, it was accumulating momentum in every corner of the nation. A rabble rouser named Morgan in the middle-west had proposed a motor caravan to Space Command Base, where the participants would go on a sit-down strike until assurance was given that no Wheel would be built again. And on the heels of this came the demand by an increasing number of Senators for a full investigation of the Base. Paul met Barker after seeing the newscast of Morgan's revivalist type appeal for a caravan of protest against the Base. "This looks like it could get to be something that would be hard to handle," Barker said. "It doesn't seem reasonable that the near-crash of the first Wheel at San Francisco could be responsible for all this commotion." "I don't think it is," Paul answered reflectively. "The sinking of a big ocean liner doesn't produce hysterical demands that no more ships be built. The crash of an airship with a hundred people aboard is accepted for what it is, without this kind of reaction. I think these broadcasts and write-ups of Captain West's appeal have sunk in deeper than Oglethorpe or anyone else ever intended. "For a long time there has been building up a sense of man's inferiority to his machines. Now this incident of the Wheel and the world-wide broadcast of West's final words have triggered that inferiority into a genuine fear. They're afraid to have another Wheel up there over their heads. They're afraid that no man is capable of mastering such a piece of machinery." Not only the public was infected with this fear, but the very men on whom the operation of the ships depended. Harper was right, Paul thought, as he reached his own office again. It must be terrible to be in their shoes, fighting constantly the conviction that they were poor miserable creatures hardly fit to polish the shining hulls of their creations ! They were trained in the best of military traditions, crushing their weaknesses by sheer force. And they had concluded their own breakdown was inevitable, in spite of their training and traditions. How could such men even hope for the stars! But where was the flaw in it all? If the answer was not in men who were more nearly like their own machines, where was it? They needed a year or two to even approach the problem properly, and some kind of answer was demanded within weeks! Oglethorpe came to the laboratory the morning Harper was to begin his test runs. "We're going on a complete crash-priority basis, with round-the-clock shifts," he said. "It's been a toss-up whether to close Superman and put everything we had on the new Wheel, or leave it open in the hope of getting something out of it. "For the time being I'm leaving it open, but remember that every hour Harper or one of his men spends here is an hour away from the job on the Wheel. "We didn't need your suggestion about an investigation. Plenty of other people thought of it first. The Senators will be here in four or five days. You're going to talk to them. You're going to tell them what you proposed to tell them." "Of course. And what are you going to do about Morgan's cavalcade?" Oglethorpe spat out an exclamation. "We'll set up barricades that they'd better not cross within ten miles of Base!" "That won't help," Paul warned. "I think you'd better let me prepare something for them, too." "Forget them! Take care of the Senators and the Project and you'll be doing enough." Harper arrived shortly, nervous in spite of his attempt to appear composed. But he was put at ease when they took him to the laboratory of complex testing equipment assembled by Nat Holt. Paul indicated a seat in the middle of the mass of equipment. "As near as we've been able to make it," he said, "this simulates the landing procedure of a rocket craft. There are a hundred and thirty-five distinct actions, observations and judgements involved. A taped voice will lead you through the sequence, asking you to press buttons and make adjustments to indicate your observations and responses. When you can do all this to your satisfaction, you will turn off the tape and continue for as many cycles as you can." "How long? A man could do that for a month, provided he didn't have to sleep." "I think you'll be a little surprised. You will continue until your accumulation of errors becomes so great that the entire procedure collapses." "It still looks like a kid's game to me," Harper said confidently. "Let's get started." Carefully, they fitted the multiple electrodes of the electro-encephalograph recorder to his. skull. The tape instructor was turned on, and Harper began the first cycle. Behind the one-way glass of the observation room, Paul sat with Nat Holt and Professor Barker and two assistants, watching. The rocket engineer began jauntily, contemptuous of the simple actions required of him, impatient to have it over with and get back to his duties at the take-off stand. The instructions coming over the speaker had some variations from the normal handling of a ship, including the items necessary to record observations and responses. Harper listened to these for a half dozen cycles. Then, confident that he could breeze through the procedure for the rest of the day if he had to, he switched off the tape and settled back to take it easy. One by one, he watched the meters, noted their information, made the proper adjustments, added compensations, waited for results, checked and re-checked -- "He'll go a long time," said Nat Holt confidently. "He's had top training. If it breaks down, we may find out a few things." "Cummins had top-drawer training, too," Paul said. "His break point seemed to have no adequate antecedents. I don't think we're going to find Harper holding out very long." After an hour, the attitude of contempt had left Harper's face, and he was proceeding with obvious boredom. He had made no error yet, but there was evident a faint trace of anxiety as he concentrated on the instruments and levers. At two hours and a half Harper reached for a button and withdrew his hand in abrupt hesitation. Then it darted out again and pressed decisively. At three hours he was making two such hesitations every cycle. "Not so good," Barker commented. "Not for a man who battles himself the way Harper does." Nat Holt remained silent, watching critically the wavering dials and graphs showing the engineer's physical condition and reaction. At four and a half hours, Harper's hand reached for a lever in the center of the board. But it didn't get more than a third of the way. In mid-air it froze, as if paralysis had suddenly struck it. Harper regarded it in seeming dumb astonishment. His face grew red, and sweat broke out upon his forehead as if from the physical exertion of trying to put his hand to the lever. Paul grabbed a microphone and switched it on. "Touch the lever," he commanded. "Draw it toward you." Harper looked around as if in panic, but he completed the motion. He sat staring at the panels for a full two minutes while alarm eyes went from green to yellow to red. "Alarm red!" Paul exclaimed into the microphone. "Correct course!" Harper turned and glared about with hate in his eyes as if to find the source of the sound. He began tearing at the wires and contacts fastened to his head and body. "To hell with the course!" he cried. "I'm getting out of here!" He hurled the wiring harness at the panels. Then, he stood in a moment's further paralysis and slumped finally into the chair. He put his arms and head down on the instrument desk and began sobbing deeply. Paul put away the microphone and moved to the door. "That's the end of that," he said. "I hope our record is good. Harper might not like to go through that again." Nat Holt was still staring through the window at the sobbing engineer. "I don't understand," he murmured. "What made him break down like that for no reason at all?" O NE BY one, the top engineers of the Base went through the breakdown test. Some broke down with an emotional storm as Harper had, others simply ended in a swirl of confusion that put lights flashing all over the panels. But all of them had a breaking point of some kind that could be measured in a small number of hours. The test was a stab in the dark. It was based on an old and wellknown principle that repeated tactile contact under command will break down the motor responses of the body in a matter of hours. Paul did not know whether it would actually provide a fertile lead to the problem of error or not, but it seemed the closest possible approach at present. Nat Holt, however, was astonished at the reaction of the men. He insisted on trying it himself, determined that he would not break down no matter what happened. He lasted six hours before the panel lit up like a Christmas tree. He subjected the resulting curves to an analyzer, and to his own he gave the most detailed attention. At the end of a full week of study on it, he called Paul with an excitement he could not suppress in his voice. "It looks like you owe that dinner," he said. "We've got what we were looking for!" "What are you talking about?" Paul demanded. "We've got proof that a human being is nothing more nor less than a simple cybernetic gadget. It's a laugh -- people trying to build a mechanical man all these years. That's the only kind there is!" "You still aren't making sense." "Come on over and see for yourself." Puzzled and irritated, Paul left his office and went down to the analyzer laboratory. There he found Holt and his staff in a buzz of excitement. The multiple recorder sheets were laid out on long tables, being studied intensely. Paul followed Holt to one series that was separated from the rest. "We didn't know we had anything at first," said Holt. "The pulse was so low in amplitude that it was hard to pick out of the noise, but the analyzer showed it was consistently present under certain conditions of the subject." "What conditions?" said Paul. "At the exact moment of committing an error! I should say it occurs between the moment of making the decision to carry out an erroneous act and the triggering of the motor impulse that executes it." Paul frowned. "How can you be sure it doesn't occur at any other time as well?" "Because we've run every set of charts through the analyzer and this particular impulse comes out no other place." "It looks very interesting," Paul said. "But why did you say you've got proof that a human being is nothing but a cybernetic gadget? I don't see what this has got to do with it." "I didn't give you quite all the story," Holt said smugly. "I should have said that the pulse occurred every time there was an intent to perform an error. Sometimes that intent was not carried out." "I don't understand." "That pulse is nothing more nor less than a feedback pulse indicating that an action matrix has been set up which is in non-conformity with the previously chosen pattern of learning or intent. It's a feedback alarm carrying the information that an error will result if the proposed action is carried out. When the feedback is successfully returned to the action matrix a change is made until there is no feedback and a correct action is taken. When the feedback is blocked or ignored, an error results. It's as simple as that! Your complex human being is nothing but a fairly elaborate cybernetic machine operating wholly on feedback principles. The only time he fails and breaks down is when he ceases to act like the cybernetic machine that he is!" Holt's eyes shone triumphantly as he patted the long strips of paper on the table. Paul followed the motion of his hand and remained staring at the graphs in a kind of stunned recognition. There must be some mistake, there had to be. Holt's interpretation was wrong, even if the data were correct. Man, a feedback response mechanism -- ! If that were true a vacuum tube structure could eventually be devised to do anything a man could do. "I think we'll hold off on that dinner a while yet," Paul said. "The data are interesting and, I'm sure, important -- but I can hardly agree with your conclusions." Inwardly, he cursed the stiltedness he felt creeping into his voice, and his irrational resentment of Holt's continued smug grin. "Take all the time you want," Holt said, "but when you're through you'll come up with the same answers I've got. Man is a machine and nothing else. Our only job now is to discover why the feedback sometimes fails, and to set it back on the job." Paul took the recordings and the analyzer graphs back to his own office. He called Barker and showed the older man what Holt had found out. "If this is true," he said, "we don't need to worry about validating Space Command's pre-chosen conclusions. It has already been done." Dr. Barker looked puzzled and a little frightened as he sat down at the desk to examine the charts. After an hour, he looked up. "It's true," he said. "There's no escaping the fact. Look what we have here -- " He pointed to a corresponding sector of the six charts he'd lined up. "After the first feedback impulse, there was no attempt to correct," he said, "or, rather, there was a deliberate effort to suppress the feedback. This created a second, larger feedback, which, in turn resulted in increased suppression and a simultaneous enlargement of the error. The result was a hunting effect in increasingly large amplitude, like the needle of an autosyn indicator with undamped positive feedback. "Now, here's another one with the opposite effect. In this case the hunting shows diminishing amplitude as correction of the effort results from application of the feedback pulses. One pulse is not sufficient, but they are applied in decreasing force as the intent is brought into alignment with the learned pattern. A purely mechanical response!" Paul turned from the window through which he had been staring toward the launchers. "Then Space Command is perfectly right," he said bitterly. "We can give them their errorless, mechanical men -- just as soon as we find ways of correcting the blockage of the feedback pulses!" Barker leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his moderate paunch. "I'm afraid that's right. We've been wrong all along in bucking the mechanical concept of Man. The technologists saw it long ago in a sort of intuitive way, but they couldn't prove it. Now, they can!" "And the soul of Man is nothing but a feedback impulse!" Barker sighed heavily. "What else, Paul?" Morgan's Caravan appeared that evening and camped at the ten-mile limit imposed by the military police guards. They posted their signs of protest and began their picket lines. Oglethorpe sent out his sound trucks to try to scare them away, but they wouldn't scare. Paul watched at home the broadcast of the scene, but the fate of the Base and the Wheel had almost ceased to concern him. He told Betty of the discovery Holt had made on Superman. "It leaves nothing to account for the most valued acts of Man," he said. "It can't account for creativeness, because a cybernetic device cannot create; it can only follow a pattern. So where is the poetry, the art, the scientific invention if this is the essence of Man? It can't be, yet there's no way of getting around this thing." "Where does the pattern come from?" asked Betty. "Isn't that the created thing which the cybernedc system tries to follow?" Paul shook his head. "The pattern we're talking about is no more than a response to stimuli, a purely mechanical thing also. Holt claims this is all there ever is, that what we call art, poetry, music inspiration, and intuition are nothing more than the results of badly functioning cybernetic systems. The more or less irrational results of errors in accommodating to the real world. We find pleasure in them because they tend to excuse our badly malfunctioning circuits. "The ideal, race of Man would be devoid of all this, a smoothly operating group of individuals unperturbed by emotional or artistic responses, completely capable of solving any problem in a purely cybernetic manner." "And do you agree with it?" Betty asked. "There's nothing else I can do! The evidence is there." He laughed shortly and moved to the window where he could see the nearby camp of Morgan's Caravan. "Human development has moved -- is moving -- in a completely different direction from anything I ever dreamed. Oglethorpe's iron-hard, emotionless machine-men are the only ones who'll get there. The rest of us who can't match the pace of a technological society will be shucked off as the waste part in the development of a species meant to inhabit galaxies instead of a single world." "If I had ever wondered how you'd sound when you were completely out of your mind I'd have the answer now," said Betty. In the morning he turned over to one of the units the task of further identifying and analyzing the feedback impulse they had discovered. In the middle of this he was called to Oglethorpe's office. The investigating Senators had arrived. They were favorably impressed by the day-long tour that General Oglethorpe provided for them around the entire Base. But they found in Paul's announcement the strongest single factor in favor of permitting Space Command to continue with its work. "We know now," he said, "and this is something I haven't even had time to present to General Oglethorpe -- we know that a completely mechanical man is possible." The General's eyes narrowed as Paul's flat statement continued. "We know that it is possible to have men at the helm of our ships, who are incapable of error. We have hopes of producing them within a very short time if Project Superman is allowed to continue. And when this is done, there is no technical goal we cannot reach." This was the thing the Senators had come to find out, and they were satisfied. "But the public has got to be reassured of this," Senator Hart said. "We need to get this mob away from your gates for one thing. The news programs keep them constantly before the public eye and the whole country is stirred up." "We'll take care of it at once," General Oglethorpe said. "As Dr. Medick has indicated, this discovery is so new that even I had not been informed of it. Morgan's mob will go away as soon as they hear the news. And that, in turn, will reassure the entire country. We can arrange for a broadcast by Dr. Medick to the whole nation." Paul was swept along as arrangements were made to make a statement to Morgan and his group camped outside the Base, to the press, and to the public in general. Oglethorpe cornered him after the meeting with the Committee. "This is on the level," he said, "not something you cooked up on the spur of the moment?" "It's on the level," said Paul. "You were right all along." When he returned to his office an urgent message from Barker awaited him. He hurried down to the testing laboratory, where the older man greeted him in excitement and anxiety. "It looks like we've got something by the tail and can't let go of it. Come in and have a look." Paul followed him and found Captain Harper in an observation room, writhing on a cot in a storm of tears and emotional fury. He beat against the walls and the floor with his fists as his sobbing continued beyond control. "What happened to him?" Paul demanded. "We have three others in the same condition," said Barker. "We tried to determine the effect of a pure feedback impulse, and fed it back to each of them in amplified form as we found it on their charts. This is what happened. I'm afraid we may have cost them their sanity, and we don't know why." "How could their own feedback do such a thing to them?" he asked in wonder. "What part of the chart did you take it from?" "We used the impulse that didn't get through, the one that was blocked so that error resulted. Apparently this is the alternative to error." He nodded toward the writhing, sobbing man. "Harper reached a point where he had to fail or else be subject to this psychic storm." Paul ran his long, bony fingers through his hair. "This makes less sense than ever! If that's true, then we've got to take back what we've told Oglethorpe. His errorless man isn't possible, after all." "I don't know." Barker shook his head thoughtfully. "Evidently the production of error is a protection against the admission of this intolerable feedback impulse. But the question remains : why is it intolerable, and why does it become so after numerous other feedback impulses have been passed? "Yesterday we thought we had it all wrapped up. Now it's blown open wider than ever before!" Oglethorpe's public relations man prepared a statement to the effect that further danger from pilot error in rocket ships and the second Wheel could be considered as completely eliminated with the new training processes that would make men incapable of technical errors. Paul knew it was as ineffectual as the average Government release, but he made no protest in his concern for Harper and the three other men. He signed the statement automatically. He was presented the following day, however, with arrangements to give it personally to the members of Morgan's Caravan from the top of one of the sound trucks. He did protest then that any flunky on the Base could read it to the crowd as well as he. But Oglethorpe insisted he do it personally. With official pompousness the big, olive-green truck rolled out from the Base. Paul rode beside the driver and Metcalf, the public relations man. He'd not told Oglethorpe about their latest development. If this psychic reaction to feedback proved an impenetrable barrier there' d be time enough to give Space Command the bad news. In the meantime a Wheel would be built, the public would be mollified, and Superman would continue on -- to what unknown ends Paul didn't know. The massed camp of the fanatic followers of Morgan appeared in the distance like a discarded rag on either side of the road. Then as they approached it broke into individual knots of sand-scoured, unwashed people clustered about their tents. Morgan hadn't given much thought to adequate facilities before leading them out here. The truck rolled to a halt in the center of the camp. Morgan himself, a long, lanky figure in a dusty black suit, came at the head of a group of his people to meet them. "I hope you have the news we are waiting for," he said cordially. "We have a statement," said Metcalf. "Dr. Medick here, who has made an important discovery that will enable all of you to return to your homes, will read it to you." Paul could have stayed in the cab, but he preferred to climb to the platform atop the truck to get a look at the crowd Morgan had assembled. He hesitated a moment with the paper in his hands, then took up the mike and read the statement Metcalf had prepared. "The United States Space Command wishes to announce that -- " It fell utterly flat on completely non-understanding ears. Paul looked over the mass of faces and knew it had failed. Something far more than this was needed. A little feedback, he thought grimly. A little feedback of the idiocy of their present situation to correct their course and return it to normalcy. "Five hundred years ago there might have been a crowd of people just like you," he said suddenly in low tones. "There was a harbor, and some small ships, and a man who believed he could sail them over the edge of the world. On the shore were people who thought he was a fool and a blasphemer, and a few who thought he was right -- or at least hoped he was. "Five hundred years ago was the beginning of a new freedom from the prison of a tiny, constricted world. Today, another freedom waits our successful conquest of space. And whenever a freedom has been won there have been more who jeered against it than have cheered for it. You are today making a choice -- " He talked for ten minutes, and when he was through he knew that he'd accomplished his goal. Even before the sound truck pulled out, the cars of the Caravan were breaking away from the mass and disappearing in the distance. "Nice job," Metcalf congratulated, as if he'd been responsible for it himself. "Just a little feedback in the right place -- " murmured Paul absently. "Feedback? What's that -- new kind of propaganda technique -- ?" "Yeah, you might call it that. How could a guy have been so blind -- ?" he said fiercely, more to himself than to his companions. He hurried to the laboratory as soon as the truck got him back to Base. He rounded up Barker and Nat Holt and a dozen of his other top men. "The answer's been under our noses all the time," he said. "We've been too busy fighting each other for the sake of our own preconceived notions to have seen it!" "What are you talking about?" Holt demanded. "Feedback. Can't you guess what it is?" "No." you a small dose -- something less than the level given Harper and his men -- and then tell us what you find out about it?" Nat Holt looked hesitant. "If you think you know what you're talking about. There's no point in my getting in a condition like Harper's." "We'll pull you out before you get anywhere near that far." Still dubious, he took a seat amid the mass of pulse generating equipment and electroencephalograph recorders. A single pair of feedback terminals were fitted to his skull. The generator was set to duplicate his own feedback impulse taken from a moment of failure. Paul switched on the circuits and advanced the controls carefully. A look of pain and regret crossed Holt's face. He cried out with a whimper. "Turn it off!" "A second more -- Paul said. He advanced the control a hair and waited. The technologist began to cry suddenly in a low, sobbing voice. Paul cut the switch. For a moment Holt continued to slump in the chair, his shoulders jerking. Then he looked up, halfbewildered, half-furious. "What did you do to me?" he demanded. "You did it to yourself," Paul reminded him. "That's your own feedback puke just beefed up a little, remember. How did it feel?" "Terrible! No wonder a guy dodges that. It's enough to make him wreck a space station to avoid the full blast of it." "What would you call it?" "I don't know -- ," Holt hesitated. "Grief, maybe. Regret -- anxiety. But regret, mostly, I guess." "That's your feedback," Paul said as he removed the terminals and turned to the others. "These feedback pulses we've isolated are nothing but stabs of pure emotion." He turned with a faint smile to Holt. "You and Harper and the rest of the iron-bowelled boys were so convinced that the pure mechanical man would be utterly devoid of all emotional responses and content! And I was so sure that a warm, responsive, emotional human being could never respond like a cold machine! "And we were both utterly wrong. The human being does both. He operates on true cybernetic principles. But the content of his feedback control pulses is sheer emotion ! "A small error, a stab of regret. It's repeated, magnified, or diminished until the action gets back on the track that brings predicted results. Ignored, the error builds up until the whole structure goes smash. "And we're taught to ignore it! It's the noble, brave and manly thing to ignore the human feelings that surge through us. Be steel, be glass, be electrons -- anything but a responsive, emotional human being! That's the way to be a super-man! We've tried to find the way to perfection and have fought tooth and nail against the only means of achieving it." Barker's face was glowing with excitement and Holt seemed to be remembering something afar off. "That was it," he breathed softly. "I can feel it now -- the way it was as I began to get jittery and make mistakes in the test procedures. I seemed to fight something within myself -- something I thought was making me do it wrong. But it wasn't that, at all. I was fighting against the emotional feedback the errors were throwing at me." "Right," said Paul. "And your iron-hard, errorless Superman is going to be the most emotionally sensitive creature you can produce." "How did you catch on to this?" Barker asked. "We should have seen it in Harper. He's the original iron-man. He's bottled up and fought his emotions all his life. A concentrated dose of his own feedback simply shattered the dam. "But I didn't get it until I watched Morgan's mob reacting to the purely rational explanation Metcalf prepared to convince them they should go home. They were on a wrong tack and needed a generous amount of the right feedback to get them back where they belonged. The cold, logical approach was a dud. What does it take to move an intractible mob? Emotion -- based on the projected consequences of what they're doing. A perfect feedback setup when correctly applied. And it worked." Holt shuddered faintly and moved away from the chair he had sat in to experience his own feedback. "I'm not quite sure who owes who that dinner," he said to Paul. "But I think somebody does." "We'll split it," Paul said. And then he was silent as they listened to the departure of another cargo ship carrying parts of the second Wheel to the thousand-mile orbit. He smiled to himself. Ye of little faith! -- he thought. Frightened about the true nature of a race that years of the kind of torment that Man had survived! Man had everything that was needed to go to the stars or anywhere else he might want to go. He was safe. Man could never be turned into a robot. The basic mechanisms of his humanity were so interwoven with the structure of his being that they could never be separated. But they hadn't come very far, Paul knew. They had opened only a small crack in a door that had been irrationally closed from the beginning of time. They had to know fully why that door had never been opened before. And beyond it might lie a thousand others just as tightly closed and closely guarded. Yet they had reached a starting point, at last. Project Superman could get about its business of preparing men for the stars.    A free sample copy of the current issue of the science fiction newspaper will be sent to any reader of P.O. Box #, Paterson #, N.J. pxpruttotur V circumstances of the execution promise a turnaway crowd of more than # spectators by Court time. All unreserved tent space has been sold out for several days. Next news at... Sir Jacques de Carougne, Lord High Executioner for the Seventh Judicial District, spun the dial on the instrument panel of his single-seater rocket, but the vidcasts were over for another hour. He cursed, without too much vigor, and wished he had troubled to look at a vidcast or faxpaper during his vacation. But then heshrugged his massive shoulders. What did it matter? After a thousand executions, everything was instinct and reflex. Some died hard ; some died easy. Some fell to their knees, too paralyzed with fear to fire their own shots. Others fought daringly, even with a degree of skill, but always the end was the same : A broken body bleeding and twitching in the dust; the blood-happy spectators shrieking in the ecstacy of release from the humdrum of their pushbutton lives; the flowers, the scented kerchiefs and the shreds of torn garments showered on him by screaming women, who always seemed to find him more satisfactory in the arena than in his tent. As the skyline of New Chicago shimmered into view, Jacques flipped on the 'copter mechanism. His air speed braked, and the needle-nosed little craft drifted lazily down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then veered westward over the tinted glass rooftops of the spotless city. Jacques stared glumly down at the city that had been so much a part of his life, from the long-ago years of his training and youth to the professional years of his most famous executions. Farther to the west, out beyond the eternally green landscaping and the precise, functional homes of the residential suburbs, Jacques saw the crude stone parapets of the Chauvency judicial arena, surrounded by acre after acre of colorful tents and pavilions. His powerful, jutting nose wrinkled with disgust, but his eyes widened at the number of tents. There must indeed be something unusual about today's execution. He hadn't worked before that big a crowd for years. The Federal Bureau of Internal Tranquility should be happy about this one! Jacques sighed, still struggling against the despondency that had been within him since the vacation interlude with the brunette government worker in Curasao had ended as unsatisfactorily as all the rest. Someday it would be his body bleeding in the dust, smashed at last by the soft-nosed bullets from Le Pistolet du Mort. Then the flowers and adulation would go to the condemned man, and the Bureau would add his name to the plaque at the base of the towering statue on the Washington Mall. So be it. He had played a long roll of the dice, and the stakes had been high. But if only once, just once before it ended... The bell on his instrument panel told him that the servo-pilot in the tower below had taken over for the landing. He sniffed with disgust again, but this time the disgust was for himself. God, but he was in a foul humor today! He released the controls and stared at his strong hands, grimly admiring them. There was still speed as well as strength in these fingers. His lips twisted into a thin smile, cold and confident. Whoever he was to meet at joute a l'outrance, let him try to match twenty years of training and skill! His rocket cradled with scarcely a jar into the small landing space at the north end of the arena, between the two replicas of #th century towers, reproduced so faithfully by #nd century technicians. Jacques squeezed his huge frame through the door of the small craft and looked dourly around. A squire, in scarlet leggings and tunic, his long black wig slightly askew, came running toward him and knelt three paces away, as prescribed by the Judicial Code of Heraldry. "Oh, sire!" he panted, "Thanks be that ye have arrived! The hour is well past noonday, and we had begun to fear..." "Time enough," Jacques growled. He gestured impatiently, and the squire clambered to his feet, bowing again. "This way, your Lordship!" The squire led him to the lower room in the north tower. It was the usual room of monastic simplicity -- whitewashed stone walls, a single window, two wooden benches and a low couch on which his garments for the occasion had been carefully arrayed. After the execution, he would be moved to his black silk tent in the center of the camping grounds. While the squire fluttered around him, eager to be of help, Jacques removed his short-sleeved dacron shirt, kicked off his sandals and stepped out of the comfortable shorts he always wore for traveling. The squire gaped with awe at the sight of his muscular body. "M'Lord, truly thou art a powerful man!" Jacques looked down at him with mixed contempt and amusement. The squire was a thin, pale little man, with the pinched look of nearsightedness about his eyes. His wig and tunic were much too big for him. "What do you do, Squire?" Jacques inquired, not unkindly. The man looked hurt, as if the question reflected somehow on his ability to serve as a squire to the Lord High Executioner. "Computer development," he muttered. "Resonating pentode circuits." Then he drew himself up defensively, with not a little pride. "But I placed at the top of the list in the Bureau's test for squires!" "That's fine," Jacques commented drily. "Now hurry, let's see what you learned..." "Dress him handsomely, Squire!" boomed a taunting voice from the doorway. "Our Lord High Executioner faces a rare challenge this day!" Jacques recognized the voice of Guy de Archambault, the Court Bailiff, whose bilious nose he intended to grind into the dust one of these fine days. But his anger at the Bailiff's intrusion was overbalanced by curiosity. "What's all the excitement about?" he demanded. "Who's on the docket, anyway?" The Bailiff grinned mockingly. "Forsooth, M'Lord, restrain thy impatience! In the Court's good time wilt ye learn..." "Oh, knock off that drivel, will you! Court's not in session yet..." The Bailiffs huge belly shook with laughter. "Have it your own way, Jacques, m'boy! But in any vernacular the meaning's the same -- you're in for quite a surprise, if rumor has it right!" "Out with it, then! I can see you've been waiting to tell me." The grin broadened on the Bailiffs puffy lips. "You can bet your last sou on that! It would have broken my heart not to be the first to tell you..." Jacques took a threatening step toward him. "I'll break more than your heart if you don't answer my question # ) "Patience, pa -- Oh, all right!" the Bailiff hastily interrupted himself as Jacques took another step in his direction. "You've got a woman to shoot down this time -- and that's just half the story!" Jacques' craggy features hardened into immobility. "What's the rest of it, fool?" "There's gossip going around that she's a page out of your past -- maybe several pages, or even a whole chapter!" Jacques leaped the rest of the distance to the door and grabbed the Bailiff by his lace collar, twisting it until his round, fat cheeks swelled and reddened. "Who is it?" "L-Lady Ann -- of -- Coberly!" Jacques thumped his head against the side of the doorway. "I told you to knock off that drivel." "But -- but that's all I know -- I swear it! I just got here this morning, too, and took a quick peek at the calendar when I heard all the rumors out among the tents...!" Jacques shoved him out into the hallway, and stalked back into the room. The Bailiff straightened his collar, but made no move to leave. "M'Lord," he jibed, breathing heavily, "there's also a rumor that you have no stomach for executing any woman. Can that be true?" Jacques only scowled in reply, but he knew that this rumor, at least, was true. The last woman had been back in the Fifth Judicial District. A flint-faced murderess with the shoulders of a man. But the horror of firing the coup du mort into her naked, contorted body still came back to haunt his dreams. For weeks afterwards he hadn't been able to touch the women who came so eagerly to his tent during the wild execution night Festivals. The Bailiff's coarse voice continued to prod at him: "I'm sure you'll remember this one, once you see her! I've just come from watching her being dressed for Court!" The Bailiff's bloodshot right eye winked suggestively. "My duty, y'know, to protect their Judicial Highnesses by checking for concealed weapons." "Get out of here!" The Bailiff fell back a step, but continued talking. "I'd say she's your type all right -- full of fire! Too bad you have to kill her instead of..." Jacques ripped the white tunic from his squire's trembling hands and hurled it into the Bailiff's face. Guy de Archambault waddled back out of danger, then finding that he was not followed, poked his head around the edge of the door. "Prithee, Sir Jacques, have ye any message for their Judicial Highnesses?" "Yes, damn you! Tell them to get someone else for this infernal execution -- and be quick about it!" With a gleeful chuckle, the Bailiff disappeared again. The little squire picked up the white tunic and brushed it off dejectedly. If he missed this opportunity to serve as squire to the Lord High Executioner, his name would rotate to the bottom of the list and he might not have a chance to serve again before it was time to make up new lists. Jacques strode to the window. Lady Ann of Coberly. The name could mean anything or nothing, according to the whimsy of the lower courts. Lady Ann... Ann! But it couldn't be her -- Or could it? Jacques looked far down the years to a youngster just out of training, eager to prove himself in the execution arena. There had been an Ann then, and she had left one morning taking a young man's heart with her, leaving behind only the unfathomable look of reproach and disappointment that he had come since to know so well. But it couldn't be that Ann! He tried to create the image of her face, but saw only the acres of spectator tents, their bright pennants snapping in the wind, and the open squares teeming with spectacular costumes copied from medieval history books by an atomic age which found in the pageantry of execution-day its one escape from safe, sanitized, prescribed living. The Arthurian song of a strolling minstrel drifted up to him... "To the fairest of all maidens, To Argante, the Queen, most beauteous elf, She will make my wounds all sound, And with a healing draught make me full well..." Jacques clenched his great fists. No, he wouldn't do it. Seniority entitled him to some consideration. If necessary, he'd put a call through to the Bureau. They'd understand. His record was good. He'd always performed faithfully, meeting death every session, dealing it out to young and old alike. But not to a woman; certainly not to a woman who might have meant a great deal to him! During the long spartan years of his training, the isolated years of monastic living at a time when youth burned strongest in him, the image of woman had become a haunting dream, unreal as the moonlight streaming through his curtainless window, untouchable as the mist of a summer morning. A sense of that image and unreality still persisted, even after all the women who had come to that undefinable look of unhappiness deep in their eyes. Since that woman back in the Fifth District, he'd been lucky with his executions. Not too many women drew the death penalty, and the few times women had been on his docket he had learned of it sufficiently in advance to pretend illness or make up some plausible excuse for emergency leave. But today had taken him totally by surprise. The squire shuffled up behind him, and begged, "Please, your Lordship, shall we not don these garments now?" Jacques shook his head so impatiently that the squire scurried back in fright. And then the Bailiff's voice intoned sonorously from the doorway: "His Highness, Chief Justice of the Seventh Judicial District!" Jacques turned in time to see the Bailiff bow low. The Chief Justice entered with a swish of ceremonial robes. He was followed by a tall, thin man, dressed in knightly costume. The Bailiff made a second bow, and spoke again: "His Excellency, Sir Mallory, representing the Federal Bureau of Internal Tranquility!" Jacques felt suddenly relieved. It was good to have someone from his own Bureau here. These judges were too cold, too impersonal. The Chief Justice was carrying his wig, which was not yet fully powdered. His heavy jowls quivered with indignation. "What's this nonsense, Sir Jacques?" he demanded imperiously. "Court is ready to convene -- We have no time to get another executioner!" "I'm sorry, your Highness, but I must ask your indulgence this one time." "Impossible!" Sir Mallory stepped forward and smiled in a conciliatory manner. "Perhaps Sir Jacques does not understand all the circumstances," he said soothingly. "You see, Sir Jacques, this execution is very imbeen a first-rate execution in nearly three years, and this is the only release we've had to offer the public in all that time. Of course, the Court still must decide in its own wisdom whether there are any grounds for setting aside the verdict, but we would not want any of our Bureau personnel to be responsible for disappointing the public." "I've always done my duty," Jacques protested. "But this one time -- " splendid record," Sir Mallory interrupted, striking a hearty note of sincerity. "Your services have been deeply appreciated in these difficult times. Yet, we must always take the long view! Particularly 'this one time', as you say. Technology has rushed us into a world without need for strife or conflict, but man has not yet matured enough for such a world -- and he needs release to prevent dangerous explosions. Believe me, Sir Jacques, it would not be wise to postpone today's execution!" The Chief Justice cleared his throat angrily. "And it's not wise to stand here talking while my court is waiting to convene," he snapped "Sir Mallory, can't you remind this man of his oath, his duty, and be done with it?" Jacques felt his own anger rising. "I know my oath," he growled, "but -- " "Of course, of course, "murshares your feelings. We also deplore -- naturally -- the idle gossip that is circulating to build such interest in this execution. But circumstances are beyond our control, Sir Jacques. As public servants, we must serve..." The Chief Justice shook his wig in Jacques' face. "Your answer, man! "he demanded. "Are you or are you not going to perform your duty?" Sir Mallory stepped back, spreading out his hands as if to show Jacques there was nothing more he could do about it. Jacques stood tautly erect, impassive, while his mind reeled on a hairline balance between defiance and submission. He knew that more than this one issue would be decided by his next words. His entire professional life was involved, everything he had trained and fought for since he had been selected for the service at the age of thirteen. A wrong word, and he could be dismissed by the Bureau. The rest of his years would be spent in a cubicle in some atom-powered plant, where he'd have his own button to push for two hours every day. The monotony would be intolerable after the way he had lived ! But to send his bullets smashing into the body of a woman who might be Ann... Sweat trickled down the chiseled furrows of his cheeks. Beside him, the little squire was a study in still life, poised with one foot forward, the white tunic still draped on his outstretched arm. "Sir Jacques, we are waiting for your reply," prompted the cold voice of the Chief Justice. A turbulent voice within Jacques urged him to turn his back on all of them, but prudence counseled that he play for time. From Sir Mallory's oily manner, he could very well have made up and circulated the gossip about his supposed past relationship with this condemned woman. It might be wise to wait a bit before making a decision that could be so final. Jacques bowed, and said hoarsely"I await the orders of the Court, Your Highness." If the Chief Justice noted that Jacques said "await" instead of the more correct "will obey", he gave no sign of it. "Very well," he said. "Court will convene in five minutes." He turned so abruptly that he almost bumped into the Bailiff, who was making a poor effort to cover his disappointment. Sir Mallory smiled at Jacques, and said warmly: When they had left the room, the still frightened squire stuttered : "S-shall we d-dress, Sire?" Jacques walked without answering to the couch and sat down on the edge of it. "Get a move on!" he ordered. His feelings were in turmoil: He was desperately eager to see this Lady Ann, yet he dreaded the moment. If this was the Ann... Fingers trembling, the squire anointed each muscular shoulder with three drops of perfumed oil, after which he drew over Jacques' head and upper body the white tunic -- white to symbolize the purity of motive in entering the execution arena. Next came the black breeches and hose -- black for the eternal remembrance of death. Over the tunic came the flaming red jupon, blazoned on the sleeves with gules and on the back with a lion rampant argent. On his left shoulder, the squire fixed a lace of white silk, representing a deed not yet accomplished. Following the execution, a woman who had won the honor in her plant lottery would cut it off. After lacing on Jacques' boots, the squire stepped back, snatching an instant to admire his handiwork. "Well done, Squire," said Jacques. "Now, let's be off!" The squire flushed and beamed in gratitude. He picked up the silver case containing the two Pistolet du Mort, one for Jacques, one for the condemned person. Court was on a portable platform in the center of the Judicial Arena. As soon as the execution was confirmed, it would be wheeled out of the way. When Jacques stepped from the tunnel and strode toward the platform, an abrupt hush choked off the babbling and laughter in the stands. Most of the hundred thousand capacity crowd was already seated. Behind Jacques, the squire straightened his narrow shoulders with pride. This was the highpoint in a life spent among the tapes, circuits and feedback problems of computer research. Jacques mounted the platform, bowed to the crowd and took his seat in the black-draped, carved oak chair to the left of the Bailiff. His squire stood proudly behind him. The Bailiff murmured: "An imposing entrance for one who had only five minutes to dress! Your fair victim isn't here yet." Jacques stonily ignored him. An explosive cry from the stands brought the Bailiff to his feet. "Here she comes!" he announced with a grin of anticipation. "Take a good look, Sir Jacques -- it's worth while!" Though it was the hardest thing he had ever done, Jacques refrained from looking until the woman and her two jailers had nearly reached the platform steps. And then he looked straight at her, and the shock of it was a physical blow. This was Ann, all right. Even after all the years there was no doubt about it. She was as tall as he remembered her, and there was the same softness and warmth in the curve of her sun-brown shoulders. He suddenly felt the old ache for her. She held a velvet robe around her shoulders, but she held it loosely, disdainfully. Under it, she was already dressed in the translucent death gown. Her thick, blond hair, much longer than the fashion of the day, fell nearly to her shoulders. On her feet were the silver sandals she would later remove, along with the velvet robe, just before stepping up on the pedestal in the execution circle. The two jailers, each in skull cap and long black sleeveless robe, led her to the prisoner's bench below the dais where the judges would sit. The sight of her was a torment to Jacques, the ripping open of an old scar. He knew that in a moment their eyes would meet, but there was not enough strength in the corded muscles of his neck to turn his face away. Time had been kind to her, Jacques thought in one comer of his numbed brain. There were signs of its passing, around her mouth and her eyes, but it had given her what youth could not. There was a knowing in the curve of her lips, and he wondered what her eyes would tell him now. But she glanced first, with some amusement, at the two jailers, who held their crooked staffs at the alert position. Next, her eyes contemptuously swept the semi-circle of empty judicial chairs. They passed by the Bailiff so quickly that he looked cheated, and then they stopped full on Jacques. He read in their calm appraisal the knowledge that she had expected him to be here, and that she was not surprised at what the years had done to him. Perhaps she had seen his pictures in the faxpapers, or even watched some of his executions. But he wanted to know more than this, and he tried to look deeper into the light and shadows of her eyes. It was still there, he discovered, feeling a selfish sense of pleasure that she had not found what he hadn't been able to give her. The endless seeking, the search for something never put into words, the want unfulfilled -- all this was still there. He knew that she was reading him in the same way, but he could not tell what she found. Finally, it was she who looked away first, not in retreat, rather to appraise him thoughtfully. He felt her eyes on the knotted muscles of his cheeks, on his arms, on the whitened knuckles of his scarred hands, on his boots, now grey with dust from the walk across the arena. When her eyes came back to his, her unpainted lips parted in a faint smile. She knows, thought Jacques. She knows I don't want to kill her! And then the torment in him became unbearable. What irony that out of all the years of their lives they should come back together at this moment. An impulse tugged at him to snatch his pistols from the squire's silver box and try to take her from the arena, daring any to stop them. Then he realized that the Bailiff was standing again, that the hundred thousand spectators were surging to their feet. Trumpet fanfare blasted from the main tunnel, signalling the arrival of the judges. Instinct brought Jacques to his feet. Ann remained seated, and rose only after the jailers nudged her with their curved staffs. "Oyez, oyez, oyez!" cried the Bailiff into a microphone concealed in a carved boar's head. " 'Tis now two of the clock at aftir noone, and yon heralds bearing trumpets of devise give in knowledge unto all gentilmen, ladyes and gentilwoomen the cooming of this high and most honourable court! Remain at standing until said court is seated!" The Chief Justice, regally stern, led the procession of judges, clerks and pages across the arena. They mounted the platform, stepping in cadence. When the robed and bewigged judges were all seated, the Bailiff raised his staff and the crowd settled down with a buzz of anticipation. High atop one of the north towers, hidden cameras picked up the scene and vidcast it around the earth, and to the satellites and lonely planet outposts. One of the clerks picked up five rolls of parchment, untied the scarlet ribbon on each, and passed them around to the judges. The Chief Justice went through the pretext of scanning his, then nodded to the Bailiff to present the prisoner. With a sly wink at Jacques, the Bailiff took Ann firmly by the arm and guided her three steps forward. The Chief Justice coughed the nervousness from his throat, and asked : "Is this the Lady Ann of Coberly?" Before the Bailiff could make the correct response, Ann gave her own impatient answer. "I am Badge No. #, Transistor Division, Coberly precision Products, Ltd." The Chief Justice frowned at this breach of court etiquette. "Have ye not been properly instructed?" Ann shrugged, and the loose robe slipped lower on her shoulders. "I suppose so, but is it necessary to waste all this time? You've got the record in front of you!" The judges exchanged significant glances, and a delicious shudder swept through the stands. Jacques felt time running out on him. At best the chances of a reprieve for any prisoner were small, and in face of Ann's attitude... The Chief Justice's expression congealed into judicial impassiveness. "Ye are charged with taking the life of a man," he began solemnly. "That's not true!" Ann interrupted. Her unexpected words brought a startled gasp from the spectators. The judges leaned forward alertly. "According to the evidence..." the Chief Justice began again. "He wasn't a man!" Ann cried scornfully. Her glance flickered across at Jacques. "There are no more men." Ponderously, like a slow moving river that would not be diverted from its course, the Chief Justice returned to the facts of the case: "Ye speak in riddles, Lady Ann! The evidence makes it full clear that the victim was a man..." "Evidence!" Ann gestured toward the breathless stands. "There is your evidence! Ask those women what they are doing here! Ask them what their great, great grandmothers were doing at the ancient wrestling matches!! Ask them if they have ever known a real man -- or ask your own wives!" The Chief Justice's impassiveness was shattered. His cheeks puffed out indignantly. A strange, tense silence gripped the women in the stands; the men drew back their padded shoulders, and shouted in reproof : "Shame! For shame. Lady Ann!" "Why don't you ask them?" Ann persisted. Yes, ask them, Jacques thought, with a sudden, overpowering anger of his own. Ask them! Maybe their answers would tell why he, too, of all men, should have failed so many of them. "Hold thy insolent tongue, woman!" roared the Chief Justice. "There remains before this Court only one issue -- Did ye or did ye not strike a man to his death in the full view of scores of gentilmen and gentilwoomen of Coberly?" Ann shook her long hair in defiance. "It wasn't a man I struck with heraldic mockery can't make him a man! I struck a bloodless slide-rule, a cold filing cabinet full of equations, a set of dull geometric patterns, an automaton that tried to treat a woman like a punched holrith card! He was no more a man than this..." She brought her elbow up so sharply that the paunchy Bailiff was toppled off balance and nearly fell. He looked frightened. demanded the Chief Justice. "I'm proud of it!" "And ye claim no special circumstances?" "How would you understand them?" The crowd exploded into a frantic, unintelligible babble, and the Chief Justice slammed down his gavel. He turned to his fellow judges. Two were staring at the prisoner with an indignation that exceeded his own. The other two, both very old men, sat with heads bowed and hands fumbling with their robes. Jacques felt his pulse leap with a hope that had seemed impossible. Could it be that after all...? Ann turned toward him, faltering for the first time, and they stared into each other's eyes. At a curt nod from the Chief Justice, the Bailiff, still trembling, began to poll the Court. The first two judges angrily raised their hands to signify that they were voting to uphold the death sentence of the lower court. The third judge hesitated, then held out both hands, palms down. This brought an outburst of applause from the stands. The first palms-down vote always evoked such a demonstration, for a onesided execution was a comparatively dull affair. But the applause was choked off as the fourth judge slowly extended both hands, palms down. A scattering of boos and catcalls started. An ugly undercurrent rippled close to the surface. Was this woman going to win a reversal, in spite of all her insolence? If she did, the whole holiday would be spoiled, since there were no other executions on the docket. Better to have stayed home and watched films of nightly vidcast! Jacques looked away from Ann to watch the Chief Justice. The lines in Jacques' face were like gouges in a metal casting. Acutely aware of his role, the Chief Justice stood up and drew his robe about him with great dignity, taking care to face toward the TV cameras on the north tower. And as the Bailiff called for his deciding vote, the Chief Justice solemnly raised his right hand. Three to two for death! A hundred thousand spectators leaped to their feet, hysterically waving their arms. Three shots for the Lord High Executioner! Two for Lady Ann ! What a day this was going to be after all! Here was a truly great joute a l'outrance! Ann swayed a little, then smiled. Jacques closed his eyes. Ritual and habit took over where Jacques' will could not function. His squire stepped forward, opened the silver box and offered the Pistolets du Mort to the Bailiff. The weapons sparkled in the sunlight. They were a modern adaptation of an ancient design, and had become official death weapons after earlier experiments had convinced the FBlT that few #nd century men were strong enough to handle the swords and lances of chivalry. The Bailiff loaded one gun with two shells, the other with three. Then he replaced both in the silver box, closed the lid and put the box on the bench in front of the Chief Justice. Already the judicial platform was wheeled to one side of the arena; the twin pedestals were being rolled to position in the execution circle. They were thirty inches high, and were positioned precisely sixty feet apart, each on a line with the open ends of the stands so that wild shots would not strike a spectator. Next came the Ceremony of Confrontation, intended to symbolize that the Lord High Executioner was acting only under the compulsion of duty, without malice or any base motive. Moving mechanically, Jacques stepped toward Ann. The jailers crossed their staffs two paces in front of her. It was the closest Jacques would be permitted to approach until the Ceremony of the Spirit, when he would kneel beside her shattered body in the dust of the arena. He also was supposed to kneel now, and silently speak a prayer for both their souls. He knelt, but could not bow his head. Ann looked down at him, and the faint, unfathomable smile returned to her lips. "It's all right," she said softly. "You don't have to speak to me with words." The natural, warm scent of her body came through the fragrance of the oils with which she had been anointed in her death cell. It was a remembered scent that once again drove Jacques to the brink of madness. Her voice, husky and steadying, came down to him: "For two like us there is no other way, Jacques. Don't fail me again." He rose stiffly, backing away, staring into the mystery of the lights and shadows in her wide eyes, groping for the meaning of her words. A friar moved up to take his place, and the jailers dropped their staffs. But Ann dismissed the friar with a quick shake of her head. The Code now called for Jacques to leave the platform and walk with measured steps around the arena before mounting his pedestal in the execution circle. A signal from the trumpets started him on his way before he was aware of what he was doing. The habits of a thousand executions demanded obedience. Women in the front rows leaned far over the railing. Some reached their hands down to him, offering flowers and kerchiefs, hoarsely begging him to wear their favors during the execution. Others sat still, transfixed, lips parted and moist. The men beside them shrank back in their seats, looking at him as a sparrow would look at a coiled snake. Vendors of ribbands and souvenirs, cakes and drink, stood silent as he passed before them. The flutes, citterns and cymbals, the melodic voices of the minstrels, picked up the brooding death chanson : "Farewell my friends, the tyde abideth no man, I am departed from hence, and so shall ye; But in this passage the best songe that I can Is requiem eternam... The walk around the arena was an eternity, and then it was over and done with, and he had mounted his pedestal. A low crescendo, like the roll of faraway surf, swept across the stands. Ann was at the edge of the platform. She stepped out of her slippers, unfastened the velvet robe, handed it to one of the jailers. The crescendo grew, matching the surge of blood in Jacques' temples. A breeze swept the translucent death gown tight against her bare body, and she walked steadily down the steps, across the arena. Her feet stirred little puffs of grey dust that twisted and whirled away. The friar followed a few paces behind. At the pedestal, he offered her his hand. She refused it, stepped up without assistance. Bowing his head, the friar walked back to the judge's platform. Jacques' squire and a page boy appeared almost immediately. They walked part way across the arena together. Each bore one of the pistols on a black satin pillow. At the edge of the execution circle, their paths forked toward each of the pedestals. The trembling page offered Ann her pistol first. "Do ye remember your instructions?" he asked in a quavering voice that was picked up for the vidcast by the microphone hung under his frock. "Yes, thank you." Ann held the pistol loosely at her side, and looked toward Jacques, across the abyss of sixty feet. With frozen fingers, Jacques accepted the other pistol from his squire, and knew that he was out beyond the point of no returning. But he did not, could not, know what he would do once the signal for the execution was given. "Do not fail me again," Ann had pleaded. But what had she meant? Even at this final moment her smile was as enigmatic as ever. The page and the squire retreated to their stations at the side of the arena, this time moving hastily. The Bailiff raised his black staff and pennant, held it poised until the Chief Justice nodded, then lowered it with a flourish. A trumpet sounded one high, clear note. The signal had been given. Jacques remained motionless, waiting for a sign from Ann. But she, too, waited, her chin slightly lifted. What was she waiting for? What did she expect from him? In the stands, the breathing of a hundred thousand people was a rasping sound. And then Ann moved, so quickly that the surprise was complete. Her pistol flashed up, fired while still in its arc. The bullet blasted the air beside Jacques' ear, so close that for a fraction of a second he thought he had been hit. Ann's voice drifted across to him, across the stunned silence, and it contained both a taunt and a plea : "I won't miss next time, Jacques!" And he knew she would not. He had seen too many guns fired not to recognize technique. If she had learned to shoot that well, there was no doubt she could have hit him the first time. Jacques still couldn't fathom her motive, but there was no longer any chance to consider it. His conscious mind wanted to let her fire again, to put an end to this terrible dream. But the instinct of self-preservation was too strong; had been taught too well. Numbness went out of him, and he watched her eyes for the telltale (Continued on page #) It was a race between the tortoise and the hare. But this hare was using some dirty tricks to make sure the ending would be different... Illustrated by Ed Emsh friendly enemies, sitting across the table from each other for their last meal before blastoff. Outside the ports, the sky was nothing but light-streaked blackness, punctured periodically by Earth glare, for Space Station # whirled swiftly on its axis, creating an artificial gravity. "Jonner, I figured you the last man ever to desert the rockets for a hot-rod tow-job," chided Russo Baat, captain of the Mars Corporation's gleaming new freighter. Mar sward XV #. Baat was fat and red-faced, and one of the shrewdest space captains in the business. Jonner Jons, at the other end of the table, inclined his grizzled head and smiled. "Times change, Russo," he answered quietly. "Even the Mars Corporation can't stop that." "Is it true that you're pulling five thousand tons of cargo, Captain?" asked one of the crewmen of the Marsward XVlll. "Something like that," agreed Jonner, and his smile broadened. "And I have only about twice the fuel supply you carry for a #ton payload." The communicator above them squawked and blared: "Captain Jons and Captain Baat of Martian competition run, please report to control for final briefing." "I knew it!" grumbled Baat, getting heavily and reluctantly to his feet. "I haven't gotten to finish a meal on this blasted merry-goround yet." In the space station's control section, Commander Ortega of the Space Control Commission, an ascetic officer in plain blues, looked them up and down severely. "As you know, gentlemen," he said, "blastoff time is #. Tonnage of cargo, fuel and empty vessels cannot be a factor, under the law. The Mars Corporation will retain its exclusive franchise to the Earth-Mars run, unless the ship sponsored by the Atom-Star Company returns to Earth with full cargo at least twenty hours ahead of the ship sponsored by the Mars Corporation. Cargo must be unloaded at Mars and new cargo taken on. I do not consider the twenty-hour bias in favor of the Mars Corporation a fair one," said Ortega severely, turning his gaze to Baat, "but the Space Control Commission does not make the laws. It enforces them. Docking and loading facilities will be available to both of you on an equal basis at Phobos and Marsport. Good luck." He shook hands with both of them. "Saturn, I'm glad to get out of there!" exclaimed Baat, mopping his brow as they left the control section. "Every time I take a step. I feel like I'm falling on my face." "It's because the control section's so close to the center," replied Jonner. "The station's spinning to maintain artificial gravity, and your feet are away from the center. As long as you're standing upright, the pull is straight up and down to you, but actually your feet are moving faster than your head, in a larger orbit. When you try to move, as in normal gravity, your body swings out of that line of pull and you nearly fall. The best corrective, I've found, is to lean backward slightly when you start to walk." As the two space captains walked back toward the wardroom together, Baat said: "Jonner, I hear the Mars Corporation offered you the Marsward turned them down. Why? You piloted the Marsward V and the Wayward Lady for Marscorp when those upstarts in the Argentine were trying to crack the EarthMars run. This Atom-Star couldn't have enough money to buy you away from Marscorp." "No, Marscorp offered me more," said Jonner, soberly now. "But this atomic drive is the future of space travel, Russo. Marscorp has it, but they're sitting on it because they've got their fingers in hydrazine interests here, and the atom drive will make hydrazine useless for space fuel. Unless I can break the franchise for Atom-Star, it may be a hundred years before we switch to the atom drive in space." "What the hell difference does that make to you?" asked Baat bluntly. "Hydrazine's expensive," replied Jonner. "Reaction mass isn't, and you use less of it. I was bom on Mars, Russo. Mars is my home, and I want to see my people get the supplies they need from Earth at a reasonable transport cost, not pay through the nose for every packet of vegetable seed." They reached the wardroom door. "Too bad I have to degrav my old chief," said Baat, chuckling. "But I'm a rocket man, myself, and I say to hell with your hot-rod atom drive. I'm sorry you got deflected into this run, Jonner; you'll never break Marscorp's orbit." The Mar sward XV #I was a huge vessel, the biggest the Mars Corporation ever had put into space. It was a collection of spheres and cylinders, joined together by a network of steel ties. Nearly # of its weight was fuel, for the oneway trip to Mars. Its competitor, the Radiant Hope, riding ten miles away in orbit around the Earth, was the strangest looking vessel ever to get clearance from a space station. It looked like a tug towing a barge. The tug was the atomic power plant. Two miles behind, attached by a thin cable, was the passenger compartment and cargo. On the control deck of the Radiant Hope, Jonner gripped a microphone and shouted profane instructions at the pilot of a squat ground-to-space rocket twenty miles away. T'an Li Cho, the ship's engineer, was peering out the port at the speck of light toward which Jonner was directing his wrath, while Qoqol, the Martian astrogator, worked at his charts on the other side of the deck. "I thought all cargo was aboard, Jonner," said T'an. "It is," said Jonner, laying the mike aside. "That G-boat isn't hauling cargo. It's going with us. I'm not taking any chances on Marscorp refusing to ferry our cargo back and forth at Mars." "Is plotted, Jonner," boomed Qoqol, turning his head to peer at them with huge eyes through the spidery tangle of his thin, doublejointed arms and legs. He reached an eight-foot arm across the deck and handed Jonner his figures. Jonner gave them to T'an. "Figure out power for that one, T'an," ordered Jonner, and took his seat in the cushioned control chair. T'an pulled a slide rule from his tunic pocket, but his black almond eyes rested quizzically on Jonner. "It's four hours before blastoff," he reminded. "I've cleared power for this with Space Control," replied Jonner. "That planet-loving G-boat jockey missed orbit. We'll have to swing out a little and go to him." On a conventional space craft, the order for acceleration would have sent the engineer to the engine deck to watch his gauges and report by intercom. But the Radiant Hope's "engine deck" was the atomic tug two miles ahead, which T'an, in heavy armor, would enter only in emergencies. He calculated for a moment, then called softly to Jonner: "Pile One, in ten." "In ten," confirmed Jonner, pulling a lever on the calibrated gauge of the radio control. "Pile Two, in fifteen." "In fifteen." "Check. I'll have the length of burst figured for you in a jiffy." A faint glow appeared around the atomic tug far ahead, and there was the faintest shiver in the ship. But after a moment, Qoqol said in a puzzled tone: "No Gs, Jonner. Engine not work?" "Sure, she's working," said Jonner with a grin. "You'll never get any more G than we've got now, Qoqol, all the way to Mars. Our maximum acceleration will be ##, "One three-thousandth?" exclaimed T'an, shaken out of his Oriental calm. "Jonner, the Marsward will blast away at one or two Gs. How do you expect to beat that at ##, #th?" "Because they have to cut off and coast most of the way in an elliptic orbit, like any other rocket," answered Jonner calmly. "We drive straight across the system, under power all the time. We accelerate half way, decelerate the other half." "But I #th!" "You'll be surprised at what constant power can do. I know Baat, and I know the trick he's going to use. It's obvious from the blastoff time they arranged. He's going to tack off the Moon and use his power right to cut # days off that regular #-day schedule. But this tug-boat will make it in # days!" They took aboard the #-ton landing boat. By the time they got it secured, the radio already was sounding warnings for blastoff. Zero hour arrived. Again Jonner pulled levers and again the faint glow appeared around the tail of their distant tug. Across space the flared into blinding flame. In a moment, it began to pull ahead visibly and soon was receding like a meteor. Near the Radiant Hope, the space station seemed not to have changed position at all. "The race is not always to the swift," remarked Jonner philosophically. "And we're the tortoise," said this jaunt, Jonner?" "Is should, Jonner," agreed Qoqol. "T'an know all about crazy new engine, I know all about crazy new orbit. Both not know all. You tell." "I planned to, anyway," said Jonner. "I had figured on having Serj in on it, but he wouldn't understand much of it anyhow. There's no use in waking him up." Serj was the ship's doctor-psychologist and fourth member of the crew. He was asleep below on the centerdeck. "For your information, Qoqol," said Jonner, " the atomic engine produces electrical energy, which accelerates reaction mass. Actually, it's a crude ion engine. T'an can explain the details to you later, but the important thing is that the fuel is cheap, the fuel-to-cargo ratio is low and constant acceleration is practical. "As for you, T'an, I was surprised at your not understanding why we'll use low acceleration. To boost the engine power and give us more Gs, we'd either have to carry more fuel or coast part of the way on momentum, like an ordinary rocket. This way's more efficient, and our #-day margin over the Marsward each way is more than enough for unloading and loading more cargo and fuel." "With those figures, I can't see how Marscorp expects to win this competition," said T'an. "We've got them, flat, on the basis of performance," agreed Jonner. "So we'll have to watch for tricks. I know Marscorp. That's why I arranged to take aboard that G-boat at the last minute. Marscorp controls all the G-boats at Marsport, and they're smart enough to keep us from using them, in spite of the Space Control Commission. As for refueling for the return trip, we can knock a chunk off of Phobos for reaction mass." The meteor alarm bells clanged suddenly, and the screen lit up once with a fast-moving red line that traced the path of the approaching object. "Miss us about half a mile," said Jonner after a glance at the screen. "Must be pretty big... and it's coming up!" He and T'an floated to one of the ports, and in a few moments saw the object speed by. "That's no meteor!" exclaimed Jonner with a puzzled frown. "That's man-made. But it's too small for a G-boat." The radio blared: "All craft in orbit near Space Station #! Warning! All craft near Space Station #! Experimental missile misfired from White Sands! Repeat: experimental missile misfired from White Sands! Coordinates..." "Fine time to tell us," remarked T'an drily. "Experimental missile, hell!" snorted Jonner, comprehension dawning. "Qoqol, what would have happened if we hadn't shifted orbit to take aboard that G-boat?" Qoqol calculated a moment. "Hit our engines," he announced. "Dead center." Jonner' s blue eyes clouded ominously. "Looks like they're playing for keeps this time, boys." T he brotherhood of spacemen is an exclusive club. Any captain, astrogator or engineer is likely to be well known to his colleagues, either personally or by reputation. The ship's doctor-psychologist is in a different category. Most of them sign on for a few runs for the adventure of it, as a means of getting back and forth between planets without paying the high cost of passage or to pick up even more money than they can get from lucrative planetbound practice. Jonner did not know Serj, the Radiant Hope's doctor. Neither T'an nor Qoqol ever had heard of him. But Serj appeared to know his business well enough, and was friendly enough. It was Serj's first trip and he was very interested in the way the ship operated. He nosed into every corner of it and asked a hundred questions a day. "You're as inquisitive as a cadet spaceman, Serj," Jonner told him on the twenty-fifth day out. Everybody knew everyone else well by then, which meant that Jonner and Qoqol, who had served together before, had become acquainted with T'an and Serj. "There's a lot to see and learn about space, Captain," said Serj. He was a young fellow, with fair hair and an easy grin. "Think I could go outside?" "If you keep a lifeline hooked on. The suits have magnetic shoes to hold you to the hull of the ship, but you can lose your footing." "Thanks," said Serj. He touched his hand to his forehead and left the control deck. Jonner, near the end of his eighthour duty shift, watched the dials. The red light showing the inner airlock door was open blinked on. It blinked off, then the outer airlock indicator went on, and off. A shadow fell across Jonner briefly. He glanced at the port and reached for the microphone. "Careful and don't step on any of the ports," he warned Serj. "The magnetic soles won't hold on them." "I'll be careful, sir," answered Serj. No one but a veteran spaceman would have noticed the faint quiver that ran through the ship, but Jonner felt it. Automatically, he swung his control chair and his eyes swept the bank of dials. At first he saw nothing. The outer lock light blinked on and off, then the inner lock indicator. That was Serj coming back inside. Then Jonner noted that the hand on one dial rested on zero. Above His eyes snapped to the radio controls. The atomic pile levers were still at their proper calibration. The dials above them said the engines were working properly. The atomic tug was still accelerating, but passengers and cargo were in free fall. Swearing Jonner jerked at the levers to pull out the piles aboard the tug. A blue flash flared across the control board, momentarily blinding him. Jonner recoiled, only his webbed safety belt preventing him from plummeting from the control chair. He swung back anxiously to the dials, brushing futilely at the spots that swam before his eyes. He breathed a sigh of relief. The radio controls had operated. The atomic engines had ceased firing. Tentatively, cautiously, he reversed the lever. There was no blue flash this time, but neither did the dials quiver. He swore. Something had burned out in the radio controls. He couldn't reverse the tug. He punched the general alarm button viciously, and the raucous clangor of the bell sounded through the confines of the ship. One by one, the other crew members popped up to the control deck from below. He turned the controls over to Qoqol. "Take readings on that damn tug," Jonner ordered. "I think our cable broke. T'an, let's go take a look." When they got outside, they found about a foot of the one-inch cable still attached to the ship. The rest of it, drawn away by the tug before Jonner could cut acceleration, was out of sight. "Can it be welded, T'an?" "It can, but it'll take a while," replied the engineer slowly. "First, we'll have to reverse that tug and get the other end of that break." "Damn, and the radio control's burned out. I tried to reverse it before I sounded the alarm. T'an, how fast can you get those controls repaired?" "Great space!" exclaimed T'an softly. "Without seeing it, I'd say at least two days, Jonner. Those controls are complicated as hell." They re-entered the ship. Qoqol was working at his diagrams, and Serj was looking over his shoulder. Jonner took a heat-gun quietly from the rack and pointed it at Serj. "You'll get below, mister," he commanded grimly. You'll be handcuffed to your bunk from here on out." "Sir?... I don't understand," stammered Serj. "Like hell you don't. You cut that cable," Jonner accused. Serj started to shrug, but he dropped his eyes. "They paid me," he said in a low tone. "They paid me a thousand solars." "What good would a thousand solars do you when you're dead, Serj... dead of suffocation and drifting forever in space?" Serj looked up in astonishment. "Why, you can still reach Earth by radio, easy," he said. "It wouldn't take long for a rescue ship to reach us." "Chemical rockets have their limitations, "said Jonner coldly. "And you don't realize what speed we've built up with steady acceleration. We'd head straight out of the system, and nothing could intercept us, if that tug had gotten too far before we noticed it was gone." He jabbed the white-faced doctor with the muzzle of the heatgun. "Get below," he ordered. "I'll turn you over to Space Control at Mars." When Serj had left the control deck, Jonner turned to the others. His face was grave. "That tug picked up speed before I could shut off the engines, after the cable was cut," he said. "It's moving away from us slowly, and at a tangent. And solar gravity's acting on both bodies now. By the time we get those controls repaired, the drift may be such that we'll waste weeks maneuvering the the tug back." "I could jet out to the tug in a spacesuit, before it gets too far away," said T'an thoughtfully. "But that wouldn't do any good. There's no way of controlling the engines, at the tug. It has to be done by radio." "If we get out of this, remind me to recommend that atomic ships always carry a spare cable," said Jonner gloomily. "If we had one, we could splice them and hold the ship to the tug until the controls are repaired." "Is cable in cargo strong enough, Jonner?" asked Qoqol. "That's right!" exclaimed Jonner, brightening. "Most of our cargo's cable! That #ton spool we're hauling back there is # miles of cable to lay a television network between the Martian cities." "Television cable?" repeated T'an doubtfully. "Will that be strong enough?" "It's bound in flonite, that new fluorine compound. It's strong enough to tow this whole cargo at a couple of Gs. There's nothing aboard this ship that would cut off a length of it -- a heat-gun at full power wouldn't even scorch it -- but we can unwind enough of it, and block the spool. It'll hold the ship to the tug until the controls can be repaired, then we can reverse the tug and weld the cable." "You mean the whole # miles of it's in one piece?" demanded T'an in astonishment. "That's not so much. The cablelaying steamer Dominia carried # miles in one piece to lay Atlantic cables in the early #th century." "But how'll we ever get # tons in one piece down to Mars?" asked T'an. "No G-boat can carry that load." Jonner chuckled. "Same way they got it up from Earth to the ship," he answered. "They attached one end of it to a G-boat and sent it up to orbit, then wound it up on a fast winch. Since the G-boat will be decelerating to Mars, the unwinding will have to be slowed or the cable would tangle itself all over Syrtis." "Sounds like it's made to order," said T'an, grinning. "I'll get into my spacesuit." "You'll get to work on the radio controls," contradicted Jonner, getting up. "That's something I can't do, and I can get into a spacesuit and haul a length of cable out to the tug. Qoqol can handle the winch." Company's representative at Mars City, and Kruger of the Space Control Commission were waiting when the Radiant Hope's G-boat dropped down from the Phobos station and came to rest in a wash of jets. They rode out to the G-boat together in a Commission groundcar. Jonner emerged from the Gboat, following the handcuffed Serj. "He's all yours," Jonner told Kruger, gesturing at Serj. "You have my radio reports on the cablecutting, and I'll make my log available to you." Kruger put his prisoner in the front seat of the groundcar beside him, and Jonner climbed in the back seat with Deveet. "I brought the crates of dies for the groundcar factory down this time," Jonner told Deveet. "We'll bring down all the loose cargo before shooting the television cable down. While they're unloading the G-boat, I wish you'd get the tanks refilled with hydrazine and nitric acid. I've got enough to get back up, but not enough for a round trip." "What do you plan to do?" asked Deveet. He was a darkskinned, long-faced man with a sardonic twist to his mouth. "I've got to sign on a new ship's doctor to replace Serj. When the Marsward comes in, Marscorp will have a dozen G-boats working round the clock to unload and reload her. With only one G-boat, we've got to make every hour count. We still have reaction mass to pick up on Phobos." "Right," agreed Deveet. "You can take the return cargo up in one load, though. It's just twenty tons of Martian relics for the Solar Museum. Mars-to-Earth cargos run light." At the. administration building, Jonner took his leave of Deveet and went up to the Space Control Commission's personnel office on the second floor. He was in luck. On the board as applying for a MarsEarth run as ship's doctor-psychologist was one name: Lana Elden. He looked up the name in the Mars City directory and dialed into the city from a nearby telephone booth. A woman's voice answered. "Is Lana Elden there?" asked Jonner. "I'm Lana Elden," she said. Jonner swore under his breath. A woman! But if she weren't qualified, her name would not have been on the Commission board. The verbal contract was made quickly, and Jonner cut the Commission monitor into the line to make it binding. That was done often when rival ships, even of the same line, were bidding for the services of crewmen. "Blastoff time is # tonight," he said, ending the interview. "Be here." Jonner left the personnel office and walked down the hall. At the elevator, Deveet and Kruger hurried out, almost colliding with him. "Jonner, we've run into trouble!" exclaimed Deveet. "Space Fuels won't sell us any hydrazine and nitric acid to refill the tanks. They say they have a new contract with Marscorp that takes all their supply." "Contract, hell!" snorted jonner. "Marscorp owns Space Fuels. What can be done about it, Kruger?" Kruger shook his head. "I'm all for you, but Space Control has no jurisdiction," he said. "If a private firm wants to restrict its sales to a franchised line, there's nothing we can do about it. If you had a franchise, we could force them to allot fuel on the basis of cargo handled, since Space Fuels has a monopoly here. But you don't have a franchise yet." Jonner scratched his grey head thoughtfully. It was a serious situation. The atom-powered Radiant Hope could no more make a planetary landing than the chemically-powered ships. Its power gave a low, sustained thrust that permitted it to accelerate constantly over long periods of time. To beat the powerful pull of planetary surface gravity, the terrific burst of quick energy from the streamlined G-boats, the planetary landing craft, was needed. "We can still handle it," Jonner said at last. "With only twenty tons return cargo, we can take it up this trip. Add some large parachutes to that, Deveet. We'll shoot the end of the cable down by signal rocket, out in the lowlands, and stop the winch when we've made contact, long enough to attach the rest of the cargo to the cable. Pull it down with the cable and, with Mars' low gravity, the parachutes will keep it from being damaged." But when Jonner got back to the landing field to check on unloading operations, his plan was smashed. As he approached the Gboat, a mechanic wearing an illconcealed smirk came up to him. "Captain, looks like you sprung a leak in your fuel line," he said. "All your hydrazine's leaked out in the sand." Jonner swung from the waist and knocked the man flat. Then he turned on his heel and went back to the administration building to pay the #-credit fine he would be assessed for assaulting a spaceport employe. The Space Control Commission's hearing room in Mars City was almost empty. The examiner sat on the bench, resting his chin on his hand as he listened to testimony. In the plaintiff's section sat Jonner, flanked by Deveet and Lana Elden. In the defense box were the Mars Corporation attorney and Captain Russo Baat of the Marsward XV #. Kruger, seated near the rear of the room, was the only spectator. The Mars Corporation attorney had succeeded in delaying the final hearing more than a #-day Martian month by legal maneuvers. had blasted down to Phobos, and G-boats had been shuttling back and forth unloading the vessel and reloading it for the return trip to Earth. When testimony had been completed, the examiner shuffled through his papers. He put on his spectacles and peered over them at the litigants. "It is the ruling of this court," he said formally, "that the plaintiffs have not presented sufficient evidence to prove tampering with the fuel line of the G-boat of the spaceship Radiant Hope. There is no evidence that it was cut or burned, but only that it was broken. The court must remind the plaintiffs that this could have been done accidentally, through inept handling of cargo. "Since the plaintiffs have not been able to prove their contention, this court of complaint has no alternative than to dismiss the case. The examiner arose and left the hearing room. Baat waddled across the aisle, puffing. "Too bad, Jonner," he said. "I don't like the stuff Marscorp's pulling, and I think you know I don't have anything to do with it. "I want to win, but I want to win fair and square. If there's anything I can do to help..." "Haven't got a spare G-boat in your pocket, have you?" retorted Jonner, with a rueful smile. Baat pulled at his jowls. "The Marsward isn't carrying G-boats," he said regretfully. "They all belong to the port, and Marscorp's got them so tied up you'll never get a sniff of one. But if you want to get back to your ship, Jonner, I can take you up to Phobos with me, as my guest." Jonner shook his head. "I figure on taking the Radiant Hope back to Earth," he said. "But I'm not blasting off without cargo until it's too late for me to beat you on the run." "You sure? This'll be my last ferry trip. The Marsward blasts off for Earth at # tomorrow." "No, thanks, Russo. But I will appreciate your taking my ship's doctor, Dr. Elden, up to Phobos." "Done!" agreed Baat. "Let's go, Dr. Elden. The G-boat leaves Marsport in two hours." Jonner watched Baat puff away, with the slender, white-clad brunette at his side. Baat personally would see Lana Elden safely aboard the Radiant Hope, even if it delayed his own blastoff. Morosely, he left the hearing room with Deveet. "What I can't understand," said the latter, "is why all this dirty work, why didn't Marscorp just use one of their atom-drive ships for the competition run?" "Because whatever ship is used on a competition run has to be kept in service on the franchised run," answered Jonner. "Marscorp has terests, and they're more interested in keeping an atomic ship off this run than they are in a monopoly franchise. But they tie in together: if Marscorp loses the monopoly franchise and Atom-Star puts in atom-drive ships, Marscorp will have to switch to atom-drive to meet the competition." "If we had a franchise, we could force Space Fuels to sell us hydrazine," said Deveet unhappily. "Well, we don't. And, at this rate, we'll never get one." ing at the Mars City Recreation Center. It had been several blasted off to Earth with a full cargo. And still the atomic ship Radiant Hope rested on Phobos with most of her Marsbound cargo still aboard; and still her crew languished at the Phobos space station; and still Jonner moved back and forth between Mars City and Marsport daily, racking his brain for a solution that would not come. "How in space do you get twenty tons of cargo up to an orbit # miles out, without any rocket fuel?" he demanded of Deveet more than once. He received no satisfactory answer. The Recreation Center was a two-acre park that lay beneath the plastic dome of Mars City. Above them they could see swift-moving Phobos and distant Deimos among the other stars that powdered the night. In the park around them, colonists rode the amusement machines, canoed along the canal that twisted through the park or sipped refreshment at scattered tables. A dozen or more sat, like Jonner and Deveet, around the edge of the tiny lake, fishing. Deveet's line tightened. He pulled in a streamlined, flapping object from which the light glistened wetly. "Good catch," complimented Jonner. "That's worth a full credit." Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish: live fish were unknown on Mars. They paid for the privilege of fishing for a certain time and any fish caught were "sold" back to the management at a fixed price, depending on size, to be put back into the lake. "You're pretty good at it," said Jonner. "That's your third tonight." "It's all in the speed at which you reel in your line," explained Deveet. "The fish move at pre-set speeds. They're made to turn and catch a hook that moves across their path at a slightly slower speed than they're swimming. The management changes the speeds once a week to keep the fishermen from getting too expert." "You can't beat the management," chuckled Jonner. "But if it's a matter of matching orbital speeds to make contact, I ought to do pretty well when I get the hang of it." He cocked an eye up toward the transparent dome. Phobos had moved across the sky into Capricorn since he last saw her. His memory automatically ticked off the satellite's orbital speed: # miles a second ; speed in relation to planetary motion... Why go over that again? One had to have fuel first. Meanwhile, the Radiant Hope lay idle on Phobos and its crew whiled away the hours at the space station inside the moon, their feet spinning faster than their heads... no, that wasn't true on Phobos, because it didn't have a spin to impart artificial gravity, like the space stations around Earth. He sat up suddenly. Deveet looked at him in surprise. Jonner's lips moved silently for a moment, then he got to his feet. "Where can we use a radiophone?" he asked. "One in my office," said Deveet, standing up. "Let's go. Quick, before Phobos sets." They turned in their rods, Deveet collecting the credits for his fish, and left the Recreation Center. When they reached the AtomStar Company's Martian office Jonner plugged in the radiophone and called the Phobos space station. He got T'an. "All of you get aboard," Jonner ordered. "Then have Qoqol call me." He signed off and turned to Deveet. Can we charter a plane to haul our Earthbound cargo out of Marsport?" "A plane? I suppose so. Where do you want to haul it?" "Charax is as good as any other place. But I need a fast plane." "I think we can get it. Marscorp still controls all the airlines, but the Mars government keeps a pretty strict finger on their planetbound operations. They can't refuse a cargo haul without good reason." "Just to play safe, have some friend of yours whom they don't know, charter the plane in his name. They won't know it's us till we start loading cargo." "Right," said Deveet, picking up the telephone. "I know just the man." Towmotors scuttled across the landing area at Marsport, shifting the cargo that had been destined for the Radiant Hope from the helpless G-boat to a jet cargo-plane. Nearby, watching the operation, were Jonner and Deveet, with the Marsport agent of Mars Air Transport Company. "We didn't know Atom-Star was the one chartering the plane until you ordered the G-boat cargo loaded on it," confessed the MarsAir agent. "I see you and Mr. Deveet are signed up to accompany the cargo. You'll have to rent suits for the trip. We have to play it safe, and there's always the possibility of a forced landing." "There are a couple of spacesuits aboard the G-boat that we want to take along," said Jonner casually. "We'll just wear those instead." "Okay." The agent spread his hands and shrugged. "Everybody at Marsport knows about you bucking Marscorp, Captain. What you expect to gain by transferring your cargo to Charax is beyond me, but it's your business." An hour later, the chartered airplane took off with a thunder of jets. Aboard was the #-ton cargo the Radiant Hope was supposed to carry to Earth, plus some large parachutes. The Mars-Air pilot wore a light suit with plastic helmet designed for survival in the thin, cold Martian air. Jonner and Deveet wore the bulkier spacesuits. Five minutes out of Marsport, Jonner thrust the muzzle of a heatgun in the pilot's back. "Set it on automatic, strap on your parachute and bail out," he ordered. "We're taking over." The pilot had no choice. He went through the plane's airlock and jumped, helped by a hearty boost from Jonner. His parachute blossomed out as he drifted down toward the green Syrtis Major Lowland. Jonner didn't worry about him. He knew the pilot's helmet radio would reach Marsport and a helicopter would rescue him shortly. "I don't know what you're trying to do, Jonner," said Deveet apprehensively over his spacehelmet radio. "But whatever it is, you'd better do it fast. They'll have every plane on Mars looking for hs in half an hour." "Let 'em look, and keep quiet a while," retorted Jonner. "I've got some figuring to do. He put the plane on automatic, took off the spacesuit handhooks and scribbled figures on a scrap of paper. He tuned in the plane's radio and called Qogol on Phobos. They talked to each other briefly in Martian. The darker green line of a canal crossed the green lowland below them. "Good, there's Drosinas, muttered Jonner. "Let's see, time # hours, speed # miles an hour... Jonner boosted the jets a bit and watched the terrain. "By Saturn, I almost overran it!" he exclaimed. "Deveet, smash out those ports." "Break out the ports?" repeated Deveet. "That'll depressurize the cabin!" "That's right. So you'd better be sure your spacesuit's secure." Obviously puzzled, Deveet strode up and down the cabin, knocking out its six windows with the handhooks of his spacesuit. Jonner maneuvered the plane gently, and set it on automatic. He got out of the pilot's seat and strode to the right front port. Reaching through the broken window, he pulled in a section of cable that was trailing alongside. While the baffled Deveet watched, he reeled it in until he brought up the end of it, to which was attached a fish-shaped finned metal missile. Jonner carried the cable end and the attached missile across the cabin and tossed it out the broken front port on the other side, swinging it so that the #-mile-an-hour slipstream snapped it back in through the rearmost port like a bullet. "Pick it up and pass it out the right rear port," he commanded. "We'll have to pass it to each other from port to port. The slipstream won't let us swing it forward and through." In a few moments, the two of them had worked the missile and the cable end to the right front port and in through it. Originating above the plane, it now made a loop through the four open ports. Jonner untied the missile and tied the end to the portion which came into the cabin, making a bowline knot of the loop. Deveet picked up the missile from the floor, where Jonner had thrown it. "Looks like a spent rocket shell," he commented. "It's a signal rocket," said Jonner. "The flare trigger was disconnected." He picked up the microphone and called the Radiant Hope on Phobos. "We've hooked our fish, Qoqol," he told the Martian, and laid the mike aside. "What does that mean?" asked Deveet. "Means we'd better strap in," said Jonner, suiting the action to the words. "You're in for a short trip to Phobos, Deveet." Jonner pulled back slowly on the elevator control, and the plane began a shallow climb. At # miles an hour, it began to attain a height at which its broad wings -- broader than those of any terrestrial plane -- would not support it. "I'm trying to decide," said Deveet with forced calm, "whether you've flipped your helmet." "Nope," answered Jonner. "Trolling for those fish in Mars City gave me the idea. The rest was no more than an astrogation problem, like any rendezvous with a ship in a fixed orbit, which Qoqol could figure. Remember that #mile television cable the ship's hauling? Qoqol just shot the end of it down to Mars' surface by signal rocket, we hooked on and now he'll haul us up to Phobos. He's got the ship's engine hooked onto the cable winch." The jets coughed and stopped. The plane was out of fuel. It was on momentum -- to be drawn by the cable, or to snap it and fall. "Impossible!" cried Deveet in alarm. "Phobos' orbital speed is more than a mile a second! No cable can take the sudden difference in that and the speed we're traveling. When the slack is gone, it'll break!" "The slack's gone already. You're thinking of the speed of Phobos, at Phobos. At this end of the cable, we're like the head of a man in the control section of a space station, which is traveling slower than his feet because its orbit is smaller -- but it revolves around the center in the same time. "Look," Jonner added, "I'll put it in round numbers. Figure your cable as part of a radius of Phobos' orbit. Phobos travels at #, but the other end of the radius travels at zero because it's at the center. The cable end, at the Martian surface, travels at a speed in between -- roughly # miles an hour -- but it keeps up with Phobos' revolution. Since the surface of Mars itself rotates at # miles an hour, all I had to do was boost the plane up to # to match the speed of the cable end. "That cable will haul a hell of a lot more than twenty tons, and that's all that's on it right now. By winching us up slowly, there'll never be too great a strain on it." Deveet looked apprehensively out of the port. The plane was hanging sidewise now, and the distant Martian surface was straight out the left-hand ports. The cable was holding. "We can make the trip to Earth # days faster than the Marsward," said Jonner, "and they have only about # days' start. It won't take us but a few days to make Phobos and get this cable and the rest of the cargo shot back to Mars. AtomStar will get its franchise, and you'll see all spaceships switching to the atomic drive within the next decade." "How about this plane?" asked Deveet. "We stole it, you know." "You can hire a G-boat to take it back to Marsport," said Jonner with a chuckle. "Pay Mars-Air for the time and the broken ports, and settle out of court with that pilot we dropped. I don't think they'll send you to jail, Deveet." He was silent for a few minutes. "By the way, Deveet," said Jonner then, "radio Atom-Star to buy some flonite cable of their ownand ship it to Phobos. Damned if I don't think this is cheaper than G-boats!"    # -- Electron. # -- Catalysis. # -- Inversely. # -- #. # -- One. # -- Parthogenesis. #I -- #. # -- Right angles. # -- #. # -- Violet. # -- Hydrogen. # -- One. # -- Two. # -- Hydrogen. # -- Balloons. # -- ##ths. clroie The Car was the new concept of the golden calf. And the Green Pastures and Still Waters had been replaced by the Happy Highways of Heaven... Object worship reached its heyday in the mid twenty-first century. The bluebird, which had already become a number of ignominious things, finally became an automobile. It grew chrome wings and exchanged its heart for a carburetor, its feet for wheels and its backyard for a pedestal in The Church of the Happy Traveler. It was inevitable that the procedure for catching it should change. Sunday. Marcus Brett shouldered his way through the vestibule into the big Showroom and paused at the head of the center aisle. The Showroom was ablaze with the bluewhite radiance of fluorescent candles, a radiance brightly multiplied by the mirrored walls, caught by the polished chrome ceiling and flung blindingly down upon the congregation. The new Seneca model which was to be unveiled stood upon the pedestal behind the Dealer's dais, concealed by a huge damask sheet. Brett looked at it hungrily, trying to visualize its new lines, its new combination of colors. He took a slow deep breath, then started down the aisle toward his reserved seat. The seat next to his was Czech's, Brett's turn-buddy. Brett Illustrated by Kelly Freas was surprised to find it occupied by a White Collar girl. White Collar Workers were getting bolder and bolder every day. Not that the girl's boldness was going to do her any good : as soon as Czech showed up she'd have to leave. She glanced at Brett curiously when he sat down beside her and he returned the glance with his flat gray eyes. Her hair was short and dark and her eyes were a limpid brown. Her small turned up nose and round cheeks lent her face a quality of childish innocence; it could almost have passed for a little girl's face if her full lips hadn't given it away. She was wearing a cheap majorette ensemble, but cheap or not, on her robust young body it looked good. Quite without his knowing it, Brett's glance had become a stare. The girl dropped her eyes, obviously embarrassed, though she did not blush. Brett turned away then, irked at the direction of his thoughts, and tried to concentrate on the sheet covered model. It looked slightly longer than last year's job, but he couldn't be sure. However, an increase in length was a good bet, for the Seneca manufacturers had a tradition to live up to : every new model they put on the market virtually had to be longer than its predecessor... Gradually Brett became aware of a subtle perfume. There was something about it -- perhaps the nostalgic scent of apple blossoms which it contained -- that intrigued him. There was no question as to its source and it was all he could do to keep his eyes on the sheet covered model where they belonged. He was relieved when the electronic organ struck up the Seneca hymn and the choir came down the aisle. Brett listened to their voices with usual dedication, but he still smelled apple blossoms. After the choir had aligned themselves on either side of the pedestal and delivered their last note, the Dealer himself appeared, resplendent in a gold and scarlet robe. He walked slowly and majestically down the aisle, stepped upon the dais, and turned to face the congregation. His eyes surveyed the packed Showroom. "My children," he said simply, in his deep resonant voice; then, after a brief prayer, he began the Seneca beadtudes: "Blessed are the rubber forests of Vega Twelve for their worthy contribution to the betterment of Mankind. Blessed are the mountains of Rigel Seven for their tin and their copper and their magnesium... And finally -- "Blessed are the rust red plains of Alpha Crucis Fourteen, for without their manganese, their titanium, and their iron ore, life as we know it would have long since perished from the Earth." The sermon followed. It was a typical sermon, exalting the supreme patience of the Finance Bishop and deprecating the thoughtless irresponsibility of the average consumer. Brett shifted uneasily. He had a guilty conscience. During the caryear which was now drawing to a close, he'd missed three weekly installments and had had to have them prorated. As a result, the remaining installments had been so huge that he'd barely been able to manage them, and he'd come uncomfortably close to losing his Seneca. Even now, with his final payment safely deposited with the Finance Bishop, the very thought of such a calamity was enough to evoke tiny globules of sweat on his brow. He promised himself to be more conservative in the future, chase fewer women, drink fewer Dream Girls. Then his attention wandered. The Dealer was explaining a new decree which the Finance Bishop had issued, and decrees bored Brett to death. He unsealed his white driving jacket and slumped down in his seat, crossing his booted legs. The apple blossom scent was all around him, more intriguing than ever. He wondered rather desperately what had happened to Czech and concluded that something important must have come up and made it impossible for him to attend the services. At last the sermon ended and the moment for the unveiling arrived. The congregation murmured in awed expectation, and there was an over-all shift in the spectrum of gaudy driving jackets as everyone leaned forward in his seat. After giving forth with the usual panegyrics concerning the superiority of Seneca models in general and the new Seneca model in particular, the Dealer said: "And now it is my privilege to reveal our latest creative masterpiece -- the Bluebird!" Fie raised one square bejeweled hand and the sheet fluttered ceilingward like a frightened cloud. At first there was only silence, and then a mass Ahhhh rose from the congregation. Following the Ahhhh, voice after voice was raised in reverent astonishment. "Why," Brett gasped, "it is longer. A good ten inches longer!" "It's a dream," the White Collar girl breathed. "Beautiful," Brett murmured. "Beautiful beautiful beautiful..." He began to notice some of the details he had glossed over in his first moment of rapture. The Bluebird was not only longer than last year's model, it was lower, too: its highest point was barely three feet above the pedestal. And there was a striking change in the chrome decor, the main feature being a blue flanks so suggestive of movement that it was hard to believe the car was standing still. "It looks almost as if it could fly," the White Collar girl said. In his excitement, Brett forgot her status. "It's a swell job all right," he said, turning towards her. "Such a beautiful blue!" Briefly, Brett forgot the car. The girl's enthusiasm had turned her full cheeks pink, made her dark eyes sparkle. Her cheap majorette ensemble was painfully conspicious in a gathering where women wore feminine adaptations of masculine driving attire; nevertheless, it brought out her figure in a way that a pair of thigh-tight breeches and a breast-fitted jacket never could have. Abruptly Brett wondered what she'd be like undressed. He'd never tried to pick up a White Collar girl, not only because they were beneath his social status, but because it had never occurred to him that any of them would be worth the trouble. This one looked like she might be worth a lot of trouble. "What's your name?" he asked impulsively, invisible apple blossoms falling all around him. "Linda," she said. "Linda Dalms." "Mark Brett... Like to ride?" Her eyes had been on his face. At his question they dropped to the gaudy Seneca insigne on the collar of his jacket. "Yes. Yes I do." "How would it be if I picked you up around six tonight and we take a whirl?" "It would be divine," Linda said... The Dealer was bringing the services to a close. "Tonight," he said, "the Bluebird will be placed on display in Seneca Square. While there will be enough of the new models to supply all our customers, I'd advise all prospective buyers to place their orders before Turn-In Friday in order to be assured of delivery by New Car Sunday. Orders will be taken in the vicarage immediately following the end of the services." After the prayer, Brett accompanied Linda to the street. Standing in the April morning sunlight, he said: "Guess I'll order mine right away. No sense waiting." He watched for a gleam of envy to come into her eyes; such a reaction on the part of a person who couldn't even buy one of the chrome wings of the new model would have been logical. But Linda's eyes remained the samelarge and limpid and guileless -- and all she said was, "I'm glad, Mr. Brett." Brett was annoyed. "Whereabouts in Center City do you live?" he asked abruptly. She hadn't said she lived in Center City and his assuming that she did was a calculated insult, even though both of them knew she couldn't possibly live anywhere else. But if the insult got home, she gave no sign. "The old office block," she said. "Building #, Apartment #." "I'll see you about six," Brett said. He was about to turn and walk away, but she beat him to it. She threw a soft goodbye over her shoulder just before the departing crowd engulfed her. He stood there furious for a moment, but a wisp of her perfume had lingered behind her and when it touched his nostrils his anger dissolved. Suddenly he remembered the small apple orchard in which he had played as a little boy. The whole scene came back, the trees with their pink-white blossoms, his mother reading in the nearby summerhouse ; the utter peace and tranly June day... The orchard was gone now, leveled to make room for the new illuminated Raceway, the orchard and the antique double garage behind which it had stood; and his mother too, for that matter, killed in the same five car pile-up in which his father had perished magnificently. Only the memory remained, strengthened by the number of times he had had to recall it orally in the presence of the finance psychoanalyst during the yearly pre-contract examination, and triggered now by the ersatz scent of apple blossoms contained in a White Collar girl's perfume. It was far from being an unpleasant memory, and ordinarily Brett would have permitted his mind to dwell upon it. But there was a much more important item on his mind this morning and the memory had scarcely touched his consciousness before the Bluebird brushed it aside with a scintillating flurry of chrome wings. Brett turned and began walking towards the vicarage. The Seneca vicarage adjoined the Seneca cathedral, facing the mile-wide business boulevard that encircled Center City. While its modest facade could not compete with the glorious facade of the cathedral itself, it was imposing in its own right. It had no chromemullioned windows of course, and no chrome-garnished steeples; but its ornamental glassbrick design was pleasing to the eye, and it boasted the largest display window of any vicarage in the city. Last year's Seneca -- the Four window. Brett merely glanced at it as he passed. A year ago its sleek lines and scarlet body had dazzled him, and he had been one of the thousands of enthusiastic First Owners to drive in the New Car Sunday Parade. But now he had glimpsed the Bluebird and beside looked like an antique clunker, only too deserving of the fiery demise which awaited it in one of the open hearths during the coming caryear. A queue of people had formed outside the vicarage door and Brett appended himself to it. He lit a cigarette and smoked nervously. It was noon by the time he stood in front of the caged window and presented his identity disk to the acolyte in charge. The acolyte took the disk and placed it beneath the objective eye of the electronic examiner. Brett waited complacently for the familiar "Beep" of approval. He was demoralized when the examiner emitted the raucous buzz that signified credit disqualification. "There must be some mistake," he said tightly. "Try it again." The acolyte did so. The buzz sounded again, more raucous than before. "There's no mistake," the acolyte said. "But there must be!" Brett's whole world was tottering. "I want to see the Dealer. I demand to see the Dealer!" "If you wish." The acolyte depressed a button with his elbow. "Another one, Father," he said into his wristcom, giving Brett's name and number. Then he raised his wrist to his ear, listened a moment, finally lowered his arm and depressed the elbow switch again. The Dealer will see you presently," he said to Brett, handing back the disk. "Take a seat, please." There was a bench running the length of the office at right angles to the acolyte's window. Brett saw that it was already crowded, and he felt some consolation in the evident fact that his disk wasn't the only one that the examiner had rejected. He made room for himself, wedging his lean body between a perspiring fat man and a sniffling woman; then he folded his arms across his chest and gazed up through the transparent ceiling into the pale blue April sky. A jet had just finished stratosphere-writing. Brett read the familiar sentence automatically: dropped his eyes to the tile floor. The Finance Man had been close upon his heels for the past several months and the experience had been harrowing. And then the thought struck him: perhaps his three defaulted payments had had something to do with his credit disqualification. He shook his head. Missing payments and prorating them was common practice, and becoming more common every day. It was unthinkable that the Finance Bishop would disqualify anyone's credit on those grounds alone. Or was it? Brett spent the next two hours trying to convince himself that it was. Every fifteen minutes or so a small, tousle-haired acolyte threw open the door leading to the Dealer's quarters, called a name, and one of the occupants of the bench got up and followed him out of the office. But the bench never emptied. At intervals the examiner behind the acolyte's window would emit a raucous buzz, and shortly thereafter another crestfallen consumer would come over and sit down. Presently the tousle-haired acolyte opened the door and said: "Marcus Brett." Brett got up, followed him through a long cool corridor, through two sumptuous outer rooms and into a large study. Three of the study walls were lined with car catalogues, parts manuals, and road atlases -- all bound in imitation Morocco leather. On the wall opposite the door hung a huge three-dimensional mural depicting the popular conception of the Highways of Heaven : shining roads leaped like shards of light from fleecy cloud to fleecy cloud against a backdrop of breathless blue, and here and there along the promised highways could be seen the speeding cars of the Happy Travelers. The Dealer sat behind a tremendous chrome desk studying a thick sheaf of papers. He had divested himself of his sacerdotal robes and was wearing a black, smartly-cut driving jacket that contrasted effectively with the whiteness of his turned around collar. He looked up when Brett and the acolyte entered, dismissing the acolyte with a wriggle of his little finger. "Sit down, my son," he said to Brett, indicating a chrome chair by the desk. Brett complied nervously and the Dealer returned his attention to the papers. He was an old man -- fortyfive at least. But that was not surprising for Dealers were usually good drivers. The ancient tortoiserimmed spectacles which he affected gave his full square face an aristocratic touch, and his dark brown hair grew gray and graceful along his temples. After a moment he looked up at Brett again. "You realize, do you not," he said in his deep pleasant voice, "that these papers which I am perusing are facsimiles of your contract, your promptitude record, your character analysis, and your biography?" "Yes, Father." "An electronic examiner never makes a mistake, but I am always tomer's dossier if he so wishes. I have checked yours thoroughly and see nothing that would invalidate the examiner's decision. What makes you think that your credit does not deserve disqualification?" "I can't see any reason why it should deserve disqualification," Brett said hoarsely. "My Four Million's all paid for -- I deposited my last installment in the Finance Bishop's account yesterday. Maybe I defaulted once or twice, but -- " "Three times," the Dealer said... "Did you attend my services this morning?" "Certainly, Father. I attend your services every Sunday." The Dealer shook his large handsome head in mild despair. "You attend them -- and hear nothing of what I say. This morning I called everyone's attention to the new restriction which the Finance Bishop has seen fit to impose on future finance contractions, yet apparently no one in the Showroom heard me other than myself." Brett hung his head. "I heard you mention something about a restriction, but I'm afraid I missed exactly what it was." "I'll repeat verbatim what I said." The Dealer leaned forward, resting his elbows on the polished chrome of the desktop. "Listen carefully, my son: In view of the fact that delinquency in weekly finance payments has increased deplorably during the recent caryear, the Finance Bishop has been forced to issue the following decree: 'Any car buyer who has defaulted on more than two installments during the caryear ending April #, # shall be deemed unworthy of contract renewal on any new model unless ( I ) he deposits a down payment in addition to the traditional one third allowance on his last year's model, said payment not to be less than one fourth the amount of the remaining balance, or (#) he submits evidence that his character has, or will in the near future, come under the stabilizing influence of a factor hitherto unpresent.' " Brett was on his feet. His face was ashen. "But that's fantastic, Father!" he shouted. "You know I can't raise that much money!" The Dealer raised a square, twinkling hand. "Calm yourself, my son. If alternative number one is impracticable, why not consider alternative number two? And in this connection, may I presume to elaborate upon the Finance Bishop's erudite, but somewhat confusing, phraseology? The factor to which His Holiness refers is, to put it simply, marriage. It is a statistical fact that of all the car buyers who defaulted on more than two payments during the recent caryear, ninety-eight percent were unattached men or women, the men predominating by a ratio of almost two to one. Quite obviously the responsibilities of conjugality have a stabilizing effect upon both sexes, particularly the male; add to this happy eventuality the fact that marriage brings two incomes together over the same garage and you begin to appreciate the shrewd reasoning behind the Bishop's decree... Have you any marital prospects, my son?" Brett shook his head numbly. His last affair had been dead embers for more than a week, and the one coming up with the White Collar girl didn't count. A White Collar girl was a far cry from being a marital prospect. "Then I'd suggest," the Dealer continued, "that you start looking around. And may I remind you," he added, his wide, thin-lipped mouth curving in a bleak smile, "that you haven't much time if you don't want to get caught without a new car. You have, in fact -- "and he glanced at his watch -- "six days, nine hours, forty minutes, and some odd seconds before New Car SunDay." He wriggled his little finger and the tousle-haired acolyte appeared magically in the doorway. "Show Consumer Brett out through the side entrance," the Dealer said. "And for Seneca's sake, comb your hair!" the parklot. He was so upset that he almost climbed into his Seneca without deactivating the sentry and he came close to getting his brains blown out for trying to steal his own car. The sentry was the latest car thief device to be put on the market, and like all the devices that had preceded it, it would be good only until the car thieves got onto it. Otherwise its only drawback was its impartiality: while it was functioning anyone who came within its field of vision was automatically classified as a car thief and shortly thereafter became a car thief with a hole in his head. Driving along the boulevard, Brett considered getting rid of the deadly little mechanism. He decided not to. The safety of his Seneca warranted a little personal danger. After all, it was the only car he had, and from the way things were beginning to look, it was the last car he was ever going to have. He made a complete circuit of the business district, his mind reverting to the Bluebird. He had never wanted a car so badly. Presently he turned down one of the tangent streets that led to Peripheral City. After the mile-wide boulevard, Peripheral City seemed friendly and secure. Brett drove along slowly, winding through the idyllic streets, looking at the trimmed hedges and the pruned shade trees, the neat garages set well back from the street and reached by concrete, blacktop, pebble, or gravel driveways; the charming little self-service stations tucked away in maple arbors. Garages always fascinated him, regardless of his mood. There was that colonial affair, with sedate hedgerows leading up to its early American double doors; and then, a block farther on, that ranch type affair, so low and rambling that there was hardly enough space for the overhead apartment. Double garages predominated of course; one car families were unusual in Peripheral City, and a single garage almost invariably implied a single man or woman. Presently he came to the street that led to his own garage and turned down it. His problem was heavy on his shoulders as he climbed the narrow stairs to his overhead apartment, and when he bumped his head on the low beam in the kitchenette, his morale was far from being improved. He ordered a salmon course from the Instantcook, and picked at it disinterestedly when it emerged. For one of the few times in his life he couldn't concentrate on his food. All he could think of was the Bluebird. He glanced at his watch. He had nearly two hours to kill before he could pick up Linda. He decided against going for a ride -- riding would only bring the Bluebird more poignantly to mind. That left #V. Brett threw the remnants of his meal into the devourer and went into the compact living room. He sat down in his relaxer and toed on the #V set. The Construction Engineer materialized on the screen. Ordinarily Brett never listened to the Construction Engineer. Changing channels when the thin haunted face appeared was practically a conditioned reflex in any car owner. But Brett wasn't himself today, and he lay back in his relaxer, hardly aware of what the man was saying. However, his indifference was short-lived. There was a quality about the Construction Engineer's voice that commanded attention : a deep, vibrant sincerity that belied the insanity of his perspective, the dearth of logic behind his words. His words were many -- " -- cannot impart sanctity. Stealing the hierarchical nomenclature, the architectonics, and the ceremonial garb from a genuine institution and integrating them into a pseudo-institution can never validate that pseudo-institution in the eyes of God. A money lender is still a money lender no matter what title he confers upon himself. Spires do not a cathedral make, nor sacerdotal robes a man of God. "Economic necessity can never justify the apotheosis of metal. The fact that the yearly turnover of automobiles is inexorably related to the financial security of the individual is an inadequate foundation for a religion. I say to you: Better an economic chaos than the idealogical chaos which affronts us now!" Brett shifted uncomfortably in the relaxer. What the Construction Engineer was saying was pure nonsense, but his sincerity was to unquestionable that the nonsense took on some of the aspects of sense. Perhaps that was why the Dealers feared him so much, why they campaigned so incessantly against him. The Seneca Dealer was the most zealous campaigner, possibly because it was the Seneca Memorial Trust Building that had precipitated the Construction Engineer's heresy. A year ago his bid had been accepted by the Seneca Foundation and he had begun the job on schedule. Then, the day following the ceremonial laying of the first cornerstone, he had inexplicably disappeared. All efforts to contact him had failed, and finally another contractor had been engaged. Then, six months later, the Construction Engineer had reappeared, purchased #V time, and commenced his series of anti-automobile lectures. To date, the Dealers had been unable to do much about him. Even the Finance Bishop was helpless. For although the Construction Engineer's lectures sometimes embodied economic and ethical heresy, he had never advocated the overthrow of the existent society on any but a religious level and therefore could not be prosecuted. With an effort Brett raised his eyes to the man's face. It was an old face -- the Construction Engineer was a good fifty. But considering the fact that he had not driven a car for years, his age was not unusual. In spite of himself Brett found himself listening to the man's words: "The canonization in the year # of the original automobile manufacturers was the result of diverse pressures: the whole economy hinged on car output and car consumption ; the four-wheeled raison d'etre of the average individual had long ago been established; and the automobile foundations had already begun the initial experiments in faster-thanlight drives that led eventually to the conquest of interstellar space -- and of course to the acquisition of desperately needed natural resources. "But the canonization of the original automobile manufacturers can never justify the series of sacrilegious events that followed it: the new sales methods, the renaming of names, the rebuilding of showrooms to resemble cathedrals, the creation of the Church of the Happy Traveler and its subsequent usurpation of all religious activities in the western world; the supplanting of Green Pastures and Still Waters with the immature concept of the Highways of Heaven -- " The Construction Engineer paused, as though overcome by his own rhetoric. "What," he asked abruptly, "is a car?" There was a blackboard behind him and, turning, he printed the letter "A" in the upper left hand corner and the letter "B" in the lower right hand corner. "A car," he went on, "is a mechanical conveyance capable of transporting us from point "A" to point "B", or, conversely, from point "B" to point "A". It is nothing more than that. "It is a means toward an end, and as long as it is so regarded, it is beneficial to the human race. When, however, it is regarded as an end in itself, nothing but tragedy can result -- " With a convulsive movement Brett pressed the channel pedal with the toe of his right boot. The Construction Engineer was beginning to get on his nerves. He looked at his watch: #:# o'clock. If he stopped some place and had a few drinks he could be at Linda's apartment long enough after six to convince her that he didn't much care whether she went riding with him or not. He descended to the garage, deactivated the sentry and got in his Seneca. He chose a tangent street at random, made a half circle of the business boulevard and drew into the parklot of the The Hub Cap. It was dusk by then and the myriad lights of the business buildings formed coruscating palisades on either side of the car streaming boulevard. Brett brooded over a Dream Girl at the chrome bar, trying to see some way out of his dilemma. He lit a cigarette and considered selling his garage to raise the one fourth down payment which the Finance Bishop required. But if he sold his garage he'd have to live in his car, and it would only be a question of time before the carcops picked him up for Indecency. Next he considered putting a second mortgage on his garage. But that would never do: he had trouble enough keeping up the payments on the first mortgage. Finally, after three more Dream Girls, he got around to considering marriage. He didn't consider it for long. Marriage, when you were only twenty-six, was an outrageous price to have to pay, even for a Bluebird. Besides, he had no prospects anyway -- unless you counted Linda. And he was damned if he'd count her! But just the same, when he thought of her his pulse came to life, and he glanced at the clock inset in the big chrome hub cap behind the bar: #:#. He finished his fifth Dream Girl hurriedly and went out and got in his Seneca. It wasn't technically wise to be too late. Center City had once been the city before the gradual exodus to the suburbs had isolated it. Some of its buildings were centuries old, and its ancient streets were little more than series of chuck holes, frost upheavals, and fissures. A long time ago the begrimed towers had been honeycombed with offices; now the few offices needed in a society of business machines existed behind the bright facades on the business boulevard, while the old office space had been taken over by the White Collar Workers and converted into apartments. The elevator of Building # creaked alarmingly as it raised him to the ninth floor. He was relieved when he stepped out into the cluttered corridor. Old fashioned fluorescents cast pallid light on the dusty floor, lent a ghastly tinge to the peeling walls. Many of the rooms were vacant, but most of them were occupied by squabbling families. The stale odor of plankton soup hung in the air like miasma. By the time he found Apartment #, Brett was sorry he had come. Then, when the battered door opened at his knock and Linda stepped out to meet him, he was suddenly glad that he had come. The odor of plankton soup faded away and the corridor became an apple orchard in June. Linda had exchanged the majorette ensemble for a simple dacron dress, and she looked like a Greek goddess with a baby face who had just descended the slopes of Olympus to find out what mortal life was all about. Brett took a slow, deep breath. "All set, baby?" he said. When Brett was a small boy attending elementary tech, there had been a certain period which he and all the other pupils looked forward to each day. It was the period during which the identifilms -- donated by the Seneca, the Oneida, or one of the other Dealers -- were shown, and it was called the Daydream Hour. Invariably the identifilms dealt with automobiles, and invariably the youthful audience got a chance to get behind the wheel at least once during the hour. Total identification techniques were primitive in those days, but they were capable of lending a sense of participation, especially if you were a child. The film that had made the deepest impression on Brett depicted a boy taking his girl for a ride in a new Seneca. The boy was Brett's own age and Brett identified with him easily, and shortly he was behind the wheel and feeling the pulse of the car beneath his feet and the summer wind in his hair. From that moment on, he had lived for the time when he could really climb into a new Seneca and really take his girl for a ride on the Speedway. He had realized the Daydream many times by now of course, though the Speedway had bowed out before the wider and better banked Raceway; but those first vicarious moments were still sweet in his memory, and he knew he would never forget them as long as he lived. "Do you always drive so fast?" Linda asked. "You call this fast?" Brett said. "You should ride to work with me some time!" The illuminated Raceway had its usual Sunday evening complement of hurtling cars. Brett twisted adroitly in and out, never diminishing the Seneca's speed unless collision were unavoidable. The myriad lights of the Seneca Assembly Plant began to flicker by. Brett pointed. "That's where they put these jobs together," he said. "Do you work there?" "Not me. I run an open hearth." "Oh." It was a small "oh." And small wonder, Brett thought. The kid was probably overawed. Here was a world she had probably never seen before, imprisoned as she was in the cramped canyons of Center City. The lights of the Seneca Stamping Plant came next, and after them, the haze-dimmed lights of the Seneca Steel Mill. Brett pointed out the open hearth which he operated, but it was behind them by the time Linda turned her head. "Ever seen the spaceport?" he asked. "Not for years." "I know a parking place where we can get a good view of the ships. "What d'you say?" "All right," Linda said. Brett watched for the turnoff, and when it appeared, slipped smoothly out of the stream of traffic. The darkness of the countryside activated the Seneca's headlights, and the macadam leaped into bright visibility. It was familiar territory to Brett and he drove confidently, taking the banked curves at an easy ninety. It was the kind of driving he liked best. The spires of the ships began to show against the starred sky. Brett slowed the Seneca, keeping an eye on the right shoulder of the macadam. Presently the sign he was It was a dirt road, badly eroded by the spring rains. He followed it to the crest of the hill from which it had obtained its name, then turned off into a blackened field. The hill had been halved to make room for the expanding port, and he braked the Seneca near the edge of the man-made cliff. There was a ship squatting in the blasting pit at the foot of the cliff, its tapered prow rising high above the halved hilltop. Beyond it, the prows of other ships showed, some in darkness, some pied with the round radiance of open ports. Brett turned off the motor and extinguished the headlights. He turned to Linda. "Like it here?" "Is it safe? That sign back there -- " "That sign is for rubes who don't know anything about ship schedules," Brett said. "That big job in the pit there is the only one close enough to bum us and it isn't due to blast off till Turn-In Friday. It's a prison ship." "If it did blast right now, there wouldn't be much left of us, would there, Mark?" she said. "Not even ashes. But I didn't bring you all the way up here just to talk about ships." He slipped his arm around her shoulders. She moved closer to him. Her face, when he bent down to kiss her, was soft and pale in the starlight; her lips were tender, cool and moist. Apple blossoms fell aromatically and April changed subtly to June. A sense of security pervaded Brett; he felt safe and warm and wanted... His hand fumbled with the shoulder strap of the dacron dress, then paused of its own accord. He tried again, and again his hand refused to do his bidding. He raised his head and looked down into Linda's round starlit face. Her eyes seemed more limpid than ever, and from their deeps the reflected stars looked steadily up at him. Tenderness suffused him, tenderness and anger. For with the tenderness came the realization that he could not treat this girl the way he had treated all the others. His need for her was different; it was far more complex than the simple craving he'd experienced in the presence of the other girls he had taken out. He could not analyze it -- it was far beyond him ; and finally he gave up trying. He bent and kissed her again and contentment and peace engulfed him. He became a wanderer in the enchanted universe of her lips and her subtle perfume. When he raised his head and looked around him the night had attained a new beauty: a simple beauty of land and sky and stars. He knew that if he kissed her again he would say things he would regret in the morning, and he knew that if they stayed there on the hilltop he could not help kissing her again. Brett was a practical man. He kneed the starter and the Seneca purred in the night, its headlights picking up the pitted hull of the prison ship. He withdrew his arm from Linda's shoulder. "Feel like riding?" he asked. Her limpid eyes regarded him quietly, and again he saw the reflected stars in their depths. The laughing stars -- For a moment he had the eerie feeling that she knew exactly what he was thinking, exactly why he was running away. But she only said: "I love to ride." about Linda and he got up the next morning and went to work still thinking about Linda. Her face accompanied him up to the air-conditioned control booth and her eyes mocked him as he sat down before the televised images of his six furnaces, numbers # through #. "#'s ready," the #-# man said, donning his jacket. "I just took a test bar... How's the car?" "Fine," Brett said. "How's yours?" "Couldn't be better. Be seeing you." Brett lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Linda's face. Then he tapped #, giving his attention to the pit screen while the blue-white heat poured out into the three hundred ton ladle. His fingers moving unerringly over the intricate maze of buttons on the horizontal remote control panel. He started number # charger on the limestone charge. The scrap charge was late and he phoned Yard to hurry it up. Pit called. "# be ready this turn?" Czech asked. Brett glanced at the tapping time schedule. "No." "That's good news," Czech said... "How's the Seneca?" "Fine," Brett said. "How's yours?" "Great." Brett thought of something. "Where were you yesterday? I didn't see you at the Services." "I got called before the Finance Bishop," Czech said. "Somehow they forgot to process my last ten payments and the F. B. thought I'd defaulted. But when I kept insisting that I was paid up to date, he checked back and found out that his office was to blame. Some efficiency! How was the Bluebird?" "Out of this world," Brett said. "Going to get one?" "Certainly I'm going to get one! Why should you ask that?" "Don't get mad. I was just curious." "I'm not mad!" Brett hung up. His hands were trembling. Linda had driven the Bluebird out of his thoughts, but now it flew back, more tantalizing than before. If he continued to Turn-In Friday, he would automatically become a social outcast. There was no law that said you had to turn your car in every year. But there were the expressions on peoples' faces and there was the contempt in peoples' eyes; there was the hollow feeling inside you that you did not belong; that you were no better than the White Collar Workers who walked all their lives because their wages never permitted them to amass the amount of a down payment. Abruptly his thoughts switched back to Linda. Why should a poverty-stricken White Collar girl affect him so? What quality did she have that his other girls had lacked? He did not know. He only knew that he had to see her again, that the security and contentment he had experienced in her company had only whetted his appetite. Yard had sent up the scrap charge, and Brett started number # charger in on the first buggy. He never tired of watching a scrap charge. He loved to see the compressed bodies of last year's cars being shoved into the White-hot maw of the hearth, dumped unceremoniously, then left to turn into unshapely pink ghosts, finally to dissolve into the yellow ignominy of molten metal. Soon, he knew, he would be getbodies. And none to soon. Last year's scrap inventory was nearly exhausted and the open hearths needed new material. In his absorption with the scrap charge Brett had forgotten Linda and the Bluebird, but the moment the charger dumped the last pan, both returned to haunt him. For the first time he saw Linda and the Bluebird in relationship to each other, and a common solution to both problems began to germinate in his mind. It was time for #'s drink and Brett brought the hot metal ladle down on number I crane, set the spout in number # door, and slowly tilted the ladle till the red-gold Crucis ore spilled in a steady molten flow down into the bath. His mind was exceedingly clear now. There were two main objectives: (#) to get the Bluebird, (#) to have his way with Linda. Getting the Bluebird involved getting married; having his way with Linda, and placating his incomprehensible idealization of her, involved the same thing. But there was one more consideration: his self respect. Steel workers in their right minds did not marry White Collar girls. Not if they wanted to keep their self respect. But a steel worker could marry a White Collar girl and keep his self respect if he had the marriage annulled as soon as he got what he wanted. And getting the annulment would be no problem: no judge could possibly fail to see the incongruity of such a union once it was brought to his attention. Relief ran warmly through Brett's body. Here was the perfect solution; here was the loophole which the Finance Bishop had overlooked. Not only would he be able to get the Bluebird, but he would be able to make love to Linda without coming into conflict with his idiotic idealization of her; and he would emerge from the whole transaction a free man. It was time for #'s drink. Brett whistled happily as he guided number I crane down the floor to the hot metal pit. The world had never seemed so bright. After the turn he shaved and showered, then he dressed and went down to the open hearth parklot. He deactivated the sentry, then he started the Seneca and drove it out of the lot and onto the Raceway. He gunned it up to one ten. The April wind sang in the vents, and the sky was a brisk spring blue. He stopped at a Raceway restaurant and ordered a scallop plate. There was a #V screen behind the counter and a tele-newscast was in progress. The Construction Engineer was the number one topic of the day; according to the announcer he had gone berserk on the previous night and left himself wide open to legal prosecution. The scene of his activities had been Seneca Square. He had desecrated the alabaster statue of the Seneca Dealer by writing "Thou shalt not steal!" across its base, and he had desecrated the Bluebird, which had just been put on display, by printing "Golden Calf II" on its windshield. Moreover, the announcer said, the Construction Engineer had performed both acts in the presence of a dozen witnesses, against him. It was as though he were proud of his heretic vandalism, though not proud enough -- the announcer added -- to remain on the scene till the police arrived. "Mr. District Attorney has let it be known," the announcer concluded, "that every force at his command will be utilized to apprehend this madman in our midst. Informed sources say that the Construction Engineer is at present hiding out in Center City." Brett finished the rest of his scallops and lit a cigarette. He wondered if the Foundations would ever get far enough ahead on raw materials so that they could develop at least one of their planets along agricultural lines -- a project they had been promising the people for decades. Seafood was all right, but it got monotonous after a while. Meat wasn't even available on the black market any more, and potatoes were no more than a dream remembered. But the economy came first, and automobiles were the backbone of the economy, and you couldn't very well manufacture automobiles without the necessary metals and people couldn't very well drive them without the necessary fuel. Besides, there were plenty of fish in the ocean, so there wasn't really any need for extra-terrestrial agricultural development -- as long as traffic fatalities continued to counterbalance population. Brett paid the electronic cashier and went outside. The sky was more briskly blue than before, and the breeze coming in over the factoried fields was acrid with spring. High in the sky a jet was stratosphere-writing. Brett watched idly as the lofty letters emerged: He smiled. No, not today, he thought. Nor tomorrow. His courtship of Linda was going to take a little time. But definitely by Turn-In Friday! covered, had a Fitzgerald effect on time. At first she was very quiet when he picked her up for their second date, opening the door of her apartment before he even had time to knock, then closing the door quickly behind her and taking his arm. But her quietness gave way to gayety when he took her to the latest identi-scope where they became vicarious bride and groom in a hilarious highway marriage. Afterwards on the Raceway she snuggled against his shoulder, so close that her soft hair tickled his neck and her perfume enveloped him like an enchanted cloud. Almost before he knew it, it was time to take her home. That was Monday night. Tuesday night he took her dining, and later in the evening they found a charming little cafe in the country where you could sit at a rustic table in a secluded corner and listen to the muted strains of the latest love songs, and drink and talk -- They talked of many things. Brett talked about his work, and she listened attentively. But when it came time for her to talk about her work, she said very little, only that she was a secretary and that she hated her job. Brett thought he understood her reticence and did not press her. After a while the Construction Engineer crept into their conversation. "I can't figure him out," Brett said. "What's he trying to accomplish?" "He has a Christ-complex," Linda said. "Can't you recognize the pattern?" "You mean he thinks he's Christ?" Linda's voice had become bitter. "Yes. He thinks he's Christ." "But he's never claimed to be." "Of course not. Did Christ ever publicly claim to be the Messiah? It's all a part of the pattern. His disappearance a year ago was supposed to symbolize Christ's sojourn in the wilderness, and his #V harangues are supposed to symbolize the ministry in Galilee; his antisocial demonstration in Seneca Square the other night was supposed to represent Christ's conflict with the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin. He's deliberately seeking both persecution and prosecution now, and probably will contrive some way of attaining symbolic crucifixion." "But why?" Brett demanded. Linda's eyes were on the chequered tablecloth. Sadness routed the bitterness from her voice. "Because he's sick," she said. "Though of course he thinks that we are the ones who are sick and that he is the physician come to cure us. By playing Christ he hopes to change society -- eliminate the automobile, the Raceways, and so forth. His perspective is so warped that he can't realize that a high traffic fatality rate is the only effective way to counterbalance population increase; that the public's endorsement of the Church of the Happy Traveler is not the result of materialism but of economic pressure ; or that economic pressure is merely a civilized way of saying 'fear of hunger'. Considering the economic importance of the automobile to the average consumer, its apotheosis isn't any more abnormal than the fertility rites of the ancient Egyptians, or the worship of the rain gods by the Zuni." "You seem to know a lot about him," Brett said. "Why are you so interested in him?" "Because -- Oh, never mind. I don't want to talk about him any more!" She raised her eyes and the desperation in them astonished him. "It's so close in here. Can't we go riding somewhere?" "The Raceway?" "Yes. Yes. The Raceway. And drive fast, Mark. Fast... The Construction Engineer was apprehended the next morning. Brett was eating a late breakfast when the bulletin bulb on his #V turned red and began to buzz. He went into the living room and toed the set on, depressing the channel pedal till the buzzing stopped and the light went off. A familiar room appeared on the screen and Brett recognized it as the vicarage office. There was the bench, and there was the acolyte's window, and beyond the window -- Brett gasped. He had never seen so many overturned tables and chairs before, so many papers of all description scattered about. In the middle of the shambles stood the Seneca Dealer, and beside him stood On-the-spot Harrigan, the traveling newscaster. An interview was in progress. The Dealer was saying. "He performed the whole sacrilegious act right in front of me. But as I said, I couldn't raise a finger to stop him. There was something about the way he looked at me -- As though -- As though he felt sorry for me." "But why should he feel sorry for you of all people, Father?" "I don't know," the Dealer said. "Well all I can say is he should have saved his pity for himself," On-the-spot Harrigan said meaningfully. "He's going to need it." He turned and faced the eye of the #V camera. "Yes folks," he went on, "he's going to need it real bad. For our minions of the law have him safely in custody, and Mr. District Attorney assures me that he'll have this infamous scoundrel shackled in the brig of the prison ship before Turn-In Friday." Brett toed off the set and returned to his breakfast. He wondered what Linda would have to say regarding this new development. She didn't say anything about it. She was pale and listless when he picked her up that night, and all she wanted to do was ride on the Raceway. He couldn't drive fast enough to suit her. Brett was disgusted. He'd planned to propose to her, but you couldn't propose to a girl while you were hurtling at a one hundred thirty mile per hour clip through a veritable river of cars. He decided to wait till he took her home, but when he pulled up before Building # she got out of the car before he had a chance to say a word; then, as though remembering his existence, she leaned through the open window and kissed him warmly on the lips. "I know I've been terribly poor company," she said. "But I'll make up for it tomorrow night." "Promise?" Brett said. "Promise!" And then she was gone and he was sitting alone in the car. It began to rain and he drove home in the rain, wondering if he was going to get the Bluebird after all. There was only one day left. He proposed to her the next night. He didn't wait for the right moment, the right background, the right anything. Time was running out, and not only that, there was a desperation inside him that he could not analyze, that he was afraid to analyze. "Will you marry me, Linda?" he said when she answered his knock. She paused in the doorway, lovely in her white dress. She did not close the door behind her as she had the night before and he could see the bare peeling walls of the apartment behind her. She said: "You can't be serious, Mark!" "Yes I can." The huskiness of his voice surprised him. His words sounded sincere even to himself. Apparently they sounded sincere to Linda too, for she said, "When?" "Right now," Brett said. His heart was pounding painfully and it was all he could do to keep from taking her in his arms and kissing away whatever objections she might have. His passion for the Bluebird astonished him; he could not recall a time when the prospect of getting a car had had so profound an effect upon his emotions. "You forgot one thing," Linda said. "When you propose to a girl you're supposed to tell her you love her." Her large limpid eyes were on his face as though daring him to say the words. A little ways down the hall a husband-wife fight was in progress, and from somewhere nearby a baby was squalling lustily. But even though the background was definitely detrimental to romance, Brett found that he could say the words easily. "I love you," he said. Her eyes dropped then. "I'll get my things," she said. She had pitifully few belongings: an armful of clothes, a handful of trinkets, and a half dozen books. Most of the books, Brett noticed, were written by the same author -- someone named Freud. He helped her carry them down to the car. By ten o'clock they were man and wife, thanks to the efficiency of the marriage processing bureau which was open twenty-four hours a day. Across the street from the marriage bureau was the separation bureau which maintained the same hours and the same efficiency. "I think the occasion calls for champagne," Brett said. "But darling, it's fabulously expensive." "We aren't going to drink an ocean of it. Just a glass or two. I've got the midnight turn tonight, so that's all we'll have time for anyway." He chose a glittering bar on the business boulevard not far from the Seneca Cathedral. Czech was there, sipping a Dream Girl at the bar. Brett waved to him as he ushered Linda to a private table, and Czech waved back, his eyes protuberant with surprise. Linda gave a little start when Czech's eyes met hers. She glanced away quickly. At first Brett felt self-conscious about being out with a White Collar girl; then he remembered that this particular girl was his wife and his self-consciousness was supplanted by pride. His pride, in turn, was supplanted by bewilderment : why in the world should he feel proud of Linda? The inevitable #V screen iridesced behind the bar, strategically located so that it was visible -- and audible -- to every customer in the place. Brett didn't want to watch #V, but when he saw the direction Linda's eyes had taken, his own eyes followed. A bulletin had just been issued. The Construction Engineer had been tried, found guilty of cardesecration, and sentenced to hard labor for the rest of his life in the Foundation mines. Two car thieves had received similar sentences at the same tribunal, and all three sentences were to be carried out immediately. The scene shifted from the studio and the announcer to the spaceport. On-the-spot Harrigan was standing at the foot of a mobile Jacob's lift. On the platform of the lift stood three men manacled together. Brett recognized the man in the middle as the Construction Engineer. "You cannot sin against your society and survive," On-the-spot Harrigan said sententiously. "The three prisoners you see standing before you have cheated on the Ride and now they must pay the Chauffeur." He raised one arm dramatically and the platform began to rise. The camera followed it. The three men stood pale and silent, their faces touched by starlight. Presently the bright rectangle of the open lock came into view and the platform stopped. Two guards stepped forth and ushered the prisoners into the ship. The lock swung shut and the scene faded out. Brett became aware of Linda's fingers digging into his wrist. When he turned to her the whiteness of her face frightened him. "That ship," she said. "It's the one we saw that night we parked on that hill, isn't it?" "That's the one," Brett said. "It blasts at dawn tomorrow -- "And the hill we were parked on. What was its name?" "Skull Hill. You haven't touched your champagne." "Skull Hill. Of course. The pattern was too perfect, it might never occur again. The fool, the poor, pitiful fool..." Her eyes glistened oddly in the rose-tinted light of the table lamp. Brett looked at her for a moment, wanting to question her, and yet reluctant to question her because he was afraid he might get answers he did not want to hear. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Czech was looking at her too, staring at her as though he couldn't get over the fact that his turn buddy had fallen for a White Collar girl. Again the sequence of self-consciousness, pride, and bewilderment ran its gamut of Brett's emotions. But this time another phase was added. Realization. With a shock he recognized his real reason for marrying Linda. The Bluebird, for all its chrome and grandeur, had been nothing more than a rationalization, a means whereby he could fit an incongruous item into his rigid set of values. And the item was love... Brett stood up. "We can go home if you want to," he said. He took her arm and escorted her proudly to the door. He hoped that Czech was still watching but he did not turn his head to look. Suddenly he felt sorry for Czech. The #-# man had tapped # and when Brett took over the heat was still running into the pit ladle. He gave #a drink while he was waiting and by the time he replaced the hot metal ladle the last of #'s contents had run out and Czech was already pouring the heat. Brett dried #'s bottom with the robo-shoveler and closed the tap hole. He started number I charger on the limestone charge. Czech called. "Where'd you meet the Finance Bishop's secretary?" Brett had anticipated the call but he hadn't anticipated the question. He'd anticipated a number of other questions and he had his answers ready. But this one caught him unprepared. "Whose secretary?" "The F. B.'s. Don't tell me you didn't know she works for His Holiness himself!" The control booth seemed suddenly cold. "She's some number all right," Czech went on when he got no answer. "White Collar girl or not! I saw her Sunday morning when I went before the F. B. She was just leaving when I got there. I heard her tell His Holiness she had an important appointment, and away she went! Where'd you meet her?" The suspicion in Brett's mind was as yet no more than a minuscule seed but it was germinating rapidly. "I'll tell you later," he said. "The scrap charge just came up and I've got to get it started." He couldn't feel his fingers they were so numb, but they were so familiar with the console of the r.c. panel that they directed the charge of their own accord. The whole pattern of Linda's deceit emerged and arrayed itself mockingly before his eyes. She had known about the Finance Bishop's new restriction long before anyone else -- months in advance, probably -- and she had seen in it an opportunity to escape from the sidewalks to the boulevard, from the crumbling canyons of Center City to the idyllic garages of Peripheral City, from poverty to security ; and above all she had seen an opportunity to get the Bluebird. As secretary to the Finance Bishop she had access to the dossier of every car owner in the city. She had known which marriageable car owners would be affected by the new restriction and to find the most likely prospect she had merely needed to study their character analyses, their personal histories, and their financial statuses. She had finally narrowed the prospects down -- probably after a great deal of deliberation -- to a single name : Marcus Brett. As secretary to the Finance Bishop she also had access to the floor plan of every cathedral in the city. To arrange a meeting at the most opportune moment all she had had to do was vacate the seat next to Brett's. This she had done by deliberately neglecting to process Czech's last ten payments, by calling the Finance Bishop's attention to Czech's payment record a day or two before Display Sunday, and by coinciding Czech's appointment with the Finance Bishop with the unveiling of the Bluebird. The rest had been a gamble -- a gamble abetted by a perfume that was probably aphrodisiacal, a baby face, a goddess-figure, and a proficiency in the art of dissimulation. Brett's fingers were no longer numb. They were taut and purposeful, depressing combinations of switches with cold efficiency. He took a test bar of #. He filled the manganese pan for #. He gave # a shot of spar. The pit phone rang. Brett let it ring. morning Linda had disappeared. The windows of the overhead apartment were gray with dawn and the bulletin bulb was buzzing angrily. When he went into the living room Brett saw the folded sheet of paper propped before the #V screen. Wonderingly, he picked it up and unfolded it. He read the hastily written words in the red light of the bulletin bulb: Dear Mark , Czech recognized me tonight and by now he has probably told you where he saw me. No doubt you've guessed part of the truth and no doubt you hate me. When I tell you the whole truth you will despise me. Five years ago my mother was horribly mutilated in a ten car pileup on the Raceway. She lived for almost a year , if you can call  existence without a face , without sight, without hearing, without vocal chords, living. My father never left her side. The only sound she ever made was a thin whistling sound. I heard it only once. He must have heard it many times. My father is the Construction Engineer. After my mother's death, he went back to work. That is, part of him went back to work. The rest of him brooded. He did not break down till a year ago at the laying of the cornerstone of the Seneca Memorial Trust Building, and he did not break down then, really; the inner part of him took over -- the part that had exhaustively systematized the factors that resulted in my mother's death and discovered that society was to blame. I reacted to my mother's death differently. I was young and I had only heard the whistling sound once. To me my mother's death was tragic, but I did not hold society responsible. Society was nothing more to me than a musty concept and had nothing to do with the glittering galaxy of objects almost within my reach -- objects made all the more desirable by my father's refusal to let me touch them. Shortly after my mother's accident I was taken out of tech school and forbidden to ride in any kind of car whatsoever. My friends refused to associate with me; the world I had taken for granted came tumbling down around me. Owning a car of my own became more than a conditioned reflex for me: it became an obsession. I was twenty-one when my father began his symbolical acts. That was when I left home. I never saw him again till last week when he came to Center City and asked me to hide him from the police. Yesterday morning he left the apartment and committed his penultimate symbolic act -- the overturning of the tables in the "temple". When I left home there was no place for me to go except Center City. ( All my near relatives are listed in the traffic fatality files). My technical education had been cut short, so I couldn't obtain a respectable position; however, I was literate enough to obtain a white collar job, and I finally did obtain one -- with the Finance Bishop. I had only one aim in life -- to get a car. The opportunity I had been waiting for turned up two months ago when the Finance Bishop drafted his new restriction. I selected you as the most logical prospect and contrived to meet you. That much you probably know already. What you don't know is that part of the F.B.'s restriction never got through to the Dealers -- the proviso that reads: "Any person who has defaulted on more than two payments during the recent caryear and who chooses alternative number # ( marriage ) must agree to forfeit his or her purchase to his or her marriage partner in the event of a divorce or an annulment." I saw to it that it didn't go through -- but it'll be a part of the contract you'll sign tomorrow. Now you merely hate me. But in a moment you'll despise me. When you were eight you fell inlove with, your mother. You fell in love with her in an apple orchard on an afternoon in June, and the apple trees were in blossom. It's all there in your dossier. Finance psycho-analysts, like all psycho-analysts, are primarily interested in the Oedipal phase, even when it is normal. All children fall in love with their sexually opposite parent at one time or another, and to a varying degree, carry the parent's imago in their mind. But the imago is not merely a mental picture of the parent: it is a composite memory , a memory compounded of surroundings and sound; of sight and smell and taste. My perfume called your mother to your mind, whether you were aware of it or not. The taste of her lip rouge was enough to complete the illusion (I had access to her dossier too, and I had the rouge made especially.) The combined attack upon the two senses brought back the feeling of security and love which you once felt in your mother's presence, and reawakened your idealization of her. And you transferred that idealization to me. In retrospect it seems fantastic that I should have gone to such extremes to acquire an object which, now that I can acquire it, means utterly nothing to me. When you sign the contract tomorrow you needn't worry about the proviso. I don't want the Bluebird. I was glossing over the truth when I said that the apotheosis of the automobile wasn't any more abnormal than the fertility rites of the ancient Egyptians or the worship of the rain gods by the Zuhi. I wanted to prove to you -- and thereby prove to myself -- that my father was wrong in his denunciation of the Church of the Happy Traveler. Fear of hunger seldom gives birth to noble concepts, and hucksters are poor substitutes for men of God. My father was right in everything he said. You're wondering by now what made, me change my mind, and why I'm writing this. I have been sitting here in this absurd overhead apartment ever since you left. thinking of how clever I have been. But I forgot one thing -- the most important thing of all. I forgot that I, too, had been a child once, and that I had fallen in love with my sexually opposite parent. Do you know when I fell in love with my father, Mark? I fell in love with him the first time he took me riding on the Raceway. Linda Brett stood in the gray room waiting for the hatred to rise in him. He stood there waiting for a long time, cold and empty. Presently he became aware of the buzzing of the bulletin bulb and he turned the #V set on and depressed the channel pedal till the buzzing stopped and the light went out. There on the screen before him was the prison ship, gaunt in the dawnlight. Behind it was Skull Hill, its blackened top a smudge against the pinkening sky. On the edge of the man-made cliff bordering the blast pit stood a tiny figure -- unidentifiable to the casual observer, unmistakable to Brett. His emptiness left him abruptly, and he realized why he had been unable to feel hatred. The sight of Linda standing there awaiting cremation in the backwash of the prison ship brought home to him the truth that love is a thing-initself, unrelated to the factors that motivate it. And then he was running down the stairs to the garage and climbing into the Seneca -- and remembering, almost too late, the death trap he had set for thieves. The bullet struck Brett in the shoulder as he made a convulsive effort to get out of the car. He felt no pain, only numbness, and the numbness spread all through him, turning into rage. He bent and tore the deadly mechanism from its fastenings and hurled it, trailing wires and all, against the back of the garage, all the while marveling how any human being could value a possession more highly than he valued his own life. He drove furiously through the streets of Peripheral City, finally gained the Raceway. With luck he could reach her in time and with more luck he could get her to safety before the prison ship blasted. Just before he came to the turnoff he passed a four car pileup -- two Senecas, an Oneida, and a Cortez. The cars were mangled and there were mangled bodies in them, and shattered glass and blood intermingled on the macadam. The salvage crew was already on the scene, separating flesh from metal. As usual, there were no survivors. Brett had seen a thousand pileups but none of them had ever bothered him. This one, why he did not know, horrified him. He kept seeing the flesh and the metal and the blood long after he had left the Raceway behind, and for the first time he asked himself the question : W hy? The spires of the ships came into view against the brightening sky and Brett slowed. He noticed an acrid odor and traced it to the shorted wires behind the dash. His Seneca was on fire! His every instinct screamed for him to stop and extinguish the flames but the thought of Linda standing on the blackened hilltop froze his foot to the accelerator and his eyes to the sky where, any moment, he expected to see the prison ship rise on an incandescent geyser. A barrier had been erected across the entrance to Skull Hill Seneca on the shoulder of the highway and fumbled beneath the seat for the fire extinguisher. Abruptly the Brobdingnagian voice of the port tower came to life -- "The Gethsemane now blasting from pit #. Payload: sixty prisoners for occupational assignment. Destination: Alpha Crucis Fourteen... "One minute -- " Brett stood paralyzed, the fire extinguisher in his hands. "Fifty-nine seconds -- " Without a car as a down payment he would never be able to buy the Bluebird. "Fifty-eight seconds -- " He would lose his job, his garage, his social status -- "Fifty-seven seconds -- " Everything he had valued so highly, everything -- except Linda -- "Fifty-six seconds -- " The fire extinguisher slipped from Brett's fingers and he began running up the hill. As he ran, a burden slipped from his shoulders and his heart found a new rhythm -- a cadence that pounded through his whole body apprising his every cell of the new freedom. "Nineteen seconds -- " He glimpsed the hull of the (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Paul Orban love story Everything was aimed at satisfying the whims of women. The popular cliches , the pretty romances, the catchwords of advertising became realities; and the compound kept the men enslaved. George knew what he had to do... obediently George clattered down the steps from his confinement cubicle over the garage. His mother's chartreuse-colored Cadillac convertible purred to a stop in the drive. "It's so sweet of you to come, Georgie," his mother said when George opened the door for her. "Whenever you need me, Mummy." It was no effort at all to keep the sneer out of his voice. Deception had become a part of his character. His mother squeezed his arm. "I can always count on my little boy to do the right thing." "Yes, Mummy." They were mouthing a formula of words. They were both very much aware that if George hadn't snapped to attention as soon as the duty bell rang, he risked being sentenced, at least temporarily, to the national hero's corps. Still in the customary, martyr's whisper, George's mother said, "This has been such a tiring day. A man can never understand what a woman has to endure, Georgie; my life is such an ordeal." Her tone turned at once coldly practical. "I've two packages in the trunk; carry them to the house for me." George picked up the cardboard boxes and followed her along the brick walk in the direction of the white, Colonial mansion where his mother and her two daughters and her current husband lived. George, being a boy, was allowed in the house only when his mother invited him, or when he was being shown off to a prospective bride. George was nineteen, the most acceptable marriage age; because he had a magnificent build and the reputation for being a good boy, his mother was rumored to be asking twenty thousand shares for him. As they passed the rose arbor, his mother dropped on the wooden seat and drew George down beside her. "I've a surprise for you, George -- a new bidder. Mrs. Harper is thinking about you for her daughter." "Jenny Harper?" Suddenly his throat was dust dry with excitement. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Georgie?" "Whatever arrangement you make, Mummy." Jenny Harper was one of the few outsiders George had occasionally seen as he grew up. She was approximately his age, a stunning, dark-eyed brunette. "Jenny and her mother are coming to dinner to talk over a marriage settlement." Speculatively she ran her hand over the tanned, muscle-hard curve of his upper arm. "You're anxious to have your own woman, aren't you, George?" "So I can begin to work for her, Mummy." That, at least, was the correct answer, if not an honest one. "And begin taking the compound every day." His mother smiled. "Oh, I know you wicked boys! Put on your dress trunks tonight. We want Jenny to see you at your best." She got up and strode toward the house again. George followed respectfully two paces behind her. As they passed beyond the garden hedge, she saw the old business coupe parked in the delivery court. Her body stiffened in anger. "Why is your father home so early, may I ask?" It was an accusation, rather than a question. "I don't know, Mother. I heard my sisters talking in the yard; I think he was taken sick at work." "Sick! Some men never stop pampering themselves." "They said it was a heart attack or -- "Ridiculous; he isn't dead, is he? Georgie, this is the last straw. I intend to trade your father in today on a younger man." She snatched the two packages from him and stormed into the house. Since his mother hadn't asked him in, George returned to his confinement cubicle in the garage. He felt sorry, in an impersonal way, for the husband his mother was about to dispose of, but otherwise the fate of the old man was quite normal. He had outlived his economic usefulness; George had seen it happen before. His real father had died a natural death -- from strain and overwork -- when George was four. His mother had since then bought four other husbands; but, because boys were brought up in rigid isolation, George had known none of them well. For the same reason, he had no personal friends. He climbed the narrow stairway to his cubicle. It was already late afternoon, almost time for dinner. He showered and oiled his body carefully, before he put on his dress trunks, briefs made of black silk studded with seed pearls and small diamonds. He was permitted to wear the jewels because his mother's stockholdings were large enough to make her an Associate Director. His family status gave George a high marriage value and his Adonis physique kicked the asking price still higher. At nineteen he stood more than six feet tall, even without his formal, highheeled boots. He weighed one hundred and eighty-five, not an ounce of it superfluous fat. His skin was deeply bronzed by the sunlamps in the gym; his eyes were sapphire blue; his crewcut was a platinum blond -- thanks to the peroxide wash his mother made him use. Observing himself critically in the full-length mirror, George knew his mother was justified in asking twenty thousand shares for him. Marriage was an essential part of his own plans; without it revenge was out of his reach. He desperately hoped the deal would be made with Jenny Harper. A young woman would be far less difficult for him to handle. When the oil on his skin was dry, he lay down on his bunk to catch up on his required viewing until the duty bell called him to the house. The automatic circuit snapped on the television screen above his bunk; wearily George fixed his eyes on the unreeling love story. For as long as he could remember, television had been a fundamental part of his education. A federal law required every male to watch the TV romances three hours a day. Failure to do so -- and that was determined by monthly form tests mailed out by the Directorate -- meant a three month sentence to the national hero's corps. If the statistics periodically published by the Directorate were true, George was a relatively rare case, having survived adolescence without serving a single tour of duty as a national hero. For that he indirectly thanked his immunity to the compound. Fear and guilt kept him so much on his toes, he grew up an amazingly well-disciplined child. George was aware that the television romances were designed to shape his attitudes and his emotional reactions. The stories endlessly repeated his mother's philosophy. All men were pictured as beasts crudely dominated by lust. Women, on the other hand, were always sensitive, delicate, modest, and intelligent; their martyrdom to the men in their lives was called love. To pay for their animal lusts, men were expected to slave away their lives earning things -- kitchen gadgets, household appliances, fancy cars, luxuries and stockholdings -- for their patient, long-suffering wives. And it's all a fake! George thought. He had seen his Mother drive two men to their graves and trade off two others because they hadn't produced luxuries as fast as she demanded. His mother and his pinch-faced sisters were pampered, selfish, rock-hard Amazons; by no conceivable twist of imagination could they be called martyrs to anything. That seemed self-evident, but George had no way of knowing if any other man had ever reasoned out the same conclusion. Maybe he was unique because of his immunity to the compound. He was sure that very few men -- possibly none -- had reached marriage age with their immunity still undiscovered. George was lucky, in a way: he knew the truth about himself when he was seven, and he had time to adjust to it -- to plan the role he had been acting for the past twelve years. His early childhood had been a livid nightmare, primarily because of the precocious cruelty of his two sisters. Shortly before his seventh birthday they forced him to take part in a game they called cocktail party. The game involved only one activity: the two little girls filled a glass with an unidentified liquid, and ordered George to drink. Afterward, dancing up and down in girlish glee, they said they had given him the compound. George had seen the love stories on television; he knew how he was expected to act. He gave a good performance -- better than his sisters realized, for inside his mind George was in turmoil. They had given him the compound (true, years before he should have taken it), and nothing had happened. He had felt absolutely nothing; he was immune ! If anyone had ever found out, George would have been given a life sentence to the national hero's corps; or, more probably, the Morals Squad would have disposed of him altogether. From that day on, George lived with guilt and fear. As the years passed, he several times stole capsules of the compound from his mother's love-cabinet and gulped them down. Sometimes he felt a little giddy, and once he was sick. But he experienced no reaction which could possibly be defined as love. Not that he had any idea what that reaction should have been, but he knew he was supposed to feel very wicked and he never did. Each failure increased the agony of guilt; George drove himself to be far better behaved than he was required to be. He dreaded making one mistake. If his mother or a Director examined it too closely, they might find out his real secret. George's basic education began when he was assigned to his confinement room above the garage after his tenth birthday. Thereafter his time was thoroughly regulated by law. Three hours a day he watched television; three hours he spent in his gym, building a magnificent -- and salable -- body ; for four hours he listened to the educational tapes. Arithmetic, economics, salemanship, business techniques, accounting, mechanics, practical science : the things he had to know in order to earn a satisfactory living for the woman who bought him in marriage. He learned nothing else and as he grew older he became very conscious of the gaps in his education. For instance, what of the past? Had the world always been this sham he lived in? That question he had the good sense not to ask. But George had learned enough from his lessons in practical science to guess what the compound really was, what it had to be: a mixture of aphrodisiacs and a habit-forming drug. The compound was calculated to stir up a man's desire to the point where he would give up anything in order to satisfy it. Boys were given increased doses during their adolescence; by the time they married, they were addicts, unable to leave the compound alone. George couldn't prove his conclusion. He had no idea how many other men had followed the same line of reasoning and come up with the same answer. But why was George immune? There was only one way he could figure it: it must have happened because his sisters gave him the first draft when he was seven. But logically that didn't make much sense. Bachelors were another sort of enemy : men who shirked their duty and deserted their wives. It seemed unreasonable to believe a man could desert his wife, when first he had to break himself of addiction to the compound. George had always supposed that bachelor was a boogy word contrived to frighten growing children. As a consequence, he was very surprised when the house next door was raided. Through the window of his confinement cubicle, he actually saw the five gray-haired men who were rounded up by the Morals Squad. The Squad -- heavily armed, six-foot Amazons -- tried to question their captives. They used injections of a truth serum. Two of the old men died at once. The others went berserk, frothing at the mouth and screaming animal profanity until the Squad captain ordered them shot. George overheard one of the women say, "It's always like this. They take something so our serum can't be effective." Later that afternoon George found a scrap of paper in his mother's garden. It had blown out of the bonfire which the Morals Squad made of the papers they took out of the house next door. The burned page had apparently been part of an informational bulletin, compiled by the bachelors for distribution among themselves. "... data compiled from old publications," the fragment began, "and interpreted by our most reliable authorities." At that point a part of the page was burned away. "...and perhaps less than ninety years ago men and women lived in equality. The evidence on that point is entirely conclusive. The present matriarchy evolved by accident, not design. Ninety years ago entertainment and advertising were exclusively directed at satisfying a woman's whim. No product was sold without some sort of tie-in with women. Fiction, drama, television, motion pictures -- all glorified a romantic thing called love. In that same period business was in the process of taking over government from statesmen and politicians. Women, of course, were the stockholders who owned big business, although the directors and managers at that time were still men -- operating under the illusion Of IF, published bi-monthly at Buffalo, New York, for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher , Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y.; Editor, James L. Quinn, # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y.; Managing editor , None. Business manager , None. #. The owner is (if owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I per cent or more of total amount of stock) : Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y.; James L, Quinn, # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: None, #. The two paragraphs next above, giving the names of owners, stockholders, and security holders, if any, contain not only the list of stockholders and security holders as they appear upon the books of the company but also, in cases where the stockholders or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, is given; also that the said two paragraphs contain statements embracing affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner; and this affiant has no reason to believe that any other person, association, or corporation has any interest direct or indirect in the said stock, bonds, or other securities than as so stated by him. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only) . James L. Quinn, Editor. Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September, #. that they were the executives who represented ownership. In effect, however, women owned the country and women governed it; suddenly the matriarchy existed. There is no evidence that it was imposed; there is no suggestion of civil strife or..." More words burned away. "However, the women were not unConsequently the popular cliches, the pretty romances, and the catchwords of advertising became a substitute for reality. As for the compound... There the fragment ended. Much of it George did not understand. But it gave him a great deal of courage simply to know the bachelors actually existed. He began to plan his own escape to a bachelor hideout. He would have no opportunity, no freedom of any sort, until he married. Every boy was rigidly isolated in his confinement cubicle, under the watchful eye of his mother's spy-cameras, until he was bought in his first marriage. Then, as he thought more about it, George realized there was a better way for him to use his immunity. He couldn't be sure of finding a bachelor hideout before the Morals Squad tracked him down. But George could force his bride to tell him where the compound was made, since he was not an addict and she could not use the compound to enslave him. Once he knew the location of the factory, he would destroy it. How, he wasn't sure; he didn't plan that far ahead. If the supply of the drug could be interrupted, many hundreds of men might be goaded into making a break for the hills. snapped to attention on the edge of his bunk. He saw his mother waving from the back door of her house. "I'll be down right away, Mummy." His mother was waiting for him in the pantry. Under the glaring overhead light he stopped for her last minute inspection. She used a pocket-stick to touch up a spot on his chest where the oil gleam had faded a little. And she gave him a glass of the compound to drink. "Jenny really wants to marry you, George," she confided. "I know the symptoms; half our battle's won for us. And my former husband won't be around to worry us with his aches and pains. I made the trade this afternoon." He followed her into the dining room where the cocktails were being served. Aside from the Harpers, George's mother had rented two handsome, muscular escorts for his sisters. In the confusion, George saw jenny Harper's mother stealthily lace his water glass with a dose of the compound. He suppressed a grin. Apparently she was anxious to complete the deal, too. George found it almost impossible to hold back hilarious laughter when Jenny herself shyly pressed a capsule of the compound into his hand and asked him to use it. Three full-size slugs of the drug! George wondered what would have happened if he hadn't been immune. Fortunately, he knew how to act the lusty, eager, drooling male which each of the women expected. The negotiations moved along without a hitch. George's mother held out for twenty-eight thousand shares, and got it. The only problem left was the date for the wedding, and Jenny settled that very quickly. "I want my man. Mom," she said, "and I want him now." Jenny always got what she wanted. When she and her mother left that evening, she held George's hand in hers and whispered earnestly, "So they were married and lived happily ever after. That's the way it's going to be with us, isn't it, George?" "It's up to you, Jenny; for as long as you want me." That was the conventional answer which he was expected to make, but he saw unmasked disappointment in her face. She wanted something more genuine, with more of himself in it. He felt suddenly sorry for her, for the way he was going to use her. She was a pretty girl, even sweet and innocent -- if those words still had any real meaning left after what his mother's world had done to them. Under other circumstances, George would have looked forward with keen pleasure to marrying Jenny. As it was, Jenny Harper was first a symbol of the fakery he intended to destroy, and after that a woman. Five days later they were married. In spite of the short engagement, Mrs. Harper and George's mother managed to put on a splendid show in the church. George received a business sedan from his mother, the traditional gift given every bridegroom; and from Mrs. Harper he received a good job in a company where she was the majority stockholder. And so, in the customary pageantry and ceremony, George became Mr. Harper. "Think of it -- Mr. Harper," Jenny sighed, clinging to his arm. "Now you're really mine, George." On the church steps the newlyweds posed for photographs -- George in the plain, white trunks which symbolized a first marriage; Jenny in a dazzling cloud of fluff, suggestively nearly transparent. Then Mrs. Harper drew Jenny aside and whispered in her daughter's ear: the traditional telling of the secret. Now Jenny knew where the compound was manufactured; and for George revenge was within his grasp. George's mother had arranged for their honeymoon at Memory Lodge, a resort not far from the Directorate capital in Hollywood. It was the national capital as well, though everyone conscientiously maintained the pretense that Washington, with an all-male Congress, still governed the country. George considered himself lucky that his mother had chosen Memory Lodge. He had already planned to dese'rt Jenny in the mountains. George knew how to drive; his mother had wanted him to do a great deal of chauffeuring for her. But he had never driven beyond town, and he had never driven anywhere alone. His mother gave him a map on which his route to the lodge was indicated in bright red. In the foothills George left the marked highway on a paved side road. He gambled that Jenny wouldn't immediately realize what he had done, and the gamble paid off. Still wearing her nearly transparent wedding gown, she pressed close to him and ran her hands constantly over his naked chest, thoroughly satisfied with the man she had bought. In the church George had been given a tall glass of the compound; he acted the part Jenny expected. But it was far less a role he played than George wanted to admit. His body sang with excitement. He found it very difficult to hold the excitement in check. If he had been addicted to the compound, it would have been out of the question. More than ever before he sympathized with the men who were enslaved by love. In spite of his own immunity, he nearly yielded to the sensuous appeal of her caress. He held the wheel so hard his knuckles went white ; he clenched his teeth until his jaw ached. All afternoon George drove aimless mountain roads, moving deeper into the uninhabited canyons. Carefully judging his distances with an eye on the map, he saw to it that he remained relatively close to the city; after he forced Jenny to give him the information he wanted, he wanted to be able to get out fast. By dusk the roads he drove were no longer paved. Ruts carved deep by spring rains suggested long disuse. The swaying of the car and the constant grinding of gears eventually jolted Jenny out of her romantic dreams. She moved away from George and sat looking at the pines which met above the road. "We're lost, aren't we?" she asked. "What's that?" he shouted to be heard above the roar of the motor. "Lost!" For a minute or two longer he continued to drive until he saw an open space under the trees. He pulled the car into the clearing and snapped off the ignition. Then he looked Jenny full in the face and answered her. "No, Jenny, we aren't lost; I know exactly what I'm doing." "Oh." He was sure she had understood him, but she said, "We can spend the night here and find the lodge in the morning. It's a pity we didn't bring something to eat." She smiled ingenuously. "But I brought the compound; and we have each other." They got out of the car. Jenny looked up at the sunset, dull red above the trees, and shivered; she asked George to build a fire. He tucked the ignition key into the band of his white trunks and began to gather dry boughs and pine needles from the floor of the forest. He found several large branches and carried them back to the clearing. There was enough wood to last until morning -- whether he stayed that long or not. Jenny had lugged the seats and a blanket out of the car and improvised a lean-to close to the fire. He piled on two of the larger branches and the bright glow of flame lit their faces. She beckoned to him and gave him a bottle of the compound, watching bright-eyed as he emptied it. With her lips parted, she waited. He did nothing. Slowly the light died in her eyes. Like a savage she flung herself into his arms. He steeled himself to show absolutely no reaction and finally she drew away. Trembling and with tears in her eyes, she whispered, "The compound doesn't -- " The look of pain in her eyes turned to terror. "You're immune!" "Now you know." "But who told you -- " She searched his face, shaking her head. "You don't know, do you -- not really?" "Know what?" Instead of replying, she asked, "You brought me here deliberately, didn't you?" "So we wouldn't be interrupted. You see, Jenny, you're going to tell me where the compound's made." "It wouldn't do you any good. Don't you see -- " He closed his hands on her wrists and jerked her rudely to her feet. He saw her face go white. And no wonder: that magnificent, granite hard body, which she had bought in good faith for her own pleasure, was suddenly out of her control. He grinned. He crushed her mouth against his and kissed her. Limp in his arms, she clung to him and said in a choked, husky whisper, "I love you, George." "And you'll make any sacrifice for love," he replied, mocking the dialogue of the television love stories. "Yes, anything!" "Then tell me where the compound's manufactured." "Hold me close, George; never let me go." How many times had he heard that particular line! It sickened him, hearing it now from Jenny ; he had expected something better of her. He pushed her from him. By accident his fist raked her face. She fell back blood trickling from her mouth. In her eyes he saw shock and a vague sense of pain ; but both were overridden by adoration. She was like a whipped puppy, ready to lick his hand. "I'll tell you, George," she whispered. "But don't leave me." She pulled herself to her feet and stood beside him, reaching for his hand. "We make it in Hollywood, in the Directorate Building, the part that used to be a sound stage." "Thanks, Jenny." He picked up one of the car seats and walked back to the sedan. She stood motionless watching him. He fitted the seat in place and put the key in the lock. The starter ground away, but the motor did not turn over. He glanced back at Jenny. She was smiling inscrutably, "You see, George, you have to stay with me." He got out of the car and moved toward her. "I was afraid you were planning to desert me," she went on, "so I took out the distributor cap while you were getting the firewood." He stood in front of her. Coldly he demanded, "Where did you put it, Jenny?" She tilted her lips toward his. "Kiss and tell -- maybe." "I haven't time for games. Where is it?" His fist shot out. Jenny sprawled on the ground at his feet. Again he saw the pain and the adoration in her face. But that couldn't be right. She would hate him by this time. He yanked her to her feet. Her lips were still bleeding and blood came now from a wound in her cheek. Yet she managed to smile again. "I don't want to hurt you, Jenny," he told her. "But I have to have -- " "I love you, George. I never thought I'd want to give myself to a man. All the buying doesn't make any difference, does it? Not really. And I never knew that before!" With an unconscious movement, she kicked her train aside and he saw the distributor cap lying beneath it. He picked it up. She flung herself at him screaming. He felt the hammer beat of her heart; her fingers dug into his back like cat claws. Now it didn't matter. He had the secret; he could go whenever he wanted to. Nonetheless he pushed her away -- tenderly, and with regret. To surrender like this was no better than a capitulation to the compound. It was instinctively important to make her understand that. He knew that much, but his emotions were churned too close to fever pitch for him to reason out what else that implied. He clipped her neatly on the jaw and put her unconscious body on the ground by the fire. He left the map with her so she could find her way out in the morning; he knew it was really a very short hike to a highway, where she would be picked up by a passing car or truck. He drove out the way he had come in -- at least he tried to remember. Four times he took a wrong turn and had to backtrack. It was, therefore, dawn before he reached the outskirts of Hollywood. In any other city he would not have been conspicuous -- simply a man on his way to work ; only women slept late. However, Hollywood was off-limits to every male. The city was not only the seat of the Directorate, but the manufacturing center for the cosmetics industry. And since that gave women her charm, it was a business no man worked at. George had to have a disguise. He stopped on a residential street, where the people were still likely to be in their beds. He read names on mail boxes until he found a house where an unmarried woman lived. He had no way of knowing if she had a husband on approval with her, but the box was marked "Miss." With any luck he might have got what he wanted without disturbing her, but the woman was a light sleeper and she caught him as he was putting on the dress. He was sorry he had to slug her, but she gave him no resistance. A spark of hope, a spark of long-forgotten youth glowed in her eyes; before she slid into unconsciousness. Wearing the stolen dress, which fit him like a tent, and an enormous hat to hide his face, George parked his sedan near the Directorate and entered the building when it opened at eight. In room after room automatons demonstrated how to dress correctly ; robot faces displayed the uses of cosmetics. There were displays of kitchen gadgets, appliances, and other heavy machinery for the home; recorded lectures on stock management and market control. Here women came from every part of the country for advice, help and guidance. Here the Top Directors met to plan business policy, to govern the nation, and to supervise the production of the compound. For only the Top Directors -- less than a dozen women -- actually knew the formula. Like their stockholdings, the secret was hereditary, passed from mother to daughter. George searched every floor of the building, but found nothing except exhibit rooms. Time passed, and still he did not find what he had come for. More and more women crowded in to see the exhibits. Several times he found newcomers examining him oddly; he found he had to avoid the crowds. Eventually he went down steps into the basement, though a door marked "Keep Out." The door was neither locked nor guarded, but there was a remote chance it might lead to the production center for the compound. In the basement George found a mechanical operation underway; at first he took it for another cosmetic exhibit. Conveyor belts delivered barrels of flavoring syrup, alcohol and a widely advertised liquid vitamin compound. Machines sliced open the containers, dumping the contents into huge vats, from which pipes emptied the mixture into passing rows of bottles. The bottles : suddenly George recognized them and the truth dawned on him, sickeningly. Here was the manufacturing center for the compound -- but it might just as well have been a barn in Connecticut or a store window in Manhattan. No man was enslaved by the compound, for the compound did not exist. He was imprisoned by his own sense of guilt, his own fear of being different. George remembered his own fear and guilt; he knew how much a man could be driven to make himself conform to what he thought other men were like. His revenge was as foolish as the sham he wanted to destroy. He should have reasoned that out long ago; he should have realized it was impossible to have immunity to an addictive drug. But, no, George believed what he saw on the television programs. He was victimized as much as any man had ever been. He turned blindly toward the stairway, and from the shadows in the hall the Morals Squad closed in around him. With a final gesture of defiance, he ripped off the stolen dress and the absurd hat, and stood waiting for the blast from their guns. An old woman, wearing the shoulder insignia of a Top Director, pushed through the squad and faced him, a revolver in her hand. She was neither angry nor disturbed. Her voice, when she spoke, was filled with pity. Pity! That was the final indignity. "Now you know the truth," she said. "A few men always have to try it; and we usually let them see this room and find out for themselves before -- before we close the case." Tensely he demanded, "Just how much longer do you think -- " "We can get away with thus? As iong as men are human beings. It's easier to make yourself believe a lie if you think everyone else believes it, than to believe a truth you've found out on your own. All of us want more than anything else to be like other people. Women have created a world for you with television programs; you grow up observing nothing else; you make yourself fit into the pattern. Only a few independent-minded characters have the courage to accept their own immunity; most of them end up here, trying to do something noble for the rest of mankind. But you have one satisfaction, for what it's worth: you've been true to yourself." True to yourself. George found a strange comfort in the words, and his fear was gone. He squared his shoulders and faced the mouth of her gun. T rue to yourself : that was something worth dying for. He saw a flicker of emotion in the old woman's eyes. Admiration? He couldn't be sure. For at the moment a shot rang out from the end of the corridor; and the Top Director fell back, nursing a hand suddenly bright with blood. "Let him go." It was Jenny's voice. She was sheltered by a partly open door at the foot of the stairway. "Don't be a fool," the old woman replied. "He's seen too much." "It doesn't matter. Who would believe him?" "You're upset. You don't realize -- " "He's mine and I want him." "The Directorate will give you a refund of the purchase price." "You didn't understand me. I don't want one of your pretty automatons; anybody can buy them for a few shares of stock. I want a man -- a real man; I want to belong to him." "He belongs to you; you bought him." "And that's what's wrong. We really belong to each other." The old woman glanced at George and he saw the same flicker of feeling in her eyes. And tears, tears of regret. Why? "We have you outnumbered," the old woman said quietly to Jenny. "I don't care. I have a gun; I'll use it as long as I'm able." The Morals Squad raised their weapons. The Director shook her head imperiously and they snapped to attention again. "If you take him from us," she called out to Jenny, "you'll be outlawed. We'll hunt you down, if we can." "I want him," Jenny persisted. "I don't care about the rest of it." The old woman nodded to George. He couldn't believe that she meant it. The Director was on her home ground, in her headquarters building, backed by an armed squad of stone-faced Amazons. She had no reason to let him gShe walked beside him as he moved down the hall. When they were twenty feet from the guard, she closed her thin hand on his arm; her eyes swam with tears and she whispered, "There truly is a love potion. Not this nonsense we bottle here, but something real and very worthwhile. You and this girl have found it. I know that, from the way she talks. She doesn't say anything about ownership, and that's as it should be. As it has to be, for any of us to be happy. Hold tight to that all the rest of your life. Don't ever believe in words; don't fall for any more love stories; believe what you feel deep inside -- what you know yourself to be true. "You men who learn how to break away are our only hope, too. Most of us don't see that yet. I do; I know what it used to be like. Someday there may be enough men with the stamina to take back the place of dominance that we stole from them. We thought we wanted it; for decades before we had been screaming about women's rights." Her thin lips twisted in a sneer and she spat her disgust. "Finally we took what we wanted, and it turned to ashes in our hands. We made our men playthings; we made them slaves. And after that they weren't men any more. But what we stole isn't the sort of thing you can hand back on a silver platter; you men have to get enough courage to take it away from us." Her grip tightened on his arm. "There's a fire door at the end of the hall; if you push the emergency button, you'll close it. That will give you a five or ten minute start. I can't help you any more... They were abreast of Jenny. She seized Jenny's hand and thrust it into his. "Beat it, kids; there's a bachelor camp on the north ridge. You can make it. "And from here on in, what he says goes," the old woman added. "Don't forget that." "She won't," George answered, supremely self-assured. He took Jenny's arm and, turning abruptly, they made their break for freedom. The Director managed to remain standing in the middle of the corridor, making a dangerous target of herself so that none of the Morals Squad could risk a shot at the fugitives. As the fire door clanged shut George looked back. He saw the old woman's lips moving in silent prayer.    A I # Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. Each month takes you on an expedition to one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, from Sun-baked Mercury to Frigid Pluto.  # two-color illustrations  Scientifically accurate text with each illustration  Wonderful for your den  Printed in limited edition  Only I .# postpaid order  P. #. Box#-E Endorsed by The Society for the ' Advancement of Space Travel i I I ( Continued from page # ) Otto) Binder, Dr. Keller, Hugo Gemsback, Ray Cummings et al. In retrospect Russell was amused at how the year # had once held such a fatal fascination for him as a far distant year of mystery, glamor, excitement; when robots would be walking the streets, the TransAtlantic Tunnel would be a reality, and stratorockets would ply the transpolar route, # minutes from New York to London. I must confess that #I years ago, when I attended the first meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (then chapter ## of the S.F. League), I scarcely thought that I'd be attending most of the nearly # meetings thru the years to come and be Master of Ceremonies (shy guy and tongue-tied introverted youth that I was in those days) at the Adult Anniversary meeting. But the Hallowe'en organization in existence -- was its #st birthday, and I'm sure I'll be at the #th meeting and the quarter century mark as well. A salute to my pal Russ Flodgkins, Australian-born fan who's the only other charter member of the club who's a "survivor" to today. And the Anniversary meeting itself was hung out. Mark Clifton, Ed Clinton, Kris Neville, Mel Sturgis, Arthur J. and Wm. D. Cox, Henry Lee and Frank Quattrocchi were among the pro's present as Directrix Helen Urban, herself a selling sci-fi writer, banged the oaken gavel to call the memorable meeting together. A large number of congratulatory telegrams were received from around the world, (Jules Verne's Navy, that is). " Congratulations on #st Anniversary. I predict club meetings in future will take place regularly each week-day evening falling between Wednesday and Friday. -- Nostra Damus." Signed Sincerely Yours, countered a more loyal, kind, considerate; well-behaved, intelligent, morally straight and physically strong group , and my keeper says it's time for my electric shock treatment now. -- Robespierre Bloch." France: Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" to be filmed. Italy: #th issue of beautiful bi weekly sci-fi magazine, Urania, published. original scientifilm script by Frank Quattrocchi, to be produced here in widescreen and technicolor. That's All, Folks. -- fja What Is Your Science I. Q.? make sure you catch on the next time the hero is a "down to earth" scientist, test yourself on this quiz. Count # for each correct answer. A score of # is excellent! Answers on page #. I . The best conductor of electricity among the metals is . #. What is another name for a magnetic resonance accelerator? #. The lighter a gas the more it diffuses. #. Who originated the theory of probability? #. A positron is a particle having the same mass and magnitude of charge as . #. What is the term used to describe the changing of the speed of a reaction brought about by the introduction of a contact agent? #. The density of sea water is proportional to its temperature and increases with salinity. #. How many calories of heat are required for ice to change each gram of water at its melting point? #. # foot-pounds of work per minute are equal to -- horsepower. #. What term is used to describe the form of reproduction in which a female cell reproduces without fertilization by a male cell? #. Bottom waters of the ocean in all latitudes approach degrees Fahrenheit. #. In which direction do light waves vibrate in relation to the direction in which they are traveling? #. Standard pressure for scientific observations is established at pounds per square inch. #. Which color of the spectrum has the shortest wave length? #. Deuterium is a form of heavy . #. How many B.T.U.'s of heat are required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree? #. The velocity of sound increases about feet per second with every centigrade degree rise in the temperature of the air. #. Which element is used as the unit of comparison for deciding the valence numbers? #. Radiosondes are used in the study of meteorology. #. A Fahrenheit degree is equal to of a centigrade degree. (Continued from page #) flicker that would give a split-second warning of her next move. The warning came, and he was ahead of it. His shot struck Ann high on the right shoulder. Her second and last bullet ploughed into the dust midway between them. She twisted around from the force of the impact, and half slipped, half fell from the pedestal. But she kept herself erect, bracing against the pedestal with her left hand. A red blotch was spreading from her shoulder to her breast and down her side. There was shock and pain in her eyes, but the half-smile was still on her lips. "Une!" shouted the crowd, counting his first shot. Jacques no longer needed a will of his own. The momentum of a thousand deaths swept him along, overpowering everything else. "Deux!" screamed the hundred thousand voices. "Deux! Deux!" His second shot struck Ann well below the left shoulder, knocking her away from the support of the pedestal, sprawling her in the dust. Yet so indomitable was her will that she brought her hands together and raised herself to her knees. Her entire upper body was covered with dust and spreading fingers of crimson. "Trois!" shrieked the maddened crowd. "Trois! Trois!" Women tore away pieces of their clothing and waved them with savage abandon. "Trois! Trois! Trois!" The third shot could barely be heard. Ann was lifted from her knees and hurled backwards. She rolled over twice, then lay face downward, her fingers digging in the hard earth. With his last shot, the fierceness drained out of Jacques. He blinked like a man awakening from a horrible dream. He stared at Ann's shuddering body, not believing he could have done this. He cried out to her, and ran to her side with great, lunging steps. His body shook with dry sobs. He turned her over tenderly, smoothed back the tangled hair from her forehead, tried to wipe some of the dirt and bubbles of red from her lips. them with a microphone. With one terrible look, Jacques sent him scurrying back. "Ann... Ann..." he cried. "What have I done?" Her glazing, pain-filled eyes cleared for a moment, and drew him closer. In them, for all the pain, there was peace at last. No reproach, no disappointment. Only peace. And he knew then, what he should always have known: That when a man lived as one with Death, he could not give less to any person, nor expect more. Ann's fingers crawled through the dust and touched the toe of his boot. Her quivering lips twisted in a final grimace of ecstacy. And out of the lonely void of the dying came the words he had always hoped to hear, and would never hear again: "Good night," she whispered. "You -- were wonderful -- my lover -- my husband."    Dream cars of the future will have practically trouble-free motors. Experiments have proved that gas turbine engines are simpler and more rugged and will burn almost any liquid fuel including kerosene and cheap diesel oil. The new motor, which operates on the pinwheel principle, is inherently simple, with none of the clutch and shift jerks felt even in modern cars with automatic transmissions. The engine has few parts, only one of which requires workmanship to close tolerances. The only real moving part is the turbine, an efficient fan that converts jet blasts to turning motion. It is easy to take apart and put together and packs more power per pound of engine than the piston engine of today. Even telegraph operators can be replaced by machines. An electronic device is now ready that can translate international Morse code signals from radio beeps into typed copy. The robot radioman can handle signals produced by hand or machine keying and overcomes a major problem by automatically adjusting itself to different speeds of transmission. It can even compensate for the sender's change of pace within a single message. A new solar cooker folds up like an umbrella for carrying, but inverted in the sun it becomes so effective in concentrating the sun's heat that hot dogs can be roasted at the "handle" heat focus. The fabric of the cooker is a special reflecting plastic. Picnickers of tomorrow will be able to carry the cooker with them on a sunny day and prepare lunch without fuel or flame. Pilots in Australia are being trained to fly planes that catch falling parachute-borne rockets in midair. When the rockets begin to fall, a parachute opens. A plane with a #-foot paravane trailing slightly to one side then flies alongside the falling missile, and grapnels on the paravene cable grip on a cable trailing from the parachute. The "catch" is played like a fish on the line and the plane flies down a gully spanned by cables so that the rocket is transferred from the paravane to a cable, where it swings until collected. Antibiotic-burgers may be on the menu at the local diner soon. The presence of small amounts of aureomycin will keep hamburger meat from spoiling several days longer than meat kept under refrigeration. Experimenters have found that as little as ten parts of the antibiotic keeps the meat in good condition for at least ten days. The process is not yet commercially usable since the effects of the aureomycin on humans eating the meat has not yet been thoroughly studied. Evidence that the anti-proton actually exists was recently announced by the A.E.C. The negatively charged particle was created in the bevatron at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no known "practical" application of the anti-proton discovery; but it does verify the electrical charge symmetry of nature -- for each known charged particle there is a particle of equal mass with opposite charge. A new era of nuclear research, rivaling that which led to the atomic bomb, is foreseen as a result of this anti-proton creation. An aerial uranium detector designed for one-man pilot prospectors has been developed. The #pound scintillation counter has an automatic alarm that signals the pilot whenever an anomaly is passed. The counter can also be provided with a strip chart pen recorder and two indicating meters. Air "traffic cops" will need more and more radar to keep up with the mammoth air jam envisioned in the next ten years. The Civil Aeronautics Commission has a tenyear program set up to loosen the jam. This includes a secondary radar beacon system with an airborne device that returns signals so strong they can penetrate rain and fog. More important, the device returns a coded impulse for positive indentification of the plane. The new set up should be ready for installation early in #. Trackless wastelands will be broad highways for a new truck-train with huge balloon-like tires. The cross country carrier can crisscross the deserts, glide through jungles and roll over arctic snow without bogging down. Cars in the train are connected mechanically by a steering arrangement that makes every car follow the tracks of the lead truck. The train can climb steeper inclines than an auto and can. roll smoothly over stumps and ditches. Tires on the cars range up to ten feet in height. An automatic "seek-and-kill" system for submarine torpedoes that uses transistors instead of the conventional vacuum tubes has been developed. The new guided torpedo system eliminates the need for a thirty-second warm-up period before firing, uses less current and is more compact. Developed by Westinghouse Laboratories, the torpedo guides itself toward the enemy target by means of ultrasonic sound waves in the water. The establishment of the first civilian skin bank was announced recently. This followed on the heels of the development of a new technique for grafting the skin from recently dead bodies as a life-saving measure for persons with severe and extensive burns. When stored at ordinary refrigerator temperatures these post-mortem grafts can be used as long as three weeks after removal. The added factor of being able to use larger and larger patches with success has practically eliminated the need for live donors. Sir: Your World's Champion is a fraud, if we judge by # standards. Looky there, brass knuckles, wrist spikes and a bikini boxing outfit... and not a scar! Max Factor and Perc Westmore should live so long... or do such a cover up job. I can only conclude that their # equivalents have never been near her. I am also forced to conclude that this is her first, last and only defense of her championship, she having originally won it by sending in write-in votes on Krispy-Krunchy boxtops. She's an ad agency promotion discovered by a talent scout while sitting on a drugstore stool in Cornpone, Ky. The annual contest ended last week at Atlantic City and oil wells were awarded to runners up. Sales of Krispy Krunchies have quadrupled. The Champion will defend her title against a specially designed robot made by the Azimov Positronic Robot Foundry. She will win by a knockout after # seconds of the #th round when the robot responds to an electronic impulse and collapses to the canvas in a welter of slipped gears and worn condensers. She will be awarded a size # champion's belt, which will later be displayed on # nationally televised coast-to-coast spectaculars. Her retirement will consist of # weeks at the Palace Theater, a # year recording contract, a shortterm movie contract and a # week contract with T.V. awarding the mink coats on giveaway programs. She will marry a man three times her age, cheat him of his longevity shots, and buy a planet of the Vega system as a gilt-edged investment. -- Bob Pilkington Louisville, Ky. Dear Editor: I am impressed and intrigued by the lack of intelligence in the faces on your cover... I see this as a symbol of a time when Man has forgotten the basic laws for civilized existence, a world declining, retrogressing, without love and with too much leisure; an irreligious, heartless, deadly, insensible world moving backward in terms of intelligence and callous far beyond the point of brutality. If we make the assumption that a regime such as that of the communists has overrun the earth, subjugating man and bringing intellectual chaos, then the cover is more than possible. -- Mervin Chapman Key West, Fla. The writers of the two preceding letters were awarded # each for their thoughts on our December cover. Three other awards went to Orma McCormick of Ferndale, Mich., John Murphy of Jersey City, New Jersey, and J. Frank Gamble of Littleton, Colorado... Comments on the gal with the brass knucks were varied and interesting indeed and we wish we had room to run more of them. Dear Sir: I flatly think that sexy covers are the reason that s-f isn't skyrocketing to greater popularity. When the average individual throws his #c on the counter he undoubtedly has an urge to hide the covers. You have a readable magazine and I give science-fiction the credit for my choosing Physics as my college major. My only complaint is those covers. Can't s-f editors be a little subtle -- the drawings usually scream of poor taste. -- W. G. Cantrell Bryan, Texas Sirs: Interstellar colonization seems to be the most hopeful subject for the s-f readers of today, yet authors always assume that other races will be either so far ahead of us that they are dead or so far behind us that we will have to "civilize" them. I agree that the chances of another exactly at our own level is a probability that's astronomical considering the differences in time, temperature, physiology etc. that are involved. Considering the former highly civilized group, why haven't we met them yet? They must have passed through the exploratory stage somewhere along the line. We've argued the point pro and con and come up with several proposed explanations. #. The supermen are here, but so smart we haven't found any traces. #. Habitable planets are so rare they can't find each other. #. Interstellar travel is so difficult that races are confined to a few light-years from their home planet. #. The extermination theory: the cultural level necessary for star travel makes race suicide inevitable. What I'm after is an answer from your readers who I'm sure have given it a deal of thought themselves. Or at least an estimated percentage of how many numbers of readers believe which theory would be of interest to all s-f fans. Would you let the readers use the letter column for a sounding board? -- J. G. Hickman Park Forest, #. Delighted! We'll go a step farther and propound a fifth explanation: Could it be that we really are the first and most highly civilized race? Dear Editor: IF was my ideal, unfortunately this state of affairs was not to last. "Hue and Cry" has reared its ugly head. A trespasser from the pulp field. You were original with "What's Your Science I.Q.?", "Science Briefs" and "Worth Citing", so why retrogress? I'm convinced that a number of those in favor of letter columns are more interested in getting their names in print than in constructive criticism. Apart from "Hue and Cry" keep it as is -- it's great. -- W. J. Allen Calgary, Alberta We hate to disagree and don't feel that we publish the "pulpy" sort of letter. If we can have good arguments and slices of interesting ideas , we enjoy the stimulation. I hereby appoint " Hue and Cry" the sounding board for this controversy, in the hopes that a solution will be found. Sirs: Perhaps someday we can build machines that have all the functions of a human; would these machines be competitors of ours? Should we scrap all machines now lest we become their slaves? I don't think so. It may be paradoxical, but the more we understand about machine thinking, the more we understand about human thinking. With a greater understanding of ourselves, we can ensure that the role of the machine is a beneficent one. I have a deep conviction that a vastly humbled and chastened -- but improved! -- humanity will result from the effort to teach a machine what Man believes. The tough part will be that Man will have to find out exactly what he believes -- and make sense out of it. -- K. L. Hamilton Walton, Mass. Wouldn't you like to stick around a few thousand years and find out? It's a new approach: instead of the computers solving the problems -- they will force man to solve them himself. Dear Mr. Quinn: Although a reader of s-f for about # years, I've never felt the urge to write to an editor before now. What did it? Jerry Bixby's Laboratory, that's what. The relatively few attempts at humor in s-f have made me glad that they were few they have been of such low quality. In my opinion Laboratory is far and away the best piece of humorous s-f I've read. I also enjoyed the other yarns. -- George Thome Detroit, Mich. # fantasy and sciencefiction books and backissue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #K Verona, Pennsylvania (Continued from, page #) Gethsemane through the trees. It was blood-red in the morning sunlight. "Ten seconds -- " There wasn't going to be time enough to save Linda from the backwash, but there was time enough to try -- "Five seconds -- " No, not even time enough to try. "Two seconds -- " Brett breasted the hill just as the Gethsemane blasted. He reeled back, blinded by the jets, deafened by their thunder. When the afterimage faded he saw the brief morning star in the sky and he felt the first tearing pangs of his loss. "How did you know I'd be here?" Linda said. Brett turned around, not believing at first. She had just stepped from a sheltering stand of locusts. She was crying. "I saw you on the telecast," he said. "I thought -- " She shook her head. "You can't fight anything by running away from it," she said. "One useless sacrifice is enough." She swayed and Brett leaped forward and caught her arm. "I'm all right," she said. She looked into his eyes and seemed surprised at what she saw there. "I thought you'd hate me," she said. "I can't hate you," Brett said. "You can't hate someone when you already love them." She looked up at the sky. "I'll get him back," she said. "Somehow, some way. Will you help me?" "Of course I'll help you." They walked down the hill together. When they reached the highway the Seneca was burning brightly. Linda gasped. Brett took a slow deep breath. It was the most beautiful fire he had ever seen. A long time ago Thoreau said: "We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us." It remained for the wife of an unemployed steelworker to paraphrase that statement. In her best-selling social novel, The Highways of Hell ( Brandt  Payne, #), Linda Dalms Brett wrote: "We do not drive our cars; our cars drive us." Civilizations decay from within. Sometimes the decay goes unnoticed for years, manifesting itself only through reactions of the subconscious. But it is there, weakening the social structure to a point where the slightest impetus can send that structure toppling. The Highways of Hell afforded that impetus, and the sacred automobile fell from its pedestal. It became a mere vehicle again, with a tyrannical governor that said # mph and meant it. As a mere vehicle it could not of course justify the stern laws enacted to protect it in its former glory, and consequently those laws were modified. This resulted in amnesty for some tens of thousands of prisoners serving sentences on the Foundation planets, among them a man who once believed himself to be Christ... -- Bethe Royale continued from Back Cover fiction Club's Biggest Bargain Offer N OW, for the first time, on this big Sci(see description on other side) -- PLi S any Fiction described on this page for only #I (Worth Up to # Retail) I of these story-packed Each is packed with rocket-swift stories that take you soaring in time and space... written by the greatest science-fiction writers. A # value, full-length, full-size, in haudsoiue permanent bindings -- and all yours for only I on this amazing offer l A story about the first Atomb... written before it was invented! Plus a score of other host tales from Astounding Science-Fiction magazine by editor John W. Campbell, Jr. (Publ. ed. #.) W orl d renowned stories by IT. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley. Philip Wylie, Edgar Allan Poe. etc. # pp. (Publ. ed. #.) #I remarkable and fantastic tales about some of the most awe-inspiring, charming and monstrous children imaginable. (Publ. ed. #.) Edited by Frederik Pohl -- The story of the space monster who when killed -- could continue to live in an earth man's #.) Round-Trip Reservations To The Moon. (See Other Side.) Two books are your gift for joining, and one is your first Club selection. Every month, you will be offered the "cream" of the new # and # ScienceFiction books -- for only #. You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year. This offer may Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. # top-stories of startling inventions... of visitors from Outer Space...of Far Traveling... # pages. (Publ. ed. #.) new #th Series. The story of the synthetic man who could do feats no huPlus #I other 'gems." (Publ. ed. #.) I Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. H Rush # books chocked below, as my gift books and first I selection. 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Each reservation certifies that you are among the first to apply for passage to the moon. Neither in any way com in its the holder to make the voyage. They simply signify that your name and the friend's name you submit are being held on file in Science-Fiction Book Club archives to be turned over to the first commercial company making trips to the moon. Your reservations include many amazing facts: your actual weight on the moon, a Rocket-Ship schedule, etc. Like your interest in Science-Fiction books, the hard-back, wallet-size certificate , will be evidence of your adventurous spirit... your imagination... your interest in the world of tomorrow. ing books described on the other side -- for only ?#. Then mail coupon and Moon-Tour Application at once ! louu jot ## Moon-Tour Reservations, Secretary Science-Fiction Book Club To-The-Moon Reservations. My Reservations which will he printed on handy, wallet-size cards, will include a Mfon weight chart and a complete Rocket-Ship Flight Schedule for the Moon, Venus. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. I will in no way be committed to make a voyage. Please register both reservations in my name. Honored Unless Filled Out and Signed on the Reverse Side. For only #!  Eminent Men of Science Preview "Project Vanguard' Man's First Skirmish in the Conquest of Space ! One are mounted here in tandem for test firing prior to installation in the air frame. These motors are designed to yield three hundred thousand pounds of thrust to lift the three stage assembly. The test crew is stationed in a heavily armored vehicle downslope from the test stand to observe the firing. The vibration and roar created by these monster engines is inconceivable to anyone who has not witnessed such a firing. Men have been known to assume the foetal position, or lose control of their bodily functions, under its impact. (Now see inside back cover.) All Stories New and Complete i I  (First of Two Parts) I  Z by Charles L. Fontenay # I I Three-stage Satellite Rocket by Mel Hunter  IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. # Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street' Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next (August) issue on sale June #th  Editor's  doesn't know it?) science will embark on the most colossal probing of the mysteries of the universe the world has ever known. The occasion, of course, is the International Geophysical Year -- an #-months "year" which will last from July #, #, through December, #. During this time # nations will pool their scientific brains to prove a lot of things and to disprove a lot of other things. Weather, gravity, outer atmosphere, latitudes and longitudes, oceanography, earthquakes, glaciology and many other pertinent subjects will get close clinical scrutiny. It's going to be an exciting # months, not only for the science minded and the science fiction fan but for anyone who can read, write, see, feel, smell or hear. publishing a series of articles that may well turn out to be a world scoop on anticipating the design and functioning of the artificial satellite to be launched through "Operation Vanguard", pne of the United States' most prominent containly the most dramatic. Since the first announcement by President Eisenhower, there has been a bombardment of newspaper, radio and TV stories, but still the public has received only a vague, general idea of what this first (if Russia doesn't make good its boast) artificial satellite is actually going to be like. Being a top-secret project, this is only natural. And it's going to be a good while before anybody gets the Government's own story. However, we did the next best thing: we sought the calculated predictions of scientists who, though not connected with "Project Vanguard", are actively engaged in various phases of rocket development -- rocket design, propulsion, astrophysics, instrumentation and other phases of astronautics. They are men high in their fields -- and, we believe, what they present will be very, very close to the satellite of "Project Vanguard". The authors of the first two articles are James M. Nuding and Paul J. Vanous, who present a plan for constructing and launching the satellite vehicle, and the instrumentation and operation of the actual satellite after it reaches its orbit. search Engineer, Atomic Research Energy and Problems of Instrumentation, at North American Aviation. His rise to eminence has the flavor and color of a story by Horatio Alger. Born in Oakland, California, in #, he was orphaned at the age of ten. Through training received in technical classes in high school and night school, he was able to secure a license as a radio operator. His first job as a radio operator was aboard a four-masted barque bound for the Bering Sea. From "wind jammering" he went to the Coast Guard, where he served aboard a rum-runner in the same capacity. After leaving the Coast Guard he had a variety of jobs which included experimenting with X-ray, glass blowing for neon tubes, and work on high-voltage electrical systems. His first big step upward in the field of science was when he went to Stanford University to work on the Klystron Project, under the Varian brothers. (The klystron, incidentally, is a gadget that makes possible U.H.F. transmission.) A year later, he went to Sperry Gyro to work out commercial applications for the klystron. When the Sperry laboratories moved east, he went to the University of California, where he worked, under radarjamming device used in World War II. After a short tenure here he transferred to the #-inch cyclotron lab, becoming its chief of operations. In #, with the war at fever pitch, he was again transferred, this time to the Calutron Project, where he experimented with an electronic device for separating the U# isotope for use in the A-bomb. Within a year he was a supervisor and training head. In # he was sent to Oak Ridge and for three years he was engaged in work on process improvement of the Electromagnetic Separation Plant. He went to North American Aviation in # and has remained there since. James Nuding is a long time member and former president of the Pacific Rocket Society, an active group dedicated to the pursuit of astronautical research and the furtherance of space flight. Under the auspices of this organization, he became one of the pioneers in the actual designing, building and firing of many of the successful rockets which have roared into southern California skies. of #I years, is Microwave Senior Design Engineer, Missile Guidance Systems Division, at Bendix Aviation. A resident of Burbank, California, he holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California and a membership card in the Microwave Chapter of I.R.E. Much of his time is spent flying across the country on problems of component development. Mr. Vanous made the original designs and drawings from which the interior illustrations and June and August covers were adapted. about James Nuding and Paul Vanous. I wish we could run a more detailed story about each instead of this brief introduction. (Continued on page #) "Operation Vanguard", Man's first skirmish with outer space, What will the Satellite actually look like? How will it reach its orbit? What instruments will it carry and what will they tell us?... Here are the predictions of two eminent rocket men. Lead Research Engineer, Atomic Research Energy and Problems of Instrumentation , North American Aviation Microwave Senior Design Engineer, Missile Guidance Systems Division, Bendix Aviation might someday contrive to through Dr. Goddard's basement hoist himself by his own bootstraps window has been raised to the shatacross the last, and most formitering roar of today's rocket motors, dable of the great frontiers into producing horsepower measured in nation of writers, scientists and layamounts almost unimaginable a men for many generations. Out of few years ago has come into our these imaginations over the years, hands; and with it, the announcehave come ideas. From the many ment by the President of the Unitfields of science and engineering ed States that this nation will have come concepts and mechanpioneer in the exploration of the ical improvements, until at last space frontier by launching a temporary satellite into a predetermined orbital path around the Earth. This launching of an Earth Satellite Vehicle is perhaps the most exciting of all the projects planned for the International Geophysical Year #. The program, known as "Project Vanguard", can, if it is successful, contribute more to the science of the world in general than any other single project envisaged. The mere fact that the Satellite when launched must necessarily fly over all the countries of the world, will call for a mutual trust and cooperation between them which will be unprecedented. Coupled with this is the fact that such a Satellite will offer an unparalleled opportunity for science to study the physical phenomena surrounding the earth. During the past hundred years, Man, despite being earthbound, has made enormous strides toward understanding the universe. However, the limitations of not being able to mount his instruments above the heavy blanket of the atmosphere, has forced many of the problems to remain unsolved. With today's knowledge of rockets and instrumentation this need no longer be true. There appear to be four main objectives to be accomplished in "Project Vanguard", the first of which is the testing of the feasibilAt right are the dimensions of the three-stage Satellite rocket, the Satellite itself being the third stage. The "basketball" ' shape theory is exploded as impractical. The Satellite is here shown to be needle-shaped, # feet long and one foot in diameter. i ity of constructing a three stage Rocket-Satellite Vehicle and successfully establishing it in an orbit around the earth. Viewed from the standpoint of an astronautical enthusiast, the successful accomplishment of the first objective will justify the expense and effort of the whole project. However, since public funds are being spent in the financing of the program, other things must be accomplished to satisfy not only the general public, but also the scientists concerned with the Geophysical Year. The second objective is the instrumentation of the third stage so that once in orbit, information of interest to the I.G.Y. scientists can be collected by it and transmitted to strategically placed monitor stations on the ground. From the viewpoint of the scientists, the accomplishment of the second objective will be the main justification; the more diverse the information collected, the more priceless the Satellite's contribution to research. The knowledge gained by the second objective will be of vital importance in the accomplishment of the next step. This will be the planning of larger, more elaborate, and possibly manned satellites to be built in the future. The third objective, we feel, is probably of major interest to the military and, if pursued with the proper attitude, can be of inestimable value in the preservation of world peace. The fourth objective is of longer range and possibly of somewhat visionary character, although one which should not be dismissed because of the lack of immediacy. It is the. exploration of the hazards of space and the gaining of knowledge of space travel in general. Once a space vehicle has been manned, interplanetary exploration and travel will be the next logical step. It is well to point out at this time that the actual design specifications to be used in the satellite project will undoubtedly involve rockets and instrumentation which are part of the military security of the United States, and as such have already been classified as secret. But since the authors of this article have no connections with, or sources of information from, "Project Vanguard", it will be interesting to see how close an "educated guess" will bring us to what actually develops. W E feel that the "basket ball" nomenclature was an unfortunate choice. In the first place, it is very unlikely that the Satellite will look anything like a basket ball. The diameter of a basket ball is roughly twelve inches, and in order to put such a sphere into an orbit around the earth it must be carried there by a missile whose diameter must necessarily be somewhat larger. The missile must contain besides its propulsion system and guidance mechanism, a device for expulsion of the satellite. If this device is to Scale at right shows altitudes at which first and second stages . drop away  Nuding and Vanous predict that orbit eventually will be # miles above Earth's surface instead of # or # miles . add any appreciable velocity to that already attained from the carrier rocket, it will have to contain additional fuel in the form of an explosive charge. This explosive and the gun-like mechanism would be heavy, requiring many thousands of pounds of fuel in the first and second stages just to get it up there. Assuming that we have placed a "basket ball" in orbit, what of value, if anything, will we have? A little rough calculation will show that a sphere twelve inches in diameter can contain very little useful instrumentation. It is possible that it could hold a battery operated power supply and a small radio transmitter of sufficient strength to be heard back on earth. By no amount of miniaturization however, could we squeeze in much of anything else. Authorities on upper atmosphere research agree that a Satellite Vehicle placed in a stable orbit # miles up could probably stay there a year before it fell back to earth. If this is so, then obviously no battery would be sufficient to power the transmitter for that length of time. Also, if the Vehicle is going to be circling the earth for that period of time, common sense dictates that it should be so instrumented that full advantage be taken of its sojourn in space. It is true that some useful information other than the mechanics of getting up there, could be obtained from an uninstrumented Vehicle orbiting around die earth at a known altitude and velocity. Deviations in its orbital path as a function of geographical location would provide some clue to the deviations in the earth's magnetic field. Change in orbital velocity as a function of time and latitude would tell something about the density of the residual atmosphere through which the Satellite must travel as it slowly spirals its way back to earth. With the exception of these two bits of information, it is unlikely that anything of importance could be obtained from an uninstrumented vehicle. However, if the whole third stage of the rocket assembly is utilized, as it probably will be, the increased available volume and the great saving in weight will allow a much more elaborate instrumentation system to be put in orbit, with a correspondingly greater amount of useful information transmitted. The designing and building of a rocket combination which is capable of raising the Satellite Vehicle to an altitude of up to # miles, is in itself an engineering feat of major importance. It is true that the United States has already sent a two stage rocket (Bumper Project) up # miles; but one must remember that the second stage of Bumper was a relatively small rocket with a very small payload. This was launched vertically and arrived at its # mile altitude with zero velocity, whereupon it merely fell back to earth. In the case of the Satellite's second stage, it must, while carrying the relatively heavy third stage, arrive at or near the # mile goal in a fairly horizontal position and path. It must also at this time have achieved a large fraction of the # miles per hour horizontal velocity necessary to keep the satellite in orbit. To do this it is necessary that stage one and stage two larger than any single rocket that has ever flown up to this time and will most likely consist of two of the largest rocket motors built, mounted side by side. It will develop in the neighborhood of # pounds of dirust for a period in excess of one minute. It will be about # feet in diameter and approximately # feet high. Its total weight will be on the order of # pounds, # pounds of which will be liquid fuel and oxidizer. The fuel will be alcohol or some similar liquid and the oxident will be liquid oxygen. The propulsion system will be a modernized version of that used in the V# rockets, i.e. -- a steam or gas driven turbo-pump which draws the fuel and oxident from large storage tanks and forces them, at about # pounds per square inch pressure, through spray nozzles and combustion chambers where they combine and burn. The resultant hot gases, escaping through the motor nozzles, furnish the impulse which causes the assembly to rise. Stage one will carry in its upper end, just below the socket where stage two sits, an electronic "brain" which will take controlling impulses from the master "brain" located in stage three. These impulses will be amplified and fed to servo-mechanisms located in the tail which will in turn actuate the steering vanes on the fins and also carbon vanes in the jet stream, just below the rocket nozzles. These carbon vanes will stabilize the rocket during the period in take-off when tail fins are ineffective. Stage II may well be a Viking rocket or one similar in size and performance. The small tail fins used by the Viking could very well be left off in the case of the second stage. The motor mounted on a gimbal allows it to be swiveled in any direction, thus permitting the thrust from the jet to be used to steer the rocket after it has left the atmosphere -- where tail fins would have nothing to bear against. The apparently excessive size of Stage I and Stage II is necessitated by the fact that nearly all of the # mile altitude and the # mile per hour orbital velocity must be attained by the second stage so used for making orbital corrections in both position and velocity. Satellite itself, should be a rocket with the performance characteristics of the Aerobee and with a guidance system similar to that of the Wac Corporal. While it should resemble the system of the Wac Corporal, it will require a considerable amount of modification to fit it for use as a satellite. This would involve mounting the motor on gimbals, and the installation of hydrogen peroxide jets mounted laterally for making altitude and roll corrections. (Continued on page #) ) 'gpMA mwT. Time reversal exists at the sub-atomic level according to Feynman s Theory -- and according to that same theory any entity can exist in three places at one time... Does this explain the strange co-existence of Summer, Mark and Wyn? natural principle is behind the mysterious appearances recorded some years ago by Mr. Charles Fort, I'm sure I don't know. It could, of course, be the same as that behind the sudden appearance of Wyndham Storm in Central Park, but I don't believe I've heard of a case that exactly paralleled this one. I gather from a perusal of Mr. Fort's works that it is not uncommon for these unheralded visitors to come onstage without the formality of clothing; but I don't believe it's customary for them to bring their wives along, I got caught in a thunderstorm that night in Central Park -- not New York's Central Park, but Allertown's Central Park, which isn't as big. Having no raincoat -- the skies had appeared clear when I left home for the movies -- I took refuge in the big octagonal bandstand. The storm was brief, but spectacular; one of those violent affairs that often mark the arrival of a cold front to dispel an unusually intense midsummer heat wave. The rain slashed across the park in wind-whipped sheets, managing to drench me even in my shelter. Big trees bowed low and reluctantly hurled away leaves and limbs. Thunder rolled incessantly and the lightning made an eerie daylight of the blackness. Suddenly, there was a terrific clap of thunder and a fiery flash that blotted out everything around me. Shaken, I picked myself up from the floor of the bandstand, still not sure I hadn't been struck. Blue smoke was boiling away from a wrecked tree about thirty feet away, in the midst of a clump of charred, waving shrubbery. And like Venus rising from the foam the naked woman stepped out of the shrubbery, followed by the naked man. My first impulse was to laugh at these two whom the storm had chased from their hiding place and to be astonished at their brashness in disrobing completely in the heart of the park. Then it occurred to me that the lightning must have stripped them. They might be hurt. I jumped from the bandstand and walked swiftly over to them. To my utter amazement, the young woman promptly threw her arms around my neck and said : "Whatever has just happened, Don, I want you to know it's you I love." Then she kissed me. "What on earth!" I exclaimed, disengaging myself. The man was looking from one to the other of us, mutely. "I'm Summer Storm and this is my husband, Wyn Storm, and we live at # March Street," she said, all in a rush. "Oh, Don, I'm sorry you don't know us any more, but I should have known from the way Wyn was acting and everything that's going to happen..." "Wait a minute, wait a minute!" I interrupted. "I don't know you. How did you know my name?" She didn't answer, but just stood there, looking at me intently. I averted my eyes. I was beginning to recover from shock enough to be embarrassed. "How about this?" I asked the man. "Why should I know you, and where do you come from?" "I'm afraid I don't know," he replied, sounding perfectly honest about it. "I'm afraid I don't remember anything. Do you suppose I have amnesia?" "That's possible," I said. "But your wife seems not to be bothered with it. All right. Summer Storm and Wyn Storm it is -- but the names are too trite in these circumstances not to be false. Both of you had better get back in the shrubbery while I get some help." I found the policeman on the Main Street beat. As I thought, it was my old friend, Gus Adams. He accompanied me back to the park, the rain gleaming on his slicker. "They picked a good address to lie about," he said, when I had explained the situation to him on the way. "The house at # March Street is vacant." "They're probably spooners who got caught by that lightning bolt and are too ashamed to give their right names," I said. "If they had any clothes, I don't know what happened to them. I didn't see any in those bushes." "What do you figure I ought to do with them, Mr. Gracey?" he asked. "They look like decent youngsters," I said. "If it's all right with you, we'll take them out. to my house until they're ready to let me help them get back where they came from," "You're taking a chance," he grunted. But we wrapped the woman in his slicker and tied my best suit coat around the man's waist. Gus called the town's only patrol car and had them drive us out to my house. I suppose nudists and doctors eventually reach the point where they look on nakedness as normal. But, to me, my "orphans of the storm" looked a lot more like ,human beings when I had them clothed in a couple of my old sweaters and some slacks. They might have been twins. For all I knew, they were, in spite of Z the woman's claim that they were man and wife. Their eyes were an identical sky-blue, their hair an identical pale, wavy gold. Her hair was cut short, his needed cutting, so they were a good match. I judged their ages to be about #, although I've been over-estimating young women's ages since I passed #. "Now, suppose you tell me where you're from and what this is all about," I said sternly, when they had finished eating the meal I had rustled up for them. The man spread his hands and, for the first time, he smiled. It was the smile of an archangel. Whatever the failure of his memory, his smile was that of wisdom and patience. I was to find, not much later, that the woman's smile was its feminine counterpart. "I'm afraid I don't remember anything before standing in the park in the rain," said the man. "What wrong? What's wrong, Don?" demanded the woman, a note of hysteria in her voice. "What's happening to us?" "It's just that I don't understand this situation at all," I said. "You say you're husband and wife. Then you won't mind both sleeping here in the den, and tomorrow we'll see what we can find out." In this remarkable fashion began a remarkable fifteen years. L ooking back on it, i supi pose I loved Summer Storm from the time I saw her. I've been trying to decide what that makes me. Incestuous? Just narcissistic?' Or, perhaps, Jovian? She was alone in the den when I looked in the next morning before breakfast. Wyn -- short for "Wyndham," I learned later -- was wandering around in the back yard, looking lost. Summer had a pair of my scissors in her hand, evidently preparing to trim her hair. Somewhat to my surprise, she looked contrite when she saw me. "I just thought I might look better with short hair," she explained. "Good Lord, it's too short now!" I exclaimed. "I like women with long hair." She hesitated, then reached up to begin clipping. Somewhat nettled, I turned on my heel and walked out. That incident is noteworthy for its strange sequel. At breakfast, I was thunderstruck to observe that Summer Storm's hair was long -- at least shoulder length, for it was done up in a neat bun behind her head. Where in my house had she found a wig to match her own hair? And how long must the wig have been originally, for her to have cut from it the long tresses I found later in the wastebasket? After breakfast, I took Wyn with me to check on the house at # March Street. I left Summer at home. Although she claimed to remember things and Wyn said he couldn't, I could make nothing of her "memories." There was a strangeness about talking with her, too, something I couldn't quite put my finger on yet. As Gus had said, the house at # March Street was vacant It was for rent. The owner, old Albert Meecham, lived next door, and I made an impulsive decision on the spot. "Your wife insists you live here, so you two must be connected with this address in some way," I told Wyn. "I'll rent the place for you while we're trying to run down some information on your background. If you decide to stay in Allertown, you can pay me back after you get a job." The only way I knew to probe the origins of Wyn and Summer was through the customary channels. That afternoon, I went down to the police station to talk with my friend, Gus, before he started on his beat. The Allertown police station is nothing but a room in the ancient city hall, a block off Main Street, but it does have a separate outside entrance. Gus was sitting on a bench in the shade by the entrance, fanning himself with his cap. The perspiration pasted his dark blue shirt to his well-padded arms and chest. The relief the storm had brought hadn't lasted long. I sat down on the other end of the bench. "Gus," I said, "can you fellows help me find out who those people are we picked up in the park last night? It's funny, but the man has amnesia, and I think the woman's a little strange in the head." Gus looked at me a little reproachfully. He laid the cap down, to pull his handkerchief from his hip pocket and mop his brow. "You mean that story you told me was the truth?" he asked. "I thought they might be some relatives of yours, that had got into some sort of a scrape. Both of them look a lot like you." "Do they? Well, they're no relatives of mine. I'd like to know just who they are. Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham Storm, she says." "They don't come from Allertown," he said. "I'd know them if they was from Allertown. But they was raised around in this country somewhere." "How do you know that?" "There's a way of talking folks have around here. You don't hear it outside these three or four counties, and you wouldn't notice it if you wasn't watching for it. Take my word for it, those folks was bom and raised not fifty miles from here." "Well, just to be on die safe side, you'd better check to see that they're not wanted criminals," I said. "Amnesia would make a good dodge for a criminal." "I've already done that," he said quiedy. "There not." Wyn and Summer weren't missing persons from anywhere in our secdon of the state, either. Gus looked into that angle very thoroughly dining the next few weeks, and reported failure. Wyn got a job as clerk at McClellan's Dry Goods Store and, for reasons he did not confide to me, enrolled in night classes at Slayden College. He and Summer soon were established in the neighborhood as "that nice young couple that Don Gracey brought in from somewhere out West." How the townspeople got started on that Z Western origin theory, I don't know; I suppose it's natural for people to tack some sort of an origin on strangers. I confess that their origin soon became a matter of minor importance to me, although I remained curious about it. I found Wyn extremely likeable; we became very close friends, although I estimate that I am ten to fifteen years older than Wyn. And, as I say, I was in love with Summer, although it was a long time before I admitted that to myself. I told myself I felt about Summer as I would my own daughter, if a bachelor like me could say such a thing; and I felt toward Wyn as though he were my son. There was a good deal of accuracy to that description of my feelings, but there was a mystery about Summer that drew me powerfully. I think the unattainable in woman is always irresistible. Summer had the most peculiar air of unattainability about her I ever have experienced. It was as though, when I touched her, it was a fleeting touch; when I looked at her, I was constantly beset by the feeling that she would, the next instant, shimmer into insubstantiality. Talking with her heightened this illusion, rather than lessening it. A conversation with Summer was a unique experience. It was a little like two people trying to talk at once, each talking, then each hesitating to let the other have his say. Our words crossed each other, like scissor blades that do not quite meet. She might answer a question before it was asked, or take the conversation off on tangent after tangent. Disconnected, discontinuous -- those adjectives describe our conversations. Except for his amnesia, dating back to the night in the park, Wyn was perfectly normal. After some time, he confided that he, too, was concerned about Summer's strangeness. I got the impression from him -- though he did not go into great detail -- that it extended beyond her conversation, to her actions. "It seems to me that I ought to know what's wrong with Summer," he told me, very puzzled about it. "I mean, it seems I ought to remember. But I don't. I've gone so far as to talk it over with her." "What did she say?" I asked. "She said she wasn't going to tell me now. She said she'd tell me one of these days, but that when she did, I'd leave her. She smiled all the time she was saying it, in the strangest way." Well, we had Summer examined. Old Doctor Lodge is no psychiatrist, but a man isn't a general practitioner for as long as he's been at it without learning something about the way a person's mind ticks. He said there was nothing wrong with Summer, mentally. "She acts like she's still suffering a little from some sort of shock," he said. "If she was right next to a lightning bolt when it struck, I'm not surprised. It's lasting a little longer than such things usually do, but it'll clear up." It didn't clear up, but Wyn and I got used to it. Amateurs, they say, shouldn't fool around with hypnosis, and I suppose there's a sound reason behind that admonition. But I'm a little better than the average amateur hypnotist. I've not only done a good deal of it at club benefits and what not, but I've read pretty heavily in psychology. I decided to see if hypnotizing Wyn would give me any clue to his past and Summer's. Summer sat beside me that night at their home, as I went through the familiar motions and Wyn sank into hypnotic trance. Under hypnosis, Wyn recalled easily everything that had happened since that night in the park. But attempts to regress him past that night brought only a death-like silence, in which he sat pale and immobile. I tried several times, and at last succeeded in getting him in an extremely deep hypnotic state. Suddenly, Summer interrupted with an exclamation. "That's me!" she exclaimed. "That's what I told him four years ago!" "Quiet, Summer," I commanded, looking at her curiously. "I think I may be able to get something out of Wyn now." Despite total lack of response when regressed to ages # and #, I regressed him to age #. He stirred and murmured. His eyelids fluttered. "What do you see?" I asked eagerly. "What are you doing?" "Wyn?" he exclaimed. His voice was clear and treble, the voice of a woman, as he called his own name. He clenched his fists, and moved his head from side to side. "Wyn, I'm going to have a baby!" "What!" I exploded, amazed. "Wyn, what do you see?" He opened his eyes. "Why, I see you, Don," he said in his normal hearty voice. "What else should I see?" With a suddenness I never have seen before or since, he had come out of the hypnotic state. I was afraid to delve any deeper. I didn't try hypnosis again. During these first few years, Wyn and Summer gradually lost that identity of appearance which had made them look so much like twins the night I found them in the park. Wyn aged, not excessively but as any adult man would age in a few years. Summer, on the other hand, seemed to have found the secret of eternal youth. She grew ever more delicate and beautiful, and her fair skin seemed to take on a translucent glow. I was a close friend of the couple, and I found that I was alone with Summer a good deal. Summer had shown an interest in schooling, too. She started in college with Wyn, then dropped back to high school, and finally fell back on studying at home. It wasn't that she wasn't bright. She seemed to recognize the facts she was studying almost at once, but tests and examinations were her downfall. She never could remember enough of the things she had studied to make a passing grade. So I went to the house at # March Street often in the early evenings, to help Summer in her studies. Z Their son was bom about six years after they came to Allertown. It was a peculiar thing. There was no noticeable sign of pregnancy. Summer was sure she was pregnant, but Doctor Lodge scoffed at her, right up to the time of the birth. "Sure, she has milk," he told Wyn and me, tugging at his white mustache and giving us a wise smile. "It's not unusual. She isn't carrying a child, though. It's a false pregnancy." But the child was bom. Then Doctor Lodge reversed himself and insisted she was carrying an unborn twin. Again he was wrong. Summer gradually but steadily recovered from the effects of the birth and regained her slender figure. I still do not attempt to excuse Wyn for leaving his wife and newborn son. He was overwrought, it's true, but he should have taken them with him. Instead, he came to me, his suitcase packed, when the child was about a month old. His face showed his agitation. "Don, I'm leaving Summer," he said abruptly. "Wyn! Why? What's happened?" "I found out yesterday why she acts and talks so strangely. She told me. I couldn't sleep last night, and I've decided I must leave Allertown. Somewhere there may be people who can help me, but I can't find the help I need here." "Was it so terrible?" I asked, trying to calm him. "What did she tell you, Wyn?" He leaned forward intensely, pointing a finger at me, and opened his mouth to speak. Then he shut it and sat back. He shook his head. "No," he said. "Maybe it wouldn't affect you as it has me, but you couldn't feel comfortable about it. All I want from you, Don, is the promise that you'll take care of Summer and little Mark for me until I come back." "You know I'll do that. They can move in here right away. But I think you're making a mistake, running away from whatever it is." "I'm not running away," he replied. "I told you, I've got to have help." That's all he would say. He left on the mid-afternoon train for Mayer City, and I went around to # March Street to help move his wife and child into my own home. I didn't recall until three days later that Summer had predicted -- or so Wyn had said -- that when she told him why she acted as she did, he would leave her. leaving his wife and child, I have even less excuse for becoming his wife's lover. The fact that the interlude may have been necessary to his very existence -- and hers -- is no justification, for I did not know that then. Nor do I know it certainly now. But picture the plight of a man who has in his home a young and beautiful woman, the realization growing on him, day by day, that he has loved her for six years. And it was Summer's fault, as much as my own. Perhaps more. Despite Wyn's words, I could not be sure that he would return to her, and certainly she must have known that he would. Despite this, she did more than merely encourage me. I have wondered often about the philosophical implications of this fact. If Summer had not encouraged me, I wouldn't have been bold enough to make any advances on my own account... and where would that have left Summer? On the other hand, it was the most natural thing in the world that Summer should encourage me. She knew. Wyn had been away only about two months when Summer, rousing herself from a deeply pensive mood one night, sat down by my side on the sofa and snuggled up close to me. I couldn't bring myself to pull away from her, but I exclaimed : "Summer, this isn't right. What about Wyn?" "I don't understand this coolness toward me, Don," she said, laying her head on my shoulder. "People who love each other shouldn't act so aloof." "I was thunderstruck at this admission. But I couldn't help saying what I said then. "I do love you, Summer," I confessed, almost choking. At once she arose and left me. I thought I had offended her, and I was almost relieved that I had. It was best that she should be discouraged about any ideas she might have about me. But thirty minutes later she gave me a smile that made me not so sure she was offended. And the incident seemed to increase, rather than dampen, the warmth of her attitude toward me. It was unpardonable, with Wyn gone so short a time, but I had no strength to resist the inexorable attentions of a woman I loved. When she came to me in negligee late one night a week later, I became Summer's lover. I have said it was partly Summer's fault, and the sequence of events would make it appear almost entirely her fault. This is not true; and I found out several years later why it is not true. My inexcusable affair with Summer lasted for about a year, before the conversation occurred which caused me to terminate it abruptly. I had just entered the parlor, where Summer was curled in a big chair, reading. "I don't see any reason for our not loving each other, if we really do, Don," she said petulantly. "Wyn says he's my husband, but I don't feel that he is. Why should I be tied by a marriage ceremony I don't know anything about yet?" I could not answer, for I was looking at her through new eyes. Her tone of voice had been so like that of an indignant child that it awakened me to something I should have seen before. How like an adolescent girl she was, really! The pale gold hair framed a young face. Despite the rondures of her figure, there was a looseness about the way her legs were attached to her pelvis, giving her frame that impression of hoiZ lowness that is frequent among slender young virgins. In the seven years I had known her, how could I ever have built up in my mind the picture of her as a mature woman? When I thought about that sudden protestation of hers, made after we had lived as man and wife for a year, it seemed to me that it could only have arisen from remorse at such a situation. But it was neither this nor the fact that I was wronging her and Wyn that caused me to resolve then and there that never again would I so much as kiss her. It was that she was too young! I did not waver in that resolve, from that time on. But I thought a great deal about this matter: I had known Summer for seven years and she had been a woman when I first saw her. Yet her youthful appearance now made it impossible that she should have been adult then. Surely my memory did not play me wrong in picturing the Summer Storm I had seen that night in the park; indeed, the picture of her was burned indelibly on my mind. She must have, in the interim, become slighter, even smaller. Oddly, this slenderizing process, once I noticed it, seemed reluctant to stop. The bathroom scales proved that she was losing weight slowly, but in her appearance the decline progressed much more rapidly. She began to get leggy and angular and she completely lost the once-voluptuous contours of her body, despite all the milk and starchy foods I could feed her. Nor was it that she lost appetite. She ate voraciously. At the same time, I became convinced she was losing her memory. Chance remarks dropped at odd times indicated that her recollection of Wyn, of the events before Mark's birth, of all her past life in Allertown, was extremely faulty; she never had shown signs of remembering any events before she came to Allertown. As a matter of fact, it became increasingly apparent that she no longer accepted Mark as her son. The boy was growing out of babyhood with that speed which is so remarkable in children. She cared for him solicitously, but seemed to look on him as her little brother. Of course, I took her to Doctor Lodge. He, in turn, went with us to consult doctors at Mayer City. He could find nothing wrong with Summer physically, nor could they. They seemed to think we were faking. They heard my assurances, and those of Doctor Lodge, that Summer must be approaching the age of thirty, with obvious skepticism. "There is nothing wrong with this girl except an unfortunate emotional aberration," one doctor told me flatly. "Physiologically she is a girl of about fourteen, and it is difficult for me to believe that her chronological age is any higher." "As I told you before, she has a son nearly four years old," I said. "I don't say that's impossible at her age, for it isn't," he retorted. "But this girl has never been a mother. She's a virgin." I should have realized what all this meant. I believe there have been such cases in medical history before. But I suppose I was too close to it. I didn't understand, even when Summer reposed childish confidence in me. "I know what's going to happen, you know, because it's already happened to me," she said. She was a skinny girl now, with enormous blue eyes. "You know what's happened, because its already happened to you. Isn't it funny?" Fortunately, Wyn returned not long after that. Wyn had the answer to the questions that had been puzzling me. return. He just walked into the house one afternoon, carrying a suitcase and smoking a pipe. When I found Wyn and Summer in the park, they had appeared to be twins. During Wyn's absence his hair had begun to gray -- prematurely, I'm sure -- and now he looked like Summer's father. The change in her must have been even more noticeable to him than it was to me, because he had been separated from her during its most remarkable development. But he showed no surprise at it. "I knew what the trouble was before I left," he said soberly. "You see, as Summer's husband I was much closer to her than you could be, even since she and the boy have been living with you." I could feel my ears turning red. I asked hurriedly: "What is wrong with Summer, Wyn?" "She lives backwards," he said. "Time is reversed for her. It isn't only a physiological reversal. Everything goes backwards in time for her. The future is the past to Summer, and the past is the unknown future. She remembers the future, Don -- she remembers it, because she has seen it happen." "That's impossible!" I exclaimed. "How can she? It hasn't happened yet!" "To her it has," he replied. "It may upset your conception of the future as a fluid thing of limitless possibilities, but Summer's experience is pretty good evidence that it is as frozen and stable as the past. As the Orientals say, what is to be will be." I thought about that, and I thought I detected a flaw. "Oh, no!" I said. "Wait a minute here, Wyn. If she can't remember the past even a minute ahead, you couldn't even talk with her. She'd remember what you were going to say, instead of what you had said. Not only that, she'd talk backward! You'd never be able to understand her." "People are adaptable," he replied. "She evidently learned to talk backward -- to her; correctly, to us. People learn to talk so others can understand them. And as for conversation, do you remember Summer ever answering a question directly?" I started to say I did, for it seemed that I did. But a moment's reflection changed my mind. Not a direct question; and her participation in a conversation always had been a jumpy and disturbing thing. Z "But we can talk with Summer," I protested. "For years we've been able to understand each other." "Like writing letters that cross in the mails," he said. "And I think people do have some knowledge of the immediate future, even you and I. Summer would develop that faculty more than the average person." Certainly. No wonder she had been so affectionate to me that it had been impossible for me to resist her. To her, at that time, we had already been lovers. By the same token, my own knowledge when the affair was concluded that we had been lovers must have created in me an attitude that was a strong incentive for her to yield to me at the end of our relationship -- the beginning, to her. What a way to live! Always trying to guess, from the conversation of those around her, what (to her) was going to happen, so she could react intelligently. to accept it, "if the past is the future to her, her actions could affect the past." "Exactly," he said. "I told you, this means you have to accept the principle that the past is just as mailable as the future, and the future is no more mailable than the past." Wyn had known all this before he left. He had gone, not just to avoid seeing his wife revert to childhood before his eyes, but to delve into studies on the nature of time itself. Where he had been, how he had supported himself I didn't know. I still don't know. Summer, her age now about thirteen, was old enough to understand that she was Wyn's wife, but he did not resume his position as husband to her. Instead, he acted toward her and Mark both as a father. Me? I suppose I was something in the nature of a benevolent uncle now. As a matter of fact, Wyn plunged so deeply into work that the task devolved upon me to be both father and mother to Summer and her child. Mark, developing apace into a vigorous young specimen, looked like both his parents -- since their features were so much alike, he could not be said to resemble one more than the other. Wyn did not return with his family to the house at # March Street. It had long been occupied by someone else. He moved in with us and, with my tacit consent, made my home both his home and the headquarters for his work. His work actually was double. He got a good job, this time as engineer at the Allertown Mill Industries. During all his spare time, he worked at converting my precious den and my basement into something completely beyond my understanding. There are some people who accept misfortune and live with it -- or die with it. Others battle it angrily to the bitter end, even when there is no evidence that anyone ever conquered their particular misfortune before. Admittedly, there was little precedent for Summer's case ; and this made the prognosis even less optimistic. Still, Wyn was constitutionally the latter type of person. "I don't know how much longer she lived in the past before you found us," he told me. "Nothing I could do has helped my amnesia for that period. She may have lived to a ripe old age, for all I know. "But we know that she has only a few years to live, the way she is now -- perhaps twelve or thirteen. That's her physical age, and she is living backwards toward babyhood." "What will she do?" I asked curiously. "Just fade away?" "She has to be born," he answered solemnly. "My guess is that, a few years in the future, there will occur the most unique birth ever known to man -- a birth in reverse. Some couple, somewhere -- perhaps someone we know here in Allertown -- will live through the experience of the daughter they never knew reentering the mother's womb and retracing her steps through the embryo stage to the moment of conception." "Fantastic!" I exclaimed. "It must be true;" he insisted. "It has to be true, unless she reversed... will reverse... her direction in time after birth. In that case, perhaps some baby girl here even now is Summer, living coexistently with her reversed self." "If you're going to reverse her direction in time again and make her live normally," I said, for he already had told. me this was his aim, "I don't see how you can prevent a paradox. She has already lived in the past as an adult woman. If you reverse her existence at this stage, then she can't be born, because she'd be living from her present age on, both forward and backward in time." He shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "Perhaps it can't be done. Perhaps it would involve a parallel time stream, if there is such a thing. All I know is that I must try. If I can, she might still consent to be my wife later, if the difference in our ages isn't too great. That would be up to her." "I don't see how you even know where to start on such a project," I confessed. "The chances are slim," he admitted, "but I have some hope. The only actual time reversal we know, scientifically, is at the sub-atomic level. The theory was advanced by Feynman that annihilation of an electron-positron pair upon contact might be, not actual annihilation, but a 'time reversal' of the electron. The emission of a photon of energy, in such cases, is powerful enough to cause a recoil in time, and the positron is merely the electron traveling backward through time after the energy explosion." I looked extremely blank. "Look," said Wyn, taking up a pencil. He drew a big "Z" on a piece of scrap paper, labelling the two arms "E" and the connecting line "P". The angles he marked "A" and "B:" "The flow of Time is from left to right," he explained. "At left is the past, at right the future. This electron, E, is moving normally along at the top of the diagram Z E when it runs into an energy explosion at A. It reverses itself, going back through time as the positron, P, until it hits another energy explosion at B. Then it is reversed again into the right time direction, continuing as the electron E, at the bottom. You follow the line, as the pencil point does in making the Z, and it's a single body. "But," and he drew a vertical line through the Z, "we move always forward in time. To us, the energy explosion at B happens before the one at A. Suddenly at B, a positron and an electron are created out of nothing. The electron at the top apparently has nothing to do with either of them. But the positron moves along and collides with it at A, leaving nothing there again -- except, once more, an apparently unrelated electron, the one at the bottom of the diagram." "But you're saying the same thing can exist in three places at once," I objected. "Exactly, but in one of those places, it's traveling backward in time. So, if Summer's time reversal occurred or will occur after birth, she may be existing somewhere else, as a younger girl, right now; besides being here in the house with us." "Your example is, as you say, at the atomic level," I said. "How can you transfer that into terms of human beings?" "The only thing I know to do," he said, is to create an energy explosion which I know won't hurt Summer physically, but may reverse her back to a normal direction. It would be like the energy explosion that meets the positron at B and forces it to continue existence as an electron." "It appears to me," I said slowly, trying to grasp the concept, "that your explosion at B would have to have happened already if it were going to happen at all." The amazing thing about it is that Wyn, the man who had studied all this thoroughly, apparently didn't understand what I meant. It just goes to show that he must have been right, when he said the future is as fixed as the past. get his equipment ready for a test. He explained to me what it was supposed to do, but I never did get more than a general idea of the principle involved. The heart of the thing was a heavily wired chamber in the basement. "The human body can take a lot of electricity, if it's administered in the right way," he said. "If it's administered in the wrong way, you've electrocuted somebody. "I still don't know whether I've probed the secrets of the space-time fabric deeply enough to make this work, but I think it will reverse the charge of every atomic particle in the body of whatever is in that cubicle. I'm going to put a cat in it, as our first time-traveler. "We may turn up with a cat and an anti-cat, the latter traveling backward in time. We may end with no cat at all. If so, maybe we've created an anti-cat in the past or maybe we've just electrocuted a cat." "I don't see how you expect to interpret your results," I commented drily. "If there's no cat, I won't risk it," he answered. "If we double our cats, I think we're on the way to something that may help Summer." We picked our way through the mess of wiring and went upstairs. He had torn my bookcases out of one wall of the den and installed a control board with a television screen where the fireplace had been. "The experiment will be controlled from here," he said. "The energies that are going to run around all over the basement would make it pretty dangerous for anyone down there. I'm sorry you can't watch, but somebody's got to keep the children away from here." When he said "children," he meant Summer and Mark. Summer now looked as much a twin to her nine-year-old son as she had looked to her husband when I first saw them. At the last two Christmases, we had bought toys for both of them, and she played happily with Mark. She called Wyn "daddy" and me "Uncle Don," just as Mark did. Making them look even more like twins as we entered the living room on the day of Wyn's experiment was the fact that they were dressed alike. She wore a pair of Mark's overalls, and both had on T-shirts. At the moment, the two were trying to put doll clothes on Thomas, the stray yellow cat Wyn had picked up for his experiment. We had had Thomas about six months now. Wyn and I had dubbed the animal "Tom," unaware of its sex -- it had borne kittens during its stay with us -- but the children thought the cat too dignified for the nickname. It was, except when they were trying out their various original ideas on it. "Thomas is our first heroine -- or martyr," said Wyn, and swept the cat up from the floor. Over the protests of the children, he stripped off the doll clothing. "You youngsters go out on the side lawn and play. Uncle Don will take care of you for a while." Caring for the children had been my chore for so long I was accustomed to the peculiarities involved. Mark was as much a problem as any normal, active boy -- no more. But Summer's reverse living, her reverse memory, made her even more difficult to deal with as she reverted to childish habits and attitudes. For some weeks now, she had indulged in the fantasy that she was Mark and Mark was she, a game Mark rebelled at strenuously. At the same time, her manner of Z speaking had become so confused and tangled that it was often incoherent. If Wyn failed in his experiment, the next nine years threatened to be trying indeed. The children left the house with me docilely enough, but as soon as we reached the lawn Mark burst into tears. "What's the matter with you, young fellow?" I asked in surprise. "What's Daddy going to do to Thomas?" he demanded. "Daddy's going to hurt Thomas!" "Don't worry, Thomas isn't going to hurt," I reassured him, aware that I might not be telling the truth. The boy looked at me straight "I know what a martyr is," he said indignantly, his sobs subsiding. "I studied Joan of Arc in school." "Daddy... Thomas in big furnace put," Summer informed us in her labored fashion. "Thomas all burnt up was going to. Him... but I him saved. Saved him, Summer and I." "Neither one of you is going to do anything about Thomas right now," I said brusquely, recognizing Summer's use of the past tense as an expression of intention. "When Daddy's through with Thomas, you may play with him again." Mark subsided, but he retained on his face a rebellious expression which had by now become familiar to me. Summer, although she said nothing for a few moments, became more excited. She alternately flushed and paled, breathing hard, until I began to fear she was ill. Now a deep, powerful hum arose from the house. Wyn had switched on the power and was ready for his experiment. It was a tremendous volume of sound, a physical thing that throbbed through the ground under our feet and caused the leaves of the trees to tremble as in a breeze. An electric tension filled the air and seemed to intensify Summer's agitation. Her eyes dilated in fright and her teeth began to chatter. "Away got I but!" she cried suddenly in a shrill voice. "Up blew it before away ran he and Thomas saved I! Me with up blew it and fire of full furnace big a was it! Furnace a in Thomas had they!" "Here, child!" I shouted above the increasing roar of the generators. "You're hysterical. Nothing's going to happen to Thomas." She quieted abruptly, glaring at Mark in affright. He stared back, equally alarmed. "He isn't, Summer he's?" she asked me plaintively. "Boy a be Summer could how? Mark I'm know I." I didn't understand this at all, especially when Summer began feeling her arms and legs and inspecting herself all over, carefully. The sound of the machinery in the basement reached a shrieking crescendo that must have put the teeth of everyone in the neighborhood on edge. Mark came to life. His eyes shining fiercely, he grasped Summer by the arm. "Are they going to hurt Thomas?" he demanded intently. "Are they, Summer?" She looked at me, not the boy, and suddenly she was calm as though in the grip of profound shock. I could hardly hear her quiet, childish voice through the noise from the basement. "Where... know... don't," she began haltingly. "Gone... Summer's but. Furnace the in him had they. Thomas saved I." Her voice trailed to a gurgle and then she began to chant, "Bum Thomas bum Thomas bum Thomas..." The boy suddenly broke from her and began to run for the house. after him. Caught by surprise, it was a moment before I could gather my wits and follow, shouting at them. They had disappeared around the corner of the house, and I rounded it in time to see them tug open the outside basement door and vanish inside. An eerie blue light flickered from the open door. Trying to run too fast, I tripped over the garden hose and fell. I got to my feet, momentarily dazed. The explosion knocked me flat on my back, blinded by the flash that burst from the basement win dows and through the cracking walls. The blast tilted the den up from the bottom. Its metal and concrete floor, reinforced for the experiment, buckled but remained unbroken, like a giant slide. Down that slide, through the smashed walls, Wyn catapulted, to fall unhurt into the grass. But the rest of the house crumpled in on the basement and caught fire. Under the blazing piles of ruins, I could only surmise, were trapped the children, both mother and son. I wept frantically. At my age, I must have been a pitiful spectacle. Neighbors put their arms around my shoulders, tried to comfort me. In contrast, Wyn was remarkably calm as he reported to Gus Adams. "Every precaution was taken, Mr. Adams," he said, staring morosely into the smoking embers of the house. "Both of them ran into the basement just before the explosion. There was nothing anyone could do after that." "Too bad, Mr. Storm, to lose your wife and son all at once," said Gus sympathetically, writing in his report book. We had kept Summer pretty well concealed behind the high board fence in recent years, so few people were aware of her retrogression. "If there's anything I can do to help, let me know." I upbraided Wyn for his apparent callousness when we got to a room at the City Hotel. "You may be right," he said. "But, first, I want to know something." He had me relate to him everything that had transpired with the children after we left the house. He made me repeat several points and questioned me closely. He was interested particularly in what Summer had said, how she had said it and how she had acted. The whole thing was so clearly impressed on my mind, as it is today, that I'm sure I made few errors. "Well," he said, when I had finished, "we'll never see either of them again, but I think I can say Z definitely they weren't killed in that explosion." "I don't see how you can say that!" I exclaimed. "You remember what I told you -- that if Summer's existence had been reversed in time after she was bom, she was existing somewhere else at the same time? Living normally as a younger child in one place, and as we knew her in reverse?" I did remember it. "Well, she was. But we thought she'd be a girl in both instances. When her time direction was reversed, so was her sex. Mark and Summer were the same person! # I gasped. Wyn took a piece of hotel stationery from the rickety desk and scratched a zigzag on it with his pen. It was a figure like the one he had drawn in the library of our home, except that the top arm of this Z was very short. He labelled the top arm of the Z "Mark," and the diagonal "Summer." "My mistake was that I thought my energy explosion would be at B, throwing Summer back into a normal time direction. Instead, it was at A, reversing the time direction of Mark's existence: and the reversed Mark was Summer." "But Mark was Summer's son." I exclaimed. "Curious, isn't it?" he agreed, smiling strangely. "She gave birth to herself, like the phoenix. Nor is that all. She conceived herself!" With a firm hand, he wrote "Wyn" above the bottom arm of the Z! The diagram looked like this: "The re-reversal !" His blue eyes were a little self conscious as they looked at me now. "Don, I was bom Mark Storm. This explosion today reversed my time direction and I became Summer Storm, to give birth to myself nine years ago. And in a terrific burst of natural energy that you yourself saw, a crucible so fiery that it could wrench the very inner fabric and physical form of the body, the time flow for me was twisted back to its proper direction that night in the park and I became myself -- to father myself six years later! "I was my mother. I am my own father and my own son!" There it is. Wyn believes he sprang from nothingness, from himself. Amid the wreckage of the laws of cause and effect that this whole thing involves, it's possible, I suppose. But a couple of details still bother me, details I haven't mentioned to Wyn. Oh, it isn't the coincidences. If the future is fixed as is the past, they wouldn't necessarily be coincidences: things like Summer -- in the reversed time in which she lived -- stripping off her clothes, donning Gus Adams' raincoat over her nakedness and going with us out to the park, to that rendezvous with the lightning and Wyn. One of the details I can't take is that it's hard to believe that, even in such strange twistings and turnings of time, any creature can initiate itself and, in effect, spring from nothing -- though Wyn says it's done at the sub-atomic level in simple terms of conversion of energy to matter. But how about the fact that such a complicated creature as man is built by the action of the genes and chromosomes? The other is that year that I was Summer's lover. If she was living backward biologically, wouldn't that apply, too, to the growth of an unborn child while it was still part of her. And Wyn left Allertown right after Mark's birth. I've heard of virgin mothers. I'd rather believe in a "virgin father" than human creation from nothingness. I once had hair, and it was blond. My eyes are blue. I look in the mirror, and then I look at Wyn lounging at ease behind his newspaper. My son? My motherless son?    What Is Your Science I. Q.f T RY answering the quiz below to find out how science-wise you are. Score # points for each correct answer; # is good, # very good, over # makes you a whizz. Answers on page #. #. According to the theory of relativity, mass and are equal and interchangeable. #. On the basis of the chemical activity of metals, which metal is the most active? #. The critical temperature of oxygen is centigrade. #. What do we call a compound which consists of two elements only? #. Long waves are radio waves with frequencies less than kilocycles. #. What is the chief component of protoplasm? #. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and are always present in proteins. #. light vibrates on only one plane. #. What is the name of the chemical process in which a solid substance changes directly to vapor without going through a liquid state? #. Ozone is times heavier than oxygen by weight. #. What have, quaternion, tensor and vector in common? #. Which radioactive rays cannot have their direction changed by a magnetic field? #. Pressure in the ocean increases one atmosphere for feet of depth. #. What is the name given to the process of joining together a number of molecules of the same kind to form a single larger molecule? #. Inertia as velocity approaches the speed of light. #. A nuclear particle intermediate between an electron and a proton is called a . #. A siderite is a meteorite composed entirely of . #. Heat energy is liberated by the decomposition of radium at a rate of about calories per hour for each gram. #. Which radioactive rays have the lowest velocity? #. The photic zone of the ocean where there is sufficient light for photosynthesis of sea plants exists only to a depth of about feet. Wellesley was ordered to check on deviants or mutants. But the evidence was often subtle, and he knew he couldn't afford to take a chance... the scam per ers in the season of aphelion, when the binary suns of that remote planet were cold serpent's eyes, dimly seen above the chill mists that shrouded its fern forests and craggy, young mountains, its silent oceans and magnificent organ pipe cities of legend. From space one might look down upon the vista of these latter prominences and imagine a vast, exotic civilization spread over the face of the equinoctial swamps, but Wellesley knew that the giant towers were mere calcareous shells, hollow as the expectations they had inspired in the first planeteers to arrive here two hundred years ago -- they were the work, in fact, of small, mindless crustaceans. His own destination, a small, shabby, corporate plantation, was less impressive in appearance. Its name was Aidennsport. It consisted of a hundred buildings, including a commissary and a hulking communal storehouse. The primordial jungle was all about it. To Wellesley, yellow-cheeked from too many years in space, cynical from the paucity of human values in his life, Aidennsport was the despised prototype of colonial stagnation about the galactic rim. For he was a dour, lanky pessimist among that immense, invaluable, but nondescript order of men, the Rift constabulary, wjiose beat is the emptiness between the stars, and which enforces the name of law throughout the vast reaches of the firmament beyond Sol's sprawling civilization. Wellesley's ship was accustomed to describe an elliptical orbit which brought it near the system containing Ophir once every seventh sidereal month. It never stopped. Its course was an inexorable as a comet's; nevertheless, he had lately received the commission of an errand here for the omnipotent Department of Genetics and Genealogical Records. And so he was forced to make landfall in a rocket tender in a meadow by Aidennsport, while the ground quaked dangerously beneath the settling blasts of the tiny vessel. He located the single course of the village without difficulty. Half a dozen ragged children were playing there, and stopped to stare. Women peered at his dark uniform from behind curtains in the stained, milk-colored bungalows. Quaintly dressed men, tending the auto-pickers in nearby fields of drug-plant, shaded their eyes to gaze with silent menace, though there was no sun. He was able to find the house of the agent by the frayed company flag flying over it. To the right of it was the warehouse where the annual crop of senna-like leaves of the drug-plant were stored for drying. This was Aidennsport's meagre industry. Beyond lay the swamp, and far across its desolate surface, the multi-colored towers of the pipes fingered the sky, aloof and sinister in aspect. A boy of no more than ten, dark eyed but with that startling, burnished-gold complexion so often found in the systems of twin or multiple suns, sat upon the steps before the cottage. He was playing with a furry animal not unlike a Martian ferrax, which sprang up, scarlet-eyed and bristling, at the sight of Wellesley. "Here, boy," said Wellesley, who neither liked nor trusted children. the factor of Aidennsport?" "Sure. That's my pa. Say, are you a spaceman?" "Never mind that. Where is your father?" "In the warehouse," the boy said. "I'll show you how to get inside. My name's Joseph, and I have a spaceship in the back yard. I call it the Stygia, after the pirate ship of the twenty-eighth century Do you want to see my crew?" "Later, perhaps," said Wellesley dryly. "Come along, now" They found tall, aluminum doors which slid back at the wave of a hand, and entered into a vastness of cool gloom, permeated by a spicelike odor of curing leaves. A figure emerged from the drying racks at the other end of die warehouse. "Is that you , Joseph ?" "That's pa," Joseph said. "Damn you, Joseph!" "I guess he's drunk," Joseph said. Wellesley advanced. "I am Lieutenant Wellesley of the Rift police," he said. ruin of a man, with seamed face and heavy grey brows that shadowed intense blue eyes. Eyes that glared just now. "What do you want here?" he bellowed. "My mission is to perform an ethnic census for the Bureau of Genetics. I shall require your cooperation." "There are three hundred and twelve people in Aidennsport," get out. Go back to your space castle and leave us alone." Wellesley sighed. "I am afraid that an ethnic census is never quite that simple. However, since you are required by law to assist me, you may as well know the truth. This community is suspected of inbreed  mg. Inbreeding is not, of course, a crime, except against nature. Nor is it ordinarily dangerous. Combined, however, with the environmental influences of certain Rim planets, it may cause genuine, truebreeding mutations within the species, such as monsters, impressiono-telepaths, psycho-variants and other undesirables which, if allowed to multiply for a few generations, might become dominant. They are located and deported to A-type worlds. It had been an anonymous tip that had brought Wellesley to Ophir, but in all the inhabited universe, he knew, the Bureau was the sole guardian of the classic blood strain, and it took no chances. "What's 'inbreeding,' pa?" said Joseph, tugging solemnly at his father's sleeve. "A naughty word of the middle aboo of the mighty sky-chiefs. If we do not co-operate we bring their lightning upon our heads. Yet, what must we do?" Wellesley did not smile. "You must inform the colonists that I wish to interview each member of every family and clan briefly, beginning tomorrow morning at seven. I do not mind in the least being persona non grata, but if any person fails to show up, or if there is any trouble, you will be held personally responsible. Moreover, I do not think you are as drunk as you would like me to believe." from his pocket and drained it. "One other thing. I shall need a place to sleep." abandoned native daub-hut behind my house. You are welcome to it." "It will serve," answered Wellesley coldly. "There are natives in the area then?" "Yes. Bipeds, though not mammalian, you will find. In fact, quite low in the scale of evolution. They are nearsighted and harmless by day, but you will be wise to keep to your hut after dark." "I can take care of myself." "I'll show you the place," Joseph offered. "I can carry your space kit, too." "Over there is my ship," Joseph said, pointing. "We are making ready to put out for Arcturus." There was a bright constancy about Joseph that clutched at the heart. Not Lieutenant Wellesley's heart, of course, he reminded himself. The "ship" was indeed the rusty, peaked foretank from some ancient freighter, complete with hatch. It was set on end at the edge Of the swamp. To any boy it would have been a starship. It was already dusk. The Ophirian daub-hut was not so bad as he expected. It was massive. The orifice had been enlarged into a door. Windows had been added. The only furnishing was the rude couch. tility. Joseph spied the ferrax-thing scuttling across the lawn and dived at it. The two of them rolled over and over, Joseph laughing, the animal growling and spitting. Wellesley went in, closed the door and removed his official log from its case. The next two hours were spent in a carefully worded account -- for space logs are part of the permanent records of the Galactic Court, among others -- of the events of the day, including a bleak and perhaps prejudiced account of the character of Aidennsport and Afterwards he lay back on the couch and smoked several cigarettes in lieu of the food capsules that he did not crave. He was far from imaginative; nevertheless, the character of the place crept at last into his consciousness. He was used to cramped, machinery-filled spaces and the sterile smells of hot metal and ozone ; here was an aura of decaying organic matter -- and of something else. A faint, but unmistakable reptilian odor, attesting to the nature of past inhabitants. The vault of darkness was absolute, unabated by the dim patches of light that were the fenestrations above where he lay. And presently someone very stealthily opened the door and entered. Only for an instant was the figure silhouetted there before the door closed and darkness reigned supreme once more. Yet that instant was long enough to tell him that it had been a woman. And though her features had not been discernible, he had gotten the impression of exceptional beauty. For a time there was no movement; no sound save her faint breathing. "Who's there?" he said. "What do you want?" And then she came nearer and stood so close to him that the perfume of her breath was upon his face. Suddenly he groped, caught her arm and pulled her to him. The warmth of her body was against him. He felt her tremble. But she did not try to pull away. He laughed. "Perhaps I may revise my opinion of Ophir," he said. "No light!" she whispered. Her voice was low and vibrant. "Why not?" "I must not be seen here. But I had to warn you. It would not have been right not to warn you about Aidennsport." "What of Aidennsport?" "It is a dreadful -- an evil place. There are forces here which you would not understand. Leave at once while you are still able to go!" "You forget that I am a policeman. To leave without completing the census would be dereliction. I remind you that the Empire is inexorable in these things. And who are you, anyway?" She did not answer, but drew away so quickly that he could not grasp her. In a moment, from across the room her voice came. It was less intimate, even matter-of-fact. "If you will not leave," she said, "lock this door behind me and do not, as you value your life, step outside this hut until daylight." She was suddenly gone and he was alone in mystification and wonder, and a dull, stirring anger that he could not account for. But he could make nothing of it and after a time he put the incident resolutely out of his mind and tried to sleep. This was not accomplished at once. Curious sounds had begun to filter in through the fenestrations. Some were the night sounds of birds or insects. Other sounds, faint hissings and gruntings, were unidentifiable. Once he thought he heard the slap-slap of bare feet running past his door. At last he was forced to employ a mild form of auto-suggestion learned long ago and employed often during those first lonely years in space. He slept. But once, in the early hours of morning, he was awakened by a tumult. There was much loud hissing and the scampering of many feet outside the daub-hut, as though some intricate and riotous game might be in progress out there, the nature Of the game -- or for that matter, the players -- unguessed at. But he was half asleep, and thought little of it until he awoke again at daybreak. constabulary is acknowledged universally, though sometimes grudgingly. The men of Aidennsport, therefore, sullenly reported to Wellesley, and brought their families. It is a singular thing, but almost every birth and death in the galaxy is recorded by the Empire. The laws concerning this are old and stringently enforced. Therefore Wellesley already had a fairly accurate estimate of the true population of Aidennsport, and it came close to the number offered by Following the seldom-used manual of the Bureau, he received vital statistics, made micro-photos and dermal prints, and endeavored .a minute scrutiny of every man, woman and child that passed before him. He was finished by midafternoon. Evidence of ingeneration he found in plenty, in the marked similarity of features among certain families, but nothing which could be called deviation or mutation. Not even polydactylism, which is one of the earlier manifestations. Still, he knew that the physical impress of the mutant was often subtle, and that he might have overlooked something. In none of the females could he identify the girl of last evening. If she had failed to appear -- was hiding in the village -- might not others be hiding too? The only recourse was to study the natives and try again. In many cases deviation among homo sapiens , who had colonized the Rim planets, simulated the natural characteristics of native races. The relationship between mutation and environment was obvious. The chief magistrate, factor, or leader of any colony with an official grant was required by law to assist and obey any member of the Rift police in the capacity of a deputy. who had been avoiding him all day. "Is there a tribe of the dominant native species near here?" he asked. saluted stiffly. "In the swamp, Lieutenant." "Guide me there." said, "and I will guide you there " "You refuse?" "I do. It's too dangerous for a spaceman. Full of bog-fever. You've no natural resistance. Besides, I'm busy inventorying." "Very well," Wellesley said, struggling to hold his temper in check, "I'll find them alone." "you will not come back, and that will be an irreparable loss to the Empire." Wellesley left him and made his way toward the swamp. Joseph was playing near his ship, and calling orders to an imaginary crew inside. When he saw Wellesley he came running. "We were just blasting off for Earth," he said, "but I heard you and Pa talking. If you want to go in the swamp. I'll show you the way. I've been there lots. The Ophirians hang out on the shores of the black lake, where the organ pipes are." He pointed to the towering pinnacles in the distance. "They catch shellfish there." "You know them?" "Everybody has seen them. They are kind of green and slimy, but they won't hurt you. They can't see in the day-time. Only smell. Anyway, I'm not afraid of them." "Done," said Wellesley, "and in return for the favor I promise to put in a word for you at the nearest spaceman's hiring hall." "You won't have to do that," Joseph said. "My crew and I are going to be space pirates." Then Wellesley laughed aloud, and felt better afterward than he had felt in many a long month. The trail through the swamp was damp and primitive. Everywhere the cycads, giant ferns and reeds overhung the path. There were great, blood-colored flowers which snapped at twigs that Joseph put into their corollas. Meanwhile, the ferrax-beast labored behind them, following with its proboscis to the ground, until the boy, taking pity, picked it up and carried it. Wellesley asked its name. "His name is Omur," Joseph said. "I caught him in the mountains when he was little and raised him. But now Omur is too fat to walk." Eventually they emerged into an open swale, with a stretch of dark water before them. On the other side of the slough lay a sight well worth a day's march. Dozens of giant pipes, some two hundred feet or more in height, stood braced against the sky, pastel blue, pink, and gold in the mists. But Wellesley was less interested in these than the creatures which moved like grubs about their base, at the edge of the lake -- squat, grotesque forms that waded the shallow water, scavenging for shellfish and crustaceans, and took no notice of the humans. On coming nearer, however, Wellesley observed a very curious fact. The Ophirians were of two varieties. The ones in the mud were gross and toadlike in appearance. Whenever they found an especial delicacy they would run, with their webbed feet making smacking sounds in the shoal water, and lay it at the feet of an Ophirian who sat in a wallow of peat moss and mud, and did nothing. He was a much smaller variety, but, Wellesley noted, with considerably greater frontal development to his skull. Also his thin body bore a long, green tail. The tails of the workers were vestigial. "The chief?" Wellesley asked. "No," Joseph said. "It's something else." "Are they a clan, then, or brothers?" "Closer than brothers," Joseph said, scratching Omur's head. "I have it -- avatars! I should have guessed!" He had heard of this odd genetic arrangement before, but never witnessed it. In such cases a dozen or more individuals were bom of a single nucleus in a single egg. Of these, one developed more fully than the rest and controlled his mentally-stunted avatars with a mental vinculum far more fundamental and powerful than mere telepathic union. On the other hand, the avatars were his hands and feet, and had larger bodies. The large-headed Ophirian sat in his wallow and accepted the food offered him with long, leathery fingers. He crunched noisily. Once he turned to stare at them briefly with great, owl eyes. Eleven avatars turned simultaneously to stare. It was like looking into a multiple mirror. "They sense us," Joseph said, "but they can't see us. Come on." From nearby, the pipes were even more awe-inspiring. Besides the massive old towers there were smaller ones in every stage of development. It was incredible to think that they were actually growing; pushing up out of the lake. In one of them a jagged hole, five or six feet in circumference, had been broken at the base. Joseph, with his furry pet under his arm, went to investigate it. A moment later there came a shout from him that brought Wellesley running. "What's the matter?" "Omur went up the pipe," Joseph said, "but you can get him." There were tears in his eyes. Beseeching tears. "We'll see," said Lieutenant Wellesley brusquely. He put his head inside the pipe. A tiny circle of light far above him showed at what an awesome height was the upper rim. The inner surface, however, was very rough, and there were plenty of holds for hands and feet. He could not see Omur; only the circle of light, and around it, blackness. Suppose the damned thing bit him when he tried to rescue it! A faint, moaning sound emanated from the vast funnel, doubtless from the updraft. He found a place for his foot; drew himself up a step; then another. Joseph's white face was staring up at him from below. And suddenly the circle of light was blotted out! like dry leaves in the wind, and a sudden, sharp pain in his temple. Then another at the base of his neck. He fell back and sprang out into the open. The aperture, in an instant, was full of small, needlelike fluttering things. "Stingbats!" Joseph screamed. "Run!" Wellesley fled after him, but he was already beginning to feel a sick, draining weakness. Within a few steps his legs had become rubbery. Joseph was out of sight. Perhaps gone for help. But then Joseph did not know that he had been stung. After a while he came to a small, black pond in his path. He had gotten off the trail. He sank down, there, beneath a fern tree, cursing. He was sure that he was dying, for a numbness, an absence of feeling, had stolen up from his feet and possessed his legs. He essayed a bitter smile. He was more chagrined than afraid, for this was an ignominious way to pass, here in a nameless swamp, alone, not even beset by one worthy enemy. And perhaps when he thought he smiled, he was merely baring his teeth in that manner that certain neurotoxins leave their corpses always... Someone was shaking him brutally and insistently, and someone was repeating his name, over and over. He knew the voice at once, for it had been lately in his thoughts. "Get up!" she said. "I can't." "You must -- or die. (Jet up now and try to walk. Come, I'll help you." She did help him, and with her support he managed to get to his knees and then to his feet. He walked. Afterward, there was a kind of delirium. He remembered bitter tasting capsules which she made him swallow later on in the daubhut, but he did not recall having arrived there. He only knew that it was pleasant to have her cool hands on his forehead. The hands seemed to fill a vast, fundamental need. And this was out-of-character for Lieutenant Wellesley. After a w r hile he was lucid, and was surprised to note that, as at their other meeting, the darkness was absolute. "It's night," he said. "Very dark." "Yes." "Give me your hand." He held it for a time in both his own. It was a firm, capable hand with long, tapering fingers. "Believe that I am grateful," Wellesley said, "even though I must be grateful to a benefactor whom I have yet to see for the first time. Let me look at you. I cannot command you to tell me who you are, as an officer of the Rift constabulary, but I ask it as your friend." "You ask the impossible," she said. "The worst is over for you, but there may be still another shock to come. You must stay here until you are stronger, and then I will help you escape. Now I had better go, before -- before I am missed." He heard her retreating footsteps and the closing of the door. Escape from what ? he wondered vaguely. The poison, or the antidote seemed to have brought about some curious psychological change in him. He could not think with the old, clear incisiveness. The drive was gone, the purposefulness of his mission to Ophir. He was like Samson shorn -- or a man taken with void amentia whose mind becomes as a child's. And it was so dark. A horrible suspicion arose in his mind. He searched for, and found the torch that was in his kit. He turned it on. Nothing happened. No beam of light shot out to illuminate the ceiling. He clicked the switch several times, then held the lens against his cheek. It was warm, all right. He was stone blind. learned in the physiological sciences. He guessed that the blindness might be temporary -- a result of neural shock, but that was scant consolation. Now it seemed to him that since his arrival an invisible pattern of ill-will had been forming up around him. An ugly something lurking beneath the sullen surface of this strange village. A malignant force, beyond doubt, that well knew his true mission on Ophir. Now he was helpless, incapable of concerted action. He could not even retreat, but only lie and listen and wait. Now it was their move. The terrors of the blind were apt to be blind terrors indeed. The sounds were not long in beginning. At first an indistinct murmur. Then something -- or someone -- scampered swiftly past his door. He got up and locked it; then lay back, spent by the exertion. Presently the running and scampering began in earnest. And a hissing and squealing such as might have emanated from all the fiends in Hell. Once there came .a scratching at the door. An hour passed like a century. The sounds had gradually died away into an absolute silence that was much worse. He waited. There came a knock at the door. He sat up quickly. "Who is it?" "It's me -- Joseph " He unlocked the door and the boy came in with light, eager tread. "You all right?" he said. "Yes -- yes, I'm all right. But I can't see. Tell me, what time is it?" "It's nearly morning." "Thank God! Now listen carefully. Do you know what a strategic withdrawal is?" "Sure, everybody knows that. Every spaceman, I mean." "Good. It is time for me to withdraw to my patrol monitor in space and make a radio report. Will you guide me to the rocket? There may be danger." "I'm not afraid," Joseph said. "Come on, I know a short cut." Wellesley slung his space kit over his shoulder and followed, with his hand on Joseph's collar. They went out into the night air which smelled fresh and clean after the daub-hut, and revived him a little. At first he walked easily, for the ground was level, but after a minute or two the growth became heavy underfoot, causing him to stumble, and reeds were whipping against his face. Presently they halted. "Why have we stopped?" Wellesley asked. "Here we are," Joseph said. "We couldn't have gotten there in such a short time. Not even by a short cut." "Put your hand out before you," Joseph commanded. "You'll see. I guess we can blast off any time." There was a sound of feet, scrambling up a steel ladder. A moment later he could hear Joseph's voice from inside, echoing hollowly. He put his hand out and touched the ladder. The rungs were flaked with heavy rust beneath his finger. "This is not my rocket!" "It's my rocket," said Joseph's disembodied voice, from somewhere above his head. Wellesley cursed him. "It's the fastest ship in the universe," Joseph said. " Where you going?" Black anger possessed him, but the keen instinct of orientation common to men who have lived in interstellar space worked for his salvation. He might have blundered into the swamp, but he did not. Instead he came up, after a terrible half-hour, against the wall of a building which, by its immense extent, could only have been the warehouse. He moved along its sheer, featureless side until he came to a door, which reoriented him, then struck out in the direction that he guessed the daub-hut to be. He bumped against it at last, located its door, flung himself in and thankfully bolted it behind him. But he was not alone. She was there, waiting for him. He started when she spoke. "Where have you been?" she breathed. "I have been terrified. I found the hut empty and I was sure that you were dead." "Like a bad penny," he said, "I return. But your being here is good fortune. I am certain that you will consent to leading a blind man to his ship without resorting to childish trickery. In fact, I shall make sure of it." "Not now," she said. "It is too dangerous. We could never get through the swamp. Besides, you must still be weak from the effects of the poison. Let us wait until morning." He seized her wrists and squeezed. "You're hurting me!" she cried. "Then waste no time. And if you try to break way, or lead me into a trap, I'll snap your wrist like a straw!" He dragged her to the door. "Through the village is best," she said. "They are sure to see us, but in the open we may be able to outrun them." "Who is sure to see us?" "Never mind that now. Follow me! Their flight had a father dreamlike quality because nothing impeded them, even beyond the village. Miraculously she seemed to guide him where no underbrush or tangling grasses caught his feet, so that not once did he fall. "There it is, just ahead," she said. "The rocket tubes appear to have sunk into the mud two or three feet, though. Do you think you will be able to take off?" "It will not matter in the least," he said. "But tell me, is it still dark?" "Yes." "Quite dark?" "Very dark," she said. "That's all I wanted to know. Open the airlock and climb up. I'll follow." Once aboard, he found the controls and set them for take-off. Then he pressed a small button. The port began to swing shut. He heard her run toward it, but he caught her and held her until the heavy hatch had banged shut with a hiss of escaping air. "Let me go," she whimpered. "What are you going to do to me?" "You are under civil arrest," he said harshly. "But I haven't done anything. I have helped you." "Of course. But you forget that I represent law -- not justice. Once I told you that I could be ruthless. You see, whoever you are, you are what I came here to find. I have suspected all along; now I am certain." "What do you mean?" "You brought me here without losing the way. Then, from a hundred feet away you saw that this rocket tender had settled two feet into mud. All this in absolute darkness, That must mean that you have night sight -- like the natives, a sure sign of abnormality. Besides that, you have consistently avoided me in daylight. Meaning that I must not get a glimpse of you, even though you were able to see me quite well. You were the reason for rid of me before I found out about you. Joseph, the normal child, was used as a decoy to mislead me. But Joseph's sister was a mutant." She fell to the deck, sobbing, as he throttled full power for the blast-off. small, grey-green globe in the vastness of black space and set an automatic course for the mother ship, where he intended to submit a detailed report by radio to Regional Headquarters on Rigel Twelve. So far as he was concerned, the case was closed, once they were aboard the patrol ship, but it was three weeks to the vicinity of Rigel, and in that time a curious sequel had developed. The girl (her name turned out to be Laura) had stopped crying, and had begun to take an interest in life once more. In fact, he sensed that she was studying him a great deal of late. They were standing before the viewport, she looking at the great angry mass of Rigel, magnified in the glass, but actually still two days ahead, he listening to every sound aboard the huge ship as he had learned to listen since the darkness closed in on Ophir. She spoke. "How will it be on Rigel Twelve? Will I ever see you again?" "Will you care?" he said. "Perhaps I ought to hate you, but it is only because you are blind that you can not understand. On Ophir I was not happy, but at least it was home. Out there they may laugh at me. It is exciting and wonderful, but terrifying." "They will not laugh at you. You will be allowed to live on any approved planet that you wish, and choose your own profession. You will be trained at the expense of the Empire. And in a few years you may be allowed to visit your father and brother on Ophir. Only visit , I mean. Does that sound so bad?" "But if they laugh -- " "I am not laughing," said Wellesley, with a strange lump in his throat. "You might if you could see me. I'm too dark. My eyes are too big. My ears are too small." "I can see you," he said. "Is it true!" She clasped his shoulders. "But when -- how long?" "Since this morning, a little. The effect of the venom is passing. Now I can see you perfectly, and you are beautiful. Strange, and -- and beautiful." And she was. "Do not go to Rigel Twelve. Stay with me," he said. (It was Wellesley's misfortune that he always sounded like a policeman making an arrest, but she kissed him anyway.) And he thought what a fool troubles of his own. It was the evening after Wellesley had taken dreaded the coming night, as he always did, and had fortified himself against it. He was drunk, but not drunk enough. The warehouse was locked for the day. He was walking toward the house, lurching a little, and mumbling curses as he did so. Then he spied Joseph. Joseph, a small figure in the dusk, had just climbed out of the rusty old peak-tank at the edge of the swamp. He had furnished it with a bunk, as befit a well-found spaceship, and often slept there. The fact was that he had been sleeping there all day, having been up all night. Joseph did not go to school. He yawned and stretched. house, and started to shut the door behind him, but Joseph, coming up behind him, pushed it open and came in. He was breathing hard, having hurried to catch up with his father. He asked : "What about the spaceman ?" "What about him?" "Was he lost in the swamp?" "Where did you get that idea?" off before you were up this mom ing, just before dawn." "I was up," Joseph said. "I thought it was a meteorite. Damn!" He stamped his small foot. went with him." Joseph's face whitened. "Laura? Damn him! Damn her too." "You always hated her," said his pocket and sucking it. "She was too normal for you to stomach, I guess." "I would've got him if he hadn't run away like a yellow dog," Joseph said. "The stingbats would have done it if she hadn't interfered. And then this morning I had him, too." He was thoughtful for a moment. "Who do you suppose tipped him off?" And he watched his father's pasty face. "Who?" "All right," Joseph hissed. "I'll get you for that. You wanted to get rid of me, I'll bet. But you got rid of her instead." inside, because this was almost as good as getting rid of Joseph, having Laura out of his clutches at last. "Me and my crew will fix you for that," Joseph said bitterly. And with that, his avatars came crowding in behind him, squat, powerful and ugly, their saucer He had been through it several times before, but this time he screamed a little bit before it was over. He could not get away from Joseph, of course. There was too many of him.    IF you are a regular reader of IF and would like to complete your collection with copies of issues missed or lost -- just send #c for each copy ordered and we will mail them to you post haste. Nearly all back issues are available in limited quantities. Write to Circulation Department, IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. ( Continued from page # ) E stablishing a satellite in its orbit is an extremely critical operation, which if improperly carried out could result in an orbit so eccentric that even though the satellite had the correct orbital velocity, it could re-enter the earth's atmosphere in less than one revolution around the earth. This of course, would result in its destruction. In fact, there are an infinite number of orbital paths possible depending on the attitude of the rocket while it is achieving its orbital velocity. Common sense therefore dictates that it be possible to make corrections in its course after it has arrived at the proper altitude. It seems likely that if an instrumented third stage is used as the Satellite, the control and sequencing mechanism for all three stages will be carried in the third stage. This will include, besides a stabilized platform which acts as a point of reference for the guidance system, an integrating accelerometer. This device integrates the acceleration achieved by each stage, so that after a predetermined amount of velocity has been gained, the fuel is shut off and the stage is dropped. This is extremely important in order that the final stage will arrive at maximum altitude with the proper orbital velocity. As each stage is exhausted, it is dropped and the control will be transferred to the next higher stage which will then carry on through its programmed flight until it has contributed its part to the altitude velocityattitude picture. It would be of great advantage if the Stage enough fuel left in its tanks so that observers on the ground could use its radio receiver to make minor adjustments in its course and velocity. It would then be possible to more nearly approach an optimum orbit, which would prolong the satellite's stay in space. It is possible that Stage I, which will be a huge and costly affair, might be recovered by parachute; since it will be spent at an altitude of somewhere between ten and twenty miles. Stage II, however, will go so high and attain such velocity that frictional heat developed as it re-enters the atmosphere will destroy it. As announced, the three stage rocket will be launched at the Government's long distance rocket proving grounds on the Florida coast. This location will provide a good # miles of practically unobstructed ocean for the spent rockets to fall into, as well as a number of strategically placed islands which are already equipped with the instrumentation for tracking long distance military rockets. It is practically impossible to do more than briefly touch on the immense technical complexities involved in getting such a small unmanned vehicle into space even temporarily. However, the second article, which will appear in the next issue of IF, will discuss in considerable detail the probable makeup of the third-stage Satellite Vehicle itself, as well as instrumentation of monitor stations.    Alarms plan might save the race from extinction -- but he was the clan's only husband and had to be protected from his own folly... out, Alan had been sitting with some twenty young people of the Wolf clan in a grove of aspen approximately half way between the fields and the citadel on the hilltop. He had been teaching them myth-legend and, as usual, the girls were bored and unbelieving, the boys open mouthed. He realized, even as he spoke, diat the telling had changed even since his own youth. As a boy of ten, before it was definitely known whether or not he was a sterilie, he had sat at the feet of the Turtle clan's husband as open mouthed as those who sat at his feet now. But the telling was different. Now, had he spoken openly of when men bore weapons and women lived at home with the children, he would have crossed the boundaries of decency. It hadn't been so in his own youth, but then, when he was a boy, they had been one Illustrated, by Ed Emsh generation nearer to the old days, which weren't so far back after all. Helen complained, "This is so silly, Alan. Why don't you tell us something about... well, about hunting, or true fighting?" He looked at her. Gould this be a daughter of his? Tall for her fourteen years and straight, clear of eye, aggressive and brooking of no nonsense. The old books told of the femininity of women, but... The shots went bang , bang, bang, from below, faint in the half mile or more of distance. And then bang, bang again and several booms from the new muzzle loading muskets. Helen was on her feet first, her eyes flashing. Instantly she was in command. "Alan," she snapped. "Quick, to the citadel. All of you boys, hurry! To the citadel!" She whirled to her older classmates. "Ruth, Margo, Jenny, Paula. Get stones, sharp stones. You younger girls go with Alan. See if you can help at the citadel. We'll come last. Hurry Alan." Alan was already off, herding the boys before him. Possibly all of them were sterilies and so wouldn't count. But you never knew. As they climbed the hill, he looked back over his shoulder. Down in the fields he could see the workers scattering for their weapons and for cover. One stumbled and was down. In the distance he couldn't make out whether she had fallen accidentally or been wounded. Further beyond the fields he could see the smoke from a half dozen or more places where the shots had originated. It didn't seem to be an attack in force. Not far up the hill from the field workers, on a overhanging boulder in a lookout position, he could make out Vivian, the scout chief. She sat, seemingly in unconcerned ease, one elbow supported on a knee as her telescoped rifle went crack, cracky crack. If he knew Vivian there was more than one casualty among the raiders. Who could it be this time? Deer from the south, Coyote or Horse from the east? Possibly Eagles, Crows or Dogs from Denver way. The clan couldn't stand much more of this pressure. It was the third raid in six months. They couldn't stand it and put in a crop, nor could the drain on the arsenal be maintained. He had heard that the Turtle clan, near Colorado Springs, the clan of his birth, had got to the point where they were using bows and arrows even for defense. If so, it wouldn't be long before they would be losing their husband. He was puffing somewhat by the time they reached the citadel. Helen and her four girls were coming much more slowly, watching the progress of the fight below them, keeping their eyes peeled for a possible break through of individual enemies. The stones in their hands were pathetically brave. The rounded citadel building, stone built, loopholed for rifles, loomed before them. He swung open the door and hurried inside. "Hello, honey," a strange voice said pseudo-pleasantly. "Hey, you're kind of cute." Alan's eyes went from the two figures before him, automatic rifles cuddled under their arms, to the two Wolf clan sentries collapsed in their own blood on the floor. They had paid for lack of vigilance with their lives. He could see that the strangers were of different clans by their kilts, one a Horse the other a Crow. This would mean two clans had united in order to raid the Wolves and that, in turn, would mean the Wolves were outnumbered as much as two to one. "Relax, darling," the second one said, a lewd quality in her voice. "Nothing's going to happen to you." Her eyes took in the dozen boys ranging in age from five to twelve. "Look like a bunch of sterilies to me," she sneered. "Get them up above, and those girls too. You stay here where we can watch you, honey." The Crow went to a small window, stared down below. "Wanda is holding them pretty well but they're beginning to work their way back in this direction." She laughed harshly. "These Wolves never could fight." Her companion fingered the Bren gun which lay on the heavy table top in the round room's center. Aside from four equally heavily constructed chairs the table was the large room's sole furniture. While Alan was ushering the boys and younger girls up to the second floor where they would be safe, the Horse said musingly, "We could turn this loose on them even at this distance." The crow shook her head. "No. It'll be better to wait until they're closer. Besides, by that time Peggy and her group'll be coming up from the arroyo. There won't be a Wolf left half an hour from now." Alan, his stomach empty, stared out the loophole nearest him. One of the women said, grinning, "You better get away from there, honey. Make you sick. That's a mighty pretty suit you've got on. Make it yourself?" "No," Alan said. As a matter of fact one of the sterilies had made it. She laughed. "Well, don't be so uppity. You're going to have to learn how to be nice to me, you know." Both of them laughed, but Alan said nothing. He wondered how long the women of these clans had been without a husband. Down below he could make out the progress of the fighting and then realized the battle plan of the aggressors. They must have planned it for months, waiting until the season was such that practically the whole Wolf clan, and particularly the fighters, would be at work in the fields. They'd sent these two scouts, probably their best warriors, to take the citadel by stealth. Only two of them, more would have been conspicuous. They had then, with a limited force, opened fire on the field workers, pinning them down temporarily. Meanwhile, the main body was ascending the arroyo to the left, completely hidden from the defending forces although they would have been in open sight from above had the citadel remained uncaptured. Alan could see plainly what the next fifteen minutes would mean. The Wolf clan would draw back on the citadel, Vivian and her younger warriors bringing up the rear. When they broke into the clear and started the last dash for the safety of their fortress, they would be in the open and at the mercy of the crossfire from arroyo and citadel. If only these two had failed in their attempt to... The Crow woman said, "Look at this. Five young brats with stones in their hands. What do you say?" It was Helen and her four girls. Alan said, "They're only children! You can't... "You be quiet, sweetheart. We can't be bothered with you." The Horse said, "Two years from now they'll all be warriors. Here, let me turn this on them." Alan closed his eyes and he wanted to retch as he heard the automatic rifle speak out in five short bursts. In spite of himself he opened them again. Helen, his first born, Paula, his second. Ruth, Margo and Jenny, all his children. They were crumbled like rag dolls, fifty feet from the citadel door. Now he was able to tell himself that he should have called out a warning. One or two of them, at least, might have escaped. Might have escaped to warn the approaching fighters of the trap behind them. Tradition had been too strong within him, the tradition that a man did not interfere in the business of the warriors, that war was a thing apart. Jenny's body moved, stirred again, and she tried to drag herself away. Little Jenny, twelve years old. The rifle spat just once again and she slumped forward and remained quiet. "Little bitch," the Crow woman said. The heavy chair was in his hands and high above his head, he had brought it down on her before the rage of his hate had allowed him to think of what he was doing. The chair splintered but there was still a good half of it in his hands when he spun on the Horse woman. She stepped back, her eyes wide in disbelief. As her companion went down, the side of her face and her scalp welling blood, the Horse at first brought up her rifle and then, in despair, tried to reverse it to use its butt as a club. She was stumbling backward, trying to get out of the way of his improvised weapon, when her heel caught on the body of one of the fallen Wolf sentries. She tried to catch herself, her eyes still staring horrified disbelief, even as he caught her over the head, and then once again. He beat her, beat her hysterically, until he knew she must be dead. He worked now in a mental vacuum, all but unconsciously. He ran to the stair bottom and called, "Come down," his voice was shrill. "Alice, Tommy, all of you." when they saw the shambles of the room stared at him with as #  much disbelief as had the enemy women. He pointed a finger at the oldest of the girls. "Alice," he said, "you've been given instruction by the warriors. How is the Bren gun fired?" The eleven year old bug eyed at him. "But you're a husband, Alan ." "How is it fired?" he shrilled. "Unless you tell me, there will be no Wolf clan left!" He lugged the heavy gun to the window, mounted it there as he had seen the women do in practice. "Tommy," he said to a thirteen year old boy. "Quick, get me a pan of ammunition." "I can't," Tommy all but wailed. "Get it!" "I can t. It's... it's unmanly !" Tommy melted into a sea of tears, utterly confused. "Maureen," Alan snapped, cooler now. "Get me a pan of ammunition for the Bren gun. Quickly. Alice, show me how the gun is charged." Alice was at his side, trying to explain. He would have let her take over had she been larger, but he knew she couldn't handle the bucking of the weapon. Maureen had returned with the ammunition, slipped it expertly into place. She too had had instructions in the gun's operation. Alan ran his eyes down the arroyo. There were possibly forty of them, Horses and Crows -- well armed, he could see. Less than a quarter of them had the new muzzle loaders being resorted to by many as ammunition stocks for the old arms became increasingly rare. The others had ancient arms, rifles, both military and sport, one or two tommy guns. He waited another three or four minutes, one eye cocked on the progress of the running battle below. Vivian, the scout chief, had dropped back to take over command of the younger warriors. She was probably beginning to smell a rat. The intensity of fire wasn't such as to suggest a large body of enemy. The women in the arroyo were placed now as he wanted them. He forced himself to keep his eyes open as he pressed the trigger. Blat, blat, blat . The gun spoke, kicking high the dust and gravel before the Horse and Crow warriors advancing up the arroyo. They stopped, startled. The citadel was supposedly in their hands. They reversed themselves and scurried back to get out of their exposed position. He touched the trigger again. Blat , blat, blat. The heavy slugs tore up the arroyo wall behind them, they could retreat no further without running into his fire. They stopped, confused. Alan said, "Maureen, get another pan of ammunition. I'll have to hold them there until Vivian comes up. Alice, run down to the matriarch and tell her about the warriors in the arroyo. Quickly, now." Little Alice said sourly, "A husband shouldn't interfere in warrior affairs," but she went. When Vivian strode into the citadel she had her sniper rifle slung over her back and was admiring a tommy gun she had taken from one of the captured Horses. "Perfect," she said, stroking the stock. "Perfect shape. And they seem to have worlds of ammunition too. Must have made some kind of deal with the Denver clans." Her eyes swept the room and her mouth turned down in sour amusement. The Horse woman was dead and the Crow had by no,w been marched off to take her place with the other prisoners who were being held in the stone corral. "What warriors," she said contemptuously. "A man overcomes two of them. Two of them, mind you." She looked at Alan, the reaction was upon his now and he was white faced and couldn't keep his hands from trembling. "What a cutie you turned out to be. Who ever heard of such a thing?" Alan said, defensively, "They didn't expect it. I took them unawares." Vivian laughed aloud, her even white teeth sparkling in the redness of her lips. She was tall, shapely, a twenty-five year old goddess in her Wolf clan kilts. "I'll bet you did, sweetie." One of the other warriors entered from behind Vivian, looked at the dead Horse . woman and shuddered. "What a way to die, not even able to defend yourself." She said to Vivian worriedly, "They've got an awful lot of equipment, chief." Vivian said, "Well, what're you worrying about, Jean? We have it now." The girl said, "They have three tommy guns, four automatic rifles, twenty grenades and forty sticks of dynamite." Vivian was impatient. "They had them, now they're ours. It's good, not bad." Jean said doggedly, "These raids are coming more and more often. We've lost ten fighters in less than a year. And each time they come at us they're better equipped and there're more of them." She looked over at Alan. "If it hadn't been for this... this queer way things worked out, they'd have our husband now and we'd be done for." "Well, it didn't happen that way," Vivian said abruptly, "and we still have our husband and we're going to keep him. This wasn't a bad action at all. They killed three of us, we've got more than forty of them." "Not three, eight," Jean said. "You forget the five girls. In another couple of years they'd have been warriors. And besides, what difference does it make if we've got forty of them? There're always more of them where they came from. There must be a thousand women toward Denver without a husband between them." Vivian quieted. "Let's hope they don't all decide on Alan at once," she said. "I wonder if the Turtles are having the same trouble." "They're having more," Alan said. He had lowered himself wearily into one of the chairs. The two warriors looked at him. "How do you know, sweetie?" Vivian asked him. "I was talking to Warren, a few weeks ago. He's husband of the Turtle clan now, they traded him from the Foxes. Both clans were getting too interbred..." "Get to the point, honey," Jean said, embarrassed at this man talk. "The Turtles are having more trouble than we are. They have a stronger natural fortress at the center of their farm lands, but they've had so many raids that their arsenal is depleted and half their warriors dead or wounded. They're getting desperate." "That's too bad," Vivian muttered. "They make good neighbors." Jean said, "The matriarch told me to let you know there'd be a meeting this afternoon in the assembly hall. Clan meeting, all present." "What about?" Vivian said, her attention going back to the beauty of her captured weapon again. "About the prisoners. We've got to decide what to do with them." "Do with them? We'll push them over the side of the canyon. Nobody thought we'd waste bullets on them did they?" Alan said, mildly, "The question has come up whether we ought to destroy them at all." Vivian looked at him in gentle annoyance. "Sweetie," she said, "don't bother your handsome head with these things. You've had enough excitement to last a nice looking fellow like you a lifetime." Jean said, echoing her chief's disgust, "Anyway, that's what the meeting is about. Alan, here, has been talking to the matriarch and she's agreed to bring it up for discussion." Vivian said nastily, "Sally is beginning to lose her grip. If there's anything a clan needs it's a strong matriarch." "A wise matriarch," Alan amended, knowing he shouldn't. Vivian stared at him for a moment, then threw her head back and laughed. "I'm going to have to spank your bottom one of these days," she told him. "You get awfully sassy for a man." voice but not a vote in the meetings of the Wolf clan. He sometimes wondered at the institution which had come down from pre-bomb days. Why was it necessary to have a chairman. Of course, myth-legend had it that men were once just as numerous and active in society's economic (and even martial!) life as were women. But that was myth-legend. It all had a basis in reality, perhaps, but some of it was undoubtedly stretched all but to the breaking point. Of course if all men had been fertile in the old days. But if you started with if, as a beginning point, you could go as far as you wished in any direction. He called the meeting to order in the assembly hall which stood possibly a hundred feet below the citadel in one direction, another hundred from the stone corral which housed their prisoners, in the other. The Wolf clan was present in its entirety with the exception of children under ten and except for four scouts who were holding the prisoners. As chairman, Alan sat on the dais flanked by Sally, the matriarch, # years of age, tall, Junoesque, on one side and by Vivian the scout chief, on the other. Before them sat, first, the active warrior-workers, some thirty-five of them. Second, the older women, less than a score. Further back were the sterilies, possibly twenty of these and quite young, only within recent memory had they been allowed to become part of the clan, in the past they had been driven away or killed. Further back still were the children above ten but too young to join the ranks of either warriorworkers or sterilies. Alan called the meeting to order, quieted them somewhat and then invited the matriarch to take the floor. Sally stood and looked out over her clan, the dignity of her presence silencing them where Alan's plea had not. She said, "We have two matters to bring to our attention. First, I believe the clan should make it clear to Alan, our husband, that such interference in the affairs of women is utterly out of the question. I am speaking of his unmanly activities in the raid this morning." There were mumblings of approval throughout the hall. Alan came to his feet, his face bewildered. "But, Sally, what else could I do? If I hadn't overcome the enemy warriors and turned the Bren gun on the others you would all be gone now. Possibly none of you would have survived." Sally quieted him with a chill look. "Let me repeat what is well known to every member of the clan. We consist of less than sixty women, a few more than thirty-five of whom are active. There are twenty sterilies and twenty-five or so children. And one husband. A few more than one hundred in all." Her voice slowed and lowered for the sake of emphasis. "All of our women -- except for two or three -- might die and the clan would live on. The sterilies certainly might all die, and the clan live on. Even the children could all die and the clan live on. But if our husband dies, the clan dies . The greatest responsibility of every member of any clan is to protect the husband. Under no circumstances is he to be endangered. You know this, it should not have to be brought to your attention." There was a strong murmur of assent from those seated before them. Alan said, "But, Sally, I saved your lives! And if I hadn't, I would have been captured by the Crows and Horses and you would have lost me at any rate." This was hard for Sally Wolf, but she said, "Then, at least, they would have had you. If you had died, in your foolhardiness, you would have been gone for all of us. Alan, two clans, husbandless clans, united in this attempt to capture you from us. While we fought to protect our husband, the life of our clan, we hold no rancor against them. In their position, we would have done the same. Much rather would we see you taken by them, than to see you dead. Even though the Wolf clan might die, the race must go on." She added, but not very believably, "If they had captured you, perhaps we could have, in our turn, captured a husband from some other clan." "The reason we probably couldn't," Vivian said mildly, "is that since we've turned to agriculture and settled, our numbers have dropped off by half. We had more than sixty warriors while we were hunter-foragers." "That's enough, Vivian," Sally snapped. "The question isn't being discussed this afternoon." "Ought to be," somebody whispered down in front. "Order," Alan said. He knew it was a growing belief in the clan that giving up the nomadic life had been a mistake. From raiders, they had become the raided. Sally said, "The second order of business is the disposal of the Horse and Crow prisoners captured in the action today." Vivian said, "We can't afford to waste valuable ammunition. I say shove them into the canyon. Most of those seated in the hall approved of that. Some were puzzled of face, wondering why the matter hadn't been left simply in the scout chief's hands. Sally said, dryly, "I haven't formed an opinion myself. However, our chairman has some words to say." Vivian looked at Alan as though he was a precocious child. She shook her head. "You cutie, you. You're getting bigger and bigger for your britches every day." Two or three of the warriors echoed her by chuckling fondly. Alan said nothing to that, needing to maintain what dignity and prestige he could muster. He stood and faced them and waited for their silence before saying, "You feminine members of the clan are too busy with work and with defense to pursue some of the studies for which we men find time." Vivian murmured, "You ain't just a whistlin', honey. But we don't mind. You do what you want with your time, honey." He tried to smile politely, but went on. "It has come to the point where few women read to any extent and most learning has fallen into the hands of the men -- few as we are." Sally said impatiently, "What has this got to do with the prisoners, Alan dear?" It would seem that he had ignored her when he said, "I have been discussing the matter with Warren of the Turtle clan and two or three other men with whom I occasionally come in contact. At the rate the race is going, there will be no men left at all in another few generations." There was quiet in the long hall. Deathly quiet. Sally said, "How... how do you mean, dear?" "I mean our present system can't go on. It isn't working." "Of course it's working," Vivian snapped. "Here we are aren't we? It's always worked, it always will. Here's the clan. You're our hus- band. After we've had you for twenty years, we'll trade you to another clan for their husband -- prevents interbreeding. If you have a fertile son, the clan will either split, each half taking one husband, or we'll trade him off for land, or guns, or whatever else is valuable. Of course, it works." He shook his head, stubbornly. "Things are changing. For a generation or two after bomb day, we were in chaos. By time things cleared we were divided as we are now, in clans. However, we were still largely able to exist on the canned goods, the animals, left over from the old days. There was food and guns for all and only a few of the men were sterilies." Vivian began to say something again, but he shook a hand negatively at her, pleading for silence. "No, I'm not talking about mythlegend now. Warren's great-grandfather, whom he knew as a boy, remembers when there were four times or more the number of men we have today and when the sterilies were very few." # -- Water. # -- Nitrogen. # -- Polarized. # -- Sublimation. # -- #J#. #I -- All higher complex numbers. # -- Gamma. # -- #. # -- Polymerization. # -- Increases. # -- Meson. # -- Stone. # -- #-#. # -- Alpha. # -- #. Vivian said impatiently, "What's this got to do with the prisoners? There they are. We can kill them or let them go. If we let them go, they'll be coming back, six months from now, to take another crack at us. Alan is cute as a button, but I don't think he should meddle in women's affairs." But most of them were silent. They looked up at him, waiting for him to go on. "I suppose," Sally said, "that you're coming to a point, dear?" He nodded, his face tight. "I'm coming to the point. The point is that we've got to change the basis of clan society. This isn't working any more -- if it ever did. There's such a thing as planned breeding... it had been hard to say this, and the younger women in the audience, in particular, tittered... and we're going to have to think in terms of it." Sally had flushed. She said now, "A certain dignity is expected at a clan meeting, Alan dear. But just what did you mean?" Vivian said, "This is nonsense, I'm leaving," and she was up from the speaker's table and away. Two or three of her younger girls looked after, scowling, but they didn't follow her out of the hall. "I mean," Alan said doggedly, "that one of those Crow women has been the mother of two fertile men. To my knowledge she is the only woman within hundreds of miles this can be said about. We men have been keeping records of such things." Sally was as mystified as the rest of the clan.  Alan said, "I say bring these women into the clan. Unite with the Turtles and the Burros so that we'll have three clans, five counting the Horses and Crows. Then we'll have enough strength to fight off the forager-hunters, and we'll have enough men to experiment in selective breeding." Half of the hall was on its feet in a roar. "Share you with these...  these desert rats who just raided us, who killed eight of our clan?" Sally snapped, flabbergasted. He stood his ground. "Yes. I'll repeat, one of those Crow women has bonie two fertile men children. We can't afford to kill her. For all we know, she might have a dozen more. This haphazard method of a single husband for a whole clan must be replaced..." The hall broke down into chaos again. Sally held up a commanding hand for silence. She said, "And if we share you with another forty or fifty women, to what extent will the rest of us have any husband at all?" He pointed out the sterilies, seated silently in the back. "It would be healthier if you gave up some of this superior contempt you hold for sterile males and accept their companionship. Although they cannot be fathers, they can be mates otherwise. As it is, how much true companionship do you secure from me -- any of you? Less than once a month do you see me more than from a distance." "Mate with sterilies?" someone gasped from the front row. "Yes," Alan snapped back. "And let fertile men be used expressly for attempting to produce additional fertile men. Confound it, can't you warriors realize what I'm saying? I have reports that there is a woman among the Crows who has borne two fertile male children. Have you ever heard of any such phenomenon before? Do you realize that in the fifteen years I have been the husband of this clan, we have not had even one fertile man child bom? Do you realize that in the past twenty years there has been bom not one fertile man child in the Turtle clan? Only one in the Burro clan?" He had them in the palm of his hand now. "What -- what does the Turtle clan think of this plan of yours?" Sally said. "I was talking to Warren just the other day. He thinks he can win their approval. We can also probably talk the Burros into it. They're growing desperate. Their husband is nearly sixty years old and has produced only one fertile male child, which was later captured in a raid by the Denver foragers." Sally said, "And we'd have to share you with all these, and with our prisoners as well?" "Yes, in an attempt to breed fertile men back into the race." Sally turned to the assembled clan. A heavy explosion, room-shaking in its violence, all but threw them to the floor. Half a dozen of the younger warriors scurried to the windows, guns at the ready. In the distance, from the outside, there was the chatter of a machine gun, then individual pistol shots. "The corral," Jean the scout said, her lips going back over her teeth. Vivian came sauntering back into the assembly hall, patting the stock of her new tommy gun appreciately. "Works like a charm," she said. "That dynamite we captured was fresh too. Blew 'em to smithereens. Only had to finish off half a dozen." Alan said, agonizingly, "Vivian! You didn't... the prisoners?" She grinned at him. "Alan, you're as cute as a button, but you don't know anything about women's affairs. Now you be a honey and go back to taking care of the children." the master of his heredity through genetics -- and that the goal will be the psi mind . But what happens when a laboratory on the scale of life itself is set up to carry out the idea ? What is the ultimate end when aliens force Man to toss off the drag of orthodoxy and dogma and face new horizons? teresting answers -- and exciting reading. Don't miss it in the August issue of IF... Ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy Now! With a new cast nightly, it was the best show in town. Gay crowds mobbed the box office for tickets; but few went back more than twice... unreconstructed part of town. No buses ran out here, and the only way that Stan and Julie could reach the court was on foot, threading their way through the debris of neglect and vandalism that littered the narrow streets. This was a part of New York that Julie had never seen. Twentieth century tenements, dimly illuminated by ancient incandescent lamps, lined the rubble-filled streets, where garbage and the de caying carcasses of poisoned rats lay stinking in the gutters. The night was warm, but Julie shivered. She hurried along at Stan's side, Illustrated by Paul Orban trying to hold her breath to shut out the unpleasant smells. They stopped at the edge of the sidewalk across the street from the court and watched a crowd of peoanxiously pressing to the box office to try to get hard-to-get tickets. "Look at that mob!" Julie said. "We'll never get in!" She tried to sound disappointed, but she knew that she could not hide her feeling of relief. She didn't want to go in. She wanted to go away, back to the clean, pretty city she knew. Stan smiled and patted her hand. "You underestimate me, honey. Little Stanley knows how to take care of himself. I knew there'd be a crowd tonight, so..." He drew two tickets from his pocket. "If you don't reserve 'em, you don't deserve 'em, I always say!" He took her hand, and they started across the street toward the courthouse. It was a bleak, gray, Stone-faced building whose ornate sculptured trim was weather worn and darkened with age. Once an aspiration to architectural beauty, it was pathetically ugly, a melancholy reminder of a bygone and possibly better era. A modem theater marquee had been incongruously added to the old structure and, atop the shiny new addition, huge letters of light Smaller cast aluminum letters protruded upward from the metal rim of the arcing canopy and formed the words of a motto: "Judge not, that ye be not judged". Bold type plastered across the gleaming glass facade of the marquee loudly proLY". Stan and Julie pushed through the congestion outside the entrance of the court. A dizzying confusion Of elbows and backs and sweating, eager faces surrounded them. Stan squeezed through the seething mass of people and, holding tightly to his hand, Julie followed. For the tenth -- or hundredth -- time, she was sorry that she had come. But it was too late to turn back now. Stan showed his tickets to the guard at the door, and they were ushered politely inside where a uniformed woman with a military bearing guided them to their seats. "Your ID cards, please," the young woman said. Julie was startled by the request, and alarmed. A confiscated ID card meant trouble -- police trouble ! "Why?" she asked, nervously, "What did we do?" Stan smiled knowingly. "It's just a formality," he assured her. "They give it back to you when you leave." He handed the usher his card. "And yours, miss?" Hesitantly, Julie took out her wallet. A cold premonition urged her to stop, to leave now, before it was too late. Then she saw Stan's amused eyes grinning at her and she reminded herself that it was already too late for her to leave. She gave the girl her ID card. The usher smiled mechanically. She handed them each a program and hurried away up the aisle. "Don't worry, honey," Stan said, "you'll get it back." He held his program up for her to admire. ' Pretty snazzy, huh?" Julie nodded half-heartedly and silently leafed through her own program. It was a four page souvenir booklet. On the first page, or front cover, was the seal of justice with a perfectly balanced scale and a few words of Latin. Above the seal, black on the slick yellow paper, and below it, the legend "Judge not, that ye be not judged". Beneath the seal, in red italics, was the inscription: "For with what judgment ye judge # ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete , it shall be measured to you again . -- Matthew, #:#." The page was set up attractively but, Julie thought, the quotations seemed inappropriate. What was the purpose of the court, if not to judge? "I still can't figure it out," Stan said, as if he had read her thoughts. He reached over and tapped Julie's program with his finger. "This is the third time I've been here, and you can believe me, honey, they both judge and mete out justice in this place!" He grinned at her. "This 'judge not' business doesn't make sense!" Julie said nothing. There was nothing to say. now, and she watched the people slowly filing in. She was fascinated by the looks of anticipatory pleasure in their faces, the whole place tingled with barely repressed excitement. The spectators packed into the room until every seat was taken and they were standing, eight deep, in the rear of the court. Scanning their faces, Julie could feel -- could almost taste -- the many varied emotions that radiated from them: amusement, lust, hatred, curiosity, vengeance. It was a puzzling combination. "Now, this quotation makes some sense," Stan was saying. Julie turned her attention back to him. He had opened his program booklet to the centerfold, and he pointed to an inscription printed across the top of the two inner pages. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," he recited. "That's what this place really stands for!" He said it with relish. Julie began to feel sick. She did not like the hungry look on Stan's face or the merciless atmosphere in the courtroom. Why had she come? She stifled a shudder. She knew why she had come. She had come because Stan wanted her to and, to be honest, because she had been curious to see what the Show was like. Now that she was here, she could not call the whole thing off just because her curiosity was satisfied or because she was too squeamish to enjoy what many people considered the best entertainment in town. She had no right to ruin Stan's evening. She tried to assume a casual interest in the impending events. "What are all these lines for?" she asked weakly, indicating the horizontal lines that crossed the inner pages and were bisected by three vertical lines into four columns of uneven width. "It looks like a ledger." "It is, sort of," Stan said. "Y'see, honey, this is a scorecard. In the first column, you put the name of the accused; in the second, the offense he's charged with; in the third, his plea; and in the fourth, the disposition of the case. Up here," he explained, showing her the appropriate place, "you fill in the name of the presiding magistrate. And here," he continued, "you put in the date. It makes a nice souvenir. If you fill it out right, you can look at it six months from now and remember all the fun, just as if it were happening all over again." "Fun?" Julie's voice cracked. "Sure!" Stan said with enthusiasm. "It's a terrific show! Everyone has a good time. Well, anyhow... and he chuckled, "everyone but the bums!" He laughed. A man in the row in front of them turned around and looked at Julie. Perspiration glistened in an oily film on his round, pudgy moon-face. A lewd grin twisted his mouth. "First timer?" he asked. Stan grinned back at him, sharing a comradeship of common experience. "Yeah. I kept telling her she didn't know what she was missing. Finally convinced her to give it a try. I've been here twice before, myself," he added proudly. "Yeah? Me too!" the man said. "Guess that makes us real old pros: third timers!" He laughed and mopped his face with a crumpled handkerchief. "Damn! it's hot in here!" Mild embarrassment and a violent dislike for the oily-skinned man combined to redden Julie's face in a hot blush. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Y'know, I never thought of it before," Stan said to the man in front, "but now that you mention it, I don't know of anybody who's been here three times." A smile of accomplishment spread onto his face. "I'll bet I'm the first one in my sector!" A growing anger blended into Julie's feeling of disgust. "I don't see that it's anything to be proud of," she said coldly. Stan's laugh was a derisive bray. "She talks just like a first timer, doesn't she?" The man in front of them nodded knowingly, again sharing with Stan the common bond of experience. "The next thing you know," Stan jeered kiddingly, "she'll be preaching to us like one of those crackpot reformers." The revulsion that Julie felt must have been clearly evident now. Stan smiled fondly and put his arm around her shoulder. "I'm only kidding, honey," he half-apologized. "What's so wrong about the reformers?" Julie demanded, angrily shrugging away his arm. "Why shouldn't men be given another chance? What... ?" "Men?" The man with the moon face burst into loud laughter. "Wait'll you see these bums, kid! They're not men, they're things l" "He's right, honey," Stan said. "These joes don't have any homes or jobs or families or friends. They don't even have ID cards." "No ID cards?" That was impossible! But Julie was beginning to learn that many impossible things could happen in a world that most citizens knew nothing about. "Then how can they be expected to get jobs? You've got to have an ID card in order to be assigned..." "That's the general idea, lady," someone nearby said in a loud voice. Several people laughed. "You don't wanna put the court out of business, do ya?" Julie's lips trembled as she opened her mouth to voice the word that shouted emphatically within her: yes! yes! "Here they come!" someone shouted, and excited conversation buzzed throughout the room. Julie's voice was never heard. She stared silently at the people near her, then turned to the front of the room to see what they were all watching so avidly. A straggling line of bedraggled, dirty, unshaven men shuffled into a wire enclosure set along the right wall of the courtroom. Crushed men -- weary, lifeless, resigned to a life without hope -- they filed into the pen and slumped onto the wooden benches that were placed lengthwise in three rows in the oblong cage. Their shoulders drooped in beaten curves. Their heads were bowed. The man in front turned around and nudged Julie's knee. His triumphant smile was an obscenity. "Call those men?" He laughed and winked at Stan, then turned back to the front of the court to watch the preliminary proceedings. An incipient convulsion crawled about in Julie's stomach. Her knee felt cold and clammy where the moon-faced man had touched it. Her skin was prickly and tight. She began to itch. "Get up, honey," Stan was saying. "Here comes the judge." She stood, numbly, her eyes riveted on the men in the wire enclosure. "Julie!" She felt a hand tugging at her arm. "You can sit down now, Julie," Stan said. "Sit down!" Mechanically, she sat down. Woodenly, she stared at the tableau before her -- the judge perched on his elevated throne, the stone-faced attendants at each side of the dais, the wire pen filled with misery. Through the almost tangible excitement and glee of the spectators, the misery reached her, held her. the people of the City of New York against... against an assortment of outcasts -- drunks, derelicts, cripples, beggars -- the "undesirables" that had been rounded up by the police in the past twentyfour hours. The people of the City of New York against a pen full of men whose only crimes, for the most part, were sickness, lack of hope and failure to possess the ID cards which everyone needed and which, somehow, they had been denied. How? Julie wondered. How could anyone not have an ID? Even if you lost your card you could get a new one simply by paying a fine. Even if you had been in prison you got a new card when you were released. You had to have a card! Everyone had to... A court attendant called out: "Garcia, Miguel!" and a small, dark-complexioned man walked out of the detention pen and stood meekly before the judge. The clerk of the court read the charge, rattling it off in the singsong jargon of court clerks, his words slurred together into one almost unintelligible burst of sound. There was a pause, and silence in the courtroom. "Well?" said the magistrate, "how do you plead?" His voice sounded kindly. He sat high on his bench, hunched into his black robe, and looked down with apparent benignancy on the little man who stood silently before him. The audience was hushed. It watched hopefully and waited. Julie could sense the intense excitement in Stan as he leaned forward, straining to catch every detail of the scene, anxious not to miss a thing. She heard a giggle, then Stan's hearty laugh, then a loud burst of laughter. She opened her eyes. The defendant was shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment. He turned half-way around to look at the laughing audience, a sheepish grin on his face. The magistrate smiled his appreciation of the humorous response to his question. "So, you can't make up your mind?" he said in a seemingly friendly and sympathetic way. "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do, Miguel. I'll give you thirty days in the city's hotel to think it over." Laughter and applause filled the room. The judge nodded his head in a little bow of acknowledgement. Miguel Garcia was led away, still smiling, obviously ignorant of what was happening. Miguel Garcia apparently did not understand English. first line of his scorecard. His face was flushed. His eyes were bright. A satisfied smile lingered on his lips. "Stan, let's leave," Julie said. Stan laughed in disbelief. "Are you kidding? The fun's just startmg. "Please, Stan. I... I don't feel well." "Oh? I'm sorry, honey." It was # . a formality, like saying T beg your pardon' to a stranger you bump into in a crowd. There was no concern in Stan's voice. The second case was being presented, and his attention was rapt upon the clerk and the object of the proceedings, an old white haired derelict. "Stan, please!" Julie insisted. "Look, honey," Stan said impatiently, "we can't leave now, even if we wanted to. They don't give back the IDs until after it's all over." A sharp burst of laughter brought his attention abruptly back to the action up front. The old man had dropped his hat and an attendant had kicked it away from him. The white haired castoff shuffled across the room to retrieve it. "I missed something!" Stan said, testily. He turned to his neighbor and was hurriedly filled in on what had happened. "Well, Vm leaving!" Julie said. She got up and edged her way out to the aisle. Stan made no protest. He was concentrating on the performance up front. Julie hurried up the aisle and pushed through the pack of people standing in the back of the room. She found the usher at the door. "I'd like to leave," she told the girl. "May I please have my ID?" The usher's face was expressionless, her voice efficiently official. "ID cards will be returned at the conclusion of the session." "But I want to leave now!" Julie protested. "I don't want to see any more of this!" "No cards can be returned until the session is concluded," the usher recited. It was a final decree of official policy. There could be no arguing, no appeal from the decision. There was no alternative but to abide by it. Julie returned to her seat. She squeezed past a barricade of knees, rousing disgruntled comments from several of the spectators. Stan glanced up at her as she settled back into the seat at his side. It was only a glance, and then his eyes were fixed once again on the magistrate, the attendants, and the "undesirable" being judged. Minutes passed. Hours. Julie suffered the time in silence. She saw and heard, but could hardly believe, the unrestrained sadism of the giggling, laughing, applauding, cheering, jeering audience. What kind of people were these, who laughed at the pain and humiliation of others? What did they find amusing in the ruin of human life? They laughed when a partially paralyzed hunchback limped before the judge and pleaded guilty to a charge of ogling girls in a public park. They roared with hilarity when the magistrate suspended sentence and commented that a more appropriate charge would have been that of defacing public property. They applauded lustily when he said to the arresting officer, "Bring him in on that one tomorrow and I'll throw the book at him!" They laughed when an alcoholic appeared, twitching and brushing imaginary creatures from his tom jacket. They howled gleefully when he whimpered and sobbed like a small boy having a nightmare. They laughed when the magistrate said his fountain pen had run out of ink and, looking into the detention pen, inquired, "Would any of you blue bloods care to make a donation?" They laughed when a court attendant read a complaint which charged that the defendant, a small skinny man, had attacked the arresting officer, and that the officer ( six-three, two hundred and ten pounds) had used reasonable force in defending himself. The man's broken arm was in a sling and bandages covered twelve stitches in his scalp. The audience laughed. They gloated. They sat in judgment of their fellow men and called for punishment -- the more severe, the better. At last, the detention pen was empty. The last "undesirable" was brought before the bench. He was a small, pathetic looking man dressed in sailor's dungarees. He spoke Norwegian and clumsily tried to explain his predicament with the few words of English that he knew. "Stop gibbering!" the judge shouted at him. The magistrate's facade of kindliness had long since disappeared. He turned to the arresting officer. "Do you speak that language?" He made it sound like a disgrace to be able to speak Norwegian. The officer shook his head. "Neither do I," the magistrate said, with obvious pride that he was not contaminated by such knowledge. He arbitrarily ordered the man held until he learned to make himself understood; the hearing to take place when that had been accomplished. The sailor was led away. The Show was over. "That's the end of it, folks," the judge said, genially. He tapped his gavel and rose from his seat. The courtroom rang with lusty applause. The judge hurried through the door to his chambers and the applause died out. The people started to leave. Their animated discussions of the evening's events dinned through the room in a babble of noise. and there was a queasy feeling in her stomach. She thirsted for fresh air. Slowly, the mob of spectators formed a procession in the aisle. Slowly, the column of people moved toward the exit. Slowly, slowly, Julie was pushed along with the crowd. The line paused as each person stopped at the door and waited until his ID card was located and returned to him. Then the procession would take another step forward. And pause again. And again. Occasionally, an ID could not be found and its owner was requested to step aside and allow the line to move on while the search for his card continued. And there was another step forward. Stan held Julie's hand to prevent the pressing crowd from separating them. "How'd you like it?" he asked. He was aglow with satisfaction, tired by the long evening's excitement but with a pleasant weariness of accomplishment. "It's a terrific show, isn't it?" Julie did not answer him. She wanted to break away and run and run and run and run! She inched along with the rest of the procession. At last they reached the door. They told the usher their names and she methodically checked through the cards in her file. The procession behind them waited. Julie's ID card was quickly found and returned to her, but the usher reported some difficulty in finding Stan's card. He was asked to step aside, please, and let the line go through. He protested at the inconvenience, then sullenly joined a few other people waiting for their cards in the rear of the court. Julie stood impatiently in the doorway. She watched Stan strike up a grumbling conversation with another detained person. It was the moon-faced man who had been sitting in front of them. For a fleeting moment she thought of the old adage about "birds of a feather". She waited. People filed past her in a steady stream, from the courtroom, across the lobby, out through the street door. Watching them -- smiles and pleasant conversation, civilized small talk and serious debate of the merit of the evening's fare, as if it were a dramatic work of art. She clenched her teeth and prayed that Stan would hurry up. Soon the flow of people stopped. Still no Stan. Julie waited. Some twenty minutes later, an attendant came out of the courtroom. He went past Julie, then paused at the door, turned and came over to her. "Waiting for someone, miss?" "Yes. My friend. They seem to have misplaced his ID card." The attendant smiled and shook his head. "You might as well go on home, miss. If he's still in there, he won't be coming out for some time." "I'll wait," Julie said. "You don't understand, miss. He won't be out tonight." "What are you talking about? He's just waiting till they find his ID, and it couldn't have gotten up and... "Seventeen IDs were lost," the attendant explained, "Those people in there can't get them back. They're going to have to go to Caracas or Milan to apply for new cards." "Don't be silly!" Julie scoffed, "You don't have to go to another city to apply for a new card! All you have to do is file a claim and pay the fine." "These are special cases," the attendant said uneasily. He seemed reluctant to talk about it. Julie frowned. "What's special about them? Their ID cards were lost, weren't they?" "Look, miss, all I know is every time an ID is lost in there," he nodded toward the courtroom, "they've gotta go out of the country to apply for a new one. That's all I can tell you." "But why out of the...?" "The reassignment orders are being drawn up right now," the attendant said. He led Julie to the street exit. "So you'd better go home and forget that fellow." Confusion and a vicarious fear made Julie shiver. "Will he... will they get new cards?" The attendant shrugged. "They might -- some day." He touched her arm. His voice was low, barely audible. "Was this your first time at the Show?" Julie nodded. "How did you like it?" "I... I..." She shook her head. The attendant smiled at her gently. "Don't ever be a thirdtimer." He released her arm and hurried away down the street. Julie puzzled over his parting remark as she went out into the foul smelling night and walked away from the courthouse. Suddenly, the street before her dimmed as the lights on the huge marquee blinked out. She turned and looked back at the entrance of the court, now dark and deserted. And then she understood. She remembered the moon-faced man's observation about the scarcity of third-timers. She understood how the "undesirables" lost their ID cards and why so many could not speak English. She understood the apparent cruelty of the sentences meted out to them, too. The answer was on the marquee. As she looked back at it, only the raised letters on the canopy were visible, shining luminously in the darkness: "judge not, that ye be not judged And she recalled the quotation on the program: "For with what judgement ye judge , ye shall be judged     minute. Architects of tomorrow who will be thinking less in terms of insulation to keep out the sun's heat and more in terms of using the roof as part of the heating system will be making this new unit a common household term to replace "gallons" of oil and "tons" of coal. Hope of making milk a diseasegerm-fighting substance -- so that all who drink it would have immunity to a host of ailments -- is held out for the future by researchers at the University of Minnesota. The method would be to inject vaccines for disease-causing bacteria and viruses into the cow's udders. In response to this kind of vaccination, cows produce large quantities of antibodies. This would give milk drinkers passive immunity, which is not as long lasting as the kind one gets from an attack of a disease or a vaccination. However, by continuing to drink the milk die passive immunity could be continued. Science minded folks of the future may soon be adding two new words to their vocabulary of measurements. Timekeeping with atomic clocks has produced the word "essen" to designate a second as measured by atomic vibrations, to distinguish it from the word used to designate astronomical seconds. "Roof" is a new unit described as the quantity of energy that would fall on the actual roof area of a small house about # feet square during a day when the sun shines The marriage of the engine of the future with the fuel of the future was described recently at the first unclassified public discussion of nuclear gas turbines. Such nuclear gas turbine plants will have their greatest application in ships and in areas where other power plants cannot be used. With a gas turbine as the ideal power take-off for the nuclear reactor, they could be used in remote areas where power is now unavailable, where storage of conventional fuels is a problem, and during wartime where both storage and refueling for long lifelines are important. The gas turbine power plant takes up less space and operates at a higher efficiency than do power plants run on water or fossil fuels. Perhaps their greatest advantage over existing power plants is the fact that they can be transported from one place to another. Although there are still refinements to be made, nuclear gas turbine plants are a fact, and will come into use in the not too distant future. Housewives may have to go to the frozen food counter for a loaf of bread in tomorrow's supermarket. Bakers are looking hopefully toward the commercial freezing of bread, a practice that promises to reduce staling, loss of unsold loaves and costly night baking. Experts have probed into the technical problems, and learned that the maximum storage temperature for top quality bread is # degrees Fahrenheit for periods of about a week. Zero degrees is needed for extended storage. Moisture distribution, firmness, and taste are essentially the same as in freshly baked bread and will remain that way for four to seven weeks at zero degrees Fahrenheit Aircraft of the future may have to be designed to last for only a few hours, and then be scrapped. The problems created by the thermal barrier are triggering this new design philosophy. The two problems that must be mastered before Man's missiles can break through the earth's atmosphere at supersonic speed are: heat and creep (the softening of materials under increased stress). At five times the speed of sound at sea level temperatures are sufficient to melt the best aluminum alloys known. This, coupled with a weight penalty due to weakening of materials brought on by aerodynamic heating, may limit sustained flight to a region below three and a half times the speed of sound. A national astronomical observatory, long the dream of astronomers, will become an accomplished fact in about five years. The first of its kind in the United States, the observatory will probably be run jointly by several institutions. It will give astronomers from all over the country much better research facilities than their institutions can separately afford. A grant of #, (XX) has been made to the University of Michigan to look for an appropriate site and begin construction of a #-inch telescope. A mass trial of a vaccine against a special type of infectious cold is expected to get under way within a year. It will be similar to the trials of the polio vaccine; but instead of grade school children, military recruits will be lining up for shots. A vaccine for the grippe-like virus colds has already been tried on prison volunteers. It prevented the sickness in about # of the susceptible volunteers when the vaccine was "challenged" by doses of live virus swabbed into the eye. It is expected to give even greater protection against naturally caught disease, since a person is not likely to get such a big dose of virus that way. The vaccine caused no reaction among the volunteers and takes effect within ten days to two weeks. It will probably protect for a year or more, although this fact has not yet been proved. There may be a whole new concept of music for the listeners of tomorrow. R.C.A. recently announced a "music synthesizer" -- electronic equipment that can imitate any known musical sound or instrument and also create a multiplicity of sounds for which there is no known mechanical means of generation. The device also has an endless capacity for rhythmical variation. Jet planes may soon be able to land on runways only one-third as long as those now needed. Engineers have been experimenting with a new type of built-in brake for jet craft known as thrust reverses. The reverses scoop up the jet blast, diverting it to the opposite direction. The devices can potentially reduce ground roll far more efficiently than the parachutes used at present. The idea behind them is not only to slow down the jets on landing, but to brake them in mid-air. Totally automatic defense of North America by guided missiles automatically directed to their target by giant electronic "brains" is only a matter of time. This is foreseen with the announcement of a new electronic system which controls aircraft flight and fires the plane's rockets at the proper instant after it is within # miles of its target. When the radar "eyes" spot the attacking bomber, the pilot pushes a button, locking the radar on target. An electronic computer takes over, flying the plane on interception course no matter how the bomber maneuvers. At exactly the correct moment, the rockets are automatically launched. The U.S. Army has developed a new radio transmitter powered by the voice of the sender alone. The oneand-one-half pound device requires no batteries or external source of power and may be able to transmit at a range of one mile. A tiny companion receiver now under development would use voice energy that had been stored up during transmission to power it. Together the two would make a battery-less walkie-talkie small enough to fit into a telephone mouthpiece. A new experimental machine which can print, at the touch of a single key, any one of # eighteen-character words or phrases at the rate of # words per minute was recently announced by I.B.M. The model is a standard electric typewriter. Connected to it is a memory system set up in a control panel. The typewriter can be used normally, but a slight pressure on a foot switch converts it into the Wordwriter which types the stock phrases such as "Dear Sirs:", "In response to your request", "Yours truly", etc.  Spaceman's air domes may soon be dotting the countryside. Inflated fabric domes used for housing radar equipment have pointed the way for practical construction of such buildings. Structures such as these already in use can withstand wind velocities up to # miles per hour and varying temperature changes. Practical aspects of these inflated buildings include portability, safety, and unlimited space; commercial blowers being the only mechanical device necessary to maintain the pressure to keep them inflated. Researchers at Cornell are already constructing a hockey rink using this principle. Dear Mr. Quinn: As one of your silent readers who has bought your fine book ever since it came out without missing an ish, I've a gripe to give you. Why the heck have you gone bimonthly? Good grief, with the hokum and bunk several other mags offer all the time without folding, you're at least as good as any of file rest pubbing monthly. The poorer mags as a rule are the ones pubbing less often or on a bimonthly schedule. You've got a first class mag! Why bi-monthly then? I like the idea of bringing back the letter department; also the other departments. But you could still use a few more. It's like the guy who gets a grade-A steak three times a day -- he finally gets tired of it and wouldn't mind eating the humble bean or potato in between -- not that there's anything humble about good non-fiction. In the February ish, G.A. Kempner's letter is in part foolish. He argues that time travel is for the birds. So was atomic power # years ago, at least in theory. Then he really puts his foot into it re telepathy. "... no conclusive evidence is available at present". I wonder what Dr. Rhine would say to this, or what several scores of students and scientists who participated in conclusive telepathic experiments would voice in angry rebuttal? These people ain't a bunch of Rosicrucians bub! This can be considered answer enough to the rest in "Hue and Cry" who hold with Kempner's viewpoint. How about having Cal Beck do some fanzine reviews, club reports, movie reviews and similar stuff, and get Miller or Knight for book reviews. With men like that in IF, you'd have about the best mag in SF, bar none. -- Bernard Krumpel Newark, N. J. See this issue for that non-fiction but this is definitely not fC the bean and potato" kind. As to the other suggestions... how about some reader comments? Dear Editor: I have just finished reading Jim McConnell's very good story "Avoidance Situation" and can only say "he goofed". He refers to a C # drive and a C # radio. He neglects the fact that C # is not a velocity. Consider c -- # x # # cmsec. Then c #  # x # # cmsec#. Obviously this is not a velocity. Now I suppose someone will say that he didn't mean to square the units, only the numerical magnitude. Let us see where this leads. Considering c # as a velocity we get: for c -- # x # # cmsec, c #  # x # # cmsec; for c  # x # # milessec, c # -- # x # # milessec, which is the same as # x # # cmsec; for c -- I (light-sec) sec, c #  I (light-sec)  sec which is the same as # x # # cm sec. Obviously the value of c # depends upon the units used in c. Now Mr. McConnell says that the Terran ship can travel faster in subspace than the alien can using the c # drive. This implies that the alien uses the same system of units as we do. This is a statistical nightmare. The units we use are arbitrary. (This would not be the case if we used a distance of I light unit and a time of the same unit, but then c # is no faster than c.) I cannot see how the alien could have the same system. -- Stuart L. Anderson Seattle #, Wash. It would be a coincidence; but how else could McConnell get the idea across for the non-mathematician? Dear Editor: As an old time "sfan" -- if I may coin such a word at this late date in my science-fiction career -- I find great interest in your articles by Forrest Ackerman, whom I knew well in the early thirties. His February comments on the origin of S-F terms particularly intrigued me. While he did not mention the word "scientifilm", Fve seen it used enough to make me take a small measure of pride in having created that hybrid. If I remember correctly, it first appeared in print in The Time Traveller , the earliest sfan paper, which I edited back in #. Since I don't have a single some other old-timer may confirm my recollection. Another word I coin around that time was "scientale", but apparently it never caught on. Now I wonder what "sfandom" will think of my latest creation, "sfan"? That term seems so natural and obvious I can hardly believe it's really new; but I haven't seen it anywhere else before. -- Allan Glasser Brooklyn, New York Any old timers who still have copies of The Time Traveller? And how about "sfan"? Dear Mr. Q: I'm getting a little tired of all the protesting that only in the liberal arts can the true gospel of Man be found and the tendency to make the scientists the scapegoats for all the ills of the modem world. Too many of today's men of affairs are proud that they know nothing about science, and as a result the world has a philosophy that the men of science and engineering are narrowly materialistic and heedless of human values. Please make the following observation: Complete understanding of the destructive possibilities of an atom bomb does not mean that one must be built -- somebody has to want one. The nature of their work being what it is, skilled scientists and technicians usually work for the men of affairs. Can there then be so much questioning of their motives and values by the "humanists"? -- J. R. Ryder Chicago, #. This has all the earmarks of a good controversy . Who's on who's side? Dear Mr. Quinn: I must air some comments on the delightful February issue. The Hunter cover and space satellite drawings were worth the price of the magazine itself. Have one question to ask. When did you change art editors? Since I missed the December issue, I don't know whether you changed then or with this issue. And now to the inside. The short novel "Avoidance Situation" was extremely good. The writing some of the best I've seen in a long time. The Anderson novelette just didn't seem to click, though I usually like his stories very much. The rest of the stories were above average. The gem of the whole issue is "The Drivers" by Ed Ludwig. It's a most thought provoking story which takes today's reckless driving to perhaps the ultimate in story telling. -- Tom Driscoll Cincinnati, Ohio See what happens when you miss an issue? There's more to come on the satellite too . Better not miss any more . Dear Mr. Quinn: I haven't had a chance to read more than a couple of stories in the February IF -- "The Drivers", incidentally was excellent -- but as usual, I read the letter section and features first. May I dip a short oar into the controversy over G. W. Walton's viewpoint? It's rather bold to say that anything is impossible. I can think of two circumstances under which time travel -- physical, that is -- would be conceivable. One is the Einsteinian theory of time as another dimension of space, on which present advanced science is based. Under this concept, the future exists and has existed just as the past and the present and no change can be made in it. A theoretical time traveler finds that his action changes nothing, because he was already back at the point to which he traveled in time and his influence there had a casual effect on circumstances before the backward jump -- maybe even caused it. It is difficult to see, however, how a man could "skip" over a period of years in traveling either forward or backward in time. The other possibility is one which has a part in African savage religions, the concept of the "fanshaped" destiny. At every moment of choice, when the choice is evenly balanced, both courses are taken. This of course involves parallel time streams, and many parallel worlds diverging from every possible point. A return to a parallel world then would involve no paradox. If we limit ourselves to proven facts in our themes, we have no science fiction. -- Charles Fontenay Madison, Tennessee See Mr . Fontenay # s "Z # in this issue for one Einsteinian time concept... and tell us what you think . Dear Sir: Mel Hunter has goofed! Take a copy of February IF... turn to the inside front cover. Look in the upper left hand corner. We see a three stager taking off; Minimum Orbital Unmanned Satellite of Earth. But all three stages have wings! Only the first stage needs wings and they are just to enable it to navigate a shallow orbit (straight up is needless and, at present, impossible). However, there will be no air after Stage I falls to earth and Stage II takes over as far as airfoils are concerned. That is, there will not be enough air with which to glide. Sheer momentum and free fall will hold it up. -- Jerry Page Decatur, Georgia Mr. Page, you are right! Hunter and editor both goofed . The drawing. of the satellite rocket on page # will bear you out . And don # t miss the August issue ! Dear Editor: Have read for years stories and articles on space travel that make the false assumption that a person on the Moon or other planet of lighter-than-Earth gravity would be able to leap over obstacles of a height greater than those he could clear on Earth, the height being figured as inversely proportional to the decrease in gravity. The gentlemen who write such "data" say a man can jump over a five-foot obstacle on Earth; on the Moon, gravity is only one-sixth as strong; therefore he can jump six times as high or clear a thirty-foot obstacle! Sounds logical, but overlooks some of the important facts about how people jump -- and confuses clearing an obstacle with lifting the human C.G. A six-foot man, standing, has a C.G. roughly three and a half feet from the ground. In leaping over a five-foot barrier, his C.G. will clear it by a foot or less; therefore he lifted two and one half feet the other two and one half feet for clearing the obstacle being obtained by tucking up the legs. If I haven't overlooked some factors, then a man on the Moon should be able to leap over a seventeen-to eighteen-foot obstacle, hoisting his C.G. # x ##, or # feet pulling his legs in for the rest. There should be another way to calculate this: a man on the moon would weigh one sixth of, say, one hundred and eighty pounds -- or thirty pounds. Now, if we knew how fast a man's legs muscles could push an object weighing thirty pounds with an inertia of one hundred and eighty pounds, we could calculate how long that six-foot per sec (approximate) gravity of the Moon would take to stop and retrieve it, and m how far it would travel before it stopped. -- J. E. Cheme Hagerstown, Md. How about jumping obstacles under an air dome on the moon? Dear Mr. Quinn: At present you are up with the other top magazines in maintaining a proper balance between fiction and the features. However, I disagree with Mr. Hallam of the Dec. # issue, regarding technical articles. IF has yet to produce articles as absorbing as those on Thiotimiline or the series Origins of Galactic Etiquette. -- K. H. Quinlem Brisbane, Australia Dear Mr. Quinn: How about more stories such as Raymond Jones' "Human Error" and Ed Ludwig's "The Drivers"? These have the ring of reality and authenticity. If I could have one wish, I think I would like to live as long as Methuselah. Reincarnation wouldn't be the answer -- I wouldn't want to miss the next nine hundred years. How about some more letters from lady S.F. fans? Interest in S.F. isn't silly girls, it beats love stories all to pieces. Then too, some of our great scientists are women. I have been an S.F. fan for five years and I'm proud of it. -- Margaret Wilhelm Freeland, Md. (Continued from page #) However, as you have no doubt surmised by now, their speculations on the Satellite are not idle conjecture but come from a wealth of working know-how and personal experience. The first article (page #) dismisses the "basketball" idea and presents the satellite as a giant needle, # feet in length and one foot in diameter, and discusses the requirements for getting it into space. The second article, which will appear in the August issue, goes into more detail and describes instrumentation, functioning, orbital behavior and transmission of intelligence. -- jlq # fantasy and sciencefiction books and backissue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #K Verona Pennsylvania is shown being hoisted into position atop Stage One, one hundred feet high. The twenty foot Stage Three Satellite will be placed in position last. Monster gantry rig is built with adjustable crane arm to facilitate simultaneous rapid fueling of all three stages just prior to takeoff, in order to minimize boiloff of volatile oxidizer. Just before firing, tower will be pulled back to allow rocket to stand alone. Blockhouse is underground a half-mile away. Scene is near Patrick Air Force Base, Cocoa, Florida. (Drawings by Mel Hunter) Exciting New Worlds of Sc ience Reading! to be found anywhere in the world is now appearing regularly in IF. Also, you will find exclusive, factual, authoritative 'articles on the sciences of foday and tomorrow -- by eminent scientists. Here (this copy is a sample), in a beautifully printed and illustrated magazine, is the world of the future in both fact and fiction. But -- have you enjoyed this issue? Then why not subscribe. If you do, we will send your -- Your subscription brings you (bimonthly) # issues for just #. But we will send the first issue as a gift, which means you get I # issues in all... So, don't miss a single one of the important issues to come. Send your subscription to -- IF Magazine  special! Man's First Contact With Outer Space! booster is jettisoned, motor of Stage Three is ignited. Gimbal-mounted motor steers Satellite into orbit, three hundred miles up, at a speed of I # m.p.h. At cut-off, small amount of fuel will remain in tanks to be used for intermittent firing to stabilize Satellite in orbit. After jettisoning. Stage Two will coast nearly all the way around Earth in slowly descending path before entering upper levels of denser atmosphere and burning away due to air All Stories New and Complete I and Paul J. Vanous #  I (Second of Two Parts)  # # '"Satellite Over Europe" by Mel Hunter IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. # Copyright J# by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U S A Next ( October) issue on sale August #th Here is a workable 'blue print" of the instrumentation of the Satellite -- how it functions aloft for a year, how it tells Earth-bound Man what ifs like up there! The Satellite Vehicle Lead Research Engineer y Atomic Research Energy and Problems of Instrumentation , North American Aviation Microwave Senior Design Engineer y Missile Guidance Systems Divisiony Bendix Aviation these two articles was undergoing painstaking preparationy a continuouSy trickle of news, from various sources, has described bit by bit the actual development of the first Temporary Satellite assemblies. Thus it becomes more and more clear, as each day passes, that almost all the vitally necessary advantages of the proposed Satellite vehicle, described by Mr. Nuding and Mr. Vanous, are being by-passed in the designs of the vehicles actually readied for the LG.Y, program. The prime reason seems to be one of fanatic haste to get some-thing, anything, off the ground and into space by late # or early #, as announced. The publicity and propaganda value of being first into space with any kind of satellite is immense, and an openhanded gesture of peaceful intent. However, the satellites are supposed to have a purpose, namely: the gathering of technical data on conditions of many kinds in the volume of space immediately surrounding the Earth. The editors of IF have felt, almost from the opening announcement of Project Vanguard, that the very short time allowed for design, development and construction of the actual hardware to be fired precluded any chance for the accomplishment of the main purpose in anything more than a momentary fashion. Therefore, as long ago as October, #, IF commissioned Mr. Nuding and Mr. Vanous to develop and describe a design for such a satellite assembly which would satisfactorily perform the task of gathering a complex assortment of spatial data, and stay in orbit for a long enough time to provide information o maximum contribution to the I.G.Y. We feel that Messrs. Nuding and Vanous, have accomplished a remarkable feat. The construction of each of the three rocket stages which they propose presents no really great problem that has not already been under attack for a actual Satellite, is a close adaptation of Aerobee. Stage II is a modified Viking chassis, and Stage I presents dimensions and performance that are not likely to be too far removed from the thoughts being considered for our Intercontinental Ballistics Missile, Atlas. It is IF's conviction that -- once scientific appetites are whetted by the intriguing, but inconclusive, results of the first hasty shots of the I.G.Y. satellites -- it is inevitable that the design of a vehicle much more similar to the one we here propose will follow. For instance, it has been recently announced that the I.G.Y. birds will be fired into an elliptical orbit of very high eccentricity at an angle which belts the Earth more or less completely in its equatorial zone. This can only be, as Mr. Nuding and Mr. Vanous point out, because insufficient power is being utilized to provide that last thousand-miles-per-hour velocity necessary to overcome the EartWs rotational spin. Yet, the Equatorial orbit is a miserable compromise from a whole spectrum of viewpoints, and such an orbital elliptical eccentricity will allow only a scant few days of life for the bird before burnup at perigee, because of too deep re-entry into the upper atmosphere at that point every ninety minutes. There will be a bigger, more high flying bird" in a stable Polar orbit before too long, and the odds are excellent that it will be a substantial piece of respectable engineering -- not a globule. T he first article on this subject June IF) dealt briefly with Stages I and II of a desirable type of satellite vehicle for launching during the forthcoming Geophysical Year by the Defense Department of the United States. This article deals in detail with Stage toring stations of the Satellite vehicle. It will also discuss the possible orbits into which the Satellite might be put and the effect of these orbits on the information obtainable. Stages I and II, although they will be an engineering feat of prime importance, must be considered only as a means toward an end -- a conveyance or elevator to raise the Satellite # miles above the surface of the Earth and accelerate it along the direction of its orbital we see as a much more complicated device. It will be not only a rocket, complete with all the necessary fuel tanks, motor, guidance systems, etc., but it should also contain an electric power source, radio gear for sending and receiving information to and from the earth; a gyrostabilized platform, a navigation system, and a number of sensing instruments for the gathering of information of interest to I.G.Y. scientists. We have tried to design a satellite that will give the maximum amount of information and justify the great expense of its manufacture and launching. It differs considerably from the current popular conception of what the satellite vehicle will be like. In fact, it differs from what the first few satellites may actually be like. In order to enclose the numerous devices mentioned in the preceding paragraph, it would have to be a rocket at least as large as the Aerobee. The Aerobee is # feet long and # inches in diameter. Whereas the Aerobee was designed to carry a # lb. payload to an altitude of approximately # miles, the instrumented third stage of the proposed satellite would be carried by the second stage to near the altitude of the desired orbit, and have imparted to it by the second stage, nearly all of the # miles per hour velocity necessary to keep it there. All that would be required of the rocket propulsion system of the Satellite itself would be a sufficient number of shortduration impulses to make final and continuing corrections to the Satellite's orbit. This means that tankage and fuel load could be small, leaving room for the large bulk of desired instrumentation. satellite, one must consider the economics of the situation. If the cost of the venture is to be the deciding factor, then the satellite should be launched at or near the equator, in the direction of the Earth's rotation. This allows one to take advantage of the # miles per hour rotational velocity which the surface of the Earth has at the equator. This would considerably decrease the load of fuel necessary to bring the satellite to its orbital velocity, of approximately # mph. The size of both Stages I and II would thus be reduced, makbe scanty and inadequate, but obing the whole project of a size more servers on the ground would be consistent with present day rocket working under great terrestrial diftechnology. Acuities. Balanced against this gain, howThe ideal orbit, informationwise, ever, is the fact that such an orbit would be one that circles the Earth would probably give less informafrom pole to pole, which nullifies tion about the Earth and the upper velocity imparted by the rotation atmosphere than any other orbit of the Earth. In this way, the plane that could be chosen. Two of the of the orbit would be fixed with remost interesting bits of knowledge, spect to a point in space, and the which it is hoped the satellite will Earth would rotate under the satelcontribute, concern the magnetic lite while it moved along lines of field of the Earth and the Auroral equal longtitude with respect to the lights. Both of these phenomena Earth. This would allow the satelare concentrated at or near the lite to scan every bit of the Earth's poles. A satellite orbiting around surface every # hours. Actually, the equator would not be able to for the purpose of the Satellite get much if anything of value on Vehicle we have in mind, it would either of these. A further argument be ideal if the orbit were inclined against an Equatorial orbit is the # degrees from the axis of the fact that only a very narrow band Earth's rotation. This would allow of territory on each side of the the satellite to follow the twilight equator, mostly jungle and water, zone of the Earth, in the greater would be scanned by the satellite, part of a year, at least. The adThus, not only would information vantage of this would be that the power for the instrumentation in the satellite has been provided by covering one side of the satellite with solar cells which would derive energy directly from the sun. It would, therefore, be necessary to keep one side of it always facing the sun, or as nearly so as possible. (Fig#) The sequence of events necessary to put the satellite in its orbit, assuming that it will be the "ideal" orbit described above, is as follows : The three stage assembly would be launched vertically from the government's launching facilities in Cocoa, Florida. As soon as it has passed through the densest portion of the atmosphere, (about # miles altitude), its flight would be inclined, by the flight programmer, # degrees toward the west. This is to start neutralization of the Earth's surface rotational velocity. At the same time, the programmer would command controls to incline the Satellite along a slowly curving path toward the north. If the launching is made in the summertime, the end of this curving path must be calculated to place the satellite over an area # degrees incombustion chamber correction jet instrumentation power navigational control section dined from the North Pole in the direction away from the sun. Its heading must be such that, as it continues its flight, it will pass over an area # degrees inclined from the South Pole in the direction toward the sun. (Fig. #) At an altitude of just above # miles, the integrating accelerometer located in the third stage would terminate the firing of Stage I and start the firing of the motor in Stage II. Separation would occur Stage I behind. Stage I would coast along to an altitude of perhaps # miles and then fall back to earth, either to crash or to be recovered, depending upon whether or not a recovery system has been provided. Stage I would have an initial weight of about # tons, including fuel, and would take off with an initial acceleration of .# gravities net. It would have a burning time of about # seconds and would reach a velocity of about # miles per hour. Seventy-five seconds after Stage II starts firing, the integrating accelerometer will signal the flight programmer to terminate the firing of Stage II and start the firing of will have reached an altitude of # miles and a velocity of approximately # miles per hour. Since the Satellite will still have about # miles of altitude to gain, its position along the flight curve has not yet placed it in a horizontal position, but is at approximately a # degree altitude angle to the horizontal. At this time, separation continues accelerating along to the final flight curve attitude. Stage II would have a weight of about # tons, including fuel, and would weigh approximately # tons empty. It would develop a thrust of # pounds for about # seconds and have an initial acceleration of # times the Earth's gravitational attraction. Due to the fact that during part of the flight Stage II was inclined at an angle toward the horizontal, gravity would not exert the normal drag. Therefore, the acceleration would increase more rapidly than if it were climbing vertically. After # seconds of bumng, the integrating accelerometer in Stage quired acceleration to achieve a velocity close to # miles per hour. At this time the accelerometer terminates the firing of Stage Ill's motor. During the # seconds of burning, the flight programmer would have held the rocket to the predetermined curve which, at burnout, places the rocket in a horizontal attitude and in the "ideal" orbital path. Stage Ill's motor is designed to develop a thrust of # pounds, with a potential burning time of # seconds. The rocket would have a total weight load of # pounds. The fuel would be red fuming nitric acid as oxidant and hydrazine as reductant. It is planned that nearly # of the fuel would remain in the tanks after the Satellite has reached its orbit, to be used later for the correction of the orbit after the residual atmosphere has begun to slow the Satellite down. This would greatly prolong the Satellite's stay in its orbit. "T Z # # Vehicle may be held in its orbit monitor stations to determine its for a year or longer, and during roll position through telescopes, this period be able to transmit a Outside the Earth's atmosphere, maximum amount of useful in the sun delivers about # watts formation back to Earth, it would of thermal energy per square yard be necessary that provisions be of irradiated surface. The availmade for the correction of the orbit able area of one side of such a and the attitude of the Satellite, satellite would be # square feet This would be done by installing a per foot of length. The available command radio receiver in the inlength in our design is about # strument compartment, which, feet. This gives an irradiated area upon receiving certain coded imof # square yards, or a thermal pulses from the ground, would be input of # watts, able to turn on the rocket motor The new solar energy cells now and regain lost velocity; or, on rebeing developed by the Bell Teleceipt of a different coded impulse, phone Laboratories will produce activate laterally mounted steering # watts of electrical energy for jets which could be used to correct every square yard of illuminated the Satellite's attitude in pitch and area at sea level. Outside the atroll. mosphere, the solar illumination is The steering jets consist of eight somewhat higher, providing aptiny hydrogen peroxide rocket proximately # more power per motors, mounted in groups of four square yard. If the full # sq. yd. at each end of the Satellite. The of available area on the Satellite arrangement, as shown in Fig. #, is were used for solar cells of this type, such that they may be fired in they would produce # watts of couples to position the Satellite power, which could be used to around its longitudinal or roll axis, charge the Satellite's batteries. This or to overcome or introduce tumble would be more than ample to suparound its lateral axis. ply all of the electronic equipment Since this satellite depends for its and instrumentation power requireelectrical energy upon solar cells ments, even if the Satellite were located on its outer skin, it is imonly in the sunshine half of each # portant that these cells be always hour day. Figure # is a block diaoriented toward the sun. If the gram which shows the power deSatellite should be spinning upon mands of all the electrical comits axis after burnout (which it alponents in the proposed Satellite, most certainly will), the steering jets could be used to overcome this the solar cell side facing the sun. A of any practical satellite vehiThe Satellite would be painted excle would, of necessity, make use of temally with a design which would all of the latest techniques for (Ref. Kimball, Proceedings Internat. Illumination Congress, #, p#I ) tow. #W. AC selector I #W. from ground monitor amplifier I #VV. #W. miniaturization and sub-miniaturization of all components. Wherever possible, transistors would be used instead of vacuum tubes, not only because of their small size, but also because of their low electrical power drain. The radio transmitter, which would be used for telemetry, would have a total power input of # watts with an output of approximately # watts. It would be pulse modulated by an encoding device which receives information from the various sensing instruments. The encoder converts the information into a data transmission code, which is transmitted back to Earth and recorded for study at a later date. The Satellite would contain a small electric motor, and mounted on its shaft a little coil which rotates outside the skin of the Satellite. If the Satellite's orbit should pass through a region of large electric currents (as recently predicted and detected in the ionosphere), the magnetic field produced by these currents would induce a current in the rotating coil. This would appear as an A.G. signal, the amplitude of which would depend upon the magnitude of the current flowing in the ionosphere. This A.G. signal would be amplified and fed into the encoder. It is well to mention that in our design all signals from the sensing instruments are sampled one at a time, in rotation, by an electronic commutating device. This prevents the encoder from receiving information from two or more sources simultaneously. Also provided is a radio command receiver, consisting of a detector and control amplifier, to receive coded orbital correction signals from transmitters at the monitor stations. The output of the receiver would be fed into a decoder which converts the signals into command impulses for the opening and closing of the fuel valves furnishing impulse power to the steering jets and main propulsion motor. The power demand of the command receiver would be about # watts. The "B plus" supply for the transmitter and receiver would be a relaxation oscillator transformer supply, similar to that used in many brands of Geiger counters. This produces high voltage D.G. without using high voltage batteries. There would be a bank of photo cells looking through openings in the skin on the side of the Satellite facing the sun. These would have filters of graduated density in front of them to screen out all the visible rays and allow each photo cell to respond only to a narrow band of frequencies in the ultra-violet. The output of these cells would be amplified and fed into the encoder. A similar bank of photo cells would be located on the dark side of the Satellite, focused in a horizontal direction parallel to the Earth's surface. Some of these cells would have ultra-violet filters. Some would be sensitive to visible light of all frequencies, while others would respond only to certain selected colors. This bank of cells is to collect information on spectrum and intensity of the "Auroral Lights" (or Northern Lights) from the very region in which they originate. The signals from the photo cell banks are amplified by one stage of D.G. amplification, providing cell isolation and building the signal to usable proportions. A multivibrator circuit is actuated by this amplified signal and the "flip-flop" frequency is then a function of the incident light intensity. The resultant A.C. signal is then fed into the encoder. Located near the front end of the Satellite, on the side facing the Earth, is a socket containing a hinged arm. Mounted on the free end of this arm is the sensing element of a magnetometer. When the Satellite's propulsion motor ceases firing, an electronically operated catch releases the arm and a spring swings it out and away from the body. The magnetometer can be one of several types, the most sensitive of which is made in Germany. It operates on the principle that a change in the magnetic field of the Earth, as seen by the sensing coil, produces a harmonic in the frequency of an oscillator. The size of the harmonic is a function of the change in the magnetic field. This instrument is not only incredibly sensitive, but it will not be influenced by any magnetic fields arising from the Satellite itself. The output of the magnetometer would be amplified and fed into the encoder. The density of the residual atmosphere in the region of the Satellite's orbit may be measured by an instrument called an Alphatron. This device contains a small capsule of radium which emits alpha rays. The atmosphere enters into the space surrounding the radium capsule and is ionized by the alpha rays. The ions are attracted to an electrically charged plate, where they cause a current to flow in the circuit which is connected to the plate. The number of ions produced is determined by the number of air molecules present, thus the current flowing in the circuit is a function of the air density. An electroscope is mounted beneath a suitable screen which is opaque to all light radiations but is transparent to soft X-rays. This instrument will be on the side facing the sun. This device is nothing more than a small, very high quality capacitor, capable of holding a charge for a very long time. When X-rays fall on such a capacitor, they cause the charge to leak oft, slowly or quickly, depending upon the intensity of the X-rays. By calibrating this electroscope with X-ray sources of known intensity, one can measure by comparison X-ray sources of unknown intensity. An electronic circuit places a charge on the electroscope which immediately begins to leak off when exposed to the soft X-rays coming from the sun. As soon as the charge has decreased to a certain predetermined amount, the charge is replaced. The frequency of these recharging cycles, then, may be used as a measure of the X-ray intensity. This signal can be fed directly into the encoder. Another bit of information on the upper atmosphere which is of interest to the scientists of the I.G.Y. concerns the degree and type of ionization of the upper air. A possible instrument which could be installed in the Satellite and would give information about these phenomena would consist of a metal plate which would be open to the outside but shielded from all light. This plate would be electrically insulated and connected to an electronic circuit which would alternately place a positive and negative bias on it. While the plate was positive it would attract negative ions; while negative it would attract positive ions. If there were positive ions present in the air, they would cause a current to flow in the circuit in one direction; if negative ions were present, the current would be in the opposite direction. The size of the cunent would indicate the ion density. T he ground monitoring stations for the proposed satellite should be located geographically, so that it can be under observation as continuously as possible, especially when it is traversing regions of particular interest to the scientists. Obviously the areas of sky above the poles would be the most fruitful, informationwise, so that it is essential that there be several polar monitor stations. , At the equator, the area or strip of Earth, viewed by the Satellite as it makes its pole to pole circuits, is wide enough to give an overlap between strips. Due to the convergence of the lines of equal longitude, there would be a greater and greater overlap as the Satellite approaches the pole. Thus fewer monitor stations would be needed, until at the pole itself one station could observe every revolution. The number of stations located on other parts of the Earth depends upon (Continued on page #) Project Hi-Psi The aliens were conducting an experiment under laboratory conditions. So, how could they guess that their guinea pigs held the ultimate weapon? Illustrated by Virgil Finlay ridor of the Federal Building. The taps on his leather heels clicked a precise rhythm on the marble floor. He ignored the door that offered "Information", passed up office after office until he came to the glass paneled door which informed him that behind it funcarea. The door was locked. Lucifer Brill rubbed the knuckles of his left hand over the bristles of his sand-colored, neatly trimmed bit of mustache. It was a gesture known to all graduate students, Department of Parapsychology, Western University, as an indication of annoyance. The possibility of this office being closed had definitely not been part of Lucifer Brill's prospectus. A movement behind the opaque glass panel caught his attention. He rattled the knob. When this produced no results, he tapped with his immaculate fingernails on the glass. A shadow moved inside the office. The lock clicked. The door opened. An overweight young woman, obviously interrupted in the act of painting a lush mouth over thin lips, glared at him through a veneer of politeness. "Yes?" 'T have an appointment with the Director." Lucifer Brill's voice still carried the twang of boyhood in Chelmsford, Mass. The young woman's plucked eyebrows arched. "This office is closed. If there is an emergency, you may..." Lucifer handed her his card. The eyebrows arched still higher. "Dr. Brill! Your appointment was for #:#!" "I am aware of that," he told her, severely, "but the other drivers were not, and there were an incredible number of them on the road. Now, if you please..." "Would you care to make another appointment for tomorrow?" "I would not. You may inform the Director that I have arrived, that I regret my tardiness and that the purpose of my visit involves a matter of extreme urgency." Lucifer hadn't raised the level of his voice, but behind the rimless spectacles, his mild blue eyes became very cold and direct. The secretary unpursed her lips and flounced toward the inner office. She was back in a moment, and said with disapproval, "This way, please -- Sir." The Director greeted Lucifer Brill with a courtesy that was somewhat strained. His briefcase was on his desk. So was his hat. Lucifer went peremptorily to the point. "I must report a most serious case." From long training, the Director ignored the tone and inquired with careful politeness. "What sort of a case. Dr. Brill?" "I believe you would call it a case of kidnapping -- multiple kidnapping." "Kid -- kidnapping ! ' ' The Director's large hands hit the desk top with a cracking sound. His knee touched a button to flip on the tape recorder. "When? -- Where? -- Who " Lucifer considered the questions, methodically organized his answers. "As to when, I would say over the last eight years." "What?" "As to where, I would say all over the United States." "Now, one moment... please!" "As to who... Well, that would require a rather lengthy answer." The Director's voice shook with an effort to keep calm. "Dr. Brill, I would appreciate an answer to my question." "Very well." Lucifer took a small, brown leather notebook from the inside pocket of his beautifully pressed gabardine. "It will take a little time. You see, I believe that over # persons have been kidnapped." The Director's thick neck turned prime-rib red, and swelled over the collar of his shirt. Lucifer began to read: "Anthell, Ruth... Atwater, Horace... Borsook, George... 'That's enough, Dr. Brill!" "Thank you. Time really is of the essence, you know. I learned this morning that two of the missing persons disappeared as recently as four days ago." The Director breathed heavily. "Just who are these people, Dr. Brill?" "They are all positives. Some of them are positive positives." The Director made a small, strangling sound. "If you don't mind. Dr. Brill -- just what in the hell are positive positives?" "Oh, I'm sorry. I had presumed you were familiar with my work." "Fm a little vague about it." "I see." Lucifer's expression showed intolerance for this cultural lag, but he condescended to explain. "For several years I have been re-evaluating psi card tests at Western University, with the project goal of answering criticism that Rhine and other researchers ended scoring runs at so-called convenient points. While one cannot approach the statistical ideal of infinity in any series, it is nevertheless mathematically possible, through multitudinous repetitions..." There was an expression on the Director's face of a man trying to plod doggedly against a strong gale. "Positives..." he reminded, a little desperately. "... to amass statistics that are conclusively beyond the bounds of chance. In this rechecking, I have received excellent cooperation from researchers at other universities, and consequently have compiled what may well be the largest list of psi cases on record, whereby..." "Positives," grated the Director. "Kidnapping... remember. Dr. Brill... ?" "... I have been able to establish categories -- in my own terminology -- of non-positives, positives and positive-positives. Do you follow me. Sir?" removed sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Now, shall we get on with this kidnapping..." "I am convinced that my positives and positive positives are either being kidnapped, or otherwise caused to disappear involuntarily." "# of them?" "#." The Director, in this crisis, took refuge in routine. He picked up Lucifer's card. "Do you have any other identification with you. Dr. Brill." The routine was a mistake. Lucifer produced an expired driver's license, an unpaid gas bill, a membership card in the American Society for Psychic Research, a faculty football ticket, a credit slip from the May Company, six traffic citations... The Director held up his hand in weary surrender. "O.K.," he said. "Tell me all about it." Lucifer told his story with an admirable lack of detail, and a certain intensity that compelled attention. At a certain phase of his project, it was necessary to start re-evaluating cases he had previously reevaluated. That phase had been reached two months ago. He had selected five hundred names from his card file, and had sent them form letters preparatory to arranging for tests. When # came back marked "Address Unknown", or "No Forwarding Address", he was disturbed, but not unduly so. In an era of great population shifts, people could be lost and forgotten. He mailed out another # forms. Four hundred and sixtythree came back unopened. A third mailing brought similar results. Subsequent mailings added up to the startling statistic that some # people apparently had vanished. Lucifer personally checked a score of names in the greater Los Angeles area. Five could not be located ; seven seemed to have moved without leaving a forwarding address; one was reported drowned in the surf off Point Fermin; six were listed with the Missing Persons Bureau. Of the latter, two had briefly made headlines. They had kissed their wives goodby, driven off to work and had never been seen again. was impressed by Lucifer Brill's calm recital of these facts. "But # people," he demurred. "Isn't it simply incredible that # people could disappear without causing a commotion?" "Do you know the number of missing persons listed annually by the Los Angeles Police Department?" The Director admitted he did not. "Nearly # juveniles and adults. The number in other cities is roughly proportionate to the population... New York, for example, had about eight..." cision. "Dr. Brill," he said, "Give me that list of names and addresses." teletypes began pouring in from the District Offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Individually, the reports meant nothing. Obscure people who simply were missing. Many of them were not even missed enough to be listed as missing persons. The final tabulation showed that # men and women were missing out of # people who had registered significantly abovechance in the psi re-evaluation tests conducted by Western University. Lucifer Brill pointed out something else. "The missing positives were my stronger positives. Most of those who have not disappeared were closer to borderline cases." At this point, to the infinite relief of the Los Angeles office, prime responsibility for the case shifted to Washington, D.C. A tight lid of security was clamped over the whole affair. facts and figures. Mathematically, they proved that the percentage of missing psi test cases was fantastically above the probability of coincidence. One by one, the people had dropped from sight, lost in the swirling undercurrents of a vast, shifting population. A school teacher in Little Rock, a side-show freak in Chattanooga, a TV salesman in Milwaukee, an artist in Philadelphia -- all had disappeared, obscurely but definitely. And the disappearances were continuing. Only two days before an inquircist in Dubuque, the man had closed up the drugstore, started for home and had never been seen again. He was listed as an amnesia victim at the local police department. In his psi test, four years earlier, he had consistently averaged seventeen out of twenty-five calls. Remorselessly, the accrual of new facts added to the Bureau's bewilderment. pointed out that almost an identical number of men and women were missing: # men; # women. Another perceptive young researcher ran cards on the missing and came up with this statistic: The women were between the ages of # and #; the men between # and #. Eighty percent of both sexes were in their late twenties. When all possible data had been mitted its report to a super-secret meeting of the Central Intelligence Agency. The reaction was not flattering. Navy's slightly profane comment was that someone in the Bureau had flipped his wig. Army looked disgusted. State Department was pained. White House was silent. The Chairman smiled, and waited for someone else to laugh. No one laughed. insisted that its report merited serious consideration. "We've kept this thing quiet," reporters could do with it." State looked less pained. Even Army and Navy gave reluctant attention. White House asked tentatively, "What about the Russian angle? If even a fraction of this nonsense we hear about psi is true, these people might serve an espionage purpose. Gould Soviet agents have smuggled them out of the country?" "But not #. Not by any known method of transportation." "Any subversives among them?" asked Army. "One hard-shelled Commie, a few fuzzy-minded joiners... about par for the course." "Then why in the hell is this important, anyway?" demanded Navy. A large hassle ensued, but all eventually agreed that if more than # people actually had been caused to vanish, it was at least potentially a cause for security concern. Army pointed out: "Next time, they might not waste the effort on these crackpots. They might bag some important people." White House asked : "What are we going to do about it?" There was an outburst of silence. Finally, State spoke up: "By all means, keep the matter quiet. It could be deucedly embarrassing." But something, of course, had to be done. And while something was being debated, at top level, in top secrecy, in eyes-only, Q-clearance sanctums, Lucifer Brill took matters into his own hands. He felt a compelling personal responsibility to the missing people, Their names had been compiled together in his files; he had made no effort to protect the lists. Anyone who wanted to make the attempt could have found a way to copy the cards. Lucifer also felt a sense of responsibility to science. And by science, he meant his o'vn branch of parapsychology. All other science eicisted for him in a vague limbo into which no serious psychological student would venture. "Nuts and bolts," was the way Lucifer customarily dismissed the shadowworld of science outside his own laboratory. But what use was it to go on confirming and re-confirming the existence of positives and positive positives if they just up and disappeared? The answer was discouraging. So Lucifer Brill took stock of himself. He was forty-four years old. He had no dependents, and was dependent on no one. Except for chronic nearsightedness, and hay fever in the months of July and August, he was sound of limb and body. Lucifer withdrew from the bank the balance of his inheritance and life savings. He placed the money in a trust fund to be given to Western University for continuance of psi research, five years after his death or disappearance. He drew up a holographic will bequeathing and bequesting his library and papers to the University. He prepared a sealed envelope containing three hundred dollars in cash and instructions for the care of his two parrots for the balance of their natural lives. And then Lucifer Brill released to the profession the news that after testing thousands of people for the psi talent, he had finely tested himself -- and had scored an average of # out of # in # PT tests, all conducted under strict laboratory conditions. Parapsychological circles reacted with an affectionate blend of awe and amusement. Fellow professors wrote him congratulatory notes, some with postscripts that jibed at him goodnaturedly. The editors of two psychic journals called to ask for articles. One Eastern university wanted to test him for PC and PK, but Lucifer stalled for time, waiting for something or someone to cause him to vanish from the face of the earth. On the evening of August #, about eight-thirty, there was a knock on the screen door of his bachelor apartment. Lucifer called, "Come in, please," but he continued to work at a statistical tabulation. The door opened; footsteps approached his desk. "Sit down," said Lucifer. He had been expecting a summer school graduate student to come by for a book. 'T'll be through with this column in just a moment." "There is no hurry. Dr. Brill." The voice was strange. It had almost a metallic ring. Lucifer's fingers turned white where they gripped the pencil. But he carefully totalled up the column and rechecked the answer, ferreting out an error in the addition of # plus #. Only then did he swivel around to face the tall, thin, dark-faced stranger. Lucifer said quietly, "Good evening. I am sorry to have kept you waiting." The stranger nodded, and took a small blue phial from his pocket. Long, lean-muscled fingers squeezed the phial. Lucifer's apartment faded gently away in the sweet, cloying odor of hyacinth. his eyes, his face was half buried in a white pillow. A damp breeze blew across the back of his neck. The breeze was heavy with tropical odors. Yet there was something curious about them. Lucifer sniffed, and sniffed again. He discovered that his hay fever wasn't bothering him. Through one probing eye, Lucifer could see his glasses on a nightstand. Beyond them was a window down which drops of rain were beginning to streak. Memories of the blue phial and the strange visitor flooded back. His right arm was numb, but he decided he had been sleeping on it. He experimented with his toes and legs. They moved. His right knee bumped against an object on the other side of the bed. The object felt alien to anything in Lucifer Brill's previous experience. He pushed firmly with his knee, and felt something that was both firm and soft, yielding and unyielding, warm and slightly cold. There was a sleepy murmur of protest, and the alien object moved away. Lucifer Brill obeyed habit. He reached for his glasses. Then he raised himself on his tingling right elbow and peered cautiously toward the other side of the bed. By many standards, Lucifer could have been adjudged a brave man. But what he saw had a curiously frightening effect on him. He saw the back of a woman's head, and a tangle of dark hair, a bare, sun-brown arm, a bare shoulder. Lucifer took off his glasses, breathed upon them, polished them thoughtfully on a corner of the sheet, and looked again. The apparition was still there. Only now the head was turned. The eyes that were watching him were wide and startled. The lips moved in sort of a gasping sound. They framed the words: "Get out of my bed!" In spite of a certain paralysis, Lucifer bridled at the words. He was a rational man, and believed that words should originate in a context of rationality. "I can assure you," he stated, "that I am not voluntarily in your bed, and that I have no intention of remaining here." There was another gasping sound. The eyes widened still more. The lips exclaimed. "Dr. Brill! Dr. Lucifer Brill!" Lucifer made a sound that was as close to a gurgle as he had come since infancy. When he had collated his emotions, he asked in his customary tone, "Have we met?" The lips smiled wryly. "It looks that way." "Ah... Yes, of course. But, I mean... under social or professional circumstances?" "You're the odd little man who gave me those card tests in San Diego last winter." Lucifer Brill digested this information in dignified silence. He considered the woman gravely, then took the white sheet and covered her up to her chin. She gasped again. "There are certain proprieties," he reminded her severely. He considered her again, trying to place her face and its personality among the thousands of people he had psi-tested. It was what he though he had never been able to establish any defineable connection between bone structure and psi positive characteristics. This was a strong face on the pillow beside him. Strong and at the same time possessed of certain female qualities, principally in the fullness of the rather large lips and in the throat lines. The cheek bones were fairly high. The skin texture indicated a chronological age of about thirty. Having thus appraised and catalogued the woman, Lucifer asked, "May I have the privilege of making your acquaintance?" "Wh... what?" "Your name," he said impatiently. "Do you mind telling me your name?" "Nina... Nina Poteil. They call me Nina... professionally." "Professionally... Lucifer rolled the word on his tongue as though he relished its flavor. "May I inquire as to the nature of your profession?" "You don't remember? Oh, well, I guess you'd call me a psychologist." "A psychologist!" Lucifer's eyes glowed with relief and approval. If he had to awake to find himself in these distressing circumstances, it was good to know that he was with a confrere. "Really!" he said. "I had no idea! It astonishes me that I do not remember you. What is your specialization?" "I'm called an entertainment psychologist." "How extraordinary! Where do you practice?" "At the Blue Grotto on Fifth Street. I'm billed for character readings. Cards are my medium, but I don't need them, of course." "Oh." Lucifer adjusted his glasses. He said, "Now, if you will kindly face toward the opposite wall, I will get out of this bed. As Lucifer climbed out of bed, he was painfully conscious of a short kimono that scarcely reached to his white, bony knees. Panicstricken, he looked around for something else to wear, and found some neatly folded garments on a chair behind his side of the bed. With a shock, he realized this was exactly the way he had always left his own clothes overnight. Only these were not his own clothes. They appeared to be made of a light, semi-transparent plastic material. There was a pair of trousers that fit rather like jodhpurs, a loose, practical tunic, and boots of the same thin material. When he had dressed, he still felt like a man in a goldfish bowl. Looking out the window, he saw that they were near the center of a very large compound, comprising hundreds of small dwellings, all constructed of a slate-like grey metal. Each dwelling was surrounded with a neat area of what appeared at first glance to be a lawn. On closer observation, it was a lush, mossy growth, deep green in color. At one end of the compound was a much larger building, sprawling into many wings and substructures. Behind it rose a tremendous, yet somehow slender and graceful, silhouette of a shining projectile, aimed toward the clouds. Around the compound, at intervals of about two hundred yards, were tall guard towers. The compound itself seemed to be located in a vast, towering forest that rolled away in all directions until it disappeared in the low-hanging mists. Through a break in the clouds, Lucifer saw a giant, orange wheel, many times the size of the sun he had known all his life. "Amazing," Lucifer murmured. Averting his eyes from the bed, he walked across the room and opened a door. It led to a large, bright room, artificially lighted from a source he could not determine. At the far end of the room were a door and glass casement windows that opened on a small, mossy clearing. The forest curved in behind the clearing, and walled it off. In the room itself, a large screen occupied most of one wall. The furniture was extremely functional. Everything, even the cushions on a low couch, appeared to be made of a tinted metal. But when Lucifer touched one of the cushions, it yielded resiliently. "Amazing," he repeated. In his astonishment, Lucifer forgot himself and looked toward the bed. "Miss Poteil, have you any idea where we are?" "I woke up after you did," she reminded him. "I see." He regarded her sternly. "What is your last recollection prior to awakening?" "I don't know... Yes, I do!" She sat up, then sank back and covered herself again as he glared disapproval. "I was in the Blue Grotto -- It was getting late, and I had just left my card -- like I always do -- at a table where two men were drinking. One of them said, 'Sure, we want a reading.' Then I sat down, and that's all I remember." "All?" he insisted, as if questioning a reluctant student. "There was kind of a strange odor..." "I know." "You do!" She bolted upright, forgetting the sheet. She looked accusingly at him. "Naturally, I recall the same odor. How else do you suppose I happened to wake up in this bed?" "I wondered." Lucifer turned back to the window in time to see two men, in the same plastic tunic and leggings he was wearing, approaching the front of their bungalow. "We have visitors," he said. "Perhaps we shall also have some answers. While I greet them, I suggest that you make an effort to acquire some kind of apparel." gaunt, heavy-boned man, exceedingly tall. Lucifer guessed his height at close to seven feet. The bone structure of his face was harsh and massive. His head was shaved; the flesh deeply bronzed. The second visitor was nearly as tall, but he was older, and his shoulders sagged. Bronze skin hung loosely over the bones of his face. After a cautious glance over his shoulder indicated that Nina had stepped into the semi-transparent leggings and tunic that appeared to be standard garb, Lucifer opened the door and faced the men coming up the path. The younger of the two nodded. "Good morning. Dr. Brill." His voice had the same metallic timbre that Lucifer had first heard from the tall visitor in his own study. The older man stepped close to Lucifer and gazed intently into his eyes. "He has emerged," he said. "Good. In that case, we must introduce ourselves all over again." The large man bowed slightly, then drew himself stiffly erect. "Dr. Brill, in your language, my name would approximate the phonetic sounds: Huth Glaspac. You may call me Huth. I am the Administrative Director of this project." He indicated his older companion. "This is our medical director. For simplicity, you may call him Dr. Thame." Lucifer studied them gravely. "Come in. Gentlemen," he said. Awkwardly, he went through the motions of introducing them to Nina. Dr. Thame examined Nina's eyes, and nodded. "Our laboratory calculations were correct," he pronounced in a brittle voice that reflected satisfaction. To Nina and Lucifer he explained. "Due to the differing metabolisms of your bodies, it required a rather delicate calculation to bring you both out of the drug at the same time. It was estimated to occur about four cintros... that is, hours... ago, during your sleep..." "Gentlemen," Lucifer interrupted impatiently, "do you mind telling us where we are and what this is all about?" Huth's massive bronze features lightened with the shadow of a smile, "It is doubtful that the answer to either question will be helpful at this time. However, in response to the first, may I inquire: Have you studied astronomy?" Lucifer drew himself up with dignity, "I am a Parapsychologist." Again there was the shadow of a smile on Huth's bronze features. "The extreme specialization of your science will never cease to amaze me. At any rate, you are on the planet Melus, one of the outer planets of the star which your Earth astronomers call Capella, and which they place in the constellation of Auriga." Lucifer blinked rapidly and rubbed the bristles of his mustache with more than ordinary vigor. Some of his colleagues at Western University had worked on rocket projects. He had always suspected they were fools; now he was sure of it. Why else would they be wasting their time with rockets, while another race was running around the universe, kidnapping positives? It was Nina who spoke up first, her dark, deep-set eyes burning with excitement. "Capella... I know!" she exclaimed. "Sometimes I work with the medium of astrology. It doesn't mean anything, really, no more than the cards. I could do just as well without either. But the customers... Say, unless you're not telling the truth, Mr. Huth, we're quite a ways from San Diego!" "The distance is not important," said Huth. "Melus is now your home, and will be for the rest of your lives." As the import of his words reached them, Lucifer blinked again. Nina sat down on the edge of the steel-grey couch. "For the rest of our lives," she repeated wonderingly. "That's a long time." "It is to be hoped," said Dr. Thame. Lucifer had to speak with more than usual severity in order to keep the tremor out of his voice. "I asked two questions," he reminded Huth. Huth nodded. "Your second question will be answered during your orientation period," "And how long does that last?" "It varies. For you, Dr. Brill, it could be much longer than for your wife." "My -- " This time, Lucifer's dry New England twang definitely broke. "Oh, yes. We learned that by observing the rituals of your culture we can minimize emotional trauma and thereby hasten orientation." He turned to Nina. "I can assure you that the proper Earth rituals were performed in the prescribed manner. Since neither of you were married, we could dispense with the Earth divorce ritual and perform only the marriage ritual. Does that ease your mind?" She stared at him without answering. Lucifer's temper bristled. "I refuse to recognize such mockery. It is immoral, illegal and definitely unethical." Huth dismissed the matter with a slight shake of his massive head, and proceeded to explain some of the objective facts of their situation. During orientation period, they would be required to remain on their own premises, except for their educational sessions at Center. They would be taken to Center once or twice each day, depending on their progress. Food preparation was handled at the Project commissary. Huth opened a small pantry. Meals, cooked by molecular agitation in the commissary, would be delivered to the pantry via the commissary tubicular. He showed them how to turn on the visagraph screen. "This is used for communication, education and also entertainment. You will find it very pleasant to read micro-filmed books off the screen. We also have a rather complete repertory of Earth music. After orientation, you will be assigned duties, and, of course, can become acquainted with fellow members of this project." Dr. Thame added briefly that Melus had been chosen for the project because it was a hydrogenoxygen planet similar to Earth, although almost uniformly tropical. The inner planets of the system were not inhabitable, since Capella, with three times the mass of Sol, produced one hundred times more heat. "You'll discover that members of your Project have given this planet another name," he concluded. "But don't let it disturb you." Nina spoke up suddenly. "The name is -- It's Mendel's Planet!" A muscle twitched in Huth's bronze cheek. "How did you know that?" She shook her head. "I never know how. Things just come to me. Sometimes I say -- said things to my customers at the Blue Grotto, and they would ask me the same thing. How do I know?" She shrugged her strong shoulders. "How does anyone know they know anything?" Huth and Dr. Thame exchanged quick glances. "Very interesting," said Huth. He moved toward the door. "We will send for you in two hours for your basic family record test." "Basic fam -- ." Lucifer choked on the word. He asked bleakly. "What might that be?" "It will be elementary to you. Dr. Brill. Just a basic psi-card test. We have your record, of course, but for purposes of standardization, we always start a new family's record in this manner. You undoubtedly will score rather close to your high test score on Earth." Lucifer hoped his apprehension did not show. He had not expected having to meet this challenge so soon. Nina had been pursing her lips, frowning and thoughtful. Now she asked. "Mr. Huth, how long have we. Dr. Brill and I, been here on Melus?" A hint of humor flickered in Huth's somber eyes. "Two Earth months." F or several moments after their departure, Lucifer stalked silently around the room. Nina remained on the couch. Her eyes were closed; her hands folded on her legs. There was a click in the pantry. Nina got up and looked inside. Breakfast had arrived. "We'd better eat something," she told Lucifer. "I am not hungry. Miss Poteil." She brought a plate, and stood resolutely before him. "This is going to be a hard day. You will need the food." He tried to stare her down, but couldn't. He accepted the plate, feeling like a chided school boy. Lucifer ate in silence, and when he had finished, he wandered out into the mossy patio behind the bungalow. There was a milky opaqueness, without obvious form or solidity, that walled the area off from the bungalow on either side. The rear of the patio, facing the forest, was clear, but when he walked too far in that direction, an invisible force shocked him warningly, and he leaped back. The trees were incredibly high; their canopy of branches and leaves was tightly interwoven. The rain had stopped momentarily, but water dripped unceasingly from the canopy to the mat of leaves on the forest floor. Spidery root tendrils crawled upward to mesh with tree boles and hanging vines. There was a smell of eternal dampness. Somewhere back in the shadows, an animal cried out. It sounded like a woman in pain. Lucifer shivered. He wished forlornly that he had left matters up gence Agency. He reviewed his prospects, and did not find them good. In a narrow sense, he had succeeded. He had found his positives and positive positives, but he did not yet know why they had been kidnapped. Nor was it likely that the knowledge would do him much good. He was on a strange planet, in the system of a distant star, apparently destined to spend the rest of his life with a woman who had been a nightclub fortune teller. As a doctor of parapsychology, Lucifer was appalled. As a confirmed bachelor, he was horrified. But a more immediate problem clamored for consideration. What happened to non-positives on Melus? He would soon know. The two attendants who came to take them to Center were much younger than Huth. They carried themselves with military stiffness. Nina and Lucifer were led to what vaguely resembled a motorboat, covered with a transparent bubble. The conveyance hovered in the air, about two feet above a narrow pathway that was surfaced with a dark, burnished metal. Lucifer accepted the vehicle without surprise. Physical scientists had always reminded him of boys playing with erector sets, and their accomplishments bored him. Center was a series of low slatemetal buildings scattered over several acres. Some were inter-connected; some were separated by mossy areas. The outer walls were broken by tall casement windows that extended from just above the ground to just below the eaves. As they circled among the buildings, the casement windows began to swing shut. Lucifer thought at first that this had something to do with their coming, but then he saw the thunder clouds tumbling in over the forest roof and heard the approaching rain. The hot wind swept open a gate as they were rounding one of the opaquely enclosed areas. Lucifer caught a nerve-shocking glimpse of many grotesquely malformed creatures stumbling, sprawling and hopping into the building, under the supervision of several bronzed, statuesque attendants. One creature, with a huge bulging head that flopped uncontrollably from shoulder to shoulder, was bounding along on a single leg. Its twisted features were grimacing horribly. Lucifer did not raise his eyes to Nina's face, but through the transparent sleeves of her tunic, he saw the muscles in her arms grow rigid. The conveyance stopped in front of the entrance to one of the larger buildings. An attendant met them as they stepped out of the vehicle. He led them down a long, glassroofed corridor. The rain was now drumming dismally against the glass A blindfolded girl of about six passed them in the corridor. She stepped politely to one side, then continued surely and unconcernedly on her way. Huth received them in a large room equipped with two rows of facing desks. "As I told you," he explained to Lucifer, "these tests will be very elementary. Together with your Earth records, they will form part of your basic family file. And," he added, harshness edging into his voice, "it will be wise for you to give us your complete cooperation." One of the attendants led Nina to a seat in front of a desk. The other attendant beckoned to Lucifer. "If you please," Lucifer said to Huth, "I would like to observe your technique. Being a professional man, you know..." Huth assented. "May I compliment you on your attitude. Dr. Brill. Such an interest can shorten your period of orientation, and it raises my already considerable expectations for you. But we do not pretend to any originality of technique." After watching the attendant run through twenty-five cards with Nina, Lucifer was quite ready to agree with Huth. The technique was crude, far below minimal laboratory standards. Nina's attention wandered about the room, but she called off the cards without hesitation. The attendant took her through three runs, checked his file record and stood up with a shrug. He said something to Huth in a language that blurred and rasped. "Dr. Brill," said Huth, "will you oblige us now?" Lucifer stepped resolutely to the desk, but the palms of his hands were moist. Over the past two decades he had taken many tests, enough to know that he could never score above chance save for an occasional run of coincidence. And this was not one of those runs. He saw it in the attendant's manner before five cards had been turned. Desperately, he fumbled ahead, guessing blindly. At the end of the first run, the attendant spoke rapidly to Huth. Lucifer saw Nina watching him with surprise. "This technique is incredible!" he snapped at Huth. "With all the distractions in this room, not to mention the emotional stress of our situation, a true score would have to depend on chancel" "That is not necessarily so," Huth answered calmly. "The stronger a psi sense may be, the more easily it is brought into use, regardless of external circumstances. You Earth scientists go to incredible lengths to test under laboratory conditions an ability that does not belong in the laboratory." "Ridiculous! Laboratory standards were necessary to prove the existence of psi." "Therefore, Earth scientists will go on proving it to each other for the next hundred years." "What are you proving by this inferior duplication of our psi tests?" Lucifer challenged, hoping to divert attention from another disastrous run of the cards. "More than you suspect. Dr. Brill. For one thing, by checking this first test with your Earth record, and later with additional tests, we can obtain an indication of your response to orientation. This could be important to you, vitally important, I might add. Now, shall we proceed." It was an order, not a question. Lucifer saw Nina nod at him, and try to smile encouragingly. This fed his anger with the fuel of humiliation. The attendant took a new deck of cards, began to turn them. Brill felt his eyes drawn again to Nina. He called out his answer, unthinkingly. "Circle... circle... star... rectangle... circle..." When the run was completed, the attendant instantly started another. A third and a fourth run, then the attendant turned to Huth with a rapid burst of language. "Excellent," said Huth. "Excellent, Dr. Brill. All you needed to do was relax! Excepting the first run, you averaged very close to your Earth score." Since awakening that morning, Lucifer had found his professional equanimity tried sorely on several occasions. But never more so than at this moment. To have scored so significantly above chance on three consecutive card runs was a greater shock than awakening to find himself with a strange wife on a strange planet. The law of probability was the unchallengeable bastion of his private world. He caught Nina's glance again. Her dark eyes were watching him in a way he could not understand. Huth said, "This has been a most satisfactory prelude to orientation. We can proceed immediately." He touched a button. In a moment. Dr. Thame entered. "You will go with Dr. Thame," Huth told Nina. "Your husband will remain here." Nina looked at Lucifer again, hesitated, then turned away without comment and followed Dr. Thame out of the room. Huth led Lucifer into a smaller office. "This procedure is somewhat unusual' Huth commented. "Ordinarily, new arrivals are assigned directly to units of the Orientation Staff. But we have special hopes and plans for both of you. In particular, Dr. Brill, you can be of great service to us." It was difficult for Lucifer to be anything but forthright, but he tried. "Psi is my work," he said. "I suppose it matters little enough where I work at it. But it would help to know the purpose of all this." "Undoubtedly. But it will not be easy for you." "I am not a child." "No, but you are an Earth scientist." Lucifer felt his anger rising again. "I'm afraid I don't follow you." "I intended no invidious comparison, Dr. Brill. But, as orientation progresses, you will better understand what I mean. Have you ever thought how your science would appear to an extra-terrestrial mind?" "The concept has never occurred to me," Lucifer snapped, thinking of the grotesque creatures running out of the rain, and the blindfolded child walking alone down the corridor. "We see your science as a great number of cubicles, all operating within one structure, with a minimum amount of inter-communication. Each cubicle is engrossed in a process of infinite abstraction from a body of potential knowledge self-doomed to be finite. It studies every new idea chiefly in terms of concepts fundamental to its own specialized body of knowledge." Huth waved a large hand to cut off a protest from Lucifer. "And what of the phenomena an individual scientist observes and evaluates? He shapes the facts into an hypothesis that may be valid only within his own cubicle. He does not venture outside, A most glaring example is that of your medical diagnostician. He uses the lays them down and becomes a therapeutic nihilist!" "Specialization has meant progress," Lucifer protested. "Progress, yes, but progress only to the frontiers of infinity. Will you dare venture into that frontier, Dr. Brill?" "Of course." "Be careful! The price of that venture is very high. Consider for a moment your Earth biologist: The very nature of the subject on which he has founded his science eventually dooms him to technological unemployment! If he follows the living cells to their ultimate sequence of interactions between ions and molecules, biology ends as it began -- as applied chemistry and physics!" Lucifer shifted uneasily. "From another value judgement," Huth continued, "the orthodoxy of Earth science is a product of its fragmentation. Within each cubicle, isolated from the fertilization of new concepts, the unorthodox all too often and too soon can become rigidly orthodox. This is the circle around which each science seems forever to travel!" Lucifer felt himself being moved skillfully toward an unknown objective. It was like being a Knight on a chessboard in the hands of an expert player. Huth moved in closer to his objective. "And so it is with psi, Dr. Brill. Or so it appears to an extraterrestrial viewpoint, which is now necessarily your own! Parapsychology had to depart from the physiology of orthodox psychology in order to get a look at itself. It became unorthodox avant guarde! It established a scientific case for psi, and for two decades thereafter established little else. What have you proved that Rhine did not prove twenty years ago?" "It is necess -- " "Already we see forming a dogma of psychic research, a cult of psychologizers that may match in exclusivity the cult of physiologizers -- each declining to draw upon the resources of the other! We see a tendency to look backward instead of forward, a bemusement with the historical concepts of association theories, psychon systems and continuums of cosmic consciousness -- all of which suggests a turning away from the frontiers of infinity to an interminable abstraction of possibilities from your own finite knowledge. "Do you follow me. Dr. Brill?" Lucifer removed his glasses, breathed on them, polished them carefully on the sleeve of his tunic. He looked beyond Huth to the window and the steaming tropical rain. When his thoughts were composed again, he answered, "I follow you -- with reservations." "Naturally. Now consider this question : Have you looked into other cubicles of science for answers to psi?" "We welcome all viewpoints." "Do you now? I wonder! From our extra-terrestrial viewpoint, it is evident that biology, chemistry and physics all have within their present finite bodies of knowledge the fragments of concepts that could propel psi, and hence all of science, into the very frontier of infinity." Huth paused, looked searchingly at Lucifer. "Dr. Brill, are you ready to share your primacy in psi research with the physicial scientist?" "The physical scientist scoffs at us." "He also is reluctant to leave his cubicle. However, by using the mathematical tools of logic to enclose psi research in a framework of anti-logic, built on the principle that man cannot know, your psychic theorist has alienated the handyman physical scientist who has so much to contribute -- but who insists that man must know." Huth raised himself to his magnificent seven feet of height. "Let the thoughts germinate, Dr. Brill. This is only your first orientation session. On the whole, we have made good progress." He handed Lucifer a printed card. "This will instruct you how to tune in your visagraph to a closed circuit orientation program after the dinner hour. Do not fail to follow instructions." With the briefest of nods, Huth stalked toward the door, where he turned, as if in response to an afterthought. "Your motivations to progress in orientation will be several. Dr. Brill, but it may be well for you to know that you already have a hostage to the future success of our program." "Hostage?" "Your first child, Dr. Brill. It will be born in approximately seven Earth months, according to the calculations of Dr. Thame. "Meditate on this while you await the attendant who will return you to your quarters." L ucifer tried to square his thin shoulders against the straight-backed chair. He ran the tips of his fingers over his upper lip, and out of the numbness that gripped his brain came a vagrant thought: His mustache really did need trimming; it wouldn't do at all to let down about such things. The door clicked open. He turned, expecting to see one of Huth's attendants, instead he faced Nina. Her cheekbones made two spots of white against her olive skin. "Hello, Lucifer," she said. Her voice was even deeper, huskier than usual. Her tone and the way she used his first name told him she knew about the child. But he pretended not to notice. He couldn't discuss the child until he had time to evaluate the meaning of it all. "Miss Poteil," he began firmly. His voice shook a little, and he started again, "Miss Poteil, I trust your first orientation session was not too unhappy an experience." Her dark eyes were thoughtful, troubled. "What is unhappiness?" She shrugged in reply to her own question. "I am never sure about crossing the line between happiness and unhappiness. Are you?" She sat down facing him. "If your question philosophical or psychological. Miss Poteil?" She smiled faintly, and shook her head. There was silence between them. Finally she spoke again, "I saw the little girl as I came in." "The girl with the blindfold?" "Yes. She stepped right past me, and went into a room just down the corridor. The room seemed to be full of children." Lucifer stood up with sudden decision. "I believe I will try to look around." The white spots grew in her cheeks. Her full, expressive lips tightened. "Be careful, Lucifer," she said quietly. The long corridor was frighteningly deserted. With so many doors opening off it, the odds seemed overwhelming that someone would step out one of them at any moment and challenge his right to be there. Lucifer's plastic boots scraped on the metallic composition floor. A subdued tinkle of children's voices drew him to a door some thirty steps down the corridor. The door appeared to be of a glass-like material, but it was opaqued. He pushed against it, and it moved. He drew a long breath, then inched the door open. A tall, bronzed women of Huth's racial characteristics was grouping a dozen or so youngsters into an activity pattern. The children were all around five or six years old. Their fair skin and bone structure indicated they were offspring of Earth parents. The woman blindfolded one of the youngsters, a square-shouldered, blond little fellow. The she tossed a ball to one of the other boys, and gave a short command in her own language. The children scattered about the large room. The boy with the ball ran and stood against the window, which was blurred from the driving rain. After chanting what appeared to be a number count, the blindfolded boy began to move around the room. As he approached one child after another, he would hesitate while still three or four steps away, shake his head and move on to someone else. Finally, when still some ten feet from the window, he swerved abruptly toward the boy holding the ball. He ran directly to him, grabbed him by the arm, then fumbled for the ball and clutched it triumphantly. The other children broke into an excited babble, and everyone seemed to be clamoring for the next chance to be blindfolded. The woman looked disconsolately at the rain-streaked window, and began to blindfold another child. Lucifer eased the door shut. He moved on down the corridor, past room after room that seemed deserted. A tentative testing of several doors proved they were locked. Near the end of the corridor, where it turned at right angles and headed down an equally long wing of the building, Lucifer found another room that sounded occupied. Again he inched the door open. This room was occupied by smaller children, mostly of prenursery school age. They were playing a version of a game Lucifer recognized from his own childhood: Tail on the donkey. Only this donkey was a sinister looking creature with tiny ears and formidable jaws. One by one the children toddled up to pin a stubby tail on his derriere. Three of them hit the target with biological exactitude. The fourth missed badly. It was a little girl. When the others laughed, she tore off her blindfold, stamped her tiny foot. A bench sailed across the room, thudded flatly against the opposite wall. The children's derisive laugh changed to one of excitement, and the girl felt encouraged to expand her tantrum. The bench caromed from wall to wall to ceiling and off, with a crash, into a corner. The woman attendant picked up the child by the shoulders and shook her. For an instant, wild defiance flared on the childish features. Then the girl pouted, and two tears trickled down her soft cheeks. Lucifer didn't try to analyze his impressions. There would be time for that later. Now it was important only to gather as many facts as possible before he was detected. The second corridor contained many rooms. From the sound of the voices coming through the doors, and from spot-checking several rooms, Lucifer judged they were all occupied by children engaged in some form of play activity that required psionic ability. At the end of the corridor, Lucifer opened a door and found himself staring out into the rain. Urged on by a growing eagerness to learn as much as he could before he was stopped, he ducked outside and ran across a mossy stretch of courtyard toward a second building. Rain plastered his hair, and trickled down his neck, but his tunic and leggings seemed waterproof. The rain was hot and stinging, and the wind surged out of the forest with lashing force. Halfblinded, Lucifer stumbled over some unseen object. He sprawled to his knees. He got up, slipped again, and skidded int# the partial shelter of a doorway. The door couldn't be moved. Lucifer moved out into the rain again, and groped his way along the side of the building. He stumbled over something else, fell heavily. A hoarse outcry, lifting above the wind and the rain, brought him to his knees. Shielding his eyes, he saw that he had stumbled over a figure huddled in a corner of the building. The figure straightened above him. Its movements were jerky, like a carpenter's rule unfolding. It was one of the grotesque, misshapen creatures Lucifer had glimpsed on first approaching Center. Through the slanting rain, Lucifier could make out a gigantic head that bulged sickeningly and was utterly devoid of hair. The head sagged forward, flopped back again until it struck the wall of the building, then snapped forward. It had two blank eyes, a flattened horror of a nose, a mouth that sagged and twitched. The mouth was trying to say something, but the words dissolved in a bubble of red saliva and a merciful wash of rain. The head flopped back and forth. The figure jerked toward Lucifer, lunged and fell on top of him. For the first time in his adult life, Lucifer lost control of himself. He screamed, and screamed again. H ands clawed him down, smashed his face into a choking puddle of water and wet moss. The hands and arms beat against his back and ribs. Each blow was a flailing, uncoordinated effort, but the impact was crushing. Water bubbled into Lucifer's mouth and nostrils. He raised his head to breath, and a random blow smashed it back down. He gulped air and water together. He choked, strangled. And then the weight was gone from his back. The hands and arms stopped smashing against his flesh and bones. Lucifer raised himself on his elbows, retched chokingly. A powerful pair of hands picked him up and half carried him out of the rain. Someone brushed back his hair, wiped his eyes. He opened them. A tall attendant held him up. Nina dried a trickle of water from his cheek. Her dark features showed shock and concern. Huth watched him sardonically. "It was fortunate your wife sensed your danger and helped us find you," Huth said. "Your zeal for orientation is commendable. Dr. Brill, but I suggest you proceed less rigorously." Lucifer took the handkerchief from Nina, wiped his mouth. It tasted salty. He attempted to stand with some measure of dignity. "Who or what was that creature?" he demanded. "I think you have had quite enough orientation for the time being," Huth replied. The strange conveyance whisked them back to their bungalow. Lucifier soaked himself in a hot bath, and it was a long time before his trembling muscles relaxed. Dinner, via the tubicular, consisted of a meat dish, more strongly flavored than venison, two rather salty green vegetables and a flagon of warm, spicy amber liquid. They ate in silence. Soon after dinner, Huth appeared on the visagraph screen, for what he called their second orientation session. This was largely a development of the first, and so were those that followed on succeeding days. Each left Lucifer feeling more unsure of himself, tense, mentally adrift. The distance between Melus and his safe, sectire little laboratory at Western University was becoming greater than could be measured in light years. Ranging from geology to biochemistry, from physio-psychical sources of neurosis to what he called the "molecular site of understanding", Huth hammered incessantly with semantics and logic against the carefully mortared bricks of Lucifer's own scientific cubicle. Sometimes he spoke with almost mystical fervor of a frontier beyond a frontier, a science beyond a science. One evening, during a visagraph session, Nina suddenly interrupted : "Your words speak about the infinite," she murmured, "but your mind does not sing with the music of infinity." Now, for the first time, Lucifer saw uncertainty on Huth's face. Uncertainty, and a look of indescribable sadness. Then the visagraphs screen went dark. Nina was on the couch beside Lucifer. Her eyes were halfclosed; her strong fingers were clasped around her knees and she rocked back and forth gently. "What a strange man," she said. "What a strange and strong and lonely man. For a moment, I saw all the loneliness of the universe in his eyes..." Lucifer regarded her uneasily. "You see many things, Miss Poteil." "No, Lucifer, I see so very little. But what little I do see makes me feel like a blind person the rest of the time. Isn't it terrible to look at shadows?" "Really, Miss Poteil -- " "Hush!" She put her finger to his lips He started. "Wha -- ?" "Please, Lucifer -- Oh, be quiet -- Please!" Her breasts rose and fell sharply beneath the thin tunic. He saw the tendons stand out in her throat. Finally she whispered : "I think someone is coming to see us! Tonight. Fm not sure... Oh, this damned blindness!" She beat her fists furiously on her knees. Lucifer tried to speak casually: "If someone comes, we'll know about it soon enough. Meanwhile, I suggest we try to get some sleep." There was a strange weariness in her as she got up from the couch and started toward the bedroom, which Lucifer had sternly assigned to her after the first morning of awakening. But after a few steps, she stopped and turned back to him. "Lucifer, they say you are the father of my baby. If that is so, I am grateful." It was the first time they had mentioned the child. Lucifer felt shocked, and very humble. This was another new feeling. He decided it would be wisest not to speak. "You are a man, Lucifer," she went on, in her husky voice. "I knew it when you tried to take that test, knowing you would fail." She brushed her lips across his forehead. "Goodnight, Lucifer. I have known many males, but very few men. There is a great difference..." He lay awake on the couch for a long time, his body aching for sleep, his mind spinning with strange thoughts, stranger concepts. He was just beginning to slip into the twilight zone between wakefulness and troubled sleep when a foreign sound in the room jarred him awake. Forcing himself to lie completely still, to continue his even breathing, he strained to catch a repetition of the sound; his eyes turned toward the rear window. The latest rain squall had swept by, and the window was now a luminous recsky. As his vision cleared and focused, he saw that the casement window was partly open. A fresh breeze, warm and fragrant with the odors of the rain forest, swept across the couch. Lucifer heard a definite, sharp click from the visagraph. It was as though a switch had been snapped. But there was no shadow of a physical presence in the room. The bedroom door opened suddenly. Nina stood there for an instant, silhouetted in her short, white nightgown. Then she moved quickly across the room, knelt beside his couch. Her lips, warm and dry, pressed close to his ear; her long hair tumbled over his cheek and throat. She whispered: "Can I stay here a little while?" He nodded, and felt her body crowd against him on the narrow couch. They lay there together, breathing quietly, watching the open window. And then there was a shadow there, a darker something against the darkness. Nina's body stiffened. With an unconscious gesture older than remembered time, Lucifer put his arm over her. A voice spoke out quietly from the window. "It's O.K. now. Dr. Brill." A figure stepped through the window, stumbled over the hassock and sat on the edge of it. "You both there?" a man's voice asked, then, without waiting for an answer, continued: "... Good!... Fetzer's my name. Albert Fetzer. Remember me, Dr. Brill?" "I regret to say -- " "That's O.K. It was a long time ago -- when I was Gl-ing my way through electrical engineering at Western. You gave me a lot of card tests. I did pretty well, too -- dammit!" "I'm sorry." "None of us blames you anymore. We were kind of bitter at first -- now we're glad you're here." "Glad?" "Sure. We've got a lot of things figured out, but there's still a lot more we don't get. You could be a big help to us." "I sincerely hope so, but -- "But, nothing, Doc. It looks like they're really giving you the orientation business -- like they need you and are going all the way this time!" Lucifer's tongue felt dry, and difficult to maneuver. He was grateful that Fetzer didn't seem to expect an answer. "They've been cozy with some of us before, but always cooled off. You just play it smart, learn all you can! But be careful, or you'll end up with the Gooliesf' Fetzer listened intently, then chuckled. "I guess they're still kind of fouled up! We had to warp the force field behind your place -- shorted their magnetic track, too! But before they get here there's something else I've got to warn you about -- 'specially you, Mrs. Brill." He hesitated. "What is it?" Nina prompted. "Well, when you think you get a message from us don't bust out with it like you did a while ago. They pick up everything you say on that damn visagraph -- I had to short the magnetic track in order to get at the control wire to block it off -- " "Just a moment, Albert," Lucifer interrupted. "How did you know what was said in this room?" Fetzer sounded embarrassed: "Well, it's a funny thing. Doc, but back on Earth we were all kind of ashamed of this psi thing. We tried to keep it hid from other people. Here, it's different. We're all the same way, more or less. So we try to use psi instead of hide it. Doesn't work on Huth's gang, though. They got minds like machines -- It's like trying to psi into a quarter-horse motor!" There was a pounding of footsteps outside the front door. "Gotta go!" said Fetzer. He twisted lithely through the window, closed it behind him and vanished into the sultry night. Nina slipped from the couch and hurried into the bedroom. The front door banged open. The room light flared on, blinding Lucifer. Huth was there, with two of his men. The men ranged about the place with giant strides, going through the living room, the bedroom and out into the rear enclosure. One of the men worked on the visagraph, trying to light it up. He had no success. Huth stood over Lucifer's couch. "Has anyone been here?" he demanded sternly. "If there was, he was more quiet and courteous than you have been," snapped Lucifer. "Need I remind you that this has been a most exliausting day, and that to be awakened in this manner -- " "Mrs. Brill received a message, and informed you of it." "Miss Poteil talks a great deal of nonsense, which you must also have overheard. However, I assure you. Sir, that I am not interested in her hallucinations, and if you are, I suggest you discuss them with her in the morning." "What happened to the visagraph." "If I knew, I wouldn't care. Your electronic gadgets impress me as being rather juvenile." Huth bowed. "Perhaps because you do not understand them. Dr. Brill." The warning in his voice was clear. He turned sharply on his heel, motioned his men out of the room and left, shutting the door quietly. tubicular delivered a metalbacked manuscript that bore the scholarly title: "Genetics and Psi, with an Evaluation of Three Case Histories as Compiled from Earth Records." Nina glanced at the title across the breakfast tray, then shifted her chair beside Lucifer's. "I'd better read that, too," she said. "Maybe it will tell us something about our own genetics experiment." Lucifer pursed his lips in disapproval at her frankness, but he held the manuscript so that both could study it. The introduction began: "After studying the incidence of psi on Earth, we felt that the genetics approach should receive considerable concentration of effort. Our chemists, biochemists and physicists are naturally continuing their experimentation, but the geneticists seem to promise the maximum results in the minimum amount of time. If psi can be explained, understood and propagated through genetics, it can no longer be misnomered 'extra-sensory'. It will become no more 'extra-sensory' than sense of direction, sense of time and, in the case of musical aptitude, such component primary senses as sense of absolute pitch, sense of intensity, sense of harmony, sense of rhythm and sense of tonal memory. Thousands of tests have indicated that these musical senses may have an hereditary base." "Physiologizers!" Lucifer exclaimed, contemptuously. "Let's keep our windows clean," Nina murmured. He stared at her in surprise. "My father used to say that," she explained. "He told us to keep our windows clean -- so truth can look in and out." Lucifer turned back the manuscript. He felt somehow chastened. After several paragraphs of further discussion on the hereditary aspects of the various senses, even including the inheritance through a dominant gene of the ability to taste, the manuscript went into a long analysis of the family trees of Arturo Toscanini, Kirsten Flagstad and the #th century mystic, Daniel Dunglas Home. "Please note," the manuscript emphasized, "that in all three family trees a favorable heredity and a favorable environment were perfectly blended." Nina gasped excitedly. "Oh, Lucifer -- if this project can bring the right parents together... "Human beings are not white mice!" Lucifer snapped! "They are on Mendel's Planet!" Nina seized his hand. "Think, Lucifer! Our child may be able to see things we have never dreamed of seeing! We will teach him to use his eyes from the very moment of birth -- even before!" Deep anger and resentment stirred within Lucifer, but before he could answer her, a click from the visagraph screen told them they were not alone. Huth's usually calm voice betrayed his excitement. His dark eyes glowed. "Mrs. Brill -- how would you propose to train a child so early?" "By encouraging him to use his own true senses rather than his superficial senses for his very first needs! My father raised all six of us and he used to say I was a good baby, because I never cried to be fed or changed. But maybe it was because he knew what I wanted and took care of me before I cried!" Huth insisted on sending for them immediately. There was a three-day-old Earth child at Center. Huth had the baby's records before him when they arrived. Nina, flushed with eagerness, asked  "How is the baby fed?" Huth consulted a chart. "Both formula and breast. But it doesn't appear that the mother will be able to nurse much longer." "When is the next feeding time?" "In approximately one hour." Huth took them to the nursery. Through the window, they could see that the baby was still asleep. The young mother was sitting up in her room. A tiny, thin-faced woman, she looked at them with alarm. "Is something wrong with my baby?" Nina knelt beside her chair. "Don't you know your baby is all right?" she asked gently. "I -- I thought so. But when you all walked in like this, I wasn't sure." Lucifer didn't recognize this young woman; nor did she appear to recognize him. Her eyes, still dilated, roved apprehensively from face to face. "YouVe not going to do something to my baby?" Lucifer felt a great pity for this young woman, snatched away from Earth to bear a child with an unknown mate on this strange planet. "I wouldn't harm your child," Nina told her. "I'm from San Diego -- how about you?" "Masselon, Ohio." "Now tell me," Nina asked, "is your baby awake yet?" The dilated eyes stared at Nina. "I'm... I'm not sure, but I don't think so." "That's fine. Now, please don't be scared. I want to help you and your baby. Do you trust me?" The young mother studied Nina unblinkingly. After an instant of hesitation, she nodded. "Thank you. Now, are you going to feed your baby yourself this next time?" "I'll try again; but I haven't been doing so well." "Can you tell when your baby is starting to wake up?" "I thought I could the first day or so. But then I didn't try -- I guess I got used to having my baby brought to me every four hours." "Is the baby usually crying when it is brought into the room?" The young mother smiled. "Oh, yes! She's got a strong, healthy cry!" "Will you try to feed her this time before she cries, when she first tells you that she is hungry?" "What -- what do you mean?" Nina took the young mother's thin hand between her strong, brown fingers. "You know what I mean! Don't be afraid to use what God has given you! Let's stop talking now so you can keep your thoughts with your child!" Under the donunance of Nina's personality, the woman settled back in her chair. Outside, the first rain of the morning swept over the forest and steamed up the windows. Huth stood statuesquely by the door, arms folded. The taJl nurse remained watchfully beside him. Lucifer struggled with an unaccustomed inner turmoil. Dissecting the tangle of his emptions, he was astonished to realize that his pulse was thumping with excitement. Abruptly, the young mother spoke up. "My baby is hungry. She wants to be fed." "Go feed her then!" commanded Nina. She helped the young woman from the chair. Together they led the way down the corridor. As they neared the nursery, Lucifer edged closer to them. He saw that the child was still asleep. The mother saw it, too. "But she's still asleep!" she said, bewildered. "I thought -- " "Does a child have to be awake to tell of its hunger?" Nina asked gently. The young mother went ahead of them into the nursery. She took the child from the crib and cradled it in her arms. The baby stirred, grimaced. Its lips groped in small, sucking motions. The young mother hesitated, then opened her robe and brought the baby's lips to her breast. The child began to feed contentedly. At a gesture from Nina, the others left the mother and child alone in the nursery. When they were well down the corridor, Nina burst out triumphantly, "The first contact! Child has communicated to mother. Message received and answered. Child has used primary sense of communication, rather than learning to rely on secondary!" Nina squared her shoulders proudly. "My baby won't have to cry to tell me that it's hungry or cold or wet and miserable!" Lucifer's New England conscience prodded him. If indeed there was anything to this psi heredity business, then he had again hurt someone else, unknowingly, but deeply. What would Nina say and feel when she learned that he had no psi talent to pass on to their child? But this uneasy remorse conflicted with another emotion in Lucifer: The sense of excitement that he suddenly realized had been lost somewhere back in the early years of his psi testing. Somewhere, sometime along the way the sense of wonder had gone out of his work and his life. The constant repetition of the same basic testing technique had made a familiar backyard out of -- what had Huth called it? -- the very frontier of science. Huth was speaking to him. "What do you think now. Dr. Brill? Could it be possible after all that the unorthodoxy of Earth's parapsychology might have to be shaken from its own orthodoxy?" Lucifer frowned. "I do not want to split definitions with you. But it should be obvious to any scientific mind that Miss Poteil's experiment, although interesting, was painfully inadequate in methodology. In the first place, can we determine whether the child was communicating a need, or whether a psi-positive mother had some precognition of her child's need? In the second place, would a large number of children born of psi-positive parents react with significant differt ce from a similar number of children bom of psi negatives?" "A flash of lightning can be duplicated in the laboratory," said Huth, "but it is still a flash of lightning. We recognize lightning, we admit its existence, but we do not wish to go on proving forever in the laboratory that lightning is in fact lightning. If some of your earlier scientists had been content to do that, your cities would still be illuminated by oil lamps." "A fallacious comparison!" "Not entirely sol I merely wished to make a point. It is all a matter of objective. You have seen how older children are developing their psi talents in our classes. Your wife may have shown us how to begin training at a much earlier age, when training is most important." "Still, I should think you would require more substantiation, some further testing, to support Miss Poteil's little experiment." "Of course. Do you have any suggestions. Dr. Brill?" Once more Lucifer found himself backed toward a corner. Only this time he did not try to escape. The challenge intrigued him, in spite of his determination not to become involved with this nonsense. A controlled experiment was quite a different thing... "I might have," he replied, with an effort to be casual. He plucked at his mustache. "But you must grant that a valid basis for experimentation cannot be improvised on the spur of the moment." "Improvise at your leisure, Dr. Brill." Nina was sent off to continue orientation work with Dr. Thame. Lucifer was given a small cubicle near Huth's office. It consisted of little more than a desk, a stool, three bare walls and a floor to ceiling window through which an orange rim of the planet's great sun was now shining mistily. Lucifer scribbled notes, drew crude diagrams, tore them up and started all over again. Spots of color flushed his cheeks. Though he would not have made the admission, he hadn't enjoyed himself so much in fifteen years. He didn't even notice when a new squall rustled across the wet jungle, blotting out the sun and drumming against the window. Huth came in with the attendant who brought lunch. "How many children are there here now?" Lucifer asked crisply. "I believe we have about thirty under the age of nine months." "Do you have another nursery room, like the one we visited this morning?" "We have three more in the Maternity Division." Lucifer explained his immediate needs, Huth issued orders that three more babies be brought to tht Maternity Division. Each was installed alone in a nursery. Two were placed in cribs, and soon fell asleep. The third, a boy of about eight months, refused to nap. He wasn't happy until allowed to crawl around the floor, exploring the strange wonders of the nursery. Lucifer made a quick procedural adjustment, and hoped the youngster would stay awake until feeding time. He tried to tell himself, whenever he thought about it, that he was doing all this only to point up the absurdity of Huth's theories. As feeding time neared, three bottles of heated formula were brought in warmers and placed at Lucifer's direction in rooms immediately adjacent to each of the nurseries. Two of the children were still asleep; the third had discovered a pack of disposable diapers and was systematically tearing it apart. Dr. Thame joined them to watch the experiment, and he brought Nina along. Her eyes sparkled with interest and understanding as she watched Lucifer's preparations. After one quick nod, he did not look her way again, and he stifled the thought that Nina would be watching the experiment with their own child in mind. One of the babies stirred in its sleep, and whimpered a little. "Normally," explained Dr. Thame, "a child of this age would awaken shortly and begin to cry." The baby squirmed again, then turned toward the room in which one of the bottles had been placed. Its tiny lips worked in a sucking motion. 'How wonderful!" whispered Nina. Lucifer picked up the bottle, moved slowly into the corridor. The child appeared confused. Its eyes screwed up tightly, and its face reddened. Then it jerked its head toward the new position of the bottle and repeated the sucking motion. Nina, who had followed Lucifer, squeezed his arm in excitement. He gave her the bottle, and she hurried into the nursery to reward the child. Its lips groped eagerly for the nipple. By this time, the second child was stirring. Its reactions were much slower, and more uncertain, than those of the first baby, but they followed the same pattern. Nina went on to the third child, which had been left playing on the floor of the nursery. "Lucifer! Come quickly!" she called. The child had crept over to the wall nearest the room in which its bottle had been placed. It was pawing, bewildered, at the rough surface. Ducking below the window edge, Lucifer picked up the bottle and moved it to the other side of the room. For a moment the child looked like it was about to cry. But it hitched around on its knees, sprawled flat, raised up again and crawled across the floor. When it was midway to the other side of the nursery, Lucifer switched the bottle back to its original position. The child continued its forward progress for a few feet, faltered and stopped. Its red button of a nose wrinkled, and two big tears squeezed down its round cheeks. Nina rushed into the nursery, picked up the youngster, cooed over it and thrust the nipple of the bottle between its anxious lips. "My compliments. Dr. Brill," said Huth. "Does this begin to satisfy your laws of probability?" Lucifer was determined not to show his excitement. He shrugged. "Five thousand more tests might prove something -- providing you counterposed # tests on children whose ancestry was psi negative." "We're not interested in psi negative children. Dr. Brill." Lucifer faced him squarely. "Just what are you interested in? I think we are entitled to an explanation." Huth hesitated, then nodded. "Perhaps you are." Huth's office, he stood by the window and folded his huge, bronzed arms. "My home planet," he began, "is also in the system of Capella. We are an old race, but neither decadent nor degenerative. Our physical sciences -- as you can judge from your presence here -- are at least # orbits beyond the outermost probings of science on Earth." He paced across to the door, and back to the window again. "But in our obsession and fascination with the ever new horizons of physical science, we neglected that which was potentially of far greater significance. We ignored the possibilities of psionic evolution -- we ignored them until it was al most too late!" "Too late," breathed Nina. "Is that why your mind feels like a machine?" Huth inclined his massive head in her direction. "That could be why, Mrs. Brill. What society -- or our bodies -- neglect will eventually die. It is tnie even of psi. Dr. Brill." "Can you be specific?" Lucifer challenged. "I can. If you had taken your eyes out of the laboratory long enough to look at your world as it is and has been, you would have learned that psi manifestations were quite customary on Earth during the #th and #th centuries. But your industrial age did not have much room for psionics. With Daniel Dunglas Home went the last of your great psi talents!" "Our card tests have discovered many psi positives," Lucifer interjected heatedly. "You ought to know -- you have many of them here now!" "Psi positives with thwarted, arrested or frustrated talents," replied Huth. "Psi positives who wanted to be 'normal', because that is what society demanded... Psi positives who were ashamed of have it overlooked! Yes, we have them here... and, what is more important, we have their less inhibited children!" "Your logic escapes me." "It wouldn't if you had emerged from your cubicle and looked around you among the physical sciences. Some of your more venturesome geneticists believe that man will soon be the master of his heredity and that the next five million years of evolution on Earth will be the controlled evolution of the human mind. That could mean controlled evolution toward psi. Dr. Brill -- if Earth science can ever escape the terrible drag of orthodoxy and if the unorthodox can ever learn to avoid the trap of its own dogma." Nina had been watching Huth with the unblinking intensity that was so characteristic of her in moments of total concentration. "So we are your nursery!" she exclaimed. "We produce the plants that will bring life back to your own soil!" Huth came close to one of his rare smiles. "You have admirably reduced the milleniums and mathematics of evolution to a single sentence!" He turned to Lucifer. "Is this a laboratory big enough to challenge you?" Lucifer took refuge in a question of his own. "What about your Goolies? From the shadow on Huth's face, and the faint gasp from Nina's parted lips, Lucifer knew he had made a mistake. "Where did you learn that name?" Huth asked him coldly. Lucifer was not a good liar, but he tried. "I -- I don't really know. Perhaps -- from one of your nurses or drivers... "We will accept that explanation, for the moment. Later, I trust you will volunteer another." Huth's emphasis on 'Volunteer" was almost imperceptible, yet it had the effect of two pieces of steel striking together. "You have already met one of these -- Goalies, Let us go and meet some more. Nina put out her hand. "Is this necessary?" Huth regarded her thoughtfully. "Yes, I believe it is. If we are going to work together, you should know everything." "And if we're not?" Lucifer snapped. Huth shrugged. "Then it won't make any difference, I assure you." Outside, the wet moss of the courtyard was springy underfoot. Lucifer flinched with the remembered horror of trying to breath through that moss and water. Nina took his hand. Her fingers were strong and warm. A tall attendant let them into the building. Lucifer looked down a long, sterile-white corridor, flanked by small, seemingly transparent doors. "The doors are transparent only from this side, and then only when subjected to the proper wave frequency to make them so," Huth explained. "Like the rooms we live in!" Nina burst out. Huth blinked, and assented, "Like the rooms you live in." Before Lucifer could assimilate this bit of information, Huth had stopped before the first door. Inside was a shrunken monstrosity of a creature. It had the torso of a grown woman, but its legs were bone thin, twisted and scarcely eighteen inches long. It was hairless; its face was one ovular blob of flesh, in which the eyes, mouth and nostrils were knife-edge slits. It seemed to be watching the rainstreaked window. There were two beings in the next room, apparently male and female. Both were naked, and seated cross-legged on a thick mat. They were playing a complicated game with marked and colored blocks. The woman's body was covered with a fine, brown hair. Her breasts were tiny for the dimensions of her body. Her head was also small out of all proportion, as was the male's. Lucifer saw that though both were eyeless they were playing their game rapidly and skillfully. Their hands were lumps of flesh, with just rudimentary fingers. "They are quite sentient," Huth observed. And he added with pride, "You would classify them as definite psi positives -- altogether our most successful experiment of this type!" As they neared the next door, it suddenly became opaque. Huth led them past it without comment. Nina winced, and her fingers tightened convulsively. They were led quickly down the rest of the corridor. Some of the doors were opaque. Through others, they caught glimpses of more grotesquely distorted creatures, some asleep, some lurching or crawling about their rooms. The corridor ended in a large multi-purpose type of room in which semi-human creatures of all Huth opened the door. "Go on in," he said. It took all of Lucifer's will to control his revulsion and trembling and step through that door. Nina followed. Her fingers rigid in his hand. One of the creatures nearest them turned nimbly around on one leg and hopped closer. It reached out a long arm, touched Nina's forehead. A harsh, croaking sound came from its mouth. Nina's lips quivered, but she smiled and patted the leathery hand. Others bounded and crept around them, jibbering, feeling their faces and hair, probing at their bodies with stumps of arms or with hands that seemed all fingers. "All of these people show some traces of psi," Huth explained. Again there was quiet pride in his voice. A wracking cry came from one corner of the room. A huge shape hurtled into the group around them, knocking others out of its way. Lucifer saw the wildly flopping head, then long arms reached for him and a crushing weight bore him to the floor. There was a choking odor of hot, oily flesh. And then the weight was gone. Two attendants led the creature, still mouthing angry cries, out of the room. Huth helped Lucifer to his feet. "You must forgive Tetla. He shows up well in some basic psi tests, but certain other faculties were lost in the manipulation of his chromosomes. We never quite know what he will do." The other beings had fallen back in silence during the assault. Now they began to babble in wild disharmony, each gesticulating in its own way. Lucifer's cheeks were grey, but his lips were compressed into a thin line under the stubble of his mustache. He took Nina's arm and strode out of the room. Huth followed, without comment. Out in the corridor, Lucifer confronted him. A sweep of his arm encompassed the long corridor, the room they had just left. "This -- this is a monstrous inhumanity -- a terrible perversion of science!" His voice was flinty with rage. Deep within him, the conscience of his puritan ancestry was revolted. Huth raised an admonishing hand. "Don't forget your scientific training. Dr, Brill. You can't impose the value judgements of one culture upon the framework of another." "There must be certain principles basic to all cultures!" "A true Aristotelian fallacy! Form is actual reality, matter is potential reality and the form is ever in the matter! Surely, Dr. Bill, you can rise above such ontology!" "Can you justify what you have done to these people even from your own value judgement basis?" "You treat justification as a valid entity, which leads you deeper into the morass of attempting to substantialize abstracta. We do not justify, we do! Let me clarify: "With the future of our evolution in the balance, with the unbounded horizons of the universe that will be opened by psi, we have taken certain measures. Once we postulated the genetic characteristics of psi, there was no limit to possible methodology. You have seen only two of many methods we are exploring: One, of course, is the Earth project; the second is an attempt to induce psi mutations in the offspring of certain of our own people. Naturally, since the external results of such experiments are often unpleasant, we bring the newly born infants directly to our laboratory on Melus. Nina's eyes were still wide with horror. "How do you do this thing?" "Really, Mrs. Brill, it's nothing to be so shocked about. As a matter of fact, it's only a further step in what your own experimenters do by exposing Drosophilae to X-rays and plants to colchicine. We are endeavoring by many methods not only to mutate a gene by rearranging the atoms in its molecules, but also to increase the quota of chromosomes in certain cells. The difficulty, as yet, is to single out the right string of chromosomes or to hit the right gene and influence it toward the desired psi mutation. We are still groping in the dark, simply increasing the chances that one or another gene, at random, will psi mutate." As Huth spoke, he had been leading them toward a side exit. A vehicle was waiting. Huth put his hand on Lucifer's shoulder. "We did not bring you to Melus, Dr. Brill, merely to reproduce your own psi characteristics. We feel that your background will enable you to make many notable contributions, once you become oriented. Already you have justified this feeling. Your people will do things for you and Mrs. Brill that they would "I want nothing more to do with this project." "I am sure you will recognize your present reaction as purely emotional, and come quickly to realize that here you have the answer to a true scientist's dream -- a laboratory on the scale of life itself! For twenty years you have taken timid steps around the periphery of your science. Now you are at the heart of it!" What should he believe? What should he do? Lucifer walked slowly around the small clearing behind their quarters. He stared, for the most part unseeingly, through the force field and into the shadows of the forest. His shoulder brushed the invisible barricade, and the shock broke the rhythm of his stride. What should he believe? This question bubbled most frequently to the roiled surface of his thoughts. With belief would come the mental framework, the pattern for action. It was disturbing and confusing that credo should be so important to a scientific mind. Couldn't facts take form without credo? Did facts shape the framework, or were they molded to conform to it? Einstein made truth relative to its own framework, but which came first -- the framework or the truth? And if the answer was framework, could there be truth? Perhaps the childhood riddle of the chicken and the egg could have cosmic implications. A vagrant phrase from a long-ago literature class came back to prod him now: To an egg the chicken is merely the means of producing another egg. Samuel Butler. A shaft of sunlight speared down through the whispering canopy of branches high above him. It kindled to life a spot of riotous color in the perpetual shadow world at the base of the great trees. Blossoms of delicate blue, petals flecked with orange and gold. Leaves so green they brought an ache of loneliness for a forgotten spring morning of youth. What should he believe? With sudden percipience, Lucifer knew that he had moved in the shadows for a long time. The riotous dreams of youth, the exciting sense of being a pioneer among pioneers, had become like a bit of stop-motion film. It preserved the form, without the life or action. A dream cannot be framed and kept behind glass. It cannot be static. To remain, it must change. Parapsychology had been the high road. The glorious adventure. It had made the son of a New England minister an explorer on a new frontier. But does a frontier of science have purpose other than to lead to an infinite succession of new frontiers? Had he remained too long on one frontier? The unorthodox becomes the orthodox. The theory crustifies into the dogma. The method becomes methodology. Was this forever to be the entrapment of science? There were an infinite number of exploratory possibilities on this frontier of today; and, for all their challenge, they could be a soporific. The frontier itself was finite. But what about the next frontier? And the next? And the next? Huth could be right, in this at least: Perhaps parapsychology had been too long exploring the unknown of its present frontier. Some must remain behind to develop and consolidate. But others must keep moving on! To look forever beyond the next horizon! There was the challenge. There was the dream forever bright. Lucifer thought of his crude experiment with the psi positive children, and he admitted now what he had denied at the time : Not for a decade had he been so excited by any experiment ; it had brought back the wonder of the moment when an aimless undergraduate had first come upon the Rhine card tests. Lord, that was more than twenty years ago! For twenty years he had been walking in Rhine's shadow. And his personal, private dreams had never lived to see sunlight. When would science learn to use genius without being smothered by it? Freud and Einstein had left a vision to their sciences, not a citadel. They had tried to cast a light, not a shadow. Rhine had brought psi into his laboratory to demonstrate its scientific validity. Now, the physicist, the biochemist, the mathematician and, yes, the geneticist -- all of them, must take this validity into their own laboratories. The parapsychologist must become the physical scientist; the physical scientist must become the parapsychologist. Only from the total crucible of science could psi emerge in a useful form. But what of Huth, and Mendel's Planet? However it had been brought together, whatever one thought of it, this living laboratory was now a fact. Psi was being mated to psi; children were being born, children with a psi potential that could be trained into a power of unknown magnitude. Huth had described it well: A laboratory on the scale of life itself! Huth knew his semantics, all right. The barbs of his words got under the skin, hooked and held fast. How pallid an Earth laboratory would seem after Mendel's Planet. The symbol cards seemed to have lost their meaning. A dozen projects clamored to reach the surface of Lucifer's thinking. Each cried out its siren challenge; each demanded experimentation. How much there was to do here on Mendel's Planet! Now, Nina was at his side, and she said gently, "It's raining again, Lucifer. Won't you come in?" The rain had returned, and the big, splashing drops hadn't fallen into his thoughts. But they were coursing in streams down his cheeks, dripping from his eyebrows. He brushed them away, and stared at the forest. The shadows had merged. The flowering beauty was like a mirage that had never been, and never could be. There was only the wash of the rain on the forest roof, the drip-drop-drip on the molding carpet of dead leaves. that night. The click in the visagraph, the deeper blackness of the walls, the silent opening of the casement window -- these were the now recognizable signs of his coming. Lucifer hadn't been able to sleep. Nina had already gone to bed, after pressing her lips to his cheek in a swift gesture that left him more unsettled than ever. When he realized that Fetzer was coming, Lucifer sat up on the couch and drew the sheet around his shoulders. In a moment the stocky figure squeezed through the window. "Hi, there," Fetzer called softly. "You awake. Dr. Brill?" "I haven't slept." "How'd things go today?" How had things gone? "I'm not sure," Lucifer evaded. "You got it all figured out?" "Well -- not exactly." Lucifer was stunned at his own reluctance to discuss matters with Fetzer. Anything less than total frankness was a new facet of himself. It was one he didn't like. But how could he share his indecision? "We had an organization meeting after I left here last night," Fetzer said. "All the section leaders made it this time. We're set to pull the plug any time you say?" "Pull... Oh, I hadn't realized... What do you think you can do?" "Plenty. We've learned to shortcircuit the force fields in a hurry, and we can spring over a thousand men inside of two minutes. Within five minutes more, we'd be able to hit Center and the landing field." Lucifer felt himself withdrawing even more. He could see the whole psi project swept away in turmoil. Then he thought of Huth's men, so towering in their stature, so well organized, so completely equipped by a fantastically advanced technology. The revolt would be brutally crushed. "You can't do it!" he told Fetzer. "Huh?" The stocky figure tensed. "Spell it out. Doc." "You wouldn't have a chance!" "We've got a few tricks. There's a lot of vets in this bunch." "It would be suicide." Fetzer hunched closer to the couch. "Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But a man can't always stop to think of things like that. You do what you got to do." The words triggered a release, and Lucifer started to talk. With an eloquence that would have astounded his graduate students at Western University, Lucifer drew a word picture of the psi project and the theory behind it. As he talked, Nina came in quietly and sat on the couch beside him, drawing up her knees inside her short gown. Lucifer spoke of their own experiments with the babies, and of evolution foreshortened through understanding and application of Hardy's Law. Only when he came to the radiation and chemical phases of the psi project, to the pitiable Goolies, did his flow of words falter. He tried to pick up quickly with analysis of what training would do for their own children. But the nagging awareness of this second dishonesty, the knowledge that Nina knew what he had done and was watching him in the darkness, broke the flow of thought and his explanation trailed off into awkward silence. Albert Fetzer didn't say anything. He squatted on his heels, a humped blur in the darkness of the room. Lucifer could feel the probe of his eyes and darting mind. "So that's it," Fetzer said at last. "We guessed some of it, but we couldn't fill in the missing pieces. You learned a lot. Doc." "There's so much I haven't yet learned." "You learned enough." "Enough for what?" "We're going to pull that plug, remember?" "No!" Lucifer stood up in his agitation. "There must be another way -- a better way." "You name it." "Well -- naturally I'd have to think more about it. Everything here is so new to me." Fetzer stepped closer to him. His shadow was shorter even than Lucifer's, but it bulked with unseen strength, "Anything else, Doc?" "I don't understand." "You've gone for this stuff, haven't you." Lucifer recoiled from the bluntness of the question. "I am a scientist," he replied. "Or at least I have always assumed that. These ideas are as strange to me as they are to you, but Tm trying to understand and evaluate them. Isn't that important?" "Not to me it isn't -- not right now. I think the other boys will feel the same." "You don't care what all this may mean?" "Nope. Not yet, anyway. I'm not a scientist. Dr. Brill. Maybe I'm not even a very smart guy and maybe I'm just as glad of it, because my feet are on the ground and I know where I want them to go. Sure, this psi stuff could be big, mighty big. Our kids could go a long way with it. I can see that. But I'm a man, not a guinea pig. I happen to go for the woman they teamed me up with, and she feels the same way about me. That's true of most of the folks here. But we're not breeding kids for someone else. We'd rather run our own show. Guess you professors have been away from ordinary people too long to realize that. You should listen to some of our boys who fought with the underground in the last war. Makes you feel kind of good about people." "Don't you realize that Huth can destroy all of you?" "I'm not the hero type. Dr. Brill. In the war, I always kept my head down and squeezed as deep in the mud as I could. But there's some things you have to do, no matter how cold your stomach feels about it." "When do you plan to do this?" From the forest came a wild, plaintive cry. Fetzer took a quick step toward the window, then paused. "You better come with me -- both of you." Lucifer drew back. "Where? Why?" "I don't like to do this. Doc. But I don't like the way you sound, either. We can't take any chances." "You don't think..." "I don't know. I'm sorry, but I don't know enough about your kind. Hurry up, now." Lucifer still held back, but Nina stood up and moved wordlessly toward the window. Fetzer's voice toughened. "Make it easy on yourself. Doc. You're coming along, one way or the other." His legs shaking, Lucifer followed Nina through the window. T he warp m the force field was at the far comer of the enclosure. At a command from Fetzer, they dropped to their knees and crawled through. A voice whispered a challenge. Fetzer answered, and they proceeded, single file, deeper into the forest. The leader guided them with a pinpoint of light escaping from his cupped hand. They followed a winding course around the root structures of the trees. Lucifer tripped once and fell sprawling into the wet, leathery leaves. As he got up, the spider loop of a vine caught him around the throat and flipped him again. "Pick up your feet and keep your head down," Fetzer warned impatiently. Their direction took them to a shallow stream, and they splashed up the middle of it for a hundred yards. The cacophony of night sounds retreated before them, closed in behind them. The rooftop of intermeshed branches and leaves dripped endlessly. Some alien creature followed them through the branches, yapping in a strident monotone. They emerged from the stream to crawl into a semi-cave formed by the enjoining roots of two great trees. Vegetation had webbed over the roots until even the dropping of water was cut off. The light of a guttering torch showed several men waiting for them. A few carried strange weapons stolen from Huth's men. Others were armed with vicious looking clubs, and long, needle-pointed stakes. It's fantastic, thought Lucifer. Cavemen prepared to challenge a mechanized force. Cavemen forty light years from home. When they saw Nina, the men stood up, surprised, uneasy. Fetzer went into some detail on what Lucifer had told him. One of the men swore, and smashed the head of his club on the sodden floor of the cave. A balding man seated Nina on a hummock in one corner of the cave. Ignoring Lucifer, they plunged into discussion of their plans. None could see any reason for further delay. The supply ship had been gone for some time, and might return soon. Its crew would add strength to Huth's base force, which numbered around eight hundred, including nurses, doctors and various technical personnel. To Lucifer, the plan sounded bold. Pathetically bold. A sizeable group would break out of their quarters and flee into the forest, drawing a portion of Huth's men in pursuit. Another group would attack Center, making it appear that this was the chief point of concentration. After delaying as long as possible, the main force would hit the landing field and try to capture the auxiliary spaceship. The men knew they couldn't handle the ship, but their work around the field had taught them enough about it to know that its armament could give them control of the base. As Lucifer listened, a sense of familiarity kept tugging at him. It was a strange sensation that he had been through something like this before. But that was ridiculous. He'd never been any closer to military action than rejection by his draftboard, which had stupidly considered parapsychology non-essential. The feeling persisted, and suddenly he identified it: Hempstead House, New London, Conn. The stories he had been told in childhood about the underground railroad and the abolitionist meetings held by the few who believed men do something about it! The memory came to him across thirty-five years of his life, and half the span of the galaxy. It came with an impact that snapped something inside him, to bring the entity, the changing personality that was himself, into focus again. But it wasn't the same focus as before. It would never be. Yet he felt more a whole person than ever before, and within him there was a surging current that could not be held back. Hempstead House had been a verity that could not be fitted into any neat cubicle of orthodoxy. New England ministers and spinsters, businessmen and farmers -- all of them motivated by a life force that couldn't be duplicated in any laboratory. The same life force was in this tree cave tonight, far away from Earth. It would go with men forever, through all space and time. It would go with Lucifer Brill, too -- to the end of this experience, to whatever new frontiers of science he might live to reach. It would prevent the vision from becoming the still-life picture, the theory from crystalizing into dogma. As long as the force lived in any man, it had the potential of leading all men to freedom. Psi was an unknown part of that life force. It could not always remain in the laboratory. It must bring freedom from blindness, freedom from the cubicles that restricted each man, each science. It was a weapon   . A weapon! Good Lord, why not? Lucifer stepped into the center of the group before he knew what he was going to say. But the words came: "Wait... there may be a better way -- if you have the courage to try it!" Fetzer eyed him sceptically. "We don't have much time. Doc." "Then you must make time! It's your only chance -- our only chance!" The men were silent, uncertain. "Go ahead," Fetzer said. "But make it fast." "Would you fight with a knife if you had a machine gun? Would you attack on horseback if you had a jet loaded with atom bombs?" "Keep talking," said Fetzer. "The answer is obvious. You would use the best weapon available. Yet here you sit with clubs and wooden spears, ignoring a weapon so potentially powerful that it makes our H-Bomb, or some undoubtedly greater weapon of Huth's, seem like an old crossbow!" He had their attention now. He felt the force of concentration on his words. He sensed the awareness in Nina, though her eyes were hidden in the shadows beyond the wavering circle of torchlight. "Think of what I learned from Huth -- what Albert Fetzer has told you. Every person was brought here because they were psi positives, because they possessed some individual psi talent. Some of you have been ashamed of that talent. Perhaps you tried to hide it back on Earth -- because it made you different from other people. But you know something about it. You may have learned more about it -- even experimented with it -- during your months and years on this planet. You may know what even limited talents have done in perception, clairvoyance and the moving of objects through telekinesis. "These things were done by individual people, operating, as we might say, on single generators. "But now for the first time in history we have more than three thousand psi talents grouped together in one small area. "What if all the psi power here could be focused on one objective? All the men and women of Mendel's Planet -- all the children -- especially the children!... focusing their combined power! "Wouldn't that give us the force of three thousand generators -- fused into one unit? Instead of moving a chair across the room, making a table jump, levitating a person -- why couldn't a building be moved? A spaceship crushed? An attacking force cut down like grass under an invisible mower? "Gentlemen, is there any limit to the power of a psi focus? "If a psi focus is possible, we have our own world to win -- the frontiers of infinity to explore...  The silence within the tree-cave lasted for an eternity. Even the breathing of the men was hushed as each struggled with this new concept. His emotional fire spent in the greatest effort of his life, Lucifer stood limp and awkward in the center of the circle, looking around at the set faces. Their eyes were fixed on the humus beneath their crossed legs. Faintly, high above the tree-cave, the wind moaned over the forest canopy, and a new wash of rain approached. It was a cold sound, though the night was steaming hot. There was a stir in the shadows, and Nina stepped between two men to join him in the circle. Her fists were clenched. "What's the matter," she cried, "don't you have faith in yourselves? Are you afraid to fight with a new weapon?" The faces turned up toward her. "Look at that torch!" she commanded. "Now, put it out! All of us together put it out!" She turned toward the torch, which had been thrust into a fibrous root structure. She halfclosed her eyes. Her lips stretched taut; her fingers knotted and unknotted in an agony of concentration. The flame flickered violently in the still air of the cave, but it did not go out. "You're not helping me!" Nina cried; "I'm not strong enough alone -- none of us are! Please!" Abruptly, the torch twisted in its base, the wood snapped with the crack of a rifle shot. The tree-cave was dark. Nina's voice was spent, triumphant. "See! Now do you have faith in yourselves? Didn't you feel what Dr. Brill meant by a psi focus? Think of what it will be like to be in a focus of three thousand minds! Are you still afraid?" A man groped his way to the broken remnant of the torch. He re-lit the upper portion. "I'm thinking of my own kid," he said. "I've seen what he can do all by himself." Fetzer spoke up. "Fve tried it myself. I can't do it always, but sometimes it happens. I don't know why, but it happens." One after another the men spoke out, digging into hidden memories for some personal or observed experience. "My wife was a kick," recalled a scrawny little man with a huge nose. "Not the woman I got me now, but the one I had back in Portland. She never would read no cards, but when she got mad, all hell would bust loose! Once we both got mad the same time, and you never saw so much stuff zinging around! The neighbors called the cops." They fell silent again, thinking. Nina slipped her hand into Lucifer's. It was icy cold. "You'd better sit down," he told her. She shook her head. Then Fetzer spoke up. "How could we try this thing, Doc?" It was the question Lucifer had been hoping for, and fearing. The problems ahead were piling up. He was a teacher, a scientist, not a leader. But he couldn't let his doubts show now. "We can test it tomorrow night -- if you can get word to all the people by that time." "We can," Once committed, the men plunged quickly into new plans. The guard tower on the hill behind the compound was picked for the first target. Almost everyone could see it from their own quarters. And it was large enough to provide a valid test for Lucifer's psi focus theory. The searchlight that always blazed on with the coming of dusk would be the signal. "If it works," said Fetzer, "we've got to be ready to go all the way. They might not know what happened exactly, but you can be sure they'll move in and clamp down fast." It was decided that a modified version of the original attack plan would be followed if the experiment succeeded. Only this time the diversionary forces would hit the Center and the small spaceport, while the main effort would be concentrated on getting the rest of the people into a clearing just outside the compound. From there they would try to function as a psi unit. The wail of a forest animal drifted through the night. "The boys are getting ready to short the field again," Fetzer explained. "We'd better get back." He held out his hand to Lucifer. "Sorry, Doc." They made good time back to the compound, and the group split up as they approached it. Fetzer took Nina and Lucifer to their quarters and showed them how to locate the warp. "So long," he said. "Good luck to us all." Nina and Lucifer ducked through the warp, but did not go immediately inside. They watched the clouds shred apart, and the innight. "I wonder where Earth is?" Nina whispered. "We couldn't see it if we knew." "Do you think we'll ever get back, Lucifer?" "I don't know." She slipped her arm through his. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I have a feeling that we won't. That we will never see our own sun rise again." He was silent, feeling the weight of her words, the unknown to come, the burden of his responsibility. "It was hard for me to say that," she continued quietly. "I loved Earth. I loved its beauty and its ugliness. I loved its poor blind people. I loved them all, for I was part of them, and my eyes belonged to them. I could never hate anyone." She put her cheek against his, and her breath was warmer than the warmth of the night. Lucifer did not draw away. He asked, "Do you have a sense of what may happen tomorrow?" "Only a sense of much pain. Beyond that, I can't see. It may be just as well. Are you afraid, Lucifer?" "A little." "It is good to be a little afraid, always." "What about you -- are you ever afraid, Nina?" It was the first time he had spoken the name of this strange woman who bore his child. "I am afraid, but I am at peace, too. If we do not come through this, there will be nothing more to the end of time. But if we do, we will have a child who can see, and its life will belong to us. Isn't that a wonderful thought?" Lucifer trembled under the added burden, but he thrust it from his mind, lest she perceive it there. Time enough for her to know the truth when they knew the future. "We'd better go in," he said. Her cheek turned. Her mouth found his. shortly after breakfast, Lucifer was already at work in front of the visagraph screen. He held up a sheet of scribbling, and forced himself to speak with animation. "Here are some further possibilities based on our findings of yesterday. Can we work on them here today?" Huth looked interested. "Along what lines are you proceeding. Dr. Brill?" "All the primary needs and functions of a child could be related to psi, just as well as the feeding. I am intrigued by the possibility of stimulus and response in the prenatal stage. Mrs. Brill believes she has heard or read that thumb-sucking begins within the womb. Could you verify this with Dr. Thame? If it is indeed the case, the need expressed by the foetus in sucking its thumb might be ansvered psionically by a perceptive mother, thus strengthening the psi sense and building reliance on it at an even earlier stage of development." "Splendid, Dr. Brill!" Lucifer pointed to the stack of books beside him on the couch. "Earlier this morning, I asked for some works on the infant brain, and several books on electroencephalography were delivered by the tubicular. In scanning them, I find several items that may be fruitful for future research. For example, electrodes attached to the belly of a pregnant woman in the eighth month of gestation record an irregular pattern of delta waves. It also appears that both delta and theta are typically infantile rhythms, and that dieta activity is early associated with such non-visual stimulation as pleasure, pain and frustration. The pathways on this frontier go in many directions." "Follow them where you will!" There was deep satisfaction in Huth's voice. "May I say. Dr. Brill, that I have misjudged the potential adaptability of the Earth scientific mind, when it is given proper stimulus and motivation. Your progress has been remarkable, truly remarkable! Would you be content to return to your old cubicle?" "No," Lucifer answered steadily. "I would not." The day dragged endlessly, even with the research to occupy his attention. It might have been easier if he could have talked with Nina about what lay ahead, but he dared not risk a chance word being monitored. They could only try to talk casually about themselves and the research. As the minutes crawled by, new doubts tormented him. Would Fetzer and his men be able to contact everyone? Would the people believe enough in their own power to make a serious attempt at focusing it on the guard tower? If the test failed, he had no doubts that the men would go ahead with their original plan. Nina smiled whenever their eyes met, but for all its strength her dark face showed the strain of waiting. Near the end of the day, she sat beside him, brushed her lips against the edge of his mustache, and let them creep up to his ear. "I love you," she whispered. "I want to say it now, and then think only of what we must try to do." Rain came with the first of dusk. It had been holding back since mid-day, building up rolling black thunderheads. Now it came with such fury that it blotted out the view of the compound and the guard tower. Nina looked stricken. "The signal!" she whispered. "What will we do?" Lucifer could only stare through the rain-washed window and repeat to himself the fragment of a prayer he had learned from his father. With deepening of dusk, the rain lifted a little, but they still couldn't know whether the light would be visible. A sudden gust could blot it out. Huth called on the visagraph. "I will send a car for you," he said." I thought it might be pleasant to dine together and pass this miserable evening in stimulating conversation!" "Thank you," said Lucifer. He hoped his concern didn't show. From the comer of his eye he could see Nina by the window, straining to catch the first glimpse of the signal light. He must delay Huth in sending for them! Lucifer picked up a book. "I will bring this along," he said. "This afternoon I encountered another concept that may help .  As he had hoped, Huth could not resist the bait. "That's most interesting, Dr, Brill." "It has to do with what might be called the relationship between the anatomical maturing of the brain and the changing of rhythm patterns as the child grows older. This has not been applied to psi patterns -- " "By all means, let's discuss it, Dr. Brill! Now -- " "Another factor," Lucifer continued desperately, "may be the alpha rhythm patterns in a child. While these emerge very infrequently below the age of three, and do not appear with regularity until around the age of eleven, there is evidence to indicate that alpha rhythm characteristics are hereditary, and that... As Lucifer talked, he saw that Nina's body had become rigid, that her fingers were extended and shaking, with the frenzy of a drowning person trying to reach something just beyond his grasp... and that environmental factors may affect the frequency of alpha rhythms during the period of childhood. For example, two uniovular twins -- " A cry of pain escaped from Nina's lips. Huth showed he had heard it. "Is something wrong. Dr. Brill?" "Mrs. Brill may have fallen -- I will -- " And then it came, more a rending than an explosion. It was like a gigantic steel beam snapping apart from an irresistible pressure within its molecules. Their dwelling and the ground beneath it shuddered. Nina cried out again, a cry in which agony and triumph were one. Huth leaped back from the screen. A terrible rage was stamped on his bronze features. "Dr. Brill, if you are responsible for whatever has happened..." The screen went dark. Lucifer rushed to the window, tore Nina away from it. He caught a glimpse of white flames in the darkness. "Hurry! Through the warp!" he shouted. She followed woodenly, in a state of psychic shock. Her head struck the edge of the warp. Lucifer had to make her bend in order to get through. The drenching rain revived her a little. "Oh, Lucifer... It hurt me so... I tried so hard..." She was sobbing, and her tears became part of the rain on her cheeks. "It was like trying to swim against the tide of all the oceans in the universe. And the tide was pushing me back -- and then, all of a sudden, the tide was with me -- and I was tumbled and choked -- in breakers as high as the stars." She pressed hard against him, her strong body contorting in a spasm that was more than muscular. Words tore themselves from lips that quivered and twisted: "Dear God! We've never lived before! A new world, and we're not strong enough to live there, Lucifer -- Not strong enough yet! I can't go back to it -- but I want to -- I want to so much." pound, just within the fringe of the forest. As they ran, other shadow forms joined them in the scramble toward the meeting place. Children, awed momentarily to silence, ran nimbly ahead of their parents. A baby wailed. Seachlights probed through the rain, thrusting at the forest. Blocks of light and shadow flickered between the trees. It was like a film running wild in its projector. The light in the bow of the spaceship blazed on, and the misty twilight became a phosphorescent that arched up to the churning black clouds. A shouting came from the direction of Center. The first attack group had struck. Sounds of the second attack came from the area of the spaceship. The dome of light shimmered, then steadied, with eye-aching brightness. The second diversionaiy group, the one led by the little man with the huge nose, was now engaged. The clearing opened ahead. It already teemed with activity. Fetzer and his sector leaders were channeling all comers into groups of about fifty, each under one of the leaders. The groups were fanned out along the edge of the clearing, facing toward the compound. Except for the muted crying of the very young, and the low-voiced commands from the sector leaders, the groups were quiet. Fetzer ran to Lucifer. "Better stay with me. This is your show from now on! Just tell me what you want us to do, and ITl pass the signal along. My God! Did you see what happened to the guard tower?" "Some of it." "Do you think we can do anything like that again?" Lucifer looked over the nearest group. Many of the adults showed the same shock he had seen in Nina The children were no longer so awed, and their eyes were strangely bright. "I don't know what we can do again," he answered. "And I'm not sure I want to know." The clearing filled rapidly. Each sector leader's group was separated by about ten yards from the next, and all formed an uneven, convex line some four hundred yards from end to end. "All set. Doc," said Fetzer. He fired a cylindrical weapon, and a streak of orange light curved over the compound. "That's to give our boys a chance to get back into the woods -- those that still can. They'll be ready to hit again -- if this other thing doesn't work." He waited for orders. Lucifer stared across the compound. The fear in his stomach made him feel like retching. These people were waiting for him to lead! Incredible. "You have to go on now," Nina said. His stomach was still sick, but he managed to smile at her. Through the slackening downpour he saw the bare walls and flat roof of Center. "The Center' he told Fetzer. Word leaped from group to group. Center. Center. Children picked it up excitedly. "Now' said Lucifer. Fetzer brought his arm down sharply. Lucifer saw the people around him pull themselves together for another effort. Nina looked faint. Nothing happened. Most of the children were bouncing with excitement. They still hadn't joined the psi focus. Lucifer ran up to a freckle-faced boy of about five. "Let's have some fun' he said. "Blow up Center just like you did the guard tower!" The words rippled from child to child, spoken and unspoken. Now it was a game instead of an awesome duty. Hey, Tommy, this is going to be neat. Blow up Center! Wow! Watch me. Aw, you aren't so hot! Quit shovin', will ya'? I can't see. Center. Blow up Center! Oh, boy! Lucifer gripped the freckled boy by the shoulders. "All right," he said, "you show them all... Now!" The boy's eyes glowed brighter. He'd show 'em. Right here in front of Mom and Dad. You bet he would! Just watch. As child after child joined the psi focus, each grew quiet. In some deep center of his being, Lucifer had the sense of a dark, rushing wind, a nightmare sense of falling into a void, and screaming, though you knew you would never reach the bottom. Once again came that rending crack. Center disintegrated. There were no flying fragments. Just disintegration. A white light that was whiter than light. The children buzzed ecstatically. Their parents were numb and silent. Lucifer knew that if Huth still lived, he must be reorganizing his concept of what had originally happened. His reasoning would soon bring him to the truth. There was a period of quiet. It strengthened in Lucifer the belief that Huth was alive and calmly directing the operation. He found himself hoping that Huth, indeed, was alive. He had a respect for the man that bordered on a sense of kinship. The quiet was broken as Huth's men fanned in small groups through the compound. They moved with great, leaping strides. One squad probed toward the clearing. When its leader realized how many Earth people were assembled there, he signalled for a quick retreat toward the spaceship. Again there was stillness. "What now. Doc?" asked Fetzer. He looked five years older. "Shall we blast that ship before it opens up on us?" Lucifer shook his head. "I don't think it will open up -- not just yet. This project means too much to Huth. He'll try to save as much of it as possible." Once more groups of Huth's men scattered through the compound. This time the groups were larger. They followed converging courses that would end at the clearing. "They're rushing us!" cried Fetzer. "Stop them!" The command leaped from sector leader to sector leader. Lucifer picked up the freckled boy so that he could see across the compound. "Now we'll have some more fun," he said. "Those men are trying to get here. Let's see if you can stop them." "Betcha we can!" Stop 'em! Stop 'em! Word of the new game spread psionically from child to child, and was repeated vocally. One tiny girl bounced up and down in glee, dancing, first on one foot and then the other, as if she were skipping rope. A shrill whistle launched the attack. Five squads converged on the clearing. The bronze faces of Huth's men were impassive. Their long legs covered nearly three yards at a stride. Each man carried a short, silver-colored tube. Once again the adults were first to project themselves into psi focus. But this time the children were not so slow to join and reinforce them. The rain had stopped. The hot, humid air was motionless. And it was a motionless wind that seemed to strike Huth's men. They were swept off their feet and spun around as if caught in a tornado. The huge leader of the squad bearing down on Lucifer's sector shot backward in a rising trajectory that cleared the compound. He screamed once. A hoarse, wild scream. The freckled boy in Lucifer's arms clapped his chubby hands. Some of Huth's men smashed into dwellings and fell in broken heaps. Others landed in open spaces and rolled like tumbleweeds. The survivors crawled or ran, screaming and sobbing, toward the spaceship. "We'd better get that ship now!" Fetzer urged. "Perhaps Huth will try to talk to us first." Five minutes passed. No sign came from Huth. "They're up to something," said Fetzer. "Let's not wait anymore." The gates of one of the administration training buildings swung open, and the Goolies poured out, driven and prodded by their attendants. They came straight toward the clearing, running in weird, disjointed strides or bounding along on footless stumps of legs. Monstrous heads rolled loosely, snapping from shoulder to shoulder, from chest to back. Tiny, hairless, eyeless heads were fixed and rigid. Slack mouths gaped and drooled. Lipless mouths bared perpetual smiles. Dwarfed, naked creatures bumped against the knees of eight-foot giants. It was an unbelievable synthesis of every nightmare since time began. The freckled boy wrapped his arms around Lucifer's neck. His small body shuddered. Lucifer felt his own stomach twist with the remembered horror, but he held fast to reason. The Goolies were in themselves no danger. It was only their psychological effect. Huth was shrewd. He knew well the Earth framework of prejudice. If they could break up the psi focus, his own men could crash in behind them. Confinning this line of reason, Huth's men were forming again on the outskirts of the compound. "Don't let them reach the clearing!" he told Fetzer. Fetzer vaved his signal. Though shaken, the adults, too, responded to reason. They tried to focus. Children pressed against their legs, sobbing. A focus seemed to form, but weakly. It was like an exhausted, distraught athlete trying to pull himself together. The Goolies faltered, appeared to lose some momentum and balance. The attendants drove them forward again. They came on as though wading against a strong current. "Don't be afraid," Lucifer told the boy. "They really can't hurt you." The small body continued to tremble. "Try to stop them... try!" "I want my Mommy..." Nina took the boy into her own arms. She cradled his face against her breasts, pressed her lips to his cheek. "Just keep your eyes closed," she cooed gently. "Everything is all right now." She stroked the wiry red hair, and murmured. "You don't have to look to stop them, do you? Why, you can stop them any time you want to! Let's tell all the other boys and girls to keep their eyes closed -- and stop those people so they can't hurt Mommy and Daddy! Here, I'll help you -- we'll do it together." Nina pressed her cheek tightly to the child's, and closed her eyes. The boy stopped trembling. The Goolies slowed. It became harder and harder for them to move against the invisible current. An attendant picked up one of the smaller creatures and hurled it forward. In midair, the Goolie rebounded and knocked the attendant off his feet. The psi current broke loose. Clusters of bodies flew in all directions, like the exploding fragments of a grenade, crashing in and through the metal walls of the compound buildings. And then all was still, except for a few broken moans. They were the loneliest sounds Lucifer had ever heard. He saw Huth, palms outstretched, walking steadily toward the clearing. "Let him come," said Lucifer. "I will talk to him." They met about thirty yards in front of the clearing. Huth's bronze features were chiseled deep with new lines. "Dr. Brill," he said, "I am shocked and disappointed. I thought you had come to believe in this great experiment." "There is no longer a question of belief -- its success to this point is very obvious." "Then why do you destroy it?" "I am trying to save it." "I don't understand," said Huth. But there was hope in his eyes. "You have learned much about Earth and its people, but there is one thing you failed to learn : Man may be blind, warped and prejudiced, but his frameworks can be changed, and he must -- above all -- he must control his own destiny. This law has been proved so often through our history that I am surprised you missed it." Huth bowed his head to acknowledge the rebuke. "Then what do you see in the future of this project?" "I see great problems, almost insurmountable obstacles; and the threshold of a vast unknown. I see our people slowly approaching that threshold -- to find their own future." Huth looked silently over the compound, over the shell of the project to which he had dedicated his life, and not even his tremendous will could keep his shoulders from sagging. "I cannot say that I truly disagree with you. Dr. Brill. But my own culture views this project from its own framework. I, too, had to fight with prejudice to keep it going. We are a mighty race, in control of a great section of the galaxy, and I doubt that you could hold out against our full power, as you have done tonight against a fragment of it on this isolated outpost." "There seems to be a new power on this tiny planet. A power greater than any of us can yet conceive," Lucifer answered calmly. "That may be; but there is the extreme likelihood of its total destruction before you can find out how to use it. I could not prevent this destruction if I tried -- once it is known what happened here tonight. My people, too, have a destiny, and they are determined to pursue it." A great rumble, a mighty rush of air, swept them off their feet. The spaceship rose in a straight vertical line and leveled off some five hundred feet above the clearing. Its prow swung toward the Earth people. A finger of blue flame probed downward. Huth heaved himself to his feet. "No! No!" he shouted. "Oh, you fools..." The blue flame broadened at its extremity, until it resembled a long, inverted funnel. When it touched the ground, it reduced to grey ash a fifty foot area of buildings and trees. There was no burning, no odor, no smoke. Just a sifting of ashes that fell like snowflakes. Huth cried out in agony at this destruction of his dream. He ran toward the path of the flame, waving his arms. In the instant before the flame reached him, Huth stood motionless, arms outstretched, face straining upward, the great muscles of his neck standing out in rigid cords. And then his statuesque body was a sifting handful of grey ash, falling gently to the damp ground. The flame leaped forward. Lucifer got to his feet. He could think only one thought: That he must try to stand upright with as much dignity as possible. He heard Nina's voice, but couldn't make out the words. They were followed by a shrill, whistling sound. Surprisingly, the sound grew fainter, like a siren fading into the distance. Lucifer realized he had closed his eyes. He opened them and saw the spaceship streaking upward. It tumbled end over end, out of control. The blue funnel of flame whipped in wild circles, hissing against the clouds. The ship disappeared momentarily behind a cloud bank, then could be seen again, glowing with an incandesSuddenly it burst into a shower of sparks that flared like a dying meteor, and fell away into nothingness. In the clearing behind Lucifer, children chattered gleefully. L ucifer stood by the window and listened in silence as Albert Fetzer made his report. The Earth people had returned to their quarters. Those whose dwellings had been destroyed or badly damaged were sheltered with friends for the night. Fifty-three of Huth's men and thirty of the women had survived. A score of Goolies had come crawling and whimpering out of the forest. All were put under guard in one of the training buildings. Dr. Thame, his own shoulder smashed, was helping with the injured. A twenty-four hour guard was set up to watch for return of the supply ship, or any other that might come. "What about the children?" Lucifer asked. "Mostly asleep. Some of them got a little frisky and started knocking over things -- until their mothers marched them off to bed." Lucifer shivered, and he was not cold. "You'd better get some sleep," he told Fetzer. "We'll meet with the section leaders early in the morning." When Fetzer was gone, Lucifer remained by the window. Nina came out of the bedroom to join him. Together they watched the clouds close out the stars, listened to the sweep of the rising wind and the drumbeat of the returning rain. The eternal rain. "Our world," said Nina. "Our new world." Lucifer started to answer, then could not speak. The weight of his thoughts was too great a burden to ease with words. Nina put her arm around him. "A frontier must always be like this," she said. But what a frontier! There were the physical problems of existence, with Huth's administration and most of his technology gone. There was the moment when the supply ship would return, when a great fleet of ships might come to see what had happened to the project. Yet those problems seemed like foothills to the towering peaks ahead, rising in range after range, beyond the outermost perimeter of thought. As Lucifer stared into this unknown, he felt his mental stature shrivel to microscopic size. How could he, or any combination of men, offer leadership into such a future? If the project could survive against the return of Huth's people, what would keep it from disintegrating and destroying itself? How could a psi focus be channeled and used constructively? How could a professor of parapsychology, a professor who knew less about his subject than the youngest child on this planet, assail such peaks? And the children! A freckled boy whimpering in his arms. A boy with a potential power that was as yet beyond the imagination. Lucifer thought of a tiny child behind the wheel of a great diesel truck, speeding through the crowded streets of a city. Or a child toying with the fuse of a hydrogen bomb. Raise that capacity for destruction to the nth power, and then... God! Tonight, for the first time, the children had glimpsed how great their power could be. Tomorrow they would begin to play new games. Quickly they would realize that they were stronger than their parents and other adult authorities. How could such children be controlled, educated, guided to maturity? If there were problem adolescents on Earth, what problems lay ahead with adolescents who could hotrod among the stars? "But there are more than problems," Nina said, in a hushed voice. "A frontier means so much more!" His thoughts, so recently liberated from their cubicle, drew back with conditioned reluctance, then leaped toward those towering peaks. A free thought could surmount any pinnacle, and look beyond the problems to the grandeur of the infinite. The view was of a magnitude and beauty beyond his capacity to absorb. But small, incredibly wonderful details focused before him. Now he saw knowledge and knowing from all the universe pour into this steaming jungle planet through communication channels opened by a psi focus that could leap time and space. He saw knowledge and love and understanding transmitted outward again to fall like rain wherever there was parched earth. His mind drew back from the summit. It was enough to see, for an evanescent moment of wonder, just a fragment of what lay beyond the wild mountains. It was madness to look too long. The future receded; the present returned. "I was there with you," Nina said, breathlessly. He buried his face in the softness of her hair and the warm curve of her throat and shoulder. He told her about himself, and their child. She was silent and still for a long time. "I must have known," she said. "I must have known all the time, without admitting it to myself." "Fm sorry, Nina." Her strong arm tightened around him. Her answer was steady: "We must have hope, because there is so much to learn. But if our child cannot see..." Her voice shook a little, then went on firmly, "... If our child cannot see, we must find a Braille for the psiblind! And we will walk together... as long as we can... on our frontier... of infinity."    Illustrated by Ed Emsh sales When Consumption means prosperity, when the Pulitzer Prize is awarded to advertising copy, when the Salesman is the most respected citizen in the land... What chance has a non-consumer? resistance concert, Perry Mansfield whistled a pleasant melody from an old Stravinsky classic. But then, troubled by his conscience and that of his psychiatrist, he stopped to study the program again. What was that modem symphony? Oh yes, "The Flivver". The music was supposed to have its roots in antiquity when someone started converting the metal wealth of the earth on an assembly line. Those screeching noises were drill presses and lathes and automatic hammers. The syrupy melody was the saintly salesman who disbursed the wealth of gadget and machine like melted butter across the bread of the land. Perry tried to like it. But he didn't. And that disturbed him. It meant his psychotherapy wasn't working. Dr. Stone would mn him through the mechanical analyzer again and scold over the results. His simple act of walking home instead of riding an anti-gravity putterseat labeled him as a misfit. But it seemed silly to rent a flying stool just to travel two blocks. The fact was, he liked to walk. Perry sighed, discouraged, as he waited for the fluorescent scanner to identify his insides and open his front door. It opened. The lights came on. Recorded music, somewhat tuned to his mood, poured from concealed amplifiers. And then he noticed the note clipped to the door. His hand trembled as he took it down. The beautiful pastel gray of the enclosing envelope was an anachronism itself, and therefore marked unmistakably its almost priestly origin. The platinum engraved card inside said simply : A Master Salesman has chosen you for his next calL Perry placed the note carefully on a plastic table. He inhaled deeply and held it for a moment to steady his nerves. A Master salesman. No one of that stature had ever called upon him before. It was an honor like -- like a mayor or a bishop. It meant he had attained top level on the universal measuring stick -- an Anumber-#plus-plus credit rating. The prospect should have saturated him with pleasure. But, like the sharp new music, it didn't. This card also meant he was expected to buy something. Something big and expensive. And he didn't want or need something big and expensive. He wished they'd leave him alone. Perry clapped his hand to his mouth as though someone might have heard the thought. What was wrong with him anyway? He wasn't a recluse. He wanted to indulge and enjoy the polished luxury of his world. He wanted to be conventional. He was young and handsome and tall and dark. He had a good job. He had a pleasant and comfortable legal arrangement with a girl in the next block. But truly, what he had was all he wanted. He glanced at the card on the table. He could always say no. It wouldn't be easy, but he could say no. Perry thumbed through the Pulitzer prize winning work for # which had been delivered yesterday as part of his book club subscription. He had seen it already, of course, in a dozen magazines and a hundred copies of his facsimile newspaper. It was the advertising copy for Cor-T-Zan foundation garments. But he didn't need a corset and the spartan simplicity of the fragile, lovely words bored him. He switched on television. A phrenetic band was hammering out the new top jingle on the Hit Parade: Tootsie gum, tootsie gum Ooh yum-yum, its touched with rum; Love that girl with eyes so hot Perry switched off the set. He was alone. He could be honest with himself. The whole damned business irritated him. If he was out of step with the times, to hell with the times. Mr. Master Salesman didn't even say when he would call. You were expected to sit on the edge of your chair, waiting for the great man to appear. Finally Perry decided what he'd do. He'd simply not open the door when the MS came knocking. Upon that decision, he slept well. Sometime later he dreamed of frying bacon over an open fire in the woods, although he hadn't been out to the park in three years. When he opened his eyes, the sun was up. He still smelled bacon frying. Perry crawled out of bed, fumbled into his robe and followed his nose to the kitchen-bar. There, in his favorite chair, sat a handsomely-dressed, distinguished man with florid complexion, iron gray hair and a fashionable paunch. Strips of bacon were frying on the bright, spotless steel of the cooking shield. "How did you get in here?" Perry asked crossly. "Serve-All does all," his visitor said cryptically and smiled the smile that's known around the world. Perry would have no opportunity to shut out the Master Salesman. He was in. "You are Mr. Mansfield?" "Yes sir," Perry said, uncertain of decorum. "My name is Marlboro," the MS said in melodius tones. "Master is the proper term used in addressing us. Please sit down." "Yes, Master," Perry said. He felt like a fool and sat down. "Breakfast will be served in a few moments," Marlboro said. "I hope you don't mind, I examined your excellent library before you came in." He pulled a volume off the shelf. "This is a beautiful old first edition. Wherever did you find it?" It was Perry's copy of "Basic Sales Techniques" with Burton footnotes on vacuum cleaner sales charts for the last half of the #th century. "I've read it, of course," Marlboro continued, "but I've never owned a copy." He caressed the dogeared cardboard cover. "Isn't it fantastic? In that barbaric century the customers sometimes refused to buy from our predecessors in the Guild. It seems impossible that anyone could have been so crude as to turn away one of those sturdy pioneers at the door." Perry shifted uncomfortably. He had been prepared to turn away one of the Great Men at his door. "Ah!" Marlboro exclaimed. "Your bacon is ready, young man." At a flick of the salesman's finger, the golden strips of meat lifted into the air and floated to an absorbent mat on the table. Perry stared. Not a bubble of fat had fallen to the floor in passage. "How did you do that?" "Serve-All does all," the MS said coyly. "Mine doesn't," Perry said. "Of course not!" Marlboro moved deftly into the opening. "You need a new one." So he had tumbled for the first trap. Perry blushed and ate a piece of bacon. The Master hefted an object to the table top. It was a hemisphere about # inches in diameter, smooth and featureless except for a handle on the curved top. It was painted psychological green. "This is the new Serve-All," Marlboro said glibly. "Notice its smooth unobtrusive shape. No working parts exposed, but inside is a mass of circuits and servos around a baby reactor ready to do everything for you." "The bacon," Perry persisted. "How?" He was aware that the first step in successful selling is to arouse curiosity. But he was confident he could refuse to buy, though it be contrary to convention and good taste. "Fingers of energy," the MS said. "Invisible, sensitive fingers of energy reach out of here -- " He tapped the Serve-All dome. " -- and they'll do anything that needs doing, at your mental command. Right now this one's tuned to me, but a minor adjustment will fit it to your personal needs. Here, let me show you something else." Perry felt a gentle, firm pressure on his left cheekbone. It moved down his cheeks, across his upper lip and up the other side. Then under his chin. Marlboro whipped out a pocket mirror. Perry had just been shaved. "See?" the Master beamed. "Wonderful isn't it?" Perry nodded. That was calculated to put him in a yes mood. While they talked the Serve-All cleared the breakfast clutter and cleaned the cooking shield without visible remains or waste. Marlboro pulled a contract pad out of his pocket. "I presume I can put you down for one of these." "I don't need it," Perry said. "My old one is good enough." "Ridiculous!" Marlboro said indignantly and then chuckled goodhumoredly. "Oh, I see what you're doing. You're trying some of the old tricks from the #th century. Well, I like a game of wits, too. Look what else this model will do." While Perry watched, the ServeAll repaired a broken knob on a plastic chest, cleaned the rug and etched a mural of a voluptuous nude on one blank wall. "If you'll excuse me," Perry murmured, "it's time for me to go to work." "Of course, of course," the Master laughed jovially. In rapid succession a comb dressed Perry's hair, his robe and pajamas were whisked off and his street clothes came floating out of the closet on more invisible fingers of energy. Before he knew it, he was ready for work. "I really must be going, too," Marlboro said, "if you'll just sign here." "How much is it?" The Master Salesman sighed. "You're really very diflficult. It's #, plus tax." "I can't afford it." "Now, Mr. Mansfield. A joke's a joke. If your credit rating wasn't the finest, I wouldn't be here. I know, and you know, your income is mortgaged for only # more years and your life expectancy is at least #." Perry moved uneasily toward the bathroom. An invisible finger of energy opened the door for him. "If you don't mind," he said angrily, "this is something I'm quite capable of doing for myself." He slammed the door. But the Serve-All flushed the toilet for him. When he emerged, Marlboro's patience also was gone. "Sign," he said firmly. "I don't want it." "Young man," the Master said thinly. "You don't realize what dangerous ground you're on. If you do not cease this rudeness at once, I'll report you to the council." "Report and be damned! I don't need your gadget and I'm not going to buy it. Now get out!" Marlboro was blue with rage. He backed uncertainly toward the door and stopped. "This borders on sacrilege," he whispered. "You'll hear from me again. Soon." Perry slammed that door, too, and walked jauntily to work. H e heard from the Master Salesman again -- exactly two hours later. The message tube delivered a summons ordering him into City Court. That afternoon. Perry went. He had never been in court before. He was frightened and regretful that he had been so abrupt with Marlboro. But he resented the invasion of his privacy and to bolster his courage, he built that anger into a fair rage by the time he reached the courtroom. Marlboro was there. A judge was there. And on each of two tables squatted a metal box with voice tubes. A bailiff guided him to his table and placed the voice tube in his hand. "You're late Mr. Mansfield," the judge snapped. "Justice must be swift and you're impeding it." He lifted a printed card and scanned it near-sightedly for a moment. "You're here charged with violating the public interest by failing to purchase an item which you are able to consume and which you can afford to buy." "There's no law against -- " Perry began indignantly. "Don't tell me your troubles, young man," the judge interrupted. "That's what your lawyer's for." His gesture indicated the metal box. Perry held the voice tube dumbly. The bailiff leaned over his shoulder. "You tell your side of the story in there," he whispered. Marlboro was muttering rapidly and at great length into his "lawyer," Perry did likewise, relating all he could remember of the morning fiasco. When he finished, the machine whirred, whistled and harrumphed twice before spewing out several yards of perforated tape. The plaintiff's counsel did the same, except the tape was longer. "Now Mr. Bailiff," the judge said, "you may bring in the jury." Perry was no longer surprised when the jury was rolled in. It was a large gray analog computor mounted on wheels. The judge stepped down from the bench and fed in the two conflicting tapes. The jury digested the information noisily. "It's an old model," the judge apologized, but just then a white card popped out on a small metal tray. The bailiff delivered it to the judge. He studied the card. Perry's heart thiunped painfully during the calculated period of suspense. "As you attempted to inform the court earlier, Mr. Mansfield," the judge said somberly, "there is no law in the land which forces you to buy any item from our distinguished colleagues of distribution." Perry's heart brightened and he slid back from the edge of the chair. "However," the judge peered down, "it has been held by many courts that when the public interest is to be served by the individual purchase of a piece of merchandise which that individual can consume and which that individual is able to buy without financial hardship, then that individual must sacrifice his emotional reluctance to the good of society." The jurist paused thoughtfully. "I think, Mr. Mansfield, that you should relearn the basic tenets of our society and economy. First, Consumption is Prosperity and that derives from the ancient law of Supply and Demand. S  D means, in simple terms, that when there is a supply of something, a demand must be created to consume it. That is why we have Master Salesmen. That is why they are the staunchest and most highly-respected citizens in our land. He bowed to Marlboro who assumed a benevolent smile. "This court decrees," the judge said sternly, "that you are to purchase an item known as the # Serve-All from Master Salesman Marlboro and customary steps will be taken to attach your future salary to satisfy the stipulated payment schedule. Court dismissed." Perry was too stunned to move. His petty rebellion had collapsed into a pot of embarrassment. He was vaguely aware of Marlboro shaking his hand with a moist, jovial palm. "No hard feelings, young man," the MS said. "It was really quite interesting. I haven't had a case like this in five years." The condescension stirred Perry's anger again. "I demand an appeal!" The judge was leaving the bench, but he turned back. "Appeal bond is #." "No appeal," Perry S#iid glumly. He walked home. The # Serve-All was there waiting for him, in the middle of his living room floor. Marlboro had tied a gay red ribbon around it to cheer him. He wasn't cheered. The thing must have been delivered even while he was in court. There had never been a doubt that he would lose the case. Rage began to crawl its acid path through his stomach again. The Serve-All was tuned to him now. It removed his hat and coat and put them in the closet. It loosened his tie, patted a sofa cushion to his shape and brought him a drink. Perry might just possibly have adjusted to the situation, but the Serve-All was over anxious. He liked to sip a drink. But when he lifted the glass to his lips, an invisible finger of energy pushed helpfully on the bottom. Perry strangled. When he recovered, his rage had crystallized in a definite course of action. He looked at the Serve-All and he looked at his hands. Not enough. He needed something much more. His memory of history recalled such items as an axe and a sledge hammer, but such no longer existed. But the plastic table had legs of substantial heft. A low growl rose in his throat as he grabbed the table and ripped it to pieces. The dismayed Serve-All scuttled across the room to repair the damage. Perry fended it off with his new club and then smashed downward, again and again, delighting in the screech of crushed metal and the tinkling death of transistors, vacuum tubes and servos. At the center was the tiny reactor box, but that was of solid lead and steel, that, fortunately, was virtually impervious for radiation safety. But ne didn't care. It was also inert and needn't be destroyed. So Perry was free; as free as an aging husband who has just dispatched his jaded wife. He sang a little and danced around the shattered scraps of plastic and wire and metal. Then he heard the plaintive bleating beep of sound issuing from the central core of the Serve-All. He bent over it and read engraved lettering on the steel : "Central Registry No. C#-D#." Good God! Any idiot would know that every piece of equipment was centrally registered and carried a built-in signal to summon repair machinery. And destruction of mortgaged property was a criminal offense. So what now? Escape? Escape! He must be out of the house when the repair machine arrived. He must run and keep running, from the law and the Master Salesman and Serve-All, Inc. How much time did he have? Not more than a few minutes for the smooth central machinery to reach across the city to him; machinery which even now was on its way to rescue a damaged brother. Perry snatched his coat from the closet and ran to the door. Food. If he would hide from the methodical meat grinder of society, he must have food to live. He raced to the kitchen bar. There was food there, but he didn't know how to get at it. He had never before needed to do more than dial up portions for a meal, but he must have food in containers, food that would not spoil while he conserved his life on its dwindling supply. He ripped open a locked panel on the wall. There was food. But the large containers were locked in place. He clawed at the metal, but only tore his flesh and dripped blood on the immaculate counter top. The club he had used on the ServeAll I He recovered the plastic bludgeon and went to work. Five minutes later he had dislodged two of the large tins. One said beans; the other said meat. Beans dripped a trail of juice across the floor as he ran to the door. He threw it open. A repair robot scuttled in and knocked him sprawling on the living room floor. Perry stared wildly at the mechanical beast. It hummed anxiously, retrieving bits of wreckage like a mother bird repairing a broken egg Mansfield belly-crawled stealthily back toward the door. He might make it yet. The robot probably wasn't geared for cop duty. But the door was blocked. Perry looked up past the knees and the belted paunch to the face. It was Master Marlboro. Perry rose wearily to his feet and dropped the tins of food to the floor. "All right," he said, "I give up." "Really, Mr. Mansfield," Marlboro's lips curled with delicate disgust. "Isn't this a childish way to treat a beautiful machine?" "What will you do with me?" The MS didn't answer. He pulled a contract pad out of his pocket and started writing. "You mean you're going to sell me another one?" Marlboro shoved the pad in his hand. "I'm quite sure you'll sign this one," he said firmly. Perry read the sales contract: For standard consideration y this entitles one Perry Mansfield to all required services and exclusive use of private quarters in Airy Hills Sanatarium, Perry signed.    YouHl laugh and squirm as you read this biting new satire about the integrated Man of tomorrow! By Bryce Walton Anderson, Tom Godwin, Robert F. Young, Fox Holden and others. Ask your news dealer to reserve you a copy now! The officials had been napping the day Donnie passed inspection... How else could you explain such an error in his emotional conditioning? D onnie clenched his small fists and tried not to cry, but two elliptical tears ran slowly down his cheeks. The sight of them made Mr. Ames even madder. "Look at him' he stormed, turning to Martha. "Just look at him. Every damn time I try to reason with him, he starts to snivel like an animal, instead of acting like a normal human being." Mr. Ames flicked his cigar ashes toward a vacuum cup on the wall and looked down at the boy. "Now stop that stupid crying and tell me what this is all about." Donnie sniffled a couple of times and wiped his nose on the back of one of his blue uniform sleeves. "Well," Mr. Ames said, coldly. The boy took a deep breath and raised his head. "I want you to spend some time with me' he said. 'T want you to -- " he searched the elusive shadows of memory until he found the word he wanted -- "I want you to play with me. That's it. I want you to play with me once in a while." Mr. Ames blinked his eyes and stepped back. "Play," he repeated. "What do you mean play?' Donnie hesitated. "You know," he said, finally, "take me on long walks and sit down and play games and tell me stories once in a while." "But you've got all the stories you need," Mr. Ames said, waving his hand at the banks of audiotapes stacked neatly on the wall shelves. "And your audio-prompter can tell them better than I can." "Yes," Donnie said, 'i)ut that's a machine and I want -- " "What's wrong with a machine," Mr. Ames said, his face getting red. "Some of our best things come from machines. Didn't they teach you that at the Incubator?" "Yes," the boy said, "but isn't there anything besides machines? I can't play with machines, I want to play with you!" He began to sob again. Mr. Ames dashed his cigar to the floor. "I give up," he said. "By the Red Balls of Jupiter, I give up!" "Now, Henry," his wife said. "Remember, the boy's only seven." "Don't 'Henry' me," Mr. Ames said, "And besides, what does being seven have to do with it. When I was his age, I was an honor student in physics. He can't even pass algebra." Donnie stared at the toes of his boots. "I've given this kid everything," Mr. Ames went on. "He's going to the best pre-nuclear school in the whole hemisphere. He's got his own rocket kit. Why, he's even been on a study cruise to the moon! How many kids his age have been to the moon already? I bet no other kid in our project has been there. And what do I get as a reward." Mr. Ames didn't wait for an answer. "Trouble. That's what I get, trouble. Why in Galaxy he can't leave me alone like a normal child is more than I can understand." He stopped for breath and lit a fresh cigar. "Maybe the boy's sick," Martha said timidly. Mr. Ames ignored her. "I've tried to be a good father to him," he said, his voice self-righteous. "I'm giving him a chance to make something out of himself. All I ask is that he be of service to the world, and make me proud of him some day. But what does he do? Does he concentrate on his career, like the rest of the kids? Hell, no, he wants to hang around me, always underfoot, always asking stupid questions. Play!" Mr. Ames snorted. "It's not just play." "Heh, what's that?" Mr. Ames jumped. "I said it's not just play," Donnie repeated, bravely brushing away his tears. "You don't give me any -- he searched again for the right word -- "any companionship. A boy needs companionship. Don't you understand?" "No, I don't," Mr. Ames said. "And Tm sure they didn't teach you that in the Incubator either. Don't you realize you should be fully coordinated by now. Instead, you want me to take time from my work -- Why it's preposterous. It's, it's -- unscientific !" "But, all I want -- " Mr. Ames held up his hand. "Enough of this," he said. "I refuse to discuss it anymore. Now go to your room and get ready for your study period." The boy burst out crying again and ran out of the room. Mr. Ames shook his head. "Definite neurotic tendencies," he muttered to himself. "What dear?" his wife said. "Nothing, Martha," he answered. "Just talking to myself." He sat down heavily on the couch and sighed. What was wrong with Donnie, anyway? Where did he get those archaic ideas from? Surely he had been taught that the whole purpose of the incubator system was to speed up learning and growth processes so children wouldn't have to waste precious years growing up, like they did in tixe old days. Why their new technological age simply had no time to fool around with infantile desires. There were too many things to do, too many knotty scientific problems to solve. Emotions, Mr. Ames mumbled to himself, you never could trust your damn emotions. That night, after Donnie was in bed, Mr. Ames went to his study and pulled out the boy's file. It explained what he was fitted for, what abilities he had inherited, and what Illustrated by Paul Orban his primary training included. Mr. Ames noted sadly that the boy's Scientific Quotient was #, well above normal, and that he would stand six feet tall and weigh close to # pounds when fully developed. Mr. Ames, who was incubatorbom himself, was completely sold on the ingenious system the Federation of World Councils had devised. No more hit-and-miss mass reproduction, where morons were gradually out-breeding intelligent beings, but instead, selective artificial insemination through which only the best strains were permitted to reproduce. Each generation, the human race got healthier and smarter. Insanity and inherited diseases were a thing of the past and nature's primitive law -- only the fittest shall survive -- was now a glittering reality. Why the Federated Incubators even took over the burden of educating the children for the first five years. Parents no longer had to be bothered caring for helpless, bawling brats. By the time Incubates were placed on the available list, they were completely self-sufficient and emotionally conditioned to fit into any family group. Parents simply picked what they wanted. Mr. Ames, of course, had selected a future nuclear-chemist It was a beautiful system, Mr. Ames told himself, and even more important, it worked. But somehow, some way, there was something radically wrong with their child. "Definite neurotic symptoms," Mr. Ames murmured, half aloud. By Jupiter, there was only one thing to do. He shut the folder firmly and spun around to the trans-audio. A green light appeared on the panel almost immediately. "Your connection, please?" the automon said. "Give me the local Incubator." There was a pause, then a click. "Federated Health and Service, coordinator speaking. May I help you?" "Yes. This is Mr. Henry Ames, over at the Amarillo Group Project. I have a complaint to make." "Yes?" The coordinator, a woman, was carefully polite. "It's about the child you sent us." "Specimen please?" "What? Oh, it's a boy. Class Triple A, breed, nuclear chemistry. We got him about # months ago and -- " "What is your number please?" "It's... just a minute." Mr. Ames consulted the folder. "My number is #-#-oh-#. And we've got a three-year guarantee," he added pointedly. "Yes, sir. Just a minute sir." There was a whirring sound at the other end of the circuit. After a short wait, the coordinator's voice came through again. "Well, sir," she said. "You have the select model in our scientific line of seven-year-olds. According to our records, he checked out perfectly on all phases of learning and aptitude. Have you tried memory teaching?" "Yes, I've tried memory teaching. He learns fine." Mr. Ames stopped. "Look, you don't seem to understand. He's okay as far as performance goes. He does everything we tell him and all that, but he's still a real pain in the -- I mean, he's developing very annoying characteristics." "Please go on, Mr. Ames." The coordinator's voice was warm and sympathetic. "How does he annoy you?" "Well, for one thing, he's getting pronounced possessive tendencies. He almost seems to resent being left alone. Why, just this evening he told me he wants us to play with him!" "Did you say play with him?" "That's right," Mr. Ames said, triumphantly. "And he says he needs companionship, or something like that." "Companionship," the coordinator repeated. "Oh, dear. This is more serious than I thought. I'm afraid you definitely have a reject, Mr. Ames. If he shows these tendencies at this early age, then the situation will be intolerable later on. "It's intolerable right now," Henry insisted. "Anyway, I thought you people were supposed to clear up all this emotional unbalance in the primary psych indoctrination." "We usually do," the coordinator agreed, "but every once in a while, one slips through inspection with faulty communal-perception. The one you've got is obviously a throwback." The coordinator coughed apologetically. "It's really not the boy's fault, of course, but I'm afraid we'll have to reclaim him." "The sooner the better," Mr. Ames said. "This mess is upsetting my work at the lab. When can I get a replacement?" "We'll send a new model over when we pick up the reject. Will tomorrow morning be convenient?" "Sure. Fine. Just make sure this one is normal. You better check our physio records too. I hear the people down the circle got one that didn't look like them at all." "Don't worry," the coordinator assured him. "You'll get a boy you can be proud of this time. Will there be anything more now?" "No, no, I guess not." An uneasy feeling slipped into Mr. Ames's consciousness. "I just wondered," he said, suddenly. "What will happen to Don -- I mean, the reject you sent us. Will he be -- uh-niestroyed?" The coordinator laughed. "Heavens, no, Mr, Ames," she said, lightly. "He'll be sent to the Biological Reservation and allowed to live out his life span with other rejects. He'll be much happier there. We're not savages, you know." "That's right," Mr. Ames said, his tone matching her brightness. "We're not savages. Well, we'll be expecting the new one tomorrow, and thanks for all your trouble." "No trouble at all," the coordinator said, smoothly. "Feel free to call on us any time."    'Tain't the things we don't know what makes us so ignorant, The Pied Piper who had promised them Paradise and led them across half the universe had changed his tune. But this time it was the Piper who had to pay... R uth was standing at the vast window of the spacejX)rt, her body taut and eager the luggage piled high around her. When Harvey Flanders came out of the ship carrying the last two suitcases, she darted to him. "Harvey, it's a dream -- it's heavenly!" she cried, catching hold of his arm. "Did you imagine -- did you possibly ever imagine it would be like this?" Harvey's eyes followed the sweep of his wife's hand, out at the dazzling expanse of fields and orchards, green and gold under this magnificent sun. The fantastic vegetation stretched in lush undulations to a distant purple horizon, the sweep broken only by the brown streaks of roads, the winding ribbons of sapphire-tinted water, and, here and there, the pastel pink and blue roofs of the settlers' houses. Illustrated by Paul Orban Exultation filled his chest. He fought it down, deliberately, grimly. 'There were places on Earth that were like this before the blight came. California... Florida... looked like this' "Like this?" Ruth exclaimed. "Harvey! Look at those giant fruit trees. Look at them." Harvey caught her shoulder in a tight grip. "Honey, we just can't let ourselves go overboard till we're sure everything's okay," he said quietly. "We've had our hopes built up and slapped down so many times." He looked down into her brown eyes. "Kitten, do you remember the time old man Reeber came climbing over the fence, yelling that the blight was going, it was moving off his cornfield, and we believed, we actually believed some miracle had happened, and we went chasing after him and found it was just a sunbeam breaking through a cloud bank. What a mirage that was!" "Harvey," Ruth said softly, "do you really think that this" -- her hand traced the horizon -- "is a mirage?" "I want to get a closer look, honey -- I want to feel it and taste it before I believe it," he said. But when he glanced again at the landscape, his breath quickened and a tingle rode over his skin. "No, honey," he said quickly, T don't think it's a mirage. I think it's what we've been dreaming about a long, long time." Ruth gave a relieved cry and flung her arms around him. He held her, patting her gently. "Now take it easy," he said. She looked up abruptly, her eyes wet. "The first thing, you've got to get some color back," she said fiercely. "You've gotten so awfully pale!" "And you're lovelier than ever," he said, running a hand along her cheek. "Now let's get moving before they put us back on the ship and send us home for being slowpokes." She pounced down on a big, leather-thonged trunk. He pushed her aside. "Half pint, you te the little ones." Together they loaded their baggage on the red four-wheeled cart. Most of the other immigrants had already loaded their luggage and now stood beside the carts, each couple a little island of chatter and excitement. Next to Harvey and Ruth were Dr. Norbert Lurie and his wife Edna, both spectacled, scholarly, and too thin; both earnest, conscientious, and eager to help; rather boring company on a ten-month space voyage, but very comforting to have as neighbors in a strange land. After them came the Schweitzer twins, husky, blond, pink-faced youths, each with his little china-doll wife. Beyond them stood big, redheaded Jim Brace and his slim brunette wife, Nancy. Brace was heaving the last of his trunks onto his cart, his biceps bulging awesomely. "Real pioneer stock, this Red Brace," Harvey said. "Shame there are no Indians around -- he'd have been a good man to have around in a scrap." Ruth's eyes crinkled in puzzled thought. "Harvey, weren't there any people here at all?" "Nope. Not a soul. Not till the good gray colonel stepped out of his ship onto one of these golden hills, about fifteen years ago." "It seems incredible," Ruth whispered. "Hey, fellows," came the booming voice of big Red Brace, but it was promptly lost in the roar of a loudspeaker: "Attention! Everyone will please assemble in the main reception room. Follow the red arrows down the ramp to the green doors. Please fill up all the front seats. Colonel Baker will address you. Leave your baggage where it is. Everybody now -- follow the red arrows." Excited, high-hearted talk frothed up from the immigrants as they moved down the ramp. After being confined for ten months in the narrow, dreadfully soundproofed rooms and corridors of the spaceship, every sound, every bit of motion was an intense delight. Green doors opened on a long, low-ceilinged room with paneled wooden walls painted in mottled green and gold. Large windows threw shafts of light across the rows of rough-hewn benches. The babble of voices swelled around them, grew louder and more excited as the minutes passed. Then abruptly the voices in the front of the auditorium quieted, and silence flooded backward. Heads began to turn to the right side of the stage where something seemed to be happening in the wing -- and then, at last. Colonel Martin E. Baker came into sight and walked slowly to the center of the stage. He stood there smiling, a middlesized man in a light brown suit, with a friendly bulge in the abdomen, and small, neat feet. His cheeks were round and sunburned; though thinning at the temples and the back of his skull. He held a lemon-colored cane in front of him and leaned on it slighdy. "Well," he said, a concealed microphone carrying his voice through the auditorium, "what do you think?" The immigrants seated before him answered with delighted laughter which merged into a wave of handclapping. When the noise died down. Colonel Baker said, in a low voice, "That's all I want to hear." He nodded, looking thoughtful. "This is the moment I always wait for -- the moment when the settlers get off the ship and verify for themselves all the things I told them. You see, my friends, when I go on my lecture tours around the Earth, the scepticism I run into makes me feel like a very lonely man. I tell my story -- about a place where things grow five to seven times as big as anything Earth ever saw in her best days, a place where one gets three or four harvests in what would be a single growing season on Earth -- I tell the story and find that quite a lot of people don't believe it. But fortunately, here and there I meet people who can respond to a vision -- people brave enough to rip up their stakes and take a journey across the oceans of space. And what I wait for is to see their faces and hear their voices when they reach these shores and learn that everything is true -- everything -- just as I told it." There was another burst of handclapping. Red Brace put two fingers to his lips and produced a deafening whistle, prolonging it until his wife yanked his hand away from his mouth. "You can imagine," Colonel Baker went on in his mellow, vibrant voice -- "you can imagine, my friends, what my feelings were when I stepped out of the spaceship Explorer and set foot on this incredible planet for the first time." His eyes fixed themselves on a distant point above the heads of his audience. "Here, I said to myself -- here is Paradise. The blight on Earth was already becoming acute -- and here suddenly I was in a land richer than anything man has ever seen since he left the Garden of Eden. I still remember the thrill I felt when I squeezed this magic loam between my fingers. I could scarcely wait out the return trip to Earth so I could bring back here the seeds and cuttings of our edible plants. What happened after that is history. Peaches, pears, apples, all producing abundantly in their first season. Oranges the size of melons. Vegetables big enough for giants... Of course, it wasn't economically feasible to send this produce to Earth -- although one of these days I think it will be. As the blight gets worse people will get so sick of subsisting on dehyto pay the enormous transportation costs to get our fruits and vegetables. But meanwhile, by the greatest good fortune, an economic base for our agriculture did develop with the discovery of radioactive minerals on our neighboring planet. It's a perfect arrangement: we feed the miners, and they pay us with the earnings from their mines. Two planets, floating side by side in space, each supplying what the other needs -- it seems too perfect to be a mere coincidence. You feel there must be some providence, some mysterious intellect that planned it this way." He paused. A smile softened his face. "I guess I've talked long enough. I'm delighted to see you all here, safe and happy. You are the twenty-third group to arrive since we opened this planet. Soon the ship will leave for the long voyage to Earth to pick up the twenty-fourth contingent, most of whom are already signed up. My associate, Mr. Carsing, will take over now and fill you in on some of the things you'll want to know. Meanwhile, I want to say: Welcome to Paradise. If you ever have any problems of any kind, let me hear from you. Good luck!" Applause rolled after him as he walked slowly off stage. Almost immediately, a tall, thin man in a gray suit walked to the center of the stage. He carried a sheaf of papers. His movements were quick and nervous. His scalp was naked except for ragged patches of hair above his ears. His skin shone sallowly in the light from the windows. "I will now read the assignment of subdivisions," he said. "Please listen carefully and make a note of your location." His voice had a harsh edge of shrillness. Ruth looked at Harvey and wrinkled her nose. "I don't like him as much as Colonel Baker," she said. Carsing read off the names, designating a number and letter for each. Harvey and Ruth Flanders were assigned to area #D. The numbers for the Luries and the Schweitzers followed closely, but the Braces weren't reached until the #'s. "Hey," growled Red Brace, "don't take me away from my buddies." "All marketing of crops will be handled by our central office," Carsing said. "All your shipments will be listed in a credit account, against which all your charges will be debited. For bookkeeping convenience, settlement will be made once a year." His papers moved restlessly in his hands. "The guides are waiting to take you to your homesteads. You will now return to your luggage and finish loading it on the carts. After that, you are to go to the main door, where you will receive your oxygen packs, and then you are to assemble outside. Are there any questions?" "Yeh!" called out Red Brace, jumping to his feet. "I don't like the location you gave me. How do I get it changed?" Carsing scowled. "How do you know you don't like it before you have even seen it?" "I know. It's not near my friends." "Write an application for a change. If there are no further questions -- "Question!" Harvey was on his feet. "What's this you said about oxygen packs?" "I said they'd be issued at the main door. Anything else?" "Why -- why do we need oxygen packs?" "To breathe," Carsing said sourly. "I should think that would be obvious." "You mean..." Harvey's heart pounded. "You mean there's no oxygen out there?" "The oxygen content of our atmosphere is seven percent," Carsing said, his voice falling to a weary monotone. "Seven percent is equivalent to the oxygen content you find when you travel # feet above Earth. You know you can't exist at # feet unless you have an artificial supply of oxygen. Very well. The same condition applies here -- on the ground. You will wear your oxygen packs at all times. The only exception is this building. We have oxygen pumped into it." "What's this all about?" shouted Red Brace. "Are you kidding us or something?" Carsing's mouth formed a crumpled smile. "If you think I'm joking you can take a walk outside and see." He turned his eyes away from Brace. "The packs are small and light. The outlet cup covers only the nose. There is no interference with speech. You can thank Colonel Baker for sponsoring the research that produced these lightweight packs." "Thank him for what?" said Harvey hoarsely. "Why didn't he tell us before he signed us up?" A clamor of supporting voices rose around him. Other immigrants leaped to their feet, trying to make themselves heard. Red Brace was bellowing something unintelligible. His wife added her indignant contralto. Carsing shouted, "Quiet!" and then gave up and stood there, scowling. straight-backed chair, sat Colonel Martin E. Baker, his eyes half closed, his hands folded against his belly, as he listened to the angry tumult. This always happened. It was an unpleasantness he could count on with the arrival of every new group of homesteaders. In an instant everybody had forgotten that he had rescued them from a miserable existence on a blighted Earth. There was no thought of gratitude to him for finding this fabulous place and developing it and bringing them here. No -- the only thing in their grubby minds was the thought of the oxygen pack they would have to wear, to save themselves from quick death. Of course, they gave no thought to the money and effort he had expended to develop this pack, this neat little lightweight marvel. By the time he had this perfected and had worked out all the other details involved in colonizing this place, he had spent a fortune, he was practically broke. Sometimes he found it hard to maintain a feeling of calm and good will. If he wanted to let himself go, it would be so easy to become a bitter, misanthropic old man. But there would be no sense in that. These people were young and thoughtless, the victims of their own impulsiveness, and what the situation called for was patience, understanding, and forgiveness. Martin Baker let out a long sigh and heaved his round body out of his chair. He walked slowly toward the confused jumble of voices. He knew, even without distinguishing the sounds, that they were demanding that he appear. Baker ran a hand over his clothes to make sure they were in order, put on a broad and gentle smile, and stepped out on the stage. He waited until the clamor quieted, and then he said, "Fm here to answer any questions." Half a dozen of the homesteaders tried to talk at once. Baker smiled understandingly and held up his hand. "One at a time, please -- every one will have his chance." "What kind of a deal is this?" a voice bellowed from the rear. Baker recognized the big red-headed man, Brace. A bold, adventuresome man, handsome and powerfully built, but, alas, so very stupid. He would make a lot of noise. Baker knew, but actually he wouldn't be any real trouble. "And what, may I ask, is the cause of your dissatisfaction?" Baker inquired. "How come we travel all the way out here and find out we've got to wear oxygen masks?" Baker shook his head, smiling gently. "Not really masks, my friend. They cover only the end of your nose. They're marvelously comfortable, as you'll soon see. In a few days you won't even be aware you're wearing them." "Like heU," Brace growled. "# know I'm wearing it." Baker shrugged affably, and then gestured invitingly to the long, thin, somber looking man who stood with his hand up, not far from Brace. This was Lurie, the biology professor, a nice, harmless Ph.D. "What's wrong with the atmosphere?" Lurie said. "Why is an artificial supply of oxygen necessary?" "The answer is very simple," Baker said. "This is a young planet, as planets go. The conditions here are just about what they were on Ear A eons ago. The carbon dioxide exhaled from the interior of the planet and saturating the atmosphere is gradually being converted by the plant life -- broken down, I should say, releasing free oxygen. At the present time, our oxygen content is about seven percent. Eventually, the oxygen will probably reach the level you find on the surface of the Earth -- about twenty-one percent. But that should take a long time; I'm afraid none of us will be around when that point is reached. Meanwhile, our plants luxuriate in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide. Plants, as you know, use carbon dioxide for their most essential life process -- photosynthesis. But I'm sure Professor Lurie can tell you much more about that than I can." Lurie blinked embarrassedly, and looked aside at his wife, and smiled shyly. "Mr. Baker!" another voice broke in. This speaker, Baker recognized, was Harvey Flanders, definitely a dangerous type. He was a brooder; he had a slow, relentless fire in his eyes. Baker had been doubtful about him from the start; he'd had half a mind to reject his application. But as things happened, the passenger list was one couple short and so, at the last moment, he had taken Flanders and his wife. Was he going to have reason to regret what he'd done? "How do you propose to make up for this fraud you've put over on us?" Flanders was saying. "I'm sorry," Baker said. "Did you say fraud?" "Fraud," Harvey repeated bitter"That's a harsh word, my friend. What are you referring to?" "Dammit, those glowing talks you gave us -- " "And isn't everything I told you true? Go out, I beg of you, and point out to me a single instance where I've exaggerated." "But the oxygen -- " "I made no statement about oxygen," Baker said firmly. "I'm sure everyone here will corroborate that. Did I make any false claims about the atmosphere? Did I, now? No, my friend, if you will think back you will find that I said nothing aut the atmosphere." "But that's what I mean," Harvey said, his voice rising in exasperation. "My good friend," Baker said gently, "if you were describing a beautiful woman, would you bother to mention that she had a mole on the sole of her foot?" "But this is something basic." "What seems basic to one person may seem merely incidental to another, Every man to his own opinion -- and I assure you, my friend, you have a perfect right to yours. If you feel you were misled, then I am deeply and humbly sorry. If you don't like it here, if you think you can find something better -- " "You goddamned phony, you know once you've got us here, we're at your mercy!" Baker smiled forgivingly. "Mercy. There, my friend, is a word I much prefer to that other one you used a while ago. Mercy, charity, forbearance... My friends, we are all here together -- let us try to live in true fellowship and to make the most of what has been given us. I can think of nothing more tragic than to start this great adventure on a note of strife and suspicion. I hope rather that we all go forward with hearts full of trust -- trust in the future, and trust in each other." His voice rose -- his eyes again fixed themselves on a point above the heads of his audience. "If we work together, if we keep our eyes on the distant horizon, and ignore the advocates of spite, the petty minds that spin their miserable webs in the dark, I am sure we can all look forward to a bright and glowing future. We stand, my friends, on the threshold of a brave new world. Let us all go forward with hope and faith. Under such banners, I know we cannot fail." Slowly, Martin Baker walked off the stage. Harvey looked around helplessly at the faces of his fellowvoyagers who were staring at the stage in half-dazed fascination. "Look, we're not going to let him get away with this," he pleaded. "This is exactly the way he talked us into signing up." Harvey got some irritated looks in return. "Hell, we're here, ain't we?" somebody growled. "Harvey," Dr. Lurie said, "I'd suggest we avoid conclusions until we've given this a fair trial." A murmured chorus of approval rose around him. At that moment, Carsing reappeared on the stage. "All right, everybody," he said briskly, "go back and finish loading up, and pick up your oxygen packs. Everybody's eager to see their homesteads, so let's not anybody hold us up. Let's go." With a surge of relief, the homesteaders flowed down the aisles to the exits. T he oxygen packs turned out to be, in fact, wonderfully comfortable. A small outlet cup fitted over the nose with no more pressure than a pair of spectacles. Two narrow tubes curved over the shoulders and ended in a small pack weighing about two pounds, most of that being the weight of a replaceable metal capsule. There was no interference with speech. "You see," Ruth laughed tremulously -- "you see, it actually improves your appearance." She grimaced at Harvey. "All right, sourpuss, you can smile, can't you?" The air outside was soft and golden, laced with a cool, gentle wind. The excited voices of the homesteaders rang with startling clarity. They looked with delight at each other, and called out at each other, and laughed, not knowing exactly why. "Don't seem anything wrong with this air," said Red Brace. "Feels like any other air. I wonder if the old bird was kidding us." One of the Schweitzer twins gave a laugh. "There's one way to find out," he said, and yanked the outlet cup off his nose. He inhaled deeply, smiling. "Look, Ma, I'm breathing," he laughed. He took deep, gulping breaths. He did a somersault. He pounded his chest. "It's all a matter of lungs," he said. "If you don't have lungs, well, you just can't manage it, that's all..." He chattered on -- and then, abruptly, his eyes took on a startled look. He began to breathe more rapidly. His breathing became labored. He fumbled for the outlet cup. He raised it to his nose -- it slipped out of his now frantic hands -- Harvey and Dr. Lurie grabbed him as he wavered, and fitted the outlet cup back over his nose. The youth stood there with trembling knees. "Sit down, kid," Harvey said. "Relax -- you'll be all right." The settlers stood in a stricken silence. They had been fully informed of the situation, they knew precisely what would happen, yet seeing it demonstrated this way was an appalling thing. They could see now, graphically, the precarious condition of their existence. There was no more shouting. There was little they had to say to each other now. Carsing came out of the building. He was instantly recognizable, despite the cup over his nose. With his nervous, jerky steps, he walked to a low platform and held up his hand. With him were two men, both gray-haired and darkly tanned. "These are your guides," Carsing announced. "Go get your carts and move out." "Hey!" shouted Red Brace. "What pulls these carts?" "You do," Carsing said coldly. 'Tfou mean there aren't any horses -- or trucks?" Carsing's mouth twisted. "No -- no horses or trucks. Or tractors or washing machines. You'd better make up your minds to that right now. Transporting any large mechanical equipment all the way out here would be impossibly expensive. Outside of the few small devices we absolutely had to have, we've imported nothing. So please don't come complaining to me. From now on, you'll have to learn to improvise with native materials. All right" -- he gestured to the two men who stood drooping behind him, as if leaning on invisible poles -- "get them out and get going." Carsing left the platform and went back into the building. For a moment, there was no motion among the settlers. Then several started maneuvering the heavily loaded carts, the men embarrassedly accepting the assistance of their wives. The two guides waited, still leaning on their phantom supports, talking softly, hardly looking at the settlers. When all the carts were lined up in a straggling column, the two guides ambled to the road that led away from the spaceport. They paused and looked back briefly with worn eyes. Then with a motion that was more a shrug than a gesture, they started up the brown dirt road. Harvey looked at Ruth. Her face was taut. All around him the settlers were silent, except for labored breathing or a hurried warning as the wagon wheels reached a rut or a rock. Reality had flooded over them with abrupt and dismaying force. The sky was still bright, the fields were still gloriously golden but the radiance seemed to have gone out of their paradise. Harvey put an arm around Ruth's slim shoulders. Strangely, as spirits sank around him, his rose. Now his vague forebodings had become clarified; now he knew what the reality was, he knew what he had to cope with. "They get a ship here from Earth every two years," he said to her. "We'll work hard and save our money, and if we find we can't stand it, we'll just pack up and go home." She looked at him miserably. "How awful. After all our hopes..." "Maybe it'll work out," he said lightly. "I hate to think of living in a place run by these guys, but I'm Keep your chin up, kitten." The road became steeper, and the settlers slipped and grunted and struggled behind the carts. Near the crest, in a field to the right of the road, four people were working, apparently cutting and binding grain. As the column of settiers approached, the workers glanced up, said something to each other, and bent to their work again. "Look at that," growled Red Brace. "We come across practically half the universe to reach this place, and all we get is a cockeyed glance out of the corner of their eyes." "Well, you aren't exactly a pretty sight," Harvey said. But it was strange, he thought -- this indifference, this lack of curiosity. Here, for the first time in two years, were newcomers from distant Earth. Didn't they want to hear the news, hear about the blight, ask questions about relatives and friends? Could anybody be that uninterested? At the crest of the rise, the guides paused, and the settlers leaned against their carts or sat on the ground to rest. In the valley below were little clumps of houses, long, low buildings, arranged in groups of three and four, with a hundred yards or so between each group. Off to the right, a hill, steep and lofty, stood alone in the rolling plain. Almost at the summit, in a cleft in the rock, was a building shaped like a semicircle, topped with a slim spire. Its walls seemed mostly windows. They glinted golden in the warm light. "And who lives up there, I wonder," said Red Brace. "I could make a guess," Harvey said. "Mr. Big. A nice, cozy spot where he can sit all day and spit down everybody else's throat." "I'm sure," Harvey said, "the gentleman never does anything as inelegant as that." The clusters of buildings had looked close. It took fully an hour before the settlers reached them. By that time, they were hot and thirsty and dispirited. As they went up the village street, the guides pointed out the numbered houses, and the settlers assigned to them left the column and carried their luggage inside. Most of them were inside only a few minutes before they came to the doorways to stare unhappily at each other. They had found that the houses, made of wood and plaster, each consisted of three boxy rooms containing a few sticks of crudely made furniture. Nothing was painted. There was no glass in the windows. The beds consisted of four posts with mattresses of woven vines. "What did you expect -- innersprings?" Harvey said. "Remember -- Colonel Baker never said you'd get innersprings on this planet. The man never told you a lie." The toilets were tiny out-houses, a hundred yards away in the field. "Oh, dear," Ruth said. "Well, you can't expect the man to transport sewer pipe to Paradise," Harvey said grimly. He stood in the doorway and waited until the guides had deposited the last of the settlers and were started on their return trip. Harvey called to them as they came by. They glanced at him blankly, said something to each other, and kept on walking. Harvey leaped to the street, raced after them, grabbed them by the shoulders and spun them both around. "When I talk to somebody, I expect an answer," he said savagely. The two guides looked at him with worn, emotionless eyes. They stood there, shoulders drooping slightly in a weirdly identical posture. "What's this all about?" Harvey said, subduing his voice with difficulty. He waited. Nothing came out of them. "Do you work for Baker? Don't you have farms like the rest of us?" The stocky one's mouth twisted slightly. Then he spoke. "We have farms," he said in a low, sullen voice. "We are also guides. We couldn't work our farms all the way. We had to do extra work to meet our payments." Harvey stared at them. "Payments for what? Didn't you pay for the farms before you came here?" "Payments for the oxygen," said the stocky man. "'What do you mean?" A weak, sardonic smile edged across their faces. "They weren't told," the tall man said. Harvey boiled over. He grabbed one man by the throat. "Told what, goddamn you? Talk!" The pale eyes stared into his. The sardonic smile stayed on the man's lips. "Told that you'll have to work all day, every day, dawn to dark" -- his voice hardened viciously -- "to pay for the oxygen you breathe." His smile widened as he saw the alarm in Harvey's face. Harvey loosened his grip, but the man kept his face close to his. "You see that tube of oxygen on your back? That will last you one day. When you get a new one, you will owe a hundred credits. Do you understand now? You'll never be able to stop working, because you can't get ahead of that hundred credits a day, you just about make it if you work all day -- and you have to make it, do you understand, you fool? -- you have to, if you want your oxygen tomorrow, if you want to breathe." Harvey watched dazedly as the two guides turned and started away down the road, and then, abruptly, the stocky one looked back and yelled back, "You're slaves! All of you! You're the same as us! You're slaves!" Ruth, wide-eyed, was waiting at the doorway for liim, when he came back. "You heard them?" Harvey said shakily. "I heard," Ruth said in a quiet voice. "Lord, what did I get you into?" She put a hand on his arm. "There's nothing to grieve about. If we find that things just don't work out, we'll stick it out for two years and save up enough for our return passage." Harvey looked at her brokenly. "If what they say is true, how can you save anything?" afterward, the guide could have been talking nonsense, he could have been some sort of nut. So Harvey said nothing about his encounter to the other settlers. But after three days, everybody knew the true conditions of their existence. The story was made explicit by the little debit-and-credit book that each settler was given. Every evening a caravan of Baker's men, pulling carts, came down the road, collected what the settlers had harvested during the day, and marked the credits in their books. Those who worked from dawn to dusk usually managed to achieve # credits. A few went over # -- three, four, or five credits over -- and were told that if they kept this rate up, why, in six months or so, they'd have enough credits to buy some clothes at the central commissary. Several settlers fell short each day. They got particular attention from the man who collected the depleted oxygen tanks from the settlers and handed each a new one. "We're not cutting anybody's oxygen off -- not right away," he said. "But if I were you. I'd get working -- fast. The Colonel looks these accounts over every night. He doesn't like anybody getting far in arrears." Dr. Lurie, .who, with his wife, had averaged only # credits on each of the first three days, spoke up puzzledly. "Do you mean -- do you mean you actually let people -- asphyxiate?" The leader gave a nasty grin. "I didn't say that -- I just said we don't give them any more oxygen. What they do after that is their business." "Is that right?" growled Red Brace. He moved slowly through to the front of the crowd and then, with a lunge, grabbed the leader by the throat. "I'm just going to squeeze, and squeeze," he gritted, "and what happens to you is your business." Harvey leaped forward and grabbed Brace's arms. "Let go, Red!" he yelled. "Let go!" Brace jammed him aside with a jerk of his big shoulders. Harvey leaped at him again. "For God's sake, Red, this isn't the one -- it's not his fault!" He yanked at Brace's arms. It was like yanking an oak. Harvey stepped back, his mouth grim, and slammed his fist into Brace's jaw. Red Brace staggered. The caravan leader slipped from his hands and oozed down on the ground, gasping weakly. Red Brace's fists tightened and he turned on Harvey. "Goddam you, you want to get yourself killed?" They stood there, glowering at each other, breathing hard. "The guy is only one of Baker's slaves," Harvey said. "Why were you taking it out on him?" The caravan leader was on his feet now. "That's what I was trying to tell him," he said weakly. "I'm only carrying out orders. I've got to work my place and work for Baker, too, to make up my credits. You know how long I'd last if I didn't carry out orders." "Okay, okay," Harvey said, suddenly sick of the whole thing. "We've got our oxygen, we've got our lecture. Now take off." The settlers watched Baker's men move to their wagons, like a troop of horses, and slowly set out up the road. "All right," Red Brace growled abruptly, "I'm sorry. But you didn't have any call to take a poke at me." "You were about to kill the guy," Harvey snapped. "All right, all right, I said I'm sorry. It was the wrong guy. Now let's go after the right one." In the center of the settlement, at the side of the road, was a yelfor communications. A loudspeaker on the roof brought messages from the central office. Inside the booth was a microphone and other electronic apparatus. Dr. Lurie sat down before the microphone and pressed the Call button. He cleared his throat. "I -- we want to talk to Colonel Baker personally," he said. I N A large circular room, with a huge curving window overlooking the golden valley, sat Colonel Martin E. Baker, sipping a Scotch highball. It was a weak highball; Colonel Baker really didn't enjoy drinking. But his doctor had told him, on the periodic physical he had taken during his last visit to Earth, that a mild drink before dinner might help overcome his dyspepsia. "Tenseness," the doctor had said. "You've got to relax more." This seemed preposterous to Colonel Baker, who always thought himself to be a very relaxed person, but there was no denying the dyspepsia -- it was there all the time -- that might ameliorate it. When the gentle buzzer sounded and the red light glowed on the communications set, Colonel Baker went over to it, flipped the switch and leaned back in his reclining chair. "Yes?" said Baker pleasantly. He was rather tickled with the arrangement that permitted him to watch the faces of people who were unaware of the television camera focused on them. "Sir said Dr. Lurie in a strained voice, "there has been -- there is -- a good deal of dissatisfaction in our group. This system of credits doesn't seem equitable. Some of us find it extremely difficult to amass a hundred credits a day, and yet that is the amount we are charged for our daily tube of oxygen. Now, sir, we believe it would be fair if you reduced the charge for the oxygen, to, shall we say, eighty credits?" Baker took another sip of his highball. "Impossible," he said. "I'm sorry, but it's impossible." He watched Dr. Lurie's face go through some nervous gyrations. "Why, sir?" "The economy of this entire settlement was carefully worked out with the counsel of economists," Colonel Baker said. "You realize that we just can't step in and change one part without upsetting the entire pattern. We can't tinker -- it's too hazardous." "But, sir, we find that we're just working for our respiratory needs, so to speak. That, plus the little food we consume ourselves from what we harvest. Oxygen and food -- isn't there any possibility of our earning anything more? "There have been settlers who have amassed enough credits to import some things from Earth. It's all a matter of the rate of work. Incidentally, I've noticed your production figures. Dr. Lurie. I wouldn't keep on this way, if I were you. Deficits pile up. The situation can become dangerous faster than you imagine." Even over the televiewer. Baker could see Dr. Lurie's face pale. A hand suddenly appeared, pushing Dr. Lurie aside. The big face of the redhead, Brace, appeared on the screen. "Listen, Baker," he roared, "if we don't get a better deal, we'll strike. You won't get a damn thing out of us. And what the hell're you going to do about that?" Baker sipped his Scotch and smiled. "You're all free agents," he said gently. "Far be it for me to attempt to dictate your behavior. You're at liberty to do as you please." Dr. Lurie's voice came over in a tense whisper. "He'll cut off our oxygen!" "He wouldn't dare," Brace snarled. "Nobody goes and kills a couple of hundred people." Baker chuckled loud enough for the settlers to hear. "If that is all, gentlemen, good day," he said, and flicked a switch. But it was only a one-way switch, shutting off sound from his direction but permitting him to see and hear the settlers. Their talk didn't go on very long before Baker could see that Brace had lost -- the thought of not seeing the oxygen wagons come along in the evening was too frightening. "All right, you jerks," Red Brace shouted, "I'll go after him myself." He strode off up the road. Harvey Flanders ran after him. Baker could see, but not hear, the heated colloquy as the two men walked on, and then, finally. Brace turned around and came back, and the two men disappeared inside Flanders' house. Baker flicked a switch. Carsing's face appeared on the screen, with a brisk, "Yes, sir?" "Might be some trouble the next couple of days -- perhaps even tonight," Baker said. "Double-check the infrared warning system, will you?" "Yes, sir." Baker went back to his highball, feeling rather pleasant. Late that night, in Harvey Flanders' house, a long discussion went on among Harvey, Brace, Dr. Lurie, and the Schweitzer twins. "I went over it in detail with some of the old-timers here," Harvey said. "I also did some personal scouting, and everything they said seems to be true. Here's the setup: "Our idea of raiding the commissary for a lot of oxygen tanks is out. They don't keep any stock; there's never more than a single day's supply for the settlement. Of course, we can't make off with that, unless we want to kill off everybody else. "The oxygen plant itself is right up there on the hill, next to Baker's house. That's the key to his control, and he keeps it right under his thumb. Nobody -- I mean nobody -- except Carsing ever goes up there. They've got an endless belt system for taking up the empty tanks and sending back the full ones to the commissary." "That makes the whole thing simple," Red Brace said impatiently. "We go up there, knock off Baker and Carsing, and take over the oxygen factory." "It's not that simple," Harvey said. "I imagine the old boy has a way of keeping strangers out. The story I get is that he's got some sort of electronic telescope, and he sits up there all day watching everything that's going on. You're not going to sneak up on him, exactly." Brace stood up. "The longer we sit and talk, the more time he has to get set for us. Anybody coming with me?" He looked around. "Frankly, I don't give a damn if anybody comes or not. You'd only be in the way, anyway." He headed for the doorway. "Red, you can't go off halfcocked like this," Harvey pleaded. "So long," said Brace and went out into the cloudy night. Harvey looked around desperately. "We've got to stop him." "I say let him go," said Dr. Lurie. "He might find out something of value." "Get himself killed, more likely." Harvey went to the doorway. "Red!" he shouted. He got no answer. The road was empty as far as he could see in the clotted darkness. He raced around to the rear of the house and stood still. Faintly he heard the crunch and crackle of steps in the grain field. Red was hitting across country. Harvey raced into the field. "Red!" he shouted. Harvey found him by the sounds. Brace was coldly angry. "Either you pipe down and come along, or you go on back. Nobody's stopping me. If you try any monkey business. I'll kill you, and I'm not kidding." Harvey fell in alongside him. "You're the craziest jerk I ever saw." "Pipe down before you give us away," Brace growled. The hill loomed ahead of them like a giant blot against the sky. On their left were the thick woods where the settlers gathered timber for fencing and bridging. Straight ahead was a deep stream, traversed by a single bridge. "That bridge is a likely place for a burglar alarm," Harvey said. "We'd better swim." They took off their clothes and left them on the bank. They let themselves carefully down into the water and set out, using the breast stroke to keep the oxygen apparatus out of the water. They clambered up on the other side, chilled and shivering, and continued, naked, toward the hill. The ground roughened underfoot; the rise began. There was no apparent road. Here and there stood small blighted trees, devoid of foliage, standing like posts -- They weren't trees at all! Harvey gripped Brace's arm. "Keep away from those posts," he whispered. They continued upward slowly. Harvey heard a faint click. He stopped. "Hear that?" he whispered, "that click?" Brace shook his head. They stood still, listening. There was no other sound. Brace took a step forward, and stopped. "I heard it," he whispered. They sank to the ground, and stretched out on their bellies, and waited tensely. Not a sound came out of the surrounding darkness. Far ahead, high in the sky, the windows of Baker's castle dimly glowed with a yellow light. There was still a long way to go. Brace sat up and jerked a hand impatiently at Harvey. They got to their feet and moved forward. They were moving through trees now. Harvey followed Brace reluctantly. There was something funny. Some sound he was hearing -- or wasn't hearing -- "Red!" It was the oxygen pack. The soft, bubbling murmur it always made was gone. "My oxygen is off! Yours, too! We've got to get back -- fast!" Brace's eyes flared white in the darkness. "Gome on," Harvey shouted, and rushed back through the trees. Brace came lumbering after him, protesting loudly. They raced across an open space -- there were the posts again -- they passed them -- Click! And now Harvey knew where the click came from. It came from inside his oxygen pack. Almost instantly, he felt the soft flow of the oxygen through the tubes. He sat down. Brace sat down heavily beside him. "Those posts," Harvey said. "He must have them all around the hill. They throw out a radio wave that shuts these things off when you go past them." He shook his head ruefully. "I should have guessed it. When I first took a look inside this oxygen pack, I noticed something that looked like a transistor, but I couldn't imagine what that could have to do with oxygen." Brace let out a long breath. "We should have kept going," he said bitterly. "There was a good two hours of climbing ahead of us. We'd have been dead a long time before we got there." "Okay," Brace said. "Let's go wreck these radio posts." "I'm afraid he has that all figured out," Harvey said sadly. "You notice the posts shut you off when you're going one way, and turn you on again when you're going back. If you go over there and wreck them, there'll be nothing to turn you on again." Red cursed long and loud. "There must be some way to beat this oxygen racket." "We'll think of something," Harvey said determinedly. But the echo of his confident words rapidly faded as they moved through the grain fields. He was tired and chilled. Think of something? That white-haired devil in that eagle's nest had been thinking of the same subject for a decade. Could there be any angles he had overlooked? Long after Ruth was asleep that night, Harvey lay in bed thinking. He reviewed, item by item, everything he could remember about electricity, radiation, the laws of gases, atmospheric constituents, the mechanics of partial pressures -- all the tag-end memories of his college science courses. He felt that if there was a solution, it had to be something elementary, something that matched the simplicity of Baker's own idea. The thoughts went around and around in his brain, an intricate and dizzying dance, forming a pattern that grew fuzzier and fuzzier and fuzzier... He sat up with a start. His brain was tingling with something... something that seemed to be ... He struggled into his clothes, and dashed out of the house. He ran up the dark road and burst into Dr. Lurie's house. "Doc, Doc, wake up!" he yelled. "I need some scientific advice!" Shortly after sunrise, when most of the settlers were heading for the fields, Harvey and Dr. Lurie went do the talking," Harvey said. "I'd prefer it that way," Dr. Lurie said. B aker, sitting before the electronic telescope, was enjoying the sight of the great phalanx of settlers swarming into the fields, when the buzzer sounded on his communication set. In a moment, two faces appeared -- Dr. Lurie and Harvey Flanders. They weren't wearing their oxygen packs. "Good morning, gentlemen," Baker said affably. "Hiya," said Harvey Flanders. "Well!" said Baker. "I'm certainly glad to see you in such good spirits after last night's expedition." "Thanks," Harvey said. "All we want to tell you is that you don't have to send us any oxygen any more." Baker chuckled. "I see. You are going on strike, eh?" "No," Harvey said, "we're going to keep working -- but for ourselves, not for you, Colonel. You see. Dr. Lurie here has put his scientific brain to work and come up with a substitute for your oxygen pack." "How incredible," Baker said pleasantly. "And what is the substitute, if I may ask? Alcohol?" "No, it's still oxygen, Colonel, but not the way your pack handles it. You see. Dr. Lurie has figured out a way to use atomic, not molecular, oxygen -- O instead of O # , if you follow me -- and to give it by injection in a highly concentrated form. As you see, we're not wearing oxygen packs any more." "So I noticed. But I'm afraid your little hoax can't go on very long. In another two minutes, my friends, you'll be gasping like fish and running frantically home to get those pesky oxygen packs." "Why don't you time us?" Baker sipped his coffee. "I am timing you, my friends. There are certain principles of physiology that can't be contravened. We're at the oxygen equivalent of a #-foot elevation. The average duration of useful consciousness is two and a half minutes." Baker sipped his coffee, watching the faces of the two men. The clock on his desk moved past two minutes. Two and a half minutes. Baker shrugged. He knew there were some exceptions. Some persons in superior physiological condition had proved in aeronautical tests on Earth to be able to go on for as long as four minutes in as rarefied oxygen as existed here. But no more than four minutes. The clock hand reached four minutes. The men still sat there. He had timed them wrong. He had missed a minute. Certainly. They were going to start sagging now. Now. Another minute went by. Another minute. The men sat there, looking straight at him through the tele-screen. There was a cynical smile on their faces, as if they knew the camera was on them -- as if they could actually see him. Another minute passed. Another minute. Baker leaped to his feet. "Die, damn you!" he screamed. The two men burst into laughter that exploded all over the screen. With a curse. Baker switched off the set and stood there, breathing hard. A moment later, he flicked it on again. The two men were leaving the booth. "Come back," he yelled. They turned, part way. Their indifference was maddening. "Come up here," Baker commanded. "I want to see your invention. I want to buy it." "Not interested." "Damn you, you must!" Baker shouted, his heart beating furiously. His hypnotized eyes kept swinging back to the clock. At least eleven minutes had passed! "We're not walking into any trap. Colonel," Harvey Flanders said. "If you want to do any dickering, you'll have to come see us. You know where to get us if you want us." The two men started up the road. Baker watched them with sick eyes as they went with firm steps to Harvey Flanders' house, and disappeared inside the doorway. Inside Harvey Flanders' doorway, Dr. Lurie staggered. Harvey caught him, but didn't have the strength to hold him, and both sagged to the floor. "Quick, Ruth," Harvey said, gasping. She was waiting with the oxygen packs. Red Brace was with her. They fitted the masks quickly over the faces of the two men on the floor, and anxiously watched their rapid, intense breathing. In a little while, Harvey and Dr. Lurie were breathing at a normal rate. They got up and sat at the table, where Ruth had breakfast ready. "Do you think he'll come?" Dr. Lurie said. "He has to," Harvey said. "He can't afford to let anybody spread a new gospel among his people." "Would you guys mind explaining what this is all about?" growled Red Brace. Harvey laughed. "Sure, Red. It's nothing complicated ; not very, anyway. Baker keeps plugging away at the fact that this is the same as living at a #-foot altitude. It struck me suddenly that if that were really the case, some of us would be suffering from nose bleeds and other symptoms you get when you go up to a thin atmosphere, where the outside pressure is less than the body's blood pressure. But nothing like that has happened. So obviously, the atmospheric pressure must be about normal -- the same pressure we have on Earth. There's less oxygen, but there's more carbon dioxide and there must be more of other gases, like nitrogen, to make up the full amount of pressure. "So you see where Baker figured wrong. He figured that if the amount of oxygen here is the equivalent of what exists at # feet, on Earth, then the survival time here ought to be the same as at # feet. But the analogy is wrong. At # feet above Earth, the atmospheric pressure is so light that whatever oxygen is in your blood bubbles out pretty fast. But here, where we have normal pressure, the atmosphere is pushing in on us a lot harder and keeps the oxygen in the blood longer. You follow me? "Anyway, I put all this to Doc Lurie last night and he said I must be right. So he got out some of his books and did some figuring, and what he came up with was this: If we rested -- didn't move -- while we breathed from our packs, getting our blood a hundred percent saturated, then we could take off the packs and go as long as fourteen or fifteen minutes before we keeled over. Long enough to convince that old buzzard that we've invented a new gimmick for giving oxygen by injection. He's up there in his palace now tearing out his hair -- or more probably hotfooting this way." Red Brace leaned against the doorpost and grunted contentedly. "Boy, when I get my mitts on him." "Red," Harvey said, "this time you can get as rough as you like. I don't care what happens to him. You keep a lookout at the window. Soon as Baker gets close, everybody take off your oxygen mask and stow it out of sight. We don't want him getting suspicious about the Lurie invention. Another thing: We'll need something for him to see when he walks in the door -- a box that looks as if it contains some sort of instruments." "I've got some boxes," Ruth said, going back into the bedroom. "Okay. Now, Doc, you'll do the talking, and Red and I will do the grabbing. But look casual as hell when he walks in." Ruth placed a covered box on the table. "Impressive," Harvey said. "Now, everybody, sit down and relax. It might be a long wait." "Not so long," said Red Brace a little while later. "They're coming over the crest right now." "Who's with him?" "Looks like Carsing." "I might have guessed that." Harvey watched a while at the window, then turned back. "Okay, everybody, masks out of sight." There was a pause; a sound on the outside step. Then into the doorway walked Carsing. His hand made a swift motion inside his coat and out again. The squat, ugly barrel of an explosive scatter-gun glinted at them. "Everybody back against the wall," Carsing said. "Colonel Baker doesn't want to be crowded." Slowly, tensely, staring at each other, they moved to the wall opposite the doorway. Baker walked in. His eyes made a quick circuit of the room, stopped briefly at the box, then turned to them. "What's the gun for?" Harvey said bitterly. Baker smiled. "You didn't trust me, hence I didn't trust you. Mistrust begets mistrust. Now, gentlemen," he said briskly, "explain this invention you told me about." "Before we do any explaining, we want you to know what we want." "Go right ahead." Baker pulled a chair to the doorway and sat down. "Name your price." "We'll take the gun." Baker's eyebrows rose. "Impossible. This is the only weapon on the planet." "That's all right with us. Hand it over and we'll tell you all about our invention." "I'm sorry, this weapon must remain in our hands. We're responsible for maintaining order and stability -- it wouldn't make sense for anyone else to have custody of it Now let's get on with the business. This box, I presume -- " "Not a word until we get the gun," Harvey said. Baker's eyes narrowed. "Young man, you'd better hold your tongue. Dr. Lurie, I'm talking to you. I want the facts -- immediately. And I must tell you, you're in no position to negotiate. Now speak up." "I, sir -- I -- " Dr. Lurie's voice broke -- he began again -- "I'll do what Mr. Flanders says -- " "We'll see about that," Baker said grimly. He stood up. "You're coming with me. Carsing, take the box." Carsing, holding the gun out warily in front of him, moved to the table. "Don't you dare open it!" Ruth cried out. Garsing stared at her. Then, holding the gun against his armpit with one hand, a finger on the trigger, he reached with his free hand and unhooked the lid -- Something sprang out of the box at his face -- "Watch out. Carsing!" Baker shouted -- but Harvey was already halfway across the room. He dove across the table, one hand aimed at Carsing's chest, the other slamming against the moving weapon, knocking it upward, backward -- Shot spattered through and around the doorway. Baker had leaped aside as he saw the muzzle swinging in his direction. Now he made a quick move toward Harvey and Carsing, tangled and struggling on the floor -- but a blow from Brace's fist caught him on the cheekbone and sent him crashing back against the wall. Brace darted down at the struggling men. He stood up a moment later, holding the gun. Garsing struggled upward, out of Harvey's grasp and reached for the gun. Brace's foot shot out and crashed with ferocious impact against his jaw. Carsing's head slammed backward against the floor. His body arched a moment, and then went limp all over. Harvey sat up, breathing hard. Ruth already had her oxygen pack on and quickly adjusted his. "Get mine," Red Brace said. He was standing in the middle of the floor, the gun trained on Baker, who stood half-slumped against the wall, watching them dazedly. There was a hissing in the air, A soft, persistent hissing. "Somebody has a leak!" Dr. Lurie shouted. Harvey, Ruth, Brace frantically felt their oxygen packs -- and then their hands stopped, and they stared at Baker. A jagged hole, caused by a small bit of shot, was visible on the side of his oxygen pack. "Give the orders, Flanders," Brace said. "Do I blast him?" "Won't be necessary, Red," Harvey said quietly. Baker looked from one to the other with puzzled eyes. Then he muttered, "I must be going," and swung away from the wall, and out the door. He stopped. He felt his pack. He came rushing back, his eyes wide with terror. "A leak!" he shrilled. "I need another pack!" "Sorry, we've only one apiece," Harvey said. "You know that." Baker's lips trembled. His face was white. "Your invention! Your invention! I'll make any deal you want. Hurry!" "There's no invention," Harvey said gently. "Don't you know that by now?" Suddenly Baker leaped forward, his hands flying. He had the oxygen mask half off Harvey's face before Harvey could untwist his hands and wrench free. Baker stood there, breathing hard. Abruptly he turned and rushed out to the road. "Somebody!" he yelled. "Somebody give me a pack! I'll pay anything!" Homesteaders peered at him in amazement from their doorways -- then shut their doors as he rushed at them. "I'll pay anything!" Baker screamed at the pitilessly closed doors, "This is what he was leading up to for ten years' said Brace. Harvey looked at the purple box. "A jack-in-the-box' he said softly. "Ruth where in the world did this thing ever come from?" "I brought it with me' Ruth said defiantly. "I thought maybe it might be hard to get toys here -- and maybe we might want toys someday... for somebody." Carsing stirred and groaned. "That's a relief -- we're going to need the man to show us how to run the oxygen works," Harvey said. "Okay, kids, let's go to work. There's a lot to be done." "Going to try to get a ship for the trip back home?" asked Brace. "I don't know," said Harvey. "Maybe we can make a go of it after all," he went on dreamily, "we might be able to pump oxygen into the houses so you don't have to wear a mask when you're home relaxing... or making love." He put an arm around Ruth's shoulders. "Who knows? -- maybe one of these days we might find use for those toys you brought."    What Is Your Science I. Q.? Count # for each correct answer: # is good, # excellent! Answers on page #. #. The weight of a cubic centimeter of water at # C. is used as the unit of weight in the system. #. What is another name for a thermionic valve? #. Meteors composed of metal and stone are called #. Do the molecules of a liquid have greater or lesser cohesion than those of a gas? #. A body with an excess of electrons is charged. #. The belt of low atmospheric pressure found around the equator is called the #. What unit of measurement describes electromotive force? #. The Dewar Flask is a container for #. About how much of the weight of protoplasm consists of proteins? #. The dark lines on the solar spectrum are called lines. #. What do we call the involuntary response of an organism to the effects of gravity? #. The Fitzgerald effect postulates that the length of a body as its speed increases. ( Continued from page # ) the elaborateness of the study program and the degree of importance the scientists attach to any particular area. The ground stations themselves can be largely automatic in operation. They can consist of a radio receiver and recording device which can be turned on by the signal from the Satellite. After the signal has faded out, a time delay device can turn off the station receiver. Certain of the stations should be manned, however. These should contain scientific personnel equipped with powerful telescopes, theodolites and radio transmitters to be used for monitoring the flight of the Satellite and making any corrections in its attitude or its orbit that may be necessary. For this purpose a computer could be used to calculate the actual orbit and compute the correction required to regain the desired orbital position. The orbit will require correction to compensate for loss in altitude due to the residual atmosphere even at three hundred miles altitude. These stations need not be in remote areas, since the Satellite will pass over any area of the Earth every # hours. The purpose of this article has been to propose an orbital satellite which would provide a maximum amount of data on the phenomena connected with the Earth and the upper atmosphere surrounding it. The information gained from such a satellite would also remove many of the obstacles in the path of man's next great conquest -- outer space. Satellites of the future will undoubtedly be larger and more elaborate, leading up to the final goal, the manned space platform. From it we will be able to keep watch on our weather, look out for potential infractors of peace and, finally, use it as a spring board for the long dive into the vast ocean of space, with destination, who knows? (We wish to express thanks to Dr, R. S, Richardson of Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, for information and help on the subject of possible orbits for this satellite vehicle,)    The goals that science seeks are not merely more food, more products, more gadgets. The goal in the last analysis is a moral goal -- more happiness for human beings, expressed in whatever terms their own philosophy dictates. -- L.A, Du Bridge Balance is a fundamental law of order. How, then, can integrity cancel such a principle even though the future of Mankind demands it? X His name was Tharn, and he was known throughout the sprawling colony for the highstrung nervousness that was understandable enough in a youth of fifty, but hardly normal for a man of his years. You had to be careful how you talked to Tharn, even if you were Angelo, Dean of Masters, himself. "I don't like it," Tharn reiterated, with another dramatic sweep of his long bony arm, "one bit, Angelo. Look at them, circling up there." The thin, lined face turned squarely to Angelo's own, and the large, almost protruding black eyes snapped with all the vibrant fire of the fine artistic mind that boiled constantly behind them. Angelo turned his own eyes upward, momentarily following Tham's still-upthrust arm. Although he did not need to look again. It was as the Second-Eldest of the colony said, of course. The slender, stylus-shaped object that reflected the golden midday sunlight in splintering shards against the almost cloudless cobalt of the sky still circled. It would land at the edge of the great colony. Angelo knew this, Tham knew it, the colony knew it. Angelo turned his old eyes back upon Tharn, and the ghost of a smile plucked at his white-bearded lips. Tham colored, suddenly aware of the incongruous picture he presented. Poised with all the drama of a Mark Antony pleading to the populace to sorrow for a Caesar, while rather mundanely bedecked in his paint-spattered workingsmock! The high color in his seamed face remained, but he pursued his point as though Angelo had never smiled at all. "They won't be satisfied -- " Angelo got up from the canvas stool before his easel, and the motion itself was enough to halt Tham in mid-sentence. There was going to be some sort of action, anyway. "Now look," Angelo said slowly. His voice carried the measured deliberation that its rich, deep timbre complemented so harmoniously. "First of all, Tharn, if we begin showing signs of undue alarm, you know what it will do to our younger men and women. They'll be upset for weeks, and we'll have another one of those terrible Realist periods." Angelo grimaced with his incredibly bushy eyebrows. "Besides that, if you'd take a really careful look at that ship, you'd see in a moment that it's certainly of a type none of us have ever seen. We certainly cannot prevent its landing. We certainly do not have the means to present a hostile front when it does. Therefore, we shall go to the Dell and greet it. I would estimate -- " Angelo turned his massive, white head slowly for another glance above the low, alabaster walls of the mosaic-tiled court-yard, "that they will effect a landing within another ten minutes or so. If you'll send an apprentice to go fetch Maler, the Philosopher, and Ghezi, the Semanticist, and -- and I think Ojar, the Orator, with word to meet us by the Lesser Amphitheater there, we can be on our way directly. Oh -- and Tharn -- " Tham followed the First-Elder's glance to his paint-smeared smock, colored once more, and immediately erupted into a volcano of action, as though rounding up a young jack-a-napes apprentice and locating and donning a suitable street toga were things that could be simultaneously accomplished. He exited, mumbling heatedly between cries of "Boy! Boy.'" and Angelo smiled again, and prepared his own person for the meeting. He mused that Maler, the Philosopher, commented often in his evening wine that to run was never to escape, only to change the pattern of pursuit, and of course you couldn't argue much with Maler. Not and win, -- but then, nobody on Ste. Catherine very often argued to win. Where was the pleasure in that?" T here was a great, scorched spot in the soft greenness of the gently-rolling earth, and it widened like an undammed, muddy pool as the thundering, cylinder of steel lowered itself on a pillar of flame. They kept a respectable distance; Angelo, Tharn, Maler, Ghezi, Ojar, and the several hundred curious and apprehensive of the colony who had followed. Angelo had decided the closest possible spot for waiting, stopped there, and then made no move save to shield his eyes from the terrible glare of the ship's landing-jets as it made its cautious descent. As he had predicted, the chosen landing-spot was at the extreme northern edge of the Dell, near the Lesser Amphitheater. And they had all just arrived in time. The ship settled; its thunder ceased. Masters, Students, and apprentices alike unshielded their eyes, and then all were turned in unbroken silence toward Angelo himself. He was Dean. He could deal with this. Angelo hesitated for perhaps a full minute. In that time he ordered the scene in his mind; the ship from Space, thrust upward toward the heavens like some weapon of challenge, surrounded by the gentle undulations of the low Renoir range to the far west ; the rugged, ice-capped Alps of Cezanne to the south and further distant still; the low, wind-tossed and wild Van Gogh Plain that stretched endlessly to the east, and finally to the north, the fertile richness of the VEilleys of Rembrandt which reached as far as the eye could see. All this, and the warmth of the clear atmosphere that embraced it all was seen and felt in that minute -- by Angelo, and by the rest, as he intended they should, Thisy the minute seemed to say, is yours. Do not betray it. And then he was walking with the dignified deliberation of his office toward the ship, the pure white of his full toga billowing gently in the soft breezes of the Dell. There was a clanging sound. A round section of the ship, near the wide fins of its stern, swung open; men came through it, started down a series of metal rungs to the ground. As he walked, Angelo counted them -- one; two; three. Three men. Three men from Earth, of course. And he knew what they wanted. They met halfway; three men from Earth in their blue-and-silver uniforms, their heads close-shaven, their boots polished as though fashioned of metal... and Angelo, inches shorter than they, far greater in girth than they, with his feet in hide sandals, and his long white hair falling free to merge with the rolling folds of his single garment. The man in the middle of the uniformed trio spoke; the obvious leader. "This is the -- the Colony of Artists, Planet of Ste. Catherine?" The heavy sound of his voice seemed to balk at the words ever so slightly. "You are their leader?" "I am Angelo, Dean of Masters here," Angelo replied. "I do not lead, but guide, instead. I am at your service, gentlemen of Earth." "You seem certain of where we are from "But of course -- do I not immediately recognize and speak your tongue?" "You would, of course," the leader said, and Angelo did not miss the hint of grudging acknowledgement in his voice as he said it. In face he was little different than the other two, although perhaps a year or two older. But for all practical purposes they were the same -- the high foreheads, the too-closelyspaced blue eyes, the sharp, disciplined features, the lack of any genuine character at all. They were as much of the same bolt of cloth as the imiforms they wore. "Of course," Angelo smiled. "Our memories here on Ste. Catherine are fortunately long, and our libraries are well-filled -- and wellused! And of course we have been expecting you." Expecting us?" "Naturally," and again Angelo smiled. "It is a philosophical truth after all -- Man is a social creature by nature, and as such, must continually seek the company of his own kind. And of course," and there was the hint of a repressed glitter in the old man's eyes, "the people of Earth have always known, and have -- have never forgotten where we of Ste. Catherine were to be found." The leader reddened and seemed on the point of explosive speech, and the muscles of his jaw hardened as he controlled his impulse. Angelo waited. "You are of course -- correct," he said after a moment's pause. "And no it will perhaps be best for all that we understand each other clearly from the beginning. We come to you in some embarrassment, we come to you asking a favor." The last word the leader uttered with a distaste that the best of his selfdiscipline could not control, and Angelo chuckled inwardly. A favor, was it? Embarrassed, were they? He could quite imagine! "Perhaps," Angelo said, "it would be more comfortable to discuss your mission in my studio. Will you gentlemen follow me, please?" He turned and began walking back to where the others waited, and the three men from Earth followed him. At first they balked for the briefest moment, but they followed him. T he studio of Angelo, Dean of Masters, was open to the sky like his court-yard, for this was the fair season on Ste. Catherine in this latitude, and not yet time to draw the transparent tarpaulin skylight across the tops of the studio walls. Angelo had seated himself near the center of the superblymuraled room, on one of the low, colorful cushions so widely preferred in the colony to the more formal furniture that was still to be found, to some extent, in the shops and homes of the artisans. Artists in their own way, of course -- and some practical work had to be put up with to satisfy the more mundane requirements of existence. As long as they took true pride in the beauty of their work, the artisans would always be very welcome members of the colony -- as well, to be sure, as necessary. And seated in a semi-circle behind Angelo were the other Elders, and two or three advanced Students to cater to whatever needs might arise during the conference. There would be no apprentices here! Before Angelo, taking to their cushions rather awkwardly (his beard, fortunately, was of sufficient luxuriance to cloak the tiny smile of satisfaction at his lips!) were the three Earthmen; their leader, of course, in the center and facing Angelo directly. "We may begin at any time," Angelo said in his most courtly fashion. Those behind him nodded -- Tharn for once a little absently, because he had become involved in a rather difficult line-sketch on the tablet supplied him for note-taking. He didn't approve of these strangers, but there were more important things than interstellar visitors, especially since they were only Earthmen, and Angelo was insisting on taking full charge. He, Tham, was through arguing. Walking multiplicationtables! Pah! Angelo could have them, then! "It is possible you are not aware, here on Ste. Catherine," the leader began with the slightest tinge of sarcasm, "that on Earth there is, at present, a rather regrettable difference of thinking on policy." "Another political slaughter, that is," Angelo countered not too lightly for the obvious allusion to Ste. Catherine's complete lack of any kind of electrical or electronic communications. "A major war, in other words." The leader flushed slightly. "Well, yes. As a matter of fact, it has gotten somewhat out of control." His teeth were almost clenched as he made the admission, and Angelo easily sensed the pain in the man at having to make it to the Artists of Ste. Catherine, of all people in the universe. "Out of control," the leader was continuing, "to the point where, in fact, and according to the unimpeachable findings of our actuarial computers, human life on Earth is threatened with complete extinction." The leader hesitated, interpreted the looks in the eyes of the men whom he faced, and found himself not quite able to meet them with his own. But he continued; best to get it said once and for all. "We are now, of course, well aware that predictions which were once thought the mere rantings of alarmists -- religious and philosophical cranks -- were tragically accurate. Both sides are perfectly matched from the technological aspect, of course. The so-called 'secrets' of science cannot be kept 'secret' at all, at least not by men. They exist everywhere in the universe, for any man to seek and to exploit as he sees fit." He paused, at last found the timerity to meet the gazes of the others. "Go on," Angelo said. "Both sides have come to absolute stalemate. But not, regrettably, the kind of stalemate that means cessation of activity. In a conflict to the death, stalemate simply means battle without victory; battle until neither side has a living man left to fight. "So, in short, we are desperate. There must be a victor, or Earth is lost entirely. One more mass stratoattack with L-bombs and... Well, at any rate -- there must, as you can readily understand, be a victor, and soon. Obviously, the Others must be defeated." Yes of course, thought Maler, the Philosopher. It is the Others, always, who must he defeated... "And so we have," the leader was saying, "come to you for help." He stopped speaking then, for a moment, waiting for Angelo's reply. Waiting simply for him to ask "what kind of help could we Artists possibly give you..." -- waiting for, and prepared to take unflinchingly, the searing taunt that could not help but be in the question... " -- you who can fly ships through Space, who have at your computertips the hard-won miracles of science and engineering?" But wordlessly, the leader waited. And in the brief moment before he spoke, the history of it all flashed through Angelo's mind; the history that began with the Revolt, Three centuries ago, with the Ancestors of them all on Ste. Catherine. The artists, the philosophers, the writers, the orators, the dramatists, the poets -- all of them, who had, when at last they could no longer stomach their civilization's arrested adolescence and its refusal to be weaned from its electronic and atomic toys, remembered the first Fundamental Law of Order in art, and put it to devastating use. Unity. In Unity, they rebelled. They warned, first, in fairness. They took pains to point out carefully that it is a healthy sign for the developing child to become intrigued with movement, sound, and color -- that it was normal for a child to spend hours observing, examining, operating, even building a new mechanical toy. But when his new books gathered dust and fell into disuse -- when he could quote all of Faraday and none of Swinburne -- when this happened, his development as a human being of full depth and breadth was at an end. When he became hypnotized by his toys -- When motion and force became an obsession -- When the means became an end in itself ; when the tool became the raison-detre, rather than the structure it had been fashioned only to help build, then the point of civlization had been hopelessly lost, and thinking men had but one alternative: leave, and start over. And so, banded together, they had left. It had not been so difficult. For to the Ancestors, a tool was always that and nothing more. They could not build spaceships, but they could buy them, and so they had. They could not navigate Space nor pilot their craft, so they hired the technicians and engineers who could. And when the Ancestors had arrived at a planet of their choice (the scientists had been duly proud of their superior accomplishment in being able to find just such a planet -- and of course were paid more than the engineers and technicians) the Ancestors gave tliem all sizable bonuses and sent them packing back to Earth where there were so many fine Things to spend their money on. The Ancestors had, of course, been called dreamers, ivorytowerists, alarmists, fools. They had been called madmen who lived in the unenlightened past, believers in some foolishness called artistic integrity; schizoids who were afraid to face Reality. Posh, polish, and good riddance muttered the sane ones over their charts and oscilloscopes as the last of the Ancestors' ships blasted free of Earth. Muttered, of course, because there was, somehow, a vague awareness that the Culture-Vultures hadn't left in fear of the bright, quick Machines, but in -- well, they said, in disgust! Good riddance to childish rubbish. But now, apparently, the men of Earth had gotten themselves into something so peculiarly impossible that they were desperate enough to face the cutting wit of the fat-bottomed Artists on Ste. Catherine, who wouldn't be able to say "I told you so" in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way and let it go at that. Oh, no. But it would be better to have their damned articulate tongues tear you apart than an S-field. The moment of reflection was spent, and Angelo asked the question. "And how can we help you?" was all he said. The leader took a deep breath. "One moment," Angelo said as he was about to speak. "Just a word of warning if you please. If you want anything of us at all, simply state your case in plain language. Don't try to 'sell' us anything -- we can beat you roundly at that! And if we agree to your request, you will accept exactly what we give you; beggars, no matter how expert in some things, are still not in the position of choosers! A matter, after all, of -- shall we say, artistic integrity?" The leader's eyes flashed: Damn you and your infernal artistic in tegrity! but it was his mouth which, fortunately for him under the circumstances, did the talking. "Very well. As I said, both Sides are in perfect technological and therefore military balance -- "Balance is so important," interrupted Angelo. Behind him, Ojar, the Orator was having a difficult time repressing a yelp of pure mirth. It was unfair, of course, to bait these stumble-witted fellows like this, but it was amusing -- especially when Angelo did it, who, though a Painter, was well up on his word-play. "... Perhaps you have already noticed," Angelo was going on, quite oblivious to the perspiration on the leader's high forehead, and exactly as Ojar had expected, "how well we of Ste. Catherine observe the Fundamental Laws of Order. The Rhythm of our very way of life, for example -- but excuse me! You were outlining your request..." The leader had reddened helplessly, and his subordinates had both stolen quick glances at him. It was as though images of the man himself, reflected from mirrors at either side, had suddenly taken on a volition of movement of their own. But quite quickly they became wellbehaved images again. "Both sides have equally effective weapons and defenses," the leader went on, "and so it has become a disastrous war of attrition. To win, we must have something they do not have, obviously." "To bring your Side into Dominance, of course," said Angelo sagely. "To prevent your Subordination, as it were..." Ojar had a sudden, violent fit of coughing. "Yes," the leader said. There was a momentary blankness in his eyes, and Angelo decided that enough was enough. Unfairness was unfairness, after all. They must hear the man out. "We have looked back over history," the leader said. "It was an unprecedented step, to be sure, but we were desperate! At any rate, we discovered that one time, it was possible to make an enemy believe he was wrong, and that you, his enemy, were right, through a rather obscure verbal art called, I believe it was, propaganda?" "Yes," said Angelo. "The province in Art of writers and orators. As a painter or sculptor will create illusion with paints or stone, just so did the writer create illusion with letters." "So we came to understand," the leader said, trying a little note of sarcasm of his own. "Our present difficulty is this: we of course have no such peop -- er. Artists -- at our disposal. We of course tried our own hand at it but nobody ever seemed quite able to agree on just what it was we were trying to talk about, so -- well -- We have come to you. Will you do this for us? A few words, for the sake of humanity?" Clever, thought Maler, at that. An intended appeal to the philosophical side of the artistic mind. Maybe the poor wretch really meant it, even if he wasn't aware that "humanity" meant both Sides. "To answer you," Angelo was replying, "I'll of course have to summon our Master of Letters. It may not be easy to win his assent, I warn you. He can trace his own ancestry all the way back to newspaper reporters, advertising copywriters and tradejournal writers -- and so has naturally inherited their bitterness toward all such prostitutions of the Art of Writing, and artistic integrity in general. And you will admit that hacking out propaganda to order is of course just that, to say nothing of the moral aspects involved! However -- Magnanimously, Angelo lifted his right arm and beckoned, and a Student was at once at his side. "Fetch Master Forsyth at once. And tell him I said to leave his new Quarto behind; this is urgent." The young woman left, and they waited. "A cigarette?' Angelo proffered the leader. There was surprise on the man's face. "You mean you can make -- "Just crude paper and tobacco grown in the soil," Angelo said apologetically. "Untouched by any rays but the sun's, I'm afraid, and our few medicine-men -- we have all kinds of hobbies here of course -- just won't comment. Here... and a light... The leader had almost finished his cigarette when the Master of Letters arrived. "Angelo, you churl, sir! Do you know how long I've been working on that line? You know how difficult it is for me to get a decent trochee when I'm -- oh, company? Capital! 'Come fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring -- ' " "Please, Forsyth. These men are here on business. They want you to do them a favor." Resignedly, Forsyth kept quiet. And listened for good measure. He listened for ten minutes. And then the leader was finished and Forsyth said "A pox on't!" "Please, Forsyth -- "He's right! came Tham's voice. "I told you I didn't like it, and I dont, and -- " doesn't like it?" bellowed Forsyth. "Then by Heaven, I'll do it! Teach you, sire, to make charcoal caricatures of me on a day when I'm not lampooning you! Very well, but I don't think I've got too many apprentices that aren't engaged right at the moment. Nonetheless, if --  The leader was beyond control. "Apprentices, did you say?" he croaked hoarsely. "Why, you --  "What in Dante did you think, man-child?" shot back Forsyth. "You don't suppose I'd give you finished, creative writers for the job of a trained ape, do you? Some aj prentices I've got, and some apprentices you'll get -- and only because Dean Angelo here says so." T he three men from Earth strode with military precision back toward their ship. The leader was in the center, and his subordinates, each with bulging briefcases in both hands, were on either side. A large group from the colony walked at a slower pace behind. Angelo, as usual, was at their head, and flanking him were Tham and Forsyth. "Another whole week wasted!" lamented Forsyth. "Not that the time means anything, but those sensitive young boys and girls of mine will never be the same! One of them, just this morning, told me she was thinking of taking up politics as a hobby! The tortures I go through for you, Angelo -- "I still don't like it!" Tham cut him oflF. "And I don't like them! And, Forsyth, I saw what you had your precious little apprentices doing! You had them writing exactly the same tripe they wrote for that other crowd that landed two weeks ago!" "Tham, you certainly aren't the only one who has no use for that barbaric breed. So -- as long as they remain equally matched, they'll eventually, uh --  ""But that means --  "A Fundamental Law of Order, of course, my dear Tham. Balance, as I think I may already have pointed out..." Forsyth quoted something from on obscure source about the importance of artistic integrity, and then they watched together as the ship from Earth blasted homeward.    (Continued from page #) subject entitled Freedom of the American Road, and it is filled with remarkable photography, diagrams, drawings and maps. Scores of wellknown authors, reporters and experts have contributed articles and reports that are as exciting to read as they are informative. It was published -- not as a commercial book venture -- but as a promotion by The Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford II, in the foreword, says: "We do not attempt to give any one answer -- no master plan that will solve all our highway problems. Here, instead, are many ideas, many new approaches, all of them proved in action. "We hope that you, too, will find them inspiring, challenging, and useful -- right in your own community." If you have a traffic problem in your community, write for a copy -- for here is the graphic, fascinating story of counties, cities and villages all over America and what they have done to obtain better traffic conditions and safer roads. Pout Anderson's new novel is not science fiction but a historical novel entitled Taller Than Other Men which deals with the #th Century Norwegian King Harald Hardrede... Alan E. Nourse, now in the final stages of his internship at a Seattle Washington, hospital, hopes to practice in a small town. Object: fewer patients and more time for science fiction writing... Hollywood reported vying for Out of The Deeps by John Wyndham... Frederic Brown, whose last sf book success was Martians, Go Home, is now working on two novels -- one a straight novel, the other a "picaresque" sort of sf tale... Jack Vance is putting the final touches to a non-sf novel entitled Clarges for forthcoming Ballantine publication... Robert Sheckley, whose latest book was Citizen in Space, is considering taking his typewriter to Guatemala... Lester del Ray now at work on a novel based on his famous novelette Nerves... Mack Reynolds, when last heard of, was in Tangiers. Seems like he'd signed up for a trek with a desert caravan, with overnight stops at French Foreign Legion posts and destination Timbuktu... Dick Matheson back in California again where he is working on the movie adaptation of his book. The Shrinking Man. Both are scheduled for summer release . , . Mike Shaara, (who has an ideal name for a cop!) did a year's turn as a Florida policeman but has turned in his badge to return to science fiction writing .  . Mel Hunter, who did such an outstanding job with our satellite covers, coming up with a two page spread in Life... And Tom Godwin, Robert Young, Bryce Walton and Poul Anderson have some really top-notch yarns in the next IF . , . Don't miss them! -- jiq If research is to be intelligent and far-sighted it cannot mathematically follow the ups and downs of the short-range sales curve . -- Dow Rip Van Winkles may be real in # years if the success that has been achieved in restoring frozen hamsters can be transferred to humans. Tests at the Medical Research Center in London have proved that the hamsters can be put to sleep, packed in ice for a few hours, then gently thawed without damage to the brain or other internal organs. By treating certain organs with glycerine before freezing, scientists hope animals can be stored in a completely frozen state indefinitely. If so, they would be alive and no older when thawed out. The researchers also believe that airmen and seamen, who have been in accidents in frozen areas, should not be given up for dead, that resuscitation such as is used on the hamsters should be attempted. A skin "garden" in which living human skin will be grown is being set up at Duke University. If sue cessful it is expected to provide the means for saving thousands of lives now lost each year as a result of burns. A bit of the burned victim's own skin would be set to growing in the garden. In two weeks such a piece of growing skin may be multiplied to ten times its original size, as experiments have shown, and would be an excellent size for grafting. Since a skin graft from a donor lasts only ten to thirty days and the victim's own skin is necessary for a permanent graft, the skin garden would be an excellent source. The Duke project is believed to be the world's first attempt to reproduce the patient's whole skin, consisting of both outer layer and true skin for grafting. Cattle of the future may get an entire bale of hay in the form of a shovel full of pellets. Research experiments have shown that most feeds can be pelleted by subjecting them to certain tremendous pressures. A machine has been developed which can produce the # to # pound per square inch which is necessary. For the future farmer who owns such a "pelleting" machine it will reduce labor, the need for maintaining a quality feed and it will cut the cost of storage space, feed handling equipment and transportation. Scientists have predicted that seven more heavy elements, # through #, will be created in the next # years. The most likely production method will be an atom smasher such as the heavy ion linear reactor which will speed up very heavy nuclei, like neon. By hurling relatively large nuclei into the hearts of heavy atoms like uranium it should be possible to build up the heavier elements. Predictions also state that elements # through # should be stable enough to identify chemically. Those from # through # probably will decay so rapidly that they can be analyzed only from their radioactivity Buying and selling of stocks may some day really become the "sure thing" that investors dream of. Researchers have found that an electronic computer, when properly directed, can make the calculations necessary to indicate future trends on the market. The program is still so new that its success or failure is yet to be determined, but the experimenters are convinced that the correct formula can be found. They know that the chartists who plot the daily curves on opening and closing quotations have noted that a daily geometric pattern forms which seems to indicate future trends. If this pattern can be properly calculated by the computer, short range fluctuations should definitely be predictable. The armed services may in the future employ totally deaf individuals to work at jet air fields. Science knows that to the human ear noise above # decibles is intolerable, and modem jets already create sound levels around # decibles. Others in production will produce # to # decibles, or noise levels greater than humans can stand. In such an instance the man who is totally deaf has an advantage that is incalculable, and may well be the only individual who can bear the brunt of such noise levels. Safe and successful bone transplants using radiation-sterilized bones will soon be normal hospital procedure. The bones which can be taken from dead bodies, are cut into various sizes and shapes with a heavy duty band saw, then they are freeze-dried and sealed in glass tubes imder vacuum. To sterilize them, the glass tubes are placed within a concrete cave containing cobalt rods. At the end of a # hour period, the bone is removed and stored at room temperature. The treatment kills any bacteria and viruses that may have been in the bones, but there is no residual radioactivity and the character of the bone and its capacity for further growth are not changed. Parents may soon be able to know in advance whether the nursery ought to be pink for a girl or blue for a boy. A discovery by Canadian scientists has made it possible to determine the sex of an unborn infant about one month before it is born. From the amniotic fluid which surrounds the baby in the womb, doctors are able to determine whether the cell component known as chromatin, found only in female cells, is present. # -- Negatively. # -- Doldrums. # -- Volt. # -- Liquid air. # -- #. # -- Frauenhofer. #I -- Geotropism. # -- Contracts. Dear Editor: J. C. Hickman in "Hue and of April brings up the subject of interstellar civilizations and asks what others think about the subject. I cannot entertain the notion that we might be the first and most highly civilized race, as the editor states in his footnote to Mr. Hickman's letter. That idea would seem to be the height of conceit on man's part. I believe there may be people on our moon now, and so on and on in space there is life after life in some form. We may be very surprised at what we find "out there" when we begin to travel the stars. As I read between the lines of science fiction it seems to me the authors are aware of much that isn't published in the newspapers. And the truth we may someday find, may be much stranger than the fiction we read now. -- H. Conrad Port Orchard, Wash. Dear Mr. Quinn: I think it's a damn shame that a mag such as "If" should be running on a bimonthly schedule. The material you print is on a level with the best and far above that printed in some of the monthlies. In the April issue, I can say that I enjoyed every story. Jones' "Human Error" was written in the same style with which he appears in the "top" mags. It was a good story and well thought out. The drawing that accompanied was quite mediocre though. "Chrome Pastures" was another excellent job, except that I thought the epilogue was tacked on and should have been worked out in the story itself. Having met Harlan Ellison at a recent meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association, I enjoyed his story all the more. He's an up and coming talent and it's good to see him rise from the mass of fandom. -- Allan Cheuse Perth Amboy, N. J. Did you see Ellison s 'The Crackpots" in the June issue? Dear Editor: Aren't there any kind aliens? It seems to me that stories always depict them as so far above us that we are beneath contempt or that they are so monstrous they want to kill us all off and take over Earth for themselves. The general idea in S.F. seems to be to prepare man for what may be an inevitable meeting with such creatures; and to tell man that he's not ready for it; but when the aliens are constantly painted in such evil lights how will man ever be ready? How can you expect an alien to be acceptable unless some form of writing is used that will convince Mankind that those we might meet are not the monsters drawn in S-F? -- K. J. Ashton Gardner, Me. A good point and well taken... also one to which we wish we knew the answer. Anybody got any ideas? Gentlemen : I'm a reader of "If' because my son is a subscriber. I agree with W. C. Cantrell of Bryan, Texas, about the sexy covers. The April cover is # fantasy and sciencefiction books and backissue magazines at # to #  under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! #K Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania an example of what I mean. I also disapprove of the story illustrated by the cover. Such wanton and in a representation of our future world. The other stories are on a much higher level. I especially enjoyed "Human Error" and "Chrome Pastures". -- J. Schofield Chesterhill, Ohio Sirs: Why so much speculation on what "other" worlds are like in science fiction magazines? Seems to me we should do a little more worrying about the mess we have right here and straighten out a few thousand things before we start spreading ourselves too thin over the galaxy. About the only advantage I can see to finding another world that's liveable is that it would enable some of us to get away from this badly mismanaged one. On second thought what's to prevent men from making that one just as bad. Seems to me Mankind is just dreaming about Utopias and is at least intelligent enough to realize he's messed up his own world so badly that Utopia is impossible here. But how many realize that just because the place is fresh and new and perfect it doesn't necessarily follow that it will stay that way once man gets his hands on it. -- C. H. Bellows Atlanta, Georgia Reader Bellows has grabbed a tiger by the tail. Hope hes got more than personal opinions to back up his stand. of the Three-Stage Satellite proposal as developed by Mr. Nuding and Mr. Vanous. Their proposal is much more comprehensive than the first few Project Vanguard Satellites which must be necessarily rushed to enter the International Geophysical Year. IF has commissioned the building of this large, detailed, cut-away model of the beautifully designed engineering proposal which, together with supplementary material, will be displayed at various places across the nation. (Drawings by Mel Hunter) Exciting New Worlds of Science Reading! to be found anywhere in the world is now appearing regularly in IF. Also, you will find exclusive, factual, authoritative articles on the sciences of today and tomorrow -- by eminent scientists. Here (this copy is a sample), in a beautifully printed and illustrated magazine, is the world of the future in both fact and fiction. But -- have you enjoyed this issue? Then why not subscribe. If you do, we will send your -- Your subscription brings you (bimonthly) I # issues for just #. But we will send the first issue as a gift, which means you get # issues in all... So, don't miss a single one of the important issues to come. Send your subscription to -- IF Magazine    the integrated Man of tomorrow Exciting New Worlds of Science Reading! to be found anywhere in the world is now appearing regularly in IF. Also, you will find exclusive, factual, authoritative articles on the sciences of today and tomorrow -- by eminent scientists. Here (this copy is a sample), in a beautifully printed and illustrated magazine, is the world of the future in both fact and fiction. But -- have you enjoyed this issue? Then why not subscribe. If you do, we will send your -- Your subscription brings you (bimonthly) I # issues for just #. But we will send the first issue as a gift, which means you get # issues in all... So, don't miss a single one of the important issues to come. Send your subscription to -- IF Magazine All Stories New and Complete 'Gifts for the Natives" by Mel Hunter i Copyn g ht, # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lori Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office Buffalo New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and PonsTiada W for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearff "y Similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A Next (December) issue on sale October #th gimwinniuinira  Editor's   report I # # Let's look ahead a hundred years or so when we have a space station a thousand miles up and exploratory travel to the nearer planets. The question in the mind of everyone who considers such a possibility is: What kind of life will we find out there? Conjectures as to the answer to that question are certainly many and varied and pro and con. But whatever the right answer eventually turns out to be, for the time being IF has just come up with another scoop! Not only for a science fiction publication but for any other publication as well. It isn't often that a magazine or newspaper can boast of an article by a scientist of the stature of Dr. Walther Riedel -- and that's just what IF can do. In the next issue Dr. Riedel, world's ranking aerophysicist and propulsion expert, presents his views on the possibilities of finding intelligent life on other planets. Dr. Riedel, as you doubtlessly already know, was director of Peenemuende and head of the German Government's entire rocket program during the latter part of World War II -- a time when they had out-distanced by far the entire world in rocket development. Coming to America after the war, he worked for Uncle Sam at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Fort Bliss and White Sands. Right now he is in Nuremburg, where he is carrying on his work in research and applied science. This is the first time Dr. Riedel has ever written for an American magazine and, to put it mildly, we think you'll be interested. Don't miss what he has to say in This Lonely Earth in the December IF! When tin editor suddenly starts getting deluged with manuscripts from an unknown writer and the manuscripts keep coming in, something in the mail every week, come rain, snow, or sleet or rejects, and finally he starts clicking -- well you begin to wonder about the tenacity or stubbornness or something of the writer. Such was the case with Charles L. Fontenay, a newspaper man down in Tennessee, who has appeared in IF with Disqualified , Escape Velocity Blow the Man Down y The Patriot , Atom Drive , Z, and Communication in this issue. He has another coming up in the December issue, a gem of a story about a "do gooder" whose intended victim is a man of a "super race". The title is Family Tree -- and it's good reading! Anyhow, when his story first appeared in IF and when we were getting curious about him, he dropped into the office to say 'hello" and that was about all, for he was gone again before I could even take him to lunch. Since then, however, we've gotten a line on him -- past, present, and prospective future. "Thinking back", he wrote us recently, "I suppose I'm one of the real veteran science fiction fans. In the late '#s, Boys Life ran a fourth dimension story and that got me into it... I started writing science fiction, for no good reason, in August, #, and sold my first to IF five months later." Fontenay turns out a prodigious amount of copy (which we suspected), considering that his fulltime job is that of rewrite man on The Nashville Tennessean, where he has been for nearly ten years. In addition to the scores of science fiction pieces he has written, he completed a biography of Estes Kefauver last year. Due to lack of time to whip it into final shape, he sold the manuscript to Jack Anderson and Fred Blumenthal of Washington, D. C., who are now editing it and rewriting it under their joint by-line. It is due for publication soon under the Dial imprint. But Fontenay is already at work on another novel, a historical one based on the life of Ptolemy I. One of Fontenay's outstanding assignments as a newspaper man was back in #, when he covered the campaign of Senator Kefauver in which the Crump machine was overthrown. He has also covered several governor's races, five legislative sessions and a constitutional convention, all for Tennessee newspapers and when he was with the Associated Press. The story he recalls most fondly, one that hit the nation's front pages, was the original story on the famous "yoo hoo" incident, just before the last war, when General Ben Lear made an entire regiment march from Memphis to Little Rock because they had shouted at a woman in shorts. Charles Fontenay was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but raised by his uncle in Union City, Tennessee. Because his father was English and his mother American, he encountered certain complications when he applied for a commission in the intelligence corps in World War II. However, he made it, and came out a captain after # months in the South Pacific. Right now, to fill in all the spare time he has between his rewrite job, science fiction and other writing, he is something of a correspondence chess player (# Class C North American Champion), does oil and water color painting (two first and two second prizes at Tennessee State Fairs), landscape gardening, with roses a specialty, and Chinese cooking! "A native of Canton," he informs us, "just returned to New York from Formosa, has been my ritual blood brother since boyhood and he helps me get materials for paper-wrapped chicken and other Chinese dishes." Asked if he was married, he replied that he was. "Thirteen years ago I married my girl from Nebraska", he said, and then added, "So far, the only patter of feet around the house is that of Maximilian von Fortlagehaus -- our red dachshund." (Continued on page #) Everyone was thoughtful, considerate, kind and very happy; But where was the right of dignity or individuality ? It was like being dropped into the middle of a nightmare. The kind that finds you running naked in a crowd . Illustrated by Ed Emsh take his cushion pills, that they were contacting the pits at La Guardia within half an hour. "I still can't figure you," the Captain said. "Up there, just you and your wife for sixteen years. That's a hell of a long time." Kane smiled. He had been almost completely out of touch with the world for sixteen years, and it surprised him a little that anyone thought it remarkable in any way. Particularly the Captain who spent most of his time, too, alone. But the Captain was genuinely perturbed about it. The authorities had abandoned the space-station project. Abandoned the Martian project. They had taken away the other three ships from the Moonrun, and there was no explanation for it at all. The rest of the Captain's crew, except an old atomics man, had drifted away and never come back, and the Captain had been unable to find out anything whatsoever about what had happened to them. He had never heard from them again. They had never been replaced. But the Captain couldn't seem to define what it was he was warning Kane to be wary of down there. "I haven't left my ship for years, Professor Kane, and that's the truth. I take on supplies and see to the ore getting into the holds but when those machines up there that do the digging and loading wear out, they won't be replaced. Just no interest in space any more. I can tell. "I stay on the ship, with my wife, see. And the few guys down there around the field at La Guardia I have to rub up against -- why, sir, they treat me as if I had some kind of contagious disease! "But they need this ore I'm bringing back here now, so they leave me alone."  "Who leaves you alone?" "Whoever didn't leave the rest of my crew alone. Whoever sang 'em the old siren song, that's who. Once a spaceman, always a spaceman, sir. And not a one of those men pulled out because he wanted to do it! That's what I'm saying. And I'm telling you to watch out. I'm blasting off for the Moon again on the #th. I hope you're aboard." Kane shrugged as the Captain bowed out, making disgruntled noises in his throat. He was getting along in years, Kane reasoned, and was probably just expressing that fact, externalizing some way or another. Still, what he had said was odd -- The truth was, Kane had been inexcusably out of contact with the world. The pills dulled his senses and he began to fall asleep on the pneumatic couch. He thought of the years of work on his theories concerning the unified fields in the formulation of spatial matter. He thought of Helen, the good years together before her sudden death, sharing love and work, how complete and full and good it had been. During all those sixteen years he couldn't recall a moment of real boredom. He hadn't missed life on Earth. When a man has one full love and his work, he's isolated no matter where he is, even in the middle of New York City. He had ten notebooks full of notes in his briefcase. It would open their eyes, a really basic new theory that would defy the pessimistic theory of entropy, and its assurance of an inevitable death of all things. Finding another wife to replace Helen wouldn't be easy of course. A new relationship would be different, but it should be as good. It might require some difficulties which he had anticipated and was prepared for. He was only forty-six. He had a long time to look. He was in excellent physical condition and was not unattractive, though of course that wasn't the real issue either way. He wanted love, a companion, someone who could truly share in his work. Who would love that observatory in Albetegnius crater as a home for the rest of her life. He woke up, and prepared to leave the ship. He carried his briefcase with his notes in it. The rest of his luggage would follow later. According to Phil Nordsen, there was a suite reserved for him at the Midtown Hotel at #th and Madison Avenue. He climbed down the ladder to the exit. The door was open and a heavy fog drifted past the opening, but a small dark car with two drivers waited outside. As Kane stepped down the gangplank, one of the figures, a woman in a light blue uniform, jumped out and opened the door for him. Interest and excitement rose in Kane as the car moved through the mist toward the terminal where he was to meet Phil. It would probably do him good, get away from his work, different surroundings, just rest up a little. Even live it up a little perhaps. There would be parties, and he wanted to see a little of the country. Maybe visit some of Helen's relatives in the Middle West, and he certainly wanted to have some long bull sessions with Professors Martinson and Legmann over at the University. Then there was the question of meeting the right kind of woman. That was something only the fates could decide, Kane thought. He was no romantic, but that sort of thing wasn't something you could figure out in advance, plot out like an equation. It wasn't anything you could handle with personality charts, though they had been trying that when he'd left The personality you could measure with gadgets was such a small part of it really... But Phil would arrange for the social activities. As he recalled his old schoolmate, he remembered that Phil was a very social kind of fellow. Phil had thought it was absurd, Kane's volunteering for that job in Albetagnius. Phil hadn't even gone on to post-graduate work in electronics, his chosen field. Phil had gone right out to accept a position with Isotopics Unlimited, somewhere in New Jersey. They had corresponded for a while; and the cablegram from Phil had expressed Phil's delight at Kane's decision to return to Earth. The car stopped before the welllighted entrance to terminal building No. # and the woman hopped out, opened the door for Kane. He went inside the building, feeling the abnormally heavy pull of gravity. He had grown accustomed to the gravity on the Moon, and though his body was already starting to adapt itself, it would take time, and he was beginning to feel the drag. Phil was there waiting. He hadn't mentioned anyone else being there, and Kane certainly didn't expect anyone else. He didn't know anyone really, no one other than Phil except Martin and Legmann. But there was Phil, and a number of people around him, and they were all rushing toward Kane, smiling, shouting, waving their arms. Phil looked much the same, tall and flashily dressed, thin and good looking as always, but with hair slightly greying. The others, men, women, various ages and sizes, waving scarfs and circling eagerly around Kane, broke out in a happy chorus of mixed voices: Greetings! Welcome , Old Friend Kane! Welcome home to Earth again . Kane felt a brief compulsion to retreat, but that was absurd. "Good to see you, Prof!" Phil shouted. "Hello, Phil." Someone grabbed his briefcase. Kane tried to get it back but it was gone among the "We'll take care of it, Kane boy," Phil said. His arm was over Kane's shoulders. Several women were hanging onto Kane's arms. Healthy, tanned, lovely women. "Sure glad to see you, Prof. Aren't we?" A chorus enthusiastically shrieked, "Yes!" Kane felt some embarrassment. He was being crowded out an exit toward a line of cabs. Several shiny ten-foot saucers with railings around them whirred past and disappeared in the fog. All of them had two or more people on them, and from the sound, there were quite a number of them up in the fog somewhere. "We've all got a saucer now," Phil said. "Only we have to take cabs over to Lucie's house. This way we can all ride together. We can all get into two cabs, can't we, gang?" "Yes!" "Lucie?" Kane asked as they crowded around the two cabs. Who were these people? Friends of Phil's of course. "We're Lucie," the woman said softly. Kane caught a glimpse of a mature face and a lovely figure. The face was odd, Kane thought, the maturity seeming to be disguised by an insincere smile. What a peculiar way of introducing oneself... S "We're having a little party at the house," Lucille said. "Aren't we?" "Yes!" "We've got lots of fun planned for us, Kane boy," Phil said. Kane remembered a look of sardonic mockery in Lucille's eyes as her face disappeared and was replaced by several others. Somehow, Kane couldn't figure out how, five of them were jammed into the back seat of one of the cabs and then they were moving away through the fog. Someone who said "We're Laura," with a tight tanned body was wriggling on Kane's lap and her arm was around Kane's neck. She had bright teeth and she breathed scentedly into Kane's face. "Nothing to worry about, Kane boy," he heard Phil say in a muffled joy. "We're the gang." " 'It's always fair weather, the Sunhill Gang is always together,' " Laura was crooning. The red-faced fat man next to Kane laughed and then Kane saw that the red-faced man whose name seemed to be Ben and the woman on his lap whom he called Jenny, were kissing one another. There was something embarrassingly intimate about the way they did it. It was suddenly much more than a mere spontaneous show of affection. Kane looked away. Beyond a certain point, he felt that love-making was something that should be reserved for privacy. That sort of thing might be expected to change, of course. Customs changed, and as Kane recalled, one could say the trend had been somewhat in that direction. There were two drivers up front. That was a change too. Every cab had had two drivers, a man and a woman. It was all a bit overdone, Kane thought. Still, they were friends of Phil's. A friend of yours is a friend of mine. But it affected Kane adversely. He felt uneasy. He didn't really know them at all. In fact, he scarcely even knew Phil. "We're so glad with you," the girl on Kane's lap said. She crushed her lips over his mouth and pressed her body against him. Kane couldn't say that was affecting him adversely. In fact, if there weren't all these other people around -- "We're nice together," Laura breathed against his lips. Everyone was so damn glad to see him. All they needed were banners, little pins. Official Welcoming Party to Greet the Arrival of Professor Larry Kane. Kane managed to look out the window as they crossed the TriBorough Bridge at #th Street and started up the East River Drive. "Things haven't changed much," Kane said. "Not nearly so much traffic though." "The saucers," Phil said. "Most of the traffic's up in the air." "We're looking at things," Laura said. "Great old town," Ben said and laughed, on and on. Jenny laughed too, then said. "It looks just the same almost as when we left." They're all speaking for me, Kane thought. Funny, a damned funny custom. It was a reflection of something else. What did it really mean? His feeling of unease seemed exaggerated. But then their efforts to make him welcome seemed pretty exaggerated too... "Everybody happy?" the fat man yelled. "Yes!" "We're happy aren't we, honey," Laura said. "Sure," Kane said. Why not? Kane noticed the amazing dearth of traffic on Madison Avenue. No traffic cops either. That had changed too. One thing you had always been sure of seeing and that was a cop in New York. When Kane asked about it, the smiles almost fled from every face, and the moment of silence seemed like a form of shock. Kane realized then that there hadn't been even a second of silence before then. "It's hard to realize we've been away so long," Phil finally said. "I'm really tired," Kane said to Phil as they went on past the Midtown Hotel toward Lucille's apartment. "I was intending to go directly to the hotel and rest up a while -- " "We'll relax at Lucie's" Jenny said. "We got music, we got music, we got music, who could ask for anything more?" "But -- " Kane started to protest at least mildly, but the rest of the sentence was blotted out by a long kiss from Laura. elevator, and then rushed into Lucille's apartment on a high level of The Sunny Hill building near Washington Square. The apartment consisted of one huge room with a circular couch in the middle upon which everyone immediately sat. Laura sat beside Kane who was getting more tired every minute. There was just enough room for the gang to squeeze up tight to one another in a circle around a table supporting some kind of machine with wires that were immediately run from it and attached to everyone's wrist, and to a narrow metal headband with which everyone's head was crowned. Kane was listening to music. It was like being dropped unexpectedly into the middle of a large symphony orchestra. The sound seemed to pulse and vibrate gigantically all around him. It was more than merely listening. He was in it. He felt himself a part of it, swimming in it, and almost fighting to keep from being carried away by what seemed to be perfectly recorded music that was now being delivered by some final form of hi-fi. The music itself was familiar enough. Instrumentalized opera arias orchestrated on a fantastic scale. The quantity was so great that sensitivity as to quality was dulled. Kane, shocked by thunderous sweeps of sheer volume gave way before the sound. It wasn't sleep. He could hardly say he rested, but he was in a semi-stupor. When he glanced at his watch sometime later, two hours and some minutes had passed. The wires were being removed from wrists, headbands from heads. Kane's head ached slightly. Everyone was reaching as cards fell out of the machine in the middle. Laura handed one to Kane. It was covered with symbols in the form of some kind of graph, but he couldn't decipher it. There was a great deal of chatter, musical jargon, colloquial in both space and time, most of it eluding comprehension. Kane stood there holding his card as everyone milled around one another. Phil said, "Let's see how we liked it, Prof?" That seemed to have been the general idea -- how much everyone liked the music. And each one looked at his card, and they were all comparing cards and exclaiming over them. Phil was looking at Kane's card, comparing it with his own and with some other cards. "Well, not bad," Phil was saying, "Is it, gang?" "Not bad at all!" they chorused. "What isn't bad?" Kane asked. "Our taste, man," Laura said. "You'll fit so good." The odd one, Lucille, raised an eyebrow, with some mockery in it still, at Kane. "You'll sure belong, Professor. Don't worry," Lucille said. She held up her card. "We liked it." "Of course it'll take a little time," Phil said as he threw his arm over Kane's shoulder. "A few sessions and you'll match up just right." "I really don't believe I understand," Kane said vaguely. "You will," Lucille said as she moved away from him. "You sure will, Professor." She was tall, and with long lithe legs. She was a handsome woman, Kane thought. As Phil explained casually on the way toward the Midtown Hotel, they had just had a music session. Everything was done in sessions, in groups that is. Everyone had his group, and his group did everything together. Anyway, they had had a music session. The machine in the middle was a Reacto. The cards were Reacto Cards. It was really a kind of taste tester, and the point was that the Reacto tested everyone's reaction to the music. The cards enabled everyone to check their reactions, check them against the reactions of all the others. It involved conformity ratings, and tendencies to stray from the group norm. The important thing about the taste rate cards was that they enabled you to find out just how much group spirit you had. The closer your card resembled that of all the others in your group, the more GS you had. "My GS rating's gone up," Laura kept burbling all the way to the Midtown Hotel. "It's gone up!" The same process applied to reading, movies, television, eating, anything involving the elements of reacting. The important thing was not how you yourself felt, but how you felt in relation to the feelings of the group. The problem seemed to be that of reducing deviation tendencies to a minimum. On the way to the Midtown Hotel, Jenny asked Phil how he liked the new best-seller, Love Is Forever , and Phil took a small card out of his wallet and they all compared Reacto Cards in order to determine relative reactions to Love Is Forever . Good God! You had to look at a card to find out how you liked something! It was frightening as hell. Kane wondered how wide-spread how universal, it really was, this incredible conformity, this collective thinking. This appalling sacrifice of individuality. Kane was too tired to give much, thought to it right then. He was anxious to get to the Hotel, and he was beginning to fantasize a bed, cool sheets, his body stretching and sinking down into blissful slumber. But as appalling as the situation seemed at the time, Kane soon found that he had only circled on the fringes of it. This was only the beginning. "Here we are, here were are, gang!" someone shouted as they piled out of the cabs and Kane was being hustled toward the suddenly formidable glint of a revolving door. So here we are, Kane thought. It was nice being here all right. He was glad, very glad. But it sounded as though someone might swoon over the fact. There was some difficulty with the revolving door. No one seemed able to move first, and there were spontaneous group lunges ending in jamming chaos in which someone hurt their arm. Kane thought it was the fat man, Ben. "We're hurt!" Jenny screamed. "Oh -- it's not bad," Ben said, laughing all the time he was groaning. "Just bruised a little, gang. We're just bruised a little' Kane grabbed his advantage and ventured alone through the revolving doors into the lobby. A pair of desk clerks nodded across the lobby. A group was emerging from behind drapes and beyond them Kane saw an ornate, subtly lighted, cocktail lounge. Kane was heading for the elevator when the gang overtook him. Laura had hold of one of his arms, and Phil the other. "We're having cocktails," Laura said. Phil repeated it, and Ben and Jenny joined in. The young man, Clarence, was singing as he herded the others toward the drapes of the cocktail lounge, and. they were all whisking Kane away before he could voice any protest. "What'll the gang have?" the waiter asked, smiling. Only he wasn't really smiling at any of them, Kane thought. He had picked out a center point of focus and was smiling at that so as not to appear to be smiling at any one, but at everyone. "Martinis!" several voices said. The waiter nodded, whirled away. "Ah, waiter," Kane said. "I'll have a double shot of Scotch. No ice." The waiter seemed shocked, unable to come to grips with Kane's seemingly simple order. "But -- but I thought you said Martini." The gang was still smiling, but faintly. The waiter was backing away, "No," Kane insisted. "He said Martinis, and she said Martinis, and so did several others. But I didn't say Martinis. I said Scotch, no ice." "But Martinis -- " Ben forced a pained laugh. "But we ordered Martinis." "Martinis," Laura said. "The ayes always have it," Kane heard Lucille whisper near him. Phil said, with a kind of shaky joviality. "Martinis -- " "Gin makes me ill," Kane said. "For me, it has to be Scotch." Phil whispered. "Scotch." "Scotch," the waiter said. A jukebox in a far corner blasted out from a sea of bubbling, multicolored light We're all pals togetherrrrrrrr . The Gang knows no bad weath errrrrrr. We're all for us all for us , And we're rolling do-own life's highway , On our crowded busssssss! Laura whispered huskily in his ear. "Don't worry about any little old thing. We're one together, man." G OD HE was tired. He was so tired he could hardly sit there. He felt numb, and there was desperation under the numbness. Kane wanted to get off somewhere by himself so he could rest, sleep, and think. He wanted to think... Bits of information drifted haphazardly into Kane's consciousness from the conversation. He had ordered another double Scotch and was almost through with it. He was passing out, but held to conscious awareness by the unceasing banter, laughter and the jukebox -- like a marionette held up with wires. If he suddenly found himself alone in silence, he knew he would collapse instantly. It seemed that this was a group with a certain common Reacto level, and they all worked in the same place, and lived in the same section of a big housing project, a place called Sunny Hill. Phil was their Integrator, and he was also an Official in the Isotopic Corporation where the Group worked. Phil was an Integrator for the Isotopic Corporation, a sort of personnel man whose main duty was the integration of the employees' private lives. When Kane tried to find out about the work itself, no one seemed interested enough to respond. The work was relatively unimportant. The emphasis seemed to be centered almost completely on how people got along together. If your Reacto cards reported a general reaction that strayed too far from your Group norm, you were either sent to another group, or sent to a Staff. A Staff was a rather vague term for specialists in Integration on a clinical level. The job was always referred to as "our job", and the Gang seemed to do practically everything together. Someone mentioned that a friend hadn't been competent in group relations at school and had been Processed. Kane didn't like the words they were so casually throwing around. In fact Kane didn't like any of it, and he was liking it less all the time. Another term that referred to some sort of adjustment process was the word homogenized. Someone had been "homogenized". Once Kane tried to find out about his old friends, Professors Legmann, and Martin over at New York University. Phil avoided the question for a time, then finally admitted that Martin was still there in the archeology department, but that Legmann had quit the profession years ago. "He quit teaching and became a plumber." "A plumber?" Kane whispered. "Legmann?" "That's right," Phil grinned. "We're all plumbing together," Laura lisped. "But -- that's preposterous!" Kane almost yelled. "Legmann -- why he was the finest research chemist -- " "But he wasn't really happy in his profession," Phil said. "As I recall -- he just wasn't well adjusted as a research chemist and teacher." "Who said he wasn't?" "Why the Staff." "What Staff -- ?" "Anyway, he's a plumber now somewhere," Phil said. "He's happy now." Kane felt a coldness on his neck. His stomach seemed to turn completely over. The devil with this, he thought. His eyeballs felt as though they were covered with sand, and his lids seemed leaded weights. He pushed back his chair. "You'll excuse me," he said. "But I'm really tired out. I'm going to get some rest -- " "But the night's young for us, man," Laura shrieked. "We're having more Scotch," Lucille said, watching him carefully. "Fun time's only starting for us," the young man protested, and the fat man and Jenny and all of them protested loudly together, laughing all the while. Kane was backing away. The hell with them. He turned and ran for the elevator. Then he remembered that he didn't know what room he was supposed to be checked into. He didn't have a key either. He -- Two smiling men, were on either side of him. In a mirror he could see the half smiling, half concerned faces of Phil and Laura, and the slightly sardonic eyes of Lucille. "Don't worry, Gang," he heard Phil say. "We're taking a Special room. We'll be together again soon." "This way," the two young smiling men said. They wore uniforms and appeared to be bellhops. "We'll show you to our room." The two bellhops started to back out of the room. "What's special about it," Kane asked. "Only thing I can see about it that could be considered special is that it's about big enough to be someone's closet! I reserved a suite. What kind of a run-around is this anyway?" It was hardly bigger than a large closet. A white room, with only a single bed in it, and a bureau. Through a narrow, partly open door, he could see a bathroom, and that was it. "Well," the bellhop said, smiling. "It's our Single." "You mean you call it special because it's a single," Kane asked. The bellhops nodded. "Why?" Kane insisted. "What's special about a single?" "We only have one single here," the bellhops said. "We hope you are comfortable with us, Professor Kane." "Look here! Why should you only have one single in this entire hotel? And what's so special about it?" "This single is seldom demanded by guests," the bellhop said. "I didn't demand it. I reserved a suite, or at least I understood that my friend, Phil Nordson, reserved a suite. I certainly didn't demand this!" "But -- but of course you did. We have to have a single when we're -- not getting along well with ourselves." Kane started for the door, but the two men backed out and shut it in his face. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He turned quickly and scanned the room, but there was no key visible. Then one of the curtains moved as he walked toward it, and he saw that the narrow window was barred. As he swept the curtains aside to look out through the bars, and grabbed at the bars in a kind of instinctual gesture, a metal panel slid noiselessly across and shut out a flash of neon light. He was alone, locked up like a dangerous madman! that resembled something anti' septic in a barracks, Kane saw the black eye of a phone peeking out of a niche in the wall. He pulled it out and jabbed at a button. His throat felt tight and he could feel the pounding of his heart as he leaned against the wall. "This is Professor Kane, room # ." "Yes, we're here." "And I'm here! In this ridiculous closet. I'm locked in. There must be some sort of mistake. The window -- " "We'll be all right. We'll be fine in a little while." "Look here -- connect me with the cocktail lounge. I want to speak with Phil Nordson. Yes, he's there -- " He heard nothing, absolutely nothing, except his own heart. No clock in the room either. The walls and ceiling had a peculiar grained look. "Hello, Prof!" "Phil! PhU, listen, what in the name of God goes on here? I'm locked in! You said you reserved a suite for me, and this room -- " "We aren't going to worry," Phil said. Kane heard laughter in the background and the high-pitched choral voices from the jukebox. "We'll be all right. We figured there would be a little trouble here and there, at first. "I don't give a damn about a little trouble there! Phil, I'm talking about me, here! I'm locked in. And my luggage. Where is it? And -- " Kane's stomach jumped. A kind of terror hit him like a cold breath. "Phil! My briefcase. Where's my briefcase?" "We have it somewhere -- " Phil was saying. "Just don't let us worry." Kane heard a clicking sound somewhere and he yelled into the phone but nothing came back. He released the phone and it was sucked back into the wall. He sank down on the bed and fumbled absently at his coat and then at his necktie. The walls had a blurred quality and he felt on the edge of passing out. He kept thinking of die briefcase, with years of work in it, the equations, more than could be preserved entirely in a man's head. It was too sickening to think about, the possibility of them losing his briefcase. Phil didn't seem concerned. No one was concerned with his briefcase, that was obvious. The only thing they were concerned about was that he didn't get along with the Gang. The hell with the Gang, every last one of the Gang. If he never heard of the Gang or saw the Gang again, he would consider himself extremely fortunate. He felt numb, too tired to think about anything. He fumbled at one shoe, got it off, then worked vaguely at the other one. He would rest, sleep, sleep for a long time, then he would be able to think. He might find this all exaggerated, unreal, once he slept, rested, woke up again. A man certainly had rights. There was some authority he could contact of course. He was just too upset to think about it anymore. He had his shirt, his undershirt off. He had his shoes and socks off and he flexed his feet in ecstasy. He unzipped his fly and as he started to stand up to take his pants off, he groaned with fright and fell backward onto the bed. A chair fused with the bed. Laura was there, sitting on the chair, but also practically sitting in Kane's lap. He blinked rapidly and reached out, and his hand moved through the image of Laura, only Laura seemed solid, three-dimensional, very real indeed. Too real. "Get out," he whispered. "What -- " Glass clinked loudly right in the room with him. The jukebox blared. Kane couldn't move. He sat rigidly, and the table was there, and all the Gang around it, and Phil there smiling and they were all around Kane drinking Scotch, double shots of Scotch, no ice. Lucille looked across the table and shook her lovely head slightly. There was concern, genuine concern, a kind of sadness, behind the false smile. The smile, he knew, was for the others. But the concern was for him. Phil raised his glass. Nine glasses were in the air. "Here's to us, happy Gang, Prof," Phil shouted. "Here's to us! Here's to Sunny Hill!" they shouted. Kane slowly moistened his lips. The three walls and the ceiling had come alive. They were actually huge TV screens, and the effect was startlingly three-dimensional. Only the absence of touch could break the illusion. But the visual and the audial made up for the absence of touch. Kane didn't want to touch them anyway. He wanted them to go away, altogether. His room was crammed with phantoms from the cocktail lounge. In fact, his room was fused with the cocktail lounge. It was all there somehow. "Go to sleepy-bye," Laura whispered and made a very suggestive gesture. Her cheeks were flushed as she leaned into and through him. "Take ourselves a good long snooze," Phil grinned. "Don't worry. The Gang's all here." Lucille said, hardly smiling at all. "No, don't worry, Professor. We'll all sleep with you." He zipped his pants back up and slid back through several phantom shapes and pressed against the wall. "Phil," he finally said. "Phil!" "Aren't you sleepy now?" Phil asked. "He's sleepy," Laura said. "We're sleeping with you, Professor man." "Yes, yes I am sleepy. Goodnight now," Kane said. "Goodnight." He waited. They didn't take the hint. To them it was no hint at all. He knew they weren't going away. He knew that no matter what he said or did, they wouldn't go away. That was the thing he understood, incredible as it was, he knew now that no matter what he said or did, they wouldn't go away. They only understood that he was somehow ill. He knew that too. They were right, so he was wrong. They thought they were doing what was best for him. That was obvious. It was all over their faces and actions. If they had any idea how he felt, they still considered his feelings only symptoms of some kind, and they seemed confident that Kane would soon be all right. But his being all right had nothing to do with their going away. Kane decided not to give way, not to scream or anything absurd like that. It wouldn't do any good. Calm, be calm and -- well maybe just try pretending they're not there at all. Then he remembered the bathroom and ran through several chairs, a table, and three people, and into the bathroom. He slammed the door and leaned against it and let out a long relieved breath. He was taking off his shorts when the bathroom walls and the ceiling came alive. What had been labeled "Boy's Room" down in the cocktail lounge was being projected into the bathroom of room #. It wasn't false modesty that prompted Kane's moan. It wasn't any form of prudishness that moved Kane to clutch his undershorts to his body and leap into the shower stall. It was a panicky realization of the absolutely involuntary nature of the way things were. Strangers, with friendly smiles, everywhere around him all the time, and he, Larry Kane, had nothing -- abso lutely nothing to say about it. The shower stall with the pulled curtain was no refuge either. There was a superimposed sink in there on the wall with a phantom shape using an electric razor, Phil and Ben were leaning through the shower curtain. They weren't there for anything specific. They were just there, chatting, smiling, bantering. Others came in and out of the "Boy's Room" of the cocktail lounge. Everyone said hello, or directed some sort of friendly comment casually at Kane as though superimposed washrooms were the quintessence of social normalcy. And, Kane thought pushing hard at panic, they probably were. Phil and Ben were there for no other reason than to keep Kane company. To help him. He could see that. No matter how tortured he seemed, their attitude remained that of beneficence. The trouble was all his, and they gave no indication of seeing his side of anything. Evidently, to them, being alone was the worst thing that could happen to anybody. If he wanted to be alone then he was wrong, he was sick, he was put in a special room. A single. But they wouldn't go away. He managed to turn on the shower, and he turned his face up to the icy water and closed his eyes and imagined he was back in blessed isolation in the study of the observatory on the Moon. But it was a long long way back to the Moon. It worked both ways. He could see and hear them. They could hear and see him too, but he determined to do his best to ignore them. The idea of social amenities no longer bothered Kane. Being impolite was an absurdity. Social decency was a mutual thing, and these people weren't considering his rights at all. He finished his shower and draped the towel around his waist and went back out into the closet they had given him. He walked toward the bed, sidestepping people, chairs, tables still unable to realize fully that these things weren't really here. The jukebox got louder. A couple danced through him. Suddenly, Kane stood shivering, a raw panic taking hold. Control fled before the rising jukebox clangor, the laughter, the waving and shouting and hideous unwelcome demons of camaraderie. He felt himself wildly waving his arms about and shouting at the walls. "Get out! For God's sake get out and let me sleep!" Ben was staring at Kane from only a few inches away. "You," Kane pointed a finger at the three dimensional ghost. "You -- fade out, go away somewhere. No -- no, Phil, not you. Get these other people out. I want to talk to you -- Phil -- " "Easy now," Phil said soothingly. "We'll be all right. In a little while now -- " "I am all right, but I won't be if I can't sleep. Phil -- can't all this just -- just be tuned out or something?" Kane tried to imagine none of the others were there. Just the small room, himself, and Phil. But the others were all looking at Kane, all of them looking, all of them smiling. Lucille was looking too, but somehow he was sure he could see a reflection of his own feelings in her eyes, hidden, but there. "We'll be with you all the way," Phil said. "But how can I sleep with a cocktail lounge full of people all over my bed? Tell me. I'm listening. Tell me how!" Phil's smile disappeared completely for a brief second. He whispered, close to Kane's ear. "Try to do it, Larry. Please -- try!" Kane ran to the wall, clicked the light switch. He knew that the lights in his room went out, but the slightly dimmer lights projected from the cocktail lounge remained. Somehow, that was even worse. It seemed to resemble the implacable characters of a persisting nightmare. Subdued, with the coruscating bubbling play of multicolored light from the jukebox turning a rainbow over and over the ceiling and the bed, and the Gang, the Gang all there like ghosts with greenish faces smiling, sitting, whispering round the bed. Kane threw himself on the bed and covered his eyes with his arms. He was going mad with fatigue, and yet he knew he could never sleep, never rest, under these circumstances. It wasn't just the figures there, the lights, the laughter and whispering and the chorus breaking from the jukebox. It was what their being there really meant, the suggestion of the bigger cause behind what was happening to Kane. A man who fears to sleep in the dark is not really afraid of the dark. But of what is hiding in it. Shadows moved above his closed lids. Glass tinkled with ice cubes. Under his sweating forearm, his eyes throbbed and his body felt as though the skin had been scraped all over until it was raw Kane propped himself on an elbow, and looked to one side at Phil. Phil grinned sympathetically. Laura was in the same cushioned chair, but she seemed to be sitting beside Kane on the bed. Lucille was avoiding looking at Kane. "Phil." "Well, Prof, we thought we were getting our sleep!" "No," Kane whispered. "I can't sleep. I'm asking you, you Phil, and all the rest of you, to let me sleep. I'm asking you to help me in that way, just for a while. I'm imploring you really to just tune yourselves out for a while and let me sleep." There was something blank, uncomprehending in the way they smiled at him. Kane knew then that they could never allow themselves to try to understand his situation, because then they might question their own. For example, if they've taken refuge in one another from a terrible fear of insecurity, anxiety, and aloneness, then Kane could only represent the threat of reawakened fear. What was the use? "We'll turn the lights down low, how would that be, Prof?" Phil asked. "We'd like that," Laura whispered. "Don't be afraid, we're with you," Ben said. "We'll sing you into dreamland," Jenny said. "Don't be afraid. We're all together and our Gang is with you," someone else said. It didn't matter who really, Kane thought, because they all spoke not as individuals but as the Gang. "Through sunshine and in shadow," Lucille said. The lights dimmed slowly as Kane curled up on the bed and clenched his eyes shut. He pulled the sheet up over his face. He pressed his fingers into his ears. But it wouldn't work. Nothing like that would do any good. You couldn't shut off indignity such as this. You couldn't block out such an intrusion of spirit and human dignity by burying your head, or pressing your ears. You could try, but not very long, not when you knew it wouldn't do any good. He had no idea now what time it was, how long he had been here. He had tried to spot a wall clock somewhere in the cocktail lounge, but none was within view. That didn't help either, this timeless feeling. That only enhanced the similarity it all had to a persisting nightmare. It was a gnawing murmur all around him. It was like a hollow tooth. The softened sounds of their voices going on and on was maddening because they were softened. Softened for him, yet they were still there. He felt like an irritated baby sleeping while adults talked, pretending to soften their voices. His body was slimy with sweat, and his head pounded with a dull ache. He jumped out of bed and ran straight through Laura to the wall and jerked the phone from its slot. He yelled into it. "This is Professor Larry Kane. Room #. I'm checking out. Send someone up here with a key! I said send someone up here..." "We understand, Professor Kane." "Then you'll send someone up immediately with a key!" "Please don't get upset. The Staff has been busy, but now the Staff will soon be with you." The Staff... "I just want a key, I want to get the hell out of here!" Kane yelled several times into the phone after the click, but no voice came back. He had grabbed up the table, the metal table at the head of the bed, and flung it into the wall before he realized what he was doing. The shadows moved toward him. Phil, Laura, Ben, Jetiny, Lawrence, Lucille, all the others, nameless, what did it matter anyway, their names? They were smiling, holding out their arms to him. Compassionate, sympathy, they had it all. All they wanted to do was help him. He ran through them back toward the bathroom. It was still full of men from the downstairs john. "What time is it?" Kane yelled at someone with a paper towel pressed to his eyes. "'Bout three I'd say, what a night!" "Three -- " Three o'clock in the morning, but the fact was Kane wasn't sure about the day. He backed out of the bathroom, slammed the door. "The Staff is ready, Prof," Phil said. "We're all with you, aren't we?" Laura giggled. The closet. Kane ran into the closet and slammed the door. There was something immediately cozy in the narrow black confines of the closet. Either closet walls weren't TV screens, or they had decided to let him sleep at last. Probably the former. Better convert closets to Television. In case kiddies misbehave and get locked in the closet, they'll not be alone in there... He curled up on the floor in the pitch blackness and almost immediately began to drift off into sleep. The narrow darkness tightened around him like a thick comforting blanket on a cold night... Sometime later -- he had no idea how much time had passed -- a light was blinking at his lids. He opened them slowly and stared into a flickering yellow eye. A doorhinge creaked. Up there somewhere a voice said pleasantly: "Professor Kane, your Staff is here." "Staff?" he whispered, trying to see above the blinking light. "We're here." T HE TV walls were dead now, but that was hardly consoling. The overhead light was glaring with an intense whiteness. The three members of the Staff were busy, and Kane was being Tested. Kane had emerged from the closet determined to remain as rational as possible, to control his emotions, and find out what he could about his human rights as an individual. That was easy to find out and only required a few questions honestly and frankly answered. As a minority, Kane had no rights whatsoever. He had one big right, the right to think as the majority did. But that didn't count for much yet because Kane was ill, maladjusted and had anti-group feeling. The Staff was going to test him, find out what was wrong with Kane. And this of course implied that when they found out what was wrong, the difficulty would be taken care of. The Staff was kind, considerate, almost excessively polite considering the circumstances. They were young efficient men with crewcuts, briefcases, and wearing tight conservative dark suits. Only slight differences in build distinguished them one from another, but this superficial outward difference only seemed to emphasize the Staffs basic unity, its Group Spirit, its Staff Consciousness. Every public institution, every business establishment, every school, club, hotel, factory, office building -- in short, everywhere that people congregated in official Groups, there was a regular Staff on duty twenty-four hours a day. They were Integrators. Glorified personnel men. Electrodes were clamped on Kane's head and wrists. Something was strapped around his chest. Wires ran into a miniature Reacto. A stylus began to make jagged lines on a strip of moving tape. "We're getting a complete personality checkup," the Staff said. It was indeed complete. It was as complete as a personality checkup could be short of an actual dissection. Kane looked at countless inkblots. He was shown a great many pictures and whether he answered verbally or not was of no concern of the Staff. Whatever his reactions were, they were all analyzed by the machines. Words weren't necessary. The Staff had a shortcut to personality checkups. From the mind right into the machine. The Staff only interpreted the results, or maybe they didn't even do that. It was more likely that machines did that too. Kane protested for a while, but he was too tired to protest very long. He asked them a great many questions, and they answered them They were interested in his questions too. He was an interesting symptom, but actually he knew that they already had him pretty well tabbed. They answered his questions the way big-hearted adults answered inquisitive children. "We must," the Staff said, "determine why you don't fit in." Kane talked about his work, his theories, his years of devotion to what he had always considered to be a contribution to society. They hardly seemed interested. What good was all that -- astronomy and such -- when a man was not happy with others? "What about this aversion to people?" the Staff said, in a kindly way. "This -- well -- clinically, this de-grouping syndrome. This antagonism to the group spirit." "You mean my reaction to Phil and his friends?" "Your friends. Your Group," The Staff said. "But I don't dislike those people," Kane insisted. "Certainly, I have no aversion to them! Hell, I don't even know them." "But they're people," the Staff said. "Part of the family of man." "I know that. But I was tired and wanted to sleep!" "You'll find the true group Spirit," the Staff said. "Let us ask you this, Professor Kane. If you really had no aversion to people generally, why would you object to them being with you? Why should the presence of people disturb your sleep? Wouldn't a Healthy person enjoy sleeping with others merely because they were there? Doesn't one sleep best among friends, knowing he isn't alone, knowing even his sleep is shared -- " There was a great deal more, but it all boiled down to the same thing. Kane was wrong. And he didn't have the right to be wrong. They, or rather it, the Staff, seemed to concentrate on the whole question of why Kane had ever volunteered for a job demanding extreme isolation in the first place. The point was that apparently Kane had been anti-social, a Group Spirit deviant from the beginning. Kane tried to explain it, calmly at first, then more emotionally. Either way, he knew that whatever he said was only additional grist to their syndrome recording mill. Being alone in order to do certain kinds of work demanding isolation seemed to be beside the point. The point was that being on the Moon deprived a man of Groups. It was a kind of psychological suicide. Now that he was back home they would straighten him out. The question of returning to the Moon was ignored. To them, this was an absurdity. What did Kane want? Kane was in no position to know what he really wanted -- yet. They were going to help him decide what he really wanted. But they already knew that. It only remained for Kane to agree with them. The majority was always right. He explained his values to them. They listened. He told them that as far as he was concerned the social setup was now deadly, a kind of self-garrisoned mental concentration camp in which free thought was impossible. A stagnate, in fact a regressive state of affairs. Proficiency in skills would go, science would die. A herd state. Individuality lost. Depersonalized. Tyranny of the Majority. Integration mania. Collective thinking. Mass media. But Kane wasn't happy, that was the important thing wasn't it? Could a knowledge of how rapidly the Universe was expanding contribute to the happiness of a human being living on Madison Avenue in Manhattan? Obviously the answer to that was no. Kane was going to be happy. He wouldn't concern himself with the stars any more. He wouldn't practice a self-imposed barren isolation of himself any more. Kane was going to be happy. He was going to be one of the Group. Time went by. He was given sedatives. He slept at last. He awoke and was tested and went to sleep again, many times. He was fed too, given injections with needles of energy and vitamins and proteins and glucose and carbohydrates, because he refused to eat any other way. Vaguely he remembered episodes of babbling under the influence of hypnotic drugs. He kept remembering the briefcase. In a dream the Group had it, throwing it around among them like a basketball. The clasp broke. The papers, thousands of papers spilled out and drifted away over New York and Kane was running through a maze looking up at them and then he was lost. Now he knew what had happened to the other Moon ships, and to the rest of the Captain's crew, where they had gone to and never come back from. Space was lonely and dark. Space was empty. Space was frightening. They had gone back to the closeness and warmth and security of their Group. How many were there left such as the Captain, and Kane -- Kane for a while yet perhaps? How many were there? Could he escape? At some unrelated point on the Testing chart, the Staff closed up their briefcases, politely said goodbye, and left. The data would be run through more machines. Kane would be happy. All he had to do was wait. start and stared at the prison of his room. The walls began coming alive. Phil, Laura, Lucille, Herby, Clarence, Jenny, Ben, the happy happy Group, always there, always waiting, always reliable, sharing everything, pleasure and pain. "How we feeling now, Prof," Phil yelled. He was stark naked. "You look so cuddly," Laura giggled, and for an instant there, Kane could almost feel her snuggling in beside him. Kane lay there in a dim superimposed puzzle of furniture, moving forms, comers of rooms jutting out of the wrong walls, bodies walking through beds and one another, and then a naked figure curving into the air, falling toward him in a graceful arc, down, getting larger and larger, plunging right for Kane's face. Kane rolled frantically. And then somewhere under him he heard a splash and there was the vague ripple of unreal water as Phil swam away across his cool blue pool. There -- that was Laura, only in a boudoir, standing before a mirror wearing only a pair of very brief panties, and nothing else. Her reflection in the mirror smiled at Kane as she brushed her hair. "Morning, Prof honey. How we feeling this morning?" It was morning. Some morning on some day during some year. There was Lucille on this morning lying in a sunchair, her black hair shining in the sunlight somewhere. Probably in the Group house at Sunny Hill. In a while now, Kane knew, the Group would all go away together to their office, and they would do their work, concentrating on getting along together until they could return to Sunny Hill together. Lucille was reading a newspaper, and she glanced up at Kane. There was a pale line around her mouth and she pulled her eyes quickly away as though she didn't want to look at him. She wasn't like the others. She was different. Of course. It had to be a matter of degree. Nothing was black and white. There had to be differences of opinion, some degree of individuality -- somehow. Somewhere. Perhaps Lucille -- "Good morning, good morning to all of us!" Kane shouted suddenly. "Did we have a good rest, Prof?" Phil was yelling from his pool. He seemed greatly pleased with Kane's enthusiastic social response. Not that Kane was really trying to fool anybody. He was pretty sure the Staff wouldn't be fooled. Somewhere the machines were scanning the data. Soon, the Staff would have a full analysis of Kane, what was wrong, and what would make it right. What he should have done, and what he should be. Jenny and Ben were making love on a couch. Kane tried to keep on watching them as though he suffered no embarrassment, but it was impossible. "I've a full schedule planned for today," Phil yelled up. "Soon we'll all be going to the Office. You'll be going with us soon too, Prof!" He would belong to the happy Group. Sharing everything. But maybe it wouldn't be this happy Group. Maybe the machines would decide that he belonged in some other Group. Whatever Group it was it would be happy. That was a fact. Could he escape ? Could he, perhaps, get back to the La Guardia Pits, and the Captain of the Moonship? The windows still barred, paneled in metal. The door locked. If he managed to get out of this Single, say, and out of the Midtown Hotel, and into the street, then what? That didn't matter. If he could only get that far -- Laura was standing there naked, close to Kane. "We're having our wedding at five," she whispered. "Who?" Kane said, startled. "Ben and Jenny. They're right for all of us together." From a number of rooms, people were watching Ben and Jenny being right for all of us together, but Kane couldn't look. "See us all," Laura shouted and dived through the floor. A spray of water spilled up and fell unfelt through Kane's flinching torso. Ben and Jenny ran away. Kane was practically alone with Lucille. It was the first time in he had no idea now how long that he had been this much alone with any one other person. She glanced rather sadly at Kane above the paper she was reading. "You know how I feel, Lucie?" She nodded, almost imperceptibly. "How can you stand it, all the time this way?" he asked. "Some of us learn to be in it, with a part of us out of it. A kind of selfhypnosis, a retreat of some kind. Into fantasy, that's what it really is. But -- but I don't think any of us can keep on doing it forever. We will all give way completely -- sooner or later." "I've got to get out," Kane said. "Do you want to get out?" "It's impossible to get out." "I've got to try." "What's the use of trying if you know you can't get away? Where can anyone go?" "There must be people who break away," Kane said. "There have to be." "There's supposed to be an underground, some secret group of some kind that helps people get out." "Get out -- where? Out of the country?" "It's pretty much like this everywhere. But there are supposed to be areas where it isn't. Islands somewhere. Hidden places right here in the country. Supposed to be places in the Kentucky Mountains, and in New Mexico, places like that." "The Moon," Kane said. "That's a place I know of. I've been there." Her eyes were bright for a moment. "I know. It must have been wonderful. Why on Earth did you ever leave?" "I didn't know what it was like here. And -- my wife died. I wanted and needed another wife. More than a wife really. Someone who could share that kind of a life with me, someone who would be interested in the work too." She turned quickly back to the paper. "You might be able to get out of the hotel," she said. "But you would be too conspicuous." "Because I would be traveling alone?" "Yes." "If you came with me, there would be two of us. We wouldn't be conspicuous that way." He saw the flush move up through her face. "Is that the only reason?" "You know it isn't." She knew it. They both knew it and had probably known it for a long time. They had a lot in common, a minority of two. And then he remembered. She wasn't really there in the Mid town with him. She was in Sunny Hill, wherever that was. They couldn't leave inconspicuously together because they weren't together now, and they couldn't get together without the Gang being together too. The rooms, furniture, sounds, everything began to fade. "Goodbye," Lucille said. "Get sick or something," Kane said quickly. "Don't go with the Group to work. Stay there, wherever you are! Stay there -- " Faintly, her voice came to him out of a kind of melting mask of a face. "I'll try -- " Kane was alone in the single room the door opened. The smiling Staff came in and shut the door. The three of them stood there happily holding their briefcases. "We're happy to report that we have completed your personality breakdown." The word was a bit premature, Kane thought. "What is it?" he asked. "Excellent," the Staff beamed. "You should never have been an astronomer. You took up that profession as a way of escaping from people. Actually, of course, you love people and hate your profession. "Have you determined what I should be if not an astronomer?" "Naturally, it's all in the breakdown." "What is it?" "Generally, you prefer physical work, not mental work. Mental work is a constant strain on your psychological balance. You have done it neurotically to reinforce your need to avoid people." "Physical work? What kind?" "Specifically, it seems that you are best suited for the profession of plumbing." "Plumbing?" Kane said. 'Tlumbing what?" "Plumbing, the art of pipe-fitting, the study of water mains, sewage lines, and so forth." "Plumbing." Kane said. "Of course, you react antagonistically to it now. But that will be changed." Kane had nothing against plumbers or plumbing. Once, as a kid, he remembered having a long interesting talk with a plumber who was unstopping the kitchen sink. He had fascinating tools, and at that time, Kane had said he would be a plumber when he grew up. But he had also wanted to be any number of other things when he grew up, including an astronomer. Now he had no desire whatsoever to be a plumber. Kane drew the metal bedside table up hard and the edge of it caught number one of the Staff under the chin. Kane attacked, violently. He did it knowing that something more was at stake than his life -- his identity. Number one fell down on his knees and whimpered. He wasn't hit hard. But he squatted there blubbering as though he had suffered some horrible shock. Numbers two and three gaped as though equally shocked without ever having been hit at all. That was Kane's initial advantage. The Staff seemed incapable of understanding that anyone would do what Kane was doing. Kane hit number two four times before number two covered up his face with his hands and started to cry. Kane ran him into the closet and locked the door. Number three swung his briefcase at Kane's head, fluttering his other hand wildly. Kane was heavier than he should have been because he was accustomed to the Moon. But he was desperate and that was some compensation. He had some experience, a very little, as a boxer in college, but that had been years ago. But as little experience as he had at this sort of thing, he was way ahead of number three. Number three kept swinging his briefcase, and Kane hit him on the chin and then in the stomach and then on the back of the neck. Number three lay unconscious on the floor. Kane stared at his bleeding knuckles a moment, then dragged Number one up onto his feet. "You're going to help me," Kane said. "We're getting a saucer and then we're going to Sunny Hill. You know where Sunny Hill is?" Number one ran his hand nervously through his dark brushcut He had a boyish face that seemed deeply insulted by what Kane had done. Insulted and shocked as though he had been a good boy all his life and then someone had slapped his hand -- for no reason at all. Kane doubled his fists. Number one winced and looked shocked again, and very frightened. A great deal more frightened than anyone would be who was afraid only of physical injury. "Yes, that's part of a big Group Housing Project downtown." "Where can we get a saucer?" "The roof." "Unlock the door," Kane said. "And just pretend everything is happy and that we're relating beautifully to one another. Now listen -- I'll kill you if you try anything else. I hope you believe it because I really will. What you fellows intend doing with me, as far as I'm concerned, is worse than murder." They stepped onto one of several saucers decorating the roof of the Midtown Hotel. The rotary blades in the ten foot platform whirred under them, and Kane felt the saucer rise up to a thousand feet, then dip downtown. The air was full of them and only some kind of sixth-sense seemed to keep them from jamming into one another. There was never less than two on a saucer. And Kane noticed that most of the saucers were flying in Groups like aimless geese. Kane jumped from the saucer and ran across the roof landing of the Sunny Hill project building. There were a number of them like huge blocks arranged in some incomprehensible plan. Kane glanced back to see number one leaping from the saucer and running in the opposite direction. Kane ran on toward the elevator. He knew he didn't have much time, but what bothered him was the authority he was running against. Public opinion was a general attitude, not a cop car, or a squad of officers with guns. Getting out of line, Kane figured, was usually its own punishment -- isolation, loneliness, social ostracism. But what about the exception? The guy who fought conformity and the majority opinion. Who would they put on Kane? Or what? It would help to know what he was running from. What concrete force or power would try to stop him. Then he saw her running toward him. Her face was flushed and the wind blew her dress tightly against her slim body as she stopped and looked at him. He took hold of her arm. "We've got to hurry," she said. "The Group knows I've run away. (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Ed Emsh What had caused the people of the crystal city to perish ? And why had their remains disappeared so completely that not even their bones were left? sphere of crystalline cause and effect. It was the sound of glass chimes in a summer wind captured and set to architecture. It was the only child of a lonely star, and it was moonless. It was also dead. Donant didn't know how long he'd been walking. An hour, perhaps. Maybe longer. There was a timelessness about the eternal streets and the endless edifices, and he'd left his watch in the ship, remembering only his compass. But the compass was by far the more important item: with its needle never deviating from the magnetic lode in the ship's heart, he could never get lost -- not even in a city that covered an entire planet. Not even in a dead city. Donant was a cartographer and much of his life had been spent in the unexplored sectors of the galaxy where civilizations were rare and cities even rarer. Nevertheless he was used to cities. He knew the Cities of the Plane intimately -- the metropolises of Mars and Venus and the collective edifices of Earth. But he was used to cities with limited boundaries, not cities that covered whole land masses and linked crystalline arms across seas. Moreover he was used to cities with people in them. He came presently to a structure more striking than the others. Like them it was constructed of a crystallike material and seemed to have been cast from a single gigantic mold ; but there was a quality about it that set it aside. Gazing up at the prismatic facade, Donant got the impression that the long dead architect had used an emotional rather than an architectural blueprint. The facade transformed the shifting rainbows. Poignant lines blended together to form a frozen waterfall of windows and balconies, cornices and ledges. The effect was dazzling. It was also tinselly. Donant wondered why. Just before him was the entrance, a huge triangle cut into the base of the waterfall. There were no doors. Donant hesitated a moment, then climbed the crystalline stairs and entered the building. The huge chamber into which he stepped should have awed him, but it didn't. The light of day seeping colorfully through the prismatic walls was abetted by a cluster of blazing lights suspended from the dome. In the center of the floor a lofty statue stood upon a square pedestal, and around the pedestal were circular rows of chairs. Beyond the chairs, balconies rose, tier on tier, to the point where the walls ended and the dome began. Everything -- chairs, statue, walls, dome -- was constructed of the same crystalline substance, everything was immaculate -- and everything was dead. A council room, Donant thought. Perhaps the council room. He chose an aisle and walked down it to the pedestal. The chairs substantiated the evidence of the doors and windows of the other buildings he had passed: the race that had built the city had been humanoid and of approximately the same stature as Earthmen. The pedestal turned out to be a speaker's platform as well as the base for the statue; steps were cut into it for the convenience of the speaker. Donant did not climb the steps. There was nothing he had to say, and even if there had been, there was no one to whom he could have said it. Instead he stood at the end of the aisle, gazing up at the statue. The statue represented a woman, a beautiful woman. Alien though her beauty was, Donant was impressed by it. Her body was thin, but unmistakably mammalian. Her features were small, almost tiny, yet exquisite in their flawless perfection. She was wearing a simple white tunic and the exposed areas of her flesh were tinted -- no, permeated -- with the pink-gold flush of living human tissue. For a moment Donant almost forgot he was looking at a statue. Her pose intrigued him. Her right arm hung gracefully at her side, but her left arm was raised, and suspended from her fragile fingers at a level with her eyes was a horizontal bar. Suspended from the bar, in turn, were two shallow cups, one at each end. The bar was slightly canted, and one of the cups was lower than the other. Scales, Donant thought. Primitive scales. He craned his neck to see their contents, but he was too close to the pedestal. He walked back up the aisle to the entrance, turned and tried again. The angle was still wrong: all he could see was a sparkle in one scale and a flash of green in the other. He found stairs that led to the balconies, climbed them. He went as high as he could, to the beginning of the dome itself. Then he looked at the scales again. This time their contents were clearly visible. In one of them, the lower, heavier one, was a dazzling crystalline cube. In the other, the one found wanting in the balance, was a green knife. Curiosity had motivated Donant's landing. Extinct planetary cultures were none of his business. None of his official business, anyway. But he liked cultural problems, and he particularly liked this one. A dead city, a crystalline cube, and a green knife... In the street again, walking, he attacked the problem. The planet was dead; therefore the inhabitants had either left it or perished on it. If the first alternative were the case, then they must have had space travel. Donant shook his head. A race of people, in order to develop space travel, must have stepping stones. Its imagination has to mature gradually. Without the moon as the first stepping stone man might not have been able to reach Venus and Mars. Without Venus and Mars it was extremely doubtful if he could have reached Mercury and Pluto; and without the confidence that those first stepping stones gave him, the prospect of traveling over four light years to Alpha Centauri would have overawed him, crippled his as yet immature imagination, and he would have gone on living on Earth, crowding himself into ever expanding cities, turning the energy that would have gone into the building of better and better spacecraft into the building of better and better buildings, into the creation of better and better building materials, till at last he found the ultimate material and with it, possibly, his justification for existence. This planet had no moon. It was the only offspring of its sun, and the nearest star was forty-one light years away. No, Donant concluded, its inhabitants definitely had not had space travel. That left alternative number two: the inhabitants had perished, every single one of them, and so completely that not even their bones remained. Why? Donant stared at the shining streets and the immaculate buildings. The gentle throb of entombed machines coursed rhythmically through the crystalline bricks beneath his feet. But the streets were as devoid of life as they were of dust, and the doors of the buildings were closed, the windows faceless. Plague? W eltschmerz? Moral decay? Donant shook his head again. His directionless walk had brought him to a different sector of the city. The buildings here were slightly more functional in appearance, but they were facsimiles of each other and they stood shoulder to shoulder like rows of pretty girls, each with the same make-up, the same girth of bust and buttock, and the same stereotyped smile. At the base of each, on a level with the street, was a little sunken doorway fringed with crystalline lattice. Apartment houses, Donant thought. Or at least their equivalent. Coincidentally with the thought came another thought: when a problem as a whole proves insoluble, concentrate on a single aspect of the problem. In this case, a single building. He chose the building at random and stepped into its sunken entrance, intending to try the door. But before his fingers even touched the featureless surface, the door swung inward and concealed lights flicked on to reveal an empty foyer. Donant stepped across the threshold and the door closed behind him. The furniture was simple and -- inevitably -- of the same material as everything else in the city, on the whole planet for that matter. Against one wall a blue table stood on legs as slender as flower stems. There were blue chairs to match, and a small blue cloud of a couch. On the wall opposite the door was a vertical bank of buttons. Donant stepped forward and depressed the lowest one. The wall behaved as he had thought it would: it split vertically, and the two halves receded. But instead of the elevator he had expected, he saw a long corridor lined at regular intervals with doors. He frowned. He was a logical man and he liked logical phenomena. So far nothing on the planet had made sense, and he knew he would never be able to leave till he forced it to make sense. As he stood there the two halves of the wall came back together in a seamless junction. Annoyed, Donant depressed the second lowest button. This time there was a pause before the wall enacted its alternative role as a door -- a pause and a sense of increased weight. Donant smiled then. It was he who had been illogical, not the builders. What he had mistaken for a mere foyer was really a foyer-elevator. The second floor corridor was identical in all outward respects to the first. But Donant was a systematic as well as a logical man, and a systematic investigation of the building virtually demanded that he begin on the ground floor. When the door became a wall again he depressed the lowest button and a moment later stepped out into the first floor corridor. He stood immobile for a moment, listening. There was no sound except the almost inaudible purring of invisible machinery. Behind him the foyer-elevator door once more blended into a wall. He started walking down the corridor. Light emanated softly from an indeterminate source, seemed to be a part of the crystalline walls themselves. He paused before the first door. It was featureless, just as the street door had been, hardly distinguishable from the wall itself. He stood before it confidently, waiting for it to open. He stood there for some time but nothing happened. Naturally not, Donant thought, irked with himself. The street door was indiscriminate, admitted anyone. This door was probably attuned to the ex-tenant's personality or emotional pattern. This door didn't know him from Adam. Donant drew his incandescer, dialed it to maximum intensity and began to bum out a section large enough to permit his passage. The crystalline material had an incredibly high melting point, but it cowered before the blue-white wrath of the incandescer beam. Blue smoke coiled up, and automatic suction fans hummed into action and whisked it away. When the section of the door broke free and fell to the floor, the corridor walls saturated it with an acridsmelling fluid. Donant edged through the opening into the room beyond. It was a large room, well ventilated and well furnished. Opposite the door a big oval window looked out into a courtyard. All of the chairs in the room were arranged so that they faced the window, but the chairs were empty, the room was empty, and the courtyard was empty. He approached the window more closely and peered out. The courtyard was a small one, surrounded by high featureless walls. Donant started. The walls, unlike every thing else he had seen in the city, were not made of the crystalline substance. They were made of metal, a dull, gray, familiar metal. They were made of lead. Presently Donant lowered his eyes. The grass of the courtyard was a sickly green. There was a flower garden to the left, and the alien flowers drooped tiredly in the bright sunlight. Directly opposite the window there was a tree. Donant found himself staring at the tree. It was an alien tree, botanically remote from the elms and maples he had known on Eartl but it wasn't the alien quality that gave him pause, that filled him with foreboding. It was something else. The tree was dead. The other two rooms of the apartment were small and windowless. They contained padded oval platforms and were obviously sleeping quarters. There wasn't a particle of dust in them -- or a particle of life. Donant returned to the corridor. He experienced a sense of wrongness. After a moment he noticed that the section of the door he had burned out had disappeared, and then he noticed that the burned edges of the door itself, into which the section had fitted, had receded back to where the crystalline material was unaffected. As he watched, the material closed back in upon itself as though the orifice were a wound and the wound were healing. In a little while the door was whole again and all evidence of his vandalism had vanished. A self-healing building? A selfhealing city? Then it must be a sentient city too. The crystalline material, despite its deceptive appearance, bore no relationship to crystal. It was a complex alloy that the extinct race had developed, an alloy that possessed therapeutic qualities and an awareness of decomposition. And its awareness was not confined to its own decomposition. It included and acted upon everything detrimental to the cleanliness of the streets and structures which the metal comprised. For the first time Donant understood why there was no dust or corrosion in a city that had probably been dead for years, if not centuries. And he guessed why there were no bodies, no bones. A most meticulous metal. Not only did it clean up after itself, it cleaned up after its creators as well. Donant burned a section out of the next door and stepped into the next apartment. It was a duplicate of the first -- three rooms, the furniture in the largest room grouped with the oval window as the central motif, and the window framing a view of walls, grass, flowers, and tree -- Donant found himself staring at the tree again. It was unquestionably the same tree, its twisted trunk and leafless branches the same bone white in the glaring sunlight. And yet it stood just outside the window, exactly in front of the window, and that was manifestly impossible because it stood exactly in front of the window of the room he had just left. After a moment he dropped his eyes to the lawn. It was a wretched lawn by any standards. In some places it had faded to a bleached yellow, in others it had died out altogether. Even in the few places where it still contained a semblance of life, it was singularly unimpressive. The individual blades of grass were asymmetrical, thick on one side, dwindling to a sharp edge on the other, tapering upward to a lopsided point -- Suddenly Donant found himself thinking of the statue he had seen in the council chamber -- the statue and the scales, and the objects the scales contained. A crystalline cube and a green knife -- Or a building brick and a blade of grass? Abruptly another incongruity about the courtyard caught his eye. When he had entered the apartment building the sun had long since passed its meridian. That being so, part of the courtyard should have been in shadow, but the only shadows on the dying lawn were the shadows cast by the branches of the dead tree, and they lay directly beneath the branches themselves... Donant left the room, walked down the corridor, took the foyerelevator to the sixth floor and burned down the first door he came to. There was another living room and another oval window, and beyond the window, on the same level as the floor, were the tree, the lawn, and the flowers. Donant was not surprised. He walked over to the window and put his foot through it. The huge tube popped and showered in white dust to the floor, and the crystal-like alloy devoured the dust the way it devoured all dust, all dirt, all flesh that had ceased to live. The tree and the lawn and the flowers became a medley of wires and tubes and resistors, and Donant knew why the city was dead. ten thousand feet and threw it into glide. He turned up the scanner to a radius of five thousand miles and attuned it to the characteristics of the place he wanted to find. Buildings and streets and streets and buildings flowed forever beneath him ; oceans and causeways, and automatic factories that once had processed the food that had been drained from the seas. He flew west, keeping pace with the sun, and the fading afternoon traveled with him. Two subjective hours passed before the scanner gave the sharp buzz he was waiting for. Darkness began to creep in from the twilight belt as he arrowed the ship down to the dot of greenness shining like a verdant star in the scintillating wastes of the city. The ship was small, and he brought it down on the moribund lawn. He got out and walked over to the dead tree. The tree was a pitiful thing in the lengthening shadows -- a desiccated corpse, an unburied cadaver. Donant stood beneath it, thinking of the race that had killed it -- and thereby killed themselves. They had had to make a decision, and the statue in the council chamber symbolized that decision. The had weighed nature against cities and they had found nature wanting in the balance; and their decision had been irrevocable because if the ultimate building material they had created destroyed all dirt, all decayed matter -- it destroyed topsoil too . Why, then, hadn't they chosen a different metal? Donant thought he knew the answer. Aside from the fact that the new alloy had promised them an architectural utopia, there had been another consideration: over-population. No matter what building material they had chosen, the end result would have been the same: a planetary city. The only alternative would have been birth control, and birth control, Donant knew, was contrary to the survival urge of any race of people. The dead race had overlooked the essential truth that, while machines could take over the function of physical photosynthesis, they could not take over the function of spiritual photosynthesis; that a man cannot live solely for the sake of his own creations, and that he had to have other creations to inspire him, to reanimate his will to go on living; natural creations above and beyond his ability to duplicate. The beauty of the council building -- and the beauty of the city as a whole -- was tinselly because it was the product of creators without a criterion, creators who were creatively impotent. And, Donant knew, it was only a short step from creative impotence to sexual impotence. Sunoikismos, he thought. Carried to extremes, it resulted in tragedy which the ancient Greeks had never dreamed of. For if it was true that man could not live entirely alone, neither could he live entirely with his fellow men. He could usurp his green lands with his cities, and he could find sustenance for his belly in his seas. He could create a complex society and learn to live in harmony with his neighbors. And as long as he did not completely lose contact with the death-to-life cycle of the earth he could find the strength and the inspiration to go on living, reproducing, laughing, loving, creating. But when he covered up and killed the last but one area of green land and in desperation televised that area to his tens of billions of sterile cubicles, he was very close to death. Donant touched the trunk of the tree. His fingers sank deep into the dead tissue. The grass around his feet was gray and lifeless in the shadows. He walked slowly towards the ship. A three dimension televisor camera stood on spidery legs on the fringe of the lawn. Its glass eye stared at him solemnly as he passed, its lens glinting forlornly in the last rays of the lonely sun. Beyond the high lead walls, that had failed to perform their function, the crystalline edifices stood, tall and mute and empty. Donant lifted the ship. The dot of dying grass and dead tree faded into the building shadows. The buildings coalesced, became a meaningless mass. When he left the atmosphere Donant set his coordinates so that the ship would emerge amid green worlds. Then he hit the transphotic -- Hard.    Earth by Dr. Walther Riedel in the Dec. IF. Dearest Enemy Well trained actors are taught the old tradition that the show must go on. But what's the point of it all when your audience is very  very dead? was a buzzing sound. It kept repeating. The gentle throb of it vibrated his eardrums; the vibrations registered somewhere at the bottom edges of his brain. Buzzzz. Insistently, like a wasp. Like a trapped wasp .  . But there were no wasps in the streamlined metal shell of Vanguard-I. Better answer another part of his brain whispered. Better answer... they want to tell you what to do... God! Some sweat oozed from the dark bunches of his eyebrows, fogged the binocular eye-piece of the orbitsynchronized refractor, but he kept watching, he could not stop watching. Buzzz ! Buzzzz! Red gouts of flame, as big as a pin-head, as big as a shirt-button, as big as -- damn the fogging-up! No, no it was the mushrooms, not the fogging; you could count them, like puffs of gunsmoke along a firing-line stippling the Atlantic seaboard, now branching, riddling westward -- others drifting eastward from the Pacific as though groping toward a pre-planned rendezvous. Buzzzz! Buzzzz! He would answer. There would be the sound of another man's voice and that would make it all real. If he silenced the buzzer and listened to the voice it would be real and not a final training-film; the films would be over, the lectures over, the flight-tests over, the eliminations over and he and Streeter chosen and Streeter dead and buried at Space and now he was alone up in Vanguard-I... Vanguard-I was "up" and Earth Illustrated by Paul Orban was "down # and both were real. Beyond the buzzing, both would be real. The strong young voice was an old voice as it answered the buzzing, as it gave sound to words for the "Home Plate, Home Plate, this is Mrs. Grundy, over... "Mrs. Grundy this is Home Plate. Are you reading? Are you ready for a circus or is all your money gone? Over... "Ready for a circus. Regret delay in acknowledging. I -- was in Observation, over . # "Mrs. Grundy, your Daddy-o wants to talk to you so bye bye baby... General Knight himself. Knight himself to talk to him... so it was that bad Of course it was that bad! "Mrs. Grundy can you read, over..." Knight's voice. It sounded calm. It sounded unruffled. You had to know Knight, you had to have heard him often to know that it was not calm, that it was not at all unruffled... "Even the small print Daddy-o, over... "No words twice so baby make marks -- # Thorn's hand flashed to the card-punch and magnetic-tape unit switches, flicked them to ONnot taken completely off balance; retaliation now in progress as you have probably already observed or will observe in course of orbital passage. Plan Able Zebra effective immediately..." The words were coming so fast they were slurred, and Knight was exaggerating his own Alabama accent. "Expect report once each turn..." He would not have needed the recording or even words twice. Each of Knight's directions was graven into him as it was spoken. To cease all scientific observation... r and recording at once; to begin military observation of the Enemy and his puppet-states, and all possibly-discernible activities, immediately. To remember that as the coast of California appeared on his horizon he was to begin transmitting in code, and that he would finish transmitting before the Atlantic coast disappeared over the horizon behind him. To remember that his stores of fuel were for orbitcorrection only, to be used for effecting an Earthside landing only upon explicit and properly-coded order, or upon threat of otherwise unavoidable destruction. To calculate present stores of food concentrate and air to the hour if possible, not forgetting that with Streeter gone the time-lapse between rendezvous with the supply rocket should be at least doubled. To remember a thousand things; things he already knew by rote... but the tape and card-punch units clicked softly away, recording, recording... "... and Mrs. Grundy here's a morsel for you -- you may have a new neighbor in your block but not like you at all -- there's probably a world between you -- don't take any wooden nickels baby. Say good-bye to Daddy-o baby, over..." "Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy sees all and heard everything, out." The whole transmission had taken less than two minutes. Now one break, anyway. If, somehow, the Enemy had succeeded in getting up a satellite of his own, he had at least -- according to Knight -- sacrificed the ability to directly monitor Thorn's radio for invisibility. Vanguard-I was aloft for geophysical purposes only, according to the propaganda-pitch back home. But as far as Big Red knew, it was loaded to the locks with as much armament as a thing of its comparatively tiny size could carry. And as far as Thorn himself knew, nobody making geophysical observations had ever needed to do it through the tubes of missilelaunchers like the ones that were cuddled snugly in Vanguard-I's blunt forehull... Such little thoughts whipped quickly through his mind as he tried to make it regain balance for the immediate tasks besetting him, because they were little and simple and easy to grasp and discard. They could keep him from going crazy. It was the bigger thoughts -- the bigger ones that might come later -- they were the kind he had to keep out of his head. Major Joshua Thorn began his work with the equipment, to modify it for use as Daddy-o had told him. He could do it automatically, do it in his sleep, do it blind. Couldn't watch and do it, though. Watch later. Think of the little things now that were easy while the equipment got automatically modified. Little things to keep the big ones like what was happening down there from tipping him over into the whirlpool of madness that was trying so hard to pull at him. Little things... JT Thom." "Yes sir." "This will be your Final Security interrogation. To be followed, upon its favorable completion, by Final Briefing. Before we begin, do you have any questions, Major?" The thick lenses of the glasses reflected the interrogation cubicle's harsh lighting and would not let him see accurately into the pale eyes that blinked behind them. But it was almost as though he and Intelligence, were old friends. And the sweating faces of the three G-# psychiatrists that gleamed at McQuine's left on the opposite end of the big oval-shaped conferencetable -- they were more than familiar. They had never thought he, Thom, was really sane. What really sane man who had flown twice too many missions in one war would volunteer to fly in the next that followed? What sane man would go begging for military flight-test assignments in weird ships that had never been flown anywhere but in a wind-tunnel and on computertapes. And what sane man -- God help him -- what man in his senses would ask to be fired a thousand miles off the Earth with only the knowledge that a thing the size of a basketball had circled the planet successfully for almost a year before it fell back and burned up? Had the Major ever had thoughts of -- well, of doing away with himself? Had the Major hated his father when he was young? Been afraid of girls? (Oh, is that a fact, Major? Well! Well, now...) Only the faces of the three Senate Committee members were different. But they usually were. "Yes sir, one question. It was my understanding -- and Captain Streeter's, I'm sure -- that Final Security and Briefing had been scheduled for about nine weeks from now. There has been no acceleration in the final phases of our program, so -- " "I, ah -- " McQuine interrupted smoothly "think that question might best be answered by your Final Briefing officers, Major. Now, any other questions?" "No sir." So that was it, all right. The rumors, as usual, had a germ of truth in diem. All rumors did. And these had been more persistent than most. Cold war not so cold anymore . General Adams transferring . That last note from Big Red -- didn't all get to the papers! Cold war not so cold anymore... "Now, Major, when you were a sophomore in high-school -- the book entitled # Wwld United was not on your required English or Political Science reading lists, was it?" "No sir, not as I recall, but -- " "Then why did you read it? You have admitted before that you did read it -- " Pause. All up to him. Every single word, every single inflection, up to him... "I took quite an interest in my studies, both in high-school and in college, sir, as I believe my records will show you. They'll show that I also read books relating to other courses that weren't a regular part of the curriculum..." Nodding. But looking him squarely in the face, hesitating just the right length of time. Then suddenly "Major Thorn do you swear here and now in the presence of witnesses that your allegiance to your country comes first above all with the sole possible exception of Almighty God?" "I do so swear..." And on and on... "... why did you major in the Fine Arts in high-school, switch to Engineering in college, then switch again to take your degrees in World History and Political Science... were you ever heard to say, or reported to have said, or did you in fact say... Major, I have here the records of..." The Senators had their questions. The psychiatrists had theirs. "... hesitation, Major, in firing upon an Enemy aircraft, even though disabled... guilt-feeling at destroying a city containing al# you told us that... training for five years now, and you realize... More and more and more, but it was not so difficult to keep his nerves straightened out as it had been the first time or the next time after that. He had told the absolute truth as far as he could possibly know it. So it was just a matter of giving the same answers he had always given. Let 'em make what they could of the truth... "Yes, Senator, I readily admit having written my senior essay on the basis of the book A World United . Yes sir, I studied philosophy and some foreign languages in college... No sir -- no sir, nothing like that. No. Never... And then hardly an hour after it was all over, less than an hour to relax for Streeter and himself, cooped up in a single room with cigarettes and magazines and nothing else and nobody else to talk to, hardly an hour, and then Final Briefing was underway. General Groton: Typical Orders of Procedure. General Simms: Technical Details. General Orton: Estimate of the Present Situation. Rumors , hell... And then the Secretary of Defense himself. "Major Thorn, Captain Streeter... There is probably little I can add to all that has been so thoroughly ingrained in you in your five years of training for this experiment, or learned by both of you, the hard way, in war. But there are certain points I feel I ought to emphasize personally... even though I know you've heard them many, many times before. "First, this is your country. In the adventure -- in the duty, that you are about to undertake, there must be no mistake that your nation comes above all other considerations! Now, I don't question your devotion, I merely re-impress... Pause. The man was good, all right. "Second, despite what you may have heard from -- from any of various sources in recent months, our cold-war Enemy is hard-pressed; he is desperate, and he is likewise determined. Determined as even you may not guess. Our Intelligence has learned that he has trained women to bear arms as well as children for his armies. He has trained them to march, to bivouac, to fly intercontinental bombers, to fly rocket interceptors, to go to the attack with men -- and on an equal basis, and in almost equal numbers. A point to remember, even from where you shall soon sit! Don't forget it. "Last, if -- and we all pray that it won't happen in this or any other generation -- but, if war should come -- if some unsuspecting midnight it should suddenly erupt (and such eruption would be on both our shores, smashing all of our greatest cities even as we retaliated) if this happens, gendemen, you must not forget one thing. You must not forget for an instant that in such a war, all the Enemy must die. "If I sound melodramatic forgive me, and bear with me. You both realize, I'm certain, that any Next War would be a war to the death. After which -- " the skillfully-modulated voice lowered, softened, paused, softened again... "After which, there will be only one of us left. Because there will be no time for armistice, for truce... It will be Our Side, or Theirs. Gendemen, it must be Ours ! So if there is war, I repeat, all the Enemy must die! "That's all I have, except to say good luck and God-speed." Very firm hand-shake for each of them, and Final Briefing was over. Even yet Joshua Thom could remember that first emotion shared by himself and Streeter after the effects of the four-G blast-off had worn away, after the tension of establishing orbit was eased, the first report made to Home Plate, and they were at last granted a moment's rest, a moment's respite to look back, to realize... Done it. Done it... They had done it! They could almost see themselves, the National Emblem emwhite metal skin, riding in dignified, silent triumph over all of the Earth. Now let anybody -- anybody, anybody anywhere (for weren't they above all of anywhere?) shake a fist, rattle a sabre! First Men in Space. Like God, somehow... They thudded each other on the back, they yelled things they could not remember, they let the tears flood down their cheeks without noticing, and they laughed ; they laughed long and loudly with words and wordlessly, and tjien they watched again, watched mighty Earth below them turning by some power that was not theirs to see on an invisible spit over Infinity. It was at the end of the fourth month that Streeter died. "Josh? Josh what's our trouble?" Young, earnest. Wiry and pinkcheeked and an eternal glint of excitement in his light blue eyes. Thorn kept studying the instruments as he answered, slowly, and without alarm in his voice. It wasn't much, but the bunching of his thick eyebrows had given him away. It always did. "Port reflector's all, I guess, Johnny. Been watching it; a hair off, so we're down just enough supply. Must have come out a little cockeyed when we popped it. Want to watch the panel a few minutes while I -- " "Second-guessed you, Skipper -- " Johnny Streeter was already halfway into a pressure-suit. "Just zip me up the back and check my petticoat..." Josh Thorn grinned, closed Johnny's suit, secured his soapbubble helmet. They'd both been Out before so it wasn't as if this was the first time. It was just that this was the first time it had to be done. "Suit-check, Johnny..." "I read you -- " crackled the bulkhead audio. "Air?" "Fourteen point seven psi, oxygen # per cent, nitrogen... They finished the check; all the complex machinery of BaggyDrawers was functioning perfectly. Then Instrument Check -- Methodically, Johnny's gauntleted mitts touched each magnetic hook on the wide girdle, named each implement suspended from it, replaced it. "Can I go out and play now?" "Be a good boy, Johnny." The lock hissed, cycled down, and then Thorn was hearing the metallic noises of Johnny's feet striding ponderously like some story-book Colossus along the "upper" hull, sternward, and then to port. "Be a cinch, Josh," the audio crackled. "If they're all this easy I'll feel like a draft-dodger! Maybe if I swab the deck while I'm ou -- " A sound that wasn't Johnny but it was. "Johnny? Johnny, do you read me?" Josh Thorn could feel sweat dripping on his stomach. "Johnny -- " He left the mike, made his way aft in clumsy haste, the simulated gravity confusing long-conditioned reflexes. And he listened beneath the hull section over which Johnny would be. Listened for a thump, a scrape of metal on metal, a vibration of life... Nothing. His own Baggy-Drawers seemed built for a midget with one leg as he struggled into it. Cursory check -- enough, she worked, she'd have to... Out. Aft. Port. Johnny... Johnny Streeter was still standing, but it was an odd kind of stance; the stance of a marionette on slack strings. Motionless. Standing by the reflector mast, some of his magnetized instruments clinging to it. And then he saw Johnny Streeter's helmet, and saw that it was no longer transparent. Josh tasted vomit on his lips. statisticians had said? About the same chance as a fatal auto accident, having a meteor hit you... E quipment converted, recalibrated for Earthside observation. Equipment checked. Emergency reflectors out (power drain still damned heavy) and radar full out; close-down scanners on, recording equipment humming, ready... Coast coming up in -- ohnine minutes, three-seven seconds. Now wait. You can watch while you wait... His eyes hurt, their sockets hurt as he pressed them too hard into the binocular eye-piece. Damn the fogging! Damn the blue fogging -- blue? No It filled the object-lens; it swirled, it calmed, it coalesced, it thinned, and there was a second's sight through it, and then Josh Thom was swinging the refractor in near-abandon on its panhead... there! Clear! Clear, you could see -- at the edges! Coming in again, drifting, drifting slowly, drifting... blind. His fingertips slipped, grabbed again, swung the telescope too violently, steadied. Blue fog, moving slowly, deliberately, and yet so fast, so unbelievably fast, why, they said it if it ever happened it would take weeks, months, maybe years, but they could've been wrong, so many things they couldn't have known... Blue. Cobalt blue. With some force of sheer power of reason, Joshua Thorn forced himself from the refractor; forced himself past the blue-faced scanners (maybe it was only an Enemy trick; an Enemy screen, the biggest blue smoke-screen ever made!) to overdue. Minutes overdue; they were waiting for him down there, waiting for his call, wondering if perhaps the screen had really fooled him, or if it were really effective in blocking his sight, or if... They were right down there, right underneath him, waiting under the blue smoke-screen. "Home Plate Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy over..." Crackling. "Home Plate Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy. Home Plate Home Plate what's the matter can't you read? Home Plate Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy, over... Over ! # Crackling. The meters... All right -- on the nose, right. What were they, asleep down there? Maybe the smokecould try a bounce and see. Narrow beam. Tight. Watch the screen... Pip. Pip. Pip. Getting through. Lousy smoke, just couldn't see through it... "Home Plate Home Plate Home Plate -- " He had beep around fifty times; he had counted. It had taken one hundred hours ; he had counted... He had transmitted steadily since the twentieth time, in the few languages he knew beside his own, for sixty hours; he had counted. He had only a whisper for a voice now, and only aching places where his ears were. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter. "Home Plate, this is Mrs. Grundy -- "Can anyone read me? Does anyone read me down there? " Kann jedermann. mich horen? Aniworten-Sie , bitte... " Repondez , repondez si vous mfentendrez... "Damn you can't you hear me He'd tried to keep track of the time. He thought it had been a month; maybe more, but a month anyway. And now the blue was solid over Earth, over all of it. There were still little swirls, little eddies of it here and there, but most of it -- already, most of it had settled like a fixed shell, like the quiescent sutt face of a stagnant pool. And somehow he'd accepted it. They were all dead down there. Cobalt blue had killed them all, killed them all... Funny. It had a rhythm to it. Cobalt blue had killed them all, killed them all, Cobalt bombs had killed them all -- But if they were all dead... And if he were not dead... Then he was the last human being left alive. That was crazy. Nobody could be -- nobody could be the last -- But there was nobody. Except him. So, it followed: therefore -- ergo: logically, if there was nobody, and if... God it was dark. God, it was quiet. And if... If you laugh you'll go crazy. If you don't laugh, if you don't laugh, if you -- hell, only one dose of barbiturate left in the First Aid stores... big thing, hard to swallow... and if there's nobody left, then... Sleep. three months, but he'd left it on regardless of the power drain just in case. He had divided the hours off into sleeping and eating periods, and he had just slept, and just eaten, and he'd shaved, and put on a fresh uniform. He had knotted the tie perfectly; his collar insignia were shined and pinned in place without a single wrinkle. He had it figured out. He could die of oxygen, if not food, starvation in five more months, three and one-half more days. And that would be the end of it. The hell it would! Who the hell did they think they were to do this to him... But he had his computers. He had his reference-tapes. He had his refractor and his scanners, and his s#r-charts and his store of fuel for orbital correction (ninety percent of which remained, because it had beep an almost perfect shot) and he had his brains. If you threw a stone off the rear of a moving train at a speed less than the train's speed forward, the stone would of course leave the train, but in relation to the ground would still be travelling in the train's direction. If you threw a satellite away from its path around Earth and directly into Earth's wake, but at a speed less than Earth's forward speed in its orbit, the satellite would break free, but would continue in Earth's orbital direction. And then with a brief side-blast, you could warp into an orbit around the Sun all your own, or -- into that of the planet Venus, if you chose... And beneath that eternal shell of cloud -- who knew? He had his computers. He had his reference-tapes. He had his refractor and his scanners, and his star-charts and his precious store of fuel. (Three-score years and ten, the Good Book said. Better than five months. Better than sitting and waiting. So he would fail -- no worse than what was Below.) And he had his brains. He worked methodically. He drew schedules : four hours of work, one for eating and relaxation; five hours more of work, and another for food and rest; six hours more of work, then seven for sleep, and then the cycle began again. By making a rhythm of it, he thought, rather than a program of perfectly equal work-periods, he would avoid monotony. With monotony would come despair, and with despair... Despair of course would kill him. And there was the thing in him that would not be killed; a thing that had been rooted as deep within his kind as Life itself, since the first Man had shambled erect on the face of the still-steaming Earth. He would survive. As Joshua Thom, and as Man. He would not let Man die yet. Not out here. Not in the cold dark alone. Somehow, Thorn thought, Man had earned a better way, a better place to die... But of course it was silly to think that Man should ever die, that be could ever die... Ridiculous. Baloney. Oh, you could kill a lot of people, certainly. Sure. But the whole race of Man -- nuts to the philosophers! The only thing they knew how to do was think l He worked methodically, ascertaining first that at the present point in her orbital swing, Venu  approaching as she was from aphelion, would be in close enough proximity as she passed by to be met within the time limit set by his remaining store of food and oxygen. And he ascertained secondly that he had sufficient "emergency" fuel (and this, he assumed, might be classified as an emergency of sorts?) to blast him out of orbit and into Earth's wake with barely sufficient speed to assure him of not falling back. If the computers weren't lying, there'd even be enough after that to warp him into the gradual, drifting arc that would intercept Venus in her path around the Sun, and then -- perhaps enough to effect landing. Barely, if at all. His taut mouth twitched in a humorless little smile. What an irony to actually succeed -- to make it all the way, first human in history to accomplish it -- and then, maybe one or two hundred feet above surface, to have the final drop of fuel run out... So... what was there to lose but the race of Man... And that anyway, eventually. Thirty-five more years (if he were lucky; he smiled again) appended to -- how many? a nervous twitch on the skin of Time. A spark in an eternal, allconsuming fire; a spark that died even as it flared its little second and then crumbled into ashes. and made a note of the date; it was # homs, October #. He did not even glance at the pale-blue thing that rolled and shimmered grotesquely a scant thousand miles on his left. Be damned to you! But you are damned already. So goodbye. His fingers finished the business of tightening the heavy buckle of his seat-belt, and then the punched the red firing-studs, and Vanguard-I broke her bondage. The ferroelectric brains of the computers considered silently; acted. The organic brain of the man hazed red, hazed darkly, and trusted, for it was powerless to do more save fight a primal struggle for consciousness. It could not regard the situation. It could not think: I am the first human being to fly Space. It could not think, of all the things that all the humans in all of history have ever done, I alone have done this. Roll the drums for Agamemnon, Roll the drums for Hercules! Roll the drums for Caesar, Alexander, for Amenhotep, Rameses... drum the drums for Khan, for Suleiman, for Plato, Aristides -- drum your drums for York and Tudor, Bacon, Michelangelo... For Austerlitz. For York town. Chickamauga, Ypres, and Anzio... Roll the drums. Roll the drums for me... Motors off. Click-hum, computers... Silently. Wheel your eternal wheeling, stars. Darkly. Cold. The screens showed white, thick white, and the fuel-pumps disgorged the remainder of Vanguard Vs life-blood into the roaring combustion chambers. The muted complaining of heavy atmosphere keened up the scale to a banshee's lament and sweat poured from Josh Thom's half-nude body as his tiny metal cell grew stifling. Power -- how much power to keep from becoming a vagrant meteorite in Venus' milky skies? From flaring, white-hot, and falling... a cinder from nowhere, with nowhere to go, the last of Earth's ashes... One hundred miles. Fifty. Thirty. Twelve... Cooler, now. He shivered in # degrees Fahrenheit, shivered in #, in #... His sweat was cold. Ten thousand feet! Slowing, slowing, a century of time to drop to nine thousand, ease off the power, eight thousand, steady; fuel, barely, six thousand, steady,... Steady Watch your screens! Green. Brown, yellow, blue-veined green; low-rolling magenta mountains westward, cloud-shadows rippling, mingling with tenuous wisps of steam... steam from the jungles of tall forest... One thousand feet. No sign of mobile life on this planet, in this valley into which VanguardI lowered. But all sign -- all sign, indeed, of the rich lushness that would support it, embrace it, hold it close like a long-denied lover... Thorn sweated again -- hot sweat, now -- at his scanners, his control panel. Temperature again hovering past #, but there was no time to notice or to feel. One hundred feet... gently... And then Vanguard-I was down, and at rest. Josh Thom hesitated. BaggyDrawers? Or not? Beneath the white, tenuous outer atmospheric shell of methane and ammonia, what? Air he could breathe? Or poison that would strangle him -- He swung the inner air-lock open. If poison, then death would be but a matter of days ; the bubble of Made-in-U.S.A. atmosphere that across Space had supplied him for the nearly four months the Journey had taken. It had done its job, he could demand no more than that. Two weeks more, at best, and it would tye spent forever. Two weeks, thirty-five years, five thousand centuries -- He swung the outer air-lock open. And breathed. And breathed. And breathed deeply again. Joshua Thorn wanted to cry. There was a hurt in his throat, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to laugh great peals of laughter even as the unchecked salt tears streamed across the deep valleys of his cheeks. He walked, he ran. He stopped, he turned his face to the sky, he spread his arms wide and let the great bellows of laughter roll from his lips in the lusty prayer of thanks that only the living who are full with life and amid the teeming fullness of life can know. Thank you, God. Thank you God. Thank you... (For this little while more, for this little while more for the race of Man; I am the last of Man, You know -- ) He prayed thank you, but he did not pray for more, because this was already more than he deserved ; the Almighty had been merciful, compassionate and merciful, and he could not ask for more, in no way dared ask -- The thunder seemed straight above him. The sound of his own laughter had drowned it out at first, and then the two had mingled, and then as he stood gasping for new breath, as his hoarse voice rested, he heard it -- welling as if from a great heavy throat, and now rising to a baleful cry, then falling -- falling gently, and now a new thunder to drown it, a mightier thunder than the first Joshua Thom stood transfixed as he watched the gleaming bulletshape descend its pillar of fire. It could have been twin to Vanguard-I. It was descending -- it was -- maneuvering to be near him! From somewhere far back in his brain the words formed again, and Mrs. Grundy here's dirt for you -- you may have a new neighbor in your block but not like you at all -- probably a world between you -- don't take any wooden nickels... But Daddy-o could never know, would never comprehend -- He was running, stumbling, falling, running again toward the spot where the red-starred satellite of the Enemy (Enemy, what a madman's word now!) would land. Running like a child, running like an idiot, arms waving, mouth laughing, throat shouting -- Thank you, oh Thank you God .   He was within twenty yards of the craft when its outer lock opened. Fifteen when the uniformed figure who stepped out caught sight and sound of him, ten when the rifle was aimed at him, five before he could comprehend the mindless meaning of it -- But we are the only two human beings left! his brain whimpered... All of the Enemy must die! a remembering part of his mind intoned... But someone had trained the Enemy, too. The scarlet insigne emblazoned on the streamlined metal shell seemed on fire in the filtered Venusian sunlight. Thom's plunging hands grabbed the muzzle of the weapon even as it fired, wrenched it aside without feeling the hurt where his left earlobe had been. "Great God, you imbecile -- " Twisting the weapon, struggling, trigger-finger constricting to fire again, a final, sudden twist, the finger wrenched against the trigger even as the butt was swinging upward, the muzzle swinging down... The muffled explosion. The gaping, oozing hole in the Enemy's breast. Joshua Thom looked down at the crumpled figure, watched as the slow-moving shadow of a cloud eddied across it. He tried to sob, for he could not pray again. He turned. Back toward Vanguard-I. If only he could cry. Behind him, the Enemy lay dead. All, now, all of the Enemy... was dead. Her body would soon be turning cold.    peared in IF during its first five years! A festive book for a festive occasion! Watch for it! T HE first terrestrial expedition to Mars didn't find any Martians. Neither did the second. Since there are so few Martians left, those facts are less surprising than that the third did. i . r For many years before space Everyone knows that Earth s flight was accomplished, there had been discussions and theories about how to communicate with Martians, if any existed. But, of course, nobody was ready when the time the third planet from the sun . came. They fell back on that antiquated gimmick. Von Frisch, Riley and Smith But how about looking at it watched the , ha  doze  Martians  approach, and their watching was not without some trepidation. Except that they were about twenty miles away from their G-boat -- the planetary landing craft -- they probfrom an alien point of view? ably would have fled. Except that they had their orders, they probably would have shot first and asked questions later. "Sir, this is Von Frisch," said the engineer into the microphone of his helmet. He was a little "We're being approached by Martians!" "How do they act?" asked Captains Powers back at the G-boat, immediately. "They don't act hostile, sir." "Stand by, then, but don't take any chances. What do they look like?" "They're quite a bit taller than we are, but their bodies are round and not much bigger than a child's. They've got real long legs and arms, and big heads with big eyes and ears." "Are they intelligent? Are they civilized? How do they breathe?" "Wait a minute, Captain," protested Von Frisch. "You're going a little too fast, sir. They've just come up to us. I don't know whether that's fur on them or whether they're wearing clothes." "Well, try to communicate with them, man!" exclaimed Powers excitedly. Von Frisch did his best. The Martians appeared friendly enough, and interested. Von Frisch tried to communicate in the only method he had heard about. While his companions watched curiously, he shut his ears to the running fire of questions from Powers, squatted and drew a right angled triangle in the red desert sand. By one of the sides he drew three marks, by another four. Then he stepped back and looked questioningly at the Martians. One of the Martians squatted in a tangle of pipestem arms and legs, and with a long finger drew five lines beside the triangle's hypotenuse. "They understand the Pythagorean theorem, sir!" exclaimed Von Frisch. "Good! They undoubtedly know some astronomy, then. Go on." Von Frisch hesitated a moment, then erased the triangle. He drew a small circle with rays from it, for the sun. He drew four larger concentric circles around it, with small circles for planets on the rim of each one. He pointed to the third planet, then at himself, then at his companions, one by one. Then he pointed at the fourth planet and at the Martians, one by one. To complete the matter, he pointed at the sky. "We are Earthmen," he said. "You are Martians." The trouble was that the Earthmen didn't realize the things the Martians had were weapons until they used them. They didn't realize it then, as a matter of fact, because the Earthmen were dead, all three of them. The Martian hunting party came back from the desert with word of the strange creatures who came , apparently , from another world . "Whether they have weapons , we do not know" said the leader of the hunting party. "But they wished to harm our people , so we killed them all" " That is desperate action" said the patriarch of the village . "In what way were they dangerous to us?" "Foolishly they disclosed their intention to us" replied the leader of the hunting party. "They informed us they planned to take over our world and to drive our people farther from the sun, to the great planet Jupiter." "Then you did right ," said the patriarch, blinking his big eyes. Biggs and Golden were working near the G-boat. Their helmet radios were set to a different channel from that used by the exploring (Continued on page # ) What Is Your Science I. Q. ? answer; # is good, # very good, over # makes you a whizz. Answers are on page #. I . The sidereal year is about longer than the solar year. #. How many degrees must be added to the centigrade scale to change it to the Kelvin scale? #. The boiling point of a substance is that point at which its vapor pressure is equal to -- . #. What do we call atoms which have lost or gained an electron? #. An hour of our time represents an arc of degrees in the apparent rotation of the celestial sphere. #. Light must pass from one medium to another at an angle before refraction can occur. #. Hypersonic speeds are speeds over miles per hour. #. Which radioactive rays have the greatest penetrative power? #. The unit of measurement of the quantity of electrical flow is called a . #. According to the theory of relativity, mass depends on . #. The ratio of atomic weight to specific gravity determines the of an element. #. Avogardo's Law is the basis for determining the molecular weight of . #. Which proton is believed to be the fundamental positive charged unit of the atom? #. Meteors composed entirely of stone are called . #. The zigzag movement of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid is called . #. The straight line which joins the center of an attracting body with that of the body describing an orbit around it is called . #. How many miles per second would be the necessary escape velocity from the moon? #. Short waves have frequencies over kilocycles. #. A fourth dimensional geometric super solid is called a . #. There are prime numbers in the first one hundred. We all know that every android has its little idiosyncrasies. But what can a civilized human being do about it Illustrated by Paul Orban when his perfect servant drives him crazy? the android and dropped her suitcase on the floor. She turned to her husband and said in an angry, unsteady voice, "I'm leaving. ,, Her double chin trembled. "I can't stand the sight of that thing another second." Raymond Golden gripped his empty glass with both hands, leaned forward tensely in the chair, and tried to find the right words. "Paula," he began helplessly. "Please wait. I'll get it fixed, or sell it, or trade it in. I'll do something." Mrs. Golden pointed a shaky, pudgy finger. "I'll never come back as long as that is here." She bent to pick up her suitcase. The android approached silently and stared at her posterior. "Madam," the android said, "you are getting quite fat." Paula's back snapped upward. Her face was red and there were dark shadows under her eyes. "I can't stand it!" she shrieked. "I can't! I can't!" The words pierced Raymond's skull, exploded and splattered within. He winced under the barrage. Paula ignored the automatic door button, and flung the plastic slab open with her hand. The android followed her with its cold stare and spoke in its perfect voice. "Madam, that dress is atrocious. I would suggest that you change at once to your gray, princess silk, which will, at least, create the impression of slenderness." Paula screamed hysterically and ran out of the apartment. The android moved swiftly to the door and called after her, "Farewell, Madam. Watch your weight. Take care." It pushed the button on the wall and the door swung shut. The dreaded ultimatum had at last been carried out, and Raymond felt helpless, numbed. Indecision settled upon him like a leaden cloak and pulled him back against the foam-air-rest, where his head wobbled uncomfortably. He closed his burning, blood-shot eyes, and found no peace. He rubbed them with his free hand, and opened his vision to the staring android. Without any conscious thought, his arm extended in a slow, habitual motion. The android responded automatically, plucked the empty glass out of his hand, and said, "You drink too much, sir." Raymond nodded irritably. "I know. You've reiterated that profound spiritual message with monotonous irregularity." "But you do, you know." Raymond shouted angrily, "Shut up!" "Very good, sir." The android was a tall, handsome model. Its voice was deep, resonant and faintly British. It glided over to the built-in bar and performed rapid, indiscernible manipulations involving ice cubes, whiskey and soda. The android returned swiftly with the drink and served it with a sweeping flourish. Raymond took the glass and gestured impatiently. "Cigar." "Very good, sir." The android withdrew a long, brown cigar from the humidor on the small, floating ebony end-table, placed the clipped end in Raymond's mouth, and lit it with the tip of its forefinger, which suddenly glowed red. It watched as Raymond puffed up several billowing, little gray clouds. The smoke drifted towards the android, and it said: "Disgusting habit." Raymond raised his glass, sipped the cold liquid, and remarked bitterly, "What a pity you can't enjoy your own poisonous concoctions." The android stepped back and stared fixedly at the man. "You are a sot, sir." Raymond exploded. "What!" "S-o-t, sot. An alcoholic. A drunkard. One who imbibes intoxicating liquors." Raymond jumped out of the chair and threw his glass and cigar on the carpet violently. The cigar sizzled in the midst of the foaming liquid. He glared at the android. "You go to hell!" "As I have repeatedly attempted to impress upon your happy, pickled brain, sir," the android said, "It is impossible for me to go there." "That isn't exactly what I meant." "In that case, sir, I would suggest that hereafter you say what you mean." Raymond swore. He swayed uncertainly, and then dropped back into the chair. He reached out to the floating table for a fresh cigar, jammed it in his mouth, and chewed it nervously. He was a short, chubby man, with brown, thinning hair, a double chin, and lines around his mouth; where a friendly smile had recently met an untimely death. Raymond pulled his cigar out of his mouth and stared at the wet soggy end. He moved his head from side to side, turned his gaze on the android, and muttered through his teeth, "You and your impeccable androidal exterior have got to go." The decision immediately had a relaxing effect. Raymond's moist brow unwrinkled itself momentarily, and he almost smiled at the thought. "Allow me to point out, sir," the android said. "That you have, to date, invested approximately three thousand dollars in my interior and exterior, as well." Raymond nodded sadly. "Not to mention fifteen more easy, cardiovascular producing payments." He placed his hand over the spot, where, deep down, his heart was located. Satisfied that it was still there, he said, "I've got a lot of expensive money tied up in you, but if I have to choose between mechanical misery and matrimonial bliss, I'll settle for Paula's brand of inhuman torture." "That, sir, is extremely faulty, illogical, and irrational reasoning. Typical, however, of most humans." Raymond smiled grimly and stood up. "If you will watch closely, oh, loyal servant, you will note that I am about to do something not so typical of my assorted human friends. ,, Walking unsteadily over to the bar, he reached into a small drawer, and withdrew a small plastic con"In fact," Raymond said, as he removed two pills and tossed them into his mouth, "I must be out of my mind." He swallowed hard, blinked, and gasped. For a moment he leaned heavily on the bar. Then suddenly, clarity. The room was brighter. The drab grays resolved into blue and yellow pastel panelling along the walls. The carpeting was a rich deep blue. The polished floating ebony slab glittered in the room. "Come on, Android. We're heading for the big city." The city, as they flew over it, was a blazing ocean of roof-top advertisements, designed to attract the attention of the overhead traffic. Raymond threw a switch and a private radar beacon blipped brightly on his jetcopter's screen. He touched a button and the controls automatically guided the craft towards a gigantic flashing sign, The jetcopter dropped onto the roof-top parking lot with a thud. The android and Raymond climbed out and took the nearest escalator down to the mezzanine. They entered the Sales Manager's office, where Raymond cornered Mr. Krutchamer, the Assistant Sales Manager, and quickly explained the difficulties with the android. Mr. Krutchamer was a smsdl wiry man with a surprisingly deep, impressive voice. He shrugged his slight shoulders, after listening patiently, and said, "Doesn't sound like a mechanical manifestation to me, sir." "Mechanical or electronical," Raymond demanded perplexed, "what's the difference?" "Well, sir," Mr. Krutchamer began with a flashing white-toothed smile, "you've had your android for three months, and while our guarantee is for one year, it specifically spells out an unconditional warranty against mechanical defects." "No guarantee against any electronic defects?" The little man shook his head emphatically. "No, sir. All electrical parts are guaranteed, of course, for thirty days, but you've had the android for ninety days." Mr. Krutchamer's face was sad, his eyebrows crept down over his eyes, and his voice dropped to a confidential decibel level. "I'm sorry, sir, but your problem sounds more like a chronic psycho-electronic condition. I would recommend "What's that?" Raymond was annoyed. His face was flushed and he squinted at the little man. "Doctor of Psychiatric Robotory." "This android doesn't need Psycho-therapy, damn it," Raymond said hotly. "Maybe some minor adjustment with a heavy monkey wrench. But that's all." "Perhaps." The little man turned #  on the smile. "The important thing in an android is that it function properly and efficiendy. We are prepared in every way to keep your android in perfect operating condition, but we do not feel that it is at all necessary to concern ourselves with an android's alleged thoughts or vocal expressions. After all, it is only an android. A machine. A clever machine, but a machine." "This clever machine has driven my wife out of our home, and is edging me into a cybernetic psychoneurosis." Raymond walked stiffly out of the Sales Manager's office on to the balcony that overlooked the various androids that were on display in the showroom below and stared at variety of tall, short, slim, fat, young, middle-aged, and old looking androids. Mr. Krutchamer approached him slowly. Raymond fought back his annoyance and asked in desperation, "What kind of deal can you give me on a trade in?" The Assistant Sales Manager smiled and said thoughtfully, "Let me see." He turned and examined the android. He looked it up and down, walked around in back of it, and looked it up and down some more. Then he circled it slowly three times, and concluded the ritual by making clucking noises with his teeth. Finally Mr. Krtuchamer said, "Can't give you too much, you realize. It isn't equipped with radar, or any navagational instruments, or even the built-in computer. About as high as I can go would he one thousand." "One thousand!" exclaimed Raymond. "That would leave a balance of almost four thousand, plus the balance I've already got on this one." The android stared at Raymond and said, "I could have told you that before you came down here, sir. Raymond jumped, and snapped at the android, "Shut up!" Raymond was furious. He turned suddenly on Mr. Krutchamer. The Assistant Sales Manager ran into his office and closed the door behind him. "Really, sir," the android said, "your method of operating this flying machine is truly offensive." Raymond jabbed the throttle and the jetcopter leaped forward. He sat tensely at the controls, beads of perspiration across his forehead. The android said, "I would suggest, sir, that you allow me to demonstrate the proper method of operating these controls." The jetcopter lurched suddenly in a sharp turning motion, and angled in rapidly for a reckless, Mr. Wheeler personally met Raymond and the android as they disembarked. "Greetings," he said. "Looking for a good used android?" Raymond shook his head. "Got one I want to sell." He pointed and asked, "How much?" Wheeler examined the android rapidly and said, "Looks like a good clean model. Guess I could give you about five hundred cash' Raymond exclaimed, "What! That the best you can do?" Wheeler nodded and smiled. "That's Blue Book on this model. Take it or leave it. That's my top offer -- cash." Raymond turned away. "Come, my faithful manservant," he said despondently. "Let us return to our dismal retreat, where I can get properly and thoroughly liquored up." jected. His face was lined and despair was in his eyes. He collapsed into his favorite chair and dispatched the android to the bar. Two highballs later an idea dashed itself to pieces in Raymond's brain. He jumped up, ran over to the Televisor, and placed a call to Allied-News-Facs. When the News-Facs android's plastic face appeared on the screen, Raymond said, "I want to place an ad in the For Sale or Swap section of the Four O'clock Edition." "Yes, sir. What do you desire to say?" Raymond frowned. "Just say this: Anyone desiring to take over the payments of one darling, efficient, well-mannered, handsome, unbearably conscientious android can purchase the equity extremely cheap at great sacrifice." "Is that all?" "Yes, for now. If that doesn't work, I'll call you back." He gave his address and televisor number and switched off. Raymond turned to his android and said, "I've reconsidered. Maybe psycho-electronic-therapy can really help -- one of us' He glanced at his watch. It was eleven a. m. "Let's go." The android followed obediently and said, "This is extremely monotonous Inside, the waiting room was jammed with human beings and assorted electronic, two-legged contrivances. Surprise halted Raymond half-way through the doorway, and he studied the crowd in disbelief. A beautiful female voice pierced the noisy confusion of human and unhuman voices: "Do you have an appointment, or are you human?" Raymond stared at the Receptionist-Android, with its fixed smile on its sculptured feminine face, and replied unhappily, "I had no idea I would need one." The Receptionist-Android smiled steadily. "Is this an emergency, or a disaster, or are you sober?" "Could be," Raymond replied, bewildered. "Yes." "If you desire to wait, perhaps the Doctor might see you, see you, see you. But I don't see why, see why, see why." Mumbling a hasty assent, Raymond retreated into an unoccupied corner, where he and his android waited. The other men and women in the room were a grim, haggard looking group. As for the other androids, Raymond refused to look at them; and he closed his ears to all sound. Noon came and passed, and the afternoon dragged. Raymond lost his feeling of impatience, and stood in the comer trance-like. Finally at two-thirty a tiny green light flashed in the Receptionist-Android's metallic bosom. "The doctor will see you now or never." The large, spacious office, with its glowing walls, dimmed ceiling, and deep, soft carpeting was a silent, soothing relief. Raymond's android watched as the two men engaged in a mutually weary handshake. Dr. Millhop was a tall thin, sharp featured man. There were black moons under his eyes that lay heavily on long, guttered wrinkles. He leaned back in his chair, as Raymond explained the android's manifestations. The Doctor nodded his head in the manner of a man who had been listening to the same story all day, day after day. "Mr. Golden," Dr. Millhop said, "you must realize that every android has its own peculiar idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately, in some instances, there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it." Raymond gestured at his android, and asked hopefully, "What about this instance?" "I don't know," the Doctor replied frankly. "Before I can express an opinion, it will be necessary to run your android through exhaustive tests and have my technical staff examine its electronic circuits minutely. If it is a simple matter of rewiring, or, say, a faulty component, why, of course, we can straighten it out very easily. However, if it is a condition that is caused by Unknown Factors, then I can prescribe only one thing." He paused, spread his palms, and added sadly, "As so many of us seem to be attempting these days -- don't lose your temper " "How long will it take to run your tests?" "We can send it into the lab immediately, run it through the analyzers, and have a report in one hour." Raymond reached into his coat pocket for a cigar, stuck it in his mouth and lighted it with an oldfashioned lighter. He puffed thoughtfully, took one glance at the android, and said, "Let's do it." The android's head swiveled sharply, staring first at Raymond and then at the Doctor. "Isn't anyone going to consult me?" Dr. Millhop's chair groaned, as he leaned forward suddenly. His voice was cold death in an angry whisper. "Shut up!" The Doctor viciously pressed a button. A large panel in the wall snapped open and two huge, square-shouldered, power-androids clanked into the room. The Doctor pointed. They lifted Raymond's protesting android, and carried it from the room. Back in the waiting room, Raymond drummed his fingers nervously on the receptionist's desk. He finished his cigar, started another one and finished that one. Precisely one hour later the little light flashed on the Receptionist-Android's dashboard chest. "The Doctor will see you again and again and again." As Raymond re-entered the office, the Doctor was examining a folder. "Mr. Golden," Dr. Millhop said in a tired voice without looking up, "there is absolutely nothing that can be done, short of electronic lobotomy." Raymond asked, "What is electronic lobotomy?" "That is tantamount to an entirely new memory bank. Even then we cannot guarantee that some other idiosyncrasy will not develop. Frankly, I do not recommend it to you. It is an expensive process, and lobotomys are mainly performed in the larger industrial robotic devices, where an extremely expensive piece of equipment is involved." The chubby man rubbed his jaw. "Fve got to salvage my investment somehow. How much will it cost?" "Three thousand dollars." Raymond shrugged sadly, turned and walked out of the room. The Receptionist-Android looked up at him and said impersonally, "You will receive the Doctor's enormous bill by Telefacs." As Raymond entered his apartment, disillusioned and exhausted, the Four O'clock News-Facs, containing his want-ad, was sputtering out of the receiver. When the News-Facs had ceased its chattering, he scanned the paper, grunted a resentful satisfaction, and slumped into his favorite chair. He sat and fidgeted, and waited and waited, until darkness fell. But there was no response to his ad. Finally he said to the android, "Looks as if you and I were meant for each other forever and ever." "Certainly, sir," replied the android. "You need a stable, intelli-. gent advisor and mentor to save you from your frequent, horrifying errors of human judgment. For instance, I could have told you in advance that electronic butcher could not so much as cure headaches in a buzzsaw. In short, sir, you will never find a finer, more loyal, more capable android than myself. Put yourself entirely in my hands. I will even do your thinking for you." Raymond shook his head wearily, and remarked, "I am both excruciatingly sad and divinely happy at that information." "I am mystified at your sadness, sir, though gratified at any little happiness I might bring into your drab, miserable existence." Raymond said mildly, almost too mildly, "Shut up." "Very good, sir." With an effort the chubby man got to his feet, walked to the bar and poured himself a long drjnk. The following morning Raymond, finding his body host to a horrible hangover, staggered into the living room, and fumbled behind the bar for a small plastic conHe removed two blue pills and tossed them into his mouth. When Raymond was halfway through his second cup of coffee, he suddenly jumped to his feet and snapped his fingers. "I've got it. What a tremendous, frightening idea. But it might work." He raced over to the Televisor and put in another call to AlliedNews-Facs. A half hour later the ad was coming out of the News-Facs machine in an excited staccato that matched Raymond's quickening pulse. As soon as the ad was printed, he ripped it out of the receiver: Raymond grinned happily for the first time in days. "Ingenious." The android said, "A complete, hopeless waste of human endeavor, sir. However, it is quite typical of your impulsive and somewhat obnoxious personality." Raymond laughed. "Say anything you like, my vanishing servant. You are not long for my little world." Thirty minutes later the automatic door-announcer sang out: "Visitor!" Raymond set the door control on automatic. A tall, thin, haggard looking man entered and offered his moist hand in a feeble grip. "My name is Groober." He pointed weakly at the glistening android behind him. "Tins is George." Raymond stared hopefully at George and said, "Our android was once fondly known as Francois, but we've since been unable to think of it as anything but It " Mr. Groober sat down with a sigh, and said in a hoarse voice, "This idiotic robotic device has a chemurgical complex." George, the android, stared at Raymond. "Sir, you have an extremely high fat content." Raymond briefly described his android to Mr. Groober, and the latter shook his head sadly. "Looks as if they've got a lot in common." Raymond nodded sympathetically. The door-announcer sang out again: "Visitor!" A little old lady entered. "I am Mrs. Quimby," she announced in a squeaky voice. "And this is Daisy." Daisy followed her in, walking on its hands. Raymond stared curiously at Daisy and remarked, "That's a new twist." Mrs. Quimby said with bitterness, "That ain't all Daisy does." Daisy suddenly collapsed to the floor, leaped to its feet, and began jumping up and down. Its feet hit the floor with a crash; it's head hit the ceiling with a thud; up and down, up and down. Raymond asked, "How do you stop it? My ceiling can't take much more of that." Mrs. Quimby said, "Don't know. Depends on the ceiling." "Visitor!" The door-announcer cried again in its one-word recorded glee. A large android walked in ahead of a short, perspiring man. The android announced, "I am Ulysses, the greatest android ever produced. This poor creature is my old, worn out owner. I am here to find. a new, strong, vigorous owner. Which one of you is interested?" The door-announcer sang out again and again. In two hours the little apartment was jammed with human beings and inhuman androids. The interviewing process no longer involved Raymond alone. It became an interwoven, complex affair. The confused, excited melee continued on through the night. It lasted all through the following day and night, and on into the day after, when the last guest left with his militaristic android counting cadence in a loud grating voice. Raymond mixed a strong drink and collapsed into his chair, muttering to himself, "How utterly, utterly hopeless. There wasn't a single android that didn't have some glaring incurable idiosyncrasy that could drive Paula and me completely out of our minds as easily as our present mechanized helpmate." He appealed to the cracked ceiling. "What am I going to do?" His android said, "You look like a tired, fat old man." "Shut up." The android stared at Raymond and asked, "What fiendish, diabolical, sure-fire scheme have you devised in that tiny, inadequate human brain of yours now, sir?" Raymond leered at the android. Perspiration was breaking out all over his body. His lower lip began to tremble and his cheek twitched. Raymond tapped hip forehead. "When science fails," he said in a hoarse whisper, "there is but pne method left for a poor, ignorant savage with a primitive brain." Moving forward swiftly, Raymond bent over, and seized the floating ebony end-table in both hands. "Gome here, oh, modest, unassuming, subservient one. I want to bend your ear." Raymond lunged forward and swung. The android dodged awkwardly, and the table top glanced off the side of its head. For a long moment the android remained quiet and motionless. Finally it said, "Did you ring, sir?" The ebony slab slipped from Raymond's hands. He squinted at the android from under drooping, redrimmed eyelids. The android's head remained perfectly still. Its eyes did not follow him. Raymond stepped over to the bar, made tinkling noises with the bottles, and waited tensely. Silence. Pure silence. The stillness of the room was suddenly warm and friendlv. Astonishment swept over Raymond in a dizzy wave. He asked in an excited whisper, "Who are you?" The android turned towards him and bowed humbly. "Your servant. # -- #. # -- Oblique. # -- #. # -- Gamma. # -- Coulomb. # -- Velocity. #I -- Atomic volume. # -- Gases. # -- Hydrogen. # -- Aerolites. # -- Brownian movement. # -- Radius vector, # -- #. # -- #. # -- Tesseract. # -- #. How can a ship travel both forward and backward and sideways in two different directions , be going twice as fast as the speed of light -- and still be completely motionless? the flight preparation crew filed out of the Argo?s airlock. Barnes was the last; fat and bald and squinting against the brightness of the Arizona sun. "All set, Carl," he said. "They had us to check and countercheck, especially the drives." Engle nodded. "Good. Ground Control reports the Slug cruiser still circling seven hundred miles out and they think the Slugs suspect something." "Damned centipedes!" Barnes said. "I still say they're telepathic." He looked at his watch. Zero hour minus twenty-six minutes. "Good luck, boy, and I hope this space warp dingus works like they think it will." He waddled down the boarding ramp and Engle went through the airlock, frowning a little as he threw the switches that would withdraw the ramp and close the airlock behind him. Barnes' implied doubt in the success of the space warp shuttle was not comforting. If the shuttle failed to work, the Argosy would be on the proverbial spot with the Slug cruiser eager to smear it well thereupon... Access to the control room was up through the room that housed the space warp shuttle. Dr. Harding, the tall, bristle-browed physicist, and his young assistant, Garvin, looked up briefly as he entered then returned their attention to their work. The master computer, borrowed from M.I.T., stood like a colossal many-dialed refrigerator along one wall. A protective railing around it bore a blunt left unwatched. Garvin was seated before it, his fingers flitting over the keyboard and the computer's answer panel replying with strange mathematical symbols. The space warp shuttle sat in the middle of the room, a cube approximately two-thirds of a meter along the edge, studded with dials and knobs and surmounted by a ball of some shining silvery alloy. Dr. Harding was talking into the transdimensional communicator mounted beside the shuttle. Engle went on to the computer and waited outside the railing until Illustrated by Paul Orban Garvin finished with his work and turned in his seat to face him. "The last check question," Garvin said. "Now to sweat out the last twenty minutes." "If you've got the time, how about telling me about the shuttle," said Engle, "I've been kept in the dark about it; but from what I understand, the shuttle builds up a field around the ship, with the silver ball as the center of the field, and this field goes into another dimension called the 'space warp'." "Ah -- it could be described in that manner," Garvin said, smiling a little. "A clear description could not be made without the use of several special kinds of mathematics, but you might say this field in normal space is like a bubble under water. The air bubble seeks its own element, rises rapidly until it emerges into free air -- in this case, the space warp. This transition into the warp is almost instantaneous and the shuttle automatically ceases operation when the warp is fully entered. The shuttle is no longer needed ; the hypothetical bubble no longer exists -- it has found its own element and merged with it." "I know that a light-hour of travel in the warp is supposed to be equivalent to several light-years in normal space," Engle said, "but what about when you want to get back into normal space?" "The original process is simply reversed : the shuttle creates a 'bubble' that cannot exist in the warp and seeks its own element, normal space." "I see. But if the shuttle should -- '" He never completed the question. Dr. Harding strode over, his eyes blue and piercing under the fierce eyebrows as he fixed them on him. He spoke without preamble: "You realize the importance of this test flight with the shuttle, of course? Entirely aside from our personal survival should the Slug cruiser intercept us." "Yes, sir," he answered, feeling the question suggested an even lower opinion of his intelligence than he had thought Harding held. Project Space Warp existed for the purpose of sending the Argosy to Sirius by means of the space warp shuttle and bringing back the Thunderbolt by the same swift method. The Thunderbolt , Earth's first near-to-light-speed interstellar ship, was a huge ship; armed, armored, and invincible. It had been built to meet every conceivable danger that might be encountered in interstellar exploration -- but the danger had come to the solar system from the direction of Capella nine years after the departure of the Thunderbolt . Eight cruisers of the pulpy, ten-foot centipede-like things called Slugs had methodically destroyed the colonies on Mars and Venus and established their own outposts there. Earth's ground defenses had held the enemy at bay beyond the atmosphere for a year but such defense could not be maintained indefinitely. The Thunderbolt was needed quickly and its own drives could not bring it back in less than ten years... "We will go into the warp well beyond the atmosphere," Harding said. "Transition cannot be made within an atmosphere. Since a very moderate normal space velocity of the ship will be transformed into a greater-than-light velocity when in the warp, it is desirable that we make turn-over and decelerate to a very low speed before going into the warp." "Yes, sir," he said. "I was briefed on that part and I'll bring us as near to a halt as that cruiser will permit." "There will be communication between us during the flight," Harding said. "I will give you further instructions when they become necessary." He turned away with an air of dismissal. Engle went to the ladder by the wall. He climbed up it and through the interroom airlock, closing the airlock behind him; the routine safety measure in case any single room was punctured. He went to the control board with a vague resentment gnawing for the first time at his normally placid good nature. So far as Harding was concerned -- and Garvin, too -- he might as well have been an unusually intelligent baboon. Zero hour came and the Argosy lifted until Earth was a tremendous, curving ball below and the stars black sky. The Slug cruiser swung to intercept him within the first minute of flight but it seemed to move with unnatural slowness. It should have been driving in at full speed and it wasn't... "Something's up," Ground Control said. "It's coming in tod slowly." "I see that," he answered. "It must be covering something beyond it, in your radar shadow." It was. When he was almost free of the last traces of atmosphere he saw the other cruiser, far out and hidden from Ground Control's radar by the radar shadow cast by the first one. He reported, giving its position and course as given him by the robot astrogating unit. "We'll have the greatest amount of time if I make turn-over now and decelerate," he finished. The voice of Harding came through the auxiliary speaker: "Do so." The Argosy swung, end for end, and he decelerated. The cruiser behind him increased its speed, making certain it would be in position to cut off any return to Earth. The other cruiser altered its course to intersect the point in space the Argosy would soon occupy, and the Argosy was between the rapidly closing jaws of a trap. He made reports to Ground Control at one-minute intervals. At #:# he said: "Our velocity is approaching zero. We'll be within range of the second cruiser's blasters in two more minutes." Harding spoke again to him : "We'll go into the warp now. Do not alter the deceleration or the course of the ship while we're in the warp." "I won't," he said. There was a faint mutter from the auxiliary speaker as Harding gave some instructions to Garvin. Engle took a last look at the viewscreen ; at blue-green Earth looming large in the center, Orion and Sirius glittering above it and the sun burning bright and yellow on the right. It was a scene he had observed many times before, all very familiar and normal -- The chronometer touched #:# and normalcy vanished. Earth and sun and stars fled away from him, altering in appearance as they went, shrinking, dwindling. The seas and continents of Earth erupted and shook and boiled before Earth faded and disappeared. The sun changed from yellow to green to blue, to a tiny point of bright violet light that the screen and faded and disappeared as Earth had done. Then the viewscreen was black, utterly, completely, dead black. And the communicator that had connected him with Ground Control was silent, without the faintest whisper of background sound or space static. In the silence the voice of Harding as he spoke to Garvin came through the speaker; puzzled, incredulous, almost shocked: "Our velocity couldn't have been that great -- and the sun receded into the ultraviolet!" There was the quick sound of hurrying footsteps then the more distant sound of the computer's keys being operated at a high rate of speed. He wanted to ask what had gone wrong but he knew no one would answer him. And it would be a pointless question -- it was obvious from Harding's tone that he did not know, either. He had an unpleasant feeling that Man's first venture into another dimension had produced catastrophic results. What had caused sun and Earth to disappear so quickly -- and what force had riven and disfigured Earth? Then he realized the significance of Harding's statement about the sun receding into the ultraviolet. If the ship had been traveling at a high velocity away from the sun, the wave length of the sun's light would have been increased in proportion to the speed of the ship. The sun should have disappeared in the longwave infrared end of the spectrum, not the short-wave ultraviolet, With the thought came the explanation of the way the continents and oceans of Earth had quivered and seethed. The shifting of the spectrum range had shortened normally visible rays into invisibly short ultraviolet radiations while at the same time formerly invisible long infrared radiations had been shortened into visible wave lengths. There had been a continuous displacement into and past the ultraviolet and each wave length would have reflected best from a different place -- mountains, valleys, oceans, deserts, warm areas, cool areas, -- and the steady progression into the ultraviolet had revealed each area in quick succession and given the appearance of agitated movement. So there was no catastrophe and everything had a logical explanation. Except how they could have been approaching a sun that he had seen clearly, visibly, racing away from them, "Engle -- " The voice of Harding came through the speaker. "We're going back into normal space to make another observation. I don't know just where we are but we're certain to be far from the cruisers. Don't alter our course or velocity." "Yes, sir," he said. They came out of the warp at #:#. The communicator burped suddenly and the viewscreen came to life; a deep, dull red that brightened quickly. A tiny coal flared up, swelling in size and shifting from red to orange to yellow -- the sun. Earth appeared as a hazy red dot that enlarged and resolved itself into a planet with distorted continents that trembled and changed, to resume their natural shapes and colors. Within a few seconds the sun was shining as ever, Earth loomed large and blue-green before them and the stars of Orion glittered unchanged beyond. Even their position in space was the same -- they had not moved. But the Slug cruisers had. One was very near and from its forward port came the violet haze that always preceded a blaster beam. There was no time to escape -- no chance at all. He spoke into the mike, harsh and urgent: "Into the warp ! There's a blaster beam coming -- move!" There was a silence from below that seemed to last an eternity, then the sound of a switch being slapped hastily. At the same time, the violet haze before the cruiser erupted into blue fire and the blaster beam lanced out at them. It struck somewhere astern. The power output needle swung jerkily as thje generators went out and the emergency batteries took the heavy load of the shuttle's operation. There was a sensation of falling as the ship's artificial gravity units ceased functioning. The auxiliary speaker rattled wordlessly and there was a sound like a hard rush of wind through it, accompanied by quick bumping sounds. Then the speaker was still and there was no sound of any kind as the viewscreen shifted into the ultraviolet and Earth and stars and sun once again raced away and disappeared in the blackness. board informed him the generators were destroyed, the stem section riddled and airless, the emergency batteries damaged and reduced to quarter charge, the shuttle room punctured and airless. And, of course, Harding and Garvin were dead. He felt a surge of futile anger. It had all been unnecessary. If only they had not considered him incompetent to be entrusted with anything more than the ship's operation -- if only they had installed an emergency switch for the shuttle by his control board, there would not have been the two-second delay following his order and they would have been safely in the warp before the blaster beam struck. But they had not trusted him with responsibility and now he was alone in a space warp he did not understand; sole and full responsibility for the shuttle suddenly in his hands. He considered his course of action, then got into a pressure suit. Magnets in the soles of its heavy boots permitted him to walk in the absence of gravity and he went to the interroom airlock with metallically clicking steps. He let himself through the lock and walked down what had been the room's wall, then across to the center of its floor. But for the fact there was no one in the room, it was as he had last seen it. The shuttle, computer, and other equipment stood in their orderly positions with their lighted dials unchanged. Until one looked at the gash ripped in the hull and saw the stains along its edge where the occupants had been hurled through it by the escaping air. He went on to the next room and the next. The damage increased as he proceeded toward the stem. The power generators were sliced into ribbons and the emergency batteries in such condition it seemed a miracle they were functioning at all. The drives had received the greatest damage; they were an unrecognizable mass of wreckage. He made his way back to the shuttle room, there to appraise his circumstances. He reached automatically for a cigarette and stopped when his glove bumped the breast plate of his pressure suit. First, he would have to make the shuttle room livable; get out of the pressure suit. He would have to question the computer and he could not do that with the thick, clumsy gloves on his hands. The job didn't take long. There were repair plates on the ship and a quick-hardening plastic spray. He closed the sternward airlock when he was done and opened the airlock leading to the control room, as well as the locks beyond. Air filled the shuttle room, with only a minor over-all loss of air pressure. He removed the suit, attached a pair of magnetic soles to his shoes so he could operate the keys of the computer without the movements sending him floating away, and went to it. He had never been permitted to touch it before, nor even stand close enough to see what the keyboard looked like. Now, he saw that the alphabetical portion of the keyboard was minor compared with the mathematical portion, many of the symbols strange to him. The operation of an interplanetary ship required a certain knowledge of mathematics, but not the kind used by theoretical physicists. He typed, doubtfully: once in the answer panel and relief came to him like the lifting of a heavy burden. The computer knew as much about the space warp as Harding or anyone else. It was connected with his drive controls and instruments and knew how far, how fast, and in what directions the flight had taken place. It had even been given blueprints of the ship's construction, in case the structure of the ship should affect the ship's performance in the warp, and knew every nut, bolt, plate and dimension in the ship. There was supposed to be a ce tain method of procedure when questioning the computer. "It knows -- but it can't think," Garvin had one said. "It lacks the initiative to correlate data and arrive at conclusions unless the proceedure of correlation is given it in detail." Perhaps he could manage to outline some method of correlation for the computer. The facts of his predicament were simple enough: He was in an unknown medium called "the Space Warp." Something not anticipated occurred when a ship went into the warp and Harding had not yet solved the mystery when he died. The physicists in Observation would be able to find the answer but he could not ask them. The forward movement of the ship was not tranferred with it into the warp and if he emerged into normal space the waiting Slug cruisers would disintegrate him before he spoke three words to Observation. There was a pencil and a tablet of paper by the computer. He used them to calculate the time at which the charge in the damaged batteries would reach a critical low, beyond which the charge would be insufficient to activate the shuttle. The answer was #:#. He would have to go out of the warp at # : # or remain in it forever. He had a great deal less than two hours in which to act. He typed the first question to the computer: The answer appeared on the panel at once; the coordinates of a position more than a light-year toward Ophiuchus. He stared at the answer, feeling it must be an error. But it could not be an error -- the computer did not make mistakes. How, then, could the ship have traveled more than a light-year during its second stay in the warp when it had not moved at all during the first stay? Had some factor of the warp unknown to him entered the picture? As a check he typed another question : The answer was a position lightdays toward Ophiuchus. He typed: impossible. The computer replied : this He recalled the importance of keeping the computer free of all faulty or obscure data and typed quickly: cancel conflicting statement. conflicting statement canceled, it replied. He tried another tack, this ship He thought the computer would proceed to give him some sort of an explanation. Instead, it noncommittally replied : data acknowledged. He typed : explain this discrepancy between space warp It answered: insufficient data to account for discrepancy. He asked, how did you determine our present position? It replied: by triangulation, into the ultraviolet, he objected. Again it answered with the noncommital, data acknowledged. data? he asked. It replied: data insufficient He paused, pondering his next move. Time was speeding by and he was learning nothing of value. He would have to move the ship to some place in the warp where emergence into normal space would not put him under the blasters of the Slug cruisers. He could not know where to move the ship until he knew where the ship was at the present. He did not believe it was in the position given him by the computer, and its original space warp position had certainly not been the one given by the computer. The computer did not have the ability to use its knowledge to explain contradictory data. It had been ordered to compute their space warp position by triangulation of the receding sun and stars and was not at all disturbed by the contradicting shift of the sun into the ultraviolet. Suppose it had been ordered to calculate their position by computations based on the shift of the sun's and stars spectrum into the ultraviolet? He asked it: what is our posiIt gave him the coordinates of a position almost two light-years toward Orion. The triangulation computations had shown the ship to be going backward at many times the speed of light; the spectrum-shift computations showed it to be going forward with approximately the same speed. data acknowledged, it agreed. logical explanation, it answered. It replied with the characteristic single-mindedness: data shows He paused again. He was still getting nowhere while time fled by. How swiftly less than a hundred minutes could pass when they were all a man had left to him... The computer was a genius with the mental initiative of a moronic child. It could find the answer for him but first he would have to take it by the hand and lead it in the right direction. To do that he would have to know more about the warp. He wrote: explain the nature It answered at once: this canThe chronometer read #:#. He typed: data acknowledged, it replied. it answered. this cannot be done, it replied. He wrote, with morbid curiosity: It anwered: give a damn is a He got out of the computer seat and walked about the room restlessly. He passed by the transdimensional viewscreen and communicator and pressed the communicator's signal button. A dial flickered in return, showing his signal was going out, but there was no sound in response. If only he could make contact with the brains in Observation -- west of the sun. He was racing faster than light in two different directions at once and he was sitting motionless under the blasters of two Slug cruisers. Another thought came to him: even if he could move the ship while in the warp, where could he go? He would have to go far beyond the outer limits of the solar system to escape detection by the Slug cruisers. And at that distance the sun would be only a yellow star, incapable of energizing the little solar power units. He would not live long after the last of the power was drained from the batteries and the air regeneration equipment ceased functioning. He would not even dare sleep, toward the last. There were no convection currents in the air of a ship without gravity, and it was imperative that the air be circulated constantly. The air circulation blowers would cease functioning while the ship still contained pure air but he would have to move about continually to breathe that air. Should he lie down to sleep he would smother to death in a carbon dioxide bubble of his own making. If he managed to emerge into normal space at some point just outside Earth's atmosphere, beyond range of the cruisers, his driveless ship would descend as a blazing meteor. If, by some miracle, he could emerge into normal space just a few inches above the spacefield it would be to materialize into space already occupied by air. Such a materialization would be simultaneously fatal to him and to the electronic components of the shuttle and computer. And if he did not move the ship, the Slug cruisers would disintegrate him. He had four hypothetical choices of his way to die, all equally unpleasant. He smiled wanly at his reflection in the bright metal bordering the viewscreen and said, "Brother -- you've had it!" there to brush his fingers across the useless control buttons and look into the viewscreen that revealed only black and limitless Nothing. What was the warp? Surely it must have definite physical laws of some kind. It was difficult to imagine any kind of existence -- even the black nothing of the warp -- as being utterly without rule or reason. If he knew the laws of the warp he might find some means of survival hitherto hidden from him. There was only one way he could learn about the warp. He would have to question the computer and continue questioning it until he learned or until his time was up. He returned to the computer and considered his next question. The computer had calculated their positions from observations of the sun and other stars in front of the ship -- what would similar calculations based on observations of the stars behind the ship reveal? He typed: The answers appeared. They showed the ship to be simultaneously speeding away from Ophiuchus and toward it. He asked: do these two posiyes, it answered. Was the paradox limited to the line of flight? He asked the computer: what The answer appeared on the panel : the ship was racing sideward through the warp in two diametrically opposed directions, but at only one-third the speed with which it was racing forward and backward. So now the ship had four impossible positions and two different speeds. He frowned at the computer, trying to find some clue in the new data. He noticed, absently, that the hand of one of the dials was near zero in the red section of the dial. He had not noticed any of the diaL registering in the danger zone before... He jerked out of his preoccupation with apprehension and typed: It answered: one of my cirHe slammed the master switch to out, the various needles swung to zero, leaving the computer a mindless structure more than ever resembling an overgrown refrigerator. Four minutes more of operation... and he had so many questions to ask before he could hope to learn enough about the warp to know what he should do. He had wasted almost an hour of the computer's limited life, leaving it turned on when he was not using it. If only it had told him... but it was not the nature of a machine to voluntarily give information. Besides, the receding hand of the dial was there for him to see. The computer neither knew nor cared that no one had thought it worthwhile to teach him the rudiments of its operation and maintenance. It was #:#. One hour and one minute left. He put the thought aside and concentrated on the problem of finding tfie key to the paradox. What conceivable set of circumstances would cause receding stars to have a spectrum shift that showed them to be approaching the ship? Or, to rephrase the question, what conceivable set of circumstances would cause approaching stars to appear to dwindle in size? The answer came with startling suddenness and clarity: There was no paradox -- the ship was expanding. He considered the solution, examining it for flaws of logic, and found none. If he and the ship were expanding the wave length of light would diminish in proportion to the increasing size of the retinas of his eyes and the scanner plates of the transdimensional viewscreens: would become shorter and go into the ultraviolet. At the same time, the increasing size of himself and the ship would make the Earth and sun relatively smaller and therefore apparently receding. The same theory explained the two different speeds of the ship : its length was three times its diameter so its longitudinal expansion would proceed at three times the speed of its cross-sectional expansion. Everything checked. How large was the ship now? He made a rough calculation and stared almost unbelievingly at the results. He was a giant, more than a third of a light-year tall, in a ship that was six light-years long and two light-years in diameter. Far Centauri, which had required thirty years to reach in the fastest interplanetary ship, floated seventy-one feet away in the blackness outside the hull. And the sun and Earth were in the room with him, going into the shuttle's silvery focal ball. He would have to ask the computer to make certain his theory was valid. His time was too critically short for him to waste any of it with speculation based on an erroneous theory. He switched on the computer and it lighted up again. He typed rapidly : There was a brief pause as the computer evaluated its data, then it answered with one word: He switched it off again, to squander none of its short period of usefulness until he had decided upon what his further questions should be. At last, he had some grounds for conjecture ; had learned something about the warp the designers of the shuttle had not suspected. Their calculations had been correct when they showed a ship would travel in the warp at many times the normal space speed of light. But somewhere some little factor had been overlooked -- or never found -- and their precise mathematics had not indicated that the travel would be produced by expansion. Nature abhors a vacuum . And the black, empty warp was a vacuum more perfect than any that existed in normal space. In the normal space universe there were there was utter Nothing. Did the physical laws of the warp demand that matter be scattered throughout it, in emulation of its rich neighbor in the adjoining dimension? Was the warp hungry for matter? He rejected the thought as fantasy. There was some explanation that the physicists would eventually find. Perhaps there was a vast sizeratio difference between the two dimensions; perhaps the warp was far larger than the normal space universe and some co-universal law demanded that objects entering it become proportionally larger. None of that aspect of his circumstances, however, was of importance. There was only one prime problem facing him : how to move the ship within less than an hour to some point in the warp where his emergence into normal space would result in neither instant nor days-away death and where he would have the time to try to carry out the responsibility, so suddenly placed in his hands, of delivering the space warp shuttle to the Thun derbolt. The long-range task depended upon his immediate survival. He had to move the ship, and how did a man move a driveless ship? It might not require a very large propulsive force -- perhaps even an oxygen tank would serve as a jet. Except that he had none. He could use part of the air in the ship. Its sudden release should move the ship. There was a sun very near: Alpha Cenjauri. If he had the proper tools, and the time, he could cut a hole in the hull opposite Centauri... but he had neither the took nor the time. , , And what good would it do him if he could emerge into normal space at the desired distance from Centauri? He would be provided with power for the air regenerators by the solar power units but not power sufficient to operate the shuttle. He would breathe, and eat, for a week. Then the small amount of food on the ship would be gone and he would breathe for another four or five weeks. And then he would die of starvation and his driveless ship would continue its slow drift into the sun, taking his bones and the shuttle with it. He would have to go to Sirius and he would have to reach it the first try or never. If he could emerge into normal space at the proper distance from Sirius he would have power from it to operate the communicator. The Thunderbolt would come at once when it received his message and swallow the little Argosy in its enormous hold. The return to Earth would be the swift one through the warp and the Slug cruisers, so bold in pursuit of unarmed interplanetary ships, would quickly cease to exist. At #:# Sirius would be somewhere in or near the bow of the ship. The ship would not have to be moved more than two thirds of its length -- twenty meters. He could do that by releasing part of the air in the shuttle room through the sternward airlock. How much air? He tried to remember long-forgotten formulas. So many cubic feet of air at such and such a pressure when released through an opening of such and such a diameter would exert a propulsive force of... Hell, he didn't know. And not even the computer would be able to tell him because there were so many unknown factors, such as the proportion of the ship's mass lost to the Slug blasters, the irregular shape of the airlock opening, the degree of smoothness of its metal... He made calculations with pencil and paper. He would have to move the ship with extreme precision. A light-hour short of the proper distance put him too far from the sun for it to power the communicator, a light-hour beyond put him in the sun's flaming white heart. One light-hour out of eight point six light-years was approximately one part out of seventy-five thousand. He would have to move the ship with an accuracy of point aught three centimeters -- one hundredth of an inch. One hundredth of an inch! He laid the pencil , back down, almost numbly. He could never open and close an airlock and move a mass of thousands of tons with an accuracy of a hundredth of an inch. The very thought was wildly fantastic. He was already far closer to Sirius than he would be if he tried to get any closer. And that was over eight light-years from it. He looked at the chronometer and saw the hands had already reached #:#... Thirty-three minutes left to him. Sirius was near -- soon it would be in the bow of the ship -- and Sirius was eight point six light-years away. How could he move the ship a certain distance accurate to one hundredth of an inch? He couldn't. The answer was blunt and ugly and irrefutable: he couldn't. He got up and walked across the room, feeling like a man who had in quick succession been condemned. reprieved, recondemned. He had been projected into a situation for which he had had no preliminary training whatever; had been made sole custodian and operator of a computer and a space warp shuttle that he had never before been permitted to touch. He had used the sound but given him to solve the riddle of the paradoxes and learn where he was and where he wanted to go. He had done quite well -- he had solved every problem of his survival and the shuttle's delivery except the last one! He passed by the shuttle and stopped to rest his hand on the bright, silvery focal ball. The solar system would be deep inside the ball; the atoms of the ball larger than Earth, perhaps, and far more impalpable than the thinnest air. The Slug cruisers would be in there, infinitesimally tiny, waiting for him to return... No -- faulty reasoning. The solar system was as it had always been, not diminished in size and not really in the ball. It was only that two different points in two different dimensions coincided in the ball... He saw the answer. He did not have to move the ship to Sirius -- he had only to move the ball! very little time. First, to see if the warp shuttle was portable -- It was. When he unfastened the clamp that held it to the stand it lifted up freely, trailing a heavy cable behind it. He saw it was only a power supply cable, with a plug that would fit one of the sockets in the bow of the ship. He left the shuttle floating in the air, leashed by the cable, and went to the computer. Next, he would have to know if Sirius would be fully in the ship -- He switched the computer on and typed : It gave him the answer a moHe visualized the distance, from his knowledge of the ship's interior, and saw the position would be within the forward spare-parts room. Next, to learn exactly where in that room he should place the shuttle. He could not do so by measuring from the present position of the shuttle. The most precise steel tape would have to be at exactly the right temperature for such a measurement to be neither too short nor too long. He had no such tape, and the distance from the focal ball was only part of the necessary measuring: he would have to measure off a certain distance and a precisely certain angle from the purely imaginary central line of the ship's axis to intersect the original line. Such a measurement would be impossible in die time he had. He considered what would be his last question to the computer. The' hand was touching the zero and his question would have to be worded very clearly and subject to no misinterpretations. There would be no follow-up questions permitted. He began typing: sirius at #:#. consider all It seemed to take it an unduly long time to answer the question and he waited restlessly, unpleasantly aware of the hand touching zero and wondering if the computer's mind was baffled by the question; the mind that thought best in terms of orderly mathematics and could not know or care that measurement by protractor and tape would result in a position fatally far from that described by the neat, rigid figures. Then the answer appeared, beautifully concise: The computer died with an oddly human sigh. Its last act had been to give him the location of Sirius in such a manner that he could accurately position the shuttle's focal ball with the aid of the precision measuring devices in the ship's repair room. He went to the shuttle and picked it up in his arms. It was entirely weightless, and each magnet-clicking step he took toward the bow of the ship brought Sirius almost half a light-year nearer. He squinted against the white glare of Sirius in the viewscreen as he continued his terse report to the Th underbolt's commander: "I have about a week's supply of food. How long will it be until you reach me?" The commander's reply came after the pause caused by the distance involved: "We'll be there within three days. Go ahead and eat hearty. But how did you travel from Earth to Sirius in only two hours? My God, man -- what kind of a drive did that ship have?" "Why, it didn't have any drive from the start," he said. "To get here I" -- he frowned thoughtfully -- "you might say I walked and carried the ship."    It was a terrific theory and it would send Man to the stars. But the two men involved had to buck more than physical laws; and so the project was finished, over, done with. Unless... Corbow's Theory The same problem rocket designers have been struggling with for five years. Nobody's found the answer -- and they never will!" Bronsen Corbow glared at the older man, his lips pressed tightly together to keep from giving voice to the anger mounting inside of him. Mars Kenton was an argumentive old fool, but the company had made him his assistant and nothing could be done about it. "They've known ever since they discovered that interstellar drive," Mars continued, "that they can only make enough Carbolium to send four ships a year to the end of our galaxy and back again. Is it our fault they have to make the blasted stuff instead of mining it out of the ground?" The words ringing in the quiet of the laboratory seemed to pound in Bronsen's ears and he found he could hold his tongue no longer. He leaned toward the older physicist and slammed his hand down on the table. "That's enough, Mars. I happen to be the one in charge here, not you." His quiet voice made clear the anger he felt. "Reed turned the problem over to us. I say we can lick it. Just because my chief assistant is still thinking in terms of ancient history, it's no reason to send back a report from this laboratory saying we can't handle the problem." He ran a trembling hand through his close-cropped hair and swore at himself when he saw Mars noticed the trembling. Why did he have to start shaking every time he got mad? The person he was mad at invariably took the shaking to be fear, and he would always be forced to drive his point home all the harder in order to get the respect he demanded. Mars Kenton sneered. "Mind telling me just how you are going to eliminate interstellar drive from our rocket ships? Or have you cooked up another of your bright ideas to try out at the company's expense?" "I'm fed up with you, Mars!" All control over his temper was gone now and the younger man gave full vent to his anger. His powerful body fairly bristled in his rage and in spite of himself Mars was forced to cringe beneath the assailing roars that followed. "You may be twenty years older than I am; you may have been one of the pioneers in space travel; you may still be a good man if you could forget that the whole world didn't plot that accident that left you with a bad leg -- but you're still taking orders from me. We have some good men in this department, and you can either keep your mouth shut and work with us or you can get out. Interstellar drive isn't the only solution to space travel and the answer to the problem is going to come from this laboratory. Now take your choice!" Mars glared at Bronsen and seethed inwardly but swung back to his work table. His right leg twitched convulsively, forcing him into a stumbling limp and he silently cursed the fate that had brought him to such a lowly existance. Him! Joe Kenton! Member of the first expedition to land on Mars and successfully return to Earth. And what was he now? Just a second rate design consultant working in a laboratory on the moon. His water blue eyes clouded in his flood of self pity. How beautiful it had been out there... all blackness, all majesty, the throbbing power of the rockets, the thrill of unknown adventures in the void. His rickety old heart beat faster with remembering. The scorching desolateness of Mars was something he would never forget. Even now he could see the miles of heatdrenched land, the thick red powder that covered the planet's crust, the stretching reaches of nothing but a barren, dead world. And then -- the accident. Sure, it was just an accident. How could he know that the port lid was going to break its magnetic field and slam down upon him? It had though, and he had returned an honored man, praised for his selfsacrificing adventure, then pitied because he would spend the rest of his life a crippled man. He twisted his thin, blue-veined hands together, those hands that had piloted a glittering rocket through ace, those hands that had sifted rough the sands of an alien world, those hands that now were white and fragile, working over drawings and plans for other ships. Gone were the dreams, and with their going came the bitterness. He felt his anger melting in his own self pity, decided not to brush away the tears that gathered in his eyes and turned to his board, staring at it through blurred vision. "Bong! End of round five. Just wait around a minute folks, next round coming up." Vem Webber peered cautiously around the door as if expecting something to fly at him, then jumped into the room. His youthful face broke into a broad grin as he bowed before the chief designer. "Oh great and noble Mr. Bronsen Corbow. Is it safe for your lowly servant to approach these hallowed halls in answer to your summons? Mine is not to reason why -- but I'd still like to leave here with my head on my shoulders." Bronsen found himself smiling at his young assistant. Vem, although he was twenty-four, had the spirit and air of a teenager and usually succeeded in keeping the lab in a state of high humor. The tenseness of the argument with Mars dispelled itself and Bronsen relaxed. "Get word to the men that we are having a special meeting this afternoon, in the conference room. We're going to blow the lid right off the present concepts of space travel and really give those people out there something that will make their eyes bulge. I'll tell you more about it this afternoon." "Aye, aye, sir!" Vem clicked his heels, gave an exaggerated salute and was gone. Bronsen glanced in returning annoyance at the snort of disgust that issued from Mars' comer. That old fool and his rockets, he thought were things of the past. There was only the future now. New ideas, new methods, new successes. Why couldn't Mars see that? And yet, Bronsen himself felt a tiny pulsing of doubt. He cursed himself for that tinge of selfdistrust, but could do nothing about it. He was brilliant, he was a master of design and he knew space flight as well as he knew the shape, workings and complexities of the pencil he twirled in his hands. But what if he wasn't right? What if his new theory was a flop -- and with it a waste of money, time and human lives? He tore himself from his dismal thoughts with a savage determination and strode into his office. That damned Mars was just getting under his skin, that's all. Listen to him long enough and he'll have you thinking we should all have stayed back in the horse and buggy days. No problems of space flight then, no old beliefs, ancient ideas, stagnant prejudices to worry about then. Not as far as traveling to the stars was concerned, anyway. T points I know you are all familiar with, but that you should keep in mind, starting with the beginning of space travel." Bronsen ran his hand through his hair and looked over the eagerly expectant faces of his staff, considering carefully the points he had to make. "First, there were the Detoriurodriven rockets. Fine ships that opened up the realm of travel in outer space." His voice was firm, stringent with his inner excitement, his faith in his idea. "In fact, it was just such a ship as this' that Joe Kenton, Mars to you folks, was on when they made their first landing on Mars. These ships had their good points and still are excellent over short distances but certainly are of no use for intergalactic flight. They are much too slow, requiring more than a lifetime to make the trip there and back. "Then came the interstellar drive, the method we are now using. This drive, utilizing Carbolium which we have to manufacture, makes full use of space as a medium of travel. There's only one catch. We can make only a certain amount of Carbolium, and the costs of making it are astronomical. However, no matter what the expense, the supply is limited. Still, everything's fine. We use the old rockets for short distances and the interstellar drive for intergalactic trips." He paused a minute to let it sink in. "That is everything was fine. As you know, we have found another planet, remarkably similar to Earth in the Eastrex Galaxy, and have succeeded in setting up a colony there. This presents problems. For one, since we can send only four ships a year to Naver, this new planet, our colonizing is going to be slowed down to a crawl. Also, we will have a mighty hard time trying to get supplies and everything else that a new colony needs to Naver within a reasonable length of time. In other words, what we need is a ship that will be cheap to run, fast enough to get there and get back again and also safe enough to carry passengers and cargo, even in small amounts. You've heard of this problem before; I know you've tried independently to work it out and have not had much luck. I think we might have an answer now. "How many of you have shot a rifle or are familiar with a gun?" The expectant faces had gone blank. What was he leading up to anyhow? Still, a large number of hands cautiously worked their way into the air. "All right. All you have to do right now is forget about space ships and concentrate on a rifle and a bullet." There was beginning to be the muttering and stirring of a confused group of people. Bronsen's muscular hands gripped the table eagerly. They were confused, but they were also interested. "You are familiar with the fields and grooves of a gun barrel," he continued, "and you kpow they are there to give the bullet a spin when it is fired. Now what happens to a bullet when it is fired from a smooth barrel, with no grooves? It is inaccurate, wobbles, has less power and eventually turns end over end. Now, take the grooved rifle barrel. The bullet is given a spin, it has many times the velocity of the other, it has a straight line accuracy due to the spiral motion -- keep these last two points in mind -- and providing the rifle is aimed right in the first place, will hit the target." The group was being split up into two factions, those who leaned forward expectantly once more and those who shook their heads in bafflement. "Now, let's go back again to the old rockets, and also our present ones. They all use the same principle to get off the ground -- blast off with rockets. But let's add a second type of blasting off area, also using rockets, but one that looks like a monstrous rifle barrel, complete to the fields and grooves. We have a launching apparatus that is like a grooved rifle compared to a smooth barreled one. The smooth barrel that we now use, the rockets taking off straight, gives good acceleration but not enough top speed. Our old rockets had that fault and never could get good velocity even when in flight. Our new ones take over with the interstellar drive, but we want to eliminate this last method. The spiral take off though, would give much greater velocity right from the start, would enable the ship to hit outer space with a greater speed than it could attain using the other methods and it would continue on in space at a much faster rate. The lack of friction would keep it from slowing down and if we could hit the speed we want before entering outer space, the ship could go right on at that same rate in space. There wouldn't even be need for rocket power while in actual galactic flight. The initial momentum would carry it through to its destination. The rocket could do all this because this spiral launching would give us more 'muzzle velocity', and in a given time after blast off, the spinning ship would have reached a much greater speed than the regularly fired one. This means operating cost will be confined to blast off, landing and to skirt around any sudden dangers that might arise in space." "We therefore have a ship that has the velocity of the drive and maybe more, without the cost of drive. It has safety since our old rockets proved to be remarkably accident-free and this design would actually be working on almost the same principle as the old rockets, except for the blast off. The difference in outer space would be this. The old ships used rockets throughout the trip to increase their velocity. The new ones will be traveling so fast when they enter outer space, they won't have to use any power because they will already have the velocity needed." He paused to swallow the dryness in his mouth and noticed with pleasure that more than one face was twisted in thought. Good. All they have to do is be given a theory to think about, the time to do that thinking and they'd be on their way. "That's about it for now. I have some ideas of my own for the design of this ship... and it's really surprising when you think how simple it is. But I'll save that for some other time. Right now, I'd want all of you to think about it. It gets top priority. Report back to me with your ideas. I think we can lick this problem and get our bread and butter, Inter Galactic Enterprises, right on top of the pile. Good luck." The meeting broke up amidst frantic discussion, wails of misunderstanding, confusion and quiet self-musings. Bronsen smiled to himself, his face almost boyishly radiant in his pleasure. The seed had been planted. Now all he had to do was give it time to grow and bear fruit. with reverence as he stood with Bronsen looking over the first test rocket as it was slowly wheeled to the launching area. "Boy-o-boy! Look at that beauty! Did you ever see anything like it?" The silver ship lay on its side as it approached the huge tower, but already Vem could see its glistening majesty soaring through the sky. "She was a lot of work, Vem. Let's just keep our fingers crossed. By the way, that design of yours on the rotating cylinder inside the rocket, working independently of the rocket's forced spin, was good. Tough thing to lick, but now the pilot can keep a steady 'up' and 'down' no matter how much the outside of the ship is spinning. Good work." Vern shrugged his shoulders. "Tust call me the Einstein of the #rd century, that's all. We'll all see how well everything works pretty soon now." Bronsen was finding the tension beginning to build up in him. Just a few more hours and his theory would be lauded with success or shattered into the dust. He peered at the rocket, at the tiny black figures of the men that were dwarfed by its size and at the giant, black tube, towering hundreds of feet high, waiting patiently to receive her first charge. The needle-nosed space craft glistened in the early morning sun, her thin beauty tantalizing to the senses of a spaceman. Her lines swept gracefully back across her smooth expanse until they hit the four fin tips sweeping out from the rotating band of the tail piece, the fin tips that would fit into the slowly spiraling grooves of the launching tower. The field and groove construction first suggested by Bronsen had been replaced by lands and grooves when it was found that the fewer grooves gave greater accuracy and better muzzle velocity when tested on the laboratory models. Thus, there were only four fins instead of the originally planned eight. The rocket reached the lowering platform and Bronsen watched in nervous anxiety as the ship was lowered into the ground tail first, then slowly began its upward ascent into the belly of the launcher. He thought of a thousand things that could happen right then, found that none of them were going to and returned to his office. The rocket was safely nestled in the launcher's belly, patiently waiting for the human crew to arrive and give it life. When they gathered about the launching field that afternoon Bronsen found himself sweating in both the heat of the day and the torrid intensity of Mars' insistence that the whole thing was going to be one big flop. "Just one blast from those rockets and we'll all be blown into the next galaxy, without benefit of a space ship. Trying to shoot a # pound rocket as if it were a toy gun. You'll learn one of these days, Gorbow, that the old way was still the best. It got us to Mars and back and if you'd work on that instead of this, it would be good for intergalactic flight too. But no, you've got to have your name up there in print." "Oh, shut up your damned mumbling, Mars!" Bronsen shot the words out savagely. He gave the older man a withering look and turned his attention again to the ship. The men that were to take her up had disappeared inside the expanse of the launching tower and the other figures darted back and forth, making last minute preparations. The minutes began to tick off. Five minutes until blast off. Four minutes. Three minutes. The field was now completely devoid of human figures. Two minutes. One minute. Ten seconds, nine, eight. The launcher looked lonely and terrifying in its greatness and Bronsen tried to wish the rocket up out of her belly by will power alone. Four, three , two, one... The ground trembled as the ear-shattering roar jumped across the lunar landscape. The sound grew louder, sharper, and Bronsen began to think his head would split with the noise. The rockets pitched higher, their scream pierced the air and then the silver nose of the ship edged above the top of the launcher. It pulled further into view, the shimmering silver glinting in the sun and Bronsen clenched his fists in anxiety. Come on baby; show them what you can do. That's it baby, keep right on coming. Come on girl! The ship rose clear of the launcher, the distance making it look as if it were shot straight out, but Bronsen knew the steadily spinning hull was heading right. Suddenly he noticed it. Something was wrong! The ship wasn't acting right. What was it? His eyes tried to leap from his head to get closer to the rising needle and then he saw it. It was shaking. The whole ship was trembling as if in human terror. He watched the tremors pass from the nose to the tail, each one more violent than the last, until the whole ship was wracked with a shaking like palsy. Why? It had worked so beautifully with the experimental models. What was causing it? The bow of the ship was now visibly shaking, the tremors becoming more savage and then the nose began to dip. With a final shudder of resignation, the rocket pitched over and began its screaming descent. Bronsen watched the plunging ship, felt his heart grab in pain in his chest and stumbled back from the observation window unable to watch any at once slammed into the unyielding lunar plain. In his mind's eye he could see the twisted, exploding mass of metal and the thought sickened him. The others ran from the room, heading for the wrecked ship. Broasen watched them with dull eyes and made no attempt to follow. What could they do for the four men that had gone to their deaths in his mad creation? What could that now lay a twisted heap of rubble? He turned to drag his defeated body back to the lab, to twist and mull in his mind what had happened, and found himself looking into the glaring eyes of "I told you, didn't I, Mr. Corbow?" Bronsen covered his ears so that he wouldn't hear. He screamed, "Shut up! Shut up before I slam you one." Mars spat in disgust. "Four nice guys in that ship, too. Knew 'em, didn't you?" Bronsen's hammer-hard first smashed into Mars' mouth and the old man was slammed against the wall before falling in a crumpled heap on the floor. He sat there, the blood oozing from his mouth as he stared at the retreating back of the man he never thought would have enough nerve to really hit him. Now he was sorry he had said anything and the self pity welled up within him. He really didn't mean half of what he always managed to spit out. What made him do it? He wiped the blood from his mouth and pulled himself to his feet. down into the soft contours of the chair, eyeing Hanson Reed with a tortured soul. The president of Inter Galactic Enterprises glared at him from the other side of the desk, every inch of his paunchy frame the body of an outraged executive. He chewed violently on the black cigar in his mouth and waited impatiently for Bronsen to explain. Bronsen spread his hands helplessly. "I don't know Reed. I just don't know." His shoulders heaved in a sigh of dejection. "Every single person in the moon lab has been looking for an answer and we still can't find out why the ship crashed. We've tested the laboratory models over and over again. We've gone over every little detail and have nothing but a blank to show for it." Reed chewed more savagely at the end of his cold cigar. "We spent development and all we have to show for it is a pile of scrap metal and four corpses scattered over the lunar landscape. There's got to be some explanation." that an accident like this would happen," Bronsen countered desperately. "It's just coincidence that it happened on the first model." "Coincidence!" Mars' voice was guttural with contempt. "I told you from the start it wasn't practical. I knew..." "All right, Mars," Reed interrupted. "You were project design engineer, right?" Mars nodded in agreement. "Was there anything wrong with the design of the ship, any reason why it probably wouldn't have worked, from a design stand-point?" "No," he answered reluctantly. "Not that I could see. I just knew from the start it wasn't going to work. I told Bronsen that, lots of times, but he just isn't the type to take advice." Bronsen roared and leaped to his feet. "You old fool," he bellowed. "Technically, theoretically and mechanically, there wasn't one indication that it wasn't going to be a completely successful launching procedure. You know that as well as anyone! Ask the men around you. They handled the final application, the mechanics, the construction, the blast off. Ask any one of them. Every single one of them will tell you the same thing. There was no reason why the ship should have crashed! Every item had been checked, double checked and re-checked again. The instruments indicated everything was functioning perfectly at blast off. If you didn't have such a twisted inverted opinion of everything..." Mars leaned forward, his body now trembling, "Don't you go calling me names, you swell-headed pup!" Reed pounded his desk violently. "Mars! Bronsen! he shouted impatiently. "This is hardly the time for name-calling and airing personal gripes. We're here to find a good reason for spending more money on this project. We're not children in a schoolyard, arguing over a piece of candy, although that's exactly what it's beginning to sound like. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that with so much internal fighting going on, nothing could possibly come of spending more. It would be a waste of both finances nd time." Bronsen slowly sat down again, his trembling hands clenched into tight fists. "That's one item you don't have to worry about," he growled. "Kenton is completely finished as far as I'm concerned. He's out. Fired." Mars' face fell in shocked surprise. Reed tore the cigar from his mouth and glared at Bronsen. "No one is being fired, Bronsen. You've been a good leader, in my opinion, as well as a friend, but I do the firing around here." Bronsen glowered and reddened under the unexpected rebuttal but said nothing. "You are young yet," Reed continued. "You've got brains, imagination, leadership and ability. Wouldn't be where you are if you didn't. There's just one thing lacking, and Mars is the one that has it. Experience. And with that experience goes well-used caution. You've got the go-ahead, but he has the wisdom. Temperance and drive. That's Mars and you. You've got each other. Why don't you just learn how to work with and use each other?" Bronsen remained in baleful silence. Mars glared at the younger man and sneered contemptuously. "That young pup never will know what the word caution means. He's so eager to get his name up..." Bronsen rose to his feet, his grey eyes flashing in hate. Reed slammed his cigar into the ashtray and threw up his hands. "That's it! It's the last straw! I'm through playing referee for two snarling dogs. The project is closed, finished! If and when some body can come up with a decent reason why it should be opened again, we'll consider it then. Until that time, consider the project non-existent and return to your regular jobs. And cut out the bickering and fighting -- or you are both fired!" He pulled out a fresh cigar, bit into it in disgust and dismissed the meeting by returning to the papers on his desk. Bronsen felt the anger boiling over within him and suppressed the desire to hand in his resignation on the spot. He looked for Mars and saw his thin frame out the door. He wearily passed a hand over his eyes and left the room. ance at Vem's whistling and silently wished the young assistant would get out of the room and let him brood in peace. He chewed the end of his pencil methodically and savagely, his features blushing pink with anger as he remembered the tirade of words exchanged with Bronsen a week ago. "Stupid, insolent, day-dreaming pup," he snarled half aloud. Vem stopped in mid-step, eyeing him in surprise. "Huh?" he said. "Did you say something to me?" Mars grimaced. "No. I was just talking to myself." Vem grinned widely. "That's good. I'd sure hate to have anybody think those words were a description of me. Good old Vem, that's me. Combination office boy, slave, master of ceremonies and soothing balm for ruffled egos. That's my description of me. Master of all trades, Jack of none. Of course, I can't say what others think." "You don't make much sense," Mars growled thickly, biting again into the pencil. "Neither do you," Vem countered quickly. "But then again, what man does to a struggling young genius like myself?" "Oh dry up," came the reply. "And take that drawing table into the new drafter's room." "Oh, sure. You only need about three men to move that monster but..." He left the sentence unfinished and dragged the table from the wall. Mars smiled sympathetically, shook his head, and pointed to his bad leg when Vern indicated he could use some help. "Such is the life of a slave," the younger man sighed and hoisting the clumsy article, headed for the door. "Look out!" Mars suddenly yelled and jumped forward to catch a falling rocket model as the table edge glanced off it. Vem yelped in surprise, jolted backward and fell against the wall, the heavy board crashing down on his foot. "My God, Vern. Your foot..." The other grinned, withdrew his foot, from beneath the board and pulled down his sock. "Not this baby," he flipped. "I've got castiron insurance. It's plastic from the ankle down, see?" Mars stared in shock at the artificial limb and could think of noth"Got it in cadet school," Vein explained and then answered the question in Mars' eyes. "I was training to be a space pilot myself. Some fellows and I decided to celebrate our graduation, got drunk and ended up in a wreck. They put me together real good, even taught me how to use the foot so no one would ever know it wasn't the real thing. It washed me out as far as the Space Corps was concerned though. I drowned my sorrows in alcohol for a couple weeks, told myself I was going to hell with myself and then decided to put what I did know to work. That's how I joined up with this outfit. Now I sit back and design the rockets my classmates have to worry about flying... Enough of this chatter... got to get busy. See you." Mars turned thoughtfully back to his desk. "That kid's got only one foot," he mused soberly. He looked down at his own injured leg and savagely kicked it against the wall. "Your leg. Your poor, crippled leg... what a fine crutch it has been," he bitterly reproached himself. "It proves you were one of the first in space, and you won't let people forget it. You're a jealous old man. You're afraid to have someone else do what you no longer can do. You want things to stay the way they were when you got hurt, so no one else can live your dream. If time stood still, there would be no trips to new planets, no new discoveries and Mars Kenton would still be the hero of his dream." He tried to revolt, to denounce the self-accusations. "What about Bronsen Corbow?" he asked. "Does that explain why I've fought him so hard?" His slowly growing conscience laughed at him. "But it does. Bronsen ignores your crutch, your proof that the old way worked the best. He's concerned with the future, the future you never want to come." He buried his grey-thatched head in his hands and felt the weariness in his bones. His thoughts returned to the unsuccessful launching. "But it was a crazy idea," he argued weakly. "It would never have worked anyway." It was a poor defense, one that faltered and failed when he finally admitted the truth : He was a jealous, bitter man, fighting anonymity. Once more he found himself mulling over the rocket launching, probing for support to his initial decision that it wouldn't work, searching for some point to substantiate his claim. But was he really right in that decision? Had he let his hate-ridden heart rule his reasoning mind? He waded back to the beginning of Bronsen's theory. Bullets... the test models were the bullets. Shells... the huge rocket itself was a shell compared to the bullets. Shells have an ojive, bourrelet, rotating band, but bullets are different. How? He stopped. He reviewed the parts in his mind, then suddenly lurched to the files and pu'led out the rocket plans. He compared the ship's construction bit by bit with a shell, his mind working quickly, accurately, with a new enthusiasm... Hours later he leaned back from his drawing table and his voice rumbled out into the quiet reaches of the empty room. "Men will fly to the stars like a bullet," he prophesized. "Because I know why the rocket crashed." It was dark but the light in Bronsen's office was still on. Mars pulled himself erect and turned toward Bronsen's room, then faltered. "I could just forget it," he mused. "Then the idea would be filed away. But someday..." He could not do it. The excitement was beginning to mount inside of him, pushing him forward. He took a deep breath and with a decisive shrug drew back his shoulders, standing straighter and taller than he had in fifteen long years. He strode from the room and headed down the hall. Bronsen heard the door behind him open and close softly. He glanced up and saw who it was and returned, scowling, to his work. When Mars did not leave, he looked up again, curiosity stirring within him at the expression in the older man's face. "Well?" It wasn't really a question, nor an inflection denoting that he wanted to hear what Mars had to say. It was more of a compromise between physically throwing him out and grudgingly listening to what he had to say. "I've got it, I know what happened to the ship," Mars announced quietly. "I knew it when I saw it come out of the launcher but I couldn't explain it." Bronsen returned to his papers with a snort and Mars pleaded, "I'm sorry about all those things I said. For God's sake. Listen to me!" The tortured pleading in the man's voice made Bronsen put down the papers in surprise. "The models worked," Mars plunged ahead. "Sure they did. But because they were small... so much smaller than the real ship... there was no trouble and they worked perfectly. The trouble reveals itself only as the projectile gets larger. The nose, Bronsen. A nose band. Don't you see what I'm trying to say?" The younger man stared in silence at the pleading ex-space pilot, before the words began to penetrate his whirling thoughts. He forgot the crash of the ship; he forgot the feel of hard teeth splitting the skin across his knuckles; he forgot the animosity that existed between them. His mind could focus on nothing but what Mars was trying to say. "The nose of the ship is long. The only guides were on the tail at the rotating band. Think of shells. Bourrelets. The big shells have bourrelets... bands around the nose that dig into the grooves and steady the front of the shell. The ship... its front began trembling because there was nothing to guide the nose in a steady path. The more velocity the rocket had, the worse the trembling became until it threw the whole ship out of control. Don't you see? That's all that was wrong with it! It would have been perfect if it had had guide wings on the bourrelet. The guide pieces could be withdrawn when the ship is launched... but they would have to be there in order to get it launched. I'm right, you know I am! That's your answer. That was the only part wrong with it!" The enormity of Mars' words left Bronsen speechless. He looked at the suddenly joyous man before him and saw the old bitterness replaced by the rapture of his discovery. Yes, that was what had been wrong. It was the solution... the one tiny piece that made the puzzle into an understandable picture. He paused a moment, as if trying to make a great decision, then grabbed the older man by the arm. "Come on! Let's get it down on paper!" the belly of the launching tower, her needle-like body quiet, waiting, her control panels flashing signals and instructions to her masters, her circuits buzzing with the tenseness of the seconds before blast off. The steady counting drummed through her wires, tripped relays, and her masters flipped the switches, pressed the buttons and pulled the levers that readied her for her maiden flight. Eight seconds, seven seconds. Six seconds, five, four. The switch was jerked upward and she felt the power beginning to move in her vitals. Three, two, one! The driver button slammed home, her rockets roared out in ferocious birth, snarling, roaring, growing with each passing second. She settled back upon her rockets as if in protest at their screaming growth, then was forced to give ground and the ship moved up the shaft. Her rotating band and bourrelet fins dug deep into the spiraling grooves, her body began to turn... slowly, so slowly. Then she suddenly leaped forward, her hull whirling upward; the shaft raced by in dizzy swiftness, her rockets roared louder and she raised her spinning body further. She was free! Her body hurtled up and up, her needle nose straight and true, her velocity leaping forward... "Off rockets! Set up emergency interstellar drive for instant activation if needed. Signal in scanning screens. Activate force field and take a breather boys. We're on our way and the blast off was perfect." The pilot's mechanical sounding voice droned through the speaker in the moon-bound observation room and simultaneously the air was ruffled by the deep exhale of relief, the rustle of slowly relaxing bodies strung tight with the hopeful tenseness of the blast off. Mars gazed up at the disappearing silver streak, his blue eyes intent, glistening with pride and excitement. "I never thought I'd see the day," he breathed. "Look at her, she's going straight and true. She's the most beautiful thing I ever saw." Bronsen' s face relaxed into a happy grin as the gleaming rocket hurtled up out of sight. He glanced at Mars and gave him a companionable smile. "Even more beautiful than Mars (Continued on page #) The invaders were going to make galactic history. Fate made it a comedy of errors. mitted to himself that he was uneasy. Arching his thorax, he unrolled his antennae slowly in a lazy gesture he hoped would conceal the unseemly nervousness he felt now that the ship had swung into an orbit around the strange planet. When a commander briefs his officers, he must radiate confidence and calm. "Companions, an historic moment has arrived , # he began pompously, his antennae moving in the deliberate, stylized movements of the Court language. "Below us lies the verdant expanse of the third planet, green gem of the heavens . # At this, several of his subordinates turned a rather puzzled yellow around their head orifices, obviously unable to understand a gesture of what he was saying. Only the second-in-command seemed unconcerned; he knew from long experience that his commander would revert to common vernacular when he had finished the usual ceremonial preamble. Zurg did so, noting the relieved hues of his officers as he continued : "As you all know, our scouts have reconnoitered this world on several occasions. But now the time has arrived to make an actual landing. In fact, companions, we are the vanguard of an invasion . # Pausing to let this register, he was pleased to see that none of the officers seemed to be suppressing thwirms. If any, thing, they were calmer than he was. "Not a great deal is known about the inhabitants of the planet, but the dominant form of life, strangely enough, is mammalian, and possesses some intelligence. Her Majesty desires conquest without undue destruction. As the Queen wills, her servants shall act." All dipped their antennae at this formula, and watched in attentive hues as the commander went on to explain that due to the high percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere, special coverings would have to be worn. They would filter the air before it reached the ventral tracheae, and leaving the head exposed, would shield all the rest of the body. A bit clumsy, the commander admitted, but absolutely essential. "Now as to our behavior toward the natives -- previous experience with mammalian life-types shows that they are susceptible to panic and fear when confronted with something totally strange, so we will use tactics which basically are very simple. First, we will land near a native settlement. When we march into the area, our alien appearance will stun the natives. Our detachment of all-range telepathic sensitives will notify us when the state of shock has set in, then our attack support will open up with full-scale mental assault, and keep the creatures paralyzed while we seize the area before a defense can be organized. Then the Grand Fleet will proceed here at top speed." "Remember that in this, as in all operations where the powers of the collective mind are used, we must first trigger the enemy's reaction by physical means, therefore nothing can be done until we know that they are in the needed state of shock. Now are there any questions?" How strange actually, mused the commander as he returned to his cubicle, that a race like his own, so gifted at pure mental contact with other life-forms, should still use signals and colorations to communicate among themselves. The chafed spot on his left antenna was paining again after the exercise of the brie ing. The report had said that these mammalians were believed to converse through some kind of atmospheric vibrations... Odd too, that mental warfare, refined and developed though it was, could still only be used against minds agitated by a specific physical stimulus. And that physical stimulus had to be provided by the invaders appearing on the scene, and if necessary performing the Dra, a series of dances and contortions so repulsive to most lifeforms that all thinking would fade into panic. Having once thwirmed himself at a performance of the Dra, he hoped it wouldn't be necessary... his musings were interrupted as the ship's lights flickered to orange, signalling hands to stations for planetfall. Leaving the con of the ship to his second-in-command, he shut himself in his cubicle and made preparations to be miserably sick, as he always was during deceleration. Stroking the chafed spot on his antenna with the smooth edge of his left forearm's prehensile claw, Zurg raised his medicine kit in his secondary tentacles and snapped off the heavy lead seal with his jagged incisor mandibles. I wonder, he speculated, why alien races always find us so frightening... high in the sky, but only a few filtered beams penetrated to the sheltered copse where the slate-colored ship lay partially concealed by artfully placed vines and underbrush. Drawn up in three ranks beside the ship, only their heads protruding from the loose-fitting coveralls, stood the detail picked to make the entry into the native settlement. Zurg led them out through the underbrush barrier they had thrown up the night before, and they emerged onto a little-traveled dirt road leading off across the fields toward a cluster of buildings that marked the edge of town. No creatures appeared as the invading column lumbered along. As they neared the edge of the settlement, Zurg, his antennae drooping slightly from the unusual heat, turned to remind the others: "Remember, the mental assault won't begin until we are well into the area and shock reaction is effected, so stay in formation until I order otherwise." There were still no natives in sight on the small side street by which they entered town; but as they turned a corner and swung on to the broad central thoroughfare, the commander saw that the street was clogged with natives, a great the street in the same direction as his column, about a hundred yards ahead. For a moment they didn't appear to notice the newcomers, but soon a growing number had turned and were gesturing excitedly to each other, pointing at the approaching troop. Watching them anxiously, Zurg saw no evidence of panic. The column kept moving, and the crowd began parting to let them pass through. Some darted forward as though to get a closer look at the strangers. The commander fought off a thwirm as he realized the crowd was now all around them, pressing in more closely on every side. The atmosphere itself seemed to vibrate strangely, and looking around, he saw that the creatures were opening small head orifices and striking the ends of their forward limbs together. Were they communicating -- or was it something else? It was surely not panic. Feeling increasingly dizzy from the heat and vibrations, he glanced anxiously over his followers, and saw at once that they were more upset than he. Colors were flushing their faces in meaningless successions. One or two seemed to be staggering. The shock threshold of these beings has been horribly underestimated, thought Zurg desperately. Only one thing left to do -- turning again, he signalled the detail to begin the Dra. Perhaps that would overcome this incomprehen sible counterattack... "I tell you Charlie, you've got to discipline that gang! They didn't show up on time, they didn't complete the route, they put on a public ritual that wasn't scheduled, apparently stealing the entire show -- stupid crowd yelled themselves hoarse. Then they all reeled off into a side street. They must have been drunk to a man -- I understand about half of them had to be carried! And when I confronted Andy Sharpe, he swore up and down that they weren't out of their hotel that morning. All sleeping off that spree they had the night before. He actually had the nerve to say, # I don't know who those boys were that you claim were a block behind the end of the parade, but they weren't our boys.' " Charlie Dils, new Commander of Legion, leaned back in his chair car seat and blew a cloud of cigar smoke toward the ceiling. "Maybe they were men from Mars," he grinned. Then, remembering his dignity, he sobered abruptly. "Anyway, one bunch looks about the same as another, once they get their masks on -- good Lord, it was a hot day for masks -- but it certainly made the parade more impressive. People are still talking about it. We're even getting credit for having a flying saucer. Some farmer out at the edge of town claims he saw one take off after the parade last night. Says it was going west like a bat out of hell. "If we can get that kind of publicity, Frank, I wouldn't worry about Andy and the boys. I'll write him a letter. It was a great convention -- let's let it go at that."    (Continued from page #) that day? Or the old rockets?" Mars looked slightly embarrassed and shuffled his legs into a more comfortable position. "Aw hell," he said awkwardly. "Can't you forget an old fool's ramblings? We just watched a rocket launched that's going to open up a whole new era in space travel. It was a perfect blast off and we know it'll be a perfect trip and landing. Bronsen thoughtfully nodded his head, his grey eyes dancing. "Tell you what," Mars continued. "I've got a bottle that I've been saving for about fifteen years. Got it when we got back from that first trip and never opened it. Bronsen grinned and gave the old man's thin shoulder a hearty slap. "Let's get that drink!"    Greatest Selection of Puzzles Ever for Only # T HE largest, most varied and interesting selection of puzzles, word games, math games, quizzes and brain teasers ever published at the price! Hundreds of exciting ways to test your wits and talents! Months and months of fun and entertainment! Puts pep into parties. Order today! Send only CO., Inc. Kingston, N. Y. Ill ( Continued from page # ) The Staff will be after me" Kane glanced at the elevator, then they ran back toward the saucer. "You'll have to pilot this thing," Kane said. "It's a little crowded up there for me." She started the motor and the saucer lifted abruptly. "The terminal at La Guardia?" she said. "No. The ship's at least two miles from the Terminal. We'll go directly to the ship." He hesitated. "The only thing is -- it isn't due to blast out of here until the #th." "That doesn't matter," she said. "Why doesn't it? We're flaunting the law. They're after us. They won't let us just hide away on that ship until the #th." "They?" He stared at her. "You said yourself we had to hurry, because the Staff -- " "But don't you see, there's no one to stop us now. The Staff at Sunny Hills could have, but here there isn't any Staff. There's none at the ship either, is there?" "No." "Well then, we'll just wait on the ship until -- we go to the Moon." "But you were afraid, Lucie. You talked about undergrounds, and how it was impossible -- " She touched his arm and then took hold of his hand. "You don't understand I guess. Maybe you never will." "Understand what?" "What it is to try to get away, be alone, be by yourself, when you can't. When no matter what you do you're with the Group, night and day, even in your dreams. You knew it for a while, but imagine it for years, not days. There's no place to hide. Wherever you go the Group goes with you. That's why I said you couldn't get away -- " "Then there isn't any law to prevent us from going to the Moon?" "Only the law of the majority, of Public Opinion," she said. "But you can't stay here and fight it, not for very long. Finally you have to give in to it. You become what they are or go mad. And there are Groups even for them." The saucer dropped down to the fog draped earth and they were walking toward the pits where the Moonship waited. It looked like such a wonderful world, he thought. Everyone happy, everyone smiling all the time. No wars. No externalized authority. The Manufacturers of consent. A quasi-totalitarian society in which means of communication had largely replaced force as the apparatus of compulsion. Communication, fear, insecurity. In his isolation and insecurity, man clung to his Group, to the majority, the accepted opinions. The majority did not need to force a man now. No need for police, or armies. They convinced him. The only way you could keep from being convinced was to get out. The hatch slid open. "Welcome aboard," the Captain said.    Cities may soon give up trying to control traffic by lights and other conventional means and turn to directing individual automobiles as traffic congestion mounts. Such individual directing may be done, for example, by directly controlling the movements of each car, or by a broadcast that informs every driver of traffic conditions for blocks around him. Before this happens, engineers expect to use electronic brains in all major cities to solve complex traffic snarls. Each large city will have its own digital computer and a team of operators who will be able to work out the best method of control -- through use of mathematical models -- without disrupting actual traffic flow. Tomorrow's atomic airliners will be locomotives of the sky, according to a recent report delivered to the Society of Automotive engineers. The "engine" will be a giant atomicpowered fuel-plane. The coaches will be smaller ships coupled to the locomotive in mid-air. The airborne nuclear train would fly its course, with commercial airliners "unhooking" on arrival at their terminal airport, where other passenger aircraft would "latch on" for new airports of call. With such a set-up, indefinite shuttle service could be maintained, limited only by the crew's endurance. Airlines and freighters, thus relieved of carrying full fuel loads, could haul larger passenger and pay loads. The tow plane concept also eliminates the problem of shielding passengers and cargo from radiation emitted by a nuclear engine. The day is coming when children will drink milk shakes or swallow capsules of live polio virus safely and get protection against the disease. Tests with # non-immune persons have shown that all developed antibodies against the disease. None has gotten polio or suffered any ill-effects that could be laid to swallowing the viruses. Capsules are considered the best way to give the live virus for vaccination. With these, the mouth and throat are bypassed so that only the lower end of the digestive tract can be a source of contagion. Simple personal hygiene may completely prevent the transmission of the viruses from this source. "The telephone is singing" may outmode the familiar phrase "the telephone is ringing." The new transistorized device installed in experimental phones sounds like an oboe or clarinet giving forth a string of staccato notes of the same pitch. The tone can be varied in pitch to signal party-line customers or please private line customers. The range is from A sharp above middle C to two C's above middle C. Experiments have shown that the musical tone can be heard over much greater distances than the regular bell, and can also be distinguished from doorbells, alarm clocks and fire alarms. Another advantage is that it is an aid to the hard of hearing because it employs more energy in the middle frequency range, where hearing is most often impaired. The overage man # years from now will probably have a coffee colored skin, straight or slightly wavy black hair, dark eyes and will be about the same height he is now. And, according to a professor of zoology at the University of Cincinnati, in # years man will still be recognizable as human; although slow evolutionary trends will have given him an almost complete physical change. People of that time will have larger brains, more intelligence, larger heads, smaller jaws, fewer teeth, a lower rate of development and a longer life. A person living then will probably not have to worry about such things as appendicitis or tonsilitis, because appendix and tonsils will cease to exist. Interplanetary missiles zooming around Venus and Mars and landing on the moon are already being planned by leading rocket engineers and scientists. At a recent symposium on the earth satellites, plans were made for a three stage rocket would be needed to place # pounds of scientific instruments on the moon. Remote control would be used to land the satellite, and television would provide the wherewithal to study lunar conditions. Spring flower festivals may soon take place on schedule, despite cold seasons. Experiments controlling the time of budding by chemical methods have had wide success. Horticulturists now can delay the fall of cherry blossoms by spraying them with a solution of naphthalene acetic acid when the first petals are out. The treatment keeps the blossoms on the trees one week longer than would be expected. The same solution is also used to delay the drop of fruit from the trees at harvest time. On the other hand, if the chemical is sprayed on fruit trees earlier in the season, it will cause the fruit to drop early. In seeking ways to trap solar energy to power our mechanical civilization, the world may again see great population shifts similar to those that occurred as mankind settled in one new area after another. With the ingenuity already developed by experience in building machines to use fossil fuels, and whetted by recent application of nuclear energy to producing useful power, mankind will probably solve problems inherent in use of solar energy before our heritage of fossil fuels run out. As soon as sunshine-using devices become at all practical, ancient semi-tropical river valleys, where civilization first began, will probably see a new spurt of immigration by gadget-minded people. A chemical rain repellent that elinu inates mechanical windshield wipers will soon be on the market. Designed for high speed aircraft the repellent is made of silicones and a combination of natural and synthetic waxes. The chemical rain protector sets up a hard coating on the window pane that makes rain roll off like heavy beads of mercury. Spacemen may someday find that the clouds astronomers observe on Mars are formed by volcanoes. A new theory recently advanced also suggests that the dark areas we know as canals may be drifts of volcanic ash resulting from fall-out in the pattern of the prevailing martian winds. Discovery that, on two occasions # years apart, clouds appeared in the same regions means they must have been produced mechanically or at least on a fixed location on the planet's surface. Mushrooms may soon become part of the staple diet, one which doesn't impinge on Man's natural resources. Scientists have found a way to grow the fungus in sawdust so that they can become a year round crop. Using a ton of sawdust with a small amount of oatmeal researchers were able to grow # pounds of mushrooms in two weeks. This sawdust grown crop is also important because the mushrooms so produced can be grown at room temperatures. This means the elimination of seasonal crops and special caves or vaults for mushroom growing. The world's largest chain radar tracking system, capable of checking supersonic rockets and missiles, will soon be completed. The chain of #I radar installations on eight islands have an accuracy within two hundredths of a degree. They lock on a missile the instant it is fired and continuously track its position, course, velocity and accelerations without delay or interruption until the missile hits the target or is itself destroyed. People may someday be lining up for TB shots much as they now do for smallpox, polio, etc. Researchers have come up with a new vaccine which is excellent protection in mice, and uses non-living particles of tuberculosis germs, rather than live germ vaccine. In this ground up in solution and then spun in a centrifuge to separate and remove the larger particles. Dentists may soon be able to transplant teeth the way cornea transplants are done now. Recent advances in dental surgery of this type have shown that, after several years, such a transplanted tooth grows to full size, roots lengthen properly and the tooth lines up with surrounding teeth. The transplant also shows a response to heat and cold, similar to that of other teeth in the patient's mouth. If test trials work out properly, diabetics may soon be taking pills instead of insulin injections The pills, derived from a sulfa drug, show a significantly high response when used in certain cases, ranging from a return to normal to a # reduction in insulin requirements. (Continued from page #) ( Continued from page #I ) party, so they were unable to hear Captain Powers shouting frantically into his microphone and getting no answer. It was just after sunset, and Biggs was looking into the west. "We ought to see it now, but it ain't there," commented Biggs. "What ain't there?" demanded Golden. "Mercury," said Biggs, who prided himself on being an amateur astronomer. "I reckon you can't see it from Mars without a telescope. Too close to the sun." He chuckled. "If there are any Martians," he added, "I reckon they think they live on the third planet. That's funny, ain't it?"    # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #K Verona, Pennsylvania so complicated that we'll never have a complete science of it. All we'll ever be able to do mathematically is predict and guide the broad trends. But those trends are dividual people and incidents. To pervert an old saying, in government it is necessary to be able to see the trees for the forest. It takes an artist to know how and when to use the equations, and how to supplement them with his own intuitive common sense. It takes not only a technician, but a poet to write a report which will really let me know what's going on." He raised his eyes again and said mildly: "It's not your fault that you are neither an artist nor a poet. I take it you wish to remain in the Service?" "Yes, sir." Randos was not a quitter. "Very well. I'm assigning you to a chief technicianship in my own evaluation center. Consider it a promotion, a reward for honest effort... at least, it's a higher rank and salary. You may go." Kri thought he heard a gasp of relief, but returned to his papers. One might as well face it, you can't kick a favorite nephew anywhere but upstairs. The fellow might even make a good technical boss. As for this planet called Earth, maybe the new man could salvage it. If not, well, it was only one planet.    Dear Mr. Quinn: I have just finished reading the June issue of Hue and Cry, and my sense of fair play compels me to express my surprise at the readiness of people to condemn or censure. I am referring to Stuart Anderson's letter complaining about an error in " Avoidance Situation". According to his argument, the velocity c # assumes various values depending on the original units used in stating the value of c. He uses a lot of large figures in his "proof" involving many powers of ten. All that he has succeeded in doing is confusing himself and hide the basic fallacy of his argument. The proof that he's wrong lies in the mathematical fact that equals remain equals as long as the same factors are applied to each. Let us select a foot as common measurement, and we shall define a foot as a certain fraction of a lightsecond so that any measurement system can be converted to feet. Thus a square yard per second becomes # feet per second as a numerical value only . Now bring on your metric or Chinese units or Martian units or any other measurement of velocity. Reduce the measurement to Terran feet per Terran second and then square the numerical value only to obtain a numerical value for velocity squared. -- Leslie Fogal North Bay, Ontario Dear Sir : Letter writing is not my habit, but in the June issue of Hue and Cry one of your correspondents "goofed" in his letter concerning the math in "Avoidance Situation". Neglecting that a velocity in excess of c cannot be obtained we can write c # # x # # cm # sec # and consider only the magnitude of the number. The writer of the letter published in June went on to state that the value of c # depends on the units used -- I say he should read a text on elementary mathematics before he makes such a statement. He states c # cgs. does not equal c # fps, but he forgot to convert properly. He said, and I quote in part: "c# x # # cmsec, c #  # x # # cmsec; for c # x # # milessec, c # -- # x # # miles sec, which is the same as # # x # # cmsec." Now I say, and I will spell it out : c# x # # cmsec, c # # x # # cm # sec # c # x # # milessec, c # # x # # miles # sec # and since I mile #  sec #  ( # X # X # #) # sec # # x Ft. in # # x (# x # x #) # # x # # cm #  sec # , and the value of c does not depend on units here or elsewhere. Units are not arbitrary, but chosen for convenience. I was shocked to say the least. -- Gerald Ouellette Belmont, Mass. Dear Sir: Mr. Ryder's letter in Hue and Cry in June's IF has caused me to break a record of ten years of avid reading of s-f, and finally write a "fan letter". In his short but excellent letter Mr. Ryder has, I feel, only briefly touched the "liberal arts approach" to science, and the exceeding blindness of an attitude which persistently condemns the scientist as a coldminded materialist. One cannot help feeling that this attitude often stems from a guilty awareness of ignorance of those vital factors which have done so much to safeguard health, sanity and the well-being of people everywhere. While philosophers and Mr. Ryder's "men of affairs" have been sitting on their hands, cold-blooded scientists have been easing the pain of childbirth, the ravages of diseases, and committing sundry other "materialistic" acts. But then, these activities have not the sanction of being commanded by the authorities, and are therefore not as officially representative as bomb making. In my own field of music, the Middle Ages lives on very strongly, and the attitude of the academic musicians toward the scientist perhaps represents the "liberal arts" approach par excellence . Having struggled with this fuzzy attitude for the larger part of my career (I am now finishing work toward a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition), I am in full sympathy with Mr. Ryder's letter, and only wish that there were more that I could say to emphasize this strange dichotomy of reason vs. logic which seems to characterize our general contemporary attitudes toward science and the scientists. -- Gregg Wm. Saeger Boston, Mass. Dear Mr. Quinn : Herewith another letter from a reader who hasn't missed an issue. Having read them all for more years than I care to think about, I give it as my opinion that you have now reached the top. And you go bi-monthly. With something over # potential readers in the country, the inescapable conclusion is reached that only a very few of us have imagination after all. How many people, do you suppose, have the curiosity to be s-f readers? Woefully few, I am sure. I particularly like Hue and Cry and the letters you choose to print Mr. Ryder has a good point. He seems to be one of the few people who realize that scientists don't always strive to produce something with an end result' in view. They are merely seeking knowledge for its own sake. I offer a point of my own which has been covered in stories, but never to my knowledge, has been discussed seriously. About the origin of Man. It seems to me that the evolution of Man is based on some very scanty and flimsy evidence. In fact we have more such evidence for the cockroach, unchanged in form for the past # years. I have two questions: One is that if we have evolved physically, why hasn't something been found reasonably close to our present physical shape? The second concerns our language. Probably the oldest language on Earth is Sanskrit. Have you ever examined it? It is tremendously complex. Could such a language have sprung in one leap from creatures who communicated by grunts? If not, surely at some time in that period when it was developing, somebody should have chiseled a few words on a rock here and there and preserved the rock for us. Older things have been dug up. The evidence seems to be that Man appeared on earth with some sort of language and civilization all at once, and not too long ago, geologically at that. Further, the oldest extant writings do not show any less intelligence than is presently current. In that case shouldn't there be some remains of these people as intelligent as we are, in the form of artifacts, or some alteration on the face of the earth? There are many questions on this subject still to be answered, but they won't be if we close our minds to everything but the Evolutionary Theory. -- Floyd W. Zwicky Rockford, #. Dear Mr. Quinn: I am one of many ardent fans of good SF short stories and enjoy reading If which in my opinion is one of the best magazines in the country today. I personally think the departments add flavor and variety. So naturally I was overwhelmed to see that the June issue boasted an article on the Vanguard Satellite and several beautiful illustrations by Mel Hunter. But I have a bone to pick with the authors. I think the article was well written, but the source of the author's information seems to leave a lot to be desired. Quote: "We feel that the basketball nomenclature was an unfortunate choice". The following, in my opinion, proves the authors know how to read. The general announcement of the Vanguard Project came on July #, # when the plan was revealed to the press by James Hagerty, Press Secretary, Detlew Bronk, President of the National Academy of Sciences and Alan Waterman, director of the National Science Foundation. The official statement read, "Plans for the construction of a small, unmanned earth circling satellite vehicle to be used for basic scientific observations during the forthcoming International Geophysical year were announced on July #". In the original announcement no description of the satellite was given with the exception of small and unmanned. Yet the next day the papers carried accounts of a basketball shaped satellite. To my knowledge the press accounts were of an unmanned satellite designed by S. Fred Singer, a physicist at the University of Maryland. It was this sphere shape, that the two scientific organizations (before mentioned) have decided to utilize. The phrase "basketball' was coined to give the general public an idea of its comparative smallness. The # foot long satellite described in IF would be overcome by the residential air drag much sooner than would one of spherical shape ejected from the third stage of a minimum orbital rocket. The article is bristling with errors. I should hate to see the second installment. The Department of Defense has announced that the rocket will have a length of # feet, not quite the length of the first stage rocket described in Satellite . The first stage to be built by the Glen L. Martin Company (builders of the Viking) will have only one rocket motor, the entire rocket will be completely finless to save weight and reduce high speed drag, and both the motor of the first and second stage will be gimbaled. The article also states that the instrumentation in such a basketball shaped satellite would be scant, while the satellite announced by the department of defense, having a diameter of about ## feet would have an easily computable volume of # plus, cubic inches. Apparently the authors have never heard of transistors and subminiature electronic parts. -- S. Earl Cohen Winnetka, #. We hate to bring this up -- but if the reader noticed the authors were making an C( educated guess " at what they felt the satellite should look like -- before any datum was released. The introduction also mentioned that Mr. Nuding is an Instrumentation Research Engineer and that Mr. Vanous is a designer of missile guidance systems -- both work for well known corporations. Reading article number two might clear up some of the problems. Also , in the Editor's note preceding the second installment , we took care to emphasize that the Nuding Vanous designed rocket-satellite was for ultimate efficiency and not the early race to get " something or anything  up there. (Continued from page #) One of the most provocative satires IF has published in its young life is Malice in Wonderland by Evan Hunter, who zoomed into notice with The Blackboard Jungle. Now it looks like we'll be reading "Malice" as a novel, as Hunter is now expanding it for the hardbacks. If it gets the promotion "Blackboard" received it will be a sensation. And if you can't or won't wait for the novel, look it up in the January, #, issue of IF. # marks the fifth birthday of IF Magazine and we are planning The First World of IF, an anthology of the best of the first five years, to commemorate the occasion. It will be a handsome paperback edition priced at #c, but the distribution will be rather limited -- so put your bid in early. -- jlq -- Continued from Back Cover with membership Science-Fiction Best-Sellers Only # Each! We make this amazing offer to prove how much you will enjoy membership in the exciting Science-Fiction Book Club. Each month the Club offers you the best of the newest Science-Fiction few cents shipping charge) -- even though they cost up to # and more in publishers' original editions. Each is described well in advance, in the Club's interesting free bulletin. You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year, if you wish. ers -- each one a complete ScienceFiction Library in itself! Each is packed with rocket-swift stories that take you soaring in time and space... written by the greatest science-fiction authors of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A # value, complete in handsome permanent bindings -- and all yours for only I on this amazing offer ! Omnibus of "The largest number of Science-Fiction stories to appear in one book" -- including the Wonders of the Universe and the Future... Outer Space, etc. The woman who became her own daughter... atomic power from beans... the man who lived # years... gambling on a strange planet, etc. complete play... scores of all-time great S-F stories -- shocker, "The Invasion from Mars." Just Mail Coupon V The pictures on the other side of this page give you just an inkling ot the size and scope of these three books. The partial list of authors is a mere suggestion of the great writers who contributed their most exciting tales. This most generous introductory offer is our way of welcoming new members to the Science-Fiction Rook Club. But the supply of these exciting new best sellers, worth # and offered to you lor only I -- is very limited. That's why  it s important for you to mail the coubooks immediately. ! Dept. IF#, Garden City, N. Y.   Dept. IFI #, Garden City, New York  described on this page, as my gift books and first selection. Rill me only  I for all # (plus few cents shipping charges) and enroll me as a member  of the Science-Fiction Rook Club. Every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus shipping. I do not have to take a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. books in # days, pay nothing and this membership will be cancelled! Treasuries of Science-Fiction.  Over # Pages Crammed with Thrills of Tomorrow, Including # Rocket-Swift Stories.  Four Selections from the Wy.C Greatest Classics of Sciencewf Fiction. Written by the Outstandof Yesterday, Today and mm. Tomorrow. Hfej  Worth # in Publishers' Editions! See Other Side for Further Details Greatest Feast of Science-fiction  Will We Find Intelligent Life in Space? World's Foremost Aerophysicist Exciting New Worlds of Science Fiction! to be found onywhere in the world is now appearing regularly in IF. Also, you will find exclusive, factual, authoritative articles on the science of today and tomorrow -- by eminent scientists. Here (this copy is a sample), in a beautifully printed and i I I us trated magazine, is the world of the future in both fact and fiction. But -- have you enjoyed this issue? Then why not subscribe. If you do, we will send your -- Your subscription brings you (bimonthly) # issues for just #. But we will send the first issue as a gift, which means you get I # issues in all... So, don't miss a single one of the important issues to come. Send your subscription to -- IF Magazine All Stories New and Complete  A Symbolism of "This Lonely Earth", by Mel Hunter  IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next (February) issue on sale December #th Editor's Not so many weeks ago "the greatest show on earth" folded its tents for the last time. Just a short time before this dramatic announcement, other major circuses went into bankruptcy or were forced to shut down. It was an era dying, an era of fanfare and color and superlatives and fun for all ages passing clamor of the midway, smell and roar of the animals, barking of pitchmen, swelling tones of the calliope, and the excited shrieks and laughter of children. Some reports say the major circuses will play hereafter in big air-conditioned arenas. Some say they will fold forever. But even if they do continue in the big arenas, they'll never be the same again. Not to me, anyway. I've seen the circus at Madison Square Garden and I've seen it under the big top pitched in country meadows. But the city arena of concrete and steel was never as exciting and suspenseful and filled with the spirit of holiday as the canvas and ropes. Every now and then an author will ask what is our approach to science fiction and the answer is the same as it has always been : A philosophical approach with good writing getting the call over gadgetry and scientific gimmicks. And I am always glad to receive a letter from an author reporting that at local gatherings of authors and artists the majority feel the same way. Fox B. Holden (his real name), who wrote Dearest Enemy (Oct. IF), and A Matter of Order (Aug. IF), recently said: "I began writing science fiction while still in college because I felt that science goes -- or can go -- a long way beyond the production of gadgets. Taken far enough it really, to my mind, becomes one with philosophy. And philosophy, after all, is just thinking -- the kind of thinking that is impossible for animals, but of which Man is allegedly capable. "It's the kind of thinking that can give us all a glimpse of the might-be -- which usually is a brighter subject than the mighthave-been. Hope, they call it -- and it does something to keep a guy's chin up -- even if it is sometimes worked through a negative "better not do that " approach. And how could you evaluate positiveness, anyway, if you didn't have a few minus signs here and there to go by? "So -- science-philosophy. And when it's put down by people who like to spin yarns, it becomes science fiction." Fox Holden, incidentally, lives in nearby Poughkeepsie and is a parttime science fictioneer whose fulltime job is that of publicity writer for the electronic research division of one of the world's large manufacturers of typewriters and computing machines. He is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont, getting his sheepskin after putting in four years in the Infantry, Air Force and Armored Forces. Before going to his present job, he served seven years as a newspaper man. In his present work he is as close to a push-button world of gadgets and technology as a writer could possibly be -- yet his science fiction writing reveals ideals far, far afield. Two new anthologies are due for early publication -- a collection of Richard Matheson's short stories and a variety of authors compiled by Ted Dikty. Included in the Matheson selections is Being one of the most suspenseful, eerie and Frank Reilly's The Cyber and Justice Holmes is included in the Dikty selection... Hero Driver by Alfred Coppel, who seems to have drifted from science fiction circles, will soon be released as a movie by United Artists... Bourgey and Curl, late comers to science fiction book publishing, will bring out For These , My Children by Raymond F. Jones. Ray Jones has appeared in these pages on a number of occasions, always with some top-notch entertainment... A writers' magazine recently reported Harlan Ellison's age as "just sixteen". If true, he sure got married mighty young and learned an awful lot at a tender age to have written The Crackpots (June IF)... Gordon Dickson has something of a lulu in Lulungomeena which is scheduled for X-Minus-One, the N.B.C. science fiction TV show... Head of what is perhaps America's largest stable of science fiction writers, among others, is a stocky, well-set, dark haired dynamo of an agent you sf readers seldom, if ever, hear about. His name is Scott Meredith and his staff of readers, located on the #th floor of a Fifth Avenue office building, outnumbers the personnel of many good-sized publishing houses... It becomes more evident each day that the most constant thing about science fiction is the interest of the American fans. May their tribe increase. Prime example: About the time you read this, The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society will hold its #th meeting. That , brother, is being constant!... Two offers for Dr. Alan E. Nourse to practice in a "quiet town where there is time to write science fiction" -- one from California and one from Alaska (see August IF). By the way, Dr. Nourse is working on an outline for an article on the future of medical progress that promises to be one of the most fascinating you ever read. It will be in an early issue. And don't forget about The First World of IF, Wrap around cover and end papers are by Mel Hunter. Preliminary color sketch for the cover is a honey. We'll list proposed stories and authors in the next IF. Incidentally, it will be a rather small printing for newsstand distribution, so ask your news dealer to save you a copy. -- jiq Outside was miserably primitive , while the City-State was Utopia. What reason could a person have for swapping heaven for hell unless it was for laughs! ing in the city and he didn't like that. Oren had one of the few outdoor gardens remaining in Greater New York and he'd had to hook up an irrigation system fed by hose from a tap in his basement. While he was at it, he ran another hose up to sprinklers above the windows of his ground-floor study and arranged them so they could send a shower of water against the panes from outside. He turned the rain on hard so that water drummed against the glass with the realistic sound of a downpour. It was almost satisfying. The bright sunlight streaming through the drops spoiled it, somewhat. Oren had known people who'd missed more than the rain. Some had bid good-by to the city proper and moved to the suburbs, though they remained within the boundaries of the City-State. Others had fled Outside. But there were those who had wanted, or needed, the benefits of the super-metropolis -- and they compromised, as Oren and his wife had. They'd diverted the rain away from the cities because it was mostly a waste to have it fall there. It was better to shunt it over to where it could fill a reservoir or unparch a desert or put out a forest fire -- provided these places were on resources land belonging to one of the City-States. All very laudable, Oren supposed, but it was an interference with nature that he didn't care for. He was a conservative, an anti-progress crank. Actually, euphemisms aside, he knew he was an anti-regimentarian. Had he been one outside his private thoughts, though, he would have been considered an undesirable member of society. It wasn't illegal, yet, to question the Suggestions of the City-State Council. Thus far, the Suggestions lacked the force of law. They served, however, to establish customs which most citizens found it wise to follow if they cared to avoid harassment by the green-tunicked members of the Council Guard. It was no more illegal to be an anti-regimentarian in Greater New York in # than it had been to be a Jew in the early days of HitlerGermany, a Communist in the latter days of the United States, or a Conciliationist during the States' Rights Wars -- in which the victors became the City-States and the losers were banished Outside. But obviously it was healthier to keep quiet and follow Councildecreed custom than to seek justice in the letter of the law. Oren was just sitting there in the study, smoking, not really thinking consciously about any of this, when his wife came in. His body was cradled to the optimum relaxation point in the restochair, but he was nervous. "Oh, you've got the rain on," Edith said. "That's nice. But the sun kind of spoils it." "Yes, it does," Oren said. "Pull the blinds, will you, honey?" She darkened the room and curled up into a resto next to his. "That is better," she said. "Makes it more cozy." He lighted a cigaret for her and for a time they sat quietly while smoke rose to mingle with the shadows of the room. "It is today, isn't it, Oren?" she said finally. "I haven't been able to concentrate on a thing. I've got that orchestration sitting on the piano -- the one the maestro wants by tomorrow -- but I don't have the patience to finish it." "It's just routine, isn't it? Nothing you couldn't knock out in a couple of hours, I should think." "Yes, but I seem to be so jumpy," his wife said. "I know I'm not supposed to be. It isn't Modem, and all that, but I am." He laughed and reached out a hand to pat her flat waistline. "Old skinny-tummy," he said. "It used to be that only the husbands went through waiting and smoking themselves into a frazzle. Now the female of the species knows what it's like, too. Relax," he said. He tried to give it the casual touch. "Our baby will be bom at the proper moment, sanitary, strong and just as squally as the old-fashioned ones. The obby said he'd call immediately from the delivery lab and we'll probably see him tomorrow, when the little bugger's adjusted to things." "The obby!" Edith said. "What a terrible expression. Dr. Morales is the best obstetrician in Greater New York and you call him an obby, as if he were some kind of gadget." "Well, isn't he? I think I'm being very modern and enlightened about this whole impersonal business. Our first child is being bom six miles away in an antiseptic laboratory while its mother and father sit smoking and discussing terminology. Nine months ago they got a droplet of goo from me and one from you and mixed them up in a high-gear cocktail shaker and ever since it's been growing in a bowl of heat-controlled expandomush on a shelf where they look at it every so frequently and see that it's notgoing sour and agitate it a bit so it won't think its forgotten. If that doesn't entitle me to call Dr. Morales an obby I don't know what does." "Really, Oren, you're terrible," she said. "You talk as if somebody put something over on you. After all, you're the one who wanted to do to go about it in the old-fashioned way. There's no law against it -- not really. Just a Suggestion. And we could have moved Outside, if necessary. We'd have gotten along all right." "We've been over this so many times, Edith," he said. He was being angry in his icy-calm way. "Let me enumerate the points for you. One -- we're both Intellectuals, so called. You're a musician; I publish talking books. It just so happens that the seats of our culture -- the only places we could make a living -- are the city-states. We're not farmers or workers and we'd be of no use on the Outside. "Point two -- if we left Greater New York where would we go? Ghicagoland? The Bay? Dixieton? One's as bad as the other -- and besides none of them has a decent publishing house, even if you could write your music wherever you had a piano. "Point three -- although it would be socially unacceptable to have a natural baby here, it would be safe. You'd have the best facilities, even if you got lectured at while you used them. Who knows what would happen to you Outside?" "I'm sure people survive natural pregnancy on the Outside just as they used to," Edith said. "I think you've listened to the Council so long that you're beginning to believe everything you're told. Next they'll be telling you what kind of books to publish, if they haven't already." She had become angry herself, now, as she did when he assumed his superior-logic tone of voice. Instantly he was contrite. He realized that he had been sharp with her only because she had verbalized the dilemma he wanted to avoid having to recognize. "I'm sorry, Edie," he said. "I'm all tense. This waiting around for someone else to have our baby for us has me on edge. And you're right about the Council. They sent us a Suggestion last week. Very logical thing it was, too, on the surface. They'd noted that some of the titles on our back list haven't been moving well' lately. That's true enough. They rarely do. They're standards, though, and the sales are steady, if small. But the Council Suggested that we let them go out of print. In the interests of conservation, of course. It was just a Suggestion, mind you; we can take it or leave it." "And if you leave it?" "I don't know. I think it's just a feeler the Council is putting out, to see how far it can go. I suppose if enough publishers took it, instead of leaving it, the next step would be a Resolution, to bring the rest of us into line." "What kind of titles are they Suggesting you drop?" Edie asked. "Simply to help save tape, of course." "Oh, some works on politics and government, as you might expect, and some less likely -- such as a whole list of titles by Haskell, the naturalist." "You're resisting the Suggestion, I hope." "I don't know," he said. "We're having a conference on it tomorrow. We did take one of their Suggestions, but that was strictly meritwise." " h? " "It wasn't exactly a Suggestion. It was a letter of recommendation sent along with a manuscript by a Dr. Stern, the head of the Health Department. We're taping his book. It's about his pet theory, but it's sound. You know, the one about the creativity of women. I told you about it." "I don't remember," she said. "But I don't think I'll' like it." "It applies to you, though. Stern's theory is that for so many hundreds of centuries women had been conditioned to motherhood that as a group they had a block against other channels of creativity. Even the unmarried and childless couldn't break the pattern because they themselves were the products of motherhood. Theoretically, that would be why you're having such difficulty with your music." "But my mother was deconditioned," she protested. "She was born naturally, but I grew up in a bowl of mush, as you call it, and I intend to break the pattern." "It's a three-generation process, Stern thinks," Oren said. "Not that I agree with him necessarily, but if we had a daughter, and if she were an obbv baby, she might be the first to break the pattern in our family -- if she had any talent, of course." "You and your Dr. Stern can have his theory. I intend to break the pattern myself," Edith said. "Provided I don't fall back into it by having a baby myself in the normal way. I'll write that symphony yet, you'll see." "Now you're being inconsistent." She smiled as she recognized the truth of his remark. "All right," she said. "But that's my prerogative. They haven't bred that out of us yet. I'm still a woman." She became serious again. "And I guess that's why I don't know whether I want to have another baby this way. It's so impersonal, so cold -- like going shopping. This way is so easy; it saves so much time and makes everything so simple. But do you appreciate the things you get the easy way, or do things only become precious to you when you'd had to suffer to have them?" "Now don't give me any of that martyr talk," Oren said. "Were you any less precious to your mother because you were an obby baby?" He grinned. "As I recall, you were about the most spoiled creature in existence until I snatched you from the bosom of your family." His joke failed to return the smile to her face. "I'm worried about something else," she said. "Aside from the psychological aspects of the thing. I mean, have I deteriorated... as a woman? I don't want to be just a brain and a talent, if I am that. I want to be interesting in that other way, loo -- the way grandma was when she was a girl." He turned in his chair to look directly at her. "Believe me, Edie, you're interesting. Oh, yes. Believe me." Then he leaned over and kissed her soundly on the mouth. "If you wish," he said, "I'll elaborate on that comment." "Do that," she said. But the elaboration had to wait. There was a musical tone and a voice said: "Dr. Morales calling Mr. and Mrs. Oren Donn." "There he is," said Edith. "There he is!" "Now calm down," her husband said. "Are you ready? Would you like a drink or anything before we talk to him?" "No. Go ahead, answer him." Oren spoke the words that opened the communications circuits of their home to the doctor's call. "Donn Fourteen. Hello, Doctor, this is Oren Donn. Edith's here, too." "Hello," said Dr. Morales. "Your son has been born." "A son!" Oren cried. "Do you hear that, Edie? It's a boy!" "That's wonderful," she said. "How does he look, Doctor?" "Perfect," Dr. Morales said. "He's a lively little tike. Got good color, too. Not all red like these natural children. He's had his first cry and his first meal and now he's sleeping. You can see him tomorrow at -- say fourteen hundred. Will that be convenient for you?" "That'll be fine," Oren said. Edith nodded agreement. "I'd like to bring him a little present, if I may. A little gold wristband my father gave me when I was born. Sort of a family tradition, you know." "I'm afraid that won't be possible, Mr. Donn," the doctor said. "You know the rules. No foreign matter must touch him except what the laboratory provides. That's why you were advised not to buy any clothing or bedding in advance. We have all the things the child needs right here. In six weeks, when you take him home, you can dress him in an Indian suit, if you wish, but until then you must abide by our rules." "Of course, Doctor," Edith said. "We understand. Tomorrow at fourteen hundred, then." "Right. Goodby." "Goodby." The double goodby switched off the communicator and a single musical tone signalled that the connection was closed. "Well," said Oren, "there he is. Bom and everything. How do you feel?" "A little weak. Honestly," she said. "I feel as if something had happened to me physically, just now. A lightening of pressure, sort of, and yet a kind of frustration. I can't explain it, really." "It's strange," Oren said. "I don't know how a natural father used to feel, after he'd been sweating it out in a hospital corridor, but I'm pretty excited. But what bothers me is that I had the same sort of feeling when the dealer called up last year to say that our new gyro was ready to be delivered." "Funny," she said. "He won't really be ours for six weeks. And until then I won't even be able to hold him in my arms except half an hour a day. What is that horrible name they have for it?" "Parent Acclimatization." He took her hand and squeezed it. Then he got to his feet decisively. "I'll get you a drink. A good stiff one. Then I want you to go in and finish that orchestration. We've got to snap out of this." "All right," she said. "And while you're working, I'll go out. I feel like taking a walk in the rain." "But there isn't any rain," she said, "except just outside the window." She turned a switch and stopped the drumming of the Water on the panes. "You are in a State, aren't you?" "He laughed. "I certainly am. All right, then, I'll fix us both a drink." Later, when Edith had finished the orchestration, Oren asked: "Shall we see what's on the triveo?" "I don't care," she said. "If you Hke." When television first went threedimensional it was called tri-video, to distinguish it. In time this was shortened to triveo, first with a long i y then with a short one. And there were many, like Edith, who changed the word once more -- to trivia. There was always a discussion about the triveo before they switched it on. Sometimes weeks went by during which it lay silent and unseen. Probably it was the least-used piece of equipment in the house, a price it paid for its lack of intelligent programming. Oren pushed a button on the panel attached to the arm of his restochair and a section of the living room wall became the front page of the daily gazette. He dialed for the triveo section. "It says Jerry Hilarious is on," he said. Edith squinted at the projected page. There was a flat shot of a man in evening clothes, with his eyes crossed and his tongue held grotesquely in a corner of his mouth. "Looks more like a Jerry Gruesome," she said. "Who is he?" "A comic, it says. It's his triveo premiere. He's made a big hit in the pleasurants, it also says." "I'm glad we eat at home, then," she said, "where we don't have to have belly laughs with our roast beef." "Let's try him," Oren said. "We can always turn him off." "All right," she said. "But you never do. You hang on to the grim end of everything." "You've got to give them a chance. We wouldn't have any talent at all if everybody was condemned sight unseen." "Off with their heads!" said Edith cheerfully; and later, when Jerry Hilarious had made his debut, she asked: "You call this talent? The comedian was a short, skinny man who gave the appearance of brash boyishness, though he must have been well into his thirties. He had a crop of scarlet hair whose vividness resulted either from dye or the affinity of the triveo cameras for the primary colors. Jerry Hilarious also had an amazingly plastic face which he contorted at will and a repertory of startling gestures made still more fantastic by his apparent ability to throw each limb out of joint. One of the gestures, delivered as if from a pitcher's mound, sent his forefinger streaking out by triveo magic so it seemed to be only an inch from the viewer's nose. Then the outthrust arm and finger moved to the southwest and its owner's comic high-pitched voice would say to a stooge with the utmost scorn: "Aw, g'wan outside " The gesture and the gag line were used several times during the program and it was obvious that these had helped to win him a spot on the City-State Network. It also was obvious that a new catch phrase had been bom and that the Donns could expect to hear it often from amateur comedians among their acquaintances. M ark olafson had to be careful now. He had to use the utmost caution while appearing to be casual. Moving by night, it hadn't been too hard to cross open country undetected into the town on the outskirts of the City-State. From there, by stages, he had traveled nearly to the west bank of the Hudson River. At the bus terminal, Mark went to the men's room and, waiting for a moment when he was alone, quickly but carefully redusted his face with talcum to hide the redness of the skin that marked him as a man from Outside. That done, he rubbed the excess off his hands and adjusted his borrowed clothing. It was the best in the village and it had been pooled from among various owners for his mission. The village's best was only a seedy approximation of the everyday clothing of those he was among now. He pulled a telltale burr from the pants leg, wiped the shoes, adjusted the hat and, taking a deep breath, walked out into the terminal. Mark ignored the moving pavement as being too open to scrutiny, and too slow. He bought a ticket to Timesquare and found the right bus. There were plenty of empty seats and he chose one in the back next to a window and tried to sink into it inconspicuously. He saw the bus driver look back in his direction and he averted his eyes quickly. The driver seemed to be staring at him, but finally turned back. A few more people got on. No one sat beside him, luckily. The driver started the engine, closed the doors and the bus moved out onto the ramp leading to the tunnel under the river. Oren Donn was sitting in his temperature-controlled, windowless office trying to decide whether to use good old reliable Smithson, with his fine familiar voice, to read the new pot-boiling historical romance into the tapes, or to experiment with a new voice, when the reception screen announced a visitor. Oren pushed the papers to a corner of his desk and got up to greet the caller. The name, Mark Olafson, sounded familiar but he couldn't quite place it. But the man's face and the handclasp he gave him brought it all back. "Mark!" said Oren. "You old scoundrel! I haven't seen you since school." "That's right," the visitor said. He looked around the quiet, efficient office and dropped into a heavy lounge chair. "Hope you don't mind, I'm about beat." He sighed. "Been traveling." He looked carefully at Oren. "Make yourself at home," Oren said. "Brothers of the Oath don't stand on ceremony." Mark Olafson laughed. "Remember that, do you? It's been a long time since that schoolboy binge. You were pretty crocked." Oren pretended to look hurt. "Held my liquor as well as a certain other eighteen-year-old I could name." "Good old Donnie," said Mark. "Does the oath still hold?" He was serious suddenly. "Of course." Oren looked at his visitor's clothing. He saw the rubbed places in the cloth and the worn shoe-soles. "I don't have a lot of cash with me, but you're welcome to what I've got -- and I'll be here tomorrow." Mark grinned. "That's more than I can say. Thanks, Donnie, but it's not money I need. Principally I need a friend -- someone I can trust -- a brother." "Just a minute." Oren lifted a section of his desk and pressed a button. Mark jumped to his feet. Oren looked surprised. "Just wiping the tape. Don't be alarmed. I start it up in the morning and record all conversations. It's just a business gimmick." "Does it go anywhere else?" Mark asked. "No. I have it for my convenience. Lots of people do. Helps you remember things, if you've got a memory like mine. Here, take the spool. There's nothing important on it today." He unhooked it and handed it to his visitor. "I'm sorry," Mark said. He sank back into the chair. I've got a case of nerves." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. Some of the talcum came off. "You see, I'm from Outside." "Oh." Oren looked grave and drummed on the desktop with his fingers. "That's where you've been. Pretty grim, I imagine." "Yes and no. It depends on what you're used to -- and what you want. For instance, I'm used to not having much -- but I want a great deal. Does that sound paradoxical?" "Yes." "It's not, really," said Mark. "I don't have time to go into it right now, but one day we'll have a yam about it. In the meantime, old brother, what I need are clothes that will get me by without suspicion, sme kind of cosmetic to cover up my ruddy outdoor face that'll stay put for more than half an hour, and your solemn promise not to say a word to anyone -- not even your wife, if you've got one." "I have. She's Edith Riordan Donn, the composer." "So she's your wife? Well congratulations. We hear her music out there, once in a while. 'The Storm that Wasn't,' for instance. Good subversive stuff." Oren wasn't sure this was a joke. "Look, Mark," he said, "I'll help you all I can. I give you my word, which should be superfluous. I'll bring the clothes and the makeup and I won't say anything to anybody. But because I do have a family -- there's my little boy, too -- I don't want..." "I understand," his visitor said. "Don't worry. I'm deeply grateful and I wish I didn't have to be so mysterious. But that irt itself helps protect you. And I'd go a long way toward Death to avoid involving you and your family. I mean that." Oren felt a thrill of vicarious adventure, but it was short lived. "I believe you," he said. "Shall I bring the clothes and things tomorrow. Here?" "If you will. It's a busy office building, with people coming and going all day. Better than my going to your house, or meeting you someplace else." Mark Olafson stood up. "Now I've got to run. I'm very grateful to you." Oren waved away the gratitude. "Tell me," he said. "Do you think -- ? I mean if my family and I -- " Mark Olafson's glance was keen but impersonal as it swept up from Oren's good clothes to his pale, well-fed face and around the luxurious, gadgeted office. "Somehow, Donnie' he said. "I don't think you'd like it out there." Martin was a very good baby. He never cried, never was any trouble. He was sent to them in an ambulance ("Delivery truck!" Oren called it) from the hospital. He arrived in a cage of glass called a Sleeprplay. It was to be his home till he outgrew it. The thing regulated the temperature to the baby's needs, kept out insects, bathed him with anti-germ beams and made him inaccessible to random pats, cuddles and chin-chucks. There was also a switch they could have used to soundproof the cabinet if Martin had been too noisy. But even if he had been the worst wailer in the world they wouldn't have considered using it against him, they said, and wondered who would be so heartless. But though they derided the glass box, they found it a useful improvement over the old-fashioned crib and play pen. And much more sanitary. There was a Chango at one end of the gadget. Oren never quite lost his fear that it would swallow up his son whole one day. It was operated by plunging the baby into it up to his waist and holding him there. Then, behind the scenes, the old diaper was stripped off, the baby washed and oiled and a new, pinless diaper fastened to his loins. The whole operation took thirtyseven seconds and the manufacturers were looking for a safe short-cut which would reduce the time to half a minute flat. But they hadn't yet found anything to make the diaper itself obsolete. Martin was so little trouble that they sometimes forgot he was in the house. He ate without fuss and slept well and the glass box discouraged much playing. So Edith had plenty of time for her music. She worked hard and, sometimes when the baby was asleep and the piano was making a great racket, she would soundproof the Sleeprplay so he wouldn't be disturbed. But she was often discouraged in the evenings when Oren returned from work and soon he found it was better not to question her about her progress. Tonight he had tickets to a theater. It was a surprise for her -- a dance act was going to use some of her old music. She met him at the door and, before he could tell her about the tickets, she threw herself at him with a hug that almost tumbled him off his feet. "What's up, Edie?" he asked. "Martin been doing something precocious?" He sometimes was bitter about their son; about the machine-like way in which he was progressing, without mishap, through infancy. And he always called the baby Martin, never Marty or any pet name. "Now you stop that," Edith told him. "This isn't about the baby at all ; it's about me." "All right. I'll be good," he said. He followed his wife into the studio. She sat him down in a restochair, handed him a highball and went to the piano. "Now don't be too critical," she said. "This is just the theme, with a few embellishments." She sat for a moment with her hands poised over the keyboard, and then began to play. There were five majestic notes at the beginning. Edith wove them powerfully into a statement which spoke authoritatively of revelations to come. Her right hand was the harbinger of the calm future, her left the evoker of monumental discord, raging in the dying throes of the tortured present. There was strength in her playing and meaning in the music. It stirred him even on this first hearing. There was a kinship here with Beethoven, he thought, in the feeling, and yet it would be unfair to make a comparison on any other basis. He had sense enough not to mention it. She finished on a chord that echoed away in the big room, then picked up a pencil and made a change in the rough score propped on the stand beside her. Oren's face was serious when Edith looked at him. "Not so hot, was it?" she said. "Edie," he said, "you couldn't be more wrong. It's tremendous. I'm impressed more than I can say. I'm an old duffer about music -- all I know is what I like -- but you tell me I have good taste in good stuff. This is good stuff, Edie. It's the real thing." She went to sit next to him. "Do you really think so? Don't give me any malarky, Oren -- not about this. It's too important to if me. "Of course it is," he said. "And it's going to be important to a lot more people, I think. Did this all happen today?" "Sort of. It all went together today. I've had the theme -- those first five notes -- going through my mind for a week or more. I'd feel them pounding through me when I was doing something altogether irrelevant -- Tike dipping Marty into the Chango, or hydrating his formula -- but they didn't come out until I sat down at the piano today. Then there they were. They just came out of my fingers. I didn't even write them down, at first; they were so much a part of me I knew I'd never lose them." "That's wonderful," he said. Then he asked: "Where do you think it came from?" "What do you mean? The music? I wrote it, of course." "Of course you did. I mean, do you think it has anything to do with the Stem theory? The one about non-babying helping women create? You're a generation ahead of his schedule, if there's anything to it." "I think his theory is a lot of egotistical male nonsense," Edith said. "The only reason women haven't become great musicians or artists -- or generals, for that matter -- is that we never got a chance to show what we could do. Not till lately, anyhow. Remember, it's been less than a century since women were permitted to emerge from the cocoons that the men had spun for them." Oren smiled but said nothing. "My theory is that Dr. Stern is just a crackpot' Edith said. "It's a matter of environment and opportunity, that's all. Otherwise why did it take man so long to write his first novel from the time he spoke his first intelligible grunt as a caveman? I wrote that music myself, without any mystic help from a sublimated sex urge. And I'd have written it just as well if Marty had been born in me instead of in a laboratory." "Good for you," he said. "Then we've got a reason for celebrating." He told her about the theater tickets. She was pleased and ran to dress. The dance act wasn't good and Edith's music seemed to her to be badly played by the orchestra. But it was an evening out and Edith squeezed Oren's hand to reassure him. They hadn't expected to see a movie, too, but the curtains parted after intermission and there it was, in Ultra-Dimension, Authenticolor and Tactilivity, presented as a public service by the Department of Information, Greater New York. A breath of cooled, somewhat rancid air swept across the audience and the sound apparatus played a stylized theme borrowed from a Tin Pan Alley relic that Edith recognized at "Baby, It's Cold Outside." The title of the film, formed by blocks of ice, was, simply, Outside . The movie purported to be a travelog but they recognized it as propaganda. Nevertheless, after two reels of cineramic proximity to the gaunt, sullen-looking people who had chosen to live beyond the blessings of the City-States, they decided they were extremely fortunate to be living where they were. Oren, in addition, had the recent memory of Mark Olafson. His caller, whp had been so nervous, so suspicious in the office, might easily have been one of the people in the film. "That's not for me," Oren said later. "That's going back two hundred years -- going Outside. Those shacks they live in -- what did the commentator call them, quaint? -- they're not quaint, they're primitive." "I suppose that is the impression we're expected to go away with," Edith said. "But I don't see how we could have any other. The cameras don't lie. If that's freedom, they've changed the definition and they can have it." Oren recalled Mark Olafson's words. No, he and Edith wouldn't like it out there. for a time. But its progress was steady. Edith knew what she wanted to say through the music and she said it forcefully. Sometimes the statement came originally at her piano as she sat and coaxed the black and white keys to express a phrase that was throbbing through her body. At other times whole passages suggested themselves to Edith with such clarity that the piano was superfluous. The third movement was a revelation. The entire theme of it suggested itself to her in one home from a department store sale. She was riding the moving pavement, clutching a few parcels she hadn't wanted to entrust to the delivery tubes and hemmed in by a crowd of other women shoppers. There, one flight underground, moving north at the speed of fifteen miles an hour and trying to ignore the advertising placards set into the tunnel ceiling at an angle just overhead, she felt the music hit her. It came not as a phrase or snatch -- not as a tender seedling thrusting hopefully through a crack it had made in the soil -- but full-blown, like the bouquet of flowers a magician would produce from an empty fist. The movement exploded in her mind, in a fraction of a second, fully-developed. It was a natural outgrowth of the first and second movements, over which she had worked so hard, and, although it was similar to them thematically, it was a totally original concept of their potentials. It was as if the first two had mated and produced the third, spontaneously and perfectly. Edith was transfixed as the music throbbed through her. She was carried two exits beyond her own before she realized it and then in her excitement elbowed her way to the slow lane and off, where she took the escalator to the street. She walked home from there, quickly. She was running when the front door cushioned closed behind her. She threw the parcels to a couch, dropped her coat to a floor, sailed her hat across the room and was at the piano. She was still at the piano, the floor around her littered with paper and pencil stubs and the ashtrays piled with cigaret butts, when her husband came home. "Hi, Edie," he said. "How's the baby?" She was irritated that his first thought should be of the child. But then she said : "Oh my God! The baby!" "What's the matter?" Oren asked. Alarmed, he headed for the nursery. She followed him. "I plugged his sleeper into the sitter connection when I went shopping and when I came home -- frankly I forgot all about him." Martin was asleep, peacefully. If he was damp he didn't show it or object. "What a terrible mother I am," Edith said. Anxiously she pressed a button and a voice said, almost instantly: "Nursaway, Incorporated. Everything was just fine while you were gone. One moment, please." That was just Tape A, but it did mean there had been no trouble; no need to send a nurse in person from the central sitter office. "Electronic nursemaids," Oren snorted. He was about to elaborate when a viewscreen which could be seen from the baby's Sleeprplay went alight. The image of a young woman in a crisp white uniform appeared. She said: "Martin was wonderful while you were gone. He slept most of the time. Once he got a bit cranky, but we ran off a puppet film on the screen, which amused him, and then played a Soothe-tune. He went back to sleep. You have a very fine baby, Mrs. Donn." "Yes, I know," Edith said. "Thank you." "Will there be anything else?" "No. Thank you very much, Nurse." "Thank you." The screen darkened and Edith plugged out the connection. "So everything's under control," Oren said. "I'll change him and feed him later, if you like." They went back to the studio. "You seem to be busy." He looked around at the mess. She laughed and curled up on the couch, moving the parcels to the floor. "You have no idea," she said. "I've been going like a mad one all afternoon. And the reason why? This will kill you." She spoke selfconsciously. "Your strictly notalent wife thinks she has something good. She thinks she has it and she may not lose it, if only she keeps working at it like fury so as to keep it from getting away." "Of course you've got something," he said. "We both know that." "But this is different. It's the third movement. It's all there. Part of it's down on paper -- there," she pointed her chin at a mass of papers on the piano top, "and part of it's up here." She rapped her skull with her knuckles. "Or down here," she added. "I seem to feel it in my stomach, too. Is that the way great music is written -- with the stomach?" "I don't know," Oren said. "But if that's the way you write, that's the way you write." "Well, this is ulcer music. Maybe I'll give it a name. Symphony Number I by Edith Donn, subtitled The Brain and the Ulcer.' " "Good," he said. "Now you're relaxing. I'll get us a drink and you knock off for the day so you can go at it fresh in the morning." "Thanks," she said. "I'll take the drink, but I've got to get back to this. I can't risk losing it. If you don't mind getting your own supper, that is? I don't think I want anything." He came back from the portable bar and handed her a drink. "In the old days I'd have blown my stack," he said, grinning. "Work hard all day and then have to stand over a hot stove while my wife makes merry in the music room. But even though I'm Apologist Number One for the old-fashioned way, I must admit this modern cooking has grandma's methods beat all to hell." "You know how to do it, don't you?" his wife asked. "The freezer's full of all kinds of meals. All you have to do..." "I know," he said. "From the freezer into the Electronicook and orito the table in ten seconds flat. Then into me, and what's left into the Disposo. But just to be perverse, I think I'll have a couple of medieval sandwiches. If I fix you some and tiptoe in quietly with them, you'll eat them, won't you?" "You're a darling," Edith said. She gave him a quick kiss and went to the piano. "Yes, I will." At twenty-three thirty Oren Donn came out of the shower and peeked into the studio. Edith was still hard at work. He wrote a note, tiptoed in and put it on the piano top : "Baby's all tucked away. Now I'm tucking myself away. Please come to bed soon." glance, smiled, blew him a kiss and nodded vaguely. When he awoke the next morning the first thing he was conscious of was the muted sounds of the piano. He went in to her. "Honey, for God's sake!" Her face was pale and drawn but her eyes were bright. She would play a few bars, then write a line of notes in quick, expert strokes. There was a little box of tabodex She read the note at a quick on the piano top next to a glass. "I'm fine," Edith said. "Don't worry about me. It's a bit tricky in spots, but it's really coming along." "You've got to slow down -- have some rest," he protested. "I won't let you do this to yourself." "No," she said. "The music is more important. You run along. With luck, I'll be through with this movement by the time you're home." He conceded defeat, respecting her judgment and sense of values as she had always respected his. "All right, but don't overdo it. I'll make you some scrambled eggs and coffee. And I'm going to call Nursaway and get a sitter for Martin so you won't be disturbed. Except that she'll be instructed to feed you lunch -- forcibly if necessary." Edith put down her pencil, got to her feet, put her arms around him and rested her head on his chest. "I just want to tell you," she said softly, "that you're the most wonderful, perfect, sensational, terrifically colossal person in the whole world and I love you love you love you love you." Her tears wet the skin of his chest in the V of his bathrobe. "Thank you for you," she whispered. He kissed the top of her head and then on each wet cheek and gently on the mouth. "Okay," he said, considerably affected. "Okay, fine. I'll go fix the eggs. And you write this thing good, Edie. Give it hell, Sweetheart. Give it hell." Oren pushed open the door of the apartment that night and called : "Edith. Edie!" He went into the studio, but it was empty -- and clean. The piano lid was down. The ashtrays were empty and sparkling. The papers were gone from the floor. "Edie!" he cried. A nurse in starched white came from the bedroom. She had her finger to her lips. "She's in bed, Mr. Donn. I tried to call you at the office, but they told me you'd just left." "What is it? What's the matter?" "It's all right. Strain and fatigue is about all. I've given her a sedative and she's sleeping now. Dr. Harrons is on his way, but just as a precaution." He pushed past the nurse and into the bedroom. Edith lay quietly in the center of the double bed, breathing just a bit heavily. He stood at the edge of the bed, looking at her. The nurse followed him. She put her hand on Edith's forehead, in a gesture which she combined with the smoothing of the sleeping woman's hair, adjusted the covers and turned to smile at Oren. "I'm sure there's nothing to worry about," she said. "Poor kid," Oren said. "I put her to bed," the nurse said. "And called you and the doctor. But as I said, it's just strain, I'm sure." "Thank you, Miss Loring. I guess you didn't bargain for all this when you came to baby-sit." "I'm glad I could help," she said. "Would you like me to fix you some coffee or anything while we wait for the doctor?" "No, thanks. Fll go visit with Martin, I think, till he gets here. Has the baby been good?" "Perfect," she said. "A real doll." His son was asleep. Oren sat and looked at him and worried about Edith. Doctor Harrons was packing his things away in his bag. He refused a drink but accepted one of Oren's cigarets and sat down in a straightbacked chair. Oren stood and fidgeted in front of him. "It's as Miss Loring said." The doctor took out a prescription kit. "Fatigue, mostly. Your wife was driving herself on borrowed energy -- she'd taken a few of those Tabodex things, you know. Perfectly all right, of course, occasionally, but you do have to let yourself catch up afterwards. Mrs. Donn just went a bit too far before allowing herself to catch up. A good night's rest and a minimum of activity tomorrow and she'll be as good as new. Who is your regular doctor?" "We don't have one. We had Dr. Morales, but he was just the obby -- the obstetrician for the baby. A laboratory baby, of course." "Good man, Morales, in his field. But I would suggest another in this case. I mean no criticism of Morales whatsoever, but he is a specialist. He'd be the first to tell you so himself. No, if I may make a recommendation, I'd say Dr. Leif." "If you say so," Oren said. "I suppose you're too busy to take on another patient yourself?" The doctor carefully ground out his cigaret in an ashtray. He looked at Oren, began a smile, then stopped it in the middle. "Mr. Donn," he said, "apparently I have news for you. Have a drink yourself, Mr. Donn. Your wife is pregnant." Oren stiffened. His face went through a series of contortions as it adjusted itself to the emotions chasing around behind it. He ended his confusion by breaking out into a broad grin. "Pregnant!" he cried. "You mean pregnant? You mean she's going to have a baby? The way people used to do? The old-fashioned way? Naturally?" "Naturally," said Dr. Harrons, grinning back. "Oh, boy!" Oren exploded. "Oh, boy-oh-boy! That's wonderful!" He walked up and down the room in excitement. "Pregnant! Imagine that! The little devil! Doctor, I'm going to have a drink and you're going to have one with me." "Well," the doctor said, "all right. Just a weak one." Edith slept through the night. Oren sent word to his office that he was taking the day off and he was anxiously hovering over his wife when she stirred into wakefulness. "Hello, Maw," he said when her eyes opened. "Hello, darling," she said. She stretched out a hand to him and he put it to his lips. It was warm and soft. "I feel so lazy and relaxed," she said. "It's about time," he said. "And that's the way you're going to stay." "Oh, but I can't. I have so much work to do. I've -- " She frowned and looked around the sunlit room. "It's morning' she said. "I don't remember going to bed. What happened?" "It's all right. Just relax." "But it's not all right. I have work to do. I have to finish the symphony. I have a lot of work to do." "You finished it," he said. "You finished it last night. Before I came home." She frowned down at the covers. "I remember now. Yes, I did finish. But that was only the third movement. It was good. It came out all right, Oren. I remember. But I don't remember after that. Did I fall asleep in the studio?" "Yes," he said. "And the babysitter put you to bed. You were knocked out." "Well, I'm not knocked out any more. I've got to get right up and start the last movement. That's going to be a humdinger to tackle. I've got no ideas whatsoever. The third took everything out of me." "So I hear," he said. "Now you listen to me. You're going to stay in bed all day. That's an order. Doctor's order. Maybe tonight, if you're very good, you can get up for a little while. But not before. You've got to take care of yourself. You owe it to the baby." "Poor Marty. I've certainly been neglecting him. All right, I'll be good. I'll stay in bed and behave. And maybe you'll bring him in and he can stay with me, the way he's never had a chance to, in that damned old scientific box of his all the time." "Edith Riordan Donn," he said to her, grinning. "Mrs. Oren Donn, I want you to stop talking like an idiot. The doctor has been here, and he's told me everything, and there's no point in your trying to hide it any longer because I know. I, your husband Mr. Donn. I know." "Know what, silly? What doctor? What are you talking about?" "You know perfectly well what I'm -- Don't you? You mean you don't know? Don't you really?" She laughed. "No, I don't. And if you keep mumbling to yourself like a fool I never will. What are you talking about?" He took both her hands in his and said: "Edie, darling. The doctor was here. He examined you after you passed out. He said you'd been overworking yourself. He said you need a rest. But he also said -- He said, and I think it's wonderful -- he said we're going to have a baby." She looked at him, her eyes wide. "Oh, no!" she said. She withdrew one of her hands and pulled it down the side of her face. "Not no, yes. We're going to be real live parents. No bowl of mush stuff, with all due respect to Martin, but an honest-to-God old-fashioned baby." Her staring eyes were focused on nothing. When she spoke again her voice was barely audible. "Now I'll never finish the symphony," she said. "It's no good any more. I can't do it now." "Silly girl," he said. "You sound like Dr. Stern. Surely you can't agree with him now. You can have your baby and your symphony both. You can have a dozen babies and write a dozen symphonies, if you want to." "No," she said dully. "Not now. I was talking a lot of bravado then. Now I'm just an ordinary woman, like all the rest. We can't do two things at once. We're strictly onetrack people. It's our fate." "Fate hell!" Oren exploded. "What a lot of nonsense you're talking. You did three movements, didn't you? You can do anything you want to do, if you'll only get out of this defeatist frame of mind." "You're shouting at me." She looked at him, her eyes grown cold. "You did this thing to me and now you're shouting at me." Her voice rose and she had a wild look. "You're jealous of my work. I was doing something creative and you weren't and now you're jealous of my work and you're trying to destroy it. That's why I'm pregnant. You did it on purpose. You did it maliciously. Well, I won't let you destroy my music. I'll destroy your child first!" She thrust the bedclothes aside and got unsteadily to her feet. He sprang up to help her. She shoved him aside, with more strength than he thought she possessed. "Honey," he said. "Hypocrite!" she yelled. She clawed a dress from a hanger in the closet, gathered together other clothing and ran to the bathroom, where she locked the door against him. He pounded on it. "Edie," he said. "You're sick. Open the door. Come back to bed. I'll call the doctor." "You needn't bother," she said. "I'm going to the doctor. I'm going to have an abortion." Oren, pale and shaking, went to the communicator. He set it for private and whispered: "Medical emergency." A minute later the bathroom door opened and Edith came out, dressed for the street. Her face was ashen under its makeup. She carried her purse in her left hand and behind it she was shielding something she held in her right hand. Oren stood at the front door, barring her way. "You're not going out," he said softly. "Please, darling, be reasonable." She walked toward him. She lifted the purse so he could see the large pair of scissors in her other hand, the point of one blade just touching her body. "Open the door, my dear husband," she said. "Let me go out." He hesitated only a moment, watching her mad eyes, then opened the door for her. a stretcher ten minutes later. She was unconscious. At Oren's gesture the two men carrying the stretcher took it into the bedroom and the young medical officer with the gold badge on his white tunic helped them transfer her to the bed. "Preventive paralysis," the officer said to Oren. "She's all right. We tracked her from the street door as soon as we got your call and made contact in person a minute or two later." "But you had to use the para ray?" Oren asked. "She was carrying those shears and we couldn't take a chance. She seemed to be wandering aimlessly until she saw us. Then she began to run and we pre-parred her. No one saw and Dr. Soames caught her as she fell. There'll be no publicity, I think I can assure you." "Thank God for that." Oren knelt by the bed and pushed a lock of hair away from his wife's face. She was breathing peacefully and the mad look had gone. "There will be a few questions, though, if we can go into the next room. Dr. Soames will see that Mrs. Donn is made comfortable." "Questions?" "Just routine," the medical officer said. "For the department records. Confidential, of course." He took Oren's elbow and guided him out of the bedroom. The questions, if routine, were extensive. At one point Oren angrily crushed out a cigaret and said: "What is this, anyway? You make it sound like a police matter. If we're charged with anything let me know and I'll get a lawyer. I don't like this inquisition." "Well, now," soothed the medical officer, "you know that there's often a very fine line of demarcation between a medical case and a police matter. Our department must have the facts if the case is to be closed." "Don't call it a 'case.' You make me sorry I ever called you." "You might have been sorrier if you hadn't," the officer said coldly, his affability slipping for a moment "Our job is to safeguard all the citizenry and it's people like you who make things difficult." Oren jumped to his feet. "Listen, you young squirt," he began. But Soames came from the bedroom then and after a grave look at Oren whispered into the officer's ear. The medical officer frowned. "What is it?" asked Oren. "What's wrong?" "Mr. Donn," the officer said reproachfully, "you didn't tell us your wife was pregnant." "You didn't give me a chance to, with your stupid questions. Well, what of it?" "We should have had that fact in our possession at the time we answered your emergency call," the officer said sententiously. "Then we would have proceeded differently. As it is, you must take responsibility." "Responsibility for what? What do you mean?" "I mean this. Preventive paralysis is harmless, generally speaking, but its effect on a foetus or embryo is not completely known and may even be harmful. Therefore we disclaim responsibility for any injury or mutation which may occur in the course of this natural birth. I have a form here which I must ask you to sign, to absolve the departm -- " That was when Oren socked him in the jaw. It was thirty-six hours before the Donn household was back nearly to normal. Oren had been under house arrest for twenty-four of those hours. During that time the house had been aswarm with Council Guards, medics and medical officers, a lawyer, nurses, a baby-sitter and reporters from half a dozen news media. One reporter carrying a creepy-peepy sent the scene out for triveo. Finally all of them had gone except Oren's lawyer, in whose custody he was paroled. "Not only don't they have a case, Oren," the lawyer said, "but you might have a strong action against the Council. I say this in the strictly legal sense, of course, without consideration of such extra-legal litx tle gimmicks such as Suggestions and Resolutions they could whip out at the spur of a moment, and assuming that they'd allow a suit. I imagine, though, that all you want is peace and privacy again." "Exactly, Burt," Oren said. He kicked at a fax tabloid whose headline screamed: "You could sue that sheet, at least," Burt said. "Forget it." The bedroom door opened. Oren pushed the tabloid under the couch with his toe as he got to his feet. Edith came in, wearing a hostess gown and smiling uncertainly. "Hello, darling," she said. "Hello, Burt. I've been a bad girl, haven't I?" Oren went to her and led her to the couch. She was a bit unsteady on her feet. She relaxed gratefully. "We're not going to talk about anything unpleasant tonight," her husband said. "We'll pretend that Burt is here on one of his rare social evenings." They pretended as best they could but it was not a success. Oren was worried about his wife's condition and was not talkative. Edith, who had not been told there was anything to worry about, was pale under her makeup and wore a fixed half-smile which soon choked off Burt's attempts at conversation. So in desperation they switched on the triveo. It was Jerry Hilarious night and the scarlet-haired comedian was in rare form. His material usually was topical, and tonight it was right up to the minute. They had turned him on in the middle of a routine which obviously was a parody of the Donn case. Since they had missed the beginning, it wasn't too clear what was going on, but in the act with Jerry Hilarious were a couple wearing heavy glasses -- which he had made symbolic of the intellectuals the City-State so despised. Moreover, the girl was wearing as a costume a print dress polka-dotted with music notes and a hat that was a grand piano, while the man, obviously a snob, carried a heavy old-fashioned book under his arm. "Oh, he's subtle," said Burt. "Subtle as a kick in the teeth. Shall I turn him off?" "No," said Oren. "We might as well see ourselves as The Common Man sees us -- unless it upsets you, Edie?" "It's all right," she said. "It has a certain fascination." The triveo couple, with Jerry Hilarious laughing it up in the foreground, were singing: "We don't like the City-State But we think we are just first rate." The couple, with their faces fixed in expressions of the utmost gravity, were going through a series of insane antics as they sang the verses, and the studio audience was roaring with laughter as Jerry Hilarious mugged, cross-eyed, and danced around the pair with his arms and legs flailing fantastically. The production ended with a crash of music and a sudden silence in which Jerry Hilarious wound up and let fly his gesture of banishment. "Aw, g'wan outside!" he cried. A wind machine went into action and, as it howled, snowflakes pelted the ridiculous, bespectacled couple. They cringed away from the gesture and crept toward an icy gate. Edith, with a switch next to the couch, cut off the triveo. Her expression was angry and her lips were pressed into a firm line. "You know," she said, "I'd like to do just that." Health Department experts and the Donns' private physician -- couldn't tell what the effect of the para ray would be on Edith's unborn child. It was alive, they agreed, but whether it would be normal after birth was something they could not yet say. They put her through a Diagnosticon, they thumped on her belly with fingers and X-steths, they examined smears and slides and dials and they said they'd be back to run some more tests when she was five months pregnant. It was thoroughly humiliating. Oren was tried on the assault charge. The trial was held in chambers with the press barred. Nothing had appeared anywhere about the fact that Edith was pregnant when she was rayed down by preventive paralysis and the Council intended that nothing should. The case was handled as one of simple assault and the judge sentenced Oren to a year in Correction, then suspended the sentence. He was free then, but from that time on the Donns were under surveillance. They planned one Restday to go on a gyro trip with a picnic lunch. They hadn't ever made such a trip as a family unit, and little Marty seemed to sense their anticipation. His heels kicked against the lunch pack as they wheeled him the few blocks to the gyropark. But the plane wasn't there. A hostile attendant, speaking from the back of his booth as if fearing contamination, told them the Council Guards had confiscated it. Marty sensed their mood of frustration and bitterness as they wheeled him back home and he began to cry. He was still crying when they reached the house and Oren on an angry impulse put the infant in the Sleeprplay and cut off his yowls by turning the soundproof switch. Then Oren went intQ the study and turned on the artificial rain; the streams of water slammed against the window. But suddenly the sound stopped. He looked up and saw a Council Guard looking at him from outside the panes. The booted, green-tunicked guard motioned to him to open the window. He did, and asked belligerently, "Did you turn that off ? # "I did," the guard said. "As you must be aware, there's a Suggestion against artificial rain. In addition to being wasteful, it's naturalistic." The guard took out a pocket Listener and aimed it at Oren. "I didn't know about any such Suggestion," Oren said. He was leaning out the window and talking loudly to the guard standing in the garden below. "And if there is such a Suggestion, it's petty tyranny." "Oren Donn, with two n's," the guard said into the Listener. "And 'tyranny.' That was the word you used, wasn't it, Mr. Donn?" "Go to hell," exploded Oren. "And get the hell out of my garden. You have no right here at all." "And use of profanity to a guard in the performance of his duty," the guard said. "People under surveillance are subject to loss of certain rights. I'm sure that was explained to you at the time of your trial." Oren bit the inside of his cheek then, and was silent. The guard looked up at Oren, smiled faintly and put the Listener back in his pocket. "Nothing else to say, Mr. Donn. Too bad. I was enjoying your lecture, as I am sure the Council will when it is transcribed for them. Nice garden you have here. Very natural." The guard turned and on his way to the gate at the back of the garden his heavy boots tramped through a border of moss roses. Oren bit off a little piece of the inside of his cheek. A man had been standing in the street beyond the garden, watching the scene, and he walked on leisurely as the guard left. The guard gave him a passing glance and disappeared around a corner. Oren recognized the man. Mark Olafson, the man from Outside. Oren was about to speak when Mark shook his head almost imperceptibly. Then he, too, disappeared from view. At his office the next day Oren spent the entire morning failing to get anything accomplished. Half a dozen times he began to tackle the correspondence that had accumulated over the weekend and half a dozen times he yanked the page out of the voicewriter. He was still in his mood when the reception screen showed that he had a visitor. It was Mark Olafson, but the name he gave now was Ross Buckley and his appearance was that of a successful businessman. Oren looked his surprise. "Well," he said. "Made a go of it, have you?" "You might say so." Mark replied. "In a manner of speaking." "I saw you go by our place yesterday, but I had no idea you'd had such a complete change of fortune. Why didn't you come in? Or is that a stupid question? I'm not much of a conspirator." "You're not a conspirator at all, I'm afraid," Mark said. He lifted a flap in Oren's desk and pressed the button that wiped the conversation tape. "You'll pardon me. No, Donnie, you're just a victim of an evil, stupid government. I saw that little drama in the garden yesterday, and I know more about you and Edith than you might suppose -- never mind how. I've been busy since you and I last talked. In several ways. And I know that things have changed with you." "They have, Mar -- Buckley. They certainly have." "Good lad. Thanks for the 'Buckley.' We'll make a conspirator of you yet." "They're driving me into it," Oren said. "Or out of the CityState, at any rate. Edith is already half-way thinking about that Jerry Hilarious thing as being a good idea -- that 'g'wan outside' business. I guess you've been here long enough now to know about Jerry Hilarious." "Yes," said Mark. "Fve become very well acclimated. You know, Donnie, once I told you I didn't think you'd like it out there. Now I'm not so sure. It hasn't changed any Outside, except insofar as it's always changing -- for the better, we think -- but..." "I know," Oren said. "I've changed. I'm waking up." Mark Olafson looked at the other man intently. "I shouldn't do this," he said. "It's not my primary job, directly. But if you like, I'll help you go." "Oh?" Oren chewed his lip for a while. "I'd like to think about it, and talk to Edith. Could we make a living? We're not farmers or laborers, you know. And -- could we take it?" "Yes, to both. I suppose you've been saturated with the propaganda films about Outside. I'll not tell you they're fakes, because they're not exactly. They're factual as far as they go. But they only go as far with their cameras and spies as we let them go." "Oh?" Oren said again. "You mean there's more than -- " "Lots more. I think I can safely say -- to you -- that you'd be pleasantly surprised. Some of our people are farmers, of course, and some work in factories. But we have a thing called a Constitution, pretty much the same as the one a bunch of the boys hammered out back in the seventeen hundreds. It says things, for instance, about freedom of the press, and that means books, and books means somebody has to publish them." "Books?" said Oren. "Of course. Your business. Ours don't talk, yet. You still have to turn the pages and know how to read. But it's something you could do if you didn't mind going into the print shop once in a while and getting your hands inky." "Printer's ink," said Oren, "How I used to love that smell! But how about Edith's music?" "We're not barbarians, except maybe when the City-State turns its cameras on us. We have music, too." "Well." Oren's eyes had a far-off look in them. "Well?" Mark echoed the word, smiling. "I don't know what to say. I'm tempted, very much, to pack right up and move out there, but I don't know. This is my country, even if it's wrong in a lot of ways, and maybe I should stay and try to help make it right instead of deserting it." "That's a noble thought. I don't mean that flippantly," Mark added quickly. "I respect you for it. But can the few people like you who are left still do anything -- from Inside?" "I don't know," Oren said. "I'll have to think about it." "I'll be around," Mark said. "Now that I'm respectable, or almost, I'll be keeping in touch with you." "Good. What are you doing here -- as Ross Buckley, I mean?" "Officially -- at least as far as the City-State is concerned -- I'm in the talking book business. Just like you. That's why it'll be easy for me to see you often, after I've really got started. Unofficially -- you might say I'm in the business of counterpropaganda, or recruiting." Oren realized that he'd be of no use in the office the rest of the day, either, and decided to go home and talk to Edith. "You'd better let me go ahead, by about five minutes," Mark said. "I don't think we should be seen together in public until things have firmed up just a bit more." Oren never saw him again. When he reached the street he found a crowd of people watching the departure of a Council Guard van. He asked the doorman what had happened. "They got an Outsider. He puts up a struggle but they beats him over the head and takes him off." With his stomach squeezed tight Oren asked, "where did he come from?" "Somewheres in the building. Just by luck the same elevator jockey brings him down as takes him up and remembers the floor he comes from. The guards are up there now. They got the whole thirty-sixth floor sealed off and every last soul up there is getting their heads grilled off." Mark Olafson must have walked three flights before and after his visit. Oren's office was on the thirtyninth floor. tension into the Donn home. Oren knew Mark would never mention his name but he was frightened by the efficiency of the Council Guard in tracking down the Outsider despite his elaborate precautions. Apparently no one but the mechanical reception screen had seen Mark visit his office and fortunately it was not one that kept a permanent record. But presumably they knew where Mark Olafson lived and the clothes Oren had brought for him might be traced, if Mark had kept them. Although Oren tried to keep his new worry from Edith, she finally forced it from him. But with it went the picture of Outside as Mark had described it for him and that, at least, was a consolation. The couple talked more and more seriously about making the break with their once-comfortable life and fleeing to the wilderness that now seemed more a promise of paradise. But where once they could have made the emigration with no difficulty other than the scorn of their friends and the sneers of a government which would have confiscated their funds as it stamped their visas, they now were trapped in a land they had come to loathe. As a man under surveillance, Oren had only limited freedom. They'd already taken his gyro and he was sure that if he strayed far from the route between his home and office he'd soon be tapped on the shoulder by a Council Guard. In this atmosphere Edith's music stagnated. It was an academic question now whether the fact that she was naturally pregnant meant that she could not write a great symphony. She knew she could not write a bar now if she was a sixteenth generation obby baby whose female ancestors for three hundred years had been born in bowls of laboratory mush. Then, in the fifth month of her pregnancy, the Health Department specialists came back for the reexamination. All the exhaustive tests again were made but still there was none among them who could say with any certainty if Edith's child would be normal after birth. Preventive paralysis was a tricky thing. That was about all they could state positively, and there had been only a few cases of an expectant mother having been prepared. The specialists went into a conference and emerged with a Recommendation which they sent to the City-State Council. The Council deliberated and issued a Suggestion to Mr. and Mrs. Oren Donn. A Suggestion to a person under surveillance had the power of a Resolution and, of course, a Resolution was an Edict, backed by whatever force was needed to carry it out The Suggestion was that the mother should enter a Health Department hospital at the beginning of her ninth month and be subject to exhaustive tests under rigidlycontrolled conditions. Then, if it was indicated that the birth would be normal -- if something so oldfashioned as a natural birth could be considered "normal" -- a film record would be made of the birth and of the infant's progress. It would of course be necessary to have a complete record until such time as the child was found to be either normal or abnormal and therefore it was Suggested that the child would become a ward of the City-State while doubt remained. The mother would be free to return home after the birth. That was when Oren and Edith decided they'd had it. They read the copy of the Suggestion which had been brought to them for their signatures. They signed it, received the thanks of the medical officer for their intelligent cooperation, and then made their plans. There was to be, on the Restday after next, the annual Rededication Jubilee in State Square, a vast public amphitheater. It was the one day in the year when the Members of the Council made a public appearance and of course everyone went to pay his respects and add to the din of applause and cheers when the Members made their brief speeches. It was also the day awards were made in the form of medals and scrolls to citizens who had done most for the City-State during the preceding year. Mostly the recipients were officials of the government, but they never were the Council Members themselves, who year after year modestly refused their nomination by the awards committee. This alone should have been enough to guarantee attendance, but there was always entertainment besides. The greatest names in the movies and triveo appeared, each with a special new act never before seen anywhere. The star of stars this year was to be Jerry Hilarious, that sensational new triveo comic. There was no triveo of the Jubilee, however. It was thoroughly understood that it would be unpatriotic not to be one of the crowd personally taking part in the Oath of Rededication that climaxed the occasion. Therefore there would be no one at home to see a triveo cast of it. Films were made, though, for showing at a later date to those who had to work on the holiday and those in institutions. Jubilee Day dawned hot and sunny. Oren and Ethel knew that their best chance would come when the ceremonies ended and the mobs of people swarmed in all directions for home. They and little Marty in his baby buggy would be part of that anonymous crowd and they would let that part of it which swarmed west take them with it -- toward the setting sun, and Outside. Just exactly how they would escape notice when they reached the outskirts of the City-State, or how they would cross the boundary, they did not know. But if there was a way they would find it. It was a long day. They'd taken nothing with them except some changes of clothing for the baby, and only as much money as they would normally be expected to carry with them, and Edith's music -- the manuscript of the first three movements of her symphony. But though they were traveling light they had the weight of fear with them until they had worked themselves well into the center of the crowd in the great square. They found seats. Under the broiling sun -- the heat only slightly mitigated by the frigeration towers -- the program began. The vast audience was restless despite the brevity of the official speeches but when each ended the applause was deafening. Oren and Edith applauded, too, looking cautiously around to see if any guards were watching. None was in sight anywhere near them. Jerry Hilarious romped onto the stage and was welcomed with a roar of laughter. At first the Donns forced themselves to laugh at his antics, not to seem out of place, and as they watched they realized that the short, wiry redhead was genuinely an artist and not just a buffoon. He was giving a masterful performance and through his special material could be seen the man, warm-hearted, inventive, instantly responsive to the mood of the crowd. Oren and Edith relaxed and felt their tension ease off. They gained strength through the respite for the journey ahead. Only when Jerry Hilarious wound himself up and threw his familiar catch line at the crowd did Edith fail to laugh. "Aw," boomed the words, "g'wan outside !" "Amen," said Edith under her breath. Finally, after repeated encores, Jerry Hilarious left the stage. Act after act followed and at last, in late afternoon, the program ended with the solemn Oath of Rededication. The Donns mouthed the promissory, meaningless words, stood up froiri the folding chairs for the recessional music and then joined a throng that was heading west. The crush was so great that Oren took Marty up and carried him while Edith collapsed the baby buggy to briefcase size and carried it. They found a kiosk and, surrounded by humanity, made their way down to the westbound moving pavement. Clinging together so as not to lose each other, they were propelled along at a steady fifteen miles an hour. The pavement and the throng took them under the Hudson River and into what had once been New Jersey but which now was just another part of Greater New York. The crowd had begun to thin as the pavement branched north and south but there were still many thousands of people heading west. Marty was asleep with his head on his father's shoulder and Oren's arms were beginning to ache. Edith had a pain in the back of the neck, as if someone were staring at her there and any moment would tap her on the shoulder and say "Go back." Miles later the moving pavement ended, at the top of a rise. Nearby was a loading platform for buses. Neither of them knew where they were or in which direction to go next. A dilapidated old gasoline bus that still carried the lettering Pennsylvania Greyhound was marked Borderville and they boarded that one. They were exhausted when the bus reached its terminal. It had been crowded when it started off. The Donns had found seats but many others stood. At the end of the line, however, less than two dozen persons still were aboard. Wearily the Donns got up. When they left the bus it drove off. Their fellow riders melted away into the dusk and the Donns walked at random down a street of ancient houses and old-fashioned stores with full plate-glass windows. They tried to look as if they had a destination. Several blocks later they saw a sign in red neon tubing which once have to go in. They could do nothing more tonight. In the dimly lit lobby, an old man sat in a heavy armchair behind the counter, dozing. There was no one else. Oren cleared his throat and the man opened his eyes. "Hi, there," he said. "Customers, eh? Always get a customer or two on Jubilee Day. How was the show?" "Great," said Oren without enthusiasm. "Could we have a double room, please, with an extra cot for the baby? I don't suppose you have a crib." "Sure do," the old man said. "We ain't so antiquated as you might think, though we are a mite far off from the center of things. Like a room with a bath, or would down the hall do you? Five credits cheaper for down the hall." "With bath, please," Oren smiled. He couldn't remember that he'd ever had to make the choice before. "Right you are, sir. Sir," he repeated. "Sometimes forget to say that." He cackled. "You from Outside? Or maybe goin' there? I know you ain't from around here." Edith looked at Oren with weary, frightened eyes and Marty whimpered sleepily as Oren shifted him to the other shoulder.  The old man cackled again. "That's all right," he said. "You don't have to say nothin'. Lots of Outsiders sneak across on Jubilee Day. And vicey versa. Nobody pays much mind. I certainly ain't goin' to make a fuss about it. All I care about's you pay me twenty credits in advance, seein' as you got no luggage." Oren fished out his wallet and handed it to Edith, who counted out twenty credits to the old man, who put them in his pocket and took a key out of a cubbyhole. "Second floor," he said. "Elevator got cranky couple years ago and it ain't worked since. Hope you don't mind the stairs." The stairs creaked loudly as they climbed them. Their room was just off the stair well and there was a film of dust on the battered chest of drawers. When Edith took the spread off the big double bed, though, she found fresh linen underneath. Oren put the baby down with a grunt of relief. "I'll bring the crib up in a little while," the old man said. "Anything else you'd like?" He was dubious when Oren asked about the possibility of having a meal sent up to the room but finally agreed to see what he could do. Maybe the place down the street, if they weren't too busy. He went out. The food came sooner than they had dared hope. It was hot and good, although they had to eat off a rickety card table the old man brought up with the crib. They ate the meal, fed the baby and put him to bed and then, while Edith ran herself a hot bath, Oren went down to the lobby to buy cigarets. The stairs creaked under his feet but the sound was drowned out by a crash as the street door was thrown open and a crowd of people entered in a babble of loud talk. There were about a dozen of them. Two of them were women and all of them seemed to be drunk. All were well dressed. Oren froze on the landing, half in the shadow. He dared not go back up for fear of attracting attention to himself, so he stood and watched. One man, apparently the leader of the noisy group, went to the counter and pounded on it. "Innkeeper!" he commanded. He took off his hat and sailed it neatly onto the branch of a coattree across the room. The gesture revealed a flaming shock of red hair. There was no doubt of his identity. Jerry Hilarious. Oren drew himself farther back into the corner of the landing. The old man came around a corner of the lobby. "There you are' said Jerry Hilarious. "Throw open the bar for these good people, Innkeeper. They're beginning to run down." "Ain't got no bar, strictly speakin'," the old man said. "I have hung up my hat and I intend to stay," the red-haired man said. "You have tables in the lobby. These will do. Put liquor on them. Or would you rather" -- he wound up and let fly his gesture of banishment at the old man -- "g'wan outside !" One of the other men in the group slapped a third on the back and howled: "That Jerry Hilarious -- he kills me!" The old man spat calmly into a flaked enamel cuspidor. "Don't kill me," he said. "If you got money I guess I can rustle up some bar whisky from someplace. We get all kinds here. You come from the Jubilee, I take it?" A florid-faced man in a checkered tunic pushed importantly forward and slapped some credits on the counter. "Take it!" he cried, laughing drunkenly. "We brought the Jubilee with us -- hah, Jerry?" "I have brought this roistering company," Jerry Hilarious said, "to see the outside of the Outside. But if you don't hurry they'll start to unroister, which is a disheartening sight. So hasten with the liquor, Innkeeper." The comedian ended his little speech with a crazy dance that evoked more laughter. The old man brought bottles and glasses from under the counter and set them out on the tables. One of the women hiccupped in a moment of silence and leaned against her escort for support. "Music!" cried Jerry Hilarious. "Turn on the triveo!" "Trivia!" shouted the man in the checkered tunic. "Turn on the trivia!" "Sir," said Jerry Hilarious, pirouetting and jabbing a finger into one of the checks, "you slander my profession. G'wan outside!" "G'wan outside! G'wan outside!" the others echoed, laughing, and the company was roistering again. "Ain't got no triveo," the old man said without apology. "Got an old video, though." He switched it on. "I don't think this is a very good party," said the woman who had hiccupped. "I'm depressed." "Can't expect all the conveniences, dear, when you get so far from civilization," her escort said. "Can you, Jerry?" "Extemporaneous reply," Jerry Hilarious said. He sang: You'd feel worse in a hearse -- You'd be drab on a slab. That is the curse Of being inside the Outside. He went into one of his fantastic dances as music blasted out of the video. Oren took advantage of the diversion to slip back upstairs and into their room. Edith came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her. "What's all that noise, Oren?" she asked. "It worried me." "It's Jerry Hilarious, of all people. He's got a crowd with him on the tail end of some private Jubilee." "Jerry Hilarious!" she said. "Did they see you?" "I don't think so." "Why did they come all the way out here?" she asked. "Educational tour, apparently. Slumming to see how it is in borderland so they can congratulate themselves on living where they do. We can't leave. About all we can do is try to get some sleep and see what happens in the morning. I don't think they'll make a night of it. A couple of them are pretty bored already." But an hour later, as they were dozing off, they heard the stairs creak. It wasn't the tired tread of the old man. Someone was taking the steps two at a time. They listened in alarm to the footsteps, then in dread as they stopped just outside their door. There was a knock, a brisk tattoo. They dressed quickly. Oren opened the door. Jerry Hilarious stood there. Oren's heart sank. Edith came to his side. "Oh," she said. She took Oren's hand. "Hello," Jerry Hilarious said. He was smiling. "May I come in? I could only get away for a minute." "So you found us," Oren said in despair. He opened the door wider, then closed it behind the comedian. "And we were laughing at you -- with you, really -- just this afternoon," Edith said. "I know you have to work for them that way, but I didn't think you were their bloodhound, too." "No, no," said Jerry Hilarious. "I've never hunted anything, except laughs. I'm sorry if I frightened you. I'm on your side, the way Mark Olafson was." "You know Mark?" Oren asked. "I knew him. He's dead. They beat him to death. They'd beat me to death, too, if they found out about me." "Then you're an Outsider, too?" Oren asked. Relief swept through him. Edith grasped the comedian's hand. "Mr. Hilarious," she said. "Oh, I could cry." "Call me Jerry. That's my real name. The Hilarious is strictly for laughs." "Poor Mark," Oren said. "It was (Continued on page #) What are the chances of Man finding intelligent life on other planets? Here is the answer by a world ranking aero physicist! Lonely Earth pitifully brief span of those few fully to acquire the ability to observe, contemplate, and deduce, he has become more and more selfconscious of his lone position in the midst of all other creatures. The first domestication of wild animals may have arisen as an answer to his psychological desire to find at least semi-intelligent creatures among other branches of the animal kingdom, just as much as through his physical need for a plentiful food supply which was not dependent on the vagaries of the hunt and chase. From this same psychological root may stem our present interest in all the animated world; our eager striving to unravel the mystery of the homing sense of migrating birds, or that of the world of social insects which solved complicated political and sociological problems several hunour simple love of the pooch in the parlor. Our evolution, from animal-like acceptance of our surroundings, to searching contemplation may have left entangled in our personality the deeply rooted vision of the Garden of Eden as a reflex of that long gone dawn age when preMan vigorously lived out his short life in ignorance, and often in terror, but as yet uncursed with the concept of loneliness. This perpetual loneliness of mankind, in the midst of teeming life, results in mythological contemplation, in religious endeavor, and in philosophical and scientific study. Modern science fiction often presupposes that extraterrestrial cultures and civilizations do exist in time coincident with ours, and that their locations in space will be within range of our future technology in travel and communications. This concept implicitly embodies three conditions which must be fulfilled if human space expeditions are to have any chance ever to encounter Extraterrestrial intelligence. We believe that today we are able to judge these three questions with sufficient reliability to secure answers which are likely to be close to reality. Starting with those beyond our own control, we have to judge: #. a. Chances for the existence of intelligent life in the Universe in our Galaxy, in our planetary system. #. Odds on the timely coincidence of outside intelligent cultures within the limited span of existence of our own species, Homo Sapiens. Dr. Walther Riedel is perhaps best known for his work on rockets during the second World War. Following a series of important posts during his earlier career, in # he became attached to the Rocket Research and Development Station at Peenemuende, becoming a key figure in the advancement of German rocketry. At this station he was Scientific Coordinator between the Technical University and Peenemuende for two years, then Chief Designer for one year; from #-# he was Director of Development and Design and vice-Director of Peenemuende Station, heading up some # technical personnel. From #-# he was Governmental Co-ordinator for all German rocket propulsion systems development and production. Following the war, he came to America and for ten years was engaged in the advanced development of American rockets and guided missiles. Dr. Riedel's article is a scholarly approach to the question of whether or not we will find intelligent life in outer space and gives us a startling concept of time, space and Man. #. Possible future range of human space expeditions. The elapsed span of some four oldest ancestors acquired the right to be called forerunners of modern man, can be divided into five periods of rapidly diminishing length: in animal-like acceptance of nature. logical explanation for nature's demonstrations. #. Several thousand years of religious world concept. #. A few thousand years of philosophical approach. #. A few hundred years of exact Science. Rudiments of these five epochs are mixed within modem man to varying degrees, and this individual composition in each of us is a part of our "world picture". This alloy of so many diverging influences gives us the strength, usually, to withstand the daily impact of quarreling impressions -- and gives us, now and again, the very common mental headache against which no remedial aspirin has been found, beyond a few infamous narcotics. Perhaps, out of this pot-pourri of thinking systems, arises also our gift of simultaneously considering the thought of Man as the "crown of creation" together with the reluctantly forgiven egotism implicit in such a notion. Intelligent life in this universe and within "our" galaxy ? Strange as it may seem, this question is simply answered. We shall have to think, for the moment, in well established large, even gigantic figures. Because of their enormous size, we will here give them in powers of ten. (that is, # #I is the short way of writing I followed by #I zeroes. Similarly, # # is the same as I followed by six zeroes, or in calculating the above figures the number of zeroes, indicated by the raised 'power' numeral immediately following each #, to the numeral #.) Modern scientific thinking has evolved a draft of the dimensions and content of our Universe which may be described in the following terms: In a volume of space # x # # light years in diameter are distributed # # grams of matter. (one light year is a figure close to # miles; i.e., the distance a beam of light travels in one year at the constant rate of approximately # miles per second.) About half of this total weight of existing matter is embodied in the form of stars, or suns, the total existing number of which we may estimate to be approximately # # . These suns are organized in large, separate groups, which we call galaxies, and which may be estimated to be roughly # # in number. Therefore, the average number of suns contained in an average galaxy is about # # . If we assume one is gifted with one planet upon whose surface exist conditions suitable to the maintainance of life (as we can presently define it), then it follows that in this Universe there are # #divided-by-# # , or # #C suns encircled by at least one planet which is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. Just for impact, this last sentence means there are # such suns, with such planets capable of life, in existence throughout our Universe, right this moment. This stupendous number of planets in the Universe which display Earth-like conditions demands we answer a clear "yes # to the question of whether intelligent life exists in the Universe, and "yes" again, even when we narrow our field of consideration down to the single, more or less average, galaxy in which our own sun is a very unof others. The above figures show that, in our own galaxy alone -- just in our own Milky Way -- there are # #divided-by-# # , or apare likely to have planets which resemble Mother Earth with regard to conditions for life. Even if Nature should have only # success in developing intelligent life where conditions are favorable, we would still have to expect a minimum of a thousand planets gifted with intelligent life here in our own galaxy. Conclusion: The existence of intelligent life within the Universe, and within our own Milky Way galaxy is beyond doubt. Intelligent life in our planetary system? Within our Solar System, the climates of the four inner planets are fairly well known; i.e., Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Mars would appear to be the most feasible object for close study by human space expeditions, after they have reached our neighbor Moon. In comparing its climatological conditions with those of Earth, many experts may be found leaning over backwards to call them "unliveable". We should not underestimate the tenacity with which life can adjust itself to an enormous span of physical and chemical conditions. Man has populated the Earth from the Arctic Ice Gap to the sizzling heat of parched deserts and the soggy drip of brooding jungles, from sea level to the majestic peaks of the Andes. Lowering temperatures, rarification of the atmosphere, and depreciation of chemical resources can be mastered by capable civilizations to an amazing degree, as our still infinitesimal history already shows. The slow increase in the importance of problems seems to produce solutions to solve them. For instance, the decrease of easily available fuels, here on Earth, would eventually have resulted in the detection of nuclear energy sources, even if the Second World War had not brought about peaceful applications of atomic energy almost as a by-product. Therefore, such adjectives as "unliveable", when applied to a planet such as Mars, do not properly take into account the ability of life to adapt itself to changing conditions, particularly to those slow changes which are the result of the normal aging of a planet the size of Mars. Such aging, in the case of Mars, has been vastly more rapid than that of the larger Earth, as shown in the accompanying illustrations; but to our human senses, during the whole span of the existence of human life on Earth, it would have been almost imperceptible. T HE accompanying graphical illustration shows temperature plotted against the passage of time for both Earth and Mars. The dense canopy of primeval clouds, surrounding both hot planets, began to condense to heavy rainstorms after temperatures below #F. were reached -- very early on Mars (after # years) and only # to # years later on Earth. Early forms of primitive life may have evolved shortly after the water temperature passed beyears after "zero time" on Mars, on Earth. At an age of ten to temperature on Mars must have been close to that of the Earth when it reached an age of four billion years. If we assume that organic life developed on Earth after the average surface temperature sank below the coagulation point of protoyears after the birth of the Earth, the gigantic span of three thousand developed species whose residual remains were enduring enough to leave evidence of their existence scattered through the jumble of the upper strata of the Earth's crust in the form of fossils. Only a few of the first insects, ants, termites and bees had already reached an astonishing perfection. In the Eocene, the early Tertiary period, termites had already evolved winged versions to undertake the task of spreading the species by means of the deadly honeymoon flight. In the Oligocene, the existence of sterile 'workers' has been established. With regard to such ancient "archaic" inhabitants of Earth, Man, as such, is a very young newcomer. My graph shows Man at the right-hand end of the time axis, droplet of molten matter started its trajectory around Mother Sun to eventually become the Earth upon which we live. If we could spread the graph in such a way that the time axis would be as long as our distance around the equator of the Earth, then a distance on it of ten kilometers (# miles) would Therefore, only # kilometers, a tiny segment of this circumference, represent the time since a simianlike type of animal learned to walk erectly. In freeing its two front feet from the task of walking, it developed that most agile natural tool, the hand. The span of history from the far-off day of that most ancient primitive root from which the race of modern man has sprung, to the modern day in which we live, is thus seen to cover only a tiny ## of the total history of the planet Earth. And only within the last # years has a more advanced type started to spread over the planet's face... a type for which we have coined the name "Homo Sapiens". These # years correspond, on our expanded graph, to a distance of only # kilometers, out of roughly # for the total history of the planet. On the graph as it is printed, these # years would be represented by a dot less than # #" of an inch in width, which is far too small to be visible to the naked eye. The diameter of the dot for "Man", as years, or one hundred and fifty times the actual life span of the human species on this Earth. Who dares to say that Homo Sapiens will still exist when the steadily creeping time will have covered the full diameter of this little dot on the right-hand comer of the graph? numbers futile! Yet they establish that the time for intelligent life on our own, or other planets is extremely short; so short that any timely coincidence of intelligent life on two or more planets within our small planetary system is highly improbable. By the same logic, it is possible that, at this very time, intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the Universe. To clarify this apparent contradiction, notice that the graph illustrates the results of calculations of the temperature of identical age, as that temperature is influenced by their size only. The two circles illustrate the relative sizes of Earth and Mars which, for rough consideration, have diameters in the ratio of ##. Therefore, by the familiar calculations, Earth possesses # times the surface area of Mars, and # times its volume. These proportions indicate about twice the volume of matter per unit of surface for Earth in comparison to Mars. More exact figures in the graph show that one square mile of Earth surface must radiate the heat stemming from # cubic miles of earthen matter, while one square mile of Martian surface radiates the heat content of only # cubic miles of matter. Neglecting the influence of the different distances of both planets from the Sun, and assuming that heat-capacity, radiancy and nuclear processes are similar in both bodies, the resulting temperatureversus-time curves have been calculated. In the beginning, with both planets at a temperature of around # Fahrenheit, the cooling rate of Earth must have been on the order of #F. per year, and that of Mars about four times as high, #F. per year. Since the possible date for the beginning of protoplasmic life on Earth down to our present day, nearly four billion years have passed, resulting in an average-temperature drop to #F. on Earth, and to #F. for Mars. Even if Martian life succeeded in speeding up its development under the pressure of decreasing temperature and dissipating atmosphere, it must be very much doubted that this rapid development lead to intelligent beings which have managed to survive the enormously long time gap between the age of their first appearance and ours. The statement that Mars is an "old" planet becomes, in the light of these considerations, erroneous. Mars is a planet which is of the same geological age as the Earth, yet which possesses, due to the nature of its geometry, a higher cooling rate. Mars seems to us to be fairly unfavorable to life because of its low mean temperature (-# to-#F.), low density of atmosphere (surface atmospheric pressure on Mars equals that of the Earth at an altitude of eleven miles), rarity of gaseous oxygen (# # content of Mars' atmosphere seems to be # to ## that of Earth), and # m.p.h. sandstorms roaring across its eroded surface. But there is no necessity that a Martian-bom intelligence should feel the same way about his home climate as we do .now, from so far away, and as we still will when human expeditions first set foot on Martian soil. It is quite possible that intelligent beings years of evolution on Mars since the establishment of life on that planet, but that they died out under the pressure of increasingly severe climatological conditions, and have been gone for uncounted ages. The result of these conclusions is that the first expeditions which Man succeeds in throwing out to Mars will not, upon setting foot upon that barren planet, find traces of former civilization. Only after long and very detailed studies, and with equipment which will require several transits between Earth and Mars, might they possibly detect traces of former intelligent life, should such traces have survived accidentally or intentionally some chemical and physical attack by the natural forces of their environment. Not a single human product of today would be able to survive the ravages of such a tremendous length of time, in any form sufficient for some intelligent explorer of the faroff dim future to identify it as an artifact, or relic of our present civilization. The five thousand years since Cheops built his pyramid are not worth mentioning in this context. Even the twenty thousand years since the first crude Neolithic culture represent only ## of that gigantic span by which Martian culture may have preceded us. It would not be too surprising if, after centuries of careful studies on Mars, we may find that, if once there were Martians, they may have chosen to emigrate, rather than to die, to some other part of the Solar System and in doing so by-passed Earth because of her unfavorable climate for the Martian emigrant. The decades to come will increase and refine our knowledge about the climates of the planets in our Solar System. And, since the escape velocity of a space-bound rocket ship is only # m.p.h., or # times that of the two-stage Bumper fired several years ago (V # plus Wac Corporal), mankind will solve the problems of travel through space to the Moon, and then to Mars, within a short time. Yet the minimum energy route of # days for a one-way trip to Mars, or that to Venus, as she circles in her even that to the broiling Sunward face of Mercury, might be called still in the rubber band class, when compared to the task of spanning the tremendous distances between Earth and Jupiter and the other outer planets. Jupiter protects himself by this great distance from us (the one-way trip would require two years and nine months with the same techniques sufficient to cover the Earth-Mars run) and by his formidable gravity, which would necessitate an escape velocity of # m.p.h., or more than five times that necessary to leave Earth. An unmeasurable period of technological development will therefore be necessary -- as well as the development of propulsion methods completely unforeseeable today -- before mankind will find it possible to touch even the inmost of the outer planets, or one of their many satellites. Light covers the distance from the Sun to Jupiter in four minutes and thirty seconds. Yet it must travel # years to reach our nextdoor-neighbor sun within the galaxy. Only if it were possible for Man to span distances of many thousands of light-years in his explorations would a decent statistical chance evolve for him to encounter extraterrestrial intelligent life. This fact must be taken at face value, in spite of the great number of suns, even in our own galaxy, with planets on which intelligent life will have existed and died, may be active now, or will evolve in future. With these conclusions in mind, we can now answer our basic questions. We can predict that within the entire range of Mankind's future existence as a living species of this Earth, any chance for his physical contact with intelligent life outside this Solar planetary system is impossible, even though the chances for the existence of such remote-in-space, but congruent-in-time intelligent life are so high as to be beyond doubt. Whatever chances there are for Man to encounter intelligent life are limited to this planetary system which surrounds our own Sun ; and, for an extremely long period, to the inner planets alone. Unfortunately, the chances for the existence of any intelligent life on the inner planets, within the time-span of Man, would appear to be on the order of nil. But when did Man ever cast the die of his future according to logic. He will go and look.    It was a war of survival. Children against, old men. And not a chance in the world to bridge T H E chasm ing gray with fatigue under the wrinkled brown. He was beginning to get that deadly catching pain in his left chest. But he forced himself to move again, his ragged dusty uniform of the old Home Guard blending into the rubble the way a lizard merges with sand. He hobbled behind a pile of masonry and peered through the crack. He angled his bald head, listening. His hands never really stopped quivering these days and the automatic rifle barrel made a fluttering crackle on the concrete. He lowered the barrel, then wiped his face with a bandanna. He'd thought he heard a creeping rustle over there. But he didn't see any sign of the Children. He'd been picked to reconnoiter because his eyes were only comparatively good. The truth was he couldn't see too well, especially when the sun reflecting on the flat naked angles of the ruined town made his eyes smart and water and now his head was beginning to throb. A dust devil danced away whirling a funnel of dust. Sal Lemmon looked at it, and then he slid from behind the rubble and moved along down the shattered block, keeping to the wall of jagged holes and broken walls that had once been the Main Street of a town. He remembered with a wry expression on his face that he had passed his ninety-fourth birthday eight days back. He had never thought he could be concerned with whether he lived to see his ninety-fifth, because there had always been the feeling that by the time he was ninety-four he would have made his peace with himself and with whatever was outside. He moved warily, like a dusty rabbit, in and out of the ruins, shrinking through the sun's dead noon glare. He stopped, and crouched in the shade behind a pile of slag that had once been the iron statue of some important historical figure. He contacted Captain Murphy on the walkie-talkie. "Don't see any signs of Children." "Max said he saw some around there," Murphy yelled. "Max's getting too old. Guess he's seeing things." "He saw them right around there somewhere." "Haven't seen him either." "We haven't heard another word from Max here, Sal." The old man shrugged. "How could the Children have gotten through our post defenses?" He looked away down the white glare of the street. "You're supposed to be finding out," Murphy yelled. He had a good voice for a man two months short of being a hundred. He liked to show it off. Then Sal thought he saw an odd fluttery movement down the block. "I'll report in a few minutes," he said, and then he edged along next to the angled wall. A disturbed stream of plaster whispered down and ran off his shoulder. Near the comer, he stopped. "Max," he said. He whispered it several times. "Max... that you, Max?" He moved nearer to the blob on the concrete. Heat waves radiated up around it and it seemed to quiver and dance. He dropped the walkie-talkie. There wasn't even enough left of Max to take back in or put under the ground. He heard the metallic clank and the manhole cover moved and then he saw them coming up over the edge. He ran and behind him he could hear their screams and cries and their feet striking hard over the blisters, cracks, and dried out holes in the dead town's skin. He dodged into rubble and fell and got up and kept on running. The pain was like something squeezing in his belly, and he kept on running because he wanted to live and because he had to tell the others that the Children were indeed inside the post defenses. He knew now how they had come in. Through the sewers, under the defenses. He began to feel and hear them crawling, digging, moving all over beneath the ruins, waiting to come out in a filthy screaming stream. Sal was still resting in the comer of the old warehouse by the river. A lantern hung on a beam and the dank floor was covered with deep moving shadows. Captain Murphy was pacing in a circle, looking like something sewn quickly together by a nervous seamstress. Doctor Cartley sat on a canvas chair, elbows on knees, chin in his hands. He kept looking at the floor. He was in his early eighties and sometimes seemed like a young man to Sal. His ideas maybe. He thought differently about the Children and where things were going. "We're going to get out tonight," Captain Murphy said again. "We'll get that barge loaded and we'll get out." Sal sat up. The pills had made his heart settle down a bit, and his hands were comparatively calm. "Is the barge almost loaded now? It better be," Sal said. "They'll attack any minute now. I know that much." "Another hour's all we need. If they attack before then we can hold them off long enough to get that barge into the river. Once we get into the river with it, we'll be safe. We can float her down and into the sea. Somewhere along the coast we'll land and wherever it is will be fine for us. We'll have licked the Children. They know we've found the only eatable food stores in God knows how many thousands of miles in this goddamned wasteland. They can't live another month without this stuff, and we're taking it all down the river. That's right isn't it, Doc?" Cartley looked up. "But as I said before, squeezing a little more life out of ourselves doesn't mean anything to me. What do we want to get away and live a little longer for? It doesn't make sense, except in a ridiculous selfish way. So we live another month, maybe six months, or a year longer? What for?" Sal glanced at Murphy who finally sat down. "We want to live," Murphy said thickly, and he gripped his hands together. "Survival. It's a natural law." "What about the survival of the species?" Cartley asked. "By running out and taking the food, we're think I'll be with you, Murphy." "What are you going to do? Stay here? They'll torture you to death. They'll do to you what they did to Donaldson, and all the others they've caught. You want to stay for that kind of treatment?" "We ought to try. Running off, taking all this food, that means they're sure to die inside a few weeks. They might catch a few rats or birds, but there aren't even enough of those around to sustain life beyond a few days. So we kill the future just so we can go on living for a little longer. We've got no reason to live when we know the race will die. My wife refused to fight them. They killed her, that's true, but I still think she was right. We've got to make one more attempt to establish some kind of truce with the Children. If we had that, then we might be able to start building up some kind of relationship. The only way they can survive, even if they had food, is to absorb our knowledge. You know that. Without our knowledge and experience, they'll die anyway, even if they had a thousand years of food supplies." "It can't be done," Murphy said. Cartley looked at the shadows for a long time. Finally he shook his head. "I don't have any idea how to do it. But we should try. We can't use discipline and power because we're too weak. And too outnumbered. We'd have to do that first in order to teach them, and we can't. So there has to be some other way." "Faith?" Sal said. He shook his head. "They don't believe in anything. You can't make any appeal to them through faith, or ethics, any kind of code of honor, nothing like that. They're worse than animals." Cartley stood up wearily and started to walk away. "They hate us," he said. "That's the one thing we're sure of. We're the means and they're the ends. We made them what they are. They're brutalized and motivated almost completely by hatred. And what's underneath hatred?" He turned back toward Murphy. "Fear." Sal stood up. "I never thought of them as being afraid," he said. "That doesn't matter," Murphy said. "It's the hate and vicious brutality we have to deal with. You do whatever you want to do, Cartley. We've voted, and we've voted to move the stuff out tonight on the barge. The world we helped make is dead, Cartley. The Children grew up in a world we killed. We've all got bad consciences, but we can't do anything about it. The chasm between them and us is too wide. It was wide even before the bombs fell. And the bombs made it a hell of a lot wider. Too wide to put any kind of bridge across now." "Just the same, we ought to die trying," Cartley said. When he went outside, Sal followed him. The barge was about loaded. All outer defense units had been pulled in and were concentrated on the head of the pier behind walls of sandbags. Burp guns and machine guns were ready, and the barge lay along the side of the pier in the moonlight like a dead whale. There were several sewer openings near the head of the pier. Men were stationed around these sewers with automatic rifles, hand grenades and flame throwers. Sal walked to where Cartley stood leaning against the partly closed door of the rotting warehouse. Jagged splinters of steel and wood angled out against the sky. After a while, Sal said softly, "Well, what could we try to do, Doc?" Cartley turned quickly. Some of the anguish in his eyes had gone away, and he gripped Sal's shoulders in hands surprisingly strong for so old a man. "You want to help me try?" "Guess I do. Like you said, we only have a little time left anyway. And if we can't help the Children, what's the good of it?" They stood there in the shadows a while, not saying anything. "This way," Cartley said. He led Sal down away from the pier and along the water's edge. Dry reed rustled, and mud squished under their shoes. "Here," Cartley said. There was a small flat-bottomed rowboat, and in it were several cartons of food supplies, all in cans. There were also several large tins of water. "We'll need a little time," Cartley said. "We'll have to wait. I figure we'll row upstream maybe a few hundred yards, and hole up in one of those caves. We can watch, Sal. We can watch and wait and try to figure it out." "Sure," Sal said. "That seems the only way to start." Cartley sat down on the bank near the boat, and Sal sat down too. "The Children," Cartley said, "never had a chance to be any other way. But we're the oldsters, and we've got this obligation, Sal. Man's a cultural animal. He isn't bom with any inherent concepts of right, or wrong, or good or bad, or even an ability to survive on an animal level. We have to be taught to survive by the elders, Sal. And we're the elders." He hesitated, "We're the only ones left." A flare of horrid light exploded over the warehouse down river and it lit up Cartley's face and turned it a shimmering crimson. His hands widened to perfect roundness and he raised his hands in a voiceless scream to stop the sudden explosions of burp guns, grenades, machine guns, and rifles. Looking down river then, Sal could see the flames eating up through the warehouse. The pier, the barge, everything for a hundred square yards was lit up as bright as day, and the flare spread out over the river and made a black ominous shadow of the opposite bank. "They're getting away," Cartley said. Sal watched the barge move out. The Children came screaming out of the blazing warehouse, overran the pier, streamed into the water. But a steady blast of fire from the barge drove them back, and in a few more minutes the barge dissolved downriver into darkness. Cartley's hands were shaking as he gripped Sal's arm. "Let's go now. We need time. Time may help us a lot, Sal. We can wait and watch. We can figure something out." Sal heard the screams and mocking savage cries coming up over the water, and then the jagged cries of some oldsters who hadn't managed to get away. Still looking downstream toward the blazing pier, Sal pushed Cartley into the rowboat, and they shoved off. Sal started rowing, but he kept looking back. "They should have put them in the same shelters with us," Sal said, "that would have made a difference. But they put us in separate shelters." Only the oldest and the youngest had been saved. The old out of pity and because they were helpless, had been granted the safety of shelters. The young because they were the symbols of hope had been granted shelters, too. "No," Cartley said. "It started long before that. The chasm was building up long before the war. This alienation between the young and the old. Between the sun and ( Continued on page #I ) WMML Hurtling through space to meet the enemy in equipment too delicate to step on, without enough fuel to get back, and knowing you're completely expendable is just for a room, screaming off the metal their flat, metallic clang. Gressey its checkerboard to the floor. Running to the suitlocker, he wondered if the bells had to be loud enough to jar a man's mind. The other on-duty men in the wardroom were running with him, and the corridor outside reverberated to the sound of pounding feet on metal. As his hand automatically manipulated the zippers on his G-suit, he noticed that his heart was beating furiously. At this point, Gressey had never been able to tell whether he was frightened or not. As far as he could know from what his belly told him, there was no physical difference between plain old chicken fear and the body's normal preparation for action. The men pounded 'up' the metal stairs to the Hornet's Nest on the satellite's rim. The Hornet's Nest. Cressey thought suddenly how irrational it was. When a nickname stuck, it carried its aura to everything around it. He didn't know what live-wire journalist had first used the name Hornets for the Primary Interceptor Command, but now, inevitably, the launching racks were Hornet's Nests and the sleek missiles Stingers. He suddenly felt slightly nauseated. He hated this light-headed, slightly sick feeling, listening to the roaring of blood in his head and the thundering of his heart. The medics had told him these physical symptoms were just nature's way of preparing the body for sudden activity. Cressey didn't know. It felt like fear to him, and he was afraid now. and when he reached it the Stingers were just coming up the loading elevators. Long, slim, twentyfoot pencils of death, glistening in the harsh glare of the overheads. They had their own sort of lethal beauty, those Stingers, and a power about them, as if they were quiescently submitting to these puny men for now, for their own mechanical reasons. Each Hornet carried two Stingers, slung beneath the stubby deltawings. The Stingers were twice the length of the Hornet itself, projecting fore and aft of the ship for five feet in either direction. The Hornet looked ungainly, riding atop those slim needles, like some grotesque parasite hitching a ride on two silver arrows. They're -- quite small. Who had said that? Mackley. Captain Mackley, the glib Information Officer who'd told Cressey everything he was allowed to know about Hornets before he saw one. I'll be frank with you, Mr. Cressey. Strategic Command has Hornets listed not as aircraft, but as portable launching racks. Their job is to take Stingers to the Outspace ships. There's a man in them because we can't build a computer as efficient as man at such light weight. And we couldn't afford to if we had the necessary knowledge. Cressey remembered his shock at being told he was a light-weight computer, and some of the bitterness. He watched the loading crew lock the Stingers into position beneath the Hornet's wings and throw the hooked boarding ladder over the edge of the cockpit. Cressey mounted past the red-painted settled himself in the cramped cockpit. As the crew carried the ladder away, he flipped the switch by his left hand and listened to the hum as the canopy rolled forward and locked into place with a metalwearily. His own god-damned life, entrusted to a piece of equipment too delicate to step on. He swung the fish-bowl over his head and locked it into place. He coupled the hose leading from his right hip to a similar hose which disappeared into the floor of the cockpit, and partially inflated his suit. No detectable leaks. If his check crew had done their job, he was ready. Opening the communications channel, he listened to the other 'hot' Hornets checking off. "#." "Ready out." "#." "Ready out." "#." "Ready sir. Out." "#." "My fuel gauge doesn't register, sir." "Scratch #. #." "Ready out," replied Cressey. He wondered what was wrong with #. No fuel? Or gauge just out of whack somehow? The way the Hornets were built, you could never be sure of anything. They were made for one trip, no more. No matter how the intercept worked out, they never went home again. There was not much money wasted in their construction. Mackley had easily justified that, too. Cressey, you must understand one thing . We are desperate . The Out spacers caught us totally unprepared, and some of the measures we must resort to are not what we would normally desire , When the Outspacers came into the system, six years ago, we had only two manned satellites in operation, Within two years this was increased to six, and it was still inadequate, For this reason, another ring of stations was set up, this time one-man Detector Posts . There are twelve of them, two reporting to each Satellite Base . Their of bit is roughly half-way between the orbits of Earth and Mars . T wo concentric circles about the Earth, do you see? When an Outspacer crosses D-line, a signal is flashed to the nearest Satellite Base and the Hornets launched. The point Tm trying to make, Cressey, is this: it took nearly forty years to set up the first manned satellite, and that after all the means were in our hands. Then, in just over two years, we put up four more satellites and twelve D-Posts. We were not geared for that effort. Translated into personal terms, Mackley had meant that the planet could not afford to enclose Cressey in an adequate ship. Too much would be lost if the Outspacer weapons caught it. The loading crew had retreated into the sealed cubicle from which they would watch the launching. The huge, curved walls of the hull began to roll back, and even in the cockpit, Cressey could hear the air roar out into space with a brief explosion of sound. The air hissed out of his cockpit, and his suit inflated full. Still no leak. He felt a momentary panic as the launching rack swung him out, pointed away from the Satellite directly into the emptiness of space. Now he could not see the reassuring bulk of the mother ship. He was alone, with only the incredible myriads of stars before him, and the two needle points of the Stingers projecting full into their mass. The tens of thousands of bright specks that seemed so close gave no comfort. His eyes told him space was full, crammed to bursting with stars, and his mind told him it was as empty as death. Pointed out into loneliness, riding the two graceful arrows, Cressey heard the Communicator rasp, "Gentlemen, you are on an intercept to an Outspace ship. The safety of your world rides with you. Do your job well. ,, The hypocritical son-of-a-bitch, thought Cressey angrily, sitting in his snug control room telling us to do our job! Well, maybe it made an impression on the first-timers, he couldn't remember. This was his third, and he could no longer remember any farther back than when he climbed into the cockpit. It was better not to remember his other missions, much better. The roar seemed to come a split second before the pressure, and then Cressey was slammed into his acceleration cradle by the sudden impact. His body suddenly weighed over a thousand pounds, and his blood sloshed wearily in his veins as a straining heart refused to pump such a load. "Captain Mackley ," said Cressey, "I've heard it said that Earth is the aggressor in this war." "Have you ever seen the London Crater ?" asked the Information Officer . "Pictures, yes, but what I want to know is, who attacked first?" "It doesn't really matter, does it Cressey? There is a war, and we've got to fight it, no matter how it started." "Yes sir ," said Cressey, "but I wanted to know" "All right, I'll tell you then . The Outspacers contacted this system roughly six years ago . The first eighteen months they spent on the outer planets . During the second year they came in as far as Mars, and established a base there. Six months later, one of their ships left on an obvious course toward Earth . It was destroyed by a missile launched from Satellite II." Mackley shrugged. "You know the rest . They retaliated. Satellite II was vaporized ." "But Earth fired first?" "I told you, it doesn't make any difference now. One Outspacer later got through the defense rings, and now there's nothing from London to Cambridge but glass. Whatever the hell they use for weapons, they're effective." "So we don't know whether or not they were originally hostile ." "No, we don't. It had to be assumed they were. We were not in a position to make allowances. You must realize , Cressey, we were dealing with something totally unprecedented, a completely unknown force. Common sense is enough to tell you the Outspacer had to be considered inimical to us, until proven otherwise." "They weren't given much of a chance to prove it." "That may be. The point is irrelevant at the moment. We are committed to a line of action, and we must follow it through. On their part, the Outspacers are doing the same." Cressey was silent for a moment, and Mackley continued in a softer voice . "Look here, son . I don't have to tell you all this . J could just as easily shoot you full of starry eyed patriotism and send you out to save the world from the BugEyed Monsters, but the military isn't doing things that way any more . There is a possibility that we've made a mistake, I'll admit that, but we're stuck with the consequences of the original action . We're defending our planet with everything we've got. The Hornets are the only weapon that has proven even remotely effective." " I'll have to think it over, Captain." "Of course," said Mackley. "It's not an easy decision to make. Come back again, any time you like, and we'll talk it over some more." And Cressey had gone back. abated, and Cressey's face resumed its normal shape. The red haze in front of his eyes cleared, and he could see out through his canopy again. The thick blanket of stars remained motionless, though he knew he was moving with tremendous speed toward the Outspace ship. In front of him behind the instrument panel, he could hear the insect-like buzzing as his course computer was fed information from his Base Satellite. With both the outer D-Post and the Satellite tracking the enemy, fairly precise positioning was possible. Unfortunately, because of the enormous distances involved, not precise enough to pinpoint the Stingers themselves. You had to be closer to do that, and the way to get closer was in a Hornet. For a few minutes now, Cressey had only to watch his own scope for the first pip, and consider his insane position. It was his third mission. Of nearly a thousand Hornetmen, forty-three had more than one mission. If he got out of this one, he had two more before compulsory retirement. He was not sure he could go two more missions, even if he survived physically. Five missions, then retirement. It had looked good to him, a year ago. When he left college for Primary Interceptors, it had seemed the very best kind of an idea. Five missions as a Hometman, then home. Home as a hero, as a king. At twenty-one he would never have to worry about anything again. The pension Mackley had mentioned was so high as to be inconceivable. And that was just from the government. Being a hero had other, less official compensations. A shack in Beverly Hills, worth a hundred thousand or so? Hell, they'd force it on him, just for being a hero. A woman? What woman could resist a five-mission Hornetman? Every daydream he'd ever had, and a hundred he'd not thought of, free for nothing. Or free for running five intercepts. It had looked good to him until his first mission. Then it had suddenly lost its charm. He had learned why, so far, there were no fivemission Hometmen. Abruptly he heard the "ping" telling him his radar was tracking. The Satellite had guided him true enough. He was within the limited range of his own radar. "Radar contact made," he said into the lip mike. "# going on manual control. Out." He clicked the Com switch and settled down to fixing on his target. From the size of the blip on the screen, he could see the Outspace ship was huge, as all of them were. Funny, there had not even been enough contact to know how many different sorts of ship the Alien had. They were not battleships, nor cruisers, nor anything else specific. They were simply Outspace, and he had to seek them out and destroy them. A single ship, as usual. He wondered why they had never sent more than one ship at a time. Perhaps their thinking was so completely foreign it had never occurred to them. No one knew anything about how they thought, except that they retaliated when attacked. Cressey wondered how the conflict looked through Outspacer eyes. Perhaps they were completely bewildered by attack. Perhaps those god-awful disruptor beams were meant for some other, more peaceful purpose, and were being pressed into use as an emergency weapon by "frightened beings. It was even possible the aliens did not know they were under attack by sentient creatures, and wrote off the loss of their ships to natural calamity of some unknown nature. There were a thousand maybes. It useless to speculate in the total absence of data. You couldn't be sure of anything, so you couldn't take any chances. You hadto act as though they were hostile just to be on the safe side. The malignant neurosis of humanity, making it behave as though all things unknown were dangerous. Or perhaps just realistic thinking. You couldn't know, unless you knew all about the universe. Perhaps the idea of conscious animosity was incomprehensible to the Outspacers, but there was no way to tell. He reached between his legs to the cockpit floor and threw the switches there, arming the Stinger warheads. On his first mission he had actually gotten within visual range of the Outspace ship, launching the Stingers at not more than three miles range. The ship had been bulky, almost grotesque by his own standards, covered with lumps and bulges of indeterminate purpose. There had been no lights visible, no ports. Perhaps the Aliens did not see in our spectrum, or perhaps they had radiation screens across the ports, there was no way to tell. Cressey smiled ruefully. This miserable war was turning him into a philosopher. On his second mission he had not seen his target. He had launched at six miles, out of fear, trusting to the followers in the Stingers' noses to track. He did not know what the result had been either time. He had turned and run for home at full acceleration, and he fully intended to do the same on this mission. There was such a thing as pushing your luck too far, and he needed all he had. The pip on his screen drifted to the left, and he gave a short burst to center it He begrudged haittg to use his infinitesimal fuel on tracking when he needed it so desperately to go home. He looked through the canopy, but saw nothing, and returned his eyes to the screen. The telltale pip had drifted slightly to the right. He had overcorrected. Cursing, he fired another burst, shorter this time, with the left bank, and watched the pip center. That was good enough. His ranging said only twelve . miles, his speed two mps, relative to target. One second, two seconds, three -- there it was, occulting a tiny area of star patched sky. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a bright flare as some other Hornet disappeared in the wave of energy released by its molecular disruption. Then another, in another quadrant. The Alien was fighting back. He jabbed violently at the Stinger release, and saw the two pencils roar fiercely out ahead of him on their own power. He cut his flimsy launching rack into as tight a turn as it would take. The familiar red haze clouded his vision, and just before blacking out he fired another last long burst on the rockets to head him toward home. "You understand ," said Mackley , "that the amount of fuel we can pack into a Hornet is severely limited by the size of the craft. There is not enough to perform the complicated braking maneuvers necessary to return to the Satellite . "Therefore, the Hornets make no attempt to return to the Satellite from which they were launched . Instead, they return directly to Etirth. This may sound contradictory, but remember that the planet has a heavy envelope of air, which the Satellite Bases, of course, have not . We use that air to brake the ships, through friction " "But Captain, wouldn't the Hornet burn as soon as it touched atmosphere ?" "Ordinarily, if it plunged directly in, yes. But there are techniques for slowing your flight through friction without heating excessively . Basically, the operation is the same as skipping a flat stone on a lake . The Hornet actually only skims the atmosphere, entering at a very shallow angle. The entire deltawing of the ship is a control surface . That much area, even at such extreme heights, gives a certain amount of control, and the pilot can pull up out of the atmosphere again before heating has become too extreme . He has also been considerably slowed by the same friction which causes the heating. Do you follow me?" "Yes, I suppose so, but it seems pretty tricky ."  "It is tricky, Cressey, and you never want to forget it. It takes a very considerable amount of piloting skill, but it can be done." "Captain, how many Hornets do you lose trying to get in like that?" Mackley hesitated momentarily. "Our losses are right around thirtyseven percent. That's due to enemy fire. It's high, but under the circumstances, it isn't extreme. We're fighting at a disadvantage, and combat is not a gentle affair. Men's lives are lost. That's been true ever since two cave men took after each other with stone axes. It was true with hows and arrows and muzzle loaders. It was true with tanks and machine guns , and it is true now. "It is expected in a combat situation that men will die. One of the aims of military strategy has always been to keep as many of your own men alive as possible . This has not changed either. But combat is, after all, combat; and there are some unavoidable risks" " What's the total loss , Captain? I mean from enemy action and from the hazards of this skip approach you were talking about?" The Information Officer stared at Cressey for what seemed like a long time before he answered. "Our total losses, Mr. Cressey, are roughly ninety-three percent." consciousness, the Earth was of vision. He could not estimate his distance, though he thought he was within the Satellite ring. His speed would plunge him into atmosphere shortly, too shortly. Within seconds he began to feel the warmth as he entered the region where a few air molecules began to brush over the surfaces of his ship. He rotated the delta-wings full, but there was no response. He was not yet deep enough into the sea of air for the control surfaces to react. He watched the tips of the wings, so ridiculously close to him, though he knew he would not be able to see anything. Soon he begap to feel a gentle bucking motion as the wings met resistance. He flattened them out, horizontal, and began to draw them up again slowly, so they would move the tiny ship upward instead of simply tearing off at the roots. The heat was already uncomfortable, and he was slowing. Now he was pressed forward against the seat belt as deceleration increased. The control surfaces bit into the thin air more solidly now, and Cressey thought the nose had come up a bit, but it was so slight he couldn't be sure. The bucking motion was more pronounced, but there was nothing he could do about that. Slowly, slowly. The wings had to tilt so very slowly, or they would be ripped from the pod-like hull, leaving it to plummet into thick air and glow briefly like a cigarette in the dark before it plunged down to earth. His face was wet behind the fishbowl, but he could not reach it to wipe the sweat away. Nor could he have taken his hands away from the controls in any case. The nose had come up, he was certain of that now. He was definitely rising, but the heat was becoming unbearable. Imperceptibly, a thin shrieking had arisen in the cabin, almost out of sonic range, just enough to make a man's nerves feel as if they had been dragged across a rough file. The heat transmitted through the body of the pod and into the bucket was beginning to bum his legs. He was being held out of the seat itself by the force of his deceleration, but the backs of his calves still touched metal. He thought he could smell the fabric of his suit burning, but realized it was probably his overwrought imagination. His cheeks felt too large, puffed out, as though strong, implacable hands were pulling all his loose flesh forward. His eyes strained forward, threatening to come out of their sockets. The red haze began, and he had a sudden frightening thought that he might lose consciousness before the Hornet had well begun its rise out of atmosphere. The red darkened into black. He regained consciousness. The first skip had been made. The ship began to settle back into atmosphere again, and now its speed was lower. With each pass the heat would become more intense, as the plane would not have a chance to cool completely before it began to heat again. He had to maintain a delicate balance between going deep enough to slow him, but not so deep he couldn't bring the ship up before it burned, cherry-red. His body was drenched as by a shower, and the inner lining of his suit felt soggy from sweat. The second skip was worse than the first, and he lost consciousness almost too soon. The third was worse than the second. After the fourth, he could not lift high enough to clear atmosphere. He had gone too deep, and was now bound by the great mass of Earth below. He was still at a shallow angle, relative to the ground. He estimated he would make at least one complete orbit, perhaps two, before his spiralling trajectory brought him to the contact point on the surface. If he were still conscious, he would leave the aircraft at # feet, and hope. He knew his speed was still too high, well over Mach #, higher than it had been on either of his other approaches The ship was threatening to tear apart under the furious pounding it was taking from air and shock waves. Hobson's choice. Bail out high, and suffocate because the automatic chute release would not allow him to make a delayed opening. Bail out low, and the thick air would pound his body to a pulp, and below the steel webbed chute would hang nothing but a suit, full of a still, red messiness. The timing had to be precision itself, but it had to be done by guesswork. There was no training that could prepare a man for this. It was all new. He uncoupled the air hose leading to his suit, and placed his hand on the ejector lever. He knew he was too high, but the wings showed quivering signs of buckling under the strain. He pulled the lever, releasing the canopy and arming the seat cartridge. The canopy disappeared miraculously from over his head. He was deafened by the thunderous roar of air that entered the cramped cockpit, like an explosion peak that remained constant, not diminishing. Instinctively, he ducked his head, recoiling at the sound. He did not remember triggering the seat ejector. Cressey fell. The seat dropped away from him, the incredibly strong parachute opened, all automatically. He fell forty-five thousand feet into the Pacific Ocean, (Continued on page #) You don't like Darwin's theory of Evolution? Maybe you're right. Maybe Man's ancestors weren't monkeys after all... H OW DO you get rid of a superman? The method Masefield Truggles used was the tried-and-true Masefield Truggles method. Of course, he didn't know at the beginning that Blan Forsythe was a superman. But Forsythe had lived in Marston Hill most of his life -- born there, in fact -- while Truggles had been there only two years. So Truggles gave the case the full treatment with flourishes, including a careIllustrated by Paul Orban ful reconnaissance to determine vulnerable spots in Forsythe's reputation. Truggles determined that reform or removal of Forsythe would be his contribution to the moral welfare of Marston Hill as soon as he heard the rumors, some joking, some serious, about Forsythe's polygamous tendencies. This was a ready-made situation for Truggles. Truggles began his research with Forsythe's ex-wife, Phyllis Allison. He had learned from experience that an ex-wife usually is a good source of information about vulnerable spots. She served him tea in the parlor of her modest home. After a routine round of chit-chat designed to put her at ease, Truggies approached the point. "As you may know, Mrs. Allison, I am president of our Social Standards Protective League," he said, fixing his deep blue eyes on her face. "I've heard of it, Mr. Truggies," she said in a low voice. "My duties at home keep me too busy to belong to any organizations, though." As if to emphasize her point, she put her arm around the shoulders of her young son. The boy sat quietly beside her, watching Truggies like a young animal. Truggies figured he must be about five years old -- certainly he would be below school age, for school was in session -- but he was big for his age. There was something disturbing about his intent gaze. "I'm not here in the interest of your joining the League, Mrs. Allison, though we'd be glad to have you," said Truggies. "I came to ask you for some confidential information about the shameful way your former husband mistreated you." Her eyes opened wide. "Why, Blan never mistreated me!" she exclaimed. "Whoever told you such a thing? I loved Blan, and he loved me. I still love him." "If he loved you, why did he leave you?" demanded Truggies triumphantly. "I think you're asking questions about something that isn't any of your business, Mr. Truggies," said Phyllis Allison, her eyes flashing ominously. "Blan Forsythe is... different. We agreed to separate because it appeared I could give him no children. We were wrong, but it was too late, then." "So he turned to polygamy through a mad desire to produce children," murmured Truggies happily. "You say you were wrong? I thought the boy was your only child." "Donald is my only child, but he is Blan's child," said Phyllis, patting the boy on the shoulder. Truggies raised bushy eyebrows. "Wasn't it seven years ago you and Mr. Forsythe were divorced?" he asked pointedly. "Yes, and Donald is only five," she answered defiantly. "My husband -- Dr. Allison -- tells me I'm foolish to have the feeling I do that Donald is Blan's son. He says it's impossible. But I know it's true. I've been working with Donnie, and, Mr. Truggies..." She leaned forward intently and fixed her gaze gravely on Truggies' face. "... Donnie has the Power!" she said in a tense whisper. Truggies blinked. Phyllis Allison sat back and looked embarrassed, as though she had not intended to confide so much. Truggies asked no more questions. He did not pursue the line of inquiry this revelation at once brought to mind. He took his leave as graciously as possible and left the house. He knew that both Phyllis Allison and her son watched him as he walked out the door with shoulders bent in a show of humility. But it wks the boy's eyes he felt. Phyllis Allison. The fresh memory of her slender beauty, her wide, honest eyes, struck pain in Truggles' heart. They were rare -- but why did he seem to run across them so often? -- these women who reminded him of her. His lost love, his long-lost love, the smiling fairy with the dancing heart, without whom life never had been quite complete again. The woman really believed the boy was Blan Forsythe's child. It was pathetic. And that reference to Donald's having "the power:" Truggles wondered how many women he had known who thought their sons were "different," who even convinced themselves that the children had been sired by a dream prince or such like. Deluded souls, to so excuse their sins! He straightened and ran his fingers through his short-clipped gray hair as he strode along the walk. The extensive lawn of Blan Forsythe's mansion stretched only two doors away from the bungalow he had just left. It was decked with flower beds and evergreens. Truggles was too circumspect to do anything openly at this stage. But he shook a fist at the stone pile, mentally. Behind him, Truggles had a record of nothing but successes. There had been the alcoholic in Han town, the Negro fortuneteller in New Bacon, the member of some queer religious sect in Steckleville. Truggles had set his face against them. He had shown the people of these towns what manner of creatures they harbored in their bosoms. They had been driven out (it was unfortunate, in a way, that the alcoholic had been hit by a brick and killed in the confusion of public reaction, but such accidents happen) ; and eventually Truggles himself, purring inwardly at the consciousness of a job well done, had moved on to fields of further effort. Blan Forsythe was not big enough to escape his righteousness. If the mayor of Marston Hill would cooperate, it would save Masefield Truggles a lot of work and possibly some unpleasantness for everyone. Sometimes mayors did cooperate, especially when elections weren't far off. Truggles was not offended that Mayor Ben Sands received him in the garden of his home on the edge of town. He had known many fine gentlemen with dirt on their hands who abhorred dirt in the mind. "I haven't seen Blan much lately, but he used to spend a lot of time out here," said Sands, taking his battered pipe from his mouth to speak. "He was interested in the flowers. Those asters, now. They're tetraploid. He developed 'em. Used colchicine." He looked at Truggles inquiringly, to see if he understood. Truggles allowed a smile to quirk his lips and shook his head slightly. "Extract from the autumn crocus," said Sands. "Makes plants tend to double their chromosomes." Around them, the garden was a solid blaze of color. Zinnias, marigolds, phlox cast their colorful bounty to the air. "I'm afraid I'm not much of a horticulturist," apologized Truggles. "Well, it's like this," said Sands. "Every cell of every plant of the same species has the same number of chromosomes -- you know, those bright little threads that hold the guiding genes of growth and development. Mutations in plants come when there are changes in individual genes from time to time. But when you hit them with colchicine, the chromosomes sometimes double without the cell dividing. Creates a new species, usually bigger, stronger, slower growing. Call them tetraploids. I've heard it called 'cataclysmic evolution.' " "You mean man tampers with the basic laws of nature?" asked Truggles, awed and disturbed. "I reckon you could call it that. Lots of plants have been treated that way -- tomatoes, snapdragons, alyssum. Of course, it happens naturally, too. Wheat developed from the crossing of an inferior early species, eink'om, with a wild grass. Einkorn and the grass had seven chromosomes each, but in crossing the chromosomes were doubled. The result was Persian wheat, a superior variety with # chromosomes." Sands took the pipe from his mouth and knocked the ashes out against the sole of his shoe. Pulling a sack of tobacco thoughtfully from his hip pocket, he began to refill it. "Blan had a theory," he said, "that doubling of chromosomes in animals in the past could have given rise to new species and explain a lot of gaps in evolution. Man has # chromosomes in every cell, and Blan pointed out to me that # is double #, which is double #, which is double six, which is double three. He thought that was too much of a coincidence. I reckon I do, too." He paused and struck a wooden match, holding it against the bowl of his pipe and sucking noisily. "I don't hold with the evolutionary theory," said Truggles stiffly. "What I really wanted to ask you, Mayor Sands, was whether you are aware that Blan Forsythe is practicing polygamy, right here in Marston Hill?" "You've been listening to those old hens gossip," accused Sands. "Look, I knew Blan right well when he was married to Phyllis Allison. Phyllis is my niece and I was sorry to see them break up, but the young people have to live their own lives. Blan has some ideas us old stick-in-the-muds might not understand, Mr. Truggles, but he's all right." "A dozen women live with him in that big house of his," insisted Truggles. "I've found out there's a turnover, too. When one moves out, another moves in." "I don't poke my nose into other people's business," said Sands bluntly. "But Dr. Allison tells me Blan maintains a staff, and it's convenient for them to live in that big house. He's doing biological research, along the lines I just explained." "Biological research, I have no doubt," said Truggles, assuming his best organ-like tone. He fixed his blue eyes on Sands, but Sands' eyes were just as blue. They showed a gleam of anger. "You refuse to take any action against this abomination, then, Mayor?" "I refuse to believe idle rumors," said Sands firmly. "And before you attempt to stir things up around here with your Social Standards Protective League, Mr. Truggles, I would recommend that you make some effort to secure accurate information. Dr. Allison is Blan's research assistant, and he can tell you much more of Blan's current experiments than I can." Truggles bowed slightly and turned away. The sharp scent of the marigolds tickled his nostrils, making him want to sneeze. "Dr. Allison," said Sands behind him, raising his voice slightly as Truggles walked away, "may even consent to tell you why Blan Forsythe's face is liver-colored. From what I hear of you, Mr. Truggles, that probably is your principal complaint against him." Truggles straightened as though stabbed between the shoulder blades. He quickened his pace. That had been a telling blow. Could Sands know? No, it was impossible. The recurring waves of time and travel had long since obliterated Truggles' distant past. The Brazilian was a secret demon in his own heart, his private, bitter hatred, the swarthy ogre who had crushed the flower of his life and whose face arose to torment him only in times of bitterness. Sands was an idiot. All of these people in Marston Hill were idiots, letting a man like Forsythe fool them, liking him, looking up to him. They were empty shells, people, to be possessed alike by the strong, whether angel or demon. He, Truggles, would pit his strength against Forsythe. As for Sands... Old fool! Entrenched politician! Truggles had dealt with such civic laxity before. Direct action would be necessary. on the grass the evening Masefield Truggles went again to the Allison home. Dr. Alex Allison, a chubby man with rimless spectacles, admitted him. Truggles caught a glimpse of Phyllis Allison and the boy, Donald, in the kitchen as Allison led him through the dining room. They mounted a short flight of stairs to Allison's study. Allison offered him wine and a cigar. Truggles refused. Allison placed the wine decanter back on the shelf unopened, but lit a cigar and settled back comfortably in his chair. "Well, Mr. Truggles?" he asked briskly, with the air of a man who had no time to waste. Truggles looked him over, assessing him, and decided on the direct attack. "I wonder if you are aware, Dr. Allison," he said softly, "that your employer is breaking up your home?" He waited for the reaction. There was none. Allison puffed calmly on his cigar and waited. The light glinted from his spectacles as he kept his eyes fixed steadily on Truggles' face. "Dr. Allison, your wife confessed to me that she still loves her former husband, Blan Forsythe," said Truggles, emphasizing every word. "I was aware of that," said Allison unconcernedly. "Most women who know Blan are desperately in love with him. Is that all you came to see me about?" He half rose from his chair. Truggles made a hurried gesture of protest. He realized he had tried to move too fast. "No, no," said Truggles hastily. "Forgive me, Dr. Allison, but I was agitated over the situation. What I really came here for was to ask you to give me some information about Mr. Forsythe." "Why?" asked Allison. The flat question caught Truggles unprepared. He was aware that his mouth hung open foolishly as he tried desperately to frame an answer that would not be too revealing. "Why -- I was trying to lay to rest some rumors," he stammered at last. "Mayor Sands said you might tell me something about Mr. Forsythe." Allison was silent for a long minute. He took the cigar from his mouth, knocked half an inch of ash into an ashtray and resumed his puffing. "Mr. Truggles, how much do you know about mice?" Allison asked. Truggles stared at him, unable to answer. This interview was beginning to take on a nightmarish aspect. "What do you consider to be the principal difference between mice and men, Mr. Truggles?" pursued Allison. "Really, Dr. Allison, I don't see -- I don't know what point you're trying to make, but a mouse is an animal and a man is -- well, a man." "Nothing else?" "Well, a man is bigger than a mouse." He began to feel familiar ground under his feet. "A man is bigger more ways than physically. He is bigger spiritually, emotionally. He thinks. He has a -- " "Ben Sands told me about his talk with you. So you don't believe in evolution? You don't believe the ancestors of men and monkeys came from a common stock?" "I do not, sir. It is inconceivable..." "How would mice strike you, then? Would you rather believe that men descended from mice than monkeys?" Again the bewildered Truggles found himself physically incapable of answering. "I have done a great deal of research, with the kind assistance of Blan Forsythe," said Allison precisely. "Blan is my friend. He has been my associate, even my experimental animal. I am preparing a paper on what I consider a revolutionary contribution to the theory of evolution -- that men are related directly to the genus rodentia, and only more distantly so to the primates. "Blan Forsythe is the real originator of this theory, as a result of his very personal interest in sudden evolutionary changes through doubling of chromosomes. It is reasonable to suppose that the ancestor of man himself, with all of his survival advantages, arose through such a process. Man has # chromosomes. Now, Mr. Truggles, what sort of animal would you guess has half that number -- # chromosomes?" "Mice?" hazarded Truggles thinly"Precisely. Mice. The common house mouse. There is also a variety of squirrel that carries # chromosomes. The peromyscus and apode mus families of mice -- and some other animals, including the rhesus monkey -- have # -- cousins whose chromosome doubling eons ago started them up different paths from ours. Mr. Truggles, the ancestor of man was a rodent whose doubled chromosomes gave him new attributes that worked to his evolutionary advantage." "Is that what is called a mutation?" asked Truggles, interested in spite of himself. "Mutation? A mutation is a change in one gene. Men mutate would take simple mutations to build a man from a rodent -- or a lemur, either, for that matter?" "Well, really, Dr. Allison, I believe you misunderstand what I asked you. Your theory is fine, I'm sure, among scientists, but I'm interested in information about Blan Forsythe." "That's what I've given you. Blan Forsythe is a tetraploid man. His cells carry # chromosomes instead of the normal #. Every cell of his body is doubled." "Is that why his skin is livercolored?" asked Truggles, remembering what Sands had said. Allison smiled. "Coincidence," he said. "It's true that liver cells have doubled chromosomes, but that isn't the reason for the color." "What does all this mean, then?" asked Truggles. Allison laid his half-smoked cigar carefully on the edge of the ashtray and gazed at Truggles through his spectacles. "Blan Forsythe is a new species," he said slowly. "He is not man. Everyone has theorized that a superman might arise from a mutation, perhaps caused by radiation. My God, a hundred mutations of individual genes wouldn't make a superman overnight! But Blan Forsythe is one -- a tetraploid man -- a superman." "And what is a superman, Dr. Allison?" asked Truggles drily, thinking of Nietzsche and the Sunday comic strips. "Who knows? How can you and I comprehend the novel qualities, the undreamed-of abilities of such a creature? Do you think a mouse could understand a man's ability to reason, to talk, to build machines? Blan may not realize them himself. After all, he was reared in a human society, and no doubt the tetraploid rodent which is our ancestor seemed little different from his associates. There are two things I'm sure of: the differences are there, and they are qualities you and I could never point to and say, 'This is an ability of the superman. Truggles' mouth twisted in a crooked smile. Allison had allowed his enthusiasm to draw him out. Allison was vulnerable now. "And because this man -- this creature -- is different, you allow him to cuckold you?" he demanded in a low, ugly voice. Allison was not vulnerable. "Don't let Phyllis mislead you," he said quietly. "She thinks Donald is Blan's child because she always yearned to give Blan the child he wanted. Donald was bom two years after they were divorced." "She seems very sure," insinuated Truggles. "It is possible for a tetraploid to be fertile in a mating with a normal diploid," said Allison. "Persian wheat, with # chromosomes, crossed with a grass which has seven chromosomes, to produce common wheat. That was Blan's hope while he and Phyllis were married, and it's still his hope with the others. I was his doctor and associate then, as I am now. Neither Phyllis nor Donald has more than the normal number of chromosomes, and Blan has not seen Phyllis since they were divorced." "What, then, Dr. Allison, is this 'Power' that your wife says the boy has?" Allison's face froze. "That is a family matter, Mr. Truggles," he said icily. "I do not discuss my son's characteristics with strangers. Good night, sir." Truggles saw Phyllis Allison as he left the house. Dr. Allison remained in his study when Truggles left, and Phyllis stepped from the darkened doorway of the dining room as Truggles opened the front door. "Mr. Truggles," she said, placing her hand on his arm, "I don't know what your object is, but don't make any trouble for Blan Forsythe." "My poor child, I am not trying to make trouble for him," said Truggles sadly. "I hope only to convince him that his unfortunate differences do not privilege him to flout the sound social customs of other men. If there is any trouble, it will be made by the man himself." "You'll see him, then?" "Certainly, I intend to try to convince him personally that what he is doing is wrong." She sighed. "I wish I could see him again," she murmured. For this unhappy woman's sake if for no other reason, it would certainly be the thing to do to talk to Forsythe himself, Truggles thought as he left the house. The anticipation had a certain zest to it. Besides, Truggles believed in being fair. He always liked to give a man a chance to reform voluntarily, to bow to his righteous persuasion. As for Allison, Truggles detested a man like that. The "scientific" mind, always so sure of its own theories. Such men could not see beyond the material, into the living realm of possession and power, the struggle between good and evil. This theory that Forsythe was a superior creature... Truggles shivered with resentment. Man was the apex, the conqueror -- the conqueror through his service to the good way, the right way, through his militant demand that things be good and right. A superior being. Truggles trembled again, this time overwhelmed by a feeling he hated, the feeling of inferiority. It swept over him from long, long ago, that bitter night when he had stood in tears before the Brazilian, when he had implored on his knees the only woman he had ever loved. Something small and dark scurried across the walk in front of him. Mice, he thought. The idea that man descended from a mouse was even more repellant than that man descended from monkey. But, if evolution had any basis in fact, mice might have certain claims. They lived in human habitations, they ate human foods. Their psychology was studied in mazes, and their physical makeup made them good subjects for experimentation in human diseases. Mice. Truggles shrugged and walked on. M asefield truggles had seen Blan Forsythe at a distance, walking along the streets of Marston Hill, but Forsythe's appearance at close range was a severe shock. The tetraploid man's skin was, as Sands and Allison had described it, the deep red color and texture of liver. His hair was short, molegray fur over the top of his head, and his eyes were a jade green that glowed with inner fires. Truggles was a tall man, but Forsythe stood a head taller and was massively built. Forsythe's rugged features were not repulsive, when one became accustomed to their hue. Still, Truggles could not understand how a woman could be attracted to him. But the adoration that shone from the eyes of the pretty secretary who escorted him into Forsythe's office was unmistakable. It was a spacious office, on the second floor of the mansion Truggles had passed so often. Why a man needed a business office to conduct private biological research was something Truggles could not understand, but this one would have fitted very well in a metropolitan skyscraper. The weight of the pistol in its shoulder holster was comforting to Truggles. Others might not believe Forsythe dangerous. He did. He was protected. "I understand you are determined to run me out of town, Mr. Truggles," said Forsythe pleasantly, leaning back in his swivel chair and putting his fingertips together. With his back to the window, his face was in slight shadow and he looked like a well-tanned business executive. "You either have a well-organized spy network or some of the strange powers your associates attribute to you, Mr. Forsythe," replied Truggles easily. It would have been easier to deal with a man who did not exhibit such self-confidence, who was a little worried and nervous, but everyone seemed to be conspiring to make this project difficult for Truggles. Forsythe smiled, and his teeth were white as shining ivory in his dark face. "My extraordinary powers don't lie along those lines, " he said. "I'd be obliged to someone who could tell me along what lines they do lie. I've had flashes of them from time to time, but I'm afraid they couldn't be explained to you." "I don't want to see you run out of town, Mr. Forsythe," said Truggles. "I came here in the hope of offering you friendship and help. The people of Marston Hill are disturbed -- I might say, aroused -- at your insistence on polygamous practices. I hope to persuade you to abandon such unsocial behavior, so I may have some background for reasoning with them in your behalf." Truggles expected the usual retort -- that the people of . the town had minded their own business (i.e., been blind to what was going on) until Truggles came to town. Instead, Forsythe said: "I have conformed to human social standards. My formal religious affiliation is Mohammedan." Truggles quivered with shock. "Mohammedan!" he exclaimed, possibly more outraged by that than by his original suspicion of polygamy. "The Koran allows us four wives, Mr. Truggles. The rest must be concubines." "You admit it! You admit that your so-called research is only a blind for a den of iniquity!" . Forsythe rose, and stepped from behind his desk. Suddenly alarmed, Truggles cringed. Forsythe was a very big man. Truggles' fingers strayed toward the shoulder holster. But Forsythe smiled "The research is genuine," he said. "Come with me, Mr. Truggles. I'd like for you to meet several of my wives. You may ask them questions if you wish." He took the nervous Truggles firmly by the arm, lifted him almost bodily from his chair and escorted him into the anteroom. The pretty secretary looked up from her desk. "Mr. Truggles, this is Trella, my youngest wife," said Forsythe. "Fortunately, she has had secretarial training, so she fits well in this office." The young woman smiled at Truggles, without embarrassment. He was not so fortunate. He dropped his eyes, the deep blue eyes that had so often been the nemesis of evil-doers. "You said I might question the -- the young lady?" he murmured. Forsythe laughed. "I'll leave so you may feel more free," he said, and went back into his office. Truggles looked upon Trella Forsythe with more self-assurance. She was a pert, brown-eyed blonde, in her early twenties. Remembering Phyllis Allison, Truggles could not but admire Forsythe's appreciation of beauty. "How long have you been married to Mr. Forsythe, Mrs. -- uh, Miss Trella?" he asked. "Only about six months," she answered. "I hope I'll prove satisfactory." "Satisfactory?" "I don't want to have to leave Blan after two years," she said. "I love him." "My dear child, how can you love a man who has a dozen other wives? How can you lower yourself to be part of such a scheme ?" "Why is it that some men never understand women?" she countered, a little angrily. "A woman may be jealous of her man's other loves, but if he's a real man the thing that matters is that he loves her . I get along fine with Blan's other wives. We have something in common -- we all love him." Truggles resisted a strong temptation to attempt to convert her to sanity on the spot. His powers of convincing women were potent ones, as experience had proved. But, in this case, the root of the evil was Forsythe himself and there was no point in wasting any time on the wives. Truggles had expected Forsythe to conduct him on a tour of what he already had labeled, in his mind, "the harem." But Forsythe remained closeted in his office, and it was Trella who escorted Truggles through a portion of the building. They met three other women, busy at various tasks, all of them young and attractive. Truggles questioned them briefly. He found substantially the same reaction he had received from Trella. When they had mounted the wide stairs again, on their way back to the office, Truggles was introduced to another wife, Lois. The door of a room stood ajar as they came to it, and he happened to see her sitting inside, weeping. He thought Trella appeared reluctant when he stopped and pushed open the door, but she did not protest. "Why are you weeping, my child?" asked Truggles, after he had talked with her for a moment "I must leave," she explained, "I've been married to Blan twc years tomorrow, and I haven't given him a child." "That's the most inhuman thing I ever heard of!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean to say he gives you this little time of happiness, and then if you don't produce progeny for him he casts you off like an old shoe?" "It's Dr. Allison's advice to him," said Lois. "Dr. Allison thinks it would be bad for him to have too many wives around at one time, and he considers two years long enough to prove certainly whether a woman can be fertile with Blan. I'm not the first. I won't be the last. But it's hard to have to go away and never see him again." These women he had seen today, these wives of Forsythe: they aroused no bitter feelings in Truggles. He felt clean and strong talking to them. They were like the many women to whom he had held out sympathy and understanding over the years, who had been stubborn and wilful at first, only to melt at last and see the truth. If only he could get them from Forsythe's influence, he thought he could save these women. Truggles turned to Trella. "Do you see what's in store for you, young woman?" he demanded. "Do you still think it's worth ruining your life to live here in sin with . this man?" "I may be different," she answered calmly. "And if Tm not, tell me, Mr. Truggles: does a mouse have the right to question the motives of a man?" Truggles went back into Forsythe's office. The tetraploid man had swung his chair away from his desk and was staring moodily out the big window. He inclined his head at Truggles' entrance, but did not speak. "Forsythe, this has been the most amazing, the most revolting, revelation I have ever experienced," opened Truggles. His indignation fueled his courage now, and his voice held the commanding resonance of a pipe organ. "You claim to be superhuman. I say you are inhuman, to force these poor young women to live in servitude, sharing you with each other, and then to discard them with brutal unconcern when you find they cannot fulfill your insane dream of foisting others of your kind on the earth!" "They love me and I have a great affection for all of them," said Forsythe, not turning. "I provide for them when they leave me. Because the great experience of love cannot last a lifetime, should it be denied altogether?" The ancient bitterness swept over Truggles in a consuming wave. Yes, yes, cried his soul, far better never to have loved, never to have known the meaning of love, than to have it snatched from the grasp in full flower! Forsythe was a monster. How could he know? Did the superman have telepathic powers? Or was it again chance, this dropping of a remark that burned deep into his writhing memories? Forsythe's face was turned from him. One shot and this incredible thing, this liver-hued monstrosity that sat before him would be removed from the face of the earth. Truggles put his hand inside his coat. The butt of the pistol was cool under his fingers. No. A murderer in prison has no influence. He cannot battle evil, recruiting to his shining leadership an army of righteous people. Truggles dropped his hand to his lap and said calmly: "You speak as though they could love no one else. Is polygamy, then, to be a characteristic of the longheralded superman?" "Polygamy and monogamy, as such, have no moral values, for man or superman," replied Forsythe, speaking to the window. "Polygamy was a part of man's social scheme for centuries. Monogamy has been replacing it as a more desirable scheme; but to attribute moral values to it is propaganda. I challenge you to find an edict against polygamy in the basic writings of any religion -- Christianity, Judaism, any of them. Remember Solomon? Monogamy has the advantage of closer companionship between man and woman, and for that reason I would prefer it." A great thrill shot through Truggles' breast at these words. Was it possible that Forsythe had weakened? Was it possible that he could lead this strange man back to the path of truth? "Why not give it up, Forsythe?" he asked in a low, compelling voice. "Why not eschew your dream of a new race and leave such things to higher powers? Send these poor women back to their homes and turn back to your one true, legal wife, Phyllis, and your son." Forsythe swung to face him. The green eyes were deep and haunted. "Don't you think that's what I would prefer, above all else?" he asked in a low voice. "Perhaps you didn't know it, but I married Phyllis before I knew I was -- different; other than my appearance, I mean. The genuine love of a man for a woman does not die. Do you think even a superman -- it's your term, Truggles, not mine -- enjoys loneliness? The worship of other women, my affection for them as human beings, can't fill the gap left by the loss of someone who shared complete understanding with me." He laughed shortly. "Besides," he added, "you're trying to talk me into committing an immoral act, Truggles. You forget that Phyllis is Dr. Allison's wife now, and Donald is Dr. Allison's son. Truggles brushed that aside. "That's no excuse for what you're doing," he said. "One of the major duties of any individual, of whatever species, is to reproduce his kind, if he can," answered Forsythe soberly. "In the human community, safe as a race through its very numbers, that has been lost sight of and overlaid with social responsibilities. I'm different. I can't ignore it. "How was the misconception ever begotten that a superman -- again, it's your term, not mine -- would merely mate with the daughters of men and, lo! a new race? The superman is a new sDecies. Species do not interbreed fertilely very often, even when closely related. "Dr. Allison found I was tetraploid, while Phyllis and I were still married. He and I have been searching for a tetraploid woman, without success. Meanwhile, I try and still hope for fertile matings with a normal diploid woman, for the tetraploid has been fertile with the diploid sometimes in plants. "No, Donald can't be my son, whatever Phyllis says. There's more involved than the time of his birth -- two years after our divorce. Dr. Allison has tested him, and Donald has the normal # chromosomes." "Can't you accept the verdict of nature, Forsythe?" demanded Truggles. "If you were born a eunuch, you could never reproduce." "While there's hope, I have the responsibility," said Forsythe slowly. "If the stream of life is to progress, something greater than man must arise from him. I know, Truggles -- I know -- I am that superior thing. And I think back in history to the geniuses, the superior men, who died without progeny and I wonder how many of them were tetraploid, as I am, but could not pass on their new abilities to the world." Truggles shook his head angrily and arose. "You can't succeed by flouting the social conventions man has built up," he said stiffly. "I'm afraid you'll find that out to your sorrow, Forsythe." His mind caressed the gun inside his coat pocket. Such a direct solution appealed to him. But he resisted it. There was a better, safer way. He turned his back on Forsythe and left. As he walked past the Allison home, and covered half a block toward town, seething inwardly at Forsythe's stubbornness; a woman arose from a sidewalk bench to accost him. It was Lois, Forsythe's dark-haired wife to whom he had talked while she wept half an hour earlier. "Why, Mrs. For -- Miss Lois!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here? Did you escape?" "Escape?" she repeated. Her eyes were shadowed from weeping. "Blan doesn't keep us prisoners. We come and go as we please. It's just that most of us prefer not to go out into town." "I can understand that," he said drily. "Can I help you, Miss Lois?" "Perhaps I can help myself, by helping you. Mr. Truggles, aren't you trying to stop Blan from keeping more than one wife?" "I am, indeed. I expect to seek an indictment against him on bigamy charges." "You won't succeed. He'll just sue you for false arrest, and ruin you. You don't think Blan would overlook something like that, do you? None of the girls would admit they lived with him as his wives. I wouldn't either, if it would hurt Blan." Truggles was taken aback. After a moment, he asked: "What did you have in mind?" "Nothing. But I thought if I could help you persuade him -- as the wife who's been with him longest, I'd be the one to stay, wouldn't I?" Thinking of an unknown number of others who might have been sent away previously, Truggles was inclined to doubt it. But he would not let such an opinion interfere with this opportunity. "Probably," he said. "Will you help me if I promise to take no legal action against Forsythe?" "What do you want me to do?" she asked. "You say you're free to come and go as you please?" "Yes." "I just want you to tell the truth about what he's doing, as I've learned it, at a few meetings of good, sympathetic citizens during the next few weeks." "I'll do it if you're sure it won't hurt Blan in any way," she said. "I'm positive it won't," Truggles lied. tective League was a small organization, composed largely of elderly women and a few men. Masefield Truggles had never meant for it to serve as anything more than a nucleus. Before he lit the flame, he spent a week building up his tinder pile. He announced, by word of mouth and through the columns of The Clarion , Marston Hill's small daily newspaper, that the Social Standards Protective League would hold a series of special meetings every afternoon for a week. The public would be welcome, he said, and there would be startling revelations of vice conditions in Marston Hill. Truggles rented the city's ancient, rickety auditorium for the meetings, and invited Mayor Ben Sands to speak at the first one. Lois Forsythe sat on the platform that first afternoon, but Truggles did not call on her. Sands made a routine talk, the kind any mayor of a small town might, on the conscientiousness of Marston Hill's three-man police force, the lack of crime in the town, the recreational facilities and educational methods being utilized to see that the young people did not stray on the wrong path. He received polite applause. When he had finished, Truggles arose and said: "Sometimes after talks of this kind, we throw our meetings open to questions from the audience. Instead, I would like to ask Mayor Sands one question. Does he recall that I complained to him not long ago about the activities of Blan Forsythe, and what the tenor of the conversation was?" "Why, yes," answered Sands, surprised. "You accused Blan of practicing polygamy. I told you that you'd been listening to too much gossip, and that Blan was doing biological research. I don't believe these good people would be interested in the nature of the research." "I do," answered Truggles, "and it will be the subject of tomorrow's meeting. I have investigated these experiments, and they are well worth hearing about. Thank you, Mr. Mayor." Truggles was a past master at building tension. The next day, he apologized for changing the program and gave a lecture on polygamy in human society. Backgrounded with considerable research at the Marston Hill public library, he described polygamy in Biblical times, in savage communities, in China and the Mohammedan world and among the early Mormons in the United States. He told of the social objections to polygamy and the progress made in eliminating it as a way of life. The following day, he described Forsythe's research with tetraploid plants -- not too accurately, but that didn't matter with this audience -- and skillfully translated chromosome doubling into human terms until his final revelation that Forsythe was a tetraploid man left them gasping. And, the fourth day, he told, with some embroidery, of Forsythe's polygamy. During each of these talks, Lois sat on the stage. Polygamy was a known, routine affair to her. Truggles was able to word his talks so that, to Lois, his revelations appeared calm and unbiased; but at the same time they were insinuating and inflammatory to his audiences, to whom polygamy was something strange and monstrous. During none of the first four talks did he call on Lois. But at the end of the fourth, he announced : "I have described to you what Forsythe told me himself. Perhaps you have been wondering who this attractive young lady is. She is none other than one of Forsythe's multiple wives, and tomorrow evening you shall hear a description of a polygamous household from her own lips." The first meeting had contained only the members of the small group which Truggles himself had organized, and two or three visitors attracted by the mayor's presence. But such words as "polygamy," "harem," "strange research," "monstrous plants and people" got around, as Truggles intended they should. The audience grew by leaps and bounds. By the night of the final meeting, the old auditorium was filled to overflowing; they were standing in the aisles. Calmly, and yet not without some hint of the tragedy she herself felt, Lois described the day-to-day life of Forsythe's household; the friendship among the wives, their jealousies, their hopes and regrets. She did not realize that her words, like those of Truggles the day before, were building anger in the breasts of her hearers at something they had not experienced and could not understand. When she had finished, Truggles took the stage, and now the calmness, the factualness, was gone from him. "You have heard what this poor woman told you!" he cried. "You have heard how this man, this Forsythe, took advantage of her. Remember, her sisters are as unfortunate as she. Shall this lecher, this monster, go unpunished?" Before he could say more, Lois was on her feet. "Mr. Truggles, wait!" she exclaimed. "You told me you were going to try to get Blan to give up polygamy. I wouldn't have come here and helped you if I'd known you were going to try to arouse his friends against him!" "My poor child, it's too late," answered Truggles loudly. "I tried to persuade the man to give up his life of sin, and his heart was as stone. He must feel the lash of just retribution!" She stared at him, her eyes widening in slow realization. Then she burst into tears and ran from the stage. She fled down the aisle and out of the auditorium. "Do you see?" cried Truggles to his audience. His blue eyes flashed and his voice rang like a trumpet. "Even now she cannot break his devilish hold on her! Think! Are your daughters safe from him? Are your wives, even? Do you know that the wife of his best friend, Dr. Allison, admits that her child is the child of this man, this monster?" For five minutes, he shouted, he wept, he shook his fists, he raised his hands to heaven. Then, striding to the edge of the platform, he demanded in a low, compelling tone: "Who will take up the sword of righteousness and go with me to drive this creature from our midst?" For a moment, there was dead silence. Then a young man stood up in the middle of the auditorium. "By God, I will!" he shouted... "I reckon I will, too," called an older man near the rear. One by one, then all at once, they were on around. Truggles leaped from the stage and forced his way through the crowd to the door. They surged out of the auditorium at his heels and poured down the middle of the street toward the home of Blan Forsythe, yelling. With Truggles in the lead, the excited citizens swept onto the broad lawn in front of the big mansion, spread out over the grass, trampling the flower beds. There were fifty to a hundred of them. Porch lights went on all over the neighborhood. From the same direction from which the crowd had come, two figures ran across the yards in the dimness and, circling the edge of the crowd, came up to Truggles. He recognized Phyllis Allison and her son, Donald. "What is this, Mr. Truggles?" she cried, peering into his face. "What are all these people doing?" "I'm sorry you came here, Mrs. Allison," he answered, shouting to make himself heard over the uproar of the people around them. "These people are determined to right the wrong this man has done you." Outside lights from the mansion suddenly lit the entire lawn, and the mob that stirred restlessly on it. A momentary silence feH. Their numbers did not seem as great, their ranks not so solid, in the glare of the lights. "Come on, Forsythe!" shouted Truggles in a great voice. "Come out and face your judges!" The front door opened and Allison stepped out on the railinged porch. Truggles, at the front of the crowd, was about seventy feet from him. "What is this?" demanded Allison. "What are you people doing here?" "We've come for Forsythe," answered Truggles, and a murmur from the crowd backed him up. "Where is he?" "I'm surprised at you, all of you," said Allison. "You people are my friends and Blan's friends. Why, you -- " He broke off as he caught sight of Phyllis and Donald. "Phyllis!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here? Take that boy home!" Obediently, she turned away, but Truggles caught her by the arm. "Get Forsythe out here!" he cried. "Let him face the woman he wronged!" At that moment, Forsythe himself came out of the door and stood at Allison's side. A wordless cry ran through the mob at the sight of the tetraploid man's face, topped withits cap of mole-gray fuzz. "I see you're still taking an active interest in my affairs, Truggles," said Forsythe. He did not raise his voice, but it carried across the lawn. "Evil is every man's business," answered Truggles boldly. "These good people are enraged that you should flout the laws of society so brazenly." "Naturally," replied Forsythe, smiling. "And you enraged them. As long as everyone here minded his own business, no harm was done." "I expected you to take that attitude, Forsythe," shouted Truggles. "Have you no sense of responsibility, no respect for the customs that others have established for their protection?" "Certainly," said Forsythe, but he added, logically: "Would you be bound by the customs of a colony of mice, if they interfered with your pursuit of greater ends?" "Listen at him!" cried Truggles, turning to the crowd and spreading his hands. "'You see what high regard he has for you, who have befriended him? He scorns you! He calls you mice!" He turned back to the mansion with clenched fists and took a step forward. "You monster!" he shouted. "Even mice can be dangerous!" The crowd behind him surged forward with a roar. Forsythe's voice rang out above it. "Wait!" he cried. "I appeal to your reason! I have no higher power. I can't strike you dead, or vanish from your sight. All I can do is ask you one question. Will you destroy me because I violate your customs, when I represent the hope of your race to become something greater?" His words fell on deaf ears. The crowd inched forward, ugly, dangerous. A figure brushed past Truggles. It was Phyllis Allison, and she tugged the boy Donald with her. "Stop her!" cried Truggles. "Don't let her get in his clutches!" Alone, for these words seemed only to confuse those near him, Truggles ran after Phyllis and the boy. But they stopped, halfway to the porch, and Truggles reached them. He placed his hand on Phyllis' arm and pulled at her compellingly. He was close enough to her to hear her words to the boy. "Donnie!" she urged anxiously. "You remember the game we played? Use the Power!" The boy looked apprehensively toward the porch. "Daddy said don't," he demurred. Dr. Alex Allison stood, his hands gripping the rail of the porch, looking out over the ugly crowd. There was no mistaking the moment. At any instant, the mob would surge over the porch. "Blan, I can't let them kill you because I've wronged you," said Allison in a clear, agonized voice. "Donald is your son!" There was a cry from Phyllis and she clutched the boy convulsively, twisting free of Truggles' grip. The people on the lawn fell silent, their upturned faces white in the light, waiting, sensing the import of the revelation. "I told you there was the possibility that the tetraploid could reproduce with the diploid," said Allison. "It's true Donald's cells don't contain # chromosomes -- but neither do they contain just #. They contain # chromosomes -- an even number, a viable number! Not always, but sometimes the hybrid is superior to both diploid and tetraploid. Blan, with all your unexplored qualities, you're just the vehicle of the new race. Donald is the superman!" "But it's impossible!" exclaimed Forsythe. "I haven't even seen Phyllis since we were divorced." "Did you think the tetraploid, the new species, would have the same gestation period as man?" asked Allison. "The gestation period is thirty months. Phyllis was pregnant when you were divorced, Blan, but I loved her and I didn't let either of you know. I wanted her for myself." "So that's why you recommended polygamy so enthusiastically," remarked Forsythe. "That's why I recommended a two-year limit on keeping any of your wives, and why I made sure they were sent far away," admitted Allison. "I couldn't let you know. You have half a dozen sons and daughters now, Blan, and Lois is going to be a mother." There was happiness in Forsythe's dark face as he looked out over the crowd. To see happiness on his face cut Truggles' soul like a knife. And all this small talk was losing his crowd. The seething emotions he had nurtured so carefully were simmering down in harmless curiosity aroused by the small private drama that had unfolded before the people on the lawn. "It's a conspiracy to mislead you!" he howled. "If no one else will throw the first stone, I will!" It was a symbolic gesture, his scooping up a harmless clod and hurling it to explode against the porch as he marched on the man he hated. His back to the crowd, Truggles feared with a terrible fear that it was already too late. He was chancing making himself ridiculous. But his heart leaped as the voices of a few hotheads arose in his support behind him, and he felt, rather than heard, some of the people surge forward. How many? He didn't know, but a few would be enough to start the rest again. Allison was leaning over the porch rail, his face white, looking not at Truggles but past him. "Donald!" he cried in a low voice that carried intensely across the grass. "Do as your mother says! I won't punish you. Use the Power!" And Truggles faltered and stopped in his tracks. He looked around him, confused, as some unseen force seemed to take his will and disperse it. The harsh glare of the lights faded in the glow of a greater, softer, more glorious illumination. A soundless music filled the air, so deep and majestic that it was felt, rather than heard. Almost, Truggles expected the sky to open and a heavenly choir to appear. Around him, he saw the familiar things of Marston Hill with new eyes. Life coursed through the green grass, bade a winter's farewell from the turning leaves of the trees. He felt for the first time that he was not a creature alone, but a part of all life around him. The faces of the people around him showed that they, too, felt what he felt. They saw beauty in the air, in the world. As he looked on them, Truggles realized, for the first time in the heart of him, that their small faults were not vices, not innate evil -- not even the hatred and fear that had been in their hearts when they stormed here with him was evil. There were only the well-meaning flaws that sprang from earnest eagerness. Even the face of Forsythe, when Truggles looked at it, mirrored the ecstatic understanding of something that he had experienced only partially before. And Truggles knew that the type of understanding that had opened up to Forsythe was something he himself never could comprehend. And in the midst of this experience that transcended understanding, the boy Donald took his mother's hand and the two of them floated up, into the air, above Truggles' head, and forward to alight gently at Forsythe's side on the porch. But, amazing as that was, Truggles recognized it was only a small outward manifestation of the Power. The Power of the superman was what he and all these others felt, a weapon greater than fire or sword, greater than will or reason. Under its influence, no man could raise his hand against his brother, for he understood . The vision, if vision it was, faded, and only a crowd of murmuring people stood around sheepishly in the cold glare of the lights on Forsythe's lawn. "Truggles, you've won your point," said Forsythe, and there was no animosity in his voice. "I don't need to experiment any more. I'm leaving Marston Hill with my wife and son..." He caught himself and looked at Allison. "I can't hold her," said Allison in a low tone. "I won't try to. I'll give her a divorce." "... With my only wife and son," resumed Forsythe happily. "I'm going to find my other children. And I don't think any of you will ever hear of us again." He turned and entered the house with Phyllis and Donald. Allison followed them, his head bowed. Truggles sat in his small, sparsely-furnished room and fought his soul. For a long time, the memory of what the boy Donald had somehow shown the people of Marston Hill lingered with him: the conception of a world that was all good, all beauty, everything right. Truggles tried to cling to it, but gradually it slipped from him. There was something in him that prevented him holding it. At last, he still could remember it, but the memory was a logical thing, a thing that was incredible to him because it had no roots in emotion. As that happened, the old torment returned ten-fold, as though it had battered outside of the vision's barrier fruitlessly until it could burst on him with renewed vigor. Writhing inwardly, twisting his hands, Truggles stared unseeing at the room about him while he relived the agony of the past. He held Margaret -- how long, how many years had it been, since he had let himself even think that name? -- he held her in his arms and felt her cool lips against his. He talked with her, he felt the closeness of something infinitely good and right for him. He lived again the angry, shouting interview when she stood with the arm of the Brazilian, De Castro, around her shoulders and said : "I'm sorry, Masefield. I like you and for a while I thought it was something more. But I've found love with a man who's so far superior to either of us that I still can't believe he's mine." "That foreigner?" he shouted again, and tears sprang tq his eyes as they had then. "You turn me down for him? You think I'm inferior to him?" And again he lived through the shame of falling on his knees before her, turning up his weeping face to her, imploring her to no avail. He saw on her face and the Brazilian's face the pity, the scorn, before they walked out together, leaving him to sob alone. Truggles beat his hands helplessly on the arm of the chair. Of all the hapless people he had tracked down and tossed to the ravening, outraged contempt of the public, he had wanted most of all to conquer Forsythe. He had wanted to see Forsythe cower and whimper, beg before they hung him. And Forsythe had won. What mattered it that he was leaving Marston Hill? Truggles had thought that would be a victory, to make Forsythe run away. But Forsythe was not going alone and hunted. He was taking with him the woman he loved, who reminded Truggles of the clean beauty of Margaret; the one woman who understood him as none of those others could. And the boy. Was it a defeat to a man to know that his son was greater than he? Truggles knew it was not. A vision rose before him of a race of men and women who walked among the clouds, who saw only beauty in the world and looked down with sympathetic pity upon the poor creeping humans below. The new race, greater than Truggles could even imagine himself. Truggles stirred, and awoke to his surroundings, bitterly. He would have to leave Marston Hill himself. The people would not thank him for arousing them against Forsythe. From them, he could expect only anger, contempt, perhaps even... There was a sudden rattling behind him. Truggles jumped to his feet, alarmed, fearful, his heart beating fast. His apprehensive eyes searched the room. A paper moved in a corner. It was only a mouse.    copies of the first issue of IF, Volume #, No. #, dated March #. If your collection is missing this collector's item, you can get it for the published price. Send only #tf and your copy will be mailed at once. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April #; February, April, June, August and October #. Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. Earthmen were considered stupid. But they knew something that the alien didn't -- and about his own planet! a little knowledge iences, Caesar could never have staged such a triumph, and in the face of world history-making, he wouldn't have reason to. Olbu's visit to the earth was certainly a bigger deal for the archives than anything Caesar ever did. "No one can say you aren't a good sport," commended Ralph Rodkey of the Interstate Broadcasting Network. "You had plenty of reason to be annoyed, especially when the mob tried to tear your clothes off. But, the people meant no harm; they just adore you." Olbu had learned English overnight and mastered it. He hardly had an accent: "I was a little disturbed, you might say." "Well, our people are hero worshippers," Rodkey explained. "And you're certainly a hero, being the first man from off the Earth to land on the Earth, you might say. And then too, given an opportunity to celebrate, an Earthman will take full advantage of the slightest excuse." "Rather barbaric," said Olbu. "You say you don't travel in space as yet?" "No, and you're the first visitor from space we've had. You see no planets of this solar system are inhabited by intelligent forms of Illustrated by Ed Emsh "But then this is a barbaric planet." "Uh? Oh, yes. Just joking, of course. Now we're about ready for our telecast with Cecil Burroughs, the greatest commentator in the business. You'll appear with one of our leading scientists." "I hope he can understand the things I shall talk about." "We may not know much about space flight, but we know a lot of things; my boy," said Rodkey. life." "You can say that again," said Olbu. "With the exception of the Earth, of course." Rodkey laughed. "We were very thrilled to have someone drop in on us." "How strange!" "In fact, many of our people figured that Man was unique. They thought he couldn't exist anywhere but here." "It would be nice if such were the case," said Olbu. "But I'm afraid the galaxy is not so fortunate. Many planets have men. Some are more like men than others, if you understand what I mean. But they all have his chief faults and good points." Rodkey had arranged for the interview in the Presidential suite of the Claremont Hotel and in the next room electricians were busy setting up the equipment. Presently the door opened and a man of about #, clean shaven and slightly bald, paused in the doorway. He looked at the confusion for a moment, hesitated as if he were checking an impulse to flee, then spotted Rodkey through the bedroom door. "Dr. Bruber!" exclaimed Rodkey. Dr. Alymir Bruber beamed, extended his hand and strode forward. He tripped over a cable, but caught himself on the doorframe with nothing worse than a bumped shoulder. Rodkey pumped his hand enthusiastically. "It's been a long time, Doctor!" he said, slapping him on the shoulder. "Remember, we met when I interviewed you on the nervous electron factor of your diatomic equivalent energy principle back in '#." "Oh," said Bruber. "Yes, I remember you well." He turned his head toward Olbu. One glance would have convinced anyone that Olbu was from space -- or at least another planet. He had an unusually large head, small neck, skinny arms and legs and a pot belly. Everyone knows that people from other planets have all of these things. The only thing wrong with Olbu was that his eyes were just like anyone's eyes, a little slanted, perhaps, but not more so than the average oriental, and of course Olbu had no feelers extending from his forehead. But those things weren't absolutely necessary in a man who looked the part, as Olbu did. "This must be our visitor!" Once more Dr. Bruber extended his hand and this time he tripped over the rug, but Rodkey was handy to catch him. "My glasses," explained Dr. Bruber. "They're only bifocals, and I have trouble adjusting to middle distances." "Olbu," said Rodkey, "allow me to present Dr. Bruber, the world's greatest living scientist." Dr. Bruber laughed nervously and shook hands with Olbu. "I'm afraid Mr. Rodkey is being extravagant. Actually I'm not the greatest. Only the greatest in my field. I'm second greatest in three others though." "Dr. Bruber is too modest," said Rodkey. "There's practically nothing that he doesn't know." "No one knows nothing," said Olbu. Dr. Bruber blinked as he tried to figure that one out. It doubtless hinged on a lingual difference to start with and so he gave up. "Well, gentlemen," said Rodkey, "our broadcast will start in thirty minutes. Perhaps we can go over briefly what topics we should talk upon. You know we don't want to get into anything too deep for our viewers to understand, yet we don't want to be too trivial, you know. Give them something interesting, I always say. Then if we have any time left, we might touch on some topics that go a little beyond that." "Did you have a nice trip?" asked Dr. Bruber. "It was beastly," said Olbu. "Thirty-two light years of space and not even an interesting meteor." "We're on the verge of making an interplanetary flight here on Earth," Dr. Bruber said. "The trouble is, no one that wants a flight has any money and those that have the money don't care about space flight." "You're probably better off all around," said Olbu. "Come now, gentlemen," said Rodkey. "We can do better than that. You can cut loose with a few scientific terms now and then. It gives the interview an authentic flavor. Ask Olbu his opinion of the quantum jump, Dr. Bruber." Dr. Bruber turned toward the director and blinked through his heavy glasses. "I'd rather ask our distinguished visitor why he came." "Yes, Dr. Bruber. Please do," said Olbu. "All right. Why did you come here?" "We wanted to decide whether to wipe out the solar system or not." For a moment it was silent in the room, except for the sound of the electricians outside the door. "Goddamit," said an electrician. "You can't use that hookup on the Y-circuit. You'll cut out the monitors." Ralph Rodkey tiptoed to the bedroom door and closed it. "Surely you're joking," said Dr. Bruber. "Quite a sense of humor. Ha-Ha." "No, I'm not. We discovered there was at least one habitable planet here -- and where there are habitable planets, there are likely to be human beings. Human beings are dangerous." Rodkey cleared his throat. "Gentlemen. Far be it from me to interfere in a scientific discussion like this, but if I were you I'd try another tack. A large number of our viewers might not understand it." "You think it would be better, perhaps, if we killed them all without warning?" Olbu said, turning toward the director. "Really, Mr. Olbu," said Rodkey. "You don't intend to blot us out, do you?" "That decision is hardly mine to make," said Olbu. "I'll have to report to my superiors. If you're dangerous, you'll have to be erased, and there's nothing that can be done about it." "Excuse me a moment." Rodkey rose, went to the phone and ordered liquor sent up to the room. He hung up the receiver. "I think it's best that we make your stay here a pleasant one, Olbu." "If you intend to bribe me, I'm afraid you'll have no success," said Olbu. "I was chosen because I am impeccable." "I'm quite sure of it," said Dr. Bruber. "And perhaps there is something in your premise that not all human beings are desirable. I should like to know how Earth is making out." Olbu shrugged his shoulders. "So far I've seen nothing worth saving," he said. "You're a vain lot. You're trivial. You have no respect for the dignity of Man. And your worst fault is ambition. I suppose you have wars?" "Not for a long time. Two or three years anyhow," said Rodkey. "How long is a year? Ah yes, I forgot. It is the period of the planet on its journey around the sun. And how long does that take? One year. The usual nonsensical way you have of defining things. You don't even know how to measure time." "How very interesting!" exclaimed Dr. Bruber. "Actually it never occurred to me that there might be an absolute method of measuring time. What is it?" "It's the Mpto. Fortythree and a third Mptos make an Anup, and Zorex. It's a lot simpler than seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and so on." "Yes, I see," said Dr. Bruber. "But getting back to our topic. Just what should we have that would make us worth saving?" "Stability," said Olbu. "Earthmen lack stability." "Don't you think you should talk more about your trip?" Rodkey asked. "How did Saturn look when you passed it?" "Saturn wasn't in the right place to be seen at all," Dr. Bruber said. "But you did see Pluto. How did it look?" "There was nothing about it and it looked awful," said Olbu. "I hate to be injecting my own personal ideas into this conversation," said Rodkey, "because after all, I know nothing about science. But don't you suppose it would please our viewers if we talked more about space flight than about the destruction of the human race?" "You see," said Olbu to Dr. Bruber. "That's what I mean. No stability." "After all, the poor man doesn't want to lose his job," Bruber explained. "I'd say that was a desire to be stable." "If he's going to be dead, which he will be when I get word from my superiors, he'll lose his job whether he wants to or not," said Olbu. "I'll go along with a joke as well as anyone," said Rodkey, "but gentlemen, we've only got twelve minutes till we go on the air. Now let's cut out this nonsense about destroying Earth and talk about something pleasant." "Certainly," said Dr. Bruber. "What planet did you come from?" "Xvik," said Olbu. "It's the fourth planet of a star you call GC#." "Good old GC#!" said Dr. Bruber. "Oh, you know that star?" "Yes, it's a minor variable loosely attached to Lyra." "There's no tiling loose about my star' said Olbu. Tm sure Dr. Bruber didn't mean it that way," said Rodkey hastily. He looked nervously at Dr. Bruber. "Did you, doctor?" "That's one of the things I don't know," he said, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief. "Tell me, Olbu, if you should decide we aren't worth saving, how would you communicate with your superiors, considering they're # light years away. Wouldn't it take # years -- thirty-two going and thirtytwo coming -- to get a message through?" "Oh, no! I communicate by instantaneous telepathy," said Olbu. "It's much faster than energy forms of communication." . "I wish you'd talk about something else," said Rodkey. "Only ten minutes to go." Dr. Bruber disregarded the request. "I don't know why people on a planet # light years away should consider Earth dangerous." "Oh Earth isn't. It's only the people on it," said Olbu. "How do you know about the people?" "We have a method of enlarging telescopic photos to bring out every detail. We know all about Man, we've watched you from the days when your ancestors lived in caves." "Goodness! You know more about us than we know ourselves." "Why don't you tell our viewers about that !" exclaimed Rodkey. "Yes," went on Olbu, who also seemed to have forgotten the existence of Rodkey, "we saw your ancestors fight with sticks and stones. We saw them use spears, then gunpowder. Then we saw the atom bomb and the Council decided to send me to see if anything could be salvaged." "But the bomb was # years ago," said Dr. Bruber. "Twelve Zorax," corrected Olbu. "I've been on the way here for twelve Zorax -- or if you will -- thirty-two light years, two hundred time years." "Surely the atom bomb can't affect your existence when we don't even have space flight," said Dr. Bruber. "My race has developed a type of logic that can look into the future," said Olbu. "We know that certain patterns develop from past events. In your case, you'll follow the Atom bomb with the Hydrogen bomb, and the Hydrogen bomb with the Cobalt bomb -- " "We have them both." "Ah! You see. Our logical foresight is infallible," said Olbu. "Next you'll wipe out nations, when only one is left, you'll fight neighboring planets. Since you haven't any inhabited near neighbors, you'll have to invade Alpha Centauri. After that you'll battle with other stars, until you've conquered the cluster, then the galaxy, finally the universe. It's a very unstable state of affairs." Slowly Dr. Bruber nodded. "You're right. I never realized where science was taking us. You have something ready to wipe us out with?" "Yes," said Olbu. "Just beyond the moon, circling the Earth and the moon as a satellite, is a missile which I can bring here by instantaneous telepathy, as soon as I have my orders from my superior." "I trust you'll postpone the fateful message until after our telecast?" Olbu smiled graciously. "A dying man is usually granted his last request." "Gentlemen," said Rodkey, wiping his brow with a damp handkerchief, "they're waiting for us in the next room. We're on in a minute." He opened the door, allowed Olbu to pass through first, and then whispered to Dr. Bruber. "I guess my job doesn't matter now. At least we'll scoop the other networks on the end of the world." "Tish, tosh, old man," said Dr. Bruber. "Your job's safe and so is the world. But if I should resort to murder in the next fifteen minutes, I hope you'll testify in my behalf." the door, tripped over a cable and sprawled in front of the television cameras. Rodkey helped him to his feet and steered him to a seat to the left of the distinguished news commentator, Cecil Burroughs. On the right of the commentator sat Olbu, bobbing his huge head and smiling. Rodkey barely got out of camera range in time to give the signal. Burroughs gave the commercial, which had nothing to do with interplanetary flight, or anything gentlemen," said Burroughs, "our two distinguished scientists have a great deal to tell us about two widely separated points in the universe." Dr. Bruber smiled into the camera. "Just before we went on the air, Mr. Burroughs," he said, "Ambassador Olbu and I had an interesting discussion about the merits of Earth. He contends that it is unstable -- " "You are twisting my words around, doctor," interpolated Olbu. "I made it clear that it was not the planet itself, but the people who are objectionable." "The people spoil the planet?" "In a sense. The people are dangerous, the planet is not." "Would it be possible for a planet to spoil the people?" Olbu seemed to digest the words in his mind before he spoke: "That is a rather weak effort to shift the blame from the shoulders of those responsible for a sad state of affairs, doctor. You are trying to say there is something in the air, or the water, that makes Earthmen what they are. "No, I was hinting that there might be something wrong with your planet, Mr. Olbu." "Nonsense! Nothing is wrong with my planet. My people would not be affected even if the air and water were bad. We, the children of Xvik, are the highest expression of the human race." "It's easy to see that," said Dr. Bruber. "You were pointing out to me that Earth's pattern of existence doesn't offer much hope for the future." "That is right," said Olbu. "Earth's future is not much to look forward to." "But the planet is worth saving?" "Definitely." "Yet the people are a part of the planet." "You should study logic, Dr. Bruber. You're trying to make me say things that are not logical." "Okay, let's forget logic and look at what Earth is likely to do if it follows its 'natural' trend. You say it will destroy itself." "If someone else doesn't do it first," said Olbu. "It will continue to have wars till it exhausts all opportunities for it on the planet. Then it will war in the skies, with other planets, with other stars, finally with other galaxies. Man has a thirst for power, and that thirst is never satisfied. On the other hand, knowledge leads to contentment. If the Earth should seek knowledge, it would forget war." "Perhaps war is necessary for survival," suggested Dr. Bruber. "War is seldom fought for survival. It is a result of a struggle for supremacy. And, might I ask, supremacy of what? After you've conquered all the galaxies, what do you have?" "Olbu seems to have a point there," said Burroughs. "It is now time for a brief message from our sponsor." The message had nothing to do with war, or knowledge. "Now, Olbu," began Burroughs, "we were talking about wars, knowledge, power and survival. Do you have anything else to add?" "Only that Earth has brought this on itself," said Olbu. "I don't quite understand -- " Cecil Burroughs wrinkled his massive brow. "What our distinguished visitor is trying to say," said Dr. Bruber, "is that a planet is only as stable as its people. And a star system is only as stable as its planets. Isn't that it Ambassador?" "You have a round-about method of stating nothing at all," said Olbu. "What I'm trying to tell you is that sometimes worlds must come to an end." "Exactly," said Dr. Bruber. "I've made a study of GC# for many years and I'm quite familiar with it. This star, as many scientists know, became a super nova about fifteen years ago." "What?" Olbu's eyes grew less slanting and more round. "It was an unstable star," said Dr. Bruber. "The Earth, with all its faults, is stable. It may be young, impulsive, inclined to play with fire -- atomic fire no less -- but it will grow up some day." "My star, my planet -- gone?" "You haven't been in contact with your home base since you arrived?" Dr. Bruber asked. "I was not supposed to contact my base," said Olbu, "until -- " He stopped abruptly, and those with him were aware of the fact that he was using his mental powers to call his superiors. -- The lengthening silence seemed to give proof to Bruber's words. "Since you have no world to go to," interrupted the Dr. gently, "I hope you'll be our guest. Perhaps (Continued on page #) Propaganda-wise, Newsear was a wonderful gadget. And a sinister one! seemed  amused at Danton's wide-eyed incredulity. "Let me get this straight," Danton said, tapping the sharp corner of the official envelope against the desk. "You mean I went through nine months of blistering basic for this?" The flush on his hard young face ended ludicrously at the hairline of his shaven head. "That's right," the Newsear director smiled. "Look. I took everything those at me. I walked through a # radioactive field. I pushed an atom tank halfway across Texas. You mean the Army is going to take all that training and -- and dump it into a desk job?" The man pointed. "You read the orders." "But it's crazy!" He looked down at the gray-green, metal-free uniform, as if to reassure himself of his status. "I'm a trained atom tanker -- an officer." He glared at the small, owlishlysmiling man, whose short legs barely touched the floor beneath the desk. "Angry, lieutenant?" The Director's name was Forbes. "Angry?" Forbes said. "Or relieved?" Mel Danton turned his head away, stung by the sharp truth. "What's the assignment?" "That will develop later. First we want to acquaint you with Newsear, so you'll better understand its strategic importance. You see, this war has many battlefields. We consider Newsear as important as any other -- and in some ways, even more trying." Danton snorted. "I know that's hard to believe. But Newsear operates directly under the office of the War Department. Don't be fooled by the civilian atmosphere. News dissemination has military importance. We're a government agency now." "Yeah? Which government?" The smooth voice crackled. "The government that put you in uniform. The Central Federal Gov"You can now. We've knocked the price down to practically nothing. But as a member of Newsear, you're entitled to a complimentary unit. Here." He opened a drawer arid removed a small clear-plastic envelope. He tore it open, removed another earfunnel, and extended it towards the man in uniform. "Put it in," Forbes coaxed. "It's indispensable these days. Nobody ever knows the score without Newsear." He put a hand to his mouth m m emment. and smiled behind it. "Go on, put it in. It's clean." Danton hesitated. Then  he slipped the gadget into l his left ear. I For a moment, there was I nothing. j Then : ... Canton , Seven Point . Four , Cleveland , Eighteen I Point Nine , Hillsboro , Four f Point Two... Fifth Army radiation clean-up battalions presently engaged in these sectors... residents advised to stay indoors... On the Appalachian front , a small force of enemy snipers have been destroyed by local Home Guard action... Truce Forbes' pinched face relaxed, and he reached into his left ear and removed the tiny, colorless funnel and held it up between two fingers. "This little gizmo," he grinned, "is one of the nation's most potent weapons. Don't ever underestimate that fact." Danton stared at it. "Ever use one?" The lieutenant shook his head. "No. I never could afford it." teams in the Aleutians report no progress with the Eastern-Coalition Government , warn of build-up near Dutch Harbor..." Danton yanked the earpiece out. "How do you shut the damned thing off?" "That's one way," Forbes admitted. "But most citizens prefer to keep tuned. We only broadcast on the average of three hours a day. This happens to be a busy hour." Danton examined the object curiously. "It's a lot better than the gadgets we used in basic. For field instructions." "That's part of our job, too. We're manufacturers as well as broadcasters. Newsear turns out something like five thousand earpieces a day for the military. Limited-frequency types. It's only recently that we've developed adequate subminiaturization techniques to produce the unit you're holding." "I can see its military importance." Danton, no longer so sure of himself, rubbed a hand over his head where the thick blond hair once grew. "But as far as civilian importance -- " "The Government doesn't agree with you," the Director said. "Newsear is virtually the only method left for informing the public. The radio-TV blackout took care of that. How else can we reach the people?" He shrugged, as if the argument was self-evident. He leaned forward, and his small features changed as if the light had shifted on his face. "And there's still another reason," he said mysteriously. "What's that?" "Ah," the Director said. He walked out from behind the desk and stumped forward towards the door. Danton hadn't noticed the artificial legs before. "That will all be clear to you in due course." He opened the door. "Sorry we don't have a free office at the moment. You'll have to share one with somebody else." His eyes twinkled. "You won't mind too much. Your companion will be a rather charming young lady." "But what am I supposed to do here?" Forbes blinked. "You have electronics training?" "Some." "You understand sonic problems?" "Ah. You're modest. We are in possession of both your military and academic records. We have reason to believe that you were a remarkably capable student." "That's not true. I was only an average student." Danton looked down the hallway. "What charming voung lady?" "Selena McKay is her name. She's been with Newsear almost three years. A very clever young girl. Come -- I'll introduce you." They walked down the barren hallway, with its dull lead-shielded walls. The Director's progress was slow and stilted, and his face reflected the effort. By the time they reached the small, two-desk office at the end of the corridor, he was puffing, and his face was moist. The girl, with plainly-cut black hair dramatically framing a white face, looked up from her desk and greeted him. "Welcome to Newsear," Selena McKay said. "Glad to meet you." Danton shook her hand, while the Director beamed. "It's all right for today," the girl said, with a fixed half-smile. "But after this -- don't ever wear that uniform in this office. Ever. Understand?" Danton turned a bewildered look at Forbes. The Director lifted his narrow shoulders. "It's purely optional, of course. But Miss McKay has an allergy to gray-green. It would only be common courtesy..." The lieutenant looked back at the girl. Her bold black eyes were staring at the front of his tunic with such loathing that he unconsciously recoiled. "All right," he mumbled. The Director had been correct. She was a lovely girl; but the left side of her face was paralyzed. Newsear building the next morning, Mel Danton wore mufti. It was the first time in almost a year, and the tweedy stuff caused his lean, tough body to itch. He squirmed with every step, and when he entered the office he shared with Selena McKay, he whipped off the jacket and flung it onto a hook. There was a murmur of quiet, professional activity throughout the four-story building. Men of widely disparate age were moving swiftly and noiselessly through the corridors. There were radiation detection barriers on every outside entrance, necessitating a patiencetrying wait for employees of the news center. The security precautions were even more elaborate than the Army's. Danton had done little on his first day. Mostly, he had listened to Selena's dry analysis of the operational importance of Newsear, a service she performed for him without interruption of her regular duties. The extent of his labor was to sharpen half a dozen pencils for her, the points of which she had promptly destroyed with her heavyhanded scrawls on sheets of ruled yellow paper. When she appeared this morning, she noted the tweed jacket on the hook and said: "Well. That's much better. "Her smile was strange and a trifle eerie; a halfsmile that warmed just one side of her lovely face. The effect was odd, and yet, somehow, still attractive. "I think you can do more than Sharpen pencils today. I think the fifty-cent tour is in order. All right with you?" "Fine." "I'll just clean up the desk a bit. Then we'll have a look at Newsear." When they left the office, he followed at a respectful distance. Her heels clicked along the corridors, and she flung open doors with the casual air of confidence. One of the doors led to a chart room. "This is Central Intelligence," she told Danton briskly. "We get our reports directly from the military on troop movements and enemy actions all over the world -- all filtered through a sort of double censorship. The Government's, and our own. Only the events considered of pertinent importance to the citizenry ever go into their receivers. Radiation counts in local areas are reported in another room; that's an important service, of course." "Impressive," Danton grunted, watching the men and women moving efficiently between the gigantic wall charts and the chattering teletypes. "It's not easy to make sense out of this war." "That's our biggest problem, of course. The distinctions between Enemy and Ally become increasingly difficult. The picture seems to change hourly; our staff of political analysts are probably the largest single group at Newsear. Come along." The next exhibit was a laboratory. "It's only a segment of our research organization," Selena said. "This happens to be our Sonar unit; there are some fifteen others. We're constantly seeking to improve the technical side of our service. The goal, of course, is perfection in Mass-Personal communications, striving for a single, foolproof link between every individual on Our Side." "You've done a remarkable job." She grimaced. "Far from perfect. You said it yourself yesterday. The military units presently in the field are sub-standard, clumsy, outdated. The civilian population is already equipped with subminiaturized funnels. But it will take months before their limited frequency equipment reaches the fighting men. And there are other problems... "This is the broadcasting section. Probably the least complex section of our activities." She glanced up at the flashing red sign over the door. "Sorry, no admittance for the moment. We'll come back some other time." "Do you have an earpiece? Mine's in the office." She fumbled in her pocket. "Sure. Want to listen?" "If you don't mind." He took the small funnel in his hand and placed it within his ear. He heard: "... Operation Icecube under attack... Alaskan patrols report enemy bombers sighted north-north east of... He flipped the gadget back into his palm. "The second floor is hundredpercent research," Selena said. "The third floor is a sort of hodgepodge of executive offices, including our political smart boys ; I won't bother taking you there. The fourth floor -- " Her face changed. "Administrative. I guess." "You guess?" The girl shrugged. "I've never been to Four. I only understand that it's administrative. Only what that means exactly... Danton grinned. "A Bluebeard floor, eh? Sounds interesting." "Don't get ideas, lieutenant. The floor is restricted." Back in their office, Danton broke a sudden depressed silence and asked: "But why am I here?" Selena looked up. "I haven't the faintest idea. Don't you know?" "No! I studied electronics, sure. But I left college a year before graduation, to join up. And I wasn't such a hot pupil, either. There were a hundred guys with more on the ball than I had. Why aren't they here?" "I wouldn't know." Tentatively, Danton said: "And how about you? What brings you to Newsear?" "Ability' she snapped. "I'm a psychologist. One of the best." D irector forbes sent for him in the afternoon. "Recognize these?" There was a folder in his hand, and he was spilling out papers. "Looks familiar," the lieutenant grunted. "My service records." "That's right. I understand that you made quite a mark in the mental energy tests." "So they tell me. Frankly, I never knew what the hell they were all about." "Few people do. But confidentially, the Army -- and Newsear, I might add -- consider it one of the most crucial tests in the entire examination. Even more important than psych ratings, or the standard Binet foolishness. They indicate something very important in this crazy world of ours -- the ability of concentration." Danton licked his lips. "If you're expecting some electronic miracle out of me, you're going to be sadly disappointed." The Director looked surprised. "I'm no psychologist, either. And no political analyst. I'm as confused as anybody as to who's fighting who. Maybe more than most." "How about broadcasting?" the Director smiled. "What?" "We always need broadcasters, you know." Danton swore. "You mean you want me for my dulcet tones? You must be kidding." "Maybe not." The Director stood up. "But we'll talk about that later." He snapped the switch on an intercom. "Harris. I'll be out of the office for an hour. Anything comes up, you can reach me on Four." He circled the desk and opened the door. Danton hesitated. "What's on the fourth floor?" "My dear young man." The Director chuckled and prodded him outside. "You're in too much of a hurry to learn everything." A month went by, and Mel Danton became wise in the ways of Newsear. Selena McKay was his mentor. Her knowledge of the broadcasting system was nothing short of encyclopedic. Her appreciation of the problems of war reporting was equally great. Her technical understanding was easily on par with his own college level. After a while, Danton was comfortably ensconced in the seemingly unhectic routine of the Newsear employees, performing odd jobs for the laboratories and the reporters, and even -- one nervous afternoon -- sitting in as broadcaster of Newsear's end product: the news itself. "Never again," he told Selena, after the chore was done. "I just don't have the voice." "You did all right," she said grudgingly. He was getting to like her more and more. But one thing bothered him. Since her first day. Selena McKay had stopped smiling. At the end of Mel Danton's first month in the new assignment, the Frozen People began to appear. He heard the story on his own Newsear, and only remarked it because of its incongruity in a broadcast filled with troop actions and bombardments and truce talks. The first Frozen man had appeared in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was sixty-seven -- twelve years above draft age -- and he was discovered in the middle of an intersection, a hazard to traffic. He was removed to a local medical station, and diagnosed simply as a mental case -- a catatonic. Then three other cataleptics appeared in various districts, "frozen" people who had stopped in the midst of everyday activities, as if some inner motor had ceased to function. The incidence became widespread. On the date of the Newsear broadcast, the announcer registered the approximate total of catatonic victims at a hundred and eighty. " Government health authorities," the voice said in his ear, ( are investigating the possibility that these outbreaks are the result of some new enemy weapon..." Danton spoke to Selena about the news. She replied coldly. "Frankly, I don't believe there's any sort of secret weapon involved. I think it's the state of the world. These people are retreating from an almost unbearable situation." She returned to her work, but soon looked up again. "As a matter of fact -- this is strictly confidential -- but the total we heard is a slight understatement. The smart boys are trying to determine its relative importance as a news story, so we're waiting to release the complete facts." "You mean there are more of them?" "Many more. Nobody has an accurate count, of course. But the indications are that there are some two thousand..." Danton swallowed hard. "Two thousand catatonics?" "At least," the girl said grimly. "People seem to be freezing up all over the country. We don't have word of any cases in the services. That's why I can't believe it's any enemy weapon. Isn't that sensible?" "You'd think so." "Well, it's not our concern." "No," Danton said musingly. some sixteen thousand Frozen People had been officially tabulated, and Mel Danton was summoned again into the office of Newsear Director Forbes. "Okay, Mel," he said cheerfully. "We're going to Four. I think you've had enough of the preliminaries. Now it's time for the main event." He followed Forbes down the long corridor, and into the elevators. When the doors slid open, Danton had his first glimpse of the Bluebeard floor of the Newsear building. It looked exactly like the others. They entered an office which was bare except for a conference table with six wide armchairs. Forbes flopped into one, and invited the lieutenant to sit down. He offered him a cigarette, normally forbidden on the lower floors. They smoked in silence, until the door was opened and two men, strangers to the officer, entered the room. Forbes introduced them casually as Kirsch and Douglas, members of something called the "administrative Board." Kirsch was a heavy-set man with a clumsy manner. Douglas was tall, bony-thin, with a weary distinguished face and voice. "Ah," Kirsch said. "This is the man, hah?" "Perhaps," Forbes smiled. "How much do you know about this?" Douglas's fingers rapped the table. "I mean, about this side of Newsear?" "Not a thing," Danton said frankly. "I only know the lower level. Is there something else?" Kirsch made a grating noise in his throat. Douglas looked sharply at the Director, as if displeased. "Orientation is a luxury," Douglas said icily. "We need a new man, and we need him in a hurry. Standish is -- " He paused, and frowned. "Well, you know about Standish." "Who?" Danton said. "A broadcaster," Forbes answered hurriedly. "One whose capabilities we overestimated. We need a replacement as soon as we can find one. We were considering, perhaps, that your own mental energy record..." He trailed off, and puffed on his cigarette. "Do you have a Newsear?" the thin man said. Danton removed it from his ear. Douglas took it, examined it with something like contempt, and sent it skidding along the slippery surface of the table. It rolled onto the floor with a tiny clatter. Danton looked surprised. "Kirsch," the thin man said crisply. "Give me a dirty one." The other man reached into his pocket and handed his partner a Newsear apparently identical with the first. "Slip this on," Douglas said. "I'll give you a practical demonstration. That's worth more than talk." "What do you mean a 'dirty' one?" The lieutenant held the thing suspiciously. "It's just a word," Douglas answered. "We call the regular Newsear 'clean'. It was only natural that we call -- these -- dirty. Put it in." Danton followed orders. "We'll leave you alone for an hour," the thin man said. "Don't, under any circumstances, remove the Newsear. Do you understand?" "Look -- I think you ought to tell me -- "I'll tell you nothing more!" Douglas stood up, his face darkening. "This is an order, lieutenant. And if you don't like taking orders from civilians, rest easy. I hold the rank of Colonel." Danton slumped in his chair. "Yes, sir." They left the room without another display of disagreement. Danton felt foolish. The Newsear was silent. He got up from the chair and paced the room. At one point, he rattled the knob of the conference room door, and, as he expected, found it locked. The Director had left his cigarettes on the table. He smoked another one. He studied the room. The walls were cork-lined, the floor bare and hard, the table of sturdy oak. The room was windowless. It couldn't have been more than thirty feet by twenty. Yet he knew he was being watched. He whirled, suddenly tense. "Sniper!" he whispered. He circled the table cautiously. "Sniper!" he shouted. He ducked beneath the table, trembling. If he only had a gun He crawled on hands and knees, protected by the overhang, until his fingers touched the feet of a chair. "Kill the dirty snipers," he breathed. He skittered out of cover, dragging the chair with him. "Where are you?" he screamed. He tried to raise it over his head. It was too heavy, and crashed back to the floor. Without this makeshift weapon, he felt unprotected and afraid. He dived back beneath the shelter of the conference table. That was how they found him, ten minutes later. It was Kirsch who took the "dirty" Newsear out, and murmured something sympathetic. Forbes helped him into a chair, while Douglas watched them dispassionately. Then Douglas said: "Well? What happened to you?" "I don't know." He was still trembling. "I thought there were snipers -- " He looked wildly around the small room. "Snipers. In here . I wanted to kill them -- " "Mr. Kirsch," Douglas said. "Read the order of the day." The heavy-set man sighed and reached into his pocket. He withdrew a folded sheet of paper, and squinted to read the words. "Enemy snipers are everywhere" he read. "Kill them all..." "I don't understand." Douglas smiled for the first time. "This is our Newsear broadcast for today," he said. "The one you can't hear with your ears. Only your mind." went to the first floor to collect his gear, and more importantly, to say goodbye to Selena McKay. The office was empty. The man in the next cubicle, a whispy fellow with white hair and an apologetic manner, said: "She's gone for the day. Some trouble at home, I think." "Do you know her number?" "No. You might try registry." "Thanks," Danton said. Registry obliged. He dialed Selena's telephone, and was forced to wait the usual five minutes before the call could be completed. "Hello?" "Selena? It's Mel. Listen, I came down to see you this afternoon. To say goodbye..." "Yes." Her voice was dreamy. "Yes, of course..." "I'm going to Four," he said tightly. "I don't quite understand it -- but that's what they want." "I understand." "Selena -- is something wrong?" "What?" "I hear you have some trouble at home. Nothing serious?" "Yes. Yes," Selena said. "Fairly serious. My mother -- " "Is she ill?" "Frozen," the girl said faintly. "Catatonic. My mother..." "Oh, Lord!" Danton groaned. "Selena, I'm sorry." "She doesn't know me." Her voice was quivering dangerously. "She doesn't know me, Mel -- " "Look, Selena. Could I come over? Would you mind that?" "Law of averages," the girl replied, her voice sing-song. "It's only the law of averages, Mel. A thousand a day... Why not my mother?" She laughed abruptly, and the sound chilled him. "Selena, where do you live?" "De Kruif," Selena said, almost casually. "Seventh Street and De Kruif. Why do you want to come? She doesn't even know me, Mel -- " "I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Selena? Did you hear me?" He slammed down the receiver, grabbed his coat, and left the Newsear building on the run. The address was a semi-ruin, stripped of electrical power. Danton ran past the useless elevator, and up the stairs to Selena's fifthfloor apartment. He found her sitting cross-legged on the floor, weeping into her lap, the eternal picture of woman in grief. It was the first time he had ever seen so raw emotion on the girl's face. Tears poured from only one eye, but the entire effect on her lovely, tortured face was one of sorrow and desolation. He lifted her to her feet, gently, and she leaned against him. "Selena... " "Oh, Mel. It was so terrible -- seeing her like that -- " "I know, I know..." "Do you?" She backed off and studied him. "Do you know what my mother's gone through? We were on the perimeter of a blast area five years ago. My father and sister were killed outright. My mother lost the use of one hand. I got out -- with this." She gestured towards the unmoving side of her face. "She withstood it, Mel. Four awful tragedies -- and she came through it. And now -- " She began to sob again. Danton waited patiently until the tears subsided. "I'm sure they'll find a cure," he said softly. "There have been catatonics before. They'll help her," She was moaning hopelessly. "This is different... different..." She broke from him, and walked unsteadily to the window. She folded her arms, and looked out at the gray clouds hovering overhead. "She called me at the office this morning. Something she hardly ever does. She was so worried. About snipers, she said. She felt they were everywhere, surrounding her -- " Her hands covered her face. "Snipers?" Danton blinked. "Oh, there have been snipers in the neighborhood before. But that was almost two years ago." "Newsear..." the lieutenant said. "What?" "It happened to me -- today -- on the fourth floor." "What did?" She turned to face him. "I'm not supposed to talk about it -- " "Mel! If there's something I should know -- " "Selena, I've been ordered!" His voice was pained. "I'm not supposed to say a word." She came to him. "Mel, what are you talking about?" "Selena, listen. I can't tell you any details -- and God help me if you repeat any of this -- "There's another kind of News ear" "Another kind?" Her. eyes widened. "Yes, The earpieces the Newsear personnel wear are 'clean' -- that's what they call it. The earpieces everybody else gets are 'dirty'. They have a sub-unit -- a secondary function -- that reaches right into the mind itself." "What are you saying?" Her head was moving from side to side. "It's true! There's a secondary broadcast that takes place every day on the fourth floor. A message to the public... a daily thought... a directive..." "Why? What for?" "Don't ask me to explain. I've never known about it until today. It's a way of unifying the efforts of the people -- Newsear tells them what to think." "To think?" she repeated, her voice quivering. "Mel, that's horrible! You can't direct the mind! You can't force thought on people! It's wrong! It's worse than bombs!" "But they can , Selena! I've seen the proof -- " "We don't know enough," she whispered. "We don't know what such a thing can do. What the mind will do..." She took two backward steps, her eyes fixed on the man in front of her, her hands covering her ears. "Mel!" she screamed. "They did it. They did this to my mother!" At #:# a.m. the next day, the thin man named Douglas said to Danton : "This is your home now." Danton looked around. It appeared to be more of a laboratory than a business office. "You'll sit here, of course," Danton said smoothly, pointing to the well-padded leather chair. "Don't let all those gadgets frighten you. Only three of them will actually make contact with your person. These electrodes will clamp on your head ; they're quite painless. A very mild current, nothing alarming. And you'll get used to it in time." "I see," the lieutenant said. "It will be your ability to concentrate that matters here. You must work very hard to keep your mind free of nothing but the order of the day." "And what will they be?" "The General Staff determines that. They vary from outpourings of patriotic feeling, to very specific drives." Danton stroked the back of the chair. "Have you heard much about these Frozen People ?" "Enough  # Douglas said. "What about them ? # "What do you think is causing it ? # "I've no idea , # he snapped. "I'm sure the authorities are working on it . # Kirsch came in. "We're ready to start . # "The first day is the hardest," Douglas said. "Good luck." Strapped firmly into the chair, his arms imprisoned, his brain a tool of world affairs, Mel Dan ton waited for the signal to begin. "The order for today," Douglas said, "is -- beware of spies. No one is to be trusted. Report suspicious actions immediately to your Home Guard headquarters." He clapped Danton's back. "Now all you have to do is think." He grinned, and left the room. Danton closed his eyes. "Destroy your Newsear " he thought. "Destroy your Newsear..."    (Continued from page #) the seed. That's what we've got to bring back, Sal. Between us, we have stored up a hundred and seventy-nine years of human culture. There isn't a kid back there, Sal, more than twelve years old." "We'll find a way," Sal said. The rowboat was about fifteen feet away from the thick reeds growing in the marshy ooze of the bank. Cartley heard the sound first and turned, his face white. When Sal looked toward the bank, he saw the girl. She came on out from the curtain of reeds and looked at them. She was perfectly clear in the moonlight standing there. She wore a short ragged print dress and she had long hair that seemed silken and soft and golden in the moonlight even though it, her dress, her little legs and her face were streaked with mud. Sal hesitated, then pulled heavily on his left oar and the boat nosed toward her. Up close, Sal could see her face, the clear blue eyes wet, and the tears running down her cheeks. The girl reached out and asked in a sobbing breath, "Granpa? Is that you, Granpa?" "Oh God, Oh God," Cartley said. He was crying as he picked her up and got her into the boat. He was rocking her in his arms and half crying and half laughing as Sal rowed the boat upstream. "Yes, yes, honey," Sal heard Cartley say over and over. "I'm your granpa, honey. Don't cry. Go to sleep now. I'm your granpa and I've been looking for you, honey, and now everything's going to be all right." It's funny, Sal thought, as he kept on rowing upstream. It's a funny thing how one little girl remembered her granpa, and how maybe that was the beginning of the bridge across the chasm.    the patient into Dr. Walter Needzak's office. She punched her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose, patted the bun of hair at the back of her head, and said : "This is Mr. Stallings, doctor." Dr. Needzak motioned the patient to a chair. Stallings sat down, slowly but limberly. He still held his hat, and placed it in the precise center of his lap. The receptionist handed a form to Dr. Needzak and returned to the waiting room, after looking once over her shoulder. "You're only #, Mr. Stallfelt got me so interested and excited that I forgot what I wanted at the office, once I was there. So I thought that that was a hopeful enough sign for me to come around and see you." Dr. Needzak, a young man at # and who looked even younger, hoisted the stethoscope amplifier onto his desk, turned it on, and signalled for Stallings to unbutton his shirt. He placed the stethoscope against the bony chest. The bumping of the heart filled the room, drew a wild pattern on the unfolding strip of paper in the visual secBut the patient lived ings?" Dr. Needzak asked. The patient nodded sadly. "Well, you should be hale and hearty for another # years, judging by the report on your preliminary exam. Are you sure that it's any use for you to consult me?" "I wouldn't bother you," Stallings said, age showing only in the high pitch of his voice, "except for the funny feeling in my chest the other day. I had to visit an office on the twelfth story. The elevator wasn't running, so I walked up. Just as an experiment, I went as fast as I could. The way my chest tion of the amplifier, and created magnetic patterns on the tape. Dr. Needzak listened for two minutes, then thumbed through a reference listing of visual heart patterns. Finally he switched off the amplifier, and said: "You have no history of heart trouble." "I'm afraid not." "Well, I don't want to raise false hopes. The only thing that I can suggest is more physical exertion. Really vigorous exertion, the kind that makes you pant and tremble and get a bit dizzy. Try that every day for a month and come back to see me. There's just a trace of a flutter now, and we might be able to speed up its development." The old man smiled for the first time, at something that his eyes saw behind the white plaster of the far wall. Finally, Stallings rose to leave. Buttoning himself up, he said: "You'll send the bill?" Dr. Needzak laughed genially. "I can see that you aren't accustomed to visiting doctors, young man. The better the doctor, the more risky it is to send the bill. My policy is to request full payment before the patient leaves the office, just in case I've given the right sort of advice. In cases where I prescribe medicine, of course, you may pay for the prescription and the consultation fee simultaneously. Before taking the medicine, you understand." Again he laughed. "I understand. I should have guessed. I work in a bank myself. I hate the work. I'm tired of everything, in fact. But I know how important it is to pay promptly." The doctor had just filed away Stallings' physical record when the receptionist ushered in an extremely elderly woman. Dr. Needzak smiled broadly, and said: "Mrs. Watkins! I didn't expect to see you again so soon." He waved in annoyance at the receptionist, who hovered behind the new patient. She left, reluctantly. Mrs. Watkins groped her way to the chair, wincing when the receptionist slammed the door. The old woman rubbed her bony forehead with a mottled hand that trembled and said: "I know that I wasn't supposed to come back for another three months. But did you realize that I'll have my #th birthday before those three months are up? When a person gets to be that old, she looks forward to seeing the doctor more than she used to look forward for Santa to arrive back in the old days." "No symptoms since your last visit?" Dr. Needzak spoke more loudly than usual in deference to her failing hearing, and turned up the light to aid weak, old eyes. "None." She spat out the word. "I'm going to change doctors, if this keeps up. I've heard of a couple of doctors who aren't as scrupulous as you are. After living all this time, I think that I could be permitted one little crime, lying to them about a symptom. Then I know that I'd be made happy. What's the use being moral when you're too frail and tottery to enjoy life?" Dr. Needzak shook his head, disapprovingly. "I don't think you're quite as miserable as you think you are. Don't go to those quack doctors. Suppose you're caught, halfway through a crime? You might linger for decades, half-well, halfsick, from the effects of what they'd give you. Even the quacks won't supply you with strychnine, you know." "I know. I shouldn't have suggested it. But I get so tired of liv  jj mg. "Well, I can't see any physical trouble that could have developed enough to warrant a complete exam since your last one. Maybe those arteries will start hardening by the time you have that #th birthday. Or you could take up chemistry as a hobby. Just think what a fine explosion you might get mixed up in!" "I thought of that." A couple of tears trickled down the wrinkled cheeks of Mrs. Watkins. "But the thrice-great-grandchildren watch me like a hawk. They don't let me do anything that might hiirt me. I suppose I'll just have to wait, and hope, and wait, and pray." She rose, very suddenly. Then she shook her head disgustedly. "I don't even get dizzy when I do that, like most people my age. Thank you, anyway, doctor." Mrs. Watkins walked out with dignity. Dr. Needzak noticed that his during the two seconds that Mrs. Watkins opened the door to leave. He fumed inwardly at his patience in dealing at length with cases like the last two, whom he couldn't possibly be sure of helping. But his ill-humor was replaced by astonishment. The receptionist introduced a woman even younger than he. She was very pale, but Dr. Needzak guessed that that pallor derived from tension, not some rare organic disturbance. "Are you sure that you haven't made a mistake, Miss Tillet?" He asked the question quietly, trying to catch her eyes. She kept them resolutely on her hands, which were folding and unfolding in her lap. "I talked with several good friends before coming to you, doctor," the girl said. Her voice was very low. "You had been a good doctor for their grandparents or great-grandparents. They told me that you could help me, if anybody could." "But your preliminary examination shows nothing whatsoever wrong with you," the doctor said. "It'll be another century before you would normally develop the slightest symptom on which I'd be allowed to work. And people of your age just don't go to doctors. It's only when you're past the century mark, and know that decade after decade stretches out ahead of you, that you start feeling that a doctor might -- " "Please," she interrupted, almost inaudibly. "I don't think that a physician should allow the consideration of a patient's age to enter into his course of action. For personal reasons, I may need a doctor more than the average person six times my age." "Will you tell me something about yourself? I'm not curious, except as far as knowledge might affect my recommendations." "I don't care to discuss personal problems. Now, doctor, your assistant who gave the preliminary examination overlooked the reason for my coming to you. Right here," and she carefully touched a spot on the well-tailored dress. "I think that it might be a tumor." "What good does it do to come to a doctor for that?" Dr. Needzak said. "Tumors are so rare that there's very little chance that it's more than your imagination. And the best physician can't speed up the growth of a tumor, or change it from benign to malign." "A physician can diagnose," she answered. "If it's malign, I'll be able to have patience. I won't need to break the law." Unexpectedly, grotesquely, she drew one finger across her throat in a cutting gesture, and looked squarely at him for the first time. Dr. Needzak walked softly to the door that led to the reception room. He drew noiselessly a bolt across the jamb, locking it. Then he pointed to another door, telling the girl: "Go in there and undress. I'll be ready for you in a moment." He whistled softly under his breath, as he pulled instruments and jars of colored substances from the deepest recesses of a cupboard. The girl already lay calmly on a metal table in the inner room when Dr. Needzak entered. He staggered a trifle under a precariously balanced pile of equipment in his arms. He explained : "I should let the receptionist do the hard work like this. But I don't let her snoop around in this private room." "Will you really need all those things?" the girl asked, uncertainly. "I thought that you just snip out a tiny specimen with a little gadget, to make a diagnosis." "I could probably get along with just that one gadget," the doctor said. He pulled a mask from a drawer and snapped on the sterilite. "But I'm an old boy scout at heart. Always prepared." Unexpectedly, he plopped the mask squarely over the girl's face. Her cry was almost inaudible, as the thick gauze clamped itself over her mouth, clung tightly beneath the jaw. Dr. Needzak pinioned her shoulders to the table, while her legs kicked wildly for a few seconds. The anesthetic stopped the kicking within five seconds. He waited for a count of ten, before he wrenched the mask free. Turning up the sterilite to full strength, Dr. Needzak began to line up surgical instruments in a neat row, humming under his breath. Fifteen minutes later, the physician made a pair of injections into the girl's upper arm. Then he swished oxygen into her face until she recovered consciousness. "Wonderful stuff, this new anesthetic," he told her placidly. "It works fast, wears off just as fast, doesn't leave the patient retching. Now, you can sit up slowly. If you don't try anything strenuous for the next day or two, you'll never know that you've had an operation." Miss Tillett's eyes widened. "Operation! I came here for a diagnosis. I didn't authorize -- " "I'm sorry. I operated without your consent. But I had a good reason. It wasn't even a benign tumor that you had. It was only a cyst. If I had merely diagnosed, and told you the truth, you would have kept clinging to the hope that it might be a malign tumor. You wouldn't have let me take it out. It would have grown big enough to disfigure you, not big enough to cause you any physical damage. You would have gone through the years with a new trouble, that of deformity, and you might have been mentally warped in the delusion that you had a fatal disease. You're as sound as a rock." Something inside the girl seemed to turn into liquid. She sat with slumped shoulders, arms dangling limply at her side, and head sunk so far that her chin rested against her chest. After a moment, she rose and walked slowly into the dressing cubicle. When she emerged, she ignored the doctor, unlocked the door with her own hands, and walked into the reception room, sobbing softly. Dr. Needzak cleaned up rapidly, and hustled into his main office to see his next patient. No one was there. He grumbled to himself and opened the door into the reception room. Blinking, he saw that it was not a half-hour earlier. The doctor had heard no noises indicating a commotion on the street outside; and that was the only reason he could think of for the sudden disappearance of his patients. To make sure, he strode through the reception room, walked briskly down the short hall, and stuck his head through the door leading into the street. Everything appeared normal in the bustling business district, until a large, black sedan ground to a stop at the curb in a no parking zone. The receptionist climbed from the vehicle, two men behind her. "Miss Waters!" Dr. Needzak exploded, when she reached the building's entrance. "What do you mean by leaving without my permission? All my patients have left. They must have thought that office hours were over." The receptionist gave him one baleful look, and shoved past him into the building. And Dr. Needzak suddenly recognized the two men. "Bill Carson! And Pop Manville! What brings you big doctors down here to see a small-time pill-dealer like me?" "Let's go into your office," Pop said, softly. He was old, tall and gaunt with a perpetual look of worry. Dr. Carson, younger and bustling, evaded Dr. Needzak's eyes. Miss Waters was shoveling personal belongings from her desk into a giant handbag, when they reached the reception room. Dr. Needzak felt her eyes upon him, as the other two physicians kept him moving by the sheer impetus of their bodies into his consultation room. "Where is it, Walt?" Dr. Manville asked, looking gloomily around the consultation room. "Where's what, Pop? The drinks? I keep them -- " "The door to your operating room," Dr. Carson interrupted, hurriedly. "Let's not drag this thing out. It's going to be painful enough, among old friends. Your private office has been wired for sight and sound for the past three weeks. You shouldn't have tried to get away with that kind of practice in a big city." Dr. Needzak felt the blood draining from his face. He reached fof a drawer. Dr. Manville grabbed hk arm with a tight, claw-like grasp f before it could touch the handle. "It's all right, Pop," he said. "Nothing but gin in there. I'm not the violent type." Dr. Carson pulled open the drawer toward which he had reached. He pulled out the tall bottle, slipped off the patent top, and sniffled. Handing it to Dr. Needzak, . he said : "Okay. You need some. Then save the rest for us. We'll feel like it, too, when we're done." Dr. Needzak coughed after three large swallows. He looked at the other two doctors. "Who ratted?" Dr. Carson nodded toward the reception room. Dr. Needzak instinctively clenched his fists. He half-rose from his chair, then sank back slowly. "I thought you guys were my friends," he said. "We are, Walt," Dr. Manville said thoughtfully. "But this is business. When someone charges violation of medical ethics, we're the investigation committee. It looks like a simple investigation this time, with those tapes on file." "What does she have against you, anyway?" Dr. Carson asked. "Usually a receptionist will go through hell to cover up little flubs for her boss. Were you mixed up with her in a personal way?" "Mixed up with her?" Dr. Needzak laughed mirthlessly. "She's worked for me fifteen years. I've never made a pass at her." Dr. Manville nodded sadly. "That was your mistake, Walt. Frustration. Disappointment. Worse than jealousy. Now, why not tell us everything?" "There's nothing to tell. Those tapes give a false impression, sometimes. I just take difficult cases back there where I'm sure there won't be any disturbance." "No tise," Dr. Carson interrupted. "Things will be harder for you, if we lose patience with you. We know you've been curing illness against the patient's wishes, time after time. We just saw you take out a tumor. The poor kid will probably drag through another hundred years before she develops anything else serious. You prescribed anticoagulants to a man with an obvious blood clot. You even talked a couple with weak lungs into moving to Denver." "All right, it was a tumor," Dr. Needzak admitted. "It was malign and it would have killed her in two or three years. But she's too young to make a decision for herself. Five years from now, she may have a different outlook on her personal problems. I have ethics, and I can't help it if they don't correspond in some details with the association's ethics." "You were given your medical license under an oath to respect the ethics of the profession," Dr. Manville said slowly, emphatically. "The license did not give you the right to practice under ethics of your own invention." "Ethics!" Dr. Needzak looked as if he wanted to spit. "Ethics is just a word. There was a time when physicians spent their time curing diseases and preventing them. They called that ethics. nNow that there aren't enough illnesses left to give us work, now that people live long past the time when they want to go on living, now that we make our money helping people commit suicide the legal way, we call that ethics." "You can't annihilate a concept simply by thinking it's only a word," Dr. Manville said. "There was a time when physicians used leeches for almost every patient. They fitted that nasty habit into their ethics. You wouldn't want to introduce leeches into this century would you? But you should, if you're so consistently opposed to anything that sounds like changes in ethics." "But I've done my part to get rid of human miseries," Dr. Needzak said, nodding toward a filing cabinet. "I can show you the data on hundreds of my patients. Old folks, who just got tired of living; I helped them die legally. Even younger people, who had a genuine reason for being tired of life. I couldn't have my fine home or pay rent in this building, if I went around curing every patient. There's no money in that." "You wouldn't keep a filing cabinet for the times you disobeyed the medical code," Dr. Carson broke in. "But we have some of those cases on tape. You didn't refuse to handle the cases. You went ahead and played God, going directly against the direct will of your patients. Did you follow up all of the patients who aren't in your file cabinets? We traced the later records of some of them. Several suicided right out in the open. Their families haven't gotten back on their feet from the disgrace yet." Dr. Needzak took two more deep swallows from the bottle. He looked glumly at the low level of the liquid through its dark side, saying: "You fellows are enjoying this conversation more than old friends should enjoy the job of taking action against a fellow-doctor. And I'll tell you why you aren't too unhappy about it. You're jealous of me. You're jealous of the fact that I've been following a physician's natural instincts and healing people. You're angry with me for doing the things that you'd really love to do yourselves, if you had the guts. You aren't worried about that girl; you're peeved because you'd give your shirts for a chance to take out a genuine tumor yourself." "Admitted," Dr. Carson said cheerfully. "I haven't seen a live tumor in three or four years. They're scarce. But we can't sit here chatting. We don't want to end up arguing." Dr. Needzak rose. "What do I do, then?" "The best action would be to come along with us to the association headquarters," Dr. Manville advised, avoiding Dr. Needzak's eyes. "In a half-hour or so, you can sign enough statements to avoid weeks of hearings. Otherwise, we'll be forced to bother lots of other physicians, hunt up your old patients, endure newspaper publicity, and have a general mess." "After that, I start pounding the pavements, hunting a job." Dr. Needzak flexed his long, lean fingers. "Is it hard to learn how to operate ditch diggers?" Dr. Carson stood up and slapped him on the back. "It isn't that bad. You can find a place in any pharmacy in the country, if we get through this disbarment without publicity. You'll never be rich, handing out irritants and hyperstimulants, but -- " Dr. Needzak was already striding toward the street. The other two doctors trailed after him, waiting while he locked up carefully. They glanced at one another significantly, noting that he had unconsciously brought along his little black bag. Dr. Needzak explained as they began the two-block walk to association headquarters : "The kids are married and away from home. I suppose that I can get enough income from sub-leasing the office to keep the wife and me eating until I find -- " A grating crash broke into his sentence. The three doctors whirled simultaneously. Thin wails drifted through the constant rumble of traffic, from somewhere around a comer. People erupted from buildings, running toward the source of the noise. The doctors instinctively trotted after them. coming upon a rare sight. It was a motor vehicle accident, first in the business district for months. A school bus lay on its side, just short of the intersection. Children were clambering cautiously from the emergency door. The uniformed driver was ignoring his passengers, staring in disbelief at the radar controls at the street comer, which had failed a moment earlier. The other vehicle involved in the crash was wrapped around a power pole. It was an auto of antique vintage, produced before full automatic driving provisions. There weren't more than a dozen such no vehicles remaining on the streets of the city. The radar controls almost never went on the blink. Only the combination of the vehicle and the inoperative controls could have created an accident. Dr. Needzak led the other doctors through the thickening crowd, to the side of the bus. Kids were no longer climbing through the emergency exist, but noises were coming from within the vehicle. His bag under his left arm, he hauled himself atop the overturned bus, and dropped through the emergency exit into its half-dark interior. He saw the other two doctors outlined against the sky, as they perched on the horizontal side of the vehicle, peering down, helpless without their bags. Dr. Needzak found a small boy sprawled awkwardly around a seat, bleeding rapidly from the leg, face ashen, unconscious. The physician clipped off the trousers leg, bound the leg tightly above the deep gash, and slipped on a bandage. Then he lifted the small boy up to Dr. Carson. A girl was struggling to raise herself from the next seat, obviously unaware that the leg wouldn't support her because it had suffered a compound fracture. Dr. Needzak forced a grin when he attracted her attention. He persuaded her to lie flat. With one quick motion, he rough-set the leg. Then he boosted her out of the vehicle, and looked down to investigate the source of the plucking at his coat. It was a small, chubby boy, standing beside him. "I'm hurt real bad," the boy said. Needzak ran his hands over the boy's body to make sure the bones were sound. "You better take care of me real quick' the child said, looking more worried than ever. Dr. Needzak made sure that the blood on the boy's cheek came from only a scratch, and found the heartbeat normal. So he pulled a a sugar wafer from his bag and ordered the boy to swallow it. "Think you can climb out now?" Dr. Needzak asked. The youngster, face brightening, leaped to the door and went out unassisted. The only child remaining in the vehicle hadn't uttered a sound. But the doctor sensed that her breathing was heavier. He bent over her, and pushed back the lid of her half-closed eye. When he saw the back of her head, he stopped his hasty examination. Her words were barely audible. "Am I hurt bad?" "Why, there won't even be any pain," Dr. Needzak told her cheerfully. Before he could yell to the other doctors to call for a stretcher, the girl's breathing stopped. Slowly, as if suddenly tired, Dr. Needzak climbed out of the vehicle. Police had already dispersed the crowd. Tow trucks were waiting to haul away the vehicles. The injured children were gone. The three doctors resumed their walk. Dr. Needzak felt the eyes of the other two men on him, lost patience after a moment, and said irritably: "Go ahead, start bawling me out. But I've not signed anything yet. I'm still a licensed physician. I had every right to help those kids." The other two doctors stopped, looking at one another, as if trying to probe each other's thoughts. Simultaneous smiles spread over their faces. Dr. Needzak stopped walking, when he heard them starting to laugh. He pushed between them with a frown, asking: "Look, if you -- " Dr. Carson slapped him on the back, hard. Dr. Manville grasped Dr. Needzak's hand and squeezed it with unexpected strength. "The same thing hit us both at the same time, I'll bet," the older doctor said. "It would be the ideal thing for you." Dr. Carson was pumping Dr. Needzak's other hand up and down. "Sure. Emergency physician! I don't know why we didn't think of that in the first place. Accidents still happen now and then. It isn't to specialize in them, because it isn't steady income and it doesn't pay a whole lot. But you have those screwball ideas about helping people to get well. And that's just what an emergency physician must do." "I'll talk to a couple of the men on the association board as soon as I can get to a telephone," Dr. Manville said. "I think I can persuade them to assign you to accidents without going through a disbarring procedure, as long as you agree to stay away from general Dr. Needzak pulled his hands free and looked at the spots of dried blood that remained on the fingers and palms. He hadn't been able A new type of bus will be built as soon as countries of the world have roads to take it. The new coach is to be built entirely of plastic and will be roofed with polarized glass, so that passengers will have an uninterrupted view without having to worry about the glare of the strongest sun. Passengers will be seated in individual armchairs that can be inclined or swiveled at will. The plastic construction will make for extreme lightness, but give the same strength now associated only with metal construction. The coach is to be air-conditioned, and the design includes arrangements for radio-telephone and television. Other equipment includes refrigerator, coffee-machine and buffet. Suspension of the coach will be independent on all four wheels, incorporating a balancing system for expected high speeds. It will also have special tubeless tires and the gas turbine motor, which is being built by Fiat, will be mounted under the floorboards. The boss of the future may dictate letters directly to a phonetic typewriter or speech writer that will type out his words. A model of such a voice-operated typewriter has already been constructed and has a vocabulary of ten common English words, including "Are, see, a." It types from dictation with #  accuracy which, researchers comment, "is probably as good as the average secretary." The first step toward the speech writer was to analyse speech in terms of "formants". Next problem was conversion of the energy of speech sounds into a series of visual tokens whose number of types is on the same order as the number of different symbols in a written language. Development also includes such factors as the particular form in which the word is typed, the means for analyzing the sounds of speech, identification of sounds, translating sounds into impulses for actuating the machine, and finally design of mechanism for operating the typewriter. Next step in keeping the atomic peace may be internationalization of the radar and other warning nets. Scientists in the know have privately been suggesting that it might be effective for both the U.S. and the Russians to admit that their warning networks are in great danger of clashing and getting mixed up with each other. They suggest that the two countries get together and man a jointly consolidated warning line pointed both ways. Each side would, of course, reserve the right to have their own air intelligence. With United Nations the logical agency to perform the function, World peace may be bought more cheaply and more safely with such a joint operation. Paper made from sugar cane may soon help solve the shortage of pulpwood for papermaking. A fibrous residue of sugar cane stalks, known as bagasse, is already being made into newsprint. Now agriculture scientists have found an economical method for making other grades of paper from the waste product. The new process separates bagasse fibers from the pith, which gives greater strength to fibers for use in making fine bleached papers and packaging materials. Bagasse papers are stronger than softwood papers in all but tearing resistance. They are particularly suited for blending with wood pulps to make different kinds of paper products. The pith remaining after bagasse fibers are extracted is useful as a carrier for blackstrap molasses used as feed. An atomic arsenal on rails designed to fight the nation's destructive agricultural pests may soon be crisscrossing the nation's farmlands. As a mobile railway irradiation station, the proposed "Atomic Flyer" could be used to treat potatoes to keep them from sprouting; process citrus fruits, curtail fruit fly infestation, increase the shelf-life of seafoods and sterilize the insects in grain and cereal that annually eat their way through # worth of food. Preliminary design is already completed and it is hoped that the #-ton unit can be built by government or industry and placed in operation within two years. Engineers estimate the radiation train will cost # to build and # a year to operate. The rolling station could handle from one-half to I I tons of food an hour, depending on the dosage required. The cost of treatment per ton would range from # to #. Earth is now between two Ice Ages and another glacial advance can be expected within a few centuries, according to proposals made by scientists recently. Some hundreds of years from now, temperature decreases will mark the start of a new glacial period. At the time, the Arctic Ocean, which seems to have been warming up recently, will be entirely ice free. For the last few thousand years, researchers point out, temperatures have remained about as high as the highest value reached during any previous interglacial stages. These temperatures are regulated by the surface layers of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, not external conditions. An ice-free Arctic Ocean would result in a marked increase in the exchange of water between the Arctic and the Atlantic, warming the former and cooling the latter. An open Arctic would provide moisture for glacier growth but would eventually reduce sea level, resulting in a sharp decrease of the inflow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean. The cooling effect would eventually produce a new Arctic ice sheet. A "made to order" super alloy, representing a major step forward in metallurgy, was shown in New York recently by its developers. The alloy, called Nivco, was hailed by scientists as the forerunner of a new class of metals that can be "tailormade" to do a specific job. Important as is the alloy itself, research technique used to develope the alloy is perhaps more important. The process permits "predesign" of needed properties in an alloy before it is ever prepared, thereby eliminating the time-and-money-consuming "cut and try" methods now being used. The new material, five times stronger than # chrome steel, resists breakdown when subjected to temperatures as high as # degrees Fahrenheit and mechanical vibration. Although exact ingredients of the new alloy were not disclosed, metallurgists said it contained cobalt and nickel and smaller amounts of five additional elements. An immediate application for the alloy will be for high-temperature steam turbine blades. The day when television antennas can pick up any station within range without need of rotation is foreseen. Physicists have found that, at least in theory, pick-up can be altered by feeding power to points other than the center of the antenna as is now done. Changing the power feed point should set up reception waves simultaneously in from two to several directions. The study was initiated because when the artificial satellite is launched communication between it and Earth is important and very little is yet known about the mathematical equations which govern the operation of antennas. Since a rocket or satellite couldn't use an outside antenna, scientists are investigating the possibility of cigar shaped antennas and find that it is possible to treat the rocket itself as an antenna by applying electrical charges to various parts of the rocket. Radiation forecasts may soon be appearing in the daily newspapers along with the weather summaries. Since such information is more vital potentially, to human health and welfare than temperature or rainfall figures, the National Academy of Sciences has suggested it as one way to keep people posted for their personal safety and the prevention of defective children in future generations. In the atomic industry each worker carries a radiation badge. In our atomic world everyone may be asked to carry some such radiation record or to be inspected, like one's car, periodically. Or we may have personal X-ray records for medical radiation, and doctors and dentists may be required to go through them periodically to check radiation "debits". Even the prospective bride may ask for such information on the groom along with such prosaic matters as money in the bank. IQ? C. # -- Geode. # -- Minerals. # -- Minus # G. # -- Synapse. # -- Gilbert. # -- Extremes. # -- Red. # -- Female. # -- Zwitterion. #I -- North magnetic pole. # -- Metals. I # -- Quadrature. (Continued from page #) my fault. They killed him because he tried to help us." "No," said Jerry. "It had nothing to do with you. He told us about you, but they never knew of any connection, either way. Mark slipped up somewhere along the line, or they were too clever for him. It's a chance we all take. "We volunteer to go in. To infiltrate the system and help point up its evils and contradictions to intelligent people -- people like you." "You had me fooled, "Oren said. "But in the end it was that crazy gag line of yours that we remembered -- and we went." "You certainly did," Jerry said. "You went a lot sooner than we expected you to and we had the devil's own time finding you. I come here every Jubilee Day -- guiding a tour of drunks from Inside makes fine camouflage. It's a sort of wide-open town anyway and I can report and get new instructions from Outside. The old man told me you were here. He's one of us." "I liked him, too," Oren said. "How many of you are there, Inside?" "Plenty of us. There have to be, because there are a lot of you -- people we need Outside." "You need us?" Edith asked. "Honestly? We're not just -- refugees?" "You're a cause celebre" Jerry said. "And in that connection I think I can reassure you about your baby, Mrs. Donn." Edith looked toward the crib where Marty was sleeping. "The new one," Jerry said. "We've had experience with the para-ray and your baby will be all right." "Thank God," said Edith. "And of course we need you," Jerry went on. "We're rebuilding hands and stout hearts but we need a brain or two besides. And a little music to lighten the burden, Mrs. Donn. "We want to live in peace with the City-States, even though we're the remnants of their defeated enemies. But if we can't live side by side in dignity and if it comes to a struggle, one day there'll be a lightning coup from within and without simultaneously. As I said, there are many of us, and some of us are pretty high up." "Do you mean in the government itself?" Oren asked. Jerry smiled. "I've talked too much already. And I have to get back to the roisterers. Now go to sleep. Talk to the old man in the morning and he'll send you to a man who'll show you the way." As he left them, Jerry Hilarious said softly, smiling and without the gesture: "G'wan outside!" As they walked, the next morning, towards sanity and dignity, the sun came out. It was warm and friendly. Edith felt a slight movement of life inside her. Maybe she'd never write the fourth movement of her symphony now, but she didn't care. She was beginning to live it.    Dear Mr. Quinn: In the "Hue and Cry" section (which, by the way, I seldom read) of the August issue of IF, I came across an Ed's note at the very bottom of the last page which ran: "Reader Bellows has grabbed a tiger by the tail. Hope he's got more than personal opinions to back up his stand."... After reading the preceding letter, I was inclined to agree that Bellows had indeed grabbed a tiger by the tail. By the very nature of his (or her) letter, even the most rear-ranked amateur is able to deduce that friend Bellows is a fatalist in his beliefs about Mankind's destiny. And, in the fault-finding way of every fatalist, is living up to his name by heavens. In the relatively short time that Man has thrived upon this planet as an intelligent species, he has literally lifted himself by his bootstraps to a position where he is able to look back at what he has achieved with a certain amount of satisfaction; in the same breath, he is able to look forward to the position he desires to attain avoiding the dangerous pitfalls he has come to recognize across the years through a process of trial and error. I believe I can sum up my whole gripe in the words of Omar Khyyam ; fatalist ; deceased : "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on : nor all your piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it." Dwell on that, Sir (Lady) Bellows!!!" -- Wayne L. Simpson Dear Editor: I agree with K.J. Ashton in that a meeting with "aliens" is inevitable, and that science fiction is not helping us prepare for it. What if this meeting is being prevented, or has been prevented by the adverse mental stereotypes created by science fiction? Science fiction novels, magazines and especially Hollywood films have painted aliens, whether correctly or otherwise, in an unfavorable light. I feel too many people would adopt a "shoot first" attitude because of this overall picture. It seems thus logical to assume that under such a deluge of unfavorable writing and the mental attitudes it is creating, no alien would risk open contact. -- Allan Marcus Lorain, Ohio Sirs: There are two questions I would like to answer. First -- concerning the cruelness of characters from outer space -- frankly, I believe this portrayal is a mistake. If man is to prepare for the meeting, why isn't it just as plausibkito suppose these creatures or beings are the sort that would realize our shortAnd two: This fellow Bellows -- yes, I agree, Man is not ready for other worlds. He has had Utopia at his finger-tips -- stripped it bare, upset its natural laws, bickered and destroyed. How can he expect to exact Utopia from another world when he can not even manage his own? Mankind has not reached his full potential and this would seem to me to be the first step he must take... his own perfection! Then and only then will he be ready to look on other horizons, other worlds. -- Meta Vratny Detroit, Mich. Dear Editor: The obvious fallacy of Mr. Ashton's letter was too great for me to let it pass unchallenged. I fear that all he has done is to show his ignorance of science fiction. So he wants kind aliens, does he? Well what about Ho-Pan Xvin in Tenn's "The Deserter"; Maeth in "The Witness" by Eric Frank Russell; the People in Zenna Henderson's "Ararat" ; the alien in "Alien" by Lester del Rey; Nemo in "The Clinic" by Sturgeon  and a host of others -- in particular lovable Mr. Green in Richard Wilson's heartwarming "Friend of the Family". I suggest that Mr. Ashton read these and if he isn't forced to eat his words I'll send him some more. -- Kent Meyers Le Roy, Minn. Dear Mr. Quinn: In criticism of Mr. Ryder's letter in the June issue. I would like to comment that his complaint against anti-science "humanists" is too general. We must realize that many scientists are "humanists" in their own way and not a few "humanists" are also scientifically minded, in the material sense. The morality of scientific discoveries in the physical realm arises in the application of these discoveries; both "humanists" and scientists share the blame for any existing evils stemming from technical progress. It is well known how far afield certain scientists go, even to the extent of dogmatically pronouncing on metaphysical problems such as the existence of God. On the other hand, many humanists have adopted the spirit of science, namely pragmatism, in investigations, in social, religious and philosophical subjects. Paradoxically, this last group breeds anti-intellectual philosophers. Justification for either attitude, I suppose, can be found in the fact that some people regard man as a mere material being. The controversy is not between "smug liberal arts" and "disinterested physical science', but between pragmatism and classic traditionalism, between expedient morals and necessary morals. If we take the trouble to look, we will find "humanists" and scientists on both sides of the fence, so neither faction alone is to blame for the evils of applied science. -- A. M. King Ames, Iowa Dear Mr. Quinn: I want to compliment you on the June issue of IF, especially "Z". I'll go so far as to say that newspaperman Fontenay's "Z" is the best story I've ever read. It is one of the few times I have ever seen a completely new concept used. However, a couple of things seem to be inadequately explained: #. Since Summer was regressing, or rather growing backward through time, how can her affection for Thomas the cat, which led her to be caught in the explosion, be explained (unless it was a holdover from her previous existence as Mark) ? #. I can see how, immediately before the explosion, Summer would speak and act in reverse, but why would each separate word be normally spoken? I've been reading IF for over two years now, and I honestly believe it's the best s-f magazine on the market. Would also like to hear from other sfans in the area. -- Charles Boldrick Lebanon, Ky. The affection for Thomas was indeed a holdover... we know because we asked the same question. We thought of the other one too; but decided we could take some "poetic license" since both printers and proofreaders would have gone stark staring mad if we tried to spell all the words backwards too -- to say nothing of the readers . Dear Mr. Quinn: I have recently carried a figure to the fourth dimension and am now working out a formula. It proves that time travel is impossible and that the future doesn't exist until we get there. If you would like to have the formula for your letter column please let me know. -- Wiley Jordan, Jr. Brookings, Ore. We definitely do want to see that formula and we're darn sure most of our readers do too. # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania you can teach us something about space flight and your mental powers." "Oh yes!" said Olbu eagerly. "And if I have by any chance cast reflections on your planet... "My dear Mr. Olbu, science has never suffered when scientists have dealt frankly with problems at hand." "I'm afraid our time is up," put in Cecil Burroughs. "Thank you gentlemen, and I hope our viewers will tune in again next week when we will have two interesting personalities, Sam Katchum, who tames rattlesnakes, and Joe Wattles, who stuffs cobras. Glad we could be together." Ralph Rodkey shook Dr. Bruber's hand as he emerged from the (Continued from page #) broadcast room. "You saved my life; you saved my job!" "Think nothing of it, Ralph. It was nothing I wouldn't have done for myself." "But if you hadn't known about GC# becoming a super nova -- " "You don't think the loss of GC# was accidental, do you?" "Good Lord, Bruber. I don't know anything about those things." "As our friend Olbu said, Man develops along certain patterns... first his own planet, then neighboring planets, then star systems." "You don't think -- ?" "I do, Rodkey. I do. Somebody else was just a little more advanced than GC# and did to them what they wanted to do to us."    unconscious. His face was battered by windblast almost beyond recognition, and his body equally so. When the rescue team pulled him from the water, three hours later, they thought he was an old man. His eyes were a mass of red, from dozens of sub-conjunctival hemorrhages. He would see again, but not until after weeks of near blindness. But he was alive. When he woke up in the California hospital four days later, he considered ruefully that that was about the best one could expect in his business. "Cressey, can you hear me?" "Yes, I can hear you. Who is it?" "It's Captain Mackley. I've come (Continued from page #) to see you." "Well -- thanks, Captain." "You got the Outspacer, Cressey. I thought you'd like to know." "Frankly, Captain, I couldn't care less. But thanks for telling me, anyway." "It means a lot, Cressey. There were a lot of people's lives riding with you." Yeah , Fm a hero. Fm a Hornetman. "Thanks, Captain." "Was it pretty rough?" Rough ? Like birth and death and all of life , rolled into minutes. "No more so than I expected, Captain. Pretty much routine. Routine for a Hometman."    -- Continued from Back Cover thi musmor science Ficrm cussics j # # srouMm stows Any Of These Great Fiction masterpieces described here -- Free -- with your first regular Selection. Exploring Mars. (See other Side.) Every month, you will be offered the "cream" of the new # and # Science-Fiction books -- for only #. You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year. This offer may have to be withdrawn. So mail Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. They're packed with roeket-fast stories that take you soaring through time and space -- in handsome Mars as your first selection. about the first A-bomb, written before it was invented! One about le machine that shows "newstany others. imous novels; a complete play; scores of all-time great S-F tories. including H. (J. Wells' 'Invasion from Mars." made famous by Orson Welles. authors. Wonders of Earth and Man. Amazing inventions. Space travel. Worlds of tomorrow. # fascinating pages I Series). The girl whose tortured mind is bombarded by the thought waves of other people. The synthetic creature that goes "berserk" at high temperatures. Sohl. A terrifying, suspensepacked story of the future, when the Reds have enslaved every living soul on earth -- except one American boy. Judith Merril. A new collection of # superb tales of fantasy -- the supernatural mass hypnosis -- telepathy -- levitation, etc. Dept. IF-#. Garden City. New York with Exploring Mars as my first selection. Bill me only I (plus few cents shipping charges), and enroll me as a member. Every month send Club's free bulletin so that I may decide whether to receive the coming selections described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus shipping. I need take only four books during each year I am a member -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. # days, pay nothing and this membersnip will be cancelled.  Astounding ScienceFiction Anthology  Best From Fantasy and Science-Fiction  Omnibus of Science-Fiction  Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time  Point Ultimate  Treasury of ScienceFiction Classics (Please Print) Selections in Canada # plus shipping. Address # Bond, Toronto #, (Good only in Continental U. S. and Canada.) This Exciting New Book Is Your "Ticket" to Explore Mars with One of America's Top Scientists. To the Most Fascinating Planet of All! I Richardson, well-known astronomer c f the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, takes us streaking through space at more than # miles per second to the most intriguing planet of the universe -- Mars ! How long will it take the first interplanetary space ship, as scientists now visualize it, to reach Mars? Will it be ?Any #"." when you join and get "Exploring Mart" a your first See Other Side for Complete Details able to get back to Earth? What sort of an atmosphere does Mars have? Is there any life there ? Are the "canals" actually channels of water? Are its polar ice caps made of "dry ice"? What causes the "pink mists" that give Mars its reddish glow? The author answers these and hundreds of other questions, as he takes you on ing reading that it has been chosen as the first Selection for new members of the Science-Fiction Book Club. You can start your membership with EXof the great Science-Fiction classics described on the other side of this for only #, as a new member. Pick the ones you want now, and mail the Dept. IFI #, Garden City, N. Y.  k James McConnell, Bryce Walton and others See page # for full details All Stories New and Complete  by Stephen Bartholomew # The Titan Flagpole Painter by Mel Hunter IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lora Street, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this ' magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next (April) issue on sale February #th mimmiii With this issue, IF is five years old, and the question that seems to have popped up most frequently during that time is one concerning its title. Some folks aver that IF isn't the best title a science fiction magazine could have. Others express the opinion that it is a good title. Neutrals ask: "Why did you call it IF?" At the #th World Science Fiction Convention in New York the subject came up and one of the best known artists in the field remarked that IF had more science fiction "guts" than any other title. It was a flattering remark. Yet, with more truth than we realized at the time. For when you really think about it for a while, IF is science fiction! For instance, any science fiction story you read is really: "What would happen if -- ?" A sound philosophy, a logical extrapolation and good writing provide the imaginary answer. An imaginary answer, a fictional answer -- but an answer that gives us some of the most stimulating and entertaining reading we have today, reading that provokes thought and presents some fascinating new concepts about Mankind of the Future. Thus, we always come back to if. What would happen if -- if the human lifespan was increased to # years, if the awesome power of nuclear fission got out of hand, if telepathy or electronics or semantics were ever developed to the ultimate, if space travel became an everyday event, if the integration of nationalities, languages, races, creeds and colors became a reality -- if anyone of the myriad sciences were projected a hundred or thoufuture? in time to make this issue. The theme is "medicine at the crossroads" and it examines, in the light of progress of yesterday and today, the expectations of the future. We found it to be completely fascinating, an article of equal interest to members of the medical profession as to lay readers. Don't miss it... Henry Slesar, who makes his first appearance in these pages with is another who does science fiction in his spare time. A newcomer to the field and a young man just under thirty, he has been earning his living at the typewriter since he was # years old. With five years out for time in the Service, most of it has been writing advertising copy. At present he is vice president of a New York advertising agency and lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter, a little girl almost two. He claims a collection of records that would be the envy of any jazz lover... Charles Fontenay (See October issue) recently made national news when he won first prize at a Nashville art exhibit -- with a wipe rag for his brushes. When I wrote him about it, he replied: "It's one of the funniest things that ever happened to me... The whole thing started when one of those Nashville abstract artists got control of a statewide exhibit here early this year, and threw out # of # paintings entered, leaving in only the abstracts. One of those thrown out was mine, and I didn't get my entry fee back. I was painting something at the time, and slapped my excess paint on an old canvas and angrily told my wife, 'That's exactly the sort of stuff that gets blue ribbons nowadays. I'm going to enter that in the state fair and win first prize.' I went through with it -- and it did!... The abstract artists who infest Nashville are madder than hops, which tickles me no end." Bryce Walton who has appeared others), is one of the most prolific writers in the general fiction field. To date he has two books, a hundred television shows, numerous articles, and over # short stories, novelettes and short novels to his credit. He writes under his own name (Bryce Walton) and # pen names. ' Bom in a one-room farmhouse in an isolated section of Northwest Missouri, May #, #, his only playmates until the age of nine were horses, cows, pigs, dogs, birds, ; chickens and snakes. He grew up in an imaginative world of his own in which he fantasied the animals as being people and vice versa. This confusion remains with him even today and, he says, contributes to his continuation as a writer. He does not feel that any character he has ever seen in the world of fiction, literary or otherwise, has but a faint resemblance to the people he meets in real life. He is convinced that fictional characters are created to carry out an author's whims and are therefore understandable, but that real people are beyond comprehension. Mr. Walton attended public school in Kansas City, where he never succeeded in making a decent adjustment to his schoolmates as human beings, but always got to imagining them as friendly and sometimes not so friendly animals. After graduating from High School he stepped into the depression of the Thirties and spent several years bumming about the country on freight trains, and although at this time he had no idea of becoming a writer, he did all the things writers are supposed to have done -- migrant fruit picker in Idaho and California, gold miner in Montana, carpenter, sign-painter, dishwasher, fry-cook, etc. He worked his way through Los Angeles City College as a school librarian for the National Youth Administration, and in #I he enlisted in the U. S. Navy. He became a writer when he wrote such a stirring portrait of the ( Continued on page #) Brevity was the new watchword. Vrythg dgstd stht Isrcdb njyd. Illustrated by Ed Emsh Abbr. W alther Von Koenigsburg woke up a few moments after the earth shuttle had passed Venus. As he gazed back at the lonely, shrouded planet, abandoned long ago when Man won freedom to colonize more habitable worlds in deep space, Walther realized that in just a matter of minutes his long pilgrimage would be over. Soon he would walk down the ramp and set foot on Earth -- the almost mythical homeland of his people. Walther was young enough, and old enough, not to be ashamed of the sudden choking in his throat, the moisture in his eyes. A light touch on his shoulder brought him back to the shuttle ship. The pert stewardess smiled at his start. "Wyslgsr," she asked pleasantly. Or at least that's what it sounded like to Walther, whose ears were still ringing from the take off at the "I beg your pardon," he began. "I'm afraid..." For a moment she looked startled, then her full, red lips parted in another bright smile. "Oh, I'm sorry!" she exclaimed. "I didn't realize... I just asked, Sir, whether you had been sleeping" She spoke with the mechanical, stilted perfection he had first noted when transferring from the Aldebaran liner at the shuttleport. He had wondered, briefly, about the source of the accent, but had been too polite to ask. The stewardess put a small pillow in his lap, then placed a tray on it. The recessed compartments of the tray held a cup of steaming black coffee, a piece of pastry that reminded Walther of apfelstrudel, and a paper-covered booklet entitled: "Easy Earth Dictionary and Orientation Manual". Stamped on the cover, in the manner of an official seal, were the words: "Prepared under the authorization of Happy Time, Ltd." "Thank you," said Walther, then he grinned buoyantly, eager to share these moments of excitement at being so close to Earth. "But I don't think I'll need the dictionary!" Tiny frown lines appeared between the stewardess's carefully arched eyebrows. "Hg su'v rthsr?" she inquired uncertainly. "I don't understand..." The stewardess managed a professional smile that was edged with just the faintest touch of impatience. "That's what I thought. What I asked, Sir, was how long since you've been on Earth?" "This is my first visit!" "Then you had better study the dictionary," she said firmly. "Oh, no, I really don't need it!" Walther's inner excitement showed in the flush of his fair Nordic complexion. He turned toward her in a burst of confidence. "You see, my people always kept alive their native languages. My father's side of the family was German... and down through all the generations they've managed to teach the language to their children! It was the same way with my mother's family, who were English..." Pride came into his voice : "I could speak both languages by the time I was four." "And you've never taken this shuttle from Cyngus?" "I've never been on Cyngus before -- nor on Aldebaran VI -- Deneb II -- or Arcturus IX," explained Walther, naming the farflung way station across the galaxy. He added: 'Tm on my way in from Neustadt -- Andromeda, you know." Respect replaced the hint of impatience in the stewardess's smile, which instantly became more personal. Not for generations had a colonist from the Andromeda galaxy boarded this shuttle; the Andromeda run, across # light years of space, could be made only by special charter, at a fantastic cost. This blonde young man with the stubborn chin and sensitive mouth was obviously a colonial of tremendous wealth. The pilot's buzzer sounded, and a red light flickered on the Passenger Instruction panel. "I have to go forward now," the stewardess said, regretfully. "We're entering the warp, and it's time to prepare for landing. Maybe later..." She let the invitation trail off, and left him with a very special smile. Walther understood the smile. He was a young man, but he was no fool. In the trading centers of Andromeda many women smiled at him that way when they learned he was a Von Koenigsburg from Neustadt. He dunked the pastry in the black coffee, took a generous bite and settled back to be alone with his thoughts. An earth woman was not an essential part of the dream that had taken him on this quixotic voyage. True, there might be a woman who would come to love him enough so that she would leave the old world culture and graciousness of Earth for the colonial life on the immense frontier of Andromeda. But, being of an age where the dreams of youth are merging with practicality, Walther rather doubted he would find such a woman. He didn't doubt that the rest of his dream would come gloriously to life. While the shuttleship whirled without motion through the voidless void of hyper space, Walther smiled at the prospect ahead. Six months to immerse himself in the wonder of Earth's culture! Six months to enjoy the whole of it, instead of nourishing the few precious fragments kept alive by his family through the first centuries of colonial life in the new galaxy. Delightful evenings at the symphony and the opera! Beethoven, Verdi, Brahms, Shubert and Wagner! Wagner! -- Perhaps he would even be able to attend a performance of Die Meistersinger. Walther smiled to himself. His great, great grandfather, who had first discovered the incredibly rich mines, forests and black loam of Neustadt, had started the tradition of naming the first son Walther, after the whimsical Meistersinger, Walther von der Vogelweide. Then there would be leisurely afternoons in the great libraries and museums! All the great classics of literature and art, instead of the few faded pictures and the handful of volumes in the high beamed library of his family castle. The infrequent ships that traveled between the fringes of the two galaxies had little room for books and art treasures. Three years ago, on the occasion of Walther's twentyfirst birthday, his mother had broken down in tears as she told of trying for half a decade to order a set of Goethe as a coming of age present for him. But after the request had finally reached Earth, some clerk had garbled the order and sent a four-page booklet that apparently was some kind of puzzlebook for children. Now he could steep himself in Goethe, Schiller, Dickens, Maupassant, Tolstoi! And best of all the conversation! The delicate art of communicating mind with mind! What tales he would have to tell when he sat again in the family banquet hall! How his mother V eyes would sparkle! How his father would roar with delight as he recounted some rapier-like bon mot... But all this was only the small part of the dream. The small, personal part. The dream itself was so much bigger, as big as a dream must be to carry over from youth to manhood. He had first dreamed it as a boy, sitting on the hearth rug with his knees tucked up under his chin, watching the great leaping fire, while behind him in the shadows his grandfather played on the old violin. Meditation , his grandfather had called it. By a long ago composer of Earth, a man strangely named Thais. His grandfather couldn't play very much of it, but the fragment had lodged in Walther's heart and would be there to the end of his life. Walther's dream was indeed a grand dream, shaped of a melody and leaping flames. He would not spend his lifetime wresting more wealth from the riches of Neustadt. That had been done for him; the challenge was gone. But someday he would make the journey to Earth, and bring back with him enough of the beauty and culture to make Neustadt a miniatum Earth, out on the rim of Andromeda. It was indeed a grand dream. He would spend his wealth for books and music and treasures of art. He would try to bring back artists and teachers, too, and from Neustadt would spread the wonder of the new, old culture; it would reach out to all the colonies of the Andromeda galaxy, giving texture to life. And it would be there like a shining beacon when Man made his next great step across space, the Camora galaxy, and beyond... The stewardess again touched his shoulder, with a gesture that was not entirely according to shuttleship regulations. "We're through the warp and are now in orbit," she said. "We'll land at Uniport in three minutes." Uniport! The fabled entry port of Earth! It was the new hub, the pulsing heart of the homeland. It was the syndrome of all Earth culture, and its stratoways reached out like spokes of a spidery wheel to every city of the planet. Walther's knees were a little shaky as he moved down the ramp, and the moisture in the corners of his eyes was not caused by the sleety December wind that whipped across the vast landing area. He was on Earth. He was the first of his people to returh to the fatherland that had cradled them and sent them out into the universe. When the stewardess said goodby to him at the foot of the ramp, she looked both puzzled and disappointed. Her smile had been an invitation, and she had sensed the tug of it in his answering grin. But he only tipped his hat, and went on into the customs office. He felt like a small boy suddenly confronted by so many delights that he knew not which to sample first. "Destination?" The customs officer's blue pencil poised over the question on the Uniport entry form. Walther shrugged carelessly. "Oh, Fll look around Uniport awhile, then visit other cities... New York... London... Vienna... I have six months, you know." "I know -- I'm sure you'll enjoy your happy time. But you must have a destination -- someplace where you can be contacted, or leave forwarding addresses." The official's voice was patient, but it had the curious mechanical quality Walther had noted in speech of the pretty young stewardess. "Can you recommend good lodging?" "The Uniport landing provides excellent facilities, and you'll be among other travelers until you have a chance to adjust yourself to happy time activities." "Oh, no! I don't want to waste a moment! I want to live among the people of Earth from this very first night!" The customs officer peered at Walther's entry permit. "Andromeda... that's what I thought." He shook his head dubiously. "You have your Orientation Manual?" Walther fumbled in the pockets of his greatcoat. "I must have left it on the shuttleship, but I don't need it." The official pressed another copy of the manual firmly into Walther's hands. "It is required," he said. "First visitors are not allowed to leave the Uniport landing without one." Walther was too happy to argue. He shoved the manual into one of pockets. "If I may suggest, Sir," said the customs officer, his eyes widening as he looked over Walther's letters of credit, "You will find the Hotel Altair most comfortable. It's where all important visitors in Uniport stay." The next few moments went by so quickly they left Walther a little dazed. A servo-robot took his bags and led him to a monorail car, which whisked him off to the hotel. "Gdegr," said the doorman, an-, scarlet uniform. Its wax-like features were set in a perpetual smile. Walther blinked. "I'm sorry," he began. "I -- " "Thayr," said the majestic robot, taking Walther's handtooled overnight bag and motioning imperiously for two bellhop robots td bring the rest of the luggage. Silent and smiling, they leaped to obey. The desk clerk was a human, and greeted Walther with an efficient: "Wemtalr." He offered Walther a pen and a registration card on which appeared some undecipherable combination of letters, Walther began to have a sense of unreality about the whole thing, as if he were still day-dreaming in the Venus warp. "Really," he said, "I seem to be quite confused -- " With a smile of sudden comprehension, the clerk produced a Manual and thumbed rapidly through its pages. He pointed to a phrase with the tip of his pen, and Walther read: What price room do you desire? Opposite these words was the phonetic jumble : Whprumuirer? Walther shrugged to indicate that price was not important, but his thoughts were spinning. And they were still spinning when the robot bellhop left him alone in his suite. The possibility of a language barrier on Earth was something he had never considered. With only six months planned for his visit, it would be impossible to learn a new language and still do all he had dreamed of doing. But the Von Koenigsburgs were noted for their stubbornness. Walther's chin set, and he opened the Manual to learn what this was all about. He promptly realized that this was a Manual only for the most elementary needs of conversation, and that a great amount of study would be necessary for normal discourse. The first section of the Manual devoted a short chapter to each of the basic languages of Earth. Turning from one to another, Walther discovered that an extreme degree of condensation had taken place in all languages. It was as though a form of speedwriting and shorthand had been vocalized. But why? What did it mean? Walther found a partial explanation in the Orientation section which began: "Be brief!" "Soyez bref!" "Mach # es kurz!" "Sea breze!" In a score of languages, first-time visitors were admonished that an understanding of these two words was essential to getting maximum enjoyment out of their stay on Earth. "Even in an earlier age," the introduction pointed out, "the words 'Be Brief' expressed the essence of a new way of life, a life in which pace and tempo were all important. Later, as technology and automation relieved man of the burden of labor, he realized that tempo was equally important to fullest enjoyment of his happy time hours. You will understand this better after a few pleasant days on Earth." There was a false ring to the words that heightened Walther's sense of forboding. Under the glass top of his dressing table, he saw several brightly colored, attractively illustrated notices. One in particular caught his attention. It showed a young woman with lovely and poignantly expressive features. Her hands were outstretched, as though she were singing or engaged in a dramatic scene. With the help of his Manual, Walther ascertained that the young woman was named Maria Piavi, and that she was an Italian operatic soprano appearing currently in Uniport with a New York company. Walther' s buoyancy began to return. What better way to become acquainted with Earth's culture than to spend his first evening at the opera? He removed the announcement with Maria Piavi' s picture from under the glass and stood it upright against die mirror. Dinner in the hotel's main dining room was a confusing interlude. The cuisine was superb, the robot waiter faultless -- although Walther was beginning to weary of their fixed smiles. But more irritating was the flicker of huge, tri-dimensional television screens on the walls of the dining room. When he deciphered his bill, he saw he had been taxed for the TV entertainment. After dinner, he showed the opera announcement to the hotel clerk, and asked how to get there. The clerk wrote down the number of the monorail car he was to take, but when Walther learned the opera house was only six blocks away, he decided to walk. The clerk was aghast at this, and followed him all the way to the sidewalk, waving his arms and protesting in an hysterical jumble of consonants. revelation. All he had dreamed of, and more. The frescoed facade! The dazzling marquee! The crowd of elegantly dressed men and women, animatedly speaking their strange syllables as they watched a floor show in the lobby. When the floor show ended, and the crowd shifted to the far end, where a pantomimist was beginning his act, Walther had a clear view of the life-size cutout of Maria Piavi in the center of the lobby. He stood in front of it, staring with unashamed admiration. There was and earthiness and warmth about her that reminded him of the young women of his own planet. Paradoxically, there was also an air of remoteness and rigid self-discipline, a sense of emotion eternally controlled. He wondered which was the real Maria. Beside her picture was the photograph of a peppery old man whom Walther was able to identify as Willy Fritsh. The consonants under his name said he was now a producer, and had formerly directed for many years. Walther purchased his ticket without too much difficulty. The lights blinked, and he followed the crowd into the orchestra section. As he sank into the luxury of upholstered seat, Walther opened his senses to the sounds and sights about him, the tingling scent of the lovely women, the ebb and flow of indistinguishable conversation, the strange, short bursts of music which he found to be emanating from a tiny, jeweled radio in the purse of the woman who sat next to him. His excitement and anticipation grew still greater when he carefully deciphered the program and discovered that Maria Piavi was to sing Gilda, in Rigoletto, this very evening. What unbelievable good luck! Rigoletto, to commemorate his first evening on Earth! Walther vaguely knew the story of the opera, but from earliest childhood he could remember his mother singing snatches of Caro Nome and La donna e mobile . Now he would hear the entire arias, the full score of this masterpiece. Suddenly all was quiet. The orchestra rose swiftly into view in front of the stage. The whitehaired leader bowed. There was an eruption of applause, as brief as the crack of a rocket breaking the sound barrier. The golden baton rose, a glorious burst of music filled the opera house and the velvet curtain zipped upward so rapidly that the blinking of an eye would have missed it. The opening scene of festal entertainment in the hall of the ducal palace was a masterpiece in conception, but the gay cavaliers and ladies, the Duke's twenty-second condensation of the "Questa o quella" ballata, the plotting with Rigoletto and the mocking of Monterone were all accomplished and done with before Walther knew what was happening. Then he realized that he was looking upon a tremendous revolving stage, divided into many exquisite sets. Each set appeared majestically, established itself, often with an almost indiscernable pause, and then moved out of view to be replaced by the next. The second scene was the deserted street outside Rigoletto's cottage. Rigoletto appeared and disappeared, Gilda and the disguised Duke flashed through their duets, the orchestra set up the briefest of fanfares, and the lovely Maria Piavi moved to the center of the stage to sing Gilda's immortal aria "Caro nome che il me cor... The words electrified Walther to the edge of his seat. Here were the first naturally spoken words of the opera, the words of Gilda as she expressed joy at learning the name of her lover. Walther's mother had sung the haunting words on many an evening as he drifted off to sleep in his nursery. But he had never heard them phrased so beautifully as they came now from the lips of Maria Piavi. After the numbing shock of the first scene, they started the blood throbbing in his temples again. But they were the last words he understood of the aria. Using the archaic phrase with superb showmanship to startle her audience, Maria swung with flawless technique into a contraction of verse and music that somehow managed to convey the beauty of both in the few seconds that she held the center of the stage. It was like passing a star just before you entered hyperspace. You saw it for an instant, it awed and choked you with its wonder, and then it vanished into a nothingness that was deeper than night. There was so much beauty in the fragment that Walther ached to hear the rest of the aria. But Gilda had been abducted to the Duke's palace, and the stage had revolved far into Act II before Walther could assimilate the realization that no more of "Caro Nome" would be heard this evening, or any evening. Nothing mattered after this, not even the Duke's half-minute condensation of "La donna e mobile The stage picked up momentum, thunder and lightning flashed, the murdered Gilda's body was discovered by her father in the sack beside the river, the final curtain swooped down over the grisly horror, the orchestra disappeared, lights flashed on and Walther found himself being hurried along with the pleased audience toward the exit, where servo-robots were passing out handbills and pointing to a theatre across the street. The entire opera had lasted eleven minutes. Stunned, his dream crumbling, Walther stood outside the opera house and watched the crowd disappear into the theatre across the street, or plunge into passing monorail cars. The wind of the late afternoon was gone. A light snow was falling; it melted on his cheeks and powdered the fur collar of his greatcoat. Some of the younger couples didn't immediately board the monorail. They walked around to the stage exit and waited, laughing and chattering. Walther joined them. In a few moments members of the cast began to appear. They waved gaily at friends in the crowd. Maria came out in the company of two young men, followed closely by the peppery, bright-eyed little man whom Walther recognized from the lobby poster as being Willy Fritsh, the producer. The young couples closed around them, applauding. Walther shouldered his way toward the center of the group. Maria was laughing with excitement. This was the warm, earthy Maria, not the exquisite, almost aloof, artist Walther had seen on the stage. She was a full-lipped, gay Italian girl who was enjoying the plaudits of her friends. She was bundled in a white fur, and her teeth flashed as she tossed back a rippling comment to one of the young men standing near Walther. As they started to move away, Walther stepped forward in sudden desperation. "I beg pardon," he said. "Can you wait while I try to ask one question?" Maria looked startled, and one of her escorts stepped quickly between her and Walther. "Whtstywt?" the young man snapped. Walther flushed at the tone. He wasn't used to being spoken to this way, certainly not by anyone his own age. His jaw set as he held on to his self control, and continued thumbing through the Manual. Then he noticed that Maria was being hurried along by her other escort. He tried to step around the young man blocking his path. The young man put out his arm and pushed against Walther's shoulder, as if to shove him back into the crowd. Out of the corner of his eye, Walther saw Willy Fritsh hurrying forward to intervene. But his own reflexes were already in motion. His left hand flashed up; the back of it struck the young man in the chest. Walther didn't intend it to be a blow, merely a warning. He even managed to check it before it landed. But, to his bewilderment, the young man staggered back, slumped to his knees, gasping for breath. The other escort, though whitefaced with fear, hurled himself at Walther. Still trying to maintain a measure of control, Walther merely blocked the second escort by thrusting out the palm of his hand. The young man toppled backward, and the whole scene began to take on a never-never land quality. Girls screamed in terror; the crowd around Walther scrambled out of his reach. Maria stared at him wide-eyed, but didn't move. "I'm terribly sorry," Walther blurted. There was a shrill whistle, a drumbeat of running feet on the cold sidewalk. Walther moved forward to help the young men to their feet. They shrank away from him, and then he was surrounded by three armed police officers, shouting a gibberish of commands. Finally, Willy Fritsh made himself heard. He pointed to Walther's manual, and spoke a few patient words of explanation. When one of the officers still seemed unsatisfied, Willy turned to Walther with a twinkle in his eyes: "They want to know if you are a professional pugilist?" Walther felt immeasureably relieved at hearing these naturally spoken words. "Good Lord, no!" he gasped. He took out his entry permits, his identification certificate and his letters of credit, impressively drawn up on the stationery of the InterGalactic Exchange Union on Deneb II. When the doubting officer saw the amount of the credits, his hands shook and he handed the papers back to Walther as if they were state documents. The officers helped the two young men to their feet, admonished them sharply, tipped their hats to Walther and hurried back to their posts. Willy regarded Walther quizzically. "Well, young man, you seem to have very persuasive ways!" At home, it had been easy for Walther to slip from English to German. He did it now in the stress of the moment. "Ich kann Ihnen nicht sagen wie leid es mir tut -- " He was in the middle of his apology before he realized he was talking German. He broke off in confusion. Willy's pink cheeks crinkled with amusement. "#st schon gut. Ich spreche auch das 'alte' Deutsch." Willy went on to explain : "As a young man I translated many of the German masters into our modern happy time presentations. Now, what is it you wanted to ask Miss Maria?" Walther addressed his question to Willy, but he looked at Maria as he spoke: "I... I wanted to ask if she would ever consider singing Rigoletto in its original form. I would be happy to pay all expenses... "I'm sure you would," Willy said drily. "But Miss Maria sings only the pure happy time essence of Rigoletto. Not for more than a century has Verdi's original version been sung on Earth." Maria looked puzzled during the interchange. Willy translated for her, and she nodded in vigorous endorsement of his words. There was a titter of laughter from the young couples who had crowded around them again. Walther drew himself very erect. "Thank you," he said. He turned on his heel and walked into the darkness beyond the stage exit. He walked blindly into the snow flurries, not caring where his steps were taking him. But he had not gone two hundred yards before he realized he was being followed. waited. The footsteps behind him drew closer. A slight shadow bulked out of the darkness, and Walther heard Willy Fritsh say in German: "Don't be alarmed, young man." Willy came up and linked his arm through Walther's. "Keep on walking -- It's a cold night." The chill air rattled in Willy's throat as he panted from the pace of overtaking Walther. When he caught his breath, he asked: "What sort of world do you come from? It's quite amazing that someone from the Andromeda galaxy should ask for the original Rigoletto!" Walther told the old producer something of his home and family. Willy questioned him closely on several points, and finally seemed satisfied. "When they come from the stars," he murmured. "I beg your pardon?" "It is nothing -- just the title of an old classic." At the next corner, Willy stopped. "I leave you here." He stepped closer to Walther and lowered his voice, even though there was nothing around them but darkness and drifting snow. "Would you care to sample a bit of Bohemia, my boy?" "Well -- I guess so," Walther answered doubtfully. "Tomorrow evening then, at eight. # Avenue B, apartment #. Can you remember that?" "# Avenue B, apartment #." "I must emphasize the need for discretion on your part. There will be important people present." "Why do you trust me?" Walther challenged. "Because I am an old fool," chuckled Willy Fritsh. The chuckle emboldened Walther to ask one more question: "Will Maria be there?" "Now you are a fool!" Willy took a step away, then returned, flicked on his cigarette lighter and studied Walther thoughtfully. "Or maybe not," he murmured. "Maybe not. Perhaps Maria could be there, this once..." He snapped out the lighter. With another chuckle, Willy disappeared into the darkness. # Avenue B, apartment #. Eight o'clock tomorrow evening. The directions whirled all night through Walther's fitful sleep. They intermingled with a strange company of servo-robots, unintelligible phrases, the dry chuckle of Willy Fritsh and the haunting voice of Maria Piavi, beginning an aria she would never finish. The next day, Walther determined to find out how the cult of brevity had changed other fields of Earth's culture. He went first to the library, where foreboding hardened into bitter reality. Classic after classic was cut to its essence. Hamlet was reduced to a total reading time of seven minutes. But the old librarian seemed embarrassed about this. By mutual reference to the Manual, she managed to convey to him that a new edition would be out soon, and that it would be edited down to five minutes reading time. Did he want to sign up for a copy? Walther gave her a stricken look, and silently shook his head. Puzzled, she led him to the other classics on his list. Each was a new blow. "Great Expectations" was cut to twenty pages, all of Thoreau to one thin pamphlet, Henry James to a pocket-size digest of less than ten pages; "Leaves of Grass" to a few lines of verse. Walther's sense of loss became more than personal. He saw uncounted generations of boys who would never know Whitman, who might never have time for the open road in the Spring, the sweet springtime of life. The road and the poem, they were part of each other. Without one, the other could not live. The fire of Walther's dream flamed up fiercely within him. There was yet time for beauty in Andromeda. Time for quiet and thinking and true leisure. Somehow, he must rescue the treasures of the ages from the tomb of Earth and let them live again, three-quarHe beckoned to the old librarian, and laboriously communicated his question : "The originals of these classics -- where are they?" She frowned in bewilderment. He pointed to the proper words again, and gestured with his hands to indicate a large book. A smile of understanding replaced her frown. She consulted a larger edition of his own Manual, and wrote: Digester's Vaults -- lower six levels. He wrote back : Can I go down there? After some delay, she encoded the answer: Only authorized happy time Digesters are permitted in the vaults. Walther thanked her glumly. His spirits were so depressed that not even the digested version of the Bible shocked him too greatly. The Old Testament amounted to eleven pages, in rather large type ; the Gospel of St. Mark was three paragraphs; the Acts of the Apostles spanned less than half a page. Walther left the library, and the icy wind roused him from depression. It lashed him to anger, to a desperate, unreasoning anger that drove him to find, somewhere on Earth, an ember of the old culture. Somewhere he had to find such an ember and bring it back to Neustadt, where it would flame again. He managed to get directions to the Vienna stratowaycar. Surely in Vienna he would find some trace of the spirit left by Mozart and Hayden, Beethoven, Schubert and Strauss. Ten minutes later, when he left the stratoway in the Platz terminal near the Vienna Ring, his heart beat a little faster. This was indeed the old Vienna, as he had envisaged it from the few pictures he had seen and the many stories he had been told. The buildings on the Ring were in good repair, and not substantially altered. There was the Burg Theatre, the Art and History Museum, the buttressed facade of the ancient Opera House, the soaring twin spires of the Votive Church. It was like seeing an old woodcut come to life. But, for Walther, that was all that came to life in Vienna. The Burg Theatre was currently presenting Faust, in what was billed as down to seventeen minutes. Walther sadly recalled Goethe's prophetic line: Mein Lied ertont der unbekaten Menge... My song sounds to the unknown multitude. Wandering outside the city itself, into the footpaths of the Wienerwald, Walther tried to lose himself among the gentle slopes and the old trees that cut latticework into the sky. He came suddenly upon the village of Tullnerzing, where, from a tiny sidewalk cafe, music of a stringed ensemble came in short, quick bursts. It was scherzo speeded up a hundredfold, with not three but an infinite number of quarter notes blurred into what sounded like a single beat. These were the Vienna woods! How could he ever tell his mother and father? Heartsick, he returned to the Platz and found the Berlin stratoway. In Berlin, his bitterness grew. He had known the Unter den Linden must have changed through the centuries, but he was not prepared for such a pace of life, such a frenzy of leisure. Better not to have left Andromeda. Better always to have lived with a dream. The sight of two elderly burghers drinking beer reminded him of his own great grandfather, and gave him a heartening twinge of nostalgia. But as he stepped close to their table, he saw that as they sipped from their miniature steins the fingers of their free hands beat out a rhythmic accompaniment to the convolutions of an adagio team imaged on the table-top television screen. The final irony came to him when he read the lines of Schiller, carved over the entrance to a museum near the Brandenburg Gate. Because they were cut deep into the old stone, they could not be erased or condensed. They were there to give their ironic message to a world that could no longer read them : Only through the morning gateway of the beautiful did you enter the land of knowledge. And beneath them was Schiller's immortal warning to the artist: Der Menschheit Wurde ist in eure Hand gegeben , Bewahret sie... Walther copied the entire passage on the back of his Manual. This, at least, he could take back with him. These words he could preserve for the artists who would someday create their works of beauty on the frontier of Andromeda. As he copied them, Walther felt that the words were also a personal message from Schiller to himself: The dignity of Mankind is placed in your hands , Preserve it! Whether it sinks or rises depends on you . The holy spell of poetry Serves a wise world order; May it guide man to that great sea Where harmony prevails. The words sustained Walther's spirits until he left the stratoway in Paris and went to the Louvre. He had told himself that by this time nothing could shock him, that he could take any blow. But the Louvre was a new shock all over again. Translating a title with the help of his Manual and the servo-robot guide, Walther found that the thin, wavering line, about two inches long, against a background of misty blue, was the Mona Lisa. The servo-robot explained, after much searching among its tapes for words: "This is the spirit of the famous Mona Lisa smile. The Happy Time artist has cleverly removed all nonessential detail so that you can get the meaning of the picture in the minimum amount of time." Walther studied the thin, wavering line. This, then, was Da Vinci's eternal enigma of womanhood. Perhaps it explained why he felt there were two Marias. Could there be one whole woman in a culture of fragmented lives? The portraits of Holbein were reduced to a few sprinkles of geometric designs shot through with a Watteau, Rubens and Velazquez were little more than shadow curves. In the east wing of the Louvre, the servo-robot pointed to a series of larger paintings. Each of these, Walther learned, summarized the entire life work of a single artist. Here it was possible to see all of Titian or Michaelangelo or Van Gogh on one simplified canvas. Where were the originals of these classics? In the cultural vaults at Uniport, the servo-robot explained. Only authorized Happy Time artists could work with them. Afterwards, Walther was never quite certain what happened to the rest of his day. Distraught, he wandered around the Earth, changing from stratoway to stratoway, scarcely paying any heed to his next destination. Rome, Athens, Moscow, Jerusalem. Everywhere the pace of leisure was the same. Capetown, New Delhi, Tibet, Tokyo, San Francisco. Everywhere he saw something that crumbled his dream a little more: The Buddhist monk pausing for ten seconds of meditation while he counted his beads, not one by one but in groups of twenty; the World Government Chamber where the Senator from the United States filibustered a proposal to death by speaking for the unprecedented period of four minutes; the cafe near the school where teenage boys and girls, immense numbers of them, danced, snapped their fingers and shrieked ecstatically as the latest popular record exploded in a wild three-note burst of sound. It was seven o'clock in the evening before Walther became aware of the time. He was half the Earth and just one hour away from his meeting with Willy Fritsh. # Avenue B, apartment #. A bit of Bohemia, Willy had promised him. The words disturbed Walther. He had been disappointed so often in his twenty-four hours on Earth that he didn't feel like bracing himself for another letdown. Nor did he feel in the mood for a gay evening, if that was what Willy had meant. Would Maria be there? Walther shook his head angrily. He was indeed a fool if he expected anything after this day. moments by monorail from the Hotel Altair. A gentle-faced woman who reminded Walther of his own mother answered his knock on the door of Apartment #. "Kdftc?" she inquired politely. Walther stared at her. Was this all a cruel joke played by Willy Fritsh? Certainly this elderly woman, this quiet building, contained no Bohemia to be spoken of with discretion. "Excuse me," he muttered, not even bothering to consult his Manual. He bowed and backed away. "I'm afraid I've made a mistake -- " She stayed him with a small gesture of her delicate fingers. Glancing swiftly up and down the hall, she beckoned him inside. When the door was closed, she smiled a bright welcome, and spoke in the old tongue : "You're the young man from Andromeda!" Walther felt the tension inside him beginning to relax. He nodded, and she took his arm. "Willy told us -- we've been expecting you." She led him from the small foyer into a large, tastefully furnished living room. Walther glanced around uncertainly, but his first impression proved correct. There was no one else here. The woman urged him forward with a light touch of her fingertips. "We must be so careful," she murmured. She guided him through the living room, past the kitchen and one bedroom, and then opened the door of what appeared to be the entrance to a second bedroom. This room was unexpectedly large, and contained many people. They were talking with great animation, but hushed abruptly as he entered. "The young man from Andromeda," his hostess announced. The dry voice of Willy Fritsh came through the haze of cigarette smoke. "Over here, boy! Come and sit down!" He saw Willy and Maria sitting on a long cushion against the far wall. They moved over to make room for him. Maria smiled rather hesitantly. He sensed she was very ill at ease. "I'll introduce you around later," said Willy. "Everybody's too keyed up right now. We've just had an unexpected surprise -- really quite startling." The conversation had bubbled up again, and there was an electric feeling of excitement in the air. Everyone was trying to talk at the same time. Cheeks were flushed, eyes sparkled. While everyone was talking to those nearest, the most constantly recurring focal point of attention was the thin, balding man seated just across the room from Walther, on the arm of the sofa. He was riffling the pages of a pocket-size notebook and smiling with selfconscious pride. Willy nodded toward the man. "There's the gentleman who furnished our surprise -- He brought shorthand notes on an entire chapter from Don Quixote!" After the day he had just been through, Walther could appreciate this. He asked wonderingly, "Where did he get them?" "He's a Happy Time Digester." Walther studied the little man. So this was one of the comparative few on Earth who could get into the deep vaults of the Uniport library! What wonders he must have explored! What beauty and adventure, what mind-stretching thoughts he must encounter in those underground catacombs. How deep into die past he could explore, how far into the future! Why, he could range the universe faster than the warp drive, out even beyond the Andromeda galaxy! Willy cut into his thoughts. "He's going to read the entire chapter!" Walther turned to Maria to see if she shared his excitement. It was the aloof, controlled Maria who smiled faintly at him. It was obvious she had come against her will, and was trying to be gracious about it. A middle-aged couple arrived. "Dr. and Mrs. Althuss," Willy whispered. "He's the famous heart surgeon..." The next arrival was a distinguished looking man whose fingers shook with nervousness. "That's the World Government alternate delegate from England," Willy whispered again. "It wouldn't do his reputation any good for word to get out that he spent an evening in this Bohemian crowd..." Their hostess moved to the center of the room, raised her hand and announced: "We're all here now. Please go ahead, Lome." The room quieted instantly. The thin little man proudly began in the old English: "Don Cervante at the Castle..." His reading was painfully slow, and he stumbled over the pronunciation of many words. The people in the room watched him so intensely, with such absolute concentration, that they gave the impression of reading his lips rather than listening to his words. Frequently, he would have to translate a word or phrase into the new language, and there would be nods of understanding and relief. Willy's bright blue eyes sparkled more brightly than ever. He ran his fingers constantly through his thin bristle of white hair. The elderly woman on the sofa beside the Digester was so flushed and breathing so rapidly that Walther feared she was on the verge of a stroke. Even the urbane heart surgeon showed the emotional impact of this experience. His long, tapered fingers were clenched together, and he ran his under lip constantly over the edge of his greying mustache. Maria seemed the only one in the room who was not affected by the reading. Only a slight tightening of her lips marred her careful composure. Soon Walther lost himself in the tingling excitement of the room, and he forgot about watching the others. Word by word, sentence by sentence, the Digester led them along with Don Cervante. The reading, with its many pauses for translation, took almost two hours. When it was over, everyone was emotionally and physically exhausted. The little Digester was so pale he looked ill; his high forehead dripped with perspiration. Walther drew a long breath, and brought himself reluctantly back to reality. Willy asked quietly: "What do you think of our intellectual underworld?" An outbreak of almost hysterical conversation made it useless for Walther to answer. Maria, with a look of reproach at Willy, moved across the room to speak to their hostess. Willy lit one of his cigars and leaned closer to Walther. There was a gleam of amusement in his twinkling blue eyes. "You look more worn out than Don Cervante!" he chuckled. The contrast between this evening and the disillusionment of the day made it hard for Walther to put his gratitude into words. "I can't thank you enough -- " he began. "Don't try," said Willy. "I may have had my own devious reasons for inviting you." He glanced toward Maria, who was making an effort at polite conversation with the hostess. "I'm afraid our young diva isn't an ardent admirer of the unexpurgated Don Quixote" There were many questions Walther wanted to ask about Maria, but he tactfully inquired, instead: "How often does this group meet?" "Whenever there is something to share -- a chapter of literature -- a copy of an old painting -- a recording. It all depends on what our few Digester friends can manage -- They don't have an easy time of it, you know." "Is it difficult for them to take things out of the vaults?" "Difficult... and dangerous," Willy answered grimly. "But why...?" For reasons that make good sense, officially at least. A culture founded on brevity cannot be expected to encourage its own demise through the acts of its civil servants! Think what could happen: A total work of art, whatever its form, takes time to appreciate! But if people spend too long at an opera, the legitimate theatre or the television industry would be slighted! If they paused too long in contemplation of a painting, newspapers might not be purchased! If they dawdled over the old-style newspaper, the digest magazines, the popular recordings, the minute movies, the spectator sports -- the thousand and one forms of mass recreation offered the public -- each in turn would suffer from unrestrained competition!" "It's inconceivable," Walther protested, "that entertainment interests could be strong enough to shape a culture! Surely the productive basis of Earth's economy... Willy snorted. "My boy, work as such may still be important in Andromeda, but how could it possibly be so here on Earth? Generations ago, automation, the control of the atom, the harnessing of the sun's energy -- all combined with many other factors to make work a negligible part of Man's existence! Thus, with fourfifths of his waking hours devoted to leisure-time pursuits, the balance of power shifted inevitably to the purveyors of mass entertainment. Great monopolies, operating under the Happy Time, Ltd. cartel, seized upon the digest trend in the old culture and made brevity the basis of the new order. The briefer you make a piece of entertainment, the more pieces you can sell the public in a given number of leisure hours! It's just good business," Willy concluded drily. Walther was silent a moment, trying to frame this picture in his thoughts. But there were so many missing elements. "Your artists and writers," he demanded, "all your creative people -- don't they have anything to say about it?" "Damn little. You see, the successful artist -- whatever his field -- is well paid by his particular monopoly. Besides, he's been trained in the new form! I doubt if Maria has ever seen the original score of an opera -- let alone tried to sing an entire aria!" Willy took a glass of wine from a tray offered by the hostess's servorobot. He motioned to Walther to help himself, but Walther shook his head. Another question was troubling him. "Why do the monopolies even bother with Digesters and the classics? Why not let modem artists create in the new form?" Willy's voice grew hard. "Because," he snapped, "there have been no creative artists on Earth for over a century! Why create when your creation is only fed into the maw of the Digesters? That which is not wanted dies -- in a culture as well as in the human body! That -- my young friend from Andromeda -- is the bitter tragedy of it all!" Maria rejoined them, and whispered something to Willy. The old producer sighed and turned to Walther. "Maria would like to leave now. Will you take her back to our hotel? There are some people here I must see..." "Of course!" Yet, in spite of his eagerness to get better acquainted with Maria, Walther was reluctant to leave. There was so much more he wanted to ask, to learn. And deep beneath the surface of his thoughts a bold idea was beginning to form. As if reading his mind, Willy said: "We have no performance tomorrow afternoon. Gome and see me at our hotel -- we'll talk further! Meanwhile -- " Willy's blue eyes sparkled again, "Meanwhile, for the young, the evening is still young. It should be an interesting challenge!" Maria said nothing until they had left the apartment building and started across the street to the monorail station. Then she stopped, drew a long breath of the wintry air, and shook her head. "Whtrblvng!" she exclaimed. She smiled at his puzzled expression and tucked her arm through his. When they were inside the station, he handed her his Manual. She flipped through the pages, but could not find the exact translation of her remark. Finally, she picked out parts of three phrases. Put together, they read: "What a terrible evening!" After the first shock of her words, Walther realized he could expect her to feel no differently. She was a product of her culture, and evidently this had been her first visit to Willy's Bohemia. It was past midnight when they boarded the monorail, and they were alone in the car. Fumbling in her purse for a coin, Maria pointed to the small screen on the back of the seat in front of them. Walther offered a handful of coins. She put one into the slot beside the screen. A comedy sequence appeared, lasting for approximately thirty seconds. Much of it was lost to Walther, because he couldn't understand the dialogue. But Maria laughed gaily. The tension lines, the outward evidences of inner emotional control, began to smooth away. Her cheeks flushed ; her dark eyes began to sparkle. This was the Maria Walther felt he could learn to know. When the television screen went dark, Maria promptly put another coin into a slot beside a small grid. A full-scale orchestra sounded what might have been the first chord of a symphony, but the piece was over before Walther could identify it. A third coin, dropped into the arm of the seat, produced a small two-page magazine, which seemed to consist chiefly of pictures. One of the pictures showed Maria herself, in operatic costume. She studied it critically, then tossed the magazine into a handy receptacle under the seat. A fourth coin brought out a game from the side of the monorail car. It vaguely resembled a checkerboard, except that there were only six squares and two magnetized checkers. Maria guided his hand while he made two moves. As she completed her last move, the board automatically folded back into the side of the car. A fifth coin summoned a miniature keyboard from just beneath the television screen. Maria touched the keys, producing tinkling noises that sounded like a tiny celeste. Then the keyboard zipped back into its enclosure. Maria reached for a sixth coin. Walther closed his hand over hers, and made a motion to indicate that his head was already in a whirl. She laughed, but didn't try to remove her hand. A moment later the monorail stopped in front of their hotel. As they crossed the lobby, Walther pointed inquiringly toward the cocktail lounge. Maria smiled and nodded gaily. A servo-robot waiter seated them at a small chrome table beside a tiny dance floor. Maria ordered their drinks, and the waiter was back with them in a matter of seconds. The glasses seemed extremely small to Walther, compared to the huge mugs and steins he was accustomed to on Neustadt. The liquor tasted rather bland, more like a sweet wine than a whiskey. The servo-robot presented a bill with the drinks. Money had never meant anything to Walther, but he could scarcely repress a start when he deciphered the amount of the bill. By any standard of wealth or exchange, the drinks were fantastically expensive. A scattering of applause announced the return of the orchestra. Maria held out her hand in an invitation to Walther. With some misgivings, he led her out on the dance floor. She turned and came into his arms so naturally and suddenly that she almost took his breath away. She danced very close to him. Her cheek was warm, and the faint perfume from the tip of her ear was something he would have liked to explore more thoroughly. But the moment was over before it began. The music stopped, the orchestra leader bowed and led his men from the stage. Back at the table, Walther lifted his glass to suggest another drink. She shook her head, explaining, "Olndrptd." Spelled out with his Manual, her explanation was: "Only one drink is permitted." And, after Willy's brief orientation, this was understandable : Nothing could disrupt the perpetual entertainment cycles more easily than excessive drinking. A tipsy person was not a good customer for other leisure-time activities. Therefore, permit only one drink to a person, and charge enough for it so that the liquor monopoly would get its fair share of the entertainment expenditure. As Willy would say, it was just good business. Maria touched his hand to signify it was time to leave. Walther took her up to her room on the #nd floor, and they watched two musical comedies en route on the elevator pay-as-you-see television screen. In front of her door, Maria lightly touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. She said, "Thyfrwrdrftm." Walther knew she was thanking him, but from force of newly-acquired habit he reached for his Manual. She laughed, shook her head and translated her own words by raising up on tiptoe and brushing his lips with her own. Their lips were together so briefly that Walther wasn't sure whether he had really kissed her. He reached out to take her in his arms and make sure of it. Deftly, she turned away and closed her door behind her. with Walther's second night of sleep on Earth, and they weren't only of Maria. In fact, as his idea took form, even the scent of her perfume and the moth-like touch of her lips were forced temporarily into the background of his consciousness. The next morning he waited impatiently for an hour after breakfast, then went up to Willy's room. Willy came to the door in his dressing robe, holding his glasses in one hand and a sheet of music in the other. He waved aside Walther's apology for not waiting until afternoon. "Nein... nein!" he said. "I ordered an extra pot of coffee -- because I didn't think you could wait!" Willy led Walther into his sitting room and poured him some coffee. "Maria was already here," he chuckled. "She came to... ah... pick up music... and to ask what I know about you. I told her nothing good, and nothing bad!" He settled himself in his easy chair with a luxurious sigh. His bristling white hair and cherubic cheeks gave him the appearance of a benign old innkeeper, brought to life from a canvas by Holbein. "All right, tell me what you've been thinking about all night!" Walther shifted tensely to the edge of his chair. He spilled a little coffee in setting his cup down. "I would like to buy copies," he said, "of everything your Digester friends have ever smuggled out of the vaults!" "That's a large order, my young friend." "I'll pay... whatever it costs!" "So would I -- if I could afford it! But I fear it's not that simple. Take, for example, the chapter of Don Quixote you heard last evening. The World Government representative from England sent the Digester's notes to an aunt in Liverpool. She'll read them to her Bohemian friends tonight, and tomorrow they may be in Buenos Aires or Istanbul -- who knows?" "But what happens to them eventually? Aren't they kept in some central place?" Willy spread his short, pudgy fingers in a gesture of hopelessness. "That would mean organization -- and we're not organized. We wouldn't dare to be! I've never stopped to think what finally happens to these things. Perhaps they end up among the papers of some old dreamer like myself. It's enough that they have brought their mellow moments of happiness!" "It's not enough!" Walther protested fiercely. "It's a great waste! How will you ever improve things that way?" "Who's trying to improve anything? The people of Earth are content -- and those of us who are not entirely so -- well, we have our little underworlds of pleasure." "Is that all you want?" "Is there more?" Walther jumped up angrily. "I believe there is -- and I think you do, too!" he said harshly. "If you don't, why did you take me to that meeting last night and invite me here today? Why did you send me off alone with Maria?" Willy only smiled, but under his silk robe his round belly shook with silent laughter. "You are a foolish young man... and sometimes not so foolish! Sit down. Sit down... He leaned forward in his easy chair, and his manner became grave. "Perhaps it's difficult for an old man to come near the end of life fearing that the beauty he loves will never escape from its tomb. Perhaps it's also difficult for an old maestro who cherishes the talent and loveliness of a young woman to know that she may never understand what her gift really means. Perhaps an old man can still dream some dreams that a young man could not comprehend..." The tight knot in Walther's stomach slowly unwound itself. "Then you will help me," he said quietly. "Yes, I will help you... if I can... and you will help me!" At Willy's suggestion, they decided to talk first to the Digester who had smuggled out the Don Quixote chapter. "He's been most successful of all of our friends," said Willy. "He of Digesters who could bring out things to be duplicated, and return them, I question, though, that you could duplicate many things here on Earth." "Then we'll ship them away from Earth! The outermost world of this galaxy -- at least to my knowledge -- is Alden IV ; it's technically welldeveloped and is a contact with our own galaxy." Willy called the bald little Digester, and he came over right after lunch. But his reaction to Walther's proposal was not what they had expected. "This... this is a terrible mistake!" he stammered. "It's... it's too big -- much too big! Now -- by being cautious -- we can enjoy our little evenings together. But if we anger the Happy Time, Ltd. people we'll lose everything!" Willy snapped his fingers impatiently. "What have we to lose? A chance to be tea-cup rebels! This young man is giving us an opportunity to do something about what we profess to believe!" The Digester looked pained. "We are already doing something," he protested. "Did I not bring Chapter IX of Don Quixote...  "You did, and we enjoyed it! But what if we could inspire a rebirth of art as big as a whole galaxy instead of entertaining each other with our little flings at Bohemia?" The little Digester struggled with the thought for a moment, then dismissed it with a shudder. "It's too big," he repeated miserably. "Please forget about it, Willy -- our own way is best." He glared at Walther, and his distress turned to rage: "I warn you, young man... don't start trouble for us! If you can't accept the ways of Earth, go back where you belong!" He held out a trembling hand to Willy. "Goodby, Willy... I go now." He hesitated, then added with the vistful air of a small boy waiting to be praised: "In two weeks I will bring another whole chapter to read!" When Willy only shrugged, the little Digester turned away and sadly left the room. During the next two days, Willy contacted several other Digester friends. In varying degrees, he met with refusals from each. By the end of the week, only two of the younger Digesters in the Bohemian set had agreed to cooperate and even they were careful not to promise too much. "At this rate," Walther pointed out glumly, "it will take years to collect any real quantity of material -- and I have only six months! Is there no other source?" Willy shook his head. "None that I know of." "There must be!" Walther insisted. "Do you mean to tell me that in all the homes of Earth there are no treasured heirlooms of the past? No books? No paintings? No recordings?" "Oh, I'm sure they are," Willy agreed. "But how to reach them? We can hardly advertise." He paused, hesitated, then snapped his fingers, "Wait -- there may be a way -- even more illegal than your first suggestion, but still a way..." "What is it?" "I used the word 'underworld' in speaking of our Bohemian group last night, but actually there is an underworld, of a sort... trafficking mostly in liquor. The cartel's onedrink restriction has never been too enforceable." Willy lifted the seat of his piano bench and took out a bottle. "If you can afford it, you can always buy a bootleg supply." "What's liquor got to do with art?" "For a price -- the underworld literature and music... in addition to alcohol!" Willy sent out word through a bootlegger who supplied some of the opera singers with their favorite beverages. The next night, after final curtain, a greying, bespectacled and very distinguished looking gentleman in formal dress met Willy and Walther in a vacant dressing room backstage. He spoke tersely, and Willy translated: "He says he has friends who could be interested in your proposition, if there's money enough in it." "Tell him there's money enough," Walther replied grimly. Willy digested this, and their visitor smiled his scepticism. Not accustomed to having his financial standing questioned, Walther faced the man himself and demanded : "How much money do you want?" The man understood Walther's tone, if not his words. After a brief calculation, he named a price that shocked Willy, who turned to Walther with dismay: "Ten thousand credits for every usable piece of art that can be bought outright. An additional deposit of ten thousand if it has to be sent away from Earth to be duplicated. You are to pay all shipping costs, as well as legal expenses if any of their men are arrested." Walther accepted the terms with a nod. Their underworld contact stared respectfully at Walther, took off his suede gloves and proceeded to get down to business. It was soon arranged for Walther to set up letters of credit in banks of all major cities. Shipments of "tools and machinery" would be billed against these credits, after bills of lading had been inspected by Walther or a designated representative. From the level of the discussion, they might have been transacting legal business on a corporation scale. Their visitor shook hands with each of them, doffed his top hat and left with a courteous bow. Willy wiped shining beads of sweat from his forehead. "High finance," he gasped, "is not a part of my daily routine!" He dug into a wardrobe trunk, brought out a bottle and poured two drinks. Raising his glass high in the air, he toasted: "To art... and crime! I hope we don't have to pay too much for either!" "How are you getting along with Maria?" Willy asked a few days later. "Just what do you expect to accomplish by throwing the two of us together so much," Walther asked bluntly. "Oh, I enjoy it, mind you -- hut , really, we're worlds apart. When I go back .  ." "With the young everything is possible -- even the impossible," Willy answered evasively. "Well, tell me something more about her. Where does she come from? Has she ever been engaged? Married?" Willy filtered a cloud of smoke through his nostrils. "Maria's the only talented offspring ever produced by a rather poor family in Naples. She still supports them -- or rather, makes it possible for them to be good Happy Time consumers. As for her talent... well, it was discovered by her first school teacher -- and from then on her education was taken over by the opera monopoly! Engaged? Nothing serious that I know of. Married?" Willy frowned. "I shudder to think of her marriage to one of our mechanical young rabbits!" Walther blinked. "Do you mind explaining that one?" Willy grimaced. "I might as well. You see, sex per se is encouraged, with or without the formality of marriage. Large numbers of offspring are good for society! We have the technology to provide for them, and the more there are, the more potential Happy Time consumers! But the arts of sex... the refinements of love... Can't you imagine by this time what takes place in the boudoirs of Earth? Sex is something to be accommodated between pay-as-you see television programs! Besides, you've encountered a couple of our young men, do you consider them physically capable of prolonged amour?" Walther was finding it heavy going to picture some of the tilings Willy was describing for him. But the mention of the two young men he had met outside the opera that first night brought up a question he'd been waiting to ask: "What was wrong with them? I barely touched them!" "Participation sports -- physical activity of any kind is discouraged as interfering with the mass entertainment media. The few gifted boys are trained to be professionals. The others scarcely develop enough muscle to walk against a strong wind. In fact, they don't walk any more than is necessary!" Willy paced agitatedly around his room, and stopped in front of Walther's chair. He held out his hands pleadingly: "Be patient with Maria," he begged. "You promised to help me, too... and this is all I ask of you!" Walther didn't find it unpleasant to comply with Willy's request. He had nothing to do while waiting for the first shipment to be assembled, and so was able to attend rehearsals as well as the performances of the operas. At rehearsals, he saw a serious Maria, a perfectionist devoted to her art, a superb technician. After rehearsals and the opera itself, he saw a Maria who was a product of the alien leisure-time culture he had found on Earth -- a Maria who flitted with tireless zest from one activity to another, who naturally and enthusiastically accepted the innumerable forms of entertainment offered by the Happy Time cartel. With growing despair, Walther tried to find some activity they could share. He had always enjoyed sports, so he took her to all the attractions at the Uniport arenas. Each was a new disappointment. What was billed as a fight for the world's heavyweight title ended with a one-round decision. A basketball game was exciting -- for three furiously-contested minutes. The professional tennis match consisted of each player serving four balls, which the other attempted to return. While traveling to and from the various attractions, there were always the diversions offered on the monorail and stratoway cars. Private transportation, Walther learned after hopefully exploring this possibility, had been eliminated for the obvious reason that it was restricted in the number of recreational opportunities it permitted, and might lead to over-indulgence in sex -- from the point of view of the time involved, rather than promiscuity. And while walking was not strictly illegal, those who tended to over-indulge were advised to curtail their eccentricity. # After much thought, Walther did hit upon a possibility: It was prompted by his recollection that the natural beauty of such places as the Vienna woods had not been obscured. Since Maria was not required to be at rehearsals until two in the afternoon, they could spend the morning visiting some distant beauty spots he had read or heard about back on Neustadt. Perhaps in some of these places the pace of leisure would be slowed. Maria happily accepted his initial invitation to spend a morning in the South Sea Islands. They boarded a stratoway car immediately after breakfasting together at the hotel, and soon had exchanged chilly Uniport for languorous Tahiti. The island village, the natives and their costumes, the wet fragrance of the jungle and the soft rippling of the surf were all as Walther had pictured them since his first reading of Stevenson's voyages to the South Seas. However, suspecting that the Happy Time cartel had probably made its presence felt in the village itself, Walther steered Maria around it, toward a path that wound invitingly between the tall palms and growths of bread fruit trees. Maria's hand fell easily, naturally into his own, and she pressed a little closer to him, as if awed by the unaccustomed stillness. She smiled up at him, started to say something, but Walther put his finger over her lips and shook his head. Maria looked puzzled, then took out of her handbag a miniaturized, self-powered television set, with its own tiny coin meter. She popped in a coin, flicked the dial, and the image of an actor appeared on the screen. Walther covered it with his hand. He took the set away from her, and dropped it into the pocket of his coat. Then he pointed to her, to the shadowed trees around them -- and spread his hands as if to ask what more anyone could possibly want. He wasn't sure she understood, but he put his arm around her waist and she rested her head against his shoulder. They continued a dozen steps down the path, until it ended at a silvery lagoon. Here, she touched the radio button of her wristwatch -- rented on a weekly basis -- and the rhythm of a jazz band filled the tropical air. Walther took her wrist, shut off the radio. He turned her toward him and held her face tightly between the palms of his hands. "No television," he said firmly, "No radio -- no nothing -- except this..."  She yielded with a faint smile. Her eyes closed, but their lips had scarcely touched when she tried to draw back. "Not that way," Walther told her. "This way... He held her face firmly teaching her the kind of kisses that were used in a frontier world where people had time to make love. She struggled away from the unnaturalness of his kissing, then slowly she ceased to struggle. Suddenly, the lagoon was lighted robot stepped out of the shadows. It said pleasantly: "Since only tourists come to this spot, it is presumed that you come from some distant planet. Therefore, let me point out that all couples are limited to two minutes by the lagoon. If you hurry, you can catch a native dance number before the next stratoway leaves." In the same pleasant tone, the servo-robot began to repeat these words in the other ancient languages of Earth. Maria's breath came in short, trembling gasps. Her lips were still apart, and she touched them with the tip of her tongue. "Weil nur Touristen naeh diesem Fleckchen Erde kommen..." the servo-robot droned along in its pleasing voice. "Oh, shut up!" Walther growled. He took Maria by the arm and led her back up the path. "Somehow," he promised her fervently, "Somewhere -- we're going to finish that." "Dthgn," she whispered in breathless wonder. and machinery" had been assembled at the Uniport landing. Walther received a formal notice to this effect from the local Exchange Bank. The same evening, in a backstage dressing room, he and Willy Fritsh received a rather more informative report from the gentleman who was their contact with the bootleg underworld. Every item in the shipment was listed and described with meticulous care. By reference to a leather-bound pocket notebook, the contact managed to furnish additional details. With Willy's help, Walther was able to judge the nature of the haul. He was both pleased and disappointed. Numerically, it had more items than he had expected. Qualitatively, it left much to be desired. There were no complete literary works, only fragments. The pictures were admittedly cheap copies; the recordings were only passages from major works. A total of eight hundred items had been purchased outright by underworld agents; fourteen hundred more had been borrowed on the security of the huge deposit. The latter would have to be duplicated on Alden IV and returned to their Earth owners as quickly as possible. Walther had expended a huge fortune for a dubious return. But, through Willy, he told the contact: "Keep it up. Get everything you can!" Several items did look promising: From an elderly spinster in Durban, South Africa, the first two acts of "Othello" had been obtained by the bootlegger who delivered her dry sec sherry twice a month; in New Orleans, an undertaker had parted with a nearly complete Louis Armstrong original -- about an inch was broken off one edge of the record, but the bill of lading stated that the rest was quite audible. There was also what was reported to be the last third of "Grime and Punishment," loaned by a lawyer in Prague. The second shipment was on a par with the first, with the hopeful indication that some of the new acquisitions would complement others in the first shipment. Walther stood beside Willy at the Uniport landing as the shuttleship carrying their second shipment blasted off on the first leg of the long route to far-off Alden IV. The third shipment was much smaller, only three hundred outright purchases and seven hundred and twenty items obtained against deposit. With the bill of lading came a warning note. Walther translated it himself. It was from their contact, who wrote: "Don't try to get in touch with me until further notice. Send off this shipment as soon as possible. The Happy Time boys know something big is going on." By paying a fabulous premium, Walther was able to get the third shipment off on the midnight shuttle. Afterwards he stood in the window of Willy's hotel room, staring up at the star-filled sky. "Well, that may be the end of it," he said. "You've done well," said Willy, joining him. "I didn't think you'd get that much." "I hope it'll do some good. Perhaps all this new material will at least form the basis of a good research library." Willy glanced, at him speculatively. "I was disappointed about the music," he said. "Not one complete work." By this time, Walther had learned to know when Willy was maneuvering toward an objective. "Just tell me what you've got in mind," he grinned. "No preliminaries." Willy chuckled his appreciation, then grew serious. "Our opera season ends this week... We're supposed to take a month off, then start rehearsals for the next tour. Perhaps, during this month..." Walther sensed what was coming next, but he held his breath -- waiting for Willy to say it. Willy did : "Perhaps -- if you still want to spend more money to pay them -- we could persuade some of our group to record..." "A full-length opera!" Walther exclaimed. "Would they -- could they -- do it?" Willy pursed his lips thoughtfully. served that your wealth is rather persuasive on Earth. Like most artists, our people spend more than they earn, and would probably try anything for what you could pay them. As for ability -- we'd undoubtedly have to record in short sessions. We might even have to break up the arias into sections, because we're not conditioned for sustained effort." "I'll pay them anything to try it," Walther broke in, enthusiastically. "Where would you try it -- here in Uniport?" "Hardly. But there's an old inn in North Wales where I once spent a vacation with some of our group. If the Happy Time agents should be watching us now, it would be quite natural to return to that inn." "Maria... do you think she would?" Willy sighed, and shrugged. "Not for the money alone... she's quite a perfectionist about her art. But I'm hopeful that by this time..." His eyes twinkled. Walther laughed. "What a chess player you would make! I think you've been moving me around like a pawn ever since the first evening we met!" "Not a pawn," Willy corrected him with a smile. "A knight." However, they decided not to tell Maria the real purpose of the proposed vacation until they were all set up at the inn in North Wales. Walther thought the setting sounded perfect for some personal unfinished business. "Even I could sing an aria in such a place," Willy enthused. Willy began quietly and individually contacting other members of his company. With the kind of payment Walther authorized him to offer, he had little difficulty getting performers for the venture. Most of them thought the project ridiculous, but the money was more than they would normally earn in an entire season. Willy swore each of them to silence. They were to treat the trip as nothing more than a vacation. He made arrangements for the various pieces of recording equipment to be shipped separately from London, Berlin and New York. Willy's pink cheeks were perpetually flushed these days, and his bright eyes sparkled brighter than ever. When Walther brought up the question of which opera would be attempted, he discovered that the shrewd old maestro had long ago acquired Puccini's complete "Madame Butterfly" and had already packed the music for shipment to North Wales. The night before they were to leave Uniport, a familiar, distinguished figure appeared backstage, threading his way between the huge crates being packed by the servorobot stagehands. Willy led him immediately to one of the dressing rooms. With admirable simplicity, the underworld contact put a proposition before them, The first three shipments had pretty well exhausted the supply of readily obtainable material. With the Happy Time agents now alerted, the risk of trying to get more material wasn't justified by the probable results. But the underworld wasn't anxious to let go of a good revenue source without one big payoff. What did they propose to do? Willy's voice shook as he translated: "For -- for the right -- fee -- they're Library vaults!" Walther was silent for a long moment. Instinctively, he recoiled from such overt action. But reason asked: Why should he draw back now? Everything taken from the vaults would be duplicated and returned in good condition. Was it right to let his own personal reaction stand in the way of something that might benefit whole ages of Mankind? When he had firm control of his own voice, he nodded and asked: "How do they propose to do it?" The plan was a piece of professional craftsmanship. In the century of its existence, no one had ever attempted to enter the new library illegally. With the absence of any known motive for doing so, the need for guarding against it was routine. There were the usual doors and time-locks, the alarm systems and servo-robot guards, but nothing that couldn't be handled. They would bring in technicians from Vega VI to handle the time-locks. Otherwise, barring some unsuspected move by the Happy Time security police, the job was within the bounds of their own abilities. Of course, there must be meticulous attention to detail and planning. The contact explained that, according to preliminary surveys, they could count on about two hours of work after gaining entrance to the vaults. By concentrating only on books, for speed of handling and packing, a reasonable sized crew should be able to get at least twenty thousand volumes out of the vaults and into a waiting monorail transport, where the crates would already be assembled. Previous arrangements could be made for the midnight freight shuttle to take the crates from the Uniport landing to could be dispersed throughout the immeasurable reaches of deep space. "But they must be returned," Walther insisted. 'Til see to that!" Their visitor shrugged, indicating that this detail was of no interest to him. He named a price, and when Walther promptly agreed to it, Willy poured them all a drink. "When I was a small boy," Willy said, in a voice that still trembled, "I slid on the seat of my trousers down an icy slope in the Alps. It was good fun for the first twenty yards; and then I realized I had gone beyond my power to stop. That's the way I feel right now. Prosit!" As their caller started to leave, Walther stopped him by raising his hand. Throughout the discussion, an irresistible compulsion had been growing within him. Now he had to speak: "I've come a long way," he told Willy. "Granting that nothing goes wrong, and that I'm able to leave, I know I'll never return to Earth again. But there's one selfish, personal thing I want to do before leaving. It isn't sensible, I know -- but neither was my dream to begin with. I want to go with these men into the Uniport vaults -- just to see for an hour -- greater treasures than I can ever hope to see again." floor of the Bridge End Inn, Walther could look down upon the River Dee, tumbling along beside what was still called the Shropshire and Union Railroad Canal, although the tracks of that ancient railroad had been torn up centuries ago. Old ways and names had a way of persisting in North Wales, despite the pace of modern leisure. Walther had noted with satisfaction that the double consonants of the old language, with their strange throaty pronunciation, had defied contraction. Llangollen and Llantysilio were two nearby cities whose names were still spelled out, as they had been for a thousand years. He glanced at his watch. Maria should be waking from her nap just about now. In a half hour, Willy wanted to meet with her and ask her cooperation in doing "Madame Butterfly". Walther had suggested waiting until the next day, since Maria was tired from the closing night festivities in Uniport, and from packing the rest of the night in time to catch the morning stratoway. But Willy opposed delay. As he stood there by his window, Walther had a sense of peace, for the first time since he'd been on Earth. The moment was all the more to be cherished, since he knew it could not last. A light knock on his door jarred the view and the peace out of focus. "Come in," he called, and turned, expecting to see Willy. But it was Maria who entered, looking remarkably refreshed after her short nap. She wore a sweater, a very short skirt and open-toed sandals. Her long, dark hair was combed out loose. It was the first time he had seen her dressed so casually. She looked more like a Welsh mountain girl than the star of the Uniport opera. "Hi!" he said, inadequately. She laughed at his surprise, and put her arms around him. "Hi," she answered. Maria had not forgotten her first lesson beside the Tahiti lagoon; and Walther was reviewing some subsequent lessons when both of them became aware of the unwelcome fact that they were not alone. Willy Fritsh stood in the doorway, smiling benignly. "Oh, hell," said Walther. "Believe me, I didn't intend to interrupt," Willy said happily. "But since we're all together right now... under such... ah... propitious circumstances, suppose we talk things over." "Later," said Walther. Ignoring his protest, Willy sat himself comfortably on the window seat, opened a large envelope and took out the bound libretto of "Madame Butterfly". He handed it to Maria, without comment. She stared at it curiously, but made no move to open it until Willy motioned her to do so. She nodded with recognition at the title page, then as she riffled through succeeding pages, her expression changed from surprise to distaste. She tried to hand the libretto back to Willy, but instead of taking it, he drew her to the window seat beside him, and spoke to her as a father might speak to his daughter. By this time, Walther could understand a little of what Willy was saying and he could guess the rest of it. Maria's first reaction was to stare incredulously at Willy. As the full meaning of what he was asking became clear to her, she looked up at Walther. He saw scorn and anger in her dark eyes. When she looked back at Willy, it was to shake her head in emphatic refusal. Willy's tone became even more persuasive. He gazed out the window as he spoke, down at the river pouring over the weir and ducking under the old stone bridge. Maria rolled the libretto into a tight scroll. Her fingers showed white through her unpolished nails. Willy stopped abruptly. He looked older, tired. Maria remained silent, her lips compressed into a tight line. At last she answered him, in a voice that was tightly, coldly controlled. She stood up and walked toward the door. Walther held out his hand; she ignored it. He started after her, and Willy said, "Let her go." Willy looked so depressed that Walther felt a need to comfort him. "It's all right," he said. "We'll forget the whole idea." Willy shook his head. "She'll do it," he said wearily. "But..." "She'll do it because she thinks she owes it to me." Walther waited for the old maestro to continue. "As soon as we're through recording," Willy went on, pushing himself up from the window seat, "Maria wants to be released to another opera company." "I'll go see her right now," Walther began. "Not now," Willy interrupted. "She wouldn't have anything to do with you. She thinks your only interest has been this recording." Willy started rehearsals early the next morning, in the big stone barn behind the inn. The structure's high roof and thick walls provided natural acoustics, while its location was far enough from Llangollen to avoid creating undue curiosity. Recording equipment had been set up along one side; around it, the orchestra was grouped. The center area was marked off for vocal rehearsals. Willy handled the direction himself, and not for a century had any director on Earth undertaken such a staggering task. From the first moments of rehearsal, it became evident that the orchestra could never hope to play an entire number in one sustained effort. It was not so much the physical effort involved, as the difficulty of maintaining an emotional crest for so long a period. The first violinist fainted halfway through the opening sequence between Lieutenr ant Pinkerton and the American consul. This triggered a mass collapse among the woodwinds. The pianist wavered off an octave through sheer fatigue, and the drummer dropped his sticks when Willy cued him to step up tempo. Willy was frantic. "We'll have to record a few bars at a time -- until they're more accustomed to the strain," he told Walther. "What an editing job this will bei" The problem with the vocalists was even more acute. Every duet would have to be recorded in at least ten segments. Maria was the only one who stubbornly insisted on doing a complete number. It was a point of pride with her. She hated the music; it violated every principle she had ever learned. But the perfectionist in her, reinforced by her bitterness toward Walther and her sense of obligation to Willy, drove her to deliver the full measure of her promise. In the love duet between Butterfly and Pinkerton, which closed Act I, the pale and perspiring Pinkerton was nearly spent as he began his final lines: Come then, Love, what fear holds you trembling? Have done with all misgivings... His impassioned plea quavered; he clutched Maria's arm to steady himself. Willy cutr the music. For five minutes they held cold compresses to the singer's wrists, while members of the orchestra slumped, exhausted, in their chairs. When all were somewhat recovered, Pinkerton attempted the next two lines of his wedding night rapture: The night doth enfold us, See the world lies sleeping... And then he had to rest again. But when Maria answered, her dark eyes flashing defiantly, she went through her entire eight lines without a pause. Her great test came with the famous second act solo, "One Fine Day". It was difficult enough to learn the strange words and music, but to achieve and hold the emotional peaks of the solo for nearly two minutes was something she had never before attempted. Because she insisted on doing the entire aria without resting, Willy set the recording for early in the morning, when the orchestra would be fresh. He asked them to assemble on the improvised sound stage an hour after breakfast. Willy limited the orchestra to a minimum tune up period so that the musicians could conserve their energies for the ordeal ahead. The violins were the last to be ready. When the final string had been tuned, Willy cued the engineers to stand by and pointed the tip of his baton toward Maria. "Un Bel Di... " The words came clear as the notes of a silver bell, calling back to life the beauty that had been dead for so long. Walther felt his stomach muscles tighten; a tingle of wonder crept up his spine. Standing there in the center of the old stone bam, wearing only sandals, shorts and a light blouse open at die neck, Maria still managed to convey the feelings of the lonely young Japanese wife who sang so confidently of her husband's return from across the sea. This was Maria, the incomparable artist, using all of her technique to blend the unfamiliar words and music. But for the first few lines it was only a technical tour de force. Then Puccini's music began to take hold of Maria, merging the artist with the woman, and creating yet a third entity out of the two. He saw Willy turn, transfixed toward Maria. His hands and baton continued to move, but not by conscious direction. His pink cheeks were pale, etched with deepening lines. His blue eyes were misted. Even the other members of the company seemed moved by Maria's performance. Yet they could not stay with her emotionally ; they were compelled to break the tension by shuffling their feet and self-consciously lighting cigarettes. To a man, the orchestra played as if hypnotized, sweeping through measure after measure with an intensity that seemed impossible to maintain. For an uncertain moment, near the end of the aria, it looked as if Maria could not finish. She swayed, held tightly to the microphone for support. Walther stepped forward to catch her, but she recovered, drawing on some inner source of strength to finish: "... This will all come to pass, as I tell you! Banish your idle fears... For he will return, I know it!" As Maria finished, she tore herself away from the microphone. Her lips were trembling; her eyes were wide, like those of a woman in shock. She half-ran out of the barn, stopped -- confused -- in the bright sunlight, and then ran on down the path toward the Inn. would see no one. Then she agreed to see Willy for a few moments. When the old maestro left her room, he looked deeply troubled. "I don't know..." he told Walther, shaking his head. "I don't know what this has done to her." "What did she say?" "Right now, she says she will never sing again. She's going to her home in Italy this evening." "Can we do anything?" "Looks like we've already done more than we should. Mixing two cultures in one artist is dangerous chemistry!" Up to this moment. Walther had deliberately avoided any decision about Maria. She had been a continuing and delightful challenge, especially since Tahiti, but beyond that he had not allowed his thoughts to go. Now there was a responsibility he could no longer evade. He had watched the dual personality that was Maria being shattered under the impact of Puccini's music. How would the pieces fit together again? Should he stand by and watch? Or should he try to help? And if he could help her, how would it all end? The gulf between two cultures could be wider than the mathematics of space between two galaxies, or the bridging power of sex. Against Willy's advice, Walther decided to catch the same stratoway with Maria, and take his chances on what might happen. But a phone call from Uniport abruptly changed his plans. It was from their underworld contact, who informed Willy that the "Board of Directors" was meeting that evening; if Walther wanted to attend, he would have to take the next stratoway to Uniport. Someone would meet him at the station. Uniport or Italy? Willy intervened to make the decision easier. "This will be your only chance to get into the vaults," he counseled. "Besides, Maria must think some things through for herself." His emotions in turmoil, Walther boarded the next stratoway for Uniport. As North Wales and England blurred into the ocean beneath him, he had the feeling that he would never see the River Dee country again. A tall, thin young man, with eyes as colorless as waxpaper, met him at the Uniport station and hurried him into a monorail car. Walther tentatively began a question, but the young man stopped him with an opaque stare. Four times they changed monorail cars, ending up eventually at a freight terminal, where an older man met them and pointed silently to one of the freight cars. Inside, Walther saw a strange assortment of smiling servo-robots and grimfaced humans sitting around on empty packing cases. The cases were already marked for shipment and trans-shipment throughout the galaxy. After quick, sharp glances of appraisal, no one paid any attention to him. He sat down beside one of the servo-robots and forced himself to wait as patiently as possible. For a half hour nothing happened. The servo-robots remained motionless; the humans chain-smoked until the air in the freight car was an acrid grey smog. Nearly every human switched constantly and nervously from his tiny TV set to his watchradio. One of the men brought out a bottle, but quickly put it away after a staccato command from the greying, squarejawed man who seemed to be in charge. At # o'clock, without warning, the freight car vibrated slightly and began to move. The servo-robots stood up attentively; the humans snuffed out their cigarettes. Peering through one of the small windows, Walther saw that twilight was merging into night. It was completely dark when the car stopped at a loading platform behind the steel-grey building that towered above the Uniport cultural vaults. A servo-robot guard stepped forward challengingly. At a gesture from the leader, one of the servo-robots within the car marched out on the platform and presented a punched bill of lading. As the guard fed the document into its tabulator, the other stepped closer and lightly brushed against it. The guard stiffened, as though from a severe shock. There was a sound like that of a racing motor suddenly thrown out of gear. Then a click, and silence. The servorobot guard unhinged itself at the knees and collapsed on the platform. Another signal from the leader, and out of the car scurried the humans and servo-robots. They ran across the platform toward the shadow of the building. Here, two of the men, who Walther guessed to be thS experts imported to Earth for this job, traced a circle around the door with an instrument that resembled a small camera. Evidently this was to cut off the alarm system, for almost immediately they relaxed and went on to open the door without any attempt at caution. Proceeding in single file, lighting their way with powerful flashlights, they passed in similar manner through a series of inner doors to an elevator leading down into the vaults. A servo-robot took over its operation, and they shot downward. At each level, the leader stepped off the elevator to look around. At the sixth level, he nodded and they followed him into the vault. This was the book vault. Tier upon tier, the stacks of books reached in every direction as far as a flashlight beam could probe. Motioning Walther to follow him, the leader took a piece of chalk and began marking off groups of books. The men rounded up library carts for the servorobots, who swiftly fell to loading the carts and trundling them back to the elevator. Walther soon moved ahead of the leader and began marking the books himself. They had started in the M-sections. With mounting excitement, Walther chalked off Machiavelli, Mann, Markham, Masefield, Maugham, Maupassant, Melville, Millay, Moliere... Leaping to the next tier, he raced through the stacks marking the works of Nathan and Newton, O'Neill... Ovid... Then on to Parker, Pater, Pepys, Plato, Poe... Racine, Rousseau... Sandburg... Santayana... What an astounding haul this would be! The masterpieces of the ages, to be whisked across space, from star system to star system, until at last they reached his homeland, where they would grow and into generation, down through the millenniums of universal time. Back to the A-sections! Adams, Aeschylus, Anderson, Aristotle... On to the B-sections! Bacon... Balzac... Benet... Bronte... Byron... It was like drinking a heady burgundy. Each new title whetted his taste for more. Inevitably, the very magnitude of the thing began to have its sobering effect. Was it actually possible to get so much material out of the vaults? Off the Earth? The leader caught up with him in the K-sections and motioned him not to mark off any more books. They'd have a hard time getting those Walther had already chalked. Walther rode up with the next elevator load. On the way down, he indicated to the servo-robot that he wanted to go all the way to the bottom level. There he stepped out of the elevator and stood in the darkness for a moment to steady himself from the excitement of marking so many books. Then he swept his flashlight beam slowly around the vault. It was like turning on a light in a tomb that had been sealed for centuries. Certainly this tomb had been sealed, to all except the Digesters and the servo-robot attendants. The vault was at least two hundred feet high. Walther could only guess at the other dimensions, and the extent of the corridors that fanned out like the spokes of a wheel. Sculptured figures from all the ages of Earth loomed out of the shadows with a quality of arrested life that might at any moment move again. The figures of the Pharaohs were here, the chiseled perfection of Athens and Rome, the genius of the Renaissance and the primitive gods of the Aztecs. The armless Venus gazed down dispassionately on the bowed back of the Discus Thrower, while Rodin's Thinker stared in eternal contemplation at the belly of Buddha. And then Walther looked upward. High overhead, reassembled on a great oblong span of artificial ceiling suspended from the top of the vault, were the nine immortal panels from the Sistine Chapel. Tracing his beam of light through scene by scene of Michaelangelo's creation of the world, lingering among the connective figures of the prophets and sibyls, the lunettes and triangles, Walther lost all sense of time. When his back and neck muscles could stand the strain no longer, he wandered deeper into the dim recesses of the vault, following corridor after corridor, entranced. He was like a condemned man watching his last sunrise and trying to absorb it ail, knowing he would not come this way again. Walther did not realize how far he had wandered until he came at last to the end of a corridor and glanced at his watch. Ten o'clock! He'd been gone from the group for nearly three hours, and the entire raid had been timed for two hours. He started running for the elevator. Corridor led into corridor, gallery into gallery. It took him twenty minutes to find his way back to the main vault, another five minutes to locate the right elevator. He pressed the button and listened. There was no sound within the shaft. He shouted, and there was only the echo of his own voice reverberating through the ages around him. Fighting down a flutter of panic, Walther turned off his light and leaned against the elevator door to organize his thoughts. He was sure the others had left on time to make shipment schedules at the Uniport landing. They might have delayed long enough to make a cursory search for him, but his safety was no part of their commitment. They had successfully raided the vaults, which was all they had contracted to do. Before morning, most of them undoubtedly would have embarked on inter-planetary cruises. Walther's first decision was to try the other elevators on the offchance that one had been left in operating gear. None had. Next, he set off to look for a stair well, fire ladder or other method of exit. It took him three hours to cover the entire vault and its corridors. No doubt of it, the elevators were the only means of entering and leaving. It was now one o'clock. In eight hours the upper level doors would open to the Digesters. No particular effort had been made to camouflage the gaps in the stacks. His one chance was to reach the street level before anyone noticed the missing books. Meanwhile, he could do nothing except spend the night as comfortably as possible. He spread his coat on the marble floor behind the squat statue of a Malayan goddess. Surprisingly, he did doze off toward morning. He awoke shortly after eight o'clock, and began to punch the elevator button every five minutes. Finally, at three minutes to nine, a faint hum responded within the shaft. He retreated hastily into the nearest corridor, and waited another ten minutes before bringing the elevator down to his level. Then he entered it, pressed the street-level control and shot upward. He lit a cigarette, and was prepared to step out nonchalantly as soon as the door opened. His exit was nonchalant enough, but the servo-robot guard in front of the elevator held out its tabulator slot and said. "Crdpls." Walther was shaken, but did not freeze up. He fumbled in his pocket for a slip of paper and tried to cram it into the tabulator. A red light flashed on the servo-robot's chest; a buzzer sounded. Thirty yards beyond, Walther saw the front desk and the door open to the street. He acted with the impulse. A sidestep took him around the servo-robot, and then he was racing toward the door. Three steps later, a vise-like grip clamped around his shoulders and swept him off his feet. Twisting, he saw that the servo-robot's arm had elongated, and that the fingers had stretched to encircle his body. He kicked hard at the arm, and that was his last conscious act. The next time Walther opened his eyes, his head throbbed so violently he closed them again. When the spinning stopped, he tried once more. Around him he saw four metallic walls, and overhead a ceiling of similar material. Except for a ventilator grid, and the outlines of two doors, there were no breaks in the wall and no decorations. He was lying on a low, narrow cot, and was still fully dressed. He felt his head. There was a large lump above his right temple, where he might have struck the floor. But he was still too groggy for much speculation. He closed his eyes to ease the throbbing, and fell into an uneasy sleep. The creaking of the door must have roused him, for it was closing as he focussed on it. A tray of food was within arm's reach. A smaller door behind his bed had been opened; it led to a tiny washroom. After freshening up and trying the food, Walther felt much better. He was a strong-nerved young man, not accustomed to worry, and he tried to weigh the facts for and against him. If the shipments had gone off without a hitch, things might not be so bad. He'd been found leaving the vaults, but no one would suppose that he'd have staved around after somehow disposing of the books. They might suspect him, but it would be hard to disprove his story that he'd taken the elevator by mistake the day before and been trapped overnight. Anyway, as a visitor from another galaxy, he was entitled to certain consideration. He felt even better when the door opened late in the afternoon to admit Willy Fritsh and a tightlipped man of about forty. "Your lawyer," said Willy. He looked and sounded grim. After completing introductions, Willy told him that he was indeed accused of the theft, and would be arraigned in the morning. "They can't prove it," Walther answered calmly. "They think they can. Our Digester friend -- remember our Bohemian evening? -- has come forward to accuse you. He'll testify about the offer we made him." "We? Will he accuse you, too?" "Not exactly I'm supposed to be an innocent bystander. A friend who was used!" In spite of the circumstances, a hint of the old sparkle returned to Willy's eyes and he smiled faintly. "What can they do about it?" Walther demanded. After all, he was a Von Koenigsburg. Willy's smile vanished. "Our legal friend here says ten years would be a light sentence." They discussed the case for an hour, while the lawyer took meticulous notes. Then, through Willy, the attorney began questioning Walther about his financial status. Even in the language of consonants, his voice was suave. The lawyer's precise little symbols wavered as Walther briefly outlined his family circumstances, but a servo-robot opened the door before further questions could be asked. Willy started to shake hands with Walther, then impulsively put his arms around him. There were tears in the corners of his blue eyes. He tried to say something, but gave it up and hurried out the door behind the attorney. "Wait." Walther called after him. "Have you heard anything from Maria?" Willy sadly shook his head. "No. Nothing." Walther had scarcely finished breakfast next morning when a servo-robot came to take him to court. The robot linked thumb and forefinger around Walther's wrist with the grip of a handcuff. There were no spectators in the courtroom; perhaps, Walther thought glumly, because it was a free attraction that would interfere with the consumption of happy time entertainment. Willy joined him at the defendants table. "Still the loyal, misguided friend," Willy murmured. "I volunteered to be your interpreter." The Judge was a human, but all clerks and bailiffs were servorobots. As soon as the court was gaveled into session, the Prosecutor presented a twenty-second digest of the case against Walther, and called the little Digester as a substantiating witness. Walther didn't need any translation to understand what the witness was saying. Shifting unhappily in his chair, and avoiding Willy's eyes, the little Digester answered preliminary questions in a scarcely audible voice. But when he pointed his finger at Walther, his voice became shrill and he reddened to the top of his bald head. "Now he'll be afraid to attend one of our meetings," Willy murmured. "That's what he's really blaming you for." When the Digester left the stand, a portly man, with a perpetual tick in his left cheek, arose to address the court. He was at the Prosecutor's table, and until this moment had seemed to take very little interest in the proceedings. But now he spoke in a steel-edged voice that was in surprising contrast to his slow, heavy movements. "He's speaking as a friend of the court," Willy whispered. "His office is legal representative of the Happy Time cartel in Uniport. He's telling the court what a terrible of -- in the public interest not to press charges if you'll return the books at once. Otherwise, he demands you be held for trial without bail." Walther's lawyer conferred briefly with Willy. The Judge and Prosecutor also conferred, and both spoke with obvious deference to the Happy Time attorney. With a bow to all three, Walther's lawyer addressed the court. His smooth voice rippled lightly over the harsh consonants, and his thin lips parted often in a swift, mirthless smile. He spoke for almost a minute, and the Judge began to toy with his gavel, watching the Happy Time attorney for a cue to his feelings. The attorney had slumped back in his chair, eyes drooping. But the tick in his cheek worked furiously. Then Walth's lawyer turned toward the Happy Time lawyer and paused dramatically. "He's talking about your family," Willy whispered again. "I think he's exaggerating a bit, but he says they own an entire planet twice the size of Earth." When the lawyer continued, the smoothness was gone from his voice. His words came hard, crisp, brief. The elderly Judge sagged back in his chair, the Prosecutor blinked and the Happy Time attorney allowed his eyes to close completely. "I hope you approve," Willy said in a shaky whisper. "You've just offered to deposit a hundred Time cartel as assurance the books will be returned." "What? -- I don't even admit taking them!" "Neither does your lawyer. But, as he puts it, if anyone acting in your behalf, but without your direct knowledge, should have seized these books and shipped them off the Earth, you will assume responsibility for their return. Otherwise, they may be turned loose among the people of Earth to plant seeds of future trouble." Walther's lawyer emphasized one brief phrase, and sat down. Even Walther recognized the words: The Happy Time attorney slowly opened his eyes and heaved himself to his feet. He spread out both pudgy hands to the Judge, and shrugged his bulking shoulders. He spoke briefly, and the steel-edge was gone from his voice. "He suggests that the court in its wisdom, temper justice with mercy," Willy translated excitedly. After this it was a matter of detail, with the Prosecutor insisting only that Walther be kept in custody and deported immediately after the deposit had been arranged. The strain of the whole affair had been too much for Willy, but as the smiling servo-robot led Walther out of the courtroom, he called after him: "I'll be at the landing!" Walther knew he should be happy. He had found what he wanted on Earth. Not in the way he had hoped, but the final reckoning was the same. Still, there was an emptiness to it all, an emptiness and an aching. When he cleared customs, and was released by his servo-robot guard, Walther saw Willy Fritsh tleship. A half dozen of his musicians were with him. Willy said with simple directness: "If you want us, we'd like to go with you." Of all the things that had happened to him in the last twentyfour hours, this took Walther most completely by surprise. He stared, speechless, from Willy to the musicians, most of them older men. "These few came to me," Willy said. "They don't want to go back to our own music -- Neither do I!" His voice broke, and he continued, pleading: "We can help hring your dream to life in the few years left to us." Walther enveloped the old maestro in a bear-hug that crushed the breath out of him. "Want you?" he cried. "Now, who's a fool?" "You are," gasped Willy, "if you thought I'd leave part of my heart behind!" Walther looked around quickly. At the top of the shuttleship ramp stood a young woman with half a smile and half a question on her lips. There was doubt in that smile, and fear. There was loneliness and wonder, and hope. It was a promise and a warning of all that lay ahead for them, out there beyond the stars. Humbly, more knowing that he had yet been in his short life, Walther held out his hands and walked up the ramp toward her -- toward a dream that was over, and a reality that could be more bitter, more sweet, than any dream.    ij Coming January #th! ! ing the first five years of IF Magazine! Selected by the editors to !; include as many variations as possible, you will find something ! ! different in every story -- an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme ' ! and pace. Here you will find Isaac Asimov, Charles Beaumont, s Jerome Bixby, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Frank Riley, Robert ;! Sheckley and others -- in a book chock full of the best in 'science fiction entertainment. I I The edition is small and many places will not receive copies.  However, if your local news dealer cannot get you a copy, send j! # cents to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and a copy will ;! be mailed to you at once. Is Man on the way to perfect health and longevity? Will tomorrow's citizens be free of plagues, disease and deformity? days who seem to feel that we are now in the midst of the Golden Age of medical discovery, and I don't believe a word of it. "But look at what we've accomplished in the last half century!" they will cry indignantly. "We've routed infectious diseases with the use of antibiotic drugs. We've given life and hope to diabetics. We've solved the riddle of poliomyelitis. We have proved that the human heart can be opened by the surgeon's knife and closed again with impunity. Give us enough money, enough workers, and enough education and we could wipe malaria from the face of the Earth in fourteen days flat. We've made more progress in diagnosis, treatment, and cure of human illness in the past fifty years than in the preceding fifty centuries! If this isn't the Golden Age, then what is? Why shouldn't we expect to continue at this pace until all human illness has fallen to the blade?" Well, why shouldn't we? There is a very simple and fundamental reason why we shouldn't expect to, and won't, continue medical progress at the same wild gallop that has characterized the past fifty years of work. We have come within sight of discoveries that will make the achievements of the past half century look pale by comparison -- only to find the road blocked off by a great barrier. Nothing we have done in the past will help us to surmount that barrier, but we have reached a point where no other road will do. Far from rushing untrammeled through a Golden Age, medical research has reached the crossroads, and must find some fundamental answers before it can go on. In essence, medical workers in the past fifty years have been going about the countryside slaying all the little dragons they could find. They have been commendably successful -- so much so, indeed, that there aren't very many little dragons left to slay. But it just happens that there are some big dragons around that we haven't even touched yet. We don't even know for sure what they look like, much less how to go about slaying them. And these dragons are killers -- the group of disorders generally known as the degenerative diseases, responsible among themselves for the vast majority of human death : Arteriosclerosis and heart disease. Hypertension. Cancer. We have names for them. That's about all that we have. Of course, there are certain things we do know about these diseases -- important things to consider in thinking about the future of our attempts to track them down. First, none of these diseases can be expected to yield to medical research in the abrupt, dramatic manner of past medical triumphs. The reason lies in the peculiar nature of these disorders. With the infectious' diseases, or poliomyelitis, we were dealing with specific micro-organisms, vulnerable to specific drugs, medications, or antibodies capable of slowing or stopping their growth. With diabetes mellitus a specific enzyme system was found to be at fault, for which a key enzyme could be supplied artificially once it was discovered and identified. But the degenerative diseases are not specific disorders of any organ or enzyme system. They are generalized diseases involving multiple organ systems. In each of them we are dealing not with a sick kidney or a sick liver, but with a sick human body, suffering from a widespread malfunction of the fundamental physiological and biochemical processes of life. We can see, then, why no specific, simple, encapsulated answer is likely to be found for any of these vicious disorders. We've tried that already, and failed. Physicians have, for example, run the whole gamut of drugs which should, theoretically, bring down high blood pressure -- but their patients continue to die of hypertensive cardiovascular disease. We have tried everything imaginable to stop the wild, erratic growth of malignant cancer cells -- but the cancers keep right on growing. We have even resorted to surgery to try to replace the sclerotic blood vessels in human hearts -- but we haven't found any way to stop the steady march of arteriosclerosis in the aging human body. Gradually it has become apparent that the answers we need so desperately will never be found this way. These diseases will be stopped only when we understand what they are and why they happen; to reach this goal it will be necessary for men to ferret out a complete basic understanding of the physiological and biochemical nature of life itself. This, then, is the great barrier to the Golden Age of medicine. It will not be surmounted in the next decade, nor even the next. We may well stand on the brink of a "barren age" of medical progress -- fifty or sixty years, maybe a hundred, of futile searching -- before this great barrier begins to crumble. It will cost us stupendous sums of money and the finest minds we can possibly recruit from the present and future generations, for we will find the answers only if we can develop and sustain the greatest concerted search in the history of mankind. But the reward will be far greater than the mere ability to prevent or cure a group of human ailments. The knowledge we acquire in such a search will give us the weapons we need to fight the last enemy -- Death -- on his own grounds. It will place relative immortality within our reach : a useful, productive human life-span measured in centuries rather than in decades. This will be the Golden Age of medicine. It could come in our time. suggest, from the above, that I anticipate a Mexican stand-off in medicine for the next fifty years or so. There will be progress of one sort or another, and plenty of it. For one thing, all the little dragons aren't slain yet by any means. A few of them that remain are quite unpleasant enough to deserve the continued attention of medical researchers for many years to come. Some, indeed, have never been truly dead, but continue to twitch their tails from time to time in a most annoying fashion. Others, only recently discovered, are drawing much attention to themselves -- such nasty customers as the disease called lupus erythematosus, first recognized in the early #'s, a country cousin of rheumatic fever and rheumatoid arthritis, but distinguished by its proclivity for killing teen-aged girls and young women. For another thing, and perhaps more important, many research programs now under way show great promise of providing at least some hope of palliation until the final answers are found. But if the answers coming from the laboratories and clinics in the next half century are not as startling and revolutionary as those in the past, we can anticipate that certain social and economic changes directly related to medicine will be. Some of these changes have already begun, and their endpoint can be foreseen; others haven't started yet, but are as logical as they are inevitable. First, we will see the emergence of greater and greater degrees of specialization and super-specialization among practitioners of medicine. The sheer bulk of information and knowledge needed for successful diagnosis and treatment of illness will force this trend to continue and grow. As a result, the concept of the "GP" and the "family doctor" will vanish completely, grieved for a while but soon forgotten. In its place clinic groups of trained specialists will burgeon, offering a far higher quality of medical care for far more people than the general practitioner could hope to supply. As an unfortunate but inevitable corollary, medical education will take longer and cost more in a time when more and more medically trained men and women are desperately needed. Side by side with the trend toward super-specialization (have you ever heard of a pituitary osmoreceptorologist? A specialist in the function of Paccinian Corpuscle? You haven't? We've got 'em!) another phenomenon, already present, will develop and expand rapidly: the consolidation of medical clinics and research laboratories into huge, centralized medical centers. Although such centers will grow up chiefly because of economic pressures, they will offer tremendous advantages to medical researchers. Diagnostic and research equipment, as it becomes more refined, also becomes more expensive. X-ray and fluoroscopic equipment, clinical laboratory facilities, electron microscopes, radioactive isotope facilities -- all can be shared by many groups of workers in a centralized location, whereas their cost would be prohibitive in smaller installations. What is more, a large, consolidated medical center could effectively use another tool to ease the almost insurmountable task of following current medical literature: electronic memory storage and computer mechanisms could be maintained, with trained crews to summarize medical journal material, catalogue it, store it, and make it quickly available to save researchers the days, weeks and months of almost totally unproductive reading they are so often forced to do just to keep up to date. Naturally, such installations will cost money, and lots of it. They will become not only research centers but centers for diagnosis, treatment, and hospitalization of hundreds of thousands of patients annually. Medical insurance programs will help foot some small part of the bill, but sooner or later government support to help allay the costs of medical care and research will become mandatory. When that happens it will come, paradoxically, without political control over the use of the money. This idea of paying the Piper without any say about the tune to be played may well be revolting to a national government -- just about as revolting as the very thought of government subsidy is to the medical profession -- but stark necessity will force an uneasy truce. Medical work, with its basically humanitarian aims and goals, must not be allowed to become a political issue -- witness the grisly example of Dr. Salk's vaccine -- and yet the search for the answers we must have will be too costly for private support. A truce will have to be made, and the resulting compromise may well be unique in the #-year history of high finance! We will see other strange bedfellows appearing. Already the radiologist is hard put to tell whether he is a physicist specializing in medicine or a medical doctor specializing in physics. There was a time when the biochemist and the physiologist would have laughed at the suggestion that the electronic engineer might be able to offer them help; now they seek him out to build diagnostic and research machines for them. Lions and lambs, together they go, and the result is a broader scope for each, and perhaps a greater hope that the answers will, finally, be reached. say, but it doesn't help Granny with her rheumatism very much right now. There is every reason to believe that within a few decades we will have answers that will put an end to Granny's rheumatism once and for all -- but what about the meantime? Unfortunately we don't have those answers yet, and we do have Granny. It will hardly do to stand by and wring our hands as we wait, so to speak, for Armageddon. So the search goes on for answers applicable to human diseases and disorders here and now -- palliative answers perhaps, almost always incomplete and tentative answers, but some kind of approach at least. This, then, will be the area of visible progress in the forthcoming "barren age" of medicine. Again, we will see developments in two regions: the refinement of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques already known; and the search for techniques and methods not yet discovered. In the first category, it seems very likely that we will see massive enlargement and refinement of the gawky, impractical present day mass-screening techniques for the early detection of such diseases as pulmonary tuberculosis, cancer, gastro-intestinal ulcer, hypertension and kidney disease. Such mass-screenings have already been undertaken in certain of our cities -- massive programs of chest X-rays to "screen" significant segments of the population for pulmonary tuberculosis, to cite a single example. Such programs have invariably been considered impractical for wider use -- but with our backs to the wall, any technique that offers hope of earlier diagnosis of cancer, for example, must be examined most carefully. Ways can be found to surmount the monumental cost of such programs; indeed, another decade or so may see mass-screenings as a basic annual requirement of all hospitalization and life insurance contracts. In the past quarter century we have seen surgery come into its own with the development of techniques once thought # be either impossible or recklessly dangerous. Cardiac surgery, for instance, is now refined to such a degree that surgery of the heart is commonplace, and greater and greater daring is paying big dividends. But at best surgery of today is a pretty coarse proposition -- excision of large masses or diseased organs, repair of large faults, incision and drainage of wounds and abscesses. Surgery has always been limited by the necessity of maintaining natural circulation of blood to the vital organs while the operation goes on. But the next quarter century will see great progress in overcoming this barrier to surgical activity. Artificial kidneys and heart-lung machines will become part of every surgical armamentarium. Artificial liver circulation systems may even be developed. With such devices, in conjunction with hypo-thermic anaesthesia methods and drugs capable of slowing metabolic processes throughout the body, micro-surgical techniques would be feasible. Tiny instruments, remotely controlled under microscopic visualization could be used, for instance, to separate cancer cells from surrounding normal tissue on a cell-by-cell basis, or for repair or replacement of tiny, deep-seated blood vessels in vital organs. Attempts have already been made to "seed" new coronary blood vessels into human hearts to replace diseased vessels, without significant success; micro-techniques would allow implanting and grafting of tiny, healthy vessels deep in heart muscle to replace the old, sclerotic vessels. Portions of liver or kidney could be excised or repaired without damage to surrounding healthy cells. Technically impossible today, such procedures may become commonplace as soon as the proper tools are made. Here again the medical researcher and the engineer will work cheek by jowl to do a job neither can do by himself. Cancer is, of course, the target of concerted attack from all sides in medicine today. The many faces it shows, its inexorable march to fatality once started, the very alien nature of its growth within the human body, all make it a fearful enemy to human life. Yet, paradoxically, the very nature of cancerous growth -- wild, disordered, spreading to any type of tissue within the body, even surviving transplantation from body to body -- may provide another weapon against the diseases of degeneration: the artificial culturing and transplanting of whole prosthetic organs to replace old, dying ones. Again, an exciting challenge, technically impossible today, which may come within the realm of reason tomorrow. As for new drugs, the parade continues, often to the exhaustion of our patience. But along with the new drugs, new concepts of drug usage are slowly emerging. The strange behavior of the adrenal cortical steroids and other hormonal substances are suggesting tantalizing new possibilities to medical researchers. Imagine a drug which gives the best therapeutic effect when it is taken by the doctor rather than the patient! Yet this is exactly the way the lysergic acid derivatives are being used in dealing with schizophrenia. Gradually the classical uses of drugs are being reinforced by unknown and untried methods of use. ately avoided much comment on the future attack on mental illness, chiefly because I cannot find a good, solid, logical jumpingoff place from which to start speculating. Speculation might be interesting, but it would necessarily be wild, and right now I'm trying to keep my feet within kicking distance of the ground. But in speculating on any future development in medicine or allied fields we must recognize the presence of another factor at work -- a factor so staggeringly important that it is perhaps the single greatest shaper of the future, yet so unpredictable that it utterly defies speculation. This factor has been called the principle of serendipity . In his essays Horace Walpole described the journeys of three hypothetical Princes of Serendib (an ancient name for Ceylon) who traveled in quest of things they never succeeded in finding, but discovered along the way many things which turned out to be better than what they were looking for. The lucky coincidences that occur and lead to the great medical discoveries, the unpredictable variables that make any speculation seem timid and conservative -- this factor of serendipity exercises an overwhelming influence on the direction of medical progress. of serendipity: the spores of peniFleming's window were nothing more than an annoying contaminant of his bacteria cultures, and it took him twelve years to realize what had actually happened ,to him -- but it changed history when he finally woke up. Practically every medical discovery in history has had some degree of serendipity involved. It is a process which is constantly at work -- erratic, undependable, upsetting orderly experiments in the most annoying fashion, yet opening doors we never even dreamed existed before. So speculation is only of limited value even when based on the firmest ground. Nevertheless, I feel sure that one thing is clear: medicine today stands at the crossroads. We are emerging, only now, from a great darkness, and ahead we can see the barest glimmer of light. The Golden Age of medicine, when it arrives, will bring problems of unimaginable proportions; the social and economic implications of physical immortality are stupendous. It will bring the potential for wisdom, or for cataclysm. It will bring the stars within reach. We stand on the brink of discovery -- we will live to see it, to participate in it.    Burial on Earth was the dream of every person in the galaxy. And Krieg was certainly rich enough to. buy his way in. Valhalla was his. But he changed his mind... #. Illustrated by Virgil Finlay lor Dost Corrupt but that was as had been intended. Perhaps thirty feet high, fifty feet wide, it stretched a good hundred feet in length. It was paneled entirely in jet black onyx, which gave a sense of infinity to it. The floor was a thick lawn of heavy black pile carpeting. Only two areas of the room offered mitigation to this oppressive gloom. Just past the middle, bathed in a haze of light, was placed a large black desk, and behind it sat a man. At the far end of the room, slightly elevated, was an alabaster statue, an abstraction of incredible beauty and poignancy. The statue too was wrapped in a soft nimbus. Few visitors to this room ever had to be told the title of this work of art, for its meaning was apparent in its every line -- Bereavement . The man behind the big black desk belonged to the room as much as did the onyx walls, the thick carpet or the alabaster statue. Without the presence of this man the chamber seemed strangely empty, strangely morbid, and few of the man's associates cared to remain in the room when he was not there. Somehow the warm air of benevolence to be found in his fair, pinkish face softened the harsh somberness of the appointments, while the gentle strength in his dark and mournful eyes gave amelioration to the atmosphere of despair. His job was to be a Janus, looking from the cheery rubric of today towards the unknown but dimmer colors of tomorrow -- to be a bridge between present pleasures and future fears. There was no better man for the task in all the Galaxy than Consolator Steen. At the moment Consolator Steen sat waiting, thinking, planning. Soon through the huge doors facing him would come a man, one Joseph Krieg by name, who sought Steen's assistance. The fact that Krieg was one of the richest men in all the known universe made the impending interview a most important one, for Consolator Steen's assistance depended entirely upon the price that could be paid. Steen's fingers flicked over the set of hidden controls on his desk. Everything was in readiness. "And another innocent fish gets hooked," he muttered to himself. He sighed once, shortly, then touched an invisible button. will see Joseph Krieg now." In ther outer office Steen's aide-de-camp, Assistant Consolator Braun, sprang to an attitude of proper deference as the huge bronze doors swung open. Braun bowed slightly as Joseph Krieg strode past him and into the onyx chamber. Steen's eyes narrowed in admiration as he examined the man walking towards him. Joseph Krieg was a huge person, just past middle age but still retaining the hardened appearance of late youth. His face had a chiseled squareness to it, and his manner indicated not so much wealth as it did an obvious determination to succeed. This would be an interesting fish to play with indeed, Steen thought. About half-way to the desk Krieg stumbled slightly, but recovered his pace with the cumbersome grace of some massive animal. A smile flickered briefly over Steen's face. The thickness of the carpet had more purposes than one. When Krieg was almost upon him, Steen stood up. Krieg stopped in front of the desk, facing Steen, as if waiting for some signal. Steen, who knew the value of silence, remained absolutely still. After a few seconds, obviously perplexed, Krieg smiled nervously. "Consolator Steen?" james McConnell "Welcome to Earth, Joseph Krieg. Welcome to the Heart of the Galaxy." Steen's voice was rich, mellifluous, and the words fell from his mouth like benedictions. He extended a hand. "Won't you please be seated?" The chair received Krieg's body as if it were the most precious burden it had ever held. It's soft contours almost demanded that he relax, yield the tenseness of his muscles to its smooth and welcoming shape. Its surface closed around him as if it were a second skin, then began to tingle in gentle caress. Joseph Krieg had never felt so comforted in his life. Consolator Steen seated himself behind his desk, then waited until his assistant, Braun, had taken a chair some feet away. He smiled paternally. "May I ask you one favor? Would it seem presumptuous if I called you Joseph? Perhaps you would feel it an impertinence on my part, but..." Consolator Steen gestured slightly with both his hands, as if to implore forgiveness. Joseph Krieg smiled, nodded his head. "Of course I won't mind if you use my first name. It would be an honor, Sir." The smile continued on his face, but his eyes narrowed as if fie were attempting to puzzle out the figure behind the desk. "You will excuse me too if I say that you've come too soon, Joseph," the Consolator said. "Too soon?" Krieg replied quizzically. "I don't think I..." Steen smiled warmly. "I only mean that you look still so young, so strong and vibrant with life. And yet, perhaps you are the wiser to come now, still in the vigor of living. It shows an honesty with yourself, an ability to face the facts, which is much to be admired." "Thank you, Sir," Krieg replied. He continued to stare at the Consolator. Steen knew full well the turmoil that was stirring within the man. The entire interview had been psychologically planned to evoke dark and dormant emotions which, when released, would destroy Krieg's normal ability to judge situations impassively. Proof that things were going as intended came from Krieg's continual use of the word "Sir." Krieg's commercial empires spanned the Universe; from perfume to starships, from food to fertilizers, he was king. And yet he would never understand that it was Steen's quiet paternal power, the fact that he wore wise sorrow wrapped around him the way some men wear a cloak, that called forth this unfamiliar reverence. The psychological survey done on Krieg had cost the Consolator a small fortune, and he didn't intend to waste it. "You must realize, Joseph, that the things which you have come to discuss are matters of the deepest concern for all of us here on Earth." Steen gesticulated towards Braun as if Braun represented Earth. "The problem is one that touches deep within all of us, and we are anxious to be of whatever service possible. But more than anything else, we want you to know that we understand " "Thank you, Sir," Krieg repeated. He frowned for a moment, then seemed to smile. "But if you don't mind, maybe we could begin our discussion of terms." Steen raised one eyebrow slightly. The man showed a remarkable lack of sentimentality. Corrections would have to be made in the approach ... "Of course. I am delighted to get on with things. And I must say, I find your attitude extraordinarily sane. The problem is, really, a simple one best met head on. You are here because you know that as it come to all men, death must come to you too. And you feel the necessity to make certain that when your time comes, you will be-brought to Earth to your final rest. You are a son of Earth. This is your great ancestral home." Krieg started slightly, then relaxed almost in reverie. Steen smiled inwardly at the power of words, repeated, to invoke long forgotten memories. For Steen knew that when Krieg had been no more than a toddling child, learning to read, learning to respond to affection, his simple-syllabled books had spoken in reverent tones of "The Great Ancestral Home." In later years, all of Krieg' s studies had had hidden at their core an emotional dependence upon Earth. No place was finer, more beauitful, more important. No, not all the rest of the stars put together. He had been become an inseparable part of his very personality, just so the words would have the desired effect at this moment. The Great Ancestral Home . "You are so fortunate, my son," the Consolator continued. "So very few of Earth's teeming children will ever hae the opportunity that lies within your' grasp. You must make the most of it." As Steen watched, Krieg seemed to shake some of the feelihg of awe from him. "I intend to make the most of it, Sir," he said, offering Steen his most charming smile. "It just depends on how hard a bargain you want to drive." Consolator Steen gave Krieg a look of mild reproach. "There is no 'bargaining' to be done, Joseph. The monetary considerations are set by law, and we have no choice in the matter. All that we can do is to explain the services which we are prepared to extend to you, and then help you as best we can to arrive at the most suitable decision. Our position is simply that of catering to your individual wants as best we can." "My wants are simple," Krieg replied, and it seemed to Steen that far too much of the man's usual forcefulness was returning to his voice. "I wish to be buried on Earth when I die, and I want you to arrange this for m." "Of course, of course, my son," Steen said, letting just a glint of steel appear in his eyes. "But what do we mean by burial? We have such different problems here on Earth than you do elsewhere in the Galaxy. You must understand that. We are forced to such strange solutions to these problems. But perhaps if I merely show you the varijames McConnell ons types of burial which we undertake, then you will understand." Steen laughed to himself. The fish appeared fat and hungry, and now it was time to drop in the bait. The Consolator touched a hidden switch atop his desk and one of the black onyx walls rippled and seemed to dissolve in mist. A replica of Earth swam through the haze and into view. "Earth. Such an incredibly small planet, Joseph. But the heart of the Galaxy none the less." The replica seemed to swell in size and geographical details became apparent. "Earth. Once a world of gentle, rolling plains, winding rivers, thick forests, wide oceans and soaring mountains. Just like any other habitable planet. And now look at it. One solid mass of buildings and machines, Joseph. We've drained the oceans and filled in their beds with metal. We've destroyed the forests and the rolling plains and planted the land for milefc above and below with throbbing inorganic monsters. We've hollowed out the very mountains to make more space. Space for nine And still we are cramped almost beyond belief. We need to expand a hundredfold. But we cannot. There simply is no room left. "No room for the living, Joseph, and this means no more room for the dead, either. Here, let me show you." The scene changed, showing first a huge building, and then, the bottom floor of the edifice. "This is one of our larger buildings, Joseph. It is more than fifty miles long and one hundred miles wide. The bottom floor alone is more than one quarter mile high. This huge space is completely filled with cubes two inches square. Each cube holds the ashes of one human being who wished to find his final resting place on Earth." Consolator Steen made a motion of resignation. "Notice that I said 'on Earth,' Joseph, and not 'in Earth.' This is our 'pauper's field,' the burial ground of those devoted souls who could not afford to be buried in the Earth itself." Joseph Krieg frowned. "But surely underneath the building..." "Underneath the bottom floor of that building are the bodies of as there are bodies under all of our buildings. Bodies of those wealthy few who could afford to escape cremation and find surcease of life in the loamy substance of the Earth itself. I shudder to tell you how tightly packed they are, of the skin-tight coffins which we had to devise, of the geometrical tricks involved in jamming as many bodies as possible in the least amount of space. And yet, it is burial, and it is in the Earth itself. No granite monuments, of course, no vases of flowers, no green grass. Just a perpetual flame burning in the main lobby of the building, and a micro-film file available somewhere listing the vital statistics of all those souls whose remains lie in the basement -- or below." Krieg' s face was furrowed with a heavy frown. Steen's words had been as shocking to the man as Steen had hoped they would be. "But the Parks..." "Ah, yes, Joseph. The Parks... " Consolator Steen leaned forward slightly. The fish was sniffing at the bait quite properly now. "Our Parks, which are the one remaining link with the past. Those green arjl grassy meadows in the midst of our metallic forests. The last places on Earth where you can be buried out in the open, with flowers over your head and birds singing above. You want to be buried in one of the Parks, don't you Joseph?" When the man nodded briefly, Steen continued. "Which Park, Joseph?" "Manhattan... Steen drew himself up with S sudden, silent movement. The fish had taken a good look at the bait. Now to remove it from sight for a while. Steen closed his eyes briefly, then raised a hand as if to brush away a sudden tear. "I'm sorry, Joe. Very sorry indeed. I was afraid that was what you wanted, and yet, there was always..." He blinked his eyes. "Manhattan Park is impossible, Joe. Confucius Park in Hong Kong, perhaps. I think there are still same plots available in Frogner Park in Oslo. I'm certain that we could get you into Amundsen Park at the South Pole. But Manhattan... No, Joe. That's one dream I'm afraid you'll just have to give up." "Why?" Joseph Krieg asked quietly but determinedly. "Have you ever seen it, Joe? I thought not. It's perhaps the most beautiful part of this most beautiful planet in the Galaxy. Would you like to see Manhattan?" Manhattan . Steen was quite aware that to Joseph Krieg this was a word of a hundred thousand associations, each of them connected with love, security, devotion and repose. It was like asking a starving man if he would care for something to eat. Steen did not even wait for a reply. T think it could be managed, as a special favor. Permission to enter Manhattan Park is difficult to get, you know, but I think this once..." Steen turned to Braun. "Put a call through to the President's office..." willows trailed languid branches to the ground. Silver-throated birds sang secret melodies while ees hummed a scarcely audible background. Narrow graveled paths wound through this gentle landscape, now hugging the edge of a tinkling stream, now plunging through carpets of gorgeous flowers. The three men sat silent on a rough stone bench observing the pastoral scene. Finally Consolator Steen spoke softly. "I understand how you feel, Joe. The first time any of us sees it, we are afflicted with silence. Its beauty is almost painful, the memories it invokes almost beyond bearing. Lincoln is buried there, just beyond that hillock; Landowski not far from him. Shakespeare's grave is there to the right, and close by is the body of Sharon, the poet of tie Galaxy. Einstein's final resting place is a mile or so away, and near to it you'll find Chi Wan, who gave us Stardrive. Humanity's Valhalla, Joe" james McConnell Joseph Krieg had not cried openly since childhood, and yet now there were tears in his eyes. "This has always been my dream..." Consolator Steen placed a friendly arm around the man's shoulders. "Yes, now you have seen it. Your dream has come true." He paused for just a moment, then said, "And now, Joe, perhaps we had better gJoseph Krieg turned towards the man with an abrupt motion. "Go? Why should we go? We've been here scarcely ten minutes." "Because the longer you stay, the harder it will be for you to leave, Joe. And the less attractive the ether parks will seem to you. So, I'd like for us to leave at once." His voice became businesslike. "First, I'd like to show you Hong Kong, and then... "I don't want to see Hong Kong, or any place else. This is where I want to be buried, Steen. Whatever the price is, I'll pay." Consolator Steen sighed deeply. "I don't think you understand, Joe. It isn't a matter of price. Manhattan is simply not available to you, for the reason that it is not for sale. I know that you have heard otherwise; I am sure that rumors have reached your ears that burial in Manhattan could be effected for fantastic tales are incorrect -- for two reasons. "The first reason, Joe, is a financial one. To the average man, a tic, unobtainable sum that he is sure anything in the Galaxy could not so, as you and I both know. get you a burial in a two-inchsquare cube in the bottom floor of one of our huge buildings. Remember? I called those huge bargain basements 'pauper's fields.' And that they are -- available to those poor jpeople throughout the Unito their names. Incredible, isn't it? ble for burial under one of the buildings, where you're packed in bodies. And how many people in the Galaxy can lay their hands on a swer, Joe, is too many people indeed. Some of them have so much more money than that, they can actually afford to be buried in one of the Parks. get you buried in Hong Kong Park, or in Frogner, or Amundsen. But not for long. You can rent a temporary grave in Hong Kong, for credits, you'd stay buried on Earth for less than three years, and then your body would have to be moved elsewhere. Very few people can afford to purchase a permanent plot in one of these parks. But they are available -- at a cost of someAnd just how many men in the or so?" Consolator Steen knew the answer to this question exactly -- he also knew that Joseph Krieg was one of these men. Krieg could have would have exhausted his fortune. Steen waited until he was tjre that the other man was deep in mental turmoil and then he continued, Iris voice now softer, less commercial sounding. "And having given you 'the prices,' so to speak, of the lesser treasures, I will now surprise you by saying that the entry ticket to Manhattan Park is free." Joseph Krieg looked at the man intently, a curious fire of hope in his eyes. "Free?" Steen nodded. "And because it is free, it is unobtainable. It is not generally known, Joe, but the only way one can be buried in Manhattan Park is by permission of the Galactic Congress. Only certified heroes are so honored, and they are few and far between. Remember the great bacteriologist Manuel de Artega? It took the Galactic Congress more than fifty years of debate after he died to decide to let him in -- but after all, the only claim to fame he had was from the Green Plague. He was buried here some thirteen years ago. There has been no one since, and no one in sight." Steen patted the man on the shoulder. "Now, come along, Joe. I want you to take a look at Amundsen Park before you make up your mind. It's not at all cold at the Pole these days -- lovely flowers, trees..." "No!" Joseph Krieg cried, standing up. Steen and Braun both rose too. "There must be a way!" The Consolator smiled inwardly. The fish was responding magnificently, Now to push the bait just a little closer... "Now, now, Joe. You mustn't get upset about this. The other Parks are just as fine, I assure you," Steen murmured in consolation. Krieg shook his head. "You can't tell me that sometime or other someone didn't buy his way into Manhattan. It stands to reason..." "Now, Joe. You're taking this much too hard... "I tell you, I know people. And that's aK-the Galactic Congress is made up of -- people. Tell me the truth, Steen. Has anyone ever bribed his way into this Park?" Steen frowned and turned his head slightly away from the man. Just a flick or two more of the line... "I wish you wouldn't ask me questions like that, Joe. When I say that it's impossible, I mean just that. You'll just excite yourself needlessly by listening to foolish rumors..." Krieg pounced on the word jubilantly. "What do you mean, rumors? Then there has been someone who bought his way in! Who was it, Steen? I swear, if you don't tell me, I'll move heaven and earth to find out." Consolator Steen seemed to consider for a moment, then sighed. Hooked . "All right, Joe. But believe me, you'll wish you hadn't asked. For what happened to... to this other person is unattainable to you." "Who was it?" Krieg asked excitedly. james McConnell "Who was the richest man who ever lived, Joe?" "You mean..." "Who was it that founded the University you went to, the hospital in which you were born? Who gave a magnificent library to every city in the known universe, who was it..." Krieg interrupted. "Old C. T. himself... Steen nodded. "Yes, old C. T. Anderman himself. Years ago, Joe, he faced the same problem you face now, and he reacted the same way you have. So he set out on a campaign to get into Manhattan the only way he knew how -- with money. There was one difference, Joe. Where you are fabulously wealthy, C. T. Anderman was wealthy beyond all dreams. Do you know that he gave away more than away ! Just to make his name universally known. 'The Philanthropist of the Galaxy,' they called him. they voted him a hero's grave. But what the press and the public never knew is that it cost him more than twice that much -- for he had to credits for bribes and influence. It took him fifty years, Joe, to pack the Galactic Congress with enough of his men to swing the trick. But he finally did it." There was a short silence, then Steen continued. "Now you see why I didn't want to tell you, Joe -- to raise false hopes. Only one man in the Galaxy was ever wealthy enough to buy his way into Manhattan. And he had to give up his entire fortune to do it. I'm afraid that you'll never make the grade, Joe." Krieg stood stunned. Steen was was beyond Krieg' s wildest dreams, for Steen knew that Joseph Krieg had come to Earth determined to purchase his burial lot and then retire from the business world. Steen pulled lightly at Krieg's arm. "Now, come along, Joe. Let's go take a look at Hong Kong." The three men started off down the path, but before they had gone ten feet, a robot scurried out of the bushes and dashed over to the bench they had been sitting on. It clucked softly to itself, put forth several arms, and in a matter of seconds had completely washed and disinfected the bench. Joseph Krieg, an empty and numb look on his face, stopped to watch the process. He stared for a few seconds, then asked hoarsely, "What's that?" Consolator Steen smiled. "One of the Guardians, Joe. Superb -- and completely incorruptible. Within minutes after we leave, every vestige of our visit will be gone -- each piece of gravel we tread on will be scrubbed clean or replaced, each piece of grass we touch uprooted and destroyed, even the very air we breathe will be sterilized to remove our traces. We have our problem of vandals too, you know," Steen said, a wisp of a smile playing about the corners of his mouth. "But these are vandals who want to get in and leave something, not like those of ancient times on Earth who broke into burial grounds to loot and destroy. Yes, Joe, we found long ago that the only safe method was to employ mechanical devices to guard against clandestine burials. So even the gardeners who keep this Park in blossom are mechanical. See, there's another one over there, hard at work." Joseph Krieg turned and saw to one side, by a large bed of red flowers, another robot with dozens of visible appendages. It purred an almost silent tune as it clipped and pruned, dug and spaded, trimmed and cleaned the beds, occasionally sprinkling a rich fertilizer dust here and there. "The Guardians of Valhalla, Joe. They were set into motion centuries ago, and not even the President knows how to change their orders. They can't be bribed, even if their human masters can be." Joseph Krieg stooped down beside the bed of flowers. He reached out and picked up a handful of the fine dirt and let it slip pensively through his fingers. "Dust unto dust," he said slowly. "Man was created from the soil of Earth, and to dust he returneth." There was a long silence as Steen let the emotion run its course. Then he touched Krieg lightly on the arm and the man stood up again. They started off down the path, ignoring the machine that skittered along behind them, cleansing each bit of gravel they stepped upon. To Steen, this was always the most important part of the interview. While the fish was masticating the bait, he had to prattle on to keep the hook from becoming too visible. "Some day I must tell you of all the ways people have tried to get themselves buried on Earth without paying for the privilege, Joe. It makes a fascinating story. We're in a difficult position here, you know, for we have to import every single bit of food we eat, every machine we use, each piece of clothing that we wear. But every single item that we import is carefully scanned to make sure that no one has concealed so much as a single human hair in the process." Steen watched Krieg's face closely as they walked. The man should be going through hell just now, but not too much of it showed on his face. Steen continued his prattle, a little puzzled. "Oh, it's incredible the ways that people have tried to cheat. Some of the methods used are too ugly to relate, some of them humorous beyond belief. But this is why we've resorted to mechanical guards all the way round -- to maintain our incorruptibility. Even Anderman have bribed his way past our machines." Steen's voice betrayed none of the anxiety that he felt. For Joseph Krieg was almost smiling now, was apparently feeling none of the great confusion that Steen had counted upon. They reached the gates. "Well, Joe. I think we'll head straight for Hong Kong, if you don't mind. It will be early morning there by now, and that's the best time..." Joseph Krieg turned to face the man. "Thank you very much, Consolator, but I don't think that will be necessary. You see, I've changed my mind." Steen repressed a frown. james McConnell "Changed your mind?" he asked blandly. "Yes. After giving it due consideration, I think that it would be foolish to squander all of my fortune on a burial on Earth. My family would be cheated out of its inheritance if I did, and after all, if my sons carry on in their father's tradition, that's enough for me." Krieg extended his hand. "I wish to thank you, Steen, for your kindness. I regret that I have troubled you for nothing." Steen shook the man's hand warmly, using his free hand to grasp Krieg's arm in friendly fashion. "It was no trouble at all, I assure you. But please understand, Joseph, if I can ever be of service to you in any way, if I can ever be of assistance in any manner whatsoever, please do not hesitate to call upon me. After all, even Anderman had certain problems which..." Steen smiled knowingly. Krieg returned the smile. "I think I understand. And I appreciate your offer, although I must tell you that there is little likelihood that I will be forced to take it up. Again my thanks. And now, goodbye." Krieg turned and strode through the gates. assistant, Braun, stood watching the man as he disappeared into the distance. Then Steen turned and walked oyer to one of the benches in the Park near to the gates. He sat down wearily. "Braun," he said. "I don't like it. Not at all. He should have been beside himself with worry, he should have pumped me for more information, he should have done a thousand other things. But he didn't. He just turned and left. I tell you, I don't like it at all." Braun frowned. "He seemed to take the bait, Sir." "And then, after sniffing it over carefully, he turned and spat it right back in our faces. We can't afford mistakes like this, Braun. Earth needs the money too badly. It's our only means of support, and we can't let a fish like Krieg get off the hook." "There are other fish around. Sir." Steen's face took on an angry look. "Of course there are. But none with the potentialities that Krieg showed. Don't you realize that ever since that sad day when Earth realized that she was a hasbeen, she's had to take advantage of every single opportunity offered her, just to keep alive? Oh, they were clever, those ancient ones who realized that if a civilization is to be kept together, it must have a myth. And so they gave our civilization its myth -- that of Earth, the Great Ancestral Home. Just accidentally, it also offered Earth a means of retaining at least a part of her power." Steen waved his hands in the air. "From an economic viewpoint it was nice too. Only the very wealthy 'could afford an Earth burial, and so it became a means of hidden, graduated taxation -- Earth soaked the rich and ignored the poor, and cut her overt taxes while doing so. Burial became so costly that it helped break up the huge Estates, it helped leaven out the wealth. Our propaganda was sharpened to the point where we could take a man like Anderman and drive him all of his life towards an almost unattainable goal, force him to expend his tremendous energies in the accumulation of great wealth # " extending the frontiers of the Galaxy as he did so, building up our civilization's strength in the process, and then, in the end, make him turn all of his wealth over to Earth in one form or another. Oh, I tell you, Braun, those ancient ones were clever." The tirade halted. The air hung silent for a moment, and the twittering of a near-by bird could be heard. "They were very, very clever. They gave us all the tools, and somehow we've failed to use them correctly. What was it, Braun? What did we do, or fail to do, that let Krieg get away from us?" Braun frowned. "I don't know, Sir. Perhaps he just changed his mind about Earth." Steen snorted. "Impossible! He's had too many years' exposure to our propaganda for that. He can no more give up his dream of burial in Manhattan than he can give up his very personality. No, Braun, I think we just underestimated the man. Somewhere along the line he had an idea, he saw something that we failed to see. Braun shrugged his shoulders. "But what are we going to do about it?" Gonsolator Steen pursed his lips. "I tell you what I'm going to do about it. I'm going straight back to the office and sit and think, and think, and then think some more. Krieg' s got a good fifty years ahead of him yet, and that means I've got exactly that long to guess what's on credits if it's the last thing I do." They had no more than reached the gate when one of the mechanical Guardians appeared from behind a bush, chortled to itself and scurried over to the bench. It cleansed the rough-hewn stone, then washed the path the two men had taken. Then, its exceptional chores accomplished, it went back to its normal pursuits. It approached a bed of begonias nearby. One appendage extended itself and began digging up the dirt around the plants. Meanwhile, inside the machine, other appendages ripped open a small bag and spilled the fine dust inside the bag into a small trough. The empty bag was rolled up and stuck in a disposal bin along with several other bags, all with identical markings: The machine clucked quietly to itself as it sprinkled the dust evenly over the black, yielding earth. It patted the fertilizer gently into the rich soil, making sure that each plant got its fair share. Then it scurried off silently to tend to a bed It's been said that the soul is the form that makes the body -- which may just possibly explain what happened on that fatal day at Ivy College... dents and many of his colleagues on the faculty as "The Old Goat." Very appropriate, that name. He had the disposition of a goat with dyspepsia, he had the cold blue eyes of a goat, he had the waggling whiskers of a goat. Perhaps it's in memory of Dr. Angstrom that Ivy College has a goat for its mascot now. Dr. Angstrom was even more goatish than usual that day last summer when half a dozen top scientists in the field gathered to see his preview experiment on matter transmission of a live animal. He had been working # Jiard for weeks on the transmitter and keeping up classes at the same time, which did not improve his disposition. Besides, he had a real goat for an experimental animal, and goats are notoriously hard on the nervous system. This particular animal, at the moment the scientists entered, was straining at his rope, trying to get a mouthful of a tablecloth which graced a nearby table full of jars and retorts. Failing this, the goat exhibited that typical lack of discrimination in matters edible and began to chew on his rope. I felt a little out of place among all these giant brains. My reason for being there was that I"had been serving, during my college career, as sort of a factotum and fetch-andcarry man for Dr. Angstrom, and I was to take notes for him. I had acquired considerable affection for The Old Goat. Maybe that's one reason I hate to see his great scientific work kept under wraps because people still insist it's dangerous. "I have proved to my own satisfaction that the matter transmitter works," Dr. Angstrom told the assembled scientists. "I have made a number of transmissions of inanimate matter. In theory, it should work just as well for animate objects and I have invited you to be present at the first test of this theory. "I need not go into detail with you about the basic theory of matter transmission. The transmitter itself picks up the atomic and electronic 'image' of the object inside it, much as a television scanner picks up a scene, except that it is done in three dimensions instead of two. This is made possible by the four-dimensional element which is the heart of the apparatus and was made available to us through recent intra-atomic research. "The receiver picks up the image as a television receiver does, except again in three dimensions. The matter is not duplicated because the transmitter strips down the object within it as it transmits. "Now the question that has been raised by some scientists about the transmission of animate objects is whether the 'soul' or 'life force' can be transmitted. I consider this question ridiculous, and will prove it so. It is my contention that such 'life force' is not a thing apart from the physical shell." The matter transmitter was a large closed cylinder on one side of the room. The receiver was a similar cylinder on the other. Both were raised slightly from the floor. As sort of hors d' oeuvre, Dr. Angstrom transmitted a large chunk of lead across the room, then a glass jar. In each case, the object was placed in the transmitter and a moment later removed from the receiver across the room. There was no possible way for it to have been moved across the intervening space except by broadcast transmission. "As you see," said Dr. Angstrom, "I have eliminated the necessity for a switch by building the switch into the door of the transmitter. As soon as the door is closed, transmis( Continued on page #) '  -- ; What Is Your Science I. Q.? entific facts you often read about in science fiction. Count # for each correct answer. You should score #. Over # makes you a ! whiz. Answers on page #. #. The phenomenon of an element or a compound in two or more forms is called :  #. The Beaufort scale is used to measure I . #. A sphenic number is one with unequal factors. #. How many pairs of nerves connect Man's spinal cord with the main body cavities and the response organs? Y #. Hysteretic loss is  loss of energy due to molecular change manifest in #. How many coulombs are equal to one faraday? #. What are the growth stimulating hormones in plants called? #. What have axons, cytons and dendrites in common? ' .  #. Which archeological age is known as "The Age of Reptiles"? j I #. The response of plants to touch stimuli is called . I #. The technical term for the ultimate heat death of the uni verse is v #. The human embryo begins existence with a --  cham bered heart. ' #. The inequality of the moon's motion in orbit due to the  attraction of the sun is called an #. An alloy combining mercury and almost any other metal is  j called -- v  #. Marble is a form of --  --  -- rock. f  #. A Nicol Prism is used in the -- of light, u ' #. Chemically pH is used to indicate the concentration  of a substance. #. The Baume scale is used to determine . #. The type of nutrition in which an organism lives on dead organic matter is called . #. A Wheatstone Bridge is an especially devised current for ! measuring W '. v" ' f in a conductor. Illustrated by Paul Orban You know how a tune can dominate the mind. Imagine the effect of the perfect melody! VJ "That darn tune you're whistling is driving me mad. I've heard it every time I've switched on the radio for the last week." There was a sniff from John Christopher. "You ought to stay tuned to the Third Programme. Then you'd be safe." "Some of us," retorted Harry, "don't care for an exclusive diet of Elizabethan madrigals. But don't let's quarrel about that , for heaven's sake. Has it ever occurred to you that there's something rather -- fundamental -- about hit tunes?" "What do you mean?" "Well, they come along out of nowhere, and then for weeks everybody's humming them, just as Charlie did then. The good ones grab hold of you so thoroughly that you just can't get them out of your head -- they go round and round for days. And then, suddenly, they've vanished again." "I know what you mean," said Art Vincent. "There are some melodies that you can take or leave, but others that stick like treacle, whether you want them or not." "Precisely. I got saddled that way for a whole week with the big theme from the finale of Sibelius Two -- even went to sleep with it running round inside my head. Then there's that "Third Man" piece -- da di da di daa, di da, di daa... look what that did to everybody." Harry had to pause for a moment until his audience had stopped zithering. When the last "Plonk!" had died away he continued: "Precisely! You all felt the same way. Now what is there about these tunes that has this effect? Some of them are great music -- others just banal, but they've obviously got something in common." "Go on," said Charlie. "We're waiting." "I don't know what the answer is," replied Harry. "And what's more, I don't want to. For I know a man who fund out." Automatically, someone handed him a beer, so that the tenor of his tale would not be disturbed. It always annoyed a lot of people when he had to stop in mid-flight for a refill. "I don't know why it is," said Harry Purvis, "that most scientists are interested in music, but it's an undeniable fact. I've known several large labs that had their own amateur symphony orchestras -- some of them quite good, too. As far as the mathematicians are concerned, one can think of obvious reasons for this fondness: music, particularly classical music, has a form which is almost mathematical. And then, of course, there's the underlying theory -- harmonic relations, wave analysis, frequency distribution, and so on. It's a fascinating study in itself, and one that appeals strongly to the scientific mind. Moreover, it doesn't -- as some people might think -- preclude a purely aesthetic appreciation of music for its own sake. "However, I must confess that Gilbert Lister's interest in music was purely cerebral. He was, primarily, a physiologist, specializing in the study of the brain. So when I said that his interest was cerebral, I meant it quite literally. Alexander's Ragtime Band and the Choral Symphony were all the same to him. He wasn't concerned with the sounds themselves, but only what happened when they got past the ears and started doing things to the brain. "In an audience as well educated as this:" said Harry, with an emphasis that made it sound positively insulting, "there will be noone who's unaware of the fact that much of the brain's activity is electrical. There are, in fact, steady pulsing rhythms going on all the time, and they can be detected and analysed by modern instruments. This was Gilbert Lister's territory. He could stick electrodes on your scalp and his amplifiers would draw your brain waves on yards of tape. Then he could examine them and tell you all sorts of interesting things about yourself. Ultimately, he claimed, it would be possible to identify anyone from their encephalogram -- to use the correct term -- more positively than by fingerprints. A man might get a surgeon to change his skin, but if we ever got to the stage when surgery could change your brain -- well, you'd have turned into somebody else, anyway, so the system still wouldn't have failed. "It was while he was studying the alpha, beta and other rhythms in the brain that Gilbert got interested in music. He was sure that there must be some connection between musical and mental rhythms. He'd play music at various tempos to his subjects and see what effect it had on their normal brain frequencies. As you might expect, it had a lot, and the discoveries he made led Gilbert on into more philosophical fields. "I only had one good talk with him about his theories. It was not that he was at all secretive -- I've never met a scientist who was, come to think of it -- but he didn't like to talk about his work until he knew where it was leading. However, what he told me was enough to prove that he'd opened up a very interesting line, and thereafter I made rather a point of cultivating him. My firm supplied some of his equipment, but I wasn't averse to picking up a little profit on the side. It occurred to me that if Gilbert's ideas worked out, he'd need a business manager before you could whistle the opening bar of the Fifth Symphony... "For what Gilbert was trying to do was to lay a scientific foundation for the theory of hit-tunes. Of course, he didn't think of it that way: he regarded it as a pure research project, and didn't look any further ahead than a paper in the Proceedings of the Physical Society . But I spotted its financial implications at once. They were quite breath-taking. "Gilbert was sure that a great melody, or a hit tune, made its impression on the mind because in some way it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain. One analogy he used was "It's like a Yale key going into a lock -- the two patterns have got to fit before anything happens." "He tackled the problem from two angles. In the first place, he took hundreds of the really famous tunes in classical and popular music and analysed their structure -- their morphology, as he put it. This was done automatically, in a big harmonic analyser that sorted out all the frequencies. Of course, there was a lot more to it than this, but I'm sure you've got the basic idea. "At the same time, he tried to see how the resutling patterns of waves agreed with the natural electrical vibrations of the brain. Because it was Gilbert's theory -- and this is where we get into rather deep philosophical waters -- that all existing tunes were merely crude approximations to one fundamental melody. Musicians had been groping for it down the centuries, but they didn't know what they were doing, because they were ignorant of the relation between music and mind. Now that this had been unravelled, it should be possible to discover the Ultimate Melody." "Huh!" said John Christopher. "It's only a rehash of Plato's theory of ideals. You know -- all the objects of our material world are merely crude copies of the ideal chair or table or what-have-you. So your friend was after the ideal melody. And did he find it?" "I'll tell you," continued Harry imperturbably. "It took Gilbert about a year to complete his analysis, and then he started on the synthesis. To put it crudely, he built a machine that would automatically construct patterns of sound according to the laws that he'd uncovered. He had banks of oscillators and mixers -- in fact, he modified an ordinary electronic organ for this part of the apparatus -- which were controlled by his composing machine. In the rather childish way that scientists like to name their offspring, Gilbert had called this device Ludwig. "Maybe it helps to understand how Ludwig operated if you think of him as a kind of kaleidoscope, working with sound rather than light. But he was a kaleidoscope set to obey certain laws, and those laws -- so Gilbert believed -- were based on the fundamental structure of the human mind. If he could get the adjustments correct, Ludwig would be bound, sooner or later, to arrive at the Ultimate Melody as he searched through all the possible patterns of music. "I had one opportunity of hearing Ludwig at work, and it was uncanny. The equipment was the usual nondescript mess of electronics which one meets in any lab : it might have been a mock-up of a new computer, a radar gun-sight, a traffic control system, or a ham radio. It was very hard to believe that, if it worked, it would put every composer in the world out of business. Or would it? Perhaps not: Ludwig might be able to deliver the raw material, but surely it would still have to be orchestrated. "Then the sound started to come from the speaker. At first it seemed to me that I was listening to the five-finger exercises of an accurate but completely uninspired pupil. Most of the themes were quite banal : the machine would play one, then ring the changes on it bar after bar until it had exhausted all the possibilities before going on to the next. Occasionally a quite striking phrase would come up, but on the whole I was not at all impressed. "However, Gilbert explained that this was only a trial run and that the main circuits had not yet been set up. When they were, Ludwig would be far more selective : at the moment, he was playing everything that came along -- he had no sense of discrimination. When he had acquired that, then the possibilities were limitless. "That was the last time I ever saw Gilbert Lister. I had arranged to meet him at the lab about a week later, when he expected to have made substantial progress. As it happened, I was about an hour late for my appointment. And that was very lucky for me... "When I got there, they had just taken Gilbert away. His lab assistant, an old man who'd been with him for years, was sitting distraught and disconsolate among the tangled wiring of Ludwig. It took me a long time to discover what had happened, and longer still to work out the explanation. "There was no doubt of one thing. Ludwig had finally worked. The assistant had gone off to lunch while Gilbert was making the final adjustments, and when he came back an hour later the laboratory was pulsing with one long and very complex melodic phrase. Either the machine had stopped automatically at that point, or Gilbert had any rate, he had been listening, for several hundred times at least, to that same melody. When his assistant found him, he seemed to be in a trance. His eyes were open yet unseeing, his limbs rigid. Even when Ludwig was switched off, it made no difference. Gilbert was beyond help. "What had happened? Well, I suppose we should have thought of it, but it's so easy to be wise after the event. It's just as I said at the beginning. If a composer, working merely by rule of thumb, can produce a melody which can dominate your mind for days on end, imagine the effect of the Ultimate Melody for which Gilbert was searching! Supposing it existed -- and I'm not admitting that it does -- it would form an endless ring in the memory circuits of the mind. It would go round and round forever, obliterating all other thoughts. All the cloying melodies of the past would be mere ephemerae compared to it. "They've tried shock therapy -- everything. But it's no good; the pattern has been set, and it can't be broken. He's lost all consciousness of the outer world, and has to be fed intravenously. He never moves or reacts to external stimuli, but sometimes, they tell me, he twitches in a peculiar way as if he is beating time... "I'm afraid there's no hope for him. Yet I'm not sure if his fate is a horrible one, or whether he should be envied. Perhaps, in a sense, he's found the ultimate reality that philosophers like Plato are always talking about. I really don't know. And sometimes I find myself wondering just what that infernal melody was like, and almost wishing that I'd been able to hear it perhaps once. But there'll never be a chance now, of course." "I was waiting for this," said the apparatus blew up, or something, so that as usual there's no way of checking your story." Harry gave him his best more-insorrow-than-in-anger look. "What happened next was one of those completely maddening things for which I shall never stop blaming myself. You see, I'd been too interested in Gilbert's experiment to look after my firm's business in the way that I should. I'm afraid he'd fallen badly behind with his payments, and when the Accounts Department discovered what had happened to him they acted quickly. I was only off for a couple of days on another job, and when I got back, do you know what had happened? They'd pushed through a court order, and had seized all their property. Of course that had meant dismantling Ludwig: when I saw him next he was just a pile of useless junk. It made me weep." "I'm sure of it," said Eric Maine. "But you've forgotten Loose End Number Two. What about Gilbert's assistant ? He went into the lab while the gadget was going full blast. Why didn't it get him, too?" H. Purvis, Esquire, paused to drain the last drops from his glass and to hand it across to Drew. "Really!" he said. "Is this a cross-examination? I didn't mention the point because it was rather trivial. You see, Gilbert's assistant was a first-rate lab technician, but he'd never been able to help much with the adjustments to Ludwig. For he was one of those people who are completely tone-deaf. To him, the Ultimate Melody meant no more than a couple of cats on a garden wall."    B Y President if he had heard from the Secretary of State. "Yes' the President said. "I heard from Mr. Thompson only a few minutes ago." "How's their final conference coming, Mr. President?" "Inevitably. Operation Push Button within the hour." The Minister of Peace blinked out the window at Washington, D.G. "So they're going to blow up the world?" "Inevitably." "Shall we watch it?" asked the Minister of Peace. The President nodded, spoke to master control through the intercom box on his desk, and switched on the TV screen. They had a special pipe-line into the United Nations Cellar. They sat back, had martinis, and watched the interior of the Cellar come to life on the screen. Three thousand miles from New Washington, under a natural camouflage of tundra and wintry hills, the U.N. Cellar was thought by its occupants to be thoroughly resistant to any offensive weapons. It was three miles underground, protected by lead, concrete and steel. Its location was known only to the UN Security Division The playing of war games should not be forbidden; but rather viewed as a natural outlet for emotional tensions . -- dr. l. m. stoltz, Stanford university. Illustrated by Ed Emsh that was supposed to be strictly neutral in international affairs, or so the Cellar occupants assumed. The engineers and workmen who had planned and constructed the Cellar were supposed to have been brainwashed and therefore had no memory of the great project. An occasional caribou drifted over the Cellar with the North Wind, and wolves that always follow the caribou. In his suite, Chandler Thompson, Secretary of State, prepared himself for the global diplomacy game's final hand in which it is never so important what hand you play, as the way you play it. After years of negotiation, full agreement on Operation Push Button had been attained, and Thompson took some pride in having played a leading role in the ingenious idea. Morten, his valet, finished shaving Thompson's pale face, helped him dress in striped trousers, cutaway, and white gardenia. "Thank you, Morten," said the Secretary of State. "You seem calm enough, sir. Frankly, I'm ill at ease." "You may leave the Cellar if you wish," Thompson said, skimming through his notes. "You've served graciously. I appreciate it. But it is your privilege to return to your family outside now. I might remind you that your chance of survival if you remain here is practically # percent." "It isn't that, sir. It just seems incredible that so many must die." He felt of his wallet, the pictures of his family in it. "It's hardly a matter of principle," Thompson said. "Nor a question of ideology. It's simply a question of firmness and realistic practicality, and getting the job done once and for all. That has been my stand from the beginning and naturally it cannot be changed." "Death before dishonor, Morten." "Yes, sir." Morten knew that in every suite in the Cellar every diplomat was saying practically the same thing. Thompson looked up from his neat notes. "People, Morten, have been properly prepared for violent death. Indeed there has been a feeling of security in numbers. The Ministry of Education working with the War Department has done such a splendid job. Now every child has grown up fully prepared to die in the holocaust. And every individual still a child regards violent death as casually as a game of marbles. The required attitude has been thoroughly conditioned in the populace. The idea was to make violence, savagery, and sudden death, an every day affair. And we have done it. Sad, but a necessary task." Morten said nothing. Thompson looked at the neon map coruscating on the wall. "Our country is not unique in this, Morten. Annihilation will come as a shock only to the misinformed anywhere in the world." Morten sat down. He remembered how his kids used to come home from school laughingly playing war games, manipulating toy atomic cannons and the like. They received additional marks in school for being good and cooperative during atomic bomb drills and preparations for thermonuclear disasters. They had been so proud of their dogtags that came with boxes of cereal. In the evenings out back they used to have bury-thedead games. Thompson was saying, "Remember juvenile delinquency? It was ditioned psychologically for Operation Killer. An insensitive, fatalistic attitude had to be engendered. For their own good." Morten flicked a speck of lint from Thompson's stooped shoulder. "Yes, sir," he said. "Maybe it will be humane, in the long run." "One must face the hard, materialistic facts," Thompson said. "Oh, that reminds me." He went to his private switchboard and got a secret outside line to the Office of Civilian Defense. "Hello, Donnelson. Yes, I'm fine. I haven't talked with you for some time now, and I was wondering about that suggestion of mine. Yes, the household pets thing. That's right, particularly dogs. They're big morale factors in the lives of children and there may be some survivors. Well, then, issue another bulletin on that immediately. Things are reaching a head here in the Cellar. Yes, dogs should be lashed firmly to heavy pieces of furniture, away from windows. Put water where they can reach it. Hysteria under the bombing attacks can be avoided by giving sodium bromide tablets to the dogs. That's right. Survivors will need pets. Morale..." After Thompson was through talking to Donnelson, Morten said. "You know, sir, the end will be a relief to some people. They've been blitzed by a non-stop barrage of fear bombs so long, I think they'll be glad to get it over with." "Very perceptive, Morten. That has been one of Psychological Warfare's primary aims in preparation." Thompson got another outside line. Dawson, Civilian Defense. As he waited for Dawson to come in, he said to Morten. "Get the dueling pistols out of the cabinet, please." Morten nodded. "Hello, Dawson. Fine, fine, things coming to a head here. How much distribution did you manage on the shrouds? Eighty percent? Excellent. I haven't heard from Harry on the details for quite a while. Wanted to check personally. As you say, I've never really lost my touch with the grass-roots. My feeling from the start was that millions of wooden coffins would be out of the question. The olive drab plastic sheets seemed to be the only practical recourse from the start. The psychological importance of getting bodies out of sight as rapidly as possible cannot be overemphasized. Oh, Dawson, one moment... yes, I know about the public parks, playgrounds and vacant tracts in the suburbs. But what about New York City? The only way is to send the bodies up the Hudson River using piers as morgues. The problem of where to put so many bodies, particularly when they will all appear for disposal at the same time, is a considerable one. Allowing for three-bysix grave-sites, with three feet for aisles, the whole problem of ade-, quate disposal acreage is primary." Thompson switched off the connection. Thompson moved his fingers over the .# caliber dueling pistols in the velvet-lined case. His eyes mellowed with nostalgia. "Gift from the old Secretary of War. My boy, Don, learned to shoot with this one when he was only six years old. If he had lived to be an adult, he would have been a tough fighter. But hti was killed by a rival delinquent gang when he was twelve. He only got there a little sooner. He had just finished reading Niebuhr, so he knew the tragic irony of history." Thompson balanced one of the pistols in his hand. He looked at his watch. "It's time," he said religiously. As Thompson entered the Hall of Ministers, the representatives of five balance of power nations arose at once in deference to the sixth. Morten sat unobtrusively in a far corner, holding the case of dueling pistols on his knees. Thompson sat down. The minutes of the last conference were read by a mechanical secretary. A summation of their final agreement on Operation Push Button was briefly reviewed by the automatic translating secretary. No changes were suggested. The surface of the huge conference table was somewhat like a gigantic topographical map of the world. It covered perhaps a thousand square feet and had been constructed by brain-washed artisans and engineers and scientists in perfect electronic detail. It was so realistic that it radiated a sort of sentience, seeming almost to breathe in astonishing precision with the respiration of important strategically located cities, ports, commynication and manufacturing centers. Before each Minister was a"console containing several buttons. Each Minister arose, made a speech concerning the sovereign rights of the particular nation or bloc of nations he represented. In each case, the speeches seemed the same to Morten. He knew that if merely the name of the country or bloc in each speech was changed, the rest would be the same, and sound something like: "Gentlemen, a free such-andsuch people can no longer tolerate a militant rearming so-and-so. Every other possibility has been discussed and rejected. I must say now that at this moment a state of war must of necessity exist between such-and-such and so-and-so." Morten had been hearing variations of it for years. He knew it all by heart. As each Minister made this implacable statement, he sat down, and without further ceremony, pushed a button or buttons on his private console. On the topographical map, as a button was pushed, some important section of the map, an area, a city, a port, some significant transportation, communication, or manufacturing industrial center, would shoot out realistic sparks, smoke, and then crumble into lifeless debris. Morten tried to control the flinching and twitching of his muscles. An intricate network of electronic relays connected with thermonuclear bombs went out all over the world, and were hooked in to the map on the conference table. up somewhere, Morten thought. Another Minister finished his speech, sat down, pressed buttons. More smoke and flashes shot up. where have just been annihilated, Morten thought. It doesn't seem possible, he thought then. It's not possible. It's some kind of final madness. But it's happening. It had been decided that this was the simple direct way, avoiding long, time-wasting programs of mobilization and warfare. If the conclusion was foregone, had been the question, then why not go directly to it by the shortest and most efficient route? And the answer was as inevitable as the question. More Ministers stood up, made their final declarations, and pushed buttons. Little puffballs and clouds of smoke drifted over the conference table, obscuring distinctive facial outlines and turning the ministers into shadow shapes as Morten watched. Only two of the Ministers had not yet pressed their buttons. Only two sectors of the world remain alive, Morten thought. He coughed as acrid smoke swirled about the room. He felt a kind of blessed numbed paralysis. He could almost feel the whole world turning into a radioactive hell all around him, mushrooms of, gigantic size sprouting fast and furiously in the last big aftermath of rain. Yet he could scarcely imagine how it really was now, outside the Cellar. He thought vaguely about the dogs, wondering how many of them had avoided hysteria by having been tied to heavy pieces of furniture and given sodium bromide tablets. The kids who survived would need pets. Morten sat there, trying to see through the thickening smoke. He tried to feel grateful for having been in the Cellar. But in a few more seconds America might also be destroyed. What then? And what if only America remained -- would that be any better? He had resisted such speculation, but how could he resist it any longer? The Ministers had their wives, families, lovers in the Cellar, and supplies enough to last indefinitely. But Morten's family was outside. In a few seconds they might be dead. After that nothing. Nothing at all. He heard Thompson say in a calm voice. "Morten, the pistols." He also heard the other Minister say in Russian that he wanted his pistol. Morten had to respect the secret agreement that Thompson and the Russian Minister had made yesterday. After the other Ministers pushed their buttons, Thompson and the Russian would fight a duel then the survivor of the duel would push his button. "Someone should win," Thompson and the Russian had agreed. "This way, one will be the absolute victor." If the other Ministers knew what this secret agreement was they either did not care, or did not care enough now. They got up from the (Continued on page #) Barton was unique -- an absolutely self-sufficient human being. The biggest problem he had in space was holding on to his sanity. And he solved it by altering time itself to suit his needs... of miles from nowhere out among the planets, Barton had two main duties. To keep his sanity and to keep the watch. The second was simple. The gadgets all took care of themselves. All Barton did was send in a report in case an alarm went off indicating something was wrong with some gadget or other. Staying sane was supposed to be a watcher's big problem. Barton couldn't figure out why they were so concerned, especially the neuropsychologist or whatever he was, Von Ulrich, who was always coming around in his clinical space boat, studying Barton, asking him questions, giving him all kinds of tests. Illustrated by Paul Orban Once something glinted like a mote in sunlight past the observation port and Von Ulrich said. "That's Collins out there. Collins was here only a week and he put on a pressure suit and jumped into space. He's still rotating round and round out there." "Poor devil," Barton said. "Most of them don't even last a week out here, Barton. Six months is the maximum. You've been here almost a year and you're liable to start cracking any minute. I don't like the way things look." "I feel fine, sir." Several months later, Von Ulrich dropped by again. "How are things going, Barton?" "Great, sir. Just swell." "You feel comfortable, no anxiety?" "I feel fine." "You've done a fine job, Barton -- so far." "Thank you, sir." "You manage to keep occupied?" "I just take it easy, sir." "I see." A few months later, Von Ulrich was back, watching Barton moulding something out of clay, a sort of human shape without a face. There were other self-amusement gimmicks, wood-working, soapcarving, movies and the like, but Barton preferred moulding things haphazardly out of clay, and sometimes reading one of the books he wasn't supposed to have brought along because books were no longer popular. "What were you thinking about when you moulded this thing?" Von Ulrich asked. "Nothing much, sir." "You must have been thinking of something?" "I guess I was thinking of a man sleeping beside a river in green grass with nobody for miles around. Something like that." "You weren't by any chance thinking about a dead man?" "I don't like death much." Later on sometime, Von Ulrich dropped around again on his therapeutic tour of basketballs, and Martian bases, and other bases even more remote. Barton wondered how anyone could find the basketball drifting in all that blackness. Just a little ragged spheroid like a piece of dead slag, something like a cork bobbing in a black ocean too big even to bother thinking about. If no one ever found the basketball Barton would have been happier, because the basketball was self-sustaining and could go on and on for years without supplies or any human contact. "Getting a little lonely maybe?" Von Ulrich asked. "No sir." "Don't miss having people around. Your wife, your son?" Barton wanted to laugh. "Well, I'll be back to see you, Barton. I may be gone a year this time." "Happy New Year," Barton said. But it didn't seem like a year when Von Ulrich came back in his sleek little space-hopping clinic. It didn't seem like much of anything. "You don't find the absence of women irritating, Barton?" "I can take them or leave them, sir. "Not here. There simply aren't any at all." "I like something, but then if it isn't there, I don't miss it." "All right, Barton," Von Ulrich would say after giving Barton more brain-wave tests, word-association tests and making him look at inkblots until his eyes turned red. "See you in a few months." "See you, sir," Barton said. And sure enough, as though he had never really been away, Von Ulrich would show up again, with his testing devices, his cages of mice and guinea pigs, and his intense searching eyes. He had a folder of pictures and after ink-blot tests, he had Barton look at the pictures, like the one of a man in deep shadow standing over a sleeping kid. "What do you see there, Barton? " "A guy standing over a kid." "What's he doing there?" "I haven't any idea." "Is the child sleeping?" "Maybe it's just pretending." "Pretending what?" "Or maybe it's dead." Von Ulrich's thin face frowned intensely. "Is the child pretending to be asleep, or is it dead?" "Maybe it isn't a real kid. Maybe it's a dummy." Von Ulrich's face reddened. "What's the man thinking?" "How should I know, sir." "You don't care?" "No, why should I give a damn what he's thinking?" "You tell me. Why shouldn't you?" "Because it's none of my business." Then there was another time, during some visit or other, when Von Ulrich pulled another word asssociation test. "Love." "It makes the world go round." "Blackness." "Sleep." "Alone." "Quiet." It went on for hours. Von Ulrich always seemed to be angrier because Barton didn't crack up, or because he insisted on turning in a perfect service record in the basketball. "Barton, for God's sake, don't you realize how important this watch is? This valuable information gathered by these recorders. Think what it would mean if that data fell into the hands of the Asians! What if you missed an alarm, or fouled up in some way, and one of these recorders destroyed all the data?" "Haven't I been alert all the time, sir?" "Yes! But you've been out here now for three years! Three years. No one can possibly stand it longer than six months. And the fact that you've been here for three years only means some absolutely catastrophic crack-up is being prolonged, built up inside." "I don't feel a bit different, sir." "There are subtle ways of cracking up." "You want me to have some sort of symptom or something?" "Don't be ridiculous." other year before Von Ulrich came back to Barton's basketball, triumphantly equipped with new devices, and waving a spacegram in Barton's sleepy face. Barton read it, shrugged, and let it drift to the floor. Von Ulrich tried to control a look almost of fear. "As soon as the minimum time allowed, she married again," Von Ulrich said. "And you pretend it means nothing?" "She never did mean much of anything, sir. I mean, she was an interfering kind of woman. She wouldn't let a man live." "All right, Barton. What about this? She was committing adulterous acts with this fellow, this Major General Woods. She was having an affair with him for two years before you volunteered for duty in the basketball." "I figured she was playing around." "You what?" "It figured." "You still pretend it meant nothing, that it means nothing now?" "I don't know what it means. What's it got to do with me now? It was all right, I guess. I could have gone on with it. But this is better." He dimly remembered Jean bitching all the time of an evening because Barton kept forgetting to take his officer's exam, and how she had to skimp along on an so forth. Very much the nagging kind. She wouldn't let him read either. He would tell her he was just sort of stupid, and had always been a drifter anyway, and just sort of fell into marriage and that he never had had any ambition particularly, and anyway big brass got ulcers and heart conditions. And then she would drag little Joey, the big-headed little brat into it, and talk about how little Joey didn't have the right kind of idealized image to assure him a respectable future, and little Joey would stand there and nod his oversized head. "What about little Joey's future?" Jean would say. "You want him to be just another stupid He's got to have his teeth straightened. They tease him at school, call him The Squirrel." "Yeah, Dad. You want me to be personable and saleable and high on the success potential scale? What about my teeth protruding?" And when Barton went into the bathroom and came back out, Jean was throwing all those books he'd had such a hard time finding into the incinerator. Barton volunteered the next day for basketball duty. It didn't even seem long ago to Barton. It was oddly like a dream that might have been in the past, or the future, or never at all. Von Ulrich grabbed up the spacegram and walked stiffly erect out of the basketball. At some time in the future, Von Ulrich showed up again with even more complicated tests and questions. Barton wasn't sure, but it seemed longer than usual that Von Ulrich was away these days. Time didn't mean much. It didn't have any particular use to Barton now. "Yes, yes, you have a perfect service record, Barton. Never have missed turning in an alarm with alacrity. And we're so damned short of men capable of taking this kind of duty that I can't pull you out of here until you make an error -- or crack up. Just the same you're not fooling me much longer, and you won't be able to fool yourself either." Sometime later there was the business about Barton's mother. Von Ulrich had files on Barton going clear back to pre-natal, and maybe even before that. "All right, Barton, you were an only child, and you lived with your mother for # years after your father died. Then you married. What about the fact that Jean was a replacement for your mother?" "If she was, it never seemed that way to me." "You expected your wife to take care of you the way your mother did. And not demand anything of you. You expected to escape all responsibility and -- Barton, do you consider this basketball to be your mother?" "What's that, sir?" "Deafness can be psychosomatic too, don't forget that. I said -- but you heard me, answer me." "Doctor Von Ulrich, maybe I'm not normal, but -- " "Then you admit the regression. That this basketball floating in space is a substitute for your mother's womb. You admit it!" "Why, sir, I didn't -- " "But you know it's true don't you?" "I didn't say anything about it. You said it." "I said it because it's a summation of years of careful diagnosis. Look at the etiology. A man who never matured, never was able to accept responsibility as a mature adult. Always just drifting along, into one job, out of it, into another job, out of that, never establishing roots anywhere, always floating about. Unable to accept any responsibility for your marriage, wanting to escape it. Never able to get close, get involved with others, only wanting to receive, never give. What does it add up to? A fix, a freeze in the pre-natal stage where you were floating free and completely irresponsible in your mother's amniotic fluid. That's why you're here in the basketball." Von Ulrich's intense eyes seemed to reach out like arms to enfold Barton, then recoiled as Barton shrugged and said : "So, it's like my Ma's womb. What difference does it make what you call it as long as I'm happy in it and do my job?" Von Ulrich's lips moved soundlessly and then he pointed a finger into Barton's nose. "It makes a helluva lot of difference what you call it. You may be doing an efficient job here, but for the wrong reasons. I wish I could recommend, on the basis of my diagnosis, that you agree to a month's checkup in the Martian Clinic but -- " Barton interrupted. "I'm glad you can't. I wouldn't like that as much as this. Maybe your reports won't cut much ice as long as I keep up the perfect service record." Von Ulrich's jaws were ridged. "Damn the military system! Damn a system that says a man has to stay up here till he's dead or crazy or makes a mistake!" "But Doc, I like it. I'm happier here, I think. Maybe I wasn't normal on Earth. Maybe I'm not normal here, or maybe being abnormal on Earth makes me normal here. I'm happy and I do my work." Von Ulrich backed away a few steps, then turned and ran out and slammed the sliding panel. He didn't say goodbye to Barton this time, or that he would be back. But Barton took no hope from Von Ulrich's lack of ceremony. Von Ulrich did come back, several times. Barton was sleeping a great deal now. He didn't putter with the gimmicks much, not even the clay, and he'd about read the books out. He slept a lot and yet there was a funny heavy feeling as though he never did quite sleep or never quite woke up either. But it was a good feeling because when a man was too sound asleep he didn't enjoy it because he didn't know anything about it. This was sort of in-between, and Barton loved it. Sometimes he would blink his eyes and see Von Ulrich standing there, probably with some new testing device, or with a notebook open, or with a helmet with wires to attach to Barton's skull to record something. Another time he thought some stranger was there and then he realized that Von Ulrich's face was sagging and wrinkled and that his hair was thinner and gray. "Why not have groups of watchers if you're so worried about one being alone?" "We tried that, it was worse, Barton. They killed one another." "Well, sir, my being alone is a good thing then, in that respect." "Have you ever thought that you would kill yourself?" "Why no, sir. Why should I?" "Because you hate yourself. In a society, people can externalize their self-hate. They can hate society, other people. You can only turn your hate inward, on yourself." "But I don't hate anything, sir." "You do!" "But, sir, I don't." "Barton, I said you hate yourself. It's in all the charts, everything. We all hate ourselves to some extent, why should you be different from everybody else?" "Why not, sir?" Von Ulrich pressed his hand over his eyes, and walked out. ow drifting in and out and in again, and it was Von Ulrich, looking so much older this time. "It's been almost fifteen years, Barton. Fifteen years." "So? Fifteen years earth time. What does that mean here to me, sir?" Barton smiled, closed his eyes. "What does time matter in your mother's womb?" "You've developed a definite measurable syndrome, Barton. Excessive lethargy and a sleeping compulsion. Eventually it will destroy your efficiency as a watcher if it hasn't already." Von Ulrich set off an alarm and in less than four seconds Barton was over there sending a report out to the authorities, a report Von Ulrich immediately canceled as being false. Von Ulrich seemed to dissolve in a haze of fading light. "Is that you, Von Ulrich, sir?" ' "I'm afraid so, Barton. Back again." Von Ulrich sat down in the contour chair and filled a pipe. "Remember, Barton when you took your test for basketball duty? The dead man's float?" "I sort of remember it, sir. It was fun." Von Ulrich flinched. "Fun? I've gone over that report on your test. Barton. It doesn't make sense. What the hell are you anyway? A damned freak, a mutation, an alien in disguise?" The dead man's float had been pleasant for Barton, that was all he could remember about it. They had taken off all Barton's clothes so that nothing touched Barton's body but a blacked-out head-mask through which to get air. He had been put in a tank of water at body temperature upside down and floated there. There was no sensation. It had been one of the happiest times of his life. Like floating on air. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing except his own existence. Not even able to tell which was right side up, or right side down, cross-wise or whatnot. He had been told to keep still, but nobody had needed to tell him to do that. "The first two or three hours of that dead man's float is a good test for basketball duty, Barton. It's a kind of final isolation of the human organism. Normal human beings can take a couple of hours of it usually. They like it. Every human being to some extent likes to return to the womb. But after a couple of hours most human beings start going to pieces, short-circuiting. The reason is the deprivation of any outside stimuli. Something has to feed in through some source -- some reception source -- the skin, ears, nose, the eyes. These things feeding in, they orient a person, tells him when he's thinking, feeling, gives him stimuli for additional thinking. With all these turned off, a person is simply left with a closed circuit. This begins to go round and round and distorts and magnifies and ruptures the whole thinking process. The floater becomes anxious, then very anxious, then he begins having hallucinations, finally becomes completely disoriented. All this happens to a normal human being inside, at the most, three or four hours. No human being should be able to remain sane after four hours of the dead man's float. Barton. But remember how long you lay there in that tank?" "I didn't care how long it was." "Three days," Von Ulrich said. "The neurophysiologist in charge there kept checking your reaction and finally he had to take you out of the tank, not because you were short-circuiting, but because he was. The impression was that you would have been delighted with the prospect of doing the dead man's float forever." "I don't remember it being any special time. It was like a dream, sir, you know." "I don't know, but I'm trying to find out." Von Ulrich sighed and looked through the spaceport at blackness. "Out here I sometimes find myself wondering what normalcy really is. Things sometimes veer toward the dangerously relativistic." He sat there in the pure one hundred percent silence of the basketball while it accumulated. "There's one thing we've always insisted no human being could tolerate, Barton. Isolation. Sullivan said that a single minute of complete isolation would kill a human being. And you've been in a dead man's float for almost twenty-two years." "Twenty-two years, sir?" "Doesn't mean a thing to you does it?" "Well, sir, it doesn't seem to have had any time in it. I was just here." There was another time, like all the other times, except that Von Ulrich seemed much older, his hair thinner and now all of it gray. There seemed to be something tired about him, except for the brightness coming from behind his intense questioning eyes. Suddenly he asked, "Barton, what time is it?" Barton glanced at the chrono. "Quarter of four, sir." "Keep looking." After a while Barton said, "Still quarter of four." "That chrono hasn't been working for three years. I stopped it three years ago. You haven't even noticed it, have you?" "I guess not, sir." "Take a long look out there, Barton. Nothing to see but blackness. No feeling of distance. Imagine your mind going out there, exploring, trying to fit in somewhere. You look out there, you project your thoughts out there, nothing comes back. So what time is it? Where are you in all this? There was nothing out here until you came along, not even any meaningful kind of time out here. But there has to he some feeling of time , Barton !" Barton felt a tinge of uneasiness. He looked out. It looked cold. "What time is it, Barton?" "What difference does it make?" "Your body has to know. Your body works on a timetable doesn't it? Your lungs, expanding, contracting regularly. Your heart beating so many times regularly -- every minute . Your blood circulating regularly. Look here, Barton. You're a product of a specific environment, on a big scale, call it Earth, the Solar System. You claim it means nothing, time means nothing. But your heart beats regularly so many times every minute and that's why you're alive. Where did the arbitrary rhythm of that beat come from, Barton? You were born with it. It isn't anything you control, or had anything to do with developing, is it? What's a minute? On Earth, it has meaning. Sixty seconds part of a minute. Sixty minutes make up an hour. What's an hour but a segment of a # hour day. Where does that figure come from? The Earth, Barton. It rotates on its axis approximately every # hours. # hours make a day, seven days a week, so many weeks in a month, twelve months make up a year. A year, Barton, the Earth rotates around the sun once a year." For the first time in the basketball, Barton began to feel some discomfort. He closed his eyes and while they were closed he became acutely aware of his heart beating, and the expanding and contracting of his lungs. "You claim there is no Earth any more, Barton. No Earth rotating on its axis, no Earth rotating around the sun. No sun, no moon, no time. Why should your heart go on beating regularly so many times a minute -- when there's nothing out here that gives a minute any meaning? Has time stopped here? Is there any time here, Barton, when there's nothing here to turn time into measurable segments? How can your heart beat so many times a minute, a year, a lifetime if there's no such thing here any more?" Barton slowly opened his eyes. His hands felt wet. "This basketball doesn't rotate, Barton. Doesn't move toward, away from, or around anything. It's moving with the Galaxy but that can't mean anything to you can it? Listen, Barton, your body operates largely on an unconscious level, but what if unconsciously your heart, your lungs, your bodily functions start to lose their conditioned memory of the Earth's rotation, the regularity of its movement on its axis and around the Sun that gave your birth? What will happen then, Barton? What happens to your heartbeat if your heart begins to forget how long a minute is?" Von Ulrich leaned down close to Barton's damp face. "What time is it, Barton?" Barton started to look out the spaceport again, but jerked his head in the other direction. He didn't want to look out. Von Ulrich waited, but Barton didn't say anything. Finally, with a tight smile on his face, Von Ulrich got up and went to the door. "I'll see you again, Barton. Some time." Barton started. "Wait -- don't go," he started to say. But something constricted in his throat and he hardly even moved his lips, and no sound came out at all. He saw the cold streak flash past the view port. It was Von Ulrich's clinic. Quickly he looked toward the wall. The chrono was gone. Von Ulrich had taken it with him. There was a watch, a wrist watch. Barton ran around looking for the wrist watch, but he couldn't find it. When he lay down again and closed his eyes, he couldn't rest. He couldn't sleep. His heart beat got louder, and after a while that was all he could hear, and when he tried to figure out how many times a minute his heart was, or was not, beating, he couldn't. What time was it? Earth's outposts were involved, lasted thirty years. The basketballs were forgotten for a long time, and when they were remembered again, a special search was rewarded by finding only two of them. In the first basketball there was no trace of the watchman who had been abandoned in it almost half a century before, and no indication of what had happened to him. In the second one, Von Ulrich found Barton still lying peacefully on the couch, looking hardly any different than when Von Ulrich had walked out and left him there.  Von Ulrich, who had been retired for a long time and who was unable to get about except in a wheel-chair, had requested inclusion among the search boat's personnel. No one had figured out why because even if they found any basketballs, it was certain that no one would be alive on any of them, let alone anyone needing Von Ulrich's specialized talents. Von Ulrich had hoped that Barton's basketball would be found and when it was found, he insisted on being carried through the interconnecting airlock into the spheroid that looked on the outside like a dead piece of slag. The ship's medical officer, a man young and rather stiff, was shocked at first to see Barton lying there, but he had a ready explanation as he used his stethescope. "Must have sprung a leak and let in preserving frigidity." "But then how did the leak repair itself and the temperature return to normal?" Von Ulrich asked as he studied Barton's smooth, unaged face. "Dead," the medical officer said, and he dropped the stethescope back into his case. Von Ulrich gripped the husks of his hands together to keep them from rattling, and he smiled slowly. "Barton didn't like death much." Zeiger the medical officer looked puzzled. "You know this man?" "A little. I tried to know him better but a war intervened. His name is Harry Barton and he was assigned to duty in this basketball fiftythree years and about four months ago." Zeiger turned away as though to hide an embarrassed reaction. "You think I speak out of some mental senility, Zeiger? You know this man isn't dead." "He has to be dead." "Not Barton. He would hardly approve of your diagnosis. He never cared much for diagnosis anyway. This is Harry Barton, and I've preserved -- for personal reasons -- his file. I have it with me. You want to check his fingerprints? You'll find it's the same man who was assigned to duty here fifty-three years ago." "There's no heart-beat," Zeiger insisted, but not very enthusiastically. "Better give Barton a more thorough check," Von Ulrich said. Barton's heart was beating all right. Once every thirty-seven hours and fourteen seconds. Regularly, strongly, very slowly, but without a tremor. The electroencephalograph registered brain waves of regular rhythm, but of quite low amplitude. But with a frequency slowed to a point so far below normalcy that it took a week to establish recognizable delta, theta, alpha and higher frequency wave-forms. Using the electronic stroboscope to induce changes in brain-wave reaction by flicker got results. But the frequency didn't change. When they forced Barton's eyes open and used the stroboscope, a slight change in theta rhythm signified some irritation, but it was mild. "Barton never hated anybody," Von Ulrich said. It was slow work though, testing Barton's reactions. It was five days after the stroboscopic stimulation before the termination of the brain reactive crescendo. Another week before theta rhythm returned to normal. "... so I finally decided," Von Ulrich told Zeiger, "that Barton was unique -- he was the impossible. The absolutely self-sufficient human being, needing nothing but himself. I was getting older and I figured there was a chance I might not get back and the war threat and so forth. I was worried about leaving Barton. But only for one reason." Von Ulrich explained his concern about what might have happened if Barton's autonomic nervous system had lost its identification with the time factor that had conditioned it. "I figured Barton was absolutely self-sufficient, except for the time factor. He had to have something outside himself relatively to which his organs could function in a necessary regularity." Zeiger poured himself another shot of rum and drank it quickly. "So he's still here," Zeiger said. "We'll have to take him to the Martian Base for observation." "Why not, leave him here? Barton has a perfect service record. He's never missed an alarm." "But in this condition -- " "Let's see." Von Ulrich set off an alarm. Barton moved, but it took him almost a week to move a few inches. "That's too slow," Zeiger insisted. Von Ulrich said, "I'll turn in a complete report on Barton. If the authorities want to have him removed, all right. But maybe they won't. Maybe they'll decide they have a laboratory here for the study of a human being that's more important than whatever's being absorbed by those recorders. Barton is the thing to watch. I call him the 'Adaptable,' because I believe he can adapt to anything, fit himself into any situation, any kind of environmental circumstance, if he's not interfered with too much, if he's given even a slight chance. You see he altered his metabolism in order to relate to a different, highly personalized time. And he hasn't aged much either. God knows how long he will live, Zeiger, with such a slowed metabolism. And not only that -- who knows what unique kind of personalized time he's developing there inside himself? Who knows if we can even make a human comparison?" "But how did he set this new arbitrary time of his? The heart beating every thirty-seven hours and fourteen seconds?" Von Ulrich looked through the spaceport, and then pointed when the pressure suit drifted past with the long-dead Collins perfectly preserved in it and still looking out through the face plate. "That way," Von Ulrich said. "Collins is our little human satellite out there, and he rotates around the basketball once every thirtyseven hours and fourteen seconds." "Well I'll be damned," Zeiger said. "Of our time, that is," Von Ulrich said. "But our time doesn't mean anything to Barton now."  #  She was wonderful and Forsdon was in love. But he'd seen the future and knew that in five days she was slated for murder! and a new job for me. I found the room in the basement of police headquarters -- a big room, with freshly stenciled letters D F G on the door, and an unholy conglomeration of tubes, wires and dials bulking large in one corner. A bright young police cadet sat at a desk in the center of the room. "Are you Mr. Forsdon?" I nodded, and dumped my bag beside the desk. "Captain Marks is waiting for you," he said and jerked his head toward a door to the rear. Captain Marks had his office in a cubbyhole off the main room. It was quite a comedown from the quarters he'd occupied upstairs as captain of detectives. He'd held onto that job past his retirement age and, when they were about to throw him out on his ear, D. F. C. Illustrated by Paul Orban came along and he jumped at it. The Captain was not the retiring type. His door was open, and he waved me in. "Sit down, Forsdon," he said. "Welcome to the Department of Future Crime." I sat down, and he looked me over. A lean, hard face, closely cropped white hair, and steely grey eyes that looked through a man, rather than at him. Small -- five feet seven, a hundred and forty pounds. You looked at him and wondered how he'd ever gotten on the force in the first place, until you saw his eyes. I'd never felt comfortable in his presence. "Do you know what we have here, Forsdon?" he said. "Not exactly." "I don't either -- exactly. The brass upstairs thinks it's an expensive toy. It is. But they've given us a trial budget to see if it works, and now it's up to us." I nodded, and waited for him to go on. He packed his pipe, lit it, and then leaned back and let the smoke go out. "We have an invention," he said, "which I don't pretend to understand. You saw the thing?" "Yes," I said. It wasn't easy to overlook. "Walker calls it Cronus -- for the Greek God of Time. It gives us random glances around the city on what looks like a large TV screen -- random glances into the future !" He paused for dramatic effect, and I probably disappointed him. I already knew that much. "The picture is hazy," he went on, "and sometimes we have a hell of a time figuring out the location of whatever it is we're looking at. We also have trouble pinpointing the time of an event. But we can't deny the potential. We've been in operation for three weeks, and already we've seen half a dozen holdups days before they happened." "At least it's an ideal we've always worked for," I offered. "I mean, to prevent crime, rather than just catch the criminal." "Oh!" he said, and went to work on his pipe again. "Maybe I didn't make myself clear. We saw the holdups on that screen, but we couldn't prevent a single one. All we managed to do was catch the criminal a few minutes after he had committed the crime. So it raises an interesting question: Is it possible to change the future?" "Why not?" I said. Captain Marks thought a moment. "It isn't too critical, where the holdups are concerned. The criminal is caught immediately, the loot is recovered, and the victim goes his way thinking kind thoughts about the efficiency of the police force. But what about assault, or rape, or murder? Apprehending the criminal ten minutes later won't be much comfort to the victim. But now that you're here to follow up the leads given us by Cronus -- well, we'll see what we can do. Come on. I want you to meet Walker. And Cronus!" Walker -- Dr. Howard F. Walker -- was huddled over his creation. There was no doubt about it being his baby, as you could see from the way his hands caressed the dials. He was a gangling-looking man, six feet one, maybe # pounds, fiftyodd years old. He had a long neck, an overly pronounced Adam's apple, and thinning hair. He wore thick glasses, his face was gentle and dignified, and he looked like a very tired university professor. He didn't hear us come up, and the Old Man waited quietly until he noticed us. "Walker," the Old Man said, "this is Forsdon, our new detective." He nodded at me. "Cronus has something," he said. "If I can find it again... He turned to his dials. "That's one of our problems," Captain Marks said. "Once we focus on a crime, it's sometimes hard to locate it again. The time interval between the present and the time the crime is committed keeps getting less. It takes a different adjustment each time..." His voice trailed away, and I looked from Walker to the sixfoot-square screen above his head. Shadows flitted about on the screen. A female shadow walking along the street holding a child shadow by the hand. Shadow aircars moving along jerkily. A row of male shadows grotesquely posed along a bar, their glasses making bright blotches in the picture. A room, and a female shadow moving around a table. The future revealed by Cronus was a shadow world and the only way you could tell male from female was by their dress. The scene kept shifting. A park, with trees, and lounging adults, and running children. A room with people seated around a table, a reading room, perhaps at the public library. A large living room, with an old-fashioned fireplace, and a bright blotch that was the fire. Another smaller room, a female shadow... "That's it!" Walker said suddenly. He moved a motion picture camera into position, and pressed a button. It whirred softly as we watched. A nondescript living room. A female shadow. She threw up her hands and stood transfixed for a horrible moment or two. A male shadow bounded into the picture -- a giant male shadow. She turned to run, and he caught her from behind. His hand moved upward. Something glittered in it, and he brought it down. He struck twice, and the female crumpled to the floor. He whirled, ran toward us, and disappeared. The camera ground on, recording the image of that shapeless shadow on the floor. Abruptly the scene changed. A restaurant, with crowded tables and jerkily moving robot-servers. Walker swore softly and turned off the camera. "That's all I got before," he said. "If I could come on it from a different angle, maybe we could locate the place." "When?" the Captain asked. "Seven to twelve days." It hit me, then, like a solid wallop on the jaw. I'd been looking into the future. "Plenty of time," the Captain said. "But not much to go on." He looked at me. "What do you think?" "Might be able to identify the man," I said. "He'll be well over six feet -- wouldn't surprise me if he were six-eight or nine. He'll have the build of a male gorilla. And he limps slightly with his right foot." "Not bad. Anything else?" "It's an apartment or a hotel room," I said. "I'd guess an apartment. The scanner screen by the door means it's either relatively new, or it's been remodeled. The living room has a comer location, with windows on two sides. It's hard to say for certain, but I believe there's an old-fashioned sofa -- one of those with a back on it -- along the far wall." Walker slumped into a chair. "You make me feel better," he said. "I thought there was next to nothing to go on." Captain Marks nodded. "But you missed one thing." "What's that?" "Our assailant is left-handed. Also -- the limp may be something temporary. All right, Forsdon, it's all yours. Seven to twelve days, and you'd better plan onseven." He went back to his office, and I looked at Walker. "Can you give me any idea at all as to the location?" "I can draw you a circle on the map, but it's only about fifty-fifty that you'll find the place inside the circle." "That's better than nothing." "There is one thing," Walker said. "I'd like to have you wear this. Everywhere." A band of elastic, with what looked like dark beads placed on it at intervals. "It's an arm band," Walker said. "Cronus picks up these beads as bright spots. So I'll be able to identify you if you show up on the screen." I hesitated, and he said, "The Captain wears one. We know it works, because Cronus has picked him up twice." I took the arm band, and slipped it on. I sat down with the map and a directory and worked until a technician came back with the developed film. Walker was still perspiring in front of Cronus. He hadn't been able to focus on the crime a third time. The Captain's door was closed, and his nasal voice was rattling the door as he bellowed into his telephone. I pulled the curtains to darken one corner of the room, and fed the film into a projection machine. I ran the film ten times without coming up with anything new. I couldn't make out the number on the door. I also couldn't decide whether the assailant was a chance prowler or someone known to the victim. I stopped the camera, and made a sketch of the room from what I could make out in the way of furnishings. The Captain came barging out of his office, took a quick look at my sketch, and nodded approval. "We'll find the apartment," he said. "Then our troubles will really start." I couldn't see that, and I told him so. I figured our troubles would be nearly over if we found the apartment. "You think it's possible to prevent this crime," he said. "I don't. Even if we find the apartment and identify the man and woman, the crime is still going to happen." "Why?" I said. "Look at it this way. If we prevent the crime, it's not going to happen. Right?" "Right." "And if it's not going to happen, Cronus wouldn't show it to us. All you see on that screen is what will happen. As far s Cronus is concerned, it already has happened. Preventing it is like trying to change the past." "We can try," I said. "Yes, we can try. The regular force will help us on this one. A team of detectives is waiting outside. Tell them what you want done." I wanted an apartment living room with a corner location and a door scanner. It wasn't as bad as it sounded -- the scanner was a new gadget at that time. Not many apartment buildings would have it. There was always the chance, of course, that an individual had had one installed on his own, but that was a worry I could postpone. I put in a hectic day of trudging through apartment buildings and squabbling with superintendents, but we found it the next morning, in a stubby little seven-story building on South Central. It was one of those apartment buildings that went up way back in #, when the city decided it couldn't afford the luxury of open spaces and opened part of old Central Park to apartment buildings. This one was a midget among the other buildings in that development, but it had been remodeled recently. It had scanner screens. After the usual protests, the superintendent showed me around. Most of the occupants weren't home. He let me into a rear apartment on the sixth floor, and I took one look and caught my breath. I pulled out my sketch, though I had it memorized by this time, and moved across the room to get the right angle. The sofa was there -- it was an old-fashioned job with a back. What had been a bright blotch in the picture turned out to be a mirror. A blur by the sofa was a low table. A chair was in the wrong place, but that could have been moved. What was I thinking about? It was going to be moved . Every detail checked. "Stella Emerson," the superintendent said. "Miss Stella Emerson -- I think. She never gave me no trouble. Something wrong?" "Not a thing," I said. "I want some information from her." "I dunno when she's home." Her next-door neighbor did. I went back to headquarters and picked up the loose ends on the attempt to identify our assailant-tobe. No luck. And at six o'clock that evening, I was having a cup of coffee with Miss Stella Emerson. She was the sort of person it's always a joy to interview. Alert, understanding, cooperative -- none of that petty, temperamental business about invasion of privacy. She was brunette and twenty-six or twentyseven, maybe five feet four, a hundred and ten pounds. The pounds were well distributed, and she was darned nice looking. She served the coffee on the low table by the sofa, and sat back with her cup in her hand. "You wanted information?" she said. I fingered my own cup, but I didn't lift it. "I'd like to have you think carefully' I said, "and see if you've ever known a man who matches this description. He's big, really big. Heavy set. Maybe six feet eight or nine. He's left handed. He might walk with a slight limp in his right foot... She set her cup down with a bang. "Why, that sounds like Mike -- Mike Gregory. I haven't seen him for years. Not since... I took a deep breath, and wrote "Mike Gregory" in my notebook. "Where was he when you saw him last?" "On Mars. I was there for two years with Civil Service. Mike was a sort of general handyman around the administration building." "Do you know where he is now?" "As far as I know, he's still on Mars!" My coffee was scalding hot, but I didn't notice as I gulped it down. "I'd like to know everything you can tell me about this Mike Gregory," I said. "May I take you to dinner?" As my dad used to say, there's nothing like mixing business with pleasure. She suggested the place -- a queer little restaurant in the basement of a nearby apartment building. There were lighted candles on the tables -- the first candles I'd seen since I was a child. The waitresses wore odd costumes with handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads. An old man sat off in one corner scraping on a violin. It was almost weird. But the food was good, and Stella Emerson was good company. Unfortunately, her mind was on Mike Gregory. "Is Mike in trouble?" she said. "He always seemed like such a gentle, considerate person." I thought of the knifewielding shadow, and shuddered. "How well did you know him?" I said. "Not too well -- he stopped to talk with me now and then. I never saw him except at work." "Was he -- interested in you?" She blushed. It was also the first blush I had seen in so long I couldn't remember when. I had heard it said that the blush went out when women did away with their two-piece bathing suits and started wearing trunks like the men. I'm telling you, you can't have any idea about what's wrong with our scientific civilization until you've seen a girl blush by candlelight. "I suppose he was," she said. "He kept asking me to go places with him. I felt sorry for him -- he seemed such a grotesque person -- but I didn't want to encourage him." "You're certain about the limp?" "Oh, yes. It was very noticeable." "And about his being left-handed?" She thought for a moment. "No. I'm not certain about that. He could have been, I suppose, but I don't think I ever noticed." "Is there anything else you remember about him?" She shook her head slowly. "Not much, I'm afraid. He was just a person who came through the office now and then. He had an odd way of talking. He spoke very slowly. He separated his words, just... like... this. Most of the girls laughed at him, and when they did he'd turn around and walk away without saying anything. And -- oh, yes, sometimes he'd talk about California. I guess that was where he was from. I never found out anything about his personal life." "But you didn't laugh at him?" "No. I couldn't laugh at him. He was just too -- pathetic." "Have you heard from him since you came back?" "He sent me a Christmas card once. He didn't know my address on Earth, so he sent it to the office on Mars so it would be forwarded. It didn't reach me until July!" "How long ago was that?" "It must be four years ago. It was a couple of years after I left Mars." I dropped Mike Gregory, and tried to learn something about Stella Emerson. She was twenty-eight. She'd worked for two years on Mars, and then she came back and got a job as private secretary with a small firm manufacturing plastic textiles. She made enough money for her own needs, and was able to save a little. She liked having a place of her own. She had a sister in Boston, and an aunt over in Newark, and they visited her occasionally. She led a quiet life, with books, and visits to the art institutes, and working with her hobby, which was photography. It all sounded wonderful to me. The quiet life. A detective gets enough excitement on the job. If he can't relax at home, he's going to be a blight on the mortality tables. We were on our second cup of coffee, by then, and I motioned the old fiddler over to our table. His bloodshot eyes peered out over a twoweek growth of beard. I slipped him a dollar bill. "How about giving us a melody." He gave us a clumsy serenade and Stella reacted just as I'd hoped she would. She blushed furiously, and kept right on blushing, and I just leaned back and enjoyed it. I took her back to her apartment, and said a friendly farewell at her door. We shook hands! And she didn't invite me to spend the night with her, which was just as refreshing. I rode the elevator with chiming bells and a wisp of the old man's music floating through my mind. I stepped out on the ground level, walked dreamily out the door and hailed an aircab with my pocket signal. And just as I was about to step in, it stabbed me like the flickering knife on Cronus's screen. She was a wonderful girl, and I was falling for her, and in seven to twelve days -- no, nearer five to ten days, now -- she was going to be murdered. "Something wrong?" the driver said. I flashed my credentials. "Police Headquarters," I said. "Use the emergency altitude." front of Cronus, perspiring, as usual, but looking infinitely more tired. No matter what time I came in, he always seemed to be there, or there was a note saying he was down in his lab in the sub-basement. "I haven't found it again," he said. 'That's all right. We can manage with what we have." He frowned irritably. "It's important, confound it. This is just an experimental model, and it's maddeningly inefficient. With money and research facilities, we could produce one that would really work, but we can't get that kind of support by predicting a few piddling holdups. But a murder, now -- that would make someone sit up and take notice." "Stop worrying about your dratted Cronus," I snapped. "I don't give a damn about that pile of junk. There's a girl's life to be saved." It was unfair, but he didn't object. "Yes, of course," he said. "The girl's life -- but if I can't get more information..." "I've found the apartment," I told him, "and I've found the girl. But the man is supposed to be on Mars. It doesn't figure, but it's something to work on." I called the Captain, and gave him my report. If he resented my bothering him at home, he didn't show it. Any wheel I could get my fingers on I set turning, and then I went home. I won't pretend that I slept. By morning we had a complete report from the colonial administration on Michael Rolland Gregory. Fingerprints, photos, detailed description, complete with limp and left-handedness. The works. Also, the added information that he'd resigned his civil service job eight months before and had left immediately for Earth, on a Dawn Liner scheduled to land at San Francisco. I swore savagely, got off an urgent message to San Francisco, and left for a dinner date with Stella Emerson. And another handshake at her apartment door. San Francisco did a thorough job, but it took time -- two more days. Michael Rolland Gregory had hung around for a while, living in run-down rooming houses, and holding a series of odd jobs. Two months before he had disappeared. "He could be anywhere by now," I told the Captain. "Including here in New York," the Captain said dryly. Two to seven days. I took Stella back to her apartment after our dinner date, and in front of the door I said, "Stella, I like you." She blushed wonderfully. "I like you too, Jim." "Then do me a favor -- a very special favor." Her blush deepened, with an overlay of panic. "I'd -- like to, Jim. Because I -- like you. But I can't. It's hard to explain, but I've always told myself that unless I marry a man..." I leaned against the wall and laughed helplessly while her eyes widened in amazement. Then I dispensed with the handshaking. She clung to me, and it might have been her first kiss. In fact, it was. "I don't just like you, darling," I said. "I love you. And that wasn't the favor I was going to ask. You said you have an aunt over in Newark. I want you to stay with her for a while -- for a week or so." "But -- why?" "Will you trust me? I can't tell you anything except that you're in danger here." "You mean -- Mike?" "I'm afraid so." "It's hard to believe that Mike would want to harm me. But if you think it's important..." "I do. Will you call your aunt, now, and make the arrangements? I'll take you over tonight." She packed some things, and I took her to Newark in an aircab. Her aunt was hospitable and cooperative, albeit a little confused. I checked her apartment thoroughly. I was taking no chances that the aunt's living room could be the potential scene of the crime. It wasn't -- no similarity. "Promise me," I said, "that you won't go back to your apartment for any reason until I tell you it's all right." "I promise. But I may need some more things." "Make a list, and I'll have a police woman pick them up for you." "All right." I arranged with the superintendent of her apartment building to have the lights in her apartment turned on each evening, and turned off at an appropriate time. I put a stakeout on her apartment building, and on her aunt's. I got a detective assigned to shadow her, though she didn't know it, of course. Then it was zero to five days, and I was quietly going nuts. Zero to four days. I walked into the D. F. C. room, and Walker swarmed all over me. "I found it again," he said. "Anything new?" "No. Just the same thing. Exactly the same." "When?" "Two to three days." I sat down wearily, and stared at Cronus. The screen was blank. "How did you manage to invent that thing?" I said. "I didn't really invent it. I just -- discovered it. I was tinkering with a TV set, and I changed some circuits and added a lot of gadgets, just for the hell of it. The pictures I got were darned poor, but they didn't seem to be coming from any known station -- or combination of stations, since they kept changing. That was interesting, so I kept working on it. Then one day the screen showed me a big aircar smashup. There were about ten units involved, and I told myself, 'Boy, these Class D pictures are really overdoing it.' About a week later I opened my morning paper, and there was the same smashup on page one. It took a long time to get anybody interested." He stopped suddenly as the Captain came charging out of his office. "Brooklyn," he called. "Gregory was living in a rooming house in Brooklyn. He left three weeks ago." knew where he'd gone. It proved that he was somewhere in the vicinity of New York City, but I don't think any of us ever doubted that. "One thing is interesting," the Captain said. "He's using his own name. No reason why he shouldn't, of course. He's not a criminal -- but he is a potential criminal, and he doesn't know that" I saw, suddenly, that we had a double problem. We had to protect Stella from Gregory, but we also had to protect Gregory from himself. If we could find him. "There's not much we can do," I said, "but keep on looking." It was what Walker called the Critical Period. Something had to happen on this day or the next, or Cronus was a monkey's dutch uncle. "If we could only pick Gregory up and hold him for a couple of days, maybe we could beat this," I told the Captain. "We've eliminated Stella Emerson, we've locked the apartment, and caging Gregory should snap the last thread." He laughed sarcastically. "You think that would solve the problem? Listen. We spotted a holdup, and I recognized the crook. He had a long record. I had him picked up, and he was carrying a gun so we slapped him in jail on a concealed weapons charge. He escaped, got another gun, and committed the holdup right on schedule. I'm telling you, Cronus shows exactly how the future is. We can't change it. I'm working as hard as anyone else to prevent this, but I know for a certainty that sometime today or tomorrow the girl and Gregory are going to meet in that apartment -- or in one exactly like it." "We're going to change it this time," I said. On my way out I stopped for a good look at Cronus. Nothing but a monster would give you a murderer, and a victim, and the place and approximate time, and make you completely helpless to do anything about it. I felt like giving Cronus a firm kick in a vital part of its anatomy. I called off my dinner date with Stella and prowled around Manhattan looking for a big man with a pronounced limp. One speck of with satisfaction that I was not alone in my search. Aircars were swooping in low for a quick look at pedestrians. Foot patrolmen were scrutinizing every passerby. And detectives would be making the rounds of the rooming houses and hotels with photographs. Cab and bus drivers would be alerted. For a man who had no reason to hide, Michael Holland Gregory was doing an expert job of keeping out of sight. I radioed police headquarters at #:# P.M., and the Captain's voice exploded at me. "Where the hell have you been? The stakeout at the girl's apartment got Gregory. They're bringing him in." I cut off without any of the formalities, and sprinted. I tore down the corridor to the D. F. C. room, and burst in on what might have been a funeral celebration. Walker sat with his face in his hands, and the Captain was pacing in a tight circle. "He got away," the Captain snarled. "Snapped the handcuffs like toothpicks, beat up his escort and ran. The man must have the strength of a utility robot." "How did they happen to pick him up?" I wanted to know. "He came strolling down the street and started to go into the apartment building. Completely innocent about the whole thing, of course. He didn't have any idea we were looking for him." "He has now," I said. "It's going to be great sport locating him again." We had a small army loose in the area where Gregory escaped, but for all they found he might have burrowed into the pavement. I called Stella and asked her to stay home from work the next day. I got the stakeout on her aunt's apartment doubled. I was up at dawn, prowling the streets, riding in patrolling aircars, and I suppose generally making a nuisance of myself with calls to headquarters. We put in a miserable day, and Gregory might have been hiding on Mars, for all the luck we had. I had my evening meal at a little sandwich shop, and did a leisurely foot patrol along the street by Stella's apartment building. The stakeout was on the job, and the superintendent had Stella's lights on. I stood for a moment in the doorway, watching the few pedestrians, and then I signaled an aircab. "I'd like to circle around here a bit," I said. "Sure thing," the cabbie said. We crisscrossed back and forth above the streets, and I squinted at pedestrians and watched the thin traffic pattern. Fifteen minutes later we wereback by the apartment building. "Circle low around the building," I said. "Oh, no! Want me to lose my license? I can't go out of the air lanes." "You can this time," I said. "Police." He looked at my credentials, and , grunted. "Why didn't you say so?" There was a narrow strip of lawn behind the building, with a couple of trees, and then a dimly-lit alley. The cabbie handed me a pair of binoculars, and I strained my eyes on the sprawling shadows. I couldn't see anything suspicious, but I decided it might be worth a trip on foot. The third time around I glanced at Stella's lighted windows -- the rear ones -- and gasped. A dark shadow clung to the side of the building, edging slowly along the ledge towards her window. Gregory. "See that?" I said to the cabbie. As we watched, he got the window open, and disappeared into the apartment. I tried to radio the men on the stakeout, and couldn't rouse them. I called headquarters. Both Walker and Captain Marks were out. They would be back in a few minutes. But I didn't have minutes left. "Skip it," I said. I snapped out a description of the situation, and cut off. "Can you get close enough to get me through that window?" I asked the cabbie. "I can try," he said. "But watch your step, fellow. It's a long drop." He hovered close, and I grabbed the edge of the window and pulled myself through. Gregory faced me across the living room, a bewildered, panicky look on his huge, child-like face. I was thinking, how stupid can we get? From the way he came into Cronus's picture we should have known he didn't come through the door. Stella had come through the door, and we just assumed he was already in the room. But who would have thought Gregory could make like a human fly? "All right, Gregory," I said. "You're under arrest." Tears streaked his face. His jaw moved, but no sound came out. Suddenly I saw how we had blundered. This grotesquely oversized child meant no harm to anyone. Stella was the only person he'd ever known who treated him like a human being, and he wanted to see her again. For some reason he couldn't understand, the police were trying to prevent that. Suddenly the entire universe was against him, even Stella, and he was frightened. And dangerous. He lunged at me like a pile driver, and forced me back towards the open window. I got my gun out, and he just casually knocked it out of my hand. He had me on the window ledge, forcing me back and all I could see were the stars out in space. Then the apartment door opened and closed and Gregory glanced back over his shoulder. I screamed. "Run, Stella! Run -- " Then the night air was whistling past me. I bounced off an awning, crashed into the branches of a tree, struggled frantically for a hold, and fell through. From the window above came a piercing scream .  . an owl, and he bent over me, making funny clucking noises with his tongue. "There we are," he said, when he saw my eyes open. "Not bad at all." "What's good about it?" I said. "Young man, you fell six stories, and all you have is a broken leg and assorted bruises. You ask me what's good about it?" "You wouldn't understand," I said. "Beat it." Stella's scream still rang in my ears. I twisted, and felt the heavy cast on my left leg. My mood merged and blended with the dull grey of the hospital room. A nurse came tiptoing in, and smiled blandly when she saw I was awake. "You have some visitors," she said. "Do you want to see them?" I knew it was the Captain. I hated to face him, but I said, "Let's get it over with." The Captain loomed in the doorway, backed away, and came in again. And ahead of him walked Stella. A different Stella -- face pale and distorted, eyes registering shock and grief, but alive. But very much alive. I started to get up, and the nurse placed a firm hand on each shoulder and held me to the bed. "Not so fast, sonny boy," she said. Captain Marks moved up a chair for Stella. "Jim," she said. Her voice broke. "I'll tell him," the Captain said. "It seems that Miss Emerson has a sister living in Boston. She didn't know anything about our problem, and she came down this evening for a visit. She had a key to Miss Emerson's apartment, and she walked in just at the right time to play a leading role in Cronus's drama." "Was she -- " "No. Thankfully, no. Her condition is serious but she'll be all right again. The knife missed a vital spot by a fraction." I relaxed. "What happened to Gregory?" "He tried to go out the way he came in. There wasn't any tree to break his fall. And one other thing. I have an urgent message for you from Walker." I glanced at the slip of paper. "Jim -- for God's sake, stay out of aircars!" "Cronus showed us your fall half an hour before it happened. From our angle, it looked as if you fell out of the aircab that was hovering over the building. Some time in the next twenty-four hours, Walker calculated, but we couldn't reach you." "It wouldn't have made any difference," I said. "You know yourself..." "Yes," he said. "I know." His voice rambled on, while my eyes met Stella's. "So Cronus can show us the future," I heard him say, "but he can't change it, and neither can we." "Cronus changed mine," I said, still looking at Stella. The Captain took the hint, and left. Five minutes later the phone rang, and I reached around Stella to answer it. It was Walker, and Stella held her face close to mine and listened. "Just called to offer my congratulations," Walker said. "Congratulations for what?" "For your wedding. Cronus just spotted it." I swore, but I kept it under my breath. "I haven't even asked the girl," I said, "and don't tell me I'm wearing that stupid arm band at my wedding, because I'm not." "No, you're on crutches. But the Captain is standing up with you, and he's wearing his." "All right," I said. "When is this glad event going to take place?" "Four to eight days." I slammed down the receiver, and kissed Stella's blushing face. "Cronus says we're getting married in four to eight days, and this is one time that monstrosity's going to be wrong. We'll get married tomorrow." "All right, Jim, if you want to. But..." "But what?" "This is May twenty-eighth, and I want to be a June bride." We were married five days later, and we went to Arizona on our honeymoon. I'd done some checking, and I knew Arizona was well outside of Cronus's range.    The noise was too much for him. He wanted quiet -- at any price . Illustrated by Ed Emsh fice his ears were aching from the noise of the copter and from his earplugs. Lately, every little thing seemed to make him irritable. He supposed it was because his drafting department was behind schedule on the latest Defense contract. His ears were sore and his stomach writhed with dyspepsia, and his feet hurt. Walking through the clerical office usually made him feel better. The constant clatter of typewriters and office machines gave him a sense of efficiency, of stability, an all-is-well-withtheworld feeling. He waved to a few of the more familiar employees and smiled, but of course you couldn't say hello with the continual racket. This morning, somehow, it didn't make him feel better. He supposed it was because of the song they were playing over the speakers, "Slam Bang Boom," the latest Top Hit. He hated that song. Of course the National Mental Health people said constant music had a beneficial effect on office workers, so Joseph was no one to object, even though he did wonder if anyone could ever actually listen to it over the other noise. In his own office the steady din was hardly diminished despite soundproofing, and since he was next to an outside wall he was subjected also to the noises of the city. He stood staring out of the huge window for awhile, watching the cars on the freeway and listening to the homogeneous rumble and scream of turbines. Something's wrong with me, he thought. I shouldn't he feeling this way. Nerves. Nerves. He turned around and got his private secretary on the viewer. She simpered at him, trying to be friendly with her dull, sunken eyes. "Betty," he told her, "I want you to make an appointment with my therapist for me this afternoon. Tell him it's just a case of nerves, though." "Yes sir. Anything else?" Her voice, like every one's, was a high pitched screech trying to be heard above the noise. Joseph winced. "Anybody want to see me this morning?" "Well, Mr. Wills says he has the first model of his invention ready to show you." "Let him in whenever he's ready. Otherwise, if nothing important comes up, I want you to leave me alone." "Yes sir, certainly." She smiled again, a mechanical, automatic smile that seemed to want to be something more. Joseph switched off. That was a damn funny way of saying it, he thought. "I want you to leave me alone " As if somebody were after me" He spent about an hour on routine paperwork and then Bob Wills showed up so Joseph switched off his dictograph and let him in. "I'm afraid you'll have to make it brief, Bob," he grinned. "I've a whale of a lot of work to do, and I seem to be developing a splitting headache. Nerves, you know." "Sure, Mister Partch. I won't take a minute; I just thought you'd like to have a look at the first model of our widget and get clued in on our progress so far..." "Yes, yes, just go ahead. How does the thing work?" Bob smiled and set the grey steel chassis on Partch' s desk, sat down in front of it, and began tracing the wiring for Joseph. It was an interesting problem, or at any rate should have been. It was one that had been harassing cities, industry, and particularly airfields, for many years. Of course, every one wore earplugs -- and that helped a little. And some firms had partially solved the problem by using personnel that were totally deaf, because such persons were the only ones who could stand the terrific noise levels that a technological civilization forced everyone to endure. The noise from a commercial rocket motor on the ground had been known to drive men mad, and sometimes kill them. There had never seemed to be any wholly satisfactory solution. But now Bob Wills apparently had the beginnings of a real answer. A device that would use the principle of interference to cancel out sound waves, leaving behind only heat. It should have been fascinating to Partch, but somehow he couldn't make himself get interested in it. "The really big problem is the power requirement," Wills was saying. "We've got to use a lot of energy to cancel out big sound waves, but we've got several possible answers in mind and we're working on all of them." He caressed the crackle-finish box fondly. "The basic gimmick works fine, though. Yesterday I took it down to a static test stand over in building # and had them turn on a pretty fair-sized steering rocket for one of the big moon-ships. Reduced the noise-level by about # per cent, it did. Of course, I still needed my plugs." Joseph nodded approvingly and stared vacantly into the maze of transistors and tubes. "I've built it to work on ordinary # cycle house current," Wills told him. "In case you should want to demonstrate it to anybody." Partch became brusque. He liked Bob, but he had work to do. "Yes, I probably shall, Bob. I tell you what, why don't you just leave it here in my office and I'll look it over later, hm?" "Okay, Mr. Partch." Joseph ushered him out of the office, complimenting him profusely on the good work he was doing. Only after he was gone and Joseph was alone again behind the closed door, did he realize that he had a sudden yearning for company, for someone to talk to. Partch had Betty send him in a light lunch and he sat behind his desk nibbling the tasteless stuff without much enthusiasm. He wondered if he was getting an ulcer. Yes, he decided, he was going to have to have a long talk with Dr. Coles that afternoon. Be a pleasure to get it all off his chest, his feeling of melancholia, his latent sense of doom. Be good just to talk about it. Oh, everything was getting to him these days. He was in a rut, that was it. A rut. He spat a sesame seed against the far wall and the low whir of the automatic vacuum cleaner rose and fell briefly. Joseph winced. The speakers were playing "Slam Bang Boom" again. His mind turned away from the grating melody in self defense, to look inward on himself. Of what, after all, did Joseph Partch's life consist? He licked his fingers and thought about it. What would he do this evening after work, for instance? Why, he'd stuff his earplugs back in his inflamed ears and board the commuter's copter and ride for half an hour listening to the drumming of the rotors and the pleading of the various canned commercials played on the copter's speakers loud enough to be heard over the engine noise and through the plugs. And then when he got home, there would be the continuous yammer of his wife added to the Tri-Di set going full blast and the dull food from the automatic kitchen. And synthetic coffee and one stale cigaret. Perhaps a glass of brandy to steady his nerves if Dr. Coles approved. Partch brooded. The sense of foreboding had been submerged in the day's work, but it was still there. It was as if, any moment, a hydrogen bomb were going to be dropped down the chimney, and you had no way of knowing when. And what would there be to do after he had finished dinner that night? Why, the same things he had been doing every night for the past fifteen years. There would be TriDi first of all. The loud comedians, and the musical commercials, and the loud bands, and the commercials, and the loud songs... And every twenty minutes or so, the viewer would jangle with one of Felicia's friends calling up, and more yammering from Felicia. Perhaps there would be company that night, to play cards and sip drinks and talk and talk and talk, and never say a thing at all. There would be aircraft shaking the house now and then, and the cry of the monorail horn at intervals. And then, at last, it would be time to go to bed, and the murmur of the somnolearner orating him on the Theory of Groups all through the long night. And in the morning, he would be shocked into awareness with the clangor of the alarm clock and whatever disc jockey the clock radio happened to tune in on. Joseph Partch's world was made up of sounds and noises, he decided. Dimly, he wondered of what civilization itself would be constructed if all the sounds were once taken away. Why, after all, was the world of Man so noisy? It was almost as if -- as if everybody were making as much noise as they could to conceal the fact that there was something lacking. Or something they were afraid of. Like a little boy whistling loudly as he walks by a cemetery at night. Partch got out of his chair and stared out the window again. There was a fire over on the East Side, a bad one by the smoke. The fire engines went screaming through the streets like wounded dragons. Sirens, bells. Police whistles. All at once, Partch realized that never in his life had he experienced real quiet or solitude. That actually, he had no conception of what an absence of thunder and wailing would be like. A total absence of sound and noise. Almost, it was like trying to imagine what a negation of space would be like. And then he turned, and his eyes fell on Bob Wills' machine. It could reduce the noise level of a rocket motor by # per cent, Wills had said. Here in the office, the sound level was less than that of a rocket motor. And the machine worked on ordinary house current, Bob had said. Partch had an almost horrifying idea. Suppose... But what would Dr. Coles say about this, Partch wondered. Oh, he had to get a grip on himself. This was silly, childish... But looking down, he found that he had already plugged in the line cord. An almost erotic excitement began to shake Joseph's body. The sense of disaster had surged up anew, but he didn't recognize it yet. An absence of sound ? No! Silly! Then a fire engine came tearing around the comer just below the ocean of noise. Joseph's hand jerked and flicked the switch. And then the dream came back to him, the nightmare of the night before that had precipitated, unknown to him, his mood of foreboding. It came back to him with stark realism and flooded him with unadorned fear. In the dream, he had been in a forest. Not just the city park, but a real forest, one thousands of miles and centuries away from human civilization. A wood in which the foot of Man had never trod. It was dark there, and the trees were thick and tall. There was no wind, the leaves were soft underfoot. And Joseph Partch was all alone, completely alone. And it was -- quiet. Doctor Coles looked at the patient on the white cot sadly. "I've only seen a case like it once before in my entire career, Dr. Leeds." Leeds nodded. "It is rather rare. Look at him -- total catatonia. He's curled into a perfect foetal position. Never be the same again, I'm afraid." "The shock must have been tremendous. An awful psychic blow, especially to a person as emotionally disturbed as Mr. Partch was." "Yes, that machine of Mr. Wills' (Continued from page #) sion occurs. Now we shall send our animate object." He untied the goat and, with some difficulty, hauled the animal by its collar to the transmitter. There the goat balked and Dr. Angstrom, having got its head through the door, got behind it and shoved heartily, hanging onto the edge of the door so he could shut it quickly when the goat was inside. As goats will, the goat suddenly changed its mind and leaped into the transmitter. Caught off balance, Dr. Angstrom fell in after it -- and the door, given a last frantic jerk, slammed on them both. There were gasps of horror and is extremely dangerous. What amazes me is that it didn't kill Partch altogether. Good thing we got to him when we did." Dr. Coles rubbed his jaw. "Yes, you know it is incredible how much the human mind can sometimes take, actually. As you say, it's a wonder it didn't kill him." He shook his head. "Perfectly horrible. How could any modern human stand it? Two hours, he was alone with that machine. Imagine -- two hours of total silence!"    alarm from the scientists, but I held up my hand to calm them. "There's no danger, gentlemen," I said. "It's just as well this way. I happen to know that Dr. Angstrom's next step, after proving to you with the goat that animate objects could be transmitted, was to prove that human beings also could be transmitted. He planned to be his own first subject." With serene confidence, I went to the receiver and threw open the door. Just as I had anticipated, the goat leaped out, unharmed, followed by Dr. Angstrom. "I told you animate objects could be transmitted successfully," said the goat triumphantly. "Baa!" said Dr. Angstrom, and began eating the tablecloth.    #. # -- Auxins. # -- All part of a neuron. # -- Mesozoic. # -- Thigmotropism. #I -- Maximum entropy. # -- #. # -- Evection. # -- Amalgam. # -- Metamorphic. # -- Polarization. # -- Hydrogen-ion. # -- Specific gravity. # -- Saphrophytism. # -- Electrical resistance. (Continued from page #I ) conference table and drifted out of the big spheroid room to their families, wives -- wherever they wanted to go. Now only Thompson and the Russian remained in the room. They walked ten paces away from one another in the classic tradition of honorable dueling, turned, and fired. They fell almost at the same time. Morten rushed over to Thompson was was already dead, having died instantly with a bullet in his heart. Morten saw that the Russian had a bullet hole just above his left eye. Thompson, foreseeing this possible situation, had gotten a promise from Morten that he would press the button that would annihilate Russia, in case Thompson was dead or incapacitated. That would leave the United States the sole victor in the last great global struggle to establish once and for all, world wide, the true faith. Morten fought a brief struggle with his conscience, then ran out of the room, leaving the console untouched. The United States and Russia still survived. Morten's family was still safe. He ran toward the bank of elevators to get out of the Cellar. He hadn't been out of the Cellar for a long, long time. The President of the United States switched off the T.V., and poured another martini. "You want another?" he asked the Minister of Peace. "No, sir, Mr. President." v For a while they said nothing as they looked out the window at the peaceful sunshine, and watched birds settle in the trees. "They ran their own course," the Minister of Peace said. "Just the same, it was an unpleasant thing to see." "Inevitable," said the President. "There wasn't any other possible way to handle them." Psychiatry would never have altered their rigid mold, he knew. It was a strangely funny thing, that spontaneous rebellion all over the world. The people putting a stop to the whole damn vicious historical show. But they had done it. The lie had been given to all the historical pessimists like Spencer and Toynbee and Marx and all the others who had said the same things, whether they really had admitted it or not. The people, acting out of intuitive realization that they faced annihilation, had reacted en masse and taken things over for themselves. Now you couldn't find even a water pistol anywhere in the world. The U.N. Cellar had been walled off, turned into a kind of sanitarium. Its occupants had never known the truth about the outside. Thompson and that absurd Russian were dead. But what about the others in the Cellar, living there still and believing they were the only few survivors left in the world? Poor bastards, the President thought. And then he thought of that statement by Sartre. The one about hell being a restaurant where you served yourself    The army is looking for a throwaway engine to power its lightweight combat vehicles, hoping to find an engine cheaper to abandon when it breaks down than to repair. The need for such an engine, together with faster and lighter vehicles, has been brought about by changes in modern warfare. Emphasis today is on getting troops where needed in a hurry. An ideal engine would be a super powerplant giving one horsepower per cubic inch of displacement, one horsepower per pound of weight, and costing less than one dollar per horsepower. The answer to the military problem lies in the engine that could be "factory tested, sealed, issued and written off". A promising engine for the future is the small gas turbine, operating on regenerative cycles. Rice fields of the future may look like stagnant ditches. Use of algae, the lowly forms of plant life that fix nitrogen from the air, to transmit food to rice plants and other crops of economic value is advocated by Dr. Mary Belle Allen of the University of California. She has succeeded in cultivating a group of nitrogen-fixing organisms known as blue-green algae. Under greenhouse conditions, these organisms can promote growth of rice plants that would not thrive without them. Tests show that rice plants grown in sand and nutrient chemicals will not grow without the photosynthetic help of the bluegreen algae. The possibility of improving rice crops by flooding the paddies with the algae would aid the world's production immeasurably and certainly reduce starvation statistics in critical areas. Amateur radio operators or hams can help track the earth satellite to be launched during the International Geophysical Years starting July #. The signal sent out at # megacycles by the moonlet's threepound transmitter should be detectable over much of the United States, and amateurs could make a real contribution by setting up equipment to listen in. Such a ham network would not only back up the main system of Minitrack antennas, but would also allow nearly vertical observations of the satellite at some station during each orbit. Calibration of the tracking system is expected to be the most difficult job. For the amateur tracking installation, two antennas would be set up # to # feet apart on an eastwest line in a field remote from population centers, industrial plants, busy highways and other sources of radio noise. By comparing the path length from the satellite's transmitter to one station with a path length to a second antenna, the satellite's position in its earth-girdling orbit can be found. A monkey's bone marrow may some day be used to save the life of a person doomed by fatal disease or atomic radiation. Monkey bone marrow, transplanted or injected into the body, will go on functioning as a blood cell factory, producing monkey blood cells to circulate through the human arteries and veins. While human application is in the future, at the A.E.C. Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee, the bone marrow of a rat has saved the life of a mouse. From this experiment may come the knowledge of the genesis of radiation-caused leukemia. The bone marrow treatment will prevent this leukemia in mice if given right after the radiation. The day of the crucial experiment of putting marrow from animal into a human may be far distant, but when the problem of which animal to use as a source of supply is solved, the method may be used to treat victims of bone marrow disease and perhaps to allow larger, more effective doses of X-rays or other radiation treatment. Scientists have taken a long look into the future and come up with this picture of tomorrow's merchant fleet: Fishing vessels will be floating factories remaining at sea all year. Finished products will go straight from ship to market. Mining ships will drill for oil on continental shelves far from their sources of fuel and supplies. Rough weather will not cause seasickness on tomorrow's atomic vessel. Ships will simply submerge beneath the waves into undisturbed waters. Icebreakers will be able to smash through Arctic ice packs and remain locked in frozen waters all winter if necessary, because space which would be used for fuel today can be used for food tomorrow. These predictions are based on known advantages of atomic power. Patients of the future may have their drugs built to order. One such drug has already been synthesized and found to reduce blood pressure in patients with hypertension. The tonin, a natural body chemical found in blood serum, and was devised to block serotonin's action in the body. In the designing of the drug, researchers had to make it effective when taken by mouth, with a low inhibition index and not reversible in its action, and lacking effect on the central nervous system. Future man-designed drugs may have many other such features planned right into them before production begins. Atomic energy may turn the Antarctic into a seventh habitable continent. Sir Raymond Priestly, who accompanied Shackleton to the Antarctic in #, foresees that frozen mass as the world's surplus food locker as well as a great mining area. It would provide a vermin-free store for periodical food surpluses, where they could be preserved against the need of future generations. Once mineral deposits are found, the entire mining operation could be moved underground. Atomic power could be used to maintain populations. Antarctic gales might also be harnessed as another source of power; making it practically self sufficient. A solid fuel, neither coal nor asphalt, may soon be on the market. Latest mining and transportation methods are put to use in a new processing plant, to be completed in the near future, which will make high purity coke out of an unusual geological formation found near Salt Lake City. The formation, known as Uintaite, is of hydrocarbon origin. Black, like coal, it contains more resin and less sulphur than asphalt. Petroleum-like byproducts, similar to those from oil shale, are expected to be recovered in the coking process. Several companies have joined together to adapt the hydrocarbon mineral to fuel use. They have renamed it Gilsonite. Tornados will warn of their approach with a scream on a loudspeaker if plans of the U.S. Weather Bureau are successful. The technique, known as Doppler radar, spots the target by its relative speed and the output of such radar is in the audible range. One aim is to spot the tornado before its swooping funnel, so lethal where it sweeps the ground, is formed. Its high winds, thought to whirl at speeds up to # miles per hour, would contrast with those of the surrounding air to produce the audible sound on Doppler radar. Moisture carried by the winds would reflect the radar waves. A simplified model is now being tested, using two #-inch antennas with an output of five watts. This device has scanned the clouds and, when conditions are good, has shown turbulent motion within them. Their design will be improved for an operational instrument that will soon be field tested. By # the world's scheduled airlines will be flying # passenger miles annually. This thirteenfold increase over today's mileage will come about through the use of atomic freighters flying nonstop between any two points on the earth's surface at supersonic speeds of # miles per hour. Passenger planes will be capable of traveling # miles per hour, carrying # passengers on non-stop flights of up to # miles. And civil transport aircraft, weighing upward of # pounds and powered by the atom, will be in regular service. # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania  The breakdown of specialization! Read -- Hit treats of #! Twenty outstanding short stories selected from the first five years of IF Magazine -- covering a greater variety of science fiction themes than you have ever before encountered in one volume. You will find something excitingly differmood, idea, theme and pace. The editors, however, have given them all one common denominator -- entertaining science fiction. At your news dealer -- only # cents. Or direct from IF Magazine, Kingston, N.Y. All Stories New and Complete in in ninininini innnn September Morn, Venus Style, by Mel Hunter IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co,, Inc. Office of imblicion, # Ld Strt, Buffalo, New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All storiw appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A Next (June) issue on sale April #th I Editor's s Maps of the world have been changing fast and furiously of late. Until # or # years ago, changes were slow and gradual; but, since the first world war, the pace has been almost too fast for geography teachers to keep up with it. Now we're going to have some new changes, and these will not be made by dictators or armies or politicians, but by Project Vanguard, to be launched with the forthcoming International Geophysical Year beginning July #st. By observing the changes in the orbits of the various satellites to be sent aloft, scientists will very probably learn why maps, of the same location but made at different times, do not always agree. Scientists once argued that continents drifted like boats on the plastic core of the Earth; that land masses, now separated by oceans, were contiguous. Now, with totally new data about the Earth's gravity and the magnetic north, new methods of position determination might cause cartographers to re-do a lot of their work. You probably won't notice it on your local road map and your neighbor won't claim you're growing your petunias on his land. But -- there could be some revised boundaries that might provoke new arguments to take the place of the old. Success Story: A couple years ago we got a letter from an aspiring author who had this to say: "In the past I have sent you approximately six different tales, with no success. Now, curiosity compels me to ask you a simple question. Do you think I have any possibilities as a writer?" I read the accompanying story and returned it with a note that was anything but encouraging. "This story has nothing," I wrote, underscoring the nothing. "You need a lot of practice... study everything, plot, construction, etc." Last month we got another story and another letter in which he explained that my note (which I had long forgotten) had jolted him into taking a course in short story writing and now, with diploma in hand, he was tackling us again. The writer is George Revelle of Newburgh, New York, and his story Operation Boomerang appears in this issue. America will be short # scientists and engineers, within # years, according to a recent statement by John F. Collyer, President of the B. F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio. The U. S. now has # scientists and engineers. Ten years from now we will need #; by # we will require the services of # scientists and engineers... That, no doubt, is why a young graduate electrical engineer recently said, "Me look for a job?" he laughed. 'T can write my own ticket with half a dozen places." Young man going somewhere in a hurry seems to be the best way of describing Harlan Ellison, who first appeared in IF with Life Hutch and The Crackpots, Bom in Cleveland # years ago, Harlan attended Ohio State U. until his English professor told him he would never sell a word. The professor was right -- for a couple of years. A couple of years which turned into a hodge-podge of jobs which included runner for a bookie, "topman" in a carnival, tmck driver, door-to-door brush salesman, logger and department store floorwalker. When he first reached New York he joined up with a gang of juvenile delinquents in Brooklyn's tough Redhook section in order to gain experience about kid gangs. He turned his experiences into # words of saleable juvenile delinquency fiction. He works # hours a day (ah, youth!) and during the past year he sold # stories of all sorts to various magazines of all sorts. He's in an army uniform now, but we hope he'll soon be making another appearance in IF. A couple of months ago I bought myself a copy of American Science and Invention, by Mitchell Wilson, and promptly forgot about it. Last week, while looking for some lost artwork, I literally stumbled over it (it's a big book!) and realized I hadn't even opened it. Well, I went back to my desk and sat down and opened it -- and there went the rest of the day. On the jacket was a blurb that read: "The fabulous story of how American dreaming, wizardry and inspired tinkerers converted a wilderness into the wonder of the world." I used to write book blurbs and ad copy and am somewhat leery about fatuous utterances by literary hucksters or friends of the author. After a couple hours with the book I found I might easily have written the same glowing terms, and I don't even know the author or the publisher, except through the pages of a weekly trade journal. But to continue: the book is a lot of fun and I plan to spend many more hours with it. For here is the story of American invention and ingenuity from the very first patent issued in Boston in # to Joseph Jenkes for the "manifactures of engins of mils to go by water for speedy dispatch of much worke with few hands" to the greatest discovery of modern man, the controlled release of nuclear fission. With their myriad experiments and inventions you meet such giants as Franklin, Priestley, Fulton, Henry, Morse, Goodyear, Underwood, Bell, Edison, Westinghouse, Eastman, the Wright brothers, Michelson, Hale, Compton, Fermi and many, many others. American Science and Invention gets my vote for the most interesting book on "popular" science and invention published during the past year -- all # words and # pictures of it. -- jlq If the law of cause and effect is overthrown, and if ultimate understanding is impossible, and intelligence becomes less than worthless. where can a man turn -- except to madness? green thnmli Johnny Sundance was seven parts Cherokee Indian and one part tramp printer. He was horn in # at the Chilocco Indian School, Oklahoma, where his father taught mathematics. Johnny's father was all Cherokee, with a Cherokee's fierce pride and a Cherokee's stoicism. When he discovered what his child was, he poured his frustrated ambition and his knowledge into Johnny as his ancestors had once poured powder into a trade musket. Johnny learned to read when he was three. When he was five he was reading all the books in his father's library, and his father started him on algebra. His parents died in the last of the great airplane crashes, before automatic avoidance mechanisms became compulsory. They had a reservation on an earlier plane, but their helicab had been trapped in a Los Angeles traffic jam, Johnny was six years old. The government put him into a primary grade pool in a modern school at the Haskell Indian Institute. He graduated to the fourth grade at seven, began his scientific education at eight, and advanced at his own best speed until he grad uated from high school at eleven, from college at fourteen, got his Ph,D, at sixteen, and passed his boards the same year. He was a specialist. Those quaU ified to judge his work considered physicist in the country. He won his first contest at nine with an original paper on atomic models. In the years following he published five books on particle physics and innumerable articles in scholarly journals. He liked poetry, beer, and moun tain climbing. Just after his nineteenth birth day, he disappeared. T he type bars slamming viciously through the ribbon and paper against the hard rubber platen made the old-fashioned typewriter jump on the cluttered solid walnut desk. Gideon McKenzie glared at the paper as his stubby fingers jabbed at the keys. Occas ionally a distant clink of metal against metal made him twitch, miss a key, and swear. "The principle of specialization became inextricably embedded in the social matrix during the late #'s," he wrote. "It was based on a recognition of the green thumb phenomenon : everyone has a talent which needs only the proper environment of social approval, favorable circumstances, and frequent, much admired successes to develop genius out of what may be only superior original capacity. It was at once the savior and the curse of Twentieth Century civilization. "The arguments for it went like this: you can't have a complex civilization without specialists; knowledge has become too extensive for any one man to encompass it all. It's as much as he can do to master one small aspect of a subject. When there was much to learn, a spade was sufficient, but now that all the ground has been turned over, a man must dig deep to find virgin soil. He needs a sharpshooter. "What has been called a revolution is actually the maturation of tendencies evident in the early years of the Electronic Age, and this is a lot of over-ripe manure!" Gideon jerked the paper out of the typewriter, crumpling it in his hand, and glowered at the machine as if it were to blame. A McKenzie glare was a terrifying thing, but a glower was enough to freeze even a typewriter's bearings. Gideon was a lumpy man. He looked like he had been molded in a bass fiddle case and then a clumsy child had stuck on fat blobs for legs and arms. But his face was his own creation. Once it had been fat and jolly, but it had been carved by indignation and mottled by choler. The nose was a piece of redveined putty; his eyebrows were dark bushes under which his pale blue eyes lurked in wait for the unwary bungler. His hair was thick, black, and unkempt, like a nest he had slept in. The typewriter waited, unmoved, amid the precarious stacks of dusty books and tattered manuscripts on the desk. Gideon rolled another sheet of paper into the machine and began to pound the keys again. When he finished, he drew the sheet carefully out of the typewriter and leaning back in the wooden desk chair read it with an expression of Machiavellian delight. Dear Barney: I have written many potboilers in my career, but I cannot stomach this tripe. If you want to put out a revised edition of Green Thumb, you will have to do it yourself or have some specialist hack it out. Specialization, I am unalterably convinced, is a plague on all our houses. Gideon P.S. If you publish that book in any form, I will sue you. P.P.S. Where are this quarter's royalties? The chair in which Gideon sat was the only chair in the room. An ancient green wool rug covered the floor. The walls, except for two doors, a real window looking out upon the concrete and aluminum peaks and cliffs of a city, and the desk, were books from rug to ceiling, stacked, heaped, stuck in sideways, backwards, and upside down. From behind the door on the opposite side of the room the clinking sounds started again. A man cursed. Gideon's eyebrows became a single thicket over his eyes. Something crashed. In a blur of motion, Gideon was out of his chair. He flung open the door and revealed three men in a narrow, tiled closet. They were standing over the remains of what had been an excellent medicine cabinet. Gideon thundered, "What in the name of Moloch do you think you're doing? Three men sent to do a boy's job, and you've been here all morning!" A surly, dark-haired lavatorbot specialist second class said defensively, "This lavatorbot hasn't been repaired for so long it wouldn't work at all. When he tried to remove it, the thing slipped and fell." Gideon asked dangerously, "Why didn't you remove it?" The young man drew himself up proudly. "I am an electronic lavatorbot specialist. He" -- the young man pointed -- "is the mechanic lavatorbot specialist." Muted violence was in his voice as Gideon said, "Did it ever occur to you that the lavatorbot was not a lavatorbot at all? It was a perfectly good medicine chest, and you will procure me a new one immediately -- and replacements for all the pharmaceuticals within." He pointed at the old-fashioned, whitechina commode in the comer. "That is what I wanted fixed -- a simple, three-minute job an idiot child could perform." "That is completely outside my specialty!" Gideon pointed a pudgy finger at the third man, a tall, thin young man with red hair. "Why don't you fix it!" The young man said indignantly, "I am a plumber, not an antiquarian. If you had a modem disposerbot, it would be a simple matter. That is an atrocity." Gideon roared, "Keep my personal preferences out of this. Can you fix that thing?" The plumber flinched. He said meekly, "What seems to be wrong with it?" Itwon't -- flush."  Gingerly the red-haired plumber twisted the handle on the water closet. Water gurgled into the bowl and swirled up dangerously close to the edge before it subsided. Slowly the level dropped. "Well," said the plumber. "Well. My suggestion is that you get rid of the whole affair. I can get a crew of men in a few days, rip this thing out, and put in a modem disposerbot -- " "Young man! I like this commode. I have become accustomed to it. I sometimes stand here for hours and flush it for recreation, just to listen to its long, withdrawing, melancholy roar." Gideon's pale eyes lighted on the plumber's open tool box. "What's that!" "This?" The plumber picked up a rubber plunger on a stick. "This is known as a plumber's friend." "No doubt the only one you have," Gregor said scathingly. "IJse it!" e "This, sir," the plumber said icily, "is my specialist's badge. It is purely ornamental." With a roar of rage, Gideon grabbed the plunger and jabbed it several times into the commode. The water surged down and out. "There! Now out! All of you!" They fled before him, scrambling through the doorway and the room beyond, fumbling with the oldfashioned door into the hall. Gideon pursued them, the plumber's friend waving in one hand like a mace. Finally the lavatorbot specialist, electronic, got the door open, and they scattered in all directions down the hall. With a triumphant swing of his arm, Gideon threw the plunger after them, narrowly missing a tall, gray-haired man whose hand was raised to knock on the door. In a voice that was almost pleasant, Gideon said, "What in Beelzebub's name do you want?" The man stared down the hall toward the spot where the plunger clung to the distant wall like a native spear and then looked back at Gideon with incredulous eyes. He blinked, and his expression sobered. "I am Carl Vigran, psychospecialist, administrative assistant, personnel, to the president of the University -- " "My time is worth money," Gideon snapped. Vigran said simply, "Johnny Sundance has disappeared." The lean, broad-shouldered young man had a face that was hard to forget. It was broad, fiat, and copper-colored beneath a stiff, unruly mass of blue-black hair. The nose was prominent and aquiline, but the dark eyes were dull. He lurched drunkenly as he stepped off the Fifth Avenue slidewalk. On the stationary pavement he caught himself and began walking aimlessly into the older part of the city. People turned to look at him as he passed, but he saw none of them. He stopped, finally, and turned his face toward the building, his eyes closed, his forehead leaning against a black, plate-glass window as if he were trying to cool it. In a moment he reeled back and opened his eyes. Lavender words wriggled across the black glass. He squinted at them as if he were trying to read and couldnH. Then he turned and shouldered his way through the door. He stood, swaying, just inside the entrance, staring blindly into the dim recesses of the room. Gideon leaned back comfortably in his desk chair, studying without pretense of manners the middleaged man who stood uncomfortably near the door. Vigran had taken good care of himself ; at sixty he was slim and vigorous. His face was thin and sharp, stamped by the aristocracy of intelligence. He looked younger than his prematurely gray hair suggested. Impeccably dressed in a grayj onepiece business suit, he was a brilliant man, a capable man, a specialist. Gideon said calmly, "Johnny has disappeared. So?" Vigran's poise shattered with the jerky movements of his hands. "You haven't seen him?" "Why should I?" "You were his closest friend." Gideon looked surprised. "Was I? Poor Johnny. What about women?" "When he's working on a problem, he hasn't time for anything else. None of them have seen him for months." Vigran said urgently, "We've got to find him, McKenzie. If you can help us in any way, if you can think of any place he might have gone -- " Gideon's pale eyes studied Vigran's face. The psychospecialist's lip was twitching. "What makes Johnny so much more important than any of the others?" Vigran said quickly, "What others?" Gideon's voice was sharp. "Don't fence with me. The other specialists who have disappeared, the other particle physicists. You can bury them among the personals, but you can't cover them up completely. How many have there been in the last six months? Six? Seven?" Vigran said unhappily, "Nine." "How many have you found?" "One. He -- he came back." Gideon said shrewdly, "Insane?" Slowly Vigran nodded. Thoughtfully Gideon placed the tips of his stubby fingers together. "Quite an epidemic," he said cheerfully. Vigran said, "They're all important. If we can solve one we'll have a clue to the others. But we need Johnny in particular. His recent work -- his associates say it may . # be the most important research in the last fifty years. They can't decipher his notes. They jump over whole areas of development and proof to indecipherable conclusions. Interspersed are philosophical ramblings. Most uncharacteristic." Gideon had tired of the conversation. He swung his chair toward the desk in a gesture of dismissal. "Sic your bloodhounds on him." Vigran moved quickly to the desk, leaned over it to face Gideon. "They lost the trail, McKenzie. Like they did with the others. Their actions have not followed any anticipated pattern. Their movements have been random. McKenzie -- you were Johnny's friend. For Johnny's sake!" Gideon stared malevolently at Vigran. "I remember you. A year ago you refused me the use of the University library. Said a nonspecialist could not make effective use of it." "A misunderstanding!" Vigran gasped. "That will be corrected." Gideon looked down at the palms of his pudgy hands. They were dirty. "How do you know he wants to come back?" "He had everything he could have wanted. A free hand in his research, unrestricted grants to finance it, prestige, a large salarywhy should he leave?" Vigran hesitated. "We're afraid of amnesia." "Nine times? Amnesia is a myth. It was exploded many years ago. Why was he unhappy?" Vigran said sharply, "He wasn't! He was at the top of his specialty in a profession that is universally admired. He was doing what he was best fitted for; he was using his talent to the fullest. He enjoyed his work. He had security, admiration, friends... What did he lack?" "What indeed? You make it sound idyllic." Gideon said sharply, "But he ran away." Vigran's hands fluttered ineffectually. "We don't know that he did. He just -- disappeared." A slow, pleased smile crept over Gideon's face. "You know what's the matter with you? You're a specialist and you've found a problem you can't solve. You're frustrated -- just like your bloodhounds. They must be thoroughly useless by now." He chuckled happily. "Unless your problem is resolved, they'll be looking for you one of these days." Vigran drew himself up stiffly. "You're forgetting yourself, McKenzie." "No, Vigran, you're forgetting that you came to me. You're forgetting why you came to me. Not because I knew Johnny. Your specialists could dig up more about Johnny than I could possibly know. You came to me because I am the last of the universal geniuses." He put his elbow on the desk, propped his chin in his palm, and stared up complacently at Vigran. He looked like a fat man's version of Rodin's Thinker. Vigran gasped, "You're mad, McKenzie. But maybe you're mad enough to find an answer. Everything else has failed." Gideon was not insulted. "I'm interested. Two conditions. First, I must have full access to your personnel and psychological files, as well as Johnny-s papers." Vigran hesitated and then nodded. "Two: when I find Johnny, he doesn't have to return unless he wishes." Vigran said indignantly, "What do you think the University is? A prison?" "Yes," Gideon snarled. "A prison for minds," The servandroid stopped in front of the young man with the copper-colored face and the dull, black eyes and said, 'You arenH well, sir. Shall I call a doctor? He brushed the thing aside and walked unsteadily into the dim room, over the lavender carpet, toward a row of booths against the far wall. The place was almost deserted. It was quiet. The young man staggered when he reached the booths and caught himself on a gray, plastic table. The schooner of beer on it sloshed some of its contents onto the table. His eyes focused on the glass. His dark hand reached out, lifted it to his lips. He drained it. What you think youre -- a hoarse voice began. A hand grabbed the young man by the shoulder. The voice gentled. Say, youre sick.' Johnny Sundance slumped bonelessly into the booth. T he lavender words wriggling on the black, plate-glass window spelled "Sam's Place." It was an ordinary neighborhood bar. Inside, it was gloomy, cool, and old-fashioned. The thick carpeting was lavender. The tables were gray plastic. The booths along the walls were upholstered in pink imitation leather. Female servandroids, their bodies sculptured perfection under their tiny, translucent uniforms, carried trays among the tables. Carl Vigran hesitated blindly at the entrance and then stumbled down three steps before he saw Gideon. He made his way quickly to the booth. "Why did you want me to meet you here?" Gideon raised to his lips an oldfashioned schooner of beer and sipped the foamy, yellow liquid gingerly. He wiped his mouth on the back of a hairy hand. "To find Johnny. This is where your bloodhounds lost the trail." Vigran said impatiently, 'I know that, but he isn't coming back. This place has been watched for days." "Maybe," Gideon suggested slyly, "you were watching for the wrong person." Vigran looked startled and pleased. "You've found him!" "Sit down." Gideon waited until Vigran had slipped into the seat opposite. "No, I haven't found Johnny. Even a universal genius must have more than twenty-four hours. First I had to learn Johnny inside out. I had to be able to think like Johnny." "Well?" "Now I know Johnny like one of my own characters." Gideon drained his glass and summoned a servandroid. "Again," he said. "You see," he said to Vigran, "I am drinking beer, a drink I detest, because it was Johnny's favorite. Anything more potent was firewater, and the Indian has a notoriously weak stomach for alcohol, he used to say. "Johnny and I met by accident. He had happened on a potboiler of mine called Green Thumb, written during a brief period of insanity when I was under the spell of modern education. He wrote to me, asking where he should continue his work on quantum physics. He was ten at the time. "I had come to my senses, I tried to discourage him, but he persisted. I turned his letter over to the University, and you reregulations somewhat in the process. Vigran leaned toward Gideon. He said abruptly, "That's better forgotten." "Later Johnny insisted on coming around and thanking me for my help. Frequently. He had an engagingly inquisitive mind, and my broad range of interests fascinated him. I tried to expand his scope, but he was a specialist and satisfied to be that and nothing more." The servandroid brought back Gideon's glass. He patted her familiarly as she bent over the table. Vigran exploded. "That's an android!" Gideon winked expressively. "You know that, and I know that. But does she know that? Ah, well." He shrugged. "At first I suspected women, but Johnny has had the normal sexual experiences for his maturation group, including some with older women infatuated by his reputation. Lately he became more fastidious. He has led, it appears, a full, satisfying life." Vigran said, "I told you that much. But why did he disappear?" His lip jerked. It was getting worse. "For the same reason the others disappeared." Vigran's hand began to pound on the table. He didn't notice. "Why? Do you have a theory?" Gideon leaned back contemptuously. "Many. Theories are cheap. For instance, they may have been kidnaped by extraterrestrials." Vigran made a disgusted face. "All right," Gideon said mildly, "scratch theory number one. Number two: when men get too intelligent they learn something that the rest of us are too stupid to see, that makes further effort futile. "Number three : modern education is forced growth. The tendency of many child prodigies to fail in later life is an infantile rebellion against authority. "Theory number four: thinking is a disease. Intelligence, like size, adaptability, prolificness, speed, and so forth, is an evolutionary experiment. All of them are survival characteristics, and all of them carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. "The trouble with intelligence is that it sees problems and seeks answers. The one thing intelligence must have which it cannot manipulate like its environment is understanding. And ultimate understanding is impossible. Result: madness' or its equivalent, the rejection of intelligence." Vigran's expression had progressed from incredulity to contempt. "Which one do you prefer?" he asked sarcastically. Gideon shrugged his plump shoulders. "All of them. None of them. I always wait for the proof of experimental evidence. Which we are about to get. See that man?" Vigran looked up. Passing them was a short, thick young man with long, untrimmed blond hair and a pale, scowling face. He glanced suspiciously at everyone he passed. In his hand he had a round, yellow, plastic container. He started up the steps toward the entrance. Vigran whispered. "That isn't Johnny!" With great disgust, Gideon said, "Who said it was? He will lead us to Johnny." It was early morning when they came out. The streets were deserted, There was no one to notice a tall, black-haired, copper-skinned man and the short, thick blond who supported him as they walked, Johnny reeled and almost fell. The blond caught him, held him up, 'Just a little farther, Johnny, Then well be home, Home?' Johnny said. He began to laugh, Home sweet home. Home is where the heart is. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill, The laughter broke into a sob. Shhhh, Johnny! Here we are, Carefully the blond young man led Johnny down a short flight of steps and put out a hand against the door plate. The door swung open. Warm, humid air came out to meet them. It was thick with the odor of green, growing things. As soon as the yoimg man was gone, Gideon moved swiftly toward the door. A servandroid stepped quickly into his path and said pleasantly, "Your bill, sir?" Gideon jerked a thumb at Vigran. "He'll pay." When Vigran had caught up with Gideon, the lumpy man was gazing intently into a shop window. It featured a display of stretch shoes. There were all about size five. The sign on the window said, "This is your size." "You're mad!" Vigran panted. "Shhhh! He's gone into the seed shop across the street." The short, thick man came out of the store, glancing both ways. He did not notice Gideon or Vigran, whom Gideon had swung around to face the shop window. "Now," Gideon said. He turned and walked casually down the street. The stocky man was just turning the comer ahead. Now he had two containers in his hand. "Ah!" Gideon said. Vigran trotted to keep up with Gideon. "That fellow can't have anything to do with Johnny. He's obviously an unspecialized laborer." "Hah!" Gideon said. They txurned the corner. Their quarry was disappearing into the basement entrance of a decrepit, green-tinted concrete slab apartment building. "I see now why you couldn't possibly find Johnny. It's because of the very nature of specialization." Vigran said crisply, "Nonsense! I don't know what you're doing, but I know this much: without specialization our society would have disintegrated long ago." Gideon breathed noisily through his putty nose. "Specialists are tame animals. They are trained to do one thing well. But what happens when they meet totally unforeseen conditions? They fail. They cannot cope, because that is the function of the wild, unspecialized animal. You couldn't find Johnny because his disappearance was unpredictable. "Every science that deals with man ignores everything except what it deals with. Medicine deals with the physical man, economics with that simplification known as Economic Man, psychiatry with a fictitious creature in whom it would have no interest if he were 'normal,' and one branch of psychology with I.Q. Man, whose only significant aspect is his ability to solve puzzles. "Literature is the only thing that deals with the whole complex phenomenon at once. If it were to cease to exist, whatever is not considered by one or another of the sciences would no longer be considered at all and would perhaps vanish completely." Skepticism battled hope across Vigran's face. "Then he's in there?" "We shall see." Gideon waddled heavily down the concrete steps. "Carl Vigran to see Johnny Sundance," he said to the red door. The door cleared its throat rustily. "This is the residence of Otto Haber. There is no one here named Johnny Sundance." "Announce me," Gideon said sharply. "Carl Vigran." Vigran asked sharply, "Why don't you use your own name?" "He's afraid of me." The door stood silent and unmoved. "Come, Otto," Gideon muttered. "We are waiting." Vigran said, "What makes you think he's here?" Gideon said, "Johnny was fleeing. He was trying to escape. He needed something he had not had for fourteen years -- emotional security." Vigran said in a pained voice, "You're talking my specialty. That isn't done -- not by a layman." "I'm talking about something you've forgotten: love. The kind that asks nothing but the chance to love. The kind that makes no demands, that incurs no responsibilities. Johnny stumbled into Sam's Place -- and met Otto." Vigran looked startled. "What are you trying to imply?" Gideon turned his massive head so that his pale blue eyes looked straight and hard at Vigran. "Nothing. I am telling you what happened. If you want to make inferences, I can assure you that they are wrong. No one noticed Johnny when he left Sam's Place because he came in alone and left with Otto. No one saw him on the street because it was very late, and your bloodhounds were looking for one man, not two. And here Johnny has been ever since Gideon turned back to the door and began to bang on it with his fist. "Please!" said the doorbot in a shocked voice. "Sir!" Vigran said, "All right, then, how did you find him?" "I checked the central retail food one person's bill has increased in the last few days without reason. Otto Haber's." A furtive note of doubt crept into Gideon's voice. "Oddly enough, though, only by about one-third." Disgustedly Vigran said, "Guesswork! I should have known better than to follow a fool on a fool's errand," He took a step toward the street. The door opened a crack. The stocky young man's blond, suspicious face peered out. "What you want?" he asked hoarsely. "We've come to see Johnny, Gideon said quietly. "Never heard of him. Ain't nobody here but me." He tried to slam the door, but Gideon was leaning against it. "Get out of here!" "When we see Johnny," Gideon said. Vigran tugged at Gideon's sleeve. "Come on, McKenzie. Don't get us both into trouble." Otto paid no attention to Vigran. His hard eyes were fixed on Gideon. "You got a warrant says you can break in a man's home?" Gideon shook his head. "No warrant. We can get one if we have to. But if we get a warrant you'll lose Johnny for sure. All we want to do is see him, and we'll leave. If Johnny doesn't want to come, this man promises to leave him alone." Otto shifted his glaring eyes to Vigran and back again to Gideon. "Who's he?" "Administrative assistant to the president at the University. Where Johnny was. He wants Johnny back. Let us in now and that will be the end of it." Unexpectedly the door swung open. "All right," Otto snarled. "See him and get out!" Otto carried the packages into the bedroom, for once not stopping to look at his flowers or the tank farm. His face was eager as he handed Johnny the plastic con tainer. Here, Johnny. Heres your beerf The copper-faced young man lying on the rumpled bed, his black eyes staring blindly at the ceiling with its intricate network of fine cracks, slowly sat up. He took the container and tore off the strip that sealed the top. He raised it to his thin lips and then spat a mouthful on the floor beside the bed. Ifs warm he said flatly. You stopped somewhere "Honest, Johnny Otto said. Just long enough to get some bug spray. It must have been warm when they sold it to me. Ill take it back, Johnny. You want I should take it back? No. I dont want it anyway. Johnny laid down again and looked at the mottled wall. Hopefully Otto said, Im gonna make some stew tonight. I got me some real beef bouillon cubes. Ill get me some potatoes and carrots and cabbage fresh from the farm -- Johnny, is there something wrong? Anybody follow you? No, Johnny. I was careful like you said. Then why is somebody at the door? Otto raised his head and listened. He could hear it now, the cracked voice of the doorbot saying, Carl Vigran for Johnny Sundance. Otto said, wont go. They got no business here. Theyll think nobody s home. Theyll go away. Contemptuously Johnny said, They saw you come in. Answer the door. Johnny, what are you gonna do? Dont let Vigran in. Hell need a warrant. Hes a fool. Hell go away, but hell be back. As soon as he goes away, ##I leave. Slowly Otto said, Where would you go, Johnny? What would you do? Who cares? Now answer the door, stupid! Otto said softly, Dont leave me, Johnny. T here was a short entrance hall lined on either side with a long box filled with flowers. Their lamps beaming down warmly from the ceiling: bright yellow, scarlet, gentian blue, purple, violet, emerald .  . The air was warm and steamy and filled with the odor of green things growing and the mingled scent of many flowers. Otto had an aersol spray in one hand. He held it as if it were a bomb he was prepared to throw at any moment. Gideon glanced sharply at the flowers and then led Vigran down the hall over the pitted, green plastic tile. The hall opened into a small living room. The room was dim, but the odor of vegetation was even stronger. The room was made even smaller by a wide, flat tank that covered two-thirds of the floor. There were vegetables growing in it -- potatoes, carrots, beets, tomatoes, green beans, corn -- their roots floating in a nutrient solution. Somewhere a pump gurgled quietly. It was the only sound in the room. Gideon's eyes brightened. "Ah. Fresh food!" Otto sneered. "He's in there!" He pointed to a doorway. Gideon stopped just inside the next room. It was even smaller than the living room. There was space for a bed, a marred, black table, and two rickety chairs. Curtains closed off an alcove. Gideon guessed that it was a cooking area. The room was sour and dirty. Johnny was propped up in the bed, the covers wrinkled and gray around him. Beside him was a plastic container of beer. His broad, flat face was turned toward the doorway. He looked at Gideon for a moment with obsidian eyes and then turned his head toward the wall. The room was silent. "These men," Otto said softly. "They come to see you, Johnny. You know them?" Johnny didn't move. Vigran edged into the room and took it in with one horrified glance. "Johnny! What are you doing here? Why did you run away? What -- ?" Gideon said flatly, "Shut up!" He walked over to one of the chairs and drew it up to the bed. Gingerly he eased his massive body onto it, listening to it creak beneath him. When he was sure it would not collapse beneath him, he leaned forward. He said gently, "Johnny! We aren't going to stay long. We aren't going to take you away unless you want to come. We just want to talk for a moment." Johnny stared at the wall. Finally, without turning, he said tonelessly, "What are you doing here?" "Vigran asked me to help." "Why did you?" "It was the only way I could be sure he wouldn't cart you off if he did find you. He promised to leave you alone if you decide to stay." Indignantly Vigran said, "McKenzie!" "Shut up!" Gideon said wearily. Johnny said, "How did you find me?" "Chance," Gideon said, A slow tremor ran over Johnny's lean body. "No. You thought it all out. You knew. Why don't you leave me alone?" "We will, Johnny," Gideon said. "In just a moment. I know why you ran away." Johnny turned his head to look at Gideon. His black eyes were fierce and hawklike. "Do you? Do you really? Do you know what it is to realize that you have wasted your life, that everything you have tried to do is futile, that nothing has any meaning?" Gideon said, "Yes." Johnny said violently, "Chance rules the universe. Man is only a minute flyspeck in the cosmos, tossed here and there by the Brownian Movement of fate. He's still a mindless blob of protoplasm. "I know now what killed my parents. Not an airplane. Chance. Chance brought me to the University. Chance drove me away." Vigran whispered to Gideon, "I'll get help." Gideon didn't look away from Johnny. "Stay where you are! He isn't crazy." Coldly Johnny said, "No. I'm sane. Too sane. Too sane for my own good." "Come back, Johnny," Vigran pleaded. "If there was anything wrong with the way we treated you, if -- " He looked at Johnny's eyes and stopped. Gideon said, "He doesn't understand, Johnny. I think maybe you owe him an explanation. Other men have disappeared. It's driving him insane." "Let him read my notes. It's all there." Otto had been looking at Johnny without understanding. Now he said, "You want I should throw them out, Johnny?" Vigran turned on him furiously. "You, Haber! You know what you've got here in this rat's nest? The finest mind of our generation. He's got more than fifty thousand dollars in the bank, and he's lying here in rags and filth." Otto's puzzled eyes turned back toward Johnny. "Is that right, Johnny? You got all that money?" Johnny shrugged. "What good is it?" "You could go back to that?" "Fm never going back." Otto took a step toward the bed. "I been keeping you, buying you beer. And you got fifty thousand. You're no good, Johnny! I don't like you." His voice was climbing toward a scream. "Get out!" He hit Johnny across the face with the back of his hand. "Get out!" The most important single gift of science to civilization was freedom from superstition: the idea that order, not caprice, governs the world, that man was capable of understanding it. Beginning with Newtons discovery of the universal sway of the law of gravitation, man felt himself to he in a congenial universe; all things were subject to universal laws. But that conviction arose from the narrowness of his horizons. When he extended his range he found that nature was neither understandable nor subject to law. For this we may thank Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Heisenbergs uncertainty principle set an unsuspected limit on the accuracy with which we can describe physical situations. If we measure one quality accurately we cant do the same for another. Perfect accuracy in the measurement of the position of an electron denies us any measurement at all of its velocity. Therefore an electron canh have both position and velocity. A physical concept has meaning to the physicist only in terms of some sort of measurement. A body has position only in so far as its position can be measured. If it cant be measured, the concept is meaningless -- a position of the body doesn't exist. By choosing whether we shall measure position or velocity, we determine which of those qualities the electron has. The physical properties of an electron are not inherent; they involve the choice of the observer. The law of cause and effect is invalid; it gives only an approximation ( just as quantum mechanics gives its answers only in statistical probability). Events are not causally connected; the concept of cause has no meaning. Whenever we observe something, our sensory equipment reacts on the object observed, and that interaction can't be reduced below a minimum. When the minimum interaction is taking place, the object can't be observed; we can't measure with an instrument as coarse as the thing we are trying to analyze. The physicist has come to the end of his domain. He has reached the point where knowledge must stop because of the nature of knowledge itself. Beyond this point, meaning ceases. We do not live in a world of reason, understandable by the intellect of man. As we penetrate deeper, the very law of cause and effect which we had thought to be a formula to which we could force God himself to subscribe, ceases to have meaning. (Excerpt from the notebooks of Johnny Sundance) with eyes that were suddenly warm with knowledge. While his cheek slowly grew a darker red, he said gently, "Don't be a fool, Otto. You can't drive me away." He looked at Vigran. "I don't think I can ever forgive you." Gideon said, "He's desperate. He's lost." "There's no way of predicting photon movements," Johnny threw at Vigran. "No way at all. They're governed by chance." Vigran looked bewildered and afraid. "That doesn't make sense. That's no reason to -- " Gideon said ironically, "It isn't your specialty. The function of intelligence is to solve problems. What if it finds a problem for which there can be no solution? It protects itself by going mad or denying its own existence. Johnny is a specialist, and his specialty has led him into a blind alley where the only way to go is out the way he came in." Johnny repeated, "Chance rules the universe." "That's -- that's nothing but superstition." Gideon said, "Science giveth and science taketh away." "Get this," Johnny said. "This is the last time I'll say it, the last time I'll think about it. You're trying to determine the position and velocity of an electron. In order for it to be seen, a photon must strike it and be reflected into your detection instrument, but the very act of striking deflects the electron so that it isn't where it was or it isn't going with the velocity it had. "Make two slits. Reflect a photon so that it may enter either one. Which does it enter? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. And you can't ever be sure which!" Vigran shook his head desperately. "But that all takes place at the level of the electron. It doesn't affect us." Gideon said, "Compton suggested an experiment in which a ray of light is diffracted through two slits so that it may enter either of two photoelectric cells. Through one it explodes a stick of dynamite; through the other it throws a switch which prevents the dynamite from exploding. What determines whether the dynamite explodes? Chance." Johnny said quickly, "In the same way the nervous system of a living organism acts as an amplifier, so that its actions depend on events on so small a scale that they are subject to Heisenberg Uncertainty. A neuron fires or does not fire because at a lower level an electron goes one way or another." Vigran looked back and forth between them. "But then it's an old idea. You already knew this, Johnny. Why should it bother you now?" Johnny shivered. "I accepted it intellectually. Now I know it. It's no use trying to understand the universe. Intelligence is worthless. The universe is governed by pure chance." With a finality that seemed beyond argument Johnny turned his head once more to the wall. "Now go away." Vigran began, "But -- " Otto turned on Vigran savagely as if he was hoping for resistance. You heard him. Get out!" "Just a moment," Gideon said quietly. "I'd like to talk to you a moment, Otto. How would you like a job?" Johnny turned his head to look back at Gideon suspiciously. Otto's eyes narrowed. "What kind of job?" "Doing what you're doing here. Growing things. Only all the time and with more equipment." "Where?" Otto said hoarsely. "At the University." "McKenzie -- " Vigran exclaimed. "Shut up, Vigran! What do you say, Otto?" "What do they want food for?" Otto asked sullenly. "Not food, Otto -- knowledp." "See here, McKenzie!" Vigran broke in. "We can't hire him. He's a layman. He doesn't have a specialty or a degree -- Gideon turned on him fiercely. "You're interested in the green thumb phenomenon. Talent isn't all intellectual. How did he do that?" He jerked his thumb toward the tank filled with flourishing vegetation." Vigran spluttered, "Why he just -- He knows -- " "A layman? Without a specialty or a degree? He doesn't know anything. He's got a green thumb. Why?" "Maybe," Vigran muttered. "Maybe." Gideon turned back to Otto. "What do you say, Otto? It means two or three times what you're making now. It means a chance to do what you like to do. Grow things. And find out why they grow for you." Johnny said fiercely, "Don't do it, Otto! They'll tear you apart!" Otto frowned. "What about Johnny?" "He can live with you at the University until he decides what he wants to do." Johnny said, "It's just a trick, Otto!" "I don't go without Johnny." "Let me talk to him," Gideon said. "For the last time. Go talk to Dr. Vigran about the job." Otto hesitated for a moment and then with a long look at Johnny left the room. The little room was silent for a long time while Gideon and Johnny looked at each other, "Why are you doing this to me?" Johnny asked. Gideon said, "I know what you're going through." Violently Johnny said, "You! What do you know?" "I went through it myself. These others -- they can't understand what it is to stake their lives on an idea -- and feel the idea vanish beneath them. You're floundering, Johnny, trying to find solid ground. Don't do yourself irreparable damage in the process." "You're lying to me." Gideon took a deep breath. For a moment he looked not like a lumpy old man but a hero. "Look at me, Johnny! Why do you think I'm a fat buffoon wasting my talent on potboilers. Why do I punish myself and the world, lashing out at everyone who comes within tongue's range? Because I lived too long with fear and despair." Johnny said hopelessly, "There isn't any solid ground." "Think of this. If cause and effect is overthrown, so is predestination. Free will is given back to Man. He can choose without the inner certainty that the choice was made for him by an inexorable pattern fixed in the instant of the explosion of the primordial giant atom. You're free, Johnny. You can be whatever you want to be -- except God." Johnny laughed, but his voice broke in the middle. "Who wants to be God -- that must be a lousy job. But what else is there to be?" "A man. A suffering, erring, loving man. A free man. God is inextricably bound by his own omniscience. Only man is free." "But what is there to do?" "Perhaps there are other routes besides intelligence, other ways to control chance. Ask Otto how he does it; ask him in a way he can answer, as you would ask a question of nature. Other people have similar talents. Find out how they work, and perhaps you can make another assault on the citadel of ultimate knowledge." Johnny stretched his arms out wide and sat up on the edge of the bed. Suddenly he looked very young. "Perhaps," he said. "I'll -- I'll think about it." Gideon said gently, "Yes, Johnny. You think about it." In the next room, Gideon said, "Go in with Johnny, Otto. I think he would like to talk to you." Vigran whispered, "Well? Will he come back?" Gideon nodded wearily. "Yes. He'll come back." His pale eyes moved slowly around the room. He stared thoughtfully at the hydroponic tank. "What about the others?" Gideon spun around angrily. "That's your responsibility! I do not like to play God." His voice dropped. "I do not like it at all." A World Famous Astronomer Previews Mars!  Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories  Mars, but what about this dramatic planet in the light of Man's  most recent studies and observations? Here are the authentic,  timely and fascinating answers by a world-renowned authority --  in the June IF, on sale April #th... Also in this issue are  unusual stories by Isaac Asimov, Charles Fontenay, Lloyd Biggies,  Dan Galouye and others.  He had been sent to the psiless world to learn to hide his t.k. power. That was very clear. But how was he to survive? hidden talent T he spaceport on Mondarran IV was a small one, as might be expected on the sort of fifth-rate backwater world it was. Rygor Davison picked up his lone suitcase at the baggage depot and struck out into the dry, windy heat of mid-afternoon. The sun -- Gtype, hot -- was high overhead, and a dusty brown dirt road ran crookedly away from the rudimentary spaceport toward a small gray village about a thousand meters away. There was no one on hand to greet him. Not an impressive welcome, he thought, and began to walk down the dirt road toward the village which would be his home for the next five years -- if he survived. After he had gone half a dozen steps, he heard someone behind him, turned, and saw a small boy, heavily tanned, come trotting down the road. He was about eleven, and clad in a pair of golden swim trunks and nothing else. He seemed to be in a hurry. "Whoa, youngster!" Davison called. The boy looked up questioningly, slowed, and stopped, panting slightly. "Just get here? I saw the ship come down!" Davison grinned. "Just got here. What's the hurry?" "Witch," the boy gasped. "They're giving him the business this afternoon. I don't want to miss it. Come on -- hurry along." Davison stiffened. "What's going to happen, boy?" "They're roasting a witch," the boy said, speaking very clearly, as one would to an idiot or an extremely young child. "Hurry along, if you want to get there on time -- but don't make me miss it." Davison hefted his suitcase and began to stride rapidly alongside the boy, who urged him impatiently on. Clouds of dust rose from the road and swirled around them. A witch-burning, eh? He shuddered despite himself, and wondered if the Esper Guild had sent him to his death. The Guild of Espers operated quietly but efficiently. They had found Davison, had trained him, had developed his enormous potential of telekinetic power. And they had sent him to the outworlds to learn how not to use it. It had been Lloyd Kechnie, Davison's guide, who explained it to him. Kechnie was a wiry, brighteyed man with a hawk's nose and a gorilla's eyebrows. He had worked with Davison for eight years. "You're a damned fine telekinetic," Kechnie told him. "The guild can't do anything more for you. And in just a few years, you'll be ready for a full discharge." "Few years? But I thought -- "You're the best tk I've seen," said Kechnie. "You're so good that by now it's second nature for you to use your power. You don't know how to hide it. Someday you'll regret that. You haven't learned restraint." Kechnie leaned forward over his desk. "Ry, we've decided to let you sink or swim -- and you're not the first we've done this to. We're going to send you to a psiless world -- one where the powers haven't been developed. You'll be forced to hide your psi, or else be stoned for witchcraft or some such thing." "Can't I stay on Earth and learn?" Davison asked hopefully. "Uh-uh. It's too easy to get by here. In the outworlds, you'll face an all-or-nothing situation. That's where you're going." Davison had gone on the next ship. And now, on Mondarran IV, he was going to learn -- or else. "Where you come from?" the boy asked, after a few minutes of silence. "You goin' to be a colonist here?" "For a while," Davison said. want to give any hint of his Earth known psiless world. It might mean his life if they suspected he was an esper. "Nice world?" "Not very," Davison said. "Rains a lot." fire burst out over the village ahead, illuminating the afternoon sky like a bolt of low-mounting lightning. "Oh, damn," the boy said disgustedly. "There's the flare. I missed the show after all. I guess I should have started out earlier," "Too late, eh?" Davison felt more than a little relieved. He licked dry lips. "Guess we missed all the fun." "It's real exciting," the boy said enthusiastically. "Especially when they're good witches, and play tricks before we can bum 'em. You should see some of the things they do, once we've got 'em pinned to the stake." I can imagine Davison thought grimly. He said nothing. They continued walking, moving at a slower pace now, and the village grew closer. He could pick out the nearer buildings fairly clearly, and was able to discern people moving around in the streets. Overhead, the sun pelted down hard. A shambling, ragged figure appeared and came toward them as they headed down the final twist in the road. "Hello, Dumb Joe," the boy said cheerily, as the figure approached. The newcomer grunted a monosyllable and kept moving. He was tall and gaunt-looking, with a grubby growth of beard, openseamed moccasins, and a battered leather shirt. He paused as he passed Davison, looked closely into his face, and smiled, revealing yellow-stained teeth. "Got a spare copper, friend?" Dumb Joe asked in a deep, rumbling voice. "Somethin' for a poor man?" Davison fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small coin. The boy glared at him disapprovingly, but he dropped the coin into the waiting palm of the panhandler. "Best of luck, mister," the beggar said, and shuffled away. After a few steps he turned and said, "Too bad you missed the roasting, mister. It was real good." They proceeded on into the town. Davison saw that it consisted of a sprawling group of twostory shacks, prefabs, apparently, strung loosely around a central plaza -- in the heart of which, Davison noticed, was a sturdy steel post with something unpleasant smouldering at its base. He shuddered, and looked away. "What's the matter, mister?" the boy asked derisively. "Don't "Not very often," Davison said. He found that his fingers were trembling, and he struggled to regain control over them. He thought of Kechnie, comfortably back on Earth. While he was out here, on a fly-plagued dust hole of a world, doomed to spend the next five years in a two-bit village twiddling his thumbs. It was like a prison sentence. No -- worse. In prison, you don't have any worries. You just go through your daily rock-crumbling, and they give you three meals and a place, of sorts, to sleep. No agonies. Here it was different. Davison barely repressed a curse. He'd have to be on constant lookout, supressing his psi, hiding his power -- or he'd wind up shackled to that steel gibbet in the central plaza, providing a morning's entertainment for the villagers before he went up in flames. Then he grinned. Kechnie knows what hes doing, he admitted despite himself. If I survive this, Pll be fit for anything they can throw at me. He squared his shoulders, fixed a broad grin on his face, and headed forward into the town. A tall man with a weathercreased face the color of curdled turpentine came toward him, loping amiably. "Hello, stranger. My name's Domarke -- I'm the Mayor. You new down here?" Davison nodded. "Just put down my luck here." "Glad to have you, friend," Domarke said pleasantly. "Too bad you missed our little show. You probably saw the flare from the spaceport." "Sorry I missed it too," Davison forced himself to say. "You have much trouble with witches down here?" Domarke's face darkened. "A little," he said. "Not much. Every once in a while, there's a guy who pulls off some kind of fancy stunt. We've been pretty quick to send them to their Master the second we spot them. We don't want none of that kind here, brother." "I don't blame you," Davison said. "Men aren't supposed to do things the way those guys do." "Nossir," the Mayor said. "But we fix 'em when they do. There was a fellow down from Lanargon Seven last year, took a job here as a beekeeper. Nice boy -- young, with a good head on his shoulders. Saw a lot of my daughter. We all liked him. We never suspected he was a wronger." "Witch, eh?" "Sure was," Domarke said. "Swarm of his bees got loose and broke up. They come after him, and started stinging away. Next thing we know, he's looking at them kinda funny and fire starts shootin' from his fingertips." Domarke shook his head retrospectively. "Burned all those bees to tatters. He didn't even try to stop us when  strung him up." "Strung; him up? How come you didn't burn him?" Davison asked, morbidly curious. Domarke shrugged. "Wasn't any point to it. Those guys in league with fire, you don't get anywhere trying to burn 'em. We hang them on the spot." One of Kechnie s boys, probably, Davison thought. A pyrotic sent out here to learn how to control his power. He didn't learn fast enough. He chewed at his lower lip for a second and said, "Guess it's about time I got to my point. Who can I see about getting a room in this town?" T hey found him a room with a family named Rinehart, on a small farm about ten minutes' walk from the heart of the village. They had posted a sign advertising for a hired hand. He moved in that afternoon, unpacked his meager belongings, and hung up his jacket in the tiny closet they provided. Then he went downstairs to meet his hosts. It was a family of five. Rinehart was a balding man of fifty-five or so, dark skinned from long hours of toil in the blazing sun, heavyjowled and jovial. His wife -- Ma -- was a formidable woman in an amazingly archaic-looking apron. Her voice was a mellow masculine boom, and she radiated an atmosphere of simple, traditional folksiness. It was, thought Davison, a frame of mind long since extinct on so sophisticated a planet as Earth. They had three children -- Janey, a long-legged, full-bodied girl of eighteen or so; Bo, a sullen-faced, muscular seventeen-year-old ; and Buster, a chubby eleven-year-old. It seemed to be a happy familial setup, thought Davison. He left his room -- painstakingly opening and closing the door by hand -- and ambled down the stairs. He slipped on the fourth from the bottom, started to slide, and teeked against the landing to hold himself upright. He caught his balance, straightened up, and then, as he realized what he had done, he paused and felt cold droplets of sweat starting out on his forehead. No one had seen. No one this time. But how many more slips would there be? He let the shock filter out of his nervous system, waited a moment while the blood returned to his cheeks, and then finished descending the stairs and entered the living-room. The Rineharts were already gathered. "Evening, Ry!" Rinehart said pleasantly. "Evening, sir," Davison said. He smiled at the rest of them, and took a seat. "All unpacked?" Ma Rinehart asked. "You like your room?" "It's fine, Mrs. Rinehart." "'Ma, if you don't mind." "All right -- Ma. I like the room just fine. I'm going to be very happy here." "Sure you are," Rinehart said. "Maybe it's not as fancy a place as some, but you'll like it here. We're good people on this world -- sound, sane, feet-on-the-ground people. I can't think of any planet I'd rather live on." "At the moment, neither can I," anything would be an improvement." "It's a damned rainy world there," Rinehart muttered. "You'll get some good sun on your face here. Two weeks out in my fields and you'll lose that fishbelly paleness of yours, Ry." Janey appeared in the doorway and glanced indolently at Davison. "Supper's on," she said. Rinehart scooped himself out of his big chair and they followed him to the kitchen, ranging themselves around the table. "That seat down there's yours," Rinehart said. Davison sat down. Rinehart, at the head of the table, uttered a brief but devout blessing, finishing up with a word of prayer for the new hired hand who had come among them. Then Janey appeared from the back with a tray of steaming soup. "Hot stuff," she said, and Bo and Buster moved apart to let her serve it. She brought the tray down -- and then it happened. Davison saw it starting, and bit his lip in anguish. One of the scalding bowls of soup began to slide off the end of the tray. He watched, almost in slow motion, as it curled over the lip of the tray, dipped, and poured its steaming contents on his bare right arm. Tears of pain came to his eyes -- and he didn't know which hurt more, the pain of the soup on his arm or the real shock he had received when he had forced himself to keep from teeking the falling soup halfway across the room. He bit hard into his lip, and sat there, shivering from the mental effort the restraint had cost him. Janey put down the tray and fussed embarrassedly over him. "Gee, Ry, I didn't mean that! Gosh, did I bum you?" "I'll live," he said. "Don't trouble yourself about it." He mopped the soup away from his corner of the table, feeling the pain slowly subside. Kechnie, Kechnie, you didnt send me on any picnic! Rinehart gave him a job, working in the fields. The staple crop of Mondarran IV was something called Long Beans, a leguminous vegetable that everyone ate in great quantities, pounded down into wheat, and used for a dozen other purposes. It was a tough, almost indestructible plant that yielded three crops a year in the constant warmth of Mondarran IV. Rinehart had a small farm, ten acres or so, spreading out over a rolling hill that overlooked a muddy swimming-hole. It was almost time for the year's second crop, and that meant a laborious process of stripping the stalks of the twisted pods that contained beans. There were, of course, machines that whisked down the rows of plants, ripping loose the pods and depositing them in a hopper in which the beans were extracted, the pods baled, and the leaves stripped away, all in a moment. Davison had seen them in operation on Earth one summer, when he'd paid a visit to the farmlands of miidlewestem America. They had such machines on Mondarran IV, too. Lord Gabrielson had one -- he was the wealthy landowner who farmed a thousand acres on the other side of the river. Lord Darnley, back the other way, had one too. But Dirk Rinehart and the other small farmers stripped their pods by hand, without complaining. "You bend down like this and rip," Rinehart said, demonstrating for Davison. "Then you swivel around and drop the pod in the basket behind you." "Doesn't look like fun," Davison said. "It isn't." Rinehart straightened up and extended a thick, powerful, corded forearm. "This is what happens to you after a while. But hard work's its own reward, son. Don't ever forget it." Davison grinned. "Don't worry about me, sir. I'm here to work." "I wasn't accusing you, boy. Come on -- take a furrow through with me, just to get the feel of it." Rinehart strapped the harness around Davison's shoulders, then donned his own, and together they started through the field. Overhead, the sun was high. It always seems to be noon on this planet, Davison thought, as he began to sweat. Purple-winged flies buzzed noisily around the thick stalks of the bean-plants. Dragging the basket behind him, Davison advanced through the field, struggling to keep up with Rinehart. The older man was already ten feet ahead of him in the next furrow, ducking, bobbing, yanking, and depositing the pod in the basket, all in a smooth series of motions. It was hard work. Davison felt his hands beginning to redden from the contact with the rough sandpaper surfaces of the plants' leaves, and his back started to ache from the constant repetition of the unaccustomed pattern of motion. Down, up, reach around. Down, up, reach around. He ground his teeth together and forced himself to keep going. His arm was throbbing from the exertion of using muscles that had lain unbothered for years. Sweat rolled down his forehead, crept into his collar, fell beadily into his eyebrows. His clothes seemed to be soaked through and through. He reached the end of the furrow at last, and looked up. Rinehart was waiting there for him, arms akimbo, looking almost as cool and fresh as he had when he had begun. He was grinning. "Tough sled, eh, Ry?" Too winded to say anything, Davison simply nodded. "Don't let it get you. A couple of weeks out here, and it'll toughen you up. I know how you city fellows are at the start." Davison mopped his forehead. "You wouldn't think just pulling pods off a plant could be so rough," he said. "It's tough work, and I'm not denying it," Rinehart said. He pounded Davison affectionately on the back. "You'll get used to it. Come on back to the house, and I'll get you some beer." full-time picker the next day. It was, like all the other days promised to be, hot. The whole family was out with him -- the two elder Rineharts, Janey, Bo, and Buster. Each had his own harness strapped on, with the basket behind for dropping in the pods. "We'll start down at the east end," Rinehart said, and without furAer discussion the entire crew followed him down. Each took a furrow. Davison found himself with Janey on his left. Bo Rinehart on his right. Further down the field, he could see Dirk Rinehart already fearsomely making his way through the close-packed rows of plants, a two-legged picking machine and nothing more. He watched the older man's effortless motions for a moment, and then, conscious that Janey and Bo were already a few steps ahead of him, he set to work. He was wearing an open shirt and a pair of ragged trousers that he'd had since his college days. It was his most comfortable outfit. Bo was wearing a pair of jeans, no shirt; the upper part of his body, sunbronzed and heavy-muscled, gleamed brightly. Buster, the younger brother, whose body still retained some youthful chubbiness, was clad in the swim trunks that seemed to be the customary boys' garb. Janey wore briefs and a sort of wraparound halter; Davison eyed her lean brown legs approvingly. It was an efficient farming machine, this family. He plunged into his work with a will, happy to be part of their unit. The morning sun was still climbing in the sky, and the day had not yet reached its peak of heat, but Davison began to perspire after only a few moments of bending and yanking. He stopped to rub his sleeve over his forehead and heard light, derisive laughter come from up ahead. Flushing hotly, he glanced up and saw Janey pausing in her furrow, hands on her hips, grinning back at him. It was much the same pose her father had taken the day before, and it irritated him. Without saying anything, he bent his head and returned to the job of picking. A muscle at the base of his right arm began to complain. It was the business of reaching back and thrusting the picked pod into the basket that was doing it, straining the arm-socket muscles in a way they had never been used before. Kechnie's mocking words drifted back to him. "You donH want your muscles to atrophy y son They had been words spoken lightly, in jest -- but, Davison now realized, they carried with themselves a certain measure of truth. He had relied on his psi for the ordinary tasks of life, had gloried in his mastery of the power to relieve himself of a portion of everyday drudgery. Little things -- things like opening doors, pulling up hassocks, moving furniture. It was simpler to teek an object than to drag it, Davison had always felt. Why not use a power, if you have it to perfection? The answer was that he didn't have it to perfection -- yet. Perfection implied something more than utter control of objects; it meant, also, learning moderation, knowing when to use the psi and when not to. On Earth, where it didn't matter, he had used his power almost promiscuously. Here he didn't dare to -- and his aching muscles were paying the price of his earlier indulgence. Kechnie had known what he was doing, all right. They reached the end of the furrow finally. Davison and Buster Rinehart came in in a dead heat for last place, and Buster didn't even seem winded. Davison thought he caught a shred of disapproval on Rinehart's face, as if he were disappointed at his hired hand's performance, but he wasn't sure. There was a definite expression of scorn on Janey's face; her eyes, under their heavy lids, sparkled at him almost insultingly. He glanced away, over to Rinehart, who was emptying his basket into the truck that stood in the middle of the field. "Let's dump here before we start the next row," he said. The field seemed to stretch out endlessly. Davison lifted his basket with nerveless fingers and watched the gray-green pods tumble into the back of the truck. He replaced it in his harness, feeling oddly light now that the dragging weight no longer pulled down on him. He had a fleeting thought as they moved on to the next batch of furrows: How simple it would be to teek the pods into the baskets! No more bending, no swivelling, no arms that felt like they were ready to fall off. Simple. Sure, simple -- but if Janey or Bo or any of the others should happen to turn around and see the beanpods floating mysteriously into Davison's basket, he'd be roasting by nightfall. Damn Kechnie, he thought savagely, and wiped a glistening bead of sweat from his face. What had seemed like a wry joke half an hour before now hung temptingly before Davison's eyes as as very real possibility. He was almost an entire furrow behind the rest of them. He was disgracing himself. And his poor, unused, unathletic body was aching mercilessly. He had the power, and he wasn't using it. He was penning it up within himself, and it hurt. It was the scalding soup all over again ; he didn't know if it hurt more to keep bending and dragging his numb arm back up again in the blistering heat, or to pen the psi up within him until it seemed almost to be brimming out over the edges of his mind. Davison forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, forced himself to forget the power. This is the learning process, he told himself grimly. This is growing up. Kechnie knows what hes doing. They reached the end of the furrow, and through a dim haze of fatigue he heard Rinehart say, "Okay, let's knock off for a while. It's getting too hot to work, anyway." He shucked off his harness and dropped it where he was, and began to walk back toward the farmhouse. With an unvoiced sigh of relief, Davison wriggled out of the leather straps and stood up straight. He made his way across the field, noticing Janey fall in at his side. "You look pretty bushed, Ry," she said. "I am. Takes a while to get used to this sort of work, I guess." "Guess so," the girl said. She reached out and kicked a clump of dirt. "You'll toughen up," she said. "Either that or you'll fall apart. Last hired man we had fell apart. But you look like better stuff." "Hope you're right," he said, wondering who the last hired man was and what power it was that he had cooped up within himself. For some, it wouldn't be so bad. A precog wouldn't need a training session like this -- but precogs were one not, either, since anyone who had tp already had such a high-voltage mind that this sort of kindergarten toilet-training was unnecessary. It was only the garden-variety espers who needed trips to the psiless worlds, Davison thought. Telekinetics and pyrotics, and others whose simple, unspecialized powers lulled them into false security. A new thought was entering Davison's mind as he crossed the field, with Janey's distracting legs flashing at his side. A normal man needed some sort of sexual release; long-enforced continence required a special kind of mind, and most men simply folded from the sustained tension. How about a normal esper? Could he keep his power bottled up like this for five years? He was feeling the strain already, and it was just a couple of days. Just a couple of days, Davison # .I thought. He'd been hiding his psi only that long. Then he stopped to think how many days there were in five years, and he began to perspire afresh. Two more days in the field toughened him to the point where each picking-session was no longer a nightmare. His body was a healthy one, and his muscles adapted without too much protest to their new regime. He could hold his own in the field now, and he felt a gratifying broadening of muscle and increase of vigor, a development of mere physical power which somehow pleased him mightily. "Look at him eat," Ma Rinehart commented one night at supper. "He puts it away like it's the last meal he's ever going to see." Davison grinned and shovelled down another mouthful of food. It was true; he was eating as he had never eaten before. His entire life on Earth seemed peculiarly pale and cloistered, next to this ground-hugging job on Mondarran IV. He was rounding into fine shape, physically. But what was happening to his mind was starting to worry him. He had the tk well under control, he thought, despite the fairly constant temptation to use it. It hurt, but he went right on living without making use of his paranormal powers. But there was a drawback developing. Early on the fifth morning of his stay on Mondarran IV, he came awake in an instant, sitting up in bed and staring around. His brain seemed to be on fire; he blinked, driving the spots away, and climbed out of bed. He stood there uneasily for a moment or two, wondering what had happened to him, listening to the pounding of his heart. Then he reached out, found the trousers draped over a chair, and slipped into them. He walked to the window and looked out. It was still long before dawn. The sun was not yet gleaming on the horizon, and, high above, the twin moons moved in stately procession through the sky. They cast a glittering, icy light on the fields. Outside, it was terribly quiet. Davison knew what had happened. It was the reaction of his tortured, repressed mind, jolting him out of sleep to scream its protest at the treatment it was receiving. You couldn't just stop teeking, just like that. You had to taper off. That was it, thought Davison. Taper off. He made his way down the stairs, sucking in his breath in fear every time they creaked, and left the farmhouse by the side door. He trotted lightly over the ground to the small barn that stood at the edge of the field, brimming over with picked bean pods. Quickly, in the pre-dawn silence, he hoisted himself up the ladder and into the bam. The warm, slightly musty odor of masses of pods drifted up at him. He dropped from the ladder, landed hip-deep in pods. Then, cautiously, he brought his tk into use. A flood of relief came over him as he teeked. He reached out, lifted a solitary pod, flipped it a few feet in the air, and let it fall back. Then another; then, two at a time. It continued for almost fifteen minutes. He revelled in the use of his power, throwing the pods merrily about. One thing alarmed him, though. He didn't seem to have his old facility. There was a definite effort involved in the telekinesis now, and he sensed a faint fatigue after a few moments of activity. This had never happened to him before. The ominous thought struck him: suppose abstinence hurt his ability? Suppose five solid years of abstinence -- assuming he could hold out that long -- were to rob him of his power forever? It didn't seem likely. After all, others had gone on these five-year exiles and returned with their powers unimpaired. They had abstained -- or had they? Had they been forced into some expedient such as this, forced to rise in the small hours and go behind someone's bam to teek or to set fires? Davison had no answers. Grimly, he teeked a few more pods into the air, and then, feeling refreshed, he climbed back out the window and down the long ladder. Buster Rinehart was standing on the ground, looking up curiously at him. He caught his breath sharply and continued descending. "Hey there," Buster said. "What you doin' in there, Ry? Why ain't you asleep?" "I could ask you the same thing," Davison said, determined to Wuff it out. His hands were shaking. What if Buster had spied on him, watched him using his power? Would they take a small boy's word on so serious a charge? Probably they would, on a psiless, witch-hysterical world like this "What are you doing out of bed, Buster? Your mother would whale you if she knew you were up and around at this hour." "She don't mind," the boy said. He held out a bucket that slopped over with greasy-looking pale worms. "I was out gettin' fishbait. It's the only time you can dig it, in the middle of the night with the moons shining." He grinned confidentially up at Davison. "Now what's your story?" "I couldn't sleep. I just went for a walk," Davison said nervously, hating the necessity of defending himself in front of this boy. "That's all." "That's what I thought. Having sleepin' troubles, eh?" Buster asked. "I know what's the matter with you, Ry. You're out mooning after my sister. She's got you so crazy for her you can't sleep. Right?" Davison nodded immediately. "But don't tell her, will you?" He reached in a pocket and drew out a small coin, and slipped it into the boy's palm. Instantly the stubby fingers closed around it, and the coin vanished. "I don't want her to know anything about the way I feel till I've been here a while longer," Davison said. "I'll keep shut," said the boy. His eyes sparkled in the light of the twin moons. He grasped the can of worms more tightly. He was in possession of a precious secret now, and it excited him. "What say we go back to bed?" Davison suggested. "I need couple of more worms. You can go, if you want to." "See you in the morning," Davison said. He turned and headed back to the farmhouse, grinning wryly. The net was getting tighter, he thought. He was at the point where he had to invent imaginary romances with long-legged farmgirls in order to save his skin. It had worked, this once. But he couldn't risk getting out there a second time. His private teeking in the barn would have to stop. He'd need to find an outlet somewhere else. Puzzled, he climbed back into bed and pulled the covers down tight. A few minutes later, he drifted into a troubled sleep. came, Davison went downstairs and confronted old Rinehart. "Morning, Ry. What's on your mind, son?" "Can you spare me for today, sir? I'd like to have some free time, if it's all right with you." The farmer frowned and scratched the back of one ear. "Free time? At harvest? Is it really necessary, boy? We'd like to get everything picked before season's out. It's going to be planting-time again soon enough, you know." "I know," Davison said. "But I'd still like to have the morning free. I need to think soii things out." "Got troubles, eh?" Rinehart said sympathetically. He shrugged. "Okay, Ry. I'm no slave-driver. Take the morning off, if you want. You can make up the time on Sunday." "Fair enough," Davison said. The heat was just beginning as he trudged away from the Rinehart farm and down to the muddy swimming-hole at the far end of their land. He skirted it and headed on into the thick forest that separated their land from that of wealthy Lord Gabrielson. He struck out into the forest, which was delightfully cool. Thickboled, redleaved trees stood arrayed in a closely-packed stand of what looked like virgin timber; the soil was dark and fertile looking, and a profusion of wild vegetation spread heavily over the ground. Above, there was the chittering of colorful birds, and occasionally a curious bat-winged creature fluttered from branch to branch of the giant trees. He knew why he was on Mondarran IV: to learn moderation. To learn to handle his power. That much was clear. But how was he going to survive? The religious setup here was one of jealous orthodoxy, it seemed, and the moral code made no allowance for any deviatory abilities. Psi meant witchcraft -- a common equation, apparently, on these backwater psiless worlds. The farmers here had little contact with the more sophisticated planets from which they had sprung, ten or twenty centuries before, and somehow they had reached a point of cultural equilibrium that left no room for psi. That meant Davison would have to suppress his power. Only -- he couldn't suppress it. Five days of watchful self-control and he was half out of his mind from the strain. And what if he ran into a position where he had to use his psi or be killed? Suppose that tree over there were to fall directly on him; he could push it away, but what would that avail if someone were watching -- someone who would cry "Witch!" Yet men had come to Mondarran IV and returned, and survived. That meant they had found the way. Davison threaded further on into the forest, trying to arrange his thoughts coherently. The forest, he thought, was a pleasant place, not at all like the fly-bitten farmland beyond. The curtain of trees effectively screened out the searching beams of the sun, and down at shrub-level it was a cool, sweet-smelling, silent world. He glanced up ahead. A winding river trickled softly through the trees. And, it seemed to him, up ahead a blue curl of smoke rose up over the bushes. Was someone using a fire there? Cautiously, he tiptoed forward, cursing every time his foot cracked a twig. After a few tense moments, he rounded a bend in the path and discovered where the fire was com- ing from. Squatting at the edge of the river, holding a pan in one hand, was Dumb Joe -- the beggar he had encountered on the road from the spaceport. The beggar was still clad in his tattered leather outfit, and he seemed to be roasting a couple of fish over a small fire. Grinning in relief, Davison came closer. And then the grin vanished, and he stood in openjawed astonishment. Dumb Joe was roasting fish, all right. But there wasn't any fire -- except for the radiation that seemed to be streaming from his fingertips. Dumb Joe was a pyrotic. Davison hung in midstride, frozen in amazement. Dumb Joe, a filthy, ignorant half-imbecile of a beggar, was casually squatting in the seclusion of the forest, psionically cooking a couple of fish for breakfast. A little further up the bank, Davison saw a rudely-constructed shack which was evidently Dumb Joe's home. The answer to the whole thing flooded through his mind instantly. It made perfect sense. It was impossible to live in Mondarran society with a psi power and survive the full five years. It was too hard to keep from unintentional uses of power, and the strains attendant 'on the whole enterprise were too great for most men to stand. But one could live alongside society -- as a wandering hobo, perhaps, frying fish in the forest -- and no one would notice, no one would be on hand to see your occasional practice of psi. No one would suspect a flea-ridden tramp of being a witch. Of course not! Davison took another step forward, and started to say something to Dumb Joe. But Dumb Joe looked up at the sound of the footstep. He spotted Davison standing some twenty feet away, glared angrily at him, and let the pan of fish drop to the ground. Reaching down to his hip, he whipped out a mirror-surfaced hunting knife, and without the slightest hesitation sent it whistling straight at Davison. In the brief flashing instant after the knife left Dumb Joe's hand, a thought tore through Davison's mind. Dumb Joe would have to be an Earthman like himself, serving his five-year stay out on Mondarran. And therefore it wasn't necessary to hide his own psi power from him, wasn't necessary to lei the blade strike -- Davison whisked the knife aside and let it plant itself to the hilt in the soft earth near his foot. He stooped, picked it up, and glanced at Dumb Joe. "You -- teeked it away," the beggar said, almost incredulously. "You're not a spy!" Davison smiled. "No, I'm a tk. And you're a pyrotic!" A slow grin crept over Dumb Joe's stubblebearded face. He crossed the ground to where Davison was standing, and seized his hand. "You're an Earthman. A real Earthman," he said exultantly, in a half whisper. Davison nodded. "You too?" "Yes," Dumb Joe said. "I've been here three years, and you're the first I've dared speak to. All the others I've seen have been burned." All of them?" Davison asked. "I didn't mean that," Dumb Joe said. "Actually hardly any get burned. The Guild doesn't lose as many men as you might think. But the ones I've known about got roasted. I didn't dare approach those I wasn't sure about. You're the first -- and you saw me first. I shouldn't have been so careless, but no one ever comes out this way but me." "Or another crazy Earthman," Davison said. He didn't dare to spend much time with Dumb Joe -- whose real name, he discovered, was Joseph Flanagan, formerly of Earth. In their hurried conversation in the forest, Flanagan explained the whole thing to him. It was a perfectly logical development. Apparently a great many of the Earthmen sent to such planets adopted the guise of a tramp, and moved with shambling gait and rolling eyes from one village to another, never staying anywhere too long, never tipping their hands as to the power they possessed. They could always slip off to the forest and use their power privately, to relieve the strain of abstinence. It didn't matter. No one was watching them; no one expected them to be witches. It was perfect camouflage. "We'd better go," Flanagan said. "It isn't safe, even this way. And I want to last out my remaining two years. Lord, it'll be good to take baths again regularly!" Davison grinned. "You've really got it figured," he said. "It's the simplest way," said Flanagan. "You can't bat your head against the wall forever. I tried living in the village, the way you're doing. I almost cracked inside a mondi, maybe less. You can't come down to their level and hope to survive; you've got to get below their level, where they don't expect to find witches. Then they'll leave you alone." Davison nodded in agreement. "Thatmakes sense." "I'll have to go now," said Flanagan. He allowed his muscles to relax, adopted the crooked gait and the character of Dumb Joe again, and without saying goodbye began to straggle off further into the forest. Davison stood there for a while, watching him go, and then turned and started back the way he came. He had an answer now, he thought. But by the time he had emerged from the forest and felt the noonday sun beating down, he wasn't so sure. Kechnie had once told him, run away He hadn't explained -- but now Davison knew what he meant. Dumb Joe Flanagan would last out his five years with a minimum of effort, and when he returned he would get his release and become a member of the Guild. But had he really accomplished his goal to the fullest? Not really, Davison told himself. It wouldn't be possible for him to hide as a beggar forever; sometime, somewhere, it would be necessary for him to function as a member of society, and then Flanagan's five years of shambling would do him little good. There had to be some other way, Davison thought fiercely. Some way to stick out the five years without burying his head like an ostrich. Some way that would leave him fit to return to society, or to live in some psiless society, and still have his psi power under firm control. He strode through the hot fields. Off in the distance, he could see the Rinehart family finishing up a furrow. It was noon, and they would be knocking off now. As he looked, he saw sturdy Dirk Rinehart finish his furrow and empty his pods into the waiting truck, and before he had come within shouting distance the rest of them had done so too, and were standing around relaxing after a hard morning's work. "Well, look who's back!" Janey exclaimed, as Davison drew near. "Have a nice morning's relaxation?" "I did some heavy thinking, Janey," Davison said mildly. "And I'll be making up my time on Sunday, while you're resting. It balances out." Old Rinehart came over, smiling. "All thought out, youngster? I hope so, because there's a rough afternoon's work waiting for us." "I'll be with you," Davison said. He clamped his lips together, not listening to what they were saying, wondering only where the way out might lie. "Hey, look at me," called a piping voice from behind him. "Put those down!" Dirk Rinehart ordered sternly. "Get down from there before you break your neck!" Davison turned and saw Buster Rinehart, standing upon the cab of the truck. He had some bean pods in his hands, and he was energetically juggling them through the air. "Look at me!" he yelled again, evidently proud of his own acrobatic skill. "I'm juggling!" A moment later he lost control of the pods. They fell and scattered all over the ground. A moment later, the boy was yowling in pain as his father's palm administered punishment vigorously. Davison chuckled. Then he laughed louder, as he realized what had happened. He had his answer at last Davison gave notice at the end of the week, after working particularly hard in the field. He felt a litde guilty about quitting just before planting time, and he had grown to like the Rineharts more than a little. But it was necessary to pull out and move on. He told Dirk Rinehart he would go after another week had elapsed, and though the farmer had obviously not been pleased by the news, he made no protest. When his week was up, Davison left, gathering his goods together in his suitcase and departing by foot. He needed to cover quite a distance -- far enough from the village so that no one would trace him. He hired one of the nearby farmers' sons to drive him to the next town, giving him one of his remaining coins to do so. Folded in his hip pocket was the crumpled wad of bills that was his salary for his stay at Rinehart's, above room and board. He didn't want to touch that money at all. The boy drove him through the flat, monotonous Mondarran countryside to another town only slightly larger than the first, and otherwise almost identical. "Thanks," Davison said simply, got out, and started to walk. He entered the town -- it, too, had its witch-pole -- and started looking around for a place to live. He had many preparations to tend to before he would be ready. started to appear all over the local countryside. They were gaudy, printed in three colors, bright and eye-catching. They said, simply, It caused a stir. As Davison drove his gilded, ornate chariot into the first town on his itinerary, the rambling village on the far side of Lord Gabrielson's domain, a crowd gathered before him and preceded him down the main street, shouting and whooping. It wasn't every day of the year that a travelling magician came to town. He drove solemnly behind them down the wide street, turned the chariot around, and parked it almost in front of the steel witchpole. He set the handbrakes, lowered the little platform on which he was going to perform, and stepped out, resplendent in his red-and-gold costume with billowing cloak, in full view of the crowd. He saw a little ripple of anticipation run through them at his appearance. A tall yokel in the front called out, "Are you the presti -- prestig -- the whatever you are?" "I am Marius the Prestidigitator, indeed," Davison said in a sepulchral voice. He was enjoying it. "Well, just what do you do, Mr. Marius?" the yokel replied. Davison grinned. This was better than having a shill or a trained stooge in the crowd. "Young man, I perform feats that stagger the imagination, that astound the mind, that topple reality." He waved his arms over his head in a wild, grandiose gesture. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep!" he thundered. "I hold the secrets of life and death!" "That's what all you magicians say," someone drawled boredly from the back of the crowd. "Let's see you do something, before we have to pay!" "Very well, unbeliever!" Davison roared. He reached behind himself, drew forth a pair of wax candles, struck a match, and lit the candles. "Observe the way I handle these tapers," he said sonorously. "Notice that I handle the fiery flames without experiencing the slightest harm." He hefted the candles, tossed them aloft, and began to rotate them telekinetically so that whenever they came down, it was the unlit end he grasped. He juggled the two candles for a moment or two, then reached back, drew forth a third, and inserted it into the rotation. He remained that way for a moment, and the crowd grew silent as Davison tottered around under the candles, pretending to be having all sorts of difficulties. Finally, when the wax became too pliable to handle easily, he teeked the candles down and caught them. He waved them aloft. The crowd (Continued on page #) by henry slesar Ron definitely didn't like what had happened. But who can blame him? How would you like to wake and find your body had been switched for a child's? For one thing, the legs he swung off the narrow bed wouldn't touch the floor. And his hands, whose ten strong fingers could manipulate the controls of any ship ever launched into space, were weak and clumsy. He looked at the hands first, looked at them for a long time. Then he screamed. He screamed until footsteps were loud in the corridor outside his room; shrill, piping screams that didn't stop even when the giant woman-face was bending over him, speaking gentle, soothing words, stroking his thin shoulders with giant, comforting gestures. "There, there, now," the woman was saying. "You're all right, Ronnie. You're all right. It was only a nightmare... a bad old nightmare..." She was right. Only the nightmare hadn't ended. The nightmare was before his face, in her gargantuan features, in her motherly touch on his frail body, in the sight of the small, soft appendages that were his hands. They were the hands of a boy of twelve. And Ron Carver was thirty years old. Two men giants joined the woman at his bedside, and one of them forced a small speckled capsule past his resisting lips. Then his viewpoint became detached and distant, and a pleasurable drowsiness overcame him. He stretched out and shut his eyes, but he could still hear the worried tones of their speech. "Dr. Minton warned us," one of the men said, lifting Ron's bony wrist and feeling for the pulse. "The boy has suffered some severe traumatic shock..." Dr. Minton! Ron Carver's mind grasped the familiar name -- the name of his own physician -- gratefully. But his body gave no sign. "Maybe we better call him," the woman said nervously. "I think he's still in the sick bay." "Good idea." In another moment, a familiar hairy face was floating over Ron's head like a captive balloon, a face grown grotesque in size. "Doctor... he said with his lips. "There." Dr. Minton patted his shoulder. "You're all right now, Ronnie. You're perfectly all right. Just relax and try to sleep." The balloon came closer, and the scraggly ends of the doctor's beard brushed his cheek. Then the doctor's mouth was covering his small ear. "Play the game," the doctor whispered. "For your own sake. Play the game, Ron..." Then he was asleep. He awoke to the sound of running feet. He sat up in bed and looked towards the door of the small white room in which he was confined. It was partly open, and the sound of clattering soles and shrill young voices came through clearly. The door slammed open, startling him. A hoydenish youngster gaped at him. There was a flat lock of reddish hair over his forehead, and his face was freckled. "Hoy," he said. "What's the matter with you? Ron stared back wordlessly. "You sick or something?" the boy said, edging into the room. "No." His own voice, strange and reedy, frightened him. "No, I'm all right." "Andy!" A tall man with a frowning face appeared behind the boy. "Come on, fella. Let's not waste any time." He looked at Ron. "You the new chap?" "Yes." "Feel well enough for some breakfast?" "I guess so." "Fine. Then get some clothes on and come along." "Hoy," the freckle-faced boy said curiously. "You play airball?" "That's enough of that." The man paddled the boy's rump. "Get along, Andy. You'll have plenty of time to get acquainted later." The boy giggled and ran down the hall. Ron got out of bed slowly, and walked towards the undersized clothing that was draped on a nearby chair. He slipped into a gray coverall and said: "Listen -- can I talk to you?" The man looked at his watch. "Well... all right, I suppose. But only for a minute. I promised the boys a game this morning; I'm Mr, Larkin, the athletic director." Ron hesitated. "Mr. Larkin, I -- where am I?" "Don't you know?" Even the man's smile was half a frown. "You're at Roverwood Home for Boys. Didn't they tell you that?" "No," Ron said carefully. "I -- I don't seem to remember very much. How I got here, I mean." "Dr. Minton brought you in last evening. He's one of our directors." "Oh." Ron laced on the tiny scuffed shoes. "And where's Dr. Minton now?" "Gone back to the city. He's a busy man. Hear they've got him working on some big government project. Well, come on, Ronnie. Breakfast's waiting." "Yes, sir," Ron Carver said. He followed the tall man down the hall, having trouble guiding the short stumpy legs that were now his own. They entered a communal dining room, filled with the clatter of dishes and the laughter of boys. He was brought to a long table and seated beside Larkin. The other boys greeted him with only mild interest, but the freckle-faced youth at the other end dropped him a broad wink. He ate sparingly, choking on the food, his mind working. It was the longest nightmare of his life, and the moment of awakening seemed too far off for comfort. Then Larkin was standing up and rattling a spoon against a water glass. "Fellas," he said, "all those interested in this morning's airball game will assemble on the field in half an hour after breakfast. Please don't volunteer unless you're able to handle a PF. Everybody else is invited to see the game." He sat down, amid cheers. He smiled sadly at Ron, and asked: "How about you, Ronnie? Can you operate a PF?" "Of course," he answered, without thinking. He'd been using Personal Flyers since he was old enough to dream about flight. On his tenth birthday, his father had bought him one of the earliest models, a cumbersome machine then called a "platform". Since that day, he had become familiar with every man-made thing that flew, from the double-rotored PF's to the sixty-rocket space liners. "Fine," Larkin said cheerfully. "Then maybe you'd like to play the game." Ron Carver looked up sharply. Play the game... "Sure, Mr. Larkin," he said, forcing his eagerness. Haff an hour later, they were assembled on the huge lawn outside of the main building of Roverwood Home for Boys. The long row of PF's, looking like chrome-plate potbellied stoves, gleamed in the morning sun. The boys began to run when they saw their Flyers, and Ron found his arm taken by the freckled youth who had entered his room. "Hoy," he said. "Follow me. I'll pick you out a lively one!" The redhead clambered inside a machine marked Seven, and Ronnie followed his instructions by choosing the vehicle marked Nine. They secured themselves inside, and tested the jet tube set in front of the Flyer. The boys took off from the ground in perfect unison, the redhead bellowing out an introduction over the sound of the wind roaring past their ears. The PF's descended on a blast from Mr. Larkin's whistle, congregating in the center of the field. Teams were chosen, and Andy was picked as Captain of the Odds. A coin was tossed to decide the playing sequence, and they were ready. Larkin released the first airball, and the two teams streamed up after it. Andy gunned the engine and reached the ball first. He sent it scooting thirty yards ahead of him with the blast of the airjet pipe, but a member of the Evens team was there to veer it off to the left. Another Evens man, a burly youth of fourteen, took command of it, neatly getting the airball in the sight of his airjet and corkscrewing it towards the goalpost. Ron had grown too old before the game of airball had become popular with the nation's youngsters, but he had seen enough action to have learned some tricks. He pointed his PF directly for the Even machine, and kept coming. The burly youth looked up, startled at the onslaught, and pulled his Flyer away. The fact that the PF's were magnetically collision-proof didn't matter; it was pure instinct. Ron captured the ball in his airjet pipe, and shouted for Andy to block his path towards the goal. The Odds scored, and the two teams descended for a rest. Andy, the grin wide on his brown-spotted face, said: "You're okay, Ronnie! Hoy, I mean it. You're okay!" "Thanks," Ron said. He found himself panting. The game resumed. It ended in a #-# score, favor of the Odds. Andy and Ron were cheered as they left the Flyers and headed for the communal showers of the Roverwood Home for Boys. In the stall, Ron Carver looked down at the spindly frame that was now his body, and began to weep. Andy heard him, but said nothing. Then they dressed and ambled back to the main house, sharing the awkward silence of new friends. Finally, the older boy said: "I don't mean to butt in, Ronnie. But is somethin' the matter?" "I -- I don't know, Andy. I'm all mixed up. I don't even know how I got here." "That's easy. Dr. Minton brought you." "But where is he now, Andy? Dr. Minton? It's very important that I see him." Andy shrugged. "Not much chance of that. Dr. Minton only comes around once, twice a year. "But I have to see him! Right away! Will they call him for me?" "Gosh. I don't think so. He's some kind of big shot in the government now." They flopped on the grass, and Andy tore out a ragged clump and chewed on it blankly. Ron said: "Andy, I'm in trouble. I need some help." "No kidding?" "Yes!" He brought his voice to a whisper. "Andy -- what if I told you that I was really -- " He stopped, and examined the open, innocent face in front of his eyes. He knew that it would be useless to tell the truth. "Skip it," he said. "I don't get you. What's on your mind, Ronnie?" "Nothing, Andy. I just have to get away from here." "But you can't. I mean, not until they let you. It's the rules." "Andy -- how long have you been here?" The boy thought a moment. "Almost nine years," he said blissfully. "Since my folks got killed." "How long do you have to stay?" "Why, 'til I'm old enough to work. Eighteen, I guess." Only six years to go, Ron thought sourly. He stood up. "Andy -- where do they put the PF's?" "In the shed." "Is it possible to get one out?" " 'Course not. Only when we play the game." "And when will we play another game?" "Dunno. Tomorrow maybe. It's Sunday." Play the game, Ron said to himself. The Evens team member caught the spinning, gas-filled airball in the path of his airjet and kept it moving in front of his Flyer. Andy was after him in a flash, shouting for Ron to join him. But Ron's daring tactics of yesterday seemed to have deserted him. He steered the PF out of the path of the Evens man, and the goal was scored. On the ground, Andy said : "What's the trouble, Ronnie? Didn't you hear me?" "Yes, I heard you. Andy, listen. I'm taking off -- " "Sure, in just a minute," the freckled boy said. "But, look, the next time you see me cut across the -- " "You don't understand!" Ron said intensely. "I'm running away!" "What?" Larkin's whistle sounded the signal to resume play. The airball shot into the sky, and the two teams sped after it. Andy was late getting started. He looked at Ron and gasped: "You can't do that -- " But Ron Carver was already in flight, and his PF was heading away from the center of the action, heading over the jagged pinetree tops that surrounded the Roverwood Home for Boys, heading for the misty green hills beyond. Larkin saw what was happening, and he blew his whistle shrilly. The teams descended, thinking a foul had been called. Larkin shouted a command towards the burly youth who had played so aggressively the day before, but then realized it was far too late to stop the swift passage of the PF now disappearing behind the trees. R on dropped the PF to earth as soon as his eyes sf)otted the first sign of a settled community. He landed the small machine in the shadow of a hillside, and dragged it into the thick underbrush for concealment. Then he trekked to the main highway, until he reached a road sign that informed him of his location. He was in a town called Spring Harbor, just fifteen miles outside of the city. He looked down at the waxy newness of his gray Roverwood coverall, and wondered if it was a familiar uniform to the residents. But he had to take the chance. He covered the cloth with dust, and rolled up the trouser legs almost to his knees. Then he broke off a long branch from a sapling and used it as a walking stick. Casually, he strolled into the town proper. The pose worked. Some people on the porches looked after him with mild curiosity, but no one stopped him. Then he paused at a gas station, and asked the owner of the automatic pump if there was transportation available to the city. The owner scratched his face and looked at the boy curiously. Ron told a plausible story about being separated from a scouting group, and the man seemed satisfied. He had a pick-up copter going into the city at ten o'clock; he invited Ron to wait inside his house, and even served him a sandwich. The copter pilot, a genial redfaced man, asked him some gentle questions. Ron answered them guardedly, and told him that his destination was Fordham Terrace. The copter dropped him on the rooftop of the massive office building, and the pilot left with a friendly wave of his hand. When he was gone, Ron rolled down his trouser legs, brushed his uniform clean, and descended to the fourteenth floor of the building. He walked rapidly along the corridors until he came to the door marked : He rattled the knob. When he found the door locked, he let out an adult oath. It was Sunday, of course. Dr. Minton wouldn't be in on Sunday. And Ron had never known his home address. He returned to the elevator and went to the ground floor. There was an information booth, and the woman behind the glass was a motherly type. Her eyes softened at his approach. "Dr. Minton?" she said, lifting an eyebrow. "Why, I guess I do have his adress. But who sent you, young man?" "Nobody," Ron said. "I was supposed to see him, that's all." She kept her eyes on his face while her hand leafed through the directory on her desk. "Of course. Dr. Minton doesn't use his office anymore. He gave up his practice here almost a year ago. He was put on an important government project. Dr. Jurgens, his assistant, handles all his patients now. Would you like Dr. Jurgens' number?" "No," Ron said. "Please. I must see Dr. Minton." "All right. But I don't know if you can see him without an appointment. He's staying at the Government Medical Center in Washington." She smiled. "That's a long way for a little boy..." "Thank you," Ron said curtly, and walked off. His mind was racing, tripping over his thoughts. A year ago! But that was impossible! It seemed only days since he had returned from Andromeda, after a five-year absence. One of his first visits had been to Dr. Minton's office -- not just to renew an old friendship, but to allow the physician to examine him thoroughly for traces of the varied and deadly diseases that man was subject to on alien worlds. Could it have been a whole year ago? Where had he spent the time between? And what had happened to give him the body of a twelveyear-old child? He fought off the questions. He had no time for the puzzle now; there weren't enough pieces to make sense. He had only one thought: to find the doctor. But that was a major problem all by itself. Washington was a good hour away by fast copter service. And in this big, suspicious city, it wouldn't be as easy to obtain free transport to his destination. He could do nothing -- not without money. When he thought of money, he thought of Adrian. Adrian... Of course! Adrian would know what to do next. Adrian always seemed to know what to do. Her father's money had opened every conceivable door in this city, and she herself had often suggested that it open doors for him. Doors to the executive heights of the Space Transport Company. Doors to the plush offices in the sky tower, doors to the select circle of cigarsmoking men who controlled the transportation empire of which Ron had been only a spare part. But Ron Carver had been young (he thought now, sourly) and his head had been stuffed with ideals. He detested the groundworms who stayed home and counted the profits of space travel. He wanted the stars. So he had become a pilot, one of the best in her father's fleet. She had sworn at him for his decision, and turned away from his embrace. But on the night of their parting, the night before the dawn ascent towards the speck of light that was Andromeda, she had softened, and cried in his arms. He thought now of that moment, and his small fingers rolled into fists. Adrian, he thought. I must go to her... The doorman was magnificent and imposing in his braided uniform, but his eyes were cold when he saw Ron. "What do you want, son?" "I -- I have a message for Miss Walder. It's very important." "Okay, son. You just give your message to me." "No! I'm supposed to deliver it in person!" The doorman grunted. "Wait a minute." He put in a call to the penthouse apartment. The idea of a twelve-year-old visitor must have amused the girl. He brought back an invitation for Ron to enter her home. Ron stepped off the elevator, and his stomach was churning. What would she say when she saw him? Would she believe his story? Would she help him find an answer? Adrian came to the door herself, and the amusement was evident on her long, smoothly-planed face. Her auburn hair was swept back in Grecian ringlets, and the gown she wore was blindingly white. "Come in, dear," she said, smiling. The effect of looking up at the girl, now a sort of giantess in his eyes, made Ron dizzy. He swayed against the doorframe, and her cool fingers steadied him. "You poor boy," she crooned. "Come inside." She half-carried him to the downy sofa. For a full minute, he was too choked to speak. She offered him a glass of milk, but he asked for water. She brought some to him, and he coughed. "Now," the girl said, spreading the wide skirt over her knees, "just what was it you wanted to tell me?" "Come now." She smiled endearingly, and brushed back the hair from his forehead. "You must have had something on your mind." "Yes," he said at last, his voice strained. "Yes, Adrian. I -- I'm Ron..." "What?" "Fm Ron Carver! No, listen. I'm not mad. It's really me, Ron!" She had stood up, shocked. Then she laughed. "Adrian, listen to me! Something happened to me when I returned from Andromeda. I don't know what. I found myself at a boy's home near Spring Harbor." "Now, really! This is the craziest -- " "I know it's crazy!" He wiped his forehead in an adult gesture. "But it's true, Adrian. I've been -- changed somehow. I don't know why. But it's something to do with Dr. Minton." She sat down again, limply. Then she studied his face, and for a moment, Ron thought she was seriously considering his predicament. But then the laugh started again, the same slightly off-key laugh Ron remembered. "Adrian, you must believe me! I can prove it! Just listen to me for a moment!" She stopped the laugh and grew serious, her eyes caught by the intensity of his own. "All right," she whispered. "I'll listen..." "My name is Ronald Carver. I'm thirty years old. I'm a Captain of the Walder Space Transport Company. I have been in the Andromeda system for the past five years. I returned to Earth -- " he stopped, and swallowed hard. "I don't know exactly when. I went to see Dr. Minton, an old friend and a physician. He examined me, and then -- " She stared, fascinated. "And then I was a child! A child of twelve, in a home for boys. I ran away from there this morning, and came looking for Dr. Minton. I've been told that he's in Washington. I must get to him. I must find out what's happened to me -- " She was shaking her head, slowly, eyes still fixed on his face. He got up from the sofa and came towards her. His small hand reached out and patted the fine bones of hers. "You must remember," he said. "You must believe me, Adrian. Remember our last night together? Right here? We stood by that window, and you cried in my arms. And then we . , She tore her hand away, as if burned. Then she stood up, looking horrified. "Get out of here!" she shrieked. "You little monster!" "Adrian -- " Only now did he realize what it must have been like to her, to hear those words from his childish lips, to feel the touch of his tiny hand as he spoke of the night they... , "Get out!" she cried, covering her face. "Get out before I call the police!" "Adrian!" She screamed, piercingly. This time, the sound brought heavy footside clumping outside her front door. It was thrown open, and a uniformed man with bouncing epaulets was striding towards him. "No," Ron said. "You must listen -- "Get him out of here!" "Sure, Miss Walder!" He struggled in the big man's grip, while the girl turned her head aside. He managed to squirm from his hold, and broke for the door. The houseman started after him, cursing. Ron's hand went out and grasped a solid metal ash tray. He threw it without thought or aim, but it crashed squarely into the man's face and sent him thudding to the carpet. Adrian screamed again. He looked at her once more, imploringly. Then he ran for the door, just before she reached for the house telephone. In the elevator cage, he punched the button marked roof, and fell against the wall, panting. On the rooftop, he galloped across the metallic surface towards the ledge. He peered over it, and his heart sank when he saw that his stratagem had deceived no one. Police were entering the building, and some were pointing fingers in his direction. With a sigh, he dropped to his knees and rested his head against the cool aluminum surface. "It's no use," he said aloud. Then he heard the copter overhead. He looked up, thinking it was a police vehicle. But then he saw the outmoded design of its fuselage, and the young face at the controls. It hovered over his head, and a rope ladder unfolded. The youthful pilot said: "Quick! Climb in!" He blinked at the voice, unbelievingly. Then he scrambled to his feet, and grabbed the dangling ladder. He barely made it into the copter; the pilot had to help. "Who are you?" he said, gasping. The boy laughed. "I hate cops, too." Then they were in the air, and speeding towards the west. back of the young boy's neck for twenty minutes, while he steered the ancient copter expertly across the skies. He figured that the boy might have been fourteen or fifteen, but there was a competence in the way his hands moved over the controls, and a steeliness in the way his head sat on his thin neck. They didn't make much conversation, but Ron gathered that the boy was a member of something called the Red Rockets, an organization with some inexplicable purpose. It was only after the copter had landed on the roof of a half-decayed slum in the worst part of town, that Ron realized who the Red Rockets were. They were kids, all of them, banded together for mutual defense and in common antagonism toward the world. When he clambered out of the copter, his rescuer grinned and said: "This is it, pal. This is where the gang meets." "The Red Rockets?" "Yeah. This is Shock's house. He's the leader." They had to descend by stairs; there was no building elevator. When they reached die second floor, the boy put a finger to his lips, and rapped one-two, two-two on the apartment door. A boy no older than Ron's new body opened it. His dark pinched face grew smaller and darker when he saw the stranger. He looked back into the room before letting them in. The room was a study in decay. Someone had once wallpapered it in an optimistic pink pattern that was now sardonic in the surroundings. The furniture was rudimentary, and there were no working light fixtures. A battery lamp was sitting in the middle of a wooden table, and three youngsters were playing with a ragged deck of cards. The tallest of them arose when the newcomers entered. He was the only one wearing a jacket; the others were in shirtsleeves. His hair was black, and unruly to the point of being ludicrous. His wide mouth twisted when he spoke. "Who's this?" he said. "What's the idea?" "He's okay," Ron's protector said. "He's an okay kid. I spotted him on a rooftop down on Park. A down in the copter and picked him up." The tall boy studied Ron's face. "What's your name?" "Ron." "What were the cops chasin' you for?" Ron hesitated. "Any of your business?" The tall boy smiled. "Maybe not." He looked towards the others, and winked as if pleased. "Guess he's okay." He held his right hand out to Ron, while his left ducked into his jacket pocket. "My name's Shock, pal. And I'm the leader here. And just so's you don't forget it -- " Pain lanced through Ron's arm and struck the base of his skull. He tried to free himself from the tall boy's grip, but his fingers wouldn't part from the other's flesh. He dropped to his knees in agony, until the grip was broken. He looked up, his face damp. "That's your 'nitiation," the tall boy grinned. "Now you know what's whatj Ronnie boy. So if you want to join the Rockets, you'll know where your orders come from." Shock helped him to his feet. "Right, Ronnie boy?" Ron shook his head, still bewildered. "Good deal," Shock said. "Now let's finish that game. You play, kid?" "No," Ron said. He staggered towards a wooden chair on the side of the room and dropped on it heavily. "No," he repeated, still trying to regain his breath. Play the game... His rescuer sat beside him. "Don't mind that guy," he whispered. "He does that to everybody. He got some kind of a power in his hands. But he's not a bad guy, Honest." "Sure," Ron said weakly. "We get a lot of kicks," the boy said eagerly. "You'll see. We have dogfights with the other gangs. With copters. We only got one, that ain't so much. But we're figurin' on gettin' some PF's next year, if we can collect enough dough in the treasury..." "That'll be great," Ron said. Then he dropped his hand on the other's arm. "Listen -- is there any chance of takin' a trip? In the copter?" "Yeah, sure," the boy said warily. "Only you gotta ask for it in advance. I mean, it's Rocket property, and you gotta sign for it. And even then, if Shock wants to use it -- well..." "Why?" Ron said. "Why's that? Because he's the leader?" "Sure," the boy said simply. "That's the reason." Ron looked across the room at the card players. "How do you get to be the leader?" "I dunno. Shock's the leader 'cause he can lick anybody in the Rockets. That makes sense, don't it?" "Yes. I suppose so." He chewed his lip. "Listen. Let's say I was leader. Could I use the copter then? Any time I wanted?" "Sure. I mean, if you're the leader, who's gonna stop you?" "Yes," Ron said. He stood up and walked to the table, watching the cards as they were slapped on the wood. "Hey, Shock," he said. The tall boy didn't look up. "What is it?" "You cheat." A thrill ran through Ron's new body as he said it, and he muttered a small prayer that his guess about Shock's power was correct. "I what? "I've been watching you play, and you cheat. You don't even cheat good. You cheat sloppy." The tall boy stood up slowly, and the other chairs were scraped back in anticipation. "Now that's something," he said. "That's really something! The kid's here ten minutes, and right away he wants to be buried." His face became grim. "Boy, we've had 'em wise before, pal. But never like this." Ron planted himself in front of him, "So?" he said. Shock's face clouded. "Say, are you kidding? You really like trouble that bad?" His right hand lashed out, while the left headed for his jacket pocket. But it wasn't the right that Ron avoided. Both of his short arms shot out towards the tall boy's left, and stopped the descent of the arm. Shock's right hand thudded against Ron's shoulder, the blow only stinging him. "Hey!" Shock cried, "Hey, you -- " It was a triumph for Ron, He had been right about the electrical circuit woven through Shock's clothing, the circuit he couldn't complete without his left hand tripping the mechanism in his pocket. With the power off, Shock's weapon was useless. He was caught by surprise, and Ron's quick-moving hands tumbled him to the floor. Before he had a chance to do anything else, Ron was upon him with an upraised chair. He closed his eyes before he swung. The sound of the crash might have sickened him in other circumstances; now it sounded good and satisfying. Ron looked around the room, panting. "I'm the leader now," he said. "Understand? I'm the leader!" The looked at each other uncertainly. "I'm taking the copter for a while," Ron said, backing towards the door. "Any arguments?" Nobody answered. "Swell. So long, pals." Outside the door, he ran all the way back to the roof and was off before the gang could follow. The trip took almost two hours. Even Ron's experienced guidance of the controls couldn't push the old copter past its limits, and he was keeping a worried eye on the fuel gauge. It was with a sigh of relief that he dropped the vehicle atop a public parking station in the downtown district, within walking distance of the Government Medical Center. The sun was dropping fast, and the Washington streets were still filled with Sunday sightseers who found nothing odd in the sight of a solitary twelve-year-old. When he entered the enormous U-shaped edifice that housed a hundred and one government medical projects, he was thinking fast about a plausible story for the receptionist. The best he could do was: "I'm looking for Dr. Wilfred Minton. He -- he's my uncle." "Dr. Minton?" She was young, and the efficient type. "I'm sorry, but Dr. Minton's been on special assignment for some time. It's not easy to locate him." "Oh, I know about that," Ron said airily. "But I was supposed to see him today. You see, my mom -- his sister that is -- she was in a very bad accident..." He swallowed hard, wondering if he was being believed. The woman frowned. "Well, if it's an emergency, I suppose I could check with central control. If it's really important." "Oh, it's important, all right!" He said this with great conviction. 'ery well, then." She picked up her telephone, and there was much transferring from party to party. Finally, she lowered the receiver, saying: "He's in the east wing. It's Security territory, so I'll have to see about a pass." It took another ten minutes for her to locate the authority she was seeking. A young man with crinkly hair and a grim expression came briskly to the desk, asked him a few questions, and then signed his name on a document. Ron put the paper into the pocket of his coveralls, and followed the man to a bank of private elevators. The man waved him inside one, and he couldn't resist a wide-eyed question. "Gosh, mister. Are you from the The man couldn't conceal a small pleased grin. "That's right, son. Only you keep it a secret." "Sure," Ron said. When the door closed and the elevator ascended, he grinned too. Being twelve had its advantages sometimes. He got off the elevator, and a uniformed guard checked his paper and led him into an anteroom. "You wait here, son," he said, and left. Ron waited five minutes. When nothing happened, he tried an adjoining door. It was open. He stepped inside the next room, and saw that it was a bare room with nothing but a row of filing cabinets and an abandoned swivel chair with a definite list to port. He went to the files and peered at the designation cards. They read: He shrugged, and tried to open the top file. It was locked. He tried the oers, with no better luck. Then he heard the voices in the anteroom. For some reason, he sensed danger. He knew he shouldn't be in the file room, that if he were found his visit to Dr. Minton might come to a sudden end. He couldn't take the chance. He tiptoed to the front door of the file room and turned the knob. He slipped out, and ran on his toes down the empty corridor. Quickly, without thought of the consequence, Ron opened still another door and closed it behind him. He looked at the shining brass fixtures and ultra modern appliances, and wondered what a kitchen was doing in a government medical building. Then, when he heard a sound in the adjoining room, he reasoned that he had stumbled into someone's living quarters. He went to a brown mahogany door and pushed against it gently, until he widened the crack sufficiently to make out the figure walking up and down in the other room. When the man crossed his line of vision, Ron's breath tumbled out in a gasp. It was his own body. His thirtyyear-old body, with its six-foot-two frame of big bones and long muscles, its sandy, close-cropped hair, its brooding eyes and full mouth. It was Ron Carver. It was himself as he had been before. "Here's the little rascal," a voice said behind him. took his arm roughly. "Okay, kid. Let's hear it." "Hear what?" Ron said plaintively. "I wasn't doing anything!" "Sure," the guard sneered. "He wasn't doin' a thing. Just snoopin' around, that's all." The swinging door opened. "What's going on here?" Ron Carver looked at himself ; at his own face, now strange and stony; at his own eyes, now bright and disinterested ; at his own mouth, now a thin line of discontent. He heard his own voice, in a dangerous inflection he had never known before. "Sorry, sir," the guard said, redman dening. "Didn't know you were inside. Wouldn't have disturbed you -- " "How did he get here?" "Gosh, sir, I really don't know. He says he was lookin' for Dr. Minton -- " "Minton," Ron Carver's voice said. "Yes, of course. He would be looking for Minton, wouldn't he?" "Sir?" "Never mind. Bring the boy into my quarters. Then get Dr. Minton up here at once." "Yes, sir!" They pushed the swinging door open and shoved Ron ahead of them. The room was an anomaly in this pristine government building, a warm room of deep-colored woods and thick carpeting. He was placed in a leather chair, his feet not touching the floor. The two men exited, and Ron Carver's body walked to an oaken desk and sat in the padded swivel chair behind the blotter. "Well," he said. "This is something of a surprise for me." "And how about me?" Ron said hoarsely. The man laughed. "Yes, we are both surprised. Was it Robert Burns? Yes, of course. 'To see ourselves as others see us... " He chuckled, and reached for a cigarette. "Filthy habit, this. Don't know how I picked it up. Possibly a deepseated trait of yours, Mr. Carver. Odd how these things can be transferred." The door opened again. "Dr. Minton!" Ron leaped to his feet. The doctor's face went white behind the gray beard and moustache. "Then you've found him," he said softly, to neither of them in particular. "No," Ron Carver's body answered. "I didn't find him, doctor. Rather, he found us. Isn't that right, Mr. Carver?" "Yes!" Ron said. "And now I want to know the truth!" "I, too, need answers," the Ronbody said stiffly. "I need answers at once, Dr. Minton. I would think this requires an explanation." "I couldn't do it," the doctor whispered. "I couldn't do what you wanted. Scholar." "Do what?" Ron said. "All right, then," the Ron-body said coldly. "You failed once. But you're far too intelligent to make the same mistake twice. So you have your assignment. Dr. Minton. I will get you the help you need. But kill this -- this remnant -- " He turned away in disgust, and picked up the telephone. He spoke under his breath for a few moments, and then hung up. "Dr. Luther will be here in just a moment. He'll arrange things with the laboratory. It will all be very painless and quick." Ron said: "What are you talking about?" He looked wildly towards the old man, who had aged even further since entering the room. "Dr. Minton -- " The door opened. A brisk young man, carrying a small valise, appeared. "All set downstairs," he said. "Good," the Ron-body answered. "Then get it over with." Ron struggled for a moment in the young man's grip, but he found it iron. "Please, Ron." Doctor Minton's eyes were moist. "Don't make any trouble. Please .  The laboratory was in the basement of the building, an antiseptic room with the acrid odor of chemicals. Dr. Luther prepared something in a hypodermic syringe, while Dr. Minton strapped his former patient onto a padded examining table. "Doctor..." Ron whispered. "Hush, Ron. It's all right... " "But what is all this? Who am I?" The doctor frowned. "You're Ronald Carver. You're the same Ronald Carver you always were. But you have made an exchange of bodies. That is all." "But why? How?" "I don't really know. God help us. It was his project from start to finish -- that thing upstairs." "Who is he?" "A phenomenon. A mutation. A freak. A genius. A god. I can't explain him. He was born twelve years ago, to normal parents in the middle west. He was a recognized prodigy at the age of six months, a mathematical wizard at one, a scientific genius at three... You've heard of this kind of thing, Ron. Once a generation, something like this. And once a millenium -- a horror like this one." "I don't understand! What is Project Scholar?" "He is. All by himself. The government has taken charge of his abilities, at least for the time being." He snorted. "He's already done things I wouldn't have believed possible in five thousand years of evolution. And yet he is still only twelve years old..." "Only twelve?" Ron squirmed in the straps. "Doctor! This body -- "Yes, Ron. It's his, of course. He grew angry with it; wanted to discard it, like everything else which doesn't fit his conception of the fitness of things. It was awkward -- a giant's brain in a child's body. So he developed a solution -- an operation, involving the total transference of electrical energy... The doctor's shaggy head bowed. "He needed human help for that. That's when I was brought in as assistant. And it was my function to select the perfect body as a temporary house for his ego... "Temporary?" "When this body ages and grows feeble, there will be another. Our friend has outwitted Death itself." The doctor looked up, his jaw firm. "I was instructed to destroy his body when the transference was completed. I couldn't do it, Ron. I managed to spirit you away where you would be cared for. It was almost a year before you came to your senses after the operation. By that time, I didn't know what to do with you. My first thought was the Roverwood Home, where I am a director, where you would be lost among many, many boys' faces..." "But why me, doctor? Why me?" "I had to choose someone, Ron. It was merely a question of who..." Dr. Luther entered, priming the needle. "Ready?" he said. "One moment." The doctor's hand covered Ron's mouth, and he felt the contours of a small round pill against his lips. He realized he was meant to swallow it, and he did. "Ready now," Dr. Minton said. Dr. Luther performed the injection. "Good night, sweet prince," he said gently. When Ron awoke, it was under a blanket of darkness and ice. He blinked until his eyes became accustomed to the impoverished light that was glowing behind a glass-paned door. He was on a block of some cold composition, in what must have been the Medical Center's morgue. He reacted with revulsion at the thought, and leaped off. Then he saw that his left hand was holding a sheet of paper. He carried it to the meager light source and read it quickly: Ron -- Don't wait another moment. You'll find a suit of clothes in the closet left. Leave through back stairway marked N. There is money in suit. Use it to leave the city. Do not return if you value your safety and the life of M. He found the clothes as directed, a neatly-cut suit of boy's clothing, with a small wallet stuffed with bills amounting to three hundred dollars. He dressed rapidly, opened the door, and peered down the hall. It was empty as he ran silently towards the exit marked N. Now he was doubly in debt to Dr. Minton. But he couldn't spare the doctor even now, for his life had been given a new direction and purpose. He was going to kill the Scholar. He walked rapidly through the dark streets towards the public parking lot where the helicopter had been stored. He took the lift to the roof, and walked up to it quickly. "It's about time, pal." It was Shock, his hair tousled over his hard, bright eyes. There was a gun in his hand. "I've been waitin' an hour, you punk. Think you were gettin' off so easy?" "Look, Shock -- " "You thought you were a clever boy, didn't you? Well, I got news for you -- " "Look, I don't want to be leader. I just needed a copter for a few hours." "Yeah, sure. Only you forgot something. We put Finder equipment on this baby a long time ago, so we could keep tabs on it." "You can have the copter -- "I don't want just the copter, Ronnie boy. I want to square a few things with you." "Look, Shock. I'll make a deal with you. I'll give you two hundred bucks for that gun." The tall boy's face changed. "What?" "You heard me. You hand over that gun, I'll give you two hundred dollars." His eyes narrowed. "Then what? I suppose you'd shoot me and take off. Uh-uh, pal." "You can check the gun downstairs, and sell me the key." "Okay," Shock said slowly. "But if you're pullin' something -- " He balled his hands menacingly. They went down to the lower level together. Shock bought himself a public locker, and shoved the gun inside. Then he held up the key. "Here it is, pal. Two hundred bucks worth." Ron handed him the money. Shock whistled at the sight of the bills. "Now," Ron said. "Would you like to make a hundred more?" He looked at Ron with respect. "Okay. What's the pitch?" "I want you to make a phone call for me." "Yeah, sure." Shock looked bewildered. Then Ron explained. They reached the guard in the East Wing of the Medical Center without much difficulty. Shock crouched over the receiver and said: "This is Dr. Luther. Something's happened; you better connect me with him" "Okay, hold on." There was a wait. Then Ron Carver's own voice, in its eerie new inflection, was on the other end. "What is it?" "This is Luther. Something's happened down here. I think the boy got away." "What? Where are you?" "In the morgue, downstairs. I think you better come down yourself." "How could it happen?" The Ron-voice was raging. "How?" "I don't know. But you better meet me here in ten minutes -- " Ron jabbed Shock in the side, and the tall boy slammed the receiver back into place with a relieved sigh. "I don't get it," he said. "Who was that guy?" "Me," Ron said, with a grim smile. He handed Shock the money, and watched him depart, still looking baffled. Then he went to the locker and removed the gun, stuffing it inside his jacket. It bulked large against his narrow chest. He raced through the streets back to the medical center, heading for Exit N and the morgue. R on was waiting, gun poised, behind the empty slab. A shadow covered the dim light behind the glass-plated door, and the Ron-body entered the silent room. He saw his own hand reaching out to flick on the light switch. He saw his own face register dismay and annoyance at the quiet scene. Then the Ron-body turned and was about to leave. "Stay awhile," Ron said. He stood up, revealing the weapon, holding it in both of his small hands for firm control of the trigger. "Well," his voice said. "Yes, well," Ron answered. "Very well, thanks. Only I won't speak for you. Scholar. Because I don't think you're well at all. I think you're out of your mind..." The Ron-lips curled. "Naturally. Genius is akin to madness. It's one of the deeprooted convictions of the human eo. It reflects their suspicion, their distrust of the superintelligent... I understand you, Mr. Carver." "And I don't understand you! You're something new to me. Maybe you're better than us, maybe you're worse. I don't know, Scholar. But that's not why I'm going to kill you -- " "Oh?" "No! You think I want to kill you for the sake of the world? Because you're a menace to homo sapiens? Because of your contempt for us ordinary mortals? Hell, no. Scholar! I'm too ordinary myself. Carver! Because I'm sore! Just plain sore!" He raised the gun. For a moment, Ron didn't know what had happened. Something else blurred his vision, a fast-moving figure bulking up in front of his target. It was only when he heard the voice that he recognized the intruder as Dr. Minton, and he saw then that the doctor had rescued the Scholar from certain death. "Stop, Ron -- " "Doctor! Get out of the way!" "No, Ron. You don't know what you're doing -- " The old man was shielding the Ron-body with his own. Ron put the weapon down. "But why?" he said "Because this is no answer! This is the assassin's way -- " He turned to the Ron-body, and his voice was shaking. "Listen, Scholar. I want to arbitrate. Will you listen?" "Do I have a choice?" "Yes!" the doctor said fiercely. "Life or death! Will you listen to my terms?" The Ron-body shrugged. "All right." "Very well. Then I want you to spare Ron Carver. I want you to (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Ed Emsh In the past year the Martian rebels had been pushed back to the wall. All that was left to them was Plan Blue. And what was Plan Blue... ? cautiously behind a big rock as another groundcar appeared among the dunes to the south and approached the little group of men. He was sure Sir Stanrich had told him there were to be four others in his little task force: and there were four with him now. But the new groundcar did not approach like a hostile patrol car. There was an air of confidence about the way its driver swung it up to the others. Jonner held his hand, thinking furiously, as the airtight door swung open and the newcomer leaped lightly to the ground. The sun was settling over the iron-red wastes of the Isidis Desert. The groundcars clustered like giant beetles at the top of the cliff that dropped straight down to the shadowed lowland of Syrtis Major. The six men in marsuits, huddled at rendezvous, kept their helmet radios low, for Mars City was less than fifty miles east of them. With the twilight, the blue mist of Mars was beginning to settle toward the ground. Jonner debated with himself. Could he have misunderstood Sir Stanrich? Or could the plans have been changed after he left the Isidis spaceport? No. Then who was the sixth man? And which man was he? "Regina fell right after I left' said the burly, gray-haired man. That would be Tyruss, the former space captain, who had come here from Regina. "Our troops were falling back along the Hadriacum Lowland. I suppose they plan to make a stand before Charax." "No, Charax is to be evacuated tonight," said Jonner, and savored the shock of that announcement on his hearers. He studied the credentials each man had handed him on arrival. There was Tyruss from Regina. There was Farlan, an astrogator from the Rebel defenses in the Strymon Canals, and there was Aron, who had just arrived, a space engineer from the Hadriacum front. There were Stein, an astrogator, and Wessfeld, an engineer, who had come together in one groundcar from Charax. The credentials were all alike, except the names. But one of them was -- must be -- a Marscorp spy. Jonner could not check with Sir Stanrich by radio -- Mars City was too close, and they would be overheard. He had no time to spend investigating his personnel -- Sir Stanrich had impressed on him that their mission must be carried out on schedule. He decided he would not tell them just yet that one of them could not be trusted. He might be able to trip the spy. But he said: "One or more of us may be killed or captured, so Fm going to brief everyone. No matter how many of us are lost, those who are left must carry out the mission. What were you told about this?" "I was told to meet you here and follow your instructions. I was told it's a dangerous and important assignment. That's all," said Tyruss. The others murmured agreement. "The instructions I give you won't be mine, but those of Sir Stanrich O'Kellin, supreme commander of the Rebel forces," said Jonner. He squatted on the sand and the others crowded around in the blue twilight as he sketched diagrams with his gloved hand while he talked : "As some of you may have learned, the Charax Rebellion is in danger of collapsing, because our supplies have been running out since Marscorp intercepted and destroyed our last space fleet from Earth. Plan Red, which was our master plan for defeating Marscorp in the field by capturing the domecities one by one, has failed. Regina and Charax are being evacuated because we couldn't hold them much longer anyway, and all our people are being transported around the Marscorp territory to the secret underground spaceport we established in the Isidis Desert two years ago. "This is a temporary measure, to prepare for Plan Blue, our lastgasp emergency plan. Marscorp will no doubt find the location of the underground base by observation of the refugees, but we hope to have Plan Blue in operation before they can shift their forces from Hadriacum to the desert and break through our defenses.' "I've heard rumors of this Plan Blue," said Parian, a slight man with blond hair. "What is it?" "I don't know," conceded Jonner candidly. "I don't think anyone does but Sir Stanrich and a few of our top strategists. But our part of it is this: "You may not know it, but we lost our last G-boat when we pulled that unsuccessful attack on Phobos early this year. We do have an old spaceship, riding in a polar orbit, that Marscorp doesn't know about, but no way to get up to it. Our job is to capture a Marscorp Gboat, get to that spaceship, capture The Egg and tow it into an Earthward orbit." "The Egg?" repeated Stein, a dark, chubby fellow. "You mean tliat ovoid space station of Marscorp's with the antennae sticking out all over it? I've seen that thing floating up there. I always wondered why we didn't blast it." "Not important enough," said Jonner. "It's an experimental laboratory that amplifies the magnetic field of Mars, and they've been experimenting with it as an auxiliary power station. But neither side is bothered by any lack of power from the atomic energy sources on Mars." Tyruss appeared annoyed at this. "Tell me something, Jonner," he demanded. "If it wasn't important enough to blast when we had the ships to do it, why is it important enough for us to capture now?" "I don't know," said Jonner. "Those are our orders. Now, we leave the groundcars here and go on foot to Marsport. Check equipment, everyone." "Say," commented Parian after a moment, "I don't seem to have any sunburn lotion." "You can have mine," said Aron, laughing. "This far from the sun, I haven't been sunburned yet, and don't expect to be." "Haven't been on Mars a year yet, have you?" suggested Tyruss. "No," admitted Aron. "I came from Earth with the last space fleet and escaped in a lifeboat. Why?" "There's an Earth-sun conjunction coming up. Every time the Earth swings between Mars and the sun, everybody on Mars gets a bad sunburn. When it comes, you better cover yourself with lotion, because clothes don't protect you and even if you're in a city, the domes and house roofs are transparent to pick up the sun's heat." "We have enough among us," said Jonner. "Besides, if our mission goes off on schedule, we'll be back at base by the time the Earth-sun conjunction starts. Let's head for Marsport," The six men crouched in the concealing canal sage near the edge of Marsport, the spaceport outside Mars City. The blue mist was a heavy fog that swirled around them. In the lighted circle of the spaceport area three stubby, two-stage gravity-boats sat upright, about a hundred yards apart. These were the heavy duty rockets that plied back and forth to Phobos, Mars' inner moon and Marscorp's natural space station, entering the planetary atmosphere of Mars where spaceships could not go. Workmen stirred busily around one of the G-boats; a guard stood at the entrance port of each of the other two. Jonner tried to assess the evidence, to decide which of his five companions was the Marscorp spy. How Marscorp had found out about the expedition, how the credentials had been forged, how the rendezvous had been learned, did not matter now. Marscorp could not know their plans beyond the rendezvous in the desert, because only he and Sir Stanrich had known the orders Sir Stanrich had given him for this mission. The fact that Stein and Wessfeld had arrived together from Charax eliminated them as suspects, for the Charax command would have known whether one or two men were to be sent from there. Jonner did not believe Tyruss was the spy. Jonner had won his space papers just before the Rebellion began, but it was logical that Sir Stanrich would send a more experienced space captain to handle their ship. That left Parian and Aron, from different sections of the Hadriacum front. Which one? In their specialties, Parian was an alternate to Stein as an astrogator, Aron an alternate to Wessfeld as an engineer. But every spaceman could handle every other spaceman's duties in an emergency, and it was hard to say which task they had decided to double up on. Jonner expected the spy to make some move here, tonight, and he had prepared for it on the way from the desert. One earphone of his helmet receiver was tuned with his speaker to the Rebel band they used, the other was tuned to the local frequency used by Marscorp. Jonner listened with one ear to the occasional reports and orders that were passed around the spaceport. Jonner punched Tyruss, next to him, twice on the shoulder. It was the signal. The six men rose and moved forward together. The sentry who loomed before them had no chance. A heat-gun beam is invisible. They cut him down and scurried to the edge of the spaceport, into the circle of light, running in long leaps toward the nearest G-boat. It was as they broke from the canal sage that the thing happened which Jonner had expected. The words were shouted into the earphone attuned to the Marscorp band: "Attention, Marscorp! Att... Jonner pressed a button on his belt, and his other defense went into action. A scrambler beam cut in on the attempted warning, and everything on that channel dissolved into a buzzing roar. Jonner cast a glance down the line of his companions, but they were too far separated for him to see whether any of them was talking into his helmet microphone. Some of the workmen at the far G-boat saw them running across the field, and scattered in alarm, but the scrambling prevented them from warning others through helmet communicators. The guard at the G-boat that was their goal saw them when they were fifty feet away. He was cut down as he tried to duck around the G-boat. They ran up the ramp. Jonner, first to reach the port, stopped and tried to watch his companions as they hurried past him. Tyruss was fumbling at some control on the belt of his marsuit. His radio channel control? Armed men were converging on the G-boat from all over the field as Jonner slammed and fastened the port. They scrambled up to the nose of the G-boat, and he and Tyruss sank into the pilots' seats. "Strap down for blast-off!" shouted Jonner, and wished viciously that the spy would still be tuned on the Marscorp band and fail to hear him. But everyone strapped down, hurriedly. A score of Marscorp soldiers were standing around the G-boat, firing up at its ports with heatguns. The beams were futile, for Gboats were built to stand frictional temperatures it would take a heatgun minutes to build to. Halfway across the field, a squad of men wheeled an anti-tank gun into position. The gentle gravity of Mars quadrupled as the G-boat strained upward on roaring jets, gathering speed. Through the port, Jonner saw the anti-tank gun's muzzle elevate and blossom flame. There was no impact; and there was no opportunity for another shot. The G-boat curved eastward in a long ascending arc. The first stage dropped off over the Aerian Desert, and in a few moments they were in free fall. floated to each man in turn, examining his control belt. Farlan's channel dial was a fraction off the band they used. "Parian, your radio control's off center," said Jonner quietly. "What?" said Farlan's voice, blurred a little. He fumbled at the dial, and his words came in clearly. "Must have hit it against something." Or he could have missed a little when he returned the dial to channel after trying to warn Marscorp. But Tyruss had been fumbling with something on his belt as they ran onto the G-boat. No, it wouldn't do to make an accusation against the wrong man. An automatic calendar on the G-boat's control board showed the date: upright, the Martian date, Aster #, #; reversed, the Earth date, June #, #. Jonner looked down through the port at the inhabited hemisphere of Mars unfolding below them. Those green lowlands, those red deserts, now were all in Marscorp hands -- even the cradle of the Charax Rebellion, the dome-city of Charax, at the edge of the edge of the Tiphys Fretum Lowland in the south polar area. There, six Martian years ago, the rebellion had flared bravely against the Mars Corporation. Marscorp had held a monopoly on space travel between Earth and Mars since the first Martian colony was established at Mars City in the Earth year #. For the supplies Marscorp brought from Earth, the price was kept high. Marscorp also ernment of Mars, or, as the colonists read the initials, "Old Greedy Marscorp" -- and Marscorp made and enforced the laws. It had been a fairly even match at first. Marscorp's initial monopoly of the supply lines had been overcome when many of the people on Earth were roused to sympathy for the Rebel cause. Gradually, the Rebels had invested much of the Hadriacum Lowland with its domefarms and had captured Regina, another of the planet's six domecities. That had been before the disastrous space battle of the year #. Now, in the past year, the Rebels had been pushed back to the wall. All that was left to them was Plan Blue. And what was Plan Blue? Jonner looked over his five companions. All helmets were off now, and Jonner couldn't detect a guilty look in any face. He had never seen such pure unanimity of apparent innocence and loyalty. "Now that we're aspace, we'll go on the customary shifts," he said: "eight hours duty, eight hours sleep, eight hours free time. We'll pair off: Stein with Parian, Wessfeld with Aron, Tyruss with me. "And these are special orders: no one is to let the man with whom he is paired out of his sight" He would not tell them more than that now; he hoped to trap the spy when they approached The Egg. The spaceship slid up orbit, overtaking the shining ovoid from which antenhae sprouted like pins from a pin-cushion. The captured G-boat was lashed to the spaceship's side. "You'd think they'd have some defenses, anyhow," grumbled Tyruss, watching the ovoid on the screen. "Why?" countered Jonner. "They knew we didn't have any G-boats left, and they didn't know we had any spaceships left, either. Of course, they don't know this is our target, but I'll bet they have some ships from Phobos on the way here now, anyhow." Their timing was just right. Thirty minutes later The Egg would swing around the limb of Mars, in line of sight with Marsport. But so far there had been no chance for The Egg to receive a radio warning of the stolen G-boat. The spaceship pulled abreast of The Egg and Jonner and Tyruss went across to it in spacesuits. They passed through the airlock to find The Egg's crew of three waiting with welcoming smiles. The smiles faded at the sight of their levelled heat-guns. "Sorry you weren't expecting us," said Jonner, opening the faceplate of his spacesuit with his left hand. "You'll have to get into spacesuits." They sent their captives through the airlock and across the intervening space to the spaceship, where the others would be awaiting them. Then Jonner and Tyruss searched The Egg for other Marscorp personnel. They found none. "We'd better get a line on her and get under way before those ships from Phobos can get here," said Tyruss. "Right," agreed Jonner, and they got busy. A towline secured between the two vessels, Jonner and Tyruss returned to the spaceship. The three Marscorp captives had been secured by chains to stanchions on the storage deck, just above the engine deck. Stein and Parian, the engineers, were standing by. "We're getting under way," Tyruss told them. Stein and Parian descended to the engine deck, and Tyruss and Jonner climbed to the control deck. On the centerdeck, Aron and Wessfeld, the astrogators, were asleep. Tyruss climbed into the control chair and switched the radio to the Marscorp band. A voice blared from the communicator: "Marscorp calling The Egg. Marscorp calling The Egg. Come in. Egg. Can you hear us, Egg? Rebels captured G-boat here. Double alert. Marscorp calling .  ." Tyruss switched it off, laughing. "A little late," he commented. "Yes," said Jonner. "Keep the receiver on that band, Tyruss, because we won't be hearing from our side. But, until we finish our mission, I'm going to disconnect the sending equipment." Jonner floated to the other side of the control deck and moved around behind the control board. He was busy disconnecting wires, a few minutes later, when he heard an exclamation from Tyruss. He peeked around Ae edge of the control board. The three Marscorp captives were floating up the companionway from below, heatguns in their hands! "Keep your hands off those controls, Reb," warned one of them. "This ship's staying right here." "Wasn't there another one in this gang, Robbo?" asked another. Tyruss twisted in his chair and reached for his heat-gun. One of the Marscorp men rayed him through the throat. Cautiously, Jonner poked the muzzle of his heat-gun around the edge of the control board. Methodically, he shot the three Marscorp men, one by one. They died without discovering the source of the invisible heat-beam that cut them down. Tyruss was dead. Cursing, Jonner went below, heat-gun in hand. On the centerdeck, Wessfeld's body floated. Wessfeld was dead, burned through the chest. Aron was not there. He found all three of the others, locked in the airlock, without spacesuits. Jonner watched Aron suspiciously as they emerged. "What happened?" he demanded of Aron. "I don't know," disclaimed Aron. "They woke us up. They had heatguns then. Wessfeld tried to reach his, and they shot him, Stein and Parian were already in the airlock when they brought me down." "Stein, were you and Parian constantly in sight of each other, as ordered?" asked Jonner, watching Aron. Did Aron's eyes widen apprehensively? Stein started. "Why, no," he admitted. "Farlan was on the engine deck, and I was down in the airlock checking the spacesuits before blast-off. That's routine, you know. They herded Farlan down and caught me by surprise." "That's right," said Farlan. "I was checking the engines when they came through the hatch from above with heat-guns." "Damn!" exploded Jonner. "I gave everyone strict orders -- all right, it's too late now. It just cost us two men, and one of the four of us left is a Marscorp spy. Everyone get above and strap down for acceleration." The spy was Aron or Farlan, but he still didn't know which. Aron could have feigned sleep, and slipped down to the storage deck to release and arm the Marscorp men. Or Farlan could have climbed from the engine deck and done it while Stein was in the airlock. Whoever it was, he had chosen to be locked in with the others -- probably in case the sortie failed. Now they were two men short, and still he would have to pair off with Aron and pair Stein with Farlan. They would have to go on twelve-hour duty shifts, with only four hours free time. And to what purpose? As Tyruss had suggested several times, why couldn't they have just blasted The Egg out of space, if the purpose was to get rid of it? Why go to all the trouble of shifting it to an Earthward orbit? The Earth would be nowhere near the intersection point when The Egg reached Earth's orbit, if that made any difference. Jonner had at last let the others know, as he should have before, that one of them was a spy. But he would not tell them, as he had told Tyruss, that he had disconnected the radio transmitter. Let the spy try to get in touch with Marscorp now! "Jonner," said Aron, "there are a couple of blips on the radar screen that shouldn't be there." Jonner swung the control chair to look at the screen. There were two dots there, almost directly to the rear of the spaceship. Jonner watched them. They held their position on the screen. "I don't know," he said. "Pretty large for meteors, and there doesn't seem to be any lateral movement." Their ship had just begun acceleration, following a hyperbola that would break them free of Mars' gravity. It was a hyperbola that swung the ship against the direction of the planet's orbital travel, and, while speeding the ship away from the planet, slowed it in relation to the sun. Jonner and Aron were on duty on the control deck. Stein and Farlan slept on the centerdeck below. Two #-hour periods had passed since they captured The Egg and maneuvered it into the right orbit for their departure from the Martian area. The blips grew on the screen, and still they did not move laterally. "Spaceships," Jonner decided. "They're following our course, and overtaking us." "Marscorp ships!" exclaimed Aron. "But Jonner, we never were in radar range of any Marscorp ship or installation. How could they know our position and course?" Without replying, Jonner arose from the control chair and went around behind the control board. The wires to the radio transmitter, which he had disconnected so carefully, had been reconnected. "Aron," said Jonner, coming back to the control chair, "go down and chain Parian to his bunk. He's our Marscorp spy." "He is?" Aron's eyes widened. "How do you know?" "Because you haven't been out of my sight since we took The Egg in tow, and you haven't been near that control board while we were on duty. Stein must have let Parian get away from him again." "Why not Stein?" "You forget. Stein and Wessfeld arrived together from Charax, at the rendezvous. They had to be clean." Aron unstrapped and arose. "Shouldn't we boost acceleration and try to evade them?" he asked, gesturing at the radar screen. "We can't now," said Jonner. "We're on an escape hyperbola and we've got to hold this acceleration until she runs out, or we'd throw it completely off." Aron went below. Jonner watched the screen anxiously. The Marscorp ships must have set an interception course, for their acceleration was much too high to be following their own escape orbit. They were getting closer rapidly. Jonner looked at the chronometer and at the tape still ticking through the ship's control mechanism. Eleven minutes was a brief time, but it seemed long when enemy ships were overtaking them at twice their acceleration. Towing The Egg, this old ship could not match the Marscorp attackers' acceleration. It could accelerate much faster than it was, but if he was to hit the Earthward orbit he had been ordered to take he would have to hold his present acceleration until the eleven minutes was up. And the Marscorp ships got closer by the minute. Aron climbed back to the control deck from below. "Parian's tied up, and he's madder than hell," Aron reported. "Stein said Parian did go behind the control board on their last duty stretch, to 'adjust' the radio. What's the situation now?" "They've started decelerating to match our pace when they get abreast of us," said Jonner, indicating the rocket flares that now appeared on the aft visual screen. The tape suddenly ran out, and the rockets' roar faded. They were in free fall again. "Get into a spacesuit and cut that towline," commanded Jonner. "We're going to make a run for it." "We're not going to stay and guard The Egg?" asked Aron, getting a suit off one of the hooks. "No outside guns. This hulk was a supply ship. As soon as you get back in and secure the outer airlock, holler and we'll start partial acceleration. When you've strapped down somewhere below, holler again and we'll blow the tubes." While Aron went below to carry out his assignment, Jonner swung the ship end-to with the gyroscopes. He prayed silently that the towline to The Egg wouldn't foul. They'd have to head back toward Mars, for further acceleration in this direction would throw them, helpless, in a path toward outer space. The radio loudspeaker boomed: spaceship. Stand by for boarding or get blasted." The Marscorp ships were within a few miles now, slowing to match the pace of the Rebel ship. The outer airlock warning light flashed red, then green again. "Ready!" said Aron's voice on the ship's communicator. Jonner flicked his radio transmitter to the Marscorp beam. "Go to hell!" he announced, and depressed the firing buttons. It was uncomfortable for Aron, climbing out of the airlock, but Jonner threw the ship into a full G acceleration. The Marscorp ships loomed suddenly to each side, then faded behind them. A few futile flashes of gunfire blossomed from their noses. Then rings of fire appeared behind them as they gave chase. "Strapped down!" called Aron, and Jonner gave the rockets full blast. The ship leaped like a frantic old war-horse. Jonner was pressed down heavily in his control chair. Its beams and plates groaned as G was piled on G. The Egg was gone from the rearward screens, released and floating free in an Earthward orbit. The Marscorp ships fell farther behind. Then they stopped receding and began to grow on the screens again. Newer and more powerful, they were overtaking the Rebel ship. Suddenly the ship's rockets ceased firing again, and they were in free fall. A moment later, Aron popped up from below. "Are we hit?" he asked. "No, they aren't back in range yet," answered Jonner. "We're out of fuel. Maybe it's just as well they came along, because I don't believe this clunk had enough fuel to overtake Mars again, even if we hadn't blown it in that escape try." The Marscorp attackers apparently interpreted the Rebel ship's dead rocket tubes as a surrender. Within half an hour they had drawn alongside, and armed men in spacesuits came through the airlock. Parian was freed of his chains, and Jonner, Stein and Aron were herded onto the centerdeck of one of the Marscorp ships and secured to stanchions. The Marscorp captain floated before them, looking them over quizzically, "I don't know what you fellows were trying to prove, but you're lucky," he said. "If you hadn't cut your rockets when you did, we'd have blasted you out of space." Jonner answered out of the knowledge that no ships which had accelerated as these two had in the past hour would have more than enough fuel left to get them back to Phobos. The Egg, trailing far behind Mars now, would overtake the planet gradually as the pull of the sun sped it up, but it would pass Mars well to sunward in its plunge toward the orbit of Earth. Any ship that tried to intercept it from Mars now would fight increasing solar gravity and would run the risk of not getting back to Mars. "Well, we accomplished our mission, anyhow," Jonner said resignedly, "for whatever it's worth." "A fool's mission," said the Marscorp captain, and Jonner was inclined to agree with him. "The Egg was an experimental laboratory and an auxiliary power station, and we can build another cheaper than we could recover it. As for you fellows, you're better off than you realize " "How's that?" asked Stein. "Why, if you aren't tried as war criminals, you ought to be freed pretty quickly. According to the latest news reports from Mars City, our armies are driving your people back into your underground base in the Isidis Desert. The war will be over as soon as we've cracked that." around in the Marscorp brig on Phobos for more than a month. To be precise, they floated around, for Phobos had little more surface gravity than a spaceship in orbit. When there was no indication they were going to be transferred from Phobos, Jonner set up a howl that at last was heard in the little moon's officialdom. Jonner was taken before the adjutant of the Phobos base to air his complaint. "Look," said Jonner, placing both hands belligerently on the official's desk, "the terms of the terrestrial Space Compact apply to Mars, too. No prisoners of war shall be confined beyond a planetary atmosphere, except for so long as it is impracticable for them to be transferred to a surface prison." "That provision was written into the compact to permit inspection by neutral powers and because, ordinarily, a prisoner has some hope that a surface prison will be overrun by troops of his own side and he will be released," answered the adjutant mildly, peering at Jonner over old-fashioned rimless spectacles. "In your case, that's not likely to happen and I can't see why you're raising such a fuss. The last we heard up here, our troops were about to overrun your last base." "What do you mean, the last you heard?" demanded Jonner. "I heard that two days before we were brought to Phobos." "Radio communication with Mars has been out completely," explained the adjutant good-naturedly. "Static's always bad during die Earth-sun conjunctions, as you ought to know, being a spaceman. This time we haven't been able to get anything through at all." "Well, maybe it's true that we've lost and the war's about over," said Jonner. "But the three of us still want to be transferred to the surface. Free fall can drive you nuts when you're in an eight-by-eight cell." "As a matter of fact," said the adjutant, "there hasn't been any G-boat traffic to and from the surface since the radio went out. It's a dangerous business, trying to land at a spaceport without any radio guide. But we have to send a Gboat down for supplies in a couple of days, and if you fellows are insistent about it, we'll send you down to Marsport on it." It was not two days, but more than a week later than the three of them were allowed to get into spacesuits and were escorted out to a G-boat anchored to the surface of Phobos. Above them, the orange disc of Mars filled the sky, Phobos was swinging across the inhabited hemisphere now, and the dark green areas of Syrtis and Hadriacum were plainly visible. Jonner strained his eyes upward at the red spot that was the Isidis Desert. Somewhere in the heart of that red spot. Sir Stanrich O'Kellin was directing the lastgasp stand of the Charax Rebels. They would be manning the underground chambers of the base, perhaps fighting in the corridors as the Marscorp troops battled to effect an entry. It might even be that the base had fallen by now, overrun by the government forces, and he and his companions would be, technically, free men by the time they landed at Marsport. Jonner sighed unhappily. He didn't want that kind of freedom. Following Stein and Aron, he climbed into the G-boat. It had a crew of two, plus an armed guard for the prisoners. "There'll be no unstrapping during free fall," announced the Gboat pilot. "Everybody will remain strapped down until we land. With the Earth-sun conjunction over, we've re-established radio communication partially, but it's spotty, and we may crash." "Is the war over?" asked Jonner. "How the hell should I know?" grunted the pilot. "We haven't had a single news broadcast that makes sense since the radio came back in. They're all chopped up with static." The G-boat lifted gently from the surface of Phobos and began its spiral downward toward Mars. The six men, crowded together in its single passenger compartment, listened to the radio that spat and growled over their heads. What they heard was unintelHgible. "Sector Four... squawk... spsst!" snarled the loudspeaker. "Colonel... squawk... troops in... squawk... move tank squad to... spsst-crack-crack!... more ambulances... squawk... ninety per cent disabled..." Periodically the pilot tried to establish contact: "G-boat MG-# to Marsport. Gboat MG-# to Marsport. Come in, Marsport." The attempts were futile until the G-boat had entered the atmosphere and was gliding high above the desert on its broad wings. Then, miraculously, the airwaves were clear for a moment. "Marsport to G-boat MC-#," said the loudspeaker. "Go ahead." "G-boat MC-# to Marsport," said the pilot hurriedly. "Give us a beam. We're coming in for a landing." "Don't land! We're...#" exclaimed the loudspeaker, and exploded into static in midsentence. "What the hell do they mean, don't land?" snorted the pilot, fiddling frantically and uselessly with dials. "They think I've got enough fuel to get back to Phobos?" The G-boat held its glide and swooped down on Marsport, a tiny landing field and a miniature group of buildings set apart from the dome of Mars City. Groups of men were scurrying about at the port like ants. A column of smoke rose ominously from one of the buildings. The G-boat touched ground and skidded to a stop in mid-field. Its passengers unstrapped and the pilot opened the port. Men crowded into the G-boat, men with drawn heat-guns, men in the blue-and-gold marsuits of the Charax Rebels! rode into Mars City in a groundcar with Sir Stanrich O'Kellin. Stein and Aron had remained at Marsport for the time being. Marsport was completely in the hands of the Rebels, and efforts were being made to get through by radio to Phobos to give the Marscorp forces there a surrender ultimatum. "What's happened to the Mars City dome?" asked Jonner in astonishment as they approached the city. The once-transparent dome was cracked and badly discolored. "Plan Blue," answered Sir Stanrich with a smile. "Look, sir, how about telling me what happened?" said Jonner. "When we got captured in the middle of our wild goose chase with Marscorp's Egg, our troops had been driven into the ground at the Isidis base and we got the impression it was only a matter of time before that fell. Then the radio goes out for a few days and we land here to find Mars City overrun with our troops." "Why," said Sir Stanrich, his mustache quirking mischievously, "we counter-attacked. We came out of the base, defeated the Marscorp army there, drove across the desert to Mars City and took it. Task forces are out now, taking over the other cities. That's all there is to it." "Simple!" snorted Jonner. "Except that they outnumbered us four or five to one, and probably outgunned us more than that." "Science wins wars nowj my boy, not numbers and guns." They had entered the Mars City airlock and were driving down the broad Avenue of the Canals. Rebel soldiers swarmed through the city. The few men and women they saw in Marscorp uniforms staggered around, groping blindly, their faces and arms fiery red and peeling from sunburn. (Continued on page #) Boys, Captain Kidd and Benedict Arnold put together -- cdl because he was BY eral Products Corporation was adjourned, as usual, with the Consumer's Pledge. The same pledge recited each morning by children in schools across the nation. J. L. Spender, Assistant Vice-President of Cotter Pin Production for Plant Five was proud to put in these extra Thursday mornings. Let the common herd work their three day, twenty-one hour week. He was part of the management team, working behind the scenes, constantly raising the standard of living of the American Consumer. A silent elevator whisked J.L. to the roof of the Administration Building where the heliport attendant rolled out his new helicopter, a June, # Buick Skymaster. It was a sculpture in chrome and plexiglass; a suitable vehicle for the assistant vice-president as prescribed by Consumer's Guide. A loyal conIllustrated by Paul Orban sumer, he bought the new model every six months. Once in the air and on course, J.L. set the Ultramatic autopilot -- a new feature on the '# model -- and pushed the chrome seat control lever to semi-reclining. Scarcely a cloud marred the pristine blue, and below nestled the neat, colorful homes of happy American consumers, but his problem was not to be soothed by sinking back to enjoy the crisp spring air. Life, J.L. felt, would be all sweetness and light were it not for the unaccountable affection his pretty young daughter. Glory, bore for an ascetic looking young man of doubtful integrity as a consumer. There had been a parade of acceptable young men through his front door, none of whom had excited more in him than apathy. But this dne. He wore spectacles with heavy black frames when almost everyone used disposable contact lenses. His suits were at least a month behind the current style. And with all those young men to choose from. Glory picked him to ask to dinner that evening. Glory had been taught to respect the might of the dollar and the disaster that comes of not spending it. She was a credit to her family; a sound, patriotic consumer. She could spend money faster, more sensibly than any of her frivolous friends. One fortunate young man would find her an excellent wife. No dollar-hoarder would fill her mind with subversive notions if he could prevent it. Much as J.L. disliked having that particular young man to dinner, it did afford the opportunity to spend some of the extra money that always collected if you didn't watch very carefully. Being forced to pay a savings tax wouldn't do his career or social position any good, and he certainly wouldn't think of putting it into a secret bank account. The Hudson river was beneath him. He would soon be home. The thought reminded him that though the family had already passed the five year mark in this house, he had still not made an appointment with his architect. Just before landing J.L. took the controls. The autopilot was supposed to land itself, but somehow he felt better doing it himself. A control on the dash opened the garage, another retracted the overhead rotors. He drove in, closed the garage door, and got out. He paused in the hall only long enough to throw his hat and topcoat into the waste receptacle. From the kitchen he heard the familiar crackling of packages being unwrapped. "Home at last," he sighed, pecking Marge, his wife, on the cheek. "What did you buy today. Honey?" It was a treat to watch the pleasure with which Marge unwrapped packages. J.L. bought most things out of a sense of duty, but Marge and Glory really enjoyed spending money, God bless them. "Oh, lots of things." Marge answered. She held a cut crystal goblet to the light watching it sparkle. "A new set of china, thus exquisite stemware, and the loveliest linen tablecloth, and... oh, and they're sending a genuine oak table for the dining room. The shop I bought it in has the cleverest service. The man who delivers the table cuts up the old one so it can be used in the fireplace. Isn't that practical?" "That is clever." J.L. said. "It's a pity to waste it aU on that goodfor-nothing, whatever his name is." "Stringer." "What?" "That's his name, Ernest Stringer. Why is he a good-fornothing? He does dress oddly, I admit, but Glory seems to like him." "That's exactly why I'm worried. If she asked him for dinner there's no telling what's going on. A person like that is a bad influence." J.L. said, punctuating by jabbing the air with his index finger. "Now really. Dear. You hardly know him." "I know him well enough. You are the one who claims to be such a good judge of character. Look at those glasses he wears. Why doesn't he wear disposable contact lenses like everyone else. It's positively unsanitary. And did you see that suit? ni say he dresses oddly. That thing hasn't been in style for a month. I bet he doesn't spend half his salary." "Oh, I don't know." Marge said, abstractedly. She was admiring the floral pattern on her new china. "But do be nice to him. Don't say anything to embarrass Glory." "Oh, I'll be nice all right. I guess I know how to act. You and your daughter have trained me. And there are worse things than being embarrassed." He would have gone on, but at that moment Glory sauntered into the room. "Hi, Dad. Back from the grind, I see." Her hair was the color of lemon and in her blue eyes was reflected a youthful zest for life. "Do you like the new dress? It comes in seventeen colors. I bought them all. And hats and shoes and gloves and bags to match." She said, walking as she had seen professional models walk, with arms akimbo and swinging hips. "Very pretty," he said, "but shouldn't there be a little more to it? Style is style, but leave something to the imagination. They can't be using up much fabric with a number like that." "See, Mom. Didn't I tell you exactly what he'd say? Daddy is so mid-century. Aren't you. Darling?" "Glory, at the risk of seeming... ah... mid-century, I think you owe your mother and myself some information about this person you've asked to dinner." "What kind of information? You've met him," she said. Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Yes, I've met him. What is his background? What does he work at? What kind of a consumer is he?" "Dad, you are not being fair." "Not fair? Why not? Are you ashamed of him?" "No, I'm not ashamed of him. Ernie is a dear sweet boy. He lost both of his parents when he was very young. Bringing himself up has made him different from most people, I guess. But he has done very well. And all by himself, too. He's an OE, you know." This only added heat to J.L.'s burning suspicion. "I don't want to sound narrow minded. Glory, but I've met a good many Opinion Engineers in business and darned few of them are fit company for a young girl. They picture themselves as independent thinkers. They don't spend their money as they should." Glory's lips whitened as she pressed them together. J.L. saw the gathering storm in her eyes. "That's not fair," she said. "Ernie is perfectly all right. He just needs looking after. Mother, help me." Marge smiled calmly, and said, "Your father is just acting like a father, that's all. He is trying to protect you." "Well, I'm twenty years old, almost. And it's practically the twenty-first century, but it looks like the middle ages around here. I'm sorry I asked him to come. I'll never ask anyone again." She threw her head back and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. "Now don't start getting dramatic. I only want what's best for you." J.L. said. But it was only bluff. He knew when he was licked. "All right, all right," he said, ing to prevent her tears from brimming over. "I promise to be good tonight." It was time for him to retreat, as gracefully as possible, to his study and the latest issue of Consumer's Guide. Which he did. A t a quarter of seven J.L. tottered into his living room. He was fully dressed except for a bright red sash hanging slack, like a sail in the doldrums, just brushing the tops of his patent leather shoes. Dressing was a nerve-jarring, thirst-making business. He was in full sympathy with the need for changing men's styles so frequently, but Aose overpaid designers could surely dream up easier outfits to get into. He separated a decanter of bourbon from its fellows on the mirrorbacked shelves and from it poured a lavish helping. Using the tip of his index finger, he twirled the ice cubes and, with a sigh, lifted the golden fluid to his lips. Over the rim of the glass he saw Glory come floating into view. She was dressed, mostly below the waist, in yards of a light gauzy fabric that seemed to have life of its own. She stopped at the door while her eyes slowly swept the room. J.L. was reminded of a spider making sure the web would be cosy. Her glance came to rest on the portly figure of her father. She exhaled a sigh of controlled exasperation. "Daddy, your sash is hanging. It looks like a flag at half mast" "I am perfectly aware that my sash is hanging." He wasn't sure he approved of the tone of her voice. "Well tuck it up then. Ernie will be here any minute." "It refuses to stay up. How do you know? Maybe it is supposed to hang. Those designers should be forced to dress themselves in these things before they loose them on an unsuspecting public." She glided towards him and, with a few deft touches, the sash was neatly in place. "Dad, promise you'll be nice to him." J.L. smiled. Much as he protested, he liked being fussed over. "Of course. I'll be nice. When am I not nice? I just said those things about him because... well, I wanted you to be wary." "Don't worry about Ernie. He's a dear. And, please, no economics lectures. That business about thrift being a menace to prosperity may have been a new idea when you were young, but now every kid in school is taught it. So spare us. It makes you sound like an old fuddy duddy." Fuddy duddy? J.L. was about to make a stunning rejoinder when he heard the whirring of helicopter rotors overhead. "There he is." Glory said, excitedly, "Let him in." "Where are you running?" he asked, surprised. She was as fully dressed as she was likely to be. "You know I can't be here when he comes in," she said. "Can't be here? Where else should you be?" J.L. asked. The situation was getting out of hand. "Strategy, my dear parent. I can't just be sitting here waiting when he walks in. He is supposed to be waiting for me... with bated breath. It makes my entrance more effective. Ta ta for now." She was gone. The prospect of dining at the same table with the young man was repellent enough. Now he would have to provide entertaining conversation until Glory chose to appear. The door chimes sounded. J.L. drained his glass, stiffened his spine, and strode to the door pulling it open with a jerk, like a doctor removing adhesive tape. Any hope J.L. might have had was dashed when the door opened to reveal Ernest Stringer, his piercing brown eyes, a tight lipped smile, and the traditional gift of candy under his arm. "Good evening, Mr. Spender," he said. "You are, I believe, expecting me." He was so thin that the current, tight fitting style made him look very like a figure constructed with pipe cleaners. J.L. did his best to appear gracious. "Gome in, come in," he said, taking his hat and coat. "Glory will be in soon." The suit was up to date, but J.L. spotted other telling details. His heels were slightly lighter in color than the rest of the shoes, indicating they had been reheeled. It was also evident, to a trained eye, that the collar and cuffs of his shirt had been resized, proof that the shirt had been laundered; perhaps, even more than once. "What can I get you to drink?" J.L. asked, leading the way into the living room. "Nothing, thank you. I seldom take alcohol," the young man said. "Is that right? A young fellow like you. It certainly is fortunate that the rest of your generation doesn't share your prejudice. Alcoholic beverages account for more than five percent of total consumer purchases." "Five percent. As much as that? Well, in that case I should have something. Ah... a glass of sherry, I think," he said, smiling with lips unparted. "Sherry? Sure you don't want something more . , . more substantial?" "Sherry will do nicely, thank you." A sherry drinker is capable of anything, J.L. thought. He poured the wine into a high stemmed glass and mixed another bourbon for himself; this time going a little easier on the ice. The young man held the stem between spidery fingers, turning it slowly, delicately sniffing the bouquet. J.L. wished Glory or Marge would rescue him. He couldn't think of a thing to say. What could one say to a male sherry drinker? "What do you think of the international situation?" J.L. asked, just to break the uncomfortable silence. "What international situation?" "I mean do you think we are headed for war?" J.L, was sorry he had asked the harmless question. The young man laughed derisively. "What an idea. Of course there won't be a war," he said. "Why do you say that?" He wanted to see how far Stringer would go. "It's quite evident isn't it? War has been threatening for more than fifty years. It will probably continue to threaten for fifty more. It gives our government and that of our enemies the excuse to build enough munitions to take up the slack in the economy between production and the ability to consume what we produce." "That's ridiculous. I've never heard such nonsense." The young idiot, he thought, anyone with sense knew that to be true, but no one made a fuss about it for fear of upsetting a system that worked so well. It was an accepted iict of life, certainly preferable to actual war, and never mentioned in polite society. Stringer continued, speaking slowly, as if explaining to a very small child. He clasped his long fingers over his left knee hugging it almost to his chest, and rocked himself slightly. "Don't you see? If consumers would be taken out of the market for the duration, and many permanently. But this way governments can spend as much as they need to on war goods, to balance the economy, without disturbing the consumers at all. "The politicians love it, too. It supplies them with political issues, not easily come by these days." Stringer concluded. He seemed pleased with himself. J.L.'s glass was again empty. He rose to fill it saying, "That is a very interesting theory. Have you told it to many people?" Stringer did not answer. J.L. turned to see what had caused this sudden reticence. The young man sat with wide-eyed stare and loosely hanging jaw; obviously incapable of speech. Glory had made her strategic entrance. "Ah, there you are. Dear," J.L. said. "Mr. Stringer, here, has just been explaining international politics to me." "Doesn't he have a fine mind. Daddy?" she said, catching the young man's hand and favoring him with a smile that set his adam's apple to dancing. Fine? J.L. thought, narrow would be more accurate. He was about to make an audible comment along those lines when Marge called them in to dinner. All through the meal Marge fawned upon the young man, indulging the predatory instinct of a mother with a marriageable daughter. With the clam bisque she told of Glory's childhood ; the prettiest child in the neighborhood. With the pressed duckling she told of an army of suitors, each more desirable than the last, that Glory had discarded like week-old overcoats. And with the fresh tropical fruit supreme she praised the condition of matrimony with such fervor that J.L. could feel the warmth of a blush on his cheek. When the young people left for the evening Marge sighed and said, "Don't they make a nice couple?" "Have you lost your mind?" J.L. replied, with almost saintly restraint.  "Is something the matter. Dear?" J.L. threw up his hands in despair. "Is something the matter, she asks. Why did you butter him up like that? Did you see his face? He looked like a dog being scratched behind the ear. If he proposes to Glory tonight it's your fault." "Well, I think he'd make a fine son-in-law." "That non-consumer? I'd sooner drop him from the helicopter," he said. He noticed she was smiling. "Don't laugh. Marge. This is serious. I'm going to have a good long talk with Glory when she gets home. I'll put a stop to this." "Be careful what you say. Dear," she said. "Don't worry. I guess I know how to talk to my own daughter. I'm as modem as the next parent, you know that. But there comes a time when every child needs guidance, and I..." "Don't stay up too late. Dear," Marge interrupted, squelching a yawn. She kissed his cheek and left the room. J.L. poured another drink and settled in a comfortable chair to wait and to plan. Perhaps he should be imperious. On the screen of his imagination he saw himself. He was taller. His arms were folded high on his chest; his legs were spread wide like two sturdy trees. He had grown a full handle bar mustache. "Glory," he could hear himself say, "I forbid you ever to see that man again." Unfortunately the screen showed the probable result She salaamed before him, touching her forehead to the carpet, "I hear and obey O Magnificent One." Sarcasm was more than he could bear. If only he had some proof. If only Marge hadn't been so approving. The slam of the front door dragged him from a nightmare in which Glory, having married Ernest Stringer, was drowning in a roomful of coin and currency. The level of money had just reached her frightened eyes. In the dim light of the hall he saw her leaning against the door she had slammed. Her shoulders were hunched with sobbing. "Glory, what's the matter?" She looked up, saw her father, and ran to her room. J.L. heaved out of the chair and followed, slowly. Her door was open a crack. He hesitated, then knocked lightly. No answer. He pushed the door wide enough to see in. She was perched on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, crying silently in the darkened room. "Mind if I come in?" Still no answer. He stepped in and sat gingerly on the bed beside her. Several minutes passed. "Want to tell me?" he said gently. She shook her head violently without looking up. (Continued on page #) The puzzle left by the Martians had to be solved. Could the four Terrans do it? Or was death to be the only answer that lay within... maze M y name is George Balmain. I am forty years of age -- or should it be a minus quantity? I am well known (Was? Will be?) as a compiler of the more esoteric type of puzzle published by the highbrow literary weeklies. My main claim to fame was, I like to think, the invention of the Three Dimensional Cryptic Crossword. A steady trickle of royalties from this source maintained me in a state of comfort if not of luxury. My Inc was pleasant enough for the times in which I lived -- the Cold War, with occasional flareups of "police activity", had been in progress for over a century, and most of us were able to keep the fear of the Hot War -- which would, of course, spell the end of civilization if not of the planet itself -- well below the surface of our minds. I was, of course, interested in Space Travel -- but it was largely a professional interest. After all, new words, new expressions, new technicalities were the tools of my trade. And I was interested in the Maze. This remarkable artifact had been uncovered by one of the frequent Martian dust storms. It was, so far as could be seen from the outside, a low building, devoid of all ornamentation, circular, about two Earth miles in diameter. It was built of closely fitting blocks of stone. Inside was a veritable warren, a labyrinth, of passages. People had gone in -- armed, with lights. with an ample supply of food and water and oxygen, with spools of strong thread to pay out behind them -- and had never come out. It must be, I always thought, no more than a huge puzzle -- and the penalty for failure to solve it must be death. Now and again I allowed myself to hope that I might, some day, be the man to solve the puzzle -- after all, the Martians were, according to the archaeologists, beings similar to ourselves. It was reasonable to suppose that their minds worked in a similar way. But I knew that my hopes were wild. I should never be able to afford a one way passage even to the Moon -- and, in any case. Mars was out of bounds to all but those on Governmental business. Even so, the Maze was a subject for conjecture. Using what scanty data I could lay my hands upon I wrote a series of articles on it. The third of this series was returned by the editor to whom it was submitted, accompanied by no more than a rejection slip. At the same time I noticed that no news or speculation concerning the Maze was being published in any newspaper or periodical, and that it was never mentioned by the TV news services. All of this, naturally, intrigued me the more. Even so, I never expected, some nine months after the rejection of my article, to find myself on Mars. I'll not go into details about the voyage -- I'm a poor spaceman and my belly takes kindly to neither acceleration nor free fall. Suffice it to say that I was interviewed in my home by two Senior Civil Servants, offered the opportunity of solving the Martian puzzle and then, before I had a chance to consider all the implications of my acceptance, sworn into the Space Navy Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant. It was not until I arrived on Mars that I was told what it was all about. It was the Admiral himself who told me. Not at once -- when I was shown into his office I found him working with one of my Three Dimensional puzzles. He was stuck on # North -- 'T leave the com and become mystified on Mars..." I told him that he, of all persons, should know that one. Take "I" from "maize" -- and what have you got? He cursed his stupidity, then asked me if I'd ever thought of having diagonals, and why not "Up" as well as "Down", and "South" and "West" as well as "North" and "East"? We chatted for a while about the mechanics of Crossword compiling, then he said, "You know, Balmain, it's my idea bringing you out here. I've always been a fan of yours. A mind like yours should be able to solve the puzzle -- and without wasting too much time about it." "And what is the urgency, sir?' I asked him. "War," he said. "Not tomorrow (we hope) -- but, perhaps, the day after. Our friends on the other side of the Curtain may soon be strong enough to launch a swift, decisive blow..." "But what's the Maze got to do with it?" "That's for you to find out. But I'll put you into the picture -- as much of a picture as we have at present. We've been pushing ships out as far as the Asteroids for quite some time now -- although the news hasn't been made public. We've learned a lot. We've learned that the war that devastated Mars, that all but sterilized her, wasn't a war between the Martian nations but a war with -- Outsiders. Outsiders from Planet Five." "Jupiter?" I asked. "iVo. Jupiter is Planet Five now. The old Planet Five was hit by something that blew it into the debris that is now the Asteroid Belt -- some super fission-fusion-fission bomb, perhaps. At about the same time the Maze was built -- and used. And after the Maze was completed intelligent life vanished from Mars." "How?" "That's for you to find out, Balmain. There are two theories: one is that the Martians were stricken by conscience and committed mass suicide; the Maze being or containing some sort of super weapon. ( It'd be nice to have...) The other is that the Maze offered some sort of escape from the vengeance of the warships that were in Space, and well clear, when Planet Five blew up. (That'd be nice, too...) "Anyhow, I'm sending you into the Maze tomorrow. I'm sorry that I can't give you time to get properly acclimatized -- but, as I've told you, time is the one thing that we're liable to be short of. I'll be sending three other Lieutenants in with you -- all volunteers. Hall is regular Navy. Welsh is a physicist. And Pontefract's one of our archaeologist'' "Pontefract Castle..." I muttered to myself. "Broken bridge... A castle that puts one in mipd of broken bridges..." The Admiral laughed. "She won't put you in mind of any castles or broken bridges." "Our Lieutenant Pontefract. You don't mind working with women, I hope?" "I don't know," I said. "I've never tried it before." I was favorably impressed by my three fellow explorers at first sight. Hall looked like what he was -- a professional spaceman, trained to react instantaneously in any emergency. Welsh, like myself, was an obvious civilian in uniform, in about the same age group. And Sue... (She's reading this over my shoulder as I write, but I'd have said what I'm saying now in any case.) She was in uniform, too. No doubt it was of the correct cut -- but she made it look, with her slim, dark elegance, like something straight from Paris ornamented with gold braid and buttons. She looked as much like a naval officer as she did like an archaeologist -- which was not at all. We'd barely time to get acquainted before we were hustled into the big turret-drive Spurling. The Admiral -- bulky in his outdoor clothing, his face all but hidden by his respirator, came out to see us off and wish us good luck. His pale blue eyes behind the thick glass of his goggles looked worried. Oh, I know that the eyes are supposed to be incapable of showing expression, and that ascribing expression to them is a literary fiction -- but his eyes looked worried. That flight, from the Spaceport to the Maze, was all I ever saw of Mars. (There had been a hemisphere-wide sandstorm the day I arrived and we had dropped down through a thick, yellow dust haze.) I saw the canals and the oases -- wide, weedy ditches in the desert, straggling clumps of scrawny, tattered shrubs and trees -- and the occasional ruined city with an odd, broken tower or two, survivors of atomic blast, of sandstorm, of erosion, still standing. I saw the sky that was too dark a blue, the sun that was too small and not bright enough. I saw the desert and the low, smoothly rounded hills, and the marching dust devils swirling across the arid waste. And then I saw the Maze. There was, at first glance, nothing spectacular about it. It was only when we were coming in for a landing that we could appreciate its size. Imagine a penny dropped on an orange tablecloth -- a slightly rumpled tablecloth. That's what it was like. When we had landed on the leeward side of it I saw that this penny had a thick rim -- a very thick rim, towering all of three hundred feet above our heads. The sight of all that dark brown stone, worn shiny-smooth by the wind and the sand, towering against the dark blue sky was, somehow, frightening. I had a moment of near panic, a feeling that I had bitten off rather more than I could chew, that this was one puzzle I'd never solve. Sue and Sam Hall were the effident ones. Whilst Bill Welsh and I were gawping through the ports at the Maze they were hustling round inside the cabin, getting equipment together, checking off various items and, eventually, practically forcing the respirators on to the heads of the physicist and myself. We said goodbye to the two pilots, clambered out through the little airlock on to the powdery sand. We slung equipment about ourselves until we looked like walking Christmas trees -- the light gravity had its advantages -- picked up other gear that we had stowed in carrier bags. "Now, puzzle expert," said Sue, her high, clear voice muffled by her respirator, "what do we do?" "Where's the door, archaeologist?" I asked her. "There are thirty doors," she said, "evenly spaced. A door every point two one -- give or take a couple of hundredths -- of a mile. Do you think that has any significance?" "I don't think so," I said. "The fact that this building is circular indicates that the actual point of entry is of no importance. ( I am assuming, of course, that the Martians thought as we do.) On the other hand, it might be as well not to use a door used by past expeditions. We know that they did not come out again." "Sound reasoning," said Sam Hall. "Number thirteen is the nearest -- we numbered the doors with paint. It hasn't been used yet -- some people are superstitious..." "I take it that it was an absolutely arbitary numbering system," I ? said. "Whoever did the marking just called the door that he started with 'One' and carried on from there... "That's the way it was," said Sue. "All right, then. We'll make it thirteen." Welsh and I followed Sue and Hall, who took the lead. The door -- the white numerals standing out boldly on the wall above it -- was lower than I had anticipated. I watched the others go down on to their hands and knees -- having first removed most of their equipment -- and crawl through. I stayed outside to pass the gear in to them. A screaming roar startled me. I saw that it was the Spurling. It had lifted on its jets, was slowly following us. It would land outside the door and wait there until we emerged, or until relieved. I wondered what would happen if we came out another way. There was no more gear to pass in. I backed into the Maze, making the end of the reel of stout line I carried fast to the pole we had placed athwart the entrance. I was surprised at the spaciousness of the chamber in which I found myself. Hall and Welsh were sitting on the floor, tinkering with the radio. "There's nothing wrong with it, Sam," Welsh was saying. "It's happened with every expedition. Once inside the Maze, the radio dies. We might as well leave it here." "No," said Hall. "We shall need it when we get out -- after all, we might come out through a different door." I joined Sue as she walked along the wall of the chamber. We shone the beams of our torches on the bas-reliefs. "Human," she said. "According to the biologists it couldn't have been so, shouldn't have been so. But every picture, every sculpture we've found tells the same story. Men and women..." "What about bones?" "There aren't any. They must have cremated their dead. We're hoping that we may find something eventually -- somebody who died by accident miles from a city and whose body was never found -- but we haven't done so yet. Well -- what do you make of all this?" "It seems fairly obvious," I said. "Those men and women, and, as you say, they could be a crowd from any city street on Earth in fancy dress, are all depicted walking the same way. It's an indication that we should do likewise." "We haven't much choice," she said. "The only other way out of this chamber is back outside." The others agreed. Before we passed through die door into the passage beyond I examined the carvings carefully, trying to find some clue. There was none, at least not so far as I could see. They depicted a procession of men, women and children, all in long robes and with strange headgear, all marching in the direction that we were taking. The passage we entered was narrow and we had to walk in single file. After some discussion Welsh took the lead -- he had some theory that I never quite understood about radio-activity in the Maze, and was carrying a counter of his own invention and manufacture. Sam Hall followed him, and then Sue. I brought up the rear, paying out the thin, strong cord behind me. The walls of the passage were smooth and dark, as was the floor. The only ornamentation -- if ornamentation it was -- was in the ceiling -- a stippling of light yellow dots, grouped, apparently, at random. The same pattern was evident on the ceiling of the circular chamber we entered. Besides the doorway we had come through there were three others. By common consent the choice was mine. I decided that the clue lay in the ceiling decoration. There were thirty ways into the Maze. We had to choose between three doorways. Over the one through which we had come was a group with exactly thirty dots. One of the other doors was marked with twenty nine, one with twenty eight and the other with twenty seven. Twenty eight and twenty seven might be, I decided, short cuts to the center of the Maze. Might be. After all -- I hadn't yet got into the mind of the long dead compiler of this puzzle. I threw the beam of my torch into the entrance over which were the twenty nine dots. I said, "This one." Once again Welsh, nursing his precious counter, took the lead. This tunnel was not straight, as the first one had been. The physicist rounded a bend with more enthusiasm than caution. We heard him cry out. We heard a thud like a heavy door, a heavy stone door, slamming back into place, We found the trap -- knowing that it was there. It was a flagstone, the entire breadth of the passageway, cunningly pivoted. We forced it down and open without any difficulty, revealing a polished chute that slid down, at a steep angle, into absolute blackness. Hall took a deep breath and then removed the facepiece of his respirator. He shouted. He shouted again. Apart from the booming echoes there was no answer. He unslung the radio transceiver from his shoulder, saying, "This is one piece of equipment that isn't much use." He held it over the chute, then dropped it. We never heard the sound it made when it hit bottom. "One of us," I said, "had better go back for help." I hurried back into the circular chamber. Of the doorway through which we had entered it there was no sign -- no sign, that is, save for the thin, white cord that seemingly vanished into a solid wall. The door, obviously, had been actuated by the pivoting flagstone. We did all the obvious things and a few that weren't so obvious. We might just as well have tried to open that door with our fingernails. It was then that we had the argument with Hall. It wasn't a question of courage -- he would never have held his rank in the Service of his choice had he not been brave beyond the average. But he didn't see things the way we -- Sue and I -- did. "I'm afraid we'll have to write Bill off," he said. "There must be some indication of a pitfall that he missed... "There is," I told him. "That tiny yellow star set into the floor." "Then that's a sign we'll have to watch for in future. Meanwhile, we can jump across the pivoted slab quite easily. It's hardly more than a long step..." "And leave Bill?" flared Sue. "Yes. He made a mistake, and paid for it. The way I see the layout of this Maze we're supposed to profit by his mistake. Furthermore, I need hardly remind you and George that you're both commissioned officers of the U.N.S.N. You have a definite mission to perform -- and it would be incorrect to jeopardize the success of this mission by risking all our lives to attempt the rescue of one man, who is probably dead." "If that's military logic," I told him, "I'm glad that I'm a civilian. But there're other kinds of logic, Sam. And I'm beginning to get faint glimmerings of the purpose of this puzzle. Only the fittest will survive to solve it." "Fitness for what? asked Hall. "I don't know, Sam. But I'm trying to put myself into the compiler's mind. He was humanoid -- or human. He had lived at a time when, no doubt, the military virtues were very much in fashion. He had seen one world wrecked by the exercise of these virtues, another one ruined. Therefore -- he would be inclined to think that some -- some, mark you, not all -- of the military virtues were not worth perpetuating." "Such as?" queried Sue. "Such as 'Orders is orders'. I think -- again, I may be wrong -- that loyalty to one's own kind is a virtue of far greater importance." "AU right," said Hall. "I still think that you're wrong -- but I'm going down." "I'm not wrong," I said. "If this had been a death trap there'd have been a vertical drop. All the same, I hope that our ropes reach to the bottom." but they didn't reach. Then, when we had Hall dangling at the extreme end of our tether, I slipped. I make no excuses for what followed. I let go of rope, put out my hands to steady myself. The rope was fast around my waist. I had made it fast myself. I don't think that I should ever be able to duplicate that hitch -- it had seemed secure enough. It didn't hold. After a long, horrid pause we heard Hall shouting. We could hear and recognize his voice but could not distinguish his words. There was only one thing for us to do. We rearranged the equipment with which we were hung, slung the carrier bags to our sides. Carefully we lowered ourselves into the chute in such a way that we were face to face and with our backs pressing against the polished sides. We let go. We did not have as much control over our movements as we had hoped -- even so, our descent was not suicidally rapid. We were able to slow down -- although it was a painful process -- when we heard confused shouting below us. Then, to our intense relief, the angle at which we were falling became far less steep. When, at last, we slid out to a horizontal, polished floor we had almost lost our momentum. My torch had been on the whole time. I swung the beam; it fell on Hall. He was bending over the body of Welsh. "Thank God for a light," he said. "Tm afraid that Bill's dead." He was right. The cause of death was obvious. The physicist must have struck the back of his head when he fell into the chute. I am sure that the designer of the Maze had not intended this, that it was just an unlucky accident. But it was irrevocable. We left him there. We didn't like doing it, but we had no choice in the matter. We left him in that hemispherical chamber with its polished floor and walls -- a tomb of which a Pharaoh would have been proud. But we did not leave him -- as the Pharaohs were left -- with the possessions that he would need in the next world. We took his water and his compressed food tablets. We took the oxygen cylinder from his respirator, and the spare one. We took his knife and his pistol. Hall, whose own torch had been smashed, succeeded in repairing it from the unbroken parts of the dead man's. Then we had to decide, once again, which way to go. To return up the chute was out of the question. As before, we had a choice of three doors. As before, we had the same random pattern of stippling as a guide. It was obvious to me that we had taken some sort of short cut. One doorway was marked with a group of fourteen dots, one with a group of thirteen, and the other with a group of twelve. I said that fourteen was a logical choice. "We took the logical choice before," said Hall. "And Bill's dead because of it." "It was accidental, his death," I said. "And if the numbers are any guide we have made more progress than we would have done had we taken the other doorways." Sue laughed shakily. "You're the crossword puzzle expert, George. Has it occurred to you that # was # down?" "It has," I said. "And it may be that this will be # down. I'll take the lead -- and I'll keep my eyes skinned for a little star in the floor." I saw the star in the floor. It was, as the other had been, just at a bend in the tunnel. We found the pivoted flag -- it opened over a chute similar to the other one. I thought at first that we should slide down it, then decided against it. The first chute had been both a warning and a test. The little yellow star was a warning. I switched my torch off, told the others to do the same. When our eyes became accustomed to the darkness we saw a dim, ruddy glow at the bottom of the chute. I pulled the glove off my hand, held it over the opening. I could detect the waves of heat striking my bare skin. "Whoever they were, they played for keeps," said Hall. "It's like one of those mazes they use to test the intelligence of rats," said Sue shakily. We threw one of our heavy packs over the pivoting flagstone. The floor on the other side seemed solid enough. Then Hall jumped over; he made the other end of his rope fast around my waist with his own hands. Sue went next. I brought up the rear, but resumed the lead when I was safely over. So we carried on. We wandered through a monotony of tunnels interspersed with hemispherical chambers. After the usual narrow, warning escapes we learned to be alert for booby traps, to distinguish the warning signs in floor or walls or ceiling. They weren't all visual. Then -- it was shortly after we had rested in one of the chambers to nibble our tasteless tablets and sip from our water bottles, we struck a new kind of booby trap; or, rather, it struck us. There was no warning -- or, if there was, it was one not apparent to our senses. There was a sudden flash -- not bright, although I thought at first that it had blinded me. I realized then that the torch in my hand was gone, that I was holding some queer object of irregular shape (it was the battery -- or part of the battery). The pack on my back was suddenly light. The facepiece of my respirator fell to pieces. But I could breathe comfortably. The air was quite dense, sufficiently rich in oxygen. That was all that I could do. I was completely baffled. Hall, however, was trained to work, if need be, in complete darkness. His hands must have been busy touching, feeling. When he spoke there was wonderment and admiration in his voice. "What a weapon!" he said. "What a weapon it would make!" "What was it?" I heard Sue ask. "Some sort of radiation that, somehow, destroys all metals. The casing of my torch -- all that's left in my hand is a sprinkling of very fine dust. My oxygen cylinders. My knife. My gun. The zipper of my coveralls... Well, George, you're the expert. What do we do now?" I waited until my own hands had verified the truth of Hall's statement. I said, "That was intentional." "You're telling me," replied Hall. "I mean that it wasn't a booby trap. We've been tested in various ways, and come through the tests. Now we've been reduced to the status of primitive man..." "All right. I believe you. What do we do now?" "The only thing we can do. Carry on." So we carried on in the pitch darkness. I stayed in the lead. Sue put her two hands on my waist, just above the hips. Hall, bringing up the rear, kept in touch with the girl in the same way. I shuffled ahead through the blackness. I was scared -- and had every right to be. I screamed when I felt the floor tilt beneath me. I heard Sue scream, and heard the spaceman curse. I tried to check my descent down the chute with knees and elbows, but could get no purchase on the polished sides. I was aware of light, and remembered the trap into which we had almost fallen. But this light was blue, and not red, and there was no fire waiting to receive us in the vast cavern into which we tumbled -- no fire but bitter cold that seared our exposed flesh almost as a flame would have done. The light seemed to have no source. It seemed to come from the air itself -- the dry, still, bitterly cold air. Our breath condensed into little clouds of sparkling frost crystals. "Keep moving!" shouted Hall. "Keep moving!" "Where to?" asked Sue reasonably enough. "Wait a minute," I said. "There's a clue here -- or another test. Or both." "What do you mean?" asked the others. "This cave is cold. It's meant to be cold. But here are the means of survival." I walked across to the untidy litter of dry sticks and twigs, kicked it. Judging by the sound it made, the wood was as dry as it looked. "So we're supposed to make a fire," said Sue slowly. Her voice was shaky -- but that was caused by cold rather than by fear. "Yes," I said. "How?" she asked. "You're an archaeologist, you should know. Or don't you study primitive man?" I squatted down, began rummaging in the debris. I found a flat piece of fairly soft wood, a straight stick with a fairly sharp point to it. "Primitive man knew how to make fire without pocket lighters." "Can you do it, George?" asked Hall. "I don't know, Sam. I've never tried before." I found another length of wood that would do for a bow, strung it with what remained of my reel of cord. (That cord was eventually of use to us.) I took a couple of turns with the bowstring round the pointed stick, stood on the flat piece of wood and held the pointed stick upright between my boots. I began to saw the bow back and forth. "I don't think that anybody will mind if we cheat a little," said Hall at last. "This is fascinating to watch -- but it seems to be a long time in getting results. Whatever the radiation was that destroyed our metals it didn't affect organic compounds. My pistol holster is full of dust -- and some of that will be the powder from cartridges..." He poured some of the dust from his holster into the hollow I had worn in the flat piece of wood. He tore pages from his notebook and placed them around the firestick. I resumed my sawing -- and did not have long to wait for results. I escaped with an only slightly scorched foot -- and in a very short time we had a cheerful blaze going. We sat down around it, grateful for the heat. We thawed our water bottles and drank. We nibbled the food concentrates with their delicate flavour of old sawdust. We began to feel a little better. We discussed the advisability of sleep, then decided against it. The problem of which way to continue our exploration next exercised our minds. It was Sue who pointed out that the smoke from our fire did not stream straight up but drifted ? lazily towards the far end of the cave. It was Sue -- she was catching on -- who suggested that we take with us torches and a good supply of spares. I agreed with her. The nature of this clue argued that we should have need of fire again. We trudged what seemed like miles over the dry, sandy floor. Now and again we came upon more deposits of the dry sticks and, but more rarely, evidence of long dead (how long dead we didn't care to think) fires. At last we reached the sheer, smooth cliff that was the far wall of the cavern. There was a strong draught into a gloomy tunnel mouth. We followed the smoke of our torches, making fair progress over the sandy floor. Other tunnels opened to left and to right of us, but we ignored them, following the smoke. We heard rustlings -- ahead of us, behind us -- in the side tunnels. We heard something croaking. I looked back -- and saw eyes glowing crimson in the torchlight. I heard Hall cry out -- and saw more eyes ahead of us. "Don't stop!" ordered Hall. "They, whatever they are, will be afraid of fire!" "They might be attracted by it," I said. "But, in any case, we're surrounded." Slowly we advanced. The glowing eyes ahead of us held their ground. There must have been at least six animals there, assuming that they had one pair of eyes apiece. Hall shouted. He lit another torch from the half consumed one in his hand. Waving both torches he ran forward. There was a scuffle and a high pitched squealing. The eyes vanished. The spaceman hurled one of his blazing brands after them. Something screamed. "Another of your tests, or lessons, or clues," panted Hall. "The lower animals are afraid of fire -- and they're more scared of us than we are of them. Lord! What a stink! It smells like a fire in a featherbed factory!" And then we saw light ahead -- not cold blue, not ruddy, but yellow, like sunlight a guess as to the extent of the next cavern. Its lofty roof was hidden by grey mists, as were the further walls. Furthermore, it was a huge hothouse teeming with luxuriWhat the trees and the shrubs were I cannot say. They were similar, perhaps, to rain forest growths on Earth. They bore no resemblance to the leathery, ragged trees on the surface of Mars. The air was hot, humid, and full of strange, strong scents that made us drowsy. We shed our outer clothing, but we didn't dare to leave either it or our equipment behind; neither did we dare to dump our torches and our supply of dried sticks. There was a path for us to follow. I didn't like it -- it was all too obviously made by the regular passage of some huge, heavy beast. But we had now no means of hacking our own way through the jungle. There were things in the undergrowth, aiiong the trees. We heard them rustling and calling to each other, but we never saw them. We hoped that they weren't hostile -- we had no weapons but our torches. Even so, we soon abandoned all attempts to walk silently. We weren't bushmen, and the only end achieved by our caution was to slow our progress. The thing that came after us wasn't cautious either. It didn't need to be. It was at least as large as an Earthly elephant and had a mouth that could have swallowed a cow. I can't describe it. I didn't stop to look at it. "Run!" I yelled to Sue, gave her a push that sent her reeling down the track. I wasted no time in following her. I assumed that Hall would follow suit. As I have said before, he was a brave man. But bravery, carried to extremes, is foolhardiness, I heard him yell, and paused in my flight. I turned round and saw him. He wasn't running, he was walking. He was walking towards the monster, waving a flaming torch in each hand. Perhaps it had never seen fire before -- in any case fire is not nearly so impressive when seen in broad daylight or its equivalent. The beast never even paused in its ponderous advance. One massive, armored foot smashed Hall into the ground. He started a scream, but never finished it. There was nothing that I could do. When I resumed my flight I saw that Sue had vanished. It was another of those pitfalls of which the maker of the Maze was so fond. I found it when the ground opened suddenly beneath me -- and not a moment too soon either. Once again I was in darkness, once again I was falling. But this time it was different. On past occasions it had been a straight drop; there had been no gut wrenching twists, no sensation of being turned inside out, no consciousness of the passage of aeons of time. I was sprawled on soft grass -- by the feel of it -- and somebody was holding me very tight. I opened my eyes, and saw Sue's face. I saw the sky -- the night sky and the stars, and the yellow, full moon, with its familiar markings, almost at the zenith. My body, when I tried to raise myself to a sitting posture, was oddly heavy. "I thought you were never coming through," she said. I asked, absurdly enough, "Where am I?" I saw her smile. "There's your clue," she said, pointing to the moon. "We're on Earth. But just where I can't say. Somewhere in the Tropics is my guess... "There must be a town or village close by," I said. "We must get to a radio transmitter at once." "Must we?" she asked. "Con we?" "What do you mean?" "While I was waiting for you I saw a tiger -- but far bigger than any tiger I've ever seen in a zoo. And it had teeth too long for its mouth..." "Sue! What are you suggesting?" "Oh, I know it's fantastic. But we've quite calmly accepted the idea of teleportation through Space. It's been through Time as well. Don't ask me how, or why..." "You can ask me why," I said. "It's all beginning to make sense. The Maze isn't a puzzle so much as a school -- a school designed to teach lessons in primitive living. Our last lesson -- but I wish we hadn't learned it at Sam's expense -- is that it is sometimes wiser to run than to stand and fight... "But what for?" she asked. "This is only a guess," I said, "but will have to do. There was -- or will be -- this war between the Martians and the beings of the Fifth Planet. Mars was ruined -- the Fifth Planet utterly destroyed. But the Fifth Planet must have had a large and dreadfully armed fleet that survived the catastrophe. The surviving Martians escaped both in Time and Space. "They decided to start from scratch, literally, on Earth, They knew that if they built up a technological civilization too fast they might either attract the attention of their enemies or, possibly, develop space travel and interfere with their own history as Martians. I don't know if you've read any time travel stories -- but they're full of paradoxes. The makers of the Maze were determined to avoid them." "You may have something," she said slowly. "It may account for the true men co-existing with the Neanderthaler. Neanderthal Man must have been the aborigine -- his supplanter an invader... Something roared not too far away. Something else screamed. We remembered the last lesson of the Maze and spent what should have been -- but somehow wasn't -- a miserable night in a tree. We survived. We found ourselves a cave when the daylight came and moved in. We used the powder remaining in my holster to start a fire. We learned -- sometimes by painful experience -- what berries were edible and what weren't. We managed to snare the occasional not-quite-rabbit. I even -- and of this I still feel proud -- managed to make a quite deadly bow and a set of arrows. It brought down a small deer. In a way I am sorry that our lonely life is now finished -- but we have decided to join the band of nomads who have camped in oiu: valley. They're friendly enough people, and I don't think that we shall have much trouble in learning their language. They have spears, but not the bow -- Sue tells me no depiction of a bow has ever been found in Martian records or statuary -- so it looks as though I shall be able to make quite a good living by manufacturing that weapon. Sue tells me, too, that they are, at the most, but two generations removed from the original Martian colonists. There is very little pencil left, and I am on the last sheet of paper. I will bury this record, and then we will go to join -- but not in the Biblical sense -- our ancestors. "But we're ancestors ourselves," wander up the hull of the huge silver ship. He thought; if only Tomer were here now! He caught himself and quickly erased the thought before he remembered more... things that were better left alone, hidden behind the thin veil he had created in his mind. The quick blink of a signal light from the tower caught the comer of his eye. H-hour minus fifteen minutes. The ground crews had cleared the area. He hadn't noticed. He turned to the huge, blond man standing beside him. "Well, Allen. This is it. I've checked everything myself. You should have no trouble. Be sure and strap yourself in tightly and don't forget to check the gyro. Its the only thing we can't double check from the tower." "You're all through instructing There are all kinds of heroes. And the irony of it all lies in the fact that the bravest are those who are unknown and unsung. now, teacher" the blond man said. "I can take it from here. And I can't say I'm sorry." Wade wanted to say then all the little things that had been building up within him during the past long months. He bit back the words. It took much effort. He said: "Good luck, Captain. I really mean it." Allen gave him a tight smile. "Drop dead. Colonel." Wade dropped his outstretched hand as the big man ignored him. Ackerson turned his back and began to climb the metal rungs leading up the hull of the ship. Tomer, Wade thought. If only it could be Tomer instead of Ackerson. He waited until the blond man entered the hatch before he climbed into the jeep. He glanced once more at the silver hull of the Starfrosty then he jammed down on the accelerator. Hate was a word Wade seldom used. There was too much of it in the world already. But he was beginning to hate Ackerson. He parked the jeep beside the concrete and steel structure housing Operations. The instant his hand touched the door handle he tried to cease being Wade Boeman the man. He tried to become Colonel Wadon G. Boeman, senior officer in charge of 'Operation Boomerang,' with no personal feelings. It didn't come off fully. The four walls were lined with banks of instruments. Small lights flickered and died, only to come alive again the next instant. A man coughed. He nodded at a communications man, a civilian, as he hurried to the small table where the television set was resting. The closed circuit showed the Star frost resting alone on the sand with her nose pointed toward the sky. He took off his cap, then lighted a cigarette. He checked his wrist watch with the large clock on the wall. He set the sweep second hand to coincide with the larger one. "Twelve minutes. Colonel," someone behind Wade said. He wiped his dry lips as he flicked his eyes in the direction of the Major in charge of the control panel. The Major gave him a tight smile. Wade nodded. Major Gormely was a good man... they were all good men. Wade felt proud to be part of the team. He took in the radar man checking the never-ending sweep of the beam. Frank Piluis, a tall, lanky man of twenty-three. He was checking the screen, adjusting, as if his own life depended on its operation instead of a man he hardly knew. Wade checked his own screen again. The Starfrost was so silent... so latent... so important. Wade found Tomer creeping into his thoughts again. He shut the thought out quickly. Wade was a military man. He had orders to forget Tomer. He gave orders. He also had to take them. Wade became mindful of someone standing behind him. He turned. The man was tall, wearing the cloak of authority in the very way he smiled. Distinguished looking streaks of gray ran over his once brown hair. Tiny wrinkles at the eyes told that he was a man with a sense of humor even though pressed with responsibility. "A penny for your thoughts, Wade," The Secretary of Defense said as Boeman got up. Wade wondered if the man had been in the control room all the time. He hadn't seen him. "They aren't worth it, Harry," he answered, offering his hand. "As bad as that," the Secretary laughed. "Here we are on the edge of a History making moment and you're wasting your time with worthless thoughts." Worthless thoughts. Wade wondered if they were, really. Wade first met Harry Lowe a long time ago when the project was just a dream on the drawing boards. Since that time he had come to know the Secretary intimately. Now, suddenly, he felt awkward before the man. Perhaps it was because Lowe seemed to have a special talent for reading peoples' expressions, converting them into sentences. Like now, Wade felt the man was reading his face like a book. "That's right, Harry. History is being made isn't it?" The Secretary's face became very serious. "More than that, Wade, Perhaps salvation depends on it." "Ten minutes," a voice said. Wade nodded at the technician. Tiny lights came into play on the control panel as Major Gormely began closing circuits. The communications man made a final type check on the huge P.C.R. set. Starfrdst. This is Mother. How do you read me? Over." "Mother. This is Starfrost. Loud and clear. Five by five." Ackerson's strong voice came from the loudspeaker located in the center of the equipment. "Oxygen checks. I've bedded down. Give the Colonel my love." The radio man looked at Wade, There had been no mistaking the sarcasm in Ackerson's voice. Wade felt his face grow red. "He hasn't changed," he heard the Secretary say. "No. He hasn't changed." Wade said softly. "Don't let it throw you, Wade. "You've done a good job. We both know that nothing counts but the Project." Nothing counts but the project. Personal feelings, ideals, not even human lives. Nothing counts but the project. How many times had he said that to himself, trying to be convincing. "It's Tomer. Isn't it?" the Secretary said. Wade's eyes locked with those of the older man. There was no sense going over that now. They had had it out a dozen times already. "That and other things," he said. "Like Ackerson's attitude, I suppose." "Like Ackerson's attitude." The Secretary gave a tight smile. "We all have reasons for doing things, Wade. To you this is a military feat that could spell security for years to come. To me it does that and more. It could be the opening of a new frontier, something that will provide a new outlet for humanity instead of war." Wade said: "And to Ackerson it will mean fame and fortune. Nothing more. His name will go in the history books. There will be personal appearances, contracts, money. He has no feelings at all about what this will mean to his country." The Secretary nodded. "You're a professional military man, Wade, You're making it your life. I understand how you feel." Wade laughed bitterly, inside. Did Harry know how he felt? Did he think that military men were just brass and polish with no feelings, no friends to worry about, no cares outside of regulations and orders! "Eight minutes." The voice came again. Wade left the Secretary, went to the mike resting on the communications desk. "Starfrost, This is Mother," he said. "Go ahead. Mother." Ackerson recognized his voice. "Double check everything. Repeat. Double check everything, oxygen, hammock straps, loose objects, everything." "Relax, Mother! You sound like you're going to have another baby." Ackerson laughed over the loudspeaker. Wade gave the mike back to the radio man carefully. He walked back to the small television screen and sat down. The Star frost looked like a silver monument standing alone out there on the sand. Soon there would be nothing there but sand. Wade felt like a mother hen waiting for her first egg. He adjusted the contrast, brightened the picture. Perhaps the Secretary was right. Everyone had their reasons for doing things. He wondered what Tomer's were? "Do you think he will make it, Wade?" The Secretary sat down on the edge of the desk. He looked out of place. He should have been behind one, a large mahogany one. "I think he will," Wade said softly. "The test ship we sent made it. There is no reason to believe a ship with a man in it should fail." "Do you want him to make it?" The words jarred Boeman. He searched the lcretary's face. "Of course I do. What makes you say a thing like that?" The Secretary toyed with his tie. He said nothing. Wade got up. He could feel the anger begin to seep through his body. "You know what this trip means to me -- to the country." He faced the gray-haired man squarely. "If you're insinuating that I want him to fail because I disagree with his reasons for volunteering, you're wrong. Dead wrong." Wade found himself lighting a cigarette. "Sure. I dislike Ackerson. Dislike him violently. I've taken more lip from him in the past months then I've taken during my entire life. And when he returns that will be finished or I'll finish him. One way or another." Wade inhaled deeply. "It's the project that counts. Only the project. It's bigger than one man... it's bigger than all of us put together." Lowe smiled. His face seemed younger. "I knew you felt that way, Wade. I just wanted you to say it for your own benefit. Perhaps it will make this entire thing easier for you." The Secretary moved then, over to the communication panel. "Three minutes," someone said. Wade looked at the narrow back of Harry Lowe. And he knew how the man became Secretary of Defense. It was shrewd getting him to open up like that. They both knew how lucky they were to have Allen Ackerson. Finding men capable of making such a flight hadn't been easy. Of the dozen volunteers only Ackerson remained. Mental and physical tests had eliminated all but a few. Those remaining were unfit for space travel, weeded out by the psychological teams, unable to cope with the morbid phobia of being alone so long wrapped in a metal cocoon. Only Ackerson and Tomer had succeeded. Now there was only Ackerson. "Colonel!" Wade turned and faced the rawboned sergeant standing beside him. Meyers was a big man with a deep tan browning his face. "What is it, sergeant?" Meyers handed him a large white envelope. "Captain Ackerson said to give this to you just before take-off." "Thanks, sergeant." "Two minutes," someone said. Wade stuffed the envelope inside his jacket. Then he hurried over to the radar man. The envelope had to wait, there was no time now. "Are we set?" he asked. The man nodded as he adjusted the dials. Wade smiled. These men were experts in their fields. To double check them would be to insult them. Besides, this wasn't the first time for them. The same crew had been operating when they fired the test rocket. He knew they wouldn't fail. "One minute... #... #... #... Wade found himself counting under his breath while he stared at the small screen on the table. Would the reactors work? They would go on at #. And the Starfrosti Would it lift -- or would it, like some others before it, slowly hesitate, then begin a weird, frightening slide to the side to become a flaming blowtorch of death. "#!" Major Gormely closed the switch. Wade became conscious of the Secretary watching the screen with him. "... #... #... #... #..." The counter continued. The Starfrost shivered. Wade felt his heart skip a beat. Slowly, ever so slowly, the huge ship began to move. Dust, sand and smoke mingled with the sheets of flame pouring from her stern. The platform disappeared in a puff of smoke. The Starfrost lifted. "Thank God!" the Secretary sighed. "Amen." Wade muttered. He took out another cigarette. He was glad it had begun; the project. Now there was only the long wait. "Ackerson's a brave man." The Secretary said. "Of course he is." Wade never had any doubts about Allen's intestinal fortitude. The man had a good war record. Confidence seemed to ooze out of the man. It was his attitude, damn it. Wade drew deeply on the cigarette. Tomer had been the same type in many ways. Eager, filled with the enthusiasm, unafraid. A small man compared to the blond Ackerson, he seemed to carry himself tall. And his attitude. He felt the same intensity about National defense as Boeman did himself. Perhaps that was another reason he had felt close to the boy. Tomer would have made this trip with no thought whatsoever about the financial rewards or what the history books would have to say about him... Sixty thousand... someone said. "Start communication," Wade commanded automatically. "Romeo." The commo picked up the small hand mike. All eyes in the room centered on the silent speaker on the wall. ""Starfrost. This is Mother. How do you read me, over?" The speaker remained silent. frost. Can you read me. Over!" The Secretary looked at Wade. His face was tight and drawn. "What do you think, Wade. Are we getting through?" "It's hard to say. He's moving pretty fast. He could outrun the signal. We've never had a practical voice test." Lowe's face had a worried expression covering it. "Didn't you have communications with the test rocket?" "That was unmanned... remember?" "This silence doesn't worry you?" the Secretary asked with amazement. "Ackerson was trained for this. He knows there is nothing we can do for him. Hes on his own. Communications would be to our advantage, to be sure. But Ackerson knows that ship like you know the back of your hand. Besides... , perhaps he is too busy to answer right now. He has to be sure there is no wobble." "Wobble!" "Sure. The ship could begin to oscillate. If it does that he is done. He has to keep his eye on the gyro." The Secretary's eyes penetrated. "I can't help but feel that you would be more concerned if Tomer were in the Star frost instead of Ackerson. Wade... don't let the fact that you hate Ackerson cloud the issue. He is doing us a great service." "Stop it, Harry!" "After all. The first man to circle the Moon is entitled to a place in the history books. I can share his feelings, in a way. It's a great thing he's doing." "Others have done more," Wade said sharply. "Of course they have. But remember one thing. If Ackerson succeeds we will get the appropriations we need to build up there on that cold chunk of rock. We need that... need it badly." "I tell you we have nothing to worry about yet," Wade said quick"Have it your way, Wade. But remember, we can't land on the Moon until we have appropriations for installations. It all takes money; landing sites, protection against the elements, and most important, takeoff facilities. It's a big order. Ackerson can give us all of that if he is successful. The public will back us to the limit if we prove we have mastered space travel." The Secretary watched Wade carefully. "Ackerson is important!" "I never said he wasn't." "I know, Wade." The Secretary toyed with his tie. "But did you let your feelings toward Tomer interfere with your attitude toward Ackerson! He came to me you know, about halfway through the course. He said you were babying Tomer to the point where it was interfering with his instruction." "He lied," Wade cut in. He threw down the cigarette he was holding and ground his heel into it. "You know me better than that!" "Of course. But perhaps Ackerson did have something. Perhaps you spent mpre time with Tomer than you intended. Unconsciously you may have favored him to the point where Ackerson did suffer." Wade let his eyes wander over to the small television screen. It was still operating. Flat, empty sand and a burned out area was all that remained of the Star frost He wondered: Did I do that? Did I forget to teach Ackerson something while I was working with Tomer? The loud-speaker crackled. "Mother. This is Starfrost Over." The operations room came alive. Wade and Lowe hurried over to stand beneath the speaker, as if that would put them closer to the Starfrost, "Go ahead, Starfrost This is Mother." The communications man held the mike in a hand that wasn't quite as steady as it should be. "This is Starfrost, Everything in the green. Repeat, everhing in the green. Over." Wade took the mike. "How is the gyro, StarfrostV The loud-speaker laughed. "Tsk, tsk. Colonel. Where is your radio procedure? You forgot to say over." There was a pause and Boeman knew why. "Don't tell me you're worrying about ole Ack. I've got this thing sewed up. Why don't you take a walk around the park and see if you can find that little guy? What was his name? You know the one I mean. The one who got cold feet and dropped out before you finished feeding him. Over." Wade handed the mike back to the commo man without a word. He looked at the Secretary. Lowe's eyes cautioned him. Wade swallowed the things he was going to say. Orders. Damn them. He wanted to stick a pin in Ackerson's ego. And it would be so easy. So damn easy. Orders. He gave them and he had taken them. Wade turned and got the mike again. "This is Mother. Keep an eye on the hull temperature. Watch that gyro. If you feel the slightest vibration be sure to start the auxiliary immediately. Over." "Romeo, Mother. Take care of my letter. I -- " the speaker became silent. Major Gormely moved like a blur of light. Wade knew what was wrong the instant he looked at the pip on the radar scope. Major Gormely hurriedly began checking instruments. But he had seen too. The equipment was in order. It was the Starfrost. It had all indications of a "wobble". "This is serious, isn't it, Wade?" Boeman didn't look at the Secretary when he answered. His eyes were glued to the radar scanner. "Pretty much. It could be the end if he doesn't catch it in time." "What can we do!" "Nothing but wait. He isn't finished yet. He has the extra gyro. That should do it. If not he can try the fuel as a last resort. It's only theory plus but he might be able to blast something with substance against the dorsel fin. If he plays it carefully he might be able to give the gyro a hand. It will be tricky but we think it can be done." "What effect will that have on the mission? He has only so much fuel!" "He can waste thirty seconds. After that he is cutting himself short on the leg home." "The wobble stopped," Major Gormely said quickly. It was true. The course was slightly erratic but Ackerson had the Starfrost back under control, Wade wiped the back of his hand over his lips. Suddenly he felt tired and old. He wanted to sit down. "Keep trying on the radio, Mike," he said. He walked over to the small table with the television set on it. He switched it off. He didn't want to look at that empty sand. He lighted another cigarette. Then he reached inside his blouse and withdrew the letter Ackerson had left for him. He didn't want to read it. For the first time he had felt close to the blond man... felt sorry for him. The letter could say something to change that. "Why don't you read it, Wade?" the Secretary said. Wade looked up quickly. The Secretary was smiling with that know-all look of his. Wade reached in his pocket and brought out the pack of cigarettes. Then he caught himself. But the older man hadn't missed the one smoldering in the ashtray. A tight smile creased Wade's face. He felt like a small boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "I know a nice quiet spot in upper New York. Phonecia! There's a nice trout stream beside the only hotel. The people are simple and tolerant. And there is a small, private bar where a man can really relax. I think I'll go up there for a few years when this is all over." "Now you're reading my mind." the Secretary said. They both laughed. "Seriously, Wade. I think you should take a long rest when this is over. A man with your knowledge of the human body should realize that you're fighting fatigue. In fact I've already spoken to General Dominick about it." Wade shook his head. "You know I can't do that. I've got another job I have to take care of first." "Tomer?" "Of course." "I thought we settled on that. Someone else can take over in your place and handle that. You can supervise if you wish. But not until after you've had a rest." "You know better, Harry. This is my baby and I'll handle it. It isn't that I haven't tried to keep him out of my mind. I have. Yet he always comes back to haunt me. If not because of my own feelings, then it's Ackerson reminding me. It's no use. I can't rest with him on my mind." "Not even when you've had orders?" Wade snuffed out the cigarette. "I'm finding out that feelings can sometimes rebel against orders." "That isn't a good trait for an Army Officer to acquire." Wade's face took on a sardonic expression. "No. It isn't, is it?" he said softly. The time piece on the wall was broken. It had to be. Wade had been watching it for hours and it hardly seemed to move. The Starfrost had disappeared behind the dark side of the Moon and a press release had been duly passed on to the anxious public. The world was electrified. Man had ventured into space. The public hadn't been told that there was no communication with the Starfrost, It was better that way. Wade fished for another cigarette as he followed the sweep second hand with his eyes. It was ironic, in a way. Man had ventured to the Moon and could not land. He dared not. To set foot on the cold, dead satellite when there was no possible way of return would be inviting suicide. The test rocket fired at the silent world, and the St at frost had eaten up the last of the appropriations and it would take a battery of ships to car the supplies necessary for the building of take-off facilities. That was what Wade wanted, an installation on the Moon before another nation could make it. It was no secret that the nation that controlled the Moon in the next war would be in the driver's seat. It would be a fortress in the sky. And it was no secret that another nation was almost ready to launch a ship. Wade wanted to get there first. Wade could feel the sweat on his hands. They felt cold and clammy. The Star frost should have reappeared on the radar set an hour ago. He dared not think of what would happen to Ackerson if the big blond man miscalculated while in orbit. To shoot off alone into black, empty space, hurtling out into a void of nothing, where there was only a cold, quiet death awaiting was no way for a man to die. Damn it. Where was that silver cocoon? Ackerson had to make it. Everything depended on the success of the Starfrost, "I think I've got something," Major Gormely cried. Wade came out of his dream world with a rush. His swift steps covered the distance to the radar set in a matter of seconds. Gormely was bending over working with Pilius. And it was there... a tiny speck that could only be one thing. Wade heard himself mutter: "Thank God!" The control room became a beehive of excitement. These men were accustomed to success in the face of overwhelming pessimism. Yet this was almost the ultimate. They were part of a team that had projected an earthbound object into space. Now it was coming home. "Operation Boomerang" was nearing fulfilment. The long hours of sweat and worry were beginning to pay off. The cork was ready to burst out of their bottled up emotions. Sergeant Meyers' face was beaming. He was exuberant with excitement. "I guess that calls for a drink." He took Wade by the arm. "I've been saving a quart of homemade com for just this occasion." Suddenly Meyers stopped. His tan face became a gray mask. "... pardon me, Colonel... sir!" He came to rigid attention. Wade laughed heavily. "I think one drink would be in perfect order, sergeant. Where do you hide this liquid cob?" Meyers' face became bright again. He almost tripped as he tried to salute, about-face, and run at the same time. He was going out the door when he called back over his shoulder. "In the water closet on one of the thrones in the latrine... Sir." ruined Allen Ackerson's exit. He had the staff car pick up the pilot as soon as the hull of the Starfrost cooled. The official car had sped back over the barren sand, through the waiting throng of newsmen, straight to the small office located in the control building, without a stop. To say that it peeved Ackerson would be putting it mildly. His face was still burning with anger after twenty minutes of interrogation. Wade knew it was only the presence of the Defense Secretary keeping him in line. For that reason he tried to keep each question brief and simple. Ackerson was dying to get outside that door and receive some of the acclaim that he was being denied. "You say you had a chance to look at the test rocket we fired?" Wade asked. "Yes sir. It was resting in a red crater, fairly well beat up. It must have come down hard. In fact it looked like it may have struck a wobble at the last minute. Of course the terrain is pretty rough up there and it could have toppled after it hit. I'm sure the camera shots I took will tell us much more." Wade felt a sudden twitch in his shoulder. "You said the crater was red." "Yes, sir. A bright red. I thought it was strange. It was as if something spilled out of the ship when she hit." Wade and the Secretary exchanged glances. "It was a marking dye so you could pick up the location of the ship," Wade said too quickly. Allen twisted his head as the sound of many voices pierced the quiet room. Someone cheered loudly, Allen shifted his large frame. "How was she lying?" Wade asked. Allen brought his attention back to the two men. It was obvious, he was becoming annoyed. "Down tail-first. The nose section looked intact. That's what makes me believe she took on a wobble at the last second. The nose should have been buried out of sight." Another cheer forced its way into the room. Suddenly Allen burst out. "Tell me, Colonel. How's Tomer these days. You remember, that little guy who quit on you just before the training ended." The words had the effect the big man had hoped for. Boeman came out of the chair. His face was a vivid white. "You..." he began. The Secretary moved quickly. He was between the two men before Wade could continue. "That's all for now Captain Ackerson," he said, "or should I say Mister Ackerson. Your papers have been processed as you wished. You're a civilian, after sixty days terminal leave, of course." Ackerson watched the play of emotions on Wade's face. He was enjoying every second of it. Wade wanted to smash that smug face all over the floor. Yet he was powerless. Ackerson was still an officer and there was too much left undone to risk everything now. He sat back down on the chair. There would be time when the blond man was a civilian. "Thank you, sir." Allen grinned. The Secretary extended his hand. "Congratulations again for a job well done." They shook hands. "Don't forget, Ackerson," Boeman said as Allen hurried to the door. "The next week is mine. Solid interrogation. You're still in the service." "And one more thing, Ackerson. I know your communication was working. Why didn't you answer our calls?" "I thought that would make you sweat a little. I can see that it did." The door slammed shut. Neither man spoke when the door closed behind Ackerson. The silence was long. Finally it was Boeman who moved. He opened the top left drawer of the desk and withdrew a small glass and a bottle. He poured a drink and offered it to the Secretary with a glance of his eyes. The Secretary shook his head. Boeman lifted the tumbler to his lips and poured the liquid down with a quick motion. He made a face as it burned. He poured another, toyed with it before he tossed it down. "Well, he made it." Boeman said finally, placing the empty glass on the desk. "To the Moon and back -- non stop." "You knew he would, didn't you." Boeman nodded, staring at the glass. There was another awkward silence as both men were wrapped in thought. "Disappointed, Wade?" "Not disappointed. Disgusted." "He gave us what we wanted. The appropriations will be easy now." "I know." "Then what's wrong. Certainly you can't blame Ackerson fully. He doesn't know the entire story." "Perhaps that's what's wrong. If I could just tell the full story I might feel better." "Impossible. Gan you imagine the entire nation carrying a load on its back the way you are now?" Wade laughed bitterly. "It might wake them up." "I understand, Wade. My insides feel it too. But let him be the hero." "He will be," Wade said, reaching for the bottle again. "He will be." "Then let him. We have more important things to think about now." The Secretary got up. Wade grasped the empty tumbler in the palm of his hand, squeezing tightly. "Ackerson said red." "I know," replied the Secretary. "Red means danger. The crater should have been stained yellow." "Perhaps there was a mix-up in containers." "You don't believe that, Frank." "But the radio is still operating! A steady C.W. beam is coming in. If there was any danger we would be getting code." Wade forced a smile. "You should have been a minister. There is always hope... is that it?" The Secretary placed his hat carefully on his head. "I'd better get over to the lab and take a look at those movies he took." "It must be so lonely... Boeman said loosely. "Perhaps not. Tomer was a quiet man. Those kind don't seem to mind." A sudden, loud cheer broke the near silence in the room. Wade glanced toward the window. Then he got up slowly with the action of an old man. He went to the window and looked out. Ackerson was being carried through a path of humanity aloft on dozens of shoulders. He was waving to the hundreds of wellwishers as he was carried toward the battery of microphones waiting on the wooden platform erected for the occasion. Wade couldn't help but think of a hero of another age. Lindbergh. It must have been the same then. And who remembered those that followed him? Or those that paved the way so he could make it? Wade shook his head. He turned away from the window quickly, heading for the desk and the bottle. The Secretary followed him with his eyes, undecided. Boeman lifted the bottle high above his head in a toasting gesture. "To the hero," "Don't, Wade." The bottle paused there while the eyes of the two men met. Finally the bottle returned to the desk as Wade surrendered. Then he slumped down in the chair. The Secretary placed his hand on Wade's shoulder. Boeman shook it off, and he was sorry instantly. "O.K. Frank. You win. Ackerson wins." "Good," the Secretary said softly. "That's the way we want it. We have to prevent everyone from feeling the way you do now. It isn't that you're jealous of Ackerson getting the glory. And you know that Tomer doesn't mind. It's your worrying about him that's clouding your mind. Everyone would be feeling the same way." The Secretary looked out the window. "We couldn't have that. It would have set space travel back years. Ackerson is powerful evidence that space flight is safe. Tomer is our insurance. We need that just as badly. We had no choice. We had to stake a claim on the Moon." Wade poured another drink. "And that conceited ass is getting all the credit while Tomer is sweating it out up there on that cold chunk of rock -- while everyone thinks he quit the project because he got cold feet." "True." The Secretary shook his head. "But Tomer is our ace-inthe-hole if the iron curtain announces their intentions to land up there. "Tomer can be contacted. He can set off the signal for the world to see. In the meantime we will be working to make the next flight a complete one. It won't take long. Tomer will manage." "But Ackerson said the crater was red!" "I know. And I'm wasting time talking with you. I should be looking at those movies he took." Wade didn't watch the Secretary leave. He picked up the bottle and glass and went to the window. Down on the ramp the P.A. began to crackle. Ackerson was beginning his speech. Wade took out the letter that Ackerson had sent to him. He took out a match and touched the flame to it. It was better that way. He was finished with Ackerson. He had a job to do now, one that would consume him. He had to get the Star frost II underway. He had to get there to get Tomer. Suddenly he understood. There were all kinds of heroes. Men like Ackerson were driven by the lure of fame and money. Tomer became one because the job had to be done and there was no one else to do it. Lowe was one, in a way, fighting for peace against a world that was always in unrest. In a way Wade himself might fall in one category. The thought made him smile. The Secretary was right, of course. The public would crucify them if they knew Tomer had been in the supposedly unmanned test rocket fir at the Moon with no way home. Wade lifted his drink high in the air as Ackerson's deep voice carried into the room from the ramp below. "To a hero," he said. "A lonely hero." Wade's eyes were on the sky when he said it, on a spot where the Moon would be some hours dated March #, are still available. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April #; Febru, April, June, August, October, December #. Only # each postpaid. Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. what Is Your Science I. Q.? than # means you'd better bone up. Answers on page #. #. What is the only compound of platinum known to occur in nature? #. inches of snow is equal in water content to I inch of water. #. Using chain measure, how many chains equal I statute mile? #. The average weight of the human brain is ounces. #. What shape is a sphenoid? #. The melting point of Sodium is C, #. What is the name of the deepest spot in the ocean? #. A number that cannot be resolved into two or more factors is called a . #. The tilt of the Earth's axis is degrees away from the perpendicular. #. Which of the following two chemical elements has the longest "life" -- Curium or Rhodium? #. Which unit of weight is the same in avoirdupois, troy and apothecary weight? #. Southwest by south would be degrees minutes south of due southwest. #. The actual curvature of the surface of the Earth for the first mile of visibility is about . #. What is the name given to that region of the air which is the dividing line between the troposphere and the stratosphere? #. Schizogenesis is a term used to describe reproduction by . #. In what months is the axis of the Earth at right angles to the sun? #. A scruple is a measure of weight equal to grains. #. The potential diflference between a terminal and a neutral point of a # phase armature is called the potential. #. The anthropological term Pithecanthropus refers to the man. #. Air rests on the Earth's surface with the weight equal to a layer of water feet deep. no (Continued from page #) allow me to deliver him into the hands of friends, deliver him alive and safe. In return, I promise that your twelve-year-old body will leave this Earth virtually at once. I will send it to the colony on Mars, where it will stay until adulthood. Will you allow this?" The Scholar's smile was thin. "And that is your only condition?" "My only one!" "Doctor -- " Ron stepped towards him. "You can't leave things as they are -- " you let Ron Carver live his life in peace?" The Ron-body stiffened. "Yes," he snapped. "Ron -- " the doctor waved towards him. "Hand him your gun." "What?" "Give it to him! We've made a pact." Ron hesitated, and then extended the butt towards the Scholar. He took it with a slight bow, weighed it in his palm, and then slipped the weapon into his pocket. "You did wisely," the doctor said, with noticeable relief. "If you had turned that gun on us. Scholar, I would have killed you on the spot." He patted the metallic bulk beneath his own coat. "I came prepared, too..." The copter rose serenely towards the heavenly vault. Ron's small body was feeling the effects of the day's strain. It collapsed against the leathery cushions, the short arms and legs limp and dangling. The doctor patted his knee. "Another few moments," he said. "Where are we going?" "To the spaceport in Winnipeg. I have a friend there. He has two children of his own, both born in the Mars Colony. He'll be returning there within the week." "And you want me to go with him?" "Yes, Ron. I want you to grow up all over again, and then return to Earth. It won't be easy for you, but there will be advantages. Your life span has been lengthened. And right now, you know, you're something of a prodigy yourself." He chuckled dryly. "And what happens here?" Ron said bitterly. "What kind of Earth will I find on my return?" "An older Earth. Perhaps a wiser Earth..." "No, doctor." Ron forced himself to a sitting position. "Not with the Scholar alive and thriving, growing stronger and more intelligent with every passing year. It'll be his Earth when I return..." The doctor stared at the night sky before answering. "No, Ron. He'll never live to see it. I knew that when I selected your body to house his mind... "What do you mean?" "I chose you for a reason, Ron. A vital reason. When you came to my office on your return from Andromeda, I discovered something about you which made up my mind. An ailment without a name or a symptom, found only rarely in the bodies of a few space travelers. You had it, Ron, and in a year or two, it would have struck you down with the savagery and surprise of lightning. "It was then that I agreed to the Scholar's plan to exchange bodies. Agreed to it on my own terms, with the body of Ron Carver..." "Then FU die!" Ron said. "No, Ron. You will live. It's the Scholar who has made the bad bargain..." In the distance, the lights of the Winnipeg spaceport blinked a wel(Continued from page #) responded with a tinkle of coins. "Thank you, thank you," he said. He pulled out a box full of colored globes, and began to juggle them without prologue. Within a few seconds he had five of them going at once -- actually manipulated by tk, while he waved his hands impresMvely but meaninglessly beneath them. He sent up a sixth, then a seventh. He smiled pleasantly to himself as he juggled. Quite possibly these people had encountered telelunetics before, and had burned them for witches. But those were real telekinetics; he was only a sleight-ofhand artist, a man of exceptional coordination, a wandering charlatan -- a fake. Everyone knew magicians were phonies, and that it was by tricky fingerwork that he kept all those globes aloft. When the shower of coins had stopped, he caught the balls and restored them to their box. He began a new trick -- one which involved a rapid line of patter while he set up an elaborate balancing stunt. Piling chairs on top of thin planks and adding odd pieces of furniture from the back of his chariot to make the edifice even more precarious, he assembled a balanced heap some twelve feet high. He ran round it rapidly, ostensibly guiding it with his hands, actually keeping the woodpile under a firm tk control. Finally he was satisfied with the balance. He began to climb slowly. When he reached the uppermost chair -- balanced crazily on one of its legs alone -- he climbed up, braced himself, and, by teeking against the ground, lifted himself and balanced for a long moment by one hand. Then he swung down, leaped lightly to the ground, and waved one hand in triumph. A clatter of coins resulted. This was the way, he thought, as the crowd roared its approval. They'd never suspect he was using a sort of real magic. He could practice control of his psi in ordinary life, and this charlatanry would give him the needed outlet as well. When he returned to Earth, he'd be adjusted, more so than the ones like Dumb Joe. Davison was remaining in society. He wasn't running away. A small boy in the first row stood up. "Aw, I know how you did that," he shouted derisively. "It was just a trick. You had it all -- " "Don't give the show away, sonny," Davison interrupted in a loud stage whisper. "Let's just keep these things secret -- between us maOne of the dangers of future space travel may well be that of body waste. To throw out wastes would put the ship off its carefully plotted flight path, upset the conservation of total mass, and be impractical because of the tremendous speeds. Scientists working on the problem of sewage disposal in space are considering incinerating or chemically changing wastes by solar energy, and reusing the treated wastes to grow algae. An alternative would be burning them with the heat generated by supersonic flight; or possibly using such wastes as fuel in the space ship's propulsion system. Todays housewife will probably need a diagram or map to find her way around in the pushbutton kitchen her daughter or granddaughter will have twenty years from now. Today's electric ranges and ovens in the wall will be replaced by a marble counter top that heats to roast meat or bake a pie and then, in a moment or two, is cold enough to touch and use as a counter top or table. Ultrasonics, silent sound waves, will wash dishes in three minutes. Other gadets will include a serving cart, with selfcontained motor, that runs itself into the dining room with food and returns with the empty dishes, and an electrically-driven, partly-refrig erated turntable at the kitchen entrance which will receive milk and groceries to save the housewife from having to leave the telephone or other activity to answer the door and put groceries away. A kind of electronic "brain" 'will produce the day's menus, the housewife merely pushing button "two" or "five" or whatever she feels like. And a simple touch to the sliding paneled walls will produce the cake that's been baking, clean dishes or washed and ironed clothes. To protect the ears of an aircraft carrier's personnel from the noise of future jet planes, an island structure with a sound-proofed double wall has been suggested. Even now it is difficult or impossible for important ship's officers to communicate. With both turbojet engines at full power, the present military jet plane develops about # decibels, well above the limit of the largest power amplifier system and the threshold of painful noise. Jet planes of the next few years are expected to rise to about # decibels. Since the noisiest time is when a jet plane is running up to full power for a take-off, and since take-offs are spaced thirty seconds apart, the results to island personnel could be disastrous unless steps are taken to reduce the noise. A crash-proof car, whose safety innovations could cut the death rate on the nation's highways in half, is now in production. Passengers in the rolling safety package could emerge uninjured from a head-on collision at # miles per hour. Externally, the "crash-proof" car looks just like any other four-door sedan. Inside, however, there are some radical changes. The steering wheel has been eliminated and replaced by a hydraulic, two-handled, lever-type control system set parallel to the floor. The steering device is covered with a chest cushion and beneath the chest protector is a body restraining U-shaped webbing yoke. Passenger and driver sit in bucket seats and the seats behind the driver face toward the rear. Doors are on rollers and move rearward, folding outward, like a single accordion pleat. Metal stiffeners, similar to the "roll bars" for stock car racing, are buik into the roof. The passengers have chest pads and body yokes similar to those of the driver. The car has roof padding throughout, shock absorber material between the bumpers and the body frame, spring mounted wrap-around bumpers and an air scoop on the roof to minimize exhaust gases. Farmers of the future will be able to control the sex of their chicks before they are hatched. A new eggdipping process, which forces hormones under pressure through the porous eggshell, is being experimented with, and results have been remarkably effective. Which will you have, hens or roosters? Creating new skulls for humans may soon be standard practice among plastic surgeons. Recent reports have described such an operation in which doctors removed four ribs from a child in four separate operations and used them to cover the skull which had been crushed in an auto accident. The rib grafts form a scaffolding along which new skull bone is built; and the defect in the chest wall regenerates with new rib in as little as # days. Because the amount of bone available from ribs is almost unlimited, doctors of the future may look on ribs of the chest cage as a "bone bank within the human body." Steps toward the direct conversion of atomic radiation into chemical energy, one of the most important objectives in atomic energy development, were revealed recently by the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Ionizing radiations were used to oxidize an iron salt, ferrous sulfate, in the research aimed at understanding the decomposition of water by radiation. This gives information on the direct effects of radiation on chemical change. Most atomic energy is used by degrading the radiation energy into heat and then using the heat to produce chemical or other effects. But the short-cut to direct conversion is a giant step forward in atomic research. Smaller electronic computers with larger "memories" than those in present use may be expected in the near future. Heart of this new device is an information storage tube which is an inch-square honeycomb gadget that will store up The honeycomb is a thin sheet of glass in which small holes have been etched and filled with metal. Information written on one side of the honeycomb by an electronbeam scanning method, similar to that used in television, is picked up from the opposite side. Holes in the device are # to the inch, so that each square inch has # individual storage cells -- and each cell will recognize at least ten different levels of intensity from the writing gun. The ramprop, a jet-driven propeller turning at supersonic speeds, could give planes that land and take-off vertically the speed and load-carrying capacity of modern aircraft, scientists predict. The ramprop performs better than the turbojet, the turbofan or the turboprop. It can also attain high speed in level flight. The ramprop propulsion system, consisting of rotor blades driven with supersonic speeds by ramjets or ramrockets at the blade tips, are most suitable for heavy vertical take-off and landing, because large diameter propellers present fewer structural limitations. Some day cities may be "weather conditioned" by plastic pillows filled with helium and joined together to make a mile-high dome. Such a set-up would provide yearround sub-tropical weather widiout rain or bugs. The sun's light and heat would penetrate (with harmful rays filtered out) , and rain pouring off the edges would be caught to provide a pure water supply for all purposes. Polarized lenses may soon be standard equipment for automobile headlights and windshields. Blinding glares to approaching drivers will be eliminatea as well as those from approaching cars. In daytime driving the polarization will be cut with the flick of a switch. Chemical firms of the future may "employ" microbes as helpers. Recent laboratory research has shown that if lakes in the hot desert could be contaminated with the right kind of sewage or "broth", and stocked with specially cultivated sulphur-producing bacteria, the process of building up sulphur deposits could be speeded up to six times faster than it takes nature to do the job. With such a system in full swing, sulphur production would no longer be a problem. Dehydrofreezing may be a word to conjure with in the not too distant tomorrow. It's a name given to a new process which combines the space saving of dehydration with the advantages of freezing. Ordinary freezing tends to rupture the cellular structure of foods. Partial dehydration does much to overcome the objection, and dehydrofrozen foods ret # iin the right amount of moisture. They can be reconstituted by simply soaking them in water. Scientists report that the process costs somewhat more, but lower packaging, freezing, storage and distribution costs should result in an overall saving for the consumer. Dear Sir: I read Dr. Riedel's article in your December issue, and after some lengthy compositive reflection have added a few more decimal intervals to his list as it appeared in This Lonely Earth, Its conclusion, though prim, was startling (as it turned its phantom head to stare thoughtfully at me), so I'm forwarding the critter for post-mortem: M -- approaches I N -- less than # proportionate to . surroundings, naKN#y ture impressions of surroundings, and Anally mythical or #NM abstract or attrib(N-#) (N#) utive speculation following early mental processes #) (N) thousand years -- man proper -- considerable mental capability, indeflnite dimensional systems of coordination, such  I N #) nation -- Anal ' abstract resolution of mythical, space, surroundings, nature into religious philosophic concept #) M thousand years -- civilized lN M  -- philosophic,  (N-#)  mathematic ap'  proach to science (N#)  #) N, hundred years -- modem man -- acquirement of advanced math, approach to approximate "border control of molecule and atom Present time (#'s) should be located somewhere through this interval #) M hundred years -- future man lNMbeginning of ac V quirements of exact instrumentation as a natural sequel to the simultaneous acKN#) (N-#)) (N#) quirement of total exact mathematics #) N decades ??????? KNlo #) M decade (s) ??????? lNM (N-#) (N#) #) (N) years -- This final period of the appearance of evolutate man knioN    tain measure since it could be terminated at interval # cally rhythmical decimal variation could represent (for example) man's immergence into his surrounding three-dimensional world. That is, through # to #. As a reverse of the emergence from I to #. -- Howard Beom Chicago, #. Anyone draw any other conclusions? Dear Sir: Dr. Riedel makes out a depressingly good case for Man's enforced isolation due to his inability to explore, at this stage of his development, the world outside the solar system. I am only a sometime reader of science fiction (although a very enthusiastic one) and score very low on your I.Q. tests; but if we are limited in our eflforts at exploration, isn't it possible that some of the intelligent life which Dr. Riedel hypothesizes must exist in the universe, has already solved the problem of interstellar space flight? If this point is conceded, I have this suggestion: Why not build an automatic broadcasting machine to send throughout the galaxy, as far as we can make it go, a repetitious set of easily understood signals which could be immediately recognized as originating from living intelligence? For example, constant repetition of the numbers one, two and three. Then leave it up to them to locate us. If it is argued that this is dangerous, I will answer that it is doubtful that any large attack fleet could make an interstellar flight, but if they could, would they be able to survive terrestrial conditions and remain strong enough to fight? And why would they necessarily be hostile? And, dammit, since we only have one life to live, wouldn't it be worth it to discover once and for all that life does exist in immensity? I say, let's take that chance! -- Robert Greengard New York, New York Dear Mr. Quinn: The argument that Man isn't ready for space because he hasn't perfected a social system on earth is idiotic. The two points have no correlation, excepting one: a problem most easily solved with a maximum of factors known, and if space travel brings us a greater knowledge of the physical universe we'll be that much closer to complete knowledge of ourselves. Man will reach his full potential when he understands best his relationship to the universe, because sometime he'll meet a race that hasn't the same relationship to the universe that we have and we shall find ourselves with a problem. -- Donald Dixon New Britain, Conn. Dear Sirs: I didn't get in at the beginning of the argument, but I heartily agree with whoever said that the human race isn't ready for space travel when as yet it can't hold others as equals and live in peace. As far as aliens from space being friendly or inmical is concerned, both opinions are wrong. What makes anyone think that a superior race capable of space travel would have anything to do with us? Do we try to show the baboon his shortcomings? He's a very intelligent anim too, but he hasn't got a thing we want. I believe we've already been visited by space ships, not manned -- but recording devices. I'm going to grab the same bobcat by the tail; my name isn't Bellows and I'm not a fatalist. Now, anyone want to argue? -- Robert RafFey Minneapolis, Minn. Dear Mr. Quinn: Unlike practically all of your correspondents, I am not a scientist of any sort, nor do I have more than a tenth grader's view of science in general. But may I say that I do enjoy every story in IF as does my father who started me on an infamous career of avid science-fictionism. I'm not writing just to congratulate you all. I would also appreciate a little advice. What can you suggest as an appropriate answer when accused of reading science-fiction as an escape mechanism? I'm sure more than a few readers have the same problem, especially those who, too, happen to be under someone else's jurisdiction. (Since I don't know anything about science, that can't be used as a proper explanation for me.) -- Marcia Burtt North Hollywood, Calif. We have memories of having the same trouble with our own 'sciencefictionism way back when. How about some help for the gal from our readers? Dear Mr. Quinn: The concept of a "fixed" future, just because Mr. Einstein's theory views time as the fourth dimension, seems to me to be a very foolish one. We fill space (height, width, depth) with "things" and until a -- Ten. # -- # chains. # -- # oz. # -- Wedge. # -- #. # -- Mariannas Trench. # -- Prime number. # -- ##'. # -- Curium. # -- Grain. # -- # #'. # -- Nine inches. # -- Tropopause. # -- Fission. # -- March  September. # -- #. # -- Y. # -- Java. # -- #. body occupies space it is virtually empty. Why then can't time be "empty" until we fill it with events? I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for having a letter column that is really a letter column, not a space reserved for letters of praise to the editor. There is nothing more sickening than to read the childish (and endless) letters of praise in some of the other magazines. Keep up the good work. -- Larry Casey Dallas, Tex. ( Continued from page BI ) Suddenly, she turned and pressed her face to his chest. The sobbing subsided a little and her words came haltingly. 'Tt was awful. He's a subversive -- a criminal -- and I didn't even guess." She caught her breath. "We flew over to Staten Island. He parked near the water. Then he said, T want you to marry me.' Just like that. I liked him a lot -- but I didn't know what to say. Then he said -- Oh Daddy, it was horrible -- " Her sobs increased again and she fumbled for his pocket kerchief. "He -- he said, 'Look at this'. And Daddy it was one of those secret bankbooks! He has one hundred thousand dollars -- and he's only twenty-five -- and he's proud of it! He's worse than the old time gangsters, worse than -- oh. Daddy -- he's a non-consumer..." The last word trailed off in a wail and she was sobbing again. J.L. tightened his grip on her shoulders. "Be thankful. Baby," he murmured. Be thankful you found the dirty so-and-so out in time." ture puzzles, math games, quizzes, brain teasers, all kinds of crossword puzzles, crostics, cryptograms, etc., ever published for only # cents! Hundreds of ways to test your wits, months and months of fun and excitement, scores of party ideas -- # pages of wonderful puzzle pleasure! The ideal present for all puzzle Send only # cents to Quinn Publishing Company, Kingston, N. Y,, and your copy will be sent at once! ( Continued from page # ) "You'll get a medal out of it, too," commented Sir Stanrich. "Why? Why me?" "Because you followed orders, even though your mission appeared useless. It was your 'wild goose chase' that made our victory possible. "You see, only the blue mist of Mars protects its surface from the hard rays of the sun. Without it, we'd have no more protection than a naked man in space. The reason we're in for a bad sunburn every year is that the blue mist dissipates partially at every Earth-sun conjunction." "But what would The Egg have to do with that?" asked Jonner. "The Egg amplifies the effect of magnetic fields, the way a lens con# fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shonnon Rood Verono, Pennsylvonio centrates light rays," answered Sir Stanrich. "It's the Earth's magnetic field, not that of Mars, that interferes with the blue mist every time the Earth passes between Mars and the sun. And to amplify Earth's magnetic field, we had to place The Egg directly between Mars and Earth during the Earth-sun conjunction -- and you put it there when you got the Egg into an Earthward orbit on schedule." "But, Sir Stanrich, I've been sunburned a dozen times at these conjunctions..." "Not like this. When the blue mist was stripped away completely this time, everyone on the surface was affected. Marscorp's troops were put out of action as an effective fighting force when they received severe burns over most of their bodies and were afflicted with acute conjunctivitis so badly they were half blinded. That's why we abandoned Charax and Regina and pulled all our people to the Isidis jbase -- while the conjunction was under way, we were all protected from the sun... underground!" They had reached the center of the city. Above the old Syrtis Major Hotel, which had served as Marscorp's supreme headquarters, the flag of the Charax Rebels was fluttering in the breeze from the city's air circulators. Marscorp was beaten. Mars was In Russia, every physics undergraduate, regardless of his or her specialty, must take a course in nuclear physics. # all you pay for any when you join the Club Each One Packed from Cover to Cover With Science Thrills of the Future! by Edvard J. Ruppelt Here is the first authoritative report on hitherto hushedup facts about  flyinK saucers"... by a formei Air Force expert who was in charge iut amazing fact! Pub. ed. .#) World-renowned stories that have stood the test of time -- by H. O. Wells, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Wylie. Edgar Allan Poe, E. M. Forster, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. # pages, Pub. ed. #) # top stories by outstanding authors... stories of Wonders of Earth and Man... of startling inventions... of visitors from Outer Space... of Far Traveling... Adventures in Dimension... Worlds of Tomorrow. # pages. Pub. ed. #) A story about the first A-Bomb . , . written before it was invented I A story of the movie machine that shows "newsreels" of any past event. Plus a score of other best tales from a dozen years of Astounding ScieneeFiction magazine by its editor. John W. Campbell. Jr. Pub. ed. #) Selected stories from Fantasy and ScienceFiction Magazine. The woman who became her own daughter... atomic power from beans . , . the man who lived # years ,... gambling on a strange planet... and many others. Pub. ed. #) Now-the best new science-fiction books -- yours for j'ust I ! Each is crammed with the science thrills of the future... written by the most sought-after sciencefiction authors of today. A # to # value, complete and in handsome permanent bindings. by James Blish Set free by antigravity machines, whole cities have abandoned Earth to wander through space, reverting to the savage law of force. And now. one man must save aging, halfcrippled New York from the attack of several hundred gangster cities I Pub. ed. #) Each month the Scibnob-Fiction Book Cub brings you only the finest brand-new full-length books cents shipping charge) -- even though they cost #, # and up in pul)lishers' editions! Each month's selection is described in advance. really want -- as few as four a year. Dept. IF-#, Garden City. N. Y. Please rush me the # books checked below, as my gift volumes and first selection. Bill me only I for all three (plus few cents shipping charges), and enroll me as a member of the Science-Fiction Book Club. Every month send me the Club's free bulletin. "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus shipping. I do not have to take a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. We know you will enjoy membership it. we are making, this amazing offKift books for joining; the other is your first selection. This liberal offer may have to be withdrawn at any to: books In # days, pay nothing, and this membership will be cancelled!  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Take advantage of this offer now -- pick the # volumes of your choice and mail coupon on other side See other side for full details  Latest Look at Mars! Exclusive Report by Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories take advantage of the thin Martian atmosphere. The ship leaves an Earth Satellite Station and arrives in the upper atmosphere of Mars with wings in swept-back position. Using its rotating bank of eight motors in forward braking position, speed is finally slowed to a mushing stall in atmosphere. Wings are moved forward till they oppose, and are angled to become effective rotor blades, whereupon ship lowers like a helicopter to a vertical landing. Return journey is just the reverse, except that whole wing and tail assembly may be left in orbit about Mars for future use, and long nose section goes home alone, on chemical rocket power. Wing and tail section are atomically powered. Long nose section serves double purpose of being lightweight return rocket, and providing shielding for crew by long distance from aft reactor. White areas (see cover) are ceramic to withstand terrific heat. All Stories New and Complete s Kodachrome from Files of First Mars Expedition by Mel Hunter IF is published bi-moathly by Quinn Publkhing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. CoDvriKht # by Quinn Publiing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Bunalo New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York, lubscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next (August) issue on sale June #th Illustrated by Virgil Finlay Once a man has chosen a path to follow, there's no turning back. But what if the die could be recast and we could retrace our steps when we chose the wrong one... and choose another? Pretty Quadroon G eneral Beauregard Courtney sat in his staff car atop a slight rise and watched the slow, meshing movement of his troops on the plains south of Tullahoma, Tennessee. Clouds of dust drifted westward in the lazy summer air, and the dull boom of enemy artillery sounded from the north. "You damn black coon," he said without rancor, "you know you're costing me a night's sleep?" The Negro courier stood beside his motorcycle and his teeth flashed white in his good-natured face. The dust of the road filmed his uniform of Southern grey. "Miss Piquette told me to bring you the message, suh," he answered. "A wife couldn't be more demanding," grumbled Beauregard. "Why couldn't she wait until this push is over?" "I don't know, suh," said the courier. "Well, get back to headquarters and get some supper," commanded Beauregard. "You can fly back to Chattanooga with me." The man saluted and climbed aboard his motorcycle. It kicked to life with a sputtering roar, and he turned it southward on what was left of the highway. The sun was low in the west, and its reddening beams glinted from the weapons and vehicles of the men who moved through the fields below Beauregard. That would be the #th, moving into the trenches at the edge of what had been Camp Forrest during the last war. On the morrow this was to be the frontal attack on what was left of the Northern wind tunnel installations, while the armor moved in like a powerful pincers from Pelham to the east and Lynchburg to the west. If the Union strongpoint at Tullahoma could be enveloped, the way lay open to Shelbyville and the north. No natural barrier lay north of Tullahoma until the Duck River was reached. This was the kind of warfare Beauregard Courtney relished, this wheeling and maneuvering of tanks across country, this artillery barrage followed by infantry assault, the planes used in tactical support. It was more a soldier's warfare than the cold, calculated, long-range bombardment by guided missiles, the lofty, aloof flight of strategic bombers. He would have been happy to live in the days when wars were fought with sword and spear. When the Second War for Southern Independence (the Northerners called it "The Second Rebellion") had broken out, Beauregard had feared it would be a swift holocaust of hydrogen bombs, followed by a cruel scourge of guerilla fighting. But not one nuclear weapon had exploded, except the atomic artillery of the two opposing forces. A powerful deterrent spelled caution to both North and South. Sitting afar, watching the divided country with glee, was Soviet Russia. Her armies and navies were mobilized. She waited only for the two halves of the United States to ruin and weaken each other, before her troops would crush the flimsy barriers of western Europe and move into a disorganized America. So the Second Rebellion (Beauregard found himself using the term because it was shorter) remained a classic war of fighting on the ground and bombing of only industrial and military targets. Both sides, by tacit agreement, left the great superhighways intact, both held their H-bombers under leash, ready to reunite if need be against a greater threat. Just now the war was going well for the South. At the start, the new Confederacy had held nothing of Tennessee except Chattanooga south of the mountains and the southwestern plains around Memphis. That had been on Beauregard's advice, for he was high in the councils of the Southern military. He had felt it too dangerous to try to hold the lines as far north as Nashville, Knoxville and Paducah until the South mobilized its strength. He had proved right. The Northern bulge down into Tennessee had been a weak point, and the Southern sympathies of many Tennesseans had hampered their defense. The Army of West Tennessee had driven up along the Mississippi River plains to the Kentucky line and the Army of East Tennessee now stood at the gates of Knoxville. Outflanked by these two threats, the Union forces were pulling back toward Nashville before Beauregard Courtney's Army of Middle Tennessee, and he did not intend to stop his offensive short of the Ohio River. "Head back for Winchester, Sergeant," he commanded his driver. The man started the staff car and swung it aroimd on the highway. He should not go to Chattanooga, Beauregard thought as the car bumped southward over the rutted road. His executive officer was perfectly capable of taking care of things for the few hours he would be gone, but it ran against his military training to be away from his command so soon before an attack. Had the summons come from his wife, Beauregard would have sent her a stem refusal, even had she been in Chattanooga instead of New Orleans. She had been a soldier's wife long enough to know that duty's demands took precedence over conjugal matters. But there was a weakness in him where Piquette was concerned. Nor was that all. She knew, as well as Lucy did, the stern requirements of military existence; and she was even less likely than Lucy to ask him to come to her unless the matter was of such overwhelming import as to overshadow what he gained by staying. Beauregard sighed. He would eat a light supper on the plane and be back in Winchester by midnight. The pre-attack artillery barrage was not scheduled to open before four o'clock in the morning. The plane put down at the Chattanooga airport at dusk, and a swift military car took him down Riverside Drive, past the old Confederate cemetery, and downtown. Chattanooga was a military city. Grey-uniformed military police stood at the intersections, and soldiers on rest leave from both East and Middle armies trooped in laughing gangs along darkened Market Street. Few civilians were abroad. The siren and circled stars on Beauregard's car cleared a path for him through the sparse downtown traffic. The car roared out Broad Street, swung under the viaduct and sped up the curving drives of Lookout Mountain. At a darkened house on the brow of the mountain, overlooking Georgia and Alabama, the car pulled up. Beauregard spoke a word to the driver, got out and went to the front door. Behind him the car's lights went out, and it crunched quietly into the shadowed driveway. There was light in the house when Piquette opened the door to him. She held out her hands in welcome, and her smile was as sweet as sunshine on dew-sparkling fields. Piquette's skin was golden, like autumn leaves, with an undertone of rich bronze. Her dark eyes were liquid and warm, and her hair tumbled to her shoulders, a jet cascade. She was clad in a simple white dress that, in the daring new fashion, bared the full, firm swell of her breasts. Beauregard took her in his arms, and as her lips clung to his he felt a grey old man, as grey as his braidhung uniform. He held her away from him. In the mirror behind her he saw his face, stern, weatherbeaten, light-mustached, with startling blue eyes. "Piquette, what on earth is this folly?" he demanded, kicking the door shut behind him. "Don't you know I'm moving on Tullahoma in the morning?" "You know I wouldn't call you unless it was important. Card, as much as I long for you." When she talked, her delicately molded face was as mobile as quicksilver. "I've found something that may end the war and save my people." "Dammit, Quette, how many times have I told you they are not your people? You're a quadroon. You're three-fourths white, and a lot whiter in your heart than some white women I've seen." "But I'm one-fourth Negro, and you wouldn't have married me, for that, even if you'd known me before you met your Lucy. Isn't that right. Card?" "Look, Quette, just because things are the way they are .  ." She hushed him with a finger on his lips. "The Negroes are my people, and the white people are my people," she said. "If the world were right. I'd be a woman instead of a thing in between, scorned by both. Can't you see that. Card? You're not like most Southerners." "I am a Southerner," he answered proudly. "That I love you above my own blood makes no difference. No, I don't hate the black man, as so many Southerners do -- and Northerners too, if the truth were known. But, by God, he's not my equal, and I won't have him ruling over whites." "This is an old argument," she said wearily, "and it isn't why I called you here. I've found a man -- or, rather, a man has found me -- who can end this war and give my people the place in the world they deserve." Beauregard raised his bushy eyebrows, but he said nothing. Piquette took him by the hand and led him from the hall into the spacious living room. A Negro man sat there on die sofa, behind the antique coffee table. He was well-dressed in a civilian suit. His woolly hair was grey and his eyes shone like black diamonds in his wizened face. "General Courtney, this is Mr. Adjaha," said Piquette. "From where?" demanded Beauregard warily. Surely Piquette would not have led him into a trap set by Northern spies? Adjaha arose and inclined his head gravely. He was a short man, rather squarely built. Neither he nor Beauregard offered to shake hands. "Originally from the Ivory Coast of Africa, sir," said Adjaha in a low, mellow voice. "I have lived in the United States... in the Confederacy... since several years before the unfortunate outbreak of war." Beauregard turned to Piquette. "I don't see the point of this," he said. "Is this man some relative of yours? What does his being here have to do with this crazy talk of ending the war?" "If you will excuse me. General," said Adjaha, "I overheard your conversation in the hall and, indeed, Piquette already had informed me of the dissension in your heart. You would be fair to my race in the South, yet you fear that if they had equality under the law they would misuse their superiority in numbers." Beauregard laughed scornfully. "See her, old man, if you think I'm ripe to lead a peace and surrender movement in the South, you're wasting your time," he said. "The South is committed to this war, and so be it." "I ask only that you listen for a brief time to words that may be more fruitful than a few hours in a quadroon's bedroom," said Adjaha patiently. "As I said, I am from the Ivory Coast. When the white man set foot in that part of Africa, he found a great but savage kingdom called Dahomey: the ancestral home of most of the slaves who were brought to the South. "Before Dahomey there was a civilization whose roots struck back to the age when the Sahara bloomed and was fertile. Before the great civilizations of Egypt, of Sumer and of Crete was the greater civilization of the African black man. "That civilization had a science that was greater than anything that has arisen since. It was not a science of steel and steam and atoms, but a science of men's minds and men's motives. Its decadent recollections would have been called witchcraft in medieval Europe; they have been known in the West as voodoo and superstition." "I think you're crazy," said Beauregard candidly. "Quette, have you hired a voodoo man to hex me?" "Be tolerant. General," admonished Adjaha in his mellow voice. "Many of you in the West are not aware of it, but Africa has been struggling back to civilization in the Twentieth Century. And, while most of its people have been content to strive toward the young ways of the West, a few of us have sought in our ancestral traditions a path to the old knowledge. Not entirely in vain. Look." Like a conjuror, he produced from somewhere in his clothing a small carved figure. About six inches high, it was cut from some gleaming black stone in the attenuated form so common to African sculpture. It dangled from Adjaha's fingers on a string and turned slowly, then more swiftly. As it spun, the light from the chandelier flashed from its planes and curves in a silvery, bewildering pattern. Beauregard felt his eyes drawn to it, into it, his very brain drawn into it. Beauregard stood there, staring at the twirling image. His eyes were wide open and slightly glazed. Piquette gave a little, frightened cry, "It's all right, my dear," said Ad j aha. "He's just under hypnosis. Your General Beauregard is the key that can unlock the past and the future for us." T here was an insistent command beating against Beauregard's brain: "Go back ,... go back... go back..." It was a sunny summer morning in Memphis. Beauregard Courtney, Nashville attorney and adjutant general of Tennessee, stepped out of the elevator of the Peabody Hotel and walked across the wide, columned lobby to the newsstand. He did not go by the desk; Beauregard preferred to keep his room key in his pocket when he stayed in a hotel. He bought a copy of The Commercial Appeal and dropped onto one of the sofas nearby to read the headlines. As he had suspected, the story in which he was involved took top play. It was a three-column head at the right of the page. The Commercial wasn't as conservative as it had been when he was a boy, but it still didn't go in for the bold black streamers, he thought approvingly. He glanced at the other front Beauregard sighed. He was caught up in the vortex of great events. He arose, folding his paper, and walked toward the stairs leading down to the grill. The governors' meeting was not until eleven o'clock. After breakfast, he would talk with some of the Memphis political leaders and telephone Governor Gentry. He was in a delicate position here, representing a state that did not think exactly as he did. As he reached the steps, a darkhaired woman, dressed in misty blue for the morning, approached from the elevators. He stepped aside to let her precede him. Then they recognized each other. "Piquette!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know you were in Memphis." The quadroon flashed a smile and a sparkle of black eyes at him. "I knew you were here," she said, gesturing at his newspaper. He hesitated, uncertain whether she was just countering his own remark or telling him that he was her reason for being here. "Will you have breakfast with me?" he invited. "Yes," she answered, and gave him a sidelong glance, "if it's in my room." He laughed, rich and fullthroated. She took his arm and they went back to the elevators together. His heart was lighter now that Piquette was in Memphis with him... There were eleven Southern governors at the meeting. Governor LeBlanc of Louisiana, like Governor Gentry of Tennessee, had sent a representative in his stead. As representative of the host state, Beauregard opened the meeting, welcomed the visitors and tum over the chairmanship to Governor Dortch of Georgia. "Gentlemen, there is no point in delaying our principal discussion," said Dortch. "Within the past week, federal troops have moved into a Mississippi city to enforce the Supreme Court's infamous integration decree. For the first time since Reconstruction Days, hostile soldiers are on the soil of a sovereign Southern state. The question before us is, shall we bow to this invasion of states' rights and continue our hopeless fight in the courts, or shall we join hands in resisting force with force?" Chubby Governor Marsh of Alabama rose to his feet. "There wouldn't have been any federal troops if it hadn't been for this extremist segregation organization, the Konfederate Klan," he said heavily. "I belong to a segregationist organization myself : I suppose most of you do, because you got elected. But lynching and rioting and burning homes and schools is no way to resist integration. Mississippi's national guard should have been in Meridian." 'Tf I'd mobilized the guard. I'd have had a revolt on my hands," said Governor Ahlgren of Mississippi mildly. "Two-diirds of the guardsmen belong to the Klan." "I'll go along with the majority, of course," said Marsh, "but I think this propKsed Pact of Resistance can lead only to full-fledged military occupation of the South." regard arose. Governor Gentry had counselled caution, listening instead of talking, but a fire burned deep in Beauregard. Somehow the laughing face of Piquette as he had last seen her misted his eyes. A powerful urging was on him to beat his breast and cry: "The white man must rule...!" Beauregard opened his eyes and looked around him dazedly. He was sitting in the parlor of Piquette's house on Lookout Mountain. Piquette leaned against his shoulder, patting his hand, and Adjaha stood before him with hands clasped behind his back. Adjaha looked like a worried dwarf. "You remember that you relived your participation in the governors' conference in Memphis?" asked Adjaha. "Yes," said Beauregard, rubbing his forehead. "You black scoundrel! You hypnotized me with that pagan doll!" "Yes, sir," admitted Adjaha. "It took me a long time to trace the key to this war, and when I found you were that key I knew I could reach you only through Piquette. It was your impassioned speech before the governors that turned the South to war instead of peace." "Nonsense!" said Beauregard, sitting up straighter. "I just expressed what the majority was thinking.   Thed have agreed on the Pact of Resistance even if I had objected." "The man of destiny sometimes doesn't realize his own influence," said Adjaha drily. "Many factors were concentrated in you that day besides your own native persuasiveness. No, General, your stand swung the governors to the Pact of Resistance. Announcement of that pact spurred the Konfederate Klansmen to massacre the federal troops at Meridian. That brought the federal proclamation placing Mississippi under martial law and the subsequent mobilization and revolt of the South." "Perhaps so," conceded Beauregard wearily. "Perhaps I did wrong in not following Governor Gentry's instructions and keeping my mouth shut. But I spoke my convictions, and it's too late now." "That is not necessarily true, General," said Adjaha. "Time is a dimension, and it is as easy to move east as it is to move west. A better simile: one can move upward as well as downward, but the presence of gravitation makes special skills necessary." Beauregard shook his head. "A go theory, but good only as a theory," he said. "If it were more than that, the law of cause and effect Would be abrogated." "No, it works both ways. The present can influence the past as much as it influences Ae future, or as much as Ae past influenced it. Thus, through the past, Ae present can influence itself. "In my native land, the Ivory Coast of Africa, we believe in fanshaped destiny, General. At every instant where a choice is made, a man may take one of many paths. And Aose who had the old knowledge of my people could retrace their steps when the wrong paA was taken, and choose anoAer path." "But I can't," said Beauregard. "If I could, I don't know anything that could have changed what I said and did Aat day in Memphis." "Tell me. General, how long had Piquette been your mistress before the Memphis Conference?" asked Adjaha. "About Aree years," answered Beauregard, too puzzled at this change of tack to be offended. "Even if you were a psychologist instead of a general, it would be difficult for you to probe Ae motivation of your own heart," said the Negro. "Piquette was your reason for voting for war, instead of peace!" Beauregard sprang to his feet angrily. "Look, damn you, don't feed me your voodoo doubletalk!" he Aundered. "If it were Piquette alone I had to consider, don't you think I'd have advocated equality for Ae black race?" It was Piquette's voice Aat sobered him, like a dash of cold water. "And yet you try to tell me I'm not a Negro, Gard," she said quietlyThe anger drained from him. He slumped back to Ae sofa. "Ah, yes, Ae perversity of a man whose mind and heart are at odds!" exclaimed Adjaha softly. "You love Piquette, yet your pride tells you that you should not love a woman with Negro blood in her veins. For that you must be aggressive, you must prove the moral code taught you as a child was not wrong. "You went to the Memphis Conference with Piquette's kisses still sweet on your lips, and because of that your conscience demanded that you stand forth as a champion of the white man's superiority." "So be it, then, you black Freudian," retorted Beauregard cynically, an angry gleam in his blue eyes. "The die was cast two years ago." "The die shall be recast," said Adjaha firmly. "Piquette must not have gone to Memphis. She must not have been your mistress before you went to Memphis." With this, he walked swiftly from the room. Beauregard looked at Piquette, his eyes half amused, half doubtful. She smiled at him. "What he does is out of our hands," she said. "It's still early, Card." He took her in his arms. Courtney of Tennessee sat in the tall chair behind the governor's desk and twiddled a paperweight given him, if his recollection was accurate, by the Nashville Rotary Club. His wife, Lucy, a handsome woman whose dark brown hair was just beginning to grey, stood by the door with an armload of packages. "Beauregard, the people moving into that vacant house down on Franklin Road are Negroes," she said indignantly. "I want you to do something about it. The very idea! That close to the mansion!" "They aren't Negroes," he said patiently. "They're my secretary and her mother. My secretary is a quadroon and her mother's a mulatto. It's convenient to have them live so close, in case I need to do some weekend work at home." "A quadroon!" Lucy's eyes widened. "Which of your secretaries is a quadroon?" "Piquette. And don't tell me I shouldn't have employed her. The Negro vote is important in this state, and if I'd hired a full-blooded Negro a lot of the white vote would turn against me." "Well, I never! You've become more and more of an integrationist ever since you got into politics, Beauregard." "Maybe I've gained some wisdom and understanding," he replied. "That is not to say I'm an 'integrationist.' I'm still doing my best to get it done slowly and cautiously. But the only way the South could have resisted it was by open revolt, which would have been suicide. And I must say the Southern fears have not been realized, so far." Lucy sniffed. "I have to speak at a woman's club meeting tonight," she said, opening the door. "Are you going home now?" "No, Sergeant Parker will drive you home and come back for me. I'm going to eat downtown and clean up some work in the office tonight." She left, and Beauregard leaned back in his chair thoughtfully, having just told his wife a lie. They had no children to be affected by it, but Lucy would never become reconciled to integration. She blamed him for his part in turning the Memphis Governors Conference away from the proposed Pact of Resistance five years ago. Beauregard had had his doubts about speaking out against resisting the federal government with the threat of force. Now he thought he had done right: war would have been terrible, and the South could not have won such a war. And it was his statesmanship at that conference, and Governor Gentry's lavish praise of it, that had set him up to succeed Gentry as governor. Beauregard sighed peacefully. He had done right and the world was better for it. The door opened, and Piquette's golden, black-eyed face peeked around it. "It's four-thirty. Governor," she said. "Will you want me for anything else?" "Not just now," he said, smiling. She smiled back. "Room #," she said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. Then she was gone. Beauregard's blood quickened, but he was disturbed. This that he was going to do was not right. But what other course would a normal man take, when his wife was so estranged that she had become nothing more than a front for the married happiness the people demanded of their governor, a figurehead who lived in another wing of the mansion? He had met Piquette eight years before, briefly, when he was a staid, climbing Nashville lawyer. Not knowing she was of mixed blood then, he had been drawn to her strongly. He had thought her drawn also to him, but for some reason their paths parted and he had not seen her again until after his election to the governorship. She had been among a group of applicants for state jobs, and Beauregard had happened to be visiting the personnel office the day she came in. He employed her in the governor's office at once. She was a good secretary. Nothing untoward had passed between them in that year she had worked as his secretary. In nothing either of them said or did could any members of his staff have detected an incorrect attitude. But there were invitations of the eyes, caresses of the voice... and a week ago their hands had touched, and clung, and he had found she Beauregard heaved himself to his feet with a sigh. Briefly, he felt sorry for Lucy. He would eat supper downtown tonight, but it would be in Room #. Beauregard awoke slowly, with a hand shaking his shoulder. Reluctantly he abandoned a dream in which the South had remained at peace and he was governor of his state. Piquette's flower-like face hovered over him in the dimness. She rested on one elbow in the big bed beside him and shook his shoulder. "Gard!" she said urgently. "Wake up! It's after midnight." "Oh, damn!" he groaned, rolling out of the warm covers. "And the Northerners will attack today if my intelligence service hasn't gone completely haywire." "Get dressed," she said, dropping her bare feet to the floor and smoothing her nightgown over her knees. "I'll fix you some coffee." He pulled on his uniform, the Confederate grey with the stars glittering on the shoulders, while she plugged in the hotplate and started the coffee. Outside, the eastern sky was streaked with dim light, against which the sleeping houses of Winchester thrust up stark silhouettes. She sat across the little table from him, a flowered robe drawn around her, while he sipped his coffee and thrust the last wisps of dreams from his head. "Quette," he said, "I want you to pack and get out of here. Before daylight, if you can get ready. Head south, for Birmingham. I'll send a staff car around for you as soon as I get to headquarters." "I don't want to leave you. Card," she objected. "You've got to, Quette. We can't hold these Federals. We're in a bulge here, and the only reason they haven't cracked us out yet is Chattanooga holding our right flank." He kissed her goodbye, a long kiss, and strode down the street to the Franklin County courthouse, where he had set up headquarters for the Army of Middle Tennessee when the Union troops had forced them out of Nashville. The place was a beehive of activity. The eastern sky glowed red over the Cumberlands and the artillery was thundering in the north when General Beauregard Courtney rode out toward the front. He had his driver park the staff car on a slight rise overlooking his troop formations. The war was going badly for the South, and Beauregard unhappily took much of the responsibility on himself. Perhaps he had been wrong in making that impassioned speech at the Governors Conference in Memphis which, he was sure, had swung the weight of opinion in favor of the Pact of Resistance. Certainly he had been wrong in recommending a farflung northern battle line, at the start of the war, which stretched from Paducah, Kentucky, north of Nashville to Knoxville, with its eastern anchor on the Cumberlands. It had been his idea that a defensive line so far north would give the South more time to mobilize behind it, would hold the rich industries of Tennessee for the South, and would give the South a jumping off place for a strike across the Ohio River. But the North had mobilized faster, and Northern armies had crunched down through the Southern defenses like paper. Now all West Tennessee and a segment of Mississippi was in Federal hands. The Southern defense in East Tennessee had been forced back to the mountains around Chattanooga. And his own troops had fallen back from stand after stand after the Battle of Nashville. Even now, Federal armour was reported to have crossed the Tennessee River and be heading southeastward toward Columbia and Lewisburg. He hoped Piquette had left Winchester by now. Perhaps he should not have kept his quadroon mistress with him through the constant danger of defeat, but with Lucy way down in New Oreans... As the morning wore on, the guns thundered below him and the tanks rumbled across the Tullahoma plain, spouting fire. Several times his sergeant urged him to withdraw, out of danger, and return to headquarters, but he stayed. He wanted to direct this battle personally, giving his orders over the car radio. A great pall of smoke hung over the battlefield. Then the attack came, wave after wave of blue-clad infantry, pouring down from the north. Tanks and planes supported them, and atomic artillery shells burst in the Southern trenches. The grey lines began to crumble. "Colonel, throw in the #th and the armored reserve, and let's try to get an orderly withdrawal to the Alabama line," Beauregard ordered into his microphone. He turned to his driver. "Sergeant, I think you're right. We'd better get out of here." The staff car swung around and headed back toward Winchester over the bumpy highway. As it left the rise, Beauregard swore fervently and reached for the microphone. From the west came a great cloud of dust and a mass of rumbling tanks. The Federals had broken through the left flank at Lynchburg. Jet planes streaked overhead from the north, flying low. The flash of exploding bombs and rockets was visible in Winchester, ahead of them. Speaking swiftly into the microphone, Beauregard glanced out of the car's back window. "Sergeant!" he yelled. "Strafers!" The driver twisted the wheel so quickly Beauregard was thrown against the door. The speeding car leaped a ditch and bounced into the fields. Out the window, Beauregard saw the jet swooping down at them like a hawk. It was a speck in the sky, and almost instantly it was on them in a terrifying rush. He saw the flare of the rockets leaving the plane's wings, he felt the shock of a thunderous explosion, and the blackness engulfed him. Beauregard opened his eyes painfully. His head ached, and his left arm hurt horribly. He was lying on a rumpled bed in his tom uniform. Piquette and a wizened, very black Negro man were standing beside the bed, looking down at him anxiously. He recognized that he was in the house in Winchester, in the room where he had spent last night... or was it last night? "Quette!" he croaked, trying to sit up. He couldn't make it, and he gasped at the pain in his arm. "I thought I told you to leave Winchester." "I didn't want to leave you. Card," she answered softly. "And it's lucky I didn't. Some men on an ammunition truck found your car. Your driver was killed and your arm blown half off. They brought you here." "Dammit," he complained, "why didn't they take me to the base hospital?" "Because the base hospital took a direct hit from a bomb." That startled Beauregard into the realization that there was no sound of firing, no crash of bombs, outside. There were men's shouts and the normal sounds of a town occupied by the military. Had the Union forces been repulsed by some miracle? "Well, for Pete's sake, call the medics and get me to a field hospital," he ordered. "And you head south for Birmingham, like I told you to." "Card," she said soberly, "I thought it ought to be your decision, and not mine. If we call the medics, they'll be Federal troops. Winchester was captured hours ago, and it's just chance that they haven't entered this house and found you before now." Beauregard lay silent, stunned. The strange man beside the bed spoke for the first time. "It is not his decision," he said. "There is work that I must do which may be delayed forever if he is captured." "This is Adjaha, a friend of mine," said Piquette. "He came to Winchester to see you. He thinks he knows a way to end the war." "Poppycock!" snorted Beauregard weakly. "General Courtney," said Adjaha intensely, "you spent last night with Piquette. Where did you spend the night? Here or in Chattanooga?" Beauregard opened his mouth to say, "Here, of course." Then he stopped. Suddenly a vision, almost a memory, rose up before him and he could not be sure. There was a chandelier, and a black voodoo charm... "You do remember some of it!" exclaimed Adjaha delightedly. "It seems that I dreamed the South was winning, and I was going to drive on Tullahoma, and I went to Chattanooga to see Piquette," said Beauregard slowly. "But it's mixed up in my mind with another dream, in which there was no war at all, and I was elected governor..." "Those were not dreams," said Adjaha. "They happened and yet they did not happen." "I remember you in a dream," said Beauregard faintly, "and words about 'fan-shaped destiny'..." "You have to understand this or I can do nothing," said Adjaha hurriedly. "The South was doing well, although it could not have won in the end. You were preparing to advance on Tullahoma, and you did go to Chattanooga last night to see Piquette. This happened. "But it didn't happen, because I utilized the ancient knowledge of my people, involving dimensions beyond time, to change the factors that led to it. Decisions of different people were influenced differently at a dozen points in the past so that Piquette did not become your mistress before you went to Memphis, and your own emotional attitude was changed just enough to steer you on a different course. "Then the other things you call a dream happened instead. There was peace instead of war." "Then how is it that we actually have war and defeat?" demanded Beauregard, his voice a little stronger. "Piquette," said Adjaha gravely. "You found her again, and she became your mistress after you were governor." "But I remember that now!" exclaimed Beauregard. "That's three years in the future... and there was no war." "It is difficult to understand, but the future can change the present," said Adjaha. "General Courtney, even more than I realized at first you are the 'man of destiny,' the key to war or peace in the South, and Piquette is the key to your own emotions. "Try to comprehend this: you cannot love Piquette in a South that is at peace! The whole social fabric in which you were nurtured demands of you that a woman of Negro blood cannot be your paramour unless she is socially recognized as an inferior and, in a very real sense, not your co-equal lover but the servant of your pleasure. When Piquette became your mistress, even five years after the decisive moment of the Memphis Conference, the entire framework of time and events was distorted and thrown back into a sequence in which the South was at war. This time, unfortunately for you, a slightly different time-path was taken and the South does not fare so well." "Then you've failed, and things are worse than they were if you hadn't interfered," said Beauregard. "No, I must try again," said Adjaha. "Piquette's mother must never have brought her to Nashville as a child, so there will be no chance of your ever meeting her at all." There was a thunderous knocking at the front door. Federal troops who were investing the town at last had reached this house. Adjaha gave Beauregard one sympathetic look from his dark eyes, and slipped quietly from the room, toward the rear of the house. The knocking sounded again. Beauregard lay in a semi-daze, his blood-encrusted left arm an agony to him. Through the haze over his mind intruded a premonition that bit more deeply than the physical pain : Never to know Piquette? He clutched her hand to his breast. "Quette," he whimpered. "Be still, darling. I won't leave you," she soothed him as a mother soothes her child. Her cool hand caressed his cheek. Beauregard Courtney of Tennessee crossed Canal Street cautiously and plunged into the French Quarter of New Orleans with a swift, military stride. He had #dways urged Lucy that they take a trip to New Orleans, but she always had demurred; she said the city reminded her of war and trouble, somehow. Now he had been invited to be the principal speaker at the annual banquet of the Louisiana Bar Association tonight. He had welcomed the opportunity to make the trip, without Lucy. It had been ten years since his voice at the Memphis conference had swung the South away from war and onto the path of peace. His statesmanship on that occasion had brought him great honoiu. He had served a foim-year term as governor of his state and, on leaving that office, had been advanced to the U. S. Senate. His light-coloured hair and mustache were beginning to grey slightly. Lucy had been a good wife to him, even though there had been that near-estrangement when he was so busy as governor. Perhaps she still did not agree with him entirely on his acceptance of the fact of racial integration without bitter resistance, but she was more tolerant now of his sincerity than she had been once. He was sorry she was not here: she would have enjoyed the Old World atmosphere through which he walked. Beauregard moved up fabled Bourbon Street, past Galatoire's and the Absinthe House. He stared with interest at the intricate ironwork of the balconies that overhung the narrow sidewalk, at the bright flowers that peered over the stone walls of gardens, at the blank wooden doors flush with the sidewalk. How far, he wondered, was he from Rampart Street, where the Creoles had kept their beautiful quadroon mistresses in one-story white houses in days long gone? He knew nothing of the Vieux Carre, and had no map. As he penetrated more deeply into the French Quarter, he began to pass the barred gates that stopped the dim corridors leading back to ancient courtyards. These fascinated him, and he tried several of the gates, only to find them locked. He never knew later, studying the map, whether the street he had just crossed was Toulouse, St. Peter or Orleans, when he came upon one of those gates that stood ajar. Beauregard did not hesitate. He pushed it open and paced eagerly down the shadowed corridor until he emerged into the sunlit courtyard. There was a stone statue, grey and cracked with age, in the midst of a circular pool in the center of the courtyard. Flower-lined walks surrounded it. The doors that opened into the courtyard were shadowed by balconies, on which there were other doors, and to which steep flights of stairs climbed. On a bench beside the pool sat a woman in a simple print dress. Her skin was tawny gold and her hair was black and tumbled about her shoulders. Her eyes were black and deep, too, when she raised them in surprise to the intruder. She was beautiful, with a poignant, wistful beauty, "I'm sorry," said Beauregard. "The gate was open, and I was curious." "Mrs. Mills forgot to lock the gate," she said, smiling at him. "All of us who live here have our keys and are supposed to lock the gate when we go out. But Mrs. Mills forgets." "I'll leave," he said, not moving. "No, stay," she said. "You're a visitor to town, aren't you? There's no reason why you can't see a French Quarter courtyard, if you wish." Beauregard moved closer to her. "I'm Beauregard Courtney," he said. For some reason, he omitted the "Senator." "Card," she said in a low voice, her big eyes fixed on his face. "Card Courtney." Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, faint memory stirred. Was it the memory of a dream? "Have I dreamed that we met before?" he asked slowly. "Piquette?" "You know!" she exclaimed, her face lighting gloriously. "I didn't dream alone!" "No," he said. "No. You didn't dream alone. Your name is Piquette, isn't it? I don't know why I said that. It seemed right." "It is right." "And you live here?" "Up there," she said, and pointed to one of the doors that looked out  on the balcony. Beauregard looked up at the balcony and the door, and he knew, as though he had prevision, that before he left the courtyard he would go through that door with Piquette. He took her hands in his. "I'll never let you leave me," he murmured. General Beauregard Courtney sat under the open-sided tent that was his field headquarters and stretched long legs under the flimsy table. He gazed morosely out toward Tullahoma in the north, where the trenches stretched endlessly from east to west and only an occasional artillery shell broke the quiet of the battlefield. Stalemate. "I thought trench warfare went out with World War I," he growled to his executive officer. "No, sir. Apparently not, sir," replied Colonel Smithson correctly, not interrupting his preparation of tomorrow's orders. Stalemate. The Northern armies and the Southern armies had collided with great carnage on that battlefield. Fighting had swayed back and forth for weeks, and at last had settled down to a stubborn holding action by both sides. That had been months ago. Now trenches and fortifications and tank traps extended across southern Tennessee from the Cumberlands to the Mississippi. Occasional offensives came to naught. Only the planes of both sides swept daily over the lines, bombarding the rear areas, reducing the cities of Tennessee to rubble. Beauregard toyed with a pencil and listened idly to the news over the little radio at his elbow. It was a Nashville station, and Nashville was held by the North, but he had learned how to discount the news from the battlefront. "... And our planes destroyed thirteen Rebel tanks and an ammunition depot in a mission near Lexington," the announcer was saying. "A gunboat duel in the Mississippi River near Dyersburg was broken off after severe casualties were inflicted on the Rebel crew. Our armored troops have advanced farther into the Texas Panhandle. "Wait. There's a flash coming in... There was a momentary pause. Beauregard bent his ear to the radio. Colonel Smithson looked up, listening. "My God!" cried the announcer in a shaky voice. "This flash ,... a hydrogen bomb has exploded in New York City!" Beauregard surged to his feet, upsetting the table. The radio crashed to the ground. The other men in the tent were standing, aghast. "It isn't ours!" cried Beauregard, his face grey. "It's a Russian bomb! It must be...!" The voice on the fallen radio was shouting, excited, almost hysterical, "... The heart of the city wiped out... Number of dead not estimated yet, but known to be high... Great fires raging... Radioactive fallout spreading over New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania... "Here's a bulletin: the President accuses the Rebel government of violating the pact not to use large nuclear weapons. Retaliatory action has already been initiated... "Here's another flash: Detroit and Chicago have been H-bombed! My God, has the world gone mad? There's a report, unconfirmed, that the Detroit bombers came from the north... "They can't believe we did it!" muttered Beauregard. All the men in the tent, irrespective of rank, were clustered around the radio. No one thought to pick it up from the ground. A staff car drove in from the south and rocked to a stop in front of the headquarters tent. Beauregard hardly noticed it until Piquette got out, followed by a slight, greyhaired Negro man in civilian clothes. Beauregard strode out of the tent. The car radio was on loud, and the same announcer was babbling over it. "Quette, what are you doing out here?" he demanded. "Gard, this is Adjaha, a friend of mine," she said hurriedly. "I couldn't wait for you to come back to town tonight. I had to get him out to see you before it was too late." "Dammit, it is too late," he growled. "It's too late for anything. Haven't you been listening to that damn radio?" "This is extremely important, General," said Adjaha in a mellow voice. "If I may impose on you, I'd like to talk with you for a short while." Beauregard frowned and glanced at Piquette. She nodded slightly, and her face was anxious. "I suppose I have plenty of time to talk," he said heavily. "We can do nothing but sit here with useless armies while the country tears itself apart. Sergeant, turn that damn car radio off and go bring some chairs out here. You can listen to the radio in the tent." They sat, the three of them, and Adjaha talked. Beauregard listened skeptically, almost incredulously, but something within him -- not quite a memory, but an insistent familiarity -- caused him to listen. He did not believe, but he suspended disbelief. "So you see. General," concluded Adjaha, "there is some drive within you and Piquette -- call it fate, if you wish -- that draws you together. When it was arranged that she did not become your mistress before the Memphis Conference, she did after you became governor. When it was arranged that her parents did not move to Nashville with her, you were drawn to New Orleans to meet her. Apparently you must meet if there is any possibility that you meet, and when you meet you love each other. "And, though you can't remember it. General -- for it didn't happen, even though it did -- I explained to you once, on this very day, that you cannot love Piquette in an unrebellious and peaceful South." "If we were fated to meet. I'm happy," said Beauregard, taking Piquette's hand. "If these fantastic things you say were true, I still would never consent to not having met Piquette." "But you must see that it's right, Gard!" exclaimed Piquette, surprisingly. "Quette! How can you say that? Would you be happy if we were never to know each other?" She looked at him, and there were tears in her eyes. "Yes, Gard," she said in a low voice, "because... well, Adjaha can see a little of the future, too. And on every alternate path he sees... Gard, if the South is at war, you'll be killed before the war ends!" "We can't take any chances this time. General," said Adjaha. "Should events be thrown back into a path that leads to war again, this time you might be killed before I could reach you. Piquette's parents must never have met. She must never have been bornV Suddenly, Beauregard believed. This quiet little black man could do what he said. "I won't permit it!" he roared, starting to his feet. "Damn the South! Damn the world! Piquette is mine!" But Adjaha, moving like lightning, was in the staff car. Its motor roared, it swung in a cloud of dust and accelerated toward the south. "Sergeant! Colonel! Get that stolen staff car!" Beauregard bellowed. He whipped out his service pistol and fired two futile shots after the diminishing vehicle. The general's staff boiled out of the tent. They milled around a minute, shouting questions, before piling into two command cars and giving chase to the disappearing staff car. Beauregard glowered after them. Then he took Piquette's hand and they walked together into the empty tent. "... Here's a late flash," said the radio on the ground. "Birmingham has been H-bombed. Our planes are in the air against the Rebels..." Beauregard imagined the ground trembled. Instinctively he looked toward the south for the radioactive mushroom cloud. Then he swung back to Piquette. "Quette, he can't do it," said Beauregard. "He's a voodoo fraud." She looked at him with great, dark eyes. Her lips trembled. "Card," she whispered like a frightened child. "Card, aren't there other worlds than this one...?" She crept into his arms. Colonel Beauregard Courtney sat on the terrace of his home in the suburbs of Nashville and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his grey head. The steady hum of automobiles on the superhighway half a mile away was a droning background to the songs of birds in the trees of his big back yard. The "Colonel" was an honorary title bestowed on him by the governor, for Beauregard never had worn a uniform. He had been Governor Gentry's representative at the fateful Memphis Conference forty years ago, he had been governor of his state, he had been United States senator from Tennessee, he had been chief justice of the state supreme court. Now he preferred to think of himself as Beauregard Courtney, attorney, retired. Where was Lucy? Probably sitting in front of the television screen, nodding, not seeing a bit of the program. She should be out here in this glorious sunshine. Beauregard's gardener, a wizened Kttle Negro man, came aroimd the comer of the house. "Adjaha, you black scoundrel, why don't you die?" demanded Beauregard affectionately. "You must be twenty years older than I am." "Fully that, Colonel," agreed Adjaha with a smile that wrinkled his entire face. "But I'm waiting for you to die first. I'm here to keep watch over you, you know." He picked up the hoe and went around the house. Curious thing about Adjaha. Beauregard never had understood why an able, well-educated man like Adjaha, in a free and successfully integrated society, would be content to spend his whole life as gardener for Beauregard Courtney. Beauregard leaned back comfortably in his lawn chair and thrummed his thin fingers on its wooden arm. Absently he whistled a tune, and presently became aware that he was whistling it. It was a haunting little melody, from long ago. He didn't know the words, only one phrase; and he didn't know whether that was the title or some words from the song itself, that song of old New Orleans: "... my pretty quadroon... "Piquette," he thought, and wondered why that name came to mind. Piquette. A pretty name. Perhaps a name for a pretty quadroon. But why had that particular name come to mind? He never had known a woman The problem was enough to drive the army into a furor. It was the old classic about an immovable object meeting the irresistible force. Something just had to give... one of the Appalachian Mountains, in the Primitive Reservation, on a lovely spring day in #. The hole was to be used for a monorail track; and although in # it was very simple to run monorail lines over mountains, it was also quite easy to drill large, straight holes through almost anything; and the U. S. Army liked to affect the neatness of straight lines. So the Engineers had set up a little converter machine on a tripod, pointed it, and proceeded to convert a singularly neat hole, twenty-two feet in diameter, in the side of the mountain. At first the mountain converted nicely, the hole tunnelling along at an efficient thirteen feet per hour; and the Engineers, whose names were George and Sam, were quite pleased with themselves and rubbed their hands together with pleasure; while the little machine on the tripod hummed merrily. Illustrated by Ed Emsh birds sang, and wisps of brown smoke floated off from the mountain into an otherwise clear blue sky. And then they found it. Or, rather, the converter did, by abruptly ceasing to convert. The machine continued to hum; but the little feedback-controlled counter, which normally clicked off the number of tons of material substance that had been converted into immaterial substance, stopped. The last wisps of smoke disappeared from the mountainside. The two Engineers looked at one another. After a minute George picked a rock up from the ground, a large one, and threw it out in front of the lens of the machine. The rock vanished instantly. The one-tenth ton counter wheel trembled, and was still. "Well," Sam said, after a minute, "It's still working." George thought about this for a minute. Then he said, "I guess we'd better look at the tunnel." So they shut the machine off, walked over to the hole in the mountainside and went in. Fortunately the sun was behind them and they had no difficulty seeing as they made their way down the glassy-smooth shaft -- which needed no shoring since the converter had been set to convert part of the materials removed into a quite sturdy lining of neo-adamant. The shaft ended in a somewhat foreboding, twenty-two foot, black disk of unconverted mountain bowels. The two of them peered uneasily at this for a few minutes and then Sam said, suddenly, "What's this?" and kneeled down to inspect a rectangle, goldish in color, about ten inches long and four high, which appeared to be engraved in the rock at the dead end of the tunnel. "Let me see," George said, stooping beside his co-scientist and pulling from his pocket a pocketknife, with which he proceed to scrape around the edges of the rectangle. Some of the loose rock crumbled away, revealing that the rectangle was, actually, one surface of a solid bar of some sort. He continued to scrape for a few minutes, removing enough rock to get a grip on the sides of the bar with his fingers, took a good hold and began to try to work the bar loose. The other Engineer helped him, and they pulled, strained, wedged and pushed for about ten minutes, until finally George said, "It won't move," and they stopped, perspiring. And it hadn't moved, not a The two of them glared, for a moment, at the smooth surface of the golden bar, which shone, lustrous, back at them. Then Sam said, "Let's get a pick." "A pick?" Sam, who knew something of Army history, was patronizing; "Yes. A kind of manual powered converter. No cut-off." George was impressed. "But where?" he said. "At U-# Supply." They left the uncompleted tunnel, stepped into their Minnijet, field model, officer-type helicopter and flew at a leisurely five hundred miles per hour to U-#. U-# had been, before the #'s Decade of Enlightenment, the University of Tennessee -- the #'s had held no illusions about what was important to the American Way of Liferand they landed their little olivedrab plastic craft in front of the library. Inside, the librarian, a young sergeant, was put into something of a tizzy at their request for a pick, and explained to them that the library shelves held only weap ons of the past, and, as far as he knew, there was no such weapon as a pick. He sent them to the Captain. The Captain knew what a pick was, all right; but when the two Engineers told him what it was for he called the Major. The Major was a tall, athletic officer with wavy hair, a very neat mustache, a firm, undaunted jaw, and clear eyes that looked squarely into the future. He smoked a pipe, of course, and was wearing a natty black field uniform with regulation crimson cummerbund and beret. His voice was friendly but there was a "no-nonsense" tone in it. "What's the deal, men?" he said out of the side of his mouth, the other side being engaged in biting, squarely, on ins pipestem. They told him about the gold bar. "Interesting," he said, "Let's have a look-see" and he sent for a pick, a heavy-duty converter, a portable lighting system, two quarts of synthetic Scotch and three Privates. All of these were stowed away in a staff helicopter and then the three officers, the two Engineers and the Major, flew to the mountains. This being a staff helicopter, the trip took three and one half minutes. At the mountain two of the Privates set up the portable lighting system in the tunnel while the other studied the manual that had come with the pick. The Major was first charmed, and then somewhat piqued, by ffie bar, after trying to prod it loose with his pipestem. The Private with the pick was called, and after some difficulty with determining the proper stance and grip for swinging that instrument -- the Private was a recent recruit of only fourteen and naturally knew nothing whatever about manual converters of any sort -- a few desultory swings were taken at the granite surrounding the bar. After a while the other two Privates joined in, alternating in swinging the pick, until, finally, a rough area of about two or three square feet had been hollowed out around the bar, which was found at that time to extend only about four inches back into the mountain. Above the bar they noticed a sort of fissure, like a cicatrice, in the granite; and one of the Privates remarked that it looked like the mountain either had been split open to admit the bar from the top, or that, maybe, the bar had just been there and the mountain had grown up around it. It was impossible to cut away the rock on the other side, so the three Privates got a strong grip on the bar and began to pull. Then the officers began to pull on the Privates. The bar stayed where it was. They pulled harder. The bar stayed. The Major took off his ciunmerbund and beret and began to sweat. The bar didn't move. The Major began to curse, pushed the others aside, grabbed the pick handle, gave a mighty heave, and hit the bar solidly with the point. There was no sound from the impact, and the pick did not rebound, nor did the bar move. The Major tried again. And again. Then they knelt and looked at the bar. It still gleamed. No scars. The Major swore for five minutes. Then he said, "Who owns this mountain?" George spoke up, "The Army, sir. Of course." "Good," said the Major, beginning to look imdaunted again. "We'll get at that son of a bitch." "How, sir?" "We'll convert this Goddamn mountain, that's how." The Major began wrapping his cummerbund back around his waist. "The whole mountain?" Sam said aghast. "Level it." The Major dusted off his beret and replaced it. Sam spoke up querelously, "But wouldn't that be... ah... misusing our natural resources, sir?" "Nonsense." This mountain belongs to the Army. It's not a natursJ resource. As a matter of fact, it's an eyesore. I order you to vaporize it." So they vaporized the moimtain. Since the converter could not cut through the bar they set it up -- the heavy-duty one -- to shear off the top of the mountain. Then they moved the machine around to each of the four sides and sliced them off. Their instruments were very accurate, and when the last wisp of smoke had drifted away there stood in the middle of a plain played on it, sitting on a neat, rectangular column of granite, four feet high, what was now plainly seen as a shiny, gold colored brick, its sides glittering in the evening sun. The Major picked up the pick and walked slowly over to the column. There was a slight, almost unnoticeable, swagger in his walk. He hefted the pick slowly, carefully, braced himself, and took aim. "All right, you son of a bitch," he said, and then gave the pick a magnificent swing. The brick didn't move. The Major stood where he was, looking at the brick, for about three minutes. Then he said, softly, "All right. All right!" He walked back to the converter -- which was sitting on its tripod nearby -- and began to adjust its aim and elevation and set its dials, all very carefully. When he was ready he stood behind it, his feet planted firmly, his fists clenched, his lower jaw firm and jutting, his eyes squarely ahead, focused on the brick. Now!" he said, and pressed the switch. There was a small hum and a tiny puff of smoke and the little column of granite disappeared. The brick was now unsupported and the Major watched it, his eyes now betraying an intense gleam, waiting for it to fall to the earth. The Major waited. The brick stayed exactly where it was, four feet above the ground, completely unsupported. It took the Major a few minutes to realize that there was no use in waiting. He said nothing, however; but stepped over to the brick, looked at it a minute, and then reached casually over to it and pushed it, with his index finger. It didn't move. Then the Major sat down on the ground and began to cry, very softly, as the sun sank in the west and the birds, hushing, went back to their nests... , T hat, #F course, w only the beginning of it. Within two weeks the little plain that had once been a mountain was covered with multicolored plastic quonset huts through which moved so many people of such world-shaking importance that four gossip-columnists had to be flown in from New York and Los Angeles to handle the overflow. Generals and Admirals abounded, offering careful and profound opinions freely; slim, dark, intense young men with impeccable dark civilian suits and carrying dark attach cases held hurried, sotto voce conferences; newspaper reporters did "Profiles" of everybody. The weather held fair, the neighborhood abounded in divers kinds of nature: birdsong and waterfall, poplar and mountain daisy, which most of the visitors found quaint and novel, and a good time was being had by all. In the midst of this activity floated the still shiny golden brick, unperturbed, apparently as oblivious of the melee it had attracted as it was of the immutable laws governing the motion of masses: the laws of inertia and reaction, and the law of universal gravitation. Some interesting things had been discovered about the brick. It was, for instance, completely impervious to any known form of radiant energy; it neither absorbed nor radiated heat ; electron microscopes found its surface, on the atomic level, still smooth, metallic and shiny, without gaps, it apparently had no molecular -- or, even, atomic -- structure to speak of; it would conduct neither electricity, heat, nor anything else ; and it obeyed no physical laws whatever. Thus far nine neo-adamant points, sharpened to sub-microscopic pointedness and under pressures ranging up to three hundred fifty thousand tons, had failed to make any scratches in its surface; and all had eventually cracked. The Major had recovered most of his old poise and undauntedness, although his eyes now seemed to face the future with some hint of trepidation, and he was assigned to Operation Gold Brick -- as the Army had cleverly named it -- in an advisory capacity. In fact it was he who gave voice to a notion that had been whispered about for several days. After the ninth neo-adamant point had split against the surface of the brick it was he who marched to the orange quonset of General Pomeroy and said, "Sir, let's try an H-bomb." So they H-bombed it. There was some confusion during the four days while the crater was being filled in; but after that was done and new quonsets were built the Operation was even more pleasant and roomy, since nine more mountains had been levelled by the bomb, and about twenty others had been fused into interesting colors and shapes. The birds and trees and suchlike had, of course, been obliterated; but they had been beginning to pall on the visitors anyway; and now the area had something of the look of a neoSurrealist landscape, or a Japanese garden. The radiations had, of course, been absorbed by the usual means. The brick stayed right where it was, its surface parallel to the horizon, poised, immediately after the blast, over a crater two hundred and ninety-four feet deep. After the failure of the H-bomb the Generals' pique and frustration began to turn to anger and, in some cases, fear. One pacifistic Lieutenant General did in fact suggest that the brick be left alone and the monorail rerouted; but it was to the credit of the Army that his superiors rallied together and denounced his defeatism for what it was. But the Generals did agree at this conference to call in a theoretical physicist, provided one could be found, in a desperate hope that some light might be thrown on the nature of their adversary. A call was sent out to headquarters at Big-H (once Harvard University) and a two-day scramble ensued while a theory man -- or "egghead" as such men were cleverly called -- was sought. One was eventually found, working in a weather observatory in the Kentucky Reservation, and he was brought -- a gray-haired old fellow who freely admitted that he read books and refused to drink synthetic whiskey -- to the site of the brick, which he surveyed with some attention. "Well?" said one of the Generals. "Very interesting," said the theoretical physicist, whose name was Albert, and he produced from a trunk he had brought with him a collection of peculiar looking instruments, which he began to set up on the ground. After peering down various tripod-mounted tubes, first at the brick and then at the sun, he then said, "Amazing!" "Yes," said one of the generals, "We know that." There was a ring of security men in black flannel suits around the physicist. "Amazing," he said again, "This seems to be the exact set point of Propkofski's principle!" He gazed at the brick reverently. Whose principle?" said one of the security men, raising his eyebrows and fetching a little black book from his breast pocket. "Propkofski." The physicist's eyes were aglow. The security men were raising eyebrows at one another. "The principle of terrestial orbital space-time suspension, formulated in #, I believe. This is the place, gentlemen, the exact point, where Propkofski maintained that the mass-influx lines of the Earth's field intersected. This is the very hub, provided that Propkofski was right," and he pointed to the brick. "Yet I believe that Propkofski said something about a mountain hindering his observations." "Yes?" said the general, "We removed the mountain." "My!" said the old physicist, looking up from the brick for the first time, "How did you do that? With faith?" "With a converter," the general said. "But what about that brick? How do we move it?" "The brick? Oh." The scientist went to the floating piece of golden metal, still unmarred by the Hbomb, and examined it carefully. When he had finished checking it with a good many instruments, mechanical and electronic, he said, "I wish Newton could see this." The security man's eyebrows went up again, "Newton?" The old man smiled at him, "Another physicist," he said, "Dead." "Oh," said the security man. "Sorry." "So' said the general, impatiently. "How do we move it?" The old man looked at him a moment. "I suggest you don't." "Thank you' said the general, crisply, "Then how would you say it might be moved?" The physicist scratched his head, "Well," he said, "I suppose the Earth might be pushed away from it, since it seems to be a kind of Archemides' fulcrum. A pressure of square centimeter might accomplish that. Of course, moving the Earth might alter the length of the year considerably. And then, again, if Propkofski's principle, which states..." "Thank you," said the general, "That will be all." After the security men had taken the physicist away for investigation the general who had interviewed him looked at another general and then at the others. He could tell they were all having the same wild surmise. Finally, he said, "Well, why not?" "Ah , . said one of the others. "The cold war's been going on for fifty years. We may never get a chance to try it out." "Ah... well..." One of the other, younger generals could not contain himself and abruptly spoke up. "Let's use it!" he said, his voice quivering with emotion. And all the rest of them began to chime in, their eagerness, now that one of their number had committed himself, unrepressed. "Let's use it!" they said. "Let's use the R-bomb!" F irst a pit was dug -- or converted -- a mile and a half deep and three miles in diameter. This was then filled with neo-adamant except for a hole in the center four by ten inches rectangular, directly under the brick. Then the R-bomb and its electronic detonator, the whole thing about the size and color of an avocado, was lowered into the hole, and then the neo-adamant walls were built up six feet above the ground to enclose the brick in what amounted to the barrel of a monstrous cannon. The states of Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and half of Kentucky were then evacuated, and a final check was made of the figures. It was determined that the kickback from the blast would throw the Earth approximately four hundred and ten miles out of her orbit, and shorten the length of the year to three hundred and sixty-three days, a number which all of the generals found to be eminently satisfactory, in fact, a decided improvement. The generals decided to use the old physicist's weather station, in the Kentucky Reservation, as their observation point, its elevation and its distance from the brick being quite desirable. The station was raised on a tripod to a height of one thousand feet, and the Army had the whole structure properly reinforced and shielded. Then the equipment for observation, the T. V. monitoring screens and the electron telescopes, was set up and the generals moved in. The old physicist had by this time taken a loyalty oath and he was allowed to remain in the observarion dome for the event since, after all, he worked there. At zero hour minus sixty seconds the senior general carefully pressed a smaU red button and unwittingly echoed the words of a forgotten subordinate. "We'll blast the son of a bitch sky high," he said. Flashbulbs popped. A counter began ticking off the seconds, loudly, efficiently. All eyes were on the large T. V. screen which showed the huge circle of white neo-adamant four hundred miles away. The T. V. picture was being beamed from a monitoring, pilotless aircraft eighty miles above the location of the brick; they would be able to see the actual blast before the camera was destroyed. The physicist busied himself with his own instruments, making readings of the sun's position. The seconds ticked off. At the sixtieth tick the counter became silent. There was no sound in the little observation tower. The white circle on the screen was unchanged. Then, suddenly, the screen erupted. In a burst of flame and steam the neo-adamant circle began to crumble. Flames shot up everywhere. Mountains seen at the edge of the screen began to sizzle and ooze out of shape. It was at this moment that the states of Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio were obliterated. Then, abruptly, the picture changed. A specially controlled monitoring camera had picked up a flash of gold. The brick. It appeared to be flying through the air. "By God," said the senior general. "We did it!" At this moment the screen went black. There was a roar, a rumble, starting from what seemed to be the very bowels of the Earth, building to a dynamic, deep-buried scream, a screeching of wrenched rock and of the tearing of the Earth's crust; and then a sickening lurch, a nauseous dip and lunge of sideward motion, a sense of acceleration; and then a howling sound, the howling of a sudden, tremendous wind. The generals were all thrown to the floor, trembling. Somehow the physicist had remained standing, holding the sides of the table on which his instruments were mounted. His old hands were white with the strain and were trembling, but his face was ecstatic. "Amazing!" he said, "Amazing!" His eyes were shining. "What happened?" one of the generals said weakly, from the floor. "Propkofski! Propkofski was right!" said the other, his voice jubilant, shaking with emotion. "That was the intersection of the mass-influx lines. The brick, the gold brick, was the keystone, the hub! Amazing!" "But what," said the General, shouting above the roar of the wind that was now like a cyclone, above the screeching of twisted rock and the wrenching of the very bowels of the Earth, "What does that mean?" "It means that Propkofski must have been right!" said the other, his voice quivering. "The Earth, it seems, is falling into the sun!" What does the latest look at Mars tell us? What has been determined about its strange canals, its oxygen, its vegetation, its minerals? Here is a fascinating report by one of the world's foremost astronomers... of Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories miles of the earth, the closest approach since #, and the closest the planet will come again till #. Before last September people were asking me, "Well, Bob, what do you expect to find out about Mars this time?" Now they want to know, "What did you find out about Mars?" As I write this at the end of # it is still hard to answer that question. You can get enough plates in a single night working at the telescope to keep you busy measuring in your office for months. But some of the main results can be told now as well as later. Planning a Program for Mars People have the impression that when one of these close approaches occurs, astronomers drop all their other work to concentrate on Mars. On the contrary only a few astronomers who specialize in planetary work are affected. The others go ahead observing variable stars and nebulae the same as usual. At a large observatory there will be perhaps twenty astronomers who want to use the telescopes. This means that you cannot observe Mars whenever you like. A program is made out about a month in advance assigning certain astronomers to the telescopes on certain nights. Let us say you get one of the telescopes for five nights at the beginning of the month and five nights at the end. So on the first of the month you leave your office in the city and go to the observatory on the mountain eager to get some epoch-making observations of Mars. But all five nights turn out to be cloudy so that you never even catch a glimpse of Mars. (By a coincidence the sky clears up beautifully the day you retxum to town) . Your five nights at the end of the month now become doubly precious. But again you may be stopped by clouds or the air may be so disturbed that the image of Mars formed by the telescope is nothing but a blur of light. Mars is only near the earth for about three months. Thus it is easy to see that the planet may pass you by without your getting a single observation of any particular value. There is so much you would like to do that planning a program becomes largely a matter of elimination. The question is, 'What can you do with the instruments available in the limited time at your disposal?' After pondering the possibilities I finally decided to try for the following observations: #. Large scale spectra of Mars. #. Direct photographs (snapshots) in light of different colors on high contrast plates. #. Photographs of the star field around Mars for positions of the two satellites, as well as a possible third satellite. #. Visual observations. It would seem that such an exceptionally close approach of Mars would be an ideal time for studying the canals. But the visibility of the canals depends upon other factors besides distance. The season on Mars has to be right. Experienced observers agree that the canals first appear satisfactorily when the date in the southern hemisphere of the planet corresponds to about April I in the United States, and by the middle of June little is left of them. In # south Martian April I came on our May #, when the away. And in September when Mars was closest the Martian date was about June #. Hence, the summer of # was not such a favorable opportunity for studying the canals as might be supposed. My first observations of Mars were taken on the morning of June miles, so far away that my photographs were taken for test purposes more than anything else. The atmosphere was exceptionally steady so that the south polar cap stood out with remarkable clarity. Presently I noticed something peculiar in the appearance of the disk. The bright red regions ("deserts") were covered with innumerable irregular blue lines like veins extending through some mineral. Several minutes must have passed before it occurred to me these must be canals! I was taken completely by surprise as I had no thought of seeing canals bore no resemblance to the fine straight lines as canals are usually depicted on drawings. Their color also was disconcerting. Martian observers, such as Schiaparelli, Lowell and W.H. Pickering, apparently never saw much color in the canals, but described them merely as dark or gray. But these lines appeared to me as distinctly blue, the same color as the large dark regions or maria ("seas," as they were once thought to be) . This was exactly the opportunity T had been hoping for: a shot at Mars when the whole canal pattern was visible. But I hardly expected to have it happen on my very first night. I now got busy trying to get some photographs. A few images that showed the canals clearly might settle the controversy that had been raging ever since they were discovered in #. It would make a nice story to relate that I got some wonderful photographs that finally solved the mystery of the canals. Although some of my plates turned out pretty well the images of the planet about one-tenth of an inch in diameter were too small to show the fine markings that were easily visible to the eye under high magnification. The blue lines made such a powerful impression on me that I wrote to some other observers describing what I had seen, and urging them to start work now while the canals were out. They answered, expressing polite interest in my canal observation, but I doubt if any were stirred to activity. They probably thought I was crazy, just as I would have thought, if one of them had written me a similar letter. I never saw the canals again as I saw them on that morning in June. By the time Mars was close in September a dust storm developed on the planet rendering its atmosphere so hazy it was hard to see some of the large-scale maria. On a night in October at the #-inch, however, I did see distinctly the far southern canals Simois and Thermadon, I suspected others but I was able to hold these with my eye for a second or two. My most interesting photographs of Mars were probably those taken in orange light on August #, when Mars was # miles away. The best images show the canals Gehon, Hiddekel, Cantabras, Aga-thadaemon, Ganges, Nectar, Nilokeras, Draco, and Jamuna, They appear on the negatives as light wispy streaks. From inspection of these photographs and my admittedly casual visual observations made hurriedly between exposures, I am convinced of the existence of streaks on Mars at approximately the positions of well-known canals. They convey to me the impression of being natural surface markings of some kind. The Rift in the Polar Cap I think one of the most impressive sights Mars showed us in # was the great rift in the south polar cap which became so conspicuous about the middle of July. One of my friends, who is an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, had given me a glowing account of this great gash in the polar cap which he had seen through his #-inch telescope. Later, when I looked at Mars through the #-inch telescope in the early evening the polar cap presented its usual smooth unbroken appearance. I decided there must be something wrong someplace and started a long exposure photograph on the spectrum of the planet. But when I next looked at Mars directly about midnight, to my astonishment, there was a great gash in the polar cap that justified everything my friend had said about it. Although this rift in the polar cap was new to us, a little investigation in the library revealed that it has been known for at least a century. It appears regularly in the south Martian spring about a month before the beginning of summer. As the snow melts the rift lengthens until a portion of the cap is completely detached from the main snow field. This detached part breaks up into several white spots, presumably due to snow lingering on elevated ground. These white spots are the famous "Mountains of Mitchel," the only markings on Mars that rate the name of mountains. They were so named by the English observer, N.E. Green in #, in honor of Major General Ormsby Mac Knight Mitchel of the U.S. Army, who published the first accurate description of them in #. It is possible, however, that they may have been seen as early as # by Schroeter in Germany. The startling change in the visibility of the rift suggests it may consist of a long cliff running approximately east and west, and facing north. When Mars is turned so that we look along the cliff edgewise, it appears as a line too narrow to be readily visible. But about six hours later after Mars has made a quarter turn the cliff is facing us. It is now a conspicuous object since we are looking at it broadside. Photographs of the Satellites Information on the internal structure of Mars is greatly desired in the study of the evolution of the solar system. For example, does Mars have a dense central core like the earth? Or is it nearly uniform in composition throughout like the moon? Now we can get a clue as to the internal structure of Mars if we can determine its oblateness; that is, the amount it is bulged at the equator and flattened at the poles. But such measures are extremely hard to make no matter how you go about it. The colors vary so much over the surface that often images on a photograph have a misshapen appearance like a Japanese lantern. Strangely enough there is a method of determining the shape of Mars which has nothing to do with the color of its surface, and errors arising from other effects. The planet's equatorial bulge disturbs the motion of the satellites. Hence, if we have observations of the positions of the satellites over many years so that the disturbances in their motion can be determined very accurately, we can obtain valuable information on how Mars is constructed deep inside. I hope that measures of the positions of Phobos and Deimos on my plates will have some small share in the solution of this problem. While photographing the two known satellites there is always a chance of picking up a third. A satellite appears on the short exposure photographs as a tiny dot no different from a star image. But if comparison with another plate shows that some "star" has moved, and if a third plate shows continued motion, then you may have a satellite. You still cannot be sure for your moving object may only be an asteroid that happened to be near Mars. More observations would soon settle the matter, for a satellite of necessity would move essentially the same as Mars, while an asteroid would soon move off in an independent orbit of its own. Unfortunately a rather hurried examination of the plates failed to disclose any suspicious moving objects. The Atmosphere of Mars We know from direct observations of clouds and mist that Mars has an atmosphere of some kind. But does it contain oxygen, the element necessary for life as we know it? So far most of our knowledge of the atmosphere of Mars is negative in character. The only gas so far identified in the Martian atmosphere is carbon dioxide, the gas that comes bubbling out of soda water. We will have more to say about carbon dioxide presently. So far our best guess about the Martian atmosphere is that it consists mostly of nitrogen and a little argon, inert gases that are nonpoisonous but which will not support life. It would seem that this is a problem that could be settled with an instrument called the spectroscope. Does the spectrum of Mars show absorption lines due to molecules of oxygen (O#) ? Here we had better take time out briefly to explain what is meant by such terms as "spectrum" and "absorption lines". Otherwise the reader is likely to be in the same befuddled state of mind as the actors in a motion picture for which I once served as technical advisor. The picture was about the astronomers in a large observatory. To give it the proper scientific flavor the script contained several lines about a "Cassegrain spectrograph", an optical device attached to a certain part of the telescope. None of the actors had the remotest idea what a Cassegrain spectrograph might be. They went through their parts blithely tossing off lines to did you fare with the Cassegrain spectrograph last night?" or "Dr. Humphrey, will you check the Cassegrain spectrograph, please?". Finally one of the actors asked me, "What the devil is a Cassegrain spectrograph anyhow?" I explained to him how this instrument is built, and how it produces the spectrum of an absorption line: Everyone must be familiar with Newton's discovery that when light is passed through a triangular shaped piece of glass or prism it is spread out into a rainbow colored band, which is red at one end violet at the other. The spectrum also continues out into the infra-red and the ultra-violet, but light of this wave-length does not excite the sensation of vision in our eyes so we say it is invisible. But these regions can easily be photographed or detected by other means. A rainbow colored band or spectrum can also be produced by what is called a grating, consisting of a bright reflecting metal film on which has been ruled thousands of fine grooves. In fact, the grating has practically superseded the prism. The prism (or grating) is the essential part of a spectroscope. Other optical parts are needed to produce a "pure" spectrum. But the final result is a colored band which is a beautiful sight viewed on a piece of ground glass. If the spectroscope is equipped with a camera, and a sensitive plate is inserted at the position of the ground glass, the spectrum can be photographed and your instrument becomes a spectrograph. If you examine the spectrum of a body such as the sun you will find that it is crossed by many fine dark lines, like pencil lines drawn across a colored strip of ribbon. These lines mark places where light is lacking in the spectrum. They look dark because there isn't so much light there. Why? Because it has been absorbed. The light from the intensely hot surface of the sun has to pass through the "cooler" solar atmosphere consisting of vapors of metals and hydrogen. The atoms of these elements absorb some of the sunlight. They absorb it in a very particular way, from certain colors only. For example, sodium absorbs light strongly at two places in the yellow part of the spectrum. With a little experience you can recognize the two dark lines of sodium in the yellow at a glance. Iron produces more than # lines through the spectrum, from the ultra-violet to ths infra-red. A word of warning: All the lines you see in the solar spectrum are not produced in the sun. Some of them are produced in our own atmosphere. Thus oxygen molecules absorb sunlight powerfully in the red and near infra-red regions of the spectrum. Now a planet such as Mars or Venus slunes simply by reflected sunlight. Hence, the spectrum of these planets is the same as that of to any gases that may be in their atmospheres. The Search for Oxygen in Mars' Atmosphere Does the spectrum of Mars show lines of oxygen? It certainly does. You will find a whole series or "band" of lines in the spectrum of Mars due to oxygen molecules. The trouble is these oxygen lines originate -- not in the atmosphere of Mars -- but in the atmosphere of the earth. Light from the sun strikes Mars, where some of it penetrates the atmosphere and is reflected back into space. Light reflected from Mars in the direction of the earth penetrates our atmosphere down into an astronomer's telescope, where its spectrum is photographed at the end. Now we know that the oxygen in our atmosphere produced their characteristic dark lines in the spectrum. The big question is: did the Martian atmosphere also contribute to the absorption in these lines? But how are we going to find out when they are all covered up by the powerful lines of our own atmosphere? The most sensitive method devised at present depends upon what is known as the Doppler effect, the slight change in position of spectrum lines due to the velocity of the light source toward or away from the observer. When Mars is approaching the earth, any lines originating in its spectrum will be slightly shifted toward the violet relative to the same lines originating in the atmosphere of the earth. If Mars is receding the shift is to the red. The higher the velocity the more the lines are shifted. Unfortunately Mars never attains a velocity high enough to shift a line in its spectrum entirely clear of our atmospheric oxygen lines where we can get a good look at them. But the shift may be enough to alter the appearance of the line slightly. A search for such small displacements was made at Mount Wilson in # using an oxygen band in the red. The two astronomers who worked on this project were unable to find the least evidence for any displacements in the oxygen, and concluded that the amount of O # in the Martian atmosphere was less than I per cent of that in ours. (It is chiefly this piece of research that forces all expeditions to Mars to take along plenty of oxygen and breathing equipment for use after landing). There are oxygen lines in the infra-red region of the spectrum that furnish a more sensitive test for the gas than those in the red. The infra-red oxygen lines could not be photographed in # but they are easily accessible now. Preliminary measures on my plates of these infra-red oxygen lines are not very encouraging. Our atmosphere absorbs so powerfully that it is doubtful if any possible weak Martian lines can be detected. If there were # per cent as much oxygen in the Martian atmosphere as ours it could hardly escape us. But if it is less than I per cent the method of velocity displacements is just not good enough. It would seem to me that we should try some entirely different technique. The rocket might be a hopeful research tool here. Above an altitude of about # miles the molecules of oxygen which produce the bands in the red and infra-red, are broken up into atoms of oxygen. These atoms of oxygen do not produce absorption lines in our atmosphere. Now suppose we could get spectra of the moon and Mars above # miles. (We use the airless moon as a control body here) . The spectrum of Mars shows the red oxygen bands faintly. The spectrum of the moon does not. Then we would have proof of the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars. I understand that some such project is being considered, starting with a skyhook balloon, and working up, as it were. Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere of Mars In # a band of unknown origin was discovered in the spectrum of Venus just beyond the region in the red where the eye ceases to be sensitive to light. Laboratory research revealed the band was due to carbon dioxide. This band is an "over-tone" of a much more powerful band of carbon dioxide in the far infra-red. The fact that this near infra-red band shows distinctly in the spectrum of Venus means there must be a lot of carbon dioxide gas in that planet's atmosphere. There is not enough carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to show this "Venusian" band at all. A few years ago the existence of carbon dioxide was discovered on Mars by the identification of some bands of this gas in the far infrared spectrum of the planet. Its concentration is estimated as # times as much as in our atmosphere. Is there enough to show the "Venusian" carbon dioxide band? It seemed like a fairly hopeful possibility. Worth looking for good and hard, at any rate. Spectra of Mars taken in July failed to show the band. I tried again in August using higher contrast plates. The technique was improved by exposing on the edge of the planet, where the light from the surface had to pass through a maximum thickness of Martian atmosphere. For this purpose the south polar cap was selected. These plates also failed to show a trace of the band. Two more plates were taken in October on the chance that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars might be variable, but without result. The Color of the Dark Markings The dark markings or maria are of great interest since it is possible that they consist of vegetation. If so the maria are the only evidence we have for life beyond the earth. Their color is usually described as blue-green or gray-green in textbooks. Most olwervations of Mars have been made with a lens or refracting type of telescope, with the lens corrected so that the yellowgreen light to which the eye is most sensitive is brought to a focus. In a mirror or reflecting type of telescope all colors are brought to a common focus. A reflector would therefore seem to be the more trustworthy when it comes to detecting differences in tint. In my observations of Mars made with the #inch and #-inch reflectors on Mount Wilson, from June # t# September I I the maria always appeared to me as slate blue. This color was confirmed by others who happened to be present. But when I viewed Mars the next time on October I I the blue tint was gone. The maria looked light green or gray-green. Last night (December #) I was fortunate in getting another look at Mars through the #inch under fairly good observing conditions. The maria had a kind of dirty ay-green appearance with no distinct color at all. The season in the southern hemisphere of Mars now corresponds to about August # in the United States. The change in color is probably a seasonal effect. Summary What do all these observations mean? What do we know about Mars that we didn't know before? I feel that the most important observation I was able to make was the one on the Venusian carbon dioxide band. The fact that this band does not appear in the spectrum of Mars can be used to set a limit to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere. It is hard to fix this limit at present. This is a job for the laboratory. It may sound presumptions to talk about something you didn't find as being important. But it gives us a definite bit of information that I think is worth knowing. From my preliminary measures on the red oxygen bands I feel that the method of velocity shifts suggested by Lowell some fifty years ago is not going to tell us much about oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. The amount present is too slight to be observable by this technique. Rocket spectra of the moon and Mars above # miles seem more hopeful. The distinctly blue tint of the maria in the Martian spring is of interest in connection with the possibility of plant life on Mars. It has been generally assumed that the maria consist of growing vegetation. (A rival hypothesis is that they are dark due to green minerals deposited by the wind from volcanic action). Against the vegetation hypothesis is the fact that the maria do not reflect light as our green plants do. The chlorophyll in green plants reflect near infra-red light powerfully. That is the reason why vegetation photographed in the infra-red comes out badly over-exposed so that it looks white when printed. But the maria reflect light about the same in all colors, like the dry mosses and lichens. From a recent investigation of vegetation growing under Mars-like conditions near the Arctic circle, Russian scientists have found them to be abnormally blue in color. Thus the whole question of plant life on Mars is still wide open, with much more experimental work to be done before we can make a positive statement one way of the other. Finally, whether anybody else believes it or not, I am convinced of the existence of streaks on Mars at approximately the positions of wellknown canals. These streaks look as if they were narrow extensions of the maria into the desert regions. They impress me as being some natural surface feature. What they are I wouldn't even dare to guess, as of now, but Mars will come near enough to be studied again and again, and our instruments and techniques will grow more refined. When even the Fight Commission is in on the plot, and everyone knows that the is on, when no one will help him, what can a man do -- except help himself? the long room with the long table and long Commissioners' faces in it. He went to a chair at the head of the table, and sat down, a small man in loose, seedy clothing looking rather lost in a high-backed chair with a regal crest carved in the wood. "You," asked one of the Commissioners, "are Charles Jingle?" Charlie nodded his head, a small nod from a small man sitting in a big man's chair. "You are aware of course... began the Commissioner, but Charlie Jingle waved his fingers and cut him off. "Sure, sure, let's can the bunko and get down to cases." "You have been summoned here... began the same Commissioner, and Charlie Jingle waved his fingers again. "But I ain't gonna anyway," said Charlie Jingle. The Commissioners stirred, cleared their throats, slid their bottoms with unease on their chairs. "You understand," said the Commissioner, "that your license may be revoked if you insist on being uncooperative?" "Sure," said Charlie Jingle. "I understand." A bulky man, who had been standing at a window with his back to the seated members of the Commission while they talked with Charlie, turned to face them. A man with a heavy, grey face that had no humor in it. Charlie Jingle watched him slowly cross to the table and recognized him as Commissioner Jergen, head of the Fight Commission. "Jingle," said the man in a dry voice, "I'm going to make an exthe jungle ample of you if you don't come across. I'm going to smear your name from coast to coast. I'm going to blackball you so hard you won't get a job anyplace, at anything! Get the message?" Charlie Jingle got up from his chair and walked to the door. 'This the way out?" he asked. "Hold on!" roared Commissioner Jergen, and Charlie Jingle stopped with his hand on the knob, looking back with polite inquisitiveness at him. "You goddam people think you can pull quick deals on the Public and on the Fight Commission. I'm here to prove you can't!" Charlie Jingle laughed. "You're here to make a big noise, and scare all the scrawny citizens into a confession, Jergen. Don't kid me!" "I suppose you've got too many contacts to be frightened?" "Contacts? No, I don't have a single damn contact. All I got is my two hands, and you already told me I ain't gonna be able to make a livin' with them, so why should I stick around here anymore?" Commissioner Jergen pulled a chair forward. "Siddown, Charlie. Let's talk like reasonable men," he said. Charlie Jingle searched his face for a lie or a trick. Finding none, he went back to the table and sat down. The Commissioner waited a moment, and then said earnestly: "Listen, Jingle. Seventy years ago this country outlawed prize-fighting. It was barbarous, they said. Men shouldn't fight men. Men shouldn't capitalize on other men as if they were animals. Okay. They changed it. Now we got the Pug-Factories. But we also have the same thing that went on before. We have the grifters and the shysters and the fixers operating at full tift all over the place. There's a few honest guys in the game. I hear you're one of them. All we want is to nail the crooks! We want to bust the Fix Syndicate wide open, get me? Now, if you love the game the way I hear you do -- not for the money, but for the smell and the excitement -- why won't you help us bust them wide?" Charlie Jingle shook his head. "You got it wrong, Jergen. I know about the fixers. But I never consorted with them. If I did, I could've retired a rich man a long time ago." "Then how about that Saturday night fiasco at the Golum Auditorium? You call that a straight fight?" Charlie Jingle shrugged his shoulders. "All I know is I sent my boy in there. He's a Tank, okay. He's up against the newest fighting machine invented. Okay. He drops him. I'm as much surprised as you. All the odds read against me. I got a rebuilt Tank in the ring. But he flattens one of the flashiest pugs in the business. Sure, I admit, it looks suspicious. Fifteen minutes after the upset, one of the biggest fixers in the game walks into my boy's dressing-room... But don't forget, I'm the best trainer in the business. I take a chunk of worn out fighting machine and make it over into something that buys me bread and coffee. Sd maybe I create a freak. How do I know? Maybe I twisted a wire wrong, and my Tank's the toughest thing punching." "You're trying to tell me that fight was on the level, is that it?" "So far as I'm concerned, it's level. So far as you're concerned . Charlie Jingle shrugged. "How is it you happened to have your boy handy when the other fighter couldn't go on?" asked the Commissioner. "I got my stable a block away from the arena. When I heard about Kid Congo getting smashed up in a auto accident, I called the arena. Before the fight, I had twelve cents in my pocket, a dime of which I used to call the arena. They told me 'Sure, bring him down quick, Charlie'. So there I was..." "So they put your Tank in against the Contender. Just like that?" Jingle snapped his fingers. "Like that." "And Harry Belok had nothing to do with the upset?" "Ask Harry Belok." "Why did he come to see you when the fight was over?" Charlie Jingle laughed. "He come to pay me off..." The Commissioner looked at a sheet of paper on the table in front of him. "Nineteen thousand seven hundred and thirty two dollars worth of pay-off?" Charlie Jingle nodded. "And thirteen cents. You got the thirteen cents down?" "I've got the thirteen cents down. But how come he pays off so much money to somebody's completely broke, Charlie-boy?" "Easy," said Charlie Jingle. "The Tank's end of the purse is four hundred bucks, win or lose. Before the fight, I bet the Tank's end against Harry, at house odds. You figure it up, and see if it don't figure out to the penny." Charlie watched one of the Commissioners scribble quick numbers on a piece of blank paper. In a moment the man looked up, and handed the sheet across to Commissioner Jergen. Jergen looked at it quickly and grunted. "Okay?" asked Charlie Jingle. "Okay," growled Jergen. "When we fight the Champ, I'll send a couple tickets around free. See ya'..." Charlie Jingle went out. of the underground tubes and walked down a block of chipped brick and colored plastic buildings, past picket fences and an empty street. He looked at the street, the pavement -- dark, quiet, uncluttered by garbage, devoid of kids. On the roofs of the buildings was a jungle of neatly bent, squarely twisted, staunchly mounted aerials. The kids were under them, behind the picket fences, watching five-foot-square screens that flashed stories and news and the life histories of ring heroes like himself. A nice, clean-cut, handsome actor would act the part of Charlie Jingle, his fights, loves and disappointments, all ending up in one glorious, stirring message. Charlie Jingle made it. From rags to riches in a single swipe... So can you. He stopped in front of Hannigan's Gym, looked up and down the street, and cautiously spat into the gutter. Then he went past the swinging doors into the building's interior. Inside the door, he breathed deep the stale smell of oil and leather that permeated the atmosphere. Opening his eyes, he looked into the flat, grinning face of Emil McPhay. McPhay had been chalking schedules on a blackboard when he spotted the rapt expression of Charlie Jingle's face. "As I live and panhandle!" exclaimed McPhay, his eyes rolling in their fat sockets. "Anybody to see me, Emil?" "Well you know as well as me somebody is, Charlie. The lovin' picture-makin' people 're here. Got a whole staff wit 'em." He leaned close, rolling his eyes shyly. "You gonna give 'em the story of yer bloody life, Charlie?" Charlie strode toward his shop at the back of the gym. "Not unless they make me lead man. And you the leading lady!" He went past a row of smokedglass doors to the last one with it, opened it, and went in. As Emil McPhay had said, the room was mobbed with smoking, suntanned Californians. An elegant-looking man rushed forward and jerked his hand up and down. "Glad .   so glad... Pictures... Hope... Contract... Of course. Your boy... Mister Jingle... Famous..." Nobody had called Charlie Jingle mister for ten years. In one night, he'd graduated from flop to mister. He rubbed his fingers together, feeling the sweat on them. His eyes took in the walls painted their flat, drying green, the racks of tools on them, the pictures of great fighting machines all over them, the electrical diagrams, the Reflex-Analyses Patterns mapped out next to each one. Then he lowered his eyes to take in the grinning, smooth-faced men around him, doing nervous things with their faces and hands. He looked at the man in front of him, his mouth flapping open and closed, contorting this way and that, and suddenly Charlie shut his eyes tight, drew in a blast of air, screwed his mouth open, and yelled "Shaddap!" good and loud. There was stunned silence. Charlie looked around at them, at their poised, waiting faces. "Scram!" he yelled, and jerked his finger to the door. Slowly, the suntanned Californians drifted out of the room, watching him closely lest he maul them or loose another violation of the success story at them. One man broke the spell. "Of course. Mister Jingle, one's life history is certainly something to be treasured. Not to be treated lightly. But I assure you we -- my company, that is -- we will make certain that we adhere to the facts, in our fashion. There will be no unnec -- Charlie Jingle grabbed the man's jacket-front with his left hand, his trouser-seat with the other, and, taking advantage of the man's total unpreparedness, threw him bodily out of the room, in the same motion kicking the door shut so hard, the glass cracked and a piece jumped out of the upper left hand comer. Then Charlie Jingle stormed into his shop, where Tanker Bell awaited him. When Tanker saw Charlie come into the room fuming mad, he shut off the reflex-machine and turned to watch him. Charlie Jingle paced back and forth in the room, in the small space between work-bench and wdl. Suddenly he stopped, spun savagely to face Tanker. "Well? What the hell you lookin' at?" Tanker Bell grinned. "You, Charlie. I like to watch you when you're mad." "You do, eh?" Tanker watched the rage build up to a good healthy flush on Charlie's skin. "Jeez," Tanker jibed, "you look as red as those beets they sell over in the Old-Methods Market." "Listen you! Just because you dropped that flashy character last night. Don't let it go to your head! You get me sore, by God, I'll have you piled up in the yard along with yesterday's rusty pugs!" Tanker laughed. Charlie Jingle glared at the Tanker a moment, drew a deep breath, snorted it out, and paced twice. Then he faced the Tanker again. "Sorry, kid. They got me goin today. First the fight commission. Then these soap-peddlers from Hollywood. Sorry I blew off." "How'd it go with the Commission?" "Okay, okay, Jergen knows about me. He's just hungry for a bust, you know? Wants to nail the Fixers." The Tanker took a step toward Charlie. "The Champ call?" he asked, voice trembling. Charlie shook his head in the negative. "Why don't you sucker him, Charlie? Force his hand!" "You want a bout with the Champ?" "Sure! Don't you?" Charlie sat down on the workbench and pulled the Tanker down next to him. "Listen, Tank. Last night was a freak, you understand? Something happened last night, I don't know what. But you ain't the boy to fight the Champ -- My God, boy, you're older than me!" Tanker Bell looked at Charlie, his face puckering like a child's. "No, now wait. Lemme make it clear, Tank," said Charlie Jingle softly. You'n me been together fourteen years. We've fought in some pretty ancient Tank-towns. We've fought young and old alike, and you know as well as me that it was always an even toss whether or not you would get knocked cold. We're mediocrities. Kid. When I bought you, you'd already seen your best days. Am I right?" Tanker Bell nodded, his head down on his chest. "Look, Tanker, I ain't tryin to hurt you. I just don't wanna see you get killed!" "Well who said anything about gettin' killed, for God's sake!" bawled the Tanker. "Look at it this way. You've been knocked to pieces a dozen times, and I've gone to work and put you back together a dozen times, I've twisted your wires, re-shaped your reflex plan, doubled yom flexibility and your punch-power, co-ordinated and re-co-ordinated you and re-analyzed your nervous-pattern until I've exhausted every possible combination. You're a fighting machine, and a good one, kid. But machines grow old. They get outdated, like me. I'm a Mechanical Engineer. Okay! There's lots of new stuff I don't know that these college kids know. What happens to them? They go to work for Pugilists Inc., inventing new machines with new systems. They got systems that I never dreamed of. Do you know that?" "Well what's that got to do with me fightin' the Champ, for God's sake?" "Everything! They put machines in the ring now that are worth Five Hundred Thousand dollars! They're almost indestructible!" "How come that punk I fought last night wasn't so indestructible, then? How come about that, Charlie?" "I dunno, I dunno. Somethin' musta gone wrong. Maybe he shorted out." "Or maybe for once you hit the right combination, how about that, Charlie? Maybe I'm real ripe, now, after all these years of tankin' around!" "But Tanker! Use your head! The Champ's brand new, spankin' young. He's the newest-styled fighting machine in existence. What chance you think we stand against that?" "Listen. I fought that bum last night with ease, you know that? There I was, just glidin' around him, punchin him at will -- "Maybe it was an accident! Maybe somethin' went wrong with his system last night..." "And maybe I dropped him on the square, too..." in desperation. "Maybe you did. And maybe, if you go in against the Champ, maybe he'll kill you! Maybe he'll smash you so hard I won't be able to put you together again. You wanna take that chance? Or you wanna settle down nice and quiet in some Pug factory, supervisin young fighters?" "Naw!" yelled the Tanker. "I wanna take that chance! I want you to get me a fight with the Champ!" "Are you dumb, or what? Don't you know they never come back?" "All I know is this," began the Tanker. "Fourteen years we bin together. Fourteen years you stuck it out and starved it out, workin with scraps from a junk-heap, with stumble-bums like me who've seen their day. There was times when you went hungry because the junkheap needed oil, or wiring, or a pattern-analysis, or parts. Now you got something! Now you can be on top! You know damn well you don't want any part of that Hollywood fiasco. You got a crack at big money. You gonna let it go bythe-by because you're afraid a pile of wires might get killed? Naw! We fight, and that's the way it stacks!" "You mean it, don't you, Tanker?" The Tanker said nothing. Charlie Jingle slowly rose, tired in his bones, tired in his joints. "Okay. I'll arrange it. But don't blame me if -- " "I won't." said Tanker Bell tightly, and Charlie went out. In the hall, the Hollywood people were still waiting for him. Charlie shouldered past them with a halfspring to his step. H e sat in the waiting-room of the offices of Pugilists, Inc., on a plush powder-blue lounge chair chewing gum languidly. From time to time he shot a glance at the secretary sitting inside a totally enclosed desk, operating a Mento-Writer Machine, the electrical contact-buttons fixed to her temples. He watched in sleepy fascination as, every so often, she leaned over and pushed the button marked corrector, and there would follow an electrical hiss as the tape on the machine slid back, eliminating wrongly-formed thoughts. Charlie knew that somewhere in the room there was machinery observing him, measuring his pulse, emotional balance, probable intelligence, habits, and massing and digesting the general information so that Pugilists, Inc., would know what kind of man they were dealing with, and what approach would be best. Somewhere in this building another machine was probably purring, feeding information from memory-banks, relating all known facts and incidents regarding Charlie Jingle, his birth, environment, social and political connections, moral status, business ethics, and bank account... Not that Charlie Jingle was so important to them, this he knew. But Pugilists, Inc., kept records and histories of every and any individual having even the remotest connection with the fight game. As Charlie Jingle sat there a smile twitched across his face. Let them figure that out, he thought, and then sank into a reverie. Over in the other part of the room, across the prairie of rug, the secretary Mento wrote efficiently, the it's well-oiled quietness. "Jmgle?" Charlie Jingle looked across the room to the secretary. "What?" he asked. "Would you go in please. Mister Jingle?" Charlie followed the direction of the girl's gesture to a panel in the wall. He got up and started to cross suspiciously toward it. As he slowed down, nearing it, he looked back at her, and she smiled and encouraged him on sympathetically toward the doorless wall. Just as Charlie thought Itd be funny if I break my nose on that goddam wall... the panel swung in quietly. Charlie walked through it into a room. In it there was another veldt of rug, at the far end of which was a bar, a lounge chair, a tremendous sofa, and a low, kneehigh table. The walls were decorated with modem paintings in a colorful, tasteful, executive way. Standing near the knee-high table were three men, one distinguished looking, the other two looking as if they'd stepped out of a Young Collegiate Magazine ad. The elegant one crossed to Charlie, his face a big, pleasant, well-groomed smile, hand extended. "Allow me. Mister Jingle. I'm Kort Gassel. These two gentlemen are Jerome Rupp and Eugene White. Would you like a drink. Mister Jingle?" Charlie Jingle shook their hands and sat down, crossing his legs comfortably. "You got gin, Mister ahhh -- "Gassel." said Kort Gassel, and crossed the three feet to the bar. "Soda?" he asked. "Straight." said Charlie Jingle, and watched the other two sit down slowly as Gassel came back with his drink. "That's quite a drink. I know few men who enjoy straight gin. Mister Jingle. It always comes as a surprise when I -- " "You gonna give us the fight. Mister Gassel?" interrupted Charlie. "The fight? You mean with Iron-Man Pugg?" "That's right, with Iron-Man Pugg." "Well Mister Jingle. Since you put the matter so straightforwardly. Pugilists Incorporated only owns a small block of stock in Iron-Man Pugg, as you know. Mister Rupp and Mister White here represent the other interests involved. As you must know. Pugilists Incorporated is a large-scale business, designed to function on a large-scale basis. Now, we, the stockholders in IronMan Pugg, have thought this thing out. We've come to the conclusion that it would rather -- well, embarrass the Company to agree to such a match as you propose." "So you won't fight?" "No, no, Mister Jingle, don't jump to hasty conclusions. I'm trying to explain something to you. It's not simply a matter of matching your -- ah -- boy against ours. But we are concerned with the overall effect of such a bout. Frankly, our reputation as a manufacturing concern is more important to us than the outcome of any single bout -- " "Whadda you say you get to the point?" "Certainly. Tanker Bell, as we understand it, has a fighting history of forty-seven years. Now, I'm afraid we'd be made a laughing-stock if Tanker Bell were set into motion against one of our products." "Especially if he won, is that it?" "Particularly then. But we rest secure in the fact that that outcome is highly improbable, not to state impossible." Charlie Jingle sipped his gin, looking from one face to the other. "So?" he asked, anticipating what was about to come. "Suppose, Mister Jingle, you were offered a price for Tanker Bell, price far in excess of his actual worth. A price big enough to even make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second-rate fighter in good second-class condition." Charlie Jingle closed his eyes and tapped his foot with horny, greasemonkey fingers. In a moment he opened them and slowly took in the three representatives of the champ, Iron-Man Pugg. "Lemme get this straight. You want me to sell Tanker for much more than he's worth because you'd be humiliated at having to put one of your products in the same ring with him?" "Exactly." said Kort Gassel. "But you're sure your boy'd whip him in the ring?" "Well obviously we all know the knockout victoiy he scored over the Contender was an accident." Charlie Jingle nodded. all know it. But there's one guy in the world who don't. You know who? Tanker Bell himself." Kort Gassel laughed. "A robot. Mister Jingle? Surely you must be -- " Charlie Jingle shook his head. "Can't do it, boys. I gotta consider the Tanker. You see. Mister Gassel, Tanker thinks he could take your boy. And not only does he wanna take him, but he won't take no for an answer!" "Listen, Jingle, is this some kind of joke? What are you holding out for? A price? When I said I'd make it worth your -- " Charlie Jingle shook his head, stubbornly and firmly. "No price, Gassel. Just an agreement-contract." "Listen, you fool, don't you realize what's at stake here? We're big business! We can't afford to play around with lucky independents like you!" "Can't take any chances, huh?" "Exactly that! Can't, and won't!" "Wanna bet?" "If you try to -- " Charlie Jingle got up from his seat. "Gassel... I've been in this racket so long I've got oil in my veins instead of blood, and a Reflex-Pattern Analysis for a brain. I know every angle there is to know. If I want a fight. I'll get one. So don't go try putting your big business pressure on me. I'm too old for college-boy antics." Kort Gassel stared at him for a long, hostile moment. Then his face broke into a smile. "My friend, do you know what you're bucking? These are the offices of Pugilists Incorporated you're in. Don't you realize what that means?" "Sure." said Charlie Jingle. "It means that if Tanker Bell whips Iron-Man Pugg, Charlie Jingle will one day have as big a factory and as many orders for FightingMachines as Pug, Inc..." Charlie Jingle crossed the desert of rug toward the exit-panel. "See you at Ring-side, Kids." And he went out. M escha hannigan, owner and proprietor of Hannigan's Jungle, watched from his tier office as Hammerhead Johnny put Tanker Bell through his paces in the ring. His eyes travelled from the laboring fighters in the ring to the crowd of spectators standing and sitting around, watching the Tank work. He was smooth and fast, without a kink, stabbing light quick jabs and those murderous body-rights that had stopped the Contender, breaking, the press had said after the fight, the metal ribcage inside the Contender's body, Mischa Hannigan was happy. After fifteen years of obscurity, his gym was fast-becoming popular again. He had begun to charge admissions again to fans and promoters who were eager to see the Tank at work. Once again during the afternoon workouts there was the hum and roar of spectators, the slap-slur of springing feet on the canvas followed by the booming of fists echoing from rib-cage and jawbone structure. There was the smell of money in his gym now, along with the smells of leather and oil. The door behind him opened and Hannigan turned to Charlie Jingle. " 'Lo, Charlie."  'Lo, Mish... How's he look?" "Terrific! If I didn't know him for twenty years, I'd swear he was brand, spankin new!" Charlie Jingle grunted quietly and walked to the plate-glass window. He looked down at them there in the white-roped square, watched the Tanker attack with a quickreflex attack, block a flurry of counter-blows, weave under a righthand smash to the head, and rock Hammerhead Johnny to the ropes with a combination of shoulderstraight jabs to the stomach and a cross-hand right to the chest. A hum of approval and amazement went up from the spectators. "Charlie!" shrieked Mischa Hannigan. "Charlie, did you see that? And that Hammerhead Johnny is supposed to be the most stable Pug in the business. They say he's got magnets in his feet, can't nobody break the contact of -- " "Calm down, calm down, it's only practice." "Practice he calls it! If Hammerhead could bust up the Tank, don't you think he would?" "Hammerhead's an old junkpot, Mich, and you know it!" "Old he may be, Charlie, but junkpot he's not. Crafty as a damn president of Pugs, Inc., he is, and everybody in the business knows it. He ranks with the best sparrin' partners in the world, he does." In the ring below something happened that drew a roar of uncontrollable excitement from the crowd. It was over in a flesh and nobody saw quite how it happened. Hammerhead Johnny's body described a rigid, dark arc in the air, hovered suspended a second in a completely horizontal position, and then crashed with a hollow boom to the deck. The Hammerhead did not move. lighted Mischa Hannigan. "BEHe began to dance around the room in a jig that shook his frame with every jolt and pirouette. Charlie Jingle laughed. "Fll be dammed! The Tank's really got it! He really has got it!" "Oh, we're rich, we're rich, we're rich!" chanted the hysterical Hannigan, dancing his macabre dance of the human puff-ball. There was a knock at the door and Hannigan, still chanting, danced to the door and opened it. The relaxed puffy flesh drew tight, his back stiffened. Charlie Jingle peered around his girth to see who stood there. Harry Belok, in a black Homburg and a blue pin-stripe suit, stepped smiling into the room, twirling an ebony cane. He doffed his hat, bowing slightly. Behind him a small man slid in next to the wall, his whole body screwed up tightly into his neck. Hannigan, with a pale, sickly smile, shut the door, "If it ain't Harry Belok! Hello, Harry." Harry Belok, smiling, looked straight at Charlie Jingle. "Whadayasay, Hannigan! How's things, Charlie? Long time no see, hah?" Charlie Jingle, with a tightness in his throat, mirrored the sick expression of Mischa Hannigan. He smiled a smile so forced his flesh stretched like a rubber mask out of control. "Hello, Harry. What can I do for you?" " 'S this way, Charlie-mo. I just seen your lx)y work out. I just seen him club the Hammerhead to the deck with the weirdest combination I ever seen. It's somethin' new, he's got. Somethin' original! Know what I mean?" Harry Belok stopped pacing, stopped twirling, to look at Charlie Jingle. Charlie Jingle waited. "Well -- I hear around the grapevine that Pugs, Inc., don't relish the thought of givin your boy a crack at Iron-Man. Is that true, Charlie-mo?" Charlie Jingle shrugged. "It don't mean a thing, Harry. You know that as well as anybody." "Yeah, Charlie-mo. But you know as well as anybody that the Fight Commission has got a rules book as thick as this room. If Pugs, Inc., really wants to, they'll find some kinda statute that disqualifies your boy for the championship. Now, you don't want that to happen, do you?" Charlie Jingle began to feel the heat flushing up behind his eyeballs. "What's the pitch, Harry?" "I think maybe what you ought to do, Charlie-mo, is lemme buy a chunk out of your boy. Then I guarantee you get the match." "What makes you think I don't get the match anyway, Harry?" Harry Belok turned, pointing his stick through the glass to the gym. "Look down there. You see any reporters there? You see any cameras shootin'?" Charlie Jingle did not move, keeping his eyes unblinking on Belok. "Okay. There's no reporters. No press build-up. Pugs, Inc., has put the freeze on. So? What's the point?" "The point," said Harry Belok, tapping Charlie Jingle's chest with the white-tipped stick, "the point, is that you don't get no match from Iron-Man unless you play ball with me!" Charlie Jingle squinted at him through a cloud of brown-blue smoke. "Can't do it, Harry-mo." he said quietly. "You serious?" "Dead serious," said Charlie Jingle. "You get too serious, that's the way you liable to wind up." said Harry Belok through his teeth. He turned and stomped toward the door and went out. The little man against the wall slid out after him. Charlie Jingle walked nonchalantly to the door, hooked his foot behind it, and kicked it shut with a loud slam. Mischa Hannigan took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiping his brow. "You've gone crazy, Charlie. You've gone stark ravin' mad!" Charlie Jingle whirled. "All these years, Mish, I starved and sweated in tank-joints. All these years I broke my back, and nobody lifted a finger except a choice one or two. Now I've got a crack at somethin' good and everybody wants in. Well I don't want them in! I want them to stay clear, and lemme go my own way! Is that crazy?" "But Charlie," moaned Mischa Hannigan. "You can't go laughin' at the Fixer like that! Don't you have enough worries without gettin' killed?" Charlie Jingle looked at him a blank moment and then laughed. He turned, looking toward the ring below. The Tanker was on the Gym floor, looking up. He waved. Charlie turned to Hannigan. "Can you get me the Jawbreaker to spar with Tanker, Mish?" Hannigan sank slowly into his leather chair behind the beat-up, rusting metal desk. He rubbed a patch of rust with his thumb. "Sure. Sure I can get the Jawbreaker. Can you get the match?" "You just watch my dust." said Charlie, and went out. Mischa Hannigan crinkled his nose. He began to feel his asthma coming on. roared the apoplectic Commissioner Jergen. "I can't get myself wrapped up in ring politics! I'm a fight commissioner, not a goddam promoter!" Charlie took a few steps toward the Commissioner, leveling a finger at him in indictment. "Now you lemme tell you somethin'. You run the fight game, but the only thing you're interested in is your own goddam reputation. The only time you ever get up off your fat keister is when somebody publicly pulls a quick deal that looks phony. Then you roar up from die saddle and start screaming 'foul ' -- only because it makes you look bad if you don't!" "I can have you cited for contempt -- " "I don't give one damn in hell what you can have me cited for! I thought you were one square guy. But all you are is a bloody politician like all the others! You're here to make sure the fight racket gets a fair-deal. Well I'm getting the old freeze-away, and you still sit on your keister and don't do a damned thing!" "You damn midget!" croaked the Commissioner, and Charlie Jingle whirled, fists cocked, his face working up a nice purple color. "What'd you call me. Fatso?" "I called you a damn midget, and if you don't like it, I dare you take a poke at me!" said the Commissioner, and coming around his desk he thrust his jaw out toward Charlie Jingle's cocked fists. Jingle drew his fist back and stopped. Slowly he dropped the cocked hand by his side. "Oh, no! Oh, no you don't! You'd just love me to do it, wouldn't you? A half-hour later I'd lose my license for conduct unbecoming a fight trainer." The Commissioner straightened up slowly, glaring out from under thick grey eyebrows at Charlie Jingle's face. "You think I'd pull that?" "Goddam right you'd pull it! For all I know, you may even be working for Pugs, Inc." Fight Commissioner Jergen rocked back on his heels as if he had just taken a blow between the eyes. He sank slowly into his chair, staring in stillborn amazement at Charlie Jingle. "Wait a minute, Charlie. You mean to say -- Listen, boy, what's happening to you? You know better than to say something like that to me! Charlie Jingle suddenly felt a hollowness in his stomach. "I'm sorry, Jergen. I don't know what's the matter with me. This thing's got me sore. They got me goin', and there's nothin I can do about it. I called the press. I told them that Pugs, Inc. and Tanker Bell had come to an agreement. I even quoted a fight date. I look in the papers the next day. Nothing! They got me sewed up tight. I come here as a last resort... I'm sorry I shot off my mouth!" Charlie Jingle turned and started out. "Now wait a minute, Charlie ..." Charlie Jingle turned. "You see, I know all about these kinds of deals in the game. Have known about them for years. But they keep me shut out because I can't prove anything. If you go to court as a witness. Pugs, Inc. will have fifteen other witnesses. They'll even have a taped recording of your conversation with them, which they juggle and splice to fit their purposes. You'll hear things coming off a tape which you damn well know you didn't say or mean. But you'll have to admit it's your voice ; you were there, the other guys in the room were there -- and they got you nailed. See what I mean? They're big business. They got it sewed." "You mean there's nothing to do?" "I mean there are ways. All you've got to do is sneak yourself into the public eye. Once that happens, the public asks questions. What happened to Tanker Bell? Why isn't, he fighting the Champ? Know what I mean?" "Don't you think they're askin' questions now?" "Sure. But they ain't doin' it en masse. See?" "Yeah," said Charlie Jingle softly. "Yeah. What I gotta do is hit Pugs, Inc. where they ain't got control of the situation. Where they don't have their stooges workin' to keep things quiet." "Now you've got it." said the Commissioner, grinning. "Okay. See you around." said Charlie, and started out. "Take care." warned the Commissioner. But by that time Charlie Jingle was on his way. At one o'clock of that afternoon, Charlie Jingle boarded a coast-tocoast rocket. Fifty five minutes later, at ten fifty-five A.M. West Coast Time, Charlie Jingle set foot on the pavement of Los Angeles' Municipal Rocket-Port, hopped a cab, and got out on the lot of Galaxy Films. His business there took him two hours and twelve minutes, by which time he hopped another cab, was bom back to the Rocket-Port, and bought a return ticket on the eastbound Rocket, scheduled for takeoff at five P.M. Charlie found a few hours on his hands. He chose to divert himself at the Jet-Car Races in Culver City. He dropped forty dollars on the first two races, and had just bought another ticket when, as he walked away from the betting window, he saw a familiar profile marking possibilities on a racing sheet with a well-chewed pencil. He nudged up to Rabbit Markey, and in a half-whisper, asked: "Got anything hot today, Jack?" Rabbit Markey looked up with an annoyed frown, blinked, and when Charlie Jingle's face registered, laughed. "Lo, Charlie? How's things out on the Coast?" "Things," said Charlie, shaking his hand, "are lousy. But they'll get better real fast. How about you. Rabbit? Out of the fights for good?" Rabbit Markey sighed slow and long, nodding his head. "I dumped my whole stable, Charlie, and when I come out here, I figured Jet-Car racing was a clean way to make a buck. So I bought me a Jet outfit. But it's the same tie-up as the fights was." "I can imagine," said Charlie Jingle. "No you can't, neither. For instance, you know who Jet-Cars Incorporated happens to be an affiliate of?" "Wait! Don't tell me. Lemme guess." Charlie shut his eyes. "Pugs, Inc.?" "Bingo." said Rabbit Markey dispiritedly. "You know who makes the drivers for the Jet-Cars?" "Wait! Don't tell me!... Pugs, Inc.?" "Bingo." said Rabbit Markey sadly, and Charlie laughed. "That's the way the bugle blows, eh. Rabbit?" "You know who's got the Commissioner of Jet-Car Races bought out?" went on Rabbit Markey. "Wait! Don't tell -- How do you know that, Rabbit?" "Whatsa difference. I know. For sure! I happened to find out. Just like the old Fights Racket, eh, Charlie?" "Yeah." said C#iarlie Jingle nervously. "Except that nobody's got Jergen bought out." "Hunh?" exclaimed Rabbit Markey. "What I said -- nobody's got -- " "I heard ya, Charlie. I heard ya the first time. You mean you never heard about Jergen?" "Heard? Heard what?" "Boyo boyo boy! Buddy, you are in the middle of the neatest fix in history. You mean to say you don't know what's happening?" "Fix? What kinda fix, Rabbit?... Are you kidding? I can't even get my boy a fight, and you're talking fix!" "Aw Boyy! Awww Boyyyy are you a dummy! Lissen! Whatta you doin out here onna Coast?" "Doin? I'm tryin to set it up so I can get Tanker a fight, that's what I'm doin!" "You worked out a deal with some film company, huh?" "That's right. Why?" Rabbit Markey shot a glance to the right of him and one to the left, hunched his shoulders, pulled his trousers up, took Charlie by the lapel, and drew him close to a post. The buzzer sounded outside to announce that the race was within one minute of starting time. "Charlie, you're about to be had. Now you're playin' it the way you was supposed to in the beginning. You was supposed to play ball with the Hollywood boys to begin with. Now you done it. Now the fix is in!" "How the the hell can there be lie Jingle. "Tanker's level. Are you kiddin?" "Sure! Tanker's level! But how about the Contender? How about Hammerhead Johnny? How about Steamroller Jones?" "You're crazy!" shouted Charlie Jingle. "It can't be! How the hell would you know?" "You wanna know how I know? My daughter Marie -- you remember her, she was a kid when you seen her -- she's a secretary to Mike Bretz, the East Coast Assistant Vice of Pugs, Inc... She's got the whole map out, from the word go. Pugs, Inc. is puttin things in your way so that everybody thinks you got a real thing in the Tank. They're helpin you get a build-up, you see, as if they wanted to freeze you out. When you finally break through the freeze-out one way or the other, they're gonna have one hellofa drawing-card! Get it now, Charlie?" Charlie Jingle walked away from Rabbit Markey, went some twenty paces, kicked a dent in a refusechute, and walked back. "I don't believe it!" whispered Charlie Jingle hoarsely. "I don't believe it!" The bugle blew outside. Rabbit Markey looked at Charlie, looked at his ticket, and started toward the race-tracL Charlie Jingle caught his arm. "Wait a minute. Rabbit." Rabbit Markey shook his head. "I already said enough to float me in blood, Charlie. Now lemme go and watch the bloody no-good fixed races." No, Rabbit Tell me more. Tell me who else is swingin' this deal?" "Don't you know?" "Har Belok?" Rabbit Markey nodded. "Jergen?" asked Charlie Jingle with bated breath. Rabbit Markey nodded his head. "How they do it? Tinker with the Fighters?" "You ever see Hammerhead get knocked off his feet?" "I don't get it -- they lemme buy my own way into the news, is that it? I think Fm perfectly legitimate. So does everybody else in the game. What then?" "Then a story breaks someplace about the way Pugs, Inc. tried not to give you a fight. Everything looks like Pugs, Inc. is scared stiff of you because you can ruin them. Big build-up. Even Jergen goes to bat, confesses he tried to help you get the fight. Everybody's sore as hell at Pugs, Inc. TTiey force a fight, Tanker goes in -- and gets slaughtered. See?" Charlie Jingle felt his guts deflate in a rush. "Yeah." he said, dead-toned. "I see." "What you gonna do?" "I dunno. I got it set up with Galaxy Films to be waitin' in New York Rocket-Port with cameras. Couple of friends of mine are gonna fake a shootin with me when I get there. Guess I've got no choice. I'll have to go through with it now." "Okay now," said Rabbit Markey. "Now lemme go and get ulcers over the cars." He gave Charlie his hand and they shook slowly. "Take care, kid -- and thanks." "Nahhh! Forget it! Forget you even saw me here! But don't forget what I told you. Harry Belok's got friends in LA, too. I got racing-ulcers, but I don't mind bein' alive with them. You get me?" Charlie Jingle nodded again, and Rabbit Markey walked out into the roar of the Jet-Races. Charlie Jingle looked down at the ticket in his hand, ripped it in two, and let the pieces flutter to the floor. Outside, he hailed a cab. To board the Eastbound Rocket would have been to play into the very hands of his enemies. And he needed time to think -- to figure his way out of the fix that had been planned for him. Perhaps by avoiding the Rocket trip, he would avoid the pre-planned shooting, the filming of which was also preset, and so avoid the press, and whatever consequent notoriety would follow the whole affair at the Rocket-Port. So he hired a car and started to drive East. T here arose a great hue and cry at the disappearance of Charles Jingle, who had been a registered, scheduled passenger on the Eastbound Rocket. What had happened to him? What mystery cloaked his disappearance? Galaxy Films made it known that Charles Jingle suspected an attempt on his life. Why? asked a conscientious columnist. Who might have reason enough to threaten the life of a Robot-Trainer? Mischa Hannigan, innocently and in a moment of anger at what he thought must be vengeful murder, stated that attempts had been made to intimidate Charles Jingle into selling out Tanker Bell. Who had done so? Mischa Hannigan would not say, though hinting darkly that a 'wellknown fixer" was at the bottom of it The Press probed deeper into the mystery. What about Charles Jingle's property. Tanker Bell? Was it so valuable that the proprietor should be murdered for not parting with it? If it was, why had there been no offer of a match from the Champion? It was then that some bright reporter conceived the idea of questioning the Fight Commission as to it's views on the shamefully clandestine affair. What had it to say? Nothing, was the reply. The bright reporter launched an attack on the Commission. The fight public wanted to know what the Fight Commission thought it's function was, if not to expose underground tactics in the game? Commissioner Jergen addressed the citizenry via television. He admitted that Charles Jingle had been to see him. He aitted he was unable to move due to a lack of tangible evidence. He would not name the parties accused by Charles Jingle because there was no real evidence at this date. He would further investigate the situation, using every resource at his command. When Charlie Jingle arrived in New York two days later the lid was off the town. Everyone was fuming at what had been perpetrated against him. Everyone understood why he had come into town imobtrusively. What Charlie Jingle had sought to avoid had happened anyway. The play was in motion. There was no stopping it. He watched the day-to-day developments in a state of paralyzed horror. It was a nightmare in which he was the principal, and yet, the bystander, the spectator. He had no choice but to follow. Rabbit Markey had shown him the truth, so that all things now had a double meaning, a reality and an unreality, another dimension, another depth. When the press came to question him, Charlie fought the only way he knew. He denounced Pugs, Inc. as cheats, liars, and fixers. He denounced Commissioner Jergen, Harry Belok, the press, the Hollywood people, the prize-fight game, and the public in an attempt to break the whole business wide open. But everyone understood. "Mister Jingle is justified in his bitterness," said a reporter. "Of course Charlie's sore. He's got a right to be sore!" said Commissioner Jergen. "A horrible injustice. We were concerned over our reputation." said Kort Gassel of Pugs, Inc. "The guy deserves a break!" said the fight public. And Hollywood said, "We don't understand what prompted this unwarranted attack." So there it was. Charlie Jingle spoke the truth, but nobody helieved him. Tanker Bell was granted a match. The fix was in. As a last resort, Charlie Jingle refused to let the Tanker fight. An uproar went up from the public. It was a matter of ethics. Tanker Bell was now their champion. He was the embodiment of everyman against the Organization, against injustice. Tanker Bell must fight! It was then that Charlie Jingle understood. This was not simply a fight. This was part of a longrange plan to bring the public man to heel. This was part of a scheme to break the mass-individual spirit, because if Everyman stood with Tanker Bell as the champion of independant justice, and Tanker Bell were beaten -- so would the public-independent spirit be. But Charlie Jingle had his hands tied. Charlie Jingle corralled the Tanker in the workshop and ordered the amazed Tanker to lie down on the work-bench for a "tune up". The Tanker protested. "You crazy, Charlie? Whuffor? I never felt so good in my life!" "Don't gimme any arguments. Tank. Stretch out and shuddup." "But Charlie..." "Stretch out, for God's sake!" "What you gonna do?" "Re-vamp you. I'm gonna run the tapes on the bout with the Contender, and stuff your memory banks with tapes on every fight was ever had with a Pugs, Inc. product. Then I'm gonna run tapes on Hammerhead Johnny. I'm gonna key up your reflex-pattern to the point where you'll be operating so fast your joints are liable to break down in the ring." Tanker stared at him, openmouthed. "What for? Will you please tell me that? What for?"' "After I've fed you the tapes on the Contender and Hammerhead, you'll know, if those goddam memory-computers of yours ain't so rusty they can still work." "You tryin' to teach me somethin' I don't know?" "That's right." "Why can't you just tell me?" "If you figure it out yourself, you won't like it any more than if I told you; but you'll know it the hard way." "What a hellofa way to teach me somethin! Jazzin me up! My coordination is perfect, analysissystem is workin' like a voodoo charm, and you wanna jazz me up! It's like committin' suicide!" Something in the Tanker's face changed, quickly and suddenly, as if a diamond-bright idea exploded inside his steel-plated head. "Charlie?" Charlie Jingle looked up from his assortment of tools. "WW?" "Is this a fix?" Charlie Jingle looked at him, the flush of anger brightening his eyes. "Is that a joke, Tanker?" "No, Charlie. A question." "Stretch out." said Charlie Jingle gruffly. "Answer me first, Charlie. Is it?" "Whatta you think?" "I dunno." said the Tanker, stretching out slowly. "You really wanna win that fight, kid?" asked Charlie Jingle, sad and tender. "You know I do!" "Trust me then, hah?" The Tanker laughed, stretching out on the bench. The light glittered cold on the smooth worn steel of the tools in Charlie Jingle's hands. When the first Mechanical Pugilist was made, the Fight Commission made a number of demands. First, through each robot's sightmechanism, it was established that each machine should be equipped with cameras by which they would record the activity of their opponent in the ring. If a foul was committed which had escaped the judges, the proof would thereby be recorded on the camera-tapes, which could easily be confiscated by the Fight Commission. Secondly, there was a coordination system in each machine which could not be slackened without a noticeable difference in the conduct of the fighter, thus acting as a safeguard against the TrainerOwner's voluntarily slowing their fighters down for illegal purposes. However, there were ways to slow a pug down. There were circuitshorting devices, reflex-sabotaging devices, analysis-pattern disturbances, muscle-flexibility tensions -- all of which cut down the fighter's efficiency to some degree. The trick, of course, was to do so without exposure, since all fighters were examined moments before they entered the ring, and were subject to further investigation if the Judges deemed a fight suspiciously under expectation-level. The machines then were constructed, so that, in essence, they were totally 'honest', and every part in them was recorded in a master plan, filed with the Fight Conunission, so that nothing could be added, and certainly, nothing be subtracted from them, since their balance depended completely on very essential parts. They were also constructed so that they had their weakness-points in exactly the same places men had theirs. If a machine struck hard enough and exactly enough on the point of its opponent's jaw, it would jar wires and electrical contacts badly enough to stop its operational function -- thus the "knockout". To all intents and purposes the fighting machine was constructed as much along human lines as was possible, even to the point of corruptibility. They all had a desire to be great fighting machines, and to go down in the annals of fight history. They were, each and every one, made for the purpose of practicing a deadly, brutal art by which men could sublimate the brutality that nested like a sleeping tiger in their own persons. Provision had even been made for the sight of flowing blood. The tough rubber skin that made the robots appear human contained the red oil that lubricated the steel "innards", and if the rubber skin split the more the bloodthirsty members of the audience were satisfied. What Charlie Jingle did, when he operated on the Tanker, was what might be called, in human terms, "over-conditioningf' him. He tightened and sped his reflexes, shortened the length of his wires so that electrical responses had shorter distances to travel, sped up his Analysis-Pattern, hyper-toned his muscle-flexibility, and generally made him a nervous wreck. Then, as a final touch, he ran the tapes he had promised to run, striving to bring the truth to the Tanker. "How do you feel?" asked Charlie as he watched Tanker Bell sit up, his face twitching. "Like a damn screwball!" said the Tanker. "Did you get the message?" "Yeah. Hammerhead never fought like the way he fought me in his life! Whad they do to him?" "Fixed him:" said Charlie Jingle soberly. "The Contender too?" "Well you saw the tapes. They're all stuck away in that memory bank of yours. Whatta you think?" Tanker nodded, his head jerking up and down uncontrollably. "Fixed him too. But I don't get the picture yet. Do you, Charlie?" "Sure, I get it. The night I called the Arena to match you against the Contender because Kid Congo got squashed in that accident, they had a fix workin between them. Kid Congo was supposed to upset the Contender, see? But they must've both been fixed a little to fool the Judges. So there's diis accident, see? This throws the whole plan into a panic -- Congo's out, it's too late to im-fix the Contender. If the Auditorium puts in a fighter who's strictly legitimate, everybody will know it was a fixed. I call. They figured I had a Tank, maybe you'd look pretty bad in there, and nobody would know the difference. Okay, what happens? You nail the Contender, because, after all, you ain't that bad -- does it figure?" "Boy! Does it!" said the Tanker, his head jerking. "Why can't you go to the authorities, Charlie?" "Because this fix is piled a mile high. Tanker, in all directions." "Whadda you mean?" "I mean I can't go to the Commission." "What we gonna do? Just get belted around?" "We got no choice." said Charlie Jingle with a shrug. "The hell we ain't! If you think I'm gonna go into a ring and get mauled, you're off your rocker!" "We can't call the bout off." said Charlie Jingle dejectedly. "Well who said anything about callin' it off?" shouted Tanker. "I did the best I could! I tuned you up. I timed you. I jazzed you up good -- "But you still don't think we can beat that Iron-Man Pugg!" "That's right." "So whattam I supposed to do when I go inter the ring tonight? Throw down my hands and give it up?" "You do what I did. Do yoxxr best" "Alla while knowin' I don't stand a chance?" "If I did it, you can do it." "You know what you don't have, CJharlie? You don't have faith!" Charlie Jingle snorted in disgust. "Who hatched you? Some preacher?" "No, no, that's the truth, and you know it!" "The truth," roared Charlie Jingle in a white rage, "The truth is that everything's a lie! The truth is that everything's fixed from the word go, from the bottom up and the top down. That's the goddam truth for you!" Tanker shook his head stubbornly. "Boy, you sure are singin' a different song, all of a sudden. I dunno what the hell happened to you, but you don't even sound like yourself!" "Okay! Okay! Wait and see when they klobber you with it tonight. Tank, my boy! Wait and see when it hits you square between the eyes." The Tanker leaped up from the bench, jerking his fists in the air uncontrollably. "I'll murder him!" "No you won't. Listen, I been fighting against fixes and fixers all my life. Tanker. I never believed, and I never wanted to believe, that they had it sewed away, that the big operatoi# had us tucked away into their pockets. Now I'm convinced! They sold me their dirty bill of goods. I'm sewed in with the rest of them." The Tanker shook his fist under Charlie Jingle's face. Oil had drained from his system up into his face and head, lubricating his head-mechanisms as protection from strain, as his head-parts were being overworked. His "skin" looked blotchy. "Charlie! After this is over, I want quits with you! You hear me? I want quits!" "Suits me fine." said Charlie Jingle. "I'll bet -- began Tanker Bell, " -- I'll bet you ain't even gonna bet on me! Are you?" "Sure! I'm gonna bet a thousand on you in the open market. Then what I'm gonna do is let Hannigan bet five thousand for me on the sly on the Champ. That way, at least rU come out with somethin'. " "Even Belok's better than you! At least he's got guts enough to fix fights. You ain't even got guts enough to fight one!" Charlie Jingle walked to the door. "You better rest up," he said, and swung the door open. "Don't worry about me," said the Tanker. "I can take care of myself!" Charlie Jingle looked at him a moment, a cloud of inexpressible something in his eyes. "See you later," he said quietly, and shut the door. shoulder to shoulder with Tanker Bell, down the long cluttered corridor of Golum Auditorium toward the roped ring. There swelled, to either side of them, the surging roar of the crowd, and it seemed to Charlie that the sound lifted the bitterness of his expression from his face and floated it forcibly toward the rafters overhead, for all to see, and to know that Charlie Jingle had given up the good fight, Charlie Jingle was tired, had been had, was through, inside and out. The fix was in. There was no way to stop it. That was the way the bugle blew. They climbed into the ropes and the roar of the crowd boomed and grew, electric with the mood and feel of battle. Swiftly Charlie disrobed the Tank, sat him on a stool, and looked over at the Champion's comer. Iron-Man Pugg was already seated. On his face, as on Tanker's, there was the brooding look of combat, of dead-sure certainty that he, and he alone would win. And Charlie felt a jolt of sick depression in his stomach, because he knew it was true. The robot-referee came into the ring, and the crowd immediately hushed. A dime-sized microphone on an almost invisible wire dropped down from the batteries of overhead lights (this was more in the line of tradition than need, since the robot-referee had a built-in mike of his own), and the referee held up his hands for complete silence. The crowd shushed itself to a murmer, and the referee went through his introductory piece. After each fighter had received the crowd's roar of approbation, the referee signalled for them to come to the center. They went back to their comers. Charlie shook the robe from the Tanker's back as a hum of excitement charged through the crowd. The buzzer sounded and the fighters rose, ready. Charlie stepped through the ropes, slapped Tanker on his back. "Do your best. Tank." The Tanker looked at him, face grim and solitary, shut away from Charlie. "My best ain't enough, Charlie. I'll do more than my best." Charlie Jingle was about to say something else when the bell banged away. He scooped the stool out of the ring and watched the Tanker shuffle into center to meet the Champion. Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines. Thirty rounds of fighting, at five minutes per round, is one hundred and fifty minutes, two and a half hours, of solid, shattering labor. A machine overheats the way a man does under constant stress. It's joints expand, its lubricant thins, things begin to stick, friction wears parts. While a fight-machine's tedy works against time, its opponent pounds it, jars it, jolts it. Wires loosen. Gears slip. Tubes shatter. The machine slows, becomes gawky. Its timing is a split second off. Its flexibility, its speed, are worn down. When its pattern-analysis system becomes damaged, it cannot decipher the feints, the systems and combinations of its opponents' strategy. An eye is shattered, and the Trainer replaces it, since he carries a spare pair. The same one is smashed again, and he cannot replace it, because the Commission only allows a single replacement during a fight. Its "skin" is split and the colored oil flows, the lifeblood of the machine. The Trainer is allowed one vulcanizing skin repair job per bout. If it happens again, the fighter must go on, fighting against the time when the loss of oil will endanger his operating efficiency. Sometimes the machines strike each other with such deadly impact, they dent the inner frame-work of the body, putting strains on a section of wiring or electrical tubing. Then the damaged machine must fight defensively to protect its weakened section. The offender will work out elaborate pimchpattems to trick the defender into somehow thinking he understands the aim of each pattern of punches and where the final concentration will be. And suddenly, with uncanny craftiness, the offender switches its attack to an unexpected area. This is the function of the pattern-analysis system in each fighter. To map, plan, digest the opponent's habits of fighting, then compute them, set up a given system of punches itself which will clutter the opponent's memory banks, and then radically change the mode of attack and system of fighting. The process is mathematically complex. It is the process of the human brain operating at high speed. The first fifteen rounds of fighting are generally devoted toward "faking" patterns. Each fighter labors to out-fox the other. In a sense, the first fifteen rounds of fighting are preliminary. They give the fight fans an opportunity to warm up to what is coming. Then it begins. The lightning-fast pace shifts, becomes slower. The fighters seem to be gliding through water. Then one unleashes an attack, sets an impossibly fast pace. The game has started...  Charlie Jingle gripped the edge of the ring hard, digging his hands into the canvas, straining and twisting in tortured anguish with every slashing blow that struck the Tanker. He watched the two fighters weave, jerk, dart -- bodies and arms flashing blurs, smashing blows one to the other in sequences that were too complex for the eye to follow in detail. He groaned, cursed, hoped, bellowed, roared and screamed along with two thousand nine hundred and seventy four other human beings in the arena. The round was the twenty-sixth. This was the stretch. The final, ineradicable stretch. The bell banged away and the fighters parted imder the glare of the lights, dancing away from each other to their comers. Charlie shot the stool into the ring and went through the ropes. Tanker dropped like a chunk of hot lead onto the stool. "How do you feel, boy? How do you feel?" prompted Charlie, pumping the cooling-fluid into Tanker's insides. "Hot," rasped the Tanker. "Hot as hell." "Want me to throw in the towel?" asked Charlie, working fast, working the pump up and down quickly. "No, goddamit. Wrap it around your eyes if you can't take it." Charlie worked the body, stimulating the free flow of oil through the system. "How'm I doin'?" asked the Tanker grudgingly. "Well at least you're still in there." "By God, Charlie! Fighting Machines ain't supposed to be too emotional, but if anybody gets me sorer than you do so help me, I'll murder him!" Charlie Jingle worked the body fast, checked the heated joints for too much strain. "Favor the right. The elbow's gettin' creaky. And save the fight for the Champ. You'll need it." The buzzer sounded, Charlie shoved his tools through the ropes onto the edge of the deck, climbed out, and holding onto the edge of the stool, he said, "Watch his Three-Six combo. He's gonna angle for your jaw pretty soon." Tanker turned, looking down at him. "You don't trust me at all, do you?" The bell banged and quickly Tanker was on his feet, moving in his curious, side-long motion. By the end of the twenty-seventh. Tanker came back to his corner lame. The Champ had dented his forehead. "How is it?" asked Charlie Jingle. "Fine," said Tanker thickly. "It's fine." There was a slur to his voice, which tipped off what was beginning to happen. Tanker's co-ordination system had been damaged. "He's crackin' down, now. He's got all his power behind them punches. You can see it when he pivots." "Yeah? Well # kin feel it when he punches," said the Tanker. Charlie pumped him up with cooling fluid, worked his body. In the pit of his stomach was a sickness, a feeling of helplessness because Tanker's trouble was not where he could reach it, now. Now it was inside. "He's gonna knock your head off, this one. Tank. You got a dent in it." "I know I got a goddam dent. You don't hafta tell me." Charlie put his gear out of the ropes. "I told you it was a fix. Don't blame me for nothin'." "Yeah. You wash your hands of it. Just like that guy in the whuddayacall..." "Bibfe," said Charlie Jingle. "Yeah," said Tanker. The bell sounded and he sprang to his feet. At the end of the twenty-eighth. Tanker was dragging his feet, hanging on by a thread of will, except of course that there was no will in a fighting machine except the mechanistic desire to be a great fighting-machine. "He'll nail you this one." said Charlie Jingle. "Thass what you think," challenged Tanker. "That's what I know. The fans are already going to the windows to collect their bets." "Yeah? They got another guess com -- Why ain't you collectin'?" "I gotta stick it out, you know that!" "You mean to say you really bet on Iron Man?" "Sure," said Charlie Jingle, pulling a ticket out of his shirt pocket. "See?" Tanker bent close, scrutinizing the ticket. He looked up into Charlie's face, his own blotchy with color. "Five thousand dollars you bet on that bum?" Charlie Jingle laughed. "He don't look like no bum from where ! am." The buzzer sounded, drowning out the string of curses the Tanker loosed at him. Charlie calmly shoved his equipment out of the ring. "Make it look good right to the end, you hear?" The bell banged. Tanker Bell got up slowly, moving in a clumsy waddling gait toward the  Champion, arms hanging like stiffened lead weights by his sides, head bulled forward, shoulders hunched. He did not spring, did not dance. He shuffled forward, shoulders rocking from side to side. Iron-Man Pugg saw the stance of the beaten fighting-machine. He knew the dead-locked expression in the face, knew the shuffling, springless walk that indicated that the opponent was cold, was dead on his feet, jammed away inside, locked and frozen. But there was always the suspicion of trickery in him when he saw it. He danced in lightly, speared the Tanker's head with a long series of jabs, chopped away at his midsection, and then, as if he himself were absolutely cocksure, lowered his guard just a fraction of an inch out of the Tanker's reach. Nothing happened. The Tanker moved toward him, dead on his feet, arms limp. The Champion had to blast him back with a murderous right to prevent a head-on, chest-on collision. The Tanker staggered back, wobbled, his knees threatened to unflex and buckle, then the built-in instinct to go on picked him up, and he straightened. Iron Man could hear, behind and around him, the swelling roar of the crowd. He knew it was for him. He had won. A hard, good fight. He had won. It remained now for him to put the trimmings on the package. Artfully he flirted in and around the Tanker, jabbing him lightly, ripping powerful righthand shots to his head, toying with him. The crowd was roaring for blood. They wanted the finish. The Champion moved forward, wound up. He started his famous knockout sequence of punches, landing the first and second carefully, playing to his audience so that they could see what was happening and appreciate from the beginning what was about to happen. The Champion was enjoying himself. He worked with flash and flourish, and the crowd began to love it. Then Tanker Bell came alive. The Champion was first to see the expression of his face, and a splitsecond before it happened, he knew he had been tricked. He would forever remember that expression. It was almost human. It was an expression of hatred. Of murderous, long-controlled rage, diabolical and letll. Tanker Bell ripped a blow to his jaw so well-set, so precise, so accurate, that when the Champion's head snapped back, the cable at the back of his neck broke. The Champion fell over on his back, striking the deck like fallen thunder. The Champion was not only 'out' -- he was 'dead'. There was a great, still silence in the arena as Tanker Bell strode back to his corner. It was as if the air, and . sound, and people had been frozen. The Referee came to his senses first, stood over IronMan, and counted, with long strokes of the arm. At the last stroke, chaos broke loose. Fans and officials swarmed into the ring. The spectators roared. But Tanker Bell had eyes for one single human being in that arena. Charlie Jingle. When he turned. Tanker saw Charlie Jingle doubled over the ropes, laughing. A reporter pulled Tanker to the middle of the ring before he could get to Charlie. While they quizzed him and prodded him, Charlie Jingle remained doubled over the ropes in a violent fit of hysteria. Finally they drew Charlie Jingle into the circle at ring-center. Had he had any doubts that Tanker would win? "Never!" Did he know that Tanker was faking toward the last? Certainly, came the laughing reply. How much money had he bet on his fighter? Ten thousand dollars, came the uproarious reply, and Tanker Bell bellowed, "He's a liar! He never bet a thing!" The Press was astonished. The Officials perked up their suspicious noses. What did Tanker Bell mean? "Ask him!" accused the glaring Tanker. Did Charlie Jingle have the bet ticket with him? After all. Mister Jingle -- news. Charlie Jingle, laughing, with a flourish, produced a ticket from his shirt pocket. Tanker Bell stared at it, goggleeyed. What would Charlie Jingle do with the money from the proceeds? "Ruin Pugs, Inc.," said Charlie Jingle. "Me and a California Rabbit are goin into business together. Ruinin' Pugs, Inc." "Psychology." growled the Tanker. "The bum used his goddam psychology on me." What was Tanker Bell referring to? "Leave him alone," said Charlie Jingle, putting his arm around Tanker's shoulders. "Can't you see The largest, most varied and interesting selection of puzzles, word games, math games, quizzes and brain teasers ever published at the price! Hundreds of exciting ways to test your wits and talents! Months and months of fun and entertainment! Puts pep into parties. Order Even # years is not too long when instinct drives a creature. And Kane was willing to wait... T he ship began as a metal skeleton. Slowly a shining skin was layered on without and oddshaped vitals were crammed within. Thornton Hammer, of all the individuals (but one) involved in the growth, did the least physically. Perhaps that was why he was most highly regarded. He handled the Illustrated by Ed Emsh mathematical symbols that formed the basis for lines on drafting paper which, in turn, formed the basis for the fitting-together the various masses and different forms of energy that went into the ship. Hammer watched now through close-fitting spectacles somberly. Their lenses caught the light of the fluorescent tubes above and sent them out again as high-lights. Theodore Lengyel, representing Personnel of the corporation that was footing the bill for the project, stood beside him and said, as he pointed with a rigid, stabbing finger, "There he is. That's the man." Hammer peered. "You mean Kane?" "The fellow in the green overalls, holding a wrench." "That's Kane. Now what is this you've got against him?" "I want to know what he does. The man's an idiot." Lengyel had a round, plump face and his jowls quivered a bit. Hammer turned to look at the other, his spare body assuming an air of displeasure along every inch. "Have you been bothering him?" 'Bothering him? I've been talking to him. It's my job to talk to the men, to get their viewpoints, to get information out of which I can build campaigns for improved morale." "How does Kane disturb that?" "He's insolent. I asked him how it felt to be working on a ship that would reach the moon? I talked a little about the ship being a pathway to the stars. Perhaps I made a little speech about it, built it up a bit, when he turned away in the rudest possible manner. I called him back and said, 'Where are you going?' And he said, 'I get tired of that kind of talk. I'm going out to look at the stars.' " Hammer nodded. "All right. Kane likes to look at the stars." "It was daytime. The man's an idiot. I've been watching him since and he doesn't do any work." "I know that." "Then why is he kept on?" Hammer said with a sudden, tight fierceness, "Because I want him around. Because he's my luck." "Your luck?" faltered Lengyel. "What the hell does that mean?" "It means that when he's around I think better. When he passes me, holding his damned wrench, I get ideas. It's happened three times. I don't explain it; I'm not interested in explaining it. It's happened. He stays." "You're joking." "No, I'm not. Now leave me alone." Kane stood there in his green overalls, holding his wrench. Dimly he was aware that the ship was almost ready. It was not designed to carry a man, but there was space for a man. He knew that the way he knew a lot of things; like keeping out of the way of most people most of the time; like carrying a wrench until people grew used to him carrying a wrench and stopped noticing it. Protective coloration consisted of little things, really, -- like carrying the wrench. He was full of drives he did not fully understand; like looking at the stars. At first, many years back, he had just looked at the stars with a vae ache. Then, slowly, his attention had centered itself on a certain region of the sky, then to a certain pin-pointed spot. He didn't know why that certain spot. There were no stars in that spot. There was nothing to see. That spot was high in the nightsky in the late spring and in the summer months and he sometimes spent most of the night watching the spot until it sank toward the southwestern horizon. At other times in the year he would stare at the spot during the day. There was some thought in connection with that spot which he couldn't quite crystallize. It had grown stronger, come nearer the surface as the years passed and it was almost bursting for expression now. But still it had not quite come clear. Kane shifted restlessly and approached the ship. It was almost complete, almost whole. Everything fitted just so. Almost. For within it, far forward, was a hole a little larger than a man; and leading to that hole was a pathway a little wider than a man. Tomorrow that pathway would be filled with the last of the vitals and before that was done, the hole had to be filled, too. But not with anything they planned. Kane moved still closer and no one paid any attention to him. They were used to him. There was a metal ladder that had to be climbed and a catwalk that had to be moved along to enter the last opening. He knew where the opening was as exactly as though he had built the ship with his own hands. He climbed the ladder and moved along the catwalk. It was dark in the hole and, of course, there was no ventilation, but Kane paid no attention to that. With the sureness of instinct, he clambered upward toward the hole that would receive him, then lay there panting, flitting the cavity neatly as though it were a womb. In two hours they would begin inserting the last of the vitals, close the passage and leave Kane there, unknowing. Kane would be the sole bit of flesh and blood in a thing of nietal and ceramics and fuel. Kane was not afraid of being prematurely discovered. No one in the project knew the hole was there. The design didn't call for it. The mechanics and construction men weren't aware of having put it in. Kane had arranged that entirely by himself. He didn't know how he had arranged it, but he knew he had. He could watch his own influence without knowing how it was exerted. Take the man, Hammer, for instance, the leader of the project and the most clearly influenced. Of all the indistinct figures about Kane, he was the least indistinct. Kane would be very aware of him at times, when he passed near him in his slow and hazy journeys about the grounds. It was all that was necessary, -- passing near him. Kane recalled it had been so before, particularly with theoreticians. When Lise Meitner decided to test for barium among the products of the neutron bombardment of uranium, Kane had been there, an unnoticed plodder along a corridor nearby. He had been picking up leaves and trash in a park in # when the young Einstein had passed by, pondering. Einstein's steps had quickened with the impact of sudden thought. Kane felt it like an electric shock. But he didn't know how it was done. Does a spider know architectural theory when it begins to construct its first web?" It went further back. The evening the young Newton had stared at the Moon with the dawn of a certain thought, Kane had been there. And further back still Mexico, ordinarily deserted, was alive with human ants crawling about the metal shaft lancing upward. This one was different from all the similar structures that had preceded it. This would go free of Earth more nearly than any other. It would reach out and circle the Moon before falling back. It would be crammed with instniments that would photograph the Moon and measure its heat, emissions, probe for radioactivity, and test by micro-wave for chemical structure. It would, by automation, do almost everything that could be expected of a manned vehicle. And it would learn enough to make certain that the next ship sent out would be a manned vehicle also. Except that, in a way, this first one was a manned vehicle after all. There were representatives of various governments, of various industries, of various social and economic groupings. There were television cameras and feature writers. Those who could not be there, watched in their homes, and heard numbers counted backward in painstaking monotone in the manner grown traditional in a mere three decades. At zero, the reaction motors came to life and ponderously the ship lifted. Kane heard the noise of the rushing gases, as though from a distance, and felt the gathering acceleration press against him. He detached his mind, lifting it up and outward, freeing it from direct connection with his body in order that he might be unaware of the pain and discomfort. Dizzily, he knew his long journey was nearly over. He would no longer have to maneuver carefully to avoid having people realize he was immortal. He would no longer have to fade into the background, no longer wander eternally from place to place, changing names and personality, manipulating minds. It had not been perfect, of course. The myths of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman had arisen, but he was still here. He had not been disturbed. He could see his spot in the sky. Through the mass and solidity of the ship he could see it. Or not 'ee" really. He didn't have the proper word. He knew there was a proper word, though. He could not say how he knew a fraction of the things he knew except that as the centuries had passed he had gradually grown to know them with a sureness that required no reason. He had begun as an ovum (or as something for which "ovum" was the nearest word he knew) , deposited on Earth before the first cities had been built by the wandering hunting-creatures since called men. Earth had been chosen carefully by his progenitor. Not every world would do. What world would? What was the criterion?" That he still didn't know. Does an ichneumon wasp study entomology before it finds the one species of spider that will do for her eggs and stings it just so in order diat it may remain alive? The ovum spilt him forth at length and he took the shape of a man and lived among men and protected himself against men. And his one purpose was to arrange to have men travel along a path that would end with a ship and within the ship a hole and within the hole himself. It had taken eight thousand years of slow striving and stumbling. The spot In the sky became sharper now as the ship moved out of the atmosphere. That was the key that opened his mind, the piece that completed the puzzle. Stars blinked within that spot that could not be seen by a man's eye unaided. One in particular toward it. The expression that had been building within him for so long burst out now. "Home," he whispered. He knew! Does a salmon study cartography to find the headwaters of the fresh-water stream in which years before it had been born? The final step was thus completed in the slow maturing that had taken eight thousand years, and Kane was no longer larval, but adult. The adult Kane fled from the human flesh that had protected the larva, and fled the ship, too. Kane hastened onward, at inconceivable speeds, toward home, from which some day it, too, might set off on wanderings through space to fertilize some planet with its ovum. It sped through Space, giving no thought, to the ship carrying an empty chrysalis. It gave no thought to the fact that it had driven a whole world toward technology and space-travel in order only that it might mature and reach its fulfillment. Does a bee care what has happened to a flower when the bee has dcme and gone its way? In the August IF: A sensational new guided missile article so hot it has to be anonymous! Plus fiction by Alan E. Nourse, Tom Godwin, Charles L. Fontenay, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., and others. If you've sometimes found salesmen irresistible, it may come as quite a severe shock to you to find out why you never had a chance to say no. Illustrated by Virgil Finlay fortable in some shrubbery on a rise that overlooks the Detroit River. It's been a balmy night, and I wake up feeling good and lie there looking around, and -- Zip! This fellow comes stumbling out of nowhere, trips, and flops down on top of me. Out of nowhere, I said. I'm watching, and one second he isn't there, and the next second he is. Never saw anything like it. I roll out from under him and get my breath back and look up, to see if maybe he fell out of an air car. There aren't any air cars. He sits up and looks at me, and rubs his eyes. "Where am I?" he says, and he talks like his mouth is wired shut. "That's a real easy one," I say, "Let's talk about how you got here." He stands up and takes a few steps, craning his neck and staring in all directions, and then he comes back. "Where am I?" he says again. "New Detroit," I say. "Down by the river, as maybe you've noticed." He takes another look around, and gets mad. "Look," he says. "I know Detroit backwards, and there isn't any park that looks like this. Where's die Civic Center? And how come I can't see the Penobscot Building? This shouldn't be far from the center of town." I'm looking him over, trying not to laugh at the way he talks and at the queer clothes he's wearing. He's not a bad-looking fellow, young and well-built, though he has his hair cut straight across the top in the weirdest haircut I've ever seen. I'm beginning to wonder if maybe he hasn't escaped from somewhere, if you know what I mean. "Never heard of those places," I say, "and you're about twenty miles from the center of town." He sits down again, looking so bewildered I begin to feel sorry for him. "This is Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.?" I tell him that it's New Detroit, and I've heard it was Michigan Province, though I can't make any guarantee. And the letters he mentions don't mean anything to me. He tries again, like a child trying to get something straight. "This is Detroit... "New Detroit." "Michigan..." "Michigan Province -- maybe." "It's July fifteenth..." "Somewhere around that time," I say. I haven't been keeping a close count on the days. I decide maybe I'd better get him out of sight until I make up my mind about him, so I take his arm and start walking, and he follows along without saying anything. He keeps looking around, though, like he's never seen New Detroit before. And if he hasn't, I can't blame him for looking. It was rough on those cities that got wiped out in the big war, but they had the advantage of a fresh start. New Detroit is a beautiful place -- the whole city is one big park, with all of the commercial places and ground transportation and a lot of the dwellings underground, and just the apartment communities stretching up into the sky at regular intervals. He looks back at the river. "Are we far from Lake Erie?" he says. "Not far. You can see it from an air car, if you go up high enough." "And Lake Saint Glair?" "You mean Lake Clair. Real close." "And that's the Detroit River?" "Never heard it called anything else." "And this is Detroit?" "New Detroit." He takes a deep breath. "What year is this?" "#," I say. And so help me, the man passes out. I signal an air cab, and he comes to a little later, and I get him down to the seventh level to my hotel room without any trouble. I drop a coin in the visiscope, and leave him sitting there in front of the screen watching while I go out to get him some presentable clothes. When I came back he's still sitting there, but he looks about ready to explode. "No advertising!" he says. "What's that?" I say. "Why, advertising. You know -- they talk about a product, or sing songs about it, to try and make people want to buy it." "Sounds silly to me," I say. "Never heard of it. Don't think it would work. Singing a song wouldn't make me want to buy anything." "But it does work," he says. Damned if the man isn't serious. "You see..." Then he takes a long look at me, and says, "Skip it." And after a while he starts in again. "This is Detroit?" "New Detroit," I say. "And there's no advertising?" "Never heard of any." "How do things get sold?" "Why, there are salesmen all over the place. They don't bother me, of course, because I'm a space bug, and our credit isn't worth much. I go to a merchandise center when I want something, and pay cash. Now let's get these clothes on." I get that funny outfit off of him, and get him into die clothes I'd bought. He doesn't mind the shorts, but he raises a big fuss about the cape. "What's the sense in wearing a transparent cape?" "Everybody wears them," I say. "I don't think much of it, either. We wear more practical things in space." "Everybody -- you mean women wear them?" "Sure," I say, and give him a wink. "Some wear more transparent ones than others." "My name is Mark Jackson," he says slowly. "I'm an automobile salesman -- a good salesman. I live in Detroit, and the year is #, and I want to go home." "My name is Erf Zedden," I say. "I'm a space bug, but probably not a very good one. I work on a Mars-Gallisto ore freighter, and I'm on a six-month leave. First time on Earth in over five years, and the year is #. And what the hell is an automobile?" He doesn't say anything, so I slap him on the back and tell him I could use a drink and he looks like he could use more than one, so we go up two levels to a bar that's run by an ex-space bug. This fellow Jackson acts real queer. He keeps staring at the women, and while I must admit that in that bar their capes are more transparent than in most places, I begin to wonder if he's ever seen a woman before. "This is #?" he says finally. "Until next January," I say. "I've been trying to think what could have done it," he says. "There was that fall-out from the Nevada Hydrogen Bomb test, and all the papers were screaming about it, though the scientists said it wasn't dangerous. And then there was that damned X-ray machine..." He stops to take a good drink of Martian Gin, and I don't say anything, though I'm wondering what the hell he's talking about. "I went to sell a car to a doctor," he goes on, "and while I was waiting to see him I leaned against the X-ray machine, and somehow the damned thing got turned on. The doctor said it was only a few seconds, and there was no harm done. I can't think of anything else peculiar, but there probably was something. It was that kind of day. And the automobile accident finished everything off. I was driving away from the doctor's office, and this kid ran smack out in front of me. The top was down on my convertible, and when I swerved I hit a utility pole, and it threw me clean over the fence into a Detroit Edison Company transformer. I just had time to think, 'This is it, boy!' and then here I was. #, you say?" "Until next January." He takes another man-sized drink of gin. "I don't believe it." I tell him he'll forget his troubles if we pick up a couple of girls, but he says no, he wants to think things over. So we go back to my hotel room, and the place is jammed with police. Someone saw me bringing him in, and reported it. They take the two of us, and all of those queer clothes of his, to Police Central, and it takes me two days to convince them that I don't know anything about him. When I leave they won't tell me what they've done to him, so I figure they're holding him for psych-conditioning. Well -- I know I did the best I could for him. My leave still has four months to run, and I have money left, so I take the next rocket to New York. when I had a letter from my old friend Bran Rastin, Police Commissioner of the Michigan Province. The case which he described to me was psychologically routine, but it had its intriguing aspects. I was, of course, happy to be of any possible assistance. There was no BostonNew Detroit rocket service at that time, so I took the shuttle plane to New York, when I caught the New Detroit rocket. What I found was astonishing. I spent three days, all told, studying the various artifacts that the alleged man-from-the-past claimed to have brought with him, and listening to recordings of the various interviews which he had had. I also discussed his case in detail with the doctors in charge, and then I requested an interview. Attendants brought him into the room. It was obvious that they considered him violent. His face was young and good-looking, in spite of its sullenness. His physique was impressive. He appeared to be a leader, a man accustomed to dominating. "I don't recognize you," he said angrily. "What's your specialty? Lie detector tests? Sanity tests?" He took a step forward, and the attendants leap to restrain him. I waved them away and dismissed them. I had already decided that this Mark Jackson, whatever else he might be, was not insane. "Sit down, please," I said. We sat down facing each other across a long table, where Jackson's personal effects and odd clothing were spread out. "Fm John Parkins," I told him. "Professor of American History at Harvard University. Fve examined your property, and listened to the recordings of the interviews you've had." "And like everyone else, you think Fm nuts!" I stared at him. "What a quaint way to put it! But no, I don't doubt your sanity. I believe you're telling the truth. There's no denying the genuineness of these things. The monetary value would not be tremendous, but a number of museums would be delighted to have them. And then there's your amazingly detailed knowledge of certain aspects of twentieth century life which have always puzzled me. Yes, I believe you, incredible as your story seems." He jumped to his feet and paced back and forth for a moment. "That's a switch. Does that mean I get out of here?" "Switch..." I murmured. Everything the man said left me more convinced. Even his odd accent should have been conclusive; I said reluctantly, "No, it does not mean that you can be released. I have been unable to convince the doctors." "Oh, great You believe me, and now I suppose they have you in here with me!" I smiled and shook my head. "No. I've come to give you some advice. The doctors are determined to cure you of your delusions. Let them cure you." "How?" "Just accept what they say, and learn as much as you can about present-day civilization. The authorities are rather disturbed about you, you know. The mere fact that your fingerprints are not registered anywhere has thrown four branches of the government into confusion. Don't disturb them further. Just do what you're told, and pretend to believe what you're told, and eventually you'll be released. Then come to me, and I'll manage a teaching position for you. You should make an excellent histo nan. "No, thank you," Jackson said. "I'm a salesman -- a good salesman. Teaching wouldn't interest me." "Think it over, anyway. And remember -- the sooner you cooperate, the sooner you'll be released." The attendants took him away, and I returned to Boston. I continued to give considerable thought to this Mark Jackson, for a more perplexing problem has not come to my attention in all my years of scholarly investigation. Finally I wrote to Arnold Stephens, a cousin of my wife, who is personnel manager of the Terra Sales Corporation. I outlined what I believed to be the facts in the Jackson case, and asked him if he would be able to give the young man assistance in establishing himself. He wrote back that he would be happy to interview him, but that he could promise no more consideration than would be extended to any other applicant for a sales position. I immediately contacted the New Detroit police, and found that I was too late. Jackson had been certified cured and released, and as far as they were concerned he had disappeared. I gathered that they were only too pleased to have him off their hands. offices of Terra Sales Corporation only a few days after I had received Professor Parkins' letter concerning him. I recognized his name immediately, of course, and assumed that the Professor had sent him. For many years I have interviewed all sales applicants myself, as I am considered an excellent subject for this task. I had him sent into my office, and never have I seen a more solemn, determined young man. Other than this singular quality, there was nothing obviously different about him. The odd inflection in his speech I could have overlooked, and otherwise he seemed quite normal. If I had not known Parkins so well personally and professionally, I might have considered myself the victim of a joke. "Professor Parkins sent you to see me?" I asked. He looked surprised. "Why, no. I talked with a gentleman of that name three or four weeks ago, but we discussed -- other things." "I see. And now you wish to be a salesman." He jumped to his feet. "I am a salesman," he said firmly. And he started in. Never have I witnessed such an amazing performance. He handled himself with the skill of a trained elocutionist. He spoke persuasive. Had it not been for his odd manner of speaking, and his frequent use of strange words, I might have been carried away. Much of his discourse concerned his skill and experience in selling automobiles, which I later found to be an obsolete type of conveyance. It was wonderful, and it was also pitiful. I heard him out to the end, and shook my head sadly. "Sorry," I said. "I can't use you." "Why not?" he demanded. Salesman qualifications were then the most carefully guarded secret in the business world. I couldn't give him a direct answer, but I felt obligated to tell him something. "Have you applied at any other sales corporation?" I asked him. "Hell, yes! This is the twentythird, and I have six to go. I started in by going around to the manufacturers. No go. None of them have any salesmen. The Cadrovet Air Car Company in New Detroit offered me any one of five different jobs, but it wouldn't hire me as # i salesman. Told me it's been a hundred and fifty years since they used their own salesmen. All selling is done by sales corporations. All right. I came to New York, and I started calling on the sales corporations. They all told me the same thing. 'Young man, to be a salesman, you must first be able to sell yourself.' That's sensible, so I rented a recorder, and last niht I was up most of the night working on a sales talk to sell myself. You just heard it. I think it's good. Damn it! I know it's good. But I still get the same story. Sell yourself. At my last stop, a fat old geezer leered at me, and said, 'Make me hire you. I dare you!' " I chuckled. "That would be Barlow, of Sales, Unlimited." "Look. I know I can sell. All I want is a chance. You can hire me on a commission basis, and it won't cost you a thing if I don't deliver. What's wrong with that? Am I poison, or something?" "Professor Parkins wrote to me about you," I said. "He thinks you were transferred somehow from the twentieth century." He gestured disgustedly. "I'm not admitting anything. I spent enough time in that hospital." "I understand," I said. "But even if you were a good salesman in -- well, somewhere else -- I'm afraid you'll have to find some other way to make a living. I'd advise you to take one of these jobs at Cadrovet. As a salesman, you'd starve to death." "All I want is a chance," he snapped. "I know what I can do. I can sell anything." "To everyone?" I said. "What do you mean?" I thought for a moment, and got to my feet. "Because of your -- shall we say unusual background -- I'm going to make an exception and show you what is required of our salesmen. Follow me, please." I took him into the records room, and pulled a file at random. "Here's last week's record of one of our men. He's a below-average salesman, but he's improving. You can see that he made a hundred and seven calls -- that's about twentyone a day. He made two hundred and forty sales, of which twentytwo were majors -- sales amounting to two thousand dollars or more." "Didn't anyone say no?" Jackson exclaimed. "Of course not," I said. "We have no use for a salesman to whom people can say no. Now, I don't know what your sales record may have been back in the -- elsewhere -- but unless you can do almost as well as this, no sales corporation could afford to waste time with you. And you couldn't afford to waste your time. This salesman is making a living, though not a very good one. He'll get better, of course. He'll have to." "I see," Jackson said, but it was obvious that he didn't see at all. Suddenly he looked terribly weary -- crushed. "Better go back to Cadrovet," I told him. "They're a good company, and they must think you have ability, or they wouldn't have offered you your choice of five jobs." "They gave me aptitude tests for two days. But I'm a salesman. I wouldn't be happy sitting behind a desk, or riding herd on an assembly line. I'll have to think this over, I guess." "You have to eat, man! You'll have to work at something." "I know. Well -- this morning I ran into a fellow I met in New Detroit. Erf Zedden. He's a space bug, and he thinks he can get me a job on a Mars-Callisto ore freighter. Right now, that sounds pretty good." "That's no place for a man with ability," I said. "I suppose not, but I feel like getting away from things. I think ril take him up on it." I talked with him for a few minutes, trying to cheer him up, but without much success. Then he thanked me, and left. It was two years before I saw him again. again in New York, and he looks miserable. In fact, he looks like he is about to go down and jump in the river. My money is running out, and he tells me the money he got from selling some of his stuff to a museum is running out, too, and I say, "What the hell! I'm going back to Mars in a couple of days. Come along, and I'll get you a job. The Mars-Callisto run is an easy one, the pay is good, and when you're too old to push the ore they retire you on a good pension. What can you lose?" He says he'll think it over, but he has a few more people he wants to see. And later that day he comes to my hotel, and says, "When do we leave?" So we're off for Mars. Believe me, this Jackson is a good man. Two months on the job, and he's my boss. And at the end of a year he's running the whole show on the Callisto end, and the Jovian Mining Company calls me into the Martian Office and gives me a bonus for bringing them such a good man. Never saw a fellow go up so fast, but somehow he doesn't seem happy about it. No matter how high he goes, though, we're still good friends, and whenever I hit Callisto I stay with him. So it's natural when I start talking about a leave on Earth he thinks he could use a vacation himself, after two years, and we make arrangements to go together and do the old planet up good. I get to Earth first, because he insists on stopping off for a tourist's tour of the moon. I say, "What's so special about Earth's moon? And when you're on Earth you can look up and see the damned thing any old night." But no, he has to stop off on the moon. So I get to Stellar City a day ahead of him, and get us a room at the Martian Hotel. The next morning I leave a note for him to meet me at the Rocket Club, and go out to line up a couple of girls. And that's the day things really start jumping on Earth. These girls I get are some characters -- tall, hefty creatures, with capes so transparent they might as well not wear any. They have their hair piled up in one of these odd Venusian hair styles, and they look like they're nuclear propelled, and I think this is one leave that's going to be worth remembering. We sit around having a few drinks, and after while Jackson comes in, and we start back up Pluto Boulevard towards the hotel. And all of a sudden this mob comes charging down on us. As I said, this is the day things start jumping on Earth. We back up against a building as the mob tears past, and we get a quick look at the chalky face of the man they're chasing. He's running for his life, and the mob is the most hate-twisted bunch of murderers I've ever seen. "Good riddance," one of the girls says. "Let's watch them finish him off." Jackson lets out a yelp. "Hey! What's this all about?" The mob gallops past, and I manage to hail an air cab, and we climb aboard and drift along with the small fleet that's hovering above to watch the show. "Why are they chasing him?" Jackson says. "He's a hypno," I tell him. He's a pretty good hypnotist, and he makes it a good show. He glances over his shoulder, now and then, and freezes two or three of the mob. But the others just bowl them over and trample on them, and keep on going. Off in the distance I spot some air patrol units coming in at top speed, and I wonder if they'll make it in time. They don't, of course. The hypno runs as long as he can, and then he turns to face the mob. Maybe he's good, but even a Grade I hypno wouldn't have stood a chance. They climb all over him, and knives flash, and they cut him to pieces. The mob has scattered by the time the patrols land, and there's nothing left for them to do but clean up the mess. The cab drops us at the hotel. The girls still squealing excitedly, and Jackson looks sick. We go up to our room, and he drops into a chair and takes a good gulp of Martian Gin out of a bottle. "Why?" he says. "Why what?" one of the girls says. "Why did they murder that fellow?" We stare at him. "Haven't you heard?" I say. "I haven't heard anything. I just got in from the moon a couple of hours ago -- remember?" I go over and drop a coin in the visiscope, and we settle down to watch. Paris. Six hundred hypnotists murdered, and the total rising. Shots of mobs chasing hypnos. Applause and snickers from the girls. London. More than two hundred hypnos murdered. Uncontrolled mobs chasing about the streets. The International Institute of Hypnology burning brightly. New York. Martial Law declared. No estimate of casualties available. And so it goes. "The congressional committee released its report this morning," hypnotists on Earth, and eightyfive per cent of them are salesmen. Every time you turn around, one sells you something, and you wonder why you bought it until the next one sells you something. I came here from Venus three months ago. Know how many air cars I've got? Three. I haven't even got use for one, but I've got three. Bought the last one a week ago, along with a two-year lease on a garage a mile and a half from my apartment. Did I trade in one of the two I already have? No. So I keep asking myself, 'Why? Why do such a stupid thing?' Then this report comes out this morning, and I know. Everyone else knows, Hypnos sold them to me. Fve got two food synthesizers in my apartment. One of them will feed ten people, and I live by myself -- most of the time, anyway. Lousy hypnos. I've got four watches, and enough clothes to last me for ten years. I've got a visiscope in every room. I've got so much junk in the place I can't get in and out. I came to Earth with plenty of money, and after three months it's all gone and I'll be paying for this stuff for the next twenty years. Hypnos!" She hisses like one of them snakes I see in a zoo the last time I'm on Earffi. "My sister has three carpets on the floor," the other girl says. "Expensive carpets, one right on top of the other. She would have had a rough time with her husband, if he hadn't bought four air cars." We turn back to the visiscope. The crisis is planet-wide, and from Moscow to Honolulu hypnos are being chased through the streets or smoked out of their homes. "I'll tell you one thing," one of the girls says. "When this is over with, the hypnos -- if there are any left -- won't be selling anything. If the government won't put a stop to it, we'll have ourselves a new government." All of a sudden I notice Jackson has an odd look in his eyes. He slaps his hands together, kisses both of the girls, and pounds me on the back. "And I'll have myself a job as a salesman," he says. "Drink, anyone?" The next morning we throw out the girls, and take a rocket to New York. The girls aren't happy about it. They're looking forward to a month, maybe, with well-charged and well-heeled space men, but we throw them out. And all the way to New York Jackson keeps his nose in newspapers, reading about the riots. I do some reading myself, and I don't see anything very exciting about that congressional report. It just says that hypnos make up a bigger hunk of the population than they'd thought, and it gives a breakdown of the occupations of hypnos: two per cent politicians, eight per cent working in some branch of medicine, three per cent criminals, two per cent in various odd jobs, and eighty-five per cent salesmen. This doesn't mean much to us space bugs. Our credit isn't worth much, and salesmen never bother us. But the rest of the population is in debt up to its ears from buying, buying -- things it doesn't need and can't afford. When the report comes out, people start putting two and two together, and they don't like the answer. Neither do the hypnotists, salesmen or otherwise. In New York, Jackson drags me along with him to a fancy office building. I see Terra Sales Corporation over the door just as we go in, and inside everything is a mess. Police guards, men replacing broken windows, men sweeping debris in the big lobby, and all the employees looking like a rich uncle has just died intestate. Jackson seems real happy about everything, and he talks his way past the guards and the secretaries, and we end up in the office of a man named Stephens. He seems like a nice old man, but he also seems like he doesn't much care to talk to us, or anyone else. "Oh, yes," Stephens says. "I remember. The man from -- how are you getting along?" Jackson pulls up a couple of chairs, and we sit down, and Jackson leans across the desk just like it belongs to him instead of this Stephens. After seeing him operate on Gallisto, I wonder if maybe he's going to take over this place. "I understand, now, why you wouldn't hire me," Jackson says. "I suppose you do," Stephens says. "Of course all of our salesmen were hypnotists. Have been as long as I've been with the firm." "And if a man couldn't hypnotize you into hiring him, you turned him down." "Naturally. I have more than a normal resistance to hypnotism, and if a man can hypnotize me, I know he's good. Of course, we wouldn't hire just any hypnotist but he..." "According to this morning's papers, the government will take action before the day is out -- and you won't be hiring any hypnotists at all. So I want a job." "The answer is still no," Stephens says. I can see Jackson getting mad. "If hypnotists can't sell, you'll have to hire someone else, or go out of business." "We had a policy meeting this morning, and the General Council of Sales Companies also had a meeting. We've agreed to go out of business, if it comes to that." He grins at us, but he doesn't look particularly happy. "The restriction can't last more than a month. It'll result in an unimaginable business slump, and then we'll be able to put the hypnotists back to work. Our economy can't function without them. There's no other way to make the population consume our enormous output of material goods. So I'm sorry, but the recommendation I gave you two years ago still stands. Find something else to do." "I think you're a little out of touch with the situation," Jackson says. "I'll wait around for awhile, and see you later." Stephens told him he'd be wasting his time. "What happens now?" I say, when we get outside the building. "We contact the Jovian Mining Company, and arrange for an indefinite leave of absence," Jackson says. "Then we get jobs -- something in the government service, I think, where this slump won't hit us. And we wait. I'm going to get a job as a salesman. Maybe I'll even make a salesman out of you!" I don't think much of that idea, but I like the fellow, so I go along with him. We don't have any trouble about a leave of absence. I've been with the company eighteen years, and I have a lot of accumulated leave time. And Jackson is a good man, and they want him back. So we get jobs with the postal service, and wait to see what will happen. A t the time Mark Jackson came to see me, we actually thought we could ride out the trouble and get our hypnotists back to work. The slump developed rapidly. Our economy changed over night from one in which everyone bought everything to one in which no one bought anything. Ten million workers were unemployed by the second week, and they happily settled down to collect their unemployment checks, make grudging payments on the things they'd already bought, and try to save a little money. The number of unemployed continued to rise daily. By the third month the economy was in a catastrophic condition, and congress still refused to consider repealing its anti-hypno laws. One congressman attempted to introduce new legislation, and withdrew it the next day when his constituents started circulating recall petitions. We broke down, then, and started hiring non-hypnos as salesmen, I made an effort to locate Jackson, but he hadn't left an address, and the mining company he'd been working for knew nothing about him except that he'd requested a leave of absence. In the middle of the fourth month, Jackson came to see me again. 'T see that you're hiring nonhypnos," he said. "Yes," I admitted. "How did you know?" "One tried to sell me an air car today. Most miserable performance I've ever seen. He stopped me on the street, and hemmed and hawed, and finally said, T suppose you wouldn't want to buy a new air car.' I said no, and he thanked me kindly and walked away." He laughed uproariously, and there wasn't much that I could say. "And look here," he said, and waved a newspaper under my nose. There was a small box set in the center of the first page. The first line ordered me to look at my shoes. I didn't, and read on. "Looking shabby? Worn out? Buy a glimmering new pair of EX"What the devil is that?" I said. "Advertisement. First twentyfourth century advertisement I've ever seen. Not bad, either, for an infant profession. Hell of a lot better than that salesman did." I pulled out the sales chart for the past four weeks, and shoved it across my desk. Jackson stared at it. "No sales?" "Not one. We've had a thousand non-hypnos out selling, and they haven't made one sale. People are so delighted to be able to say no that they just aren't buying anything. Think you could do something about that?" "Your darned right I could!" I looked at him carefully. "I can concede that in a society where there was no hypnotic selling the salesmen would necessarily develop highly specialized and efficient techniques. I'm not convinced that those techniques would be successful in a society where all selling has been hypnotic, but I'm happy to give you a chance to show me. Let's go down to the warehouse, and you can pick out anything you want to sell." He grinned. "I've been waiting over two years for this. Let's go!" We went to the warehouse, and Jackson selected a stunning household ornament -- a miniature portable fountain which contained its own power supply and furnished a dazzling display of colors at the touch of a button. I explained the use of our order forms, and he asked for a pocket recorder to take along with him. "Do you mind if I watch you work?" I said. I think the idea pleased him. He spent some time selecting an apartment building, and when he'd made up his mind, I asked him why that particular one. "Government workers," he said. "They're still employed, but they're not in such a high income class that the doors have viewing screens. If you want to sell to a housewife, you have to be able to get your foot in the door." He started with the first apartment, and met the housewife with a sweeping bow. "We're making a Consumer Survey," he said. "May we come in?" I don't know which of us was the more astonished, myself, or that plump housewife. She backed away dumbly, and allowed us to enter. I stood by the door, and he circled around the living room studying the drapes, and checking on the furniture, while the housewife trailed along behind him. "Rather cramped for space, aren't you?" Jackson said. "Why, no... " she stammered. "This color scheme clashes badly. Did you select it yourself?" "I... " "And the fiuniture arrangement. All wrong. No, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you can't qualify." "Qualify for what?" she said. Jackson pulled the fountain out of a satchel. He set it on the table and touched the button, and the room sparkled with color. I looked at the childish delight in that housewife's face, and thought, "Damned if he isn't going to do it!" And the next moment he completely dumbfounded me. "I've been authorized to place a limited number of these wonderful fountains in deserving homes," he said. "But as I told you, yours can't qualify. Sorry." He turned off the fountain, stuck it back in the satchel, and started for the door. I've rarely seen a woman get so angry. Face flushed, arms waving, she planted herself in the doorway, and refused to let him go. They argued for a few minutes, and finally he relented and allowed her to sign an order form. There were sixty-two apartments in that building, and Jackson sold sixty-two fountains without varying his technique by one syllable. Then he handed me the order forms. "I'm tired," he said. "I think I'll call it a day." I was tired, and I was also speechless. I thought, "Is that how they sold things in the twentieth century? By insulting the customer and trying to keep him from buying?" I went home myself, and went to bed early. And Jackson called me out of bed at ten o'clock. "Better come down to Police Central," he said. "Pm under arrest" It took me a moment to collect my thoughts, and I finally managed to ask him what he'd done. "Hypnotic selling," he said. "Twenty-one husbands are down here complaining that I hypnotized their wives into buying those fountains. And they keep coming in. They tell me the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. I'm surprised it isn't death." At that moment I had a flicker of doubt -- his odd performances, and the peculiar reactions of those women, I suppose. "Jackson," I said, "you didn't by chance hypnotize those women, did you?" "Certainly not!" he bellowed. "I'll be right down," I said. I contacted the firm's legal advisor, and we went down together. Police Central was in an uproar. There were more than forty complaining husbands by the time we got there, and they kept coming in. Some had their wives along. The men ranted angerly. The women confessed that Jackson hadn't sold them anything. In fact, he'd tried not to sell them. They'd bought because they wanted the fountain. They still wanted it. The police contacted Central Records, and found Jackson wasn't listed as a hypnotist. Jackson produced his pocket recorder, and played back a few of those sales interviews. A hastily summoned psychiatrist heard the evidence, and declared that it was shrewd psychology, but not obviously an example of hypnotic selling. Reporters gleefully took notes and photographs and interviewed the women. And of course Jackson was released. The next morning his photo was on the visiscope, and the front page of every newspaper. "Master Salesman," the caption read. Jackson stormed into my office and angerly slammed down a paper. "We've got to put a stop to this!" "You're news," I told him. "Except for absolute necessities, that's the first time anyone has bought anything for months -- on the entire planet! We can't keep the papers from talking about that." He shook his head. "I don't like it, but -- coming along today?" He went down to the warehouse and took his own photos of the latest model air car, and we went off to prowl around a government parking lot. A somewhat battered vehicle came gliding in, and Jackson stopped the driver -- a portly, important-looking government official. "This your car?" Jackson said. "Yes. Say -- where have I seen you before?" Jackson scowled. "Couldn't say. I'm a little surprised to see a man in your position flying a beat-up job like that. Now look at that car over there." He pointed to a shining model that obviously had been purchased just before the riots. "People judge a man by the car he flies. I'll bet that man's neighbors think he's somebody The man's face modulated through several stages of perplexity. "Never thought of that," he said. "Kids really wear out a car in a hurry. Fve got five teen-agers, and they have every one of my five air cars in a mess." "That's easily solved," Jackson said. "Get a new car, and keep it for yourself. When it starts looking shabby, you can give it to the kids, and get another one." He gestured at the other car. "Really beautiful, isn't it?" "It certainly is," the man admitted. Suddenly Jackson had an order form in his hand. "Sign here," he said, "and I'll have a better one delivered to you this afternoon." The man signed. I watched Jackson sell seven air cars, and then I had to go back to my office. He came in early in the afternoon, with thirty-nine signed orders. Thirty-nine majors! No hypnosalesman had ever been able to extend control over that many men in one day who qualified for major sales in spite of credit restrictions and prior purchase commitments. "Amazing," I said. "You're certain you don't have some latent hypnotic ability?" "If I did, I wouldn't be a salesman," he said. "Where's the pleasure in selling if the customer can't say no?" "All right. I'm convinced. I want you to start right away training salesmen." "No," he said. "I need to do some more experimenting. There's something about all this that bothers me." "What could be wrong? You're selling, you're making an excellent record. Isn't that what you wanted to do?" "The people are too naive," he said. "They don't say no. And a lot of them should, with the childish approaches I'm using. Tomorrow I'm going back to selling fountains." Jackson was in the news again the next morning, along with interviews with men who'd bought air cars. Some of them were chagrined, and some of them thought it was a good joke. One or two thought they needed a new air car. All of them had their reactions to Jackson's selling technique publicized on page one. "I wish they'd quit that," Jackson said. "They won't. You're news, and even the people that buy from you are news. Evidently they enjoy that. Might as well get used to it." We went out again with the fountain. The first housewife met us at the door, stared, and squealed with delight. "You're the salesman!" she said. "I saw your picture. Do come in!" Jackson looked at me, shrugged, and followed her into the living room. She hovered around him excitedly. "I read all about it. Do it to me, just like you did to all those other women." Jackson glanced about the room. "No. I'm sorry. I'm afraid you can't qualify..." She shrieked with laughter. "That's it!" she giggled. "Thafs exactly it. I read all about it. Do it some more!" "Your living room is much too small." Another giggle. "That's it!" "The color scheme clashes badly." "That's it!" He placed the fountain on the table. "It's a beautiful ornament, but I'm afraid you can't qualify." "That's all right," she said. "My husband wouldn't want me to buy it. But thank you ever so much for showing it to me." And we were back in the hallway, both of us thoroughly unnerved. We had ten more sessions with fascinated, giggling housewives before Jackson gave up and went home. He sold no fountains. The next morning he went out to sell air cars, and he was back before noon -- with no orders. "They slap me on the back," he said. "They buy me drinks. I had more free drinks this morning than in any six months I can remember. They take me around and introduce me to their friends. And when I try to point their thinking towards a sale, they laugh in my face, and say, 'So you're the salesman! Sell me something!' " "The publicity," I said. "Yes. I'll have to think of something new." He did. The next day he was sensational. The following day he failed to make a single sale. As the days went by, that pattern was repeated over and over. He would try out a new approach, and enjoy phenomenal success. Invariably one of his customers would delightedly contact a reporter, and the next morning all of the details would be revealed to the reading and listening public. And that particular approach never worked again. "I think I understand it," he said finally. "If I can catch this twentyfourth century customer unawares, he's incredibly naive. He can't say no. But if he's forwarned, he has a terrific sales resistance. If we could only get rid of the publicity..." "We can't," I said. "The question is, could you teach other salesmen to come up with something new every day?" "No. In time, some of them could. But it takes native ability, and lots of selling experience. All I could do at the start would be to teach them an approach I've tested myself." "But once you've tested it, it won't work again." "That seems to be true." "Then I'm afraid we're beaten. One man can't stop an economic slump all by himself." Jackson got to his feet wearily. "There must be some way to lick the problem. And if anyone can find it, it'll be me." But he didn't find it. He worked incessantly, and he grew increasingly irritable. He seemed to be wearing himself away, day by day, and finally I made him take a week's rest. And during that week congress took courage and acted. It drew up a detailed code of what could be sold to whom, and how much, and let the hypnos go back to work. When Jackson returned, the economic slump was on its way out, and -- much as I regretted it -- so was Jackson. "You can have your job back, and carry on any way you like," I told him. "I appreciate what you tried to do. No one denies that your performance was remarkable. All the same, you'd have a bad time competing with hypnos." He took it amazingly well. "I know I would," he said grimly. "But I still think I can lick the problem. I'll keep working on it. And I promise you -- I'll be back." I never expected to see him again. time while he's being a salesman, and it gets worse by the day. He climbs all over me if the least little thing goes wrong around the apartment, and he sits up most of the night figuring out ways to sell liimself, and I'm damned glad when his boss makes him take a week off. We go to one of those luxury hotels on the moon for the whole week, and though I hate the place, I don't say anything, because I figure he needs the rest. And then on the day we get back he goes down to the sales company, and comes back a little later to tell me the whole thing is off. We're going back to Mars. I consider this the first good news since we hit Earth. The Jovian Mining Company is glad to have us back -- him, anyway. They make him take a demotion for being away so long, but in no time at all he's back where he was, and he keeps going up. It takes him just five years to work all the way up to President. So we go to live on Mars, and I get a promotion and a raise in salary to be his right-hand man, as he calls it, though I don't do anything but run errands for him. And I can see he isn't happy, no matter how high he goes. He wants to be a salesman, and he's convinced himself he's going back, some day, and show all those hypnos how it's done. He paces the floor with that odd look in his eyes. He sits up late at night thinking out ways to sell things, and making up sales talks, and planning what he calls sales promotions. He practices his sales talks on me, and I keep telling him they're good, though after I hear the first one they all sound alike. Things go on that way for a couple of years, and I'm getting worried about Jackson's health, and all of a sudden a crisis develops in the Jovian Mining Company. The mines on Callisto start paying out. Now the company expects this for the last fifty years, and new operations are underway on Ganymede and Europa and lo long before I first hit space, and the comcent profit on its Callisto operations, and nobody feels bad about pulling out. Nobody but Jackson. He thinks it's a crisis, and he drags me off to a directors' meeting. "It's a scandalous waste," he says. "We have six good-sized towns on CalUsto, and the cost of salvaging that fused plastic would be terrific." "Don't give it a thought' they tell him. "If it costs too much to salvage, just forget it." "It isn't good business to forget about an investment of that size." "My dear fellow," they say. "Our investment on Callisto was amortized a hundred years ago. The company never thought the mines would hold up this long. It's excellent business to forget about it." Jackson shakes his head, and I see that odd look in his eyes. "Callisto is the sole property of the Jovian Mining Company," he says. "If it's no longer of use to us, I'm asking the board of directors for permission to sell it." There's about two minutes of silence, followed by the wildest laughter I've heard since the antihypno riots. Those old men just lean back and laugh themselves silly. Sell Callisto? Why not sell Mars? Or Earth? Jackson just sits there calmly, and when they quiet down, he puts it in the form of a resolution, Callisto to be sold, if possible, with the company retaining all mineral rights. The directors can't see anything wrong with the idea, except that it isn't possible, and Jackson gets unanimous approval. The next morning we leave for Earth. Jackson spends a few days in the New York Library, where he fills a ledger with notes and statistics, and it takes him a week to get these organized. Then we call on a Mr. Whaley, who is president of a large travel bureau. "I understand you people have had a tough time since that legislation on hypnotic selling went into effect," Jackson says. This Mr. Whaley is glad to have a shoulder to cry on, and he tells us all his troubles. Before the antihypno riots he has hypno salesmen out selling travel tours to people who don't want to take them. A lot of people don't even want them after they buy them, so they don't use the tickets, which adds up to nice slices of pure profit for the travel agency. After the riots, the government puts a stop to this. "Ever since then, you've been looking for an attraction to make people want to travel," Jackson says. "We have," Whaley admits. "And right now, you're thinking of building a luxury Honeymoon Hotel on the moon." "We were thinking about it," Whaley says, "but it would be too expensive to build. We'd have to charge rates that young couples couldn't afford." "I have an answer to your problem," Jackson says. "Take your honeymooners to Callisto, where excellent accommodations are already built. You'd have to make a few alterations, but the expense would be minor." "Wouldn't work," Whaley says. "It's too far. Most of the honeymoons would have to be over before the young people could get there." "I believe I have some statistics that would interest you," Jackson says, and he hauls out his ledger. He tosses statistics at Whaley for twenty minutes. He shows him that ninety per cent of the immigrants to Mars are young and unmarried, and what the Martian marriage rate is. He shows him how much money the government is spending to interest the citizens of Earth in setding elsewhere in the solar system, and how the government would joyfully furnish subsidies for a Callisto honeymoon fleet equipped with fast military drives. "With the high marriage rate on Mars, and government assistance on transport from Earth, you'll operate at full capacity from the start," he says. "And what's more, you'll have something to sell. Something that will interest and excite people." "Think of the slogans you can use," Jackson says. "Honeymoon among the hnoons -- the twelve moons of Jupiter. Honeymoon under Jupiter, the biggest moon in the universe. Man, it's a natural!" Whaley shakes the dreamy look out of his eyes, and says, "Just what are you trying to sell?" "Callisto," Jackson says. Whaley shakes his head. "We aren't big enough. No travel agency is big enough." "All the agencies together are big enough," Jackson says. "And you can I profit. This is a plan to create business." "I have no authority," Whaley says. "Fd have to take it up with the council." "Just introduce me," Jackson says, "and I'll take it up with the council." It ends, of course, with his selling Callisto. For a few days we're overrun with reporters, and Jackson -- that sort of thing. The directors of the Jovian Mining Company send Jackson a bonus and a chunk of stock, and tell him as long as he's already on Earth, to take a vacation. I'm afraid Jackson will get ideas about being a salesman again, but he doesn't. He just takes a vacation. Then one day this man Stephens, of Terra Sales Corporation, invites us to have dinner with him. I think maybe he wants Jackson to come back to work, but no -- we just have a good dinner, and Jackson meets his daughter, and from the way they react on each other I think Jackson will be in the market for one of those Callisto honeymoons. "I see you've solved your problem," Stephens says. "Yes," Jackson says. "I've solved it. If my sales presentations won't work more than once, why -- all I have to do is sell something that only needs to be sold once." At the time I don't understand this, but right now I'm giving it some thought. Jackson marries the Stephens girl, and brings her back to Mars. He settles down to raise a big family and increase the profits of the Jovian Mining Company. He's a cinch to be the next chairman of the board, which is a neat achievement for a young man, but I can see he's not satisfied with himself. And lately I see that odd look in his eyes, and I know he's figuring out a way to sell something. So help me, I think it's Jupiter. Illustrated by Paul Orban T he frenzied bustle of Sector Headquarters hit Coordinator Vance McGune like a stifling blast as he stepped reluctantly into the arena-like control room. He paused and wearily scanned the bulky correlator machines, the clerks and technicians scurrying about like distressed ants, the video-communication operators, the endless procession of control crewmen and survey-detection personnel. A ripple of poised motionlessness swept across the room as they discovered his presence. The delayed reaction was somewhat like an assault wave. "Old Man's called a board meeting Thursday at the Secretariat." "Crew Forty-Eight needs more shields south of Denver. Can I shift the plates from Flagstaff?" "The Central Russian Sector wants us to run a high altitude current check." "Commissioner Carmath wants a spot run down." "Here's that oceanographic report... Before McCune reached his desk, he had taken in tow a scampering retinue of more than a dozen -- all clamoring for preferential attention. The Coordinator was a tall, rangy man with sagging, despondent lines in his face. If his hair seemed sparse and unkempt, it wasn't due as much to carelessness at to resignation to the inevitable. He calmly held up his hands and quieted the restless mob. The job, he had learned, demanded a certain amount of forced detachment; otherwise it would be insufferable. "One at a time," he admonished. "What's the latest on the tote board, Woolcut?" The Detection Supervisor indicated the items with a stabbing finger. "Four new spots ranging from lukewarm to damned hot. One -- an East Seattle area -- might call for partial evacuation." "All in our Sector?" "Three are. One overlaps the Western Canadian area." "What's the trouble?" Woolcut made a demonstrative gesture of wiping his blunt brow. "A front's sweeping down the coast with a trace of warm rain. Not too much -- it'll probably add only about a twentieth of a roentgen to the average exposure badge. But there'll be more if we don't cap the source." McCune dropped into his chair and began thumbing through a sheaf of reports. "Where do you figure it's coming from?" "Probably a mid-arctic disposal dump used by an early Alaskan reactor." "One of those outfits with records that don't go back more than a hundred years, I suppose," the Coordinator offered dismally. Woolcut's nod was commiserating. "When we track it down we'll probably find an exposed pile of light garbage. My guess would be selenium #, with a half-life of six hundred thousand years." "Send up all the crews we can spare." McCune turned to the second in line. It was going to be another "just dandy" day -- as they all had been in the eight years since he had taken over the Western U.S. Sector. Somehow it all struck him as being a paradox -- a monotony of newness. The scores of detection and control problems that surged to the surface every day were all different. But the differences merely added up to the ennui of an eternal job that had to be done by the Radioactivity Control Commission (or Shufflle Board, as it was facetiously known) if greatgrandson was to be of the same genetic stock as great-grandpop. But today, he reminded himself with a grim sense of desperation, would be different... Beth had gone to the hospital. The thought and his inescapable reaction of selfabasement were like a cold sweat steaming deep under his tanned skin. The first avalanche of details attended to, McCune settled back in his chair and loosened his collar. He lit a cigarette and took a deep, exhilarating draught. But his respite was short-lived as the Detection Supervisor elbowed his way through the scurrying workers. "Here's the latest on the Hawaiian Subsector," Woolcut offered in strained tones. "Geology's recorded another fault shift during the night. They're working out a probability table on whether Haleakala's going to blow." "How much proctactinium has been dumped in that crater to date?" Woolcut gestured uncertainly. "We've only got a rough estimate from the eight reactor companies on the islands -- something like seventy-two thousand tons." The Coordinator winced. "Damned fools! They were warned fifty years ago not to use that hole on Maui as a disposal site. Just because a volcano hasn't acted up since # doesn't mean it won't ever bust loose again. What's three hundred and twenty-five years in the life of a volcano?" The other shrugged noncommittally. "It'll sure raise hell if it starts blowing now. I hate to think of evacuating five hundred thousand people on that island." whole chain." McGune dismissed him and motioned for his Control Supervisor. "What sort of standby complement do we have on Maui?" he asked. "Three complete shuffle crews," Fordham disclosed. "Any suggestions on what we can do with all that hot Pa?" Fordham spread his hands helplessly. "The only safe place I could find was Diamondhead Crater on Oahu." McCune looked up sharply. "But that's right in Honolulu -- under "I know. But it's the best we can arrange on a temporary basis. We'll line the crater and cap it, of course." McCune leaned back in solicitous thought... It was an endless game. After the emergency was over, public reaction would demand that the stuff be taken out of Diamondhead and dumped elsewhere. But the new disposal site would probably leak contamination into the environment and some harassed shuffle crew ten years hence would have to gather it up and find another place for it. And all the while the accumulation of reactor waste would continue inexorably. "Who's in charge of the Maui operation?" Fordham grimaced apologetically. "Nobody. "We're fresh out of supervisory personnel, what with the Denver and Seattle deals and the New Mexico -- McCune swore disgustedly. Then his blunt fingers drummed Ae desk meditatively. "I know what you're thinking. Chief," the other broke in with concern. "Don't try it. If the Commissioner finds out he'll dump you off the board. It'll mean your job." "It won't be the first time I had to supervise a UN shuffle detail." "It won't even be the first time this month. But, hell -- six years ago you were four times over your maximum allowable roentgen level. I'll bet you've absorbed eight hundred R's in the fifteen years you've been with the Commission." "Two or three more won't hurt," McCune offered laconically. "Won't even show up on my badge -- if I can arrange another switch' He glanced down at the black square clipped to his lapel. Then he looked over at the rack where Miss Jarred's badge was visible against the light material of her coat... Someday his secretary would begin wondering where she was picking up so much radiation. Briefly, he considered how she might react when the inspectors told her she was rapidly moving out of the "genetically safe" range. Fordham went off frowning disdainfully. "It may be all right for you, since you don't expect to raise a family," he mumbled over his shoulder. "But I'm keeping my level down. I've got two fine kids. And I'm going to make damned sure the third will be normal too." This brought McCune's thoughts back to the inescapable and, hesitatingly, he dialed the hospital. He spoke low so the others wouldn't learn Beth hadnt been visiting her mother after all. "No, Mr. McCune," the head jnatemity nurse assured. "Your wife hasn't left the labor room. We'll call you when she goes into delivery." "No!" he shouted. Then, more softly, "No -- I'll call back." Numbly, he let the receiver dangle from his hand for a long while... He'd never intended having a baby. Beth, however, always had. And, after his carelessness, she had furtively kept her condition to herself until it was too late to do anything about it    Damn her! Jarred ushered in the reporter from the wire service. The Coordinator recognized Neil Lancer, one of the top spot news men, even before she announced him. McCune regarded him with a half-venomous look of resignation and reluctantly offered a chair. Diffidently, the other eased his hat up off his forehead and lit a cigarette. "Office wants me to get your views on those statements by Dr. Puang." "Who's Dr. Puang?" "The Pakistanian geneticist." Lancer leaned forward. "Maybe you haven't run across the articles, so I'll brief you. The boys back in the L.A. bureau are anxious for your reaction." Like hell they were, McCune decided. Lancer wasn't the kind of man they'd send out on a feature assignment... They'd gotten wind of the Hawaiian situation. "Puang," the newsman said, crossing his legs, "has come out with a treatise on adaptive evolution. He seems to think the human race is inherently equipped to take care of any reasonable change in its environment." If there was a Puang, McCune felt sure, he would have heard of him. Furthermore, it was obvious from the way the reporter was glancing alertly around the room that he was trying to pick up answers to questions he wasn't going to ask. "Make it short," the Coordinator snapped. "I'm busy." "Well, Puang believes humanity will eventually adjust itself to living in a radioactive environment." Lancer abstractedly fingered his radiation-tabulator badge. "He sees adaptive evolution producing a strain that'll withstand increasingly higher levels of radiation without going off the deep end with runaway mutations." Woolcut pushed up to the desk. "We've located that garbage heap in the arctic!" "The one causing the hot rain?" The Detection Supervisor nodded anxiously. "Just as I guessed -- selenium. They had it capped under the edge of a glacier on Victoria Island. But erosion exposed the dump and arctic winds are beginning to pick up contamination." "Good work. Give your data to Fordham. Tell him to set up liaison with the Western Canadian Sector and get the stuff recapped until we figure out what to do with it." McCune faced the reporter again. "All right, Lancer. Let's bury this Puang guy and call off the play acting. But first I'm going to read you the riot act  .  Section Twenty-One of the Public Panic Law deputizes -- Lancer moaned dismally, took up the chant, " -- deputizes all ShuflSe Board members to classify certain data as restricted in the interest of public safety .  . But hell, McCune, give me a break!" "Under the protective provisions of Section Twenty-One," the Coordinator continued dispassionately, "I'm charging you with the information that a critical situation is making up in the Hawaiian Islands. A dead volcano crater that has been used as a dump for reactor waste is now showing signs of erupting." One of Woolcut's assistants called over from a desk halfway across the room, "Another R-level increase in the coastal waters off Oregon!" McCune's shoulders fell dejectedly... Punch the ball in on one side and it bulges out the other. You couldn't win; couldn't even get ahead long enough to relax. The assistant came over. "You suppose it's the Portland reactor cluster?" "What else? They've been sluicing off Fe solute through the Columbia River into the Pacific. But hunt it down to make sure before we get them on the carpet." TTie assistant hesitated. "Yes?" McCune asked. "Just wondering what they'll do with the stuff now." "That's our problem. They'll probably still be able to sluice off half of their garbage. We'll just have to find a place for the otiher half." Watching the man return to his desk, McCune let his thoughts drift back through the years to his uncle's farm... They'd had a hound dog that used to make a ritual out of burying a bone. It would dig first here; decide it didn't like the spot after all; pick up the bone from the half-excavated hole, and try another location. After four or five false starts, it would finally shuffle the morsel to what it considered an adequate cache. much the same problem as the hound dog. Only, the adequate place seemed eternally elusive and the shufiling endless. He remembered the reporter. "All right, Lancer. You're charged with top confidential information. If it gets into print, you and your bureau chief could get up to twenty years." Disgusted, Lancer strode toward the door, brushing past Woolcut who was on his way to McCune's desk. The Detection Supervisor's face was drawn and haggard. "Volcanology has confirmed the subterranean rumblings in the vicinity of the Haleakala Crater." McCune sprang up. "Send out Crews Four, Seven, Thirty-Three, Thirty-Four and Forty-One." He cupped his hands and shouted over to the communications section, "Get Volcanology and find out when we can take our men into the crater. "Miss Jarred' he tossed at his secretary, "call Supply and have them ship all available shielding material to the Hawaiian Subsector. "Woolcut -- tell Flight Operations to service my ship." With each shouted order, Coordination Headquarters had seemed to shift into a more agitated tempo of scurrying activity -- until now the huge room was a blur of erratic motion. But, for McCune, there was nothing to do but await the "go ahead" from Volcanology. He couldn't shrug off the sensation of denial and thwarted purpose brought on by the delay. Impatiently, he clawed at the armrests of his chair. Remembering Beth, however, he jolted erect and grabbed the phone. "Yes, Mr. McCune," the nurse said indulgently, "she's in delivery now. But it'll be another hour -- " He dropped the receiver back in its cradle... He'd been a damned fool too. He should have ensured against anything like this happening. Then he would have avoided the months of worry -- months during which they couldn't see a doctor for fear their identity would become known and they'd be turned into objects of public curiosity. The papers would have liked that. Even now he could visualize the headlines: "Sector Coordinator, Four Times Over Safe Genetic Level, To Have Baby." Not seeing a doctor until the last minute had been a source of constant apprehension. He was sure Beth had worried as much as he had over the fifty pounds she had gained. doed to an ear-splitting roar and died off abruptly, like a reverberating peal of thunder. The craft, a mile over Los Angeles Headquarshifted to its rotor and McCune listened to the fluttering grumble of the blades as it cushioned to a landing on the apron outside. Commissioner Carmath, formidably stocky and bristling with a bearing of intense purpose, pushed his way toward the main building. McCune met him at the entrance and was promptly brushed aside as the Chief of the UN Radioactivity Control Commission plowed a furrow through the scampering workers and drew up before the main tote board. "This Hawaiian thing -- that the only emergency situation you got working?" he demanded. "The only one of any consequence. We've got twenty-six other operations -- " The Commissioner silenced him with an indignant stare. "This thing had better be worked out, McCune," he threatened. "I'm holding you responsible for the whole affair!" "But they've been dumping in that crater for a whole generation!" "If you had the merest suspicion something like this might develop," Carmath went on uncompromisingly, "yu should have taken preventive steps." McCune stiffened with resentment. "Is that the way the Commission feels?" "That is the considered opinion of every single member of the board except yourself!" The Coordinator smiled bitterly... They hadn't wasted any time in tagging their scapegoat. Well -- to hell with the job. Let somebody else shuffle the stuff around for a change. Anyway, if they had run a total on his actual accumulated exposure, he would have been pensioned off years ago. "Let's be reasonable about this. Commissioner," he began nevertheless. "In the past week this Sector has had to control environmental radiation increases in more than a hundred -- " Carmath threw up his hands impulsively and moved toward the door. "I've no time to listen to you complain about routine control measures  . , A ten-thousand square-mile patch of Japanese fishing waters was declared contaminated today because some crackpot Coordinator picked the wrong spot in the Pacific to dump niobium fifteen years ago. "In France, an entire dairy farming section has to be moved, lock, stock and barrel. Why? -- Because the pastures are picking up radiation from God-knows-where -- probably in rain from some hidden dump in the Alps." He stopped and propped his hands on his hips. "You'd think shuffling ameiicum a hundred miles into the Everglades would be a safe proposition for Miami, wouldn't you? But what happens? -- Hot insect life crops up in the area and now we've got one hell of a capping job, if not an all-out shuffling operation!" Carmath scowled. "And you try to tell me about your petty problems!" McCune wished to hell he'd get out. If the okay on the Haleakala Crater shuffle came through while the Commissioner was still around, he might learn there was nobody but McCune to supervise the operation. Fortunately, the Commission Chief turned and stormed out. McCune headed for his desk, almost colliding with the Detection Supervisor. Woolcut flashed a smug smile of satisfaction. "We've finally licked that hot artesian water problem in the Clovis-Tucumcari area." "Well, don't bother me with it!" McCune rudely waved him off. "Take it to Fordham." Immediately contrite, though, he gripped the other's arm. "Sorry. The Commissioner crawled all over me... What's the deal in New Mexico?" Woolcut grinned. "An oil well ran dry about seventy-five years ago and someone pumped it full of promethium. That stuff has a short half-life, but not short enough. It finally worked its way into the subterranean water supply." McCune shrugged hopelessly. "Then there isn't too much we can do, except padlock the artesian wells and pipe in water from a clear area." Disconsolately, he returned to his desk... Was the world radiation level increasing astronomically? Or did it just seem that way because he was thoroughly tired of working out the day-to-day challenges? Real or imaginary, he conceded, everything was in one hell of a mess. Civilized humanity had been exposure badges with one person attached to each... at least, that was the burlesque impression he carried around. to be replaced monthly so the radiation they had absorbed could be measured and the figures entered only way tabs could be kept to see that the natural mutation frequency wasn't being knocked out of kilter. When he looked up, Fordham was standing in front of his desk. "Volcanology says we'd better start the Haleakala shuffle," the Control Supervisor announced tensely. "They figure we got ten or eleven hours to move the Pa from the crater." McCune nodded resignedly and glanced over at Miss Jarred's coat. Whistling abstractedly, he rose and strolled to the rack. His back toward the secretary, he undipped her badge and pinned it to his lapel, replacing it with his own. With the designation on the reverse side, it was hardly likely she'd notice that the one on her coat wasn't hers. Before he left the building, he called the hospital again... No, Mrs. McCune hadn't come down from the delivery room yet. Five minutes later, the Sector Headquarters apron fell away beneath as the blades of his shuttle craft churned the air with a muffled roar. A mile up, he hit the powershift stud. The rotor retracted and the tubes took over with a furious grip of acceleration. tor McCune stood on the jagged rim of the crater, zippering up his plastic envelope and sealing off the seams. The Haleakala shuffle, he wearily acknowledged as he broke open the compressed air valve, was going to be one of the damndest operations he'd ever seen. Already the emergency crews had set up their equipment along the bowl of the crater. Their positions, behind mobile shields, were as he had assigned them over videocom while en route. Across the bowl, a steam shovel and a half-dozen bulldozers started down the slope, heading for the piles of Pa that glistened like blue-steel hills in the early morning sun. Beyond, the sky was dense with hovering shuffle craft, waiting to be called for loading. The crater itself was like a dismal plain of hell, with everything there but the heat... No, McCune corrected himself -- the heat was there too. Only, it was a kind the traditional hell had never seen. But curlers of gray smoke streaming from crevices in the bowl's floor were a derisive indication that even fiery heat would soon make the illusion of Hades complete. "Attention all crews' he directed over the radio as he started down the slope. "Keep the hot stuff in front of your shields. Take the outermost piles first and work in." The ground rumbled as tractors lumbered in from the rim, hauling empty packing crates. Then there was a softer but more ominous rumble and denser smoke ciurled from the fissures. Two bulldozers joined forces with one of the mobile shields and advanced on the nearest piles. The steam shovel and three tractors with packing cases took the cue and clumsily charged in. "That crew on the left!" McCune shouted, squinting to discern the number on its shield. "Crew Forty-One -- your flank's exposed! Either square around or back up." He started forward again, drawn hypnotically toward the intense activity. But a special instinct of fear and danger held him back. Trapped between the two impulses that were like magnets, he was painfully strained with indecision. "You there -- in Crew Seven," he ordered. "Get back behind your shield... Outpost, send in two more shovels... Crews ThirtyThree, Sixteen and Two -- take the third pile on the left... Shuffle Craft Number One -- stand by to load." Apprehensively, he fanned his radiation detector ahead of him. Its clatter rose to a steady alarming whine. It was going to be a disastrous job for the men in the Haleakala shuffle. No longer would it be a matter of fighting for genetic safety. Such a petty consideration, McCune realized, had long been exceeded. For, when you spoke of genetic purity, you were speaking in terms of only forty or fifty roentgens. These men would sop up radiation in the hundreds of roentgens. Now it was a fight for physical survival. Shuffle Craft One plummeted down, drew up sharply and hovered above the crane that was shoveling Pa into the cases. A thousand frantic voices suddenly shouted a hoarse alarm. McCune swore desperately as he watched the blast from die craft's rotor buffet the blue-steel hills and scatter pulverized protactinium like dust. The swirling cloud of gray powder spread over the crater like a pall of death. "Get that copter out!" the Coordinator bellowed, retreating before the deadly dust. "All crews fall back!" But the men had already broken and were fleeing in frenzied disorder up the slope. He drew up as the copter skittered beyond the rim. "Outpost! Call in all shuttle crafts and lay dolly tracks down into the crater. We'll have to cart the stuff out." Volcanology came in. "We expect a major eruption within eight hours, Coordinator. You'd better rush it up." McCune forgot about his plastic encasement and tried to wipe his forehead. He only succeeded in smearing perspiration over the transparent surface so that he could hardly see through it. "Communications!" he called urgently. "Get out a general alarm. Have all Sectors send Class I emergency crews and equipment. "Supply -- break out the doubleshielded manipulator suits and mobile platforms; we're going to have to wallow in this damned stuff. "Civil Control -- evacuate Maui and have your forces on the other islands stand by." He took another reading from his R-detector and estimated the amount of radiation being absorbed by Miss Jarred's badge on his lapel... There was bound to be an investigation at the end of the month! A civilian turning up with a hundred and nine R's in thirty days' time would raise a stink anywhere. His years of badge switching were sure to be discovered. The last crews to leave the bowl were straggling past him. Watching them clamber up the slope, pale and haggard, he was thankful now that he had ordered a full Medical Standby complement assigned to the Outpost. Making doubly sure that the crater was unmanned, he climbed up to the ridge. A huge red and white shuttle craft roared in from the east, kicking over from rocket power at only a thousand feet above the crater. The blast of its rotor further agitated the hot dust and the Coordinator swore volubly. "McCune!" came the enraged response. "Is that you down there?" He winced as he recognized the heavy voice of Commissioner Carsymbol on the craft. Watching the ship land he numbly peeled off his plastic envelope and, holding it by an inside fold, dropped the thing into a disposal bin. Carmath stormed over, sweeping the area before him with a counter. "McCune, you're cashiered as of now! I'll take over until another operation supervisor gets here." The Coornator shrugged indifferently and started back toward his shuttle craft. Doggedly, Carmath followed. "I told the Chief Correlator you were pulling something like this. But Ronson said no. He said he investigated and found nothing." McCune paid no attention. Instead, he grinned as he realized suddenly that the magnets he had fought for nearly half his life -- the alternate poles of duty and selfconsideration -- were no longer pulling. It was like a great burst of freedom. He would never again have to worry about operational radiation. white sheet, McCune's wife looked strangely small and helpless. Her face was wan and the lingering scent of the anesthetic was heavy in the room. For months he had feared this moment. But now that it was here, he felt hardly any emotion at all... The baby had been born, as it inevitably would have been come hell or high water or fifty shuffle emergencies. And now that it was over, all the anxiety was gone, even though he hadn't seen his daughter yet. Instead, there was the calming realization that Beth had been right all along; that they had desperately needed a child. And if the baby were something less than human, they would only love it all the more. His shoulders were squarer than they had ever been in all his thirtyeight years as he kissed his wife on the forehead. "Dr. Logan says you may see your daughter now, Mr. McCune." He turned toward the nurse in the doorway. "Is -- is the baby all right?" "There's -- " the nurse hesitated awkwardly. "Dr. Logan is waiting." She led the way down the corridor and he followed... So there was something wrong. Still, he felt no dejection. After all, hadn't he sincerely expected some sort of deformity? She motioned him to a halt in front of the glass partition of the nursery and went inside. He watched her cross to a doctor who was bending over one of the cribs. Then she spoke against the back of her hand and the physician looked up sharply and started anxiously toward McCune. But he paused and gestured for the nurse to follow with the baby. Her eyes widened apprehensively and she shook her head. Tensing, McCune strained to see over the side of the crib. He was suddenly sick inside at the portentious pantomime he was witnessing. Why, he wanted to shout, was she afraid to pick up the baby? She was spared the apparently repulsive task, though, as five men wearing the arm bands of the UN Medical Research Commission swept down the corridor and barged into the nursery. Three of them crowded around the crib while two held X-ray plates up to the light. Astonished, they pointed with shaky fingers at details on the negatives. Good God! He hurled the door open and charged in. But his presence went unnoticed in the din of excited voices. "... compensative muscular development..." "... completely enclosing the stroma and replacing the serous membrane..." "... might be mistaken for splenomegaly, if it weren't for the other decisive evidence..." Nudging two of the medical men out of his way, McCune gripped the side of the crib and stared down. Dr. Logan came over and grasped his shoulder. "This isn't the first case. There was one in Germany eleven years ago. But that one died. Oh, it wasn't because of this," he added hastily, waving his hand over the child. "It was a perfectly normal infant mortality. Then five years ago there was an( Continued on page # ) Illustrated by Paul Urban VF plexion asked. Kevin nodded but didn't look at his questioner. He nervously brushed back the lock of gray hair from his lined forehead and pushed his rimless glasses into a more secure position on his nose. His worried expression made him look older than his forty-eight years. It was absolutely amazing what science could do. The last century of progress had been wonderful! Why even the circus was far better -- or was it? "Hear it's better than ever," the man continued in a flat toneless voice. The Great Golden Ball is supposed to be really something. Or so they say. I go every year. It's really amazing what they can do nowadays -- science, I mean. Even the circus is better for it." Is it? thought Kevin as the speeding, robot driven monorail pastel buildings shining slimly in the sunlight filtering through the plastic dome covering New New York. Oh, is it? The man next to Kevin, discouraged by the lack of response to his attempts at conversation, quieted and both men relaxed in the privacy of their own thoughts. At any rate, the other man did. Kevin couldn't relax. His son and daughter-in-law with whom he lived could not be aware of his absence yet, Kevin reassured himself. No one knew he was here. And when the men came for him, and Sally, perhaps with tears in her eyes, went to fetch him and his small suitcase it would be too late. And that would be that. The transport slowed noiselessly to a stop and most of the passengers rose to leave. The robot driver sat motionless until the last of the people, Kevin among them stepped from the loading platform to the ground. The electronic currents whirred, the doors closed and, the circuit complete, the transport moved off into the shining caverns of the city. The people hurried forward and passed quickly through the entrance to the amphitheater over which hung a sign: Kevin watched the people file through the entrance and slowly, almost reluctantly, followed them. He presented the red plastic coin to the robot at the entrance, but hardly heard as its electrical voice crackled, "Thank you, sir. Enjoy the show." Kevin walked with the crowd along the spotless corridor and stepped aboard the automatic lift, getting out at the floor above. He seated himself in one of the comfortable lounging chairs and shuddered slightly as it fitted itself to the contours of his body. His fingers clutched tightly the undistinguished box he carried and something within him resisted the comfort offered by the large chair in which he sat. People continued to file in and take places and the amphitheater was quickly filled. Soundlessly. The walls absorbed the sound and invisible filters removed the dust from the air. Occasionally people took small pills from the containers built into the sides of their chairs and popped them into their mouths. Kevin knew the pills tasted like popcorn, candy floss, and some even like hot dcs. But they were, of course, not the same as the real thing. Neither was the amphitheater. Once there had been great canvas tents put up in the open air, and wood shavings covering the ground within, and hard benches for seats. The area around the tents had been sprinkled with small stands that sold soda in bottles and candy floss colored pink that melted into sweet nothingness in one's mouth. And everywhere there was an exciting smell made up of many separate things. Animals, the foodstuffs on sale, sawdust, and the sweat of many human beings pressed tightly together on the bleachers. There were the shouts of barkers, colored lights, and men who sold little lizards that changed color as you watched them. Kevin knew all this for he had read it in the book which he had bought from the ancient shopkeeper in the rundown section of New New York, how many years ago? Kevin smiled slightly to himself as he recalled the puzzled expression on the shopkeeper's face when he purchased the book. The circus was beginning and Kevin interrupted his reverie to watch. On small elevated squares in the center of the great arena stood figures almost too horrible to look at. Some flailed many arms about aimlessly; some simply stood -- vacantly -- and their undersize extra limbs which should have been wings fluttered sadly. One or two figures crawled about on their small squares scratching their scaly skins and making whimpering noises. One seemed to be making efforts to rise from where it lay in an amorphous heap, but was prevented from doing so by a grotesque oversized head which the creature seemed incapable of raising from the slab on which it sprawled. Kevin's stomach tightened. Every year, he knew, specimens such as these, the products of the effects of radiation on the genes of their parents or, perhaps, grandparents during the war that ended nearly a hundred years ago, were placed on display in the circus on their small squares where rising electrical currents instead of bars imprisoned them. Even the freak shows in the twentieth century circus were different from this. At least then the freaks were still, well, people, and freely chose to exhibit their oddities for profit. In many cases it was the only way they could earn a living. But this was different. These senseless mutants were captured like animals after having been abandoned by their parents; and were being displayed with the same lack of humanity. Kevin watched robots perform mindless feats of strength as the circus continued. He saw colored opaque rays support a slab of concrete and gasped with the rest of the audience as the heavy slab was suddenly disintegrated by a sudden rainbow fusion of all the rays. He listened as the recorded commercials whispered their wiles to the captive audience. Suddenly a panel slowly opened in the ceiling of the amphitheater and dramatically, silently, an immense golden sphere descended until it hung glistening at the end of its thin cable in the center of the great arena. The lights dimmed and a hush fell over the crowd. The sphere suddenly glowed brightly and, at this signal, all other lights in the amphitheater were turned off. Kevin stared as the sphere began to rotate on its axis. He heard the first reaction the audience had yet shown; the "ohs' and "ahs" that used to accompany fireworks displays in the old days. He looked into the sphere and could not believe what he saw. He was in the sphere and he -- ! Everyone would know, he thought in horror and fear! He tore his eyes from the sphere and looked, expecting anything, at the people near him whose faces were dimly visible in the light from the sphere. They all gazed spellbound at the hypnotically revolving globe. Kevin listened as a woman whispered to the man next to her without taking her eyes from the shining bubble. "Can you see it, Jim?" "Yeah," the man answered soft"I always dreamed of playing a love scene with Dirk Anders. He's the best actor in the Lifies. And there I am! Doing it -- in the Golden Ball," the woman sighed. "That's not what I see," the man said in a low voice, not taking his eyes from the turning globe. Kevin watched the man's mouth working. Saw him wipe the spittle from the comers of his mouth. He turned away from the naked look in the man's eager eyes. A child of nine or ten in front of Kevin clutched excitedly at the sleeve of the woman next to him. "I'm in there. Mom! See me! And I've got a dog! See, he's all black with one white paw! Just like I told you I wanted hnn to be. Mom!" The woman answered her son absently as she stared intently into die ball and Kevin wondered what private and personal dream she saw herself living. The Great Golden Ball, as it turned hypnotically on its cable, was providing everyone with a vision of his or her own particular wish-fulfillment. The spellbound audience was happily wallowing in a dream world. Kevin left his seat abruptly and boarded the lift in the corridor. On the lower floor he searched until he found the entrance to the arena. It was temporarily empty, but soon the robots would be using it as they brought equipment into the arena for the next display. Kevin opened his box and took from it the gaudy costume he had secretly made. Quickly he slipped it over his clothes. He took out a small mirror and, working quickly, covered his face with white powder. As he applied grease paint to his face in bright, bold strokes, a saucy grin smiled back at him from the mirror's surface. He slipped the white skull piece over his head and fastened the red wig to it. One last look in the mirror and he was ready. Kevin skipped lightly, in spite of his forty-eight years, out into the glaring light of the arena. Silence greeted him. He walked about. He skipped. And suddenly fell. He rose, rubbing the place of his contact with the floor, and scanned the floor beneath his feet. Suddenly, he threw up his hands in mock surprise and, bending from the waist, picked up something from the floor. Triumphantly he held it up. It took the audience a minute or two to "see" the imaginary straw, or pin, or whatever it was, that was clutched between Kevin's thumb and index finger. His painted smile beamed on the people before him and seemed to grow larger as a faint titter arose from a little girl in the first tier of seats. Kevin waved to her. She hid her face in her hands. And then waved shyly back. Kevin skipped about the arena watching the people whispering among themselves. The softest ripple of laughter ran through the audience and Kevin's heart soared. He repeated his fall and waved to a small boy who waved wildly back. Kevin's wig bobbed gaily as he hopped and strutted about the arena waving to the children. no "Wave to me! Wave to me!" cried a shrill voice from the stands. Kevin did not see the robots approaching on the run and yet was not surprised when they seized him and carried him from the arena, his red wig still bobbing gaily. It could not have ended otherwise, Kevin knew. But no matter. The children had laughed. So had many of the adults. The robots deposited him in the corridor beside the entrance to the arena and Kevin found himself facing two well dressed and corpulent gentlemen. "What's going on here?" shouted the first man. This was Mr, Caldwell himself, the owner of the circus. His picture had been on the Gommunico Screen in connection with the advertising for the circus Kevin remembered. "Are you crazy?" the second man sputtered. Kevin slowly removed the wig and the white skull piece and stood with lowered eyes, his arms at his sides, facing the two angry men. As they continued to shout at him for an explanation Kevin, using the skull piece, wiped the clown makeup from his face. Both men, out of breath, paused and Kevin opened his mouth to speak. "I want to apolo -- ," he began but Caldwell interrupted him. "Hey, Mike," he said to the other man, "Isn't this the guy whose picture they're sending out on the Communico Screen? You know, the guy who ran away from his son's house before they could send him to the Psych Center?" Kevin didn't give the man a chance to answer the question. "That's true, sir, and I'm going home now. I'm sorry for the trouble I've caused but I had to do it. I -- ," he faltered. How could he explain about what he had done and why he had done it? Kevin brushed the gray lock of hair back from his forehead and reached absently for the glasses he had removed earlier while applying his make-up. "It's a very long story," he said finally and there was a weariness in his tone that was not merely the result of his exertion in the arena moments before. He stood quietly before the two men. The shouting from the arena did not quite penetrate his consciousness. Kevin thought of Sally and Edward and how they had reluctantly decided to send him to the Psych Rehabilitation Center because he persisted in "living in the past" as they put it and refused to be suitably interested in or impressed with the "progress" their century had made. When Kevin had tried to explain that the progress they spoke of was not all, he sincerely believed, of a worthwhile nature they had merely shrugged and looked at him oddly. with the Psychlab's "Rehabilitation Program" now for he had proved his point. There were some good things from the past and a clown was one of them. A circus without noise and fanfare and excitement and laughter was nothing. He hated the sterility of its present scientific gadgetry. The best that could be said for it was that it did no obvious harm. But with the advent of The Great Golden Ball people were taking one more step away from what could be a pleasant reality and one more step in the direction of Dreamland. And Kevin was certain that this Dreamland would one day prove to be crawling with nightmares. " -- something written about this a Icmg time ago," Caldwell was saying to his assistant. "Looks like its got possibilities. Back in the #'s they used to have these guys who made fools of themselves in the circus. People loved them. Sorta made them see their own faults and frustrations and all." "But, sir -- " the younger man began. "I know we're supposed to be a streamlined outfit but you can hear that crowd yelling out there as well as I can. That's proof enough for me! This thing's good!" Kevin listened in amazement. This was not the way he had expected things to go. They should have sent him home in the custody of one of the robots by now. Or called the Psych Rehabilitation Center to have someone come and get him. "What's your name, dad?" Caldwell asked "Molloy. Kevin Molloy," Kevin answered, feeling shy all at once. "But I didn't -- " "Listen Molloy. Get out there and do whatever you did before. No, don't ask any questions now. We can settle details later. But from now on you're working for Caldwell's Circus!" Ill Kevin pulled the skull piece on his head once again and with shaking fingers applied his grease paint. It was a poor job but Kevin hoped it would look good enough. Still fastening the r wig, he ran out into the arena and was stopped short by the thunderous roar that went up from the crowd. Kevin lifted a boy from the stands and sat down on the floor of the arena, the boy on his lap. The age old game began. Kevin's hands covered his face. The boy pulled away one finger after another until Kevin's painted smile beamed out at him. They laughed together. Kevin played the clown and listened simultaneously to the voice shouting in his mind. Sally had always said an older man should have a hobby or something to keep him occupied. That was why I got such crazy ideas, she said, because I didn't have enough to do since I retired. Well, now I've got more than a hobby. I've got a job. I'm a clown! Maybe I can get Caldwell to put some sawdust on this floor; it's awfully slippery. Kevin placed the boy back in the stands and skipped about the arena. Maybe he'll put up a candy floss stand and sell popcorn instead of all those pills, Kevin thought as he smiled at the happy crowd. Kevin slipped, fell, and the crowd howled its delight when he found the imaginary straw. As he staggered exhausted from the arena, his heart singing, Mr. Caldwell was still excitedly talking to his assistant, who was vigorously nodding his head in agreement. " remember some ancient history myself! We'll get him to teach some other guys the same kind of stuff. Remind me to ask him about that. I figure maybe we've come full circle on this, and he's got just what we need around here the human element." ing the first five years of IF Magazine! Selected by the editors to include as many variations as possible, you will find something different in every story -- an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme and pace. Here you will find Isaac Asimov, Charles Beaumont, Jerome Bixby, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Frank Riley, Robert Sheckley and others -- in a book chock full of the best in science fiction entertainment. The edition is small and many places did not receive copies. However, if your local news dealer cannot get you a copy, send # cents to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and a copy will be mailed to you at once. What Is Your Science I. Q. ? answer; # is good, # very good, over # makes you a whizz. Answers are on page #. #. The average weight of the human skeleton is approximately ounces. #. The South Antilles Arc joins South America to the Antarctic continent beneath the Ocean. #. The inert gas argon is prepared from liquid . #. In the tables of atomic weight, oxygen at is used as the standard. #. Pinchbeck is a form of . #. Crystals are grouped according to their . #. One horsepower is equal to foot pounds of work. #. The plane of the ecliptic is inclined toward the celestial equator at an angle of about degrees. #. Hydrogen diffuses times faster than oxygen. #. How many points of the compass must be mentioned when "boxing" the compass? #. A chemical compound which in solution conducts a current of electricity and is decomposed by it is called an . #. Coral reefs form only in tropical waters in a belt about degrees North and South of the Equator. #. What measure of length is equal to # wave lengths of red light from cadmium? #. The valence of a chemical element is dependent on the number and arrangement of the revolving outside the nucleus. #. What is Babbit metal? #. Iron becomes "passive" when treated with . #. The measure of interstellar space which is equal to a distance of # light years is called a . #. To convert Centigrade to Fahrenheit, multiply by and add #. #. The angle between the planes of orbit of the Earth and the moon is about degrees. #. What is the name given to a geometric conception of a fourth dimensional super-solid? (Continued from page #) other case' Logan continued. "Two more cropped up three years ago and five in #. This is the fourteenth this year... Of course, the UN has classified all information on the cases as restricted until they can be thoroughly studied." "But what is it?"j McGune demanded, exasperated. "Pick up your child, Mr. McCune," one of the Medical Research men suggested. McCune slipped his hands under the infant's back and thighs and lifted, gently at first. Surprise streaked his face and he hastily lowered the child. "Why," he began, dumbfounded, "she -- she must weigh..." "Twenty-three and a quarter pounds, to be exact," Logan said. Someone shoved one of the Xray plates in his hand. "This is the child's spleen and here is part of the reproductive system -- the ovaries." All McCune could see, though, were intensely white patches on the negative where the doctor indicated. "Our highest X-ray voltage," Logan explained, "couldn't penetrate those areas. We haven't yet analyzed the substance or determined what sort of biological miracle the hypertissue represents. But one thing's certain -- as far as blood composition and genetic tolerance are concerned, your daughter will be able to accommodate a radiation level several thousand times as high as you or I without any ill effect." E N D Of IF -- Worlds of Science Fiction, published bi-monthly at Buffalo. New York, for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, manasrins editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Quinn Publishing Company. Inc., # Pearl Street. Kingston. N. Y.; Editor, James L. Quinn. # Pearl Street. Kingston, N.Y.; Managing editor. None; Business manager. None. #. The owner is (if owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock) ; Quinn Publishing Company. Inc., # Pearl Street. Kingston. N. Y.; James L. Quinn. # Pearl Street, Kingston. N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: None. #. The two paragraphs next above, giving the names of owners, stockholders, and security holders, if any. contain not only the list of stockholders and security holders as they appear upon the books of the company but also, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, is given; also that the said two paragraphs contain statements embracing affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner; and this affiant has no reason to believe that any other person, association, or corporation has any interest direct or indirect in the said stock, bonds, or other securities than as so stated by him. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown alve was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only) . James L. Quinn. Editor. Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September. #. Atomic powered military aircraft should make their appearance in three years and commercial aircraft in ten years, according to engineering predictions. Tomorrow's atomic airliners will be locomotives of the sky. The engine will be a giant atomic-powered fuel plane, the coaches smaller ships coupled in mid-air to the locomotive. With this set-up indefinite shuttle service could be maintained, limited only by the crew's endurance. The airborne nuclear train would fly its course, with commercial airliners unhooking on arrival at their terminal airport where other passenger aircraft would latch on for new airports of call. Airliners or airfreighters thus relieved of carrying full fuel loads could haul larger passenger and pay loads. The tow plane concept also solves the problem of shielding passengers from radiation emitted by a nuclear engine. Some day in the not too distant future people may eat whale steaks for dinner, thanks to antibiotics. The so-called mold remedies can be injected at the time of catch and keeps the whale meat fresh right through processing. Recent tests show that the decaying process, usually well advanced in the whale's intestines within # hours, had not started. Both meat and oil were in perfect condition. Injecting whales on-the-run is also being tested by a Norwegian company. On exditions, the antibiotic can be introduced into the body of the whale either by injection into the animal's stomach after it has been shot, or by harpoon shell during the chase. While whale steaks are for the future, poultry, beef and fish and sea fo preserved by antibiotics are now ready for market Discovery of some germ-reversing chemicals is expected to lead to an entirely new means of controlling disease. The germ reversal accomplished by chemicals consists in making laboratory-grown germs change from non-disease-producing ones to virulent disease producers. The chemicals causing this change are breakdown products of the cell nists to such chemicals, if found, would be the expected new weapons against germs, changing virulent to harmless germs. Silicon rubber will soon be used as the center layer in safety glass for supersonic aircraft. The conventional interlayer in safety glass does not withstand the intense frictional heat generated by potential aircraft speeds. Above #F the conventional layer softens, evolves gas bubbles and rapidly loses strength. At the other end of the scale, temperatures at the range of#F render it almost as brittle as glass itself. Laminated windshields made with the new silicone rubber retain full strength and clarity at temperatures ranging from#F to over #F. The soft silicone plastic calendered between layers of polyethylene-coated paper flows readily under pressure and requires no bonding adhesive. When laminated and cured under pressure in either flat or curved glazings, it forms a tough rubbery interlayer with excellent optical properties, with haze and distortion minimized. Skin grafts will be sprayed on in the future if a recently discovered method is adopted. Spraying is expected to be particularly useful for burn victims who have lost large areas of skin and haven't enough left for suitable grafts by other methods. The skin for spray grafts is put into an electric kitchen blender which divides the material into tiny particles suspended in salt solution. The suspension of skin particles is then sprayed by syringe onto a piece of fine mesh gauze that has been cut to fit the area needing the graft. The skin particles are deposited as a thin layer over one surface of the gauze. This is then inverted and placed over the graft area. In three weeks, the numerous scattered islands of skin have grown to cover completely the entire area. An atomic powered engine for an interplanetary missile is being built by the Russians. The researchers picture an atomic-powered unmanned rocket weighing # tons for the Mars flight. It would carry # or # tons of an inert propulsion agent and # to # tons payload. Once the rocket reaches Mars, it will be able to transmit data back to earth via instruments they claim they already have available. This will enable scientists to analyze the soil chemically and the atmosphere photographically. Creation in the laboratory of functioning glands or other organs of the human body may be achieved in the future. Replacement of failing human hearts by laboratorygrown ones would also seem a possibility. The new kind of spare parts for the human body now foreseen will be built from pure strains of cells grown, or cultured in the laboratory. The gland or stomach or kidney will not necessarily have the characteristic shape and form of the natural organ, but it will be able to function the same way. These spare parts will be achieved through advances in the field of tissue culture which has already provided the means of growing polio virus for vaccine production. # -- Symmetry. # -- #. # -- #. # -- Four. # -- #. #I -- Electrolyte. # -- # degrees. # -- Meter. # -- Electrons. # -- Antifriction metal alloy. # -- Nitric acid. # -- Parsec. # -- ##. # -- # degrees, # -- Tesseract. Electrical equipment that will last longer is the promise of a thin skinned copper wire developed recently by research engineers. Using a new metallurgical technique, scientists have been able to coat copper wire with a thin, protective aluminum skin that is only onefortieth as thick as the average skin on the human body. The resulting product will mean an increase in life, a reduction in size and an increase in the efficiency of presentday electrical equipment. Key to the new technique is encasing the wire in a protective aluminum coat and then recoating with a hightemperature insulation. The wire can operate over longer periods of time at higher temperatures than have been practical up to now. Desert water may soon be saved by whales. An Australian research organization has found a way of cutting down water evaporation using cetyl alcohol, a chemical derived from whale oil. The chemical is used to lay a film over the surface of the water. It restricts water escaping into the air, but does not stop oxygen entering the water and keeping it fresh. Cetyl alcohol is invisible and tasteless and can be used freely in dams and reservoirs. It is harmless to animal life. In ideal laboratory conditions ffie chemical cuts down evaporation by #. Trials over a few years in dams and reservoirs have shown a saving of between # and #. Shock-treatment apparatus may soon be a standard piece of American farm equipment. With it, farmers will be able to improve germination, dry grain, process food and kill weed seeds. The key to these possibilities is a small electrical device invented recently by a Department of Agriculture research man. The machine consists of a glass tube, horizontally mounted, and fitted with electrical terminals at each end. The tube has two mouths on top. One, corked in operation, is the entrance for seeds. The other is connected to a vacuum pump. Seeds put into the tube are subjected to radiation from the glow discharge of low-frequency current at less than atmospheric pressure. The device gives greater control than possible before. Experimentally, a working model of the device has successfully speeded up corn seed germination, helped prepare soybean seeds for dehydrated processing and inhibited the germination of other seeds. By the year # many kinds of mental retardation may be treated by the use of artificial enzymes. One hereditary form of mental abnormality may be prevented by placing in the artery of a new-born child with such a defect a synthesized catalyst in a polythene tube. The synthetic would do the work that normal enzyme molecules do in the normal child and the infant would then develop in a normal way. These predictions are based on the theory that many kinds of mental retardation are molecular diseases. That is, disease caused by molecules of abnormal structure present in place of molecules of normal structure. Dear Mr. Quinn : After reading Hue and Cry, I'm inclined to agree on the point that S-F will not have an untoward effect on our treatment of an alien. However, the reception depends entirely on how far advanced the alien is, his mode of approach, who's in office at the time of meeting and, most important, the current mode of thinking. Speaking of thinking, a good example of how divergent thought can be at a particular time is being illustrated right now in our own society. I refer to the difference between scientific non-Aristotelian thinking and that of the rest of the world which can be called Aristotelian or linear thinking. I refer you to Science and Sanity by Korzybski, if further elaboration on the subject is needed. Think of the hostility with which an alien would be greeted if his mode of thinking was more divergent from the common man's than that of the present day scientist's. I disagree that scientists go afield in pronouncing on metaphysical problems; the implication that there are areas of nature governed by science, and other areas which are governed by some supernatural non-physical laws, is ridiculous. As I see it, the philosophers have had some # years plus to straighten out their affairs, which are still in the same intolerable mess; although I don't see how they could have progressed much further than this when they have to give order to Nonsense or Nothing. These wrong-thinkers do nothing but impede the progress of science; witness the agitation with which something like eugenics is greeted, despite the fact that we are breeding diabetes, near-sightedness, insanity and various other debilities of the congenital and hereditary kinds into our population. We can't depend on some magical cure-all mutation springing up. The odds are against it. But we can change the odds and help the race... yet we won't. -- Owen Sear Chatham, N.J. Dear Mr. Quinn : I have just noted that Mr. King's letter in the Hue and Cry section leaves several unanswered questions regarding "humanists". I should like to clarify the issue. The term humanism has come to mean two different things in the twentieth century, both somewhat at variance with our picture of Renaissance humanism. On the one hand we have those who are merely advocates of a greater use of the so-called "humanities" in the college curriculum. On the other, we have a movement which has developed among scientists, writers, educators, philosophers, and liberal religious clergymen and laymen, such as biologists Julian Huxley, Herman J. Miller, Anton Carlson and C. Judson Herrick, psychiatrists Rudolf Dreikurs, Brock Chisholm and Erich Fromm, philosophers John Dewey, Arthur Bentley, Sidney Ratner, Oliver Reiser, Max Otto and Bertrand Russell, and writers Herbert Muller and H. G. Wells. These "humanists" tend toward agnosticism as regards immortality or the existence of purpose or plan behind the universe, and generally regard the universe as being purposeless and ethically neutral. Man is regarded as being the product of purely natural processes. He "stands alone" (Huxley) without the hope or possibility of outside help. Humanists, whether themselves scientists or laymen, regard the self-correcting scientific world view as the only sane basis for a personal philosophy or religion. Humanism is represented organizationally in the United States chiefly by the American Humanist Association, with headquarters at Yellow Springs, Ohio, of which Nobel Prize winner Herman J. Muller is currently president and in the world at large by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, with headquarters at Utrecht in the Netherlands. It is my belief that there exists a great deal of overlapping of interests between readers and writers of science fiction and those persons actively interested in the humanist movement. -- Edd Doerr Indianapolis, Ind. If the number of letters received by the editor is any indication of interest, we know the answer to it. Mail has poured in ever since Mr. King (Dec. IF) made his charges. Dear Mr. Quinn: My main reason for writing this is to add a word or two to the "Man -- Where did he come from?" controversy. It is obviously true that languages do evolve toward simplicity, but this is a fairly recent thing. It was not necessarily true when reading and writing were possessions of relatively few persons. In any case, I think most of us will agree that they have to evolve from simplicity to complexity first. Surely no one believes that the savage or the stone age man went from communication by grunts and gestures to a language of great grammatical intricacy. I doubt very much that this progress could be caused by mutation -- no matter how sudden. Intelligence was not meant to be judged by the mere use of language, but by the thoughts expressed. They are two separate things. We have no evidence of the upward evolution of languages, and we have no evidence of the upward evolution of intelligence. While I do not deny that a relatively simple gene change would make a physical difference, I doubt that one stroke-of-lightning change would make the difference between early man and the modem creature. Further, the wide physical differences between men don't seem to have any effect on their brain power. In this connection, the question is "Where is something -- anything at all -- between the cave wall scratchings of the Neanderthalers and a philosophical treatise in Sanskrit or Chinese?" Do we who accept so cheerfully the story of human evolution really know on how little evidence the theory is based? To me, the Biblical story of the creation or the common SF idea that man is descended from stranded visitors from another planet make much more sense. -- Floyd Zwickey Rockford, #. # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shonnon Rood Verona, Pennsylvania Dear Mr. Quinn ; ing but applause, both long and loud! You are certainly to be congratulated. However, the real motive of this letter is to persuade you to collect another anthology of IF stories using novelettes. I'm sure that sales of a mixed anthology, containing about four or five novelettes and half as many short stories as The First World of would be another terrific seller... Please give the above suggestion serious thought. I'm sure that I'm not the only one of your readers who would like to see you do it. -- R. J. Banks Corsicana, Texas Sirs: Why is it SF writers seem to feel that they must always be moralizing? There is almost always some "deep moral meaning" such as: we should be compassionate and forgiving or whatnot, on a level with "the bogey man will get you if you don't watch out". A few years ago we were supposed to feel individual guilt for every violent death from the trilobites on. Next, we were accused of harboring such horrendous and evil thoughts that telepaths would be driven insane if they were to open their minds. Now we are in a judge-not era, or rather the writers seem to be on a judgenot toot, which promises to be equally sickening. I'll take refuge in Jean Paul Satre, the Judger, the Evaluator. -- T. J. O'Hare New York, N.Y. The Best ScieiKe-Brtiwi Wies ew "? f Continued from back covert  -- Bromely starts a series  visits to a strange psychiatrist. But his 'Dr. wKtHL. Fell" does not exist -- and Bromely never leaves his own office! Here's a taut and terrifying tale about a new mental disease that will jolt you ! Mike Donohue hopes to stow away on a rocket ship. At last he gets a break and is on the by Cordioainer Smith -- A frightening story about fearful monsters which attack the helpless ships of space -- and how men combat them with the "borrowed" minds N. Scortia -- Gen. Preck's grim determination to make the filial plunge from Pluto to a really distant star leads him into a long series of astonishing adventures -- in which he loses his body but not his mind! of a mental hospital believes that restored to sanity without risky brain surgery. But Security rules forbid him any contact with the patient. So he commits himself as insane -- and gets put in the same cell with the man! - Camp -- A half-mad scientist who hates everyone stumbles upon a nuclear formula which can destroy the whole earth. Will he use it? It's a toss up, with our lives at stake! A summary of actual developments and events in the world of science -- and the news of the year in Science-Fiction publishing. books, plus non-fiction works of special interstories described on other side of this page! Simply mail the coupon with only a dime. Your copy of "The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels: #," will be sent to you at once, together with the current selection of the Science-Fiction Book Club, for which you will be billed only #, plus a few cents shipping charges. Every month you will be offered the cream of the new # to # sciencefiction and non-fiction science books for only I each. You are not obligated to take a book each month. You may accept as few as four a year and still retain all the privileges of membership. But this offer may be withdrawn at any time. So mail the Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. # in publisher's edition), together with the current selection of the CTlub for which you may bill me only #. plus a few cents shipping, and enroll me as a member. Every month send the Club's free bulletin, describing coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping. I need take only # books during the year and may resign at any time thereafter. return them in # days, pay nothing, and membership will be cancelled. (Please Print Clearly) Selection price in Canada # plus shipping. Address Science-Fiction Club. # Bond St., Toronto #, Ont. (Offer good only in Continental U. S. and Canada.) oSv ro This Big New Collection of yCTfOAf, "ES, it's yours for only # on this introductory offer to new members his thrill-packed volume containing re than a dozen top-flight stories d novels -- the very cream of the ir's Science-Fiction. This jumbo-size book ings you a wonderful reading feast of excitr tales by the best writers in the fleld today, are the thrills of high adventure with the #t men to brave the hazards of space! Ex)re the weird thoughts of men whose minds i hovering between genius and insanity! avel through space # centuries hence! This generous offer is made to demonstrate i many advantages of membership in the ience-Fiction Hook Club. This Clui) is really iqiie -- it brings its meml)er not only the tstanding new masterpieces of imaginative writing, but also the best factual scientific reports of special interest to science-fiction fans. For example, Club selections have recently included such exciting non-fiction books as The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects The Viking Rocket Story, and Exploring Mare, as well as outstanding new fiction novels such as The Power, The City and the Stare, and Earthman, Cone Home. As a member you are offered these fine books for only I each, though the pul)lishers' prices range up to #! Why not volume for only ten cents! Jusf a Few of the Exciting Stories in This Big New Anthology jis Budrys -- McMahon is always comf up with marvelous ideas -- yet never ents anything himself. He just knows ten others are about to invent someng good -- and is on the spot when W do! s tracked the hideous beasts to their r. And now he finds that their powerl minds can control his. They plan to Ice over the world, raising people for dl Her -- The affairs of Acme Interplanetary Express are in sad shape when Swenson takes over. Then the dark voids of space crackle with his crisp orders as he bilks the powerful competition with his lightning-like maneuvers! Frank Riley -- Will electronic machines that uncannily weigh legal evidence take the place of living judges on the bench ? Here's a provocative story about a human judge who is put on trial, pitted against an infallible mechanical wizard. side for further details  Meet the Mad Musical Ad-men of Tomorrow treats of #! Twenty outstanding short stories selected from the first five years of IF Magazine -- covering a greater variety of science fiction themes than you have ever before encountered in one volume. You will find something excitingly differmood, idea, theme and pace. The editors, however, have given them all one common denominator -- entertaining science fiction. At your news dealer -- only # cents. Or direct from IF Magazine, Kingston, N.Y. Ill All Stories New and Complete  # i # i # i #  s   Illustrating "Why Guided Missiles Can Not Be Controlled" I  by Mel Hunter  IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo New York. Entered as Second Glass Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. DO. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are liction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next ( October ) issue on sale August #th A proposal made to the United Nations by the United States not so long ago is the subject of an article that appears in this issue and which could very easily develop into a u hot potato". Whether it does or not, the facts are worth sober consideration. The title of written by a man who is well known in his field and knows whereof he speaks -- but who shall have to remain anonymous as far as what he says here is concerned. The proposal referred to is of a "propagandistic" type which, to any intelligent person, is so faulty that it borders on folly -- and perhaps is. If it ever comes to a vote and is adopted, with Russia gleefully accepting, which it would, we could kiss farewell any peace of mind we ever had as individuals or as a nation. The author, whom we shall call "Y", is an authority of long experience on his subject and he tells us exactly the provable reasons why this paper still before the United Nations (at this writing) should never be allowed to become a reality. The singing telegram might have started it all. Perhaps it did. But just before television came into prominence, our radios started vibrating with singing commercials. When television blossomed, advertising became show business in a big way. And because of wellheeled sponsors we can enjoy some fine entertainment. Today, the novelty of television has worn off and audiences are becoming discriminatory, turning off the poorer programs. However, television advertising does sell products and in the future we will have better and better programs. But the fly in the ointment is this: will the commercials ever reach a degree of saneness and palatability. Some are unique and perhaps catchy, but others are downright nauseating and have the effect of making the viewer swear off for life the product it advertises. I think the readers of IF will have to admit that it is rather disconcerting to hear the functions of Burple's Bile Correcting Capsules set to the tune of "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" or to hear a few bars of Mozart, Brahms or Beethoven gooed up with somebody's infantile prattle about the merits of an amazing discovery containing X#, a magic new ingredient, that miraculously removes old prune pits from the grease trap of your kitchen plumbing. And maybe you can think of some even more absurd. Anyway, what this is preamble to is this: Lloyd Biggie, Jr., who did such a delightful job with the super salesmen of tomorrow in On The Dotted Line (June IF), has now turned his satire dripping pen (or typewriter keys, if you will) to the subject of the advertising song writers of tomorrow. Whether The Tunesmith is a threat or a promise of what will happen when people tune in their radios or televisions a hundred years from now is something we'll let you decide. Three years ago, we ran a national collegiate science fiction contest offering # in prizes for the best novelettes, written by college students, depicting life in America # years from now. Of the winners, only Leo Kelley, who placed third, has written a story since then that we have accepted. It ran in the June issue and the title was The Human Element. It was about a circus clown -- and oddly enough, the marionette which helped pay his way through Wilkes College was a circus clown named "Candy", star of a local television program. Now # years old, he is a native of Kingston, Pennsylvania, which is quite all right, because our beef is with -- mail addressed to us (N. Y.) that goes to Kingston, New Jersey... If you are one who thinks science fiction has to be gimmicked with time or gadgets (and we hope not) read The Bridge , by G. G. Revelle, who has given us a dramatic science fiction situation that can happen this afternoon or wake you up tomorrow morning...  It has now been definitely established that the satellite, to be launched sometime during the International Geophysical Year by the United States, will be a three-stage rocket. The globule is still there, but when the ultimate satellite is finally designed and launched, refer to your copies of the June and August ( #) issues of IF and see how accurate were James M. Nuding and Paul Vanous in their proposal!... In a letter from Aron M. Mathieu, editor of the Writers # Yearbook, I was asked this question: "Do you think wellwritten, hot, spicy sex, when actually part of an sf story converts more people into sf readers?" I replied that we look on sex entirely from the viewpoint that it must have something to do with the story and must be handled in good taste; that as the main theme of a story, or as an ingredient, we have not found that it converts people into science fiction readers. So, the editorial attitude toward sex around here is simply that of how it's handled. Whether you are "fer" it or "agin" it, here's one way of treating sex which we found rather refreshing: it's called The Birds and the Bees , by Dave Fisher, a newcomer to the pages of IF. Sex is not a part of his story, nor is it an ingredient -- it is the whole doggoned story! Letters inquiring about a Second World of IF have begun to arrive. Readers want to know: When? Will it contain novelettes only, a mixture -- or what? Well, what would you like? -- jlq He was a real atomic tunesmith, the boy with the go. A throwback who knew more music than any man alive. That made him dangerous... too dangerous to live. a long one, that gets listed in government appropriations and can be looked up in the encyclopedia, but no one uses it. From Bombay to Lima, it is -- the Center. You can stagger out of the rolling mists of Venus, elbow your way up to a bar, and begin, "When I was at the Center... And every stranger within hearing will listen attentively. You can mention the Center in the depths of London, or on a Martian desert, or at the solitary outpost on Pluto, and know you are understood. No one ever explains the Center. It isn't possible, and it isn't necessary. From the babe in arms to the centenarian looking forward to redrement, everyone has been there, and plans to go again next year, and the year after that. It is the vacation land of the Solar System. It is square miles of undulating American middle-west farm land, transfigured by ingenious planning and relentless labor and incredible expense. It is a monumental summary of man's cultural achievements, and like a phoenix, it has emerged suddenly, inexplicably, at the end of the twenty-fourth century, from the corroded ashes of a shocking cultural decay. The Center is colossal, spectacular and magnificent. It is inspiring, edifying and amazing. It is awesome, it is overpowering, it is -- everything. And though few of its visitors know about this, or care, it is also haunted. You are standing in the observation gallery of the towering Bach Monument. Off to the left, on the slope of a hill, you see the tense spectators who crowd the Grecian Theatre for Aristophanes. Sunlight plays on their brightly-colored clothing. They watch eagerly, delighted to see in person what millions are watching on visiscope. Beyond the theatre, the treelined Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard curves off into the distance, past the Dante Monument and the Michelangelo Institute. The twin towers of a facsimile of the Rheims Cathedral rise above the horizon. Directly below, you see the curious landscaping of an eighteenth century French jar din, and nearby, the Moliere Theatre. A hand clutches your sleeve, and you turn suddenly, irritably, and find yourself face to face with an old man. The leathery face is scarred and wrinkled, the thin strands of hair glistening white. The hand on your arm is a gnarled claw. You stare, take in the slumping contortion of one crippled shoulder and the hideous scar of a missing ear, and back away in alarm. The sunken eyes follow you. The hand extends in a sweeping gesture that takes in the far horizon, and you notice that the fingers are maimed or missing. The voice is a harsh cackle. "Like it?" he says, and eyes you expectantly. Startled, you say, "Why, yes. Of course." He takes a step forward, and his eyes are eager, pleading. "I say, do you like it?" In your perplexity, you can do no more than nod as you turn to hurry away. But your nod brings a strange response. A strident laugh, an innocent, childish smile of pleasure, a triumphant shout. "I did it! I did it all!" Or you stand in resplendent Plato Avenue, between the Wagnerian Theatre, where the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen is performed daily without interruptions, and the reconstruction of the sixteenth century Globe Theatre, where Shakespearean Drama is present morning, afternoon and evening. A hand paws at you. "Like it?" If you respond with a torrent of ecstatic praise, the old man eyes you impatiently, and only waits until you have finished to ask again, "I say, do you like it?" But a smile and a nod is met with beaming pride, a gesture, a shout "I did it!" In the lobby of one of the thousand spacious hotels, in the waiting room of the remarkable library where a copy of any book you request is reproduced for you free of charge, in the eleventh balcony of Beethoven Hall, a ghost shuffles haltingly, clutches an arm, asks a question. And shouts proudly, "I did it!" ence behind him, but he did not turn. He leaned forward, his left hand tearing a rumbling bass figure from the multichord while his right hand fingered a solemn melody. With a lightning flip of his hand he touched a button, and the thin treble tones were suddenly fuller, more resonant, almost clarinet-like. ("But God, how unlike a clarinet!" he thought.) "Must we go through all that again, Val?" he said. "The landlord was here this morning." He hesitated, touched a button, touched several buttons, and wove weird harmonies out of the booming tones of a brass choir. (But what a feeble, distorted brass choir!) "How long does he give us this time?" "Two days. And the food synthesizer's broken down again." "Good. Run down and buy some fresh meat." "With what?" . He slammed his fists down on the keyboard, and shouted above the shattering dissonance. "I will not rent a harmonizer. I will not turn my arranging over to hacks. If a Com goes out with my name on it, it's going to be composed . It may be idiotic, and it may be sickening, but it's going to be done right. It isn't much, God knows, but it's all I have left." He turned slowly and glared at her, this pale, drooping, worn-out woman who had been his wife for twenty-five years. Then he looked away, telling himself stubbornly that he was no more to be blamed than she. When sponsors paid the same rates for good Corns that they paid for hackwork... "Is Hulsey coming today?" she asked. "He told me he was coming." "If we could get some money for the landlord..." "And the food synthesizer. And a new visiscope. And new clothes. There's a limit to what can be done with one Com." He heard her move away, heard the door open, and waited. It did not close. "WalterWalter called," she said. "You're the featured tunesmith on today's Show Case." "So? There's no money in that." "I thought you wouldn't want to watch, so I told Mrs. Rennik I'd watch with her." "Sure. Go ahead. Have fun." The door closed. Baque got to his feet, and stood looking down at his chaos-strewn worktable. Music paper, Com-lyric releases, pencils, sketches, half-finished manuscripts were cluttered together in untidy heaps and overflowed onto the floor. Baque cleared a comer for himself and sat down wearily, stretching his long legs out under the table. "Damn Hulsey," he muttered. "Damn sponsors. Damn visiscope. Damn Corns." Compose something. You're not a hack, like the other tunesmiths. You don't punch your melodies out on a harmonizer's keyboard and let a machine harmonize them for you. You're a musician, not a melody monger. Write some music. Write a -- a sonata, for multichord. Take the time now, and compose something. His eyes fell on the first lines of a Com-lyric release. "If your flyer jerks and clowns, if it has its ups and downs..." "Damn landlords," he muttered, reaching for a pencil. The tiny wall clock tinkled the hour, and Baque leaned over to turn on the visiscope. A cherubfaced master of ceremonies smiled out at him ingratiatingly. "WaiterWaiter again, ladies and gentlemen. It's Com time on today's Show Case. Thirty minutes of Commercials by one of today's most talented tunesmiths. Our Com spotlight is on -- " A noisy brass fanfare rang out, the tainted brass tones of a multichord. "Erlin Baque!" The multichord swung into an odd, dipsey melody Baque had done five years before, for Tamper Cheese, and a scattering of applause sounded in the background. A nasal soprano voice mouthed the words, and Baque groaned unhappily. "We age our cheese, and age it, age it, age it, the old-fashioned way..." WalterWalter cavorted about the stage, moving in time with the melody, darting down into the audience to kiss some sedate housewifeon-a-holiday, and beaming at the howls of laughter. The multichord sounded another fanfare, and WalterWalter leaped back onto the stage, both arms extended over his head. "Now listen to this, all you beautiful people. Here's your WalterWalter exclusive on Erlin Baque." He glanced secretively over his shoulder, tiptoed a few steps closer to the audience, placed his finger on his lips, and then called out loudly, "Once upon a time there was another composer named Baque, spelled B-A-C-H, but pronounced Baque. He was a real atomic propelled tunesmith, the boy with the go, according to them that know. He lived some four or five or six hundred years ago, so we can't exactly say that that Baque and our Baque were Baque to Baque. But we don't have to go Baque to hear Baque. We like the Baque we've got. Are you with me?" Cheers. Applause. Baque turned away, hands trembling, a choking disgust nauseating him. "We start off our Corns by Baque with that little masterpiece Baque did for Foam Soap. Art work by Bruce Combs. Stop, look -- and listen!" Baque managed to turn off the visiscope just as the first bar of soap jet propelled itself across the screen. He picked up the Com lyric again, and his mind began to shape the thread of a melody. "If your flyer jerks and clowns, if it has its ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs, you need a He hummed softly to himself, sketching a musical line that swooped and jerked like an erratic flyer. Word painting, it was called, back when words and tones meant something. Back when the B-A-C-H Baque was underscoring such grandiose concepts as heaven and hell. Baque worked slowly, now and then checking a harmonic progression at the multichord and rejecting it, straining his mind for some fluttering accompaniment pattern that would simulate the sound of a flyer. But then -- no. The Waring people wouldn't like that. They advertised that their flyers were noiseless. He was suddenly aware of urgently-sounding door chimes. He walked over to flip on the scanner, and Hulsey's pudgy face grinned out at him. "Come on up," Baque told him. Hulsey nodded, and disappeared. Five minutes later he waddled through the door, sank into a chair that sagged dangerously under his bulky figure, plunked his briefcase on the floor, and mopped his face. "Whew ! Wish you'd get yourself on a lower level. Or into a building with some modern conveniences. Those elevators scare me to death!" "I'm thinking of moving," Baque said. "Good. It's about time." "But it'll probably be somewhere higher up. The landlord has given me two days' notice." Hulsey winced, and shook his head sadly. "I see. Well, I won't keep you in suspense, then. Here's the check for the Sana-Soap Com." Baque took the check, glanced at it, and scowled. "You were behind in your guild dues," Hulsey said. "Have to deduct them, you know." "Yes. I'd forgotten." "I like to do business with SanaSoap. Cash right on the line. Too many companies wait until the end of the month. Sana-Soap wants a couple of changes, but they paid anyway." He snapped open the briefcase, and pulled out a folder. "You've got some sly bits in this, Erlin my boy. They like it. Particularly this 'sudsey, sudsey, sudsey' thing in the bass. They kicked on the number of singers, at first, but not after they heard it. Now right here they want a break for a straight announcement." Baque glanced, and nodded. "How about keeping the 'sudsey, sudsey' ostinato going as a background to the announcement?" "Sounds good. That's a sly bit, that -- what'd you call it?" "Ostinato." "Ah -- yes. Wonder why the other tunesmiths don't work in bits like that." "A harmonizer doesn't produce effects," Baque said dryly. "It just -- harmonizes." "You give them about thirty seconds of that 'sudsey' for background. They can cut it if they don't like it." Baque nodded, and scribbled a note on the manuscript. "And the arrangement," Hulsey weht on. "Sorry, Erlin, but we can't get a French horn player. You'll have to do something else with that part." "No horn player? What's wrong with Rankin?" "Blacklisted. The Performers' Guild has him blacklisted. He went out to the west coast to play. Played for nothing, and even paid his own expenses, so they blacklisted him." "I remember," Baque said softly. "The Monuments of Art Society. He played a Mozart Horn Concerto for them. Their last concert, too. Wish I could have heard it, even if it Was with multichord." "He can play it all he wants to, now, but he'll never get paid for playing again. You can work that horn part into the multichord line, or I might be able to get you a trumpet player. He could use a converter." "It'll ruin the effect." Hulsey chuckled. "Sounds the same to everyone but you, my boy. I can't tell the difference. We got your violins, and a cello player. What more do you want?" "Doesn't the London Guild have a horn player?" "You want me to bring him over for one three-minute Com? Be reasonable, Erlin! Can I pick this up tomorrow?" "Yes. I'll have it ready in the morning." Hulsey reached for his briefcase, dropped it again, and leaned forward. "Erlin, I'm worried about you. I have twenty-seven tunesmiths in my agency. You make the least money of any of them. Your net last year was twenty-two hundred. The next-highest netted eleven thousand." "That isn't news to me," Baque said. "This may be. You have as many accounts as any of the others. Did you know that?" "No," Baque said. "No, I didn't know that." "That's right. You have as many accounts, but you don't make any money. Want to know why? Two reasons. You spend too much time on a Com, and you write it too well. Sponsors can use one of your Corns for months -- or sometimes even years, like that Tamper Cheese thing. People like to hear them. Now if you just didn't write so damned well, you could work faster, and the sponsors would have to use more of your Corns, and you could turn out more." "I've thought about that. Even if I didn't, Val would keep reminding me. But it's no use. That's the way I have to work. If there was some way to get the sponsors to pay more for a good Com..." "There isn't. The guild wouldn't stand for it, because good Corns mean less work, and most tunesmiths couldn't write a really good Com. Now don't think Pm concerned about my agency. Of course I make more money when you make more, but I'm doing well enough with my other tunesmiths. I just hate to see my best man making so little money. You're a throwback, Erlin. You waste time and money collecting those antique -- what do you call them?" "Phonograph records. #I "Yes. And those moldy old books about music. I don't doubt that you know more about music than any living man, and what does it get you? Not money, certainly. You're the best there is, and you keep trying to be better, and the better you get the less money you make. Your income drops lower every year. Couldn't you manage to be mediocre now and then?" "No," Baque said. "I couldn't manage it." "Think it over." "These accounts I have. Some of the sponsors really like my work. They'd pay more, if the guild would let them. Supposing I left the guild?" "You can't, my boy. I couldn't handle your stuff -- not and stay in business long. The Tunesmiths' Guild would put on the pressure, and the Performers' and Lyric Writers' Guilds would blacklist you. Jimmy Denton plays along with the guilds, and he'd bar your stuff from visiscope. You'd lose all your accounts -- fast. No sponsor is big enough to fight all that trouble, and none of them would want to bother. So just try to be mediocre now and then. Think about it." Baque sat staring at the floor. "I'll think about it." Hulsey struggled to his feet, clasped Baque' s hand briefly, and waddled out. Baque got up slowly, and opened the drawer where he kept his meager collection of old phonograph records. Strange and wonderful music. Three times in his career, Baque had written Corns that were a full half-hour in length. On rare occasions he got an order for fifteen minutes. Usually he was limited to five, or less. But composers like the B-A-C-H Baque wrote things that lasted an hour or more -- even wrote them without lyrics. And they wrote for real instruments, even some amazing-sounding instruments that no one played any more, like bassoons, and piccolos and pianos. "Damn Denton. Damn visiscope. Damn the guilds." Baque rummaged tenderly among the discs until he found one bearing Bach's name. Magnificat . Then, because he felt too despondent to listen, he pushed it away. Six months before the Performers' Guild had blacklisted its last oboe player. Now its last horn player, and there just weren't any young people learning to play instruments. Why should they, where there were so many marvelous contraptions that ground out the Corns without any effort on the part of the performer? Even multichord players were becoming scarce, and the multichord could, if one desired, practically play itself. Baque stood looking uncertainly about the room, from multichord to worktable to the battered plastic bookcase that held his old books on music. The door jerked open, and Val hurried in. "Did Hulsey..." Baque handed her the check. She took it eagerly, glanced at it, and looked up in dismay. "My guild dues," he said. "I was behind." "Oh. Well, it's a help, anyway." Her voice was flat, emotionless, as if one more disappointment really didn't matter. Tney stood facing each other awkwardly. "I watched part of Morning with Marigold " Val said. "She talked about your Corns." "I should hear soon on that SIoSmoke Com," Baque said. "Maybe we can hold the landlord off for another week. Right now -- I'm going to walk around a little." "You should get out more..." He closed the door behind him, slicing her sentence off neatly. He knew what followed. Get a job somewhere. Be good for your health to get out of the apartment a few hours a day. Write Corns in your spare time -- they don't bring in more than a part-time income, anyway. At least do it until we get caught up. All right. If you won't, I will. But she never did. A prospective employer never wanted more than one look at her slight body and her worn, sullen face. And Baque doubted that he would receive any better treatment. He could get work as a multicord player, and make a good income. But then he'd have to join the Performers' Guild, which meant he'd have to resign from the Tunesmiths' Guild. So if he did that he could no longer write Corns. "Damn Corns!" When he reached the street, he stood for a moment watching the crowds shooting by on the swiftlymoving conveyer. A few people glanced at him, and saw a tall, gawky, balding man in a frayed, badly-fitting suit. Baque hunched up his shoulders, and walked awkwardly along the stationary sidewalk. They would consider him just another derelict from a shabby neighborhood, he knew, and they would quickly look the other way while they hummed a snatch from one of his Corns. He turned in at a crowded restaurant, found a table at one side, and ordered a beer. On the rear wall was an enormous visiscope screen, where the Corns followed each other without interruption. Baque listened to the Corns for a time, first curious to see what the other tunesmiths were doing, and then disgusted. Around him, the customers watched and listened while they ate. Some of them nodded their heads jerkily in time with the music. A few young couples were dancing on the small dance floor, skillfully changing steps as the music shifted from one Com to another. Baque watched them sadly, and thought about the way things had changed. At one time, he knew, there had been special music for dancing, and special groups of instruments to play it. And people had gone to concerts by the thousands, sitting in seats with nothing to look at but the performers. All of it was gone. Not only the music, but art, and literature, and poetry. The plays he had read in his grandfather's school books were forgotten. James Denton's Visiscope International decreed that people must look and listen at the same time. James Denton's Visiscope International decreed that the public attention span wouldn't tolerate long programs. So there were Corns... Damn Corns! When Val returned to the apartment an hour later, Baque was sitting in the comer staring at the crumbly volumes he had collected from the days when books were still printed on paper -- a scattering of biographies, books on music history, and technical books on music theory and composition. Val looked twice around the room before she noticed him, and then she confronted him anxiously, stark tragedy written on her face. "The man's coming to fix the food synthesizer." "Good," Baque said. "But the landlord won't wait. If we don't pay him day after tomorrow -- pay him everything -- we're out." "So we're out." "Where will we go? We can't get in anywhere without paying something in advance." "So we won't get in anywhere." She fled sobbing into the bedroom. signed from the Tunesmiths' Guild and joined the Performers' Guild. Hulsey's round face drooped mournfully when he heard the news. He loaned Baque enough money to pay his guild registration fee and quiet the landlord, and expressed his sorrow in eloquent terms as he hurried Baque out of his office. He would, Baque knew, waste no time in assigning Baque's clients to his other tunesmiths -- to men who worked faster and not so well. Baque went to the guild hall, where he sat for five hours waiting for a multichord assignment. He was finally escorted into the secretary's office, and brusquely motioned into a chair. The secretary eyed him suspiciously. "You belonged to the Performers' Guild twenty years ago, and you left it to become a tunesmith. Right?" "Right," Baque said. "You lost your seniority after three years. You knew that, didn't you?" "I didn't, but I didn't think it mattered. There aren't many good multichord players around." "There aren't many good jobs around, either. You'll have to start at the bottom." He scribbled on a slip of paper, and thrust it at Baque. "This one pays well, but we have a hard time keeping a man there. Lankey isn't easy to work for. If you don't irritate him too much -- well, then we'll see." Baque found himself outside the door, staring hard at the slip of paper. He rode the conveyer out to the New Jersey Space Port, floundered about through a rattle-trap slum area getting his directions hopelessly confused, and finally found the place almost within radiation distance of the port. The sprawling building had burned at some time in the remote past. Stubby remnants of walls rose out of the weedchoked rubble. A walk curved back from the street towards a dimly lit cavity at one corner of the building. Steps led uncertainly downwards. Overhead, an enormous sign pointed its flowing colors in the direction of the port. The Lankey Pank Out . Baque stepped through the door, and faltered at the onslaught of extraterrestrial odors. Lavendertinted Venusian tobacco smoke hung like a limp blanket midway between floor and ceiling. The revolting, cutting fumes of Martian Whiskey staggered him. He had a glimpse of a scattered gathering of tough spacers and tougher prostitutes before the doorman planted his bulky figure and scarred caricature of a face in front of him. "You looking for someone?" "Mr. Lankey." The doorman jerked a thumb towards the bar, and noisily stumbled back into the shadows. Baque walked towards the bar. He had no trouble picking out Lankey. The proprietor sat on a tall stool behind the bar, and thrust his bald head forward to watch him coldly as he approached. In the dim, smoke-streaked light his taut pale face had a spectral grimness. He planted one elbow on the bar, fingered his flattened stump of a nose with the two remaining fingers on one hairy hand, and stared at Baque with burning, bloodshot eyes. "I'm Erlin Baque," Baque said. "Yeh. The multichord player. Can you play that multichord, fellow?" "Why, yes, I can play..." "That's what they all say. And I've had maybe two in the last five years that could really play. Most of them come out here figuring they'll set the thing on automatic, and fuss around with one finger. I want that multichord played , fellow, and I'll tell you right now -- if you can't play you might as well jet for home base, because there isn't any automatic on my multichord. I had it disconnected." "I can play," Baque told him. "All right. I'll find out soon enough. The guild rates this place as Class Four, but I pay Class One rates if you can play. If you can really play, I'll slip you some bonuses the guild won't know about. Hours are from six P.M. to six A.M., but you get plenty of breaks, and if you get hungry or thirsty just ask for what you want. Only go easy on the hot stuff. I won't do with a drunk multichord player, no matter how good he is. Rose!" He bellowed a second time, and a woman stepped out of a door at the side of the room. She wore a faded dressing gown, and her tangled hair hung untidily about her shoulders. She turned a small, pretty face towards Baque, and studied him boldly. "Multichord," Lankey said. "Show him." Rose beckoned, and Baque followed her towards the rear of the room. Suddenly he stopped in amazement. "What's the matter?" Rose said. "No visiscope!" "No. Lankey says the spacers want better things to look at than soap suds and air cars." She giggled. "Something like me, for example." "I never heard of a restaurant without visiscope." "Neither did I, until I came here. But Lankey's got three of us to sing the Corns, and you're to do the multichord with us. I hope you make the grade. We haven't had a multichord player for a week, and it's hard singing without one." 'Til make out all right," Baque said. A narrow platform stretched across the end of the room, where any other restaurant Baque had seen had its visiscope screen. There had been one here at one time, he noticed. He could see the unpatched scars in the wall where it had been torn out. "Lankey ran a joint on Venus back when they didn't have visiscope there," Rose said. "He has his own ideas about how to entertain customers. Want to see your room?" Baque did not answer. He was examining the multichord. It was a battered old instrument, and it bore the marks of more than one brawl. He fingered the filter buttons, and swore softly to himself. Most of them were broken. Only the flute and violin filters clicked into place properly. So he would have to spend twelve hours a day with the twanging tones of an unfiltered multichord. "Want to see your room?" Rose said again. "It's only five. Might as well relax before we have to go to work." Rose showed him a cramped enclosure behind the bar. He stretched out on a hard cot and tried to relax, and then it was six o'clock, and Lankey stood in the door beckoning at him. He took his place at the multichord, and sat fingering the keys. He felt no nervousness. There wasn't anything he didn't know about Corns, and he knew he wouldn't have trouble with the music. But the atmosphere disturbed him. The haze of smoke was thicker, and he blinked his smarting eyes and felt the whiskey fumes tear at his nostrils when he took a deep breath. There was still only a scattering of customers -- mechanics in grimy work suits, swaggering pilots, a few civilians who liked their liquor strong and didn't mind the surroundings. And women. Two women, he guessed, for every man in the room. There was a sudden stirring, a yelp of approval, and an unrestrained stomping of feet. Lankey was crossing the platform with Rose, and the other singers. Baque's first horrified impression was that the girls were nude, but as they came closer he made out their brief plastic costumes. Lankey was right, he thought. The spacers would much prefer looking at that to animated Corns on a visiscope screen. "You met Rose," Lankey said. "This is Zanna and Mae. Let's get going." He walked away, and the girls gathered around the multichord. "What Corns do you know?" Rose said. "I know them all." She looked at him doubtfully. "We sing together, and then we take turns. You're -- sure you know them all?" Baque flipped on the power, and sounded a chord. "You sing, and I'll handle this." "We'll start out with a TastyMalt Com. It goes like this." She hummed softly. "Know that one?" "I wrote it," Baque said. They sang better than he had expected. He followed them easily, and was able to keep his eyes on the customers. Heads were jerking in time with the music, and he quickly caught the mood and began to experiment. His fingers shaped a rolling rhythm in the bass, fumbled with it tentatively, and then expanded it. He abandoned the melodic line, leaving the girls to carry on by themselves while he searched the entire keyboard to ornament the driving rhythm. Feet began to stomp. The girl's bodies were swaying wildly, and Baque felt himself rocking back and forth as the music swept on recklessly. The girls finished their lyrics, and when he did not stop they started in again. Spacers were on their feet, now, clapping and swaying. Some seized their women and began dancing in the narrow spaces between the tables. Finally Baque forced a cadence and slumped forward, panting and mopping his forehead. One of the girls collapsed on the stage, and the others hauled her upright. They fled to a frenzy of applause. Baque felt a hand on his shoulder. Lankey. His ugly, expressionless face eyed Baque, turned to study the wildly enthusiastic customers, turned back to Baque. He nodded, and walked away. Rose came back alone, still breathing heavily. "How about a Sally Ann Perfume Com?" "Tell me the words," Baque said... She recited them tonelessly. A tragic little story about the shattered romance of a girl who did not use Sally Ann. "Shall we make them cry?" Baque said. "Just concentrate on that. It's a sad story, and we're going to make them cry." She stood by the multichord, and sang plaintively. Baque fashioned a muted, tremulous accompaniment, and when the second verse started he improvised a drooping countermelody. The spacers sat in hushed suspense. The men did not cry, but some of the women sniffed audibly, and when Rose finished there was a taut silence. "Quick," Baque hissed. "We'll brighten things up. Sing something -- anything!" She launched into another Com, and Baque brought the spacers to their feet with the driving rhythm of his accompaniment. The other girls took their turns, and Baque watched the customers detachedly, bewildered at the power that surged in his fingers. He carried them from one emotional extreme to the other, and back again, improvising, experimenting. And his mind fumbled haltingly with an idea. "Time for a break," Rose said finally. "Better get something to eat." Seven-thirty. An hour and a half of continuous playing. Baque felt drained of strength and emodon, and he accepted his dinner tray indifferently and took it to the enclosure they called his room. He did not feel hungry. He sniffed doubtfully at the food, tasted it -- and ate ravenously. Real food, after months of synthetics! He sat for awhile on the cot, wondering how much time the girls took between appearances. Then he went looking for Lankey. "I don't like sitting around," he said. "Any objection to my playing?" "Without the girls?" "Yes." Lankey planted both elbows on the bar, cupped his chin in one fist, and sat looking absently at the far wall. "You going to sing yourself?" he said finally. "No. Just play." "Without any singing? Without words?" "Yes." "What will you play?" "Corns. Or I might improvise something." A long silence. Then -- "Think you could keep things moving while the girls are out?" "Of course I could." Lankey continued to concentrate on the far wall. His eyebrows contracted, relaxed, and contracted again. "All right," he said. "I was just wondering why I never thought of it." Unnoticed, Baque took his place at the multichord. He began softly, making the music an unobtrusive background to the rollicking conversation that filled the room. As he increased the volume, faces turned in his direction. He wondered what those people were thinking, hearing for the first time music that was not a Com, music without words. He watched intently, and satisfied himself that he was holding their attention. Now -- could he bring them out of their seats with nothing more than the sterile tones of a multichord? He gave the melody a rhythmic snap, and the stomping began. As he increased the volume again, Rose came stumbling out of a doorway and hurried across the stage, perplexity written on her pert face. "It's all right," Baque told her. "I'm just playing to amuse myself. Don't come back until you're ready." She nodded, and walked away. A red-faced spacer near the platform looked up at the revealed outline of her young body, and leered. Fascinated, Baque studied the coarse, demanding lust in his face, and searched the keyboard to express it. This? Or -- this? Or -- He had it. His body rocked as he felt himself caught up in the relentless rhythm. His foot tightened on the volume control, and he turned to watch the customers. Every pair of eyes stared hypnotically at his comer of the room. A bartender stood at a half crouch, mouth agape. There was uneasiness, a strained shuffling of feet, a restless scraping of chairs. Baque's foot dug harder at the volume control. Terrified, he sat watching the scene that erupted below him. Lasciviousness twisted every face. Men were on their feet, reaching for the women, clutching, pawing. A chair crashed to the floor, and a table, and no one seemed to notice. A woman's dress fluttered crazily downwards, and the pursued were pursuers while Baque's fingers raced onward, out of control. With a violent effort he wrenched his hands from the keys, and the moment of silence crashed into the room like thunder. Fingers trembling, he began to play softly, indifferently. Order was restored when he looked again, the chair and table were upright, and the customers were seated in apparent relaxation -- except for one woman, struggling back into her dress in obvious embarrassment. Baque continued to play quietly until the girls returned. Six A.M. Body aching with weariness, hands aching, legs cramped, Baque climbed down from the multichord. Lankey stood waiting for him. "Class One rates," he said. "You've got a job with me as long as you want it. But take it a little easy with that stuff, will you?" Baque thought about Val, cramped in the dreary apartment, eating synthetic food. "Would I be out of order to ask for an advance?" "No," Lankey said. "Not out of order. I told the cashier to give you a hundred on your way out. Call it a bonus." Weary from his long conveyer ride, Baque walked quietly into his dim apartment and looked about. No sign of Val -- she would still be sleeping. He sat down at his own multichord and touched the keys. Unbelievable. Music without Corns, without words, could make people laugh and cry, and dance, and cavort madly. And it could turn them into lewd animals. Wonderingly he played the music that had incited such unconcealed lust, played it louder, and louder... And felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to look into Val's passion-twisted face. He asked Hulsey to come and hear him that night, and later Hulsey sat slumped on the cot in his room, and shuddered. "It isn't right. No man should have that power over people. How do you do it?" "I don't know," Baque said. "I saw that young couple sitting there, and they were happy, and I felt their happiness. And as I played everyone in the room was happy. And then another couple came in, quarreling, and the next thing I knew I had everyone mad." "Almost started a fight at the next table," Hulsey said. "And what you did after that..." "Yes. But not as much as I did last night. You should have seen it last night." Hulsey shuddered again. "I have a book about Greek music," Baque said. "Ancient Greece -- way back. They had something they called ethos. They thought that the different musical scales affected people in different ways. Music could make men sad, or happy, or enthused -- or drive them crazy. They even claimed that a musician named Orpheus could move trees and soften rocks with his music. Now listen. I've had a chance to experiment, and I've noticed that my playing is most effective when I don't use the filters. There are only two filters that work on that multichord, anyway -- flute and violin -- but when I use either of them the people don't react so strongly. I'm wondering if it wasn't the Greek instruments, rather than the scales, that produced those effects. I'm wondering if the tone of an unfiltered multichord doesn't have something in common with the tone of the ancient Greek kithara or aulos " Hulsey grunted. "I don't think it's instruments, or scales, either. I think it's Baque, and I don't like it. You should have stayed a tunesmith." "I want you to help me," Baque said. "I want to find a place where we can put a lot of people -- a thousand, at least -- not to eat, or watch Corns, but just to listen to one man play on a multichord." Hulsey got up abruptly. "Baque, you're a dangerous man. I'm damned if I'll trust any man who can make me feel the way you made me feel tonight. I don't know what you're trying to do, but I won't have any part of it." He stomped away in the manner of a man about to slam a door. But a male multichordist in the LankeyPank Out did not rate the luxury of a door on his room. Hulsey paused uncertainly in the doorway, and disappeared. Baque followed, and stood watching him weave his way impatiently past the tables towards the exit. From his place behind the bar, Lankey looked at Baque, and glanced after the disappearing Hulsey. "Troubles?" he said. Baque turned away wearily. "I've known that man for twenty years. I never thought he was my friend. But then -- I never thought he was my enemy, either." "It works out that way, sometimes," Lankey said. Baque shook his head. "I'd like to try some Martian whiskey. I've never tasted the stuff." institution at the Lankey-Pank Out # and the place was jammed to capacity from the time he went to work until he left the next morning. When he performed alone, he forgot about the Corns, and played what he wanted. He'd even played some pieces by Bach for the customers, and received generous applause -- though nothing like the tumultuous enthusiasm that followed his improvisations. Sitting behind the bar, eating his evening meal and watching the customers, Baque felt vaguely happy. For the first time in years he had plenty of money. He enjoyed the work he was doing. And he had begun to wonder how he could go about eliminating the Corns altogether. As Baque pushed aside his tray, he saw Biff the doorman step forward to greet another pair of customers, halt suddenly, and back away in stupefied amazement. And no wonder -- evening clothes at the Lankey-Pank Out! The couple strolled into the room, blinking in the dim, smoketinted light, and looking about curiously. The man was bronze and handsome, but no one noticed him. The woman's striking beauty flashed like a meteor against the drab surroundings. She moved in an aura of shining loveliness. Her fragrance routed the foul tobacco and whiskey odors. Her hair gleamed golden, her shimmering, flowing gown clung seductively to her voluptuous figure. Baque stared, and suddenly recognized her. Marigold, of Morning with Marigold. Worshiped around devotees to her visiscope program. Mistress, it was said, to James Denton, the czar of visiscope. Marigold Manning. She raised her hand to her mouth in mock horror, and the bright tones of her laughter dropped tantalizingly among the spellbound spacers. "What an odd place," she said. "Where did you ever hear about a place like this?" "I need some Martian whiskey, damn it," the man muttered. "So stupid of the Port Bar to run out. With all those ships from Mars coming in, too. Are you sure we can get back in time? Jimmy'll raise hell if we aren't there when his ship lands." Lankey touched Baque's arm. "After six," he said, without taking his eyes from Marigold Manning. "They'll be getting impatient." Baque nodded, and started for the multichord. And as soon as the customers saw him, the tumult began. He paused before taking his seat, and saw Marigold Manning and her escort staring openmouthed. The sudden uproar had brought them up short, and they turned from the stomping, howling customers to examine this nondescript man who inspired such undignified enthusiasm. Miss Manning's exclamation rang out sharply above the noise. "What the hell!" Baque shrugged, and started to play. When Miss Manning finally left, after a brief conference with Lankey, her escort still hadn't gotten his Martian whiskey. The next evening Lankey greeted Baque with both fists full of telenotes. "What a hell of a mess this is! You see this Marigold dame's program this morning?" "Don't think I've watched visiscope since I came to work here." "In case it interests you, you were -- what does she call it? -- a 'Marigold Exclusive' on visiscope this morning. Erlin Baque, the famous tunesmith, is now playing the multichord in a queer little restaurant called the Lankey-Pank Out . If you want to hear some amazing music, wander out by the New Jersey Space Port, and hear Baque. Don't miss it. The experience of a lifetime." Lankey swore, and waved the telenotes. "Queer, she calls us. Now I've got ten thousand requests for reservations, some from as far away as Budapest and Shanghai. And our capacity is five hundred, counting standing room. Damn that woman! We already had all the business we could handle." "You need a bigger place," Baque said. "Yes. Well, confidentially, I've got my eye on a big warehouse. It'll seat a thousand, at least. We'll clean up. I'll give you a contract to take charge of the music." Baque shook his head. "How about opening a big place up town? Attract people that have more money to spend. You run it, and I'll bring in the customers." Lankey caressed his flattened nose solemnly. "How do we split." "Fifty-fifty," Baque said. "No," Lankey said thoughtfully. "I play fair, Baque, but fifty-fifty wouldn't be right on a deal like that. I'd have to put up all the money myself. I'll give you onethird, and you're to handle the music." They had a lawyer draw up a contract. Baque's lawyer. Lankey insisted on that. In the bleak grey of early morning Baque sleepily rode the crowded conveyer towards his apartment. It was the rush hour, when commuters jammed against each other and snarled grumpily when a neighbor shifted his feet. Was the crowd heavier than usual? Baque shrugged off the jostling and elbowing, and lost himself in thought. It was time he found a better place to live. He hadn't minded the dumpy apartment as long as he couldn't afford a better place, but Val had been complaining for years. And now when they could move, when they could have a luxury apartment or even a small home over in Pennsylvania, Val refused to go. Didn't want to leave her friends, she said. Baque mulled over this problem of feminine contrariness, and realized suddenly that he was approaching his own stop. He started to push his way towards a deceleration strip -- he shoved firmly, he attempted to step between his fellow riders, he applied his elbows, gently, at first, and then viciously. The crowd about him did not yield. "I beg your pardon," Baque said, making another attempt. "I get off here." This time a pair of brawny arms barred his way. "Not this morning, Baque. You got an appointment up town." Baque flung a glance at the circle of faces about him. Hard faces, grim, grinning faces. With a sudden effort Baque hurled himself sideways, fighting with all his strength -- and was hauled back roughly. "Up town, Baque. If you want to go dead, that's your affair." "Up town," Baque agreed. At a public air strip they left the conveyer. A flyer was waiting for them, a plush, private job that displayed a high-priority X registration number. They flew swiftly towards down-town Manhattan, cutting recklessly across the air lanes, and veered in for a landing on the towering Visiscope International Building. Baque was bundled down an anti-gravity shaft, led through a labyrinth of corridors, and prodded none too gently into an office. A huge office. It was sparsely furnished, with a desk, some chairs, a bar in the far comer, an enormous visiscope screen -- and a multichord. It was crowded. Baque's gaze swept the blur of faces and found one that was familiar. Hulsey. The plump agent took two steps forward, and stood glaring at Baque. "Day of reckoning, Erlin," he said coldly. A hand rapped sharply on the desk. "I take care of any reckoning that's done around here, Hulsey. Please sit down, Mr. Baque." Baque arranged himself uncomfortably on the chair that was thrust forward from somewhere. He waited, his eyes on the man behind the desk. "My name is James Denton. Does my fame extend to such outof-the-way places as the LankeyPank Out? "No," Baque said. "But I've heard of you." James Denton. Czar of Visiscope International. Ruthless arbitrator of public taste. He was no more than forty, with a swarthy, handsome face, flashing eyes, and a ready smile. He nodded slowly, tapped a cigar on the edge of his desk, and carefully placed it in his mouth. Men on either side of him extended lighters. He chose one without glancing up, nodded again, and puffed deeply. "I won't bore you with introductions to this gathering, Baque. Some of these men are here for professional reasons. Some are here because they're curious. I heard about you for the first time yesterday, and what I heard made me think you might be a problem. Mind you, I said 'might be' -- that's what I aim to find out. "When I have a problem, Baque, I do one of two things. I solve it, or I eliminate it, and I waste no time either way." He chuckled. "As you can see from the fact that I had you brought in at the earliest moment you were -- shall we say -- available?" "The man's dangerous, Denton!" Hulsey blurted out. Denton flashed his smile. "I like dangerous men, Hulsey. They're useful to have around. If I can use whatever it is Mr. Baque has, I'll make him an attractive offer. I'm sure he'll accept it gratefully. If I can't use it, I aim to make damned certain that he won't be inconveniencing me. Do I make myself clear, Baque?" Baque stared at the floor, and said nothing. Denton leaned forward. His smile did not waver, but his eyes narrowed, and his voice was suddenly icy. "Do I make myself clear, Baque?" "Yes," Baque muttered weakly. Denton jerked a thumb towards the door, and half of those present, including Hulsey, solemnly filed out. The others waited, talking in whispers, while Denton puffed steadily on his cigar. Suddenly Denton's intercom rasped out a single word. "Ready!" Denton pointed at the multichord. "We crave a demonstration of your skill, Mr. Baque. And take care that it's a good demonstration. Hulsey is listening, and he can tell us if you try to stall." Baque nodded, and took his place at the multichord. He sat with fingers poised, and grinned at the circle of staring faces. Overlords of business, they were, and never in their lives had they heard real music. As for Hulsey -- yes, Hulsey would be listening, but over Denton's intercom, over a communication system designed to carry voices ! And Hulsey had a terrible ear for music. Still grinning, Baque touched the violin filter, touched it again, and faltered. Denton chuckled dryly. "I neglected to inform you, Mr. Baque. On Hulsey's advice, we've had the filters disconnected. Now -- " Anger surged within Baque. He jammed his foot down hard on the volume control, insolently tapped out a visiscope fanfare, and started to play his Tamper Cheese Com. Face flushed, Denton leaned forward and snarled something. The men beside him stirred uneasily. Baque shifted to another Com, improvised some variations, and began to watch the faces around him. Overlords of the business world. It would be amusing, he thought, to make them dance and stomp their feet. His fingers shaped a compelling rhythm, and they began to sway restlessly. Suddenly he forgot his caution. Laughing silently to himself, he released an overpowering torrent of sound that set the men dancing. He froze them in ridiculous postures with an outburst of surging emotion. He made them stomp recklessly, he brought tears to their eyes, and he finished off with the pounding force that Lankey called the 'Sex Music.' Then he slumped over the keyboard, terrified at what he had done. Denton was on his feet, face pale, hands clenching and unclenching. "My God!" he muttered. He snarled a word at his intercom. "Reaction?" "Negative," came the prompt answer. "Let's wind it up." Denton sat down, passed his hand across his face, and turned to Baque with a bland smile. "An impressive performance, Mr. Baque. We'll know in a few minutes -- ah, here they are." Those who had left earlier filed back into the room, and several men huddled together in a whispered conference. Denton got up from his desk, and paced the floor. The other men in the room, including Hulsey, remained standing and waited awkwardly. Baque kept his place at the multichord, glancing uneasily about the room. In shifting his position he accidently touched a key, and the single tone shattered the poise of the conferees, spun Denton around wildly, and startled Hulsey into two steps towards the door. "Mr. Baque is getting impatient," Denton called. "Can't we finish this?" "One moment, sir." They returned, finally, and arranged themselves in two lines in front of Denton's desk. The spokesman, a white-haired, scholarly looking man with a delicate pink complexion, cleared his throat self-consciously, and waited for Denton's nod. "It is established," he said, "that those in this room were powerfully affected by the music. Those listening on the intercom experienced no reaction except a mild boredom." "Any fool could figure that out," Denton snapped. "How does he do it?" "We can only offer a working hypothesis..." "So you're guessing. Let's have it." "Erlin Baque has the ability to telepathically project his emotional experience. When the projection is subtly reinforced by the tones of the multichord, the experience of those in his immediate presence is intense. It has no effect upon those listening to his music at a distance." "And -- visiscope?" "Baque's playing would have no effect upon visiscope listeners." "I see," Denton said. He scowled thoughtfully. "What about his longterm success?" "It is difficult to predict..." "Predict, damn it!" "The novelty of his playing would attract attention, at first. In time he might develop a group of followers who would use the emotional experience of his playing as a kind of narcotic." "Thank you, gentlemen," Denton said. "That will be all." The room emptied quickly. Hulsey paused in the doorway, glared hatefully at Baque, and then walked out meekly. "So I can't use you, Baque," Denton said. "But it seems you are no problem. I know what you and Lankey are up to. If I say the word, you would never, in this lifetime, find a place for your new restaurant. I could have the Lankey-Pank Out closed down by evening. But it would hardly be worth the trouble. I won't even insist on a visiscope screen in your new restaurant. If you can develop a cult for yourself, why -- perhaps it will keep the members out of worse mischief. You see I feel generous this morning, Baque. Now you'd better leave before I change my mind." Baque nodded, and got to his feet. At that moment Marigold Manning swept into the room, radiantly lovely, exotically perfumed, her glistening blonde hair swept up into the latest Martian hair style. "Jimmy, darling -- oh!" She stared at Baque, stared at the multichord, and stammered, "Why, you're -- you're -- Erlin Baque! Jimmy, why didn't you tell me?" "Mr. Baque has been favoring me with  private performance," Denton said brusquely. "I think we understand each other, Baque. Good morning!" "You're going to use him on visiscope!" Miss Manning exclaimed. "Jimmy, that's wonderful. May I have him first? I can work him in this morning." Denton shook his head slowly. "Sorry, darling. We've decided that Mr. Baque's talent is -- not quite suitable for visiscope." "At least I can have him for a guest. You'll be my guest, won't you, Mr. Baque? There's nothing wrong with giving him a guest spot, is there Jimmy?" Denton chuckled. "No. After all the fuss you stirred up, it might be a good idea for you to guest him. It'll serve you right when he flops." "He won't flop. He'll be wonderful on visiscope. Will you come in this morning, Mr. Baque?" "Well..." Baque began. Denton nodded emphatically. "We'll be opening a new restaurant soon," Baque went on. "I wouldn't mind being your guest on opening day." "A new restaurant? That's wonderful! Does anyone know? I'll give it out this morning as an exclusive!" "It isn't exactly settled, yet," Baque said apologetically. "We haven't found a place..." "Lankey found a place yesterday," Denton said. "He'll be signing a lease this morning. Just let Miss Manning know your opening date, Baque, and she'll arrange a spot for you. Now if you don't mind..." It took Baque half an hour to find his way out of the building, but he plodded aimlessly along the corridors and disdained asking directions. He hummed happily to himself, and now and then he broke into a laugh. The overlords of the business world -- and their scientists -- knew nothing about overtones. "So that's the way it is," Lankey said. "I think we were lucky, Baque. Denton should have made his move when he had a chance -- when I wasn't expecting it. When he wises up, I'll see that it's too late." "What can we do if he really decides to put us out of business?" "I have some connections myself, Baque. They don't run in high society, like Denton, but they're every bit as dishonest. And Denton has a lot of enemies who'll be glad to back us up. Said he could close me down by evening, eh? It's a funny deal. There's not much we can do that would hurt Denton, but there's plenty we can do to keep him from hurting us." "I think we're going to hurt Denton," Baque said. Lankey moved over to the bar, and came back with a tall glass of pink, foaming liquid. "Drink it," he said. "You've had a long day, and you're getting delirious. How could we hurt Denton?" "Corns. Visiscope depends on Corns. We'll show the people they can have entertainment without them. We'll make our motto NO "Great," Lankey drawled. "I just invest a thousand in fancy new costumes for the girls -- they can't wear those plastic things in our new place, you know -- and you decide not to let them sing." "Certainly they're going to sing." Lankey leaned forward, caressing his nose. "And no Corns. Then what are they going to sing?" "I took some lyrics out of an old school book my grandfather had. They're called poems, and I'm writing music for them. I was going to try them out here, but Denton might hear about it, and there's no use starting trouble before it's necessary." "No. Save them for the new place. And you'll be on Morning with Marigold the day we open. Are you certain about this overtones stuff, Baque? You really could be projecting emotions, you know. Not that it will make any difference in the restaurant, but on visiscope... "I'm certain. How soon can we open?" "I've got three shifts remodeling the place. We'll seat twelve hundred, and have room for a nice dance floor. Should be ready in two weeks. But I'm not sure this visiscope deal is wise, Baque." "I want to do it." Lankey went back to the bar, and got a drink for himself. "All right. You do it. If your stuff comes over, all hell is going to break loose, and I might as well start getting ready for it." He grinned. "Damned if it won't be good for business!" changed her hair styling to the latest creation of Zann of Hong Kong, and she dallied for ten minutes in deciding which profile she would present to the cameras. Baque waited patiently, a bit uncomfortable in the most expensive dress suit he had ever owned. He was wondering if perhaps he really did project emotions. "I'll have it this way," Miss Manning said finally, waving a pilot screen in front of her face for a last, searching look. "And you, Mr. Baque? What will we do with you?" "Just put me at the multichord," Baque said. "But you can't just play. You'll have to say something. I've been announcing this every day for a week, and we'll have the biggest audience in years, and you'll just have to say something." "Gladly," Baque said. "If I can talk about Lankey # s " "But of course, you silly man. That's why you're here. You talk about Lankey s, and I'll talk about Erlin Baque." "Five minutes," a voice announced crisply. "Oh, dear," she said. "I'm always so nervous just before." "Be happy you're not nervous during," Baque said. "That's so right. Jimmy just makes fun of me, but it takes an artist to understand another artist. Do you get nervous?" "When I'm playing, I'm much too busy." "That's just the way it is with me. Once my program starts, I'm much too busy..." "Four minutes..." "Oh, bother!" She seized the pilot screen again. "Maybe I would have been better the other way." Baque seated himself at the multichord. "You're perfect the way you are." "Do you really think so? It's a nice thing to say, anyway. I wonder if Jimmy will take the time to watch." "I'm sure he will." "Three minutes..." Baque threw on the power, and sounded a chord. Now he was nervous. He had no idea what he was going to play. He'd intentionally refrained from preparing something, because it was his improvisations that affected people so strangely. Only one thing was certain -- there would be no Sex Music. Lankey had warned him about that. He lost himself in thought, failed to hear the final warning, and looked up startled at Miss Manning's cheerful, "Good morning, everyone. It's Morning with Marigold!" Her bright voice wandered on and on. Erlin Baque. His career as a tunesmith. Her amazing discovery of him playing in the Lankey-Pank Out . She ran the Tamper Cheese Com. Finally she finished her remarks, and risked the distortion of her lovely profile to glance in his direction. "Ladies and gentlemen, with admiration, with pride, with pleasure, I give you a Marigold Exclusive, Erlin Baque!" Baque grinned nervously, and coyly tapped out a scale with one finger. "This is my first speech," he said. "Probably it'll be my last. The new restaurant opens tonight. Lankey' s, on Broadway. Unfortunately I can't invite you to join us, because thanks to Miss Manning's generous comments this past week all space is reserved for the next two months. After that we'll be setting aside a limited number of reservations for visitors from distant places. Jet over and see us! "You'll find something different at Lankey' s. There is n visiscope screen. Maybe you've heard about that. We have attractive young ladies to sing for you. I play the multichord. We know you'll enjoy our music. We know you'll enjoy it because you'll hear no Corns at Lankey' s. Remember that -- No Corns at Lankey's. No soap with your soup. No air cars with your steaks. No shirts with your desserts. No Corns! Just good music played for your enjoyment -- like this." He brought his hands down on the keyboard. It was a strange experience, playing with no audience, or practically no audience. There was only Miss Manning, and the visiscope engineers, and Baque was suddenly apprehensive that his audiences were responsible for his success. He'd always had a throng of faces to watch, and he had paced his playing according to their reactions. People were listening all over the Western Hemisphere. And later it would be all over Earth, and all over the Solar System. Would they be clapping and stomping? Would they be thinking awesomely, "So that's how music sounds without words, without Corns?" Or would they be listening in mild boredom? Baque caught a glimpse of Miss Manning's pale face, of the engineers watching with mouths agape, and thought maybe everything was all right. He lost himself in the music, and played fervently. He continued to play after he knew that something had gone wrong. Miss Manning leaped to her feet and hurried towards him, the engineers were moving about confusedly, and the distant pilot screen was blank. Baque slowed down, and brought his playing to a halt. "We were cut off," Miss Manning said tearfully. "Who would do such a thing to me? Never, never, in all the time I've been on visiscope -- George, who cut us off?" "Orders." "Whose orders?" "My orders!" James Denton strode towards them, and he was not smiling. His lips were tight, his face pale, his eyes gleaming violence and sudden death. "Pretty bright boy, aren't you?" he said to Baque. "I don't know how you worked that trick, but no man fools James Denton more than once. Now you've made yourself a problem, and I'm not going to bother solving it. Consider yourself eliminated." "Jimmy!" Miss Manning wailed. "My program -- cut off. How could you?" "Shut up, damn it! I'll give you any odds you want, Baque, that Lankey's doesn't open tonight. Not that it's going to make any difference to you." Baque smiled gently. "I think you've lost, Denton. I think enough music got over to beat you. I'll give you any odds you want that you'll have several thousand complaints by tomorrow. So will the government. And then you'll find out who really runs Visiscope International" " I run Visiscope International" "No, Denton. It belongs to the people. They've let things slide for a long time, and taken anything you'd give them. But if they know what they want, they'll get it. I know I gave them at least three minutes of what they want. That was more than I'd hoped for." "How did you work that trick in my office?" "You tricked yourself, Denton -- because you didn't know about overtones. Your intercom wasn't built to carry music. It doesn't carry the upper frequencies at all, so the multichord sounded dead to the men in the other room. But visiscope has the frequency range of live sound." Denton nodded. "Clever. I'll have the heads of some scientists, for that. And I'll have your head, Baque." He stalked away, and as the automatic door closed behind him, Marigold Manning clutched Baque's arm. "Quick! Follow me!" As Baque hesitated, she hissed, "Don't stand there like an idiot! He'll have you killed." She led him through a control room, and out into a small corridor. They raced down it, darted through a reception room past a startled secretary, and out a rear door into another corridor. She jerked him after her into an anti-grav lift, and they shot upwards. At the top of the building she hurried him to the air car landing strip, and left him standing in a doorway. "When I give you a signal, you walk out," she said. "Don't run, just walk." She walked out calmly, and Baque heard an attendant's surprised greeting. "Through early this morning, Miss Manning?" "We're running a lot of Corns," she said. "I want the big Waring." "Coming right up." Peering around the comer, Baque saw her step into the flyer. As soon as the attendant's back was turned, she waved frantically. Baque walked carefully towards her, keeping the Waring between the attendant and himself. A moment later they were shooting upwards, and below them a siren sounded faintly. "We did it!" she gasped. "If you hadn't gotten out before that alarm sounded, you wouldn't have gotten out at all." Baque took a deep breath, and looked back at the Visiscope International Building. "Well, thanks," he said. "But surely that wasn't necessary. This is a civilized planet." "Visiscope International is not civilized!" she snapped. He looked at her wonderingly. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide with fear, and for the first time Baque saw her as a human being, a woman, a lovely woman. As he looked, she turned away and burst into tears. "Now Jimmy'll have me killed, too. And where will we go?" "Lankey' s" Baque said. "Look -- you can see it from here." She pointed the air car at the freshly painted letters on the strip above the new restaurant, and Baque, looking backwards, saw a crowd forming in the street by Visiscope International . Lankey floated his desk over to the wall, and leaned back comfortably. He wore a trim dress suit, and he had carefully groomed himself for the role of a jovial host, but in his office he was the same ungainly Lankey Baque had first seen leaning over a bar. "I told you all hell would break loose," he said flatly. "There are five thousand people over by Visiscope International , screaming for Erlin Baque. And the crowd is growing." "I didn't play for more than three minutes," Baque said. "I thought a lot of people might write in to complain about their cutting me off, but I didn't expect anything like that." "You didn't, eh? Five thousand people. Probably ten thousand, by now, and nobody knows where it will stop. And Miss Manning, here, risks her neck to get you out of the place -- ask her why, Baque." "Yes," Baque said. "Why go to all that trouble for me?" She shuddered. "Your music does things to me." "It sure does," Lankey said. "Baque, you fool, you gave a quarter of Earth's population three minutes of Sex Music!" ule that evening, with crowds gling in as long as there was standing room. The shrewd Lankey had instituted an admission charge. The standees bought no food, and Lankey couldn't see the point in furnishing free music, even if hear it. There was one last-minute change. Lankey decided that the customers would prefer a glamorous hostess to a flat-nosed old host, and he hired Marigold Manning. She moved about gracefully, the deep blue of her flowing gown offsetting her golden hair. When Baque took his place at the multichord, the frenzied ovation lasted for twenty minutes. Midway through the evening, Baque sought out Lankey. "Has Denton tried anything ?" "Not a thing. Everything is running smoothly." "It seems odd. He swore we wouldn't open tonight." Lankey chuckled. "He's had troubles of his own to worry about. The authorities are on his neck about that rioting this afternoon. I was afraid they would blame you, but they didn't. Denton put you on, and then he cut you off, and they figure he's responsible. And according to my last report, Visiscope International has had more worry, Baque. We'll hear from Denton soon enough -- and the guilds, too." "The guilds? Why the guilds?" "The Tunesmiths' Guild will be damned furious about your cutting out the Corns. The Lyric Writers' Guild will go along with them, on account of the Corns, and on account of your using music without words. The Performers' Guild won't like you because not many of its members can play worth a damn. By tomorrow morning, Baque, you'll be the most popular man in the Solar System, and the sponsors, and the visiscope people, and the guilds are going to hate your guts. I'm giving you a twentyfour hour bodyguard, and Miss Manning, too. I want you to come out of this alive." "Do you really think Denton would..." "Denton would." The next morning the Performers' Guild blacklisted Lankey's , and ordered all the musicians, including Baque, to sever relations. The musicians respectfully declined, and found themselves blacklisted before noon. Lankey called in a lawyer, the most sinister, furtive, disreputable-looking individual Baque had ever seen. "They're supposed to give us a week's notice," Lankey said, "and another week if we decide to apThe Commissioner of Public Safety called, and a little later, the Liquor Commissioner. Both conferred briefly with Lankey, and departed grim-faced. "Denton's moving too late," Lankey said gleefully. "I got to both of them a week ago, and recorded our conversations. They don't dare take any action." A riot broke out in front of Lankey's that night. Lankey had his own riot squad ready for action, and the customers never noticed the disturbance. Lankey's informants estimated that more than received by Visiscope International . An anti-Com demonstration erupted spontaneously, and five hundred visiscope screens were smashed in Manhattan restaurants. Lankey # s finished its first week unmolested, entertaining capacity crowds daily. Reservations were pouring in from as far away as Venus and Mars. Baque sent to Berlin for a multichordist to understudy him, and Lankey hoped by the end of the month to have the restaurant open twenty-four hours a day. At the beginning of the second week, Lankey told Baque, "We've got Denton licked. I've countered every move he's made, and now we're going to make a few moves. You're going on visiscope again. I'm making application today. We're legitimate business, and we've got as much right to buy time as anyone else. If he won't give it to us, I'll sue. He won't dare refuse." "Where do you get the money for all this?" Baque said. Lankey grinned. "I saved it up. And I've had a little help from people who don't like Denton." Denton didn't refuse. Baque did an Earth-wide program direct from Lankey's, with Marigold Manning introducing him. He omitted only the Sex Music. Quitting time at Lankey s . Baque was in his dressing room, wearily changing. Lankey had already left for an early-morning conference with his lawyer. They were speculating on Denton's next move. Baque was uneasy. He was, he told himself, only a dumb musician. He didn't understand legal problems, or the tangled web of connections and influence that Lankey negotiated so easily. He knew James Denton was the incarnation of evil. He also knew that Denton had enough money to buy Lankey a thousand times over. Or pay for the murder of anyone who got in his way. What was he waiting for? With enough time, Baque might deliver a death-blow to the whole institution of Corns. Denton would know that. So what was he waiting for? The door burst open, and Marigold Manning stumbled in half undressed, her pale face the bleached whiteness of her plastic breast cups. She slammed the door and leaned against it, sobs shaking her body. "Jimmy," she gasped. "I got a note from Carol -- that's his secretary. She was a good friend of mine. She says Jimmy's bribed our guards, and they're going to kill us on the way home this morning. Or let Jimmy's men kill us." "I'll call Lankey," Baque said. "There's nothing to worry about." "No! If they suspect anything they won't wait. We won't have a chance." "Then we'll just wait until Lankey gets back." "Do you think it's safe to wait? They know we're getting ready to leave." Baque sat down heavily. It was the sort of move he expected Denton to make. Lankey picked his men carefully, he knew, but then -- Denton had enough money to buy any man. And yet... "Maybe it's a trap," he said. "Maybe that note's a fake." "No. I saw that fat little man Hulsey talking with one of your guards last night, and I knew Jimmy was up to something." So that was it. Hulsey. "What do you want to do?" Baque said. "Could we get out the back way?" "I don't know. We'd have to get past at least one guard." "Couldn't we try?" Baque hesitated. She was frightened. She was sick with fright. But she knew far more about this sort of thing than he did. And she knew James Denton. He'd never have gotten out of Visiscope Internation al without her help. "If you think that's the thing to do, we'll try it." "I'll have to finish changing." "Go ahead, then. Let me know when you're ready." She looked cautiously out the door, and turned back, fear overcoming modesty. "No. You come with me." Baque and Miss Manning walked leisurely along the corridor at the back of the building, nodded to the two guards that sat there alertly, and with a sudden movement were through the door. Running. A shout of surprise came from behind them, nothing more. They dashed frantically down an alley, turned off, reached another intersection, and hesitated. "The conveyer is that way," she gasped. "If we can reach the conveyer..." "Let's go!" They ran on, hand in hand. Far ahead of them the alley opened onto a street. Baque glanced anxiously upwards for air cars, and saw none. Exactly where they were he did not know. "Are we -- being followed?" "I don't think so. There aren't any air cars, and I didn't see anyone behind us when we stopped." "Then we got away!" Thirty feet ahead of them, a man stepped abruptly out of the dawn shadows. As they halted, stricken dumb with panic, he walked towards them. A hat was pulled low over his face, but there was no mistaking the smile. James Denton. "Good morning, beautiful," he said. " Visiscope International hasn't been the same without your lovely presence. And a good morning to you, Mr. Baque." They stood silently, Miss Manning's hand clutching Baque's arm, her nails cutting through his shirt and into his flesh. He did not move. "I thought you'd fall for that little gag, beautiful. I thought you'd be just frightened enough, by now, to fall for it. I have every exit blocked, but I'm grateful to you for picking this one. Very grateful. I like to settle in person for a double cross." Suddenly he whirled on Baque, his voice an angry snarl. "Get going, Baque. It isn't your turn, yet. I have other plans for you." Baque stood rooted to the damp pavement. "Move, Baque, before I change my mind." Miss Manning released his arm. Her voice was a choking whisper. "Go!" she said. "Baque!" "Go, quickly," she whispered again. Baque took two hesitant steps. "Run!" Denton shouted. Baque ran. Behind him there was the evil crack of a gun, a scream, and silence. Baque faltered, saw Denton looking after him, and ran on. "So I'm a coward," Baque said. "No, Baque." Lankey shook his head slowly. "You're a brave man, or you wouldn't have gotten into this. It wouldn't have been bravery, to try something there. It would have been foolishness. It's my fault, for thinking he'd move first against the restaurant. I owe Denton something for this, Baque, and I'm a man who pays his debts." A troubled frown creased Lankey's ugly face. He looked oddly at Baque, and scratched his bald head. "She was a brave and beautiful woman, Baque. But I wonder why Denton let you go." The air of tragedy that hung heavily over Lankey's that night did not affect the customers. They gave Baque a thunderous ovation as he moved towards the multichord. As he paused for a halfhearted bow, three policemen closed in on him. "Erlin Baque?" "That's right." "You're under arrest." Baque grinned. Denton wasn't long in making his next move. "What's the charge?" he said. "Murder." The murder of Marigold Manning. ful face against the bars, and talked unhurriedly. "They have some witnesses," he said, "honest witnesses, who saw you run out of that alley. They have several dishonest witnesses, who saw you fire the shot. One of them is your friend Hulsey, who just happened to be taking an early-morning stroll along that alley -- or so he'll testify. Dento convict you, but he won't have to. He won't even have to bribe the jury. The case against you is that good." "What about the gun," Baque said. "They found it. No fingerprints, of course. But someone will claim you were wearing gloves, or someone will have seen you wipe it off." Baque nodded. Things were out of his hands, now. He'd worked for a cause that no one understood -- perhaps he didn't understand himself what he was trying to do. And he'd lost. "What happens next?" Lankey shook his head. "I'm not one to hold back bad news. It means life. They're going to send you to the Ganymede rock pits for life." "I see," Baque said. He added anxiously, "You're going to carry on?" "Just what were you trying to do, Baque? You weren't only working for Lankey's. I couldn't figure it out, but I went along with you because I like you. And I like your music. What was it?" "I don't know." A concert? A thousand people gathered together to hear music? Was that what he wanted? "Music, I suppose," he said. "Get rid of the Corns -- or some of them." "Yes. Yes, I think I understand. Lankey's will carry on, Baque, as long as I have any breath left. That new multichord player isn't bad. He's nothing like you were, but then -- there'll never be another one like you were. We're still turning people away. Several other restaurants are doing away with visiscope and trying to imitate us, but we have a big head start. We'll carry on the way you had things set up, and your one-third still stands. I'll have it put in trust for you. You'll be a wealthy man when you get back." "When I get back!" "Well -- a life sentence doesn't necessarily mean life. See that you behave yourself." "Val?" "She'll be taken care of. I'll give her a job of some kind, to keep her occupied." "Maybe I can send you music for the restaurant," Baque said. "I should have plenty of time." "I'm afraid not. It's music they want to keep you away from. So -- no writing of music. And they won't let you near a multichord. They think you could hypnotize the guards, and turn all the prisoners loose." "Would they -- let me have my record collection?" "I'm afraid not." "I see. Well, if that's the way it is..." "It is. Now I owe Denton two debts." The unemotional Lankey had tears in his eyes as he turned away. The jury deliberated for eight minutes, and brought in a verdict of guilty. Baque was sentenced to life imprisonment. There was some editorial grumbling on visiscope, because life in the Ganymede rock pits was frequently a very short life. And there was a swelling undertone of whispering among the little people that the verdict was bought and paid for by the sponsors, by visiscope. Erlin Baque was framed, it was said, because he gave the people music. And on the day Baque left for Ganymede, announcement was made of a public exhibition, by H. Vail, multichordist, and B. Johnson, violinist. Admission one dollar. Lankey collected evidence with painstaking care, rebribed one of the bribed witnesses, and petitioned for a new trial. The petition was denied, and the long years limped past. The New York Symphony Orchestra was organized, with twenty members. One of James Denton's plush air cars crashed, and he was instantly killed. An unfortunate acheard Erlin Baque play on visiscope endowed a dozen conservatories of music. They were to be called the Baque Conservatories, but a musical historian who had never heard of Baque got the name changed to Bach. Lankey died, and a son-in-law carried on his efforts as a family trust. A subscription was launched to build a new hall for the New York Symphony, which now numbered forty members. Interest spread like an avalanche, and a site was finally picked in Ohio, to be within easier commuting distance of all parts of the North American continent. Beethoven Hall was erected, to seat forty thousand people. The first series of concerts was fully subscribed fortyeight hours after tickets went on sale. Opera was given on visiscope for the first time in two hundred years. An opera house was built on the Ohio site, and then an art institute. The Center grew, first by private subscription, and then under government sponsorship. Lankey's sonin-law died, and a nephew took over the management of Lankey's -- and the campaign to free Erlin Baque. Thirty years passed, and then forty. And forty-nine years, seven months and nineteen days after Baque received his life sentence, he was paroled. He still owned a third interest in Manhattan's most prosperous restaurant, and the profits that had piled up over the years made him a wealthy man. He was ninety-six years old. Another capacity crowd at Beethoven Hall. Vacationists from all parts of the Solar System, music lovers who commuted for the concerts, old people who had retired to the Center, forty-thousand of them, stirred restlessly and searched the wings for the conductor. Applause thundered down from the twelve balconies as he strode forward. Erlin Baque sat in his permanent seat at the rear of the main floor. He adjusted his binoculars and peered at the orchestra, wondering again what a contrabassoon sounded like. His bitterness he had left behind on Ganymede. His life at the Center was an unending revelation of miracles. Of course no one remembered Erling Baque, tunesmith and murderer. Whole generations of people could not even remember the Corns. And yet Baque felt that he had accomplished all this, just as surely as if he had built this building -- built the Center -- with his own hands. He spread his hands before him, hands deformed by the years in the rock pits, fingers and tips of fingers crushed off, his body maimed by cascading rocks. He had no regrets. He had done his work well. Two ushers stood in the aisle behind him. One jerked a thumb in his direction, and whispered, "Now there's a character for you. Comes to every concert. Never misses one. And he just sits there in the back row watching people. They say he was one of the old tunesmiths, years and years ago." "Maybe he likes music," the other said. "Naw. Those old tunesmiths never knew anything about music. dated March #, are still available. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April #; February, April, June, August, October, December #, February, April, June #. Only # each postpaid. Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. He had only two aims in life: first, to get what he wanted; and after that to enjoy it. But to achieve the one he'd have to give up the other... or would he? Illustrated by Virgil Finlay The transport ship, bound for Capella with Outlander colonists from Earth and Frontier Guards from Arcturus, struck the hyperspace vortex without warning. It seized her, wrenching and twisting her, and flung her across its gigantic rim at thousands of times the speed of light. She emerged into normal space in an unknown region of the galaxy, broken and driveless, but near enough a planet that she could descend by means of her antigravity plates before the last of her air was gone. It was sunset when she settled heavily to earth on a grassy slope beside a forest, leaning at a dangerous angle with only her failing antigravity plates to hold her from falling. The dead had been disposed of in space and the living filed out of her: fifty Outlander men, women and children, eighteen ship's crewmen, and ten Frontier Guards. The Guard officer and ship's captain came last, of equal rank and already appraising each other with cold speculation. dark forest were coming closer. Thane listened as he watched Gurry, the ship's captain, approach across the strip of land that separated the two camps ; standing back from his fire as he waited, where he would make an uncertain target for an assassin's blaster. No one could be seen near any of the fires in the two camps on the hill. Only the unarmed Outlanders, at their fires in the swale below, moved about without wariness. And it was not yet three hours from the landing of the ship. Curry stopped before him, restrained anger on his arrogantly handsome face. "You failed to report to me and turn your Frontier Guards over to my command as you were ordered," he said. "Since your rank is no higher than mine I saw no reason to do so," Thane answered. Gurry smiled, very thinly. "Perhaps I can show you a reason." "Perhaps. Let's have it" "First, I want to remind you of our circumstances," Curry said. "The ship will never lift again and we're marooned here for centuries to come. You know what the reaction of the Outlanders will be." The Outlanders were the outcasts of a society that could not tolerate individuality. Two hundred years before the complexities of civilization had combined technocracy with integration and produced , Technogration. Technogration had abolished race, creed and color, nations and borders, had welded all into a common mass and prohibited all individual pursuits that did not contribute to the Common Good. The Outlanders, refusing to come under Technograte domination, lived as best they could in the deserts, plateaus and jungles that Technogration could not use. The ones on the ship had been bound for Capella Five where men accustomed to wrestling a living from hostile environments were needed. Under such circumstances Outlanders were given certain rights and freedoms. Until they were no longer needed. Then, again, they became a people without a world... "For two hundred years the Outlanders have hated Technogration and wanted a world where they could set up their own archaic form of society," Curry said. "Now, those down there will think their millenium has arrived and they can refuse to recognize Technograte authority." "I see," Thane said. "And you want my cooperation so that Technogration won't fall by the wayside?" subordinate position would give me an intact force of both crewmen and Guardsmen." Curry's lips thinned. "But there will be Technogration, with or without your support. There will be no retrogression back into the Outlanders' hallowed Dark Ages." "There is no argument -- we both want Technogration," Thane said. "We only disagree over who should be in command." "There is a slight difference in our qualifications. Your present rank was gained by your ability to kill and not by loyalty to Technogration." "Yes, of course," Thane agreed. "We'll say that I'm a materialistic opportunist while you're a noble idealist. But it's still the same identical whip that we're both going to reach for." "As I said, I would prefer a peaceful transfer of your Guardsmen to my command. But my crewmen outnumber them almost two to one and they are expendable if necessary." The thin smile came back, almost mocking in its confidence. "You haven't much choice but to cooperate and accept a subordinate role, have you?" The subordinate role would be very brief; it would end with a blaster beam in the back as soon as the Guardsmen were transferred to Curry's command...  "Try again, Curry. I can't bite on that one." The smile faded from Curry's face, leaving it icily cold. "That was the only opportunity you'll ever get." The howling sounded again in the forest and Thane said: "We understand each other, now. But the Outlanders are unarmed and it may require our full forces to hold off whatever is out there. I suggest a truce until mornThe iciness remained on Curry's face and he did not reply at once. "Perhaps you are right. You will order your men to observe a truce for the rest of the night." He turned back to his camp. Thane made the rounds where his guards patrolled with their searchlights probing out into the darkness. All of Curry's men but two had been added to reinforce the guard ring around the Outlander camp; most of the crewmen along the east and south lines, leaving the more experienced Guardsmen to patrol the two lines facing the forest. Guardsmen and crewmen patrolled in silence, watching one another with the calculating regard of men who knew they might soon be ordered to kill one another. Apparently it was obvious to all of them that two officers of equal rank was a situation that could not for long exist. His return to his camp took him through the scattered camp fires of the Outlanders. There were not many men to be seen; most of the survivors were women and children whom the Outlander leader had ordered into the safer inner compartments when the ship began breaking up. Thane met him at the second fire; a gaunt old man with a jutting gray beard and sharp blue eyes under bristling gray brows. He stepped out from the fire and spoke : "Captain Thane -- I'd like to ask a question." Thane stopped. "What is it?" "My name is Paul Kennedy and I speak for all of us," the old man said. "Captain Curry has locked up all arms from us -- he's already starting the regimentation for a permanent Technograte colony here and making sure we can't object. For two hundred years Technogration has failed on Earth except to turn men into robots. Here we could have a new chance and live like humans again."  "The question," Thane reminded him. "You were in the Frontier Guards, where men still have to think for themselves to survive, and we were hoping you would understand why we don't want to start another ant hill here." He could understand -- but now, after thirty years of planning and fighting, he was only one step from the top. "There will be Technogration," he said. "We thought you would say that." Kennedy's expression did not change. "We hoped we would be wrong." An ecstatic yelping sounded suddenly from nearby and something brown and white raced across the firelit ground with a laughing boy in pursuit. Thane stared. It was a dog. He had not seen one for thirty years. Technogration prohibited the owning of pets as an unnecessary drain upon the planned economy and as non-contributive to the Common Good. "We knew about the regulations," Kennedy said, "but children need pets to love and be loved by. She's going to have pups -- only she and Lornie's kitten were left." The old man's eyes watched him closely, questioningly. "Surely, no one will object to them?" The dog circled back and a dark haired young woman beyond another fire called to it: "Binkie -- come here!" The dog obeyed, its tail drooping a little, and the woman looked uncertainly in Thane's direction before she disappeared back in the shadows, the dog close behind her. The boy followed, asking, "Why did you stop us, Blanche?" Thane watched them go, the sight of the boy and dog bringing back with unwanted vividness the memory of another Outlander boy who had played with his dog, long ago; bringing back the past that necessity had forced him to forget... He put the dangerous weakness from his mind and spoke to Kennedy: "You Outlanders were bound for a Technograte world when you left Earth. You now stand on a Technograte world. You will do as you are ordered to do. As for your pets -- you may have as many as you want so far as I'm concerned." He stepped past Kennedy and continued on through the camp. The conversation of the Outlanders froze as he drew near, letting him walk in a little sea of silence that moved along with him. It was the usual reaction to the presence of a Technograte officer. A little girl was out beyond the last fire; her back turned to him as she knelt in the grass and worked at something. He came closer and saw she was trying to tie a white cord around the neck of a half grown kitten. It sat with resigned patience as she struggled with earnest, inexperienced fingers to tie a knot that would not fall apart. She was talking to it as she worked: " -- and maybe the things in the forest kill cats. So you'll have to stay tied up, Tommy, and close to me because you're the only kitten on this whole world -- " His shadow fell across her and she looked up. Black curls framed a startled little face and gray eyes went wide at the sight of his uniform. She seized the surprised kitten and held it protectively in her arms, the knot falling apart again on the ground. "Please -- Tommy won't ever hurt anything -- " Two women and a man were watching him from beyond the fire with frozen-faced hatred. Technograte regulations required the imfound smuggled aboard a ship... "I won't harm your kitten," he said He smiled sardonically at the Outlanders beyond the fire. "My horns aren't quite that long yet." most back to his camp. Curry had two bodyguards with him and passed without speaking. The hours went by and the night was like a cold October night on Earth but for the strange constellations that crept across the sky. The Outlander fires burned lower and the things in the forest became silent, as though massing for a surprise attack. Twice the wind shifted, to bring the scents from the forest, and each time he heard the dog growl uneasily while the woman tried to quiet her. He was going down the south guard line, the western horizon touched with the light of coming moonrise, when the monsters attacked the north line. They broke suddenly from the forest with a demoniac howl of command from their leader, a boiling wave of them. They were green, hard to see against the green grass, racing low to the ground like giant tigers, their long, serpentine necks thrust forward and eyes blazing yellow in hyena faces. The blaster fire of the Guardsmen met them, pale blue beams that blossomed into brief incandescence when they struck. Curry's guards added their fire, their reactions slower than those of the Guardsmen. The guards along the other three lines turned to help halt the attack, the south line guards firing across the Outlander camp. The front rank of monsters went down, with them the leader. For an instant the onslaught slowed, leaderless and uncertain, then the monster that had been behind the leader gave the commanding howl and the others surged ahead again. At that moment, when the attention of every guard in every guard line was on the north perimeter attack, the Outlander dog broke loose from whoever had been holding her. She ignored the attack from the north and was a blur as she went through the south guard line, screaming a snarl of warning and her leash whipping in the air behind her. She vanished behind the guard line and Thane swung his searchlight. Five monsters were almost upon the backs of the unsuspecting guards, charging without sound. His blaster beam raked at them and two went down. The others struck three guards with their bodies, knocking them to the ground before they could fire. Then the monsters passed on, to . lurch a dozen steps and fall limply to the ground. They did not even twitch after they fell. He saw, when he reached the first one, that it was dead. So were the other two. Yet there was not a blaster mark on them. Then he saw another thing. One of the monsters had fallen with its jaws slackly open and its teeth were visible. They were blunt and even. Despite their ferocious appearance, the monsters were only herbivores. The three fallen guards were getting to their feet, apparently unharmed. Along the north perimeter the attack was over as suddenly as it had begun; the leader of the monsters lying dead against the guard line and all the others still alive fleeing wildly back into the forest. Quiet came, broken only by the growling of the dog out near the two monsters Thane had killed. He turned his light on her, then went closer to make sure he had seen rightly. She was fighting something on the ground, green-eyed with fury as she ripped and tore at it. But there was nothing there. Nothing. ct Binkier The dark haired woman was coming toward them, wraithlike in a white sleeping garment. The dog turned away, with a last rip at the nothing it fought, and saw the three guards the monsters had knocked down. She froze, like as though she saw something she could not believe. Then, deadly with menace, a growl vibrated in her throat and she crouched to attack them. "Binkie -- don't!" The voice of the girl was shrill with urgency. "Come here -- come here!" The dog hesitated, then obeyed; going past the guards in a swift lope, her head turned to watch them and her teeth bared in a snarl. The girl seized the leash and girl and dog disappeared back into the Outlander camp, both of them running. Curry loomed out of the darkness, his two bodyguards with him, and flashed his light over the fallen monsters. "So you let three get through?" he said. He glanced to the north guard line where the searchlights of the guards showed only the dark, lifeless edge of the forest. "But no one was harmed and there's no indication that they are going to attack again." He regarded Thane with cold thoughtfulness. "Apparently the camp is in no danger, after all." To Thane the implication of his words was obvious : if the monsters were not a menace his cooperation was no longer needed by Curry. The three guards were Curry men and Curry had two with him. He was outnumbered six to one... "Sir -- " It was one of the three guards; Bellam, the ship's pharmacist. He hurried up to Curry, the other two close behind him. Curry swung on him, impatiently. "What is it?" "We must combine our forces to fight a new danger. This camp is infected with rabies." "Rabies?" "Yes, sir," Bellam answered. "The Outlander's dog had a convulsion beyond the guard line and then almost attacked the three of us. That dog is mad." "How do you know it was a convulsion?" Thane asked. "You saw it, yourself," Bellam answered. He turned his head to face Thane as he spoke and Thane saw his eyes for the first time. They were the lifeless, staring eyes of a dead man. He flicked his light over the faces of the other two guards. They were the same; all three were like walking dead. "Did the monsters harm you?" he asked Bellam. Bellam hesitated, seeming to tense with suspicion. "No." The dead eyes stared into his. "What makes you ask?" He saw that Curry had noticed nothing different about the three guards. It was typical of Curry; to him subordinates were only automatons to carry out his orders. "We were discussing a mad dog, Thane," Curry said. "Not the health of my men." He spoke to Bellam. "As I recall, rabies was a pre-Technogration plague, often fatal." "The bite of a rabid animal is invariably fatal, the death prolonged and painful," Bellam said. "There is no preventative or cure among the medical supplies on the ship. The dog must be killed at once, together with all other animals in the Outlander camp." "If the dog was mad, why hasn't it bitten any of the Outlanders," Thane asked Curry. "I suggest we keep it on a leash until until we know for sure." "The dog was smuggled aboard the ship in defiance of regulations," Curry said. "It would have been destroyed before had I known about it." He turned to Bellam, ignoring Thane. "The three of you will search the Outlander camp from end to end. Kill all animals and report to me the names of the owners." The three departed, to begin the search at the nearer end of the camp. Thane made no further objection. He knew the Outlanders well enough to know that they would have overheard the discussion on the hill and slipped the dog out through the guard lines before that discussion ended. Outlanders could be very clever in such matters -- the searchers would find no dog. There was satisfaction on Curry's face as he turned and with his two bodyguards started back up the hill to his camp. Thane watched him go, smiling a little. Curry was making the mistake that had been fatal for so many before him; he was taking it for granted too soon that he had won. A man came hurrying from the north guard line before Gurry had gone far. He called to Curry: "Sir, there is something you ought to know -- # Thane saw, with almost disbelief, that it was one of his own men: Gorman. Curry waited and when Gorman reached him he said: "When I was helping inspect the Outlander section of the ship for hidden weapons this evening I saw some small animals in storage compartment Thirteen. I think they were very young kittens. I would like to volunteer to go and kill them." Curry said something that a vagrant breeze made inaudible then his words came clear: " -- I'll send a detail to the ship as soon as the camp is searched. You will report to my guards now for orders and help them hunt for the dog." Gorman started back to meet the guards and Curry stood for a little while before he went on his way. Thane could imagine his feeling of pleased surprise and triumph. Thane called to Gorman as he passed some distance in front of him. "Were you injured in the attack?" he asked. "No," Gorman said. Then, with the same tense suspicion that Bellam had had he asked the same question: "Why do you ask?" "Why did you report to Curry instead of me?" The answer came quickly, mechanically, "The animals are in his ship and they must be killed. They may be mad." "Go help Curry's men," he said and watched Gorman go, trying to fit together the incidents that did not make sense. Herbivores had attacked without reason. There had fallen dead, without a blaster mark on them. The Outlander dog had fought nothing and almost attacked the guards. One of his own men had gone over to the other side. And there was a sudden strange urgency to kill all animals in camp. There was nothing he could do for the time being but wait for further developments so he waited. The moon came up, so swift in its retrograde orbit that its speed was visible and so near that it had the When it had lifted clear of the horizon it flooded the land with a cold silver light that made the searchlights of the guards unnecessary and revealed the camp with metallic light-and-shadow clarity. The search party was halfway through the camp, Gorman with them and Bellam in command. They were ransacking the possessions and temporary shelters of the Outlanders with swift efficiency, ignoring the protests of the women and their blasters leveled warningly on the men. They found the little girl. She was carrying her kitten ahead of them, a small, silent shadow in the moonlight, when Gorman saw her. He spoke to Bellam and Bellam's head jerked up. Then the two of them advanced on her. She tried to run when she realized they had seen the kitten, hugging it in her arms with the white cord trailing behind her. Bellarn overtook her and caught her by the shoulder, jerking her to a halt. He tore the kitten from her arms and flung it hard to the ground. It made a thin little scream of pain and the girl fought to reach it, her cry sobbing and frantic : "Don't hurt him -- " Gorman's blaster hissed and blue flame leaped from it. Incandescence enveloped the kitten and then there was nothing where it had been but a small black hole in the ground. Bellam and Gorman wheeled back, like mechanical men, to resume the search. The girl stood a moment, staring before her, saying something very low that sounded like, "Tommy... Tommy..." Then she stumbled to the little black hole and dropped to her knees beside it as though she hoped that somehow she might still find her kitten there. He looked away, strangely disturbed. He drummed his fingers restlessly on the butt of his holstered blaster then he turned again to go down into the Outlander camp. The moon was up and it was time he found the dog. Something had come out of the night with the monsters and perhaps she could tell him what it was. He could not yet believe she was mad. The dark haired woman stood by the fire, watching the little girl and the searchers with bitter, smouldering hatred. She faced him, her breath coming fast in her anger. "Her parents and her brother -- when the ship broke up -- she lost them all. Only her kitten was left to her." "Where is the dog?" he asked. "Find her!" "The dog -- where is she?" "Find her," she challenged again. "Find her and kill her -- if you can!" He stepped past her and went on his way. She had told him what he wanted to know: despite her attempts not to do so she had been unable to keep from glancing toward the ship. little girl. She was standing by the hole, small and barefooted in the grass, her hands holding the white cord that was black and charred on one end. She was crying, silently, as though too proud to let him see her break. After he had passed her the vision went with him for a little way; the terrible, helpless hatred and hurt in her eyes and the moonlight gleaming coldly on her tears. He looked back when he reached the ship. Gorman was coming, running, and the other three were turning back from the far end of the camp to hurry after Gorman. He looked toward Curry's camp and saw Curry watching him. Curry and his men moved toward him and there were six to make a rendezvous with him. The truce was over. He found the dog behind the farthest tail fin, leashed to a thorny bush and almost invisible in the shadows. She watched him as he stopped before her, her ears forward questioningly and her tail moving a little with tentative friendliness. He spoke to her and her reply was a low bark, her tail whipping with delight. She thought he had come to release her... He had known dogs well as a boy and he knew the one before him was not mad. He heard Gorman's feet plodding fast through the grass and he waited with his blaster in his hand. Gorman came around the tail fin, panting, his own blaster in his hand. The dog went rigid at the sight of him, the growl in her throat, and Gorman's blaster swung toward her. "Hold it !" he ordered. Gorman paused, and the dead eyes looked into his. "There the mad dog is -- we must kill it." "We can kill it later if it's mad. We'll watch it a while, first." The suspicion became like something almost tangible about Gorman and his blaster started the first movement toward Thane. "Why?" "I think it can see something -- " Gorman fired, so swiftly that he felt the heat of the beam even though he had been expecting it. He shot for the heart and Gorman collapsed before he could fire again. He lay still on the ground, the eyes that stared up into the sky no deader than when he had been alive. The dog was lunging against her leash, trying to get to him. Thane stepped closer and watched the grass beside Gorman's head. A patch of it the size of his hand suddenly bent down, as from an unseen weight, and then something struck his knee. He slapped at it as it darted up his leg and knocked it off; something that felt like a mass of cold, rubbery tentacles. He knew, then. He stepped back, his blaster swinging aimlessly. The thing would leap again, to reach his head as it had done with Gorman, and it was invisible. There was nothing but the moonlit grass to be seen. Perhaps it was behind him, already preparing to spring... The dog's snarling was a frenzied scream as she fought against her leash. He swung his blaster and its blue beam cut the leash in two. She flashed toward him, then up, her ears laid back, her eyes blazing slits and her teeth slashing at his throat. His blaster was in line with her chest and for a brief instant he had only to press the firing stud. He did something he had not done for thirty years ; he trusted his life to another being and did not fire. Cold tentacles whipped against his face and her teeth closed together beside his cheek with a vicious snap and gust of hot breath. She rebounded and held the thing on the ground between her paws as she tore at it; gagging a little, whining and snarling in fury and triumph. He squatted beside her and laid his hand on her, speaking to her soothingly. She calmed a little, though her chest still pounded with the beating of her heart, and he saw the thing she had killed. It was dead and slowly becoming visible as it changed to a color like pale milk. It resembled a huge, hairless spider. It was a parasite; a highly intelligent parasite that could take over the mind of its host as well as the body. The parasites had had only the forest monsters as hosts, before, but with the coming of the humans they had the opportunity for hosts of a far higher order. They possessed a means of locomotion but apparently it was limited in its duration or else they would not have needed to control the leaders of the monster bands and stage the attack that would carry them to the guard lines. The dog, with the acute sixth sense of some animals, could sense the hostile alienness of the things. She could see them -- apparently the vision range of dogs went a little farther beyond that of humans. So also would that of cats but the kitten had had no chance to show by its actions what it had seen. The dog had hated the changed men because they were alien things, no longer human. The thing that had been Bellam had used the knowledge stored in Bellam's mind to claim there was rabies in the camp and thereby enlist the support means of detecting the parasites. There was a pounding of feet beyond the ship as the zombies came. On the slope above him Curry was striding toward him, his bodyguards flanking him and the moonlight bright on his face. He stood with the dog beside him and watched them come to kill him. Only he and the dog knew of the parasites; if they were killed the way would be open for the parasites to infiltrate the camp. In the end the new world would hold only the walking dead, down to the last Outlander child. "Curry, " he called. He did not have to speak loudly in the still night air for Curry to hear him but Curry came on, his face hard, arrogant metal in the moonlight. "Give me one minute, Curry, to tell you what I found." Curry's reply was the order to his men. "The dog is with him. Kill them both." His blaster swung up as he spoke. Thane dropped, firing as he went down. Curry's arrogant face dissolved into nothing and his blaster flamed aimlessly into the ground at his feet. The blaster of the swiftest guard sent its beam hissing like a snake over Thane's head, then he went down as Curry had done, the other guard falling beside him with his first and only shot licking off into the moonlight. Then the zombies came around the tail fin, in a quick rush with their dead eyes staring and their blasters making a curtain of blue fire before them. The dog lunged at them and a blaster beam dipped down to meet her, Bellam -- his headless body was falling forward as Thane killed the zombie beside him. The blaster of the third one ripped its beam like a white-hot iron along Thane's ribs as he died. Then, within two heartbeats, it was over and the night was quiet again. He returned his blaster to its holster. The dog was limping from one zombie to the other, searching for parasites, her shoulder red with blood and staining the grass. She found none and he called her to him to look at her shoulder. It was not a serious wound but it was painful and bleeding fast and should be cared for. He took her around the ship, where the Outlander camp lay in view below. He looked again at the wound and she whimpered a little from the pain, gentle though his touch had been, then licked his hand in quick apology. "Your job is over for now," he said. He motioned toward the camp below, where the dark haired woman was waiting. "Home, girl -- go home." She left him and went running and limping down the hill where her hurts would be cared for. His side was burning and blood was like a warm, wet sheet down it. He made a temporary bandage of his shirt and then leaned wearily against the tail fin. It was all over. The nature of the parasites was known and everyone could be fitted with a thin metal helmet until they were completely eliminated. They did not seem to be numerous -- apparently there had been no more than ten or twelve among the scores of monsters. The dog would watch, and warn them if any more were in the vicinity. It was all over, with Gurry a motionless spot on the hillside above him and no one left to challenge him. He had come a long way from the Outlander boy on the high, cold prairie who had hated Technogration. He had been nineteen before he finally realized the futility of hating the unassailable power of Technogration and realized he must accept it and adapt to it. And then carve out a niche for himself with a ruthlessness greater than any of those around him. So he had fought his way up, trampling those who would have trampled him had they been a little stronger, each step another victory in his conquest of the system that had condemned him. And now -- the last victory. There was no one to challenge him; there could be no one under the rigid discipline of Technogration. The last victory. The security of Power to the end of his life. That was Technogration. D awn touched the sk y , softening the moon's hard light. As though the coming of day was a signal, the ship trembled and there was the whisper of dislodged soil as the tail fin lifted a fraction of an inch. The antigravity plates were almost exhausted -- the ship would fall within minutes. Down in the Outlander camp the children were gathering around the dog as the dark haired woman bandaged her shoulder. A voice came to him, treble and joyous, "Binkie is back -- Binkie is back..." The little girl sat to one side, so small and alone that he almost failed to see her. She watched the children crowd up to pet their dog but she did not move to join them. Only her hands moved, caressing the white cord that was charred on one end. He felt the triumph and satisfaction become like something turned bitter around the edges and draining away. Technogration was planning and man reached the top and no one dared oppose him; Technogration was control of a world and the seeds of an empire. And Technogration was a child crying in the cold moonlight, was a little black hole where a kitten had screamed out with pain, with a little girl's heart that had nothing left to hold but harsh and poignant memories and a piece of burnt cord. He ran to the boarding ramp, feeling the fiery lash of pain and hot flow of blood as the wound reopened, telling himself he was a fool who would probably die in the falling ship and would deserve it. He stood by the gray ashes of his fire, the Guardsman's combat helmet under his arm, and watched the little girl come alone up the hill. Someone had washed the tearstains from her face and she stopped before him with her head held high and defiant, trying not to let him see she was afraid of him and almost succeeding. "I sent for you, Lomie, to tell you I'm sorry about last night." He saw she did not believe him. Her face was like a little carving of cold, unforgiving stone and she did not answer him. He set the helmet down in the grass before her. Six tiny kittens lay inside it, red and white and gray fluffs of fur, their pink mouths questing hungrily. Her eyes widened with incredulous wonder. "Oh!" Then the suspicion came back and she stopped the quick forward step she had taken. "They haven't any mother and they're hungry," he said. She did not move. "They're yours, Lornie. To keep." "They're -- mine?" Then the doubt fled from her and she ran forward to gather them in her arms. He left her with her head bent down over the kittens in her lap, making soft little sounds of endearment to them, her face so radiant that there was no room left for hurt or hatred on it. Kennedy was coming, not yet knowing why he had been summoned nor that Technogration had died at dawn. He would not relinquish all his authority, of course. And he would have to remember to tell Kennedy that they were going to give him one of Binkie's pups. The companionship of an understanding dog might be comforting in the years to come, whenever he recalled the morning he had owned a world and a bare-footed girl had What Is Your Science I. Q.? you fare. Score # points for each correct answer; # is good, # very good, # and you're a genius. Answers are on page #. #. A diatom is a form of . #. The rate of the diffusion of gases with the temperature. #. What form of reproduction was characteristic of dinosaurs? #. One dyne acting through a distance of one centimeter is called an . #. The ratio of the number of solar eclipses to lunar eclipses is about . #. Does zinc or brass undergo a greater expansion in a one degree rise of temperature? #. Charles' Law states that the of a gas is directly proportional to its absolute temperature. #. Any object whose shadow is used to determine time is called a . #. Which of the following terms or concepts does not apply to lichens? -- fungus, perennial, seeds, symbiosis. #. Hyperon is a term used to refer to which of the following? -- subatomic particles, hormones, unit of measurement. #. What is the correct chemical name for marsh gas? #. What is the color of seaweeds found at the greatest ocean depths? #. Ozone is -- times heavier than oxygen. #. The pupa is the stage in the life of an insect which undergoes complete metamorphosis. #. What is the correct chemical name for saltpeter? #. The four elements, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen make up per cent of protoplasm. #. Mach one is equal to how many miles per hour? #. What is the term used to describe the common center of gravity of two revolving masses such as Earth and the moon? #. Electromagnetic waves of any wave length travel at a rate which is roughly equal to . This article , by an authority on the subject , reveals the folly of a recent proposal made by the United States to the United Nations. Read it carefully -- and with concern for the future. BY "Y" United Nations General Assembly released a four-page memorandum which had been presented to its Eleventh Session. The document bore the code number of AC. ##, and was marked Agenda Item # of the Eleventh Session, First Committee. On those four pages were contained proposals which called for "the prohibition of atomic, hydrogen, and other weapons of mass destruction..." Submitted to the General Assembly by the United States of America, this memorandum achieved distinction through its reference to weapons other than atomic and thermonuclear bombs. For the first time the United Nations was brought face to face with the question of intercontinental ballistic missiles and military satellites which were to orbit about the earth in extraterrestrial space. The specific wording of that proposal is vital to every American citizen. If it is adopted and an attempt is made to carry it out, it may well be the invitation to future sudden disaster of a magnitude difficult to conceive. Here, verbatim, is the weapons-control proposal now under study by the United Nations: "Scientists in many nations are now proceeding with efforts to propel objects through outer space and to travel in the distant areas beyond the earth's atmospheric envelope. The scope of these programmes is variously indicated in the terms: 'earth satellites', 'intercontinental missiles', 'long-range unmanned weapons', and 'space platforms'. No one can now predict with certainty what will develop from man's excursion in this new field. But it is clear that if this advance into the unknown is to be a blessing rather than a curse the efforts of all nations in this field need to be brought within the purview of a reliable armaments control system. The United States proposes that the first step toward the objective of assuring that future developments in outer space would be devoted exclusively to peaceful and scientific purposes would be to bring the testing of such objects under international inspection and participation " The sentiments expressed in this proposal are highly appealing. At first glance they appear to contain the seeds of an international inspection program which would guarantee us a freedom from sudden intercontinental missile attack. In one full swoop, it seems, we have discovered the panacea to rid us of the recurring nightmare of an unexpected and a devastating ballistic missile bombardment. It's a pretty sentiment, but it won't work. It has a fallacious premise which might well escape the attention of the diplomat, but which is obvious immediately to the missile engineer. For the substance of the disarmament proposal -- and the crux of its practicality -- is that there exists a real and distinct difference between a military missile and a scientific missile. This is not at all true. Fundamentally, the rocket which carries # pounds of instruments at a speed of # miles per hour to # miles above the earth is the same as the rocket moving in a ballistic trajectory which carries a #-pound atomic bomb at a speed of # miles per hour to a target # or # miles away. In the interest of scientific research, the rocket carries instruments along a vertical trajectory. In the interests of transforming a large city into a hideous radioactive wasteland, the instruments are replaced with a bomb, and the rocket tilts from a vertical climb into a ballistic arc. This is the first, but not at aU the only glaring weakness in a proposal based upon "international inspection". I need not call upon future developments to prove this point: the familiar rockets of the past and of the present will suffice. The most obvious example, of course, is the German V-# rocket. This was, from the start, a military program which had as its ultimate goal a rocket to carry a ton of high explosives into cities # miles distant. While this weapon degenerated into an appalling military failure, it represented sheer technological genius. With the war over and done with, the same military V-# rocket had its warhead replaced with instruments, and was used as a vehicle to further the cause of science. Now, let us turn the tables and consider a rocket designed from the outset as a research vehicle -- the familiar Viking. With only # of the power generated by the V-#'s motor, the slender Navy research rocket has carried nearly a thousand pounds of instruments # miles into space, reaching a maximum velocity of # miles per hour. Note that this speed is fully # miles per hour greater than that achieved by the V-#, although the power available is far less than found in the former German military weapon. The Viking is a highly sophisticated vehicle. Its delicate control system which utilizes a three-axis gyroscope, a magnetic amplifier autopilot (robot brain), and a gimbaled motor, endows it with phenomenal control during its flight. It is stablized in pitch and yaw movements, and its tendency to roll can be fully controlled. Most important, its attitude in flight can be controlled after the rocket motor has ceased to fire. This is indispensable to any ballistic rocket of high accurracy for it means that the entire rocket (after fuel is exhausted), or a separated warhead, may be directed accurately to a target. Control of the rocket, or warhead, is maintained during the descent from the peak of the trajectory above the atmosphere, and to a much finer degree as the rocket or warhead plunges through the thickening air toward its objective. Compared to the Viking, then, the V-# was a crude Chinese fire arrow. The Viking has constant, full-time control. Once the V-#'s motor ceased firing it was an uncontrollable empty shell tumbling haphazardly above the atmosphere. By replacing the instruments with an atomic bomb, the Viking rocket could be fired with devastating accuracy into targets up to # miles distant. But -- isn't it a research vehicle? A rocket dedicated to peaceful pursuits? Of course it is ! It is also a highly effective military weapon, if we choose to use it as such. A parallel to the Viking may be found in the Army's latest tactical weapon, the Redstone, developed by Dr. Wernher von Braun and his staff -- the same people who developed the V-#. It is most interesting to note that, like the Viking, the #-foot Redstone is controllable in movements of pitch, yaw, and roll. Even more pertinent is the fact that the warhead separates from the rocket shortly after the end of powered flight and that, through the use of small jet reactors which bleed off compressed air (exacdy as in Viking) the warhead may be directed to a target with impressive accuracy. You can replace the Viking's instruments with an atomic bomb warhead. You can replace the Redstone's atomic bomb warhead with instruments. Both will perform the same mission -- military or scientific. Let us discuss some other examples. The Project Vanguard satellite rocket has barely eleven tons total weight, and is a highly-sophisticated vehicle which carries an instrument payload of some # pounds. With this payload, Vanguard will reach velocities in excess of # miles per hour. This is far greater -- almost twice as much -- as that needed for a ballistic missile of intercontinental range. Note, however, that Vanguard is a minimum satellite effort. We could reduce its speed to # miles per hour, and increase the payload (eliminating its role as a satellite, of course), or, we could eliminate the third stage altogether, and replace the weight of the thirdstage solid-propellant rocket and the instrumented satellite with an atomic bomb equal to # tons high explosive force. And Vanguard enjoys a high degree of inflight control. Yet, Vanguard is a purely scientific venture. It is also an intercontinental missile carrying a minimal atomic bomb. There can be no distinction between the two -- military and scientific -- in respect to rockets. The only difference a missile enjoys is determined by the man who decides what its payload shall be -- bomb or instruments. Orbiter -- which in # called for a small satellite to be shot into an orbit at a speed between # and # miles per hour, was a pure research effort, to be conducted by the Office of Naval Research. The first-stage booster rocket was the giant Redstone, a military weapon. The second stage was a cluster of Loki rockets -- another military weapon. The third stage was a single Loki rocket -- a military weapon. What was the distinction? Absolutely none -- only the choice of payload distinguished the destroyer of a city from the scientific prober of outer space. The gist of the United States proposal to the United Nations is that a system of close inspection of the manufacture, testing, and firing of these large rockets, and of satellites which will lift hundreds and even thousands of pounds into orbits about the earth, will prevent the use of such rockets as weapons, by an intimate knowledge of their number, payload, and firing locations. Let us examine the first premise -- the manufacture and the number available of these rockets. It is obvious that in nations so large and diverse as the United States and the Soviet Union, large factories and even a complex of factories may be hidden from the eye of the public or, for that matter, from international inspection groups. No better example, of this is provided than in the monumental effort of the Manhattan Project during World War II.  Further, a factory to produce rocket motors and shells is not the immense undertaking which characterized the development and manufacture of the first crude atomic weapons. Motors may be produced in small plants, rocket shells and fuel tanks by any automotive or marine industry, instruments by any one of thousands of factories. The static testing of these devices may be accomplished far from civilized centers in the strictest secrecv. Indeed, an entire rocket industry may be spread throughout the industrial nation which is the United States, and never be revealed. The same applies, of course, to the Soviet Union. But even this subterfuge is totally unnecessary! For the research rocket to lift # pounds into an orbit is an intercontinental ballistic missile! The rocket to carry # pounds to a height of # miles is an intermediate range ballistic missile! The problem of payload substitution is no barrier. No inspection team can possibly keep track of every large rocket, or even of the thousands of rockets scattered around the land. It's simply too easy to keep the rockets from the sight of even an inspection team. What about launching sites? The long-range missiles may be fired from virtually anywhere . Mountains, deserts, open fields, deep forests, ships at sea, submarines -- any location will do. The United States is incredibly large; many parts of our country to this day have never been explored. The trackless expanse of Canada can swallow vast missile facilities -- "research rockets," if you will. In essence, then, any inspection program can be reduced to uselessness by any nation which chooses not to reveal its intentions to employ large rockets for military purposes. The latest advances in solid-propellant rockets only makes more critical the problem of discovering a well-planned move to blanket an enemy country within the span of a few hours with hydrogen bomb-carrying missiles. Any massive attack which uses the liquid-propellant rocket suffers a logistical problem of sorts in supplying the vast quantities of unstable fuel to fire those rockets. Of course, the production of these elements can be (and has been) established at remote locations, but it still presents a major inconvenience to a firing program. What of solid-propellant rockets -- great canisters of plastics and chemicals? Obviously these sources of power in their latest form more than suffice to meet the needs of intermediate and intercontinental range bombardment. The Navy's latest missile weapon, the Polaris , is nothing more than an oversized booster rocket using a solid-propellant fuel! And Polaris has a range greater than # miles -- which can be increased at any time simply by increasing the size of the chemicalplastic firing charge. The power and versatility of the new solid-propellant charges are incredible. They represent a major break-through in missile technology. The giant Redstone is powered with a # lb. thrust liquidpropellant motor which bums for # seconds. Today, however, there are solid-propellant charges which generate # lbs. thrust -- more than the combined power of # Redstone rockets! Moreover, the new solid-propellant charges are insensitive to temperatures; they may be fired in extreme heat or in extreme cold. They can generate their fantastic thrust for as great a duration as # seconds -- compare this to the Redstone's firing time of # seconds! They can be stored for long periods of time. They can be fired from the simplest of launchers, anywhere. They can be disguised with the greatest of ease. Their simplicity of manufacture, shipment, and storage; their ease of firing; their newly-acquired high degree of controllability; and their enormous performance and high payloads -- render an inspection program virtually worthless. No number of inspection teams, with all their probing and prying, could uncover a well-concealed and determined plan to fire hundreds, or even thousands, of these missiles. They could destroy a nation overnight. (Another factor, which is ignored, involves the human being. How extensive a prying search would our people voluntarily submit themselves to? How long would they suffer the indignity of representatives from, let us say, Russia, Pakistan, Poland, New Zealand, Argentina, probing into their affairs? For such inspection to be reliable, thousands of men would have to swarm about the nation looking into every conceivable facet of our industrial and personal lives! I know I wouldn't like it!) The fallacies of the inspection program are evident. Imagine, then, the precarious -- the fatal -- position in which our nation would be placed, were we to rely for our very existence upon the effectiveness of such an inspection scheme. Mutual arms inspection in this day and age, with the new heights of missile and weapons science already reached, is a premise which bodes only disaster. It contains not the slightest assurance of safety. Would you base the lives of your family and friends upon an assurance that our inspection teams had been able to search every nook and cranny of the vast land of the U.S.S.R., its satellites, the Siberian wastes, the Polar regions? How could any of us place ourselves in so untenable a position! Such inspection affords us no protection from the placement by saboteurs of atomic bombs in all our critical cities and industries. Nuclear weapons are small gadgets nowadays; they will fit into an overnight bag, into a typewriter case, into a bowling ball container. Sealed tight by the lightest of metal shields, they no longer emit penetrating radiation which can be detected by radiological instruments. They can be placed anywhere -- and only a screwdriver to pry open the carrying container, which can be disguised in any imaginable form, will divulge the nature of the contents. In preparing this report for IF magazine, I discussed this matter with several of my engineering colleagues. We deal in rockets. We know them intimately. There is no situation which we would rather see than an effective program in being to protect us, and the entire world, from the threat of mass attack with rockets carrying atomic and hydrogen bombs. But we must, above all, be realistic. If we are to rest our security upon the fallacious premise that an inspection and control program for rockets is effective, then we do no more than to openly court national suicide. This is bitter, inescapable truth. You cannot hide from the facts. Scientific rockets are intercontinental weapons. Long steel containers, disguised in a hundred ways, are intercontinental weapons. It is impossible to guarantee freedom from world violence through inspection teams prying into each other's national cupboards, by the same token that it is simple to use -- upon short notice -- the tools of science for the tools of war. I personally have no magic panacea for this dilemma which confronts us. I do not know the answer to world peace, and freedom from the appalling spectre of a savage hydrogen bomb war. But I do know that the hopes for peace which rest upon the inspection of facilities in each other's lands is suicidal. In closing, I am reminded to leave you with the words I heard at the dedication of the Mount Palomar Observatory. These words ring with truth; they should never be forgotten: "There is no segment of knowledge , whether in the physical or the social sciences , whether in medicine or economics or astrophysics or anthropology , which cannot ultimately he employed to the deterrent of mankind if that is what we deliberately elect to do with it. " Indeed , if the social sciences were developed as the physical sciences have been, we might have a weapon which, in unscrupulous hands, would be as deadly as the atomic bomb"... and how do you control # -- Zinc. # -- Volume. # -- Gnomen. # -- Seeds. # -- Subatomic particles. #I -- Methane. # -- Pituitary. # -- Red. # -- #J#. # -- Third. # -- Potassium nitrate. # -- #. # -- #. # -- Barycenter. # -- The speed of light. At your newsstand, or direct from IF Magazine Illustrated by Paul Orban The Birds and the Bees Which goes to prove that , in some instances , being heroic is easy! tall grass of the slopes, listening to the soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young, cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion. Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began. In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars. But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the ancient evils, wars, emergencies. "Sias! Sias -- # And they were upon me. That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were babbling in excitement. Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not been for the friendship of Xeon. "Sias , # they were saying, "the Maternite's gone . # I stared in amazement. "Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been -- # "Oh my gods!" Xeon shouted. "I tell you it's gone! Will you -- # Melia interrupted him quietly. "Xeon, will you lose all respect for the Elder ? # Then turned to me, and said calmly, "The watcher at the Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the warning, continued to rise, and then -- poof. Everything has evaporated in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone . # "All of it ? # I asked. "There is nothing left , # Melia insisted. "Can more be made? And if not, what will happen with no more children ? # "That is for the priests to say, not I , # I replied. In moments of emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I have never before been in a real emergency. A man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun -- maddugs nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I often wonder why -- but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city. They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young men do. As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an emergency. For a machine had failed! Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity. Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who knows the mysterious workings of the machines? I hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table. Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard. He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually smoothing his white beard -- of which he is excessively proud -- approached the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for those left were the most earnest and intelligent. "I would not bore you," he said, "with details of which only the gods are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be bom by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial." A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered around the Hall. "But now," he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with even a stutter here and there, "an unprecedented situation has arisen. Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Matemite Machine has actually failed." Cries of "Treason" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for the priest had I not been able to insure order. "That is not the worst," he cried, as if in defiance. "All the Prelife has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there will be no more children!" At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked, "Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the machines may produce more children for us? "As I have said," he replied, "give the machines but a bit of Prelife and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are helpless." Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to think. Rocsates leaned forward and asked, "Must there not -- must there not have been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it; and yet it came from somewhere." "Riddles are not called for," I answered severely. "Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?" he asked, in that irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. "Must there not, long ago, have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not even now -- should we discover it -- be available to us? I am reminded of the story of the animals of old -- " "I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates," I was forced to interrupt. "I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to do -- " The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I hastened to explain the legend of the animals. "It is said that many thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and although not mute, they could not speak." Rocsate's voice made itself heard. "It is true. Such creatures did indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films." "If it be so," I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, "and I would not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of men -- if it were so, then, what of it?" "May it not be," Rocsates put in, "that these animals had no machines to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then we would yet have these animals among us." "And how, then, did these animals reproduce?" I asked. "How, indeed? And is there not a legend -- admitted only a legend -- that says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced from within their own bodies?" At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of "Heresy" and "Treason", went on: "I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or disprove my words." "You wish to search the films -- " I began. "Not the films, Sias, but the books." Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient, and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest, being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost. Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race. And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse -- "Sias," he went on, "if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the only place where it may be found?" Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the Conclave adjourned. fore Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet. I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak. "Some of those among you are She's" he began. "And you know you are different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage, your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we do. Yet there is one other distinction. "Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what reason?" "Rocsates," I interrupted. "All this is fascinating, of course. But if you could be quick -- " "Of course," he replied. "In the course of my reading I have read many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have discovered : "That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines. Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!" These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also. "In fact," Rocsates added, sitting down, "this process of reproduction seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of overpopulation." Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the assembled overwhelmed him. "It seems," I shouted, "that there is a flaw in your logic." For if such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with no harm done. "For if people reproduced too often, why then this reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do, where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?" Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, "Perhaps the process of reproduction was of such a pleasure that the Conclave ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!" At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately, however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search. Now indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this they cannot do until they meet again. I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave, whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well. The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His appearance -- he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either. His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them. I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was on his feet and I gave way. "I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction," he began. "After many searchings, I came upon this -- " and he held forth the object he had carried in. "It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet." He dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes. There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's attention. He went on, speaking low. "The word 'Sex' is not defined, but it seems to mean..." His words trailed off. He was obviously unsure of how to continue. "I had better start at the beginning, I suppose," he said. "You see, once upon a time thee were birds and bees... When he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words, with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea. It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear to move. I cleared my throat. "Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved into nothingness?" "I do not think so," Rocsates replied after a while. "What to us is an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in some, at least, of the She's." We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality. "Then we must experiment," I said. "But whom could we ask to submit to such horror?" "I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers," Rocsates replied. "The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from dungeon. Are there any objections?" There were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would undergo such an ordeal for the City? "And who will be the partner?" I asked. "In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It shall be he," Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall and stood, noble and naked. Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it, but Xeon stepped forward. "My lords," he said, "would not better results be obtained were we to conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that the gods may help us?" His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table was indeed hard, and from Rocsate's description it seemed that Melia's position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft fields might be some slight help. I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields. walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries -- We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first stars. "They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described," I muttered. "They may indeed have succeeded," Rocsates replied. "There is mentioned a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately." "It doesn't matter," I said disconsolately. "Who could ask them to go through such an ordeal again?" And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me. Melia cast her eyes down, ( Continued on page # ) There was a man in our town, and he was wondrous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes. And when he saw what he had done, with all his might and main He jumped into another bush and scratched them in again. the boy waiting in his office when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. Dorffman looked as though he'd been running all night. There were dark pouches under his eyes; his heavy unshaven face seemed to sag at every crease. Lessing glanced sharply at his Field Director and sank down behind his desk with a sigh. "All right, Jack -- what's wrong?" "This kid is driving me nuts," said Dorffman through clenched teeth. "He's gone completely hayIllustrated by Paul Orban wire. Nobody's been able to get near him for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's leaving the Farm. I talk to him, I sweat him down, I do everything but tie him to the bed, and I waste my time. He's leaving the Farm. Period." "So you bring him down here," said Lessing sourly. "The worst place he could be, if something's really wrong." He looked across at the boy. "Tommy? Come over and sit down." There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin, with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape. The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear. Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently. "I don't want to go back to the ' Farm," said the boy. "Why?" "I just don't. I hate it there." "Are you frightened?" The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly. "Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?" "No. Oh, no!" "Then what?" Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off -- " He fingered the grey plastic helmet. "You think that would make you feel better?" "It would, I know it would." Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the monitor is for, don't you?" "It stops things from going out." "That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator. You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off, away from the Farm." The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there -- " The fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I never want to go back." "Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has been going on for three weeks ? # "I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern -- we see so much of that up there." "I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to deal with this morning -- the one who's threatening to upset the whole Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with. I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy downstairs." "Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman. "Certainly! And Jack -- in this case, be sure of it. If Tommy's in the trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands." Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book, and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled. Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm -- yet he hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And pow, as the book approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really get back to work again. The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the International Psionics Conference: Dear Dr. Lessing: In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October #th. A few remarks in discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order -- They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going -- but the book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good title -- concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right. And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and baffling new science. For they were floundering. When they were finally forced to recognize that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds, with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. Nothing worked, and everything worked too well. They were trying to study phenomena which made no sense, observing things that defied logic. Natural laws came crashing down about their ears as they stood sadly by and watched things happen which natural law said could never happen. They had never been in this jungle before, nor in any jungle remotely like it. The old rules didn't work here, the old methods of study failed. And the more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush became -- But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a theory to work by -- At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "A gentleman to see you," the girl said. "A Dr. Melrose. He's very impatient, sir." He shut off the scanner and said, "Send him in, please." tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark mocking eyes. He wore a threadbare sport coat and a slouch. He offered Lessing a bony hand, then flung himself into a chair as he stared about the office in awe. "Pm really overwhelmed," he said after a moment. "Within the stronghold of psionic research at last. And face to face with the Master in the trembling flesh!" Lessing frowned. "Dr. Melrose, I don't quite understand -- " "Oh, it's just that I'm impressed," the young man said airily. "Of course, I've seen old dried-up Authorities before -- but never before a brand spanking new one, just fresh out of the pupa, so to speak!" He touched his forehead in a gesture of reverence. "I bow before the Oracle. Speak, oh Motah, live forever! Cast a pearl at my feet!" "If you've come here to be insulting," Lessing said coldly, "you're just wasting time." He reached for the intercom switch. "I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply, "because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. And if you don't think I can do it, you're in for quite a dumping." Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me -- just what, exactly, do you want?" "I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of 'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental controls you keep talking about will actually bear. But mostly, I want to see just what in psionic hell you're so busy making yourself an Authority about." There was no laughter in the man's sharp brown eyes. "You couldn't touch me with a ten foot pole at this conference," snapped Lessing. The other man grinned. "Try me! We shook you up a little bit last year, but you didn't seem to get the idea." "Last year was different." Lessing scowled. "As for our 'fairy tale', we happen to have a staggering body of evidence that says that it's true." "If the papers you've already published are a preview, we think it's false as Satan." "And our controls are above suspicion." "So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said Melrose. "We've done a lot of work on it, too." "Oh, yes -- I've heard about your work. Not bad, really. A little misdirected, is all." "According to your Theory, that is." "Wildly unorthodox approach to psionics -- but at least you're energetic enough." "We haven't been energetic enough to find an orthodox approach that got us anywhere. We doubt if you have, either. But maybe we're all wrong." Melrose grinned unpleasantly. "We're not unreasonable, your Majesty. We just ask to be shown. If you dare, that is." Lessing slammed his fist down on the desk angrily. "Have you got the day to take a trip?" 'Tve got 'til New Year." Lessing shouted for his girl. "Get Dorffman up here. We're going to the Farm this afternoon." The girl nodded, then hesitated. "But what about your lunch?" "Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us..." Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the rapidtransit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside. "What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along through the afternoon sun. "I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating." Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of beating the bushes with this -- " He broke off to glare at young Melrose. Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here." "It's -- unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped. "Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here." "Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis." "Of course, you're sure you were measuring something ." "Oh, yes. We certainly were." "Yet you said that you didn't know what." "That's right," said Lessing. "We don't." "And you don't know why your instruments measure whatever they're measuring." The Chicago man's face was thoughtful. "In fact, you can't really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at all. It's not inconceivable that the children might be measuring the instruments , eh?" Lessing blinked. "It's conceivable." "Mmmm," said Melrose. "Sounds like a real firm foundation to build a theory on." "Why not?" Lessing growled. "It wouldn't be the first time the tail wagged the dog. The psychiatrists never would have gotten out of their rut if somebody hadn't gotten smart and realized that one of their new drugs worked better in combatting schizophrenia when the doctor took the medicine instead of the patient. That was quite a wall to climb." "Yes, wasn't it," mused Melrose, scratching his bony jaw. "Only took them seventy years to climb it, thanks to a certain man's theories. I wonder how long it'll take psionics to crawl out of the pit you're digging for it?" "We're not digging any pit," Lessing exploded angrily. "We're exploring -- nothing more. A phenomenon exists. We've known that, one way or another, for centuries. The fact that it doesn't seem to be bound by the same sort of natural law we've observed elsewhere doesn't mean that it isn't governed by natural law. But how can we define the law? How can we define the limits of the phenomenon, for that matter? We can't work in the dark forever -- we've got to have a working hypothesis to guide us." "So you dreamed up this 'tadpole' idea," said Melrose sourly. "For a working hypothesis -- yes. We've known for a long time that every human being has extrasensory potential to one degree or another. Not just a few here and there -- every single one. It's a differentiating quality of the human mind. Just as the ability to think logically in a crisis instead of giving way to panic is a differentiating quality." "Fine," said Melrose. "Great. We can't prove that, of course, but I'll play along." Lessing glared at him. "When we began studying this psi-potential, we found out some curious things. For one thing, it seemed to be immensely more powerful and active in infants and children than in adults. Somewhere along the line as a child grows up, something happens. We don't know what. We do know that the child's psi-potential gradually withdraws deeper and deeper into his mind, burying itself farther and farther out of reach, just the way a tadpole's tail is absorbed deeper and deeper into the growing frog until there just isn't any tail any more." Lessing paused, packing tobacco into his pipe. "That's why we have the Farm -- to try to discover why. What forces that potential underground? What buries it so deeply that adult human beings can't get at it any more?" "And you think you have an answer," said Melrose. "We think we might be near an answer. We have a theory that explains the available data." The shuttle car bounced sharply as it left the highway automatics. Dorffman took the controls. In a few moments they were skimming through the high white gates of the Farm, slowing down at the entrance to a long, low building. "All right, young man -- come along," said Lessing. "I think we can show you our answer." donned the close-fitting psionic monitors required of all personnel at the Farm. They were of a hard grey plastic material, with a network of wiring buried in the substance, connected to a simple pocket-sized power source. "The major problem," Lessing said, "has been to shield the children from any external psionic stimuli, except those we wished to expose them to. Our goal is a perfectly controlled psi environment. The monitors are quite effective -- a simple Renwick scrambler screen." "It blocks off all types of psi activity?" asked Melrose. "As far as we can measure, yes." "Which may not be very far." Jack Dorffman burst in: "What Dr. Lessing is saying is that they seem effective for our purposes." "But you don't know why," added Melrose. "All right, we don't know why. Nobody knows why a Renwick screen works -- why blame us?" They were walking down the main corridor and out through an open areaway. Behind the buildings was a broad playground. A baseball game was in progress in one corner; across the field a group of swings, slides, ring bars and other playground paraphernalia was in heavy use. The place was teeming with youngsters, all shouting in a fury of busy activity. Occasionally a helmeted supervisor hurried by; one waved to them as she rescued a four-year-old from the parallel bars. They crossed into the next building, where classes were in progress. "Some of our children are here only briefly," Lessing explained as they walked along, "and some have been here for years. "We maintain a topranking curriculum -- your idea of a 'country day school' wasn't so far afield at that -- with scholarships supported by Hoffman Center funds. Other children come to us -- foundlings, desertees, children from broken homes, children of all ages from infancy on. Sometimes they stay until they have reached college age, or go on to jobs. As far as psionics research is concerned, we are not trying to be teachers. We are strictly observers. We try to place the youngsters in positions where they can develope what potential they have -- without the presence of external psionic influences they would normally be subject to. The results have been remarkable." He led them into a long, narrow room with chairs and ash trays, facing a wide grey glass wall. The room fell into darkness, and through the grey glass they could see three children, about four years old, playing in a large room. "They're perfectly insulated from us," said Lessing. "A variety of recording instruments are working. And before you ask, Dr. Melrose, they are all empirical instruments, and they would all defy any engineer's attempts to determine what makes them go. We don't know what makes them go, and we don't care -- they go. That's all we need. Like that one, for instance -- " In the corner a flat screen was flickering, emitting a pale green fluorescent light. It hung from the wall by two plastic rods which penetrated into the children's room. There was no sign of a switch, nor a power source. As the children moved about, the screen flickered. Below it, a recording-tape clicked along in little spurts and starts of activity. "What are they doing?" Melrose asked after watching the children a few moments. "Those three seem to work as a team, somehow. Each one, individually, had a fairly constant recordable psi potential of about seventeen on the arbitrary scale we find useful here. Any two of them scale in at thirty-four to thirty-six. Put the three together and they operate somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred on the same scale." Lessing smiled. "This is an isolated phenomenon -- it doesn't hold for any other three children on the Farm. Nor did we make any effort to place them together -- they drew each other like magnets. One of our workers spent two weeks trying to find out why the instruments weren't right. It wasn't the instruments, of course." Lessing nodded to an attendant, and peered around at Melrose. "Now, I want you to watch this very closely." He opened a door and walked into the room with the children. The fluorescent screen continued to flicker as the children ran to Lessing. He inspected the block tower they were building, and stooped down to talk to them, his lips moving soundlessly behind the observation wall. The children laughed and jabbered, apparently intrigued by the game he was proposing. He walked to the table and tapped the bottom block in the tower with his thumb. The tower quivered, and the screen blazed out with green light, but the tower stood. Carefully Lessing jogged all the foundation blocks Qut of place until the tower hung in midair, clearly unsupported. The children watched it closely, and the foundation blocks inched still further out of place .  . Then, quite casually, Lessing lifted off his monitor. The children continued staring at the tower as the screen gave three or four violent bursts of green fire and went dark. The block tower fell with a crash. Moments later Lessing was back in the observation room, leaving the children busily putting the tower back together. There was a little smile on his lips as he saw Melrose's face. "Perhaps you're beginning to see what I'm driving at," he said slowly. "Yes," said Melrose. "I think I'm beginning to see." He scratched his jaw. "You think that it's adult psicontact that drives the child's potential underground -- that somehow adult contact acts like a damper, a sort of colossal candlesnuffer." "That's what I think," said Lessing. "How do you know those children didn't make you take off your monitor?" Lessing blinked. "Why should they?" "Maybe they enjoy the crash when the blocks fall down." "But that wouldn't make any difference, would it? The blocks still fall down." Melrose paced down the narrow room. "This is very good," he said suddenly, his voice earnest. "You have fine facilities here, good workers. And in spite of my flippancy, Dr. Lessing, I have never imagined for a moment that you were not an acute observer and a careful, highly imaginative worker. But suppose I told you, in perfect faith, that we have data that flatly contradicts everything you've told me today. Reproducible data, utterly incompatable with yours. What would you say to that?" "I'd say you were wrong," said Lessing. "You couldn't have such data. According to the things I am certain are true, what you're saying is sheer nonsense." "And you'd express that opinion in a professional meeting?" "I would." "And as an Authority on psionic behavior patterns," said Melrose slowly, "you would kill us then and there. You would strangle us professionally, discredit anything we did, cut us off cold." The tall man turned on him fiercely. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see what danger you're in? If you publish ydur book now, you will become an Authority in a field where the most devastating thing that could possibly happen would be -- the appearance of an Authority ." Lessing and Dorffman rode back to the Hoffman Center in grim silence. At first Lessing pretended to work; finally he snapped off the tape recorder in disgust and stared out the shuttle-car window. Melrose had gone on to Idlewild to catch a jet back to Chicago. It was a relief to see him go, Lessing thought, and tried to force the thin, angry man firmly out of his mind. But somehow Melrose wouldn't force. "Stop worrying about it," Dorffman urged. "He's a crackpot. He's crawled way out on a limb, and now he's afraid your theory is going to cut it off under him. Well, that's his worry, not yours." Dorffman's face was intense. "Scientifically, you're on unshakeable ground. Every great researcher has people like Melrose sniping at him. You just have to throw them off and keep going." Lessing shook his head. "Maybe. But this field of work is different from any other, Jack. It doesn't follow the rules. Maybe scientific grounds aren't right at all, in this case." Dorffman snorted. "Surely there's nothing wrong with theorizing -- " "He wasn't objecting to the theory. He's afraid of what happens after the theory." "So it seems. But why?" "Have you ever considered what makes a man an Authority?" "He knows more about his field than anybody else does." "He seems to, you mean. And therefore, anything he says about it carries more weight than what anybody else says. Other workers follow his lead. He developes ideas, formulates theories -- and then defends them for all he # s worth " "But why shouldn't he?" "Because a man can't fight for his life and reputation and still keep his objectivity," said Lessing. "And what if he just happens to be wrong? Once he's an Authority the question of what's right and what's wrong gets lost in the shuffle. It's what he says that counts." "But we know you're right," Dorffman protested. "Do we?" "Of course we do! Look at our work! Look at what we've seen on the Farm." "Yes, I know." Lessing's voice was weary. "But first I think we'd better look at Tommy Gilman, and the quicker we look, the better -- " A nurse greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. "We called you at the Farm, but you'd already left. The boy -- " She broke off helplessly. "He's sick, Doctor. He's sicker than we ever imagined." "What happened?" "Nothing exactly -- happened. I don't quite know how to describe it." She hurried them down the corridor and opened a door into a large children's playroom. "See what you think." The boy sat stolidly in the comer of the room. He looked up as they came in, but there was no flicker of recognition or pleasure on his pale face. The monitor helmet was still on his head. He just sat there, gripping a toy fire engine tightly in his hands. Lessing crossed the room swiftly. "Tommy," he said. The boy didn't even look at him. He stared stupidly at the fire engine. "Tommy!" Lessing reached out for the toy. The boy drew back in terror, clutching it to his chest. "Go away," he choked. "Go away, go away -- " When Lessing persisted the boy bent over swiftly and bit him hard on the hand. Lessing sat down on the table. "Tommy, listen to me." His voice was gentle. "I won't try to take it again. I promise." "Go away." "Do you know who I am?" Tommy's eyes shifted haltingly to Lessing's face. He nodded. "Go away." "Why are you afraid, Tommy?" "I hurt. My head hurts. I hurt all over. Go away." "Why do you hurt?" "I -- can't get it -- off," the boy said. The monitor , Lessing thought suddenly. Something had suddenly gone horribly wrong -- could the boy really be sensing the source of the trouble? Lessing felt a cold knot gather in the pit of his stomach. He knew what happened when adult psi-contact struck a psihigh youngster's mind. He had seen it a hundred times at the Farm. But even more -- he had felt it in his own mind, bursting from the child. Like a violent physical blow, the hate and fear and suspicion and cruelty buried and repressed in the adult mind, crushing suddenly into the raw receptors of the child's mind like a smothering fog -- it was a fearful thing. A healthy youngster could survive it, even though the scar remained. But this youngster was sick -- And yet an animal instictively seeks its own protection . With trembling fingers Lessing reached out and opened the baffle-snap on the monitor. "Take it off, Tommy," he whispered. The boy blinked in amazement, and pulled the grey helmet from his head. Lessing felt the familiar prickly feeling run down his scalp as the boy stared at him. He could feel deep in his own mind the cold chill of terror radiating from the boy. Then, suddenly, it began to fade. A sense of warmth -- peace and security and comfort -- swept in as the fear faded from the boy's face. The fire engine clattered to the floor. later, punching the data cards with greatest care, filing them through the machines for the basic processing and classification that alf their data underwent. It was late that night when they had the report back in their hands. Dorffman stared at it angrily. "It's obviously wrong," he grated. "It doesn't fit. Dave, it doesn't agree with anything we've observed before. There must be an error." "Of course," said Lessing. "According to the theory. The theory says that adult psi-contact is deadly to the growing child. It smothers their potential through repeated contact until it dries up completely. We've proved that, haven't we? Time after time. Everything goes according to the theory -- except Tommy. But Tommy's psi-potential was drying up there on the Farm, until the distortion was threatening the balance of his mind. Then he made an adult contact, and we saw how he bloomed." Lessing sank down to his desk wearily. "What are we going to do, Jack? Formulate a separate theory for Tommy?" "Of course not," said Dorffman. "The instruments were wrong. Somehow we misread the data -- " "Didn't you see his face?" Lessing burst out. "Didn't you see how he acted?" What do you want with an instrument reading?" He shook his head. "It's no good, Jack. Something different happened here, something we'd never counted on. It's something the theory just doesn't allow for." They sat silently for a while. Then Dorffman said: "What are you going to do?' "I don't know," said Lessing. "Maybe when we fell into this bramble bush we blinded ourselves with the urge to classify -- to line everything up in neat rows like pins in a paper. Maybe we were so blind we missed the path altogether." "But the book is due! The Conference speech -- " "I think we'll make some changes in the book," Lessing said slowly. "It'll be costly -- but it might even be fun. It's a pretty dry, logical presentation of ideas, as it stands. Very austere and authoritarian. But a few revisions could change all that -- " He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. "How about it, Jack? Do we have nerve enough to be laughed at? Do you think we could stand a little discredit, making silly asses of ourselves? Because when I finish this book, we'll be laughed out of existence. There won't be any Authority in psionics for a while -- and maybe that way one of the lads who's really sniffing out the trail will get somebody to listen to him! "Get a pad, get a pencil! We've got work to do. And when we finish, I think we'll send a carbon copy out Chicago way. Might even persuade that puppy out there to come here and work for me -- " His orders were final. And how could these terrified souls know their fate was his own? i jets screamed overhead, climbing for much needed altitude as they headed out to sea. The Captain took off his steel helmet and looked up at the thunderous roar just before he leaped from the still movjng jeep. When his feet touched the ground he moved quickly, shouting orders at the olive-drab truck convoy he had been leading. He pointed his finger at the side of Illustrated by Ed Emsh the road where he wanted the small stuff. The "duce and a half's" he directed to the opposite side of the road. Then he put his helmet back on. He watched as the troops quickly dismounted and assembled. He lighted a cigarette while he waited for his three officers. Only then did he look at the Bridge. The massive steel structure spanning the river was six lanes wide, cantilever style with curved upper and lower cords. The Bridge looked trim and new. It was the Captain's responsibility to see that it stayed way. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and reached inside the rear of the jeep and checked his radio set. It was set on K channel, #. He expected no messages, except in an emergency. While he had the time he took a yellow sheet of paper out of his pocket and read the words pasted on it for the fourth time. Somehow they never changed; they always read the same. And each time he got a sinking sensation in his stomach when he read them. Captain Alfred Lowary put the yellow paper away quickly when the three junior officers of the Battery reported. He returned their salutes in a lazy sort of way. He took off his helmet again. "The orders are the same as briefing," he said. "Lieutenant Kastner will take the third platoon across the river to the West side. The second platoon, Lieutenant Tudor, will move North of the entrance on this side and take up position in reserve. Lieutenant Meyers will set up defense on this side." He inhaled on the cigarette and looked at Tudor. "Place your machine guns carefully. I want a cross-fire on that slight bend on the road down there." Tudor nodded. The Captain pinpointed Meyers with his eyes. "You've got the 'hotspot'... Just remember... No one gets on the Bridge!" "But -- " Meyers began. "No buts. I said no one. Understand?" Meyers' "Yes, sir," was barely audible. "Any questions?" the Captain asked. They shook their heads negative, except Meyers. He said, "Just one thing, Captain." "What's that, Lieutenant?" Lowary asked. "Are we supposed to shoot our own people?" Lowary's face grew hard. "If we have to, Lieutenant," he said. "If we have to." The tone of his voice told them that he wanted to avoid any discussion on the subject. There was silence. Finally Lowary said, "That's it, then. Let's move." The Officers saluted and began to move off. Tudor took two steps, then halted and returned. "How much time do you think is left, Captain?" he asked. Lowary took in the man's square face, the set of his jaw. Tudor was ex-combat, infantry during the last war. "Who knows, Lieutenant! Minutes... or hours. It all depends on how strong the enemy is, how fast they're moving, if they are sending a boy to do a man's job." Tudor looked down the river in the direction of the City some thirty miles away. He seemed to have difficulty finding words. Lowary knew what he was thinking and it made him feel weak and inadequate. Lowary said softly, "We knew it would come some day, didn't we, Tudor?" Tudor faced him. "I guess we did..." he hesitated. "Well?" "I just didn't think I would draw this kind of duty. I don't mind fighting, I've had my share. But I guess I feel as Meyers does. This will be something new for me, shooting my own people." "Perhaps we won't have to," Lowary said. Tudor stepped back a pace and gave him a salute. "You don't believe that any more than I do, Captain." He began to walk away swiftly. Lowary watched him go and he wondered how many men in the Battery were thinking the same thing? It could create a serious psychological block. Damn it. It was bothering him too. But he could do it if he had to. He knew he could. He climbed into his jeep and adjusted the radio squelch button, cutting down on the steady crackling noise. He found himself repeating under his breath. I can do it be cause I know I have to. I can do it because... He jammed down on the starter and shoved the gearshift into first. He had to force the thoughts from his mind. He had orders to follow; orders left no room for personal feelings. Yet he knew the yellow paper in his pocket was mocking him. The jeep was opposite the bridge entrance when he halted it momentarily. Lieutenant Meyers was busy talking to a machine-gunner named Morgan. As Lowary recalled, from what little he had seen during the three weeks he had been commanding the outfit since his transfer from the middle west, Morgan was a conscientious type of soldier. Meyers was making a good choice for such a delicate position. He moved on. The tires made a low singing sound when he rolled on the bridge, heavy tread pounding on steel grating. A sign attached to an upright girder caught his eye. He smiled sardonically and he wondered what the author had in mind when he phrased it. The Captain shook his head. When he got to the center of the bridge he halted the jeep. He got out and crossed over the lanes to the south railing and looked down at the gray water. It looks muddy, he thought. A wide, muddy snake winding its way down to the City. He looked at the horizon. He couldn't see the City but he knew it was there. He wondered for how long! It will light up like a torch, he thought. One huge sheet of red and orange flame a mile high, like the gates of hell swinging open. Then there would be nothing but a towering mushroom of black smoke to mark the spot of the largest City in the world. He found his hand clutching something in his pocket. He took it out and looked at it. Then, bitterly, he put it away. It was the yellow sheet of paper again. To read it would be torture. Lowary ran the zipper up on his loose fitting green field jacket as a sudden chill took him. He blamed it on the nonexistent wind as he lighted another cigarette. The sound of a motor caused him to look up. He narrowed his eyes, looking at the far end of the bridge. It was Lieutenant Kastner; he could tell by the foot resting carelessly on the outside fender. Kastner drove as though he were resting in an easy chair with his feet nestled on a hassock. Kastner swung out of the jeep loosely, with the grace of a well coordinated athlete. A wide grin split his face. "Just on my way to report to you, Captain. Everything is set up on my side." Lowary smiled. He had been on his way to check Kastner. Lowary took in the blond man's well proportioned body. Kastner looked like the recruit ad on a "wild-blueyonder" poster. Kastner's eyes left Lowary's face. The Captain followed the other's gaze upward. Two long, white vapor trails were cutting across the blue sky. "They're ours," Kastner said. "They're heading North by East, toward the ocean." He looked at Lowary. "Maybe they can stop it before it starts!" "Maybe," the Captain said softly. In his heart he knew it was only a faint hope. The Air Force never tried to conceal the fact that some of the enemy could be expected to sneak through in the event of attack. "I don't think we'll have much trouble at our end of the bridge, Captain. I don't think anyone will be fighting to go in that direction," he nodded down the river, in the direction of the City. "I guess not," Lowary said absently. "This waiting can be murder," Kastner said. "It just doesn't seem right, waiting to be clobbered. Sitting here until they drop one down our throats before we can fight back." Lowary smiled bitterly. "It's always been that way, Kastner. I suppose it always will be." Lowary squashed the cigarette butt with his heel. "How's Meyers taking all this?" Kastner asked. Lowary raised his eyebrows. "His sister works in the City," Kastner went on. "They're pretty close." "I didn't know," Lowary replied. He thought, perhaps I should change assignments. Kastner wouldn't picture every woman who might try to break through as his sister. It would make it easier on Meyers. "You're from Dakota, aren't you, Captain?" "I was stationed there for three years before this assignment. This is my first trip East." "Married?" "Wife... son and daughter. The girl is eight, the boy twelve." The picture of blond, thin, lovable little Susan came to his mind. And Ronnie, with the freshly found sense of humor, who wanted to be a writer when he grew up... if he grew up. He hadn't seen them or Dot since the transfer came unexpectedly. He missed them, badly. He hadn't realized how much until just this minute. "Did you bring your family with you?" Kastner asked. Lowary shook his head. "No. Dot stayed behind to sell some of the furniture, and to let the children finish school. It's no good changing schools in the middle of a semester." "I guess it isn't. I wouldn't know though. I'm single." The sound of rubber pounding on the steel grating caused them both to turn. The Captain expected to see an Army ## ton truck. The truck wasn't olive-drab, it was the side of the closed cabin in red letters. Kastner moved to the opposite lane on a fast run. He waved his arms. "What are you doing on the bridge?" he shouted. "It's closed to civilians." The driver stuck his balding head out of the window. His face was dirty and tired. "The Lieutenant back there said it was O.K." He looked at Lowary. "I'm only going to Kingston, Captain." Lowary turned to Kastner. "Check this guy. I'll be back." He jumped into his jeep and wheeled it around. This time he kept the accelerator to the floor. Meyers was a fool! He found the tall, thin officer leaning on the rail, looking down the river toward the City. He leaped from the jeep, reached Meyers with two strides. "If you have to do that, Lieutenant, do it where the troops can't see you. It's bad for morale," he said bitterly. Meyers spun around quickly. "You had orders to keep this bridge closed, Lieutenant. Why didn't you?" Meyers opened his mouth, then shut it without saying a word. "Speak up," Lowary raised his voice. Meyers' eyes met his. "You wouldn't understand, Captain," Meyers said evenly. "Try me," Lowary fought to keep his voice down. "You seem to forget that these are our people... not the enemy. He was just a poor working slob who wanted to get home to be with his wife and kids. To him it might be his last day on earth. Who are we to deny that?" Lowary said nothing. Meyers said, "You're not worrying, your family is safe out in the Middle West. We know people around here. They aren't just shadows. We should be helping them." The Captain took off his helmet He reached for another cigarette. Finally he said, "Do you realize how important this bridge is if there is an attack? It connects one of the routes designated for the relief of the City if it is hit. You were too young for the last war so you probably don't realize what happens when wanderers, escapees hit the road. They can tie it up like a knot so that no one moves. They have other routes they can use. This one is closed. We've got to keep it for emergency use." "What's one truck?" Meyers said. "One truck, loaded with explosives could park in the middle of this huge erector set and blow it sky high. All the Reds aren't in those planes the Coastal Defense sighted. We have some right here, waiting." "But he wasn't a Red. He lives in Kingston!" Meyers protested. "How do you know?" Lowary said simply. He didn't wait for Meyers' answer, he turned and began to walk away. "Captain!" Lowary turned at the sound of Tudor's heavy voice. The stocky officer was waving at him from up the road, pumping his arm with clenched fist up and down, the signal for double time. Lowary took off on the run. He could hear Meyers' feet pounding behind him. Tudor was standing beside a young corporal looking down the steep, rocky embankment at one of the concrete piers supporting the bridge. A small figure was making its way toward it. "It looks like one of our boy's decided to go over the hill," Tudor said tersely. Lowary faced the young corporal. "Unsling that rifle, son, and see if you can pick him off." Lowary felt Tudor's hand on his arm. "There's no need for that. Captain. I'll send a squad down to pick him up." Lowary glanced down at the hand. Tudor removed it. He spoke directly to the corporal, "I said see if you can pick him off!" The soldier hesitated. Lowary knew why. The figure down there was in uniform, probably a friend. The Captain snatched the rifle from the corporal's frozen fingers. He slapped the stock against his own shoulder. "He's probably just a scared, bewildered kid," Meyers cut in quickly"If I'm wrong, I'll apologize," Lowary said as he sighted down the barrel. He planted his feet firmly and squeezed. The stock slammed him in the shoulder. He cursed, then he squeezed again. This time he remembered to hold his breath. The figure slumped, fell off the concrete, into the water. Lowary juggled the gun once by its balance, then he handed it back to the corporal who was staring dully at the small figure floating and bobbing in the water. "You can send that squad down to get him now, if you want, Lieutenant Tudor," he said before he turned away. have explained, but there wasn't time. Decisions had to be made quickly, right or wrong. Perhaps the kid down there was afraid, just running away. But he couldn't take that chance. There was no reason to believe that the military didn't have some subversive elements within; the Reds had infiltered everywhere else. And what better time for the rats to come out of their nests, then now, when the country was on their target list! One man could be as dangerous as a Red Division. Lowary climbed into his jeep conscious of how tired he felt. I'm getting old, he thought. He leaned back and took off his helmet and looked up at the clear blue sky, letting the breeze fan his face. A high, distant speck caught his eye. It was trailed by a four-forked stream of white. He felt his stomach grow cold, as he stared in fascination at the four vapor streams that could only be one thing; a multi-engine bomber. It was coming in from the Northwest, heading for the City. The enemy had slipped one through the defense. He tore his eyes from the sky. Perhaps no one else had seen it. It would be better if they never did. And so it comes, he thought. The end of an age... back to the sticks and stones for good. He drew in on a new cigarette, thinking of Dorothy and Susan and Ronnie. He became conscious of Meyers standing beside him. He wished he would go away, there was so little time left to daydream. He wanted to be alone. "The guard down the road says there is a pile-up of civilian cars that demand to go across." Lowary looked up. "Send some of the reserve platoon down and forcfc them back. You know the orders!" "Look, Captain. We've got maybe ten... fifteen minutes left. What harm will it do?" Lowary felt weary. Meyers hadn't failed to see the bomber, neither had the people in the cars. They knew it was the beginning of the end. Meyers and Tudor, and the others were wearing him down. He felt like giving them their damn bridge. It would be easy, so final. He took the yellow paper out of his pocket and glanced at the pasted letters again. When he was finished he knew what he had to do. He had no choice. Lowary handed the paper to Meyers. "I'll take care of things down the road. Perhaps you might like to read this while I'm gone," he said. The Lieutenant looked puzzled when Lowary drove away. The traffic was jammed just as Meyers said it was. The Sergeant in command of the squad had set up a small road block. A machine-gunner, Morgan, was sitting behind a .# Cal. looking down the barrel. Lowary drove past them, up to the lead car. As he threw his legs out over the side of the jeep he looked up quickly. The single multi-engine bomber was overhead, still heading South. In the distance he could see new vapor streams, much smaller, much faster. The Interceptor Command was giving chase. Lowary could see that they would be too late to save the City. "Please let us through, Captain!" a woman near him asked. She was slender, she had been crying. Lowary felt so helpless. He said, "There is nothing I can do. This bridge must be kept open for relief purposes. It is out of my hands." "You're a murderer. You're keeping us here to be killed." "There were other routes open. You should have taken -- " The woman flung herself at him, beating at his chest with her thin hands. "I want to go home," she screamed. Lowary took her by the wrists and held her off gently. God give me strength, he prayed. It would be so easy to let her through, along with the others. They would be safe, perhaps. But he would be running the risk of losing the bridge. Everyone in the City wouldn't die, some would survive the hell blast. They would need medical attention, supplies, food and water. They deserved that chance. A man's heavy voice carried above the shouts. "We can get through if we all try it at the same time. He can't shoot us... he's in the line of fire." Lowary hadn't realized it, but it was true. The machine-gunners were sighting down his back. He shouted above the rising din, "It makes no difference, they'll shoot if they have to." "It's a lie," a woman shouted. Lowary heard the whine of a powerful motor start up. "Well, I'm for giving it a try," he heard someone far back say. Lowary turned and faced the gunners. He could see Morgan's strained face. The kid looked so young, yet he was the only one Lowary felt he could depend on. "If anything moves down here I want you to open fire," he called to Morgan. "Understand?" Morgan's helmet nodded slowly. Lowary turned around. The woman seemed undecided. Lowary spoke softly. "Why don't you get down off the road, into that gully? You'll be safe there." The woman's mouth worked up and down but no words came out. Her face was white and haggard. The radio in Lowary's jeep began a familiar crackling sound as someone on the same frequency pressed a button on a handset. Lowary was afraid to move. He could easily start a stampede if the civilians thought he was making the move just to get out of the line of sight of the machine gunners. Slowly, he raised his hand until it was near the .# resting in the holster clipped to his web belt. He waited. Lowary edged backwards, still facing the crowd. The woman was crying now. Down the line of cars he could hear the high powered motor being gunned as it was being maneuvered out of the line. Soon it would make the attempt of running down Morgan and the others. It wouldn't stand a chance, but the others might succeed in the confusion that would follow. He made the decision then. Deliberately, he turned his back on the crowd and walked to the jeep. "Don't let him turn on that radio," a man's voice called. "He will warn the rest of the troops to be waiting for us." Lowary picked up the hand-mike. "This is Largo One," he said. (Continued on page #) In youth Lauria was beautiful, proud, unattainable. But when autumn came, she changed her code and lowered her defense. ral staircase in regal dignity, and wished there were someone there to witness her entrance. She walked across the parlor to the gunrack and strapped a holstered pistol to her hip, just above the rustling flare of the full skirt of her evening dress. The green sun's slanting rays in the parlor window told her it was late afternoon, nearly time to get started. She went to the full-length mirror. Beside the mirror hung the framed copy of the Constitution of Pamplin, hand-lettered on parchment. In bold red letters it proclaimed : We, the people of Pamplin , hold that: #. No government is the best government. BY #. A man's home is his castle . #. A woman's rights are equal to a man's rights. #. Only the brave deserve the fair. Lauria looked in the mirror, almost fearfully. She saw with approval the breadth of her hips, the erectness of her shoulders. With more reluctance, her eyes rose to her face. There was still beauty there, she told herself, to the discerning eye. That touch of slackness to the jaw, that faint hollowness of cheek: those were no doubt exaggerated by the dimness of the room. In a table drawer, Lauria found jars and tubes. From them she carefully filled in a fuller form for her mouth, dabbed heavily at her cheeks, touched up her eyes, smeared over her jawline. She fluffed out the thinning blond hair and donned a light scarf then she removed the heavy bars from the front door. She went out, and locked its triple locks behind her. She gazed around cautiously and stepped lightly down the gravelled path. Around the house, the grounds were a solid mass of blooming flowers. Lauria had plenty of time to spend in the garden. The baskets and other handicraft articles that were her means of income left her a good deal of leisure, and cooking and household chores were routine and brief. Farther from the house, the grounds looked better kept than they were. It was fortunate that the blue grass of the planet Pamplin grew short and neat, for Lauria never would have been able to keep the ten acres of her property trimmed. But the big trees that shaded the grounds had dropped twigs and leaves that she wouldn't clear away until the big effort of the fall clean-up. The path curved down past a small cleared area in which a dozen upright wooden markers were spaced in rows. This was the cemetery. She paused to look out across the neat rows of markers. There were men buried there. Twelve young men. They had died by her hand, in accordance with the Constitution and the law. At one end of the cemetery stood a large wooden plaque on which she had carved the Constitution of Pamplin. Many times had her mother explained the meaning of the Constitution to Lauria, when Lauria was a little girl and still intruding on her mother's privacy. "The people who colonized Pamplin left Earth many years ago because there they always had to sacrifice some of their individual rights to some government," her mother had said. "There are many kinds of governments, but all of them try to regulate people. And to regulate people, they have to invade people's privacy. "The people of Pamplin came to this world because we don't want any government. We believe that every man and woman should have his individual right to do as he pleases, without other people bothering him." "But what does No. # mean, Mother?" Lauria had asked. " ' Only the brave deserve the fair? " "That means," replied her mother, for Lauria was fourteen and deserved to know these things, "that a woman on Pamplin is not subservient to the whims of men. No man may approach her and take her in his arms unless he has fought his way through the defenses of her home. Then they may agree to share the home, if they wish, but no woman of any character will permit a man to do this until he has proved his valor by fighting his way to her." "Then my father must have been a brave man, wasn't he, Mother?" "Yes, he was, my dear," said her mother, smiling tenderly. "He was very persuasive, too." Lauria never saw her father, and no other man invaded the privacy of her mother's home while she lived there. Two men tried, and Lauria remembered the tense stirrings about the darkened house in the dead of night, the flash and roar of the guns, and her frightened glimpses of the men her mother had shot down as they tried to break in. Her father must have been very courageous, Lauria thought. She constructed a handsome picture of her father in her mind, and dreamed of the day a handsome man like he would conquer her, when she lived in her own home. Lauria's mother had some property on which she wanted Lauria to build a house, but Lauria was impatient. Even though her mother would hire men from town, Lauria would have to do much of the work herself and it would take years. So at sixteen, Lauria got her a house, ready-built. She crept past the defenses of one of the best homes in the area. She broke into the house at night and killed the defender, a tired old man, in a blazing gun battle. The house became her home, and she improved its defenses. Her ownership of the house, and her manner of taking it, gave her an immediate social standing far above that of her mother. She knew that she was envied : the bright-haired, beautiful young woman who held the ramparts of the big house and challenged all comers to conquer her. There were men who tried, and the first nearly succeeded. Even now, after many years, she could remember Poll's youthful, arrogant face, his lazy smile. They had met in the market place. "An attractive spitfire, if ever I saw one," he had said to her. "Would you surrender to my arms, pretty one?" "If you're strong enough to come and take me," she challenged, fire singing in her blood. And that night he had come. In the starlight she fired from her windows at the shadowy figure that flitted among the bushes and trees, and powder smoke hung heavy in the air. It was after several hours and a long silence, when she thought he had given up and gone away, that he almost surprised her. She was crouching in the parlour, waiting for the dawn, when there was a slight noise behind her. She whirled, whipping up her gun, and he was coming toward her swiftly and silently from the hall, a smile of triumph on his handsome face. He was holding out his arms for her and there was no weapon in his hand when she shot him down. She wept for a long time over his fair body, and knew to her shame that she had wanted him to conquer. Then she took him out and buried him beneath the grass. His grave was the first one, and behind it later she erected the wooden plaque bearing the words of the Constitution of Pamplin. Others had tried, and their graves were here, with Poll's. And the years had passed, and no man had overrun the defenses of Lauria's .house. The frost of autumn was in her veins now as she looked at the graves of twelve young men, who had been young and eager in the years when she had been young. Slowly she turned away, went out the barred front gate of her property and waited for the crowd of merrymakers she would accompany to the party in town. The music reverberated gaily amid the rafters of the huge community hall. At one end a fire blazed merrily in a big fireplace. Young couples, and their elders, danced variations of the steps that had been brought from Earth generations ago. No one wore weapons here, although every person in the hall had worn or carried a gun on the way here. The guns were checked at the entrance, and the doors were barred against any lawless raider. Here, as in the market daily, people congregated. Here they were people and not individuals. Outside, between here and their homes, they were individuals again, but still friendly, if wary. They carried their arms, they were careful of their language, they watched the people around them for signs of aggression. Outside was a code of conduct that was different from the sociable code inside, a code that condoned a duel over an insult, that recognized robbery, rape and even death if one were caught unarmed and alone. And in their homes... well, there was Cholli Rikkard. He was one-armed because of a wound he had suffered conquering Fanni in her home. Cholli had been a gay fellow who had stormed house after house of pretty women before, but after that he settled down with Fanni and they now had five children. They shared their privacy, but half a dozen times Cholli had stayed up all night fighting off those who would invade it. The strange thing was that one or more of those who had sought to invade Cholli's home and take his wife and house from him might be dancing here tonight, perhaps chatting amiably with Cholli. Cholli might even know them for the attackers. Here they were all friends, suspending their cherished privacy for weekly companionship. Lauria was one of those who sat among the oldest, and talked unhappily with those on either side of her. It was not that she was that old, for she wasn't. It was that Lauria's home now had the reputation of a deadly, unassailable fortress, and few men cared even to dance with her. It was that they feared her, she told herself as she sat there after only two dances. "Care to dance this one, Miss Lauria?" She looked up, startled. It was Cholli Rikkard, smiling at her, holding out his one arm apologetically. She arose, gratefully, and took his hand. She and Cholli were old friends. Perhaps it was the sympathy of the handicapped for the handicapped: the man with only one arm for the woman with (perhaps?) too much stem pride. "Tell me something, Cholli," said Lauria as they danced. "Is it true that many women deliberately allow men to invade their privacy?" He looked at her blandly. # 'That would be a violation of the Constitution, Lauria," he said. "I know it would," she said impatiently. "But do they?" "I've heard rumours." "I've heard rumours, too, but I want the truth. You know the truth, Cholli. You conquered quite a few women before Fanni shot you in the arm." He grinned. "Fanni always was a poor shot," he said. "Or maybe she's a better shot than I think. Yes, Lauria, it's true. The Constitution is the law, and it's right in principle, but you have to face facts. If men and women adhered to the letter of the law in... well, sex... Pamplin would be depopulated by now. I thought everybody knew that." "I didn't," said Lauria miserably. "I suspected... I'd heard a lot of talk. But... well, tell me, Cholli, how is it done? How do men know, I mean, when a woman is going to wink at the Constitution and let a man enter her home without fighting his way in?" "It depends, Lauria. I suppose most often a woman has an understanding with a certain man and he gives some sort of signal when he comes to her house, so he won't be shot. Some women -- quite a few, it is -- just sort of let it be known around that they won't shoot if a man comes around. That's more dangerous, though, and they have to be on guard." ' "I'd think so," said Lauria indignantly. "Another woman could take advantage of something like that and make a good haul." There was a silence. Then Cholli said slily: "Did you want to get a message to some man -- or get the word around that... ?" "Certainly not!" she retorted firmly. "I abide by the Constitution, and I value my privacy." "Okay, Lauria. I just thought I could get the word passed for you." He grinned. "If it weren't for this bum arm, I might have tried for you myself before now." The music stopped and they parted. "Wait, Cholli!" cried Lauria in a low intense voice. He turned and came back to her, looking at her quizzically. "Cholli," she said, almost in a whisper, "pass the word around tonight that no young man will find my home defended!" She turned her back quickly, her face flaming, and left the hall, picking up her scarf and gun at the door. She walked home alone, swiftly, holding up the hem of her skirt with her left hand and hoping savagely that someone would try to waylay her. alarm bell sounded. Lauria had been sitting in the parlor, with no light but that of the fire, a hot drink in her hand, lost in turbulent thoughts. Her thoughts twisted slightly. Had she made it plain to Cholli that only young men would be welcome? But how could she toss aside everything in which she had believed for so long, on an impulse? Would she not redeem herself by shooting down any invader? Shame was upon her now, for having told Cholli what she did. It was not the perverse shame that had run hot in her that night when she had fought Poll and wanted to be defeated, but the shame of having done what she scorned other women for doing. But Lauria was lonely now, and the fire was not as warm as it once had been. How many years had it been -- ten? fifteen? -- since the last young man had won her outer wall, only to fall beneath her bullets in the moon-shadows? Could she turn now to the ways of other women, to dissemble, to shoot wide of the mark and put up a false defense? Could she now betray the weapons that had served her so well and true? Or would there be a thirteenth grave in the little cemetery on the morrow? The bell chattered nervously. She arose and threw ashes on the fire. A weariness was in her bones. She took a gun from the rack and made the rounds of the house, checking the locks of doors and windows. All was secure. More lithely, like a pantheress, she went from window to window, looking out, her gun ready. Some of the old wine of battle quickened in her blood. The moon was bright, and the trees stood in great pools of shadow on the grounds. The bushes stood like dark, bulky sentinels. At last she saw him, a moving shadow against the still shadows, creeping closer to the house. Her gun came up and she took aim, carefully, through the barred window. Her hands were as cold as ice on the gunstock. For a moment he was still, and she lost him against the shadows. Then he moved again. Her gun blossomed roaring flame and its stock kicked against her shoulder. The shadow leaped, became a man as it fled across a path of moonlight. He was young, and he was smiling toward the window. Then he was swallowed up in the deeper shadows. For a moment she was aghast, unbelieving. She had missed! Then, like a frigid hand clutching her heart, came the realization : deliberately, without conscious volition, she had pulled the gun muzzle aside when she fired. She leaned against the wall, weak and perspiring. It was true, then. She yearned so deeply for a man, she so feared the age that crept up on her, that the principles of the Constitution no longer held real meaning for her. She did not seek to fire again. She knelt on the floor by the window and waited, looking listlessly into the embers of the fire across the room. She felt suspended in a nightmare. ( Continued, on page #) vate, to try." (Continued from page #) "Of course," I replied. Anything and would not raise them. Xeon they might want they could have, held his arm about her shoulders, My relief and gratitude must have as if to protect her, but I know not showed, for Xeon took a deep from whom. breath and spoke again. "Sias," he said. Then stopped, "We do not deserve praise, Sias," embarrassed. he said. "The truth is, we... we I waited, and Rocsates was silent, sort of enjoy it." and he continued. I watched them turn and wander "Sias, we come to tell... We will off together under the stars..." He raised his eyes to mine and My heart has a warmth in it, and said manfully, "We shall try again." I no longer fear for the future of I am afraid that tears came to our race when our young people my eyes. Such sacrifice -- can show such nobility and sacri"We beg one favor," Xeon went fice. # N D That trip abroad may some day be made aboard a submarine. Nuclear development, gas turbines and hydrogen peroxide used as fuel have added up to a possible means of shipping that may be speedier than surface boats and surer than air traffic. What makes submarine transportation so alluring is the fact that it rarely, if ever, is affected by the weather. Unlike other modes of travel, a sub could adhere to a very tight schedule mindless of typhoons, storm warnings, snow, icebergs and other hazards. A seven-pound rifle that throws out lead at the rate of # shots per minute may become the basic U.S. infantry weapon. The new weapon is called Armalite by its developer, the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, and is the first such weapon to be produced by American industry in more than a decade. Currently undergoing exhaustive tests, the lightweight, fast-firing rifle shows promise of replacing four weapons at once: the Browning Automatic, carbine, sub-machine gun, and .# caliber pistol. The new rifle emphasizes strictly functional approach, light in weight and mechanical and manufacturing simplicity. It can be fired single-shot or full automatic, from shoulder or bipod. It is # inches long, including recoil compensator, weighs seven pounds. It takes rounds from an aluminum magazine that holds # short .# caliber bullets. On full ' automatic, the #-round clip can be emptied in # seconds. Gas operated, the Armalite is so designed that when it is loaded and locked the action is entirely closed against sand, dust, mud, rain and snow. A nylon artery, shaped like a "Y", is proving to be a life prolonger for the future. The man-made artery is designed to replace tired, clogged or diseased arteries in the pelvic region or as a replacement for the human aorta. Called an "aortic bifurcation" graft, the nylon replacement opens up new areas of surgery; permits "spare" artery stocks and can be used by military surgeons in field hospitals. Latest thing for homes of the future is a photo-electronic light switch. This is a light-sensitive mechanism that turns lights on when it grows dark outside, and off when it becomes light again. Unlike clocktype switches, this gadget switches lights on at a different time each night. Simple to use too. Just plug the light to be controlled into a special plug, face the "eye" of the gadget toward the window, connect to any # volt # cycle outlet. Never needs setting or adjustment People who live in glass houses have a better chance of staying alive during an atomic attack. Particularly if the glass house is buried in the back yard. Researchers think that a preformed fiberglass shell, which can be buried adjacent to a house, would provide people with a cheap, comfortable shelter offering protection against blast, radioactivity and fires. The shelter measures # feet, eight inches high, four and one-half feet in diameter, with walls one-quarter inch thick. It sleeps four, has provisions for food, water and blankets. Air conditioning is provided by hand-operated bellows. Harmful sludging of engines, most severe under today's "stop-and-go" driving conditions, may soon be eliminated by a new motor oil additive being introduced by the DuPont company. The new detergent will prevent sludge deposits at both high and low temperature driving. It is also unique because it works in the presence of water -- and water is the foremost reason for sludge formation. The new product surrounds each individual particle of sludge in a chemical raincoat of its own. The packaged particles cannot join forces and settle, but remain suspended in oil. So small they are invisible, they easily pass through the oil screen and filter and are drained off when the oil is changed. Daily predictions of the position of the "jet stream", fast moving current of air in the upper atmosphere, may soon become routine weather service. The core of this high, fast moving wind tunnel has been located and plotted on maps for the entire United States. Knowledge of the jet stream is becoming more and more important as more jet aircraft are coming into commercial and military use. Pilots use it for an added "lift" when headed eastward, and try to avoid bucking its winds at other times. Exact knowledge of its height and location for a given area and time will be an immeasurable aid to tight schedules. An atomic tire, vulcanized by nuclear radiation, has been made by scientists of the B. F. Goodrich company. This is the first time atomic energy has been used to treat rubber. The vulcanization was accomplished without use of heat, sulfur or other chemicals and resulted in a direct linkage of the carbon atom chains of the rubber molecules. The tire, in a steel mold, was vulcanized by rotating it slowly over radioactive fuel elements taken from a nuclear reactor. Scientists predict that this "cold" method could be a vital element in the speeding of production. Boron, found in borax and boric acid, may soon become the parent of a new family of important compounds. Most provocative is the potential use of boron-hydrogen compounds as high-energy fuel. Pentobrane, for example, releases twice the energy of conventional hydrocarbon fuels on a pound for pound basis. Consequently, it might serve excellently in rocket or jet motors in missiles and supersonic aircraft. Marcia Burtt's letter in the latest IF evokes much sympathy from me -- who at #, am a confirmed science fiction and fantasy reader in spite of (because of, too) my friend's remarks. I was brought up on fairy tales, myths, ghost stories -- and with every encouragement to seek out the imaginative wherever it might be -- Jules Verne, Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, H. G. Wells and LaFanu. When my daughter began her career of avid reading, I bought her science fiction. It seemed to me that even the poorest story had at least an idea ; the young mind could stretch given an idea. Space opera or gadget story, witch's brew or faity drink, here was the field of writing most likely to encourage her imagination, her curiosity. Her brothers followed right along, to the profit of each mind. So, in defense of science fiction, I say it is one of the mind stretching crafts and to be valued for that reason if no other. All reading is escape. Even the text book allows the student to escape from his immediate world into a hoped-for world. Science fiction encourages curiosity, a resilience and balance of mind so essential in our present society. More and more science fiction is providing insight into human relations. And the "trashiest" piece of science fiction has more value than the comic book, the "true" love story, the Hollywood glamour fog that too many people mistake for reality.  -- Grace Warren Danville, Cal. You printed a letter from Miss Burtt who said she had a problem concerning the accusation of the use of science fiction as an escape mechanism. Actually science fiction, like any novel, is an escape to a certain extent. But as most novels don't do, science fiction broadens your mind in that it covers many areas. Science fiction has led me into many sidelights, among them semantics, which is my present interest. I am but a year older than Miss Burtt, in the eleventh grade, but I don't run across the accusation. In fact some people who start to criticize end up becoming interested themselves. After all T.V. is an escape. So is baseball (and look at all the people interested in that form of escape). Everyone has his own form of escaping and I guess it's pretty hard to see another fellow's point of view when your own is completely different from his I don't suppose an ardent wrestling fan can see anything at all in a ballet, yet they are both escapisms ' in their way. I suppose the hardest part is being a girl; because girls  aren't supposed to be interested in such things. -- Jim Stalker Louisville, Ky. Re the readiness of the human race for spaceflight, in connection with the equalities of said race in a peaceful society: Did it ever occur to you, Sir, that the cure is sometimes derived from the very foundaf tions of the malady itself? Insulin was devised from the pancreas of an unborn calf, and injected into the system of a human, it restores the blood sugar balance, which is in turn maintained by the human pancreas. Possibly you will wonder what this has to do with the readiness of Man for space flight. Gould it be that the remedy for Man's unrest and distrust of his fellow men lies in this venture? Is it possible that the energies consumed in aggression and protection could be channeled into one purpose? Perhaps a concentrated effort to explore the universe? Possible you say, but not probable. Neither, my friend, was the airplane; nor the horseless carriage; nor the United Nations. But, of course, we take all these things for granted now. As for the baboon (who, by the way, is not nearly so intelligent as the Chimpanzee) how can you place an intelligent, thinking human being on the same level with an ape? (Even though they are reportedly linked genetically) . And what makes you think an alien species would have "nothing to do with us"? If for no other reason, curiosity would do the trick. Why else would they undertake space travel? -- Wayne L. Simpson Jimmy Gunn's "Green Thumb" startled me. Have we here another Socrates? All my life (in the sense of awareness) I have striven for all the knowledge I could get. Yet I have always gauged my life by the maxim that doing anything without knowing why was infinite stupidity and danger, and inevitable death to the active mind. If again we consider knowledge a means to an end (i.e. to furnish food to perpetuate body, mind and soul to a farther goal), why are we all now, and why have we since the caveman, centered on the means and ignored the ends? Will we learn love building bombs; spread humanity forming armies; or find out why we're here looking into microscopes, spectroscopes, telescopes or periscopes? There is the scope of the mind, tempered with imagination; and the subject of observation -- ourselves. The answer is within ourselves and we ponder our environs. Why? And lastly: Isn't specialization preventing us from finding the answer? Aren't we concentrating on a square inch of rock two feet from a vein of gold? I say let's learn to use our learning as a guide to further learning, not stuff our heads with irrelevant facts! -- Roger Leland Smith Upland, Gal. ( Continued, from page #) She heard the crack as the lock was broken on a window in the rear of the house, and still she did not stir. But her heart began beating faster, a cold beating that did not warm her body. She began to shiver uncontrollably. She heard the soft, wary footsteps as he came through the house. In the dimness, she saw his bulk come through the parlor door. A black veil passed momentarily before her eyes, and her gun slipped from lax fingers and fell to the floor with a clatter. He leaped to one side, and the glow of the dying fire glinted from his weapon. But she stood up against the window, in the moonlight, and spread her hands so he could see she was no longer armed. "I am helpless," she said in a voice that nearly choked her. "I cannot resist your taking me for your love." His laugh boomed out in the rich darkness, and she could see that he did not lower his weapon. "Have no fear of that, old woman," he said. 'Tm only going to put you out and take your house." (Continued from page #) Lowary's hand trembled as he laid the 'mike' on the seat. He looked up at the sky. The jet bomber had veered left, was heading out to sea, heavily escorted. Lowary took off his helmet and signaled Morgan to let the civilians through. He knew Meyers and the others had heard on their own sets. The enemy had been testing the defenses, he knew. Another calcufated move in the cold war. They were probing, hitting hard with psychology. While everyone was relaxing, enjoying the reprieve, they could very well come back. That would be their way. Lowary was lighting another cigarette when the soldier came up to him, saluted. "Lieutenant Meyers said to give this to you, sir, and to say that he was sorry if he didn't understand before." He handed Lowary the yellow sheet of paper. Lowary opened the wrinkled telegram and read it again for the tenth time since that morning. Lowary put the telegram in his pocket carefully. "Hop in, son. I'll give you a lift," he said to the soldier. He looked over his shoulder, down the river. Then his eyes settled on the bridge. Finally, he said softly, "We're going home." His heart quickened when he said it. plus OF Science-Fiction Book Club Continued from other side A story about the first A-Bomb... written before it was invented! Plus a score of other best tales from a dozen years of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. (Publ. ed. #) and Science-Fiction Magazine. Adventure in other worlds... mystery, intrigue, suspense! (,Publ. ed. #) by Frank Herbert You're on a #st-century undersea mission from which no human has ever returned. Now, # feet down, you learn that an (Publ. ed. #) Ed. by T. E. Dikty # top-notch short stories and novelettes by such well known writers as Robert Bloch. Frank Robinson, Mark Clifton, many others. (Publ. ed. #) other exciting books -- worth up to # in publishers' editions -- for only I if you join this new kind top-flight authors. And they're loaded with rocket-fast reading that takes you soaring through time and space. All in handsomely bound library editions you'll be proud to own ! Mail coupon below -- without # fsynous novels; a complete play; scores of all-time great S-F stories, including H. G. Wells' "Invasion from Mars," made famous by Orson Welles' hoax newscast. (publ. ed. #) # classic stories by top authors. Wonders of Earth and Man, Amazing Inventions, Space travel and visitors from outer space. Adventures in dimension. Worlds of tomorrow. (Publ. ed. #) -- Just Mail Coupon Indicate on coupon your choice of tion masterpieces which you want in addition to "Satellite !" One book will be considered your first selection for which you'll be billed only I plus a few cents month you will be offered the cream of the new # to # science-fiction booksfor only I each. You take only those books you really wantas few as four a year. But this offer may be withdrawn at any time. So mail Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. Enroll me as a member, and rush me my full-length handcated below. Bill me only I (plus few cents shipping charges). Every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book take a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. return all books in # days, pay nothing, and this membership will be cancelled.  Astounding S-F Anthology  Dragon in the Sea  Best from Fantasy and S-F  Omnibus of S-F  Best S-F Stories and Novels  Treasury of S-F Classics f. Narm Zone State Selection price in Canada # plus shipping. Address Science-Fiction Book Club (Canada), # Bond St. Toronto #. (Good only in Continental U. S. and Canada) Top Expels x ting strangerry of our satellite ive facts not eve technical journals mounced that tec ,e(T in man's exw ,ei Vw launchan ace k. Mpvt cle .witliiw ft ,e an !t just how wh th , object work. at L ccompksh . fj first book to supmore comf 'f Erik Bergaust "".-rESs srs about many. otnei affect our lives. )f astounding cfs as exciting as the fiction. f And the wealth ot inf or m at i on J c e i fipre for tie h rs !f w i " will amaz. tWiv vnu See other side for full details (shown on the other side ) OCTOBER # CENTS a deadly secret weapon from a strange world By Lloyd Biggie, Jr. One of the year's top science fiction treats! lected from the first five years of IF Magazine -- covering a greater variety of science fiction themes than you have ever before encountered in one volume. You will find something excitingly different in idea, theme and pace... Don't miss it -- if you like good science fiction! Send only # cents to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and a copy will be mailed to you at once! All Stories New and Complete I RX by Alan E. Nourse I A Game of Marbles by Mel Hunter  IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright, # by Qmnn Publisning Co., Inc. Office of blicatlon, # Lord Street, Bunalo, New York. JSntered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subsciiption # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # Issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine arc fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next (December) issue on sale October #th # I # I # I # I # I # I # I # I To paraphrase Alice in Wonderland: "The science fiction writing business gets curiouser and curiouser." We've often been entranced by the professions which writers pursue for their livelihood. Beside professional writers of television and movie scripts, we have doctors, engineers, university professors who teach everything from biophysics to ancients languages, anthropologists, insurance investigators, advertising men, lawyers, chemists and newspapermen. However, two writers who are new to IP's pages are unique even in such distinguished company. Lloyd Biggie, Jr. (who wrote Silence is Deadly for this issue; and is also responsible for The Tunesmiths and On The Dotted Line) is the only writer we know of who has a PhD in music. He claims the longest epic he ever wrote was a # page thesis on Antonius Brumel the #th century composer. However, he doesn't feel that this is exactly a direct approach to becoming a science fiction writer! Harry Lorayne, who wrote what we think is a nice satiric little comment on our TVridden lives (The Poors), was until a few years ago considered one of the top card manipulating magicians in the country. Now memory is his business. He spends most of his time traveling around the country doing lecture demonstrations on what can be done with a trained memory. This, incidentally, includes remembering the names and faces of his entire audience after meeting them only once; memorizing the order of an entire deck of cards which has been shuffled by a volunteer; memorizing the entire issue of any chosen current magazine, etc. He's so good at it that he's been featured in Ripley's Believe It Or Not column! Collecting such oddities about our authors brings another thought to mind, one which most editors wonder about -- What about our readers? What do they do? Why do they read science fiction? What makes you, the reader, pluck IF from the newsstands? We'd really like to compile a list of statistics concerning you. Too many people still suffer from "shame" about needing to defend science fiction as their favorite reading matter; and we'd like to print some rebuttals to help both science fiction and them. Drop us a note, tell us what you do, what hobbies you pursue, what you like in science fiction and what makes you buy IF. Is it writers whose yarns you know you'll like? Is it covers? (That, of course, brings up the point about just what sort of illustrations you do like on your covers.) How would you feel about no illustrations at all? How about featured articles like the recent Face of Mars by Dr. Richardson or the one about Why Guided Missiles Can Not Be Controlled? We'll print statistics as they come in -- bet you'll be suqDrised to find what distinguished company you keep when you read IF. As an added incentive to make you take pen, pencil, crayon or quill in hand, we'll send a first edition of IF to the first one hundred letter writers. Wee had so many favorable comIF anthology (reader comments, newspaper and magazine reviews) that we're planning another one real soon -- a "second world." This time, we plan to reprint novelettes from our first six years. Some of our readers have already sent in suggestions about which ones they'd like to see. Frank Riley, who's been absent from IF's pages for far too long (busy as a beaver with TV and movie assignments) has sent us an unusual story for the December issue. A Computer Named Eddie is the title, and Eddie and his inventor are something really unique in detective teams. A missing X-# guided missile and plenty of red tape and security problems all promise something exciting and new in the realm of science fiction. So don't miss A Computer Named Eddie! Bob Silverberg (the man with the # by-lines and more than # stories to his credit) is also pounding away on a new short novel for IF. Incidentally, Bob, who writes full time himself, has as a spouse one of the few female electronics engineers extant in the United States. If you're planning to be in New York City at all within the next month or two, make it a special point to see A Visit to a Small Planet at the Booth Theater. You may have seen it on TV, but for a science fiction fan the expanded version is a must. It's a smash hit even on hard-bitten Broadway. Take Aunt Matilda too, because even the most determined anti science-fictioneer will be delighted with Cyril Ritchard and Eddie Mayehoff. After the black eye science fiction got with Night of the Auk a recent Broadway flop, this play with its delightful whimsy and humor may take the curse off for a good many years to come. Let's hope that Hollywood picks this one up (including Ritchard and Mayehoff) and gives everyone a chance to see what good entertainment science fiction can be. Our June cover has started what seems to be an interesting little controversy in several quarters. The picture was titled "Kodachrome from the Files of the First Mars Expedition," and showed theoretical ships about to make a landing on the red planet. So far we've had several letters in which people want to know why the government has (Continued on page #) What was the secret weapon of this primitive planet where people lived in mute terror? No earthman had ever seen it, and there was but one way to find out... with border clashes between the Federation and the menacing Haarvian Empire strewing space with searing debris and threatening to erupt into total war. The War Department of the Federation pinpointed the critical area, pinpointed the critical planet, and requested permission to act. The politicians refused. And while the admirals chaffed angrily and the politicians fussed helplessly, Space Intelligence went to work with its usual quiet efficiency. Space Intelligence sent in agents, one at a time, and in twos and threes -- specialists and non-specialists, bold youngsters and wily veterans, professionals and uniquelyqualified amateurs. And one at a time, and by twos and threes they disappeared without a trace. Space Intelligence lost seventeen men in two months, and then it called in Bran Hilford. "You'll have to go native," he was told. "It'll require some surgery." Hilford grinned happily. In his forty years with Space Intelligence, he'd had his body reshaped in more ways than he cared to remember. He'd had ears, nose and mouth altered and re-altered. His head had been egg-shaped, balloonshaped, and square. The irises of his eyes had been tinted a dozen different colors. As a veteran of missions on two hundred worlds, he knew that anything was commonplace under at least one sun. "Go ahead," he said, "and butcher me up." And they did. During the curious convalescence that followed, Hilford became increasingly puzzled about his new assignment. He asked for details, and got nothing. "No one here is qualified to indoctrinate you," he was told. "We have an expert coming, and you'll go back with him. He'll give you as much as he can in space. It won't be enough, and you'll probably get killed, but there's a crisis..." Hilford shrugged patiently. He lounged about with hands and head swathed in bandages. He could hear only with a communicator clapped tightly against his head, the volume turned up to what should have been an ear-shattering level. He could not account for the peculiar feeling in his hands. Because there was nothing else for him to do, he waited and said nothing, and eventually the day came when his bandages could be removed. Hilford sat stiffly on the edge of his bed, hands extended in front of him. A pretty young nurse deftly peeled the bandages from his hands. A second nurse, not so pretty, shot curious glances at him as she unrolled yards of bandage from his head. The doctor hovered nearby, his round face puckered anxiously. Hilford saw his lips move, and heard nothing. He had confidently assumed that his hearing would improve as the bandages came off. It did not. Silence enveloped and stifled him. A pair of surgical scissors slipped from nervous fingers, and fell with noiseless impact. The doctor, dancing about apprehensively, overturned a chair, and Hilford's eyes followed it as it crashed soundlessly. He coughed, and let the word, "Damn!" explode from his lips. He heard neither. The last of the bandages dropped away, and the nurses stepped back. The doctor bounded forward, gripped Hilford's head firmly, and studied it critically. Hilford waited submissively, felt the doctor's skillful fingers prodding his head, felt his own hands caught up for a rapid examination. Suddenly the doctor backed away, grinning. The nurses grinned. The three of them stood together, lips moving excitedly, hands gesturing. Hilford moved his hands, as though to push aside the void of silence that surrounded him. His hands. Left hand, thumb and five fingers. Right hand, thumb and five fingers. He examined the extra fingers with studious bewilderment, tried to move them, and gaped at the stiff response. A nurse thrust a mirror in front of him. The reflection stared back at him -- his face, but not his face. "Damn!" he bellowed, and the word dropped into nothingness. His face stretched smooth and unbroken from the point of his chin to the taut dome of his bald head. His ears were gone. Hilford lurched to his feet and advanced angrily. The doctor dropped his arms and stood helplessly before him, pink face wrinkled with merriment. The nurses clutched their sides as laughter shook their trim bodies. Hilford watched them, strained against the noiseless impact of their laughter, and finally slumped dejectedly back onto his bed. Ernst Wilkes, the Sector Chief of Intelligence, moved his bulky figure into the room, stood for a moment regarding Hilford, and dismissed the doctor and nurses with a gesture. He tossed Hilford a communicator, and tested a chair apprehensively before he settled his weight upon it. "Where are my ears?" Hilford demanded. Wilkes' wheezy voice floated faintly, far away. "Deep freeze. You can have them back when you finish this assignment. If you finish it. If you want them back, that is. You'll be two pounds lighter without those atmosphere flaps, and you might find -- I just got in. Sorry I had to be away when you reported here. Know anything about Kamm?" Hilford started. "The silent planet. So that's why I lost my ears!" "Right. Sense of hearing is atrophied in all life forms. They've even lost the external vestiges of any hearing apparatus." Hilford searched his memory. "Kamm -- never been in that sector. The natives have some kind of odd religious cult, haven't they? Reptiles?" "Birds. Wish I could tell you about it, but I can't. There aren't many experts on Kamm, and we've just lost some of our best men. You'll get as much as there is time for on the ship. Zorrel just got in, and he's to go back with you. He's waiting now. Ready to leave?" "Ready as I'll ever be." Wilkes grunted, and struggled to his feet. "I'm giving you six months leave when you finish this. But you'll probably get killed." At the space port, Wilkes introduced Hilford to Mark Zorrel, who was young, six-fingered, and earless. "He's in charge of you until you reach Kamm. The main problem will be language, and he'll see that you get that, and as much else as there's time for. Once you land, you're in full charge. Zorrel will act as your assistant." Hilford shook the communicator gently, and returned it to his head. "Give me that again. Who's in charge of what?" "Oh, hell," Wilkes said. "We have a base on a Kamm moon. You'll get your orders there. Get aboard, now, and -- luck." He waddled away. "Take good care of my ears," Hilford called after him. He turned to Zorrel. "Let's get on with it." Zorrel shook his head, and grinned. He spread his hands in front of Hilford, and the twelve fingers flashed bewilderingly. Finally he spoke, in the harsh, expressionless tones of an unused voice. "The language of Kamm. Gommimicators are much too uncertain, and too inconvenient, if those, doctors did any job at all on your ears. I'll tell you as much as I can when you've learned how to talk." Hilford followed Zorrel up the ramp, stiffly and doubtfully exercising his two newly-acquired fingers. T hey landed on Kamm at night, in a rolling meadow near the sea, and dawn found them toiling along a rough, winding coastal road. They plodded beside a clumsy wooden peddler's cart, drawn by a shaggy, stupid, ox-like animal that Hilford's mind called an ox because he knew no verbal equivalent for the Kammian sign language. They wore baggy trousers and short capes, so startlingly colored that Hilford's hands had been too paralyzed to comment on them when he first saw them. They wore the squat, scarlet hats at were the Kammian badge of their profession. They were itinerant peddlers, one of the two Kammian classes -- outside of the nobility and the wealthiest merchants -- that could travel about freely. Seamen made up the other class, but an intelligence agent disguised as a seaman worked under a decided handicap. He was bound to attract attention if he got very far inland. As soon as it was light enough to see each other's hands, they began to tdk. "Damned barbarous civilization," Hilford signaled, "when you can't talk in the dark." He found this sign language the worst thing he'd encountered in all of his intelligence service. It had grammar, even an uncomfortably rigid syntax. Some words -- names, places, important artifacts -- had a single sign or gesture. Others were literally spelled out. Hilford floundered at every turn because he had to keep thinking of verbal equivalents for what he was talking about. And what should he call this Province? The Flat Province, from the Kammian gesture; but it was rolling country, and even mountainous farther inland. And what should he call its ruler? The sign for ruler he interpreted as "Duke", and the erect second and sixth fingers on the right hand made the ruler of the Flat Province the Duke Two Fingers. It was screwy, but it was the only way he could keep things straight. Zorrel's young face, good-looking despite its lack of ears, was frowning critically. His hands moved slowly, with a sarcastic flourish. "You're still talking with one hell of a foreign accent. Don't bend your sixth finger like that. It puts the whole thing in a kind of familiar tense, and that's a rank insult when you talk with a stranger." Hilford straightened the offending finger. "I was wondering if this stuff could be derived from a spoken language." rrel's hands spoke peevishly. "Scholars have been arguing about that for years. Me, I let them argue." Hilford exercised his fingers thoughtfully. The idea that he could be tripped up on such a minor matter as a bent finger -- that any Kammian peasant might spot him instantly as an alien -- was highly disturbing. He would have to let Zorrel run things for a few days, until he became wiser in the ways of Kamn. He would have to stay in the background -- and keep his hands shut. "Let's get back to geography," Zorrel's fingers signaled. "Show me the capital cities of the twelve provinces. And watch that accent." They talked busily, reviewing names and places. At mid-morning they topped a steep hill and looked down on the great and prosperous city of #. It was market day, and half of the ten thousand population seemed to be thronging the market place that sprawled along the harbor. Zorrel's remarks changed abruptly to the brisk chatter of peddlers as they met their first passers-by, and they moved on into the market place. They backed their cart into place at the end of a long row of peddlers' carts, and Zorrel, with a wink and a shrug, began to display his merchandise to the people who had already gathered to see what the new cart had brought. Hilford stood nearby, pushed his scarlet peddler's hat farther back on his bd head, and struggled heroically to keep from gaping at the scene spread out before him. He was surrounded by a riot of color. Bold, iridescent patterns ornamented each woman's billowing skirt and contrasted with the rich, dark tones of the loose-fitting bodices. The men's clothing, from the baggy, full-length trousers to the short capes, was a startling maze of lurid, irregular stripes and jagged, multicolored lines. Children followed along sedately, amusing miniatures of their parents. Each man wore the brightlycolored, distinctive headdress of his trade. The woman of # wore no hat, but her long, flowing hair was a bewildering rainbow stirring gently in the tangy sea air. Hilford reminded himself for the hundredth time not to stare, and stared again, wondering if the women dyed each hair individually. The peddlers' carts, the stalls, the stubby, rectangular sails that were barely visible above the lowlying, barge-like ships in the harbor beyond the market place, the houses and shops of # that could be seen in the distance, even the cobblestones underfoot -- all were a tumult of color, some loud and gaudy, some exquisitely patterned masterpieces of sensitive shading and contrast. The faces of the people were solemn, almost sullen, among the gay surroundings. Hilford watched for a long time before he grasped an answer, and then he saw the explanation in every gesture, in every hesitant purchase, in every pale face. These people were frightened. Even the children were frightened. Most awesome of all was the silence. Hilford found himself straining to hear the hum of the crowd, the shouts, the piercing cries of the hawkers, the murmuring conversation -- and he heard nothing. Wooden shoes clapped noiselessly on the cobblestones. Women and peddlers haggled with soundless gestures. Itinerant musicians, such a prominent feature of market places on many worlds, were not to be found. Instead, there were shabby performers shaping whirling discs of color into exotic patterns for small groups of townspeople who watched intently, but did not applaud. Kamm, the silent planet. Silence hung heavily about Hilford. So fantastic did it seem as he watched the slow-moving crowds, watched the triangular-shaped metal coins fall noiselessly onto the hawkers' trays, watched a battered hand cart being wheeled past without a single creak or rattle, watched insects buzzing in furious silence over a soggy pile of sea mollusks, that he felt compelled to cry out himself. But he knew the sound would drop from his lips unheard. The sight of a black cape startled Hilford into alertness. Soldier, policeman -- they were one and the same on Kamm, and their black clothing and black, furtrimmed hats made them stand out sharply among the brightly-appareled populace. This Black-Cape walked slowly past, whirled suddenly to stare curiously, and then stopped a short distance away with his eyes fixed intently upon Hilford. "Well, now," HilJFord told himself. "A peddler on market day who stands around gaping and does not peddle is not behaving normally, and Blackie spotted that with one glance. It may be a primitive planet, but the police aren't stupid!" He glanced at Zorrel, who was working with enthusiasm but not much success to sell hand-carved figurines of the hideous Kanunian Holy Bird to the passers-by. Hilford caught Zorrel's eye, winked, and sauntered out to lose himself in the crowd. He carried with him Zorrel's warning frown. "It wouldn't do for me to try to peddle," he mused, "but there's nothing wrong with my looking over the wares of my competitors. All the peddlers are doing that." He moved with the crowd, making an enormous circle of the market place, and began to work in towards the center. The sun was high overhead, and his pangs of hunger prodded him into action. He stopped to buy some pastry, and after due hesitation also had a mess of seaweed measured out for him. It was one of the penalties of his profession. To masquerade as a native, he had to eat -- and apparently enjoy -- native food. Tucking his purchases under his arm, he walked on towards the center of the market place, where the fabnlous Karamian Holy Bird floated life-like at the top of a thirty-foot pillar. Metal or stone, it was -- Hilford could not decide, because it was painted in dazzling colors. It was the most vicious bird of prey Hilford had seen on any of his two hundred worlds. Its wings spanned a good ten feet from tip to tip, its eyes gleamed wickedly, its knifelike talons were poised to clutch and tear, and the huge, tapering beak was drawn back to strike. Hilford stared at it, and shuddered. According to legend, he knew, such birds were once the rulers of Kamm. According to legend, they still existed somewhere on Kamm's single continent. But Space Intelligence agents had never seen one, nor found a citizen of Kamm who had seen one. The bird's heavy shadow seemed symbolic, in that market place of the Flat Province, where the citizens lived in mute, brightly-colored terror. Glancing back, Hilford saw the Black-Gape again, this time moving towards him purposefully. Hilford uneasily threaded his way through the crowd, and tried to move faster. "It's this peddler's hat," he told himself. "They could spot a peddler a mile away." But there was compensation. He could also spot a Black-Gape from a good distance. He pushed his way forward, and when he looked back again the Black-Gape had given up the chase and was standing respectfully at attention. At the same time the crowd began to draw back in alarm. A luxurious, gaudy carriage moved slowly across the market place, pulled by two of the ox-like creatures. Behind it staggered a man of Kamm, his nude body painted gruesomely, and behind him marched ranks of the blackcaped police, solemnly swinging their sabers. Hilford had to give way with the crowd and humbly avert his eyes, but he had time to survey the scene before him and mentally photograph the occupants of the carriage. One was the notorious Duke Two Fingers, who lounged in resplendent black robes and kept his bloated, evil face staring disdainfully straight ahead. The appearance of the other occupant brought Hilford up short in amazement and forced him to risk another glance at the carriage. He was a huge, rough-looking man in native dress, but he had one physical attribute which stamped him unmistakably as alien to the planet of Kamm. He had ears. The police strapped their victim to the pillar, and their ranks filed past him in orderly manner, each man swinging his saber. The victim writhed in soundless agony as blood dripped from a multitude of slashing cuts in his back. The Duke Two Fingers and his companion watched impassively, but the citizens began to edge cautiously away. The market place thinned out, and Hilford could see crowds of people moving up the narrow streets of #, towards home. Hilford moved on, and another glance over his shoulder showed him that Black-Gape was following n him again. His hands seemed to be sialing somethin?. Was Hilford being ordered to halt? Other BlackGapes were closing in on the market place, questioning the citizens, questioning the peddlers, scowling suspiciously at everyone. Hilford made his way towards the far side of the market place, along the harbor, where the Black-Capes seemed fewer. A Kammian directly ahead of him staggered suddenly, spun around, and clutched his arm, pain mingling with astonishment in his face. A dull red began to obliterate the gay colors of his shirt sleeve, and a brightly plumed dart protruded from his arm. With reflexes long trained to alertness, Hilford was running before his mind had completely grasped what was happening. A man's purple hat fell to the ground in front of him, a dart embedded in it. Hilford ran at a crouch to make himself a smaller target, and his mind thundered angrily, "The dogs! Shoot in a crowded market place with women and children about!" Darts were whizzing past from several directions when he reached the last line of peddlers' carts. The peddlers gaped, and frantically dove for cover. A dart caught m Hilford's cape as he slipped between two carts. He hurdled a low stone wall, and found himself on the narrow quay, barren except for an occasional, weather-worn storage shack. It was a dead end, a natural trap. There was no hiding place. Hilford did not hesitate. He ducked into the sheltering shadow of a storage shack, crossed the quay in three leaping strides, dove to the deck of a ship, and crept quickly behind the stubby cabin. He plucked the dart from his sleeve and tossed it overboard. From the lining of his cape he produced a green seaman's hat. The peddler's hat was quickly concealed in the cape. He had lost the seaweed somewhere along the way, but he still clutched the pastry. He settled himself on a bench in the stem of the ship, a piece of pastry in each hand, and munched calmly as he watched the choppy waves come rippling across the bay towards him. The ship was evidently a fishing boat, and its stench was overpowering. The silence was nervewracking. When they came -- and he was certain they would come -- there would be no warning footstep, no shouted inquiry. Should he face the shore, and answer questions from a distance? He gambled on boldness -- boldness, and confident innocence, and indignation. He was leaning back with one foot on the low wooden railing, completely relaxed, when rough hands seized him and jerked him erect. Hilford reacted instantaneously, with a rage what w not feigned. He whirled and charged into Black-Cape, shoving him back. Then, apparently recognizing the costume for the first time, he halted and stood his ground, glowering. "Where is the peddler?" Hilford leered insultingly, and spoke as well as he could with the pastry clutched in his hands. "A sea-going peddler?" Black-Cape controlled his anger with difficulty. "Have you seen a peddler?" "Over there," Hilford said, gesturing towards the market place, "I saw a thousand. Here there arc none." Black-Gape spun around and strode towards the tiny cabin. He was out again an instant later, hurrying away without another glance at Hilford. Hilford returned to his bench, leaned back restfully, and munched on the pastry. He was hungry. For two hours Black-Capes prowled the quay. Hilford stole uneasy glances at them. What had gone wrong? He looked like a Kammian, as far as he knew he acted like a Kammian, and yet -- one glance, and the Black-Cape had been after him. It boded no good for his mission. He muttered a fervent prayer of thanks for Zorrel. The extra hat had been Zorrel's idea. The figurine of the Kammian Holy Bird that Hilford wore around his neck was also Zorrel's idea. Concealed in its gaping beak was a miniature stungun. Clearly Zorrel was a bright young agent who could take care of himself. And he knew Kamm. Black-Gapes were still standing watchfully at intervals along the quay when Hilford left the ship. He did not want to risk explaining his presence to a returning seaman, and he wanted to reassure Zorrel of his safety. If the young agent thought Hilford had been ten, he might proceed according to some plan of his own, and they would become separated. Hilford avoided the Black-Capes, exchanged the traditional crossedthumb greeting with a passing seaman, and turned into the market place through a break in the stone wall. He moved through the first row of peddlers' carts, glanced about quickly, and whirled to interest himself in an innocuous pile of ornamental wooden daggers. There were more Black-Capes than civilians in the market place, and thirty feet from Hilford they swarmed about Zorrers cart, while Zorrel himself was being led protestingly away. Stealing sidewise glances, Hilford saw the BlackGapes kick the ox into position, and get the cart started after Zorrel. With them, concealed in the cart, went the transmitter that was Hilford's only means of communication with the Space Intelligence Base on Kamm's largest moon. He turned his back on the pleading peddler, and walked towards the quay. Ten hours after his arrival he was alone and helpless on this most weird of all weird worlds. Staying alive was a secondary matter. He had a mission, and he scarcely knew how to begin. He sat down on the edge of the quay, not twenty feet from a stony-faced Black-Cape, dangled his feet over the water, and searched his mind for a plan of action. lem on Kanun was a simple one -- it was trapped in its own ethics. No world had ever been coerced into joining the Federation, or even into trading with it. When the first Federation ships landed on Kamm, they were greeted coldly and invited to leave. They left promptly. The Federation continued to send periodic missions, and eventually established tenuous trade relationships. After a hundred and seventy-five years, the relationships were still tenuous. The Federation landed one trading ship each month, with a small assortment of simple luxury goods for the wealthy and the noble. The Federation received in return an assortment of hand-manufactured claptrap that was promptly jettisoned in space. The gesture of friendship was considered worth the expense. In the meantime, the Federation pushed well beyond Kamm, and eventually ran headlong into the expanding Haarvian Empire. Suddenly it found itself facing a powerful enemy, and menaced from within its boundaries by a strategically located hostile and independent world. If the Haarvian Empire formed an alliance with Kamm, the results could be acutely embarrassing -- perhaps even disastrous. Kamm was a primitive world, militarily weak, and the obvious solution was a fast, ruthless conquest. But the very structure of the Federation rested upon an abhorrence of force. Time might have resolved the dilemma, but now the Federation had no time. Six months before Kamm had committed an act of deliberate, brutal violence. A Federation trading commission, making a routine courtesy call upon the most powerful Kammian nobleman, had failed to return to its ship. The following morning the members of the commission were found in the streets of # -- gruesomely murdered. "Unfortunate," the Duke Two Fingers had said. "The bandits will..." But the Federation disregarded the bandits. The murdered men were not robbed, and their deaths could only have been caused by an advanced type of weapon completely unknown to the Federation. The five members of the commission had died simultaneously, and from the same cause -- a severe cranial hemorrhage, with profuse bleeding from the nose, mouth and ears. There was no sign of external injury. A painstaking pathological examination ruled out poison or bacteria. And the use of an unknown weapon pointed directly at the Haarvian Empire. The Federation established a base on the largest Kammian moon, for Space Intelligence and the #th Fleet. A detector screen was set up around the planet, and the fleet began to make an alarming catch of Haarvian reconnaissance ships. Space Intelligence had always kept a few agents on Kamm, for training and study purposes. These were ordered into the Flat Province, and they promptly disappeared. Space Intelligence sent in more agents, and lost them. Kamm's single continent was divided into twelve provinces, and in theory the twelve rulers were equals. In fact, one duke completely dominated the others through his control of a planet-wide police force. His power evidently derived from the religion of Kamm, since he held the title, Keeper of the Bird, and the pwlice -- or soldiers -- of the Bird swore fealty not to the man, but to the title. The Keeper of the Bird was chosen, Space Intelligence believed, in some kind of lottery. He held that honor for a period roughly five years long, determined by the complicated interaction of Kamm's three moons, and at the end of that time, at a place and time shrouded in secrecy, the dukes met to choose a new Keeper of the Bird. The constant shifting of the focal point of power had kept peace on Kamm for centuries, and preserved the independence of the twelve provinces. In all of Kamm's recorded history no duke had ever served two consecutive terms as Keeper of the Bird -- until the Duke Two Fingers had received his first fifteen years before. He was now finishing his third consecutive term, and the opinion advanced by Space Intelligence was a mere phrasing of the obvious. If the Keeper of the Bird was actually chosen by lot, the Duke Two Fingers had a system. Of the twelve dukes, only the Duke Two Fingers was openly hostile to the Federation. It was he who was suspected of dealing with the Haarvian Empire. It was in his Flat Province that the trade commissioners had been murdered and the best agents Space Intelligence could supply were inexplicably disappearing. And as Keeper of the Bird he could dominate the other dukes, and force them to oppose the Federation. This was the basis for the orders that Space Intelligence handed to Bran Hilford. Find out when and where the dukes meet to choose their next Keeper of the Bird. Find out how the choice is made. If possible, see that the choice does not fall to the Duke Two Fingers for a fourth consecutive time. Above all else, track down the secret weapon that the Haarvian Empire has given to Kamm. "It's the weapon that bothers us," scholarly-looking Admiral Lantz had told Hilford. There were deep furrows of worry in his face. "Kamm couldn't trouble us with its own resources. We could seal it off, and let the diplomats work things out. But we don't dare wait. Haarn may have given that weapon to Kamm just to see if we have a defence against it. If we don't come up with a solution -- quickly -- we'll have to attack Kamm." "That could be disastrous," Hilford said. "The government would probably fall," the admiral admitted. "And it would label the Federation as a militant aggressor, which is something we've avoided for centuries. But we have no choice. That weapon must work on an electronic wave principle, and its range might be measured in light years. It could wipe out the entire population of a planet. It could kill every man in an entire fleet before our ships could get within striking distance. We simply do not dare let the Haarvians see that we fear that weapon. We know the next Keeper of the Bird will be chosen soon. I'm giving you just thirty days. If you can't supply us with the answers we want in that time, we'll have to risk an attack, and hope that surprise will outweigh the advantage of that weapon." "I'll do my best," Hilford said. "You know about the way our agents have been disappearing?" "Yes," Hilford said. "I know about that." The admiral nodded, and said solenmly, in a tone of voice that clearly implied that he never expected to see Hilford again, "Good luck." Hilford sat watching the waves ripple across the harbor, and wondered what had gone wrong. In the market place, the Black-Gape had taken one glance at him and recognized him as an alien. He was certain of that. But then -- on the fishing boat he had been taken for a Kammian seaman. Certainly changing his hat hadn't made the difference. And Zorrel -- Zorrel had had two years of experience in the rural areas of Kamm, and he was a bright young agent. And he had been snapped up like a novice on his first day in #. Looking up suddenly, Hilford saw a ship approaching, clumsily tacking across the broad bay towards the quay. He watched it idly, thinking to pick up a few seafaring points, and then lost interest. When he looked again the ship was hovering fifteen feet from the quay, and its captain stood atop the low cabin gesturing at him wildly. "Look away, you sniveling dirt digger! On your lazy feet, you depraved son of a sway-backed ox! Look away!" Startled, Hilford struggled to his feet. A deck hand swung deftly, and a thick rope shot at Hilford. He ducked out of the way, stumbled, and fell on his back on the muddy cobblestones. Momentarily stunned, he lay there with the heavy rope across his chest. Two passing seamen seized the rope and hauled lustily. They were joined by others, and the ship was slowly drawn towards the quay. Hilford got to his feet, shook his head confusedly, and started uncertainly to walk away. The ship's captain whirled about, took a long leap from the top of the cabin to the quay, seized Hilford's shoulders, and spun him around. He towered over Hilford, a huge, brawny, redfaced man, and his hands shook with anger as he flashed them under Hilford's nose. "Dirt digger! Sniveling dirt digger! When does a seaman refuse to look away? Don't think I won't report this. I'll have you back digging before your ship sails." He gave Hilford a long, hard look. "I've never seen you before. You're too old to be an apprentice. Who are you, anyway? Let's see your credentials." Hilford tried to be indignant, and managed it badly. "Who do you think you are?" "Who do I think I am? Why, you sniveling dirt digger. I'll show you..." His hands clamped vice-like on Hilford's throat. Seamen were gathering around them, and Hilford's bleary eyes saw a multitude of Black-Capes coming on the run. The hands relaxed suddenly. The captain backed away and stood with his hands silent, looking almost respectful. A hand gripped Hilford's arm firmly, turned him around, and led him along the quay. He glanced at the man beside him, expecting to see the ominous black cape, and saw instead a flash of color and the highpeaked, green hat of a sea captain. Ahead of them, two Black-Capes halted, and respectfully kept their distance. Hilford meekly allowed himself to be led to the far end of the quay, aboard a large ship, and into the cabin. The captain barred the door, pointed at a chair, and seated himself across the table. He poured a sparkling liquid into two glasses, and shoved one at Hilford. His hands spoke bluntly. "I am Captain Fist. Your name?" He was a slim, almost fragilelooking man, small for a Kammian, but Hilford sensed the hardness his slight frame concealed, and respected him. His bronze face was calm and confident, his dark eyes alert and penetrating. It W#is, Hilford thought, an honest face. This captain was intelligent, rather than cunning. He would outmaneuver a man, but he would not deceive him. He was obviously someone of importance, and he had saved Hilford, there on the quay -- but why? Hilford raised his glass, to stall for time. The captain's fingers moved slowly. 'T understand that your real name would have no meaning on Kamm. But surely the Federation gave you a Kammian name. You are from the Federation, aren't you?" Hilford choked, sputtered into his glass, and dropp it. It shattered, and the liquor collected in a shimmering puddle on the table top. Captain Fist nonchalantly produced a rag, cleaned up the mess, and sat back to look inquiringly at Hilford. Hilford made his comment a weak question. "Federation?" The captain smiled. "My last trip to #. That will be sixty days ago -- sixty-five. The Mother Moon was full." He paused to fill another glass for Hilford. "One night I found a man on the beach. He wore a peddler's hat, and there were five darts in his body. He was dead." "Describe him," Hilford said. "He was a small man, middleaged. His hair was reddish, like that of many people of the Round Province. He looked like a native of Kamm. His hands had six fingers. But when we examined his body, seeking to identify him, we found his feet had only five toes." Hilford nodded thoughtfully. Six fingers, six toes. Naturally. Space Intelligence had been careless there, which wasn't normal. But then -- the Black-Gapes didn't have X-ray vision. It wasn't his toes that had given him away. "Was the man your friend?" the captain asked. Hilford made a quick decision that was no decision at all. He had to trust this man. "No," he answered. "But I knew of him." The captain gestured his understanding. "The following night, the Black-Capes were chasing another man, outside of #, along the shore. They trapped him on the beach, and he was wounded, but he ran into the water and swam out to sea. I went with two of my men in a small boat, and we found him -- alive. I took #dm to the home of the wife I have in #, and I found that he, too, had six fingers on each hand, but only five toes on each foot. He trusted me, and from him I learned of the Federation." "The Federation," Hilford said, "has been in contact with Kamm for nearly two hundred years. There has been a trading ship each month..." "I learned of the Federation from the peddler I plucked from the sea. The great dukes do not honor the people of Kamm with dangerous knowledge. The League has long attempted to learn about the ships from the sky -- without success, until I found the peddler." "What happened to the peddler?" "I left him in # with my wife. He ignored my advice and went to the market place. He never returned." "The Federation has sent many such men to the Flat Province in the last six months. All have disappeared." "Of course," the captain said. Hilford did not understand his matter-of-fact attitude. "They have been good men -- men as accustomed to live on strange worlds as you are accustomed to travel the sea. They have been carefully trained in the language and ways of Kamm. And still they disappeared. Why?" "I guessed who you were," the captain said, "because you wore the seaman's hat and did not know the ways of seamen. Once you were inside this cabin I was certain. If you were to walk over to the market place, the first Black-Cape you passed would arrest you." "Why?" The captain poured another drink for himself, and downed it quickly. He looked at Hilford in amusement, but his hands moved almost apologetically. "By your smell," he said. Hilford sank back, and struggled to control his amazement. Kamm, the silent planet. Kamm, where the natives had lost their hearing, and gained in its place super-sensitive senses of sight and smell. Some of the manifestations were obvious -- the astonishing use of color, this captain thinking nothing of putting to sea in the dark to look for a solitary swimmer, even -- if he hadn't been such a dunce as to overlook it -- the incredible number of peddlers in the market place who dealt in perfumes. Suddenly he understood the miracle of his escape. Not even the Kammian nose could cope with the odors that blended along the quay -- fresh and decaying fish, a variety of imported foodstuffs, pungent stacks of drying seaweed. On the fishing boat, the Black-Cape's sense of smell had been completely frustrated, and he was reduced to simply looking for a peddler. And the sudden disappearance of the other Intelligence Agents -- once they invaded the market place of #, it would only be a matter of time before the Black-Gapes noticed the distinctive odor of the alien. Perhaps it was already familiar to them, from the men of the trading missions. And once they understood, they needed only to stroll about, sniffing deeply. The agents, with their clumsy olfactory equipment, could have no inkling of how they were betraying themselves. No wonder Space Intelligence had been losing agents! 'T know," the captain signaled, "that the Federation wants nothing that would not be good for the people of Kamm. I pledge you the full support of the League." "The League?" "The Seamen's League, of which I am also captain." "I'll need your assistance," Hilford said. The clasped hands, right to left and left to right, bending their wrists until their forearms touched. "Now," the captain said, "I'll take you home. You'll carry a basket of overripe fish, just in case. You must not be careless, like the peddler I plucked from the sea." # proper, but in a small seamen's village a short distance to the east of the metropolis, along the shore. Hilford carried a basket of fish, which were fully as overripe as the captain had promised. The captain's hands spoke busily as they walked, and Hilford had to strain to follow them in the gathering darkness. "The League," the captain said, "is independent of any duke. The Duke Two Fingers likes us no better than we like him. Years ago, when he was first chosen Keeper of the Bird, he tried to rule the League. The League defied him, and he arrested all the seamen who were in #." He grinned, his white teeth flashing disdainfully. "It lasted for sixty days. No more ships came to the Flat Province. The duke placed his Black-Gapes on ships of the League, and told them to be seamen. Most of them were lost in the first storm. In the end, the duke paid the League for the ships and for the affront to the seamen. Since then he has not molested the League, and though we do not bow down to him, we avoid giving him cause for anger." Hilford nodded. "You must not move your head," the captain said, looking at him sharply. "You move your hand -- so. Hilford repeated the gesture, and the captain grinned approvingly. "We will make a good Kammian of you. The Duke Two Fingers himself will not be able to tell you from a native of the Flat Province -- as long as you carry the fish!" Hilford did not find it amusing. He knew there were times when a basket of fish could be a definite handicap to a Space Intelligence Agent. In the captain's modest but brightly-painted house Hilford joined the captain and his wife for their evening meal. Kammian etiquette wisely prohibited conversation when the hands had better things to do, and they ate without exchanging a word. As soon as they had finished, the wife cleared the table and discreetly vanished. The captain sat staring at the table, absently chewing on a piece of seaweed. Hilford was suddenly seized by weariness. He had been under constant activity and nervous strain for eighteen hours. He shook his head resolutely, and straightened up. He'd had a blazing piece of good fortune, but he had actually accomplished nothing. The captain looked up quickly, and echo his thought. "There is much to be done. Some officers of the League are coming -- those that are in port. They will be here soon." "Their help will be welcome," Hilford said. The captain busied himself with the arrangements. He brought in chairs until the small room was crowded. On the arm of each chair he hung an oil lamp and lit it. The light was focused through a slot to fall across the hands of the person occupying the chair -- a Kammian device to aid night conversation. Hilford's mind began to shape plans. The cart was the most important thing. He must find the cart, and repossess the transmitter. He could then let Base know he was still operating, and ask for a postponement of the deadline. With the help of the League, he should eventually be successful -- if only he could have time... He awakened suddenly, catching himself as his body pitched forward. The room was full of men, all sitting calmly at attention, all waiting patiently for him to awake. He experienced a momentary consternation at having fallen asleep. He turned apologetically to his host, and the captain began his introduction as if nothing had happened. "Our guest is of the men who send the ships from the sky. They call themselves the Federation. We discussed this at our last meeting. This man is here to help the people of Kamm. The League will give him every assistance within its power, and all of us will guard his presence here with our lives." All eyes were on Hilford. "There was a peddler," he said slowly, "who was taken in the market place today by the Black-Capes. He was my assistant. I must know what has been done with him. I must know what has been done with his cart." "We will learn what we can," the captain replied. "The cart is important. I must have the cart." The captain glanced about the room, and his hands formed a Kammian name. A young man at the rear stood up and extinguished his lamp. "I understand," he signaled, and turned and went out. "I saw a man in the duke's carriage today," Hilford said. "He was not of this planet." "The man with the holes in his head," the captain said. "Evil meets with evil in the duke's carriage." "Do you know where he comes from?" The circle of hands remained motionless. "Two such men have been seen with the duke," the captain said finally. "We know no more than that." "Six months ago," Hilford said, "men of the Federation called on the Duke Two Fingers. Their call was a gesture of friendship, which is made each year. The next morning the men were found in the streets of #, murdered." "It is the duke's way of doing things," the captain said simply. "Anything I could learn of this crime would be of value." He followed the captain's gaze as it swept quickly about the room. No hand moved. The captain's fingers shaped another name, and a seaman extinguished his lamp and went out. Attention returned to Hilford. "There are matters which I must attend to in person," Hilford said. "What can be done to make me smell like a Kammian? I cannot carry fish everywhere I go." There was no reply. "Would it be fitting for me to use a perfume that would hide the odor?" Smiles flickered on the seamen's faces. "A male does not use perfume," the captain said bluntly. "And yet -- there is a perfume maker in #. He is a good man. He might make you a perfume that would cancel your odor, and no more. Perhaps tomorrow... "Why not tonight?" "It would be dangerous for the perfume maker. We seamen can frequent the drinking places at night and wander about undisturbed. That is expected of seamen. But the citizens of # must be in their homes two hours after sundown. It can mean death if the Black-Gapes find them on the streets." "Then let your perfume maker be a seaman," Hilford said. Puzzled faces stared at Hilford, and there was the confused movement of shifting feet and fingered protests. "I do not understand," the captain said. "He is a perfume maker..." Hilford fumbled in the lining of his cape, and donned his scarlet peddler's hat. "Look -- I'm a peddler." The captain's face wore a startled expression. "Of course!" He dispatched a young seaman, with an extra seaman's hat concealed under his cape. "When is the next Keeper of the Bird to be chosen?" Hilford asked. "Only the dukes know." "Where is the choice made?" "Somewhere in the mountains, it is said. Only the dukes know. And perhaps the most trusted BlackCapes." "Do all the dukes attend?" "Yes. The southern dukes journey by sea to #, and the northern dukes journey by sea to the Triangular Province. Where they meet, only the dukes know." Hilford did a quick review of his geography. The mountain range ran along the center of Kamm's long, narrow continent. So the dukes would travel the northern or southern seas to the center of the continent and journey inland, to meet in the mountains. It would not be difficult for them to keep their meeting place a secret. Kammian commerce moved by sea. Roads were few in the interior, and probably few people ever ventured to cross the mountains. Hilford felt encouraged. This was more than Space Intelligence had learned in the previous two centuries. "Here is our objective," he said. "The liberation of the people of Kamm must proceed slowly. We wish to avoid violence. The first step must be to secure the appointment of another duke as Keeper of the The captain gestured sadly. "That is impossible." "We of the Federation often find ourselves called upon to do the impossible." "That is impossible," the captain said again. "The duke's younger brother is High Priest of the Bird." Hilford's response was unnecessarily and futilely vocal. "Ah!" he exclaimed. So that was the basis for the duke's system in the lottery. One seaman leaned forward. It was the brawny, red-faced captain who had nearly throttled Hilford that afternoon. "I sail tomorrow for the Round Province," he said. "When I return, I bring the Duke One Thumb to #." "He comes to take part in the choice of a new Keeper of the Birdr "The Duke One Thumb does not visit the Flat Province out of love for its duke." "Is the Duke One Thumb a friend of the League?" "Not openly. But seamen feel welcome in the Round Province." "Would it be possible for me to talk with the Duke One Thumb?" "It might be arranged." The door swung open, and the perfume maker entered -- a tall, gangling man who looked ludicrous in a seaman's hat much too large for him. He carried a heavy box, and the situation had evidently been explained to him. He looked about the room, sniffed, made his way directly to Hilford, sniffed again, and grimaced distastefully. His long face had an almost comically mournful expression. He set down the box, and his delicate fingers moved concisely, gracefully. He would have, Hilford thought, a beautiful Kammian accent. "It may be difficult," he said, "but I shall work at it." "Work in the next room," the captain said. The door swung open and a seaman charged in, fingers moving frantically. "Black-Capes coming!" The captain pushed Hilford's chair aside, knelt with a knife in his hand, and pried up a small square of flooring. He signaled to Hilford. "Quickly!" Hilford lowered himself down. The space under the floor was shallow, and he stood with his head and shoulders above the floor of the room. "The perfume maker?" he asked. "Quickly!" He ducked under, and the trap closed over him. The darkness was absolute -- not so much as a crack of light entered around the trap. He edged forward until his fingers touched damp earth. He found himself in a scooped-out area perhaps three strides square. In one corner there was a box, and he sat down. The waiting began. On a normal planet he would have heard the police making a noisy entry, heard their bullying questions, and had some idea of how things were going. On Kamm he heard nothing -- and when the trap opened, he would not know if it meant safety or capture. But he was a veteran intelligence agent, and he did not waste energy in worrying about a situation that he could not control. He relaxed in the darkness, leaned back against the damp wall of his hiding place, and dozed off. Light was falling dimly through the opened trap when he awoke, and the captain was shaking him. They climbed out, closed the trap, and took their seats. The seamen faced him calmly, as if nothing had happened. "All that trouble for nothing?" Hilford asked. Captain Fist looked gloomy. "I do not like this. Not for years have there been so many Black-Gapes in our village. They inquired after the seaman I brought home with me." "That means..." "It means a seaman, or a member of his family, is in the pay of the Black-Capes. We must proceed cautiously. By tomorrow they will have compared reports with the Black-Capes that were on the quay today. They will want to know what I did with the seaman who behaved so awkwardly." "What did you tell them about the seaman you brought home?" "I brought no seaman home," the captain said. "I brought the perfume maker. Of course in the dusk some fool may have mistaken the color of his hat." He smiled slyly. "The perfume maker is conferring with the League about some perfume which he wishes to export. He will be my guest until morning. And early tomorrow the awkward seaman will ship on a boat bound for the Round Province. He will be seen going aboard by a Black-Gape who will recognize him -- we shall see to that. And I have already sent out a small boat to meet him down the coast and bring him back after dark tomorrow. We should hear no more of the matter." "It is well arranged," Hilford said. The perfume maker came in from the next room, and dabbed Hilford in unlikely places with a pungent, colorless liquid. The assembled seamen sniffed carefully, and Captain Fist delivered the verdict. "No," he said. "You have blended one evil scent with another. It hides nothing." He turned quickly to Hilford. "Apologies, but..." "Quite all right," Hilford said. The perfume maker turned away sadly. "It is difficult," his graceful fingers signaled. "But I shall work at it." Hilford briefed the seamen carefully on the Federation point-ofview, and found them vaguely disappointed. They had expected, perhaps, armed assistance against the Duke Two Fingers, and they had to resign themselves to a more subtle kind of revolution. Four times the perfume maker tiptoed in to test a new concoction, and registered four more failures. The meeting lasted until dawn, and Hilford was given a hearty breakfast and sent on his way. He walked to the quay closely surrounded by a dozen seamen. Several carried baskets that were awesomely tainted with the odor of the previous day's fish. The brawny captain left Hilford standing on board his ship in full view of the passers-by, and walked away. He returned a few minutes later, in jocular conversation with a BlackCape. The Black-Cape went his way, laughing heartily. 'T asked him," the captain told Hilford, "if he remembered the spectacle you made of yourself yesterday. He did. I told him that you men from the north are all ignoramuses, but by the time I got you back from the Round Province you'd either be dead, or a seaman. It won't surprise me if you jump ship before the return trip." He landed a hearty slap on Hilford's back and nearly sent him over the railing. Well down the coast and out of sight of land, Hilford transferred to a small fishing boat. The boat returned after dark, and landed him near the seamen's village. Captain Fist met him on the beach, and led him to a nearby shack. "The Black-Capes have been to the village twice today," he said. "I don't like it. I'm afraid this place is not safe for you. I've arranged for you to stay in #." "I place full trust in your judgment," Hilford said. "The second time they came they discovered the trap in the floor. Nothing there, of course, but it definitely means that I have a traitor in the League. I went pCTsonally to complain to the Captain of the Black-Capes. He gave me profound apologies. These are unsettled times, he said, and the police take no action that is not necessary. I told him that if the seamen are molested further I'll move League Headquarters to another province and keep the seamen out of # until the times are less unsettled. They're suspicious about something, and they don't know quite what it is." "Did you learn anything about my friend, the peddler?" "Nothing. We continue to try. But I'm afraid you will not see him again. He has probably been taken away." "Away? Where?" "To the mountains. No prisoners return from the mountains." "What happens to them?" "The Duke Two Fingers is reviving the old ways. No one knows for certain, but we guess. In the past, a bloodthirsty duke used animals. The Duke Two Fingers uses men." Hilford was staggered. Human sacrifice? Captain Fist's eyes blazed. "I have revered the Holy Bird all my life, as a man of Kamm should. But holiness that demands the life of a man is not holiness. It is evil. Now -- we go to #." H ilford was installed in an inn, next door to his friend the perfume maker. His quarters were a secret room on the third -- and top -- floor. Its dimensions were seven feet by five feet, and he remeasured it a dozen times the first day. He entered, a panel closed behind him, and he was both hidden and trapped. Captain Fist dutifully visited him once each day, and twice he brought news. A witness had seen the duke's Black-Capes dumping the bodies of the murdered trade commissioners from carts in the dingy alley where they were found the next morning. A group of prisoners had been seen leaving for the mountains. Zorrel was probably among them -- if he was not already dead. The days passed. Once the Black-Capes raided the inn. They found nothing, but Hilford's uneasiness was heightened, and the captain did not disguise his worry about the traitor in his organization. "It is not one of my officers," he said. "He suspects that I meet you here at the inn, but he does not know of the secret room. When I find him I shall feed him to the fish." The perfume maker regularly sent over new mixtures for Hilford to try. And each time a seaman would take one studious sniff and inform Hilford that he still smelled obnoxious. The days passed, and on the fifth day in the inn Hilford decided that he could wait no longer. He brought up the subject of Zorrel's cart. The captain had discovered nothing. There was no indication that the duke's agents had disposed of it, so it was assumed that the duke had converted it to his own use. "I must find that cart," Hilford said. "It will take me two minutes to remove the hidden equipment, and I must have it." That evening there was a crowded meeting in Hilford's secret chamber, and an expedition was organized. The duke's carts and wagons were parked in a meadow near his walled estate. There were two sentries who circled the area, keeping its perimeter constantly in view. The sentries were more a matter of form than necessity. No resident of # would steal from the Duke Two Fingers. "I will deal wiffi the sentries," Hilford said. "I need only to get within fifteen paces of them." "No Black-Cape sentry would allow a seaman to get that close," the captain said. "You'd have three darts in you before you got within twenty paces." "I won't be a seaman," Hilford said, a bit jauntily. "I'll be another Black-Gape." The seamen gazed at him in open-mouthed admiration. Clearly, these men from the Federation Hilford felt that the captain's plans were overly elaborate, but his protests were silenced. The expedition set out the following night, as soon as it was dark, wearing black capes and hats borrowed from the duke's official tailor. Other seamen were stationed at intervals from the wood near the duke's estate to the market place on the other side of #. And in the market place seamen were ready to start a roaring fire if a diversion was necessary. A fire in # was a serious matter, and would take priority over any cart theft. Hilford moved out of the shadows of the wood and strode towards the sentry, giving him the stiff-armed Black-Cape salute. At ten paces he triggered a focused beam from his stun-gun, and the sentry folded up into a paralyzed heap. He was dragged into the shadows, and a black-caped seaman took his place. The other sentry was quickly dealt with. Black-caped seamen stationed themselves at intervals among the carts, and one accompanied Hilford -- not to assist him, but to keep watch and let him know if trouble came. There were no shouts of warning on Kamm. Hilford turned his attention to the carts, and was startled by the number of them -- dozens, lined up in precise rows. Did the Duke Two Fingers have some passion for collecting ox carts? But no -- these would be intended as military transport. The duke was planning the conquest of Kamm! He moved quickly from cart to cart. Some he could dismiss with a glance, but many were the same type as Zorrel's cart, and he had to probe the interior for the concealed panel that hid the transmitter. He moved as quickly as possible, and his escort lurked behind him and signaled, "Haste!" every time Hilford looked at him. They reached the end of the first long row and started on the second, and suddenly the escort gripped Hilford's arm. They ran together, dodging among the carts, and in the soft light of Kamm's three moons Hilford saw waves of BlackCapes racing down on them from all directions. As he ran, he cursed himself for allowing such elaborate preparations. Too many seamen had known of the raid, and the League's traitor had struck again. Hilford wielded his stun-gun at medium power, and bowled over ranks of Black-Capes. They darted through the break in the encircling lines, and raced for the woods. In the dim light Hilford could not tell friend from foe, but evidently the seaman could. He directed Hilford's attention to shadows leaping towards them, and turned him away from others. Hilford sprayed at long range with his stun-gun. He could do no more than momentarily daze the pursuers, but seconds were what they needed. The black-caped seamen passed them, running for the woods, and Hilford held his ground to fight a delaying action. "Two missing," his escort signaled. "Can't wait." Darts were flashing past them. Hilford pointed the stun-gun as he ran, and sprayed again at long range. A dart stabbed into his arm, and he scarcely felt it. In the direction of # flames were leaping high into the air, and the pursuing Black-Capes seemed not to notice them. Hilford wondered if the diversion was coming too late. They had just reached the edge of the trees when a dart struck Hilford squarely in the back. He stumbled, crashed headlong into a tree, and lost consciousness. He came to, and opened his eyes to see a Black-Cape bending over him. He closed his eyes quickly, and weakly raised his hand to his throat. They had not taken the Holy Bird. He still had his stun-gun, which meant he had a chance to escape. But he felt horribly weak. He would need strength. He opened his eyes again, and saw the Black-Gape grinning at him. It was his seaman escort. He lay on the narrow cot in his cramped secret room. "We carried you," the seaman signaled. "The Black-Capes left us for the fire." Hilford's fingers moved feebly. "Your captain is a wise man." "The captain has been arrested," the seaman said. "So have the other officers -- all the Black-Gapes could find. You've been unconscious for six hours." "What happens now?" "We have given the duke one day to release the seamen. If he does not, we will leave #, and no more ships will come to the Flat Province." "The duke will not care, now," Hilford said. "He has traitors among the seamen, and they will train men to sail the duke's ships. The duke will need his own ships to conquer Kamm, because he knows the men of the League would not help him." "Men do not lesu'n in a day to sail the seas of Kamm." "The duke has plenty of time. Or he thinks he has, if he is chosen again to be the Keeper of the Bird' The seaman looked worried. Hilford was frantic with worry. It would be morning, now, and he had just twentytwo days before the Federation would strike. He did not dare tell that to the seamen. If a traitor took word of the attack to the duke, the Haarns would know, and what was planned as a quick conquest would turn into bloody, all-out war. He gave way to his weakness, and slept. When he awoke Captain Fist was there, with a doctor. There was grim sympathy in the captain's face. "It grieved me to hear of your wounds," he said. "It was noble of you to sacrifice yourself for my seamen, but you are the important one. You should have saved yourself." "It grieved me to hear of your imprisonment," Hilford said. "Especially so since I was responsible." "You were not responsible. The duke has never loved the League, and he is quick to blame us for any of his troubles." "Have you found your traitor?" The captain's fingers formed words that were strange to Hilford -- rousing, seaman profanity. "I shall find him. And he will be lost at sea on his next voyage." "Perhaps there is more than one," Hilford suggested. "It is possible. The Duke Two Fingers has a large purse. But the duke is not yet ready to fight the League. Later, perhaps, but not now." "We risked much for no gain," Hilford said. "I heard that two men were lost." "They were captured. They were wearing black capes, so there was nothing to identify them as seamen. But they were also released. That I do not understand." "The duke is crafty. He would like to know what we were seeking among his carts. He hopes to find out, so he turned everyone loose, expecting us to try again. But we won't try again. It would be useless." "You are not strong, now," the captain said. "You have lost blood, and you need rest. When you have recovered, we will make new plans." "Yes," Hilford said. "When I have recovered." He saw his deadline marching relentlessly towards him, one day at each stride. Now there were twenty-one. Hilford spent three days in the grip of a blazing fever, while the worried Kammian doctor ministered to him clumsily. The captain made his daily visits. The perfume maker came with new mixtures, and Hilford indifferently submitted to his dabbings. More failures. He slept and woke, and sometimes someone was there -- the captain, or the perfume maker, or the doctor, or another seaman. Sometimes he was alone. It did not seem to matter. On the fourth day he awoke and found a stranger in the room -- a short, rotund man whose flaming red hair was offset by the black of his flowing robes. He was watching Hilford curiously. "I am the Duke One Thumb," he said. Hilford stirred weakly, and struggled to sit up. "No," the duke's chubby fingers told him. "You need rest. I have a great admiration for a man who braves the imjjossible." "Nothing is impossible," Hilford said. The duke bowed respectfully. "The captain has informed me of your wish to see me. How may I serve you?" "I would like to make you the next Keeper of the Bird," Hilford said, and knew immediately that it sounded ridiculous, coming from a sick man, from a helpless fugitive. The duke answered matter-offactly, "Impossible." "Do not all dukes have an equal chance?" The duke hesitated. "Yes. All dukes have an equal chance. The Duke Two Fingers and his brother, who is the High Priest of the Bird, have made certain changes in the way the choice is made, but the changes are not new. The same procedures were in use at the time of my grandfather's grandfather. So all dukes should have an equal chance, but the Duke Two Fingers will be chosen." "How is the choice made?" "I cannot tell you. Only the dukes and the Priests of the Bird are privileged to know." "Do you approve of the giving of lives of men to the Bird?" The duke paled. "You know that? But..." He was thoughtful. "I know there have been rumors. No, I do not approve. It is a terrible thing. A sickening thing. But I cannot change it." "You would do things differently if you were Keeper of the Bird?" "There are many things I would do differently." "You won't tell me how the choice is made? For Kamm?" "I have sworn my oath. I cannot tell." "Did you know that the Duke Two Fingers plans to rule all of Kamm?" "I have guessed." "But you still cannot tell me how the choice is made?" The duke said nothing, but he met Hilford's gaze firmly. He was not, Hilford thought, the irresolute weakling he had expected. He would be a good man. Firm, but honest. The Federation could deal with such a man. "You know that I am of the Federation?" he asked. "Yes. The Federation has always been just in its dealings with Kamm." "You know that the Duke Two Fingers has guests from the sky who are not of the Federation?" He grimaced, and answered disgustedly, "Yes. They are evil men. Fit companions for the Duke Two Fingers." "Have they given the duke weapons?" "No. They have refused to give the duke weapons." He smiled at Hilford's surprise. "I have my own sources of information," he said. "Did you know that the men of the Federation's trade commission were murdered by some strange and powerful weapon?" "I heard of the deaths, I do not understand them, but I do not think the Duke Two Fingers has such a weapon." "Perhaps his evil guests used it." "That is possible. Yes, it must have happened that way." Hilford felt that he had reached an impasse. The duke was the one man he was likely to meet who could tell him everything he needed to know. And the duke had sworn an oath, and he was a man who would honor his oath. "The chosen duke is called Keeper of the Bird" Hilford said suddenly. "Why?" The duke looked at him curiously. "Because he is the Keeper of the Bird," "A real Bird? A live Bird?" "Of course." 'T did not know such Birds actually existed." "Many of them exist. One is chosen at the same time that the duke is chosen, and entrusted to his care for the term of his office." "Entrusted to his care," Hilford mused. "He is responsible for it, then. Supposing the duke is negligent?" The Duke One Thumb smiled. "He will not be negligent. It is always a young and healthy Bird, and the Keeper of the Bird lavishes tender care upon it. He would guard it with his life. If it were to die, he would lose his office immediately, and he could never hold the office again." "I understand. And the Keeper of the Bird rules all the BlackGapes on Kamm." "Yes. But he can send them into another province only when a duke requests them. And the other dukes can have no armed men outside of their personal guard, unless they request them of the Keeper of the Bird, My personal guard is large, and there are few Black-Gapes in the Round Province." A neat arrangement for an ambitious Keeper of the Bird, Hilford thought. By controlling the BlackCapes, he alone, of all the dukes, could raise a standing army. When his army was large enough, he could take over all of Kamm. But he would have to have a powerful army, because the other eleven dukes would unite against him if he attacked one. With Kamm's scanty resources it would take time to plan a full-scale conquest. It would take more than a five-year term as Keeper of the Bird. A lottery which shifted the power from duke to duke at regular intervals had been a sound system. But once a duke rigged the lottery and got himself chosen for several consecutive terms, the entire balance of power on the planet was upset. The Duke Two Fingers was finishing his third term. A fourth would enable him to conquer Kamm. "When is the next Keeper of the Bird to be chosen?" Hilford asked. "I cannot tell you that." "It must be soon, or you would not be here." "That much you know. I cannot tell you more." Hilford struggled weakly, and pushed himself into a sitting position. "I will be present when the choice is made. I will make you the next Keeper of the Bird. The duke clasped Hilford's hands, and bent forward until their forearms touched. "You are a brave man. Unfortunately, it is impossible. It would mean your death, and it would be a terrible death." He slid open the panel, and turned again before he stepped through. "Your life would be given to the Birds." been respectfully waiting for the duke to leave. He stepped through the panel, solemn as usual, and lded Hilford a small bottle. "Mixture number thirty-one," he said sadly. "Fm afraid your task is even more impossible than mine," Hilford said. "I shall succeed. I have had worse tasks. The Duke Two Fingers himself once gave me a worse task, and I accomplished it." "What need did the duke have for perfume?" "He wanted a scent that the Birds would not like." "The Holy Birds?" Hilford straightened up attentively. "Yes. They are most repulsive creatures. I worked for weeks. I would drench a rodent with scent and put him in their cage, and they would eat him. My two hundred and sixty-third mixture was a success. The rodent was perfectly safe with them -- until the scent wore off. Then they tore him to pieces. It was not pleasant, seeing those Birds every day. I did not sleep well for weeks afterwards." "You saw them at the duke's palace?" "Yes." "I thought the Keeper of the Bird kept only one bird." "These were brought by the duke's brother, who is a Priest of the Bird. I think the priests wanted something to protect themselves from the Birds, and I do not blame them. Anyway, that was years ago -- long before the Duke Two Fingers became Keeper of the Bird. Perhaps he uses it himself, now, with a Bird in his palace. I mixed him a new batch only a month ago." "You are the first person I've met, outside of the Duke One Thumb, who has ever seen a live Bird." "The Duke Two Fingers pledged me to secrecy. You are the first I have ever told." "I shall respect your confidence," Hilford said. "And I shall give your mixture thirty-one the usual critical test." The perfume maker smiled wistfully. "I shall commence mixture thii-two, just in case." Captain Fist came in the evening, and sat for a long time with his fingers silent, looking weary and troubled. "I must leave you," he said finally. "I have rarely stayed in # for so long, and the Black-Capes are suspicious. Now they follow me everywhere. So I must make a short voyage. I'll be back in ten days, and less if the winds favor me. You will be well looked after -- I promise that." "Thank you," Hilford said. He had never felt more helpless. He was too weak to leave his hiding place, and if he did the first BlackCape that happened along would arrest him. And he could no longer fully trust the League. "I will see you as soon as I return," the captain said. He arose to go, stepped towards the panel, and suddenly whirled about and stared incredulously. Twice he raised his hands to speak, and dropped them. "What's the matter?" Hilford asked anxiously. "I just noticed. I no longer smell you!" "Mixture thirty-one," Hilford said gleefully. "Tell the perfume maker to send up a large bottle." After the captain had gone, he made his plans. He would have to get out of #. Whatever else he might learn in the capital city of the Duke Two Fingers, he could not finish his assignment there. And if he stayed longer, the League's traitor might learn of his hiding place. He left only a note of thanks for the seamen, and carrying the large bottle of scent that the jubilant perfume maker had delivered, he slipped out of the inn into the dark streets of #. He wore his seaman's hat until he was clear of the town. Once a Black-Cape stopped him, and as Hilford gripped his stun-gun the policeman noticed his hat and passed him by with a nod. Outside of # Hilford changed to the peddler's hat, and struck out along the grassy ruts of the cart path that led northwards towards the mountains. He tired quickly, but he doggedly kept a firm pace and pushed himself onwards. The sun rose, and slowly added its brisk warmth to his feverish discomfort. Soon each staggering stride became a matter of forced concentration. He pushed his weakened body forward until mid-moming, and he collapsed in a scant patch of shade on a hilltop, with the buildings of # still visible on the southern horizon. He could go no farther. To the north, he saw a small village of scattered, colorful houses, a peddler with ox and cart plodding up the hill towards him -- and, in the hazy distance, the beckoning, snow-covered mountains. He struggled to his feet, and stopped the peddler. In five minutes of oblique negotiations he purchased ox, cart and merchandise at a price that roughly equaled their sound value times ten. In the village he disposed of half the merchandise to a wily old shopkeeper at a ruinous loss, and stocked up on food. Once clear of the village, he climbed into the half-empty cart and fashioned a cramped resting place for himself. A swat across its hindquarters started the ox. It lurched dumbly forward along the path it had followed less than an hour before, having no apparent interest either in where it was going or where it had been. Hilford watched anxiously to see if it would follow the path 'without supervision. When it did, he lay down and fought the agony that stabbed his wounds as the cart rocked and bumped over the ruts. Finally his exhaustion triumphed, and he slept. It was dark when he awoke. The northward track lay ahead of him in the dim moonlight, and the ox was plodding along indifferently. He got out and staggered beside it for a time, attempting to exercise his cramped muscles, but the effort proved too much for him. He led the ox off the main track and into the shelter of some trees to rest. He did not know when the dukes would leave #, or how fast they could travel. His only hope lay in reaching the mountains ahead of them. If he could do that, he might have a chance. And the attack would come in sixteen days. The following day he suffered a relapse. He lay in his cart, burning with fever, while the ox moved patiently onwards. Day blurred into night and became day again, and he lost track of time. Perhaps the ox rested when it grew tired, or perhaps not. Perhaps his cart met travelers along the way, or perhaps not. He did not know. He was able, finally, to get out of the cart and walk beside the ox. He knew that five days had passed, and perhaps it was six or seven. He walked, and rested, and his strength began to return to him. The next morning, from the side of a mountain slope, he looked down on the scraggly forested, rolling plain, and saw a long, brightly colored caravan creeping towards him -- animals, carts, attendants and the royal personages of the six southern dukes. He moved on, and his ox panted and strained as it hauled the cart up a steep mountain pass. Kamm's belt of conical mountains appeared to be of volcanic origin, and the peaks on the southern fringe were arranged confusedly -- now humped closely upon one another, now widely spaced. The rough cart path went its winding way among the lofty trees, passing between two mountains with scarcely a ripple in elevation, then pointing its way steeply upwards a thousand feet for the next pass. Hilford pushed forward, disdaining food and sleep, until exhaustion had overcome him again, and the skin of the toiling, perspiring ox hung in flabby folds. On the morning of his third day in the mountains he came upon a broad, wooded valley. He lashed the ox furiously, forcing it into a stumbling run. He must cross the valley before the dukes' party came out of the pass. He must not be seen. By noon he had crossed the valley and gained the refuge of the tree-covered slope on the opposite side. He rested, and the ox collapsed in its harness. He could safely go no farther, he thought. Now he must wait until the dukes had passed him, and follow them. The long caravan descended into the valley in mid-afternoon, crossed it, and set up camp on the north side. As darkness came on, Hilford looked down on the bright fires with satisfaction. Everything had gone according to plan. In the morning, he would let them pass him, and then follow. But he must not oversleep. He awoke with the first light of dawn in his face, and hurried to look down on the sprawling camp. There was little sign of activity. He returned to his cart, ate, and relaxed while the ox grazed contentedly on the forest bushes. At noon, cooking fires dotted the camp. The attendants finished their meal, and retired to their tents. Oxen were tethered out to pasture. Carts were parked neatly around the perimeter of the camp. The dukes were evidently in no hurry. Puzzled, Hilford turned away and walked to the top of the pass. He looked down into the valley to the north, and to his amazement he saw another camp site -- the oxen, the carts, the colorful tents. Understanding came suddenly, and crushed him. This was the camp of the northern dukes. Only the dukes could enter the Temple of the Bird, and they had left their retinues and gone on alone, and he had lost them. His exhausting journey had been wasted. But he still had a few days -- five, perhaps -- and the dukes would not undertake a long journey by themselves. The Temple of the Bird should be within a day's walk of the camps. There should be some kind of path or road leading to it. The Temple would need supplies. A movement through the trees to his left startled him. He leaped to his feet, gripping his stun-gun, and saw that his ox had pulled loose and was wandering about seeking choice leaves to munch. With a grin, he turned and hurried away through the trees. He was a peddler, seeking his strayed ox. He found the path just as darkness was falling, a meandering foot path that led up out of the valley. He quickly lost it in the darkness, but he knew its general direction, which was up, and he kept moving. An hour later he saw a flash of light on the mountain slope, far above him. But he found nothing -- no imposing Temple with brightlypainted facade, no buildings, no signs that humans had passed that way. He wandered on in the darkness, feeling the deep chill of the mountain air, feeling the weakness that he had been unable to shake off in his relentless struggle to reach the mountains. A cloud choked ofT the last feeble glimmer of the smallest Kammian moon. He slowed his pace, and peered uncertainly ahead of him. Suddenly his foot found emptiness, and he struggled for balance, lost it, and tumbled downwards. He landed on a metal framework ten feet below the surface, and found himself in a caged airshaft, about six feet in diameter. Before he could collect his confused senses pain stabbed at his arm, and he jerked away and stood in the center of the cage while the giant, hideously colored Holy Birds of Kamm fluttered greedily about him. One swooped up from below and slashed at his ankle. The bars formed a perfect ladder, and he made a rush to climb out and was forced back by tearing talons and ripping beaks. He experienced a wave of dizziness, with a throbbing, pounding sensation in his head. While he stood there in bewilderment, he saw in the dim light far below a black-hooded Priest of the Bird staring up at him. The priest whirled suddenly, and ran. hewn out of rock. Three blackhooded priests filed in, paused to sniff Hilford carefully, and took their seats. He sniffed them in turn, and caught a powerful, pungent odor that seemed at the same time agreeable and repulsive. He found an element of humor in the situation. He might have said, "We have something in common, gentlemen. We patronize the same perfume maker." But the grim-looking priests would not have appreciated the joke. He stood before them, tottering weakly, blood flowing from his arm and ankle, and told his story. The elder priest leaned forward as he finished, and Hilford found the haughty nose and cruel features vaguely familiar. This would be the younger brother of the Duke Two Fingers. He moved his fingers languidly, bored to have such a trifle brought to his attention. "A stray ox was found this evening," he said. "Your story may be true. If so, that is unfortunate. You have had the high honor of seeing the Holy Birds of Kamm. You have entered the forbidden Temple. Your life is forfeited to the Birds." The two younger priests led Hilford away. They passed through a labyrinth of corridors, straight, curving, ascending, descending, branching off. They passed through a barred door, and another, and Hilford was shoved forward into a long room that was nothing more than a wide, barren corridor. Bars closed silently behind him. At the far end were more bars. and half a hundred men of Kamm stood about, or squatted, or stretched out on the damp rock floor. Sobs shook one man's huge frame -- the only evidence of his silent weeping. Hilford's searching gaze photographed the faces, and suddenly found one that was familiar. Zorrel! The young agent walked towards him, grinning happily. They stood close together, so their fingers could have some privacy. "Now there are five of us," Zorrel said. "Three other agents here?" "Such as they are. Their morale isn't exactly good. They've been treated badly, and they've had the misfortune to see what happened to some other agents." He stopped suddenly, and fingered Hilford's blood-soaked sleeve. "My introduction to the Birds," Hilford told him. "Then I don't need to explain." "About the birds, no. About this layout, yes." "Gome," Zorrel said. He led Hilford to the far end of the room, and they stood looking out through the bars upon an enormous, domed, circular arena. At intervals around the sides there were pairs of barred openings about the size of a large door -- one at floor level, and one directly above it. In the center of the arena was a cage -- just big enough, Hilford thought grimly, to hold a man. "This is the lottery where the Keeper of the Bird is chosen, and other important matters are decided," Zorrel said. "Each duke has his own royal box -- the upper openings. There are twelve of them. When the great moment comes, the arena is filled with birds, and the victim is placed in the cage. The lower doors are opened, and the cage is hoisted up to the dome. All the victim has to do is get from the center of the arena over to one of the lower doors before the birds tear him to pieces. The first few don't get very far, but eventually the birds have their hunger satisfied, and they lose interest. The victims get farther and farther, and finally one makes it. And whatever door he escapes through, that duke is the next Keeper of the Bird. Pleasant little game, isn't it?" Hilford shuddered. He'd had his share of experience with barbarism and violence and human sacrifice, but only with the most primitive civilizations. It had seemed natural, there. Here it was only gruesome. "Generations ago, they stopped using humans and changed to animals," Zorrel went on. "But the Duke Two Fingers is reviving the old customs. It's a nice thing for the victim that finally makes it. He receives high honors, and he might even marry a daughter of a duke, if one is available. For the ones that don't make it, it isn't so nice." "When is the lottery to take place?" Zorrel laughed sardonically. "Any minute, now. We -- " his gesture swept the bare room " -- are the victims. Wonder if the Birds think old men are tougher eating than young men. You might stand a better chance than a young, tender morsel like me." Hilford stood looking thoughtfully out at the arena. "There's no escape that way," Zorrel said. "And you know what's at the other end -- two barred doors, and a couple of squads of priestly guards. Once the festivities start, they're going to be more interested in watching the arena than us." He patted his stun-gun. "That would be a good time to take over this place." "I've picked up a fair amount of information myself," Hilford said. "I think I have most of the picture, now. The question is, what do we do with it?" "The question is, how do we get out of here?" "We're intelligence agents," Hilford said. "We have an assignment." "All right -- I'm with you. Better not count too much on the others. And I'll tell you one thing." He patted the stun-gun again. "If they put me in that arena, the Birds are going to regret it. A full charge would kill a Bird." "That wouldn't solve anything. It wouldn't even get you out alive. The priests would tear you apart if the Birds didn't. Your gun's charge won't last forever, and mine is pretty well gone now." "So what do we do?" "I want to snoop around, and talk to our fellow victims." He moved back up the room, passed by one man who was gripjed in a coma of trembling fear, and stopped beside a small, wizened oldster who grinned at him cheerfully. "Don't get discouraged," he said to Hilford. "Maybe you'll be lucky, like me." "Lucky in what way?" "My number doesn't come up. Been here four years, and -- here I am. They don't call my number. Food is good, quarters aren't bad, and they don't give you much work to do. It isn't a bad life if you don't mind being herded down here on Holy Days and the like." Hilford jerked a thumb at the arena. "You enjoy what goes on there?" "I don't let itbother me. Sure -- I tell myself it might be me, in there. But it isn't, and I'll die of old age before they get to me." "You've been here four years," Hilford said. "How many lives have you seen given to the Birds?" "Don't know. Couple of hundred, maybe. Of course, on Holy Days it's only one. I never saw a Choice. They say they use a lot of us for a Choice." Hilford walked on. He found the three intelligence agents, talked with them briefly, and left them. They had been badly mistreated. Marks on their hands suggested torture. They had been starved, and they were almost too weak to walk. He'd have to get them out, of course, if he could. But he couldn't count on them for assistance. Suddenly a familiar odor caught his attention, bitter and pungent, vaguely irritating, vaguely pleasant. He turned towards it and saw a lean, bronze young man of unmistakable physical hardness. He studied his face carefully. He had seen him somewhere -- in a crowd, perhaps, where the face had been only one of many. But only one group of Kammians achieved that physical condition. He was a seaman. And he was generously anointed with the scent of the Priests of the Bird. "That's a potent perfume you wear," Hilford said. The seaman glanced at him sullenly, and said nothing. "The League will be pleased to know who their traitor is." The seaman started. He smiled slowly. "They were bound to get you, sooner or later. And the League will never learn from you." "Give my regards to the Duke Two Fingers," Hilford said. He turned, and walked back to Zorrel. Odd, he thought, how suddenly the inexplicable is unraveled. He knew who the League's traitor was -- or one of the traitors. And he knew how the Duke Two Fingers rigged the lottery. He explained to Zorrel, who scoffed, at first, and then displayed a refined mastery of Kammian profanity. "Then the whole thing is a farce," he said. "They call some numbers to put on a good show for the other dukes, and then they send this fellow in. And the birds won't touch him. And he walks through the Duke Two Fingers door, and the show is over." "For another five years." "We can arrange an accident for this seaman. At least the lottery would be genuine." "Too many witnesses," Hilford said. "And it wouldn't help the situation. All the priests would have to do is douse another prisoner with scent, and show him where the Duke Two Fingers' door is." "So what do we do about it?" "Nothing. I checked that door, and it can only be opened from the other side. There's no way out of here. We'll have to wait until they take us somewhere else." "What if they try to feed us to the Birds?" "Let me know if you figure out something." They sat down along the wall, and waited. Hilford glanced again at the arena. There were caged air vents in the ceiling, but the one that had trapped him opened into a smaller room. Enormous natural caves, he decided, altered by generations of priests to suit their purposes. The religion of Kamm would provide fascinating study material for some young Federation ethnologist -- if he were lucky enough to survive to collect it. A door opened, and the blackrobed, black-hooded priests marched in. The prisoners were summarily lined up against the wall, and a young priest moved down the line painting red numbers on their foreheads. "The paint rubs off easily," he said. "Any man found with a bare forehead will be given to the Birds immediately." Perspiration trickled down many foreheads, but Hilford noticed that no one brushed it away. There was movement in the arena. A Bird dove hungrily at their barred door, and swooped upwards. Momentary panic followed, as pale prisoners milled back away from the arena and the priests angrily sought to restore order. Four priests entered the arena, and calmly walked towards the cage in the center. The air was suddenly filled with enormous, flapping wings as the birds descended voraciously, and then veered away. The priests pushed the cage towards the door where the victims were waiting. The Choice was about to be made. The High Priest himself strode the length of the room with a retinue of priests trailing behind him. He stood for a moment looking out at the arena. Apparently satisfied that all was in order, he turned, and a metal jar was passed to him. He shook it sideways, then upright, until a disc dropped out of a slot in the bottom. He looked down, signaled indifferently, "Thirtyseven," and kicked it away. A young priest retrieved it, and number thirty-seven, a giant of a man, brushed Hilford's arm as he toppled to the floor in a dead faint. Priests stripped off his clothing, the door swung back, and he was shoved into the cage. The priests slowly pushed it to the center of the arena, and left it. A signal, and the cage jerked upwards. Those in the room watched with a compulsion born of horror. Grouching, number thirty-seven bolted for the side of the arena as soon as the cage was clear of him. The first Bird plummeted downwards, raked his back, and sent him sprawling. He rolled onto his back, lashing out with arms and legs. Somehow he clutched a Bird by the wing, and there was a momentary stir of alarm among the priests. But another Bird found his eyes, and another his throat. Then the struggle was over and the feast began. The cage was lowered, and the priests, ignored by the Birds who fought over thirty-seven's remains, returned the cage to the doorway. The High Priest shook the jar again. "Number forty-two." The priests dragged him forward, and four years of luck ran out on the wizened little man who thought to die of old age. Fear paralyzed his legs, and the priests load to support his body while they stripped off his clothes. They rudely stuffed him into the cage. When the cage went up, he slumped to a kneeling position, covering his face with his hands. For a terrible moment the Birds took no notice of him. Then one circled slowly, and landed on his back. Pain goaded him into a furious struggle, but he had waited too long. He never did regain his feet. The High Priest raised his jar, and the bloody game continued. The fifth victim called was the bronze young seaman. He strode forward manfully, but once in the arena he acted the part of a terrified victim. He ducked and dodged, stumbled and fell, struggled to his feet lashing out at the Birds. But he remained untouched, and he worked his way to one side of the arena, and suddenly darted through an open door. The door swung shut. All the lights in the royal boxes save one were extinguish. The Duke Two Fingers was chosen Keeper of the Bird for another five years. "The end of a mission," Zorrel said. Hilford shrugged. "Or the beginning of a mission." Tension in the room relaxed immediately. The High Priest strutted out, the prisoners wiped the numbers from their foreheads, and the priests organized the group into a double column and marched it away. Hilford and Zorrel held back, and were last in line. "Prisoners are kept ten in a room," Zorrel said. "The rooms are a long way from the exit -- at least from where I came in. These corridors wind all over the place. I'm not sure I could find my way out." Hilford glanced around. "We'll have to be careful. Those darts they shoot can be painful." The procession moved on through the network of corridors. They took a last turn, and came to a row of barred doors. A priest counted off ten prisoners, slammed the door on them, and barred it. "Look up ahead," Hilford said. "The corridor branches off. Where does it go?" "I don't know." Hilford moved to conceal his fingers from the priests. "When our turn comes, we'll make a dash for it. If we can get around the corner, we'll be safe from the darts, and we can knock them off a couple at a time as they come after us. We might be lucky." "I'll be right beside you." The fourth group of ten was counted off, and there were six men left. A priest jerked the next door open, and stood blocking the corridor. When Hilford's turn came, he leaped and struck once, and shoved the priest's crumpled body aside as he raced for the fork in the corridor. He sensed Zorrel's presence close behind him. They reached the fork and made the turn before the first darts flashed past. The startled priests had been slow to react. They were in a short passageway that branched off in three directions. An oil lamp overhead cast eerie reflections. They whirled and stood with stun-guns ready. "Full power," Hilford signaled. It wouldn't do to have the men come to in a few minutes and describe what had happened. The first priests came charging around the turn. In a matter of seconds a dozen bodies lay on the corridor floor. They stripped two of the men, dragged their bodies into an empty room, and donned their black robes and hoods. They strolled calmly back the way they had come. No one questioned them, but it took them all of half an hour to find the exit. They moved down the mountain path in the cold air of early dawn, ignoring the priests on sentry duty. As soon as they reached the protection of the trees, Hilford stopped. "Head straight west until you find the cart track that leads north through the mountains," he said. "Follow the track to the top of the pass. My cart is hidden in the trees maybe fifty feet to the west. In the cart you'll find a large bottle of perfume that smells like nothing you've ever smelled before. Take a quick bath in it, and it'll make you smell like a man of Kamm." Zorrel started. "So that's it!" "That is it. Once you are smelling properly, get down into the camp in the south valley, and snoop around among the carts to see if the Duke Two Fingers accidentally used ours for his trip north. I don't think anyone will question what a priest does. If you find the transmitter, tell Headquarters to call the whole thing off. We'll fill them in later." "What are you going to do?" "Finish our assignment. And you'd better trade stun-guns with me. Mine is low." Zorrel slipped the cord over his head, and handed the hand-carved Holy Bird to Hilford. "If you're going back in there, you'll ne it." He took Hilford's gun, and disappeared into the trees. Hilford chose his position carefully. He had to be invisible, and yet have a clear field of vision himself. He searched along the path, and finally settled down in a cluster of bushes ten feet from the trail. He did not know how long he would have to wait. He was thirsty and hungry, and weary from lack of sleep. He hoped he could hold out. An hour went by, and two hours. He fought to keep awake in the dreary silence. Suddenly he saw a flash of movement. A file of blackrobed priests came into view. The Duke Two Fingers walked haughtily across his field of vision. Hilford knelt and trained his stun-gun on the path. The procession was moving rapidly, and he would only have a fraction of a second. More priests passed, and suddenly Hilford saw the thing he was waiting for. A cage, towering grotesquely on the mountain path. It was all of eight feet tall, and black cloth was draped inside the bars, with a foot of air space left at top and bottom. Two black-robed priests strained under its weight at each comer. As Hilford took in these details his finger closed instinctively on the trigger. A focused beam at full power, from a distance of ten feet, would kill or permanently disable a man. It would certainly kill a bird. And as the cage passed from his view there was a convulsive flutter, and a Holy Bird of Kamm tumbled to the floor of the cage. Consternation followed. The priests set down the cage, opened it, and tenderly lifted out the Bird. Terror and uncertainty gripped their faces. The Duke Two Fingers came charging back up the trail. Other black-robed dukes came forward, pushing their way through the excited crowd of priests. Hilford sensed that a furious argument was under way, but the fluttering fingers were concealed from him. The High Priest strode anxiously down the trail, and disappeared into the crowd. Hilford held his position, and waited. The procession finally turned, assumed a semblance of order, and marched back up the mountain towards the Temple of the Bird. Hilford followed at a safe distance, and accosted one of the sentries at the entrance to the Temple. "What was all the excitement about?" The sentry wore a dazed expression. "The Bird is dead! The Keeper of the Bird is deposed!" Hilford confidently reentered the Temple, and moved through the corridors at as fast a pace as was consistent with the dignity of his black robes. He found the corridor where the prisoners were confined, and opened the fifth door. There were only four men in the room, since Hilford and Zorrel had escaped. They sprang to their feet and stood humbly at attention. "Which one of you would like to escape?" Hilford demanded. They stared at him dumbly. He picked the youngest one, pulled the bright cape from his shoulders, and clothed him in the stolen black garments. "Bar the door as you go out," he said. "If you wander around long enough, you should find the exit. Good luck!" The amazed man darted out, and they saw him shove the bar into place. One of the other prisoners suddenly recognized Hilford. "You killed the priests!" he said, his fingers trembling with excitement. Hilford dropped onto a strawpadded bunk. "Aren't you grateful?" he asked. He was thoroughly exhausted. He twisted uncomfortably, and drifted off to sleep. H e was awakened abruptly, and herded into the corridor with the other prisoners. The two lines were formed, and they marched back along the winding passageways, to the room that opened into the arena. The scene was much the same as it had been before, but with a significant difference. The royal box of the Duke Two Fingers was dark. The door under his box remained closed. He had allowed a Holy Bii'd to die, and he was disqualified. The bewildered prisoners were backed against the wall for numbering. The High Priest entered stormily, and seized the metal jar. At that moment a prisoner from Hilford's room stepped forward, and pointed at Hilford. "Him -- he's the one that killed the Holy Priests!" The High Priest whirled on Hilford, stepped close, sniffed doubtfully. "No," he signaled. The prisoner gestured excitedly. "He escaped, and then he came back wearing a black robe." The High Priest stared, coldly at Hilford. "Take off his shoes," he said finally. The High Priest studied his five-toed feet incredulously. "Take him first," he said. The informant grinned broadly, and froze in terror a moment later when the High Priest gave him his reward by adding, "And take him second." Hilford was quickly stripped. Hands clutched at his carving of the Holy Bird, and he clasped it to him protectingly. The High Priest stepped forward, saw what it was, and sneered. "Let him have it!" Hilford was shoved into the cage, and priests began pushing it into the arena. Birds flapped excitedly far above, and several dove on the priests and veered off. Hilford waited calmly in the center of the arena while the priests hurried away. He set his stun-gun at low intensity, with the broadest beam the small gun could supply. It might be fatal to kill a Bird, he knew; and it would certainly be fatal if he did not keep them away. If his first setting was not the right one, he might not have a chance to adjust it. The cage jerked upwards. He stood in the center of the arena, pivoting slowly, with both hands extended above his head. One hand grasped the stun-gun. His posture was that of one invoking the gods. His audience was about to witness a miracle, and it would be best for Hilford if somehow it got the idea that it was a Holy Miracle. The first Bird plummeted downwards, struck the gun's beam, and fluttered comically away. Another came close enough to receive a vague shock, and circled warily. Then there was a sudden rush, and the air above him was filled with beating wings. He continued to pivot, and a sudden wave of dizziness came over him. His head throbbed painfully. He staggered, nearly fell, and began to edge towards the side of the arena. A Bird came at him from the rear at arm level, underneath the beam. Hilford's blurring vision caught it just in time. He tilted the gun, and the Bird dropped to the floor of the arena, shuddered, and waddled away with its wings trailing helplessly. Hilford resumed his wavering pivot, and saw it flap into the air again. He was twenty feet from the wall of the arena, close enough to see the face of a duke who looked down on him hopefully. But it was not the duke he wanted. Another bird came at him at arm level, but circled back before he could aim the gun. The Birds were becoming cautious, and their rushes broke off farther and farther above him. But his head was a pounding, tearing agony, and he sensed that he was losing consciousness. He staggered on, arms still extended over his head, passing one duke's box after another searching for a familiar face. Suddenly he saw a flash of red hair. He summoned his last, failing strength, dashed for the open door, and collapsed as a priest swung it shut behind him. He was pulled to his feet, draped in black robes, and led up a flight of stone steps. The Duke C#ne Thumb stepped forward to greet him, stared at his face in openmouthed astonishment. "I have kept my promise," Hilford told him, and collapsed again. The duke helped him onto a cushioned dais, and knelt beside him. His hands trembled with excitement. "It is a miracle!" Hilford sank back weakly. "We must be cautious," he said. "I do not trust the Duke Two Fingers." "There's nothing he can do now, I must reward you. All my daughters are married, but perhaps... "Later," Hilford said. "The Duke Two Fingers..." Suddenly solemn, the Duke One Thumb got to his feet. "We will go to the High Priest. He must give me my credentials and my Bird." Priests made up a respectful escort. They entered the sumptuous quarters of the High Priest, where the walls were draped with black cloth and the furniture was plushly upholstered in black. The High Priest was there, with a dozen lesser priests. The Duke Two Fingers faced him arguing fiercely. "The Bird was sickly." "The Bird was young, and in good health." "Surely I cannot be guilty of negligence if it dies before it reaches # -- before it is even out of the mountains!" Hilford understood the turmoil taking place behind the frosty countenance of the High Priest. He might circumvent custom by subterfuge, by drenching a prisoner with a repellent scent, but he could not do it openly without tearing asunder the entire religious structure and undermining his own position. The priests knew the High Priest was the brother of the Duke Two Fingers, and they were watching alertly. Would he dare to disregard the venerable tradition they were all sworn to uphold? "The Bird was given into your position," he said. "The law speaks plainly." The Duke Two Fingers suddenly noticed the Duke One Thumb and his party, and he whirled angrily. "Yom' choice was not in order. It was made by an alien. Aliens are not permitted in the Temple." He turned on the High Priest. "The law speaks plainly on that. You have brought aliens into the Temple." "I have offered their lives to the Birds, as is proper. The Birds alone have decided the outcome." Hilford's glance swept over the black-hooded men standing by the Duke Two Fingers, and he praised space for his photographic memory. One face he had seen, his first day on Kamm, in the duke's carriage. And that face had had ears. He turned to the Duke One Thumb. "The Duke Two Fingers has brought aliens into the Temple," he said. "The priest on his right -- remove his hood and you will see the signs." The little duke moved decisively. He strode forward, jerked the hood from the man's head, and stood staring. Ears! No one moved. The High Priest's face was icily calm. "All present will remove their hoods," he said. Glittering weapons flashed suddenly, but a wave of priests overwhelmed the men. Hoods were ripped from the heads of the Duke Two Fingers' escort. Two more pairs of ears were revealed to the startled priests. The High Priest turned slowly, and faced his brother. The long struggle for power between the two men blazed hatefully in the looks they exchanged. Each man had attempted to use the other, and each had failed. And Hilford guessed that when the Duke Two Fingers had commenced his dealings with the men of Haarn, he had not taken his brother into his confidence. Now the brother had his revenge. He stepped back, and his fingers slowly spelled out his verdict. "The law speaks plainly. The life of an outsider in the Temple belongs to the Birds. And be he duke or commoner, the life of one who willfully brings an outsider into the Temple... The little Duke One Thumb raised both hands. "Only the dukes pass judgment on the life of a duke." The High Priest lost his calmness. He rushed at the Duke One Thmnb, his fingers screaming his rage. "In the Temple of the Bird I am the master!" "The law of Kamm does not stop at the door of the Temple," the little duke said. Hilford watched tensely. The High Priest poured out threats and invective. The Duke One Thumb tossed his red head scornfully, and kept his cahn gaze on the High Priest until he turned away uneasily. "When will the dukes sit in judgment?" he asked. "Immediately," the little duke said. The High Priest gestured at the Duke Two Fingers. "Take him away." TTxe duke sprang back, and appealed to the priests. "I am the Keeper of the Bird, Your oath is sworn to me. I command you..." The priests swarmed over him, and led him away. The High Priest pointed scornfully at the men of Haam. "Give them to the Birds." Somehow Hilford felt no desire to see the Duke Two Fingers come to judgment. He was not certain that he would be admitted, so he followed along after the men of Haarn. They were thrust into the arena without ceremony. They were not even stripped. For a few minutes they milled about confusedly, looking vainly at the closed doors that ringed the arena. As the first Birds descended upon them one slipped out of his robes and whipped them through the air. The action startled the Birds, and they circled warily. They quickly regained their confidence, and as they circled closer strange things happened to the men of Haarn. They collapsed and groveled on the bare rock floor. Their hands tore futilely at the smooth surface. Blood spurted from their ears, and their arms and # flailed weakly and were still. Hflford wearily turned away from the sickening ripping of talons. His assignment was completed. He had identified the KLammian secret weapon. A t the Federation Base on L Kanun's largest moon, Hilford was finishing his report. "Following the execution of the Duke Two Fingers, his nephew was installed as ruler of the Flat Province. He is an intelligent and conscientious young man, and he should make an excellent duke. No more agents of Haam have been discovered, and we doubt that there are more. Men with ears would find it difficult to hide on Kamm. The new Keeper of the Bird is an honest and courageous man with an instinct for leadership. He has the complete support of the Seamen's League, and he will welcome advisors from the Federation. The next five years should see a dramatic change of direction in the history of Kamm." Hilford seated himself, and indulged in a fit of coughing. The unaccustomed vocal exercise had sadly irritated his throat. He leaned back and studied the faces before him -- the military brass, the diplomatic brass, the intelligence brass. The diplomatic brass spoke first, and Hilford fumbled for a communicator, turned up the volume, and listened. "I move that we commend Special Agent Hilford for an excellent piece of work." An agitated Admiral Lantz leaped to his feet, his scholarly face flushed with excitement. "The secret weapon! You didn't mention the secret weapon!" "That calls for a special report," Hilford said. "Zorrel?" The young agent hurried out, and returned with some scientific apparatus which the distinguished audience eyed suspiciously. "I've recorded some bird talk from the Kammian Holy Bird," Hilford said. "Would you like to hear it?" The muttered assent did not reach him through the communicator. He asked again, and Admiral Lantz bellowed, "Yes!" "I'll let you hear it for exactly five seconds. And please note -- this is an oscillograph. It gives us a picture of sound waves. You can listen to this sound and watch it at the same time." He stood with a stop watch in his hand, and Zorrel turned off the machine when he signaled. "I didn't hear a thing," the admiral called. "And that line never moved. There's nothing there but silence." "Ah! Remember -- Kamm is the silent planet. This is silent bird talk." The admiral got to his feet with the air of one about to stomp out, and was hauled back into place by another admiral. Ernst Wilkes called to Hilford, "Go on, please." The Sector Chief of Intelligence looked amused. "I promise you, gentlemen," Hilford said politely, "that this is the deadliest silence in the universe. We'll wait five minutes, and then I'll give you step two." While they waited, Zorrel adjusted the oscillograph. He darted to the door and led in a giant griff hound, conveniently borrowed from a sentry. "In the first test," Hilford said, "the oscillograph was set to register sounds within the normal range of human hearing -- roughly up to # cycles. Now I'll move the upper limit as far as it will go. Watch again, for five seconds." The line on the oscillograph suddenly twisted convulsively. At the same time Hilford was flung to the floor as the dog dashed against him in a frantic effort to escape. iZorrel leaped to switch off the machine, and the dog crept under a table and howled mournfully. "You see, gentlemen," Hilford said, "how deadly that silence is. The dog can hear it -- or part of it. You can't hear a thing, but all the same you are being bombarded with a peculiarly oscillating sound wave of a murderous intensity. With that machine at normal volume, every person in this room would be dead within a minute -- except Zorrel and I, because we have no ears at the moment. And we'd be acutely uncomfortable. "The Holy Bird is a legendary monster on Kamm, for good reason. Folklore claims that the birds once ruled the planet, and it may be right. Somewhere back in the dim mists of antiquity those birds began to develop a peculiar method of catching their prey, and as their power developed it had a tremendous impact on the entire course of evolution on Kamm. Their prey had to evolve also, or become extinct. That was the course of Kammian evolution. The birds developed more power, their prey developed more immunity. Finally the birds became all-powerful, and their prey became completely immune. Man adapted to the birds by losing his hearing, and eventually, his ears. And when his hearing was gone and he became the ruling species on the planet, he continued to fear the birds. He captured them, and worshipped them." There was a long silence, interrupted by Wilkes. "What happened to the trade commissioners?" "We can only guess. By accident or on purpose, the Ehike Two Fingers exposed them to his private bird. He was probably shocked himself, at what happened, and because he feared the Federation he had the bodies dumped into the street. And now, if no one wants to hear it again, #rrel will erase the bird talk. We don't want an innocent technician committing suicide by accident. When does my leave start?" "Immediately," Wilkes said. "Two months." "You promised me six months." "I can't spare you for six months. Where do you want to go? Some nice quiet resort?" "I want my ears back," Hilford said. "And then I'm going to spend ail six months in the aft cabin of a space tug, listening to the engines." A diplomat waved his arm anxiously. "What about the future of Kanm?" Hilford was suddenly serious. "The Kammians don't realize it, but normal men could never invade Kamm. One Holy Bird, turned loose in an enemy camp at night, could wipe out an army. Even if an invader attempted to kill all the birds, he could never be certain that there wasn't one left, and one would be enough. Aliens will live on Kamm only with the gracious permission of the natives. The future of Kamm is definitely for Kammians. Or, to put it another way -- he grinned broadly " -- that planet is for the birds!" The scientific humanist doesn't pretend that every experience of life can be forced into a test tube or that every interest can be weighed on scales. He knows that something in everything always escapes the technique of measurement. -- Max Otto what Is Your Science I. Q.? science as well as facts you often read about in science fiction. Count # for each correct answer. You should score #. Over # makes you a whiz. Answers on page #. #. What have viruses and ricksettias in common? #. A perfect number is one which is the sum of all the numbers which divide it except itself. Name the first two. #. What part of a plant acts as a "photobattery"? #. Which of the body's waste products is reused by the body? #. What everyday substance can be used to replace quartz as a light polarizing part of a microscope? #. What have tsunamis and seiching in common? #. What three kinds of nuclear reactions are now known? #. What element is produced by the decaying of potassium #? #. How many first magnitude stars can be seen from the northern hemisphere? #. In walking at ordinary speed, how fast does the moving foot pass the stationary one? I I . Name six of the eight trace elements which play a vital role in the health of the human body. #. What current in the South Atlantic is similar to the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic? #. Energy for photosynthesis in plants is obtained chiefly from which jjortions of the visible spectrum? #. Kinetin is the name of the chemical in the human body that causes . #. If you reduced the volume of a sound by adding more sound, what phenomenon of sound would you be using? #. What are the four kinds of stresses? #. According to biology, which chromosomes produce males in a fertilized egg? #. What have the temperatures#.I G and# F in common? #. How many times could a ray of light circle the equator in one second? #. In reference to the theory of prime numbers, what is the peculiarity of the number two? T he hunters were necessary y of course -- but there was the other side of the picture too. The first of the morons, as they were popularly called, though they were totally lacking in intelligence, were horn in #, eleven years after the Mutual Retaliation phase of the big war-that-no-one-started, the majority of them near the big, bombed-out cities. By #, with the aid of the electron microscope, the scientists had learned all about it. Parents and offspring were steriIllustrated by Ed Emsh lized and the offspring placed in state institutions. By # there were too many of them. A new solution to the impossible situation was tried, large isolated areas in the south where the climate was mild were made into preserves for them. In the wilds the morons handed into small herds that showed no inclination to roam. By # no more of the morons were being horn. thanks to the sterilization of all parents carrying the contaminated gene. It was thought the problem was permanently solved, through perfect cooperation between science, the government, and the public. If the contamination had not been weeded out of the race one fourth of every generation for all the future would have been without any intelligence whatever. But here and there had been natural births, unattended by a doctor; and parental love coupled with fear of being sterilized and thus denied further parenthood had brought into existence a few thousand unsterilized morons, hidden away in attic rooms or in basements. And to these parents the Preserves offered the logical solution too -- drive into the nearest Preserve and turn the child loose with its kind. Thus, a new generation came into being in the scattered herds, and by # A.D, a new problem had come into being. Thanks to impurities in the moron strain or to wandering renegades -- or both -- a few normally intelligent offspring were appearing in the herds. There was danger of these recontaminating the race, if they left the herds, learned to speak, wear clothes... , In # the government attempted a mass sterilization of the herds but the herds were too wild by now, and the males too dangerous, so the sterilization program was abandoned and a new plan substituted. The government Hunters came into being, small patrol groups whose job was to pick off the renegades and any members of the herds that were intelligent. JLl and heaved erect with the front end of It. "Hi-hi-hi," Fat One and the dozen others echoed more mildly, lifting wherever they could get a hold on It. It was lifted and borne forward in a half crouching trot. "Hi-hi hi-hi-hihihi," Elf chanted, running and skipping alongside tljie panting men and their massive burden. It was carried forward through the lush grass for perhaps fifty feet. "Ah-ah-ah," Big One sighed loudly, slowly letting the front end of It down until it dug into the soft black soil. "Ahhh," Fat One and the others sighed, letting go and standing up, stretching aching back muscles, rubbing cramped hands. "Ah-ah-ah--ah-ah," Elf sang, running around and in between the resting men. He came too close to Big One and was sent sprawling by a quick, good humored push. Everyone laughed. Big One laughing the loudest. Then Big One lifted Elf to his feet and patted him on the back affectionately, a broad grin forming a toothy gap at the top of his bushy black beard. Elf answered the grin with one of his own, and at that moment his ever present yearning to grow up to be the biggest and the strongest like Big One flowed through him with new strength. Abruptly Big One leaped to the front end of It, shouting "Hi-hiHI!" "Hi-hi-hi," the others echoed, scrambling to their places. Once again It was borne forward for fifty feet -- and again and again, across the broad meadowland. A vast matting of blackberry brambles came into view off to one side. Big One veered his course toward it. The going was uphill now, so the forward surges shortened to forty feet, then thirty. By the time they reached the blackberries they were wet and glossy with sweat. It was a healthy patch, loaded with large ripe berries. The men ate hungrily at first, then more leisurely, pointing to one another's stained beards and laughing. As they denuded one area they leaped to It, carried it another ten feet, and started stripping another section, never getting more than a few feet from It. Elf picked his blackberries with first one then another of the men. When his hunger was satisfied he became mischievous, picking a handful of berries and squashing them against the back or the chest of the nearest man and running away, laughing. It was dangerous sport, he knew, because if one of them caught him he would be tossed into the brambles. Eventually they all had their fill, and thanks to Elf looked as though they were oozing blackberry juice from every pore. The sun was in its mid-aftemoon position. In the distance a line of white-barked trees could be seen -- evidence of a stream. "Hi-hi-hi!" Big One shouted. The journey toward the trees began. It was mostly downhill, so the forward spurts were often as much as a hundred feet. Before they could hear the water they could smell it. They grunted their delight at the smell, a rich fish odor betokening plenty of food. Intermingled with this odor was the spicy scent of eucalyptus. They pushed forward with renewed zeal so that the sweat ran down their skins, dissolving the berry juices and making rivulets that looked like purple blood. When less than a hundred yards from the stream, which was still hidden beyond the tall grasses and the trees lining its bank, they heard the sound of voices, high pitched -- women's voices. They became uneasy and nervous. Their surges forward shortened to ten feet, their rest periods became longer, they searched worriedly for signs of motion through the trees. They changed their course to arrive a hundred yards downstream from the source of the women's voices. Soon they reached the edge of the tree belt. It was more difficult to carry It through the scatterings of bushes. Too, they would get part way through the trees and run into trees too close together to get It past them, and have to back out and try another place. It took almost two hours to work through the trees to the bank of the stream. Only Elf recognized the place they finally broke through as the place they had left more than two days before. In that respect he knew he was different, not only from Big One and other grownups, but also all other Elfs except one, a girl Elf. He had known it as long as he could remember. He had learned it from many little things. For example, he had recognized the place when they reached it. Big One and the others never remembered anything for long. In getting It through the trees they blundered as they always had, and got through by trial and error with no memory of past blunderings. Elf was different in another way, too. He could make more sounds than the others. Sometimes he would keep a little It with him until it gave him a feeling of security almost as strong as the big It, then wander off alone with It and play with making sounds. "Bz-bz. Wallawalla-walla-rue-rue-la-lo-hi. Da !" and all kinds of sounds. It excited him to be able to make different sounds and put them together so that they pleased his hearing, but such sounds made the others avoid him and look at him from a safe distance, with worried expressions, so he had learned not to make different sounds within earshot of the others. The women and Elfs were upstream a hundred yards, where they always remained. From the acting alarmed it was evident to Elf they could no more remember the men having been here a few days before than the men could remember it themselves. It would be two or three days before they slowly lost their fear of one another; It would be the women and their Elfs who would cautiously approach, holding their portable Its clutched for security, until, finally losing all fear, they would join into one big group for a while. Big One and the others carried It right to the water's edge so they could get into the water without ever being far from It. They shivered and shouted excitedly as they bathed. Fat One screamed with delight as he held a squirming fish up for the others to see. He bit into it with strong white teeth, water dripping from his heavy brown beard. Renewed hunger possessed him. He gobbled the fish and began searching for another. He always caught two fish for any other man's one, which was why he was fat. Elf himself caught a fish. After eating it he lay on the grassy bank looking up at the white billowing clouds in the blue sky. The sun was now near the horizon, half hidden behind a cloud, sending divergent ramps of light downward. The clouds on the western horizon were slowly taking on color until red, orange, and green separated into definite areas. The soft murmur of the stream formed a lazy background to the excited voices of the men. From upstream, faintly, drifted the woman and Elf sounds. Here, close to the ground, the rich earthy smell was stronger than that of the stream. After a time a slight breeze sprang up, bringing with it other odors, that of distant pines, the pungent eucalyptus, a musky animal scent. Big One and the others were out of the water, finally. Half asleep. Elf watched them move It up to dry ground. As though that were what the sun had been waiting for, it sank rapidly below the horizon. The clouds where the sun had been seemed now to blaze for a time with a smoldering redness that cooled to black. The stars came out, one by one. A multitude of snorings erupted into the night. Elf crept among the sleeping forms until he found Big One, and settled down for the night, his head against Big One's chest, his right hand resting against the cool smooth metal of It. E lf awoke with the bright morning sun directly in his eyes. Big One was gone, already wading in the stream after fish. Some of the others were with him. A few were still sleeping. Elf leaped to his feet, paused to stretch elaborately, then splashed into the stream. As soon as he caught a fish he climbed out onto the bank and ate it. Then he turned to his search for a little It. There were many lying around, all exactly alike. He studied several, not touching some, touching and even nudging others. Since they all looked alike it was more a matter of feel than any real difference that he looked for. One and only one seemed to be the It. Elf returned his attention to it several times. Finally he picked it up and carried it over to the big It, and hid it underneath. Big One, with shouts of sheer exuberance, climbed up onto the bank dripping water. He grinned at Elf. Elf looked in the direction of the women and other Elfs. Some of them were wandering in his direction, each carrying an It of some sort, many of them similar to the one he had chosen. In sudden alaim at the thought that someone might steal his new It, Elf rescued it from its hiding place. He tiied to hide it behind him when any of the men looked his way. They scorned an individual It and, as men, preferred an It too heavy for one person. As the day advanced, women and Elfs approached nearer, pretending to be unaware at times that the men were here, at other times openly fleeing back, overcome by pnic. The men never went farther than twenty feet from the big It. But as the women came closer the men grew surly toward one another. By noon two of them were trying to pick a fight with anyone who would stand up to them. Elf clutched his little It closely and moved cautiously downstream until he was twenty feet from the big It. Tentatively he went another few feet -- farther than any of the men dared go from the big It. At first he felt secure, then panic overcame him and he ran back, dropping the little It. He touched the big It until the panic was gone. After a while he went to the little It and picked it up. He walked around, carrying it, until he felt secure with it again. Finally he went downstream again, twenty feet, twenty-five feet, thirty... He felt panic finally, but not overwhelmingly. When it became almost unendurable he calmly turned around and walked back. Confidence came to him. An hour later he went downstream until he was out of sight of the big It and the men. Security seemed to flow warmly from the little It. Excitement possessed Elf. He ran here and there, clutching It closely so as not to drop it and lose it. He felt free. "BdlboOj" he said aloud, experimentally. He liked the sounds. "Bdlboo-bdlboo-bdlboo." He saw a berry bush ahead and ran to it to munch on the delicious fruit. "Riddle piddle biddle," he said. It sounded nice. He ran on, and after a time he found a soft grassy spot and stretched out on his back, holding It carelessly in one hand. He looked up and up, at a layer of clouds going in one direction and another layer above it going in another direction. Suddenly he heard voices. At first he thought the wind must have changed so that it was carrying the voices of the men to him. He lay there listening. Slowly he realized these voices were different. They were putting sounds together like those he made himself. A sense of wonder possessed him. How could there be anyone besides himself who could do that? Unafraid, yet filled with caution, he clutched It closely to his chest and stole in the direction of the sounds. After going a hundred yards he saw signs of movement through the trees. He dropped to the ground and lay still for a moment, then gained courage to rise cautiously, ready to run. Stooping low, he stole forward until he could see several moving figures. Darting from tree to tree he moved closer to them, listening with greater excitement than he had ever known to the smoothly flowing variety of beautiful sounds they were making. This was something new, a sort of game they must be playing. One voice would make a string of sounds then stop, another would make a string of different sounds and stop, a third would take it up. They were good at it, too. But the closer he got to them the more puzzled he became. They were shaped somewhat like people, they carried Its, they had hands and faces like people. That's as far as the similarity went. Their feet were solid, their arms, legs, and body were not skin at all but strangely colored and unliving in appearance. Their faces were smooth like women's, their hair short like babies', their voices deep like men's. And the Its they carried were unlike any Elf had ever seen. Not only that, each of them carried more than one. T hat was an idea! Elf became so excited he almost forgot to keep hidden. If you had more than one It, then if something happened to one you would still feel secure! He resisted the urge to return to the stream and search for another little It to give him extra security. If he did that he might never again find these creatures that were so like men and yet so different. So instead, he filed the idea away to use at the earliest opportunity and followed the strange creatures, keeping well hidden from them. Soon Elf could hear the shouts of the men in the distance. From the behavior of the creatures ahead, they had heard those shouts too. They changed their direction so as to reach the stream a hundred yards or more downstream at about the spot where Elf had left. They made no voice sounds now that Elf could hear. They clutched their strangely shaped long Its before them tensely as though feeling greater security that way, their heads turning this way and that as they searched for any movement ahead. They moved purposefully. An overwhelming sense of kinship brought tears to Elfs eyes. These creatures were his kind. Their differences from him were physical and therefore superficial, and even if those differences were greater it wouldn't have mattered. He wanted, suddenly, to run to them. But the thought of it sent fear through him. Also they might run in panic from him if he suddenly revealed himself. It would have to be a mutual aproach, he felt. He was used to seeing them now. In due time he would reveal himself for a brief moment to them. Later he would stay in the open and watch them, making no move to approach until they got used to him being around. It might take days, but eventually, he felt sure, he could join them without causing them to panic. After all, there had been the time when he absented himself from the men for three whole days and when he returned they had forgotten him, and his sudden appearance in their midst had sent even Big One into spasms of fear. Unable to flee from the security of the big It, and unable to bear his presence among them without being used to him, they had all fallen on the ground in a fit. He had had to retreat and wait until they recovered. Then, slowly, he had let them get used to his being in sight before approaching again. It had taken two full days to get to the point where they would accept him once more. That experience. Elf felt, would be valuable to remember now. He wouldn't want to plunge these creatures into fits or see them scatter and run away. Also, he was too afraid right now to reveal himself even though every atom of his being called for their companionship. Suddenly he made another imjxDrtant discovery. Some of the Its these creatures carried had something like pliable vines attached to them so they could be hung about the neck! The thought was so staggering that Elf stopped and examined his It to see if that could be done to it. It was twice as long as his hand and round one way, tapering to a small end that opened to the hollow inside. It was too smooth to hold with a pliable vine unless -- He visualized pliable vines woven together to hold It. He wasn't sure how it could be done, but maybe it could. He set the idea aside for the future and caught up with the creatures again, looking at them with a new emotion, awe. The ideas he got just from watching them were so staggering he was getting dizzy! Anoffier new thought hit him. He rejected it at once as being too fantastic. It returned. Leaves are thin and pliable and can be wrapped around small objects like pebbles. Gould it be that these creatures were really men of some sort, with bodies like men, covered with something thin like leaves are thin? It was a new and dizzy height in portable securities, and hardly likely. No. He rejected the idea with finality and turned his mind to other things. He knew now where they could reach the stream. He decided to circle them and get ahead of them. For the next few minutes this occupied his full attention, leaving no room for crazy thoughts. He reached the stream and hid behind some bushes where he would have a quick line of retreat if necessary. He clutched It tightly and waited. In a few moments he saw the first of the creatures emerge a hundred feet away. The others soon joined the first. Elf stole forward from concealment to concealment until he was only fifteen feet from them. His heart was pounding with a mixture of fear and excitement. His knuckles were white from clutching It. The creatures were still carrying on their game of making sounds, but now in an amazing new way that made them barely audible. Elf listened to the incredibly varied sounds, enraptured. "This colony seems to have remained pure." "You never can tell." "No, you never can tell. Get out the binoculars and look, Joe." "Not just yet, Harold. I'm looking to see if I can spot one whose behavior shows intelligence." Elf ached to imitate some of the beautiful combinations of sounds. He wanted to experiment and see if he could make the softly muted voices. He had an idea how it might be done, not make a noise in your throat but breathe out and form the sounds with your mouth just like you were uttering them aloud. One of the creatures fumbled at an It hanging around his neck. The top of it hinged back. He reached in and brought out a gleaming It and held it so that it covered his eyes. He was facing toward the men upstream and stood up slowly. "See something, Joe?" Suddenly Elf was afraid. Was this some kind of magic? He had often puzzled over the problem of whether things were there when he didn't look at them. He had experimented, closing his eyes then opening them suddenly to see if things were still there, and they always were; but maybe this was magic to make the men not be there. Elf waited, watching upstream, but Big One and the others did not vanish. The one called Joe chuckled. "The toy the adult males have would be a museum piece if it were intact. A # Ford, I think. Only one wheel on it, right front." Elf's attention jerked back. One of the creatures was reaching over his shoulder, lifting on the large It fastened there. The top of the It pulled back. He reached inside, bringing out something that made Elf almost exclaim aloud. It was shaped exactly like the little It Elf was carrying, but it glistened in the sunlight and its interior was filled with a richly brown fluid. "Anyone else want a coke?" "This used to be a picnic area," the one called Joe said, not taking his eyes from the binoculars. "I can see a lot of pop bottles lying around in the general area of that wreck of a Ford." While Elf watched, breathless, the creature reached inside the skin of his hip and brought out a very small It and did something to the small end of the hollow It. Putting the very small It back under the skin of his hip, he put the hollow It to his lips and tilted it. Elf watched the brown liquid drain out. Here was magic. Such an It -- the very one he carried -- could be filled with water from the stream and carried around to drink any time! When the It held no more liquid the creature dropped it to the ground. Elf could not take his eyes from it. He wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything. They might forget it. Sometimes the women dropped their Its and forgot them, picking up another one instead, and these creatures had beardless faces like women. Besides, each of them carried so many Its that they would feel just as secure without this one. So many Its! One of the creatures held a flat white It in one hand and a very slim It shaped like a straight section of a bush stem, pointed at one end, with which he scratched on the white It at times, leaving black designs. "There' re fourteen males," the one called Joe whispered. The other wrote it down. The way these creatures did things. Elf decided, was very similar to the way Big One and the other men went at moving the big It. They were very much like men in their actions, these creatures. "Eighty-five or six females." "See any signs of intelligent action yet?" "No. A couple of the males are fighting. Probably going to be a mating free-for-all tomorrow or next day. There's one! Just a minute, I want to make sure. It's a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old. Good forehead. Her eyes definitely lack that large marble-like quality of the submoron parent species. She's intelligent all right. She's drawing something in the sand with a stick. Give me your rifle, Bill, it's got a better telescope sight on it than mine, and I don't want her to suffer." That little It, abandoned on the ground. Elf wanted it. One of the creatures would be sure to pick it up. Elf worried. He would never get it then. If only the creatures would go, or not notice him. If only -- The creature with the thing over his eyes put it back where he had gotten it out of the thing hanging from his shoulder. He had taken one of the long slim things from another of the creatures and placed the thick end against his shoulder, the small end pointed upstream. The others were standing, their backs to Elf, all of them looking upstream. If they would remain that way, maybe he could dart out and get the little It. In another moment they might lose interest in whatever they were watching. Elf darted out from his concealment and grabbed the It off the ground, and in the same instant an ear shattering sound erupted from the long slim thing against the creature's shoulder. "Got her!" the creature said. Paralyzed with fright, Elf stood motionless. One of the creatures started to turn his way. At the last instant Elf darted back to his place of concealment. His heart was pounding so loudly he felt sure they would hear it. "You sure, Joe?" "Right through the head. She never knew what happened." Elf held the new It close to him, ready to run if he were discovered. He didn't dare look at it yet. It wouldn't notice if he just held it and felt it without looking at it. It was cold at first, colder than the water in the stream. Slowly it warmed. He dared to steal a quick glance it it. It gleamed at him as though possessed of inner life. A new feeling of security grew within him, greater than he had ever known. The other It, the one half filled with dried mud, and deeply scratched from the violent rush of water over it when the stream went over its banks, lay forgotten at his feet. "Well, that finishes the survey trip for this time." Elf paid little attention to the voice whispers now, too wrapped up in his new feelings. "Yes, and quite a haul. Twentytwo colonies -- three more than ten years ago. Fourteen of them uncontaminated, seven with only one or two intelligent offspring to kill, only one colony so contaminated we had to wipe it out altogether. And one renegade." "The renegades are growing scarcer every time. Another ten or twenty years and they'll be extinct." "Then there won't be any more intelligent offspring in these colonies." "Let's get going. It'll be dark in another hour or so." The creatures were hiding some of their Its under their skin, in their carrying cases. There was a feeling about them of departure. Elf waited until they were on the move, back the way they had come, then he followed at a safe distance. He debated whether to show himself now or wait. The sun was going down in the sky now. It wouldn't be long until it went down for the night. Should he wait until in the morning to let them get their first glimpse of him? He smiled to himself. He had plenty of time. Tomorrow and tomorrow. He would never return to Big One and the other men. Men or creatures, he would join with these new and wonderful creatures. They were his kind. He thought of the girl Elf. They were her kind, too. If he could only get her to come with him. On sudden impulse he decided to try. These creatures were going back the same way they had come. If he ran, and if she came right with him, they could catch up with the creatures before they went so far they would lose them. He turned back, going carefully until he could no longer see the creatures, then he ran. He headed directly toward the place where the women and Elfs stayed. They would not be so easily alarmed as the men because there were so many of them they couldn't remember one another, and one more or less of the Elfs went unnoticed. When he reached the clearing he slowed to a walk, looking for her. Ordinarily he didn't have to look much. She would see him and come to him, smiling in recognition of the fact that he was the only one like her. He became a little angry. Was she hiding? Then he saw her. He went to her. She was on her stomach, motionless as though asleep, but something was different. There was a hole in one side of her head, and on the opposite side it was tom open, r and grayish white, with -- He knelt down and touched her. She had the same inert feel to her that others had had who never again moved. He studied her head curiously. He had never seen anything like this. He shook her. She remained limp. He sighed. He knew what would happen now. It was already happening. The odor was very faint yet, but she would not move again, and day after day the odor would get stronger. No one liked it. He would have to hurry or he would lose the creatures. He turned and ran, never looking back. Once he started to cry, then stopped in surprise. Why had he seen crying, he wondered. He hadn't hurt himself. He caught up with the creatures. They were hurrying now, their long slender Its balanced on one shoulder, the big end resting in the palm of the hand. They no longer moved cautiously. Shortly it was new country. Elf had never been this far from the stream. Big One more or less led the men, and always more or less followed the same route in cross country trips. The creatures didn't spend hours stumbling along impossible paths. They looked ahead of them and selected a way, and took it. Also they didn't have a heavy It to transport, fifty feet at a time. Elf began to sense they bad a destination in mind. Probably the place they lived. bank, higher than a man, running in a long line. The creatures climbed the bank and vanished on the other side. Cautiously Elf followed them, heading toward a large stone with It qualities at the top of the bank from whose concealment he could see where they had gone without being seen. He reached it and cautiously peeked around it. Just below him were the creatures, but what amazed Elf was the sight of the big It. It was very much like the big It the men had, except that there were differences in shape, and instead of one round thing at one comer, it had one at each corner and rested on them so that it was held off the ground. It glistened instead of being dull. It had a strange odor that was quite strong. The creatures were putting some of their Its into it, two of them had actually climbed into it -- something neither Elf nor the men had ever dared to do with their own big It. Elf took his eyes off of it for a moment to marvel at the ground. It seemed made of stone, but such stone as he had never before seen. It was an even width with edges going in straight lines that paralelled the long narrow hill on which he stood, and on the other side was a similar hill, extending as far as the eye could see. He returned his attention to the creatures and their big It. The creatures had all climbed into it now. Possibly they were settling down for the night, though it was still early for that... No matter. There was plenty of time. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Elf would show himself in the morning, then run away. He would come back again after a while and show himself a little longer, giving them time to get used to him so they wouldn't panic. They were playing their game of making voice sounds to one another again. It seemed their major preoccupation. Elf thought how much fun it would be to be one of them, making voice sounds to his heart's content. "I don't see why the government doesn't wipe out the whole lot," one of them was saying. "It's hopeless to keep them alive. Feeblemindedness is dominant in them. They can't be absorbed into the race again, and any intelligent offspring they get from mating with a renegade would start a long line of descendents, at least one fourth of whom would be mindless idiots." "Well," another of them said, "It's one of those things where there is no answer. Wipe them out, and next year it would be all the blond haired people to be wiped out to keep the race of dark haired people pure, or something. Probably in another hundred years nature will take care of the problem by wiping them out for us. Meanwhile we game wardens must make the rounds every two years and weed out any of them we can find that have intelligence." He looked up the embankment but did not notice Elf's head, concealed partially by the grass around the concrete marker. "It's an easy job. Any of them we missed seeing this time, we'll probably get next time. In the six or eight visits we make before the intelligent ones can become adults and mate we always find them." "What I hate is when they see us, those intelligent ones," a third voice said. "When they walk right up to us and want to be friends with us it's too much like plain murder, except that they can't talk, and only make moronic sounds like 'Bdl-bdl-bdl.' Even so, it gets me when we kill them." The others laughed. Suddenly Elf heard a new sound from the big It. It was not a voice sound, or if it was it was one that Elf felt he could not possibly match exactly. It was a growling, "RRrrRRrrRRrr." Suddenly it was replaced by still a different sound, a "p-p-p-p-p" going very rapidly. Perhaps it was the way these creatures snored. It was not unpleasant. Elf cocked his head to one side, listening to the sound, smiling. How exciting it would be when he could join with these creatures! He wanted to so much. The big It began to move. In the first brief second Elf could not believe his senses. How could it move without being carried? But it was moving, and the creatures didn't seem to be aware of it! Or perhaps they were too overcome by fear to leap out! Already the big It was moving faster than a walk, and was moving faster with every heartbeat. How could they remain unaware of it and not leap to safety? Belatedly Elf abandoned caution and leaped down the embankment to the flat ribbon of rock, shouting. But already the big It was over a hundred yards away, and moving faster now than birds in flight! He shouted, but the creatures didn't hear him -- or perhaps they were so overcome with fright that they were frozen. Yes, that must be it. Elf ran after the big It. If he could only catch up with it he would gladly join the creatures in their fate. Better to die with them than to lose them! He ran and ran, refusing to believe he could never overtake the big It, even when it disappeared from view, going faster than the wind. He ran and ran until his legs could lift no more. Blinded by tears, he tripped and sprawled full length on the wide ribbon of stone. His nose bled from hitting the hard surface. His knees were scraped and bleeding. He was unaware of this. He was aware only that the creatures were gone, to what unimaginable fate he could not guess, but lost to him, perhaps forever. Sobs welled up within him, spilled out, shaking his small naked body. He cried as he hadn't cried since he was a baby. And the empty Coca Cola bottle clutched forgotten in his hand glistened with the rays of the dated March #, are still available. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April #; February, April, June, August, October, December #; February, April, June #. Only # each postpaid. If you subscribe to IF for # issues (only #), we will mail you your choice of any two of these back issues as a gift! Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. Illustrated by Virgil Finlay Sooner or later it would happen, and after that he wouldn't ever have to worry again. He'd be dead, or worse. one of the silent living dead. and listening. A gray light the the unmistakable thud of a falling color of wet charcoal lay over the body. An odd whirring sound chilled room. There it was again, clicked off. Then a voice said, Plain and sharp through the thin "Grab the verminous legs of this wall separating my room from that subversive, Marty. Let's get him of old man Donnicker, the shoein the wagon." maker. "You gave him too much bip. Maybe he was sick. No, that He looks deader than Einstein." wasn't it. Another muted cry of "I said grab his legs." A door shut. I went to the window. I was shivering in the morning chill. A black car moved away down the broken pavement. It swerved to miss a large mudhole in the middle of the street and an old woman with burlap wrapped around her feet didn't move fast enough. She flew across the sidewalk like a ragged dummy and lay in a heap. Goodbye, Donnicker. I had seen the black car before. Donnicker was dead. But it didn't bother me. I never had anything to do with neighbors, anybody I didn't know had a top clearance. I was clear and intended to stay that way. You just never knew. Donnicker had seemed like a true patriot. My carefully distant and casual observations of him had led me to believe he was as happily stupid as I was. But he had been hiding something. I turned from the window and started the day's routine that had been the same for as long as I could remember. I warmed up some mush on the gas burner. At seven, as always, the Tevee warmed up, and Miss Info with the lacquered lips smiled at me. "... and so don't worry, citizens. The past is dead. The future is assured, and tomorrow will only be another today. And today we are safe and care-free." Amen. She said it every morning, but it was nice hearing it again. Then the news came on. There was a pile of junked tractors, trucks and harvesting machines, smashed and rusting. Then a line of farmers working with hoes and handguided ploughs drawn by horses. "Machines took away sacred routine work from citizens. Eggheads built the machines to rupt and spread the disease of reason. We are now replacing a week. Soon, all of us will again be united in the happy harmonious brotherhood of labor. And when you see a rusting machine, what you are seeing is another captured Egghead, frothing and fuming in its cage... At a quarter to eight I walked ten blocks to work. There were the usual hectic early morning traffic jams. Wagon-loads of produce and half-starv horses blocking the streets. The same man was bating a nag with a board. A wagon piled with fruit and vegetables was stuck in a pot hole in the pavement. Two men were carrying a spinning wheel into the front of an apartment building. A peddler was selling oil lanterns, wicks and kerosene out of a barrel. The same women and boys in dirty sheepskin jackets were hauling rickshaws. I really didn't see anyone or speak to anyone. I didn't know anyone. I knew I was safe and had nothing to worry about. Once a week I used up my GI liquor chit at a bar with a Security seal on the window. Twice a week, I slept over at a GI brothel, where every girl had a Security clearance number tattoed on her thigh. I had nothing to worry about. I was passed through three gates by guards and went to my little cage inside Pentagon Circle, local headquarters of the Department of Internal Security. Until that Tuesday morning I couldn't remember ever having done anything but sort colored cards. My chief qualification for my job: I wasn't color blind. When a green card with figures on it meaning nothing to me came out of a slot in the wall, I pushed it into a green slot that led somewhere into a filing department. When a red card came out, I pushed it into a red slot, and so forth. There were cards of fifteen colors. Another qualification: my unconscious efficiency. I never had even a hint of an abstract thought. I never remembered yesterday, let alone the day before. And until that Tuesday morning I never made even a tiny mistake. I had no idea what I was doing. Nor was I at all curious. Curiosity was highly suspect. Curiosity was dangerous in the best of all possible worlds. It was ridiculous in a state where people had never had it so good. Cards sped from my hands always into correct slots. Care-free hours slipped painlessly by into the dead past. I was sure I was safe and not thinking at all. I was a blessed blank. And then all at once -- "'The eyes are the windows of the souV The thought meant nothing to me, except it was wrong, it didn't belong in the routine. The routine flew to pieces. My efficiency blew up. I felt like a shiny bottle in a row of bottles with a sudden crack running down the middle. Red cards hit blue slots. Green cards hit yellow slots. Cards piled up, spilled over the floor. The more I tried to return to my efficiency, the worse everything was. My suit was wet with sweat. I thought of Mr. Donnicker. If a man's routine broke, it could only be because some inner guilt was disrupting his harmony. A happy person is an efficient person. Inefficiency is the symptom of a guilty conscience. "Mr. Fredricks," a voice whispered. "You're replaced here." A cold paralysis gripped me. "Get up, Fred." I jumped out of my chair. A thin, stooped little man in a cheap gray suit and dull eyes took my place. In no tiipe at all he had straightened out my mess. Cards were blurs moving into the right slots. A wide, fattish man in a wrinkled dark suit was watching me out of curiously shining eyes. He carried a black briefcase. I had seen the black briefcases before. Special Police Agent. He opened the door of my cage and motioned for me to go out ahead of him. "Say goodbye to all this, Fred." I felt the smile on my wet face as I nodded and tried to feel grateful while at the same time trying to suppress the flood of fear coming up through me and turning to sickness in my throat. I simply couldn't be afraid. I had nothing to hide. And if I was hiding something inside me I didn't know about, I should feel glad to have it detected and get it all cleaned out. "My name is John Mesner," he said as we walked down the corridor. I couldn't say anything. I felt like a string someone was beginning to saw on with a rusty knife. Mesner's office somewhere upstairs was a dingy room with a dusty desk and a couple of chairs. The walls were made of cracked concrete lined with dusty filing cabinets. The window was so soiled I could barely see the shadows of bars through the panes. Mesner sat down, put his feet on the desk. He took an apple out of his desk drawer and started peeling it slowly with a small penknife. "You scared, Fred?" "Of course not." He smiled, held out a long ribbon of apple peel and dropped it on the floor. "You're scared, Fred." I put my Personology Card on his desk right in front of him. "I just had a quarterly brain-check a week ago. There it is." I stopped myself somehow from yelling out wildly as he stabbed the card with his penknife, then tore it in little pieces and dropped them on the floor. "You've got nothing to be afraid of, Fred. But it'll probably take you a while to realize it." He went on peeling the apple. He had thick hands, stubby fingers, and the nails were dirty. He had a round pale face, a receding chin, thinning hair, and an absurd little red cupid bow mouth. I tried not to hear the moaning sound that seemed to come from the other side of a door to Mesner's right. He got up, went to the door, opened it. "Shut that guy up," he said. He shut the door and sat down again. He sliced off a bite of apple and pushed it into his mouth. "To make it short, Fred. I've investigated you thoroughly. And I being transferred." My throat was constricted. I leaned against the desk. "I don't understand, sir. I don't know anything about Police Work. I'm only a clerk, a card-sorter. I don't have any qualifications. And you can see -- my card." "A couple of field-trips with me, Fred, and you'll be a veteran." "But why me?" "You're already in the Security Department for one thing. That makes it convenient. Also, your Intelligence Quotient." "It's a low eighty," I said. "That's the average. I'm well below normal, and this brain-check showed I was lower this time than the last. So how could my IQ make any difference?" "Curiosity killed the cat, Fred." I managed to sit down before I fell down. It was impossible that I should really become an agent in the SP, the most powerful and feared organization in the state. What then was Mesner really up to? One work error shouldn't have snagged me. I'd never been guilty of thinking above a rudimentary and socially acceptable level. My IQ was unquestionably low. I was little more than a moron. So why was I frightened. Why did I feel guilty? Why was Mesner interested? Mesner stood up and dropped the apple core on the floor. "We're going on a field-trip now, Fred. Your indoctrination as an Mesner piloted the heliocar. Mesner said the only heliocars left dropped it on a plot of dried grass on the side of a forested hill in the Tennessee Mountains. Until we got out of the heliocar, I didn't know Mesner had a gun. I couldn't remember having heard of a gun or seen one before, but Mesner told me all about guns. He slid the rifle out of a canvas case, checked it, called it his favorite little field piece. Then he handed me his black briefcase. He led the way down a narrow path. It was a quiet sunny day. Squirrels ran between the trees. Birds hopped and sang up in the leaves. In front of a gray, dilapidated shack was a rickety wagon. Two men were lifting a sack out of the rear of the wagon. They wore ragged overalls and no shirts and they were both barefoot. Mesner yelled. "You. Dirksons! This is a security check." The shorter one started to run. Mesner shot him in the back of the head. The tall man grabbed up a piece of iron with a hooked end and started yelling as he ran toward us. "Open the briefcase," Mesner said oilmly. I opened it. Mesner leaned the rifle against a tree. He knelt down, brought a metal disc out of the briefcase attached to a wire. He turned a dial on a bank of controls inside the case. I heard a whirring hum. The tall hillbilly screamed. He stretched up on his toes, strained his arms and neck at the sky, then fell twitching on his face. Mesner walked toward the hillbilly and I stumbled after him. I was going to be sick, very sick. The sun worked like pins in my eyeballs. Mesner drew a round metal cap which he called a stroboscope from the case, fitted it on the hillbilly's head. The metal strip had a disc hanging down in front of the hillbilly's eyes and about two inches away. Mesner worked the dials and the flicker began blinking off and on, faster and faster, then slower, then faster again as the hillbilly's eyes stared into it unblinkingly. His muscles began to twitch. He beat the ground with his flat hands. Grasshoppers jumped across his face. Mesner pointed out to me that I was watching an on-the-spot brain-probe. The brain-prober, or bipper, as Mesner called it, was so effective he hardly ever had to use the other items in the case such as the psychopharmaceuticals, drugs, brain shock gadgets, extractors, nerve stretchers and the like. Mesner sat on his haunches, worked the flicker and lit a cigarette. "These brain-wave flickers correspond to any desired brainwave rhythm. You play around and you'll get the one you want. They talk. What they don't say comes out later from the recorder. With this bipper you can get anything out of anyone, almost. If you don't get the info you want it's only because they don't have it. It bums them out considerably in the process, but that's all to the good. They're erased, and won't do any meddlesome thinking again." The hillbilly wasn't moving now as the flicker worked on his eyes and activated desired mental responses. "Dirkson," Mesner said. "What happened to your sister, Elsa?" "Don't know. She runned away." "She was blind wasn't she? Wasn't she bom blind?" I felt an icy twist in my stomach. "That's right. Homed blind as a bat." "What happened to her?" "Runned away with some river rat." "You've hidden her somewhere, Dirkson. Where?" "I ain't hid her nowhere." Mesner turned a dial. The hillbilly screamed. His body bent upward. Blood ran out of his mouth. He was chewing his tongue, Mesner stood up and frowned. "Guess he didn't know. If he knew he'd have told us. He's no disguised Egghead. Just a damn collaborating, bottleheaded jerk." I went over behind some bmsh and was sick. The hillbilly would never answer any more questions, I knew that much. Now he was laughing and babbling and crawling around on his hands and knees. "It's rough at first, Fred. No matter how patriotic you are, and how much you hate Eggheads, it's always rough at first. But you should get used to it." "What -- I mean why -- ?" "The Dirksons didn't show for their quarterly brain-check. You assume they're hiding something. It turns out they're not, then you haven't lost anhing. Of course you have to bum them out a little to question them. But better to bum one innocent bottlehead than let one double-dome slip away." Mesner turned and lookrf at me. "Isn't that right, Fred?" "Of course it's right," I said quickly. Mesner smiled at me. ington, Mesner piloted the heliocar casually. He leaned back, smoking cigarettes, the ashes streaming down the front of his soiled lapels. "I think you'll work out fine in I was still sick. I had a throbbing ache in my head and sweat kept stinging in my eyes. I nodded numbed agreement with Mesner. "I appreciate your trying to make managed to say. "But could you have made some mistake? Gotten the wrong file or something?" "No. Your IQ is a nice low eighty, Fred. But you're just not aware that you have what is technically known as a quiescent IQ." "What's that?" "You're a true patriot, Fred. We both know that. So don't be scared. You know the sick and evil danger of a high IQ and so you've put an unconscious damfer on your own intelligence. You're not really so dumb, Fred." "But I am," I said quickly. "No, Fred. You think you are, and you look and act normally stupid and believe me, Fred, I admire your patriotic suppression of your intelligence, even from yourself. But a fact is a fact, and you're not so dumb." "I'm not pretending. I'm not a a subversive -- "Easy now," Mesner said. "You're not a subversive, that's right. A real subversive knows he's smart, is proud of it and consciously tries to hide it from others. But you loathe your own inherent mental ability, and you've been able to freeze its operation, conceal it even from yourself. Now realize this, Fred. The only place we can allow intelligence to operate is inside the Government. The Government must have a slightly superior thinking capacity in order to run things -- for the present anyway." "But any IQ above eighty is subversive. It says in the -- " "That's an ideal, a goal for the future, Fred. When the transition's been made, when the last Egghead is captured and put away, then all of us will be normal. We'll get ourselves bipped, and bum our excessive intelligence down to the eighty mark. But until that time, Fred, some of us -- especially the us. An unfortunate necessity that we pray will soon be ended." I gazed numbly out through the plastic canopy at the white clouds streaming past. He was trying to get some admission out of me, I thought. That was the only explanation. Working some subtle game with me. But that was absurd on its face, because I was way below normal. "My IQ's no good for you then," I said. "I just don't see -- " Mesner interrupted with an impatient laugh. "You're a hell of a lot brighter than you let yourself admit that you are, Fred. That's all I'm saying. You know it's a terrible thing to be smart, so you keep it under wraps. But now you know there's nothing to be afraid of. You know it's legal for a while longer to be smart as long as you're ing up, releasing your mental capacity. Believe me, Fred, it's for the good of the state. I know it sounds like a paradox, but that's how it is." "How can it be good when it's such an evil thing?" "Because right now it's a necesThere are still a lot of Eggheads mnning loose, causing trouble. And the doubledomes still loose are the toughest ones to catch, and that's our job. We've got to track down the old maniac physicists, chemists, engineers, professors, psyche-boys and the like who are still working underground. Until they're all caught Fred, we've got to live with our own filthy brains. Because you see it takes brains to catch brains." "But I have hardly any brains at all," I insisted. "You'll see, Fred. You'll see." Before I left his office that evecard. My name and face were on it. Suddenly it seemed impossibly official. All at once, I was one of the most feared and powerful men in the State. Only I knew that the only one I really feared was me. That card supposedly gave me a free hand. It could take me anywhere, even into top-secret departments in Security. With it, I was immune to curfew laws, to all social restrictions and regulations. But when I went for a walk that evening, I knew I was being followed. Wherever I went, eyes watched me constantly. Shadows moved in and out of gray doorways and dissolved around comers. After nine, after the curfew sirens howled down the emptied streets, I walked fast toward the ancient rooming house in which I thought I had always lived. Hundreds of silent gray women and children came out onto the streets and began cleaning them with brooms. One by one, the gas lights along the rubbled streets went out. I started to run through shadows, and footsteps moved behind me. A dmnken man came out of an alley and staggered down the broken pavement where weeds grew. A black car whisked him away. But no black car stopped for me. I saw no one with a black briefcase either. I saw only shadows, and felt unseen eyes watcliing me. The old woman who had been run down by a black car still lay there on the sidewalk. No one dared approach that corpse to get it off the streets. No one knew who it was, or why it was dead. No one would take any chances. One was just as suspect from associating with a guilty corpse as a living neighbor named Donnicker. Upstairs, I saw a splotch of blood on the hall floor. This time I knew it was Donnicker's. It reminded me of the Dirksons now. And of who could say how many others? I lay down and took all three of tomorrow's tranquitabs. We were allotted a month's supply of tranquitabs at a time, and we were all compelled by law to take three a day. They knocked out worry and anxiety usually. But now they didn't seem to do me much good. I couldn't seem to go to sleep. This had never happened to me before. Maybe Mesner was right. Maybe I did have a high IQ but wasn't consciously aware of it. This being true, then I had to be in high IQ could be tolerated. What really bothered me the most, of course, was why I should be worried about anything. If my IQ was useful, I ought to be glad of it. A true patriot should be glad also to have unconscious subversive elements detected. A true patriot would be grateful for whatever treatment could cleanse him. What was the matter with me? Didn't I want to be purified, cleansed? Didn't I want to be bipped a little? I didn't trust Mesner. I didn't believe he really wanted me to help him track down Eggheads. But so what? If he was trying to find out something about me, I ought to be glad to cooperate. Only I wasn't. I had bad dreams. I dreamed of Dirkson babbling and crawling and smiling at me with his bloody mouth. He kept smiling and whispering to me: "I never did know nothing, and now I'm just all burned out." I dreamed of old man Donnicker being dragged down the stairs. Then I dreamed that Mesner came in and looked down at me sleeping. A light bulb came down from the ceiling. It turned bright, then dull, then bright, then dull. Mesner smiled as he lit a cigarette. "That really bothered you didn't it, Fred. Bipping the Dirkson boy." "It made me sick." I wanted to wake up. I tried my best to wake up because I felt that if I didn't wake up now, I never would. I would die in my sleep. "Let's talk about it, Fred. I'm uneasy about it myself sometimes. I've bipped so many of them, maybe my conscience bothers me. You think it might bother a man's conscience, Fred?" "What do you mean, conscience?" "Maybe you think there's something immoral about bipping a man." "If the State does it, it's right," I said. "If it helps bring about the Era of Normalcy and absolute and permanent stability, then any method is right." Was that the correct answer? I was beginning to feel confused. Thoughts, words all jumbling up. There was an orthodox thought and an orthodox answer for everything. I'd learned them all. But had I answered this one correctly? "That's right, Fred. But the old crackpot Egghead moralists used to say that the end doesn't necessarily justify the means. They would claim that bipping a man was wrong, and that no good results could ever come from it. They would say that a destructive means would always create a destructive end. Violence, they said, could only create more violence. What do you think of that, Fred?" "That's wrong," I said. "That's confusing, double-dome stuff." "I know. But we've got to identify with Egghead thinking if we can. No matter how repulsive it is, we've got to understand how they think rf we're going to track them down and put them away. Now think hard, Fred. Have you ever heard a man say, 'Better that the whole world should die than that one man's brain should be invaded against his will.' " "No, no, that's subversive," I screamed. There was more dream, more questions, more and more confused answers. I woke up in a cold sweat. I found several electronic spyeyes concealed about the room. Just outside my door I saw one of Mesner's cigarette butts. It was yellowed with spittle, twisted and pinched in the way his always were. I didn't know if all of that night, or only part of it had been a dream. I didn't know if Mesner had actually been questioning me in my sleep or not. The spy-eyes could do that. But I knew Mesner had been outside my door. Probably he had been questioning my dreams. T hat day was worse than the night. Mesner had said to wait until I heard from him, but there ' was no word from him that day. I tried more tranquitabs. The hell with tomorrow's supply. They didn't help me. A blinding headache hit me at regular intervals. What was Mesner using me for? What did he want from me? What was I supposed to know? The Educational Tevee came on also at regular intervals. "... so if you might think, Citizens, that a machine could do your simple work better, just remember what a terrible thing the machines did to us during the cataclysmic age of reason. As you know, the machines were invented to replace human labor by Eggheads who have always tried to destroy normal, comfortable and simple ways of life. The disease of free-thought was only possible after the machines replaced human beings, gave us the time to develop excessive and self-destructive thinking..." I watched the light outside my window turn a duller gray then black, and after that an edge of white moon slid partly across the pane. Why should I care what Mesner was trying to get out of me? If it was subversive then I should be glad to get rid of it. If I was clear and clean, then I had nothing to worry about. Why wasn't I simply hipped like Donnicker and Dirkson had been? Why should a true patriot care? I shivered and stared into the darkness. Something horrible had happened to me. For the first time I realized I was entertaining unpatriotic thoughts. I didn't want to be hipped. And I knew that when Mesner finished with me, I would be hipped. When he found out whatever I was supposed to know, I'd join Dirkson and the rest of them. It had been all right, going along with the routines, as long as I actually hadn't seen what happened to a man if he didn't. I didn't want to be erased. Whatever I was, I suddenly wanted to stay me, guilty or not. Maybe this attitude was all that Mesner wanted to be sure of. But I doubted it. Because a simple hipping would have determined that. I didn't think I could stomach any more of Mesner's field-trips. On the other hand I had to go along. It all seemed to boil down to whether I wanted to get bipped now or later. "Bipping isn't bad at all," Mesner had said yesterday. "After you're bipped, you can do routine work like everyone else, never worry again about worrying. That guy who replaced you, for example. He was bipped. He's never made a mistake for # years. He never will." I closed ihy eyes. I thought of all the happy bottleheads walking the streets, out on the farms, doing their routine work, happy and carefree as long as they didn't worry. Human vegetables, the erased ones, and the terrified ones who didn't know they were even scared. Cities full of dull-eyed ciphers, and now that I was outside it a little, I could see them with an awful clarity. And I thought -- how many are as dumb as they appear to be? How many were just too frightened and numbed to think? How many would stay frightened and numb so long that they would never be able to think even if they sometime decided to try? It was easy enough to assume that too much intelligence was an evil, a virus to be burned out. Was it better to have too little and become like the hillbilly? Oh, Mesner had set my so-called quiescent IQ going all right. But how far would it go before it had gone far enough for his purpose? bad dream. Only it didn't really seem so bad as it should have been. A blind man was talking to me. Then I dreamed that a blind girl with a seeing-eye dog was looking at me. She was about fifteen, maybe younger, dressed in a plain flowered dress tied in back with a ribbon. She had a soft round face and her eyes were wide and opaque. The girl and dog seemed to come out of a mist and they whispered to me. It was frightening, but important, and I didn't remember what it was. I woke up shivering. I seemed to smell wet hair, and the window was open. I couldn't remember whether I had shut the window before I went to sleep or not. Mesner called me early the next morning. He looked the same in his wrinkled suit with the food stains on the lapels, and peeling an apple. "Fred, have you ever heard a phrase sounding like . and the blind shall lead them?' " I appeared to be trying to think about it, then said I had never heard anything like that. "You're jx)sitive about that?" "I don't remember it." "You mean you might have, but you just can't remember it." "I didn't say that. I doubt if I ever heard such a phrase." "What about this one,... and the blind shall see again,' " "No, I said. "You're sure?" I looked directly at him and he stopped peeling the apple. "If I'm supposed to have such a damn high quiescent IQ, why not let me in on a few things?" "What few things?" "These references to the blind. The Dirksons. Some blind girl named Elsa. What are you trying to find out?" "I thought maybe you remembered something, that's all. I'm pretty much in the dark myself. All I have are a few clues and theories." "Clues, theories, about what?" "Eggheads. Sabotage. What the crackpots could build, they can best destroy. They're blowing up factories, manufacturing and power plants, machines, production." "That's sabotage? I thought the whole idea in bringing about the Era of Normalcy was to do away with all mechanization. Do everything with the hands, like in the good old days." "That's an ultimate goal, Fred. Drudges don't think. They're happier. But the transition has to be more gradual. The Eggheads want to take away all mechanization at once, create chaos and anarchy. They figure that will cause the bottleheads to revolt against the Government. We can't catch the saboteurs. The saboteurs inside a blown-up factory, for example, we never know who they are. We bip every worker, not a sign of a saboteur. So whoever does the dirty work is a mindless tool of the Egghead underground, having no memory of having committed sabotage. Who are the couriers, the ones who make vital contact between the Egghead underground and the saboteurs? The dumb saboteur has to get his highly complex directives from the Eggheads. Who are the couriers?" "Why ask me?" "I know this much, Fred. Blind people are used as couriers." My knees felt weak. I couldn't say anything. All I could think about was my dreams. "I want to show you something, Fred." Mesner led me through the other door. A bleak concrete cubicle, no windows, a damp walled gray cell. Two naked men lay on slabs. Stroboscopes on their hds. Behind them, styluses recorded brain-wave patterns on moving white strips. One of the men, the one on the left, was blind. His eyes staring up into the flicker were opaque. "Look at those brain-wave recordings, Fred. They're getting the same stimulus. We can give a thousand bottleheads this stimulus with the flicker, and get identical responses. But not the blind boys. We can't successfully bip a blind boy. The brain-waves are radically different and we've never figured out a way of codifying them. A blind bastard's never seen anything. The seeing eyes are trackers, like radar. But a blind boy takes in reality and records it and keeps it in a different way. We can't get at the code easily. But I'm getting it. I've bipped plenty of blind boys and I'm getting it, Fred. The blind are used for couriers. I know that much. For the simple reason that we can't bip meaningful info out of their scrambled think-tanks." The naked men on the slabs moaned. One of them opened his mouth and a bloody foam spread over his chin. "What I'm looking for now is a known courier who is also blind. Then I can bip him, and check the info with the code I've worked out." He unbuttoned his coat and took a black hand-gun out of a holster strapped beneath his arm. "Meanwhile, Fred, these bottleheads have had it. They're burned out." I heard the two sharp echoing reports as Mesner shot them in the head. One of them beat his heels on the slab. Mesner pointed the smoking revolver. "Even dead, the blind brain records differently. See there?" I leaned against the wall. Through a crumbled hole down in the corner of damp concrete, I saw two red eyes and heard the rat squealing. "Let's go, Fred. We've got some important field-trips on today's schedule. And you still have a lot to learn." We went to Chicago. We set up some hidden electronic spy-eyes in a big apartment building. They were to be checked later for evidence of someone there who was hiding an IQ of over a hundred. And that afternoon we ran down a renegade bio-chemist hiding in a tenement. He had disguised himself for a number of years as a plumber. Mesner bipped him, and an official Security heliocar came down from Washington to take him away. When Mesner finished with the old man he was hopping around like a monkey, making grotesque faces, giggling and yelling. Tevee cameramen were on hand. A reporter was commenting on the capture of another, "... insane crackpot who has been living here under an assumed name while plotting and planning and building some diabolical machine with which to blow up the city. Our department of Internal Security excercising its eternal vigilance, captured him in time..." Mesner and I took the heliocar back up into a clear blue sky and headed for Sauk City. "Do you wonder, Fred, why we just don't kill them after they're bipped?" "What could it matter?" "It doesn't to them, but to us it matters. Public likes their scapegoats alive. More satisfying to hate live people. Public likes to see their dragons behind bars, humiliated, treated like crackpots. Makes a bottlehead feel d to see an Egghead dancing like a monkey. Also prevents martyrs. Living men are never martyrs." ' "So why are we going to Sauk City?" I asked. I wanted to change the subject. Mesner had information that an ex-professor from some long-extinct University had been concealing a high IQ after having supposedly purged himself of it years before. He was supposed to have been caught by a brain-probing spy-eye and was reported to have an IQ of over #. Mesner talked of such an IQ as though it was a living time-bomb that might go off any minute and blow Sauk City and the entire State to hell. He shot the heliocar along at # miles an hour. He held the T-Bar in one hand and lit cigarettes with the other. "What upset you so much, Fred? I mean that morning when I interrupted you sorting cards?" I felt a warning click in my head. I remembered it. The eyes are the windows of the soul. Mesner, I thought, couldn't look into the windows of a blind man. Could I? It hadn't been my own thought that had disrupted my idyllic, carefree life sorting cards. Mesner had said it to me. "Just the unexpected break in the routine," I said. "You've already explained it. My quiescent IQ is just too high to be a successful card-sorter." "It wasn't what I said?" "What did you say? I've forgotten." "The eyes are the windows of the soul. But I was only quoting, Fred. Some crackpot said that long ago." "Why probe me about blind people? I never knew any." "Ninety percent of a human being's mental activity is underground, like most of an iceberg is under water. How much of your past can you remember, Fred?" "Very little. The past is dead. Why should I remember it?" "Because a good intelligence depends on the past. Memory is a part of it. Without a past, you don't have a brain. And we've got to release our brains, Fred, for awhile. Until we can catch saboteurs and Eggheads." "I guess I've just been a patriot too long," I said. "Remember attending Drake University ten years ago, Fred?" "Sure," I said, fast, as though it was unimportant. I was really beginning to sweat. "I can remember if you keep prodding me. Sure, I can. So what? I purged myself. I forgot it. Schools weren't illegal then." "But we've got to reawaken all those past memories, Fred. Make our brains work better, even if a lot of doubledome stuff comes up. You remember a psyche prof named O'Hara?" I felt suddenly dizzy, sick. A wavering wheel started turning in my head. I managed to stop it from turning so fast. "I don't remember that at all," I said. "Then of course you wouldn't remember that he was blind?" In the darkness behind closed lids I could see patterns of light begin to flicker and threatening whispers dug at a fogging curtain. "Don't push it, Fred. It'll come. I'm patient. If I weren't, then by this time I would be bipped myself and safely put away." He would get it all right, I knew. Sooner or later he would tap it. First I would tap it, then Mesner would tap it. And after that I never would worry again. I'd never worry about remembering or forgetting anything. I wouldn't even be me. A body with a bipped brain would walk around doing routine work, and looking like me. But I'd be dead. I didn't want to die that way. Genuine physical death would be all right. But not that, not that hipping treatment. Mesner turned quickly and caught me staring at the outline of the handgun under his coat. He smiled. "You want one of these, Fred?" "Not yet," I said. "I don't remember enough yet. I'm not smart enough yet." "Tell me when you're ready." By the time we closed in on the professor in an old deserted house on the outskirts of Sauk City, he had managed to hang himself to a waterpipe in the basement. He wore a pair of ragged pants. He was terribly thin and his hair was white, and his toothless mouth gaped open and his jaws sucked in. I had never seen anyone appear so pitiful and so harmless as that old man hanging there. We untied the rope and the body fell to the floor. Mesner took a small disc from his case and put it over the dead man's heart, then stood up. "He's too dead. We should have gotten here a few minutes earlier." He seemed tired as he sat down on a soggy box. His hands were dirty with coal dust and a smudge of it was on his face. This is it, I thought. Now was as good a time for it as any, because there wasn't any good time for it. He had all the advantage. And the longer it went on, the greater advantage he would have. It was only a question of time anyway, and I couldn't stand waiting. I lunged at him. I heard the faint whining sound, saw the flash and the glint of the disc coming out of his pocket. A sudden, painless paralysis hit me and I was helpless on my knees looking at Mesner. He just stared at me morosely, tired, irritated a little. "You should know better, Fred. You're smart." "Go to hell," I said. He shook his head. "Not now, Fred. Nor you either. It isn't me you want to get, Fred. You just don't want to get hipped. You ought to trust me. I don't want to bip you, now or ever. I mean it. We need brains to catch Eggheads and that's my job. You're valuable. Everybody getting hipped, it isn't easy to get smart people these days." "Bip me now then, you bastard. Get it over with." "You'd better trust me. I'm being honest. Some of these other oiodox jerks in Security, they wouldn't fool with you. They would bip you sooner than look at you." "Why don't you?" "I've told you, for God's sake. You're a bright guy, and I'm eager to learn. And I don't want to burn up any important info." Then I got it. Then I knew why he was keeping the bipper off me. I thought about it all the way back to Washington while Mesner fed himself apples. I was supposed to have valuable unconscious info. Mesner wanted it. But the old crackpots were right. The means not only created the ends, but could destroy the ends if the means were bad enough. You probe and pry into a man's brain deep and hard enough and you come up with nothing. Your methods have destroyed the end. You've burned out the truth you're trying to get. Mesner was trying to get info from me without burning it up. The bastard was trying to have his bloody cake and eat it. But the insight didn't make my position any easier. He was going to get it some way. His talking and hinting and probing was designed to awaken vital memory in me, get it up into total consciousness where he could get at it with his instruments without the danger of burning it up. Soon as he got what he wanted he would bip me. I couldn't keep him from getting it because I didn't know what it was. I couldn't keep on suppressing something if I didn't know what it was, and I knew that no one can consciously suppress knowledge in himself in any case. F or two more days I didn't hear from Mesner. I indulged in feverish and ridiculous escape fantasies. There could be no escape for me. The educational voices from the Tevee drifted in and out... the greatest threat to man's happy survival is reason. Man was never intended to go above a certain mental level and become thereby a victim of his own imagination and complex fears. This disease of reason has been carried to its final suicidal limit by Eggheads..." No mention of sabotage. The care-free public must not hear of such disquieting things. All the public heard # hours a day was a voice telling them about the evils of reason. The destructiveness of overly-developed brains, and the vicious criminality of Eggheads. After listening to that long enough, and having all subversive level IQs purged, who could believe otherwise? How many believed otherwise now? Did I? What in hell did Mesner want to dig out of me? Who, what, why was I? I was still a bottle. But now there were countless cracks appearing in it. Then Mesner called, said we were going on another field-trip that next afternoon. All right, I said. Someway or other, I knew, I would make this my last trip with Mesner. He had located a blind man, he said, who he knew had been a courier, a blind man definitely linked up with a recent sabotaging of a motor parts plant somewhere Mesner looked down on the shanty town from a high bluff above the river. The river rats' shanties were built half in, half out of the water, some of them on stilts, some of them actually consisting of dilapidated houseboats. Mesner said river rats were They drifted up and down the rivers. You staged a raid and they dissolved away into the river like rodents. Many of them skipped quarterly brain-checks, but no one knew how many. Birth and death records weren't kept by river rats. I walked ahead of Mesner down a winding gravel path into rotting reeds by the river, then we followed another muddy path toward the shanties. Frogs and insects hummed. A path of moonlight moved across the water. A ribby hound dog slunk away from me. A ragged kid looking wilder than the hound, ran across the path and slipped soundlessly into the muddy water. Mesner pointed out the blind man's shack. Then he looked at me and smiled with that absurd little cupid bow mouth. "This isn't the time either, Fred. If you think we're not covered, you're wrong. You couldn't run fifty feet before they burned you down." We walked nearer the loosely boarded and sagging shack. "You take the back, Fred. Just remember, better later than now. And be careful. When these river rats get stirred up, they can cause a hell of a row. The entire goon squad would have to move in and there would be a mass hipping spree." Mesner crept nearer, then whispered. "No light. You can't even tell if one of them's at home after dark. Why do they need a light? Go on, watch the back door, Fred. And don't let this one slip by." I heard the front door crash inward. A man wearing only tattered pants ran out. He was thin and ribby like the dog, and I could see the moonlight shining on the opaque whiteness of his eyes. He ran directly at me. And I knew I wasn't going to try to stop him. But I didn't know why. Then Mesner came out and fired a small gun, smaller than the one under his coat. It wasn't the same. This was a nerve-gun and it curled the synaptic connections between neurons. The blind man collapsed and lay like a corpse at my feet. I knelt down and felt of him. Mesner whispered for me to drag the old man inside. I hooked my hands under his shoulders and pulled him into the shack. It didn't matter to me now, nor to the blind man, I thought. He hardly weighed anything. His eyes were fixed in a white silence as Mesner shone a small flashlight into them. Then Mesner shut both doors and pulled a ragged cloth across the single window. He opened his case. He put the stroboscope on the blind man's head. The bluish light began to flicker over the staring opaque eyes. I saw the nerve-gun lying on the floor beside Mesner's hand. "You're too late," I said. "He's dead. I wouldn't have dragged him in here if I hadn't known he was dead." Mesner was breathing thickly. His fat round face was pale and shiny with sweat. "I know he's dead. He must have gulped a fastaction poison soon as I came in the door. Maybe even the blind boys are deciding things are getting too hot." Mesner worked the stroboscope. "But he's dead," I said. "Brain cells are the last to die," Mesner said. "Maybe I can pick up a little info yet." It burst out of me then as from an abscess. The bottle cracked into a thousand fragments. I lunged at Mesner. He seemed to roll away from me, and then he squatted there in the flickering light. He leveled the gun at me. "So you're beginning to wake up, Fred!" Probing a dead man. Questioning the dead. Even a corpse was sacred no longer. The vile and horrible bastards, all of them. "I don't care what happens to me," I said. "That's noble of you." "I'm going to kill you." "Why?" "You wouldn't understand." "Maybe I wouldn't agree, but I'll understand, Fred. I know what you're thinking. What I'm doing now is just too much. Right? The final indignity one human being could inflict on another, right? A human mind should be sacred, even if it's dumb. Even if it's dead. Especially if it's dead. Right, Fred?" I started around the rickety table toward him. "Now it's set off, Fred. You're fired up now. That's what I've been waiting for. You were planted to sabotage Security itself, Fred, and I always knew that. Now we're going to find out all the rest of it. Now it's squeezing out of your unconscious, and we can drain it, empty it all out. They put a lid on your mind, Fred, and I've taken it off. Put on the ethical pressure, put it heavy on your idealistic Egghead morality, steam it up hot, blow the lid off. It's working, Fred." "Is it?" I said. "I don't remember anything that would do you any good. I just know that it's wrong, the final horrible fraud. It isn't intelligence you guys want to wipe out, Mesner. Not your own, not the big wheels in power. It's only certain kinds of thinking, undesirable thoughts, attitudes you don't like. Those are what you have to purge." "Right, Fred. Only the wrong kind of Eggheads. Me, hell I'm an Egghead too. Remember the prize pupil in your psych class at Drake University, Fred?" Mesner laughed. "That was me." "You can kill people," I said. "You can't burn a sense of what's right or wrong out of people. That old dead blind man there has preserved something you can't touch." "Too bad you won't be around to see how wrong you are, Fred. We can make people whatever we damn well want them to be. Your old ethical pals worked out the methods. We're using it for a different end." The front door squeaked. I felt a moist draft on my face, and a whisper in my brain. A few words. I don't remember what they were. But they were a key that opened floodgates of self-understanding and awareness. I remembered a lot then, a lot of things and feelings that warmed me. I had a wonderful sense of wholeness and I was no longer afraid of being bipped, or afraid to die. There was an expression of complete triumph on Mesner's face, and he knew what had happened to me and he wanted it, all of it, sucked away into his briefcase. Just the same, the whisper from the doorway distracted his attention and I went for him. In that second of time, I saw the little blind girl who had whispered that triggering phrase for my release, and behind her, the seeingeye dog. She was utterly unafraid and smiling at me. Courage she was saying. And I could share it with her. She had sealed her own death in order to make me whole again. I smashed the flashlight off the table into the wall and my weight drove Mesner onto the floor. I managed to grab his arm and we lay there in the dark straining for the nerve-gun. I began to hear the whir of heliocars. I twisted Mesner's arm up and around and released the nerve-gun's full charge directly into his face. A stammering scream came out of him. It was the scream of something not human. A full charge of that into the brain, it must have curled up the intricate connections and short circuited his brain into an irreparable hash. I took the blind girl's hand and we ran toward the river. The sky was crossed with search beams. And in the deep darkness by the river I was suddenly as blind as the girl who held my hand. We kept running and stumbling through the reeds. I felt her hand slip from mine. Then something hit me. It wasn't a localized impact, but something seemed to have hit me all over and moved through me as though my blood suddenly turned to lead. I tried to find the girl. I tried to crawl to the river, into the river. And near me I heard the girl say softly, "Goodbye now, Mr. Fredricks. Don't worry, because you'll be brave." "Thanks," I said. "Little girl, what's your name?" She didn't answer. I tried to call out to her again in the darkness, but I couldn't move my lips. Paralysis gripped me, and after that blackness, with the lights sometime later beginning to flicker against my tearing eyes, and then the horror. T he inquisition ended sooner than I thought it would. After the awful intrusion, there isn't any farther awareness of time. After you are thoroughly invaded, after your private soul, every naked cell of your brain is peeled open, exposed to the raw glaring light, after that you no longer care. What is you has been obliterated the way a shadow is eaten by the burn of cold light. Your identity is gone. They take it. You are theirs, all of you belongs to them. You feel them pouring out your mind down to the pitiful dregs as though they are pouring cups of coffee. The pain is a shredding, ripping, raveling horror. After that there is no feeling at all, and this is worse. I told them everything I knew. What I couldn't tell, they tapped, tearing chunks out the way you would rip pages and chapters out of a book. The responsible humanists, scientists, intellectuals had known what was coming. They prepared for it, and set up the plan before the last days of the Egghead purge. They set up the future saboteurs by a long intricate process of psychodynamic conditioning. They did it in the Universities before the schools were purged. Promising students were selected, worked on. Fredricks, a psychology student, was subjected to repeat hypnotic experiments. A blind Professor named O'Hara did most of it. It was all there finally in Fredrick's head, but then it was all suppressed and finally Fredricks himself forgot that he knew. A delayed hypnotic response pattern, an analogue, is set up. Later it will be triggered off by a phrase, a word, a series of words repeated at conditioned response intervals. Ten years later he was working inside, inside Security itself. When circumstances were right, a blind courier was to have triggered off Fredrick's suppressed knowledge allowing him to sabotage the entire Department of Records and Scientific Method. So many scientists and intellectuals had already been purged that few remained among the available personnel of Security who could have repaired a simple gasoline motor without a step-bystep chart taken from the Department of Records. It would have been a master coup for the underground. But Mesner had traced Fredrick's identity back to Drake University, back to O'Hara. He had gotten suspicious, and removed Fredricks from Security. The blind girl had whispered the key phrase just the same, in order that Fredricks might face the ordeal of the inquisition with as much pride, strength, and courage as possible. "Only a free man, a man who fully respects himself as an individual and a human being," Fredricks told his inquisitors, "only a man who has learned why he is living, can die like a man." Then they killed me. They tried to get more out of me, but what they wanted to know, I knew nothing whatever about. I knew nothing about the underground, or the headquarters of the Eggheads. But by then I was dead, and what they did was of no importance. I was no longer me. There was no awareness of being me. I had joined Dirkson and the renegade biochemist and all the others. I was hopping up and down in a cage before the Tevee cameras, and of smiling, care-free citizens and telling them how another vicious crackpot had been captured just in time to avert some terrible disaster which would have disturbed the status quo. Then I was taken away. "Are you awake now, Mr. Fredricks?" I opened my eyes. I was in a clean white room lying near a barred window. An attractive nurse smiled at me. She was holding a clipboard and making notations on a report pad. "How do you feel now, Fred?" Painfully, I turned and saw several ghosts standing and sitting on the other side of the bed. I could see a door behind them, partly opened onto a softly lit corridor. There was Dr. Malden, a famous anthropologist whom I had last seen in a newspaper headline during the purge. And Dr. Marquand, Nobel Prize winner in electrobiology. And Dr. Martinson, one time head of the UN Research Foundation. Dr. Rothberg, social psychologist. All dead, all purged, hipped and confined years ago. All ghosts. Only they were there. And they were alive, and they seemed glad to see me. All I knew was that I was alive again. I was aware of being me. And somehow I knew that these forgotten names were also alive again. Rothberg handed me a cigarette and the nurse lit it for me. I remembered that once I had liked cigarettes. "So what's happened," I said. My voice was weak. My insides felt as though they were filled with grinding pieces of broken razor "You're in Zany-Ward No. #," Dr. Rothberg said. "I don't believe I quite understand," I said carefully. "You will," Dr. Rothberg said. "Let's just say for a starter that when a man is hipped and brought here, we try to put him back together again. It's a long painful process. Sometimes he's not quite the same, but we've done pretty good work. We rebuild burned-out circuits. We have to know exactly what you were before you were hipped, and we try to duplicate the pattern. Regeneration is slow and rough. You'll be all right." "I'hey shook hands with me and smiled down at me and went out. The pretty nurse gave me a pill and I lay back and thought about it. It was logical enough, and I started to laugh. During the months after that while the slow process of re-learning and regeneration continued, I learned more about the ZanyWards. Serious as it was, and as much as there was yet to be done, it was always amusing. As Eggheads were apprehended and confined, they were rehabilitated, put back together again, in a way you could say fissioned. The Eggheads are the inmates. They, run the ZanyWards which are used also as bases of operation in a continuing attempt to disrupt the Era of Normalcy. Great scientific labs are concealed underground. When Security inspection committees appear on the scene, we all put on our acts. We dance, make faces, act like monkeys and giggle. Doctor Rothberg told me yesterday that if our sabotage work doesn't soon cause people to rebel against the Era of Normalcy, it won't be long before we'll be the only sane people left in the world. ( Continued from page # ) kept this mission secret so far, how we got the photos and when the expedition got back. We've also heard from folks who seem to be having some pretty hot arguments about whether or not these are real Kodachromes. We love a good argument ourselves and would like to keep this going, but our conscience compels us to admit that the whole thing is nothing more than a nice piece of imaginative illustrating by Mel Hunter. Mel went even further and furnished "blueprints" for the theoretical ship, on the front cover. Now if someone would care to build one... Last minute notes: Harlan Ellison is now in the army at Fort Benning, Georgia ; but has his typewriter along to finish novel commitments. Henry Slesar has just written, directed, produced and photographed a #-minute movie spoofing the advertising business. His agent has also just sold one of his stories to the Alfred Hitchcock program. Gnome is going to publish a book version of Riley and Clifton's science fiction award winner They'd Rather Be Right, DonT forget to drop us that note about you. The statistics can't pile up too fast -- if we must, we can borrow a computer from our neighbor I.B.M. -- ekw The tenth son of a tenth son was very sick, but it was written that he would never die. Of course, it was up to the Earth doctor to see that he didn't! T hey didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late to stop it. The call from Morua II came in quite innocently, relayed to the ship crash priority, which meant Top Grade Planetstry Emergency, and don't argue about it, fellows, just get there, fast. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins took one look at the flashing blinker and slammed the controls into automatic ; gyros hummed, bearings were computed and checked, and the General Practice Illustrated by Ed Emsh Patrol ship Lancet spun in its tracks, so to speak, and began homing on the call-source like a hound on a fox. The fact that Morua II was a Class VI planet didn't quite register with anybody, just then. Ten minutes later the Red Doctor reached for the results of the Initial Information Survey on Morua II, and let out a howl of alarm. A single card sat in the slot with a wide black stripe across it. Jenkins snapped on the intercom. "Wally," he yelped. "Better get up here fast." "Trouble?" said the squawk-box sleepily. "Oh, brother," said Jenkins. "Somebody's cracked the Contract Code or something." A moment later a tall sleepy man in green undershorts appeared at the control room, rubbing his eyes. "What happened?" he said. "We've changed course." "Yeah. Ever hear of Morua II?" Green Doctor Wally Stone frowned and scratched his whiskered chin. "Sounds familiar, but I can't quite tune in. Crash call?" His eye caught the black-striped card. "Class VI planet... a plague spot! How can we get a crash-call from this?" "You tell me," said Jenkins. "Wait a minute. Seems to me there was some sort of nasty business -- " Jenkins nodded heavily. "There sure was. Five successive attempts to establish a Contract with them, and five times we got thrown out bodily. The last time an Earth ship landed there half the crew was summarily shot and the others came home with their ears cut off. Seems the folks on Morua II didn't want a Contract with Hospital Earth. And they're still in the jungle, as far as their medicine goes. Witch doctors and spells." He tossed the Info-card down the chute with a growl. "So now we have an emergency call from them in a Contract code they couldn't possibly know." The surgeon in the green undershorts chewed his lip. "Looks like somebody in that last crew spilled the beans before they shot him." "Obviously." "Well, what arc we doing on automatics? We're not going there, are we?" "What else? You know the law. Instantaneous response to any crash-priority call, regardless of circumstances -- " "Law be damned," Stone cried. "File a protest with HQ. Cancel the course bearings and thumb our noses at them!" "And spend the next twenty years scrubbing test tubes." Jenkins shook his head "Sorry, it took me too long to get aboard one of these tubs. We don't do that in the General Practice Patrol, remember? I don't know how Morua II got the code, but they got it, and that's all the farther we're supposed to think. We answer the call, and beef about it later. If we still happen to be around later, that is." It had always been that way. Since the first formal Medical Service Contract had been signed with pital Earth had laboriously built its reputation on that single foundation stone: immediate medical assistance, without question or hesitation, whenever and wherever it was required, on any planet bound by Contract. That was the law, for Hospital Earth could not afford to jeopardize a Contract. In the early days of galactic exploration, of course. Medical Services was only a minor factor in an expanding commercial network that drew multitudes of planets into social and economic interdependence; but in any growing civilization division of labor inevitably occurs. Other planets outstripped Earth in technology, in communications, in transport, and in production techniques -- but Earth stood unrivaled in its development of the biological sciences. Wherever an Earth ship landed, the crew was soon rendering Medical Services of one sort or another, whether they had planned it that way or not. On Contract was formalized, and Hospital Earth came into being. Into all known corners of the galaxy ships of the General Practice Patrol were dispatched -- "Galactic Pill Peddlers" forging a chain of Contracts from Aldebaran to Zam, accepting calls, diagnosing ills, arranging for proper disposition of whatever medical problems they came across. Serious problems were shuttled back to Hospital Earth without delay; more frequently the and Green services, representing the ancient Earthly arts of medicine and surgery -- were able to handle the problems on the spot and by themselves. It was a rugged service for a single planet to provide, and it was costly. Many planets studied the terms of Contract and declined, pleasantly but firmly -- and were aswould answer an emergency call if one was received. There would be a fee, of course, but the call would be answered. And then there were other planets -- places such as Morua II... The Lancet homed on the dismal grey planet with an escort of eight RX ugly fighter ships which had swarmed up like hornets to greet her. They triangled her in, appled her, and dropped her with a bonejarring crash into a landing slot on the edge of the city. As Sam Jenkins and Wally Stone picked themselves off the bulkheads, trying to rearrange the scarlet and green uniforms of their respective services, the main entrance lock burst open with a squeal of tortured metal. At least a dozen Moruans poured into the control room -- huge bearlike creatures with heavy grey fur ruffing out around their faces like thick hairy dog collars. The one in command strode forward arrogantly, one huge paw leveling a placergun with a distinct air of business about it. "Well, you took long enough!" he roared, baring a set of yellow fangs that sent shivers up Jenkins spine. "Fourteen hours! Do you call that speed?" Jenkins twisted down the volume on his Translator with a grimace. "You're lucky we came at all," he said peevishly. "Where's your Contract? Where did you get the Code?" "Bother the Contract," the Moruan snarled. "You're supposed to be physicians, eh?" He eyed them up and down as though he disapproved of everything that he saw. "You make sick people well?" "That's the general idea." "All right." He poked a hairy finger at a shuttle car perched outside. "In there." They were herded into the car with three guards in front and three behind. A tunnel gulped them into darkness as the car careened madly into the city. For an endless period they pitched and churned through blackness -- then suddenly emerged into a high, gilded hall with pale sunlight filtering down. From the number of decorated guards, and the scraping and groveling that went on as they were hurried through embattled corridors, it seemed likely they were nearing the seat of government. Finally a pair of steel doors opened to admit them to a long, arched hallway. Their leader, who was called Aguar by his flunkies, halted them with a snarl and walked across to the tall figure guarding the far door. The guard did not seem pleased; he wore a long purple cap with a gold ball on the end which twitched wildly as their whispered conference devolved into growling and snarling. Finally Aguar motioned them to follow, and they entered the far chamber, with Purple-Hat glaring at them malignantly as they passed. Aguar halted them at the doorway. "His Eminence will see you," he growled. "Who is His Eminence?" Jenkins asked. "The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies," Aguar rumbled. "He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he can never die. When you enter, bow," he added. The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light. His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his feet. "Go away," he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over with his back toward them. The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. "What illness is this?" he whispered. "He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it kills -- but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written -- " "Yes, yes, I know. He can never die." Sam gave Wally a sour look. "What happens, though, if he just up and does?" Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. "'He does not die. We have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure him." They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged loosely from his arm. "Looks like His Eminence can't read," Wally muttered. "He's going fast. Doc." Jenkins nodded grimly. "What does it look like to you?" "How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right." "Probably a viremia of some sort." Jenkins went over the great groaning hulk with inquiring fingers. "If it's a viremia, we're cooked," Stone whispered. "None of the drugs cross over -- and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any new ones -- " Jenkins turned to Aguar. "How long has this gone on?" "For days," the Moruan growled. "He can't speak. He grows hot and cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles." "What about your own doctors?" Aguar spat angrily on the floor. "They are jealous as cats until trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils." He gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted sword. "Now we see." "We can't promise," Jenkins began. "Sometimes we're called too late -- but perhaps not in this case," he added hastily when he saw the Moruan's face. "Tenth Son and all that. But you'll have to give us freedom to work." "What kind of freedom?" "We'll need supplies and information from our ship. We'll have to consult your physicians. We'll need healthy Moruans to examine -- " RX "But you will cure him," Aguar said. Jenkins took a deep breath and gripped his red tunic around his throat tightly. "Sure, sure," he said weakly. "You just watch us." we're going to do?" the surgeon wailed, back in the control room of the Lancet, "Sam, we can't touch him. If he didn't die naturally we'd kill him for sure! We can't go near him without a Bio-survey -- look what happened on Baron when they tried it! Half the planetary population wiped out before they realized that the antibiotic was more deadly to the race than the virus was..." "Might not be such a bad idea for Morua," the Red Doctor muttered grimly. "Well, what did you expect me to do -- politely refuse? And have our throats slit right on the spot?" He grabbed a pad and began scribbling. "We've got to do something just to keep alive for a while." "Yeah," said Wally. "What, for instance?" "Well, we've got a little to go on just from looking at them. They're oxygen-breathers, which means they manage internal combustion of carbohydrates, somehow. From the grey skin color I'd guess at a cuprous or stannous heme-protein carrying system. They're carnivores, but god knows what their protein metabolism is like -- Let's get going on some of these specimens Aguar has rounded up for us." They dug in frantically. Under would send in a full crew of technicians to a newly-Contracted planet to make the initial Bio-survey of the indigenous races. Biochemists, physiologists, anatomists, microbiologists, radiologists -- survey workers from every Service would examine and study the new clients, take them apart cell by cell to see what made them tick. Certain basic principles were always the same, a fact which accelerated the program considerably. Humanoid or not, all forms of life had basic qualities in common. Biochemical reactions were biochemical reactions, whether they happened to occur in a wing-creature of Wolf IV or a doctor from terminant: a jelly-blob from Deneb I with its fine skein of pulsating nerve fibrils was still just a jellyblob, and would never rise above the level of amoeboid yes-no response because of its utter lack of organization. But a creature with an organized central nervous system and a functional division of work among organ systems could be categorized, tested, studied, and compared, and the information used in combating native disease. Given no major setbacks, and full cooperation of the natives, the job only took about six months to do -- For the crew of the Lancet six hours was seven hours too long. They herded cringing Moruan "volunteers" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data. "Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the Wizards for a while?" Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't having any that day. "Look," said Jenkins intensely. "You've seen this illness before. We haven't. So you can at least get us started. What kind of course does it run?" Silence. "All right then, what causes it? Do you know? Bacteria? Virus? Degeneration?" Silence. Jenkins' face was pale. "Look, boys -- your Boss out there is going to cool before long if something doesn't happen fast -- " His eyes narrowed on Kiz. "Of course, that might be right up your alley -- how about that? His Eminence bows out, somebody has to bow in, right? Maybe you, huh?" Kiz began sputtering indignantly; the Red Doctor cut him off. "It adds up," he said heatedly. "You've got the power, you've got your magic and all. Maybe you were the boys that turned thumbs down so violently on the idea of a Hospital Earth Contract, eh? Couldn't risk having outsiders cutting in on your trade." Jenkins rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "But somehow it seems to me you'd have a whale of a lot more power if you learned how to control this Pox." Kiz stopped sputtering quite abruptly. He blinked at his confederates for a long moment. Then: "You're an idiot. It can't be done." "Suppose it could." "The Spirit of the Pox is too strong. Our most powerful spells make him laugh. He eats our powders and drinks our potions. Even the Iron Circle won't drive him out." "Won't it, now! Well, we have iron needles and potions that eat the bottoms out of their jars. Suppose they drive him out?" The Moruan was visibly shaken. He held a whispered conference with his henchmen. "You'll show us these things?" he asked suspiciously. "I'll make a bargain," said Jenkins. "You give us a Contract, we give you the power -- fair enough?" More whispers. Wally Stone tugged at Sam's sleeve. "What do you think you're doing?" he choked. "These boys will cut your throat quicker than Aguar will -- " "Maybe not," said Sam. "Look, I've got an idea -- risky, but it might work if you'll play along. We can't lose much." The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. "All right, we bargain," he said. After you show us." "Now or never." Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards. "I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me. I'll see you there. If not -- " He fingered his throat suggestively. RX As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him in bewilderment. "You're going to kill him," he moaned. "Prayers, promises, pills and postmortems. That's the Medical service for you." Sam grinned. "Maybe you should operate on him. That would open their eyes all right." "No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do you want me to do?" "Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ," said Sam grimly. "Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one in the next few hours -- " Son had looked bad before, three hours had witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed. Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howUng-dog quality. Aguar met him at the door. "He's dying," he roared angrily. "Why don't you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and aJl you do is poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in this bag of bones again -- " He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending over the bed. Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly. "Try being quiet for a while," Jenkins said to Aguar. "We're going to cure the Boss here." Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor and threw it open. "First off, get rid of those things." He pointed to the braziers at the bedside. "They're enough to give anybody a headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when they're raising a din like that?" Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the braziers. Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside. "Tell me what spells you've already used." Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers. As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a liter flask, tubing and needles. "First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of two -- " Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. "But doesn't anybody ever recover from this?" "Oh, yes -- if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat and drink -- " The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube arrangement Jenkins had prepared. "What's that?" "I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment." Jenkins handed him the liter flask. "Hold it high." He began searching for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the needle; then the flask began to drip slowly. Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam Jenkins held up lus hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady drip-drip-drip. Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag. These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting e blue flames to high speartips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an ominous purple color. Kiz watched goggle-eyed. "Now!" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. "This should annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce." He popped the tube into the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube. Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. "You see what I'm doing, of course?" he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear. "Oh, yes -- yes! Indeed, indeed," said Kiz. "Fine. Now this is most important." Jenkins searched in the bag until he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect rhythm with the intravenous drip... and waited. The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His Eminence and the plinkplink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly Jenkins motioned to Kiz. "His pulse -- quickly!" Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. "A hundred and eighty," he whispered. Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. "It's a bad sign," he said. "The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an outsider." He motioned toward the mortar. "Can you do this?" Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz. He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. "Gall me when the bottle is empty -- or if there is any change. Whatever you do, dont touch anything. With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant. They woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution, and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were rousing him with frightened voices. "Quickly!" Aguar cried. "There's been a terrible change!" In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to side, groaning hoarsely. Faster!" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. "Blankets, nov -- plenty of them." The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the patient's vital signs, wiped more RX sweat from his furJ# brow. Quite suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and regular. Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it high. "You've done well!" he cried to the bewildered physician. "It's over now -- the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover." T hey escorted him in triumphal procession back to the Lancet, where Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. "I finally got through to somebody at HQ," he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard. "It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the first place, but that's the best they can do . , "Tell them to forget the armada," said Jenkins, grinning. "And anyway, they've got things all wrong back at HQ." He brandished a huge roll of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical Services of Hospital Earth. "Take a look, my boy -- the juiciest Medical Services Contract that's been written in three centuries -- " He tossed the Contract in the drystorage locker with a sigh. "Old Kiz just finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on -- " "So am I," said the Green Doctor suspiciously. "It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox." "With what? Incantations?" "Oh, the incantations were for the doctors" said Jenkins. "They expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Witnout a Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much -- " Wally Stone's jaw sagged. "So you treated him with sugar-water and aspirin," he said weakly. "And on that you risked our necks." "Not quite," said the Red Doctor. "You're forgetting that I had one other prescription to use -- the oldest, most trustworthy healer-ofall-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a thousand years ago. Without it. Hospital Earth might just as well pack up her little black bag and go home." He smiled into the mirror as he adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. "We call it Tincture of Time," he This may prove to you that Television can change your life more than you think! Illustrated by Paul Orban T he world newspapers had heralded the event for months. 'The First Personal Visit from Outer Space" was the most important headline of the decade. Now there were perhaps sixty thousand people crowding behind ropes and guards at the Earth Interspace Airport, waiting patiently for Mr. Kramvit of Planet Six. Fourth Vice President Vincent J. Carrowick had been selected to be Mr. Kramvit's guide for the length of his visit. He was waiting now, with Secretary Gordon, in the airport's executive office. Carrowick spoke first, "Well, this is it. I've spoken to Kramvit at least eight times on the Vidcope phone, but I'm as nervous as a contestant right now." Gordon eyed the screen which was noting the ship's approach. "I don't see why you should be. You know what he's like basically. Their bodies and physical capabilities are the same as ours, and most of the people of Six speak English almost as well as we do, by now." He looked at Carrowick, "Are their Vidcopes going to stay on Kramvit during his entire visit?" Carrowick spoke slowly, "Yes. At least they're going to try; on all six of the Planets. Kramvit's going to carry a pin microphone on his person all the time. So they should see and hear us no matter where we are." "How long do you intend to be out of the country with him?" asked Gordon. "Well, most of his time will be spent here, visiting all fifty-three states. We'll take one cruise to pay token visits to the heads of all countries first, then back here until he goes home. Hey! He's landing, let's go!"... After over an hour of welcoming speeches, photographs and newspaper reporters, Marryl Kramvit was alone in the executive office with Vice President Carrowick and Secretary Gordon. "If we didn't know you were from Six, we would certainly take you for an Earthman," Carrowick was saying, "Why, your clothes, your coloring, everhing about you is just the same!" Kramvit smiled and said, "Well, thank you. Physically, of course, we are the same. The clothes -- well, ours are quite a bit different, as you know. I had these made by a superb tailor who copied them from our Vidcope screens. "Many of our females," Kramvit continued, "have already started to wear some of your ladies' styles, and quite becoming they are." Carrowick put on his cloak, and said, "Well, let's be on our way. You're to meet our President for lunch, and then we start our tour, if that's all right with you." "Why, of course, that's why I'm here, and I'm anxious to see your world. Particularly America." The trip around the world had gone as smoothly as could be expected. Were it not for the multitudes that gathered at each airport in order to catch a glimpse of Kramvit, it would have been just perfect. Kramvit, however, was as cordial to the throngs as he was to the heads of their respective countries. He was a fine good will ambassador. A little flicker of disappointment was usually evident when the people saw for themselves that this man from another world looked and acted just as they did. All in all, Carrowick was quite pleased, and he and Kramvit were now in the Vincent and Marryl stage, except in public. "Well, you've been in most of the countries of the Earth," said Carrowick, as they relaxed in the private plane, "and visited forty of our States of America. What do you think, Marryl?" "I'm pleased, of course." answered Kramvit. "You're aware, I'm sure, Vincent, that Six and the other five planets of the Orb are a bit farther advanced than Earth. But, I don't think it will be very long before you're up to us. "I've been able to understand almost everything I've seen," he continued, "and I've made notes of what I couldn't understand; one thing y Vincent, you haven't explained to me at all." "What's that?" "Well, so far as I can see, there are only two economic classes here on Earth. I've seen what appear to me to be only very wealthy people and very, very poor people. I've also noticed," here Kramvit smiled, "that you have sort of avoided these poor people, and what I assume to be their dwellings. I've seen glimpses of the squalor and terribly poor sections in each of your states so far." Carrowick seemed a bit shocked, but Kramvit continued. "Also, you have addressed almost all of the working people with whom we've been in contact as Poor Mr. Jones and Poor Miss Smith, and so on. While those of the wealthy class, you simply addressed as Mr. or Mrs. Why?" Carrowick was shocked. "Didn't you know? No, I see you really didn't. I'm terribly sony, Marryl, we here on Earth take it so much for granted, and I assumed it was the same all over the Orb." "No, I don't know what you mean," said Kramvit, "on Six and the others, we have our quota of poor people. We also have a middle class, (in which I think I would belong) and some very wealthy people. But the definite dividing line here, I don't understand. "I know some of your ancient history, but I've noticed complete integration wherever I've been. I've seen absolutely no discrimination as far as color, faith or religion is concerned. I saw no caste system at all, even in India, and intermarriage, it seems, has become completely acceptable." "That is so," interrupted Carrowick. "We've had no such prejudice at all as long as I've been alive. It has avoided a lot of trouble. Nobody has been able to think up a reason for a war, since." "Then why," asked Kramvit, "have I seen these Poors, as you call them, sitting only in the rear of busses? Why have I not seen one of these unfortunate looking people in any of the restaurants in which we've eaten, or for that matter, in most any public place?" "The reason for them not being in any of the restaurants is simple. They can't afford the prices. Haven't you noticed all the Vidcope, or V.C. centers here?" "Yes, I have." "You've seen some of the V.C. shows, haven't you?" "I didn't pay much attention to them," answered Kramvit. "Fm not much for V.C. Incidentally, we call it T.V., for television, at home. Many of our people have become quite addicted to it in the last few years. I can take it or leave it alone. Usually the latter, Fm airaid." Carrowick asked, "Aren't all your shows Qua shows?" "Fm sorry, what is a Qua show?" "You're jesting, of course," laughed Carrowi. "They were once called Quiz shows. Now, they're Quas, for question and answer, I guess." "Oh, yes," said Kramvit, "we do have many of those." "Why, that's all we have here, on commercial V.C." exclaimed Carrowick. "And, there's the obvious answer to your original question!" "The answer? Fm sorry, I don't see what you mean." "It's simple," said Carrowick. "The Poors are people who have never been a contestant on a Qua show! The wealthy are those who either have been winners, or whose ancestors were." It was Kramvit's turn to be shocked. "I don't believe it." "Oh, yes, it's true," said Carrowick. "Of course, some of the Poors have been contestants, but didn't win." Kramvit was staring at Carrowick. "You are quite serious, aren't you?" "Of course," answered Carrowick, "the situation has been so, for perhaps two hundred years -- we've come to take it for what it is." "I'll wager that the Poors don't take it quite as calmly as you do. Don't tell me that they're satisfied with their position." "I wouldn't say they were satisfied," was the answer, "but they know no other way of life, and don't have much choice in the matter." Kramvit was finding it difficult to picture the situation. "Well, as I've told you," he said, "we have T.V. on Six, but we've been stressing variety and drama shows. Don't you have any big V.C. stars, like comedians or singers here?" "No, we don't. I've never seen any variety or drama shows on V.C." "I'm surprised. You see, we have been using all the air time, or most of it, for entertainment purposes. Commercially, T.V. is just a baby with us. We've been using it much longer than you have, technically, but not commercially. I'd say that we've had sponsored shows for about fourteen years." "Oh, then it is a comparatively new thing with you," said Carrowick. "We've had commercial Vidcope for over five hundred years." Kramvit shook his head. "I still can't see why your Poors have to live in such poverty. Don't they get paid on their jobs?" "Why, sure they do," answered Carrowick, "but their rate of pay is not particularly high. You see, only the Poors do all the menial and service work; aside from high service positions like government work, of course. There are so many Poors and so few jobs for them, that those that work are little better off than those that don't." "I see," said Kramvit, "and is there no protection for these unemployed? I mean Social Security or unemplyment insurance, which I know you did have a long time ago. "No, there isn't. We had to stop that because if we kept it up we'd have no workers at all." replied Carrowick. "Believe me, Marryl, I don't particularly like the situation. We've tried integration in one or two sections, but only riots resulted. I think that eventually we'll eliminate some of the prejudices, but it can't be pushed or hurried. It'll take many years to do it. I'm sure I won't live to see it gone completely." "And," asked Kramvit, "have you been a winner on a Qua show?" "Oh, no. I'm not one of those nouveau riche; my great grandtax free, when he was just a boy. That took care of us, and will take care of us from here on in." "I see," said Kramvit. "Vincent, I want to visit some of these people in their homes. Will you take me?" Carrowick was shocked again. "I don't think you'll enjoy it, Marryl. Do you really feel it's necessary?" "Please don't refuse me, Vincent. I do feel it's important. I've understood almost everything I've seen here on Earth. Either because we've been faced with it ourselves on Six, or I've read about it. But this is entirely new to me." "All right" " agreed Carrowick reluctantly. "I'm supposed to show you anything you want to see, but you won't like it." "Let me be the judge of that." end of the upper level moving street in comfortable armchairs. All of Carrowick's arguments couldn't swerve Kramvit from his idea of visiting some Poors. Kramvit was just about through with his explanation of how all the automobiles on Six drove underground, and didn't have to use the lower street level, as they did here; when they came to the end of the moving street. Now they were both walking through the filthy, garbage laden streets of the Poors' village. The smell wrinkled Carrowick's nose, and he was not displeased to see that Kramvit wasn't quite enjoying it, either. "Doesn't the sanitation department know about this?" asked Kramvit. "Don't they ever remove this dirt?" "No," answered Carrowick, "the Poors have to carry it to appointed garbage dumps themselves. They let it pile up until even they can't stand it, then they usually get rid of some of it." He went on to explain that in all the cities, except in Poor villages, all garbage recepticles led to giant imderground incinerators. Here the fires burned continually. But in the hot weather, the heat from these fires was used as power to run an underground air conditioner, so that all the streets were cooled. In the wintertime, of course, these same fires warmed the cities and highways. As they walked, they were both aware of the many Poors scrounging and searching in the debris. They were also aware of the silence that fell as they neared groups of people. The Poors just stared at them, and talked excitedly when they were out of earshot. "They're not used to seeing any of us in their villages," remarked Carrowick. Kramvit smiled, somewhat bitterly, it seemed to Carrowick, "No, I shouldn't think they would be." As they rounded a corner, Kramvit pointed to a car parked about a hundred feet away. It was almost leaning against a broken down shack, and was so dirty that it was impossible to make out its color. "How did that get here, Vincent? Surely, nobody here can afford a car." Carrowick laughed, "No, they can't. That happens to be this year's Sputzmobile, one of our most expensive cars. Although you wouldn't know it from the looks of that one. They are given as consolation prizes to losers on almost all the larger Qua shows." "I see. Why don't those people sell the cars? It seems to me they could use the money." "I guess they could," answered Carrowick. "But to whom could they sell it? Very few of us ever buy a second hand car. We all change our cars as soon as the new ones appear. Anyway, most of the losers want to keep them ; they consider it a mark of distinction." He frowned, and continued, "They drive them around the villages whenever they can beg, borrow or steal some regular grade atomic pellets. And, whenever they can maneuver through these streets. Those that own them sort of look down their noses at the other Poors. They consider themselves aristocrats of their village, because they, at least, have been called to appear on a Qua. Actually, they're to be pitied, they're worse off than the others." "Why is that?" asked Kramvit. "Well, once they've appeared on a Qua show, and lost, they'll usually never be asked again. That's the worst of it, since they have nothing more to look forward to. Also, I believe that most of the Poors leave whatever jobs they may have, as soon as they get the call. They feel it's beneath their dignity somehow. No Poor that gets on a Qua ever expects to lose. Of course, once they do lose, they can't get their jobs back. Because when they leave it's like creating a vacuum -- all the Poors in the vicinity flock to apply for his position." They were just adjacent to one of the Poors' houses at the moment, and Kramvit asked if he could visit the people that lived there. Carrowick said he could, but he doubted if they'd find anyone home. It was after four o'clock, and the large network Quas had already begun. All the Poors that could navigate would be at the large open air V.G. centers, which were usually located near the garbage dumps. These centers were sometimes miles away from many of the Poors, but that's where they were, no matter what the weather, from four in the afternoon to eleven at night, when the Quas finished and the news flashes began. These centers consisted of a large empty lot, many of which got the overflow from the adjacent garbage dumps, with two scopes seemingly suspended about six feet off the ground in the middle. They were rectangular; about five feet long, and four feet wide. Only a little over an inch thick, the pictures appeared on both sides of each scope. They were at right angles to each other, so that the picture could be seen from any part of the lot. Carrowick knocked on the old wooden door. There was no answer, and they were about to turn away, when the door opened creakily to display an elderly man. He was clean, except for the dirty rags that were tied around his throat. Carrowick explained who they were, and the elderly gentleman invited them in. "Come in, come in. I'm honored by your visit," he said in a hoarse voice. "Well, now I'm almost glad that I have this bad throat, otherwise I would be at the center, and I'd have missed your visit. By the way, my name is Poor Mr. Alex Smith." The shack consisted of two rooms, one of which was obviously a bedroom. Obviously, because there were a number of flattish mounds of rags, straw and excelsior on the floor, which could serve no other purpose than for sleeping. It was completely devoid of any furniture. The room they were in was the combination living-room, dining room and kitchen. A few old chairs, some crates and a wobbly card table on a bare floor just about filled the room. Carrowick and Kramvit introduced themselves, and Kramvit started to ask Poor Mr. Smith questions. These were all answered eagerly, and Kramvit was almost convinced that the Poors didn't mind their situation too much ; they were all quite used to it. Poor Mr. Smith asked some questions of Kramvit too, and was answered good naturedly. He showed particular interest in the pin microphone Kramvit wore, and seemed awed when he was told that he was probably being seen and heard by people on Six at this very moment. While Carrowick showed signs of impatience over the length of the visit, Kramvit asked Smith, "Tell me, my friend, wouldn't you like to see some entertainment on V.C.? Comedians or singers, or dancers, perhaps?" Poor Mr. Smith laughed, "Why no. Comedians and singers? Who wants to see them when we can watch some lucky souls winning anywhere from one to sixty-four ber about forty years ago, Mr. Krackel, our largest food pill manufacturer at that time, tried something like that." "Oh, did he?" "Yes. He had the biggest two hour Qua show on the scopes. His daughter liked to sing, and she talked him into devoting the first fifteen minutes to singing. Well," Smith laughed, "that was the last time he tried that. I read that the ratings for the show that evening went down to zero. The studio was swamped with angry letters. Everyone wanted to know why fifteen minutes of a good Qua show was wasted with such nonsense." Kramvit smiled and said, "Yes, I can understand that. Tell me. Poor Mr. Smith, what would you do if you won on a Qua?" "I'd try to help my people, of course. Perhaps like Legislator Brown. He's an ex-Poor, you know, but he worked himself up the hard way. Won a Qua, then studied and studied, and finally made the Legislature. He's the one that pass the law to give us our V.G. centers. He's a great man." "That's a worthy ambition," said Kramvit. "Do you people on Six have Qua shows, too?" asked Poor Mr. Smith. "Yes. But not as many as you do." "And do you have Poors like me on your planet?" Kramvit said that they didn't, and went on to explain a little of the situation of Six and the other five planets. Poor Mr. Smith was amazed. He couldn't believe that there was any place that didn't have Poors. "Well, don't let it happen, then," he said. "Don't do it. Don't let those Qua shows take over." His voice seemed to be getting stronger, or was it just louder, now. He leaned closer to Kramvit, his head only a foot away from the pin microphone, and almost shouted, "Do you hear me? Don't let it happen to you." He was near to sobbing now. "Be smart, stay happy -- stop those Quas. They'll only... Garrowick practically pulled Kramvit out the door, and started to hurry away. "Well," said Kramvit, "you told me that they didn't mind their situation too much ; Poor Mr. Smith almost had me believeing the same thing, but he sure didn't convince me." "He's just a sick, old man," was Garrowick's answer. visiting another Poor village the next day. Earlier, this time, so that they'd find most of the people home. After five or six visits, Kramvit was persuaded to leave by Garrowick, who reminded him that he was to appear on Earth's largest Qua show himself that very evening. Kramvit didn't want to appear, but Garrowick convinced him that all preparations had been made. This was Earth's way of honoring him, and he simply mustn't and couldn't refuse. Also, his own people would be watching for him on the show. Kramvit had to agree to do it. When they had arrived at the studio, Kramvit was amazed at the hustle and bustle that went on aroimd them. The usual investigations, interviews and testing that contestants went through were eliminated for Kramvit, since he was an honored guest. Air time approached rapidly, and Kramvit couldn't help feeling a bit apprehensive. He wasn't used to appearing before multitudes of this size, and it all made him feel uncomfortable. Garrowick assured him that there was nothing to fear; this was simply a good will appearance. The questions he would have to answer would all be in the science category, and he should have no trouble with them. Finally, Kramvit found himself standing in the wings of the vast stage. The previous contestant was just answering his last ten part question. He answered all the parts correctly, and left the stage to loud applause. Now the Master of Ceremonies asked who was to be the next guest. A booming voice whose body was nowhere to be seen, went through a flowery introduction of Marryl Kramvit. Two beautiful young ladies, dressed in almost nothing, appeared on each side of him. As the voice finished the introduction, the girls all but dragged him into camera range. Kramvit jumped with fright as eight young men, each over six feet tall, heralded his entrance with long, loud trumpets. He shook hands with the Master of Ceremonies, chatted for a while, and finally was told to get ready for his questions. The first group of queries pertained to his particular field, and he answered them correctly and easily. It took about ten minutes to arrive at the # question. Kramvit knew that if and when he be asked to come back in a week, which of course he couldn't do, to tell if he would go for two million or keep the one he had. He made a mental note to ask Carrowick as to the fate of those who wondered if they were looked down upon too. Right now, the M.C. was telling him that he would have to enter the sound proof booth for the # question. The booth appeared from nowhere, and he was escorted into it by the two lovely, almost nude, young ladies, who didn't seem to hear the trumpet blasts from the eight young men. When the door of the booth clicked shut, the booth moved out and over the studio audience, and finally came to a stop in mid-air. There were no wires or cables to be seen attached to the booth, but this didn't bother Kramvit, since he knew the principles involved. He did feel quite ridiculous, hanging suspended, with hundreds of faces upturned to watch him. It seemed to him that they must be awfully uncomfortable with their necks craned like that. But he knew that the producers of the show were only interested in the effect on the home viewers. Kramvit lost count of the questions he answered, but he was now being told that he was going for That was the largest amount of money given away on the biggest quiz show on Six; here it was just the beginning. The question consisted of sixteen parts, and he answered them without interruption until the fourteenth part. After he gave his answer to this one, the M.C. asked him to repeat it. He did, hesitantly, and saw the M.C. look nervously towards the control booth. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kramvit, that's not the correct answer." (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Paul Orban government B randon was looking at his desk again. An artificial grin spread across the narrow face of the Secretary of Interior who was watching him closely. The Secretary's pencil-thin fingers continued to toy with the small, Year after year they came back, despite his constant refusals. And still Brandon couldnt figure out why he was so important... wood figure he was holding. "Brandon," he tried to lie gracefully, "You're a card. A real card," Brandon shifted his position, brought his attention back to the thin man with the receding hairline. He couldn't, for the life of of him, remember anything humorous he had said or done. He was too tired to be jovial. The past few days had sapped his strength. He was exhausted and there were still two more interviews scheduled. Good Lord, he thought. Two more! He found his eyes wandering back to his desk. He would never finish the papers in time. That would mean a severe penalty. "Come now, Brandon. Admit it. You know you want to work for us in Interior." "Right now I don't know anything," Brandon said wearily. "My head is tired and clouded. I can't think straight." He rubbed his hand across his forehead, wondering how much longer he would be able to continue to say no to their requests. He had almost found himself agreeing with the thin man a few moments ago. That wasn't good. Brandon leaned back in the contour chair and let some of the strength seep back into his outstretched legs. Each year at this time they would begin to wander in with their strange, outlandish offers of positions with the government. It was perplexing. "Why me?" he asked suddenly. "Why in Interior? I know nothing about such work?" The thin man leaned foreward, "Because you are a good man, Brandon. And we need good men these days. Government is big business and we want the top positions filled with the best men we can get. Besides," the Secretary laughed softly, "you're wasting your time playing with dolls." "They aren't dolls!" Brandon said indignantly. "So they aren't dolls," "There is a difference," Brandon insisted. "You make is sound as if I'm in my second childhood." "All right. Puppets!" The thin man shifted in his chair. He ran his lean fingers over the handpainted figure he was holding in one hand. "But you can see my point." Brandon shook his head. That was it. He couldn't see the point. His puppets were becoming world famous, the result of reviving the almost lost art of hand carving. He was earning a fair living at it. He could see no reason for a change. "Think of the prestige if you come with us. You will be heading a department of your own," the Secretary said. Brandon wrinkled his brow, thinking of how his name was already associated with his puppets. If only they would leave him alone, if only there wasn't so much paper work waiting for him on his desk, he would be able to spread out, expand, really have a going business. But they had to keep pestering him with worthless offers that they knew he couldn't handle, wasting his time, especially now when time was of the essence. The paper work on his desk had to be completed by midnight. He would never finish it now. Brandon felt the beginning of a headache. Because of the paper work he hadn't had time to touch a new puppet in months. Now these damn interviews were keeping him from the desk work. It was a vicious circle leading to ruin. "You will be serving your Country, Brandon," the Secretary said strongly. "Not fiddling with dolls." "I told you..." The Secretary held up his hand. "I know. Puppets." Brandon got up and walked to the window and looked out at the setting sun. It was hard to define; there were some things words couldn't explain. All the offers had been good ones. But a man had to have some rule, some yardstick to guide him. Brandon had his. He wanted to be useful, that wasn't too much to ask. Life was too short to waste laboring in a position he wasn't fitted for. If he took Interior's offer all that would be ended. He would be caught in a web which allowed no escape. Brandon turned. "I'm afraid, Mr. Secretary, that you don't understand my position. It isn't that I feel above being employed by the President. I have all the respect in the world for him and his office. I have nothing but respect for you..." "Then what is it, Brandon?" "I don't think I would be happy taking orders from some one else." "We all have a boss, Brandon." "I haven't." The Secretary grinned. "You can head your own department. The President and myself will be the only ones you will have to answer to, I promise." "That's what I mean," Brandon answered softly. The Secretary felt his face flush. "You are insinuating that you are above working for the President, Mr. Brandon!" he said stiffly. "You're twisting words." Brandon's voice was determined. "It's just that I like to work alone. I like to put my hat on and go, whenever, and wherever I please." The Secretary shook his head "Brandon! I happen to know that you haven't been off this estate, this property of yours, in the past five years." "That doesn't alter a thing. I can go, anytime I please. I have no reason to leave now. But when I do, I won't feel obligated, I won't have to ask permission." The Secretary relaxed. "You can do that in the department anye you wish. Visit the conservations, then, when you are tired of traipsing around, you can come back and write up a report or two." The Secretary cleared his throat. "Just for the records, of course." Brandon sighed. "Of course. Just for the records." He brushed back his thick, black hair and sat down. Damn it. Why couldn't they leave him alone? That was all he wanted, to be left alone. He was sick of all this. They knew he wasn't fitted to be a clerk in any of the departments. Yet they wasted his time offering him important positions, as if the title would persuade him. Why? "We could outlaw your dollmaking." the Secretary said casually. Brandon shrugged his shoulders. "Harmonics did that with my music writing, remember! I didn't always do hand-carving." The Secretary remembered. He had had an indirect hand in that... It had been thought that if Brandon was suddenly without income he might easily be persuaded to accept a position. They hadn't counted on Brandon's resourcefulness, nor his stubborness. The thin man leaned back in his chair, looked again at the doll thing resting in one hand. The man was clever; there was a life-like quality to the doll. Brandon was an artist and it would be a shame to take him out of circulation. Yet what could he do? The President had insisted on the visit again this year, knowing full well that Brandon would turn down the offer. Suddenly, the Secretary felt sorry for Brandon. The man was breaking down and didn't realize it. His face was drawn and pale. He looked dog-tired. "Won't you change your mind, Brandon?" the Secretary asked softly. "With Interior you will have an opportunity to get out into the sunlight. It will be a healthy life visiting the many conservations we have situated around the country; it will agree with you, I'm sure." Brandon sighed. "I'm afraid, Mr. Secretary, that we are both wasting our time. I have a tremendous amount of paper work to finish before midnight tonight and I am tired. I also have a few more interviews before I can get at it." Brandon got up, "So if you don't mind -- " The thin man looked at Brandon searchingly. "Won't you reconsider?" "I'm afraid not," Brandon answered. The Secretary paused at the door. "See you next year, then!" "Next year," Brandon answered flatly. T he secretary of interior hardly spoke to the young man waiting by his vehicle. He wanted to get away from there as soon as possible. These yearly visits to Brandon always upset him, made him feel like a cad. It would be days before he shook the unwanted feeling. "How did it go?" the young man asked eagerly. The Secretary took in the youngish face, the confidence flowing from the eyes. Evans always managed to give that youthful impression, yet he wasn't really a young man. In a way the thin man envied Evans... with one exception, of course. This would be Evan's first visit to Brandon. Some of the confidence would be gone when he walked out of Brandon's house. 'T said how did it go?" Evans repeated. The Secretary shrugged his thin shoulders. "As usual. He refused." Evans showed white, even teeth. "Is he tired?" "Very." "Excellent," Evans said "And the paper work. Is it worrying him?" The thin man studied Evans. No, he didn't envy the man any longer. Evans had no feelings; it was written on his face. "The paper work is worrying him to death." he heard himself say. "Wonderful!" The Secretary became conscious of the small figure he was holding in his hand. He had walked out with one of Brandon's creations! Suddenly, he slammed it to the ground. The paint chipped and cracked. The small head rolled loosely across the lawn. Evans looked at him queerly. "I think you need a rest," the young man said softly, unsmiling. "Brandon is a good man. I hate to see him broken. He has a lot of talent. But not for the work we're offering him. It isn't right, grinding him into the dirt the way we are." Evans leaned over, picked up the broken puppet. One arm was twisted at an odd angle, the clown suit was tom and dirty. Evans tried to fit the head back on the small body. Finally he succeeded. He looked at the Secretary of Interior. His eyes seemed different. "I have a position he can fill and do a good job. He won't refuse. I'm sure." Evans walked away, toward Brandon's house, still holding the broken figure. Brandon stood on the veranda looking across his small estate, in the direction of the city. The site of the government was located there. Perhaps that was why he was so reluctant; he lived too close to it, had it around him day in and day out. The Government was ubiquitous, omnipresent and omnipotent. It dominated every conversation, every business, every life from birth to death. Lately it even seemed that every one he came in contact with held a position with some agency connected with the government. "Mr. Brandon!" "I know," he answered without turning. "You're from Labor." "We've never met!" Brandon turned and took in the lean individual who called himself Evans. Quite different from the one who had called last year. That one had been old and grumpy. Brandon's lips parted: "I assumed. All the other departments have been here except Revenue. I didn't see Wilson standing outside; I've heard he's out of the country. That leaves you." "You could have been wrong, you know." Evans said. "How?' Brandon asked without fully caring. "Revenue has been split. There are two departments now. Revenue and Taxation. Taxation handles income from taxpayers only." "Big deal," Brandons said harshly, remembering his desk piled high with papers. "They say you are a stubborn man, Brandon." "Stubborn?" "Quite." "Let's say I'm content with my lot." "Are you really, Brandon?" Brandon took in the young man's wide shoulders, the face that was almost too young for such a responsible position. For just an instant he had felt that this man would be different, that there might be a challenge here. He could see he was wrong. The man was going to offer him a position. "Let's get to the point," he said hurriedly. "I'm happy making puppets and I feel no need for a change." "Fm glad you are happy, Mr. Brandon." "Good. Then there is no need to continue. I refuse your offer." Brandon was getting irritated. He didn't wait for an answer, he walked past Evans, into the house. He stood by his desk. The pile of papers was still resting there, waiting for him. He had hoped, in some magical way, that they might have vanished. A foolish thought, he knew. "Income tax?" he heard Evans say from his shoulder. Brandon nodded wearily. Evans reached over and picked up a form. He frowned. "Complicated!" "Each year it gets worse," Brandon said listlessly. "I've never had to file one," Evans said. Brandon lifted one eyebrow. "Government employees never do. We are paid a flat sum and our subsistance is taken care of. Calculators and computers adjust our salary each year in proportion to the expense of the government. We have been operating out of the red that way for years. It works out fine." Brandon ran his hands through the papers and forms. Why then did he have to wade through this mess each year when it could be made so simple? He had been staggering under the load. "You're an independent, Brandon," Evans said. "You stay in business for yourself because you dislike working for someone else. Isn't that right?" "You might say that." Evans dangled a handful of papers in front of Brandons' brown eyes. "You are working for someone else now. The tax department." "Not exactly. I don't have to answer to anyone." Evans snorted. "Not even the tax collector?" "Not unless I make an error," Brandon said stubbornly. 'And I won't. I'm becoming an expert on this. When a man spends one hundred days a year working on these damn things he learns quite a bit. There will be no errors." "One hundred days!" Evans laughed. "Soon it'll be every day of the year. Then where will you be?" He looked directly into Brandon's eyes. "Can't you see? You're in the web already, working a third of the year without compensation." Evans pulled from his pocket the the broken puppet he had picked up from the driveway outside Brandon's house. He laid it in front of Brandon on the pile of income tax blanks. "Soon you'll be without income; your business will deteriorate from lack of attention." Brandon said nothing. Evans moved to the contour chair and sat down. He closed his eyes. "You've been out of circulation a long time, Brandon. The world is changing. Government is big business, one of the largest, and it's expanding. We need more men, good men." Evans opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. "You said you've become an expert on forms. Would you consider taking a position as head of the tax department?" he asked abruptly. Brandon lifted his gaze from the desk. "I thought you were with labor?" "I could arrange it." Evans closed his eyes again. "But  . "Think, Brandon. As chief of the bureau, you won't have to answer to anyone, not even the President. You've seen the mess the forms have become. You can straighten it out." "I don't think..." "I'll have it put in writing that no one wiU bother you." no Brandon stared at the papers on his desk. For the first time they were offering him a position he understood, one he could handle. It would be a challenge. He would be in a position to eliminate threequarters of that damn paperwork. God knew how many like himself were gradually getting snowed under each year. Brandon played with the puppet. The silly face stared back at him with a fixed, smiling expression. "Tell me, Evans," he asked idly. "Why so much effort to locate me in a government position? I've had no special training; this is the first offer I'm even qualified enough to accept." He lifted the puppet face high, gazed at its face. "For ten years I've been pestered." Evans laughed as he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. "You have determination and will power. We need that type of nature the days more than ever." Evans' smile became wide "And you will be one less taxpayer we will have to worry about now. You'll be on our side." Evans pushed all the forms from Brandon's desk with a sweep of his tanned hand. "Forget all of that, Brandon, forever. No more taxes for you. This is the last form you will have to sign. It appoints you Secretary of Taxation, carte blanche." "You had all this prepared?" Brandon said in amazement. Evans' smile grew wider. "We knew you couldn't refuse an intelligent offer, one where you would be useful." "We!" "The cabinet and myself." Brandon picked up the pen, twisted it between his fingers. Evans was right, of course. He would be useful. Half those damn forms were filled with worthless nonsense that could easily be eliminated. Deductions should be higher; small, independent business should be given a break. And he could handle the job -- that was important. "Just sign on the bottom line," Evans said smoothly, pushing the broken puppet out of the way. The puppet fell to the floor and the head came off again. "Forget it," Evans said quickly. Brandon studied the other man's face before he reached over and picked up the little figure. It was a funny creature with a large, sillylooking balloon nose. Brandon handled it tenderly, looking at it thoughtfully. Finally he said: "My puppets. What happens to them?" "I don't understand?" "Children enjoy them," Brandon answered. "I'm afraid you don't understand, Brandon," Evans shook his head. "I'm offering you a full time position. You can make them -- as a hobby of course -- give them away, but you can't sell them. That would give you an income again, mean more tax forms." "But I couldn't hope to produce them for nothing," Brandon insisted. "Not on a large scale, not on the fixed salary that you mentioned!" "They aren't important, Brandon." Brandon's lips became a firm, straight line. For the first time it was clear to him why he had been so reluctant to give up his work. His music had pleased people, just as his puppets were doing now. He was getting satisfaction out of his work. He was giving people something no one else seemed to be able to give them. Accepting a position he couldn't handle, workmg for someone else had nothing to do with it . , . "I've changed my mind," he said quietly. "Changed your mind?" Evans stared at the pen Brandon had carefully laid down on the desk; disbelief disfiguring his face. "You intend fighting that each year?" he pointed at the mad array of papers he had strewn at Brandon's feet. any time at all to work on your puppets against security and a life of ease?" swered. "Now I think you'd better leave Mr. , . "Evans!" "Mr. Evans. I might be able to finish these damn things before the midnight deadline." Evans opened bis mouth but Brandon was already showing him the way to the door, shoving something in his hand. and slumped down on the seat beside the President. He looked at the new puppet Brandon had forced into his hand before he could refuse. "Is Brandon Secretary of Taxation?" the President asked hopefully. Evans shook his head from side to side. What had gone wrong? They had known Brandon was a stubborn man, that was why things were done as they were. The offering of worthless positions had been a feint. He should have grabbed at something he could handle. And the tax forms! That was supposed to be the last straw. They had been loaded, prepared just for Brandon, to break his resistence. Yet they had failed. Why? "Did he suspect?" The President eyed Evans. "I don't think so. Sir." Evans said. "I had the pen in his hand. He was ready to sign. Then something went wrong. I can't understand it!" The President looked the other way, found his eyes fastened on his own reflection on the window. The cabinet had been wrong thinking it was a job for a psychologist like Evans. Brandon was an individual, a decided rarity in this day and age. "I'm glad," the President said softly to the glass. "What was that. Sir?" The President turned. "I said, I'm glad he didn't sign." "You can't mean that. Sir!" "But I do." "Do you realize what this means? Brandon was the last taxpayer. We've been forced to operate an entire bureau just to process his forms. It's the only department operating in the red. He's the only person not employed by the government, the only one still operating a private business!" Evans found himself clenching the puppet tightly in his fist. "We will break him. I know we wiU. Next year it will take him # days to compute his tax. I promise." "Next year," the President said firmly, "Brandon will get a short form. One that he can complete in ten minutes. Do you understand, Evans?" Evans' forehead creased. "I'm afraid -- " The President looked back at his reflection on the glass. "We don't want to make the boss angry now, do we Evans?" "The boss, Sir?" "Brandon, of course," the President smiled. "After all, the government works for the taxpayers, Evans -- and Brandon is the last taxpayer. He's our boss, son. The only boss we have left." "Mr. President. If I might -- " The President returned his gaze to Evans. "I think we've forgotten something over these past years, Evans. Something very important." "What is that, Sir?" The President removed the puppet from Evans' limp fingers. "If the sole puipose of the government is to serve the taxpayers -- and there were no more -- how could we justify our existence in office?" The President ran his finger under the chin of the little puppet, "Do you mind if I keep this, Evans?" he asked softly. "I'd like to take it home to my granddaughter. She's never seen a puppet, I'm sure she'll love it." The tiny figure seemed to smile A revolution in astronomy, second only to the invention of the telescope itself, is foreseen in electronic devices called image converters. These tubes, now being tested by the Farnsworth Electronic Corporation and R.C.A., promise to increase ten-fold the power of instruments in present use. They will also boost by an equivalent amount the light-gathering use of all telescopes to which they are attached. Image converters change light to electrons, greatly multiply the number of electrons, then change the tiny negative particles back into light again; the light, much intensified, falls on a photographic plate. Routine use of these converters for photographing the heavens may bring discoveries which will require Mankind to reconsider the universe, as Einstein's theory once did. A 'five-year plan"' for a manned rocket ship which will cross half the continent in # minutes is now in the drawing board stage. Dubbed the Griffon, e ship would carry a light-weight pilot, not over # pounds, weigh more than # pounds at take-off, and shoot # miles up into space in about five seconds. Then it would level off, reenter the atmosphere, and glide the rest of the way to its destination. The Griffon would have provisions for control either by the pilot or by ground stations. If the pilot lost consciousness at any time during flight, small auto-control systems would take over until he recovered. These could be similar to the units developed for V-# rockets. The motor would use a combination of gasoline and liquid oxygen for fuel; and since the liquid oxygen would be kept at # degrees below zero Fahrenheit, some of it could be used to keep the ship cool. The ship would be able to land at present day airports and would have a landing speed of about # miles per hour. Middle East oil may be towed to its buyers in giant "sausage skins" holding # tons when the government-backed experiments of two Cambridge University engineers are completed. The hope of the developers is that the nylon oil barges, nicknamed Nobs, will solve the current oil tanker shortage. The plan is to make an inner container of nylon, covered by a plastic skin, one-quarter to one-half an inch thick. The completed "sausage skin" tanker, # feet long and weighing # tons empty, could then be flown or shipped to the oil port and rolled around a drum. When full of crude oil, the Nob would be four-fifths submerged and could be towed by a loaded tanker or tug at # to # knots in normal weather conditions. With a tug at each end, it might be possible to guide one through the Suez Canal. The inventors are confident that the bullet-proof Nob would just bounce off if it were to hit a rock or dock wall at the suggested speeds. In the near future you may be going to the doctor to get a periodic fever for immunization against influenza-type diseases. Recent studies have shown that the danger factor is only a small element in the virus and it can emerge only through a tiny "escape hatch" in the lining that surrounds the virus. Armed with this knowledge of the structure of the virus, biophysicists think it will be possible to alter the disease carriers and so render them harmless. This in turn could lead to radically difTerent methods of immunization, such as using diathermal machines to create artificial fevers in people that will leave them immune to diseases caused by viruses. A space ship that can be made cheaply with the know-how and materials on hand was described at a recent Rocket Society meeting. Called the "Snooper" by the designers, the ship is a non-return, robot rocket propelled by ions, armed with television, radar, communications equipment and auxilliary power supply systems. Since the propulsion system obtains its thrust by the electrical acceleration of ionized gases to extremely high velocities (# feet per second), a nuclear reactor is used to produce the electrical field necessary to accelerate the ions. The reactor would also supply power for the three-quarters of a ton of instruments to be carried by the vehicle. The Snooper would look somewhat like a giant moth with wings spreading out for # feet from the back end. The wings would dissipate the excess heat generated by the nuclear reactor. The designers propose lifting the ion rocket into an orbit around the earth by chemical fuels similar to those suggested for an intercontinental ballistics missile. After Snooper reaches the orbit, the wings are spread and the instrument section is extended far forward of the reactor to avoid radiation damage. An ultrahigh speed camera that can take pictures at a rate of # per second has been perfected by Precision Technology, Inc., Livermore, California. An especially designed electronic tube called an image converter is the heart of the camera. The tube picks up light images by means of a photosensitive cathode at one end. These images are then transferred electronically to a viewing screen at the other end, where the picture is recorded on film. By using extremely short electrical pulses, the tube can be turned on and off again almost instantaneously. The tube and the accompanying electronic circuits act both as the camera's shutter and as its means for moving images across the face of the stationary recording film. As many as five exposures can be made on a single plate of film with microseconds or less than one-fifArmy recruits may soon be receiving their shots from a spray gun instead of a hypodermic needle. The automatic jet injection syringe uses a high-spe spray that takes less than a second to penetrate the tissue beneath the skin. The handheld gun is powered by a small hydraulic pump, connected to it by a rubber hose, and can be fired continuously until the vaccine bottle sitting at the back of the gun is empty. The gun can be cocked and reloaded in a matter of six seconds and no sterilization is needed between injections, since the tip of the injector nozzle does not actually touch the skin. The jet velocity of the vaccine is # feet per second when it comes out of the nozzle and, though not always painless, it causes less discomfort than hypodermic needles. Jet plones moy soon be given a #-mile-per-hour boost through the use of an alloy that would increase operating temperatures in jet engines about # degrees Fahrenheit. Developed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the metal, an alloy of iron, nickel, chromium, molybdenum, titanium and boron was designed to help push back what is called the "second heat barrier" being met by supersonic planes. This heating occurs in the engine, where white-hot gases from the burning fuel push against turbine blades. Since a jet engine gets its operating energy by increasing the temperature of the air passing through it, the greater the air temperature increase the more thrust a given engine will produce and the faster the plane will fly. The alloy is intended as a structural material for use in the jet's turbine section, and will enable the operation of jet engines to be increased to temperatures much higher than are now possible. Window panes and lenses of metal have been developed by the Raythoen Manufacturing Company which allows invisible heat rays from sub-zero targets to reach a supersensitive infrared detector. Made of a silicon material, these new optical parts may make it possible to detect enemy ships, planes and missiles from longer distances in total darkness without revealing the observer's position. By "seeing" colder objects, a plane equipped with an infrared detector could sense the relatively "cold" parts of a target craft like the nose and the wing sections, as well as the warm parts such as the engines. Such systems would be silent and would not broadcast signals revealing their positions. The Army's packoge power reactor has recently begun operation. It is the first of a new bre of atomic power plants that can be transported by air to remote sites, there to operate reliably for long periods without new fuel. The present pioneer plant can generate approximately # kilowatts of electricity. Installed in isolated bases in the Arctic and Antarctic, such plants will also be able to supply steam for heating as a by-product. The power package reactor is expected to be as important to land outposts as the atomic submarine. Sirs: In nearly every science fiction story I have ever read, in If and other magazines, there is one great glaring anachronism : Man. The century may be the #th or the #th. Earth is either blooming like a garden spot, and out exploiting all the other planets; or Earth is withering away, a victim of atomic wars or simply too many hydrogen bomb tests. But has Man changed since the #th century? Not a whit. If science is going to save the world from itself, the saucers, the inter-galaxy border disputes, and if we are all going to work a ten hour week and the Welfare departments are going to take care of us all, it seems inevitable that Man is going to change a great deal in the process. Not only will he grow fatter, taller, blonder, cleaner and conceivably dumber, he is going to have an entirely different batch of pressures and react in totally different ways. But does this happen in science fiction stories? No! Among the sciences, that of gadgetry is the only one, and while its present-day advance is more obvious (and more frightful) than others, the social sciences are gaining too, and it is certain that the children growing up are a different breed of cats than their still depression-and-war-haunted parents. And their children are going to be even more strange, unless there are more depressions and wars to recondition them to attitudes resembling those of present-day adults. If Man is going to triumph over his environment. Mars and the saucers, he will probably lose what is presently one of his few endearing traits: his humility. If a man with humility and all its attendant virtues survives (to be the hero of a science fiction story) his background will need to be utterly unusual. But this is never pointed out in a science fiction story: the boy scout hero who knocks out the bad guy is a "normal" man for his century. And for that matter, how did the bad guy get there? Because the homogeneity presently considered so desirable will prevent his development too. If the sociologists get their way, the world of tomorrow is going to be one sans hero or villain, in which everybody works for a paternal government or corporation, and looks and thinks and talks just like everybody else. Something on which nearly all the writers of the genre agree is that tomorrow is going to be singubuiy humorless. All joke-crackers are, per se, suspect and looked upon as a #th century anacluronism. Presently, it is true, a joke teller is barred from serious officeholding, but must we look upon this as an irreversible trend? Must we assume that we will never have another Mencken, and that the gathering clouds of grimness are never going to be cleared away? Man's laughter -- and Man has been in some pretty tough spots -- echoes down through the centuries; I think that science fiction writers condemn humor forever on too little evidence. But then let us consider the stories in which Man has lost. He has polluted his own planet with radioactivity, and little Noah-like figures are seen departing in rattletrap rockets. But he still hasn't changed at all. With a stiff upper lip and a #th century dignity, he blasts off to another planet, there, we may assume, to carry on just as before. Here I think the writers err on the side of optimism. If Man is content to let his planet be destroyed, and by nobody but himself, we may feel safe in concluding that he will then be so lethargic, so corrupted and possibly so plain disinterested, that an end to everything will be the only solution. Perhfip he will even retain a little humihty in this case, and realize that so cantankerous a beast as Man has no business destroying more than one planet. The writers also seem to be uninventive in the matter of governmental forms. They seem to believe that there is no choice except present-day democracy or one or another form of dictatorship ; but both of these are fairly recent inventions and it doesn't seem possible that Man, who so dearly loves to invent things, isn't going to come up with more variations on the theme. It's interesting to note that the higher forms oi government that the aliens always talk about so evasively are possible only because the aliens are so highly developed that they don't need any governing. But no matter how far mto tomorrow a writer looks, he never seems to think that such things can develope here. Man with all his foibles, so prone to err, and consequently so lovable, is always let off because of a sentimental pang on the part of the visiting aliens; for even the aliens have #th century humanoid weaknesses. As Thurber says, "The proper study of Mankind is Man, says Man." -- E. Mueller Guanajato, Gto., Mexico Dear Mr. Quinn: Having just finished James April issue, I find that I cannot agree with his contention that "chance rules the universe". While Heisenberg's uncertainty principle does set an "unsuspected limit on the accuracy with which we can describe physical situations" does this not apply solely on the subatomic level? My own reading and thinking (as a sociologist) on the subject has led me to accept Korzybski's conclusion that the uncertainty principle does not abolish determinism, but rather it "requires the transforming of the two-valued Aristotelian logic into the infinityvalued semantics of probability". In other words, "free will" is still a legal, moral and cultural fiction (whether useful or otherwise) and science has not yet reached the end of the road, simply because indeterminism on the subatomic level does not necessitate indeterminism oVany other level. I would have liked to see the story end with Gunn's "universal genius", who should have known better, straightening out the overspecialized physicist on the full implications and limitations of the Heisenberg principle. Sincerely, -- Edd Doerr Indianapolis, Ind. Sirs: An invasion of Earth by Martians used as a plot for a radio play once threw thousands of people into a panic. They tuned in after the play had started and mistook fiction for fact. The police were inundated with phone calls from all parts of the state from terrified people supposedly in the path of the advancing men from Mars. The idea was not new. Hollywood producers and writers of space fiction have often used the same format. In fiction, the Earth peoples have always been the victims of the grotesque, super-scientific beings with vast ant-like heads and antenna-like limbs who invaded the Earth with the intention of conquering and enslaving its people. The truth could be just the reverse. If Martians and Venusians exist, and modern astronomy sugbe contemplating our well advanced plans for moon flight and exploration with a sense of impending catastrophe. If and when we master the mysteries and hazards of space travel, and begin to wander through the trackless vastnesses of galactic space in our space ships and rockets, what would be the result? We named Mai's the Planet of War for no other reason than the fact that it was red. Its redness was innocent enough. It is only the result of great swirling clouds of dust that constantly sweep over its arid plains and deserts. If Earth were called the Planet of War it could be so named with far more significance. If peace loving peoples exist on other worlds than our own, how would Earth history read to them? They would not need to go back # years, or even #; five years or even five months would be enough. What would they think of the butchery of Budapest? Of the cries of the ill-fated Jews of Brodnow as the open box-cars of the death freights rumbles through the freezing night toward Siberia? Or of Belsen and Dachau? What of the horror and mortal agonies of London and Coventry as they were reduced to shambles in World War II? In World War I, the scarlet Flanders Poppies spread a carpet of crimson loveliness over the gashes and scars of war; but in World War II, the sons of those quietly sleeping beneath the ground had to drive their lumbering tanks over the same battlefields and tear them open again. What of the seven little Vietnamese boys fleeing from the Communists, who, led by their tongueless teacher, came staggering out of the forest with chopsticks which had been driven through their eardrums still protruding from their heads? If there are dwellers on mighty Betelgeuse, what would their reaction be to the hungry children prowling like timber wolves among the ruins of bombed cities in the tragic aftermath of war? In the not-too-distant future we expect to be able to project some kind of missile onto the lunar surface. We may be ready scientifically for the great adventure into space; but are we ready morally? Maybe the blinding glares of our atomic explosions flashed a warning understood by distant watching eyes, like the glowing campfires in the vanguard of an invader. The deepest apprehension would fill the hearts of any intelligent beings at the prospect of being indoctrinated into Earth practices in this #th century. The Kefauver Committee indicates that drug addicts from # to # years old will pay more than heroin and other life-wrecking drugs this year. In the same period, to raise this huge fortune thousands of major crimes will be committed ranging from armed robbery to murder. Man stands at the most aweinspiring moment in his arduous climb from stone age to science. At long last he has raised his sights to the stars. Now is the time for Homo Sapiens to pause, take stock, clean house. He knows the Golden Rule, now is the time for him to apply its medication to the open sores of the world's wounds. Let him learn to beat his swords into ploughshares and his spears into pruning hooks, then instead of spreading consternation from the bowl of the Big Dipper, he will come as a welcome ambassador bringing tidings of peace. -- C. H. Buncombe Tulsa, Oklahoma # -- Chloroplasts. # -- Uric acid. # -- Cellophane. # -- Both are tidal phenomena. # -- Fusion, fission, catalyzation. # -- Argon. # -- #. # -- # m.p.h. #I -- Iron, copper, zinc, manganese, cobalt, iodine, boron, molybdenum. # -- Brazil Current. # -- Red and blue-violet. # -- Growth. # -- Wave cancellation. # -- Tension, shear, bending, compression. # -- Y chromosomes. # -- Both are absolute zero. # -- lyi times. # -- It is the only even prime number. (Continued from page #) Kramvit felt himself being lowered towards the stage. He was helped out of the booth by the young ladies, and escorted to the M.C. No trumpets, now. The audience was silent as the M.C. thanked Kramvit, and told him how honored he was to be the first to welcome the first visitor from another planet on V.C. He also told him how sorry he was that Kramvit had lost. Kramvit walked off stage while the audience applauded... "The funny thing is, I really knew the answer," Kramvit was saying to Carrowick, with a sheepish grin. "I was just so nervous. I'm not accustomed to this at all." "Well," said Carrowick, "it's nothing to worry about. As I said, it was just a good wiU appearance." They were leaving the studio, when a young man in uniform approached Kramvit. "Excuse me, sir, a Phonogram for you." Kramvit looked at the envelope and saw that it was from the High Council of Six. He turned the envelope over and read the name. It was addressed to, "Poor Mr. medium to difficult. Filled with variety, features and articles to fascinate the most rabid puzzle doer. Published bi-monthly. 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Mail coupon at once!  (   lO An unusual science-espionage story by Coming soon! m of IF IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction lovers all over America, here is a volume of exceptional interest -- ten outstanding stories, by ten outstanding writers, devoted to a wide diversity of science fiction entertainment. The printing will again be a small one, so ask your news dealer right now to save you a copy. Or, if you prefer, send only # cents to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and a copy will be mailed to you upon publication, which shall be January #th. All Stories New and Complete by Robert Silverberg #   "The Critics" by Mel Hunter LF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Company, Inc. Volume #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication, # Lord Street, Buffalo New York. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, New York. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. Allow four weeks for change of address. All stories appearing in this magazine are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next (February) issue on sale December #th # i #  # I #  # ! #  #  #     Editor's  M M Don't know whether or not you reader's have noticed that Rog ( Game Preserve in our June issue and again with Captain Peabody in this one) . He had a story way back in the January (#) issue, and then did a disappearing act for about three years. Needless to say, we're delighted to have him back with us -- and according to Rog himself, he's pretty pleased too. Over the past ten years or so Rog has written under fifteen or twenty pen names in the mystery and science-fiction fields, and has had over magazine stories and pocket books have been translated into Italian, German and Japanese. Aside from that, we've a sneaking suspicion this ex-engineer-turned-writer is now a full-time member of the California Chamber of Commerce. Every communique that comes through from him sings loud huzzahs about the wonderful climate of his adopted state. ("No snow", he chortles, and seems to think this is a sort of climate Utopia. Now we hate to be snide; but what kind of a place is that for a fanatic skier like us?) Born in Spokane, Washington, Rog has lived for longer or shorter periods in practically every part of the country, including New York, but now prefers the "chosen land". Makes a special claim to never having met anyone actually uglier than he himself, but insists that people don't seem to mind -- they say it adds character or something. A reprint of our Face of Mars article by Dr. Ralph Richardson appeared in the August '# issue of Science Digest. If you missed the blow by blow description of the observation of Mars on its closest approach since #, by all means get a copy of IF for June # and catch up on the mysterious blue streaks and other phenomena that Dr. Richardson observed and described in his article... While we're on the subject of mysterious goings-on, by all means read The Last Secrets of the Earth by Bernard Busson and Gerald Leroy. The two French journalists examine such still unknown subjects as the Abominable Snowman, active volcanoes, underground rivers and flying saucers among others. Well worth the reading!... Note from Ed Emsh, one of science fictions most published artists, informs us that he is off for a month in Connecticut followed by a trip to Canada to fulfill a portrait commission... Big doings out in Disneyland, where Syl vania Electric has just set up a house of the future with a lighting system that's truly "out of this world". Direct illumination is all obtained with luminous domes which have been made a part of the ceiling construction -- and all of which is dimmer-controlled. The study utilizes a specially designed floating type of fixture suspended on thin nylon threads. Added "eye catcher" is a floor-to-ceiling "column of light" for interest and decoration. Major lighting in the living room comes from a floating dome which is internally illuminated from a special projector in the floor. One room features draperies which are made of a glass fabric and become luminous as a result of a light from the outside, which is concealed beneath a stairway. Other items include a "tree of light", an illuminated headboard with adjustable louvres which can be arranged so that one person can read while the other can sleep, panel illumination, and a seemingly complete lack of wiring. This last is accomplished by having all wiring, except that in the core of the house, located in the lower half of the walls. The Second World of IF is about ready for the printer and we're pretty proud of it already. Includes stories by such science fiction names as Charles Beaumont, Raymond F. Jones, James Blish, Jimmy Gunn, Bryce Walton and Robert Young. All novelettes this time, and guaranteed to be good entertaining reading. Watch for it... we think you'll like it. Publication is January #th. Still working on the statistics about the readers and the writers of science fiction. Some small trickles are in (but we still don't need that computer!) and the list already contains teachers, (we'll break down the fields when more returns are in) teen-agers, doctors, engineers, army men, atomic scientists, lawyers, mechanics, librarians and (bless 'em) housewives. We want mail on the subject, for we feel that IF can really do a service to science fiction if our readers will pitch in to help us. Just drop us a letter or post card and tell us what you do for a living, what your hobbies are, what you like in science fiction, who your favorite authors are and what sort of covers and illos you like. Any other data that you think pertinent will be most welcome; but we're really most interested in the above "vital statistics". So let us hear from you real soon. Last minute notes: Watch for Frank Herbert's #st Century Sub on the newsstands. Even if you read it as a serial, or read the hard cover version, the pocket edition is one that should be added to a scientiphile's library. Really good reading... Harlan Ellison still pounding his portable even though the Army has him busy as only the army can keep a man... One of the big paint companies has actually come up with a polka dot paint... Letter from a South African fan tells us that the purge of literature is getting so bad that they've even banned Black Beauty as subversive to the racial segregation ideal! Illustrated by Ed Emsh Earth's civilization and culture lay dormant and stagnant. Stupidity and ineptitude reigned supreme y and the one man who could change it didn't care enough -- until... hearsal time was, as always, chaotic. Technicians scurried back and forth, waving cue-sheets wildly in the air, shouting cryptic instructions to each other; dollied cameras rolled in for the dry run. The actors, tense and worried, congregated in the center of the sound-stage, muttering their lines fitfully and wondering if their psyche-projection would be sufficiently convincing. Only one man was calm. John Amory stood quietly at the extreme left of the stage, leaning against a camera boom, a copy of the shooting script dangling casually from one big hand. Near him was the director's chair, a flimsy wickerwork thing whose red cloth backstrip was neatly lettered in He was a tall broad-shouldered man of thirty-four, going gray early, with deep-set earnest dark eyes and bold, jutting features. He was the best director Transcontinental Tele video had, and he was watching the chaos about him coldly, impassively, hating it all but concealing his hatred. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to go, he thought; then two hours of shaping this show into something bad enough to go out over the coaxials, and then home, rest, and forgetfulness. He had lived with the current script -- Mist of Desire , it was called -- for a week, and that was eight days too long. Someone touched his shoulder. He turned slowly and looked down at the small wiry man who stood grinning at him. "What are you doing here?" Amory asked. "Come to see us slaughter your script, Lee?" "It's not my script, and you damned well know it," Lee Nourse said quietly. "Eight weeks ago I turned in a sheaf of typed-on papers and got a fat check for them; then Kavanagh and his Scripting Committee went to work. There isn't anything left of my story except my name on the credit-sheet, and I'm surprised they left that there." "Three minutes , Mr. Amory " boomed someone from the monitorbooth. Amory nodded acknowledgment. To Nourse he said, "It's one of the best scripts I've ever worked on, Lee. At times it almost reaches the level of idiocy. I hope Kavanagh hasn't pegged it too high for his audience." "He knows his job," Nourse said. "Don't worry: the Great American Cretin will love it. Good cast, great director, first-rate sensory effects -- " "And a top-ranking writer. Before they started revising the script." "Thanks, John." "Two minutes , Mr. Amory!" "It's about ready to start," Amory said. "Are you really going to watch it?" Nourse smiled diffidently. "Not really. I've already cashed the check; my interest in this script ends there. I came to invite you to a film showing." Immediately Amory brightened. "Where? When?" "Ted Beckett's place, at ten tonight. It's an English-made job; they smuggled it in through Canada. Suppose to be lovely. Take the usual precautions getting there." "One minute , Mr. Amory!" "Thanks for letting me know," Amory said. He smiled grimly and added, "I'll do my best with your script." "I know you will," Nourse said bitterly. Amory followed Nourse out of the studio with his eyes, then checked his watch and stepped forward to the director's podium, script in hand. He didn't need the script: part of his directorial technique was to memorize each week's production from cover to cover. It reassured the cast, though, if he kept the text handy. "Everybody ready," Amory said, speaking quietly but with such authority that all eyes focussed on him. "This is the final rehearsal for tomorrow's production of Lee Nourse's drama Mist of Desire . Jimmy, are you set up?" "Absolutely, Mr. Amory," said the Sensory Effects man. Sensies were pre-recorded at the dress rehearsal, odors, textures and all. That left a full day for the technicians to work out a sensory-track before the telecast. "Act One, then." He looked at his actors, hiding his unhappiness. He had hand-culled them from the nation's best, and yet just one of the batch knew anything at all about the art of acting; the rest were just competent memorizers. Well, he thought, the public can't tell the difference anyway. The silence-light glowed. Amory said, "Let's get under way, folks. Now." Two of his actors appeared, gravely reciting lines at each other in loud histrionic voices. Amory let it go on for just half a minute. "Hold it, will you? Look here, Cal: there's eight minutes of noisy commercial before you speak your first line. Dammit, make that line quiet. Sensitive. Just so the audience can tell there's been some transition between the client's poop and the play." He had been through this point five times now, but actors didn't catch on easily. It took five more runnings until he was satisfied ; then, he let the play roll on unchecked for nearly ten minutes before cutting in to demonstrate how a line should have been read. The play was some silly inconsequential frippery, a typical product of Dave Kavanagh's scriptmill. Why they bothered to get a talented man like Lee Nourse to do the original story was a mystery to Amory; anyone at all could churn out this sort of formularized hackwork, about Real People and their Real Problems in the World of Today. Small-scale, mindless, just looking at their sets between the sales-pitches. Everything had been carefully designed that way. The central climax of the hour-long play had been thoughtfully placed some four minutes before the middle break, and followed by sheer padding of no plot-value. That way, ran the general thought, the viewer's attention would not still be involved in the play while the all-important commercial was on. Amory watched glumly as his one genuine actor delivered a perfectlytimed line with true feeling, only to have some bumbler squash the effect with a hastily-barked response, upstaging him to boot. Amory called a halt and ran the dialog over; the result still offended his sense of the symphonic interplay of voices that was a well-directed play, but he let it pass. No one would notice. That was the damning part of it : no one would notice. The client cared only about his commercial spots, the playwright was nonexistent, and the viewers, bless 'em, would uncritically accept everything and anything so long as the colors were clear and sharp and the sensory effects moving. Nobody with any taste or discrimination would bother to watch commercial video in this year of Grace #. The show reached its midpoint climax and coasted into the mush calculated to yank the viewer out of the plot and prepare him psychologically for the curtain. Amory made no attempt to direct at this point; he relaxed, letting the actors fumble through the lines any way they pleased. It might cost him his job to make these pages vivid and interesting, if the client's ProductIntensity Rating should drop three percentage points the next week. The last line of Act One appeared, weak and flat and lifeless, and Amory signalled for a cut-out and a ten-minute break. Stepping down from his perch, he looked around and saw a little clump of onlookers watching from the back of the studio: Kavanagh, the head of the Scripting Committee, Van Graben, the network's Vice-President in charge of Dramatic Presentations, and a couple of others, including a roly-poly little man in a checked shirt and blazing red trousers, whom Amory recognized as the Client's Representative. He walked over to them. "Well, gentlemen? Any opinions?" Graben said immediately. "That thing really moved me. When Lois came out with that line -- 'Let's just be friends... forever, Martin ' -- I shook, John. I positively shook!" "Glad you like it," Amory said. He had shaken at that line too -- for different reasons. "But let's give credit where credit's due. To Dave, here, and his magnificent scripting job." This kind of talk comes easy to me, he thought sourly. I should have been an actor instead of a director. Dave Kavanagh was a short, blockily-built, intense man with closecropped sandy hair and a harsh, acne-pocked face. He smiled bleakly. "I'll just have to pass the buck to my committee boys, John. You're the only man in this outfit who takes solo credit -- or blame. Half a dozen men are responsible for that script you're doing." His voice dropped to a confidential whisper. "I can tell you we worked like dogs over it, too. What a stinker that guy Norris turned in!" "Nourse," Amory corrected automatically. He felt sick. Ten thousand a week, he thought mechanically. That's all that keeps me here . I may be selling my soul, but I'm getting a damned fine price for it. Graben, the network man, smiled warmly at the Client's Representative. "We haven't heard your opinion, Mr. Jaberson. I hope you're enjoying this presentation, heh-heh." "I like it," Jaberson said simply. I like it. The ultimate accolade, Amory thought. "If you'll excuse me," he said. "Time for Act Two now." Act Two went slowly. Amory had long ago decided never to slack off. He tried to do the best job he could no matter how hollow the script, how undemanding the viewers. That was the only way to retain a shred of self-dignity, to keep from sliding entirely off into the commercialized muck that was American entertainment, massmedia variety. He wondered what entertainment was like in the other countries of the world. Probably much the same, he thought. People were much the same, despite the artificial political barriers that kept each powersphere walled off from the others. Federated Empire of LatinAmerica or in the Oriental People's Republic was probably on a par with ours. He drove his actors relentlessly through the windup of the play, satisfied if they understood every tenth direction he gave, and finally it was over. He signalled to the technicians that he had finished, and the actors under the merciless lights relaxed visibly. "A great job, all of you," he made himself say. "We'll triple our ratings. You're all aces; Stanislavski would have been proud of you." He mopped sweat from his forehead, folded the shooting script neatly down its center, and dropped it into the red cloth seat of his directorial chair; the charwomen could have it now. He was through with Mist of Desire . Tomorrow night the show would go on, botched and crude as always, and the viewers would love it, the telefax critics would hail him as the greatest director of the age, and the client and the ad agency would count their money and rejoice. And come Thursday there would be a new script, fresh from the anonymous hacks of Kavanagh's Scripting Committee, full of enthusiastic marginal notes from various vicepresidents who were always afraid Amory might miss the point of the pby. The cameras retreated into their hiding-places; the cast vanished toward the dressing-rooms. Amory looked at the time. Nine-oh-five. An hour from now he'd be at Ted Beckett's place, among people. People who shared his distaste for the mass media, even though some of them were capable, as he was, of doublethink, and could take the big video money while retching in private over their work. The little group in the back of the studio had left. Amory was relieved at that. Some day, he knew, Van Graben was going to invite him out for a beer after a rehearsal, and he was going to blurt out, "Sorry, Van. I'm going up to visit that subversive Ted Beckett, who's showing some avant-garde films tonight, and we're going to sit around cursing you and your whole filthy breed." And the next day there'd be a stiff little note from the Network Head Himself in his mailbox, along with a month's severance pay. Amory smiled to himself, wondering whether that would really be a fate worse than death or not. Beckett and others had often urged him to leave his profession before it was too late, before his taste and the keen edge of his mind succumbed to the all-devouring influences about him. "Not just yet," Amory would say, even though his five years in the industry had left him a wealthy man. He realized that he was afraid to resign -- that this job, loathsome as it was, gave him his one contact with the mindless majority around him, a contact he feared to break. He could always break it, and live in a cellar like Ted Beckett, never knowing when his neighbors would tire of having an avowed egghead in the neighborhood and come crashing in to destroy his books and tapes and film projector. This way, Amory had status in the community: John Amory, the noted video director. No one inquired about his private feelings. His lofty position in the industry provided a mask for his inner discontent. He was not anxious to lose that mask. Amory shouldered his way through the studio, taking advantage of his size and rank to push the thronging technicians aside. Once someone stopped him and muttered, "Great show tonight, John" in his face. "Thanks," Amory said, and kept on going -- realizing only later that the man had been some high network executive, who probably now was fuming over Amory's haughtiness. Well, the man would forget by morning; these network people had long since had their brains addled by their work, in which they believed sincerely. They couldn't remember an insult long enough to bear a grudge. He reached the elevators, rode down, and stepped out into the night. It was a warm April evening, moonless, slightly overcast. The street was virtually empty of pedestrians, though a steady low humming told him that the roadway fifty feet above the street was thronged with cars threading their way through New York and out into the outlying suburbs; late-shift workers heading to their homes in Connecticut and New Jersey and the Long Island slums. A flickering sign around the gleaming chrome tower of the Hanley Building caught his attention. He waited patiently through four leagues of baseball scores, and heard the weather forecast : rainfall scheduled for a fifteen-minute drop at two-thirty A.M. Otherwise, nothing much new. He wondered briefly how it had been in the old days, when the newsbands had been full of international tensions, rumors of war, and such things. Thanks to the barriers, all was tranquil. Russia was so distant she might well be on some other world; even South America was an alien land. Amory wondered whether the tranquility had been worth the price. Then he shook his head. Wondering was a bad habit; it led to thoughtfulness, and that was dangerous. He sighed and looked around for a transport depot. He wanted to get to Beckett's place early. B eckett lived on #th Street, far to the north in the blotchy district of crowded tenements that was Riverdale. About the oily thing lower than living in a cellar apartment in Riverdale was to dwell in the rabbit-warrens of Levittown or one of the other jampacked towns on the Island, all blurred together in one endless mass of slum buildings but each still strenuously maintaining its ancient identity nonetheless. Amory caught a cab to Yonkers, riding the slim graceful teardrop up the silent broad Manhattan Overway, cutting off into the NinetySixth Street Overpass and shooting up the West Side Drive into Yonkers at a hundred fifty miles an hour. Amory relaxed, leaning back in the cab as far as his safety-belt would allow, confident that the driver, operating the car by remote control from the main transport switching center under the Hudson, would get him to his destination safely and swiftly. Once across the city line into Yonkers he stopped the cab, fed a bill into the meter and waited for his change, and got out. A dropshaft took him quickly to the pedestrian level. Clouds hung low over the area; pedestrians moved quickly to their homes, not lingering. Despite atmosphere control, there was something stale and unpleasant about the air up here; the odor of rotting garbage hit his nostrils as he walked back across the city line into Riverdale. Probably some of the local inhabitants had roughed up a garbage-collector the day before, and in revenge there had been no collection today. These things happened. He followed a circuitous route across and back Riverdale Avenue until he reached the turnoff that led to Beckett's place. He rang twice upstairs, feeling as always the sense of participating in something forbidden, and headed downstairs to Beckett's apartment. Beckett himself met him at the door. He was a slim, tired-looking little man with faded blue-green eyes and a high forehead; once, he had been a script writer for a video network, but he had never learned the successful man's trick of submerging his individuality, and he had been sacked after a while. He had managed to save a few hundred thousand of his salary, even after taxes, and now, jobless and alone, he lived off his accumulated backlog. "Good to see you again, John. Gome on in. There's a fair-sized crowd here already." Amory followed him into the dimly-lit apartment which had last been painted around the turn of the century. He saw three or four little groups of argumentative men, most of them clutching drinkflasks and waving them to punctuate their words. Among those he recognized were Nourse, Matt Viglan of the Author's League, fellow director Hersch Kyman of Hollywood, and two or three other present and former mass-media men. He grinned at Nourse, who immediately detached himself from the group he was in and came over, towing in his wake a tall, stoopshouldered young man Amory had never seen before. "How'd the show go?" Nourse asked. "Miserably. The brass loved it. Kavanagh dislocated an arm clapping himself on the back." "My check's in the bank," Nourse said. "John, I want you to meet Gill Hadafield. He's an esper." At the last word, Amory started suddenly and squinted at the tall young man. He was at least six-six, Amory thought, topping his own height by at least two inches. His eyes were mildly green, dreamclouded, as if he were simultaneously here and in contact with someone on the far side of the moon. His clothing was threadbare. "Gill, this is John Amory, the famous video director. You don't watch video much, do you?" "No," Hadafield said in an impossibly gentle voice, so soft it seemed feathery. "It's bad for the mind and soul. But I've heard your name, Mr. Amory. Often." "I can't say the same for you, I guess. Espers don't get much publicity." "We don't seek it," Hadafield said. He shifted his feet nervously. "And it may seem contradictory of me to answer your next question before you've asked it, but no, I'm not reading your mind. I can't. I'm a long-range linker, not a reader. But that's the first question anyone ever asks me, so -- you know." Amory chuckled. "Of course." He felt vaguely uncomfortable in the esper's presence, and was somewhat annoyed at Nourse for having brought about this awkward conversation. He used his drinklessness as an excuse to break away and head for the kitchen. There he found a drinkflask of beer, squeezed it open, and drank. A collection box lay open nearby. Ostensibly it was there simply to cover costs of drinks for the evening, since there was no reason why Beckett should have to stand the expense -- but, in actuality, though no one mentioned the fact openly, the box was for Beckett's support. Amory covertly slipped a hundreddoilar bill from his roll and slid it into the box. Beckett went to great risk to secure these films ; it was only fair to help him along. He returned to the main room. The wall-speaker was playing Bartok's Fourth Quartet -- the original score, he realized happily, not the revised # edition with the dissonances carefully smoothed out and a couple of cellos added to give the piece "body." Beckett had evidently found a copy of the untinkered score somewhere, and fed it to his synthesizer. Amory felt warm and loose. He was ordinarily a distant and aloof man, but here in Beckett's dingy cellar he found himself among friends, men of taste who shared his interests. It was good to know you were not the only one who could listen to unrevised #th Century music without frothing at the mouth; it was comforting to see others admiring the Picasso prints on the wall, the incredibly rare sets of Joyce and Kafka in the bookshelves. The fact that Beckett left those books out in the open was a compliment to his guests : lesser men, unable to comprehend the books but well aware of their worth, might be tempted to steal them. Amory drifted into a discussion that seemed shaped for him: the place of drama among the arts. A stocky earnestlooking man who wrote ad copy during the day was saying, "In a sense drama's a more purified art than the novel. It's less didactic. A novelist has the chance to stop the story, to moralize, to comment on what's happening ; the dramatist gives you only the sheer moment, just the action and the words, welling up out of people right before you. The moralizing is all submerged in the structure of the play. That's not easy." "I'll go along with that," said a pale hawk-faced man in bright blue. "But what do you make of the theater of Brecht, for example, then. Intermingling -- " "Impure drama. He admitted it himself." "Esthetically barbarous," said someone else. "But yet it makes its effect despite the mixture of techniques. What do you think, John? You're the only practicing director among us." Amory scowled pleasantly and said, "I wish you wouldn't remind me of the stuff I turn out for my daily caviar. The trash I direct would be hooted off a #th-century stage. But I'm generally in agreement with -- " He spoke confidently and enthusiastically, knowing he was an authority on his subject and knowing also that this was the only audience he was likely to find for his theories. The discussion went on some minutes; then Ted Beckett called for attention, asking everyone to take seats for the film showing. Amory found Nourse at his elbow. The wiry playwright glanced at Amory's drinkflask and said, "What are you drinking?" "Beer. What else?" "You ought to try some of this stuff. It's genuine German wine, slipped in by a friend of Beckett's through Gape Hatteras. There isn't enough of it to go around, but he wants a few people to try some." Amory glanced at the glass Nourse handed him. He sipped the white wine. It was dry, faintly bitter. As he finished the glass he felt sudden vertigo, but shook it off. The mixture of beer and wine wasn't a healthy one. Nourse was peering earnestly up at him. "Well?" "Fine stuff," Amory said. "Fine. We'd better go get seats." They found two chairs near the back of the room. Beckett unrolled a glittering prismatic screen and retired to a dark recess in the back of the room. "Will you douse the lights?" he asked. The lights were doused. He snapped on the projector. The film was something called The Oceans Are Wide. It was English-made, and the print was poor quality, flickering and yellowing here and there. Amory watched, fascinated, as the film unreeled. He thought of the slogan of his drama hour: Real People and their Real Problems in the World of Today. It sounded fine, but in practice it worked out to piffling vacuities about small-minded average-type folks, and the result was a sort of gentle happy-ending fantasy several leagues removed from any reality Amory knew. This film was different. It had been made with more honesty than skill, more sincerity than craft. But the story it unfolded was real , in the truest sense; Amory found his emotions and intellect completely absorbed. He was fascinated, too, by the almost alien rhythms of the players' speech. The gulf of the Atlantic was as a gap between worlds, in these days when all international commerce and communication was rigidly banned. The twin languages of English and American were diverging rapidly; Amory could foresee a time when it would be necessary to outfit each film out of England with subtitles, as was done when Beckett showed a French or an Italian film. After a while he forgot his surroundings, the peeling walls and the stink of garbage outside, the hooting of gangs in the distant streets, even the people beside him and the faint hum of the projector. The only reality was on the screen. This was what had been lost, he thought. Somewhere in the great American levelling-off process, the spark of artistic originality had been buried under a gush of advertising and formulas. Men were not created equal -- and to aim every play, every film at the lowest common denominator was to destroy anything higher, by a sort of cultural Gresham's Law. He sank into a mood of uncontrollable bitterness, conscious that it was spoiling his enjoyment of the film. He fought it, without success. And suddenly a wave of dizziness rippled through him. The wine, he thought. I should never -- His head swam. The image on the screen quivered, melted, spun in an impossible circle. Sweat bathed him ; he could no longer see. What's happening to me? he wondered. He was angry that he should get sick in the middle of such a fine film; he would never get another chance to see it. Then the anger faded, replaced by fear. He was a strong, healthy man. This kind of attack had never hit him before. He rose unsteadily to his feet; he had to get to the washroom, had to have a drink of water, had to splash his face with cold water to stop the burning. Someone behind him muttered, and he realized that his body was probably eclipsing the screen. He ducked, hoping he was no longer blocking the beam. Oddly, he had difficulty putting his feet on the floor; they kept wanting to float up behind him, it seemed. He took three wobbly steps. Then, quite gently, he started to fall forward on his face, and, not so gently, landed, striking the edge of his jaw against the cold wood of the floor. He blinked away the first lash of pain, but that was all. Still not comprehending, he slipped into unconsciousness. He woke slowly, almost in sections. The first layer of his mind that returned to consciousness was that part that had been meshed in the film; he looked in vain for the screen. He realized after that that he was no longer in Beckett's apartment, and still later that he had been taken somewhere else, and quite probably deliberately drugged. Drugged? Who would -- He blinked and looked around. Quite definitely he was no longer anywhere in Riverdale; the clean freshness of the high-roofed room told him that at once. It was a big room, with a sphincter-entrance at the far end; he lay stretched full length on a bare pallet, and on a chair nearby someone had neatly spread out his jacket and tie. His shoes were on the floor at his side. A desk near the window was the next thing he saw; it was littered with papers, documents perhaps. The wall was gentle green in color; the floor was covered with yellow foam. Amory sat up, shaking his head experimentally. He still felt fairly calm. He groped for his shoes and slipped into them. The foam floorcovering was springy and yielding as he walked across it. He went first to the window, but it had been opaqued and there was no sign of the polarizing controls. He saw nothing but gray blankness. He might be almost anywhere. Quickly, feeling the first quivers of alarirt, he ran to the sphincterdoor, but it too had no control. He groped over its cool metal surface, hoping to find some way of letting himself out, without success. A voice muttered suddenly, "He's awake." Another voice, deeper and more resonant, said, "Please don't be upset, Mr. Amory. You won't come to any harm." He whirled and glanced behind him. "Who said that?" "We're monitoring you from outside." He saw a speaker cone mounted in the ceiling, from which the voice was emanating. "What kind of joke is this?" Amory demanded hoarsely. "The penalties for kidnapping are -- " "Very stringent. But I think us. Please don't make judgements in advance of knowledge, Mr. Amory." He forced himself to remain very calm. Here I am, he thought, locked into a practically bare room , having been drugged and kidnapped, carrying on a eonversation with an invisible captor. Kavanagh's Scripting Committee would have turned the situation down for potential use on his show ; such things didn't happen to Real People in the World of Today. Except when they did happen, Amory thought. "Cut the monitor off," he heard the first voice say, just barely audibly and not to him. "Go in and talk to him." Amory lifted his jacket from the chair, slipped into it, and sat down to wait. A few moments later, the sphincter-door began to iris open. He caught a fragmentary glimpse of a brightly-lit corridor behind, and several figures standing in it. Someone entered ; the sphincter closed. "I'll have to apologize for our method of getting you here, Mr. Amory. You were recommended most highly to us, but the person who recommended you suggested that you be brought here unknowing, or else you might not come at all. Briefly, we're not going to be on Earth very long, and while we're here we'd like to employ your services." Amory said nothing. He was staring at the man who spoke, and wondering what there had been in the drink Nourse had given him. He narrowed his eyes, moistened his lips. The speaker was a man of his own height, perhaps a little taller. He wore clinging, rubbery-looking skintight clothes that outlined a firmly-muscled body. What there was exposed of his skin was an even dark-blue in color. He had no hair. His head was dotted with stubby little projections perhaps a quarter of an inch high and half an inch apart. He had no eyebrows. Between his two cold, intense eyes, set slightly above them, was a third eye, unwinking, equally cold and intense. The creature smiled, showing glossy black teeth. "Where did you come from?" Amory asked, in a hushed halfwhisper. "The stars," said the stranger, with a flat, even inflection that implied there was nothing at all extraordinary about such a statement. words soak in, regarding them as some sort of joke, some prank. He said in a flat quiet voice, "The stars. That's very funny, you know?" But by the time he was through saying it he was not so sure it was funny. A cold band of fear gripped his middle. "Just where are you from?" he asked, eyeing the totally alien features. "What I said was the truth. Is it that difficult to absorb, Mr. Amory?" "One doesn't expect such things. All right: I'll provisionally accept that you just blew in from the Crab Nebula, or wherever. What do you want with me?" "Your help. Your guidance." The alien touched one hand -- a webfingered hand, Amory now noticed -- lightly to his scalp. "You're a connoisseur of the arts, aren't you? A lover of books and poetry, painting, the drama. The drama particularly." "What if I am?" Amory asked cautiously. "That makes you a very unusual man, you know. We've been on Earth a while ; we've shopped around. We chose you as the man most likely to help us. In brief, we're looking for a guide to the best of Earth's culture -- someone who'll tell us what's considered good and what isn't, someone to separate the wheat from the chaff, the pure from the dross, the artistic from the -- kitsch , is that the word? We'd like to take examples of Earth's best cultural products back to our home world. Duplicates, of course; we have reproducing equipment." Amory began to be more interested. "And you want me to say, Take Mozart and leave moviemusic, take Shaw but not Sardou, take Bertrand Russell but not Herbert Spencer. Something like that?" "To a certain extent. We'll also want a sampling of the less deserving art and philosophy -- a judiciously-selected sample. We'd want Spencer, for instance; he had his influence, and he was important in his day. You see?" "I think so." "We thought you would." "How come you need a -- a native guide, though," Amory said. "Couldn't you discover these things for yourself, in time?" "Possibly; possibly not. But we don't have time on our side. A few months, perhaps a year, then we must be going. There are always other worlds to visit. So many other worlds, Mr. Amory; you have no idea." Suddenly Amory reddened. "You're a sort of anthropologist, aren't you? Collecting primitive artifacts? You'll take our finest art and stick it in a museum like an Alaskan totem-mask, and smile patronizingly at it?" The alien's face remained fixed in its affable grin, but the three dark eyes grew faintly grim. "You may think of our mission that way, or in any other way you please. We prefer to take a happier view. Earth is quite an unusual world ; we want a generous sampling of her finest work. You'll find many rewards in working with us, both materially and otherwise. But I don't want you to rush your decision. I'll leave you alone to think about it for a while. When you've made up your mind you can signal to me by pressing this stud at the side of the desk -- oh -- "  The alien blinked suddenly, as if seeing the heap of documents on the desk for the first time, and crossed the room quickly. He gathered the sheaf of papers into his arms, saying, "Unimportant papers. Sloppy to leave them lying around." One yellow-green slip of paper slid from the bundle in the alien's arms, spiralled behind him to the floor, and slid under the lambent plastic of the desk. Amory caught the sight from the comer of one eye, but thoughtfully said nothing about it. The alien was at the sphincter-door, clutching the rest of the papers. "I'll give it some thought," Amory said. He moistened his lips. "I'll signal when I'm ready." "Very good." The sphincter opened and closed in a fraction of a second, and in the interval between opening and closing the alien stepped nimbly through, leaving Amory once again a prisoner and alone. The first hard wave of post-reflexive shock went shuddering through him, and then he reasserted his normal control. He stood for a while at the blank waxy-surfaced opaqued window, staring at his own dim reflection. thing: that there were aliens among us, that the creature he had just spoken with had indeed come from some other star, that they were engaged in some kind of cultural collecting-tour here on Earth. Despite the melodramatic circumstances in which he had been brought in contact with them, he was ready to believe what he had just seen and heard. It shook his inward calm to know that Earth was just a way-station in the sky where cosmic artifact-collectors might stop off for a year or Procyon X. Yet he had foreseen it, in a way, and there was nothing in his personal philosophy that held that mankind was the highest form of life conceivable. He had had enough experience with mankind to know its shortcomings. An early dream of his, still unfulfilled, was to see man reach the Moon, the planets, the stars. They said it was theoretically possible, but nothing had ever come of it. Perhaps if war had come eighty years ago, instead of solidifying into a perpetual deep-freeze, space travel might have been realized. But war had not come, and the cold war had become an eternally frozen peace instead, each powersphere locked behind its own boundaries and all external communication voided. So they reached us first , he thought. He sighed heavily and crossed the room to the shining plastic-topped desk. They wanted his help, he thought. That was certainly flattering. Naturally, they'd demand he remain perfectly silent about their presence on Earth until they were gone, and possibly even afterward. That was easily understandable. And Amory would not mind such a restriction. He had never been overflowing with love for humanity -- at least, not the noisy filthy humanity that flooded America's cities till they burst at the seams, the race of marching morons that was now a-breeding and who hated Amory's kind as much as he hated them. He felt no obligation to tell the world about the aliens in their midst. He might almost enjoy his secret knowledge. His hand crept to the enamelled buzzer-stud at the side of the desk. One swift muscular contraction and he would summon the alien. Amory paused ; and in that pause, his eye caught the yellow-green edge of the paper the alien had dropped, protruding an inch or two from beneath the desk where it had fallen. Amory decided to postpone calling the alien a minute or two. He started to reach for the paper; then, remembering that he most probably was being monitored on an outside circuit, chose a different tack. He groaned as if in deep inner conflict, buried his head in his hands, slumped forward on the desk in apparent perplexity. The desktop was translucent. With great care he worked the sheet of paper out of its hiding-place with the toe of his shoe, and tugged it across the floor to a point directly beneath his face. He stared through the desktop at it. And slowly his face grew pale. The document was in English, though it had been typed in a curiously ornate face unlike any Amory had ever seen. The words were easily visible. It said: TO: Gargh stood Your report received and entered. So far all is well, for which we are very grateful here, since there was some doubt in Ruling Body's mind concerning the validity of the Earth expedition. Receipt of your report has caused favorable comment in high places, and there is general approval of your policy. We all agree that it's wise to gather as many of Earth's cultural outpourings as possible in the year remaining before invasion-time; we can then manipulate Council sympathies to show that we began as an unwarlike enterprise, but found it necessary for Galactic peace to cleanse Earth of its population. This despite any favorable impression the gathered artworks might create. Besides which, it would be thoughtless to let an entire culture vanish from existence without keeping some mementoes. We are in receipt of the psych reports on John Amory and Filimon Grigorescu, and agree with your preliminary guess that they would be ideal. The Rumanian particularly shows the characteristics you could best employ. We're still awaiting the geological report on the planet. The actual invasion is still in the planning stage, but of course we're anxious to avoid any actual damage to the world itself, since then it would lose all value as The message ended there, as if it were continued on some second sheet that the alien had not been thoughtful enough to leave behind. But Amory had seen enough. He read the sheet through carefully twice more, until the amiably bedded in his memory as any Shakespearean soliloquy, all without moving from his head-in-hands position on the desk. Sweat dripped from his forehead; a dull premonitory ache began in his stomach and spread its way upward through his heart and lungs into his throat. He felt sick... necessary for Galactic peace to cleanse Earth of its population... The cool friendly phrases danced before him. So they reached us first, he thought. And how! After a while he grew calm -- numb, rather. Panic reactions were fine on occasions, but not now. He was in possession of data on a gigantic conspiracy, he alone, and if he maneuvered shrewdly enough there might yet be a way out. He nudged the slip of paper back out of sight beneath the foot of the desk. This is the invasion vanguard, he thought dully. The scavengers coming in to grab whatever # s worth keeping, before they blot Earth out . And somehow I stumbled into it all. Slowly he raised his head. He addressed himself as if he were both the director on the podium and the actor under the merciless lights, instructing himself in just the proper way to sit, creating a mask of outer calm on his troubled face, bringing color back into his cheeks. He had long felt that only great actors could exert actual physical control over themselves during a performance, but that a great director could bring out latent greatness in almost anyone. Now was the test. He took a deep breath, temporarily wiped his new knowledge from his minc and jammed down fiercely on the signal stud. The alien entered. He still wore the pleasant smile, but a deeper strength lurked in the three cold eyes. Amory realized he had been fooled himself by a master actor into thinking the aliens' presence on Earth was strictly benevolent. He would have to play his role with great care. If the aliens discovered he knew their true motives, they'd dispose of him on the spot. Whatever they were planning, it was more important to them than John Amory's life. "I've been thinking over your proposition," he said conversationally. "I don't know as I like it so much." The alien looked grieved. "What are your objections, then?" Frowning, Amory said, "First of all, what's in it for me? Me, personally." "Anything you like. Wealth. Copies of the books you secure for us. We can be very helpful that way." Amory nodded. "That sounds good. But two : how do I know you're acting in good faith?" "What do you mean by that?" "Well, suppose you're planning to make away with our most priceless art treasures as soon as I point them out to you. Suppose you're not planning to take duplicates back with you, but the actual originals? In that case I'd hate to be the man who led you on." "I could give you my word we have no such intentions. Does that convince you?" Your word means a lot , Amory thought bitterly. Out loud he said, "No, but I'll have to accept it." "Any further objections?" "Some. For one thing, I don't even know your name, or where you're from. I hate working for phantoms. And lastly, I want you to understand that I'm employed, and my work will have to come first. Whatever time I devote to this... project of yours, it will be spare time only." "Very well. We anticipated such a request, and we'll honor it. As for where we're from, I'll say only that it's a star in the Lesser Magellanic Cluster, as I think you refer to it; there isn't much point in telling you which one, is there? There are so many." Amory shrugged. "Granted. You must have instantaneous spacedrive, then. Or else you don't mind a twenty or thirty thousand year trip across space to collect a few symphonies and paintings." "We have instantaneous drive," the alien said calmly. "You didn't tell me your name," Amory pointed out. "My name? How unimportant, really! But you call me Cargh, if you wish. Just Cargh; the numbers are a bore. Is everything settled, then?" Amory forced himself into a reflective mood, as if he were still weighing possible alternatives and objections, and not as though he had chosen a course of action long before Cargh had reentered the room. At length he said, "Okay. I'm your man. When do I begin?" Cargh's steady grin grew warmer. "Whenever you choose. We don't have a great deal of time, but we have enough. First I suppose you'd like to know where you are." "That might help," Amory admitted. The alien slid his webbed hands along the wall near the window, and a section of plastic sprang up, revealing control-panels underneath. Cargh touched the depolarizer and the film of opacity peeled away from the window. Bright morning sunlight came streaming through. "Recognize the territory?" Amory looked. Even at dawn, mid-Manhattan was crowded ; early-shift workers rode the Overway far below, a steady stream of bright-colored teardrops descending on the city from the suburbs. The air still looked clean and fresh, but the day's pollution would soon be upon it. Directly across the way rose the glittering column of the Hanley Building; facing it was the shining chrome needle of Transvideo Tower. They were in the very heart of Manhattan. "I'll be damned," Amory said wonderingly. "Only in New York City could something like this happen. I mean having a bunch of aliencome down out of the Magellanic Clouds and set up an office, with nobody noticing, nobody caring. Right here in the middle of Manhattan." Cargh was still smiling. "You're not far from your place of work, I believe. It'll be quite convenient for you to come here after your video chores are finished. This is the ninety-third floor of Huxley Gardens. We've rented the entire floor." "I'll be damned," Amory said again. He was not merely playing a role, now; he was genuinely astonished. Cargh re-opaqued the window. "We don't care for your sunlight," he explained. "And things are more private this way." "Of course." "I understand today is a day off for you," the alien went on. "We wouldn't want to cut into it any more than we've already done. We'll get in touch with you tomorrow and make further arrangements. If you'll come this way -- " Cargh led him through a corridor, past another sphincter, and out into the main hall. "This is as far as I can go," he said. "We never venture past that door. But you'll find the dropshaft just beyond." "Thanks," Amory said. He passed through an irising sphincter and waved to the vanishing Cargh. The neat lettering on the outer skin of the sphincter said: By Appointment Only That was all. No hint that behind that shining metal oval lived the vanguard of an alien invasion force. Amory pressed for the dropshaft and realized his hands were shaking almost uncontrollably. He wondered when the aliens would discover they had accidentally exposed a vital document, and whether they would ever learn he had read it. A mory reached his home, in fashionable Fort Lee just on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, twenty minutes later, having taken a cab up to #th Street and there across the Cathedral Avenue rivertube to the Jersey side. He had a modest three-room apartment with full privacy insulation, on the thirty-ninth floor of a sharply contoured multiple dwelling. It cost him # a month, and he considered it a bargain at that rate. He had furnished it handsomely. There were ways of circumventing taxes to some extent, and he had drawn his #-a-week check from the network long enough to be a wealthy man by now. Rich carpets covered the floor, providing presence for his sound system ; pseudowood bookcases occupied three walls from floor to ceiling, and oriental screens, fabulously rare since the People's Republic had declared its Non-Intercourse Act and cut all of Asia off from contact with the hated west, decorated his study. Amory lived well. He sank into a webfoam chair that faced the subtly-hued Tanguy original he had bought three years back, and dialed a drink: bourbon, straight. The first shot was merely a bracer; he tossed it down and dialed another. Aliens , he thought. Invasion force . There still was plenty of time. But definite plans were taking shape in his mind. First, he had to find out some things. He picked up the phone extension and punched out Ted Beckett's number. The phone rang six, seven times; then the screen across the room brightened and Beckett's worried face appeared, squinting slightly"Hello, Ted," Amory said. "I wake you up?" "I've been up a while. Feeling better now, John?" Amory smiled. "That's why I'm calling. I want some info. Last thing I remember, I was watching a film at your place. Next I know I wake up over here in my own bed. I want to know where the hell I was in between, and what happened to me last night." Beckett said, "You don't remember?" "Not a thing. Not a damn thing." "You got sick, right in the middle of the film. Got out of your seat and staggered halfway across the room, and fell flat on your face. We couldn't get you to come round for anything, John." "So?" "So Lee Nourse took you home and got you a doctor, and thatV the last I knew until you just called. Didn't they leave a note or anything?" "Not a thing. Someone put me to bed, but that's all I know." "You better call Nourse then," Beckett said. "He can tell you what happened after you left here. I really don't know." Beckett was chewing his lip suspiciously; Amory, a professionally skilled interpreter of such mannerisms, read easily that Beckett was lying, but at this point there was no need to press anything. Casually Amory asked, "Before I sign off -- can you give me the number of that esper who was at your party? Gill Hadafield, that's his name. I want to talk to him." Again Beckett munched his lip. "You better ask Nourse for that too. Lee knows the guy; I don't." "I see. Well, thanks, Ted. Thanks anyway." He broke the contact and watched Beckett's harried face vanish from the screen. His fingers hovered over the dialing stud a moment; he was on the verge of dialing Lee Nourse when the sudden dull plop of the mailchute told him that something had arrived. He rose, opened the door, and took in the bulky manila envelope. Within was a video script, with a covering note from Dave Kavanagh that said simply, Here's the script for next week's show. Amory glanced at it. The mimeoTwo Acts, by Matthew Viglan. Beneath that came the little rubberstamp that signified Scripting Committee approval. He tossed the script onto his desk, reflecting that there was probably as much of Matt Viglan's work in it as there had been of Lee Nourse's in Mist of Desire . The Committee had a way of frowning on individual stylistic enterprise. But it was difficult to think of such things as video scripts right now. He dialed Lee Nourse's number and got Nourse's wife, a blonde tense-looking woman with a shrill voice. "Lee's not home," she halfscreamed at him. "Where can I find him, then? This is John Amory." "Who?" "Amory. I directed his last script Mist of Desire." He tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. "Oh," she said. "Well, he's at his studio, Mr. Amory. He doesn't like to be disturbed while he works. I don't know if I can give you his number -- " "That's all right, Mrs. Nourse," Amory said smoothly. "I already have it." He rang off and dialed the other number, leaving her to protest to a blank screen. Nourse took his time about answering. Amory let the phone ring, knowing that the writer would pick up sooner or later, and after the tenth or eleventh ring he finally answered. "Yes?" he snarled angrily -- and, seeing Amory, softened at once. "How do you feel today, John?" "Puzzled," Amory said. "I called Beckett and he couldn't tell me anything. What the blazes happened to me last night at his place?" Nourse looked uneasy. "It must have been that wine you had, John. You conked out in the middle of the film. Luckily someone at the party was a doctor, and he took a look at you and said it was nothing serious, just a nervous reaction -- a fluke thing. So I was elected to take you home and put you to bed. I was going to call about noon to find out how you were, but I guess I don't have to." That was very interesting, Amory thought. Beckett hadn't said anything about a doctor at the party. Already he had found one major contradiction in the story, and he suspected there would be more. A faint twitch of Nourse's left eyelid aroused his suspicions. "I'm okay now," Amory said. "I'm not as young as I used to be. Say, -- you know that esper Hadafield you brought with you last night?" "Y-ess," Nourse said. "I'd like to get in touch with him. Do you think you could let me have his number?" Nourse shook his head. "He doesn't have a phone. He's a hard man to reach." "How do I do it?" asked Amory, grinning. "With a ouija board?" "No, there are better ways. Look -- how bad do you want to see him, John?" "Bad bad. I want him to make a long-distance pickup for me. To Rumania." Again Nourse' s eyelid twitched uncontrollably. But the writer's voice was even as he said, "I guess it can be arranged. When do you want to see him?" "Toward the end of the week. Let's see, now -- today's Wednesday. What can you do about Sunday afternoon?" "I'll give it a try," Nourse promised. "Call me Saturday for an okay." "Will do," Amory said, and signed off. He spent the next hour reading Folly and Fortune , the new script, with the sort of care he might lavish on a newly-discovered Shaw comedy. Viglan's script was a formula job, difficult to distinguish from the one by Nourse that had left his hands the day before. Characters, basic conflict, even the style -- identical, as might be expected from any script produced by the committee system. Amory read it with care. The secret of his success was to take anything, even trash like this, and treat it as if it were an enduring work of art, shutting out any outside distraction as he did so. Aliens from the Magellanic Clouds had invaded Earth; still, the script had to be read. He ploughed grimly past a note Van Graben had pencilled in on the eleventh page, saying, This is a moment of great poignancy . Do your best with it, John . Such helpfulness had angered him, in the beginning; now he scarcely noticed the comment. He had not quite finished his first examination of the script when the phone rang. He snapped on his extension, but instead of showing a caller's face the screen merely presented a swirling pattern of red and blue whorls. A bright, impersonal voice said, "We have a closed-circuit call for Mr. John Amory, person-to-person. If Mr. Amory is at home, will he please signal his identity-code?" A call of this sort cost a fancy figure, even on a local basis. Frowning curiously, Amory tapped out his special code, which only he and the phone company knew. After a pause came the operator's acknowledging "Go ahead, please," and the scatter-pattern on the screen broke. The swirling colors reformed into an alien face. "Good afternoon, Mr. Amory. This is Cargh." "What can I do for you?" Amory said automatically, studying the alien to see if Cargh betrayed any suspicious manifestations. But the dark blue face showed no outward change. "I'd like to make our first appointment," Cargh said. "Are you free tomorrow?" "I'm starting a new show tomorrow. How's Friday?" "Friday evening?" "Friday afternoon," Amory said. "I could get to your place about one, one-thirty. And then I'll be free most of Saturday, too." "Very well," said Cargh. "We can expect you Friday afternoon, then? Between one and one-thirty." "I'll be there." The screen blanked without another word from the alien. Amory had been unable to read the alien's face, but it did not seem to him that Cargh's attitude had changed since the last time they had spoken. They still did not know Amory had seen the document. Unless, of course, they were preparing a trap. He threw himself into his work with a sort of desperate energy, plunging deep into the problems of staging Folly and Fortune as if that could keep his mind from Cargh and the memorandum he had accidentally been permitted to read. The part Nourse and Beckett played in this affair troubled him, too. Obviously, they hadn't told him the whole truth, or anything near the whole truth, about what had been done to him at that party. He had deliberately been drugged and turned over to the aliens -- by whom? He felt suddenly cold. What if all of them -- Nourse and Beckett and Viglan and that esper too -- were in the pay of the aliens, or otherwise under sway? Plainly there had been a plot to turn him over to Cargh; who knew what lay behind that plot? Discontented intellectuals so tired of the world they were ellanics without strings? Maybe. Ted Beckett and Lee Nourse were embittered, unhappy men. Amory easily could see them doing something like this, as a wild means of revenge against the world that had no use for their talents. He shook his head and turned again to the script, and immediately intrigue and revenge faded from his mind. By some curious process of inversion the puerile script came to glowing life as he read it, until each character occupied a definite niche in his mind, firmly-rounded, vivid, bright with individuation, while Beckett and Nourse and Cargh faded to the status of cardboard figures in a Hollywood melodrama. Amory worked at this level of intensity until the bonging of the autochef told him it was dinnertime ; he chewed chlorella steak with protoid syrup mechanically, downed his caffeine-drink unknowingly, carelessly tumbled the dishes into the washer, and returned to his study, brimming over with enthusiasm, real and unfaked, for the piay. He finished working at # : #. He had a fairly good action-chart in mind, knew with reasonable accuracy what sort of stage-rhythms he would ask for, where to underscore and where to come down hard. Directing a play was a subtle game with Amory; knowing that he alone would appreciate the nuances he built into each production failed to dampen his enthusiasm for his work. His video set remained dead, though, despite the fact that Mist of Desire would be reaching the public this evening. He had no interest in seeing a play once he had finished with it. It was the original creative frenzy that attracted his mind, not the final product, which more often than not would be hopelessly disappointing. Wednesday nights he never tuned in his set; ritualistically, he listened to old opera tapes instead. He chose Wozzeck this evening. The work was in German, a language he knew fairly well, and he listened, eyes closed, thinking occasionally of Germany and the other now half-forgotten nations on the other side of the Atlantic. Curious, he thought: for the past generation his world had been bounded by Canada on the north, the Federated Empire of Latin-America on the south, and the oceans to east and west. Germany was a dream-land somewhere in Europe; somewhere else in Europe was Rumania, and there lived one Filimon Grigorescu, like himself an agent of the aliens. Amory tried to picture the map of Europe, and Rumania in relation to Germany, but failed ; even though he was old enough to have been taught geography once, he had forgotten most of what he knew. Wozzeck pursued its moody course. It ended about the time his drama hour went off the air, and he cut the sound system and dialed the studio. This was another tradition. Van Graben would be there, of course, and Kavanagh -- those two seemed to live in the Transvideo Tower. Amory asked for either of them, and got Graben. "How'd it look from out there?" Graben asked at once. "Splendid," Amory lied. "Reports come in yet?" "There's just a few. Early returns, of course, but it looks magnificent. Product-Intensity's up four point two so far, on early samplings. Jaberson's wild with joy." That was the way it went, Amory thought. A notch or two up a graph and the evening was a success; an equal distance down the checked paper, and heads rolled in the morning. He said, "How about the competition?" "We haven't received much from Hinkey yet, but the studio did a little monitoring on its own and we hardly found anyone watching Universal from nine to ten. They're probably cutting their throats over there. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, either." Graben smiled, showing white even teeth too symmetrical to be natural. "Well, I've got to take off now. They're yelling for me downstairs. Congrats again, John. Here's Kavanagh." The Scripting Committee man looked less enthusiastic. His wide, pockmarked face had none of Graben's almost hysterical happiness. "I think we fouled up, John," he said. "What? Graben's drunk with joy. You going to gloom things up, Dave?" This was traditional too. Kavanagh looked moody and said, "Graben's going to calm down when he sees the Mundy-Richardson for tonight. You know that scene where the hero storms out of the heroine's place muttering in his beard?" "Of course I know it. What went wrong?" Amory asked. "The Mundy-Richardson people ran an ideological check on it, and it turned out that one of fifteen people were sure he was heading for a bar. A bar , John! What a miserable connotation! I don't know how we could have let anything so ambiguous slip through. We may have to fire Nourse for a stunt like that." Of course, Amory thought. Don't blame yourselves for the ambiguous scene; don't blame the Scripting Committee for fouling up. Blame the writer. You hire him just to serve as a scapegoat in a pinch like this anyway, and you pay him well enough. "Nourse is a good man," Amory said cautiously. "You better think about that a couple of times before you do anything serious." "We never do anything without thinking, John," Kavanagh said with sudden implied malice. "And a low Mundy-Richardson brings trouble with the client. We can't have that, John." "Of course not." Kavanagh pleaded an urgent post-show conference and hung up. Scowling angrily, Amory turned away from the phone. Kavanagh could find a crisis in anything -- and tomorrow there would be a new party-line for his writers to follow. The phone rang again. Amory shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and answered. It was Lee Nourse, and he looked excited. Before he could say anything, Amory asked, "Did you see the show tonight?" Nourse made an impatient face. "Of course not. But listen -- " "You listen. Something went wrong with the Mundy-Richardson rating and Kavanagh's foaming at the mouth. Graben doesn't know what happened yet, but you better be near your phone when he finds out. There's talk of making you the sacrificial scapegoat when it's time for the network to issue its me a culpas" "The hell with that," Nourse snapped. "How can I worry about some damned video show when a friend is suffering?" "Who are you talking about?" Amory asked, in sudden alarm. "Beckett. Bunch of hoodlums broke into his place about half an hour ago and just about wrecked the works. A bunch called the Riverdale Raiders -- know them? They beat Ted up and turned a hose loose inside the apartment. He woke up in two feet of water." Amory muttered a short, sharp, eloquent curse. "Is anyone with him?" "Viglan's on his way over now. I'm leaving as soon as I get off the phone." "Should I come too?" "Not just yet," Nourse said. "He's in pretty bad shape; we don't want to crowd him. But I just thought I'd let you know what happened." "Thanks," Amory said. He stared bleakly at the dead screen. Riverdale Raiders, he thought, snorting angrily. They must have had a fine old time with the helpless Beckett. He could understand now what might persuade people like Nourse, sick of the senseless brutality and festering hatred that seemed to spring wild through humanity, to hand the planet over to the Magellanics. Bitterly he realized he might almost do the same himself, if he cared a little more strongly. River dale Raiders , he thought again, and swore. F irst rehearsal of Folly and Fortune was called for eight the following evening. Entertainment people preferred to work after dark ; during the day Manhattan was clogged with people despite the scattering effect achieved by abandonment of a rigid #-to-# work day. By eight p.m. only the last two shifts remained on, and then the night people emerged to do their work. Amory worked on the new script until almost six; eating then, he dressed and left. He had a stop to make before arriving at the studio. It was nearly seven by the time he reached Ted Beckett's cellar apartment in Riverdale. Beckett was there, wearing a tattered gray dressing-gown, and he was accompanied by Matt Viglan. The place was a wreck. Pools of moisture still lay unmopped on the floor; the walls had evidently been hosed as well, since soggy masses of paper indicated where Beckett's Picasso prints had been. A book lay floating in a puddle at Amory's feet: The Castle, Amory saw. The backbone had been split and pages drifted loose in the water. "Hello, John," Beckett said in a small tired voice. He wore a turban of bandages around his skull; his lower lip was swollen, his right eye blackened. Amory saw the movie screen dangling behind him, slashed three times down its full length. "Why did this happen?" Amory asked. Beckett shrugged. "It's been due for a long time. The people next door used to sit with their ears against the walls listening every time I had a film showing. They must have notified the local vigilante committee that people were thinking in here. And of course they couldn't allow that to go on, so -- " Becket shrugged, indicating the destruction. "They came last night. Seven or eight of them, in masks. They pushed their way past me and started dumping the books out of the shelves." Beckett stared broodingly at the heap of rubble that had been his library and added, "I'm glad they hit me. I wouldn't have wanted to be conscious while it was going on." Amory clenched his fists. "Do the police know?" "Of course they know," Viglan said. "I called them when I got over here. They came, and they helped pump the place dry, and they left. That's all." "Won't there be any investigation?" "Of this? Don't be naive, John." Amory glanced sharply at Beckett. "You knew this was going to happen, Ted. You could have moved. You could have told us to stop coming here. You could have asked us to hire protection for you. You didn't. Why?" "What was the use?" Beckett asked quietly. "Sure, I knew it was coming. I didn't try to fight it. But I didn't want to give up ahead of time. I wouldn't let them scare me out of what I enjoyed. So in a sense I won, even if they ruined everything. You see that, John?" Amory nodded. "I see." He reached the studio at ten of eight. The cast was there already, along with Graben and Kavanagh. None of the technicians or camera men were on hand; those would come later in the week, after Amory had worked out the rough plan of his staging and imparted it to the cast. Tonight would simply be a runthrough, as Amory surveyed the coarse material and set about shaping it into the polished production that would be shown the following Wednesday. Kavanagh glanced up at him as he entered. "Evening, John." "Hello, Dave. Van. We recover from last night's catastrophe yet? Or are the returns still coming in?" Both Graben and Kavanagh looked blank. Graben said, "What the devil you mean, John? We picked up an even five on P-I, and the Hinkey was a smash. Universal's moaning. You joking or something?" "I'm talking about the MundyRichardson," Amory said. "That was fine too," said Graben, frowning. The network executive's artificial smile clicked off for an instant to show displeasure, then clicked back, steely as ever. "What's eating you, Amory?" "Last night," Amory said patiently, "I called you. Dave told me we took a beating on the Mundy-Richardson and that heads would roll. Didn't he tell you?" Graben swivelled his head toward Kavanagh. "Huh?" Kavanagh shrugged vaguely. "I hardly remember now. Those must have been early returns, or something. The graph levelled off beautifully toward midnight when the Coast poop came in. Splendid job last night, John; splendid." Amory felt sick. These network men were slick and empty, living only in the current minute. Kavanagh had already managed to forget the short-lived crisis of the night before. "You hear what happened to Ted Beckett?" Amory asked. Graben nodded. "Viglan called in with the story. Matt won't be here tonight, by the way -- he's tending a sick aunt. But we all heard." "I knew Beckett was wrong from the start," Kavanagh said. "I always know in a case like that. I fired him because he was a deviationist, you know." "Yes. I remember," Amory said stiffly. "Well, now the court of public opinion has confirmed it. Whatever he got was better than he deserved. And I tell you, that Lee Nourse is going to go the same way one of these months. One more ideologically uncertain script and -- " Amory coughed suddenly. "Time to get the rehearsal under way, I guess." He walked away, leaving Kavanagh with mouth gaping open fishwise, wanting to get away from those two before some of their inner corruption slopped out and poisoned him. "Places, everyone !" he snapped. "First run-through of Folly and Fortune!" Like every other first runthrough, it was abominable. Amory held himself in check through the entire first act, delivering himself of a blistering fifteen-minute speech when the curtain-line had been spoken. To his relief, the second act picked up slightly. He thought about Matt Viglan's "sick aunt," and wondered what Graben and Kavanagh would say if they learned that the author of tonight's stellar script had lied to them, and was actually at this very moment in the presence of Theodore Beckett, subversive and arch-deviationist. And that the man directing tonight's stellar script had just left Beckett's place himself. Heads would certainly roll, to use Kavanagh's own beloved phrase. He remembered another phrase, from a calm memorandum:... necessary for Galactic peace to cleanse Earth of its population... "Exit left, Ray," the part of his mind watching the stage said. "Peg's going to be coming on right, so you can't go out the same door. See? " Cleanse Earth ? Well , why not? Why struggle to save Earth from the Magellanics, why fight to preserve Graben and Kavanagh and Real People and their Real Problems in the World of Today, and the seven or eight Riverdale Raiders who had smashed Ted Beckett's apartment? Shaking his head, he forced himself to devote all his attention to the stage. With a conscious effort he drove the upwelling pessimism into a deep recess of his mind, and turned his mind to other problems. Folly and Fortune ground on to its soggy finale; Amory broke in constantly to snap his whip. At eleven-fifteen he was at last satisfied, and dismissed the cast. "Be here at eight sharp tomorrow," he ordered. "And if you don't know your lines letter-clean, don't bother showing up." He turned away from his podium. Only half-listening, he took in Graben's comments on the script, heard Kavanagh praise the fine work his Committee had done in preparing it from Viglan's errorriddled original, and excused himself. The moment of defeat had passed. Perhaps Aristotle's ancient precept still held: the play, feeble as it was, had somehow purged him of pity and fear. He had his answer to the dark question of half an hour earlier. Perhaps mankind should be cleansed from the face of the Earth. But, he thought, it should be man himself who does the cleansing, not cold-eyed beings from the stars. He kept his appointment with Gargh. Precisely at one-twenty the following afternoon he arrived outside the mirror-bright sphincterWell, he had an appointment. Tentatively he touched the surface of the sphincter. A voice from a concealed speaker said, "Just one moment, Mr. Amory." The sphincter opened. Amory followed the corridor as far as the inner sphincter, which was already open. Cargh met him there and led him down the hall to the room where he had awakened on Wednesday. The place was strangely silent. "Aren't there any others around?" Amory asked. "I mean, you're not the only one of your kind on Earth, are you?" "Of course not. There are others. There are others here in Manhattan, and there are some in Europe as well. We're aware that there's little communication between continents on this planet, and we're hopeful of making our survey as complete as possible." Of course , Amory thought. He noticed that the desk was clear of papers this time, and that the document he had slid under the leg had been removed. Cargh gestured to a foamy turquoise recliner that faced the desk, and indicated that Amory should lie down in it. He did so, wondering idly whether this was the prelude to an invasion or an analysis. Cargh looked sleek and calm, his dark blue face picking up highlights from the hard clear glow-lights embedded in the ceiling. He seemed in no hurry to begin the interview. At length he seated himself behind the desk, drew a tablet and stylus from somewhere, and said, "You're an expert on the drama, Mr. Amory. Right?" "I like to think so," Amory said, half sardonically and half in humility. "We've collected a good-size library of plays already," Cargh said. "I'll read you the titles. On this first reading, I want you to rate the plays on an absolute scale of value, the most enduring being rated One y the almost-great Two , and so on down to Ten. Can you do that?" "I suppose so," Amory said. Absolute scale of values , he thought. As if such a thing could exist in literature. But that's the way a race that goes around cleansing other planets might think. He did his best. Cargh smiled blankly at him and spouted a title: "Hedda Gabler . Ibsen." "Three," Amory said without thinking. "No -- four." "Revenger's Tragedy. Tourneur." "Two." "Coriolanus. Shakespeare." "Take all of Shakespeare, I'd say." "We asked for individual ratings," Cargh said coldly. "Two, then." "Bussy D'ambois. Chapman." "Five." It went on for more than an hour ; Amory yielded up snap judgements with vigor and glee, barking them back as fast as the alien could read the play-titles to him. The fact that he had somehow rated Doctor Faustus above All for Love but below Aurung-Zebe meant little to him; it was impossible to keep half a thousand relative gradings in mind, and the absolute scale Cargh had asked for simply did not exist. At length Cargh said, "Thank you very much. You've been extremely helpful. Now, as to music # Another weary hour went by as Amory classified composers by ranks. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, Monteverdi rated the first rank; he placed Wagner too low, Corelli too high, but did not bother to correct his ratings when he thought back over them. The situation was roughly analogous to the one he faced in directing video plays: the people benefiting from his talents simply did not know the difference between good and bad, and so whatever he said was right. "There'll be difficulties in locating all these works, I imagine," Cargh said, staring down at his list. "We only have collected a few recordings so far. I suppose you'll be able to help us in that." "I suppose so," Amory agreed. He coughed and said, "All this talking is making me thirsty. Do you think you could -- " "Of course." Cargh nudged the stud at the side of the desk, and almost immediately afterward another alien entered carrying a tray. To Amory's astonishment he saw the newcomer was identical in every respect to Cargh. He took the drink -- a wine, mildly acrid, light green-yellow in color. He sipped slowly, knowing this would be his only moment of rest until the interrogation was over. It was only when he finished and replaced the glass on the gleaming tray that he remembered his troubles had begun with a glass of very similar wine. "What is this stuff?" he asked. Gargh smiled blandly. "It's a German wine. Our European agents sent it to us. Do you like it?" "Very much." "We'll have a case of it sent to your home at once. Consider it part payment from us. Now, in the field of art, would you say -- " He called a halt to the proceedings at #:#, claiming truthfully that he had to ready himself for the evening's rehearsal. He felt physically drained, both from the mental effort of marshalling critical data and forming rapid-fire opinions and from the deeper strain of masking his true feelings from the alien. "Must you go so soon?" Cargh asked. "I'm afraid so." He clambered up from the recliner and the alien guided him through the winding corridors again, out to the dropshaft, and with murmured expressions of gratitude saw him off. Amory found himself below in the street almost uncomfortably soon afterward. It was approaching five; the standard-shift people were flooding from the office buildings, ready to streak homeward. A beggar advanced down the broad avenue toward Amory, limping along on a bright chrome crutch; his left leg ended neatly at the knee. "Got some money for a needy man, doctor?" The beggar stared him squarely in the eyes, facing him from the uptown side of the street. Overhead the commuters whizzed by. The beggar's voice was deep and resonant; Amory liked the timbre. "I used to be an actor," the man said. "I did plays. I lost my leg serving a term in prison for security deviation. Couple of my cellmates played a prank that worked out better than they thought. Can you spare a dollar, doctor?" "You're not going to get very far advertising that you're a deviationist," Amory said. "You're likely to lose that other leg instead." "I don't tell everyone that. But you look different. I can tell by the eyes. Can I have a dollar?" Amory smiled slowly, drew out his billfold, and peeled off five crisp little plastic-impregnated bills. "Here," he said. "Courtesy of Transcontinental Televideo." "But these are twenties , mister! Twenties !" "I know," Amory said, and stalked away, down the busy humming street, looking for a place to eat and pass three hours until the rehearsal. Once he looked back and saw the beggar smiling after him, clutching Amory's guilt-offering in his hand. You can buy a man's soul, Amory thought, with a fistful of twenties. Tired, dispirited, he found a corner autovend, cashed a bill in for tokens, and dined miserably on algae pancakes that were stale and undercooked, washing them down with lukewarm caffeine-drink in a greasy cup. When he dumped the dishes into the conveyer, he caught a glimpse of his face reflected in a metal pillar, and saw that it was pale and shiny with sweat. day; Amory, sharp in his resolve, called Nourse about noon. The writer was at home. He looked across the screen at Amory with a faint smile curling his lips, as if he were smug and complacent about something Amory was not to know. Amory said, "You know why I'm calling, don't you?" "You want to see that esper. Okay, John -- I set up the appointment for you for tomorrow at threethirty. Hadafield will see you at home." "Where's that?" "Out on the Island," Nourse said. "Better carry a gun. I'll meet you at the Island Thruway Depot at two-thirty sharp." Nourse, as always, met his own deadline. Amory arrived at the arching glassite bubble that was the Thruway Depot at two-twentynine, according to the glowing radioclock atop the main tower, and Nourse was already there, his lean face nervously anticipatory, slouching against a seat in the waiting-room with one foot drawn up beneath his body. "There's a cab waiting for us on Level Four," Nourse said. "He'll take us as far as Levittown. Hadafield lives a little further up, but it's off the Thruway and no driver will go there. Armed?" Amory nodded, indicating a bulge under one arm. "I've had this thing for years without needing to use it. I hope today's not the day." "You never can tell," Nourse said. Their cab was waiting on Level Four as Nourse had said, its turboelectric motor throbbing impatiently. The cab, of course, was driverless ; the driver sat comfortably in an air-conditioned booth beneath the Hudson River, ready to guide them by remote control. Human-driven vehicles had been outlawed thirty years before, as dangerously unsafe. Nourse got in first, Amory after him, and they strapped their safetybelts down securely. The door clicked shut; it would not open again until the fare had been paid in full. "Okay, driver," Nourse said to the speaker-receiver grid above his head. "Let's go." The car silently swung down the winding rampway that led from the depot garage to the main road; the engines picked up power as they moved on, and by the time the car popped out onto the roadway they were travelling at seventy miles an hour. The cab settled easily into the traffic-pattern, controls locked down at a smooth hundred thirtyfive m.p.h., and glided along the shining roadway that led to the dismal slums of Long Island. Amory said nothing. He watched the whizzing scenery, the barelyglimpsed heaps of rotting old houses, here and there the bright towers of a reclamation project newly erected. Town after town flew past, with hardly an acre of green undeveloped land to be seen anywhere. It began to seem as if three-quarters of New York City's out here on the Island, though Amory knew that was untrue. "Levittown," the driver said finally. The meter read #. Amory took out a five, slid it into the waiting orifice, and waited a moment for the bill to be scanned. The cab slowed to a halt just beyond the Thruway turnoff ; a dollar bill clicked back out of the slot, followed by seventy-four cents in change. The cab doors opened of their own accord. Amory and Nourse rode the escalator down to ground level -- this part of the Thruway was too old to be equipped with dropshafts -- and paused a moment on the edge of the crumbling, criss-crossed pedestrian walkway, getting their bearings. The houses had evidently been identical at one time, row on row on row of them extending back from the roadway for miles. But the passage of years had worked a strange metamorphosis : each homeowner or home-renter, anxious to differentiate his own place in some way, had altered it. Now the foremost row presented a garish appearance. The squat little old buildings were painted red and green and blue, no two the same color, and here or there a striated webwork of yellow caught the eye. Most of them were losing their paint, too, which augmented the general piebald appearance. Curious ornate balconies and chimneys and other such excrescences had been added to a few homes in a further attempt to distinguish them from their neighbors. And the filth. Amory stood ankledeep in uncollected garbage that had been strewn near the pedestrian walkway; out here none of the houses had thermal disposalls, and the garbage collection was uncertain and irregular. Amory had thought Riverdale was filthy -- but Beckett's area had looked virtually antiseptic compared with what met his eye now. "It's up that hill, past Red Maple Drive and then right. Keep your eyes open," Nourse advised. Amory nodded, unsmilingly. They started to walk. They found the body on the corner of Red Maple, near their turnoff. Amory found it first, nearly stumbling over it (he had been looking to all sides, but not down) and emitting a little gasp of shock when he saw it. It was the corpse of a man in his twenties -- dead at least three days, perhaps more. His throat had been very meticulously sliced from a point beginning just under the left ear to the tip of the right jawbone, and just as meticulously his trouserpockets had been slashed open and their contents extracted. The dirtsmeared face looked curiously untroubled. "Come on," Nourse grunted. "You looking for trouble? We haven't had any yet; don't ask for it." "We just walk by and leave this man here?" Nourse shrugged. "He's dead, isn't he? You can't do him any good now. And maybe the fellow who killed him is lurking back of that trash barrel. You keep staring at that corpse, the locals'll think you're a relative come round to start a vendetta. Better keep moving, John." "But -- " Amory saw there was no use protesting. He forced back a little shiver of disgust and they turned down Red Maple. A small, very dirty boy of about three, naked, lean, came out to stare at them as they went past. A woman of twenty -- his mother, probably -- snatched him back inside the house with a quick clawlike hand. "They keep off the streets out here, don't they?" "As a rule. You live longer that way." Nourse smiled moodily and added, "If anyone would buy it I'd write a novel about this place. It's the nearest thing to hell this side of the Mississippi, and right up there's the shiny Thruway like a symbol of all man's wonderful progress. And forty minutes away is Manhattan. Here we are," he said quietly, almost as an afterthought, and they turned up the walk toward a small shabby house whose unpainted exterior made it almost flamboyantly conspicuous amid the riot of color all around it. The name on the mailbox was Crisley. Below it, in smaller letters, came the names Bryan , Vuorjek, Levin , Hadafield. "Espers tend to cluster together," Nourse explained as he rang the bell. The door opened almost immediately, without the usual interval for scanning the visitors. Of course, Amory thought; espers wouldn't need to maintain a conventional scanning system. He found himself looking up into gentle green eyes, set in a nondescript round-featured face. "Hello, Mr. Amory," Gill Hadafield said. Psionic contact was a new field of experience for Amory. He lay quietly on the ragged couch in Hadafield' s one bare room, watching the inert figure of the esper on the floor, glancing occasionally at Nourse, who sat tense-faced in the darkest comer of the room. Hadafield writhed as if in anguish a moment ; curiously tranquil smiles flickered rapidly over his face, alternating with grimaces of real pain. Amory waited. Filimon Grigorescu, he thought. Just a name on a memorandum from one Kress to one Cargh, concerning the forthcoming cleansing of life from Earth of the Sol system. And what a strange thing I have in common with Filimon Grigorescu of Rumania. Amory thought, watching Hadafield quiver in the effort to make contact. It was curious how the total breakdown of intercontinental communication had coincided with a sudden upwelling of psi powers among humanity -- as if the blockade of Europe and the confiscation of amateur radio equipment had somehow made it necessary for nature to provide some new means of communication. There were not many admitted espers, and an unhappy number of those had the power only in a vague and indeterminate fashion, or else were sheer frauds seeking notoriety and perhaps martyrdom. Hadafield was the genuine article, though. He seemed to be in torment on the floor, but it was the ecstatic torment of the genuine mystic, the passionate pain of deep-level communication. He sat up suddenly. His face was drained of blood ; only his eyes showed no sign of strain. "Contact is achieved," he whispered. "There'll be a lag of a minute or two. Give me your hand, Amory." "You sure this is going to be completely confidential, now," Amory asked uneasily. Hadafield shrugged and said, "I tell you I'm simply acting as a short-wave radio for you. None of your message will stay in my mind ; it'll all filter through me, through the link in Rumania, into your Grigorescu. But even if I could tune in on your message myself, which I .can't, I assure you I'd keep it confidential." He groaned suddenly. "Grigorescu has been found. Hold on tight, now; when you let go of me, I'll have to break contact." Hadafield's hand was cold and soft. Amory gripped it tightly, thinking, Filimon Grigorescu , I want to talk with you. Filimon Grigorescu -- A weird mental image formed in his mind: a dark violet-hued corridor, then a network of interlocking corridors, swirling and tangling and untangling again, stretching out over half the world, tightening, thickening -- Light appeared beyond the darkness. A bright hard spot of yellow that rushed forward like a flaming star, blazed fitfully, cooled -- I am Filimon Grigorescue, a silent voice said. Grigorescu was communicated entire ; a short stocky man, evidently of great physical strength, with deep searching eyes and a heavy outjutting nose whose fleshy tip reached almost to the firm upper lip. Amory saw him as clearly as if he stood in the darkened room. He was looking patiently at Amory, wondering apparently why he had been called ; Amory knew suddenly that this was a man of integrity and faith. Who are you? "My name is John Amory. I'm an American. Do you know where and what America is?" Of course. What do you want with me? Instead of answering, Amory transmitted a sharp mental image of Cargh. It achieved its effect; Grigorescu seemed to recoil in quick astonishment. "Do you know who that is?" That is Cargh. How do you know him? Grigorescu's alien contact, then, had given the same name, or else perhaps was the same one whom Amory knew. Back from the Rumanian came an equally vivid image of the alien. "I... help Cargh here in America," Amory said. "Selecting works of art for him to take back to his own world." And I too. I was bewildered when they first came to me, but I am over my fear of them now and have been of great help to them. Amory took a deep breath. His metallic mesh blouse was pasted stickily to his back. "Do you know why Cargh and his friends are on Earth?" To study. To learn to know us. "No," Amory said sharply. "No?" "Listen to me," Amory said. He transmitted a visual representation of the document he had seen four days before, at his first meeting with Cargh. The image was clear and sharp, well focussed. For a long moment there was complete silence at the other end, and Amory wondered if the contact had been broken or not. Just as he had decided Grigorescu had broken off, the backwash of indignation and anger hit him, and he wavered under the force of it. It is impossible to lie in this sort of contact , is it not? Grigorescu asked. What you have shown me actually exists. "Yes," Amory said. Then I have been deceived and we are all betrayed. I am a Judas , then, a Quisling, a traitor -- "You knew nothing. It wasn't your fault." What should we do now? Hadafield stirred; Amory knew the remaining time was short. "Don't do anything. Continue to work with the aliens, and whatever happens don't let them find out we know their real motives. I'll be in touch with you again; in the meantime, just keep on as before. I'm developing a plan against them." A solid wave of gratitude came flowing from the Rumanian. Hadafield stirred again. Then the image of Grigorescu wavered, blurred an instant, and shattered like a punctured bubble. The shock of bursting back into reality stunned Amory an instant. He realized he had been gripping Hadafield's hand with terrible intensity, and he released it, seeing the marks of his fingers in the esper's pale flesh. He sat up and looked around. Hadafield lay slumped as if in sleep; Nourse leaned back casually with legs crossed. "Is it all over?" Nourse asked. "Yes," Amory said, surprised to find that his voice was but a hoarse whisper. "I made contact. Couldn't you tell?" "The two of you were in a trance the whole time. I couldn't hear anything." Nourse bent and gently lifted Hadafield. The esper's perspiration-flooded face was still knotted in concentration; slowly, he opened his eyes. "Was the contact satisfactory?" he asked. "Very much so," Amory said. "I feel I owe you something. Is there any fee -- " "No," Hadafield said quickly. "We never take money." "All right then," said Amory. "Tell me: do you remember anything at all of what was said?" Hadafield shook his head. "No. Not a thing." Amory smiled grimly. "I guess you mean it. If you'd been listening, you -- well, skip it. Lee, let's go home; I'm exhausted." Hadafield accompanied them to the door; Amory caught one last glimpse of the esper's fleshless bignosed face staring curiously at him, and then the door closed. They made their way back to the Thruway escalator in silence, and without incident. staring up at the oriental screens on his study walls, Amory said, "How would you react if I told you the world was in terrible danger?" Nourse smiled slowly and humorlessly. "I don't know. Is it?" "You know more than you claim to," Amory responded. "But we'll let that drop for now. Suppose I told you that the future of humanity depends on reestablishment of contact between the nations of the world, and breakdown of this stasis of communication that's been in effect for the last thirty years? Suppose I say that unless we unite against a common enemy we're finished?" Nourse sipped his drink reflectively; his eyelid was twitching, telling the watching Amory that a hidden chord had been struck. "There's been enmity between the hemispheres for almost a century," Nourse said in a quiet voice. "It never came to actual war, not a shooting-type war. But it turned into a propaganda war. And now America and Russia and Latin America and Asia each has its own little protective bubble, and if it weren't for the espers there'd be no communication with them at all. A couple of generations and no one in America will remember that there ever were any other countries. And then some #th Century lad will do a Columbus-in-reverse and discover Europe, and -- " "There won't be any #th Century," Amory said. "Not unless those barriers come down within a year from now. Earth stands to be conquered." "By whom?" Amory rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and said, "You don't have to believe this. But there are extraterrestrial beings already on Earth, getting ready for the invasion." The silence that followed seemed to last forever. Nourse was perfectly immobile, staring at Amory as if he were staring through him. At length he said, "You've been watching Mark Belford's kiddie-horror hour again, John. Or maybe you've been directing it." "I said you didn't have to believe it. I hardly believe it myself. But take it as a hypothetical case, then: given alien invaders, how do you proceed to save Earth?" Nourse's eyelid twitched convulsively. "You can't come right out and tell everyone about the aliens, of course. No one would believe you." "If I produced an alien?" "That would be your final job. First it's necessary to reestablish contact between the nations. Once that's done, drag out your alien and show them the common threat." Nourse shook his head bitterly. "It's no simple job to reestablish contact, though. Three generations of Americans have been taught to hate Europe as a plague-spot. The young people hardly even know it's there. Thanks to our blessed mass media, a perfect propaganda job has been done." "Propaganda works both ways," Amory said. "And the video audience is a captive one. There must viewers in this country who'd sooner cut off a hand than turn the set off in the evening." "What are you getting at?" "Suppose -- just for the sake of discussion -- that a few people set about altering the national viewpoint, shifting it away from isolationism. A reference here, a news item there... it could be done, couldn't it?" "How? I can put any damn thing I want into a script, but Dave Kavanagh's going to take it out again anyway, so why bother? Video's too thoroughly censored." "Kavanagh has no control over the actual production. We get a few actors to restore your original lines the night of the performance -- make them subtle, of course -- and reinforce our holdings with printed handbills." Amory clasped his hands a moment and added, "We could get the newscasters to help out. And a few of the folksy guitarmen could slip a couple of references in. We carry this on for nearly a year, slowly building up in the public mind the concept that there are other countries in the world, that they're not our enemies, that we can live peacefully with them. Then -- we pool our cash, buy # minutes of video time, and put on a spectacular fact-show that clinches the case. No one can censor it before hand, since we'll be the sponsors!" "They can cut it off the air," Nourse pointed out. "Certainly they can. But that'll simply arouse the public more strongly. We bait our hook in the first part of the show; if they cut us off, the audience is going to want to know why. It won't be easy, but I think we could manage to swing it. And then finally we get the barrier legislation repealed and -- " "You talk as if this can be done in a single year," Nourse said. "It can't. Five years, ten maybe, but not one year. It takes time to put a world back together." Amory stood up. "We only have a year, Lee. I wasn't fooling about those aliens. They're here, and they're ready to wipe us all out." "John -- " "Okay," snapped Amory. "Don't believe me. Let's just take this on as an intellectual game: can we, being influential executives of America's greatest mass medium, so manipulate the public consciousness in a way that will bring about the rebirth of internationalism? Call it a project. Set a year's deadline for it." "It's subversive. It's deviational." "Of course it is. Will you help?" Nourse smiled warmly. "Sure I will," he said. "Aliens or no aliens." The next few days were busy ones for Amory. He put in his nightly stint on Folly and Fortune , which underwent a midweek change of title to Flesh and Folly . The word came from Dave Kavanagh, who explained that moneyreferents were henceforth to be dropped from drama-program titles, as a general rule. It seemed the Mundy-Richardson connotation researchers had come up with the fact that many viewers subconsciously resented such referents, and tended to objectify their resentment by staying away from the client's product. A close observer might have noticed that Amory was not devoting his full intensity of attention to the rechristened play, but there were no close observers. Amory saw to it that the job he was turning out was mechanically competent, at least, but he made no extra effort to inspire his cast. He needed his energies elsewhere. For three hours each day he met with Cargh, and he and the alien progressed rapidly on their tour of Terran art and culture. Chiefly Amors work was one of list-making: he prepared lengthy catalogues of the world's finest paintings, and Cargh assured him that matterduplications would be made of these paintings almost immediately. How the aliens planned to gain access to the works, Amory did not know and only half-cared; perhaps they had a worldwide network of human collaborators ready to visit museums for them. He left these meetings with Cargh drained of vigor, white-faced, exhausted. The endless list-making tired him, as did the effort of keeping his false face up at all times. Cargh seemed to have no difficulty along those lines ; never once did he say or imply that his presence on Earth was for any other than benign purposes. Amory wondered occasionally whether that memorandum had been an hallucination -- but he knew his mind was too clear and sharp, his memory of that sheet of paper too vivid, for it to be any less real than Cargh himself. Amory formed the habit of going to a Relaxomat after leaving the alien. His nerves needed easing, and generally he had several hours to spend before reporting to the studio. Besides, the Relaxomat gave him an automatic entry into the everyday world, the world of that common mass audience with which he had so little in common and whose mind he was hoping to reach and manipulate. Rehearsal was called for #; he left Cargh at #. The Relaxomat was a bright cave in the sublevel of the nearby transport depot, and Amory entered. They knew him by sight, but not by name. The white-smocked attendants nodded politely at him. He rented a locker, stripped, and ducked through the low door into the relaxing chamber. He found an unoccupied relaxor and climbed in. The warm nutrient mixture welled up around him as he slumped down into it, his body finding the textured rubber cushion at the bottom of the vat. He leaned back, letting the stress drain from his muscles, keeping only his head above the surface of the nutrient. A warm lethargy stole over him; he felt protected, secure, free from strain. The relaxor was vaguely womblike in shape. It was no coincidence of design. After the first few moments of relaxation he forced himself up out of the mindless content that enwrapped him. He opened his eyes and glanced around. Bright glareless overhead lights illuminated the vitrin tiles. He saw four balding heads projecting from four relaxor vats, men with eyes closed, mouth upcurving in the inane smile of utter tranquility. But on the other side of him men were exercizing. He listened to their conversation eagerly. "You watch Furley's show last night, Jack?" "Never miss it. Wife swears by it. Don't know what we'd do without Furley on Monday nights." "That man has sense. When he says something it's true. Comes from the heart, y'know?" "Isn't it the truth? I believe in that man, Fred." Amory smiled to himself and shut his eyes once again, slipping back into the bath. Furley. He had met the man once. One of these homespun philosophers so popular on video. Amory made a note to see him, as soon as possible. Not now, though. Not for a while. First, relax. Slide back into the warm beckoning trough of life, return, relax, sleep. Warm. Comforting. You can stop thinking here ; you don't have to think at all. You can almost forget that a shadow hangs over the world, and that all responsibility devolves on you. Shuck off responsibility here. Relax... relax... Relax until there's nothing left of you but the cold hard core of fear and tension in your middle, Amory thought suddenly. A core that no gentle lapping bath can wash away. You can forget only so much -- but not the inner stab of fear. He climbed out of the bath. Almost instantly an attendant glided toward him. "Rubdown, sir? Exercise? Mechanostim?" Amory shook his head impatiently. "Not today, Joe. Some other time." It was a great temptation, but he fought it off. There was work to do. Hal Furley was a rawboned, rangy man well over six feet tall, wearing a loose gabardine shirt, bright green whipcord trousers, and an informal duroplast neckerchief twisted in an intricate knot. He seemed to radiate good nature, virtue, strength and charm; the open readiness of his smile indicated sincerity and warmth. It was hardly surprising that his monologues, delivered in traditional homespun style, would be so fantastically popular with the American people. He seemed to sum up all the subliminal connotations that the label "American" brought to mind. Including one that the American people failed to see in him, but which Amory, being a considerably more perceptive judge of character than the average televiewer, spotted instantly. Something -- a glint in Furley's eyes, a way he had of carefully rippling his jaw muscles before each supposedly unstudied smile -- spoke of shrewdness and ambition carried almost to the point of greed. He said, "You could get me a part in your show, Mr. Amory? A starring role?" His voice was deep and soft, with the flat twang of New England speech and the slow drawl of the South and the clear-cut Midwestern inflection all simultaneously embodied in it. They were in his office in the Transvideo Tower, a luxuriously furnished place that seemed oddly in contrast with the simple virtues Furley publicly espoused. Amory nodded slowly. "It wouldn't be hard. The casting chief takes his orders directly from me. So do most of the writers. We could build a play around you -- or, rather, a homespun-type character of the sort you embody. It wouldn't be you, of course -- you'd simply be playing a Hal Furley named Joe So-and-So in a video drama." Furley moistened his lips in a clearly calculating way. "You think this'll be good for my career, Mr. Amory? I wouldn't want to disappoint my public." "I'll put it to you squarely: aside from the fifty thousand or so you'd no doubt draw for this one-shot appearance on my drama hour, you'd be laying down assurance against the future. Look, Furley: you're not the only homespun man on the air now. Rod Garson draws quite a rating with the Universal network, and there are plenty of others. You can't last in the top spot forever. Someday you'll stumble. Well, there'll always be a future for you in drama. Capitalize now. When you appear on my show, you'll draw not only my regular viewers but yours as well; we'll double the rating." "And when and if I fold up as a lasso-twirler," Furley said smoothly, "I can always point to that night's rating and tell the vicepresidents, 'Looky here, see what happened the last time I played a straight role.' I think I begin to understand your point of view, Amory. But it's this return favor that worries me." Amory firmed his jaw and said, "You never get anything for nothing in video. I'm just asking you to make a few innocent remarks on your show." "Subversion, Mr. Amory. Deviation." "What of it? Nobody'll notice. You'll be hitting the viewers so deep they won't know about it until it's done." Amory took a deep breath and plunged ahead. "After all, how did you convince them you were a loyal family man, Furley, when it's practically common knowledge you've been keeping a mistress in jj "Okay," Furley cut in roughly. "You play a hard game, Mr. Director Amory. And I don't know what your point is, but we have a deal. You sign me up for lead role in one of your plays, and on my program I'll guarantee to slip a couple of subversive remarks in. But I'm warning you that they'll be subtle. There won't be anything overt in it. I'm damned if I'll get myself thrown off the air out of this." Gone was the homespun philosopher now; Furley was all business, and tough at it. Amory extended a hand. "Subtlety is what we want. It has to be that way. Deal?" "Deal," Furley said, as he shook hands. Amory monitored the Hal Furley show the following week, forcing himself to listen to the endless reams of guff and to endure the bad guitar-playing for nearly an hour, wondering whether Furley was going to back out on the deal or not. A contract offering Furley # for a one-shot appearance on the drama hour, with return options, lay unsigned in Amory' s desk, ready to go out. The show was nearly over. Suddenly, between guitar-strums, Furley grinned in that deadly winning way of his and said, "My grandad was a great one for travelling. He went darned near around the world in his day -- he died back in 'ninetyeight, or maybe it was ought-one, I forget now -- and he used to sing me some pretty fine songs from the lands over the water. I recall one old English tune I learned pretty near at the old man's knee, when I was in rompers -- " Furley launched into something Amory barely recognized as Greensleeves, heavily disguised by the comic's customary style of guitarembroidery. Beneath the twanging chords and the steady repetitive beat, Amory was able to distinguish the familiar old sinuous melody, and he smiled. Furley would get his contract. The seed had been planted; the first attack on the walls of the world was under way. Just the merest hint that there was a land across the waters that could possibly produce a song worthy of being played on the air by Hal Furley was the sort of below-the-threshold assault needed now. Later, he could afford to be more open about things. Right now caution was necessary, until the campaign was well under way. The next step was to call Rod Garson, the rival network's competitor to Furley, and let him know gratuitously that Furley had taken a new tack and was plugging for internationalism. Garson was quick to imitate any idea Furley developed; soon Universal would catch the fever. Amory had other plans as well. He smiled. Directing this campaign required the finesse needed to direct a classic play -- and Amory felt much the same thrill he might have felt working with Racine or Moliere. The gradual building of a hundred small effects, minute nuances, half-noticed subtleties, toward one grand climax -- this production, Amory thought warmly, will be my greatest directorial triumph! were weeks of complex maneuvering on many levels, of careful, meticulously-planned placement of overtones here and there in various video shows. Amory took to conspiracy like a born plotter. He kept up his daily contact with Cargh, and while he was in the silent office all was serene; he and the alien methodically plodded through the world's art, and Amory exerted such control over himself that he scarcely even thought of Cargh' s true purpose while in the alien's presence. He found himself growing to like the strange being, in a curious way: Cargh had a bright boundless eagerness to learn which impressed Amory, and he was openly friendly and cheerful. Behind the scenes at Transvideo Tower he worked furiously and long, occasionally drawing an actor aside to communicate a special shade of meaning, several times changing a line entirely at the final rehearsal. Luckily Kavanagh and Graben kept their attention elsewhere, giving Amory more freedom than he might have had had they attended all rehearsals as they sometimes did. And the Relaxomat, his ear to the world, gave signs of the change. Stray fragments of discussion reached him: an occasional questioning of the policy of isolation, perhaps a remark that Amory knew evolved directly from one of his network plants. He saw his work taking hold, and he felt pleased. The temper of the times was shifting. And there still was plenty of time left before Cargh and his collections departed and the invasion army arrived. Hal Furley appeared on an Amory-directed show scripted by Lee Nourse, and all ratings jumped astronomically. Furley, Nourse, and Amory drew bonuses and plaudits from Graben; Kavanagh remained in the background, a gray figure with little praise in him. Amory met occasionally with Beckett, Nourse, Viglan, and some of the others who formed the chief backbone of anti-isolation agitation. They were full of ideas, brimming with enthusiasm -- but Amory quickly saw that all looked to him for leadership. He was the only one in a direct position to act, by virtue of his position in the network; the others were hampered by the Scripting Committee and by other forms of censorship. The days passed. Amory received a Matt Viglan script called Pride Leads To A Fall in which no less than four buried internationalist references had survived the Scripting Committee's hatchet, and set to work preparing it for the following week's production. A sudden phonecall jarred him out of his concentration. He snapped on the phone. "Yes? Who is it, please?" As if in answer, the square, unattractive face of Dave Kavanagh appeared on the screen. The Scripting Committee pundit looked even less cheerful than usual, his hard eyes flickering rapidly and his thin lips tight and pale. "What is it, Dave? I'm busy with this new Viglan script," Amory said irritably. "The staging still isn't worked out, and -- " "Could you stop over here to see me?" Kavanagh asked quietly. Amory shrugged. "I'll be at the studio by eight or so for the rehearsal. Suppose I look in on you about seven-thirty, thereabouts? Okay?" "No," Kavanagh said. "I'd like to see you right now." Something in his tone told Amory not to argue. Inwardly fuming, he said, "I've got an appointment for this afternoon, Dave. Is it that urgent?" "Yes. How urgent is this appointment?" "So-so." "Break it, then. I'll expect you in an hour." Amory felt sweat cascading down his abruptly cold skin. High as his own rank was, Kavanagh still outranked him in the hierarchy -- and strict observance of hierarchical order was the law in video custom and ethos. Kavanagh very rarely pulled rank on Amory; there probably was some good and special reason for it now. Amory had his ideas about that reason, and he hoped he was wrong. Kavanagh sat behind a broad realwood desk polished so brightly the glare made Amory wince. There was nothing at all friendly in the Scripting Committee chairman's manner or voice as he said, "Sit down, John. Have a cigarette." Mechanically Amory accepted the cigarette and flicked the igniting capsule with a careless gesture of his thumb. He puffed twice, then waited. Kavanagh said, "I have a script here. Lee Nourse turned it in this morning. Perhaps you know that I read all scripts submitted by our staff writers personally, and make recommendations to the Committee concerning the necessary changes they must make." "I know," Amory said. Kavanagh drew a stiff green cardboard folder from his desk and flipped it open. A stack of neatlytyped white paper lay within. Reading upside-down, Amory caught the title: Mr. Miller Meets Love , by Lee Nourse. That much was harmless enough. Amory wondered just what Nourse had put in the script. Kavanagh referred to a slip of pencil notations clipped to the folder. "I've been through this play very carefully -- with the same care I give to every play that crosses this desk, especially when it's bylined Lee Nourse. This is a very interesting script. There are no less than seven different specifically internationalist references in here, plus one bit of dialogue that's sheer deviationism of the most flagrant kind. The play is immoral. The writing is sloppy. It's the sort of job that makes an old theater man like myself wince, John. I can't even refer it to committee." "Nourse's contract calls for a standard reject allowance, doesn't it?" Amory said tightly. "Why trouble me over a lousy script? I'm not Nourse's agent." Kavanagh smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile. Yellow skew-set teeth flashed before Amory's eyes. Unlike Van Graben, Kavanagh had never bothered to have his choppers replaced by a neat white videoexecutive type plate. "To answer the first of your three questions first, John, Nourse's contract no longer calls for anything. I revoked his contract an hour ago, and he's not connected with this network as of that moment. The deviationist clause, naturally. His work has been unbearably beyond the line." Amory scowled, but said nothing. Nourse had been anticipating the axe for weeks. Probably he had gone too far in this script, perhaps deliberately inviting trouble. "Secondly, John, and also thirdly, I'm troubling you about this script because I detect a certain unhealthy trend in your own work. For example: last Wednesday's production, I understand, contained four lines that were not in the approved script which left this office." "I don't know anything about that at -- " "The lines," Kavanagh continued levelly, drawing a typed sheet of paper from a desk drawer, "referred to a type of food sold in LatinAmerican countries, to rice, the staple food of most oriental ones, to an incident in English history, and to the alleged immoral behavior of French women. Four clearcut internationalist references, all of them inserted by your actors after the script was cleared by me." Amory was hardly listening. He was studying the bulge of Kavanagh's outsized ears, his wide thinlipped mouth, his acne-ravaged cheeks. Kavanagh's thin icy voice droned on. "Strangely enough, John, I've checked back and found this sort of thing fairly common in your last two or three productions. And even more odd is the fact that they've been cropping up on Hal Furley's show, since not long after Furley starred in your program of May #." Amors throat felt dry. "Just what are you getting at, Dave? Are you calling me a deviationist?" "I'm merely warning you, not calling you anything... yet. You're one of our finest properties, John. I wouldn't want you to go the way of Ted Beckett and Lee Nourse." "You're accusing me indirectly of subversive activities. You're blaming me for these things that cropped up on my shows." "I'm not," Kavanagh snapped. "Don't put words in my mouth. I'm simply bringing to your attention certain unhappy lapses, and expressing the hope that you'll find some way of avoiding them in the future. Otherwise -- " "Otherwise what?" "Otherwise we'd regretfully have to terminate your contract, John. That would hurt us. We respect you and your abilities. You're a talent , John, and that's rare in this business. You're a real talent." "Don't give me the standard video borax," Amory blazed. "It doesn't sound very convincing coming from you, Kavanagh." "All right," Kavanagh said in a very quiet voice that held more of a whipsnap to it than any amount of bluster. "I'll lay it on the line: we're going to monitor your programs pretty closely from here on. If we have to, we'll pitch you right out of here. This industry can't put up with any subversion. We don't want any goddam deviationists polluting our viewers' minds with filth and intellectualist garbage. Got that?" "I've got it," Amory said. "Thanks for being explicit, Dave." "You're welcome. And I hope you were listening to what I said, Amory. You're not so big that we can't break you. I have Graben's approval for every word I just said. We've been watching you a long time. We don't tolerate this sort of stuff. We've got an obligation to our viewers. We've got to think of our clients. We -- " "You're foaming at the mouth, Dave. Calm down." Amory grinned at the scriptman, stubbed the butt of his cigarette into the satin finish of Kavanagh's desk, spun on his heel and left. He caught the dropshaft to his own private office some ten floors below Kavanagh's. There, he dialed Nourse's number. As soon as the writer's wiry face appeared on the screen Amory said, "Kavanagh just called me on the carpet. He told me he fired you." "About an hour ago. I guess I tried a few tricks too many in that last script. I'll manage, though -- my agent may arrange for me to do scripts for Universal at half price, under another name." "Good. But Kavanagh's wise to me. To all of us." "What did he say?" Briefly, Amory told him. Nourse scowled fitfully at the account and finally said, "We don't have much time left, in other words. You're liable to get the hook any day now, John." "I know." Wildly, Amory wondered for an instant whether it was worth all tis, the frantic conspiratorial plotting and the sacrifices, the giving up of his post. He shoved the thought away. "How much cash can we round up immediately?" "It takes five hundred thousand to buy a ninety-minute spot," Nourse said. "I can't kick in too much, in view of my present unemployment, but I can scrape up thirty thousand, say. Viglan's good for a hundred thousand. You?" "I'll go for a hundred thousand too. Beckett can't help much, but Hersch Kyman should come across." "We'll make it," Nourse said. "I'll do the script. You round up the actors. We'll let Viglan handle the actual negotiation for the timespot, through his agent, since he's the only one of us that's in really good odor, as far as we know." Nourse grinned and added, "We'll knock 'em over, John. We'll really finish 'em." "I hope so," Amory said. The show was titled No More Barriers , a #-minute video extravaganza, and all media were saturated with preliminary notices for weeks. Amory and Nourse had manproduction, of which nearly half went simply to buy time from Transvideo, and the rest was consumed in advertising and salaries. Director, scripter, and some of the cast worked without pay, which eased things. The production aroused tremendous interest as broadcast day drew near. The names of John Amory and Hal Furley were most prominently linked with it, Amory as director, Furley as star. Furley would not appear in it, and Amory had known that from the start. The people who took part in No More Barriers would be, without exception, ending their careers in entertainment that night. Furley would not care to jeopardize his future -- but he accepted # for the use of his name in the advance at the conclusion of the show it would be announced he had "withdrawn" from the production. Amory talked him into it. Furley's name would be a tremendous asset : certainly people would tune in in hopes of seeing him, and would stay with the show at least for the first ten minutes. Those were the minutes that mattered. As for the sponsors of the program, all the network or anyone knew was that an outfit called The League for Freedom had purchased the time. Video time was for sale to the highest bidder; the man who had actually handled the negotiations, an agent named Bartirone, had signed a document pledging that his client did not plan to present a show that was either atheistic, immoral, subversive, or deviationist, and that was all the insurance the network needed. Somewhat later, The League for Freedom declined to make use of the facilities of the Scripting Committee. "Kavanagh seemed pretty nasty about it," Bartirone reported to Amory. "He insisted everyone used the Committee, and that no show went on the air without a Committee stamp of approval. But there's nothing in our purchase contract that requires us to feed our copy through Kavanagh. He says it'll help in case of legal troubles later." "Tell him," Amory said, "that the League has enough money to handle any lawsuits that might arise, and so we'd just as soon skip routing the script through Committee." Kavanagh was told. He objected, but to his astonishment found there was no way to force a sponsor into making use of the Committee, if the sponsor declined. Amory rehearsed his crew of actors and ex-actors in the mornings, saw Cargh in the afternoons, and worked on his regular productions in the evenings. It was a strenuous schedule, but he survived it. He hired a detective agency to locate a certain one-legged ex-actor now panhandling for a living in Manhattan, and when they turned the man up Amory offered him five thousand to play a major role in the production. He accepted. Slowly everything took shape. Ted Beckett wrote up a Proclamation of Human Friendship, and a printer was found who would print the deviationist document. Presses turned day and night; a bombardpared, a fleet of helicopters engaged to disseminate them from the air. Amory lived his life in rigid channels. He kept the part of him that dealt with Cargh blocked off from the part that prepared a weekly video script, and both of them from the part that labored over No More Barriers each morning. The days skipped by. Telefax banners At the Relaxomat, Amory heard them talking: "You going to be watching that thing tomorrow night?" "Guess so. After all this publicity, why not?" "That's the way I feel. I'm pretty damn curious about the show, y'know?" Thursday came. Hours crawled by. Amory begged off his appointment with Cargh and spent the afternoon in a Relaxomat, fruitlessly trying to drain off the accumulated tension. At seven-thirty he caught a cab uptown to the studio. This was one show he planned to attend. from the thirty-fourth floor studio of the Transvideo Tower. This was a secondary studio, not often used, which Amory had chosen because of its special physiognomy: unlike the big upstairs studios, this one could be completely sealed off from unwanted visitors. And certainly it would be necessary to hold off the network men for as long as possible, once they caught the opening sequences of the show. Three of Amory's cast stood guard at the narrow entrance to the studio. They let him in without question. One of them said, "Mr. Graben was around here a little while ago. He didn't say what he wanted." "Did you let him in?" "Of course not. He didn't even ask." "Good," Amory said. "If Kavanagh shows up, tell him I'm not around. No -- wait a second. Call me if Kavanagh gets here." He went inside. Viglan was there already, and Lee Nourse, and Ted Beckett and a few others. Amory joined them. "You have any difficulty getting into the studio?" he asked. Nourse shook his head. "I just showed my sponsors' pass. They didn't believe it, but they couldn't argue." Amory had equipped the shadier members of the outfit with passes designating them as Client Representatives ; there was no turning away a sponsor, even if he happened to be Ted Beckett. Amory looked at the time. Still three quarters of an hour to show time. He said, "All the cameramen ready and at their posts?" Nourse nodded. "They're here and setting up. They don't know they're going to be transmitting a deviationist show yet, but they will soon enough." He pointed to three cast extras. "Those guys will stand behind them all during the show. I don't think they'll give any trouble." "And we'll lock off the control room, of course," said Beckett. "They won't be able to stop us without cutting the main trunk line. And that'll take time, of course." Amory nodded abstractedly. Now that they were almost on the brink of it, he felt calm, untroubled. He caught sight of his leading actors standing near a camera boom, walked toward them, ran them briefly through their key lines. Ten minutes before showtime, someone touched his sleeve and said, "Mr. Kavanagh's here, sir." "Alone?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Show him in here, and lock the studio door behind him." Amory grinned. "Then round up some good heavy rope. You understand?" Kavanagh came striding through the busy studio like a gale wind, pushing everyone in his way to one side. When he reached Amory he said, without preamble, "What the hell kind of stunt is this, Amory?" "I'm afraid I don't follow you, Dave." "I'm afraid you do! The studio police downstairs told me that Nourse and Beckett were here with sponsors' passes! How the hell did that happen? And who are all these actors? Not an Equity man in the lot! Why didn't you let me see the script for this show?" He scowled and demanded finally, "What kind of production is this, anyway?" "It's a ninety-minute deviationist extravaganza," Amory said in a gentle voice. "It's going to be fun, I think." Kavanagh took a step backward. For a moment he seemed struck speechless. Then he said, "A -- deviationist -- show? John, don't joke with me." "I told you the living truth," Amory said. Kavanagh came to life suddenly. He whirled and ran toward the door, shouting, "You're all under Security arrest! This is treason! This show can't go on the air!" He reached the roadblock near the door. "Hold him, boys," Amory said, in his quiet commanding voice. Two actors appeared and gripped Kavanagh tightly. Amory drew near and saw the Scripting Committee man's whitened face working in impotent rage. "Let go of him," Amory said. Kavanagh broke loose and Amory grabbed him. He was nearly a foot taller than Kavanagh, and twice as heavy. "Let go of my arm," Kavanagh snapped. "You're all under arrest. As soon as I get out of here -- " "You're not getting out of here," Amory said, and smashed his balled fist against Kavanagh's cheek. The impact stung; Kavanagh spun away, face livid with fury, and aimed a wobbly blow at Amory's middle. Amory blocked it with a downchopping motion of his left arm, brought his other hand quickly up and cracked it off the point of Kavanagh's chin. Kavanagh started to fold ; Amory hit him in the stomach and the smaller man collapsed. "Tie him up and dump him in the prop room," Amory ordered. "Keep the studio doors locked." He looked at his watch. "Places, everyone. It's two minutes to show time. We're ready to get started." He took a place at the back of the studio, and the white-faced, startled cameramen unlimbered their machines. No More Barriers was ready to roll. The show opened with a brief word of greeting and a prologue, a quick historical preview. A man carefully chosen for the vigor and force of his delivery told of the original split between the hemispheres after the Second World War, how as years passed and new weapons were developed an actual war became impossible, but an ideological one continued on a level of increasing bitterness. He went on to explain how the wave of isolationism had spread through the country during the past generation, how in a sudden turtlelike maneuver America had cut itself off from all contact with the nations across the sea. So far, just history. Then: "These barriers have been in force too long. The time has come, we believe, for them to come down -- for the world once again to be united in harmony, with free commerce and contact between the nations." Enter four scantily-clad girls intended as representatives of other nations, to cloak the sting of that bluntly deviationist statement. A brief pageant began. The studio phone rang. 'Til get it," Amory said, heading toward the soundproof booth. He picked up. Graben's face appeared in the screen, and for once the executive had lost his glossy calm. "John, what the deuce is going on in there? Why is the studio door tacked?" Amory shrugged. "It simplifies things. Why?" "You can't let that deviationist filth go out," Graben said. "Where's Kavanagh?" "Right here in the studio. But you can't talk to him; he had a little accident and we had to tie him up to keep him from hurting himself." Graben sputtered incoherently. "We'll cut you off! We'll throw you all in prison for years! John, are you insane? Why are you doing this?" "Just for the devil of it," Amory said cheerfully, and clicked off. He left the booth and collared Nourse and Beckett almost immediately. "Graben just called. He's been monitoring the show from upstairs and he's raging mad. We're going to get cut off any minute." "It'll take at least ten minutes for them to reach the main trunk line. By that time the damage'll be done," Nourse said. "It'll take ten minutes before the security boys get here. The second we get cut off, John, you tell everyone to run for it. They can't round all of us up." Amory smiled. "Poor Graben must be having a fit! A hundred deviationism!" The program lasted exactly sixteen minutes, which was six more than Nourse had been figuring on when he wrote the script. Already more outright internationalist propaganda had gone forth in those sixteen minutes than America had heard publicly in a quarter of a century. Amory sat in the middle of a tight, eager group at the back of the studio, watching the show unfold. He felt warm satisfaction: this, his final video show, was his best. The actors, not an Equity man in the tat (though most had held cards at one time or another, before getting bounced on deviationist charges) responded perfectly, bringing out the hidden nuances Amory so loved and which were so necessary in a production of this kind. They entered and left camerarange as if guided by the hand of a master conductor. And as for the impact this show was probably having on a nation so accustomed to believe what they saw on the video -- Amory was unable to estimate that. The foes of internationalism had relied simply and purely on a negative approach. By censoring any possible internationalist reference, they had thought they were preserving isolationism. Instead, they had withered it. Amory wondered how the various polling agencies would report. Eighteen minutes. Nineteen. "Graben's probably got the trunk line reached by now," Nourse said. A moment later, before anyone had a chance to agree or disagree, the lights flickered and went out; the ceiling-glow died last, a stubborn orange radiance slowly fading. Immediately Amory leaped to the seat of his chair and shouted, "Okay, folks. They finally cut us off, but I think we gave it to 'em good first. The thing to do now is run, to the door -- but once you're outside, run like blazes, and in every direction. No two of you go the same way. They can't catch us all." He jumped off his chair. "Unlock that studio door," he called. "What about Kavanagh?" Nourse asked. Amory shrugged. "We can't use hostages. Leave him here. They'll find him soon enough." In the dimness he saw the studio door open; members of the cast were flooding through it, still in costume, some of the girls nearly nude, many of the men in outlandish foreign costumes. He stood watching the procession for a moment, until Nourse caught his hand. "Come on, John. You're the one they'll be most interested in getting; let's go!" He started to run. He emerged in the hall and saw Graben and several other video network men shouting and gesturing at the fleeing actors ; there was still no sign of the security men, which was encouraging. "Keep away from the elevators!" Amory shouted. Probably they were manned by armed guards, and that would lead to trouble. He glanced at Nourse and said, "You go that way. We have to split up." He started off in the opposite direction, down the shiny panelled corridor, past some executive's office, past a prop storeroom. He heard shouts behind him. Stairs. He plunged into the photon-beam and descended three steps at a time, one hand gripping the bannister tightly. It takes a long time to run down thirty-four flights of stairs. He spiralled endlessly down and down, his long legs pistoning frantically. It was a strangely exhilarating feeling, this business of being a fugitive. His heart pounded; his senses seemed heightened. The sound of shouting grew more dim behind him with each passing flight. Gray Security Corps trucks were parked in front of the huge tower when he reached street level. Amory paused for an instant, sucking in great gasps of breath, and watched the Security men race into the building. He hoped most of the cast had already gotten free, and that they were on their way back to whatever slums they called home. He wondered what luck his onelegged star had had in escaping -- and whether Beckett and Nourse would make it. He moved out of the cover of the building, and, even though it was a warm June night, drew his collar up around him. Perhaps they would recognize him because of his size; perhaps not. He knew that he would have to move, and move fast, until this was over. He ran north to #th Street and there ducked into a service store. The proprietor was busy behind the food counter; Amory moved quietly and quickly toward the phone booths in the back of the store, without being noticed. He had to have someplace to go. It was certainly unsafe to return to his home this evening, and possibly he would never be able to go back there. Certainly he'd need to leave the immediate metropolitan area for a while. But he did have one recourse. He slipped a coin into the slot and dialed Cargh's private number. He waited, anticipating the sight of the alien's by-now-familiar features on the small old-fashioned booth screen. But the phone continued to ring... thirteen, fourteen, fifteen times. Amory stared uncomprehendingly at his own reflection in the still unlit screen. Why didn't Cargh answer? Where could the aliens possibly be? Exasperated, Amory hung up, dialed the operator, and gave her Cargh's number. "It's very important, and I can't seem to make contact. Will you try for me?" "Certainly, sir," came the impersonal machine-like tones. The screen remained dead, though -- and a moment later the operator's voice said, "I'm sorry, sir. That number has been withdrawn from the book." "What's that? What does that mean?" "That the party using that number has left its present address, and does not wish to continue using telephone service, sir. I'm very sorry, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?" "No... no," Amory said, frowning. He hung up and heard his coin tinkle down into the return box. Cargh gone? Where? Where? He pushed open the phone booth. The clock over the food counter said nine-thirty; it was only an hour since it had all begun, then. He shoved a nickel into a telefax slot, wondering if the nine o'clock edition said anything about the broadcast. The yellow sheet came rippling out of the wall-slot; Amory seized on it almost before its ink had dried, and scanned it. No, no mention of anything unusual on this evening's video; either it was too early for the 'fax to report anything, or else they had decided deliberately to ignore the existence of the broadcast. The latter was more likely, he thought. He slouched down behind the counter and ordered a seaflower sandwich. The store's video set, he saw, was tuned to the Trans video Channel, but some insipid sort of variety show was in progress. He jerked a thumb toward the set. "Hey, Mac -- isn't that spectacular supposed to be on tonight? The thing about Barriers?" The man behind the counter was a timid-looking little man with a sharp chin and mild eyes, stained an unlikely pink by his contact lenses. He chuckled. "You mean you didn't hear what happened?" Amory leaned forward. "Nope. What?" "Darned crazy show was all about the other countries of the world, and how we ought to get to know what they're like. Stuff like that, y'know. Then fifteentwenty minutes after it got going, they announced 'technical difficulties' and cut it off." The little man stared intently at Amory for a moment and added, in a low voice, "Just between you 'n me and the man in the moon, friend, I'd say that program got censored. Like it was something we weren't supposed to hear." "Sounds that way," Amory agreed. "Too bad, too -- lot of people were curious about that show, and came into the store to watch it. Lost all them customers when it got cut off." Amory munched the sandwich. "Video folks are very careful about what they show, I guess." "Mebbe too careful," the counterman said. "Not that I want to imply -- " He paused meaningfully. "I gotcha," Amory said. He paid his bill, tucked his collar up around his face, and stepped out into the moonless, starless night. A steady fluttering sound caught his attention ; he looked up and saw a helicopter hovering high above the city, its beating rotors holding it motionless. Something drifted out of the copter's belly; a sheet of paper, it looked like, followed by others. The handbills, Amory thought. The copter moved on, as the airborne sheets drifted slowly to Earth. They would be picked up; they would be read, and perhaps their message would sink in. Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it had been worth trying, all of it. The seed of deviation had been sown. Whether it would take root -- that was yet to be seen. Amory looked up, past the building-tops, past the murky haze that cloaked the city, deep into the cloudwrapped sky. No stars were visible in the darkness, but he knew they were there, bright dots beyond the dark. His heart sank as he thought of the giant task still ahead, before mankind would be ready to defend itself against Gargh and his fellows. He shook his head. Cargh would triumph; Earth would fall to the invaders. But at least , Amory thought, I tried . I tried. Suddenly he wanted to speak to Grigorescu again, to tell the Rumanian of what he had done, perhaps to learn whether the aliens had also vanished from Rumania. And Levittown would be a good place to hide. He decided to go to the esper, Hadafield. He glanced around for the nearest transport depot. As he caught sight of the neon-lit kiosk, he heard a whistle scream shrilly behind him. "There he is!" someone yelled. "There's Amory!" He began to run. a block away. Footsteps clattered against the pavement behind him as he ran. Without looking back, he sprinted into the kiosk, down the stairs that parallelled the escalator and dropshafts, and leapfrogged the turnstile. No one stopped him. Panting, he reached the multiple passages that led to the cars and took the one whose glowing sign him. He still heard the sound of pursuers as he raced up the escalator, not waiting for it to carry him, and emerged on the thruway level. He found a waiting car and entered. "Levittown, and fast, driver." A second passed, while relays opened and closed in the main switching center of the transport system. The car slid into motion. For the first time, now, Amory looked back, and saw three shadowy figures in the grey of Security uniforms appear on the Thruway platform, just as his cab shot away into the night. He watched the speedometer needle flicker its way up to # and stay there. The road was poorly lit -- with automatic safety devices making crashes impossible, there was no need for unnecessary expenditures -- and he had no way of knowing whether or not he was being followed. There was time to lose pursuers in Levittown, he didn't want to bring a trail of Security men straight to Hadafield. Towns whipped by on right and left. Amory realized dully that by committing himself to a public cab, he had left himself open for easy capture; if the police knew which car he was in, all they had to do was contact transport center, and have the car swivel off the Thruway, turn back in the other direction, and deliver him neatly to headquarters. There was no way of stopping the car from within, or of opening the doors until the driver chose to open them. But his fears were groundless. "Levittown," the driver finally called out; the cab shot off the main limb of the Thruway and deposited him at the exit level. He paid his fare and sprang from the cab the instant the door opened. Here on Long Island, the night air in June was considerably cooler and less humid; he felt an immediate chill. He descended to the pedestrian level, glancing back occasionally. So far as he could tell, he was not being followed. He paused for a moment at the concrete base of the walkway, trying to remember the route they had taken to Hadafield's house. Up the hill, past Red Maple Drive, and to the right. The streets were dim, unlit. Amory wished he had brought some weapon along. He started cautiously toward the hill. Dim shapes moved ahead of him in the dark; Security men? No. Bandits. A light flashed in his eyes, and he felt the pressure of a bare knife against his stomach. "Hand over your wallet and you won't get hurt," a cold, quiet voice said. "The wallet's yours," Amory said. He wasn't inclined to argue. "It's in my right-hand trousers pocket." The knife pricked a little deeper into flesh as a hand slipped into his pocket, drawing out the wallet. "Just take the money, will you?" Amory whispered. "There are identity cards in there, and it'll be a devil of a nuisance trying to replace them." He heard a calm ugly chuckle. "We know that, friend. We find identity cards useful. Got the wallet, Bill?" An affirmative grunt from behind. The knife's pressure eased. A fist slammed into Amory's face; his head rocked back. Obviously they weren't going to leave him conscious. Suddenly a searchbeam spotlighted the entire group. Amory saw the robbers clearly: two thin, unshaven little men, their eyes glinting like foxes, their lips thin with hunger. Under cover of darkness they had seemed menacing ; revealed, they were merely pathetic. "Security men!" one robber whispered. "Let's beat it!" "Hold it there, you!" came an authoritative cry. "Stay where you are." The thief behind Amory suddenly stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, an astonishingly loud, piercing animal-like cry. A moment later, the whistle-cry resounded from seven or eight places further back in the darkness. "Cut that out!" ordered a Security man's voice. "Amory, come out of there! We've got you!" Thwack! A bullet whistled out of the darkness and the Security man's voice trailed off into a wet gurgle. A second bullet smashed the spotlight; a third cracked into a Security truck window. "Run for it, pal!" the thief at his side whispered, and, under cover of darkness, Amory ran. Honor among thieves, he thought grimly; rob him they might, but Security men were enemies to be feared, and friends in the night had saved him. Of course, he had no money, no identity cards now. But that hardly mattered, since John Amory as an identity would have to vanish from sight. He ran on, ignoring the silent shapes that scooted through the darkness, sometimes crossing his path. This was a jungle, he thought, thinking of two dead Security men lying near a truck by the pedestrian walkway. His breath came short. Almost by instinct he turned right at the proper corner, pounded up the street towards the esper's house, and rang the right doorbell. He leaned forward, supporting himself by the doorframe, gasping for breath. Sweat drenched him. He looked back, seeing no pursuers. The door slowly opened. "Hello, Mr. Amory. We've been expecting you for quite a while," a quiet, mild voice said. Amory glanced into the darkness. "Thank God this is the right place, Hadafield! I -- " He let the words die in his throat. The figure in the doorway was not the esper Gill Hadafield. It was the alien. Cargh. Hands gathered him in, led him inside. He heard the door lock behind him, heard the sound of a doorchain being snapped into place and a bolt slammed home. He smelled the faintly musty odor of rotting woodwork that characterized the ancient houses out here in Levittown. He made no attempt to think ; he merely soaked in sense-perceptions, letting all thoughts drift by him. He sensed the darkness, the smell, noises outside, then the sound of friendly voices. He was in Hadafield's small, cramped room. Someone was holding a cup to his lips, and he drank. The taste was acrid but yet pleasant; it was a taste he had experienced before. The German wine, he realized. He sipped again, feeling the chilled wine glide down his throat. Finally he looked around. He saw familiar faces: Lee Nourse, Ted Beckett, Matt Viglan, the esper Hadafield. They were staring anxiously at him. There was no sign of the alien. "Cargh?" he asked. "I thought I saw Cargh here when I came in. You know. The alien." He swivelled on his chair to peer into the cobwebbed recesses of the room, but no alien was present. "I thought he was here," Amory half-muttered to himself. "Hallucination. The strain, the running, everything -- it must have been hallucination." "No" Lee Nourse said. "No hallucination at all." And suddenly Cargh stood before him, smilingly blandly, a look of shrewd coldness in his three iceflecked eyes. "There he is! Don't you see him?" "Of course we see him," Nourse said. "Gill, turn him off, will you?" As Amory watched, the tall, darkly handsome figure of the alien wavered and grew indistinct; the sharp outlines of the alien face flickered, the deep blue of the skin paled and seemed to wear thin, until patches of the room beyond could be seen through Cargh. Then one last flicker and the alien was gone. "What -- where'd he go?" Amory asked. He knew, deep within himself. that something was wrong; one small portion of his mind retained its old acuteness, the rest was numbed and fatigued by his frantic flight. Desperately he fought to reestablish control over his mind, like a drunken man struggling to focus his eyes to read the words that might mean his life. "I think we owe you some explanations, John," Nourse said gently. With one last effort Amory won: he drew his shattered consciousness together. "I think you do," he said, with something of his old force. He looked expectantly at Nourse. "It began the night of Ted's last movie showing," Nourse said. "At least, that's when we put it into effect. We had planned it for a while -- ever since we met Hadafield, here. "What we did was to drug you -- yes, it was the wine we used -- and carry you into Ted's back room. Hadafield went to work on you there, setting up the hypnotic illusion we were going to use. Then I rode you downtown to the office we'd rented for the purpose. I waited around for you to wake up, and that's when you first met Cargh." "There aren't any aliens, then," Amory said. He realized his fingers were quivering. "It's all a giant pipe-dream?" Nourse looked slightly shamefaced. "More or less. We took turns posing as Cargh. Hadafield so set you up that whenever any of us performed the triggering gesture, you'd be seeing the alien and not us. Matt Viglan was Cargh most of the time; Ted would have been, except that he was raided." "And you led me through that whole monkeyshine about collecting Earth's art, and had me reel off list after list after list of nonsense?" "That was incidental. We had to have some excuse, John. The key maneuver was 'accidentally' letting you find that memorandum discussing the forthcoming conquest of the Earth. That was your trigger; that was the thing that would finally jolt you into action." Amory was quite calm ; he stared levelly at Nourse, trying to fit all the pieces together. "You deliberately instilled in me the hypnotic delusion that I was meeting regularly with an alien being, and just as deliberately gave me the impression that the Earth was in danger." He had not started to get angry yet; it was all too incomprehensible still. He took a deep breath. "Why?" "Because tonight's video production would never have come into existence any other way," Nourse said sharply. "You were the only man. You were big enough and strong enough to carry the project over, and you weren't directly subject to interference from Kavanagh the way we were. But we couldn't approach you directly. You never would have agreed." Amory leaned back, shaking his head slowly. He understood, now. He began to laugh. These men were his friends. They had known him -- known how his fatalistic approach to the problems of the world had led him to adopt a what's-the-use attitude, led him to withdraw within himself into a state of bitter resigned despair. He had been the only man who could set in motion the wheels that might lead to the breakdown of the barriers between nations -- and he had refused to act, preferring instead a cynical self-withdrawal. So they had tampered with his mind. They had projected him into a fantastic dream-world, and through the dream-world had convinced him at last of the necessity of immediate action. "I should be angry," he said, looking at the small men all around him, the thin, wiry men who had rightly assessed him and taken it upon themselves to catapult him (Continued, on page #) He carried the monkey of fear on his back for all to see ; and until he could shake the beast he knew he would be a captain in name only... sation throughout the banquet room drifted into hushed silence. The occasion was the seventy-fifth meeting of place, a banquet room in the Empire Club on the hundred and sixty-fourth floor of the New Empire State Building in Manhattan; the time, approximately nine thirty in the evening, August #, #I A.D.; those present, the four hundred and and nineteen, including the new member, Captain Arthur Peabody, who had reached his ninety-fifth birthday just two weeks before, and by doing so had been automatically retired from active service and thereby become eligible for memberIllustrated by Ernie Barth ship while still in the prime of life. him. "Captain Peabody," he said "Quiet everybody," the Secretary in his loud clear voice, "The time and master of ceremonies, Captain has come for fulfillment of a tradiJohn Evers, said good-naturedly, tional part of our get-togethers -- rapping the gavel again. He turned one we all look forward to with to the new member, sitting next to great pleasure and anticipation." There was a subdued clapping of hands, then Captain Evers cleared his throat loudly and continued. "Each of us here has become a lifetime of space travel, much of that time as a Captain in charge of the destinies of our crews and passengers and ships. Inevitably each of us has had some unusual experiences in his time, and we like to talk about them, boring each other to death, no doubt, as we repeat the same stories among ourselves meeting after meeting. So it's always a treat to us to get a new member and by so doing get some fresh stories to listen to. I am about to give you the floor, and what we would like to hear is the one experience you have had which you think is the most unusual, in some way, of your entire career. The floor is now yours, Captain Arthur Peabody!" Arthur Peabody stood up slowly, a tall man, long legged and short bodied in his seven foot height, his sharply bridged nose and high forehead giving his features the stamp of authority comfortably worn, and waited, a quiet smile on his firm lips, until the applause subsided. Then he began his speech. stands out in my mind more than any other really began about five minutes after I was assigned to my first ship, the Alabama, when I was given the list of my officers and crew to check over. Half way down the list I came to a name, Oscar Resnick, and suddenly the thrill of being a captain was gone. For two cents, at that moment, I would gladly have become a retired Space Captain before I started. I was fifty-two years old then, and it had been about thirty years since I last saw Resnick. His rating was still spaceman first class, and I knew if he had ever risen higher he had been demoted again, as was inevitable, sooner or later. He was an incurable bully with the worst streak of sadistic cruelty in him I've ever run across. Even the sight of his name on that list sent an instinctive fear through me. Once, when I was still a space recruit he had whipped me to within an inch of my life and instilled in me the realization that he could do it any time, anywhere. A man like that is slightly mad, or strikes you that way. You stay out of his way if you can, and if you can't you let him have his way, swallow his insults, do anything to avoid the beating you would get if he took the whim. Live with that for two years as I had thirty years before, and you never get over it. Now I was captain of my first ship and he, was to be one of the crew. And I knew in my heart that if he walked up to me and suddenly reached up to scratch his head I would cringe and turn pale. I wouldn't be able to help it. And if that happened it would be the end of me. The crew would think I was yellow -- and I was when it came to Oscar Resnick. Oh, he wouldn't do anything that would give me cause to toss him in the brig, nor even anything that would give me cause to fire him -- at least a reason that would stand up under a union inquiry if he demanded one, which he would. He would just grin at me knowingly with eyes that told me he thought I was yellow, and hesitate just long enough after an order to make me wonder if he was going to obey -- the kind of stuff that could break me down completely, in time. And there would be nothing I could do about it. I made a try to keep him off my crew. The Dispatcher admitted Resnick had the reputation of being a trouble maker, but if I didn't take him there was likelihood the Union would call out the whole crew and ground the ship. Then the Dispatcher pointed out the fact that the list was short one man, my personal orderly. I hadn't thought about an orderly at all, and hadn't chosen one yet. He gave me the list of available orderlies and I looked it over, most of the names meaning nothing at all to me. Suddenly I ran across a name I knew. I didn't know the man, but I had heard of him, and probably all of you have. The name was David Markham. He was the David Markham all right, the Dispatcher said when I asked him -- the one who was kicked out of Space Patrol for abject cowardice. The Dispatcher told me the man had been trying for two years to get back into space, the Union wouldn't take him, and the only way he could get into service was an orderly to a Captain -- if any Captain took him. The Dispatcher suggested two or three other men he knew personally, any one of which I would probably like and decide to keep permanently. But a crazy idea was running around in my head. It was a clutching at straws, but what it amounted to was this: I had a bully on my crew, a man who had my number and knew how to use it. Why not balance him out by making my one choice on the crew a man who was the exact opposite, an abject coward? Possibly, on some level of thought, I wanted company if Resnick showed me up to the crew, someone who couldn't look down on me because of the simple fact that he was the lowest there was. The Dispatcher almost cried with happiness over my choice of David Markham. It turned out he was sorry for the guy, and felt only a man with real guts would have the courage to sign Markham on. He would certainly have been surprised if I had told him the truth. I met Markham the next morning at seven o'clock when I returned to the Dispatch Office at Spaceport, New Mexico. He was a fine looking fellow, twenty-five, rather short -- just over the six foot four minimum of the Space Patrol, about one ninety mass, blonde, square jaw. I took a liking to him at once -- but there was a haunting something at the back of his eyes that never went away even when he was smiling, and he smiled often during the time I knew him, though he never laughed but once -- and it was a sound I never want to hear again. But that came much later. I sent him aboard with my bags to get my quarters in order, then steeled myself to check in the crew. You know how it is, you sit at the window and the men come by, one at a time, you introduce yourself, fix his face in your mind, size him up, then call for the next man. Finally it was Oscar Resnick looking through the window at me, his thick shock of sandy red hair glued down, clean-shaven, six foot eight, about two hundred and forty pounds mass, his brown eyes a little too large, his thin lipped mouth a little too small, his teeth a little too long. The minute I saw him the old fear descended. It took him a few seconds to place where he had seen me before. Then he recognized me, and I could see memory flowing through his mind as his wide eyes widened even more, and his thin lips pulled back into a knowing grin. "Well, Cap'n Peabody!" he said, rolling the word Cap'n with his tongue as though flavoring it with contempt. "It's a small world. Fancy..." I could read his thoughts as they flashed across his face. He would play a waiting game, taking his time, but it would be a game to his liking. Showing up the yellow streak in a Captain. Suddenly, he was completely respectful, almost too respectful. "It is certainly good to be shipping with you, sir," he said. "That's the proper spirit, Resnick," I said. "All right, get aboard. Gate seven." After he had gone I checked in the rest of the crew, seeing liking and respect in their eyes, and wondering how quickly it would change to barely concealed contempt, wondering what Resnick would do to show me up. Like a renegade wolf he would bide his time, staying out of range, until the moment he decided was right, then he would dart in with a swift attack that would tear open my fear of him for all to see -- and dart away again to sit and laugh while my soul withered within me. That's all he would do. That's all he would have to do, and he and I both knew it. I watched the slow build-up with a certainty of knowledge that can only come from personal experience. I knew Resnick's methods. A successful bully must be a shrewd psychologist and know how to capitalize on weaknesses. I watched Oscar Resnick size up this man and that one, and go to work on each. It's a subtle formula he used. Wait until you are alone with a man, then trip him when he goes by you, or dig your elbow into his ribs painfully, then claim it was an accident, but in such a way that both he and you know it wasn't an accident yet nobody else will believe it. Mock him with your eyes and your smile, dare him to do something about it. What can a man do? He can't go running to the Mate with the complaint that you are picking on him. He can't bring the thing into the open by fighting you without striking the first blow and being branded the aggressor in an unprovoked assault, and unless he is a professional fighter your sneering confidence bluffs him out of an open fight at first. Gradually you establish a fear reaction in him that would keep him from winning a fight even if, originally, he could have beaten you. When you are the victim of that sort of thing you really have only two courses of action open to you. Try to keep out of his way as much as possible, if you have any personal integrity, or kowtow to him, grovel in his presence, sneer with him at his other victims, flatter him, and hope he will direct his sadistic streak elsewhere. Soon four or five of the crewmen start hanging around with the bully, admiring him too much, laughing too much at what he says, siding with him against others, and even doing a little minor bullying themselves by ganging up on this or that victim as soon as each has recognized the streak of cowardly sadism in the other which binds them together as human jackals. A man like Resnick leaves the strong alone at first; waits until the jackals have gathered around him. When this stage is reached, when anybody who says anything is a yellow stool-pigeon, you find the best man in your crew a hospital case with bleeding nose, bruised face, black eyes, and maybe a couple of broken ribs caved in by someone's shoe. After the doctor gives him first aid you go to the infirmary and ask him who did it. He clamps his lips together and tells you he didn't see who it was. He's lying, and he knows you know he is lying, but can you torture it out of him or punish him for not telling you? No. And there's nothing a Captain can do about it. He must have the testimony of the injured party in' writing, signed and witnessed, and the Code Book must be followed specifically in punishing the aggressors; and if the Captain does anything at all he is almost certain to be tied up in court at the first port of call by the punished parties. Even if the Captain has provable justification for putting a man in the brig or fining him or giving him a demotion in assigned type of work, his ship will be delayed by the trial, and the owners will decide they need a Captain who knows how to avoid such costly delays. A man like Oscar Resnick is a social cancer, and I saw the symptoms of his presence on the ship come into being, and grow, and I knew he was too cunning and too shrewd to let them get out of hand. Any other Captain, knowing all this, would sit back and do nothing, knowing that that was his only safe course consistent with his duty of keeping the ship on schedule. I had to follow this course of action too. But I knew that it was just a prelude, that when Resnick sensed the time was ripe for his purposes, he would get at me. It would be subtle and would only take a minute. It would take place in the presence of the crew. It would be something that would catch me unawares, bring the light of fear into my eyes for all the crew to see. That would be enough. The word would go back that Captain Peabody was yellow. Some of the crew would quit the ship at North Marsport, telling the Union business agent they didn't want to ship with a yellow Captain. The business agent would find men refusing to sign on my ship because I was a yellow Captain. And inevitably the time would come when I could not keep a full crew. Then the owners would dismiss me, and I wouldn't be able to get another berth as Captain. I didn't know how to avoid it. It was only a question of time. When would it happen? Today? Not for six months yet? Tomorrow? When? David Markham proved from the start to be an extremely conscientious orderly. My quarters were kept spotless, I had only to lift my eyebrows and he was there ready to obey. How many hours a day he spent wiping up imaginary dust, rubbing nonexistent detergent off my eating utensils for the nth time before I sat down to eat, polishing my already mirror-bright shoes, and even know about, I'll never know. Few orderlies mix with the crew, and he was no exception. Most orderlies either have the personality of a spinster to start with or acquire it after a few years. He had none of that, but then he wasn't the type that orderlies are made of. There was a tension in him at all times that was so strong it seemed almost visible -- a tension that made each minor chore a matter of life and death to him. It was pitiful to watch, and I usually avoided watching him as much as possible. But a Captain may not pick up something he has dropped, or do a lot of things that any ordinary man does for himself but which are the traditional duties of the orderly -- if for no other reason than to keep him busy; so by necessity David Markham was with me during most of my waking hours. A pattern of speculation about him grew up in one corner of my mind. David Markham was the type of man you instinctively like and respect, the type that in the service should have climbed the career ladder to an Admiralship by the time he was seventy-five. As the days passed the haunting fear in the depths of his eyes seemed almost to have vanished. If I had not known who he was I would have laughed at the possibility of his being a coward. Even knowing who he was, I began to doubt it. I thought a great deal about the circumstances brought out at his court-martial, the testimony that proved he had broken cover and run, then groveled at the feet of his captors, crying and pleading for his life. Later the enemy had captured outposts they could not have located without his help, proving that he had spilled his guts to save his skin. That had, of course, been in the fuss on Venus with Porter's Renegades. I didn't see how there could be any doubt of David Markham's guilt, even though the more I saw of the man the more unbelievable it seemed. I tried to figure out alternative explanations. I tried to believe them. I wanted to believe. I would catch Markham gazing through a viewport into the subdued silver velvet of infinity and at are the individually visible suns of our galaxy and the nebulae that are other galaxies, with his tortured soul, for the moment, at peace. I would hesitate, wanting to join him in his quiet mood as I would have joined any other man, then I would steal away unable somehow to bring myself to create any kind of bond between us. I had, I realized by then, chosen David Markham in the hopes that he might become a tidbit I could toss to Resnick to pacify him and divert him from me. A cowardly motivation, no matter how you look at it. It had been an impulse I was now ashamed of. It haunted me. Because of it I couldn't bring myself to extend to him a Judas friendship, which is what I felt it would be. We were forty days out from Earth when Resnick turned his attention to David Markham. I discovered it quite by accident. Ten minutes after my regular sleep period had begun the First Mate saw fit to inform me that an uncharted meteor swarm was going to intercept us in four hours, and of course it was my responsibility to determine what precautions should be taken. Under ordinary circumstances I would merely have rung for my orderly, but I was half asleep and did the more natural thing. I went to the door to his room, next to mine, and opened it without knocking. He had just undressed, getting ready for bed. He stood there, startled at my unexpected entrance. And I saw the ugly purple splotch over his kidneys that could have come only from the blow of a fist. I pretended I hadn't noticed it. I merely told him that there would be emergency duty, and backed out, sliding the door shut. When he came out two minutes later, he gave no indication of whether he thought I had noticed the bruise or not. And for the next few hours I was far too busy to concern myself about it anyway. But I felt as though I had given him that bruise myself, with my own fist, and I was as surely responsible for it as though I had. To make it worse, I realized that despite the guilt I felt I still hoped that Resnick would settle for a famous coward, and leave me alone. While I plotted the courses of hundreds of chunks of meteor iron to search out safe holes through the intercepting meteor group my thoughts whispered gleefully, "All you have to do is pretend you don't know anything and maybe Resnick will be grateful and leave you alone." Later, trying to get some sleep, I tried to think what could be done. Could I come right out and ask Markham about that bruise? Suppose I did, and he told me Resnick had done it, and I used that as an excuse to toss Resnick in the brig? Then the men would throw Markham's reputation in my face and claim it was a cowardly lie; and if I didn't release Resnick it would mean an official investigation at North Marsport -- on the first leg of my first command. Suppose he told me and I did nothing. Then he would know I was afraid of Resnick! I didn't sleep much. I didn't get much sleep for several days. Coupled with my guilt feeling, my hate for myself, was a growing feeling that striking my orderly was the first step in Resnick's plan to get at me, smoke me into the open where he could find an opportunity to expose me. It was obvious how Resnick had gotten to Markham. It had to be when Markham went to the kitchen to bring my meals, and it had to be with the knowledge of the cook, which meant that Resnick already ruled the crew openly, behind the scenes. There was no danger of mutiny or any of the claptrap of fiction, of course. Resnick was no fool, and had no insane ambitions other than that of feeding his streak of sadism. A few days later I noticed a small spot of blood on the back of Markham's shirt. I said nothing, but that evening after I had dismissed him and he had gone to his room I took a small flat metal mirror and slid it under his door just far enough to peek in and watch him undress, and I saw the welts across his back. Worse, I saw him crying. He shook with silent sobs while tears streamed from his eyes, and hopelessness and discouragement and friendlessness held possession of him. At that moment I knew with absolute conviction that the courtmartial had been right. He was a coward and would never be anything else. But at the same moment, I suddenly understood him. It was something he couldn't help. I lay in the darkness of my own cubicle, a dull anger growing within me, turning me into a slightly irrational being. There was, I suppose, a sort of self-flagellation to it. A psychiatrist would possibly diagnose it as that, anyway. In my own mind I was responsible for everything Resnick did to David Markham, which meant that by "punishing" Resnick I was punishing myself. When you descend to such levels of pure and obsessing emotional thinking, logic gets mixed up quite a bit. I came out of that sleepless sleep period with one thing quite clear in my thoughts. Things couldn't go on the way they were. Oh, sure, I had a sneaking hunch that this frame of mind I was in was what Resnick had been angling for. By now I had invested Resnick with omniscience so that it seemed perfectly logical that he should know I had spent a sleepless night, that he should know I had seen those welts on Markham's back. In my mind's eye I could see him, a sneer on his thin lipped small mouth, while he waited for me to stick my neck out. I could see his muscular arms, covered by freckled skin that covered sleek muscles, dangling at his sides, fingers uncoiled but ready to double into fists -- fists that had once beaten me into shuddering unconsciousness, years ago -- fists that could do it again while slightly mad brown eyes glittered at me, mocking... David Markham served my breakfast, the perfect orderly, quick to anticipate my wishes, so attuned to my habits by now that he almost seemed to read my thoughts before I was aware of them myself. He seemed to have not a care in the world. A cold shower can cover a multitude of inner tortures with a pink glow of well being... Suddenly the idea came to me. I would talk to Oscar Resnick. I would plead with him. I would offer him money -- my whole salary on this trip. Such men have their price. As Captain I made five times more than he. I would give it all to him if he would agree to lay off. All I wanted was to get through my first command without trouble, get back to Earth on schedule, make a good showing. I was, suddenly, pathetically confident that he would agree. A deal like that would have to be discussed in absolute privacy, however. The slightest inkling of it to the crew -- In a panic of haste lest my confidence wane, I skipped my third cup of coffee and hurried to my office. Switching the intercom to crews' quartersI said with the crisp tones of command, "Mr. Resnick, report to the Captain's office," repeating it three times as is customary on intercom calls aboard ship. Then I made sure the intercom was off, and sat there behind my desk waiting, my heart pounding painfully within my chest, my fingers clenched into white knuckled fists to keep them from trembling. Five minutes later there came a polite knock at the door. Composing myself as much as possible I said, "Come in," in what I hoped was a calm authoritative voice. The door slid open and Oscar Resnick stood there, his shoulders almost as wide as the door opening, his space-faded sandy hair neatly combed back, his brown eyes darting around the room in a quick survey and just as quickly masking their triumphant glitter as he saw that I was alone, his thin lips which had been in a firm straight line breaking into a satisfied and anticipatory smile. "Come in and close the door," I commanded, my voice breaking into nervous uncertainty on the last three words. He stepped inside and closed the door firmly behind him, his eyes never leaving me. When the door was firmly closed he said, "Sure, Art, old boy." With those four words he took command of the situation. They had been uttered so softly that they could not have sent a whisper over the intercom even if it had been on. He walked toward me until he came to the edge of the desk, then planting his fists on the desk top, he said, "I've been wondering how long it would take for you to call me in for a little talk." He exuded an aura of quiet contemptuous strength as his eyes flicked over me in speculation. "That's right," I said, hearing the nervous squeak in my voice, not sure whether my comment had any relation to what he had said or not. "I want to have a talk with you. Things can't go on the way they are!" Resnick drew back in pretended surprise. "Why, I don't know what you mean, sir he said. "You know perfectly well what I mean," I said, my voice breaking completely. "This is my first command! My whole future hangs on it. What satisfaction could you possibly get from ruining me?" In that moment the past descended upon me completely. Once again I was pleading for mercy where there was no mercy, hoping against hope before those soft mad eyes, searching for something that could never be there. "Why, sir  # he said, mockingly, "I don't know what you mean at all. Perhaps the stress of your new duties...?" "How much would you take?" I blurted desperately. "How much, to lay off of -- David Markham -- leave me alone...?" "Birds of a feather, huh?" he said. His eyes became thoughtful. "Every man has his price, I suppose..." A surge of hope coursed through me. Maybe we could dicker. Maybe it wouldn't cost as much as I was prepared to pay. He scratched his chin slowly, then said, "Well -- how about your salary for this trip and five thousand dollars?" His thin lips flicked back in a grin. "And a promise on your part that you will sign me on for the next trip -- or turn in your Captain's papers?" The universe stood still as I saw ruin facing me. There was no way out. No way out at all. I heard myHe leaned over my desk slowly, his fists planted on it once again, until his face was scant inches from mine. He whispered, "Because you're yellow. That's why. You never had any business becoming a captain." His hoarse, taunting whisper hung in the silence of the room like the knell of doom. There is a madness beyond madness, of that I am sure. I should have been grovelling in fear, I should have been making a decision to step into an airlock and eject myself into space, a suicide unable to live longer with himself, because what he said was true and I knew it was true beyond any shadow of doubt. Instead, I heard myself saying, "All right, Resnick. You win." My voice was perfectly calm. It was not me. Whatever it was, it was not me, talking. My part of my mind was in a numb stupor, unable to act, unable even to think. I heard my voice say, "It's a deal. You promise to lay off. In return I promise to turn my salary for this trip over to you when we get paid, and to sign you on for the next trip." My voice was perfectly calm, even practical. I felt my lips curve into a calculated and bitter smile of defeat. I heard myself say, "Such an agreement can't be put into writing, of course, but -- shall we drink on it?" I saw disappointment, disbelief, amazed surprise, cross his lean angular features as I rose from behind my desk. As though in a dream I turned my back on him as I crossed the office to the liquor cabinet, the prerogative of a space Captain. I opened it up with unshaking hands. He followed me, came to stand behind me, very close. I lifted out a bottle of Scotch, the seal still unbroken, and turned to him. "Scotch?" I asked. He hulked over me, his thin lips stretched into a gleeful grin. "Sure," he said softly, his lips pasted against his stained teeth. He sensed my sudden movement, a movement I was not conscious of dictating, but he was too slow as the full bottle crashed down on his skull, shattering and sending a shower of alcohol over his uniform and the floor. His eyes did not close, but blanked into unconsciousness as he sagged to the floor. I stood there for a moment, blinking down at his unconscious form, not quite believing what had happened. Even in unconsciousness he sent fear icing through my veins. In one mad moment I had ruined it all. When he recovered he would be unforgiving, without mercy. For a minute or two I broke down completely, crying like a baby. Then, gradually, a calm settled over me. I turned him over onto his back and pulled his slack arms together. I took off my belt and wrapped it around his wrists until I could fasten the buckle firmly. Then I went to my cubicle and brought bsck a roll of adhesive tape and taped his lips closed, laughing in a low, mad voice that was not my own. I used the rest of the roll of tape to fasten his ankles together. And just as I finished he opened his eyes. It took him a few minutes to organize his thoughts and fix his attention on me, his eyes questioning me. I continued to chuckle under my breath. I was mad, conscious of the fact that I was mad, and beyond caring. "You have nice eyes," I heard myself say. "Nice soft brown eyes." I examined his scalp with careful concern for a moment. "Good thing," I said. "The bottle broke, so there will be no sign of abrasion that could be proof of anything." I took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling fingers, while he watched me. Blowing out a streamer of smoke and jabbing in his direction with my fingers, I said, "I'm learning a few things, Resnick. Already -- I'm learning. I wonder how much it will take to break you down." I pushed his head back and tried to put my thumb against his eyeball. He closed his eyes tightly and I forced his right eye open and pressed the ball of my thumb against the exposed eyeball. "Not too much or it will make your eye bloodshot," I said, in hardly more than a whisper. "Evidence, you know. Who's going to believe that the Captain did such a thing? Not even the crew! Sure, they'll agree with you to keep from being beat up. That is, if you have any stomach for that sort of thing when I get through with you. I'm just beginning, you know." I lifted my thumb from his eye and squeezed his nostrils together, watching the terror build up in him, watching his struggles, watching him grow weaker and weaker, and releasing him at the last moment before he lost consciousness, and watching his chest heave as he sucked in lungsful of air. "I just thought of something," I said to him. "You wouldn't dare retaliate after I let you go. To strike me would be treason, punishable by life imprisonment, wouldn't it? And what would be your defense? That the Captain had tortured you? Who would believe that? Who are your witnesses? See how I have stolen your weapons?" I pried his left eye open and pressed against it with a thumbnail. "A half hour ought to do it," I taunted. "No marks. I have to be very careful so that an examination by the ship's doctor won't show a thing." In ten minutes -- or was it ten eternities? -- he became a quivering mass of flesh. I did things to him that left him too weak to move. At the end of half an hour I pulled the tape off his mouth and listened to him blubber. I took the tape off his ankles, and the belt off his wrists. I tortured him some more and he took it. "And when I call for you over the intercom," I said, "if you don't come at once I have you for gross insubordination to your Captain. And if you so much as touch one member of the crew again I'll call you, boy. I'll call you." Finally I let him go... bled like a leaf. Slowly a little bit of sanity returned to me, and with it a realization of what I had done. Nausea overcame me and I staggered into the washroom and got rid of my breakfast, then returned to my desk. For hours I sat there while my mind picked up the threads of life and began functioning again. There was still the feeling that Resnick was omniscient, that he would be able to topple me into disgrace. But with it, gradually, came the realization that he wouldn't, that he couldn't. I had used his own psychological weapons on him, building up in him a fear psychosis that he couldn't successfully fight. I had turned the tables. I couldn't really believe it just yet, but I couldn't disbelieve it either. For the next three days I went about my customary routines with a calm exterior, waiting for the storm to break, but it never did. Finally, to test it, I deliberately went on a tour of inspection through the ship, until I came to where Resnick was working, along with several others of the crew. As I entered the compartment and saw him look up, I saw the instinctive cringing that he couldn't help. In a flash of inspiration I saw that his sadism was a cover for his own cowardice, a compensation mechanism. I knew then that I had won. After one long silent moment I turned my back on him and left the compartment. As I walked by myself to the central tube and pulled myself up to the Captain's deck, for the first time I began to realize what being Captain meant. It means a lot of things, of course, but most of all it means facing up to one's command, being in charge. I knew that I would never again be afraid -- least of all afraid of Oscar Resnick. Nor would I ever again be afraid of fear. In the future I might be faced with the answer and try for # at least. Answers on page #. #. How far will a free falling object fall in the first .# second? #. What is the osmotic pressure of sea water? #. What is melanin? #. Name four of the natural radioactive elements in the air. #. What are whistlers? #. Name the three heavy fissionable elements. #. What is heparin's function in the human body? #. What are stormer orbits? #. What causes free radicals to form? #. What would be the approximate temperature at a speed of Mach #? #. What changes are indicated by thermoclines? #. What materials in auto exhaust react in sunlight to form ozone? #. Describe a cephied star. #. What does "maximum entropy" mean? #. What is a synapse? problem of a bully on my crew again, but I would know how to deal with him -- with his own weapons, the ones he used because he would be most vulnerable to them himself . When the Alabama reached North Marsport Resnick quit the ship. I was glad to see him go. The rest of the crew remained with me, and I had no more trouble during the five years I commanded the Alabama. David Markham remained with me as my orderly until I retired, and he is still with me. A few years after the incidents of this story I had an opportunity to get him a commission but he turned it down and refused to leave me. Sometimes I think he knows what happened in my office that day that I called Resnick in, but he has never given any hint whether he does or not. You wonder that I am not ashamed to confess publicly to you that I was a coward? You shouldn't wonder. We are all cowards -- or fools. I am not ashamed of the fact that once I was a coward. Bravery, in a way, consists in not being afraid of being afraid. Just one thing remains in my story. When I reached North Marsport on that first leg of my first command, I was a Captain. I have been one ever since. Philip Duncan , the St. Louis atwrote the definitive "History of Espionage ", observes that in all the records dealing with spies and counterspies there is no more significant case than that of Dr. John O'Hara Smith, an electronics research engineer. Duncan maintains that Dr. Smith, whose rather quixotic name is real and not assumed, contributed more to the advancement of espionage and counterespionage methods than any one person in history. For a period of more than a year, the case of Dr. John O'Hara Smith was known to only a few security and defense officials. The first public reference to it came on November #, #, when an assistant to Secretary of Defense Wilson obliquely commented on it in testimony before the House Military Affairs Committee. Subsequently, more details were leaked to several Washington correspondents, and then vigorously denied. A brief account of the matter appeared on an inside page of the New York Times, but aroused no general interest. As a matter of fact, so little is known about the entire case that several of the people who were in on its early phases are still not sure whether Dr. John O'Hara Smith is alive or dead, or whether he was a spy or counterspy. However , on the basis of information now declassified , plus two highly technical papers presented to the Institute of Research Engineers, anyone sufficiently interested can reconstruct most of the case. #:# P.M., August #, #, when Dr. John O'Hara Smith returned with a bag of groceries to his house trailer in the Mira Mar Trailer Park, overlooking a long blue reach of the Pacific Ocean, some twelve miles south of Los Angeles. He put the groceries on the drainboard beside his spotless twobumer butane stove, carefully flicked away a speck of dust and then stepped eagerly toward the rear of his trailer, where an intricate assembly of tubes and wires occupied what normally would have been the dining area. Dr. Smith flipped on a switch, and then received what he later called, in his precise, pedantic way, a split-second premonition of danger. The Go-NoGo panel light flashed and went out; the transistor looked grey instead of red ; the wires to the binary-coded digitizer were crossed ; the extra module in the basic assembly had not been there that morning... Dr. Smith methodically catalogued these details, and he stepped backward, just a breath of a moment before the low hum sharpened to a whine. He tripped, and in falling his left shoulder knocked open the door to the small toilet closet. Instinctively, he writhed the upper part of his body through the narrow doorway. His thick-lensed glasses fell underneath him, leaving him practically blind. His elbows and knees were still making frenzied, primordial crawling movements when the detonation brought a wave of oblivion that almost, but not quite, preceded the pain. A squad car from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department turned in the first report: John O'Hara Smith, male, white, about #; critically injured by explosion in house trailer; removed by ambulance to General Hospital; explosion occurred at... Two days later, the Sheriff's Department apparently closed the case with a one-line addition to its original report: Explosion believed to have been caused by leaking butane connection. But, in the interval, other agencies had entered the case. The first was the Industrial Security Office attached to the Western Division of the Air Force's Research and Development Command in the once suburban community of Inglewood, California. When Chief Security Officer Amos Busch received a call at #:# the morning after the explosion, he automatically noted the time on his desk pad. The call was from Pacific Electronics, Inc., a subcontracting firm in nearby El Segundo. The president and owner of Pacific Electronics was on the phone. In a tone that betrayed considerable agitation, he identified himself as Wesley Browne. "One of my research engineers -- my best engineer, dammit -- was nearly killed last night in an explosion... maybe he's dead now," reported Browne, his words breathlessly treading on each other. "There's something damn funny about this..." Amos Busch wrote : Research engineer... explosion... nearly killed. Then he asked judicially: "What do you mean by 'damn funny', Mr. Browne?" "This engineer was working on our vernier actuating cylinder for the Atlas guided missile... Just two days ago, he -- he said he wanted me to know where his files were... in case anything happened to him..." Amos Busch was a jowly, greying man who gave the appearance of being slow moving. But before the president of Pacific Electronics, Inc., hung up, Busch had already used another phone and the intercom to put in motion a chain reaction that would deliver to his desk the security report on Dr. John O'Hara Smith. There was nothing out of order in the report. There couldn't have been, or Dr. Smith wouldn't have been cleared for the ballistic missile program. According to the report, he had lived aloofly for all of his adult years. Even as a boy, his sole interest had been to tinker with mechanical projects. His grades and IQ were high above the norm, and his attitude towards his classmates varied between impatience and outright sarcasm. "I always thought John was a lonely boy," a former officer during the security check. "He never had anything in common with other youngsters." After obtaining his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, he had worked for AllisChalmers Research Division in Milwaukee and lived with his mother until her death in #, when he bought a house trailer and moved to the coast. He had no close friends, no record of even a remote connection with any communist or communist-front group. Security Officer Busch decided to visit the trailer, or what remained of it. He was not an electronics man, or even a normally incompetent do-it-yourself mechanic, but when he saw the shattered tangle of wires and tubes, along with the obvious remnant of a short-wave receiver, Amos Busch promptly called Major General David Sanders, Development Division. General Sanders scratched his tanned bald head, and said, this, Amos." thoroughness that made John O'Hara Smith's previous security investigation look like the processing of an application to join the Kiwanis. While agents sifted every detail of his life since the day of his birth, he was moved to a private room at General Hospital and three nurses cleared for security were assigned to care for him. For eight days, Smith was in a coma. On the morning of the ninth day, he groaned, turned to one side and rolled back again. The nurse on duty put down her magazine and moved quickly to his bedside. She moistened a cloth and wiped the perspiration from his high forehead, brushing back the thinning tangle of fine, brown hair. His eyes blinked open, stared at her. He whispered: "Eddie... what happened... to Eddie?" Remembering her instructions make certain the door was closed. "Was Eddie in the trailer with you?" she asked, bending closer to catch his reply. He gave her a look of utter disgust, and tried to moisten his cracked lips with the tip of his tongue. But he drifted off again without replying. This incident was duly recorded with another conversation that took place in the office of Wesley Browne at Pacific Electronics, Inc. After carefully reviewing John O'Hara Frank Cowles inquired: "Is there anything -- anything at all, Mr. Browne -- that you would consider out of the ordinary about Smith's recent actions?" There was a trace of uneasiness in Browne's manner, but he tried to cover it by looking annoyed. "I don't know why in the devil you fellows are spending so much time on Smith!... He sure as hell didn't blow himself up!" "Of course not," Cowles said, placatingly. "But we never know where a lead will come from..." He repeated the question. Browne hesitated. "I suppose," he began, shifting his big bulk uncomfortably, "this will sound kind of odd... but you know we've got the subcontract to produce this actuating cylinder for the Atlas..." The agent nodded. "Well, six months before we were asked to submit specs and bids on such a cylinder, Smith came to me and said he had an idea for something the Air Force might soon be needing..." Agent Cowles maintained his air of polite attention, but his cool grey eyes narrowed. Browne shifted again, and continued: "I told him to go ahead -- you never can tell what these research guys will come up with..." "And what did he come up with, Mr. Browne?" "You won't believe this, maybe -- but he came up with the design for the complete vernier hydraulic actuating cylinder -- including the drive sector gear -- at least three months before we had the faintest idea such an item would even be needed!" moved swiftly. "Anything else?" Browne instinctively lowered his voice : "Smith even suggested that the cylinder would help to offset the roll and yaw in an intercontinental ballistic missile!" A brittle edge came into the agent's courteous tone: "Did you report this to security?" In spite of the airconditioning unit in the window, the president and owner of Pacific Electronics, Inc., seemed to feel that the room was getting very warm. He ran a fat forefinger under his white collar. "No," he admitted. "We got the contract, of course -- it was a cinch! -- and I just wrote it off as a lucky break... You can see how Fd feel, can't you?" "Yes," said Cowles, "I can." Bit by bit, a new picture of the meticulous, professorial Dr. Smith sier. During the working week, his habit had been to keep his trailer in a small park just off Sepulveda Blvd., a half-mile from the Pacific Electronics plant. After work on Fridays, he invariably left for the weekend, usually for any one of a dozen scenic trailer parks along the coast between San Diego and Santa Barbara. He always went alone. No one had ever seen or met "Eddie". Outside of working hours, Smith's only association with his professional colleagues was through the Institute of Research Engineers. He attended monthly meetings, and occasionally wrote dry, abstract articles on theoretical research for the Institute's quarterly journal. Under microscopic study and chemical analysis, investigators determined that nitro-glycerine had caused the explosion. The fused mass of electronics wreckage in Smith's trailer were identified as parts of a computer assembly. Thousands of dollars had been spent on components over the past three years. Purchases, usually for cash, were traced to various electronic supply companies in the greater Los Angeles area. Dr. Smith's bank account showed a balance of only #. But the big find came from a safety deposit box in the same branch bank. There, along with a birth certificate, his mother's marriage license, an insurance policy, his doctor's degree from the University of Wisconsin and an unused passport, was a duplicate set of computer memory tapes. to play a few selected segments from these tapes, which obviously had been recorded over a period of several years. Two notations made by Agent Cowles indicate the type of material contained on the tapes: "If a deliberate attempt were mde to run a thermonuclear test explosion within the frontiers of Russia, in such a way as to avoid detection, it would almost certainly be successful..." "The Soviet Union may soon develop a new ratio of fusion to fission energy in high yield weapons and will require additional data..." backs were convinced, almost to a man, that they had stumbled across the hottest espionage trail since the arrest of Klaus Fuchs and the case of the Rosenbergs. A round-the-clock security guard was placed outside the hospital room of John O'Hara Smith, while Federal authorities waited impatiently to see whether he would live or die. Smith would answer, or leave unanswered, a lot of vital questions. standing, it was the day after Labor Day before the medical staff of General Hospital would permit the first direct questioning of Dr. Smith. And then the interrogators were instructed: "Only a few minutes." Three men filed quietly into Smith's room as soon as the nurse removed his luncheon tray. They stood in a semi-circle around the foot of his bed. Agent Frank Cowles opened a black leather folder the size of a small billfold and presented his credentials. He introduced General Sanders and Security Officer Busch. It was the first time any of the men had seen John O'Hara Smith. The reports had called him pudgy, but now he had lost twenty pounds and his cheek bones were gaunt under his pallid skin. He wore unusually thick, dark-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes and gave him an owlish appearance. He returned their scrutiny with a mixture of assurance and impatience, like a professor waiting for his class to come to order. "Good morning, gentlemen," he said tartly. "It's about time someone came to see me about this... Cowles cleared his throat and suggested cautiously: a statement, Dr. Smith?" "Don't talk drivel, man! How are you going to know anything about it if I don't make a statement!" Though still weak, Dr. Smith's voice had a high, imperious quality. Clearly, he did not wish to waste time or strength on mere conversation. The three men exchanged glances. Cowles and Amos Busch took out notebooks. "Now, Dr. Smith," Cowles began, "what is your view as to the nature of the explosion in your trailer and the reason for it?" "I'm an electronics research engineer, not an expert in explosives," Smith retorted with some asperity. "But as to the reason, I'm sure they wanted to destroy Eddie and me!" He glared, as if daring anybody to challenge this statement. "Eddie?" ventured Cowles. "I try to speak plainly, Mr. Cowles... I said 'Eddie and me'!" General David Sanders rested two large hands on the foot of the white iron bedstead and squeezed until his knuckles bulged ominously. A volatile man, he had trouble with his own temper even without being provoked. But his voice was deceptively calm: "Dr. Smith, do I gather that someone else was in the trailer with you at the time of the explosion?" Smith grimaced expressively, and answered as if speaking to an eightyear-old: "No, General Sanders... I was quite alone." After thirty years in the Air Force, Amos Busch was not used to hearing a Major General spoken to in this way. It violated his sense of propriety. "Dr. Smith," he exploded, "just who or what in the hell is or was Eddie?" With what was remarkably close to an air of incredulity, Smith looked slowly from one to the other. "I gather you gentlemen haven't read my latest article." "Not thoroughly," Cowles admitted. "Then you don't know of my research work with an educatable computer," Smith said accusingly. Seeing that they didn't, he added: "I have named it 'Eddie'!" "What... what is an educatable computer?" ventured Cowles. It was clear that Dr. Smith welcomed this question. His eyes glowed behind their thick lenses, and his high voice dropped its edge of sharpness. "Eddie is a computer with a capacity to learn," he replied proudly. "It learns from assimilation of information and deductive reasoning -- at a rate at least # times that of the human mind! That's why Eddie comes up with so many answers!... The only problem is, we seldom know what questions the answers answer." His three interrogators had the look of men leaning into a heavy wind. General Sanders recovered first, and demanded: "What the devil was it made for then?" "Eddie was not designed for any specific task -- that's why Eddie is so valuable... and dangerous!" Dr. Smith rolled out this last word as if he relished it. "Do you realize," he went on, with careful emphasis, "that Eddie has solved problems we won't even know exist for another thousand years!" This pronouncement was greeted by a moment of strained silence. General Sanders finally said, "H-m-m-m." He looked at Busch, who looked at Cowles, who asked: "Does Eddie solve any problems closer to our own time, Dr. Smith?" "Of course..." "Did Eddie come up with the idea for that Atlas stabilizing cylinder?" "Certainly." General Sanders moved a step closer to the bed. "Any other ideas like that?" he inquired eagerly. Dr. Smith's smile was neither wholly supercilious nor merely selfassured. It was a little of both, plus a lot of pure satisfaction at being stage center with his favorite subject. He cocked his head back and stared down his stump of a nose. "You're working on a missile defense system for bombers, aren't you?" he challenged General Sanders. "What about it?" hedged the General. "Have you learned how to design a finned missile which can be launched across the bomber's airstream without being thrown off course?" General Sanders ignored a warning glance from Amos Busch. "Do you... does this Eddie know how to do it?" "Eddie says it doesn't matter!" "What?" "Eddie says what difference does it make if the missile is thrown off course by the airstream -- as long as you can reorient it into a compensated trajectory. We were working on a new gyroscope principle that might do the trick... the personification of courtesy, but he could assert himself when necessary. He did so now. "Excuse me, General," he interrupted, "but first there are some other matters we must go into with Dr. Smith." The General nodded reluctantly. He took out an envelope and made some notes of his own on the back of it. "Now, Dr. Smith," said Cowles, "let's get back to the explosion... Why do you feel someone wanted to destroy you and Eddie?" "I believe they had copied Eddie's circuit design and wanted to make sure another one wasn't built  -- at least in the immediate future." "Why not?" Dr. John O'Hara Smith showed a neat flair for timing as he waited just long enough to build suspense, before answering: "Because Eddie knew that our security system for safeguarding the missile program is about as up to date as the horse and buggy!" His words couldn't have been better chosen to startle his audience. Amos Busch took them as a personal affront. "Horse and buggy!" he snorted. "You'd better spell that out, Dr. Smith!" Smith's reply was prompt and precise : "Eddie has concluded that human methods and minds alone are not enough to cope with security issues in an area where even the simplest technical problems must be handled by intricate computing devices... His owlish eyes moved from one man to another, trying to judge whether they were following him. "You see, Gentlemen," he went on, "the technology we are dealing with is so unbelievably complex that the possibilities for espionage are multiplied infinitely beyond the capacity of a human intellect to grasp and evaluate... "For example," demanded General Sanders. "For example," Smith retorted with equal sharpness, "what good does it do to surround ballistic missile plants with security regulations if the missile itself can be stolen right out of the air?" "Fantastic!" said General Sanders. "Nuts," said Amos Busch. Agent Cowles said nothing. John O'Hara Smith sank back against his pillow, panting a little. His high forehead glistened with sweat. When he gathered the strength to speak again, he directed his words to General Sanders: being fired into the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of Florida... Are you sure you know what's happened to all of them?" "I think so," the General answered calmly. "And what about your own X-# project, General?" The question was almost a taunt. had jumped with his paratroopers into France on a morning in June, #. He had risen in rank through the test of battle and the more excruciating ordeal of the Pentagon. He was a rock-jawed, six-foot, twohundred pound man whom little could shock and nothing could deter. But he had never faced a challenge like the seconds of silence that followed Dr. Smith's mocking question. There was nothing he dared say, yet in saying nothing he was saying Cowles looked at him, then looked quickly away. Security Officer Busch studied his own hands as though discovering them for the first time. The tableau remained frozen and silent until the door opened and a doctor said, "That's all for today, gentlemen." The three men left without a word. Dr. John O'Hara Smith closed his eyes. On his pale lips was the suggestion of a smile. When they were alone in the General's staff car, Amos Busch exhaled and said, "I'll be damned." "I gather," observed Cowles drily, "that something called an X-# has turned up missing." "A week ago," sighed General Sanders. "Somewhere in the Mojave Desert near Lancaster... It was a very elementary prototype -- the actual X-# won't be ready for another three years..." "Any idea what happened to it?" "It was on a routine test flight and ran out of the tracking screen -- headed northwest... We haven't found a splinter from it! But there's a lot of rough country around there." "Who knows it was lost?" "Just the local base and our headquarters staff. The Pentagon, too, of course." "And Dr. Smith," added Amos Busch, incredulously. The staff car detoured off the freeway to deliver Cowles to the Federal Building. "What do you make of this, Frank?" the General asked him. "I'm just supposed to be gathering information." "Oh, hell! We've been talking and you've been thinking -- what?" Cowles grinned. "I've been thinking how lucky it is I don't have to make a decision about Smith!" "So?" "So we'll question him again tomorrow... As long as he's willing to talk, the more he says, the better." But, next morning, the medical staff again exercised its veto power. John O'Hara Smith had developed an infection and fever during the night. There could be no further questioning for the time being. On the second day, when his fever ebbed, Dr. Smith irascibly ordered a pad of paper and began an interminable series of sketches. The nurse managed to sneak out a few all night vainly trying to figure out what they meant. The following evening, when the last visitor's bell had sounded and the patients were bedded down for the night, Dr. Smith was staring unblinkingly into the dark shadows of his room. He had been given a sleeping pill at #:#, but had held it under his tongue until the nurse left, and then had put it on the night table behind his thickrimmed glasses. He seemed to be struggling with a problem. Once he turned on the night light, put on his glasses and made several rapid sketches that vaguely resembled a spider web. A half hour later, his eyes began to droop. He picked up the sleeping pill, rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, then put it back on the table. His breathing became deeper. A sound startled him awake. It was an odd sound, not a part of the subdued hospital noises. It was a persistent, metallic, scraping sound, and it came from outside his window. Dr. John O'Hara Smith grabbed his glasses and rolled out of bed. He bunched up his pillow under the covers and crawled into the deeper darkness of the corner to the left of the window, which was open several inches. He crouched there, knees quivering from weakness. There followed an interval of almost inaudible prying at the screen, broken by periods of silence as someone outside the secondstory window apparently paused to listen. Finally, the screen was released with a faint pop. The lower half of the double-hung window eased upwards. Again there was silence, save for the distant clatter of the self-service elevator. Abruptly, a pencil-thin beam of light shot through the room, toward the bed. It focussed on the mound made by the pillow. Short tongues of flame leaped out three times, with soft, spitting sounds. The pillow and the tangle of blankets twitched realistically. The beam of light winked out; the screen plopped back into place. There were a few hasty, sliding noises of retreat, and that was all. John O'Hara Smith's breath came in short, strained gasps, as though he were choked up with asthma. When he got control of himself, he eased back the edge of the drape and looked out the window. It was nearly twenty feet to the ground. A car turned off the boulevard, and came up the side street. The glow of its headlights briefly silhouetted the ladder angled against the side of the hospital. Dr. Smith sat on the edge of the bed to think things over. His left thumb probed the holes in the blanket ana pillow. This seemed to make up his mind. He got his clothes from the closet and dressed as quickly as he could force his hands to move and coordinate. His trousers hung so loosly that the last hole in his belt made no difference. He pulled the belt tight and knotted it. Next, he carefully folded his sketches and put them in the inside pocket of his coat. As an afterthought, he also put the sleeping pill in his pocket. Then he drank half a glass of water and painfully edged himself out the window. His chest scraped the ledge, and it was all he could do to strangle an outcry of pain. At the foot of the ladder, he staggered and nearly fell. But after a moment's rest, he squared his shoulders and walked across a corner of the lawn, into the shadows and the night. News got further than any other paper with the story of Dr. John O'Hara Smith's mysterious disappearance from General Hospital, leaving behind a bed riddled with three bullets. In fact, the Mirror-News story had cleared the copy desk and was on its way down to the composing room before it was killed by the managing editor "for security reasons". An all-points police bulletin was sent out, but no one was optimistic about immediate results. When you can't admit a man is missing, when you can't publish his photograph, you deprive yourself of the eyes and ears of the public, which turn up seventy-five percent of the leads in missing persons cases. Security considerations posed three alternatives: If Dr. Smith was telling the truth, then it was better to let whoever had twice tried to kill him wonder whether the second attempt had been successful. If Smith had broken with an espionage ring, and had been marked for death by former associates, the various agencies concerned with security wanted a chance to find him first. If Smith was playing some devious game of his own, let him make the next move. As days went by, telephone circuits from Washington to Los Angeles carried messages that grew headquarters hinted that certain field representatives might be transferred from Southern California to southern Kansas if results in the Smith case were not forthcoming promptly. The Air Force suggested that if both Dr. Smith and the X-# prototype continued to be among the misusing, it would not be wise to present the pending promotion of General Sanders to the White House. The General was moodily digesting this thought, while half-listening to a discussion at a morning staff conference, when an aide whispered : "A call from the North American Lancaster plant, Sir. It's urgent -- and personal..." General Sanders excused himself and hurried into his adjoining private office. "Sanders," he barked. The high, imperious voice that replied was instantly recognizable: "General Sanders, I suggest you don't try to have this call traced, or we might not be able to finish our conversation!" The General pressed his intercom button and held the connection open, waiting for a chance to use it. "Go ahead, Smith," he said. "I'll come directly to the point," said Smith. "I want two things: A place to work in safety and the funds to build another Eddie!" "And what makes you think you can get them from me?" "Because Eddie can help you find the X-#." The General hunched closer to the intercom, raising his voice. "Smith he stalled, "why don't you come in and talk things over?" "I do not intend to sit around waiting to be killed while your security bunglers try to decide whether I'm telling the truth!" A Staff Sergeant looked in the door. "Is anything wrong, Sir? The General motioned for silence, then scrawled on a note pad: "Trace this call!" "Now, Dr. Smith," he said, "if you're telling us the truth, you've got nothing to worry about..." "General," Smith replied acidly, "do you know any better way of convincing you than to let Eddie find the X-#?" "Well, I -- " "Goodby, General. You think it over -- and I'll call you later. Your word will be sufficient!" The phone clicked, and General Sanders cursed bitterly. Later, he talked it over with Amos Busch, who nodded agreement to the General's proposal. "Sure," he said. "It's worth a gamble -- and we'll have Smith where we want him!" When John O'Hara Smith phoned that afternoon, the General said promptly: "Come on in, Dr. Smith -- you've got a deal." The available records on this phase of the case show that a Dr. J. O. Smith and three "assistants" were added to the payroll of a small Pasadena electronics firm on September #, #. They were installed in one wing on the top floor of the building. The entrance to this wing was sealed off with the familiar sign: "Restricted -- Permission to enter granted only on a need-to-know basis". Apparently, few needed to know, for Smith and his assistants seldom had visitors. Deliveries of electronics components were received by one of the assistants. The four men arrived together, and left together. They brought their lunch. Dr. Smith, of course, had been interrogated briefly when he had Division Headquarters. But only the General and Amos Busch had questioned him this time. "Look, Smith," said Amos, "if we're supposed to protect you, I want to know from what -- and why it's necessary..." John O'Hara Smith looked almost embarrassed. "I suppose I made the same error that is so often made in declassifying information..." "How's that?" "When information is declassified, it's done without mathematically computing the infinite number of possible ways such information may be useful to a hostile government... Of course, you need an Eddie to make such a computation!" "What's this got to do with trying to knock you off?" Busch demanded. "It's quite evident that someone read my article in the Research Engineers' journal more carefully than you did! As a matter of fact, Eddie actually warned me that anyone hostile to the United States could not possibly allow my work to continue!" Amos Busch and General Sanders exchanged wary glances. "All right," said General Sanders, "We'll let that go for the moment -- but what made you ask about the X-# in the first place?" "Eddie suggested that if the be stolen over the mid-Atlantic, it would be vastly less difficult to steal an X-# over the Mojave Desert!" As the two Air Force men digested this statement, along with the indisputable fact that an X-# had disappeared, John O'Hara Smith blandly informed them: "Incidentally, gentlemen, you'll have to get Eddie's duplicate tapes for me." Busch reddened, and could not resist asking: "Including those short-wave broadcasts from Moscow Radio?" "Naturally!" Dr. Smith snapped. "I'm sure Eddie extracts a great deal of useful information from them!" This second interrogation, like the previous one in the hospital, ended on a triumphant note for the exasperating Dr. Smith. When they were alone, General Sanders turned to Busch and sighed: "We've got a double security problem, Amos! If word of this deal with Smith gets back to Washington, I'll be laughed right out of the service!" But the General didn't begin to grasp the full implications of his predicament until the afternoon of Oct. #, when Dr. Smith phoned to say Eddie was completed. "Good," grunted the General. "Get going, then!" "We'll need more information first." "What kind of information?" General Sanders demanded suspiciously. His suspicions were reinforced by Smith's terse dictum: "Eddie must have all the facts on the X-#." "Impossible!" Dr. Smith's sniff indicated he nurtured utter disbelief in the concept of the impossible. "Eddie operates on facts," he reminded the General. General Sanders didn't sleep much that night. Neither did Amos Busch. They talked and argued until three in the morning, when the General poured one last drink and raised his glass. "O.K.," he said grimly. "I've gone this far and I've got to go the rest of the way!" They drank, and he continued: "At least, now I won't have to worry about being laughed out of the service -- I'll get court-martialed out!" He jabbed viciously at an icecube with his forefinger. "But there's one thing I'll do first," he promised. "What's that, Sir?" "Strangle Smith with my bare hands!" General Sanders sat on a metal folding chair in front of Eddie, the educatable computer, and stared belligerently at the roughly-finished aluminum facade. Eddie didn't look like much -- certainly nothing like # worth of components paid for out of the General's contingency fund. Speed had been the primary consideration in rebuilding Eddie. The exterior case was unpainted, and rather inexpertly held together with metal screws. There were no knobs on the front panel controls. The vocader grill was open; the input microphone simply rested on the workbench beside the case. The entire assembly measured about three feet long, two feet deep and eighteen inches high. "O.K., what do I do now?" rasped the General. "Just start talking -- into the mike." General Sanders took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. He glared at Smith: "You get the hell out of here! This is classified information!" Dr. Smith smiled mockingly. On his way out of the room, he paused. "The circuits will stay open -- take as long as you wish." Feeling like a combination of fool and Benedict Arnold, General Sanders cleared his throat and began to read: "The North American X-# is one of several projects now nearing the hardware stage that will take living men as well as instruments into the fourth environment of military activity, that of space. "As soon as the satellite project completes preliminary exploration of the massive high energy spectrometer, the X-#'s system should be ready to fly within two years. X-#s A, B, and G will explore # mph, # mi. up; # mph, # mi. up; and # mph and over, # mi. up and out..." General Sanders jerked open his tie. His tanned bald head was damp with sweat. He glanced around the empty workroom, set his jaw stubbornly and continued: "Meanwhile, tests are in progress with a pilot model of X-# to work out an entirely new vehicle system slow enough to maintain laminar flow in the boundary layer and fast enough to maintain control effectiveness at near sea-level environneed only remain lethal for a few seconds, both the X-# and its personnel must return to fly again..." For three hours, General Sanders read steadily from his file material. During the last half hour, his voice grew husky, his throat dry and raw. When he finished, he went to the door and shouted : "All right, Smith... Come in here and put this damn thing to work!" Smith came in and informed him imperturbably : "Not so fast, General! Eddie will still require a great deal more information." "More? Dammit, I covered everything!" "Everything you know about the X-#," Dr. Smith agreed, "but Eddie is now venturing into a new field and must have more than technical electronics and avionics data. He needs complete reports on the progress of the search to date, as well as the weather, topography, economy, history and current happenings in the entire peripheral area. I have built a supplemental circuit to accommodate this sort of material..." General Sanders groaned. "How the hell do I get into these things ?" During the next ten days, Eddie scanned microfilm on all the newspapers published since X-#'s disappearance. Also marshalled before the scanner was every pertinent reference work available at public, private and university libraries in California. At length, even John O'Hara Smith seemed satisfied. He shut off the scanner, turned on the selector mechanism and the vocader switch. For two hours, Eddie did nothing, except hum contentedly, like a miniature washing machine. Occasionally, a weird, flickering pattern of multi-colored lights would trace across the scanning screen. At #:# A.M., October #, #, a flat, toneless voice came from the vocader grill: "Laminar flow equilibrium temperature at mach #, altitude # ft., of a point # ft. back from the leading edge is # degrees Fahrenheit, assuming skin has # emissivity." There was a small, whirring noise, and the vocader circuit clicked off. "What the devil does that mean?" demanded the General. "Your aerophysicists might like to know!" came back the tart reply. At #:#, Eddie clicked into action again : "In flight between two planets, the theory of minimum energy orbit should be discarded in favor of acceleration at reduced speed for calculated periods of time." "By the time we're flying between planets," General Sanders commented bitterly, "the record of my court-martial will be ancient history!" Twenty minutes later, Eddie added: "In the operation of small exploration vehicles, the fuel cell of the #-H Clubs in Hanford and Bitteroot Creek will compete with the chemical energy of recombination for the prize sweet potato trophy." Even John O'Hara Smith looked startled. But he recovered his aplomb instantly. "Must be a circuit crossover," he explained. "No trouble to adjust it..." While he probed into the interior of Eddie with a glass-handled screwdriver, General Sanders took out a fresh cigarette and shredded it between his fingers. At #:#, Eddie had this to report: "Just as the basic physical precept of invariancy to reflection is not necessarily true, Newton's laws of motion may not always apply under certain circumstances. This would make it possible to penetrate and misdirect a navigational system based on the concept of inertial guidance." General Sanders had been tilted back in his chair, half dozing. He bounced forward with a jar. "What was that?" Dr. Smith replayed this portion of the output tape. "We talked about that at the hospital' he sternly recalled to the General. "And if the long-range missiles fired from Florida can be taken over in flight, what's to prevent their being guided to a submarine at sea?" The General frowned in deep concentration, then relaxed and shook his head. "Even if something like that would be possible, we've got nothing to worry about. Every missile carries a device which can be used to destroy it if the missile goes off course." John O'Hara Smith shook his head like a teacher confronted with a pupil who was not too bright. "Now, General, if an inertial guidance system can be penetrated, a destructor can be blocked." "That's a mighty big if," the General shot back. Dr. Smith smiled sardonically. "It may not be so big when Eddie tells us what happened to the X-#!" "When!" the General groaned. Then he came back to the problem seriously, half sarcastically, he asked : "What does Eddie think we should do about those missiles?" "Undoubtedly there are other guidance systems that can't be broken so easily... meanwhile, Eddie suggests booby-trapping the missiles so they'll explode when tampered with." General Sanders closed his eyes again, and tilted back his chair. The frown between his eyes deepened. It was six o'clock, and the early dusk was closing in on the workroom, before another statement came from Eddie. In its characteristic monotone, the educatable computer said: "The existing developmental missile program will not be affected by the rising divorce rate in Bakersfield and Kern County." Dr. John O'Hara Smith pursed his lips in disapproval. "Eddie's not behaving at all well! I'm afraid that new circuit relay will take some working over..." General Sanders climbed slowly to his feet. He picked up his hat. "O.K., Smith," he said, "You sold me a bill of goods, and I bought it! Now I'm turning you and this whole damn mess back to awhile!" General's office and heard what had been going on, he said mildly: "Well, I guess you had to take the gamble." "Thanks," said General Sanders. "I hope the Pentagon will look at it the same way -- but I doubt it!" "We've got a problem, too, General," Cowles pointed out. "When everything's said and done, there's absolutely no charge we can file against Smith." "But he just can't walk away -- not with all he -- or that miserable Eddie -- knows about the X-#!" Cowles smiled faintly. "I would imagine that Eddie now belongs to the Air Force." "We'll break the damn thing up for scrap!" The General's intercom buzzed. An aide's voice said apologetically: "That Dr. Smith is calling you again, Sir." "Tell him to go to hell!" A few seconds later, the intercom buzzed again. "Dr. Smith on the line, Sir -- He says it's something about the X-# missile." General Sanders looked as though he wanted to sweep the intercom off his desk. "Why not talk to him," Cowles suggested. "I'd like to hear this." The General picked up his phone, and said with deceptive calm: "All right, Smith... make it short." "It was the logging truck," Dr. Smith replied, in his most superior manner. "Huh?" "Eddie's circuit is coordinated now. He says that the same afternoon the X-# disappeared, a passenger car ran into the back of a logging truck northbound on Highway #, about fifty miles from the Lancaster base. Two people were killed "Smith, what kind of pipedream are you peddling now?" "General, the truck was loaded with redwood logs and heading north!" "I don't give a damn where it was going!" "Wait, General!" Dr. Smith's tone was almost a command. "Eddie wants to know why a logging truck was traveling toward the redwood country with a load of logs. He also points out that the X-# is about the size of a redwood log, and could be concealed perfectly in the middle of a load!" The General seemed to be swallowing something angular and unpleasant. "We'll check that truck," he said, at last. "But remember, Smith, you've had it -- you'll never hook me again!" He put down the phone, and said to Cowles: "You get on the merry-go-round this time!" The California Highway Patrol in Mojave had the report on the accident. Clearly, it had been the fault of the passenger car. The truck driver was identified in the report as Art Backus, an independent hauler, working out of Eureka, located on the far northern tip of the California coast, about eight hundred miles from the scene of the accident. closed that Backus had done time in San Quentin on a morals charge involving a minor girl. He had driven trucks for a dozen lumber companies in northwest California until the past summer, when he had bought a new truck and trailer, for cash, and gone into business for himself. him in a roadside cafe on Highway #, between Eureka and Trinidad Bay. A gaunt, stooped man, he nearly collapsed when the agents showed him their identifications. He was broken, and ready to talk, even before mention was made of the fact that the penalty for peacetime espionage is death. bandoned sawmill, some two miles inland, where the X-# had been taken apart, minutely photographed, and then sunk in the old log pond. The men who had hired Backus and dismantled the X-# had left the area several weeks earlier. They were remembered with friendliness by the residents of Trinidad Bay, who described them as "real nice guys and good fishermen, too." They had told Backus they would be back in the late autumn for the steelhead run, and perhaps would have some more hauling business for him at that time. chance for life. He accepted it, with abject eagerness. Beyond this point, there are no more available records on the case of Dr. John O'Hara Smith, and Eddie, the educatable computer. But several items, not apparently related in any way, make interesting speculation. On January #, #, the Air Force reported that a Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, launched from Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, had been destroyed when it appeared to be wandering off course. About the same date, a Panamanian freighter, riding the gulfstream toward the West Indies, radioed a report of sighting a massive oil slick and a scattering of debris, some of it bearing Russian insignia. No survivors were found. The U.S. State Department solicitously inquired of the Soviet Union if any of its vessels had been lost in the winter storms of the Caribbean. The Soviet Union testily replied that no Soviet vessels could have been lost, since Soviet vessels, as a matter of sound international principle, confined their operations to their own territorial waters. During Easter Week of #, the men on charges of espionage: A druggist in Tucson, Arizona; an importer in San Francisco; a retired real-estate operator in Los Angeles; an obscure trucker in northern California. All pleaded guilty in order to escape the gas chamber. The details of the charges against them were not disclosed, except to members of a Federal Grand Jury. Two other published items are worth noting: The May, #, issue of the journal published by the Institute of Research Engineers reported that one of its members, Dr. J. O. Smith, had recovered from injuries suffered in the explosion of a butane stove and had accepted a government research position in Washington, D.C. The other item was a paragraph in Aviation Weekly, congratulating ders on his promotion to Brigadier If secrecy can be carried, to the brink of madness, what can happen when imprisonment and time are added to super secrecy? he lay in the dark trying to sober up, are the living dead. It was a death without honor. It was a death of dusty, sterile stupidity. It was wretched, shameful, a human waste, and far too ridiculous a business to bear any longer. The hell with the war. The hell with the government. The hell with Secret Project X, Y, Z, or D, or whatever infantile code letter identified the legalized tomb in which Sam and the others had been incarcerated too long. He flung his hand around in the dark in a gesture of self-contempt. And his hand found the soft contours of a woman's breast. Her warm body moved, sighed beside him as he turned his head and stared at the dim outline of Professor Betty Seton's oval face, soft and unharried in sleep. Unharried, and unmarried, he thought. Good God. He detached his hand, slipped out of bed and stood in the middle of the floor, found his nylon coverall and sandals, dressed silently, and opened the door to get out of Betty's apartment, but fast. He glanced back, his face hot with bitterness and his mouth twisting with disgust. She moved slightly, and he knew she was awake and looking at him. "Darling," she said thickly, "don't goShe was awake but still drifting in the euphoria of Vat #. He felt both sad and very mean. Then he shut the door behind him, ran out into the desert night. The line of camouflaged barracks on one side, the grounds including the lab buildings, all loomed up darkly under the starlight. He took a deep breath. Now, he asked himself, have you the guts to get out, tell them off, make the gesture? It won't do any good. Nobody else will care or understand. They're too numb and resigned. You'll never get past the fence. The Guards will haul you in to the Wards and work you over. They'll work over what's left until what's left won't be worth carrying over to the incinerator with the other garbage in the morning. You'll be brainwashed and cleared until you're on mental rock bottom and won't even know what direction up is, and you won't give a damn. But don't you have the guts even to make the gesture, just for the sake of what's left of your integrity, before they dim down your futile brain cells to a faint glow of final and perpetual mediocrity? Betty and he had clung to some integrity, had made a point of not getting too intimate, a kind of challenge, a hold-out against the decadence of the Project. What was left now of any self-respect? A security Guard with his white helmet and his white leather harness and his stungun, sauntered by and Lewis ducked into the shadows beside the barracks. His heart skipped several thumps as the Guard paused, looked at the entrance to Betty's apartment. Maybe someone had reported his liaison with Betty. Beautiful and desirable as she was, and as much as he wanted to marry her, he had not been able to marry Betty Seton. If the war ever ended, if the security curtain was ever lifted, if they were ever let out of compulsive Government employment, then they would get married. That was what they had kept telling one another during # quick secret meetings. If , if, if -- Somewhere along the trail of this last alcoholic binge, one or both of them had abandoned what they had both considered an important tradition. It wasn't much, but they had clung to it against temptation, knowing that once they gave in, it wasn't much further to the bottom of skidhill. Betty Seton had been a world famous physicist. Sam Lewis had been a top-rate atomics engineer. And what are we now, he thought, watching the Guard, except just a couple of alky bums looking for a few extra kicks to keep us from admitting we're dead? A request for a marriage license had never been answered. Betty Seton did not have "Q" clearance for some reason. Sam had full clearance and worked in The Pit, the highest "Q" security section in the Project. And never the twain could meet. If their little tryst was discovered, Betty Seton would be taken to the mental wards and 'cleared', a polite term for having any security info you might have picked up cleaned out of your brain along with a great many other characteristics that made you a distinct personality. It was just one of those necessary evils. It had to be done. For security. Psychological murder in the name of Security. The Guard walked on and disappeared around the corner of the end barracks building. Lewis started walking aimlessly in the dark, up and down in front of the barracks, past the blacked out windows and doors and the shadowy hulks of the lab buildings, and beyond that the camouflaged entrances to other subterranean labs, the synthetic food plants, the stores, and supplies. The Project was self-sustaining; in complete, secure and sterile isolation from the world, from all of humanity. He headed for Professor Melvin Lanier's apartment. Tonight the big party was at Lanier's. There was a drunken brawl going on all the time at someone's apartment. There was nothing else to do. swapping, dope addiction, dreampills, sleeping tablets, and that was it. That was what the Project had come to. Experimental work at the Project had wobbled to a dead end. Only the pathetic and meaningless motions remained. Still, he thought, as he walked in through the open door of Lanier's apartment, there is a war on. Hbombs and A-bombs outlawed, but anything less than that was sporting. He wanted to do what he could, but he was squelched ; just as everyone else here was smothered and rendered useless by regulations and a Government of complete and absolute secrecy carried to its ultimate stupid denominator in the hands of political and military incompetents. Still, there is a war on, he thought again as he walked into the big living room filled with artificial light and even more artificial laughter. Was it possible to do something, just some little thing, to shake loose this caged brain? A few more drinks, he thought, will help me reach another completely indecisive decision. In another two hours he would have to report back to the Pit. No reason for it now. It was just his job, his patriotic duty. Progress in nuclear developments and reactor technology in the Pit had ground to a dismal halt for him over seven months ago. Yes, no doubt about it, he needed a few more shots to make palatable for a while longer his standing membership in the walking dead. Through shadows in the garden, shapes wavered about drunkenly to the throb of hi-fi. Lewis went to the robotic barkeep and started drinking. This time, however, he didn't feel any effects. He stood looking around, ashamed, made sicker by what he saw: some of the world's finest minds, top scientists, reduced to shallow burbling buffoons. Dave Nemerov, Nobel Prize Winner in physics, weaved up to Sam and looked at him out of bleary eyes. "Hi, Sammy. All full of gloom again, boy?" Nemerov, a chubby little man dressed in short s and nothing else, frowned with drunken exaggeration. "Easy does it, Sajnmy. You might find the security boys giving you a lobotomy rap." A drop of sweat ran down the side of Lewis' high-boned cheek. "Well, what's the great physicist been doing for his country?" Lewis asked. He knew that Nemerov hadn't even been in his lab for over a month. He even remembered when Nemerov had griped about the shortage of technically trained personnel, the policy of secrecy that clouded, divided and obstructed his work, hampered his research until it finally was no longer worth the struggle. His story was the story of everyone in the Project. He couldn't get information from other departments and projects, because of secrecy. They were all cut off from one another. No information was ever released from the restricted list. Most important documents were secret, and had remained out of reach. The only declassified documents available in the project were gradeschool stuff that everybody had known twenty years ago. For an instant, Nemerov appeared almost sober, and completely saddened. "I've forgotten what I was working on," Nemerov said. "Have another drink then," Lewis said, "and you'll forget that you've forgotten." They clinked glasses. "Smile, Sammy," Nemerov said. "It can't last forever. We'll soon get the word. The war will be over." "What war?" Lewis whispered. "Ssshhh, Sammy, for God's sake!" Nemerov moistened his lips and looked around, but there weren't any Guards at the party. There never were. The Guards had a barracks of their own in the Commander's private sector. They never talked to civilians. They never attended parties. They kept strictly to themselves. So did the Commander. For almost a year now, as far as Lewis knew, no civilian in the Project had seen the Commander. His reports were issued daily. Occasionally his voice was heard on the intercom. "Wonder who is winning the war out there?" Lewis said, to no one in particular. He thought of Betty. Some whiskey spilled from the shot glass. "I wish you would shut up, Nemerov said hoarsely. It still seemed incredible to Lewis, that the military psychologists had decided among themselves that, for the sake of security, all intercommunication between the Project and the outside was to be cut off. No news, no television, no radio, no nothing. For security, and also on the theory that scientists could work better completely cloistered up like medieval monks. Not even a phonecall. Absolute, one-hundred percent isolation. Legalized catatonia. They had choked this Project to death, and he wondered how many others were dead, and where they were. He didn't know where this Project was, except that it was on the desert. He didn't even know for sure what desert. He had been drugged when he was brought here two years ago, for security you know. Nemerov never mentioned his wife and kids any more. From the behavior of Nemerov and most of the others, you would think the outside no longer existed. Cardoza, the cybernetic genius, came up, his eyes glazed with the effects of some new narcotic that Oliver Dutton, world renowned biochemist, had cooked up for want of anything better to do. The wives of two other scientists hung on Cardoza's arms, their bodies mostly bare, their eyes dulled as they wandered about the room like radar for the promise of some emotional oasis in the wasteland. "How you fellas like my robotic barkeep?" Cardoza yelled. "It pours a nice glass of whiskey," Lewis said. "This is only the beginning," Cardoza said, his mouth glistening and wet under his hopped-up eyes. "That barkeep's a perfect servant and can never make a mistake. Spent the last year building it. It can mix anything." "It'll practically win the war for us," Lewis said. Nemerov wiped at his sweating face. The two straying wives stared dumbly. Cardoza winced. "Don't be cutting, my friend," he said to Lewis. His mouth turned down at the corners. "I tried, just as the rest of us tried. To go on and develop what I was sent here to develop, I need "Q" clearance. I can't get it because when the war started I wasn't a citizen. Is that clear, Lewis?" "Forget it," Lewis said. "That's what I intend to keep on doing," Cardoza said. "Meanwhile, my little robotic barkeep is only the beginning. I'm working on other even more ingenious automata. One will do card tricks. Another is a tight-wire artist. And one can even tell fortunes." "How about one that can drag humans out of a hat?" Lewis asked. "Come on, ladies," Cardoza said as he moved away. "Let's go play "Ohhh," one of the wives said, giggling. "Something new?" "Yeah," Lewis said to her, thinking of the fact that at one time, long ago and far away, McWilliams had been working on a theory supposed to have been aimed far mathmatical game. This one's also played in the dark. Mixed couples of course. Q-X, the big mathmatical discovery of the age. People get lost in pairs and later in the dark they add up to bigger numbers." and walked toward the far corner of the garden where he saw old Shelby Stenger, the great atomics expert, flat on his belly, lying in the moonlight with fountain water misting his face, snoring like a tired old dog, with a little thread of drool hanging out of the comer of his mouth. Mac Brogarth, nuclear physicist, came waltzing grotesquely across the garden and toppled backward into the pool under the fountain and lay there too weak even to raise his head out of the water. He would have drowned if Lewis hadn't lifted it out for him. The old man in Lewis' arms looked up at Lewis with a passing light of tragic sobriety. "Sam Lewis," he said. "That's you, isn't it, Sam? I had a cabin up near Lake Michigan and I was going up there to finish important work. I'll never get back there, Sam. I know now that I never will. I never will." Lewis stood up. Without seeing or hearing anyone, he walked out into the dry coolness of the starlit desert night. He walked between the barracks, past the messhall toward the labs, turned down the length of that ominous looking hulk which concealed The Pit, and the Monster with which Lewis had worked until there was no use working any more. Beyond that, he saw the electric fence, and the white helmeted Guards standing at rigid attention. He walked over there, his shoes crunching on sand and gravel, and looked into the Guard's face. It was a mask, expressionless, and rigid. Its eyes were hardly human, Lewis thought. It had many of the characteristics of Cardoza's robotic barkeep. Lewis knew that the security Guards had been worked over in the Wards until there was no possibility of their being security risks. Any classified thought, even if it penetrated one side of their heads, quickly drained through the sieved brain and out the other side. "Carry on, soldier," Lewis said. The Guard didn't seem to hear. Lewis walked back toward the lab building covering The Pit. The conflict was like a knife slicing him apart inside. What if he made a grandstand gesture now? It would be much worse perhaps than merely being sent into the Wards for a little mental working over. He would be found guilty of sabotage, tried by the Commander's kangaroo court martial, found guilty of being a traitor to his country, a foreign agent probably. He would be placed inside a gas chamber on a stool and a little gas pellet would be dropped on his lap. And anyway, aside from his own punishment, would it be morally right? Maybe I'm the one who is crazy, he thought. Maybe it's hell out there, reduced to God knew what kind of social chaos. Maybe we're about to win. Maybe we're about to lose. Maybe as bad as it is, it's the best one could expect during the greatest crisis. He went inside, and took the elevator down one floor into the leadlined Pit. He walked up to the control panel and looked through the thick layers of shielding transparent teflonite into the Pit, watching the Monster indirectly through the big lenticular screen disc above the control panel. The Monster stood in the leadlined Pit, inactive, as it had been inactive for months. And even befor that, during the months when Lewis was learning to control the Monster until it seemed an extension of his own nervous system, its work had become useless, due to unobtainable documents and personnel, not to mention lack of communication with other research centers. The Monster was part of a general plan to compensate for the outlawing of Aand H-bombs. The most deadly conceivable compromise. The Pit was a deadly sea of radioactivity in which only a mechanical robot monster could work. Outside the Pit, Lewis directed the Monster whose duty was the construction of drone planes. A few had been built, but they weren't quite effective, and now it was impossible to go on with the experimentation. The parts were all there. Everything was there except certain vital classified documents that could not be cleared into this particular Project. Thousands of drone planes were to have been built, and perhaps were being built in some other Project, but not in this one. Thousands of drone planes with raw, unshielded atomic engines, light and inordinately powerful with an indefinite cruising range, remote controlled, free of fallible human agency, loaded with bacteriological bombs, the terrible gas known as the G-agent, and in addition, loaded 'spray' tanks that would spew deadly gamma rays and neutrons over limitless areas of atmosphere. Lewis moved his hands over the sensitive controls, and through the lenticular disc, watched The Monster respond with the delicate gestures of a gigantic violinist. The Monster was a robot, ten times bigger than Cardoza's barkeep, and when Lewis moved his hands, the Monster moved its own huge mandibles as its electro-magnum, colloid brain, picked up Lewis' mental directions. The Monster was immune to radiation, and bacteriological horrors. It swam in death as unconcerned as a lovely lady wallowed in a pink bubble-bath. Lewis sat in the twilight of the Pit making the monster move about in its futile rounds. Lewis loved the Monster and felt the wasteful tragedy of its magnificent potential. A wonder of the world, a reaffirmation of man's imagination and his powers of reason, the Monster was built for what might seem horribly destructive ends, but its potential was for limitless achievement of the best and most far-reaching in man. Yet here it was, doing nothing at all. Standing in a sea of radioactive poison, a gigantic symbol of man's stupidity to man. Could a man know the truth and continue to deny it, and still remain sane? You could go on living that way. You could take happy pills, sleeping pills, dream-pills and stay lushed-up on government liquor. But sooner or later you would have to face the horrible empty waste. After that loomed the face of madness. And yet, Lewis thought, how do I know that I know the truth? I'm cut off. No info, no communication. For all I know we're the only people left in the world. An oasis of secrecy surrounded by desert. Lewis walked back up to the first floor, and out into the night, heading for Betty Seton's spartment. Maybe she was sober enough now to talk this thing over. The hell with security regulations. Just the same, he walked along in the shadow next to the building to avoid any eyewitness of his proposed rendezvous. Science, he thought, was really another name for freedom. It couldn't function without freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry. You couldn't mix it up with security and cut off communication, because communication is the essence of science. An idea is universal, and how can you go on thinking when you're no longer a part of the world? Whatever the decision arrived at in Lewis' own heart might otherwise have been, he was never to know. His decision was made for him by an hysterical laugh, the sound of scuffling on boards, and another laugh. He came around the corner of the barracks and saw the Guard manhandling Betty Seton down the steps of her apartment building. a wedge, with a flat bulldog face bunched up under his white helmet. The Guard's brain had been carefully honed down to an efficient, completely unintelligent but precise fighting machine level. He neither knew nor cared why he did anything. But he was handicapped by having Betty Seton in one hand. He was whirling, raising his stungun with the other hand, when Lewis hit him. Lewis drove in with his weight behind first a solid long blow that broke a rigid wall of muscle in the Guard's belly, turned it to soft clay. Betty fell free and lay laughing on the gravel. Her face was a white smear in the starlight. Lewis brought his knee up into the Guard's face as he bent over, sank another one into the soft belly, kicked the Guard in the crotch, stamped on his booted foot, came back and ran forward again, driving his shoulder again into the Guard's belly. The Guard's feet hit the bottom step, he smashed into the boards, and his helmet flew off as his headed thudded on the stanchion. The Guard just shook his shaven head, started to get up heavily, reaching again for his stungun, his face expressionless. Lewis heard footsteps pounding around the corner, slashing on gravel. More Guards. Dehumanized and insensitive, they were almost as invulnerable as so many robots -- He turned, ran past Betty Seton, stilly lying there with only a thin housecoat around her, not laughing now, but looking suddenly sober and horrified. "Betty!" She stared up at him. A block away he could hear the Guards coming and he kept on running. He yelled back. "Get a jeep. Get Brogarth, Cardoza, Nemerov, anybody. We're breaking out of here." "Where?" he heard her yelling after him as he went around the corner. He glanced back around the corner and saw the herd of mechanized human beings slogging toward him. "Near the gate' Lewis said. He ran toward the Pit. He ran down the steps, into the console room and looked into the lenticular disc where a ghostly blue radiance shadowed the walls. "We're going to do ourselves some good after all, Monster," Lewis said tightly. He gripped the controls and sent the Monster its last set of orders. It hurled tons of drone plane motors into the shielding walls, and its huge mandibles ripped open the shielding and peeled it away like a food canister. Smoke began to boil. Flames crackled in blue arcs. Steel beams crumbled like wax. Globs of concrete fell in a cloud of dust swirling debris. Lewis grabbed the intercom, dialed the Commander's office. No answer. He got through the exchange and got the Commander's apartment. He heard a drunken whine and behind that the drunken depraved laughter of officers and their wives and the sound of bongo drums. "The Monster's breaking out of the Pit," Lewis said. "It's shooting out more than enough deadly radioactivity to kill all of you if you don't get the hell out and get out fast." "What, what's that?" "If you think I'm having a nightmare," Lewis continued, "take a look out the window, Commanded." Lewis dropped the intercom. The Monster could go quite a distance before it stopped, its remote control radius probably not exceeding three miles. The Monster went out of the Pit, taking walls and flooring with it. The entire structure trembled, beams fell, ceilings crumbled, and the Monster went through the smoking debris like a juggernaut. A Guard lay crushed under a steel beam. Lewis took the stungun from his hand and went up the debris choked stairs. Outside, he saw figures streaming out into the starlight, and the lab buildings bursting into flames. He also saw the Monster, glowing with bluish radiance, moving straight ahead toward the electric fence. The siren was screaming and howling. Shadows seemed to be streaming toward air-raid shelters. That was all right. The security curtain was torn down. They could come back up later into the light and wonder what had happened and find out where they really were. Guards were running about like ugly toys out of control, looking, listening for commands. Lewis ran through thickening smoke, and saw the jeep by the South Gate. Betty was in it, together with Brogarth and Nemerov. "Hurry, hurry, run," he heard Betty scream. The Guard was cutting at an angle toward Lewis, between him and the jeep. Beyond the Guard was a gaping hole in the fence and on the other side of that he could see the gigantic flickering nimbus of the Monster still walking toward the East. Lewis kept running. Five feet away he brought up the stungun and shot the Guard in the face. (Continued on page # ) Destiny's tricks can be pretty weird sometimes. And this was one to be proud of. A cosmic joke, a switch that could make a nightmare seem tame! to. Otherwise He would not have left paper and pencil handy for me to use. And I put the word "He" in capitals because it seems the only thing to do. If I am dead and in hell, then this is only proper. However, if I am merely a captive somewhere, then surely a little flattery won't hurt matters. As I sit here in this small room and think about it, I am impressed most of all by the suddenness of the whole thing. At one moment I was out walking in the woods near my suburban home. The next thing I knew, here I was in a small, featureless room, naked as a jaybird, with only my powers of rationalization to stand between me and insanity. When the "change" was made (whatever the change was), I was not conscious of so much as a v-:. v...,v. ? Illustrated by Virgil Finlay momentary flicker between walking taneous anesthetic or He has solved in the woods and being here in this the problem of instantaneous transroom. Whoever is responsible for all portation of matter. I would prefer of this is to be complimented -- to think it the former, for the latter either He has developed an instanleads to too much anxiety. As I recall, I was immersed in the problem of how to teach my class in beginning psychology some of the more abstruse points of Learning Theory when the transition came. How far away life at the University seems at the moment: I must be forgiven if now I am much more concerned about where I am and how to get out of here than about how freshmen can be cajoled into understanding Hull or Tolman. Problem # I : Where am I? For an answer, I can only describe this room. It is about twenty feet square, some twelve feet high, with no windows, but with what might be a door in the middle of one of the walls. Everything is of a uniform gray color, and the walls and ceiling emit a fairly pleasant achromatic light. The walls themselves are of some hard material which might be metal since it feels slightly cool to the touch. The floor is of a softer, rubbery material that yields a little when I walk on it. Also, it has a rather "tingly" feel to it, suggesting that it may be in constant vibration. It is somewhat warmer than the walls, which is all to the good since it appears I must sleep on the floor. The only furniture in the room consists of what might be a table and what passes for a chair. They are not quite that, but they can be made to serve this purpose. On the table I found the paper and the pencil. No, let me correct myself. What I call paper is a good deal rougher and thicker than I am used to, and what I call a pencil is nothing more than a thin round stick of graphite which I have sharpened by rubbing one end of it on the table. And that is the sum of my surroundings. I wish I knew what He has done with my clothes. The suit was an old one, but I am worried about the walking boots. I was very fond of those boots -- they were quite expensive and I would hate to lose them. The problem still remains to be answered, however, as to just where in the hell I am -- if not in hell itself! Problem ## is a knottier one -- Why am I here? Were I subject to paranoid tendencies, I would doubtless come to the conclusion that my enemies had kidnapped me. Or perhaps that the Russians had taken such an interest in my research that they had spirited me away to some Siberian hideout and would soon appear to demand either cooperation or death. Sadly enough, I am too reality oriented. My research was highly interesting to me, and perhaps to a few other psychologists who like to dabble in esoteric problems of animal learning, but it was scarcely startling enough to warrant such attention as kidnapping. So I am left as baffled as before. Where am I, and why? And who is He? I have decided to forego all attempts at keeping this diary according to "days" or "hours." Such units of time have no meaning in my present circumstances, for the light remains constant all the time I am awake. The human organism is not possessed of as neat an internal clock as some of the lower species. Far too many studies have shown that a human being who is isolated from all external stimulation soon loses his sense of time. So I will merely indicate breaks in the narrative and hope that He will understand that if He wasn't bright enough to leave me with my wristwatch, He couldn't expect me to keep an accurate record. Nothing much has happened. I have slept, been fed and watered, and have emptied my bladder and bowels. The food was waiting on the table when I awoke last time. I must say that He has little of the gourmet in Him. Protein balls are not my idea of a feast royal. However, they will serve to keep body and soul together (presuming, of course, that they are together at the moment) . But I must object to my source of liquid refreshment. The meal made me very thirsty, and I was in the process of cursing Him and everybody else when I noticed a small nipple which had appeared in the wall while I was asleep. At first I thought that perhaps Freud was right after all, and that my libido had taken over control of my imagery. Experimentation convinced me, however, that the thing was real, and that it is my present source of water. If one sucks on the thing, it delivers a slightly cool and somewhat sweetish flow of liquid. But really, it's a most undignified procedure. It's bad enough to have to sit around all day in my birthday suit. But for a full professor to have to stand on his tip-toes and suck on an artificial nipple in order to obtain water is asking a little too much. I'd complain to the Management if only I knew to whom to complain! Following eating and drinking, the call to nature became a little too strong to ignore. Now, I was adequately toilet-trained with indoor plumbing, and the absence of same is most annoying. However, there was nothing much to do but choose a corner of the room and make the best of a none too pleasant situation. (As a sidethought, I wonder if the choosing of a comer was in any way instinctive?). However, the upshot of the whole thing was my learning what is probably the purpose of the vibration of the floor. For the excreted material disappeared through the floor not too many minutes later. The process was a gradual one. Now I will be faced with all kinds of uncomfortable thoughts concerning what might possibly happen to me if I slept too long: Perhaps this is to be expected, but I find myself becoming a little paranoid after all. In attempting to solve my Problem ##, why I am here, I have begun to wonder if perhaps some of my colleagues at the University are not using me as a subject in some kind of experiment. It would be just like McCleary to dream up some fantastic kind of "human-in-isolation" experiment and use me as a pilot observer. You would think that he'd have asked my permission first. However, perhaps it's important that the subject not know what's happening to him. If so, I have one happy thought to console me. If McCleary is responsible for this, he'll have to take over the teaching of my classes for the time being. And how he hates teaching Learning Theory to freshmen: You know, this place seems dreadfully quiet to me. Suddenly I have solved two of my problems. I know both where I am and who He is. And I bless the day that I got interested in the perception of motion. I should say to begin with that the air in this room seems to have more than the usual concentration of dust particles. This didn't seem particularly noteworthy until I noticed that most of them seemed to pile up along the floor against one wall in particular. For a while I was sure that this was due to the ventilation system -- perhaps there was an out-going airduct there where this particular wall was joined to the floor. However, when I went over and put my hand to the floor there, I could feel no breeze whatsoever. Yet even as I held my hand along the dividing line between the wall and the floor, dust motes covered my hand with a thin coating. I tried this same experiment everywhere else in the room to no avail. This was the only spot where the phenomenon occurred, and it occurred along the entire length of this one wall. But if ventilation was not responsible for the phenomenon, what was? All at once there popped into my mind some calculations I had made when the rocket boys had first proposed a manned satellite station. Engineers are notoriously naive when it comes to the performance of a human being in most situations, and I remembered that the problem of the perception of the satellite's rotation seemingly had been ignored by the slip-stick crowd. They had planned to rotate the doughnut-shaped satellite in order to substitute centrifugal force for the force of gravity. Thus the outer shell of the doughnut would appear to be "down" to anyone inside the thing. Apparently they had not realized that man is at least as sensitive to angular rotation as he is to variations in the pull of gravity. As I figured the problem then, if a man aboard the doughnut moved his head as much as three or four feet outwards from the center of the doughnut, he would have become fairly dizzy! Rather annoying it would have been, too, to have been hit by a wave of nausea every time one sat down in a chair. Also, as I pondered the problem, it became apparent that dust particles and the like would probably show a tendency to move in a direction opposite to the direction of the rotation, and hence pile up against any wall or such that impeded their flight. Using the behavior of the dust particles as a clue, I then climbed atop the table and leapt off. Sure enough, my head felt like a mule had kicked it by the time I landed on the floor. My hypothesis was confirmed. So I am aboard a spaceship: The thought is incredible, but in a strange way comforting. At least now I can postpone worrying about heaven and hell -- and somehow I find the idea of being in a spaceship much more to the liking of a confirmed agnostic. I suppose I owe McCleary an apology -- I should have known he would never have put himself in a position where he would have to teach freshmen all about learning: And, of course, I know who "He" is. Or rather, I know who He isn't, which is something else again. Surely, though, I can no longer think of Him as being human. Whether I should be consoled at this or not, I have no way of telling. I still have no notion of why I am here, however, nor why this alien chose to pick me of all people to pay a visit to His spaceship. What possible use could I be? Surely if He were interested in making contact with the human race, He would have spirited away a politician. After all, that's what politicians are for! Since there has been no effort made to communicate with me, however, I must reluctantly give up any cherished hopes that His purpose is that of making contact with genus homo . Or perhaps He's a galactic scientist of some kind, a biologist of sorts, out gathering specimens. Now, that's a particularly nasty thought. What if He turned out to be a physiologist, interested in cutting me open eventually, to see what makes me tick? Will my innards be smeared over a glass slide for scores of youthful Hims to peer at under a microscope? Brrrr! I don't mind giving my life to Science, but I'd rather do it a little at a time. If you don't mind, I think I'll go do a little repressing for a while. Good God! I should have known it! Destiny will play her little tricks, and all jokes have their cosmic angles. He is a psychologist! Had I given it due consideration, I would have realized that whenever you come across a new species, you worry about behavior first, physiology second. So I have received the ultimate insult -- or the ultimate compliment. I don't know which. I have become a specimen for an alien psychologist! This thought first occurred to me when I awoke after my latest sleep (which was filled, I must admit, with most frightening dreams). It was immediately obvious that something about the room had changed. Almost as once I noticed that one of the walls now had a lever of some kind protruding from it, and to one side of the lever, a small hole in the wall with a container beneath the hole. I wandered over to the lever, inspected it a few moments, then accidentally depressed the thing. At once there came a loud clicking noise, and a protein ball popped out of the hole and fell into the container. For just a moment a frown crossed my brow. This seemed somehow so strangely familiar. Then, all at once, I burst into wild laughter. The room had been changed into a gigantic Skinner Box! For years I had been studying animal learning by putting white rats in a Skinner Box and following the changes in the rats' behavior. The rats had to learn to press the lever in order to get a pellet of food, which was delivered to them through just such an apparatus as is now affixed to the wall of my cell. And now, after all of these years, and after all of the learning studies I had done, to find myself trapped like a rat in a Skinner Box! Perhaps this was hell after all, I told myself, and the Lord High Executioner's admonition to "let the punishment fit the crime" was being followed. Frankly, this sudden turn of events has left me more than a little shaken. cording to theory. It didn't take me long to discover that pressing the lever would give me food some of the time, while at other times all I got was the click and no protein ball. It appears that approximately every twelve hours the thing delivers me a random number of protein balls -- the number has varied from five to fifteen so far. I never know ahead of time how many pellets -- I mean protein balls -- the apparatus will deliver, and it spews them out intermittently. Sometimes I have to press the lever a dozen times or so before it will give me anything, while at other times it gives me one ball for each press. Since I don't have a watch on me, I am never quite sure when the twelve hours have passed, so I stomp over to the lever and press it every few minutes when I think it's getting close to time to be fed. Just like my rats always did. And since the pellets are small and I never get enough of them, occasionally I find myself banging away on the lever with all the compulsion of a stupid animal. But I missed the feeding time once and almost starved to death (so it seemed) before the lever delivered food the next time. About the only consolation to my wounded pride is that at this rate of starvation, I'll lose my bay window in short order. At least He doesn't seem to be fattening me up for the kill. Or maybe he just likes lean meat! I have been promoted. Apparently He in His infinite alien wisdom has decided that I'm intelligent enough to handle the Skinnertype apparatus, so I've been promoted to solving a maze. Gan you picture the irony of the situation? All of the classic Learning Theory methodology is practically being thrown in my face. If only I could communicate with Him! I don't mind being subjected to tests nearly as much as I mind being underestimated. Why, I can solve puzzles hundreds of times more complex than what He's throwing at me. But how can I tell Him? As it turns out, the maze is much like our standard T-mazes, and is not too difficult to learn. It's a rather long one, true, with some # choice points along the way. I spent the better part of half an hour wandering through the thing the first time I found myself in it. Surprisingly enough, I didn't realize the first time out what I was in, so I made no conscious attempt to memorize the correct turns. It wasn't until I reached the final turn and found food waiting for me that I recognized what I was expected to do. The next time through the maze my performance was a good deal better, and I was able to turn in a perfect performance in not too long a time. However, it does not do my ego any good to realize that my own white rats could have learned the maze a little sooner than I did. My "home cage," so to speak, still has the Skinner apparatus in it, but the lever delivers food only occasionally now. I still give it a whirl now and again, but since I'm getting a fairly good supply of food at the end of the maze each time, I don't pay the lever much attention. Now that I am very sure of what is happening to me, quite naturally my thoughts have turned to how I can get out of this situation. Mazes I can solve without too much difficulty, but how to escape apparently is beyond my intellectual capacity. But then, come to think of it, there was precious little chance for my own experimental animals to get out of my clutches. And assuming that I am unable to escape, what then? After He has finished putting me through as many paces as He wishes, where do we go from there? Will He treat me as I treated most of my non-human subjects -- that is, will I get tossed into a jar containing chloroform? "Following the experiment, the animals were sacrificed," as we so euphemistically report in the scientific literature. This doesn't appeal to me much, as you can imagine. Or maybe if I seem particularly bright to Him, He may use me for breeding purposes, to establish a colony of His own. Now, that might have possibilities... Oh, damn Freud anyhow! And damn Him too! I had just gotten the maze well learned when He upped and changed things on me. I stumbled about like a bat in the sunlight for quite some time before I finally got to the goal box. I'm afraid my performance was pretty poor. What He did was just to reverse the whole maze so that it was a mirror image of what it used to be. Took me only two trials to discover the solution. Let Him figure that one out if He's so smart! My performance on the maze reversal must have pleased Him, because now He's added a new complication. And again I suppose I could have predicted the next step if I had been thinking along the right direction. I woke up a few hours ago to find myself in a totally different room. There was nothing whatsoever in the room, but opposite me were two doors in the wall -- one door a pure white, the other jet black. Between me and the doors was a deep pit, filled with water. I didn't like the looks of the situation, for it occured to me right away that He had devised a kind of jumping stand for me. I had to choose which of the doors was open and led to food. The other door would be locked. If I jumped at the wrong door, and found it locked, I'd fall in the water. I needed a bath, that was for sure, but I didn't relish getting it in this fashion. While I stood there watching, I got the shock of my life. I meant it quite literally. The bastard had thought of everything. When I used to run rats on jumping stands, to overcome their reluctance to jump, I used to shock them. He's following exactly the same pattern. The floor in this room is wired but good. I howled and jumped about and showed all the usual anxiety behavior. It took me less than two seconds to come to my senses and make a flying leap at the white door, however. You know something? That water is ice-cold! culations, solved no fewer than # different problems on the jumping stand, and I'm getting sick and tired of it. Once I got angry and just pointed at the correct door -- and got shocked for not going ahead and jumping. I shouted bloody murder, cursing Him at the top of my voice, telling Him if He didn't like my performance, He could damn' well lump it. All He did, of course, was to increase the shock. Frankly, I don't know how much longer I can put up with this. It's not that the work is difficult. If He were giving me half a chance to show my capabilities, I wouldn't mind it. I suppose I've contemplated a thousand different means of escaping, but none of them is worth mentioning. But if I don't get out of here soon, I shall go stark raving mad! For almost an hour after it happened, I sat in this room and just wept. I realize that it is not the style in our culture for a grown man to weep, but there are times when cultural taboos must be forgotten. Again, had I thought much about the sort of experiments He must have had in mind, I most probably could have predicted the next step. Even so, I most likely would have repressed the knowledge. One of the standard problems which any learning psychologist is interested in is this one -- will an animal learn something if you fail to reward him for his performance? There are many theorists, such as Hull and Spence, who believe that reward (or "reinforcement," as they call it) is absolutely necessary for learning to occur. This is mere stuff and nonsense, as anyone with a grain of sense knows, but nonetheless the "reinforcement" theory has been dominant in the field for years now. We fought a hard battle with Spence and Hull, and actually had them with their backs to the wall at one point, when suddenly they came up with the concept of "secondary reinforcement." That is, anything associated with a reward takes on the ability to act as a reward itself. For example, the mere sight of food would become a reward in and of itself -- almost as much a reward, in fact, as is the eating of the food. The sight of food, indeed! But nonetheless, it saved their theories for the moment. For the past five years now, I have been trying to design an experiment that would show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sight of a reward was not sufficient for learning to take place. And now look at what has happened to me! I'm sure that He must lean towards Hull and Spence in His theorizing, for earlier today, when I found myself in the jumping stand room, instead of being rewarded with my usual protein balls when I made the correct jump, I -- I'm sorry, but it is difficult to write about even now. For when I made the correct jump and the door opened and I started towards the food trough, I found it had been replaced with a photograph. A calendar photograph. You know the one. Her name, I think, is Monroe. I sat on the floor and cried. For five whole years I have been attacking the validity of the secondary reinforcement theory, and now I find myself giving Him evidence that the theory is correct! For I cannot help "learning" which of the doors is the correct one to jump through. I refuse to stand on the apparatus and have the life shocked out of me, and I refuse to pick the wrong door all the time and get an icy bath time after time. It isn't fair! For He will doubtless put it all down to the fact that the mere sight of the photograph is functioning as a reward, and that I am learning the problems merely to be able to see Miss What's-hername in her bare skin ! I can just see Him now, sitting somewhere else in this spaceship, gathering in all the data I am giving Him, plotting all kinds of learning curves, chortling to Himself because I am confirming all of His pet theories. I just wish... Almost an hour has gone by since I wrote the above section. It seems longer than that, but surely it's been only an hour. And I have spent the time deep in thought. For I have discovered a way out of this place, I think. The question is, dare I do it? I was in the midst of writing that paragraph about His sitting and chortling and confirming His theories, when it suddenly struck me that theories are born of the equipment that one uses. This has probably been true throughout the history of all science, but perhaps most true of all in psychology. If Skinner had never invented his blasted box, if the maze and the jumping stand had not been developed, we probably would have entirely different theories of learning today than we now have. For if nothing else, the type of equipment that one uses drastically reduces the type of behavior that one's subjects can show, and one's theories have to account only for the type of behavior that appears in the laboratories. It follows from this also that any two cultures that devise the same sort of experimental procedures will come up with almost identical theories. Keeping all of this in mind, it's not hard for me to believe that He is an iron-clad reinforcement theorist, for He uses all of the various paraphernalia that they use, and uses it in exactly the same way. My means of escape is therefore obvious. He expects from me confirmation of all His pet theories. Well, he won't get it any more! I know all of His theories backwards and forwards, and this means I know how to give Him results that will tear His theories right smack in half! I can almost predict the results. What does any learning theorist do with an animal that won't behave properly, that refuses to give the results that are predicted? One gets rid of the beast, quite naturally. For one wishes to use only healthy, normal animals in one's work, and any animal that gives "unusual" results is removed from the study but quickly. After all, if it doesn't perform as expected, it must be sick, abnormal, or aberrant in one way or another... There is no guarantee, of course, what method He will employ to dispose of my now annoying presence. Will He "sacrifice" me? Or will He just return me to the "permanent colony"? I cannot say. I know only that I will be free from what is now an intolerable situation. Just wait until He looks at His results from now on! TO: Director, Bureau of Science Thlan, my friend, this will be an informal missive. I will send the official report along later, but I wanted to give you my subjective impressions first. The work with the newly discovered species is, for the moment, at a standstill. Things went exceedingly well at first. We picked what seemed to be a normal, healthy animal and smattered it into our standard test apparatus. I may have told you that this new species seemed quite identical to our usual laboratory animals, so we included a couple of the "toys" that our home animals seem so fond of -- thin pieces of material made from woodpulp and a tiny stick of graphite. Imagine our surprise, and our pleasure, when this new specimen made exactly the same use of the materials as have all of our home colony specimens. Could it be that there are certain innate behavior patterns to be found throughout the universe in the lower species? Well, I merely pose the question. The answer is of little importance to a Learning Theorist. Your friend Verpk keeps insisting that the use of these "toys" may have some deeper meaning to it, and that perhaps we should investigate further. At his insistence, then, I include with this informal missive the materials used by our first subject. In my opinion, Verpk is guilty of gross anthropomorphism, and I wish to have nothing further to do with the question. However, this behavior did give us hope that our newly discovered colony would yield subjects whose performances would be exactly in accordance with standard theory. And, in truth, this is exactly what seemed to be the case. The animal solved the Bfian Box problem in short order, yielding as beautiful data has I have ever seen. We then shifted it to maze, maze-reversal and jumping stand problems, and the results could not have confirmed our theories better had we rigged the data. However, when we switched the animal to secondary reinforcement problems, it seemed to undergo a strange sort of change. No longer was its performance up to par. In fact, at times it seemed to go quite berserk. For part of the experiment, it would perform superbly. But then, just as it seemed to be solving whatever problem we set it to, its behavior would subtly change into patterns that obviously could not come from a normal specimen. It got worse and worse, until its behavior departed radically from that which our theories predicted. Naturally, we knew then that something had happened to the animal, for our theories are based upon thousands of experiments with similar subjects, and hence our theories must be right. But our theories hold only for normal subjects, and for normal species, so it soon became apparent to us that we had stumbled upon some abnormal type of animal. Upon due consideration, we returned the subject to its home colony. However, we also voted almost unanimously to request from you permission to take steps to destroy the complete colony. It is obviously of little scientific use to us, and stands as a potential danger that we must take adequate steps against. Since all colonies are under your protection, we therefore request permission to destroy it. I must report, by the way, that Verpk's vote was the only one which was cast against this procedure. He has some silly notion that one should study behavior as one finds it. Frankly, I cannot understand why you have seen fit to saddle me with him on this expedition, but perhaps you have your reasons. Verpk's vote notwithstanding, however, the rest of us are of the considered opinion that this whole new colony must be destroyed, and quickly. For it is obviously diseased or some such -- as reference to our theories has proven. And should it by some chance come in contact with our other colonies, and infect our other animals with whatever disease or aberration it has, we would never be able to predict their behavior again. I need not carry the argument further, I think. May we have your permission to destroy the colony as soon as possible, then, so that we may search out yet other colonies and test our theories against other healthy animals? For it is only in this fashion that science progresses. Respectfully yours, the skin. # -- Beryllium, carbon, sulfur, tritium, # forms of phosphorus. # -- Audible radio waves generated by lightning. # -- U#, plutonium made from U#, thorium made into U#. # -- Anti blood-clotting agent. # -- Paths followed by streams of charged particles from the sun. # -- Tearing apart stable molecules by heat, interaction with light or chemical reactions. # -- # F. #I -- Sharp temperature changes in the ocean. # -- Nitrogen dioxide; hydrocarbons. # -- Yellow, variable, supergiant. # -- Ultimate heat death of the universe. # -- Point at which nervous impulses pass from one neuron to another. Meet the men who can make even an executioner seem charming. But when it's all in a day's work, who can blame them? Illustrated by Ed Emsh this life we have here. I'm a worker, not a leisure-crowded man BY with a zip-car who can use these big roads the way they were meant Been in some phase of that work for about fifty years. And I'd say we're a helluva lot more efficient at it today than we used to be. It's not so much new methods, though that helps, as it is a state of mind. The way you look at a thing is the deciding vote on almost any question, don't you think? Well, we used to lay 'em all out nice and straight, and take some of 'em in if we thought they had a chance, and patch up the rig if possible, and take down numbers and names and make a man-sized incident of the whole proceedings. As you can see, that took time, was inefficient, and held up the arterial flow, as you might say, a good deal. Now, what do we do today? Say, just let me give you a run-down on a little job we had this morning, and maybe that'll explain the service. As I said before, my job is clearance. Without me these record traffic flow movements we have today wouldn't be possible, and excuse me, I'm not bragging. Sure, I'm proud of my job, just as a plumber might be, or any other honest union worker who's dealing in an important commodity or service and doing it right and getting honest pay, and not having to strain to do it. I guess you might say my commodity is speed. My job is clearance, as I believe I said before. Anyway we were sitting around the station this morning, the oncrew was, watching the board, playing the usual cards, passing the usual ribs, swapping the usual tales. The offcrew was upstairs sponging their boots, cleaning up, getting ready for prayers and bed. Things had hardly settled down when the board came up with our number and the spot we were to go to. We weren't excited like those firemen are expected to get everytime, because the board comes up with our number, on the average, about twenty-five times a day. And you just don't get excited about your work that many times a day, dayin-day-out, unless you're crazy. We loaded into the big yellow clearance rig, which is about the most efficient vehicle of its kind yet devised, and fed it the position we were expected to go to. When we press the right numbers and road names, a spot of light formed in the brains of the vehicle and soon appears on a sensitized map of the county where we operate. That spot of light marks the position of our job. And since all the alarms were already on out there automatically, our rig would home in on the sound without a bit of trouble. I may as well tell you now we call our rig Big Soup. Now don't get the idea we're sentimental in our crews, but still it just seems natural to name our rigs, since we're with them so much, and I guess we do get attached to them, like a crew for a ship, sort of. Well, the Big Soup went on out this morning in a most routine way, and we were all feeling routine and sort of yawnish, because it was rather early, and we'd had a very hard day yesterday. A lot of calls, I mean. When we pulled up to the spot, it looked like a very usual job, and it was, except for one thing that made it a little unusual, but not very unusual, and I'll tell you about that after awhile, if I don't forget it. I let down the front end takeups, Jug let down the rear end takeups, and Tanks and John were each operating one of the sides. Jake, the senior clearance man, was holding Big Soup on to the spot and moving her a little whenever necessary to do the job. You see, we're a standard five-man crew. And Big Soup looked something like a great ripe pumpkin now laid down in four sections on the highway, with a big pot in the middle brewing the stew. The four sections probing out over the pavement and feeling along the embankments were like big vacuum cleaners whisking whatever loose things they came in contact with into the pot. After awhile we had the job cleaned up except for a little shovel work caused by rough ground affecting the efficiency of the takeups, and we all helped on that, even Jake, who I'd say is about the best crew leader I've ever worked with. We cleaned things all up fine, sectioned the Big Soup up into her usual globe-on-wheels condition, and then came on back to sponge our boots, and watch the board between jobs, and play a little cards, naturally. Oh, we horsed around a bit too, you know the way a closeknit crew will. Kidded each other about our work, our wives, big taxes, mothers-in-law, etc. And Jake, of course, had to make out the reports according to the number plates involved and notify the people most concerned and have the cups for the burial ready when they should arrive. And he had to have the contents of Big Soup assayed for metal and make a report on that before it could be dumped in the unit mix for shipment to the big steel mills. I'll say right now I wouldn't be a crew leader for the little extra that's in it, though I will say I'm pretty proud of my work and I think it's important what I'm doing to keep the big roads clear. And now you want to know what was unusual about this job this morning, but not very unusual, that I said I'd tell you about if I didn't forget it. Well, it was about a burial cup. You see, in our work we just melt everything together as we go, don't have time for anything else you might say, and just dip out a cup of the mixture for decent burial when required. Usually we only dip two cups, one to each of the next-of-kin of the two parties involved. But I have seen instances, in these multiple affairs, usually caused by fog, where we might have to dip as many as twenty cups, and that takes steel! Because it's mostly metal, after all, the way we do it. I suppose it is a comfort to the bereaved to know that the old decencies have at least been nodded at. -- But I do run on. -- You see, when one party, a woman, came for the burial cup this morning she just accepted it in the usual way and said she'd see to it that friend husband got a decent plot, which was, she said, the very least she could do, though God knew when she would ever be able to afford another zip-car. But the other party, a man, put up quite a fuss when he came for his cup, because we'd slouched our job, he said. Seems his wife's old lady, his mother-in-law you might say, at the incident had somehow got over an embankment and out into a cornfield and had struggled home with only a broken hip to show for it. He wanted to know if we wanted to come after her, since by rights he felt that she should have been vacuumed up too and in the soup, since she was out there cluttering up the arteries, or had been. But we said gosh no! we couldn't do that, it wasn't any part of our job to do that, though if she'd been in the way at the time of the clean-up we'd certainly have vacuumed her. We finally convinced him he should take his cup of the wife and kids and the family zipcar on home for decent burial and quit such unseemly fuss. As you can see, we can't afford to get mixed up in any family sentiment in our job. And most people don't expect it nowadays anyway. Our job is just to vacuum up the bodies and broken zip-cars as fast as we can after a wreck on the highway and keep the big lanes clear. It's a fair job, we got a union, and it's considered priority work. Heck, the young guys even get deferred in (Continued from page #) into action. "But I'm not." A new thought struck him. "The Rumanian -- Grigorescu. Was he part of the illusion too?" "No," Hadafield said. The esper glanced up. "He's real. He was just playing along; he knew what was going on here." "Rumania's free," Nourse said. "We've been in contact with them for months, through Hadafield. We can hide there, for a while. We're building a video transmitter in Canada, and we hope to relay our programs through all of America. The barriers are going to come down, John. It may take ten years, but it'll happen -- and there'll be a free and united world once again. The first blow was struck tonight The people saw our show; they're reading our handbills. They're starting to wonder." Amory stood up. He was a trifle unsteady on his legs. "Maybe," he said, "we'll need to bring Cargh back some day -- to stun the world into action. We may need to trump up a common enemy to unite us all. I hope not, though." He shook his head. "But now we'll have to hide. We can't stay here. Security'll be on our tails any minute." "Did they follow you here?" Nourse asked. "Yes. But the local banditti exterminated them." The whirring of a copter's vanes was audible overhead. "Here's Kyman," Beckett said. "We can leave now. And in three days we'll be in Europe." Amory nodded. "Yes," he said. (Continued from page #) Lewis jumped under the wheel of the jeep, slammed it into gear and they headed down the concrete strip and straight for the gap in the fence. "What happened to Cardoza?" Lewis asked. Brogarth said from the back seat, "He said he didn't want to be labeled a security risk and be executed for sabotage." Nemerov was drunk and he kept mumbling incoherently, and sometimes giving out with bits and pieces of half remembered poetry. About a mile out in the sand and next to a wall of sandstone, they waited for any signs of pursuit. There were none. They rested there until morning, only an hour and a half away, and when they looked back toward the location of the Project, they could see nothing that looked any different from sand, brush, rocks and red sandstone. "Perfect camouflage," Nemerov said as the jeep started up again. "You could walk within fifty feet of that fence and never know there was any Project there." Later a hot wind came up and they ran into the Monster lying dead on its face with dust devils dancing over it. An old prospector leading a burro came around the wall of sandstone and looked at the Monster, then at the occupants of the jeep. "Howdy, folks," he said. "Hello," Lewis said. "We're lost. Where are we and which way do we go to get to civilization?" "What's that thing?" the prospector asked, looking at the Monster. "A scientific experiment that was never finished," Lewis said. "What I figured," the prospector said. "You scientists out here always up to something." He pointed to the right. "Keep going that way and you'll find a narrow road. Follow it and you'll hit the middle of the valley and a highway right into the Chocolate Mountains." Lewis knew where he was. The Chocolate Mountains walled off the rushing Colorado River from the Imperial Valley and Los Angeles farther on. "Thanks," Lewis said. "How's the war going these days?" Betty asked. The prospector scratched his head and replaced his felt hat. He looked at them oddly. "You must have been holed up in the hills a long time, Miss. There ain't been any war for two years. They started one, but the first couple of days scared everybody too much and they called the whole thing off. Where you folks been anyways, to the Moon?" "Practically," Lewis said. As the jeep moved away, Nemerov turned and looked back at the Monster and the old prospector who still stood there gazing at it. " 'My name,' " Nemerov said, " 'is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.' " E N D I just read Dave E. Fisher's amusof IF and -- see here, I'm tired of that stupid phrase, "the birds and the bees" which is supposed to represent "the facts of life" or the beginnings of the sex instruction of the young. There was a picture of the same title recently starring George Gobel and there are constant references to the birds and bees on TV and in print. Well for heaven's sake, has anyone ever tried to explain sex by talking about the birds and the bees? What have the birds and the bees to do with it? The bee travels to one flower and picks up pollen from the stamens. The pollen contains the male sex cells of the plant. The bee then travels to another flower (of the same species) and the pollen brushes off onto the pistil, which contains the female sex cells of the plant. The pollen particle sends a process down the length of the pistil and eventually the male sex cell and the female sex cell unite to form a fertilized cell which developes into a seed and, eventually, into a new plant (of the same species) . Now in the human being the male cells must also be brought into contact with the female sex cell, but we don't rely on bees to do it for us. However, I will leave out the gory details, even though the poor simps who think the birds and the bees have something to do with it need the instruction badly. And what's this about "Y's" article on guided missiles? For years now, the United States has been calling for international inspection on armaments and the Soviet Union has been refusing. Do you mean that the Soviet Union has been right all along and that we have been foolish or hypocritical or both? Good heavens, I find this unsettling. -- Isaac Asimov Boston, Mass. Neither fools nor hypocrites Isaac . "Y" points out that it's so darned easy to hide them and change them from peaceful to warlike purposes , that ostensibly we'd not have any proof that all armaments were being inspected , nor that the peaceful ones we were allowed to see wouldn't be turned against us. Among science fiction writers it is generally accepted that interstellar travel by hyperspatial shortcuts is possible because distances are a lot less that way. On closer inspection this sounds like circular reasoning -- which it is -- but I have never read a story with an explanation of the theory behind hyperspatial interstellar travel, which didn't, in the final analysis, boil down to the one just mentioned. Some writers, I admit, explain that our space is so kinky that it is possible to travel between points light-years apart by only going nominal distances in hyperspace; but that still doesn't explain the kinks. Now I suggest that although it is impossible for anything to travel any distance in ordinary space without diminution of intensity and the # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania passage of time. Thought can and does do it. Since the intensity of parapsychological phenomena is completely independent of the distance between cause and effect. Thought must travel through the kinks of hyperspace. And if thought can do it, why not interstellar spaceships? At least that's as close as I can get to explaining this neat little trick that authors never quite do explain. -- A. D. Barnhart Cleveland, Ohio I'm pretty sick of the time machine. All the mechanical devices etc. that authors dream up as a gimmick seem to require enormous flows of energy, plenty of electronic gadgetry etc., all of which leads the poor slob who invents it into some sort of trouble. Now I find that the time machine I carry around on my shoulders (and I have been carrying it for some "time" now) functions with the small amount of energy contained in three square meals a day. It seems to require no more energy for me to "go back" twenty years in time than it requires to "go back" twenty minutes; this movement seems to be instantaneous and without effort. It is my considered opinion that the more stories and articles that are written about time travel, the longer it will take for the public to realize that their own minds are the only time machines that they will ever know, or that will ever be known. -- K. V. Fletcher Beaumont, Texas continued from Back Cover w msr ntau yoBKtncjm   # -- Brings You Any of These Great Books fcSsr. tiQX X? ' x ,-fc iirW ,  Values Up to # in Publishers' Editions! Each Book Packed from Cover to Cover with about the first A-Bomb... written before it was invented ! 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Take your choice of any # of the new books described here -- at only books for joining ; the other is your first selection. Mail coupon bight now to: Dept. IFI #, Garden City, N. Y. Dept. IF-#, Garden City, N. Y. I Please rush me the # books checked below, as my gift books and first selec tion. Bill me only I for all three (plus few cents shipping charges), and  enroll me as a member of the Science-Fiction Book Club. Every month send I me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come." so that I may decide  whether or not I wish to receive the coming selection described therein. For J each book I accept. I will pay only I plus shipping. I do not have to take  a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. s books in # days, pay nothing, and this membership will be cancelled! J  Astounding Science-Fiction  End of Eternity  Anthology D Omnibus of ScienceFiction   Best S-F Stories and Novels  Satellite! !  Dragon in the Sea  Treasury of S-F Classics j Name (Please Print) J Address   City Zone t State  Book Club, # Bond St... Toronto #'. Otter good in L r . S. A. A: Canada only.  L --  --  -- J fictiot with ; introduce ; r.ooK )ririgi n  yOU the V ftcti on t ion of tv I A tense novelette about strange invasion, by J. F. Bone Feeling of Power Out from the Sun of IF IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction lovers all over America, here is a volume of exceptional interest -- nine long stories by Charles Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce Walton and Robert F. Young -- devoted to a wide diversity of science fiction entertainment. The printing will again be a small one, so ask your news dealer right now to save you a copy. Or, if you prefer, send fifty cents to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and a copy will be mailed to you upon publication, which shall be January I #th.  Editor's  Mail has been piling up nicely on the editorial desk in response to our request for information about the readers. Judging by a cross section, (this means picking letters out of the heap at random) we've got readers from # to # -- all with stars in their eyes. Fields of endeavor now include musicians, salesmen, lab technicians, pharmacists, test pilots, actors and one prisoner, who writes that he "likes to escape" with science fiction! To find out why people read science fiction read some of their letters in Hue and Cry... and if you haven't already done it, why not drop us a vital statistic or two to help swell the mail? Following through on our practice of letting readers in on just what authors do, we corralled the "master" who's the lead-off man in this issue. Seems as though all people ("without exception", he claims) who meet Isaac Asimov for the first time are startled to find him clean shaven (except, of course for five o'clock shadow). For some reason an immediate picture of a patriarchal type with a long white beard (or at any rate a dignified Van Dyke) rises unbidden when his name is mentioned. Isaac has been writing science fiction for # years; but insists he started as a teen-ager -- he's still not that old. The whole thing is even more demoralizing when some great muscular hunk of humanity boasts that he was born in the same year that Asimov's first story appeared! Of course, the resounding title of Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University, plus the fact that the man has several learned textbooks to his credit, may have a great deal to do with this modern fable of "old man Asimov". A recent study concerning the aggressive tendencies of authors held at U.G.L.A., showed that there was a definite correlation between personal aggressiveness and the intensity of violence in the fiction these men wrote. The least aggressive people wrote the most consistently violent tales, while those with aggressive natures were much more variable. Interesting sidelight on the study was the fact that authors tended to write of more intense violence under stress from financial problems! Hydroponic tanks for feeding the crew of a spaceship may be outmoded before the first one is ever installed! Scientists have discovered that green plants secrete a deadly carbon monoxide gas when injured. And since no one knows just what in space could or would cause such "injury", researchers feel that plants used as a source of food and oxygen during space flight might poison the spaceship's entire air supply. By this time the world is aware that the Russians rushed their satellite into space not so much for ganda. Now the second "sputnik" is about due, and the Soviets promise it will carry much more instrumentation than "sputnik the first". The second moon will rise to # miles and speed at # miles per hour, same as the first, but will weigh # or # pounds, according to Dr. Blagonravov, who helped develop the Russian satellite program. It will broadcast intensity of cosmic rays, temperature and air density, whereas the first "moon" broadcast only temperature. Whether "sputnik the second" gets up there before the first American satellite does or not, we'll hold that Vanguard sends up a better "mouse trap", and if you are looking for real estate on the moon, don't get it from the Ruskies. The first motion picture visualization of Project Vanguard, the launching and tracking of the first American satellite, is being distributed. The four minute animated film is titled A Moon is Born and is shown in color and black and white. It includes the depiction of the Minitrack and Moonwatch phases of the project as well as the prediction of the moon's future positions. If your club, civic group or school is interested in showing this film, drop us a line and we'll send you the name and address of the distributor. We've had so many blasts, both pro and con, about our quiz, that we decided to explain our stand. Biggest noise against it comes from those who feel that the page could be used for more stories. Those in favor, feel they're learning something -- and to a man they're pretty proud when they come up with a good score. Now, a good one page story is as rare as the Penny Black of stamp collecting; and padding a story so it will run over for an extra page is against all our editorial instincts. So why not give people a chance to test themselves on what they know about the world around them? Last minute notes... The byline John Sentry on this issue's The Barbarians is a pen name for what well known science-fiction writer?... Don't forget The Second World of IF! If you haven't ordered one already, hang around your newsstand and grab it the minute it arrives. One hundred and sixty pages of solid entertainment without a single "wasted" page... Look for an exciting new yarn by Frank Riley called A Question of Identity in our April issue -- an entirely new theme in science fiction and definitely one to which we can look forward... And while we're looking ahead, by all means look for Arthur G. Clarke's newest, The Songs of Distant Earth , in the June issue. -- ekw MpSf) y iggss WjM r Sal mKflH Hn) g aggSill life A Wmi Graphitics was a startlingly new idea! So revolutionary, in fact , it rocked the top army brass . Imagine computing -- without a computer! dealing with the men in authority on long-embattled Earth. He was only a civilian but he originated programming patterns that resulted in self-directing war computers of the highest sort. Generals consequently listened to him. Heads of congressional committees, too. There was one of each in the special lounge of New Pentagon. General Weider was space-burnt and had a small mouth puckered almost into a cypher. Congressman Brant was smooth-cheeked and clear-eyed. He smoked Denebian tobacco with the air of one whose patriotism was so notorious, he could be allowed such liberties. Shuman, tall, distinguished and programmer-first-class, faced them fearlessly. He said, "This, gentlemen, is Ladislas Aub." "The one with the unusual gift that you discovered quite by accident," said Congressman Brant, placidly. "Ah." He inspected the little man with the egg-bald head with amiable curiosity. The little man, in return, twisted the fingers of his hands anxiously. He had never been near such great men before. He was only an aging low-grade Technician who had long ago failed all tests designed to smoke out the gifted ones among mankind and had settled into the rut of unskilled labor. There was just this hobby of his that the great programmer had found out about and was now making such a frightening fuss over. General Weider said, "I find this atmosphere of mystery childish." "You won't in a moment," said Shuman. "This is not something we can leak to the first-comer. -- Aub!" There was something imperative about his manner of biting off that one-syllable name, but then he was a great Programmer speaking to a mere Technician. "Aub! How much is nine times seven?" Aub hesitated a moment, his pale eyes glimmered with a feeble anxiety. "Sixty-three," he said. Congressman Brant lifted his eyebrows. "Is that right?" "Check it for yourself, congressman." The congressman took out his pocket computer, nudged the milled edges twice, looked at its face as it lay there in the palm of his hand and put it back. He said, "Is this the gift you brought us here to demonstrate. An illusionist?" "More than that, sir. Aub has memorized a few operations and with them he computes on paper." "A paper computer?" said the general. He looked pained. "No, sir," said Shuman, patiently. "Not a paper computer. Simply a sheet of paper. General, would you be so kind as to suggest a number?" "Seventeen," said the general. "And you, congressman?" "Twenty-three." "Good! Aub, multiply those numbers and please show the gentlemen your manner of doing it." "Yes, programmer," said Aub, ducking his head. He fished a small pad out of one shirt pocket and an artist's hairline stylus out the other." His forehead corrugated as he made painstaking marks on the paper. General Weider interrupted him sharply. "Let's see that." Aub passed him the paper, and Weider said, "Well, it looks like the figure seventeen." Congressman Brant nodded and said, "So it does, but I suppose anyone can copy figures off a computer. I think I could make a passable seventeen myself, even without practice." "If you will let Aub continue, gentlemen," said Shuman without heat. Aub continued, his hand trembling a little. Finally, he said in a low voice, "The answer is three hundred and ninety-one." Congressman Brant took out his computer a second time and flicked it, "By Godfrey, so it is. How did he guess?" "No guess, congressman," said Shuman. "He computed that result. He did it on this sheet of paper." "Humbug," said the general, impatiently. "A computer is one thing and marks on paper are another." "Explain, Aub," said Shuman. "Yes, programmer. -- Well, gentlemen, I write down seventeen and just underneath it, I write twentythree. Next, I say to myself: seven times three -- " The congressman interrupted smoothly, "Now, Aub, the problem is seventeen times twenty-three." "Yes, I know," said the little technician earnestly, "but I start by saying seven times three because that's the way it works. Now seven times three is twenty-one." "And how do you know that?" asked the congressman. "I just remember it. It's always twenty-one on the computer. I've checked it any number of times." "That doesn't mean it always will be, though, does it?" said the congressman. "Maybe not," stammered Aub. "I'm not a mathematician. But I always get the right answers, you see." " G  on." "Seven times three is twenty-one, so I write down twenty-one. Then one times three is three, so I write down a three under the two of twenty-one." "Why under the two?" asked Congressman Brant at once. "Because -- " Aub looked helplessly at his superior for support. "It's difficult to explain." Shuman said, "If you will accept his work for the moment, we can leave the details for the mathematicians." Brant subsided. Aub said, "Three plus two makes five, you see, so the twenty-one becomes a fifty-one. Now you let that go for a while and start fresh. You multiply seven and two, that's fourteen, and one and two, that's two. Put them down like this and it adds up to thirty-four. Now if you put the thirty-four under the fifty-one this way and add them, you get three hundred and ninety-one and that's the answer." There was an instant's silence and then General Weider said, "I don't believe it. He goes through this rigmarole and makes up numbers and multiplies and adds them this way and that, but I don't believe it. It's too complicated to be anything but hornswoggling." "Oh, no, sir," said Aub in a sweat. "It only seems complicated because you're not used to it. Actually, the rules are quite simple and will work for any numbers." "Any numbers, eh?" said the general. "Come then." He took out his own computer (a severely-styled GI model) and struck it at random. Make a five, seven, three, eight on the paper. That's five thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight." "Yes, sir," said Aub, taking a new sheet of paper. "Now," (more punching of his computer), "seven two three nine. Seven thousand two hundred and thirty-nine." "Yes, sir." "And now multiply those two." "It will take some time," quavered Aub. "Take the time," said the general. "Go ahead, Aub," said Shuman, crisply. Aub set to work, bending low. He took another sheet of paper and another. The general took out his watch finally and stared at it. "Are you through with your magic-making, technician?" "I'm almost done, sir. Here it dred and thirty-seven thousand, three hundred and eighttwo." He showed the scrawled figures of the result. General Weider smiled bitterly. He pushed the multiplication contact on his computer and let the numbers whirl to a halt. And then he stared and said in a surprised squeak. "Great Galaxy, the fella's right." The President of the Terrestrial Federation had grown haggard in office and, in private, he allowed a look of settled melancholy to appear on his sensitive features. The Denebian war, after its early start of vast movement and great popularity, had trickled down into a sordid matter of maneuver and counter-maneuver, with discontent rising steadily on Earth. Possibly, it was rising on Deneb, too. And now Congressman Brant, head of the important Committee on Military Appropriations was cheerfully and smoothly spending his half-hour appointment spouting nonsense. "Computing without a computer," said the president, impatiently, "is a contradiction in terms." "Computing," said the congressman, "is only a system for handling data. A machine might d it, or the human brain might. Let me give you an example." And, using the new skills he had learned, he worked out sums and products until the president, despite himself, grew interested. "Does this always work?" "Every time, Mr. President. It is foolproof." "Is it hard to learn?" "It took me a week to get the real hang of it. I think you could do better." "Well," said the president, considering, "it's an interesting parlor game, but what is the use of it?" "What is the use of a new-born baby, Mr. President? At the moment, there is no use, but don't you see that this points the way toward liberation from the machine. Consider, Mr. President," the congressman rose and his deep voice automatically took on some of the cadences he used in public debate, "that the Denebian was is a war of computer against computer. Their computers forge an impenetrable shield of counter-missiles against our missiles, and ours forge one against theirs. If we advance the efficiency of our computers, so do they theirs, and for five years a precarious and profitless balance has existed. "Now we have in our hands a method for going beyond the computer, leap-frogging it, passing through it.We will combine the mechanics of computation with human thought ; we will have the equivalent of intelligent computers ; what the consequences will be in detail but they will be incalculable. And if Deneb beats us to the punch, they may be catastrophic." The president said, troubled, "What would you have me do?" "Put the power of the administration behind the establishment of a secret project on human computation. Call it Project Number, if you like. I can vouch for my committee, but I will need the administration behind me." "But how far can human computation go?" "There is no limit. According to Programmer Shuman, who first introduced me to this discovery -- " "I've heard of Shuman, of course." "Yes. Well, Dr. Shuman tells me that in theory there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process." The president considered that. He said, "If Shuman says this, I am inclined to believe him, -- in theory. But, in practice, how can anyone know how a computer works?" Brant laughed genially. "Well, Mr. President, I asked the same question. It seems that at one time, computers were designed directly by human beings. Those were simple computers of course; this being before the time of the rational use of computers to design more advanced computers had been established." "Yes, yes. Go on." "Technician Aub apparently had, as his hobby, the reconstruction of some of these ancient devices and in so doing he studied the details of their workings and found he could imitate them. The multiplication I just performed for you is an imitation of the workings of a computer." "Amazing!" The congressman coughed gently, "If I may make another point, Mr. President -- The further we can develop this thing, the more we can divert our Federal effort from computer production and computer maintenance. As the human brain takes over, more of our energy can be directed into peace-time pursuits and the impingement of war on the ordinary man will be less. This will be most advantageous for the party in power, of course." "Ah," said the president, "I see your point. Well, sit down, congressman, sit down. I want some time to think about this. -- But meanwhile, show me that multiplication trick again. Let's see if I can't catch the point of it." did not try to hurry matters. Loesser was conservative, very conservative, and liked to deal with computers as his father and grandfather had. Still, he controlled the West European computer combine and if he could be persuaded to join Project Number in full enthusiasm, a great deal would have been accomplished. But Loesser was holding back. He said, "I'm not sure I like the idea of relaxing our hold on computers. The human mind is a capricious thing. The computer will give the same answer to the same problem each time. What guarantee have we that the human mind will do the same?" "The human mind, Computer Loesser, only manipulates fact. It doesn't matter whether the human mind or a machine does it. They are just tools." "Yes, yes. I've gone over your ingenious demonstration that the mind can duplicate the computer but it seems to me a little in the air. I'll grant the theory but what reason have we for thinking that theory can be converted to practice?" "I think we have reason, sir. After all, computers have not always existed. The cavemen with their triremes, stone axes and railroads had no computers." "And possibly they did not compute." "You know better than that. Even the building of a railroad or a ziggurat called for some computing, and that must have been without computers as we know them." "Do you suggest they computed in the fashion you demonstrate?" "Probably not. After all, this method -- we call it 'graphitics', by the way, from the old European word 'grapho' meaning 'to write' -- is developed from the computers themselves so it cannot have antedated them. Still, the cavemen must have had some method, eh?" "Lost arts! If you're going to talk about lost arts -- " "No, no. I'm not a lost art enthusiast, though I don't say there may not be some. After all, man was eating grain before hydroponics and if the primitives ate grain, they must have grown them in soil. What else could they have done?" "I don't know, but I'll believe in soil-growing when I see someone gro grain in soil. And I'll believe in making fire by rubbing two pieces of flint together when I see that, too." Shuman grew placating. "Well, let's stick to graphitics. It's just part of the process of etherealization. Transportation by means of bulky contrivances is giving way to direct mass-transference. Communications devices become less massive and more efficient constantly. For that matter, compare your pocket computer with the massive jobs of a thousand years ago. Why not, then, the last step of doing away with computers altogether? Come, sir, Project Number is a going concern; progress is already headlong. But we want your help. If patriotism doesn't move you, consider the intellectual adventure involved." Loesser said, skeptically, "What progress? What can you do beyond multiplication? Can you integrate a transcendental function?" "In time, sir. In time. In the last month I have learned to handle division. I can determine, and correctly, integral quotients and decimal quotients." "Decipial quotients? To how many places?" Programmer Shuman tried to keep his tone casual. "Any number!" Loesser's lower jaw dropped. "Without a computer?" "Set me a problem?" "Divide twenty-seven by thirteen? Take it to six places." Five minutes later, Shuman said, "Two point oh seven six nine two three." Loesser checked it. "Well, now, that's amazing. Multiplication didn't impress me too much because it involved integers after all, and I thought trick manipulation might do it. But decimals -- " "And that is not all. There is a new development that is, so far, top secret and which, strictly speaking, I ought not to mention. Still -- We may have made a breakthrough on the square root front." "Square roots?" "It involves some tricky points and we haven't licked the bugs yet, but Technician Aub, the man who invented the science and who has an amazing intuition in connection with it, maintains he has the problem almost solved. And he is only a technician. A man like yourself, a trained and talented mathematician ought to have no difficulty." "Square roots," muttered Loesser, attracted. "Cube roots, too. Are you with us?" Loesser's hand thrust out suddenly, "Count me in." General Weider stumped his way back and forth at the head of the room and addressed his listeners after the fashion of a savage teacher facing a group of recalcitrant students. It made no difference to the general that they were the civilian scientists heading Project Number. The general was the over-all head, and he so considered himself at every waking moment. He said, "Now square roots are all fine. I can't do them myself and I don't understand the methods, but they're fine. Still, the project will not be side-tracked into what some of you call the fundamentals. You can play with graphitics any way you want to after the war is over, but right now we have specific and very practical problems to solve." In a far corner, Technician Aub listened with painful attention. He was no longer a technician, of course, having been relieved of his duties and assigned to the project, with a fine-sounding title and good pay. But, of course, the social distinction remained and the highlyplaced scientific leaders could never bring themselves to admit him to their ranks on a footing of equality. Nor did he, himself, wish it. He was as uncomfortable with them as they with him. The general was saying, "Our goal is a simple one, gentlemen ; the replacement of the computer. A ship that can navigate space without a computer on board can be constructed in one-fifth the time and at one-tenth the expense of a computer-laden ship. We could build fleets five times, ten times as great as Deneb could if we could but eliminate the computer. "And I see something even beyond this. It may be fantastic now ; a mere dream; but in the future I see the manned missile!" There was an instant murmur from the audience. The general drove on. "At the present time, our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large so they can meet the changing nature of anti-missile defenses in an unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal and missile warfare is coming to a dead end; for the enemy, fortunately, as well as for ourselves. "On the other hand, a missile (Continued on page #) The aliens wooed Earth with gifts, love, patience and peace. Who could resist them? After all, no one shoots Santa Claus! Illustrated by Ed Emsh precision instrument that exuded a faint odor of gun oil and powder solvent. It was a perfect specimen of the gunsmith's art, a semi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight -- a precisely engineered tool that could hurl death with pinpoint accuracy for better than half a mile. Daniel Matson eyed the weapon to the narrow canyon of the street with bleak gray eyes, the eyes of a below. hunter framed in the passionless The crowd had thickened. It had face of an executioner. His blunt been gathering since early morning, hands were steady as they lifted and the growing press of spectators the gun and tried a dry shot at had now become solid walls of an imaginary target. He nodded people lining , the street, packed to himself. He was ready. Carefully tightly together on the sidewalks, he laid the rifle down on the matYet despite the fact that there were tress which covered the floor of virtually no police, the crowd did his firing point, and looked out not overflow into the streets, nor through the hole in the brickwork was there any of the pushing crowding impatience that once attended an assemblage of this sort. Instead there was a placid tolerance, a spirit of friendly good will, an ingenuous complaisance that grated on Matson's nerves like the screeching rasp of a file drawn across the edge of thin metal. He shivered uncontrollably. It was hard to be a free man in a world of slaves. It was a measure of the Aztlan's triumph that only a bare halfdozen police 'copters patrolled the empty skies above the parade route. The aliens had done this -- had conquered the world without firing a shot or speaking a word in anger. They had wooed Earth with understanding patience and superlative guile -- and Earth had fallen into their hands like a lovesick virgin! There never had been any real opposition, and what there was had been completely ineffective. Most of those who had opposed the aliens were out of circulation, imprisoned in correctional institutions, undergoing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation! a six bit word for dehumanizing. When those poor devils finished their treatment with Aztlan brain-washing techniques, they would be just like these sheep below, with the difference that they would never be able to be anything else. But these other stupid fools crowding the sidewalks, waiting to hail their destruction -- these were the ones who must be saved. They -- not the martyrs of the underground, were the important part of humanity. A police 'copter windmilled slowly down the avenue toward his hiding place, the rotating vanes and insect body of the craft starkly outlined against the jagged backdrop of the city's skyline. He laughed soundlessly as the susurrating flutter of the rotor blades beat overhead and died whispering in the distance down the long canyon of the street. His position had been chosen with care, and was invisible from air and ground alike. He had selected it months ago, and had taken considerable pains to conceal its true purpose. But after today concealment wouldn't matter. If things went as he hoped, the place might someday become a shrine. The idea amused him. Strange, he mused, how events conspire to change a man's career. Seven years ago he had been a respected and important member of that far different sort of crowd which had welcomed the visitors from space. That was a human crowd -- half afraid, wholly curious, jostling, noisy, pushing -- a teeming swarm that clustered in a thick disorderly ring around the silver disc that lay in the center of the International Airport overlooking Puget Sound. Then -- he could have predicted his career. And none of the predictions would have been true -- for none included a man with a rifle waiting in a blind for the game to approach within range... The Aztlan ship had landed early that July morning, dropping silently through the overcast covering International Airport. It settled gently to rest precisely in the center of the junction of the three main runways of the field, effectively tying up the transcontinental and transoceanic traffic. Fully five hundred feet in diameter, the giant ship squatted massively on the runway junction, cracking and buckling the thick concrete runways under its enormous weight. By noon, after the first skepticism had died, and the unbelievable TV pictures had been flashed to their waiting audience, the crowd began to gather. All through that hot July morning they came, increasing by the minute as farther outlying districts poured their curious into the Airport. By early afternoon, literally watching the great ship over a world-wide network of television stations which cancelled their regular programs to give their viewers an uninterrupted view of the enigmatic craft. By mid-morning the sun had burned off the overcast and was the squads of sweating soldiers from Fort Lewis, and more sweating squads of blue-clad police from the metropolitan area of SeattleTacoma. The police and soldiery quickly formed a ring around the ship and cleared a narrow lane around the periphery, and this they maintained despite the increasing pressure of the crowd. The hours passed and nothing happened. The faint creaking and snapping sounds as the seamless hull of the vessel warmed its spacechilled metal in the warmth of the summer sun were lost in the growing impatience of the crowd. They wanted something to happen. Shouts and catcalls filled the air as more nervous individuals clamored to relieve the tension. Off to one side a small group began to clap their hands rhythmically. The little claque gained recruits, and within moments the air was riven by the thunder of thousands of palms meeting in unison. Frightened the crowd might be, but greater than fear was the desire to see what sort of creatures were inside. Matson stood in the cleared area surrounding the ship, a position of privilege he shared with a few city and state officials and the high brass from McChord Field, Fort Lewis, and Bremerton Navy Yard. He was one of the bright young men who had chosen Government Service as a career, and who, in these days of science-consciousness had risen rapidly through ability and merit promotions to become the Director of the Office of Scientific Research while still in his early thirties. A dedicated man, trained in the bitter school of ideological survival, he understood what the alien science could mean to this world. Their knowledge would secure peace in whatever terms the possessors cared to name, and Matson intended to make sure that his nation was the one which possessed that knowledge. He stood beside a tall scholarly looking man named Roger Thornton, who was his friend and incidentally the Commissioner of Police for the Twin City metropolitan area. To a casual eye, their positions should be reversed, for the lean ascetic Thornton looked far more like the accepted idea of a scientist than burly, thick shouldered, square faced Matson, whose every movement shouted Cop. Matson glanced quizzically at the taller man. "Well, Roger, I wonder how long those birds inside are going to keep us waiting before we get a look at them?" "You'd be surprised if they really were birds, wouldn't you?" Thornton asked with a faint smile. "But seriously, I hope it isn't too much longer. This mob is giving the boys a bad time." He looked anxiously at the strained line of police and soldiery. "I guess I should have ordered out the night shift and reserves instead of just the riot squad. From the looks of things they'll be needed if this crowd gets any more unruly." Matson chuckled. "You're an alarmist," he said mildly. "As far as I can see they're doing all right. I'm not worried about them -- or the crowd, for that matter. The thing that's bothering me is my feet. I've been standing on 'em for six hours "Mine too," Thornton sighed. "Tell you what I'll do. When this is all over I'll split a bucket of hot water and a pint of arnica with you." "It's a deal," Matson said. As he spoke a deep musical hum came from inside the ship, and a section of the rim beside him separated along invisible lines of juncture, swinging downward to form a broad ramp leading upward to a square orifice in the rim of the ship. A bright shadowless light that seemed to come from the metal walls of the opening framed the shape of the star traveller who stood there, rigidly erect, looking over the heads of the section of the crowd before him. A concerted gasp of awe and admiration rose from the crowd -- a gasp that was echoed throughout the entire ring that surrounded the ship. There must be other openings like this one, Matson thought dully as he stared at the being from space. Behind him an Army tank rumbled noisily on its treads as it drove through the crowd toward the ship, the long gun in its turret lifting like an alert finger to point at the figure of the alien. The stranger didn't move from his unnaturally stiff position. His oddly luminous eyes never wavered from their fixed stare at a point far beyond the outermost fringes of the crowd. Seven feet tall, obviously masculine, he differed from mankind only in minor details. His long slender hands lacked the little finger, and his waist was abnormally small. Other than that, he was human in external appearance. A wide sleeved tunic of metallic fabric covered his upper body, gathered in at his narrow waist by a broad metal belt studded with tiny bosses. The tunic ended halfway between hip and knee, revealing powerfully muscled legs encased in silvery hose. Bright yellow hair hung to his shoulders, clipped short in a square bang across his forehead. His face was long, clean featured and extraordinarily calm -- almost godlike in its repose. Matson stared, fascinated. He had the curious impression that the visitor had stepped bodily out of the Middle Ages. His dress and haircut were almost identical with that of a medieval courtier. The starman raised his hand -- his strangely luminous steel gray eyes scanned the crowd -- and into Matson's mind came a wave of peaceful calm, a warm feeling of goodwill and brotherhood, an indescribable feeling of soothing relaxation. With an odd sense of shock Matson realized that he was not the only one to experience this. As far back as the farthest hangerson near the airport gates the tenseness of the waiting crowd relaxed. The effect was amazing! Troops lowered their weapons with shamefaced smiles on their faces. Police relaxed their sweating vigilance. The crowd stirred, moving backward to give its members room. The emotion-charged atmosphere vanished as though it had never been. And a cold chill played icy fingers up the spine of Daniel Matson. He had felt the full impact of the alien's projection, and he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life! damnably clever! That initial greeting with its disarming undertones of empathy and innocence had accomplished its purpose. It had emasculated Mankind's natural suspicion of strangers. And their subsequent actions -- so beautifully timed -- so careful to avoid the slightest hint of evil, had completed what their magnificently staged appearance had begun. The feeling of trust had persisted. It lasted through quarantine, clearance, the public receptions, and the private meetings with scientists and the heads of government. It had persisted unabated through the entire two months they remained in the Twin City area. The aliens remained as they had been in the beginning -- completely unspoiled by the interest shown in them. They remained simple, unaffected, and friendly, displaying an ingenuous innocence that demanded a corresponding faith in return. Most of their time was spent at the University of Washington, where at their own request they were studied by curious scholars, and in return were given courses in human history and behavior. They were quite frank about their reasons for following such a course of action -- according to their spokesman Ixtl they wanted to learn human ways in order to make a better impression when they visited the rest of Mankind. Matson read that blurb in an official press release and laughed cynically. Better impression, hah! They couldn't have done any better if they had an entire corps of public relations specialists assisting them! They struck exactly the right note -- and how could they improve on perfection? From the beginning they left their great ship open and unguarded while they commuted back and forth from the airport to the campus. And naturally the government quickly rectified the second error and took instant advantage of the first. A guard was posted around the ship to keep it clear of the unofficially curious, while the officially curious combed the vessel's interior with a fine tooth comb. Teams of scientists and technicians under Matson's direction swarmed through the ship, searching with the most advanced methods of human science for the secrets of the aliens. They quickly discovered that while the star travellers might be trusting, they were not exactly fools. There was nothing about the impenetrably shielded mechanisms that gave the slightest clue as to their purpose or to the principles upon which they operated -- nor were there any visible controls. The ship was as blankly uncommunicative as a brick wall. Matson was annoyed. He had expected more than this, and his frustration drove him to watch the aliens closely. He followed them, sat in on their sessions with the scholars at the University, watched them at their frequent public appearances, and came to know them well enough to recognize the microscopic differences that made them individuals. To the casual eye they were as alike as peas in a pod, but Matson could separate Farn from Quicha, and Laz from Acana -- and Ixtl -- well he would have stood out from the others in any circumstances. But Matson never intruded. He was content to sit in the background and observe. And what he saw bothered him. They gave him no reason for their appearance on Earth, and whenever the question came up Ixtl parried it adroitly. They were obviously not explorers for they displayed a startling familiarity with Earth's geography and ecology. They were possibly ambassadors, although they behaved like no ambassadors he had ever seen. They might be traders, although what they would trade only God and the aliens knew -- and neither party was in a talking mood. Mysteries bothered Matson. He didn't like them. But they could keep their mystery if he could only have the technical knowledge that was concealed beneath their beautifully shaped skulls. At that, he had to admit that their appearance had come at precisely the right time. No one better than he knew how close Mankind had been to the final war, when the last two major antagonists on Earth were girding their human and industrial power for a final showdown. But the aliens had become a diversion. The impending war was forgotten while men waited to see what was coming next. It was obvious that the starmen had a reason for being here, and until they chose to reveal it, humanity would forget its deadly problems in anticipation of the answer to this delightful puzzle that had come to them from outer space. Matson was thankful for the breathing space, all too well aware that it might be the last that Mankind might have, but the enigma of the aliens still bothered him. He was walking down the main corridor of the Physics Building on the University campus, wondering as he constantly did about how he could extract some useful knowledge from the aliens when a quiet voice speaking accentless English sounded behind him. "What precisely do you wish to know, Dr. Matson?" the voice said. Matson whirled to face the questioner, and looked into the face of Ixtl. The alien was smiling, apparently pleased at having startled him. "What gave you the idea that I wanted to know anything?" he asked. "You did," Ixtl said. "We all have been conscious of your thoughts for many days. Forgive me for intruding, but I must. Your speculations radiate on such a broad band that we cannot help being aware of them. It has been quite difficult for us to study your customs and history with this high level background noise. We are aware of your interest, but your thoughts are so confused that we have never found questions we could answer. If you would be more specific we would be happy to give you the information which you seek." "Oh yeah!" Matson thought. "Of course. It would be to our advantage to have your disturbing speculations satisfied and your fears set at rest. We could accomplish more in a calmer environment. It is too bad that you do not receive as strongly as you transmit. If you did, direct mental contact would convince you that our reasons for satisfying you are good. But you need not fear us, Earthman. We intend you no harm. Indeed, we plan to help you once we learn enough to formulate a proper program." "I do not fear you," Matson said -- knowing that he lied. "Perhaps not consciously," Ixtl said graciously, "but nevertheless fear is in you. It is too bad -- and besides," he continued with a faint smile "it is very uncomfortable. Your glandular emotions are quite primitive, and very disturbing." "I'll try to keep them under control," Matson said dryly. "Physical control is not enough. With you there would have to be mental control as well. Unfortunately you radiate much more strongly than your fellow men, and we are unable to shut you out without exerting considerable effort that could better be employed elsewhere." The alien eyed Matson speculatively. "There you go again," he said. "Now you're angry." Matson tried to force his mind to utter blankness, and the alien smiled at him. "It does some good -- but not much," he said. "Conscious control is never perfect." "Well then, what can I do?" "Go away. Your range fortunately is short." Matson looked at the alien. "Not yet," he said coldly. "I'm still looking for something." "Our technology," Ixtl nodded. "I know. However I can assure you it will be of no help to you. You simply do not have the necessary background. Our science is based upon a completely different philosophy from yours." To Matson the terms were contradictory. "Not as much as you think," Ixtl continued imperturbably. "As you will find out, I was speaking quite precisely." He paused and eyed Matson thoughtfully. "It seems as though the only way to remove your disturbing presence is to show you that our technology is of no help to you. I will make a bargain with you. We shall show you our machines, and in return you will stop harassing us. We will do all in our power to make you understand ; but whether you do or do not, you will promise to leave and allow us to continue our studies in peace. Is that agreeable?" Matson swallowed the lump in his throat. Here it was -- handed to him on a silver platter -- and suddenly he wasn't sure that he wanted it! "It is," he said. After all, it was all he could expect. They met that night at the spaceship. The aliens, tall, calm and cool; Matson stocky, heavy-set and sweating. The contrast was infernally sharp, Matson thought. It was as if a primitive savage were meeting a group of nuclear physicists at Los Alamos. For some unknown reason he felt ashamed that he had forced these people to his wishes. But the aliens were pleasant about it. They took the imposition in their usual friendly way. "Now," Ixtl said. "Exactly what do you want to see -- to know?" "First of all, what is the principle of your space drive?" "There are two," the alien said. "The drive that moves this ship in normal space time is derived from Lurgil's Fourth Order equations concerning the release of subatomic energy in a restricted space time continuum. Now don't protest! I know you know nothing of Lurgil, nor of Fourth Order equations. And while I can show you the mathematics, I'm afraid they will be of little help. You see, our Fourth Order is based upon a process which you would call Psychomathematics and that is something I am sure you have not yet achieved." Matson shook his head. "I never heard of it," he admitted. "The second drive operates in warped space time," Ixtl continued, "hyperspace in your language, uid its theory is much more difficult than that of our normal drive, although its application is quite simple, merely involving apposition of congruent surfaces of hyper and normal space at stress points in the ether where high gravitational fields balance. Navigation in hyperspace is done by electronic computer -- somewhat more advanced models than yours. However, I can't give you the basis behind the hyperspace drive." Ixtl smiled depreciatingly. "You see, I don't know them myself. Only a few of the most advanced minds of Aztlan can understand. We merely operate the machines." Matson shrugged. He had expected something like this. Now they would stall him off about the machines after handing him a fast line of double-talk. "As I said," Ixtl went on, "there is no basis for understanding. Still, if it will satisfy you, we will show you our machines -- and the mathematics that created them although I doubt that you will learn anything more from them than you have from our explanation." "I could try," Matson said grimly. "Very well  # Ixtl replied. He led the way into the center of the ship where the seamless housings stood, the housings that had baffled some of the better minds of Earth. Matson watched while the star men proceeded to be helpful. The housings fell apart at invisible lines of juncture, revealing mechanisms of baffling simplicity, and some things that didn't look like machines at all. The aliens stripped the strange devices and Ixtl attempted to explain. They had antigravity, forcefields, faster than light drive, and advanced design computers that could be packed in a suitcase. There were weird devices whose components seemed to run out of sight at crazily impossible angles, other things that rotated frictionlessly, suspended in fields of pure force, and still others which his mind could not envisage even after his eyes had seen them. All about him lay the evidence of a science so advanced and alien that his brain shrank from the sight, refusing to believe such things existed. And their math was worse! It began where Einstein left off and went off at an incomprehensible tangent Matson was lost after the first five seconds! Stunned, uncomprehending and deflated, he left the ship. An impression that he was standing with his toe barely inside the door of knowledge became a conscious certainty as he walked slowly to his car. The wry thought crossed his mind that if the aliens were trying to convince him of his abysmal ignorance, they had succeeded far beyond their fondest dreams! They certainly had! Matson thought grimly as he selected five cartridges from the box lying beside him. In fact they had succeeded too well. They had turned his deflation into antagonism, his ignorance into distrust. Like a savage, he suspected what he could not understand. But unlike the true primitive, the emotional distrust didn't interfere with his ability to reason or to draw logical inferences from the data which he accumulated. In attempting to convince, Ixtl had oversold his case. returned to Washington, that the aliens gave the waiting world the reasons for their appearance on Earth. They were, they said, members of a very ancient highly evolved culture called Aztlan. And the Aztlans, long past the need for conquest and expansion, had turned their mighty science to the help of other, less fortunate, races in the galaxy. The aliens were, in a sense, missionaries -- one of hundreds of teams travelling the star lanes to bring the benefits of Aztlan culture to less favored worlds. They were, they unblushingly admitted, altruists -- interested only in helping others. It was pure corn, Matson reflected cynically, but the world lapped it up and howled for more. After decades of cold war, lukewarm war, and sporadic outbreaks of violence, that were inevitably building to atomic destruction, men would ease the continual burden of strain and worry. To Mankind, the Aztlans' words were as refreshing as a cool breeze of hope in a desert of despair. And the world got what it wanted. Quite suddenly the aliens left the Northwest, and accompanied by Service began to cross the nation. Taking widely separated paths they visited cities, towns, and farms, exhibiting the greatest curiosity about the workings of human civilization. And, in turn, they were examined by hordes of hopeful humans. Everywhere they went, they spread their message of good will and hope backed by the incredibly convincing power of their telepathic minds. Behind them, they left peace and hopeful calm; before them, anticipation mounted. It rose to a crescendo in New York where the paths of the star men met. The Aztlans invaded the United Nations. They spoke to the General Assembly and the Security Council, were interviewed by the secretariat and reporters from a hundred foreign lands. They told their story with such conviction that even the Communist bloc failed to raise an objection, which was as amazing to the majority of the delegates as the fact of the star men themselves. Altruism, it seemed, had no conflict with dialectic materialism. The aliens offered a watered-down variety of their technology to the peoples of Earth with no strings attached, and the governments of Earth accepted with open hands, much as a small boy accepts a cookie from his mother. It was impossible for men to resist the lure of something for nothing, particularly when it was offered by such people as the Aztlans. After all, Matson reflected bitterly, nobody shoots Santa Claus! From every nation in the world came invitations to the aliens to visit their lands. The star men cheerfully accepted. They moved across Europe, Asia, and Africa -- visited South America, Central America, the Middle East and Oceania. No country escaped them. They absorbed languages, learned customs, and spread good will. Everywhere they went relaxation followed in their footsteps, and throughout the world arose a realization of the essential brotherhood of man. It took nearly three years of continual travelling before the aliens again assembled at UN headquarters to begin the second part of their promised plan -- to give their science to Earth. And men waited with calm expectation for the dawn of Golden Age. Matson's lips twisted. Fools! Blind, stupid fools! Selling their birthright for a mess of pottage! He shifted the rifle across his knees and cartridges. He felt an empty loneliness as he closed the action over the filled magazine and turned the safety to "on". There was no comforting knowledge of support and sympathy to sustain him in what he was about to do. There was no real hope that there ever would be. His was a voice crying in the wilderness, a voice that was ignored -- as it had been when he visited the President of the United States... House, presented his appointment card, and was ushered past ice-eyed Secret Service men into the presidential office. It was as close as he had ever been to the Chief Executive, and he stared with polite curiosity across the width of desk which separated them. "I wanted to see you about the Aztlan business," the President began without preamble. "You were there when their ship landed, and you are also one of the few men in the country who has seen them alone. In addition, your office will probably be handling the bulk of our requests in regard to the offer they made yesterday in the UN. You're in a favorable spot." The President smiled and shrugged. "I wanted to talk with you sooner, but business and routine play the devil with one's desires in this office. "Now tell me," he continued, "your impression of these people." "They're an enigma," Matson said flatly. "To tell the truth, I can't figure them out." He ran his fingers through his hair with a worried gesture. "I'm supposed to be a pretty fair physicist, and I've had quite a bit of training in the social sciences, but both the mechanisms and the psychology of these Aztlans are beyond my comprehension. All I can say for sure is that they're as far beyond us as we are beyond the cavemen. In fact, we have so little in common that I can't think of a single reason why they would want to stay here, and the fact that they do only adds to my confusion." "But you must have learned something," the President said. "Oh we've managed to collect data," Matson replied. "But there's a lot of difference between data and knowledge." "I can appreciate that, but I'd still like to know what you think. Your opinion could have some weight." Matson doubted it. His opinions were contrary to those of the majority. Still, the Chief asked for it -- and he might possibly have an open mind. It was a chance worth taking. "Well, Sir, I suppose you've heard of the so-called "wild talents" some of our own people occasionally possess?" The President nodded. "It is my belief," Matson continued, "that the Aztlans possess these to a far greater degree than we do, and that their science is based upon them. They have something which they call psychomathematics, which by definition is the mathematics of the mind, and this seems to be the basis of their physical science. I saw their machines, and I must confess that their purpose baffled me until I realized that they must be mechanisms for amplifying their own natural equipment. We know little or nothing about psi phenomena, so it is no wonder I couldn't figure them out. As a matter of fact we've always treated psi as something that shouldn't be mentioned in polite scientific conversation." The President grinned. "I always thought you boys had your blind spots." "We do -- but when we're confronted with a fact, we try to find out something about it -- that is if the fact hits us hard enough, often enough." "Well, you've been hit hard and often," the President chuckled, "What did you find out?" "Facts," Matson said grimly, "just facts. Things that could be determined by observation and measurement. We know that the aliens are telepathic. We also know perhaps a recognition of danger would be a better term -- and we know its range is somewhat over a third of a mile. We know that they're telekinetic. The lack of visible controls in their ship would tell us that, even if we hadn't seen them move small objects at a distance. We know that they have eidetic memories, and that they can reason on an extremely high level. Other than that we know nothing. We don't even know their physical structure. We've tried X-ray but they're radio-opaque. We've tried using some human sensitives from the Rhine Institute, but they're unable to get anywhere. They just turn empathic in the aliens' presence, and when we get them back, they do nothing but babble about the beauty of the Aztlan soul." "Considering the difficulties, you haven't done too badly," the President said. "I take it then, that you're convinced that they are an advanced life form. But do you think they're sincere in their attitude toward us?" "Oh, they're sincere enough," Matson said. "The only trouble is that we don't know just what they're sincere about. You see, sir, we are in the position of a savage to whom a trader brings the luxuries of civilization. To the savage, the trader may represent purest altruism, giving away such valuable things as glass beads and machine made cloth for useless pieces of yellow rock and the skins of some native pest. The savage hasn't the slightest inkling that he's being exploited. By the time he realizes he's been had, and the yellow rock is gold and the skins are mink, he has become so dependent upon the goods for which the trader has whetted his appetite that he inevitably becomes an economic slave. "Of course you can argue that the cloth and beads are far more valuable to the savage than the gold or mink. But in the last analysis, value is determined by the higher culture, and by that standard, the savage gets taken. And ultimately civilization moves in and the superior culture of the trader's race determines how the savage will act. "Still, the savage has a basis for his acts. He is giving something for something -- making a trade. But we're not even in that position. The aliens apparently want nothing from us. They have asked for nothing except our good will, and that isn't a tradable item." "But they're altruists!" the President protested. "Sir, do you think that they're insane?" Matson asked curiously. "Do they appear like fanatics to you?" "But we can't apply our standards to them. You yourself have said that their civilization is more advanced than ours." "Whose standards can we apply?" Matson asked. "If not ours, then whose? The only standards that we can possibly apply are our own, and in the entire history of human experience there has never been a single culture that has had a basis of pure altruism. Such a culture could not possibly exist. It would be overrun and gobbled up by its practical neighbors before it drew its first breath. "We must assume that the culture from which these aliens come has had a practical basis in its evolutionary history. It could not have risen full blown and altruistic like Minerva from the brain of Jove. And if the culture had a practical basis in the past, it logically follows that it has a practical basis in the present. Such a survival trait as practicality would probably never be lost no matter how far the Aztlan race has evolved. Therefore, we must concede that they are practical people -- people who do not give away something for nothing. But the question still remains -- what do they want? "Whatever it is, I don't think it is anything from which we will profit. No matter how good it looks, I am convinced that cooperation with these aliens will not ultimately be to our advantage. Despite the reports of every investigative agency in this government, I cannot believe that any such thing as pure altrusim exists in a sane mind. And whatever I may believe about the Aztlans, I do not think they're insane." The President sighed. "You are a suspicious man, Matson, and perhaps you are right; but it doesn't matter what you believe -- or what I believe for that matter. This government has decided to accept the help the Aztlans are so graciously offering. And until the reverse is proven, we must accept the fact that the star men are altruists, and work with them on that basis. You will organize your office along those lines, and extract every gram of information that you can. Even you must admit that they have knowledge that will improve our American way of life." Matson shook his head doggedly. "I'm afraid, Sir, if you expect Aztlan science to improve the American way of life, you are going to be disappointed. It might promote an Aztlan way of life, but the reverse is hardly possible." "It's not my decision," the President said. "My hands are tied. Congress voted for the deal by acclamation early this morning. I couldn't veto it even if I wanted to." "I cannot cooperate in what I believe is our destruction." Matson said in a flat voice. "Then you have only one course," the President said. "I will be forced to accept your resignation." He sighed wearily. "Personally, I think you're making a mistake. Think it over before you decide. You're a good man, and Lord knows the government can use good men. There are far too many fools in politics." He shrugged and stood up. The interview was over. Matson returned to his offices, filled with cold frustration. Even the President believed he could do nothing, and these shortsighted politicians who could see nothing more than the immediate gains -- there was a special hell reserved for them. There were too many fools in politics. However, he would do what he could. His sense of duty was stronger than his resentment. He would stay on and try to cushion some of the damage which the Aztlans would inevitably cause, no matter how innocent their motives. And perhaps the President was right -- perhaps the alien science would bring more good than harm. Matson watched the spread of Aztlan ideas throughout the world. He saw Aztlan devices bring health, derprivileged countries, and improve the lot of those in more favored nations. He watched tyrannies and authoritarian governments fall under the passive resistance of their peoples. He saw militarism crumble to impotence as the Aztlan influence spread through every facet of society, first as a trickle, then as a steady stream, and finally as a rushing torrent. He saw Mankind on the brink of a Golden Age -- and he was unsatisfied. Reason said that the star men were exactly what they claimed to be. Their every action proved it. Their consistency was perfect, their motives unimpeachable, and the results of their efforts were astounding. Life on Earth was becoming knew the meaning of the word. Living standards improved, and everywhere men were conscious of a feeling of warmth and brotherhood. There was no question that the aliens were doing exactly what they promised. But reason also told him that the aliens were subtly and methodically destroying everything that man had created, turning him from an individual into a satisfied puppet operated by Aztlan strings. For man is essentially lazy -- always searching for the easier way. Why should he struggle to find an answer when the Aztlans had discovered it millennia share tfieir knowledge? Why should he use inept human devices when those of the aliens performed similar operations with infinitely more ease and efficiency? Why should he work when all he had to do was ask? There was plan behind their acts. But at that point reason dissolved into pure speculation. Why were they doing this? Was it merely mistaken kindliness or was there a deeper more subtle motive? Matson didn't know, and in that lack of knowledge lay the hell in which he struggled. For two years he stayed on with down an unmarked road to an uncertain future. Then he ran away. He could take no more of this blind dependence upon alien wisdom. And with the change in administration that had occurred in the fall elections he no longer had the sense of personal loyalty to the President which had kept him working at a job he despised. He wanted no part of this brave new world the aliens were creating. He wanted to be alone. Like a hermit of ancient times who abandoned society to seek his soul, Matson fled to the desert country of the Southwest -- as far as possible from the Aztlans and their works. The grimly beautiful land toughened his muscles, blackened his skin, and brought him a measure of peace. Humanity retreated to remoteness except for Seth Winters, a leathery old-timer he had met on his first trip into the desert. The acquaintance had ripened to friendship. Seth furnished a knowledge of the desert country which Matson lacked, and Matson's money provided the occasional grubstake they needed. For weeks at a time they never saw another human -- and Matson was satisfied. The world could go its own way. He would go his. Running away was the smartest thing he could have done. Others more brave perhaps, or perhaps less rational -- had tried to fight, to form an underground movement to oppose these altruists from space; but they were a tiny minority so divided in motives and purpose that they could not act as a unit. They were never more than a nuisance, and without popular support they never had a chance. After the failure of a complicated plot to assassinate the aliens, they were quickly rounded up and confined. And the aliens continued their work. Matson shrugged. It was funny how little things could mark mileposts in a man's life. If he had known of the underground he probably would have joined it and suffered the same penalty for failure. If he hadn't fled, if he hadn't met Seth Winters, if he hadn't taken that last trip into the desert, if any one of a hundred little things had happened differently he would not be here. That last trip into the desert -- he remembered it as though it were yesterday... The yellow flare of a greasewood fire cast flickering spears of light into the encircling darkness. Above, in the purplish black vault of the moonless sky the stars shone down with icy splendor. The air was quiet, the evening breeze had died, and the stillness of the desert night pressed softly upon the earth. Far away, muted by distance, came the ululating wail of a coyote. Seth Winters laid another stick of quick-burning greasewood on the fire and squinted across the smoke at Matson who was lying on his back, arms crossed behind his head, eyeing the night sky with the fascination of a dreamer. "It's certainly peaceful out here," Matson murmured as he rose to his feet, stretched, and sat down again looking into the tiny fire. " 'Tain't nothin' unusual, Dan'l. Not out here it ain't. It's been plumb peaceful on this here desert it peaceful? Mainly 'cuz there ain't too many humans messin' around in it." "Possibly you're right, Seth." "Shore I'm right. It jest ain't nacheral fer a bunch of Homo saps to get together without an argyment startin' somewhere. 'Tain't the nature of the critter to be peaceable. An' y'know, thet's the part of this here sweetness an' light between nations that bothers me. Last time I was in Prescott, I set down an' read six months of newspapers -- an' everything's jest too damn good to be true. Seems like everybody's gettin' to love everybody else." He shook his head. "The hull world's as sticky-sweet as molasses candy. It jest ain't nacheral!" "The star men are keeping their word. They said that they would bring us peace. Isn't that what they're doing?" "Shucks Dan'l -- that don't give 'em no call to make the world a blasted honey-pot with everybody bubblin' over with brotherly love. There ain't no real excitement left. Even the Commies ain't raisin' hell like they useta. People are gettin' more like a bunch of damn woolies every day." "I'll admit that Mankind had herd instincts," Matson replied lazily, "but I've never thought of them as particularly sheeplike. More like a wolf pack, I'd say." "Wal, there's nothin' wolflike about 'em right now. Look, Dan'l, yuh know what a wolf pack's like. They're smart, tough, and mean -- an' the old boss wolf is the smartest, toughest, and meanest critter in the hull pack. TJie others respect him 'cuz he's proved his ability to lead. But take a sheep flock now -- the bellwether is jest a nice gentle old castrate thet'll do jest whut the sheepherder wants. He's got no originality. He's jest a noise thet the rest foller." "Could be." "It shore is! Jes fr instance, an' speakin' of bellwethers, have yuh ever heard of a character called Throckmorton Bixbee?" "Can't say I have. He sounds like a nance." "Whutever a nance is -- he's it! But yuh're talkin' about our next President, unless all the prophets are wrong. He's jest as bad as his name. Of all the gutless wonders I've ever heard of that pilgrim takes the prize. He even looks like a rabbit!" "I can see where I had better catch up on some contemporary history," Matson said. "I've been out in the sticks too long." "If yuh know what's good fer yuh, yuh'll stay here. The rest of the country's goin' t'hell. Brother Bixbee's jest a sample. About the only thing that'd recommend him is that he's hot fer peace -- an' he's got those furriners' blessing. Seems like those freaks swing a lotta weight nowadays, an' they ain't shy about tellin' folks who an' what they favor. They've got bold as brass this past year." Matson nodded idly -- then stiffened -- turning a wide eyed stare on Seth. A blinding light exploded in his brain as the words sank in. With crystal clarity he knew the answer! He laughed harshly. Winters stared at him with mild surprise. "What's bit yuh, Dan'l?" But Matson was completely oblivious, busily buttressing the flash of inspiration. Sure -- that was the only thing it could be! Those aliens were working on a program -- one that was grimly recognizable once his attention was focussed on it. There must have been considerable pressure to make them move so fast that a short-lived human could see what they were planning -- but Matson had a good idea of what was driving them, an atomic war that could decimate the world would be all the spur they'd need! They weren't playing for penny ante stakes. They didn't want to exploit Mankind. They didn't give a damn about Mankind! To them humanity was merely an unavoidable nuisance -- something to be pushed aside, to be made harmless and dependent, and ultimately to be quietly and bloodlessly eliminated. Man's civilization held nothing that the star men wanted, but man's planet -- that was a different story! Truly the aliens were right when they considered man a savage. Like the savage, man didn't realize his most valuable possession was his land! The peaceful penetration was what had fooled him. Mankind, faced with a similar situation, and working from a position of overwhelming strength would have reacted differently. Humanity would have invaded and conquered. But the aliens had not even considered this obvious step. Why? The answer was simple and logical. They couldn't! Even though their technology was advanced enough to exterminate man with little or no loss to themselves, combat and slaughter must be repulsive to them. It had to be. With their telepathic minds they would necessarily have a pathologic horror of suffering. They were so highly evolved that they simply couldn't fight -- at least not with the weapons of humanity. But they could use the subtler weapon of altruism! And even more important -- uncontrolled emotions were poison to them. In fact Ixtl had admitted it back in Seattle. The primitive psi waves of humanity's hates, lusts, fears, and exultations must be unbearable torture to a race long past such animal outbursts. That was -- must be -- why they were moving so fast. For their own safety, emotion had to be damped out of the human race. Matson had a faint conception of what the aliens must have suffered when they first surveyed that crowd at International Airport. No wonder they looked so strangely immobile at that first contact! The raw emotion must have nearly killed them! He felt a reluctant stir of admiration for their courage, for the dedicated bravery needed to face that crowd and establish a beachhead of tranquility. Those first few minutes must have had compressed in them the agonies of a lifetime! Matson grinned coldly. The aliens were not invulnerable. If Mankind could be taught to fear and hate them, and if that emotion could be focussed, they never again would try to take this world. It would be sheer suicide. As long as Mankind kept its emotions it would be safe from this sort of invasion. But the problem was to teach Mankind to fear and hate. Shock would do it, but how could that shock be applied? The thought led inevitably to the only possible conclusion. The aliens would have to be killed, and in such a manner as to make humanity fear retaliation from the stars. Fear would unite men against a possible invasion, and fear would force men to reach for the stars to forestall retribution. Matson grinned thinly. Human nature couldn't have changed much these past years. Even with master psychologists like the Aztlans operating upon it, changes in emotional pattern would require generations. He sighed, looked into the anxious face of Seth Winters, and returned to the reality of the desert night. His course was set. He knew what he had to do. knees and opened the little leather box sewn to the side of the guncase. With precise, careful movements he removed the silencer and fitted it to the threaded muzzle of the gun. The bulky, blue excrescence changed the rifle from a thing of beauty to one of murder. He looked at it distastefully, then shrugged and stretched out on the mattress, easing the ugly muzzle through the hole in the brickwork. It wouldn't be long now... He glanced upward through the window above him at the Weather Bureau instruments atop a nearby building. The metal cups of the anemometer hung motionless against the metallic blue of the sky. No wind stirred in the deep canyons of the city streets as the sun climbed in blazing splendor above the towering buildings. He moved a trifle, shifting the muzzle of the gun until it bore upon the sidewalks. The telescopic sight picked out faces from the waiting crowd with a crystal clarity. Everywhere was the same sheeplike placidity. He shuddered, the sights jumping crazily from one face to another, -- wondering if he had misjudged his race, if he had really come too late, if he had underestimated the powers of the Aztlans. Far down the avenue, an excited hum came to his ears, and the watching crowd stirred. Faces lighted and Matson sighed. He was not wrong. Emotion was only suppressed, not vanished. There was still time! The aliens were coming. Coming to cap the climax of their pioneer work, to drive the first nail in humanity's coffin! For the first time in history man's dream of the brotherhood of man was close to reality. And he was about to destroy it! The irony bit into Matson's soul, and for a moment he hesitated, feeling the wave of tolerance and good will rising from the street below. Did he have the right to destroy man's dream? Did he dare tamper with the will of the world? Had he the right to play God? The parade came slowly down the happy street, a kaleidoscope of color and movement that approached and went past in successive waves and masses. This was a gala day, this eve of world union! The insigne of the UN was everywhere. The aliens had used the organization to further their plans and it was now all-powerful. A solid bank of UN flags led the van of delegates, smiling and swathed in formal dress, sitting erect in their black official cars draped with the flags of native lands that would soon be furled forever if the aliens had their way. And behind them came the Aztlans! They rode together, standing on a pure white float, a bar of dazzling white in a sea of color. All equal, their inhumanly beautiful faces calm and remote, the Aztlans rode through the joyful crowd. There was something inspiring about the sight and for a moment, Matson felt a wave of revulsion sweep through him. He sighed and thumbed the safety to "off", pulled the cocking lever and slid the first cartridge into the breech. He settled himself drawing a breath of air into his lungs, letting a little dribble out through slack lips, catching the remainder of the exhalation with closed glottis. The sights wavered and steadied upon the head of the center alien, framing the pale noble face with its aureole of golden hair. The luminous eyes were dull and introspective as the alien tried to withdraw from the emotions of the crowd. There was no awareness of danger on the alien's face. At # yards he was beyond their esper range and he was further covered by the feelings of the crowd. The sights lowered to the broad chest and centered there as Matson's spatulate fingers took up the slack in the trigger and squeezed softly and steadily. A coruscating glow bathed the bodies of three of the aliens as their tall forms jerked to the smashing impact of the bullets! Their metallic tunics melted and sloughed as inner fires ate away the fragile garments that covered them! Flexible synthetic skin cracked and curled in the infernal heat, revealing padding, wirelike tendons, ropelike cords of flexible tubing and a metallic skeleton that melted and dripped in white hot drops in the heat of atomic flame -- "Robots!" Matson gasped with sudden blinding realization. "I should have known! No wonder they seemed inhuman. Their builders would never dare expose themselves to the furies and conflicts of our emotionally uncontrolled world!" One of the aliens crouched on the float, his four-fingered hands pressed against a smoking hole in his metal tunic. The smoke thickened and a yellowish ichor poured out bursting into flame on contact with the air. The fifth alien, Ixtl, was untouched, standing with hands widestretched in a gesture that at once held command and appeal. Matson reloaded quickly, but held his fire. The swarming crowd surrounding the alien was too thick for a clear shot and Matson, with risk further murder in a cause already won. The tall, silver figure of the alien winced and shuddered, his huge body shaking like a leaf in a storm! His builders had never designed him to withstand the barrage of focussed emotion that was sweeping from the crowd. Terror, shock, sympathy, hate, loathing, grief, and disillusionment -- the incredible gamut of human feelings wrenched and tore at the Aztlan, shorting delicate circuits, ripping the poised balance of his being as the violent discordant blasts lanced through him with destroying energy! Ixtl's classic features twisted in a spasm of inconceivable agony, a thin curl of smoke drifted from his distorted tragic mask of a mouth as he crumpled, a pitiful deflated figure against the whitness of the float. The cries of fear and horror changed their note as the aliens' true nature dawned upon the crowd. Pride of flesh recoiled as the swarming humans realized the facts. Revulsion at being led by machines swelled into raw red rage. The mob madness spread as an ominous growl began rising from the streets. A panicky policeman triggered it, firing his Aztlan-built shock tube into the forefront of the mob. A dozen men fell, to be trampled by their neighbors as a swarm of men and women poured over the struggling officer and buried him from sight. Like wildfire, pent-up emotions blazed out in a flame of fury. The parade vanished, sucked into the maelstrom and torn apart. Fists flew, flesh tore, men and women screamed in high bitter agony as the mob clawed and trampled in a surging press of writhing forms that filled the street from one line of buildings to the other. Half-mad with triumph, drunk with victory, shocked at the terrible form that death had taken in coming to Ixtl, Matson raised his clenched hands to the sky and screamed in a raw inhuman voice, a cry in which all of man's violence and pride were blended! The spasm passed as quickly as it came, and with its passing came exhaustion. The job was done. The aliens were destroyed. Tomorrow would bring reaction and with it would come fear. Tomorrow or the next day man would hammer out a true world union, spurred by the thought of a retribution that would never come. Yet all that didn't matter. The important thing -- the only important thing -- was preserved. Mankind would have to unite for survival -- or so men would think -- and he would never disillusion them. For this was man's world, and men were again free to work out their own destiny for better or for worse, without interference, and without help. The golden dream was over. Man might fail, but if he did he would fail on his own terms. And if he succeeded -- Matson looked up grimly at the shining sky... Slowly he rose to his feet and descended to the raging street Willy was undoubtedly a hero . The difficulty lies in deciding which side he was on... rigged out with most things needed to make life bearable, if not interesting, for the crew. Perched on the manicured, blue-green sod of the planet Engraham, its inner parts were transformed and refitted for the many months of the Exploration. No effort and no flight of imagination had been spared to make the ship resemble more a country club than a barracks. With the permission of Colonel Mondrain, the crew's bunkroom had been completely rearranged, and a segment thereof made into a quietly elegant bar. Plans for this eventual rejuvenation had been fomentin g throughout the very tiresome and very monotonous journey. When they first landed, the natives fled, and thus it was easy to liberate furnishings from the adjacent village. When the inhabitants returned, after the purposes of the visiting Earthman were acknowledged to be harmless, they proved to be too courteous to carp about a few missing articles. The chairs, of a very advanced design and most comfortable, were made of a light and durable metal alloy thus far unknown to Earth. The bar (which was probably not its purpose on Engraham, no one knew or cared what its function had been) was of a design so futuristic that it would have turned a modern artist mad. The utensils, also liberated, were unbelievably delicate, yet strong and easy to wash. At first, since the Earth had not intended the Exploration to resemble the type that Texas-stationed servicemen like to run in Matamoros, there was nothing to drink in the utensils. But hardly six weeks had passed before the first hero of the Exploration, a man named O'Connors, discovered a palatable fruit growing on nearby bushes. By means of a system of improvised pipes (also liberated) it was no time at all before tasty beverages, somewhat strident but quite effective, were being run off and consumed in quantities. The machine known as O'Connors JoyJuicer was concealed behind the bar, and all that was ever seen on the bar when Colonel Mondrain or the Doctors were around was an innocuous fruit juice. The Earth Command had stocked the ship with reading material, most of it of a disgustingly educational nature, in photostatic cards: and the second hero of the Exploration was a man named Kosalowsky, who discovered in the psychology sections the works of Freud and Krafft-Ebing. After this discovery, a few interesting discussions arose. After these changes had been made, there was very little to do. The Earth Command had assumed that the natives of Engraham would resent the Explorations (most planets did), and so had sent along the crew of thirty men for protection. All had labored mightily to become part of this special crew, chosen for endurance and known war-like qualities. For once they got back to Earth, all were slated to be mustered out of service immediately, decorated to the ears, and awarded full, life-time pensions. Many already had contracts to appear on television and one man, Blunt, hinted at a long term Hollywood contract. But once they got there, there was little to do after all. A guard was posted ; instruments were checked; and, although the necessity seemed slight, the ship was kept primed for instantaneous emergency take-off. On the day corresponding to Earth's Saturday, the ship was G. I.'d from stem to stern. The maintenance crew made sure that no parts deteriorated or got liberated by enterprising natives. But the natives were not an inventive race. It was discovered by the Doctors (Anker, Frank, Pelham and Flandeau) that the natives literally did not know how to steal. They were backward. Dr. Flandeau, who was making great strides with the language, reported that there was some evidence that the Engrahamites had once possessed this skill, along with murder, mayhem, bad faith, and politics, but had lost it, through a deterioration of the species. Thus, once the ship had been transformed into a place worthy of human dwelling, and the beverage question had been solved, and utter, imbecilic boredom circumvented by the timely discoveries of Freud and Krafft-Ebing, the men found time hanging heavily on their hands ; and the more the doctors discovered about the Engrahamites, the more dismal the situation became. The doctors, growing more and more fascinated by their tasks, left the ship bright and early each day, returning around nightfall to reduce their growing stacks of data to points of Earthly relevance. The Colonel was also out most of the time. He paid many social calls on the natives, who, being courteous, received him, and was often returned at night in a chauffeured native Hop-Hop. Life in the bunkroom became a sullen round of poker, reading of Krafft-Ebing, and gab: and Earth currency changed hands daily in the never-ending crap game. For there was one great lack in their lives. This lack, and the inability to do anything about it, absorbed many hours of conversation. At first, complaints only occurred at intervals; but as weeks passed, the lamentations became so fervent, so constant, and so heart-rending, that Dr. Flandeau observed to Dr. Frank that more stirring passages had not been made since the Jeremiad. For Dr. Flandeau, although aging, was in his off hours a poet, and a Frenchman always. Dr. Frank said, "Yes, well, poor bastards." At first, nostalgically, the crew harked back to happier times on Earth. Soon not one young lady of their collective acquaintance had escaped the most minute analysis. They were young men -- the oldest, Blunt, was only twenty-six -- and several of them had married young, greatly limiting their activities so that even their cumulative memories could not last forever. After several weeks, repetition began to set in. Once all successes had been lovingly remembered, down to the last, exquisite detail, they began recalling their failures. The master strategist, the unofficial referee of these seminars, was Dick Blunt. "Now where you went wrong there," he would tell a fledgling reporting complete zero with a her feel that you were interested. Your line with a girl like that should be one of charity. Pure charity. You impress on her that you're doing her a terrific favor. You offer to bring to her dull life romance, adventure, tenderness." "I couldn't even get my hands on her," complained the reproved failure, Herbert Banks. "I've always found that type the easiest ones of all," Blunt said indifferently. "Dull, of course." The testiness, the self-pity, the shortness of temper and the nearriots over stolen packages of cigarettes, were not improved after the Doctors, having surveyed the situation thoroughly, decided that it would do no harm to let the men of the crew go out on Liberty. Fraternizing with natives was, of course, strictly forbidden. They were not to drink off premises. (Nor on, for that matter.) They were exhorted not to steal, not to engage in fights. Still, they could walk around, take pictures of the strange pink houses and the dazzling cities. They could watch a covey of children swim in the municipal pools. They could look at the fountains, the socalled "miraculous fountains of Engraham", or climb the strange, glassy mountains. The natives, although shy of them, were most polite, and some smiled enchantingly -- especially the women. all : there were women, and they were gorgeous. A little smaller than most Earth women, with bright eyes, and high, arched eyebrows, looking forever as if they had heard the most priceless joke. Their faces conformed to the most rigid standards of Caucasian beauty. Their legs, so delicate, so tapering, so fantastically small of ankle, were breath-taking. Their clothes, which would have driven a Parisian designer to suicide, were draped carelessly over the most exquisite figures. True, they were a little deficient in one department, and this was explained, before they were granted liberty, by Dr. Flandeau. The women of Engraham, he said, did not bear children. This announcement was not received with special gloom, for until then, none of the crew had seen an Engrahamite woman. But Willy Lanham, a dark-haired, skinny boy from Tennessee, asked, unhappily, "Don't they even go in for games or nothin'?" Flandeau understood instantly. He shook his head sadly. "I should think not. It has been a long time since they have observed the normal functions. The women are mainly for decoration, although it is said that some are also created for brains. They are a most strange people." After this -- granted these agonizing liberties, and able to see that which was biologically unattainable -- the crew became so demoralized that not even Kosalowsky's discovery of the works of Wilhelm Reik relieved the deep gloom. However, they had reckoned without the superior genius of Dick Blunt. Blunt received Flandeau's news as unhappily as the others, and, like the rest, was made miserable by the sight of the glorious damozels. But he was a reasonable man and he put his reasoning powers to work. Soon he alone was cheerful. He went around with the absorbed, other-world look of a physicist grappling with a problem in ionospheric mathematics withOne day he went on Liberty alone. He did not return until the fall of night, and when he came in his elation was so immoderate that the others thought there must be bars on Engraham after all. "I have found the answer to our question," he said. No one needed to ask what question. O'Connors hurried to pour Blunt a drink. "I have spent the day pursuing this answer logically," said Blunt. "I have done what any thoughtful man would do. I have read up on it." "How?" cried Henderson. "At the library." Blunt then described his day : finding his way to the library by means of pantomime; and finding at last, that file of photographs -- photographs of an utterly self-explanatory nature. And these he pulled from his pocket, for ignoring all discipline, he had stolen them. The pictures passed from hand to hand. O'Connors passed them on to Pane, and suddenly felt the need to open the window behind him. It was Willy Lanham, the boy from Tennessee, who voiced those exultant words that rose to the throats of all:  He said, "Hey! They're made just like the Earth girls." The conversation, at this intensely interesting point, was cut short by the arrival of the Colonel. He alighted from the native Hop-Hop -- waved cheerily to its driver, and began coming up. The bottle and glasses vanished, and Kosalowsky began to read aloud from a book especially reserved for these occasions. The men maintained looks of studious interest as the officer went through. He went up the ladder to his own quarters, there to clicked. The conversation was resumed in more subdued tones. "Do you think," said Pane shakily, "They still could ? # "Not a question of it," Blunt said. "These pictures prove it. It's what you might call a lost art. Once upon a time, as with all the fortunate parts of the galaxy, this art was known to the Engrahamites. Through some terrific foul-up, they lost it. Probably a combination of the science of incubation, and the reign of some ghastly square, like Queen Victoria. Thus were the girls of Engraham deprived of the pleasures of love." "The men, too," said Willy. All glared at him reproachfully. To care about the happiness of the Engrahamite men was thought not quite patriotic. "Gradually," Blunt went on, "they must have begun to lose interest. Probably there was some taboo. In the end they probably all thought, oh, to hell with it, and began serving on committees." A long sigh went up. "It is for us," Blunt said softly, treasuring each word, "to restore these unhappy maidens to their original human rights. "But it isn't going to be easy," Blunt went on. His voice dropped even lower. "Think what would happen if it went sour. Those Doctors would get wind of it. We'd be stuck in the Ship for the rest of the Exploration." There was a sober pause. Finally Banks cleared his throat and said, "Well, how do you think it should be handled, Blunt?" "Well, every beachhead needs an invasion," Blunt said, casually holding out his glass. O'Connors leapt to fill it. "One guy has got to lay the groundwork. Let him enlighten one quail. Explain things to her." He took a long, leisurely drink, and sighed. "This quail will rush around telling the others. Pretty soon there'll be so many hanging around the ship that -- " There was a general rush for cooling beverages. "Right," someone said, when the faculty of speech was recovered. "And necessarily," said Blunt, "this has to be the guy with the most savvy. The one who knows the score. The one most likely to succeed. Check?" All knew what this was leading up to. Martin said unhappily, "Check, Blunt, You're our boy." Blunt was scheduled to stand guard the next day, but Willy Lanham, eager to assist the cause, volunteered to take over for him. The hours seemed to creep by. His air was swaggering and cool when he returned, and all gathered round with eager curiosity -- all but Lanham, who had not recovered from standing guard. Blunt sauntered to the bar, accepted a drink, sipped it, lighted a cigarette, and took a long, pensive drag. Finally he said reminiscently, "What a doll!" Pane, never a subtle man, cried in anguish, "Well, how'd you make out?" Blunt smiled smugly. He began his recital. He was walking along the street and he met this gorgeous creature. A full description followed (broken by the arrival of the Colonel and two paragraphs of ing it clear that this was the dish of dishes, the most beautiful of the beautiful, the most charming, and the most intelligent. She allowed herself to be addressed in Blunt's few words of Engrahamic and, smiling ever patiently, sat with him for several hours. Their talk took place in a secluded bower, in one of the many parks. She was agreeable and charmed and promised to see him again. He even managed, through terrific feats of pantomime, to impress on her the need of secrecy in future meetings. "That was all?" someone said, when he finished. "For the first meeting, I think I did wonders," said Blunt. "After all, sex hasn't been known here since a time corresponding to our Stone Age." Later, when the nightly poker game was beginning, Willy Lanham said, "YVhy didn't you just make a grab for her?" "That's the hill-billy approach," Blunt said disdainfully. "These girls are civilized -- very, very civilized. It's important not to shock them." set about learning the language. For this he went not to Flandeau, who best knew it, but to Ankers, who was a pure scientist in every sense of the word, and not so likely to suspect his motives. The girl proved very cultured. She took him to art galleries, to symphonies, and mountain climbing, for scrambling up and down the glassy hills was a favorite Engrahamic sport. As he advanced in the language, he learned that her name was Catataphinaria, which meant "she will attain relative wisdom". He found that she worked for the Eleven who, while not rulers, offered general suggestions which the populace more or less followed. Although his slow progress inevitably bored the crew, still, it offered that one precious ray of hope, and they became so tractable that even the Doctors noticed it. They laid it to the secret ingredient that Dr. Frank had introduced into the drinking water. The summer wore on, becoming hotter each day. By the end of the second month of his courtship, Blunt began to speak to her of love. She laughed. She said that she had little curiosity on the subject, although it was now and then mentioned by the students of antiquity. Assured that it was pleasurable, she said that she heard that barbarians also enjoyed murdering people and making them butts of jokes. Willy Lanham said, "Don't listen to what a girl says. Just make a grab for her." This suggestion was laughed to scorn. Weeks passed, the summer began to wane. Tempers again began to shorten. Flandeau said to Frank, "The men are worse again." "Yes, perhaps we should increase the dosage." The fruits for the Joy-Juicer grew thin on the silvery bushes, and men ranged far and wide, putting in supplies for the winter. One night, when Blunt had won at poker, all the men lay in their bunks, too dispirited to drink, to shoot craps, almost too miserable even for speech. Blunt again began talking of Catataphinaria. Drowsily Lanham said, "I think you're going at it the wrong way, Dick. Try some real rough stuff. You know -- kiss her. She might like it." Before Blunt could defend his strategy, Kosalowsky sat up in his bunk. "Yes, for cripes sake," he said, "Move in for the kill. Or shut up about it. You're driving us all nuts." "Would you like to try?" Blunt suggested softly. "Sure I'll try," Kosalowsky said. He turned on the light over his bunk. "Give me a crack at her. I could have managed it weeks ago. All you've done is talk to the quail." "Yah, Dick, maybe you're using the wrong approach on this one," O'Connors suggested. "It's the damn places you take her," Kosalowsky said. "Art galleries. Anybody ever seduce a girl in an art gallery? Symphonies. Popping around in her damn HopHop. Can't you ever get her alone?" "She lives with ten other girls," Blunt said sulkily. "They're all home all the time." "Well, bring her here, then," Pane suggested. "We'll all take a powder." "Where?" There was no answer. They could not all, by day, desert the ship, and it was getting too chilly for the crew to hide in adjacent shrubbery. "We could put up a wall," Pane said suddenly, "between the bunks and the bar." "With what?" "I know," Banks said eagerly, "where there's a whole pile of stuff. It's nice thin metal, just lying there getting rusty." "I think you're premature -- " "Premature!" Kosalowsky shouted. "Six months you've been chasing this tomato. You call that premature?" "Only four by Engrahamic time," Blunt said, insulted. "Listen," Kosalowsky said, "that wall goes up tomorrow. And you're smuggling her in tomorrow night. Or else," he said, glaring at Blunt, "after that it's every man for himself. Check?" Blunt, only slightly seen in the light from Kosalowsky' s bunk, was white with rage. "All right, guys," he said stonily. "I've been trying to do right by this frail. Nothing abrupt or hillbilly. Nothing to hurt her delicate feelings or her fine mind. But if this is how you want it -- Okay!" The next day the wall went up. Hardly a word was said as it was hammered in place. Once up, the place was G. I.'d thoroughly. The ash trays were washed, the floor vacuumed, and the lights adjusted to achieve the most tellingly seductive effect. Blunt went out at two, thin-lipped and silent. "The jerk," Kosalowsky said, "I think he's a lot of hot air. That's what I think." The Colonel came in at nightfall and asked about the wall. They told him that it was to cut off the recreation section from the sleeping quarters, for the protection of those who wanted more sleep to prepare for the grueling winter watches. "Very good idea men," the Colonel said, and went upstairs to write another chapter in his book. At nine the men disappeared into their bunks. O'Connors won the responsible job of peering through the narrow slit in the wall. Behind him could be heard the labored breathing of twenty-seven distraught men. One man snored. "Wake up, you stupid ass," Pane told Lanham. "You'll wreck the show." At last the door opened and Blunt came in -- with the girl. She was breath-taking. She wore, O'Connors reported, a dress cut to here -- and her hair was piled high on her patrician head. Blunt had not lied. She was even prettier than the usual run of Engraham girls. "He's offering her a drink," O'Connors whispered. "She take it?" "No -- she's sitting at the bar. He's having one, though. He's turning on the hi-fi." He did not have to tell them, since all could hear the soft music. They had selected a program of melodies considered sure-fire. "He's talking to her -- putting his arm around her waist. Oh-oh. She knocked it off. She's laughing, though." In the silence they all heard her laugh. Several men moved uncomfortably. "He's leading her toward the couch -- oh-oh -- she stopped to look at the radar screen." It was the auxiliary radar, not the important one in the control room. "What's he doing?" "Telling her -- he's edging her to the couch again -- now she's asking about the Bassett Blaster. They're fooling around with the gun. He's showing her how it works -- trying to put his hands -- !" This last was lost, for there was a sudden, resounding blast. Their bunks, the entire ship, trembled. The meaning was clear to all. They flattened to their bunks, and waited tensely. They heard a sound, the sound of a foot kicking a body. A hand scratched tentatively along the wall. No one moved. "She killed him." O'Connors voice was no more than a slight whisper. "Lay low -- lay low." Then a woman's voice said, in perfect English, "All right, you men. Come out of there." The door was found and flung open. Catataphinaria stood in the dim light -- still holding the Blaster. She said again, more sharply, "I said, Come out of there!" Clumsily, they came down from their bunks. "Now," she said, as she had them all against the wall, "call down the others." But this was unnecessary, for the Doctors and the Colonel were already descending the ladder. They turned quite white at the sight of her. Wordlessly, she indicated that they were to join the others. The Doctors found it harder to adjust to a purely military sort of emergency. Ankers asked clearly, "What on earth is this nonsense?" "No nonsense," the girl said. "Just do as I say. First, surrender all your papers." "Our papers?" "Your research. Your conclusions. Everything." Henderson said, "I'll go get it, Ma'am." "I would also like the Colonel's amusing work on the coming occupation." "I know where it is, sir," Martin said swiftly. "I'll get it." The Colonel's expression was stony. He nodded to Martin to get it, and it occurred to him that the girl was one of those whom he had personally selected as the most promising for the puppet governments. But when he asked about her identity, she cut him off without a word. "Then, may I ask where you learned such flawless English?" "All of us know English," she said. "It is a very stupid language." Martin and Henderson returned with the papers. Gingerly they approached her, handed the papers to her, and darted back to their places in the line. She placed the stack on the bar, leafed through it, all the while keeping them covered with the Blaster, and remarked on finishing, "It is exactly what one would expect barbarians to find interesting." Flandeau, however, remained a scientist to the last. "We find ourselves unhappily deceived," he said. "We were certain -- that you were utterly without defenses. We were told that you did not know how to lie, cheat, dissemble, or fight." "Only not with each other," she said. "It was, so to speak, a lost art." She glanced at Blunt. Several men squirmed. "But it is one that we have regained," she said. "And what will you do with us?" Flandeau asked. "We have decided to let you go," she said. "Now that we possess this weapon," -- she brandished the Blaster -- "which we can copy, we think we can prevent more Explorations. At least this is the opinion of the Eleven. So I am instructed to let you leave -- at once, of course." "You are most charming," said Flandeau. "At once," she repeated. "Yes, of course. Men! Prepare for blastoff!" -- the floating around, the boredom, the unending blackness of space -- but at least it was going home. After the first weeks of space-sickness, things returned to near normal, and the Doctors conferred with the Colonel. It was decided that the best report should be that Engraham was uninviting, bleak, and of no interest to Earthmen. The reputations of all were at stake (the doctors found themselves, stripped of their papers, unable to recollect enough, and the Colonel desperately feared a courtmartial) and the crew was thus advised. All agreed to keep their mouths shut. Thus their honorable discharges, medals, and life-time pensions would be safe. So, with all this decided, and Earth only a few months away, relative cheerfulness reigned. Only Willy Lanham continued to mope. "What's biting you?" Kosalowsky asked, one day as they lay strapped in adjacent bunks. "Your face is as long as this ship." "I just feel bad," Willy said. "I can feel bad if I want to, can't I?" "What the hell, we'll soon be home. We can really raise some hell, then." "I miss my girl," Willy blurted out. "You'll see her pretty soon." "I mean my girl on Engraham." It happened that just then several other men, bored with lying still, were floating past. They gripped the edges of Willy's bunk. "You mean you had," Kosalowsky said cunningly, "a girl on Engraham?" "Sure I did," said Willy defensively. "Didn't all you guys?" More and more men joined the knot of bodies around Willy's bunk. The atmosphere became distinctly menacing. "You mean you didn't?" Willy said. "You mean it wasn't a gag we were pulling on Blunt?" They were silent. One pair of floating hands neared Willy's throat. "Honest," he said. "I didn't (The following is taken from the files of the Medical Disciplinary Board , Hospital Earth , from the preliminary hearings in re: The Profession vs. Samuel B. Jenkins , Physician; First Court of Medical Affairs , final action pending.) TO: Lucius Darby, Physician Grade I, Black Service Director of Galactic Periphery Services, Hospital Earth cian Grade VI, Red Service General Practice Patrol Ship Lancet is directed to your attention in hopes that it may anticipate various charges which are certain to be placed against me as a Physician of the Red Service upon the return of the General Survey Ship Mercy to Hospital Earth (expected arrival four months from above date). These charges will undoubtedly be preferred by one Turvold Neelsen, Physician Grade II of the Black Service, and Commander of the Mercy on its current survey mission into the Vorochislov Sector. Exactly what the charges will be I cannot say, since the Black Doctor in question refuses either Illustrated by Ed Emsh audience or communication with me at the present time; however, it seems likely that treason, incompetence and mutinous insubordination will be among the milder complaints registered. It is possible that even Malpractice might be added, so you can readily understand the reasons for this statement -- The following will also clarify Mercy , upon arrival in orbit around Hospital Earth, be met immediately by a decontamination ship carrying a vat of hydrochloric acid, concentration #, measuring no less than twenty by thirty by fifty feet, and that Quarantine officials be prepared to place the entire crew of the Mercy under physical and psychiatric observation for a period of no less than six weeks upon disembarkation. The facts, in brief, are as follows: Three months ago, as crew of the General Practic Patrol Ship Lancet , my colleague Green Doctor Wallace Stone and myself began investigating certain peculiar conditions existing on the fourth planet of Mauki, Vorochislov Sector (Glass I Medical Service Contract.) The entire population of that planet was found to be suffering from a mass psychotic delusion of rather spectacular proportions: namely, that they and their entire planet were in imminent danger of being devoured, in toto, by an indestructible non-humanoid creature which they called a hlorg. The Maukivi were insistent that a hlorg had already totally consumed a non-existent outer planet in their system, and was now hard at work on neighboring Mauki V. It was their morbid fear that Mauki IV was next on its list. No amount of reassurance could convince them of the foolishness of these fears, although we exhausted our energy, our patience, and our food and medical supplies in the effort. Ultimately we referred the matter to the Grey Service, feeling confident that it was a psychiatric problem rather than medical or Mercy to take us aboard to replenish our ship's supplies, and provide us a much-needed recovery period. The Black Doctor in command approved our request and brought us aboard. The trouble began two days later... of dirty words in use by the men who travelled the spaceways back and forth from Hospital Earth. There were the words you seldom used in public, but which were colorful and descriptive in private use. Then there were the words which you seldom used even in private, but which effectively relieved feelings when directed at mirrors, inanimate objects, and people who had just left the room. Finally, there were the words that you just didn't use, period. You knew they existed; you'd heard them used at one time or another, but to hear them spoken out in plain Earth-English was enough to rock the most space-hardened of the Galactic Pill Peddlers back on his well-worn heels. Black Doctor Turvold Neelsen's Earth-English was spotty at best, but the word came through without any possibility of misinterpretation. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins stared at the little man and felt his face turning as scarlet as the lining of his uniform cape. "But that's ridiculous!" he finally stammered. "Quite aside from the language you use to suggest it." "Ah! So the word still has some punch left, eh? At least you puppies bring something away from your Medical Training, even if it's only taboos." The Black Doctor scowled across the desk at Jenkins' lanky figure. "But sometimes, my good Doctor, it is better to face a fact than to wait for the fact to face you. Sometimes we have to crawl out of our ivory towers for a minute or two -- you know?" Jenkins reddened again. He had never had any great love for physicians of the Black Service -- who did? -- but he found himself disliking this short, blunt-spoken man even more cordially than most. "Why implicate the Lancet?" he burst out. "You've landed the Mercy on plenty of planets before we brought the Lancet aboard her -- " "But we did not have it with us before the Lancet came aboard, and we do have it now. The implication is obvious. You have brought aboard a contaminant." He'd said it again. Red Doctor Jenkin's face darkened. "The Green Doctor and I have maintained the Lancet in perfect conformity with the Sterility Code. We've taken every precaution on both landing and disembarking procedures. What's more, we've spent the last three months on a planet with no mutually compatible flora or fauna. From Hospital Earth viewpoint, Mauki IV is sterile. We made only the briefest check-stop on Mauki V before joining you. It was a barren rock, but we decontaminated again after leaving. If you have a -- a contaminant on board your ship, sir, it didn't come from the Lancet. And I won't be held responsible." It was strong language to use to a Black Doctor, and Sam Jenkins knew it. There were doctors of the Green and Red Services who had spent their professional lives on some god-forsaken planetoid at the edge of the Galaxy for saying less. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins was too near the end of his Internship, too nearly ready for his first Permanent Planetary Appointment with the rank, honor, and responsibility it carried to lightly risk throwing it to the wind at this stage -- But a Red Doctor does not bring a contaminant aboard a survey ship, he thought doggedly, no matter what the Black Doctor says -- Neelsen looked at the young man slowly. Then he shrugged. "Of course, I'm merely a pathologist. I realize that we know nothing of medicine, nor of disease, nor of the manner in which disease is spread. All this is beyond our scope. But perhaps you'll permit one simple question from a dull old man, just to humor him." Jenkins looked at the floor. "I'm sorry. Sir." "Just so. You've had a very successful cruise this year with the Lancet , I understand." Jenkins nodded. "A most successful cruise. Four planets elevated from Class IV to Class II contracts, they tell me. Morua II elevated from Class VI to Class I, with certain special riders. A plague-panic averted on Setman I, and a very complex virusbacteria symbiosis unravelled on and your colleague from the Green Service are hoping for a year's exemption from training, I imagine -- " The Black Doctor looked up sharply. "You searched your holds after leaving the Mauki planets, I presume?" Jenkins blinked. "Why -- no, sir. That is, we decontaminated according to -- " "I see. You didn't search your holds. I suppose you didn't notice your food supplies dwindling at an alarming rate?" "No -- " The Red Doctor hesitated. "Not really." "Ah." The Black Doctor closed his eyes wearily and flipped an activator switch. The scanner on the far wall buzzed into activity. It focussed on the rear storage hold of the Mercy where the little Lancet was resting on its landing rack. "Look closely, Doctor." At first Jenkins saw nothing. Then his eye caught a long, pink glistening strand lying across the floor of the hold. The scanner picked up the strand, followed it to the place where it emerged from a neat pencil-sized hole in the hull of the Lancet . The strand snaked completely across the room and disappeared through another neat hole in the wall into the next storage hold. Jenkins shook his head as the scanner flipped back to the hole in the Lancet's hull. Even as he watched, the hole enlarged and a pink blob began to emerge. The blob kept coming and coming until it rested soggily on the edge of the hole. Then it teetered and fell splat on the floor. "Friend of yours?" the Black Doctor asked casually. It was a pink heap of jelly just big enough to fill a scrub bucket. It sat on the floor, quivering noxiously. Then it sent out pseudopods in several directions, probing the metal floor. After a few moments it began oozing along the strand of itself that lay on the floor, and squeezed through the hole into the next hold. "Ugh," said Sam Jenkins, feeling suddenly sick. "The hydroponic tanks are in there," the Black Doctor said. "You've seen one of those before?" "Not in person." Jenkins shook his head weakly. "Only pictures. It's a hlorg. We thought it was only a Maukivi persecution fantasy." "This thing is growing pretty fast for a persecution fantasy. We spotted it eight hours ago, demolishing what was left of your food supply. It's twice as big now as it was then." "Well, we've got to get rid of it," said Jenkins, suddenly coming to life. "Amen, Doctor." 'Til get the survey crew alerted right away. We won't waste a minute. And my apologies." Jenkins was hurrying for the door. "I'll get it cleared out of here fast." "I do hope so," said the Black Doctor. "The thing makes me ill just to think about." "I'll give you a clean-ship report in twenty-four hours," the Red Doctor said as confidently as he could and beat a hasty retreat down the corridor. He was wishing fervently that he felt as confident as he sounded. The Maukivi had described the hlorg in excruciating detail. He and Green Doctor Stone had listened, and smiled sadly at each other, day after day, marvelling at the fanciful delusion. Hlorgs, indeed! And such creatures to dream up -- eating, growing, devouring plant, animal and mineral without discrimination -- And the Maukivi had stoutly maintained that this hlorg of theirs was indestructible -- G reen doctor Waiiy Stone, true to his surgical calling, was a man of action. "You mean there is such a thing?" he exploded when his partner confronted him with the news. "For real? Not just somebody's pipe dream?" "There is," said Jenkins, "and we've got it. Here. On board the Mercy . It's eating like hell-andgone and doubling its size every eight hours." "Well what are you waiting for? Toss it overboard!" "Fine! And what happens to the next party it happens to land on? We're supposed to be altruists, remember? We're supposed to worry about the health of the Galaxy." Jenkins shook his head. "Whatever we do with it, we have to find out just what we're tossing before we toss." The creature had made itself at home aboard the Mercy . In the spirit of uninvited guests since time immemorial, it had established a toehold with remarkable asperity, and now was digging in for the long winter. Drawn to the hydroponic tanks like a flea to a dog, the hlorg had settled its bulbous pink body down in their murky depths with a contented gurgle. As it grew larger the tank-levels grew lower, the broth clearer. The fact that the twenty-five crewmen of the Mercy depended on those tanks for their food supply on the four-month run back to Hospital Earth didn't seem to bother the hlorg a bit. It just sank down wetly and began to eat. Under Jenkins' whip hand, and with Green Doctor Stone's assistance, the Survey Grew snapped into action. Survey was the soul and lifeblood of the medical services supplied by Hospital Earth to the inhabited planets of the Galaxy. Centuries before, during the era of exploration, every Earth ship had carried a rudimentary Survey Crew -- a physiologist, a biochemist, an immunologist, a physician -- to determine the safety of landings on unknown planets. Other races were more advanced in technological and physical sciences, in sales or in merchandising -- but in the biological sciences men of Earth stood unexcelled in the Galaxy. It was not surprising that their casual offerings of medical services wherever their ships touched had led to a growing demand for those services, until the first Medical had formalized the planetary specialty. Earth had become Hospital Earth, physician to a Galaxy, surgeon to a thousand worlds, midwife to those susceptible to midwifery and psychiatrist to those whose inner lives zigged when their outer lives zagged. In the early days it had been a haphazard arrangement; but gradually distinct Services appeared to handle problems of medicine, surgery, radiology, psychiatry and all the other functions of a well-appointed medical service. Under the direction of the Black Service of Pathology, Hospital ships and Survey ships were dispatched to serve as bases for the tiny General Practice Patrol ships that answered the calls of the planets under Contract. But it was the Survey ships that did the basic dirty-work on any new planet taken under Contract -- outlining the physiological and biochemical aspects of the races involved, studying their disease patterns, their immunological types, their susceptibility to medical, surgical, or psychiatric treatment. It was an exacting service to perform, and Survey did an exacting job. Now, with their own home base invaded by a hungry pink jellyblob, the Survey Crew of the Mercy dug in with all fours to find a way to exorcise it. The early returns were not encouraging. Bowman, the anatomist, spent six hours with the creature. He'd go after the functional anatomy first, he thought, as he approached the task with gusto. Special organs, vital organ systems -- after all, every Achilles had his heel. Functional would spot it if anything would -- Six hours later he rendered a preliminary report. It consisted of a blank sheet of paper and an expression of wild frustration. "What's this supposed to mean?" Jenkins asked. "Just what it says." "But it says nothing!" "That's exactly what it means." Bowman was a thin, wistful-looking man with a hawk nose and a little brown mustache. He subbed as ship's cook when things were slow in his specialty. He wasn't a very good cook, but what could anyone do with the sludge from the harvest shelf of a hydroponic tank? Now, with the hlorg incumbent, there wasn't even any sludge. "I drained off a tank and got a good look at it before it crawled over into the next one," Bowman said. "Ugly bastard. But from a strictly anatomical standpoint I can't help you a bit." Green Doctor Stone glowered over Jenkins' shoulder at the man. "But surely you can give us something" Bowman shrugged. "You want it technical ?" "Any way you like . # "Your hlorg is an ideal anamorph. A nothing. Protoplasm, just protoplasm." Jenkins looked up sharply. "What about his cellular organization?" "No cells," said Bowman. "Unless they're sub-microscopic, and I'd need an electron-peeker to tell you that." "No organ systems?" "Not even an integument. You saw how slippery he looked? That's why. There's nothing holding him in but energy." "Now, look," said Stone. "He eats, doesn't he? He must have waste materials of some sort." Bowman shook his head unhappily. "Sorry. No urates. No nitrates. No COo. Anyway, he doesn't eat because he has nothing to eat with. He absorbs. And that includes the lining of the tanks, which he seems to like as much as the contents. He doesn't bore those holes he makes -- he dissolves them." They sent Bowman back to quarters for a hot bath and a shot of Happy-O and looked up Hrunta, the biochemist. Hrunta was glaring at paper electrophoretic patterns and pulling out chunks of hair around his bald spot. He gave them a snarl and shoved a sheaf of papers into their hands. "Metabolic survey?" Jenkins asked. "Plus," said Hrunta. "You're not going to like it, either." "Why not? If it grows, it metabolizes. If it metabolizes we can kill it. Axiom number seventeen, paragraph number four." "Oh, it metabolizes, all right, but you'd better find yourself another axiom, pretty quick." "Why?" "Because it not only metabolizes, it consumes . There's no sign of the usual protein-carbohydrate-fat metabolism going on here. This baby has an enzyme system that's straight from hell. It bypasses the usual metabolic activities that produce heat and energy and gets right down to basic-basic." Jenkins swallowed. "What do you mean?" "It attacks the nuclear structure of whatever matter the creature comes in contact with. There's a partial mass-energy conversion in its rawest form. The creature goes after carbon-bearing substances first, since the G seems to break down more easily than anything else -- hence its preference for plant and animal material over non-G stuff. But it can use anything if it has to -- " Jenkins stared at the little biochemist, an image in his mind of the pink creature in the hold, growing larger by the minute as it ate its way through the hydroponics, through the dry stores, through -- "Is there anything it can't use?" "If there is, I haven't found it," Hrunta said sadly. "In fact, I can't see any reason why it couldn't consume this ship and everything in it, right down to the last rivet -- " T hey walked down to the hold for another look at their uninvited guest, and almost wished they hadn't. It had reached the size of a small hippopotamus, although the resemblance ended there. Twenty hours had elapsed since the survey had begun. The hlorg had used every minute of it, draining the tanks, engulfing dry stores, devouring walls and floors as it spread out in search of food, leaving trails of eroded metal wherever it went. It was ugly -- ugly in its pink shapelessness, ugly in its slimey halfsentient movements, in its very purposefulness . But its ugliness went even deeper, stirring primordial feelings of revulsion and loathing in their minds as they watched it oozing implacably across the hold to another dry-storage bin. Wally Stone shuddered. "It's grown " "Too fast. Bowman charts it as geometric progression." Stone scratched his jaw as a lone pink pseudopod pushed out on the floor toward him. Then he leaped forward and stamped on it, severing the strand from the body. The severed member quivered and lay still for a moment. Then it flowed back to rejoin the body with a wet gurgle. Stone looked at his half-dissolved shoe. "Egotropism," Jenkins said. "Bowman played around with that, too. A severed piece will rejoin if it can. If it can't it just takes up independent residence and we have two hlorgs " "What happens to it outside the ship?" Stone wanted to know. "It falls dormant for several hours, and then splits up into a thousand independent chunks. One of the boys spent half of yesterday out there gathering them up. I tell you, this thing is equipped to survive . " "So are we," said Green Doctor Stone grimly. "If we can't outwit this free-flowing gob of obscenity, we deserve anything we get. Let's have a conference. ' They met in the pilot room. The Black Doctor was there; so were Bowman and Hrunta. Chambers, the physiologist, was glumly clasping and unclasping his hands in a corner. The geneticist, Piccione, drew symbols on a scratch pad and stared blankly at the wall. Jenkins was saying: "Of course, these are only preliminary reports, but they serve to outline the problem. This is not just an annoyance any longer, it's a crisis. We'd all better understand that." The Black Doctor cut him off with a wave of his hand, and glowered at the papers as he read them through minutely. As he sat hunched at the desk with the black cowl of his office hanging down from his shoulders he looked like a squat black judge, Jenkins thought, a shadow from the Inquisition, a Passer of Spells. But there was no medievalism in Black Doctor Neelsen. In fact, it was for that reason, and only that reason, that the Black Service had come to be the leaders and the whips, the executors and directors of all the manifold operations of Hospital Earth. The physicians of the General Practice Patrol were fledglings, newly trained in their specialties, inexperienced in the rigorous discipline of medicine that was required of the directors of permanent Planetary Dispensaries in the heavily populated systems of the Galaxy. On outlying worlds where little was known of the ways of medicine, the temptation was great to substitute faith for knowledge, cant for investigation, nonsense rituals for hard work. But the physicians of the Black Service were always waiting to jerk wandering neophytes back to the scientific disciplines that made the service of Hospital Earth so effective. The Black Doctors would not tolerate sloppiness. "Show me the tissue, Doctor," they would say. "Prove to me that what you say is so. Prove that what you did was valid medicine..." Their laboratories were the morgues and autopsy rooms of a thousand planets, the Temples of Truth from which no physician since the days of Pasteur and Lister could escape for long and retain his position. The Black Doctors were the pragmatists, the gadflys of Hospital Earth. For this reason it was surprising to hear Black Doctor Neelsen saying, "Perhaps we are being too scientific, just now. When the creature has exhausted our food stores, it will look elsewhere for food. Perhaps we must cut at the tree and not at the root." "A frontal attack?" said Jenkins. "Just so. Its enzyme system is its vulnerability. Enzyme systems operate under specific optimum conditions, right? And every known enzyme system can be inactivated by adverse conditions of one sort or another. A physical approach may tell us how in this case. Meanwhile we will be on emergency rations, and hope that we don't starve to death finding out." The Black Doctor paused, looking at the men around him. "And in case you are thinking of enlisting help from outside, forget it. I've sent plague-warnings out for Galactic relay. We have this thing isolated, and we're going to keep it that way as long as I command this ship." They went gloomily back to their laboratories to plan their frontal attack. That was the night that Hrunta disappeared. came to wake him from his sleep period. His bunk had been slept in, but he wasn't in it. In fact, he wasn't anywhere on the ship. "But he couldn't just vanish!" the Black Doctor burst out when they told him the news. "Maybe he's hiding somewhere. Maybe this business was working on his mind." Green Doctor Stone took a crew of men to search the ship again, even though he considered it a waste of precious time. He had his private convictions about where Hrunta had gone. So did every other man on the ship, including Jenkins. The hlorg had stopped eating. Huge and round and wet and ugly, it squatted in the after hold, quivering gently, without any other sign of life. Surfeited. Like a fat man after a turkey dinner. Jenkins reviewed progress with the others. No stone had been left unturned. They had sliced the hlorg , and squeezed it. They had boiled it and frozen it. They had dropped chunks of it in acid vats and covered other chunks with dessicants and alkalis. Nothing seemed to bother it. A cold environment slowed down its activity, true, but it also stimulated the process of fission. Warmed up again, the portions sucked back together again and resumed eating. Heat was a little more effective, but not much. It stunned the creature for a brief period, but it would not burn. It hissed frightfully and gave off an overpowering stench, and curled up at the edges, but as soon as the heat was turned off it began to recover. In Hrunta's lab chunks of the hlorg sat in a dozen vats on tables and in sinks. Some contained antibiotics, some concentrated acids, some dessicants. In each vat a blob of pink protoplasm wiggled happily, showing no sign of discomfiture. On another table were the remains of Hrunta's (unsuccessful) attempt to prepare an antihlorg serum. But no Hrunta. "He was down there with the thing all day," Bowman said sadly. "He felt it was his responsibility, really. Hrunta thought biochemistry was the answer to all things, of course. Very conscientious man." "But he was in bed l" "He claimed he did his best thinking in bed. Maybe he had a brainstorm and went down to try it out, and -- " "Yes." Jenkins nodded sourly. "And." He walked down the row of vats. "You'd think that at least concentrated sulphuric would dessicate it a little. But it's just formed a crust of coagulated protein around itself, and sits there -- " Bowman peered over his shoulder, his mustache twitching. "But it does dessicate." "If you use enough long enough." "How about concentrated hydrochloric?" "Same thing. Maybe a little more effective, but not enough to count." "Okay. Next we try combinations. There's got to be something the wretched beast can't tolerate -- " There was, of course. Green Doctor Stone brought it to Jenkins as he was getting ready to turn in for a sleep period. Jenkins had checked to make sure double guards were posted in the hlorg's vicinity, and jolted them with Sleep-Not to keep them on their toes. All the same, he tied a length of stout cord around his ankle just to make sure he didn't do any sleepwalking. He was tying it to the bunk when Stone came in with a pan in his hand and a peculiar look on his face. "Take a look at this," he said. Jenkins looked at the sickly brown mass in the tray, and then up at Stone. "Where did you find it?" "Down in the hold. Our hlorg has broken precedent. It's rejected something that it ate." "Yeah. What is it?" "I don't know. I'm taking it to Neelsen for paraffin sections. But I know what it looks like to me." "Mm. I know." Jenkins felt sick. Stone headed up to the path lab, leaving the Red Doctor settled in his bunk. Ten minutes later Jenkins sat bolt upright in the darkness. Frantically he untied himself and slid into his clothes. "Idiot!" he growled to himself. "Seventh son of a seventh son -- " Five minutes later he was staring at the vats in Hrunta's laboratory. He found the one he was looking for. A pink blob of hlorg wiggled slowly around the bottom. Jenkins drew a beaker of distilled water and added it to the fluid in the vat. It hissed and sputtered and sent up quantities of acrid steam. When the steam had cleared away, Jenkins peered in eagerly. The pink thing in the bottom was turning a sickly violet. It had quit wiggling. As Jenkins watched, the violet color changed to mud grey, then to black. He prodded it with a stirring rod. There was no response. With a whoop Jenkins buzzed Bowman and Stone. "We've got it!" he shouted to them when they appeared. "Look! Look at it!" Bowman poked and probed and broke into a wide grin. The piece of hlorg was truly and sincerely dead. "It inactivates the enzyme system, and renders the base protoplasm vulnerable to anything that normally attacks it. What are we waiting for?" They began tearing the laboratory apart, searching for the right bottles. The supply was discouragingly small, but there was some in stock. The three of them raced down the corridor for the hold where the hlorg was. It took them three hours of angry work to exhaust the supply. They whittled chunks off the hlorg , tossed them in pans of the deadly fluid. With each slice they stopped momentarily to watch it turn violet, then black, as it died. The hlorg, dwindling in size, sensed the attack and slapped frantically at their ankles, sending out angry plumes of wet jelly, but they ducked and dodged and whittled some more. The hlorg quivered and gurgled and wept pinkish goo all over the floor, but it grew smaller and weaker with every whack. "Hrunta must have spotted it and come down here alone," Jenkins panted between slices. "Maybe he slipped, lost his footing, I don't know -- " They continued to work until the supply was exhausted. They had reduced the hlorg to a quarter its previous size. "Check the other labs, see if they have some more," said Stone. "I already have," Bowman said. "They don't. This is it." "But we haven't got it all killed. There's still -- " He pointed to the thing quailing in the corner. "I know. We're licked, that's all. There isn't any more of the stuff on the ship." They stopped and looked at each other suddenly. Then Jenkins said: "Oh, yes there is." There was silence. Bowman looked at Stone, and Stone looked at Bowman. They both looked at Jenkins. "Oh, no. Sorry. I decline." Stone shook his head slowly. "But we have to! There's no other way. If the enzyme system is inactivated, it's just protoplasm -- there's no physiological or biochemical reason -- " "You know what you can do with your physiology and biochemistry," Bowman said succinctly. "You can also count me out." He left them and the hatchway clanged after him. "Wally?" "Yeah." "It'll be months before we get back to Hospital Earth. We know how we can hold it in check until we get there." "Yeah." "Well?" Green Doctor Wally Stone sighed. "Greater love hath no man," he said wearily. "We'd better go tell Neelsen, I guess." B lack doctor Turvoid Neelsen's answer was a flat, unequivocal no. "It's monstrous and preposterous. I won't stand for it. Nobody will stand for it." "But you have the proof in your own hands," Jenkins said. "You saw the specimen that the Green Doctor brought you." Neelsen hunched back angrily. "I saw it." "And your impression of it? As a pathologist?" "I fail to see how my impression applies one way or the other -- " "Doctor, sometimes we have to face facts. Remember?" "All right." Neelsen seemed to curl up into himself still further. "The specimen was stomach." "Human stomach?" "Human stomach." "But the only human on this ship that doesn't have a stomach is Hrunta," said Jenkins. "So the hlorg ate him." " Most of him. Not quite all. It threw out the one part of him it couldn't eat. The part containing a substance that inactivated its enzyme system. Dilute hydrochloric acid, to be specific. We used the entire ship's supply, and cut the hlorg down to three quarters size, but we need a continuous supply to keep it whittled down until we get home. And there's only one good, permanent, reliable source of dilute hydrochloric acid on board this ship -- " The Black Doctor's face was purple. "I said no," he choked. "My answer stands." The Red Doctor sighed and turned to Green Doctor Stone. "All right, Wally," he said. (From the files of the Medical Disciplinary Board , Hospital Earthy op . cit.) I am certain that you can see from the foregoing that a reasonable effort was made by Green Doctor Stone and myself to put the plan in effect peaceably and with full approval of our commander. It was our conviction, however, that the emergency nature of the circumstances required that it be done with or without his approval. Our subsequent success in containing the hlorg to at least reasonable and managable proportions should bear out the wisdom of our decision. Actually, it has not been as bad as one might think. It has been necessary to confine the crew to their quarters, and to restrain the Black Doctor forcibly, but with liberal use of Happy-O we can occasionally convince ourselves that it is rare beefsteak, and the Green Doctor, our pro-tem cook has concocted several very tasty sauces, such as mushroom, onion, etc. We reduce the hlorg to half its size each day, and if thoroughly heated the chunks lie still on the plate for quite some time. No physical ill effects have been noted, and the period of quarantine is recommended solely to allow the men an adequate period for phychological recovery. I have only one further recommendation : that the work team from the Grey Service be recalled at once from their assignment on Mauki IV. The problem is decidedly not psychiatric, and it would be one of the tragedies of the ages if our excellent psychiatric service were to succeed in persuading the Maukivi out of their 'delusion'. After all, Hospital Earth cannot afford to jeopardize a Contract -- (Signed) Samuel B. Jenkins, Physician Grade VI Red Service A New Theme -- One Never Before Explored in Science Fiction to the legal field as a background. You remember The Cyber and Justice Holmes -- but this time Mr. Riley's theme is a startlingly new one, one which has never before been explored in science fiction. The title is A Question of Identity , and it poses a question of human identity, in all its legal, emotional and social aspects, that has no precedent. The editors of IF are proud to present A Question of Identity , confident that you will find it the most fascinating, unusual and thought-provoking science fiction stories of #. It will be published in the April issue. Don't miss it. Ask your news dealer to reserve your copy. History was repeating itself; there were moats and nobles in Pennsylvania and vassals in Manhattan and the barbarian hordes were overrunning the land . o lurch hurriedly into a nest of boulders that young Giulion Geoffrey realized he had been betrayed. With the muzzle of his own cannon still hot from the shell that had jammed The Barbarian's turret, he had yanked the starboard track lever to wheel into position for the finishing shot. All around him, the remnants of The Barbarian's invadHI I VI V  ing army were being cut T II G B Q I #I Q I I Q II S to flaming ribbons by the armored vehicles of the Seaboard League. The by billows oi cannon fire, and the din of laboring engines, guns, and rent metal was a cacophonic climax to the Seaboard League's first decisive victory over the inland invaders. Young Geoffrey could justifiably feel that he would cap that climax by personally accounting for the greatest of the inland barbarians; The Barbarian general himself. He trained his sights on the scarlet bearpaw painted on the skewed turret's flank, and laid his hand on the firing lever. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of another tankette rushing up on his port side. He glanced at it, saw its graceful handicrafting, and knew it for one of the League's own. He could even see the insigne ; the mailed heel trampling a stand of wheat; Harolde Dugald, of the neighboring fief. Geoffrey was on coldly polite terms with Dugald -- he had no use for the other man's way of treating his serfs -- and now he felt a prickle of Illustrated by Ed Emsh indignant rage at this attempt to usurp a share of his glory. He saw Dugald's turret begin to traverse, and hastily tried to get the finishing shot into The Barbarian's tankette before the other Leaguesman could fire. But Dugald was not aiming for The Barbarian. First he had to eliminate Geoffrey from the scene entirely. When he fired, at almost point-blank range, the world seemed to explode in Giulion's eyes. Somehow, no whistling shard of metal actually hit him. But the tankette, sturdy as it was, could not hope to protect him entirely. He was thrown viciously into the air, his ribs first smashing into the side of the hatch, and then he was thrown clear, onto the rocky ground of the foothills; agonized, stunned to semi-consciousness, he lay feebly beating at his smoldering tunic while Dugald spun viciously by him, almost crushing him under one tread. He saw Dugald's tankette plunge into the rocks after The Barbarian, and then, suddenly, the battle was beyond him. Dugald, The Barbarian; all the thundering might that had clashed here on the eastern seaboard of what had, long ago, been The United States of America -- all of this had suddenly, as battles will, whirled off in a new direction and left Giulion Geoffrey to lie hurt and unconscious in the night. He awoke to the trickle of cold water between his teeth. His lips bit into the threaded metal of a canteen top, and a huge arm supported his shoulders. Broad shoulders and a massive head loomed over him against the stars. A rumbling, gentle voice said: "All right, lad, now swallow some before it's all wasted." He peered around him in the night. It was as still as the bottom of a grave. Nothing moved. He drew a ragged breath that ended in a sharp gasp, and the rumbling voice said: "Ribs?" He nodded and managed a strangled "Yes." "Shouldn't wonder," the stranger grunted. "I saw you pop out of your tank like a cork coming out of a wine bottle. That was a fair shot he hit you. You're lucky." A broad hand pressed him down as the memory of Dugald's treachery started him struggling to his feet. "Hold still, lad. We'll give you a chance to catch your breath and wrap some bandages around you. You'll live to give him his due, but not tonight. You'll have to wait for another day." There was something in the stranger's voice that Geoffrey recognized for the quality that made men obey other men. It was competence, self-assurance, and, even more, the calm expression of good sense. Tonight, Geoffrey needed someone with that quality. He sank back, grateful for the stranger's help. "I'm Giulion Geoffrey of Geoff rion," he said, "and indebted to you. Who are you, stranger?" The darkness rumbled to a deep, rueful laugh. "In these parts, lad, I'm not called by my proper name. I'm Hodd Savage -- the Barbarian. And that was a fair knock you gave me. Young Geoffrey's silence lasted for a long while. Then he said in a flat, distant voice: "Why did you give me water, if you're going to kill me anyway?" The Barbarian laughed again, this time in pure amusement. "Because I'm not going to kill you, obviously. You're too good a cannoneer to be despatched by a belt knife. No -- no, lad, I'm not planning to kill anyone for some time. All I want right now is to get out of here and get home. I've got another army to raise, to make up for this pasting you Leaguesmen have just given me." "Next time, you won't be so lucky," Geoffrey muttered. "We'll see your hide flapping in the rain, if you're ever foolish enough to raid our lands again." The Barbarian slapped his thigh. "By God," he chuckled, "I knew it wasn't some ordinary veal-fed princeling that outmaneuvered me ! # He shook his head. "That other pup had better watch out for you, if you ever cross his path again. I lost him in the rocks with ease to spare. Bad luck your shot smashed my fuel tanks, or I'd be halfway home by now." The rolling voice grew low and bitter. "No sense waiting to pick up my men. Not enough of 'em left to make a corporal's guard." "What do you mean, if I ever cross Dugald's path again? I'll have him called out ot trial by combat the day I can ride a tankette once more." "I wouldn't be too sure, lad," The Barbarian said gently. "What does that look like, over there?" Geoffrey turned his head to follow the shadowy pointing arm, and saw a flicker of light in the distance. He recognized it for what it was; a huge campfire, with the Leaguesmen' s tankettes drawn up around it. "They're dividing the spoils -- what prisoners there are, to work the mills; whatever of your equipment is still usable; your baggage train. And so forth. What of it?" "Ah, yes, my baggage train," The Barbarian muttered. "Well, we'll come back to that. What else do you suppose they're dividing?" Geoffrey frowned. "Why -- nothing else. Wait!" He sat up sharply, ignoring his ribs. "The fiefs of the dead nobles." "Exactly. Your ramshackle little League held together long enough to whip us for the first time, but now the princelings are dividing up and returning to their separate holdings. Once there, they'll go back to peering covetously at each other's lands, and maybe raid amongst themselves a little, until I come back again. And you're as poor as a churchmouse at this moment, lad -- no fief, no lands, no title -- unless there's an heir?" Geoffrey shook his head distractedly. "No. I've not wed. It's as you say." "And just try to get your property back. No -- no, it won't be so easy to return. Unless you'd care to be a serf on your own former holding?" "Dugald would have me killed," Geoffrey said bitterly. "So there you are, lad. The only advantage you have is that Dugald thinks you're dead already -- you can be sure of that, or it would have been an assassin, and not me, that woke you. That's something, at least. It's a beginning, but you'll have to lay your plans carefully, and take your time. I certainly wouldn't plan on doing anything until your body's healed and your brain's had time to work." Young Geoffrey blinked back the tears of rage. The thought of losing the town and lands his father had left him was almost more than his hot blood could stand. The memory of the great old Keep that dominated the town, with its tapestried halls and torchlit chambers, was suddenly very precious to him. He felt a sharp pang at the thought that he must sleep in a field tonight, like some skulking outlaw, while Dugald quite possibly got himself drunk on Geoff rion wine and snored his headache away on the thick furs of Geoffrey's bed. But The Barbarian was right. Time was needed -- and this meant that, to a certain extent at least, his lot and Savage's were thrown in together. The thought came to Geoffrey that he might have chosen a worse partner. "Now, lad," The Barbarian said, "as long as you're not doing anything else, you might as well help me with my problem." The realization of just exactly who this man was came sharply back to young Geoffrey. "I won't help you escape to your own lands, if that's what you mean," he said quickly. "I'll take good care of that myself, when the time comes," the man answered drily. "Right now, I've got something else in mind. They're dividing my baggage train, as you said. Now, I don't mind that, seeing as most of it belonged to them in the first place. I don't mind it for this year, that is. But there's something else one of you cockerels will be wanting to take home with him, and I've a mind not to let him. There's a perfectly good woman in my personal trailer, and I'm going to get her. But if we're going to do that and get clear of this country by morning, we'd better get to it." Like every other young man of his time and place, Geoffrey had a clear-cut sense of duty regarding the safety and well-being of ladies. He had an entirely different set of attitudes toward women who were not ladies. He had not the slightest idea of which to apply to this case. What sort of woman would The Barbarian take to battle with him? What sort of women would the inland barbarians have generally? He had very little knowledge to go on. The inlanders had been appearing from over the westward mountains for generations, looting and pillaging almost at will, sometimes staying through a winter but usually disappearing in the early Fall, carrying their spoils back to their mysterious homelands on the great Mississippi plain. The seaboard civilization had somehow kept from going to its knees, in spite of them -- in this last generation, even though the barbarians had The Barbarian to lead them, the Seaboard League had managed to cobble itself together -- but no one, in all this time, had ever actually learned, or cared, much about these vicious, compactly organized raiders. Certainly no one had learned anything beyond those facts which worked to best advantage on a battlefield. So, young Giulion Geoffrey faced his problem. This 'perfectly good woman' of The Barbarian's -- was she in fact a good woman, a lady, and therefore entitled to aid in extremity from any and all gentlemen; or was she some camp follower, entirely worthy of being considered a spoil of combat? "Well, come on, Lad," The Barbarian rumbled impatiently at this point. "Do you want that Dugald enjoying her tonight along with everything else?" And that decided Geoffrey. He pushed himself to his feet, not liking the daggers in his chest, but not liking the thought of Dugald's pleasures even more. "Let's go, then." "Good enough, Lad," The Barbarian chuckled. "Now let's see how quietly we can get across to the edge of that fire." They set out -- none too quietly, with The Barbarian's heavy bulk lurching against Geoffrey's lean shoulder on occasion, and both of them uncertain of their footing in the darkness. But they made it across without being noticed -- just two more battle-sore figures in a field where many such might be expected -- and that was what counted. The noise and confusion attendant on the dividing of the spoils was an added help; they reached the fringes of the campfire easily. way history had doubled back on itself, like a worm re-growing part of its body but re-growing it in the wrong place. At one end of the kink -- of the fresh, pink scar -- was a purulent hell of fire and smoke that no one might have expected to live through. Yet, people had, as they have a habit of doing. And at the other end of the kink in time -- Giulion Geoffrey's end, Harolde Dugald's time, The Barbarian's day -- there were keeps and moats in Erie, Pennsylvania, vassals in New Brunswick, and a great stinking warren of low, half-timbered houses on the island of Manhattan. If it had taken a few centuries longer to recover from the cauterizing sun bombs, these things might still have been. But they might have had different names, and human history might have been considered to begin only a few hundred years before. Even this had not happened. The link with the past remained. There was a narrow, cobbled path on Manhattan, with sewage oozing down the ditch in its center, which was still Fifth Avenue. It ran roughly along the same directions as old Broadway, not because there was no one who could read the yellowed old maps but because surveying was in its second childhood. There was a barge running between two ropes stretched across the Hudson, and this was The George Washington Bridge ferry. So, it was only a kink in history, not a break. But Rome was not re-built in a day. Hodd Savage -- The Barbarian, the man who had come out of the hinterlands to batter on civilization's badly mortared walls -- clamped his hand on Giulion Geoffrey's arm, grunted, jerked his head toward the cluster of nobles standing beside the campfire, and muttered: "Listen." Geoffrey listened. The nobles were between him and the fire, and almost none of them were more than silhouettes. Here and there, a man faced toward the fire at such an angle that Geoffrey could make out the thick arch of an eyebrow, the jut of a cheek, or the crook of a nose. But it was not enough for recognition. All the nobles were dressed in battle accoutrements that had become stained or torn. Their harness had shifted, their tunics were askew, and they were bunched so closely that the outline of one man blended into the mis-shaped shadow of the next. The voices were hoarse from an afternoon's bellowing. Some were still drunk with the acid fire of exhausted nerves, and were loud. Others, drained, mumbled in the background like a chorus of the stupid. Gesticulating, mumbling, shouting, shadowed, lumped into one knot of blackness lighted by a ruddy cheekbone here, a gleaming brow there above an eyesocket as inky and blank as a bottomless pit, they were like something out of the wan and misty ages before the Earth had had time to form completely. Two arguing voices rose out of the mass: "Those three barbarian tankettes are mine , I say!" "Yours when I lie dead!" "They surrendered to me!" "Because I pounded them into submission." "Into submission, indeed! You skulked around their flanks like a lame dog, and now that I've taken them, you want your bone!" "You were glad enough to see me there when the battle was hot. Gall me a dog again and I'll spit you like a rat on a pitchfork." No one else in the group of nobles paid the two of them any attention. No one had time to spare for any quarrel but his own, and the whole squabbling pile of them looked ready to fly apart at any moment -- to draw sidearms and knives and flare into spiteful combat. The Barbarian spat quietly. "There's your Seaboard League, Lad. There's your convocation of free men. Step out there and ask for your lands back. Care to try?" "We've already decided that wouldn't be wise," Geoffrey said irritably. He had never cared much for these inevitable aftermaths to battle, but it made him angry to have an inland barbarian make pointed comments. "I suppose it's different when you win, eh?" "Not very. But then, we're not civilized. Let's get moving, Lad." Silently, they skirted the fire and made their way toward the parked vehicles of The Barbarian's captured supply train. The ground was rough and covered by underbrush. More than once, The Barbarian stumbled into Geoffrey, making him clench his jaw against the pain in his chest. But he saw no point in saying anything about it. "There she is," The Barbarian said in a husky growl. Geoffrey peered through the brush at an armored trailer whose flat sides were completely undecorated except for a scarlet bearpaw painted on the door. A lantern gleamed behind the slit windows, and The Barbarian grunted with satisfaction. "She's still in there. Fine. We'll have this done in a couple of seconds." In spite of the incongruity, Geoffrey asked curiously: "What's a second?" "A division of time, Lad -- one sixtieth of a minute." "Oh. What on Earth would you want to measure that accurately for?" "For getting women out of trailers in a hurry, Lad. Now -- let's look for sentries." There were two guarding the trailer -- men at arms from Dugald's holding, Geoffrey noticed -- carrying shotguns and lounging in the shadows. One of them had a wineskin -- Geoffrey heard the gurgle plainly -- and the other was constantly turning away from the trailer to listen to the shrieks and shouting coming from among the other vehicles of the train, where other guards were not being quite as careful of their masters' new property. "I see they've found the quartermaster's waggons," The Barbarian said drily. "Now, then, Lad -- you work away toward the right, there, and I'll take the left. Here -- take my knife. I won't need it." The Barbarian passed over a length of steel as big as a short-sword, but oddly curved and sharpened down one side of the blade. "Stab if you can, but if you have to cut, that blade'll go through a man's forearm. Remember you're not holding one of those overgrown daggers of yours." "And just why should I kill a man for you?" "Do you think that man won't try to kill you?" Geoffrey had no satisfactory answer to that. He moved abruptly off into the brush, holding The Barbarian's knife, and wondering just how far he was obligated for a bandaged chest and half a pint of water. But a man's duty to his rescuer was plain enough, and, besides, just what else was there to do? The blame for it all went squarely back to Dugald, and Geoffrey did not love him for it. He slipped through the bushes until he was only a few yards from the man who had the wineskin, and waited for The Barbarian to appear at the opposite end of the trailer. When it happened, it happened quite suddenly, as these things will. One moment the other sentry was craning his neck for another look at what was going on elsewhere. The next he was down on his knees, croaking through a compressed throat, with The Barbarian's arm under his chin and a driving knee ready to smash at the back of his neck again. Geoffrey jumped forward, toward his own man. The man at arms had dropped his wineskin in surprise and was staring at what was happening to his comrade. When he heard Geoffrey come out of the underbrush, the face he turned was white and oddly distended with shock, as though all the bones had drained out of it. He might have appeared fierce enough, ordinarily. But things were happening too fast for him. Geoffrey had never killed anyone but a noble in his life. Not intentionally and at close range, in any case. The completely baffled and helpless look of this one somehow found time to remind him that this was not, after all, one of his peers -- that the man was hopelessly outclassed in fair combat -- or in anything else, for that matter. Geoffrey did not stop to weigh the probity of this idea. It was the central tenet of his education and environment. Furthermore, there was some truth in it. He couldn't kill the man. He swept up his arm and struck the flat of The Barbarian's broad knife against the side of the guard's head, and bowled the man over with his rush. But the guard had a hard skull. He stared up with glazed but conscious eyes, and squalled : "Lord Geoffrey!" Geoffrey hit him again, and this time the guard stayed down, but the damage was done. Scrambling to his feet, Geoffrey ran over to The Barbarian, who was letting the other guard ooze to the ground. "We'll have to hurry!" Geoffrey panted. "Before that man comes back to his senses." The Barbarian gave him a disgusted look, but nodded. "Hurry we shall." He lurched to the trailer door and slapped it with the flat of his hand. "Let's go, Myka." There was a scrambling sound inside the trailer, and the light went out. The door slid open, and Geoffrey found himself staring at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was lithe almost to the point of boyishness, even though she was clearly some years older than Geoffrey. She had short hair the color of hammered copper, high cheekbones, and tawny eyes. She was wearing a tunic and short trousers, and there was an empty pistol holster strapped around her waist. Obviously, she was not a lady. But it was much too late for Geoffrey to care about that. She stopped in the doorway, shaking her head slowly at The Barbarian. "I swear, Hodd," she said in a low, laughing voice, "one of these days you won't come back from the dead, and I'll be surprised." "It was close enough, this time," The Barbarian growled. He jerked his head toward Geoffrey. "That young buck over there knows how to handle his enemies. Once he learns what to do about his friends, I may have to retire." Myka arched her burning eyebrows. "Oh? What's the story behind that, I'd like to know." "We can always talk," Geoffrey said a little edgily. "But we can't always find an empty tankette." "Quite right, Lad," The Barbarian said. "I saw some vehicles parked over that way." "Those belong to the nobles. There ought to be some captured ones of yours somewhere around here." "With plenty of guards on them. No thanks." "That didn't trouble you earlier." "Myka, as you may have noticed, is more than a tank. This time the prize isn't worth it. I'd rather just slip over to where I can get transportation for the choosing." "Not with my help." The Barbarian looked at him and grunted. He seemed oddly disappointed. "I would have bet the other way," he muttered. Then the shaggy head rose, and he circled Myka's waist with one arm. "All right, I'll do it without your help." "Is Myka trained to drive a tankette and fight at the same time?" "No." "Then you'd better do it my way. You'd make a poor showing, kicking drive levers with a broken leg." Geoffrey nodded toward The Barbarian's right shin. "It's been that way since before you picked me up, hasn't it? I saw it wobble when you kneed that man at arms." Myka looked at The Barbarian sharply, worry on her face, but the man was chuckling. "All right, Bucko, we'll do it your way." "Fine." Geoffrey wasn't so sure it was. Suddenly he was committed not only to helping The Barbarian escape, but also to escape with him. He was faintly surprised at himself. But there was something about the man. Something worth saving, no matter what. And there was the business now of having been recognized. Once Dugald learned he was still alive, there would be a considerable amount of danger in staying in the vicinity. Of course, he had only to stoop over the unconscious guard with The Barbarian's knife... With a quick motion, he tossed the weapon back to its owner. That one was an easy choice, Geoffrey thought. Simply stealing -- or was it recapturing? -- a tankette and using it to drive away with Myka and The Barbarian didn't mean he had to go all the way to the barbarian lands with them. Let the guard revive and run to Dugald with the news. All Geoffrey had to do was to remove himself a few miles, find shelter, and bide his time. One recaptured barbarian tankette might not even be missed. And the guard might not be believed -- well, that was a thin hope -- but, in any case, no one had any reason to suspect The Barbarian was still alive. There'd be no general pursuit. Well... maybe not. There was a man at arms choked to death, by a stronger arm than Geoffrey's, and it was The Barbarian's woman who would be missing. There might be quite a buzz about that. Geoffrey shook his head in impatient annoyance. This kind of life demanded a great deal more thinking than he was accustomed to. All these unpredictable factors made a man's head spin. And then again, maybe they didn't. The thing to do was to act, to do what would get him out of here now, and leave him free tomorrow to do whatever thinking tomorrow demanded. With a little practice, too, thinking would undoubtedly come more easily. "All right' he said decisively, "let's get moving over in that direction, and see if the guards haven't gotten a little careless." He motioned to Myka and The Barbarian, and began to lead the way into the underbrush. He thrust out a hand to pull a sapling aside, and almost ran full-tilt into Harolde Dugald. Dugald was almost exactly Geoffrey's age and size, but he had something Geoffrey lacked -- a thinlipped look of wolfish wisdom. His dark eyes were habitually slitted, and his mouth oddly off-center, always poised between a mirthless grin and a snarl. His long black hair curled under at the base of his skull, and his hands were covered with heavy gold and silver rings. There was one for each finger and thumb, and all of them were set with knobby precious stones. His lips parted now, and his long white teeth showed plainly in the semi-darkness. "I was coming back to inspect my prizes," he said in a voice like a fine-bladed saw chuckling through soft metal. "And look what I've found." The open mouth of his heavy, handmade side pistol pointed steadily between Geoffrey's eyes. "I find my erstwhile neighbor risen from the dead, and in the company of a crippled enemy and his leman. Indeed, my day is complete." The one thing Geoffrey was not feeling was fear. The wire-thin strand of his accumulated rage was stretched to breaking. Somewhere, far from the forefront of his mind, he was feeling surprise and disappointment. He was perfectly aware of Dugald's weapon, and of what it would do to his head at this range. But Geoffrey was not stopping to think. And Dugald was a bit closer to him than he ought to have been. Geoffrey's hands seemed to leap out. One tore the pistol out of Dugald's hand and knocked it spinning. The other cracked, openpalmed, against the other man's face, hard enough to split flesh and start the blood trickling down Dugald's cheek. The force of the combined blows sent Dugald staggering. He fell back, crashing into a bush, and hung against it. Stark fear shone in his eyes. He screamed: "Dugald! Dugald! To me! To me!" For a second, everything went silent; nobles quarreling, guards roistering among the captures -- suddenly the battlefield was still. Then the reaction to the rallying cry set off an entirely different kind of hubbub. The sound now was that of an alerted pack of dogs. Once more, Geoffrey swept his hand across Dugald's face, feeling his own skin break over the knuckles. But there was no time for anything else. Now they had to run, and not in silence. Now everything went by the board, and the nearest safety was the best. Behind them as they tore through the brush, they could hear Dugald shouting : "That way! The Barbarian's with him!" The Barbarian was grunting with every step. Myka was panting. Geoffrey was in the lead, his throat burning with every breath, not knowing where he was leading them, but trying to skirt around the pack of nobles that would be running toward them in the darkness. He crashed against plated metal. He peered at it in the absolute darkness this far from the fires and torches. "Tankette!" he said hoarsely. "Empty." They scrambled onto it, Geoffrey pulling at The Barbarian's arm. "Down, Myka -- inside. Ought to be room between steering posts and motor." He pushed the woman down through the hatch, and dropped back to the ground. He ran to the crank clipped to one track housing and thrust it into place. "You -- you'll have to hang onto -- turret," he panted to The Barbarian. "Help me start." He wound furiously at the starting crank until he felt the flywheel spin free of the ratchet, and then engaged the driveshaft. The tankette shuddered to the sudden torque. The motor resisted, turned its shaft reluctantly, spun the magneto, ignited, stuttered, coughed, and began to roar. The headlights flickered yellowly, glowed up to brightness as the engine built up revolutions. The Barbarian, clinging to the turret with one arm, pushed the choke control back to halfway and advanced the spark. Geoffrey scrambled up the sharply pitched rear deck, clawing for handholds on the radiator tubing, and dropped into the turret seat. He took the controls, kicked at the left side track control without caring, for the moment, whether Myka was in the way or not, spun the tankette halfway round, and pulled the throttle out as far as it would go. Its engine clamoring, its rigid tracks transmitting every shock and battering them, the tankette flogged forward through the brush. There was gunfire booming behind them, and there were other motors sputtering into life. There was no one among the nobles to drive as well as Geoffrey could -- certainly no one who could keep up with him at night, in country he knew. He could probably depend on that much. He lit the carbide lamp over the panel. Geoffrey looked at the crest worked into the metal, and laughed. He had even managed to steal Dugald's tankette. good fifty miles away from where the battle had been fought. They were almost as far as the Delaware River, and the ground was broken into low hills, each a little higher than the last. Geoffrey had only been this far away from his home a few times, before his father's death, and then never in this direction. Civilization was not considered to extend this far inland. When a young man went on his travels, preparatory for the day when he inherited his father's holdings and settled down to maintain them, he went along the coast, perhaps as far as Philadelphia or Hartford. Geoffrey had always had a lively interest in strange surroundings. He had regretted the day his journeyings came to an end -- not that he hadn't regretted his father's passing even more. Now, as dawn came up behind them, he could not help turning his head from side to side and looking at the strangely humped land, seeing for the first time a horizon which was not flat. He found himself intrigued by the thought that he had no way of knowing what lay beyond the next hill -- that he would have to travel, and keep traveling, to satisfy a perpetually renewed curiosity. All this occupied one part of his mind. Simultaneously, he wondered how much farther they'd travel in this vehicle. The huge sixteen cylinder in-line engine was by now delivering about one-fourth of its rated fifty horsepower, with a good half of its spark plugs hopelessly fouled and the carburetor choked by the dust of yesterday's battle. They were very low on shot and powder charges for the twopounder turret cannon, as well. The tankette had of course never been serviced after the battle. There was one good thing -- neither had their pursuers'. Looking back, Geoffrey could see no sign of them. But he could also see the plain imprint of the tankette's steel cleats stretched out behind them in a betraying line. The rigid, unsprung track left its mark on hard stone as easily as it did in soft earth. The wonder was that the tracks had not quite worn themselves out as yet, though all the rivets were badly strained and the tankette sounded like a barrel of stones tumbling downhill. The Barbarian had spent the night with one arm thrown over the cannon barrel and the fingers of his other hand hooked over the edge of the turret hatch. In spite of the tankette's vicious jouncing, he had not moved or changed his position. Now he raised one hand to comb the shaggy hair away from his forehead, and there were faint bloody marks on the hatch. "How much farther until we're over the mountains?" Geoffrey asked him. "Over the -- Lad, we haven't even come to the beginning of them yet." Geoffrey grimaced. "Then we'll never make it. Not in this vehicle." "I didn't expect to. We'll walk until we reach the pass. I've got a support camp set up there." "Walk? This is impossible country for people on foot. There are intransigent tribesmen all through this territory." "How da you know?" "How do I know? Why, everybody knows about them!" The Barbarian looked at him thoughtfully, and with just the faintest trace of amusement. "Well, if everybody knows they're intransigent, I guess they are. I guess we'll just have to hope they don't spot us." Geoffrey was a little nettled by The Barbarian's manner. It wasn't, after all, as if anybody claimed there were dragons or monsters or any other such oceanic thing living here. This was good, solid fact -- people had actually come up here, tried to bring civilization to the tribes, and failed completely. They were, by all reports, hairy, dirty people equipped with accurate rifles. No one had bothered to press the issue, because obviously it was hardly worth it. Geoffrey had expected to have trouble with them -- but he had expected to meet it in an armored vehicle. But now that the mountains had turned out to be so far away, the situation might grow quite serious. And The Barbarian didn't seem to care very much. "Well, now, Lad," he was saying, "if the tribesmen're that bad, maybe your friends the nobles won't dare follow us up here." "They'll follow us," Geoffrey answered flatly. "I slapped Dugald's face." "Oh. Oh, I didn't understand that. Code of honor -- that sort of thing. All the civilized appurtenances." "It's hardly funny." "No, I suppose not. I don't suppose it occurred to you to kill him on the spot?" "Kill a noble in hot blood?" "Sorry. Code of honor again. Forget I mentioned it." Geoffrey rankled under The Barbarian's barely concealed amusement. To avoid any more of this kind of thing, he pointedly turned and looked at the terrain behind them -- something he ought to have done a little earlier. Three tankettes were in sight, only a few miles behind them, laboring down the slope of a hill. And at that moment, as though rivetted iron had a dramatic sense of its own, their tankette coughed, spun lazily on one track as the crankshaft paused with a cam squarely between positions, and burned up the last drops of oil and alcohol in its fuel tank. Geoffrey and Myka crouched down in a brushy hollow. The Barbarian had crawled up to the lip of the depression, and was peering through a clump of weeds at the oncoming trio. "That seems to be all of them," he said with a turn of his head. "It's possible they kept their speed down and nursed themselves along to save fuel. They might even have a fuel waggon coming up behind them. That's the way I'd do it. It would mean these three are all we can expect for a few hours, anyway, but that they'll be heavily reinforced some time later." "That will hardly matter," Geoffrey muttered. Myka had found Dugald's personal rifle inside the tankette. Geoffrey was rolling cartridges quickly and expertly, using torn up charges from the turret cannon. He had made the choice between a round or two for the now immobile heavy weapon and a plentiful supply for the rifle, and would have been greatly surprised at anyone's choosing differently. The Barbarian had not even questioned it, and Myka was skillfully casting bullets with the help of the hissing alcohol stove and the bullet mold included in the rifle kit. There was plenty of finely ground priming powder, and even though Geoffrey was neither weighing the charges of cannon powder nor measuring the diameter of the cartridges he was rolling, no young noble of any pretensions whatsoever could not have done the same. The rub lay in the fact that none of this was liable to do them much good. If they were to flee through the woods, there would certainly be time for only a shot or two when the tribesmen found them. If the rifle was to be used against the three nobles, then it was necessary, in all decency, to wait until the nobles had stopped, climbed out of their tankettes, equipped themselves equally, and a mutual ground of battle had been agreed upon. In that case, three against one would make short work of it. The better chance lay with the woods and the tribesmen. It was the better chance, but Geoffrey did not relish it. He scowled as he dropped a primer charge down the rifle's barrel, followed it with a cartridge, took a cooled bullet from Myka, and tamped it down with the ramrod until it was firmly gripped by the collar on the cartridge. He took a square of clean flannel from its compartment in the butt and carefully wiped the lenses of the telescopic sight. "Can I stop now?" Myka asked. Geoffrey looked at her sharply. It had never occurred to him that the woman might simply be humoring him, and yet that was the tone her voice had taken. Truth to tell, he had simply handed her the stove, pig lead, and mold, and told her to go to work. He looked at her now, remembering that he'd been hurried and possibly brusque. It ought not to matter -- though it did -- since she was hardly a lady entitled to courtesy. She hardly looked like anything, after hours crouched inside the tankette. Her copper hair was smeared with grease, disarranged, and even singed where she had presumably leaned against a hot fitting. Her clothes were indescribably dirty and limp with perspiration. She was quite pale, and seemed to be fighting nausea -- hardly surprising, with the exhaust fumes that must have been present in the compartment. Nevertheless, her hair glinted where the sun struck it, and her litheness was only accented by the wrinkled clothing. Over-accented, Geoffrey thought to himself as he looked at the length of limb revealed by her short trousers. He flushed. "Of course. Thank you." He looked at the pile of finished bullets. There were enough of them to stand off an army, provided only the army did not shift about behind rocks and trees as the tribesmen did, or was not equally armed, as the nobles would be. Yet, a man had to try to the end. "You don't expect this to do much good," he said to the woman. Myka grinned at him. "Do you?" "No, frankly. But why did you help me?" "To keep you busy." "I see." He didn't. He scooped the bullets up, put them in one pocket, and dropped the cartridges in another. He stood up. "There wasn't any point in letting you get nervous," Myka explained. "You can be quite a deadly boy in action, if what I've seen and heard about you is any indicaof our friends." She was smiling at him without any malice whatsoever; rather, with a definite degree of fondness. Geoffrey did not even feel resentful at this business of being casually managed, as though he were liable to do something foolish. But he scrambled up to a place beside The Barbarian in a burst of tense movement, and looked out toward the approaching tankettes. What Myka had just said to him, and the cryptic smile on the Barbarian's face, and a thought of Geoffrey's own, had all fitted themselves together in his mind. There was no reason, really, to believe that barbarians would be hostile to barbarians, and certainly the inland raiders could not have returned year after year without some means of handling the mountain tribes. Friendship, or at least an alliance, would be the easiest way. And out on the slope of the nearest hill, bearded men in homespun clothing were rolling boulders down on the advancing tankettes. The slope of the hill was quite steep, and the boulders were massive. They tumbled and bounded with a speed that must have seemed terrifying from below. Tearing great chunks out of the earth, they rumbled down on the tankettes while the tribesmen yelled with bloodcurdling ferocity and fired on the tankettes with impossible rapidity. With respectable marksmanship, too. The nobles were swerving their vehicles frantically from side to side, trying to avoid the boulders, but their ability to do so was being destroyed by bullets that ricocheted viciously off the canted forepeak plating. All three of them were blundering about like cattle attacked by stinging insects. Only the lead tankette was still under anything like intelligent control. It lurched away from three boulders in succession, swinging on its treads and continuing to churn its way up the hillside. Geoffrey saw the other two tankettes struck almost simultaneously. One took a boulder squarely between its tracks, and stopped in a shower of rock fragments. The track cleats bit futilely at the ground. The vehicle stalled, the boulder jammed against it. The impact did not seem to have been particularly severe; but the entire body of the tankette had been buckled and accordioned. Possibly only the boulder's own bulk between the tracks had kept them from coming together like the knees of a gored ox. It was impossible to tell where, in that crushed bulk, the turret and its occupant might be. The other tankette took its boulder squarely in the flank. It began to roll over immediately, hurtling back down the hill, its driver half in and half out of its turret at the beginning of the first roll. Tankette and boulder came to rest together at the bottom of the hill, the stone nosing up against the metal. Geoffrey looked at the scene with cold fury. "That's no fitting way for a noble to die!" The Barbarian, who was sprawled out and watching calmly, nodded his head. "Probably not," he said dispassionately. "But that other man's giving a good account of himself." The remaining tankette was almost in among the tribesmen. It had passed the point where a rolling boulder's momentum would be great enough to do much damage. As Geoffrey watched, the man in the turret yanked his lanyard, and a solid shot boomed through the straggled line of bearded men. If it had been grape or canister, it might have done a good deal of damage. But the cannon had been loaded with Geoffrey's tankette in mind, and the tribesmen only jeered. One of them dashed forward, under the cannon's smoking muzzle, and jammed a wedgeshaped stone between the left side track and the massive forward track roller. The track jammed, broke, and whipped back in whistling fragments. The tankette slewed around while the unharmed tribesman danced out of the way. The noble in the turret could only watch helplessly. Apparently he had no sidearm. Geoffrey peered at him as the tribesmen swarmed over the tankette and dragged him out of the turret. It was Dugald, and Geoffrey's arm still tingled from the slap that had knocked the pistol irretrievably into the nightshadowed brush at the battlefield. "What are they going to do to him?" he asked The Barbarian. "Make him meet the test of fitness, I suppose." "Fitness?" Geoffrey did not get the answer to his question immediately. The woods all around him were stirring, and bearded men in homespun, carrying fantastic rifles, were casually walking toward him. The Barbarian pushed himself up to his feet without any show of surprise. "Howdy," he said. "Figured you were right around." One of the tribesmen -- a gaunt, incredibly tall man with a grizzled beard -- nodded. "I seen you makin' signs while you was hangin' off that tank, before. Got a mark?" The Barbarian extended his right arm and turned his wrist over. A faint double scar, crossed at right angles, showed in the skin. The tribesman peered at it and grunted. "Old one." "I got it twenty years ago, when I first came through here," The Barbarian answered. "Double, too. Ain't many of those." "My name's Hodd Savage." "Oh," the tribesman said. His entire manner changed. Without becoming servile, it was respectful. He extended his hand. "Sime Weather by." He and The Barbarian clasped hands. "That your woman down there?" the tribesman asked, nodding toward Myka. "That's right." "Good enough." For the first time, Weatherby looked directly at Geoffrey. "What about him?" The Barbarian shook his head. "No mark." The tribesman nodded. "I figured, from the way he was actin'." He seemed to make no particular signal -- perhaps none was needed -- but Geoffrey's arms were suddenly taken from behind, and his wrists were tied. "We'll see if he can get him a mark today," Weatherby said. He looked to his left, where other men were just pushing Dugald into the ring they had formed around the group. "Seein' as there's two of them, one of 'em ought to make it." Geoffrey and Dugald stared expressionlessly at each other. The Barbarian kept his eyes on Geoffrey's face. "That's right," he said. "Can't have two men fight to the death without one of them coming out alive, usually." wooden cabins tucked away among trees and hidden in narrow little valleys. Geoffrey was surprised to see windmills, and wire fencing for the cattle pastures that adjoined their homes. He was even more interested in their rifles, which, the tribesmen told him, were repeaters. He was puzzled by the absence of a cylinder, such as could be found on the generally unreliable revolvers one saw occasionally. The tribesmen were treating both him and Dugald with a complete absence of the savagery he expected. They were being perfectly matter-of-fact. If his hands had not been tied, Geoffrey might not have been a prisoner at all. This puzzled him as well. A prisoner, after all, could not expect to be treated very well. True, he and Dugald were nobles, but this could not possibly mean anything to persons as uncivilized as mountain tribesmen. Yet somehow, the only thing that was done was that all of them ; the tribesmen, The Barbarian, Myka, Dugald and he -- made their way to Weatherby's home. A number of the tribesmen continued on their way from there, going to their own homes to bring their families to watch the test. The remainder stayed behind to post guard. Dugald was put in one room, and Geoffrey in another. The Barbarian and Myka went off somewhere with Weatherby -- presumably to have breakfast. Geoffrey could smell food cooking, somewhere toward the back of the house. The smell sat intolerably on his empty stomach. He sat for perhaps a half hour in the room, which was almost bare of furniture. There was a straightbacked chair, in which he sat, a narrow bed, and a bureau. Even though his hands were still tied behind his back, he did his best to search the room for something to help him -- though he had no idea of what he would do next after he managed to escape from the room itself. The problem did not arise, because the room had been stripped of anything with a sharp edge on which to cut his lashings, and of anything else he might put to use. These people had obviously held prisoners here before. He sat back down in his chair, and stared at the wall. Eventually, someone opened the door. Geoffrey looked over, and saw that it was The Barbarian. He looked at the inlander coldly, but The Barbarian did not seem to notice. He sat down on the edge of the bed. "On top of everything else  # he began without preamble, "I've just finished a hearty breakfast. That ought to really make you mad at me. "I'm not concerned with you, or your meals , # Geoffrey pointed out. The Barbarian's eyes twinkled. "It doesn't bother you, my getting your help and then not protecting you from these intransigent tribesmen?" "Hardly. I'd be a fool to expect it." "Would you, now? Look, Bucko -- these people live a hard way of life. Living on a mountain is a good way not to live comfortably. But it's a good way of living your own way, if you can stand the gaff. These people can. Every one of them. They've got their marks to prove it. Every last one of them has fought it out face to face with another man, and proved his fitness to take up space in this territory. See -- it's a social code. And they'll extend it to cover any stranger who doesn't get killed on his way here. If you can get your mark, you're welcome here for the rest of your life. They keep their clan stock fresh and vigorous that way. And it all has the virtue of being a uniform, just, rigid code that covers every man in the group. These barbarian cultures aren't ever happy without a good code to their name, you know." "Yours seems to lack one." The Barbarian chuckled. "Oh, no. We've got one, all right, or you'd never have had me to worry you. Nothing we like better than a good, talented enemy. You know, these people here in the mountains used to be our favorite enemies. But so many of us wound up getting our marks, it just got to be futile. Once you're in, you know, you're a full-fledged clan member. That sort of divided our loyalties. The problem just seemed to solve itself, though. We understand them, they understand us, we trade back and forth... hell, it's all one family." Geoffrey frowned. "You mean -- they got those rifles from you?" "Sure. We're full of ingenuity -- for barbarians, that is. Not in the same class with you seaboard nobles, of course, but we poke along." The Barbarian stood up, and his expression turned serious. "Look, Son -- you remember that knife of mine you borrowed for a while? I'll have to lend it to you again, in .about twenty minutes. Your friend Dugald's going to have one just like it, and your left arms are going to be tied together at the wrists. I hope you remember what I happened to tell you about how to use it, because under the rules of the code, I'm not allowed to instruct you." And Geoffrey was left alone. There was a hard-packed area of dirt in front of Weatherby's home, and now its edges were crowded with tribesmen, many of whom had brought their women and children. Weatherby, together with a spare, capable-looking woman, and with The Barbarian and (Continued on page #) SVX nomenon it a massive life that sped  . Earth. you have never seen the Sun. Of course, we could not look at it directly, but only through dense filters that cut its rays down there forever above the low, jagged hills to the west of the Observatory, neither rising nor setting, yet moving round a small circle in the sky Illustrated by Virgil Finlay T # f  during the #-day year of our little world. For it is not quite true to say that Mercury keeps the same face always turned towards the Sun; it wobbles slightly on its axis, and there is a narrow twilight belt which knows such terrestrial commonplaces as dawn and sunset. We were on the edge of Mercury's twilight zone, so that we could take advantage of the cool shadows yet could keep the Sun under continuous surveillance as it hovered there above the hills. It was a fulltime job for fifty astronomers and other assorted scientists ; when we've kept it up for a hundred years or so, we may know something about the small star which brought life to Earth. There wasn't a single band of solar radiation that someone at the Observatory had not made a life's study and was watching like a hawk. From the far X-rays to the longest of radio waves, we had set our traps and snares; as soon as the Sun thought of something new, we were ready for it. So we imagined... The Sun's flaming heart beats in a slow, #year rhythm, and we were near the peak of the cycle. Two of the greatest spots ever recorded -- each of them large enough to swallow a hundred Earths -- had drifted across the disc like great black funnels piercing deeply into the turbulent outer layers of the Sun. They were black, of course, all around them; even their dark, cool cores were hotter and brighter than an electric arc. We had just watched the second of them disappear round the edge of the disc, wondering if it would survive to reappear two weeks later, when something blew up on the Equator. It was not too spectacular at first, partly because it was almost exactly beneath us -- at the precise center of the Sun's disc -- and so was merged into all the activity around it. If it had been near the edge of the Sun, and thus projected against the background of space, it would have been truly awe-inspiring. Imagine the simultaneous excan't? Nor can anyone else -- but that was the sort of thing we were watching climb up toward us at hundreds of miles a second, straight out of the Sun's spinning equator. At first it formed a narrow jet, but it was quickly frayed round the edges by the magnetic and gravitational forces that were fighting against it. The central core kept right on, and it was soon obvious that it had escaped from the Sun completely and was headed out into space -- with us as its first target. Though this had happened half a dozen times before, it was always exciting. It meant that we could capture some of the very substance of the Sun as it went hurtling past in a great cloud of electrified gas. There was no danger; by the time it reached us it would be far too tenuous to do any damage, and indeed it would take sensitive instruments to detect it at all. One of those instruments was the Observatory's radar, which was in continual use to map the invisible ionized layers that surround the my department; as soon as there was any hope of picking up the oncoming cloud against the solar background, I aimed my giant radio mirror toward it. It came in sharp and clear on the long-range screen -- a vast, luminous island still moving outward from the Sun at hundreds of miles a second. At this distance it was impossible to see its finer details, for my radar waves were taking minutes to make the round trip and to bring me back the information they were presenting on the screen. Even at its speed of not far short be almost two days before the escaping prominence reached the orbit of Mercury and swept past us towards the outer planets. But neither Venus nor Earth would record its passing, for they were nowhere near its line of flight. The hours drifted by; the Sun had settled down after the immense convulsion, that had shot so many to space, never to return. The aftermath of that eruption was now a slowly twisting and turning cloud a hundred times the size of Earth, and soon it would be close enough for the short-range radar to reveal its finer structure. Despite all the years I have been in the business, it still gives me a thrill to watch that line of light paint its picture on the screen as it spins in synchronism with the narrow beam of radio waves from the transmitter. I sometimes think of myself as a blind man, exploring the space around him with a stick that may be a hundred million miles in length. For man is truly blind to the things I study; these great clouds of ionized gas moving far out from the Sun are completely invisible to the eye and even to the most sensitive of photographic plates. They are ghosts that briefly haunt the Solar System during the few hours of their existence; if they did not reflect our radar waves, or disturb our magnetometers, we should never know that they were there. The picture on the screen looked not unlike a photograph of a spiral nebula, for as the cloud slowly rotated it trailed ragged arms of gas for ten thousand miles around it. Or it might have been a terrestrial hurricane that I was watching from above, as it spun through the atmosphere of Earth. Its internal structure was extremely complicated, and was changing minute by minute beneath the action of forces which we have never fully understood. Rivers of fire were flowing in curious paths under what could only be the influence of electric fields ; but why were they appearing from nowhere and disappearing again as if matter was being created and destroyed? And what were those gleaming nodules, larger than the Moon, that were being swept along like boulders before a flood? miles away; it would be upon us in little more than an hour. The automatic cameras were recording every complete sweep of the radar scan, storing up evidence which was to keep us arguing for years. The magnetic disturbance riding ahead of the cloud had already reached us; indeed, there was hardly an instrument in the Observatory that was not reacting in some way to the onrushing apparition. I switched to the short-range scanner, and the image of the cloud expanded so enormously that only its central portion was on the screen. At the same time I began to change frequency, tuning across the spectrum to differentiate between the various levels. The shorter the wavelength, the further you can penetrate into a layer of ionized gas; by this technique I hoped to get a kind of X-ray picture of the cloud's interior. It seemed to change before my eyes as I sliced down through the tenuous outer envelope with its trailing arms, and approached the denser core. "Denser", of course, was a purely relative word; by terrestrial standards even its most closely-packed regions were still a fairly good vacuum. I had almost reached the limit of my frequency band, and could shorten the wave length no further, when I noticed the curious, tight little echo not far from the centre of the screen. sharp-edged than the knots of gas we had watched adrift in the cloud's fiery streams. Even in that first glimpse, I knew that here was something very strange, and outside all previous records of solar phenomena. I watched it for a dozen scans of the radar beam, then called my assistant away from the radio-spectrograph with which he was analysing the velocities of the swirling gas as it spun toward us. "Look, Don," I asked him, "have you ever seen anything like that?" "No," he answered after a careful examination. "What holds it together? It hasn't changed its shape for the last two minutes." "That's what puzzles me. Whatever it is, it should have started to break up by now with all that disturbance going on around it. But it seems as stable as ever." "How big would you say it is?" I switched on the calibration grid and took a quick reading. "It's about five hundred miles long, and half that in width." "Is this the largest picture you can get?" "I'm afraid so. We'll have to wait until it's closer before we can see what makes it tick." Don gave a nervous little laugh. "This is crazy," he said, "but do you know something? I feel as if I'm looking at an amoeba under a microscope." I did not answer; for with what I can only describe as a sensation of intellectual vertigo, exactly the same thought had entered my mind. We forgot about the rest of the cloud, but luckily the automatic cameras kept up their work and no important observations were lost. From now on we had eyes only for that sharp-edged lens of gas that was growing minute by minute as it raced toward us. When it was no further away than is the Moon from Earth, it began to show the first signs of its internal structure, by revealing a curious mottled appearance that was never quite the same on two successive sweeps of the scanner. By now, half the Observatory staff had joined us in the radar room, yet there was complete silence as the oncoming enigma grew swiftly across the screen. It was coming straight toward us; in a few minutes it would hit Mercury somewhere in the center of the day-light side, and that would be the end of it -- whatever it was. From the moment we obtained our first really detailed view until the screen became blank again could not have been more than five minutes; for every one of us, that five minutes will haunt us all our lives. We were looking at what seemed to be a translucent oval, its interior laced with a network of almost invisible lines. Where the lines crossed there appeared to be tiny, pulsing nodes of light; we could never be quite sure of their existence because the radar took almost a minute to paint the complete picture on the screen -- and between each sweep the object moved several thousand miles. There was no doubt, however, that the network itself existed ; the cameras settled any arguments about that. So strong was the impression that we were looking at a solid object, I took a few moments off from the radar screen and hastily focused one of the optical telescopes on to the sky. Of course, there was nothing to be seen -- no sign of anything silhouetted against the Sun's pock-marked disc. This was a case where vision failed completely and only the electrical senses of the radar were of any use. The thing that was coming toward us out of the Sun was as transparent as air -- and far more tenuous. As those last moments ebbed away, I am quite sure that every one of us had reached the same conclusion -- and was waiting for someone else to say it first. What we were seeing was impossible, yet the evidence was there before our eyes. We were looking at life, where no life could exist... The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the Sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces which controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was its only substance. Today, now that I have run through those films a hundred times, the idea no longer seems so strange to me. For what is life but organized energy? Does it matter what form that energy takes -- whether it is chemical, as we know it on Earth, or purely electrical, as it seemed to be here? Only the pattern is important; the substance itself is of no significance. But at the time I did not think of this; I was conscious only of a vast and overwhelming wonder as I watched this creature of the Sun live out the final moments of its existence. Was it intelligent? Gould it un(Continued on page #) Illustrated by Ed Emsh eral David Walker always thought fleetingly of the good old days when he had hated the army. As usual, he smashed the thought out of his mind with a distinct sense of remorse. He looked up again at the seamed face of the Chief of Staff, General Marcus Meriwether. "This could be serious," he said slowly, with a sick sense of the statement's inadequacy. An old tic suddenly returned, tugging at the left corner of his mouth. The deadly, unsmiling expression on Meriwether's face did not change as he slid more tightly into his chair. "You know as well as I that it means the Interplanetary Confederation is ready to go to war with us." Walker stared at the typed statement on his desk. It was a decoded intelligence message from United Terra's prime agent in the Interplanetary Confederation, and it was very brief: the Confederation had developed a long-range neural weapon effectively cancelling out every armament development achieved by United Terra in fifteen years of a cold war that of late had become bitter cold. The all-butautonomous colonies of Mars and Venus, united now for twenty years in an economic league, had been itching for independence for a quarter of a century. The itch had developed into a mighty burning. "You are fully aware," Meriwether continued, his face still set, "of our feeling that the Confederation has been eager to take on Terra. They've clearly been waiting It was a touchable touching an untouchable . Both scientist and general were doing their own version of right... for some positive advantage to offset our pure strength-in-numbers." Walker forced his eyes upward and stared at his superior. "Your tone says that such a war might be -- " "Unwelcome at this time. Unwelcome at this time." Meriwether shifted around in his chair, and scratched at its leather arms with the manicured tips of his gnarled fingers. "Walker, I don't have to tell you that this weapon, if it is what our agent infers -- and there is no reason to believe otherwise -- that this weapon makes it impossible for us to go to war with the Confederation -- unless, as Chief of Weapons Development, you can tell me that we have something in our arsenal to combat it." Walker rubbed at the tic. "Nothing," he said quietly. Meriwether leaned forward, his hands crooked backward against the chair arms like catapult springs. "That answer is unacceptable. There are other questions you must answer, Walker, questions in some ways even more important than that basic one. Why haven't we developed this weapon ourselves? Why haven't we been aware of its potential existence? Where are the defensive devices which would naturally develop from such cognizance? These things are all your department, Walker." His voice pitched upward an hysterical fraction. "It just doesn't make sense, you know. We've a hundred times the personnel, ten times the facilities, unlimited funds -- but they've beaten us to it." He stood up and pushed his chair back, eyes squinting out of a reddening face that seemed on the point of bursting. "Why, Walker?" Once again Walker thought about how he had hated the army when he was a bright young physics student. That was a long time ago -- So much had happened. The doors had closed around him, one at a time, doors closing on the scientific mind. And so now, instead of a research scientist in white smock with textbook, he was a military administrator in smart greys with glittering stars of military rank. "I'll say this, Walker," Meriwether shouted, his voice breaking again. "We'd better catch up quick. Mighty quick. Let's put it this way. It might mean your rank and your job, Walker. But you won't give a damn. Because we'll have lost the war. We'll have lost the colonies. And you know what that would mean, Walker?" He bent forward across the desk, his face exploding into Walker's eyes. "Only a fool believes that United Terra can survive in an economy without triplanetary hegemony. "Walker, you've all the authority within my power to grant. You'll have no trouble getting money. But -- get the answer. Quick " Walker blinked after him as he strode to the door. "I'll try to hold off a federal investigation as long as I can," Meriwether added, turning from the halfopened door. "But I can't guarantee a thing." Walker sat alone in a cubicle of light in the darkened city and gulped down his twentieth cup of coffee. It had grown cold in the cup and with a grimace he pushed it aside. There was no doubt about it. He thumbed through the sheaf of scribbled notes he had transcribed from stacks of documents and racks of spools from Security files. Clearly, he had the answer to Meriwether's questions. But, having it, he did not quite know what to do with it. There was, however, no doubt at all: United Terra had been on the track of the neural weapon -- ten years earlier. Could have had it -- and had lost the chance. He rubbed his thumbs hard against his tired eyes and tried to remember back that ten years: at that time he had been Chief of Weapons Development for perhaps three years. His own name, though, had appeared in none of the files he had examined, so apparently he had not been directly involved in the security hearings. But he should remember. Dr. Otto Millet. Otto Millet. He let the name roll around his brain, until shortly an image began to form -- an image of a smiling man, greying at the temples, wearing a flamboyant sports shirt and affecting a very close haircut. A man perhaps forty. In the image, he was a laughing man. He remembered now. Dr. Otto Millet: into government service on the inertia of a fantastic reputation as a research physicist specializing in magnetic field studies. A man he had instantly disliked. He bent forward and reread what he had scrawled in his last notes, a verbatim extract from the report of the security committee. "It is clear that Dr. Millet's conversations and letters with Professor Greyman, together with his unrepentant attitude, render him a security risk. His various security clearances are therefore revoked, and he is hereafter prohibited access to all classified files and to any government research and development laboratory." Since virtually all laboratories were government supported, that was to all intents and purposes the end of Millet's career as an experimental physicist. Where had Millet gone? What had he done since? Walker scraped a cigarette out of the half-empty pack in his pocket. More important: what was he doing now? He inhaled deeply and sent clouds of smoke skewing across the room. Had the man really been a traitor? Walker tried to place himself in the time of Millet's hearing. He'd been not too many years out of school then, with the bitterness of his frustrated ambition to be a research physicist still rankling him ; perhaps this had colored his view of Millet. He stared at his desk, almost shocked that this thought should have occurred to him. It shook him, for it told him something about himself which he did not particularly care to know. Nowhere had he been able to find any evidence as to what had happened to Millet since. Banished, the government seemed to forget him. But one thing was clear to Walker, and he pondered it deeply as he sucked on the last quarter-inch of his cigarette and poured himself another cup of cold black coffee. One big thing: Millet had been directing development along lines that would have led to the neural weapon; he had even signed a report, early in his project effort, which had referred to the possibility of "a neural device. # ' Had he gone over to the Confederation? It would account for their possession of the weapon now. But surely -- surely , this fact would have been observed and reported by Terran intelligence agents. Walker, infinitely tired, forgot his coffee and began to tidy up the desk, filing everything he wanted to keep in an electronically locked cabinet, shoving everything else into the destruction of the vibrator. He pondered for a moment the powdered secrets that were heaped like black dust in the bottom of the canister: a symbol of safety to a terrified world. Step one: find Millet. Find Millet. exactly twenty-nine hours to locate Dr. Otto Millet. Thirty minutes later, Walker was climbing out of a government helicopter and staring at Millet's small house through squinted eyes which he shielded with both hands against the blazing desert sun. The house was fronted by a neat lawn and a white fence entwined with red roses ; there appeared to be a rather large garden in the rear. The style of the house bothered him a little: it had passed out of popularity thirty years before. Its lack of a conventional roofport had forced them to land the 'copter on the desert itself. He straightened and pushed through the creaking gate. Flagstone steps curved toward the porch, and he minced along them, uncertain, now that he had arrived, of what he would say to Millet. The damned house, he thought -- so dif-' ferent from what he had expected; it had thrown his whole thinking out of order. He hated himself for feeling uneasy. There was neither vodor nor contact system of any kind at the door, and he brushed his hand against his forehead in a gesture of frustration. He stared at his palm -- it had come away wet with sweat, and he wondered if it were all because of the desert sun. Tentatively, he banged on the door with his fist. There was no answer. Damn Millet , he thought, wiping his forehead again. Why couldn't the man have a videophone like any normal person so you could find out if he were home without taking a trip halfway across the country? He turned, stamping angrily as he did so, and was startled to see a man, wearing work clothes and holding a pair of heavy soiled gloves in his left hand, standing on the ground by the end of the porch. He was nearly bald, intensely bronzed, and he was smiling. "Wondered when you'd see me." He nodded toward the gate. "I was standing right there when you came up. You just breezed right past." His smile broadened. "You were so interested in being surprised that you couldn't see what you came for." "It must have been that damned glare," muttered Walker, shaking his head. Then, impolitely, "Are you Millet?" "Otto Millet," the other replied, inclining his head slightly. "You're from the government. I can tell because of the uniform, you see." Walker flushed. "The government hasn't thought about me in a number of years," the scientist added. He came up onto the porch and peered at the symbol on the left lapel of Walker's jacket. "Ah! Alma mater. Weapons Development." He squinted at Walker. "David Walker, I presume?" He chuckled loudly but Walker failed to see the humor. "I remember you, you see; what a shame you can't return the compliment." "It's hot out here," complained Walker, in growing discomfort. Millet opened the door. "Won't you come in? It's better inside." There it was again, thought Walker; the insolence, the imperturbable smile. He grunted and went in; it was, mercifully, considerably cooler. He looked around. It was a very cluttered living room, not messy but tossed about with the artifacts that the man obviously liked to have around him. There was an ancient painting by Bonestell hanging on one wall, a startlingly accurate twentieth-century concept of the appearance of Mars; several long pipe racks, filled to overflowing, in various spots around the room; a typewriter on a table in a corner, and piles of paper; books lining the walls, and stacked on the floor in heaps and on the table beside the typewriter; a map of the earth on the wall above the typewriter, a three-dimensional Waterson projection. The furniture was clean but -- not old; lived with. Walker went over to the wall map and peered closely. "One of Waterson's first," remarked Millet, closing the door. "Sit down, Walker, and tell me all about Weapons Development. How is the mass murder department doing these days?" Walker felt his ears redden and he was arrested in the very act of sitting down. "Really," he said, "it's not something we like to think about, you know." "Suppose not." Millet fiddled with several pipes in a rack beside his chair, selected one, and began from a battered canister. "To business, then. Why the visit?" Walker cleared his throat and tried to remember the little prefatory weasel words he had painfully assembled during the flight from Omaha. "First of all, Dr. Millet, I find myself a little embarrassed. After all, your parting from government service was not of the happiest nature for you -- " "Don't be foolish. Happiest day of my life, Walker." Walker had a sudden sense of being impaled, and the rest of the little speech was dissipated in the wave of shock which swept over him. He forced his mouth shut, and gasped, "You're not serious!" Millet shook out his second match and puffed until the pipe bowl glowed warmly, edge to edge. "Of course I'm serious." He jabbed his pipe at Walker. "You like your job?" "It's a job that has to be done." Millet smiled and shrugged. "You haven't really answered my question." Walker, sensing that he had already lost control of the conversation, waved his hands in dismissal. "Well, that is not really important. The fact remains, you did leave Weapons Development at the... ah... request of the government." "Talk on, talk on -- you'll get to the point eventually. When you're through, I'd like to show you around the place. I'm very proud of my gardens. You're sort of responsible for them, you know." Walker set his jaw and bored ahead. "However, at the time you left government service, you were pursuing certain lines of research -- " Millet leaned back and began laughing, his eyes squinted shut. "Walker, don't tell me they want me back!" It seemed his chance to dominate the discussion again. "I don't think you'd be allowed back." "Good," said Millet, looking up, his laughter fading into a smile. "I was a bit concerned for a moment." There was silence in the room. Walker began to wish that he were somewhere else: Millet simply baffled him. He obviously did not care about his disgrace. Walker felt a resurgence of the old resentment. Millet's face suddenly became very kindly. "Perhaps, as a fellow scientist" -- Walker almost winced, and knew, furiously, that his response had shown -- "you would be interested in knowing what I've been doing since my unhappy marriage with bureaucracy ended." It was a welcome gambit, and Walker accepted it eagerly. "I certainly would. One of the reasons I came here, as a matter of fact." Millet waved his pipe. "Good. Afterwards, you can stop beating around the bush, eh?" "Yes, of course," mumbled Walker. "You know," said Millet as he got up and went to a bookcase, "a man's got to earn a living. Do much reading?" "Not these days. Used to." He scratched a cigarette on the sole of his shoe and inhaled hugely. "Not enough time these days for readm gMillet reached into the bookcase and came out with a stack of magazines. "Well, that's how I make my living." He handed the stack to Walker. "Writing. Use a pen name of course. He chuckled. "Write everything -- always happiest doing science fiction, though." Walker flipped through the magazines; he looked up. "Obviously, you're doing rather well at it." "Have been for the last seven or eight years. Lot of fun." "And this has been your life since you left us?" Walker set the stack of magazines aside. "Seems a waste of genius, somehow." "As a matter of fact, this is not my life's work. As I said, a man's got to earn a living. This is just a lucrative hobby that pays the way. You see, I've been involved in an expensive research program." "Ah." Walker sat forward and smashed out his cigarette. "This may be important." "Oh, it is, it is. But not, I am afraid, in the way you mean." "You can never tell. What have you been doing?" "Completing a unified theory of life. Why a crystal grows but isn't alive, why an organism that dies isn't like a crystal. What is the process we call life? What is its relationship to the space-time continuum -- " He said it so casually that Walker was caught off his guard completely. "Are you serious, Millet?" he said. "Certainly. I expect to publish in about two years." "Is this an independent effort?" "Not entirely. Others have contributed. Some pioneers long dead, some among the living." His eyes twinkled. "You see, important things beside the development of weapons of destruction do continue in the scientific world. Did you think that was the end of everything for me, ten years ago?" He shook his head in mock gravity. "It was just the beginning. I wanted out, you see." "You wanted out?" Walker lieve what he had heard. "Are you trying to tell tne that you arranged your discharge?" Millet shrugged. "Why, of course. Nobody ever has bothered to ask me about that up to now, but I certainly did arrange it. It wasn't hard, you know. All I had to do was set up some sort of relationship with a so-called security risk, and I was on my way out." "Why... that's damned near treason." "Don't be silly. I had other important things to do. In order to do them -- to continue work on the unified life theory -- it was necessary for me to contact scientists with whom professional relationships were made illegal by security regulations. The choice was simple; besides, I didn't enjoy the idea of spending my life developing ways of destroying the very thing I wanted most to understand." "This is fantastic, Millet, utterly fantastic." "But true nonetheless. Walker, you look like you could use a drink." "By all means." He stared emptily into the air, thinking about the good old days. "Walker, a toast," said Millet, holding a tall glass out to him. "To scientific freedom." Walker blinked. "By all means," he repeated hoarsely, and there was a blurriness to his vision. "To scientific freedom." They drank, and Walker said: "I feel a bit freer to say what I have come for." "Shoot," nodded Millet, sipping his drink. "For security reasons, I'll talk in generalities. But the basic fact is, United Terra is faced with a serious situation. It is most desirable that the research you were conducting when you left us, be continued." "There are a lot of other capable physicists, both eager to be a part of such activity and blessed with security clearances." "You know very well, Millet, that this was an unique, almost independent line of development that comes to a stop in your brain. Besides," and suddenly he felt silly, "the lines of communication for research which might enable us to pick up where you left off, in time -- too much time -- are somewhat entangled in security." He glared. "Don't laugh, Millet; it's a fact of life which must be faced." Millet finished his drink and set the glass on an end table. "What you're doing is asking me to come back if you can arrange it." Walker spread his hands. "Dr. Millet, you have put it in a nutshell." Millet shook his head, and for the first time since their conversation had started he frowned. "Walker, you know how I feel about developing weapons. I'm just plain opposed to it." "The soldier is opposed to losing his life, but many have to do just that in the interests of civilization." "That serious, eh?" Walker crumpled under the weight of his fear. "That serious," he said wearily. Millet thoughtfully relit his pipe. "Of course, I'm not at all sure that United Terra is very right in this thing." "In times like these, that kind of thought is out of bounds," snapped Walker. "Whether you like it or not, you are a part of this culture. You might disapprove of many things in it, but you don't want to see it fall." Millet puffed gently. "No, I suppose not." Again the frown flickered across his face. "I've been very happy. I don't want my work interrupted. It's too important, Walker." "Undoubtedly this would more than interrupt your work. It would replace it." Millet's eyes drifted affectionately about the room. "Most unpleasant." A smile curled his lips. "Frankly, though, I don't think you can clear me again." "My problem." "Indeed." A weary resignation seemed to settle over Millet, and Walker suddenly felt very miserable. "I suppose I'll have to accept," Millet said, pulling his pipe out of his mouth and staring unhappily at its trail of smoke. Walker put his hands flat on his desk and sighed deeply. Some of the pressure, at least, was off; he had managed to cancel part of the Confederation's advantage. Terran industrial strength and technological supremacy, coupled with Millet's genius, might yet equate, or at least circumvent, the frightful weapon the Confederation held. However, he still had to get Millet back into the government. Though, on the basis of the information he had gained regarding the scientist's motivations, and considering the critical nature of the situation, it shouldn't be too difficult. He clicked on his video and dialed a secret line into Security Data. Gyrating colors danced across the screen before it went black. He scowled, depressed the cancel button, and dialed again; this time, the black was finally replaced by a recorded image, which said, sweetly out of pouting red lips, "This line is not cleared for the Security Information you seek. The problem you are handling should be routed through an individual permitted access to this information." The image faded into blackness, the sound track into static. Walker stared, stupefied. No line, no contact, no source of information had been denied to him in over twelve years. His door swung open; he came to his feet abruptly, furious that someone should enter unannounced. He felt sickness strike him like a fist in the stomach: Meriwether, flanked by two security guards, pushed through the door. His voice slashed across the office like a broadsword. "Walker, I'm shocked. Shocked. And at a time like this... Walker pounded his desk. "What the hell is going on? I can't get Security Data, you come marching in here with security men... what gives?" Meriwether gestured to the guards, and they came forward and each took one of Walker's arms. "You're out of a job, Walker," snarled General Marcus Meriwether. "In the name of God, why?" "You know very well. Take him to security detention, Sergeant." And suddenly he knew. Meriwether stared indignantly when he started laughing. It was a hell of a thing to laugh at, but it was also the most hilarious tragedy he ever hoped to encounter. Millet. Security risk. Untouchable. Millet would finish his great unified theory, and go down in history as neither Walker nor Meriwether nor the genius who invented the Confederation's neural weapon would. Millet was as safe as he could possibly want to be. And so was the Interplanetary dated March #, are still available. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April #; February, April, June, August, October, December #; February, April, June, August, October, December #. # each postpaid. Or -- if you subscribe to IF for # issues (#), we will mail you your choice of any two of these back issues as a gift! Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. The dilemma of " The Man in the White Suit " was but a minor irritation compared to Charles and his "all-weather" suit! embankment at ninety miles an hour; the result was, of course, inevitable. It was a magnificent crash, and the driver was thrown clear at the end of it for a distance of # feet. Charles looked at the body and got his bright idea. The trouble had started a couple of weeks before, when Edwin, Charles' laboratory co-ordinator, had called him into his office just before Charles was due to leave for home. It was a distinct breach of etiquette to cause a worker to arrive home at any time besides his accustomed hour, so Charles knew whatever Edwin wanted must be important. He sat down opposite the Co-ordinator and assumed a politely questioning look. "Charles, you know I wouldn't call you here at this hour if it wasn't important," Edwin said, pursing his lips. "Of course not, sir," Charles replied, waiting. "The fact of the matter is, we are in dire straits." Edwin stared at the other ominously. "As you well know, the Textile Industry, like every other business firm in the world, has functioned entirely without economic troubles of any sort for the past fifty years." "Well, of course, sir... "And you are also well aware of what would be the results of any financial deviation in any of these firms, particularly in a major industry such as our own." "Certainly, sir. Ours is a delicately balanced economic system. Any slight change in the economic status of one firm would..." "Exactly!" Edwin leaned across the desk and glared at him. "I have just come from a Board of Directors meeting. And it was made known to us that during the past three weeks our margin of profit has fallen off by three tenths of a per cent!" Charles' face turned pasty white. He swallowed and took a deep breath. "Will that information be made public, sir?" "Naturally not! But we aren't sure just how long we can keep it a secret! The fact of the matter margin will continue to spiral downward at a gradually increasing rate unless some drastic change occurs in our production set-up!" Edwin leaned back and clasped his hands, composing himself. "The precise reasons for the existence of the situation are quite obscure. that the problem can be remedied if we make a particular change in our production system, and it has informed us as to the nature of that change." He stood up and placed a finger on a capacitance switch. A panel in the Wall slid back to reveal six sales charts. There were two each marked Winter, Summer and Spring-Fall. Three were designated marlons, and three marilyns. Each of them showed a red line rising steeply on the left, levelling out to a perfectly straight bar all the way across, then dipping sharply again. "Look here," Edwin said. "These are the sales charts for our six suits. As you know, we make three different types for marlons, and three for marilyns. Hot-weather, cold-weather, and mediumweather. Each suit is designed to last a carefully calculated length of time, and each consumer need only buy three suits a year. They are exactly alike except for slight size differences, and because of elastic fabrics these differences are held to a minimum. With this system the Textile Industry attained the ultimate in Standardization, the ultimate in efficiency." Charles rubbed his chin thoughtany alternative to our system, any possible change?" Edwin sat down again, folded his arms on the desk, and scowled. "That's where you come in! The one possible way to stabilize our economy, to raise our profit margin to its former level -- and that is by further standardization!" Charles raised his eyebrows. "You mean a sexless wardrobe, sir? That's been tried..." "No, that's not what I mean!" Edwin snapped. "What I mean is an all-weather suit!" Charles swallowed audibly at that and said nothing. "You can see the advantages, of course," Edwin explained. "We'd need only to manufacture two types of suit, marlon and marilyn. Since we'd never have to adjust our factories, we could drop a lot of unnecessary technicians, and with the further standardization, manufacturing would be faster and cheaper -- a lot cheaper. The consumer would only purchase one suit a year, but we could make up for that by raising the prices somewhat." Charles finally got a word in. "But, sir! An all-weather suit? How can we design a suit that will be equally comfortable in the middle of a Florida heat-wave or a New England snowstorm?" "How? How?" Edwin's voice raised and his finger pointed. "You're the research chemist, Charles! You're supposed to tell me how!" "Sir? I..." "Listen!" Edwin poked the other in the chest. "I assume you know what will happen to Society if the Textile Industry becomes economically unstable?" "Well, yes sir, but..." "Then I assume you realize that the Board of Directors will stop at nothing to preserve the status quo! And since you happen to be our chief industrial chemist, the entire problem lands in your lap! Now, we want to know how to make an allweather suit, and we want to know fast . Therefore, Charles, you're going to tell us how to do it! Understand?" Charles nodded unhappily. "Yes sir, I understand." next day after informing his wife that she could expect him to begin keeping rather irregular hours at the laboratory. The idea of any kind of irregularity was enough to worry any wife, and Ingrid was the naturally suspicious type. She was always nagging and had, upon occasion, even gone so far as to insinuate that Charles had individualist tendencies. So he knew that she would, embarrassingly, call Edwin to check up on him, but he didn't really care. The real problem was the allweather suit. Charles put his small corps of assistants on the project, investigating several lines of thought at once. Every day, someone would drop around for a while to check on his progress, and he had no delusions about what would happen if he failed. The entire economic stability of his society depended on his coming up with an all-weather suit, and he began to have trouble sleeping nights. Eventually, he found what looked like a workable solution. He called Edwin to tell him about it, and Edwin came down to the lab to see for himself. "Is this it?" he asked, picking up what looked like a burlap handkerchief. Charles cleared his throat. "Well, that's the first sample, sir. Of course, it's possible to obtain a finer weave once we find out a few things about it, and when it's bleached..." Edwin nodded impatiently. "Yes, yesi Well, what's so special about it?" "Well, it's made of a radically new type of fiber, sir... "How's it new?" "I can show you more technical data on it, sir, but basically the difference between this and conventional types of fiber is that this is thermostatic." "How do you mean, thermostatic?" "Well, sir, basically, the diameter of the fiber is inversely proportional with the temperature. When the temperature rises, the fiber contracts, and when the temperature drops, it expands. So in cold weather, you have a fine, tight weave with good insulation, and in warm weather you have a loose weave with ventilation..." Edwin nodded and dropped the fabric on a lab bench. "Sounds good." "Well sir, we have to make a few more tests on it, and it'll have to be field tested before we can decide if it's safe to use in garments..." Edwin tapped him on the shoulder. "Test it, Charlie." "Sir?" Edwin frowned. "We don't have as much time as you think. We need that suit of yours fast. We can't afford to waste any more time puttering around the laboratory. You have the fellows downstairs make up some of this stuff into a Standard suit, and I want you to put it on yourself. What I mean is, today ! # Charles' jaw dropped. "Today! But..." "No buts! Wear it a couple of days, and if you say it checks out, we go into production immediately." So Charles went home that night in a new suit and a worried frown. T hings were smooth for about two days. Charles continued to wear the suit and Edwin insisted on his making the preliminary preparations for the massproduction of thermostatic fabric. Charles was kept busy working out specifications. Then there were two factors that brought about a drastic change in his life. One was that he was worried. Charles wasn't exactly sure what he was worried about, but at the back of his mind there was something in the complicated molecular structure of the new fiber that bothered him. The other factor was that Ingrid was still nagging him. Perhaps if Charles had been able to tell her what he was working on she would have understood why he was worried. But he didn't tell her, and she didn't understand. One day after Charles had come home and eaten, she started an argument with him about something or other, and in the most heated part of the battle she had hurled at him the supreme insult. "Charles," she said, "I think you look different!" Coupled with the strain that Charles was under, that had been enough to make him stare at Ingrid for a moment, wheel and stalk out of the apartment. After all, to say that one's face was even subtly different -- even if it really was -- was an unforgivable insult. Charles went out for a long, solitary evening walk and ended up at one of those places that features six varieties of beer, a continuous floor show and a loud band. Charles was not quite aware of entering, but once inside, watching the bump-and-grinders who wore nothing but their name tags, he found it difficult to leave. The room was just ventilated enough to prevent suffocation, but it was purposely kept hot and stuffy in the hope that this would induce thirst on the part of the customers. When he thought about it later he decided it was undoubtedly the humidity that had caused the catastrophe, but when it happened he hadn't the foggiest notion what was going on. All he knew was that he had signalled a waitress for a third beer, she had come threading her way between the postage-stamp tables, he had looked up to give his order, she had looked down impersonally, and then there was a scream. It took a moment to realize that the waitress was screaming at him, and by that time there were shouts from the surrounding tables as well, and men and women alike were stumbling all over themselves to get away from Charles. In no time at all, there was a first-rate riot in progress, then the lights went out, and Charles had brains enough to fight his way to an exit and slip into the dark alley outside. And then Charles inspected himself and realized the horrible truth. The key concept to Charles' society was expressed in the word Standardization. Standardization had had its beginning in the early Industrial Revolution, when men first discovered that it was far more efficient to make a thousand pieces of furniture if you made them all exactly alike. And since efficiency means economic predictability, and since predictability means stability, Standardization quickly became the watchword in the world's new industrial economy. So, in time, virtually every product manufactured was standardized. From the smallest bolts and screws in a wristwatch, through automobile license plates, to clothing styles; everything manufactured was strictly standard equipment. Of course, the only unpredictable factor in this structure was the human element, therefore the logical answer was a standardized consumer. The trend had started, undoubtedly, in Hollywood. The Art of Cinematography had not existed long before becoming the Motion Picture Industry. And, naturally, an industry must be efficient. The Hollywood tycoons had decided that the best way to reduce the margin of risk on any new movie star was to create an arbitrary criterion, and to require the potential star to measure up to that standard. Charles was absently aware that the female standard of beauty had been exemplified by a woman named Marilyn, and that the masculine standard had been represented in someone named Marlon. So, gradually, all of the new female stars that, were selected by Hollywood resembled Marilyn as much as possible, and male leads were selected to look like Marlon. If anyone had a nose that wasn't quite right, or large ears, a little plastic surgery quickly remedied the problem, and if a female starlet happened to have brown hair, peroxide was always handy. And in time, it became increasingly difficult to tell one movie star from another. Then the standard, idealized faces and their standards, idealized personal mannerisms became socially fashionable, and with modern cosmetics and readily available plastic surgery, the fashionable men and women in society began to imitate the ideal. It became not only fashionable to wear the Standard face, but indecent not to do so. Social conformity was encouraged as much as possible, and the end result was the closest thing to a Standardized, predictable consumer as there ever could be. This might have produced difficult problems, because with all women and all men wearing identical clothing and identical faces, it might have become impossible to tell one person from another, which was not desirable even in a Standardized world. Along with the Standard face had come name tags by which a person might individualize himself to the minimum necessary degree. These name tags were worn about the neck on a colorful plastic band, with the tag itself, a white plastic card, on the right side of the neck. On the tag, in gold lettering, was the person's name, address, and Social Security number. And -- they were worn all the time. The name tag was the only means by which a person might be identified. Without it, anyone might impersonate anyone else he pleased. So, of course, it became obscene to appear in public without one. And Charles, standing in the alley, looked down at himself and realized the horrible truth. He found himself running through back streets, sidling around corners, and darting into doorways. After an hour or two, he realized that he was no longer within the City Limits. Charles took a good locfk around him and discovered he was standing on a minor highway just outside of town. There were no cars or people in sight, and he dropped off the road into some bushes to get his wind and think. He had known there was something wrong with the molecular structure of the suit he was wearing, but Edwin wouldn't listen. It had undoubtedly been the humidity. The chemical process had no doubt been going on since he'd first donned the suit, but it had been the heat in that beer joint that had accelerated the action enough to finish the job. Human perspiration acting on the new fiber in the collar of his suit produced some obscure chemical reaction which had a corrosive effect on the plastic band and plastic card of his name tag. He had to get home, somehow, and tell Edwin to hold up production on the new thermostatic suit. Perhaps the flaw in it could be eliminated in a short time. If it couldn't... He considered. The world Dollar Standard had been absolutely stable for more years than he knew about. What would happen if it suddenly became unstable? A fluctuation of even a fraction of a cent would cause widespread panic; it would jolt the Public's faith in its infallible economic system. And the panic would cause further deviation in the Dollar's purchasing power, and -- more panic. He wiped his brow. If the situation in the Textile Industry was as critical as Edwin said it was, then Edwin and his superiors weren't going to be at all happy when Charles told them about the suit -- and Charles was going to be the fall guy. But of course he had to get back and tell them. Because Edwin was all set to start production on the all-weather suit immediately, and if he actually went through with onto consumer's backs, the result would be not panic, but disaster. And Charles' present problem was how to get home without being arrested. got an extremely tough break, and Charles got his first lucky one. A turbocar came barreling down the highway and, without warning struck an embankment. The driver was thrown fifty feet from the wreckage. Under different circumstances, he would never have considered doing what he did then. The penalty for wearing another person's name tag was severe. But Charles was under an extreme emotional strain; and without even thinking, he bent over the limp grey form of the other marlon and removed his tag. He straightened, then, clutching the plastic band and looking around at the smoking wreck. Already, he could hear a siren somewhere in the night. He slipped the name tag over his head and struck out through the bushes toward the city. His plan was simple; he had another name tag in his apartment for emergency purposes, and if Ingrid was in bed he'd have no trouble getting it, destroying the one he was wearing now, and putting on his other suit. Briefly, he wondered what the police would think of finding a body near a smashed car with no name tag. They'd probably decide it was the same person that had caused the disturbance at the night club earlier in the evening. Charles realized that the lettering on the car had indicated it was a public, coin-operated vehicle, so the authorities would have no means of identifying the body. After awhile it occurred to him that if he should go into hiding someplace, the body might easily be identified as his own, and he wouldn't have to worry about what Edwin and the other bosses would do to him. It probably wouldn't be noticed that the torn and bloodspattered clothes on the corpse were not thermostatic. But he shook his head resolutely. Even if he were crazy enough to try it, the body would be reported missing by somebody or other, so that would never do. Eventually, Charles reached a main thoroughfare in the city and hailed a cab. He climbed in the back, told the driver briefly to take him home, and then slumped down in the seat and brooded. He stared out the window, watching the buildings go by, and the emotional reaction of the evening began to set in. Morbidly, Charles wondered what they'd do to him if he kept his mouth shut and let the Industry put the suit into produce ID tags to begin to drop off. The prospect was so frightening that his apprehension over what would happen if it was discovered he was wearing somebody else's tag almost disappeared. Finally, the cab rolled to a stop. Charles got out and dropped some coins into the hand protruding from the front seat, and, head low, he turned and entered the apartment house. He trudged dismally up the stairs, thinking about his wife. He wondered what would happen if she were awake and waiting for him. If she saw that he had on somebody else's name tag. The door was unlocked. And the light was on. He wondered if he could duck into the bedroom without being seen, and then someone leaped at him and he knew it was too late. "Oh, James dear!" she cried, throwing her arms around Charles' neck. "When you walked out of here, I thought you'd never come back to me!" Charles looked at the marilyn's name tag with slow horror and realized that in his preoccupation, out of sheer force of habit, he had simply said to the cab driver, "Take me home," and the driver had looked at the address on his tag and complied. The apartment building so much resembled Charles' own that he hadn't known the difference, and he hadn't bothered to look at the number on the door. When Charles walked in, this Marilyn, Stasia her name was, had looked at his name tag and thought he was her James. She didn't have the slightest idea of who he really was. Then Charles closed his eyes, swallowed, and knew something else. It really didn't make the least bit of difference who he was. And of course, the solution to all his troubles was obvious. With a sigh, Charles leaned over Life is pretty strange when a god who is good and benevolent must prove that he has Feet of Clay "would seem to be simple." He thumped his outsized knuckles against the desk. "Almost too simple." "Why?" The other was a wearer of the black and silver uniform of Extrasol Traders; a short man, made shorter by the beer-barrel shape of his body and the extreme width of his shoulders. His head was capped with close-cropped gray curls. Illustrated by Paul Orban "Why?" he repeated. "I've been studying it ever since it first cropped up, and I must admit that it's been beyond me." "I must confess, Dillon," said Cassidy, "I wonder how you ever rose to the managerial ranks of Extrasol. I find it hard to imagine a personnel man stupid enough to put you in charge of even a backwater planet like this Kash. Surely somebody in the home office must know how dumb you are?" "My dumbness is not the subject of this conversation," said Dillon, grimly. "I didn't like the idea of calling in a trouble-shooter. I liked it even less when I found out it was to be you." Cassidy grinned. "You mean my wonderful personality hasn't made an impression on you? I'm cut to the quick." "I put up with you for only one reason. You know aliens, far better than I could ever hope to. You're about the best in the field." "Only about? Really, Dillon, if you knew of someone better than me, why didn't you get them?" "All right!" He shouted the words. "You're the best! But you still haven't explained why the problem seems simple to you." He pulled out a cigarette, and bit down savagely on the end, only to spit out the loose tobacco amidst a sputter of curses. "The misfortunes of being feebleminded," sighed Cassidy. "But for your sake, I'll take you by the hand, and try to lead you down the road of intelligence. But first, you better go over the situation once more. "We are on Kash," said Dillon, visibly controlling his patience. "It's the fourth world of a G-type sun of the periphery, unnamed in the catalogues. For that reason, we have assigned it the native name. Kash is their term for both the star and the planet, and roughly translates as 'home of the Gods'. "The planet was first contacted during the great galactic expansion of #, when the sole native language was taped. The planet is approximately two-thirds the size of Earth, but its density is somewhat less, so the gravity is about half that of Earth. It is moonless, and so far from galactic center that scarcely a hundred stars are visible in the sky. Thus a trained observer can usually pick out the other five planets of the system with no trouble at all." He paused, and took a drink of water. "Six months ago it was contacted by Unit # of Extrasol Traders... "Namely you," said Cassidy. "Me. A month was spent mapping the planet and searching out native villages. I then returned to base and picked up supplies necessary for setting up an outpost. Two months ago I returned. "And all Hell broke loose..." Night fell quickly, and with little relief on Kash, for the stars were few and far between, and shed little light. Dillon stepped out of the office that was doing doubleduty as living quarters until separate quarters could be set up, and started for the nearby well. He cursed as he realized his flashlight still lay on the desk, but the light pouring from the open door was enough to see by, and he decided against returning. As he walked, he breathed deeply of the tangy night air, and sighed with satisfaction. This world was infinitely more pleasurable than the last he had posted, and he intended to enjoy his stay. He let his thoughts ramble as he walked and so almost ran down the waiting alien before he saw him. The native's huge eyes gleamed softly in the spill of light from the office, and the gray down that covered his body and head, except for the face, seemed soft and alive. "Tarsa, Bila," said the Earthman, using the native greeting. "Tarsa, starman. May the Gods shine their eternal light on you." "And on you," Dillon said, observing the ritual. "But what brings you here at night?" "The night is beautiful, is it not, starman? It shines with a glory all its own. At times it would seem to outdo its brother, the day." "Indeed," he agreed. "Your world is one of the loveliest I have yet seen, and my travels have led me over as many stars as there are waves on the sea. But surely you did not come to talk merely of the night and its beauty." "Alas, no," sighed the native. "My task is a most unhappy one, for sorrow hangs heavy over the village. The women and children are weeping, and the men know not what to do in the face of calamity. It seems as though the Gods themselves have turned against my people." He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "What would you with me, Bila?" asked the Earthman. "Surely I cannot be of any assistance?" "As a man from the sky, surely you have met the Gods in open battle before!" cried the alien. "And just as surely you must have defeated them, else you would not be here this night." "I am flattered, Bila. It is true that the Gods of the universe and I are not total strangers. Exactly what is wrong?" "It is Toll, the son of Kylano. He has fallen from a cliff, and the bones of his arm are broken and need curing." "But isn't that a job for the priest?" "Aye. But our priest has been on a pilgrimage these past ten days, and is to be gone another thirty or more. There is no one left with the necessary knowledge. You will come?" "I'll come, Bila. But first I must get a bag from the office. With it I may be able to help the boy." "Ah, you too have an herb basket like the priest's? Truly you are a friend of the Gods." "Not quite like the priest's," said Dillon, smiling. "But it serves much the same purpose." He hurried up the path and into the shack, emerging a moment later with the first-aid bag that was standard equipment for all men isolated from the services of a doctor. "That's where you made your first mistake," said Cassidy. "Regulation #-#C, paragraph # states 'no man shall give medical aid to alien races unless a team of certified specialists has checked out all such medicines with respect to such race and certified them safe. Penalty for breaking rule : Revocation of any licenses; restriction to home world for three years; and or five thousand dollars fine.' You really did things up right. You should have left that bag in the safe where it belonged." "Well, I didn't," said Dillon. "And it's too late now to talk of what I should have done. At any rate... "Where is the boy, Bila?" asked Dillon as he came up to the alien again. "At my village, starman. Come." He slipped down the path and was soon swallowed by the darkness. The Earthman hurried after, afraid of being lost in the almost inpenetrable night. He had forgotten the flashlight again, and he cursed as he stumbled over an unseen obstruction. "Bila!" he called. "Yes, starman?" The alien appeared as if from nowhere. "I'm afraid that I'm not as gifted as you when it comes to traveling at night without light. You had better let me hold onto your shoulder." "Of course, starman. I am most sorry for causing you trouble." "It's my own fault. I should have remembered the light. Let's get going again." He placed his hand on the alien's shoulder, and they started off again. Despite his guide, he twice stumbled over obstructions, and would have fallen but for his grip on the other's shoulder. Bila waited while he steadied himself, and then started off again, keeping up a fast pace. The village lay three miles from the post, and during the day, Dillon considered it nothing more than a brisk walk. But the blindness that came with the dark wiped out all realization of time and space, and he soon began to think that they must have passed it by, when the alien spoke. "We are here, starman." They rounded a bend, and a cluster of huts came into view, lit by the dim light of a few scattered lamps. The alien threaded his way through the narrow lanes between the huts, and stopped outside one of the largest in the group. He held the hangings aside, and Dillon stooped to enter. The hut was already crowded with natives. The smoke from half a dozen of the sputtering lamps hung like a shroud over the interior, and the Earthman's eyes were soon smarting. He wondered how the natives, with their much larger eyes, could stand it. The injured boy lay on a pallet in the center of the hut. An animal skin had been thrown over him, with the broken arm exposed. Dillon knelt by him, and felt it over carefully. "A clean break, thank God," he said, more to himself than his audience. The boy whimpered, and he reached for the bag, and rummaged around. Finally he pulled out an already prepared hypo, loaded with a sedative. He swabbed the boy's good arm, and pressed the needle home. The natives moved forward when they saw the needle, and some of them began to mutter. But the boy quickly dropped off into an untroubled sleep, and they settled down. The Earthman took hold of the broken arm, and marvelled at the frailty of it. The bones had to hold a lighter weight than those of Earthmen, and thus were correspondingly weaker. He felt that he could snap one of them with his hands. He straightened the arm out, as gently as he could, and then pulled. The broken ends slid together with a satisfying pop, and he quickly bound them with a splint from his bag. He wrapped the bandage tight, and tied it. Then he arose, picking up his bag. "He should be alright now," he said. "I'll stop by in the morning, when he's awake, and give him a going-over." "His arm," said Bila. "It is... fixed?" "Yes. He's young, and he should heal fast. Three weeks from now he'll be out with the other children, playing games and just as active as ever." "We thank you, starman," said Bila. "We have not the words to say just how happy we are that you have helped us." "It's nothing," said Dillon, embarrassed by the show of gratitude. "All Earthmen would do the same." "Ah, your magic must be even greater than that of the priests. It is most unfortunate that the village priest was away. But the Gods have smiled on us, by sending you instead." "He'll be back soon, I hope?" said Dillon. "The priest, I mean." "Alas, not for at least thirty days, and perhaps more. He knew not where his pilgrimage would lead him." "But if you have more troubles like this?" "Our misfortunes," said Bila, his face downcast. "If the Gods see fit to abandon us to the miseries of the world, what can mere men say? If some must die, than they shall surely die." "No!" He regretted the word the moment it was out, but it was too late to recall it. The milk was spilt, and crying would be foolish at this point. "No. If you have troubles, come to me. I will do what I can, although I am not sure that it will be much." His eyes glistened with joy. "Our people shall be eternally grateful." "You'd better save your thanks, until you're sure that I can help you. But right now, I'd appreciate a guide back to the post, and a lamp, so I don't fall anymore." "Of course. It shall be done immediately." He motioned for one of the men in the hut, who came with a lamp. Bila held the hangings aside, and the two passed outside into the blackness again. The trip back to the trader's shack passed without mishap and Dillon went to sleep quite pleased. were days of intensified effort for Dillon, as he went about the task of setting up the rest of the post. The warehouse came first, and the living quarters. The office that had been serving double-duty reverted to its primary function. Occasionally a few natives would drop around to gaze at the workin-progress, but they would soon grow bored, and drift away to other amusements. He had twice been back to the village to look at the boy, but so far nothing else had come up to require his meagre medical knowledge. He was beginning to think that he might last out until the priest returned. He had been rereading the regulations covering contact, and the penalties were much too harsh for his liking. He began to worry about hiding traces of his one experiment. The noonday sun was on the wane when he finished wrestling the last of a group of bins into the warehouse. He pulled out his kerchief, and wiped the accumulated sweat from his eyes. The summer season was I full on the land, and the heat was as bad as any he had seen on Earth. He brought his lunch out to the office porch, and sank down in the rocker that he had brought from his last post. There was a slight breeze blowing diagonally across the clearing in front of the building, and he shifted around to receive its full benefit. The first bite was scarcely in his mouth when Bila came into sight around the bend of the path. He cursed silently, and put down his sandwich. He stood up to welcome the alien. "Tarsa, Bila," he said. "What brings you here today?" "Sadness again wearies our people, and we know not what to do. The Gods are indeed angered with us, and our priest is still away." "Just what is it this time?" "It is Kylano. He is at death's door, and the messengers of the Gods can be heard waiting to take him beyond." Two tears broke loose and rolled down his leathery gray cheeks. "The boy's father?" said Dillon. The alien nodded. "But what is wrong with him?" "Alas, we do not know. He was swimming in the lake, when a demon possessed one of the fishes, and bit him on the leg. When he came out of the water, a fever lay heavily over him, and he has become unconscious." "And you want me to save him." It was a statement, rather than a question, and the native recognized it as such. "If it be within your power, starman. If you do not come, he must surely die." "All right, Bila. I'll do whatever I can." He ducked inside the office, and came out again with his bag. They set off down the path. "Your second major mistake," said Cassidy. "You were lucky with the boy, but you should have come to your senses enough to leave the bag behind on the second call. You were just stepping out into deeper water." "But the man was sick, and I didn't know what else to do but use the medicines. I couldn't let him die!" "Why not?" "Why not? I've got feelings and a conscience. That's why! I couldn't just stand by and do nothing. Especially when the sedative worked on the boy!" "It would have been far better to let one man die than to have the aliens come to regard you as higher than their own priests." "It's easy enough for you to say what I should have done here, but I think your own actions would have been far different if you had been in my place." "I doubt it. I'd never have been made trouble-shooter, if I didn't have the brains to avoid a mess like that. I still think you're just plain stupid." "My thoughts of you are better left unsaid. At any rate, when we got to the village..." It was the same hut, and a crowd that may or may not have been present the earlier night. The numbers were the same. The only change was the lack of the overhanging pall of smoke from the lamps. The man occupied the same pallet as the boy, and the crowd made way for Dillon as he moved to his side. It was readily apparent that he was very ill, and Dillon uttered a silent prayer that he had something in the kit to help him. The leg wound was nasty and crusted over. He swabbed it clean, blanching when he saw its depth. Steadying himself, he bound it tightly, and sat back on his heels to ponder his next move. The bandage would prevent any further infection, but the Earthman was afraid the damage had already been done. The fever lay heavily on the native, and he tossed and turned in his coma. The drugs in the bag were all intended for use by Terrans only, and an attempt to aid the slight alien might only result in death. Whereas if he were left alone to ride out the fever, he just might come through all right. Kylano let out a muted sob, and struck out wildly, nearly hitting Dillon in the face. He cursed, and turned to his bag, selecting the most catholic antibiotic it contained. He looked up at the watching crowd, but they just stared back impassively. He cursed again, and swabbed a spot on the native's arm, and thrust home the needle. He threw the empty hypo back in the bag, and shut it savagely. Then he stood up, and looked around for Bila. "A drink of water, please," he said, catching the other's eye. "Certainly, starman," he replied, handing over a gourd. Dillon drank deeply, then wiped his mouth. He handed back the gourd and picked up his bag. As he pushed his way through the crowd, Bila followed. "Kylano will be well now?" said the alien. "I don't know. I just don't know. I hope so." "Is there anything more you can do?" "Perhaps. If I knew just what he was sick with, and I had the right drugs to treat it, I could do a lot. As it is..." He left the sentence hanging. "If the Gods will it, he will live." "Pray that they will it. In the meantime, you might bathe his forehead every now and then. It'll help to make him more comfortable." "In any event, we thank you, starman. With our priest gone..." "Why did your priest leave on such a long journey, Bila? I should think he would be more concerned with the care of his flock." "The ways of the priesthood are beyond the comprehension of ordinary men. When the Gods speak to them, they obey, no matter how onerous the orders may be. If men must suffer during their absence, it is unfortunate. But it must be." "Then I'd think that your priests would see to it that someone in the village would know what to do in case of emergency." "Oh, no!" He seemed horrified at the thought. "Knowledge is for the Gods to give to the chosen ones. Common men would not be worthy of it, for it is certain that they do not have the intelligence to deal with it properly. Only the priests are wise enough to be so honored. Priests and men from the stars," he added, as an afterthought. "Well, in any event, I hope you don't need me any more..." "But they did need you," said Cassidy. "Unfortunately, yes. Four more times in the twenty days before the return of the priest." "What were the troubles?" "Once, it was to aid in childbirth -- my first adventure as a midwife," he said, remembering the event and his shame at his ignorance in the matter. He had had to take directions from the woman. "Once, a hunter had fallen in an animal trap, and broken both his legs," he continued. "And twice, it was for sickness." "The same one as this Kylano?" "I don't know. I couldn't hope to diagnose it, so I just shot them full of antibiotics, and prayed for a miracle." "You should have prayed for brains instead. But all of your sick ones recovered?" "Yes. I couldn't seem to do anything wrong, and it wasn't long before the natives were beginning to look on me as the personal representative of their Gods. It was embarrassing, the way they fawned over me." "Tell me," said Cassidy. "You said you read the regs over. Why in the name of all that's holy didn't you have the sense to follow them?" "I couldn't stand by and watch them die! I had to help them, Cassidy. Damn it, I had to!" "Yeah, sure. But go on." "Well, to shorten matters, the local priest finally got back from his pilgrimage, and took up his old duties. All went well for about a week, and then another alien became ill. The priest heard about it, naturally, and went to his aid. But it seems my percentage of recoveries was better than his at its very best. They wouldn't let him even near the sick one. Instead, they sent for me." "You went?" "Of course. I didn't know the priest was back, and what else could I do?" "I shudder to think. What happened?" "The native got well, and the tribe practically pitched the priest out on his ear. He went running to his superiors, and they called a council of war. They banned the natives from the post, and threatened to cut off any who were seen with me from all priestly privileges. "The tribe made an almighty stink. They called their own council, and there was practically civil war. That's when I called you. Or, rather, the nearest trouble-shooter." "Ah, me. Why is it that I, Cassius Cassidy, get saddled with all of the real stinkers in the galaxy? I don't mind shooting other people's troubles for them, but I do resent the fact that the messiest ones get dumped in my lap. Sometimes I feel like resigning." "Cassidy, one of these days... "Oh, simmer down. I said there was a simple solution to your problem, and I knew what I was talking about. The natives have been so taken in by your ridiculously lucky flukes that they think you're the next thing to a God. Right?" "Right." Each looked as though the other were something unmentionable, left over from the last cleaning of the cesspool. "So we just... He leaned forward and outlined his plan. ably. The natives gave the post a wide margin; not even Bila showed his face. Dillon began to think that maybe there was a chance things would go back to normal by themselves ; and that Cassidy's plan would not be necessary. The first four days were merely a continuation of the heat. The two Earthmen sat around the office, speaking only when it was absolutely unavoidable, and then only in snarls. Dillon sent out a rush request for air conditioning equipment, omitted, by some mistake, from the supplies. The fifth day was as sunny as ever, but a stiff west wind sprang up, and the temperature was bearable. Cassidy smiled for the first time in days, and Dillon tried to be pleasant to him. The sixth day broke with an unceasing torrent of rain, and the men returned to their surly grumbling. "I hope the post isn't washed away," said Cassidy. "This storm begins to assume the aspects of the Biblical flood." "We're safe enough," said Dillon. "Only..." "Only what?" "Nothing. Just a hunch." "Good or bad?" "Bad. All bad. I've got a feeling we're due for a visit." As if on cue, a knock came on the office door. Dillon opened it, and stood aside for the throughly bedraggled alien waiting outside. Bila was a sorry caricature of himself, with his down plastered to his body. Water dripped from him in a steady stream. "Tarsa, starman," he said. "Tarsa, Bila," replied Dillon. "I've been expecting you." "Oh? Do you then have the powers of foreseeing the future, too?" "No," he said, laughing. "It's just that it's been several days since you were last here. You were overdue for a visit." Cassidy cleared his throat, and Dillon turned to him. "This is Cassidy, Bila," he said. "He is my brother from the stars, and has come to visit me for a short while." "Tarsa, Cassidy," the native said, gravely. "Tarsa, Bila. I have been hoping to meet a member of your people." "Oh? Has the fame of Kash spread far through the universe then?" "Indeed, all of the civilized worlds talk of Kash and its gentle folk. It is a common ambition to be able to come here and see you in person. It is hoped that soon such travel will be most frequent, to the reward of both of our peoples." "Indeed," said Bila. "I thank you in the name of my people. Will you yourself be here long?" "Unfortunately, no. But when I go I will take fond memories as souvenirs." "What is so important that it brought you out in this storm, Bila?" asked Dillon, breaking into the conversation. "Your troubles must be pressing." "Indeed, they are. The Gods frown heavily on our village this day, and I have come once more to seek your intercession." "What is the matter?" asked Cassidy. "Alas, the trouble is in my own household. My wife lies at the door to death, and I fear she is fast slipping beyond." "Haven't you had the priest in?" asked Dillon. "Against your great and wondrous magic, Dillon, what is the priest? He is like a lost little boy, unable to tell North from East, and helpless in the face of death. Only you have the power to bring her back to the world of the living, as you did with Kylano and the others." "I thank you for your trust," said Dillon. "I only hope it is not misplaced." "You will come?" "Of course. As soon as I dress for the storm, and get my bag." He turned to do so, then was struck by an afterthought. "By the way, do you mind if Cassidy comes with us? He would appreciate the chance to see your village." "It will be an honor." "Good. Get into your togs, Cass." They were soon ready. Dillon grabbed up his bag, and he followed the native out into the storm. The rain blew straight toward them, and they bent forward, into the wind. The trip to the village was a fight all the way. The village itself had become isolated; an island in the midst of a shallow lake. They waded across, to the hut that was Bila's. He held the hangings aside, and the Earthmen stepped into the stink of the alien crowd. The omnipresent lamps were lit, and the smoke hung heavy. Both of the Earthmen were soon wishing they had protection for their smarting eyes. The natives stopped their keening, and made room for the two men. They both moved forward, and bent over the woman. Dillon could see that she was as sick as the others, but whether or not it was the same disease, he could not say. For the eighth such time, he wished he had taken medical training as a youth, in deference to his family's wishes. "It's hot in here," said Cassidy. Sweat beaded out on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a shaking hand. "Small wonder," said Dillon, "with all these people here. They must up the temperature by twenty degrees." He opened his bag, and dug out a swab. After cleaning a spot on her arm, he dug out a needle, and filled it from an ampoule. "Dillon!" He whirled around. "Cass! What's the matter?" "I... don't know. Woozy. I feel woozy." He staggered, and fell forward, unconscious. "Cass!" He bent over the man, and turned him over. Cassidy's face was white, and the sweat rolled off in rivulets. Dillon felt for a pulse, and then pulled out a stethoscope. Baring the other's chest, he listened for a beat. "What is it, Dillon?" asked Bila. "What is wrong?" "I don't know. He's sick." He looked worried. "Sick?" The natives stared at each other, unbelieving. "Yes, sick! Earthmen get sick too, you know!" He bared Cassidy's arm, and swabbed it clean. Then he pressed home the needle he had prepared for the woman. "He will get well?" asked Bila. "I don't know." Dillon felt for a pulse again. Disbelief washed over his face, and he sank back on his heels. "What is it?" "He's dead." "Dead?" Amazement took hold of them. "Dead." The Earthman stood up, shaking his head. "But your wife, Bila. I must attend to her." "No." The native stepped between the man and woman, and held out his arms. "No? Why not?" "The Gods have frowned on you, starman. It is obvious that they are dissatisfied with you, for they took your brother." "But just because Cassidy died doesn't mean your wife will." He stared at the lesser being, dumfounded. "But she might, if not treated." "We shall get the priest. We cannot run the risk of offending the Gods by permitting you to touch her." The Earthman stared from face to face, but the same message was written on all. Hopelessness took the place of question, and he turned, and stumbled from the hut, and into the storm. "Take the man to the post," said Bila. Several of the men hurried to do his bidding. They carried Cassidy out into the night, without looking back. "Simple," said Cassidy. "Just like I said." He was hunched over his coffee, his ham-like hands soaking up the warmth from the cup. "Simple," said Dillon. "I don't get it. Just why did they stop me from treating the woman?" "We come from the stars, which the natives associate with the home of the Gods. We don't look quite like their legends say Gods should, but they figured we must be close to them, so they credited us with omnipotent powers. The priests claimed the cures they affected were done with the grace of the almighty, and the natives figured your cures came from the same source." "I can't figure why they wouldn't even let me touch her," said Dillon. "It doesn't make sense." "Actually, if you had given her the shot without me on the scene, and she had died, they probably would have accepted it as the will of the Gods. The priests fail once in awhile, and they just claim that the Gods have wanted that particular person to die. But when you were unable to save me, another man from the stars, and therefore presumably a close acquaintance of the Almighty, they could come to only one conclusion : The Gods withdrew their blessings from you. After that they wouldn't have let you touch a sick pig -- if they have pigs here." He drained his cup. A roar sounded down from the sky, building up into a wail that scraped the spines of the hearers. It rose to a crescendo, and then came a jarring shock that shuddered the whole building. "My chauffeur," said Cassidy. "Hot-rodding, as usual." He rose, and picked up his baggage. "You know, Dillon," he said, "You're a jerk. I'll tell my grandchildren about you. You're a perfect example of what not to do." He shook his head. "A horrible (Continued from page #) derstand the strange doom that had befallen it? There are a thousand such questions that may never be answered. It is hard to see how a creature bom in the fires of the Sun itself could know anything of the external universe, or could even sense the existence of something as unutterably cold as rigid non-gaseous matter. The living island that was falling upon us from space could never have conceived, however intelligent it might be, of the world it was so swiftly approaching. Now it filled our sky -- and perhaps, in those last few seconds, it knew that something strange was ahead of it. It may have sensed the far-flung magnetic field of Mercury, or felt the tug of our little world's gravitational pull. For it had begun to change ; the luminous lines that must have been what passed for its nervous system were clumping together in new patterns, and I would have given much to know their meaning. It may be that I was looking into the brain of a mindless beast in its last convulsion of fear -- or of a god-like being making its peace with the universe. Then the radar screen was empty, wiped clean during a single scan of the beam. The creature had fallen below our horizon, and was hidden from us now by the curve of the planet. Far out in the burning Dayside of Mercury, in the inferno where only a dozen men have ever ventured and fewer still come back alive, it smashed silently and invisibly against the seas of molten metal, the hills of slowly moving lava. The mere impact could have meant nothing to such an entity; what it could not endure was its first contact with the inconceivable cold of solid matter. Yes, cold. It had descended upon the hottest spot in the Solar System, where the temperature never falls below seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes approaches a thousand. And that was far, far colder to it than the Antarctic winter would be to a naked man. We did not see it die, out there in the freezing fire; it was beyond the reach of our instruments now, and none of them recorded its end. Yet every one of us knew when that moment came, and that is why we are not interested when those who have seen only the films and tapes .tell us that we were watching some purely natural phenomenon. How can one explain what we felt, in that last moment when half our little world was enmeshed in the dissolving tendrils of that huge but immaterial brain? I can only say that it was a soundless cry of anguish, a death-pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the gateways of the senses. Not one of us doubted then, or has ever doubted since, that he had witnessed the passing of a giant. We may have been both the first and the last of all men to see so mighty a fall. Whatever they may be, in their unimaginable world within the Sun, our paths and theirs may never cross again. It is hard to see how we can ever make contact with them, even if their intelligence matches ours. And does it? It may be well for us if we never know the answer. Perhaps they have been living there inside the Sun since the Universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom which we shall never scale. The future may be theirs, not ours; already they may be talking across the light-years to their cousins in other stars. One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they possess, as we circle round their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of organic life. And then, if they have the power, they will do what they consider necessary. The Sun will put forth its strength and lick the faces of its children; and thereafter the planets will go their way once more, as they were in the beginning, clean, and bright... and sterile. ( Continued from page # ) Myka, sat on his porch. One of the tribesmen was wrapping Geoffrey's and Dugald's forearms together. Geoffrey watched him with complete detachment. He stole a glance over toward Weatherby's porch, and it seemed to him that Myka was tense and anxious. He couldn't be sure... The fingers of his right hand gripped the haft of The Barbarian's knife. He held it with his thumb along the blade, knowing that if he drew his arm up, to stab downward, or back, to slash, Dugald would have a perfect opening. It was his thought, remembering that razor-keen blade, that he ought to be able to do plenty of damage with a simple underhand twist of his arm. He did not look down to see how Dugald was holding the knife he'd been given. That would have been unfair. The crowd of watching tribesmen was completely silent. This was a serious business with them, Geoffrey reflected. The tribesman tying their wrists had finished the job. He stepped back. "Anytime after I say 'Go,' you boys set to it. Anything goes and dead man loses. If you don't fight, we kill you both." For the first time since their capture, Geoffrey looked squarely into Dugald's slit eyes. "I'm sorry we have to do this to each other in this way, Dugald," he said. "Go!" the tribesman shouted, and jumped back. Dugald spat at Geoffrey's face. Geoffrey twitched his head involuntarily, realized what he done, and threw himself off his feet, pulling Dugald with him and just escaping the downward arc of Dugald's plunging knife. The momentum of Dugald's swing, combined with Geoffrey's weight, pulled him completely over Geoffrey's shoulder. The two of them jerked abruptly flat on the ground, their shoulders wrenched, sprawled out facing each other and tied together like two cats on a string. The crowd shouted. Geoffrey had landed full on his ribs, and for a moment he saw nothing but a red mist. Then his eyes cleared and he was staring into Dugald's face. Dugald snarled at him, and pawed out with his knife, at the advantage now because he could stab downward. Geoffrey rolled, and Dugald perforce rolled with him. The stab missed again, and Geoffrey, on his back, jabbed blindly over his head and reached nothing. Then they were on their stomachs again. Dugald was panting, his face running wet. The long black hair was full of dust, and his face was smeared. If ever Geoffrey had seen a man in an animal state, that was what Dugald resembled. Geoffrey thought wildly; Is this what a noble is? "I'll kill you!" Dugald bayed at him, and Geoffrey's hackles rose. This is not a man, he thought. This is nothing that deserves to live. Dugald's arm snapped back, knife poised, and drove downward again. Geoffrey suddenly coiled his back muscles and heaved on his left arm, yanking himself up against Dugald's chest. He snapped his hips sideward, and Dugald's knife missed him completely for the third and fatal time. The Barbarian's knife slipped upward into Dugald's rib cage, and suddenly Geoffrey was drenched with blood. Dugald's teeth bit into his neck, but the other man's jaws were already slackening. Geoffrey let himself slump, and hoped they would cut this carrion away from him as soon as possible. He heard the crowd yelping, and felt The Barbarian plucking the knife out of his hand. His arm was freed, and he rolled away. "By God, I knew you had the stuff," The Barbarian was booming. "I knew they had to start breeding men out on the coast sooner or later. Here -- give me your other wrist." The blade burned his skin twice each way -- once for victory and once for special aptitude -- and then Myka pressed a cloth to the wound. She was shaking her head. "I've never seen it done better. You're a natural born fighter, Lad. I've got one of my sisters all picked out for you." Geoffrey smiled up at The Barbarian, a little ruefully. "It seems you and I'll be going back to the coast together, next year." "Had it in mind all along, Lad," The Barbarian said. "If I can't lick 'em, I'll be damned if I won't make 'em join me." "It's an effective system," Geoffrey said. "That it is, Lad. That it is. And now, if you'll climb up to your feet, let's go get you some break( Continued from page #) with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned -- " He said much more but Technician Aub did not wait. Technician Aub, in the privacy of his quarters, labored long over the note he was leaving behind. It read finally as follows : "When I began the study of what is now called graphitics, it was no more than a hobby. I saw no more in it than an interesting amusement, an exercise of mind. "When Project Number began, I thought that others were wiser than I ; that graphitics might be put to practical use as a benefit to mankind; to aid in the production of really practical mass-transference devices perhaps. But now I see it is to be used only for death. "I cannot face the responsibility involved in having invented graphitics." He then deliberately turned the focus of a protein-depolarizer on himself and fell instantly and painlessly dead. They stood over the grave of the little Technician while tribute was paid to the greatness of his discovery. Programmer Shuman bowed his head along with the rest of them, but remained unmoved. The technician had done his share and was no longer needed, after all. He might have started graphitics, but now that it had started, it would carry on by itself overwhelmingly, triumphantly, until manned missiles were possible, along with who knew what else. Nine times seven, thought Shuman with deep satisfaction, is sixtythree and I don't need a computer to tell me so. The computer is in my own head. And it was amazing the feeling varies. # -- Tin. # -- Temperature at which vapor pressure equals one atmosphere. # -- Scientific study of Mars. # -- gypsum, fluorite, topaz. # -- Lever, wheel, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, screw. # -- Joining similar molecules to make a larger one. # -- Nobellium. #I -- Both lack true roots, stems, leaves. # -- Nitric and hydrochloric acids. # -- Wind velocity of # m.p.h. # -- Temperature when substances change magnetic behavior. # -- Fission, budding, spores. A new family of materials, made from glass, which are harder than steel, lighter than aluminum and # times as strong as plate glass has been developed by the researchers at Corning Glass. Named Pyroceram, the new material is a major contribution and an advance in glass technology whose production is a revolutionary manufacturing process in which non-crystalline glass is turned into a hard nonporous crystalline material. It can be tailor-made with thermal expansions ranging from slightly negative to high enough to match those of heavy metals. It can have electrical insulating properties superior to those of the best commercial dielectric ceramics. It can be opaque or transparent, the first polycrystalline material ever to exhibit this optical property. Certain types of the material keep their strength at temperatures as high as # degrees Fahrenheit. It can be made into large or complex shapes by any of the known glass-forming techniques. Transportation engineers are learning that all-aluminum subway cars may cost less to run and maintain than the steel cars now in use and the rush-hour contingent of the future will no doubt be jamming into the new type of subway. Cars with aluminum bodies and underframes are strong, light, and corrosion resistant due to a protective oxide on the surface of the metal. The new type of car would be about nine percent lighter than the #-ton loaded steel ones and would cost about # less per year to run and maintain. Longer bearing, wheel and track life and either more passengers carried at the same speeds, or a faster train schedule possible due to the light weight would account for much lower maintenance and operation costs. The United States Army will soon replace bottles for blood transfusions with plastic bags that pump blood when placed under the shoulder of a wounded man. The plastic bags offer the added advantage of being unbreakable, disposable and, when empty, taking up only onesixth of the space now needed for storing bottles. Designed to be placed under the shoulder of the wounded man, the bags are able to force the blood at an even rate into the arm through use of the body weight. A greatly improved micro-wave relay system capable of handling more than # telephone conversations, or I # television programs plus # telephone conversations will be in use in about two years. The new system, called TH for short will take advantage of advances such as silicon rectifiers, transistors, and ferrite switches that can switch rapidly and automatically from regular and emergency equipment in less than a thousandth of a second. It will beam signals much as a searchlight beams visible light, with short-wave, high-frequency radio waves relaying the information from one lineof-sight link to another. A study on solid propellants and the effects of solid fuel motor requirements for the guided missile program has revealed that such fuels will propel most military rockets of the future. Interest in solid fuels is based on the fact that such compounds are safer, easier to store and require less handling. The solids also cost less and there will be a dollar saving in storage, transportation and training the crews to handle them. Some solid fuels already in use include some plastics, natural and synthetic rubber compounds, nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose compounds as well as solidified boron complexes. A tiny tube the size of a cigarette filter tip which shows how long a radio, TV picture tube or other electronic device has been operating has been developed by the Raytheon Company. Simple to install, cheaper than mechanical timers, self sealed, and impervious to surrounding conditions the device can be operated in any position and uses about the same amount of energy as that generated by a flea. The sun beating down on an infantryman will be the source of energy to power the world's smallest transmitter-receiver built into a soldier's helmet. Silicon wafer solar cells used in combination with a nickel-cadmium storage cell make up a package which weighs less than a pound, and can be used both in sunlight and when clouds and nightfall cut off solar energy. Automation is overtaking even the highly trained medical laboratory technician. Called the Autoanalyser, the new machine can run through a blood analysis in almost less time than it takes to prick a finger. The machine, which was developed by the Technicon Company, can be loaded with a batch of # blood samples and test them for sugar, calcium and urea in about one hour. The magic carpet of fiction may actually be a reality someday soon. Astrophysicists foresee the carpet made of tiny closed cells filled with hydrogen or helium, the cell walls so light and strong that the carpet would be lighter than air. The production of strong, thin, single crystals has suggested the idea and lifting power could be managed by different degrees of elastic compression of the carpet's spongy metallic substance. A miniature dry-cell battery which is rechargeable and almost indestructible has been developed by government researchers. Adaptable to the transistorized circuits of hearing aids, walkie-talkies and portable radios, the tiny # ounce battery has advantages of long life, constant voltage and durability which make it a really rugged mighty midget. Didn't Mr. Smith defeat his own argument when he criticized Gunn's Green Thumb? He said he wanted us to stop stuffing our heads with the irrelevancies of specialization and use our learning as a guide to learning. What does he want us to be, a nation of philosophers? After all, most people who are specialists are not stuffing their heads with facts that are irrelevant to their own particular field. They are using their own special learning to further more learning on the same subject and thereby learning more than was known about it before. I agree with Gunn that the specialists are forgetting the larger field, that they should broaden their horizons to take in more than their own little field ; that large strides in one dimension are not enough to compensate for no forward movement in any other. However, only through specialization and attention to the details of a field of knowledge can that field make any strides toward learning more about itself. -- E. K. DeYoung Seattle, Wash. Becoming a statistic is ordinarily laughingly to be shied away from, but in this case you're welcome to include me. I'm an avid reader of science fiction, but never thought much about why until you asked. I'm a technical manual writer, writing about such commonplace powerplants as those destined to lift some lucky pilot into outer space one fine day -- liquid rocket engines. Thirty years ago I read my first s.f. stories with rocket ships as the theme. Today those dream ships are only a step away. Which brings up the point about my present outlook on the subject. Our favorite reading matter is one of the very few types of fiction left. Detective stories, love stories, and most modern fiction is anything but -- it is hashed and rehashed actual experience dressed up to look like fiction. But too many of us are "sensitive" and demand the word science be tacked in front of our fiction. I think this affectation has hurt us more than anything else. Recent movies and TV programs have been ruined because of the label "science fiction" when a slightly different accent and the removal of this label would make delightful entertainment. Playhouse # has put on at least one very good program in this category and didn't once use a title, lead, or spoken word to indicate that it was anything but good interesting fiction. It went over beautifully with the general public who would ordinarily shun science fiction. As to IF, I like the illustrations from the cover to the little trademark of Science Briefs. I like the choice of stories, the lead captions and the variety. I like the number of new writers that you feature. The old ones are good; but how nice to read a fresh approach occasionally. The paper is excellent and gives a sharp letter, the lines of type are even and very rarely contain a misplaced letter. In short, IF is a professional magazine. -- Waldo T. Boyd Orangevale, Calif. There are so many anomalies in science, evidence points out that science may not be science after all. At least a system can be constructed wherein all phenomena are dependent upon the subconscious agreements of individuals, rather than upon natural laws. In this view, we would see more magic than science. But if anything conceivable is possible, the social effect of science fiction is to literally cause the creation of new things. The new thing must first be imagined, then accepted by a number of persons, then it can be built. In science fiction we dare to imagine. Explorations in parapsychology are easily accomplished in the medium of science fiction. If one man ever knew the future, then it follows that the future can be known. If one accident prone can cause a series of accidents, then it follows that accidents are caused. If one astrologer can predict one true event, it follows that there is a relation between planetary cycles and human events. But if any of these things work because of belief in them, we can engender belief through familiarity and acceptance. A correlation of one is not useful, however, but you can determine if a correlation greater than one exists. What other agency would even look for such correlation? Very few indeed ! -- Paul Mitman Detroit, Mich. Game Preserve was quite an engenetics seem a little deficient. His assertion that of the population would be morons if they were not weeded out suggests that he is postulating a recessive anomaly. Fine, but then he comes up with "normal" being the recessive in the preserves. And if this is due to a recessive "suppressor" gene which seems the only plausible simple hypothesis, then the impurity of the preserve could not be so simply weeded out as indicated! A good story, and I liked it; but Rog should check a few references next time. -- Nick Sturm Austin, Texas I read science fiction because there are no limits to the plots. Mystery stories and westerns are always controlled and stereotyped. The hero undergoes several hardships, falls in love with the closest beautiful girl, solves his problem of either murder or bank robbery or range rustling and the book is ended. Science fiction on the other hand cannot be stereotyped. There can be no limitations; you have no idea what the story will be like until you have begun to read it; and therefore it's an adventure in itself. IF has the best reproduction, the fiction is always well written, the artists are the best in the field. The departments couldn't be better. The quiz is geared to an intelligent adult and not a teenage reader as most of them are. Science Briefs are done with a scientific atmosphere but can be understood by a fairly intelligent layman. The editorial # fantasy arid sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania is the most interesting in the field since it covers a broad number of subjects, and the letter column is exceptional since all the letters say something. IF boosts my contention that most readers are completely intelligent adults. -- Bill Meyers Chattanooga, Tenn. K.V. Fletcher in his diatribe against time machines has placed, himself in what to my mind is a rather ridiculous position. He wants us to understand, that the only time machine that will ever exist will be man's own mind which will carry him backward into his own memories and no further. He describes the author's uses of enormous flows of energy etc. to put man into the future -- all because he himself is so dogmatic that he will not accept such a possibility. I 'don't know how old he is, but I wonder if he wasn't one of those benighted souls who scorned the horseless carriage, and made Fulton suffer under jibes and jokes before he proved the worth of his steamboat. Can his mind encompass Man's reaching the stars? Or even closer to home, an artificial satellite? Well then, why not a time machine? -- A. Pasquine Metuchen, N. J. The satellite question has been answered . However , time and space are two different apples , though relative. But first , what is time? 'folce Any # of These Greet values up .o # # lQO # y SV t#UMfa#t  With membership Isaac Asimov. For description, please see other side. (Pub. ed. #). lected from Fantasy and ScienceFiction Magazine. Adventure in other worlds... mystery, intrigue, suspense! (Pub. ed. #). ies by top authors. Wonders of Earth and Man. Amazing inventions. Space Travel and Visitors from Outer Space. Adventures in Dimension. Worlds of Tomorrow. (Pub. ed. #). es. # famous novels; a complete play; scores of all-time great S-F stories, including H. G. Wells' "Invasion from Mars," made famous by Orsen Welles' hoax newscast. (Pub. ed. #). Dept. IF-#, Garden City. N. Y. Rush the # books checked below and enroll me as a member. One is my first selection, for which you may bill bulletin, describing coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus shipping. (Occasional extra-value selection at a slightly higher price.) But I need take only # books during the year and may resign at any time after that. # days, pay nothing; membership will be cancelled. Q Astounding S-F  The Naked Sun Anthology  Omnibus of Science-Fiction  Best from Fantasy  Satellite! and Science-Fiction  Treasury of S-F Classics the first A-bomb... invented! Plus a score of other best tales from a dozen years of Astounding Science-Fiction Magazine (Pub. ed. #). ler. Top experts reveal man-made Satellite -- information not even available in technical journals! (Pub. ed. #). Address. City Zone State Toronto #. (Offer good only in U. S. A. and Canada.) Isaac Asimov to the ears when beautiful Gladia Delmarre casually stepped out of her shower to talk with cial contacts were carried on by television. And just as Elijah (an Earthman brought up in underground cities) was terrified by Solaria's naked sun, the Solarians dreaded mingling with tact was out of the question. was obscene! That's why Elijah had good reason to be shocked when Gladia actually allowed him to she brazenly reached out her There was no doubt left in his mind that there was something unspeakably strange about this exotic temptress. But it was becoming more and more difficult for Elijah to admit -- even to himself -- that she was his prime suspect in a fantastically sordid murder ! in this amazing offer! see other side for details these New Masterpieces of lom fa oo  The Most Original Story of the Year! by Frank Riley OF IF U novelettes from the first six years of IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction readers all over America, this is a volume of exceptional interest -- distinguished examples of fine science fiction writing by outstanding writers. Stories that answer the age old question: '"What would happen If -- ?" Stories that call into play philosophy, logic, facts and Imagination to provide a diversity of entertainment that will appeal to all science fiction lovers, from astronomers to zoo keepers. Here you will find such authors as Charles Beaumont, James Blish, Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce Walton and Robert F. Young In an exciting variety of mood. Idea, theme and pace. All newsstands -- # cents I Editor's  One of the most fascinating sciences in this super-modern world of today is still the study of human behavior: How will a man act at a crucial moment under a given pattern of circumstances? Will he follow the dictates of custom, a lifelong creed of family love and loyalty, a mold of heredity and environment? Is the law of survival predominant against any situation, no matter who or what is involved? Just such a situation is posed in Homecoming, a taut, tense short story about a returning war veteran, with a truly "shock" ending. It's a story that might have come from one of America's more mature and experienced writers. Our assumption at first was that it did. But we were wrong. It's a "first published" story (in America) by a young man named Miguel Hidalgo who is all of # years old. At first we didn't believe it, but it was confirmed and we found ourselves with not only a "first" but one that was written by the youngest writer (to our knowledge) ever to break into science fiction. Miguel Hidalgo is a story himself. Of Spanish ancestry, he is a descendant of Simon Bolivar and was named for the Mexican liberator, Miguel Hidalgo. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Miguel came to the United States, in a basket, at the age of two months. He began writing poetry at the age of five and before he was ten he had published numerous short stories as well as poetry. Miguel has traveled the world over with his mother, who was one of the first women diplomats from Venezuela to the United States. A trained athlete and judo expert, he is now a senior at Lawrenceville School, preparing to enter Princeton next year in his quest for a degree in engineering. Miguel is "thrilled" about the publication of Homecoining in IF -- his first U. S. sale. Well, we were kind of excited ourselves; it isn't often a science fiction magazine gets a story that shows such stature from a world traveler of only # years! Another "first" for IF is Frank Riley's exciting and suspenseful story A Question of Identity. The theme is something completely new to science fiction -- one that dramatically pits a miracle of medical surgery against a court of justice. In reading the story you will find that you are the jury. It gets my vote as the most original science fiction stoiy of #, and I'd certainly like to hear from you about your reaction... Incidentally, Frank has left his job as a radio-TV writer and executive and is now devoting full time to writing. And it was good news indeed when he promised IF further stories, for he is not only a fine craftsman; he also puts unusual effort and patience into research work. A Question of Identity is such an example of fine writing backed up by careful medical and legal research. Satellite news is still hot news, with more and more of the little moons being shot into their orbits -- a prelude to space exploration, with perhaps the first manned satellite or satellite station a reality in our lifetime. All of which makes Jinuny Gunn's long novelette. Powder Keg, such a timely story. Here is a thrilling story of adventure, action and character study -- one of the best by one of science fiction's best known writers... Emsh did the cover for Powder Keg and he came up with a beauty... Ed, by the way, started drawing when he was in the first grade and, with time out for WW II, took all the art courses he could, continuing at the University of Michigan, from which he graduated in # with a major in art. After graduation he got married, went to Paris for a year's study and, when he returned, in #, started illustrating science fiction. Ed's wife, Carol, writes science fiction. They have two daughters who share their home movie hobby -- # mm fantasy films. Aluminum in omne colores del hide va esser usate in le ornamentos del automobiles de #. Le coloration del metallo es permanente. Illo es effectuate per un processo de anodisation que aperi le poros e permitte le penetration del pigmento... You can see we're on an Interlingua "kick", but this new scientific language has such possibilities and is so easy to learn that we feel the search for a truly international language has finally borne fruit. If you're interested in Interlingua, drop us a note... The gals in science fiction circles are supposed to be few and far between. All we can say is "it don't look like it." According to our survey, the ladies form a goodly part of science fiction fandom. An example of how they feel about it can be found in "Hue and Cry" -- all the letters but one are from the distaff side... Note to authors who would like to turn out more wordage: A new I. B. M. "gadget" has a transistorized tape with an input-output rate fast enough to read or write a fulllength novel in # seconds! For just # a month in rental or a purchase price of # it's yours!... Got a "birthday" greeting (at least that's when it arrived) from Charles Fontenay Conservation, in this issue) in the form of a painting of a Martian scene. For the sands of Mars he mixed Earth sand with his oils and got a really unusual effect! The more you look at it, the more it grows on you. By the way, this is the second issue in which IF has been using a different kind of type for the logo panel on the cover and on the contents page. Have you noticed it? Do you think it says "IF" better than before? I'd like to know what you readers think. -- jlq The crew on the Little Wheel had committed just about every offense in the book; and they were led by a patriot or a madman... man would hae shrugged and let it pass, but not rest until the intuitive response had been isolated and analyzed. Besides, he had been neutral, at least, when he had been here once before, when another man sat behind the broad, polished walnut desk. It was a big room, even in comparison with rooms above. Here in the sub-Pentagon, it was gigantic, fully thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. The three doors, one leading to the anterooms through which he had been ushered quickly, the others in the side walls to Communications and to Plot, were imitation walnut -- a good imitation which could be detected only by looking at the deep glow the feeling that if he touched it his fingers would sink in up to the first joint. The doors were two-inch armor plate. The floor was covered from wall to wall by a deep-pile seamless made no sound as he walked across it and stood at attention in front of the desk. The only noise in the room was the muffled whisper of the air-conditioning as it blew fresh, chilled air through ceiling ducts. had forgotten he was here. Haven Ashley was sitting with his back to sitting beside it. He seemed to be studying the mosaic on the rear wall of his office, the only decorative touch in the room. The other walls were plain battleship gray. The mosaic was an authentic art piece. It had been constructed from minute slivers of colored glass, each glued painstakingly into position to form a faithful reproduction of the appearance of Earth from # miles up. The continents were dull browns and yellows and greens overcast by a faint blue ; the oceans were grayish-blue, almost black. The mosaic was flat, but it gave the illusion of being a perfect halfsphere. Down here it was always night, but when the sun sank beyond the Potomac for the surface dwellers above, the disk darkened in Ashley's office and became spotted with the reddish patches that were cities and the single stars that were brighter concentrations of light. And in the velvet dark around the planet real stars came out, unthen by the glow of the daylit Earth. There were no satellites in the sky. The scale was too small for the #-hour orbit of the Big Wheel and too large for the Little Wheel to be more than a speck. In any case, the Little Wheel would not have appeared; that was where the artist had stood. The mosaic was strategically tered through the front wall door, it had looked like a halo around the head of General Haven Ashley. Ashley made the most of it. He was no angel. General's head for the third time. Ashley was not a tall man, but he was big. He filled out the padded desk chair from armrest to armrest, his massive thighs bulging the trouser legs of the Air Force gray uniform, his barrel chest straining the gilt buttons of the jacket. But these were things that Phillips had observed as he entered. All he could see now was the stiff, stubborn set of the shoulders, the red neck creased with a roll oiF fat, the gray hair brushed firmly into place against its natural tendency to bristle, and he thought: Whafs wrong with the room? Its identical with the room when Pickrell was here, even to the stainless steel model of a three-stage shuttle that stood on the desk as a paperweight. A little neater, perhaps, hut I have no fetish for that. He had an incipient tendency toward claustrophobia. Perhaps it was that. He could feel the weight of five hundred feet of reinforced concrete pressing down upon his shoulders and his chest. Even the air seemed stale, although he knew it was purer than he could breathe on the streets of Washington. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of why Ashley had called him here. This was no courtesy call, as the other had been. This was business, and, for some reason, Ashley couldn't talk about it. The General hadn't called to his office an obscure Air Force psychologist to discuss the psychologist's opinion of the Air Force. Nor had he summoned help for his neuroses; for Ashley that was impossible. It had to be the job. Ashley had inherited it six months ago. On his shoulders, like a modern Atlas, rested the sky. If he weakened, if he stumbled, the sky would fall, and humanity would be obliterated. was the uncertainty of the world situation itself, which had worsened, certainly, in recent months. to stab out his cigarette in the spotless ash tray, Ashley swiveled in his chair, smacked the desk with the flat of his hand, and said violently, "Intolerable!" above the tray, the cigarette burning close to his fingers. "Not you. Captain," Ashley growled. "Put that thing out. You'll have to give up smoking anyway." back tensely. "Yes, sir?" What did he mean by that? Ashley scowled at the shiny paperweight. "What do you know about the world situation? Never mind; I'll tell you in one word: desperate. It's been desperate for forty years, but now it's worse. Every puny little nation has a stockpile of atomic and hydrogen weapons; every last one of them is ready to blow your head ofT if you speak to them without the respect they think is their due." "We're sitting on a powder keg," has a fuse in one hand and a piece of smoldering punk in the other. If one of us goes, we all go. You'd think they'd decide, eventually, to stamp out the punk and tear out the fuses." Ashley's bushy red eyebrows drew closer together, deepening the creases between them, and he asked sourly, "And how can you be sure everyone does it at the same time? Idealists! The last nation with a lighted match is the master of the world." that was the function of the Little Wheel -- to keep everyone honest." Ashley said gloomily, "It's an edge. But what good is an edge in a situation like this? It's like having a machine gun when the other guy's got a .#. If the shooting starts, you're just as dead." "What about the satellite's inspection facilities? Each two hours every spot on Earth comes within view." "That! How do you see under the ground? You don't. And that's are now." "Then there's espionage -- " "And we're right back where we started twenty-five years ago." Ashley was solid and impassive in his chair, but his eyes brooded over the rocket-shaped ornament. "Have you ever been up there? Or out there, as the space nuts say." "Yes, sir. Training cruises, and a weekend on the Big Wheel." "The Little Wheel." "No, sir." "No. They won't let you up there. They won't let any psychologist up there." Ashley's voice dropped to a monotone, and he stared at the front door blindly. "When I took over command of the Air Force, I inherited a standing order that no psychologist would be allowed inside the Little Wheel. Why, Captain?" His voice grew stronger as he went on without waiting for an answer. "They were afraid of what a psychologist would find. They're afraid he'd break up their playhouse. "Pickrell tried to get me to go along with his little game. 'The witch doctors had their shot at my men in the Academy,' he would say. T won't have them messing around with my men on the job.' Well, I'm in command now, and I'm running things my way." no doubt that the men out there are stable." "Stable how?" Ashley demanded fiercely. "As spaceman, maybe. But are they stable as executioners? They've got their finger on the trigger up there, man, and there's no one to tell them when to shoot except a lunatic. Don't interrupt me! We're in communication, sure -- for twenty minutes every two hours. And radio can be jammed. If that's too obvious, an enemy can wait for sunspots. That fouls everything up but good! And astronomers have no nationality. "Men have been up there for twenty years with their trigger fingers crooked. Not sensible men. Captain, not men trained in responsibility and careful decisions, but men who must be more than a little cracked in the first place to go up there and stay." There was an indefinable note of horror in Ashley's deep voice. "Why there's a man up there who hasn't been back for twelve years -- who hasn't set foot 'on Earth since he went up! And he's in command up there! "How stable is a man. Captain, who replies to an order from his superior officer: In my opinion this is impractical or We respectfully suggest that you consider possible alternatives? "That's all. Captain. Pick up your orders as you go out. You will make a thorough survey of the psychological situation in the Little Wheel and report back when it is completed. When you come back, you will have an answer to this question: Is every man up there competent to exercise mature, unerring judgment in cases involving the welfare of the entire Earth; is every man up there incapable of cracking under the constant strain of sitting on a powder keg? "Oh, yes. Another thing. They're building something up there behind the Wheel where we can't see it. I want to know what it is." hands. The rocket model was between them, and beneath the red hairs the hands were white with strain. The paperweight snapped. The sound was startling in the silence. Ashley looked down at his hands, surprised, and then contemptuously tossed the pieces away. about the question he would have to answer when his job was done. There was only one possible answer: no. There was no group of men anywhere uniformly competent to exercise mature, unerring judgment, no man who would not crack under the stress of responsibility, if the responsibility were great enough. He could give Ashley his answer now, but that wasn't what the General wanted. He wanted the odor of legality; he wanted evidence to present to the Secretary of Defense or the President or Congress. He was determined to break the Little Wheel just as he had broken the rocket model on his desk. "What kind of a man is the commander of the Little Wheel?" Ashley stared at him, his eyes large and angry. "I told you. He's a madman. He's utterly insane." hands and said, "Why don't you order him in?" Ashley hesitated for a moment and then said in a voice that was almost inaudible, "What if he refused to come?" M.D., U.S.A.F., sat in the leather-and-tile waiting room of the vast concrete spaceport at Cocoa, Florida, and watched Swan Lake on the wide, flat television screen against the far wall. The performance was impossibly graceful, unimaginably beautiful; never had human dancers looked so much like swans as they made long, flowing swoops through air that seemed as buoyant as a crystalline pool. The program was coming from the Big Wheel, poised eternally in its # mile orbit above the United States. The performance was taking place in a low-gravity studio of the fabulous Telecity not far from the commercial satellite, and reception was flawless. could appreciate, something that the conquest of space had given him that repaid, in part, the sacrifices in human life and labor and agony and Earth's resources that could have been expended more profitably and more realistically. spaceflight or the Big Wheel or the Little Wheel, either. He was intensely interested in them -- as psychological phenomena. They had brought him into the Air Force, and they had kept him there. He wanted an answer to his own question: why? Why did men join the Air Force's Space Corps? What drove them into a brutal, alien environment where the best they could expect was hardship and a sterile life shortened by the physical damage of bad food, poisoned air, and the destruction of heavy primaries, the cumulative toll of acceleration pressures, and a fifty percent certainty of insanity or violent dedth? And why did a race expend its substance on a grand but futile gesture? Spaceflight was impractical ; that was certain. It could never return half the investment of thought, sweat, blood, and money put into it. One day there would be a thick, on it. Perhaps he would call it: Those Who Went Out, subtitled, "The Psychological Factors Involved in the Career Decisions of Space Corps Volunteers, with case histories." Or maybe: The Influence of the Broken Home on Twenty Space Corps Volunteers... Or, more simply: Spaceman -- A Study of the Space Corps... After that would come the sociological treatise: Why Space? -- A Consideration of the Sociological Necessities Behind the Development of Spaceflight. waiting room. It was bare and almost antiseptically clean. He was alone except for a second lieutenant asleep in a far corner, his space helmet tilted forward to shade his eyes. man swans on the screen, but there were more urgent and immediate demands on his thoughts -- for instance General Haven Ashley. His orders had included only twenty-four hours delay, but he had put them to good use. There was no one to say good-by to : his mother had died many years ago, his father wouldn't give a damn, and he had played the field too carefully for any girl to wonder why he didn't call. In a locked compartment of were the results of his #-hours' work : microfilms of the service and medical records of the Little Wheel's entire personnel, from a newcomer of five months to an incredible veteran of twelve years, a Colonel Danton whom General Ashley had insisted was "utterly insane." eral times during the continually delayed take-off of the shuttle, but a thorough analysis would have to wait until he had met each man individually and could correlate his observations with the impersonal details recorded in the emulsions. He did not want to prejudge anyone. It was a trait of conscientiousness that was a little annoying under the circumstances. The situation had been prejudged for him. But it was the way he worked, and he would have to endure it again, as he had suffered with it before. authority to dig into a more private file, that of Ashley himself. He knew more about Ashley now than Ashley knew about himself. He would have liked confirmation, absolute certainty; a Rorschach blob test would have provided that. But he was as likely to get that from Ashley as Danton was to get a promotion, and he had enough. He knew why Ashley wanted to destroy the Little Wheel, had to destroy it. He had the key, a small notation on Ashley's service record: Disqualified for space duty, space sickness. Ashley was one of that small minority of men who can not go weightless without complete sensory disorientation and a violent, unrelenting nausea. A lesser man would not have cared; a greater man would have forgiven himself. But Ashley could do neither. He had sublimated it, and the defeat had become a driving ambition that had carried him to the top of the Air Force through an incommensurable amount of unrelenting labor, constant politicking, and plain backstabbing. He had seen space heroes promoted over his head, and he had waited and worked and plotted through the commands of such space pioneers as Beauregard Finch and the recently invalided Frank Pickrell, through an era when spacemen could do no wrong. And he had clawed his way to the top. There were published articles in Ashley's file subtly emphasizing the necessity of civilian control and of a balanced attack upon the military problem of defense against aggression. voice growling through such phrases as "the tail wagging the dog" and "promotion policies should be influenced by considerations of all-around executive ability rather than spectacular and essentially meaningless feats of personal courage or mere physical agility. The balanced man with his feet planted firmly on the ground and his primary concern for the welfare of all the people must take precedence over visionaries and impractical idealists." Ashley would be the first to deny that he harbored any hatred for the Space Corps of his command, and he would be telling the truth. But his subconscious mind had decided long ago that spaceflight was worthless. It was equated with a terrible experience of physical and psychic distress; imprinted on an inaccessible area of Ashley's mind was the article of faith: Men are Earth creatures. The combination of genes that had determined Ashley's inability to tolerate no-gravity had doomed the Little Wheel, and perhaps the whole future of spaceflight, almost fifty years ago. Chance. Just as it had been chance that the first man into space had been unable to return, and his plight, capturing the world's sympathy, had fueled the great psychological surge that had put the Little Wheel into space. To recognize the subconscious factors behind Ashley's decision, however, was not to invalidate the decision itself. There are subconscious factors behind every decision. Ashley might be correct in spite of very probably that Ashley was right. But it rankled a little that he was going on a fool's errand. No answer he brought back -- except an outright and unacceptable lie -- could save the Little Wheel. Still, to Ashley and the world the trip was essential. The Little Wheel was going to die and spaceflight was going to die, but they had to die for a very good reason and with all due rites and ceremonies or they wouldn't stay dead. 'T beg your pardon, sir," the voice repeated. shattered into shards that could never be quite pieced together again. A second lieutenant in the Space Corps stood respectfully in front of him, his blue space helmet glanced quickly at the far corner of the room, but it was empty, and looked back at the lieutenant. 'T beg your pardon, sir," said the lieutenant for the third time, "but I was wondering -- you don't seem to be watching the screen" -- he motioned boyishly toward the far wall -- "if you'd mind if I switched channels." He was a young man -- slim, tall, broad-shouldered, and blond, his hair trimmed almost scalp short in the latest spacecut and he wore the most delightfully engaging grin. The kind of young man, in fact, for whom a uniform did the most and who did the most for a uniform. His face had sunburned and peeled and sunburned and peeled again until it was a light tan, but he would never develop any real immunity to ultraviolet. His blue eyes wavering. He was a completely normal young man, a Space Corps recruiting poster come to life, and In a moment the swans gave way to an amazing exhibition of acrobatics in zero gravity, but the young lieutenant, after he had returned and taken a pneumatic, leather formance none of his attention. He turned immediately to the psychologist and said eagerly, "Are you going out, sir?" "Yes." "Your first?" the Little Wheel." "Then you have an experience in store." smile broadened. "We'll be going out together," the boy said with great enthusiasm. The lieutenant looked sheepish. "I beg your pardon, sir. I talk too much, don't I? It's just that I'm returning from a short leave, and I can't wait to get back. My name is Grant. Jack Grant." parents living, happily married. Normally affectionate family relationship. Older brother a solar power engineer. Younger sister in high school. Normal adolescent sexual experiences. Six months service outside. Well-adjusted personality for his age when he left the Academy. into the pattern at all. Why had said. Grant went on chattering unAcademy, about the Wheel, about his recent leave and the girl he had met and what they had done -- stopping just short of the fine line between gentleman and jerk. His appetite for experience and his unquenchable good humor were inplayful puppy, bounding violently, his stub of a tail shaking his body thawed once more in spite of himself and gave the boy a verbal pat on the head occasionally. "What kind of man is Colonel Grant's smile faded. He looked serious for a moment and said, "A commander, completely loyal to his men and gets their loyalty in return. Dedicated, sir. Works harder than anyone." "You can speak frankly. Jack. I'll tell you something. Can you keep it under your hat?" He went on in a confidential murmur without waiting for an answer. "I'm a psychologist assigned to the Little Wheel. One of my jobs is to determine whether Danton is emotionally qualified for a position whose responsibility is almost beyond comprehension." That was true, certainly, although not in the sense that Grant would take it. "You can help me." "You put me in a difficult position, sir. I'd like to help you, but I just can't." Then there was something to tell. "This isn't tattling. Jack. It's much more important than that." Grant shook his head grimly. "I'm sorry, sir. You'll have to find out for yourself." I understand how you feel." Grant could not stay withdrawn for more than a few moments. Soon he was baring his normal young soul as freely as ever. Fifteen minutes later Lieutenant Kars came through the broad, glass-doored entrance. He wore blue coveralls, a webbed flight belt across his chest, and a somber expression on his dark face. Joseph Kars, #, only child of a to think before Kars said curtly, "Let's go. Captain. We can't wait all night." tly. "I've been waiting for two days." Kars looked at him out of cold, black eyes. "It's never about time, Captain. It's time or it isn't. Pick up the Captain's spacepack, Grant," he snapped. He turned on his heel. up his own luggage, but Grant already had it in his hand. He grinned at the psychologist. Philfips looked at him helplessly and back at Kars as if comparing the two and then followed the unrelenting back into the night. pitted, concrete landing field toward the skyscraper-tall threestage rocket, broad-finned at the bottom, its wings even broader at the top. Grant was some twenty at the shuttle. He was looking at Kars. There is a sameness to them, he thought. A dedication, a mania that molds their features, a look to the eyes as if they were fashioned for seeing more distant vistas than other men. There were all shapes and colors and faces, but the differences only emphasized their kinship. They came from identical molds labeled: "Experiment -- Homo Spatium." All except Grant. He was too felt a surge of affection for Grant, as if they were brothers who had just recognized that they were among aliens. "What held us up, Joe?" Phillips asked casually. "If you don't mind. Captain, call me Kars or Lieutenant." "All right. Lieutenant. What was the trouble?" "No trouble. Captain." "Two days delay, and you call it no trouble?" Kars glanced at him silently as derstanding. Then he pointed at the shuttle, standing tall and partially illuminated on the otherwise dark field. But there was life around. Somewhere animals roared in their testipg frames, spitting flame and power, shaking the ground. It was like walking through a zoo at night, wondering if the bars are strong enough. "That's a beast there. Captain," Kars said flatly, "a savage, viciously unpredictable beast straining at a leash, waiting to kill me if I overlook one small item in an endless list of precautions. "I'm in command of that thing. It doesn't move until I'm satisfied that it's ready. Every relay, every pump, every gauge must be working perfectly; every connection must be solid; every line must be clean. Or blam! No more crew, no more Joseph Kars, no more Capfor the Wheel. "We inspect every part personally, Captain. Does that surprise you?" "No. Something was wrong then?" "We weren't sure everything was right." "I'm glad you told me. I would hate to be forced to report that there was deliberate delay in the execution of my orders. General Ashley wanted me on the Little Wheel yesterday." do with General Ashley. "Besides," he concluded mildly, "there's always the possibility of sabotage. One of the crew must stand guard over the shuttle at all times." surprised. Kars' unreadable black eyes looked at him. "After the red tape you went through, you think an enemy agent could get in here?" "Did Colonel Danton tell you that? What's wrong with him?" "Captain," Kars said icily, "we didn't have to be told. As for the Colonel -- he's the greatest man who ever lived!" As they climbed up concrete steps onto the takeoff platform, the ship had grown so tall that it seemed about to topple over on them. They approached the giant hammerhead crane beside the shuttle. Grant's footsteps clicked behind them. There was a smell of old fire to the platform mingled with the sharp odor of acid and the mingled stench of old chemicals and oil. "You don't like me, Lieutenant," "I don't dislike you, Captain," Kars said without expression. "I don't feel anything about you at all except for a general distaste for all witch doctors. I had enough of them at the Academy. They ask the wrong questions. Captain. "If I resent you, it's because you're taking up space that might be occupied by someone useful. If we didn't have to lift you, we could lift another bottle of oxygen. We can breathe oxygen. Captain." said cheerfully. "Okay, Lieutenant. Man proposes, but the Air Force disposes. I've got my orders, too, and I can stand it if you can." Grant joined them in the elevator that was part of the crane's framework. It lifted them up the side of the ship, and they climbed through the thick, square doorway. Kars swarmed up a ladder toward lowed more slowly. Grant stowed ascended. gimbaled chair. "That's yours," he said, and went on to the pilot's chair above. With quick, sure competence, ling softly. So this was the way it was going to be: a test for the psychologist. Let them have their fun, he thought. They'll need it. After the interminable drone of the check-off, the lifting of the shuttle took him by surprise. Kars gave no warning on the intercom; there was suddenly more than half a ton of lead sitting on his chest, squeezing the breath out of his body, refusing to let him draw in more. His head was turned slightly to the side, forced deep into the cushions, and he could not move it. Outside the night flamed red and yellow and white, until he had to The ship trembled and shuddered and shook, and the roaring of the rocket motors was everywhere, pervading every tortured cell of his body. After a brief surcease, in which side had disappeared and his blinded eyes could see only a sooty blackness, the weight descended again. This time, as the second stage took up the job of acceleration, the pressure lasted for almost a minute. As the second stage cut off and rasping breath. By comparison, the third-stage acceleration was almost unnoticeable. Suddenly, then, the all-pervading vibration was gone. The motors He gripped the chair arms with clawing hands. This is illusion, he told himself desperately. What sent his senses reeling into the eternal night was the absence of acceleration pressure, was the release of the ear's otolith organs from the tug of gravity... His stomach rebelled. Bitter acids spurted into his mouth... Free fall, he told himself. In that sense I am falling, as all men fall when there is no resistance to the pull of gravity. But in actuality I am coasting upward into the abyss of night, protected from its hungry vacuum, from its extremes of heat and cold, by sturdy metal walls and the power of man's engineering and craftsmanship. Falling, true, but falling -- up! and a sensation of unusual wellbeing spread through his body. He was one of the lucky ones. After a few uncomfortable moments of transition, zero gravity was a delight to him. was beside him, on the other side of the ladder, but the boy was having more difficulties. His face was white, and his jaw was set grimly. The earphones popped, and Kars' sardonic voice came to Phillips clearly. "Okay, Captain?" said cheerfully. "Best lift I can remember." And that, he thought, should end the hazing from that quarter. Then there was no time for talk : the crew was too busy with problems of navigation and determining the final burst of acceleration which would stabilize the ship's orbit at # miles out and locating the Little Wheel. swiftly. Grant was still in no mood for conversation, but the psychologist watched the stars through the clear, plastic canopy. They had always fascinated him; they were so different from the twinkling, filtered, untouchable fireflies of recognized the transition in his vocabulary -- they were clear, steady, many colored, and almost within reach. That, too, was illusion. As a psychologist he knew that Ashley's article of faith was fact: Men are Earth creatures. Nowhere else could Man exist in more than a marginal, half-starved sense. No other soil would nourish him; no other world would ever be home. The two artificial satellites were special cases. They were Earth environment canned and transported at incredible expense into orbits around the home world, and whenever the psychological pressures grew unbearable, a man could look out and see the warm, fertile bosom of his mother only hours away. reverie. It wasn't one of the crew members; he had become attuned to them. This voice was carefree, almost chuckling. "Okay, Joe," it said. "You've got your bearings; don't spare the hydrazine. And be careful with the supercargo." It laughed. "We wouldn't want anything to happen to the General's errand boy." The freed third stage had slid into sunlight. The glare was dazzling, blotting out the stars. The Earth -- below? above? -- spanned the mosaic in General Ashley's office. The difTerence was that this was real, and he was Outside, floating # miles above the world beneath with its blue-black oceans, its thin-cotton clouds covering almost half the planet, its dull, brownish-yellowish-greenish continents distorted almost beyond recognition at the edges of the hemisphere, all framed by a whitish haze. This was real, and it was majestic and frightening. On the other side, the gleamingwhite, two-spoked Wheel, spinning slowly, was a triumphant thing, dazzling the eyes where the sun burned back from its rim. It was a silver ring for a giant's finger waiting on the black-velvet cushion of the night. for the sausage-shaped taxi that would take him to it. Not far from the Wheel was a vast circle of coated metal, shining mirrorlike in the sunlight. But it could not be a mirror -- not a weapon for concentrating the sun's rays on an enemy city like a burning glass on an ant hill nor a reflector for lighting the friendly night or warming the polar ice. It was pointed at right angles to Earth. Beyond the Wheel was another out what it was supposed to be ; the Wheel concealed much of it. But it was an ungainly contraption of rocket motors and spherical tanks bolted flimsily together. A man was waiting in the zerohis cumbersome suit, a man with a hard, deeply tanned face and snowwhite hair -- cosmic ray damage to follicles did that. He wore the loosefitting coveralls of an ordinary spaceman. They were ragged at cuff and neck, and there was no insignia. Sloppy at that. The man was slim and a little over medium height as near as accustomed yardsticks of perspective and familiar surroundings. The contrast of his colorless hair and eyebrows with the dark face was dramatic. In fact, the man looked surprisingly like ailing General Pickrell, even to the cataractflecked eyes, but then he grinned and the resemblance vanished. ily, floating without a handhold in mid-air. "Colonel Amos Danton at your service." and tried to cover it by shooting out a hand to meet Danton's. But it overshot its mark and had to fumble its way back with an air of embarrassment. Muscles don't learn "Glad to meet you. Colonel Danton," he said, "but I want to correct one misapprehension. I'm a little too old to be an errand boy." "I hadn't thought there was any age limit on it." Danton grinned. "But seeing you now, I'm inclined to agree. Don't mind me. I'm frank to the point of brutality." "Then I hope you'll continue to be frank with me, Colonel. I have a difficult job to do, and I'll need all the help I can get." "I know." "You know what my job is?" "Shall I quote your orders?" "Spies?" "Call them spies if you like." Danton's face hardened. "There are spies around me, now. Saboteurs. Enemies." He took a deep breath and brought his voice back to its original lightness. He shrugged. The gesture spun him gently, but he stopped it almost without effort. "We think of them as grounded spacemen. Once a spaceman always a spaceman." "What would you call me?" "Neither fish nor fowl. Captain. You're an ocean dweller with air sacs capable of absorbing oxygen from the atmosphere, but you haven't made up your mind whether it wouldn't be better, after all, to crawl back into the secure, buoyant womb of the sea." "I disagree with your analysis and your analogy. Colonel." "That's your privilege. But all this formality makes me nervous." Almost as he spoke, his eyelid jerked. "We don't worry much out here about spit and polish. My name is Amos. I'll call you Lloyd. Okay?" began a series of lazy somersaults that he didn't try to stop because he didn't know how. Perhaps it would not be as difficult as he had imagined, he thought. Danton might be as cracked a pot as Ashley believed him or as great a man as Kars had called him or as tainted as Grant had suggested, but he had no obvious chip on his shoulder. turn him into an active ally. Feeling a little silly about the somersaults, he said, "If you know my job, then I hope you'll see that I get the cooperation it demands." "Sure," Danton said. "You came out to tear down the Wheel. Go to it. If you can do it, the Wheel doesn't deserve to be out here. You'll get cooperation. And if any of the boys give you trouble, come to me. They don't like you, you know. Not only are they rather attached to this old Wheel, but you're going to slow down a job they know is important, and you're going to occupy premium space and consume valuable oxygen and food." His, eyelid jerked. "But they'll cooperate -- or else." As if he had suddenly tired of the hand as it came around and gave it a quick pull which stopped the reached out just in time to catch a rung of the rope ladder that lined the side of the tunnel. Danton, rebounding from the other side of the Hub with bent knees thrusting, was beside him immediately. "Danton coming through on B with one hundred sixty pounds of witch doctor," he said into a microget you settled. I'm giving you the cabin next to mine. It's small and uncomfortable, but it's the best we have. And you'll want the privacy, I imagine. Out here that's our scarcest commodity," said quickly as they pulled themselves along the ladder, their weight increasing as they approached the rim. "I'll want free access to every part of the Wheel. I'll set up a schedule of private interviews for everyone out here, but I want to eat with the men." "They've endured a lot of things. I guess they can survive that, too. You're free to go wherever you wish, but the weight control officer has orders to search you if you leave your room. Saboteurs, you know." T he cabin was small beyond belief. Beside it the third-class quarters of the Big Wheel were models of luxury. Here there was space for a bunk, a table, and a chair; when the bunk was folded against the wall, the table and the chair could be let down. When all of them were out of the way, a man could take two paces if he didn't step too freely. If the legend on the door were to be believed, it had housed the missile-control officer. For all its privations, it was a room with a view. When an outside viewport cover was lifted, the uniinfinity scattered lavishly with friendly, many colored lanterns to light the way, or alternately, as the Wheel turned, the great, beautiful disk of the Earth was before him, close enough to grasp in a man's two hands if there were not thick glass in the way. Occasionally, beyond a thin, ton moving softly in what must have been a twin cabin to his. was glad he had an ear mike for his recorder. If his cabin was tiny, the crew's quarters were impossible. Like flophouse patrons that rented louse-ridden beds by the hour, the crew slept in "hot" bunks, and when they slid into them their faces were no more than six inches from the bulging canvas of the bunk above. There were, at least, no lice. The food, chiefly frozen meals to save shipping space, the services of a cook, and the room necessary for a kitchen, was surprisingly good, but even eating in shifts couldn't prevent continual overcrowding of the minute dining hall. It was almost necessary to eat in unison to avoid an inextricable tangling of arms. An eternal line waited for a chance at the shower or the sanitary facilities, and recreational opportunities were practically non-existent. Occasionally there were swift games of no-gravity handball in the Hub -- against all regulations, but even Danton joined in -- and riskier games outside in spacesuits or the two-jet taxis. Inevitably, there were card games, checkers, and chess in the bunks, and probably bull sessions. The last was surmise. The men around. They glanced at him coldly or ignored him. Even when he called them to his carefully prepared cabin -- the Rorschach clay on the table, the recorder fastened underneath -- they were sullen and monosyllabic. They knew what he was there for, and they resented him violently. Only Danton's explicit orders made them report at all. Ashley would love it, he thought. They all sounded like depressives on the verge of becoming manic. None of them realized that the clay they were working in their fingers -- since they were all compulsives they picked up whatever was available to keep their hands occupied -- revealed them more surely than anything they could have said. Alumbaugh, Baker, Chapman, Dean -- straight down the roster, blobs they left behind. Psychology had taken giant strides in the last quarter century; Rorschach blots interpreted by the patient had become Rorschach blobs manipulated unconsciously by the patient, and members with certainty: schizoids, cycloids, paranoids, homosexuals, sadists, incipient homicides... psychopaths all. In a sense, part of it was unfair. Morale was better than it should have been among men working, many of them at manual labor, for twelve to sixteen hours a day and living under conditions that would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment for the most hopeless criminal. On the other hand, it was not as good as it could have been under the guidance of an experienced psychologist. have trusted them with decisions involving the safety of a small city. There was no longer any doubt in his mind: they were unstable personalities in an artificial and unnatural environment. If there was any powder keg, this was it -- waiting for a spark to set it off and blow up the world it was supposed to protect. There was only one way out : the conquest of space would have to be sacrificed to the security of the race of man. The taped interviews, his own notes and observations, the minipictures of the blobs -- kept under tamperproof lock when he was out of the cabin -- were perhaps enough to satisfy the jury that would decide the Wheel's fate, although laymen looked on the blobs with the for books. conversations of the crew when they thought they were alone, for instance, but he wasn't electrician enough to rig bugs in the sleeping quarters and the mess hall. In any case, they were never clear. his problem, looking for something overt, for something he could point to and say, "See? Here a man has cracked under the pressure. Here he has done this or forgotten to do that in an unconscious dramatization of his paranoid aggression wish or his suicidal impulse. Here, but for chance, might be the act that destroyed every living thing on Earth." But there was nothing to point to. As neurotic as the crew members certainly were, as psychopathic as many of them seemed to be, on the job they did only those things they were supposed to do and forgot nothing. The areas of the Little Wheel vital to the welfare of the men within -- and what wasn't? -- were kept in show-room condition, more immaculate and in better repair than the men who tended them. The power room, supplied by solar radiation focused on a mercury boiler by a troughlike solar mirror, was spotless. The air-conditioning system, which extracted moisture and carbon dioxide from the air, fed in fresh oxygen, and maintained pressure throughout the satellite, was tended as solicitously as a baby. The pump room gleamed, and the water recovery plant gurgled contentedly at its job of making wastes potable. servation. The screens were alive, but the telescope had been allowed to drift oflf-center. The view of the area beneath the Wheel was blurred and meaningless. There was only one crewman on duty, and he was asleep in a chair near the bulkhead that separated Earth-observation from what had once been the weather room and was now sleeping quarters for thirty-two men. by one shoulder and shook him awake. As soon as the man's eyes and rank!" Dazedly the man sprang to his feet. "Spaceman First Class Miguel Delgado, s-sir!" he stammered. jerked his shoulder free and settled back into his chair. "Oh, it's the witch doctor," he said insolently. "Are you on duty here?" "Yes, Captain." "Just you?" "You don't see nobody else, do you?" "Do you know the penalty for falling asleep on watch?" "Whatever the Colonel says." "The Colonel has nothing to do with this. The penalty is automatic : courtmartial, followed by whatever the court decides is appropriate, up to and including death." "The Colonel will say," Delgado repeated stubbornly. "Whatever the Colonel says is right." "Your loyalty to Colonel Danton is admirable. It's too bad it isn't matched by an equal loyalty to your country and the Air Force." "What's the use making a big fuss over a little nap?" Delgado shrugged. ,"It ain't like it was important." "There's nothing more important. What if you didn't see a missile base below because of your little nap? By this time those missiles could be over Washington or your own home town." Delgado looked amazed. "Who'd want to do anything like that?" missile-control officer?" "The who?" "The missile-control officer. According to your table of organization, he's in charge of Earth observation." Delgado shook his head stupidly. "Never heard of him. You better ask the Colonel." away, trying not to see Delgado's smothered yawn. It was time to see Danton. go. Beyond the next door was the little-used celestial-observation room. Sitting motionless in front of one of the magnifying screens was Danton. behind him. "Colonel!" he said sharply. Not looking away from the screen, Danton gestured for silence. "Shhhh!" ward him. "Amos! This is important!" He glanced at the screen. On it was a vivid enlargement of a quadrant of Mars, rosy and sharp, the long-disputed canals clearly delineated. "Oh, it's you, Lloyd," Danton said casually. He swung around in his chair. "What can I de for you?" question is: What can I do for you?" "Okay," Danton said agreeably. "What can you do for me?" "I can report a disrespect for authority in your command, a deteriorating morale situation, and a possible disaster in the making." "Well, now," Danton said lazily, his eyelid jerking, "I guess that's not new. There never has been much respect for authority on the Little Wheel. Out here a uniform and an insignia aren't enough; a man must earn respect on his own. The morale has always been deteriorating. And there's always a disaster in the making. Anything else?" "I just found a crewman asleep ton closely. The reaction, for once, was appropriate. Danton came out of the chair in one fluid movement. "Where?" "Earth-observation." Danton sank down again. "Oh! That's too bad." "Is that all you can say -- it's too bad?" "Who was it?" "Miguel Delgado -- a resentful, unstable personality who should never have been given such responsibility in the first place." "Well, Lloyd, we have to use what we've got. I don't think we should be too hard on him. He's just put in eight hours at hard labor on construction work outside, and he's got a six-hour stretch in a boring, unimportant job -- " "Unimportant?" "Unimportant to him." Force I belong to enlisted men aren't judges of the importance of their jobs." "I suppose he knows it's unimportant to me, too." under the white stubble. It was a wished he could get behind it, wished he could get Danton into his cabin with the recorder underneath the table and the Rorschach clay on top, wished he could be certain that Danton was as paranoid as he seemed. The martinet approach hadn't worked. He would have to proceed on the assumption of paranoia. "I don't understand you, Amos. Out here you're got the toughest job a colonel could hold in the Air Force, maybe the most responsible job anywhere, and you don't seem impressed at all." Danton said dryly, "Maybe my values are a little different." "The only possible conclusion is that twelve years out here without rest or leave has affected your judgment." Danton started to speak hurried to fire the thunderbolt he had been saving for this moment. "You needn't be surprised that I know about the standing orders General Pickrell left in your file. But you should know this: those orders have been torn up. You can go home whenever you wish." For a moment Danton stared started to laugh. The laughter was not insane; it was not even hysterical. It was the laughter of a man who has just heard something indescribably funny. F inally danton wiped the tears from his eyes and asked weakly, "You think you can buy me, do you? You think for a few lousy weeks on Earth you can get my help to break up the Little Wheel?" but Danton's hand was raised. "I listened to you; now you listen to me. Sure the Fish -- I beg your pardon -- General Pickrell put those orders in my file, and for a good reason, a reason I may tell you some day. Later it became our own personal joke. But he never offered to remove them, and I never asked him to. Why should I want to go home? My mother died two years after I came out -- yes, Lloyd, I came from a broken home -- and there's nothing left there I'm interested enough to cross the Wheel for. Go home. Captain? I am home." "And for that reason, Amos, you aren't a good risk." "Explorers have never been good risks." "I'm not talking about insurance risks; I'm talking about the risk to Earth." Danton grinned. "Don't go on! I can repeat everything Sackcloth told you. God knows he's sent it to me often enough: 'Under no conditions will you initiate independent action, no matter what the provocation or the state of communications. You will wait for orders from superior authority. I don't need to tell you, Captain, that I am not satisfied with a situation that includes the possibility of ultimate decision by man qualified for it neither by character nor by training.' " Danton's voice dropped. He stared blindly at the lighted screen in front of him. "Ashley has a nasty way of projecting his own desires and character into his mental concept of his subordinates. Who does he think is going to fire a missile without orders from Inside, and confirmation of those orders, and reconfirmation?" "A neurotic man might. Anyone out here might crack under the strain of sitting with his finger eternally on the trigger. Even you, Amos -- as certain as you are that space is your home -- you might crack. And you have the power here to make yourself the dictator or the destroyer of the world." That seemed to cheer Danton up. "Dictator, perhaps -- but for how long? There are neuroses and neuroses, Lloyd; some are dangerous, and some are functional. A fear of heights, now, has kept a lot of people from taking the long plunge. I happen to think that our kind of neurosis is only dangerous when it is penned up." tunately, you aren't a trained psychologist. My own opinion is that the Little Wheel is dangerously close to instability. You take great pains to make every part of the Wheel balance with the part diametrically opposite. It's even more important that the men inside, who must make the decisions, are carefully balanced. "In a command distinguished by slovenly watch procedures, insolence, and disrespect for authority, you have managed to inspire great personal loyalty among your men. Perhaps you can keep them under control. But I ask you to consider thisr what would happen if you were killed or suddenly recalled?" ley's haunted eyes as he had muttered, "What if he refused to come?" men are nervous, irritable, and unstable. The Wheel is a powder keg waiting for a spark." Danton turned his head to look but his flecked eyes hard. "Nervous, sure ; irritable, maybe ; but unstable, unh-unh! A force released is always stable. It's only a force contain that is unstable, and only that force will explode. "Sure we're nervous, but we've got a right to be. We're prey to a dozen hazards men Inside never know. We're eternally conscious of our environment, because we have to bring it all with us. We live in a hollow world two hundred and fifty feet across; its walls are not much more than an inch thick, and most of that is air. We face imminent death from such exotic causes as sunburn, meteoric missiles, asphyxiation, and radiation poisoning. "If I don't die violently, Lloyd, I wpn't live to be sixty years old. To me it doesn't matter. I wouldn't be anywhere else for a lifetime twice as long. This nervousness you speak of -- I call it awareness of danger, and as long as we stay nervous, we'll stay alive, most of us. "They don't need to be afraid of us, Inside. We're trying too hard to stay alive ourselves." The timing was perfect. Too perthe alarm went off with a clamor of bells and a blinking of overhead lights. stared with startled eyes at the toothin walls. By the time he had released his breath, instinctively caught in his lungs, and assured himself that the walls separating him from vacuum and death were still imperforate, Danton was at the wall phone. "Where is it?" he snapped. "Okay, ril be there in two seconds. Get the air pressure up, and release the marker." Danton had the door open and moved. The next few minutes for fusion that somehow achieved swift results. The automatic doors of the airtesting lab were closed. The walls within had been pierced by a meteor which had burst through the bumper that stopped # percent of those hitting the Wheel. Emergency air blowers were building up air pressure inside the room to give the men within time to adjust emergency oxygen helmets, locate the holes by means of the harmless colored gas that had been released into the section, and plug them. But something had gone wrong. "What's the delay?" Danton demanded. From a cluster of men performing incomprehensible jobs outside the airtight door, a sweaty face ant Chapman, the air-control officer. "I don't know. They should be out by now. I can't raise anybody. Fred's in there and young Grant. All I can pick up is a low moaning noise. Somebody's alive. I've got two men outside trying to plug the leaks from there. Until then wc can't open the door. Hold on!" He turned to the crewman beside powder keg him who had a self-powered 'handset to his ear. "Air pressure is climbing. Yes, here comes the report now. The leak is plugged. It'll be a couple of minutes." "Leak?" Danton said softly. Chapman looked at him and said, "Yes, sir. One." The minutes passed leadenly. "Okay," Chapman said. "Open it up." The door came open. Red fog it gingerly, but it was odorless. Within seconds two men were brought into the room, one bareheaded and limp in the arms of a rescuer who carried his one-third normal Earth weight without effort, the other helmeted and stumbling. Danton said impatiently, "Well, what are you waiting for?" frowning at him. "You're an M.D. Take care of that man." He pointed to the unconscious man who had been laid gently on the floor. "The other one's in shock," Phillips objected. "He needs help, too." Danton said grimly, "He'll live. Not that I care much. But Fred is tated, Danton shoved him roughly toward the man on the floor. "Get busy, damn it!" Danton, the emotion gone from his voice, said, "You don't understand, hit and the air began whooshing out. Grant forgot everything he ever learned. He froze. Fred wasted precious seconds getting a helmet onto him. By that time it was too late to get into his own." met had been stripped from his head. His young face was no longer animated and open. His nose had bled down over his upper lip and chin. His eyes were wide and unseeing; his lips moved but no sound came out. only normal man on the Wheel, and in shock," he snapped. "Spacemen don't go into shock. We can't afford to. All our lives depend upon the ability of each one of us to be able to act swiftly and correctly in an emergency when other men might go into shock. If men can't do it -- every time -- they don't belong out here." "What are you doing?" Danton demanded roughly. ton's hand slapped viciously against Grant's cheek. The boy's head jerked, but his eyes remained blank as the cheek slowly reddened. Danton screamed, "You dirty spy!" Grant, Danton swung around to stopped. In a moment Danton's breathing had slowed. He said, almost calmly, to Chapman, "Take him to first aid. When he comes around, tell him to get his personal belongings together. He's through." "He needs immediate attention," "Serum and -- " "He'll get them. Come with me." Danton's square back to weight control and down the spoke of the shoved open the door as if it were his own. He went in and put his back against the covered viewport. closed the door, Danton said casually, "You think I was hard on the kid." under the table and turned on the recorder. "You make hard rules." "This is a hard place; we have to be hard to stay out here. I'm not blaming the kid for being foolish. I was a young, foolish kid, too, and I almost got sent in for it. The reason he's going in is that he didn't do the right thing instinctively: he held his breath instead of releasing it -- you saw his nosebleed. The expansion of gases in his lungs did that ; it could as easily have been his lungs that hemorrhaged. I'm blaming him for not getting into his emergency helmet. I'm blaming a man we couldn't afford to lose." "You shouldn't have hit him." "Did I hit him?" Danton said, surprised. He must have read the I did that." "And calling him a spy?" "That, too, eh? I shouldn't have done that, either." Danton grinned but there was no mirth in it. "I don't know why I'm arguing with you about sending a boy in. You're the one who wants to send us all in." "Not me. General Ashley." "Oh, yes. General Ashley. We're going to have a time with him." Danton took a pace forward and absently picked up the blob of clay from the table. "We've read your papers up here with a lot of interest." "You get the psychological journals?" "Microfilms of things that interest us. A lot of us would like to know why we had to come out. But you haven't found the answer with your inquiries into broken homes and insecurity and neuroses." "What makes you so certain?" "Too easy. Men aren't that simple. It's like Neanderthal noticing a rainbow every time it rains and deciding that the rain makes the rainbow. The rain is part of it, but the sun is more important. It provides the energy. You can't reduce all the impulses to be different -- the adventurousness, the criminality, the greatness -- into cause and effect. After all the causes are fractionated off, you will still have an indefinable something that makes Man a man -- a questioning, seeking animal." "You can't argue away the fact that you are children playing explorer, too immature to tackle the everyday problems of life inside." Danton didn't take the bait. He grinned. This time he almost meant it. "Is that how we look to you? Well, maybe we are. But it would be a sad commentary on the human race if all its progress had to be traced to the children of the race who ran away and found something new and wonderful beyond the hill. "Did you ever ask yourself, Lloyd, why General Ashley picked you to do his field work -- a capable officer we will quickly agree, but certainly a minor Air Force captain." "I'm a young man. My adjustment rating is good." "Could it be," Danton asked gently, "that he was sure, beforehand, what kind of a report you would bring back, that he knew your reputation and your convictions -- ?" Danton let the question die in shrugged and said, "It doesn't matter. I'm going back on the next shuttle. I've got everything I need. And I'm going back with the same report any competent psychologist would make." He looked defiantly at Danton. Danton chuckled. "Don't worry. We won't stop you. We could, but we won't. Sackcloth would just send up somebody else, and he might not be as easy to get along with. What are you going to tell Ashley?" ment. The question of paranoia was settled. What he had to decide was whether he had enough evidence or whether he could take the risk of pushing Danton to the cracking point. He took the risk. "The Big Wheel has taken over all your nonmilitary functions: weather observation, scientific research, radio relay -- " "And is making money at it." "If the Little Wheel has no other function than observation and missteadily, "it has no reason for being. It can't do these things satisfactorily, and the very existence of the functions is a constant temptation to fulfill them. I can't guarantee the soundness of the men out here." "Whose soundness can you guarantee?" Dan ton asked, letting his weariness show through. "You've seen General Ashley, and you've seen me. Whose finger would you rather have on the firing button?" "The people chose General Ashley." Danton's eyelid jerked. "What people? The only person who chose General Ashley was General Ashley." was chosen through the proper functioning of a democratic government. Nobody can be permitted to substitute his personal preferences or his own decisions." "Even when 'the people's choice' is obviously a megalomaniac afflicted with agoraphobia?" Danton hesitated; when he spoke again his voice was apologetic. "That was unfair. I brought it up only to prove that you would trust General Ashley out here -- even if he could endure it -- even less than you trust me. Ashley sent you out with a question that had only one answer: no one can be trusted." "Well? Isn't that a good reason for bringing you in?" "If that were our only purpose out here, and we really could serve that purpose as everyone believes -- yes, certainly. But it wouldn't do any good, because there's ten times the firepK)wer stored Inside, waiting for a nervous finger to unleash it." Danton looked straight into Phillips' face, his eyelid twitching. "You know the real reason Ashley doesn't want us up here. He's not afraid that we'll shoot without orders. He's afraid that he'll tell us to fire and we won't obey." How much of Danton s argument was truth, how much casuistry? membered "What if he refused to come?" and thought: Yes, Ashley was worried about that. That put a new and revealing light on Ashley, but it didn't change the basic premises of the situation: there were still men up here who could destroy the world if they weren't more than men can be expected to be. The knock at the door was like punctuation for his thoughts. When Danton opened it. Chapman was there, tossing a slim length of tubing in his hand. "Got it, eh?" Danton said, without surprise. "Still reeks of gunpowder." "No one tried to sneak it away?" Chapman shook his head. "Can't figure it." Chapman to Danton. "What are you trying to say? That the lab wall was pierced by a bullet instead of a meteor?" Danton shrugged impatiently. "Of course. A meteor that size would have gone clear through. Two holes. The missile had to come from inside. And where does that knock your theories, Mr. Freud?" supports my belief that the men up here are unstable -- unstable enough to attempt murder -- or suicide." Dan ton said mildly, "You think a spaceman did that? Unh-unh. We have too great and natural a respect for meteors to create artificial ones. Besides, where would an unstable spaceman get a bullet? No. This was sabotage." "Whose?" "You figure it out. We've fought it before -- for almost six months, as a matter of fact." Danton looked at eyes. "As a matter of fact. Captain, you were the last one out." There was a moment of awkward, incredulous, and Danton's suspicions filled the room. The flat, tinny voice of the wall speaker was loud: "All hands to emergency stations. The taxis are loose. Drifting. All hands -- " Danton's expression changed instantly. "Maybe I'm wrong." A wry smile twisted his lips. "Here, Captain, here's your Rorschach blob." He put the clay gently on the table and was gone. through which Danton had vanished. Did Danton seriously suspect him? Or was it only his paranoia peeping through? There were no grounds -- But there were. The tub smelling of freshly exploded gunpowder. If it did smell of gunpowder, and if it was found in the air-testing lab, and if it had not been planted there by Danton himself. The thought had occurred to him when it happened that the timing was perfect. But that would imply an acting ability far beyond the self-limitations of paranoia. If Danton had planted the tube, he was not paranoid. If he had not, then someone was trying to sabotage the Wheel. have realized before, that the whole case against the Wheel rested or fell on the sanity of the commanding officer. He looked down at the table and froze. The clay that Danton had put there was no longer a blob. It was a figure, the figure of a child standing sturdily on his feet, looking up. Deftly, as he had talked, Danton's fingers had worked, shaping, creating -- a work of art. As such it should be judged, not in psychological terms. With a few skillful touches Danton had created what he had been describing -- the child who ran away and found something new and wonderful beyond the hill. But there was more than that -- there was the concept of greatness here and the questing... his own terms, and there was where his distress was greatest. Because in this figure was understanding and compassion and belief in mankind -- and not a trace of paranoia. That meant -- it could only mean -- that Danton was surrounded by spies. He had a right to be suspicious. His neurosis was functional. The difficulty was -- Danton knew too much. What was it he had said as he left? Here, Captain, here's your Rorschach blob. But that would imply that Danton knew himself so well, and his psychology so well, and was so consummate an artist, that he could create -- this! whirled. Nausea churned his stomach like a touch of spacesickness. Deliberately he picked up the figure and squeezed it back into shapelessness. Only moments later did he recall why Danton had hurried away. The taxis were loose. Drifting. And if the taxis were gone, he was marooned. the doorway. the spoke to the Hub. It was empty. C#nly two spacesuits were hanging from their supports. He struggled into one that was too large. He squeezed through an airlock and then, carefully snapping the hook of his safety line to a ring just beyond the cagelike entrance, slipped outside. He floated slowly out from the Hub, spinning in the black immensity of night, the pinpoint holes of the stars making streaks past his eyes like a poor astronomical plate. VVith a short tug on his line, working with an instinct he had never spin. He saw one -- a plump sausage with a plastic window -- floating gently away from the gleaming rim of the wheel. Gently -- and yet the taxi diminished with alarming swiftness. Then he saw another and another. All drifting away. As far as he could see, there were none left tied to the wheel. There should have been chaos here, with suited men pouring out of the Wheel without plan or precedent for an emergency whose scope was a crazy kind of order in the silence. Men were snapping their safety lines to each other's suits instead of the Wheel. One man, in the lead, was clambering with incredible speed along the spoke until he reached the rim. Then he jumped, his bent legs tlirusting him away from the satellite spinning beneath, his safety line trailing behind. As that line almost reached its limit, the man to whom it was attached jumped after him. One after another they jumped, forming a living chain of spacesuited men linked together by almost invisible strands of cord, working together as a unit with the social instinct of army ants, reaching toward the stars, throwing a thin bridge across the impassable river of space. FlamCi spurted from the suit at the head of the chain. It curved slowly toward the nearest taxi. of a major symbol. Men would die, but others would take their place, and one day men would cross over the bridge their comrades' courage and sacrifice had made, and reach the stars. The taxi was still receding swiftthan the chain that reached toward it. Would the chain be long enough? He caught a ring on the spoke of the Wheel and swung himself out toward the rim. Suddenly he was stopped. Something had caught him from behind. He swung his head around inside the helmet to look back. I here was a spacesuited man behind him, the hook in his sleeve-ending caught somewhere in vision. With the hook in his other sleeve, the man held himself to a ring on the Hub. Easily he pulled The helmet viewplates were dark to keep out ultraviolet. Then he recognized a faded eagle on the chest of the suit. His helmet bumped gently against the other helmet. Transmitted through that contact came the metallic voice, "Where do you think you're going?" It was Danton. "It may not be long enough." Danton did not have to ask what he meant. "If it isn't, you can't help. That takes teamwork. Something you have to learn. Something you have to live. When everybody's life depends on the actions of everyone else, that comes easily." The implication was clear: he wasn't a part of the team, not even a player on anyone's team. "But it's serious -- " "Of course it is. If they don't reach that taxi, we're stuck. We can't get supplies over from the shuttles. We can't finish our -- work." "Until they send out replacements?" Even through the helmets. Danton's voice was ironic. "And that's something Ashley can veto." "You think this is Ashley's -- ?" "That's for you to decide." trying to struggle free. "How much help would you be?" away a little to see his safety line still clipped to a ring on the Hub. Then he pulled him back. "You'd just get in their way. They'll get it." The two of them, clasped together like misshapen and amorous starfish, had floated around until the lengthening chain had drifted back into view. The first suit, its rocket jets blazing in brief spurts, was farther ahead of the second link than it should have been. It ized. It was heading out, alone, into the black, bottomless river. But it was catching up. It reached out a stubby arm toward the taxi. And missed! No, it had caught a hold. The suit and the taxi drew together, became one... dered: Who had cut the taxis loose? And why? And what had he been doing while everyone was outside. Suddenly he knew the answer to all of them. He turned, but Danton was gone. before the taxi had been caught. asked himself. And he had to answer, Yes. How much farther would he go to destroy the Little Wheel? The answer to that was: as far as he had to go. Hub. As he slipped through the cage, he saw the captured taxi blasting toward another sausageshape against the black-velvet curtain of night. Around the edge of the Wheel, like a giant moon, came that enigmatic circle of mirrorlike metal. Descending on the other side of the Wheel was that flimsy, impossible contraption of rocket motors and spherical tanks. tracted himself from his suit. Danlowed, calling, "Danton! Amos!" The words echoed in the empty Wheel. There was no answer. The weight-control room was deserted. So was the first-aid room, the pump back through weight control and into celestial observation. Danton was sitting in a chair staring calmly at the closed air-tight door that separated him from Earth-observation. "You'd better come out. Grant," Danton said gently. "You'll get hurt in there." He was talking into a wall speaker. From the speaker came a burst of hysterical laughter. "You're the ones who'll get hurt. Colonel, you and those stupid animals Inside." It nized. "The missiles are set and armed. Colonel, and I've got my finger on the firing button. Try to get me out and blooey! there goes the world! And blooey! there goes the Wheel!" known it logically, he still found it hard to believe. "But he was in shock!" had slapped off the speaker. "So we thought," he said, turning slowly toward the psychologist. "Evidently we were wrong. The cutting away of the taxis was a diversion. If it succeeded, fine. If not, it still gave Grant time to take over Earth-observation." "What's he going to do?" Danton shrugged. "You heard him." "He's insane!" "You're the authority on that." "Can't we sneak in on him another way?" "Before he can hit that button? Not a chance, even if he didn't have the other door locked, And even a madman would do that." "Haven't you got gas? Can't you knock him out?" "Before he realizes what's happening?" Danton shook his head impatiently. "We can't stock items up here unless we have a probable use for them." straw. "Someone cracked! It was what Ashley was afraid of!" "Was it?" Danton asked, smiling gently. His eyes drifted back across the wide, flat photographic projection screen where Mars still glowed redly, to the sealed door. said quickly. "In his condition, if he's alone too long he'll work up his courage to press the button." "You're the psychologist. You talk him out." took half a step backward. "Who's your missile-control officer? He should know how to cut the firing circuit, disarm the missiles..." "We had one once, but he got transferred five years ago. We never replaced him." "He's in your TO -- " "We've got no use for a missilecontrol officer. Look!" Danton swung around in the chair. It squealed a complaint. He punched a button beside the viewport. The outside cover swung away, letting in the night. "See that?" The great circle of shiny metal slid past the window. "That's an anti-missile screen," Danton said somberly, "and it's worthless. It's set squarely ahead of us in our orbit, sweeping space. But the first thing an aggressor would do would be to send up a missile without a warhead of weak gunpowder and fine lead particles. When it reached our orbit -- going in the opposite direction -- it would explode and leave in our missiles. Every hour we would run into that cloud. The first time the anti-missile screen would intercept them, maybe even the second, but then it would look like a cheese grater. After that, we would be the cheese grater." "You could strike back -- " "How? Even if we spotted the missile taking off and knew where it came from, it would take us hours to get a missile into the atmosphere without burning up. No, Lloyd, in a new war, we'd be the first casualties. This is a powder keg, all right, and we're sitting on it. We know it. We live with it every minute of every waking hour. But the fuse is down below, and the only way you can save this powder keg is to go in and stamp on it. Or make sure it is never lit." "Then there's no reason at all for the existence of the Little Wheel! The Big Wheel has taken over all your other functions: weather observation, television relay, research... All that's left is military observation and missile guidance. You ignore the first and can't fulfill the second. Your presence here is a constant temptation to resolve your problems by destroying their source." "And thereby destroy ourselves. We aren't that stupid. We can't exist independently of Earth -- not yet." "Decisions aren't always logical. Not even usually. Grant is your best example. Give me that speaker!" Danton said softly, "I think maybe he has his reasons." He hit the speaker switch. "But go ahead." "What do you want, headshrinker?" "Listen to me. Grant. Don't press that button! You don't have to. I'll guarantee that the Wheel is destroyed." silence in the little room where the red image of Mars glowed from aware of the Little Wheel's odor, a compound of oil and human sweat, like a machine shop inside the steam of it all was the acrid odor of fear. collecting on his forehead and trickling into his eyebrows. Danton was loolang at him. Phillips turned his head to meet Danton's half-tolerant contempt with cold eyes. Grant's breathing came harshly through the speaker. "Don't make me laugh, headshrinker. Nobody's gonna trick me. When I get ready, I'm gonna push this button. Nobody can stop me." "Listen to me! General Ashley sent me up here to make a report to him, and the report I'm going to make. Grant, will blast the Wheel right out of the sky. If you push that button, the world will die. Grant, and you'll die, too. You don't want that. You don't have to die. Grant. The Wheel is finished." "Even if you were telling the Danton would stop you somehow. He's too tricky. He'd find a way out. But he can't stop me from pushing this button!" sake. Grant -- " "No use, headshrinker. I think you're lying. Because Ashley sent me up to do this job, and I'm gonna do it. Tf you can't do it any other way,' he said, 'send down a missile. That'll be the end of the Wheel.' I'm really gonna do him a job." Grant laughed insanely. "I'm gonna send 'em all down." gone." Danton leaned toward the speaker. "It's no use pushing the button," he said quietly. "There aren't any missiles." He switched off the speaker and leaned back in his chair. do any good. He'll push it just to make sure." "To men who have made up their minds the truth is never any good." "What do you mean -- the truth?" "There aren't any missiles. Earth is in no danger from us. Too bad we can't tell them that. But we can't. And therefore we must live in constant expectation of a moment of madness Inside that will send up a missile to destroy a threat that doesn't exist." head incredulously. Droplets of sweat flew from his face. "What happened to them? You had them!" "Oh, we had them. But, as Ashley feared, their existence was a constant temptation. So we used them for a better purpose." "What are you talking about? What better purpose?" "In a moment." Danton looked through the viewport at the stars wheeling past, steady, many-colored, and available. "You talk of powder kegs. I'll tell you something about powder. It's only dangerous when it's imprisoned. Spread it out in the open air, set it off, and it makes a fizzling sound and a bright light. Look, there's Earth!" It roin reflected sunshine, an incredible jewel set against the velvet of the night. "That's your powder eg, masses of humanity penned up in unyielding containers, more people every minute. If you don't give them some outlet, an explosion is inevitable. Anything might set it off: an unguarded fire, an accidental spark, spontaneous combustion... "And you're the outlet?" "S)TTibolically. Oh, there's no practical way of relieving population pressures except by birth control. We can't export our excess millions to the planets or the stars. But we can give them a vent for their excess energies, for their frustrated aggressions, for their unused dreams. The existence of a frontier is enough ; everyone doesn't have to go there." Danton paused, his eyes fixed on the viewport, for a moment the tic in his eyelid stilled. "Look there! Now!" The ungainly contraption of rocket motors and spherical tanks floated past. "There's our outlet. There's where the missiles have gone: their motors are units for that ship, their warheads have been converted into atomic powerplants. They were designed with that purpose in mind." about coers every ofl'ensc in the code: disobedience, insubordination, dereliction of duty, misappropriation of material, mutiny..." Danton dismissed them with a wave of his hand. "Words. They aren't important. Survival is important. And that ship is the key to survival." "Where are you going in that thing?" ward the photographic enlargement on the projection screen. "Mars." ened face. Madman or prophet? Traitor or something greater than patriot? He had to decide, and soon. He looked back at the viewport, but the flimsy structure was gone. "In that?" "The Vikings crossed the Atlantic in their tiny dragon ships." "How are you going to get away with it?" "We were going to wait until we could announce a successful trip, but it's too late for that. Ashley is getting desperate ; next time he might not fail. We might not be here when the ship returned. Instead we'll release the news that the ship will start soon." Danton grinned unexpectedly. "Then let Ashley deny it if he dares." "He'll never rest until he drags down the Wheel." "Let him try that, too, when the world knows what we're going to do. I'hat's our hole card, the aroused dreams of the world's billions. Go on back, Lloyd. Tell them we're all neurotic, all crackpots, and we'll tell them they're in no danger from us. We've beaten our swords into dreams. We'll show them the Wheel, and we'll show them the Mars ship, and we'll invite them, vicariously, on the first trip to another world. They'll come. They can't refuse. They're men like us; they're dreamers." "Out here isn't far enough," Phillips said softly. "You're running farther away." "Gall it 'running' if you like. Another man may call it conquest or adventure. Words. What makes a man run doesn't matter; it's where he runs and what he does when he gets there and what his running means. What makes you run, Lloyd?" stiffened. "You've been analyzed. What drove you to be a psychologist? What made you enlist in the Air Force? What forced you to investigate the submerged motives of spacemen? What was it: a broken home, an overprotective mother, a disinterested father? What complex was it? Give it a name!" veins. He cant know. He's guessing --  "Give it a name," Danton continued without pausing, "and I won't give a damn. What matters to me is that you're good spaceman material gone to waste. You're one of the rare ones, one of those first air breathers, and you won't climb out upon the land because there's something left out of you. That's a pity. We need men like you. You could help us put it over -- this little thing with Ashley and the big victory over Mars and the fantastic distance that lies between." "We could use your knowledge of psychology to help pick the men who could make the trip and stay sane and come back to report their success to us and the world. You could help us phrase our releases to the imaginations of men, releases that will open their hearts and shape their dreams. You wouldn't have to go back; I could declare you essential and keep you here until Sackcloth or I died of old age." "Help you do what? Defraud the people as you have defrauded their government and their defenses?" "The exploration of the unknown is always a fraud," Danton said, his eyes distant, remembering. "Because we can't know, by definition, what we are going to find, we can't have the right reasons for finding it or even for going where we can find it. And the reasons we give ourselves will always be the wrong reasons, because the only real reason is that there's something unknown to be discovered. "Fraud," Danton repeated, his eyelid jerking again. "I'll tell you about fraud. When I came out my eyes were filled with visions and my head was swimming with dreams. And I found out that the visions were false, and the dreams were the wrong ones. "That was when I ran. I ran to the S.#. You know what it is -- the ship in the same orbit as the Little Wheel, one hundred miles ahead, in which Rev. McMillen first conquered space, in which he died because he couldn't get back. "Do you know what I found? A hollow shell. No one was ever inside. It wasn't built for a passenger. They couldn't build one to carry a man -- not with the funds they had -- and Bo Finch and Pickrell and a few others perpetrated a fraud on the people so that space could be conquered. And it was conquered -- for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. "The visions were wrong. Men never find what they are seeking. That's what keeps them seeking. Men will never find out here what they're looking for -- not peace or wealth or the thrill of final conquest. "I learned then, as every man must learn if he is to become a man, that he must be stronger than his dreams, that he must be able to watch them shatter and go on. Call it childish. Call it what you will." Danton's voice dropped wearily. Now he looked like an old man instead of a man this side of forty with prematurely white hair. "The fact remains that it is the soul of man and his salvation. He is a dream-maker, and the latest dream is the best, no matter how many have been shattered before. Inside if you wish and tell them what I have told you, all of it. And I will lie and call you a liar, and the lies won't matter, just as the shattered dreams don't matter. "The people will believe me, because I am a dreamer, and they understand dreams. This is the latest dream in the oldest dream of all -- the conquest of man's environment, the universe. "And that dream is invincible." tion opened. Grant stumbled through the doorway. His face was blank. His eyes stared, but they saw nothing. "I pushed it," he said tonelessly. "I pushed it and nothing happened." Danton had stood up as the door opened. Grant walked right into him. At the contact he collapsed. He hid his face against Danton's chest. A sob broke from his throat. Danton patted the boy's shoulder. "That's all right. It's all right. The truth is hard to find, and when you find it, it always hurts. I know. I found it." he said gently, "it isn't the neurotic men out here you have to be afraid of, not the men who had to come out. The dangerous ones are the men who come out for something else, for money or for glory." moment and then turned his eyes away, turned them to the open viewport and the stars. They were too bright, but they were not as bright as Danton. Danton was right. he had first known it. Perhaps it had been just a few minutes ago as he had pleaded with Grant, not a spaceman but a displanted Earthman, to spare the Earth. Perhaps it had been earlier as he watched the spacemen building a bridge toward the stars and he had moved to help. Perhaps it had been when he had seen the compassion and understanding in the Rorschach blob. But he thought it was much earlier, when he had realized that he himself was a spaceman, one of the air breathers who had crawled out upon the land and found the experience so satisfying that he could never go back to the mother sea. If a man is lucky he has one such time in his life when he knows himself. But it meant that his entire concept of the human animal had to change. The basic quality of life is movemerit. An immobile animal is a dead animal. Carnivore and prey know (Continued on page #) What is a Man?... A parado.x indeed -- the world's finest minds gathered to defend a punk killer... Illustrated by ViroU Finlay E watched Jake Emspak walk slowly toward the prospective juror. Around the Earth, and above it, too, from South Africa and Franz Joseph Land to the satellite stations adrift through the black morning, focussed on the gaunt figure that I  C T I T Y moved so deliberately across the Lr I  I I I I television screen. In the glass-fronted TV booth, where the #-year-old Edward R. Murrow had created something of a stir by his unexpected appearance a few moments earlier, newsmen stopped talking to let the viewers see and hear for themselves what was happening. Jake halted in front of the witness stand, both hands cupped over the gold head of the cane that had been his trademark, in and out of court, for most of a half century. The shaggy mane of white hair, once as black as the coal in the West Virginia mining country of his birth, stood out like an incongruous halo above the bone ridges of his face. The jutting nose, the forward hunch of his body accentuated the impression he always gave of being about to leap on a nervous witness. The magnificent voice, which could thunder, rasp, weep and persuade in all the registers of eloquence, now phrased his first question with disconcerting softness: "What is a man?" The prospective juror, a Bronx appliance distributor with sagging jowls and perpetual tension lines around his mouth, started visibly. "I -- I beg your pardon?" Again Jake Emspak gently phrased his question: "What is a man?" The distributor, who could wake up out of a sound sleep and addins a sales meeting of unhappy dealers, opened his mouth and closed it again. Jake waited patiently, rocking a little on the point of his cane. Finally, the distributor said: "I can't answer that -- right off... ," "Thank you," Jake said mildly. He turned to Judge Hayward and nodded his acceptance of the juror. Up in the TV booth, Murrow smiled to liimself and listened to his colleagues chew over the familiar questions: Why had Jake Emspak, taken a cheap case like this away from the Public Defender? Who would possibly pay him enough to defend a punk like Tony Corio -- a bungling hoodlum who had killed two bystanders in a miserable attempt to rob a bank? TTie Judge noted acceptance of the juror, then brusquely recessed court until # a.m. Monday. The timing was excellent. Jake smiled with satisfaction, and his smile was like the slash of a paring knife across the skin of a dried apple. He walked with Tony Corfino and the bailiff as far as the prisoner's gate. "Don't worry," Jake said. Tony's eyes were wide and bewildered, like the eyes of a confused child -- or of an old man not quite certain ' whether he is awake or dreaming. "I ain't worried," Tony replied. As he walked, there was the crackling sound of a bone twisting in a stiff joint. From under his shaggy brows, Jake studied him carefully, and was content with what he saw. Tony could have been very young, or very old. Undoubtedly he was both, with a lot of in-between, Jake thought suddenly. The tangle of black, curly hair was the hair of youth. The cameo-smooth skin had the waxed perfection of an expensive doll. But the mouth and lips were still puffy, sensuous. And the eyes -- Jake Emspak, for all his knowing, couldn't be sure about the eyes. Silently, he addressed a memo to himself : Check on the eyes. At the prisoners' gate, Tony faced him. "I ain't worried," he repeated. "It's just -- well, I don't see why you're takin' my case -- I can't pay anythin'..." The thin smile slashed again across the wrinkled harshness of Jake's face. "I'll be paid," he chuckled drily. The District Attorney brought up the same question when Jake sat in his office two hours later. They had been studying each other across the desk, thinking of all the years that were gone, the good years dying with the new quarter of the century. How many times had he sat here just like this, Jake wondered. How often had he come into this office to bargain and to deal, to cajole and plead -- and always hovering like a hawk to pounce on any bit of information that could fit his case. Now the D.A. was old, too. Older than Jake, if you measured a man's life by the inverse proportion of his distance from the grave. Even the limitless possibilities of medical science had about reached their limit with the D.A. He was heavier than Jake, and his skin was smoother, yet somehow it looked much older. "I don't get it," he wheezed, with the shortness of breath that the latest bronchial replacement had not substantially relieved. "I just can't see Jake Emspak taking a case without a fee! Why, in the old days, you wouldn't defend your mother without a cashier's check in advance!" Jake accepted the taunt without blinking. "I'm touched by this solicitude for my fees," he retorted. "Tony Corfino's guilty," said the D.A., moving up another pawn in the never-ending chess game between them. "He's a punk, and he's guilty. You know that, don't you, Jake?" "Do I?" "You know it -- and damn well! I've got six witnesses who saw Tony walk into the bank with that sawedoff shotgun! I've got four more who saw him get panicky and start spraying lead! And there are a dozen others who helped load him on a stretcher after his getaway car went over the curve on the Parkway!... Hell, Jake, this is a twobit case. Why are you taking it away from the Public Defender?" "Now, Emmett," Jake mocked, "you know it's not ethical for me to discuss my client's case." "To hell with your client!" The D.A. breathed deeply for a moment, then pressed ahead: "I don't care about that punk -- I'm talking about you, Jake. What's this case mean to you?" The chuckle started again, then died in Jake's throat. "It means a lot, Emmett," he answered soberly. "For one thing, it's mv last case..." "What?" The D.A. looked stunned. Jake nodded. "I've been around the circle enough times for any man, Emmett." Both of them absorbed this thought in silence, and the long years walked between them. The D.A.'s lips set, and the steel of his jaw showed beneath the soft folds of his skin. "I guess it'll have to be my last case, too, Jake," he said quietly. Then he banged his fist on the desk. "But what a helluva case! What a helluva two-bit case! We've had some good ones, Jake -- I've got the scars of them all over me! But why do we have to go out on something as cheap as this?" Jake Emspak stood up, all six feet of him, and he brushed back his long white hair with a gesture that was fierce and strong. "It's not a cheap case, Emmett! It's big -- bigger than any case we've ever fought out!" The reporters were waiting for Jake outside the D.A.'s office. "Is it true you're retiring, Jake?" "This is my last case." "Why are you representing Tony Corfino?" "You couldn't keep me out of a case as big as this." "Gan you tell us why it's so big?" "I can, but I won't. Not until I get before the jury." "Is robbing a bank and shooting two people so important?" "Not particularly." "What else did he do, then?" "Nothing that I know of." "Jake, this isn't some kind of a joke, is it?" "It's the most serious case I've ever handled." "Mr. Emspak, it was reported that you received # from your last client. Are you being paid for defending Tony Corfino?" "I never discuss my fees." "Would you object to a televised interview with Tony?" "Certainly not. How about tomorrow morning?" The reporters left, baffled and intrigued. That night, Jake Emspak sat alone in his apartment high over Central Park West, chuckling with satisfaction as he read the headlines in the first editions: The other headlines were substantially the same. Jake grinned. Things were working out fine, just fine. Publicity was a wonderful tool, if a lawyer knew when to use it, and how. He sliowed one of the headlines to his wife, whose picture was in a mellow gold frame on the stand beside his window chair. Marge had been dead since '#, but he still found it a quiet comfort to share things with her. She didn't have to answer, because words weren't necessary after you'd lived and loved with a woman for fortythree years. His thin smile became warmer as he turned toward her. "Mystery case!" he chortled. "Mystery! The only mystery is why someone hasn't tried a case like this before!" He paused, looked across the park at the spangle of lights, and added softly: "But I'm glad no one did." Ed Murrow called just before Jake went to bed. "Sorry you got into this?" Murrow asked. "You know better than that, Ed. Fm deeply grateful to you for tipping me off on this case." "Well, don't forget to tip me off, too, Jake! I'm not too old to appreciate a scoop now and then!" "Don't wor, Ed..." Next morning, Jake was rested and ready to meet the challenge of Tony Corfino's TV interview. He knew there was a danger Tony might say too much, but it was a calculated risk that had to be taken. The case needed build-up, plenty of build-up. The interview took place in the open square between the towering cell-blocks of Manhattan's new jail. When Jake and Tony came out, the TV cameramen and reporters had already taken their places. The city's crack newspapermen were seated on folding chairs in front of the cameras, along with two men from the District Attorney's office who self-consciously tried to look like members of the working press. Jake sat down beside Tony and hunched forward watchfully over the gold head of his cane. Bert Brown of the Tribune, whose pipelines into the D.A.'s office had brought him many an exclusive, shot out the first question. It came with a whiplash crack: "Tony, are you paying Mr. Emspak to represent you?" Tony looked uncertainly toward Jake, and when the old lawyer didn't answer, Tony said quietly: "No -- I'm not." "Is the Syndicate paying Mr. Emspak?" "I don't know why they should -- I never got into the Syndicate." Tony's answer was expressionless, yet his voice had a strangely subdued quality for a Tenth Avenue kid who had grown up fighting for crumbs from the tables of underworld kingpins. Cassidy of the Times interjected: "Do you know who is paying Mr. Emspak to represent you?" "Nope." Now the sun broke through the morning overcast and gleamed on the polished perfection of Tony's waxlike skin. A woman reporter from the Mirror asked in an abrupt, mannish voice: "Tony -- what happened to your face?" "The Doc says it's some new kind of plastic surgery. I got burned in that accident..." "When you were driving away from the bank?" Bert Brown snapped out. "Yeah." Brown grinned in triumph. It had been a neat double play. The two investigators from the D.A.'s office scribbled furiously. Jake Emspak continued to stare into the TV cameras without blinking. From the back row, a Daily News man boomed out: "Then you admit the shootings, Tony?" Jake lifted one finger from the gold head of his cane. It was a small gesture, but it silenced Tony's answer and immediately commanded the attention of everyone present. "My client," rasped Jake, neither denies nor admits any connection with the crimes for which he is being tried." Bert Brown grinned sardonically at him. "Do you expect to win this case, Mr. Emspak?" "We'll win it," Jake answered, in a voice so cold and certain and hard that the reporters involuntarily joined the TV audience in a collective gasp. Jake stood up and motioned to the deputies. It was time to end the interview. Precisely the right time. The reporters left without further questions. They knew from long experience when Jake Emspak would and would not talk. By that evening, speculation -- without the ballast of facts -- was soaring to dizzy heights. Even the communist angle came in for its share of limelight. Was Tony Corfino somehow of value to the resurgent Red underground? Could Jake Emspak's fee be traced back to Peiping, new headquarters for the Comintern? But not even the most skilled commentator could adequately sustain innuendo on innuendo alone. Not by the grossest distortion of facts could any Communist connection be twisted out of Tony's record of juvenile delinquency, pimping, pick-pocketing, petty thievery, dope peddling, armed robbery, and -- since the grain and sugar restrictions of '# -- bootlegging. But one of the more perceptive reporters had noted Tony's strangely quiet manner of speaking. Inquiries at the jail disclosed that Tony had apparently developed an interest in reading. Here, indeed, was a fresh angle! By mid-afternoon, "Gentleman Tony" had been conceived and given birth. His sordid record was reinterpreted in a picaresque light, and he became something of a Tenth Avenue Robin Hood. A nation squeezed between the twin problems of mounting population and tighter food rationing took "Gentleman Tony" to its fancy. It was like a case of #-hour flu. In the midst of all this, as Jake Emspak sat in his office Sunday morning, behind a mound of microfilmed court records dating back to the mid-fifties, he received a more serious-minded interviewer. The visitor was John O. Callihan, wellpublicized sportsman, art connoisseur, world traveler and No. I man in the Syndicate. His mistresses, and a few old friends like Jake Emspak, called him Johnno. "Greetings, Jake," he said, easing his athletic, tastefully dressed frame into the chair in front of Jake's desk. "Hello, Johnno," Jake rasped. "I'm busy." "I know. That's why I came." "I can't talk about this case, Johnno." "I'm not asking you to." Johnno lit a long, pencil-thin cigarette, and continued reflectively"Jake, I've given you some big cases, paid you well -- and always let you handle them clean, in your own way. Right?" "Right enough." "This is the first time I've ever come for a favor, Jake." "Yeah?" "Who's paying for Tony Corfino?" "Nobody you have to worry about, Johnno." "No other Syndicate -- or anything like that?" Jake shook his head, and his caller stood up. "Thanks, Jake." "Now, will you get the hell out of here!" "Sure, Jake -- give my love to Marge." Jake lowered his head to hide the mist in his eyes. Johnno had sent a simple corsage of blue violets to Marge's funeral. And he sent one every year, on the anniversary of her death. Jake went back to Crould v. Gould, # App. Div. #, and stayed with it until nearly six o'clock, when he turned wearily to People V. Gibbs. This looked like an interminable case, even on microfilm. His eyes were strained from staring at the viewer screen, and his big hand was stiff from spinning the reel crank. He opened his fingers, and the knuckles cracked. Jake stared disgustedly at them. You could take a boy out of the coal mines, but not the coal mines out of the boy. His hand was too big for such a small crank. Someday, he'd have to buy an automatic viewer, or even one of those electronic brains they demonstrated at the last Bar Association meeting. But then, he wouldn't need anything after this case. And besides, he didn't trust such impersonal help. Leibowitz had taught him a good lawyer should do his own preparation. Leibowitz! The Vera Stretz case... That was forty years ago! Jake shook his head to chase away the memories, and started People V. Gibbs, patiently searching for points of law to help him prove that a punk named Tony Corfino... Monday morning, the weekend's publicity showed its results. A bailiff whimpered to Jake that people had been waiting for the doors to open since five A.M. Thousands had gone home disappointed. The fortunate who did get seats filled the courtroom with babble and shrillness as they waited impatiently for something to happen. A new note of excitement sounded when Tony Corfino walked in beside a Sheriffs Deputy. Jake had insisted that Tony be carefully groomed and dressed each morning before coming into court, and the women among the spectators buzzed with appreciation. Promptly at ten. Judge Hayward stepped out of his chambers and looked, gimlet-eyed, over the courtroom. The hubub quieted, then faded to stillness. Jake was glad to have Judge Hayward on this case. At forty-seven, he was the youngest Superior Court judge and least wedded to precedent. He was impatient with legal sleight-of-hand, painstakingly insistent on a structure of evidence. "Any mule can kick a barn down; it takes a good carpenter to build one," he had once told Jake. Selection of the jury proceeded at a creeping pace, which court reporters had come to expect with both the D.A. and Jake Emspak in the same courtroom. In their last clash, they had meticulously examined one hundred and fifty jurors before accepting twelve. But this time, the District Attorney was responsible for most of the delay. Not knowing why Jake had taken the case, the D.A. proceeded nervously and cautiously in questioning each juror: What is your feeling about capital punishment? Would you credit the testimony of an eye witness? Do you believe that a criminal must be punished as decreed by law? Jake's questions were fewer, and less orthodox. Sometimes he asked : "What is your attitude toward science?" Or, again: "Are you a religious man?" But most frequently he came without preamble to what seemed to be the key to his case : "What is a man?" And while this went on in the courtroom, Jake continued his tireless preparations. Research, subpoenas, talking to witnesses, taking depositions, then more research and more subpoenas. Bound the case on the east, the north, the south and the west. Lincoln had said that. Jake's stomach rebelled, and he took to eating a bowl of baby cereal before going to bed in an effort to still its growling and grumbling. Those who knew how hard he worked continued to ask: Where's the money coming from? Why is this important anyway? Whenever speculation started to sag, Jake shrewly needled it by leaking a fact here, a rumor there. From Los Angeles, the ebullient old television commentator, George Putnam, still indefatigable in his late sixties, reported that a noted brain surgeon had been subpoenaed to testify at the Corfino trial. In New York, Ed Murrow asked the probing, provocative question : Why has Jake Emspak personally invited one of our great religious philosophers to appear as a defense witness? "I suggest," hinted Murrow, "that you won't find the gold in this case by panning the mainstream. Or, as Plato said..." The D.A. and his deputies sat up half the night studying an aircheck of the Murrow broadcast. By the close of the fourth day, selection of the jury had been completed and the trial was ready to begin. That evening, Jake worked on his notes until ten o'clock, and then went out for liis customary walk through the memories and quiet of Central Park. As he paused at a crosswalk to watch a satellite platform sweep like a new planet across the sky, a long, black car drifted silently to a stop beside him. The door swung open, and the District Attorney's tired voice said, "Get in, Jake." Jake got in, and neither of them spoke for awhile. "Couldn't sleep," the D.A. said finally. "Can't even sleep with them damn pills anymore." Jake didn't say anything. He stared at the back of the chauffeur in front of them. What could you say when an old friend was wearing out? "Look, Jake," the D.A. continued, "do you really rnean this is your last case?" "You know I do." "Then, how about a deal -- You cop a plea, and Tony gets off with life... "Why, Emmett?" "I don't want to see you wind up this way, Jake -- losing a penny-ante case like this!" "You know how I feel about this case." "No deal, then?" "No deal." The D.A. wheezed angrily: "Then I'm going to whip you, Jake -- and that punk's going to burn!" Jake didn't answer, and they drove slowly along the endless, winding roads of Central Park. The tires of the great car murmured over the pavement like a boat in the ripples of a lake, and the silent motor gave them a sensation of floating through the night. voice when he made his opening address to the jury. His final words were brutally to the point : "We've all heard rumors about what the defense may or may not attempt to prove in this trial, but let us not forget that in the law of our land there is no place for medical quacks, parole panderers or all the bleeding hearts who drip sympathy for a killer like Tony Gorfino! The chair is the only thing he and others like him will ever understand!" The courtroom stilled to breathlessness as Jake Emspak stepped forward to deliver his own opening remarks. He moved, then paused, with a great dramatist's sense of timing. Ghosts of a thousand courtrooms and fifty years of practice moved and paused with him. Impeccably dressed, his long silver hair artfully disheveled, he folded his blueveined hands over the gold head of his cane and swayed for a moment in silence, thoughtfully contemplating the jurors. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of remoteness that was peculiarly compelling: "I would like," he began, "to quote from a Supreme Court Justice who died before some of you were born. It was Benjamin Cardoza who said -- 'Law in its deepest aspects is one with the humanities and with all the things by which humanity is uplifted and inspired. Law is not a cadaver, but a spirit; not a finality, but a process of becoming; not a clog in the fullness of life, but an outlet and a means thereto; not a game but a sacrament'..." He waited fully a half-minute before continuing, and not a person in the courtroom stirred. "The defense," Jake went on quietly, "will rest its case on two major points: "First, we will prove that the law has not kept pace with the progress of science and the forward march of human thought. "Second... here Jake paused again, while he looked slowly from the jurors, to the judge and finally to the District Attorney. "Second," he continued, with a ghost of a smile on his thin lips, "we will prove that T ony Corfino is not T ony Corfinor Jake stood for a moment in silence. Then, with a slight, almost curt nod of his head, he turned away and walked back to his seat beside Tony Corfino. Tony stared at him wordlessly, with a look in his eyes that Jake had not yet fathomed. The courtroom exploded into bedlam. Judge Hayward gaveled peremptorily for silence, and motioned to the District Attorney to begin presentation of the People's case. If the D.A. was puzzled by Jake's opening remarks, he gave no sign of it. His marshalling of the evidence was grimly efficient. There was a quality of the inexorable about the way he moved up his witnesses one by one. It was like the maneuvering of a skilled boxer who seeks to take his opponent out, not with one punch, but with a carefully executed combination of punches. Tony Corfino was not Tony Corfino? The D.A. smiled sardonically as he pointed to the pale defendant and asked the witness to identify him. "And is this the man who entered the bank on the morning of last October #?" "Yes, it is," replied the nervous, overly plump young woman. "Were you in a position to observe him closely at all times?" "Yes." "Where were you?" "In -- in the Note Window , .  right next to where he -- he came up and pointed his gun." "Thank you." With elaborate courtesy, the D.A. turned to Jake: "Does the distinguished defense counsel desire to cross-examine this witness?" Jake nodded gravely, and advanced toward the witness stand. The young woman watched him apprehensively. In the TV booth, the regular court reporters leaned forward with anticipation. Many a time had they seen Jake Emspak take the most positive witness and reduce him to a quivering, stuttering symbol of uncertainty. "Show me an eye witness," Jake had once observed, "and I'll show you a liar." Now, as Jake began, there was a note of friendliness in his voice: "You say this is the man who entered the bank on the morning of last October #?" "Yes -- yes, sir... It is!" Jake nodded understandingly. "Suppose," he continued, "we look at it another way for a moment: Is the man who entered the bank on the morning of last October # the same man who now appears as defendant in this trial?" The young woman bit her lip, smearing some of the lipstick on her large front teeth. She hesitated, thinking through the question, then nodded firmly. "Yes -- of course!" "How do you know?" "Why -- he -- he looks the same!" "'Exactly the same? I suggest you look him over carefully before you answer." The young woman stared at Tony, then dropped her eyes in confusion. "Exactly the same?" Jake pressed. "Well... I'm... I'm not sure..." Jake teetered on the point of his cane, thoughtfully contemplating the now flustered witness. Then, unexpectedly, he turned to Judge Hayward and said, "No further questions, your Honor." The D.A. blinked in surprise. It was not like Jake to stop once he had a witness in full retreat. The court reporters looked at each other disappointedly. Maybe the old man should retire! Jake continued to treat prosecution witnesses with similar restraint. He would lead them up to the brink of uncertainty, then leave them there. As a result, the District Attorney was able to complete presentation of his case by the middle of the second morning. "The People rest," he announced, with grim satisfaction. witness was a youthful looking man of about forty who quickly identified himself as a well-known authority on fingerprints, an expert who had many times been called to assist the police in major criminal cases. "Is it not true," Jake began, "that in the tradition of modern law, fingerprints are regarded as the most positive method of identification?" "That is correct." From a mass of data on his desk, Jake extracted a single sheet of photostatic copy and handed it to Judge Hayward. "I have here," he said, "a certified copy of one Tony Corfino's fingerprints -- taken at the time of his arrest and conviction five years ago on a charge of Grand Theft, Auto..." The Judge accepted the photostat and handed it to the clerk for entry into the record. Jake then retrieved it, and gave it to his witness. "Now, Sir," he went on, "will you please take the defendant's fingerprints and compare them to this photostatic copy." The jurors craned forward curiously as the fingerprint expert opened his kit and went methodically about the business of fingerprinting Tony Corfino. When he had finished, and returned to the witness stand with the new prints, Jake Emspak demanded: "Is there any similarity between those fingerprints and the fingerprints of one Tony Corfino?" The expert looked from one set of prints to the other, and quickly replied : "There can be absolutely no doubt about it -- these are not the same prints." Red-faced with anger, the District Attorney heaved himself to his feet and strode toward the bench. "Objection, your Honor!" he stormed. "This is the most outrageous deception I have ever witnessed in a courtroom. Frankly, I am astounded that opposing counsel would stoop to such tactics!" Judge Hayward's voice had the bite of steel drill as he directed : "Will you please explain to the Court exactly what you mean?" "It's a matter of record," the D.A. snapped, "that the defendant was seriously injured in the accident that resulted in his capture. Massive burns were part of his injuries... Bone and skin grafts were necessary to repair the damage to his hands -- as well as to other parts of his body. Naturally, his fingerprints would be different! The Defense Counsel knows that!" Jake smiled, and replied mildly: "Of course the Defense Counsel knows that, and will certainly make the full extent of the defendant's injuries a part of the trial record. However, I have called this particular witness to show that Tony Corfino cannot be identified as Tony Corfino by what is still regarded as the most infallible method of criminal identification." "Your Honor," retorted the D.A., "This so-called testimony is totally irrelevant and immaterial. I request that it be stricken from the record!" "It is most relevant to our case," Jake shot back. "Furthermore, the Defense will prove that Tony Corfino cannot be identified as Tony Corfino by any known method of criminal identification!" Judge Hayward's eyes narrowed speculatively. He thought the matter over for a moment before stating, with unconcealed interest: "This may well be a legal situation without precedent. The Court will withhold ruling on the objection for the time being." The next defense witness was a specialist on agglutination of the blood. "Agglutination," he explained, adjusting his glasses pedantically, "is a biological reaction consisting of the mutual adhesion of the red corpuscles. It is also a method of establishing individualization of blood." "I see," said Jake. Now, tell us -- how has this method been used to establish identification in a criminal case?" "It is sometimes used where the victim's blood leaves stains on the murderer's clothing -- as well as the victim's own clothing. If both blood stains produce the same biological reaction, the murderer is either guilty -- or has a great deal of explaining to do!" Jake meticulously selected another exhibit from the material on his desk. "Will you identify this, please?" "It is a piece of cotton stained with the blood of this -- this defendant." "When was it stained?" "In the test I made last week." "Did you compare it with the stains on garments worn by a certain Tony Corfino at the time of his accident?" "I did." "What did you find?" "The two samples were entirely different?" "Could we assume, then, that the blood of a man known as Tony Corfino does not flow through the veins of this defendant, who also bears the name of Tony Corfino?" The witness rubbed his hand thoughtfully over the high, polished dome of his forehead. "You could put it that way," he conceded. With the skill of a symphony conductor calling upon the diverse instruments under his baton, Jake Emspak continued to bring forward a bewildering variety of witnesses to prove tliat in the identifiable details of his physiology, Tony Gorfino indeed was not Tony Gorfino. The D.A. watched in furious silence. Once, when Jake passed near him, he muttered: "This is contemptible!" Imperturbably, Jake turned back to the witness stand, where a radiographer from Scripps Institute was taking the oath. Patiently, he led the witness through a description of how the radiographies of the nasal accessory sinuses and mastoid processes could be used to establish the identity of an individual. Jake then produced medical records from a juvenile correctional institution in eastern Pennsylvania, where Tony Gorfino had sojourned during his seventeenth year. Gomparison with recent hospital records showed a striking difference between the two radiographies. The opthalmologic method of Gapdevieile was next explored by Jake to show that the eyes of Tony Gorfino were not the eyes of Tony Gorfino. The technique of Tamassia and Ameuille was employed to prove the same point about Tony's veins. The umbilicial method of Bert and Vianny intrigued the courtroom and TV audience with structural dissimilarities of Tony's navel. By means of projection on a large screen, Jake demonstrated to the jurors and Judge Hayward that Tony Gorfino, defendant, had an entirely different electrocardiagram from the Tony Gorfino whose crushed body had been pulled, more dead than alive, from the wreckage of a burning automobile. Late that afternoon, Ed Murrow commented to his news audience in the cadence that had been his trademark for more than forty years: "We know not yet where this trial is taking us, though Jake Emspak is beginning to show the direction. Perhaps, we, too, could ask ourselves the question: What is a man?' Less philosophically, a spaceweary young captain, sending in his nightly report from the satellite station, Vanguard VI, queried: "If this Tony Gorfino isn't Tony Gorfino, who or what in the hell is he?" question was on display the next morning when the jury filed into Judge Hayward's courtroom. Before them, and angled toward the TV cameras, was a chart nearly eight feet tall. It showed, in outline, the figure of a man. The figure was covered with small black dots, each bearing a white number. In all, there was seventy-two dots. As soon as court was in session, Jake called a short, squarely-built man of about fifty to the stand. There was a bulldog set to his jaw and mouth. He identified himself as Dr. Theodore Glendenning, Ghief of Staff at Gity Hospital. "Dr. Glendenning," said Jake, "I assume you are familiar with the medical and surgical care received by the defendant at your hospital?" "Quite familiar," the doctor retorted, impatiently. "Then, may I direct your attention to this chart. It indicates areas in which artificial parts were used to replace the damaged or destroyed natural parts of a certain Tony Corfino's body. Will you name them, please, as I point them out with my cane." Tapping the chart like a schoolteacher signalling for the attention of his pupils, Jake Emspak started at the outline of the head. "Vitallium skull plate," snapped Dr. Glendenning. Jake's cane touched the nose. "Vitallium nose plate." Swiftly, the tip of the cane moved around the outline of the body, pausing only long enough for the doctor to name each part: "Plastic tear duct... vitallium jaw bone and implanted dentures... paraffin and plastic sponge to fill chest after removal of lung... plastic esophagus... tantalum breast plate... tantalum mesh to patch chest wall... vitallium shoulder socket rim and shoulder joint bone... vitallium elbow joint, radius bone, ulna bone, wrist bone, finger joint... spinal fusion plate... vitallium blood vessel tubes." Jake put down his cane, and turned conversationally toward the doctor. "Dr. Glendenning, is it true that this Tony Gorfino's reproductive organs were destroyed in the accident?" "Virtually so." "And is it not also true that the defendant in this case is now capable of becoming a parent?" Dr. Glendenning glanced at his watch and sighed. "What you are referring to," he answered, "has been rather elementary surgery for the past ten years." "But the children of Tony Gorfino would not then be the children of Tony Gorfino?" Dr. Glendenning looked toward Judge Hayward with a pained expression. Receiving no sign of any kind from the Judge, he turned back to Jake Emspak. "I have given you the medical data," he said angrily. "You can draw your own conclusions." Jake nodded, and replied with emphasis : "I am sure this Gourt and the Jury will do just that." He studied the chart for a moment, then tapped the outline figure in the area of the eyes. "Tell us. Dr. Glendenning, what did your staff do about Tony Gorfino's eyes? I understand the flames had reached them. "Gomea transplants were necessary." "And where did you obtain the corneas?" "Mr. Emspak -- I'm sure you know that most people nowadays will their eyes to the Gornea Bank!" "Gan you tell us anything about the corneas that were transplanted in Tony Gorfino's eyes? From what type a person did they come?" "I'd rather not answer that?" Jake turned to the Judge. "Your Honor, unless there is a legal reason why the good doctor should not answer, I ask the Gourt to direct that he do so." Judge Hayward hesitated, then directed the witness to answer. "They came from the eyes of a priest," growled the doctor. Jake Emspak raised his cane to the chart once again, then apparently changed his mind and lowered it. "Dr. Clendenning," he asked quietly, "am I correct in believing that the construction of parts for the human body is now an important industry?" "That's right," the doctor said grudgingly. "It's grown tremendously in the past twenty years -- day..." "One further question, if you please, Doctor," said Jake. "What is your definition of a man?" The doctor thought for a moment, and smiled coldly. "I'm afraid it would not assist your case," he replied. "We are only looking for some basic truths." Dr. Clendenning bunched his square shoulders and leaned forward aggressively. "I can think of no better definition," he snapped, "than one given by a distinguished physician in the earlier years of this century. He defined the human body as an animal organism, differing in only a few respects from other animal organisms, and fitted for the performance of two main functions: The conversion of food and air into energy and tissue; and the reproduction of other individuals of its species!" So coldly, with such an air of finality did he speak, that his words brought an audible gasp from two women in the jury box. Jake Emspak remained impassive. "And this is all you see in a man?" he prodded gently. The doctor's jaw set stubbornly. "As a philosopher," he retorted, "I may engage in some speculation in the company of Plato, Schopenhauer or the Archbishop of Canterbury, but my speculations would themselves be based upon speculations and not upon any scientific data resembling observed facts!" "Then, from your point of view, the defendant in this courtroom is not the Tony Corfino -- the same man -- whose broken body was brought into your hospital eight months ago?" "Obviously not." "Thank you. Doctor." Jake walked slowly from the witness stand to the jury box, and then back to the bench. "Perhaps," he said softly, "a tenminute recess would be in order..." Judge Hayward drew a long breath, exhaled and nodded. With the sound of his gavel, tension ran out of the courtroom like water from a punctured barrel. Jake began bringing to the witness stand a parade of educators, religious leaders and philosophers who kept the courtroom alternately fascinated and bewildered for the next two days. They came from London, Rome, Johannesburg, Philadelphia, Tokyo and Chicago. They came from every oasis of learning where men could still find profit in thought, without relating the profit to the cash register or the thought of technology. They spoke in words and symbols that sometimes soared beyond space itself, and left the world's TV audience groping for stability in earthbound cliches. The paradox was incredible: All this thinking, all this culture -- all of everything brought into a courtroom to defend a bushleague hoodlum. Reporters ceased to ask who was paying for this display; they simply marveled at the pyrotechnics. Through it all, Jake Emspak moved deftly, surely, extracting from each witness the pure essence of relevant thought : Man is a creature destined to live in two worlds. He is surrounded first by the realities of this world -- and he is called to live with eternal realities that transcend this vorld... The human person is a body, and therefore subject to the laws of matter, to spatiality, temporality and opacity. As such, he is a meeting place for passing forces, a crossroads of contacts and reactions. But the human person is also a spirit, that is to say a reality that transcends apparent reality. There is within him the wakened or nascent ability to comprehend space and surpass time... The human self is an object, of a sort -- and, as such, can be described as the empiricists have described us. But the human self is also, and more essentially, a subject, which never appears to the view of others or even to the most determined introspection. The self as object is finite, but the self as subject touches the infinite; it is the meeting place of time and eternity, of man and God... For all its advances, the #th century is still a child of the #th, when the impact of the developing sciences of physics and biology produced a change in the concept of nature and Man's place in it. From Malthus and Darwin, Spencer and Feuerbach, Vogt, Buchner, Czolbe and Haeckel evolved a reductive naturalism in which the spiritual quality of man is ruled out and he becomes a unique emergent of a blind natural process -- a creature who must make of nature what he can... evolution will be in the human brain, where Man must ultimately be defined. Until Man appeared, evolution strove only to produce an organ, the brain, in a body capable of protecting it, and carrying out its will. The ancestors of Man were irresponsible actors playing parts in a play they did not understand. Man continues to play his part but wants to understand the play... Man is a blending of the rational and intuitive processes. Ethical conclusions reached by logical thinking were attained several thousand years ago by the religions, which proves that man's rational processes are strangely slower than his intuitive processes... Jurors shifted impatiently in their seats, yet their attention would inexorably be drawn back to the witness stand. Courtroom spectators, who had come to be titillated by the sensational, stayed to grope with concepts they could not understand. The TV audience, spoonfed for so many decades, tried doggedly to chew and digest adult foodstuffs. Sets were turned off in anger or despair -- and then turned back on again. "What is a man?" The pivotal nature of this question became steadily more evident. If Tony Gorfino was not Tony Corfino, was he then not more of the real personality, the human entity, than the original Tony had ever been. "In restoring the damaged areas of the brain," a surgeon testified under Jake's skillful prodding, "we thought it wise to perform a lobotomy at the same time, thereby relieving anti-social tensions and pressures." (The body is at once a means of expression for the soul, and a veil; it reveals and it hides... ) "During the convalescent period," a consulting specialist informed the courtroom, "we recommended treatment with sodium dilantin and electroshock therapy, thereby producing a change in this patient's electroencephalograph." (The body presents all the problems of matter: It is a limitation, a weight, a force. It seems almost a miracle when it is overcome, penetrated and ordered by thought and spirit...) "Subsequently," the psychiatrist stated, "this patient underwent extensive therapy, aided frequently by hypnosis and sodium pentathol. His respiratory, vascular and circulatory systems began to show increasing stability." (Released from its warped framework, brought into balance with instincts inherited from our animal ancestors, the body becomes, in a way, an image of the soul, a sign conveying something of our personal mystery...) And then Jake called the hospital Administrator to the stand. Speaking with great deliberation, so that each word registered, Jake asked: "Is this type of medical care ordinarily given to a prisonerpatient?" "The type of care depends upon the case, Mr. Emspak. In a case such as this, I would regard the treatment as routine. You see, in the past decade our approach to any patient has become one of total therapy..." "And in the case of a prisoner, what do you do when the therapy is completed?" The Administrator looked surprised. "Why, we return him to jail -- in accordance with the law." Jake Emspak stood in silence, contemplatively staring down at the blue veins on the back of his hands. At length, he announced: "Your Honor, the Defense will conclude tomorrow morning, after one more witness -- a man who goes by the name of Tony Gorfino... T he sweat on the pale, polished skin of Tony's forehead stood out like drops of summer rain; they seemed to have fallen there rather than seeped out through the pores. A polygraph lie detector had been set up under Jake's direction and wheeled close to the witness stand. A technician opened the front of Tony's shirt and made fast the pneumograph tube with the aid of a beaded chain. Next, a bloodpressure cuff, of the type used by physicians, was fasted around Tony's right arm. A set of electrodes was attached to the palmar and dorsal surfaces of the hand of the other arm. The recorder showing the graph lines had been specially constructed so as to be visible throughout the courtroom, and to the television cameras. The technician had already been on the stand to explain the simplified and easily read graph lines of the modern polygraph: A shallow breathing line denoting suppression; a heavy breath line denoting relief; the respiratory block, fast pulse and slow pulse lines; the rise in blood pressure tracing... It was all there on the screen -- the emotional picture of a man testifying at his own trial for murder. "Objection, your Honor!" shouted the D.A. for the tenth time that morning. "This procedure is definitely irregular and immaterial! Defense Counsel has been making a mockery of the Court for days, but now he has stepped completely out of line!" Jake clucked soothingly. "What," he inquired, "is irregular or immaterial about a defendant voluntarily taking a lie detector test? I believe that I have heard the District Attorney challenge clients of mine to do so on several occasions! Now, we are merely permitting the Court and the Jury to view the test in progress... Once again, the Judge withheld his ruling, and the D.A. sagged dejectedly in his chair. The strain of the last few days -- sitting in the courtroom and listening to witnesses he knew not how or why to crossexamine -- had taken its toll. His eyes were bloodshot,  and fits of wheezing seized him spasmodically, but the set of his jaw was still unyielding. Jake grieved for him. Tony Gorfino's reactions, as he sat in the witness chair watching the final preparations, would be difficult to catalogue. He looked both aloof and nervously concerned. His curly black hair was damp from the way he constantly brushed the sweat back off his forehead; his puffy lips seemed in constant need of moistening. But his hands were folded quietly in his lap. He seemed to Jake like a man lost to the past, adrift in the present and unrelated to the future. "Will you . give us your name, please?" Jake asked casually. "Tony Corfino." "Where were you born?" "I ain't -- I'm not sure... On the West Side, I suppose..." On the recorder over Tony's head, the graph lines rippled in smooth patterns. Suddenly changing his manner, Jake rasped: "Have you ever committed a crime?" Tony frowned in bewilderment. "I know that I have, but sometimes... Well, I kinda wonder..." "Do you remember what happened last October #?" "You mean the bank... the shootin'?" "That's right." "I've read so much -- heard so much talk -- that I ain't sure just what I remember... Tony's eyes -- or the eyes of the dead priest through which Tony had vision -- reflected his torment. Jake moved around so that Tony would be facing the jury when he answered the next question. "Tony," directed Jake, "think about this question before you answer it: Are you the man who tried to rob that bank -- then got excited and killed two people?" Jake knew this question was the one element of gamble in his entire case. The way it was answered could be a summation or refutation of all the evidence and testimony he had so painstakingly assembled. The jury sensed this, too. So did Judge Hayward. His keen eyes flickered alertly from the defendant's face to the lines on the polygtaph recorder. Now Tony's hands were no longer folded quietly in his lap. They were locked together, and the new veins in his wrists stood out under the new skin. His lips worked silently as he groped for words. And then the words burst into an anguished outcry: "No! I couldn't!... The polygraph lines leaped into jagged peaks. Blood pressure, respiratory block, pulse and breathing -- all climbed and dropped wildly, recording their damning message for the world to see. The D.A.'s lips twisted in a mirthless smile of triumph. Up in the TV booth, reporters sputtered, split infinitives and shattered syntax in frantic efforts to describe and interpret what had happened. Jake Emspak stood and waited, a sear and wrinkled leaf hanging motionless in the wind. (If the self is merely a node in a complex casual series, if self is solely energized and motivated by the sovereign need of survival and security, then the idea of a bridge between Man and the infinite is a pious illusion...) Tony Corfino stared down at his twisted hands, and slowly they unlocked. He looked up at Jake, and the doubt and fear and bewilderment were gone at last from his eyes. "That ain't so," he said quietly. "I did it... I know I did it... an' I know it was wrong... I deserve the chair!" (Thus Man escapes himself in freedom, and is therefore never a fully predictable or manipulatable object -- only a window through which we peer with blind eyes into the reaches of the universe...) T he District Attorney's summary to the jury was a model of legal craftsmanship. Boldly disregarding the broader issues raised by Jake, he hewed firmly to the line of criminal responsibility and punishment. Point by point he reviewed the facts of the crime. Witness by witness he retraced the eye-witness testimony. He produced photographs of Tony's body being loaded from the wreckage of the car into the ambulance, and from the ambulance into the prison ward of City Hospital. He proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Tony had never been out of custody from the moment of his apprehension. "Even the defendant admits to his responsibility for the crime," the D.A. continued coldly. Only in his concluding remarks did the District Attorney make reference to the defense presented by Jake Emspak. "I wonder," he asked, smiling for the first time, "if any of you tried -- as I did -- to carry through to its ultimate conclusion the line of reasoning presented with such detail and admitted virtuosity by the defendant's counsel? If the fabricating of replacement parts for the human body has already become a continues to achieve new miracles, how many people in this world could now -- or in the near future -- seek to escape their responsibilities by taking refuge in the argument that they were no longer themselves? At what point would we draw the line? If fifty-percent of a man's body has been replaced is he neither himself nor a new person? If fifty-one has been replaced, is he no longer the husband of his wife or the father of his children? Can he then walk blithely away from his responsibilities, proclaiming T am a new man'?" A titter went through the courtroom. Judge Hayward gavelled immediately for silence, but the D.A. winked at the TV cameras. His point had been well made. When Jake Emspak stepped up to the jury box to deliver his own final plea, he promptly picked up the challenge. "I have known the District Attorney too well, for too many years," he said, "to believe that he has considered only the superficial aspects of this case. If you should find the defendant guilty, I am sure he would be the last to oppose consideration of all the matters I have raised in the determination of a just sentence. "And I grant you that if a verdict of guilty is reached, the letter of the law will be fulfilled, and an eye for an eye can be paid. "Likewise, if the verdict is not guilty, the letter of the law most unquestionably will be violated -- but its spirit will be vindicated! "I am asking you to take a bold step, across a new frontier... Yes, down through the ages, law has become a living, meaningful instrument of human dignity because -- at each crossroad of decision -- men and women were not afraid to depart from precedent!" Old timers in the court had never before heard Jake Emspak summarize a case in such dispassionate, objective tones. Usually, his voice and argument ranged the gamut of emotional and semantic appeals, plucking at each member of the jury like the strings of a harp. Today, he seemed to be making an effort to hold himself in check. "This is the trial of a living man for the crime of a man who no longer exists," Jake continued quietly. "Science destroyed that man -- completely and with absolute finality! In his place is a man with (Continued on page #) What lasts forever? Does love? Does death?... Nothing lasts forever... Not even forever T he large horse plodded slowly over the shifting sand. The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always seeking -- searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what they sought. The horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred Illustrated by Ed Emsh his horse, and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water, and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep. When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he waited for it to boil, he went to his horse. Conqueror, stroking his mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night. In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but ashes. Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood. He slept. His brain slept. But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone; all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present and future... It was the night before he was to been declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the children to bed -- their sons -- and now sat on the couch, watching the blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her. "I've got something to tell you, and something to show you." He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry of surprised joy. "Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!" she cried in her rich, happy voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body. "It's f(#r you; so long as you wear it. I'll come back, even from the dead, if need be. Read the inscription." She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, "It is forever." Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him. He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where he had been many times before but each time found something new and unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain. "Wait!" she cried. "I've something for you, too." She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end. The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet, sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the blood in his veins. Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard, littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been great. Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb ; the threat of annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great. He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer. Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It grew louder and louder until he knew what it was. "Heavy bombers!" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for their foxholes. But the planes had passed over, the sun glinting on their bellies, reflecting a blinding light. They were bound for bigger, more important targets. When the all-clear had sounded, the men clambered from their shelters. An icy wind swept the field, bringing with it clouds which covered the sun. A strange fear had gripped him then... Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die. The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the onrushing bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell, victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked across the sky which none could escape. But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted buildings into molten streams, and then the great triplemushroom cloud filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where they had crawled. The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few, if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands. Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins. The war had ended. To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people. They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world. Yet these remnants of an army must return -- or at least try. Their exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to return -- had to know whether she was still waiting for him. They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea. After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore, and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned, and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into "El Mundo gris de Noviembre" -- the November world. Those who had, had never returned. In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In the November world. It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died, leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad, temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them, and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what might have been dead leaves, but wasn't. He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn, straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were the animal's eyes which seemed to speak -- a silent mental speech, which he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and seemed to say: "Follow me." And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had remained there a long time -- how long he could not tell, for he could only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again started the long journey home. The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen no human beings. But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land. How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away. Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over. The images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and mind slept into the shadows of the dawn. He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso, separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast. He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home. Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pockmarked goddess, with streaming hair called stars. In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness, slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard voices -- mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths. He turned quickly away and did not look back. Night paled into day; day burned into night. There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible through the moonlight, he saw it. Home. Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even better than it had been before. Then he saw her. She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve shadows. He waited, wondering if she were... Presently she stirred like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of light around her. His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken, mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were empty of life. "No, no!" he cried soundlessly. This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching. He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if trying to decipher some inscription inside it. He knew then. He had come home. Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed, shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear -- a kind of fear he had never known. He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob of darkness. "Nothing is forever!' He thought he had shouted the words, but only a thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him. He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum. "Forever -- forever. Only death is forever." He could have sworn he heard the words. He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his chest. Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowOf IF -- Worlds of Science Fiction, published bi-monthly at Buffalo, New York, for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing: editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y.; Editor, James L. Quinn, # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y.; Managing editor. None; Business manager. None. #. The owner is (if owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given) ; Quinn Publishing (Company, Inc., # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y.; James L. Quinn, # Pearl Street, Kingston, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semi-weekly and tri-weekly newspapers only). James L. Quinn, Editor Sworn to and subscribed before me this #rd day of September, #. T he yellow sands of the spaceport stretched, glaring and empty, in every direction. There was no sign of life from the little group of buildings a mile away. In the control room of the tall, round-nosed starship, technicians labored and officers conferred while the red needles that showed rocket tube temperatures sank slowly toward zero on their dials. T he people of Earth had every means of power at their command, yet they used none of it. Was it due to lack of knowledge and technique; or was there a more subtle, dangerous reason? "Maybe Earth's depopulated, Tom," suggested John Gray, the executive officer. He ran his fingers through closecropped red hair and peered through the port with thoughtful gray eyes. "Hardly, John," replied Commander Tom Wallace, frowning. "The scout rockets showed some good-sized cities, with smoke." Illustrated by Paul Orban 'I was off duty then and haven't had time to read the log," apologized John. "What gets me is that they should have a robot-controlled space relay station orbiting outside the atmosphere, and a deserted spaceport. It just doesn't jibe." "That's why we have to be just as careful as though we were landing on an alien planet," said the commander. "We don't know what the conditions on Earth are now. How long has it been, John?" "Two hundred and fifty-eight years," answered John. "Ten years, our time." "Pick three for briefing, John. This is going to be a disappointing homecoming for the crew, but we'll liave to send out an exploration party." The landing ramp slid out from just above the rocket tubes, and the armored car clanked down to the sand. John steered it across the wide expanse of the spaceport toward the group of buildings. Above and behind him, a woman swept the terrain with binoculars from the car's observation turret. In the body of the car, another woman and a man stood by the guns. The buildings were just as lifeless when they di'ew near, but there was an ominous atmosphere about them. They were windowless, of heavy concrete. Through slits in their domed roofs, the noses of a dozen cannon angled toward the ship. "John, there's someone there," said the girl in the turret, tensely. "You can't see it through the windshield, but there are some smaller guns poking out near the ground and they're following us." John stopped the car and sw'itched on the loudspeaker. "Hello, tlic spaceport!" His amplified voice boomed out across the sand and reverberated against the buildings. "Is anybody there? We come in peace." There was no reply. The big guns still angled toward the starship, the little ones focussed on tlie car. "They may be robot-controlled," suggested Phil Maxwell, the gunner on the side of the car toward the forts. "Any sign of an entrance, Ann?" "Nothing but the gunports," replied the girl in the turret. "Don't fool with them, John," said Commander Wallace, who was tuned in from the ship on the car's communications system. "If they're robot-controlled, they'll be boobytrapped. Move out of range and continue with your exploration." Two days later, the car emerged from the desert into comparatively fertile country. The four explorers found a broken concrete highway and followed it between rolling, treeless grasslands. Near dusk, they saw smoke on the horizon -- and ran into a roadblock. A segment of the highway had been thrown up into a ten-foot wall, barring their progress. Over the edge of the wall, the muzzles of heat-guns pointed at them as they brought the car to a halt some distance away. John got the commander on the car radio. "We could swing around it, but we don't know whether they have vehicles that could outrun us," he reported. "And my conception of our mission is to establish contact." "That's right," agreed Tom. "But stay in the car until you get a friendly reaction. Then you're on your own -- and I'm afraid you're expendable, John." John switched on the loudspeaker and made overtures to the roadblock. After a moment, a lone figure stepped around the edge of the mound of earth and concrete and approached the car slowly. The man was dressed in the drab, baggy uniform of a professional soldier. "If you come in peace, leave your vehicle and identify yourself," called the soldier. "You will not be harmed." "Take over, Phil," ordered John. He slipped from the driver's seat and climbed through the turret. Jumping to the ground, he approached the soldier, his arms swinging freely at his sides. "John Gray, executive officer of the starship Discovery, returned from a colonizing mission to Deneb hand. The soldier ignored the outstretched hand, saluting formally instead. "Arrive in peace," he said. "If you will leave your vehicle here, you will be escorted as deevs to Third Sarge Elfor, commander of the town of Pebbro." John returned to the car and held a brief consultation with his companions. Although he was in command of the exploration party, planetary operations of the starship's personnel were conducted on a somewhat democratic basis. The commander listened in, but left them to their own judgment. "Communications blackout for a while then, commander," said John. "I see no reason to let them know about the personal radios right now." The quartet emerged from the car wearing small packs of emergency rations and equipment. Behind the roadblock, the sight that met their eyes was unexpected. The robot-controlled space relay station, the heavily armed pillboxes at the spaceport and the heat-guns poked across the roadblock at them, all had made it logical to anticipate a powerfully equipped task force. Instead, they found a troop of #th century cavalrymen, armed for the most part with #th century weapons. There were no more than a dozen heat-guns in evidence, and their bearers also carried short swords and long-bows with quivers of arrows. The four from the starship were given mounts and, with no outward indications of hostility, were escorted to the town whose smoke they had seen. The town was another surprise. They had expected either a fortress or an outpost of brick and log buildings. It was neither. The buildings were tremendous cubes and domes of steel and concrete, sleek and modern, windowed with heavy glass bricks. Skeins of cables, coils and loops of aerials bespoke the power that must be at their command. But the people walked Not a car or a truck was to be seen. Men and women in the gray military uniforms walked or trotted up and down the broad paved streets. Occasionally a horse-drawn wagon passed, hauling a load of vegetables or manure. It was as though a cavalry post of the old West carried on its slow-moving duties in a super-modem setting. middle-aged man of military bearing, with a sandy handle-bar mustache. He sat behind a huge desk in one of the town's biggest buildings. There were elevators, open and deserted, in the lobby, but they had to climb ten flights of stairs to reach his gleaming office. "The Topkick sends you greetings from Kansity, capital of the Earth," he said. "We have watched your ship since it approached the outer atmosphere. We have listened to your communications since you left your ship, and have been interested in the indications that you are of Earth but unfamiliar with it. We are interested also in your use of a vehicle that can travel for three days without refueling. But we do not find a record of any ship named Discovery, and we do not know what you mean by Deneb "The Discovery left Earth # years ago," repli John. "We esthe third planet of the star Deneb, before returning to Earth." "You are the descendents of the ship's original crew, then?" "No," said John. He explained as well as he could the extension of subjective time at near-light speeds. "Mmm. And you have left a colony on a planet of another star." They could not tell from tlie Third Sarge's tone what he tliought. After a moment's meditation, he said: "We shall talk again tomorrow. Tonight you are our guests and will be accorded all courtesy as deevs. Are you husbands and wives, or shall we billet men and women separately?" "However it suits your convenience," answered John. "You may billet us all together if you prefer." Third Sarge Elfor took them at their word. They were conducted to a single room, evidently in the heart of officers' quarters. Here again they ran into the same anomaly that had impressed them since they landed. There were gleaming electric fixtures, but orderlies brought them tallow candles as dusk fell. There was plumbing of the most advanced order, but when they turned the taps no water came. The orderlies brought buckets full of hot water for their baths in the brighttiled tub. "I don't understand this at all, Ann," said John. He was towelling himself vigorously, while she brushed the quartet's clothing clean of the dust of the road. Phil lolled in luxurious undress on one of the four beds, reading a book from the well-stocked bookcase. Fran, preparing for her bath, was binding up her hair before a full-length mirror. "Even the cold water doesn't run a drop." "Plumbing gets out of order in the best of families, John," Ann reminded him with a smile. He glanced affectionately at her. Blue-eyed, black-haired Ann had been John's companion in the sixand their seven-year-old son now was learning to read in the starship's school. John and Ann clashed like flint and steel in the crowded confines of the starship and consequently maintained no association while aspace. But they were a happy team in the free, challenging atmosphere of a planet. "Electricity, too, at the same time?" he asked. "And it's not just that. The whole place reeks of latent power and high science, but they use an absolute minimum of it." "I've got a partial solution to the garrison state of affairs and the military set-up, anyhow," said Phil from the bed. "They've had a war since we've been gone." "That's no surprise," commented Fran. Chubby, blonde Fran and dark, stocky Phil had been companions for a year aboard the Discovery. They had volunteered jointly for the exploration mission. "They should have had several of them in # years." "This was an interplanetary war," retorted Phil mildly. "Or rather, it wasn't war, but occupation of the Earth by the enemy. The Jovians were smart enough not to attack Earth directly, but threw their strength at the crucial moment behind the weaker side in the war between Eurasia and the American Alliance. Then they moved in to take over the warweakened victors." "The classic role of the strong neutral," commented John drily. "What were the Jovians like?" "Evidently everybody on Earth knew from first-hand experience when this book was written a century ago. There are no descriptions and no illustrations. There are some hints, though : methane-breathing, cold-loving. They had domed, refrigerated cities." "What are you reading -- a history book?" asked Ann curiously. "Yes, it's the newest book of the whole lot, and the only one that isn't brittle and dog-eared. At that, it's the worst-made book of them all. It looks like it was printed on a hand-press and bound by hand." "Pioneers, oh pioneers!" trilled Fran softly. "But what are they doing in the midst of all this technology?" Supper in the officers' mess was a glittering affair in the military tradition. Their conversation developed some new revelations. Third Sarge Elfor was commander of the whole area that surrounded Pebbro for hundreds of miles, including the abandoned spaceport. The Topkick was ruler of the nation, and the nation was the top echelon in a co-operating hierarchy of countries of the world. For some reason, the simplified terms for enlisted men's grades had replaced higher ranks in Earth's military systems: such titles as "sarge" and "topkick." Inquiry developed that none of the officers was familiar with such designations as "captain" and "commander." "But why is the spaceport deseited?" asked Phil. "Is space travel at such a low ebb on Earth now?" "You are mistaken in thinking the port deserted," replied Elf or. "The big guns in the pillboxes are zeroed on your ship. If it tries to blast off, it will be destroyed." There was no enmity in his tone, no threat. It was a simple statement of fact. He didn't elaborate, and the four from the starship discreetly asked no more about it. After the meal, they retired with Elfor and several members of his staff to a quiet lounge. Like every other place they had seen in the building, it was lit with candelabra. They relaxed in comfortable, leather-covered chairs and the men enjoyed the long-forgotten luxury of good cigars. White-aproned servitors brought them wine in fragile, long-stemmed glasses. "You asked about space travel from Earth," said Elfor. "Yes, you might call it at a low ebb. Yours is the first ship to blast down in fifty years, except the scout ships in the Jupiter sector. "It is such an unusual occurrence that the Topkick is being informed daily of developments. When the men of your starship have been assured of our peaceful intentions, it will be hangared underground and the personnel quartered here until further orders from the Topkick. Meanwhile, you are the deevs of the hour and we shall drink to your return to Earth." He stood and raised his glass.' They all arose. The glasses clinked together. "Conserve!" shouted the Third Sarge and gulped his wine. It was a warm moment. For the first time, John felt the genuine glow, the thrill of homecoming, as he and Phil drained their glasses and performed the ancient rite of the spacemen when he sets foot on Earth once more. As in one motion, they hurled the empty glasses through the open door, to smash to pieces against the farther wall of the adjoining corridor. There was a second crashing tinkle on the heels of the first as the glasses of the women followed them closely. It was only when he turned back to Elfor, his face alight, that John realized something was wrong. The Third Sarge stood with his mouth open in astonishment. There was something of horror on the faces of the other Earthmen. Dead silence hung in the room. "Sleep in peace," said Elfor at last, in a strained voice. He turned on his heel and left the room. The staff members followed, coldly. "Well, what do you make of that?" asked John, turning to the others with outspread hands. "Do you suppose those glasses were valuable heirlooms or something?" "They looked like ordinary wineglasses to me," said Fran. "I don't get it, but it looks like we slipped up somewhere." The orderly who escorted them to their room cast an occasional sidelong glance, full of awe, at them. Their heat-guns had been taken from their room. "I don't know what we're in for, Tom," John said gravely into his pocket transmitter when he had tuned in to the ship. "This place is the biggest mess of contradictions I ever ran into. You'd think from the way they live that it's a decadent society living on the ruins of a former civilization. "The perplexing thing is that they obviously have power and know how to use it, but don't." "Your job is to find the motivation, John," replied the commander. "Remember, we couldn't understand the underground living habits of the Deneb IV natives until we lost half a search party in one of their semi-annual meteor showers. Do you have any recommendations for the ship?" "I'd advise you blasting off and taking an orbit," answered John, "but every gun at the spaceport is trained on the ship. I wouldn't take any chances that they don't have atomic weapons. Despite these swords and spears, we've seen several regulation heat-guns around here." "It might interest you to know that they're keeping us awake aboard with a battery of spotlights on us all night," said Tom drily. "Spotlights." John swore softly. "And all we have to see by are candles!" They didn't sleep well that night. They had the distinct impression that armed guards clanked by occasionally outside in the corridor. T here was no indication that they were prisoners the next day, however. Third Sarge Elfor and the other officers were cordial at breakfast and lunch, although they caught some quizzical glances directed at them from time to time. Their movements were not hampered. They were given the run of the town. After noon their armored car was brought in, hauled by four teams of horses. Flanked by a troop of soldiers, it was pulled around a corner and vanished from their sight. "If they're so curious about how it runs, why aren't they quizzing us instead of letting us go on a sight-seeing tour?" wondered Ann, staring after the disappearing vehicle. "I've built up a theory on these Earthmen..." began Phil. But he was interrupted as an officer and a squad of soldiers approached them. The officer saluted smartly. "Deev John Gray, Third Sarge Elfor sends greetings and desires that you confer with him. The others will be free to continue their inspection of the military city of Pebbro." "Very well," agreed John. "Ann, you'd better come along with me to take notes on the conference. We'll see you two tonight, if not sooner." He motioned to the officer to lead the way, and the group went up the street, leaving Phil and Fran standing in the shadow of a towering building. "What's your theory, Phil?" asked Fran. "Simple," he answered. "The Jovian war wiped out civilization. They've just climbed back up part of the way, but they still don't know how to operate the machinery and use the power they have available." "I don't know about that," said Fran doubtfully. "They seem to know how to handle those cannon and searchlights at the spaceport all right." "Automatic control, probably, or -- " Phil paused. He was peering through a barred window at street level. "Say, Fran, look here! Unless I miss my guess, this is a central power station!" Fran stooped to look. "I think you're right," she said. "But it's deserted." "Proof of my theory," he said triumphantly. "Now, if we can just find a door somewhere... John and Ann had been back from a very routine conference with Elfor for more than an hour, and were enjoying the informality of the officers' cocktail lounge in their building. They were aroused by a commotion in the street outside and, along with several off-duty officers in the lounge, ran to the window to see what was up. Phil and Fran, seated in a military jeep, were surrounded by excited soldiers. Some sort of argument was in progress, and John and Ann heard the word "credentials" mentioned. Just as several of the soldiers, with drawn swords, dragged the couple from the jeep, one of the officers from the lounge hurried to the scene. The soldiers stood aside and saluted. There was a heated discussion, with much gesticulating, then Phil and Fran were released and headed for the lounge. The officer got into the jeep and shifted gears. All the soldiers whipped out their swords and stood rigid, presenting arms, as he drove it to the curb at the opposite side of the street. Then he turned off the engine and got out. A guard was posted around it, and a little later a team of horses arrived to pull it away. "How did you people get into such a predicament?" asked John when the show was over and the four of them were enjoying drinks. "Oh, I don't think it was as serious as it looked," said Phil lightly. "We ran across a whole garage full of jeeps. We drove that one all over town before this gang stopped us and wanted to see our written authority for driving it. Everybody else saluted us. That's the military mind for you." "Didn't it occur to you that their objections might be something other than mere military regulations?" asked John in some asperity. "Phil has a theory -- " began Fran, but Phil silenced her with a shake of the head. "My theory can wait until I have proof for it, and I expect that in short order," said Phil, winking at Fran. "We've made good use of our time while you and Ann were in conference." Phil and Fran were eager to know what John and Ann had learned from their conference with Elfor. "Not much," he confessed. "Elfor is pretty close-mouthed. He's more anxious to learn about us than to give us information about their setup. "We did find out, though, that they've located the records of the Discovery's departure in the archives of Kansity. There seems to be something irregular about it, but I couldn't get Elfor to go into detail." The first hint John and Ann had of Phil's method of proving his theory was when he quietly stripped and went into the bathroom as they were preparing for supper that evening. Ann was about to remind him he had forgotten to get the orderly to bring his bath water, when they heard the sound of a shower roaring. All three crowded to the door, to find Phil luxuriating under a steaming downpour. "What goes on here?" demanded John. "Phil, how did you know they'd started the water pumps?" Phil smiled triumphantly. "Try the lights," he suggested. The others trooped back into the bedroom and Ann flicked the switches. White light blazed in the room, overpowering the feeble gleam of the candles. "What is this, Fran?" asked John. "You were with Phil." "We found proof of Phil's theory that these people just don't know how to operate their own machinery," replied Fran happily. "We found their main pumping station. It was in good shape, and it didn't take us long to get the engines started and the main switches thrown." The electric lights suddenly faded and died, leaving them in candlelight again. At the same time, the sound of the shower gurgled to a stop in the bathroom. Phil appeared at the door with a towel, dripping. "Don't tell me their machinery's given out so soon," he growled. "Phil, this is no time to talk about discipline," snapped John angrily, "but you and Fran probably have pulled something a lot worse than the jeep this time. Neither of you is qualified in social psychology, but even so you should have been able to read the signs that they do know how to operate thefi machines. For some reason, they just don't operate them." In less than five minutes. Third Sarge Elfor appeared at their door with a squad of armed men. All of these soldiers carried heat-guns. "Two of you were observed in the vicinity of the power station today," said Elfor. "You are warned that you are suspected of having activated the power supply of the military city of Pebbro." "We don't deny that," admitted John carefully. "We are ignorant of your customs, and hope no harm has been done." "Your claim to ignorance will be determined at a formal hearing," retorted Elfor sternly. "We have given you the benefit of every doubt and treated you as honored deevs. I regret that this makes it necessary that all of you be placed under arrest. Your meal will be served to you in your quarters." As soon as Elfor had gone, leaving armed guards outside their door, John tuned in the starship on his pocket transmitter. "I would have advised against Phil's action, in view of our lack of understanding of the situation," he reported to Commander Wallace. "But I confess I wouldn't have anticipated that the result would be so extreme. "I can't fathom their reactions, Tom. In a crazy sort of way, I suppose they fit in with all the other contradictions of their social set-up. Have you had any luck witli the ship's calculator?" "Not enough data," answered Tom. "Maybe this new stuff will help, and you might scrape for everything else you can transmit. I'd hate to try a rescue operation, because that might force us to head don't decide to blast the ship in the next hour or so, there's a chance we can pull out of this trap at our end." John did not ask for details, for he knew their conversation probably was monitored. T he four of them sat up half the night poring over the books in their room. They gleaned nothing except from the "history" Phil had been reading the night before. Unfortunately, it was not a general history, but the flowery story of a high military family. The sort of references they found were, "after the Jovian invaders had been driven from Earth" and "Second Sarge Vesix participated in the bombardment that destroyed the Jovian tyrants." No details. What did emerge from their study was a picture of the rise of a military aristocracy on the ashes of an earlier civilization which had been ground to pieces under the heels of alien rulers. There was good news from the starship at dawn. "We're orbiting," said Commander Wallace with quiet pride. "Shortly after I talked with you last night, they called on us to surrender or be blasted. I asked time for a conference of officers and promised to fire a rocket from the nose if we decided to surrender. "I fired the rocket all right, but it was an instantaneous smoke screen rocket. I still don't know whether their guns are manned or robot-controlled, but I gambled that their firing was keyed to the sight of the ship blasting off instead of to vibration. We were half a mile up before they could swing into action, and we didn't get a scratch." A rescue mission with one of the scout rockets was too risky against the strong forces of the Earthmen. Tom mentioned that fast planes had followed them into the stratosphere. But one thing was done for the imprisoned four. Soon after breakfast, they were taken under guard to a Spartan courtroom, presided over by Third Sarge Elfor. "We have received a warning from your colleagues," Elfor said grimly. "They broadcast to us a short time ago that if harm came to you, this city and others will be destroyed before they leave the solar system. In case you knew of this and it has in any way raised your hopes, I wish to remind you that Earth's cities have been destroyed before. This threat will not affect our decision to mete strict justice to you. "You are charged with being enemies of the people of Earth, and with having landed on Earth under false colors with the intent of sabotage and espionage. Your prosecutor will be Fifth Tech Jatoo, representing the nations of Earth. You will be permitted to speak in your own defense." Jatoo was a slender, thin-faced man with the air of an experienced attorney. "The governments of Earth make these charges against the joint defendants," he began matter-offactly: "That they are members of a rebellious and traitorous group who are allied with the Jovians and maintain an illegal, secret base on some planet or moon of the solar system; that they came here under the guise of strangers, with the specific intent of espionage and sabotage of Earth's defense against the Jovian enemy; and that they actually began such operations. "We shall present the following major evidence in support of these charges : "First, that the defendants did travel from the Numex spaceport to the military town of Pebbro in a vehicle, the motive power of which is still unknown but which obviously must utilize fuel, in violation of the conservation laws; "Second, that the defendants' colleagues did not approach the peoples of Earth in peace, but remained enfortressed in an armed space vessel; "Third, that the defendants Phil Alcorn and Fran Golden did throw the switches activating the electrical system and powered water system of the military town of Pebbro, that the above-named two defendants did utilize a military power vehicle for pleasure purposes and that all the defendants did unnecessarily destroy glass drinking vessels, all in violation of the conservation laws; "And, fourth, that the starship Discovery, listed in ancient records as having departed on a colonizing mission to the third planet of the star Deneb, was not scheduled to return to Earth for another seventyfive years and therefore could not be the ship in which the defendants arrived, as claimed." Elfor inclined his head toward the quartet from the starship, who sat behind a long table on the side of the room opposite Jatoo. "You may state what your defense will be," he said. "Our defense to the first three items of evidence," answered John, who had been taking notes, "is that we have been absent from Earth for more than # Earth-years and that we were, and are, ignorant of your laws and customs. Thus, we are innocent of intent to violate them. Our defense to the fourth item of evidence is that certain improvements were made in the engines of the starship Discovery was in progress, making it possible for us to return to Earth ahead of schedule. Our defense to all three charges made against us is that they are false." It was a monotonous trial, with a parade of witnesses brought to the stand by Jatoo, all of whom testified lo seeing the defendants perform one or more acts of "unconservation." "In the courts of Earth, a case can be decided only on the evidence presented," said Third Sarge Elfor when John had offered his brief defense for the quartet. "The defendants have presented no evidence, only argumeht. The fact that the defendants' clothing corresponds to that in use two and a half centuries ago cannot be considered competent, as it could be copied easily. "For the safety of Earth, the defendants are found guilty and remanded for immediate execution. In view of the existence of doubt as to their treasonable intent and their previous status as deevs, they are accorded the honor of death by power weapons. Conserve!" Shocked and silent, the four were led to a courtyard outside. As they walked, John switched on his pocket transmitter with a casual, almost unnoticeable gesture, and murmured a report to the ship. "I'm sorry, John," said the commander, his voice tense with emotion. "There's no possibility of rescue, and I know it's small satisfaction to you that your deaths will be avenged." The quartet's hands were bound behind them and they were lined up against a wall. The Third Sarge, attended by a good-sized retinue, stood at ease nearby, smoking a cigar, to direct the execution personally. " 'Power weapons' to them apparently mean regulation heatguns," remarked Phil, almost jocularly. "That's what the fellow has." A soldier was standing square in the center of the courtyard, a pistol dangling from his grip. At a signal from Elfor, he lifted it. "Looks like I'm first," said John, bracing himself. "Be seeing you, somewhere." He gritted his teeth for the wave of unbearable heat that was sure to come. Instead, there was a silent explosion in the midst of the courtyard and the soldier who had held the gun writhed on the ground, incinerated. "John! The gun exploded!" cried Phil in amazement. "I've only seen that happen once before! -- Remember that crewman who wouldn't take the trouble to keep his gun clean?" John was thinking fast. "I remember," he said in a low voice. His heart was still racing from the reaction of his near brush with death. "There's a pattern here. If I could only get a chance to talk over things sensibly with this Third Sarge..." There was great excitement among the soldiery. Several of the men were crowded around the corpse of the marksman. Elfor stood nervously, his hand on his own bolstered gun. "They're concealing weapons," he barked to his aides. "Search them!" A squad of guards swarmed over the four prisoners. There was an excited twitter when they discovered the pocket transmitters. They removed the little packets, snapping the aerial wires, and carried them to Elfor. He glanced at them, took one in his hand, and ordered: "Execute them!" Another guard with a heat-gun took his position in the center of the courtyard. He handled the weapon somewhat gingerly, but checked its mechanism and prepared to follow orders. He waited for the command from Elfor. But the Third Sarge now was staring hard at the little transmitter in his hand. Instead of ordering the guard to fire, he strode across the courtyard and thrust the tiny radio before John's face. "Is this true?" he demanded. He pointed at the well-known symbol stamped on the packet, the red diagram of an atom that warned against opening the lead-shielded mechanism without precaution. "You mean, is it atomic-powered?" asked John. "Yes it is." "It is a weapon?" "No, it's a radio transmitter." "But it operates?" "Certainly it operates. Why in thunder do you think I'd be carrying a useless transmitter?" "It has been many years since this sign was seen on a working mechanism on Earth," said Elfor soberly. "You are familiar, then, with atomic power?" "I'm not an atomic technician," answered John carefully, "but there are several on the Discovery who can build anything from one of these little transmitters to the engines of a spaceship, with the proper equipment." The Third Sarge stood in silent thought for several minutes. He was high in the councils of his country, or he would not have been commander of the zone that guarded Numex spaceport. He knew the reason for the basic slogan "Conserve!" and he knew, as # per cent of his subordinates did not, what circumstances would make that slogan meaningless. "Guard!" he growled. "Unbind the dee vs! John Gray, come with me in peace." "You'd better give me back that transmitter, first," suggested John drily. "I'd hate to escape execution just to get H-bombed by my own ship." It was the next afternoon that the four were escorted by a trimuniformed guard of honor across the flat spaceport to the Discovery. "The Jovians wanted to reduce Earth to colonial status, to be exploited for its natural resources," John explained to his companions as they walked. "All atomic installations were destroyed, all technicians and scientists exterminated systematically and all scientific books burned. They were very thorough about it. "The successful revolt was accomplished with a concealed stockpile of atomic weapons. Since that time, they've been garrisoned against the return of the Jovians. But atomic power was gone and so were the scientists who could bring it back and the books from which new scientists could learn. "It's because they can't replace even so small a thing as an electric light bulb that destruction or unnecessary use of any sort of equipment is the rankest sort of treason. They've been saving all their technological capital for a last-ditch stand against the expected invasion. (Continued on page #) Carman should have known better. Tilting at windmills is a most unrewarding affair -- you just can't win... David Carman watched the yellow snake that was the morning telefax sheet come rippling from the wall slot of his bachelor flat. The folds of plastic-impregnated tape slithered into the receiving tray, and Carman surveyed them glumly. He knew there would only be more bad news -- more tales of defeat in the Sirian war, more heralding of price increases on the consumer front. After a moment of hesitation Carman gathered up the telefax spool and slipped it into the scanner-reader. He shuddered as the first news appeared on the screen. War Sector, # Nov (via subradio) -- A Sirian pitchfork maneuver hurled Earth lines back today in the battle for Sirius IV. The sudden alien thrust cost Earth eight destroyers and more than a hundred casualties. The push began, according to a front-lines communique, when eleven Sirian battle cruisers initiated diversionary tactics in orbit around the Earth base on Sirius IV's seventh moon. Bringing in a battalion of mosquito-ships next, the aliens successfully -- Morosely Carman thumbed his weary eyes and moved the scanner further along. All these war stories were pretty much alike, he thought. And the telefax revelled in detailed descriptions of each ofTensK'e and defensive tactic. Carman knew nothing of war-making; the details bored him. But the next item was hardly more cheering. Lower Urb-district, # Nov -- Consumer prices are due for another increase-spiral as a result of the severe setback suffered by Terran forces in the Sirian sector. Economic Regulator Harrison Morch revealed this morning that a down-the-line # increase is likely. "We tried to hold the line," commented Regulator Morch. "The inflationary trend was too strong to buck, however. It is to be hoped that conclusion of hostilities will soon bring about a reversion to peacetime living standards and -- " With an angry, impatient gesture, Carman blanked the screen. There was little sense spending good money subscribing to the 'fax service if it only brought bad news. Things hadn't been this bad a year ago, before the war started, he thought, as he dialed breakfast and took his seat by the dispensall. He had even been thinking of applying for a marriage permit, then. Now, of course, it was out of the question ; his economic status was totally altered. And Sally, who worked for the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs, had received a pay-boost that put her entirely beyond Carman's aspirations. She was Third Class, now, and would soon marry a wealthy Bureau official. Carman broodingly munched his somewhat dry algae-omclet. He was thirty-three, and not getting younger. He was too pale, too thin, his eyes too close-set, his hair growing sparse. And it seemed that whenever he got some money saved and looked around to better his position, along came some war to send prices shooting up and cripple his savings. Five years ago there had been that thing in Procyon, and then a year or two of peace followed by a scuffle out near Proxima Centauri. And now Sirius. You can't win, he thought. He finished breakfast mechanically, dropped the dishes in the disposall, and selected his second-best suit with a quick, bitter jab at the wardrobe control buttons. It came issuing forth: grey crepe, with dark blue trim. The jacket was getting tattered at the elbows. rd better buy a new suit. Carman decided, as he stepped out on the pickup platform to hail a jetcab. Before clothing prices get astronomical. He reached the office at # that morning, with dawn barely brightening the late autumn sky. Carman worked as a sorter in the permit-processing department of the Confederation Passport Office, and so as a government employee had little recourse when the periodic inflation-spirals came ; he could hardly go on strike against the Confederation. A good-sized batch of passportapplications had already accumulated at his receiving-tray. Carman slid easily into the seat, flashed bright but hollow smiles at the five or six fellow-workers nearest him, and grabbed at the top sheet of the stack. He estimated quickly that a hundred eighty applications had arrived so far. They would be pouring in at a rate of seven a minute the rest of the day. He computed: If I process one form every six seconds, ten a minute, Fll gain three per minute on them. Which means Fit catch up with them in about an hour. If he kept up the ten-a-minute pace, he'd be free to take short breathers later on. This was one of the games he played to make his dreary work more palatable. The first application was from Consumer Second Class Leebig D. Quellen and family ; Consumer Second Class Quellen wanted to visit the Ganymede outpost next summer. Carman plunged the application into the bin stencil-labelled #a with his left hand, and with his right took another from the waiting stack. Sort with the left, grab with the right; sort with the left, grab with the right. Carman swayed rhythmically in his seat as he fell into the pattern of the day's work. After a while he began hitting them twelve to a minute, sometimes thirteen. By # his tray was empty. He sighed. Eight seconds of free time, now, until the next permit reared its ugly head. Sort, grab... sort, grab... it was dull but essentially simple work, in a mechanical way. It scarcely taxed his brain. But he was paid accordingly: # a week, barely a subsistence wage before the last spiral. And now -- # came. Break-time. Carman stretched and rose, noticing angrily that the girl in the upstairs receiving room had slipped three applications in after break-time sounded. She was always pulling tricks like that. Carman had long since reduced break-time to a ritual. He crossed the office to the cleanall and held his hands in the energizing bath until his fingertips were wiped clean of their accumulation of stylus grime; then, he glanced out the single big window at the crowded city, turned, and smiled at Montano, the heavy-set fellow who had occupied the next desk for the six years Carman had worked for the Passport Office. "Nice day," Montano said. "For November." "Yes." "See the morning 'fax? Looks like another upping for prices." Carman nodded unhappily. "I saw. Don't know how we'll manage." "Oh, we'll get along. We always do. The wife's due for a raise soon anyway." Montano's wife pushed buttons in a car autofactory. Somehow she seemed to be due for a raise almost every other week. "That's nice," Carman said. "Yeah." "Does she think cars are going up?" "Damn right," Montano said. "Ford-Chrysler's boosting the stock model to six thousand next month. Need turbogenerators for the war effort, they say. We already got our order in at the old price. You better buy fast if you want one, Carman. Save five hundred bucks now if you're smart." "I don't need a new car," Carman said. "Better get anything you need now, anyway. Everything's going up. Always does, wartime." The bell-tone announced the end of break-time. Carman reached his desk just in time to see a passport application come fluttering down, followed seconds later by another. "Demons take that girl," he muttered softly. She always cut her break short to plague him with extra work. Now she was six -- no, seven -- ahead of him. Justin C. Froelich and family, of Minnetonka, wished permission to visit Pluto next July. Wearily, Carman dropped Justin C. Froelich's application in the proper bin, and reached for the next. He was seething inwardly, cursing the Passport Office, the girl upstairs, inflation. Economic Regulator Morch, and the world in general. It seemed to be a rat-race with no exit from the treadmill. Fve been pushed around too long, he thought. I ought to fight hack a little. Somehow. Consumer Sixth Class Carman was on the verge of changing the course of his life. An hour more passed, and # additional passport applications disappeared into bins. Finally, he made up his mind to act, a spade-faced, dark-complected man with angular features and bright white teeth. He wore the green-and-gold uniform of the United Military Services of Earth. He stared levelly across his shining bare desk at Carman and said, "Would you mind repeating that?" "I said I wanted to fight. Against Sirius." The recruiting officer frowned ponderously. After a long pause he said, "I don't see how I can guarantee that. We enroll you; the computer ships you out. Whether you get sent to the war zone or not depends on a variable complex of factors which certainly no civilian should be expected to understand." He shoved a form across the desk toward Carman. "If you'll fill this out, Mac, we can -- " "No," Carman said. "I want a guarantee that I'll see action in the Sirius sector. Dammit, Lieutenant -- " "Sergeant." " -- Sergeant, I'm thirty-three. I'm as close to being nobody as anybody can get. If I'm lucky I'll get as high as Third Class someday. I've saved ten thousand bucks, and I suppose the new inflation's going to knock my savings in half the way the last one did." "Mr. Cairoan, I don't see how all this -- " "You will. For thirty-three years I've been sitting around on the home front going up and down with each economic spiral while Earth fights wars in Procyon and Proxima C and half a dozen other places. Fm tired of staying home. I want to enlist." "Sure, Mac, but -- " "But I don't want to enlist just to wear a uniform and police the frontiers on Betelgeuse. I want to go to Sirius, and I want to fight. Once in my life I want to engage in positive action on behalf of a Cause." Carman took a deep breath; he hadn't spoken this many words in succession in a long, long time. "Do you understand now? Will you guarantee that I'll be shipped to Sirius if I sign up?" The sergeant exhaled deeply, unhappily. "I've explained twice that the matter's not in my hands. Maybe I could attach a recommendation -- " "A guarantee" "But -- " A crafty light appeared in the recruiting sergeant's eyes; he drummed the desktop momentarily and said, "You're a very persistent man, Mac. You win; I'll see you get assigned to the war zone. Now, why don't you just sign your name here -- " Carman shook his head. "No, thanks. I just changed my mind." Before the sergeant could protest, Carman had backed warily out of the office and was gone. It had abruptly occurred to him that a recruiting officer's promise was not necessarily final. And there were more direct methods he could use to get into the war. He returned to the Passport Office at #, and the robot eye at the office door took note of it, clicking loudly as he passed through. Ordinarily Carman would haye groaned at the loss of thirteen minutes' pay, but, then, ordinarily he would have been at his desk promptly at # anyway. Everyone else was busily at work ; heads bowed, hands groping madly for the incoming applications, his fellow sorters presented an oddly ludicrous sight. Carman resumed his place. Nearly a hundred waiting permits had stacked themselves in the receiving tray during his absence -- but this, too, hardly troubled him now. He went through them at a frantic pace, occasionally hitting as high as twenty per minute. Plenty of them were going to the wrong bins, he realized, but this was no time to worry about that. He caught up with the posting department in less than forty minutes, and made use of his first eight-second breather to draw a blank passport application from his desk drawer; he had always kept a few on hand there. He filled out the blank patiently, in eight-second bursts between each of the arrivals from above. Where it said Name and Status, he wrote Consumer Sixth Class David Carman. Where it said. Intended Desthe war zone, and so theoretically within reach of commercial traffic, but passports to anywhere in the Sirius system were granted only by special dispensation since the outbreak of hostilities, and Carman knew he had small chance of receiving such dispensation. Which was why, after the form was completely filled out, he thoughtfully scribbled an expert forgery of the Secretary of Extraterrestrial Affairs' signature on the bottom of the sheet, okaying the application. Humming gently, he dropped the completed blank into the bin labelled #g and returned his attention to the labors of the day. The passport took eight days to come through. Carman had some uneasy moments while waiting, though he was ultimately confident of success. After all, the workers who processed the sorted applications and issued the passports probably handled their work as mechanically and hastily as he did in the level above them -- and he never had time to check for possible forgeries, so why should they? Never-ending cascades of passport applications descended on them ; probably they cursed him for working so fast, just as he in turn scowled up the chute at the girl in the top level. Five seconds after the passport to Sirius dropped out of his mailchute. Carman was on the phone talking to the secretary of the Personnel Chief at the Passport Office. "Yes, I said Carman. David Carman, Sixth Class. IVe enlisted in the Services and my resignation is eflfective today. Yes, today. My paycheck? Oh, burn it," Carman said impatiently, and hung up. So much for past associations. Carman withdrew his entire savings -- #. The roboteller handed the cash over without comment. Carman took the thick pile of crisp bills, counted slowly through them to the great annoyance of the people behind him in line, and nudged the acknowledge stud to let the teller know the transaction was complete. Outside the bank, he signalled for another copter and took it to the Upper Urbdistrict Spaceport, far out on what had once been Long Island. "A ticket to Sirius?" the dispatcher asked, after the robot ticketvender had passed Carman on to him in perplexity. "But the war, you know -- we've curtailed our service to that entire sector." "I don't care," Carman said stolidly. He was growing accustomed to being forceful now; it came easily to him, and he enjoyed it. "You advertise through transpassport that says I can go there, and I've got six thousand dollars to pay my way. Cash." "This is very irregular," moaned the dispatcher, a short harried-looking little man. "We discontinued passenger service to that system eight months ago, when -- " "You could lose your franchise for this," Carman snapped bluntly. have money and a passport. I demand transportation." freight run bound for Deneb, and put Carman aboard with the promise that they'd drop him at Sirius he had the cash for the payment. The trip took three weeks of steady hyperdrive travel. Six other humans were on board, all badsmelling crewmen, and the crew of a space-freighter is hardly pleasant company on a three-week journey. Carman kept to himself, inventing a form of solitaire he could play making use of hundred-dollar bills, of which he had more than thirty left even after paying passage. The ship's cargo consisted of steers slated for an agrarian colony orbiting Deneb, and Carman lived in a cramped cabin just aft of the cargo hold. He got little sleep. They put him down finally on the concrete landing apron at Zuorf, fifth day of #, having first radioed the Terran consul there to let them know he was coming. Biggest and muggiest of the twelve planets that circled the dog-star, world with ugly sprawling cities crammed between the jagged peaks; its people were brawny ursinoids, not long escaped from their neolithic culture-stage. As it happened, some sort of local celebration was in full sway when Carman, a solitary figure with a solitary suitcase of belongings, left the spaceport. Great heavy-set creatures were whirling up and down the streets in each other's arms, looking like so many dancing-bears clad in tinsel and frills. Carman stepped hastily back into the shadow of a squat yellow-painted building while a platoon of the huge shaggy aliens came thundering past, to the gay accompaniment of distant tootling music composed in excruciating quarter-tone intervals. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. Carman turned and jumped away all in the same nervous motion. He saw an Earthman behind him, clad in the somber black vestments of the Terran diplomatic corps. "Pardon me if I startled you," the stranger said in a soft, cultured voice. He was a neatly-turned out, mildly foppish-looking man in his forties, with elegant features, wellgroomed dark hair, delicatelyshaven brow ridges. Only the startling brass ring through his nostrils marred his otherwise distinguished upper-class appearance. "I'm the Terran consul on this world," he went on, in the same gentle tones. "Adrian Blyde's my name. Am I right in assuming you're the man who was just dropped off by that freighter?" "You are. I'm David Carman of Earth. Want to see my passport?" Consul Blyde smiled serenely. "In due time, Mr. Carman. I'm sure it's in good order. But would you mind telling me precisely why you've "To join the amied forces. I want to take part in the Sirian campaign." "To join the armed forces," Blyde repeated in a faintly wonderstruck voice. "Well well well. That's very interesting, Mr. Carman. Very. Would you come this way, please?" Blyde seized him firmly by the fleshy part of his arm and propelled him across the wide, poorly-paved street, between two pairs of madly careening bear-like beings, and into a narrow doorway in a building constructed of purple brick. "The autochthones are celebrating their annual fertility festival today," the Consul explained. "The couples dance through the city from morning to night without rest. Those that keep on their feet the whole day without collapsing are entitled to mate. The weak ones have to try again next year. It's quite a neat genetic system, really." Carman glanced back through the doorway at the hordes of spinning aliens weaving wildly down the broad street, locked each to each in a desperate grip of love. "The nose-rings denote masculinity' Blyde said. "Terran males who stay here have to wear them too; the natives are very, very fussy about that. When in Rome, you know. I'll give you yours tonight." "Just a minute," Carman said worriedly, as Blyde unlocked an office door and gestured within to a cluttered little room lined with booktapes and scattered papers. "I don't plan to stay here, you know. The military action's on Sirius IV. That's where I'm going as soon as I've seen the authorities and enlisted." Blyde dropped heavily into a well-upholstered pneumochair, wiped perspiration from his brow with an obviously scented cloth, and sighed unhappily. "My dear Mr. Carman: I don't know what motives impelled you to come to this system, nor by what chicanery you wangled your passage. But, now that you're here, there are several things you should know." "Such as?" "For one, there are no hostilities currently taking place anywhere in the Sirius system." Stunned, Carman gasped, "No -- hostilities? Then the war's over?" Blyde touched his fingertips lightly together. "You misunderstand. There never was any war between Earth and Sirius IV. Care for a drink?" "Rye," Carman said automatically. "Never -- was -- a -- war? But -- how -- " "Economic Regulator Harrison Morch of Earth is a great man," Blyde said with seeming irrelevancy, putting his head back as if studying the reticulated pattern of paintcracks on the office ceiling. An air conditioner hummed ineffectually somewhere. "Economic Regulator Morch has devoted a lifetime of study to examining the motives governing fluctuations in economic trends." Carman's throat felt terribly dry. atmosphere, the additional drag of the heavier gravity, the calm blandness of the Consul's manner, the sheer nonsense he was talking -- all these factors were combining to make Carman thoroughly sick. "What does all this have to do with -- " Blyde raised one manicured hand. "Economic Regulator Morch, through his studies, has reduced to a formula the general economic principle known to theorists for centuries -- that spending increases in direct proportion to adverse military news. Consumers go on buying sprees, remembering the last cycle of shortages and of rapid price increases. Money flows more freely. Of course, when the war situation lasts long enough, a period of inflation sets in -- making it necessary that an equally virulent peace be waged." Dimly Carman sensed what was coming. "No," he said. "Yes. There is no war with Sirius. It was a stroke of genius on Economic Regulator Morch's part to take advantage of the uncertainty of interstellar communication to enforce a news-block on the entire Sirius system. It's a simple matter to distribute fabricated war communiques, invent wholly fictitious spaceships which perish gorily on the demand of the moment, arouse public interest and keep it at a high pitch -- " "You mean," Carman said tonelessly, "that Morch invented this whole war, and arranges Terran victories and losses to fit economic conditions back home?" Blyde, smiling complacently. "If a decline in spending occurs, word of severe losses in space reaches the home front, and the bad news serves to unloose the purse-strings. When the economy has been reinflated, Earth's legions forge on to victory, and spending drops off again. We spend heavily in times of stress, when we need consolation -- not in peacetime." Carman blinked. "I spent six thousand dollars and forged a passport to come here and find out this! The one time in my life I decided to do something, instead of sitting back and letting things happen to me, I discover it's all a hoax." He flexed his fingers experimentally, as if wondering what he might do with them. Blyde seemed to be sympathetic. "It is, I realize, terribly awkward for you. But no more so than it is to us, who have the strenuous task of preserving this beneficial hoax and protecting it from would-be exposers." "Are you going to kill me, then?" Blyde blanched at the blunt question. "Mr. Carman! We are not barbarians!" "Well, what are you going to do with me?" The Consul shrugged. "The one completely satisfactory thing. We'll find you a good job here on Sirius than you ever were on Earth. Naturally, you can't be permitted to return home." But the man who can forge a passport to Sirius can also find a way home. In Carman's case it took him seven full months -- months of living in the sticky endless heat of sinoid natives, kowtowing to Blyde (whose secretary he became, at # a week) and wearing a brass nosering through his nostrils. It was seven months before he had mastered Blyde's signature to his own satisfaction, and knew enough of local diplomatic protocol to be able to requisition a spaceship from the small military outpost just outside Zuorf. A messenger -- there were no phones on the planet, for obscure religious reasons -- came to the Consulate to announce that the ship was ready. "Wait outside," Carman told the boy. Blyde looked up from behind his desk and said, "What ship does he mean?" "The one I'm taking back to Earth," said Carman, and released the sleep-capsule. Blyde smiled sweetly as he slipped into unconsciousness. Carman followed the boy to the spaceport. A slim, trim two-man ship waited there, sleek and golden-hulled in the bright sunlight. The pilot was an efficient-looking space-tanned man named Duane. "Diplomatic pouch," Carman said, handing over the leather attache-case he had prepared for the occasion. Duane stored it reverently in the hold, and they blasted off. "Sirius IV first," Carman ordered. "Fm supposed to take films. Top-secret, of course." "Of course." They circled the small pockmarked gray fourth planet at # feet, and Carman took enough cloud-piercing infra-red shots to prove conclusively that there was not and never had been any war between the amiable amphibious aborigines and Earth. Satisfied, he ordered the pilot to proceed immediately toward Sol. They reached Earth nineteen days later, on # August #. A squad of security police was waiting for them as they landed at Upper Urb-district Spaceport, and Carman was swiftly conveyed to a cell in Confederation Detention House in the tunnels far below Old Manhattan. Blyde had sent word ahead via subradio concerning Carman's escape, it seemed. In his cell, later that evening. Carman was visited by a parchedlooking, almost fleshless man in the blue cape and red wig of high governmental office. "So you're the culprit!" "That's what they tell me. Who are you?" "Ferdan Veller, Administrative Assistant to Regulator Morch. The Regulator sent me to see who you were and what you were like." "Well, now you've seen," Carman said. "Get out." Assistant Veller's melancholy eyes widened. "I see you're a fprceful man, Mr. Carman. No doubt you're full of plans for escaping, recapturing your confiscated films, and letting the world know what a dastardly hoax is being perpetrated in the interests of a balanced economy. Eh?" "I might be," Carman admitted. "You might be interested in this morning's telefax sheet, then," Veller said. He extended a torn-off yellow strip. The headline was: Government City, # Aug # -- Word reached Earth today of yet another threat to her peace, coming, hot on the heels of the recently-concluded police action in the Sirius sector. Forces in the Great Andromeda Nebula have issued statements inimical to Earth, and a new conflict looms -- " "You killed off Sirius because you were afraid I'd expose it," Carman said accusingly. "And now you're starting up a new one." Veller nodded smugly. "Quite. The Great Andromeda Nebula happens to be # light-years away. The round trip, even by hyperdrive, takes some twenty years." He grinned, showing a double row of square tartared teeth. "You're a (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Virgil Finlay He was a hunter with a Cause that transcended all law. But, now, could the Cause forgive him his service? the night side, less than thirty miles from Thanlar, the capitol city. The dark, slim ship drifted silently to the ground, discharged its passenger and lifted again, moving slowly like a great shark in the night. On the way out into space, it was caught by the defense screens of Thanlar and disappeared in a gout of flaming energy that lit up the entire night sky. The raider did not see it; he was already asleep. He slept, and his dreams were troubled by images of a familiar face. Strong cheekbones, the mane of white hair, the famous half-smile of Mayne Landing, Earth Commissioner to the Colony Planets. Mayne Landing, the gentle representative of Terra to her children, the kindly old gentleman with the fist of steel, the benevolent despot over a hundred Colony Planets. Mayne Landing: victim. The raider woke with the dawn, a dawn that was slightly more redtinged than the sun he was used to. He gathered his small store of equipment together and cached it in the low scrub of the surrounding forest. By a clear, sparkling stream he washed, wincing slightly from the shock of the too-cold water against his face. He wore clothes indistinguishable from the other farmers of this district, slightly shabby, a uniform dun color. They did not fit him well, but they could not hide the wide shoulder and slim waist. Well, it didn't matter: the farmers of this planet, like all the Colonies, had to work hard to scrape their meager living from the rocky soil. They were all in good condition; he would not be conspicuous. He finished washing and dried himself on the sleeve of his jumper. Then he began to walk down the rocky hill to the village that stood in the tiny valley below. In the early sun, the tiny assemblage of white clean houses sparkled like a handful of sand-polished shells clustered on a beach. He stopped for a moment, halfway down, looking at the village. It was a nice little place, he thought. Peaceful in the early light, calm. There were a few people moving about the streets, probably farmers early on their way to the fields. It was a pastoral scene, like something he had read in a book a long time ago. Nice, he thought. Quiet. I wonder what it will he like when Fm finished here. It didn't pay to think about things like that. Not in his business. He let his eyes shift slightly to take in the tall towers of Thanlar, just visible over the crest of hills on the other side of the valley. Thanlar, the capitol. That was his concern. That was what he had to think about, not the village. He sighed once, started down the hill again, walking slowly, picking his way through the loose rocks with care: As he neared the village, he passed several crews of men going out into the fields. He greeted them in Interlingua, and they replied shortly, without curiosity. He knew he was a stranger to them; they did not recognize him, but they showed no curiosity. These days, curiosity was not much advantage to anyone, he thought. The farmers had probably learned long ago not to show too much interest in any stranger who suddenly appeared from nowhere. He came into the village and walked quickly to the faded wooden Entering the little shop, more a general dry-goods store than a tailor, he moved to the rear, to a small counter. No one was there, and he rang the bell on the counter. After a moment, a man appeared, hastily buttoning a tunic, his hair still tousled, sleep in his eyes. "Yes, yes? What is it? You are too early." "My apologies, old man," said the raider. "I am looking for a hunting cloak." The small man's eyes narrowed. "Ah," he said. "A hunting cloak. I have several. What did you have in mind." "Something in gray. To suit my name." "Ah. And what might you be hunting, Mr. -- Gray?" "An animal of my home planet. It is called a jackal." "Ah." The old man suddenly turned from the low rack of cloaks and stared directly at his customer. His mouth compressed in a thin, bitter line. "So. You are he. The Mr. Gray who hunts the jackal. Come." He turned and led the way into his living quarters behind the counter. "I will tell the others you are here," he said. He left through a rear door, leaving the raider to wander about the tiny room, inspecting it without interest. He had seen too many like it in the past five years to be interested. Dingy little rooms in the back of a store, insect-ridden chambers in public lodgings, shack in the backwoods outside a city, too many, too many. And never a place to rest. After this one, he promised himself. After this one. Soon the little tailor came back, and there were two others with him. One was a ferret-eyed little man with a suspicious stare, the other a heavy-set farmer. The heavy-set man had a scythe in his hand, he had apparently been on his way to his fields when the tailor found him. He held the scythe tightly, and the raider could see he was very nerv'ous. It was probably the first time he had ever come into contact with one of the raider's -- profession. He didn't like it. Extending his free right hand, the farmer said, "My name is Garroll. Joseph Carroll. You are -- Mr. Gray?" The raider took the proffered hand warmly, trying to gain this man's friendship. He would need all the help he could get. "Gray is my given name, Mr. Carroll. My last name -- " he laughed embarrassedly, " -- well, they call me Wolf, for the time being." "Appropriate," said the man bitterly. "I'm sorry I have to meet you under these conditions, Mr. Carroll, very sorry." The other shrugged, keeping his eyes fixed on the raider's lean, brown face, trying to guess what sort of mind lay behind it. "In these times," he said finally, with an air of discouragement, "one cannot choose either one's friends or the conditions of meeting. The ferret-eyed man had been watching the exchange closely, and now he sidled up to the raider with his thin, white hand extended. "Please forgive Joseph," he said smoothly. "He is not happy about this affair." His voice exuded a sort of artificial charm, and Wolf found himself repelled by the man. "None of us do," he said. He turned to the farmer again, who was standing uncomfortably, his eyes on the floor. Wolf watched him for a moment, just long enough for the farmer to know he was being watched. "Perhaps," said Wolf slowly, "we had better straighten this out right now." The heavy-set man looked up defiantly. "All right," he said. "I admit I do not like this business, I do not like what you are here for, I do not like what will happen to our village when you are gone." The thin man laughed. "The old man means to say he is a coward." "No," said the man stubbornly, without taking his eyes away from Wolf. "I am not a coward. But your mission means death for many people, people I call my friends. I do not like that." "There is a necessity," said Wolf, quietly. "Perhaps, perhaps," said Joseph Carroll, shaking his head dubiously. "I do not pretend to understand the political complications. I know only that, whether you succeed or fail, our village is lost. Our people will suffer for what you do. Many will probably die. You cannot expect me to like that." "No," Wolf agreed. "We do not expect that of you, Joseph. No one expects you to like this. But, tell me -- " "Yes." "What was your tax the past year?" Wolf asked. The old man laughed bitterly. "Seventy-nine percent." "Enough to live on?" "Barely," said Carroll, leaning heavily on the scythe. "It means we must work many hours, sixteen or more a day, in order to survive." "That is what we fight," said Wolf simply. "That, and the near slavery of many of the Colonies. Do you know what happens to the money you pay the Ter ran Federation in taxes?" "No," admitted Carroll. "No one has dared ask." Wolf laughed. "And yet they say the Federation is a republic? When the citizen does not dare ask what happens to the taxes that are ground out of him? Fll tell you, my friend Joseph. It is used for administration. Simply that. Administration of a space empire is an expensive project, and you must pay for it. It costs a great deal of money, our treasured Empire. And what does the administration consist of? Machinery to collect taxes. It is like a snake that feeds on its own tail, Joseph. Taxes are increased in order to have enough money to collect more taxes. It never ends." "This is one thing," said Joseph. "How many do you know who have died in Debtor's camps, or died because they could not work hard enough? Joseph, this is no life for a man. The Colonies cannot develop under the Federation. They must be free to govern themselves. Otherwise, we have simply a great, cancerous tumor, spreading through the universe, calling itself the Terran Federation." Joseph sighed. "All right," he said. "In principle I agree. The colonies must be free. But is there no other way than murder and assassination? This violence -- what can come of it? And if the revolution succeeds eventually, how can we know the Federation will not be replaced by the same thing under another name?" "Because you will govern yourselves," Wolf said. "Every Colony will be autonomous, trading as a sovereign nation with the other Colonies. The idea of a Galactic Empire is self-defeating, Joseph, it is unhealthy, vicious. The only way man can go to the stars with his head up, is without dreams of infinite power blinding him." "You are an idealist," said the ferret-eyed man, with surprise. "A man must live for something," said Wolf, quietly. "Certainly, certainly," the thin man agreed quickly. "I was surprised to find an idealist in your -- trade." "My trade is as distasteful to me as it is to you," said Wolf, speaking more to Joseph Carroll than to the pale, thin man. "What will the death of Mayne Landing accomplish?" Carroll asked. "Confusion. He is the Administrator of over one hundred planets. He is a strong man, a focal point. Without him, without his personal strength, the administration of those planets will falter, and stop. It isn't that he carries on the routine work, of course. But decisions come from him, the decisions that cannot be made by routine, the decisions that require a man's creative spark. Without that, the routine itself cannot stand." "It rather sounds as if you respect the man," said Carroll. "Respect him? I -- " Wolf hesitated, uncertain. "Yes," he finished. "I respect him. He is doing what he thinks is right, as I do what I think is right." "And you would kill a man for whom you hold no hatred," Carroll muttered. "This thing is making beasts of us all." If you only knew, thought Wolf, if you only knew, "Sometimes it is necessary," he said aloud. "Sometimes bad things are necessary, that good may follow." Carroll sighed. "Well, we are committed now. We must go ahead." "I will need detailed information on Landing's plan of inspection," Wolf said. "You will have it," Carroll told him. "Daimya has been in the city for five days, listening and watching. "Good," said Wolf. He felt better now, getting into the operation. This he knew, this he could handle. It was what he was trained for. It was the other things that were bad, the thinking, the wondering, the long nights spent sleepless, uncertain. "When will he be back?" Wolf asked. "This Daimya." "She. Daimya is my daughter," Carroll said. "Even our children must have blood on their hands. She will return this evening." D aimya came, just after dark. Wolf was startled. He had expected a child, from the way Carroll spoke, and Daimya was far from a child. She was a slim woman, in her early twenties, he estimated. Her body was sleek and fit, and her long black hair was tied behind her head, where it flowed over her back like a waterfall carved from ebony. She had large eyes, slightly almond shaped, that regarded him solemnly as she gave the information she had gathered. "He will come to inspect this village in two days," she said. "He will visit four farms, picked at random, and then there will be a procession down the main street." "That would be our time," Wolf mused. "Crowds about." "Some will be killed," Daimya objected. "His guards will not take this thing lightly." "I am sorry," Wolf said sincerely. "It is our best chance of success." Daimya shrugged. "You are the killer, not I," she said, with obvious distaste. Wolf felt an impulse to explain, to justify, to make this slight girl see that he hated this. Angrily he fought it down. It doesn't matter what she thinks he told himself. It doesn't matter. What matters is to get the job done and get out. That's all. "Tell me," Daimya said curiously, "how do you come to be mixed up in a thing like this? You don't act like a hired killer." Wolf laughed shortly. "No," he said. "I'm an amateur. I was a Captain of the Security Patrol once. My whole family was in Federation Service, as a matter of fact. I was on Colony Patrol for three years. In that time I saw so much suffering, so much injustice, so much simple cruelty that -- well, never mind. When I was contacted by a member of the revolution underground, I deserted. It almost killed my father. Since I was familiar with the Federation's higher echelons, I was assigned the pleasant job of assassin." "How many men have you killed in that job?" Daimya asked, almost casually. Wolf watched her for a long moment before answering. "You don't want to ktiow that," he said slowly. The girl dropped her eyes. "No. No, I guess you're right. I'm sorry." She stood and went to the door. She stopped there and turned, looking at Wolf. He met her eyes and held them with his own, frankly, without embarrassment. "I'm sorry," she repeated. She closed the door softly behind her, and Wolf bent to study the map of the village she had provided. T he village lay in a cupshaped valley. The main street was also a direct highway out of Thanlar. On either side of the highway, the farmer's fields stretched, checkered brown and green, to the foothills. The entire valley was not more than a mile wide, and the fields extended only a quarter of a mile on either side of the main road. The foothills added another quarter of a mile, and then, abruptly, the mountains started. Though one of the principal highways to Thanlar, the main street was fairly narrow, bordered closely on either side by the small business district, composed mostly of single story buildings constructed out of native lumber from the hills. Wolf decided the center of the business district would offer the most concealment. Any group of men at any other place would be viewed with suspicion by Mayne Landing's bodyguards, and their chances would be proportionately diminished. It remained to determine the most effective weapon. Explosive? No, too many villagers would be killed. Yet that would certainly be the most certain way, a grenade thrown from the roof of one of the low buildings. He wondered how thoroughly the Administrator's men would check the village before the procession. Joseph Carroll told him the check was cursory; except for the spasmodic attacks of the revolution underground, the Colonies were submissive enough, and the precautions taken were in the nature of routine. It looked to be easy. Wolf thought wryly. The easiest of them all, since the planet was fairly distant from the scene of previous underground operations. They wouldn't be expecting it, he thought. Down the main street in procession, the Administrator standing in the little ground car, smiling and waving to his subjects, genial, effusive. And then -- "Joseph," said Wolf suddenly. "How many men can I depend on?" "Perhaps thirty," said the farmer. "Perhaps a few more." "Are they completely dependable?" "Within reason," said Carroll. "They are farmers, not soldiers. Plows are more familiar to them than guns." "How many can you get me that will obey me without question, no matter what?" Joseph Carroll tugged absentiy at his ear. Finally, he shrugged. "Perhaps five," he said. "Including myself." "All right," sighed Wolf. "It will have to be that way, then. But the others can be depended on 'within reason?' " "Yes," Carroll said. "Do not ex# pect too much. They do not like this business." "Neither do you," Wolf said. "But you count yourself among the five trustworthy." Carroll didn't answer, and Wolf took his silence as a declaration of faith. "All right," he said. "Leave me now. At sunset, bring your men to me, all of them. I will work out the attack." "Very well," said Carroll, and started to leave. "Joseph," said Wolf softly, and the older man tui ned at the door. "What is it?" "What about Daimya?" "What about her?" "Where will she be during -- this attack?" "At home, I expect," said Carroll. "Where she belongs." Wolf toyed for a moment with the map that lay before him. "Joseph," he said. "What will happen to the village?" "You don't know?" asked Carroll in surprise. "No," Wolf admitted. "I have never stayed behind." Carroll laughed bitterly. "One of two things," he said. "They will either demolish it from the air, including the populace, or they will put everyone in one of the forced labor camps." The farmer made a small gesture of resignation. "I didn't know," Wolf said, almost under his breath. Can I be responsible for that? "They don't like Colonists cooperating with the revolutionaries," Carroll continued. "Did you expect they exempted us all from our taxes as a reward?" "No," Wolf said. "But I didn't know it was so -- complete." "They are thorough," the old man shrugged. "Any village where an incident occurs is made an example. Before long, you people will not find much welcome in the Colonies." "I suppose not," Wolf mused. "Perhaps by then -- " "You really believe you're going to succeed in overthrowing the Federation, don't you?" "I must," said Wolf. "Without that, all this -- " he gestured to the map before him, traced with arrows, notations, ideas, " -- is meaningless slaughter." "So it seems," Carroll said flatly. "Joseph," said Wolf suddenly. "With luck, there will be a ship waiting for me in the mountains when I've -- finished here." "That's your good fortune," Carroll said grimly. "Will you come with me?" "And join the revolutionaries?" "You -- and Daimya." Carroll considered it slowly. "No," he said finally. "Not I. I have gotten my people into this, I must stay with them. All were against it when you first contacted us. All but me. It is my fault. I have to stay with them." Wolf felt a sudden surge of affection for the old man. Reluctant he might be, but he knew what he was doing and he knew the consethem. "And Daimya?" "That is a different matter," said Carroll. "It is not right that she should suffer for her father's folly." Or that a father should suffer for his sons folly, thought Wolf. But he said nothing. "You would take her?" Carroll asked. "If I am -- able," said Wolf. "All right," said the old man. "I will see to it. Better she should be alive than dead. That is all that matters." Wolfs final plan was simple. He had not enough men to count on a direct attack. The major work would be performed by the dependable five, of which Carroll assured him. The others would be used to create a diversion to cover the actual assault. There was a slight bend to the highway just before it entered the village. When the procession passed this point, they would see a group of men disperse quickly into the low scrub at the side of the road. This would put them on their guard, they would be apprehensive, watching. When the procession had entered the village itself and was within the short commercial strip, there would be an explosion back of them. Grenades, perhaps some shooting. If Wolfs prediction were accurate, this would divert the attention of at least the major portion of guards for long enough. Long enough for the five men in the crowd to do what they had to do -- "This must be timed perfectly," he told the man who was to head the diversionary squad. "I understand that." "Too soon or too late, either will destroy us. It will take us too long to reach the Administrator. He must be exactly opposite the tailor's shop. It must be done right." "It will be done right." "If it is not, all the sacrifices are for nothing, you understand that? The consequences will be as bad, or worse, for the village, and we will have accomplished nothing. If the Administrator is dead, there will be time for most of the villagers to escape into the hills before the Federation can take action against them." The man left, after Wolf had provided him with the weapons his group would need from his cache on the nearby hillside. The dependable five were instructed in their parts, and then there was nothing to do but wait. The next morning dawned clear. The air was cool, a slight breeze ruffled the fields around the village. As the sun rose higher in the sky, it glinted sharply from the towers of Thanlar. It had been impossible to keep the entire operation a secret from the villagers. They knew something was to happen, and they knew it concerned the inspection trip of Mayne Landing to the village. It was not hard to guess what it was. As the day drew on toward noon, the tension of the people grew. Small knots of farmers gathered on the comers, their fields forgotten for the day, talking low. Wolf didn't like it, it was too obvious. The village was primed, ready to explode, and he was afraid the tension would make the guards too alert. They had to be just tense enough to respond to the diversion, not enough so they would be watching everywhere. He was counting on an instinctive, rapid response. He sat behind the tailor shop, talking to his men with a confidence and calm he did not feel. He spoke as if the success of the mission were a foregone fact, and the escape of the villagers into the hills. But he knew it was tenuous. Perhaps he had planned it too critically. Perhaps a simple direct attack would have been better. Perhaps, perhaps -- Any number of things were possible, he thought. But it was done now. If he had made a mistake, they would know soon. On the contraband comset behind the tailor shop. Wolf had called the mother-ship that hovered just out of detection range. All right, they confirmed, there would be a shuttle in the hills back of the town. Did he know the shuttle that had brought him had been lost? No? Well, it had. With the whole crew aboard. That many more, thought Wolf. If anybody's keeping a list, Tve got a lot to my credit. Or damnation. And, bitterly: More friends than enemies. Don't think about it. Do your job and get the hell out. If you can. He spoke to Daimya, but on her father's advice did not tell her of his plan to take her along. "She won't go voluntarily," the old man said frankly. "We will have to pretend we are all going to the hills. After that -- " he nodded slowly, " -- the problem is yours." "I will take care of her, Joseph," Wolf had promised, and the sunbrowned farmer had clasped his hand tightly in a mute gesture of hopefulness. "You understand -- a man and his daughter -- you understand?" More than you probably know, Joseph. "Yes," he said aloud. "I think I understand." And then came the word that the Administrator's procession was in sight. Wolf looked at his five dependables. He passed each face slowly, as if he had never seen them before. They were young, and old, and middle-aged. They were dark from the hours in the sun, strong from the work that pulled their muscles for the long hours each day. They smiled at him, grimly, nervous, but they were good men. The faces of freedom. Wolf thought. These are the faces and the bodies of freedom. Then it was time. with silent people when the procession came into view around the slight curve. Then there was a tentative cheer from someone. It was taken up by someone else, and soon the crowd was roaring its synthetic appreciation of Administrator Mayne Landing. Woff breathed easier. Craning his neck in the crowd. Wolf spotted the other five, standing dispersed in the crowd, but all near the spot on the street opposite the tailor's shop. They made no acknowledgement except meeting his eyes, then turning away to watch the procession near. As they came closer. Wolf noted with satisfaction that several of the guards occasionally glanced at the street behind them. Good. They had seen the knot of men outside town, then. If they expected anything, they were expecting it from behind them. He could see the tall, straight figure of Mayne Landing in the ground car. He took in the familiar face almost hungrily, the great shock of white hair moving gently in the slight breeze, the characteristic gesture, a half-salute, the slight smile, the kindly eyes of the old man -- He tore his eyes away from the dignified figure and glanced behind him, down the street. He saw a figure move on a roof-top, and wondered if the guards saw it, too. Then the ground car was opposite, and Wolf had a wrenching sensation that the diversionary squad was not going to go through with it... An explosion rocked the street a block away, shaking the ground underfoot, shattering windows in the adjacent stores. A billow of dirty black smoke began to drift toward the sky. There was a scattering of small, explosive fire. The tone of the crowd's roar changed. It deepened and became a mass cry of confusion and fright. Quietly, Wolf edged forward to the street, automatically noting that his men were doing the same. Several of the guards had turned, were running back toward the source of the excitement, and others were turned toward it. But those around Mayne Landing had not responded. They were keeping their eyes fixed on the crowd. They were too well trained to be drawn off, and Wolf cursed under his breath. He stopped his forward motion and waited, rocking on the balls of his feet. This was the part he hadn't told his five about. Suddenly there was a flurry in the crowd on the opposite side of the street. The nearest guard whirled, in time to draw his hand gun and fire. The first of the five sprawled in the street, a bloody stump where his head had been. But the guard's blast had not been in time to stop the long mowing knife that buried itself to the hilt in his throat. He lurched forward, dropping the hand gun. His momentum carried him almost into the edge of the crowd, and a woman screamed hysterically. Wolf's other men had been only a fraction of a second behind the first, and the street was now a chaos of shouting and the sharp, flat reports of the guards' hand guns. The crowd milled frantically, adding to the confusion as the attackers leaped at the procession. Wolf waited, waited, watching for the single split-second when the guards were fully engaged with the crowd. Then it came, and their heads were momentarily turned away from Mayne Landing. Wolf sprinted from the crowd, the short stiletto cradled in his hand. He leaped to the side of the ground car just as Mayne Landing turned toward him. He saw the old man's face clearly in that moment. It held no fear, but only an unbelievable surprise, an astonishment beyond understanding. Then the stiletto slid gently into the throat, severing the jugular, and all surprise and emotion was lost in the implacable blank agony of death. The stillpumping heart forced a pulsing stream of bright arterial blood around the blade of the knife. Then, as quickly as he had come, Wolf was gone. He slipped back through the crowd, into the door of the tailor shop. Seconds later, Joseph Carroll was there, one side of his gray farmer's tunic turning brown-black from the blood that soaked it. "Come on!" Carroll snapped, running for the back. "What about the others?" "Gk)ne," said the old man shortly. "All of them.'; He dashed out the door of the tailor shop into the back and Wolf followed him. "Daimya!" Wolf shouted. "She's waiting for us in the foothills." The sound of the crowd and the blasting of hand guns was loud behind them as they began their dash across the checkered fields. For a few moments, nothing followed. Then Wolf heard a faint shout behind them, and a huge gout of dirt erupted from the field beside him, almost knocking him down. He regained his balance and started to run low, crouched and zig-zagging while the tiny explosive pellets pocked the field around him. It seemed an eternity before they had crossed the field, but he knew it was not more than a couple of minutes. Joseph Carroll was ahead of him, already beginning to tear through the scrub growth of the foothills, making his way up. Just as he entered the undergrowth. Wolf saw the old man joined by a smaller, slighter figure. There was a roar in his ears, and he fell, a searing pain across his back. Numbly, he realized he'd been hit, but somehow it didn't seem important. He picked himself up and followed Carroll into the scrub. Soon he was out of sight of their pursuers, though the explosions of their weapons still followed them with uncanny accuracy. He caught up with the old man and his daughter in a small clearing. Carroll lay with his head cradled in Daimya's lap, gasping for breath. "We've got to go on," Wolf said. "Come on. I'll help." "You're hurt!" the girl said. "Not badly. Come on, we've got to get your father out of here!" The old man put his arms around the shoulders of the other two, and they struggled up the hill, breaking their way through the brush, slipping, sometimes falling. Behind them, there was still the occasional sound of the explosive pellets, and infrequently, one came very near. "Close," muttered Wolf as an explosion showered them with dirt. "They're on the path now." They went a few steps farther, and Joseph slumped between them. "Dad!" called Daimya. "Please! Please try to go on!" Wolfs hand slid down the old man's back, came away warm and wet. He was silent for a moment, then gently lowered the suddenly limp body to the ground. "Come on," he said to Daimya. The girl was standing over the inert form of her father, not understanding what had happened, words of encouragement still on her lips. "Dad?" she said, bewildered. Wolf took her arm. "Daimya, he's gone. Gome on." "No -- Dad -- " She knelt beside him on the ground. "Sorry, Daimya," Wolf said under his breath. He swung, hitting her cleanly behind the head. The girl collapsed soundlessly, and he slung her over his shoulder and started on up the hill. Finally, he cleared the crest. Just beyond it, lying in a tiny meadow lay the black, unmarked shuttle ship. As he came in view, the port opened and a man ran toward him. Wolf stumbled, caught his balance, went on. "Here," said the crewman, "let me take her." Silently, out of fatigue. Wolf relinquished his load and stumbled toward the port. It slid shut behind them, just in time to keep them from being covered with dirt blown from a hole that suddenly appeared a yard behind. Wolf caught a glimpse of men appearing at the crest. Inside the ship, he could hear the thud and clang of the explosive cartridges detonating uselessly against the permalloy hull. Then the drives roared their song of power, and the shuttle lifted clear. The crewmen were more than curious. "Who the hell's the girl?" "Got me. Never heard of such a thing." "Well, I suppose a Raider has a right to pick up a little booty now and then," another laughed. "They don't have the easiest job in the world." "Bet she's going to be mad when she wakes up." "Yeah. Looks like the Raider might be worrying a little about that right now." Wolf stood at the forward screen, silerftly watching the shape of the mother-ship grow larger and larger until the screen held nothing but the great black hull. The crewmen were wrong, he wasn't worried about Daimya's waking. He could take care of that when the time came. He was thinking about other things, the things that came to him when he slept, the faces, the names, the actions, the right and wrong of living according to what you tlunk is right, no matter what the cost. But the cost, the cost... It was so high sometimes, so terribly high. This trip, he thought. A shuttle crew. Five good men, probably the whole village, eventually. Those who did escape into the hills would lead a life of fear and pursuit, foraging as they went until finally they were caught. And worst of all, this was worst of all, and mentally he saw the list, the list of his responsibilities, the list for which he would someday have to account. The bright name of Mayne Landing : victim. His mind shied away from it. Can that he forgiven? Can such a thing ever be forgiven? Gray Landing, called Wolf in the underground, turned away from the forward screen and began to prepare to board the motherinopportune moment, being in time to overhear the greater part of an acrimonious exchange between Captain Triggs and Galder, his Mate, A faint smile flickered over the missionary's lean, deeply lined face as he listened to the richly embroidered invective. "Call yourself a navigator!" bellowed Triggs. "It breaks my heart when I think of all the better navigators that I've flushed away!" "Well, we're here," said Calder sullenly. the damned planet, and God knows how many tons of The Bureaucrat reaction mass we shall have to wasffe chasing it round in its orbit! If you had some big, fat blonde waiting for you there you'd have slid into normal spacetime only half an inch from the surface." "If you'd kept your big, dirtypaws off the drive controls -- " flared Calder. "Of all the pests in space, there's none worse than a master who can't mind his own business. The drive was running perfectly until you wrecked it. Why the bloody hell can't you leave things alone?" "The drive was not running perfectly, and you damn well know it, Mr. Calder. If I hadn't taken charge we'd have finished up away to hell and gone outside the Galaxy!" Calder made the only possible reply -- the monosyllabic one. Then he saw Lanvin. He flushed. "Good morning. Pastor," he said. Captain Triggs hastily smoothed his rugged features into an expression of amiability. Illustrated by Paul Orban It has been said that if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. And that's just what someone had done on backward Gerak "Gk)od morning, Pastor," he echoed. He gestured towards the wide viewports, which now showed the normal blackness of space, the nonnal bright, unwinking stars, instead of the distorted swirls of multicolored light that were all to be seen when the interstellar drive was in operation. "We got you here." "So I see," said Lanvin. "So I heard." "Just letting off steam," explained Triggs. "You will appreciate that interstellar navigation is rather a strain on the nerves. Look!" He pointed. With the slow rotation of the ship the sun of this planetary system was swinging into view, a blazing disc, its corona giving it an oddly winged look. Hastily Calder operated the dimmers, reducing the light striking through the big ports to a tolerable intensity. "Look! There she is -- and that ball, just to the left of her, is Gerak." "How long before we land?" asked Lanvin. "About three days -- although it may be longer. There's no spaceport, of course, and we may have to waste time looking for a suitable landing place." "Time spent in the service of my Master is never wasted," said Lanvin gently. "Besides -- the Society is paying you generously for your services." "No more than the usual charter rates," pointed out Calder sourly. "They're helping to keep you in a job," snapped Triggs. "Anyhow -- we are wasting time hanging out here admiring the scenery. Get her lined up for Gerak, and get the rockets started as soon as you can!" Calder started barking into the microphone. "All hands prepare for acceleration! All off-duty personnel to acceleration couches! All hands prepare for acceleration!" "You may stay here if you wish. Pastor," said Triggs. "The Second Officer will not be coming up, and you can take his chair." "Thank you, Captain," said Lanvin. The surge of acceleration pressing him deeply into the padding of the chair was a reminder to Lativin of the gravity to which he would soon have to become accustomed once more. Always, at the conclusion of a voyage, was there this feeling of regret, almost of loss. He did not subscribe to the theory, now widely held, that only in deep space is Man close to his Creator -- but he would have hesitated to denounce it, as it had been denounced, as yet another addition to the long list of heresies. He focussed his attention on the little, glowing ball -- Gerak -- that the ship was chasing. He reviewed in his mind the data that had been placed at his disposal by the Directorate of the Society. Mass, atmospheric pressure and content, humidity and climate were so close to Earth normal that he did not anticipate inconvenience or discomfort on that score -- and he reproved himself for having allowed himself to consider that aspect of his mission. The people were humanoid, intelligent -- but, according to the reports available from the Interstellar Sui'vey Commission, living in a state of savagery. They were pagans. They had a loose framework of superstitions but no religion, no God. It was all to the good, he thought. He would be able to build without having first to destroy. It was all to the good, too, that Gerak was a protected planet -- which meant that it was out of bounds to traders and prospectors. He smiled as he remembered the long and bitter war between the Society and the Bureau of Interstellar Affairs, at the conclusion of which permission had been granted to the Society to send its missionaries to the protected worlds -- at their own risk. There was risk, of course; there is always risk. The Society already had its roll of martyrs -- but the price paid in blood was not, weighed against the successful spreading of the Word on four score worlds, a heavy one. The tenor of his thoughts was interrupted by Calder's voice. "Fm cutting to one G now. Pastor. If you like, you can return to your cabin." "Thank you, Mr. Calder," replied the Pastor, "but I think that I shall stay here awhile. There is something inspiring in the spectacle of the Hosts of Heaven." "I know what you mean," said Captain Triggs. "I often think that it would be a good thing if all the atheists and agnostics could be shown the stars as they really are -- shining bright and clear with no atmosphere, no mist, no cloud to dim them..." "Why?" asked Galder. "Well... How can I put it? As the Pastor said -- the Hosts of Heaven..." "I'm sorry," said Calder, "but they're just stars to me. I know that each one is a sun, and I know that most of them have families of planets, and I know that if I do thus and thus and so and so I can proceed from one to the other." "Mr. Calder!" snapped Triggs, "I'll thank you not to be blasphemous!" "I don't think that there was any blasphemy," said Lanvin softly. "Mr. Calder is entitled to his own opinion -- just as you and I are. Captain. He's a spaceman, doing his job -- and, on this voyage at least, he is acting in the direct service of my Master." "It's a pity. Pastor," growled Triggs, "that you won't have time to do any missionary work aboard this ship! There are some people here who need it!" "Perhaps there are," agreed Lanvin. "Tolerance is one of the virtues, you know." "It all depends what you're tolerating," said Triggs. more spectacular than orthodox -- and even Triggs could not blame his Mate either for the near-crash or its disastrous consequences. Triggs himself was at the controls, and ignored Calder' s warning about the possible effects of the wind sweeping across the plain towards which the ship was descending, balanced on the column of fire that was her interplanetary drive. The plain was almost featureless, that was the trouble; it was just a huge sea of grass or something so like grass that it made no difference. Galder got the sights of the drift indicator on to a low hummock and was able to get a rough estimate of lateral speed, but Triggs ignored his findings, snapping: "You can't do any more than guess over this sort of terrain." "Then let me fire a smoke rocket," said Galder. "And start a prairie fire? What sort of welcome do you think the Pastor will get if his coming devastates half a planet?" "We'll start a fire when we land in any case," pointed out Galder. "Not if the foam-flood apparatus is in working order -- and it's your job to see that it is." The foam-flood apparatus was in working order -- but it might just as well not have been. As soon as the ship touched, as soon as the tips of her vaned landing gear dug into the soil, the weight of the wind on her bows tilted her. The steering vanes, set as they were in the exhaust, were useless ; the servo-mechanisms whose job it was to maintain equilibrium gave up in despair. Triggs did the only possible thing -- fed power into the rockets to drive his ship up and clear from the treacherous surface, but the rocket thrust added its quota of energy to the coupling moment that was already almost uncontrollable. The ship tilted, and went on tilting. With a crash that smashed instruments and apparatus she toppled, toppled and rolled, and her incandescent exhaust cut a wide swathe of blazing destruction through the dry grass, well outside the range of the foam-flood ejectors. Triggs retained consciousness long enough to cut the drive, but then it was too late, much too late. A raging sea of fire, stretching from horizon to horizon, was racing down wind. Pastor Lanvin offered thanks to his God that none of his shipmates had perished in the crash. Indeed, casualties had been surprisingly light, nobody had suffered damage more severe than contusions and abrasions. Galder, of course, was more inclined to give the credit for this to the manufacturers of the acceleration chairs and couches than to the Almighty, and earned a rebuke from his Gaptain for voicing his thoughts aloud. "At least, sir," said Galder nastily, "I wasn't giving the credit to you." Triggs ignored this, but in such a manner as to make it clear that the subject would be reopened later. He said .to the Pastor, "I've inspected the baggage hold. I'm afraid that your helicopter is smashed beyond repair, so are your solar batteries. About all that remains in good condition is your tent." "Then I still have greater worldly possessions than many of those who spread the Word in the past," said the Pastor. "Tomorrow morning I will start to walk to the east -- it seemed to me that there was a forest in that direction as we landed." "If there's any forest left," said Galder. "The wind is from the west." He added, with a real sympathy, "I'm afraid that this has rather started you off on the wrong foot, Pastor. By your coming you have caused considerable damage -- and, it may well be, loss of life. The people of this world will be more inclined to regard you as an emissary of the Devil than of God... "Who can say how their minds will work?" asked the Pastor. "I shall send an officer with you," said Triggs. "He will take one of the spacesuit radio sets with him, to keep in touch. He will report on the state of the forest -- when you reach it. He will let me know if it is possible to recruit native labor to bring heavy spars to the scene of the wreck." "Heavy spars?" asked Lanvin. "Yes. The ship, I am sure, can be repaired with what we carry in the way of spares and plant. But she has to be up-ended before she can take off -- and the only way to do that, on a primitive planet such as this, is by rigging a sheerlegs. All hands will be busy on repairs -- if native labor can bring the spars to us it will expedite matters considerably." "I see," said the Pastor. "Frankly, I shall be glad of company, even though it may be only for a short while. May I choose my companion?" "Certainly." "Then," said Lanvin, "I should like Mr. Calder to come with me." "A rather surprising choice," said Triggs at last. "A logical one," replied the missionary. "Do you think that we could step outside, Mr. Calder, so that we may assess the magnitude of the task that lies before us?" "Certainly," said the Mate. The two men groped and stumbled through the compartments and shafts of the wrecked rocket, each of them feeling the strangeness of walking on what should have been vertical plating, of seeing what should have been decks reared upright before them like walls. They came to the airlock, the doors of which had already been opened. They jumped down to the charred stubble, which extended as far as the eye could see on every side ; the flames had worked back against the wind as well as running before it. The sun -- huge and ruddy behind the pall of smoke -- had almost set. Swiftly it dipped, and then was gone. The darkness came fast -- they were not, Lanvin remembered, far from the equator of this world. The darkness came -- but it was not a true darkness. All around them, lurid, ominous, was the glare of the fires. Above them, reflecting the ruddy light, was the smoke. "It'll be a long walk," said Calder, "and a dirty one." "At least the wind has dropped," said Lanvin. "If it had dropped before, as we were landing, it would have been more to the point," said the Mate. "Did you ever read Gibbon, Pastor?" "Of course. Why?" "One point he raises. A good one. At what precise date did the Church lose the power to perform miracles?" "Did the Church ever have that power?" asked Lanvin. "It'd be a handy power to have right now," said Calder, ignoring the counter question. "Nothing fancy -- just a little fire-fighting." Lanvin was staring towards the east. "It may be my imagination," he said, "but I think that the fires are going out." "You're right," said Calder at last. He added, almost fiercely, "But there must be a natural explanation." "Of course," agreed the Pastor. T hey set out at sunrise. They were as well equipped as was possible. They had the Pastor's tent, which was big enough for the two of them. They had a transceiver, removed from one of the spacesuits and packed into a not too uncomfortable makeshift haversack. They had a good supply of concentrated food tablets -- borrowed from the lifeboat stores. They had water, and both of them hoped that it would be enough. They had a shotgun and a fair supply of ammunition. They had a compass. When they started, Calder took the lead. He strode ahead purposively, not deigning to look back at the ship. Lanvin followed at an easier pace. By noon it was the missionary who was always a few steps ahead of his companion. Lanvin took no pride in this -- after all, he was used to covering long distances with no other means of transportation but his feet. Even so, he was enjoying the walk no more than was the ship's officer. His eyes were red-rimmed and smarting and his no throat and nose were clogged with ashes. It was at noon that Lanvin called a halt. Calder helped him to set up the little tent -- it afforded some protection from the pitiless sun. The two men sat in the tiny patch of shade, nibbling their food concentrates, washing them down with tepid water. "I suppose," said Calder hopefully, "that we can't afford any for a wash..." "No," said the Pastor. "And even if we could, we should soon be as black again as we are now." "Cleanliness has never been a strong point of the Church, anyhow," remarked Calder. "In my own private code of ethics it comes a long way before godliness." "Why are y#u so hostile?" asked Lanvin. Calder grinned, his teeth gleaming whitely in his blackened face. "I'm just a natural anti-clerical, I guess. I always have been." "And yet," said the Pastor, "in your profession you are in a position to see all the wonders of Crea, tion." He pointed. "Look there!" "I see a calcined skeleton," said the Mate. "I see the remains of some poor beast that was caught in the fire." "But look at it. Here we are, the two of us, sitting on this world thousands of light years from Earth -- and yet that skeleton could be that of a Terran ungulate. You can't deny that there's a Divine Plan." "Was it part of the Divine Plan that the coming of a missionary should bring fire and death and destruction?" asked Calder. "But let's get back to the skeleton. Its late owner, as you say, could have been something built and functioning on the lines of a Terran antelope. But what does that prove? Have you never heard of parallel evolution, Pastor? Have you never considered how two such unrelated species as the shark and the porpoise, living in the same medium, have become almost identical twins insofar as external form is concerned? Furthermore, if you grant the validity of Arrhenius' theory, it is logical to assume that all Earthtype planets will produce approximately the same life forms." "Arrhenius," said the Pastor softly. "The seeds of life, drifting through the Universe, driven by the force of light itself, tangling in gravitational fields like thistledown in a spider's web...Who sowed the seeds, Mr. Calder?" "I don't know," said Calder. "Neither do you." There was silence for a few minutes. Then: "We will sleep for three hours," said Lanvin. The pressed on through the late afternoon, through the fast gathering dusk. It was not quite dark when they came to the line -- sharp, clearly defined -- where the fire had died. On the one side of it there was the charred stubble -- on the other, the long grass. "What do you make of this?" asked Lanvin. "A miracle, perhaps," scoffed Calder. Then his voice became serious. "I've seen something like this before." "Where?" asked the missionary. "New Wyoming -- or, if you prefer it, Deneb IV. It's a rich planet -- and all its wealth is on the hoof. Cattle. Most of the land surface is prairie, like this. They have occasional prairie fires. They have very efficient fire-fighting robots -- helicopters with built-in intelligence and the wherewithal to swamp huge areas with carbon dioxide." "No machine can be intelligent," said the Pastor automatically. "That remark was the typical, machine-like reaction that one expects from one of the cloth," said Calder. "But we're getting away from the point. If there are such robots here, it argues a high level of technological civilization. But we saw no cities. There's no spaceport. According to all the data we have, this world is uninhabited save for its savage aborigines." "God put out the fire," said a new voice. "Of course," agreed Lanvin. Then, startled, "Who are you?" "I am the priest of God," came the reply. "You are the demons whose coming he foretold." "Come out of the grass!" shouted Calder, "and let's see you!" "Lay down your weapons," came the reply. "Put down the shotgun, Mr. Calder," whispered Lanvin. "Like hell! I don't like this." "Put it down, I say! After all -- this priest, whoever he is, speaks English. I'm afraid," he went on, his voice rueful, "that I am not the first, after all, to labor in this vineyard... Calder ignored this last. "I still don't like it. He's a priest, and he speaks English -- but neither fact is a guarantee that he won't have us slaughtered out of hand." "If his people have bows or blowpipes they coud do it now," reasoned Lanvin. "Lay down the gun." Reluctantly, the Mate put down the weapon. Slowly, he and the missionary backed away from the weapon. Its burnished metal caught the last of the daylight, held it, so that all around was very dark. The men who stepped out from the long grass were tall, and black, and could be distinguished only as vague shadows against the dark background of vegetation. They carried weapons. Spears? Blowpipes? Lanvin could not be sure. One of them came slowly forward, advancing cautiously to meet the two Terrans. He, like his companions, was naked. Lanvin blinked. The priest was not, after all, naked -- but his only article of clothing made his nudity an affront to the missionary. It was white, apparently of some stiff plastic, and was worn around his neck. It was a mocking parody of a Roman collar. "At least," said Calder, "they don't intend to sacrifice us right now." He and Lanvin were lying, not too uncomfortably, in the long grass. Their wrists and their ankles had been bound -- skillfully, but not so tightly as to interfere with circulation. The warriors lay all around them, sleeping. None of them, Lanvin was reasonably sure, could speak English. The priest, as befitted his superior rank, was sleeping some distance from the others. "We have no reason to assume that they are going to sacrifice us," said Lanvin quietly. "All right. So we haven't. But just what is this set-up. Pastor? You're the expert." "I wish I knew," said Lanvin. "The priesthood -- I assume that there is more than one priest -- speaks English. It could well be that English is the language of the Church here, just as Latin was on Earth, centuries ago. But why? How?" "I can guess," said Calder. "The survivor of some shipwreck -- or, perhaps, some unscrupulous trader -- has set himself up as a local deity. He must have seen our landing -- and sent out his parties of warriors, led by his priests, to take us all prisoner." ,He muttered a curse. "And I never had the savvy to use the radio before that blasted priest took it from us, just as he took everything else that would be of value if we escaped. He knew what to look for, all right. Someone put him up to it." "It can't be a trader," said Lanvin. "Such a thing could never be hidden from the Bureau of Interstellar Affairs. They're far too thorough. It can't be a survivor from a shipwreck. As you should know, if any vessel is reported missing every inch of her route is searched." "I still say that it could be either," insisted Calder. "We shall find out in the morning," said Lanvin. "Meanwhile, I suggest that we emulate our captors and sleep." They slept. were awakened by kicks from broad, horny feet. While the priest supervised, two of his men, working nimbly with their three fingered hands, removed the bonds from the Earthmen's ankles. Then, while the others stood around, blowpipes poised and ready, the lashings were taken from their wrists and they were given foul-tasting water from a skin, a handful each of something that could have been sun-dried fruit. While they broke their fast Lanvin and Calder studied their captors with interest. All of seven feet tall they were, and thin, and their noses were like elephant's trunks in miniature. The teeth that gleamed whitely in the glossy black faces were widely spaced. Yet -- they were men. There was no denying that. "We came in peace," said Lanvin to the priest. "You came to destroy our world," replied the priest. "You set fire to the prairie. But God warned us of your coming, and God sent his angels to put out the fires." "Who is your God?" asked Lanvin. "There is only one God, and he is God," came the answer. "One would almost think," said Calder, "that your Moslem rivals had got here first. But we shall get nowhere with theological arguments." He asked, "Why do you speak English?" "English? I do not understand. We -- the priests -- speak the God language. We can write it, too. But God warned us against too much talking with the demons." He snapped an order to his men in his own tongue. The two who had removed the bonds from Lanvin and Calder now replaced the ropes on their wrists. There was a trail through the long grass, and the party followed it, the priest well in the lead. At first Lanvin and Calder tried to take notice of all that they saw -- the gaudy insects, the things like flying lizards, the tracks, at right angles to their own path, that showed that something huge had passed that way. They tried to observe, and they tried to pass comments on what they saw -- but, after less than an hour, they could no longer afford to waste breath on talking, could not afford to let their attention wander from the ground, with its tough, treacherous grassroots, beneath their feet. There was a halt at noon -- a brief rest and a pause for refreshment. The priest kept well away from the prisoners and refused to answer Calder's shouted questions. There was another halt in the middle of the afternoon -- and, after this one, neither Lanvin nor Calder thought that he would be able to get to his feet again. They did get to their feet -- the point of a knife (Calder's own knife, and that hurt him almost more than the physical pain) judiciously applied ensured that. They kept on marching ; they had no option. They reeled and staggered and, at the finish, each of them had to be supported by a pair of the natives. It was dusk when they came to the edge of the forest. They hoped that the priest would order a halt, but he did not do so. The path through the wood was worse than the path through the prairie had been; it was uneven, and on each side were the viciously spined branches of man-high shrubs. Lanvin could have sworn that the things had motility, that they reached out with malicious intent to rend the skin of the passer-by. Then there was a light ahead -- pale and steady. It could not possibly be the glare of fluorescent lamps, the missionaiy told himself -- but it was. It came from only one building of the large village that stood in the clearing -- a village that was improbably neat and clean, far too well laid out. Oil lamps burned in the houses, women and children stood in lighted doorways and stared curiously at the Earthmen. Other black figures stood in attenuated silhouette against the harsh illumination from the... the temple? Yes, thought Lanvin. It must be the temple. There'll be a screen on the roof to collect solar power, and there'll be batteries to store it, and there'll be some fat ruffian sitting on a throne and impressing these poor children of nature with his puny, man-made miracles... And he has brought us here to jeer at us and to impress his flock still more sorry for Calder... After all -- being martyred is part of my job, it's not part of his. And he's not ready... The temple was built of stone. It was severe in its design -- a severity that contrasted with the ornate eaves, the elaborately carved lintels, of some, but not all, of the houses. Some of them aped the functional architectural style of the... temple? It must be the temple, thought Lanvin again. With Calder, he stumbled up the broad stone steps. With Calder he stood, dazed and dazzled, in the glare of the lights. He heard a rhythmic tapping, the occasional tinkle of a tiny bell. He heard a dry rustling sound. He heard a sharp, imperative buzzing. That must be an altar, he thought. But it's not. It's a desk -- and there's a native woman operating an electric typewriter... And that's another priest coming to meet us, and hehas a bundle of papers in his hand, and they look like printed forms... And there are more desks, and more typewriters, He said to the Mate, "Mr. Calder, I must be delirious." "I thought that I was. Pastor," replied Calder. "It seems that this God of theirs has to be approached through the proper channels." "Gant!" the priest of the temple was saying, "why did you bring the demons here? They could have been taken just as easily to Merum's temple. You knew very well that I'm behind with my returns and you know that God rarely accepts excuses!" "He will be pleased that we have captured the demons," replied Gant. "I think that the situation carries priority, and that the telephone should be used rather than the post." "He does not like us to use the telephone unnecessarily," replied the other. "He said, 'A word spoken is gone with the wind, a word written endures forever.' " "I agree that the correct forms must be filled in," said Gant, "and I would like to say that some of your staff would be better employed so doing than in staring at the demons. Meanwhile, I should like to use your telephone." "This is my temple, Gant, and nobody but me talks to God from inside these four walls." "As you please," said Gant. "After all, he knows who made the capture." The other priest vanished towards the far end of the big room. Gant ordered a junior priest -- he wore a very thin collar -- out of the chair that he occupied behind a desk. He took the seat himself, pulled a printed form from a rack of such stationery, a stylus from its holder. He motioned to Lanvin and Calder to stand before him. "Now, if you please," he said in a dry voice, "I will take note of your vital statistics." "We want food first," croaked Calder. "We want a drink. We want a rest." "Address your complaints to God," said the priest, "through the proper channels." "Have done with this blasphemy!" cried Lanvin. "Blasphemy? You must, indeed, be a demon. The only blasphemy is the neglect to fill in the forms properly." "Gant!" The other priest was back. "Get out of that chair. Fill in your forms in your own temple." "Oh, all right." "I have talked with God. He says that the demons are to be fed and watered. He says that he is sending an angel to pick them up and to carry them to Heaven, where he will interrogate them." "So be it," said Gant. Neither Lanvin nor Calder was surprised that the "angel" was a robot helicopter. It dropped down from the night sky, landing in the village square with a heavy thud. It stood there, its vanes slowly rotating, making impatient noises. As soon as the passengers had boarded it shot up like a rocket, levelled off and then flew eastwards. Heaven was the snow-capped summit of a mountain all of three miles high. Heaven was a warren of tunnels and chambers, the entrance to which was so cunningly concealed as to be invisible either from space or from the air. Heaven was a paradise of filing cabinets and electric typewriters, of desks and electronic calculators, peopled by beings of a type all too familiar to both the Pastor and the spaceman. Heaven had as its device, shining on walls and ceilings, glittering on the neat but otherwise drab uniforms of the men and women, the six pointed star of the Bureau of Interstellar Affairs. God was a little man sitting behind a big, polished desk. He was in a bad temper. "God" was a good agnostic, and made this quite clear to Lanvin in the first five seconds of their conversation. "God" did not like missionaries. "There will be trouble about this," he prophesied. "Big trouble. The fool who gave you permission to land here will be demoted. This is an experimental planet. We are giving the people a religion that will allow them to regulate their lives in a sane manner, that will leave behind an enduring framework when the need for superstition has passed." "The same," said Lanvin, "can be said for my Society -- but we never encourage superstition." "To hell with you and your Society," he flared. "You will be returned to your ship in the morning. You will stay there until she has been repaired. I will give whatever aid may be needed." "Having failed in my duty," said (Continued from page #) "And it was their faulty, groping sort of maintenance that saved our lives, because even a heat-gun deteriorates in # years. That gun hadn't been fired since the Revolt!" "Then we can be their salvation?" suggested Phil. "Yes. The scientists who built the Deneb colony can rebuild the technology of our own Earth. It will take a long time... there'll have to be schools and we'll all have to work hard... but maybe some of us will be able to go back, in # or Lanvin softly. "That is the good fortune of the natives of this world." "Mr. Godfrey," said Calder, "I used to think that I was of the same religious persuasion as yourself. I used to take pride in my atheism. But you've done more to convert me than the good Pastor could -- converting me to religion, I mean. It's your arrogant blasphemy that sticks in my throat. It's the way in which you, a confessedly godless man, take to yourself the attributes of a deity..." "But he's not godless, Mr. Calder," said the Pastor. "He's not godless -- and that's the worst part of it. This place is as much a temple as was that bleak, efficient shrine in the village. "You have a God, Mr. Godfrey -- and It has made you Its own image. But when you blunder -- as you will, as you must -- It will never have mercy upon your soul." # years, say, when the Discovery can return to Deneb." They were nearing the ship, and John saw the officers crowding the main port, watching them come. "It's sort of inconsequential, I know," said Ann then. "But several times the Third Sarge referred to us as 'deevs.' Did he mention to you what a deev is?" John smiled. "It's an ancient military slang term, just like 'sarge' and 'topkick,' " he replied. " 'Deev' is just plain old D.V. Distinguished Visitor. And I suppose we are, at that." (Continued from page #) a new body, new thoughts, new blood and new reproductive capacity. The fact that this new man can be brought to trial violates justice in its deepest and truest meaning! It points inescapably to the fact that the law must be revised to bring it up to date with present reality... Jake paused and was silent for so long that he appeared to have for-, gotten his surroundings. When he finally continued, his voice was so soft that the jurors unconsciously leaned forward to catch his words: "There is still another dimension to this case -- one that transcends science... and the law. It is one I approached with great uncertainty, because it leads down a path I am walking for the first time... "Some of the testimony brought out in this trial may not have been new to all of you, though it was new to me. Perhaps you have all formed your own conclusions with regard to the relationship between the spirit or soul of Man, and his outer shell... the house in which man lives. But if this house becomes a prison for the real man, and science releases him to live in a new dwelling, then did the man ever actually exist until his release? And if the man who lives now did not exist at the time of the crime for which he is tried, can he then be judged guilty? "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury -- we await your answer." T wilight faded, and across Central Park the skyline of the city changed from steel and concrete to a gossamer web of light and shadow. Jake Emspak sat in peace by his window, the fingers of his right hand resting gently on the gold frame of his wife's picture. He touched a button on the arm of his chair, and in a moment Ed Murrow's features came into focus on the wall-screen. "The jury in the Corfino case is now locked up for the night," Murrow began, his #-year-old voice more vibrantly alive than ever. "Tomorrow we may -- and very likely will -- have a verdict. "But whatever the verdict, this case has served an epochal purpose -- to our time as well as to the law. We have paused for an instant in our frantic drive for technological advancement to ponder the essential meaning of man -- and the worth of the human entity. "It may take years to evaluate and appreciate all of the complex testimony Jake Emspak put into the trial record, for each of us will see in it only what we want to see or are capable of seeing... "But we may be assured that in the generations to come this case will be footnoted throughout the opening worlds of space by serious students of the law, the sciences and the humanities. "For tonight, it should suffice to say: Thank you, Jake Emspak -- Well done!" Jake touched the button again, and the screen went dark. Between old friends, there was much that I like the range and scope and imagination of science fiction. There are no clear-cut rules, and the author is given a chance to do a good bit of real thinking about our future and where the human race is going and why. He can create a world of magic and mystery, a situation that can be dazzling or depressing. He can, if he is skillful, project his readers into sometliing difTerent and exciting. But, besides just giving the readers escape, he can make them think. The science fiction I don't like disregards all these things and just uses a strange setting to battle out the same old problems (usually with a "blaster" or a "death ray"). These stories have little serious thought behind them and are aimed at the less intelligent reader who doesn't want to think. IP's stories are usually credible within the limits set up for them and are entertaining. Also, they are not so loaded with scientific philosophy that they lose their appeal as stories and become lectures. You have hit a happy balance and therefore have a good magazine. -- J. Marx, Jr. Waterbury, Neb. In my opinion, science fiction can be and is good literature. In every field there are bad and good examples. Many critics, however, come up with the bad stories and unfortunately pass judgement on all science fiction on the basis of these. One attack that has been used is tliat science fiction fans are all idiots and escapists. As an example of the eiTor of such statements, let us look at Dr. Asimov, who certainly is no idiot. I think this one case refutes the whole theory of imbeciles in the field. In my high school graduating class, more than one half of the members of the National Honor Society were sciencefiction readers and had from two to four years of science courses to their credit. The readers are educated people just as the authors are. I wish someone in the critical world would start a campaign to hit the readers of sportscar, hi-fi, mystery, girlie, movie, confession and boating magazines. This sort of reading is childish too, certainly more so than science fiction. -- B. Lex Clarence, N. Y. Defend science fiction? Sure I will! My gambit with detractors is a simple statement of fact. There are two things I read -- the newspapers for today's news, and science fiction for news of the future. -- Mrs. R. Bessette El Paso, Texas More people should be made to think, introduced into new channels of thought; they should be shown the world from new perspectives. All too many see only their own narrow horizons. It is just such attitudes which cause shameful affairs like that at Little Rock. People must learn that the world exists beyond their little niches. They must be forced into other people's shoes. They must be shown the human-ness of people they have never seen whether they are on Mars or in Russia. If we cannot concede that our own planet's inhabitants ire all of the same blood, bone and flesh, how can we admit it in the face of aliens from outer space? That there is hope is patent, when we look at history and discover what cruelty was rampant... Today, people in the Western hemisphere generally proclaim the brotherhood of Man, and ostensibly, we believe in peace and freedom and justice for all. Somewhere it began and grew; surely someday it will encompass the Earth. And how much science fiction can do to help it along! It can educate and indoctrinate the blind and inhibited so that they may grow intellectually and spiritually. This is more than a duty -- it's our one chance. Others are doing what they can, through writing and radio, by example and by personal endeavor. Science fiction is in a position to do its small bit and it's worth the effort. We may not live to see the result -- but it will come and science fiction's part will be a vital one in the end. A reward worth the doing. -- Gwen Cunningham Oakland, Cal. Your pleasant questionnaire deserves an answer. I am a housewife, wife and mother, # years old. I have a Ph.D., speak four languages and have travelled all over the world. Why do I read science fiction? It is my only hobby, and it satisfies all my needs. If there were enough science fiction I would need no other reading matter. It has everything from patent law to mysticism; from symbolic logic and logical symbolism to pure mathematics and technology; from love and adventure to politics and sociology; from psychiatry to zanieness, from biology, medicine, chemistry to foreign languages, ancient history and prophecy ; painting, music, farming -- what's the use, it is impossible to enumerate them. It widens one's horizons immeasurably, gets people interested in things they would never have thought of, shows youngsters what they really are interested in when they are ready to choose a career, and keeps oldsters from becoming rigid, narrow and discouraged. Of course, I have to defend it when caught reading it, it's difficult to make converts because we are taking many premises for granted in the really good stories. And the bad stories are, of course, bad. -- A Housewife Buffalo, N. Y. # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before; here or anywhere, # K Shannon Rood Verono, Pennsylvonio (Continued from page #) forceful man, Mr. Carman. You may very well escape. You may even reach Andromeda and return with evidence once again unmasking us. If you live long enough to return, that is. I think our economic program is in no immediate danger from you." He left, smiling gravely. The cell door closed with a harsh metallic crash. "Come back!" Carman yelled. "You can't hoax mankind like that! I'll let everyone know! I'll get out and expose -- " There was no answer, not even a catcall. No one was listening. And, Carman realized dully, no one was going to listen to him at ( Continued from page # ) this instinctively. And man is a dissatisfied animal. Satisfy him and he ceases to be a man. Quiet him and he stops being alive. planted against the centrifugal force that simulated one-third Earth-normal gravity, knowing where he was with a spaceman's sure instinct. He was # miles above the surface of the Earth, in a two-hour orbit, in a satellite spinning once every # seconds. The Earth was Inside. He was Outside, and with boldness, with courage, and with infinite sacrifice, he could stay Outside. He was moving. He was alive. By being alive here, by outfacing the eternal ' enemies -- heat, cold, and airlessness, distance, acceleration, and the ever-present missiles of space itself, and other men -- he kept humanity alive. Once in liis life, if he is lucky, a man finds something worth doing. He had found it. The long journey to the stars was the most human thing that men could do. It would keep the whole race human.  The first trip would fail, he felt sure, and perhaps the second and the third. But one day men would come back from the long trip out, if the men who were born equipped to do the job did not lose faith. f  tisr ntcM samrF ncrtoN f Unioentif, :ontInued from Back Cover # Brings You Any of These Great Books Values Up to # in Publishers Editions! Each Book Packed from Cover to Cover with dozen years of Astounding Sciby a former Air Force expert in Herbert. You're on a #st-century ence-Fiction Magazine. (Pub. ed. charge of their investigation, undersea mission from which no pense! (Pub. ed. #) Space. Adventures in Dimension, made Satellite -- information not Wells' "Invasion from Mars," Dikty. # top-notch short stories but you're an Eternal -- sent from made famous by Orson Welles' and novelettes by such well-known a timeless realm to change hishoax newscast. (Pub. ed. #) writers as Robert Bloch, Frank tory. 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This generous offer is made to introduce you the best of the new science --  fiction books -- at a mere fracclassic:  A New Adventure in Science and Space! by Arthur C. Clarke OF IF U novelettes from the first six years of IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction readers all over America, this is a volume of exceptional interest -- distinguished examples of fine science fiction writing by outstanding writers. Stories that answer the age old question: "'What would happer if -- ?" Stories that call into play philosophy, logic, facts and imagination to provide a diversity of entertainment that will appeal to all science fiction lovers, from astronomers to zoo keepers. Here you will find such authors as Charles Beaumont, James Blish, Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce Walton and Robert F. Young in an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme and pace. All newsstands -- # cents A Secret Method For y Temples of the Pharaohs? Civilization began in the Nile Valley centuries ago. Where did its first builders acquire their astounding wisdom that started man on his upward climb? Beginning with naught they overcame nature's forces and gave the world its first sciences and arts. Did their knowledge come from a race now submerged beneath the sea, or were they touched with Infinite inspiration? From what concealed source came the wisdom that produced such characters as Amenhotep IV, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and a host of others? Today it is known that they discovered and learned to interpret certain Secret Methods for the development of their inner power of mind. They learned to command the inner forces within their own beings and to master life. This secret art of living has been preserved and handed down throughout the ages. Today it is extended to those who dare to use its profound principles to meet and solve the problems of life in these complex times. Has life brought you that personal satisfaction, the sense of achievement and happiness that you desire? If not, it is your duty to yourself to learn about this rational method of applying natural laws for the mastery of life. To the thoughtful person it is obvious that everyone cannot be entrusted with an intimate knowledge of the mysteries of life, for everyone is not capable of properly using it. But if you are one of those possessed of a true desire to forge ahead and wish to make use of the subtle influences of life, the Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) will send you A Sealed Book of explanation without obligation. This Sealed Book tells how you, in the privacy of your own home, without interference with your personal affairs or manner of living, may receive these secret teachings. Not weird or strange practices, but a rational application of the basic laws of life. For your complimentary copy address your request to: Scribe R.E.X. Wie Rosicrucians I Editor's  In the October issue we asked readers to write us something about themselves, what they do for a living, what they do for fun, why they read science fiction, and anydiing else they cared to mention. So far we have heard from # states, Canada and the West Indies -- enough of what might normally be call statistics to provide sort of a "cross-section" survey of what the readers of IF do and think. Some readers answered all kinds of questions (some we'd never even have thought to ask) ; others were not quite so communicative. For instance, one gentleman wrote us simply that "I buy IF because there is a certain amount of dignity to the covers." From this letter we could "statistic" only two things: the writer was male and he hailed from the state of Washington. However, we had fun, we hope you do, and while we can not undertake to answer every letter, we'd like to thank all those who wrote us and made this survey so interesting. Of all letters received, # were male, with the remaining # surprisingly high (at least to us) for the distaff side. Of the female contingent, # were single; of the married #, half were mothers with an average of two children each. (I'm glad it came out an even two. Statistics that say ## men, #  women or # ## children bother me! ) Of those who mentioned their occupations, # were employed, # were students and the remaining # were making a full time job of being a housewife. Those steadily employed and mentioning their jobs listed the following: engineer (electrical and chemical), salesman, teacher, doctor, clerk, meteorologist, nurse, professor, photographer, writer, army (all ranks). The most mentioned hobbies were: photography, music (jazz and otherwise) , amateur astronomy, sports (indoors and outdoors), collecting science fiction books and magazines, stamps, drawing and painting, chess and home do-ityourself (carpentry, plumbing, repairs, etc.). One young lady wrote that her hobby was mental telepathy. A young man at a mid-westem high school said, "my favorite sport is swimming and secondly girl watching (this is a popular sport at M. C. H. S. and I am on the varsity) ". The most frequently mentioned authors were Asimov, Russell, Heinlein, van Vogt, Sheckley, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Simak, Blish, Andersen, win and Leinster. Artists most frequently named were Finlay, Emsh, Hunter, Freas and Orban. And what was the average age of IF readers? Well, folks just didn't give out too generously with that statistic. However, # of the men did and # of the ladies didn't seem to mind. And here is what we came up with: average age of all readers reporting such was # years; the youngest was # years old, and the senior IF reader has counted #I summers. One young man wrote that he was # years old and still single! When we asked Jimmie Gunn (Hoax, Powder Keg, Green Thumb, etc.) what life was like out thar in Kansas, he replied that it was "fantastically normal". The Gunns -- Christopher, age #, Kevin, age #, wife Jane and Jimmie -- live in a three-year-old ranch house about a mile from the University of Kansas campus, where he is managing editor of University of Kansas Alumni Publications. Of all science fiction writers, Jimmie Gunn's family seems to be the one most steeped in the tradition of printers ink. Instead of the proverbial spoon of sorts, he must have been born with a printer's measure in his mouth and a couple fists full of type. Furthermore, his parents must have given him a typewriter, instead of a teddy bear, to snuggle up with when he was tucked in for the night. And I suppose it would have been quite natural considering. His father is a printer; two of his uncles are pressmen, and a third is a proofreader. His grandfather was a country editor. Bom July #, #, Jimmie breezed through grade and high school and graduated from the University of Kansas with a B. S. in journalism. After three years in the navy during World War II, he studied speech and drama at Northwestern U., and got his M. A. in English in #. But his write-forpay career, however, started before he had finished his schooling. In #, he wrote a full length play which was produced at the University and followed this with features and scripts for local newspapers and radio. During # he wrote his first # science fiction stories and sold nine of them -- all under the pen-name of "Edwin James". A little later, his masters thesis, a critical analysis of science fiction, was the only one ever published in a professional science fiction magazine. To date, Jimmie has sold over fifty short stories and has published two novels. Throughout all his writing, his philosophy has been that every serious story should contain some element which makes the reader proud he belongs to the human race -- even tragedy must lead to redemption. His space stories, in which you will find strong evidence of this philosophy (including Hoax and Powder Keg), will be published in book form this spring. Russ Winterbotham rejx)rts that he's the man responsible for the science fiction strip, Chris Welkin, which appears in # newspapers and is translated into Spanish for Latin American consumption. He also writes westerns, but his regular job is fiction editor for the Scrippsously, Russ not only works at writing, but makes it his hobby too... If you're an inveterate sidewalk superintendent, make tracks for Montreal. One of the most spectacular and complicated engineering jobs ever attempted is going on at the Jacques Cartier Bridge. Thirty hydraulic jacks are being used to raise the spans # to # feet for the St. Lawrence Seaway project -- and the flow of traffic over the bridge isn't even interrupted!... Not so long ago Dr. Lawrence S. Dillon, associate professor of biology at Texas A and M, voiced a new theory regarding the origination of Mankind: the possibility that Man is a member of the vegetable kingdom instead of the animal. Which lends the thought (among others) that our ancestors might have been more attractive as trees than the monkeys hanging by their tails amongst their branches... One of science fiction's most published artists, Virgil Finlay, considers himself more of a gallery painter than an illustrator, even after # years. He has appeared in various museums, including the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the noted Memorial Gallery in Rochester... Bertram Chandler Maze, Bureaucrat, Gift Horse, etc.) is a ship's officer on the Australian Sidney-toHobart run... Bob Silverberg's The Walls Came Tumbling Down (December IF) will be published in paperback format this spring. He has expanded it into a novel which will carry the byline of "David Osborne". Bob's latest, an exciting novelette titled The Wages o Death, will appear in the August issue of IF... The Day of the Dog (page #), an eerie piece of story telling, is by a young lady whose full-time job is boat editor of a Florida newspaper In The Songs of Distant Earth you'll find that Arthur C. Clarke can blend a charming love theme with a fascinating science fiction story... David Bunch Routine Emergency) is a Federal employee at the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center in St. Louis. A graduate of Washington University of St. Louis, with an M. A. in English, his published experience, before IF, was confined to the literary quarterlies. Or, as he puts it, "the pay-in-glory-or-something magazines"... And if you think High Dragon Bump (page #) is a wide one in phonetics -- wel, just start a conversation with any three or four year old youngster! -- jlg The Star Ship Magellan brought Earthmen to Thalassa for the first time in three hundred year si They came by accident, to syphon the waters of the sea. Thus, this story of how Leon of Earth met Lora of Thalassa B eneath the palm trees Lora waited, watching the sea. Clyde's boat was already visible as a tiny notch on the far horizon -- the only flaw in the perfect mating of sea and sky. Minute by minute it grew in size, until it had detached itself from the featureless blue globe that encompassed the world. Now she could see Clyde standing at the prow, one hand twined around the rigging, statue-still as his eyes sought her among the shadows. "Where are you, Lora?" his voice asked plaintively from the radiobracelet he had given her when they became engaged. "Come and help me -- we've got a big catch to bring home." So! Lora told herself; thafs why you asked me to hurry down to the beach. Just to punish Clyde and to reduce him to the right state of anxiety, she ignored his call until he had repeated it half a dozen times. Even then she did not press the beautiful golden pearl set in the "Transmit" button, but slowly emerged from the shade of the great trees and walked down the sloping beach. Clyde looked at her reproachfully, but gave her a satisfactory kiss as soon as he had bounded ashore and secured the boat. Then they started unloading the catch together, scooping fish large and small from both hulls of the catamaran. Lora screwed up her nose but assisted gamely, until the waiting sand-sled was piled high with the victim's of Clyde's skill. It was a good catch; when she married Clyde, Lora told herself proudly, she'd never starve. The clumsy, armored creatures of this young planet's sea were not true years before Nature invented scales here. But they were good enough eating, and the first colonists had labelled them with names they had brought, with so many other traditions, from unforgotten Earth. "TTiat's the lot!" grunted Clyde, tossing a fair imitation of a salmon on to the glistening heap. 'T'll fix the nets later -- let's go!" Finding a foot-hold with some difficulty, Lora jumped on to the sled behind him. The flexible rollers spun for a moment against the sand, then got a grip. Clyde, Lora and a hundred pounds of assorted fish starting racing up the wavescalloped beach. They had made half the brief journey when the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came suddenly to its end. The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue vault of heaven. Even as Clyde and Lora watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at its edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud. And now they could hear, falling down through the miles above their heads, a sound their world had not known for generations. Instinctively they grasped each other's hands, as they stared at that snow-white furrow across the sky and listened to the thin scream from the borders of space. The descending ship had already vanished beyond the horizon before they turned to each other and breathed, almost with reverence, the same magic word: "Earth!" After three hundred years of silence, the mother world had reached out once more to touch Thalassa... Why? Lora asked herself, when the long moment of revelation had passed and the scream of torn air ceased to echo from the sky. What had happened, after all these years, to bring a ship from mighty Earth to this quiet and contented world? There was no room for more colonists here on this one island in a watery planet, and Earth knew that well enough. Its robot survey ships had mapped and probed Thalassa from space five centuries ago, in the early days of interstellar exporation. Long before Man himself had ventured out into the gulfs between the stars, his electronic servants had gone ahead of him, circling the worlds of alien suns and heading homewards with their store of knowledge, as bees bring honey back to the parent hive. Such a scout had found Thalassa, a freak among worlds with its single large island in a shoreless sea. One day continents would be born here, but this was a new planet, its history still waiting to be written. The robot had taken a hundred years to make its homeward journey, and for a hundred more its garnered knowledge had slept in the electronic memories of the great computers which stored the wisdom of Earth. The first waves of colonization had not touched Thalassa; there were more profitable worlds to be developed -- worlds which were not nine-tenths water. Yet at last the pioneers had come; only a dozen miles from where she was standing now, Lora's ancestors had first set foot upon this planet and claimed it for Mankind. They had levelled hills, planted crops, moved rivers, built towns and factories, and multiplied until they reached the natural limits of their land. With its fertile soil, abundant seas and mild, wholly predictable weather, Thalassa was not a world which demanded much of its adopted children. The pioneering spirit had lasted perhaps two generations ; thereafter the colonists were content to work as much as necessary (but no more), to dream nostalgically of Earth, and to let the future look after itself. The village was seething with speculation when Clyde and Lora arrived. News had already come from the northern end of the island that the ship had spent its furious speed and was heading back at a low altitude, obviously looking for a place to land. "They'll still have the old maps," someone said. "Ten to one they'll ground where the First Expedition landed, up in the hUls." It was a shrewd guess, and within minutes all available transport was moving out of the village, along the seldom-used road to the west. As befitted the mayor of so important a cultural center as Palm Bay (Pop: #; occupations: fishing, hydroponics; industries: none), Lora's father led the way in his official car. The fact that its annual coat of paint was just about due was perhaps a little unfortunate; one could only hope that the visitors would overlook the occasional patches of bare metal. After all, the car itself was quite new; Lora could distinctly remember the excitement its arrival had caused, only thirteen years ago. The little caravan of assorted cars, trucks -- and even a couple of straining sand-sleds -- rolled over the crest of the hill and ground to a halt beside the weathered sign with its simple but impressive words : (# May, # A.D.) The First Expedition, Lora repeated silently. There had never been a second one -- hut here it was... The ship came in so low, and so silently, that it was almost upon them before they were aware of it. There was no sound of engines -- only a brief rustling of leaves as the displaced air stirred among the trees. Then all was still once more, but it seemed to Lora that the shining ovoid resting on the turf was a great silver egg, waiting to hatch and to bring something new and strange into the peaceful world of Thalassa. "It's so small," someone whispered behind her. "They couldn't have come from Earth in that thing!" "Of course not," the inevitable self-appointed expert replied at once. "That's only a life-boat -- the real ship's up there in space. Don't you remember that the First Expedition -- " "Sshh!" someone else remonstrated. "They're coming out!" It happened in the space of a single heart-beat. One second the seamless hull was so smooth and unbroken that the eye looked in vain for any sign of an opening. And then, an instant later, there was an oval doorway with a short ramp leading to the ground. Nothing had moved, but something had happened. How it had been done, Lora could not imagine, but she accepted the miracle without surprise. Such things were only to be expected of a ship that came from Earth. There were figures moving inside the shadowed entrance ; not a sound came from the waiting crowd as the visitors slowly emerged and stood blinking in the fierce light of an unfamiliar sun. There were seven of them -- all men -- and they did not look in the least like the super-beings she had expected. It was true that they were all somewhat above the average in height and had thin, clear-cut features, but they were so pale that their skins were almost white. They seemed, moreover, worried and uncertain, which was something that puzzled Lora very much. For the first time it occurred to her that this landing on Thalassa might be unintentional, and that the visitors were as surprised to be here as the islanders were to greet them. The Mayor of Palm Bay, confronted with the supreme moment of his career, stepped forward to deliver the speech on which he had been frantically working ever since the car left the village. A second before he opened his mouth, a sudden doubt struck him and sponged his memory clean. Everyone had automatically assumed that this ship came from Earth -- but that was pure guesswork. It might just as easily have been sent here from one of the other colonies, of which there were at least a dozen much closer than the parent world. In his panic over protocol, all that Lora's father could manage was: "We welcome you to Thalassa. You're from Earth -- I presume?" That "I presume?" was to make Mayor Fordyce immortal; it would be a century before anyone discovered that the phrase was not quite original. In all that waiting crowed, Lora was the only one who never heard the confirming answer, spoken in English that seemed to have speeded up a trifle during the centuries of separation. For in that moment, she saw Leon for the first time. He came out of the ship, moving as unobtrusively as possible to join his companions at the foot of the ramp. Perhaps he had remained behind to make some adjustment to the controls ; perhaps -- and this seemed more likely -- he had been reporting the progress of the meeting to the great mother ship vhich must be hanging up there in space, far beyond the uttermost fringes of the atmosphere. Whatever the reason, from then onwards Lora had eyes for no one else. Even in that first instant, she knew that her life could never again be the same. This was something new and beyond all her experience, wonder and fear. Her fear was for the love she felt for Clyde -- her wonder for the new and unknown thing that had come, miraculously, into her life. Leon was not as tall as his companions, but was much more stockily built, giving an impression of power and competence. His eyes, very dark and full of animation, were deep-set in rough-hewn features which no one could have called handsome, yet which Lora found disturbingly attractive. Here was a man who had looked upon sights she could not imagine -- a man who, perhaps, had walked the streets of Earth and seen its fabled cities. What was he doing here on lonely Thalassa, and why were those lines of strain and worry about his ceaselessly searching eyes? He had looked at her once already, but his gaze had swept on without faltering. Now it came back, as if prompted by memory, and for the first time he became conscious of Lora, as all along she had been aware of him. Their eyes locked, bridging gulfs of time and space and experience. The anxious furrows faded from Leon's brow, the tense lines slowly relaxed, and presently he smiled. speeches, the banquets, the receptions, the interviews were over. Leon was veiy tired, but his mind was far too active to allow him to sleep. After the strain of the last few weeks, when he awoke to the shrill clamor of alarms and fought with his colleagues to save the wounded ship, it was hard to realise that they had reached safety at last. What incredible good fortune, that this inhabited planet had been so close! Even if they could not repair the ship and complete the two centuries of flight that still lay before them, here at least they could remain among friends. No shipwrecked mariners, of sea or space, could hope for more than that. The night was cool and calm, and ablaze with unfamiliar stars. Yet therQ were still some old friends, even though the ancient patterns of the constellations were hopelessly lost. There was mighty Rigel, no fainter for all the added light-years that its rays must now cross before they reached his eyes. And that must be giant Canopus, almost in line with their destination, but so much more remote that even when they reached their new home, it would seem no brighter than in the skies of Earth. Leon shook his head, as if to clear the stupefying, hypnotic image of immensity from his mind. Forget the stars, he told himself; you will face them again soon enough. Cling to this little world while you are upon it, even though it may be a grain of dust on the road between the Earth you will never see again and the goal that waits for you at journey's end, two hundred years from now. His friends were already sleeping, tired and content, as they had a right to be. Soon he would join them -- when his restless spirit would allow him. But first he would see something of this world to which chance had brought him, this oasis peopled by his own kinsmen in the deserts of space. He left the long, single-storied guest-house that had been prepared for them in such obvious haste, and walked out into the single street of Palm Bay. There was no one about, though sleepy music came from a few houses. It seemed that the villagers believed in going to bed early -- or perhaps they too were exhausted by the excitement and hospitality of the day. That suited Leon, who wanted only to be left alone until his racing thoughts had slowed to rest. Out of the quiet night around him he became aware of the murmuring sea, and the sound drew his footsteps away from the empty street. It was dark among the palms, when the lights of the village had faded behind him, but the smaller of Thalassa's two moons was high in the South and its curious yellow glow gave him all the guidance he required. Presently he was through the narrow belt of trees, and there at the end of the steeply shelving beach lay the ocean that covered almost all this world. A line of fishing-boats was drawn up at the water's edge, and Leon walked slowly towards them, curious to see how the craftsmen of Thalassa had solved one of man's oldest problems. He looked approvingly at the trim plastic hulls, the narrow outrigger float, the poweroperated winch for raising the nets, the compact little motor, the radio with its direction-finding loop. This almost primitive, yet completely adequate simplicity had a profound appeal to him ; it was hard to think of a greater contrast to the labyrinthine complexities of the mighty ship hanging up there above his head. For a moment he amused himself with fantasy; how pleasant to jettison all his years of training and study and exchange the life of a starship propulsion engineer for the peaceful, undemanding existence of a fisherman. They must need someone to keep their boats in order, and perhaps he could think of a few improvements... He shrugged away the rosy dream, without bothering to marshal all its obvious fallacies, and began to walk along the shifting line of foam where the waves had spent their last strength against the land. Underfoot was the debris of this young ocean's new-born life -- empty shells and carapaces that might have littered the coasts of instance, was a tightly-wound spiral of limestone which he had surely seen before in some museum. It might well be : any design that had once ser ed her purpose. Nature repeated endlessly on world after world. A faint yellow glow was spreading swiftly across the eastern sky; even as Leon watched, Selene, the inner moon, edged itself above the horizon. With astonishing speed, the entire gibbous disc climbed out of the sea, flooding the beach with sudden light. Leon saw that he was not alone. The girl was sitting on one of the boats, about fifty yards further along the beach. Her back was turned towards him and she was staring out to sea, apparently unaware of his presence. Leon hesitated, not wishing to invade on her solitude, and uncertain of the local mores in these matters. It seemed highly likely, at such a time and place, that she was waiting for someone; it might be safest, and most tactful, to turn quietly back to the village. He had left it too late. As if startled by the flood of new light along the beach, the girl looked up and at once caught sight of him. She rose to her feet with an unhurried grace, showing no sign of alarm or annoyance. Indeed, if Leon could have seen her face clearly in the moonlight, he would have been surprised at the quiet satisfaction it expressed. Only twelve hours ago, Lora would have been indignant had anyone suggested that she would meet a complete stranger here on this lonely beach when the rest of the world was slumbering. Even now, she might have tried to rationalize her behavior, to argue that she felt restless and could not sleep, and had therefore decided to go for a walk. But she knew in her heart that this was not the truth; all day long he had been haunted by the image of that young engineer, whose name and position she had managed to discover without, she hoped, arousing too much curiosity among her friends. It was not even luck that she had seen him leave the Guesthouse; she had been watching most of the evening from the porch of her father's residence, on the other side of the street. And it was certainly not luck, but deliberate and careful planning, that had taken her to this point on the beach as soon as she was sure of the direction Leon was heading. He came to a halt a dozen feet away. (Did he recognise her? Did he guess that this was no accident? For a moment her courage almost failed her, but it was too late now to retreat. ) Then he gave a curious, twisted smile that seemed to light up his whole face and made him look even younger than he was. "Hello," he said. "I never expected to meet anyone at this time of night. I hope I haven't disturbed you." "Of course not," Lora answered, trying to keep her voice as steady and emotionless as she could. "I'm from the ship, you know. I thought I'd have a look at Thalassa while I'm here." At those last words, a sudden change of expression crossed Lora's face; the sadness he saw there puzzled Leon, for it could have no cause. And then, with an instantaneous shock of recognition, he knew that he had seen this girl before and understood what she was doing here. This was the girl who had smiled at him when he came out of the ship... There seemed nothing to say. They stared at each other across the wrinkled sand, each wondering at the miracle that had brought them together out of the immensity of time and space. Then, as if in unconscious agreement, they sat facing each other on the gunwale of the boat, still without a word. This is folly, Leon told himself. What am I doing here? What right have I, a wanderer passing through this world, to touch the lives of its people? I should make my apologies and leave this girl to the beach and the sea that are her birthright, not mine. Yet he did not leave. The bright disc of Selene had risen a full hand's breadth above the sea when he said at last: "What's your name?" "I'm Lora," she answered, in the soft, lilting accent of the islanders which was so attractive, but not always easy to understand. "And I'm Leon Carrell, Assistant Propulsion Engineer, Star-ship Af agellanf She gave a little smile as he introduced himself, and at that moment Leon was certain that she already knew his name. At the same time a completely irrelevant and whimsical thought struck him; until a few minutes ago he had been dead-tired, just about to turn back for his overdue sleep. Yet now he was fully awake and alert -- poised, as it were, on the brink of a new and unpredictable adventure. But Lora's next remark was predictable enough: "How do you like Thalassa?" "Give me time," Leon countered. "I've only seen Palm Bay, and not much of that." "Will you be here -- very long?" The pause was barely perceptible, but his ear detected it. This was the question that really mattered. "Fm not sure," he replied, truthfully enough. "It depends how long the repairs take." "What went wrong?" "Oh, we ran into something too big for our meteor screen to absorb. And -- bang! -- that was the end of the screen. So we've got to make a new one." "And you think you can do that here?" "We hope so. The main problem of water up to the Magellan. Luckily, I think Thalassa can spare it." "Water? I don't understand." "Well, you know that a star-ship travels at almost tlie speed of light; even then it takes years to get anywhere, so that we have to go into suspended animation and let the automatic controls run the ship." Lora nodded "Of course -- that's how our ancestors got here." "Well, the speed would be no problem if space was really empty, but it isn't. A star-ship sweeps up thousands of atoms of hydrogen, particles of dust, and sometimes larger fragments, every second of its flight. At nearly the speed of light, these bits of cosmic junk have enormous energy, and could soon burn up the ship. So we carry a shield about a mile ahead of us, and let that get burnt up instead. Do you have umbrellas on this world?" "Why -- yes," Lora replied, obviously baffled by the incongruous question. "Then you can compare a starship to a man moving head-down through a rain-storm behind the cover of an umbrella. The rain is the cosmic dust between the stars, and our ship was unlucky enough to lose its umbrella." "And you can make a new one of water?" "Yes; it's the cheapest building material in the universe. We freeze it into an iceberg which travels ahead of us. What could be simpler than that?" Lora did not answer ; her thoughts seemed to have veered on to a new track. Presently she said, her voice so low and wistful that Leon had to bend forward to hear it against the rolling of the surf: "And you left Earth a hundred years ago." "A hundred and four. Of course, it seems only a few weeks, since we were deep-sleeping until the autopilot revived us. All the colonists are still in suspended animation; they don't know that anything's happened." "And presently you'll join them again, and sleep your way on to the stars." Leon nodded, avoiding her eye. "That's right. Planetfall will be a few months late, but what does that matter on a trip that takes three hundred years?" Lora pointed to the island behind them, and then to the shoreless sea at whose edge they stood. "It's strange to think that your sleeping friends up there will never know anything of all this. I feel sorry for them." "Yes, only we fifty or so engineers will have any memories of Thalassa. To everyone else in the ship, our stop here will be nothing more than a two-hundred-year-old entry in the log-book." He glanced at Lora's face, and saw again that sadness in her eyes. "Why does that make you unhappy?" She shook her head, unable to answer. How could one express the sense of loneliness that Leon's words had brought to her? The lives of men, and all their hopes and fears, were so little against the inconceivable immensities that they had dared to challenge. The thought of that three-hundred-year journey, not yet half completed, was something from which her mind recoiled in horror. And yet -- in her own veins was the blood of those earlier pioneers who had followed the same path to Thalassa, centuries ago. The night was no longer friendly. She felt a sudden longing for her home and family, for the little room which held everything she owned and which was all the world she knew or wanted. The cold of space was freezing her heart; she wished now that she had never come on this mad adventure. It was time -- more than time -- to leave. As she rose to her feet, she noticed that they had been sitting on Clyde's boat, and wondered what unconscious prompting of her mind had brought her here to this one vessel out of all the little fleet lined up along the beach. At the thought of Clyde, a spasm of uncertainty, even of guilt, swept over her. Never in her life, except for the most fleeting moments, had she thought of any other man but him. Now she could no longer pretend that this was true. "What's the matter?" asked Leon. "Are you cold?" He held out his hand to her, and for the first time their fingers touched as she automatically responded. But at the instant of contact, she shied like a startled animal and jerked away. "I'm all right," she answered, almost angrily. "It's late -- I must go home. Good-bye." Her reaction was so abrupt that it took Leon by surprise. Had he said anything to offend her? he wondered. She was already walking quickly away when he called after her: "I will see you again?" If she answered, the sound of the waves carried away her voice. He watched her go, puzzled and a little hurt, while not for the first time in his life he reflected how hard it was to understand the mind of a woman. For a moment he thought of following her and repeating the question, but in his heart he knew there was no need. As surely as the sun would rise tomorrow, they would meet again. A nd now the life of the island .was dominated by the crippled giant a thousand miles out in space. Before dawn and after sunset, when the world was in darkness but the light of the sun still streamed overhead, the Magellan was visible as a in all the sky except the two moons themselves. But even when it could not be seen -- when it was lost in the glare of day or eclipsed by the shadow of Thalassa -- it was never far from men's thoughts. It was hard to believe that only fifty of the star-ship's crew had been awakened, and that not even half of those were on Thalassa at any one time. They seemed to be everywhere, usually in little groups of two or three, walking swiftly on mysterious errands or riding small anti-gravity scooters which floated a few feet from the ground, and moved so silently that they made life in the village rather hazardous. Despite the most pressing invitations, the visitors had still taken no part in the cultural and social activities of the island. They had explained, politely but firmly, that until the safety of their ship was secured, they would have no time for any other interests. Later, certainly, but not now... So Thalassa had to wait with what patience it could muster, while the Earthmen set up their instruments, made their surveys, drilled deep into the rocks of the island, and carried out scores of experiments which seemed to have no possible connection with their problem. Sometimes they consulted briefly with Thalassa's own scientists, but on the whole they kept to themselves. It was not that they were unfriendly or aloof; they were working with such a fierce and dedicated intensity that they were scarcely aware of anyone around them. After their first meeting, it was two days before Lora spoke to Leon again. She saw him from time to time as he hurried about the village, usually with a bulging brief-case and an abstracted expression, but they were able to exchange only the briefest of smiles. Yet even this was enough to keep her emotions in turmoil, to banish her peace of mind, and to poison her relationship with Clyde. As long as she could remember he had been part of her life; they had had their quarrels and disagreements, but no-one else had ever challenged his place in her heart. In a few months they would be married -- yet now she was not even sure of that, or indeed of anything. "Infatuation" was an ugly word, which one applied only to other people. But how else could she explain this yearning to be with a man who had come suddenly into her life from nowhere, and who must leave again in a few days or weeks? No doubt the glamor and romance of his origin was partly responsible, but that alone was not enough to account for it. There were other Earthmen better-looking than Leon, yet she had eyes for him alone and her life now was empty unless she was in his presence. By the end of the first day only her family knew about her feelings ; by the end of the second everyone she passed gave her a knowing smile. It was impossible to keep a secret in such a tight and talkative a community as Palm Bay, and she knew better than to attempt it. Her second meeting with Leon was accidental -- as far as such things can ever be accidents. She was helping her father deal with some of the correspondence and enquiries which had flooded upon the village since the Earthmen's arrival, and was trying to make some sense out of her notes when the door of the office opened. It had opened so often in the last few days that she had ceased to look up; her younger sister was acting as receptionist and dealt with all the visitors. Then she heard Leon's voice; and the paper blurred before her eyes, the notes might have been in an unknown language. "May I see the Mayor, please?" "Of course, Mr. -- ?" "Assistant Engineer Carrell." "I'll go and fetch him. Won't you sit down?" Leon slumped wearily on the ancient armchair that was the best the reception room could offer its infrequent visitors, and not until then did he notice that Lora was watching him silently from the other side of the room. At once he sloughed off his tiredness and shot to his feet. "Hello -- I didn't know you worked here." "I live here; my father's the Mayor." This jx)rtentous news did not seem to impress Leon unduly. He walked over to the desk, and picked up the fat volume through which Lora had been browsing between her secretarial duties. " 'A Concise History of Earth'," he read, " 'from the Dawn of Civilization to the Beginning of Interstellar Flight.' And all in a thousand pages! It's a pity it ends three hundred years ago." "We hope that you'll soon bring us up to date. Has much happened since that was written?" "Enough to fill about fifty libraries, I suppose. But before we go, we'll leave you copies of all our records, so that your history books will only be a hundred years out of date." They were circling round each other, avoiding the only thing that was important. When can we meet again? Lora's thoughts kept hammering silently, unable to break through the barrier of speech. And does he really like me, or is he merely making p)olite conversation? The inner door opened, and the Mayor emerged apologetically from his office. "Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Garrell, but the President was on the line -- he's coming over this afternoon. And what can I do for you?" Lora pretended to work, but she typed the same sentence eight times while Leon delivered his message from the captain of the Magellan. She was not a great deal wiser when he had finished; it seemed that the star-ship's engineers wished to build some equipment on a headland a mile from the village, and wanted to make sure there would be no objection. "Of course!" said Mayor Fordyce expansively, in his nothing's-toogood-for-our-guests tone of voice. "Go right ahead -- the land doesn't belong to anybody, and no-one lives there. What do you want to do with it?" "We're building a gravity inverter, and the generator has to be anchored in solid bedrock. It may be a little noisy when it starts to run, but I don't think it will disturb you here in the village. And of course we'll dismantle the equipment when we've finished." Lora had to admire her father. She knew perfectly well that Leon's request was as meaningless to him as it was to her, but one would never have guessed it. "That's perfectly all right -- glad to be of any help we can. And will you tell Captain Gold that the President's coming at five this afternoon? I'll send my car to collect him; the reception's at five thirty in the village Hall." When Leon had given his thanks and departed. Mayor Fordyce walked over to his daughter and picked up the slim pile of correspondence she had none-too-accurately typed. "He seems a pleasant young man," he said, "but is it a good idea to get too fond of him?" "Tdon't know what you mean." "Now, Lora! After all, I am your father, and I'm not completely unobservant." "He's not -- not -- a bit interested in me." "Are you interested in him?" "I don't know. Oh, Daddy, I'm so unhappy!" Mayor Fordyce was not a brave man, so there was only one thing he could do. He donated his handkerchief and fled back into his office. lem that Clyde had ever faced in his life, and there were no precedents that gave any help at all. Lora belonged to him -- everyone knew that. If his rival had been another villager, or someone from any other part of Thalassa, he knew exactly what he would have done. But the laws of hospitality, and above all his natural awe for anything of Earth, prevented him from politely asking Leon to take his attentions elsewhere. It would not be the first time that had happened, and there had never been the slightest trouble on those earlier occasions. That could have been because Clyde was over six feet tall, proportionally broad, and had no excess fat on his # pound frame. During the long hours at sea, when he had nothing else to do but to brood, Clyde toyed with the idea of a short, sharp bout with Leon. It would be very short; though Leon was not as skinny as most of the Earthmen, he shared their pale, washed-out look and was obviously no match for anyone who led a life of physical activity. That was the trouble -- it wouldn't be fair. Clyde knew that public opinion would be outraged if he had a fight with Leon, however justified he might be. And how justified was he? That was the big problem that worried Clyde, as it had worried a good seemed that Leon was now practically one of the family ; every time he called at the Mayor's house the Earthman seemed to be there on some pretext or other. Jealousy was an emotion which had never afflicted Clyde before, and he did not enjoy the symptoms. He was still furious about the dance. It had been tlie biggest sothe songs of distant earth dal event for years; indeed, it was not likely that Palm Bay would ever match it again in the whole of its history. To have the President of Thalassa, half the Council, and fifty visitors from Earth in the village at the same moment was not something that could happen again this side of Eternity. For all his size and strength, Clyde was a good dancer -- especially with Lora. But tonight he had little chance of proving it; Leon was too busy demonstrating the latest steps from Earth (latest, that is, if you overlooked the fact that they must have passed out of fashion a hundred years ago). In Clyde's opinion, Leon's technique was very poor and the dances were ugly; the interest that Lora showed in them was perfectly ridiculous. He had been foolish enough to tell her so when his opportunity came; and that was the last dance he had had with Lora that evening. From then onwards, he might not have been there as far as she was concerned. Clyde endured the boycott as long as he could, then left for the bar with one objective in mind. He quickly attained it, and not until he came reluctantly to his senses the next morning did he discover what he had missed. The dancing had ended early. There had been a short speech from the President -- his third that evening -- introducing the commander of the starship and promising a little surprise. Captain Gold had been equally brief; he was obviously a man more accustomed to orders than orations. "Friends," he began. "You know why we're here, and I've no need to say how much we appreciate your hospitality and kindness. We shall never forget you, and we're only sorry that we have so little time to see your beautiful island and its people. I hope you will forgive us for any seeming discourtesy, but the repair of our ship, and the safety of our companions, has had to take priority in our minds. "In the long run, the accident that brought us here may be fortunate for us both. It has given us happy memories, and also inspiration. What we have seen here is a lesson to us. May we make the world that is waiting at the end of our journey as fair a home for mankind as you have made Thalassa. "And before we resume our voyage, it is both a duty and a pleasure to leave with you all the records we can that will bridge the gap since you last had contact with Earth. Tomorrow we shall invite your scientists and historians up to our ship so that they can copy any of our information tapes they desire. Thus we hope to leave you a legacy which will enrich your world for generations to come. That is the very least we can do. "But tonight, science and history can wait, for we have other treasures aboard. Earth has not been idle in the centuries since your forefathers left. Listen, now, to some of the heritage we share together, and which we will leave upon Thalassa before we go our way." The lights dimmed; the music began. Noone who was present would ever forget this moment. In a trance of wonder, Lora listened to what men had wrought in sound during the centuries of separation. Time meant nothing; she was not even conscious of Leon standing by her side, holding her hand, as the music ebbed and flowed around them. These were the things that she had never known, the things that belonged to Earth, and to Earth alone. The slow beat of mighty bells, climbing like invisible smoke from old cathedral spires; the chant of patient boatmen, in a thousand tongues now lost forever, rowing home against the tide in the last light of day; the songs of armies marching into battles that Time had robbed of all their pain and evil; the merged murmur of ten cities woke to meet the dawn; the cold dance of the Aurora over endless seas of ice; the roar of mighty engines climbing upwards on the highway to the stars. All these she heard in the music and the songs that came out of the night -- the songs of distant Earth, carried to her across the light-years... A clear soprano voice, swooping and soaring like a bird at the very edge of hearing, was singing a wordless lament that tore at the heart. It was a dirge for all love lost in the loneliness of space, for friends and homes that could never again be seen and must fade at last from memory. It was a song for all exiles, and it spoke as clearly to those who were sundered from Earth by a dozen generations as to the voyagers to whom its fields and cities still seemed only weeks away. The music died into the darkness; misty-eyed, avoiding words, the people of Thalassa went slowly to their homes. But Lora did not go to hers; against the loneliness that had pierced her very soul, there was only one defence. And presently she found it, in the warm night of the forest, as Leon's arms tightened around her and their souls and bodies merged. Like wayfarers lost in a hostile wilderness, they sought warmth and comfort beside the fire of love. While that fire burned, they were safe from the shadows that prowled in the night, and all the universe of stars and planets shrank to a toy that they could hold within their hands. real. Despite all the urgency and peril that had brought them here, he sometimes fancied that at journey's end it would be hard to convince himself that Thalassa was not a dream that had come in his long sleep. This fierce and foredoomed love, for example; he had not asked for it -- it had been thrust upon him. Yet there were few men, he told himself, who would not have taken it, had they too landed, after weeks of grinding anxiety, on this peaceful, pleasant world. When he could escape from work, he had long walks with Lora in the fields far from the village, where men seldom came and only the robot cultivators disturbed the solitude. For hours Lora would question him about Earth -- but she would never speak of the planet which was the Magellan's goal. He understood her reasons well enough, and did his best to satisfy her endless curiosity about the world that was already "home" to more men than had ever seen it with their own eyes. She was bitterly disappointed to hear that the age of cities had passed. Despite all that Leon could tell her about the completely decentralized culture that now covered the planet from Pole to Pole, she still thought of Earth in terms of such vanished giants as Chandrigar, London, Astrograd, New York, and it was hard for her to realize that they had gone forever, and with them the way of life they represented. "When we left Earth," Leon explained, "the largest centers of population were university towns like Oxford or Ann Arbor or Canberra ; some of them had fifty thousand students and professors. There are no other cities left of even half that size." "But what happened to them?" "Oh, there was no single cause, but the development of communications started it. As soon as anyone on Earth could see and talk to anyone else by pressing a button, most of the need for cities vanished. Then anti-gravity was invented, and you could move goods or houses or anything else through the sky without bothering about geography. That completed the job of wiping out distance that the airplane had begun a couple of centuries earlier. After that, men started to live where they liked, and the cities dwindled away." For a moment Lora did not answer; she was lying on a bank of grass, watching the behavior of a bee whose ancestors, like hers, had been citizens of Earth. It was trying vainly to extract honey from one of Thalassa's native flowers; insect life had not yet arisen on this world, and the few indigenous flowei's had not yet invented lures for air-borne visitors. The frustrated bee gave up the hopeless task and buzzed angrily away; Lora hoped that it would have enough sense to head back to the orchards where it would find more co-operative flowers. When she spoke again, it was to voice a dream that had now haunted mankind for almost a thousand years. "Do you suppose," she said wistfully, "that we'll ever break through the speed of light?" Leon smiled, knowing where her thoughts were leading. To travel faster than light -- to go home to Earth, yet to return to your native world while your friends were still alive -- every colonist must, at some time or other, have dreamed of this. There was no problem, in the whole history of the human race, which had called forth so much effort and which still remained so utterly intractable. "I don't believe so," he said. "If it could be done, someone would have discovered how by this time. No -- we have to do it the slow way, because there isn't any other. That's how the Universe is built, and there's nothing we can do about it." "But surely we could still keep in touch!" Leon nodded. "That's true," he said, "and we try to, I don't know what's gone wrong, but you should have heard from Earth long before now. We've been sending out robot message-carriers to all the colonies, carrying a full history of everything that's happened up to the time of departure, and asking for a report back. As the news returns to Earth, it's all transcribed and sent out again by the next messenger. So we have a kind of interstellar news service, with the Earth as the central clearing house. It's slow, of course, but there's no other way of doing it. If the last messenger to Thalassa has been lost, there must be another on the way -- maybe several, twenty or thirty years apart." Lora tried to envisage the vast, star-spanning network of messagecarriei's, shuttling back and forth between Earth and its scattered children, and wondered why Thalassa had been overlooked. But with Leon beside her, it did not seem important. He was here ; Earth and the stars were very far away. And so also, with whatever unhappiness it might bring, was tomorrow... B y the end of the week, the visitors had built a squat and heavily-braced monster of metal girders, housing some obscure mechanism, on a rocky headland overlooking the sea. Lora, in common with the #I other inhabitants of Palm Bay and the several thousand sightseers who had descended upon the village, was watching when the first test was made. No one was allowed to go within a quarter of a mile of the machine -- a precaution which aroused a good deal of alarm among the more nervous islanders. Did the Earthmen know what they were doing? Suppose that something went wrong? And what were they doing, anyway? Leon was there with his friends inside the metal monster, making the final adjustments -- the 'coarse focussing', he had told Lora, leaving her none the wiser. She watched with the same anxious incomprehension as all her fellow islanders until the distant figures emerged from the machine and walked to the edge of the flat-topped rock on which it was built. There they stood, a tiny group of figures silhouetted against the ocean, staring out to sea. A mile from the shore, something strange was happening to the water. It seemed that a storm was brewing -- but a storm that kept within an area only a few hundred yards across. Mountainous waves were building up, smashing against each other and then swiftly subsiding again. Within a few minutes the ripples of the disturbance had reached the shore, but the center of the tiny storm showed no sign of movement. It was as if, Lora told herself, an invisible finger had reached down from the sky and was stirring the sea. Quite abruptly, the entire pattern changed. Now the waves were no longer battering against each other; they were marching in step, moving more and more swiftly in a tight circle. A cone of water was rising from the sea, becoming taller and thinner with every second. Already it was a hundred feet high, and the sound of its birth was an angry roaring that filled the air and struck terror into the hearts of all who heard it. All, that is, except the little band of men who had summoned this miracle from the deep, and who still stood watching it with calm assurance, ignoring the waves that were breaking almost against their feet. Now the spinning tower of water was climbing swiftly up the sky, piercing the clouds like an arrow as it headed towards space. Its foam-capped summit was already lost beyond sight, and from the sky there began to fall a steady shower of rain, the drops abnormally large like those which prelude a thunderstorm. Not all the water that was being lifted from Thalassa's single ocean was reaching its distant goal ; some was escaping from the power that controlled it and was falling back from the edge of space. Slowly the watching crowd drifted away, impressed but not in the least over-awed by what it had seen. Man had been able to control gravity for half a thousand years, and this trick -- spectacular though it was -- could not be compared with the miracle of hurling a great star-ship from sun to sun at little short of the speed of light. The Earthmen were now walking back towards their machine, clearly satisfied with what they had done. Even at this distance, one could see that they were happy and relaxed, perhaps for the first time since they had reached Thalassa. The water to rebuild the Magellan's shield was on its way out into space, to be shaped and frozen by the other strange forces that these men had made their servants. In a few days, they would be ready to leave, their great interstellar ark as good as new. Even until this minute, Lora had hoped that they might fail. There was nothing left of that hope now, as she watched the man-made waterspout lift its burden from the sea. Sometimes it wavered slightly, its base shifting back and forth as if at the balance point between immense and invisible forces. But it was fully under control, and it would do the task that had been set for it. That meant only one thing to her; soon she must say good-bye to Leon. the distant group of Earthmen, marshalling her thoughts and trying to subdue her emotions. Presently Leon broke away from his friends and came to meet her; relief and happiness were written across his face, but they faded swiftly when he saw Lora's expression. "Well," he said lamely, almost like a schoolboy caught in some crime, "we've done it." "And now -- how long will you be here?" He scuffed nervously at the sand, unable to meet her eye. "Oh, about three days -- perhaps four." She tried to assimiliate the words calmly; after all, she had expected them -- this was nothing new. But she failed completely, and it was as well that there was no one near them. "You can't leave!" she cried desperately. "Stay here!" Leon took her hands gently, then murmured: "No, Lora -- this isn't my world ; I would never fit into it. Half my life's been spent training for the work I'm doing now; I could never be happy here, where there aren't any more frontiers. In a month, I should die of boredom." "Then take me with you!" "You don't really mean that." "But I do!" "You only think so; you'd be more out of place in my world than I would be in yours." "I could learn -- there would be plenty of things I could do. As long as we could stay together!" He held her at arm's length, looking into her eyes. They mirrored sorrow, and also sincerity. She really believed what she was saying, Leon told himself. For the first time, his conscience smote him. He had forgotten -- or chosen not to remember -- how much more serious these things could be to a woman than to a man. He had never intended to hurt Lora; he was very fond of her, and would remember her with affection all his life. Now he was discovering, as so many men before him had done, that it was not always easy to say good-bye. There was only one thing to do. Better a short, sharp pain than a long bitterness. "Come with me, Lora," he said. "I have something to show you." They did not speak as Leon led the way to the clearing which the Earthmen used as a landing ground. It was littered with pieces of enigmatic equipment, some of them being repacked while others were being left behind for the islanders to use as they pleased. Several of the gravity-scooters were parked in the shade beneath the palms; even when not in use they spumed contact with the ground, and hovered a couple of feet above the grass. But it was not these that Leon was interested in; he walked purposefully towards the gleaming oval that dominated the clearing, and spoke a few words to the engineer who was standing beside it. There was a short argument; then the other capitulated with fairly good grace. "It's not fully loaded," Leon explained as he helped Lora up the ramp. "But we're going just the same. The other shuttle will be down in half an hour, anyway." Already Lora was in a world she had never known before -- a world of technology in which the most Thalassa would be lost. The island possessed all the machines it needed for its life and happiness; this was something utterly beyond its ken. Lora had once seen the great computer that was the virtual ruler of her people and with those decisions they disagreed not once in a generation. That giant brain was huge and complex, but there was an awesome simplicity about this machine that impressed even her non-technical mind. When Leon sat down at the absurdly small control board, his hands seemed to do nothing except rest lightly upon it. Yet the walls were suddenly transparent -- and there was Thalassa, already shrinking below them. There had been no sense of movement, no whisper of sound, yet the island was dwindling even as she watched. The misty edge of the world, a great bow dividing the blue of the sea from the velvet blackness of space, was becoming more curved with every passing second. "Look," said Leon, pointing to the stars. The ship was already visible, and Lora felt a sudden sense of disappointment that it was so small. She could see a cluster of portholes around the center section, but there appeared to be no other breaks anywhere on the vessel's squat and angular hull. The illusion lasted only for a second. Then, with a shock of incredulity that made her senses reel and brought her to the edge of vertigo, she saw how hopelessly her eyes had been deceived. Those were no port-holes; the ship was still miles away. What she was seeing were the gaping hatches through which the ferries could shuttle on their journeys between the star-ship and Thalassa. There is no sense of perspective in space, where all objects are still clear and sharp whatever their distance. Even when the hull of the ship was looming up beside them, an endless curving wall of metal eclipsing the stars, there was still no real way of judging its size. She could only guess that it must be at least two miles in length. The ferry berthed itself, as far as Lora could judge, without any intervention from Leon. She followed him out of the little control rooms, and when the airlock opened she was surprised to discover that they could step directly into one of the star-ship's passageways. T hey were standing in a long tubular corridor that stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see. The floor was moving beneath their feet, carrying them along swiftly and effortlessly -- yet strangely enough Lora had felt no sudden jerk as she stepped on to the conveyer that was now sweeping her through the ship. One more mystery she would never explain; there would be many others before Leon had finished showing her the Magellan, It was an hour before they met another human being. In that time they must have travelled miles, sometimes being carried along by the moving corridors, sometimes being lifted up long tubes within which gravity had been abolished. It was obvious what Leon was trying to do; he was attempting to give her some faint impression of the size and complexity of this artificial world which had been built to carry the seeds of a new civilization to the stars. The engine-room alone, with its sleeping, shrouded monsters of metal and crystal, must have been half a mile in length. As they stood on the balcony high above that vast arena of latent power, Leon said proudly, and perhaps not altogether accurately: "These are mine." Lora looked down on the huge and meaningless shapes that had carriec Leon to her across the light-years, and did not know whether to bless them for what they had brought, or to curse them for what they might soon take away. They sped swiftly through cavernous holds, packed with all the machines and instruments and stores needed to mould a virgin planet and to make it a fit home for humanity. There were miles upon miles of storage racks, holding in tape or microfilm or still more compact form the cultural heritage of mankind. Here they met a group of experts from Thalassa, looking rather dazed, trying to decide how much of all this wealth they could loot in the few hours left to them. Had her own ancestors, Lora wondered, been so well equipped when they crossed space? She doubted it; their ship had been far smaller, and Earth must have learned much about the techniques of interstellar colonization in the centuries since Thalassa was opened up. When the Magellan's sleeping travellers reached their new home, their success was assured if their spirit matched their material resources. Now they had come to a great white door which slid silently open as they approached to reveal -- of all incongruous things to find inside a spaceship -- a cloakroom in which lines of heavy furs hung from pegs. Leon helped Lora to climb into one of these, then selected another for himself. She followed him uncomprehendingly as he walked towards a circle of frosted glass set in the floor; then he turned to her and said: "There's no gravity where we're going now, so keep close to me and do exactly as I say." The crystal trap-door swung upwards like an opening watch-glass, and out of the depths swirled a blast of cold such as Lora had never imagined, still less experienced. Thin wisps of moisture condensed in the freezing air, dancing round her like ghosts. She looked at Leon as if to say "Surely you don't expect me to go down there!'" He took her arm reassuringly and said "Don't worry -- you won't notice the cold after a few minutes. I'll go first." The trapdoor swallowed him ; Lora hesitated for a moment, then lowered herself after him. Lowered? No; that was the wrong word; up and down no longer existed here. Gravity had been abolished -- she was floating without weight in this frigid, snow-white universe. All round her were glittering honeycombs of glass, forming thousands and tens of thousands of hexagonal cells. They were laced together with clusters of pipes and bundles of wiring, and each cell was large enough to hold a human being. And each cell did. There they were, sleeping all around her, the thousands of colonists to whom Earth was still, in literal truth, a memory of yesterday. What were they dreaming, less than half-way through their three-hundred-year sleep? Did the brain dream at all, in this dim no-man's-land between life and death? Narrow, endless belts, fitted with hand-holds every few feet, were strung across the face of the honeycomb. Leon grabbed one of these, and let it tow them swiftly past the great mosaic of hexagons. Twice they changed direction, switching from one belt to another, until at last they must have been a full quarter of a mile from the point where they had started. Leon released his grip, and they drifted to rest beside one cell no different from all the myriads of others. But as Lora saw the expression on Leon's face, she knew why he had brought her here, and knew that her battle was already lost. The girl floating in her crystal coffin had a face that was not beautiful, but was full of character and intelligence. Even in this centurieslong repose, it showed determination and resourcefulness. It was the face of a pioneer, of a frontierswoman who could stand beside her mate and help him wield whatever fabulous tools of science might be needed to build a new Earth beyond the stars. For a long time, unconscious of the cold, Lora stared down at the sleeping rival who would never know of her existence. Had any love, she wondered, in the whole history of the world, ever ended in so strange a place? At last she spoke, her voice hushed as if she feared to wake these slumbering legions. "Is she your wife?" Leon nodded. "I'm sorry, Lora. I never intended to hurt you..." "It doesn't matter now. It was my fault too." She paused, and looked more closely at the sleeping woman. "And your child as well?" "Yes; it will be bom three months after we land." How strange to think of a gestation that would last three hundred years! Yet it was all part of the same pattern; and that, she knew now, was a pattern that had no place for her. These patient multitudes would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life; as the crystal trapdoor closed behind her, and warmth crept back into her body, she wished that the cold that had entered her heart could be so easily dispelled. One day, perhaps, it would be; but many days and many lonely nights must pass ere that time came. She remembered nothing of the journey back through the labyrinth of corridors and echoing chambers; it took her by surprise when she found herself once more in the cabin of the little ferry ship that had brought them up from Thalassa. Leon walked over to the controls, made a few adjustments, but did not sit down. "Good-bye, Lora," he said. "My work is done. It would be better if I stayed here." He took her hands in his ; and now, in the last moment they would ever have together, there were no words that she could say. She could not even see his face for the tears that blurred her vision. His hands tightened once, then relaxed. He gave a strangled sob, and when she could see clearly again, the cabin was empty. A long time later a smooth, synthetic voice announced from the control board "We have landed; please leave by the forward airlock." The pattern of opening doors guided her steps, and presently she was looking out into the busy clearing she had left a lifetime ago. A small crowd was watching the ship with attentive interest, as if it had not landed a hundred times before. For a moment she did not understand the reason; then Clyde's voice roared "Where is he? I've had enough of this!" In a couple of bounds he was up the ramp and had gripped her roughly by the arm. "Tell him to come out like a man!" Lora shook her head listlessly. "He's not here," she answered. "I've said good-bye to him. I'll never see him again." Clyde stared at her disbelievingly, then saw that she spoke the truth. In the same moment she crumbled into his arms, sobbing as if her heart would break. As she collapsed, his anger too collapsed within him, and all that he had intended to say to her vanished from his mind. She belonged to him again; there was nothing else that mattered now. F or almost fifty hours the geyser roared off the coast of Thalassa until its work was done. All the island watched, through the lenses of the television cameras, the shaping of the iceberg that would rise ahead of the Magellan on her way to the stars. Might the new shield serve her better, prayed all who watched, than the one she had brought from Earth. The great cone of ice was itself protected, during these few hours while it was close to Thalassa's sun, by a paper-thin screen of polished metal that kept it always in shadow. The sun-shade would be left behind as soon as the journey began; it could not be needed in the interstellar wastes. The last day came and went; Lora's heart was not the only one to feel sadness now as the sun went down and the men from Earth made their final farewells to the world they would never forget -- and which their sleeping friends would never remember. In the same swift silence with which it had first landed, the gleaming egg lifted from the clearing, dipped for a moment in salutation above the village, and climbed back into its natural element. Then Thalassa waited. The night was shattered by a soundless detonation of light. A than a single star had banished all the hosts of heaven and now dominated the sky, far outshining the pale disc of Selene and casting sharpedged shadows on the ground, shadows that moved even as one watched. Up there on the borders of space the fires that powered the suns themselves were burning now, preparing to drive the star-ship out into immensity on the last leg of her interrupted journey. Dry-eyed, Lora watched the silent glory on which half her heart was riding out towards the stars. She was drained of emotion now; if she had tears, they would come later. Was Leon already sleeping, or was he looking back upon Thalassa, thinking of what might have been? Asleep or waking, what did it matter now... She felt Clyde's arms close around her, and welcomed their comfort against the loneliness of space. This was where she belonged; her heart would not stray again. Goodbye, Leon -- may you he happy on that far world which you and your children will conquer for mankind. But think of me sometimes, two hundred years behind you on the road to Earth. She clung fiercely to the strong arms that enfolded her, and felt against her cheek the beating of Clyde's heart -- the heart that belonged to her and which she would never spurn again. Out of the silence of the night there came a sudden, long-drawn sigh from the watching thousands, and she knew that the Magellan had sunk out of sight below the edge of the In science the man of real genius is the man who invents a new method. The notable discoveries are often made by his successors, who can apply the method with fresh vigor, unimpaired by the previous labor of perfecting itBertrand Russell At the moment, humanity is rather like an irrespKnsible child who has been presented with a set of machine tools, a box of matches and a supply of dynamite. -- Julien Huxley There she was -- mysterious but beautiful and for the taking. Where the ship came from, no one asked. As for where she was going, no one... bunch on Dunsinane, although this was no fault of our own. Ever since its founding, the colony had been unlucky. To begin with, there were metals in quantities sufficient only for local use. There were no indigenous flora and fauna which, considered as foodstuffs, would be so exotic as to command fancy prices in the luxury markets throughout the Galaxy. Then it had taken a long while, too long a while, for the Terran animals and plants, introduced when the colony was started, to gain a foothold -- the original ecological survey had been criminally haphazard and all manner of viruses, moulds and rusts had been overlooked. Then there were the earthquakes... And the droughts... And the floods... All in all, we were a povertystricken bunch, and the onerous freight charges that we had to pay Illustrated by Virgil Finlay on all goods shipped to and from Dunsinane kept us so. We had to export in order to pay for imported essentials -- and by the time the Interstellar Transport Commission had taken its whack there were few essentials that we could afford. The rest we had to do without. We were in no mood, therefore, to look in the mouth of any gift horse sent trotting our way by Providence. The Gift Horse -- that's what we called her. Ogilvy, the Headmaster of the Port Macbeth Academy, wanted her called Birnam Wood -- after all, he argued, she had come to Dunsinane. But Gift Horse she was dubbed almost from the very beginning, and the name stuck. Governor Smith broke a bottle of our very inferior whiskey over her bows when she was ready for Space after her refit, and Gift Horse was what he officially christened her. I wasn't the first one to see her, but I was the second. I was working late in my office at the spaceport that night -- the Commission's freighter. Epsilon Lyrae, which we nicknamed "Epi leptic Liar had pushed off that afternoon for Elsinore and had left behind more paperwork than cargo. I needn't have worked late -- her next call wasn't due for all of six weeks -- but I wanted to have the following day free for work on my small holding. That was the way all of us on Dunsinane lived. We did the clerical work necessary to hold the fabric of civilization together, but in all the time that we could spare from such essentially unproductive labors we were farmers and artisans. Anyhow, I was working late, and cursing the Purser of the 'Epileptic Liar for having not done all the things that he should have done to make my task easier. I was a Purser myself until I met Judith -- she was a hostess in the Alpha Class liner in which I was serving -- and decided that life in deep space was no life for a civilized man and woman. The same can be said for life in the Shakespearean colonies -- but we didn't know that when we made our decision to give the interstellar ships avay and become colonists. I was still wrestling with the manifest -- it didn't check at all with the bills of lading -- when the buzzer of my desk 'phone sounded. I flipped the switch over and the little screen lit up. I saw the fat, usually placid face of Bill Higgins, our chief radar operator. It was the first time that I'd ever seen him excited. "Ken," he said, "come to the radar office, will you?" "What for?" I asked. "We've acquired a satellite," he said. "Must be the "Epileptic Liar come back for something. Perhaps her Purser's decided that he'd better finish all the paper work he wished on to me." "It's not the "Epileptic Liar, I tracked her until she went into interstellar drive. She's well on her way to Port Hamlet. Come over, Ken. I want a witness before I start raising the alaim." I wasn't sorry to leave my papers. I walked out of the office, into the open air. I looked up at the sky, half expecting to see something. There was nothing visible to the naked eye, of course. All that I could see were the sparse stars and the great gulfs of emptiness between them -- at this time of the year the huge, luminescent lens that was the Galaxy set shortly after the sun. The absence of stars made the night -- although this was only subjective -- very cold as well as very dark. It was dark and cold in the radar office, too. Only one screen was in use, and the bulky figure of Bill Higgins was hunched over it. He stood up as I approached. "Do you see it?" he asked, moving to one side. I looked at the screen. I saw a little blob of light that could have been anything. "There's something there," I said. "Too right there's something there. Range one thousand miles -- straight up. And it's in a twenty four orbit over Port Macbeth." "It must be a ship," I said brightly. "Yes, but what ship? I've called them on every frequency known to man, and a few that aren't, and got no reply." "It still could be Epsilon Lyrae, Whatever accident forced her to return could have put her radio out of kilter. What about psionic communications? Have you called Templar out?" Like most radio specialists Higgins had nothing but contempt for the so-called psionic radio and for the trained telepaths who were its operators. He let me go to the 'phone and dial Templar's number. He let me explain to Templar what it was all about. He told me, when Templar was on the way, to keep the Psionic Communications Officer out of the radar office. I met Templar outside. We went straight to his own office. The sight of the big organic brain -- grown from tissue from the brain of a dog it was -- gave me, as it always did, the creeps. Templar patted the glass dome and said, "Hello, Fido old boy." He did all the things necessary to bring the organic amplifier from sleep into wakefulness, then put on the elaborate headset and relaxed in the deep armchair. I sat in a less comfortable chair and waited. I listened to the sigh and gurgle of the pumps as they kept Fido supplied with oxygen and nutrient solution. I watched Templar's thin lips moving as he muttered something. I strained my ears to hear what it was. All I heard was, Calling... Calling... " "Any reply?" I asked. "No. There's... something there. But it's faint, vague. The ghost of a thought..." "Are you sure it's not Epsilon Lyrae?" "She would answer me at once." "Not if her operators are dead or unconscious." "How does Epsilon Lyrae bear from here?" he asked me. I got Higgins on the 'phone, asked him for an estimated line of bearing. Templar swivelled his chair -- it was mounted on a turntable -- to my directions. I saw his lips moving again. ""Epsilon Lyrae answering," he said, after a brief pause. "So it's not them hanging over the spaceport?" "No. They want to know what we want." "Tell them you're testing," I said. "Just testing." "What about the... the whatever it is?" "Don't say anything about it. It's our business, not the Commission's." Somehow, the thought of salvage had already flickered across my mind. We, the Colony, could use the proceeds of salvage, and it would have been foolish to throw our prize, whatever it was, into the laps of the Commission and the crew of the Epileptic Liar. I went back to see Bill Higgins, and we decided it was time we got old Captain Sorensen, the Port Master, out of his bed. McDuff Observatory turned its big reflector on to the azimuth and altitude given the astronomers by Higgins, and confirmed our suspicions that the mysterious object was a spaceship. They couldn't tell us much more. They could tell us no more than that the vessel seemed to be midway in size between one of the Commission's Gamma Class and one of the Delta Class. They didn't think that she was either a Huqua or a Shaara ship, but they couldn't be sure. Was the ship manned? That was the problem. She must have approached Dunsinane under interstellar drive, reverting to normal space-time when almost within the outer atmosphere. She must have used interplanetary drive to establish herself in her orbit -- although, unluckily, nobody happened to be looking at the sky at the time. On the other hand, she answered no signals whatsoever -- neither radio, psionic radio nor light. Mid morning, there was a conference in Captain Sorensen's office. Governor Smith was there, together with a half dozen members of the Legislative Council. Higgins was there. Templar was there. I was there. It was Sorensen who kept harping on the fact that the strange ship was probably in distress, and that we should endeavor to go to her aid. He pointed out that we had one barely spaceworthy vessel at our disposal -- a Spurling Six with rocket drive instead of the more usual jets. He said that even though he had been planetbound for years he was still capable of simple piloting. There were three spacesuits in the spaceport stores, and if two volunteers would step forward... Everybody stepped forward, including the Governor. Sorensen decided, wisely, to make his choice of companions from among those who had several years of deep space experience, which disqualified most of those present. Higgins, Templar and myself -- exspacemen all -- matched coins to see which of us would have the privilege. On the first attempt we all turned up heads. On the second attempt Higgins and I had heads. Templar's coin showed a tail. The Port Master -- and he had no ized the readying of the Spurling for space. Higgins and I went to the stores for the spacesuits. They hadn't been used for years. Luckily we were able to get full oxygen cylinders from the spaceport engineering shop. We were able, after a struggle with our memories, to go through the full testing procedure. While all this was happening I had, of course, found time to keep in touch with Judith, I wasn't surprised when Higgins and I -- fully suited except for our helmets -- walked to where the vicious looking little Spurling was standing on the apron to see her among the crowd around the aircraft. She said, "Be careful, Ken." "You were shipmates with me long enough to know that I'm always careful," I told her. "That was in a real ship," she said, "not a garbage can with rockets." Sorensen glared at her from under his bushy white brows. "If you've quite finished, Mr. Chambers, you might help me on with my suit." I kissed Judith hastily. With Bill Higgins assisting, I eased the bulk of the Port Master into his spacesuit. The three of us put our helmets on -- the Spurling's cabin was supposed to be hermetically sealed, but it wouldn't have held small coal. In any case, the inner door of the little airlock had been missing for quite some time. Bill and I climbed into the Spurling first, took our seats at the rear of the cabin. Captain Sorensen followed us, wedged himself into the pilot's chair. He ran his hea# gloves over the controls, satisfied himself that they would not affect his manual dexterity too badly. Outside we could see the Spaceport Police clearing the field for our take-off. The Old Man took us up in a hurry. He had to, to conserve fuel -- the Spurling's fuel tanks had never been designed for actual spatial maneuvering. He didn't bother with the turret drive, he just turned her until her nose was pointing straight up. In seconds we were through the thin, high cirrus and the sky had changed from blue to black. It seemed only a few more seconds, although it must have been longer, when the drive was cut and we were falling weightless around Dunsinane, in a rough approximation of a twenty four hour orbit. The longest part of the whole business was the visual search for the strange ship. We found her at last, gleaming like a star in the sunlight. My body ached as Sorensen nudged us towards her with short, vicious stabs of rocket blast. It had been so long since I had been in Space that the first acceleration had hit me badly. We matched velocities with the stranger. We looked at her. She was a big brute, bigger than the old 'Epileptic Liary She had the vanes and the slender, needle prowed form that showed that she had been designed for landings and blastings off in an atmosphere. Her shell plating -- at least, to my unpracticed eye -- was in good condition, bore none of the pitting and scarring that must occur during years spent in allegedly empty Space, with descents and take-offs through planetary atmospheres. There was the usual greenhouse in the nose. There was a name just below the big windows -- but it was in no script with which we were familiar. It wasn't in the Terrn alphabet, neither was it in either Huqua or Shaara. It was like some of the more abstruse symbols used by the mathematicians. There was an airlock where one would expect an airlock to be -- about two thirds of the way between nose and tail. The big, round door was open. I shivered. It looked too much like an open mouth, gaping wide to swallow us. I said as much. Sorensen laughed, making my helmet 'phones crackle. "So it does," he said. "So it does. But we mustn't look a gift horse in the mouth." "A gift horse. Captain?" asked Higgins. "Yes -- a gift horse. A spaceship's just what we've been wanting for years -- and now we've got one." "But she's not ours," I said. "And what about her crew?" "Damn the crew," he replied. "Oh, I'm sorry for them, something must have happened to them -- didn't you notice that both airlock doors were open? That ship's deserted." "All artifacts of Extra-Terran origin are the property of the Institute of Extra-Terran Arts and Sciences," I reminded him. "Like hell! This is a ship, man -- not a bloody artifact. I don't know how she got here, or from where, but we can use her. We'll be able to run the Commission out of the Shakespearean Sector. We'll do all the fetching and carrying between Dunsinane and Elsinore and Venice and Illyria and Philippi -- at freight rates that our fellow colonists can afford to pay." "But she can't be deserted," said Higgins. "There's only one way to find out," said the Old Man. He was the first across from the Spurling to the ship, using the little rocket unit that was part of his suit equipment. He paid out his lifeline as he went. Once inside the airlock he pulled the Spurling to the ship. She crumpled her starboard wing rather badly coming alongside, and I remember wondering how we would ever get back to Dunsinane -- and Dunsinane was such a long way down. I looked at the cloudy, ocean girdled globe and shuddered. We made the Spurling fast alongside the stranger. Then Bill and I joined Sorensen in the airlock. It was like the airlocks of all the ships that we had ever known -- but there is, after all, only one way to make an efficient airlock. By the light of our torches we prowled through the empty alleyways, the deserted compartments. The more we saw the more we were convinced that the owners -- or the late owners -- of the vessel had been an essentially humanoid race. Everything was to the right scale. The chairs in the Control Room could have been designed for human bodies. The controls themselves must have been designed for something very like the human hand. Sorensen made a careful inspection of the controls. "This," he said, "must be the pilot's chair. The big, red key must actuate the main drive, the smaller ones the auxiliaries. That screen will be a radar altimeter, and the other one a drift indicator. These could be the gyroscope controls..." He prodded a button with a thick, gloved forefinger. He swore as a low humming sound, rising rapidly to a whine, was audible, transmitted to us through the metal of hull and decks and bulkheads, through the metallic soles of our boots. Outside the big ports the stars were wheeling in slow procession, the stars and the huge lens of the Galaxy. Sorensen prodded other buttons, frantically. The whining stopped, but the ship was still swinging. "There must be power in the batteries still," he muttered. "Why not?" asked Higgins. "And why shouldn't the Pile be alive, too? Everything must have been working for her to get here. There's no reason to suppose that nothing is working is now." By the time that we had decided that everything was working, the insides of our suits were clammy and foul, and we were tired and hungry. We had tried, using our suit radios, to get in touch with Port Macbeth, but without success. I was beginning to worry about Judith, knowing that she would be worried about me. Even so, results were encouraging. None of us was an engineer, but we knew enough to be able to tell that both Drives, Interplanetary and Interstellar, were functioning. The Pile was alive, and there was ample propellant, if the meters on the tanks, with their alien numerals, said what we thought they said. But we had ample evidence to indicate that the builders of the ship were a right handed race. The Interstellar Drive was as near to a Mannschenn Unit as made no difference. Obviously, with its complexity of spinning wheels, it could work only on the principle of Temporal Precession. The tools in the engineroom stores were all understandable, remarkably un-alien in their construction and design. The tools, as a matter of fact, were the only items of equipment in the ship. The other storerooms were all empty, looked as though they had never been used. The cabins were empty. There were no books or papers of any kind. The galley -- there was nothing else that it could have been -- bore no evidence that anybody had ever cooked anything in the electronic range. We returned to the Control Room for a conference. "This is the situation," said Sorensen. "We could try to straighten the Spurling's starboard wing -- but, even if we did, it'll be badly weakened. I'd not guarantee a safe landing. On the other hand -- I feel quite sure that I could set this ship down in one piece. All we have to do is to start the generators -- I'm enough of an engineer for that -- and get the controls, all the controls, alive. Then I shall require at least an hour's playing around with her to get the feel of her. Then I take her down." "But we can't notify Port Macbeth," objected Bill. "Port Macbeth, to all practical intents and purposes, is in this Control Room, Mr. Higgins. Besides, everybody in Dunsinane will be staring at the sky, and the Observatory will see what's happening soon enough. Come on, now -- we'll get the jennies started." So we started the jennies, and we cast the poor little Spurling adrift. We found the controls for the airlock doors and we, as Captain Sorensen had put it, played around for all of an hour. By this time the air regenerating units of our suits were beginning to feel the strain, and so were we. By this time we were ceasing to worry what sort of landing we could make. As far as I was concerned all that I wanted was to get the helmet off my head and get a lungful of good, clean air. All that I wanted was to feel the solid ground of Dunsinane under my feet. All that I wanted was a surcease from the gut wrenching accelerations and decelerations. I wanted to see Judith again too -- but not, I must confess, with such urgency. We fell, at last, through the evening sky, the ship almost obedient to the touch of Sorensen's big hands, with Bill and I prompting his memory as to which control was which, which syTubol meant what. We fell, they told us, like a falling star, the glare of our rockets intolerably bright in the evening sky. Even so, we hit the apron almost as lightly as the proverbial falling feather -- and stumbled from the ship to face the levelled rifles of the Spaceport Police and the volunteers, who dropped their rifles to cheer when we threw off our helmets and were recognized. It was a homecoming that made the danger and hardship worthwhile. T here was llttle time to rest, almost no time to tell Judith of our discoveries. A meeting of the Council was convened for that very night and, of course, Sorensen, Higgins and myself had to appear before it to say our pieces. The decision of the Council was unanimous. After all, we were a povertystricken bunch on Dunsinane and ethics, to us, were an expensive luxury, and the laws and rules made by somebody on Earth, parsecs away, were made, we all felt, to be ignored. We didn't know where the ship had come from -- for all we knew she could have drifted from some other Galaxy. We didn't know what had happened to her crew -- it seemed to us that she had never been manned. We didn't know of what value she would be to the Institute of Extra-Terran Arts and Sciences -- although we could make a conservative guess -- but we did know, only too well, of what value she would be to us. What the Institute never knew would never worry its corporate mind. Other colonies, other planet states throughout the Galaxy owned and operated their own ships, but they had been rich enough to buy them. We weren't rich, and never would be rich, and we could not afford to look our big, beautiful, shining gift horse in the mouth. That is what we decided to call her -- the Gift Horse. The meeting finished with all of us drinking toasts to the beast in New Caledon whiskey -- it was far better than our own -- that Governor Smith had produced for the occasion. That was the end of the talking; the next day the work started. Our main trouble was that we had so very few ex-spacemen among us. There was Captain Sorensen, of course, and there were Higgins and Templar, the two communications specialists. There was Judith -- although she had sailed only as hostess, she had her Catering Officer's Certificate. There was Harry Hawkins, who ran the Port Macbeth engineering shop. He had been a Junior Engineer -- reaction -- in the Commission's ships and had an Interstellar Endorsement to his Second's ticket. He knew nothing of the theory of the Mannschenn Drive -- all that he knew was how to trace faults and check circuits. We found a Doctor Calver among the staff of the Observatory who thought that he would be able to handle interstellar navigation. We found a professor of biology at the Academy who was confident that he would be able to look after the yeasts and algae upon which we should depend both for food and atmosphere. We found a few bright boys from the airlines who thought that they should have been spacemen, not airmen, and who, learn. Sorensen, of course, was to be Master, and Hawkins the engineer, handling both reaction and interstellar drives. Calver was to be navigator and Hawkins' assistant so far as the Mannschenn Drive was concerned. Mackay, the professor from the Academy, was elected BioChemist. Higgins and Templar were to be communications officers. I was the obvious choice for Purser, just as Judith was for the position of Chief Steward. We had specialized vacancies. Meanwhile, the work of fitting out the Gift Horse continued day and night. We had no time to lose. We wanted to get her out into Space before the Commission's Epsilon Lyrae came bumbling along on her appointed rounds. We wanted to carry our first load from Dunsinane to Elsinore, from Elsinore to Illyria, to Venice and Philippi so that the opposition would be greeted with empty warehouses and a paucity of customers. We didn't know where she had come from, and by this time we didn't care. She was our ship. She was, to a surprising extent, only the shell of a ship -- and that made our task so much easier. We were able to install the algae tanks and yeast vats in positions to suit ourselves and not the whim of some Commission draughtsman huddled over his drawing board. Not that there were many whims in the design of the Commission's ships -- it was just that such-andsuch had always lived in soand-so space, and always would live there, the convenience of her crew and passengers notwithstanding. Tlie airline pilots took her lifeboats -- the fact that they were still in their nests was one of the puzzling features -- and played with them outside the atmosphere and got the feel of handling a ship in a vacuum. The rest of us were planetbound -- but it was only temporary. We pushed on with our tas, and it was a day ahead of schedule that the Governor, perched precariously a-top the scaffolding, broke the ceremonial bottle of whiskey over Gift Horse's bow. It was two days later that we were ready for the blast-off. We were a full ship insofar as the passenger accommodation was concerned. Most of our novice spacemen were married, and it had been decided to give their wives a holiday jaunt around the other worlds of the Shakespearean Sector. Sorensen didn't like it, complaining that enough things could go wrong on a maiden voyage without having a parcel of women cluttering up the ship. He was over-ruled by the Governor himself. Our cargo spaces were far from full. We had so little to export from our world. There were the bags of mail to the other planetary systems. There was a prize ram, with two ewes, for Elsinore. There were a dozen or so bales of sheepskins for Illyria and a shipment of whiskey for Venice, whose attempts at the manufacture of potables had failed even more dismally than had our own. There was a rooster and a half dozen hens for somebody on Philippi. Unfortunately they did not survive the initial acceleration. It was a fine morning when we blasted off. There was bright bunting all over the spaceport, and the Police Band was playing us off. I remember The Road To The Isles and, as the airlock doors were closing, the inevitable Auld Lang Syne, I remember, too, Will Ye No' Come Back Again? and how Judith said that they might have played something a little less ominous. I remember how stiff and selfconscious the new hands looked in their new uniforms as they paraded before the Governor, and how much at home the old hands looked in theirs, with the tarnished braid and badges. I remember the cheers, and the slow booming of the saluting cannon that Hawkins' men in the shop had found time to make, somehow, in spite of the fact that they had been working on the ship every waking hour. I remember how we marched up the ramp to the airlock, striding in time to the skirling of the pipes and the throbbing of the drums. Then we were busy, except for the deadheads. The navigational, engineering and communications staff went straight to their stations. Judith and I were busy, too -- we worked together, seeing that all the passengers were strapped safely in their acceleration couches. We got to our own cabin just as Sorensen's voice was coming over the intercom: "Thirty seconds to blast-off! Twenty... Fifteen... Ten..." We were lifting then, and the giant h#md of inertia was pressing US down into the padding. We were lifting, and I could hear, even above the roar of the rockets, the usual, disquieting noises inevitable at the beginning of any voyage, even with the most highly trained crew. There is always something insecurely fastened that will carry away from a bulkhead. There is always something in a state of unstable equilibrium that will fall. There is always at least one substandard light fitting that will shatter. There is always somebody -- and it isn't always a woman -- who will panic and scream. The Old Man's voice came through the speakers. Judging from the sound of it he had been having as bad a time as anybody, probably worse. He was old, and fat, and in no condition to take the strains and stresses of spaceship handling. Although, I reflected, he had shown no signs of wear and tear after we had brought the Gift Horse in. It must be, I decided, emotion. After years ashore he was once again Master of a ship in deep sjace. "Stand by for Free Fall," he said slowly. The rockets died. "The vessel will be proceeding under Interstellar Drive within a few minutes," said Sorensen. "Those of you who wish may proceed to the lounge. Mr. and Mrs. Chambers will explain to you what is happening and will answer any questions you care to ask." "He means that we'll try to explain and try to answer their questions," said Judith, unbuckling her straps. "I never noticed you at a loss for an answer when we were in the old Beta Virginis I told her. "Or I you," she replied. "I remember that physicist we carried -- what was his name? -- told me that he had never been so entertained in all his life as he was by your explanation of the working of the Drive..." "I remember," I said. "That... wolfr "You had no need to worry," she smiled. "I was known among the girls as the virgin of the Virgin Bettyr We floated out into the alleyway, pulled ourselves along the guide rails to the lounge. About two thirds of our deadhead passengers were there. The others, doubtless, were being sick. I hoped that Judith's two assistants -- airlines hostesses they had been -- weren't being sick themselves. There was the usual cry of wonderment as the shutters slid aside from the huge windows. We all looked out. There lay Dunsinane, a huge globe, all green and brown and blue, with the light of Macbeth, our primary, reflected brilliantly from the Polar icecaps and the summits of the high, snow covered mountains of the Malcolm Range. Beyond Dunsinane was the blackness of intergalactic space, broken only by the sparse, dim nebulosities that were other galaxies, that were island universes. I wondered from which of them Gift Horse had come. I wondered why she had come. I wondered what we would do and say when her rightful ownel's confronted us and accused us of stealing their ship. "Mr. Chambers," said somebody. I turned round. It was pretty little Mrs. Mackay, the Bio-Ghemist's wife. Somebody should have told her, I thought, that a wide skirt is not the ideal garment to wear during Free Fall. I was rather glad that nobody had. "Mr. Chambers," she said again, "the Captain said that you'd answer any questions we had. The Purser of the boat I came out on did tell me about the Mannschenn Drive, but I'm afraid that he wasn't very clear... "First of all," I said, raising my voice a little for the benefit of anybody else who might be listening, "the ship has to be pointed the right way. Sometimes this is done by cutting the reaction drive -- the rockets -- and swinging the ship on her gyroscopes and then cutting in the reaction drive again for a few minutes. The best, and the least wasteful way -- as far as reaction mass is concerned -- is to blast off at just the right time so that the ship is pointed the right way to start with. That's what the Captain did. We're pointed directly at Hamlet. "Now, the Drive itself. Everybody knows that a spinning gyroscope will precess at right angles to an applied force. It was Mannschenn who discovered the principle of what is called Temporal Precession, who induced a gyroscope to precess at right angles to the three dimensions of Space. The precession, of course, still takes place within the framework of the space-time continuum... "A sort of time machine!" she said. "No. It's not # l Time Machine." "But the Purser of Epsilon Lyrae told me that the ship was going ahead in space and astern in time." "You can't go astern in time," I said. "Oh, I know that there have been stories written in which the Drive, either by accident or on purpose, has been used as a time machine -- but you've only to think about it to see how utterly impossible it is. Once you have time travel you get involved in a mess of absolutely insoluble paradoxes. You go back and you murder your great grandfather -- thus automatically cancelling yourself out. So, if you never existed, you couldn't go back in time to murder your great grandfather. But if you haven't murdered your great grandfather you do exist after all. Do you see?" "No," said Judith, who had joined the audience. "But carry on, darling." "But he's making it all so clear, Mrs. Chambers," said Mrs. Mackay. "Is he?" "Anyhow," I said, "it takes some few minutes to warm the Drive up. You can hear the gyroscopes that are its essential guts humming now. Once the precession starts you'll see the stars -- what few stars we can see from here -- fade and vanish. You'll see Dunsinane vanish. Navigation will no longer be visual, but will be entirely by instruments, by the mass detectors and such. We shall see nothing further until we return to normal space-time in the neighborhood of Hamlet Then we shall come in to Elsinore on rocket drive." "Normal space-time?" asked Mrs. Mackay. "But you said that the so-called Temporal Precession took place within the framework of the spacetime continuum." I noted with relief that the humming of the Drive had risen to an almost supersonic whine. "What I meant was," I said, speaking with deliberate slowness, "was... "Stand by for Interstellar Drive!" barked Sorensen's voice from the bulkhead speaker. "Stand by for Interstellar Drive!" H ave you ever tried to swim in molasses? That's what it was like as I made my slow and painful way through alleyways and along the axial shaft to Control. There was something wrong with the Drive, something very badly wrong with the Drive, and we all knew it. Perhaps the passengers wouldn't have realized it, at first, had not Hawkins, his face white and strained and dripping with perspiration, passed through the lounge on his laborious journey to Control, had he not returned, minutes later, with a worried and scared looking Calver in tow. We got the passengers back into their cabins, Judith and I, and saw that they were securely strapped into their bunks. Then I decided to see Sorensen to ask what was wrong. We had heard nothing over the intercom, and all our attempts to get into touch with Control by its use had failed. And there was something wrong with the lights. They were burning dimly, with a feeble radiance that was so close to the infra-red that it made no appreciable difference. There was light a-plenty from the pearly glow that streamed in through the still unshuttered ports. My journey to Control seemed to take years. How long it took in actuality I don't know. There are so many different kinds of time. But I got there at last, pulled myself into the compartment through the open hatchway. Sorensen was there, strapped into his chair, staring out through the viewports at the luminous emptiness. The three ex-airmen were there, looking, in spite of their spacemen's uniforms, like fish out of water. One of them was huddled over the Mass Detector. "There's nothing!" he was crying hysterically. "There's nothing! "Captain Sorensen!" I said. "What's happened? What's wrong?" The old man turned his head slowly. "I wish I knew. Chambers," he said. "All I can tell you is this -- but don't say anything to the passengers yet -- all I can tell you is this; the Drive's taken charge." I remembered the stories and the legends of which I had made such fun when I was explaining the Drive to Mrs. Mackay -- how long ago? I thought of time cycles and paradoxes. I thought of Gift Horse as a sort of Flying Dutchman of Space, with ourselves condemned to wander through and around and outside the Continuum for all eternity. "Are we headed for the Past?" I asked. "But that's impossible." "I know damn' well that it's, impossible!" he barked, with a return to his old irascibility. "It always was impossible, and it is still impossible. So we aren't doing it." "Then what are we doing?" "I... don't... know. Hawkins doesn't know. Calver doesn't know. All that I know is this -- we should have tried to get hold of a properly qualified Mannschenn engineer. All that I know is this -- we should have looked our gift horse in the mouth before riding off on her. Gift horse? She's a Trojan Horse in reverse!" Hawkins came in to Control. He looked even more frightened than when I had seen him last. "Well, Mr. Hawkins?" asked Sorensen. "Or is it not well?" "It's not. Captain. There were no faults when we blasted off -- I'll swear to that. There was nothing wrong with the circuits. But the controls burned out almost immediately after we got her started -- they could almost have been booby trapped. They were booby trapped. And... and..." "And what, Mr. Hawkins?" "I can't believe it myself, but Dr. Calver says it's so. She's running in reverse!" There was a long silence. Then! "Get hold of Higgins and Templar," the Old Man told me. "Tell them to try their damnedest to get in touch with somebody somewhere, somehow... But Higgins' receivers were dead, as was all his apparatus. And Templar I found unconscious and Fido, the organic psionic amplifier, was no more than a mass of corruption in its tank. I found the Doctor, and we revived Templar. All he could tell us was that he had been hit by an overwhelming wave of age and tiredness. It had been, he said, like the entire Galaxy crying out for rest, for a surcease from labor. It had been too much for him. There was nothing now, he said. There was nothing. Nothing. L ooking back, i am stiii surI prised that not one of us thought of making a finish to it all. Perhaps some of us did think of it but, if so, the idea never got past the thinking stage. Our only salvation, I am convinced, was the women. They let us console ourselves with the thought that, no matter where -- or when -- we finished up we could become the Adams and Eves of a new race. Too, there was the urge to carry on to see what would happen next. I know that already detailed plans were being made to consider the ship as a closed, ecological unit capable of functioning as such for an indefinite period of time. So we kept going. Sorensen gave Calver and Hawkins strict instructions not to do anything -- anything -- to the Drive until they were sure what they were doing. Committees for this, that and the other were organized. An amateur theatrical society came into being, and a string quartet. The almost lost art of writing was revived. Until something happened -- or until Hawkins and Calver made something happen -- we were a world, even though a pitifully small one. We adjusted ourselves to the effects of the field of the Drive -- after all, the human animal can adjust itself to almost anything. We lived our not unhappy lives. We saw to it that there was work for everybody. Never, in all the history of Man the Navigator, has the inside of a ship shone as did the interior of Gift Horse. We had alcohol to take the sharp edge off our doubts and fears and forebodings -- Mackay saw to that. As a brewer and as a distiller he was a first class Bio-Chemist -- even so, his "Gift Horse Vodka" was a boon and a blessing. We had all, I suppose, settled down quite comfortably, almost happily, when the Drive stopped. It happened without warning, at a time when Hawkins and Calver were in Control discussing matters with Sorensen and his senior officers. The sudden cessation of the high-pitched whine was as nerve shattering as an explosion would have been. It was some time before any of us thought to look out of the ports, before any of us looked at the instruments. The shining haze was gone, as though it never had been. Outside was blackness -- a blackness more intense than any of us had ever known, broken -- and intensified by a pitiful scattering of dim, faint stars. Outside was a feebly glowing red sun. Outside was a planet, even at this range obviously desolate, even at this range no more than a ball of ice and desert sand. The meeting broke up suddenly. Hawkins and Calver scurried out of Control, followed closely by Higgins and Templar. Judith and I remained. The intercom was working again. "Calver here," came the scientist's dry voice. "The Mannschenn Drive Unit has burned itself out. It can never be repaired." "Tell Hawkins to speak to me," said Sorensen crisply. "Mr. Hawkins -- Reaction Drive stations!" "Reaction Drive stations it is, sir!" "Communications to Control. Templar here. There's something, somebody, on that planet. It's not quite alien, but..." Radio Communications to Control. Higgins here. Captain. I'm in touch with them, whoever they are. They speak English. I'll switch you through." "Calling starship," came a flat voice. "Calling starship. Come in, please." "Starship Gift Horse here," replied the Old Man. "Sorensen, Master. Who are you? Where are we?" "Prepare for landing. Captain Sorensen. Prepare for landing. Follow the beam in." "Why the hell should we land?" exploded Sorensen. "You have nowhere else to go. Captain. You have no Interstellar Drive." "Suppose we don't want to land?" "We are quite capable of coming to fetch you in, Captain. Furthermore, we would point out that your ship was built to withstand aging stresses for a limited period only, and that, according to our calculations, only a few hours of life remain to her." 'They built the ship," muttered the Old Man. "They know what they put into her... They're not bluffing -- or are they?" He shrugged his thick shoulders. "All right," he said. "All right, whoever you are. We're coming down." To us he said, "Landing Stations." I should have gone back into the accommodation with Judith to help control the passengers. But I wanted so to watch what was happening. I made myself as small and as inconspicuous as possible, and hoped that Captain Sorensen wouldn't see me and chase me out of Control. The descent was routine enough -- swinging Gift Horse on her gyroscopes, braking her with brief rocket blasts. We fell rapidly at first, and abruptly the world beneath us was no longer a globe but a huge bowl into which we were falling. We heard the thin, high keening as the first molecules of atmosphere swept up and past our hull. We felt the rise in internal temperature. And then we slowed. Carefully the Old Man brought her down, carefully, carefully, riding the beam in. I looked at the screen to see what it was to which we were falling, what desolate huddle of buildings in the all pervading desert, among the low, eroded hills. I cried aloud in amazement -- we were dropping to what seemed to be the only oasis on the time-ravaged face of the planet. We touched at last, and the silence beat at our ears with the cessation of the rockets' screaming roar. We touched at last, and I got up from my seat and looked out at the pleasant landscape -- the grass, the trees, the bright flowers. I looked at the beings who were coming towards us. There were three men in gleaming spacesuits, and following them were half a dozen wheeled machines. I was relieved when I saw no obvious weapons. "Send for the Purser," the Old Man was saying, "and... Oh, you're here, Chambers." "Yes, sir," I said. "I see no reason to depart from standard practice," said Sorensen. "You will go down to the airlock to receive our visitors -- they must be the Port officials." "Hadn't I better wear a spacesuit, sir?" "Yes. You'd better. They're wearing spacesuits." "Captain Sorensen," said the radio. "Evacuate your ship at once, bringing with you such easily portable stores and baggage as you require. I assure you that the atmosphere is breathable and the temperature tolerable." "Put on your spacesuit," said Sorensen to me. "Go down to the airlock. Find out, if you can, why they are wearing suits." I put on my spacesuit -- the same one that I had worn when we brought the Gift Horse in. I went down to the airlock. The inner door shut behind me. After a long pause, the outer door opened. The retractable ramp reached down to the ground like a long, gleaming tongue. The three spacesuited figures walked stiffly up the ramp. Before I could retreat two of them had seized me by the arms while the third one raised his gloved hands to twist my helmet. It came clear and free, and as I opened my mouth to shout I took a great, involuntary gasp of air. I realized, too late, what I had done. I decided that it didn't matter, and went on breathing. Because the men in spacesuits weren't men in spacesuits at all. They were robots in human form, beautifully and cunnhly made, graceful as only finely wrought metal can be graceful, their featureless heads somehow in keeping with the slender bodies. "Welcome to Dunsinane," said one of them. I stared at him stupidly. "Welcome to Dunsinane," he said again. I began to realize, then, what had happened. I saw, dimly, that we had come a long way in a long time -- or should I have said a long time in a long way? I knew that we had come full circle, but that it wasn't a circle, but a spiral. I knew that we should have looked our gift horse in the mouth. All hands managed to get away from the ship before she crumbled into metallic dust, saving most of the stores and cargo and personal effects. We were taken to the charming village where we still live -- we and our children. We have no cause to complain of our treatment; we are waited upon hand no emperor of olden times could ever have commanded. We live quite well on the fruit and the vegetables of the oasis, and on the synthetics that the robots make for us. Now and again we allow ourselves the luxury of mutton or lamb. (It is a great pity that those fowls did not survive the take-off...) We know, too, what it was -- and is -- all about. It was Templar who got into touch with the... entity living -- and I think the word "living" is justifiable -- in the very heart of the planet. It is practically pure brain, says Templar, for all that it is a machine and not an organic being. Its relationship to the lesser machines on the surface is almost like that of the queen bee to the other inhabitants of the hive. Almost -- because each of the lesser machines has its own intelligence, its own personality, and emotions. They were lonely, the robots. Man had gone, vanishing from the dying, expanding Universe. Man had gone -- and they, built and designed to serve Man, were faced with an eternity of frustration. They were lonely, and their Queen Mother did what she could -- Templar always calls her "she" -- to alleviate their loneliness. The trap was set and baited -- the trap that old Sorensen so aptly called "a Trojan Horse in reverse". The trap was set and baited, and we walked into it. (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Ed Emsh Do unto others as you would have them do unto you... And the natives of Capella IV, philosophers at heart. were not ones to ignore the Golden Rule... ItX of the Daughters of Terra. I am her nephew, the one who didn't turn out well. Christened Hapland Graves, after Earth President Hapland, a cousin by marriage, the fellows at school naturally called me Happy Graves. "Haphazard Graves, it should be," Aunt Mattie commented acidly the first time she heard it. It was her not very subtle way of reminding me of the way I lived my life and did things, or didn't do them. She shuddered at anything disorderly, which of course included me, and it was  her beholden duty to right anything which to her appeared wrong. "There won't be any evil to march on after you get through, Aunt Mattie," I once said when I was a child. I like now to think that even at the age of six I must have mastered the straight face, but I'm afraid I was so awed by her that I was sincere. "That will do, Hapland!" she said sternly. But I think she knew I meant it -- then -- and I think that was the day I became her favorite nephew. For some reason, never quite clear to me, she was my favorite aunt. I think she liked me most because I was the cross she had to bear. I liked her most. I'm sure, because it was such a comfortable ride. house can make things quite comfortable. carry out her hobbies, or, as she called it, her "life's work." Aunt Mattie always spoke in cliches because people could understand what you meant. One of these hobbies was her collection of flora of the universe. It was begun by her maternal grandfather, one of the wealthier Plots, and increased as the family fortunes were increased by her father, one of the more ruthless Tombs, but it was under Aunt Mattie's supervision that it came, so to speak, into full flower. "Love," she would say, "means more to a flower than all the scientific knowledge in the world." Apparently she felt that the small army of gardeners, each a graduate specialist in duplicating the right planetary conditions, hardly mattered. The collection covered some two hundred acres in our grounds at the west side of the house. Small, perhaps, as some of the more vulgar displays by others go, but very, very choice. The other hobby, which she combines with the first, is equally expensive. She and her club members, the Daughters of Terra (D.T.s for short), often find it necessary to take junkets on the family space yacht out to some distant planet -- to straighten out reprehensible conditions which have come to her attention. I usually went along to take care of -- symbolically, at least -- the bags and (their) baggage. My psychiatrist would say that expressing it in this way shows I have never outgrown my juvenile attitudes. He says I am simply a case of arrested development, mental, caused through too much overshadowing by the rest of the family. He says that, like the rest of them, I have inherited the family compulsion to make the universe over to my own liking so I can pass it on to posterity with a clear conscience, and my negative attitude toward this is simply a defense mechanism because I haven't had a chance to do it. He says I really hate my aunt's flora collection because I see it as a rival for her afifection. I tell him if I have any resentments toward it at all it is for the long hours spent in getting the latinized names of things drilled into me. I ask him why gardeners always insist on forcing long meaningless names upon non-gardeners who simply don't care. He ignores that, and says that subconsciously I hate my Aunt Mattie because I secretly recognize that she is a challenge too great for me to overcome. I ask him why, if I subconsciously hate Aunt Mattie, why I would care about how much affection she gives to her flora collection. He says, ahah! We are making progress. He says he can't cure me -- of what, I'm never clear -- until I find the means to cut down and destroy my Aunt Mattie. This is all patent nonsense because Aunt Mattie is the rock, the firm foundation in a universe of shifting values. Even her cliches are precious to me because they are unchanging. On her, I can depend. He tells Aunt Mattie his diagnoses and conclusions, too. Unethical? Well now! Between a mere psychiatrist and my Aunt Mattie is there any doubt about who shall say what is ethical? After one of their long conferences about me she calls me into her study, looks at me wordlessly, sadly, shakes her head, sighs -- then squares her shoulders until the shelf of her broad, although maiden, bosom becomes huge enough to carry any burden, even the burden of my alleged hate. This she bears bravely, even gratefully. I might resent this needless pain the psychiatrist gives her, except that it really seems to make her happier in some obscure way. Perhaps she has some kind of guilt complex, and I am her deserved punishment? Aunt Mattie with a guilt complex? Never! Aunt Mattie knows she is right, and goes ahead. So all his nonsense is completely ridiculous. I love my Aunt Mattie. I adore my Aunt Mattie. I would never do anything to hurt my Aunt Mattie. Or, well, I didn't mean to hurt her, anyway. All I did was wink. I only meant...  port of Capella IV by the planet administrator, himself, one John J. McCabe. It was no particular coincidence that I knew him. My school was progressive. It admitted not only the scions of the established families but those of the ambitious f#unilies as well. Its graduates, naturally, went into tlie significant careei's. Johnny McCabe was one of the ambitious ones. We hadn't been anything like bosom pals at school ; but he'd been tolerant of me, and I'd admired him, and fitfully told myself I should be more like him. Perhaps this was the reason Aunt Mattie had insisted on this particular school, the hope that some of the ambition would rub off on me. Capella IV wasn't much of a post, not even for tlie early stages in a young man's career, although, socially, it was perhaps the best beginning Johnny's family could have expected. It was a small planet, entii'ely covered by salt. Even inside the port bubble with its duplication of Earth atmosphere, the salt lay like a permanent snow scene. Actually it was little more than a way station along the space route out in that direction, and Johnny's problems were little more than the problems of a professional host at some obscure resort. But no doubt his dad spoke pridefully of "My son, a planet administrator," and when I called on the family to tell them I'd visited tlieir son, I wouldn't be one to snitch. There was doubt in my mind that even Johnny's ambition could make the planet into anything more than it was already. It had nothing we wanted, or at least was worth the space freight it would cost to ship it. The natives had never given us any trouble, and, up until now, we hadn't given them any. So Earth's brand upon it was simply a small bubble enclosing a landing field, a hangar for checkup and repair of ships requiring an emergency landing, some barracks for the men and women of the port personnel, a small hotel to house stranded space passengers while repairs were made to their ship, or stray V.I.P.'s. A small administration building flying Federated Earth flag, and a warehouse to contain supplies, which had to be shipped in, completed the installation. The planet furnished man nothing but water pumped from deep in the rock strata beneath the salt, and even that had to be treated to remove enough of the saline content to make it usable. At the time, I didn't know what the natives, outside our bubble, lived on. The decision to come had been a sudden one, and I hadn't had more than enough time to call the State Department to find out who the planet administrator might be. I was first out of the yacht and down the landing steps to the salt covered ground. Aunt Mattie was still busy giving her ship captain his instructions, and possibly inspecting the crew's teeth to see if they'd brushed them this morning. The two members of her special committee of the D.T.'s who'd come along, a Miss Point and a Mrs. Waddle, naturally would be standing at her sides, and a half pace to the rear, to be of assistance should she need them in dealing with males. There was a certain stiff formality in the way McCabe, flanked by his own two selected subordinates, approached the ship -- until I turned around at the foot of the steps and he recognized me. "Hap!" he yelled, then. "Happy Graves, you old son of a gun!" He broke into a run, dignity forgotten, and when he got to me he grabbed both my shoulders in his powerful hands to shake me as if he were some sort of terrier -- and I a rat. His joy seemed all out of proportion until I remembered he probably hadn't seen anybody from school for a long time; and until I further remembered that he would have been alerted by the State Department to Aunt Mattie's visit and would have been looking forward to it with dread and misgivings. To realize he had a friend at court must really have overjoyed him. "Johnny," I said. "Long time." It had been. Five-six years anyway. I held out my hand in the old school gesture. He let loose my shoulders and grabbed it in the traditional manner. We went through the ritual, which my psychiatrist would have called juvenile, and then he looked at me pointedly. "You remember what it means," he said, a little anxiously I thought, and looked significantly at my hand. "That we will always stand by each other, through thick and thin." His eyes were pulled upward to the open door of the yacht. "You can expect it to be both thick and thin," I said drily. "If you know my Aunt Mattie." "She's your aunt?" he asked, his eyes widening. "Matthewa H. Tombs is your aunt. I never knew. To think, all those years at school, and I never knew. Why, Hap, Happy, old boy, this is wonderful. Man, have I been worried!" "Don't, stop on my account," I said, maybe a little dolefully. "Somebody reported to the Daughters of Terra that you let the natives run around out here stark naked, and if Aunt Mattie says she's going to put mother hubbards on them, then that's exactly what she's going to do. You can depend on that, old man." "Mother Hub..." he gasped. He looked at me strangely. "It's a joke," he said. "Somebody's pulled a practical joke on the D.T.'s. Have you ever seen our natives? Pictures of them? Didn't anybody check up on what they're like before you came out here? It's a joke. A practical joke on the D.T.'s. It has to be." "I wouldn't know," I said. "But if they're naked they won't be for long, I can tell you that. Aunt Mattie... His eyes left my face and darted up to the door of the ship which was no longer a black oval. The unexplained bewilderment of his expression was. not diminished as Aunt Mattie came through the door, out on the loading platform, and started down the steps. He grew a little white around the mouth, licked his lips, and forgot all his joy at meeting an old school mate. His two subordinates who had remained standing just out of earshot, as if recognizing a crisis now, stepped briskly up to his sides. Aunt Mattie's two committee women, as if to match phalanx with phalanx, came through the door and started down the steps behind her. I stepped to one side as the two forces met face to face on the crunching salt that covered the ground. It might look like a Christmas scene, but under Capella's rays it was blazing hot, and I found myself in sympathy with the men's open necked shirts and brief shorts. Still, they should have known better than to dress like that. Somebody in the State Department had goofed. Aunt Mattie and her two committee women were dressed conservatively in something that might have resembled an English Colonel's wife's idea of the correct tweeds to wear on a cold, foggy night. If they were already sweltering beneath these coverings, as I was beginning to in my lighter suit, they were too ladylike to show it. Their acid glance at the men's attire showed what they thought of the informality of dress in which they'd been received. But they were too ladylike to comment. After that first pointed look at bare knees, they had no need of it. "This is the official attire prescribed for us by the State Department," Johnny said, a little anxiously, I thought. It was hardly the formal speech of welcome he, as planet administrator, must have prepared. "I have no doubt of it," Aunt Mattie said, and her tone told them what she thought of the State Department under the present administration. "You would hardly have met ladies in such -- ah -- otherwise." I could see that she was making a mental note to speak to the State Department about it. "Make a note," she said and turned to Miss Point. "I will speak to the State Department. How can one expect natives to... if our own representatives don't... etc., etc." "May I show you to your quarters, ma'am?" Johnny asked humbly. "No doubt you will wish to freshen up, or..." Miss Point blushed furiously. "We are already quite fresh, young man," Aunt Mattie said firmly. I happened to know that Aunt Mattie didn't like to browbeat people, not at all. It would all have been so much more pleasant, gracious, if they'd been brought up to know right from wrong. But what parents and schools had failed to do, she must correct as her duty. I thought it about time I tried to smooth things over. I stepped up into their focus. "Aunt Mattie," I said. "This is Johnny McCabe. We were at school together." Her eyebrows shot upward. "You were?" she asked, and looked piercingly at Johnny. "Then, I realize, young man, that your attire is not your fault. You must have been acting under orders, and against your personal knowledge of what would be correct. I understand." She turned again to Miss Point. "Underscore that note to the State Department," she said. "Mark it emergency." She turned back to Johnny. "Very well, Mr. McCabe, we would appreciate it, after all, if you would show us to our quarters so that we may -- ah -- freshen up a bit. It is rather a warm day, isn't it?" She was quite gracious now, reassured because Johnny was an old school mate of mine, and would therefore know right from wrong. If I sometimes didn't seem to, she knew me well enough to know it had not been the fault of the school. The three of us, Johnny on one side of Aunt Mattie and I on the other side, started toward the frame building on the other side of the bubble, which I assumed was the hotel. The four subordinates trailed along behind, silent, wary of one another. Behind them the baggage truck, which had been piled high by the ship's crew, hissed into life and started moving along on its tractor treads. Johnny caught a glimpse of it, without actually turning around, and his eyes opened wide. He misinterpreted, of course. From the mountain of baggage it looked like our intention to stay a long time. But then he wouldn't have been particularly reassured, either, had he realized that our own supplies were quite scant and these bags, boxes, and crates contained sewing machines and many, many bolts of gaily colored cloth. -- freshened up a bit myself in my hotel room, when I heard a discreet knock on my door. I opened it and saw Johnny McCabe. "May I come in. Hap?" he asked. As if against his will, he glanced quickly down the hall toward the suite where aunt and her committee had been put. "Sure, Johnny," I said, and opened the door wide. I pointed to an aluminum tube torture rack, government issue's idea of a chair. "You can have the chair," I said. "I'll sit on the edge of the bed." "I'm sorry about the furnishings," he said apologetically as he sat down and I closed the door. "It's the best government will issue us in this hole." "Aunt Mattie would be disappointed if it were better," I said as I sat on the edge of the bed, which was little softer than the chair. "She expects to rough it, and finds special virtue in doing her duty as uncomfortably as possible." He looked sharply at me, but I had merely stated an accepted fact, not an opinion, and was therefore emotionless about it. "I'm in trouble. Hap," he said desperately. He leaned forward with his clasped hands held between his knees. "Well, old man," I answered. "You know me." "Yes," he said. "But there isn't anybody else I can turn to." "Then we understand each other," I agreed. He looked both resentful and puzzled. "No, I never did understand you," he disagreed. "I suppose it's insulation for you. You never had to plan, and scheme, and stand alert indefinitely like a terrier at a rat hole waiting for opportunity to stick out its nose so you could pounce on it. So I don't see how you can appreciate my problem now." "I might try," I said humbly. "This job," he said. "It's not much, and I know it. But it was a start. The department doesn't expect anything from me but patience. It's not so much ability, you know, just a matter of who can hang on the longest without getting into trouble. I've been hanging on, and keeping out of trouble." "But you're in trouble now." "I will be when your aunt fails to put mother hubbards on the natives." "She won't fail," I said confidently. "And when she storms into the State Department with fire in her eye and starts turning things upside down, it'll be my fault -- somehow," he said miserably. "So let her put some clothes on some natives," I said. "She'll go away happy and then, for all you care, tliey can take 'em off and bum 'em if they insist on going around naked. Just swing with the punch, man. Don't stand up and let 'em knock your block off. Surely you have some influence with the natives. I don't hear any war drums, any tom-toms. I don't see them trying to tear holes in the sides of your bubble to let the air out. You must be at peace with them. You must have some kind of mutual cooperation. So just get a tribe or so to go along with the idea for a while." He looked at me and shook his head sadly. Sort of the way Aunt Mattie shook her head after a conference with my psychiatrist. But Johnny didn't seem somehow happier. He had a pretty good chest, but it didn't look enormous enough to carry any burden. "I've been pretty proud of myself," he said. "After five years of daily attempts, and after using everything I ever learned in school courses on extraterrestrial psychology, plus some things I've made up myself, I established a kind of communication with the natives -- if you could call it communication. I'd go out in my spacesuit into their chlorinated atmosphere. I'd stand in front of one of them and talk a blue streak, think a blue streak. After about five years of it, one of them slowly closed his eye and then opened it again. I invited one of them to come inside the bubble. I told him about the difference in atmosphere, that it might be dangerous. I got one of them to come in. It made no difference to him." "Well, fine, then," I said. "Just get some of them to come in again, let Aunt Mattie put some clothes on them, and everybody's happy." He stood up suddenly. "Take a walk with me, Hap," he said. It was more of a command than an invitation. "Over to the edge of the bubble. I want to show you some natives." On the way around to the back of the building, over the crunching salt, I had a thought. "If all he did was close an eye," I said. "How did you learn their language, so you could invite him inside, exjlain about the atmosphere?" "I don't even know they have a language," he said. "Maybe he learned mine. I used to draw pictures in the salt, the way they taught us at school, and say words. Maybe it took him five years to put the thoughts together, maybe they don't have any concept of language at all, or need it. Maybe he was thinking about something else all those five years, and just got around to noticing me. I don't know. Hap." We came around the edge of an outbuilding then to an unobstructed view of the bubble edge. Even through dark glasses he'd cautioned me to wear with a gesture, as he put on another pair for himself, the scene through the clear plastic was blinding white. Scattered here and there on the glistening salt were blobs of black. "Why," I exclaimed. "Those are octopi. I suppose that's what the natives use for food? I've wondered." "Those are the natives," he answered, drily. By now we were up to the plastic barrier of our bubble and stood looking out at the scene. "Well," I said after some long moments of staring. "It will be a challenge to the D.T.'s, won't it?" He looked at me with disgust. "What do they eat?" I asked. "Salt?" "I don't know if they eat," he said. "Can't you get it through your thick skull, man, that these things are alien? Completely alien? How do I know?" "Well you must know some things after five years of study. You must have observed them. They must get food somehow, they must sleep and wake, they must procreate. You must have observed something." "I've observed the process of procreation," he answered cautiously. "Well fine, then," I said. "That's what's going to concern Aunt Mattie the most." "Here's something that may help you understand them," he said, and I felt a bit of the sardonic in his voice, a grimness. "When that one visited me inside here," he said. "I took him into my office, so I could photograph him better with all the equipment. I was explaining everything, not knowing how much he understood. I happened to pick up a cigarette and a lighter. Soon as I flipped the lighter on, he shot up a tentacle and took it out of my hand. I let him keep it, of course. Next day, when I went outLide, everyone of them, as far as I could see in the distance, had a lighter, exactly like the one I'd given him. Furthermore, in a chlorinated atmosphere, without oxygen, those lighters burned normally. Does that help you to understand them better?" he asked with no attempt to hide the heavy irony. I didn't have a chance to answer because we both heard a crunching in the salt behind us. We turned about and there was Aunt Mattie and her two committee women behind her also now in dark glasses. I waited until the ladies had come up to us, then I waved my arm grandly at the scene beyond the plastic. "Behold the natives in all their nakedness. Aunt Mattie," I said. Then, to soften the blow it must have been, "I'm afraid somebody was pulling your leg when they reported it to the D.T.'s." Miss Point gasped audibly. Mrs. Waddle said, "Shocking!" I couldn't tell whether it was the sight of the natives, or my remark which indicated I knew they had legs to pull. For the first time in my life I saw uncertainty in Aunt Mattie's eyes as she looked, startled, at me, and then at Johnny. Then her chin squared, her back straightened still more, the shelf of her bosom firmed. "It really won't be too much of a problem, girls," she said. "Actually simpler than some we've solved. Take a square of cloth, cut a hole in the center for that headlike pouch to come through where its eye is, put in a draw string to cinch it up tight, above those -- ah -- those protuberances, and let it flow out over those -- ah -- legs. Simple, and quite attractive, don't you think?" The girls nodded happily, and Johnny just stood there gasping for breath. I T was simpler than any of us had thought. Johnny looked at me desperately when Aunt Mattie told him to have one of the natives come in so she could fit a pattern on it, to see if any gussets would be needed for fullness -- whatever gussets might be. "One of them came inside before," I said in answer to Johnny's pleading look. "Ask him again. If he refuses, Mohammed will go to the mountain. I'm sure you have extra space suits. I'm sure the ladies won't mind going out to the natives if the natives won't come to them." "I don't know," Johnny said miserably. "He may have had sufficient curiosity to come inside once, but not sufficient to bring him in again. You see, ladies," he turned to them desperately. "They don't seem to care about us, one way or the other." The two committee women looked apprehensively at Aunt Mattie. Not to care about her, one way or the other? This was beyond comprehension. But Aunt Mattie was equal to it. "Very well," she said crisply. "We shall not ask them to come to us. We shall go to them. It is our duty to carry enlightenment to the ignorant, wherever they may be, so that they can be taught to care. In the performance of our duty, we have no room for pride. We shall go to them, humbly, happily." We did, too. By the time we'd got into space suits and through the bubble lock out into the ordinary landscape of Capella IV, Capella, the sun, was sinking rapidly. "We will just have time," Aunt Mattie said crisply, through the intercom of our suits, "To set the pattern and get some idea of the sizes needed. Then tomorrow we can begin our work." Through his face plate I got a look at Johnny's wide, apprehensive eyes. "Ladies," he said desperately. "I must warn you again. I've never tried to touch one of them. I don't know what will happen. I can't be held responsible." "You have been most remiss, young man," Aunt Mattie said sternly. "But then," she added, as if remembering that he had gone to a proper school, "you're young. No doubt overburdened by nonsensical red tape in your administrative duties. And -- if you had done this already, there'd be no reason for my help wherever I'm needed." All five of us marched silently, and bravely, on after that. A hundred yards brought us to the first native. It lay there, spread eagled in eight directions, on the salt. In the center of the tentacles there arose a column of black rubbery flesh, topped by a rounded dome in the center of which was one huge liquid black eye. There was not a twitch of a tentacle as we came to a halt beside it. "Is this the one you talked to, Johnny?" I asked. "How should I know?" he asked bitterly. "I never knew if I talked to the same one twice." "They're much bigger than I thought," Miss Point said with a little dismay in her voice. "Some of them are ten feet in diameter," Johnny said, I thought with a bit of vindictiveness in his tone. "Never mind," Aunt Mattie said. "We'll simply sew three lengths of cloth together to get our square. I'm sure they won't mind a neatly done seam." She had a length of cloth in one arm of her space suit, and a pair of scissors in the mechanical claw of the other hand. With her eye she seemed to measure the diameter of the dome and, manipulating the scissors with the claw like an expert space mechanic, she cut a sizable hole in the center of the cloth. Entirely without fear or hesitation, she stepped into the triangle between two long black tentacles that lay on the salt and walked up to the erect column at the center. Expertly, she flipped the cloth so that the hole settled over the creature's head, or whatever it was. Fore and aft, the cloth rippled out to cover the tentacles. The creature did not move. With an amazing speed, she took some bundles of cloth from the arms of Mrs. Waddle, and with even more amazing dexterity of the space claw, which showed she was no amateur, she basted a length of cloth on either side of the first strip. Then with her scissors, careful not to gouge his hide, she cut off the comers so that the eight tentacles barely peeped out from underneath the cloth. Somehow, it reminded me of a huge red flower with a black pistil laying there on the white salt. "There, sir," my aunt said with satisfaction to the monster. "This will hide your nakedness, instill in you a sense of tme modesty." She turned to Johnny. "They must not only know what," she instructed. "They must also know why." She turned back and faced the monster again. "It is not your fault," she said to it, "That you have been living in a state of sin. On Earth, where I come from, we have a code which must be followed. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Fm sure that if I lived in a state of ignorant sin, I would humbly appreciate the kindness of someone letting me know. Fm sure that, in time, you will also come to appreciate it." It was quite a noble speech, and her two companions bowed their space suit helmets in acknowledgement. Johnny's mouth and eyes were wide, and desperate. She stepped back then and we all stood there looking at the monster. The dome of its head began to tilt until the eye was fastened upon us. It swept over the three ladies, hesitated on Johnny as if recognizing him, but came to rest upon me. It stared at me for a full minute. I stared back. In some strange way I felt as if my psychiatrist were staring at me, as he often did. Then the great eye slowly closed, and opened again. As slowly, and somewhat to my amazement, I felt one of my eyes close and open. I winked at it. "That's all for this evening," Aunt Mattie said crisply. "Let it have its clothes, get used to them. I have the pattern in my mind. Tomorrow we will get out our sewing machines, and really get busy, girls." All the way back to the entrance of the bubble, I felt that huge eye upon me, following me. Why me? X busy the next morning. I was aw#ikened by a shout, there was the sound of running feet in the hall, and a pounding on my door. Sleepy eyed, for I had dreamed of the monster's eye all night long, I opened the door as soon as I had found a robe to cover my own nakedness. It was Johnny, of course. "Most amazing thing," he rushed in and collapsed into a sitting position on the side of my bed. "Absolutely amazing. You should see them." "What?" I asked. The rumpus must have disturbed the ladies, too, for there came another knock on my door, and when I opened it all three of them stood there fully dressed. Apparently they had arisen at the crack of dawn to get busy with their sewing. Miss Point and Mrs. Waddle averted their eyes modestly from the V neck of my robe and my bare legs. Aunt Mattie was used to my shameless ways. "What is it?" Aunt Mattie asked crisply. Johnny leaped to his feet again. "Amazing," he said again. "Fll have to show you. You'll never believe it." "Young man," Aunt Mattie said sharply. "No one has accused you of untruthfulness, and you are hardly a judge of what we are capable of believing." He stood looking at her with his mouth open. "Now ladies," I said, and started closing the door. "If you'll excuse me for two minutes I'll dress and we'll go see what Mr. McCabe wants to show us." The door clicked on my last words, and I hastily doffed the robe and slid into pants and a shirt. Oddly enough, I knew what he was going to show us. I just knew. I slipped on some shoes without bothering about socks. "All right," I said. "I'm ready." They had started down the hall, and we quickly overtook them. Johnny went ahead, led us out of the hotel, around its side, and when we came around the corner of the outbuilding which obscured the view, there before us, through the bubble wall, we saw what I had expected. As far as the eye could see, dotted here and there like poppies on snow, the natives lay in the early sun, each dressed in flaring cloth like that Aunt Mattie had designed the night before. "You see?" Johnny cried out. "It's the same as with the lighter. One liked it, so they all have it!" By now we were up against the plastic barrier. The two subordinates Were gasping such words as "Fantastic, amazing, astounding, incredible, wondrous, weird". Aunt Mattie took it all in, and her face lit into a beatific smile. "You see, young man," she said to Johnny. "They needed only to be shown right from wrong. Let this be a lesson to you." "But how did they do it?" Mrs. Waddle gasped. "Give them some credit for diligence and ingenuity," Aunt Mattie almost snapped at her assistant. "I always say we underrate the intelligence and ingenuity of the lesser orders, and that it saps their strengths if we are overprotective. I admire self-reliance, and these have shown they have it. So we will not have to do the sewing after all. Come girls, we must pack and be on our way back to Earth. Our mission here is accomplished." The two ladies obeyed their leader without question. The three of them, in their sturdy walking shoes and their tweed suits, crunched off across the salt back to their rooms to start packing. Johnny and I walked along more slowly behind. "The incredible Matthewa H. Tombs!" he breathed. "She's a legencj, you know. Hap. But I never believed it before." Then, in a complete and sudden change of mood he snickered. Or, at least, it was the nearest thing to a small boy snicker I'd heard since prep school. The snicker turned into a roar of laughter, a grown man's laughter. "If they only knew!" he shouted, apparently feeling secure because they'd turned the corner and gone out of sight. "Knew what?" I asked. "Why," he said, and doubled up with laughter again. "They've covered up all the innocent parts and left the reprehensible part, which is right behind the eye, fully exposed." "Johnny, my boy," I said with a chuckle. "Do you really believe there are innocent parts and reprehensible parts of any creature in the universe?" He stood stock still and stared at me. "It takes a nasty, salacious mind to make that kind of separation," I said. "But your aun... the Daughters of..." "I know my aunt and the Daughters of Terra," I said. "I've lived with them for years. I know their kind of mind. Who would know it better?" "But you..." "The human race," I said, "is very young. It's only in the last few thousand years that it has discovered sex as a concept. So like little kids in kindergarten it goes around being embarrassed and snickering. But we'll grow up. Give us time." "But you..." he said again. "But they... That's the kind of organization that keeps us from growing up. Hap. Don't you see that? They've kept us mentally retarded for generations, centuries. How can we make progress when..." "What's the hurry, Johnny? eternity." He looked at me again, sharply, shrewdly. "I've underestimated you. Hap," he said. "I'm afraid I always did. I had no idea you..." I shrugged and passed it off. I'd had no idea either, not until this morning, last night,, yesterday evening when that eye had turned on me -- and I'd winked bask. I didn't know how to tell him, or any reason why I should, that there couldn't be anything right or wrong, good or bad; that nothing could happen, nothing at all, excepting through the working of the law of nature. Could one say that water running down hill is good, and water being pumped up hill is bad? Both are operating within known to go, wasn't it likely we would go on discovering the laws governing how things worked? Until one by one we had to give up all notion of good and bad happenings? Understood them as only the operation of natural law? In all the universe, how could there be any such thing as unnatural happenings? "Don't worry about it, Johnny," I said as we started walking again. "And don't worry about your career, either. Aunt Mattie likes you, and she's mighty pleased with the results of her work out here. Certain people in the State Department may consider her a bit of a meddlesome pest, but make no mistake about it, every politician in the universe trembles in his boots at the very mention of the D.T.'s. And she likes you, Johnny." "Thanks, Hap," he said as we came to a stop before the doorway of the hotel. "I'll see you before your ship takes off. Oh -- ah -- you won't tell her she covered up the wrong -- well what she would think was the wrong part?" "I could have told her that last night," I said. He walked away with that startled, incredulous look he'd worn ever since our arrival. to rush ofF to a convention of D.T.'s, where I had no doubt her latest exploit in combating ignorance and sin would be the main topic of conversation and add to the triumph of her lionization. To give her credit, I think this lionization bothered her, embarrassed her a little, and she probably wondered at times if it were all sincere. But I also think she would have been lonely and disappointed without it. When one is doing all he can to make the universe we have inherited a better place for our posterity to inherit one likes it to be appreciated. For two or three weeks after she came back home, she was immersed in administrative duties for the D.T., setting wheels in motion to carry out all the promises she'd made at the convention. I spent the time in my own suite in the south wing of our house. Mostly, I just sat. No one bothered me except the servants necessary to eating, dressing, sleeping, and they were all but mute about it. My psychiatrist called once, but I sent word that I didn't need any today. I called none of my regular friends and did not answer their messages. I did send to the Library of Science in Washington for the original science survey report on Capella IV. It told me Uttle, but allowed me to surmise some things. Apparently the original scientists were singularly uncurious about the octopoids, perhaps because they didn't have five years to hang around and wait for one to blink an eye, as Johnny had. As always, they were overworked and understaffed, they did their quick survey and rushed on to some new planet job. If one hoped that someday somebody might go back and take another look at the octopoids I found no burning yearning for it in the dry reports. As far as they went, their surplanet had lost the last of its ocean water. Apparently, as they failed to adapt to the increasing salinity of the little left, one by one the original life forms died out. Something in the octopoid metabolism (or mentality?) allowed them to survive, to become land instead of water animals. Something in their metabolism (or mentality?) allowed them to subsist on the air and sunlight. (Really now? Did they even need these?) That was as far as the reports went. They did not draw the picture of highly developed mentalities who thought about the nature of being. Such things as how mental manipulation of force fields can provide each of them with a cigarette lighter that burns without any fluid in it and any oxygen around its wick, or such things as mother hubbards which had caught their fancy, or perhaps gave them some kind of sensual kick caused by heat filtering through red cloth. But mostly I just sat. I went to see Aunt Mattie when she came back from the convention, of course. She had the west wing where her sitting room looked out upon her flora collection -- and the gardeners who were supposed to keep busy. Our greeting was fond, but brief. She did look at me rather quizzically, rather shrewdly, but she made no comment. She did not return my visit. This was not unusual. She never visited my suite. When I was twenty-one she took me into the south wing and said, "Choose your own suite, Hapland. You are a man now, and I understand about young men." If she had in mind what I thought she had it was a mighty big concession to reality, although, of course, she was five years late in coming around to it. This older generation -- so wise, so naive. She probably resolutely refrained from imagining far worse things than really went on. About two weeks after she'd come back from the convention, a month since we returned from Capella IV, there was an interruption, an excited one. For once in his life the butler forgot to touch my door with feather fingertips and cough discreetly. Instead he knocked two sharp raps, and opened the door without invitation. "Come quickly. Master Hapland," he chittered urgently. "There are creatures on our private landing field." There were, too. When I got there in my garden scooter, and pushed my way through the crowd of gardeners who were clustered on the path and around the gate to the landing field, I saw them. At least a dozen of the Capella iV octopoids were spread eagled, their tentacles out flat on the hot cement of the runway. Their eye stared unblinking into the sun. Over their spread of tentacles, like inverted hibiscus blossoms, they wore their mother hubbards. Behind them, over at the far edge of the field, was an exact duplicate of our own space yacht. I wondered, rather hysterically perhaps, if each of them on Capella IV now had one. I suspected the yacht was simply there for show, that they hadn't needed it, not any more than they needed the mother hubbards. There was the hiss of another scooter, and I turned around to see Aunt Mattie come to a stop. She stepped out and came over to me. "Our social call on Capella IV is being returned," I said with a grin and twinkle at her. She took in the sight with only one blink. "Very well," she answered. "I shall receive them, of course." Somebody once said that the most snobbish thing about the whole tribe of Tombs was that they'd never learned the meaning of the word, or had to. But I did wonder what the servants would think when the creatures started slithering into our drawing room. There was a gasp and a low rumble of protesting voices from the gardeners as Aunt Mattie opened the gate and walked through it. I followed, of course. We walked up to the nearest monster and came to stop at the edge of its skirt. "I'm deeply honored," Aunt Mattie said withmore cordiality than I'd seen her use on a Secretary of State. "What can I do to make your visit to Earth more comfortable?" There was no reply, not even the flicker of a tentacle. They were even more xmusual than one might expect. Aunt Mattie resolutely went to each of the dozen and gave the same greeting. She felt her duty as a hostess required it, although I knew that a greeting to one was a greeting to all. Not one of them responded. It seemed rather ridiculous. They'd come all this way to see us, then didn't bother to acknowledge that we were there. We spent more than an hour waiting for some kind of a response. None came. Aunt Mattie showed no sign of impatience, which I thought was rather praiseworthy, all things considered. But finally we left. She didn't show what she felt, perhaps felt only that one had to be patient with the lack of manners in the lower orders. I was more interested in another kind of feeling, the one we left behind. What was it? I couldn't put my finger on it. Sadness? Regret? Distaste? Pity? Magnanimity? Give a basket of goodies to the poor at Christmas? Give them some clothes to cover their nakedness? Teach them a sense of shame? No, I couldn't put my finger on it. Hilarity? I found myself regretting that back there on Capella IV, when Aunt Mattie put clothes on him, and the monster had looked at me, I winked. I wondered why I should regret that. I didn't have long to wonder. Nothing happened during the rest of the day. We went back, together and separately, several times during the daylight hours and during the early hours of the night. For a wonder, nobody had leaked anything to the newspapers, and for what it was worth, we had the show to ourselves. "Perhaps tomorrow," Aunt Mattie said around midnight, as we left the field for the last time. "Perhaps they must rest." "I could use some of that," I said with a yawn. "Yes, Hapland," she agreed. "We must conserve our strength. Heaven knows what may be required of us on the morrow." Did she feel something, too? It was so strong, how could she help it? And yet, the monster had not looked into her eye. I didn't expect to sleep well, but I fooled myself. I was quite sure I hadn't more than clos my eyes when I was roused by another excited rapping on my droom door and again the butler rushed in without ceremony. "Look, Master Hapland," he shouted in a near falsetto. He pulled so hard on my drapes they swept back from my windows like a stage curtain -- and I looked. To the very limit of our grounds in the distance, but not beyond, the trees, the shrubs, the drives and walkways, the lawns and ponds, all were covered with a two foot thick blanket of glistening salt. "And the monsters are gone," the butler was saying. "And I must go to your aunt." "So must I," I said, and grabbed up a robe. As I ran, overtook him, passed him, from all over the house I could hear excited outcries, wonder, amazement, anger, fear from the servants. I finisKed the length of my wing, sprinted through the main body of the house, and down the hallway of her wing to the door of her suite. I didn't need to knock, someone had left it open. Her own personal maid, I saw, as I ran past the little alcove into the sitting room. The maid was standing beside Aunt Mattie, wringing her hands and crying. The drapes here, too, were swept full back, and through the windows I could see the collection, the highly prized, wondrous collection of flora, all covered in salt. Aunt Mattie stood there, without support, looking at it. When I came up to her there were tears in her eyes and glistening streaks on her wrinkled cheeks. "Why?" she asked. It was very quietly spoken. By now the butler had made the trip, and came into the room. I turned to him. "If we hurry," I said. "A good deal of the collection is enclosed under plastic domes. If we don't wet the salt, and if we hurry and have it scraped away from the buildings it won't poison the ground inside them. We can save most of the collection that way." "No, Master Hapland," he said, and shook his head. "The salt is inside the buildings, just as much as here. A gardener shouted it at me as I passed." Aunt Mattie's closed fist came up to her lips, and then dropped again. That was all. "Why, Hapland?" she asked again. "Evil for good? Why?" I motioned the maid and butler to leave -- and take with them the cluster of servants around the door in the hall. I took Aunt Mattie over to her favorite chair, the one where she could sit and look out at her collection; no point in pretending the salt wasn't there. I sat down at her feet, the way I used to when I was ten years old. I looked out at the salt, too. It was everywhere. Every inch of our grounds was covered with it, to poison the earth so that nothing could grow in it. It would take years to restore the grounds, and many more years to restore the collection. "Try to understand. Aunt Mattie," I said. "Not only what I say, but all the implications of it. They didn't return evil for good. Let's see it from what might have been their point of view. They live on a world of salt, an antiseptic world. We went there, and you intended good. You told them that our code was to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. (Continued on page #) They came home from a strange journey... And heroes they Illustrated by Ed Emsh The mitter. "I hate being out here in the middle of the Caribbean with no radio communication. Can't you fix it?" "This is a year for sun spots, and transmission usually gets impossible around dusk," Bill exIf you want to listen to the radio, you can use the portable radio directional finder. That always works." "I want to catch the # o'clock news and hear the latest on our satellite," Carol replied. She went to standard broadcast channel. "Anyhow, I'd feel better if we could put out a signal. The way we're limping along with water in our gas is no fun. It will take us twenty hours to get back to Nassau the way we're Bill Anderson looked at his young, pretty wife and smiled. "You're behaving like a tenderfoot. We've plenty of gas, a good boat and perfect weather. Tomorrow morning I'll clean out our carburetors and we'll pick up speed. Meantime, we're about to enter one of the prettiest harbors in the Bahamas, throw over anchor... "The world is anxiously awaiting return of the chamber from the world's first manned satellite launched by the United States ten days ago. The world also awaits the answers to two questions: Is there any chance that Robert Joy, the volunteer scientist who went up in the satellite, is still living? There seems to be little hope for his survival since radio communication from him stopped three days ago. Timing mechanism for the ejection of Joy are set for tonight. And that's the second question. Will the satellite, still in its orbit, eject the chamber containing Joy? Will it eject the chamber as scheduled, and will the chamber arrive back at earth at the designated place? "There are many 'if s' to this project which is shrouded in secrecy. The President himself has assured us of a free flow of news once the chamber has been recovered, and this station will be standing by to bring you a full report." Carol switched the radio off. "Do you think he's alive?" She suppressed a shudder. "God! Think of a human being up there in that thing." "Well, the dog lived for several days. It was just a question of getting it back, which the Russians couldn't do. I don't know about Joy. He sounded real cheerful and healthy until his broadcasts stopped." Bill peered into the fading twilight. "Come on now, let's put our minds to getting the hook over!" They concentrated on the tricky entrance to the lee side of Little Harbor Cay. It meant finding and passing a treacherous coral head north of the adjoining Frozen Cay. Little Harbor Cay was midway in the chain of the Berry Islands which stretched to the north like beads in a necklace. "There's the cove," called Carol. About a mile of coastline ahead was the small native settlement. Once the center of a thriving sponge industry, the island was now practically deserted. A handful of small cottages, a pile of conch shells on the beach and two fishing smacks gave evidence of a remaining, though sparse, population. Dusk was rapidly approaching and Carol strained her eyes against the failing light. Bill heard her call his name and saw her pointing -- not ahead to their anchorage, but amidships and toward the sky. He turned his eyes to where she was indicating and saw a dullish object in the sky, some thousand feet up. The object seemed to be falling leisurely towards earth. "What in the world is that?" ased Bill. "It's not a bird, that's for sure." The object seemed to be parachuting, not falling. The breezes were blowing it towards the island. Before they could study it further, it was lost in the lowering dusk and darkness of the shore line. "Looks like a ball on a parachute," Bill finally said. However, the business at hand was to make secure the Seven Seas and together they spent the next quarter hour anchoring. After "setting the hook" securely, Carol and Bill donned swim suits, dove overboard and swam lazily the # yards in to shore. "Let's try to find that thing we saw. It shouldn't be too far from here," said Carol the moment they hit the beach. They climbed inland on the rocky island. Little green lizards scooted underfoot and vines scratched at their ankles. Bill was leading, when suddenly he called, "Carol, I see something up ahead! There's something lying on the ground!" He hurried toward what he had seen. The dying sun reflected on a luminescent bolt of cloth, somewhat like a spun-aluminum fabric. Thin wire lines were entangling it, and about ten feet away lay three fragments of what appeared to have been a dull metal box. Carol knelt at the closest piece, evidently a corner of the box. It was lined with wiring and tubes. "It looks like electronic equipment," decided Carol, peering intently at the strange piece. Bill had approached the second and largest fragment. He carefully turned it over. It was filled with black and yellow... fur? "Oh no!" he cried, knowing in a flash, yet denying it in his mind at the same time. Stunned he stared at the perky ears, the dull staring and unseeing eyes, the leather thongs that held the head and body of a dog to the metal encasement. Carol saw it the next instant. "It's some horrible joke!" she gasped. "It couldn't be the second Russian satellite, it couldn't be Muttnik! My God, no, it couldn't be!" Bill kept staring, his thoughts racing. There were rumors of an ejection chamber for Muttnik. But they had been denied by the Russians. But suppose the Russians had planned an ejection chamber for the dog Laika when they launched the satellite and had only denied it after they thought it had failed? But if it had worked, why had it taken so long to find its way to earth? The satellite itself was supposed to have disintegrated months ago. "Damn," thought Bill. "I wish I were a scientist right now instead of a know-nothing artist!" He touched the dog with his toe. It was perfectly preserved, as though it had died, just a few hours before. It was rigid, but it had not started to decompose. "Carol, are we crazy? Is this some dream, or do you believe we are looking at the ejection chamber of the Russian satellite?" he asked, doubting even what he was saying. "I don't know." Carol was wideeyed. "But what shall we do now? We'd better contact the authorities immediately!" Bill tried to keep reason from overcoming his disbelief of their discovery. "But how, Carol? Our radio transmitter isn't working. It won't till morning. And there's certainly no other way to communicate with anyone. We can't even take the boat anywhere with the speed we're making. We'll have to wait till morning." "What shall we do with the dog?" asked Carol. "Do you think we ought to bury it?" "Lord no, Carol. The body of the dog will be extremely valuable to science. We've got to get someone here as quickly as possible." Bill was trying to steady his nerves. "Let's go back and try to raise someone on the radio. Let's try again, it may work," called Carol, running in the direction of the boat. Bill followed her. They stumbled on the craggy rocks and exposed sea grape roots, but together in the darless they struck out for the boat. Bill was first aboard and went directly to the ship-to-shore radio. "Try the Nassau marine operator first," Carol panted as she clambered aboard. "He's a lot closer to us than Miami." As the receiver warmed up, static filled the cabin. Bill depressed the transmitting button. "This is the Yacht Seven Seas calling the Nassau Marine operator," he called into the phone. Only static answered. "Bill!" Carol said in sudden inspiration. "Give a May Day. Try every channel with a May Day. If anyone picks up a May Day call you'll get emergency action." "May Day, May Day! This is the Yacht Seven Seas. Come in anyone!" Bill called urgently into the mouthpiece. He switched to the Coast Guard channel, then to the Miami Marine operators channel. Only static filled the cabin. No welcome voice acknowledged their distress call. Bill flipped the switch desperately to the two ship-to-ship channels. "May Day! Come in any boat!" Still static. Nothing but static. a moon. The island loomed dark against the black waters. The dark was relieved only by a small fire burning at the native settlement a half-mile down the coast, and the cabin lights of the Seven Seas. "What will we do now?" Carol tried to sound unconcerned, but her voice sounded thin and wavering. "I don't know what we can do, except wait until daybreak. I'm sure we can get a signal out then," Bill replied, clamly as he could. He hoped she couldn't hear the pounding of his heart. "What about the dog?" she asked. "Will it be all right there? Should we bring it aboard?" "We better leave everything untouched. Our best bet is to get some sleep and place our call as soon as day breaks." Neither of them could eat much supper and after putting the dishes away, they made up their bunks and climbed in. After a very few minutes, Bill handed a lighted cigarette across the narrow chasm between the bunks. "I can't sleep. My head is spinning. Do you really believe that's what we've found?" Carol's voice sounded small. "Yes, I do. I believe we've found the Russian ejection unit, complete with the dog Laika and instrumentation." They lay quietly, the glow of two cigarettes occasionally reflecting on the bulkhead. Bill finally arose. "I can't think of another thing but what's sitting out there on Little Harbor Cay!" He walked up to the main cabin and switched on the music, and then: "Flash! The United States Government has just officially released the news that at #:# p.m. Eastern Standard Time the U. S. Satellite ejection chamber was successfully returned to earth at the designated location. This was some six hours earlier than expected. The chamber, into which Robert Joy voluntarily had himself strapped, has landed at an undisclosed site and is being raced under heavy guard to the Walter Reed Hospital at Washington, D. C. There is no hope that Joy is still living. Word has just been released by Dr. James uring Joy's pulse rate indicated three days ago that all Joy's bodily processes ceased to function at that time. We repeat, all hoje of the sumval of Robert Joy is now abandoned as the result of scientific data "The satellite is being brought intact to Walter Reed Hospital and leading physiologists and scientists are racing to the scene to be on hand for the opening of the unit scheduled for # a.m. tomorrow morning. Further reports will be given as received. This station will remain on the air all night. Stay tuned for further developments. We repeat, the U. S. satellite's ejection chamber, containing the first human being ever to go into space, has been successfully returned to earth as predicted, though all hope has been abandoned for the survival of Robert Joy, the man in the moon. The chamber will be opened for scientific study tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for further news." Bill tuned down the music that ensued and returned to his bunk. "You heard that Carol?" He knew she wasn't. asleep. "Yes. And it makes this whole thing that we've found seem more plausible. I've been lying here trying to make myself believe it's some sort of dream, but it isn't. If we could only..." Carol's voice faded softly into the night. There was absolutely nothing they could do. Nothing but lie tliere and smoke and pretend to sleep. They didn't talk much, and keenly felt the terrible frustration of their enforced silence on the ship-toshore. They heard several more news reports and several analyses of the news, but nothing new was added throughout the night. The radio only reiterated that the ejection unit had been recovered, that hope had faded for Joy's survival and that the chamber was to be opened in the morning as soon as scientists had convened in Washington. D awn, long in coming, broke about #:#. With the lifting of the dark, the sun spots which interferred with radio reception miraculously lifted also. Bill and Carol sat next to the ship-to-shore and turned it on. This time they heard the reassuring hum of the transmitter, not drowned out by the awful static of the night before. Bill switched to the Coast Guard channel. "May Day. May Day. This is the Seven Seas calling the United States Coast Guard. Come in please!" And a voice, almost miraculously, answered, "This is th U. S. Coast Guard. Come in Seven Seas, What is your position? Come in Seven Seas." "This is the yacht Seven Seas back to the Coast Guard. We are located at the Berry Islands at Little Harbor Cay. We want to report the discovery of what we believe to be the second Russian satellite." "This is the Coast Guard to the Seven Seas. Do we read you correctly? Are you reporting discovery of the Russian satellite? Please clarify. Over." A stern voice crackled through the speaker. "Last evening on entering the harbor here we saw an object fall to the ground. On inspection, it was a metal box which was broken apart on impact. In it are electronic equipment and the body of a small dog. Over." Bill tried to be calm and succinct. "Coast Guard to Seven Seas. Is your boat in distress? Over." "No, no! Did you read me about the Russian satellite?" asked Bill, impatience in his voice. "Will you state your name and address. Will you state the master's full name, and the call letters and registration of your craft. Over," crackled the voice from the speaker. "Oh my lord, we're not going to have red tape at a time like this, are we?" Carol asked exasperatedly. "This is Bill Anderson of Ft. Lauderdale, owner and skipper. #, Coast Guard registration ##-#-#. What are your instructions regarding dog satellite?" "Please stand by." Bill and Carol stared at each other while the voice on the radio was silent. "This is the United States Coast Guard calling the yacht Seven Seas." "Seven Seas standing by." "We wish to remind you that it is illegal and punishable by fine and or imprisonment to issue false reports to the Coast Guard. We are investigating your report and wish you to stand by." "Investigating our report?" Bill fairly shouted into the phone. "Good God, man! The thing to investigate is here, laying in three pieces on the middle of Little Harbor Gay. This is no joke." Despite the emotion in Bill's voice, the answer came back routine and cold, "Please stand by. We will call you. Do not, we repeat, do not make further contact anywhere. Please stand by. Coast Guard stanclingdiy with the Seven Seas "Seven Seas standing by," shouted Bill, almost apoplectic, his face reddening in anger. "Now what? It looks like they're going to take their time in believing us. At least until they find out who we are and if we're really here," said Carol. Bill paced the deck in frustration. Suddenly he decided, "Carol, you stick with the radio. I'm going ashore again and take another look at our Muttnik. It seems so incredible that I'm not even sure of what I saw last night. Once they believe us they'll want to know as much about it as we can tell them." Bill hurriedly put on his swim suit and heard Carol shout as he dove overboard, "Hurry back, Bill. I don't like you leaving me here alone!" Bill swam with sure even strokes to the shore where they had gone last night. The water felt cool. It soothed his nerves which jangled in the excitement of the discovery and in the anger at the disbelieving authorities. He reached shallow water and waded towards shore. Suddenly he stopped dead, his ankles in five inches of water. His eyes stared ahead in disbelief. His brain was numbed. Only his eyes were alive, staring, wide in horror. Finally his brain pieced together the image that his vision sent to it. Pieced it together but made no comprehension of it. His brain told him that there was a blanket of fur laying unevenly twenty feet back from the shore line. A blanket of yellow and black fur... covering the earth, covering mangrove roots, fitted neatly around the iDcnt palm tree trunks, lying over the rocks that had cut his feet last night... smothering, suffocating... hugging the earth. Bill shut liis eyes, and still the vision kept shooting to his brain. All yellow and black and fuzzy, with trees or a tall mangrove bush or a sea grape vine sticking up here and there. He opened his eyes and wanted to run, for the scene was still there. It hadn't disappeared as a nightmare disappears when you wake up. Thick yellow and black fur lay on the ground like dirty snow. Covering everything low, hugging the base of taller things. "Run!" his mind told him. Yet he stood rooted to the spot, staring at the carpet of fur near him. It was only ten feet away. Ten feet? His every muscle jumped. The lock that had held his muscles and brain in a tight vice gave loose and a flood of realization hit him. "It's moving!" he realized in horror. "It's growing!" ly, as the petals of a morning glory unfold before the eye, the yellow and black fur carpet stretched itself in ever-increasing perimeter. He saw it approach a rock near the beach. The mind, when confronted with a huge shock, somehow concentrates itself on a small detail. Perhaps it tries to absorb itself in a small thing because the whole thing is too great to comprehend all at once. So with Bill's mind. He saw the yellow and black fur grow toward the rock. It seemed to ooze around it and then up and over the top of it. Bill saw, when it reached the top of the rock, that it dropped a spiny tendril to the ground. Like a root, the tendril buried itself into the earth below the jutting rock, and slowly the rock was covered with the flowing fur. Bill's thoughts sped ahead of his reason. The dog. The dog... growing like a plant. Its hide covering the ground, putting out roots, suffocating everything, smothering everything, growing, growing. With almost superhuman effort, he turned his back on the awful sight and swam desperately out to the Seven Seas. "Bill, what's happened?" cried Carol, when she saw his white and terrified face. "Carol... the dog... it must have had some cosmic reaction to its cellular structure... some cancerous reaction... when the chamber broke open and the cells were exposed to our atmosphere again it started some action... started to grow... doesn't stop growing... it's horrible..." Bill's words were disjointed and hysterical. Carol stared at him. "Bill, what are you saying?" Bill pointed mutely to the shore. Carol rushed to the cockpit. She stared at the island. She ran back to the cabin where Bill was sitting, holding his head in his hands. She grabbed the binoculars from the bookshelf and turned them to the island. "Bill! It's... oh no! The whole island looks as though it's covered with... fur!" She screamed. Bill grabbed the binoculars and ranged the island with them. A quarter of a mile down he could see small figures in the water, floundering around, climbing aboard the two fishing smacks. All around, the black and yellow mounds of fur carpeted the pretty green island with a soft rug of yellow and black. "Get the Coast Guard, Carol!" "They called back while you were gone. They're sending a plane over immediately." "Call them, Carol!" Bill shouted at her. "Don't you realize what this could mean? Don't you realize that something, only God knows what, has happened to the cellular structure of this animal, has turned it into a voracious plant-like thing that seems to grow and grow once it hits our atmosphere? Don't you realize that today they're going to open that satellite, that other one, in Washington? Suppose this is what happens when living tissue is exposed to cosmic rays or whatever is up there. Don't you see what could happen?" Bill was hoarse from fright and shouting. "Smother everything, grow and grow and smother..." Carol was at the ship-to-shore. "What time is it, Carol?" "I don't know. # : # I guess." "They plan to open the ejection chamber at six. We've got to tell them what happened here before they open it! Hurry with the damned Coast Guard!" "May Day! May Day! Coast Guard come in. This is the Seven Seas. Come in and hurry!" "Coast Guard to the Seven Seas. Come in." Bill grabbed the phone. "Listen carefully," he said in a quiet determined voice. "This is God's own truth. I repeat: This is God's own truth. The remains of the dog we discovered last night have started to grow. It is growing as we look at it. It has covered the entire island as far as we can see, with fur. Stinking yellow and black fur. We've got to get word to Washington before they open up the satellite. The same thing could happen there. Do you understand? I must get in touch with Washington. Immediately!" There was no mistaking the urgency and near-panic in Bill's voice. The Coast Guard returned with "We understand you Seven Seas. We will clear a line directly to Dr. With his hand shaking, Bill turned on the standard broadcast cut in: "... latest reports from Walter Reed General Hospital where the first human-manned satellite ejection chamber has just been opened. All leading physiologists and physicists were assembled at the hospital by midnight last night and plans to open the ejection chamber at # a.m. this morning were moved up. The chamber was opened at # a.m. Eastern Standard Time today. Our first report confirmed that volunteer moon traveller, the man in the moon, Robert Joy, was no longer alive. Hope had been abandoned for him some # hours previous, when recording instruments on his body processes indicated no reactions. Of scientific curiosity is the fact that though dead for more than three days, his body is in a perfect state of preservation... "Flash! We interrupt this special newscast for a late bulletin: The body of Robert Joy has begun to shoot out unexplained appendages, like rapidly growing cancerous growths. His integument appears to be enlarging, growing away from his body... "Hello Seven Seas" broke in the ship-to-shore. "We are still trying An exciting new novelette about a group of political refugees and one man who stopped running... By Robert Silverberg On First, by Lloyd Biggie, Jr., in which a super, "out-of-thisworld" team amazes and startles the world of baseball. And other unusual science fiction entertainment. What is more frightening than the fear of the unknown? Johnny found out! Illustrated by Ed Emsh T he day was still no more than a ragged streak of red in the east; the pre-dawn air was sharply cold, making Johnny Youngbear's face feel slightly brittle as he dressed quietly in the gray bedroom. He sat down on the bed, pulling on his boots, and felt his wife stir sleepily beneath the covers. Suddenly she stiffened, sat upright in tlie bed, startled into wakefulness. Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawklike face umeadable in the cold gray light streaming through the huge picture window. "Johnny?" said his wife hesitantlyHe murmured an acknowledgement, watching the bright flare of color as she drew on the cigarette. Her soft, dark hair was coiled loosely around her shoulders, very black against the pale skin. Her eyes were invisible in shadow, and Johnny could not read their expression. He turned away, knowing she was watching him. "Be careful," she said simply. "Try," he said. Then he shrugged. "Not my day, anyway." "I know," she said. "But -- be careful." He left the house and walked out into the chill desert dawn. He turned his face to the brightness in the east, trying to catch a little warmth, but could not. He warmed up the jeep, listening to the engine grumble protest until it settled to a flat, banging roar. He swerved out of the driveway with a screaming of tires. Reaching the long ribbon of concrete that led out into the desert, he settled down hard on the accelerator, indifferent to the whining complaint of the jeep's motor. It was eight miles from his sprawling house to the Mesa Dry Lake launching site, due east, into the sun. He pulled to the top of Six Mile Hill and stopped in the middle of the highway. Two miles ahead was Launching Base I, throwing long, sharp shadows at him in the rosy dawn light. A cluster of squat, gray blockhouses; a long runway tapering into the distance with an Air Force B-# motionless at the near end ; that was all. Except the Ship. The Ship towered high, dominating the desert like a pinnacle of bright silver. Even silhouetted against the eastern sky, it sparkled and glistened. Impassive it stood, graceful, seeming to strain into the sky, anxious to be off and gone. The loading gantry was a dark, spidery framework beside The Ship, leaning against it, drawing strength from its sleek beauty. Johnny watched it in silence for a moment, then turned his eyes up, to the sky. Somewhere up there a tiny satellite spun wildly about the earth, a little silver ball in some celestial roulette wheel. Gradually it would spiral closer and closer, caught by the planet's implacable grasp, until it flared brightly like a cigarette in the heavens before dissolving into drops of molten metal. But it would have served its purpose. In its short life it would have given Man knowledge; knowledge of space, knowledge enough that he could go himself, knowing what he would find in the emptiness between the earth and the moon. Or knowing nearly. Whats it like out there? The satellite answered partly; the Ship would answer more. Johnny slammed the jeep into gear, hurtled down the other side of Six Mile Hill. Through his mind ran the insistent repetition of an old song he knew, and he hummed it tunelessly through closed teeth. I had a true wife but I left her... oh, oh, oh. The jeep skidded to a halt beside Control. Mitch Campbell's green station wagon was already there, creaking and settling as the motor cooled. Control was full of people; Air Force brass, technicians, observers, enlisted men of indiscernible purpose. The room hummed with the muted buzz of low, serious conversation. Mitch Campbell sat in one corner, apparently forgotten in the confusion. He had nothing to do. Not yet. He was already in flight dress, holding the massive helmet in his hands morosely, turning it over and over, staring at it as though he thought he might find his head inside if he looked carefully enough. "Morning, Colonel," said Johnny, forcing his voice to be casual and cheerful. "You're up early this morning." "Morning, Colonel yourself," said Mitch, looUng up. "Big date today?" "Well -- yeah, you might say so," Mitch said, smiling faintly and with obvious effort. "Thought I might go once around lightly," he said, hooking his thumb upwards. Upwards through the concrete ceiling, into the air, through the air, up where there was no air for a man to breathe. Once around lightly. Around the world. Lightly. "Tell you what, Mitch." "O.K., tell me what," he said. "You like the movies?" Johnny asked. "You like to get a little adventure in your soul? You like a little vicarious thrill now and then?" "Yeah, I like that." "Tell you what. We'll go. No, don't thank me. We'll go. Tonight. Eight o'clock, you come by." "Wives and everybody?" Mitch asked. "Why not?" Johnny said. "They're cooped up in the house all day." They both knew the wives would be in Control in an hour, listening to the radio chatter, waiting, eyes wide, shoulders stiff and tight. "Fine," said Mitch. "Fine." A crew chief came up and touched Johnny's shoulder. "Colonel Youngbear," he said, "Observation is going up." Johnny stood and looked out the tiny window at the red-painted B-#. "See you tonight, Mitch. Eight o'clock? Don't forget. Westerns." "See you," said Mitch. He looked back down at the helmet and was turning it over and over again when Johnny left. The Observation B-# climbed, screaming. Johnny lit a cigarette and watched out the port at the contrails rolling straight and white behind the jets. He sat by the radioman, a Sergeant, ignoring the rest of the officers in the converted bomb-bay. "Hope he makes it. Colonel," said the Sergeant. "He'll make it," Johnny said flatly, irritated. Relenting, he added in a gentler tone, "The pilot section breaks away. If he gets in serious trouble, he can dump it and ride the nose down. Like a bird. He'll make it." There was a raucous buzz, and a squawk box said: "On my mark it will be Zero minus four minutes... mark!" The voice of Control, # feet below. The B-# swung ponderously onto the base leg of its circle, and there was a creaking of stretching metal inside. "Minus two minutes." Not my day, anyway, Johnny thought. He lit another cigarette. "Control," said a new voice, "This is Red Leader. Red Leader. Red Flight is in position." "Rog, Red Leader," Control acknowledged. The Observation flight of jet fighters was waiting, too. "Minus five... four... three... two... one... mark!" Silence. I had a true wife but I left her... oh, oh, oh. There was another rattle of the speaker, and Mitch's voice came through, grunting, heavy, as the acceleration of the Ship laid a heavy hand on his chest. "Acceleration... eight gee   . controls respond." Silence. "There he is," someone said. A wavering trail of smoke was barely visible below, a thread of white, coming up fast, blown erratically by winds into a distorted tiny snake. "Altitude..." said Mitch's voice. "#... Acceleration... dropping." The white snake wriggled up to their level, rose above them. Johnny could not see the silver head. "Altitude... #... I have a loud, very high buzz in my headphones. I'm going to -- there, it's gone now, went out of my range." His voice sounded wrong to Johnny, but he couldn't pin it down. "Altitude... #. Beginning orbital correction. Beginning -- beginning... I can't -- I'm -- I'm -- " The voice became unintelligible. It was pitched very high, like a woman's, and it sounded as if his teeth were chattering. "Mitch," Johnny pleaded softly. "Mitch, baby. Dump it, boy, come on home, now. Dump it." There was no more from the speaker. A confused babble broke out in the bomb-bay. The Sergeant fiddled with his dials frantically, spinning across wavelengths, trying to find a word. The confusion ceased when the speaker rattled again, seeming hours later. "Uh, hello. Control, this is Red Three, do you read me?" One of the fighter flight. "Rog, Red Three, go ahead," came Control's voice from below. "Uh, Control, I have a flash and smoke cloud on a bearing of threeseven degrees." "Red Three, what altitude? What altitude?" "None," said the fighter pilot. "On the deck." After a moment, Johnny climbed unsteadily to his feet in the midst of a booming silence. He made his way back along the catwalk to the head, where he retched violently until the tears came to his eyes. sat in Doctor Lambert's office. He watched the lean,, graying psychologist turn off the tape recorder, watched him methodically tamp tobacco in his pipe. "That's all she wrote, Johnny," said Lambert, finally. "That recording of Mitch's voice is just about all we have. The Ship was under full power when it hit. There wasn't much left." Johnny looked absently out the window at the gleaming needle of Ship II beside the flimsy looking gantry. Full power was a lot of power. The psychologist followed Johnny's eyes. "Beautiful," he said, and the word brought to Johnny's mind the wide-eyed pale face of Mitch's wife, staring at him. "That Ship is the best we can make her," Lambert said. "Engineering is as certain as they can be that there was no structural failure on Ship I." "So?" Johnny said, still staring at the Ship. Even at this distance, he could almost believe he could see his own lean face reflected in the shining metal. "So we look somewhere else for the cause of failure," said Lambert. "Where?" said Johnny. He turned back, saw that the psychologist was putting a new reel on the tape recorder. "The weak link in the control system," Lambert said. "There weren't any." "One." "What?" "Mitch Campbell." Johnny stood, angry. "Mitch was go. Damn good." The psychologist looked up, and his eyes were tired. "I know it," he said calmly. "Listen to this." He started the machine playing the new tape. Johnny listened to it through. The voice that came out was high and wavering. It shook, it chat'tered, words were indistinguishable. It was thin with tension, and it rang in Johnny's ears with unwanted familiarity. "What's it sound like to you?" Lambert asked when it had finished. "Like Mitch's voice," Johnny admitted reluctantly. "It did to me, too. What do you think it is?" "Don't know," said Johnny shortly. "Might be a pilot whose plane is shaking apart." "No." "I don't know." Lambert sat back down behind his desk and sucked on his pipestem. He regarded Johnny impassively, seeming to consider some problem remote from the room. Abruptly, he stood again and went to the window, watching the ant-like activity around the base of Ship II. "That was a madman's voice," he said. "I made the recording while I was interning at a state institution." "So?" "Mad with fear," Lambert said. "Pure. Simple. Unadulterated. That was the sound of terror you heard, Johnny. Terror such as few humans have ever known. That man knew such fear he could not remain sane and live with it." I had a true wife but I left her... ohy oh, oh. "You think Mitch -- " "You said yourself the voices were alike." Lambert pointed out. "I don't believe it." "Don't have to," said Lambert, turning from the window. "But I'll tell you something, Johnny. That Ship -- " he hooked his thumb out the window -- "is a very big toy. Maybe too big." "Meaning?" "Meaning it's possible weVe reached beyond Man's limitations. Meaning it's possible we've built something too big for a man to handle and stay sane. Maybe we've finally gone too far." "MaVbe." "I don't insist it's true," said the psychologist. "It's an idea. Fear. Fear of the unknown, maybe. Too much fear to hold." "You think I'll crack?" asked Johnny. The psychologist didn't answer directly. "It's an idea, as I said. I just wanted you to think it over." "I will," said Johnny. He stood again, his jaw held tight. "Is that aU?" "Yes, Colonel, that's all," said Lambert. When Johnny left, the psychologist sat in brooding silence, staring morosely at a trail of blue smoke rising from his pipe bowl. He sat there until the afternoon light faded from the desert base. Then he stood in the darkened office, sighed, lit his pipe and went home. He was very tired. Youngbear walked out of the Control blockhouse into the cold desert morning, carrying his helmet under his arm. He ran his eyes swiftly up the length of Ship II, trying to forget those other eyes staring at his back from the blockhouse. The Ship rippled and gleamed, alive, eager, the thundering power in her belly waiting to be bom. Oh, you bitch! You beautiful bitch, Johnny thought. Pregnant with power like a goddess with a gods child. Bitch, bitch, bitch! I love you I hate you. You kill me. The crew-chief walked by his side. "Nice morning. Colonel," he said. "Very," said Johnny. # had a true wife but I left her... oh, oh, oh. For you, you beautiful bitch. "Say something. Colonel?" asked the crew-chief. "No. Song running through my head," he explained. "Yeah," the other man chuckled. "I know how it is." They strapped him into the padded control chair, the controls arranged around him in a neat semicircle, easy to reach. This is my day. They left him. Alone. Once around lightly. The loneliness was in his belly, aching like a tumor... read me?" Contrors voice in his earphones. "Loud and clear," he said absently... minus two minutes... mark!" A different voice. So many different voices. They knew him, they talked to him. But he was alone with his bitch. I had a true wife but -- "... minus one minute... mark!" This is my day I had a true wife -- "... three... two... one... mark!" There was the sound of a world dying in his mind, the sound of thunder, the sound of a sun splitting, the sound of a goddess giving birth, with pain with agony in loneliness. A giant's fist came from out of nothingness and smashed into his body. His chest was compressed, his face was flattened, he could not get enough air to breathe. The heavy sledge of acceleration crushed him back into the padded chair, inexorable, implacable, relentless, heavy. His vision clouded in red and he thought he would die. Instead, he spoke into the lip mike, resenting it bitterly. "Acceleration... nine gee." He looked at the gauge that shimmered redly before him, disbelieving. "Altitude #." He blacked out, sinking helplessly into the black plush night of unawareness. I had a true I had I had -- Awakening to pain, he glanced at the gauges. He had been gone only a split second. "Altitude # acceleration pressure dropping." His face began to resume its normal shape as the acceleration dropped. "... six gee," he said, and breaking was easier. The giant reluctantly began to withdraw his massive fist from Johnny's face. He tipped a lever, watched the artificial horizon tilt slightly. "Air control surfaces respond," he said. But soon there would be no air for the surfaces to move against, and then he would control by flicking the power that rumbled behind him. "Altitude #..." "... #..." "... #..." The sky was glistening black, he was passing from the earth's envelope of air into the nothingness that was space. Now, Now. Now it was time to change angle, flatten the ship out, bring it into position to run around the earth. Once around lightly. There was a high-pitched scream in his earphones. He remembered it had been there for long, and wondered if he had told Control. He flicked the switch that ignited the powerful steering rockets, and the whine grew louder, unbearably loud. It sang to him, his bitch sang I had a true wife, hut I left her... oh, oh, oh. He began to feel a light tingle over his body, tiny needles delicately jabbing every inch. His face became wooden, felt prickly. He tried to lick his lips and could feel no sensation there. His vision fogged again, and he knew it was not from acceleration this time, it was something else. Something else. Whafs it like out there? His belly told him. Fear. He reached out his hand to touch the control panel, and his arm did not respond. It was shaking, uncontrollably, and moved off to the right of where he wanted it to go. When he tried to correct, it swung too far to the left, waving as if it were alive. It hung there before him as in a dream, oscillating back and forth. He could not control his body, and the realization nurtured the tiny seed of panic that lay heavily in his belly. Dump it... What did that mean? Dump it go home now, baby... I had a true... Decision... there was a decision he had to make, but he was too frightened to know what it was. He had been born in fear and lived in fear and his body was full of it, quivering to the lover's touch of fear. Falling, darkness, the fear of dying, the unknown, the unimaginable always lurking just out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to scream and the fear choked it off. His hands were at his sides, limply, useless, dangling at the seat. He had to hang on to something. His hand found a projection at the side of the seat. He clutched it desperately. He knew he would fall, down, spiraling, weightless, off the cliff as in a dream, off the ladder, the tree, he was a child and his toes were tingling as he stood too near the edge of the cliff, knowing he might fall. He clutched tightly, putting every ounce of his strength into holding on to the lever, the single solid reality in a world of shifting unreality. He was going to fall he was falling I love you I hate you I had a true wife... T here was softness beneath his back, and he moved his hands, feeling the crispness of sheets. There was a low murmur of voices. He raised his hands to his eyes and the voices stopped. There were heavy bandages on his eyes. "Colonel?" came a questing voice, and Johnny realized it was Doctor Lambert. "Awake?" "I can't see. Why can't I see?" "You'll be all right. It's all right." "What happened?" "How much do you remember?" asked the voice. "The blast-off?" "Yes -- yes, I remember that." "The orbit? The landing?" "No," he said. "Not that." "You did it," said the voice. "You made it." This is my day. Once around lightly. "Johnny," said the voice. "I don't know just how to say this. We know what was wrong with Ship I, and why it killed Mitch. We know -- hell, we don't even begin to realize what we have at our fingertips now. It's so big it's impossible to evaluate." "What? I don't -- " "Sound, Johnny, sound. Or rather, vibration. It's something we're just beginning to learn about. We know a few things; we know you can boil water with sound if the frequency is high enough. And you can drill metal with it -- and it does things to the human body. "There are frequencies of sound which can act directly on human nerves, directly on the human brain. It means that if we know the right frequency, we'll be able to produce any state we want in a man, any emotion. Fear, anguish, anything. "When the steering rockets were cut in, the Ship began to vibrate. It generated frequencies so high that ordinary human senses couldn't detect them. And when your nerves were exposed to those vibrations, it produced fear. Pure and absolute fear. Motor control went, rational processes went, all the nervous functions of the body went out of control. Your body became a giant tuning fork, and the frequency to which it vibrated was fear. "I can't remember -- "Sanity went, too, Johnny," said the man softly. "You could not stand that fear and remain sane, so something cut off. That was what happened to Mitch." "How did I get back?" "We don't know. The films show your face suddenly going blank. Then you flew. That's all. We hoped you could tell us." "No. No -- I don't remember -- " "There was something in you so strong it overrode everying else, even the fear. We'd like to know what it is. We'll find out, Johnny, and it will mean a lot to the human race when we do." This is my day. "Is my wife here?" There was a cool hand on his forehead. "Yes, Johnny." "Well," he said helplessly. "Well, how are you?" "I'm fine, Johnny," she whispered, and there was the sound of tears in her voice. "I'm just fine." He felt the warm softness of her lips on his. I had a true wife but I left her... ohy ohy oh. And then he came home again. Service with a Smile Herbert was truly a gentleman robot. The ladies slightest wish was his command... H erbert bowed with a muted clank -- indicating he probably needed oiling somewhere -- and presented Alice with a perfect martini on a silver tray. He stood holding the tray, a white, permanent porcelain smile on his smooth metal face, as Alice sipped the drink and grimaced. Illustrated by Paul Orhan "It's a good martini, Herbert," said Alice. "Thank you. But, damnit, I wish you didn't have that everlasting smile!" "I am very sorry. Miss Alice, but I am unable to alter myself in any way," replied Herbert in his polite, hollow voice. He retired to a corner and stood impassively, still holding the tray. Herbert had found a silver deposit and made the tray. Herbert had found sand and made the cocktail glass. Herbert had combined God knew what atmospheric and earth chemicals to make what tasted like gin and vermouth, and Herbert had frozen the ice to chill it. "Sometimes," said Thera wistfully, "it occurs to me it would be better to live in a mud hut with a real man than in a mansion with Herbert." The four women lolled comfortably in the living room of their spacious house, as luxurious as anything any of them would have known on distant Earth. The rugs were thick, the furniture was overstuffed, the paintings on the walls were aesthetic and inspiring, the shelves were filled with booktapes and musictapes. Herbert had done it all, except the booktapes and musictapes, which had ben salvaged from the wrecked spaceship. "Do you suppose we'll ever escape from this best of all possible manless worlds?" asked Betsy, fluffing her thick black hair with her fingers and inspecting herself in a Herbert-made mirror. "I don't see how," answered blond Alice glumly. "That atmospheric trap would wreck any other ship just as it wrecked ours, and the same magnetic layer prevents any radio message from getting out. No, I'm afraid we're a colony." "A colony perpetuates itself," reminded sharp-faced Marguerite, acidly. "We aren't a colony, without men." They were not the prettiest for women in the universe, nor the youngest. The prettiest women and the youngest did not go to space. But they were young enough and healthy enough, or they could not have gone to space. It had been a year and a half now -- an Earth year and a half on a nice little planet revolving around a nice little yellow sun. Herbert, the robot, was obedient and versatile and had provided them with a house, food, clothing, anything they wished created out of the raw elements of earth and air and water. But the bones of all the men who had been aspace with these four ladies lay mouldering in the wreckage of their spaceship. And Herbert could not create a man. Herbert did not have to have direct orders, and he had tried once to create a man when he had overheard them wishing for one. They had buried the corpse -- perfect in every detail except that it never had been alive. "It's been a hot day," said Alice, fanning her brow. "I wish it would rain." Silently, Herbert moved from his corner and went out the door. Marguerite gestured after him with a bitter little laugh. "It'll rain this afternoon," she said. "I don't know how Herbert does it -- maybe with silver iodide. But it'll rain. Wouldn't it have been simpler to get him to air-condition the house, Alice?" "That's a good idea," said Alice thoughtfully. "We should have had him do it before." H erbert had not quite completed the task of air-conditioning the house when the other spaceship crashed. They all rushed out to he smoking site -- the four women and Herbert. It was a tiny scoutship, and its single occupant was alive. He was unconscious, but he was alive. And he was a man! They carted him back to the house, tenderly, and put him to bed. They hovered over him like four hens over a single chick, waiting and watching for him to come out of his coma, while Herbert scurried about creating and administering the necessary medicines. "He'll live," said Thera happily. Thera had been a space nurse. "He'll be on his feet and walking around in a few weeks." "A man!" murmured Betsy, with something like awe in her voice. "I could almost believe Herbert brought him here in answer to our prayers." "Now, girls," said Alice, "we have to realize that a man brings problems, as well as possibilities." There was a matter-of-fact hardness to her tone which almost masked the quiver behind it. There was a defiant note of competition there which had not been heard on this little planet before. "What do you mean?" asked Thera. "I know what she means," said Marguerite, and the new hardness came natural to her. "She means, which one of us gets him?" Betsy, the youngest, gasped, and her mouth rounded to a startled O. Thera blinked, as though she were coming out of a daze. "That's right," said Alice. "Do we draw straws, or do we let him choose?" "Couldn't we wait?" suggested Betsy timidly. "Couldn't we wait until he gets well?" Herbert came in with a new thermometer and poked it into the unconscious man's mouth. He stood by the bed, waiting patiently. "No, I don't think we can," said Alice. 'T think we ought to have it all worked out and agreed on, so there won't be any dispute about it." "I say, draw straws," said Marguerite. Marguerite's face was thin, and she had a skinny figure. Betsy, the youngest, opened her mouth, but Thera forestalled her. "We are not on Earth," she said firmly, in her soft, mellow voice. "We don't have to follow terrestrial customs, and we shouldn't. There's only one solution that will keep everybody happy -- all of us and the man." "And that is...?" asked Marguerite drily. "Polygamy, of course. He must belong to us all." Betsy shuddered but, surprisingly, she nodded. (Continued on page #) Illustrated by Paul Orhan A Mixture of Genius WhOy but the imaginative youngs shall inherit the stars? T he sleek transcontinental fading to a dense roar, it taxied airliner settled onto one of the across the field toward the central maze of runways that was Stevenbuilding. Inside the plane a red son Airport. With its turbojets light went off. Senator Vance Duran unhooked the seat belt, reached for his briefcase, and stepped into the crowded aisle. The other passengers were all strangers, which had meant that for nearly an hour he had been able to give his full attention to the several hundred pages of proposed legislation and reports presented to the Committee on Extraterrestrial Development, of which he was chairman. But now there would be reporters, local political pleaders, the dinner at the Governor's, and the inevitable unexpected interruptions which were a part of every trip home. As he strode through the door and onto the mobile escalator, he donned his smile of tempered confidence in the economic future of the nation. A television camera went into action at once and newsmen formed a small circle at the bottom of the ramp. "That was a great little debate you put on with Ben Wickolm last week," one of the reporters said. "You really tied him up." "You can thank Senator Wickolm for arousing me," Duran answered, observing to himself that perhaps all of his efforts on the Hill did not go unnoticed in his home state, if most of them seemed to. "What do you think. Senator, of integrated lunar relay station plan?" another asked. "I haven't had time to get fully acquainted with it," the senator evaded, stepping onto the ground and out of the way of the ramp. "Say, Senator, what about the Mars colony project?" a third put in. "How come it's bogged down?" "No comment at present," the senator said. But he gave them an ambiguous little grimace which was meant to suggest a minor but sticky snarl behind the scenes. He hoped it would satisfy them for the moment. Making his escape as quickly as possible, he climbed onto the shuttle car already loaded down with the other passengers. Finding an empty seat, he folded himself into it, and was immediately joined by someone else. "Well, Senator, how does it feel to be home?" his companion asked with sympathetic irony. Duran turned, grinned, and reached for the man's hand. "Great, Wayne," he answered, recognizing an old friend who had been of no small aid during his earlier years in politics. "Say, I'd ask you over for dinner if we weren't going to the Governor's tonight. Molly would love to see you. Unfortunately I'm leaving for Washington again in the morning." "Why doesn't Molly move to D.G. with you, Vance?" the journalist asked. Duran hesitated. "Maybe in a year or so. After the boys are out of highschool. If I get the job again." The smile on the younger man's face was heartening. "Don't play coy with me, Vance. You know you've got this state sewed up." Then came the slight frown of doubt. "Just one thing, though. A lot of people are wondering why the hold up on the colony project. You're bound to get a little of the criticism. What the hell's wrong, anyway?" "Can't you guess?" "Yeah. I can guess. There's only one possibility, since the government scientists assure us they've ironed out all the technical wrinkles. But it's pretty hard to believe that out of the thousands of people who volunteer every week, not even a couple of hundred are acceptable." Duran considered his answer carefully before voicing it. "Ever ask yourself who volunteers, Wayne?" The journalist looked at him oddly, then nodded. tor directly to the helicopter landing on the roof of the building. It was several minutes before he had located the little runabout he had bought for his wife the previous Christmas. Jack Woodvale, their caretaker, gardener, and chauffeur was just retrieving his suitcase from the baggage lift as the senator arrived. Waiting until Woodvale had secured the suitcase in the luggage compartment and climbed into the pilot's seat, Duran squeezed himself into the cabin. A minute or two later the little craft was rising from the port, directed automatically into the appropriate channel and guided off toward the city. "How've things been going, Jack?" the senator asked. He felt good. Wayne's friendship and assurances had provided a needed boost. "Everything okay?" "I'd say so, sh," Woodvale told him. "Had a little trouble with the solar screen. The store sent a man out to fix it. It's all right now." The new power unit had been another of Molly's ideas, Duran recalled. The old crystal sulfide screen had been perfectly reliable. But Molly had thought it looked ugly up there on the roof. Molly's main faults, he decided, derived from her concern with the neighbors' opinions. "Oh, there was something else came up while I was on my way out to get you," Woodvale continued abruptly. "The state's Attorney General called -- said it was important you contact him immediately." Duran sensed anger surging up as he remembered the times when, as District Attorney, Sig Loeffler had openly snubbed him. That, of course, had been back in the days when Duran had been a junior partner in one of the city's smaller law firms. He had not forgiven Loeffler, nor had Loeffler given him any reason to do so. Only the Governor's back-slapping mediation had allowed them to reach a politically stable relationship. The relationship did not involve Duran's compliance with the man's whims, however. "Get him on the phone. Jack," Duran said at last. "But just make one call. If he's not at his office, forget it." In less than a minute Woodvale was turning around to say: "He's in, sir. You want to talk to him?" Duran grunted and lifted the phone from the clamp beside his seat. "Senator Duran speaking," he said. "Vance, this is Loeffler," boomed a voice in considerable contrast to the senator's own mild tone. "Something pretty fantastic has happened. We're trying to keep it quiet, at least until we decide on what action to take. But if you can make it over here some time this evening. I'll tell you the story. You're going to be in on it eventually, and I thought you'd prefer getting in on it early." Duran had intended quite bluntly to explain that he had more important business. But there was something compelling about the man's apparently ingenuous urgency that caused the senator to change his mind. "Okay, Loeffler. I'll be right over." He broke the contact and told Woodvale to dial his home number. "Ernie, this is Dad," he said at the sound of his younger son's voice. "Tell Mother I'm going to stop off at the Attorney General's office -- that's right -- but that I'll be home in plenty of time to get ready for the dinner. Got that? That's right. How's school? Something wrong? Okay, son. I'll see you later." Ernie had said that everything was all right, but with an uneasiness in the way he spoke. Grades, maybe, Duran thought. The boy had been doing pretty well, almost as well as Roger, but was showing the inevitable adolescent ramifications of interest. Duran found himself musing briefly upon his own youthful extra-curricular forays up the tree of knowledge and sighed. "Go to the capitol building. Jack," he said. "Which port should I use, sir?" the younger man asked. "The official one," Duran told him. This was Loeffler's idea. The senator was surprised to find one of the Attorney General's harried-looking secretaries working late. She glanced up from her typewriter and gave him an equivocal smile of recognition. "He's expecting you, Mr. Senator," she said, nodding toward the inner office. "Go right in." Sigmund Loeffler was not alone. But the two other visitors were paled by the aura of importance which emanated from the large black-haired man behind the desk. He rose grandly at Duran's entrance, and without bothering to shake hands proceeded with introductions. "Fritz Ambly, Senator Vance Duran. Fritz," he explained, "is chairman of the state Youth Welfare Board." Duran took the thin hand which the other extended to him and noted the concern on the man's slim freckled face. His features were appropriately almost those of a child, but of a worried child. "And Bob Duff, Senator Duran," Loeffler went on. "Bob is head of our Civil Defense now." The second man was, in contrast, short and homely, but not without a touch of the other's anxiety. "Well, gentlemen, you're welcome to stay if you wish," the Attorney General told them. "I'll have to repeat all the facts to Senator Duran, of course," "I'd better be off," Ambly said. "Perhaps I'll see you at the Governor's tonight?" "Not me. I'm afraid," Loeffler told him. "The DA and I have a little problem to work out together. I'll call you both tomorrow about the press release." "We can't wait too long," said Duff. "Rumors can be a lot worse than the truth. Especially about something like this. In fact, I don't see the point in waiting at all." "Tomorrow, Bob. Tomorrow," Loeffler promised. "Noon at the latest." His heavy smile faded as the two visitors closed the door behind them. With an unthrottled groan, he lowered himself into the chair and turned his dark gaze upon the senator. "They think they have troubles," he said. "And you think I have," Duran returned, seating himself. "I know you do. Unfortunately I happen to share them to some extent." He paused to relight the stub of a cigar, then went on. "It's a crazy world we live in, Vance. Things change. Sometimes it's hard for us adults to keep up with it. The kids seem to, though." Duran tried to appear suavely bored with the other's musings. But in spite of himself he could sense his gaze becoming intently expectant. Whatever connection there might be between himself, Ambly, and Duff completely eluded him. And that elusive connection had aroused his curiosity. "Yeah, they keep up with things, all right," Loeffler went on. "And sometimes they get some pretty big ideas." He ha iced, puffed thoughtfully, then barked: "Remember Mel Skinner's lodge out on that island in Wakataoga Lake? Big Spanish-style place. Built it for that wife of his he brought back from Chile or somewhere." "Yes, I remember it. Molly and I spent a weekend there a couple of years ago. Why?" the senator asked, realizing more than ever how niuch he disliked Sigmund Loeffler. "What are you getting at?" "Well, the next time you go you'd better take along some sleeping bags," said Loeffler. "Because the house isn't there anymore." "Okay," Duran said, strangely anxious. "Let's forget the riddles and get down to business. What happened to Mel Skinner's hacienda?" The Attorney General stared at his guest for a moment, before remarking harshly: "It got blown up." "A bomb, you mean?" Duran asked. "Oh, no, no -- nothing so crude as that. This was a guided missile. With a warhead." The senator was thinking fast now, but still the pattern eluded him. "Not an act of war, surely?" he remarked. "More like an act of revolution," Loeffler told him. "Because the agents behind it were kids. Kids from our state, our city. Kids from decent homes, educated families. Bright kids. Happy kids. Kids with every opportunity. Kids who ought to know better -- "Hold it, Loeffler!" Duran interrupted, rising from the chair to place both hands on the edge of the desk. "Just one question -- was anyone killed or injured?" The other man hesitated melodramatically, then looked down at his cigar. "No. There was no one on the island. The place had been closed down for the winter. That's the only pleasant thing about it." Duran found it such unexpectedly good news that he was actually able to smile when he dropped back into the chair. "In other words, Loeffler, it was a prank." But the Attorney General seemed not to see it in precisely that light. "A prank, yes!" he exploded. "A hundred thousand dollar prank! My God, Vance, don't you see what those boys did? They demonstrated the grossest lack of respect for private property. And what if they'd miscalculated? That rocket was fired from a distance of some fifty or sixty miles. It could have killed any number of people along its course had it fallen short," "Well, I'll admit it's not the sort of thing I'd like to see encouraged," said Duran. "Now give me the details. Who were they? Where did they get the rocket? What was the point of it, anyway?" Sigmund Loeffler opened a folder which lay on his desk and started sifting through its contents. He pulled out several memoranda and a list of names, closing the folder again. "There was a gang of eight, all in the eleventh or twelfth grades at Eisenhower High. Five of them were members of the school rocket club. Three of them had juvenile delinquency records -- minor stuff, mostly, like copter stunting and public disturbance. The youngest had won a couple of science awards for demonstrations in -- " he glanced significantly at the senator, "the chemistry of explosives." Duran said nothing, but his sense of concern was growing. "Let's see," Loeffler went on. "Two of the boys were taking vocational courses. One had his own machine shop, in fact. Then there was the electronics expert -- Ceasar Grasso's son -- know him?" The senator nodded. "He runs the highschool T-V station. Knows a lot about radio, I understand. Oh, yes. There was also the lad who drew up the plans for the gadget. Pretty sharp at engineering design, they say -- " Duran peered numbly across the desk at the grim faced official. This was what he had been fearirig all along. But despite his apprehension, he was not entirely ready for it. "That, I suppose," he said quietly, "was my son Roger." Loeffler nodded slowly. "That was your boy, Vance. Sorry I had to be the one to break it to you." "But where is he?" Duran asked. "And does Molly know about it?" "She knows he's been detained, but not how serious the charges are. "Just how serious are the charges?" "I don't know yet," said Loeffler. "That's not really my province, of course," said Loeffler. "But the problem is complicated by the fact that Lake Wakataoga is state property, with the island merely leased to Skinner." Duran fumbled through his pockets for his cigarettes. He found them and lit one. "When did this happen?" he asked, aware that the painfully tangled knot in his stomach was beginning to untie itself. "This afternoon around onethirty. A couple of guys fishing on the lake saw the explosion and called the local civil defense headquarters. They claim they heard the rocket fall. Damned near had a war scare till the pieces were found. They were easy enough to trace, and the kids gave themselves away by all eight of them being awol from their one o'clock classes. Especially since five of them were absent from a physics class -- that was one class they never cut." "I don't see how they managed to go all the way through with it without someone finding out," Duran said, bewilderedly. "I know," agreed Loeffler, nodding. "That's the way we all felt. But they admit doing it -- hell, they're proud of it! -- and we found the shed where the thing was assembled." "I don't suppose they offered any motive," Duran said. "Oh, sure. They claim they'd been planning it ever since Skinner wouldn't let them land copters on the island. Pretty weak, huh?" The senator made no response. "Well, Vance, I guess you'll want to talk to the boy," Loeffler concluded. "I had him brought up here. Figured it would be best all around that way. I knew you had to get back to Washington tomorrow and probably wouldn't have time to see him then. Shall I have him come in?" When Duran hesitated, he added, "Oh, I've got to duck out for a few minutes. Get some supper. Got a long evening ahead of me." "Okay, Loeffler, send him in. And -- " This was the hardest part. "And I appreciate this." "No trouble, Vance," the man said, rising and stepping around the desk. "No more than we've got already." He removed a suit coat from a hanger and left the office with it under his arm. A moment later the door opened again and the senator saw the shaggy head of his older son peer into the room. The boy was the one who finally broke the silence which followed. "Hi, Dad," he said, sauntering casually into the office. "Guess you're pretty sore at me. Can't blame you." Duran remained seated, indicating a chair against one wall. He waited till his son had sat down. "I'm a little dumbfounded, Rog, that's all. I suppose you had a good reason for it." "Sure. Old skinflint Skinner wouldn't let us -- " '"Roger!'" the senator growled threateningly. He was not going to allow the interview to start off with a half-truth. "Yeah, but that's state land," the boy persisted. "He hadn't any right -- " "Roger, I said a good reason." "Okay, Dad," he sighed. "No, we didn't have that kind of a reason. "What it amounted to," Duran said, "was that you wanted to do something spectacular like building a rocket and firing it at something. Only to be fun it had to be illegal, if not immoral. And Melvin Skinner's place seemed like the least objectionable target. Isn't that about it?" "Yeah, I guess so. Only we had just about finished the rocket before we started wondering about a target. That was the trouble. Once we'd built it, we had to do something with it." "How to you think that's going to sound in court?" "I don't know, Dad. You're the lawyer." Duran cringed, but tried not to show it. "Roger," he said slowly. "Flippancy is the easiest defense, and the least effective. I hope you won't feel you have to resort to it too often." The boy said nothing. "Well, tell me about it," his father suggested, sensing his son's isolation. "About what?" "The rocket. Wouldn't a jet have been easier to make?" "A rocket was cheaper." The source of the money required for the project was something Duran had overlooked. However, it was, he realized, one best postponed for the present. The important thing now was to regain his son's confidence. "Did you design it?" "Yeah. Well, I drew it up. Nothing very original about it. But it was a good little machine." Duran noticed the boy's restless squirming, saw him perfunctorily place a hand to the baggy pocket of his jacket and quickly withdraw it, then arrived at a decision. Reaching into his own coat, Duran took out the pack of cigarettes, extending it to his son. "Care for a cigarette?" he asked. The youth looked at him doubtfully for an instant. Then he smiled his first smile that evening. "Thanks, Dad," he responded, taking one and lighting it self-consciously. He added, "You've been out of town so much, I didn't think you knew I'd started -- " "I know, Rog," the man said, aware of a rising flood of self-condemnation. "Go on, son. About the rocket. What kind of fuel did you use?" "Oh, nothing special. It had a liquid bi-propellant motor. We used ethanol and liquid oxygen. Pretty old-fashioned. But we didn't know how to get hold of the fancier stuff, and didn't have any way of synthesizing it. Then, at the last minute, we found that one of the valves feeding into the nozzle was clogged up. That's why we were late to class." "Couldn't that have been dangerous?" Duran asked, and realized at once that he had said the wrong thing. The boy merely shrugged. "Well, it must have been a pretty good machine if it flew sixty miles and hit its target," Duran went on. "Oh, we had it radio-controlled, with a midget T.V. transmitter mounted in it. Grasso took care of that. He did a terrific job. Of course, it was pretty expensive." He glanced at his father tentatively for a moment, then bent his gaze to the cigarette. "I don't have my car any more. But I guess I won't be needing it now." There was a cautious knock on the door. "Listen, Rog," Duran began, "I'll try to get to see you tomorrow before I leave. Remember that your mother and I are both on your side, without qualification. You've done a pretty terrible thing, of course. But I have to admit, at the same time, that I'm really rather proud of you. Does that me sense?" "Sure," said Roger huskily, "I guess so." T he flight home was a quiet one. Duran found himself with many thoughts to think, not the least of which was what his wife's reaction would be. The difficulty lay in the fact that their married life had been too easy, too free of tragedy, to enable him to foresee her response. But life would not be quite the same now, even if Roger escaped the more concrete forms of punishment. And perhaps it would be the most difficult for Ernest, who would forever be expected either to live up to or down to his older brother's reputation. When all poor Ernest seemed to want these days was to play the saxophone. And then there was his own political future to consider. This would certainly not help it. But perhaps the affair would be forgotten in the next three years. After all, it might have been far worse. It might have happened in a campaign year. This way he still had a fighting chance. Three sessions with a good record might overbalance the loss in public confidence this would incur. And then he thought of the Mars colony mess and winced. Telling his wife about the matter was not nearly so difficult as the senator had feared. She had been ready for news of a crime of passion, or at least of armed robbery. What her husband had to relate stunned her at first. But once she had ridden out the shock, she recovered quickly. "You don't have to go tonight, Molly," Duran told her. "You think it might look better if I didn't?" she asked gently. "That wasn't what I was getting at," he said. He thought it over for a moment, then added, "No, I don't. In fact, I think it would look better if we both went to the Governor's. Roger is not a juvenile delinquent. That, I believe, is understood. If we must accept some of the responsibility for what he did today, then let's do so gracefully. Were you to stay home tonight, it might appear to some that you had reason to be ashamed of the business, which you don't." "It might also look as if I were afraid that Ernest might do something similar, as if I felt I had to watch him," she said. "Oh, people can be so ridiculous! Why wasn't Duran smiled at the idea of the CJovemor's tubby, obtuse son involved in the construction of anything more demanding than a paper glider. The Governor's mansion, a century old edifice typifying the moribund tendency to confuse dignity with discomfort, was teeming with professional and political personages when the Durans arrived. The dinner went off routinely, with no overt references made to the missile matter. However, the senator noticed that no one inquired into the health and happiness of his two sons, so that he presumed word had got around. It was not until after dinner, when he had seated himself alone in a corner of the luxurious old living room, a B and B in one hand and a cigar in the other, that his host approached him. "Evenin', Vance. Sure glad you could make it," exclaimed the familiarly jovial voice of Governor Will Gorton. Duran sat down his drink and took the Governor's plump hand, shaking it vigorously. Then the senator observed the intense youngish face of Fritz Ambly, who had followed the Governor. "Guess you know Fritz," Gorton went on, seating himself next to Duran. "Says he met you at Sig's office this afternoon." "That's right," Duran said. "Good to see you again, Ambly." The Youth Welfare board chairman nodded affably and took the remaining chair. His look of concern had mellowed somewhat with the evening. But the pale close eyes remained set in an expression of aggressive earnestness. "How's Roger?" Gorton asked, after a moment's silence. "As normal as ever," said Duran, unprepared for the question. Then, slyly, he added, "Thanks for talking Loeffler into letting me see him." "Well, Sig agreed it was the only thing to do, after I told him you'd be leaving for Washington again tomorrow," the Governor said. Duran grinned wryly. It had been a guess, but a good one. And Loeffler's having passed the interview off as a personal favor put their relationship back in its proper perspective. "Well, what's to be done about the boys? They're all under eighteen, I suppose." "That's right," Gorton said. "It's entirely a matter for the juvenile authority. At least we're going to try to keep it there. But there's more to it than that. Which is why Fritz is here. He has something on his mind which he thinks is pretty important. I do too." "You see. Senator," said Ambly, coming in promptly on his cue, "it's this way. If the case were an isolated one, it would be easy enough for us to deal with. But it's part of a pattern which few people have yet noticed. Let me cite several other similar incidents. "Perhaps you read about the group of fifty teen-aged copter jockeys who decided to hold a transcontinental scavenger hunt. Ignoring all air-traffic regulations, they managed to run up the magnificent total of seventeen collisions and thirty-two casualties." "Hear about that one, Vance?" the Governor asked, his earlier festiveness gone. "Yes, I think I saw something about it," Duran said. "It was pretty unfortunate, but -- " "And then there was the case of the promising young New England biologist who was discovered to have evolved a particularly deadly strain of bacteria, which he had been toting around with him in an aspirin bottle," Ambly went on, his thin hands clasped tightly in front of him. "Of course, at the age of sixteen, one perhaps can't be expected to foresee all of the possible consequences. "So let us consider the two seventeen-year-olds who caused something of a sensation in Florida when they used the Branski-Baker method of genetic exchange to breed a quite fabulous species of winged alligator. Several of these so called 'allibats' escaped into the everglades, but it is doubted that they will be able to reproduce themselves. At least there is some doubt." The senator reached for his drink and sipped it thoughtfully. He was beginning to see Roger's gang's misadventure in a new light. But it was an unfamiliar light, one that would take him a while to become accustomed to. "Perhaps the most startling case of all," Ambly went on, "concerns the Nuclear Fission Society of Urania, Nevada. It is not a well publicized fact that this quasiacademic group of adolescent physicists was exposed in the act of assembling an elementary but workable atomic bomb. Many of the elders in this fast-growing little community are engaged, as you no doubt know, in atomic development of one sort or another. It seemed that this interest had trickled down to their offspring, who showed an impressive amount of ingenuity in getting the necessary materials. Fortunately, one youngster asked his father entirely too many questions concerning the actual fabrication of fission weapons. The man investigated and -- " "Now, wait a minute," Duran interrupted, wondering momentarily if the whole tale might not have been a hoax. "How much of this am I really expected to believe?" "It's all fact, Vance," Governor Gorton responded solemnly. "Fritz has a couple of scrapbooks I'd like you to look at some time. Each case is pretty well authenticated. But the important thing is the pattern. It's really sort of frightening in a way." "Many similar incidents have no doubt occurred of which I have no record," said Ambly. "I'd estimate that ninety percent of such cases are suppressed, either in the interest of national security or because the children's parents are sufficiently influential to have the story squelched." "Just as we'd have sat on this one," added Gorton, "if the dang thing hadn't actually been shot off." Duran smiled inwardly at the picture evoked by the Governor's metaphor. However, he had to admit that the press would in all probability not have learned about the rocket at all, had it been discovered prior to being launched. "Still," he remarked, "it's odd that the papers haven't shown more of an interest in it." "I wrote an article on the subject some time ago," Ambly told him, "but was never able to get it published. It seems that people, for the most part, are more interested in the traditional sordid-sensational type of juvenile delinquency. "Whereas, this is something different, something unique. It isn't the result of poverty or broken homes, ignorance or twisted personalities -- this is a mixture of genius, knowledge, restlessness, and something else I don't think we understand." "What do you suggest be done about it?" Duran asked. "Well, the first step," said Ambly, "is to get Congress to recognize the problem for what it is. And even that won't be easy." "That's where you're supposed to come in," the Governor said, grinning a little guiltily. "Fritz has been tryin' to get me to talk to you about it for some months. I've got to admit, though, that the business this afternoon involvin' your son was what finally convinced me you might be sold." "I'm sold. Will," Duran told him. "But what's the solution? We can't supervise the activities of every kid in the country with an IQ above a hundred and ten. Anyway, they're too limited as it is. That, it seems to me, is part of the trouble. And we can't hold their parents accountable. Responsibility has to be an individual matter. So what's the solution?" Governor Gorton raised a quizzical eyebrow at Fritz Ambly, who in turn merely shrugged. The senator glanced at each of them, then down at his drink. "So there isn't one," he said. "Whatever it is," said Ambly, "it won't be simple or painless. There's only one such solution, and that's the time-honored technique of letting them grow into maturity. And even that is far from painless and simple to those doing the growing, nor is it always the solution." "Yet you're convinced this -- " the senator paused briefly, "phenomenon constitutes a danger to the nation?" Ambly merely smiled. But very, very grimly. "Well, think it over, Vance," the Governor said, getting to his feet. "Say, there are a couple of hydroponics men here somewhere who are pretty interested in meetin' you. You've heard of Van Neef Industries. He's one of 'em." So much for the welfare of the nation, Duran thought with a taste of bitterness. Now back to politics. But he finished off his drink, and put out his cigar, and rose to follow the Governor. Politics, after all, was the reason he had come. Vance Duran wearily dropped into bed. But he found no rest in sleep that night. For in his dreams he seemed to see a youngster walking, now through a forest, now through a city, now through an autumn countryside. And in the boy's hand was a tightly capped bottle. And the expression on his face was an enigma... Early the next morning Jack Woodvale parked the helicopter in a lot back of the city youth detention home. Five minutes later the senator was again talking to his older son. "I have to get back to Washington this morning, Roger," he said. "I've scheduled a committee meeting for ten-thirty. I suppose I could call it off, but we've got to do something about the Mars colony project before public apathy forces us to drop the whole thing. You understand, don't you?" "Sure," the boy said with apparent indifference. "Maybe you should have let me volunteer. You'd have solved two problems at the same time." "Now, Roger -- " Duran began. But he stopped, suddenly alert. "Son, you weren't ever serious about that, were you? I mean all that talk I used to hear about your wanting to go to one of the planets?" "Ah, I don't know, Dad -- " "Please, Roger, you've got to be honest with me. I want to know exactly how you feel about it. I know you've tried before, and I refused to take you seriously. I realize that. But now -- now tell me the truth." And the curious thing was, he realized, that he wanted to hear from his son what he feared most to hear. "Well -- sure, I wanted to go," his son said. "I kept telling you, didn't I? Of course, I wouldn't want to go unless some of the gang were going too." "You really think that you'd be your family -- " Duran hesitated angrily, knowing it was the wrong approach. He waited a moment, then began again. "I'm not condemning you for it, Roger. I just find it hard to believe. And I have to be sure you know what you'd be sacrificing." "I think I do. Dad," Roger said. "But you've got to make a break sometime. I guess there' d be some girls going along, wouldn't there?" Duran grinned numbly. "I guess there would, son," he said. T he senator watched the land of his home state sink rapidly into the morning haze as the jetliner soared upward. It was a sight he had seen often, but never with the sense of challenge he experienced now. For every moment brought him closer to what beyond all doubt would be the toughest fight of his political career. But he felt that he had logic on his side, though sentiment would very probably be against him. He sat back, lit a cigarette, and considered the irony of the situation. When legislation had been passed authorizing the Department of Extraterrestrial Development to start the colony project, a list of criteria had been drawn up for the would-be settler. It had meticulously specified the requirements of health, intelligence, and adaptability. And most rigidly adhered to of all had been the provision that the applicant be over the age of twentyfive. For, above all, it was assumed, a colonist must be mature. And in that assumption, Duran concluded, had been hidden the fallacy which had made a fiasco of the project. For was not maturity largely a matter of finding an acceptable place for oneself in the scheme of things? Was not maturity essentially a realistic, but wholly irrevocable, resignation? If so, it had been inevitable that those who came to volunteer would, for the most part, be the misfits and the malcontents, men who hoped to escape the imagined or to find the imaginary. The mature, the resigned, had assuredly inherited the earth. Only the young could seek the stars. Can You Always Find a Copy of IF at Your Local Newsstand? copies of IF?... During the past few months we have received an increasing number of letters from readers telling us that they cannot find IF where they live. And this can be true, for the congestion on newsstands is now greater than it has ever been. If you do not see IF -- ask for it. Better still, be sure you don't miss an issue by subscribing to IF right now. Use the coupon below. Yes -- I want to subscribe to IF for the next # issues for which I enclose # (check or money order). Please begin my subscription with the issue. Illustrated by Paul Orhan High Dragon Bump If it took reduction or torch hair, the Cirissins wanted a bump. Hokum, thistle, gluck. girl with golden blond hair and smooth skin the color of creamed sweet potatoes floated in the middle of the windowless metal room into which Wayne Brighton drifted. The girl was not exactly naked, but her few filmy clothes concealed nothing. Wayne cleared his throat, his apprehension changing rapidly to confusion. "'You are going to reduce me?" he asked. "The word is seduce, mister," the girl said. "They told me reduce, too, but they don't talk real good, and I think I'm supposed to seduce you so you'll tell 'em something, and then they'll let me go. I guess. I hope. What is it they wantcha to tell 'em?" Wayne cleared his throat again, striving merely to keep a firm grip on his sanity. Things had been happening much too fast for him to have retained anything like his customary composure. He said, "Well, tliey want me to get them a, uh -- well, a high dragon bump." He pronounced the words carefully. "So why dontcha?" the girl asked. WaTie's voice rose. "I don't even know what it is. I told them and they don't believe me. Now you're here! I suppose if I can't be reduced -- seduced -- into getting them one, it will wind up with torch hair. Believe me, I never heard of a high dragon bump." "Now, don't get panicky!" the girl pleaded. "After all. I'm scared too." "I am not scared!" Wayne replied indignantly. But he realized that he was. So far, in the hour or so he'd been a captive of the Cirissins, he'd managed to keep his fright pretty well subdued. He'd understood almost at once what had happened, and his first reaction had not been terror or even any great degree of surprise. He was a scientist and he had a scientist's curiosity. And at first the Cirissins -- or the one that had done all the talking -- had been cooperative in answering his questions. But then, when he wasn't able to comprehend what they meant by high dragon bump, they'd started getting impatient. "What's your name?" he asked the girl. She was making gentle swimming motions with her hands and feet, moving gradually closer to him. "Sheilah," she said. "Sheilah Ralue. I'm a model. I pose for pitchers. You know -- for sexy magazines and calendars and stuff like that." "I see. You were posing when -- ?" "When they snatched me, yeah. Couple hours ago, I guess. The flash bulb went off and blinded me for a second like it always does, and I seemed to be falling. Then I was here. Only I still don't even know where here is. Do you? How come we don't weigh nothing? It's ghastly!" "We're in a space ship," Wayne told her. "In free fall, circling earth a thousand miles or so out. I thought you at least knew we were in a space ship." The girl said, "Oh, bull. We can't be in no space ship. How'd we get here so fast?" "They have a matter transmitter, but I haven't the slightest idea of how it works. Obviously it's limited to living creatures or they could just as well have taken whatever it is they want instead of... You don't happen to know what a high dragon bump is, do you?" "Don't be dumb. Of course I... well, unless it's a dance or something. I use to be a dancer, ya know. Sort of." "With bubbles, I imagine," Wayne said. "Tassles. They was my specialty. But there's more money in posing for pitchers, and the work ain't quite so -- " "I doubt that a high dragon bump is a dance," Wayne said. Then he rubbed his chin. High dragon bump? Bumps and grinds? Highland fling? Chinese dragon dances? Hell, why not? The idea of space travelers visiting earth to learn a new dance was no more fantastic than the idea of them being here at all. Wayne turned his face to the door and shouted, "Hey, is that it? A dance? You want us to teach you a dance called the high dragon bump?" A muffled metallic voice from the other side said, "Nod danz. Bump. HugufT quig." Wayne shrugged and grinned weakly at Sheilah. "Well, we're making headway. We know one thing that it isn't." The girl had drifted so close to him now that he could feel the warmth of her body and smell the overwhelming fragrance of her perfume. She put one hand on his arm, and Wayne found that he had neither the strength nor the inclination to jerk away. But he protested weakly, "Now, listen, there's no point in you -- I mean -- even if we did, I couldn't produce a high dragon bump." "What kind of work do you do, mister?" Sheilah asked softly, drawing herself even closer. "You know, you ain't even told me your name yet." "It's Wayne," he said, fumbling in an effort to loosen his tie so he could breath more easily. "I'm an instructor. I teach physics at Kyler College, and I've got a weekly science show on TV. In fact I'd just finished my show when they got me. I was leaving the studio, starting down the stairs. Thought at first I'd missed a step and was falling, but I just kept falling. And I landed here, and... Now, don't do that!" "Why, I wasn't doing nothing. Whaddya do on your TV show?" "I talk. About science. Physics. Like today, I was discussing the H-bomb. How it works, you know, and why the fallout is dangerous, and... Oh, good Gawd! Seduce, reduce! High dragon bump!" He shoved her away from him abruptly and violently and he went hurtling in the opposite direction. "Well, hey!" Sheilah protested. "You don't need to get so rough. I wasn't going to -- " "Shut up," Wayne said. "I think I've figured out what the Cirissins want! "Hey! Hey, open the door," he shouted. "I've got to talk to you." The door opened and a Cirissin floated in. Sheilah turned her head away, shuddering, and Wayne found it wise to close his eyes and open them little by little to grow reaccustomed to the sight gradually. The only thing he could think of with which to compare the Cirissins was the intestinal complex of an anemic elephant. It was not an entirely satisfactory comparison; but then, from his point of view, the Cirissins were entirely unsatisfactory creatures. Each of the four he had seen was nearly twice his size. They had no recognizable features such as eyes, ears, nose, head, arms or legs. Tentacle-like protrusions of various size and lenh seemed to serve as the sensory and prehensile organs. Wayne had identified one waving, restless flexible stalk as the eye. He suspected another of being the mouth, except that it apparently wasn't used for talking. The voice came from somewhere deep inside the convoluted mass of pastel streaked tissue. "Wand tog?" the Cirissin rumbled. Wayne said, "Yes. Do you mind telling me what you want a high dragon bump or." "Blast away hearth," the Cirissin replied unhesitatingly. Wayne swallowed and found it unnaturally difficult to do so. "To blast away earth?" he said. "You can do that with just one high dragon bump?" "Certificate. Alteration energy maguntoot. Compilated, though. Want splain?" Wayne said, "Never mind. I believe you. Just tell me this: Why? Who do you feel it's necessary to do it?" "Cause is necessary," the Cirissin explained. "Hearth no good. Whee dun lake. Godda gut red oft." Sheilah gasped, "Why the inhuman beasts!" Wayne expended one sidelong silencing glance on her and then said, "I see. And just suppose now that I don't give you a high dragon bump? What do you do then?" "Use hot tummy ache your arnium fishing bumps. Got them us elves. Tooking longthier, more hurlcful, but can. Few don't gives high dragon bump tweddy far whores, thin godda." Wayne was silent for a while, staring at the alien creature, aware of Sheilah staring at him. "Twenty-four hours," he muttered. "Then they use uranium fission bombs. Oh, hell!" Finally he shrugged. "All right. I'll do it. Anyway, I'll try. I'll do what I can." Sheilah said, "Hey, listen mister, you can't..." "Shut up!" Wayne snapped. "How do you know what I can do? You just let me handle this." "No sea juicing?" the Cirissin asked, waving his eye stem at Sheilah. "No. No sea juicing, and no torch hair either, please. I just didn't understand what you wanted at first. Now, if I could talk to your captain -- or, are you the captain?" The Cirissin replied, "I spoke man. Name Orealgrailbliqu. Capitate nod sparking merry can languish. I only earning languish. Gut, hah? Tree whacks." "Uh, yeah, very good indeed," Wayne said. "And in only three weeks! Now, Mr. -- you don't mind if I call you O'Reilly, do you? Well, then, O'Reilly, do you have any suggestions as to how I should go about getting you a high dragon bump? You want me to make you one? Or -- " "Yukon Mike?" O'Reilly asked. Wayne shrugged modestly. "Of course. With proper materials and equipment -- and enough time." He wondered if there was any chance at all of convincing O'Reilly of that. "Nod mush timeless," O'Reilly said doubtfully. "God gut lab tarry, few wand lug." Wayne hesitated, partly to translate O'Reilly's rumblings and partly to marvel at an audacious idea taking shape in his mind. He said, "Uh, yes, by all means. I do want to look at your laboratory. Let's go." The Cirissin offered no objections to Sheilah accompanying them, so they followed him, pulling themselves along the tubular corridor by means of metal rings set in the walls, apparently for that specific purpose. It was the same means of propulsion employed by their guide, except that he used tentacles instead of hands. They were more awkward than he, and so they fell behind. "Listen, mister," Sheilah said. "You're not really gonna help these creeps, are ya? Cause, I mean, if you are I'm gonna stop you -- one way or another." Wayne looked at her, feeling a deep sadness that anything so gorgeous could be so stupid. Stirred to self-consciousness by her nearnudity, he glanced quickly away. "Why don't you quit trying to think?" he advised her. "I may not be able to make a high dragon bump, but so help me I'm going to do my damnedest to see that they get one. And don't you get any stupid patriotic ideas. You just keep out of it. Understand?" O'Reilly had thrown open a door and was waiting for them. Wayne looked inside. "Smatter? Dun lake lab tarry?" the Cirissin asked after waiting nearly a minute for some comment. The laboratory probably wasn't adequate to produce a hydrogen bomb, Wayne realized; but he wasn't at all sure. It was the most complex, complete and compact laboratory he had ever seen. Its sheer size forced him to revise upward his estimate of the overall size of the ship. Much of the equipment was totally alien to him, but there was also a great deal that he could at least guess the purpose of. Including a fabulous array of electronic equipment. When Wayne still didn't say anything, the Cirissin closed the door. "Batter blan," he announced. "Wheeze india buck terth. Cup girlish ear. Torch herf youdon brink high dragon bump." Wayne said, "Huh?" "Flow me." O'Reilly led Wayne and Sheilah through a maze of corridors, tunnels and hatchways, stopping at last to throw open a door and let Wayne peer into the control cabin of a miniature space ship. O'Reilly jumblingly explained that it was a reconnaisance ship, used for visiting the surface of a planet when it was impractical to land the mother ship. The control board was simple: a few dials, one or two buttons, several switches and a viewplate. It looked too simple. Wayne said, "Now, wait. Let's see if I have this straight. You want me to take this ship to earth and swipe you a high dragon bump. And you're going to keep Sheilah here and torture her if I don't deliver the goods, huh?" The Cirissin said that was right. "Kwiger butter. Jus bush piggest putton. Token ley tours gutther." "I see. And what about communications?" Wayne asked. "Is the boat equipped with radio? How can I let you know when I have your high dragon bump?" O'Reilly said, "Can't. Combvindlecations Cirissin only." From his further explanation Wayne gathered that communications between the two ships was on the basis of some sort of amplified brain waves, and could carry only the brain waves of Cirissins. Wayne considered the situation. Two hours to get to earth. No radio. The big Cirissin ship was circling earth at an unknown distance, unknown speed and unknown direction. And although the ship was enormous, it would be impossible to spot it from earth unless you knew exactly where to look. He said, "It would really be better, wouldn't it, if I could make the high dragon bump right here?" O'Reilly agreed that it would be better. "Well, let me try. You've got a good lab, and we have plenty of time. Twenty-four hours, you said? Well, give me about ten hours in the lalx)ratory. If I can't produce a high dragon bump in that time I'll take the small shup down and get you one. Okay?" While the Cirissin thought it over in meditative silence Wayne was aware of Sheilah watching him with cold, hostile eyes. He wished he could explain things to her, but he didn't dare try. Finally O'Reilly said, "Hokum. Tenners in lab. Thistle." "It'll be enough," Wayne assured him. room where Wayne had met her and the Cirissin instructed her to stay there. He closed the door but did not lock it. Then he took Wayne back to the lab. "Neediest hulp?" he asked. "Hulp? Help? Uh... Why, no. No thanks. I can manage fine by myself. In fact I'd rather work alone. Fewer distractions the better, you know." "Hack saw lent. Wheel buzzy preparation. In trol room few deriding hulp needed." Then O'Reilly floated out the door. Wayne was astounded. He'd taken it for granted that the Cirissin would insist on supervising him, and he'd been evolving elaborate plans for escaping his attention. But Wayne thought he had the explanation for the Cirissins' idiotic behavior. This ship and everything about it indicated an extremely high intelligence and an advanced culture. Everything, that is, but the Cirissins themselves. The idea of kidnaping him from earth to provide them with a weapon to destroy earth ; kidnaping Sheilah to seduce him; the idea of even expecting him to be able to produce such a weapon -- it was all idiotic. There was only one explanation that he could see. The Cirissins were idiots. Some other race had produced this ship. These cosmic degenerates had somehow gotten hold of it and were on a mad binge through the universe, destroying all the worlds they didn't like. He wondered how many they'd already wiped out. They had to be stopped. Wayne immediately started constructing a radio transmitter from convenient materials in the laboratory. It was fairly simple. He was not interrupted for nearly two hours. At which time he was saying into his improvised microphone : "Seven hours? That long? Can't make it any sooner than that? Five hours? Six?" And then it was not a Cirissin voice behind him which said : "Drop that. Put up your hands and turn around!" It was Sheilah. Wayne turned and saw her floating at the doorway pointing a long, tubular metal object at him, her finger poised on a protruding lever. "What's that?" Wayne asked. Sheilah said, "It's a gun I found after lookin' all over the damn ship. I'm going to kill you. And then I'm going to kill your Cirissin friends. You're nothing but a dirty traitor, and I wouldn't seduce you if -- I never did trust you scientists. Maybe I'll be killed, too, but I don't care." She was close to tears. "You're going to kill me?" Wayne said. "With that? How do you know it's even a gun? Looks more like a fire extinguisher to me. Aw, you poor little imbecile, I haven't had a chance to explain yet, but -- " Sheilah said, "You make me sick." She pulled the trigger. The object was not a fire extinguisher, after all. It was quite obviously a weapon of some kind. Also it seemed obvious that Sheilah had been pointing the wrong end of the weapon toward Wayne. One more obvious fact that Wayne had time to cbmprehend was that the weapon was not a recoilless type. But by then Sheilah had gone limp and the gun had rebounded from her grasp and was sailing at Wayne's head. He ducked but not fast enough. The object whacked him solidly on top of his head. His brain exploded into a display of dazzling lights, excruciating pain and deafening noise. Then the lights went out and a long, dense silence set in. When Wayne fought through the layers of renewed pain and opened his eyes, he was still floating near his makeshift radio equipment in the laboratory. Sheilah still hung limply in midair near the door. The tubular weapon wavered near the ceiling. The radio transmitter was still open. It was just as though he'd been unconscious no more than a few minutes. But Wayne had a strong feeling: that it had been more than that. Therefore he was only shocked, rather than stunned, when a glance at his wristwatch indicated six hours and forty minutes had elapsed. He held his head tightly in both hands to keep it from flying off in all directions at once, and he tried to think. He knew it was important to think -- fast and straight. Six hours and forty minutes. That was too long to be unconscious from a simple blow on the head, and his head didn't really hurt that bad. Probably the weapon had still been firing whatever mysterious ammunition it used when it struck him; and when it bounced off his head it had turned, and he'd been caught in its blast. But that didn't matter. That wasn't the important thing. Six hours and forty minutes he'd been out. Seven hours! The Defense Department official he'd spoken to had told him seven hours. And thank God it wasn't five hours or six, as he'd been urging them to make it. Anyway he had only twenty minutes now. Possibly a little more, but just as likely less. That realization should have spurred him to instantaneous and heroic action, but instead it paralyzed him for several minutes. He couldn't think what to do. He couldn't get his muscles and nerves functioning and coordinated. The absence of gravity didn't help. He thrashed about futilely. But at last, almost by accident, his feet touched a metal support beam, and he pushed himself toward Sheilah. He grabbed her around the waist with one arm and with his free hand pulled both of them through the door. It seemed a long, long time before he got Sheilah to the reconnaisance ship. By then the twenty minutes were up. His life was going into overtime. Sheilah was conscious but still disorganized and limp, struggling weakly and ineffectually. Wayne fumbled with the door, got it open and shoved her inside. Then he pulled himself in and closed the door. They might make it yet. They still had a chance. He studied the control board, deciding on the proper button to push. From behind him Sheilah screamed, "The bomb! You've got the bomb and you're going to -- Well, you're not!" Her body slammed against his shoulders and her arms encircled his neck. Her fingers clawed at his eyes. Wayne struggled, not to free himself, but only to get one hand loose, to reach the control board. When he did get a hand free, they had floated too far from the controls. "Stop it, you stupid bitch!" Wayne snarled. "You're going to kUl us both!" Wayne said, "Listen, there's a guided missile from earth heading straight for this ship, and it has a hydrogen bomb warhead. It'll get here any minute now and when it -- " His words were broken off by the tremendous roar and concussion of the hydrogen bomb. Wayne's last thought before oblivion swallowed him was that they wouldn't have had time to escape, anyway. But that wasn't the end. Wayne woke up enough to refuse to believe he was alive, and O'Reilly was somewhere near, telling him : "Girissins full of grate your forts. Radio eggulant blan. Thankel normous. Rid of earth now. Blasted away. Givish good high dragon bump. Yukon gome now." Wayne groaned. The meaning of O'Reilly's words was trying to get through to his brain, and he was trying desperately to keep the meaning out. O'Reilly's voice receded into a thick gray fog. "Keep shib. Shores. Presirent felpings. Gluck." Metal slammed against metal. Wayne slammed against something hard. And darkness closed in once again. But this time it wasn't so smothering and didn't last nearly so long. When he opened his eyes his head was clear. He wasn't floating. He was lying on something hard -- a floor surface of the Cirissin landing ship. He didn't ache anywhere. All in all he felt pretty good. For the first few seconds. Then he started remembering things, and he wished he hadn't bothered to wake up. Sheilah was standing by the control panel, her back to him. She blocked the view screen, but Wayne didn't want to see it anyway. He wasn't even curious. Sheilah turned, saw him, smiled broadly. She said, "Gee, mister, I guess you're a hero. I dunno how you done it, but you made 'em go away, and you made 'em turn us loose." Wayne could detect no mockery or bitterness in her voice. "Aw, shut up," he growled. "You still mad at me cause of what I done? Well, gee. I'm sorry. I didn't get whatcha were up to. I guess I still don't, but... Oh, hell, let's don't fight about it. It don't matter now, does it?" Wayne shook his head wearily. "No," he agreed. "It doesn't matter now." Sheilah moved away from the control board and came toward him. In her filmy, transparent costume, she was the quintessence of womanly allure. Wayne gasped and stared, but not at her. The view screen had become visible when she'd moved. It showed earth. Or a curved, cloud-veiled slice of earth. Intact, serene and growing steadily larger. "What the hell! Why, I thought..." Wayne jumped to his feet, brushed past Sheilah and peered more closely at the view plate. There was no mistaking it. Earth. "What's a matter with you, mister?" Sheilah asked. Wayne felt dizzy. O'Reilly had said, "Earth blasted away," hadn't he? And the H-bomb hadn't destroyed the Cirissin ship. Therefore... Well, therefore what? In the first place what O'Reilly had actually said was, "Rid of earth now. Blasted away." It wasn't quite the same as... O'Reilly had never said anything about destroying earth. Quite a sizeable re-evaluation project was taking place in Wayne's mind. It took several minutes for all the pieces to fall into their propto realize that the Cirissins had known what they were doing, everything seemed obvious. "Oh, good Gawd!" he muttered.  Vhat utter idiots!" "The Cirissins?" Sheilah asked. "No, I mean us. Me. Good Lord, just because O'Reilly's English wasn't perfect! What did I expect for only three weeks? Hummm. The atomic structure of the entire ship must be uniformly charged to... Damn! High dragon bump!" "I don't getcha," Sheilah said. "What's with this high dragon bump business? I thought they wanted a hydrogen bomb to destroy earth, and I thought you'd agreed to help 'em, and so I thought..." "Oh, never mind," Wayne said. "I know what you thought, and you weren't any more stupid than I was. We were both wrong. "Look, the Cirissins must have been stalled -- out of gas, sort of. Something had gone wrong with their nuclear drive units. They had some emergency fuel, but they didn't want to use it. Like having a can of kerosene in the car when the tank runs dry, I suppose. It will work, but it messes up the engine. You understand so far?" "Sure." "Okay then. They happened to be close to earth, so they went into an orbit around it and studied it for a while on radio and TV bands, and realized they might be able to get help without using their emergency fuel -- uranium, incidentally, not kerosene. "So they grabbed us. Me, I supK pose because they'd seen my TV science program. They must have gotten the idea from some stupid spy show that scientists have to be seduced into revealing information. That's why they picked up you." Sheilah interrupted, "But what did they want? I thought..." Patiently, Wayne said, "Just what they said. A high dragon bump. A bump, not a bomb. A boost, a push. Not to blast away earth, but to blast away from earth. The scientific humanist doesn't pretend that every experience of life can be forced into a test tube or that every interest can be weighed on scales. He knows that something in everything always escapes the technique of measurement. -- Max Otto no what Is Your Science I. Q.? each correct answer. Eighty or more makes you a galactic of some standing. Answers on page #. #. Which of the following is secreted by the salivary glands: erepsin, ptyalin, pepsin? #. What does parabolic velocity mean? #. What is the chief difference between algae and fungi? #. What part of the brain serves as the pathway for impulses from the brain to the spinal cord? #. How do protozoa reproduce? #. What is a Robinson Cup? #. Which of the following refers to rare earths: actinide series, lanthanide series? #. What would a magnitude of# indicate about a star? #. What is paedogenesis? #. What have fibrinogen and thrombin in common? #. What is the Fitzgerald effect? #. Which undergoes a greater expansion due to a one degree rise in temperature, silver or zinc? #. What is the magnitude of the faintest star still visible to the naked eye? #. What is a Guyot? #. Which radioactive rays can have their direction most definitely changed by a magnetic field? #. Cumulonimbus clouds indicate what sort of weather? #. Moving bodies on the Earth's surface are deflected in which direction north of the equator? #. A man weighing # pounds would weigh how much under the pressure of # gravities? #. What is the name of the South Pole star? #. What is a meson? Ill There is no return -- at least, not for us. There are too few of us, and too many of the robots, and they know too much and are too strong. Our children, or their children, may figure out a way to persuade or force the Central Intelligence to build another Gift Horse and to send her back in Time, as our Gift Horse was sent. But will they want to? (Continued from page #) Because we are no longer a poverty-stricken bunch on Dunsinane. We live better than lords ever lived. Many of our contemporaries, in our own time, would have envied us. It's just that at night when we look up to the sky, to the black sky with those pitifully few, faint stars like candles going out one by one in the windy dark, we feel so (Continued from page #) "They returned our visit, and what did they find? What kind of a pestilent horror did we live in? Bare of life forms in every cubic foot of ground beneath our feet. Above the ground, too. Raw, growing life all around us, towering over us. "If they were doomed to live in such a world, they would want it covered in salt, to kill all the life, make it antiseptic. They owed nothing to the rest of Earth, but they owed this kindness to you. They did unto others, as they would have others do unto them." "I never realized -- I was sure I couldn't be... I've built my life around it," she said. "I know," I said with a regretful sigh. "So many people have." And yet, I still wonder if it might not have happened at all -- if I hadn't winked. I wonder if that pesty psychiatrist has been right, all "That's well and good," agreed Marguerite, "but we have to agree that no one of us will be favored above the others. He has to understand that from the start." "That's fair," said Alice, pursing her lips. "Yes, that's fair. But I agree with Marguerite: he must be divided equally among the four of us." Chattering over the details, the hard competitiveness vanished from (Continued from page #) their tones, the four left the sickroom to prepare supper. After supper they went back in. Herbert stood by the bed, the eternal smile of service on his metal face. As always, Herbert had not required a direct command to accede to their wishes. The man was divided into four quarters, one for each of them. It Wings of clay may be the answer to problems of liigh-speed aviation of the future. Engineers at the University of California at Los Angeles have designed and tested ceramic wings under simulated flight loads and results indicate that ceramic materials can withstand the jiigh temperatures created by aerodynamic heating. Use of tension cables in prestressing the ceramics overcomes the brittle quality which would make such wings seem unfeasible. A mirror system developed by the Libbey-Owen-Ford Glass company is the key to a new landing system for aircraft carriers. Using a curved mirror about four by four feet mounted on an automatic stabilizing frame, and four bright lights which are beamed into the mirror to form an optical glide beam for the pilot, the new system gives a pilot # seconds instead of the usual three or four to position his aircraft correctly. A radio pill that can be swallowed by a patient and then tuned in by doctors as it broadcasts information from the stomach has been perfected by R. G. A. The tiny transmitter once in the intestinal tract can send out information on pressure, temperature and chemical changes. To pick up the internal broadcast, a doctor uses an X-ray machine or a small tuned antenna close by the body. A plan to erect a # foot high skyport, supported by three glassclad towers, in central London has been revealed. Considered the answer to requirements for the year #, the cloverleaf platform with three sections will provide space for handling # aircraft per hour. The three shafts, supporting the platform section, consist of finned structural drums encased in outer cylinders of glass, behind which high speed elevators will operate. A new dieting drug that does not make the user nervous or jumpy is something that should interest those trying to lose a few pounds. It is an appetite-depressant called Levonor, claimed to have absolutely no side effects. Exhibited recently to the American Medical Association, its great advantage was described as having no stimulating effect on the nervous system, diminishes hunger without cutting it out completely, is inexpensive, and can be used by virtually all dieters. This month in Brussels, Belgium, marks the opening of the first World's Fair in nearly # years. Emphasis will be on science and its peaceful uses. Dominating the entire fair grounds will be a giant, #-foot structure called The Atomium. Shaped to resemble the arrangement of atoms in an elementary crystal of metal, the Atoniium will symbolize the Bnissel's Fair much the way the Trylon and Perisphere did the last World's Fair in New York in #. The # acres of Heysel Park, four miles from the center of the city, will house the exhibits of # nations. A new electric typewriter, with a ten-key companion keyboard, has has a magnetic core "memory" and can be programmed to automatically retain and type out gross sales, compute taxes, miscellaneous charges, invoice totals, add, subtract, multiply, extend, hold in "memory" for later processing, etc. Simplicity of operation is the keynote in a new electric eye, #mm motion picture camera developed by Bell  Howell. It has a lens that opens or closes automatically according to the brightness of the light in which it is being used. For example, in bright sunlight the camera lens closes to restrict the amount of light entering the camera; in dull light, the lens opens. In automatic operation, the lens is instantly set for correct exposure, as the camera is aimed at its subject, activated by a photocell that converts solar or light energy to mechanical energy to open or close the lens. A tiny tube the size of a cigarette filter tip that shows how long a radio, TV picture tube or other electronic device has been operating has been developed by Raytheon. The timer weighs less than onesixth of an ounce, and runs on about the same amount of energy generated by a flea. It is completely self-sealed and impervious to surrounding conditions, can operate immersed in liquid and in any position and works equally well in hot or cold temperatures. It is so small and light that it can be used in individual sections of a large complex electronic system. Simple to install and much cheaper than mechanical timing devices, the new on jet precision bombers, motor bearings, heater elements, TV transmitters, electronic computers and mobile radio car fleets. Blood-letting, the medieval practice of draining off various amoimts of the body's vital fluid will soon be back in style, but for newer and more scientific reasons. Plamapheresis, a type of blood-letting where the whole blood is removed, divorced from its plasma content, and then immediately put back into the donor, has dramatically opened new opportunities for the treatment of disease as well as the stockpiling of valuable plasma for emergencies. A pint of blood is removed each time and put into a centrifuge that separates the red blood cells from the plasma. The plasma is taken off for other uses and the red cells are back in the body in #I minutes. In cases of poisoning the toxic substances can be removed from the blood much more quickly than by an artificial kidney; plasma taken from immune donors can be used to control diseases such as diptheria, tetanus, etc. in other persons. Mr. Barnhart, in your December me, deprecates the methods -- or ck of methodology -- employed by ience fiction writers when dealing ith the problem of space travel, he factors of the problem are the d familiar ones of space (or disnce), time, and velocity, inherent the action of travel. The apirent stumbling block involved in 'oblems where distance is astrojmical is the Einsteinian axiom lat: "when v approaches the value c then the increase of mass bemes very great, reaching infinity hen V becomes the speed of light. # infinite mass offers infinite resisnce, then no body can travel with e speed of light." The above is elementary, and so the obvious reluctance of most udents to heed the asterisk that lually follows the above statement id requests the reader to see apmdix. In the appendix we find the I # statement concerning increase of mass in ratio to velocity, slightly expanded: "a body moving with the velocity Vj which absorbs an amount of energy, in the form of radiation without suffering an alteration in velocity in the process, has, as a consequence, its energy increased etc. -- the increased energy, of course, becomes an increase in the inertial mass of the given body. Here we see that the increase in mass is caused by the absorption of radiation; and, it would be a logical process, within the realm of matterof-fact knowledge, to have the inferred space ship radiation-repulsant (or proof) , thus eliminating, or greatly decreasing, the need for author-magic. The ship might even be able to absorb controlled amounts of radiation and use the radiation for fuel! -- the more speed, the more available fuel; the more fuel, the more speed, etc. Simply put (if it already hasn't been), if the ship does not absorb radiation, it does not increase its mass; and if mass is not increased there is no limit put to its speed by a non-existing increase in mass. Purely speaking, velocity has no "body", and cannot impart that which it does not have. Velocity is an "action" of bodies, not a body in itself! -- and I, for one, wish velocity would cease assuming status to which it has no claim. Even with speeds in excess of light achieved by relatively logical methods, I suppose that some authors will still insist upon the "mystic" confusion of the perceived image with the real object -- the ship arrives before it starts; or, the same ship (traveling at excess light speeds) is seen to land twice, and, so, becomes twins. Such a ship in landing would, of course, have to decrease speed and its secondary outsped image might catch up with its primary. Even if it did not, and the ship had outdistanced its "light image" by any desired amount of time, the secondary image would still cease to exist at the point where the ship decreased its speed to less than light. An object is an object, and its image is an image; and it is not a theoretical necessity that they have temporal and spacial simultaneity. This separation does not in the least affect the matterof-fact premise that one is the real object and the other is merely its image! -- we are all familiar with the phrase series of images, and do not confuse object with image. We accept the cause of a sound (supersonic jet) passing us before the effect (sound) come tagging along. Is it so much more difficult to accept the cause of an image (speed-of-light ship) passing us sometime before the outsped, lightperceptible image of the ship comes along. And must we then say that both were objects, instead of object and belated image? Comes to mind that we would have here the separation of a trilogy that by custom and inference have always (prior to super sonic) been "reasoned" as going together. The reasoning is, of course (good old, Hume), based on nothing but custom. In excess-light speeds we would have, first, the unperceived, real object; then the perceptible image; and then, much, much later, the sound. -- Bryden Pearce Carmel, California I am a housewife and an incurable reader. I discovered science fiction about five years ago and have been an addict ever since. As for covers and illustrations -- the cover on a magazine doesn't sell me, but a list of the authors does. When I buy a science fiction magazine I always turn to the table of contents. I enjoy most of the top flight authors... I enjoy two types of science fiction stories especially, the believable adventure stories... and the humanist type plots which point out the road ead to anyone who will see. I do not enjoy the pseudo-technical mishmash, even if I am convinced that the author knows what he is writing about. I do not know what heparin's function to the human body is, or have any knowledge of a cephied star... Oh, before I close, I have one pet peeve. I loathe and detest the growing habit of coining new words from perfectly good old ones. Mag for magazine. Ugh! -- and fanzine -- I won't even tell you my opinion of that horror! -- Thelma Bartleson Tacoma, Washington Mr. Riley has again stirred us with the humanistic implications of incipient scientific achievements. In this aspect of his writing his work is distinctive because it challenges us to creative contemplation of ethical and philosophical frontiers of life. With A Question of Identity (April IF) he raises two rather fundamental problems for the future. The first question is essentially forensic and although it is postulated for the future it has dramatic meaning for today. While he has not specifically demanded an answer to the problem, it is implicit in his story. Psychological research into conditioning factors that are responsible for aberrant behavior has long since indicated that many individuals have had such a traumatic and painful psychogenic background that criminal behavior is a natural response on their parts. If a father and a mother have raised a child in such an atmosphere of frustration and denial that catastrophic hostility characterises the child when grown, there is a very profound question as to where responsibility lies when that individual commits a felony. The law, which grew up under a different understanding of human nature, takes no account of the destruction of moral qualities or emotional sensitivities. It is true that if it can be proved that a man is insane at the time a crime is committed, he is not held responsible. But the psychologist knows that a man may have an intellectual awareness that something is wrong and still have such a powerful compulsion that his ethical awareness is nothing compared to the overwhelming force of his emotional drive. But here the law says he was sane and he must pay the price. And if one follows out the reasonable inferences of a psyche logical understanding of crime it renders a code of law essentially based on retaliation senseless and archaic. It is this assumption which lies behind the changing concept of law enforcement which emphasizes therapy rather than punishment. But when it comes to the more violent forms of crime, society lapses back to its primitive penology, an "eye for an eye". The second question has to do with the nature of man. Of course the question raised by the defense attorney, "What is man?", has been raised by every philosopher and every spiritual leader. Mr. Riley gives the question a little different twist by making the question referrable to physiological transformations which today seem plausible. New discoveries in the functions of certain cells in the nervous column of the spine indicate that these cells "think" and the gradient in psychological thinking is to abandon the term psycho-somatic because of the dualism involved. Today, mind and body are thought to be so inextricably interwined that such a term does violence to the reality of the process. If then personality is essentially a product of the interaction of one entity (mind-body) , with other persons and with nature it is certainly true that radical alterations of the hormonal, neurological or physical characteristics of a person could produce a new and unique person. But this is not so unique. Endocrinologists and psychiatrists have been doing this for years. The question remains as to the identity of the resultant personality. I have personally watched individuals with the characteristics of one sex and the feelings of the other changed by hormone therapy and operations so that their appearances came to be better aligned with their feelings. They had previously played the role of men and came now to play the role of women, or vice versa. In many cases they do not assume they are the same person because they change their name as well as their total pattern of life. To bring Mr. Riley's question down to the present is permissable in this case. Suppose Mrs. "X" commits a ciime just before she undergoes a series of transformations from which she emerges as Mr. 'X". Would the court or would society feel that Mr. "X" is responsible for a crime Mrs. "X" perpetrated? But the question has much more grave implications for the religious philosopher. We know that many so-called "conversions" are spurious, but we also know that in some cases the Christian goal of a "new-born" personality is true. These that are truly "saved" abandon completely their previous tendencies towards crime, their bad habits of life, and take on by identification a new personality. Is this the same person? Forcnsically "yes" and the law has always held that this is true, but the total change may be as remarkable as in the case Mr. Riley hypothesizes resulted from physical and psychological therapy. Finally, one must ask what is the essential aspect of personality then? What is this "soul" that Mr. Riley mentions? It would be fascinating to draw out the implications of his story for that concept but we can only suggest here that the thoughtful reader will do that himself. -- Dr. James A. Peterson Los Angeles, Calif. Dr. Peterson is Marriage Counselor at the University of Southern Calu fornia and author of the text book Education for Marriage". Since you are curious about your readers -- I'm a schoolteacher -- high school English -- and can add that a few high school students like science fiction; it's a natural part of my business to inquire into their reading preferences. However, in my observations, they are in the minority. Most consider the vocabulary too difficult; of those who do not, many have other tastes; and there just can't be overlooked the matter of the typical science fiction magazine cover and its effect on any normal parent who doesn't read science fiction. It gives me an impression that your readers, unless exceptional, start at or beyond college age. My son Mike, and occasionally some of his friends, read my copies and more of their own. He's twenty, has long been fond of space opera if full of action... but is apparently developing discrimination. He is an Air Force jet mechanic, or something like that. There seem to be a lot of science fiction readers among the real life space cadets. You seem equipped to please a wide variety of readers, so why should you care? Your stories are generally well written, often beyond praise, and at the same time have color, action, freshness. About "John Sentry" -- he can't be using a penname as an absolute disguise -- or you wouldn't mention it at all. He can't be using it because of another story in the same issue, surely -- imagination boggles over a supposition that Nourse, Clarke, or Asimov would write a story that way. Your quiz feature raises interesting questions but why the title? Doesn't fit. Intelligence tests aren't valid unless the population has equal learning opportunity, whereas in science it would take myriad lifetimes. Some other title would be more attractive and sound less foolish, wouldn't it? -- Alma Hill Fort Kent, Maine I don't think you knew what you were asking for when you wrote in your February editorial, "The byline John Sentry on this issue's The Barbarians is a pen name for what well known science-fiction author?" As the editor of a science-fiction magazine, you should know that some fans will take the greatest pains to discover which author is behind a pen name. I don't know if I should be proud of it or not, but I am one of these fans. Looking into my files, I found three stories by John Sentry, and all three magazines shared one other author, the prolific Isaac Asimov. I therefore conclude that John Sentry is a named used by Isaac Asimov for his second story in # fantasy and sciencefiction books and back-issue magazines at # to # under what they've cost you before, here or anywhere, # K Shannon Rood Verona, Pennsylvonio Then Become a Scientology "Clear" Make your own investigation of the space worlds without depertding on others. Write, Wire or Call: Scientology, United States # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C the same issue of a magazine. Am I right? -- Leslie Gerber Brooklyn, New York Wrong... But luckily, a postcard from Mr, Gerber caught us before this went to press, and he has now succeeded in tracking down the true identity of "Mr. Sentry"". I was a little distressed with the editorial in the February, # issue, and can only hope that it was written too soon after Sputnik for you to have regained your equilibrium. As a matter of fact, one of the things that has made us the laughing-stock of the world in recent months is the poor sportsmanship with which we've taken our licking in the satellite field. You say,... the Russians rushed their satellite into space not so much for benefit That's not so at all. The Russians announced they would send up satellites just as we did. Months before the hoisting of Sputnik they announced the approximate time of launching and described the characteristics of Sputnik. We didn't pay any attention to that because until October # we never paid attention to the Russians as far as science was concerned. And the Sputniks have proven of Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge has collected enough data to keep it busy for years. Drs. Hynek and Whipple, who head it, say that the Soviets have kept all their agreements as far as sharing information was concerned. To be sure, the Russian politicians have used the Sputnik for their own propagandistic purposes, -- but what do you expect? When we had a monopoly on the A-bomb, we used that for all it was worth, propagandawise. I sincerely hope that we end by sending up a better satellite ourselves, but we'll do that only by buckling down to work and not by belittling the competition. Now isn't that so? -- Isaac Asimov West Newton, Mass. No sooner said than done! from an infinite distance. # -- Algae contain chlorophyll. # -- Medulla oblongata. # -- Fission, conjugation, spores, budding. # -- Anemometer. # -- Lanthanide. # -- A supernova. # -- Production of offspring by larval forms. # -- Both concerned with clotting of blood. #I -- Length of a body contracts as speed increases. # -- Zinc. # -- Sixth. # -- Underwater mountain in the Pacific Ocean. # -- Beta. # -- Thunderstorms. # -- Right. # -- # lbs. # -- Sigma Octantis. # -- Nuclear particle between a electron and a proton. values up to #  # With mtinbershi Y es, take any three of these exciting books -- worth up to # in publishers' editions -- yours for only I simply Vy works of science-fiction (or factual science books of special interest to science-fiction fans), by top-fiight authors. And they're loaded with rocket-fast reading that takes you soaring through time and space. 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To This Eorthmon on the Planet 'Soloria" An More Dongejojis than m rmsmrof sctfm fmm cmstcsj by fsooc Asimov to the ears when beautiful Gladia Delmarre casually stepped out of her shower to talk with cial contacts were carried on by television. And just as Elijah (an Earthman brought up in underground cities) was terrified by Solaria's naked sun, the Solarians dreaded mingling with tact was out of the question. was obscene! That's why Elijah had good reason to be shocked when Gladia actually allowed him to she brazenly reached out her There was no doubt left in his mind that there was something unspeakably strange about this exotic temptress. But it was becoming more and more difficult for IClijah to admit -- even to himself -- that she was his prime suspect in a fantastically sordid murder!  in this amazing offer! soo other side for details hen of these New Masterpieces of oo  plus of IF IS novelettes from the first six years of IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction readers all over America, this is a volume of exceptional interest -- distinguished examples of fine science fiction writing by outstanding writers. Stories that answer the age old question: "What would happen if -- ?" Stories that call into play philosophy, logic, facts and imagination to provide a diversity of entertainment that will appeal to all science fiction lovers, from astronomers to zoo keepers. Here you will find such authors as Charles Beaumont, James Blish, Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce WaU ton and Robert F. Young in an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme and pace. All newsstands -- # cents . m All Stories New and Complete  "Get a Horse" by Ed Emsh IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Vol. #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication # Lora Street, Buffalo N.Y. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, N.Y. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions;. Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. All stories are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next (October) issue on sale August #th Escape lay two thousand frightening miles ahead of them -- a lonely, cowering band of loyalists led by a renegade. En route, some must die, while one man must try another road... tersection of Lincoln Boulestreet-sign. Independence Avenue , it vard and Jefferson Street, looking said, in neat yellow script. Macin all directions for the Truthmen. intyre still thought of it as Jefferson The wind was from the north. It Street, although it was nearly two was past the hour of sundown, and years since the split-up with Earth, two of the moons were in the bleak Half a block to the north a graytwilight sky. clad figure appeared, carrying a swinging torch to light his way through the gathering gloom. Macintyre recognized the figure as one of Lumley's Truthmen, out on a prowl in search of enemies of the state. Macintyre stared bitterly at the chunky advancing figure; then, realizing his danger, he hurried down the street he still called Jefferson Street. He moved silently and swiftly. He was used to running. It had been a hard life, these two years since the Decree of Separation. Macintyre had surprised himself then by remaining loyal to the mother world. In the succeeding two years he had continued to surprise himself by surviving Lumley's persecution of the dwindling Loyalists. He reached the alleyway between Numbers # and # Jefferson, glanced round once to make sure the coast was clear, and ducked through. He scaled a low fence, trotted over a much-trampled backyard garden, and slipped into a beckoning opening in the. ground. Instantly the door closed behind him, and a familiar voice said, "We were worried about you. You're a half hour late." "Couldn't help it," Macintyre said. He was hoarse; he poured himself a glass of water from the tap in the comer. Familiar faces surrounded him : nine frightened men. All the Loyalists left in Maynard City. There are so jew of us left , Macintyre thought . And is it worth it , all the running and hid ing? It was a strange group, these remnants of the Loyalist Party. Norman Maynard, great-great-greatgrandson of the man who had discovered this world -- Norman Maynard, a ratty-looking little man with ulcers. Vitello, once a dramatist, who now looked like a ragpicker. Christie, once Professor of Terran History at Maynard University, enamored of his own textbooks and unable to relinquish loyalty to the mother world. Bryson. Hallert. Fugitives. "Well?" Maynard demanded. "What did you find out? Did you see the proclamation? Is it true?" Macintyre nodded. "I saw the proclamation. It's posted in half a dozen places downtown. Everything we were told is true."  He crossed the room and sat down on the battered old couch. He stared at his toothin, toosensitive hands. "According to the proclamation, every citizen of the Free World of Maynard must carry with him at all times a card declaring he has sworn the Oath of Allegiance to the Republic. Without taking the oath you can't hold citizenship. And then at the bottom of the proclamation it says that for the duration of the emergency jury trial is suspended and all non-citizens are under automatic sentence of death." Macintyre looked up. "That's all there is. Either get yourselves a card or be ready to run, and run fast." The room was very quiet. Finally Vitello said, "What do we do now?" "What do you think we do?" Hallert demanded. He was a thin watery-eyed man who had been Secretary of Outworld Relations in the last Loyalist cabinet. "Either we go down to the post office and swear allegiance to Lumley, or we stay here and wait for them to flush us out. It can't take long. Either way our course is pretty simple." "We could call Ritterheim and accept his offer," said Christie in a mild voice. Nine pairs of eyes focussed suddenly on the ex-Professor of Terran History. Macintyre felt a muscle in his cheek begin to twitch. He had been thinking along the same lines himself, ever since he had seen the proclamations posted in Government Square. Ritterheim was their only hope. Ritterheim was their sole chance. But there were uncomfortable truths to be faced if they were to accept Ritterheim's offer. And it was not epsy for a man to face those truths. Macintyre's mind drifted back to the day -- was it only three days ago? -- when the radio set in the corner of their hideout had come bleeping to life. Bryson, the electronics technician who had built the set during the days when there still was some talk of a Loyalist counterrevolution and hence some need of communication between the bands of fugitives, sprang to the controls. The call had come via subradio from the neighboring world of Haxley -- a world staunchly Loyalist, one which had flatly refused to take part in the Separatist uprising. Charles Ritterheim, Haxley Minister of Foreign Affairs, was calling. He had learned that the Separatist government on Maynard was soon to publish a declaration prescribing the death penalty for any remaining Loyalists. Would they, Ritterheim wanted to know, care to flee to Haxley and take sanctuary there? "How would we get there?" Bryson asked. "There's a ship of ours ready to leave Maynard now," Ritterheim said. "A mercantile ship. We're putting down at Dillard Spaceport on the #th of the month. If there happened to be a dozen or so Loyalists in the area at that time, we might look the other way." "But Dillard's two thousand miles from here," Bryson objected. "Couldn't you arrange a landing somewhere closer to us? The dangers of a continental crossing -- " "I'm sorry. But we're booked in at Dillard. I'm afraid that a landing anywhere else would be construed as an act of war by the Maynard government, and we're not anxious to go to war with your friend Lumley just yet. Well? Will your group be at Dillard on the #th?" "I -- don't know. There are so many aspects we have to consider -- " "Very well," Ritterheim said, a trifle coldly. "Consider them. Our offer still goes, if you're interested. Call me back within a week or else forget about it." versation with them. For two days and two nights the group had considered it; on a purely theoretical level, of course, since no official word had come down about a death penalty for Loyalist beliefs. Finally Macintyre had volunteered to leave the shelter arid try to discover if any such proclamation had been made. It had. The choices were clear-cut now. They could abandon the last shred of loyalty to Earth, admit that Lumley's government was de jure as well as de facto in control of Maynard, and swear allegiance. Of nard, all but a few hundred had done so. Lumley promised immediate amnesty for any recusants who swore allegiance. Or they could take the opposite stand, and remain in hiding, surreptitiously writing and spreading pamphlets opposing the Separatist movement, urging a return to affiliation with Earth. But that was the way of martyrdom. Ritterheim offered a third alternative -- flight. They could take sanctuary on Haxley and wait there for the inevitable moment when the forces of Earth would exact vengeance on Lumley for his treason j against the mother world. Round and round and round the discussion went, as it had almost constantly since the moment Ritterheim's call had come through. Macintyre watched silently, feeling curiously detached from himself. He flexed his fingers. He wished he could sculpt this group, mold its confusions in living plastic, express in tangible form the cross-currents of bewilderment and cowardice that his nine comrades were creating. But it was more than a year since he had last worked at his art ; these troubled times had no use for poets or painters or sculptors. Naturally, none of the group advanced the suggestion that they give up and swear the Oath. They were too deeply committed for that; this was the hard core of the Loyalist movement, and for them there was no turning back. But yet it was hard for them to accept Ritterheim's offer. Macintyre listened as the stale, insincere arguments were advanced one by one: that it was cowardly to flee, that our work demanded that we stay here and continue the fight on the home world, that it would be betraying our ideals -- Finally Macintyre grew tired. Putting some edge in his voice for the first time in weeks, he said, "Gentlemen, may I speak ? # Startled by the authority in his voice, they grew quiet. Macintyre looked around at them. "We've been discussing this matter for three days, friends. At least, you have. I've just been listening. But now I want to talk. "The prevailing sentiment among you seems to be that we should turn down Ritterheim's offer, stay here, and go gloriously to our deaths whenever Lumley's Truthmen happen to stumble over our little hideout. You, Hallert, and Maynard over there -- you've been holding out for martyrdom, haven't you? You think it's noble. Do you mind if I tell you what's really on your minds?" "Hold on, there, Macintyre," Maynard broke in roughly. "If you think -- " "I don't think anything. Shut up and listen." Macintyre locked his hands together. "You're picking martyrdom because it's the easy way out. We can t go back; we're too far out on the limb to turn around and swear allegiance to Lumley. It sounds paradoxical, but doing that requires real courage, the kind none of us has. The courage to admit we might have been wrong all along." "Are you suggesting, Tom, that Lumley's right and we're wrong?" Christie asked. "Of course not. I'm just as firmly pro-Earth as any of you. What I'm saying is that none of us, myself included, would ever have the guts to admit Lumley was right, if we ever began thinking so. Okay. So the only paths open for us are staying on Maynard, which means inevitable execution, or fleeing to Haxley, which means we may live to fight some other day. And you all seem to be holding out for staying here and going gloriously to the gas chamber. How damned brave!" Macintyre stared bitterly at the nine puzzled faces and felt a current of excitement welling up inside him. He had never spoken this way before, never felt the urge to get up on his back legs and tell people what lay behind their pretences. Only now his life was at stake, his and all theirs -- and he didn't intend to give it up easily. "You know why you're all so keen on letting Lumley execute you?" he asked. "Not because you feel your misSion is here on Maynard. No. The gas chamber is an easy way out, a noble way out. It's an end to struggle, and it's a praiseworthy end in the eyes of others. It's a way of giving up. "So you want to turn down Ritterheim. That's interesting. Tell me this: suppose Ritterheim offered to put a ship down in our back yard and take us all away to Haxley? Would you turn him down then? Like hell you would! You'd scramble aboard that ship so fast -- " Hallert was white-faced. He seemed ready to explode. Macintyre stood up and pointed. "I'm almost done. I just want to say one more thing. The reason you all want to turn Ritterheim down -- me, too, I feel that way -- is that you all want to stay here in this cozy cellar until you're caught. You know that Dillard Spaceport is two thousand miles from here, and you're scared stiff of making the trek. It takes courage to run halfway across a continent, even if you're only running away." He sat down and looked at his hands again. They were trembling. His face was flushed. No one was saying anything. After a while he looked up at them. One minute went by, and another, and still no one spoke. "I take it from your silence that you agree with me. I expected it. Hell, I'm enough like you to know what's in your minds -- only I threw it out in the open to show you." "You know we'd never survive a trip across the continent," Vitello said reproachfully. "We're soft, Tom. We can't kill men. We can't lie very well. We can't fight back. We wouldn't get more than ten miles before they found us out. Isn't it better to stay here and try to spread our pamphlets than to go to certain death on the trek to Dillard?" "We could make it," Macintyre said. "Even a bunch of soft-headed arty types like ourselves. All we need is a guide. A shepherd, you might say. Someone to keep the wolves away -- a strong man." "Are you suggesting yourself?" Bryson asked. Macintyre blinked. "Are you kidding? I'm no tougher than any of you, despite my size and the way I just spoke. No. I've got a man in mind, though. His name is Wallace. He'll take us to Dillard for a fee, and he'll see to it we get there alive." Vitello's sensitive features wrinkled in distaste. "A mercenary, you mean?" Macintyre nodded. "Call him that, if you like. He isn't a pleasant sort. But he'll get us there. Anybody interested in the deal?" day, Macintyre left the shelter of the hideout -- this time bearing the task of locating Wallace and offering him the job. just as Macintyre himself had been Wallace was known by name and by reputation to most of them. He was a freebooter, a footloose member of the mercenary class that had sprung up on Maynard during its three centuries of existence as a Terran colony. He had the reputa -- for a price. But as Macintyre had won his inward battle, so did he convince his friends that hiring Wallace was essential to their survival. They were surely doomed if they remained in Maynard City; just as surely, they would never reach Dillard Spaceport alive on their own exertions. With Wallace, they stood a chance. Macintyre headed northward to the bar where Wallace spent much of his free time. All three of Maynard's moons had risen, now, and the streets were uncomfortably bright. Macintyre's throat felt dry. There was a bounty of # on his head -- no fortune, but enough to make it worthwhile for someone recognizing him to turn him in to the Truthmen. He paused outside the bar, peering in. He made out Wallace's face; the mercenary was sitting alone, near the back. Macintyre shattered the photonic beam and stepped through the opening door. It seemed to him that the hum of conversation in the bar dropped off perceptibly as he came in. For a moment he heard no sound but the raucous wailing of the musicbox; then the interrupted conversations were resumed. Macintyre made his way toward the back, toward Walls ce "Mind if I sit down here?" he asked. The mercenary looked up. He was a broad-faced man, heavybearded, with deepset dark eyes and a thick sprawling nose. A pale scar lanced diagonally across his left cheek, beginning at the tip of the jawbone and terminating a fraction of an inch from his eyeball. "You better have a good reason for it," Wallace growled. "I do." Macintyre slipped into the seat. "You know who I am?" "I know your politics, friend. Not your name. What are you drinking?" "Ale," Macintyre said. Wallace ordered a mug. Macintyre stared closely at the other's seamed face. "My name is Tom Macintyre," he said slowly. "That bit of information is worth a hundred dollars to you, cash on the line, if you feel like yelling for a Truthman." "I've been thinking that very thing, Mr. Macintyre. I don't know what you want with me, but it better be worth more than the price on your head." "It is." Macintyre took a deep sip. The ale was cold, dark, and potent. "I've got a job for you. It involves acting as a sort of guide for ten Loyalists, including myself. We have to be at Dillard Spaceport by the #th of the month." Wallace nodded. "Dillard's a couple of thousand miles from here. And today's the #th." "There's plenty of time, if we leave immediately," Macintyre said. "Interested?" "Maybe." "How much would it be worth to you?" Smiling, the mercenary said, "I could sell the lot of you to the Truthmen for a thousand dollars. You better outbid that by plenty." Macintyre moistened his lips. "Two thousand five hundred is what we offer. How does that sound?" "In cash?" "In cash. One thousand down immediately, fifteen hundred more when and if we reach Dillard safely and on time. I'm talking in hard money, Galactic crown pieces, not Lumley scrip." Wallace looked thoughtful. He intertwined thick, stubby fingers, coughed, scowled. "I don't know how much I like doing business with Loyalists. How come you need a guide, anyway? Can't you find your way to Dillard by yourselves?" Macintyre went red; he felt his cheeks steaming. With an effort, he forced the words out: "We don't think we can make it ourselves. It's a dangerous trip. We're peaceful men. We -- " He stopped. He heard voices just behind his back. "That's Macintyre," someone said, in a dull menacing tone. "Go get a Truthman. We'll split." Macintyre half-rose; Wallace's hand shot out, caught his wrist, dragged him back down into his seat. From somewhere a gleaming little needlegun appeared in the mercenary's hand. Quietly Wallace said, "You stay right here and let the Truthmen alone, chum. You're making a big mistake. This man's name isn't Macintyre. It's Smith. Theodore H. Smith. And he's a very good friend of mine." Instantly tension subsided in the bar; the would-be informer tossed a surly look at Wallace and vanished into the crowd. Wallace smiled coldly at Macintyre. "Don't let these ruffians upset you, Mr. -- ah -- Smith . I can understand how someone of your delicate sensibilities can get ruffled by talk like that." Wallace grinned savagely. "Back to business, now. One thousand now, one and a half later. I think I'll accept, Mr. Smith. It ought to be a very amusing trip." hours just before dawn, after Bryson had put through a call to Haxley to let Ritterheim know they were accepting the offer of sanctuary. It was at that vague time when the moons had set and the sun was still below the horizon, when a ghostly pale light illuminated the rain-washed streets. Macintyre felt a dull sense of regret as the little party of eleven set out. Up ahead of them, swaggering a little, Wallace led the way; in his pocket were ten crown pieces, each of them worth ten eagles -- one thousand dollars of their money. Fifteen hundred more awaited him at completion of the journey. To be reduced to this, Macintyre thought -- to hiring a man like Wallace, a paid killer, a man with the morals of a snake and the muscles of an ape -- that hurt more than anything. There he was, and on him their lives depended. It was all part of the pattern, the pattern that had begun when Claude Lumley first appeared on the Maynard political scene. Before Lumley, all had been well. Maynard was one of the eighty-six Earth-type worlds strung through the galaxy. It corresponded to Earth-norm within two decimal places. It had a descended settlers. And until Lumley, it had been unquestioningly loyal to the mother world. The ties had been mild ones. Earth required that a Resident Adviser live on a colony world and aid in planetary administration ; that a token sum be paid in taxes to the mother world each year; that the colony grant certain trifling trade privileges to Earth. At one time the relationship had been of great significance to Earth, but the centuries had passed, and the colonies had evolved into self sufficiency, while Earth herself no longer had need of the sort of sociocultural stimulus colonizing afforded. The relationship became one of purely symbolic value, a gesture of gratitude toward the world that had first sent its peoples forth to the worlds of the galaxy. As a symbol, it was a loved thing. No one grudged the pittance paid in taxes, and no one objected to the presence of a Resident Adviser so long as he performed a purely ceremonial function. The peoples of the colony worlds maintained a warm and pleasant mock-subservience toward the mother world. One took for granted the fact that a certain amount of respect was due the parent planet. Until Lumley. The ambitious young politician had been swept into the Chancellorship of Maynard by a landslide vote -- and had promptly announced that he intended to discontinue paying the tithe to Earth. Resident Adviser Humphries had objected on grounds of tradition, and Lumley had seized his chance. Ordering Humphries back to Earth on charges of wanton interference with local sovereignty of Maynard, Lumley declared the planet a Free World, owing no further allegiance to Earth, setting forth in his Decree of Separation the doctrine that the tie with Earth was a potentially unhealthy one that should be severed before it became diseased. There was an immediate uproar of protest from the people of Maynard -- but a surprising volume of agreeing voices was audible. Slowly the force of opinion swung toward Lumley. Earth herself made no comment on Lum ley's rash decree, and many on Maynard took Earth's silence for assent. The Separatists were a minority one day, a roaring majority the next. There were those who objected, Macintyre among them. The artists, the poets, the sculptors, the teachers -- gentle people, most of them, who valued the old traditions and were not anxious to see them die. They proclaimed continuing loyalty to Earth, and urged Lumley to retract his decree. It was only natural that Lumley should regard these protests as direct attacks on his regime. He initiated a campaign to bring about # acceptance of the Decree of Separation, and when more than three-fifths of the population had sworn allegiance to the new government he pushed through the first of the anti-Loyalist laws. It became punishable by # fine and thirty days' imprisonment to publicly advocate restoration of the relationship with Earth. Most of the wavering Loyalists yielded and took the Oath; others went defiantly to prison, emerging with their opinions unchanged. Gradually the anti-Loyalist laws became more stringent, and the Loyalist numbers dropped away. Two years after his accession, Lumley dared to make Loyalism punihable by death -- but by that time only a few hundred remained on all of Maynard, and those few remained well hidden. And it had come to this, now, Macintyre thought. The last few of us in the capital city of Maynard, fleeing desperately to another world, being shepherded to safety by a ruthless killer who laughs at our money. He wiped rain from his face and brows and glanced up ahead. Wallace set a steady pace, down the Old River Road that led out of Maynard City via the South Bridge. He was a big man, this Wallace, broadshouldered and heavy-muscled, but Macintyre knew he himself was just as big, perhaps even an inch taller, five pounds heavier. Bigger on the outside, that was. Wallace carried less of a load, though. He was not weighted down with things like scruples or ethics or second thoughts. And that was why, thought Macintyre with a trace of bitterness, Wallace was leading the party and he was slinking along in the rear. It was two thousand miles southeast to Dillard, second largest city of the planet. Maynard City was located in the heart of the broad western plain of Continent One; Dillard lay in fertile farmland beyond the great mountain-range that divided the continent. There were regular commercial flights to Dillard each day -- but for the ten of them, such a flight would be the prelude to immediate arrest. Lumley screened the airports closely. I I Instead they would have to make the trek overland. Wallace had planned their trip for them during the night, working out a detailed schedule that would bring them to Dillard in time to meet the Haxley spaceship on the #th. They would take one means of transportation and another, assume false identities, and with Wallace's help they would lie and bribe their way across the continent. They could never have managed the trip alone. Macintyre glared resentfully at Wallace's broad back, and stepped up his pace. proceed on foot over the South Bridge and out of the city; at this hour, it was not likely that the bridge would be guarded. They moved along silently through the steady rain, over the bridge, into the brown farmlands that lay just to the southeast of the capital. "All right," Wallace said gruffly. "Now the legwork begins." He pointed to the swiftly-flowing, turbulent waters of the Stinnis River. "We'll advance on foot five miles along the river, and pick up the riverboat at the town at the bend. From there it's up the river to Collins' Ford, and then overland due south sixteen miles. Just remember that you're soldier-mercenaries on your way east to seek a living in Dillard Province, and leave the rest to me." The idea of posing as a soldier amused Macintyre in a dark way. Ten years before he had been one of the officers of a pacifist movement in the mountain town of Hollister; they had drawn up petitions, published muzzy pamphlets, and made much noise about disbanding the standing army maintained by the Maynard administration. After a while they had all lost interest in the campaign. Macintyre, seeking a career in the plastic arts, drifted off to Maynard City to study sculpture in the atelier of a famous Terran artist newly emigrated. And a decade later the ex-pacifist was pretending to be a soldier, to save his own skin. At the village of Lester Falls, they boarded a small early-morning riverpacket bound eastward on the Stinnis. They boarded the vessel without incident. As he stood staring out over the rail, Hallert edged up to him. The watery-eyed little man looked frightened half to death; he had said nothing on the march out of Maynard City. "How's your stomach?" Macintyre asked. "I can manage. Do you think there'll be any trouble?" "What kind of trouble?" "Truthmen trouble," Hallert whispered. "I saw Wallace talking to someone in an Army uniform." "So what? Probably an old buddy of his." "I don't like it," Hallert whispered. "Suppose he's selling us out? He's already got a thousand of our money ; if he turns us in he gets another thousand -- " Annoyed Macintyre snapped, "I don't give two hoots what you think, Hallert! If you think Wallace is going to turn us in, jump overboard and finish the rest of the trip by yourself." "You know I can't do that." "Then keep shut," Macintyre said gloomily. "We're paying Wallace to do a job. We might as well assume he's halfway trustworthy." They stayed that night in a cheap dreary hotel in the mining town of Collins' Ford, the ten of them crammed into two smoky rooms at a dollar apiece. It was a mercenaries' hostelry; for half the night Macintyre lay awake, listening to the raucous, uninhibited laughter from below. Wallace woke him with a shove in the ribs, just before dawn. The mercenary was bleary-eyed and dirty. He smelled of beer. "We're pulling out now," Wallace said. "There's an # train going south." "Do we have time to wash?" Wallace glared at him half in amusement and half in scorn. "You're a soldier, Macintyre. Washing's for civilians. And the more filth and stubble you have on that pretty face of yours, the less chance there is somebody's going to recognize you. Come on, now." The monorail station was just outside town, perhaps half an hour's walk from the hotel. Feeling drab and dirty, Macintyre let himself be hustled from the hotel and out onto the road with his companions. He touched his cheeks: a wiry stubble was growing there. This was the first day of his adult life on which he had gone without shaving and it annoyed him. The sun was nearly up by the time they arrived at the depot. There was a long line waiting for tickets at the tube-mouth. Evidently trains did not run frequently out here in the flatlands. Macintyre noticed half a dozen gray uniforms in the long line, and went pale. He nudged Wallace. "Truthmen." "I see them. So what?" "Aren't you afraid that -- I mean -- they might -- " He stopped, abashed. "They won't do anything unless you give the show away," Wallace grunted. "Keep to yourselves, don't look for trouble, and remember who you're supposed to be in case anybody asks you." They joined the line. Fare was twenty units apiece; Macintyre drew one of his remaining dollars from his pocket and idly fondled the small yellow coin. He had been fairly well-to-do before Lumley; now, after contributing two hundred and fifty dollars towards Wallace's hire, he was down to sixty dollars and a few units in change. Suddenly he saw a familiar face in the line ahead of him -- Roy Charters, a short, bouncy man, a confirmed Loyalist and in the old days a generous patron of the arts. Now Charters was shabby, his hair uncombed. It was more than a year since Macintyre had seen him. He lifted his arm, waved, started to call out Charters' name. Instantly Wallace seized his wrist and dug his nails in hard. "What do you think you're doing?" he whispered furiously. "You want to get us all killed?" "I saw someone I knew," Macintyre said shamefacedly. He glanced at his companions. "It was Roy Charters," he explained to Vitello. "He's standing near the front of the line." "Who's this Charters?" Wallace asked suspiciously. Briefly, Macintyre told him. Wallace frowned. "Loyalist, eh? Point him 'nut to me." Macintyre pointed him out. Wallace squinted and nodded. "Okay. See that you keep away from him. It's too early in the trip to get into trouble." Macintyre shrugged angrily and turned away. The line crawled forward; at last it was his turn. He gave his destination, scooped up his ticket and his eighty units change, and shuffled inside the station, toward the great single rail along which the train was due to come rocketing in the next ten minutes. He noticed an ominous little group of Truthmen standing near the edge of the track. Lumley's special police corps, grimly fanatical men. The Truthmen boarded the same car as they did. Wallace seemed undisturbed ; there were eighty or ninety people in the car, and there was no reason to suspect they were being followed. Wallace curled up comfortably in the comer of their section of the car, took out a pocketknife, and began whittling and singing. Macintyre stared moodily out the window. Bryson and Vitello broke into a salty argument over the girls of Collins' Ford; Hallert and Maynard played cards. It looked convincing enough : a group of unshaven, overhung mercenaries en route to a new job. Macintyre eyed the reflection of the Truthmen in his window. They showed no overt interest in the doings of the noisy group opposite them. The warning light blinked, the departure hum sounded, and the train shot away from the Collins' Ford station. Their destination was Abramville, sixteen miles southward on the north bank of the Hastings River. The trip would take just eight minutes. Despite the presence of the Truthmen, it looked to be a placid hop. But abruptly the door between compartments slid open and a small round figure advanced uncertainly from the next car. Macintyre stiffened. It was Charters. He paused at the front of the car, looking around as if in search of someone. Then his eyes came to rest on Macintyre; he smiled, his face lit up, he pointed. He began to say something. Began. But before he got a word out, Wallace was on his feet, letting shavings and whittling alike go tumbling to the floor. The big man crossed the car to where Charters stood, threw his arms around the other, and with a jovial pseudodrunken outburst drowned out anything Charters might have been about to say. Macintyre saw Charters draw back in Surprise. He heard Wallace's booming voice: "Well, if it isn't old Joe Taylor! Haven't seen you since those days in Palmerston, Joe! Come on over and meet the boys!" Charters went very pale. He drew away from Wallace, only to be playfully tugged across the car. Macintyre noticed that the Truthmen were watching the scene with considerable interest. Macintyre heard Charters' thin protest: "I'm afraid I don't understand. My name isn't -- " It was drowned out by a drunken burst of song. Holding Charters firmly with one arm wrapped around his shoulders, Wallace reeled across the car, staggering past the suddenly silent group of Loyalists. Macintyre heard Charters murmur as they went past, "If you don't let go of me I'm going to notify the -- " And then they were gone, disappearing into the washroom at the far end of the car. A minute passed, two; the sound of drunken singing was audible from behind the closed door. The Truthmen lost interest; self-consciously, the Loyalists returned to their conversation and their cardgames. Several minutes went by; the car roared into the Abramville station. Still neither Wallace nor Charters emerged from, the washroom. Macintyre drummed impatiently on the windowledge, wondering what was going on in there. The main door of the car swung open ; the Abramville passengers filed out. Macintyre noticed that the Truthmen were remaining on the train. Shrugging, he said, in the rough voice he was trying to cultivate, "Those guys must've passed out in there. You make sure the train don't leave. I'll take a peek inside." But there was no need for that. Wallace appeared suddenly and gestured for them to get off the train. They made it just in time; Hallert was the last one off, and hardly had he come through the hatch when the monorail car went swooshing off southward. Macintyre turned to Wallace. "What was that all about? And where's Charters?" "Tell you about it sometime," Wallace murmured. "Let's go hire a riverboat." They found a pier and after some haggling Wallace made a deal with a sleazy old bargeman to take them fourteen miles upstream to the township of Miller Bridge. When the deal was closed, Wallace led them up the embankment to a cheap eatery where they breakfasted. On the way down toward the river again, Macintyre said a second time, "Would you mind explaining what took place aboard the train?" "It won't interest you." "It does. I want to know why you dragged Charters off to the washroom. I hadn't seen that man in a year, and now I may never see him again. I -- "Stop asking me questions! And don't worry yourself over Charters." Something in the mercenary's tone enraged Macintyre. It was Charters who had contributed most of the money Macintyre had needed to complete his statuary grouping, Sons of Earth , that had had the place of honor in Maynard Park until Lumley's hammermen smashed it to sand. "But what did -- " Wallace's jaw-muscles flickered a moment. "Look, Macintyre, if I'd let that fellow talk to you those Truthmen would be dragging us away to the Abramville hoosegow right now. You know what a Judas ram is?" "What does that have to do with it?" "Plenty. Those Truthboys knew Charters; I could tell by the way they tried to look bored when he came in. If I had let him wave hello to you, we'd all be finished. So I made sure he wouldn't give the show away. It was him or us, and I said I'd get you to Dillard. I'd handle you the same way if necessary." Macintyre felt cold. Obstinately he persisted: "What did you do to him?" "I got him in the washroom and asked him where he was getting off. He said Donovan. I happened to have overheard those Truthmen when they bought their tickets, and they were going to Donovan too. So they would have interrogated your pal Charters the second they got him alone, and ten minutes after that there'd be a three-province alarm out for us." Wallace took a deep breath. Tm violating my Oath by helping you -- so I'm subject to the same penalties you are. I don't want to get caught, and I knew if I left Charters alone I'd get caught. So I opened the washroom window and pitched him out. He's lying someplace near the track, nine miles back." They reached the waterfront. "Come on," Wallace said, before Macintyre could manage to speak. "There's our boat. Let's get moving." . the shipping towns and into the gathering uplands that led to the mountains, Wallace's calm, selfassured words echoed over and over: I opened the washroom window and pitched him out . Just like that. It made sense, Macintyre thought numbly, on an abstract, utterly and remorselessly logical plane. The death of one man had temporarily insured the continued survival of eleven others. The survival of that one man would have meant death for all twelve. So poor Charters had to die. Maybe it made sense logically. But for half a day Macintyre trembled at the thought that Wallace had been able so coldly to weigh one life against eleven, and then to kill. It was a pure calculus of survival. Macintyre realized for the first time how utterly alien Wallace was, how far from the set of specifications Macintyre had always thought applied to the class " human being " Macintyre did not tell the others what Wallace had done. He felt responsible for having brought the mercenary to the group; and in an obscure way it was almost as if he had killed Charters himself. He penned the guilt within himself. The #th passed, and the #th; they travelled by rented car overland toward the town of Hollister, the last town of any importance before they hit the mountain path. They reached Hollister on the #th, half a day ahead of schedule. At this rate they would certainly reach Dillard -- and safety -- by the deadline of the #th. The day was warm and bright; Maynard's temperate zone was in its early summer season now. The seasons slipped by slowly on Maynard. It was a pleasant world. He would regret leaving Maynard behind for the less moderate world of Haxley. His feelings toward Wallace subsided slowly. He, of all the group, was the only one who seemed ever The others regarded him as an unavoidable evil, a kind of talking pack-animal. Macintyre wondered how they would feel toward Wallace if they were to learn of the incident aboard the monorail. The morning they left Hollister and rode mountainward, Macintyre found himself at Wallace's side in the truck they had rented. He said, "You think we're going to make it?" "Probably. It's easier than I thought it would be. Like taking money for doing nothing. Twentyfive hundred for a trip to Dillard! Brother, that's work I like!" "You won't get much more," Macintyre said. "There aren't many of us left." "That's true enough. I'm surprised that ten of you lasted as long as you did. You Loyalists are stupid bastards. Ten grown men afraid of their shadows. Like that meeting in the monorail. As soon as Charters sang out, 'Well, if it isn't Tom Macintyre,' that would have been the end. But -- " "I wish you hadn't brought that up," Macintyre said, as the truck went jouncing up into the heavilywooded foothills. The sun was coming down stronger. "Why? Still can't understand it, can you?" "I can -- almost see it," Macintyre admitted. "Dammit, Wallace, how could you coldbloodedly -- " Wallace laughed. "Cold blood? Hell, Macintyre, I just like to stay alive." "And you'd do anything to stay alive?" "Wouldn't you?" Stumped, Macintyre looked away. After a moment he said, "Let me set up a hypothetical situation. We cross the mountains and we come into a town where the people are on the lookout for Loyalists. Somehow they find out that -- say, Hallert -- has Loyalist leanings. They suspect the rest of us, but they're not sure. Okay. Tell me, Wallace: how would you get us out of that town safely?" The mercenary frowned. "As long as we're playing games, Macintyre, let me suggest a better one. You put yourself in my shoes and tell me what I'd be likely to do." "Don't you see, that's just what I can't do? Suppose I had to take charge of the party -- what would I do? I don't know. I'd guess we'd all be finished." "Not ' aU " Wallace said. "Just Hallert." "How would you save the rest of us?" "I'd go to the mayor of that town. I'd tell him honestly enough that we'd picked up a Loyalist in our wanderings. I'd ask him if he'd be good enough to take him off our hands." "You'd sacrifice Hallert?" ' Wallace smiled grimly. "When your leg's caught in a trap, Macintyre, and you hear the hounds coming after you, the only thing you can do is cut your leg off and crawl away. There isn't any time to think about whether you're being fair to your leg." Macintyre stared quietly at the road a long moment, wondering what had shaped this man, what had stripped all humanity away from him. They had been born on the same planet, they both came from pure Terran-descended stock -- but yet, thought Macintyre, comparing the mercenary's short, strong hands with his own tapering fingers, there was as much difference between the two of them as if they hailed from opposite ends of the galaxy. three full days, and Macintyre was so concerned with the sheer physical problem of getting across that he let his mind move away from Wallace. It was tough, hard work crossing those mountains. There was no time for theoreticizing. The weather dipped coldly as they ascended; the mountains were jagged ruffles in the planet's skin, seven thousand feet high at their heights. Macintyre was a warmweather man and he felt the cold. Wallace did not seem to mind. They rode in open trucks, part of a supplies convoy crossing to the eastern provinces. Wallace had bought them into the convoy cheap, on a foodwork exchange. Each night they helped to make camp, fumbling with the tents and struggling with the chores. Wallace obviously was keeping tight rein on his patience as the well-meaning exsculptors and ex-professors tried manfully to look like tough mercenaries. One of the truckdrivers wandered over once on the first night and stood by, grinning, while Hallert and Macintyre puzzled out the technique of putting up a folding tentpole. The truckman snorted goodhumoredly. "No wonder you're heading east for work!" Macintyre looked up. "What's that?" "I said it's small wonder you're out of work. If you two are any samples, you're the damndest bunch of amateur mercenaries this side of Blue Ocean." Sudden rage thundered through Macintyre. Before he had time to consider he had brought his fist up and connected solidly with the man's chin. The impact bent one of his knuckles and sent pain shooting up his arm. The trucker took an uncertain step backward, wobbled, tried to muster his strength for a counterattack. Trembling from strain, Macintyre readied himself for a second punch. Wallace leapt between them. The mercenary grabbed the burly trucker firmly and propelled him toward the truck; turning to Macintyre he said, "What was that all about?" "He didn't like the way we were putting up the tent. He made some remarks." Macintyre looked at his hand. The knuckle of his middle finger was swelling, and the whole hand felt numb. "That's the first time I ever hit a man," he said. "And I didn't stop to think. I just swung." He rubbed his aching hand. "I had to do it, though. No hire-soldier would take that sort of stuff from a trucker." Wallace smiled slowly -- and it seemed to the startled Macintyre that there was real friendliness in the mercenary's eyes for the first time. "You know," Wallace said, "I think you're beginning to understand." The rest of the mountain trip was without incident, and Macintyre was greatly relieved when, on the afternoon of the #th, they came down out of the Webster Hills that marked the extreme easternmost border of the continental divide, and said curt goodbyes to the trucking caravan. They had been on the road five days now. Filthy, ragged, unshaven, they looked not even remotely like the band of mild Loyalists that had set out from Maynard City early on the morning of the #th. Now they were in the flatlands of Webster Province, the mercantile center of the continent; six hundred miles from Dillard Spaceport. Wallace's itinerary was drawn up to skirt the provincial capital, Webster. It was in Webster that Claude Lumley had been bom, it was Webster that had started him on the road to power by electing him as their Assembly representative, and in Webster anti-Loyalist feeling was at an almost hysterical peak. Only a madman would risk a passage through the city. Instead they doubled back on their tracks, detouring north-northwest toward the small river town of Lorris, where they could pick up a boat travelling downriver toward the distant southern coast. It was forty miles to Lorris, and they reached it near nightfall. Wallace knew a good cheap hotel. It was a rickety relic of the earliest settlement days, with flickering lumipanels casting an ugly gray light and dirty non-opaquing windows. Macintyre didn't care. He was tired and dirty, and any place would do. The hotel had a bar, and they sat up drinking a while. Wallace was as boisterous as ever, but Macintyre, sitting by his side, noticed that the mercenary had had a total of just three beers during the evening. It was a point worth noting. Wallace always seemed to be drinking, and made a great show of being drunk ; but in actuality he drank very little, and was always fully aware, fully on guard. Shortly past midnight the group headed for their rooms. Macintyre was the last to leave the bar. As he started out into the dingy corridor, he felt a hand gently touch his shoulder and pull him back. He turned. It was the barkeepproprietor, a faded balding man of sixty or so. Whispering, the man said, "Come back and have one last drink with me, friend." Macintyre frowned. The others were gone; throughout the trip he had followed a policy of staying close to the group. "I'm pretty tanked," he said. "Think I'll get some sleep, if y' don't mind." "No." The barkeep tugged insistently. "Gome back. Let me tell you some things you might want to know." Macintyre went. As soon as he had recrossed the threshold, the old man spun and shut the bar door firmly; then he looked up at Macintyre, bloodshot old eyes looking at gentle young ones, and said, "You're a Loyalist, aren't you? You and the bunch you came with." Macintyre stiffened. "You're drunk, old man! I'm a free soldier. And -- " "Stop pretending," said the old one softly. "It doesn't come natural to you; you don't fool me. I won't turn you in. I want to warn you." "Warn me of what?" "That man Wallace. Get quit of him. He's deadly." Macintyre drew the old man down next to him at one of the tables and said, "What do you know about Wallace?" "He came through Lorris about two months ago with a party of five. Loyalists. They were paying him to get them to the coast -- I guess they figured on taking a boat over to Ludlow Island and hide out. Only when they got to Dillard he collected his fee from them and sold 'em all to the Truthmen." Macintyre felt the blood drain from his face. "Where'd you hear that?" "Never you mind. But when I saw that same ugly fellow come through here again, and ten fellows with him, I knew he was pulling the same thing all over again. Watch for yourselves, friend. You're in rough hands." "How am I supposed to believe this?" The barkeep smiled indifferently. "I don't give a damn if you believe me. I'm trying to help you." His face darkened. "I know what you boys are going through. I'd be with you myself, except -- well, I'm not young, and the hotel doesn't bring in much. When they came around asking me to sign the Oath I signed. But I keep a little globe of Earth upstairs." He rose. "It's getting late. You never know who's listening." Macintyre nodded. "Thanks," he said shakily. He had no chance to discuss this new information with the others until the morning of the # th, when they were a hundred and fifty miles from Dillard. They stopped in a small town called Fleury. Wallace left them while he went into town to make arrangements for covering the remaining distance. Macintyre told the group what the innkeeper had said, adding, "I guess it's my fault for having got us into this." Hallert looked up owlishly. "How sure are you that the old man was telling the truth?" "You can't be sure of anything. lace came this way once before and sold his clients to the Truthmen at the end of the trip. Let's assume that it's so. What do we do?" "We could go up to him and ask him just what his intentions are when we reach Dillard," Bryson said. The suggestion was so naive that Macintyre laughed. "And I guess we could get him to promise he won't hand us in, I suppose. Sorry, Mark. It won't go." "Then what do we do?" Hallert asked desperately. "Just ride along and hand over our money and let him sell us to the Truthmen?" "We go to Dillard by ourselves, now," suggested Vitello. "We haven't had any trouble so far, and we're practically there. If we hurry, before Wallace comes back from town -- " "Don't be a fool," Hallert snapped pettishly. "If he finds us gone he'll wire ahead to Dillard and notify the authorities. No, that won't work either. But suppose we -- " Macintyre listened impatiently. All they did was talk, he thought, and kick feeble suggestions around, none of them daring to approach the concrete. There was only one solution. He knew what it was. Fifteen minutes more of discussion followed. It developed that the prevailing sentiment of the group was, Wait and See. Wallace's return ended the discussion. He had engaged three trucks to see them down the road toward Dillard, and they left. Macintyre was seated near Wallace. He stared covertly at the mercenary as they pulled out of Fleury ; the man seemed to take on more awesomely monstrous characteristics each day, as they saw more and more of him in action. Yet he had the knack of seeming good company, cheerful, quick-witted, bawdy of tongue, and Macintyre found himself forgetting that this was the man who had killed Charters and had sold five earlier Loyalists to the Truthmen. Who perhaps was going to do the same to them. Macintyre stared at the yellow and purple splotches of shrubbery flanking the road. "You're almost safe," Wallace said. "Weren't you silly to hire me? You can see how easy it was." "Easy for you, maybe. We'd never have made it." Wallace nodded. "I guess you're right. You wouldn't have gotten through. You wouldn't have the guts." Macintyre tensed, and forced himself to subside. Wallace grinned. "Easy, there. Don't go picking fights with me." "Then don't make yourself any more offensive than you have to be," Macintyre snapped. "There we go, there we go!" Wallace crowed. "Spoken like a man -- for the first time in your spineless life! This trip has almost been the making of you, Macintyre." Macintyre turned. "You enjoy taunting us, don't you? Because we're not coldblooded. You love to tell us that we think too much, that we stall instead of acting. I guess it never occurs to you that there are such things as moral codes, and ethical choices for a man to make. Eh?" Wallace looked curiously serious. "What gives you that idea?" "The way you act. The way you think. The way you pushed that harmless man off the train." The way you sold those five to the T ruthmen , he added, silently. "Ruthlessness is a way of life with you, isn't it?" "It's a way of staying alive," Wallace admitted. "It's a hard world. It's a hard universe, brother. And the universe doesn't give a damn about you or me or Claude Lumley. You have to take care of yourself." who gets in your way," Macintyre said. "It may look that way to you, but that's because you don't understand. Look, Macintyre : when I was very young I sat down and worked out my idea of the way the world worked. I figured out what I wanted out of life. I figured out what I had to do to get it. And I've been doing it ever since. I have my own code. I know my limits and I stick to them. And I guess to you I look like an ape, eh?" Macintyre was silent. He stared at the bouncing road and tried to piece his thoughts together. "I -- had a philosophy too," he said after a while. "I thought it worked. It traying ideals. And -- and -- " "And it ended up bringing you here, a miserable fugitive who has to hire a nursemaid to get you off the planet." With elaborate deliberateness Wallace spat; the stream landed an inch from Macintyre's boots. "Go ahead," Wallace urged. "Stand up and pitch me off the truck. You're big -- just as big as I am. But you won't fight." "No," Macintyre said, moving his feet. "I won't. I'm a human being." Wallace merely laughed. and they approached the outskirts of Dillard now. Macintyre's mind dwelled only on the day to come. Tomorrow. They would pay Wallace the # they owed him, and they would leave for Haxley that night. Or would they? Would Wallace pocket his cash and phone the Truthmen? Tomorrow was hazed round with doubts. But slowly, out of the haze, the answer presented itself, and Macintyre found himself unable to deny its validity. The evidence showed that Wallace would betray them. Every sign of his character showed that, and the words of the innkeeper in Lorris. There was always the chance that he had no such intention, of course ; but the cloud of doubt could not be dispelled. Macintyre knew he could take no chance. No. Wallace was confident; too confident. He looked at the whiteness of his hands. Yellowish, now, from callus. He wondered if he had the strength to kill. They stopped that night at Brownston, twenty miles from the spaceport. They would be in plenty of time for their rendezvous with Ritterheim the next day, if -- The Loyalists buzzed with nervous tension. Like so many little bees , Macintyre thought. He stood before a mirror, staring at the thin high-bridged nose, the soft eyes. Was this a killer's face? He took a deep breath. Wallace had been necessary to the success of their journey. But the journey was over. Wallace had to be discarded, before he wrecked the entire crossing at the final moment. Macintyre's hand gripped the knife. It felt cold and strange. He tiptoed from his room, down the hall, toward the room where Wallace and Bryson were booked. He pushed open the door. They were asleep: the small man on a cot, Wallace on the bed. Macintyre felt almost calm. He crossed the room and stood over the slumbering Wallace. So he's human after all, Macintyre thought. He doesn't have an automatic danger-alarm built into his skull to wake him up. Macintyre unsheathed the knife and gently touched Wallace's shoulder. The mercenary grunted sleepily, opened one eye, and said, "What do you want, Macintyre?' # "I wanted to ask you about those five Loyalists you sold to the Truthmen last month." "Huh? You having a nightmare, Macintyre?" "Maybe I am. But tell me the truth or I'll cut you open, Wallace. I'm not kidding." Wallace grunted. "Go back to sleep, will you?" "Answer me!" "What if I told you I did sell them? What if I told you I was going to do the same to you?" Wallace sat up suddenly in the bed. "If I told you that, Mac, what could you do about it?" "This," Macintyre said, and brought the knife upward from his hip. Wallace saw it at the last moment; his reflexes asserted themselves, and he tried to block the blow, to seize Macintyre's arm. But the effort failed. The knife plunged; Wallace sank back. In an indistinct voice he muttered, "I guess I underestimated you, Mac." And then the room was quiet. Macintyre stood alone, holding the bloody knife. He heard the door open ; he turned, saw them filing in, Hallert and Vitello and the rest. He forced himself to grin. "He meant to turn us in," Macintyre said. He saw them looking blankly at him, then to the knife, then to the body on the bed. Nobody was speaking. "What's the matter?" he demanded. "He would have turned us in. We're safe, now. We can go to Dillard in the morning." But he saw that they did not understand. There was blank horror in their eyes, and he realized that he had never belonged with them at all. He was not their kind. He had pretended to be their kind, had fooled himself into thinking it, but he was not. He looked toward the bed; his eyes, grown accustomed to the dark, sought the dead man's face. Wallace was smiling. Wallace had understood. The mercenary had had a code, and he had lived by it and died by it. Wallace had been a killer and a cheat and a traitor, but he had been a superb killer, a splendid cheat. They had hired him to do a job, and he had done it with magnificent competence. You have to respect him for it, Macintyre thought leadenly. He let the knife drop. Wallace had dealt out death; the wages of death is death. It was simple, neat, valid. But now something new was arising. Macintyre looked at the nine awed statues. "There's a spaceship leaving for Haxley tomorrow," he said quietly. "It's blasting out of Dillard Spaceport. I want you all to make sure you're on it. You need to be. This isn't any world for you." "And what are you going to do?" Maynard asked, in a hoarse, frightened voice. "I'm going to stay here on your grandad's world," Macintyre said. "I made this trip for nothing. I'm not really a Loyalist, you know. I decided that last night. You people are, because you don't have the courage to step forward and change things. You don't like Lumley, so you hide in cellars and wait for him to come kill you. "I guess I'm not like that. I just found that out, tonight. What I want to stay here and do is to keep an eye on Lumley, to work for the sort of planet I want." Macintyre took a deep breath. He expected a reaction, the revolt of strained nerves, but he was calm. "The way to fight Lumley is to fight him out in the open. So I'll take the Oath of Allegiance first, and be a legal citizen again. And then I can try to do something." He walked to the door. It was almost morning, and the sun was coming over the Eastern Ocean toward them, brightening the sky. "You know what I'm going to do now?" he asked. "I'm going to walk into town and wait for the post office to open. And then I'm going to take the Oath. And none of you will ever understand why, will you?" He glanced at the man on the bed. "So long, Wallace. It's too bad we couldn't have known each other under different circumstances!" He opened the door and looked back at Maynard and Hallert and the others -- white, dumfounded men. He smiled at them, but they did not smile back. He turned, closing the door carefully behind him, and started down the road, on the long walk toward the post ofTwo early " collector's " issues if you subscribe now! dated March #, are still available. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April #; February, April, June, August, October, December #; February, April, June, August, October, December #. You may obtain these back issues for # each postpaid. your choice of any two of these back issues as a gift! Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. mm iih ! u it'll y  ' m ' , A? ws  . , Wfflpr Mm it, 'K-fM ... I r". ,.   '  Illustrated by Virgil Finlay The Zades had their sample Earthling. What would eventually happen to the whole depended on what happened to v the specimen. It was as simple as that!jL office when they brought the alien in. He was as tall as an average Zade, of pretty much the same color, and would have been able to pass as one of us except that he had no vestigial wings. It gave his shoulders an odd, flat, appearance, and somehow added to the abrupt awkwardness of every movement of his body. He might have had wires rather than muscles beneath his soft dark skin. There were other, minor differences, of course. Hair grew not only on his head, but also on his body. Coarse, black hair. It could be seen on his hands and the exposed portions of his arms, and on his chest where his blouse was open at the neck. His eyes were brown and set wide apart, with long hairs on the lid edges. His nose had no hard upper ridge. The bone was covered only by the same flesh as the rest of his face. He was accompanied by a Commander Leik, captain of the space ship that had brought him from Earth. When they entered Srtes rose and set the scroll he had been studying to one side. "I welcome you back," he said to Leik, touching his cheek with the greeting finger of his left hand. Leik respectfully returned the gesture. "I am once more content," he replied. "Has he been instructed in our language?" Srtes asked, after the brief formalities were over. He indicated the Earth native. "He has become quite adept during the eight great tides since we left his world," the Commander answered. "It is well." Srtes turned and eyed the Earth man searchingly. The alien returned the gaze, not defiantly, yet not at all subserviently. I could tell that he was ill at ease. A fine sprinkling of perspiration dotted his forehead, and he breathed slowly and deeply, as though carefully timing each inhalation and exhalation. "Do you have a name?" Srtes asked him. He made a nodding motion with his head. "John Wilson," he said. The words were clear enough, but spoken with a slurred, soft-palate, sound. "You have two names?" The hairlines above Srtes # eyes raised slightly. "It is the custom on their world," Leik supplied. "The surname has a clan connotation." "You understand your purpose here?" Srtes asked the outworlder. "Yes." He added nothing to the reply. "You are aware that there are no restrictions on the study we may make of you?" "Yes." "Even that we may dissect you. or kill you, if we so desire?" The alien's complexion changed subtly, becoming slightly lighter, and his lips pressed firmly together. He made the bobbing motion with his head again. "His nodding signifies an affirmative reply," Leik interjected. "He volunteered to come with us, so he is quite familiar with the conditions." "Volunteered?" "It is strange," Leik agreed. "Yet when I offered to leave one of our men in return for a specimen of their race -- so that mutual study might be made -- I was firmly refused. It seems their culture has some absurd belief in inherent rights of its individual members. I was saved the inconvenience of abducting the necessary specimen when this one volunteered." Srtes had difficulty grasping the concept. His forehead creased in concentration for a moment before he said, "Perhaps it would be better if I read the report first. In the meantime, please escort him to our physiologists on the ground floor. They can begin their stuy immediately." F OR seventeen days they examined the alien. As expected, they learned quickly that his body was intrinsically weak. His vital organs had no protective walls of cartilage, and he was extremely vulnerable to the thrust of any sharp or pointed weapon. Our first opinion was that he would prove an innocuous foe. However, as the tests continued, we began to have some doubts. Physically he was quite powerful. His reflexes were sharp, and he showed an aptness at learning that surprised us. And his intelligence was above average. The twentieth day I was ordered to report to Srtes' office. I found the other seven members of the council already conferring with Srtes when I entered. "We have been unable to arrive at any definite conclusion thus far," Srtes was saying. "Therefore it becomes necessary to try him in the Big Run." He paused and frowned in annoyance as I made some slight disturbance. Hurriedly I took my place. I moved among these men only by sufferance. "One of the crewmen on the space ship that brought him here," Srtes resumed, "a Zade named Gtvar, clashed with the alien several times during the voyage. He was restrained from violence by the captain. This Ctvar should prove an apt instrument for driving our hostage to the proper desperation for the Big Run." Srtes switched on the large visiscreen that blanketed the front wall of his office. "The alien has been wandering through the streets for the past several hours," he said. "If we are fortunate, Gtvar should put in his appearance soon." The visi-screen flickered once, cleared, and exposed an outside street. At the far end the alien -- John Wilson, as he caMed himself -- walked slowly, with his head down, and his hands in the pockets of the outlandish jacket he had brought with him. He proceeded aimlessly, with a peculiar, jerky, movement of his limbs. Perhaps he was lonesome for his home world, and uncertain of what awaited him . A party of Zade men left a drinking place just ahead of him. They were quarreling -- without any particular rancor -- and one of them was loudly keening a verse of hunting song. At their forefront strode a burly Zade with a bush of red-orange hair. "The big one is the crewman I mentioned," Srtes pointed out. The burly Zade spied the alien and a pleased burst of laughter rumbled up from his chest. "Our unwinged friend from Earth!" he shouted. It was a deadly insult. As the alien stopped uncertainly, Gtvar and his friends crowded around him. "Are all Earthlings wingless freaks?" one of them asked in a loud voice. The others laughed. I expected the alien to show some fight, but he only stood silently. The party of Zades showed their contempt by increasing the tempo of their insults. Still the Earthling did nothing. Finally Gtvar became disgusted with the other's spinelessness and spat in his face, at the same time reaching out to grab him. I heard several gasps from those around me as the alien moved. His actions the next moment were almost too swift for us to follow. He spread his legs slightly, as Ctvar reached for him, and swung his right fist. An instant later Gtvar lay on the ground. One leg made a continuous kicking motion, but it was only a reflex action. Ctvar had been knocked unconscious! The shouting of the other Zades quieted to an ugly murmur, and they surged forward. The Earthling set his back against the building behind him and struck out at his attackers, but they overwhelmed him by sheer numbers and dragged him to the ground. They beat him and stamped several times on his body before a squad of sentinels appeared and broke them up. "A fine start," Srtes said. "Unless he is already dead." "I don't believe he is," Srtes answered. "But if he is no more hardy than that, there will be no necessity for us to learn more." The Earthling proved to be much hardier. And more stubborn. The sentinels, of course, gave him no further help. They would not have stopped the fight, except that they had orders from Srtes to save our visitor from any disabling injury, if at all possible. The Earthling lay on the ground for only a short while before he pulled himself to a sitting position. His face was bruised, blood ran from his nose, and one eye was swollen and closed. With the other he followed the progress of Ctvar and his party as they went on to the next drinking place. When he climbed to his feet his left leg buckled but he limped about on it for a few minutes until he could walk. He strode purposefully toward the drinking place Ctvar's party had entered, and pushed his way inside. Someone behind me muttered angrily. There was no pick-up in the drinking place and we could only watch the exterior of the building. We did not have long to wait. The sound of commotion inside reached us soon after the alien entered. A short time later he tumbled out through the doorway. His body was limp as it landed in the dirt street. He lay motionless. A few minutes later we caught another view of Ctvar. He and two of his friends were carried from the drinking place. The alien did not recover so quickly this time. His first movement was a slow rocking of his head. At each motion a low groan came from his lips. He made several attempts to regain his feet, but his legs would not hold him. At last he began crawling toward his room a few blocks away. He left a small trail of blood behind him. It took him almost an hour of crawling, between rests, to reach his room. I left Srtes' office with the council members. There would be little to observe for some days, and that little I could watch on the screen in my own cubicle. A LL the next day the alien lay . on his sleeping rug. He rose only in response to his nature calls, and once to fix himself a bowl of porridge. However, the following afternoon, though he was obviously still not at all physically fit, he dressed and left s room. It took me a few minutes after he reached the street to realize that he was heading for the Building Administrates. Undoubtedly to complain to Srtes of the treatment he had received at the hands of Ctvar and his party. And just when I was beginning to have some small amount of respect for the outworlder. I switched hurriedly to Srtes and informed him of the imminent visit. At the same time I requested permission to cover the interview. The request was granted. Srtes' visitor surprised us by making no complaint against Ctvar, and requesting no protection. He declined the hassocks Srtes offered him, and stood with his hands clasped behind his back. "I've heard nothing from you for some time now," he said. "Does that mean your examiners are finished with me?" "That is correct," Srtes answered courteously. "What comes next?" he asked. "Next?" Srtes repeated. "Why, that is your own decision. My interest in you ceased the day our study was complete. You are free now to do as you wish." The alien thought that over for a time. "You do not intend to return me to Earth?" he asked. "Is there any reason why you should expect us to?" Srtes replied. "To me it seems there is," he said. "I fulfilled my part of the contract. Shouldn't I expect you, as a fair return, to see that I got back to Earth?" Srtes' expression betrayed a mild irritation. "We had no contract," he said. "You were given to us to do with as we wished. Now that our study is completed, we owe you nothing." "I expected as much," the alien said, almost without interest. "Will you tell me then, what I can do to help myself? I presume you do not intend to furnish me with food and shelter indefinitely." "You will be permitted to keep your room until you find new quarters. The rest is your own responsibility." He considered that for a long moment. "Do you have any suggestions as to how I might go about earning my living?" he asked. "If you have any serviceable skill, you will probably be able to find employment for it. If not -- " Srtes shrugged. "How would I know what skills would be useful here? I know practically nothing about you." "I'm afraid that's your own problem," Srtes said. "If you are unable to adapt, you will not survive. It is the natural law." The alien's eyes narrowed. He seemed to be holding in check a cold anger. "Tell me," he said. "Do you consider yourselves just?" Srtes' hair bristled until his head appeared twice its normal size. He half rose from his hassock, then slowly resumed his seat. I admired his self-restraint. "We consider ourselves extremely fair," he said carefully. "Only the strong have the right to survive, and the fact that they do survive proves their strength. What you are determines your end. We are demanding nothing more from you than we expect from our own citizens. Weaklings and inefficients are perishing every day on the ragged confines of our civilization. In simple justice I can offer you nothing more." The Earthling's shoulders had gradually drooped as Srtes spoke. "Yours is a harsh philosophy," he mumbled at the end. "It is our means of being certain that we maintain our race's fitness," Srtes explained patiently. "On this world only the strong and their progeny survive. As long as that natural struggle continues the strength of each generation will become greater." The alien seemed to recognize Srtes' sincerity. He rose tiredly. "Thanks, for the explanation at least," he said, as he left the office. During the rest of the afternoon, as I watched on the visiscreen, the Earthling kept to his room. Most of the day he lay on his sleeping rug, with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The rest of the time he paced aimlessly. The next morning he ate the last of his porridge, and as the day progressed I recognized that much of his unrest must be prompted by hunger. Yet his battered body needed the rest he was giving it. He napped shortly after dusk, but only for a short time. When he awoke he put on his jacket and went outside. On the screen I followed his forlorn wanderings about the city. After several hours he stopped and leaned against a wooden building. The night breeze had risen to its near-gale intensity by this time, and he pulled his jacket closer about him. It was only a few degrees below freezing, and he should have been warm enough, but I understood his race was unable to withstand any great degree of cold. And he was sore and hungry. I received my call from Srtes then. He and the council had decided that the alien had reached the proper depth of misery and hopelessness. I was to contact him -- and set him for the Big Run. I found him still leaning against the same wooden building. He looked up at me from under his heavy brows as I neared him. I kept a safe distance between us. I remembered Ctvar. "Will you allow me to buy you something to eat?" I asked, deciding to use a direct approach. I liked the way he did not ask any questions. He merely regarded me for a moment longer, then made his nodding motion. All through the meal in the public eating place he remained silent. He ate hungrily but without haste and only when he'd finished did he speak again. "Why?" he asked. "I do not understand what you mean," I evaded. "I haven't learned much about you Zades since I've been here," he said, "but I have learned that you do nothing out of kindness. What do you want from me?" I forced myself to smile. "You are right, of course," I said. "I do want something from you. Information about your world. In return for your cooperation I will see that you continue to be well fed." "I thought Srtes was through with me," he said. "My interest is strictly personal," I answered. "I am what you would call a reporter. We give out our news on disseminators similar to your television." I had caught his interest. I suppose he was eager to learn anything that he might use to make his way. "I've seen no signs of television," he said. "This is one of our smaller cities," I improvised quickly. "There are only a few receiving sets here. Most of them are in the main halls of the various clans." The explanation satisfied him. "Just what do you want to know?" he asked. "Anything about your Earth that you think might be of interest to my listeners." "Couldn't you get that from Srtes and histaff?" "Their supply of information is limited. You should be able to give me much more." He was actually eager to talk. It probably relieved his homesickness. We returned to his room, and our conversation took up most of the rest of the night. Toward morning he began questioning me. "I've given you all the information you asked for," he said. "Now I'd like some in return. Can you suggest any way I can make a living on this world of yours?" I thought for a moment. "You might be able to introduce some product of your civilization's technology that would be useful here. Not knowing your world, I couldn't suggest just what." "I should be able to come up with something," he said thoughtfully. "Would I be allowed to manufacture and sell it if I did?" "If you can demonstrate that you can do it better than anyone else, you will be given an exclusive right to control both its construction and distribution." "Does that apply to every function of your society?" he asked. "This world belongs to those who can prove their strength," I answered. "That's a bit different than on Earth," he said. "We have always held that competition makes for the best results." I had become quite interested in the discussion, and found myself giving a rather lengthy explanation of that part of our society's functioning. "Competition is very real here, even though it is less tangible than yours. The fact that a producer of a product or service may be displaced by anyone demonstrating a better or more efficient product or method, acts as a spur to best efforts. The price is set by the state, with the prices of competing bidders in mind. Under our system time and energy is not wasted making inferior goods, or those already in adequate supply. The purchasers, also, are never exposed to an inferior article." I was becoming quite drowsy by this time and left after I'd answered a few more of his questions. I felt affection toward the Earthling. He was direct and honest. Beneath his placid manner he had a pride as fierce as any Zade. Tomorrow would be the crucial day for him. i bought a packet of food and brought it to the ou two rider's room. "Did you have trouble with a Zade named Ctvar?" I asked him, immediately on entering. "Yes, I did," he answered. "Why?" "His clansmen have been pouring into the city all day. I just learned that they are looking for His eyes widened slightly. "Isn't Ctvar able to handle his own trouble?" "Ctvar is dead." He seemed unable at first to find the words to speak. At last he said, "It happened in a fight that he started. Why should they seek revenge?" "They would be poor clan brothers if they did not avenge him," I answered. "Won't your sentinels do anything to stop them?" he asked. "They won't help you," I answered. "You make no contribution to the state that would entitle you to their protection." "Don't you have laws against this sort of thing?" "An undetermined number of persons wish you dead. You, and perhaps I, want you to live. The majority is against us." "But I'm at least entitled to a trial." I puzzled over his meaning of the word, but could find no sure answer. "I don't know what the purpose of a trial would be," I said. "But it could change nothing. You have the ill will of many citizens." He stared at the floor without any further questions. Against the strong logic of my reasoning I felt a strong empathy toward him. He had conducted himself well on this world that must seem very strange to him. I offered what consolation I could. "There is this possibility," I said. "A majority is not always reckoned by numbers. If you can collect superior strength to your side -- either by getting others to help you, or by your own ingenuity -- and whip Ctyar's clan, the law will do nothing to punish you. You may even kill them with impunity, except for the revenge of the other clansmen." "That's a small hope." "It is," I agreed, belatedly recalling to mind my mission. I was probably this minute under disapproving observation. "You can't hope to fight them all," I continued. "That is why I would earnestly suggest that you run." "To where would I run?" "I gave that a good deal of thought on my way here," I said. "There's a space ship -- on a meadow outside the walls, on the far side of the city -- that you might be able to reach. You could take it and flee to your ,own world, probably the only place where you'd be safe." "I wouldn't know how to operate it." "The ship is very nearly automatic. Look," I said. I took a sheet of velum, and a stylus, and drew three circles with smaller circles beneath them. "These represent the dials on the ship's control panel. The bubbles in the first dial must be set in this order -- you'd better memorize them -- blue-blue-yellowblue-yellow. That's the range for your Earth. You'll have to shrink the last yellow bubble to about three-quarter size. That will give you a safety leeway. The ship will take itself in on motors from there. "This second dial starts the ship. You merely squeeze the knob beneath it. The third dial is for stopping. As you are about to land, the tighter you grip the knob, the slower the ship will settle. You shouldn't have any trouble manipulating it." His spirits seemed to revive somewhat. "It's worth a try," he said. "I have nothing to lose." "It's only a few hours to nightfall," I told him. "That will be the best time to try getting through the city. I'd suggest you eat a good meal, and fix yourself a lunch to take along. Then nap if you can." I was back in Srtes' office, watching the big screen, with the eight council members, when the alien started out. That was shortly after dusk. It is never completely dark on Zade. He was shrewd enough to leave his room the back way, I observed. There was no rear door, but he let himself down from the balcony, dropping the last few feet to the ground. "He is wearing a sword, I see," a white haired councilor remarked. "Yes," Srtes answered. "He was given it when they were testing his weapons adaptability. But the fool filed it down until it is hardly thicker than a reed. It will be a poor weapon." The alien hugged the wall of the house, and after glancing into the opening between it and the next, scurried quickly across. Two buildings farther on the rear court ended, and he had to go around to the front. When he reached the yellow pedestrian walk he did not turn, as we might have expected, but went on across a second courtyard. "He realizes that the normally travelled yellow walks would not be very safe," Srtes said. "I wonder how long it will take him to solve the enigma of the others." At the next white street he turned to his right. When he reached the end and learned that he had gone up a blind alley he retraced his steps and went across to a perpendicular blue street. He seemed a bit nervous now. A third of the way down the blue walk he ran into the invisible electric shock wall, and staggered backward. The lunch packet that he carried fell from his hand, and he was obviously too stunned to remember to pick it up as he started back. He had retreated only a short way before he paused and stood considering his situation. After a minute he returned and examined the buildings at each side of the electrified area. He must have found that the conduction outlets did not extend to the ground, for soon he began crawling forward on his hands and knees. "A point for the alien," I heard Srtes murmur. I detected a hint of admiration in his voice. The alien kept his caution, for when the ground cayed beneath his hand, at the end of the third street, he did not fall into the trap. He simply rolled back and lay quietly for a moment. Another decision. He was equal to it. Rising to his feet, he took a short run and leaped for the balcony on the nearest building. From there it was an easy matter to reach the roof. Observing carefully below before each venture, he leaped from roof to roof until he reached the end of the street. We lost him for a short time then. He had gone down into the last house. A few minutes later when a guard in front of the door stumbled abruptly backward and disappeared inside. Another moment passed and the guard reappeared. He walked briskly up two streets before we became aware of what had happened. The  alien had changed to the guard's clothes! That would not take him far, of course. At the beginning of the third street he was. stopped by two sentries. When they demanded a password, he whipped his sword out from beneath his cloak and ran the nearest through. The second shouted for help and drew his own sword. He offered only a moment of resistance. We saw then the alien's reason for grinding down the long sword. He handled it almost like a whip, and the sentry was unable to parry his swift thrusts. As I noted the councilors' exchange of wondering glances I understood that a new weapons concept had been bom. When the second sentry fell, the alien sprinted into the house, and reappeared a minute later on the roof. Soon he was a block away from the scene of the fight. The sentries at the second intersection had run back in answer to the shout for help, and the alien was able to cross the street unmolested. Once again he took to the roof, and when he came down again he had reached the Building Administrates. He was directly below us! We followed him on the screen as he ran down the stairs to the basement. A sound from the front of the building attracted our attention and we switched back. Two sentinels had not been caught off guard. They had spotted him entering Administrates and were following closely. We switched back to the fugitive, and just in time. He had dragged himself almost all the way under the bottom ramp of the stairs. Soon he had disappeared entirely. Now the sentinals were looking about in a confused way. I heard Srtes beside me sigh heavily as he rose to his feet. "Do you realize," he asked no one in particular, "that he is already halfway through? All our calculations pointed to the odds being heavily against his reaching this far." "The sentinels will find him in a few minutes," one of the councilors said reassuringly. "Of course they will!" Srtes replied angrily. "But he was not supposed to be able to get this far." ramp only until his pursuers ran past. Immediately after, he reappeared and strode without hesitation toward the nearest air vent. The screen stuck when he gripped its spokes and tried to turn it, but he exerted his strength and it gave slowly. He pulled it from its frame and let it rest on the floor. Pushing his feet through the vent opening, still clutching the screen, he let himself down. Soon his feet came to rest on the inside ledge of the air tunnel and he balanced there as he screwed the screen back into place. He had vanished by the time the sentinels came running back. "By the great hound of Hagras!" a councilor exclaimed. "Is there no end to the creature's ingenuity?" None of us paid any attention to him ; we were too busy watching the scene below. Only Sites spoke. "Will the fools have brains enough to look for him down there?" he muttered. The excitement of the chase had obviously gripped him also. He clicked on a control button that split the screen into two scenes, and we were able to watch the activity above, as well as in the tunnels below. We had no trouble following the flight of the alien. The lining of the tunnels had been prepared with a luminous coating that gave enough light for us to see the inside clearly. As we watched, the alien stumbled and fell to the floor. He lay for a long moment, too weary to rise. By this time he must be exhausted. His stamina had already proven greater than we had anticipated. He rose again and walked doggedly on, searching absent-mindedly in his pockets as he went. I knew he must be hungry and thirsty. He was probably only now remembering the packet he had lost early in his flight. But he did not slow his steady progress forward. On the right half of the screen we noted that the captain of the sentinels had evidently figured out what had happened. Up ahead his men were hurrying into the numerous branches of the air tunnel and blocking every passage. As they had probably been ordered, they began walking slowly back. We kept our attention on the one who would intercept the fugitive. The alien stopped occasionally and stood listening. Once he paused longer than usual. Was his hearing that good, I wondered, or was he just being cautious? After a minute he moved forward again, until only a fairly long bend in the tunnel branch separated him from the oncoming sentinel. This time he did hear his interceptor. He ran quickly back, keeping a close observation on the wall to his left as he went. Soon he found the hiding place he sought. Probably he had noted it in passing before, and had kept it in mind for an emergency of this kind. Where he stopped a connection in the sheet metal lining the tunnel had come loose and a dark space gaped open. He crawled inside. The man was stupid, I thought, if he expected the sentinel to pass without noticing the hiding place. The sentinel was not stupid. But then, we soon found out, neither was the alien. When the sentinel came to the opening he paused and jabbed tentatively into the dark cavity with the long sword that he carried in his hand. An instant later he stumbled forward, his knees gave beneath him, and he sagged to the floor. After a moment the alien emerged. A portion of his cloak was wrapped around one hand, his sword in the other. We understood then what had happened. He had grasped the sentinel's sword in his padded hand and jerked him forward, at the same time thrusting out with his own weapon. The sentinel had been wounded critically. However, the alien himself had not escaped unscathed. As he unbuttoned his jacket we could see a large spot of blood on the lighter surface of his blouse. He took a white cloth from a rear pocket of his trousers and pressed it between his jacket and the wound. When he went on this time he was very weary, obviously dredging up the last dregs of his strength. In the short pause from action of the screen I looked around me. I was the only one in the room still sitting. The others had been unable to keep their seats during the excitement of watching the flight of the fighting alien. Some stood tensely or leaned against the walls, others paced restlessly, and one knelt on his hassock. I returned my attention to the outside half of the screen. The captain of the sentinels was letting gas into the tunnel! I felt a pang of regret. This was the beginning of the end. I wondered then if the alien did not have some inkling by this time that there was more to this than a mere seeking of revenge by Ctvar's kinsmen. He went on only a few strides farther before he detected the gas. Even then his ingenuity did not desert him. As he stood with his nostrils spread a noise above him caused him to look up. He spied a metal covered opening into the tunnel directly over his head. A dozen sentinels, I saw with a side glance, were grouped around it. After only a brief hesitation the alien returned to the Zade he had wounded a few minutes before. The man had ceased to move. Evidently he was dead. The alien tossed the dead sentinel across his shoulders and carried him to the spot beneath the metal cover. Here he reached up and tapped sharply. The cover moved back cautiously, and the alien rammed the corpse upward, head foremost. The body struck the cover and knocked it aside. The alien shoved it a bit higher, and it quivered as the swords above pierced it. He dropped the dead carcass and sprinted forward. He had bought all the time he could, and there was nothing for him to do now except try to reach the end of the tunnel before the gas overcame him. His head was held high as he ran -- he had deduced that they had to use a heavierthan-air gas. He did not have far to go. He reached the end of the tunnel and stumbled onto a conduit leading from the main air compressor. For a short time he lay sprawled across the metal duct, too ediausted to move. Finally he raised his head and looked wearily about him. He spied a vent opening on a level with his head, and with a determined effort he removed the screen and climbed through. Utter fatigue showed in line of his body. Outside he stood for several minutes, drawing clean air deep into his lungs. There were no sentries here. They had not expected him to get this far. But they would come, soon after they failed to flush him from the tunnel. The alien looked about, then headed unerringly toward the sand banked against the wall of the pumping station. He dug until he had made a long hollow then let his weary body fall into the shallow place and began piling sand over his legs. When he had covered all of himself except one arm, he burrowed it down until he was completely hidden from sight. "How can such a man be stopped ?" Srtes asked. His face was drawn and gray, as though he had suffered some great defeat. off to sleep for he stayed in the sand for several hours, and did not emerge until shortly before daylight. Evidently he had first made an opening through which to observe, for there were no guards about when he stood up and shook the sand from his body. He must also have studied all his surroundings. He had reached the city's end. The wall ahead of him was without a gate. He had been sent on a foredoomed errand. Though I had been acting under orders, I felt a kind of shame at the part I had played in the deception. Even then, however, he was not defeated. He struck out without delay to his right where there were few sentries, using his rooftop technique when needed, and reached a side gate within an hour. He dispatched the final sentry by dropping on him from a convenient balcony -- he was probably too exhausted to risk a fight -- and let himself out through the gate. He walked with jaded steps back the way he had come, skirting the outside wall closely. At last he reached the meadow for which he had started seven hours earlier. He must have guessed before this that the story of the waiting space ship was a hoax. But, giving the last of his strength, and hoping against hope, he had fought his way there. When the first rays of the morning sun showed him that the meadow was bare and empty his raw courage deserted him. He fell face forward on the red sand. "I suggest we conclude our project with a final vote before we leave," Srtes said, a few minutes after we watched the alien come to the end of his resources. "I am certain no one of you can have any doubts as to what our decision must be." His passive face betrayed no emotion. "Our plan, decided on soon after we learned of the Humans' existence," Srtes' voice droned on, "was to make an early contact. If the (Continued on page #)  Illustrated by Ed Emsh Every manager dreams of a miracle team... Well, Pops finally got his hands on one and baseball was never the Priority Rating: Routine. nile Affairs To: All Planetary Police Organizations All Interplanetary Patrol Units # Sectors #; #; # ; # Subject: Juvenile detention escapee Muko Zilo All law enforcement agencies are hereby informed of the escape of Muko Zilo from the Juvenile Re same again! habilitation Center on Philey # Raff #, Sector #. Escapee is presumed to have fled the planet in a stolen space yacht # Stellar Class lly range unlimited. His probable destination is unknown. Escapee is not considered dangerous. He possesses low-grade intelligence and has no psi ability higher than Class F. mediately upon detention. A# season of # was only two weeks old, and Manager Pops Poppinger wished it was over and done with. Since opening day his Pirates had managed to lose fourteen games while winning none, and Pops had only the Baseball Managers' Tenure Act of # to thank for the fact that he was still gainfully employed. As a matter of fact, he had that same Act to thank for his regular paychecks during the # and # seasons. "But it can't last," he muttered. "Congress will repeal the thing, and cite me as the reason." He strode through the locker room without a glance at his lounging ballplayers, entered his private office, and slammed the door. If a Do Not Disturb sign had been available, he would have hung it out. He did not want to talk to anyone, especially to anyone wearing the uniform of the Pirates. He dropped an armful of newspapers on his desk, tilted back in his chair until he could get his size thirteen feet in a comfortable position, and opened the top paper to the sports pages. The headline "In the venerable days of yore," the article said, "when professional baseball organizations found it necessary to attach themselves to some unfortunate city in the mistaken belief that civic loyalty would induce the population to attend games in person and pay for the privilege, die fair city of Pittsburg spawned the baseball Pirates. The record book says, if you care to believe it, that back in the sixties the Pirates won five consecutive world championships. "Those days of myth and fable are far behind us. The Pirates wouldn't know how to take a game as a gift. They amply demonstrated this yesterday, when their opposition was stricken with paralytic generosity. The Dodgers committed six errors and presented the Pirates with nine unearned runs. But the Pirates lost, twenty-seven to nine." Pops carefully folded the paper, and tossed it over his shoulder. "Bah!" he said, striking a match. He puffed deeply. "Let 'em rave. I ain't got any ballplayers, but I got lots of tenure." He reached for antossed that one aside without reading it. A knock rattled the door, and Dipsey Marlow, the Pirates' thirdbase coach, opened it a crack and stuck in his large, grinning face. "Scram!" Pops snapped. "Some kid here to see you, Pops." "Tell him I got a bat boy." "Oh, he's older than that -- I think. He's got a letter for you." Pops straightened up, and grinned. "From Congress?" "It's from Pete Holloway." "Send him in." The kid shuffled in awkwardly. He was not taller than five-feetfive, and he looked just about fivefeet-five wide. He was not fat -- in fact, there was an unhealthy thinness about his freckled face, and his overly large ears gave his features a whimsical grotesqueness. His was the original square build. He was shaped like a box, and he moved like one. He dragged to a stop in front of Pops' desk, fumbled through four pockets, and came up with a letter. "Mr. Poppinger?" The high, squeeky voice made Pops' ears ring. "I'm ashamed to admit it," he said. "But I am." "Mr. Holloway told me to give this to you." "The last I heard of Pete Holloway, he was lost in the woods up in Maine." "He still is, sir. I mean, he still lives in Maine." "You came clear out here to California just to give me this?" "Yes, sir." Pops took the envelope, and ripped it open. "Dear Pops," he read. "This here kid Zile is the most gawdawful ballplayer I ever see on two legs. He is also the luckiest man south of the north pole. Put him out in center with a rocking chair and a bottle of beer and every ball hit to the outfield will drop right in his lap. He'll even catch some of them. Sign him, and you'll win the pennant. Yours, Pete. P.S. He is also lucky with the bat." Pops scratched his head, and squinted unbelievingly at Zile. "What d'ya play?" "Outfield," Zile said, and quickly corrected himself. "Outfield, sir." "Where in the outfield?" "Anywhere, sir. Just so it's the outfield, sir." Pops wasn't certain whether he should throw him out, or go along with the gag. "I got three outfielders that get by. How about second or short? Between first and third I got nothing but grass." "Oh, no sir. Mr. Holloway had me play short, and I made nine errors in one inning. Then he moved me to the outfield." "I'm surprised he didn't kill you," Pops said. "But you played for Pete?" "Yes, sir. Last summer, sir. I went to see him a week ago to find out when I could start playing again, and he said he thought you could use me, because your season started before his did." "What'd you bat?" "Six forty, sir." Pops winced. "What'd you field?" "A thousand, sir. In the outfield. It was -- zero, in the infield." Pops got up slowly. "Son, Pete Holloway is an old friend of mine, and he never gave me a bad tip yet. I'll give you a tryout." "That's very kind of you, sir." "The name is Pops. And it ain't kind of me, after what happened yesterday." of the dugout with Ed Schwartz, the club secretary, when the new Pirate walked out onto the field. Pops took one look, clapped his hand to his forehead, and gasped, "My God!" "Okay," Ed said. "You told me you wanted to use him. I told you I d find him a uniform. I didn't guarantee to find him one that fit. He just isn't made the way our uniforms are made, and if I were you I'd make sure I wanted to keep him before I called the tailor." Pops walked over to the thirdbase coaching box, where Dipsey Marlow was standing watching batting practice. The Brooklyn dugout had just gotten its first incredulous look at Zilo, and Pops waited until the uproar faded somewhat before he spoke. "Think Pete is pulling my leg?" he said. "It wouldn't be like Pete, but it's possible." "The way things is going, he ought to know better. I'll look him up when the season is over, and shoot him." Dipsey grinned happily. He seemed rather pleased with himself, in spite of yesterday's loss. As third-base coach he'd been the loneliest man in the western hemisphere for seven straight days while the Pirates were being shut out without a man reaching third. Even if the Pirates were losing, he liked to have some traffic to direct. "You got nothing to lose but ball games," he said. Zilo had taken his place in the batter's box. He cut on the first pitch, and the ball dribbled weakly out towards the pitcher's mound. "Like swatting flies," Dipsey said. Zilo poked two more lazy ground balls back at the pitcher, and lifted a pop fly to the third baseman. Apparently satisfied, he borrowed a glove and wandered out to left field. He dropped a couple of balls that were hit right at him, and if a ball wasn't hit right at him he couldn't get near it. "It's a joke," Pops said. "Pete must have seen him catch one. That's what he means by him being lucky." Dipsey walked out to left field to talk with Zilo. He came back looking foolish. "The kid says it's all right -- he's just testing the atmosphere, or something like that. It'll be different when the game starts." "He says he hit six forty," Pops said dreamily. "You going to use him?" "Sure I'll use him. If I'm gonna shoot Pete, I gotta have a reason that'll stand up in court. As soon as we get ten runs behind, in he goes." Pops headed back towards the dugout, and the tourists that were trickling into the grandstand lifted a lusty chorus of boos. Pops scowled, and ducked into the dugout out of sight. The dratted tourists were ruining the game. There had been a time when a manager could concentrate on what he was doing, but how was he supposed to concentrate with a mob of howling spectators literally hanging over his shoulder and shouting advice and comments into his ear? It got on the players' nerves, too. There was the Giants' Red Cowan, who'd been a good pitcher until they opened the games to tourists. The noise rattled him so he had to retire. And now so many tourists were showing up that they were talking about enlarging the stands. "Why can't they stay home and see it on TV, like everybody else?" Pops growled. "Because they pay money, that's why," Ed Schwartz said. "There's a novelty or something in seeing a ball game in the flesh, and it's getting so some of these tourists are planning their vacations just so they can do that. Bill Willard -- you know, the L.A. Times man -- he was saying about half of these tourists come to California just to see a few National League games. The American League is getting the same treatment over in Arizona. And it's getting more profitable every year." "I don't mind their watching," Pops said, "if only they'd keep their mouths shut. When I first came up, there was never anyone around during a game except the TV men, and they never shouted. Even the newspaper men watched on TV. Now they camp here during the season, and you can't go out after the morning paper without finding one on the steps waiting for an interview." "You might as well get used to it. They're even talking about putting up some hotels for the tourists, so they won't have to commute from Fresno to sec the games." Pops sat down and borrowed Ed's pen to make out his lineup. Ed looked over his shoulder, and said, "How come you're not using that new guy?" "I'm saving him," Pops said, "until we get far enough behind." "You mean until the second inning," Ed said, and ducked as Pops fired a catcher's mask. The game started off in a way sadly familiar to Pops. The Dodgers scored three runs in the first inning, and were threatening to blast the Pirates clear out of the league. With the bases loaded and one out, the Pirate third baseman managed to hang onto a sizzling line drive and turn it into a double play. Pops sank back and breathed easier, but not for long. Lefty Effinger, the Pirate pitcher, spent the afternoon falling out of one hole into another. In nine innings he gave up a total of seventeen hits, but a miraculous series of picked-off runners, overrun bases and double plays kept the Dodgers shut out after those first three runs. In the meantime, Dodger pitcher Rube Ruster was having one of his good days. He gave up a scratch single in the second and a walk in the fourth, and by the ninth inning he had fanned twelve, to the general amusement of the hooting, jeering tourists. The last of the ninth opened with Ruster striking out the first two Pirates on six pitches, and the Pirates in the dugout started sneaking off to the dressing room. Then first baseman Sam Lyle ducked away from an inside pitch. It hit his bat, and blooped out over the infield lor a single. Pops called for the hit-and-run, and the next batter bounced a perfect double-play ball at the Dodger shortstop. The shortstop threw the ball into right field, and the runners got to second and third. Ruster paced angrily about the mound, and then walked the next batter on four pitches. Pops jumped out of the dugout, and called time. He searched the bench, and saw Zilo looking at him expectantly from the far end. "Hit six forty, did he?" Pops muttered, and yelled, "Zilo!" Zilo bounced up, beaming. "Yes, sirr "Get out there and hit!" "Yes, sir!" He shuffled out towards the plate, and the uproar the tourists sent up when they saw him rocked the grandstand. From the third-base coaching box, Dipsey Marlow called time again, and hurried over to the dugout. "You off your rocker? We got a chance to win this one." "I know." "Then let's get that thing out of there, and use a left hander." "Look," Pops said. "You know derned well the way Ruster is pitching we're lucky to get a foul off of him. That hit was luck, and the error was luck, and the base on balls happened only because Ruster got mad. He'll cool off, now, and the only thing that keeps this going is luck. Pete says the kid's lucky. I want some of that luck." Marlow turned on his heel, and went back to his coaching box. Ruster coiled up and shot a bullet at home plate. Zilo swatted at it awkwardly -- and popped it up. The second baseman backed up three steps, waved the rest of the infield away, and got ready to end the game. The Pirate baserunners, running furiously with two out, came down the stretch from third in a mournful procession. Zilo loped along the base path, watching the Dodger second baseman and the ball. The ball reached the top of its arc, and suddenly seemed to carry. The second baseman backed confidently into position, changed his mind, and backed up again. Suddenly he whirled and raced towards center field with his eyes on the misbehaving ball. The centerfielder had already trotted in towards the infield, and he picked up speed and came on at a rush. The second baseman leaped for the ball. The centerfielder dove for it. Neither man touched it, and they went down in a heap as the ball frolicked away. The lumbering Zilo crossed home plate before the startled rightfielder could get to the ball. The Pirates had won, four to three, and they hoisted Zilo to their shoulders and bore him off to the dressing room. Pops went over to the Dodger dugout to claim the ball. When he came back, he found Dipsey Marlow still standing in his third-base coaching box, staring vacantly towards the outfield. "Luck," Pops said, and gently led him away. brisk little president, flew over from L. A. that evening and threw a victory celebration in the ultramodern building that housed the National League Offices. All the Pirates were there, and those that had families brought them. Women and children congregated in one room and the men in another. Champagne and milk shakes flowed freely in both rooms. National League President Edgar Rysdale looked in on the party briefly, beaming approval. A team in a slump was bad for all the teams -- bad for the league. When the race was a good one, fans frequently paid a double TV fee, watching two games at once, or, if they had only one set, switching back and forth. If one team was floundering, National League fans would watch only one game -- or none. They might even patronize the American League. So President Rysdale was not unhappy, and neither were the other owners, who stopped by to sample the champagne and talk shop with Wilks. Even Fred Carter, the Dodger Manager, did not seem mournful, though Zilo's freak pop fly had ruined a nine-game winning streak for him. He backed Pops into a corner, and said with a grin, "I been watching pop flies for thirtyfive years, and I never saw one act like that. # Pops shrugged. "I been watching baseball forty-five years, and I see something new seven times a week." "Just the same, the next time that kid comes up, I pass out the butterfly nets. He don't look like a hitter. Where'd you get him?" "Pete Holloway sent him out." Carter arched his eyebrows. "He must have something, then." "Pete says he ain't got a thing except luck." "Ain't that enough? Think I'll go over and watch the Reds and the Giants. Want to come?" "Nope. Now that I finally won one, I'm gonna get some sleep tonight." Pops saw Ed Schwartz talking with Zilo, and he wandered over to see what line the club secretary might be handing out. Ed was talking about the old days, and Zilo was listening intently, his eyes sparkling. "Each team had its own city," Ed said, "and its own ball park. Think of the waste that involved. There were always four parks that weren't in use, and more when day and night games were mixed up. Then there was all that traveling expense. Our hotel bill for the season used to look like the national debt, and the train and plane fares weren't any better. It was rough on the players, too, with all that traveling, and getting traded just as they got settled somewhere, or maybe trying to keep up one home during baseball season, and another one between seasons. Putting the entire league in one place solved everything. The climate is wonderful, and we almost never have a game postponed because of bad weather. We have two fields, and they're used twice a day, for two afternoon and two night games. Each club has its own little community where its personnel lives. Baseball, California, is growing, boy, and lots of players are settling here permanently and buying their own homes. You'll want to, too. It's a wonderful place." "It's a soft place for club secretaries," Pops growled. "Ed used to have to worry about baggage, train schedules, hotel reservations, and a all he has to do is get the equipment moved a couple of hundred yards from one park to the other, now and then, and he gripes about it. Has he stopped talking long enough to get you settled?" "Oh, yes, sir," Zilo said. "I'm rooming with Jerry Fargo." "All right. Gome out early tomorrow. You gotta learn to catch a fly ball without getting hit on the head." Dipsey Marlow nudged Pops' arm, and pulled him aside. "Going to play him tomorrow?" "Might. We could use a little luck every day." "I been listening to the big boys. Know what they're going to do? Put up a flock of temporary stands at World Series time. They think they might get fifteen thousand people out here for every game." "That's their business," Pops said. "Just tell me why anyone wants to take a trip and pay a stiff price to see a ball game, when he can sit at home in his easy chair and see it for fifty cents?" "People are funny," Pops said. "Sometimes almost as funny as ball players." President Wilks came over and placed a full glass in Pops' hand. Pops sipped the champagne, and grimaced. "It's all right, I guess. But it'll never take the place of beer." "Finish in first division," Wilks said, "and I'll buy you enough beer to take you through the off season." Pops grinned. "How about putting that in my contract?" "I'll take care of it first thing in the morning." He grinned and prodded Pops in the ribs, but behind the grin his expression was anxious. "Do you think we have a chance?" "Too early to say. Sure, we only won one out of fifteen, but we're only ten games out of first. If we snap out of it -- well, the season's got a long way to go." "I hope you snap out of it," Wilks said. "Managers have tenure, but presidents haven't." Pops found a bottle of beer to kill the taste of the champagne, and he made a quiet exit after instructing Marlow to get the players home to bed at a reasonable hour. The National League's two playing fields were a blaze of light, and the shouts of the two crowds intermingled. There seemed to be a lot of tourists on hand. Pops walked slowly back to Pirateville, grumbling to himself. He passed the mansion which had been designed for the manager, and which he had turned over to Dipsey Marlow, who needed space for his eight kids. Pops lived in a smaller house a short distance down the street. His middle-aged daughter Marge kept house for him, and she was already in bed when he got home. She didn't like baseball. Priority Rating: Routine. nile Affairs To: All Planetary Police Organizations , Sectors # ; #; #; #. All Interplanetary Patrol Units , Sectors # ; #; #; # . Subject: Juvenile Detention Escapee Muko Zilo. Reference: Previous memorandum #B#D#. Information indicates that an unidentified ship , possibly that of Escapee Zilo, traveled on a course roughly parallel to Trade Route #B, which would take it into or through your sectors. Because of the time elapsed since his escape, it is assumed that Zilo has found an effective planetary hiding place. Immediate investigation requested. Escapee is not -- repeat not -- dangerous. upon detention. series against the Cubs with Zilo in left field. He figured the youngster would do the least damage there, since he was pitching Simp Simpson, his best right hander, and the Cubs had seven left-handed batters in their lineup. His strategy seemed to be sound. In the first six innings only two balls were hit to left. One was a line drive single, which Zilo hobbled for an error as the runner reached second. The other was a foul fly on which Zilo seemed about to make a miraculous catch until his feet got tangled up and spilled him. At the plate he waved his bat futilely and struck out twice while the Cubs were taking a five-run lead. In the last of the sixth the Pirates got men on first and second, and it was Zilo's turn to bat. Dipsey Marlow called time, and as the tourists hooted he strode back to the dugout. "Take him out," he said. "Why?" Pops said. "He's still batting .#. That's better than anyone else on this team." "You gotta understand this luck thing. Yesterday it was luck to put him in. Today it's luck to take him out. I found a spider in my locker, today, and that means..." "Hit and run on the first pitch," Pops said. Zilo fanned the air lustily, and dribbled a grounder down to the first baseman. As he reached for the ball, it took an unaccountable eight-foot bounce over his head, and rolled into the outfield, picking up speed. Zilo pulled up at first, breathing heavily, and the two runners scored. Sam Lyle followed with a lazy fly ball to right. Zilo moved off first base, and halted to watch the progress of the ball. The right fielder seemed to be having difficulties. He wandered about shading his eyes, backed up, finally lost the ball in the sun. The center fielder had come over fast, and he shouted the right fielder away, backed up slowly, and finally turned in disgust to watch the ball drop over the fence. Lyle trailed the floundering Zilo around the bases, and the score was five to four. Three fast outs later, Dipsey Marlow returned to the dugout and squeezed in beside Pops. "I take it back," he said. "I won't argue with you again the rest of the season. But that spider of mine... Pops cupped his hands, and shouted. "Let's hold 'em, now! Let's win this one!" "... this spider of mine was in my sweat shirt, and my old mother always used to say spider in your clothes means money..." "We got two hundred twentyfour games to go," Pops said. "Get to work, and pick us off a sign or two." Zilo came up again in the eighth, and got a rally started with a pop fly that three infielders chased futilely. He got to second on a ground ball that took a bad hop, and scored on a soft line drive that curved sharply and landed between the outfielders. Two more runs scored on hits that were just about as unlikely, and the Pirates took a two-run lead into the ninth. The Cubs came back with a vengence. The first two batters lashed out sizzling singles. Pops prodded his bullpen into action, and went out to talk to Simpson. They stood looking down on the next Cub batter, the burly catcher Bugs Rice. "Don't let him pull one," Pops said. "He won't pull one," Simp said determinedly, through clenched teeth. Rice did not pull one. He didn't have to. He unloaded on the first pitch, and drove it far, far away into left field, the opposite field. Pops sat down with the crack of the bat, and covered his face with his hands. Suddenly the men on the bench broke into excited cheers, and there was a scattering of applause from the tourists. Pops looked up, saw runners on second and third, saw the scoreboard registering one out. "What happened ?" he yelled. "Zilo caught it," Dipsey Marlow said. "Took so much time getting the ball back to the infield that the runners had time to touch up and advance, but he caught it." "He didn't. I know a homerun when I see one, and that ball was gone. I can tell by the way it sounds, and I can tell by the way it leaves the bat. I heard that one,' and I saw it go. It should have cleared the fence by twenty feet." "Your eyes aren't as young as they used to be. Zilo caught it back by the fence." Pops shook his head. He huddled down in a corner of the dugout while Simpson fanned one batter and got another on a tap to the infield, and the Pirates had won two in a row. Pirates pushed their winning streak to twelve, lost one, won eight more. They were twenty and fifteen, and in fourth place. Zilo became something of a national sensation, and he kept his batting average around the .# mark. He even got another home run, on a ball to the outfield that took crazy bounces in nineteen directions while Zilo lumbered around the bases. The rest of the team took courage and started playing baseball. But not even Zilo could carry the Pirates above fourth place. Pops' pitching staff was a haphazard assortment of aching, overage veterans and unpredictable, inexperienced youths. On one day they would be unhittable; on the next they would be massacred, and Pops found to his sorrow that not even luck can overcome a nineteen-run lead. Still, the season drifted along with the Pirates holding desperately to fourth, and Pops began to think they might even stay there, if the luck held out. Then Zilo sprained his ankle. The trainer outfitted him with crutches and applied every known remedy, and a few unknown ones that Zilo suggested, but the ankle failed to respond. "It beats me' the trainer said to Pops. "Things that should make it better seem to make it worse." "How long will he be out?" Pops said gloomily. "I won't even guess. The way things are going, it'll last him a lifetime." Pops breathed a profane farewell to first division. Zilo attended the games in his street clothes, hobbling on his crutches to the far end of the dugout where he watched the games with silent concentration. Oddly enough, for a time the Pirates' luck continued. Ground balls took freakish bounces, fly balls responded to unlikely air currents, and on some days opposition pitchers suffered such a loss of control that they would occasionally wander in and stare at home plate, as though to assure themselves that it was still there. Ollie Richards, the Reds' ace, and one of the best control pitchers in either league, walked ten men in one inning, and left the game on the short end of a six to three score without having given up a hit. Zilo's broad, good-natured face took on an unhealthy pallor. Wrinkles furrowed his brow, and his eyes held a tense, haunted look. The Pirates' luck began to fade, and he grew increasingly irritable and despondent. On the day they slipped to fifth place, he sought out Pops. Pops was feeling despondent enough himself, that afternoon. The Pirates' pitching had collapsed, and for the first time in a month he was back in second division. He hurried through the dressing room towards his office, and Zilo placed a large hand on his arm. "Could I speak with you, sir?" "Sure," Pops said. "Come along." Pops held the door as Zilo swung through on his crutches. He pulled out a chair for him, and got him seated, and settled back with his own feet propped up on his desk. "Ankle any better?" "I'm afraid not, sir." "Takes time, sometimes." "Sir," Zilo said, "I know I'm not a good ballplayer. Like they say, I'm just lucky. Maybe this will be the only season I'll play." "Wouldn't say that," Pops said. "You're young. Luck has took a lot of men a long way in baseball." "Anyway, sir, I like to play, even if I'm not good. And I'd like to have us win the pennant and play in the World Series." "Wouldn't mind having another winner myself, before I retire." "What I'd like to do, sir, is go home for awhile. I think I could get my ankle fixed up there, and I'd like to bring back some friends who could help us." Pops was amused. "Ballplayers?" "I think they'd be better than I am, sir. Or luckier, maybe. Do you -- would you give them a trial?" "I'll give anyone a trial," Pops said seriously. "Mosdy shortstops and second basemen and pitchers, but I'll have a look at anybody." Zilo pushed himself erect on his crutches. "I'll get back as soon as I can." "All right. But leave a little of that luck here, will you?" Zilo turned, and looked at Pops strangely. "I wish I could, sir. I really wish I could." Ed Schwartz took Zilo in to L.A., and put him on a plane. For Maine. And at Baseball, Gal., the Pirates won two more games, and went into a cataclysmic slump. They lost ten straight, and slipped to sixth place. Pops put through a phone call to the Maine address Zilo had given him, and was informed there wasn't such a place. Then he called Pete Holloway. "I wondered what was happening to you," Pete said. "I haven't seen the kid. He showed up here last summer and played a little sandlot ball for me. He never told me where he came from, but I don't think it was Maine. If he shows up again, I'll get in touch with you." "Thanks," Pops said, and hung up. Ed Schwartz sat eyeing him solemnly. "I suppose I better get a detective on it." "Detectives," Pops said, and wearily headed for the field and another Pirate beating. Two more weeks went by. The detectives traced Zilo to Maine, where he seemed to have vanished completely. The Pirates continued to lose, and tottered on the brink of last place. Then Pops received an airmail letter from Zilo -- from Brazil. "I got lost," he wrote plaintively. "Our plane crashed in the jungle, and they won't let us leave the country." Pops called President Wilks into conference, and President Wilks got on the phone to Washington. He knew enough of the right people to make the necessary arrangements and keep the matter out of the papers. Zilo was flown back on a chartered plane, and he brought four friends with him. Ed Schwartz met them in L.A., and rushed them out to Baseball in President Wilks' own plane. They arrived during the fourth inning of another Pirate massacre. "How's the ankle?" Pops demanded. Zilo beamed. "Just fine!" "Get in there, then." Zilo got his friends seated on the bench, and went out to loft a long fly ball over the fence for a home run. The Pirates came to life. Everyone hit, and a ten to nothing drubbing was transformed like magic into a twenty-five to twelve victory. After the game, Zilo introduced his friends- -- John Smith, Sam Anderson. Smith and Jones, Zilo said, were infielders. White and Anderson were pitchers. Ed Schwartz had already taken in their proportions with a groan, and gone to work on the uniform problem. Their builds were similar to Zilo's, but there was much more of them. They were all about six feet six, and they towered over Pops, answered his questions politely, and showed a child-like interest in all that went on about them. Pops called one of his catchers over, and introduced him to White and Anderson. "See what they got," he said. He took Smith and Jones out for a little infield practice, and watched goggle-eyed as they covered ground like jet-propelled gazelles and made breath-taking leaps to pull down line drives. The catcher returned, drew Pops aside, and said awesomely, "They got curves that break three feet. They got sliders that do a little loop-the-loop and cross the plate twice. They got fast balls that I'm scared to catch. They got pitches that change speed four times between the mound and the plate. If you're figuring on pitching those guys, you can get yourself another catcher." Pops turned the ceremony of signing them over to Ed Schwartz, handed releases to four players who weren't worth the space they were taking up on the bench, and went home to his first good night's sleep in more than a month. Priority Rating: Urgent. nile Affairs To: All Planetary Police Organizations All Interplanetary Patrol Units Subject: Juvenile detention escapees All law enforcement agencies are hereby informed of the escape of four inmates of the Juvenile Rehabilitation Center on Philoy , Raff #II  Sector #. Best information is that they have left Philoy. Escapees have high psi ratings, and may use them dangerously. Kindly give this matter toppriority attention, and notify Philoy next day, against the Braves. The Pirates bounced forty hits over and through and around the infield, and scored thirty-five runs. Anderson pitched a no-hit game, and struck out twenty-seven. White duplicated the performance on the following day. Thereafter Pops worked them into his regular pitching rotation. He wasn't sure whether they hypnotized everyone on the field, or just the ball, but as Dipsey Marlow put it, they made the ball do everything but stop and back up. Pops' regular pitchers suddenly began to look like champions with Smith and Jones playing behind them. In spite of their awkward builds, they ranged about the infield with all of the agility of jack rabbits. No one ever measured exactly how high they went up after line drives, but one sports writer claimed they were a hazard to air traffic, and should be licensed as aircraft. They sped far into the outfield after fly balls. Jones playing second, made more catches in right field than the right fielder, and it was not an unusual sight to see Jones and Smith both out in center field contesting the right to a descending ball while the center fielder made a hasty retreat. And both swung murderous bats. The Pirates had won fifty-seven games in a row and rewritten the record book when Zilo timidly knocked on the door of Pops' office. He was carrying a newspaper, and he looked disturbed. "Sir," he said anxiously, "it says here that we're ruining baseball." Pops chuckled. "They always say that when one team starts to pull away." "But -- is it true?" "Well, now -- if we kept on winning the way we are now, we wouldn't do the game any good. People like to see a close race, and if one team wins too much, or loses too much, a lot of people stop watching the games. And that ain't good. But don't let it worry you. We'll do our best to go on winning, and we're still going to drop a few, one of these days, and things will be back to normal. Your friends been playing over their heads and we've been luckier than usual. That can't last forever." "I see," Zilo said thoughtfully. That evening Pops ruefully wished he'd kept his mouth shut. Talking about a slump when you're winning... Anderson got knocked out in the first inning, and lost his first game. White failed the next day, and the Pirates dropped five straight. Then they got off on another winning streak, but the talk about their ruining the game had quieted down. Pops never bothered to remind Zilo how right he'd been. He wasn't going to open his big mouth and jinx the team again. "Those baseball players of yours," his daughter said to him one evening. "You know -- the funny-looking ones." "Sure I know," Pops said. "What about 'em?" "They're supposed to be pretty good, aren't they?" Pops grinned wickedly. "Pretty fair," he said. It would have been a waste of time referring Marge to the record book -- or what was left of it, now. "I was over at the bowling alley with Ruth Wavel, and they were there bowling. They had everybody excited." "How'd they do?" "I guess they must be pretty good at that, too. They knocked all the pins over." Pops grinned again. Marge's idea of a sport was crossword puzzles, and she could go through an entire season without seeing a single game. The thought of Marge as a bowling critic -- or any other kind of sports critic -- amused him. "Nothing unusual about that," he said. "Happens all the time." She seemed surprised. "Does it? The people there thought it was something special." "How many times did they knock all the pins down?" "I didn't count them. They knocked them all down every time. All evening. It was the first time they'd ever played, too." "Natural athletic ability," Pops muttered. He was thinking that they'd never played baseball before, either, except that Zilo told him he'd been coaching them. The more he thought about it, the odder it seemed, but he was not one to argue with no-hit games, and home runs, and sensational fielding plays. No manager would argue with those. To all ships of the Space Nauy Sec tors #, #, # . General Alert. Five escapees Juvenile Repiloting stolen space yacht Stellar Class II. Range unlimited. Have been traced through Sector #. Destination unsurveyed quadrant C#. Contact Base Headquarters Sector # for patrol assignments. Acknowledge Zan First Admiral. a five-team race for first place. The Pirates stayed in first or second, playing either with unbelieveptness. Pops took the race stoically and shrugged off the tourist hysteria that enveloped Baseball, Gal. He was doing so much better that he had imagined in his wildest moments of pre-season optimism that it really didn't matter where he finished. He was a cinch to be Manager of the Year. He might add a pennant and a World Series, or he might not. But a smart manager quits when he's ahead -- especially when he's well along in his sixties. Pops called a news conference, and announced his retirement at the end of the season. "Before or after the World Series?" a reporter called. "No comment," Pops said. The club owners erected their World Series stands early, and the tourists jammed them -- fifteen or twenty thousand for every game. Pops wondered where they came from. National League President Rysdale wandered about smiling fondly over the daily television receipts, and President Wilks sent Pops a load of beer that half-filled his basement. Over in Baseball, Arizona, the American League officials were glum. The Senators had opened up a fifteen-game lead, and nobody cared any longer what happened in the American League. "Three weeks to go," Pops told his team. "What d'ya say we wrap this thing up?" "Right!" Zilo said happily. "Right!" Smith, Jones, Anderson and White chorused. The Pirates started on another winning streak. To all ships of the Space Navy patrolling unsurveyed Quadrant C#. Prepare landing parties for planetary search. This message your authorization to investigate any planet with civilization at level # or below. Contact with civilizations higher than level # forbidden. Space intelligence agents will be furnished each ship to handle highcivilization planets. Acknowledge . Zan First Admiral. When the last week of the season opened, the Pirates were in first place, five games ahead of the Dodgers. A provident schedule put the Dodgers and the Pirates in a three-game series. With twenty-two howling tourists in the stands and half of Earth's population watching on TV, White and Anderson put together no-hit games and the Pirate batters demolished the Dodger pitching staff. The Pirates took all three games. President Wilks threw another champagne party, and the sports writers backed Pops into a comer and fired questions. ' How about that retirement, Pops. Still going through with it?" "I've gone through with it." "Is it true that Dipsey Marlow will take your place?" "That's up to the front office. They ain't asked my opinion." "What if they did ask your opinion?" "I'd faint." "Who'll start the series? Anderson or White?" "I'll flip a coin," Pops said. "It don't matter." "Going to give the Senators a sporting chance, eh?" "No comment," Pops said. President Wilks and League President Rysdale carried him away from the reporters and into the league offices. "We have a proposal from the American League," Rysdale said. "We'd like to know what you think of it, and what you think the players would think of it. They'd like to split up the series, and play part of the games here, and part in Arizona. They think it would stir up more local interest." "I wouldn't like it," Pops said. "What's wrong with the way it is now? Here one year, there the next year. What do they want to do -- travel back and forth between each game?" "We'd start out with four games here, and then play five in Arizona, if one team hasn't won seven by then. And if we needed to we'd come back here for the last four. Next year we'd start out with four in Arizona. It used to be done that way, years ago." "I like it better the way it is. I think the players would, too. One ball park is just like another, so why change around?" "They think we would draw more tourists that way than we would playing in one place. As far as we're concerned, we're drawing capacity crowds now. It might make a difference in Arizona, because they haven't got so many population centers over there." "They just thought of it because it's in California this year," Pops said. "Next year they'd want to change back." "That's a thought," Rysdale said. "I think I'll tell them it's too late to change, but we might consider it for next year." "Good," Pops said. "Next year you can play it in Brazil, for all I care." In the hallway Pops encountered half-a-dozen of his players, crowding around infielder Jones. "What's up?" he asked Dipsey Marlow. "Just some horsing around. They were practicing high jumps, and Jones just cleared eight feet." "So?" "That's a world record by some ten inches. I just looked it up." Affairs: Space ship presumed that jungle unsurveyed quadrant C#. Planet has type # D civilization. Intelligence agents call situation critical, Am taking no action pending receipt of further instructions. Requesting Ministry take charge and assume responsibility . Zan First Admiral . before the series opened, having ordered all of his players to do the same. Marge was out somewhere, but Pops left the night light on, and went off to bed. He didn't sleep, but he was relaxing comfortably when she came in an hour later. She marched straight through the house and into his bedroom. "Those ballplayers of yours -- the funny looking ones -- they were at the bowling alley!" Pops took a deep breath. "They were eh" "They'd been drinking!" Pops sat up and reached for his shoes. "You don't say." "And they were bowling, only -- they weren't bowling. They'd pretend to throw the ball but they wouldn't throw it, and then the pins would fall down anyway. The manager was mad." "No doubt," Pops said, pulling on his trousers. "They wouldn't tell anyone how they did it, but everytime they waved the ball all the pins would fall down. They'd been drinking." "Maybe that's how they did it' Pops said, slipping into his shirt. "How?" "By drinking." He headed for the bowling alley on the dead run. The place was crowded with players from other tegfte. American and National lJfcAie, and quite a few sports 'fers were around. The writers headed for Pops, and he shoved them aside and found the manager. "Who was it?" he demanded. "Those four squares of yours. Jones, Smith, Anderson, White." "Zilo?" "No. Zilo wasn't here." "Did they make trouble?" "Not the way you mean. They didn't get rough, though I had a hard time getting them away from the alleys. They left maybe ten minutes ago." "Thanks," Pops said. "When you find them, ask them how they pulled that gag with the pins. They were too drunk to tell # me. "I got some other things to ask them," Pops said. He fought his way to a phone booth, and called Ed Schwartz. "I got you," Ed said. "They may be back at their rooms by now, but we won't take any chances. Don't worry about a thing -- I'll handle it." "Sure. I won't worry about a thing." He pushed out through the writers, and headed for Bachelor's Paradise, the house where the unmarried Pirates lived with a couple of solicitous houseboys to look after them. Ed Schwartz was already there. All the players were in bed -- except Smith, Jones, Anderson, White and Zilo. The others knew nothing except that Zilo had been concerned about his friends' absence, and gone looking for them. "You go on home," Ed said. "I'll find them." Pops paced grimly back and forth, taking an occasional kick at a piece of furniture. "You find them," he said, "and I'll fine them." He went home to bed, but he did not sleep. Twice during the night he called Ed Schwartz, and Ed was out. He got ahold of him at breakfast time, and learned that no trace of the players had been found. The reporters had gotten ahold of the story, of course, and the headlines mocked Pops over his coffee. Ed Schwartz had notified both President Wilks and President Rysdale, and President Rysdale had called in the F.B.I. The local police were out in full strength, President Wilks hired some private detectives, and by ten o'clock police in every city in the country were looking for the missing Pirates. When Pops got over to the field for the late-morning workout there was still no word. He banned newsmen from the field and dressing room, told Lefty Effinger he might have to start, and went around trying to cheer up his players. The players remembered only too well their fourteen game losing streak at the beginning of the season, and the collapse that had followed Zilo's departure. Gloom hung thickly in the Pirates' dugout. An hour before game time, Pops was called to the telephone. It was Ed Schwartz, in L.A. "I found them," he said. "They're already on their way back. They'll be there in plenty of time." "Good," Pops said. "Bad. They're still pretty high -- all except Zilo. I don't know if you can use them, but that's your problem." Pops slammed down the phone. "Did they find 'em?" Dipsey Marlow said. "Found 'em dead drunk." Marlow rubbed his hands together. "Just let me at 'em. Ten minutes, and I'll have 'em dead sober." "I dunno," Pops said. "Somehow, these guys are different." They made it with time to spare, and Dipsey Marlow went to work enthusiastically. He started by shoving the recalcitrant players into a cold shower, fully dressed. Zilo stood anxiously looking on. "I'm sorry," he said to Pops. "I'd have stopped them, but they went off without me. And they never had any of that alcohol before and they didn't know what it would do to them." "That's all right," Pops said. "It wasn't your fault." Zilo had tears in his eyes. "Do you think they can play?" "Just leave 'em to me," Marlow said. "I'm just getting started." They left them to him, and he came out later, looking frustrated. "I just don't know," he said. "They tell me they're all right, but I think they're still drunk." "Gan they play?" Pops asked. "They can walk a straight line. I won't say how long a straight line. I suppose ycfu got nothing to lose by playing them." "There ain't nothing else I can do," Pops said. "I could start Effinger, but what could I use for infielders?" World Series. Even Pops, who had seen every one for forty-five years as player, manager or spectator, felt a momentary thrill and a clutching emptiness in his stomach as he moved to the top step of the dugout and looked out across the sunlit field. The stands, permanent and temporary, stretched the full length of the foul lines, and they were jammed with tourists. The Standing Room Only signs were up in the box offices, but there really wasn't any of that. Ed Schwartz stood at Pops' elbow, looking at the crowd. "There's something about a hot dog that's different when you buy it at a ball park," he said. "Ptomaine," Pops growled. Clutching his lineup, he strode towards home plate to meet the umpires and Senator Manager Bert Basom. Basom grinned evilly. "Your men well rested? I hear they keep late hours." "They're rested well enough." A few minutes later, with the National Anthem played and the flag raised, Pops watched critically as Anderson took his last warm-up pitches. He warmed up lazily, as he always did, and if he was feeling any after-effects, it wasn't evident to Pops. Feeling better, he returned to the dugout. But Anderson got off to a shaky start. The Senator's leadoff man t ted a tremendous drive back left field, but Zilo made one of sensational, lumbering catches, second batter drove one back through the box. Jones started after it, got his feet tangled up, and fell headlong. Smith Hashed over with unbelievable speed, gloved the ball, and threw to first -- too late. Anderson settled down, then, and struck out the next two batters. In the Pirates' half of the first, Zilo collected one of his lucky hits, and Smith followed him with a lazy fly ball that cleared the fence. The Pirates led, two to nothing. Jones followed, and the first pitch was a called strike. Jones whirled on the umpire, towering over him, his big face livid with rage. His voice carried to the dugout over the noise of the crowd. "You wouldn't fcnow a strike zone if I measured it out for you!" Pops started for home plate, and Jones saw him coming and meekly took his place in the batter's box. Pops called time, and went over to talks to Dipsey Marlow. "Darned if I don't think he's still tight. Think I should lift him?" "Let him bat," Marlow said. "Maybe he'll connect." The pitcher wasted one, and followed it with a curve that cut the outside comer. "Strike two!" the umpire called. Jones' outraged bellow rattled the center field fence. "What?" he shrieked. He moved back around the catcher. The umpire gestured patiently to show where the ball had crossed the plate. Pops started out of the dugout again. The umpire said brusquely, "Play ball." The pitcher wound up again, and as the ball sped platewards Jones suddenly leaped into the air -- and stayed there. He hovered six feet off the ground, and the ball crossed the plate far below his dangling feet. It was missed completely by the startled catcher and bounded back to the screen. The umpire did not call the pitch. He took two steps forward, and stood looking up at Jones. The crowd came to its feet, and players from both teams edged out of their dugouts. A sudden, paralyzed hush gripped the field. The voices from around home plate carried far. "Come down here," the umpire called. "What'd you call that pitch? Strike, I suppose. Over the plate between my knees and armpits, wasn't it?" "Come down here." "You can't make me." "Come down here." "You show me where it says in the rules that I have to bat with both feet on the ground." The umpire moved down the third base line, and summoned his colleagues in for a conference. Pops walked out to home plate, and Zilo followed him. "Jones," Zilo said pleadingly. "Go to hell," Jones said. "I know I'm right. I'm still in the batter's box." "Please," Zilo said. "You'll spoil everything. You've already spoiled everything." "So what? It's about time we showed them how this game should be played." "I'm taking you out, Jones," Pops said. "I'm running in a pinch hitter. Get back to the dugout." Jones shot up another four feet. "You can't make me." The umpire returned. "I'm putting you out of the game," he said. "Leave the field immediately." "I've already left the field." Pops, Zilo and the umpire stood glaring up as Jones glared down. At that critical moment Smith took charge. He walked slowly out to home plate, soared over the heads of those on the ground, and gave Jones a healthy clout on the jaw. Jones descended heavily, and Smith calmly landed nearby, and dried his hands on his trousers. Effective as his performance was, nobody noticed it. All eyes were on the sky, where a glistening tower of metal was dropping slowly down towards the outfield. It settled easily on the outfield grass, while the outfielders fled in panic. The crowd murmured excitedly, and just as suddenly lapsed into silence again. A port opened in the side of the towering, needle-like object, and a landing ramp came down. The solitary figure that emerged did not use the ramp. He stepped off into mid-air, and drifted slowly towards the crowd at home plate. There he landed, a tremendous figure, square like Zilo and his friends, but a startling seven plus feet tall, trimly uniformed in a lustrous brown, with ribbons and metallic braid in abundance. Zilo, Jones and Smith stood with their eyes downcast while the others stared. Anderson and White moved out of the Pirates' dugout and walked forward haltingly. The stranger spoke one crisp sentence, which nobody understood -- nobody, that is, except Zilo, Jones, Smith, Anderson and White. Smith and Jones lifted slowly, and floated out to the ship, where they disappeared through the port. Anderson and White turned, and trudged wearily across the infield, across the outfield, and mounted the ramp. Only Zilo lingered. A few policemen moved nervously out of the stands, and surrounded the ship. The hush continued as the tourists stared and half of Earth's population watched on TV. Pops looked at the ship, at the oversized stranger, at Zilo. Tears streaked Zilo's face. "I'm sorry, Pops. I hoped we could finish it off for you. I really wanted to win this World Series. But I # m afraid we'll have to go." Pops responded absently. "Go where?" "Where I came from. It's another world." "I see. Then -- that's how come you guys played so well." Zilo wiped his eyes, and blubbered miserably. His big, goodnatured face was in the throes of torment. "The others did," he sobbed. "I'm only a class F telekinetic myself, and that isn't much where I come from. I guess you'd call me a moron. I did the best I could, but it was a terrible strain keeping the balls I hit away from the fielders, and stopping balls from going over the fence, and holding balls up until I could catch them. When I hurt my ankle I tried to help out from the bench, and it #yrked for awhile. Sometimes I jijjuld even control the ball enough #I spoil a pitcher's control, but usually when the ball was thrown fast or hit fast I couldn't do anything with it, unless I was in the outfield and it had a long way to go. So I went back where I could get my ankle fixed, and I got the others. They're really good -- all of them Glass A. Anderson and White -- those are just names I had them use -- they could control the ball so well they could make it look like they were pitching. And no matter how hard the ball was hit they could control it, even when they were sitting on the bench." Pops scratched his head, and said dazedly, "Make it look like they were pitching?" "They just pretended to throw, and then they controlled the ball -- well, mentally. Any good telekinetic could do it. They could have done it just as well sitting on the bench, or they could help out when one of our other pitchers was pitching. And Smith and Jones are levitators. They could cover the ground real fast, and go up as high as they wanted to. I had a terrible time keeping them from going too high and spoiling everything. When we hit the ball Anderson and White could make it go anywhere they wanted, and they could control balls the other team hit, and nothing could get past Smith and Jones unless we wanted it to. We won the pennant, and I hoped we would win this World Series, but they had to go and drink some of that alcohol, and I guess Jones would have spoiled it even if we hadn't been caught." The stranger spoke another crisp sentence, and Zilo wiped the tears from his face and took Pops' hand. "Good by, Pops," he said. "It was lots of fun. I really like baseball.' # He walked slowly out to the ship, passed the police without a glance, and climbed the ramp. Reporters were crowding out onto the field, and the stranger waved them back and spoke in English in a booming voice. "You shall have a complete explanation at the proper time. It is now my most unpleasant duty to call upon the man you call your president, to deliver the apologies of my government. Muke Zilo says he did the best he could. He did entirely too much." He floated back to the ship. The ramp lifted, and the police scattered as the ship plummeted upwards. The umpire-in-chief shrugged his shoulders and gestured with his mask. "Play ball!" Pops beckoned to a pinch hitter, got a pitcher warming up to replace Anderson, and walked back to the dugout. "They been calling me a genius," he muttered to himself. "Manager of the year, they been calling me. And how could I lose?" A sports writer leaned down out of the stands. "How about a statement, Pops?" Pops spoke firmly. "You can say that the best decision I made this year was to retire." An official statement was handed out in Washington before the game was over. That the Senators won the game, twenty-three to two, was irrelevant. No one cared, not even the ballplayers. Priority Rating: Routine . nile Affairs To: Milz Woolly Minister of Justice Subject: Escapees from the Juvenile Rehabilitation Center , Philoy, Raff #, Sector #I . A full report on the activity of these escapees has no doubt reached your desk. The consequences of their offence are so serious they have not yet been fully evaluated. Not only have they forced us into premature contact with a Type # D civilization for which neither of us is prepared, but our best estimate is that they have destroyed a notable cultural institution of that civilization. They are juveniles, their only motive seems to be that they were enjoying themselves. Nevertheless they are old enough to know better. I favor a maximum penalty . game had frequently remarked down through the years, was essentially a game of records and statistics. The records were there for all to see -- incredible records, with Jones and Smith tied with a hundred and fortytwo home runs and batting in the vicinity of .#, with Anderson and White each hurling two dozen no-hit games, and with the strike outs, and the extra-base hits, and the double plays, and the games won, and the total bases, and the runs batted in, and the runs scored, and the multitudinous individual and team records that the Pirates had marked up during the season, the record book was permanently maimed. It was not the beginning of the end. It was the end. Who had done all this? Four kids, four rather naughty kids, who, according to the strange man from outer space, were not especially bright. Four kids from another world, who had entered into a game requiring the ultimate in skill and intelligence and training and practice, entered into it without ever playing it before, and made the best players Earth could offer look like a bunch of inept Little Leaguers. The records could be thrown out, but they could not be forgotten. And it could not be forgotten that the four kids had made those records when they weren't half trying -- because they didn't want to make Earth's ballplayers look too bad. Supposing -- just supposing -- the people from outer space were to send a team made up of intelligent adults? No one cared to contemplate that possibility. So it was the end. The Senators took the World Series in seven straight games, and nobody cared. The stands were empty, and so few people paid to see the games on TV that the series ended up a financial catastrophe. A committee met to decide what to do about the aliens' records, and reached no decision. Again, nobody cared. The various awards for the most valuable players and managers of the year and the various individual championships were never made. The oversight was not protested. People had other things on their minds. And when a dozen TV comedy teams simultaneously resurrected an ancient, half-legendary, half-forgotten comedy sketch, they got no laughs whatsoever. The sketch was ( Continued from page # ) Humans proved a race whose physical and mental strength equaled or surpassed our own, prudence would indicate that we seek peace. If we found them weak, we would exterminate them, and take over their world. The dominant factor in our decision was to be our study of the specimen we brought back, and how he conducted himself in t Big Run. We have all seen the ifegfa of that experiment." jttes looked about the room, we all agreed that the only wise course -- in view of our observations -- is to do everything in our power to establish peaceful relations with the Earthmen?" There was no dissenting vote. "When our envoys leave for Earth an honored place will be made for our visitor," Srtes added. The meeting was over, and the fateful decision had been made. For the next great tide much of my work would consist in reporting the tearing down of the Big Run. The alien had believed it to be one of our cities. It was a great deal of work, constructing the Big Run to test one alien specimen, but the results had proven the effort warranted. Now it could be disposed of. Perhaps this very day we would begin demanding the giant testing to bring the ship in on the satellite out of sight of the prying telescopes which no doubt existed on such an invitingly green planet. He was a cautious man and didn't intend to lose any more crew members if he could help it. He could tell by the unusually poor handling of the ship that the crew was still demoralized from the brush with the high I.Q. slugs on that last planet which they had approached so directly. They'd lost three men in that scrap, one of them a highly-valued anthropologist. There were only two more of those left in the freeze locker. Too bad it couldn't have been a radio operator, there were plenty of those on ice. The computer classified it "rabbit" and Montresig was not one to argue , long ears or not! Rabbits Have LO'NG Ears  The Commander's thoughts were interrupted by his second officer who entered without the customary military burp. "I'll forgive you this time, Montresig," said the Commander, "but we can't relax regulations now, can we. Anything new to report on this planet?" "No, Your Loftiness," said Montresig, after giving a belated burp, "there's nothing to add to what we already know, but then we've just come to rest on this clinker of a moon. I don't imagine, however, that we've located our long lost ancestors or our mythical home planet. There doesn't seem to be a race in this galaxy that walks upright on two good legs with two arms, two eyes, nose, mouth and other standard equipment." "Could be we'll find one this time," said the Commander. "We know it's an oxygen planet, and that there are intelligent beings there, judging from the cities we can see and their use of radio." 'Maybe," grumbled Montresig, "but they won't be men. If they're not slugs they'll be talking fish or intellectual spiders, or something equally repulsive. And I can tell you one thing, whatever we find, if it has brains it will want to fight." "Now Montresig, don't be bitter. We've only examined a couple hundred planets. There are many more and you know we'll have to take a look at as many as we can. I tell you, however, we won't take any more chances. Unless we find out they're pretty much like us we won't go near the damn planet." "How do you propose to find that out, Your Loftiness? We can't see anything that small by telescope, we haven't learned much so far by listening to them, and it's pretty dangerous business using the dredge..." "Ah, my dear Montresig, the crux of the matter is that we can tell about them, I believe, from listening to them. Judging from the reports I got from CommunicrAipns, this is the talkingest planet iOe galaxy. They are utilizing the eira e radio spectrum we know and, I suspect, some portions of it we don't know. All they do is talk. uals on that planet jabbering in a dozen different languages. Our language technicians have decoded two of the major tongues already and have fed the information to the main computer. All radio signals in those languages are now being fed directly to the computer and the information is being classified and cross-referenced." Montresig's furry countenance brightened. "Then we won't have to send down the dredge?" "I hope not, Montresig, I do not like to bring strange life forms aboard the ship. Remember planet # in the Dghorzid system?" Montresig shuddered. "I'll never forget. When that monster materialized in the hold I snapped on the stasis field and it had no effect. I tried every last trick in the bag including seven kinds of poison gas. Luckily the dredge operator was able to catch him and throw him back where he came from but the hold was a shambles and two men had to have extensive repair work." "Well," said the Commander, "I don't like the dredge at all, but I suppose it's better than landing and having to do battle with slugs. I swear I was certain there was no intelligent life on that planet. By the way, I'm having an anthropologist thawed out now, that leaves only one more in the freeze locker and we can't operate without one. Take care nothing happens to him, Montresig." Commander Losure made the sign of dismissal and Montresig burped gracefully and withdrew. The Commander signaled communications. After a considerable delay a burp sounded from the speaker on the wall and a voice announced: "Troniff here. May I serve Your Loftiness ?" "Troniff," said the Commander, "the delay is inexcusable. Does the computer have its belly full yet?" "Your Loftiness, the reference tapes are full, but the machine is unable to present a full picture of the dominant life form. It appears, however, that they are much like us in general body shape. Unfortunately, we can get no reference point from which to judge their size. They are exceedingly ferocious and blood thirsty, and apparently war among themselves continuously." "I'm tempted to leave now," said the Commander. "I'll have to use the dredge, I suppose... Are you sure it won't do some good to listen to their communications awhile longer?" The speaker was silent for a moment, then Troniff spoke.' "I don't like to mention this, Your Loftiness, but my engineers have found several unidentified types of emission besides those carrying speech frequencies. They think that one particular type characterized by an extremely broad frequency range just might be transmission of visual images... "I don't believe it," said the Commander. "We've been trying to do that for hundreds of years without success and so far as we've been we've never found another race in the galaxy as far advanced technologically as ours. These people don't even have space flight." "They have artificial satellites up," said Troniff, "We're monitoring signals from one, and from what I gather they're apt to have something up on this moon before long." "Any chance of finding out how they transmit visual images -- if they really do?" "Not a chance," said Troniff. "My engineers can't even conceive of a device that could convert these signals into a picture." "That's all, Troniff. Notify Montresig that he's to meet me immediately in the dredge room with the anthropologist and a dredge operator." The commander sighed. What irony that the only truly peaceful race in the galaxy should be the only one to discover interstellar flight. For four thousand years the Kaar had had their ships and had colonized hundreds of planets until they had lost track of which one they started from. In all that time they had avoided planets with intelligent life, had never found any other ships in space. Now, thought the Commander, we have to go looking for trouble just to satisfy our curiosity as to where we started from. Montresig introduced the newlythawed anthropologist to him on the dredge room balcony and Commander Losure briefed him on the importance of his job. "We don't believe this race has any connection with ours," said the Commander. "It's too savage. And yet, we haven't found another race as far advanced in science, nor one that appears to be so similar to ours. Our problem is to find out a little more about them, their physical size, whether it's safe to contact them, which I personally doubt." "Is it your intention to bring back one of these intelligent beings with the dredge?" asked the anthropologist. "You know better than that, or maybe you don't." said the Commander. "Anyway, you should know that it is against our code of ethics to cause harm to any intelligent being. That dredge is set to reject any living creature capable of a high order of thought and that control is sealed against our use. The idea is to bring back artifacts that might tell us something about the people of the planet... maybe they have a written language and have something that approximates our scrolls, maybe they have drawings. I'd especially like to snag one of the visual image receptors our communications engineers think they have." "The dredge operator is ready," said Montresig. "The computer controls have been switched to this balcony and the stasis beam has been checked." up at the dredge operator in his glassed-in booth high on the opposite wall of the hold. He gave a quick hand signal and transferred f ; attention to the floor of the vast Id below him. A shimmering stiness began to form in the cen of the floor. Commander Losure could feel the tension of his companions as they waited. It was a blind grab ; the dredge operator had no way of knowing what would be scooped up at the end of his force beam. Slowly the mistiness grew more dense, darkening to an impenetrable cloud, and then vanished with an audible snap leaving a strange alien mechanism on the floor of the hold. It resembled a huge cylinder resting on tractor-like treads. From the balcony the men scurrying across the floor seemed dwarfed by the object. Unheeding of any danger they swanned over it, measuring, testing, amassing information to be fed to the computer. "Holy Ghosts of My Departed Ancestors," gasped Montresig, "what is it?" "You know as much about it as I do, my dear fellow," the Commander said. "As soon as the engineers get through poking at it we'll find out what the computer thinks it is." "I'll bet it's a weapon of some sort," said Montresig. "They're almost always fighting down there according to the data we have and there's frequent mention of a device called a hydrogen bomb. If it's what I think it is I have no desire to visit them in person." A figure detached itself from the group of men surrounding the hugh contrivance and came hurrying to the elevator entrance beneath the balcony. In a moment he appeared on the balcony, burped perfunctorily, and handed Commander Losure several sheets of script. The Commander read them into a microphone grill which was part of the remote panel feeding into the main computer. He waited until a red light glowed, indicating that the material had been integrated. He pressed a stud and spoke into the microphone again. "Classify," he said. "Information in storage banks reveals object to be a gun," said the loudspeaker. "Gun: an instrument variously known as revolver, heater, rod, betsy, automatic, typewriter, gat, which refer to. Carried by gunmen, cowboys, mobsters, killers, cons, doughboys, cops, G-men, marines, gangsters and kids, which refer to. Weapon fires projectile known as bullet, lead, shell, slug, which refer to. Solid projectile pierces body of individual causing serious injury and death. It is used with that intention. No information on size of instrument previous to captured speciman which is nearly fourteen zeng... about five and a quarter man-lengths... long. Sample excerpt demonstrating use: 'Blinky snapped the gun from his holster and fired from the hip. (sound of explosion) The big cowpoke grabbed at his chest and blood spurted between his fingers. With a look of surprise on his face he slumped to the barroom floor.' " "What do you make of that?" asked the Commander. "I'd have been suprised, too," said Montresig. "They're bloodthirsty giants," said the anthropologist. "If that's a pocket weapon they'd be so big you couldn't get one into this hold. "I don't believe it," said the Commander. "I think there's something wrong somewhere. Possibly guns come in various sizes. This could be a stationary weapon, perhaps, to blow buildings apart instead of people, though I can't figure out why anybody would want to. I'm going to send the dredge back once more to make sure we aren't being misled." "I think you're wrong," said Montresig. "All evidence does point to a race of giants, evil creatures at best, even if maybe they do have two eyes, a nose and a mouth like us. Not that I don't think it's a good idea to send the dredge back," he added hastily at the sight of Commander Losure's glowering countenance. The Commander signaled to the dredge operator again and they waited while he returned the gun to wherever he got it and fished for something else from the surface of the green planet. The anthropologist cleared his throat. "You can't deny that the telescope shows us the most gigantic cities to be found anywhere in the galaxy." "That doesn't necessarily mean that the inhabitants are physically large, only that there may be a lot of them," said the Commander. "Or both." Their attention turned to the floor of the hold as the opaque cloud rapidly grew darker and vanished again with a snap. Montresig's reaction was the same as before. "Great Shades of My Holy Ancestors," he said. "What is it?" "It is assuredly an animal," said the Commander, "not unlike some we have on our own planet. I'll have the biologists and medics examine it." He turned to the anthropologist. "You go, too, Alfvis." The animal, which had appeared stunned when it first appeared, now began to turn around, making clicking noises on the floor. As the men approached it from all directions it looked about nervously, opened its mouth to show some glistening teeth and proceeded to make a long, harsh noise. Alfvis made the mistake of approaching too closely to the beast which wheeled and kicked him head over heels some distance away. Montresig touched a red button on the railing and stasis beams converged on the animal freezing it instantly. It toppled over and lay stiffly on the floor of the hold. Alfvis dragged himself to his feet and shouted up to the balcony. "Ask the computer about animals with long ears." The Commander spoke into the microphone again. "Four-legged animal, long ears. Classify." "Rabbit," said the computer. "An animal variously known as bunny, hare, coney, peter, uncle wiggly. Strong rear legs. Progresses over ground erratically. Consumes vegetation. Multiplies with great rapidity. Lays egg at Easter Time. It is generally considered timid and is hunted for food. Sample excerpt demonstrating relationship : 'Lon climbed over the stone wall and continued across the woodlot to wards his cabin, the carcasses of rytfiree rabbits slung over his shoulS r... there would be rabbit stew night.' " "Holy Gods in Their Celestial Quarters," said Montresig. "Did you hear that? Is there any question in your mind now about the size and ferocity of these people?" "Considerable," said the Commander. "That computer has made mistakes before, witness that last planet. Those were supposed to be garden snails, those slugs that gave us such a walloping. I don't think we get the right information through to it." "But Your Loftiness," wailed Montresig, "everything adds up, you can see for yourself... their giant cities, their warring on each other, the information the computer gave us... it isn't safe to land on that planet." "No, I suppose not," sighed the Commander. "But do you realize the implications? Here we have a highly advanced race just ready to take off into space... and according to our information they are savage war-making giants. If I bring that news back our Supreme Goodness is apt to issue orders to evacuate several hundred planets and move to some other galaxy -- Let's try the dredge once more." Commander signaled the dredge operator and waited a reasonable length of time before he was informed that something was wrong with it and that it would be some time before repairs could be made. "I give up," said Commander Losure. "I have orders not to land on a questionable planet and I've learned my lesson. Either that computer has a few loose connections or those people are broadcasting pure nonsense. I just don't believe in giants, much less in scientific ones. Get ready to leave, Montresig, and see that you make an accurate written report of this whole situation." "What do we do with the animal, Your Loftiness?" "The dredge is busted, so what do you think we can do with it? Heave it out the airlock. It can stay here on the moon until the first explorers come up from the planet, which won't be long, and they can have rabbit stew." The great ship lifted from the dark moonscape, leaving behind the frozen form of the first earth beinsr to have crossed space, a surprise for the crew of the first manned moon rocket, if not the makings of rabbit stew. yond the sun, the ship accelerated rapidly. The Commander looked up from his desk as Montresig entered smartly with a precision burp. "Alfvis is back in the freeze locker and repairs are going forward on the dredge, but it'll be a long job." "It doesn't matter," said the Commander. "We're going home. I'm committed to bringing back a report on this planet now, but I don't like it and will advise further study of it by other expeditions before any desperate measures are taken such as evacuating the galaxy." "It's funny about that rabbit," said Montresig. "I noticed as we shoved it out the lock that it had semi-circles of some hard metal, probably iron, nailed to its feet." "That is peculiar," said the Commander. "Almost like the shoes we attach to the feests' hooves before the children ride them. Just for the fun of it, Montresig, why don't you give that information to the computer and see what it says?" "Can't," said Montresig. "I wiped the memory tanks clean. I don't think it means much, anyway; a rabbit's a rabbit, shoes or no shoes." The Commander nodded and Montresig burped and withdrew. Watch for this exciting novelette in the next IF! By Don Berry from the stars, only to find a greater loneliness here on Earth... The October issue of IF promises to be one of the most interesting we've ever published. It is an all space-travel issue, with stories that follow the whole history of space exploration -- from the earliest rockets to the final mysteries of the galaxy. Here is a magazine of connected stories, all complete in themselves, but together forming one long, prophetic narrative. And be on the lookout for future issues of IF! There are some wonderful surprises in store for you! Illustrated by Ed Emsh The Short Snorter His saucer was parked in woods, and Mr. Steanot ( from Venus ) was parked in the lobby... woods away from the resort hotel, and of the three two were clearly marked: one with a sign that said it led to the lake, the other pointing toward the golf links. The third pathway was unmarked, and this was the one that inevitably the lovers and the honeymooners took -- the path that Alice and Fred Daniels followed today. The sun was unusually warm for this time of year, but only a few yards along the pathway Fred and Alice were swallowed up by the great and near-great trees of the forest. The sunlight was, except for an occasional patch of light here and there, warded away by the foliage above. The forest was very quiet. The pathway bridged a silent brook, and then, perhaps a third of a mile into the woods, turned abruptly to the left and the woods became even more dense, the pathway narrow. Through the trees to the right at this point was a clearing, an unusual grassy circle perhaps sixty yards in diameter. It was not the clearing itself, however, but, instead, the glint of color in the sunlight that caused Fred and Alice to stop and look. Alice said, "Fred, what is that?" "Don't know," he said. "Something red. Let's look." The two of them turned off the path and made their way through a dismal barrage of thicket to the clearing that lay beyond. When they got there, they saw the circular object -- vehicle might be a better word. It was possibly fifteen yards in diameter. It seemed to be made of three rings, smaller ones bottom and top and the larger one ribbing the center, and to be constructed of some kind of plastic. Between the central and upper rings were set a series of small windows. The entire thing was painted a gaudy red. "What do you think it is?" Fred said. "A flying saucer," Alice said promptly. She laughed a little, but clutched at her husband's arm. "Isn't it?" "I don't know." "But what else would it be?" "I don't know," Fred said again. "Let's look inside." "Fred," Alice said, "You'd better not -- " "Don't be silly," he said, and walked resolutely up to the object and, standing on tiptoe, peered through one of the windows. "What is it?" Alice called from the edge of the clearing. "What do you see?" "It's empty," he called back. "What's inside?" Fred shook his head. "You won't believe it." "What?" "It's got a steering wheel," he called out hollowly. "And some dials." "My goodness," Alice said. "Is it a real one?" "How do I know?" he said, and rejoined her, casting a series of glances uncertainly over his shoulder at the bright red saucer behind him. "What do you suppose we ought to do?" "Tell somebody," Alice said. "I suppose." "Who do we tell?" "I don't know. There must be somebody -- " They looked almost guiltily at each other. "Nobody'll believe us," Fred said. "Why not?" Alice said. "It's here , isn't it?" Fred stopped and thought. "Who knows how long it'll stay?" They looked at each other again. Then Alice said slowly, "If we went back and got the camera -- " Swiftly, they made their way back toward the hotel through the quiet forest. When they got there, they found Mr. Mason, the manager of the hotel, adjusting the badminton net in front of the main porch. Mr. Mason loosed a ready smile. "How's everything?" he said. "Find enough to do?" "Yes, thank you," Fred said to him. "We were just walking through the woods. We came back for our camera. Then we're off again." Mr. Mason nodded. "Find the saucer?" Fred looked at him. "You mean the flying saucer?" The manager nodded again. "I see you did find it. Good. Take a picture of it, by all means. I've already taken a whole batch myself." "You have?" Fred said, frowning. "What's it all about?" "It's a flying saucer," Mr. Mason said. "From Venus. Mr. Steariot, who piloted it, is a guest here. I can introduce you to him if you like. He speaks excellent English." Daniels said, "Wait a minA -- " " # , there's no point in it," Mr. Mason said in a weary tone of voice. "No point in it at all. I took pictures. I tried to get the Army up here. I wrote letters." He shrugged expressively. "It's a cynical age we live in, I guess. Everybody's very polite, but they make it clear they think it's just a gimmick I worked up to get the hotel publicity." He nodded seriously. "The whole trouble's with Mr. Steariot. If he had a light bulb for a head, or seven legs, or talked funny, why, it'd be a different thing entirely. But he looks and acts just like you or I. Here I've got a legitimate flying saucer sitting on my property and you might as well try to tell them it's a -- well, a flying saucer! For all they'll believe me. Now you two have seen it with your own eyes and you don't believe it either." Fred swallowed and looked at Alice for a moment. Then he said, "What did you say his name was?" "Mr. Steariot," Mr. Mason said. "Actually, he's just as happy nobody believes he's from Venus. If they believed it, they'd probably lock him up in jail somewhere or impound his saucer. As it is, he says this is the first vacation he's had in years." Mr. Mason looked unhappily about him. "He's probably in the lounge now. Want to meet him?" Fred said dazedly, "I -- " "Ah, come on," Mr. Mason said. "He won't bite you." He led the way up the steps of the porch and into the lounge and over to where a small, mustachioed man, wearing eyeglasses and appearing to be in his late forties, was working a crossword puzzle in the morning paper. "Mr. Steariot," Mr. Mason said, "I should like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Daniels, also guests here. They have just seen your saucer." "Charmed," Mr. Steariot said, and got to his feet. He shook hands with Fred Daniels. "Are you here for a long stay, Mr. Daniels?" "I'm not sure," Fred said, a little unhappily. "Mr. Mason told us you were from Venus." "I told them about you, Mr. Steariot," Mr. Mason said. "Naturally, they don't believe it any more than anybody else." "No reason why they should," Mr. Steariot said amiably. "No reason in the world, if I may coin a phrase. Dr. Phelps at the Institute didn't believe it either." Mr. Mason said, "Mr. Steariot here had a long interview with Dr. Phelps of the Geophysical Institute at Princeton when he first arrived here on Earth with us." "Oh," Fred said. He gazed uncomfortably at Mr. Steariot. "We didn't mean to interrupt you." "I was only doing the crossword puzzle," Mr. Steariot said. "Do you know a two-letter word for sungod?" Alice said, "Is this your first trip here?" "You mean here to the hotel," Mr. Steariot said, "or to Earth?" "Earth," Fred said, dismally. "My second," Mr. Steariot said. "First trip I wound up near Leningrad. Terrible time. I thought they'd talk English, but they don't, and they thought I was an American, and two of their officials got into the saucer with me, and the only way I could save myself was to take off with them. They're on Venus now." "This accounts," Mr. Mason broke in, "for the way those two high Russian officials suddenly disappeared from sight three years ago. You remember? Everybody thought they'd been liquidated." Fred Daniels looked around the room. A hollow, frightening feeling had come upon him. There were hundreds of questions he could have asked, and yet he wanted nothing so much as to be away from there. His wife Alice, though, was constrained to learn more about Mr. Steariot. She said, "Mr. Steariot, may I ask you something?" "By all means," Mr. Steariot said, and blinked owlishly at her. "Do you," Alice said to him, "carry any money?" It was, Fred Daniels realized, a marvelous question. If there were sham here, this would be the quickest way to -- "Why, of course," Mr. Steariot said, and reached for his wallet. "Let's see -- health insurance -- saucer driver's license -- here, my dear. A five-djino bill." He extracted a yellow banknote and handed it to Alice. The banknote, slightly larger than an American dollar bill, was remarkably similar in other trticulars. It had upon it a pictJflfetaf a flying saucer, the figure #, "Let me sign it for you," Mr. Steariot said, taking out a pen. "You can have it for a souvenier." "Like the short snorters in the war," Mr. Mason, the hotel manager, said. "You remember them, Mr. Daniels? Where people got famous signatures on five and ten and twenty-dollar bills and exchanged them and what not, and they called them short snorters?" "I remember," Fred Daniels said. "Something like that." "Five djinos on Venus," Mr. Steariot said, signing his name with a flourish, "is worth about twenty dollars here on Earth. No official rate of exchange, of course, but from what I've seen, that's about what I'd judge. Here you go." He handed the bill over. "Well, wait, then," Fred Daniels said. "I ought to sign one of our bills for you " "Ah, no need for that," Mr. Steariot said. "No doubt you need twenty dollars worse than I need five djinos." "Don't be ridiculous," Fred said, a little stiffly; and, by now committed, he went into his wallet and came out with a twenty dollar bill. He signed his name to it, using Mr. Steariot's fountain pen. "Wonderful," Mr. Steariot said. "How nice to have met you both." "I feel very badly about this," Mr. Mason, the hotel manager, said to Fred and Alice. The three of them were on the porch outside. "This short snorter business always seems to happen whenever I introduce Mr. Steariot to anyone. Dr. Phelps at the Institute gave him fifty dollars. Can you imagine that?" "It's interesting in its way," Fred said. "It just occurred to me: Mr. Steariot can spend Earth money here, but we can't spend Venus money." "That's true," Mr. Mason said. "On the other hand, Mr. Steariot has never once, to my knowledge, been the one to bring up the subject. I think it's quite painful to him, really. But the same thing inevitably occurs to everybody he meets. You know, let's see the color of your money. I guess people are pretty much the same everywhere -- that is, everywhere on Earth. They judge everything in terms of money, including whether you've even been bom on Earth! 'Let's see your money,' they say to Mr. Steariot, and out he comes with one of those damn five-djino bills, and we're off." "You know," Alice Daniels said thoughtfully, "in a way it's a lesson. Isn't it, Fred? I mean, everybody is money conscious. Maybe too much so. I'm not sorry it cost us twenty dollars to meet Mr. Steariot." 'You may be right," Fred said to her. "You may be right. Who knows, some day this five-djino bill may be a very valuable -- " "There you go again," Alice cut in. "Always putting it in terms of money." "But you're the one," Fred said, "who thought to ask him about it in the first place." "Don't quarrel," Mr. Mason, the hotel manager, said to them. "After all, for you it's just a vacation. For me, I've got this man sitting in my lounge day in and day out doing crossword puzzles and trading short snorters with my guests. Nobody really believes he's from Venus -- nobody important, anyway. It's a little frightening, when you're trying to run a happy hotel. Sometimes I wish he'd go back to whereever he came from." "Well," Fred said, "he's bound to leave one of these days." "Maybe," Mr. Mason said doubtfully. "Offhand, though, I'd say the way he's taking it in, he can't Pete never heard of that old adage about "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander"... The BY didn't love his wives, or that he wanted to see them hurry on into the next world. He always felt real grief when he found himself a widower. But a man must be practical. They were all healthy young women, or at least middle aged when he married them, good insurance risks, and no insurance agent was turning down the business when Pete asked for a policy that big, especially when Pete was putting the cash on the line to pay up the policy when he bought it. That was the most sensible way for a man in the interstellar service to invest hifnoney, Pete said. When he wafiSLft in space traveling at near light sfffild, and time slowed almost to a stop for him, the few months he spent on an expedition meant that nine years passed for a wife on Earth for a Centauri trip, and Sirius meant fifteen, and Altair twenty-five. So a man only saw his wife two or three times between trips, and maybe the last time he saw her he had to take her to the old ladies' home, and the next time he pulled into Earth the insurance company was waiting for him with a check. Safer than stocks, and there was always the possibility that the loving wife might come to an accidental end, which would sadden him, but it meant a double indemnity payment. That sort of satisfied a man's natural desire to have a little speculation attached to his investment. Sally was the seventh. Pete sat fingering the check, feeling genuine sadness at his bereavement. "Lovely girl , # he told the insurance agent. "It makes a man feel empty to come home from the stars and find that his wife has gone to her reward." The insurance man disguised a cynical smirk behind his sympathetic mask. "Yes... a wonderful woman. But it must happen to all of us." He patted Pete's shoulder gently. Pete rose, folded the check carelessly and put it into a pocket. He shook the insurance agent's hand. "You've been very kind. I'll take your card... in case I ever need another policy..." Pete expected to need another policy before he left for his next trip. He felt unhappy about Sally's being gone, but a man mustn't give in to morbid self pity. And hadn't he heard somebody say that a man without a wife was like a spaceship without a motor? He strolled about the city, unimpressed by the changes since his last visit. An interstellar man with as much service as Pete was beyond showing surprise at superficial differences. He was a little annoyed to find that the moving sidewalks were old-fashioned and had been tom out. People now wore little repulsor units on their belts. Walking was tiresome. He stopped at a corner and watched the pedestrians as they whizzed by a few inches off the ground. At least they were clothed ; the nudity of the previous century had been somewhat unnerving even to the blase eyes of a time man. And he was glad to see that the women were back to wearing long, well groomed hair. That period when fashion had called for smoothly shaven heads hadn't suited his taste at all. In fact, none of it seemed to appeal to him very much any more. That was sophistication, the price that must be paid by a man in the interstellar service, watching the centuries go by without belonging to any one of them. He watched a group of young people flit laughing by, felt an unreasoning irritation. They'd be gone and forgotten when he'd made a few more trips. One of the young girls noticed him. She broke from the group and approached. "You're an interstellar, aren't you? I hope you'll join me. I'm Nancy..." Pete straightened up and looked her over. A little young, maybe nineteen, but that meant a lower premium. Nice blond hair, big waves of it that stayed in place even when she was moving fast, and even when she was standing still she seemed to moving. She was really alive, smiling and laughing and talking easily, and in a pleasant low voice. Really healthy -- that slender but nicely rounded body was good for a hundred years. But then, money isn't everything. "A lovely name," he told her. "I like girls with old-fashioned names    Nancy, it seemed, wanted to interview a time man in connection with a thesis, and in this particular age there was no taboo against a young girl introducing herself to a strange man. Pete didn't mind at all being interviewed and having dinner with her and seeing the town with her. And even when he had given her enough material for a dozen theses, she didn't seem in any hurry to break off their friendship. waking hours with Nancy and the other half in the men's beauty parlor. Not that he was old -- a little prematurely gray and somewhat wrinkled from the hard sun of space and the unkind atmospheres of alien planets. And he had his contact lenses changed -- paper was scarce in this era and they were using finer print to stretch the supply. But he was still young. He studied the full length mirror and decided he'd pass for thirty-five. His actual age -- that would be hard to guess. Someday he'd look into the company records and figure it out. But mentally, he told himself, I'm a young man, even though I walked through this city five hundred years ago. A young man in love. They knew in this era how to make it nice for young people in love, if you could afford one of the better places. Pete sat across the table from Nancy at a tiny table on a roof far above the city. The room was crowded, but some trick of design made it seem that they were alone together. There was real music played by real people. Some of the melodies were old ones that brought a mood of nostalgia to the time man, with memories of past loves. But then he looked across at Nancy, with her innocent laughing eyes, and the beauty of her brought a lump to his throat that drove out all the small loves of the past. This was it. This time he was really in love. "Pete," she said, "don't you ever get tired of it? Of jumping through the ages, coming back to find your old friends gone, being a stranger in a strange world? For instance, how about me? You'll be back from Sirius or Altair some day, a year or two older, and I'll be an old woman? How does it really feel?" Pete took her hands and stared earnestly into her eyes. She was more serious than he'd ever seen her as she gazed back at him. "It's not the right way to live, Nancy. A man doesn't really live, in the real meaning of life. A man needs a woman, a wife he can come home to." He squeezed her hands gently. "Nancy, will you marry me?" Her hands trembled in his grasp. "I will, Pete -- oh, Pete, I've been so hoping -- and so afraid. But, Pete, your job...?" He smiled reassuringly. "I'm signed up for a trip, but it's only a short one -- that planet of Proxima Centauri they just discovered is on the list for a complete survey. But I'll be back in -- seven, eight years. Then we can really settle down." She bent over the table and kissed him. "I'll wait, Pete." "No, Nancy. Now. We'll be married first; I'll still be here a couple of months, why waste them? I don't want to take any chances of losing you." "I wanted to hear that, Pete." Her eyes were shining with happiness. "About getting married now, I mean -- there's no chance of your losing me." Pete was serious about settling down after the short trip to Proxima. At least he was serious about it now. But after that trip was over... He didn't think about that sort of thing any more. He had tried to puzzle it out a few times, how he could tell a girl he was making one more trip, and mean it, and then one more and then one more until a happy young girl was suddenly a disillusioned embittered old woman. There was a paradox of conscience here that he had given up trying to resolve. When he said he was making one more trip, he meant it. But at the same time he knew that when he came back he'd sign up for another. If he meant what he said when he said it, even though he knew he'd change his mind later -- His conscience was clear. And of course a man must be practical. His earnings must be invested, and the future provided for. The honeymoon was still new when the insurance agent responded to Pete's call. "I've always believed in insurance," he told Nancy. "Of course, no amount of money could console me if I came back and found that something had happened to you. But people must prepare for the unpleasant things in life." "Of course," said Nancy, who never disagreed with her husband. "We have to be sensible about things. I might have an accident, and so might you. We have to face things like that." The insurance man was a little dazed. He'd never sold a policy nearly as big as the amount Pete had named. "Nobody's had an accident on an interstellar ship in hundreds of years," he assured Nancy. "The rate for your husband will be negligible -- we expect him to be around for a real long time. Now, sir," he told Pete, "your best buy is our family special -- the full value to be paid to the survivor. As I said, the cost for you is trivial, and for your wife..." He thumbed his rate book nervously. Pete wrote a check to pay the policy in full, and the insurance man walked out in a trance, spending his commission. And Nancy hadn't noticed that Pete's signature had gone on a guarantee that he wouldn't resign from the interstellar service for at least two hundred years, objective Earth time. leave began to run out. They sat around evenings adoring each other, not too late, because Pete was a man who needed plenty of sleep or he felt irritable the next day. Nancy never took his bad days seriously. The laughing happiness of youth was still in her eyes, but there was a firmness behind it now, the maturity of a girl who knows how to become a woman. He went down to the spaceport a few times to look over the ship he was signed up for, and took the routine physical. Doctors went over his mind and his body, probing with needles and tubes and questions that were pointless. "What do you think of the popular songs of today, Mr. Cooper?" "What do you remember of your mother, Mr. Cooper?" "Are you interested in girls, Mr. Cooper?" "Do you have a close friendship with any of the other men in the crew, Mr. Cooper?... The routine this time seemed worse than ever. Actually he'd had worse ones, when the medical fashions of the time called for it, but somehow it seemed more annoying this time. "Five hundred years," he told the doctor. "Five hundred years I've been living this life and I know more about it than you ever will. Captain Drago told me on the trip to Altair -- no, Sirius it was, that I was the most devoted man in the service. Pete, he said, when you're aboard, I never worry about the engines, I'd rather have you sitting on them than anybody else. That's the way he talked -- sitting on the engines, he called it..." The doctor watched Pete thoughtfully and made notes on the paper before him. And the next day the mail brought the message that Peter Cooper, Master Engineman First Class, was retired from the service. There was a personal letter of congratulations from an undersecretary, and a notice that his pension would start the first of the following month. "It's a mistake!" Pete told his wife angrily. "Something wrong! They didn't talk to Captain Drago like I told them, and -- " Nancy's eyes were indignant. She sent him steaming back with fire in his eyes, but he couldn't change the decision. He did get as far as the office of the doctor who had asked him all the fool questions, and he saw a paper he wasn't meant to see. It stunned him into temporary silence. But it wasn't true! Positively not! Definite signs of senility, the notes read. Irritable reaction to questioning. Mind wanders, fixes on irrelevancies. Preoccupation with casual remarks of associates... And more. He didn't tell Nancy this, nor did he show her the reply he received to his protest. "While a search of our records indicates a subjective -- chronological age of approximately # years, physiological analysis puts the condition of your body at a much higher figure -- it would be guesswork to try to name a figure. However, recent studies indicate that interstellar personnel with long terms of service tend to age at an increasingly rapid rate, due probably to psychological factors stemming from the knowledge of separation from the natal culture... "We are sorry..." He kept his hair dark and the wrinkles smoothed out and forced the tiredness from his bones. Other things were harder to fake, but Nancy wasn't a demanding wife. She thought he was about thirtyfive, and she thought the blow of being dropped from the service had taken the life from him. She took his part firmly. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, Pete. Not one person in a thousand could pass the examination for the interstellar service -- they're really tough. And we're together." "What will we live on?" Pete demanded, knowing he was being too irritable, but unable to control it. He waved the pension check. "Can we live on that? A fine payment for my years of service." Nancy looked dubiously at the check. "I thought it was a lot... but don't worry, Pete. You have a wife to stand by you." his wife had gone about standing by him, he was almost shocked speechless. Almost. "You signed up as my replacement on the Proxima expedition! But you can't! It's no job for a woman! And you're leaving me alone -- for seven or eight years! They won't take you!" "They already did." She smiled bravely at him. "As the wife of a retired serviceman I had preference. We need the extra money, Pete. And it won't be for long. When I come back, we'll still be young enough to enjoy life, darling. And they pay well -- a few years of sacrifice now will make so much difference in our future..." Pete closed his eyes and thought of how many times he had said the same words to starry eyed young women. It won't be long... we'll still be young... good pay... Her loving lips tenderly brushed his dark hair. On nice days, Pete sits in a rocking chair on the porch with the other old men. He doesn't bother to dye his hair any more and he reads now with a thick glass, complaining about the small type they use nowadays. The attendants laugh off his irritability, and some of the visitors who come to see the other old men don't mind listening to his stories about the interstellar service. When it gets toward dusk, he looks into the sky sometimes as the stars appear. Centaurus isn't really there, not here in the northern hemisphere, but he looks anyway. Out there in space, his wife is doing a man's job. Wonderful woman, Elsie. Not Elsie -- Nancy. How could he have made that mistake. Nancy, a laughing young girl who had grown swiftly into a strong mature woman defending her man and her marriage vows. He leans back and rocks faster then, a smile on his face. Sometimes the visitors see him and shake their heads sympathetically, and sometimes he sees them doing it, but it doesn't matter. They don't know. They don't know about his nest egg, that insurance policy he's going to collect some day now, because he's going to straighten them out down at the interstellar bureau. Captain Drago will straighten them out, and then he's going back into space and support his wife as a man should. And sometimes the smile fades and a tear rolls down his cheeks when he thinks of Nancy growing old and passing away and the insurance man giving him a check and a few words of sympathy. But a man has to be practical about Here's why you should ask for Illustrated by Paul Orban a "Feetch M-D" next time you get a can opener! BY M. don, president of the Piltdon Opener Company, slamming the drafting board with his hairy fist, "I want results !' # Heads lifted over boards. Kalvin Feetch shrunk visibly. "As chief engineer you're not carrying the ball," Piltdon went on savagely. "The Piltdon Can-Opener is trailing the competition. Advertising and Sales are breaking their necks. It's Engineering that # s missing the boat!" "But Mr. Piltdon," remonstrated Feetch unsteadily under his employer's glare, "don't you remember? I tried to... "For two years there hasn't been one lousy improvement in the Piltdon Can-Opener!" roared Mr. Piltdon. "Look at our competitors. The International rips apart cans in three and three-tenths seconds. Universal does it in four." "But Mr. Piltdon -- " "The Minerva Mighty Midget does it in four point two two and plays Home Sweet Home in chimes. Our own Piltdon opener barely manages to open a can in eight point nine without chimes. Is this what I'm paying you for?" Feetch adjusted his spectacles with shaking hands. "But Mr. Piltdon, our opener still has stability, solidity. It is built to last. It has dignity..." "Dignity," pronounced Piltdon, "is for museums. Four months, Feetch! In four months I want a new can-opener that will be faster, lighter, stronger, flashier and more musical than any other on the market. I want it completely developed, engineered and tooled-up, ready for production. Otherwise, Feetch -- " Feetch's body twitched. "But Mr. Piltdon, four months is hardly time enough for development, even with an adequate staff. I've been trying to tell you for years that we're bound to fall behind because we don't have enough personnel to conduct research. Our men can barely keep up with production and maintenance. If you would let me put on a few draftsmen and... "Excuses," sneered Mr. Piltdon. "Your staff is more than adequate. I will not allow you to throw out my money. Four months, Feetch, no more!" Piltdon trudged out of the room, leaving behind him an oppressive silence. How could you set a time limit on research and development? A designer had to dream at his board, investigate, search, build, test, compare, discard. He had always wanted to devote all his time to research, but Piltdon Opener had not given him that opportunity. Twenty-five years! thought Feetch. Twentyfive years of close supervision, dead-lines, production headaches, inadequate facilities and assistance. What had happened, to the proud dream he once had, the dream of exploring uncharted engineering regions, of unlimited time to investigate and develop? Ah, well, thought Feetch straightening his thin shoulders, he had managed somehow to design a few good things during his twenty-five years with Piltdon. That was some satisfaction. What now? He had to hang on to his job. Technical work was scarce. Since the early #'s the schools had been turning out more technicians than industry could absorb. He was too old to compete in the employment market. He couldn't afford to lose any money. Jenny wasn't well. How to meet this four month deadline? He would get right on it himself, of course; Hanson -- good man -- could work with him. He shook his head despairingly. Something would be sure to blow up. Well, he had to start -- "Chief," said Hanson a few weeks later as they entered the lab, "I'm beginning to wonder if the answer is in the hand mechanical type at all." "Got to be," answered Feetch tiredly. "We must work along classical can-opener lines. Departures, such as the thermal or motor-driven types, would be too expensive for mass production." Three new models and a group of cans were waiting for them on the bench. They began testing, Hanson operating the openers and Feetch clocking. "Four point four," announced Feetch after the last test. "Good, but not good enough. Too bulky. Appearance unsatisfactory. Chimes tinny. We've made progress, but we've a long way to go." The problem was tricky. It might seem that use of the proper gear ratios would give the required velocity, but there were too many other factors that negated this direct approach. The mechanism had to be compact and streamlined. Gear sizes had to be kept down. Can-top resistance, internal resistance, cutting tooth performance, handle size and moment, the minimum strength of a woman's hand were some of the variables that had to be balanced within rigid limits. Sector type cutters, traversing several arcs at the same time, had seemed to offer the answer for a while, but the adjusting mechanism necessary to compensate for variable can sizes had been too complex to be practical. There was the everpresent limit to production cost. Hanson's eyes were upon him. "Chief," he said, "it's a rotten shame. Twentyfive years of your life you put in with Piltdon, and he'd fire you just like that if you don't do the impossible. The Piltdon Company is built upon your designs and you get handed this deal!" "Well, well," said Feetch. "I drew my pay every week so I suppose I have no complaints. Although," a wistful note crept into his voice "I would have liked a little recognition. Piltdon is a household word, but who has heard of Feetch? Well," -- Feetch blew his nose -- "how do we stand, Hanson?" Hanson's bull-dog features drew into a scowl. "Piltdon ought to be rayed," he growled. "O.K., Chief. Eleven experimental models designed to date. Two more on the boards. Nine completed and tested, two in work. Best performance, four point four, but model otherwise unsatisfactory." "Hello," said Feetch as an aproned machinist entered carrying a glistening mechanism. "Here's another model. Let's try it." The machinist departed and Hanson locked the opener on a can. "I hope " he turned the handle, and stopped abruptly, staring down open-mouthed. A cylinder of close-packed beans rested on the bench under the opener. The can itself had disappeared. "Chief," said Hanson. "Chief." "Yes," said Feetch. "I see it too. Try another can." "Vegetable soup or spinach?" inquired Hanson dreamily. "Spinach, I think," said Feetch. "Where did the can go, do you suppose?" The spinach can disappeared. Likewise several com cans, sweet potato cans and corned-beef hash cans, leaving their contents intact. It was rather disconcerting. "Dear, dear," said Feetch, regarding the piles of food on the bench. "There must be some explanation. I designed this opener with sixteen degree, twenty-two minute pressure angle modified involute gear teeth, seven degree, nineteen minute front clearance cutter angle and thirty-six degree, twelve minute back rake angle. I expected that such departures from the norm might achieve unconventional performance, but this -- Dear, dear. Where do the cans go, I wonder?" "What's the difference? Don't you see what you've got here? It's the answer! It's more than the answer! We can put this right into work and beat the dead-line." Feetch shook his head. "No, Hanson. We're producing something we don't understand. What forces have we uncovered here? Where do the cans go? What makes them disappear? Are we dealing with a kinetic or a kinematic effect? What motions can we plot in the area of disappearance and what are their analytical mathematical formulae? What masses may be critical here? What transformations of energy are involved? No Hanson, we must learn a lot more." "But Chief, your job." "I'll risk that. Not a word to Piltdon" Several days later, however, Piltdon himself charged into the drawing room and slapped Feetch heartily on the back, causing him to break a pencil point. "Feetch!" roared Piltdon. "Is this talk that's going around the plant true? Why didn't you tell me? Let's see it." After Piltdon had seen it his eyes took on a feverish glint. "This," he exulted, "will make can-opener history. Instantaneous opening! Automatic disposal! Wait until Advertising and Sales get hold of this! We'll throttle our competitors! The Piltdon Super-Opener we'll call it." "Mr. Piltdon -- " said Feetch shakily. Piltdon stared at his chief engineer sharply. "What's the matter, Feetch? The thing can be duplicated, can't it?" "Yes sir. I've just finished checking that. But I'm in the midst of further investigation of the effect. There's more here than just a new type can-opener, sir. A whole new field of physics. New principles. This is big, Mr. Piltdon. I recommend that we delay production until further research can be completed. Hire a few top scientists and engineers. Find out where the cans go. Put out a scientific paper on the effect." "Feetch," bit out Piltdon, his face growing hard. "Stow this hooey. I don't give a damn where the cans goMay I remind you that under our standard patent agreement, all rights to your invention belong to the company? As well as anything you may produce in the field within a year after leaving our employ? We have a good thing here, and I don't want you holding it back. We're going into production immediately." and it had been close, but he'd made it. Beat the time limit by a half-day. The first tentative shipments of Piltdon Super-Openers had gone to distributors along the Eastern seaboard. The first advertisements blazed in selected media. The first reorders came back, and then: "It's a sell-out!" crowed Piltdon, waving a sheaf of telegrams. "Step up production! Let 'er rip!" The Super-Openers rolled over the country. In a remarkably short kitchens from coast-to-coast. Sales climbed to hundreds of thousands per day. Piltdon Opener went into peak production in three shifts, but was still unable to keep up with the demand. Construction was begun on a new plant, and additional plants were planned. Long lines waited in front of houseware stores. Department stores, lucky enough to have Super-Openers on hand, limited sales to one to a customer. Piltdon cancelled his advertising program... Newspapers, magazines, radio, television and word-of-mouth spread the fame of the opener so that advertising was unnecessary. Meanwhile, of course, government scientists, research foundations, universities and independent investigators began to look into this new phenomonen. Receiving no satisfactory explanation from Piltdon, they set up their own research. Far into the night burned the lights of countless laboratories. Noted physicists probed, measured, weighed, traced, X-rayed, dissolved, spun, peered at, photographed, magnetized, exploded, shattered and analyzed Super-Openers without achieving the glimmer of a satisfactory explanation. Competitors found the patent impossible to circumvent, for any departure from its exact specifications nullified the effect. Piltdon, genial these days with success and acclaim, roared at Feetch: "I'm putting you in for a raise. Yes sir! To reward you for assisting me with my invention I'm raising your pay two hundred dollars a year. That's almost four dollars a week, man." "Thank you, Mr. Piltdon." And still, thought Feetch wryly, he received no recognition. His name did not even appear on the patent. Well, well, that was the way it went. He must find his satisfaction in his work. And it had been interesting lately, the work he had been doing nights at home investigating what had been named the Piltdon Effect. It had been difficult, working alone and buying his own equipment. The oscillator and ultra microwave tracking unit had been particularly expensive. He was a fool, he supposed, to try independent research when so many huge scientific organizations were working on it. But he could no more keep away from it than he could stop eating. He still didn't know where the cans went, but somehow he felt that he was close to the answer. When he finally found the answer, it was too late. The Borenchuck incident was only hours away. As soon as he could get hold of Piltdon, Feetch said trembling, "Sir, I think I know where those cans are going. I recommend -- " "Are you still worrying about that?" Piltdon roared jovially. "Leave that to the long-hairs. We're making money, that's all that counts, eh Feetch?" That night, at six-ten p.m., the Borenchuck family of Selby, South Dakota, sat down to their evening meal. Just as they started in on the soup, a rain of empty tin cans clattered down, splashed into the soup, raised a welt on the forehead of Borenchuck senior, settled down to a gentle, steady klunk! klunk! klunk! and inexorably began to pile up on the dining-room floor. They seemed to materialize from a plane just below the ceiling. The police called the fire department and the fire department stared helplessly and recommended the sanitation department. The incident made headlines in the local papers. The next day other local papers in widely scattered locations reported similar incidents. The following day, cans began falling on Chicago. St. Louis was next, and then over the entire nation the cans began to rain down. They fell outdoors and indoors, usually materializing at heights that were not dangerous. The deluge followed no pattern. Sometimes it would slacken, sometimes it would stop, sometimes begin heavily again. It fell in homes, on the streets, in theatres, trains, ships, universities and dog-food factories. No place was immune. People took to wearing hats indoors and out, and the sale of helmets boomed. All activity was seriously curtailed. A state of national emergency was declared. Government investigators went to work and soon confirmed what was generally suspected : these were the same cans that had been opened by the Piltdon SuperOpener. Statisticians and mathematicians calculated the mean rate of can precipitation and estimated that if all the cans opened by Piltdon openers were to come back, the deluge should be over in fifteen point twenty-nine days. Super-Opener sales of course immediately plummeted to zero and stayed there. Anti-Piltdon editorials appeared in the papers. Commentators accused Piltdon of deliberately hoaxing the public for his own gain. A Congressional investigation was demanded. Piltdon received threats of bodily injury. Lawsuits were filed against him. He barricaded himself in the plant, surrounded by bodyguards. Livid with fury and apprehension, he screamed at Feetch, "This is your doing, you vandal! I'm a ruined man!" A falling can caught him neatly on the tip of his nose. "But sir," trembled Feetch, dodging three spaghetti cans, "I tried to warn you." "You're through, Feetch!" raved Piltdon. "Fired! Get out! But before you go, I want you to know that I've directed the blame where it belongs. I've just released to the press the truth about who created the Super-Opener. Now, get out!" "Yes sir," said Feetch paling. "Then you don't want to hear about my discovery of a way to prevent the cans from coming back?" Klunk ! A barrage of cans hit the floor, and both men took refuge under Piltdon's huge desk. "No!" yelled Piltdon at Feetch's face which was inches away. "No, I What did you say?" "A small design improvement sir, and the cans would disappear forever." Klunk! "Forever, Feetch?" "Yes sir." Klunk! Klunk! "You're positive, Feetch?" Piltdon's eyes glared into Feetch's. "Sir, I never make careless claims." "That's true," said Piltdon. His eyes grew dreamy. "It can be done," he mused. "The New Type SuperOpener. Free exchanges for the old. Cash guarantee that empty cans will never bother you. Take a licking at first, but then monopolize the market. All right, Feetch, I'll give you another chance. You'll turn over all the details to me. The patent on the improvement will naturally be mine. I'll get the credit for rectifying your blunder. Fine, fine. We'll work it out. Hop on production, at once, Feetch." Feetch felt himself sag inwardly. "Mr. Piltdon," he said. "I'm asking only one favor. Let me work full time on research and development, especially on the Piltdon effect. Hire a couple of extra men to help with production. I assure you the company will benefit in the end." "Damn it, no!" roared Piltdon. "How many times must I tell you? You got your job back, didn't you?" The prospect of long years of heavy production schedules, restricted engineering and tight supervision suddenly made Kalvin Feetch feel very tired. Research, he thought. Development. What he had always wanted. Over the years he had waited, thinking that there would be opportunities later. But now he was growing older, and he felt that there might not be a later. Somehow he would manage to get along. Perhaps someone would give him a job working in the new field he had pioneered. With a sense of relief he realized that he had made his decision. "Mr. Piltdon," Feetch said. "I -- " klunk! -- "resign." Piltdon started, extreme astonishment crossing his face. "No use," said Feetch. "Nothing you can say -- " klunk! klunk! klunk! -- "will make any difference now." "But see here, the New Type Super-Opener... !" "Will remain my secret. Good day." "Feetch!" howled Piltdon. "I order you to remain!" Feetch almost submitted from force of habit. He hesitated for a moment, then turned abruptly. "Good-day," said Feetch firmly, sprinting through the falling cans to the door. while, was a good thing to have. His supply was running pretty low. He was not having any luck finding another job. Although the cans had stopped falling on the fifteenth day, as predicted by the statisticians, industry would not soon forget the inconvenience and losses caused by the deluge. It was not anxious to hire the man it regarded as responsible for the whole thing. "Feetch," the personnel man would read. "Kalvin Feetch." Then, looking up, "Not the Kalvin Feetch who -- " "Yes," Feetch would admit miserably. "I am sorry, but -- " He did no better with research organizations. Typical was a letter from the Van Terrel Foundation: " -- cannot accept your application inasmuch as we feel your premature application of your discovery to profit-making denotes a lack of scientific responsibility and ethics not desirable in a member of our organization -- former employer states the decision was yours entirely. Unfavorable reference -- " Piltdon, Feetch thought, feeling a strange sensation deep within his chest that he had not the experience to recognize as the beginning of a slow anger, Piltdon was hitting low and getting away with it. Of course, if he were to agree to reveal his latest discoveries to a research organization, he would undoubtedly get an appointment. But how could he? Everything patentable in his work would automatically revert to Piltdon under the one year clause in the company patent agreement. No, Feetch told himself, he was revealing nothing that Piltdon might grab. The anger began to mount. But he was beginning to need money desperately. Jenny wasn't getting any better and medical bills were running high. The phone rang. Feetch seized it and said to the image: "Absolutely not." "I'll go up another ten dollars," grated the little Piltdon image. "Do you realize, man, this is the fourteenth raise I've offered you? A total increase of one hundred and twenty-six dollars? Be sensible, Feetch. I know you can't find work anywhere else." "Thanks to you. Mr. Piltdon, I wouldn't work for you if -- " A barrage of rocks crashed against the heavy steel screening of the window. "What's going on!" yelled Piltdon. "Oh, I see. People throwing rocks at your house again? Oh, I know all about that, Feetch. I know that you are probably the most unpopular man alive to-day. I know about the rocks, the tomatoes, the rotten eggs, the sneaking out at night, the disguises you've had to use. Why don't you come back to us and change all that, Feetch? We'll put out the New Type Super-Opener and the world will soon forget about the old one." "No," said Feetch. "People will forget anyway -- I hope." "If you won't think of yourself, at least think of your fellow workmen," begged Piltdon, his voice going blurry. "Do you realize that Piltdon Opener will soon be forced to close down, throwing all your former associates out of work? Think of Hanson, Sanchez, Forbes. They have families too. Think of the men in the shop, the girls in the office, the salesmen on the road. All, all unemployed because of you. Think of that, Feetch." Feetch blinked. This had not occurred to him. Piltdon eyed him sharply, then smiled with a hint of triumph. "Think it over, Feetch." Feetch sat, thinking it over. Was it right to let all these people lose their jobs? Frowning, he dialed Hanson's number. "Chief," said Hanson, "Forget it. The boys are behind you one hundred per cent. We'll make out." "But that's the trouble. I thought you'd feel like this, and I can't let you." "You're beginning to weaken. Don't. Think, chief, think. The brain that figured the Super-Opener can solve this." Feetch hung up. A glow of anger that had been building up in his chest grew warmer. He began pacing the floor. How he hated to do it. Think, Hanson had said. But he had. He's considered every angle, and there was no solution. Feetch walked into the kitchen and carefully poured himself a drink of water. He drank the water slowly and placed the glass on the washstand with a tiny click. It was the tiny click that did it. Something about it touched off the growing rage. If Piltdon were there he would have punched him in the nose. The twenty-five years. The tricks. The threats. Think? He'd figured the solution long ago, only he hadn't allowed himself to see it. Not lack of brains, lack of guts. Well, he thought grimly, dialing Piltdon's number, he was going through with it now. "Piltdon!" he barked. "Three p.m. tomorrow. My place. Be here. That's all." He hung up. In the same grim mood the following morning, he placed a few more calls. I N the same mood that afternoon he stood in the middle of his living-room and looked at his visitors: Foundation; Steiner of Westchester University; the members of the press. "Gentlemen," he said. "I'll make it brief." He waved the papers in his hand. "Here is everything I know about what I call the Feetch Effect, including plans and specifications for the New Type SuperOpener. All of you have special reasons for being keenly interested in this information. I am now going to give a copy to each of you, providing one condition is met by Mr. Piltdon." He stared at Piltdon. "In short, I want fifty-one per cent of the stock of Piltdon Opener." Piltdon leaped from his chair. "Outrageous!" He roared. "Ridiculous!" "Fifty-one percent," said Feetch firmly. "Don't bother with any counterproposals or the interview is at an end." "Gentlemen!" squawked Piltdon, "I appeal to you -- " "Stop bluffing," said Feetch coldly "There's no other way out for you. Otherwise you're ruined. Here, sign this agreement." Piltdon threw the paper to the floor and screamed: "Gentlemen, will you be a party to this?" "Well," murmured the Government man, "I never did think Feetch got a fair shake." "This information is important to science," said the Van Terrel man. After Piltdon had signed, the papers were distributed. Published in the newspapers the following day, Feetch's statement read, in part: "The motion in space and time of the singular curvilinear proportions of the original SuperOpener combined with the capacitor effect built up as it increased its frictional electro-static charge in inverse proportion to the cube root of the tolerance between the involute teeth caused an instantaneous disruption of what I call the Alpha multi-dimensional screen. The can, being metallic, dropped through, leaving its non-metallic contents behind. The disruption was instantly repaired by the stable nature of the screen. "Beyond the screen is what I call Alpha space, a space apparently quite as extensive as our own universe. Unfortunately, as my investigations indicated, Alpha space seems to be thickly inhabited. These inhabitants, the nature of whom I have not yet ascertained, obviously resented the intrusion of the cans, developed a method of disrupting the screen from their side, and hurled the cans back at us. "However, I have established the existence of other spaces up to Mu space, and suspect that others exist beyond that. Beta space, which is also adjacent to our own space, is devoid of any form of life. The New Type Super-Opener is designed to pass cans through the Beta screen. Beta space will safely absorb an infinite number of cans. "I sincerely and humbly venture the opinion that we are on the threshold of tremendous and mighty discoveries. It is my belief that possibly an infinite number of universes exist in a type of laminated block separated by screens. "Therefore, might it not be that an infinite number of laminated blocks exist -- ?" #TI don. Feetch looked up from his desk in the newly constructed Feetch Multi-Dimensional Development Division of the Piltdon Opener Company. "Piltdon, don't bother me about production. Production is your problem." "But Mr. Feetch -- " "Get out," said Feetch. Piltdon blanched and left. "As I was saying, Hanson -- " The fullest use of science for human well-being will only be possible when our knowledge of material resources is supplemented with a genuine scientific knowledge of human needs. -- Lancelot Hogben About Science and Science Fiction In response to numerous requests, the quiz this issue is re-titled and devoted to science fiction as well as science. We hope you find it a little more interesting. If not, blast us with a letter. Score # for each correct answer and # is pretty good. The answers are on page #. #. How many years ago was the cyclotron invented? #. What science fiction writer "invented" the Mannschen Drive? #. The New York Times once placed a cash value of # on the brain of a certain scientist. Who was he? #. What associate professor of biochemistry wrote The End ? #. Plutonium is a natural element found in the earth. (True or false?) #. What planet has an orbital velocity of # miles per second and an escape velocity of #.I miles per second? #. In what novel is the slogan "Big Brother Is Watching You" used? #. What is the scientific term for the bright streaks and areas on the sun? #. What is a zwitterion? #. Mercury is the planet in the solar system. I #. Who is the author of Islands in the Sky? Of Childhood's End? #. What is the name of the new common language of science and technology? Stick to mink, girls -- or rabbit! Even if you can 'get a luxurious O' Grady' s Mole fur coat for free... work of discharge was well under way, then went ashore. He could have left the ship earlier; he could, had he so wished it, have been the first to leave, but the other officers, his juniors, were all marIllustrated by Ed Emsh lied, and he was not ; not any longer. Still, he reflected, he was lucky to have a home to go to. He was lucky to have a sister. It would be utterly grim to come in from Deep Space -- especially after a voyage to a drab world like Beta SexSlag Heap -- to spend one's leave in dreary hotel rooms. She was a good kid, Judith, he thought, even though she did marry that stuffed shirt of a Colonel. The taxi was waiting for him at the foot of the gangway. Kennedy slung his bags into the passenger compartment, followed them. He sat back comfortably in his seat as the whirling vanes lifted him clear of the spaceport with its busy cranes and gantries and conveyor belts, the gleaming ships that looked like huge spinning tops scattered by some giant child. "A good voyage, Mister?" asked the driver. "No," said Kennedy. "Lousy. It's good to be back on Earth. I hope they send us somewhere better next trip." "Where' re you in from?" asked the driver. "It looked like metal you were discharging. Slabs and ingots... nedy. "The Slag Heap. Three months from Earth even with the Ehrenhaft Drive running flat out, and when you get there it's nothing but a big ball of rubble where it rains for three hundred and ninety days out of the four hundred that make its year. There's no surface vegetation except for a few things like Terran lichens. There' re fungi in the caves and tunnels -- that's where the natives live. They come out on fine days, I'm told " "What are they like?" asked the driver. "I've heard tales those extraTerran women -- I've often wished that I'd gone into Astronautics myself -- " "One trip to the Slag Heap would cure you of wishing," said Kennedy. "You've seen chimpanzees? Try to imagine albino chimpanzees that have a bath every six months. Oh, they're intelligent, up to a point. They work in the mines and the smelters, and get paid in gin and tobacco. The overseeing is done by Earthmen. The poor devils are out on a three-year contract." "What do they do?" "What can they do? They drink, they watch the films -- ancient ones -- and they drink. I've heard some of them have tried giving the native women -- if you can call them that -- a good wash and employing them as housekeepers, so there's been labor trouble, with floggings and shootings -- " "Sounds like a jolly place," said the driver. "It wouldn't do me. Come to think of it -- when I pick you officers up at the spaceport you usually have bags and boxes full of souvenirs you've brought home with you. All you have is one grip and one suitcase. Looks like there aren't even any curios worth picking up on that world of yours." "It's no world of mine, thank God," said Kennedy. "Oddly enough, I did strike something worth bringing home, though -- " Gently, the taxi dropped down to the flat roof of the block in which Judith lived. Kennedy paid the driver, then carried his bags to the elevator. Seconds later he was walking along the passageway to his sister's suite. She opened the door as he approached it. "Bill!" she cried, "it's good to see you back! Come in -- your room's ready for you." "It's good to see you again, Judith," he said, dropping his bags and hugging her. "It's good to have a home to come back to." "It's good to have a big brother," she replied, leading him into the lounge. "How's the Colonel?" "I wish that you wouldn't keep referring to Jim as the Colonel," she objected. "But he is so a Colonel," insisted Kennedy. "You could never take him for anything else. I shall be quite surprised if you don't snap to attention when he comes in tonight..." "He'll not be coming in tonight," said Judith. "He's got a tour of garrison duty on the Moon. As a matter of fact I should have gone there with him -- but I insisted on being home to welcome you in." "You shouldn't have done that," said Kennedy. "And why shouldn't I? You're my best big brother. Anyhow, I had to stay to see what you've brought me this time." "Mercenary cat. I told you, before I left, what sort of a world Beta and worse. A slag heap in a cold drizzle, crawling with butterfly brained apes..." "I'm going to sulk," she said. "Will you pour me another beer?" "No" "All right, all right -- you've blackmailed me into it." Kennedy got to his feet, opened his suitcase. He lifted out a civilian suit and then, carefully, a lustrous golden fur. "But this is lovely!" cried Judith. She almost snatched it from him, held it against her cheek. "It's beautiful!" "And it matches your hair," said Kennedy. "But look at it carefully. Look at the cunning way in which the animal was skinned..." "Why spoil things?" asked his sister. "Women love fur -- but they don't like to be reminded of the -- preliminaries." "Even so," insisted the spaceman, "it's interesting. You've seen tiger skins and bear skins, of course, to say nothing of that birix pelt I brought home from Spica II -- Are you still using it as a bedside rug, by the way?" "Yes. Well, as a matter of fact Jim got rather huffy when I refused to come to the Moon with him and said that he was going to have some home comforts, and took it with him." "Trust the Colonel. Well -- you can use this until he comes back. After that -- have it made up. But we're wandering away from the point. The average pelt, as I said, has to be cut to remove it from the animal. This -- well, it may have been cut, but I don't think so. It's just as though every morsel of flesh, every splinter of bone, was vaporised and blown out -- " "Never mind the details. What was the animal, anyhow?" "I can't remember the native name -- and if I could I couldn't pronounce it. We call it O'Grady's Mole -- O' Grady was one of the officers of the survey ship that made the first landing; he stumbled on a sort of colony of the things in one of the caves. As a matter of fact, they're supposed to be protected -- " "Won't you get into trouble for having this skin?" "I could, I suppose. But I didn't kill the mole myself, and there's no law to stop the natives from doing it -- after all, it's their world. All that can happen is a new Standing Order to the effect that personnel will not, repeat not  buy furs, pelts or skins from the aborigines of Beta "How did you get it, then?" "Well, as I've already told you, the Slag Heap is a grim world. You're far better off staying aboard the ship -- but, sooner or later, you have to go ashore for a breather or start climbing up the wall paper. You go ashore, and what's there to do?" "Knowing you," she said, "I can guess." "How right you are. (My glass is empty, by the way...) Well, there's a sort of village where the overseers and the clerical staff live. They have a couple of pubs. They're far from jolly places -- you'd think that the boys in charge of the mines and the works would be pleased to see a few new faces, but they're not. They're a sullen crowd. "Anyhow, this night in question, there were four of us from the ship at one end of the bar -- the Old Man, the Second Pilot, the Doctor and myself -- and a bunch of the locals at the other. Each party was keeping to itself. Suddenly there was a commotion at the door. We looked round. One of the natives was trying to force his way in, and two hairy faced, hairy chested overseers who looked just about as human as the natives were trying to keep him out. "Well, it was none of our business. If we lived in Africa we'd take a dim view of baboons forcing their presence upon us while we were enjoying a quiet beer. We were ignoring the whole affair when the native, who seemed to know some English, started shouting out, 'Spacemen! Must see spacemen! Must see Captain!' "This direct appeal to the Old Man had results. "He said, in his best Control Room voice, 'Let him in.' " 'He's not coming in here, Mister,' said the barman. "The Old Man just loves being called Mister. " 'My man,' he said, 'I would remind you that I, as Master of an interstellar ship, rank with, but not below, the Governor of a Third Grade Colony -- ' "He was right, of course -- and the bartender knew sufficient interstellar law to recognise it. He said, however, that he would send a report in to the Commission, and the Old Man said that there were many things that he could mention in his report, including miscegenation -- And this threat brought results. "So they let the native in. He looked pitiful standing there under the glaring lights -- a huge, shambling brute with filthy, matted white fur, almost human, but not quite; here, in this bar, an alien on his own world. In one big, gnarled hand he carried a limply hanging sack. "I heard two of the overseers whispering together. 'Yes -- That's him. Dangerous bastard -- cause of all the trouble -- ' And, 'You can hardly blame him -- Ken Slater shouldn't have taken both his women -- ' Then, 'Christ! Are you a monkey lover the same as these bloody spacemen?' "The Old Man overheard this last. He said, 'We're not monkey lovers -- but we believe in fair play.' To the native he said, 'What do you want?' " 'Captain, sir, # -- I wish that I could put the accent across properly; it was like a dog talking in broad Glaswegian -- 'do trade.' " 'All right. What's in the bag ? # " 'This, Captain sir.' "And so he pulled out, one by one, five of the pelts. The locals were furious. Nobody offered them bargains like that. And they were bargains, too. Do you know how much I paid for this?" "No , # said Judith. "But I can tell you that this pelt, on Earth, would take all of Jim's monthly pay, and yours too." "I paid , # Kennedy told her, "just one bottle of gin. That's all that any of us paid, except for the Old Man. He paid two -- but he got two furs -- I suppose you're going to have it made up into a coat?" "Not yet, Bill. Not until Jim gets back from his tour of duty. I miss my bedside rug." "As you please," he said. "It's your fur. And now, my dear sister, what about climbing into something glamorous and doing the rounds of the night spots with me?" "As you please, Bill. But I know you, and know that you'd sooner spend your first night at home at home. I've got steak, and I'll do it the way you like, with lots of garlic. There's a bottle of Burgundy. There's a big hunk of that stinking English Stilton." "You're an angel. Remind me to get you a pair of wings next trip." She refilled his glass. "It's a funny thing. I've often heard you and the Colonel grumbling about this apartment, complaining that it has no windows, no natural light -- That, to a spaceman, is a point in its favour. We see enough of the sky and the stars. When we get home we like to forget about 'em." was told that all the cargo had been discharged from his ship and that Lloyd's Surveyor would be making the routine inspection of the hull. A Survey was a job for the ship's own Chief Officer, and not for the spaceport relieving staff. Judith accompanied him up to the roof, where the taxi was waiting for him. "Pity it's such a dull day," said Kennedy. "Weather Control must have slipped up. You won't be able to get in your sunbathing."    "I'll manage," she said. "There's plenty to do about the house. Don't work too hard, Bill. Give me a ring when you're ready to come home." He enjoyed the flight from the city to the spaceport. He looked down with pride at his gleaming ship as the helicopter drifted in to a landing. He climbed the ramp to the main airlock with a certain eagerness, whistled softly and happily as the elevator whisked him up to the Officers' flat. In his cabin he changed into protective clothing, then sat down to wait for the Surveyor and the Astronautical Superintendent. The survey did not take long. No plates and no structural members were in need of renewal. Kennedy would have been free, then, but for the fact that it had been impossible during the forenoon -- cabin stores were being loaded -- to test the main airlock doors. So Kennedy lunched on board, his only companion at table being the elderly, grounded ex Chief Officer who undertook relieving duties aboard the ships in port. The old tionalist. Kennedy found him rather boring. After lunch -- the survey of the airlock doors would not be for another hour or so -- Kennedy retired to his cabin, lit his pipe and pulled from his bookcase a wellthumbed volume of Kipling. He was reading happily when there was a knock at his door. "Come in!" he said, rather testily. He finished reading the verse before looking up to see who his caller was. The Colonel's lady and Judy O # Grady, Sisters under their skins..." "What did you do with your skin?" asked a voice. Kennedy looked up, saw that it was the ship's Surgeon. "What brings you back, Doc?" he asked. "Loading's not started yet." "Never mind the loading. What did you do with your skin?" "My skin? Oh, you mean those pelts we got at Port Debenham -- I took it home, of course. My sister has it now. What's the flap? Customs?" "No, Bill, it's worse. Your sister hasn't had the skin made up into a coat, I hope. I tell you -- once those skins get out into sunlight they're dangerous!" "Why?" asked Kennedy. "I'll tell you. It so happens that Marilyn -- my wife -- is allergic to fur, even to extra-Terran fur. As soon as I unpacked the thing she started to sneeze. She said that she appreciated such a lovely present, but that I, as a medical man, should have known that, as far as she was concerned, it was quite impossible. "Well, I'm well in with the boys at the Department of Extra-Terran Biology, and I thought that they'd be glad of the pelt. The next morning I took it round to them. The following morning they rang me, saying that it was urgent that I come round to see them at once. "I'll skip the biology of it all. I'll just tell you in words of one syllable what happened at the lab. They're a distrustful lot of beggars. They work on the assumptipn that the average spaceman is an incompetent bungler. They assumed that nobody aboard the ship had the savvy to sterilize the furs. After taking samples to be checked for micro-organisms, they proceeded with the sterilization. They used all sorts of radiation, including ultra violet. When they were using the ultra violet the skin came to life -- it tried to eat one of the lab technicians..." "Impossible," said Kennedy. "It's not impossible! Here's the way that they doped it out. O'Grady's Mole is as near as, dammit, immortal. When its body is worn out, it comes to the surface and dies. Flesh and bone are either absorbed into the skin or blow away as dust. Sooner or later the empty skin will be found by one of the aborigines, and used as rough clothing of a sort. Sooner or later the aborigine will be wearing the skin, on the surface of the planet, on one of the rare fine days. What happens then is simple -- there'll be one aborigine less and one O'Grady's Mole the more. "Anyhow, the flap was on. We got all the skins back but yours. The Captain's wife was lucky -- she laid both her furs out on the flat roof to air. When we got there she was in hysterics. Two odd looking things, like three-quarter deflated balloons covered with golden fur, were flopping round the roof. They had once been Pekingese dogs -- " "I gave the skin to my sister," said Kennedy. "She's using it as a bedside rug for the time being. Luckily she lives in one of those inside, fully air-conditioned apartments. There's no danger." "Even so," said the Doctor, "you'd better go to her straight away and get the skin back." "I've got a Survey." "Damn your Survey! Can't you see, Bill, that those natives hate the guts of all Earthmen? Selling the skins to us was a way to get revenge. There's no time to lose!" "You're right," said Kennedy. "I'll ring Judith ancj tell her to lock the skin in a cupboard." He went out to the wardroom to use the telephone. When he came back his face was pale. He said, "She doesn't answer. But she's out shopping probably." "We'd better hurry!" They hurried. There was nobody in the flat -- nobody human, that is. There was a thing that shambled to meet them, walking clumsily on all fours, skidding on the polished floor. Kennedy looked over the golden furred back of the brute to the open bedroom door, saw the articles of clothing scattered on the bed, saw the overturned sun ray lamp Scientific discoveries have been so closely linked to the ebb and flow of the events of history that it seems strange that histories have not been written with all the generals left out and the important inventors and scientists put in their places. -- C. C. Furnas Faint car never won fair lady!... Make your car proud of you!... Grinning Gregory helps used people! , till l Illustrated by Paul Orban The Used People Lot wonderful red Thunderflash, I thought to myself, isn't worth the electricity to atomize it to Kingdom Come. Ever since that drunk in his twoseat Charioteer plowed into the rear end with such force that even my radar repellant couldn't stop it, my Thunderflash had been out of kilter. The specialists my garage recommended worked over it for two days, but couldn't get it to running the way it did new. And what was I supposed to do for an automobile now? I had signed the customary #-year pact for half my salary to pay for it. That meant I would still be shelling out by #. Weeping over it wasn't going to do any good. It was stuck on the fifth level expressway and that was that. I levered myself out (at least the ejector still worked) then got behind the car and gave it a good old-fashioned push to get it on an off-ramp, out of the stream of traffic. After I parked I remembered I was heading for a date with Jenny. I checked my wallet. No, not enough for a taxi there. I would just have to phone her to cancel the date. Reluctantly I pushed the tip of my tongue against my tooth telephone. "Operator," said the operator. "Poplar #, please." "Thank you. One moment. I'll ache it for you." She dialed the number of the tooth telephone in Jenny's mouth, so the two fine wires sent gentle electric currents into the nerve. On the third ache Jenny clicked the receiver open with the tip of her tongue. "Hello?" "Jenny, this is Arnold. I won't be able to come over this evening." "But we had a date," Jenny said in a petulant voice. "I know, but my car broke down." "Again?" "Yes, honey." "Why don't you do something about it?" Jenny complained. "But baby, what can I do? I've been to the garage. I've been to the specialists. I'm so broke on account of these repair bills I've been living on macaroni concentrate for the last couple of weeks." Jenny, my beautiful sweetheart, was distinctly unhappy. "Don't come to me with your troubles," she replied. "In fact, you don't have to come to me at all until you can come like a gentleman." "Aw, listen just a minute, Jenny," I started to plead. But it was too late. Jenny had clicked off. A fine thermokettle of fish! A month ago I had a shiny lifetime car and was romancing the best looking girl in town. Then one drunk comes along and my car is next to useless and my girl is mad at me. Feeling in a distinctly blue mood I moved my tongue to the other side of my mouth and shoved on my tooth radio. I rolled the tongue over the bottom of the tooth until I got a program with some blues music. Just the way I felt. The blues. I sat in the front seat of my Thunderflash and listened to the music echoing against my tonsils. After the song came the inevitable commercial. Only this was a new one. The announcer said: "Here's some big, big, big news from Grinning Gregory, your largest volume dealer in lifetime cars. Gregory announced today that his used people lots are nearly empty. Yes, Grinning Gregory's used people lots are nearly empty. And that means good, good, good news for you car owners with lifetime contracts who would like new cars. "Grinning Gregory has added to his stocks of new Orions, Thunderflashes, Galaxies, Solars, Charioteers, Protons and Fords. For the first time in two years, yes, the first time in two years, he has more new cars than new people to sell them to. "So he is offering a limited number of them to used people, you folks who have had cars, on his conveniently located used people lots. Gome on down and let some of Grinning Gregory's new cars look you over. Be sure and bring photostats of your credit ratings and official car histories. Hurry, hurry, hurry and avoid the rush to Grinning Gregory's used people lots." The commercial ended and was replaced by music. Gosh, that was exciting news. Ever since the accident I had given up hope of ever owning a decent running car again, automobile prices and government restrictions being what they were. I clicked on my tooth telephone and ached my garage mechanic to come by and pick up my car. Then I took my credit rating and official car history from the glove compartment and caught a helibus to the nearest of Grinning Gregory's used people lots. there before me, most of them in the same fix I was. They had been in accidents or they were divorced and their wives got custody of the car, although they still had to pay for it. Some of them had been on the lot for some time and looked a little shopworn under the lights and fluttering pennants, but they hadn't found a car yet that would take them. We were all classified as used people, a lot less desirable than people who hadn't signed for cars yet. One of Grinning Gregory's contract brokers lined us up in a row facing the path the cars would come by robot direction. The fellow to my right slicked his hair down neatly and began shining his shoetops on the backs of his trouser legs. "Sure hope I get selected," he whispered nervously to me. "Boy, don't you sometimes wish you were living a couple of hundred years ago when cars were cheap enough so that people were doing the picking?" "Not me," I told him. "Drive that junk? I'll admit you didn't have to swear but a couple of years of your life away. But look at all you get now in a car." "Mmm, I suppose you're right," he said. "My Orion was stolen a year ago when I accidentally cut off the burglar photocell. The police never did find it and I've been trying ever since to get another one." "This is the first time I've tried," I said. "My car..." "Ssh," he interrupted. "Here they come." A procession of new cars, led by a beautiful green Solar convertible, inched its way along the row of hopeful buyers, all of us with our credit ratings and car histories pinned to our lapels. Each car's robot mechanism recorded our statistics, took our pictures, noted our heights, weights and appearances, then began to correlate the data. By government order the robot mechanism was directed to select its most promising future owner. A sobersides bank president, for example, might dearly love to change his big black Galaxy sedan for a low-slung Charioteer sports car, but sports cars were planned with crewcutted college boys in mind, so the bank president would be likely to end up with another big Galaxy. Of course, the payment rate was fixed and the contracts were almost always for # years. A tie salesman might want a Galaxy to make an impression on his neighbors, but he'd probably wind up with a Proton or a Thunderflash like I had. I was a tie salesman. The Solar came abreast of me. I stood straight and smiling as it began to note my statistics. It flashed a # when it was done. Not so good. That put me in the # percentile rank of its desirability. The next car, a rhinestone Ford, gave me a #. I was rated #, #, # (by a Galaxy), #, # and # by the next six cars. That was the way it went for the whole procession. I received the highest rating, #, from an experimental model Proton that was no longer in production, but I knew it was rating everybody higher and I was pretty gloomy. Imagine my surprise when my name was called out as one of the possible choices. I went into the broker's office and was told the Proton would select me if I would get rid of all but ten years of my Thunderflash contract. That meant I had to find someone to take my car and # years of my contract, since I had been paying for three years of the #. The price of the Proton, the broker told me, was scaled down to a #-year contract because it was an off-model. But who would take my heap with a #-year contract attached to it? The broker said Grinning Gregory might go for five years, just out of the goodness of his big, big, big heart. I wouldn't get that kind of a deal anywhere else, the broker said. Maybe I wouldn't, but that didn't do me much good. I needed someone to take # years. Harry! Why didn't I think of Harry before? He didn't have a car yet. Skinflint Harry didn't want to sign the standard #-year contract for a car and he had been shopping around for second-hand cars. Besides, good old Harry knew how crazy I was about Jenny. He had even taken her out a couple of times. I gave Harry an ache on the telephone and told him I'd be right over. Then I ached the garage and the mechanic told me he could get my Thunderflash in pretty good running condition again, even though he couldn't promise anything permanent. I caught a helibus to my friend's apartment. "Harry, old pal, I've got the chance of a lifetime for both of us." Harry eyed me suspiciously. "How's that?" he asked. "Well, here's the deal. You know my real fine Thunderflash? You it was a sharp car. It is. It s a first class car. But ever since that slight accident, I've had just a wee bit of trouble with it. Not much, you understand, but it's niggling enough to annoy my girl, Jenny. You remember Jenny, the girl you used to go with before I cut you out? Ha! Ha! Anyhow, Jenny wants me to get another car. A newer one." "But how can you?" Harry asked. "You already have one." "That's just it, old buddy," I replied. "Grinning Gregory has one of those experimental model Protons. It's a beauty, shimmering orange with purple wheels and bearskin upholstery. You'd love it. They'll let me have it on a #-year contract if I can sell # years of my Thunderflash contract. So here's what I'm going to do for you, pal. I'll keep ten years of the contract and let you have the Thunderflash for the rest. You'll be getting a three-yearold car with # years of the contract taken care of. Now is that a deal or is that a deal!" Harry wasn't convinced. "What's wrong with your car?" "Oh, hardly anything." "What's hardly anything?" "Not even worth mentioning." "What's not worth mentioning?" "To tell the truth, the frame is just the least trifle out of line and every once in a great while it makes the rear wheel twist sideways." "I don't know," said Harry. "Good old cautious, hard-headed Harry," I told him. "You are getting the deal of a lifetime and doing a good, loyal friend a big favor besides." "I still don't know, Arnold," said Harry. "All right. When will you know?" "Let me sleep on it tonight." "OK, Harry." I went home in high spirits. I knew Harry would come through for me and take that wreck off my hands. He always was a man with an eye out for a deal. I slept late the next morning, but by afternoon I was over to the used people lot to tell them to hold the Proton for me for another day. Instead, they tapped me over the head with the news that someone came in that morning and bought it. And they didn't have another one like it that would accept me. Another hope gone astray! I caught a helibus to the garage and picked up my Thunderflash after paying a whopping repair bill. I drove to Jenny's house to convince her it was just as good as new. Jenny's mother met me at the door. "Hello, Arnold," she said with the big smile of greeting she always gave me. "I'm glad to see you and I hope you'll keep dropping over to see me, but Jenny isn't here any more." "Not here?" "I'm afraid not." "Where is she?" "She eloped less than an hour ago. You remember the boy she used to go with, Harry? He came by in a beautiful new car. It was shimmering orange with purple wheels and bearskin upholstery no Health was no longer a problem for the aged. All they had to do was ban sex and tobacco to those over thirty-five... joying the second of vicious sting. He closed the medicine cabinet and stood for a minute examining himself in the fluorescent lighted mirror. He was lean and hard and, of course, tanned. A few grey hairs flecked the sideburns, but he didn't think that he looked thirty-five. And, damn it all to hell! he didn't feel thirty-five! He opened the bathroom door, and hesitated. He dreaded to walk through the photoelectric beam and set off that odious disc ! Sometimes he got down on hands and knees and crawled under. But he felt so damn silly! Well, he couldn't stand there all day. It was Monday and they would expect him at the office. He squared his shoulders and walked into the hall. "Lung Cancer, Heart Attacks! Heart Attacks, Lung Cancer! Beware, old man, Be... ware!" The tinkly message followed him up the hall. "I could jam the damn thing!" he thought, "but they'd only repair BY ill it at daily Gov-Apts Inspection and report me again!" He pushed his hands into his pants pockets and walked into the dining ell. He slouched in his chair, and watched Sally swish back and forth from the kitchen as she set the table. She was in blue nylon pajamas and fuzzy blue mules. Her red hair was tied up in a provocative pony tail. She felt him watching her, gave him a devilish grin. "Sleep well last night, dear? In your own little bed?" "You know damn well I didn't!" God, he wanted a cigarette. After two years he still wanted one! When would the hunger for them ever stop? "You knew where I was sleeping. The door was unlocked!" She came to him, suddenly compassionate, and sat on his lap. She pulled his head against her. He felt, on his face, the slickness of the nylon, and underneath her firm body. She whispered, "You know honey, no matter what the government says, I'm not made for sleeping alone!" "And I'm thirty-five and not 'spose to!" "Thirty-five and eighty-nine days! How well I know! The toast!" She scooted off his lap and ran into the kitchen. How she managed to burn toast in an electronic toaster beat him. By sending it down twice, he suspected. He picked up the paper by his plate and unfolded it. The first page, as usual, was devoted to the Propagandists. Headlines proclaimed: "# died this weekend doing you know what " The second line asked: "Will you be next?" It made a good story because only three hundred deaths had been predicted. The bottom half of the page was filled with pictures of the victims and the spouses who "lead them on, knowing at the time that over forty percent of the heart attacks in men and women over thirty-five are brought on by sexual relations." Sally was leaning over him, serving his plate with scrambled eggs and ham, but he tried to ignore her and turned to the next page. Here was an editorial by the Department of Health. He scanned it. Same old thing. Sex to be avoided like poison by all persons, male and female, over thirty-five years. Chuck forked a piece of soya bread, and swabbed the last of ham grease and egg from his plate. He sat drinking his soya hot chocolate, and wanting a cigarette. Sally finished eating, stretched, and the nylon threatened to rip. She went and got his suit coat and hat. At the door he tried to kiss her goodbye in his best "big brother" manner. But she clinched in close, and suddenly he didn't feel like a brother. She whispered in his ear, "Come on back. I'll call and tell them you caught a virus!" He almost took off his hat. Then he said, "You know it would show up in my weekly S-Count!" He shuddered just saying the words. God! how he hated that! He continued, "And if I slip once or twice on that, you know what they do." Feeling sorry for her, he added half-heartedly, "But you're only thirty. And I wouldn't blame you... Lot of people do, you know." She leaned back, still in his arms, and laughed up at him. "No, I'll wait and break you down!" "Even knowing what they're likely to do?" "But surely! Then at least the temptation wouldn't be so handy!" He walked rapidly toward the office. Other groups walked along talking and laughing. Here and there someone called to him. He came to U.S. #, a deserted graying eight lane strip. As he started across, a bike came over the rise and he dived into the ditch. But it was only a Catholic priest pedalling furiously along on a girl's bicycle. Then there had been another clash! He climbed out of the ditch, and walked a ways down the highway. There it was. The priest was just climbing off  the bike, and there was a motorcycle cop. Chuck Dane walked up the highway to the scene and stood watching. The priest was kneeling, his black bag open, administering last rites to the two youths. The cop, fat and redfaced, came over and stood beside Chuck. "Two less Teenagers!" he grinned. "Dying, eh?" Chuck asked. "Dying or dead! These damn kids!" He said it with just a tinge of envy. The Father snapped his bag shut, and pedalled away. Chuck went over for a closer look. Both of the kids were on roller skates, the powered kind. Chuck Dane noted with satisfaction that they were Airex skates. Both of the kids had on the regular uniform, black leather jackets, and leather belts eight inches wide. Mounted on the center front of the belts were the regulation three foot razor sharp spears. Only now there was not much of the spears to be seen. Because neither kid had chickened. The shorter boy had caught a spear in the lower chest, and the taller one caught it in the guts. Funny, Chuck Dane thought, staring down at them. Even in this cotton batting, vacuum world of # the Teenagers could find ways to kill each other off! He envied them their spirit! He waved at the cop, who was calling in a report, and walked back up the highway. When he got to his usual place, he started to cross. "Ola!" In that frantic second, he saw only the black leather jacket bearing down upon him. And the bike with the spear mounted on the handlebars, the tip sparkling like a diamond in the sun. It swerved, and came straight for him. Chuck dived into the ditch, even as he felt it prick his coat. The kid yelled, "Cock-a-doodledo!" and pedalled on. Chuck climbed up out of the ditch and ran across the highway. Then he straightened his clothing, dusted himself off. This was damn undignified! He hated the kid, wanted to kill him with his bare hands. He walked along, thinking how it had all come about. First it had been the highway death toll. When it had reached over two thousand on week days, and ten thousand on weekends, the government had stepped in. Their solution had been simple and foolproof. They simply taxed gas out of sight. Now the oil companies exported their total output, and were making more money than ever. Then some fool in the A.M.A. had pointed out that almost as many people were dying of lung cancer as had previously fallen on the ribbons of death. At first Congress had passed a bill to ban the manufacture of all cigarettes. But the black market flourished and the psychiatrists yelped. They yelped that the approach to the problem was all wrong, due to the fact that they hadn't been consulted. This was warping personalities and making martyrs out of cigarette users. The way to do it, they said, was to have tobacco products available, but to shame people into giving them up of their own free wills. They theorized that a cigarette smoker is really a frustrated person unable to cope with the adult world. When he puts a cig between his lips he is really searching for his mother's nipple. Therefore, the thing to do is to force him to outgrow this, rather than take it forcibly away from him. Same way with a cigar smoker or pipe smoker. The psychiatric lobby prevailed and the government repealed the tobacco bill. And replaced it with another. Now it was the law for all cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco to have an hallucination inducing drug, Xlene #, in them. Also, as was compulsory, all cigars, pipes and cigarettes sported rubber filters shaped like nipples. Then, Chuck Dane reminisced, with lung cancer dropping off steadily, they had started in to curb heart attacks. And taken away the only pleasure a guy had left! He was in sight of his place of work now. A huge half-circle of plexiglass that was Airex Roller Skating Factory. Chuck thought as he entered the building, that four hours was a hell of a long working day, especially doing material control posting all that time. He hoped the bill to change working hours to three hours would pass soon... Lnoon, Chuck lined up with the rest of the office force to walk single file past the hidden electronic camera. Out of habit, he held his right hand in salute position, palm toward the camera. These deals had been interesting when they first replaced the old style time clocks, now they were routine. As the queue neared the door where the company's three psychiatrists stood, Chuck got more and more nervous. Suppose they could read his mind, or something! Sure enough, Doctor Benton wiggled a finger for him to step out of line. He took him to one side, and peered into his face. Chuck tried to look into the green eyes, so calm and assured, but he had to look away. "You okay, Dane?" "Sure! Tired, that's all. Helluva long day!" "Yes. Well, you come in and see me tomorrow. We'll have us a little talk." Rapidly, Chuck left the building. He muttered, "Like hell we will, Headshrinker!" Furtively, he left the usual road home, and walked into a corner drugstore. He stood around with his hands in his pockets, until all the other customers cleared out. "Puffies," he said. The big man behind the counter tried to hitch his belt over his paunch. "Sure you know what you're doin', Bud? Have to take your number you know." Chuck didn't answer. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket and laid it palm up on the glass counter top. The man wrote down the id number and handed over the cigarettes. Chuck walked on home, with the Puffies a guilty lump in his jacket pocket. He felt sure everybody he met knew what he was up to. At home, Chuck stuck his head in the kitchen and said "Hi" to Sally. He resisted patting her. He went to the den and locked the door with trembling fingers, then sat at the desk and took out his knife. He cut off the realistic red nipples from all twenty cigarettes, and made a pyre of them in the middle of the glass top. Then he set fire to them, not minding the acrid smoke. He put a cigarette to his lips. Still he hesitated, fearing the hallucinations, about which he had heard but never experienced. Suddenly he grinned and leaned back, lit up and closed his eyes. The parade of pictures began in front of his eyeballs. First a picture of human lungs, and slowly the cancer virus invades them and eats them away. Then the parade of men and women clutching their chests, writhing in death throes. Chuck Dane smiled, enjoying each hallucination. Pretending that the unlucky victims were the Propagandists. He lit another cigarette from the butt of the first one, and leaned back, feeling his lungs pleasantly saturated with smoke. When ten cigarettes were snubbed in a row on the glass top of the desk, he stopped and mused. Now, he guessed he would die of cancer for sure. He wondered how long... Then another thought hit him. With two temptations, he wondered why he had given in to the cigarette first. He lit another PufEe and leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. A perfect technicolor picture of Sally crossed his mind, swishing the pony tail provocatively. He got up. Left the den. Went to the kitchen and leaned in the door watching her. Tomorrow was Tuesday. His day for S-Count. But he wouldn't submit to that again. Or have that little talk with Doctor Benton. Tomorrow, going to work, when he crossed U.S. # he would give some Teenager a hell of a thrill! But tonight... tonight... "Come here, baby!" he whispered A built-in guidance system for tomorrows' highways was recently demonstrated at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, when an automobile was automatically guided along a onemile check road. The combined electronic computer and servo mechanism, which controlled the car, followed a magnetic path produced by low frequency power in an electrical cable under the highway. #.# tons of dust of cosmic origin is suspended in the earth's atmosphere below the # mile level, according to a recent report of Dr. Hans Pettersson of the University of Hawaii. The dust, fine meteoric particles, which continuously sift earthward, is renewed every two years. This means that the earth is picking up # tons a year. To this tonnage is added another # tons of interplanetary dust which the earth collects each year in its journey around the sun. Dr. Pettersson took his samples by filtering large volumes of air through fine-pored filters at Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii at # feet and at Mt. Haleakala, on Maui, T. H., at # feet. The filters were analyzed for iron, cobalt and nickel content, and weight was estimated from the nickel content. Dr. Pettersson advises further experiments, as this tonnage is four times that of estimates previously made. The Army Prosthetics Research Laboratory has announced a "cosmetic glove" to fit the mechanical hands of amputees. Complete with hair and fingernails, they are so lifelike they cannot be distinguished at a casual glance from a real hand. With today's mechanical hand developed to the point where it can be operated with a single cable at # efficiency, scientists at the of touch and feel -- an extension of the nerves into the mechanical fingers! Cleaner streets with nylon is a prediction of the DuPont Company. Scientific research is responsible for the use of nylon bristles, the same kind you have in your toothbrush, in brooms and brushes to clean the nation's streets. Tests prove that brooms with ordinary vegetable fibre bristles last #-# sweeping miles, while nylon-bristled streetbrooms provide # miles of sweeping. Bristles used in test brooms were # inches long, with a useful length of seven inches and a diameter the size of an ordinary lead pencil. Average wear was # miles to the inch. A tiny, # Yq inch, #watt TruFlector lamp, smaller than any comparable projection lamp, has been announced by Sylvania Elecprojector, it provides about the same screen brightness as the larger #-watt type in wide use today. Its chief advantage, aside from economy, is that it requires less cooling and, consequently, is much quieter. The Kilowatt Heat Barrier has been broken by a Detroit inventor, Glenn W. Watson, who has found the Kilowatt. This is two and three quarters times the # year old figof two basic electronic principles produces the new heat figure. Electronic steam radiator heat in one room and a bank of "hot wire" heat positioned in another room fifty feet away, produces the new figure results. The inventor declares present in the Kilowatt but man did not know how to extract it for use. He states that more went to waste by the ground wire than was utilized. A "time clock" for atomic fallout has been developed at the Atomic Energy Project at University of California at Los Angeles. The device, which punches its own time clock, shows the precise time at which fallout arrives in areas up to # jiles from "ground zero". This information is vital to determine the amount of radiation-exposure people in this area may have received. The device operates when increased radiation intensity reaches a pre-set rate, shorting the electrical circuit, blowing a fuse and stopping the clock instantly, thus showing exact time of fallout arrival. Such a device will provide accurate data for effective treatment of victims, particularly in cases where time is the determining factor. Polio shots for all children under five is strongly urged by the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. According to # figures, the highest attack rate, # per #, was among children one year old. The next highest was # among two-year olds, and for children through four years of age the rate was #. For children between the ages of # and # the average was #. Become a Scientology "Clear" A Scientology "Clear" has: If you would like to have all these qualities then look into Scientology. Inquire today: Scientology, United States # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C Your editorial comments on what writers write about are interesting and somewhat accurate. The dream-expression aspect of a story shows up especially in fantasy, so that theoretically a story of that type expresses the conflicts that are in the writer, when such conflicts are strong at the time of writing. However, there is another aspect to conflict -- getting conflict into a story when the writer isn't at war with something. That is. when the writer feels he has to have conflict to sell a story. A writer can get in a rut in that direction. For example, two stories of mine, (Captain Peabody , Game Preserve ) have similarities on the symbolic level -- two major ones, to be specific : ( I ) a group of people that are the helpless victims and (#) one act of extreme cruelty perlormed by an individual from noble motivations. In both cases the victim was helpless at the time, in both cases the person administering the cruelty was going against his nature. And also, in both cases, it was not so much a person that was attacked with such all-out swiftness and reluctance, but something present in the attacked person. In one it was mixed genes that could threaten the race, in the other it was a sadism that threatened everyone aboard ship. In fact, abstractly the two stories are so similar that they could be said to be significantly symptomatic -- except for the fact that they were not written at the same time nor were they the only stories I wrote nor were they the only ones I sold. In going over the stories written during that year, they are the only two having those qualities. In fact, they seem to be the only two I've ever written having just those qualities. But in finding that out I've also found out that I have a most definite repugnance to conflict, and a general approach to it of stalling it off and making it swift, allout, and getting it out of the way quickly, like taking medicine. In real life I'm the same way. I still think Game Preserve one of the best stories I ever wrote, and very gentle in touch rather than sadistic. All those who have written to me directly seem to agree. In answer to that letter (February IF) taking task with "one fourth of the population would be subnormal", the problem would be social as well as Mendelian, with so many social variables involved that not a priori argument from Mendel's laws alone could possibly be correct except by accident. One factor would be that very few normals would I # marry subnormals. Another would be that renegade male normals might sire a large percentage of the offspring of subnormal females. But my "educated guess" that one fourth of the population would become subnormal without the preserves cannot be disproven, any more than it can be proven, from any knowledge we possess today. Berkeley, Calif. Fascinating language, Interlingua -- sounds like a kind of scramble of the "Romance" Languages. Would certainly like more information. Origin of the language, etc. -- and, since I live in Mexico, I would be grateful for the addresses of stateside publishers of textbooks, if any, on the subject. While we're about it, let me say that, yes, IF is a good magazine. Nice that you publish "unknowns" like Miguel Hidalgo. Too many science fiction magazines rely purely on established names, and while this is all well and good, even the best writers flub sometimes. Isn't it better to print something fresh by an "unknown" than a mediocre effort by a "name"? Incidentally, there seems to be a prevalence of science fiction titles down here. Maybe because there are so many "escapees" in Mexico. -- Jeanne Malone Mexico, D. F. You were absolutely right about Miguel Hidalgo. His story wasn't the best in the issue, but it was certainly a very fine story, and I hope the sale will inspire Miguel to write more stories. I hope I will be able to write that well when I am fifteen. You weren't as absolutely right about A Question of Identity (April '#). I'm fairly sure that a more original story will come along during #. The idea of establishing what a man is was used (with a different twist -- the missing link is found and no one knows whether to call them men or apes) in You Shall Know Them. The idea of rebuilding men has also been often used before. The originality of this story lies in the combination of ideas. The rest of the stories were also more or less lacking in originality, but they were all good. IF seems to be typed; in this issue five of seven stories dealt with extrapolated societies or extraterrestrial societies. If you must buy typed stories, why don't you spread them? The new IF logo is much better. -- Leslie Gerber Brooklyn, New York About Science and Science Fiction son. # -- Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity. # -- False; it is man-made. # -- Mars. # -- # by George Orwell. # -- Faculae. #- -- An ion that is both positively and negatively charged. # -- Hottest. #I -- Arthur C. Clarke wrote both. # -- Interlingua. In the February '# issue of IF, Ike Asimov wrote a good, humorous story. I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, he overlooks some things, probably on purpose; mainly that computors work many times faster than the human mind and with no possibility of mistakes (other than the human feeding wrong information into it). In the story, they talked about breaking through on the "square root front", but the farthest a man (without a computer) has gone with the irrational square root of two is in the hundreds, while a computor has had it out in the thousands, without much human strain, and in a much shorter period of time! Another thing in the story was the development of a manned missile to fight against a computorcontrolled missile. It isn't practical because of the slow reaction time of humans compared to computors. The only way manned missiles could destroy one would be through overwhelming numbers. But then the loss of ships would nullify most of the advantage of getting five times as many and at one-tenth of the cost of the compu tor-manned missiles. South Pasadena, Calif. t; . When is scien' e fiction not science fiction? When it's an historical novel of the future. When is a science fiction story a bore? When a present-day dilemma (war, degression, bad television, book-burning) is propelled into the defenseless future, and then solved in a manner suitable to the author. Is science fiction about science or is it just about tomorrowland? And if it's about tomorrowland, why, groan, can't we give tomorrowland another batch of troubles? Can't we assume that a lot of our troubles (inflation, Fuller Brush men, California tailpipes) will, like the snows of yesteryear, just fade away? Does shoving the clock ahead a couple of hundred years make a story a science fiction story? And why, oh, why, does the hero of the story always stop to reflect how much things have improveddeteriorated since the middle of the twentieth century? Why doesn't he think, just once, about the nineteenth century? Or the twentyfirst? What is so uniquely interesting about the #s that all the people of the future hark back on it with nostalgiahorror? The crux of a science fiction story, a real one, will always be a valid idea about science. Be it gadgets, be it medicine, be it sociology, be it economics, be it space travel, be it teleportation, time travel, or whatever. An adventure story without a new concept of some facet of science is not a science fiction story. So what if the action takes place on an unheard-of planet? Who cares if a man of conscience declaims Tom Paine on an unheard-of planet? We recognize all the old faces. Science fiction writers who leave out the science: Big brother is watching you! -- Betty Herman  Continued from Back Cover And if you DO go back, will you ever be able to return to your #st century paradise? In short, can you actually live your life twice ? Read this Whole Amazing Story -- Yours for Only #c Science-fiction fans, get set for a real challenge to Heinlein -- one of today's topnotch science-fiction writers -- is a thriller crammed with new turns and new twists. You'll find your everyday thought processes turned topsy-turvy by it. It's selling everywhere right now for #. But as a new member of the ScienceFiction Book Club, you can get this new book for only one dime! Read, below why the Club is making this amazing offer -- then rush in the coupon (with only # at once ! Why We Make This Amazingly Generous Offer W HY DO we offer you this brand-new, fulllength Science-Fiction thriller for only #? Simply to introduce you to the Science-Fiction Book Club, a wonderful idea in bringing you the best of the new science-fiction books -- at a mere fraction of their usual cost! Each month the Club brings you only the only I each ( plus a few cents shipping cha rge) -- even though they cost #, # and up in the original publisher's editions. # Each month's selection is described in advance in the Club's free bulletin. You take only those books you want -- as few as # a year. No money in advance. No membership fees. You may cancel tnembership at any time. Recent selections have included such books as The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, The Isotofie Man and Earthman, Come Home... Th e Club also brings members the best jn factual scientific books, such as Satelofe, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects and Exploring Mars. Mail Coupon with only #c Simply mail the coupon with only a dime. sent at once, together with the current election, for which you will be billed only #, plus a few cents shipping. If not delighted return both books, owe nothing, and membership will be Dept. #-FM-#, Garden City, N. Y. selection of the Club for which you may bill me only # plus a few cents shipping, and enroll me as a member. Every month send the Club's free bulletin, describing coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping. I need take only # books during each year I am a member anil may resign at any time thereafter. turn them in # days, pay nothing, and membership will be cancelled. Name Address. (Please Print Clearly) City. Zone State (Offer good only in l'. S. A. and Canada. ) # place. It's the year #. You're a dollar invention. You're sitting pretty -- until your passionate friend. Belle Darkin, upsets your apple cart. First she steals your invention. Then she slips you a hypo; puts you in a new kind of deep freeze called "The Long Sleep." the year # -- and you're still only # years old! But time has passed while you were in "cold storage," and Belle, your ccc-sweetheart, is now # years older than you are ! Well, you've lost interest in her anyway, after the way she twotimed and future-timed you. The Fascinating World of # #.D. But there are other attractions in that world of # : its women in "sticktite" clothes they just throw away after wearing... its honeymoon trips to the moon... its remarkable new conveniences...its brand new words of love and ways to live. No more menial labor. Robots take care of all that. Soon you're enjoying life as never before! You're glad to be out of that miserably backward world of the #th century. But unfortunately you must get back to the year #, to take care of one last urgent mission. You only hope that you can come back to the #st century by taking "The Long Sleep" again. The big question is: Can it be done? Yburs This Spine-Tingling Science-Fiction Novel by Robert Heinlein -- Continued on other side  Returned from the stars... OF F II novelettes from the first six years of IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction readers all over America, this is a volume of exceptional interest -- distinguished examples of fine science fiction writing by outstanding writers. Stories that answer the age old question: "What would happen if -- ?" Stories that call into play philosophy, logic, facts and imagination to provide a diversity of entertainment that will appeal to all science fiction lovers, from astronomers to zoo keepers. Here you will find such authors as Charles Beaumont, James Blish, Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce Walton and Robert F. Young in an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme and pace. All newsstands -- # cents All Stories New and Complete by Boyd Ellanbee # by R. M. McKenna (Novelette) # by Cordwainer Smith # by Dean McLaughlin # Illustrations by Ed Emsh, Kelly Freas, Paul Orban IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Vol. #, No. #. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication # Lord Street, Buffalo, N.Y. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, N.Y. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. All stories arc fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A. Next (December) issue on sale October #th  The history of spaceflight begins before man. While our planet still lay wrapped in its dream of isolation , other intelligences watched from above -- minds pure , undying, noble -- and pathetically vulnerable... "Oh, he is dead!" my mind cried out ing this as a release for my conscience. Those things which trouble me are not such as one exchanges with vigil companions, or indeed with anyone not bound by ties like ours. If I were at home with you I would exchange with your soul in a moment the feeling of my own, but distance permits no such consolation and it is not suitable for me to exchange so familiarly with my colleagues. I find myself questioning the value of our customary refusal to communicate thoughts of a delicate and sensitive nature. The Earth people, who speak their thoughts, perhaps are less primitive than we like to imagine. They seem to have no sense of the danger of overwhelming the soul of another with unwanted confidences. The purely vocal nature of their communication does not admit an excessive degree of emotion to their relationships. They do not have to erect any artificial barriers between each other, as we must who exchange on a. mental level. These doubts of mine never could have arisen if we men of Hainos had not presumed to observe the alien ways of those creatures on the third Earth, so like ourselves and yet so remote, though we have hovered above them, listening and watching, for twelve of their generations. This vigil, though it is to last but one journey around the sun, has seemed longer and less fruitful than all the others. I think I shall not come again, but leave such work to those who can remain efficient and disinterested Observers, unmoved by doubt and anxiety. Novna, you must begin to think what we two shall do with the rest of our eternity, for now that I have spent some small portion of mine in fifty vigils, I find they have become distasteful. We might go to the Palace of Art and study to be poet-priests. My last vigil has convinced me that I am more fitted for that life than this. When our mission left Hainos for the third Earth, there was aboard our ship the poet-priest Gven. You must remember the many nights we sat beneath the rocks by the ocean, listening as his soul gave ours his songs. Innocent they were, and filled with talk of purity and light, though Gven is as old as the rest of us, even if he is as different from you and me as the Earth child is from its parents. "You have never seen him, I think. He is smaller than I, slight of build and tender-faced. How out of place he looked among the ship's sturdy men of science, with their ages of discipline and austerity written indelibly into their features. They did not want him. They told the commissioner that they did not want him. "Let him stay at home," they said, "and sing his songs to those who wish to listen." But the commissioner himself, and, I suspect, the commissioner's wife, was as fond as any of Gven and his songs, so he said Gven was to come if he liked. Poor Gven tried hard enough to make us like him. He offered us the only gift he had, that of his songs, but no one cared to hear them except me, and I was ashamed to say so. In the end he was reduced to sitting for hours, looking out into the night through which the ship bore us, saying nothing to anyone, for fear of our scorn. He would have liked us to tell him about the Earth people, for his studies at the Palace fitted him sadly for a scientific expedition. Of the Earth people, however, we hesitated to speak freely, even among ourselves, for all of us feel strongly about them, in one way or another. Our exchanges on the matter have always been burdened with emotion ; and we find we cannot share easily our thoughts about Earth people, unless we banter lightly and say little of what we really feel. When our long-ship drew near the third Earth, we were transferred into the round-ship in which we were to carry on our observations. I could see Gven was limp with excitement, but as always. I would not exchange with him for fear of the others, not even to drain off that excess of feeling which was to prove so dangerous to him. Perhaps he thought it would be different, once we had established ourselves in our designated area of observation. Then we might warm toward him, giving him the comforts of our experience. If such were his expectations, he was disappointed. Whatever he gathered from us was purely accidental, information that we exchanged among ourselves as we worked. Only in this way did he learn of those few bonds we had forged with the Earth people. It is our custom, as you know, for each man to select one of the Earth people as his subject. This is not part of our work, it is only a device to drive away the tedium that descends upon men far from home and bound to exacting work in a confined place. We begin to feel quite passionately concerned with our subjects, and occasionally find it difficult to return to our primary concerns. For some time I had been spending my free hours in the world of a gentle old merchant named Jacobs. I lived his life with him briefly, seeing his wife and children as he saw them, going with him to his store. His memories were good ones, filled with hard work and simple pleasures. One day, when I had left the computing tables to prepare for dinner, I sought the mind of Jacobs. He was crossing the street and as he turned his head, he saw the shining lights of an automobile just before it struck him. I withdrew from his mind in a shower of pain and darkness. "Oh, he is dead," my mind cried out to my vigil companions before I could smother the shock and emotion in it. They looked up at me, questioning. Then I exchanged with them more coolly, "My man Jacobs has been killed crossing the street." Kcven, the fuel technician, reached my mind first. "A pity, I lost a subject myself that way not long ago. It is a bad death for them, poor things. They might build overpasses, mightn't they? A pity." It has never failed to unsettle me, the way my companions have come to accept the idea of death so easily. To me it is always a horror, unnatural and alien. You cannot quite see how it is, Novna, for you have never been in the mind of one who dies. I withdrew for a little while to mourn my man Jacobs, for my sorrow was not to be shared with the others. It was while I sat thinking of the dead Jacobs that Gven approached hesitantly and sat near me. "Is it possible," he asked, "that one can read the soul of an Earth man? Could I? Or perhaps that would not be permitted to me?" His eagerness made me ashamed of the silence I had maintained between us. "It is certainly possible for you to try, though it cannot always be done. You need ask no one for permission." The delight in his eyes made me forget Jacobs a little. "I may try anyone at all?" "I advise you to search about a little. Don't seize on the first one you contact as a subject. You have less time than the rest of us for this sort of thing." Gven thanked me shyly and went away. Later I saw him sitting at the open panels, looking down at the cloud-topped mountains and sandy valleys over which we circled. His face was still and pale as he concentrated. The next day at dinner, Gven sat playing with his food, looking up at the rest of us frequently, as if his fear of our coldness were contending with his wish to open his mind to us. I was not the only one to notice his excitement, but the rest sat looking at their plates stonily. They liked Gven even less than they had at first, and preferred to ignore his presence altogether. At last I lifted my head defiantly and my thought streamed across the table into the mind of Gven with such energy and violence that the others raised their eyes from their food in quick surprise. "It must be that you have found a subject. I should like to hear about it." At once Gven let his thoughts explode in undisciplined profusion. The men drew back a little, shocked by the unfamiliar impact of another's passion on their minds. "The very first mind I sought was that of a girl who calls herself Maria Dolores. Often her mind turns in upon itself and she reflects like this, 'Maria Dolores, you have behaved badly to your papa today. Now you must go and ask him to forgive you and give him a kiss . # In this way she scolds herself for small misdemeanors. Her world is composed of happy, innocent trivialities, though as her purity touches on them and causes them to glow briefly before they are left behind, it seems that there are no more divine and lovely things in existence than those in the world of my Maria Dolores . # Gven blushed and paused for a moment, then rushed on. "I sense that her father and mother have barricaded her from everyone else. They are strict with Maria Dolores and sometimes she wishes she could go out to dances as the other girls do. But she is not sad for long, and goes to gather flowers for the dinner table. She sets them in long silver dishes, that reflect the pink and red glow of the sunset slanting through the window. This pleases Maria Dolores and she stands watching for a long time." Gven would have said more, but all at once Corven, the cultural researcher, interrupted, looking at me. "Noven, what have you brought upon us by your curiosity? We are being buried in an avalanche of poetic fancies." After this, Gven sat silent, his face burning, and the rest of us began to talk of the relation between the sites of mines and the locations of proving grounds. For many days, I watched Gven covertly. He no longer seemed to care about our rebuffs, nor did he show any desire to ask us questions. He only sat by the panels, his expression withdrawn and intent, while the rest of us hustled busily and a little self-consciously around him. I came to notice a certain perplexity in his face after a time, and felt that I should ask if he needed any assistance. But I was awkward and unsure of myself, so I only watched him and said nothing. At last he came to me, having built up a powerful reserve of feeling that overflowed with the more violence for having been repressed so long. "There is something that is to happen in the life of my Maria Dolores," Gven began directly. Unaccountably, I tensed and tried to suppress the warmth I felt toward him. "Well, what is it then?" I answered. He seemed not to notice the strain I was under. "They have told her she is to be married to a young man whom they have chosen for her. She is unhappy, but cannot tell them. Now they are making many preparations. Maria Dolores spends her time with her mother, sewing dresses and packing them away. Then her mother speaks to her of things that frighten her and me, things that seem to happen when men and women are alone at night. She does not understand and lies awake when her mother has gone, afraid and wondering. We are uneasy, Maria Dolores and I." Here, Novna, I must attempt to explain the marriage of Earth people. While with us marriage is the spiritualized union of masculine and feminine natures in one soul, it is to them a more concrete thing. Their junction is not only one of minds, but one of bodies as well. The union seems not to be unpleasant for those who take part in it, but for us, who so jealously guard our bodies from another's touch, the marriage of Earth people is difficult to contemplate without revulsion. I was rescued from having to answer Gven by the laughter of Corven, who had overheard the last of the poet's words. "Well then, poet, if she is unhappy, you must take her away, mustn't you? That's what you want, it seems, to take her away to Hainos and make her your Gvna." Gven stood up and glared angrily at Corven. "Would it be so bad a thing to carry back one person of Earth? Why shouldn't we?" he flung at the other man. Corven turned away in disgust. "You know we have no authority to intervene in their affairs. This is what comes of letting a poetpriest meddle in the concerns of science." A sullenness came over Gven's face, and he withdrew from us again, turning back to the panels. I knew he was with Maria Dolores. Though I was uneasy over his ignorance, I could not help feeling relieved that I had not been forced to enlighten him. My anxiety proved to be wellfounded. It was only a few weeks later that we reaped the results of our long-cultivated conspiracy of silence against the poet-priest. We were deeply engrossed in our work at the computing tables when our nerves were shattered by a cry of anguish from the mind of Gven. In a moment we were standing around him, avoiding each other's eyes and scarcely daring to look at the man shuddering before us, his face in his hands. "It is done." Gven cast his anger at us like a stone. "It is as though she had been killed. Why couldn't you tell me? You, Noven, I asked you. Why couldn't you have spared me this?" The men looked uneasily at me and back at Gven. Shaken, they drifted away, back to their work, still ashamed to meet each other's eyes. Gven sat there, grinding his fist into his palm, staring straight ahead. He has been gone for some time now. At his request, a long-ship stopped for him on its homeward cruise. I have not tried to reach another subject, nor have any of the others. At least, if they have, they do not speak of it. We are reluctant to attempt any communion with these creatures whose alien nature has been so strikingly demonstrated to us. The game of Observation itself has become less a game, and we go about our work with a vague sense of unrest, as though the descent of catastrophe upon us were imminent. Gven gave us one last gift before he left. He sang us a song that made us want to bend our heads to the ground in shame. If his songs are bitter now, and if there is no innocence in them, one needs not look far to find the A.D. #: "I can't let it go, maimed and suffering... He had hunted mud worms on Venus, and lions in the jungles of Earth. Now he was after bigger game -- the shining beast that flies between the worlds. J minds me of?" asked Wilkins abruptly. "No," said Layton. "What?" "An albatross," said the passenger. "A great albatross, following the ship for day after day, week after week. I made a voyage, once, in one of the windjammers owned by that crazy squarehead, Larsen..." "He's not so crazy," said the mate. "My last long leave. I did the same -- signed on as ordinary seaman -- and it cost me plenty for the privilege. I never finished that voyage either -- the ship was weeks behind schedule and the Commission had to send a long range copter to locate me and take me off, otherwise I'd have missed my own ship. As it was, they were already warming up the venturis when I scrambled aboard, nattily attired in dungarees, jersey and seaboots. That's how I got my nickname -- you've probably heard it -- 'Sailor' Layton." "I was talking about albatrosses," said Wilkins as Layton paused for breath. "You were talking about Larsen's windjammers," said the mate. "But never mind -- I still have the rest of my watch to get through and nothing to do bu,t look at the stars and that thing out there. And when you've seen one, you've seen them all. Still, as you say, there is something of the albatross about them. Funny, isn't it, how so many people before the turn of the century used to think they were spaceships from Mars or Venus, or from outside the solar system altogether. It wasn't till we got out into space ourselves that we found they were life fonns, attracted down into Earth's atmosphere by the release of certain kinds of energy. That's why our friend is following us now -- he's hoping we'll fire the rockets (as we must, sooner or later) so that he can enjoy a free, radio-active meal... "Just as an albatross follows a surface ship, hoping for a free meal of garbage," said Wilkins. "The story I heard was different," objected Layton. "I was told they followed surface ships to take advantage of the wind eddies around the hull, and the superstructure and sails; that way they can cover thousands of miles with no more than an occasional flick of their wingtips." "They have to eat." "Fish," said Layton. "Garbage," insisted Wilkins. "Or sailors' eyes," said Layton. "One of the seamen -- one of the real seamen -- aboard that windjammer told me a rather horrid story. A few voyages back a friend of his had fallen overboard. They were able to throw him a lifebuoy, get the way off the ship and lower a boat. It didn't take them long to get to the man in the water -- but the albatrosses had got there first. They'd plucked out his eyes and torn his face to ribbons with their sharp beaks. Anyhow, this sailor, this A.B., had declared war on albatrosses from then on. He used to fish for them -- a strong line, a stout hook baited with meat. But he never dared do it if the Old Man were on deck -- the captain believed in every sailors' superstition going, as well as one or two of his own. According to him , killing an albatross brought bad luck." "What rubbish!" said Wilkins. "Yes, isn't it? As a matter of fact that ship -- Greta Andersen was her name -- was lost with all hands a week or so after I left her... "Coincidence," said Wilkins. "Of course," agreed Layton. They both turned, then, to look out through the wide viewport. From this angle the sun was not visible -- only the blackness of space, the cold, unwinking gleam of a myriad stars. Wilkins had no interest in the stars, no interest in the yellow planet among them, already showing an appreciable disc, that was Jupiter, to the satellites of which world the ship was bound. Wilkins was a hunter. He loved the trade, and he made it pay. He had killed, or captured -- according to the wishes of his clients -- the giant mud worms of the Venerian swamps, the vicious sand tigers of the Martian desert. He had gone as far afield as Pluto to bring back to the Museum of the Institute of Extra-Terran Biology the only specimen of the dominant life form of that frigid world -- one of the so-called "glass scorpions" -- ever to be seen in captivity. That it did not live for long in its tank at the museum was not Wilkins' fault -- he had warned the curator that light would kill the beast just as surely as would heat, and the curator had been fool enough to allow the press all the light they wanted for their cameras. But here, he thought, as he looked out through the viewport, is something that can take all the radiation we care to throw at it and thrive. But what is it? (I suppose they'll find out after I get this specimen back...) A swirl, an eddy of charged gas -- or a vortex of pure energy? And how did they ever come to call a thing like that a saucer ? "He must be hungry," said Layton, breaking into his thoughts. "That's all of six days, ship's time, that he's followed us now. When do you intend to try to capture him?" "There's no point in delaying much longer," Wilkins said. "He might sheer off. I've been studying him, as you know, trying to decide what makes him tick. I'm no closer now than ever I was, and there's nothing in the books as a guide. When there is, it'll be I who've written it." "What weapon will you use?" asked the Mate. "The one I showed you. The energy pump gun." "You're going to pump energy into the beast? I should think it would like that." "No, no. The pump gun draws energy out of whatever the beam hits. I'm going to stun him by draining his energy." "Hm. It does seem odd, enough, doesn't it? A weapon generally kills, or stuns, by pumping energy into the victim -- kinetic energy of a bullet, or chemical energy released by one kind of explosion, or the binding energy released by another kind." "But suppose your target lives on energy?" asked Wilkins. "Don't we all," countered the mate, "directly or indirectly?" "Indirectly. We don't take our energy neat. We use solar power, it is true, but it's been well processed by the time that it gets into our mouths and bellies." "Talking of solar power," said Layton, "why doesn't that thing out there live on it? It -- or its ancestors -- must have done so before we started throwing energy away on such a lavish scale." "Reverting to sea voyages," replied Wilkins, "consider the shark and the albatross. Both of them managed to subsist quite well before man started crossing the ocean in his ships. Neither of them starved -- and yet each of them acquired the taste for ship's garbage. Then, getting away from the sea, there's the clothes moth. Its ancestors must have been carrion caters at one time, living on the fur of dead animals." "Could be," agreed Layton after a few seconds' reflection. "Could be... The energy that we throw out has been... processed, and in the processing has acquired a new and attractive flavor..." "That's the way of it," said Wilkins. "At least -- that's what I think." He stared out of the port at the thing that could have been, save for its fluctuating outline and shifting colors, a miniature spiral nebula. "Well, Layton, there's my tiger. All that remains now is to stake out the goat, wait until he comes in to take the bait -- and then get him." "He was an albatross," said Layton, "and now he's a tiger... But you're the expert. What are you going to use for bait?" "The obvious thing. Energy. I've already talked it over with Captain Jones. I'm going out in a spacesuit and lash myself to one of the fins, right aft. The Old Man will feed the merest trickle of power into the drive. Our friend will sense it and come in to feed -- and I get him. I hope. I don't know what will be left after my gun has drained him." "When do you intend to use it?" "I'll make it tonight," said Wilkins. "Faithful Freddy might get tired of hanging around -- and it could be weeks, at least, before the next one picks us up. I'll see the captain right after dinner." "As long as somebody lets me know. I'm only the mate, but I like to be kept informed of what's going on. Ah, here's the second. Must be almost dinner time now." "Relieve the watch, sir?" asked the second officer. "The pleasure," replied Layton, "is all mine." He waved a hand vaguely at the instrument board. "As you see, falling free. One saucer keeping station at three o'clock ahead -- and little he knows what is going to happen to him within a couple of hours. Tonight's the night that Mr. Wilkins uses his fancy cannon." "That should be worth watching," said the second. "I hope so," the hunter said. "Come on down," said the mate. "We've time for a blue gin before dinner -- and as it's been the surgeon's turn in the galley today wc shall probably need it!" spacesuit -- it was lighter and less rugged than the standard model, and the sacrifice of armor was more than compensated for by the increased ease of movement. He put it on in the privacy of his cabin, all but the gloves and helmet, and then, as was his habit, regarded himself carefully in the fulllength mirror. All seemed to be in order. His eyes strayed from the inspection of his suited body to that of his face. He thought, You carry your years well, Hugh my boy. You look hardly older than you did when you went out for your first lion -- and that was all of twenty years ago. There's a touch of gray in that carroty thatch of yours, and the plastic surgeons weren't able to do much about that scar down the left side of your face -- but you've worn remarkably well, considering. And the best part of it is that you get as much kick out of every new hunt as you did from the first... He opened the locker beside his bunk, took out, one by one, the three cartridges, handling them with a slowness that was not altogether due to the great care that he was exercising. Each cartridge was no bigger than a table tennis ball -- but each was enormously massive. He packed them into the pouch at his belt, then fastened on the tightly rolled electronic net in which he hoped to catch the stunned beast, and draw it into the specially prepared room aft. He pulled himself out of his cabin and along the alleyway to the airlock. The captain was there, and the mate, and a half dozen of the other officers. They were looking curiously at the gun, which one of the cadets was holding. It was not large. It was no longer than the high-powered rifle that Wilkins had used on the Venerian mudworms. But it was bulky and cumbersome around the stock, and its barrel flared out to a bell. "He's still there," said Captain Jones. "I've just come from control. He's still there. Will you helmet up? You can test your suit radio with the officer of the watch." "We'd better get back to control ourselves, sir," suggested Layton. "The second officer can look after the door." "Yes, Mr. Layton. It'd be a pity to miss anything." Jones took Wilkins' hand in his. "Good luck." "Thank you, captain," replied the hunter. He shook hands with the mate, but did not trouble to watch the two officers depart for the control room. He put on his helmet, then his gloves. He tested his suit radio. Assisted by the cadet, he slung the energy pump gun over his shoulder. It was rather cramped in the airlock -- it had never been designed for the use of men carrying large and clumsy weapons. Wilkins had foreseen this -- that was why he was deferring the loading of the gun until he got outboard; there was always the chance that a sudden jar might set it ofT. Wilkins stood there patiently, the magnetic soles of his boots holding him to the deck, watching the needle of the gauge creeping back against the illuminated dial. As the pressure dropped he flexed his arms and legs -- found, as he had expected, that the joints of his suit were in perfect order. When the outer door opened he was ready. Cautiously, he made his way out of the ship. He stooped and clipped the end of his lifeline to the ringbolt just outside the airlock. He straightened, and looked forward. The space beast was still there, still keeping station on the ship abeam of the control room. He was not happy as he made his slow, careful way aft. The ship was so small -- a mere silver needle floating in immensity. He was so small -- a microbe on the surface of the needle. He told himself that he was exposed to far less risk than he had been during his last hunt, the expedition to capture a Plutonian glass scorpion. He told himself that then he had been really alone, that if anything had gone wrong it would have taken the other members of the expedition days to find him, and that help, inevitably, would have come too late. Here, crawling along the outer skin of the ship, help was only minutes away. "Wilkins," crackled Captain Jones' voice from the helmet speaker, "how does it go?" "Fine, captain," replied Wilkins. "I'm almost at the tail now. I'll let you know when to fire the rockets." The huge fin loomed before him -- gleaming, yet dark against the stars, the shrunken sun. Wilkins found another eyebolt without any difficulty -- at his suggestion these fittings had been painted white -- and snapped the spring hook at the end of his second lifeline to it. He looked forward. The energy being was still there. "Will you fire the rockets now, sir?" asked Wilkins. "Are you secure?" "All secure, captain." "Good. Stand by for firing. I shall fire on the count of ten." "Thank you." "One... two..." I hope the thing doesn't come aft too fast, thought Wilkins. But I should have time. I've practiced unslinging, loading and aiming this gun enough times, and I'd be a fool to have it unslung and in my hands when the ship starts accelerating... "Five... six..." I hope the lifeline holds, he thought. But there's no danger. All the acceleration will do is press me back against the fin... "Eight... nine... ten ! # The acceleration was gentle, no more than a nudge. Wilkins felt the reassuring pressure of the base of the fin against his back as he unslung the gun with deft hands, took a cartridge from its pouch and slipped it into the breech. He did not look behind him -- his attention was focused on the target. If he had looked behind he would have seen that the bight of his second lifeline -- he had allowed far too much slack -- had sagged directly into the incandescent exhaust. Swiftly, hungrily, the glowing disc swept aft. Wilkins' gun followed it. There was no need for him to use the sights -- the target was too near, too big. Wilkins pressed the trigger. prise. He had expected to be knocked backwards -- and the vicious, forward tug of the gun pulled him off balance. He did not let go the weapon, but clung to it grimly. The magnetized soles of his boots broke contact with the hull and he found himself spinning out into emptiness. He heard Jones' shout, "Wilkins! Your second lifeline has parted! You let it get into the exhaust!" "How's my first one?" he demanded. "It'll hold!" "It'd better. What's happened to the target? I can't see a thing the way I'm spinning round!" "It's still there -- b u t you wounded it, I think. The colors are fading, the light is dying... But it's still alive." I have to get it, thought the hunter. I have to finish it. I can't let it go drifting off into the darkness, maimed and suffering... He ignored the dizzying whirl of ship and sun and stars, concentrated on ejecting the used cartridge. The scientists at the Institute had been insistent that he bring back all expended ammunition. The spent charge he put back into the pouch. He reloaded the gun. A jerk told him that he had reached the end of the first lifeline. Holding the gun in his right hand, he grasped the line with his left, tried to check his motion. He was only partially successful. Even so, the stars were now stars -- points and not undulant ribbons of light. The ship swam into his field of view -- the ship and, close alongside her. the slowly pulsating, waning disc of pallid flame. The hunter put the gun to his shoulder, fired again. He was ready, this time, for the reversed recoil, but not for the vibration, for the sudden heat that burned his hands even through the gloves of his suit. He threw the gun from him, towards the ship. It was the best thing he could have done, as it happened -- the reaction slowed him down just sufficiently to allow him to fall against the metal hull without breaking every bone in his body. He was stunned and badly bruised, and it was all of ten minutes before he had recovered sufficiently to whisper into his helmet microphone; but he was alive. "Captain Jones," he said shakily. "Captain Jones!" There was no reply. "Layton!" he cried. "Layton! Can you hear me?" The helmet speaker was dead. And so is the set, he thought. It's robust -- but not robust enough to stand a battering like the one it just got. Even so -- they must have seen what happened. They might have sent somebody out to fetch me in. He got both hands on the lifeline, pulled in the slack. Hand over hand he hauled himself over the smooth surface of the hull until he had reached the airlock door. There was something wrong -- the light had been burning in the little compartment when he left the ship; it was out now. He pulled himself into the airlock. He waited patiently for the outer door to close. He shouted into his useless helmet microphone. He managed to wedge his back against the frame of the outer door, and kicked the inner door with his heavy boots. Fear he had known before -- but no fear like the dread that paralyzed him now. He knew what he would find when he got inside the ship. Almost he decided to kick himself out through the open door. It was stubbornness rather than hope that set him, at last, to the awkward task of manually closing the outer airlock door. He managed it by making the end of his lifeline fast to the wheel that controlled the great disc, by making himself fast to the corresponding wheel on the inner door. When at last he got the door shut, the inside of his suit was streaming with perspiration. He cast off the lashings, turned the wheel -- it was reluctant under his gloved hands -- and sealed the outer hull of the ship. By the light of the lantern built into the breastplate of his suit, he located the manually operated air valve. He opened it, looked at the intakes for the puffs of frozen moisture and gas that would tell him that the little compartment was being flooded. Nothing happened. He turned his attention to the pressure gauge. The needle was on zero -- and it stayed there. Wilkins doubted that he would have the strength to force open the inner door against the pressure of the air inside the ship -- but he had to try it. The wheel turned easily enough, and the door opened through about twenty-five degrees, then jammed on something. The hunter braced his back against the outer door, lifted his legs and pushed with his feet. Slowly the door moved -- through another ten degrees. There was space enough for the man to squeeze through. He saw what had jammed the door. It looked like a mass of icy snow. It was snow -- but a snow whose constituents were solid oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide as well as frozen water vapor. Wilkins knew that in his eagerness to shoot the space beast, he had swept the ship with the beam of the energy pump gun. He knew what he would find -- the bodies of the crew at their stations, the dead machines. He was not prepared, even so, for the absolute deadness of the ship. He had seen dead men before -- but none so dead as these. It was not that corruption had set in (but a putrefying corpse is literally crawling with life) -- that would be absolutely impossible unless the interior of the ship were warmed and the air thawed and the bacteria of decay released from his own body. It was that all the dead men were... drained. More had gone from them than life. More had gone from them than heat. More had gone from poor Layton (Wilkins was now in the control room) than his verbosity, than his hopes of a ferryman's job in the Martian system. More had gone from Captain Jones than the cock-sparrow jauntiness of the little man. They were like wax dummies, and not very convincing ones at that. It was as though they had never been alive. had happened to the gun that he had thrown from him, to the weapon that now contained in its expended cartridge all the energy that had been in the ship -- the lives of pile and storage batteries, of men and micro-organisms, of the algae in their tanks, of the yeasts in their vats, of the surgeon's Siamese cat and the chief engineer's aquarium of Venerian rainbow fish. He reproached himself for his almost instinctive action in throwing away the gun -- had he kept it he might, somehow, have restored life to the ship, to his shipmates -- or, more possibly, the scientists of the Institute might have done so. Perhaps the gun was not irretrievably lost. It was this forlorn hope, the slim chance that the results of his own criminal carelessness might be undone, that stirred in him thoughts on the subject of his own survival, his own rescue. He knew of the life-saving service maintained by the Terran Space Navy, he had been told of the little ships swinging in their lonely orbits around the sun, ready to respond instantly to a call for help. He had been shown the emergency transmitter by Layton and had been taught how to operate it. He left the control room. He pulled himself through the alleyways -- the beam of his lamp falling upon the crystals of frozen air, the dead men -- and into the axial shaft. The transmitter was amidships, in the safest part of the ship. All that Wilkins had to do was to press the starting button. He pressed it -- then cursed as he realized that the batteries were dead. He thought again of the gun, with its load of precious energy, tumbling through the emptiness of space. He thought, suddenly, of the used cartridge in the pouch at his waist. With unsteady fingers he brought it out, stared at the little, gleaming ball. Power was there, the life-force of the thing that he had likened to an albatross. Power was there, energy that, if released, might save his life He pushed the cartridge into a mass of frozen air that bulged, like some grotesque stalagmitic formation, from the wall of the shaft. He pulled from his belt the axe that he always carried. His first blow ruptured the casing, and the reaction slammed him back against the wall of the shaft. His second blow broke the shell. Nothing happened. Desperately, he beat at the little sphere until it was no more than a crumpled, shapeless mass. Suddenly the cartridge came alive and the ice around it melted, puffing into a cloud of vapor. Suddenly it glowed, expanded' into a whirling disc of pale fire. Suddenly there was life again in the ship -- an alien life, not hostile yet, somehow, frightening. Wilkins tried to throw himself backwards as tendrils of cold flame brushed his helmet. He shouted. The space-thing swirled and eddied in the narrow confines of the axial shaft, like a huge butterfly beating itself against the hard transparency of a window. And then, suddenly, it was gone -- and with its going the emergency lights came on, and the pilot lights on the panel of the emergency transmitter. Even through his helmet Wilkins could hear the hiss and crackle of thawing air. I've done all I can do, thought the hunter. But have I? No. I must go to the control room and turn off the lights, the heaters. I must stay in my suit. I must regard the ship as a giant deep freeze, the contents of which must be saved from decay until such time as they can be restored to life... But it might well be, he knew, weeks before the arrival of the rescue ship, and to attempt to live in a suit for such a length of time would be a protracted, filthy and miserable means of suicide. In the end he decided on a compromise; he was able to operate the manual controls of the airtight doors and seal off a short section of alleyway, with cabins and a bathroom. The cabins, luckily, were empty -- their occupants had been watching his last hunt from the big viewports in the lounge. Here, then, was his litde oasis of light and relative warmth and atmosphere that grew fouler with every passing day, in spite of the efficient little air purifier that he had taken from his suit. Here was the place where he lay, strapped to his bunk, and brooded. Here was where he tried to read -- he had never been a reading man -- the books that had belonged to the owner of one of the cabins. He had never been a reading man, although he had, now and again, usually during periods in hospital whilst recovering from a mauling, read novels of the trashier kind. Poetry was new to him -- and there was nothing but poetry for him to read. Some of it, he had to admit, had a message for him -- one poem in particular, one by a man called Coleridge, had a message. He was reading the poem for the fourteenth time when he heard the clang of magnetic grapples on the hull. Instead of the Cross the albatross About my neck was and works forward -- or the kind who skips around from story to story -- don't do it this time, or you'll miss half the fun. This is a special issue, designed to be read straight through from beginning to end. Each story is complete and separate in itself but, taken all together, they form an imaginative future history of space-flight, from A.D. # (The Pure Observers) to A.D. # (Brink of Creation ). If you enjoy this issue, and would like to see something similar done once in a while, be sure to let us hear from you. The ship went out safely, came back safely. The pilot was unaware of anything wrong. Somewhere in the depths of his brain was locked the secret that made him ly in the region of a G-type star. There was a bright flare as a few random hydrogen atoms were destroyed by the ship's sudden appearance. One moment space had been empty except for the few drifting atoms, and the next -- the ship was there, squat and ugly. Inside, a bell chimed sweetly, signalling the return to a universe of mass and gravitation and a limiting velocity called C. , Colonel Richard Harkins glanced briefly out his forward port, and saw no more than he had expected to see. At this distance the G-type star was no brighter or yellower than many another he had seen. For a man it might have been hard to tell which star it was. But the ship knew. Within one of the ungainly bulges that sprouted along the length of Phoenix #, a score of instruments mindlessly swung to focus their receptors on the nearest body of starmass. Harkins leaned contentedly back in the padded control seat and watched while the needles gradually found their final position on dials. A few scattered lights bloomed on the console ahead of him. He grunted once with satisfaction as the thermoneedle steadied at # C. After that he was silent. He leaned forward and flipped up two switches, and a faint sound of a woodpecker came into the control room as the spectrograph punched its data on a tape. The end of the tape began to come out of a slot. Harkins tore it off when the spectrograph was finished with it, threaded it on the feeder spool of the ship's calculator, and inserted the free end in the input slot. The calculator blinked once at him, as if surprised, and spat out a little card with the single word Harkins whistled softly to himself, happily.  had d true wife but I left her , he whistled. Old song. Old when he first heard it. Had a true... He wondered vaguely what a 'wife" was, but decided it probably didn't matter. Had a true wife but I left her , he whistled. He was glad to be home. The direction finder gave him a fix on Earth and he tried to isolate the unimportant star from the others in the same general direction, but he couldn't do it, visually. The ship would do it, though, he wasn't worried about that. He wished he could use the Skipdrive to get a little closer. It would take a long time to get in close on the atomic rockets. Several days, maybe. Well, he had to do it. The Skipdrive wasn't dependable in massspace. You couldn't tell what it was goipg to do when you got it too close to a large mass. He'd have to go in on the chemical. Mass-space , he thought. Molasses-space, I call it. Too slow, everything too slow, that was the trouble. Reluctantly he switched off the Skipdrive's complacent purr. The sudden lack of noise in the cabin made him squint his eyes, and he thought he was going to get a headache for some reason. Abruptly, all the cabin furniture seemed very harsh and angular, distorted in some strange way so as to be distinctly irritating to him. He brushed his foot across the deck and the sound of his boot was rasping and annoying. He didn't like this space much. It wasn't soft, it wasn't restful, it was all full of clutter and junk. He grimaced with distaste at the suddenly ugly console. He looked down at the floor, frowning, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger, flirting with the idea of turning the drive back on. But for some reason he couldn't quite think of at the moment, he couldn't do that. He frowned more severely, but it didn't help; he still couldn't think of the reason he couldn't do it. That headache was coming on strong, now. He'd have to take something for it. Well, well, he thought resignedly. Home again, home again. He was sure he was glad to be home. Home is the hunter, home from something something... He couldn't remember any of the rest. What the hell was a hunter, anyway? They irritated him, these nonsense songs. He didn't know why he kept thinking about them. Hunters and wifes. Nonsense. Babble. He keyed the directional instruments into the course-control and armed the starting charge for the chemical motors. When he had checked everything carefully, as he had been taught, he strapped himself into the control chair with his hand on the arm-rest over the firing button. He knew it was going to hurt him. He fired, and it did hurt him, the sense of explosive pressure, the abrupt thundering vibration. It was not the same as the soft, enfolding purr of the Skipdrive, comforting, assuring, loving... What's that? Loving? A wife is a Martha , he thought. A Martha is a wife. It seemed to mean something, but he didn't have time to decipher it before he passed out. mediately switched off the chemical drive. It had given him a good shove in the right direction, and that was all that was necessary. He would coast in now, and he had to save his fuel for maneuvering in atmosphere. After that, he rested, trying to accustom himself to the harshness of things in mass-space. His time-to-destination indicator gave him ten hours, when he began to feel uneasy. He couldn't pinpoint the source of unease at first. He was fidgety, impatient. Or something that resembled those feelings. It was like when he couldn't remember why he wasn't supposed to turn the Skipdrive back on. It occurred to him that he wasn't thinking clearly, somehow. He noticed to his surprise he had switched on his transmitter. Probably while he was drumming his fingers or something. He switched it off. Thirty minutes later he found himself toying with the same switch. He had turned it on again. This was getting ridiculous. He shouldn't be so nervous. He grinned wryly to himself. The transmitter switch, indeed. If ever a useless piece of junk had been put in Phoenix , that was it. Transmitter switch! He laughed aloud. And left the switch open. He found himself staring with fascination at the microphone. It was pretty interesting, he had to admit that. It was mounted on the back of the control chair, on swivel arms. It could easily be pulled into position right in front of his face. Just as if it had been meant to. He fiddled with it interestedly, swinging it back and forth, seeing how it moved on the swivel arms. He was interested in the way it moved so smoothly, that was all. By coincidence, when he let go of it, it was directly in front of him. There was something picking at him, something was nagging at the back of his mind. He whistled under his breath and knuckled his eyes. He scrubbed at the top of his head with his right hand, as if he could rub the annoying thought. Suddenly he heard his own voice saying : "Earth Control this is Phoenix I. Come in please." He looked up, startled. Now why would he say a thing like that? And then, in the midst of his surprise, he repeated it! "Earth Control this is Phoenix . Come in please." He flipped the Receive switch without volition. His hands had suddenly developed a life of their own. He began to breathe more rapidly, and his forehead felt cool. He swallowed twice, quickly. There was no answer on the receiver. No what? Answer? What is "answer"? "Estimate arrival four hundred seventytwo minutes," he said loudly, looking at the time-to-destination indicator. There was a sudden flood of relief, washing away the irritation that had been picking away at the back of his mind. He felt at ease again. He turned off both transmitter and receiver and stood out of the control chair. He felt better now, but he was a little worried about what had happened. He couldn't understand it. Suddenly he had lost control of himself, of his voice and his hands. He was doing meaningless things, saying things, making motions stupidly. Every movement he made, every act, was without pattern or sense. He had a sudden thought, and it made his whole body grow cold and prickly, and he almost choked. Maybe I'm going Nova . He was near the edge of panic for a minute. Nova Nova Nova Nova. Brightly flaring, burning out, of light years... That was how it started, he knew. Unpredictability, variation without explanation... He sat back down in the control chair, feeling shaky and weak and frightened. By the time he had regained his balance, time-to-destination told him # minutes. orbit around Earth. He circled three times, braking steadily with his forward rockets until he entered atmosphere. On his fifth pass he spotted his landing place. How he knew, he didn't quite understand, but he knew it when he saw it. There was a sense of satisfaction somewhere in him that told him, "That's it. That's the right place." Each succeeding pass was lower and slower, until finally he was maneuvering the ungainly bulk of the ship like a plane, wholly in atmosphere. Like a what? But he was too busy to worry about it. Fighting the Phoenix I down in atmosphere required all his attention. Absently he noted the amazingly regular formations of rock surrounding his landing place. His hands flew over the console automatically, a skilled performer playing a well-learned fugue without conscious attention to detail. The overall .pattern was clear in his mind, and he knew with absolute confidence he could depend on his hands to take care of the necessary small motions that went to make up the large pattern. He did not think: Upper left button third from end right bank rockets three-quarters correct deviation. He thought: Straight . And his hand darted out. The ground was near below him, now. He could see parts of the landscape through the port, wavering uncertainly in the heat waves from his landing blast. Slower... slower... slower... The roar was reflected loud off the flat below... Touch. Perfect , he thought happily. Per feet perfect perfect . He leaned contentedly back in the control chair and watched the needles of the console gauges fall lifeless back to the pins. He whistled a little tune under his breath and smiled. Now what? Get out. He couldn't think of the reason for it, but he would do it. While he waited for the hull to cool, he dropped the exit ladder, listened to the whine of the servomotors. He opened the port and stood at the edge, looking out. His headache had come back again, worse than ever, and he grimaced at the sudden pin. Before him stretched the flat black plane of the landing pad, ending abruptly in the regular formations he had noted before. They were mostly white, and contrasted strongly with the black of the pad. They weren't, he realized, rock formations at all, they were -- They were -- buildings, they -- His mind shied away from the thought. It was silent. His headache seemed to be affecting his vision, somehow. Either that or the landing pad wasn't cool yet. When he looked toward the -- toward the white formations at the edge of the pad, they seemed to waver slightly near the ground. Heat waves still, he decided. Nimbly, and with a pleasant sense of being home again, he scrambled down the ladder and stood on the ground, tiny beneath the clumsy shape of Phoenix L About halfway between the edge of the pad and his ship stood a tiny cluster of thin, upright poles. From their bases he could see black, snakelike cables twisting off toward the edge, shifting in his uncertain vision. He walked toward them. The silence was so complete it was unnatural. It was almost as if his ears were plugged, rather than the simple absence of sound. Well, he supposed that was natural, after all. He had lived with the buzzing purr of the Skipdrive and the thunder of the rockets so long, any silence would seem abnormal. As he drew closer to the upright rods, he saw each one was topped with a bulge, a vaguely familiar... They were microphones! They were just like the microphone in Phoenix #, the one he had fooled with. He was sincerely puzzled. All that transmit-receive gadgetry in the ship had been foolish, but what was he to think of finding it here on his landing pad? It didn't make any sense. He was getting the uneasy sense of confusion again. The headache was becoming almost unbearable. He walked over to the cluster of microphones. That was probably the place to start. He took the neck of one in his hand and pulled it, but it didn't move smoothly, as the one on his control chair had. It simply tipped awkwardly toward him. Suddenly he felt something on his shoulder, and looked around quickly, but could see nothing. The pressure on his shoulder remained, and he vaguely brushed at it with his hand. It went away. He set the microphone back upright and looked back at his ship. There was another pressure on his opposite shoulder, sudden and harder than the first had been. He slapped at it, and stepped back, uncertainly. One of the microphones tipped toward him, but he hadn't touched it. He took another step backwards, and felt something close tightly around his left arm. He snapped his head to the left, but there was nothing there. He twisted sharply away to the right, and the motion freed him, but his shoulder hit something solid. He gasped, and his throat tightened again. He raised his hand to his head. The headache was getting worse all the time. Something touched him on the back. He spun, crouching. Nothing. He stood straight again, his eyes wide, panting from the fear that was beginning to choke him. His fists clenched and unclenched as he tried to puzzle out what was happening to him. The air closed abruptly around both arms simultaneously, gripping so tightly it hurt. He shouted and twisted loose and started to run back toward the ship. He stumbled against an invisible something, fell against another, but it kept him upright and prevented his falling. Several times as he ran, things he could not see brushed him, touched him on the shoulders and back. By the time he scrambled up the ladder, his breath was short, and coming in little whimpers. The headache was the greatest pain he thought he could ever have known, and he wondered if he were dying. He had to kick at invisible things that clutched at his feet on the ladder, and when he reached the edge of the port he stood kicking and flailing at nothing until he was certain none of the -- creatures, things were there. He shut the port swiftly and ran breathlessly up to the control room. He threw himself into the padded chair. Finally he lowered his head into his hands and began to weep. # . The land turned gray and silver and white under the chill light of the rising moon. The buildings of Gila Lake Base IV were sharp and distinct, glowing faintly in the moonlight as if lit somehow inside the concrete walls. On the landing pad, Phoenix I squatted darkly, clumsily. The moon washed its bulbous flanks with cascading light that flowed down the long surfaces of the hull and disappeared into the absorbent blackness without trace. Tiny prickling reflections of stars glinted from the once-polished metal. At the edges of the Base, where wire meshes stretched up out of the desert dividing the things of the desert from the things of men, nervous patrols paced forlornly in the night. One of the blockhouses at the inner edge of the landing area presented two yellow rectangles of windows to the night. Inside the blockhouse were two men, talking. One of the men was in uniform, and his collar held the discreet starand-comet of a staff officer, SpaServ. He was young for his rank, perhaps in his early forties, with gray eyes that now were harried. He sat on the edge of his desk regarding the other man. The second of the two was a civilian. He was slumped in an oddly incongruous overstuffed chair, with his legs stretched out straight before him. He held the bowl of an unlit pipe in both hands and sucked morosely on the stem as the SpaServ brigadier talked. He was slightly younger than the other, but his hair was beginning to thin at the temples. He had sharp blue eyes that regarded the tips of his shoes without apparent interest. Colin Meany was his name, and he was a psychiatrist. Finally General Banning finished his account of the afternoon, raised his hands in a shrug, and said, "That's it. That's all we have. # Colin Meany took his pipe out of his mouth and regarded the tooth-marked bit curiously. He shoved it in his coat pocket and walked over to the window, looking out across the moon-flooded flat to the looming, ominous shape of Phoenix #. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, rocking gently back and forth on his toes. "Ugly thing, # he said casually. Banning shrugged. The psychiatrist turned away from the window and sat down again. He began to fill his pipe. "Where is he now? # he asked. "In the ship, # the general told him. "What's he doing? # Banning laughed bitterly. "Broadcasting a distress signal. # "Voice?" "Does it matter?" the general asked. "I don't know." "No, it's code. It's an automatic tape. The kind all passenger vessels carry." Colin considered this for a moment. "And he didn't say anything." "Absolutely nothing," said General Banning. "He got out of the ship, walked over to the reception committee, slapped a few people and ran back to the ship and locked himself in." "It doesn't make any sense." "You're telling me?" After a second the general added almost wistfully, "He knocked Senator Gilroy down." Colin laughed. "Good for him." "Yeah," the general agreed. "That bastard fought us tooth and nail all the way down the line, cutting appropriations, taking our best men... Then when we get a ship back, he's the first in line for the newsreels." Colin looked up. "You have newsreels?" "Sure, but I don't think they're processed yet. # ' "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? Check them, will you?" The general made a short phone call. When he hung up he looked embarrassed. "You want to see them?" "Very much." 'There's a viewing room in Building Three," Banning said. "We can walk." When the lights had come on again, Colin sat staring at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he sighed, stood and stretched. "Well," Bannnig said. "What do you think?" "I'll want to see it again. But it's pretty clear, I think." The general looked up in surprise. "Clear? It's just the same thing I told you." "Oh, no," Colin said. "You left out the most important part." "What was that?" "Your boy is blind and deaf." "Blind and deaf! You're crazy. The ship, he looked at the ship, and the microphone, and... "Oh, it's pretty selective blindness," Colin said. He filled his pipe with maddening slowness and lit it before he spoke again. "People," he said finally. "He doesn't see people. At all." forward inthe control chair with his head on his arms. When he wakened, the sky outside the viewport was turning dark. With a sense of sudden danger, he clamped down the metal shutters over the port. Methodically he climbed down catwalks the length of the ship, making certain all ports were secured both from entry and from sight. He didn't want to see outside. When he had done this, he felt easier. Walking to the galley, he put a can of soup in the heater, and took it back up to the control room with him. He sat there, absently eating his soup and staring ahead at the console. He noted he was beginning to get used to the harsh outlines it presented in this space. Suddenly he realized there was a red light on the board. He put the bowl of soup carefully on the deck and went over to the transmitter where a loop of tape was endlessly repeating itself, apparently broadcasting. He could not remember having inserted it. The empty spool lying beside the He understood all the words, all right, but put together they didn't would it be for? Why would such a thing be broadcast? If you were in distress, you surely knew it without transmitting it. He shook his head. Things were very bad with him. He was profoundly disturbed by his loss of control. Performing all sorts of meaningless actions without volition... And now, with this tape, he had not even been conscious of the act, could not remember it. He went back to the control chair and finished his bowl of soup. Thinking about it, his meaningless activities had all been centered around one thing, this odd transmit-receive apparatus, this radio. He had looked at it before, and he realized it was very carefully constructed, and complicated. The wiring itself confused him. And more than that, he could not determine any possible use such a thing might have. Thinking about it gave him the same prickly sensation at the back of his neck as when he thought about the nonsense words in the songs he knew. "Wife' Things like that. He rubbed the back of his neck hard, until it hurt. He realized his headache had almost gone away when he secured the ports, but now it was coming back again. Another light flashed on the console, and a melodic "beep -- beep" began to sound from somewhere behind the panel. Automatically he reached forward aid flipped a switch, and the "beep -- beep" stopped. Without surprise, he noticed it was the switch marked Receive. So. When the light flashed and the "beep -- beep" sounded he was supposed to throw that Receive switch. Presumably, then, he should receive something. Was that right? He looked around the control room, but nothing happened. Just on the edge of his consciousness there was a faint sussuration, but when he turned his attention to it, it disappeared. There was no sound. But when he thought of something else, it came back again. It was like an image caught in the corner of his eye. There was nothing there, but sometimes you thought you caught just a flash of something out of the comer of your eye. Like this afternoon... He shuddered at the recollection. In all his life, he could not remember anything that had driven him into such pure panic as the loathsome invisible touches he had felt. What kind of creatures were these? This was Earth. This was his home, it was where he belonged, and he couldn't remember anything about invisible... Yes! Yes, he did remember! But there was still something wrong because -- he couldn't think why. He remembered walking on a grassy meadow on a spring day. The grass was rich and luxuriant and the sun was hot copper in the sky. He was walking toward the top of a hill. Right at the top there was a single small, green tree. He was going to go up and lie down under that tree and look down in the valley at the meadow. And beside him there was -- a presence. He remembered turning to look, and -- nothing. There was nothing there. But the feeling of the presence next to him made him pleased, somehow. It was right. It was not menacing, like this afternoon, it was more -- comforting. As the sound the Skipdrive made was comforting. It made him feel fine. But when he turned to look, there was nothing. He could not remember. What kind of presence? Like the ship? No, much smaller. Smaller even than himself. Compared to the ship, he was small, quite small. He was infinitely smaller than even planetary mass. And there were things on the ship that were smaller than he. But he couldn't quite place himself with assurance on the scale of of size. He was larger than some things, like the bowl of soup, and he was smaller than other things, like planets. He must be of a sort of medium size. But closer to the bowl of soup than the planet. A wife is a Martha. He remembered thinking that just as the rockets had fired. It was in the song... He whistled a few bars. I had a good wife but I left her, oh, oh, oh, oh. And it had something to do with the remembered -- presence, when he was walking in the meadow. But what was a Martha? You can't define a nonsense word in terms of another nonsense word. Or perhaps, he thought ruefully, you can't define it any other way. A wife is a Martha. A wife is a Martha. A Martha is a wife. Nothing. But he felt the headache coming on again. He went down to the galley again, and took the soup bowl with him. He put it in the washer, and rummaged around in the cabinets until he found the little white pills that helped his headaches. He took three of them before he went back up to the control room. He had to make some kind of plans for -- for what? Escape? He didn't want to escape. He was home. He wanted tb stay here. But he had to deal with the -- things, somehow. He wondered if they could be killed. There was no way to tell. If you killed one you couldn't see its body. And he didn't have any weapons, at any rate. He would simply have to outsmart them. He wondered how smart they were. And how large. That would make a good deal of difference, how large they were. He went to the viewport and cracked the shutter, just a little. It was dark. He didn't want to go out in the dark, that was too much. It would be too much risk. He would wait until morning. In spite of the pills, the headac he was getting worse, almost to the insane level it had been in the afternoon. He decided he'd better try to sleep. # . stood at the shoulder of the radio operator in Gila Base IV Central Control. It was just past midnight. Banning's fatigue was evident ; Colin, having been involved a shorter time, still looked reasonably fresh. Monotonously the radio tech droned: "Gila Control to Phoenix I come in please. Gila Control to Phoenix I come in please. Gila Control to Phoenix I come in please." After every third repetition of the chant, he switched to Receive and briefly listened to the buzz and crackle from the overhead speakers. "Gila Control to Phoenix #... "Is he still transmitting the distress code?" Colin asked. "Yes, sir," the tech said. "But he could stireply if he wanted to. Distress dperates from a separate transmitter on a single fixed frequency. The ordinary transmitter isn't tied up." "I he receiving?" "I think so. When we gave him the 'Message coming' impulse, he switched to receive. That was hours ago. "Maybe he's tuned to the wrong frequency," Banning suggested. The tech looked up in surprise, then resumed his respectful attitude toward the brass. "No, sir. His rig is a self-tuner. The signal automatically tunes the receiver to the right frequency. He's getting it, all right." "In other words," Colin said, "your voice is being broadcast on the ship's speakers." "As far as I can tell." "Mm." Colin leaned back against a chart table and pulled on his pipe for a few moments. "Please go on, sergeant," he said finally. "Keep trying. But change the patter to 'please reply,' would you?" "What difference does that make?" Banning asked. "That's what 'come in' means, anyway. Same thing." "Just an idea," Colin said. "Why don't you get some rest? You look beat." "What kind of an idea?" Banning said, rubbing his forehead. "Can you get a couple of cots brought to your office?" "Yes, but what's your idea?" "Come on along and I'll tell you about it," Colin said. They left Central Control, with the voice of the sergeant sounding behind them, " Gila Control to Phoenix I please reply. Gila Control..." Reaching Banning's office, Colin sent one of the ubiquitous armed guards after two cots. "You can't shoot all your energy at once," he pointed out, when Banning protested he didn't need the sleep. "If we're going to get Harkins out of that ship, we're going to have to stay in pretty good shape ourselves." "All right," Banning grumbled. He made coffee on the hot plate from the bottom drawer of his desk, grinning at Colin like a small boy caught stealing cookies. "I like a little coffee once in a while," he explained unnecessarily. When they had settled themselves with the coffee, Banning asked, "All right, now. Why'd you change 'come in please' to 'please reply'?" "It's less ambiguous," Colin said. " 'Come in please' could mean several things." "So? Anybody with as much radio experience as Harkins knows what 'Come in please' means." "You're going to have to get used to the idea you're not dealing with Harkins in this. Take the point of view, this is somebody you've never seen before. Somebody you have to figure out from scratch." ' "Mm. I suppose so. Okay, why the change?" "Well -- " Colin hesitated. "First of all, this -- blindness is purely a functional block of some kind. There's nothing organically wrong with his vision." "I'm still not sure I go along with your blind-deaf idea," the General said dubiously. "I'm virtually certain, after seeing the film strip again. Your Colonel Harkins behaves exactly like a man being molested by something he can't see." "For the sake of argument, then... Banning nodded. "All right. Presupposing he does not want to see human beings -- for whatever reason -- there are several mechanisms he could use." "He didn't even have to come back," Banning pointed out. "That's one of the mechanisms. But he did come back. Why? Problem one, for the future. Mechanism two: Catalepsy. Suspension of all sensation and consciousness." "Obviously not the case." "Right. Mechanism three," Colin went on, ticking the points off on his fingers, " partial disorientation. Loss of perception of  single class of objects, human beings." "Even that isn't entirely true," Banning said. "He felt people." "That's right. And I think this is our opening wedge. Of the possible means of avoidance I named, partial disorientation is the least successful of all. It involves too many contradictions. He was disturbed by the microphones, for example. Why? Because they are meaningful only in a context of human beings. Communication. He would have to do some fancy twisting to avoid the notion of human beings. The same goes for any other r human artifact. Somehow, in order to make the world 'reasonable' in his own terms, he has to explain the existence of these things, without admitting the existence of people who made and use them." "Impossible." "Very nearly. It means that some facet of his personality must be continually making decisions about what can be recognized and what cannot. His censoring mechanism is in a constant scramble to prevent certain data from reaching his conscious mind. It has to justify and explain away all data which would eventually point to the existence of human beings." "What the hell does he think he is?" Banning asked angrily. "I have no idea. Maybe that's problem two for the future. At any rate, as you pointed out, this is an impossible job. It must be infinitely more difficult now that he';s on Earth, where there are so many more things to explain away. This is going to set up a terrific strain inside. It may break him." "What would do that to a man?" "I don't know that, either," Colin admitted. "Our first problem now is to get him out of the ship. And to do that, we have to contact him." "This is why you changed to 'please reply'? What good is it going to do if he can't hear it, anyway?" "That's the point. I think he can hear it. He can't recognize it, but that isn't quite the same thing. His eardrums still vibrate, the data gets in, all rit. But it doesn't reach the congous level. Fortunately, it isn't always necessary to be consciously aware of a stimulus before you can respond to it. Frequently a persistent stimulation just below the threshold of awareness will produce a response in the organism. Sub-threshold stimulation, it's called." "Yeah," Banning said, "I've heard of it. Used it in advertising, didn't they?" "For a while. Before Congress passed the Privacy Amendment." "Okay. Now what?" "Now we wait and see if it works. I'm going to take a nap. Wake me up if anything happens." Colin stretched out on one of the cots, put his hands behind his head and soon was breathing deeply in an excellent imitation of sleep. said #:# when his communicator chimed. Banning was off his cot and at the desk before the first soft echoes faded. "Banning. Yes... yes... all right, right away." "What is it?" Colin asked. "They've got something from the Phoenix at Control." When they reached the radio room again, a different technician was on shift. He was intently watching an oscilloscope face on the board in front of him. "What happened, did he answer?" the general asked. "No, sir. But a few minutes ago we started getting a carrier wave on his transmission frequency." Banning sighed disgustedly. "Is that all? Dammit!" "What does that mean?" Colin asked. "Not a damned thing," Banning said angrily. "He just threw the transmission switch, is all." "Look, sir." The radioman pointed to the oscilloscope. The smooth sine of the carrier was slightly modulated now, uneven dips and jogs appearing rhythmically. "There's something coming through, but it's awfully damned faint...Sir." "Run your sensitivity up," Banning ordered. The radioman slowly twisted a knob, and the hiss-and-crackle coming through the speakers increased in volume until each snap was like a gunshot in the radio room. Colin winced at the noise. "Maximum, sir." "Increase your gain, then." The technician did. The speakers Very faintly behind the torrent of sound another sound could be heard, more regular. The rhythm corresponded with the jogging of the oscilloscope. "That's it," Banning said. "But what the hell is it?" "I don't -- wait a minute," said Colin. "He's whistling! It's a tune." "You recognize it?" "No -- no, it's vaguely familiar, but -- " "I know it, sir," the radioman said. "It's an old folksong, The Quaker's Wooing." "Why is it so faint?" asked Colin. "He must be a hell of a ways off-mike," said the tech. "Clear at the other end of the control room, I'd say." ' Turn down that damned noise' said Banning. The radioman twisted his controls back to medium range, and the thunderous hissing roar of the speakers died away. "Well," said Banning, "nothing. We shoulda stood in bed." "I'm not so sure," Colin answered. "After all, he did start to transmit, and that's more than we've had since he landed. I think we'd better keep it up." "All right. Keep at it, sergeant." "Yes, sir." As Colin afnd Banning turned away, the psychiatrist heard the sergeant begin to sing softly to himself. Suddenly Colin stopped and turned back to the man. "What'd you say?" he demanded. "Nothing, sir." "What you were singing, that song." "Oh, it was the one the colonel was whistling, sir. It gets to running around in your head. I'm sorry, it won't happen again." "No, I want to know what the words are. What you just said." "Well, it goes, I mean it starts out, I can't remember the whole -- " "Come on, man! Sing it!" In an uncertain voice the radioman began to sing: "I had a true wife but I left her, oh, oh, oh, oh. And now I'm broken hearted, oh, oh, oh, oh. Well, if she's gone, I wouldn't mind her, Foldy roldy hey ding di do. Soon find one -- " "That's enough, sergeant," Colin said, relaxing. He turned to Banning. "Well, General, that's it. The wedge goes in a little deeper." "What do you mean?" "Is Harkins married?" "Yes, yes, I think so. She lives in the officer's quarters on base." "Get her," Colin said. "Now? My God man, it isn't even five -- " "Get her," Colin repeated. "Harkins has her on his mind. Maybe we can get to him through her." Martha Harkins was a small brunette, too plain ever to be called pretty. Almost mousy, Colin thought. But intelligent, and quick to understand the situation, in spite of her nervousness. She sat on the opposite side of Banning's desk, her hands folded quietly in her lap, fingers twined, while Colin explained what they wanted her to do. Her still-sleepy eyes were fixed on her fingers while the psychiatrist talked. "I -- I think I see," she said hesitantly. "What it comes down to is that you want me to try to talk Dick out of Phoenix I." Colin nodded. "It may not be easy. I've told you as much as .we know about the condition of his mind. He will not consciously hear you, in all likelihood. We hope to appeal to deep-seated emotions below the conscious level. Are you "Of course," she said with real surprise, looking up at him for the first time. "Good," Colin said warmly. He stood from behind the desk. "We'll take yoj#fever to radio, now" Bamnng was waiting for them in Central Control. "Any change?" Colin asked. "No. Same thing. Sometimes he comes closer to the mike. We can hear his footsteps. He seems to be wandering around the control room pretty aimlessly. Or maybe he's just carrying on the in-flight routine, we can't tell." 'This is Mrs. Harkins," Colin said. "General Banning." "Thank you for coming, Mrs. Harkins," the general said. "I hope this isn't too difficult for you." He took her small hand in his own. Martha Harkins smiled faintly. "A service wife gets used to just about everything, general." "Unfortunately true. If you'll come with me, I'll introduce you to your technician. Has Dr. Meany explained what we want vou to do?" "Yes, I think so." "Good." "Just one thing, Mrs. Harkins," Colin put in. "This may take some time. It may be we'll want you to cut a tape with a request to leave the ship, if we can't get any response from live voice. Repetition is the important thing, and the sound of your voice." "All right. I'll do whatever you say." She turned away briefly, but not before Colin saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes. Banning led her over to the radio console, saw her seated and instructed in the use of the equipment, and returned to Colin. "What do you think?" he said. "She'll do." "Will it work?" "How the hell do I know?" the psychiatrist answered roughly. They were silent for a moment, watching the small figure of the woman leaning forward tensely over the microphone, as if by her nearness she might make her husband hear. "You know," Banning said musingly, "I get the feeling this is all the fault of SpaServ, somehow. Some little thing we overlooked. A little more training, maybe." The woman's soft voice droned on, not quite carrying distinctly to the two men, though the warmth and urgency of it was evident in her tone. "I think you did all right with your training," Colin said finally. "He came back, didn't he # " # . H arkins slept only lightly, turning restlessly in the large control chair. Finally the pain of his headache increased td the point he could no longer sleep at all, even lightly. Just before he wakened, he thought he heard a sound at once intolerably loud and somehow soothing. Which was impossible, of course. Opening the viewport shutter a crack, he found the land outside lit ambiguously by the false dawn that was beginning to spread against the eastern hills. He took several more of the white pills for his headache. Briefly he considered eating something, but abandoned the idea. The pain was so intense, he didn't think he could keep anything down. He found the illusion he had noted yesterday -- the whispering sound he could not hear when he tried -- was still there. It was even worse now. All about him was the flickering shadow of a sound, demanding his attention, requesting. And still -- when he tried to hear it, it was gone. He pressed his knuckles against his forehead and clenched his eyes tightly shut. If only he had something to do to take his mind off the headache and the elusive sound... But there was nothing to do. With neither the Skipdrive nor the atomics operating, he had not even the routine powerchecks to keep him occupied. Then why am I here? His function was to operate the ship. That much he knew without doubt. And he was well suited to operate it. His hands were properly shaped to manipulate the controls, and he could do it automatically, without thinking about it. He was Ship-Operator. But the ship was not operating... What was his function then, when the ship was not operating? The other control devices, when not controlling, automatically shut off. Perhaps something had gone wrong in his shut-off relay. That was not it, either. He was not the same as the other controlling mechanisms. He was different. Different materials, different potential functions in his structure, all kinds of differences. But even if it were true that he was not intended to switch off when not functioning as Ship-Operator, what was he to do? Think it out. Think this thing out very carefully. Pain was a signal of improper functioning. All right. He was not functioning properly, then, and he knew it because of the level of pain in his head. If he could get rid of the headache, he would at the same time be finding his proper function. Step one, then: Get rid of the headache. And he had to do that anyway, because he was unable to think clearly while he had li. The headache had alleviated several times, then come back again. That meant he had performed properly, then drifted away into -- into -- Wrong was the word that came to his mind. Wrong. He had drifted into improper functioning, and the word for that was Wrong, and his headache had come back as a result. All right. When had the headache alleviated? He tried to think back. The first time, the first time was when he had found himself speaking the meaningless words into the microphone, announcing his estimated time-to-destination. And then, when he had closed the viewports. And throwing that Receive switch... What did these actions have in common? What factor did they share? Only one thing. Two, really. First, they had some connection with the transmit-receive apparatus. Or two of the three did, at any rate. The other factor, shared by all three acts, was that they were done almost without his conscious will. This, then, might be the critical factor. That he act without volition. Relax. Completely. Allow yourself to act. He leaned back in the control chair and tried to blank his mind, tried not to give his body any commands. Without volition, without will ing. He closed his eyes. For a long while there was nothing. Then he heard the whir of servomotors. He opened his eyes, delicately probed with his mind... and the headache had lessened. He glanced up at the console, to see what he had done. A red switch, then. And it had been the "proper function" for him, because the headache had lessened. But the out-of-range whispering had not diminished. The airlock? He shook his head in puzzlement. But the technique seemed to be working. What now? He closed his eyes again, and this time the delay was shorter. He knew before he looked what had happened. He had lowered the landing ladder. Well, this began to be obvious. He was to leave the ship. And yet, the headache had been worst when he had left the ship. What did that mean? It seemed to mean leaving the ship was a W rong function. But it was certainly indicated this time, from his opening of the airlock and lowering the ladder. Well, what was Wrong function at one time might well be Right function another time. That could happen. Leave the ship... There was an edge of pleasantness and warmth to that thought, and the headache diminished. fC Please leave the ship , Dick... It was almost as if he could hear a warmth in the air saying that to him. Try the alternative. Deliberately he thought: Stay in the ship . A flash of pain soared up the back of his head and across the top to settle swirling and agonizingly in his temples. Leave the ship , he thought quickly, and the pain abated. Clear enough. He got to his feet and carefully made his way out of the control room down the catwalk toward the airlock that stood open and waiting to let him out of Phoenix #... An excited non-com slammed open the door to the radio room and shouted, "The airlock's opening!" Banning and Colin dashed to the broad window and stared out at the bulky shape of Phoenix #, resting monolithic on the landing pad. Banning took the proffered binoculars from the non-com, focussed them on the broad flank of the ship. "It's open, all right," he said. "Here." He handed the binoculars to Colin. After a long delay, the landing ladder slid down the side of the ship. "I think he's going to come out." "There he is." "What's he doing?" "Standing in the airlock, looking around. Now he's starting to come down. Now he's at the bottom of the ladder, looking around again... Now he's walking this way." "Give me the glasses," Banning said. He looked for a long moment, making sure the colonel's direction did not change. "Still coming this way," he said, putting the glasses carefully on the table by the window. He turned to look at the psychiatrist. "What now?" Colin shrugged. "Get him." "Sergeant!" Banning called. "Sergeant, take five men..." him was comfortable and secure. Very secure. The bed was firmly welded to the wall, the table bolted to the floor. There was nothing movable or detachable in the room. The three microphones picked up little but the shuffle of feet; cameras dutifully imprinted on film the image of a man pacing restlessly back and forth, examining the fixtures of the room without apparent anxiety or curiosity. "No trouble at all," Banning answered Colin's question. "He didn't even see the patrol. Spray shot of Somnol in the arm and that was it." "He doesn't seem particularly upset," Colin mused, watching the screen on which the lean figure of Colonel Harkins paced. "Nervous," Banning said. "Not as badly as the situation would warrant. I don't think it's getting through to him. He's apathetic." "How did he react to seeing his wife?" Banning asked. "Bewildered him. Gave him a hell of a headache." "That all?" "That's all." "What now?" Colin sighed. "Get through to him some way." He tamped tobacco in his pipe, his eyes still on the spyscreen. Harkins was now sitting on the bed, his hands immobile on his knees, staring straight ahead. "How do you intend to do that?" Colin reached for a pad of paper and began scribbling, talking as he wrote. "How are you feeding him?" "Double door compartment. Put the food in, close the outside door, open the inside." "Put this on his tray next time, will you?" Colin handed the general a slip of paper. On it was written a single sentence: Richard Harkins , I want to talk to you. "All right," Banning said, reading it. "He's due for lunch in about an hour." On the screen, Colin could see the light come on over the food compartment, and the microphones picked up the sound of a bell. Harkins, who had not moved from the bed since his initial examination of the cubicle, looked up. The inner door of the compartment opened, revealing a tray with several steaming dishes, a pitcher of milk and a pot of coffee on a self-warm pad. Harkins stood up. He looked at the food, walked over to the tiny open door and picked up the tray. Calmly he carried it over to the table, sat down, unfolded the napkin and put it in his lap. "My God," Banning whispered, "you'd think he'd eaten this way all his life." "Apathetic," Colin said shortly. "He refuses to admit anything unusual." "How the hell could he rationalize losing consciousness and waking up in a windowless room?" Colin shrugged. "Brain's a funny thing," was his only comment. His eyes were fixed intently on the screen. Suddenly Harkins noticed the slip of paper tucked under the corner of one of the dishes. Colin leaned forward, took his pipe out of his mouth. Harkins withdrew the paper and looked at it. Even on the screen, Colin could see the writing, almost make out the words. Harkins stared briefly at the paper, turned it over and looked at the other side in puzzlement. He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Finally he gave a little shrug, put the message back on the tray and resumed eating. Colin sat heavily back in his chair. He sighed. "He didn't even see it," Banning said disgustedly. "He saw the paper, not the message." "Why?" "Personal communication. It implies the existence of another communicating -- entity. He won't admit it." Cojin re-lit his pipe. "Ah, hell!" "I guess we'll' have to take the direct approach," Colin said thoughtfully. He lay relaxed on the bed in the little room, his eyes closed, his face calm and quiet. Pulse normal, temperature normal. Above and in the walls recorders and cameras purred almost silently with the bland indifference of omniscience. Harkins . Yes. Can you hear me?... no... The strain of the question twisted the man's face into a grimace of pain. Pause. Then: You are Richard Harkins. Yes. Colonel... Yes. Can you hear me? I... No. Anxious contortion. All right. It's all right. The man's face returned to relaxation. How old are you? Thirty-two. Have you always been thirtytwo? Have you always been thirtytwo?... no... Hesitantly. You were once younger. Yes. You were once a child and grew to be a young man and grew to be thirty-two... yes... Why do you hesitate? I don't understand all the words you say . What words don't you understand ? Well -- Man . The expression of pain and anxiety flitted across bis relaxed features. I will explain the words later . Don't worry about them now. All right. Richard Harkins , we are going to move back to a time when you were nineteen . You are nineteen years old. You are nineteen. How old are you? Nineteen. What are you doing? I -- I'm a cadet, I -- What kind of cadet?... SpaServ... All right, now we'll move ahead two years. You are twenty-one years old. Twenty-one. How old are you? Gradually Colin brought Harkins forward in time, carefully, feeling his way gingerly along the dark corridors of his mind. He brought him through cadets, graduation, his marriage to Martha (touchy: gently, gently) -- his service in the planetary fleet. Then: a mysterious phrase; rumors -- Phoenix Project. -- nobody seems to know . Something secret , but no telling. Everything's secret this year. Testing officers right and left and up and down. But nobody knows what for... card waiting for me at breakfast... Months of testing. Still nobody knows, but the rumors are running fast and heavy. Whole base preoccupied with the misty Phoenix Project. Secret construction hangar, security precautions to the point of absurdity... I'm it!... it's f asterthan-light drive, that's what Phoenix Project is. F asterthan-light. The big dream, the dream of the stars... Training. Slower through the two years of intensive training. This may be a critical phase. Two years, endless repetitive drill, drill practice drill drill drill... Colin's forehead feels cool as he sits beside the bed. Perspiration. A glance at his watch shows him two hours since they began. How did you take to this intensive training? All right. It was all right. Dull, you know, but it was all right generally. After the first year it was pretty automatic. Conditioned response, I didn't have to think. If and when such and such happens, press this button, throw that switch. Automatic. Automatic, Colin thought. That's why he came back then. Without volition, responding to given signals according to training... walking toward the ship. She's big and bulky, but we're friends by now. Now I'm climbing the ladder up to the lock... listening to the count down... two... one... fire!... Harkins grunted as the re-lived acceleration slammed him back in the control chair with a relentless and unabating pressure. He was silent for thirty seconds... blacked out , not long . Report in to Gila Base , launching successful. They acknowledge , give me course. I # m moving "up", at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Fastest way to get away from large mass bodies... Time then on atomic rockets, almost a full day. Colin brushed over this phase, which was routine. As far as he could tell, Harkins # duties had been designed principally to keep him from getting bored before it was time to cut in the Skipdrive, and this corresponded with what General Banning had told him. As he approached the time of the Skip, he moved more slowly, taking in detail... three minute bell. The bell is a pretty sound. I am checking the controls again . Everything is fine. I am sitting down in the control chair with my hands relaxed over the ends of the arms. When my fingers brush against the buttons, they tingle , or seem to. We're all ready. There's the two minute bell... Pause. One minute bell... Suddenly Harkins sat stiffly upright on the bed. His eyes snapped open, staring with fear and disbelief at something Colin could not see. Oh , my God, he whispered. What is it? But there was no direct answer. Harkins repeated: Oh, my God, my God , my God... What do you see? What is there? Oh Jesus the stars the stars the stars God in heaven I can't Jesus make them go make them go make them go... His voice had risen almost to a scream, his eyes open wide and staring, his body rigid. With a whimper, he clenched his eyes shut and fell back on the bed. He drew his knees slowly and jerkily up to his chest, as if resisting the movement, clasped his arms around his legs tightly. He began to rock back and forth, gently, gently, as if immersed in water, his breath making an involuntary whining sound as it passed his constricted throat. Move forward in time. Move ahead. You are coming out of the Skip. You are coming out of the Skip. You are returning to normal space. Colin's voice was steady and calm over the high-pitched whines coming from the throat of the man on the bed. Suddenly his face relaxed. The eyes remained closed, but closed as if in sleep, rather than anguish. His arms and shoulder released their clenched grip around his knees. Evenly, smoothly, his legs straightened on the bed, his feet digging into the covers and pushing them into a roll at the bottom. He finally lay as he had begun, stretched straight with his hands beside his thighs and his face relaxed. When he spoke, it was in a normal, almost conversational tone... belled out. I like the sound of that bell, it is relaxing. It's a good signal and I'm glad it hap pens that way. I stand up from the control chair and stretch. I have the strong notion something very pleasant has happened. How do you feel? Do you feel strange ? No, I feel fine. Everything is fine. I check the instruments, and they show that a Skip has been completed. That # s good. I don't -- I don't -- somehow I can't remember why I wanted to... His voice broke off, puzzled. Colin waited, and in a minute Harkins began to speak again... hear the sound of the Skipdrive. It comforts me. Funny, I don't remember ever hearing it before... Go back before. Go back. You hear the one minute bell. You can hear the one minute bell and you are ready to make your Skip. You are getting ready to make your Skip. Harkins snapped upright again and repeated his actions. He shouted and screamed, his body was forced into the foetal position jerkily... Whimpering. Go forward. You arc returning to normal space... I feel fine, everything is fine. I check the instruments... Go back... There was no lessening. Colin's shirt was slick on his body with sweat, his' face looked old, older, his breath came in almost imperceptible quaverings, but his voice remained calm and assured, in violent and distinct contrast to the strain that showed plainly as age in his face -- Move ahead... Move back... Twentythree minutes later, Colin closed his eyes and said: In ten minutes from this time you will waken feeling refreshed and relaxed, as after a good sleep. You will be alert and fresh when you waken. You will feel as if you have just had a pleasant nap. You will remember nothing of what has happened while you were asleep, but you will feel fresh and relaxed when you waken ten minutes from this time. He finished the waking-formula mechanically and left the little room. He walked slowly and deliberately to his quarters on the base, as though holding himself rigidly in control. He did not answer Banning's excited questions except to say, "I can't talk about it now." Reaching his room he fell full length on the bed and was asleep nearly before the swaying of the bed had quieted. # . again in General Banning's office. "Look," Banning said, "I'm sorry to press this, and I know you took a hell of a beating in there. But we've got to know." Colin nodded morosely. "I know. I'm sorry about the delay." "You looked more dead than alive when you came out." "I'm afraid I'm too long on empathy and too short on objectivity to fool with that kind of thing. One of the reasons I don't often trigger these big discharges in my own practice. I get -- inside, I guess, somehow. No detachment, or not enough." "What was there? Inside, if that's the way you want to put it." Colin sighed, absently pulled his pipe from his jacket pocket. "Specifically, I don't think I can tell you. He saw -- or experienced as seeing -- something when he went into the Skip. It was something so damned big it stripped him of his orientation as a human being." "The films show him assuming a foetal position. That what you mean?" "Well -- basically this kind of regression is a denial of responsibility. 'I'm not a man,' he says. 'I'm just an unborn child. Take care of me.' The individual wants no part of the problems and responsibilities of adulthood. Harkins came out of that, or he never could have got the ship back. But he couldn't face being a man. The only way he could carry out his responsibilities, and survive, was to abolish the category, man." Colin leaned back and sighed. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "Harkins must be the loneliest human being that ever lived. God!" After a moment he looked up. "Ever read any Emerson?" "The philosopher Emerson? No, not much. Some maybe, when I was in college. Why?" "Nothing in particular. I was just thinking of an essay of his on Nature." "No, haven't read it. Well," he continued, standing, "where do we go from here?" "More of the same, I'm afraid. We have to find out what he saw. What was so -- immense, that it could make a man deny the existence of other men." Night came to Gila Base IV ; the second night after the Phoenix Ps landing. Darkness climbed out of the eastern hills and spread itself upward into the sky and across the plane of the desert. Phoenix I was still on the landing pad, but its sides were hidden by a webwork of ganties and scaffolding as base technicians clambered over it, testing, checking, examining. Colin insisted on leaving the base, making the twenty-mile drive into town and his home. Banning was too tired to argue about it. He gave the psychiatrist a security gatepass and went to bed in his own office. Colin's car buzzed down the wide concrete toward the little cluster of lights that marked Gila City. He slowed when he reached the outskirts, watching the blue glare of the overhead sodium lamps slide along the hood and up over the windshield. Reaching his apartment, he flicked on the lights and went in. It was a single room, two walls covered with floorto-ceiling bookcases; there was a desk, one overstuffed chair. Automatically his eyes swept the room with the questioning glance of a man returning home; they lingered apprehensively on the neat stack of unopened mail the cleaning woman had put on the exact corner of the desk. He sighed. No matter how preoccupied a man got, the rest of the world went on just the same. He went into the little kitchenette and made himself a cup of instant coffee, returned to the main room stirring it absently. He seated himself heavily in the overstuffed chair. Struck by a sudden thought, he put the coffee down on the edge of his desk and went over to one book-wall. He scanned the multicolored spines until he found the thin paperback he was looking for. He took it down and went back to the chair. "Nature," the cover said, "by Ralph Waldo Emerson." Laying the little pamphlet open in his lap, he pulled pipe and tobacco out of his jacket pocket, tamped the bowl full and lit it. He shifted himself easily in the chair, settling himself. Our Age is retrospective, the introduction began. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers... He read on, gliding over the familiar words with a pleasant sense of acquaintanceship, the sense of sharing an idea with a respected friend. To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. The next line of the essay made him sit up straight in the chair. He read it over twice, then closed the pamphlet and carefully put it back in the bookcase with a vague feeling of having been either betrayed or helped, he couldn't tell which. As he was turning out the lights to go to bed, his com buzzed. Answering it, he recognized the voice of Banning's secretary. "Mr. Meany, can you get back to the base right away? Something's happened." "What is it?" Colin snapped. "The Colonel has gotten back into Phoenix I" "... understand exactly how it happened," Banning said. "He seemed to be sleeping peacefully, and one of the men vyent in the room to take out his garbage, for Christ's sake. When the door opened, he made a dash for it." The two men stood in the control room before the wide windowwall looking out on the landing pad. Phoenix I , still surrounded by scaffolding, was brightly lit in the glaring beams of a dozen searchlights playing from the Gila Base buildings and trucks on the field. "Can he take it off?" Colin asked. "I don't think so," Banning said. "Sergeant, is there fuel in those tanks?" "Yes, sir," said one of the men in the group that crowded in front of the window. "But the feed valve is off. It can't get into the firing chambers." "What would happen if he tried?" Colin asked. "Nothing," Banning said. "It wouldn't fire. Unless -- unless he didn't pay any attention to the board, and left his hotpoints on after he saw it wouldn't fire." "What are hotpoints?" "The ignition elements. They'd melt down under continuous heating and -- well, then we wouldn't have any more problem. The tanks would go." "You'd better clear the field," Colin said quietly after a minute. "Sergeant," he said to the radioman, "would you give the Phoenix a 'message coming' beep?" The radioman did. then said to Colin, "Go ahead." "Is he receiving?" "Yes, sir." "Colonel Harkins," Colin said. "Colonel Harkins, can you hear me?" The loudspeakers buzzed. "Colonel Harkins, please reply." The speakers snapped once. The sound of Harkins' whistle came over, loud at first, then drifting away. He was whisding the same tune as before... had a true wife but I left her , oh, oh, oh, oh..." "Do you want her back again?" Banning asked, recognizing the melody. "Colonel Harkins, please reply," Colin said. Switching the mike off, he turned to Banning. "Better get her," he said. "We may have to go through the whole thing again." It took twelve minutes by the control clock before they heard the door of the room open, and the light tapping of Martha Harkins' feet. Banning and Colin turned away from the window to greet her. Suddenly their shadows were thrown violently ahead of them, leaping across the floor and up the opposite wall like frightened animals trying to escape. They swung back to the window, their words of greeting still unspoken. For perhaps a half second they could make out the upper part of Phoenix I, standing above the ugly glare like the nose of a whale thrusting up through a sea of boiling flame. Then it disappeared, and the fire-ball climbed suddenly into the night sky, rolling and twisting in on itself. A gantry tipped and fell out of the flame with ponderous slowness, twisted and melted before it crashed to the pad. Then the unbearable glare died, and the searchlights played on an opaque black column of smoke, redly lit from within, standing where Phoenix I had stood. The roar that shook the building seemed to come much too late. lately in the control room, staring blankly out at the clusters of beetle-like trucks clustered around the landing pad, with their feathery antennae caressing the stack of still-burning wreckage. Washed down by the foam trucks, the fire would soon be out. But there would be little advantage to it, except to clear the pad. "How's Mrs. Harkins?" he asked without turning as he heard footsteps behind him. "Under sedation # General Banning said. He came to stand beside the psychiatrist, looked with him at the firecrew's activity, so disorganized and insect-like at a distance. "They'll have it out pretty soon," he said unnecessarily. "Mm." Both men were silent. After a while, Colin tamped in fresh tobacco and lit his pipe, sending up cottony puffs of smoke. "What do we do now?" he said absently. General Banning sighed. "See that hangar?" he asked, gesturing to a tall building perhaps a quarter mile away down the edge of the field. Colin nodded. "Phoenix #" the General said, and his voice was flat and expressionless. "Send another man into it, knowing no more than we know?" "We have to know," Banning said. "Men have died before without as good reason." "I'm going home. Call me if you need me." Colin stood, and the general made a silent gesture of helplessness. They wouldn't need him. Not until Phoenix #I came home. Then they would need him. Colin spoke, quietly, as if thinking of something else. "I didn't hear you," Banning said. "Quoting Emerson. The essay on Nature I mentioned." "What did he say?" " 'But if a man would be alone " Colin quoted, " 'let him look at the stars Good night, General." "Good night." Colin walked outside into the cold desert air. The night was clear and crisp, and the Milky Way hurled itself like a mass of vapor across the sky... if a man would be alone , let him look at the stars... He looked up, and was alone in The startling story of a forbidden experiment that defied the s laws of life and science! jj We predict that you will be fascinated, probably shocked, perhaps  a little horrified -- but you'll certainly be sorry if you miss it.  You'll find it, along with exciting stories by Philip K. Dick, f Theodore Thomas, Cordwainer Smith, R. M. McKenna and # others, in the December issue of IF. Ask your news dealer to save   you a copy. t "Is this a trick?" JL dome, idly waiting while his twenty-odd light-years away y friend adjusted the dials of the receiver. The recording tape spilled other eyes see our own Sun over the table in loops of aluminum. blazing in the middle of a "Doesn't this job get dull?" he inquired. familiar constellation... Nautunal turned the fifth dial a few degrees, and glanced up. "Depends on your interest. It's true this is just routine space-sweep, but noise from space is amazingly variegated. Just one more sector to scan tonight, and I'll be through. What's matter with you, Pehn? Your face looks little lopsided." Pehn tried to grin, and fingered the slight swelling on his cheek. "My face will never be my fortune, I guess. I don't know what's matter. Just ache." Even at his best, as Pehn's family loved to remind him, he was an ugly young man; he had none of the rounded placidity of feature which was the ideal of his race. His oHve skin stretched too tightly over his cheekbones, and his black eyes peered too intensely from their deep sockets. It helped very little that he happened to be extremely intelligent. Pehn covered the aching place with his hand, and tried to concentrate on the emerging spills of tape. As a matter of fact, he had been having severe periodic toothaches for six months now, but had never spoken of it. Suddenly he bent forward. "Hold it! Just minute. Let me see that." Nautunal raised one eyebrow. "Don't let it get you, lad. Listening to space is apt to make you jumpy. Your friends over at Atomics wouldn't like that. More than once I've thought I was finding some sort of sense in all this chatter, but it never pans out. It's just noise. There may be other inhabited planets besides Zenob, just as Bidagha claims, but if so, they aren't talking." "Stop, watch tape," said Pehn. Nautunal shrugged his shoulders, but he picked up the tape and watched as it trickled through his fingers. The machine was recording short bursts of energy, separated by distinct pauses: "  "Two and two," remarked Pehn, "are four. Three and three are six. Four -- " "I know. I've been to kindergarten too. Four and four are eight. Has your aching face affected your mind? You ought to submit yourself for treatment." He reached to shift the scanner, but Pehn grabbed his hand. "Can't you see? Somebody is trying to show us they know how to add. Someone out in space. Keep watching. I wonder if they use duodecimal system, or what? Where is it coming from?" Nautunal dropped his skeptical pose, and watched the emerging tape in silence. The growing table of symbols built all the simple additions up to # plus #, by the laborious accumulation of dots. Then it began again, systematically, "One and one are two, two and two -- " Pehn turned his wondering eyes on his friend. "Is this trick? Joke you rigged up for my benefit?" Nautunal shook his head, and his voice was hardly a whisper. "No. That stuff is really coming through space -- through phase space." Twice more, the table of additions appeared. Then, after a brief pause, came simple multiplications. Hour after hour the signals continued, endlessly repeated, and shortly after midnight the two could recognize the periodic table of chemical elements, with atomic weights and numbers of isotopes. "If those numbers which follow atomic weights are abundances," said Pehn, "composition of their planet is not quite same as ours. Look how rare # is. Where do you suppose this is coming from?" "You guess," said Nautunal. He waved his arm towards the transparent dome through which the stars shone, and grinned. "From little data I have so far, signals might be coming from somewhere in Weaver, perhaps from neighborhood of Topaz, but it's too early to be sure of anything." Suddenly a marked change occurred in the pattern of the signals. The clear symmetry of mathematics ended and was replaced by a formless jumble, but a jumble whose repetition suggested that it, too, contained a pattern if it could once be glimpsed. Meters and meters of tape piled up, and the young men stared at it in frustration. Nautunal stood up in sudden decision. "Bidagha is right. There must be intelligent life in another part of galaxy. We need help, Pehn. We can't decipher this stuff, and yet it may be key to basic vocabulary. We need mathematicians, linguists, semanticists. I'll put out call to director." He lifted a finger to activate the visiphone in his wrist band, but before touching it he glanced at his friend in some concern. "But you don't look well. Perhaps you ought to go home and get some sleep?" Pehn shook his head. "No, pain will probably be gone by morning, and at time like this sleep would be only gift from Evil Ones. I'm going to get Bidagha. He'll be more use to us than dozen semanticists." "Call him on visiphone." "You know he can't wear one. He's at Cave tonight, holding Ceremony. I'll go after him." "All right, Pehn. But remember, government will probably disapprove of this business. Whatever you do -- don't tell your father!" Pehn grounded his copter at the outskirts of the city, then turned his back to the glowing lights and walked north across the darkened fields towards Cave. The early morning sky blazed with stars, and ahead of him, low on the northern horizon, gleamed the sprawling constellation of Weaver. He had never been able to force his imagination to see many of the constellations in their completeness, and in the patterns of stars which his pastoral ancestors had conceived as Weaver, Sower, Homed Toth, he could see only random clusters of suns. He watched it now, as he walked over the rutted earth, and suddenly the pattern took shape, so that he could discern the old lady's Shuttle, and at Topaz, which might that very moment be sending its signals through the galaxy. How many planets revolved around Topaz? He stopped, for the field ended in a sharp bluff which descended to a narrow valley. Across the valley's floor was the entrance to Cave. He could see the bobbing lights of candles, down there, and hear a muffled chant of many voices. He hoped Ceremony would end, soon, so that he could consult his friend. Once again he felt impatient that Bidagha should have to be met in person just because, as a Healer, he could not wear a visiphone into Cave. Bidagha was really more progressive than many scientists. But the culture of Zenob still had a strongly anti-materialistic, one might almost say anti-scientific tinge, and no machine of any kind could ever be brought into any of Sacred Places. Cave had been the ehief place for the ceremonies of those living in Lahzen area for so many thousands of years, that even the historians did not know of a time when it was not in use. It was so old, some heretics said, that it had outlived its usefulness, and was not even a safe place to be in. The stars were fading, and the northern sky was paling when the chanting stopped in Cave below. People filed out silently, extinguishing their candles as they reached the opening, and last of all came the Healer. "Bidagha!" Pehn called softly. "Up here!" The tall figure paused, then ran lightly up the steps out in the sloping hill. "Has something happened?" "Hurry. My copter is waiting back there, and I'll take you to signal dome. Then I'll have to go home. If I'm not there for breakfast, my father will begin another lecture on depravity of youth." Bidagha's eyes twinkled. "Premier Karn is pretty conscious of his responsibilities to nation, Pehn, but perhaps eighteen years ought to be more respectful of fifty. I am nearly lafter myself, you know. But what has happened?" Pehn raised his arm and pointed towards Weaver. "We're getting signals. We think maybe they come from some planet of Topaz." Bidagha clasped his strong hands on his breast. His black hair, curling over a high, olive forehead, was held in place by the narrow green band of his calling. Under his little mustache his mouth was firm and serene, and his gray eyes were exalted as he stared at the fading yellow star. "At last!" he said. had risen by the time Pehn got home. He sat through the family breakfast with his parents and his sister, thankful that his night's absence had apparently not been noticed. Pehn's father, old Premier Kam, represented, the old man liked to think, the ideal of Zenobian maturity. The placidity of his mind was reflected in the soft roundness of his unlined face, and his full lips curved at the corners in perpetual contentment. Like most of his countrymen, he had never felt any conflict between his own impulses and the customs of his society, and never in his life had he needed the ministrations of a Healer. In his usual benevolent mood I this morning, Premier Kam enter) tained his family with his meditaa tions on his favorite theme, the glories of Zenob's history and the s perfection of her knowledge. They s listened to his remarks in patient t silence. As he sipped at his last c cup of fragrant akhlai , he tried to  make a kindly remark to his son. i "And what progress is your institute making towards practical i atomic power, Pehn? Foundations  of this work were laid down more I than two hundred years ago, and I government would be glad to have  demonstration at any time. #  "We're little uncertain, sir, when I that will be. We want to be sure, s before our first trial, that we have i checked against even vaguest posi sibility of starting widespread chain i reaction."  The Premier frowned, set down  his cup, and touched his napkin I to his lips. "But how could this i occur?"  "It is not at all likely. But if, for j example, as has been suggested, j crust of our planet should contain J large quantities of some heavy eleI ment with properties we don't I know about, something related to s # or # for instance, and easily i fissionable, our very first trial might i prove disastrous." I "Nonsense, nonsense!" said the i Premier. "Complete chemistry of I our planet was worked out and I tabulated more than three hundred I years ago. There were great chem istr in those days, and since then i no further research has ever been necessary. There could not possibly j be any elements which we don't know about. It is not seemly for you young men to be questioning work of great geniuses of past." Pehn's sister, Soma, had been silent, as befitted a woman. Now she said, "Father, I have been told that long time ago, Sarkar Talat, after life spent in philosophical research, gave Warning to government -- " "Trouble with you, my dear," and the Premier patted his pretty daughter's arm, "is that you don't realize women usually lack spiritual insight necessary to interpret veiled words of Ancients. Of course I admit our Healers can foresee future, but they don't always describe it in unambiguous language. Actually, Sarkar issued two Warnings, but they obviously did not mean what they seem to at first glance. First was, that we are in danger because we only think we have mastered all basic knowledge. Second was, that there are undoubtedly other worlds in universe, and one of them will one day affect destiny of Zenob. Taken at face value, these are obviously both false. As to first, no new knowledge has been added to our sciences for generations, in spite of fact that Ainta ages ago showed us how to use faculty of precognition. As to second, it is clearly foolish to think Sarkar meant other worlds in physical sense. He must have meant spiritual worlds." He turned again to Pehn, who had risen from the table and was waiting politely. "When can we have that demonstration? Within month?" "I'll speak to director today, sir." The throbbing in his cheek was becoming evident again, and he touched his face gently. "What's matter, Pehn?" said his mother. "Nothing. My face hurts, little." "Ignore it!" his father ordered. "I won't have any maladjustment in Lord Karn's family!" He picked up the gold-headed cane which was his badge of office, and strode out of the room. Pehn managed to spend a second night with the sleepless group of experts at the signal dome, but fatigue, and the growing pain in his cheek sent him home again just before dawn. Softly he ran up the ramp to the second floor and into his bathroom, to the medicine closet In Pehn's family, a transient illness was an embarrassment, a persistent illness a disgrace. It had always been his mother's pride, and his father's boast, that in the Karn household the contents of the medicine shelves were never needed, and that the doors of the cupboard remained closed from one year to the next. It was with a sense of guilt, then, that Pehn pressed a spot on the green-tiled wall to slide back the cupboard doors, and picked up an ivory box, from which he took a He swallowed the huge pill, then took another. A double dose, this time, for he knew the pain would never yield to anything less. He stood shivering for a few moments, waiting for the drug to take effect. He looked up, and realized that his sister was standing at the open door, watching him sympathetically. "Pehn," she said, "you're ill. Won't you talk it over with me?" "I would talk it over with one of Evil Ones if I thought it would help this pain. It grows worse and worse." "Have you told Father yet? He could arrange for Healer -- " "No!" he shouted. "I don't want him to know. He'd only begin lecture on his shame, his gray hairs, how all pain comes from unruly mind, why don't I put myself in tune with group -- old familiar story. But I know this is something different." "But Pehn! You know yourself, surely, that since you've got into Atomics Institute, you have changed. You aren't perfectly adjusted, any more. You worry about things." He touched his swollen face and smiled at her placatingly. "Don't worry, Soma, or you'll get lines in your forehead, and Father could never bear shame of having two maladjusted children in family. I'm stronger than you think. Last year when I passed Fire Test, I stood flames longer than any of boys in my class, longer even than Nautunal. But this is different. Trouble with Zenob is that we don't have any biology or any real medicine." "Pehn! How can you say such things? Your best friend is Healer." "You know I haven't anything against Healers. But only ailments they can cure are those that originate in mind, and they can't really do anything for purely physical ailments. Bidagha has admitted as much to me. He wants to change all that -- he thinks time is ripe." "But Pehn, our Healers can foresee future. You know that Ainta Penab proved that, five centuries ago." "Ainta was worst disaster that ever befell Zenob," shouted Pehn. He put out his hand to restrain his sister, who was attempting to struggle to her feet in horror. "Oh, Soma, I guess I'm just heretic. But listen to me. Sure Ainta Penab proved conclusively that such phenomena as telepathy and precognition are real. And what was result? Members of Cult used it as argument and launched campaign to stop scientific research completely. They nearly succeeded, too. Medical research has never been resumed on any large scale, and chemistry and physics only in last century." Soma sighed. "You shouldn't get all excited, Pehn. Come down into living room, and stretch out on couch. I'll rub your forehead. You may be ugly old atavism but you're only brother I have, and I want to keep you." In the big living room, Soma drew the curtains from the lucite walls that looked over the white city. The early sunlight came in, warm and faintly blue, soothing. She put foam pillows under his aching head, and drew up a footstool beside him. She stroked his forehead and he was beginning to doze, lightly, when a muted chime roused him. He activated his wrist dial, to find Nautunal's grave face looldng at him. Pehn sat up. "What have you found?" "Something. Can you come here, now?" Pehn struggled to his feet. "Just give me minute to clear my head." "Don't go, Pehn!" cried Soma. "You're not well! It's nearly breakfast time, too. Don't go. What will I tell father?" But the door had closed, and from the window Soma watched Pehn's copter rise above the rooftops and glide out of sight. found the specialists still at work, pale and tense from lack of sleep. Some still conferred over pages of mathematical equations, some watched the tape which monotonously continued to record the symbols. Bidagha strode forward to meet him. "We've finally found key to vocabulary, Pehn, and others are at work now on main body of message. Signals are undoubtedly coming from one of planets of sun we call Topaz. It has system of nine planets, and waves are being sent from third. All my life I've believed that there were other planet systems like ours, and other intelligences in galaxy, but now that one of them is signalling us, I can hardly make myself believe it!" From the top gallery, high in the dome, Nautunal ran down the spiral ramp. "We're getting it now, Bidagha! Planet of Topaz, is signalling this entire sector of galaxy, hoping to find planets with intelligent life on them. They wish to communicate, to exchange information, and they offer to visit any planet which would welcome them." "Then they can travel through space?" "Yes. They say they are only twenty-seven light-years away." Bidagha's shoulders drooped in disappointment. "But if these signals have been twenty-seven years on way, it would take us another twenty-seven years to answer them. I shall never live to see their visit!" "But you don't understand, Bidagha. I forgot this isn't your field. These waves are coming through phase space, and they go much faster than speed of light. They reach us almost instantaneously." Pehn began to laugh. He felt light-headed, and for some reason amused. "I suppose you all remember my father's Jarlu lecture, in which he demonstrated mathematically that life or intelligence on any planet except Zenob was impossible. He pointed out that unique properties of carbon compounds of which we are composed could never be duplicated on another planet. And how remarkable circumstance of our having Ice I, only form of solid water that can float, had allowed life to evolve on Zenob, alone. Poor father! This will be hard on him. Of course, you are not going to send answer?" Bidagha had seemed to be in meditation, but now he spoke in a commanding tone. "Of course we must reply!" Nautunal gasped, and stepped away. "But we haven't right! That would be heresy!" "I claim right. Centuries ago, Healers dreamed of this day, and as Healer I dare to claim right. We will reply to these signals and tell people of Topaz planet that intelligent men do exist on our own world." Nautunal's eyes had become dreamy and speculative. "I am not certain that we could reply, even if we dared," he said. He looked uncertainly at the other microwave technicians, to see fear looking from their faces, too. At last one spoke. " think we could change over to transmission through phase space in about half hour -- if we had orders." He hastily turned away, afraid of his own thoughts. "Responsibility is mine," said Bidagha. "I speak with authority of my calling. We will send same set of mathematical tables we have received, and then periodic table of elements as they exist here." Pehn felt confused, battered with warring emotions, and too tired to think or speak. But Nautunal moved with abrupt decision. "If you order it, Bidagha, we will try." He turned to his technicians. "We'll start work immediately." Nearly an hour had passed before the wave modulator was reported ready. In the highest level of the dome, they watched nervously as Nautunal turned up the power and worried the dials. "All set?" he said. There was no reply. In a dead silence he touched the button, and started an impulse driving towards the star Topaz. The door behind them opened with a crash and Premier Karn strode in, his face contorted with an anger he had never shown before in his life. "Despicable traitors!" he shouted. "Turn off that instrument!" White-faced, one of the technicians obeyed, and the power indicators dropped. "Can it be true, what has come to my ears -- what I see now with my own eyes -- that you would dare to reply to message that comes from foreign planet?" Bidagha's commanding figure grew even taller. "Premier, I speak now, not as Bidagha man, but as Bidagha Healer, and I must give you my Warning: Zenob cannot escape contacts with other worlds! "In my opinion, Zenob has reached fateful turning point in its history. We must face fact that our knowledge of physical science is not adequate. Our fossil fuels are nearly gone, and we must have atomic power. But frankly, our physicists don't know enough to design safe atomic reactors. And at rate science progresses on Zenob, they won't know enough for centuries. All of this could be remedied by exchange of information with this other world." As he faced Bidagha, the Premier trembled with rage, and his usually placid face was contorted. "Bidagha, you could be unfrocked for that! Zenob would be better off if Healers would confine their opinions and activities to healing, and leave politics to those whose business it is. Government will not base its decisions upon visions of dreamers who have dwelt too long in Cave." Pehn closed his eyes as a wave of agony broke over him. The voices receded; dimly he was aware that he was falling. Pain and shouting together faded away into darkness. post on Long Island, Joe Weber sat before his recorder, intent on the noise from space. The chief anthropologist studied the star map on the wall as he asked his question. "Have you got anything at all, Joe?" The technician shook his head. "Nothing but noise. I've only been beaming them for four days, and our schedule calls for a week on each sector. I'll keep on as planned, but I'm positive that the star systems in the Lyra sector are not inhabited in any sense we would recognize, or, if there is life there, it hasn't developed enough of a science for them to know they're being signalled." The anthropologist sighed. "It may be a hopeless task. It may be several lifetimes before we locate systems similar to ours. I had hoped to find some in my day." "Don't be discouraged, professor. I'll start hitting Cygnus for you, and maybe we can find something there. Yesterday, for a minute, I thought had something in Lyra. In the middle of the random noise, suddenly I came across what looked like 'dot dot, dot dot, dotdotdotdot, dot dot dot, dot dot dot -- ' It was clear as crystal, and much louder than the noise, but then it lapsed into the usual nonsense. Pure chance at work, of course, but for a minute there, my hair stood on end. Well, it's all in the day's work. I'll just keep sending our stuff -- " "Of course," said the anthropologist, "there might be intelligent people in the sector you're working right now, but they might be like the Zuni." "The Zuni?" asked Weber. "The Zuni are a large village of American Indians who live in New Mexico. Right next to what used to be a big Indian reservation for the Navahos. A typical inwardlooking culture. Now the Navahos, although they still keep their own language and religion, are an outward-looking culture, interested in the rest of the world. The Zuni are not. For them the boundaries of the world are the walls of Zuni village. They wouldn't bother to listen to a message from outer space, much less reply." "Can't be very bright." said Joe. "On the contrary. Some of them have made the highest scores on the Tromovich intelligence test that have ever been recorded. It's not a matter of intelligence, but the attitude of the culture." "Well," said Joe, "let's hope most of the worlds of space have outward-looking cultures." He turned back to his transmitter. on a couch. He tried to get up, and felt his father's hands at his shoulders restraining him. "Don't move, Pehn," said his mother. "You fainted, and they brought you home." She lifted his head, and let him sip a cup of the hot akhlai. After a time his father addressed him with unusual kindness. "We cannot 'delay any longer, Pehn. Your mother and sister and I are all agreed. You must undergo Ceremony. What is proper thing to do for you, I don't know, but Bidagha believes he can help you. This crisis in our world is making us all ill, and it is no wonder that you, being young, should suffer more acutely than rest of us." Pehn tried to laugh. "Would you trust me to Bidagha?" "Yes, I would. Although his views on world affairs are perverse and dangerous he is good Healer, and he has your best interests at heart." "Your son is very ill, Lord Karn. If I am able to help him, would ty, at least, that wisdom of Healer is not confined to human body alone?"  Premier Karn brushed his hand across his eyes. In the last few days he had suddenly become an old man, and his mouth was drawn and tense. "I cannot tell, Bidagha. I am tired, and confused. I no longer seem to be sure what is true, and what is right." Pehn opened his eyes to speak to Bidagha. "Do you think you can cure me, by Ceremony alone?" "I have cured people who were much more ill than you are, but your case is serious because you have delayed so long. It may be that we should not rely on ritual alone, and that it would be wiser to use knife." Lord Karn gasped with horror. "Never! Have you lost faith in your own art?" "Of course none of us like to use knife, since very few minds are skilled enough to control infection likely to follow. No, first we shall hold Ceremony just as our traditions counsel us. Tonight." The muted chime of the visiphone interrupted them. The Premier touched his wrist and the gaunt face of Nautunal appeared in the dial. " 'Signals have entered new stage, sir. Message coming at present states that Topaz planet wishes to visit any planet inhabited by intelligent race. They say they have phase space drive for spaceships, but in all their searching have not found even one inhabited world. They say they want to know that they are not alone in universe." The Premier's face worked. "I cannot say what is right. Later. I will decide after Ceremony. Are you ready, Pehn?" Pehn covered his face with his folded arms. "All right," he whispered. "Sooner, better." Deep in the valley north of the city. Cave yawned. For thousands of years its narrow mouth had been open to the Healers and the participants in the ceremonial ritual. The age of Cave was unknown, some said as old as the planet itself. Great rocks formed the inner walls, which ascended to a low domed ceiling, and occasionally a handful of gravel trickled down the walls to the bottom where a small stream still worked at hollowing out the stone. At the back of Cave was the hearth, and across the floor were ancient stone benches waiting for the friends and family of the patient, for by tradition, only patient and Healer approached the hearth itself. The others, whose wills and hearts were to unite, for one brief night, to heal the sickness, sat apart in a broad circle, where they could see the ceremony, and the chant of their voices could float back to the ears of the sufferer. As the sun set, Pehn was carried into Cave on a litter. His father and mother, his sister, his father's collaborators in the government, and representatives of the whole community filed down the valley to the entrance where Bidagha stood, and each person, clad for this occasion only in a robe of animal fur, as he approached the opening extended his hands to show that he had removed his wrist band, and lifted his arms to show that no material product of modem technology was being taken inside to profane Cave. They all respected the ancient proverb, "What Immortals want new, they make new." Each one lit his candle at Bidagha's flame, and silently took his place in the circle. Pehn had not been inside Cave since his early childhood, but it seemed a familiar place, since its description formed a part of many of Zenob's myths, and was part of all her history. The age-old figures scratched on the walls and filled in with colored earths, had been made by his remote ancestors at a time when their only weapons were the bows and arrows pictured there, and the stone-tipped spears with which they hunted their game. In the flickering light of the fi he could recognize the lithe toda, and the great-tusked khalmat, animals which had been extinct for many ages. How vividly Old Ones had portrayed these animals, and the ritual of their hunts! The wood fire, which Bidagha had kindled with a primitive wooden drill, burned on the hearth, and above his head through a rift in the ceiling, Pehn could see a narrow band of sky and a sprinkling of stars. "Keep your head pointed towards fire," said Bidagha, "and lie quiet. Ritual has no value unless we observe it strictly." He gave Pehn a warm potion from an earthenware cup, which made him feel sleepy. Bidagha began to chant, his bass voice reverberating from wall to wall, each syllable a sonorous musical note which was answered at intervals by the watching group of well-wishers. A wooden bowl filled with coarsely ground grain was passed from one person to another, and each one placed a few grains on his tongue, some on his forehead, and threw a token punch of the flour over his left shoulder. An hour passed, two; the stars above shifted their position, and still Bidagha chanted, never hesitating, never stumbling over the archaic words. Midnight passed and the stars grew pale. Through the roaring in his ears, Pehn heard the Healer kneel on the rock floor beside him; then he felt Bidagha's strong fingers on his shoulder. "How is it with you, my son?" Pehn groaned, unable to speak. The pain was not alleviated -- it was greater then ever. The soles of Bidagha's sandals scraped as he stood up again. "Bring knife!" he called. In his roaring darkness, Pehn stirred. Vaguely he sensed the murmuring of the watchers. Then someone else came near, and Bidagha's voice rose again. "Immortals, bless knife!" Fingers pried open his jaw, probed at the misshapen gum, sending fiery flashes of agony into his brain. Then a hard edge of pain struck, cutting, releasing a flood of warm wetness in his mouth. Yet it all seemed to be happening far away. He sensed Bidagha bending near once more. "Boy is going fast. Infection is deep." Another voice: "Move him to experimental hospital?" "He would not live to get there." A pause. "Go, bring forceps and bone knives. Hurry." A long roaring darkness. Then new movement around where he lay: and a sudden voice that he dimly recognized as his father's. "Stop! What is that tool in your hand?" "A new device for extracting teeth," came Bidagha's calm, resonant voice: "with which we may save your son's life." Shocked murmurs all over the hall, topped by his father's shout of outrage, "In Cave -- in hands of Healer?" Bidagha replied, "What Immortals want new, they make new! Here and now, in my hands, they end our years of darkness! Let Immortals confound me if I lie!" roared their approval, and Premier Kam hesitated. He appeared to be struggling within himself. As the echoes died away, a pebble rolled from a ledge, dislodged by the sound, and fell at Bidagha's feet. A second pebble fell, and a boulder which had rested above the hearth for untold centuries shifted its position. With a shout, Bidagha flung himself over Pehn's body as the boulder trembled and fell, crushing the life from the bodies of both men. Dust rose, and a rumble began near the ceiling. "Run!" cried Premier Kam. "Run for your lives!" As the others ran from Cave, Lord Karn rushed to the huge rock lying upon his son, but he had no hope. Neither Pehn nor Bidagha would ever move again. A trickle of sand pattered to the floor, and with a last backward glance Lord Kam ran from Cave. Boulders rained from the ceiling. The Premier had just reached the outside when a huge slab of rock crashed to the floor against the entrance. On the slope nearby, Pehn's mother and sister wept silently. Lord Karn stood motionless a long while. At last he spoke. "Cave is sealed," he said. "Let it never be opened again. Immortals have willed that my son should rest here forever, with impious Bidagha." Turning his face to the sky, he shook his fist at the bright spark of Topaz in the paling north. "So much for new things and foreign stars!" he said between his teeth. "This day's evil is enough." They extinguished their candles and went slowly up the valley path towards the city. Twenty-eight years later, on Earth, an astronomer comparing recent plates taken of the constellation Lyra noticed that Vega, its brightest star, had increased in brightness by a slight amount. The event was not especially remarkable -- there are on the average, twenty-five novas reported every year in our galaxy -- but Vega was one of the stars to be visited during the next decade by one of the Survey ships now in mid-voyage. "There's one place they won't have to stop, now," he said to a colleague, showing him the plates. "I don't suppose it matters. What's one star, more or less, when they all turn out to be the same -- no planets, or barren ones -- no stopping place for man." "I suppose you're right," said the astronomer, staring glumly at the waste immensity of the photoA.D. #: By Shandy was a teddy bear, a lion, an ape, a rival for Nancy Tanner's affections... But what else was he? H olman came down out of the forest of giant orangewoods and trudged across the plain toward the place where Nancy Tanner lived. It was late afternoon and the woods beyond Nancy's home were already growing dark and dim. The door of the old spaceship was open and a dark flowered rug hung over the rail of the gangway. Late sun glazed the round window near the door, but Holman thought he had seen Nancy behind the strawberry-patterned curtains. Wearing a pale blue cotton dress, tan and slender, Nancy came out of the ship and into the low-trimmed grass. She held up one arm and waved once, smiling. "Ken," she said and turned to roll up the rug. Holman said, "How you been?" as he came near, walking at his usual pace. Setting the rug carefully on the bottom step, Nancy looked up at him. "Fine. Yourself?" "Not bad. Had a cold last week." Holman put his suitcase down next to the neatly rolled rug. Nancy frowned. "You still don't eat enough greens. That's Wffy." Holman kissed her, his hands gentle on her back. "Well, here I am," he said. "Well, come in and we'll talk." She stepped slowly away from him and went up into the ship. Holman gathered up his suitcase and the rolled rug and followed her. He looked in and all around the kitchen before he entered. Nancy watched him over her shoulder while she got two china cups. She grinned at him as he stepped into the room. "I left the rug and my grip in the hall," Holman said and sat down in a straight-backed chair. Stooping to retie his hiking shoes, he glanced under the table. "Made it from the settlement in under four hours. Of course, I took big steps." "Would you like rum or whisky or something like that in your coffee?" Nancy asked, touching the handle of the coffee pot. "School teachers don't drink before sundown." "You're on vacation." "I'll wait. You go ahead, though." Nancy set a cup in front of him and backed away. "You really have a tent in that little suitcase? You're not trying to get me to put you up here?" "It's one of those monofilm ones." He pulled the cup closer to him and it rattled in the saucer. "I told you my intentions in my letter. And you said okay. So here I am to court you." Holman started to rise. Nancy nodded him down. "I supposed it will be all right. I don't know." She went back to the stove. Holman stood and started toward Nancy. He was distracted by a clicking sound in the hallway outside. As he turned to the entranceway, a large tan lion came in, its black-tipped tail swishing slowly. Holman stopped as the lion crossed the kitchen between him and Nancy. "Don't panic, Nancy," he said in a calm voice. "If nobody moves, it'll go away." Nancy smiled. "Why should he go away? It's only Shandy." The lion nuzzled his head over the backs of Nancy's knees and made a growling, purring sound. The tip of his tail flipped against the smooth white stove. Holman frowned at the lion and dropped back into his chair. "Shandy? The last time I saw him he was a St. Bernard dog." Nancy rumpled the lion's mane. "Well, you know how Shandy is. He doesn't stay one thing for long. He saw a picture of a lion on a sack of meal last week and off he went." "When you're through fondling him I'd like my coffee. And where's the rum?" Gently pushing the leaning lion away from her legs, Nancy said, "I'll get it, Ken." She patted Shandy on the back. "Go outside and play, Shandy. That's a nice boy." Without looking at Holman, the lion left the kitchen. "That's ridiculous," Holman said, turning from the empty doorway. "Damn it, Ken. He's my pet and I like him." The rum bottle made a hard flat sound as she put it in front of Holman. "You might try to accept him. He's a very nice pet." Holman unscrewed the botde cap. "Love me, love my whatever the hell he is." "For somebody who came by to court me you're not being very pleasant." She poured out two cups of coffee. Looking at the red bottle cap, Holman said, "Okay. I'm sorry." "You know Shandy's been with me since I was just ten or so. And since dad died, Shandy's been a real help." "You don't have to live out here." Holman poured some rum into his coffee. "Just because your father was a naturalist and all." "We don't have to talk about my father. I like living here. We've always lived here. Since we came out to Enoch." "All right." He paused to look across the table at her. "You want to keep arguing or will you let me propose now?" Nancy shook her head. "Don't now, Ken. Later sometime." "You do know, though, that I want you. And you know I want you with me at the settlement." Nancy folded her hands on the white tablecloth. "Oh, yes." Holman drank the hot coffee fast. "And, really, Nancy, I don't see how we could keep something like Shandy in the settlement." "Come and have dinner with me tonight and we'll talk then." Putting down his empty cup, Holman said, "I'll go set up my tent at a safe distance." Outside it was nearly night. A few yards from the ship, the lion was rolling on his back in a patch of yellow flowers and growling to himself. Holman kept his back to the lion while he assembled his tent. And when he had it finished he went inside and didn't come out until Nancy called him for dinner. The sky, up through the yellowgreen leaves, was clear. The afternoon was warm, with a slight feel of coming rain. Holman locked his hands behind his head and halfclosed his eyes. "And living alone by the woods is dangerous," he said. Nancy laughed. "You've just eaten lunch in it." Holman closed his eyes. "And how do you know what Shandy is? Maybe he's why this place got a bad name in the first place." "He's a harmless pet. I'm very fond of him." "Didn't your father have any ideas about him?" "Dad couldn't figure Shandy out. He made all kinds of tests. Shandy's the only one of his kind we ever saw. But, see, dad wasn't sure what he was originally. He's a mimic, an over-done chameleon. I don't know. I like him." Sitting up, Holman said, "Okay." He touched Nancy's shoulder. "Look, we've known each other, what? over a year now." "Since you made that ridiculous field trip with your pupils and trampled all over everything." She tucked her legs under her and leaned toward him. "Yeah. So let's not argue or anything. But, really, Nancy, I would sort of like to marry you." "I know." "Have you any idea if you're nearing a decision?" "Oh, yes." "And?" "Well, I think we can." "Marry?" "Uh huh." "Fine." After he'd kissed Nancy, Holman became aware of a shambling off in the trees beyond their picnic spot. Twigs crackled and a mediumsized gorilla crashed into the open. Holman let go of Nancy and asked her, "Shandy?" The gorilla was carrying a large book in one paw. "Yes," Nancy said, smiling. "He's been nosing through the storeroom again. Must have been in one of my old picture books." The gorilla came up near their picnic basket and held out the book. "He wants me to read to him, Ken. He gets that way now and then." Nancy took the book and opened it to the title page. "Earth fairy tales. This is one of your favorites, huh, Shandy?" Bobbing his gorilla head, Shandy squatted down among the fallen leaves and smacked his paws together. "Is he intelligent?" Ken asked incredulously. His scalp began to crawl. "Oh, no... Well, let's start at the very beginning again," Nancy said. Shandy rested his head on one clenched paw. "Once upon a time," Nancy started. Holman stood and grabbed up his windbreaker. "I've heard this one before. I'll drop by your place in the evening. Be finished by then?" Nancy half closed the book with her finger as a marker. "You're angry?" His coat seam jammed and Holman decided to wear the coat open. "No." He walked away into the woods. He was only a few steps into the trees when Nancy started the story again. T he fire flared up , brightening the ground around Holman's tent. Nancy hugged her knees up close to her and rested her head on them. "He would be out of place at the settlement," she said. Holman dropped a log on the campfire and came back to sit beside the girl. "He'd probably be happier running around out here in the woods." Nancy nodded slowly. "Probably." The stairs out of the old ship rattled once off in the darkness. Holman looked away from the fire and toward the ship. Coming across the grass toward them was a giant teddy bear. Laughing, Nancy rose. "It's Shandy." She glanced at Holman. "Be nice to him." Holman watched Shandy approach and didn't answer. The teddy bear sat down, like a dropped rag doll, next to Nancy. He rubbed his fuzzy brown paws over his black nose and blinked his button eyes at her. "Nice old Shandy," said Nancy, pulling one of Shandy's round ears. She smiled at Holman. "This is what he was being when dad and I first found him." Holman, tilting forward, flipped a flat stone into the fire and scattered sparks. "That's a coincidence." "I was just, you know, about ten," Nancy said, patting Shandy's head. "What had happened was I'd been playing in the woods. And, anyway, I left my own teddy bear out there. Lost it. And I told dad, because it was almost night when I remembered. Well, he found it and right beside it there was big old Shandy. Dad and I both decided after looking at him for awhile that his name should be Shandy." Shandy blinked his eyes and clapped his paws. Holman's left heel jammed hard against the ground as he shot up. "God damn, Nancy, will you knock off all this maudlin, banal, boy and his dog stuff. We're not taking that monster away anywhere." "I know, I know, Ken. Don't talk about it now." She kept patdng the teddy bear gently. "Nice Shandy." "And you, Shandy," Holman shouted. "I'm doing the courting around here. Go hibernate or something, dammit." Shandy's eyes stopped blinking. Nancy's hand slipped from his head and trailed down his woolly back as he rolled over and away. Without turning Shandy started off for the ship, slowly, on all fours. Finally Nancy looked at Holman. "That wasn't nice, Ken." Holman knew that. He could find nothing to say back to Nancy. He frowned and went into his tent, slamming the flap behind him. After closing the storeroom door, Holman carried the two old suitcases down the bright corridor to Nancy's kitchen. Nancy smiled at him and then at the brown, scuffed luggage. "Oh, sure, those will do," she said. "I guess the movers will be able to take care of the heavy stuff." Holman agreed and picked up his halffinished cup of coffee. "And we can leave lots of the stuff here. If we're going to use this as sort of a summer place. I don't think we'll have to worry about vandals." From the doorway Nancy said, "Not many girls bring a spaceship as a dowry." Holman took her shoulders and turned her back into the room. "We can make Shandy sort of a watchdog." "If he ever comes back." "It's only little more than a day he's been gone." "You were unkind to him." "I know. I'm sorry." Nancy edged around him and went to stand by the stove. "More coffee?" "Okay." Holman was halfway to her when the knock sounded on the spaceship door. "Maybe it's Shandy," Nancy said, partly surprised, partly relieved. "Maybe. I'll get it." When Holman opened the door a tall, slender young man, wearing a conservative suit, stepped out of the darkness and into the light of the corridor. He had a neat black mustache and was carrying a big bunch of red and gold forest flowers. "Is Miss Nancy at home?" "Who are you?" The young man was standing close to him but Holman didn't move back. The young man bowed slightly and smiled. "Tell Miss Nancy it's Shandy. Or better, Mr. Shandy." "Christ," said Holman, backing now. Shandy bowed again politely and walked to the door of the kitchen, knocking on the wall before he entered. Holman jerked himself together when he heard Nancy gasp, and ran back to her. Shandy was sitting in a kitchen chair, his legs crossed. "It's a rather interesting story, Miss Nancy," he said, smiling evenly. Nancy reached out and turned off the stove. "I imagine." Shandy brushed each side of his mustache. "Well, to begin then. I was in the wood and suddenly I tripped, carelessly, over a fallen log and was knocked unconscious. When I recovered I found myself in this state." He paused to rub his head. "And, of course, I remembered." Looking straight at him, Nancy said, "You'd had amnesia." "Yes. You see, Miss Nancy, many years ago, I'm not sure how many, my people lived here and I was quite a prominent member of the ruling class. But I incurred, unfortunately, the wrath of an evil scientist." "And?" asked Holman. For somebody who'd recently been a teddy bear, Shandy looked pretty dapper. Shandy smiled. "She put a spell on me which caused me to change shape, and also made me forget what I had originally been." Nancy laughed softly. "Well, it's good to have you back." With a faint flourish Shandy held out the wild flowers. "For you, Miss Nancy." "Why, thank you, Shandy." Holman leaned against the wall under the clock and eyed Shandy. "You back to stay?" "Well," Shandy said. "I've known Miss Nancy quite a while. And am really quite fond of her. I hate to see her go." He looked at the flowers Nancy held against her chest. "I have come to ask (Continued on page #) I With more courage than prudence, the ensign followed his star to the final ( and delectably feminine ) test of a young officer's honor... A tender, ironic and funny story, by a new name you'll be seeing again. ooooooooooo Thoughts came unbidden to watch officer Welnicki . bored Ensign Stephen Weierence... medal of honor. ,... nicki. The ship's computer rotated His pale blue eyes gleamed and skew-quadro fields, inscrutably alhis short blond hair bristled even tering by threes the twenty-seven more at the thought. His quarterpositional variables -- leaving the master broke in. watch officer idle. Thoughts were "That emigrant ship is a minute to be had for the thinking. late calling in, sir. Shall I buzz it?" Thoughts came unbidden to "No. We are senior. I will repriwatch officer Welnicki. What if the mand her at five after." never-found alien intelligence, That ship in synchro with Carlyle feared so absurdly in official polwas S.S. Rubberjack, carrying icy, was sub spatial ? Weird things, twelve hundred colonists and equipeating mathematics, fighting with ment to found a settlement on a yet music. They'd attack... Captain nameless planet of Kappa-# CarKravitz and the others nerveinae. From some democratic planet frozen somehow... command of in Vela sector, to be settled athwart Galactic Patrol Ship Carlyle dean autocratic trend coming down volving upon Ensign Welnicki... from Columba. Ensign Welnicki, aged twenty-four, was already helping make galactic history. G.P.S. Carlyle would stand by until the settlement was viable. Adventure... a flyer forced down among nameless mountains... hardships... mineral deposits... tremendous cliff's and chasms... forever after, on the maps, the Welnicki Mountains... "Five past, sir." "Very well." Ensign Welnicki brought his slight form erect and strode across to the subspace voder, hardening his lips. Forestalling him, the light blinked on and the neutral machine-voice said, "... Carlyle. S.S. Rubberjack calling G.P.S. Carlyle . The ensign pressed his transmitter bar and snapped, e Carlyle here. Go ahead, Rubberjack # Too bad there was no visual transmission in subspace, to carry his hawklike stare to that sloppy merchant officer. Too bad his crisp voice would be wasted in the neutrality of Rubberjack # s voder. "This is Wendrew Fishdollar, President of the Republic of Fishdollar Five," the voder said. "Our forces now control S.S. Rubberjack. We wish to negotiate a standard treaty with the Galactic Patrol." Welnicki's long, thin nose twitched in dismay. "What . , . where is Fishdollar Five?" he gasped. Are they human? his thoughts ran. "Our present seat of government is in S.S. Rubberjack's tender," the neutral voice replied. "We have seceded from the main body of settiers. We wish to arrange for settlement on a different planet." "Oh! Oh. Mutinous settlers?" Welnicki's eyes narrowed. He smiled grimly. He glanced down at his blue and gold tunic and punched on the photo-recorder. Best have a record for the historians. "Fishdollar, this is mutiny in subspace. In the name of the Galactic Patrol, I command you to surrender yourself and your accomplices to Captain Glover at once!" "I am chief of state of a sovereign nation and I will not be spoken to like that," the voder said. "If necessary, we will cast loose the tender and enter space to find our own planet. We are holding the tender crew at their stations, even as I speak." "I forbid it absolutely!" the ensign barked. "If you inspace at random, you will likely be far beyond the sphere of permitted exploration. You may betray humanity to an unknown enemy. Moreover, you will all be pirates and slavers. President Fishdollar, consider what you do!" "National survival is at stake. My first loyalty is to my nation." Ensign Welnicki arched his neck. "I warn you, President Fishdollar," he said vibrantly, "if you take those Rubberjack crewmen into space, I will follow and free them if I must pursue you to the uttermost ends of the galaxy!" "We will defend our sovereignty to our last drop of blood," the voder replied pleasantly. "We had hoped for Patrol cooperation, but we are prepared to carry on in the teeth of Patrol hostility. Our determination, Captain Kravitz, is unshakable. Goodbye, sir!" The light blinked off. That parting speech must have been sonorous and magnificent in old Fishdollar's natural voice, the ensign thought. Then an echo of it nagged at him and he jumped. "Oh my," he said, and punched the captain's emergency signal. Captain Kravitz played back the photo-record and cocked a grizzled eyebrow at Welnicki. He sounded the general alarm and snapped orders: ready Scout Vessel Two and boarding party. Sleepy men manned battle stations. Captain Glover came on the voder to report his tender gone and trouble with lost-mass aberration. He was almost inaudible at full gain. "Prepare to regress," Captain Kravitz ordered. "Proceed to destination and wait in orbit for me," he shouted into the voder. "I will regress and send a party after your tender. Give me the break coordinates." Whispered data passed until Kravitz said abruptly, "That's enough, captain. I want a short regress. Good luck." Welnicki thought about regression. The nine canonical threes vary independently in subspace; when a ship inspaces between the initial and terminal points set up in her computer, she may be anywhere. To find the Fishdollars, Carlyle would have to regress to the tender's breakaway point without changing computer settings. It is a mode of living backwards, and indescribably unpleasant. "Stand by to regress!" Howls of dismay arose. Ensign Welnicki stood at attention and raised his chin. Welnicki faced Captain Kravitz after Carlyle inspaced. The tall, graying captain looked shaken also, but his eyes burned. His voice was ironically gentle. "Given the chance, I might have persuaded Fishdollar to take another Carina planet, avoided all this... four thousand parsecs beyond the frontier of exploration... dangerous security breach... you command the search party, Ensign Welnicki... field-search each system in turn, buoy each as you leave... I know I can count on you for the last full measure of devotion, Ensign Welnicki..." Welnicki opened his eyes wide. "I shall not fail you, sir," he said as firmly as he could. The captain stroked his clipped gray mustache with two fingers. "I expect you to pursue the Fishdollars to the uttermost ends of the galaxy, Ensign Welnicki," he said solemnly. G.P.S. Carlyle had ghosted back into subspace. Welnicki in blue and gold faced his subordinates across a green table in the tiny wardroom of Scout Vessel Two. They wore gray coveralls. Sergeant Chong, dark, stocky, impassive. Chief Quartermaster Rutledge, plump, florid, voluble. Chief Drive Tech Kihara, small, dark, reserved. The ensign cleared his throat. "This is a council of war, gentlemen. Here is our situation..." Five Sol-type stars lay within the tender's range. They would visit and field-search each system in turn, regain control of the tender and its crew when found, then wait for Carlyle. Under the treaty they were agents of the settlers' parent system, Sigma-# Velorum, and bound by its constitution. "So, gentlemen, it is really intersystemic war. Now the enemy population is about fifty -- Captain Glover's estimate, he hadn't time to muster the settlers before we regressed. We have twenty marines and nine spacers. We are outnumbered and must attack prepared positions, but courage and imagination -- " "Won't some setders be women?" Chong broke in gruffly. "We may not be so overmatched. How are they armed?" "Body weapons only, sergeant. Nothing heavy. We mustn't hurt women, of course." Chong coughed and subsided. "One thing more. Our inspace separation from Carlyle is great enough so that, under article fourteen of Patrol Regulations, our scout is an independent ship. I now declare this ship in full commission." He took glasses and a bottle of Earth whisky from a bag at his feet and poured drinks all around. "Stand, gentlemen," he bade them. "To our ship and her christening: gentlemen, I give you G.P. S. Fish dollar's Bane The men choked a little on the fiery liquor. Ensign Welnicki wiped moisture from his eyds and looked on them with kindly gravity. "Hereafter you may address me as 'Captain Welnicki,' " he said. "And now stand by to outspace." Arrowing through the fourth system like a hundred-foot rapier probing enemy vitals, G.P.S. Fishdollar's Bane finally sniffed out the tender's ID pattern on an inner planet. "Pinpoint the enemy and orbit his horizon. Compute physical data and report," Captain Welnicki ordered Rutledge. Next ship-day he briefed his subordinates. A single continent lay athwart the planet's equator, with major volcanic activity in its galactic north. The enemy base was on the southwest coast. Gravity was point nine, the day twenty-six standard hours, and the season spring in the southern hemisphere. They would achieve surprise by landing in the north and staging the landing party south in the atmospheric flyer. What did they think? "It's a laugh, the way we outgun them Fishdollars, Mr. -- I mean Captain Welnicki," Chong growled. "Why not take -- this ship -- right over 'em and call on 'em to surrender?" "They'd defy us, sergeant. They're ready to die to the last man -- oh, you should have heard old Wendrew Fishdollar's parting speech! And remember, they have hostages." "Oughta be some way we could use the ship's armament." "You're a tough fighter, sergeant, but you lack creative imagination. No, my decision stands. Have your marines roll field packs." Spiralling in, Captain Welnicki thought the continent spectacular. Volcanoes and fissure flows welled forth seas of molten rock. Seas of rain slashed into them and roared skyward again as atmospheres of steam. The shrewdest enemy would never expect attack from this quarter. G.P.S. F i s h d o liar's Bane grounded at dusk in a wooded region of low hills. The air was sulfurous but good, the sky a smoking glory. Occasionally the ground trembled. Singing birds in the strapleaf foliage and furry ground rats were curious and unafraid. Captain Welnicki walked apart and listened to the shouts of his marines getting groundworthy. Kihara and the spacers were assembling the flyer. The marines were playing grabtail, except two armed sentries. Keen fighting men all, spoiling for a fight or a footrace. The captain winced when he heard one refer to his ship as G.P.S. Fishbait. But then, enlisted men were that way, hiding their nobler sentiments under such rough endearments. Underneath, however, hearts of oak... Early in the flaming dawn Kihara flew the marines south. He returned in midaftemoon from the four-thousand-mile round trip. Then Captain Welnicki and the spacers flew south with equipment to complete the camp. There seemed to be no large animal life, so he left the ship closed but unguarded. Chong's position lay behind a hill fifty miles north of the enemy. Great strap-leaf trees concealed tents and sentries. The captain, wearing the gray working uniform for the first time, called a council of war in his command tent. Eve of battle, gentlemen. Stout hearts, now. Chong, Crespi and Swenson would be landed in darkness to scout for the attack. They would plant a guide beacon and hide until the full party joined them the next night. Tomorrow the flyer would move reserve rations and the heavy blaster ammo down from the ship. Sgt. Chong, in accordance with Patrol Regulations, would direct the actual fighting. He, Captain Welnicki, would resume command when the diplomatic phase opened, that is, when President Fishdollar offered to surrender. Questions? No questions. When Kihara returned from dropping Chong, he came again to the dark command tent and brushed past the orderly. "Captain, wake up. The ship's guide beam don't register on the flyer's screen. Noticed it coming back just now. Something's wrong." "Do you suppose the Fishdollars -- " Captain Welnicki came full awake. Never betray doubt to a subordinate... the lonely leader... "Locate it visually tomorrow, then," he said calmly. "Take Rutledge to help. But you can't miss that big T-shaped lake." "Oh, I guess we'll find it, if -- " "Of course you will. Turn in now, Kihara. Get some rest." The captain did not sleep. He paced uneasily next day until the flyer returned, then almost forgot himself and ran to meet it. "Gone forever," Rutledge said excitedly. "One of them fissure flows, must've been... miles of boiling rock right where we was... updrafts like to tore us apart and fried us too... now what, captain?" Captain Welnicki stood very erect and lifted his chin. small moons. Captain Welnicki stood apart and thought. Nothing but hand weapons and pack rations for two days. A fanatic enemy sitting with enormous reserves in a prepared position. So... attack, of course... always the audacity... out of this nettle danger I pluck this flower... Kihara landed the party, minus the useless blasters, by Chong's beacon. Chong, sulfurous in disgust, drew his corporals aside to improvise a new plan. Captain Welnicki hovered near, saying nothing. He heard Chong tell Swenson to use the spacers for support fire. "Soon's it's light enough I'll pass the word," Chong finished. "Scatter now." "Come on, you spacers," Corporal Swenson growled. He moved off, followed by the spacers. After a moment Captain Welnicki trailed along. The enemy base lay on high ground across a small stream. One large unfinished building of slagged earth stood near the tender. The land was uneven and wooded. The roar of the sea came faintly through night air as Swenson briefed his spacers. "Sleep if you can," he ended. "I'll watch." "I want to scout in closer, corporal," the captain said. "Not past the stream, if you please, captain. We spotted infrapickups over there. That's why Chong wants daylight and cover fire." Minutes after he crossed the stream the captain's throat communicator prickled. It was Chong. "Swenson tells me you're prowling, captain. Don't tell me where you are cause I'm scared to know. But freeze there. That's a military order in the field." "Aye aye, sergeant," the captain said glumly. He slept fitfully on the hard ground. Long time until dawn like thunder... Corporal Swenson stunned, command of the spacers devolving upon Captain Welnicki... ask no quarter, give none... red dawn streaks now, an omen brush! Over his flame pistol Captain Welnicki saw a tall man appear. He wore a merchant spacer's leather jumper and carried a small shovel. At the captain's terse command he dropped the shovel and faced the leveled pistol, hands at shoulder height. "Quiet now! Who are you?" Welnicki whispered. Eyes squinted above the loose mouth. "I'm Jonas Cobb, that was third officer in Rubberjack. Are you a Patroler?" "Captain Stephen Welnicki, commanding G.P.S. Fishdollar # s Bane. I have come to liberate you." "Well now, cap'n, that's right good of you. I'd be pleased to help." The hands dropped. "You can, Cobb. I can use help. I've lost my ship, you see. I have only twenty-eight men with nothing but body weapons and two days' rations. I must win on my first assault." "Here's an idea, cap'n. Them Fishdollars are still sleeping aboard. Suppose I sneak back, close the bunkroom collision doors and pull the fuses? I'll jam the hull doors too, so the guards can't close 'em." "Good man, Cobb! Would you dare try?" "I would, cap'n. Suppose they closed up the tender on you? All the chow's still aboard, and you can't eat native protein here without it's bio-fielded. Them Fishdollars could just sit and guzzle while you poor Patrolers all starved, and then who'd liberate us? Handguns won't noways touch that plating." Chong came on the communicator. "Military order, captain. Stay put and keep your head down. We attack in one minute." "No! Oh no, sergeant," the captain protested. "I've taken a Rubberjack prisoner... he'll jam the hull doors for us -- " "Don't trust him nor you neither. The both of you stay put. Here goes -- " "No, Sergeant Chong! I relieve you of command. Article thirtyseven, Patrol Regulations. Stand fast, now!" He smiled apologetically. "My field commander is impatient. But hurry, Cobb. My marines are straining at the leash." Cobb moved off hastily. Moments later came a subdued clamor of voices, scurrying feet, grating noises. Captain Welnicki peeped through the screening shrubbery just in time to see the ramp pull in and the ponderous cargo doors swing shut. He called Chong: "Enemy alerted... fortunes of war... stiff upper lip... resume command, Sgt. Chong." Chong exploded. Situation militarily hopeless... stop playacting and surrender... your baby, captain, and look to its napkin. Captain Welnicki stood stiffly erect and raised his chin. T hat darkest hour... inexorable hunger on this starlost planet... guile now... keen intelligence of the spaceways... Captain Welnicki called his subordinates to a council of war. They had one idea -- to surrender. "Somebody, you, captain, go bang on that personnel port," Rutledge urged. "Never! Death before dishonor!" "Hey! They're sending out a flag," Chong said. The tender's personnel valves were ajar and between them a white cloth dangled. "I'll go in and parley," Captain Welnicki said crisply. "Deploy and cover me, sergeant. If they try to overpower me, blast us all down." Sgt. Chong snorted nervously. The captain walked toward the ship... lonely, gallant... ashes of defeat... guile now... The ramp poked out and a lanky figure, bearing the flag, descended. It was Cobb. "Cobb! What happened? Did they -- " "General Cobb to you, cap'n. General of the Army of Fishdollar Five. I come out to take your surrender." The captain stared. "President Fishdollar says tell you we'll treat you real good if the marines'll help with the settlement. If so be you've a mind to, the foreign minister will work out a Patrol treaty." The hangdog features gloated in mean triumph. Degrading... proud wings drooping... unless... yes... restructure the gestalit... "I come not in war but in peace, general. Commanding a Patrol vessel empowers me to act as Patrol ambassador. My men will aid you, in accordance with standard Patrol policy. Tell President Fishdollar I will make my official entry shortly after noon." "I'll do that, cap'n. Say, you're a slippery one too, ain't you?" the general asked admiringly. He turned away. Ambassador Welnicki rejoined his aides in stately dignity. Rutledge was secretary, Kihara chauffeur and Chong commander of the honor guard, he told them. Then he ordered a retreat to the flyer. In the flyer he donned his blue and gold uniform. He had meant to wear it when he took President Fishdollar's surrender. Oh well, he had not disgraced that ancient, mystic bird-and-anchor symbol... diplomatic triumphs, now... Kihara landed the flyer before the large single building. No one was about. Eight marines got out and lined up. Ambassador Welnicki watched while a pretty young woman came out of the building and looked doubtfully at the flyer. She was small, dark haired and wore a high-girded chlamys of clinging white cloth. Squinting, he saw above her left breast an emblem worked in red. It was an outlined fish with the ancient, mystic dollar symbol inscribed. She approached the marines hesitantly. "Here now, young woman, those men are on duty," the ambassador warned. "You mustn't molest them. Please inform the foreign minister -- " She smiled. "I am the foreign minister," she said, bobbing a curtsy. "Lindrew Fishdollar, at your service, Mr. Ambassador, and welcome to Fishdollar Five. The president is waiting in the state reception hall." "Thank you, Madame Minister." He stepped down with dignity, saluting, and followed her into the building. She danced ahead with vivacity unbecoming a foreign minister. The hall was large, with bare slag walls and rough wooden furniture. Coming to meet him was another pretty young woman in another white chlamys that molded itself to her walking. He stopped short. She was smiling... milk white skin and jet black hair... thick eyebrows, black eyes... small, sweetly curvesome... holding out a hand... "Oh my God!" he said shakily "You! You are Wendrew Fishdollar!" "Wendy to my friends, Captain Wennocky, and I hope you will be one. We do so want a Patrol treaty. Won't you sit down?" The ambassador sat down, head whirling. "How many of your officers of state are women, may I ask, Madame President?" "All of us," she said brightly. "Our charter population, fiftytwo in all, is entirely feminine. Since our founding vye have naturalized eleven men." "Well, Madame President... you must realize... most unusual..." "I understand, Captain Wennocky. Perhaps you're tired. Quarters are ready for you upstairs and the minister of the interior will show you to them if you wish. General Cobb will berth your men in the tender." "My name is Welnicki," the ambassador said, rising. "Captain Stephen Wel-nicki." "Oh, forgive me, Captain Welnicki. General Cobb -- but there, poor man, you're tired and I won't keep you. Will you and your aides attend an informal dinner tonight with my cabinet officers?" "Yes... delighted..." The minister of the interior skipped along apologizing prettily for the crude furniture. She was Wandrew Fishdollar, call her Wanda, and she would see him again at dinner. His bedroom was also the Fishdollar National Library. The ambassador called a council of state. His aides were equally overcome. Who'da thought it?... all women, all named Fishdollar... cute as crystals, too... always liked them Sigma Velorum planets... hey, Chong, you old goat?... Dinner... elfin faces with white skin and black eyes... short, kilted skirts, sleeveless blouses... Cindrew, Rondrew, Sandrew, Dundrew... minister of this, minister of that... the ambassador was still dazed. His aides did well. Kihara talked slaggers and nuclear furnaces to the minister of public works -- Cindy, was she? Rutledge, expansive, held a group bright eyed and breathless with his account of the volcanic north. Chong was saying, "No offense, General Cobb, but in a fight the marines..." Defense Minister Bondrew listened admiringly. The ambassador felt better. Born diplomats, these men. That came of roaming the starways... a cosmoplanetary polish... charm no provincial could resist -- "What did you say, Madame President? My mind wandered." "Let's take our teacups into the next room where it's quiet. I want to tell you the story of the Fishdollars." "Of course." The ambassador rose with courtly, cosmoplanetary grace. She sat beside him on the single cloth draped bench, and smoothed her short red skirt. "In the second century After Space, Stephen -- may I call you Stephen?" she began. He nodded indulgently. The eighty-fourth planet colonized from Earth, she told him, was Fishdollar One, so named for Andrew Fishdollar, who founded the settlement and brought along many kinsmen. The settlement prospered but the planet had a strong Rho effect. Did he understand? "Yes, Madame President. An excess of female over male births until a certain population density is reached." "It may take centuries. It's terrible. Stevie, I # ve actually heard the Patrol sometimes sends ships..." She blushed prettily and looked down at the teacup on her rounded knee. "Yes. Yes, Wendrew. There is a special clause -- oh, most delicately worded -- in the standard Patrol treaty with Rho effect planets. Spacers call them good liberty planets." He felt warm, tugged at his tight collar and kept his gaze on the president's teacup. She took up her story. Genetic strains varied in susceptibility to the Rho effect, of course he knew, and it was terribly severe on Fishdollars. The clan became immensely wealthy through pioneer land holdings, but the name was dying out. Male Fishdollars were recruited from Earth and the other planets until the name was extinct elsewhere, but it was no use. Sex control was no good -- bad psychic effects in the resultant males. Finally, in the fourth century, the Fishdollars settled a new planet, seeking a reduced Rho effect. "But Wendy, why not adopt boys, change names and so on?" "Against the laws, Stevie. People with low-Rho names believed the effect worked through the name and not the gene pattern. Silly superstition of course, but they had the votes." It was the same story on Planets Fishdollar Two and Three. Fishdollar wealth grew and Fishdollar males dwindled in inverse ratio. On Fishdollar Four, in the Sigma-# Velorum system, they vanished altogether. A few hundred women still bore the name. "It's pitiful, Stevie, when a name dies after thousands of years," she said softly. She put down her teacup and smoothed nervously at her brief skirt. "I can imagine. Ten generations of Welnickis have served the Patrol." "We tried hard to keep the name alive," she went on, vainly tugging the pleated skirt lower on the smooth white legs. "Stevie, some of us here are haploid and some are illegitimate." Her head drooped. Wordless, he watched her hands. She raised a rosy face to him impulsively. "You mustn't think I'm one," she said rapidly. "My father was the last Andrew Fishdollar, the last man. He died two years ago." The younger Fishdollars, she continued, planned one last effort to settle a new planet, to be named Fishdollar Five. They recruited a group meeting Patrol standards and got sponsorship. It cost them a great deal of money. Their constitution and legal codes were those of the parent system, with minor changes correcting the unfair laws against high-Rho names. "And then -- oh Stevie, those superstitious, ungrateful, low-Rho settlers! While we were still in subspace they began amending the laws and the constitution. They even changed our planet's name to Rewbobbin, the ugliest, lowest-Rho name among them!" "Rewbobbin!" He shuddered. "We were just frantic, Stevie. We wanted to scratch their eyes out and we wanted to die. Then we thought about seceding. We learned that Rubber jack # s tender was preloaded to care for an advance party of two hundred. We talked to General Cobb -- you know the rest." "Yes, Wendy. How imaginative... a random inspacing into unexplored vastness... Wendy, I salute your courage!" "We weren't really so brave. The tender was a last resort, to force Captain Kravitz to settle us on another Carina planet. But when he reacted so violently -- oh, Stevie, you should have heard the language he used to me -- we knew we must go. We really had no choice, now did we?" The ambassador coughed and licked his lips. "No, I suppose not, Wendy. Captain Kravitz is unimaginative... aging..." "Stevie, did we do wrong? Do you think we did?" "No, Wendy. Not you, whoever else may have. You were magnificent. I will use all my influence to see that your setdement lives." "I'm so happy, Stevie. I feel safe now. Tomorrow Linda can work out a treaty with you. Shall we join the others?" The smooth white legs stood up. The ambassador could not sleep. His own copy of Patrol Regulations was lost, but providentially he found a copy in the Fishdollar National Library beside his bed. He thumbed it. He was, indeed, still captain and therefore ambassador while his crew was intact. But that other article... here it was: "In exceptional circumstances involving galactic security the commander of a ship or squadron may assume plenipotentiary status and execute finally rather than provisionally binding agreements... as soon thereafter as practicable he shall report to Prime Reference for plenary court martial." So. If he dared... He remembered old Borthwick's lectures in Patrol Jurisprudence at the academy. Only two men, both squadron commanders, had ever used that article. One had been shot, one cashiered... The ambassador slept. Over coffee next morning the foreign minister produced copies of the Patrol treaty with Sigma-# Velorum, with appropriate name changes, and proposed thev signthem. "These won't do, Madame Minister," he protested. "Why not, Stephen? We have almost the same constitution." "Your planet, Lindrew. Almost four thousand parsecs beyond the sphere of settlement. Do you know why we have a frontier?" "Oh, Patrol policy... no, why?" "Other intelligent beings may be settling the galaxy just like we are. We're afraid to meet them too soon." "Why?" "Maybe hostile. Lindrew, just because the Patrol prevents interplanetary wars, it's the only deep space fighting force humanity has. But with no wars, and support of the Patrol voluntary, it isn't very big. Not big enough for galactic war." "Will it ever be?" "We hope so. We add a new ship for each new planet. We increase as the cube of the radius and our frontier only as the square, as long as we enforce the sphere of settlement concept." "The Patrol enforces it?" "Yes, by denying sponsorship and protection to non-treaty settlements. We can't actually use force against a sovereign planet, except blockade under certain conditions." "Do settlements ever defy you?" "Not for long. They give up and we move them to a settled planet that wants them, wiping out all traces of their stay." "Oh. Stephen, do you approve of that policy?" "No, Lindrew, I never have. It's -- it's unimaginative. But they'll tear their beards at Prime Reference about your planet." "But you'll help us, won't you Stephen? How must we change the standard treaty?" "This is an outpost planet and the aliens, if they exist, will surely find it first. We'll need a Class I base. You must in time support extraplanetary defenses." "You make the changes, Stephen. Whatever you say. Then we'll sign." He shuffled his feet. "I'm afraid I can only initial it, Madame Minister. Prime Reference must ratify. I will urge most strongly -- " "Oh Stephen," she interrupted, pretty face stricken, "might we lose our treaty after all?" "There's a chance, I can't deny it." "Oh dear! I haven't the heart to tell Wendy." "I need to think," the ambassador said. He excused himself unhappily. ment grew. The ambassador put away his blue and gold and worked with his hands. The native strap-leaf vegetation flowered riotously through long, warm days, and so did Earth plants in the test plots. The shapely Fishdollars became golden-tan and more charming than ever. The Patrolers worked like fiends erecting buildings and plants, striving to outdo the merchant spacers. The girls helped where they could and bubbled admiringly at the prodigies of labor. The minister of public works told Chong privately that one marine equalled two merchant spacers. The latter, as if unware of their lesser worth, worked like fiends too. Kihara and his two petty officers were the engineers. Corporal Crespi, with a gang of marines and Fishdollars, milled fragrant lumber from native hardwoods. Houses went up and were filled with furniture rough-styled by General Cobb. The ambassador worked on the power plant, the materials converter, and then the air conditioning. The men became hard, deeply bronzed, strongly alive as the native trees. With his aides, the ambassador worked out treaty revisions. "PR will never ratify," Rutledge said. "Look. Maybe the aliens don't exist," the ambassador argued. "If they do exist, they may respect boundaries. Then Fishdollar Five stakes a huge claim for humanity. If it's war, we make our fight around an outpost planet, far from settled regions." "We ain't Prime Reference," Chong growled. "Who you trying to convince?" Fishdollar Five ratified the treaty. Ambassador Welnicki looked unhappily at his initials and told the foreign minister, "I'm sorry, Linda." "We understand, Stephen. We know you're doing all you dare for us." Resting one day from pipefitting, the ambassador asked Kihara, "You know math, chief. Isn't it true this damned, sacred 'sphere of settlement' really takes in the whole galaxy in subspace?" "Yes, in a way." "It's fossilized, Einsteinian thinking. Damn the admirals!" "The admirals think Einstein is God. You better think the admirals are God," Kihara warned. The ambassador thought. The outpost planet... last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart... one man with imagination... serve humanity and be damned for it now, canonized later... One afternoon he walked with Wendy to their favorite spot on a headland above the sea. She climbed before him up the steep, narrow way, and the sea wind fluttered her skirt. The outpost planet... democracy... daughter planets teeming with pretty girls like Wendy and stalwart young men like... really imaginative galactic ecology... Sunset neared and half the sky, as usual, flamed gorgeously. The sea sent back the color and beat hypnotically against the cliff base. Wendy stood on tiptoe, arms raised, skirt wind-molded, sweetly rounded form outlined against the sky. "Stevie, Stevie," she whispered, "isn't our planet beautiful? I would rather die than leave it. I feel... fulfilled, somehow." "Wendy, I haven't told you, but She came to him in quick concern, her hand on his arm. Then it came out of him in a rush. "Regulations permit me to assume plenipotentiary status. If I do and then sign that treaty, it will bind the Patrol absolutely. Wendy, I'm going to do it!" "Can you really, Stephen? Won't they find a way... Her face was grave. "I can, for sure. I'll undergo court martial after. But the treaty will stand. The pledged word of the Galactic Patrol is sacred. Only the Patrol binds humanity into any kind of unity, and its very existence depends upon planetary trust in Patrol good faith." "It's so much power for one man." "Not every man is made a Patrol captain. Believe me, Wendy, your planet will live. And I'm glad." Then she was in his arms and they were kissing, and CaptainAmbassador Welnicki trod on air back to the settlement feeling that the game was worth the candle if they took his head for it. He signed with a flourish, Stephen Welnicki, Captain, GP, subscribed Ambassador Plenipotentiary. Then he called his aides into council and assumed the status formally, just for the record. warmer, fruits forming on the native plants. Basic installations were complete. Exploring and mapping teams brought in mineral and biotic specimens for testing. It was midsummer of the four-hundred-two-day year. President Fishdollar brought up a delicate subject with the ambassador plenipotentiary. Four of her citizens were, well, you know, and they wanted to marry four of his marines. Could he authorize it? "Of course, Wendy. Enlisted men may marry on any treaty planet." He spoke to Chong. "I told 'em hell no," the sergeant said. "Us marines depend on higher authority to protect us from that. You're gonna back me up, ain't you, captain?" "No I'm not! What's so terrible about marriage?" "Ask Corporal Hodges that, captain. He's married and the Fishdollars know it." Chief Justice Sandrew married the four couples in a mass ceremony. President Fishdollar wept and the ambassador plenipotentiary comforted her. She was distrait and melancholy in the days that followed, and the ambassador plenipotentiary was himself obscurely troubled. Eight more couples married. Then one evening they were again on the headland in a flaming sunset and she began crying softly. She didn't know why, unless it was because the sunset was so beautiful. So he held her and they talked in low voices until, as the sun's red disk touched the sea rim, he had to tell her that no Galactic Patrol officer could marry until he reached the rank of commander. "But you're a captain already, Stevie." "Only in a special, temporary way -- " "But your heroism, finding us, losing your ship -- surely they'll make it permanent." "Wendy, they'll want my head for all that. I... I've tried to think that way myself, but I can't. I do believe, in the far future the name Welnicki will be honored by what I have done, but now -- when Captain Kravitz comes -- I have no right -- " "Every man has a right to happiness, Stevie. What if you married anyway?" "Cashiered, automatically. Ten generations of Welnickis have given their lives to the Patrol with not one dishonorable action -- " "Stevie, you make me furious! How can marriage be dishonorable? We'll keep it secret and you can command the base here until you make commander. It's all so simple, really." "I need to think," he said sadly. She laid her dark head on his shoulder and cried. He thought: make her happy... secret... impassioned speech before the admirals... galaxy to fill... creative imagination confirms me now, gentlemen, time will vindicate me... so tearfully anxious... in for a copper, in for a solar... make her happy... "Wendy," he said in a low, halting voice, "let's do get married." "Oh yes , Stevie! Yes, yes, yes!" She melted into his arms. The crimson sun dropped below the sea rim and the sky faded to somber red. They walked back hand in hand, the president chattering gaily, the ambassador plenipotentiary oppressed under the cumulative enormity of his command decisions. The wedding was beautiful. The bride wore her chlamys of state and the groom stood very erect in blue and gold. Chief Justice Sandrew wept but managed to get the words out clearly enough through tears and sniffs. All the Fishdollars wept. Even hard, unsentimental Sgt. Chong snorted nervously. Married life was wonderful. The president melted with affection and the ambassador plenipotentiary loved it. Never had diplomatic relations between the Patrol and any planetary government been so cordial. Even the weather reflected it. The days, cold and rainy as winter came on, turned clear and warm again. The native trees were deciduous and their long strap-leaves became a blaze of color carrying the dawn glory through softly bright days, carpeting the ground with sunset. Thinking and worry were fantastically unnecessary. Then one beautiful morning after an intimate breakfast, the ambassador plenipotentiary learned that maybe, just maybe now, darling, he was going to be a father. A few tearful moments later an excited quartermaster called him to his door. G.P.S. Carlyle was in orbit and would ground next day. Captain Kravitz instructed Ensign Welnicki to report aboard as soon as grounding was secured. All along her six-hundred-foot length, ground shores probed out to equalize tensions as G.P.S. Carlyle eased her lift. The shriek died with the slowing generators, and the starboard personnel port swung open. Beyond the zone markers Ensign Welnicki looked into his wife's face, then marched toward the ship. He wore his blue and gold. Carlyle's passageways seemed more cramped than he remembered. He felt foolish in his dress uniform, exchanging greetings with coverall-clad shipmates. He ducked past the saluting orderly into the captain's office almost with relief. Captain Kravitz, behind his gray desk, had never looked more austerely forbidding. As the ensign made his report, the grizzled eyebrows raised, then two fingers stroked the gray mustache. When the ensign reported his binding signature of the treaty, the captain raised his hand. "Very well, Ensign Welnicki. Remain in your room incommunicado until further notice." Ensign Welnicki stood very erect and raised his chin. Then he walked directly to his stateroom in the bow, ignoring greetings from former shipmates. He clanged the door shut, and never before had the tiny room seemed so microscopic. A long week's pacing, three steps each way. Thoughts... defense at Prime Reference... first the grave statement of facts, for the record and for unborn historians... for some future Welnicki burning to vindicate his triple-great grandfather... then the exhortation to courage and imagination, powerfully restrained emotion almost breaking through... deep, ringing sincerity... then the gray courtyard and the firing squad... I die without resentment... my short life justified, its me anin g found in action... Thoughts about his planet... his planet?... Wendy, the child... a boy, of course, the Welnickis were quite low-Rho... never to see his son... knowing that in the gray courtyard... He wanted to cry. brassarded, came to conduct him to the captain on the eighth day. "Damn orders, Steve," Sotero said, standing in the door. "We know most of the story and we're all for you. Your wife and the skipper have been going round and round for days, beating each other over the head with that treaty, Patrol Regulations and the constitution of Sigma-# Velorum. Somebody heard him say she's the smartest space lawyer this side of Earth. Don't let him stampede you, Steve!" "Thanks, Juan, I won't." Ensign Welnicki's own voice sounded strange to him after the silence. The captain was disconcertingly un-fierce. He looked tired and sad i behind the gray desk. "Sit down, Stephen," he said dully. "Let's talk about this mess we're in." Ensign Welnicki sat down gingerly, his back stiff. "My head falls too, of course," the captain went on. "You're too little a goat. They may even chop down Sector Admiral Carruthers." He sighed and looked at the overhead. The ensign opened his mouth. "I see my error now," the captain forestalled him. "You are not mature enough for command. But I was ensign under your grandfather Welnicki in the old Ashburton before you were bom. I thought I sensed in you the same intangible that made him great. Well, spilt milk, Stephen. What can we do?" Ensign Welnicki suggested unsteadily that the Fishdollars might consent to removal to an approved planet. "First offer I made, Stephen. They voted it down unanimously. Bluster was no good, pleading no good. With that treaty they've got us cold and they know it." Ensign Welnicki wished he were dead but did not see how that would help. After a long silence the captain spoke again. "I have one last hope, Stephen. Something you've overlooked. I got it from Rutledge." The ensign looked his question. "You didn't formally assume plenipotentiary status until after you signed, so technically your signature is not binding. Now if it was a forced subterfuge to counter logistic pressure, your ship being lost and all, we can repudiate the treaty without breaching faith. Only you can really know." Ensign Welnicki breathed deeply. "The Fishdollars with no treaty, how they can survive, I don't know, captain..." "We'll leave message capsules. When they call for help we'll dump 'em on Rewbobbin." "I... I don't know, captain." "We can fix everything else, save your career." "No, sir. The treaty stands." "You signed falsely and you know it." "I can say -- I hereby do say that I signed second copies afterward. The treaty stands, sir!" Ensign Welnicki stood up, suddenly feeling good. Captain Kravitz stood up too, face tautly impersonal. "All right," he said, shuffling papers on his desk. "I want to lift out as soon as possible." He pulled out a paper and looked coldly at the ensign. "As you may or many not know, your marriage makes you a citizen of Fishdollar Five," he went on. "As you may or may not know, your precious treaty forbids removal of a citizen to another planet without governmental consent. I doubt the admirals at Prime Reference would choose to come all the way out here just to courtmartial one small ensign. But as you certainly know, your marriage means the automatic revocation of your commission. You will save me trouble and delay by signing this resignation." He shoved the paper across the desk. Ensign Welnicki looked at it stupidly. His inner song was muted. "Sgt. Chong will stay to command the temporary base force," the captain was saying. "Within a year you may expect a Patrol construction fleet to open your communications and start work on the base. Your pay accounts can be settled then. There! Sign it!" Ensign Welnicki bent and signed. The captain looked at the paper and handed it back. "Use your right name," he said. Ensign Welnicki looked blank. "Stephen Fishdollar!" the captain roared. The ensign looked blanker still. "Ensign Fishdollar, some day you really must read through the legal codes of your adopted planet," the captain said mock-earnestly. "One of the changes made by the Fishdollars in the Sigma-# Velorum codes was to make marriage and descent ma trilineal. That way their name escapes Rho-death." Ensign Fishdollar sagged. His inner song faded to a whisper. "Very, very clever of the Fishdollars," the captain said musingly. "To link their name with the Xchromosome rather than with the Y. So it becomes as low-Rho as it was high before. Very clever indeed. "Ensign Fishdollar, you utter lamb, did you honestly not know that?" he finished with roar. Ensign Fishdollar swung his head dumbly. "You know, Ensign Fishdollar, that the Patrol regards as null any marriage with a citizen of a nontreaty planet," the captain said softly. The savage self-biting of his autonomic nervous system almost made him grimace as he bent wordlessly to the paper and signed "Stephen Fishdollar." The inner song was dead. "You may go home now, Mr. Fishdollar," the captain said. "I will send your personal effects, less uniforms, ashore before I lift out." Mr. Fishdollar turned away. Captain Kravitz came around the desk and laid an arm across his shoulders. "Sit down again, Stephen," he said soberly. "I had to play it out to the end, but I don't want you leaving on that note, lad." They sat down, on the same side of the desk. "Stephen," the captain said gently, "all youngsters worth their salt chafe at the policy of restricted settlement and exploration. I did and I still do, but I never had the courage to act directly." He paused and closed his eyes, then continued. "Graybeards in conclave never make the important decisions for our species. They are always afraid. The decisions well up from the four-dimensional life-continuum that is our species, and the graybeards accept, with what grace they can muster." He tilted back his head, eyes still closed. "The decisions always come through crooked, unmapped channels, through poets and prophets and dreamers, to enter the consciousness of man. Dreamers drove man to be free when he feared freedom. A few centuries later they drove him into space, shrinking and trembling. Now this. Dreamers, giving vent to that will of our species which no graybeard can gainsay." The captain opened his eyes and looked again at his companion. "There is an old saying, Stephen : 'Beware of the dreamer who dreams concretely.' Perhaps the Patrol version should be 'Never put a dreamer in the way of dreaming concretely.' I will never know for certain how much I have really had to do with this. I will be in grave trouble before it ends. But I know, as you have just learned, that dreams can be merciless." Mr. Fishdollar smiled weakly. Captain Kravitz stood up and so did Mr. Fishdollar. The captain held out his hand. "Goodbye, Stephen," he said. "Good luck, lad, and I'm proud of you." They shook hands and Mr. Fishdollar turned to the door. He rather thought that, just as he turned, the captain snapped him a salute. toward the settlement. People passed and he did not see them. He was not thinking. Someone ran squealing. Then Wendy was running toward him, crying. "Stevie, Stevie, I'm so glad!" she sobbed against his shoulder. "They tried to browbeat us into taking another planet, but we remembered and fought for your dream of an outpost planet. We've won, haven't we won, Stevie?" "Yes, Wendy, we've won," Mr. Fishdollar said slowly. She pressed closer and he hugged her convulsively. "Let's celebrate tonight," she cried. "A Thanksgiving -- " "All right, but let me go now, sweetheart. I need to think." He hugged her convulsively again and released himself. Alone on the headland, he looked out over the sea for a long time. He took off his blue and gold tunic, folded it neatly, and thrust it deep into a crevice of the rock. The day was gray-chilly and he shivered in his undershirt. Evening drew on, red-gray over the water. He stood very erect with his chin up. He heard the signal gun and then the roar as Carlyle lifted out, and his chin rose higher. Finally thoughts began coming through the hurt. Thoughts were still to be had for the thinking. President-consort Fishdollar walked through ghostly, tentative snowflakes toward the settlement on the lonely outpost planet... standing like a great rock in the way of the aliens... or in the way of the sickly pale cast of conscious thinking... aliens both, to the unsearchable mind of the species... aliens, then, war or negotiation... President Fishdollar down with nervous strain... the First Gentleman in de facto control... triumph... reception at Prime Reference . i . medal of honor... With a spring in his step and warmth inside him, Stephen FishAugust #th to September #st at Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles, California. Write Len J. Moffat, # Belcher, Downey, California, for information and reservations. The Burning of the Brain As the ship's power failed , coldness and blackness and death would crush in on them . And that would be all , all of the Wu-Feinstein, all of Dolores Oh... #. Dolores Oh more than sad, it is fearful -- it is a dreadful thing to go into the Up and Out, to fly without flying, to move between the stars as a moth may drift among the leaves on a summer night. Of all the men who took the great ships into planoform none was braver, none stronger, than Captain Magno Taliano. Scanners had been gone for centuries and the jonasoidal effect had become so simple, so manageable, that the traversing of lightyears was no more difficult to most of the passengers of the great ships than to go from one room to the other. Passengers moved easily. Not the crew. Least of all the captain. The captaincy of a jonasoidal ship which embarked on an interstellar journey was a man subject to rare and overwhelming strains. The art of getting past all the complications of space was far more like the piloting of turbulent waters in ancient days than like the smooth seas which legendary men once traversed with sails alone. Go-Captain on the Wu-Feinstein , finest ship of its class, was Magno Taliano. Of him it was said, "He could sail through hell with the muscles of his left eye alone. He could plow space with his living brain if the instruments failed..." Wife to the Go-Captain was Dolores Oh. The name was Japonical, from some nation of the ancient days. Dolores Oh had been once beautiful, so beautiful that she took men's breath away, made wise men into fools, made young men into nightmares of lust and yearning. Wherever she went men had quarreled and fought over her. But Dolores Oh was proud beyond all common limits of pride. She refused to go through the ordinary rejuvenescence. A terrible yearning a hundred or so years back must have come over her. Perhaps she said to herself, before that hope and terror which a mirror in a quiet room becomes to anyone, "Surely I am me. There must be a me more than the beauty of my face, there must be a something other than the delicacy of skin and the accidental lines of my jaw and my cheekbone. "What have men loved if it wasn't me? Can I ever find out who I am or what I am if I don't let beauty perish and live on in whatever flesh age gives me?" She had met the Go-Captain and 'had married him in a romance that left forty planets talking and half the ship lines stunned. Magno Taliano was at the very beginning of his genius. Space, we can tell you, is rough -- rough like the wildest of storm-driven waters, filled with perils which only the most sensitive, the quickest, the most daring of men can surmount. Best of them all, class for class, age for age, out of class, beating the best of his seniors, was Magno Taliano. For him to marry the most beautiful beauty of forty worlds was a wedding like Eloise and Abelard's, or like the unforgettable romance of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more. The ships of the Go-Captain Magno Taliano became more beautiful year by year, century by century. As ships became better he always obtained the best. He maintained his lead over the other Go-Captains so overwhelmingly that it was unthinkable for the finest ship of mankind to sail out amid the roughnesses and uncertainties of twodimensional space without himself at the helm. Stop-Captains were proud to sail space beside him. (Though the Stop-Captains had nothing more to do than to check the maintenance of the ship, its loading and unloading when it was in normal space, they were still more than ordinary men in their own kind of world, a world far below the more majestic and adventurous universe of the GoCap tains.) Magno Taliano had a niece who in the modern style used a place instead of a name: she was called "Dita from the Great South House." When Dita came aboard the WuFeinstein she had heard much of Dolores Oh, her aunt by marriage who had once captivated the men in many worlds. Dita was wholly unprepared for what she found. Dolores greeted her civilly enough, but the civility was a sucking pump of hideous anxiety, the friendliness was the driest of mockeries, the greeting itself an attack. "What's the matter with the woman?" thought Dita. As if to answer her thought, Dolores said aloud and in words: "It's nice to meet a woman who's not trying to take Taliano from me. I love him. Can you believe that? Can you?" "Of course," said Dita. She looked at the ruined face of Dolores Oh, at the dreaming terror in Dolores' eyes, and she realized that Dolores had passed all limits of nightmare and had become a veritable demon of regret, a possessive ghost who sucked the vitality from her husband, who dreaded companionship, hated friendship, rejected even the most casual of acquaintances, because she feared forever and without limit that there was really nothing to herself, and feared that without Magno Taliano she would be more lost than the blackest of whirlpools in the nothing between the stars. Magno Taliano came in. He saw his wife and niece together. He must have been used to Dolores Oh. In Dita's eyes Dolores was more frightening than a mudcaked reptile raising its wounded and venomous head with blind hunger and blind rage. To Magno Taliano the ghastly woman who stood like a witch beside him was somehow the beautiful girl he had wooed and had married one hundred sixty-four years before. He kissed the withered cheek, he stroked the dried and stringy hair, he looked into the greedy terrorhaunted eyes as though they were the eyes of a child he loved. He said, lightly and gently, "Be good to Dita, my dear." He went on through the lobby of the ship to the inner sanctum of the pianoforming room. The Stop-Captain waited for him. Outside on the world of Sherman the scented breezes of that pleasant planet blew in through the open windows of the ship. Wu-Feinstein , finest ship of its class, had no need for metal walls. It was built to resemble an ancient, pre-historic estate named Mount Vernon, and when it sailed between the stars it was encased in its own rigid and self-renewing field of force. The passengers went through a few pleasant hours of strolling on the grass, enjoying the spacious rooms, chatting beneath a marvelous simulacrum of an atmosphere-filled sky. Only in the pianoforming room did the Go-Captain know what happened. The Go-Captain, his Pinlighters sitting beside him, took the ship from one compression to another, leaping hotly and frantically through space, sometimes one light year, sometimes a hundred light years, jump, jump, jump, jump until the ship, the light touches of the captain's mind guidat its appointed destination and settled as lightly as one feather resting upon others, settled into an embroidered and decorated countryside where the passengers could move as easily away from their journey as if they had done nothing more than to pass an afternoon in a pleasant old house by the side of a river. # . The Lost Locksheet his Pinlighters. The StopCaptain bowed obsequiously from the doorway of the pianoforming room. Taliano looked at him sternly, but with robust friendliness. With formal and austere courtesy he asked, "Sir and colleague, is everything ready for the jonasoidal effect?" The Stop-Captain bowed even more formally. "Truly ready, sir and master." "The Locksheet in place?" "Truly in place, sir and master." "The passengers secure?" "The passengers are secure, numbered, happy and ready, sir and master." Then came the last and the most serious of questions. "Are my Pinlighters warmed with their pinsets and ready for combat?" "Ready for combat, sir and master." With these words the Stop-Captain withdrew. Magno Taliano smiled to his Pinlighters. All Pinlighters were telepathic. Through the minds of all of them there passed the same thought. "How could a man that pleasant stay married all those years to a hag like Dolores Oh? How could that witch, that horror, have ever been a beauty? How could that beast have ever been a woman, particularly the divine and glamorous Dolores Oh whose image we still see in four-di every now and then?" Yet pleasant he was, though long he may have been married to Dolores Oh. Her loneliness and greed might suck at him like a nightmare, but his strength was more than enough strength for two. Was he not the captain of the greatest ship to sail between the stars? Even as the Pinlighters smiled their greetings back to him, his right hand depressed the golden ceremonial lever of the ship. This instrument alone was mechanical. All other controls in the ship had long since been formed telepathically or electronically. Within the pianoforming room the black skies became visible and the tissue of space shot up around them like boiling water at the base of a waterfall. Outside that one room the passengers still walked sedately on scented lawns. From the wall facing him, as he sat rigid in his Go-Captain's chair, Magno Taliano sensed the forming of a pattern which in three tell him where he was and would give him the next clue as to how to move. He moved the ship with the impulses of his own brain, to which the wall was a superlative complement. The wall was a living brickwork of locksheets, laminated charts, one hundred thousand charts to the inch, the wall pre-selected and preassembled for all imaginable contingencies of the journey which, each time afresh, took the ship across half unknown immensities of time and space. The ship leapt, as it had before. The new star focused. Magno Taliano waited for the wall to show him where he was, expecting (in partnership with the wall) to flick the ship back into the pattern of stellar space, moving it by immense skips from source to destination. This time nothing happened. "Nothing?" For the first time in a hundred years his mind knew panic. It couldn't be nothing. Not noth ing. Something had to focus. The locksheets always focused. His mind reached into the locksheets and he realized with a devastation beyond all limits of ordinary human grief that they were lost as no ship had ever been lost before. By some error never before committed in the history of mankind, the entire wall was made of duplicates of the same locksheet. Worst of all, the Emergency Return Sheet was lost. There were midstars none of them had ever seen before, perhaps as little as five far as forty parsecs. And the locksheet was lost. And they would die. As the ship's power failed coldness and blackness and death would crush in on them in a few hours at the most. That then would be all, all of the Wu-Feinstein , all of Dolores Oh. # . The Secret of the Old Dark Brain room of the Wu-Feinstein the passengers had no reason to understand that they were marooned in the nothing-at-all. Dolores Oh rocked back and forth in an ancient rocking chair. Her haggard face looked without pleasure at the imaginary river that ran past the edge of the lawn. Dita from the Great South House sat on a hassock by her aunt's knees. Dolores was talking about a trip she had made when she was young and vibrant with beauty, a beauty which brought trouble and hate wherever it went. "... so the guardsman killed the captain and then came to my cabin and said to me, 'You've got to marry me now. I've given up everything for your sake,' and I said to him, 'I never said that I loved you. It was sweet of you to get into a fight, and in a way I suppose it is a compliment to my beauty, but it doesn't mean that I belong to you the rest of my life. What do you think I am, anyhow?' " Dolores Oh sighed a dry, ugly sigh, like the crackling of subzero winds through frozen twigs. "So you see, Dita, being beautiful the way you are is no answer to anything. A woman has got to be herself before she finds out what she is. I know that my lord and husband, the Go-Captain, loves me because my beauty is gone, and with my beauty gone there is nothing but me to love, is there?" An odd figure came out on the verandah. It was a Pinlighter in full fighting costume. Pinlighters were never supposed to leave the pianoforming room, and it was most extraordinary for one of them to appear among the passengers when the ship was in flight. He bowed to the two ladies and said with the utmost courtesy, "Ladies, will you please come into the pianoforming room? We have need that you should see the Go-Captain now." Dolores' hand leapt to her mouth. Her gesture of grief was as automatic as the striking of a snake. Dita sensed that her aunt had been waiting a hundred years and more for disaster, that her aunt had craved ruin for her husband the way that some people crave love and others crave death. Dita said nothing. Neither did Dolores, apparently at second thought, utter a word. They followed the Pinlighter silently into the pianoforming room. The heavy door closed behind them. Magno Taliano was still rigid in his Captain's chair. He spoke very slowly, his voice sounding like a record played too slowly on an ancient parlophone. "We are lost in space , my dear," said the frigid, ghostly voice of the Captain, still in his Go-Captain's trance. "We are lost in space and I thought that perhaps if your mind aided mine we might think of a way back " Dita started to speak. A Pinlighter told her: "Go ahead and speak, my dear. Do you have any suggestion?" "Why don't we just go back? It would be humiliating, wouldn't it? Still it would be better than dying. Let's use the Emergency Return Locksheet and go on right back. The world will forgive Magno Taliano for a single failure after ful trips." The Pinlighter, a pleasant enough young man, was as friendly and calm as a doctor informing someone of a death or of a mutilation. "The impossible has happened, Dita from the Great South House. All the Locksheets are wrong. They are all the same one. And not one of them is good for emergency return." With that the two women knew where they were. They knew that space would tear into them like threads being pulled out of a fiber so that they would either die bit by bit as the hours passed and as the material of their bodies faded away a few molecules here and a few there. Or, alternatively, they could die all at once in a flash if the GoCaptain chose to kill himself and the ship rather than to wait for a slow death. Or, if they believed in religion, they could pray. The Pinlighter said, "We think we see a familiar pattern at the edge of your own brain. May we look in?" Taliano nodded very slowly, very gravely. The Pinlighter stood still. The two women watched. Nothing visible happened, but they knew that beyond the limits of vision and yet before their eyes a great drama was being played out. The minds of the Pinlighters probed deep into the mind of the frozen Go-Captain, searching amid the synapses for the secret of the faintest clue to their possible rescue. Minutes passed. They seemed like hours. At last the Pinlighter spoke. "We can see into your midbrain, Captain. At the edge of your paleocortex there is a star pattern which resembles the upper left rear of our present location." The Pinlighter laughed nervously. "We want to know can you fly the ship home on your brain?" Magno Taliano looked with deep tragic eyes at the inquirer. His slow voice came out at them once again since he dared not leave the half-trance which held the entire ship in stasis. "Do you mean can I fly the ship on a brain alone? It would burn out my brain and the ship would be lost anyhow... "But we're lost, lost, lost," screamed Dolores Oh. Her face was alive with hideous hope, with a hunger for ruin, with a greedy welcome of disaster. She screamed at her husband, "Wake up, my darling, and let us die together. At least we can belong to each other that much, that long, forever!" "Why die?" said the Pinlighter softly. "You tell him, Dita." Said Dita, "Why not try, sir and uncle?" Slowly Magno Taliano turned his face toward his knees. Again his hollow voice sounded. "If I do this I shall be a fool or a child or a dead man, but I will do it for you " Dita had studied the work of the Go-Captains and she knew well enough that if the paleocortex was lost the personality became intellectually sane, but emotionally crazed. With the most ancient part of the brain gone the fundamental controls of hostility, hunger and sex disappeared. The most ferocious of animals and the most brilliant of men were reduced to a common level -- a level of infantile friendliness in which lust and playfulness and gentle, unappeasable hunger became the eternity of their days. Magno Taliano did not wait. He reached out a slow hand and squeezed the hand of Dolores Oh. "As I die you shall at last be sure I love you" Once again the women saw nothing. They realized they had been called in simply to give Magno Taliano a last glimpse of his own life. A quiet Pinlighter thrust a beam-electrode so that it reaohed square into the paleocortex of Captain Magno Taliano. The pianoforming room came to life. Strange heavens swirled about them like milk being churned in a bowl. Dita realized that her partial capacity of telepathy was functioning even without the aid of a machine. With her mind she could feel the dead wall of the locksheets. She was aware of the rocking of the Wu-Feinstein as it leapt from space to space, as uncertain as a man crossing a river by leaping from one ice-covered rock to the other. In a strange way she even knew that the paleocortical part of her uncle's brain was burning out at last and forever, that the star patterns which had been frozen in the locksheets lived on in the infinitely complex pattern of his own memories, and that with the help of his own telepathic Pinlighters he was burning out his brain cell by cell in order for them to find a way to the ship's destination. This indeed was his last trip. Dolores Oh watched her husband with a hungry greed surpassing all expression. Little by little his face became relaxed and stupid. Dita could see the midbrain being burned blank, as the ship's controls with the help of the Pinlighters searched through the most magnificent intellect of its time for a last course into harbor. Suddenly Dolores Oh was on her knees, sobbing by the hand of her husband. A Pinlighter took Dita by the arm. "We have reached destination," he said. "And my uncle?" The Pinlighter looked at her strangely. She realized he was speaking to her without moving his lips -- speaking mind-to-mind with pure telepathy. "Can't you see it?" She shook her head dazedly. The Pinlighter thought his emphatic statement at her once again. "As your uncle burned out his brain, you picked up his skills. Can't you sense it? You are a GoCaptain yourself and one of the greatest of us." "And he?" The Pinlighter thought a merciful comment at her. Magno Taliano had risen from his chair and was being led from the room by his wife and consort, Dolores Oh. He had the amiable smile of an idiot, and his face for the first time in more than a hundred years trembled with shy and When the planets die , when the friendly stars grow cold, man the ephemeral will still be searching for new habitations, and new adventures of the spirit... Then comes the day when he stands at the edge of the darkened year gulf between galaxies...  the beginning of the cataclysm. too long even for a people whose science had extended the average life span to three thousand years. But of all the living things in the galaxy, only men and those creatures protected by men survived. The invader galaxy had approached the home galaxy in the plane of its spiral arms. It was obscured from men's early civilizations by the clouds of dust and hydrogen that clogged the spiral arms. Its coming was unheralded. It struck like the blast of a thousand supernovae. Yet, strangely, not one star of the invader crashed into a star of the home galaxy. Even in the crowded central globe, a galaxy is mosdy empty space. The two star systems interpenetrated. Their stars slipped past each other -- rarely close -- deflected each other's motions into new paths, and went blindly on. But the gas and dust clouds of the two colliding galaxies -- which comprised fully half their mass -- did meet. Carried on by the momentum which they shared with their respective galaxies, they smashed into each other and erupted with incandescent fury. Fearful radiations were generated. Everything died within a hundred light years of the impact. And, as the invader plunged unopposed through the galaxy in macroscopic slow motion, its interstellar clouds came with it. Impeded by the home galaxy's own interstellar clouds, the wave front of impact fell behind the invader. But it drove on irresistibly across the galaxy, radiating death ahead of it -- leaving behind it worlds stripped of life, and the tragic artifacts and known by men. The human race was luckier than most. The invader was almost and the sight of its forwardleaning spiral arm arched up over the Milky Way like a scorpion's fang was sufficient forewarning to allow a fraction of humanity to escape. Necessity and human ingenuity have been the parents of progress since the first protohuman -- physically puny and beset by enemies -- discovered a use for tree limbs not anticipated by the laws of natural selection. So it was that again human genius found a way to salvation. It would have done no good to flee ahead of the advancing conflagration. The edge of the galaxy was only ten thousand light years away, and when the invader closed in they could go no further. There would be no place to go. Nor could they plunge through the bath of deadly radiation. So men invented transposition, by which they could arrive at any point without the need of passing through the space between. It fell short of the lost ideal of travel faster than light -- for a ship moved by transposition could not arrive any sooner than light from the same point and instant of origin -- but it was enough to meet the needs of the time. It allowed the survivors to pass beyond the deadly wave front without passing through it. In arks -- some well equipped and some equipped not at all -- a small part of the human race escaped to the already devastated parts of the galaxy. There, on planets void of life -- but full of the relics and leavings of life -- they found refuge. Some did not survive, for men are dependent for life on many other living things, and all the living things they had at their disposal were the ones they brought with them. Some -- in the effort of staying alive -- retreated into savagery, even cannibalism. Many forgot their heritage, their history, their science, and their gods. Some chose the wrong worlds, and were carried back into the conflagration by the galaxy's slow rotation. But some did survive, and a few even kept their knowledge of the transposition way of travel. In time, there arose a looselyjoined confederation among the stars. And commerce. And the exchange of ideas and knowledge. By then, the invader was long since gone on its blundering flight through the cosmos -- and men looking up at the night sky saw the same disaster overtake the Andromeda galaxy -- saw a cataclysm a half years before, the sight of which was only now # coming to them. For the invader was only one rogue of a cluster of rogues. Men traced the incredibly slow passage of the cluster through the sky -- knowing that although they were seeing them now, by light that had dean McLaughlin the galaxies themselves had already c passed and gone on -- perhaps tor ward other cataclysms which, for r all they knew, might have already I happened. t I But that was not all the disaster, a although men went a long time bei fore they discovered it. And when they discovered it, they were slow to realize it was a disaster -- for it seemed a very unimportant thing, c Not for almost a hundred thousand years did they realize how fatal it c was. t It was a simple thing: the dust I and gas clouds were gone from the f sky. In smashing its way across the c galaxy, the invader's gas and dust r clouds had imparted to the clouds #: of the home galaxy a new proper motion. The two sets of clouds c merged -- became a single mass which coasted through the home t galaxy, gobbling up all the clouds t in its path. And carried on by ini ertia, the great cloud -- having s swept the home galaxy clean -- z drifted onward into intergalactic t space.  It was possible, with the gas and i dust gone, for men to see from one c edge of the galaxy to the other, even through the central globe, t They found it difficult to imagine i a time when that had not been t possible. So they did not realize it  was a disaster. I But astronomers rediscovered that the universe was expanding -- i as though from an explosion which i was finally calculated to have taken  discovered that, while the stars of ( the central globe and of globular  clusters might be nearly as ancient, many stars of the spiral arms could not possibly have burned for that long -- long since, they would have used up their hydrogen, and their helium... would have transmuted all their available atoms into heavier elements, and died. But instead they burned fiercely -- the brightest stars in the night. Therefore, they were of a later creation. Loose clusters of stars were discovered -- stars whose proper motions, traced back, showed them to have come almost simultaneously from the same region. Many were obviously young stars, only a few been created in those regions. But there was nothing there that could have created them. With that, the matter rested until study of extragalactic nebulae -- the only kind known any more -- revealed that other galaxies possessed thick clouds of black dust, and astronomers were reminded that the home galaxy, also, had once had such clouds. And those nebulae which did not have these clouds, did not have spiral arms. The lesson was plain. The home galaxy would never bear another new star. And, with the passage of time, the existing stars would burn out. Men would have no place to live -- not one world fit to live on. That fate was still a hundred now, men with foresight argued, was the time to make provision for that time. For the only hope of escaping the fate of the galaxy was to move to a galaxy which -- with hydrogen and dust clouds -- was replacing its burnt-out stars just as a living body replaces dying cells. Since the nearest promising galaway, and because there would be, in addition, the problem of locating its present position -- an exploratory ship would certainly use up course of scouting a galaxy and returning with a report. The nearest galaxies were studied. Some -- the small ones and the ones void of dust -- were rejected at once. The others were marked for close-hand study. Ships were built, equipped, and staffed. They were sent out, each to its assigned galaxy. The men aboard them went, knowing that before they returned even planets and stars they had known would have vanished -- that they could not come back to anything they had left behind. erything -- the homes he had known, the friends, and family, and property, and every small familiar thing. Before he returned, the most lasting of these would have rotted and crumbled and mixed with the Even the stars would have changed. And -- though he steadfastly doubted it -- the human race might be gone from the universe. It was the starjumper's fate, of course. A little of it happened every time he transpositioned stellar distances. But the leaps were short -- rarely more than a dozen or a score of light years, and when he returned not much had really changed. But this time, in one great leap, Fikret Griff had forever separated himself from all his former life. By his own choice, he was here aboard the Royan , storming the brink of eternity itself. In the telescope blister, strapped in a chair in darkness, Griff monitored the Royan ' s slow, deliberate, spiralling needle sweep of the entire celestial sphere. Before him, the large globe-chart slowly turned, and on its face, always toward him, a flickering small square of light gradually crept downward from pole to equator. Now and then a faint, shrill peep announced the end of a film reel. The chart stopped turning, and the square of light steadied and held its position. Griff twisted around to the telescope camera and refilled its magazine with a new spool of film. Slotting the exposed reel in the storage rack, he touched a control. The globe began to turn again. The bright square edged toward the equator. It was like' looking at the uniserse from the outside. But, to his eyes, it was a very poor universe -- blackness broken by only the feeblest of gleams. Only one galaxy was near enough to be even a smear of misty, cold light. A few more were flecks of pale luminescence. All the rest -- nor were there many -- were tiny, faint sparks. The illuminated square crossed the equator and continued downward. At each revolution of the dean McLaughlin globe, it descended not quite its own width. Griff watched, and changed reels, and watched again. To see the universe this way -- seemingly outside looking in -- was not the fearful thing that seeing it the other way had been. Just after the Royan emerged in this region of space, he had climbed the ladder to the observation bubble. There, breathlessly frozen, he had found himself in the presence of a vast, blotting blackness which seemed so near and solid that, if he reached out, its hard, reflectionless surface would stop his hand. Nowhere in that blackness was there anything his eyes could fix on. He was a mote in the wastes of endlessness. Numb and tranced, he had come back down the ladder. Where he wandered in the ship, or how long he walked, he afterwards could not remember. But for hours, only the hard deck underfoot assured him that anything was real. The globe was different. It was a size his mind could comprehend, and it was a thing he looked into from the outside. It did not bear down on him the knowledge of his infinite smallness. It continued to turn. The lighted square continued downward. Finally, it reached the pole. The globe stopped turning. Griff removed the film spool from the telescope camera. Taking the other reels from their rack, he sealed them in a lightproof case. Then he allowed the lights to come on. The first step of the job was begun. Back in his quarters, he put the film through the treatment machine. He checked it for flaws, but it was flawless. Then he rested. The next day he gave Shipmaster Amiro a set of guidance chits, and the Royan transpositioned to its second station, a hundred light years away. There, Griff again recorded the celestial sphere. Another day passed before he made his report to the shipmaster, and it was with a feeling of inadequacy -- of bewilderment in the face of unanticipated difficulties -- that he opened the door to the shipmaster's quarters. He stopped on the threshold, cold. Standing there, waiting with the shipmaster -- his broad back to the computer console -- was Bron Klystro, the survey captain. "Well, have you found it, young man?" the survey captain demanded. Full of misgivings, Griff made himself walk over to the study desk. He unclipped a pack of photo plates from his board and laid them in a row. Shipmaster Det Amiro and the survey captain bent to examine them. "It is one of these seven," Griff said, swallowing uncomfortably. Each plate showed a galaxy. Three were normal spirals, but all of them crude -- their sprawling, tentacular arms like misshapen swastikas. Two more were elliptical, with totally featureless, eggshaped bodies. Of the remaining two, one had no shape; the other was a barred spiral whose fat-elbowed, thin, threadlike arms trailed clockwise from its knob-centered. rod-like nucleus. Klystro straightened up. "It is none of these," he said evenly. "Young man..." "The parallax check showed all the others are more than fifteen million light years away," Griff said. "Have you a plate of Likert's Nebula?" Amiro asked. Griff unclipped it from his board and laid it on the desk. The galaxy was a beautiful, symmetrical whorl of snowy light. It looked not at all like any of the seven. have changed," Griff said without conviction. "Not this much," Klystro said. "In fact, it could never have evolved into any of these. Never in all the time since the universe began." He gestured do,wn the row' of photo plates. "Young man, y Qtf have made a mistake." Griff had checked and rechecked, but the comparitor 'had doggedly shown only the seven a having parallaxes which placed years away. Finally, he had reset the machine to select all the galyears, and had winnowed through the dozens that came out. The conclusion was the same. Likert's Nebula had to be one of the seven. Doubting everything, Griff had rechecked the Royan's position. He identified the home galaxy, a not very difficult task, because the Royan still shared the home galaxy's proper motion. Careful study of fixed galaxies showed that the Roy art's position was along a line drawn between the home galaxy and the place where Likert's Nebago. Examination of the fixed galaxies in the opposite direction hacj confirmed that the Royan was on that direction line, and a parallax reading on the home galaxy had shown that the Royan was fifteen The conclusion was inescapable. The Royan was exactly where it was supposed tor be. Likert's Nebula, therefore, had to be one of the seven. "Either it has disappeared entirely, or it is moving faster than light," Griff argued. "Or else -- it is one of these seven." "Impossible," Klystro said, and shut his jaw hard. "I disagree," Shipmaster Amiro said. "It is one of those seven." "Nevertheless, it is not," Klystro insisted. "Perhaps, young man, you would care to explain how Likert's Nebula -- a third stage symmetrical galaxy -- could have evolved into agy one of these seven." Griff stiffened speechlessly. He had no answer. Amiro said, "You, Survey Captain, are the authority on galactic Structure here. If anyone must make an explanation, you are he. The fact is, Survey Captain, that Likert's years ago. These seven, by reason of their positions, are the only ones that could have been here then. All others are too far away. Therefore, one of these is Likert's Nebula." He turned to Griff. "Can you decide which one?" dean McLaughlin "I think I can, Shipmaster," c Griff said. "But not without mov ing ship." s "Then we shall move it," Amiro b said. "What displacement?" r "We need a second set of paralb lax sightings," Griff told him. f "From the same positions, but after e a thousand-year lapse." "How do you propose to do s that?" Klystro demanded. ; Griff explained. By transpositiont ing away in any direction five r hundred light years, and then res turning, they would arrive one f thousand years later. r With the second set of parallax 's sightings, it would be possible to c compute the proper motions of the j seven galaxies. Knowing both the direction and speed of each -- and r making allowance for the time t elapsed since the light now seen I had left them -- Griff could deteri mine which of them had been I before. It should have been simple. s shipmaster was on his side, be) cause when he reported his analysis of the two sets of parallax sightings, t Survey Captain Klystro nearly  kicked a hole in the deck.  The results maddeningly indicated that none of the seven gals axies had passed through the re gion where Likert's Nebula had i been. But two had passed close -- ) proper date. Griff laid photo plates ( of the two galaxies on the study  desk. One was an elliptical; the f other was the barred spiral. That was as far as he got. Klystro turned his narrow face and burning eyes to him. "Young man," he said bitterly, "your bungling has now lost us completely. We will be lucky if we ever find our way home." Griff's mouth opened, but Klystro went on without a pause. "Shipmaster, I suggest you assign the duties of your guidance department to my staff -- since your own staff has proven incompetent. I further suggest that, as we now have no hope of finding Likert's Nebula, we should select the nearest of the crude spirals as an alternate objective." Amiro listened patiently. He rubbed his jaw and strolled over to the plotting sphere. The colored lights that represented the seven galaxies gleamed steadily. He leaned his weight on the broad, concave pedestal, peering down. Then he turned. "It was my understanding," he said slowly, "that crude-form galaxies such as those would not have years." "That is so, according to a theory of galactic evolution to which I have never subscribed," Klystro said acidly. Amiro nodded. "My charter," he said patiently, "directs me to deliver you and your staff to Likert's Nebula, and to cooperate with you in your survey. I will not violate that charter. Furthermore, I am not convinced that we cannot find Likert's Nebula. My guidance officer has already limited it to one of two possibilities." "Those two?" Klystro demanded. "The elliptical is worthless, and the other is almost as bad." He gestured to the photo plates. "Look at them -- practically no dust clouds in either." "If it is either one, it has changed Amiro pointed out. "Can you predict how they will change in an"Hardly at all," Klystro said. "With no dust clouds, they cannot form planets. A few stars might condense out of gas clouds, but it is doubtful, and any planets would be large, sub-stellar bodies with low density. Completely unlivable." Amiro nodded patiently. "We were assigned to survey Likert's Nebula," he repeated. "We will find it and go there." He glanced at Griff significantly. "Can you determine which one was Likert's?" "I think I can, shipmaster," Griff said. "I believe it's the barred spiral." He wished he could speak with more certainty; but the facts were not entirely conclusive. The factor that cast doubt on everything was that the two galaxies must have passed close to each other. Griff could not be sure exactly how close, because that depended on their masses -- which he did not know. Certainly, though, they had passed each other close enough to warp their flight paths, and to temporarily increase their velocities. The degree of these alterations would depend on the closeness of the encounter, on the distribution of their masses, and the rate of propagation of a gravitational field. Moreover, the tidal forces of the two galaxies, acting on each other, could have changed their structure and their mass distribution, further complicating the analysis. But, Griff pointed out, the closeness of the encounter might explain how Likert's Nebula had changed so radically. And, of the two possible galaxies, only the barred spiral bore any resemblance to Likert's. Amiro listened and nodded. "Your judgement is sound. Prepare a set of chits to place us twenty-five thousand light years from the center of its nucleus, perpendicular to its plane." He said to Klystro, "We will begin our survey there." "That galaxy is not Likert's Nebula," Klystro repeated. "I believe that it is." Amiro said. "And we shall go there." "Shipmaster, I protest." Klystro squared his shoulders and looked up at Amiro venomously. "Let that be in the record." From eighteen thousand light years above its roundly bulging crown, the barred spiral galaxy filled almost a whole hemisphere of the sky. The close-packed stars of its nucleus blended into each other, seemed a solid mass of glowing matter, grained and blotched with a dull ruddy light. From that center, the bar arms tapered outward, arched backward like scimitar blades, then bent sharply to become the trailing spiral arms. Out there, bright stars clustered dean McLaughlin together, blazing with a white, fewer with the passing of time, black, dark dust clouds in which, go on. Though the conclusion was endlessly, they were formed. already obvious, they might a well But Griff had only a glimpse of be thorough. Men would likely it. He found himself shut out of never come this way again, the telescope blister, nor was he Somewhere in the ship, Klystro's welcome in the observation bubble, men were preparing test spheres to Survey Captain Klystro's crew was be transpositioned into the galaxy, everywhere, looking stern and efIf their automechanisms failed to ficient, and resentfully dissatisfied bring them back, or if they returned with the galaxy to which Griff had with micro-pitted, radioactive hulls, guided them. the galaxy would be proven see tee Gradually, Griff was made to -- totally destructive to men and realize how shamefully unsatisfyvessels alike. ing the galaxy was. Its nucleus was But if they returned -- or most of worthless, of course, being comthem -- from their forty thousand posed of prime-origin stars -- stars years of transposition and their created at a time when there was month-long stay inside the galaxy, almost nothing but hydrogen in the Roy an would go in where they the universe. Any planets they had had gone, to study and survey at would be gaseous blobs, totally closer range, useless for human settlement. And the stars themselves were old now, Fever-hued red giants, most of JL while the Royan transpositioned them, they were swollen things deeper and deeper into the galaxy, slowly guttering down to extincand from region to region within tion. it, Griff spent all the time he could That much they had expected, in a study of the bar spiral galaxy's But the bar arms were no better, flight path. It was tedious work, Only in the spiral arms, where the and he was constantly interrupted dust clouds were black flecks to confirm guidance chits which against the brightness, were there were always right, or to take his signs of renewal. There, young stars turn in the telescope blister for burned with the fury and fierceness new observations of the home galof youth, newly bom from the dark, axy, before the Royan transposilight-blotting clouds. tioned to a new station. But the spiral arms were cut The encounter of the two galshort, trailing after them fainter, axies was difficult to analyze. Bemisty streamers of old and aging sides the question of their masses, stars. there was the problem of whether The galaxy, probably, had hosthere had been an exchange of pitable worlds and pleasant stars, mass between them. And, too, the But they were few, and would be slight gravitational force of other, neighboring galaxies -- immeasurable and, because of their movements, constantly changing -- tended to warp the flight paths of the two galaxies he was studying. But he had to keep at it. It was his only hope now, for he had failed miserably in his attempt to study the bar spiral galaxy's present structure as a clue to its metamorphosis. The trouble was, he did not know enough -- he could not interpret with confidence the puzzling data the films revealed. He had expected the galaxy's nucleus to show the same general mixture of star types as the nucleus of the home galaxy. For, according to theory, the primary origin stars of all galaxies came into being at nearly the same time -- past. But the stars of the nucleus did not conform to that pattern. There were too many red giants not yet expanded to maximum size, and too many variable stars, just beginning their climb from the main sequence. The older, declining red giants were not present in anything like their proper numbers, nor was Griff able to find as many as he had expected of the white, cooling corpses of stars. As if the galaxy was inexplicably younger than it had any right to be. That was nonsense. Everyone knew that all galaxies must have originated at about the same time -- that the vast gas clouds must have condensed almost simultaneously. For in that ancient, unknowable time, the universe had been much more closely packed than now, and those clouds which failed to contract at once would have been tom apart by the conflicting tidal forces of galaxies already formed. Griff frowned at the graph he had made, shrugged, and gve up. He did not know enough to fathom its meaning. Or perhaps he had made a mistake -- some tyro blunder -- and the graph was ludicrously wrong. So it had to be analysis of the galaxies' flight paths. And, as the weeks passed, even that hope faded, wilted, and finally died. "I have absolute proof," Klystro said precisely, "that this is not Likert's Nebula." They were in the shipmaster's quarters. The big plotting sphere blazed with swarming brightness of thousands of infinitesimal starsparks, in replica of the heavens surrounding the Roy an. In the center of the sphere, a green spark denoted the Royan's location, and near it -- gigantic -- a fistlike black mass poised in abeyance, its dark textures limned by the internal glov of stars in the torment of being born. "Give it," Amiro told the survey captain. He turned to Griff. "I want you to hear this." Griff nodded woodenly. He had expected something like this ever since his analysis of the galaxies' flight paths had shown -- impossibly -- the gravitational influence of an invisible, galaxy-sized mass. "Yes," Klystro said heartily. dean McLaughlin "Young man, before we set out from the home galaxy, we obtained  an estimate of the mass of Likert's r Nebula. You did not know that, did you?" s Numhly, Griff shook his head. Klystro smiled. "Granted, it was  only an estimate. But the efrror could not have been more than s five percent. Now, young man -- e now we have measured this galaxy's t mass to within one thousandth -- i and it is only a little more than c half the original figure. Even grants ing that its structure has radically  changed -- which of course is imI possible -- it could not have lost mass. Therefore, young man, this t is not Likert's Nebula." s It was a heavy indictment, and t Griff should have smarted under # it. But something in the middle t of Klystro's statement, some ran dom fragment of thought, suddenc ly filled him with a stunned excitet ment. He did not speak. He crossed the t room and sat down at the compus ter board. His hands darted over ) the keys. s "Young man, what are you doing?" Klystro demanded. Griff c scarcely heard. c "Do you hear me?" Griff made t no answer. He frowned over the report screen, his fingers poised I tensely over the keys. Then he was t busy again, and the screen flashed s and trembled and changed. Griff watched, his lips pressed into a I thin, bloodless line. At last he c nodded wordlessly, satisfied. I Abruptly, he stopped. He stood f up -- turned back to Klystro and t the shipmaster.  "Shipmaster," he announced, "this is Likert's Nebula -- what remains of it." "I did not doubt it," Amiro said calmly. "I suppose you can justify this preposterous claim?" Klystro asked. "I think so, Survey Captain. You see, the two galaxies passed through each other -- Likert's Nebula and the elliptical galaxy we observed. And both of them lost almost all of their interstellar matter -- it was swept right out of them. We... we. could expect Likert's Nebula to have lost almost half its mass." He paused, then went on. "And the elliptical galaxy was smaller, so it did not take the clouds in the outermost parts of the spiral arms -- it left a little on each side. And the regions where the clouds were left had twice the mass density of the rest of the galaxy. That upset the galaxy's gravitational stability. The arms drew the stars toward them, wrecking the original spiral structure. The result was... well, you have seen it, Shipmaster. A bar spiral." "Interesting," Klystro said. "And can you support with proof this odd conglomeration of assumptions?" "I think I can," Griff said. He bent over the computer and extracted its tape, spread it on the study desk. "These are only approximations," he said. "But I think a complete analysis will confirm them. When I tried to analyze the galaxies' flight paths, I discovered that I had to assume the existence of an invisible, galaxy-sized mass to account for their motions. But, in the presence of that mass, neither of the galaxies could have passed through the region where Likert's Nebula was." "Neither is Likert's Nebula," Klystro put in. "I have said that from the beginning." "This barred spiral is Likert's Nebula, Survey Captain," Griff answered deliberately. "You see, if I postulate that the two galaxies interpenetrated, and that their interstellar matter became a separate body as a result, all their motions can be accounted for -- and if I trace this barred spiral backward to a time before the encounter, we find that it passed through the position Likert's Nebula occupied, at the time we know Likert's was there. And it is so unlikely that more than one set of conditions could place anything within a million light years of the place, we must conclude that this is what happened." He was right and he knew he was right. His rightness was a blaze of pleasure and excitement in him. No longer was he intimidated by this man named Klystro -- no more did he feel compelled to doubt everything he himself thought and said and did. And no longer did he have to think of the Royarf s expedition as a wasted effort or a failure. Because... because... "You forget, young man," Klystro said slowly, "that a gas cloud detached from a galaxy in this manner would be torn by violent turbulences. I very much doubt that any such cloud would remain intact for long. It would disintegrate from its own internal instability." "No, survey captain," Griff replied. "A cloud like that can hold together." "Young man, you are impertinent," Klystro snapped. "Survey Captain," Griff repeated, "It has happened." "Nonsense." "It has happened to this galaxy -- to Likert's Nebula, Survey Captain," Griff said. "To the dust and gas cloud out of which it evolved. You must know it yourself." "I know nothing of the sort." "But you must admit that the primary-origin stars of this galaxy are younger than those of our home "Well, what if they are?" Klystro demanded. "Why, how else can you explain it?" Griff demanded. "If the universe as we know it began as an exploding super-atom, then all the galaxies must have condensed at approximately the same time. Therefore, the cloud which became this galaxy did not exist at that time. So where did it come from? It must have been the gas and dust cloud separated from its parent galaxy by a collision. I can think of no other explanation." Klystro smirked coldly. "A pretty theory. However, it does not affect our mission in the slightest. This galaxy is practically useless, which after all -- " "But it does mean something, survey captain," Griff insisted. "Why, it means that right now there must be galaxies evolving out dean McLaughlin of dark clouds. The cloud from Likert's Nebula will be a galaxy some day, and so will the cloud which the invader swept out of our own galaxy! And there will always be new galaxies. Always." "A fabric of suppositions," Klytro said angrily. "Can you prove this?" asked Amiro. "We can try, Shipmaster," Griff said. "If this is a galaxy of secondary origin, the planets of its primary-population stars should be similar in composition to the planets of secondary-origin stars such as we are already familiar with. If I am wrong, they will be gaseous bodies, as we assumed until now. It should be simple to select a few solar systems in this galaxy's nucleus. If we find that the planets are gaseous, I will be shown wrong." Amiro nodded to Klystro. "Well?" "It is hardly worth investigating," the survey captain said contemptuously. "Is your survey completed?" "Very nearly." "If you have no objection, then," Amiro said, "I will instruct my guidance officer to prepare us chits to place us in this galaxy's nucleus, so we may conduct the survey he suggests." He waited then, but Klystro, glowering, said nothing. The shipmaster turned to Fikret Griff. "Prepare the chits." "Yes, Shipmaster," Griff said. "Yes. And thank you, Shipmaster." "And I hope you are right," the shipmaster said. Griff went back to his quarters. He felt good. He knew he was right and the survey would prove it. But it was more than that : much more. He saw, opening out before the vision of his mind, a truly infinite future for the human race. For there would always be new galaxies. Always . Even if every galaxy were gutted by collisions, men would still have always a place to go. That was the big thing, the important thing. Creation was endless. And deathless. And ceaseless. And forever. Two early "collector's" issues if you subscribe now! dated March #, are still available. Other back issues available are: May and July #; March, April, July, October and November #; January, March and April, #; February, April, June, August, October, December #; Feb., April, June, Aug., Oct., Dec. #, all # issues. You may obtain these back issues for # each postpaid. your choice of any two of these back issues as a gift! Address Circulation Dept., IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. ( Continued Jrom page # ) Miss Nancy toallow me to court her. With all due respects to Mr. Holman." "Damn it to hell  # Holman said, straightening. Nancy placed the flowers on the table and smiled at Shandy. He stood as she approached him. Nancy laughed and put her arms around the young man. With her head against Shandy's chest Nancy said, "Poor Shandy. Poor Shandy." She made him sit down again. Then she patted him fondly on the head. "Stay right there, Shandy." Nancy hurried from the room. Holman followed her. "Listen, are you sure he Isn't intelligent? Because, my God, the scientists down at the settlement -- " Nancy said, "Oh, no, Ken. He just copies things he's heard people say. Wait a minute." She disappeared into the storeroom. When she returned she was holding a dusty album in her hand. Holman followed her back into the kitchen. Shandy looked at the album for a moment and then smiled. "I meant well," he said. "I knew I recognized you," Nancy said, turning a third through the book. "My Uncle Maxwell when he graduated from Mars-Yale." She slid the picture out and held it toward Holman, but he didn't take it. Shandy said, "Hated to see you Gome to think of it, Holman thought, he does just repeat things people are always saying. Setting the book beside the flowers, Nancy said, "What are you really, Shandy? I've never had a chance to talk to you before, except in a one-sided sort of way." Shandy folded his hands and uncrossed his legs. "I don't remember just now, Miss Nancy. I used to know. I don't think there are many of us left now." He touched his mustache again, smoothing it. "Maybe in the mountains there are some more. I don't remember." Nancy patted his head. "I'm going to marry Ken, Shandy. And live in the settlement." "You'll enjoy that." "You think you'll stay this way?" Holman asked. "I might. I don't know." Holman held out his hand to Shandy. "Anyway, we want you to stay here and keep watch over things." Shandy hesitated and then shook hands. "I might as well." Holman and Nancy left for the settlement the next morning, with the suitcases. Shandy, still in the shape of Uncle Maxwell, they left on the front steps of the ship. He waved goodbye to them. When they were gone, he changed slowly into a large teddy bear. Then, with a moist gleam in his eye, he went back to reading the thick, red-leather, picGive me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. -- Archimedes Book Reviews by the Editor Mid-Century , edited by Orville Prescott (Pocket Books, #), only four are fantasy in the general sense, and of these only one superficially resembles science fiction -- "The Hour of Letdown," by E. B. White. But it is a distinguished collection of contemporary short stories, and I thought it might be fruitful to inquire why there is no science fiction in it. The immediate answer is, of course, that Prescott didn't like any s-f story well enough. But this is begging the question: it could have been predicted that he wouldn't like any s-f story enough, because he is a respectable critic, and respectable critics don't. What I wanted to know is: why not? What are the deficiencies in science fiction, or in its critics, that make it the forgotten child of American letters? A representative story from this collection, and a very good one, is John P. Marquand's "Lunch At Honolulu." The five main characters, casually sketched in, are a job lot assembled by chance at one rived from the States, two senior naval officers, a brash young naval aviator, and the host, an oldtimer in the islands. The background, on the other hand, is assembled with care, and drips with local color. Even the dialogue is largely devoted to building up background information; the host is a local patriot, with a hobbyist's enthusiasm for anything Hawaiian, and a bore's persistence: This is a lanai, not a verandah. Those are kukui trees. This is onefinger poi. And so on, inexhaustibly. The admiral, his aide, and the the young aviator is rude. He hums under his breath. He interrupts, with brutal reminiscences about action he has seen. ( " 'Now this first one that hit us -- ... he came in from the port side. We gave him everything we had. You could see the #s going into him like red-hot rivets. That kid must have been dead, but he still kept coming in... It was a very rugged feeling. # # ) And he drinks too much. After he leaves, the host apologizes for him; but the admiral says: "'Every now and then they act that way. You and I would, too... It's only that boy was glad -- and that's natural -- just glad he is still alive. # # That's all there is to the story. At first it seems like an awful lot of setting for one small pearl. Then, as it sinks in, you realize that Marquand has used the story as a device to contain something much larger than itself -- the whole great tragedy of the war in the Pacific. This is one of the standard tricks of the short story; when it's well done it's enormously effective; the sudden widening of view at the end seems to satisfy some human hunger. In this story, and in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and half a dozen others in the volume, the author uses careful, elaborate, evocative detail of setting, to prepare you for a sudden illumination about people. The setting is made to seem interesting in itself, like the motions of a magician's hand, only to distract your attention and catch you off guard. Now this is something that s-f can do. "The Lottery," "Cyclist's Raid," by Frank Rooney, and Shirley Ann Grau's "The Black Prince" are allegorical fantasies, with obvious parallels in such s-f stories as Harry Bates' "Farewell to the Master," "The Yehudi Principle," by Fredric Brown, and George Orwell's "#." The best s-f stories frequently depend on just this effect -- producing out of a needle's eye something vast and altogether astonishing. Because Prescott chose the four fantasies (and wrote an appropriately loving introduction to the # edition of The Worm Ou roboros ) , we know he is not one of those who think a story must be naturalistic to be taken seriously. Whatever his standards are, they are fine enough to admit fantasy and yet exclude science fiction. It might be an instructive exercise to rewrite "Lunch At Honolulu" as science fiction: at least it would be remarkably easy to do. Where the text reads "koa" or "poi," substitute some equally exotic but invented word; for "Japanese" substitute "Barsoomian," or what have you ; for "battleship," "spaceship," and there you are. The resulting copy, if carefully written, would have all the values of the original : and yet you can see immediately that such a story would never wind up in a collection like this one. Why not? Because the Marquand original has a real background, whereas the copy would have an invented one? Nonsense. Every writer gives his characters names as if they were real people, and calls his setting "Kentucky" or "Hollywood" as if it were a real place; but one is as much invented as theother. But let's not quibble: is it because a place called Honolulu does actually exist? So does a place called Mars. Then is it because a story about Honolulu has to be carefully researched, whereas you can say anything you like about Mars? Neither half of this plausible formulation happens to be true. There is so much readily available material about Honolulu, that any writer with an hour to spare could dig out of a guidebook all the facts Marquand used in his story. Information about Mars exists, but is scantier and harder to come by; to write a logically consistent story about Mars, taking into account all that is known about the planet, is not the easiest job imaginable. Now, as far as the average reader is concerned, the trouble may well be one of a lack of confidence in the authors. The backwoods Southern landscape of "The Black Prince" is as much a fantasy of Miss Grau's as the things she makes happen in it; but never mind, the reader knows Miss Grau is a Southerner, so there must be some fact in the mixture. Even though the Kentucky of "Land of Our Enemies" is a moody charcoal drawing, all shadows and moonlight; even though the bar, in "The Hour of Letdown," is like no New York bar the reader was ever in, never mind: Stuart is a Kentuckian and White a New Yorker. We have no Martian writers. Hence, probably, the exaggerated respect paid to s-f writers who are also working scientists, even though it almost always turns out that the biochemists write space opera, and the astronomers write biochemical fantasy. Where the critics are concerned, however, I have a hunch that the trouble is something more resembling a lack of self-confidence. By and large, our literary critics are not educated in science; they grew up in a tradition that has made a physicist as alien to them as a plumber. I think they are embarrassed to find themselves unequipped to distinguish accurate science fiction from twaddle. And I think most of them have fallen back on the assumption that if the traditional critical standards won't fit it, it can't be art. science fiction is that, like the Indian Ocean, it has no natural boundaries. There is a central area which everyone agrees is science fiction; then as you go farther out you meet disturbing similarities to other forms of fiction; and finally, at the edges, the most puzzling things happen. Take time travel, one of the staples of science fiction since H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in #. It accounts for perhaps one out of fifty science fiction stories, year in and year out; more in the case of some writers. In #. I was rash enough to express a belief that the time travel story was dying out; since then, eight of the thirty-six stories I've written have been time travel stories. Time travel has also been a staple device of the historical fiction writer, certainly since Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (#), and perhaps earlier. Two recent examples are delightfully hard to classify: Pawn of Time , by Robin Carson (Holt, #) and Curtain of Mist , by M. Pardoe (Funk  Wagnalls, #). Paivn of Time is a big, sprawling, robust novel about a young New Yorker with the improbable name of Heitman Urban, who gets himself back into Renaissance Italy by the crudest sort of parlor hocuspocus: " 'Simple,' the Pernod drinker told him. 'Concentrate on Venice in that period. Then clear the mind of every thought and image for about three minutes. Let the mind go blank, and then J #) And then Urban finds himself in Venice, in his own physical body, but wearing Renaissance clothes, and carrying a whacking big pouch of gold. Carson's explanation: "He thought he knew why he was in possession of a fortune. It represented the mechanized and collective services of his own age, which had been exchanged for the all-embracing commodity of money." Swallow this, and the rest follows with logic enough, and with such vividness and good-humored impudence that you would forgive greater offenses. Carson obviously loves his period, and he makes it come alive -- #th century Venice and Rome, full of Spanish adventurers talking about their cojonesy virtuous whores and available nuns, filth and velvet, piety, pillage and manslaughter. Carson is a Swede, and writes with occasional unidiomatic awkwardness (the first sixty pages or so are full of blunders like "to ignore that" and "to really lose grip"; later they almost disappear, as if the author had perfected his English while writing this book). He is also a master of the telling phrase: "and the blood shot out like a black arm over the stones." Urban (who, not unpredictably, turns out to be an accomplished fencer) saves a young Spaniard, Don Manuel Ordonez de Talavera, from armed attack; acquires a new name, and spins a wonderful C. S. Lewisish tale to account for his ignorance of local events and personages: reared among the savage New World Indians by his mother (who taught' him all the niceties of civilized conduct), he floated across to Europe on a tree. His hosts innocently take all this for gospel, and in fact the head of the household, Don Isidro de Bahamonte Mendoza y de Beltran, puts a secretary to work at writing it down as an edifying chronicle: The Marvelous Life and Astonishing Adventures of the Most Excellent Sehor and Very Magnificent Cavalier Don Jaiman Urban de Biqueman; How by Unwavering Faith and with God's Help He Escaped from the Land of the Heathen; With Special Maps and Explanations by the Author. (" 'I think we have hit on a very snappy title said Urban.") The one really curious thing about Urban is that he has no past history of his own ; beyond the fact that he lived on Beekman Place in New York, the author tells us nothing about him; and he is described so sparsely that it isn't until nearly halfway through the book that we can even form any clear idea of what he looks like. In contrast, all the other characters are drawn with loving clarity and precision. Nearly all of them are rogues of one degree or another, and the more rascally they are, the better the author makes us like them. What makes the book so absorbing to read is the author's seemingly deep and genuine love for the people of the period -- not the great personages, who do not appear; but the ordinary, everyday men and women of the Renaissance. Now Urban, being a time traveler, has the virtues of both an observer and a participant. He is immersed in the story, but sees it freshly. To this extent, the time traveling element may be considered a purely formal device ; but Carson has also made use of it in several unexpected ways for its own sake, with uneven success. The broad theme of the book is that of Urban's slow cultural assimilation, until at the end he is completely a man of the time. The last vestige of his attachment to the #th century takes the curious (and plausible) form of a dress fetishism, practiced with one of his mistress's servant girls. In quirky episodes like this one, Carson plays the two cultures off against each tentative efforts to use the timetraveling element in a more sciencefictional way are clumsy and weak. The purchasing-powerto-gold transformation, already mentioned, is one example; another is Urban's six-year pursuit of gold, under the persuasion that he has to earn as much as he came with, before he can go back. Again, the minor character who turns out to be another time-traveler is implausible throughout; this is in striking contrast to the strength of the other minor characters. Although Carson has Urban introduce modem fencing a hundred years early, it doesn't seem to occur to him to wonder what changes in the history of modern Europe and America this would inevitably cause. Finally, the metaphysical surprise with which he ends his story is a pure opportunism, a shocker without any structural link to the rest of the book. Let me add at once that these defects, which would no doubt be fatal in a pure science fiction story, are unimportant flaws here : the book is coherent, vital and satisfying, with all its imperfections, from one end to the other. Curtain of Mist is an uncommonly good juvenile, about four #thcentury people set down in preRoman Britain. Like Carson, Miss Pardoe evidently knows and loves her subject; and like his, her narrative is written in a forthright, no-nonsense style. (As a rule, it's the author trying to cover up his ignorance who writes with stuffy erudition.) Here again, there is no attempt to provide a scientific rationale for the timetravel experience : in spite of some talk about Dunne's An Experiment With Time (listed in the bibliography, along with twenty-odd scholarly works on ancient history and archaeology), it's Polynesian magic that gets the four travelers into the past at the beginning of the story, and Celtic magic that returns them at the end. Now, clearly, this is nothing more than a convenient trick to get two otherwise incompatible things together -- the modern protagonists, and the ancient setting. The timetraveling experience itself is not of the essence; Miss Pardoe has used it to get to the real heart of her story, just as Selma Lagerlof used the device of a miniature boy who traveled with the wild geese and spoke their language, to write a kind of story-geography of Sweden. But authors' intentions often go astray. H. G. Wells was under the impression that in The Food of the Gods he had written an allegory of changing transportation systems in Britain, and he was quite put out that no one got the point. Authors' intentions aside, The Food of the Gods is a science fiction novel in which the good story-telling entirely overshadows the bad allegory; and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is surely more fantasy than geography. At any rate, Curtain of Mist is mostly an historical novel, but the elements of fantasy in it, even of science fiction -- for instance, the very careful use of telepathy to get over the translation problem -- make it impossible to exclude it from the field altogether. To meet the ancient Celts, some in their "wheelhouses" and brochs, some in Romanized villas with central heating -- not just bluepainted savages, but people with a high culture of their own -- is a fascinating experience in this novel. What's the difference between that and reading a story about an imaginary barbaric culture in the future, or on another planet? Technical differences there certainly are, but the pleasure, it seems to me, is exactly the same. licizing John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (#), for reasons I cannot fathom, as a comic novel. Certainly the plot sounds comic enough. Something like a flying saucer descends on a sleepy English village; there is a #-hour blackout during which nobody from outside can get in, and the inhabitants slumber; and a few months later it becomes evident that every fertile woman in the village is pregnant. In the hands of a French writer, like the author of The Scandals of Clochemerle, I suppose this idea might actually have turned out to be funny; but Wyndham is nothing if not English, and his treatment is deadly serious, and I'm sorry to say, deadly dull. The book opens promisingly, with a phlegmatic parade of Britons imperturbably vanishing into Midwich, and other Britons being sent to hunt for them. There are glimmers of humor later on, as when a character refers to "the Obstetrics Division of Military Intelligence." But about page # the story begins to bog down under layers of polite restraint, sentimentality, lethargy and women's-magazine masochism, and it never lifts its head long again. To begin with, the narrator is purely an observer; he continually gets in the way of the story, without contributing anything of his own. The central events of the story, partly for this reason, never emerge. The golden-eyed, hypnotic super-children grow up to a nasty teenhood and are then bombed to bits by a patriotic villager, which is just about what you would expect to happen. (In # pages, the book reaches the point at which van Vogt's Sian begins.) Who the "cuckoos" in the flying saucer were, and what the hell they thought they were up to, we never learn. Presumably the author was at a loss, too. Wyndham's unbearably leisurely preparation consumes # pages before we get our first first-hand glimpse of a super-child; we do not hear one speak more than a couple of syllables until page #, and the effect then is one of fraud -- .it's too late to convince us now that they can talk like anyone else. In Wyndham's Out of the Sea , this same kind of arm's-length treatment was highly effective, because in that one, the invaders were at the bottom of the ocean, and we could only speculate about them. But in The Midwich Cuckoos, the children are here; to keep them always half a mile in the background, as Wyndham does, is indefensible. Vanguard to Venus, by Jeffery Lloyd Castle (Dodd, Mead, #) is another astonishing combination author of Satellite E One. description of the departure of the first Venus ship, which for vivid imagery and plausibility ranks with anything done in the field. The foolishness: Venerians, or, if you like, Venusians (Castle, alone in the entire world, calls them "Venutians") descended from a space shipload of ancient Egyptians, and practicing black magic along with nuclear physics. The "Venutian" part of the story is nonsense, and thirty-yearold nonsense at that; but Castle's handling of space travel is not only technically admirable, it is lyrical too. Here is a man who if he chose, and if he would get a few maggots out of his head, could write the Mob y Dick of space-flight: Less than a mile away the Satellite itself, permanent-seeming as the Moon, revolved about its central tower with majestic and unvarying smoothness, a mighty ring of gold suspended in space, half floodlit in the Sun's strange unrefracted light, half deeply shadowed and invisible against the equal black of the sky. Like those grotesque processions of saints that sometimes mark the striking of cathedral clocks, the assorted masts and antennae, telescopes and scanners, marched round and round eternally, from light to darkness and from darkness into light. The Joy Wagon, by Arthur T. Hadley (Viking, #) is a farcical novel about a political campaign. It gets enormous mileage out of one simple but blood-chilling device: substituting for the human candidate a Machiavellian computer named Microvac -- and as far as possible, letting the plot proceed exactly as if he were human. The first twenty pages of the book, for some odd reason, are written in primer-sized sentences, and as awkwardly put together as possible -- a line of wooden dialogue, then a paragraph of background material, then another line of dialogue, like a man trying to start a balky Model T. On page #, the engine catches when Hadley turns to the unorthodox love problems of a young university professor and a night telephone operator. ("The room could be locked from the inside, but there were only two small swivel chairs with upright backs. Interruptions from the board, though infrequent, were of a disturbingly random pattern. Kay, hinting at some past experience, was nervous about cleaning men with pass keys...") And away we go. Hadley, who went through the # Presidential campaign as a member of Stevenson's staff, has met all the gorgeously varied fauna of a Presidential year -- and here they are: Bryant W. Dangle, the egghead candidate, "who never split an infinitive or joined an issue"; Congressman Bates Hewball, "the sheep's friend"; mad Nora Claggett ("In her hands she bore a nine-foot pole from whose top fluttered a gigantic green and blue pennant with a gold radio tube on it. Beneath the tube were embroidered in scarlet the words, 'Prepare for Doom.'"); TV camera crews everywhere (Two heaving roustabouts were snaking a heavy cable across the room. They flipped it over a line of chairs, fetching the ladies in the next row an oily smack. 'Hands off dat cable!' they yelled crossly.") ; Indians ( " 'See, Microvac got no head. All world know machine got no head. You give bonnet to machine that got no head, you look silly to whole world, Chief.'"); hustlers, advance men, managers, and above all, Mike itself. Mike is a political manager's dream. It works tirelessly, knows all the answers, has a dynamic handshake (engineered with "delicate electronic pads" in its hands), never loses its temper, never makes the same mistake twice. As thousands cheer, you cheer, too: the best part of the joke is that you find yourself wanting Microvac to win, because it's a more likable guy, a greater American, a more forceful and intelligent leader than either of the two regular candidates. It ought to win, too, if logic means anything: instead, the book ends with a last-minute disaster which is clumsily contrived and abrupt; if, as I half suspect, this "happy" ending was forced on Hadley by an editor, the latter ought to be shot. ' IF" anyone asks when science fiction, as a literary form, is going to attain maturity, I shall refer them to Frank Riley's A Question of Identity (April '#). Of course, craftsmanship and precision of detail make it a smooth-flowing, suspenseful yarn, but standing proud and tall in front of all other such considerations is the concept around which the story technicalities form the body substance. It takes skill to treat dignified subjects in a dignified way. Too many of us take the easy way out, and hide behind the ubiquitous "light touch" when we have something serious to say. All well and good, the light touch is a fine thing, but I wonder how often it is used as a shield for embarrassment at having something significant to say and no decent way to say it. Frank Riley has shown us that he can say something decent without embarrassment. -- Willard D. Nelson Portland, Oregon A "Bravo" and also a "Tch-tch" to the housewife who authored the last letter in your April issue letter dept. I'll bet that every sci-fi fan agrees with most of her letter, but bristles at the last part when she says she has to defend it when caught reading science fiction. "Defend it!" -- she should be proud she can appreciate it! Most adults feel contemptuous of those who read "scandal, andor love" type publications (and Nothing Else). One of the best ways to turn a scoffer into a "fan" is to loan him a few pre-selected books or magazines -- it has never failed me yet in producing converts, but is a wee bit hard on the library -- mine is practically a "circulating" library -- but then I always seem to find a story which will really interest the doubter -- possibly because I belong to a book-club of science-fiction editions, and also buy every magazine on the market. By the way -- there's only one thing wrong with IF -- I can't put it down until I've read it cover to cover and am disappointed that there isn't just one more story! -- Mrs. Chester A. Ladd San Jose, Cal. First, some statistics for your survey: I am #, married, no chilfive years' standing. Have been reading science fiction since #, and have managed to collect since that time some # science fiction books and magazines -- and I'm just beginning! So much for the statistics. Now I have a most vehement and violent complaint against your change of type for the "IF" on the cover and contents page. I don't like it! The old one was stylish, distinctive, and very pleasant to look at. But this new monstrosity is coarse, formless, and utterly undistinguished. It doesn't say anything, it's just -- there. Very characterless. Please change back to the old style. I also think it was better when you had "World of" above the "IF," in the little square. It gave your magazine a very distinctive personality. How about it? I like your stories in general, though I notice a slight similarity in some of them, as if it were the same theme being treated slightly differently. But still, it ranks in the top few, and is usually well worth reading. In conclusion, keep up the good work -- but please change that "IF", it doesn't become you! -- Bumice F. Wyszkowski Toronto, Canada I am #, B.A.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from University of Toronto, married. I have been reading science fiction since #. Currently I have to be extremely selective with regard to my reading matter, because of limited time. I read practically nothing else but favorite authors (Asimov, Heinlein, Clement, and an assortment of lesser names) published elsewhere. So much for statistics for your survey. In spite of what I have stated above, I have always held IF to be one of the four best science fiction magazines. If I have neglected it recently, it is only because of time demands. As your former steady and currently occasional reader, I want to protest most vehemently against the atrocity wrought upon the appearance of the cover of your magazine. I don't know whose idea it was to change the cover to its present design, but only a soap commercial writer could have conceived it. From a distinctive and elegant design, you have changed to a common, hackneyed, utterly uninspired one. There is nothing now to distinguish your magazine from a dozen others with similar covers. Furthermore, while the present nearly square format of the color illustration on the cover no doubt costs considerably less than a full page illo, I would like to see IF return to the original full page color cover if at all possible. I would also like to point out here, that magazines with predominantly monochromatic covers have a much greater eye appeal than the ones whose covers are a jumble of colors light and dark. Especially predominantly black or predominantly white covers with a simple shape standing out in sharp contrast are most eyecatching. You might consider these points in choosing your illos and your cover design. Another point: I would like to see the lettering on the cover kept to a bare minimum, and placed in an unobtrusive place. In addition, each illustration should be purposely designed to form a balanced whole with the lettering, something that is seldom seen on the covers of s-f magazines these days. Some of your covers, I notice, are guilty in this respect too, e.g. the February issue.Paul Wyszkowski, S.E.I.C. Toronto, Canada Will anybody who (like me) prefers the new logotype please speak up, and balance the equation? I had to write and tell you how much I enjoyed reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth. This is definitely the best science fiction story I have read in years. What I particularly liked about the story was the way the author made everything seem real and somehow ordinary, at the same time that it was all wonderful and strange. I don't know if I am expressing this right, but it seems to me that most writers don't know how to do this. Either they are always oh-ing and ah-ing over how wonderful their inventions, etc., are, or else they take everything for granted so that the reader is bored before he starts. I think people will go on living their ordinary day to day lives in the future, but that doesn't mean they will lose their sense of wonder. The two things have to go together, it seems, or else the story just is not believable. This is a pet gripe of mine, so I wanted to let you know you hit me just right with The Songs of Distant Earth. More! -- Robert W. Grundy North Bend, Washington I have been a reader of science fiction for over twenty years, but this is the first time I have ever written a letter to a magazine. By profession I am an Electrical Engineer, and enjoy reading science fiction for mental stimulation, even though the stories are frequently implausible. The reason I am writing now is because my attention was caught by the method Arthur C. Clarke used, in his story The Songs of Distant Earth , for insulating the interstellar space ship from the heat released by contact with interstellar dust, etc. This certainly is a spectacular idea, carrying an iceberg a mile ahead of the space ship to act as a "bumper." But let's see how it would work out. To start with, we will take the case of the space ship moving at a comparatively modest speed -- one thousand miles a second, or # km. sec. This sounds like a lot, but is actually quite slow as cosmic speeds go. Now the mass of the iceberg "bumper," Clarke tells us, is about # tons. Converting this into metric tons for convenience, we have #I m. tons. We don't know what shape the "bumper" is, but again for convenience will suppose it is a cube, about # meters on a side. (This gives a volume of # c.c.'s, which is pretty close.) As the space ship travels in a forward direction, the leading face of the cube, with an area of # square centimeters, will be contacting whatever cosmic dust is in the way (mostly hydrogen). Taking the distribution of hydrogen atoms in interstellar space at about one per c.c., we find that the "bumper" will be hitting some # (fifatoms every second. The combined mass, at rest, of these atoms, will be in the neighborhood of .# grams. Figuring for kinetic energy, which equals one-half the mass times the velocity squared, we get the respectable sum of # ergs. Now the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water one degree G. is one joule, or # ergs. In other words, to raise the whole mass of ice one degree G. would require roughly # times # or #,ergs. Dividing this by our figure of #, we find that # seconds -- about # years -- would be required to raise the mass of ice one degree C. (This is simplifying, of course; in actuality, the ice molecules would be heated to vapor point and would boil off into space along the leading face of the cube, gradually reducing its depth; however, this method gives us a good approximation of the problem.) So we see that at these moderate speeds, the "bumper" would work nicely. But now let's examine the case of the space ship moving at speeds near the speed of light -- which is what Clarke's space ship does. That is a different case altogether. According to relativity theory, mass becomes infinite as velocity approaches the speed of light. Suppose we assume the space ship is traveling at nine-tenths c y or about # cm.sec. This is really moving! And I want to know how Clarke propels such a mass, but that is a different problem. At this speed, the leading face of the ice "bumper" would be contacting on the order of #,hydrogen atoms every second. The "rest mass" of these atoms would be about .# grams : but their mass with reference to the moving space ship would be # grams! And the kinetic energy released by contact with the "bumper" works out to the astonishing figure of # ( thirtyThat would be enough to blow the "bumper" to hell and gone in less than one-tenth of a second -- and spread it around over a lot of interstellar space too! The oddest thing of all when you come to look at it is that this "bumper" of Mr. Clarke's seems to be held in place by some kind of force beam or "gravity field," such as was used to raise it from the planet Thalassa. Now if you have a convenient thing like that, why use a "bumper" at all? Presumably the field would be propagated at the speed of light, and so it could push the H atoms out of the road quick enough for the space ship to get by. Anyhow, I enjoyed the story! -- E. M. Wallingford Newton, Miss. I am # years old, a housewife and the mother of a # month old girl who leaves me breathless from her constant bounce. I was a chemistry major in college and worked for a year at an airplane plant in the design department. Both of these heightened my enjoyment of science fiction, but I have been reading it since I was #. I'll always be grateful to the druggist who ignored the plump little girl eagerly devouring his magazines while picking at her sandwich so it would last a long time. I read each copy from cover to cover, week after week between my flute and piano lessons every Saturday. Since I arranged for a two-hour lunch period and because I was a very fast reader, I had no trouble finishing several a week. Occasionally I brought one home, but the lurid covers brought down my father's wrath. He still doesn't appreciate this type of literature, but restricts himself to an occasional headshake. My husband fortunately shares this enthusiasm for s-f. I had saved my copies from '# on, and he had a field day catching up. This left me twiddling my thumbs several times during our dating days, but I think now it was worth every minute. Now we sit and read magazines together and this cozy scene is broken only by a chuckle or some other approving or disappointed monosyllable and an occasional "Hey, did you read this one? If you're done, I'll trade." We find ourselves discussing stories we especially enjoyed months later. This has been handicapped somewhat for the last five months since he is working in an isolated spot in Alaska as a communications technician. We expect to be reading If and all our other favorites together again in September. Arthur G. Clarke is one of my two favorite authors, Isaac Asimov being the other. -- Janice K. Rodes Richmond Heights, Mo. Become a Scientology "Clear" A Scientology "Clear" has: If you would like to have all these qualities then look into Scientology. Inquire today: Scientology, United States # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. The most important new magazine about the most important age in history since The Stone Age ! XI An authoritative, beautifully illustrated magazine that tells, in word and picture, the dramatic story of the conquest of space! Here are vivid, factual accounts of the men and the machines blasting off into a new era for all mankind. Here is the only magazine yet designed to show you what's what and who's who in the race for space power! That answers the question: Is Russia really ahead of the United States? That introduces you to the men and the machines behind the scenes. That keeps you informed, editorially and pictorially, as science probes into worlds beyond. torial History of United States Air Power , Vanguard , Count Down for Tomorrow and other important works. The art director is Mel Hunter, whose paintings and drawings have established him as one of America's most accomplished artists in the fields of astronautics and astronomy. The staff and writers of and photography. It is excitingly beyond anything of its kind ever published. The first issue will be out August #th. Ask for it -- Continued from Back Cover And if you DO go back, will you ever be able to return to your #st century paradise? In short, can you actually live your life twice? Bead this Whole Amazing Story -- Yours for Only #c Science-fiction fans, get set for a real challenge to Heinlein -- one of today's topnotch science-fiction writers -- is a thriller crammed with new turns and new twists. You'll find your everyday thought processes turned topsy-turvy by it. It's selling everywhere right now for #. But as a new member of the ScienceFiction Book Club, you cab get this new book for only one dime ! Read, below why the Club is making this amazing offer -- then rush in the coupon (with only #?) at once! Why We Make This Amazingly Generous Offer W HY DO we offer you this brand-new, fulllength Science-Fiction thriller for only #?? Simply to introduce you to the Science-Fiction Book Club, a wonderful idea in bringing you the best of the new science-fiction books -- at a mere fraction of their usual cost! Each month the Club brings you only the finest, brand-new, full-length books for charge) -- even though they cost #, # and up in the original publisher's editions. # Each month's selection is described in advance in the Club's free bulletin. You take only those books you want -- as few as # a year. No money in advance. No membership fees. You may cancel membership at any time. Recent selections have included such books as The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, The Isotope Man and Earthman, Come Home. The Club also brings members the best in factual scientific books, such as Satellite!, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects and Exploring Mars, Mail Coupon with only #  Simply mail the coupon with only a dime. Your copy of the door into summer will be sent at once, together with the current selection, for which you will be billed only SI, plus a few cents shipping. If not delighted return both books, owe nothing, and membership will be Dept. #-FM-O, Garden City, N. Y. selection of the Club for which you may bill me only # plus a few cents shipping, and enroll me as a member. Every month send the Club's free bulletin, describing coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping. I need take only # books during each year I am a member and may resign at any time thereafter. turn them in # days, pay nothing, and membership will be cancelled. (Please Print Clearly) City . State (Offer good only in U. S. A. and Canada.) S# Imagine Yourclfttmglraled Into The #rCenfury place. It's the year #. You're a dollar invention. You're sitting pretty -- until your passionate friend, Belle Darkin, upsets your apple cart. First she steals your invention. Then she slips you a hypo; puts you in a new kind of deep freeze called "The Long Sleep." the year #-and you're still only # years old! But time has passed while you were in "cold storage," and Belle, your e#-sweetheart, is now # years older than you are ! Well, you've lost interest in her anyway, after the way she twotimed and future-timed you. The Fascinating World of # A,D . But there are other attractions in that world of # : its women in "sticktite" clothes they just throw away after wearing... its honeymoon trips to the moon... its remarkable new conveniences...its brand new words of love and ways to live. No more menial labor. Robots take care of all that. Soon you're enjoying life as never before! You're glad to be out of that miserably backward world of the #th century. But unfortunately you must get back to the year #, to take care of one last urgent mission. You only hope that you can come back to the #st century by taking "The Long Sleep" again. The big question is: Can it be done? Yours This Spine-Tingling Science-Fiction Novel by Robert Heinlein -- Continued on other side  Rat in the Skull OF IF novelettes from the first six years of IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction readers all over America, this is a volume of exceptional interest -- distinguished examples of fine science fiction writing by such authors as Charles Beaumont, James Blish, Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce Walton and Robert F. Young in an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme and pace. And if you missed The First World of IF, containing # really outstanding short stories from the first five years of IF, there are still a few copies available... Just send # a copy for either the "First World" or the "Second World" to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and your copy will be mailed at once All Stories New and Complete by Cordwainer Smith Illustrations by Emsh and Frees # I # I #I I #I I #  #  # I IF is published bi-monthly by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Vol. #. No. I. Copyright # by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication # Lora Street, Buffalo, N.Y. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, N.Y. Subscription # for # Issues In U.S. and Possessions Canada # for # issues elsewhere #. All stories are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S.A, Next ( February ) issue on sale December #th the sort of person one would in spite of having stepped out of expect him to be in the light of his chosen field, what happened. Indeed, it is safe to At the age of thirty-four, he had say that until the summer of # to his credit a college textbook on he was more "normal", better adadvanced calculus, an introductory justed, than the average college physics, and seventy-two papers professor. And we have every reathat had appeared in various journals, copies of which wen in neat order in a special section of the bookcase in his office at the university, and duplicate copies of which were in equally neat order in his office at home. None of these were in the field of psychology, the field in which he was shortly to become famous -- or infamous. Bui anyone who studies the published writings of Dr. MacNare must inevitably conclude that he was a competent, responsible scientist, and a firm believer in institutional research, research by teams, rather than in private research and go-italone secrecy, the course he eventually followed. In fact, there is every reason to believe he followed this course with the greatest of reluctance, aware of its pitfalls, and that he took every precaution that was humanly possible. Certainly, on that day in late August, #fr, at the little cabin on the Russian River, a hundred miles upstate from the university, when !)r. MacNare completed his paper on An Experimental Approach to the Psychological Phenomena of Verification, he had no slightest thought of "going it alone.' # It was mid-afternoon. His wife. Alice, was dozing on the small dock that stretched out into the water, her slim figure tanned a smooth brown that was just a shade lighter than her hair. Their cight-ycar-old son, Paul, was fifty yards upstream playing with some other boys, their shouts the only sound except for the whisper of rushing water and the sound of wind in the trees. Some people will be shocked by this story. Others will be deeply moved. Everyone who reads it will be talking about it. Read the first four pages: then put it down if you can. Dr. MacNare, in swim trunks, his lean muscular body hardly tanned at all, emerged from the cabin and came out on the dock. "Wake up, Alice, ,, he said, nudging her with his foot. "You have a husband again." "Well, it's about time," Alice said, turning over on her back and looking up at him, smiling in answer to his happy grin. He stepped over her and went out on the diving board, leaping up and down on it, higher and higher each time, in smooth coordination, then went into a one and a half gainer, his body cutting into the water with a minimum of splash. His head broke the surface. He looked up at his wife, and laughed in the sheer pleasure of being alive. A few swift strokes brought him to the foot of the ladder. He climbed, dripping water, to the dock, then sat down by his wife. "Yep, it's done," he said. "How many days of our vacation left? Two? That's time enough for me to get a little tan. Might as well make the most of it. I'm going to be working harder this winter than I ever did in my life." "But I thought you said your paper was done!" "It is. But that's only the beginning. Instead of sending it in for publication, I'm going to submit it to the directors, with a request for facilities and personnel to conduct a line of research based on pages twenty-seven to thirty-two of the paper." "And you think they'll grant your request?" "There's no question about it," Dr. MacNarc said, smiling confidently. "It's the most important line of research ever opened up to experimental psychology. They'll be forced to grant my request. It will put the university on the map!" Alice laughed, and sat up and kissed him. "Maybe they won't agree with you," she said. "Is it all right for me to read the paper?" "I wish you would," he said. "Where's that son of mine? Upstream?" He leaped to his feet and went to the diving board again. "Better walk along the bank, Joe. The stream is too swift." "Nonsense!" Dr. MacNare said. He made a long shallow dive, then began swimming in a powerful crawl that took him upstream slowly. Alice stood on the dock watching him until he was lost to sight around the bend, then went into the cabin. The completed paper lay beside the typewriter. not so sure the board will approve of this," she said. Dr. MacNare, somewhat exasperated, said, "What makes you think that? Pavlov experimented with his dog, physiological experiments with rats, rabbits, and other animals go on all the time. There's nothing cruel about it." "Just the same... Alice said. So Dr. MacNare cautiously resisted the impulse to talk about his paper with has fellow professors and his most intelligent students. Instead, he merely turned his paper in to the board at the earliest opportunity and kept silent, waiting for their decision. He hadn't long to wait. On the last Friday of September he received a note requesting his presence in the board room at three o'clock on Monday. He rushed home after his last class and told Alice about it. "Let's hope their decision is favorable," she said. "It has to be," Dr. MacNarc answered with conviction. He spent the week-end making plans. "They'll probably assign me a machinist and a couple of electronics experts from the hill," he told Alice. "I can use graduate students for work with the animals. I hope they give me Dr. Munitz from Psych as a consultant, because I like him much better than Vecrhof. By early spring we should have things rolling." Monday at three o'clock on the dot, Dr. MacNare knocked on the door of the board room, and entered. He was not unfamiliar with it, nor with the faces around the massive walnut conference table. Always before he had known what to expect -- a brief commendation for the revisions in his textbook on calculus for its fifth printing, a nice speech from the president about his good work as a prelude to a salary raise -- quiet, expected things. Nothing unanticipated had ever happened here. Now, as he entered, he sensed a difference. All eyes were fixed on him, but not with admiration or friendliness. They were fixed more in the manner of a restaurateur watching the approach of a cockroach along the surface of the counter. Suddenly the room seemed hot and stufFy. The confidence in Dr. MacNarc's expression evaporated. He glanced back toward the door as though wishing to escape. "So it's you!" the president said, setting the lone of what followed. "This is yours?" the president added, picking up the neatly typed manuscript, glancing at it, and dropping it back on the table as though it were something unclean. Dr. MacNare nodded, and cleared his throat nervously to say yes, but didn't get the chance. "We -- all of us -- are amazed and shocked," the president said. "Of course, we understand that psychology is not your field, and you probably were thinking only from the mathematical viewpoint. We arc agreed on that. What you propose, though... He shook his head slowly. "It's not only out of the question, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to request that you forget the whole thing -- put this paper where no one can see it, preferably destroy it. I'm sorry, Dr. MacNare, but the university simply cannot afford to be associated with such a thing even remotely. I'll put it bluntly because I feel strongly about it, as do the other members of the Board. If this paper is published or in any way comes to light  we will be forced to request your resignation from the faculty" "But why?" Dr. MacNare asked in complete bewilderment. "Why?" another board member exploded, slapping the table. "It's the most inhuman thing I ever heard of, strapping a newborn animal onto some kind of frame and tying its legs to control levers, with the intention of never letting it free. The most fiendish and inhuman torture imaginable! If you didn't have such an outstanding record I would be for demanding your resignation at once." "But that's not true!" Dr. MacNare said. "It's not torture! Not in any way! Didn't you read the paper? Didn't you understand that -- " "I read it," the man said. "We all read it. Every word." "Then you should have understood -- " Dr. MacNare said. "We read it," the man repeated, "and we discussed some aspects of it with Dr. Veerhof without bringing your paper into it, nor your name." "Oh," Dr. MacNare said. "Veerhof... " "He says experiments, very careful experiments, have already been conducted along the lines of getting an animal to understand a symbol system and it can'l be done. The nerve paths aren't (here. Your line of research, besides being inhumanly cruel, would accomplish nothing." "Oh," Dr. MacNare said, his eyes flashing. "So you know all about the results of an experiment in an untried field without performing the experiments!" "According to Dr. Veerhof that field is not untried but rather well explored," the board member said. "Giving an animal the means to make vocal sounds would not enable it to form a symbol system." "I disagree," Dr. MacNare said, seething. "My studies indicate clearly-" "I think," the president said with a firmness that demanded the floor, "our position has been made very clear, Dr. MacNare. The matter is now closed. Permanently. I hope you will have the good sense, if I may use such a strong term, to forget the whole ihing. For the good of your career and your very nice wife and son. That is all." He held the manuscript toward Dr. MacNare. "I can't understand their attitude!" Dr. MacNare said to Alice when he told her about it. "Possibly I can understand it a little better than you, Joe," Alice said thoughtfully. "I had a little of what I think they feel, when I first read your paper. A -- a prejudice against the idea of it, is as closely as I can describe it. Like it would be violating the order of nature, giving an animal a soul, in a way." "Then you feel as they do?" Dr. MacNare said. "I didn't say that, Joe." Alice put her arms around her husband and kissed him fiercely. "Maybe I feel just the opposite, that if there is some way to give an animal a soul, we should do it." Dr. MacNare chuckled. "It wouldn't be quite that cosmic. An animal can't be given something it doesn't have already. All that can be done is to give it the means to fully capitalize on what it has. Animals -- man included -- can only do by observing the results. When you move a finger, what you really do is send a neural impulse out from the brain along one particular nerve or one particular set of nerves, but you can never learn that, nor just what it is you do. All that you can know is that when you do a definite something your eyes and sense of touch bring you the information that your finger moved. But if that finger were attached to a voice element that made the sound ah, and you could never sec your finger, all you could ever know is that when you did that particular something you made a certain vocal sound. Changing the resultant effect of mental commands to include ihings normally impossible to you may expand the potential of your mind, but it won't give you a soul if you don't have one to begin with. I ' "You're using Vcerhofs arguments on me," Alice said. "And I think we're arguing from separaLc definitions of a soul. Pin afraid of it, Joe. It would be a tragedy, I think, to give some animal -- a rat, maybe -- the soul of a poet, and then have it discover that it is only a rat." "Oh," Dr. MacNare said. "That kind of soul. No, I'm not that optimistic about the results. I think we'd be lucky to get any results at all, a limited vocabulary that the animal would use meaningfully. But I do think we'd get that." "It would take a lot of time and patience." "And we'd have to keep the whole thing secret from everyone," l)r. MacNare said. "Wc couldn't even let Paul have an inkling of it, because he might say something to one of his playmates, and it would get back to some member of the board. How could we keep it secret from Paul?" "Paul knows he's not allowed in your study," Alice said. "We could keep everything there -- and keep the door locked." "Then it's settled?" "Wasn't it, from the very beginning?" Alice put her arms around her husband and her check against his ear to hide her worried expression. "I love you, Joe. I'll help you in any way I can. And if we haven't enough in the savings account, there's always what Mother left me." "I hope we won't have to use any of it, sweetheart," he said. T he following day Dr. MacNare was an hour and a half late corning home from the campus. He had been, he announced casually, to a pet store. "We'll have to hurry," said Alice. "Paul will be home any minute." She helped him carry the packages from the car to the study. Together they moved things around to make room for the gleaming new cages with their white rats and hamsters and guinea pigs. When it was done they stood arm in arm viewing their new possession. presence of the animals in her husband's study brought the research project into reality. As the days passed that romantic feeling became fact. "We're going to have to do together," Joe MacNare told her at the end of the first week, "what a team of a dozen specialists in separate fields should be doing. Our first job, before we can do anything else, is to study the natural movements of each species and translate them into patterns of robot directives.' # "Robot directives?" "I visualize it this way," Dr. MacNarc said. "The animal will be strapped comfortably in a frame so that its body can't move but its legs can. Its legs will be attached to four separate, free-moving levers which make a different electrical contact for every position. Each electrical contact, or control switch, will cause the robot body to do one specific thing, such as move a leg, utter some particular sound through its voice box, or move just one finger. Can you visualize that, Alice?" Alice nodded. "Okay. Now, one leg has to be used for nothing but voice sounds. That leaves three legs for control of the movements of the robot body. In body movement there will be simultaneous movements and sequences. A simple sequence can be controlled by one leg. All movements of the robot will have to be reduced to not more than three concurrent sequences of movement of the animal's legs. Our problem, then, is to make the unlearned and the most natural movements of the legs of the animal control the robot body's movements in a functional manner." Endless hours were consumed in this initial study and mapping. Alice worked at it while her husband was at the university and Paul was at school. Dr. MacNare rushed home each day to go over what she had done and continue the work himself. He grew more and more grudging of the time his classes took. In December he finally wrote to the three technical journals that had been expecting papers from him for publication during the year that he would be too busy to do them. By January the initial phase of research was well enough along so that Dr. MacNare could begin planning the robot. For this he set up a workshop in the garage. In early February he finished what he called the "test frame." After Paul had gone to bed, Dr. MacNare brought the test frame into the study from the garage. To Alice it looked very much like the insides of a radio. She watched while he placed a husky-looking male white rate in the body harness fastened to the framework of aluminum and tied its legs to small metal rods. Nothing happened except that the rat kept trying to get free, and the small metal rods tied to its feet kept moving in pivot sockets. "Now!" Dr. MacNare said excitedly, flicking a small toggle switch on the side of the assembly. Immediately a succession of vocal sounds erupted from the speaker. They followed one another, making no sensible word. "He's doing that," Dr. MacNare said triumphantly. "If we left him in that, do you think he'd eventually associate his movements with the sounds?" "It's possible. But that would be more on the order of what we do when we drive a car. To some extent a car becomes an extension of the body, but you're always aware that your hands are on the steering wheel, your foot on the gas pedal or brake. You extend your awareness consciously. You interpret a slight tremble in the steering wheel as a shimmy in the front wheels. You're oriented primarily to your body and only secondarily to the car as an extension of you." Alice closed her eyes for a moment. "Mm hm," she said. "And that's the best we could get, using a rat that knows already it's a rat." Alice stared at the struggling rat, her eyes round with comprehension, while the loudspeaker in l he test frame said, "Ag-pr-ds-raf-os-dg..." Dr. MacNare shut oil the sound and began freeing the rat. "By starting with a newborn animal and never letting it know what it is," he said, "we can get a complete exlcnsion of the animal into the machine, in its orientation. So complete that if you took it out of the machine after it grew up, it would have no more idea of what had happened than -- than your brain if it were taken out of your head and put on a table!" "Now I'm getting that feeling again, Joe," Alice said, laughing nervously. "When you said that about my brain I thought, 'Or my soul?'" Dr. MacNare put the rat back in its cage. "There might be a valid analogy there," he said slowly. "If we have a soul that survives after death, what is it like? It probably interprets its surroundings in terms of its former orientation in the body." "That's a little of what I mean," Alice said. "I can't help it, Joe. Sometimes I feel so sorry for whatever baby animal you'll eventually use, that I want to cry. I feel so sorry for it, because we will never dare let it know what it really is!" "That's true. Which brings up another line of research that should be the work of one expert on the team I ought to have for this. As it is, I'll turn it over to you to do while I build the robot." "What's that?" "Opiates," Dr. MacNare said. "What we want is an opiate that can be used on a small animal every few days, so that we can take it out of the robot, bathe it, and put it back again without its knowing about it. There probably is no ideal drug. We'll have to test the more promising ones." Later that night, as they lay beside each other in the silence and darkness of their bedroom, Dr. MacNare sighed deeply. "So many problems," he said. "I sometimes wonder if we can solve them all. See them all..." To Alice MacNare, later, that night in early February marked the end of the first phase of research -- the point where two alternative futures hung in the balance, and either could have been taken. That night she might have said, there in the darkness, "Let's drop it," and her husband might have agreed. She thought of saying it. She even opened her mouth to say it. But her husband's soft snores suddenly broke the silence of the night. The moment of return had passed. Alice it was a period of rushing from kitchen to hypodermic injections to vacuum cleaner to hypodermic injections, her key to the study in constant use. Paul, nine years old now, took to spring baseball and developed an indifference to TV, much to the relief of both his parents. In the garage workshop Dr. MacNare made parts for the robot, and kept a couple of innocent projects going which he worked on when his son Paul evinced his periodic curiosity about what was going on. Spring became summer. For six weeks Paul went to Scout camp, and during those six weeks Dr. MacNarc reorganized the entire research project in line with what it would be in the fall. A decision was made to use only white rats from then on. The rest of the animals were sold to a pet store, and a system for automatically I ceding, watering, and keeping the cages clean was installed in preparation for a much needed two weeks' vacation at the cabin. When the time came to go, they had to tear themselves away from their work by an effort of will -- aided by the realization that they could get little done with Paul underfoot. September came all too soon. By mid-September both Dr. MacNarc and his wife felt they were on the home stretch. Parts of the robot were going together and being tested, the female white rats were being bred at the rate of one a week so that when the robot was completed there would be a supply of newborn rats on hand. October came, and passed. The robot was finished, but there were minor defects in it that had to be corrected. "Adam," Dr. MacNare said one day, "will have to wear this robot all his life. It has to be just right." And with each litter of baby rats Alice said, "I wonder which one is Adam." They talked of Adam often now, speculating on what he would be like. It was almost, they decided, as though Adam were their second child. And finally, on November #, #, everything was ready. Adam would be born in the next litter, due in about three days. The amount of work that had gone into preparation for the great moment is beyond conception. Four file cabinet drawers were filled with noies. By actual measurement seventeen feet of shelf space was filled with hooks on the thousand and one subjects that had to be mastered. The robot itself was a masterpiece of engineering that would have done credit to the research staff of a watch manufacturer. The vernier adjustments alone, used to compensate daily for the rat's growth, had eight patentable features. And the skills that had had to be acquired! Alice, who had never before had a hypodermic syringe in her hand, could now inject a prerisely measured amount of opiate into the tiny body of a baby rat with calm confidence in her skill. After such monumental preparation, the great moment itself was anticlimactic. While the mother of Adam was still preoccupied with the birth of the remainder of the brood, Adam, a pink helpless thing about the size of a little finger, was picked up and transferee! to the head of the robot. His tiny feet, which he would never know existed, were fastened with gentle care to the four control rods. His tiny head was thrust into a helmet attached to a pivotmounted optical system, ending in the lenses that served the robot for eyes. And finally a transparent plastic cover contoured to the shape of the back of a human head was fastened in place. Through it his feeble attempts at movement could be easily observed. Thus, Dr. MacNare' s Adam was born into his body, and the time of the completion of his birth was onethirty in the afternoon on the fifth day of November, #. in the ensuing half hour all the cages of rats were removed from the study, the floor was scrubbed, and deodorizers were sprayed, so that no slightest trace of Adam's lowly origins remained. When this was done, Dr. MacNare loaded the cages into his car and drove them to a pet store that had agreed to take them. When he returned, he joined Alice in the study, and at five minutes before four, with Alice hovering anxiously beside him, he opened the cover on Adam's chest and turned on the master switch that gave Adam complete dominion over his robot body. Adam was beautiful -- and monstrous. Made of metal from the neck down, but shaped to be covered by padding and skin in human semblance. From the neck up the job was done. The face was human, masculine, handsome, much like that of a clothing store dummy except for its mobility of expression, and the incongruity of the rest of the body. The voice-control lever and contacts had been designed so that the ability to produce most sounds would have to be discovered by Adam as lie gained control of his natural right front leg. Now the only sounds being uttered were oh, ah, mm, and . in random order. Similarly, the only movements of his arms and legs were feeble, like those of a human baby. The tremendous strength in his limbs was something he would be unable to tap fully until he had learned conscious coordination. After a while Adam became silent and without movement. Alarmed, Dr. MacNare opened the instrument panel in the abdomen. The instruments showed that Adam's pulse and respiration were normal. He had fallen asleep. Dr. MacNare and his wife stole softly from the study, and locked the door. care and feeding of Adam all that remained of the giant research project, the pace of the days shifted ) I to that of, long-range patience. "It's just like having a baby," Alice said. "You know something?" Dr. MacNarc asked. "I've had to resist passing ouL cigars. I hate to say it, but I'm prouder of Adam than I was of Paul when he was born." "So am I, Joe," Alice said quietly. "But I'm getting a little of that scared feeling back again." "In what wav?" "He watches me. Oh, I know it's natural for him to, but I do wish you had made the eyes so that his own didn't show as little dark dots in the center of the iris." "It couldn't be helped," Dr. MacNare said. "He has to be able to see, and I had to set up the system of mirrors so that the two axes of vision would be three inches apart as they are in the average human pair of eyes." "Oh, I know," said Alice. "Probably it's just something I've seized on. But when he watches me, I find myself holding my breath in fear that he can read in my expression the secret we have to keep from him, that he is a rat." "Forget it, Alice. That's outside his experience and beyond his comprehension." "I know," Alice sighed. "When he begins to show some of the signs of intelligence a baby has, I'll be able to think of him as a human being." "Sure, darling," Dr. MacNare said. "Do you think he ever will?" "That," Dr. MacNarc said, "is the big question. I think he will. I think so now even more than I did at the start. Aside from eating and sleeping, he has no avenue of expression except his robot body, and no source of reward except that of making sense -- human sense " The days passed, and became weeks, then months. During the daytime when her husband was at the university and her son was at school, Alice would spend most of her hours with Adam, forcing herself to smile at him and talk to him as she had to Paul when he was a baby. But when she watched his motions through the transparent back of his head, his leg motions remained those of attempted walking and attempted running. Then, one day when Adam was four months old, things changed -- as abruptly as the turning on of a light. The unrewarding walking and running movements of Adam's little legs ceased. It was evening, and both Dr. MacNare and his wife were there. For a fc W seconds there was no sound or movement from the robot body. Then, quite deliberately, Adam said, "Ah." "Ah," Dr. MacNare echoed. "Mm. Mm, ah. Ma-nia." "Mm," Adam said. The silence in the study became absolute. The seconds stretched into eternities. Then -- "Mm, ah," Adam said. "Mm, ah." Alice began crying with happiness. "Mm, ah," Adam said. "Mm, ah. Ma-ma. Mamamamama." Then, as though the effort had been too much lor Adam, he went to sleep. Having achieved the impossible, Adam seemed to lose interest in it. For two days he uttered nothing more than an occasional involuntary syllabic. "I would call that as much of an achievement as speech itself," Dr. MacNarc said to his wife. "His right front leg has asserted its independence. If each of his other three legs can do as well, he can control the robot body." It became obvious that Adam was trying. Though the movements of his body remained non-purposive, the pauses in those movements became more and more pregnant with what was obviously mental effort. During that period there was of course room for argument and speculation about it, and even a certain amount of humor. Had Adam's right front leg, at the moment of achieving meaningful speech, suffered a nervous breakdown? What would a psychiatrist have to say about a white rat that had a nervous breakdown in its right front leg? 'The worst part about it," Dr. MacNarc said to his wife, "is that if he fails to make it he'll have to be killed. He can't have permanent frustration forced onto him, and, by now, returning him to his natural state would be even worse." "And be has such a stout little heart," Alice said. "Sometimes when he looks at me I'm sure he knows what is happening and he wants me to know he's trying." When they went to bed that night they were more discouraged than they had ever been. Eventually the slept. When the alarm went off, Alice slipped into her robe and went into the study first, as she always did. A moment later she was back in the bedroom, shaking her husband's shoulder. "Joe!" she whispered. "Wake up! Come into the study!" He leaped out of bccl and rushed past her. She caught up with him and pulled him to a slop. "Take it easy, Joe," she said. "Don't alarm him." "Oh." Dr. MacNare relaxed. "I thought something had happened." "Something has!" They stopped in the doorway of the study. Dr. MacNare sucked in his breath sharply, but remained silent. Adam seemed oblivious of their presence. He was too interested in something else. He was interested in his hands. He was holding his hands up where he could see them, and he was moving them independently, clenching and unclenching the metal fingers with slow deliberation. Suddenly the movement slopped. He had become aware of them. Then, impossibly, unbelievably, he spoke. "Ma ma," Adam said. Then, "Pa  pa. "Adam!" Alice sobbed, rushing across the study to him and sinking down beside him. Her arms went around his metal body. "Oh, Adam," she cried happily. n of that beginning is not known. Alice MacNare believes it was early in May, but more probably it was in April. There was no time to keep notes. In fact, there was no longer a research project nor any thought of one. Instead, there was Adam, the person. At least, to Alice he became that, completely. Perhaps, also, to Dr. MacNare. Dr. MacNare quite often stood behind Adam where he could watch the rat body through the transpar- ent skull case while Alice engaged Adam's attention. Alice did the same, at times, but she finally refused to do so any more. The sight of Adam the rat, his body held in a net attached to the frame, his head covered by the helmet, his four legs moving independently of one another with little semblance of walking or running motion nor even of coordination, but with swift darting motions and pauses pregnant with meaning, brought back to Alice the old feeling of vague fear, and a tremendous surge of pity for Adam that made her want to cry. Slowly, subtly, Adam's rat body became to Alice a pure brain, and his legs four nerve ganglia. A brain covered with short white fur; and when she took him out of his harness under opiate to bathe him, she bathed him as gently and carefully as any brain surgeon sponging a cortical surface. Once started, Adam's mental development progressed rapidly. Dr. MacNare began making notes again on June #, #, just ten days before the end, and it is to these notes that we go for an insight into Adam's mind. On June #th Dr. MacNare wrote, "I am of the opinion that Adam will never develop beyond the level of a moron, in the scale of human standards. He would probably make a good factory worker or chauffeur, in a year or two. But lie is consciously aware of himself as Adam, he thinks in words and simple sentences with an accurate understanding of their meaning, and he is able to do new things from spoken instructions. There is no question, therefore, but that he has an integrated mind, entirely human in every respect." On June # th Dr. MacNare wrote, "Something is developing which I hesitate to put down on paper -- for a variety of reasons. Creating Adam was a scientific experiment , nothing more than that. Both the premises on which the project was based have been proven: that the principle of verification is the main factor in learned response, and that, given the proper conditions, some animals are capable of abstract symbol systems and therefore of thinking with words to form meaningful concepts. "Nothing more was contemplated in the experiment. I stress this because -- Adam is becoming deeply religious -- and before any mistaken conclusions are drawn from this I will explain what caused this development. It was an oversight of a type that is bound to happen in any complex project. "Alice's experimental data on the effects of opiates, and especially the data on increasing the dose to offset growing tolerance, were based on observation of the subject alone, without any knowledge of the mental aspects of increased tolerance -- which would of course be impossible except with human subjects. "Unknown to us, Adam has been becoming partly conscious during his bath. Just conscious enough to be vaguely aware of certain sensations, and to remember them afterward. Few, if any, of these half remembered sensations are such that he can fit them into the pattern of his waking reality. The one that has had the most pronounced influence on him is, to quote him, Teel clean inside. Feel good Quite obviously this sensation is caused by his bath. "With it is a distinct feeling of disembodiment, of being -- ancl these arc his own words -- 'outside my body'! This, of course, is an accurate realization, because to him the robot is his body, and he knows nothing of the existence of his actual, living, rat body. "In addition to these two effects, there is a third one. A feeling of walking, and sometimes of floating, of stumbling over things he can't see, of talking, of being talked to by disembodied voices. "The explanation of this is also obvious. When he is being bathed his legs are moved about. Any movement of a leg is to him cither a spoken sound or a movement of some part of his robot body. Any movement of his right front leg, for example, tells his mind that he is making a sound. But, since his leg  not connected to the sound system of his robot body, his ears bring no physical verification of the sound. The mental anticipation of that verification then becomes a disembodied voice to him. "The end result of all this is that Adam is becoming convinced that there is a hidden side of things (which there is), and that it is supernatural (which it is, in the framework of his orientation) . "What wc arc going lo have to do is make sure he is completely unconscious before taking him out and bathing him. His mental health is far more important than exploring the interesting avenues opened up by this unforeseen development. # I do intend, however, to make one simple test, while he is fully awake, before dropping this avenue of investigation." Dr. MacNarc docs not state in his notes what this test was lo be: but his wife says that it probably refers to the time when he pinched Adam's tail and Adam complained of a sudden, violent headache. This transference is the one well known to doctors. Unoriented pain in the human body manifests itself as a "headache," when the source of the pain is actually the stomach, or the liver, or any one of a hundred spots in the body. The last notes made by Dr. MacNare were those of June I #, #. and are unimportant except for the date. Wc return, therefore, to actual events, so far as they can be reconstructed. We have said little or nothing about Dr. MacNare's life at the university after embarking on the research project, nor of the social life of the MacNares. As conspirators, they had kept up their social life to avoid any possibility of the board getting curious about any radical change in Dr. MacNare's habits; but as time went on both Dr. MacNarr and his wife became so engrossed in their project that only with the greatest reluctance did they go anywhere. The annual faculty party at Professor Long's on June #th was something they could not evade. Not to have gone would have been almost tantamount to a resignation from the university. "Besides," Alice had said when they discussed the matter in May, "isn't it about time to do a little hinting that you have something up your sleeve?" "I don't know, Alice," Dr. MacNnre had said. Then a smile quirked his lips and he said, "I wouldn't mind telling off Veerhof. I've never gotten over his deciding something was impossible without enough data to pass judgment." He frowned. "We are going to have to let the world know about Adam pretty soon, aren't wc? That's something I haven't thought about. But not yet. Next fail will be time enough." WpON'T forget, Joe," Alice said party at Professor Long's." "How can I forget with you reminding me?" Dr. MacNare said, winking at his son. "And you, Paul," Alice said. "I don't want you leaving the house. You understand? You can watch TV, and I want you in bed by nine thirty." "Ah, Mom!" Paul protested. "Nine thirty?" He suppressed a grin. He had a party of his own planned. "And you can wipe the dishes for me. We have to be at Professor Long's by eight o'clock." "i'll help you," Dr. MacNare said. "No, you have to get ready. Besides, don't you have to look up something for one of the faculty?" "I'd forgotten," said Dr. MacNare. "Thanks for reminding me." After dinner he went directly to the study. Adam was sitting on the floor playing with his wooden blocks. They were alphabet blocks, but he didn't know that yet. The summer project was going to be teaching him the alphabet. Already, though, he preferred placing them in straight rows rather than stacking them up. At seven o'clock Alice rapped on the door to the study. "Time to get dressed, Joe," she called. "You'll be all right while we're gone, Adam?" Dr. MacNare said. "I be all right, papa," Adam said. "I sleep." "That's good," Dr. MacNare said. "I'll turn out the light." At the door he waited until Adam had sat down in the chair he always slept on, and settled himself. Then he pushed the switch just to the right of the door and went out. "Hurry, dear," Alice called. "I'm hurrying," Dr. MacNare protested -- and, for the first time, lie forgot to lock the study door. The bathroom was next to the study, the wall between them soundproofed by a ceiling-high bookshelf in the study filled with thousands of books. On the other side was the master bedroom, with a closet with sliding panels that opened both on the bedroom and the bathroom. These sliding panels were partly open, so that Dr. MacNare and Alice could talk. "Did you lock the study door?" "Of course," Dr. MacNare said. "But I'll check before we leave." "How is Adam taking being alone tonight?" Alice called. "Okay," Dr. MacNare said. "Damn!" "What's the 'matter, Joe?" "I forgot to get razor blades." The conversation died down. Alice MacNare finished dressing. "Aren't you ready yet, Joe?" she called. "It's almost a quarter to eight." "Be right with you. I nicked myself shaving with an old blade. The bleeding's almost stopped now." Alice went into the living room. Paul had turned on the TV and was sprawled out on the rug. "You be sure and stay home, and be in bed by nine thirty, Paul," she said. "Promise?" "Ah, Mom," he protested. "Well, all right." Dr. MacNare came into the room, still working on his tie. A moment later they went out the front door. They had been gone less than five minutes when there was a knock. Paul jumped to his feet and opened the door. "Hi, Fred, Tony, Bill," he said. The boys, all nine years old, sprawled on the rug and watched television. It became eight o'clock, eight thirty, and finally five minutes to nine. The commercial began. "Where's your bathroom?" Tony asked. "In there," Paul said, pointing vaguely at the doorway to the hall. Tony got up off the floor and went into the hall. He saw several doors, all looking much alike. He picked one and opened it. It was dark inside. He felt along the wall for a light switch and found it. Light flooded the room. He stared at what he saw for perhaps ten seconds, then turned and ran down the hall to the living room. "Say, Paul!" lie said. "You never said anything about having a real honest to gosh robot!" "What arc you talking about?" Paul said. "In that room in there!" Tony said. "Come on. I'll show you!" The TV program forgotten, Paul, Fred, and Bill crowded after him. A moment later they stood in the doorway to the study, staring in awe at the strange figure of metal that sat motionless in a chair across the room. Adam, it seems certain, was asleep, and had not been wakened by this intrusion nor the turning on of the light. "Gee!" Paul said. "It belongs to Dad. We'd better get out of here." "Naw," Tony said with a feeling of proprietorship at having been the original discoverer. "Let's take a look. He'll never know about it." They crossed the room slowly, until they were close up to the robot figure, marveling at it, moving around it. "Say!" Bill whispered, pointing. ) # "What's that in there? It looks like a white rat with its head stuck into that kind of helmet thing." They stared at it a moment. "Maybe it's dead. Let's see." "How you going to find out?" "See those hinges on the cover?" Tony said importantly. "Watch." With cautious skill he opened the transparent back half of the dome, and reached in, wrapping his fingers around the white rat. He was unable to get it loose, but he succeeded in pulling its head free of the helmet. At the same time Adam awoke. "Ouch!" Tony cried, jerking his hand away. "He bit me!" "He's alive all right," Bill said. "Look at him glare!" He prodded the body of the rat and pulled his hand away quickly as the rat lunged. "Gee, look at its eyes," Paul said nervously. "They're getting bloodshot." "Dirty old rat!" Tony said vindictively, jabbing at the rat with his finger and evading the snapping teeth. "Get its head back in there!" Paul said desperately. "I don't want papa to find out we were in here!" He reached in, driven by desperation, pressing the rat's head between his fingers and forcing it back into the tight fitting helmet. Immediately screaming sounds erupted from the lips of the robot. (It was determined by later examination that only when the rat's body was completely where it should be were the circuits operable.) "Let's get out of here!" Tony shouted, and dived for the door, thereby saving his life. "Yeah! Let's get out of here!" Fred shouted as the robot figure rose to its feet. Terror enabled him to escape. Bill and Paul delayed an instant too long. Metal fingers seized them. Bill's arm snapped halfway between shoulder and elbow. He screamed with pain and struggled to free himself. Paul was unable to scream. Metal fingers gripped his shoulder, with a metal thumb thrust deeply against his larynx, paralyzing his vocal cords. Fred and Tony had run into the front room. There they waited, ready to start running again. They could hear Bill's screams. They could hear a male voice jabbering nonsense, and finally repeating over and over again, "Oh my, oil my, oh my," in a tone all the more horrible because it portrayed no emotion whatever. Then there was silence. The silence lasted several minutes. Then Bill began to sniffle, rubbing his knuckles in his eyes. "I wanta go home," he whimpered. "Me too." They took each other's hand and tiptoed to the front door, watching the open doorway to the hall. When they reached the front door Tony opened it, and when it was open they ran, not stopping to close the door behind them. tell. It is known that Tony and Bill arrived at their respective homes, saying nothing of what had happened. Only later did they come forward and admit their share in ihc night's events. Joe and Alice MacNare arrived home from the party at Professor Long's at twelve thirty, finding the front door wide open, the lights on in the living room, and the television on. Sensing that something was wrong, Alice hurried to her son's room and discovered he wasn't (here. While she was doing that, Joe shut the front door and turned off the television. Alice returned to the living room, eyes round with alarm, and said, "'Paul's not in his room!" "Adam!" Joe croaked, and rushed into the hallway, with Alice following more slowly. She reached the open door of the study in time to see the robot figure pounce on Joe and fasten its metal fingers about his throat, crushing vertebrae and flesh alike. Oblivious to her own danger, she rushed to rescue her already dead husband, but the metal fingers were inflexible. Belatedly she abandoned the attempt and ran into the hallway to the phone. When the police arrived, they found her slumped against the wall in the hallway. She pointed toward the open doorway of the study, without speaking. The police rushed into the study. At once there came the sounds of shots. Dozens of them, it seemed. Later both policemen admitted that they lost their heads and fired until their guns were empty. But it was not yet the end of Adam. It would perhaps be impossible to conceive the full horror of his last hours, but we can at least make a guess. Asleep when the boys entered the study, he awakened to a world he had never before perceived except very vaguely and under the soporific veil of opiate. But it was a world vastly different even than that. There is no way of knowing what he saw -- probably blurred ghostly figures, monstrous beyond the ability of his mind to grasp, for his eyes were adjusted only to the series of prisms and lenses that enabled him to see and coordinate the images brought to him through the eyes of the robot. He saw these impossible figures, he felt pain and torture that were not of the flesh as he knew it, but of the spirit; agony beyond agony administered by what he could only believe were fiends from some nether hell. And then, abruptly, as ten-ycarold Paul shoved his head back into the helmet, the world he had come to believe was reality returned. It was as though he had returned to the body from some awful pit of hell, with the soul sickness still with him. Before him he saw four humanlike figures of reality, but beings unlike the only two he had ever seen. Smaller, seeming to be a part of the unbelievable nightmare he had been in. Two of them fled, two were within his grasp. Perhaps he didn't know what he was doing when he killed Paul and Bill. It's doubtful if he had the ability to think at all then, only to tremble and struggle in his pitiful little rat body, with the automatic mechanisms of the robot acting from those frantic motions. But it is known that there were three hours between the deaths of the two boys and the entry of Dr. MacNare at twelve thirty, and during those three hours he would have had a chance to recover, and to think, and to partially rationalize the nightmare he had experienced in realms outside what to him was the world of reality. Adam must certainly have been calm enough, rational enough, to recognize Dr. MacNare when he entered the study at twelve thirty. Then why did Adam deliberately kill Joe by breaking his neck? Was it because, in that three hours, he had put together the evidence of his senses and come to the realization that he was not a man but a rat? Its not likely. It is much more likely that Adam came to some aberrated conclusion dictated by the superstitious feelings that had grown so strongly into his strange and unique existence, that dictated he must kill Joseph. For it would have been impossible for him to have realized that he was only a rat. You see, Joseph MacNare had taken great care that Adam never, in all his life, should see another rat. There remains only the end of Adam to relate. Physically it can be only anticlimactic. With his metal body out of commission from a dozen or so shots, two of which destroyed the robot extensions of his eyes, he remained helpless until the coroner carefully removed him. To the coroner he was just a white rat, and a strangely helpless one, unable to walk or stand as rats are supposed to. Also a strangely vicious one, with red little beads of eyes and lips drawn back from sharp teeth the same as some rabid wild animal. The coroner had no way of knowing that somewhere in that small, menacing form, there was a noble but lost mentality that knew itself as Adam, and held thoughts of a strange and wonderful realm of peace and splendor beyond the grasp of the normal physical senses. The coroner could not know that the erratic motions of that small left front foot, if connected to the proper mechanisms, would have been audible as, perhaps, a prayer, a desperate plea to whatever lay in the Great Beyond to come down and rescue its humble creature. "Vicious little bastard," the coroner said nervously to the homicide men gathered around Dr. MacNare's desk. "Let me take care of it' said one of the detectives. "No," the coroner answered. "I'll do it." Quickly, so as not to be bitten, he picked Adam up by the tip of the tail and slammed him forcefully against the top of the desk. couple of city kids on their first country outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect -- the first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp and weft of your A new author , and a decidedly unusual idea of the summer camp of the future: hard labor, insults, and hog kidneys! clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows, under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your belly-button. It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet. We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper. They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said "Looky there!" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they wore -- "Just like convicts," she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency brake and wheeled around at us then. "You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!" All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years younger already. The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the gate -- stark, black lettering on a light gray background -- read : Silence! -- No admission without authority -- No smoking ! # acres of swamp -- Our own rock quarry -- Jute Mill -- Steam laundry Harshest dietary laws in the Catskills A small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky, wellmuscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose. "Read and sign, shnook!" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate. The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away. Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garmcnts we had seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear. "Strip and pack your clothes hero, shnooks," said the woman with the empty suitcase. We did, (hough it was pretty awkward... standing there in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea. The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog kidneys. "What the hell was that?" I protested. "Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? just let us do the thinkin # around here. Git outa line just once an # you #I see what wc can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys." I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was. how I wafited a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping as I had in forty years. The ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small door at the side of the gate, and at last wc found ourselves within the ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and giggled. Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around in a circle. Their gray coveralls were.dark and heavy with the rain and clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These proved in inch-high letters which ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough the man grinned at us. "You'll be sah-reecee," he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing in the center of the cheerless little circle. "Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!" barked the guard. The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed. We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, onestory building. A sign on the door said, simply, " Admissions . Knock and Remove Hat. # The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to remove ; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our faces annoyingly. from my eyes, I was able to see the form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of gauntness that should be covered by a sheet -- tenderly, reverently and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the image. The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark, overhanging cliffs -- the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra -- a wasting, darkening malnutritional discase which no man had suffered for three hundred years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered such a specimen. "I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to," he said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl -- something not yet language, not quite human. Instead Ills voice was clipped, precise, clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp, immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man. "What did you do on the Outside, shnook?" he snapped at me. "Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of work a month," I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of humility. "Hah! Another low-hour man. T don't sec how the hell you could afford to come here. Well, anyway -- we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this -- ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't forget that!" Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons behind me had fetched me ;i solid clout on the side of the head with her sap. "Mark 'em and put 'em to work," he barked at the guards. Two uniformed men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted my eyes and tried to look blank. "This is indelible," one of them explained. "We have the chemical to take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so." When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. "There is a choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the stump-removal detail, the manure pile..." "How about the steam laundry?" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building. Splukk ! went the guard's kidneysock as it landed on the right hinge of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me. "I said there is a choice -- not you have a choice, shnook. Besides, the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here." "Who is in charge here, then?" I asked, strangely emboldened by the clout on the side of the jaw. Splukk! "That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't gonna sue nobody. You signed a release -- remember?" I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then, behind my hack, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. "Stop that! Oh stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about -- " "Take it easy lady," said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. "I won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable." I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember with terrible clarity that I felt nothing. "So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?" said the man behind the desk -- "the captain," we were instructed to call him. Another gust of wet wind joined his commems. "Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain. I " He fixed rnc then with those deep-set, glowworm eyes, coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try c follow. I knew the rules : there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours per week. Fifteen minutes each. The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the edge of the desk with his kidney-sock. "You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?" asked the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause. My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect. soon after that, that my sense of time went gently haywire. I was conducted to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the larger trees. A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant that his voice did not command the entire scene. "Hut-ho! Iiut-ho ! wretched, gray-clad figures, whose number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at their endless work in apparent unawarencss of his cadenccd chant. I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least, coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed, was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards distant. This we cement hags with the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile. Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower seams. This n leant scraping up the stuff with paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether redundant to explain this rule. I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper. My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. Wc had dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being in or with something. We had just dumplings -- cold and not quite cooked through. Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves, perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously. "They'll bind ya," he said with the finality of special and personal knowledge. "Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a -- # ' I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject. If I had hoped for respite after "supper," it was at that time that I learned not to hope. Back to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" we went, and under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one, slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time sof tened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number # at work on a monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an undifferentiated man. I experienced change. I knew now that my identity, rny ego, was an infinitesimal diing which rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms, more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones, as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came down and the manure bags broke and wc scrabbled with our hands to refill new ones. The raucous alarm sounded again, and a voice which might have been that of a hospital nurse or of an outraged parrot announced that it was time for "Beddy-by." And in a continuous, unbroken motion we slogged into another longbuilding, discarded our coveralls, waded through a shallow tank of cloudy disinfectant solution and were finally hosed down by the guards. I remember observing to myself giddily that I now knew how cars must feel in an auto laundry. There were clean towels waiting for us at the far end of the long building, but I must have just blotted the excess water oil' mysell in a perfunctory way, because I still felt wet when I donned the clean coverall that someone handed me. "Beddy-by" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three feet in another long, lowed I inged barracks. I knew that I would find no real release in "Bcddy-by" only another dimension of that abiding stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned, creaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way as l measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment. held in the building housing the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form: One and two ami three and four; One and to do with the virtues of endless toil, the importance of thrift, and the hideous dangers lurking in cigarette smoking and needless borrowing. I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of time, it is not possible that the Ghecr-Up period lasted less than two hours. Then they let us go to the latrine. After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts -- more savory than you might imagine -- we were assigned to our work for the day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that the sun was out and the day promised to he a hot one. The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledgehammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered a sharp sound the smooth handles of the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again. It was that night -- or perhaps the following night -- that Bertha and I had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed : her face glowed with fevcrisli vitality, her hair was stringy and moist, and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within me -- microscopically but unmistakably. She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too had to go in with the rest of the wash. We specula le d on where the socks and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that no animals were in evidence here. Both, wc concluded, must have been shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle, when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of conversational material lor that precious quarter hour. Thereafter, when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the fiction that wc shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge. The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones, swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over us as though selecting one for slaughter. When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold, incisive tone that "there will be no rest periods, no chow, no Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock." He indicated a towering slab of stone. Wc raised our heads only longenough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily. "Why -- this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate," I said to a small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar. Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others, and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six inches wide at the top! "If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any' imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack -- pry!" No one questioned me. When all of the tools were in position I gave the count: The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered fpr a queasy moment, then fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm that was new. Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his face, and I had grown to fear novelty. "You had a moment," he said, simply and declaratively. "You didn't miss it, did you?" "No," I replied, not fully understanding. "No, I didn't miss it." "You are more fortunate than most," he weni no, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like ?# this, or permit themselves to he confined in the  lulls of old submarines, nnd some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa: they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast -- soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment': only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate Jew, Mr. Dcvotv' Then the film dissolved -- finally Lind completely -- from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole gloriousweeks could have passed so swiftly? "You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer' said the Captain. to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the rrtoment -- this moment -- it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that wc have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever. We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape -- all impressed on .magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure. I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and desserts -- an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than the nearest dumb-waiter door. And wc will both become softer, heavier, a little less responsive. When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off our breath, wc will step into our flying platform and set its automatic controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted lours to the Himalayas now, or to the "lost' # cities of the South American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We will bide our time, much as others do. But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control ; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble and checkers). Wc cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another "Quick! I'm off!' It had to come sooner or later -- the perilous moment when Our satellite crossed the orbit of Theirs... the chart and once again computed the orbit. It was quiet in the satellite, a busy quiet broken by the click of seeking inicroswitches and the gentle purr of smooth-running motors. The deep pulsing throb of the air conditioner had stopped: the satellite was in the Earth's shadow and there was no need for cooling the interior. "Well," said Morgan, "it checks. We'll pass within fifty feet of the other satellite. Too close. Think we ought to move?" Kaufman looked at him and did not speak. McNary glanced up and snorted. Morgan nodded. He said, "That's right. If there's any moving to be done, let them do it." He felt a curious nascent emotion, a blend of anger and exhilaration -- very faint now, just strong enough to be recognizable. The pencil snapped in his fingers, and he stared at it, and smiled. Kaufman said, "Any way we can reline this a little? Fifty feet cuts it kind of close." They were silent, and the murmuring of machinery filled the cramped room. "How's this?" said McNary. "Wait till we see the other satellite, take a couple of readings on it, and compute the orbit again. We'd have about five minutes to make the calculations. Morgan here can do it in less than that. Then we'd know if we're on a collision course." Morgan nodded. "We could do it that way." He studied the chart in front of him. "The only thing, those boys on the other satellite will see what we're doing. They'll know we're afraid of a collision. They'll radio it down to Earth, and -- you know the Russian mind -- we'll lose face." "That so bad?" asked Kaufman. Morgan stared at the chart. He answered softly, "Yes, I think it is. The Russians will milk it dry if we make any move to get our satellite out of the way of theirs. We can't do that to our people." McNary nodded. Kaufman said, "Agree. Just wanted to throw it out. We stay put. We hit, we hit." The other two looked at Kaufman. The abrupt dismissal of a serious problem was characteristic of the little astronomer; Kaufman wasted no time with second guesses. A decision made was a fact accomplished; it was over. Morgan glanced at McNary to see how he was taking it. McNary, now, big as he was, was a worrier. He stood ready to change his mind at any time, whenever some new alternative looked better. Only the soundness of his judgment prevented his being putty in any strong hands. He was a meteorologist, and a good one. "You know," said McNary, "I still can't quite believe it. Two satellites, one pole-to-pole, the other equatorial, both having apogees and perigees of different elevations -- yet they wind up on what amounts to a collision course." Morgan said, "That's what regression will do for you. But we haven't got any time for that; we've got to think this out. Let's see, they'll be coming up from below us at passage. Can we make anything of that?" There was silence while the three men considered it. Morgan's mind was focussed on the thing that was about to happen; but wisps of memory intruded. Faintly he could hear the waves, smell the bite in the salt sea air. A man who had sailed a thirty-two-foot ketch alone into every comer of the globe never thereafter quite lost the sound of the sea in his car. And the struggle, i he duel, the strain of outguessing the implacable elements, there was a test of a man... "Better be outside in any case," said Kaufman. "Suited up and outside. They'll see us, and know we intend to do nothing to avoid collision. Also, we'll be in a better position to cope with anything that comes along, if we're in the suits." Morgan and McNary nodded, and again there was talk. They discussed the desirability of radio communication with the other satellite, and decided against it. To keep their own conversations private, they agreed to use telephone communication instead of radio. When the discussion trailed off, Kaufman said, "Be some picture, if we have the course computed right. We stand there and wave at 'em as they go by." Morgan tried to see it in his mind: three men standing on a long, slim tube, and waving at three men on another. The first rocket passage, and men waving. And then Morgan remembered something, and the image changed. He saw the flimsy, awkward planes sputtering past each other on the morning's mission. The pilots, detached observers, noncombatants really, waved at each other as the rickety planes passed. Kindred souls they were, high above the walks of normal men. So they waved... for a while. Morgan said, "Do you suppose they'll try anything?" "Like what?" said Kaufman. "Like knocking us out of orbit if they can. Like shooting at us if they have a gun. Like throwing something at us, if they've got nothing better to do." "My God," said McNary, "you think they might have brought a gun up here?" Morgan began examining the interior of the tiny cabin. Slowly he turned his head, looking at one piece of equipment after another, visualizing what was packed away under it and behind it. To the right of the radio was the spacesuit locker, and his glance lingered there. He reached over, opened the door and slipped a hand under the suits packed in the locker. For a moment he fumbled and then he sat back holding an oxygen flask in his hand. He hefted the small steel flask and looked at Kaufman. "Gan you think of anything better than tills for throwing?" Kaufman took it and hefted it in his turn, and passed it to McNary. McNary did the same and then carefully held it in front of him and took his hand away. The flask remained poised in mid-air, motionless. Kaufman shook his head and said. "I can't think of anything better. It's got good mass, fits the hand well. It'll do." Morgan said, "Another thing. We clip extra flasks to our belts and they look like part of the standard equipment. It won't be obvious that we're carrying something we can throw." McNary gently pushed the flask toward Morgan, who caught it and replaced it. McNary said, "I used to throw a hot pass at Berkeley. I wonder how the old arm is." The discussion went on. At one point the radio came to life and Kaufman had a lengthy conversation with one of the control points on the surface of the planet below. They talked in code. It was agreed that the American satellite should not move to make room for the other, and this information was carefully leaked so the Russians would be aware of the decision. The only difficulty was that the Russians also leaked the information that their satellite would not move, either. A final check of the two orbits revealed no change. Kaufman switched off the set. "That," he said, "is the whole of it" "They're leaving us pretty much on our own," said McNary. "Couldn't be any other way," Morgan answered. "We're the ones at the scene. Besides -- " he smiled his tight smile -- "they trust us." Kaufman snorted. "Ought to. They went to enough trouble to pick us." McNary looked at the chronometer and said, "Three quarters of an hour to passage. We'd better suit up." M organ nodded and reached again into the suit locker. The top suit was McNary's, and as he worked his way into it, Morgan and Kaufman pressed against the walls to give him room. Kaufman was next, and then Morgan. They sat out the helmets, and while Kaufman and McNary made a final check of the equipment, Morgan took several sights to verify their position. "Luck," said Kaufman, and dropped his helmet over his head. The others followed and they all went through the air-sealing checkoff. They passed the telephone wire around, and tested the circuit. Morgan handed out extra oxygen flasks, three for each. Kaufman waved, squeezed into the air lock and pulled the hatch closed bcliind him. McNary went next, then Morgan. Morgan carefully pulled himself erect alongside the outer hatch and plugged the telephone jack into his helmet. As he straightened, he saw the Earth directly in front of him. It loomed large, visible as a great mass of blackness cutting off the harsh white starshine. The blackness was smudged with irregular pale lies of oratigish light that marked the cities of Earth. Morgan betaine aware that McNary, beside him, was pointing toward the center of the Earth. Following the line of his finger Morgan could see a slight flicker of light against the blackness; it was so faint that he had to look above it to see it. "Storm," said McNary. "Just below the equator. It must be a pip if we can see the lightning through the clouds from here. Fve been watching it develop for the last two days." Morgan stared, and nodded to himself. He knew what it was like down there. The familiar feeling was building up, stronger now as the time to passage drew closer. First the waiting. The sea, restless in expectancy as the waves tossed their hoary manes. The gathering majesty of the elements, reaching, searching, striving... And if at the height of the contest the screaming wind snatched up and smothered a defiant roar from a mortal throat, there was none to tell of it. Then the time came when the forces waned. A slight let-up at first, then another. Soon the toothed and jagged edge of the waves subsided, the hard side-driven spray and rain assumed a more normal direction. The man looked after the departing storm, and there was pain in his eyes, longing. Almost, the words rose to his lips, "Come back, I am still here, do not leave me, come back." But the silent supplication went unanswered, and the man was left with a taste of glory gone, with an emptiness that drained the soul. The encounter hacl ended, the man had won. But the winning was bitter. The hard fight was not hard enough. Somewhere there must be a test sufficient to try the mettle of this man. Somewhere there was a crucible hot enough to float any dross. But where? The man searched and searched, but could not find it. Morgan turned his head away from the storm and saw that Kaufman and McNary had walked to the top of thttj satellite. Carefully he turned his body and began placing one foot in front of the other to join them. Yes, he thought, men must always be on top, even if the top is only a state of mind. Here on the outer surface of the satellite, clinging to the metallic skin with shoes of magnetized alloy, there was no top. One direction was the same as another, as with a fly walking on a chandelier. Yet some primordial impulse drove a man to that position which he considered the top, drove him to stand with his feet pointed toward the Earth and his head toward the outer reaches where the stars moved. Walking under these conditions was difficult, so Morgan moved with care. The feet could easily tread ahead of the man without his knowing it, or they could lag behind. A slight unthinking motion could detach the shoes from the satellite, leaving the man floating free, unable to return. So Morgan moved with care, keeping the telephone line clear with one hand. When he reached the others, Morgan stopped and looked around. The sight always gave him pause. It was not pretty; rather, it was harsh and garish like the raucous illumination of a honkytonk saloon. The black was too black, and the stars burned too white. Everything appeared sharp and hard, with none of the softness seen from the Earth. Morgan stared, and his lips curled back over his teeth. The anticipation inside him grew greater. No sound and fury here; the menace was of a different sort. Looming. quietly foreboding, it was everywhere. Morgan leaned back to look overhead, and his lips curled further. This was where it might come, this was the place. Raw space, where a man moved and breathed in momentary peril, where cosmic debris formed arrow-swift reefs on which to founder, where star-born particles traveled at unthinkable speeds out of the macrocosm seeking some fragile microcosm to shatter. "Sun." Kaufman's voice echoed tinnily inside the helmet. Morgan brought his head down. There, ahead, a tinge of deep red edged a narrow segment of the black Earth. The red brightened rapidly, and broadened. Morgan reached to one side of his helmet and dropped a filter into place; he continued to stare at the sun. to passage." Morgan unhooked one of the oxygen cylinders at his belt and said, "We need some practice. We'd better try throwing one of these now; not much time left." He turned sideways ancl made several throwing motions with his right hand without releasing the cylinder. "Better lean into it more than you would down below. Well, here goes." He pushed the telephone line clear of his right side and leaned back, raising his right arm. He began to lean forward. When it seemed that he must topple, he snapped his arm down and threw the cylinder. The recoil straightened him neatly, and he stood securely upright. The cylinder shot out and down in a straight line and was quickly lost to sight. "Very nice," said McNary. "Good timing. I'll keep mine low too. No sense cluttering the orbits up here witli any more junk." Carefully McNary leaned back, leaned forward, and threw. The second cylinder followed the first, and McNary kept his footing. Without speaking Kaufman went through the preliminaries and launched his cylinder. Morgan and McNary watched it speed into the distance. "Shooting stars on Earth tonight," said McNary. "Quick! I'm off." It was Kaufman. Morgan and McNary turned to see Kaufman floating several feet above the satellite, and slowly receding. Morgan stepped toward him and scooped up the telephone wire that ran to Kaufman's helmet. Kaufrnan swung an arm in a circle so that it became entangled in the wire. Morgan carefully drew the wire taut and checked Kaufman's outward motion. Gently, so as not to snap the wire, he slowly reeled him in. McNary grasped Kaufman's shoulders and turned him so that his feet louched the metal shell of the satellite. McNary chuckled and said, "Why didn't you ride an oxygen cylinder down?" Kaufman grunted and said, "Oh, sure. I'll leave that to the idiots in the movies; that's the only place a man can ride a cylinder in space." He turned to Morgan. "Thanks. Do as much for you some day." "Hope you don't have to," Morgan answered. "Look, any throwing to be done, you better leave it to Mac and me. We can't be fishing anyone back if things get hot." "Right," said Kaufman. "I'll do what I can to fend ofT anything they throw at us." lie sniffed. "Be simpler if we have a collision." Morgan was staring to the left. He lifted a hand and pointed. "That it?" The others squinted in that direction. After a moment they saw the spot of light moving swiftly up and across the black backdrop of the naked sky. "Must be," said Kaufman. "Right time, right place. Must be." Morgan promptly turned his back on the sun and closed his eyes; he would need his best vision shortly now, and he wanted his pupils dilated as much as possible. "Make anything out yet?" he said. "No. Little brighter." Morgan stood without moving. He could feel the heat on his back as his suit seized the radiant energf from the sun and converted it to heat. He grew warm at the back, yet his front remained cold. The sensation was familiar, and Morgan sought to place it. Yes, that was it -- a fireplace. He felt as does a man who stands in a cold room with his back toward a roaring fire. One side toasted, the other side frigid. Funny, the homey sensations, even here. "Damn face plate." It was Kaufman. He had scraped the front of his helmet against die outside hatch a week ago. Since then the scratches distracted him every time he wore the helmet. Morgan waited and the exultation seethed and bubbled and fumed. "Anything?" lie said. "It's brighter," said McNary. "But -- wait a minute, I can make it out. They're outside, the three of them. I can just see them." It was time. Morgan turned to face the approaching satellite. He raised a hand to shield his face plate from the sun and carefully opened his eyes. He shifted his hand into the proper position and studied the other satellite. It was like their own, even to the three men standing on it, except that the three were spaced further apart. "Any sign of a rifle or gun?" asked McNary. "Not that I see," said Morgan. "They're not close enough to tell." He watched the other satellite grow larger and he tried to judge its course, but it was too far away. Although his eyes were on the satellite, his side vision noted the brightlit Earth below and the stars beyond. A small part of his mind was amused by his own stubborn egocentricity. Knowing well that he was moving and moving fast, he still felt that he stood ' motionless while the rest of the universe revolved around him. The great globe seemed to be majestically turning under his rooted feet. The harsh seemed to sweep by overhead. And that oncoming satellite, it seemed not to move so much as merely swell in size as lie watched. One of the tiny figures on the other satellite shifted its position toward the others. Sensitive to the smallest detail, Morgan said, "He didn't clear a line when he walked. No telephone. They're on radio. See if we can find the frequency. Mac, take the low. Shorty, the medium. I'll take the high." Morgan reached to his helmet and began turning the channel se(Continued on page #) OF BY R. M . I' he talented author of "The a F ishdollar Affair" returns with another compelling story of a frontier world -- grim New Cornwall of the Black Learning. is Four still lived, their legs crudely hamstrung... sipped his black coffee and ard year," said the cook. He was a looked around the chrome and placid, squinting man, pink in his white tile galley of Space Freighter crisp whites. "But like I said, no Gorbalsy in which he was riding girls, no drinks, nothing clown there down the last joint of a dogleg jourbut hard looks and a punch in the ney to the hermit planet of New nose for being curious. We mostly Cornwall. stay aboard, up in orbit. Them "Nothing's been published about New Cornish are the biggest, meanthe planet lor the last five hundred cst men I ever did see, Doc." years," lie said in a nervous, jerky "I'm not a real doctor yet," Cole voice. "You people on Gorbals at said, glancing down at the scholar least see the place, and I undergrays he was wearing. "If I don't stand you're the only ship that do a good job on New Cornwall I does." may never he. This is my Ph. D. trial field assignment. I should be stuffing myself with data on the ecosystem so I can ask the right questions when I get there. But there's nothing!" "What's a pec aitch dee?" "That's being a doctor. I'm an ecologist -- that means I deal with everything alive, and the way it all works in with climate and geography. I can use any kind of data. I have only six months until Gorbals comes again to make my survey and report. If I fumble away my doctorate, and Tin twenty-three already..." Cole knitted shaggy red eyebrows in worry. "Well hell, Doc, I can tell you things like, it's got four moons and only one whopper of a continent and it's low grav, and the forest there you won't believe even when you see it -- " "I need to know about stomper s. Bidgrass Company wants Belconti U. to save them from extinction, but they didn't say what the threat is. They sent travel directions, a visa and passage scrip for just one man. And I only had two days for packing and library research, before I had to jump to Tristan in order to catch this ship. I've been running in the dark ever since. You'd think the Bidgrass people didn't really care." "Price of stomper egg what it is, f doubt that," the cook said, scratching his fat jaw. "But for a fact, they're shipping less these days. Must be some kind of trouble.  never saw a stomper, but they say they're big birds that live in the forest." AO "You see? The few old journal articles I did find, said they were flightless birdhomologs that lived on the plains and preyed on the great herds of something called darv cattle." "Nothing but forest and sea for thousands of miles around Bidgrass Station, Doc. Stompcrs are pure hell on big long legs, they say." "There again! I read they were harmless to man." "Tell you what, you talk to Daley, lie's cargo officer and has to go clown with each tender trip. He'll maybe know something can help you." The cook turned away to inspect his ovens. Cole put down his cup and clamped a freckled hand over his chin, thinking. He thought about stomper eggs, New Cornwall's sole export and apparently, for five hundred years, its one link with the other planets of Carina sector. Their reputedly indescribable flavor had endeared them to gourmets on a hundred planets. They were symbols of coaspicuous consumption for the ostentatious wealthy. No wonder most of the literature under the New Cornwall reference had turned out to be cookbooks. Orphaned and impecunious, a self-made scholar, Cole had never tasted stomper egg. The cook slammed an oven door on the fresh bread smell. "Just thought, Doc. I keep a can or two of stomper egg, squeeze it from cargo for when I got a passenger to feed. How'd you like a mess for chow tonight?" "Why not?" Cole said, grinning suddenly. "Anything may be data lor an ecologist, especially if it's good to cat" The stomper egg came to the officers' mess table as a heaped platter of bite-sized golden spheres, deep-fried in bittra oil. Their delicate, porous texture hardly required chewing. Their flavor was like -- cinnamon? Peppery sandalwood? Yes, yes, and yet unique... Cole realized in confusion that he had eaten half the plattcrful and the other six men had not had any. He groped for a lost feeling -- was it that he and the others formed a connected biomass and that he could eat for all of them? Ridiculous ! "I'm a pig." he laughed weakly. "Here, Mr. Daley, have some." Daley, a gingery, spry little man. said "By me" and slid the platter along. It rounded the table and returned to Cole untouched. "Fall to. Doc." Daley said, grinning. Cole was already reaching... lying in his stateroom and he was the bunk cradling a taut, messianic body flaming with imageless dreams. He dreamed himself asleep and slept himself into shamed wakefulness needing coffee. It was ship-night. Cole walked through dimmed lights to the galley and carried his cup of hot black coffee to main control, where he found Daley on watch, lounging against the gray enamel computer. "I feci like a fool," Cole said. "You're a martyr to science, Doc. Which reminds me, Cookie told me you got questions about Bidgrass Station " "Well yes, about stompers. What's wiping them out, what's their habitat and life pattern, oh anything." "I learned quick not to ask about stompers. I gather they're twenty feet high or so and they're penned up behind a stockade. I never saw one. "Well dammit! I read they couldn't be domesticated." "They're not. Bidgrass Station is in a clearing the New Cornish cut from sea to sea across a narrow neck of land. On the west is this stockade and beyond it is Lundy square miles of the damndest forest over grew on any planet. That's where the stompers are." "How thickly settled is this Lund Peninsula?" "Not a soul there, Doc. The settlement is around Car Truro on the. cast coast, twelve thousand miles east of Bidgrass. I never been there, but you can see from the air it isn't much." "How big a city is Bidgrass? Does it have a university?" Daley smiled again and shook his head. "They got fields and pastures, hut it's more like a military camp than a town. I see barracks for the workers and egg hunters, hangars and shops, a big egg-processing plant and warehouses around ' the landing field. I never get away from the field, but I'd guess four, five thousand people at Bidgrass." Cole sighed and put down his cup on the log desk. "What is it they import, one half so precious as the stuff they sell?" Daley chuckled and rocked on his toes. "Drugs, chemicals, machinery parts, hundreds of tons of Warburton energy capsules. Pistols, blasters, cases of flame charge, tanks of fire mist -- you'd think they had a war on." "That's no help. I'll make up for lost time when I get there. I'll beat their ears off with questions." Daley's gnomish face grew serious. "Watch what you ask and who you ask, Doc. They're suspicious as hell and they hate strangers." "They need my help. Besides. I'll deal only with scientists." "Bidgrass isn't much like a campus. I don't know, Doc, something's wrong on that planet and I'm always glad to lift out." "Why didn't you and the others cat any of that s tom per egg?' Cole asked abruptly. "Because the people at Bidgrass turn sick and want to slug you if you mention eating it. That's reason enough for me." Well, that was data too, Cole thought, heading back to his stateroom. the cargo tender down in a three-lap braking spiral around New Cornwall. Cole sat beside him in the cramped control room, eyes fixed on the view panel. Once he had the bright and barren moon Cairdween at upper left, above a vastly curving sweep of sun-glinting ocean, and he caught his breath in wonder. "I know the feeling, Doc," Daley said softly. "Like being a giant and jumping from world to world." Clouds obscured much of the sprawling, multi-lobed single continent. The sharpening of outline and hint of regularity Cole remembered noting on Tristan and his own planet of Belconti, the mark of man, was absent here. Yet New Cornwall, as a human settlement, was two hundred years older than Belconti. The forests stretched across the south and west, broken by uplands and rain shadows, as the old books said. He saw between cloud patches the glint of lakes and the crumpled leaf drainage pattern of the great northeastern plain but, oddly, the plain was darker in color dian the pinkishyellow forest. He mentioned it to Daley. "It's llowcrs and vines and moss makes it that color," the little man said, busy with controls. "Whole world in that forest top -- snakes, birds, jumping things big as horses. Doc, them trees are big" "Of course! I read about the epiphytal biota. And low gravity always conduces to gigantism." "There's Lundy," Daley grunted, porting. It looked like a grinning ovoid monster-head straining into the western ocean at the end of a threadlike neck. Across the neck Bidgrass Station slashed between parallel lines of forest edge like a collar. Cole watched it again on the landing approach, noting the half-mile of clearing between the great wall and the forest edge, the buildings and fields rectilinear in ordered clumps cast of the wall, and then the light aberration of the lender's lift field blotted it out. "Likely I won't see you till next trip," Daley said, taking leave. "Good luck, Doc." Cole shuffled down the personnel ramp, grateful for the weight of his two bags  in the absurdly light gravity. Trucks and cargo lifts were coming across the white field from the silvery warehouses along its edge. Men also, shaggy-haired big men in loose blue garments, walking oddly without the stride and drive of leg muscles. Their faces were uniformly grim and blank to Cole, standing there uncertainly. Then a ground car pulled up and a tall old man in the same rough clothing got out and walked directly toward him. He hqd white hair, bushy white eyebrows over deepset gray eyes, and a commanding beak of a nose. "Who might you be?" he demanded. "I'm Flinter Cole, from Belconti University. Someone here is expecting me." The old man squinted in thought and bit his lower lip. Finally he said, "The biologist, hey? Didn't expect you until next Gorbals. Didn't think you could make the connections for this one." "It left me no time at all to study up in. But when species extinction is the issue, time is important. And I'm an ecologist." "Well," the old man said. "Well. I'm Garth Bidgrass." He shook Cole's hand, a powerful grip quickly released. "Hawkins there in the car will take you to the manor house and get you settled. I'll phone ahead. I'll be tied up checking cargo for a day or two, I expect. You just rest up awhile." He spoke to the driver in what sounded like Old English, then moved rapidly across the field toward the warehouses in the same strange walk as the other men. As far as Cole could see, he did not bend his knees at all. Hawkins, also old but frail and stooped, took Cole's bags to the car. When the ecologist tried to follow him he almost fell headlong, then managed a stiff-legged shuffle. Momentarily he longed for the Earthnormal gravity of Belconti and the ship. They drove past unfenced fields green with vegetable and cereal crops, and fenced pastures holding beef and dairy cattle of the old Earth breeds. It was a typical human ecosystem. Then they passed a group of field workers, and surprise jolted the ecologist. They were huge -- eight or nine feet tall, both men and women, all with long hair and some of them naked. They did not look up. Cole looked at Hawkins. The old man glared at him from redrimmed eyes and chattered something in archaic English. He speeded up, losing the giants behind a hedge, and the manor house with the palisade behind it loomed ahead. The great fence dwarfed the house. Single baulks of grassy brown timber ten feet on a side soared two hundred feet into the air, intricately braced and stayed. High above, a flyer drifted as if on sentry duty. Half a mile beyond, dwarfing the fence in its turn, arose the thousand-foot black escarpment of the forest edge. The manor house huddled in a walled garden with armed guards at the gate. It was two-storied and sprawling, with a flat-roofed watch tower at the southeast corner, and made of the same glassy brown timber. Hawkins stopped the car by the pillared veranda where a lumpy, gray, nondescript woman waited. Cole got out, awkwardly careful in the light gravity. The woman would not meet his glance. "I'm Flada Vignoli, Mr. Bidgrass' s niece and housekeeper," she said in a dead voice. C T#I show you your rooms." She turned away before Cole could respond. "Let me carry the bags, I need to," he said to Hawkins, laughing uncertainly. The old man hoisted his skinny shoulders and spat. The rooms were on the second floor, comfortable but archaic in style. The gray woman told him that Hawkins would bring his meals, that Garth Bidgrass would see him in a few days to make plans, and that Mr. Bidgrass thought he should not go about unescorted until he knew more about local conditions. Cole nodded. "HI want to confer with your leading biologists, Mrs. Vignoli, as soon as I can. For today, can you get me a copy of your most recent biotic survey?" "Ain't any biologists, ain't any surveys," she said, standing in the half-closed door. "Well, any recent book about stampers or your general zoology. It's important that I start at once." The face under the scraggly gray hair went blanker still. "You'll have to talk to Mr. Bidgrass." She closed the door. Cole unpacked, bathed, dressed again and explored his three rooms. Like a museum, he thought. He looked out his west windows at the palisade and forest edge. Then he decided to go downstairs, and found his door was locked. The shock was more fear than indignation, he realized, wondering at himself. He paced his sitting room, thinking about his scholarly status and the wealth and power of Belconti, until he had the indignation flaming. Then a knock came at the door and it opened to reveal old Hawkins with a wheeled food tray. 'What do you mean, locking me in?" Cole asked hotly. lie pushed past the food tray into the hall. Hawkins danced and made shooing motions with his hands, chattering shrilly in the vernacular. Cole walked to the railing around the stairwell and looked down. At the foot of the stair a giant figure, man or woman he could not say, sat and busied itself with something in its lap. Cole went back into his room. The food was boiled beef, potatoes and beets, plain but plentiful, plus bread and coffee. He ate heartily and looked out his windows again to see night coming on. Finally he tried the door and it was not locked. He shrugged, pushed the food tray into the hall and closed the door again. Then he shot the inside bolt. In bed, he finally dropped off into a restless, disturbed sleep. a hearty tray breakfast. Cole explored. He was in a two-floor wing, and the doors into the main house were locked. Through them he heard voices and domestic clatter. Unlocked across the secondfloor hall was another suite of rooms like his own. Downstairs was still another suite and along the south side a library. The door into the garden was locked. My kingdom, Cole thought wryly. Prisoner of state! He explored the library. Tristanian books, historical romances for the most part, none less than three hundred years old. No periodicals, nothing of New Cornwall publication. He drifted from window to window looking out at the formal garden of flower beds, hedges and white sand paths. Then he saw the oitI O #I ' She knelt in a sleeveless gray dress trimming a hedge. Her tanned and rounded arms had dimpled elbows, he noted. She turned suddenly and he saw, framed by reddish-brown curls, her oval face with small nose and firm chin. The face was unsuitably grave and the eyes wide. She was not staring at his window, Cole decided after a qualm, but listening. Then she rose, picked up her basket of trimmings and glided around the comer of the house. Before he could pursue her plump vision to another window, a man appeared. He looked taller than Cole and was built massively as a stone. Straight black hair fell to his shoulders, cut square across his forehead and bound by a white fillet. Under the black bar of eyebrow the heavy face held itself in grim, unsmiling lines. He moved with that odd, unstriding New Cornish walk that suggested tremendous power held in leash. Cole crossed the hall and watched the blue-clad form enter a door in the wing opposite. The girl was nowhere. Again Cole felt a twinge of fear, and boiled up anger to mask it. Inside looking out, he thought. Peeping like an ecologist in a bird blind! When Hawkins brought lunch Cole raged at him and demanded to see Garth Bidgrass. The old man chattered incomprehensibly and danced like a fighting cock. Thwarted, the ecologist ate moodily and went down to the library. The garden was empty and he decided on impulse to open a window. A way of retreat, but from what and to where, he wondered as he worked at the fastenings. Just as he got it free, a woman stooped through the library door. She was at least seven feet tall. Cole stood erect and held his breath. Not looking at him, the woman dropped to her knees and began dusting the natural wood half-panelling that encircled the room between bookcases. She had long blonde hair and a mild, vacant face; she wore a shapeless blue dress. "Hello' Cole said. She paid no attention. "Hello!" he said more sharply. "Do you speak Galactic English?" She looked at him out of empty blue eyes and went back to her work. Pie went past her gingerly and up to his room. There he wrote a note to Garth Bidgrass, paced and fanned his indignation, tore up the note and wrote a stronger one. When Hawkins brought his dinner, Cole beat down his chattering objections and stuffed the note into the old man's coat pocket. "See that Bidgrass gets it at once! Do you hear, at once!" he shouted. After nightfall, nervous and wakeful, Cole looked out on the garden by the pale light of two moons. He saw the girl, wearing the same dress, come out of the opposite wing, and decided on impulse to intercept her. As he climbed through the library window he said to himself, "Anything may be data to an ecologist, especially if it's pretty to look at." He met her full face at the house corner and her hands flew up, fending. She turned and he said, "Please don't run away from me. I want to talk to you." She turned back with eyes wide and troubled, in what nature had meant to be a merry, careless face. "Do you know who I am?" he asked. She nodded. "Uncle Garth says I'm not to talk to you." It was a little girl's voice, tremulous. "Why? What am I, some kind of monster?" "N-no. You're an outworlder, from a great, wealthy planet." "Belconti is a very ordinary planet. What's your name?" "I'm Pia -- Pia Vignoli." The voice took on more assurance, but the plump body stayed poised for flight. "Well I'm Flinter Cole, and I have a job to do on this planet. It's terribly important that I get started. Will you help me?" "How can I, Mr. Cole? I'm nobody. I don't know anything." She moved away, and he followed, awkwardly. "Girls know all sorts of things that would interest an ecologist," he protested. "Tell me all you know about stompers." "Oh no! I mustn't talk about stompers." "Well talk about nothing then, like girls do," he said impatiently. "What's the name of that moon?" He pointed overhead. Tension left her and she smiled a little. "Morwcnna," she said. "That one jusL setting into Lundy Forest is Armis. You can tell Annis by her bluish shadows that are never the same." "Good girl! How about the other two, the ones that aren't up?" "One's Cairdween and the other, the red one -- oh, I daren't talk about moons either." "Not even moons? Really, Miss Vignoli -- " "Let's not talk at all. I'll show you how to walk, you do look so funny all spraddled and scraping your feet. I was born off-planet and I had to learn it myself." She showed him the light downflex of the foot that threw the body more forward than up, and he learned to wait out the strange micropause before his weight settled on the other foot. Wilh a little practice he got it, walking up and down the moonlit path beside her in an effortless toedance. Then he learned to turn corners and to jump. "Pia," he said once. "Pia. I like the sound, but it doesn't suit this rough planet." "I was born on Tristan," she murmured. "Please don't ask -- " "i won't. But no reason why I can't talk. May I call you Pia?" He described Belconti and the university, and his doctorate, at stake in this field assignment. Suddenly she stopped short and pointed to where a red moon lifted above the dark cliff of the eastern forest. "It's late," she said. "There comes Hoggy Darn. Good night, Mr. Cole." She danced away faster than he could follow. He crawle# back through his window in the reddish moonlight. Garth Bidgrass in the library. The old man sat with folded arms, craggy face impassive. Cole, standing, leaned his weight on his hands and thrust his sharp face across the table. His freckles stood out against his angry pallor, and sunlight from the end window blazed in his red hair. "Let me sum up," he said, thinlipped. "For obscure reasons I must be essentially a prisoner. All right. You have no education here, no biologists of any kind. All right. Now here is what they expect of me on Belconti: to rough out the planetary ecosystem, set up a functional profile series for the stomper and its interacting species, make energy flow charts and outline the problem. If my report is incorrect or incomplete, Belconti won't send the right task group of specialists. Then you spend your money for nothing and I lose my doctorate. I must have skilled helpers, a clerical staff, masses of data!" "You've said all that before," Bidgrass said calmly. "I told you, I can provide none of that." "Then it's hopeless! Why did you ever send for an ecologist?" "I sent for help. Belconti sent the ecologist."  "Help me to help you, then. You must try to understand, Mr. Bidgrass, science can't operate in a vacuum. I can't work up a total planetary biology. I must start with that data." "Do what you can for us," Bidgrass said. "They won't blame you on Belconti when they know and we won't blame you here if it doesn't help."  Cole sat down, shaking his head. "But Belconti won't count it as a field job, not in ecology. You will not understand my position. Let me put it this way: suppose someone gave you a hatchet and told you, only one 'man, to cut down Lundy Forest?" "I could start," the old man said. His eyes blazed and he smiled grimly. "I'd leave my mark on one tree." Colt felt suddenly foolish and humbled. "All right," he said. "I'll do what I can. What do you think is wiping out the stompers?" "I know what. A parasite bird that lays its eggs on stomper eggs. Its young hatch first and eat the big egg. The people call them piskies." 'Til need to work out its life cycle, look for weak points and natural enemies. Who knows a lot about these piskies?" "I know as much as anybody, and I # ve never seen a grown one. We believe they stay in the deep forest. But there are always three to each stomper egg and they're vicious. Go for a man's eyes or jugular. Egg hunters kill dozens every day." 'Til want dozens, alive if possible, and a lab. Can you do that much?" "Yes. You can use Dr. Rudall's lab at the hospital." Bidgrass stood up and looked at his watch. "The egg harvest should start coming in soon down at the plant and then. may be a dead pisky. Come along and see." As Hawkins guided the car past a group of the giant field workers, Cole felt Bidgrass' eyes on him. He turned, and the old man said slowly, "Stick to piskies, Mr. Cole. We'll all be happier." "Anything may be data to an ecologist, especially if he overlooks it," Cole murmured stubbornly. Hawkins cackled something about "Hoggy Dam itha hoose" and speeded up. In the cavernous, machinerylined plant Cole met the manager. He was the same powerful, longhaired man Cole had seen in the garden. "Morgan." Bidgrass introduced him with the one name, adding, "He doesn't use Galactic English." Morgan bent his head slightly, unsmiling, ignoring Cole's offered hand. His wide-set eyes were so lustrously black that they seemed to have no pupils, and under the hostile stare Cole flushed angrily. They walked through the plant, Morgan talking to Bidgrass in the vernacular. His voice was deep and resonant, organ-like. Bidgrass explained to Cole how stomper egg was vac-frozen under biostat and sealed in plastic for export. He pointed out a piece of shell, half an inch thick and highly translucent. From its radius of curvature Cole realized that stomper eggs were much larger than he had pictured them. Then someone shouted and Bidgrass said a flyer was coming in. They went out on the loading dock. The flyer alongside carried six men forward of the cargo space and had four heavy blasters mounted almost like a warcraft. As the dock crew unloaded two eggs into dollies, other flyers were skittering in, further along the dock. Bidgrass pointed out to Cole on one huge four by three-foot egg the bases of broken parasite eggs cemented to its shell. Through a hole made by piskies, the ecologist noted that the substance of the large egg was a stiff gel. Morgan flashed a strong pocket lamp on the shell and growled something. "There may be a pisky hiding inside," Bidgrass said. "You are lucky, Mr. Cole." Morgan stepped inside and returned almost at once wearing goggles and heavy gloves, and carrying a small power sa He used the light again, traced an eight-inch square with his finger, and sawed it out. The others, all but Cole, stood back. Morgan pulled away the piece and something black flew up, incredibly swift, with a shrill, keening sound. Cole looked after it and Morgan struck him heavily in the face, knocking him to hands and knees. Feet stamped and scraped around him and Cole saw his own blood dripping on the dock. He stood up dazed and angry. "Morgan saved your eye," Bidgrass told him, "but the pisky took a nasty gouge at your cheekbone. I'll have Hawkins drive you to the hospital -- you wanted to meet tJr. Rudall anyway." Cole examined the crushed pisky on the way to the hospital. Big as his fist, with a tripartite beak, it was no true bird. The wings were flaps of black skin that still wrinkled and folded flexibly with residual life. It had nine Iocs on each foot and seemed covered with fine scales. Dr. Rudall treated Cole's cheek in a surprisingly large and well appointed dressing room. He was a gray, defeatedlooking man and told Cole in an apologetic voice that he had taken medical training on Planet Tristan many years ago... out of touch now. His small lab looked hopelessly archaic, but he promised to biostat the dead pisky until Cole could get back to it. Hawkins was not with the ground car. Cole drove back to the plant without him. He wanted another look at the mode of adhesion of pisky egg on stomper egg. He drove to the further end of the plant and mounted the dock from outside, to freeze in surprise. Twenty feet away, the dock crew was unloading a giant. He was naked, strapped limply to a plank, and his face was bloody. Half his reddish hair and heard was singed away. Then a hand hit Cole's shoulder and spun him around. It was Morgan. "Clear out of here, you!" the big man said in fluent, if plain, Galactic English. "Don't you ever coe here without Garth Bidgrass brings you!" He seemed hardly to move his lips, but the voice rumbled like thunder. "Well," thought Cole, driving back after Hawkins, "datums are data, if they bite off your head."T Cole, you must not again leave the company of either Hawkins or Dr. Rudall when you are away from the house," Bidgrass told Cole the next morning. "The people have strange beliefs that would seem sheer nonsense to you, but their impulsive acts, if you provoke them, will be unpleasantly real." "If I knew their beliefs I might know how to behave." "It is your very presence that is provoking. If you were made of salt you would have to stay out of the rain. Here you ait; an outworlder and you must stay within certain limits. It's like that." "All right," Cole said glumly. He worked all day at the hospital dissecting the pisky, but found no parasites. He noted interesting points of anatomy. The three-part beak of silicified horn was razor sharp and designed to exert a double shearing stress. The eye was triune and of fixed focus; the three eyeballs lay in a narrow isosceles triangle pattern, base down, behind a common triangular conjunctiva with incurved sides and narrow base. The wings were elastic and stiffened with a fan of nine multijointed bones that probably gave them grasping and manipulating power in the living organism. None of it suggested the limit factor he sought. Dr. Rudall helped him make cultures in a sterile broth derived from the pisky' s own tissues. In the evening a worker from the plant brought eleven dead piskies and Cole put them in biostat. He rode home with Hawkins to his solitary dinner feeling he had made a start. Day followed day. Cole remained isolated in his wing, coming and going through his back door into the garden. He became used to the mute giant domestics who swept and cleaned. Now and then he exchanged a few words with the sad Mrs. Vignoli, Pia's mother, he learned, or with old Bidgrass, in chance meetings. He watched Pia through his windows sometimes and knew she fled when he came out. There was something incongruous in the timid wariness with which her plump figure and should-bemerry face confronted the world. Once he caught her and held her wrist. "Why do you run away from me, Pia?" She pulled away gently. 'Til get you in trouble, Mr. Cole. They don't trust me either. My father was a Tristanian." "Who are they?" "Just they. Morgan, all of them." "If we're both outworld, we should stick together. I'm the loneliest man on this planet, Pia." "I know the feeling," she said, looking down. He patted her curls. "Let's be friends then, and you help me. Where do these giant people come from?" Her head jerked up angrily. "That has nothing to do with your work! I'm inworld too, Mr. Cole. My mother is of the old stock." Cole let her go in silence. He began working evenings in the lab, losing himself in work. Few of the blue-clad men and women he encountered would look at him. but he sensed their hostile glances on the back of his neck. He felt islanded in a sea of dull hatred. Only Dr. Rudall was vaguely friendly. Cole found no parasites in hundreds of dissected piskies, but his cultures were frequently contaminated by a fungus that formed dark red, globular fruiting bodies. When he turned to cytology he found that what he had supposed to be an incredibly complex autonomic nervous system was instead a fungal mycelium, so fine as to be visible only in phase contrast. He experimented with staining techniques and verified it in a dozen specimens, then danced the surprised Dr. Rudall around ihc lab. "I've done it! One man against a planet!" he chortled. "We'll culture it, then work up mutant strains of increasing virulence -- oh for a Belconti geno-mycologist now!" "It's not pathogenic, I'm afraid," Dr. Rudall said. "I... ah... read once, that idea was tried centuries ago... all the native fauna have fungal symbiotes... protect them against all known pathogenic microbiota... should have mentioned it, I suppose..." "Yes, you should have told me! My God, there go half the weapons of applied ecology over the moon... my time wasted... why didn't you tell me?" The ecologist's sharp face flushed red as his hair with frustrated anger. "You didn't ask... hardly know what ecology means... didn't realize it was important..." the old doctor stammered. "Everythin" is important to an ecologist, especially what people won't tell him!" Cole stormed. He tried to stamp out of the lab, and progressed in a ludicrous bouncing that enraged him even more. He shouted for Hawkins and went home early. In his rooms he brooded on his wrongs for an hour, then went downstairs and thundered on the locked door into the main house, shouting Garth Bidgrass' name. The sounds beyond hushed. Then Garth Bidgrass opened the door, looking stern and angry. "Come into the library, Mr. Cole," he said. "Try to control yourself." In the library Cole poured out his story while Bidgrass, standing with right elbow resting atop a bookcase, listened gravely. "You must understand," Cole finished, "to save the stompers wc must cut down the piskies. Crudely put, the most common method is to find a disease or a parasite that affects them, and breed more potent strains of it. But that won't work on piskies, and I could have and should have known that to begin with."  "Then you must give up?" "No! Something must prey on them or their eggs in their native habitat, a macrobiotic limit factor I can use. I must learn the adult pisky's diet; if its range is narrow enough that cafi be made a limit factor." the old man frowned. "How would you learn all this?" "Field study. I want at least twenty intelligent men and a permanent camp somewhere in Lundy Forest." Bidgrass folded his arms and shook his head. "Can't spare the men. And it's too dangerous -- stompers would attack you day and night. I've had over two hundred egg hunters killed this year, and they're trained men in teams." "Let me go out with a team then, use my own two eyes." "Men wouldn't have you. I told you, they're superstitious about outworlders." "Then it's failure! Your money and my doctorate go down the drain." "You're young, you'll get your doctorate another place," the old man said. "You've tried hard, and I'll tell Belconti that." His voice was placating, but Cole thought he saw a wary glint in the hard gray eyes. Cole shrugged. "I suppose I'll settle in and wait for Gorbals. But I've had pleasanter vacations." He turned his back and scanned the shelves ostentatiously for a book. Bidgrass left the room quiet!yIt was a boring evening. Pia was not in the garden. Cole looked at the barrier and the incredible cliff of Lundy Forest. He would like to get into that forest, just once. Hundred and fifty days before Gorbals... why had they ever sent for him? They seemed to be conspiring to cheat him of his doctorate. They had, too... Finally he slept. wail and doors slamming and feet scraping in the main house. Dressing in haste, he noted a red glow in the sky to southward and heard a booming noise. In the hall outside his room he met Pia, face white and eyes enormous. "Stamper attack!" she cried. "Come quickly, you must hide in the basement with us!" He followed her into the main house and downstairs to where Mrs. Vignoli was herding a crowd of the giant domestics down a doored staircase. The giant women were tossing their heads nervously. Several were naked and one was tearing off her dress. Cole drew back. 'Tm an ecologist, I want to see," he said. "Stampers are data." He pushed her gently toward the women and walked out on the front veranda. From southward came an incredibly rich and powerful chord of organ music, booming and swelling, impossibly sustained. Old Hawkins danced in the driveway in grotesque pointed leaps, shrieking "Hoosa maida! lloosa maida!" Overhead the moons Cairdween, Morwenna and Annis of the blue shadows were arranged in a perfect isosceles triangle, naimw base parallel to the horizon. It stirred something in Cole, but the swelling music unhinged his thought. With a twinge of panic he turned, to find Pia at his elbow. "They're after me, after us," she cried against the music. "I must see. You go find shelter, Pia." "With you I feel less alone now," she said. "One can't really hide, anyway. Come to the watch tower and you'll see." He followed her through the house and up two flights lo the roof of the tower on the southeast corner. As they stepped iuLo the night air, the great organ sound enwrapped them, and Cole saw the southern sky ablaze, with flyers swooping and black moles hurtling through the glare. Interwoven pencils of ion-flame flickered in the verging darkness and the ripping sound of heavy blasters came faintly through the music. A hundred-yard section of the barrier was down in flames, and the great, bobbing, leggy shapes of stampers came bounding through it while others glided down from the top. Flyers swarmed like angry bees around the top of the break, firing mounted blasters and tearing away great masses of wood. The powerful chord of music swelled unendurably in volume and exultant richness until Cole cried out and shook the girl. "It plucks at my backbone and I can't think! Pia, Pia, what is that music ?' # "It's the stompers singing  # she shouted back. He shook his head. Bidgrass Station seethed, lights everywhere, roads crowded with trucks. Around the base of the breakthrough a defense perimeter flared with the blue-violet of blasters and the angry red of flame guns. As Cole watched it was overrun and darkened in place after place, only to reform further out as reserves came into action. Expanding jerkily, pushed this way and that, die flaming periphery looked like a fire-mernbrane stressed past endurance by some savage contained thing. With a surge of emotion Cole realized it was men down there, with their guns and their puny muscles and their fragile lives against twolegged, boat-shaped monsters twenty feet high. "Sheer power of biomass  # he thought. "Even their shot-down bodies are missiles, to crush and break . # A sudden eddy in the flaming defense line brought it to within half a mile of the house. Cole could sec men die against the glare, in the great music. The girl pressed close to him and whimpered, "Oh, start the fire mist! Morwenna pity them!" Cole put his arm tightlyaround her. A truck convoy pulled up by the manor house and soldiers were everywhere, moving quickly and surely. A group hauled a squat, vertical cylinder on wheels crashing through the ornamental shrubbery. Violet glowing metal vailing wound about it in a double helix. "It's a Corbin powercaster  # Pia shouted into Cole's ear. "It broadcasts power to the portable blasters so the men don't heed to carry pack charges or lose time changing them . # Cole looked at the soldiers. The same big men he saw every dy, the same closed and hostile faces, but now a wild and savage joy shone in them. This was their human meaning to themselves, their justification. The red boundary roared down on them, they would be dying in a few minutes, but they were braced and fiercely ready. The music swelled impossibly loud and Cole knew that he too was going to die with them, despised outworlder that he was. He hugged the girl fiercely and tried to kiss her. "Let me in your world, Pia!" he cried. She pulled away. "Look! The fire mist! Oh thank you, good Morwenna T # He saw it, a rose pink paled by nearer flame, washing lazily against the black clifT edge of Lundy Forest. It grew, boiling up over the the gap, and the great, agonizing chord of music muted and dwindled. The flame-perimeter began shrinking and still the fire mist grew, staining the night sky north and south beyond eyc-rcach. The song became a mournful wailing and the soldiers in the garden # moved forward for the mopping up. "Pia, Fve got to go down there. I've got to see a stomper close up." She was trembling and crying with reaction. "I think they'll be Loo busy to mind," she said. "But don't go too far in... Flinter." He ran down the stairs and through the unguarded gate toward the fought-over area. Wounded men were being helped or carried past him, but no one noticed him. He found a stomper, blaster-torn but not yet dead, and stopped to watch the four-foot tripart beak snap feebly and the dark wings writhe and clutch. The paired vertical eyelid folds rolled apart laterally to reveal three eyes under a single triangular conjunctiva, lambent in the flame-shot darkness. Soldiers passed unheeding while Cole stood and wondered. Then a hand jerked violently at his arm. It was Morgan. Morgan wordlessly marched him off to a knot of men nearer the mopping up line and pushed him before Garth Bidgrass. Sweat dripped from flaring eyebrows down the grim old face, and over a blistered right cheek. A heavy blaster hung from the old man's body harness. "Well, Mr. Cole, is this data?" he asked dourly. "Have you come out to save stompers?" "I wish I could have saved men, Mr. Bidgrass. I wanted to help," Cole said. "Another like this and you may have to," Bidgrass said, less sharply. "It was close work, lad." "I can help Dr. Rudall. You must have many wounded." "Good, good," the old man said approvingly. "The men will take that kindly and so will I." "One favor," Cole said. "Will you have your men save half a dozen living stompers for me? I have another idea." "Well, I don't know," Bidgrass said. "The men won't like it... but a few days, maybe... yes, I'll save you some." "Thank you, sir." Cole turned away, catching a thick scowl from Morgan. Overhead the three moons were strung in a ragged line across the sky, and Hoggy Darn was rising. clock at the hospital, sterilizing instruments and helping Dr. Rudall with dressings. He was surprised to see other doctors, many nurses and numerous biofield projectors as modern as any on Bclconti. Some of the wounded wen women. All of them, wounded and unwounded, seemed in a shared mood of exaltation. He caught glimpses of Pia, working too. She seemed less poised for flight, tired but happy, and she smiled at him. After three days Cole saw his stompers in a stonefloored pen at the slaughter house. Earth breed cattle lowed in adjacent pens. Four stompers still lived, their bodies blaster torn and their legs crudely hamstrung so they could not stand. They lay with heads together and the sun glinted on the blue-black, iridescent scales covering the domed heads and long necks. Three shock-headed butchers stood by, assigned to help him. Their distaste for Cole and the job was so evident that he burned through the gross dissection of the two dead stornpers at one end of the same pen. Alter an hour he thought to ask, as best he could, whether the living stompers were being given food and water. When one man understood, black hatred crossed his lace and he spat on Cole's shoe. The ecologist flushed, then shrugged and got on with the jb. It brought him jarring surprises culminating in a tentative conclusion late on the second day. Then the situation began to fall apart. Working alone for the moment, Cole opened the stomach of the second stomper and found in it halfdigested parts of a human body. Skull and humerus size told him it was one of the giants. First pulling a flap of mesentery over the stomach incision, Cole went into the office and phoned Dr. Rudall to come at once. Coming out, he heard angry shouts and saw two of his helpers running to join the third, who stood pointing into the carcass. Then all three seized axes, ran across the pen and began hacking at the necks of the living stompers. The great creatures boomed and writhed, clacking their beaks and half rising on thecir wings, unable to defend themselves. The butchers howled curses, and the stompers broke into a mournful wailing harmonized with flesh-creeping subsonics. Cole shouted and pleaded, finally wrested an axe from one and mounted guard over the last living stomper. He stood embattled, facing a growing crowd of butchers from the 'plant, when Dr. Rudall arrived. "Dr. Rudall, explain to these maniacs why I must keep this stomper alive!" he cried angrily. "I'm sorry, Mr. Cole, they will kill it in spite of you." "But Garth Bidgrass ordered -- # "In spite of him. There are factors you don't understand, Mr. Cole. You arc yourself in great danger." The old doctor's hands trembled. Cole thought rcfpidly. "All right, will they wait a day? I want tissue explants fc a reason I'll explain later. If you'll help me work up the nutrient tonight -- " "Our pisky nutrient will work. We can take your samples within the hour. Let me call the hospital." He spoke rapidly to the glowering butchers in the vernacular, then hurried into the building. An hour later the stomper was dead, and Hawkins drove Cole and the doctor back to their lab with the explants. "I've almost got it," Cole said happily. "Several weeks and two more bits of information and I'll tell you. In spite of all odds, one man against a planet -- this will found my professional reputation back on Belconti." Once again Cole faced Garth Bidgrass across the round table in the library. This time he felt vastly different. "The piskies are really baby stompers," he said, watching the craggy old face for its reaction. It did not change. "I suspected it when I saw how the smaller eggs fused with the large egg, with continuous laminae," Cole went on. "There was the morphological resemblance, too. But when I dissected two mature stompers I found immature eggs. Even before entry inlo the oviduct what you call pisky eggs are fi lamented to the main body of cytoplasm." Disappointingly, Bidgrass did not marvel. He squinted and cocked his head. Finally he said, "Do you mean the piskies lay their eggs internally in the stompers?" "Impossible! I made a karyotype analysis of pisky and stomper tissue and they are identical , I tell you. My working hypothesis for now is that pisky eggs are fertilized polar bodies. It's not unknown. But that the main body should be sterile and serve as an external food source -- that's new, I'm sure. That will get my name in the journals all through Carina sector." He could not help smiling happily. Bidgrass bit his lower lip and stared keenly, not speaking. Cole became nettled. "I hope you see the logic," he said. "What threatens your stompers is harvest pressure from your own egg hunters. Stop it for a few decades, or set aside breeding areas, and you can have a whole planetful again." The old man scowled and stood up. "We'll not stop," he said gruffly. "There are still plenty of stompers. Remember last month." He walked to the end window and back, then sat down again still looking grim. "Don't be too sure," Cole objected. "I haven't finished my report. I made a Harvey analysis on the tissues of one stomper. It involves culturing clones, measuring growth rates and zones of migration and working out a complex set of ratios -- I won't go inlo details. But when I fitted my figures into Harvey's formula it indicated unmistakably that the stompers have a critical biomass." "What does thai mean?" "Think of a species as one great animal that never dies, of which each individual is only a part. Can you do that?" "Yes!" the old man exploded, sitting bolt upright. "Well, the weight of a cross-section of the greater animal at any moment in time is its biomass. Many species have a point or value of critical biomass such that, if it falls below that point, the greater animal dies. The species loses its will to live, decays, drifts into extinction in spite of all efforts to save it. The stomper is such a species, no doubt whatever. Do you see how the slaughter a month ago may already have extinguished them as a species?" Bidgrass nodded, smiling grimly. His eyes held a curious light. "Tell me, Mr. Cole, your Harvey formula -- do human beings have a critical biomass?" "Yes, biologically," Cole said, surprised. "But in our case a varying part of the greater animal is carried in our culture, our symbol system, and is not directly dependent on biomass. A mathematical anthropologist could tell you more than I can." Bidgrass placed his hands palm down on the table and leaned back in sudden resolution. "Mr. Cole, you force me to tell you something I had been minded to hold back. I already know a good part of what you have just told me. I wish to exterminate the stompers and I will do so. But I meant for you to go back to Belconti thinking it was the piskies." Cole propped his chin on folded hands and raised his eyebrows. "I half suspected that. But I fooled you, didn't I?" "Yes, and I admire you for it. Now let me tell you more. Stomper egg brings a very high price and I have kept it higher by storing large reserves. When it is known the stomper is extinct, the rarity value of my reserve will be enormous. It will mean an end of this harsh life for me and for rriy grandniece after me." Cole's lip curled, and red mounted in the old man's face as he talked, but he went on doggedly. "I want the pisky theory and the news of stomper extinction to be released through Belconti University. The news will spread faster and be more readily believed and I will avoid a certain moral stigma -- "And now T've crossed you up!" "You can still do it. I can ease your conscience with a settlement of -- say -- five thousand solars a year for life." Cole leaped up and leaned across the table. "No!" he snapped. "Old man, yoli don't know how ecologists feel about the greed-murder of species. What I will do is work through Belconti on your government at Car Truro, warn it that you are about to destroy an important planetary resource." Bidgrass stood up too, scowling darkly red. "Not so fast, young fellow. I have copies of your early notes in which you call the piskies the critical limit factor in stomper extinction. Almost three hundred people were killed in that stomper attack, and you could easily have been one of them. If you had, I would naturally have reported it via the ifcxt Gorbals to Belconti and sent along your notes to date -- do you follow me?" "Yes. A threat." "A counter-threat. Think it over for a few days, Mr. Cole."  waiting for his dinner and wondering if it would be poisoned. When old Hawkins tapped, he pulled open the door, only to find Pia instead with a service for two. She was rosy and smiling in a lowcut, off-shoulder brown dress lie had not seen before. "May I eat dinner with you tonight, Flinter?" she asked. "Please do," he said, startled. "Am  people now, or something?" "Uncle Garth says now dial you know -- " She broke off, blushing still more. "I don't like what I know," he said somberly, "but it's not you, Pia. Here, let me." He pulled the cart into the room and helped her set the things on his table. Pia was lovely, he decided, wanting to caress the smooth roundness of her shoulders and dimpled arms. When she sat across the small table from him he could not help responding to the swell of her round breasts barely below the neckline. But her manner seemed forced and she looked more frightened than ever. "You look like a little rabbit that knows it's strayed too far from the woods, Pia. What are you always afraid of?" Her smile faded. "Not because I'm too far from the woods," she said. "What's a rabbit? But let's not talk about fear." They talked of food and weather through a more than usually elaborate dinner. There was a bottle of Tristanian kresch to follow it. Cole splashed the blue wine into the two crystal goblets, gave her one and held up his own. "Here's to the richest little girl on Tristan someday," he said, half mockingly. Tears sprang to her eyes. "I don't want to be rich. I just want a home away from New Cornwall, just anywhere. I was born on Tristan. Oh Flinter, what you must think -- " She began crying in earnest. He patted her shoulder. "Forgive me for a fool, Pia. Tell me about Tristan. I had only one day there, waiting for GorbaW tender." She spoke of her childhood on Tristan, and the tension eased in both. Finally she proposed a picnic for the next day, the two of them to take a sports flyer into the forest top. He agreed with pleasure and squeezed her hand in saying good night. She squeezed back a little. But she still looked frightened. Next day Pia wore a brief yellow playsuit, and Cole could not keep his eyes off her. When he was loading the picnic hamper into the small flyer before the main hangar, she suddenly pressed close to him. He followed her wide-eyed gaze over his right shoulder and saw Morgan bulking darkly Len feel away. "Hello there, Mr. Morgan," Cole said into the impassive, face under the black bar of eyebrow. Morgan rumbled in vernacular and walked on. His lips did not move. "You're afraid of Morgan," Cole said when he had the flyer aloft and heading east. "He's a bard. He has a power," she said. "Today, let's forget him." Cole looked back al the bulk of Lundy Peninsula, swelling lost into blue-green distance from the narrow isthmus. The straight slash of Bidgrass Station from sea to sea looked puny beside the mighty forest towering on either side. Then Pia had his arm and wanted him to land. He grounded on a pinkish-green mass of lichen several acres in area. Pia assured him it would support the flyer, reminding him of the planet's low gravity. The resilient surface gave off a fragrance as they walked about on it. In a sea all around their island, branches of the great forest trees thrust up, leafy and flowering and bedecked with a profusion of epiphytal plants in many shapes and colors. Bright-hued true birds darted from shadow into sunlight and back again, twittering and crying. "It's beautiful," he said. And so was Pia, he thought, watching her on tiptoe reaching to a great white flower. The attractive firmness of her skin, the roundness and dimpling, ripeness , that was the word he wanted. And her eyes. "Pia, you're not frightened any more!" It was true. The long-lashed brown eyes were merry as nature meant them to be. "It's peaceful and safe," she said. "When I come to the forest top I never want to go back to Bidgrass Station." "Too bad we must, and let's pretend we don't," lie said, pointing to a cluster of red-gold fruits. "Are those good to cat?" "Too good. That's the trouble with New Cornwall." "What do you mean?" "Race you hack to the flyer," she cried, and danced away, bare limbs twinkling in the sunlight. He floundered after. The lunch was good and she had brought along the rest of the bottle of kresch. They sipped it seated beside the flyer while she tried to teach him New Cornish folk songs. Her small, clear singing blended with that of the birds around them. "I catch parts of it," he said. "As an undergraduate a few years ago I studied the pre-space poets. I can read Old English, but it is strange to my car." "I could teach you." "I love one wry-witted ancient named Robert Graves. How does it go: # strange things happen where she is -- no, I can't recall it now." "I could write the songs out for you." "The beauty is in you and your voice. Just sing." She sang, something about a king with light streaming from his hair, coming naked out of the folest to bring love into his kingdom. Small white clouds drifted in the blue sky, and blue Annis slept just above the rustling branches that guarded the secret of their island. He listened and watched her. She was softly rounded as the clouds, and her clustered brown curls made an island of the vivid face expressing the song she sang so bird-like and naturally. She was vital, compact, self closed, perfect -- like one of the great flowers nodding in the breeze along the island shore -- and his heart yearned across to her.  "Pia," he said, breaking into the song, "do you really want to get away from New Cornwall?" She nodded, eyes suddenly wide, lips still parted. "Come with me to Belconti then. Right now. We'll cross to Car Truro and wait there for Gorbals " The light dimmed in her face. "Why Car Truro?" "Pia, it's hard to tell you. I'm afraid of your great-uncle... I want to contact the planetary government." "It's no good at Car Truro, Flinter. Can't you just come back to Bidgrass Station and... and... do what Uncle Garth wants?" He could barely hear the last. The fear was back in her eyes. "Do you know what he wants?" "Yes." The brown curls drooped. Cole stood up. "So that's the reason -- well, .I'll not do it, do you hear? Garth Bidgrass is an evil, greedy old man and maybe it runs in the blood." She jumped up, eyes more angry now than fearful. "He is not! He's trying to save you! He's good and noble and... and great! If you only knew the truth -- Morwenna forgive me!" She clapped her hand to her mouth. "Tell me the truth then, since I'm still being made a Belconti fool of. What is the truth?" "I've said too much. Now I'll have to tell Uncle Garth -- " She began crying. "Tell him what? That I know he's a liar? That you failed as a -- " He could not quite say the word. "It's true I was supposed to make you love me and I tried and I can't because... because..." she ended in incoherent sobbing. Cole stroked her hair and comforted her. "I've been hasty again," he apologized. "I'm still running in the dark, and that makes for stumbles. Let's go back, and I'll talk to your great-uncle again." looking tired and stern, invited Cole to breakfast with the family. Cole had never been in the large, wood-panelled room overlooking the south garden through broad windows. Pia was subdued, Mrs. Vignoli strangely cheerful. The meal, served by a giant maid, was the customary plain porridge and fried meat. The women left when the maid cleared the table. Bidgrass poured more coffee, then leaned back and looked across at Cole. "Mr. Cole, I did you a wrong in having you sent here. I kept you in the dark for your own protection. Can you believe that?" "I can believe that you believe it." "You came too soon. You were too curious, too smart. I have had to compound that wrong with others to Pia and my own good name." Cole smiled. "I know I'm curious. But why can't I know -- " "You can, lad. You've nosed through to it and I'll tell you if you insist. But it will endanger you even more and I wish you would forego it." Cole shook his head. "I'm an ecologist. If I have the big picture, maybe I can help." "I thought you'd say that. Well, history first, and settle yourself because it is a big picture and not a pretty one. This planet was settled directly from Earth in the year # After Space, almost eight hundred years ago. It seemed ideal -- native protein was actually superior to Earth protein in human metabolism. Easy climate, geophysically stable, no diseases -- but planetology was not much of a science in those days. "The colony won political independence in # A.S. It had a thriving trade in luxury foods, mostly stomper egg concentrates -- freight was dear then. Settlements radiated out from Car Truro across the plains. Food was to be had for the taking in the mild climate and it was a kind of paradise. Paradise !" The old man's voice rang hard on the last word and Cole stiffened. Bidgrass went on. "Early in the third century our social scientists began to worry about the unnatural way the culture graded from the complexity of Car Truro to a simple pattern of mud huts and food gathering along the frontiers. Children of successive generations were taller than their able to use symbols. By the time a minority decided the trend should be reversed, the majority of the people could not be roused to see a danger." "Earth life is normally resistant to low-grav gigantism," Cole said. "I wonder -- " "It was all the native foods they ate, but mainly stomper egg. There are more powerful and quickeracting substances in the forest fungi, but then the population was all in the eastern grasslands, where the s tempers ranged." "I read they were a plains animal." "Yes, and harmless too, except for their eggs. Well, the minority set up a dictatorship and began cultivating Earth plants and animals. They passed laws limiting the mechanical simplicity of households and regulating diets. They took children from subnormal parents and educated and fed them in camps. But the normals were too few and the trend continued. "Shortly after mid-century the population reached the edge of the southern forest, and there many were completely wild. They drifted along the forest edge naked, without tools or fire or language or even family groupings. Their average stature was nearly eight feet. The normals knew they were losing. Can you imagine how they felt, lad?" Cole relaxed a little. "Ah... yes, I can... I imagine the fight was inside them, too." Bidgrass nodded. "Yes, they were all tainted. But they fought. They asked Earth for help and learned that Earth regarded them as tyrants oppressing a simple, natural folk. The economy broke down and more had to be imported. The only way to pay was in stomper egg exports. In spite of that, in about the year #, they decided to restrict the stompers to the western part of the grasslands, thousands of miles beyond the human range. piskies and grown stompers. They killtal off the great, stupid herds of darv cattle on which the stompers fed. The stompers that survived became wary and hostile, good at hidoff the eastern darv herds broke them and in a generation they vanished from the eastern plains. Things seemed to improve and they thought the tide was turned. Then, in the year #, came what our bards now call the Black Learning." "Bards?" Cole said. He drained his coffee cup. "Morgan could sing you this history to shiver the flesh on your bones," the old man said, pouringmore coffee. "What I am telling you is nowhere written down, but it is engraved in thousands of hearts. Well, to go on. "We knew some of the stompers had gone into the southern forest -- you see, they have to incubate their eggs in direct sunlight and we kept finding them along the forest edge. But we had assumed they were eating the snakes and slugs and fungi native to the forest floor. Now we learned that a large population of wild humans had grown up unknown to us in the deep forest -- and the stompers were eating them. "You have seen our forests from a distance, lad. Do you realize how impossible it is to patrol them? We hadn't the men, money or machines for it. We appealed, and learned we would get no help from any planet in Carina sector except for pay. But the egg market fell off, and our income with it. Ships did come, however, small ones in stealth, to ground along the forest edge and capture the young women of the wild people." Cole struck the table. "How rotten... !" His voice failed. Bidgrass nodded. "We call that the Lesser Shame. The young women were without personality or language, yet tractable and responsive to affection. They were flawless in health and physique, and eight feet tall. They could be sold for fantastic prices on loosely organized frontier planets and yes, even to Earth, as we learned. Something dark in a man responds to that combination. You feel it as I speak -- no, don't protest, I know. Wc had long had that trouble among our own people." "Did my own people of Belconti -- " Again Cole's voice failed. He brushed back his red hair angrily. "Belconti was new then, still a colony. Well, that was the help we got. We hadn't the power to fight stompers, let alone slave raiders. But the Galactic Patrol was just getting organized and the sector admiral agreed to keep a ship in orbit blockading us. Wc broke oIT all contact except with Tristan, and the Patrol let only one freight line come through to handle our offplanet trade. It was then wc began to hate the other planets. We call it the Turning Away. "Now we are forgotten, almost a myth. The Patrol ship has been gone since two hundred years ago. But we remember." "I wish I'd known this," Cole said. "Mr. Bidgrass, things are greatly changed in Carina sector -- " Bidgrass held up his hand. "I know, lad. That's why you're here, and I'll come to it. But let me go on. Early in the fifth century we decided to exterminate the stumpers altogether and in two decades killed off all the darv cattle. But the stompers went into the forests in the south and west and from there came out to raid the plains. Not to kill, but to carry off normal and semi-wild people into the forest for breeding stock. A stomper's wing is more flexible than a hand. One of them can carry half a dozen men and women and run a thousand miles in a day. Some fungi in the forest can dull a man in an hour and take his mind in a week. Few who were carried in ever came out again. "This went on, lad, for centuries. From our fortified towns and hunting camps we ranged along the forest edge like wolves. The stompers must lay their eggs in direct sunlight. That forced them out where we could get at them, into clearings and uplands and along the forest edge. We killed all we could. "We found rhythms in their life pattern keyed lo our four moons. When the three lady moons form a tall triangle, the stompers group in the open to mill and dance and sing. About every three months this happens over several days and in old times it was the peak raid season. It was also our chance to kill. The people call the configuration the House of the Maidens." Cole nodded vigorously. "I remember that. Strange how lunar periodicity is bionative in every planet having a moon." "It saved us here, praise Morwenna, but once almost destroyed us. There is a longer, sixty-two year cycle called the Nights of Hoggy Darn. Them the red moon passes through the House of the Maidens artd the stompers go completely berserk. The first one after the war was joined fully, in #, caught us unprepared and cost us more than three-fourths of our normal population in the week that we remember as the Great Taking. We were thrown back into Car Truro for decades and the stompers came back on the plains. They snatched people from the streets of Car Truro itself. That we call the Dark Time. # The old man's craggy face shadowed with sorrow and he sighed, leaning back. Cole opened his mouth but Bidgrass leaned forward again, new, fierce energy in his voice. "We rallied and came back. We fought from the air and killed them in large numbers when we caught them in the open on Maiden nights. We drove them back off the plains and harried them along the forest edges and in the upland clearings where they came to lay eggs. We gathered all the eggs we could find. They defended their eggs and caused us steady losses. But we fought. "We built our strategy on the Maidens and in time we drove the enemy out of the southern forest and into the west. Then we crowded him into Lundy Peninsula, made it a sanctuary for a hundred years to draw him in. When I was your age we fought out the last Nights of Hoggy Darn a few miles east of here. Ten years later we finished Bidgrass Station and the barrier and the continent was free of stompers." Cole shifted his chair to get the sun off his neck. "I hardly know what to say," he began, but Bidgrass raised his hand. "I've more to tell you, that you must know. By the late seventh century things were normal around Car Truro as regards regression. We began a pilot program of reclamation. The egg hunters captured wild people along the forest edge, still do. But some are beyond saving, and those they kill. We have to pen them like animals at first, but they can be trained to work in the fields, and for a long time now we have hail few machines except what we need for war. Their children, on an Earth diet, come back toward normal in size and intelligence. The fourth and fifth generations are normal enough to join in the war. But war has always come first and wc have never been able to spare many normals for reclamation work. "Even so, ex-wilds make up more than half our normal population now. That's about forty thousand; there arc nearly a hundred thousand on the reclamation ladder, mostly around Car Truro. The exwilds have a queer, poetic strain, and mainly through them we've developed a sort of religion along the way. It helps the subnormals who are so powerfully drawn to run back to the forests. It's a strange mixture of poetry and prophecy, but it's breath of life to the exwilds. I guess I pretty well believe it myself and even you believe some of it." Cole looked his question, hitching his chair nearer the table. 'Yes, your notion of the greater animal, critical biomass, that you spoke of. Wc speak of Grandfather Stomper and wc are trying to kill him. He is trying to enslave Grandfather Man. The whole purpose and meaning of human life, to an ex-wild, is to kill Grandfather Stomper and then to reclaim Grandfather Man from the forest. You would have to hear Morgan sing it to appreciate how deeply they feel that, lad." "I feel it, a little. I understand Morgan now, I think. He's an exwild, isn't he?" "Yes, and our master bard. In some ways he has more power than I." Cole got up. "Mind if I pull a curtain? That sun is hot." "No, go ahead. Our coffee is cold," the old man said, rising too. "I'll ask lor a fresh pot." Seated again in the shaded room, Bidgrass resumed, "There's not much more. After the barrier was up it seemed as if Grandfather Stomper knew his time was running out. Don't laugh now. Individual stompers don't have intelligence, symbol-using, that is, as far as we know. But they changed from plains to forest. They learned to practise a gruesome kind of animal husbandry -- oh, I could tell you things. Something had to figure it out." "I'm not laughing," Cole said. "You're talking sound ecology. Go  on. "Well, they began laying eggs right along the barrier and didn't try to defend them. Wc picked up hundreds, even thousands, every day. The people said Grandfather Stomper was trying to make peace, to pay rent on Lundy Lores t. And maybe he was. "But we spat in his face. We gathered his tribute and still took all the eggs we could find in the inland clearings. We killed every stomper we saw. Then, for the first time I think, Grandfather Stomper knew it was war to the death. He began to fight as never before. Where once a stomper would carry a captured egg hunter a hundred miles into the forest and turn him loose, now it killed out of hand. They began making mass attacks on the station and they didn't come to capture, they came to kill. So it has gone for forty years now." The old man's Voice changed, less fierce, more solemn. He sat up straight. "Lundy Forest is near eight hundred thousand square miles. No wild humans are in it or how many scores of thousands of stomper. But this I knew long before you came to tell me about critical biomass: Grandfather Stompcr is very near to death. He ruled this planet me for near : thousand, but his time is come. "Don't laugh, lad, at what I am about to say now. Mass belief, blind faith over centuries of people like our ex-wilds and semi-wilds, can do strange things. To them and even to myself I re present Grandfather Man, and from them a power comes into me that is more than myself. I know in a direct way that in the Nights of Hoggy Darn to come I will at long  last kill Grandfather Stomper and the war will be won. That time is only eight weeks away." "Then Til still be here. Grand -- Mr. Bidgrass, I want to fight with you." "You may and welcome, lad. Must, even, to redeem yourself. Because, for what you know now, your life is forfeit if the ex-wilds suspect." "Why so? Are you not proud -- " Cole haif stood and Bidgrass waved him down. "Consider, lad. For centuries across the inhabited planets people of wealth and influence have been eating stomper egg, serving it at state banquets. But now you know it is human flesh at one remove. How will they feel toward us when they learn that?" "How should they feel? Man has to be consumed at some trophic level. His substance is as much in the biogeochemical cycles as that of a pig or a chicken. I suppose we do feel he should cap the end of a food chain and not short-cycle through himself, but I'm damned if I'm horrified -- " "Any non-ecologist would be. You know that." The giant maid came in with a pot of coITee and clean cups. Bidgrass poured and both men sipped in silence. Then Bidgrass said slowly, "Do you know what the people here call outworlders? Cannibals! For centuries we have had the feeling that we have been selling our own flesh to the outworlds in exchange for the weapons to free Grandfather Man." He stood up, towering over Cole, and his voice deepened. "It has left bone-deep marks: of guilt, for making the outworlders unknowing cannibals ; of hatred, because we feel the outworlds left us no choice. And shame, lad, deep, deep shame, more than a man can bear, to have been degraded to food animals here in our forests and across the opulent tables of the other planets. Morgan is only second-generation normal -- his father was killed beside me, last Hoggy Darn. If Morgan knew you had learned our secret he would kill you out of hand. I could not stop him. Do you understand now why wc didn't want you until next Gorbals? Do you see into the hell you have been skating over?" Cole nodded and rubbed his chin. "Yes, I do. But I don't despise Morgan, I think I love him. On Belconti, Grandfather Man is mainly concerned to titillate his own appetites, but here, well... how do I feel it?... I think what you have just told me makes me more proud to be a man than I have ever been before. I will carry through the deception of Belconti University with all my heart. Can't Morgan understand that?" "Yes, and kill you anyway. Because you know . You will not lightly be forgiven that." Cole shook his head helplessly. "Well dammit then -- " "Now, now, there's a way out," Bidgrass said, sitting down again. "The prophecies all foretell a change of heart after Grandfather Stomper dies. They speak of joy, love, good feeling. Morgan did agree to your coming here -- he wants to hide the past as much as I do and lie could see the value of my plan. In the time of good feeling I hope he will accept you." "I hope so too," Cole said. "Morgan is a strange man. Why is Pia so afraid of him?" "I'll tell you that, lad -- maybe it will help you to appreciate your own danger. Some few of us arc educated on Tristan. Twenty-three years ago my younger brother took my niece Flada there. She ran away and married a Tristanian named Ralph Vignoli. My brother persuaded them to come back and live at our installation there, and Ralph swore to keep secret the little he knew. "The ex-wilds of New Cornwall kept wanting Ralph to come here so they could be sure of the secret. He kept refusing and finally they sent an emissary to kill him. My brother was killed protecting him. I stepped in then with a compromise, persuaded Ralph to come here for the sake of his wife and daughter. Pia was seven at the time. "Ralph was a good man and fought well in battles, but two years later Morgan and some others came to the house in my absence and took him away. They took him to a clearing in Lundy Forest, where the stompers come to lay eggs, stripped ofT his clothing and left him. That was so the stompers would not take him for an egg hunter and kill him outright, but would carry him into the forest like they do with strayed wild stock. Morgan said the command came to him in a dream. "I think Pia feels she is partly responsible for Ralph's death. I think she sometimes fears Morgan will dream about her, her Tristanian blood..." "Poor Pia," Cole said softly. "These years of grief and fear..." "They'll be ended come Hoggy Darn again, Morwenna grant. Don't you grieve her with your death too, lad. Stay close to the house, in the house." Bidgrass rose and gulped the last of his coffee standing. "I must go, T in laic," he said, more cheerfully than Cole had ever heard his voice. "I have a conference with General Arscoate, our military leader, whom you'll meet soon." He went out. Cole went out too, thoughts wrestling with feelings, looking for Pia. Cole took his meals with the family except when there were guests not in Bidgrass' confidence. The doors into the main house remained unlocked and he saw much of Pia, but she seemed unexpectedly elusive and remote. Cole, busy with his report to Bclconti University, had little time to wonder about it. He faked statistics wholesale and cited dozens of nonexistent New Cornish authorities. To his real data indicating critical biomass he added imaginary values for the parameters of climate, range, longevity, fertility period and Ruhan indices to get an estimated figure. Then he faked field census reports going back fifty years, and drew a curve dipping below critical ten years before his arrival. He made the latest field census show new biomass fortytwo percent below critical and juggled figures to make the curve extrapolate to zero in twelve more years. It pained him in his heart to leave out the curious inverse reproduction data. But it was a masterpiece of deception that should put the seal on his doctorate, and because it reported the extinction of a planetary dominant, he knew it would make the journals and the general news all through the sector. The night he finished it, working late in the library, Pia brought him milk and cookies and sat with him as he explained what he had done. "It's right," he defended himself to her against his scholar's conscience. "Humans on New Cornwall are a threatened species too. The secret must he hidden forever." "Yes," she agreed soberly. "I think if all the sector knew, the exwilds would literally die of shame and rage. Being wild is not so bad, but -- that other!" She shuddered under her gray dress. "Pia, sometimes I feel you're still avoiding me. Surely now it's all right and genuine between us." She smiled sadly. "I'll bring you trouble, with Morgan. Father came to New Cornwall because of me." "But I didn't. I've been thinking I may stay, partly because of you. You've been afraid so long it's habitual." "Strangely, Flinter, I don't feel it as fear any more. It's like bowing with sadness, my strength to run is gone. My old dreams -- Morgan coming for me -- I have them every night now." "Morgan! Always Morgan!" She shook her head and smiled faintly. "He has a dark, poetic power. He is what he is, just like the stompers. I feel... not hate, not even fear... a kind of dread' # He stroked the back of her hand and she pulled it away. "An old song runs through my head," she went on. "A prophecy that Grandfather Stomper cannot be killed while outworld blood pumps through any heart on the planet. I feel like my own enemy, like... like your enemy. You should not have come until next G orb ah. Flinter, stay away from me!" He talked soothingly, to little avail. When they parted he said heartily, "Forget those silly prophecies, Pia. I'll look out for you . # Privately, he wondered how. Cole sat beside Pia and across the food-laden table from General Arscoate, a large pinkfa cod man in middle life. "It's an old and proven strategy, Mr. Cole," the general explained. "When Hoggy Darn starts we will harass the enemy from the air in all but one of the fourteen sizable open spaces in Lundy Forest. That one is Emrys Upland, the largest. They will concentrate in Emrys, more each night, until the climactic night of peak frenzy. Then we come down with all the men and women we can muster and we kill. We may go but Grandfather Stomper will die on that night." "Why not kill from the air?" "More firepower on the ground. I can only lift ninety-four flyers all told. But I will shuttle twenty thousand fighting men into Emrys in an hour or two on the big night." "So quickly? How can you?" Cole laid down his fork. "They will be waiting in the forest top all around the periphery, in places where we are already building weapons dumps. In the first days of harrying, we will stage in the fighters." "Morgan will visit each group in the forest top and sing our history," Bidgrass said from the head of the table. "On the evening of the climactic night, as Hoggy Darn rises, they will take a sacramental meal of stomper egg. At no other time is it eaten on this planet." Mrs. Vignoli looked down. "Garth!" Arscoate said. "The lad must know, must take it with us," Bidgrass said. "Lad, the air is that the people need, to kill personally, with their feet on the ground. So our poetry has always described that last, great fight. I must personally kill Grandfather Stomper." Cole toyed with his knife. "But he is only a metaphor, a totem image -- " "The people believe in an actual individual who is the stomper counterpart of Garth here," the general broke in. "You know, Mr. Cole, the stoinpers wc kill ordinarily are all females. The males are smaller, with a white crest, and they keep to the deep forest except on Iloggy Darn nights. Maybe the frenzy then has something to do with mating -- no one. knows. But Garlh will kill the largest male he can find. The people, and I expect Garth and I as well, are going to believe that he has killed Grandfather Stomper in person." The general sipped water and looked sternly over his glass at Cole. Cole glanced at Pia, who seemed lost in a dream of her own,, not there to them. "I see. A symbol," he agreed. "Not the less real," Arscoate said tartly. "Symbols both mean and are. Garth here is a symbol too and that is why, old as lie is, he must be in the thick of it. He is like the ancient battle flags of romantic prespace history. People before now have actually seen Grandfather Stomper. I am not a superstitious backworlder, Mr. Cole, but -- " Cole raised a placatory hand. "I know you are not, general. Forgive me if I seemed to suggest it." "Let's have wine," Bid grass said, pushing back his chair. "Wr'll take it in the parlor and Pia canning for us." When General Arscoate said goodnight he told Cole not to worry, that he would have reliable guards at the manor gate during Garth Bidgrass' absence in Car Truro. "I meant to tell you and Pia in the morning, lad," Bidgrass said. "Arscoate and I must go to Car Truro. There's heartburning there over who gets to fight and who must stay behind. It will be only  two days." spent most of it writing the covering letter for his report and phrasing his resignation from the university field staff. He wrote personal letters to his uncle and a few friends. After dinner he finally signed the official letters and took the completed report to Bidgrass # desk. Then he went to bed and slept soundly. Pia wakened him with frantic shaking. "Dress quickly, Flinter. The guard at the gate was just changed and it's not time. # She darted out to the hall window while he struggled with clothing, then back again. "Quickly, darling! Morgan's crossing the garden, with men. Follow me." She led him through the kitchen and out a pantry window, then stooping along the base of a hedge to where a flowering tree overshadowed the garden wall. "I planned this, out of sight of guard posts, when I was a little girl," she whispered. "I always knew -- over, Flinter, quickly!" Outside was rough ground, a road, a wide field of cabbages and then the barrier. Veiled Annis rode high and bluish in the clear sky. They crossed the field in soaring leaps, and shouts pursued them. The girl ran north a hundred yards behind the shadowy buttresses and squeezed through a narrow crack between two huge timber baulks. Cole barely made it, skinning his shoulders. "I found this too when I was a little girl," Pia whispered. "I had to enlarge it when my hips grew, but only just enough. Morwenna grant they're all too big!" "Morgan is, for sure," Cole said, rubbing his shoulder. "Pia, I hate to run." "We must still run. My old plan was to reach here unseen, but now they know and they'll come over the wall in flyers. We'll have to hide in the thick brush near the forest edge until Uncle Garth returns. She pulled a basket out of the shadows. "Food," she said. "I brought it last night." He carried the basket and they raced across the half-mile belt to concealment among high shrubbery and enormous mounds of fungi. Flyers with floodlights came low along the wall and others quartered the clearing. Cole and Pia stole nearer to the forest edge, into its shadow. They did not sleep. Once he asked, "How about stampers?" "They're a chance," she whispered. "Morgan's sure . # With daylight they saw four flyers patrolling instead of the usual one. At their backs colossal blackish-gray, deeply rugose tree trunks eighty feet in diameter rose up and up without a branch for many hundreds of feet. Then branches jutted out enormously and the colorful cascade of forest-top epiphytes came down the side and hung over their heads a thousand feet above. Pia opened the food basket and they ate, seated on a bank. She wore her brown dress, her finest, he had learned, and she had new red shoes. She was quiet, as if tranced. Cole remembered the picnic on the forest top, the secret island of beauty and innocence, and his heart stirred. He saw that the food basket was the same one. He did not tell her his thoughts. They talked of trivial things or were silent for long periods. He held her hand. Once she roused herself to say, "Tomorrow, about this time, Uncle Garth will come looking for us." Shortly after, she gasped and caught his arm, pointing. He peered, finally made a gestalt of broken outlines through the shrubbery. It was a stomper, swinging its head nervously. "It smells us," she whispered. "Oh Flinter, forgive me darling. Take off your clothes, quickly ! # She undressed rapidly and hid her clothes. Cole undressed too, fear prickling his skin, remembering what Bidgrass had told him. The stomper moved nearer in a crackle of brush and stopped again. Man and girl knelt trembling under a fan of red-orange fungus. The girl broke off a piece and motioned the man to do the same. "When it comes, pretend to eat," she breathed, almost inaudibly. "Don't look up and don't say a word. Morwenna be with us now." The stomper's shadow fell across them. The man's skin prickled and sweat sprang out. He looked at the girl and she was pale but not tense, munching on her piece of fungus. She clicked her teeth faintly and he knew it was a signal. He ate. The stomper lifted the man by his right shoulder. It was like two fingers in a mitten holding him three times his own height off the ground. He saw the beak and the eye and his sight dimmed in anguish. Then the right wing reached down and nipped the left shoulder of the rosy girlbody placidly crouching there. It swung her up to face the man momentarily under the great beak and the tricorn eye, and their own eyes met. Very faintly she smiled and her eyes tried desperately to say, "I'm sorry" and "Goodbye, Flinter." His eyes cried in agony "No! No! I will not have it so!" Then the two-fingered mitten became a nine-fingered mitten lapping him in darkness that bounced and swayed and he knew that the stomper was running into Lundy Forest. The wing was smooth and warm but not soft, and it smelled of cinnamon and sandalwood. The odor overpowered him and the man lapsed into stupor. The man woke into a fantastic dream. Luminous surfaces stretched up to be lost in gloom, with columns of darkness between. The spongy ground on which lie lay shone with faint blue light. Luminous, slanting walls criss-crossed in front of him. Close at hand, behind and to the right, enormous bracket fungi ascended into darkness in ten-foot steps that supported a profusion of higher order fungi in many bizarre shapes. He stood up and he was alone. He climbed over a slanting rootbuttress and saw her lying there. He called' her name and she rose lightly and came to him. Radiant face, dimpled arms, round breasts, cradling hips: his woman. They embraced without shame and she cried thanks to Morwenna. He said, "People have come out of the forest. What are the rules?" "We must cat only the seeds of the pure white fungus -- that's the least dangerous. We must walk and walk to keep our bodies so tired and hungry that they use it all. We must keep to a straight line." "We'll live," he said. "Outside among our people, with our minds whole. We'll alternate left and right each time we round a tree, to hold our straight line. We'll come out somewhere." "I will follow. May Morwenna go with us." The fantastic journey wound over great gnarled roots and buttresses fusing and intermingling until it seemed that the root-complex was one unthinkably vast organism with many trunksoaring half-seen into endless darkness. Time had no feeling there. Space was a bubble of ghostly light a man could leap across. Could leap and did, over and over, the woman following. The man climbed a curiously regular, whitish root higher than his head and it writhed. Then, swaying back along its length, came a great serpent head ; with luminous ovoid eves. While the man crouched in horror, waving the woman back, the monstrous jaws gaped and the teeth were blunt choppers and grinders, weirdly human looking. They hit hugely into a bracket fungus and worried at it. Man and woman hurried on. Strength waned. The woman fell behind. The man turned back to her and the light was failing. The blue mold was black, the luminous panels more ghostly. "It's night. Shall we sleep?" he asked. "It's just come day," the woman said, pointing upward. He looked up. Far above, where had been gloom, hung a pinkishgreen, opalescent haze of light. Parallel lines of tree trunks converged through it to be lost in nebulosity. "Daylight overpowers the luminous fungi," she said. "We sleep, then walk again. Shall vve find food?' # "No. We must always go to sleep hungry so we will wake again." They looked, until tired out, for a place of shelter. They slept, locked together in the cranny of a massive buttress. The man dreamed of his tame homeworld. mare. In a twenty-foot fangrove of the white fungus they combed handfuls of black spores out of gill slots. The birdshot-sized spores had a pleasant, nutty flavor. With the strength more walking. Use it, use it, burn the poison. Day faded above, and luminous night below came back to light the way. A rocky ledge and another, and then a shallow ravine with a black stream cascading. 'They drank and the man said, "We'll follow it, find an upland clearing." They heard rapid motion and crouched unbreathing while a stomper minced hv up ahead. It had a white cresl. On and on, fal isi ici the whip for greater fatigue and salvation at the end of endurance. They passed wild humans. A statuesque woman with dull eyes and yellow hah to her ankles, placidly feeding. Babies big as four-year-old normals, by themselves, grazing on finger-shaped fungi. An enormous human, fourteen feet tall, fat-enfolded, too ponderous to stand even in low gravity, crawling through fungus beds. The man could not tell its sex. On and on, sleep and eat and travel and sleep, darkness above or darkness below, outside of time. The stream lost, found again, sourcing out finally under a great rock. And there, lodged in a black sandbank, the man found a human thigh bone half his own height. He scoured off the water mold with sand. He was armed. The man walked ahead clutching his thigh bone, and the woman followed. They slept clasped together naked all three, man woman and thigh bone. Stampers passed them and they crouched in sham feeding. The man prayed without words, both or neither . And hatred grew in him. Snakes and giant slugs and the beautiful, gigantic, mindless wild humans, again and again, a familiar part of nightmare. The fat and truly enormous humans; and the man learned they had been male once. He remembered from far away where time was linear the voice of Grandfather Man: Some are beyond saving , and those they kill And a stomper passed, white crested, and far ahead a human voice cried out in wordless pain and protest. The man was minded to deviate from his line for fear of what they might see, but he did not. When they came on the boy, larger than the man but beardless and without formed muscles, the man looked at the tears dropping from the dull eyes and the blood dropping from the mutilation and killed him with the thigh bone. Some are beyond saving . And the hatred in him flamed to whiteness. On and on, day above and day below in recurrent clash of lights. A white crested stomper paused and looked at them, crouched apart and trembling. The man felt the deepest, most anguished fear of all and beneath it, hatred surged until his teeth ached. On and on. The man's stubble softened into beard, his hair touched his ears. On and on. The land sloped upward and became rocky. The trees became smaller and wider spaced so that whole trunks were visible and the light of upper day descended. A patch of blue sky, then more as they ran shouting with gladness, and a bare mountain crest reared in the distance. They embraced in wild joy and the woman cried, "Thank you, oh loveliest Morwcnna!" "Pia, we're human again," Cole said. "We're back in the world. And I love you." Fearful of stompers, they moved rapidly away from the forest over steadily rising ground. The growth became more sparse, the ground more rocky, and near eveningthey crossed a wide moorland covered with coarse grass and scattered blocks of stone. Ahead a long, low fault scarp bounded it and there they found a cave tunneled into the rock, too narrow for a stomper. At last they felt safe. Morwcnna rode silvery above the distant forest. Water trickled from the cave which widened inlo a squaredoff chamber in which the water spilled over the rim of a basin that looked cut with hands. Underfoot were small stone cylinders of various lengths and as his eyes adjusted Cole saw that they were drill cores. "Prospectors made this," be told Pia, "in the old, innocent days when they still hoped to find heavy metals' Then he saw the graven initials, T.C.B., and the date, # A.S. They ate red berries growing in their dooryard, gathered grass for a bed and slept in a great weariness. Next day and the next they ate red berries and fleshy, purple ground fruits and slept, gaining strength. Secure in their cave mouth they watched stompers cross the moorland. When night fell they gazed at the bunched moons, but the three Maidens did not quite form a house and Hoggy Darn was still pursuing them. "A few days," Pia said. "If this isn't Emrys Upland, Arscoatc will kill us with fire mist." She nodded. More stompers crossed the moorland, some white crested. They moved there randomly at night and from the forest came a far-off sound of stampers singing. The Maidens formed a house and Hoggy Darn grazed the side of it before they fled. To south and west faint rose glowed in the night sky. "Fire mist," Pia said. "The nights of harrying have begun. Oh Flinter, if this is really Emrys Upland it will be perfect." "What will?" "You -- us -- oh, I can't say yet." "Secrets, Pia? Still secrets? Between us?" "You'll know soon, Flinter. I mustn't spoil it." The love in her eyes was tinged with a strangeness. She sought his arms and hid her face in his shoulder. Stompers on the moorland all day so they dared not leave the cave. Flyers streaking high overhead, scouting. "Pia, I believe this is Emrys Upland. I'll help after all with the "You will help, Flinter." "Afterward I'll take you to Belconti." "We will never see Bclconti, Flinter." The strangeness in her eyes troubled him. He could not kiss it away. Stompers crowding the moorland all night with their dancing, their vast singing coming to the cave from all round the compass. Rose banks distant in the night sky and Hoggy Darn crossing the House of the Maidens. Red Hoggy Darn, still lagging, still not catching it perfectly upright. The strangeness of Pia. The waiting, clutching a polished thigh bone.mighty war song of the stompers went up unbearably, as the man had heard it that once before, and fire mist boiled along the distant mountains. Flyers shuttled across the sky, dropped, rose again. Blasters ripped the night with ion-pencils. Hoggy Darn gleamed redly on the threshold of the House of the Maidens that stood almost upright and perfect with silvery Morwenna at the vertex. Flyers blasted clearings in the throng of stompers, and grounded. Men boiled out of them, setting up Corbin powercasters here, there, another place, fighting as soon as their feet hit ground. The man stood up and brandished the thigh bone. "I must go down and fight. Wait here." "I must go too," the girl said calmly. "Yes, you must," he agreed. "Gome along." Stompers rushed by them and bounded over their heads and did not harm them. Blastertorn stompers fell heavily beside them, threshing and snapping, and they were not touched. Men lowered weapons to point at the man and girl, shouting to one another out of mazed faces silently in the whelming music of the stomper chorus. Man and girl walked on. Unharmed through the forest of singing, leaping shapes, hand in hand through a screen of fighting men that parted to admit them, they walked into the light of a glowing Corbin where a tall, gaunt old man stood watching their approach. The feeling of exalted unreality began to lift from Cole. "Grandfather, give us blasters," he shouted. "We want to fight." "The power is on you, lad, and you only half know it," the old man shouted back. "Stand here by the Corbin. Your fight is not yet." Tears stood in the fierce old eyes. Across the. moorland the fighting raged. Islands of men and women grouped round their Corbins held back the booming, chaotic sea of stompers that surged against them from all sides. Dikes of dead and dying grew up, men and stompers mingled. The flyers shuttled down and up again and more islands of men took shape. Hoggy Darn crossed the threshold and the savage war song of the stompers shook the night sky. In a lull Morgan came in to the Corbin to change the wave track on his blaster. His face was a mask of iron joy and his eyes blazed. "Morgan, if we are both alive after, I will kill you!" Cole shouted. "No," Morgan rumbled. "You have been into the forest and come out again. It took you three weeks. It took me three hundred years. Clasp hands, my brother in hatred." "Yes, brother in hatred." The exalted unreality began coming back strongly. "I want a blaster!" he howled at Morgan. "No, brother in hatred, your fight is not yet." Morgan rejoined the battle, the ring of men standing braced in blaster harness fifty yards away, ripping down with interweaving ion-pencils the great forms leaping inward. Man and girl held hands and watched. To the left trouble came to a nearby island. Stompers converged from all sides, abandoning the other attacks, impossibly many. They overran the defenders, attacking not them but the powercastcr behind them, and piled up until the Corbin's blue-violet glare was hidden. A great blossoming of flame tore the pile of stompers apart, but the Corbin was dark. "They blew out the power banks," Pia said. "They've never known to do that before. Now the men still living have only pack charges." It was a new tactic, a deathhour flash of insight for Grandfather Stomper. Across the moor, island after island went dark and the war song grew in savage exultation, but the man thought it dwindled in total volume. Then it was their own turn. Cole and Pia crouched away from the Corbin in the lee of a stone block and two still-twitching stompers. Beside them Morgan and Bidgrass fired steadily at the shapes hurtling above. When the Corbin blew, a wave of stinking heat rolled over them. All around, survivors struggled to their feet, using flame pistols to head-shoot wounded stompers, digging out and connecting emergency pack charges to their blasters. They wen' pitifully few and their new, dark island was thirty feet across. The moor seemed dark with only the red of flame pistols and the violet flickering of power pack blasters. It seemed to heave randomly like a sluggish sea with the seen struggles of dying stompers and the felt struggles of lesser human bodies. Thinned now, stompers attacked singly or in small groups. Blasters flickered and ripped and went darkly silent as power packs discharged. The red of shortrange flame pistols replaced them. But across the fault scarp ridge the tumult swelled to new heights and Corbin after Corbin there flamed out of existence in a bloom of rosepurple against the skyline. In a lull Bidgrass si touted to Morgan, "That's costing them more than they have to give, over there. Listen. Can you hear it?" "Yes, Father in Hatred," Morgan said. "They will break soon." "Yes. when Arscoalc lays the fire mist. They will come through here. I have one charge left." "I have two, Father in Hatred. Change packs with me." Cole found his voice and his senses once more. "I must find a weapon! Grandfather, give me your flame pistol!" "Soon, lad. Soon now. Let the power take you," the old man soothed. Stompers streamed over the moor again and the fighting flared up. The war song beat against the man's ears so that he drew the girl nearer and shook the thigh bone. Blaster fire flickered out altogether and the red blooming of flame pistols weakened. But more and more stompers streamed past without attacking. Then the man saw fire mist plume lazily in the east, point after point coalescing all along the forest edge. "Now!" shouted a great voice beside him. "Now, lad!" It was old Bidgrass, striding out like a giant, blaster leveled in its carrying harness. The shout released Cole and he saw it far off, coming down the scrap rubble to the moor. Huger than any, white crest thirty feet above the ground, Grandfather Stomper. The war song roared insanely over the moor. Hoggy Darn gleamed heart-midst of the three lady moons. The grim old man aimed and fired. The great bird-shape staggered and came on, left wing trailing. The old man waited until it was nearly on top of him and fired again. The stomper jerked its head and the boll shattered the great tripart beak but did not kill it. With the right mitten-wing it reached down and swung its adversary twenty feet up, held him and haggled at him with its stumps of beak. The old man's free right arm flailed wildly. Cole beat the stamper's leg with the thigh bone and howled in hatred. Then he saw the flame pistol lying where it had fallen from the holster. He picked it up, but the power was on him again and he did not use it. He hurled the thigh bone at the stamper's head, diverting it for a second, and tossed the pistol to old Bidgrass. He knew they could not fail. The old man caught the pistol. When the great head swung back he held the muzzle against the tricorn eye and fired. Red plasma-jet burned into the brain behind it. The stomper bounded once in the air, dropped its slayer, ran three steps and collapsed. The stomper song changed suddenly. It became a mournful lament, a dying into grieving subsonics. Cole knew that note. He had heard it from the stompers in the stone-floored pen when the butchers were hacking off their heads. He knew that Grandfather Stomper was dead forever, after seven hundred years of war. Flyers crossed above, blasters were still at work across the ridge, but the war was ended. The power, whatever that sense of exalted unreality might be, left Cole; and he felt naked and ridiculous and wondered what he was doing there. Then he saw the girl bending above Garth Bidgrass and regained control of himself. The strong old man was smiling wearily. "We've won the war, lad," he said. "The next task is yours.' 'Til help you," Cole said. "You'll lead. Oh, Til live, but not for long. Centuries ago, lad, there was a prophecy, and until tonight people like myself and Arscoate thought it was only poetry, however literally Morgan and the other exwilds took it." "What was it?" "It foretells that on the night Grandfather Stomper shall die the new Grandfather Man will come naked out of the forest with his beautiful wife and armed with a thigh bone, and that he will lead us in the even greater task of reclamation that comes after. Your ritual title of address is 'Father in Love lad, and I'm just a broken old man now. Take up the burden." Cole's throat swelled, choking speech for a moment. #, through October, # -- and may be obtained from the Circulation Dept, at # # each. But -- if you subscribe to IF for # issues (#), your choice of any two back issues will be mailed to you as a gift! First coine, first served! Write now to: IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. The tale of a Martian and three Communists , told with tongue firmly in cheek . the top of a granite cJifF. In order to enjoy the breeze better he had taken on the shape of a small fir tree. The wind always felt very pleasant through non-deciduous needles. BY cordwainer smith At the Ixjtlom of the dilT stood an American, the first tiie Martian had ever seen. The American extracted from his pocket a fantastically ingenious device. It was a small metal box with a nozzle which lifted up and produced an immediate flame. From this miraculous device the American readily lit a tube of blissdiving herbs. The Martian understood that these were called cigarettes by the Americans. As the American finished lighting his cigarette, the Martian changed his shape to that of a fifteen-foot, redfaced, black-whiskered Chinese demagogue, and shouted to the American in English, "Hello, friend!" The American looked up and almost dropped his teeth. The Martian stepped off the clifT and floated gently down toward the American, approaching slowly so as not to affright him too much. Nevertheless, the American did seem to be concerned, because he said, "You're not real, arc you? You can't be. Or can you?" Modestly the Martian looked into the mind of the American and realized that fifteen-foot Chinese demagogues were not reassuring visual images in an everyday American psychology. He peeked modestly into the mind of the American, seeking a reassuring image. The first image he saw was that of the American's mother, so the Martian promptly changed into the form of the American's mother and answered, "What is real, darling?" With this the American turned slightly green and put his hand over his eyes. The Martian looked once again into the mind of the American and saw a slightly confused image. When the American opened his eyes, the Martian had taken on the form of a Red Cross girl halfway through a strip-lease act. Although the maneuver was designed to be pleasant, the American was not reassured. His fear began to change into anger and he said. "What the hell arc you?" The Martian gave up trying to be obliging. He changed himself into a Chinese Nationalist major general with an Oxford education and said in a distinct British accent, "I'm by way of being one of the local characters, a bit on the Supernatural side, you know. I do hope you do not mind. Western science is so wonderful that. I had to examine that fantastic machine you have in your hand. Would you like to chat a bit before you go on?" The Martian caught a confused glimpse of images in the American's mind. They seemed to be concerned with something called prohibition , something else called "on the wagon," and the reiterated question, "How the hell did I get here?" Meanwhile the Martian examined the lighter. He handed it back to the American, who looked stunned. "Very fine magic," said the Martian. # # We do not do anything of that sort in these hills. I am a fairly low class Demon. I see that you are a captain in the illustrious army of the United States. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the I ,#th Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan. Do you have time for a chat?" The American looked at the Chinese Nationalist uniform. Then he looked behind him. His Chinese porters and interpreter lay like bundles of rags on the meadowy floor of the valley; they had all fainted dead away. The American held himself together long enough to say, "What is a Lohan?" "A Lohan is an Arhat," said the Martian. The American did not take in this information either and the Martian concluded that something must have been missing from the usual amenities of getting acquainted with American officers. Regretfully the Martian erased all memory of himself from the mind of the American and from the minds of the swooned Chinese. He planted himself back on the dill' top, resumed the shape of a fir tree, and woke the entire gathering. He saw the Chinese interpreter gesticulating at the American and he knew that the Chinese was saying, "There are Demons in these hills... The Martian rather liked the hearty laugh with which the American greeted this piece of superstitious Chinese ponsensc. He watched the party disappear as they went around lire miraculously beautiful little Lake of the Eight-Mouthed River. That was in #). The Martian spent many thoughtful hours trying to materialize a lighter, but he never managed to create one which did not dissolve back into some unpleasant primordial effluvium within hours. Then it was #. The Martian heard that a Soviet officer was coming, and he looked forward with genuine pleasure to making the acquaintance of another person from the miraculously up-to-date Western world. German. The vulgar Germans are about as much Russian as the Pennsylvania Dutch are Americans. They have lived in Russia for more than two hundred years, but the terrible bitterness of the Second World War led to the breakup of most of their communities. Farrer himself had fared well in this. After holding the noncommissioned rank of yefreitor in the Red Army for some years he had become a sub-lieutenant. In a technikurn he had studied geology and survey. The chief of the Soviet military mission to the province of Yunnan in the People's Republic of China had said to him, "Farrer, you are getting a real holiday. There is no danger in this trip, but we do want to get an estimate on the feasibility of building a secondary mountain highway along the rock cliffs west of Lake Pakou. I think well of you. Farrer. You have lived down your German name and you're a good Soviet citizen and officer. I know that you will not cause any trouble with our Chinese allies or with the mountain people among whom you must travel. Go easy with them, Farrer. They are very superstitious. We need their full support, but we can take our time to get it. The liberation of India is still a long way off, but when we must move to help the Indians throw off American imperialism we do not want to have any soft areas in our rear. Do not push things too hard, Farrer. Be sure that you get a good technical job done, but that you make friends with everyone other than imperialist reactionary elements." Farrer nodded very seriously. "You mean, comrade Colonel, that I must make friends with everything?" "Everything," said the colonel firmly. Farrer was young and he liked doing a bit of crusading on his own. "I'm a militant atheist, Colonel. Do I have to be pleasant to priests?" "Priests, too," said the colonel, "especially priests." The colonel looked sharply at Farrer. "You make friends with everything, everything except women. You hear me, comrade? Stay out of trouble." Farrer saluted and went back to his desk to make preparations for the trip. Three weeks later Farrer was climbing up past the small cascades which led to the River of the Golden Sands, the Chinshachiang, as the Long River or Yangtze was known locally. Beside him there trotted Party Secretary Kungsun. Kungsun was a Peking aristocrat who had joined the Communist Party in his youth. Sharp-faced, sharp-voiced, he made up for his aristocracy by being the most violent Communist in all of northwestern Yunnan. Though they had only a squad of troops and a lot of local bearers for their supplies, they did have an officer of the old People's Liberation Army to assure their military well-being and to keep an eye on Farrcr's technical competence. Comrade Captain Li, roly-poly and jolly, sweated wearily behind them as they climbed the steep cliffs. Li called after them, "If you want to be heroes of labor let's keep climbing, but if you are following sound military logistics let's all sit down and drink some tea. We can't possibly get to Pakouhu before nightfall anyhow." Kungsun looked back contemptuously. The ribbon of soldiers and bearers reached back two hundred yards, making a snake of dust clutched to the rocky slope of the mountain. From this perspective he saw the caps of the soldiers and the barrels of their rifles pointing upward toward him as they climbed. He saw the towel-wrapped heads of the liberated porters and he knew without speaking to them that they were cursing him in language just as violent as the language with which they had cursed l heir capitalist oppressors in days gone past. Far below them all the thread of the Chinshachiang was woven like a single strand of gold into the graygreen of the twilight valley floor. He spat at the army captain, "If you had your way about it, we'd still be sitting there in an inn drinking the hot tea while the men slept." The captain did not take offense. He had seen many party secretaries in his day. In the New China it was much safer to be a captain. A few i )I the party secretaries lie had known had got to be very important men. One of them had even got to Peking and had been assigned a whole Buick to himself together with three Parker #I pens. In the minds of the Communist bureaucracy this represented a state close to absolute bliss. Captain Li wanted none of that. Two square meals a day and an endless succession of patriotic farm girls, preferably chubby ones, represented his view of a wholly liberated China. Farrer' s Chinese was poor, but he got the intent of the argument. In thick but understandable mandarin he called, half laughing at them, "Come along, comrades. Wc may not make it to liar lake by nightfall, but we certainly can't bivouac on this cl ill either." He whistled, Ich halt ' (in Kamcraden through his teeth as he pulled ahead of Kungsun and led (he climb on up the mountain. Thus it was Fairer who first came over the lip of (Ik cliff and met the Martian face to face. ready. He remembered his disappointing experience with the American, and he did not want to affright his guest so as to spoil the social nature of the occasion. While Farrer had been climbing the cliff, the Martian had been climbing Farrer' s mind, chasing in and out of Farrer' s memories as happily as a squirrel chases around inside an immense oak tree. From Farrcr's own mind he had extracted a great many pleasant memories. He had then hastened back Lo the top of the cliff and had incorporated these in very substantial-looking phantoms. Farrer got halfway across the lip of the cliff before he realized what he was looking at. Two Soviet military trucks were parked in a tiny glade. Each of them had tables in front of it. One of the tables was set with a very elaborate Russian sakouska (the Soviet equivalent of a smorgasbord). The Martian hoped he would be able to keep these objects materialized while Farrer ate them, but he was afraid they might disappear each time Farrer swallowed them because the Martian was not very well acquainted with digestive processes of human beings and did not want to give his guest a violent stomachache by allowing him to deposit through his esophagus and into his stomach objects of extremely improvised and uncertain chemical makeup. The first truck had a big red flag on it with white Russian letters The second truck was even better. The Martian could see that Farrer was very fond of women, so he had materialized four very pretty Soviet girls, a blonde, a brunette, a redhead, and an albino just to make it interesting. The Martian did not trust himself to make them all speak the correctly feminine and appealing forms of the Russian language, so having materialized them he set them all in lounge chairs and put them to sleep. He had wondered what form he himself should take and decided that it would be very hospitable to assume the appearance of Mao-tze-tung. Farrer did not come on over the cliff. He stayed where he was. He looked at the Martian and the MarWe are waiting for you." "Who the hell are you?" barked Farrer. "I am a pro-Soviet Demon," said the apparent Mr. Mao-tze-tung, "and these are materialized Communist hospitality arrangements. I hope you like them." At this point both Kungsun and Li appeared. Li climbed up the left side of Farrer, Kungsun on the right. All three stopped, gaping. Kungsun recovered his wits first. He recognized Mao-tze-tung. He never passed up a chance to get acquainted with the higher command of the Communist Party. He said in a very weak, strained, incredulous voice, "Mr. Party Chairman Mao, I never thought that we would see you here in these hills, or are you you, and if you aren't you, who are you?" "I am not your party chairman," said the Martian. "I am merely a local Demon who has strong proCommunist sentiments and would like to meet companionable people like yourselves." At this point Li fainted and would have rolled back down the cliff knocking over soldiers and porters if the Martian had not reached out his left arm, concurrently changing the left arm into the shape of a python, picking up the unconscious Li and resting his body gently against the side of the picnic truck. The Soviet sleeping beauties slept on. The python turned back into an arm. Kungsun's face had turned completely white; since he was a pale and pleasant ivory color to start with, his whiteness had a very marked tinge. "I think this wang-pa is a counter-revolutionary impostor," he said weakly, "but I don't know what to do about him. I am glad that the Chinese People's Republic has a representative from the Soviet Union to instruct us in difficult party procedure." Farrer snapped, "If he is a goose, he is a Chinese goose. He is not a Russian goose. You'd better not call him that dirty name. He seems to have some powers that do work. Look at what he did lo Li." The Martian decided to show off his education and said very conciliatorily, "If I am a wang-pa you are a wang-pen" He added brightly, in the Russian language, "That's an ingrate, you know. Much worse than an illegitimate one. Do you like my shape, comrade Farrer? Do you have a eigaretle lighter with you? Western science is so wonderful, I can never make very solid things, and you people make airplanes, atom bombs, and all sorts of refreshing entertainments of that kind." Farrer reached into his pocket, groping for his lighter. A scream sounded behind him. One of the Chinese enlisted men had left the stopped column behind and had stuck his head over the edge of the cliff to see what was happening. When he saw the trucks mid tiic figure of Mao-tze-tung he began shrieking, "There are devils here! There arc devils here!" From centuries of experience, the Martian knew there was no use trying to get along with the local people unless they were very, very young or very, very old. He walked to the edge of the cliff so that all the men could see him. He expanded the shape of Mao-tze-tung until it was thirty-five feet high. Then he changed himself into the embodiment of an ancient Chinese god of war with whiskers, ribbons, and sword tassels blowing in the breeze. They all fainted dead away as he had intended, lie packed them snugly against the rocks so that none of them would fall hack down the slope. Then lie look on rather pretty little blonde with sergeant's insignia -- and re-malcrialized himself beside Fairer. By this point Farm had his lighter ouL. The pretty little blonde said to Farrer, "Do you like this shape better?" Farrer said, "I don't believe this at all. I am a militant atheist. I have fought against supers! it ion all my life." Farrer was twenty-four. The Martian said, "I don't think you like me being a girl. It bothers you, doesn't it?" "Since you do not exist you cannot bother me. But if you don't mind could you please change your shape again?" The Martian took on the appearance of a chubby little Buddha. He knew this was a little impious, but he felt Farrer give a sigh of relief. Even Li seemed cheered up, now that die Martian had taken on a proper religious form. "Listen, you obscene demonic monstrosity," snarled Kungsun. "this is the Chinese People's Republic. You have absolutely no business taking on supernatural images or conducting unatheistic activities. Please abolish yourself and those illusions yonder. What do you want, anyhow?" "I would like," said the Martian mildly, "to become a member of the Chinese Communist Party." Farrer and Kungsun stared at each other. Then they both spoke at once, Farrer in Russian and Kungsun in Chinese, "But we can't let you in the Party." Kungsun said, "If you're a demon you don't exist, and if you do exist you're illegal." The Martian smiled. "Take some refreshments. You may change your minds. Would you like a girl?" he said, pointing at the assorted Russian beauties who still slept in their lounge chairs. But Kungsun and Farrer shook their heads. With a sigh the Martian dematerialized the girls and replaced them with three striped Siberian tigers. The tigers approached. One tiger stopped cozily behind the Martian and sat down. The Martian sat on him. Said the Martian brightly, "I like tigers to sit on. They're so comfortable. Have a tiger." Farrer and Kungsun were staring open-mouthed at their respective tigers. The tigers yawned at them and stretched out. With a tremendous effort of will the two young men sat down on the ground in front of their tigers. Farrer sighed, "What do you want? I suppose you won this trick... of wine." He materialized a jug of wine and a porcelain cup in front of each, including himself. He poured himself a drink and looked at them through shrewd, narrowed eyes. "I would like to learn all about Western science. You see, I am a Martian student who was exiled here to become the #th Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan and I have been here more than two thousand years, and I can only perceive in a radius of ten leagues. Western science is very interesting. If I could, I would like to be an engineering student, but since I cannot leave this place I would like to join the Communist Party and have many visitors come to see me." By this time Kungsun made up his mind. He was a Communist, but he was also a Chinese -- an aristocratic Chinese and a man well versed in the folklore of his own country. Kungsun used a politely archaic form of the Peking court dialect when he spoke again in much milder terms, "Honored, esteemed Demon, sir, it's just no use at all your trying to get into the Communist Party. I admit it is very patriotic of you as a Chinese Demon to want to join the progressive group which leads the Chinese people in their endless struggle against the vicious American imperialists. Even if you convinced me I don't think you can convince the party authorities, esteemed sir. The only thing for you to do in our new Communist world of the New China is to become a counter-revolutionary refugee and migrate to capitalist territory." The Martian looked hurt and sullen. He frowned at them as he sipped his wine. Behind him Li began snoring where he slept against the wheel of a truck. Very persuasively the Martian began to speak: "I see, young man, that you're beginning to believe in me. You don't have to recognize me. Just believe in me a little bit. I am happy to see that you, Party Secretary Kungsun, are prepared to be polite. I am not a Chinese demon, since I was originally a Martian who was elected to the Lesser Assembly of Concord, but who made an inopportune remark and who must live on as the #th Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan for three hundred thousand springs and autumns before I can return. I expect to be around a very long time indeed. On the other hand, I would like to study engineering and I think it would be much better for me to become a member of the Communist Party than to go to a strange place." Farrer had an inspiration. Said he to the Martian, "I have an idea. Before I explain it, though, would you please take those damned trucks away and remove that sakou ska? It makes my mouth water and Pm very sorry, but I just can't accept your hospitality." The Martian complied with a wave of his hand. The trucks and the tables disappeared. Li had been leaning against a truck. His head went thump against the grass. He muttered something in his sleep and then resumed his snoring. The Martian turned back to his guests. Farrer picked up the thread of his own thoughts. "Leaving aside the questipn of whether you exist or not, I can assure you that I know the Russian Communist Parly and my colleague, Comrade Kungsun here, knows the Chinese Communist Party. Communist: parlies are very wonderful things. They lead the masses in the fight against wicked Americans. Do you realize that if we didn't fight on with the revolutionary struggle all of us would have to drink coca-cola every day?" "What is coca-cola?" asked the Demon. "I don't know," replied Farrer. "Then why be afraid to drink any?" "Don't be irrelevant. I hear that the capitalists make everybody drink it. The Communist Party cannot take time to open up supernatural secretariats. It would spoil irreligious campaigns for us to have a demonic secretary. I can tell you the Russian Communist Party won't put up with it and our friend here will tell you there is no place in the Chinese Communist Party. We want you to be happy. You seem to be a very friendly demon. Why don't you just go away? The capitalist will welcome you. They arc very reactionary and very religious. who would believe in you." The Martian changed his shape, from that of a roly-poly Buddha and assumed the appearance and dress of a young Chinese man, a student of engineering at the University of the Revolution in Peking. In the shape of the student he continued, "I don't want to be believed in. I want to study engineering, and I want to learn all about Western science." Kungsun came to Farrcr's support. He said, "It's just no use trying to be a Communist engineer. You look like a very absent-minded demon to me and I think that even if you tried to pass yourself off as a human being you would keep forgetting and changing shapes. That would ruin the morale of any class." The Martian thought to himself that the young man had a point there. He hated keeping any one particular shape for more than half an hour. Staying in one bodily form made him itch. He also liked to change sexes every few times; it seemed sort of refreshing. He did not admit to the young man that Kungsun had scored a point with that remark about shape-changing, but he nodded amiably at them and asked, "But how could I get abroad?" "Just go," said Kungsun, wearily. "Just go. You're a demon. You can do anything." "I can't do that," snapped the studenl-Martian. "I have to have something to go by." He turned to Farrer. "It won't do any good, your giving me something. If you gave me something You might even Find people there Russian and I would end up in Russia, from what you say they won't want to have a Communist Martian any more than these Chinese people do. I won't like to leave my beautiful lake anyhow, but I suppose I will have to if I am to get acquainted with Western science." Farrer said, "I have an idea" He took off his wristwatch and handed it to the Martian. The Martian inspected it. Many years before, the watch had been manufactured in the United States of America. It had been traded by a G. I. to a fraulein, by the fraulein's grandmother to a Red Army man for three sacks of potatoes, and by the Red Army man for five hundred rubles to Farrer when the two of them met in Kuibyshev. The numbers were painted with radium, as were the hands. The second hand was missing, so the Martian materialized a new one. He changed the shape of it several times before it fitted. On the watch there was written in English, of the watch there was the name of The Martian read it. Said he to Farrer, "Where is this place Waterbury, Kahn ? # "The Conn, is the short form of the name of one of the American states. If you are going to be a reactionary capitalist that is a very good place to be a capitalist in." Still white-faced, but in a sickly ingratiating way, Kungsun added his bit. "I think you would like coca-cola. It's very reactionary." The studcnt-Martian frowned. He still held the watch in his hand. Said he, "I don't care whether it's reactionary or not. I want to be in a very scientific place." Farrer said, "You couldn't go any place more scientific than Waterbury, Conn., especially Conn. -- that's the most scientific place they have in America and I'm sure they are very pro-lVkrtian and you can join one of the capitalist parties. They won't mind. But the Communist parties would make a lot of trouble for you." Farrer smiled and his eyes lit up. "Furthermore," he added, as a winning point, "you can keep my watch for yourself, for always." The Martian frowned. Speaking to himself the student-Martian said, "I can see that Chinese Communism is going to collapse in eight years, eight hundred years, or eighty thousand years. Perhaps I'd better go to this Waterbury, Conn." The two young Communists nodded their heads vigorously and grinned. They both smiled at the Martian. "Honored, esteemed Martian, sir, please hurry along because I want to get my men over the edge of the cliff before darkness falls. Go with our blessing." The Martian changed shape. He took on the image of an Arhat, a, subordinate disciple of Buddha. Eight feet tall, he loomed above them. His face radiated unearthly calm. The watch, miraculously provided with a new strap, was firmly strapped to his left wrist. "Bless you, my boys," said he. "I go to Waterbury." And he did. "What's happened to Li?" Kungsun shook his head dazedly. "I don't know. I feel funny." (In departing for that marvelous strange place, Watcrbury, Conn., the Martian had taken with him all their memories of himself.) Kungsun walked to the edge of the cliff. Looking over, he saw the men sleeping. "Look at that," he muLlercd. lie stepped to the edge of the dill and began shouting: "Wake up, you fools, you turtles. Haven' l you any more sense than to sleep on a cliff as nightfall approaches?" The Martian concentrated all his powers on the location of Watcrbury, Conn. He was the #, #?)l li Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan (or an Arhat) , and his powers were limited, impressive though they might seem to outsiders. With a shock, a thrill, a something of breaking, a sense of things done and undone, he found himself in flat country. Strange darkness surrounded him. Air, which he had never smelled before, Mowed (quietly around him. Farrer and Li, flanging on a clifF high above the Chinshachiang, lay far behind him in the world from which he had broken. He remembered that he had left his shape behind. Absent-mindedly he glanced down at himself to see what form he had taken for the trip. He discovered that he had arrived in the form of a small, laughing Buddha seven inches high, carved in yellowed ivory. "This will never do!" muttered the Martian to himself. "I must take on one of the local forms..." He sensed around in his environment, groping telepathically for interesting objects near him. "Aha, a milk truck." Thought he, Western science is indeed very wonderful. Imagine a machine made purely for the purpose of transporting milk! Swiftly he transferred himself into a milk truck. In the darkness, his telepathic senses had not distinguished the metal of which the milk truck was made nor the color of the paint. In order to remain inconspicuous, he turned himself into a milk truck made of solid gold. Then, without a driver, he started up his own engine and began driving himself down one of the main highways leading into Waterbury, Connecticut... So if you happen to be passing through Waterbury, Conn., and see a solid gold milk truck driving itself through the streets, you'll know it's the Martian, otherwise the #, #th Eastern Subordinate Incarnation of a Lohan, and that he still thinks Western Science World of If (# short stories) and The Second World of If (# novelettes). If you have not obtained your copies, you may still do so at #tf per copy, postpaid. Address: IF Magazine, Kingston, New York. Pluto was a coffin world , airless  utterly cold. And. they had ten days to reach Base Camp , ten thousand miles away . fogged, and their metal glove hard-frozen pallor that had been joints stiffened in the incredible Pluto's atmosphere, cons ago. surface cold ; but the two men who From the wrecked cylinder of the could work finished their job. In scout rocket they had dragged two the black sky glistered the little arcinterior girders, ready-curved at the light of the sun, a sixteen-hunends. These, clamped side by side dredth of the blaze that fell on with transverse brackets and decked Earth. Around them sulked Pluto's with bulkhead metal, managed to look like a. sled. At the real they sel a salvaged engine unit. For steering, dicy rigged a boom shaft to warp the runners right or left. For cargo, they piled the sled with full containers, ration boxes, the foil tent, what instruments they could detach and carry, armfuls of heat-tools, a crowbar, a hatchet, a few other items. Moving back from the finished work, one of them stumbled against the other. Instantly the two puffy, soot-black shapes were crouched, gloved fists up, fierce in the system's duskiest corner. Then the moment passed. Warily, helmets turned toward each other, they went back lo the halfstripped wreck. In the still airtight control room, lighted by one bulb, their officer stirred on his bedstrip. His tunic had been pulled off, his broken left arm and collarbone set and splinted. Under a fillet of bandage, his gaunt young face looked pale, bui he had his wits back. "The appropriate question I he said, "is 'What happened?' " The two men were removing their helmets. "Conked and crashed, sir," said Jenks, the smaller one, uncovering a sallow, hollowcheeked face. Lieutenant Wofforth sat. up. supporting himself on his sound arm. "How long have I been out?" "Maybe forty hours, sir. Delirious. Corbett and me did the best we could. Take it easy, sir," he said as Wofforth began to get up. "Lie back. We've done what Emergency Plan Six says -- bolted a sled togclher and coupled on a sound engine unit for power." "Quite a haul back to base," said Wofforth, almost cheerfully. His eyes were bright, as though he savored the idea. "About halfway around Pluto. We'd better start now, or they'll get tired of waiting." "They've gone, sir," Corbett growled before Jenks could gesture him to silence. He was beefy, sliteyed. "We saw the jets going sunward this morning." Wofforth winced. "Gone," he said. "That's right, I didn't stop to think. You said forty hours... They couldn't wait that long. We're past opposition already, getting farther away all the time. They had to go, or they wouldn't have made it." He stood up uncertainly and reached for his ripped tunic. Corbett stepped over and helped him slide his uninjured arm into the right sleeve, then to fasten and drape the tunic over his splinted left arm and shoulder. "We'll just have to get back to Base Camp and wait," said Wofford), grimly. "Sir," said Jenks, "our radio is gone, i tried to patch it up, but it was gone. When they didn't get a signal, they must have thought -- " "Nonsense!" Wofforth broke in. "They'll have left us supplies. They couldn't wait, signal or none. Our job is to get back, and stick it out then' until they come for us." He sat at the control and began to write in the log book. Corbett and Jenks drifted together at the other end of the room. "You meat-head." snarled Jenks #) under his breath. "You knew he took the berth to Pluto because the first mate was a lady -- Lya Stromminger." "He had to know they were gone' protested Corbett, equally fierce. "Not flat like you gave it. He came here to be with her. Now she's jetted away without him. How does a man feel when a woman's done that -- " "Stop blathering, you two, and help me into my suit," called Wofforth, rising again. "We're going to rev up that sled engine and get out of here!" Outside, the sled lay ready under the frigid sky. WofForth tramped around it, leaned over and poked the load. "Too much," said his voice in their radios. "Keep the synthesizer, the tent, these two ration boxes. Wait, keep the crowbar and the hatchet. Dump the rest." "We travel that light, sir?" said Jcnks doubtfully. "I've been figuring," said Wofforth. "We're on the far side of Pluto from Base Camp. T hat makes ten thousand miles, more or less. Pluto's day is nineteen hours and a minute or so, Earth time. We can travel only by what they humorously call daylight. And we'd better get there in ten days -- a thousand miles every nine and a half hours -- or maybe we won't get there at all." "How's that, sir?" asked Corbett. "The heaters in these suits," Wofforth reminded him. "Two hundred and forty hours of efficiency, and that's all. Well, it's noon. Let's take off." His voice shook. He was still weak. Jenks helped him sit on the two lashed ration boxes, and slung a mooring strap across his knees. Then Jenks took the steering boom, and Corbett bent to start the engine. When the arclight sun set in the west, they had traveled more than four hours over country not too rugged to slow them much. Darkness closed in fast while Jenks and Corbett pitched the pyramidal tent of metal foil and clamped it down solidly. They spread and zipped in the ground fabric, set up lights and heater inside, and began to pipe in thawed gases from the drifts outside. After their scanty meal, Corbett and Jenks sought their bedstrips. on opposite sides of the tent. Wofforth tended the atomic heater for minutes, until the sound of deep breathing told him that his companions were asleep. Then he put on his spaccsuit, clumsy with his single hand to close seams. He picked up sextant and telescope, and slipped out into the Plutonian night. It was as utterly black as the bottom of a pond of ink. But above Wofforth shone the faithful stars, in the constellations mapped by the first star-gazers of long ago. He made observations, checked for time and position. He chuckled inside his helmet, as though congratulating himself. Back in the tent, he opened the log book and wrote: First day: Course due west. Run # mi. J o go # ini. approx . Supplies adcq. Spirits good. Wriggling out of his space gear, he lay down, asleep almost before his weary limbs relaxed. dawn. They made coffee on the heater, and broke out protein biscuits for breakfast. As the tiny sun winked into view over the horizon, they loaded the sled. Corbett slouched toward the idling engine at the tail of the sled. "No, get on amidships," said WofForth. "I'll take over engine." "My job -- " began Corbett. "You're relieved. Strap yourself on the ration boxes. That's right. Jcnks, steer again. Make for the level ahead." With his right hand Wolforth ran a length of pliable cable around his waist and through a ring-bolt on the decking. He touched the engine controls, and they pulled away from camp. The sled coursed over great knoll-like swellings of the terrain, coated with the dull-pale frozen atmosphere. Beyond, it gained speed on a vast flat plain, almost as smooth as a desert of glass. "What's this big rink, Lieutenant?" asked Jenks. "Maybe a sea, or maybe just a sunken area, full of solid gases. Stand by the helm, I'm going to gun a few more M. P. H. out of her." "No winfl," grunted Corbett. "Nothing moving except us. The floor of hell." "If you was in hell, the rest of ns would be better olf," said Jenks sourly. Wofforth began to sing, though he did not fed like it: Trim your nails and scrape your face , They're all on the Other Side of space! ' Tokyo -- Baltimore , Maryland -- Hong Kong -- Paris -- Samarkand -- Tokyo -- London -- T roy -- For t Worth -- The happy towns of the Planet Earth... At camp that night he wrote in the log book: Second Day: Course due west. Run # mi. To go # mi. approx. Supplies adeq. Spirits fair... "What's for supper?" bawled Corbett, entering. "I could eat a horse." "That'd be cannibalism," said Jenks at once. "Yah. you splinter! Don't cat any lizards, then." Spirits good , Wofforth corrected his entry, and closed the log book, lie thought of Lva Strommingcr. She was a most efficient officer. Her hair was black as night on Pluto, and her eves as bright as the faraway sun. Wofforth wrote in his log book: Fifth day: Course north , west, then southwest. Curving thru mountainous territory. Run # mi. but direct progress toward base camp not exceeding #. To go, # mi. approx. Supplies short. Spirits fair. lie wrote in his log book : Seventh day : Course west y southwest, west , northwest , west . Run # mi. To go # mi. approx . Supplies low . Spirits fair. He wrote in his log book : Ninth day: Course north west by west , west. Run # mi. To go # mi. approx. Supplies low. Spirits low... "Lieutenant," said Jenks from across the tent, as WofTorth closed the book. "Well?" "We know you're in command. This party and all of Pluto. But we ask permission to state our case." "What case is your case?" demanded WofTorth, rising. "I'm doing my best to get you back to Base Gamp." "Sure," said Corbett. "Sure. But why Base Camp?" "You know why." "That's right, we know why," agreed Jenks, and Corbett grinned in his ten days' tussock of beard. "They'll have left supplies for us," WofTorth went on. "Shelter and food and fuel and instruments. They' #I expect us to reach Base Camp and hold it down for the next attempt to reach Pluto." "We know why," repeated Jenks. "And that's not why, lieutenant. Let me talk, sir. It's a dead man talking." "You won't die," snapped Wofforth. "I'll get you both there alive." He stepped to where, in one corner, he had managed a bath -- a hollow in the frozen ground, lined by pushing the floor fabric into it. From the heater he ran tepid, clean wter into it. He clipped a mirror to the tent foil, searched out an automatic razor, and began to shave his own dark young thatch of beard. "You're proving my point, lieutenant," said Jenks. "Policing up your face to look pretty." "Why not?" growled WofTorth, mowing another swath of whiskers. "No reason why not. Ten, twenty years from now they'll find your body -- whenever the inner orbits get to where they can boom off another expedition. You'll look young and clean-shaved. You know who'll weep." WofTorth lowered the razor in his good hand and glared at the two. They grinned in the bright light opposite him. They looked as if they hoped he'd see the joke. "I said it's a dying man that's talking," said Jenks again. "Won't you let me say my dying say, lieutenant? Let's all die honest." "I'm going to get you there," WofTorth insisted. "Ah, now," said Corbett, as though persuading a naughty child. "You think they've left twenty years' worth of supplies to keep us going? The ship didn't carry that much, even if they left it all." He grinned mirthlessly. "I can figure what you're figuring, lieutenant," he went on, with a touch of Jenks' sly manner. "You die, young and brave. You'll shave up again before you lie down and let go. And when the next shipload arrives there'll be you, lying like a statue of your good-looking young self, frozen stiff. Am I right?" Corbett was right, WofTorth admitted to himself. The man was more than a great meaty lump, after all, to see another man's unspoken thought so clearly. "Then," Jcnks took it up, "First Mate Lya Slromminger will have a look. She may command the new expedition. She'll be promoted away up to Admiral or higher -- twenty around the edges, but still a lovely lady. There you'll lie before her eyes, young and brave as you was when she deserted you. She'll cry, won't she? And hot tears can't thaw you out or wake you up -- " "Shut your heads, both of you!" shouted WofTorth, so fierce and loud that the foil tent wall vibrated as with a gale in the airless night. But they had guessed true. He'd wanted to be found at Base Camp. He'd wanted Lya Stromininger to know, some day, that she'd blasted ofT and left behind the man most worthy of all men on all worlds... "Everybody takes a hot bath tonight," said Wofiorth. "We'll all sleep better for it. Tomorrow's our last day on the trail." "To do two thousand miles?" said jcnks. "To do all of that. The expedition mapped an area at least that wide around Base Camp, and it's slick and smooth. We can almost slide in." "All slick and smooth but just this side of Base Camp, lieutenant," said Jenks. f "How do you mean?" "That string of craters. Don't you remember? It's just this side -- east of Base Camp. This sled'll never go over that, sir." "Nor around," Corbett put in. "We'd have to detour maybe three thousand miles. And the heaters in our suits won't last." "I know about the craters," said Wofiorth. "We ll take care of them when we reach them." Stripping, he lowered his body into the makeshift tub and began to scrub himself one-handed. to the sound of furious argument. Corbett and Jenks, of course. A trifle -- division of the breakfast ration, or of the breakfast chores -- had set ofT their nerves like trains of explosive. Even as WofTorth rose from his beds trip, Corbett swung a cobble-like fist at Jenks' gaunt, grimacing face. The nimbler, smaller man ducked and sidled away. Corbett took a lumbering step to close in on his enemy, and Jcnks darted a hand to his belt behind, then brought it forward again with an elcctro-automatic pistol. "I've been keeping this for you!" Jenks shrilled. "I'll just diminish the population of Pluto by thirtythree and onethird percent!" "Hold it!" bellowed Wofiorth. I le was too late. A stream of bullets chattered through Corbett's body, folding him over and ripping through the paper-thin wall of the tent. Air whistled out; the tent began to collapse. Jenks, pinned under Corbett's body, was squealing like a pig. "Lieutenant, help me -- !" Wofiorth saw in an instant that the wall could not be patched in time; the bullets had tom loose an irregular strip, pressure had done the rest: even now, the tent was only a few seconds away from complete collapse. As he stumbled across the floor toward the spacesuits, his heart was laboring and his chest straining for breath. Spots swam in front of his eyes. He found the topmost spacesuit by touch, and fumbled for the helmet. The tent drifted down on his head in soft, murderous folds. He opened the valve, shoved his face into the helmet, and gulped precious oxygen. His dulled awareness brightened again, momentarily ; but he knew he was still a dead man unless he could get into the suit before pressure fell completely. Numbed fingers plucked at the suit opening. Somehow he got the awkward garment over his legs, closed and locked the torso, pulled down the helmet... He was lying in darkness, with a low, steady hiss of oxygen in his ears. He rolled over weakly, got to his feet. He turned on his helmet light. He was propping up a gray cave of metal foil, that fell in stiff creases all around him. At his feet were the bodies of Jenks and Corbett. Both were dead. After a while, clumsily, painfully, he dragged the two corpses free of the tent. He found the heater and thawed a hole in the frozen surface, big enough for both. He tumbled them in, then undercut the edges of the hole with the heater, so that chunks fell in and covered them. While he watched, the cloud of vapor he had made began to settle, slowly congealing on the broken surface and blurring it over again. In a year, there would be no mark here to show that the surface had been disturbed. In a thousand years, it would still be the same. In the first ray of dawn he flung all supplies from the sled except the fuel containers. He checked the engine, and started it. Into his belt-bag he thrust the log book. Nothing else went aboard the sled -- no food, no water container, no tools, instruments or oxygen tanks. The tent he left lying there, with all that had been carried inside the night before. As the sun rose clear of the distant rim of the plain to eastward, he rigged a line to the steering boom, then lashed himself securely within reach of the engine. Steering by the taut line, he started westward, slowly at first, then faster. It was as he had hoped. The lightened sled attained and held a greater speed than on any previous day. 'Til make it , # he said aloud, with nobody else to listen on all Pluto. C TU make it!" Faster he urged the engine's rhythm, and faster. He clocked its speed by the indicators on the housing. A hundred and fifty miles an hour. A hundred and sixty; not enough. Whipping the boom line tight around his waist to hold his course steady, he sighted between the upcurve of the runner forward. There was level, smooth-frozen country, mile upon mile. He speeded up to one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. More. The sled hummed at every joining. At noon, he had done a good thousand miles. At mid-afternoon, sixteen hundred. Two and a half hours of visibility lelt, and more than four hundred miles to go. "I can do those on my head," muttered WofTorth to himself, and then, far in ihc distance, the flat rim of the horizon was flat no longer. It had sprung up jagged, full of points and bulges. Speeding toward it, he steered by the line around his waist while he cut his engine. He caine close at fifty miles an hour, almost a crawl. Some ancient volcanic action had thrown up those mountains, like a rank of close-drawn sentries. The sled could not cross them anywhere. Still reducing speed, WofTorth drew close to a notch, hut the notch gave into a crater, a great shallow saucer two miles in diameter and filled with shadows below, so that Wofforth could not gauge its depth. Opposite, another notch -- perhaps once the crater had been a lake, with water running in and out. If he had come there at noon, he could have seen the bottom, and perhaps -- "But it isn't noon." WofTorth was talking to himself again. His voice sounded thin and petulant in his own ears. "By noon tomorrow, the heat will be out of this suit." He stopped the sled, unlashed himself and trudged to the notch. He stood in it, looking down, then across. The little bright jewel f the sun, sagging toward the horizon, showed him the upper reaches of the crater's interior, pitched at an angle of perhaps fifty degrees. Even if it had been noon, it would have been no use. The sled could nevei climb a slope like that. Then he looked again, this way and that. He nodded inside his helmet. He might as well try. Returning to the sled, he started the engine and lashed himself fast again. He steered away from the crater, and around. He made a great looping journey of twenty miles or so across the plain, building speed all the time. As he rounded the rear curve of his course, he was driving along at two hundred and sixty miles an hour, and he had to apply pressure to the boom with both hand and knees to point the sled back straight for the notch. Straightening his humming vehicle into a headlong course, he leaned forward and sighted between the upeurved runners. "Now!" he urged himself, and watched the break in the crater wall rush towar dhirn. It greatened, yawned. He leaped through, and with a groaning gasp of prayer he dragged the boom over to steer the sled right. dared hope. The runners bounced, bit. Then he was racing around the inside of the great cup's rim, like a hurtling bubble on the inner surface of a whirlpool's funnel. Two miles across, three miles and more on the half diameter -- the engine laboring up to three hundred miles an hour, centrifugal force holding it there -- Little more than thirty seconds raced by when he knew he had won. He saw the far notch growing near. He came to it in a last booming rush, and hurled his whole weight against the boom to face the runners into the notch. Under the low-dropping sun, he and his sled shot into open country beyond the range. His right arm felt dead from shoulder to fingertip. His head roared and drummed with the racing of his blood. His face had tired spots in it, where muscles he had never used before had locked into an agonized grimace. On he sped, straight west, gasping and gurgling and mumbling in crazy triumph. An hour, an anticlimactic hour wherein the sled almost steered itself over the smoothest of plain, and up ahead he spied the black outline of Base Camp. It was a sprawling, low structure, prefabricated metal and plastic and insulation, black outside to gather what heat might come from outer space. It held aloof on the dull frozen plain from the irregular stain where the expedition ship had braked off with one set of rockets and had soared away with another set. Larger, more familiar, grew Base Camp with each second of approach. Shakily Wofforth cut his engine, slowed from high speed to medium, to a hundred miles an hour, to sixty, to fifty. He made a final circle around Base Camp, and let it coast in with the engine off, to within twenty yards of the main lock panel. He got up, on legs that shook inside his boots. He felt his heart still racing, his head still ringing. He sighed once, and walked close, his gauntlet fumbling at the release button on the lock panel. But the button did not respond. "Jammed," he said. "No -- locked . # He couldn't get in. He had reached Base Camp, but he could not get in. They hadn't counted on his return. They'd gone off and left Base Camp locked up. He sagged against the lock panel, and cursed once, with an utter and furious resignation. He felt himself slipping. He was going to faint. His legs would not hold him up. He was slipping forward -- seemed to be sinking into the massive and unyielding outer surface of Base Camp. It was a dream. Or it was death. He did not lose all hold on his awareness. He had a sense of lying at full length, and blinding light flashes that made his eyelids jump. And a tug somewhere, as though his helmet was corning off. He would have put out a hand to see, but his left arm was broken, and his right arm limp from weariness. "You're back," said a voice he knew, a voice strained with wonder. "You managed. I knew you would." "Now," said Wofforth, "I know it's a dream. We dream after we die." A hand was cupped behind his neck, lifting him to a sitting position. He felt warm fluid at his lips. "It's no dream," said the voice beseechingly. "Look at me." "I don't dare. The dream will go away." (Continued on page #) " First the E-bomb , in which the Earth itself reaches critical mass and explodes. Then the S-bomb to wreck the Sun -- then the G-bomb, and then... his dark bedroom, tense, listening. A faint breeze stirred the lace curtains. Yellow streetlight filtered over the bed, the dresser, the books and toys and dollies. In the next room, two voices were murmuring together. "Jean, we've got to do something," the man's voice said. A strangled gasp. "Ralph, please don't hurt him. You must control yourself. I won't let you hurt him." "I'm not going to hurt him." There was brute anguish in the man's wliisper. "Why does he do these things? Why doesn't he play baseball and tag like normal boys? Why does he have to burn down stores and torture helpless animals? Why?" "He's different, Ralph. We must try to understand." "Maybe we better take him to the doctor," his father said. "Maybe he's got some kind of glandular disease." "You mean old Doc Grady? But you said he couldn't find -- " "Not Doc Grady. He quit after Lemuel destroyed his x-ray equipment and smashed all the furniture in his office. No, this is bigger than that." A tense pause. "Jean, I'm taking him up to the Hill." "Oh, Ralph! Please -- " "I mean it." Grim determination, the harsh growl of a trapped animal. "Those psychologists may be able to do something. Maybe they can help him. Maybe not." "But they might not let us have him back. And oh, Ralph, he's all we've got!" "Sure," Ralph muttered hoarsely. "I know he is. But I've made up my mind. That day he slashed his teacher with a knife and leaped out the window. That day I made up my mind. Lemuel is going up to the Hill... " The day was warm and bright. Between the swaying trees the huge white hospital sparkled, all concrete and steel and plastic. Ralph Jorgenson peered about uncertainly, hat twisted between his fingers, subdued by the immensity of the place. Lemuel listened intently. Straining his big, mobile ears, he could hear many voices, a shifting sea of voices that surged around him. The voices came from all the rooms and offices, on all the levels. They excited him. Dr. James North came toward them, holding out his hand. He was tall and handsome, perhaps thirty, with brown hair and black hornrimmed glasses. His stride was firm, his grip, when he shook hands with Lemuel, brief and confident. "Come in here," he boomed. Ralph moved toward the office, but Dr. North shook his head. "Not you. The boy. Lemuel and I are going to have a talk alone." Excited, Lemuel followed Dr. North into his office. North quickly secured the door with triple magnetic locks. "You can call me James," he said, smiling warmly at the boy. "And I'll call you Lem, right?" "Sure," Lemuel said guardedly. He felt no hostility emanating from the man, but he had learned to keep his guard up. He had to be careful, even with this friendly, good-looking doctor, a man of obvious intellectual ability. North lit a cigarette and studied the boy. "When you tied up and then dissected those old derelicts," he said thoughtfully, "you were scientifically curious, weren't you? You wanted to know -- facts, not opinions. You wanted to find out for yourself how human beings were constructed." Lemuel's excitement grew. "But no one understood." "No." North shook his head. "No, they wouldn't. Do you know why?" "I think so." North paced back and forth. "I'll give you a few tests. To find out things. You don't mind, do you? We'll both learn more about you. I've been studying you, Lem. I've examined the police records and the newspaper files." Abruptly, he opened the drawer of his desk and got out the Minnesota Multiphasic, the Rorschach blots, the Bender cards, an oujja board, a pair of dice, a magic writing tablet, a wax doll with fingernail parings and bits of hair, and a small piece of lead to be turned into gold. "What do you want me to do?" Lemuel asked. "I'm going to ask you a few questions, and give you a few objects to play with. I'll watch your reactions, note down a few things. How's that sound?" Lemuel hesitated. He needed a friend so badly -- but be was afraid. ( j jj Dr. North put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "You can trust me. I'm not like those kids that beat you up, that morning." Lemuel glanced up gratefully. "You know about that? I discovered the rules of their game were purely arbitrary. Therefore I naturally oriented myself to the basic reality of the situation, and when I came up at bat I lilt the pitcher and the catcher over the head. Later I discovered that all human ethics and morals are exactly the same sort of -- " He broke off, suddenly afraid. "Maybe I -- " Dr. North sat down behind his desk and began shuffling the Rhine said softly. "Everything will be all right. I understand." sat in silence. It was six o'clock, and the sun was beginning to set outside. At last Dr. North spoke. "Incredible. I can scarcely believe it, myself. You're utterly logical. You've completely cast off all thalamic emotion. Your mind is totally free of moral and cultural bias. You're a perfect paranoid, without any empathic ability whatever. You're utterly incapable of feeling sorrow or pity or compassion, or any of the normal human emotions." Lemuel nodded. "True." Dr. North leaned back, dazed. "It's hard even for me to grasp this. It's overwhelming. You possess super-logic, completely free of valueorientation bias. And you conceive of the entire world as organized against you." "Yes." "Of course. You've analyzed the structure of human activity and I seen that as soon as they find out, they'll pounce on you and try to destroy you." "Because I'm different." North was overcome. "They've always classed paranoia as a mental illness, but it isn't! There's no lack of coni act with reality -- on the contrary, the paranoid is directly related to reality. He's a perfect empiricist. Not cluttered with ethical and moral-cultural inhibitions. The paranoid sees things as they really arc; he's actually the only sane man." "I've been reading Mein Karri if " Lemuel said. "It shows me I'm not alone." And in his mind he breathed the silent prayer of thanks: Not alone. Us. There are more of us. Dr. North caught his expression. "The wave of the future' he said. 'Tm not a part of it, but I can try to understand. I can appreciate I'm just a human being, limited by my thalamic emotional and cultural bias. I can't be one of you, but I can sympathize... He looked up, face alight with enthusiasm. "And I can help!" The next days were filled with excitement for Lemuel. Dr. North arranged for custody of him, and the boy took up residence at the doctor's uptown apartment. Here, he was no longer under pressure from his family; he could do as he pleased. Dr. North began at once to aid Lemuel in locating other mutant paranoids. One evening after dinner, Dr. North asked, "Lemuel, do you think you could explain your theory of Null-O to me? It's hard to grasp the principle of non-object orientation." Lemuel indicated the apartment with a wave of his head. "All these apparent objects -- each has a name. Book, chair, couch, rug, lamp, drapes, window, door, wall, and so on. But this division into objects is purely artificial. Based on an aptiquated system of thought. In reality there are no objects. The universe is actually a unity. We have been taught to think in terms of objects. This thing , that thing. When NullO is realized, this purely verbal division will cease. It has long since outlived its usefulness." "Gan you give me an example, a demonstration?" Lemuel hesitated. "It's hard to do alone. Later on, when we've contacted others... I can do it crudely, on a small scale." As Dr. North watched intently, Lemuel rushed about the apartment gathering everything together in a heap. Then, when ail the books, pictures, rugs, drapes, furniture and bric-a-brac had been collected, he systematically smashed everything into a shapeless mass. "You see," he said, exhausted and pale from the violent effort "the distinction into arbitrary objects is now gone. This unification of things into their basic homogeneity can be applied to the universe as a whole. The universe is a gestalt, a unified substance, without division into living and nonliving, being and non-being. A vast vortex of energy, not discrete particles! Underlying the purely artificial appearance of material objects lies the world of reality: a vast undifferentiated realm of pure energy. Remember: the object is not the reality. First law of Null-O thought!" Dr. North was solemn, deeply impressed. He kicked at a bit of broken chair, part of the shapeless heap of wood and cloth and paper and shattered glass. "Do you think this restoration to reality can be accomplished?" "I don't know," Lemuel said simply. "There will be opposition, of course. Human beings will fight us; they're incapable of rising above their monkey-like preoccupation with things -- bright objects they can touch and possess. It will all depend on how well wc can coordinate with each other." Dr. North unfolded a slip of paper from his pocket. "I have a lead," he said quietly. 'The name of a man I think is one of you. We'll visit him tomorrow -- then we'll see." them with brisk elTieiency, at the entrance of bis well-guarded lab overlooking Palo Alto. Rows of uniformed government guards protected the vital work lie was doing, the immense system of labs and research offices. Men and women in white robes were working day and night. "My work," lie explained, as he signaled for the heavy-duty entrance locks to be closed behind them, "was basic, in the development of the C-borrib, the cobalt case for the H-bomb. You will find that many top nuclear physicists are Null-O." Lemuel's breath caught. "Then "Of course." Weller wasted no words. "We've been working for years. Rockets at Pecnemundc, the A-bomb at Los Alamos, the hydrogen bomb, and now this, the Cbomb. There are, of course, many scientists who are not Null-O, regular human beings with thalamic bias. Einstein, for example. But we're well on the way; unless too much opposition is encountered we'll be able to go into action very shortly." The rear door of the laboratory slid aside, and a group of whiteclad men and women filed solemnly in. Lemuel's heart gave a jump. Here they were, full-fledged adult Null-O's! Men and women both, and they had been working for years! He recognized them easily; all had the elongated and mobile ears, by which the m-utant Null-O picked up minute air vibrations over great distances. It enabled him to communicate, wherever they were, throughout the world. "Explain our program," Weller said to a small blond man who stood beside him, calm and collected, face stern with the importance of the moment. "The G-bomb is almost ready," the man said quietly, with a slight German accent. "But it is not the final step in our plans. There is also the E-bomb, which is the ultimate of this initial phase. Wc have never made the E-bomb public. If human beings should find out about it, we should have to cope with serious emotional opposition." "Wliat is the E-bomb?" Lemuel asked, glowing with excitement. "The phrase, 'the E-bomb,' " said the small blond mAi, "describes the process by which the Earth itself heroines a pile, is brought up to critical mass, and then allowed to detonate." Lemuel was overcome. "I had no idea you had developed the plan this far!" The blond man smiled faintly. "Yes, we have done a lot, since the early days. Under Dr. Rust, I was able to work out the basic ideological concepts of our program. Ultimately. we will unify the entire universe into a homogeneous mass. Right now, however, our concern is with the Earth. But once we have been successful here, there's no reason why we can't continue our work indefinitely." "Transportation," Weller explained, "has been arranged to other planets. Dr. Frisch here -- " "A modification of the guided missiles we developed at Peenemiinde," the blond man continued. "We have constructed a ship which will take us to Venus. There, we will initiate the second phase of our work. A V-bornb will he developed, which will restore Venus to its primordial state of homogeneous energy. And then -- " He smiled faintly. "And then an S-bomb. The Sol bomb. Which will, if we are successful, unify this whole system of planets and moons into a vast gestalt." By June #, #, Null-O personnel had gained virtual control of all major world governments. The process, begun in the middle thirties, was for all practical purposes complete. The United States and Soviet Russia, were firmly in the bands of Null-O individuals. NullO men controlled all policy-level positions, and hence, could speed up the program of Null-O. The time had come. Secrecy was no longer necessary. Lemuel and Dr. North watched from a circling rocket as the first H-bombs were detonated. By careful arrangement, both nations began H-bomb attack simultaneously. Within an hour, class-one results were obtained; most of North America and Eastern Europe were gone. Vast clouds of radioactive particles drifted and billowed. Fused pits of rnctal bubbled and sputtered as far as the eye could see. In Africa, Asia, on endless islands and out-of-the-way places, surviving human beings cowered in terror. "Perfect," came Dr. Weller's voice in Lemuel's ears. He was somewhere below the surface, down in the carefully protected headquarters where the Venus ship was in its last stages of assembly. Lemuel agreed. "Great work. We've managed to unify at least a fifth of the world's land surface!" "But there's more to come. Next the C-bombs are to be released. This will prevent human beings from interfering with our final work, the E-bomb installations. The terminals must still be erected. That can't be done as long as humans remain to interfere." Within a week, the first C-bomb was set off. More followed, hurtled up from carefully concealed launchers in Russia and America. By August #, #, the human population of the world had been diminished to three thousand. The Null-O's, in their subsurface offices, glowed with satisfaction. Unification was proceeding exactly as planned. The dream was coming true. "Now," said Dr. Weller, "we can begin erection of the E-bomb terminals." O NE terminal was begun at Arequipa, Peru. The other, at the opposite side of the globe, at Bandoeng, Java. Within a month the two immense towers rose high against the dust-swept sky. In heavy protective suits and helmets, the two colonies of Null-O's worked day and night to complete the program. Dr. Weller flew Lemuel to the Peruvian installation. AH the way from San Francisco to Lima there I was nothing but rolling asli and still-burning metallic fires. No sign of life or separate entities: everything had been fused into a single mass of heaving slag. The oceans themselves were steam and boiling water. All distinction between land and sea had been lost. The surface of the Earth was a single expanse of dull gray and white, where blue oceans and green forests, roads and cities and fields had once been. 'There # Dr. Weller said. "See it? # Lemuel saw it, all right. Ilis breath caught in his throat, at its sheer beauty. The Null-O's had erected a vast bubble-shield, a sphere of transparent plastic amidst the rolling sea of liquid slag. Within the bubble the terminal itself could be seen, an intricate wch of flashing metal and wires that made both Dr. Weller and Lemuel fall silent. "You see # Weller explained, as he dropped the rocket through the locks of the shield, "we have only unified the surface of the Earth and perhaps a mile of rock beneath. The vast mass of the planet, however, is unchanged. But the E-bomb will handle that. The still-liquid core of the planet will erupt; the whole sphere will become a new sun. And when the S-bomb goes off, the entire system will become a unified mass of fiery gas." Lemuel nodded. "Logical. And then -- " "The G-bomb. The galaxy itself is next. The final stages of the plan... So vast, so awesome, we scarcely dare think of them. The G-bomb, and finally -- # Weller smiled slightly, his eyes bright. "Then the U-bomb." They landed, and were met by Dr. Frisch, full of nervous excitement. "Dr. Weller!" he gasped. "Something has gone wrong!" "What is it?" ' Frisch's face was contorted with dismay. By a violent Null-O leap lie managed to integrate his mental faculties and throw off thalamic impulses. "A number of human beings have survived! # Weller was incredulous. "What do you mean? How -- " "I picked up the sound of their voices. I was rotating my ears, enjoying the roar and lap of the slag outside the bubble, when I picked up the noise of ordinary human beings." "But where?" "Below the surface. Certain wealthy industrialists had secretly transferred their factories below ground, in violation of their governments' absolute orders to the contrary." "Yes, we had an explicit policy to prevent that." "These industrialists acted with typical thalamic greed. They transferred whole labor forces below, to work as slaves when war began. At least ten thousand humans were spared. They are still alive. And -- " "And whaL?" "They have improvised huge bores, and are moving this way as quickly as possible. We're going to have a fight on our hands. I've already notified the Venus ship. It's being brought up to the surface at once." Lemuel and Dr. Weller glanced at each other in horror. There were only a thousand Null-O's; they'd be outnumbered ten to one. "This is terrible," Weller said thickly. "Just when everything seemed near completion. How long before the power towers are ready?" "It will be another six days before the Earth can be brought up to critical mass," Frisch muttered. "And the bores arc virtually here. Rotate your ears. You'll hear them." Lemuel and Dr. Weller did so. At once, a confusing babble of human voices came to them. A chaotic clang of sound, from a number ol : bores converging on the two terminal bubbles. "Perfectly ordinary humans!" Lemuel gasped. "I can tell by the sound!" "We're trapped!" Weller grabbed up a blaster, and Frisch did so, too. All the Null-O's were arming themselves. Work was forgotten. With a shattering roar the snout of a bore burst through the ground and aimed itself directly at them. The Null-O's fired wildly; they scattered and fell back toward the tower. A second bore appeared, and then a third. The air was alive with blazing beams of energy, as the Null-O's fired and the humans fired back. The humans were the most common possible, a variety of laborers taken subsurface by their employers. The lowest forms of human life: clerks, bus drivers, daylaborers, typists, janitors, tailors, bakers, turret lathe operators, shipping clerks, baseball players, radio announcers, garage mechanics, policemen, necktie peddlers, icc cream venders, door-to-door salesmen, bill collectors, receptionists, welders, carpenters, construction laborers, farmers, politicians, merchants -- the men and women whose very existence terrified the Null-O's to their core. The emotional masses of ordinary people who resented the Great Work, the bombs and bacteria and guided missiles, were coming to the surface. They were rising up -- finally. Putting an end to super-logic: rationality without responsibility. "We haven't a chance," Weller gasped. "Forget the towers. Get the ship to the surface." A salesman and two plumbers were setting fire to the terminal. A group of men in overalls and canvas shirts were ripping clown the wiring. Others just as ordinary were turning their heat guns on the intricate controls. Flames licked up. The terminal tower swayed ominously. The Venus ship appeared, lifted to the surface by an intricate stagesystem. At once the Null-O's poured into it, in two efficient lines, all of them controlled and integrated as the crazed human beings decimated their ranks. "Animals," Weller said sadly. "The mass of men. Mindless animals, dominated by their emotions. Beasts, unable to see things logicaliy" A heat beam finished him ofT, and the man behind moved forward. Finally the last remaining Null-O was aboard, and the great hatches slammed shut. With a thunderous roar the jets of the ship opened, and it shot through the bubble into the sky. Lemuel lay where he had fallen, when a heal beam, wielded by a crazed electrician, had touched his left leg. Sadly, he saw the ship rise, hesitate, then crash through ancl dwindle into the flaming sky. Human beings were all around him, repairing the damaged protection bubble, shouting orders and yelling excitedly. The babble of their voices beat against his sensitive ears; feebly, he put his hands up and covered them. The ship was gone. He had been left behind. But the plan would continue without him. A distant voice came to him. It was Dr. Frisch aboard the Venus ship, yelling down with cupped hands. The voice was faint, lost in the trackless miles of space, but Lemuel managed to make it out above the noise and hubbub around him. "Goodbye... We'll remember you..." "Work hard!" the boy shouted hack. "Don't give up until the plan is complete!" "We'll work..." The voice grew more faint. "We'll keep on... It died out, then returned for a brief Instant. "We'll succeed... And then there was only silence. With a peaceful smile on his face, a smile of happiness and contentment, satisfaction at a job well done, Lemuel lay back and waited for the pack of irrational human By Fritz Leiber This happened in Greenwich Village, of course, where anything odd, rusty, obsolete, discarded, forgotten or nonexistent is likely to turn up. But not every Village apartment looks out on a rooftop where four Russians named Stulnikov-Gurevich are pumping green witch-fire through a transparent pipe -- witch-fire, with little girl-shapes swimming in it! In the same issue, you'll find stories by Gordwainer Smith, Theodore L. Thomas, George H. Smith, and othersan issue full of rich, satisfying science fiction entertainment from beginning to end. Don't miss the February IF-on sale December #! Book Reviews by the Editor science, which created a sensalion when it appeared in IF in #, lias now been expanded by the author into a full-length novel (Ballantine, #c) which is even better than the original: a rich, controlled, deeply felt work. The original novelette appears with only minor changes as Book One of the novel. It deals with the fascinating moral, theological and practical problems posed by the idyllic reptilian culture of the planet Lithia, under investigation by a U. N. team including an aggressive atheist and a Jesuit priest. The other two members arc more or less neutral, but to Cleaver the engineer and Ruiz-Sanchez the Jesuit biologist, Lithia is not merely a planet for exploitation, but a testing ground of faith. Cleaver, a grotesque symbol of ruthless materialism, wants to use Lithia as an inexhaustible storehouse of nuclear weapons. RuizSanchez wants it sealed off from all further contact, for an equally grotesque but logical reason: Lithia 's scaly citizens enjoy perfect peace and happiness -- the state of Eden before the Fall -- without religion. To Ruiz-Sanchez, this theologically impossible condition can only be a creation of the Adversary -- one more piece of manufactured evidence to destroy belief in God. In short, he is convinced that the whole planet and all its creatures arc a fabrication of the Devil. Book One ends in a poetic ambiguity, as the U. N. team, unable lo agree on any decision, prepares to go back to Earth. The reader is left to wonder whether RuizSanchez is tragically right, or pathetically wrong. As a final gesture, one of the Li Lilians has presented Ruiz-Sanchez with a vase in which a Lithian egg has been placed. And it is from this egg, in an astonishingly forceful growth of logic, that the rest of the story emerges. The Earth background of Book Two, which might have been dim in comparison with the rich landscape of Lithia, is stunningly vivid. The new characters, half a dozen of them, are drawn with a sure touch Blish never had before, and even the old characters, including Ruiz-Sanchez himself, have taken on a new roundness, a new feeling of humanity. But Egtverchi, the emigrated Lithian, steals the show whenever he appears. Blish has had the insight to realize that a Lithian brought up in Earth's decadent underground society would be neither a denizen of Paradise nor one of Earth. Egtverchi is a rogue male, a less maker of mischief. Unable to feel any kinship with Earth's customs, wholly ignorant of Lithia's, he has no role but to spread dissension: and he does so with elan, audacity and style. Without fumbling a moment, Blish carries this story forward concurrently with three others -- Michaclis' love affair with Liu Meid, Ruiz-Sanchez' pilgrimage to Rome in the expectation of being tried for heresy, and Cleaver's conquest of Lithia. They all come together with a bang -- leaving the reader, again, to decide for himself what has actually happened and who was in the right. To my mind, Blish has balanced this equation with exquisite nicety. Most stories on theological themes are written polemically from one viewpoint or the other, excluding the arguments of the opposing side. Blish has put them all in, and so compellingly that even if you are a confirmed doubter like me, you must feel the truth of Ruiz-Sanchez' agony: and I think very likely, even if you are a True Believer, you must glimpse some of the yawning holes in Ruiz-Sanchez' position. The book resonates with a note of its own; although the final question is not answered, the novel is in no sense unfinished -- it is complete and perfect. Fred Hoyle, the Cambridge astronomer noted for his revolutionary creation, has written a delightful first novel, The Black Cloud , (Harper, #) . His theme was familiar thirty years or so ago, when world-wrecking stories were in vogue, but has lately been neglected: what would happen if the solar system passed through a dense cloud of cosmic dust? Hoyle's answer, written from the viewpoint of the professional astronomer, is at once more elaborately convincing and aot livelier than the usual gloom-laden treatment. Something of a rebel in politics as well as in astronomy, Hoyle takes a dim view of the governments of his country and ours, and shows no reverence even for the eminent members of his own profession. The menace of the Cloud, frighteningly plausible to begin with (" 'Within a fortnight we shall have a hundred degrees of frost, and within a month there'll be two hundred and fifty or more.' ") is enlivened by Hoyle's disrespectful irony, and heightened by his careful and elaborate exposition of the problem. (When a calculation is called for. Iioyle puls it in a footnote.) Except for one or two lapses, when trained astronomers patiently explain kindergarten matters to each other, Hoyle's presentation of this difficult subject is both plausible and lucid. His manipulation of vhe problem, when it turns out that the Cloud is more dian it seems, I had better pass over, for fear of spoiling the story ; but it is masterly. and the result is a whacking good sciencc-puzzlc thriller. The label under which they were published, "novels of menace I is as good a description as any of A Stir of Echoes , by Richard Mulhcson, and The Man Who Couldn't Sleep, by Charles Eric Maine (Lippincott, each #). Neither is quite science fiction, although both resemble it. The Mathrson is a thin and banal ghost story with psi trimmings. written in a Chippendale Chinese style (e.g., "knitting plastically into a hot core of multiformed awareness") stuffed full of tautologies (who else but Mathcson could write #I 'to re-plungc back into the formless irrational again'"?). The dialogue is California Domestic, the descriptions eloquently emetic. The Maine, published in England as Escapement in #, is one of this erratic authors oddest performances: a tasteless ancf shoddy mixture of Sax Rohmer and Mickey Spillane, with some passages of strikingly good s-f extrapolation and imagination. The hero, a scientist named Maxwell, is a man who has suffered an injury to his sleep center, and who undergoes periodic losses of various functions as a result -- like a Superman in reverse, at crucial moments he is likely to go deaf, or lose his memory. The characters are almost without exception sadistic dreamimages; Maxwell himself is a gray cipher. When it pauses between acts of violence, the story is sometimes intriguing, oftencr dull. A multiple murder by the hero, (# victims) winds up the .story. Robots and Changelings, by Lesler del Roy (Ballantinc, #c), is a collection of eleven stories originally published between # and #. Although the stories range widely in subject, and show some technical development, they arc remarkably uniform in theme. Del Roy's preoccupation now, as it was when he began to write fiction, is the superseded man, the odd one. the misfit -- the dying god of "The Pipes of Pan' the elf of "The Coppersmith # the old space captain of "The Still Waters' the normal boy in a super-world of "Kindness," the immortal dog of "The Keepers of the House # vhe aging dictator of "Uneasy Lies the Head # the man without an identity Qf "The Monster # the puzzled robot of "Into Thy Hands. # These stories are memorable for their quiet compassion. The Skylark of Space , by Edward E. Smith (Pyramid, #c), somewhat abridged and rewritten, captures my imagination as much as ever it did. This #-year-old grandfather of the galactic space opera -- I # Smith's first story -- has a fast, lean plot, an air of excitement, and four characters who are comfortingly bigger than life. Later writers felt they had to be more finicking about interstellar distances, and more sophisticated about the motives of heroes and villains. In The Skylark , everything is big and simple -- Seaton, his alter ego DuQucsne, the wonderful globular spaceship -- and the feeling that adventures are waiting everywhere. The Other Side of the Sky, by Arthur C. Clarke, (Harcourt, Brace. #), takes its title from one of the two series of short-short space stories which are included in the volume. These vignettes, twelve of them, are without exception remarkably trivial. The other twelve stories, first published between # and #, include some of Clarke's very best work -- notably "The Nine "Out of the Sun," and "The Songs of Distant Earth." twentytwo stories in The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels, Ninth Series , edited by T. E. Diklv (Advent, #), and S-F, the Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Judith Merril (Dell, #c). Of these, to my mind, two are first-rate: "Call Me Joe," by Poul Anderson, from Astounding, and "Hunting Machine," by Carol Emshwiller, from Science Fiction Stories. Both stories appear in the Dikiy collection. The Anderson is a powerful novelette about a man's existence-byproxy on the planet Jupiter, writvigor. Reinterpreting Simak's "Desertion" and Blish's "Bridge," it improves on both of them, which is no small achievement. The Emshwiller, one of the first published stories by this talented writer, is a jewel-perfect vignette of human spiritual smallness, contrasted with the physical bigness of a brown bear. Not many stories this small pack so much wallop. The best of the rest are Kuttner's comic "Near Miss" (Merril), Kate Wilhelm's dizzy and compact "The Mile-Long Spaceship" (Dikty, Astounding), Brian W. Aldiss's engagingly insane "Let's Be Frank" (Merril, New Worlds ), Avram Davidson's "New Let Us Sleep' and Algis Budrys' "The Edge of the Sea" (Merril, Venture), two powerful stories crippled by false endserve" (Merril, If) and Lloyd Biggie, Jr.'s "The Tunesmith" (Dikty, ).; The others arc all reasonably good but undistinguished stories: lackluster exercises on familiar themes. Seven of MerriPs eleven stories belong to the "and fantasy" half of her title; Dikty's, with the exceptions mentioned, are mostly dead-level puzzles of melodramas, each one grayly blending into a hundred similar stories you have read and mildly enjoyed. Ladies and gentlemen, it was a bad year. Man of Earth , by Algis Budrys, (Ballanline, #c) is an expanded and revised version of the novelette. "The Man From Earth," which appeared in Satellite in #. The new version has all the faults and virtues of the original, plus a few new ones. Budrys' opening situation is one of the most intriguing ideas in recent science fiction: a mousy little executive named Sibley undergoes "personality alteration" and effectively becomes a new person. Outgoing, virile and combative, he takes the appropriate name of John L. Sullivan. This death-and-rebirth episode is symbolically powerful, and beautifully managed. When Budrys goes on to tell the adventures of Sullivan, however, the story first loses its special flavor, and then becomes a different story altogether. Sibley was persuasively drawn, with all his timidities and his haling self-knowledge ; Sullivan is a big lump who gets dragooned into the army on Pluto, knocks everybody around, and is unable to understand why nobody likes him. The brutal training program which is then set forth in detail has its own horrid fascination, but is not science fiction; neither is Sullivan's conventional romance with a counter girl (straight out of how many pulp fight stories and Westerns?). The story is oriented around a question : what is this army training itself so hard for? And the answer, this time, is no more satisfactory than it was before. In the original version, Budrys rang in some last-minute aliens and a lot of invasion-of-Earth nonsense; in this one, he explains at the end that the army is going to be sent out to colonize the stars, because nobody else wants to. Cut it out. Somebody always wants to go anywhere. Out of This World , by Murray Leinster, is a loosely organized collection of stories about Bud Gregory, the hillbilly polymath who has an intuitive understanding of electronics and atomic physics, and whomps up a new wonderful invention in every other chapter. The stories originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder. As always, Leinster is ingenious in thinking up zany practical applications of slightly cockeyed principles. But watching Gregory pull these things out of his hat one after the other is wearisome; unlimited fantasy, as Arthur Koestler said (and as H. G. Wells said before him) is generally boring. World Without Men , (Ace, #c) is Charles Eric Maine's usual mixture of audacity, bad taste, worse science, sadism, ingenuity and imaginative syntax. This one is about a world in which the men have all died off due to the use of Stcrilin, an oral contraceptive. Maine explains this with some remarkably antiquated Bergsonian blether: "... a blind reaction of nature to the mass Stcrilin addiction of the human race. From nature's point of view almost the entire female half of the human species had become sterile. What was the obvious compensating action? Simply to produce more females to replace those who had lost their capacity to conceive..." Why "nature" didn't conclude the childless males were sterile, and produce more of them too, Maine does not say. The Sundial , by Shirley Jackson (Farrar, Straus  Cudahy, #) either is or is not science fiction, fantasy, or a perfectly (if peculiarly) mundane novel, according to how you look at it. The story concerns a warning received by a maiden lady from her late father that the world is coming to an end. The warning, if it is a warning, is entirely subjective but certainly feels real enough, and in one way or another a whole oddly-assorted family plus a. few even odder guests come to believe in it, and prepare for the day of destruction. The Halloran family relationship is one of delicately balanced distastes and malices, candidly expressed. ("Did you marry me for my father's money?" "Well, that, and the house.") The goings-on in the household are unexceptional, even dreary, but every now and then there is a vaguely unsettling incursion of fantasy: a snake in the fireplace; a mist in which marble statues appear warm as flesh. There is a suggestion throughout that the banal domestic reality of the house is only a fiction, which may be discarded at any moment. c 'We are in a pocket of time, Orianna, a tiny segment of time suddenly pinpointed by a celestial eye.' " The tiny cruelties of the family circle grow to seem almost kindly, in comparison with the vast Zero that waits outside; and when in the last chapter the household waits for the appointed day, the question is not only, "Will the world end?" but "Did it ever exist?" Fantasia Mathematical edited by Clifton Fadiman, is a tasteful collection of stories, poems and oddments dealing mostly with the fantasy worlds of mathematics. Fifteen stories are science fiction or fantasy, including Robert A. Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House," Martin Gardner's "No-Sided Professor," and "A Subway Named Mocbius," by A. J. Deutsch. The pill is carefully sugar-coated, with selections from the works of Huxley, Kocstler, Cabell, Plato, Capek, Morley, Millay, Housman and many others, and will persuade book snobs that science fiction is good... maybe. The Space Encyclopaedia , edited by M. T. Bizony and R. Griffin (Dutton, #) is a beautifully comprehensive and convenient source book for science fiction writers, and for readers interested in keeping up with the explosive new field of space exploration. There are general articles on such subjects as Cosmology; the Galaxy; Relativity, Theory of; c.; and shorter entries, from a page or so down to a single sentence, clearly explaining technical terms and concepts in astronomy and rocketry. The # illustrations are fascinating in themselves. The book is photo-offset (apparently from the original British edition) on heavy, glossy white paper. The price is stiff, but the book is worth it. From the Earth to the Moon and A Trip Around It, by Jules Verne. Lippincott, #. Here are two ( lassies, of which T was able to penetrate the first one a matter of some # pages. In this translation at least, it is heavily jocose, creaky ( uc What point in the heavens ought the cannon to be aimed at which is intended to discharge the projectile? # # ) and chock full of scientific misinformation. The Iron Heel , by Jack London. Macmillan, #. Here's another classic which I'd never opened before, and this one is lively. In spite of having been written (in #) about the period beginning with #, the book carries its own clumsy, exuberant conviction. Some of the characters arc lay figures, speaking to prove London's point rather than their own, but it doesn't seem to matter. Ernest Everhard is one of the last of the Victorian heroes of fiction -- a lot bigger than life and more enleriaining. Some ol London's forccasls are pathetically unreal -- contrast his socialist uprising against World War I with the patriotic frenzy that really took place -- others are curiously suggestive; for instance, he begins the war with a German attack on Honolulu (on December #th!). Toward the latter part, the book drifts off inconclusively, but it's still alive and kicking. The Shrouded Planet, by Robert Randall. Gnome, #. All about the planet Niclor, whose ecology seems to be made up entirely of peych beans, hugl bugs, and simpletons. The Survivors, by Tom Godwin. Gnome, #. Some intersteller colonists are captured by the Gerns and set down on a cold, high-gravity planet. The survivors drive themselves for three generations to get their own back. The conception is grandiose, the execution glum and banal. (Continued from page #) lector, hunting for the frequency the Russians were using. Kaufman found it. He said, "Got it, I think. One twenty-eight point nine." Morgan set his selector, heard nothing at first. Then hard in his ear burst an unintelligible sentence with the characteristic fruity diphthongs of Russian. "I think that's it," he said. He watched, and the satellite increased in size. "No rifle or any other weapon that I see," said Morgan. "But they are carrying a lot of extra oxygen bottles." Kaufman grunted. McNary asked, "Can you tell if it's a collision course yet? I can't." Morgan stared at the satellite through narrowed eyes, frowning in concentration. "I think not. I think it'll cross our bow twenty or thirty feet out; close but no collision." McNary's breath sounded loud in the helmet. "Good. Then we've nothing but the men to worry about. I wonder how those boys pitch." Another burst of Russian came over the radio, and with it Morgan felt himself slip into the relaxed state he knew, so well. No longer was the anticipation rising. He was ready now, in a state of calm, a deadly and efficient calm -- ready for the test. This was how it always was with him when the time came, and the time was now. Morgan watched as the other satellite approached. His feet were apart and his head turned sideways over his left shoulder. At a thousand yards, he heard a mutter in Russian and saw the man at the stern start moving rapidly toward the bow. His steps were long. Too long. Morgan saw the gap appear between the man and the surface of the other ship, saw the legs kicking in a futile attempt to establish contact again. The radio was alive with quick, short sentences, and the two men turned and began to work their way swiftly toward the bit of human jetsam that floated near them. "I'll be damned," said Kaufman. "They'll never make it." Morgan had seen that this was true. The gap between floating man and ship widened faster than the gap between men and floating man diminished. Without conscious thought or plan, Morgan leaned forward and pulled the jack on the telephone line from McNary's helmet. He leaned back and did the same to Kaufman, straightened and removed his own. He threw a quick knot and gathered the line, forming a coil in his left hand and one in his right, and leaving a large loop floating near the ship in front of him. He stepped forward to clear Kaufman, and twisted his body far around to the right. There he waited, eyes fixed on the other satellite. He crouched slightly and began to lean forward, far forward. At the proper moment he snapped both his arms around to throw the line, the left hand throwing high, the right low. All his sailor's skill went into that heave. As the other satellite swept past, the line flew true to meet it. The floating man saw it coming and grabbed it and wrapped ii around his hand and shouted into the radio. The call was not needed; the lower portion of the line struck one of the walking men. He turned and pulled the line into his arms and hauled it tight. The satellite was barely past when the bit of human jetsam was returning to its metallic haven. The two men became three again, and they turned to face the American satellite. As one man the three raised both arms and waved. Still without thinking, Morgan found himself raising an arm with Kaufman and McNary and waving back. He dropped his arm and watched the satellite shrink in size. The calmness left him, replaced by a small spot of emptiness that grew inside him, and grew and swelled and threatened to engulf him. Passage was ended, but the taste in his mouth was of ashes and not (Continued from page #) But he opened his eyes and looked at her hair like Plutonian night, her eyes like bright stars. "Lya," he said. "I'm going to call you Lya." "Please call me Lya " "I'd be bound to dream about you. I've dreamed about you so much... Owww!" He got his right hand up to cherish his tingling cheek. "So you felt that," she said. "Now you know you're awake. Or must I slap you again?" 'Tm sorry, Madame." "You called me Lya. Can you stand up? I'll help you." She helped him. He stood up, there in the admission chamber of Base Camp. Lya Stromminger was smiling, and she was crying, too. "You didn't go away," he said. "You' re still here." The weight of his oclysscy, half around Pluto, was beginning to stagger him. "No, I stayed. I knew you'd come back. I knew Pluto couldn't kill you or keep you from coming back." He drank more from the cup she held to his lips. "We'll wait together for them to come with the next expedition," she promised him. "Twenty years? Supplies -- " "There'll be plenty. Don't you know about Pluto? Didn't those craters, those old volcanoes, tell you?" Thinking of how he had crossed the crater, Wofforth shuddered. "Pluto is colder than anybody even guessed -- outside. But inside are the internal fires -- like all the solid planets. We made our tests and we can tap them. I kept the instruments for that. It incans we'll have power, and can make our synthetic foods and so on for as long as we need them. You are I are the inhabitants here -- " He stumbled to a chair and sat. "Twenty years -- " he said. Her arm was still around him. Her hair brushed his cheek. "It won't be long. We have so much I have several bouquets anti a couple of bottles of skunk perfume to hand out. My first bouquet, a bit one, goes to your magazine as a whole. You publish, issue for issue, the best sociological s-f on the market. Thai's not all, however; you also seem to have a corner on the most imaginative "space opera" to be found on the corner newsstand. A bouquet, also, for your artwork. As for your stories, I'm afraid that this was an off issue for you. A Quest ion of Identity was superb. Powder Keg is good, but the same idea popped up in Operation: Outer Space. Passport to Sirius , The Raider , and The Bureaucrat were mediocre (for you). Conservation had a painfully obvious ending; and a gallon of highgrade skunk oil to whoever "brainstormed" up the idea of publishing Homecoming. I think that Mr. Hidalgo wrote up a nightmare he had one night, and (through hypnotism?) fobbed it off on vou. Bantering aside, I would like to make some constructive suggestions :  ) Why not get Kelly Frcas? #) Why not eliminate Science Quiz altogether? #) Why not add # pages; everyone else has #? #) Why must I always turn to the back of the magazine for the last two paragraphs of any interesting story? (The # pages mentioned above would liquidate this nuisance.) fj) Why not bring back Forrest J. Ackerman's column of s-f news notes? #) Why not write some real editorials; if Astounding and the Co# ) Why not a good book reviewer (Damon Knight, or P. Schuyler Miller) and have some meaty reviews waiting for your readers every other month? #) Why not use one issue a year to publish a full-length novel, complete in one issue? #) Belter still, why nol go monthly; and if you're a little leery of taking the plunge all at once, you can do as Infinity did, and go to a #-month-a-year schedule, then if the circulation returns you can switch to monthly with no trouble at all? I'm interested in forming a fan club in Wayne County, so please print my street address when you publish this, and would all interested persons get in touch with me --  -- Roger Blackmar Allen Park, Mich. One of us has been reading the other's mind. Freas is here; the Science Quiz is gone; and I'm the new book reviewer. To answer your other points: (#) IF is published on a press which turns out a " signature " of twenty pages instead of the more usual sixteen. Some day we may be able to add twenty pages to the magazine , and we're enthusiastic about the new things we'll be able to bring you then. In the meantime , however , our compact , readable type-face allows us to print more words of fiction in every issue than nearly any other s-f magazine. This issue has # words of stories , compared to as little as #I # in some other magazines. (#) We regret the occasional runovers; but would you rather have us cut two paragraphs from a good story? (#) We'd like to hear some more reactions to your suggestion about the s-f news column. (#) The editorials will appear as part of In the Balance. (#) I'd hate to change IF's identity as a magazine by turning a whole issue over to a novel. Our hope is to enlarge the magazine so as to be able to give you a booklength novel and short stories , novelettes and departments. (#) Monthly publication is one of our aims , too... how soon it happens is partly up to you. I have finally found a story I thought good enough to write in about. I am referring to Gunn's Powder Keg. I buy s-f for stories like this, and usually don't find them. The other stories were good, but I can't say too much for Powder Keg. You mentioned Interlingua in your report. J'rn interested, and would like to find out more about it. I know enough to get confused! I'd like to thank you for one of the best s-f mags on the market. -- Marti Larson Roundup, Mont. Information about Interlingua can be had from Alexander Code, Science Service , Interlingua Division , # E. #I th St., New York # , N. Y. After reading Arthur C. Clarke's. "The Songs of Distant Earth" -- and what such a beautiful title, too -- I am frankly surprised. This was undoubtedly one of the best that IF has ever presented and I dare say that it will be that way for a real long time to come in the far future of science fiction. It brought back to me the memories of the Good Old Days and a person's personal freedom on this earth then. It seems like I can still hear the echoes of the Songs of Earth and everything else, and I believe that they will be a long time in waning. I guess this here is mostly a praise to Mr. Clarke, one of my favorite authors. I have read some fine works from him in the past. Need I say that Against The Fall of Night is his best? I guess every author loves plugs about himself now and then -- I have gotten some letters Charles V. De Vet, telling me that those plugs always do help. -- James W. Ayers Attalla, Ala. Noe II, in his letter in the August # issue, took rny story The Feeling of Power , too literally. When my characters spoke about breaking through on the "square root front", they did not mean that they were solving square roots for the first time. They meant they were learning how to solve them without computers . And certainly a manned missile is not practical as a counter to a computer-controlled missile. In the story, however, please note that the characters were unaware of the limitations of the human mind as compared to the computer. As a matter of fact, the story was intended to be a social satire, rather than a straight to-be-takenliterally story. As to exactly what I was satirizing, V m not sure. I'll leave it to the readers tc interpret that as they please -- only, please, not literally. -- Isaac Asimov West Newton. Mass. In the August IF, a Miss Betty Herman went about presenting a challenge that I have been meaning to take up for quite a while; yet in her letter, she described just the opposite of the idea which I have formed. Miss Herman asked the often repeated question, Is science fiction about science or about the world of tomorrow? Such stories such as Messiah , Fahrenheit #I , # , Not This August , and Hero's Walk concern future society on Earth, and these seem to be the type which was being attacked by Miss Herman. Now stop! Miss Herman writes that science fiction should be gadgets and medicine -- sociology and economics' -- space I ravel and teleportation -- but why, if these are to be considered science, not consider a story about future society science -- why not consider a good social satire science fiction? Is the science which Miss Herman speaks of just the science which can be translated by an SF author into gizmos and rockets? What is to be considered science and what not? What is to be considered science fiction and what not? According to a rather philosophical definition I have heard, "Science is truth found out". Therefore, stories about the future could be "Truth yet to be found out" whether it be on any subject. On the other hand, stories labeled science fiction about the future would have to be "Truth not yet found out" or maybe "Truth not to be found out" or... -- Christopher Corson Tahoe Valley, Calif. Yes, but ti' J k'ii a science fiction writer uses # attitudes, anxieties, c. in a story about #, that isn't '"truth not yet found out;' is it? Miss Herman's complaint was against slipshod and phony future societies . I think . S( When is a science fiction story a bore? When a pres ent-day dilemma (war, depression, bad television , book-burning) is propelled into the defenseless future, and then solved in a manner suitable to the author I think she's right. In regard to Miss Bartlcson's voicing of her distaste for old words changed into new ones: Why should magazine not be modified Become a Scientology "Clear" A Scientology "Clear" has: If you would like to have all these qualities then look into Scientology. Inquire today: Scientology, United States # #th Street, N.W. Washington # , D.C. to mag? AnJ what is wrong with fanzine? Would you have it called fan magazine as it once w r as, or fanmag? And do you know what a fanzine is that you loathe the word? Language at best is only a relative thing. The "accepted" language changes as popular usage changes. Why then should not mag and fanzine be used, when everyone knows or can easily guess what they mean? After all, fanzine is only a condensation of fan maga zine. Of course, anything can go to extremes, as with #e Ackerman's abbreviated English. But even that noble mess is understandable with very little effort, and it yields many opportunities for punning, Bv the way, while I am here, I must say that IF has the neatest repro (aha, those "new" words) of any mag on the stands, rivaled by Satellite. Its paper is superior, and its covers and interior illos (I forget myself, Miss Bartleson) are tops. I won't rave on about the material, in fear I'll sound like someone from an Amazing lettercol, but I truly enjoyed Clarke thish (this issue. Miss Bartleson) ; Fontenav, Castle, and Thompson were a bit elementary, but Castle did have a message. But what about juvenile misfits? I find the amoeba has solved one of the most fundamental math problems, that of multiplying by dividing. -- John Koning Youngstown, Ohio And there's Frank Riley's delightful satire on condensation called "Abbr". no More fun for puzzle lovers! Then you won't want lo inis this favorite magazine of puzzles for everyone -- crosswords, croslics. hrain leasers, word games, quizzes, malli games, etc. For those who like medium lo easy puzzles, here is a big value in puzzle pleasure. At all newsstands -- just # cents. croslics, diagram less, puns and anagrams, rhyming crosswords, and cryptograms. All kinds of puzzles -- guaranteed lo make your brain spin! Ask your news dealer for a copy, just # cents. croslics, diagramless, cryptograms -- for experts by experts. If you like them really lough, ask your news dealer, or send # to Quinn Publishing Company Kingston, N. Y. The most important new magazine about the most important age in history since The Stone Age! An authoritative, beautifully illustrated magazine that tells, in word and picture, the dramatic story of the conquest of space! Here are vivid, factual accounts of the men and the machines blasting off into a new era for all mankind. Here is the only magazine yet designed to show you what's what and who's who in the race for space power! That introduces you to the personalities and research behind the scenes you informed, editorially and pictorially, as science probes into worlds beyond. For The Moon , Countdown for Tomorrow , Vanguard !, Air Force and other important works. Artwork is under the direction of Mel Hunter, nationally-known science and astronautics artist, and Fred L. Wolff', noted aviation illustrator of books among the most experienced in America. and photography. It is excitingly beyond anything of its kind ever published. The first issue is now on sale. Ask your news dealer.  WORLD OF IF II novelettes from the first six years of IF Magazine! Like The First World of IF, which received such enthusiastic response from science fiction readers all over America, this is a volume of exceptional Interest -- distinguished examples of fine science fiction writing by such authors as Charles Beaumont, James Blish, Dickson, Charles L. Fontenay, James E. Gunn, Raymond F. Jones, Bryce Walton and Robert F. Young in an exciting variety of mood, idea, theme and pace. And if you missed The First World of IF, containing # really outstanding short stories from the first five years of IF, there are still a few copies available... Just send a copy for either the ""First World"" or the ""Second World"" to IF Magazine, Kingston, New York, and your copy will be mailed at once. All Stories New and Complete Illustrations by Ed Emsh and Paul Orban IF is published bi-monthly Iw Quinn Publbhing Co., Inc. Vol. #, No. #. Copyright # Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Office of publication # Lord S treet, Buffalo, N.Y. Entered as Second Class Matter at Post Office, Buffalo, N.Y. Subscription # for # issues in U.S. and Possessions; Canada # for # issues; elsewhere #. All stories are fiction; any similarity to actual persons is coincidental. Not responsible for unsolicited artwork or manuscripts. #c a copy. Printed in U.S. A. Next (April) issue on sale February #th By fritz leiber Simon Grue found a two-inch mermaid in his bathtub. It had arms, hips, a finny tail, and (here the real trouble began ) a face that reminded him irresistibly of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich ,... turned up in his bathtub that Simon Grue seriously began to wonder what the Russians were doing on the roof next door. The old house next door together with its spacious tarpapered roof , which held a sort of pent-shack, a cylindrical old water tank, and several chicken-wire enclosures, had always been a focus of curiosity in this region of Greenwich Village, especially to whoever happened to be renting Simon's studio, the north window-cum-skylight of which looked down upon it -- if you were exceptionally tall or if, like Simon, you stood halfway up a stepladder and peered. During the #'s, old-timers told Simon, the house had been owned by a bootlegger, who had installed a costly pipe organ and used the water tank to store hooch. Later there had been a colony of shavenheaded Buddhist monks, who had strolled about the roof in their orange and yellow robes, meditating and eating raw vegetables. There had followed a cormnedia deir arte theatrical group, a fencing salon, a school of the organ (the bottlegger's organ was always one of the prime renting points of the house), an Arabian restaurant, several art schools and silvercraft shops of course, and an Existentialist coffee house. The last occupants had been two bony-cheeked Swedish blondes who sunbathed interminably and had built the chicken-wire enclosures to cage a large number of sinister smoke-colored dogs -- Simon decided they were breeding werewolves, and one of his most successful abstractions, "Gray Hunger", had been painted to the inspiration of an eldritch howling. The dogs and their owners had depart abruptly one night in a closed van, without any of the dogs ever having been offered for sale or either of the girls having responded with anything more than a raised eyebrow to Simon's brave greetings of "Skoal!" The Russians had taken possession about six months ago -- four brothers apparently, and one sister, who never stirred from the house but could occasionally be seen peering dreamily from a window. A white card with a boldly-inked "Stulnikov-Gurevich" had been thumbtacked to the peeling greenpainted front door. Lafcadio Smits, the interior decorator, told Simon that the newcomers were clearly White Russians; he could tell it by their bushy beards. Lester Phlegius maintained that they were Red Russians passing as White, and talked alarmingly of spying, sabotage and suitcase bombs. Simon, who had the advantages of living on the spot and having been introduced to one of the brothers -- Vasily -- at a neighboring art gallery, came to believe that they were both Red and White and something more -- solid, complete Slavs in any case. Double Dostoevsky Russians if one may be permitted the expression. They ordered vodka, caviar, and soda crackers by the case. They argued interminably (loudly in Russian, softly in English) , they went on mysterious silent errands, they gloomed about on the roof, they made melancholy music with their deep harmonious voices and several large guitars. Once Simon thought they even had the bootlegger's organ going, but there had been a bad storm at the time and he hadn't been sure. They were not quite as tightlipped as the Swedish girls. Gradually a curt front-sidewalk acquaintance developed and Simon came to know their names. There was Vasily, of course, who wore thick glasses, the most scholarly-looking of the lot and certainly the most bibulous -- Simon came to think of Vasily as the Vodka Breather. Occasionally he could be glimpsed holding Erlenmeyer flasks, trays of culture dishes, and other pieces of biological equipment, or absentmindedly wiping off a glass slide with his beard. Then there was Ivan, the dourest of the four, though none of them save Vasily seemed very amiable. Simon's private names for Ivan were the Nihilist and the Bomber, since he sometimes lugged about with him a heavy globular leather case. With it and his beard -- a square black one -- he had more than once created a mild sensation in the narrow streets of the Village. Next there was Mikhail, who wore a large crucifix on a silver chain around his neck and looked like a more spiritual Rasputin. However, Simon thought of him less as the Religious than as the Whistler -- for his inveterate habit of whistling into his straggly beard a strange tune that obeyed no common harmonic laws. Somehow Mikhail seemed to carry a chilly breeze around with him, a perpetual cold draught, so that Simon had to check himself in order not to clutch together his coat collar whenever he heard the approach of the eerie piping. Finally there was Lev, beardless, shorter by several inches, and certainly the most elusive of the brothers. He always moved at a scurry, frequently dipping his head, so that it was some time before Simon assured himself that he had the Stulnikov-Gurevich face. He did, unmistakably. Lev seemed to be away on trips a good deal. On his returns he was frequently accompanied by furtive but important-looking men -- a different one on each occasion. There would be much bustle at such times -- among other things, the shades would be drawn. Then in a few hours Lev would be off again, and his manabout-town companion too. And of course there was the indoors-keeping sister. Several times Simon had heard one of the brothers calling "Grushenka", so he assumed that was her name. She had the Stulnikov-Gurevich face too, though on her, almost incredibly, it was strangely attractive. She never ventured on the roof but she often sat in the pent-shack. As far as Simon could make out, she always wore some dark Victorian costume -- at least it had a high neck, long sleeves, and puffed shoulders. Pale-faced in the greenish gloom, she would stare for hours out of the pent-shack's single window, though never in Simon's direction. Occasionally she would part and close her lips, but not exactly as if she were speaking, at least aloud -- he thought of calling her the Bubble Blower. The effect was as odd as Mikhail's whistling but not as unpleasant. In fact, Simon found himself studying Grushenka for ridiculously long periods of time. His mild obsession began to irk him and one day he decided henceforth to stay away altogether from his north window and the stepladder. As a result he saw little of the alterations the Russians began to make on the roof at this point, though he did notice that they lugged up among other things a length of largediameter transparent plastic piping. now for the mermaid. Late one night Simon started to fill his bathtub with cold water to soak his brushes and rags -- he was working with a kind of calcimine at the time, experimenting with portable murals painted on large plaster-faced wooden panels. Heavily laden, he got back to the bathroom just in time to shut off the water -- and to see a tiny fish of some sort splashing around in it. He was not unduly surprised. Fish up to four or five inches in length were not unheard-of apparitions in the cold-water supply of the area, and this specimen looked as if it displaced no more than a teaspoon of water. He made a lucky grab and the next moment he was holding in his firmly clenched right hand the bottom half of a slim wriggling creature hardly two inches long -- and now Simon was surprised indeed. To begin with, it was not greenish white nor any common fish color, but palely-pinkish, flesh-colored in fact. And it didn't seem so much a fish as a tadpole -- at least its visible half had a slightly oversize head shaped like a bullet that has mushroomed a little, and two tiny writhing arms or appendages of some sort -- and it felt as if it had rather large hips for a fish or even a tadpole. Equip a two-months human embryo with a finny tail, give it in addition a precocious feminine sexiness, and you'd get something of the same effect. But all that was nothing. The trouble was that it had a face -- a tiny face, of course, and rather goggly-ghostly like a planarian's, but a face nevertheless, a humanlooking face, and also (here was the real trouble) a face that bore a grotesque but striking resemblance to that of Grushenka StulnikovGurevich. Simon's fingers tightened convulsively. Simultaneously the slippery creature gave a desperate wriggle. It shot into the air in a high curve and fell into the scant inch of space between the bathtub and the wall. The next half hour was hectic in a groveling sort of way. Retrieving anything from behind Simon's ancient claw-footed bathtub was a most difficult feat. There was barely space to get an arm under it and at one point the warping of the floor boards prevented even that. Besides, there was the host of dustshrouded objects it had previously been too much trouble to tease out -- an accumulation of decades. At first Simon tried to guide himself by the faint flopping noises along the hidden base of the wall, but these soon ceased. Being on your knees and your chest with an ear against the floor and an arm strainingly outstretched is probably not the best position to assume while weird trains of thought go hooting through your head, but sometimes it has to happen that way. First came a remembered piece of neighborhood lore that supported the possibility of a connection between the house next door and the tiny pink aquatic creature now suffering minute agonies behind the bathtub. No one knew what ancient and probably larcenyminded amateur plumber was responsible, but the old-timers assured Simon there was a link between the water supply of the Russians' house with its aerial cistern and that of the building containing Simon's studio and several smaller apartments; at any rate they maintained that there had been a time during the period when the bootlegger was storing hooch in the water tank that several neighborhood cold-water taps were dispensing a weak but nonetheless authoritative mixture of bourbon and branch water. So, thought Simon as he groped and strained, if the Russians were somehow responsible for this weird fishlet, there was no insuperable difficulty in understanding how it might have gotten here. But that was the least of Simon's preoccupations. He scrabbled wildly and unsuccessfully for several minutes, then realizing he would never get anywhere in this unsystematic manner, he began to remove the accumulated debris piece by piece: dark cracked ends of soap, washrags dried out in tortured attitudes, innumerable dark-dyed cigarette stumps, several pocket magazines with bleached wrinkled pages, empty and near-empty medicine bottles and pill vials, rusty hairpins, bobby pins, safety pins, crumpled toothpaste tubes (and a couple for oil paint), a gray toothbrush, a fty-cent piece and several pennies, the mummy of a mouse, a letter from Picasso, and last of all, from the dark comer behind the bathtub's inside claw, the limp pitiful thing he was seeking. It was even tinier than he'd thought. He carefully washed the dust and flug off it, but it was clearly dead and its resemblance to Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich had become problematical -- indeed, Simon decided that someone seeing it now for the first time would think it a freak minnow or monstrous tadpole and nothing more, though mutation or disease had obviously been at work. The illusion of a miniature mermaid still existed in the tapering tail and armlike appendages, but it was faint. He tried to remember what he knew about salamanders -- almost nothing, it turned out. He thought of embryos, but his mind veered away from the subject. He wandered back into the studio carrying the thing in his hand. He climbed the stepladder by the north window and studied the house next door. What windows he could see were dark. He got a very vague impression that the roof had changed. After he had strained his eyes for some time he fancied he could see a faint path of greenish luminescence streaming between the pent-shack and the water-tank, but it was very faint indeed and might only be his vision swimming. He climbed down the stepladder and stood for a moment weighing the tiny dead thing in his hand. It occurred to him that one of his friends at the university could dig up a zoologist to pass on his find. But Simon's curiosity was more artistic than scientific. In the end he twisted a bit of cellophane around the thing, placed it on the ledge of his easel and went off to bed... and to a series of disturbingly erotic dreams. N ext day he got up late and, after breakfasting on black coffee, gloomed around the studio for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He glanced frequently at the stepladder, but resisted the temptation to climb up and have another look next door. Sighing, he thumbtacked a sheet of paper to a drawing board and halfheartedly began blocking in a female figure. It was insipid and lifeless. Stabbing irritably at the heavy cui've of the figure's hip, he broke his charcoal. "Damn!" he said, glaring around the room. Abandoning all pretense, he threw the charcoal on the floor and climbed the stepladder. He pressed his nose against the glass. In daylight, the adjoining roof looked bare and grimy. There was a big transparent pipe running between the water tank and the shack, braced in two places by improvisedlooking wooden scaffolding. Listening intently, Simon thought he could hear a motor going in the shack. The water looked sallow green. It reminded Simon of those futuristic algae farms where the stuff is supposed to be pumped through transparent pipes to expose it to sunlight. There seemed to be a transparent top on the water tank too -- it was too high for Simon to see, but there was a gleam around the edge. Staring at the pipe again, Simon got the impression there were little things traveling in the water, but he couldn't make them out. Climbing down in some excitement, Simon got the twist of cellophane from the ledge of the easel and stared at its contents. Wild thoughts were tumbling through his head as he got back up on the stepladder. Sunlight flashed on the greenish water pipe between the tank and the shack, but after the first glance he had no eyes for it. Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich had her face tragically pressed to the window of the shack. She was wearing the black drcss with high neck and puffed shoulders. At that moment she looked straight at him. She lifted her hands and seemed to speak imploringly. Then she slowly sank from sight as if, it horridly occurred to Simon, into quicksand. Simon sprang from his chair, heart beating wildly, and ran down the stairs to the street. Two or three passersby paused to study him as he alternately pounded the flaking green door of the Russians' house and leaned on the button. Also watching was the shirt-sleeved driver of a moving van, emblazoned "Stulnikov-Gurevicli Enterprises," which almost filled the street in front of the house. The door opened narrowly. A man with a square black beard frowned out of it. He topped Simon by almost a head. "Yes?" Ivan the Bomber asked, in a deep, exasperated voice. "I must see the lady of the house immediately," Simon cried. "Your sister, I believe. She's in danger." He surged forward. The butt of the Bomber's right palm took him firmly in the chest and he staggered back. The Bomber said coldly, "My sister is -- hal -- taking a bath." Simon cried, "In that case she's drowning!" and surged forward again, but the Bomber's hand stopped him short. "I'll call the police!" Simon shouted, flailing his limbs. The hand at his chest suddenly stopped pushing and began to pull. Gripped by the front of his shirt, Simon felt himself being drawn rapidly inside. "Let go! Help, a kidnapping!" he shouted to the inquisitive faces outside, before the door banged shut. "No police!" rumbled the Bomber, assisting Simon upstairs. "Now look here," Simon protested futilely. In the two-story-high living room to his right, the pipes of an organ gleamed golden from the shadows. At the second landing, a disheveled figure met them, glasses twinkling -- Vasily the Vodka Breather. He spoke querulously in Russian to Ivan, who replied shortly, then Vasily turned and the three of them crowded up the narrow third flight to the pent-shack. This housed a small noisy machine, perhaps an aerator of some sort, for bubbles were streaming into the transparent pipe where it was connected to the machine; and under the pipe, sitting with an idiot smile on a chair of red plush and gilt, was a pale black-mustached man. An empty clear-glass bottle with a red and gold label lay on the floor at his feet. The opposite side of the room was hidden by a heavy plastic shower curtain. Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich was not in view. Ivan said something explosive, picking up the bottle and staring at it. "Vodka!" he went on. "I have told you not to mix the pipe and the vodka! Now see what you have done!" "To me it seemed hospitable," said Vasily with an apologetic gesture. "Besides, only one bottle -- " Ducking under the pipe where it crossed the pent-shack, Ivan picked up the pale man and dumped him crosswise in the chair, with his patent-leather shoes sticking up on one side and his plump hands crossed over his chest. "Let him sleep. First we must take down all the apparatus, before the capitalistic police arrive. Now : what to do with this one?" He looked at Simon, and clenched one large and hairy fist. 'Nyet-nyet-nyet said the Vodka Breather, and went to whisper in Ivan's ear. They both stared at Simon, who felt uncomfortable and began to back toward the door; but Ivan ducked agilely under the pipe and grasped him by the arm, pulling him eflfortlessly toward the roof exit. "Just come this way if you please, Mr. Gru-ay"' said Vasily, hurrying after. As they left the shack, he picked up a kitchen chair. Crossing the roof, Simon made a sudden effort and wrenched himself free. They caught him again at the edge of the roof, where he had run with nothing clearly in mind, but with his mouth open to yell. Suspended in the grip of the two Russians, with Ivan's meaty palm over his mouth, Simon had a momentary glimpse of the street below. A third bearded figure, Mikhail the Religious, was staring up at them from the sunny sidewalk. The melancholy face, the deep-socketed tormented eyes, and the narrow beard tangled with the dangling crucifix combined to give the effect of a Tolstoy novel's dustjacket. As they hauled Simon away, he had the impression that a chilly breeze had sprung up and the street had darkened. In his ears was Mikhail's distant, oddly discordant whistling. Grunting, the two brothers set Simon down on the kitchen chair and slid him across the roof until something hard but resilient touched the top of his head. It was the plastic pipe, through which, peering upward, he could see myriads of tiny polliwog-shapes flitting back and forth. "Do us a kindness not to make noise," said Ivan, removing his palm. "My brother Vasily will now explain." He went away. kept Simon in his chair. Vasily, bobbing his head and smiling, sat down tailor-fashion on the roof in front of him. "First I must tell you, Mr. Gru-ay that I am specialist in biological sciences. Here you see results of my most successful experiment." He withdrew a round clearglass bottle from his pocket and unscrewed the top. "Ah?" said Simon tentatively. "Indeed yes. In my researches, Mi . Gru-y, I discovered a chemical  Inch will inhibit growth at any level of embryonic development, producing a viable organism at that point. The basic effect of this chemical is always toward sui'vival at whatever level of development -- one cell, a blastula, a worm, a fish, a four-legger. This research, which Lysenko scoffed at when I told him of it, I had no trouble in keeping secret, though at the time I was working as the unhappy collaborator of the godless soviets. But perhaps I am being too technical?" "Not at all," Simon assured him. "Good," Vasily said with simple satisfaction and gulped at his bottle. "Meanwhile my brother Mikhail was a religious brother at a monastery near Mount Athos, my Nihilist brother Ivan was in central Europe, while my third brother Lev, who is of commercial talents, had preceded us to the New World, where we always felt it would some day be our destiny to join one another. "With the aid of brother Ivan, I and my sister Grushenka escaped from Russia. We picked up Mikhail from his monastery and proceeded here, where Lev had become a capitalist business magnate. "My brothel's, Ivan especially, were interested in my research. He had a theory that we could eventually produce hosts of men in this way, whole armies and political parties, all Nihilist and all of them Stulnikov-Gurcviches. I assured him that this was impossible, that I could not play Cadmus, for freeswimming forms are one thing, we have the way to feed them in the aqueous medium ; but to make fully developed mammals placental nourishment is necessary -- that I cannot provide. Yet to please him I begin with (pardon me!) tlie egg of my sister, that was as good a beginning as any and perhaps it intrigued my vanity. Ivan dreamed his dreams of a Nihilist StulnikovGurevich humanity -- it was harmless, as I told myself." Simon stared at him glassy-eyed. Something rather peculiar was beginning to happen inside hi head -- about an inch under the point where the cool water-filled plastic pipe pressed down on his scalp. Little ghostly images were darting -- delightfully wispy litde girlthings, smiling down at him impudently, then flirting away with a quick motion of their mermaid tails. The sky had been growing steadily darker and now there came the growl of thunder. Against the purple-gray clouds Simon could barely make out the semi-transparent shapes of the golliwogs in the pipe over his head; but the images inside his mind were growing clearer by the minute. "Ah, we have a storm," Vasily observed as the thunder growled again. "That reminds me of Mikhail, who is much influenced by our Finnish grandmother. He had the belief as a child that he could call up the winds by whistling for them -- he even learned special wind musics from her. Later he became a Christian religious -- there are great struggles in him. Mikhail objected to my researches when he heard I used the egg of my sister. of souls who are not baptized. I asked him how about the water they are in, he replied this is not the same thing, these little swimmers will wriggle in hell eternally. This worried him greatly. We tried to tell him I had not used the egg of my sister, only the egg of a fish. "But he did not believe this, because my sister changed greatly at the time. She no longer spoke. She put on my mother's bathing costume (we are a family people) and retired to the bathtub all day long. I accepted this -- at least in the water she is not violent. Mikhail said, 'See, her soul is now split into many unredeemed sub-souls, one each for the little swimmers. There is a sympathy between them -- a hypnode vibration. So long as you keep them near her, in that tank on the roof, this will be. If they were gone from there, far from there, the subsouls would reunite and Grushenka's soul would be one again.' He begged me to stop my research, to dump it in the sea, to scatter it away, but Lev and Ivan demand I keep on. Yet Mikhail warned me that works of evil end in the whirlwind. I am torn and undecided." He gulped at his vodka. Thunder growled louder. Simon was thinking, dreamily, that if the soul of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich were split into thousands of sub-souls, vibrating hynotically in the nearby water tank, with at least one of them escaping as far as his bathtub, then it was no wonder if Grushenka had a strange attraction for him. "But that is not yet the worst," Vasily continued. "The hypnotic vibrations of the free-swimming ones in their multitude turn out to have a stimulating effect on any male who is near. Their sub-minds induce dreams of the piquant sort. Lev says that to make money for the work we must sell these dreams to rich men. I protest, but to no avail. "Lev is maddened for money. Now besides selling the dreams I find he plans to sell the creatures themselves, sell them one by one, but keep enough to sell the dreams too. It is a madness." The darkness had become that of night. The thunder continued to growl and now it seemed to Simon that it had music in it. Visions swam through his mind to its rhythm -- hordes of swimming pygmy souls, of unborn water babies, migrations of miniature mermaids. The pipe hanging between water tank and pentshack became in his imagination a giant umbilicus or a canal for a monstrous multiple birth. Sitting beneath it, helpless to move, he focused his attention with increasing pleasure on the active, supple, ever more human girlbodies that swam across his mind. Now more mermaid than tadpole, with bright smiling lips and eyes, long Lorelei-hair trailing behind them, they darted and hovered caressingly. In their wide-cheeked oval faces, he discovered without shock, there was a transcendent resemblance to the features of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich -- a younger, milk-skinned maiden of the steppes, with challenging eyes and fingers that brushed against him with delightful shocks... "So it is for me the great problem," Vasily's distant voice continued. "I see in my work only the pure research, the play of the mind. Lev sees money, Ivan sees dragon teeth -- fodder for his political cannon -- Mikhail sees unshriven souls, Grushenka sees -- who knows? -- madness. It is indeed one great problem." T hunder game again, crashingly this time. The door of the pent-shack opened. Framed in it stood Ivan the Bomber. "Vasily!" he roared. "Do you know what that idiot is doing now?" As the thunder and his voice trailed off together, Simon became aware at last of the identity of the other sound, which had been growing in volume all the time. Simultaneously Vasily struggled to his feet. "The organ!" he cried. "Mikhail is playing the Whirlwind Music! We must stop him!" Pausing only for a last pull at the bottle, he charged into the pent-shack, following Ivan. Wind was shaking the heavy pipe over Simon's head, tossing him back and forth in the chair. Looking with an effort toward the west, Simon saw the reason: a spinning black pencil of wind that was writing its way toward them in wreckage across the intervening roofs. The chair fell under him. Stumbling across the roof, he tugged futilely at the door to the pentshack, then threw himself flat, clawing at the tarpaper. There was a mounting roar. The top of the water tank went spinning off like a flying saucer. Momentarily, as if it were a giant syringe, the whirlwind dipped into the tank. Simon felt himself sliding across the roof, felt his legs lifting. He fetched up against the roofs low wall and at that moment the wind let go of him and his legs touched tarpaper again. Gaining his feet numbly, Simon staggered into the leaning pentshack. The pale man was nowhere to be seen, the plush chair empty. The curtain at the other side of the room had fallen with its rods, revealing a bathtub more antique than Simon's. In the tub, under the window, sat Grushenka. The lightning flares showed her with her chin level with the water, her eyes placidly staring, her mouth opening and closing. Simon found himself putting his arms around the black-clad figure. With a straining effort he lifted her out of the tub, water sloshing all over his legs, and half carried, half slid with her down the stairs. He fetched up panting and disheveled at the top landing, his attention riveted by the lightningilluminated scene in the two-storyhigh living room below. At the far end of it a dark-robed figure crouched at the console of the mighty organ, like a giant bat at the base of the portico of a black and gold temple. In the center of the room Ivan was in the act of heaving above his head his globular leather case. Mikhail darted a look over his shoulder and sprang to one side. The projectile crashed against the organ. Mikhail picked himself up, tearing something from his neck. Ivan lunged forward with a roar. Mikhail crashed a fist against his jaw. The Bomber went down and didn't come up. Mikhail unwrapped his crucifix from his fingers and resumed playing. With a wild cry Simon heaved himself to his feet, stumbled over Grushenka's sodden garments, and pitched headlong down the stairs. When he came to, the house was empty and the Stulnikov moving van was gone. At the front door he was met by a poker-faced young man who identified himself as a him the globular case Ivan had thrown at the organ. It proved to contain a bowling ball. The young gendeman listened to his story without changing expression, thanked him warmly, and shooed him out. The Stulnikov-Gureviches disappeared for good, though not quite without a trace. Simon found this item in the next evening's paper, the first of many he accumulated yearningly in a scrapbook during the following months: Milford Pa . -- The "mermaid rain" reported here has been declared a fraud by an eminent European biologist. Vasily StulnikovGurevich, formerly Professor of Gene ties at Pire University, Latvia, passing through here on a crosscountry trip, declared the miniature "mermaids" were "albino tadpoles, probably scattered about as a hoax by schoolboys." The professor added, "I would like to know where they got them, however. There is clear evidence of mutation, due perhaps to fallout." Dr. Stulnikov directed his party in a brief but intensive search for overlooked specimens. His charming silent sister, Grushenka Stulnikov, wearing a quaint Latvian swimming costume, explored the shallows of the Delaware. After collecting as many specimens as possible, the professor and his assistants continued their trip in their unusual camping car. Dr. Stulnikov intends to found a biological research center "in the calm and tolerant atmosphere of the Inhabited only by whispering winds y Robins World was a paradise for the wrong two people -- Eve and her son... the Starholm's crew, hunting heavy elements for fuel -- eight months, on an idyllic green paradise of a planet; a soft, windy, whispering world, inhabited only by trees and winds. But in the end it presented its own unique problem. Specifically, it presented Captain Merrihew with the problem of Robin, male, father unknown, who had been born the day before, and a month prematurely, to Dr. Helen Murray. Merrihew found her lying abed in the laboratory shelter, pale and calm, with the child beside her. The little shelter, constructed roughly of green planks, looked out on the clearing which the Star holm had used as a base of operations during the layover; a beautiful place at the bottom of a wide valley, in the curve of a broad, deepflowing river. The crew, tired of being shipbound, had built half a dozen such huts and shacks in these eight months. Menihew glared down at Helen. He snorted, 'This is a fine situation. You, of all the people in the whole damned crew -- the ship's doctor! It's -- it's -- " Inarticulate with rage, he fell back on a ridiculously inadequate phrase. "It's -- criminal carelessness!" "I know." Helen Murray, too young and far too lovely for a ship's officer on a ten-year cruise, still looked weak and white, and her voice was a gentle shadow of its crisp self. "I'm afraid four years in space made me careless." Merrihew brooded, looking down at her. Something about ship-gravity conditions, while not affecting potency, made conception impossible; no child had ever been conceived in space and none ever would. On planet layovers, the effect wore off very slowly; only after three months aground had Dr. Murray started routine administration of anticeptin to the twenty-two women of the crew, herself included. At that time she had been still unaware that she herself was already carrying a child. Outside, the leafy forest whispered and rustled, and Merrihew knew Helen had forgotten his existence again. The day-old child was tucked up in one of her rolled coveralls at her side. To Merrihew, he looked like a skinned monkey, but Helen's eyes smoldered as her hands moved gendy over the tiny round head. He stood and listened to the winds and said at random, "These shacks will fall to pieces in another month. It doesn't matter, we'll have taken off by then." Dr. Chao Lin came into the shack, an angular woman of thirtyfive. She said, "Company, Helen? Well, it's about time. Here, let me take Robin." Helen said in weak protest, "You're spoiling me, Lin." "It will do you good," Chao Lin returned. Merrihew, in a sudden surge of fury and frustration, exploded, "Damn it, Lin, you're making it all worse. He'll die when we go into overdrive, you know as well as I do!" Helen sat up, clutching Robin protectively. "Are you proposing to drown him like a kitten?" "Helen, I'm not proposing anything. I'm stating a fact." "But it's not a fact. He won't die in overdrive because he won't be aboard when we go into overdrive!" Merrihew looked at Lin helplessly, but his face softened. "Shdl we -- put him to sleep and bury him here?" The woman's face turned white. "No!" she cried in passionate protest, and Lin bent to disengage her frantic grip. "Helen, you'll hurt him. Put him down. There." Merrihew looked down at her, troubled, and said, "We can't just abandon him to die slowly, Helen -- " "Who says I'm going to abandon him?" Merrihew asked slowly, "Are you planning to desert?" He added, after a minute, "There's a chance lie'll survive. After all, his vry birth was against all medical precedent. Maybe -- " "Captain -- " Helen sounded desperate. "Even drugged, no child under ten has ever endured the shift into hyperspace drive. A newborn would die in seconds." She clasped Robin to her again, and said, "It's the only way -- you have Lin for a doctor, Reynolds can handle my collateral duties. This planet is uninhabited, the climate is mild, we couldn't possibly starve." Her face, so gentle, was suddenly like rock. "Enter my death in the log, if you want to." Merrihew looked from Helen to Lin, and said, "Helen, you're insane!" She said, "Even if I'm sane now, I wouldn't be long if I had to abandon Robin." The wild note had died out of her voice, and she spoke rationally, but inflexibly. "Captain Merrihew, to get me aboard the Starholm, you will have to have me drugged or taken by force; I promise you I won't go any other way. And if you do that -- and if Robin is left behind, or dies in overdrive -- just so you will have my services as a doctor -- then I solemnly swear that I will kill myself at the first opportunity." "My God," said Merrihew, "you are insane!" Helen gave a very tiny shrug. "Do you want a madwoman aboard?" Chao Lin said quietly, "Captain, I don't see any other way. We would have had to arrange it that way if Helen had actually died in childbirth. Of two unsatisfactory solutions, we must choose the least harmful." And Merrihew knew that he had no real choice. "I still think you're both crazy," he blustered, but it was surrender, and Helen knew it. Ten days after the Starholm took off, young Colin Reynolds, technician, committed suicide by the messy procedure of slicing his jugular artery, which -- in zero gravity -- distributed several quarts of blood in big round globules all over his cabin. He left an incoherent note. Merrihew put the note in the disposal and Chao Lin put the blood in the ship's blood-bank for surgery, and they hushed it up as an accident; but Merrihew had the unpleasant feeling that the layover on the green and windy planet was going to become a legend, spread in whispers by the crew. And it did, but that is another story. when he first heard the voices in the wind. He pulled at his mother's arm and crooned softly, in imitation. "What is it, lovey?" "Pretty." He crooned again to the distant murmuring sound. Helen smiled vaguely and patted the round cheek. Robin, his infant imagination suddenly distracted, said, "Hungry. Robin hungry. Berries." "Berries after you eat," Helen promised absently, and picked him up. Robin tugged at her arm. "Mommy pretty, too!" She laughed, a rosy and smiling young Diana. She was happy on the solitary planet ; they lived quite comfortably in one of the larger shacks, and only a little frown-line between her eyes bore witness to the terror which had closed down on her in the first months, when every new day had been some new struggle -- against weakness, against unfamiliar sounds, against loneliness and dread. Nights when she lay wakeful, sweating with terror while the winds rose and fell again and her imagination gave them voices, bleak days when she wandered dazedly around the shack or stared moodily at Robin. There had been moments -- only fleeting, and penanced with hours of shame and regret -- when she thought that even the horror of losing Robin in those first days would have been less than the horror of spending the rest of her life alone here; when she had wondered why Merrihew had not realized that she was unbalanced, and forced her to go with them... by now, Robin would have been only a moment's painful memory. Still not strong, knowing she had to be strong for Robin or he would die as surely as if she had abandoned him, she had spent the first months in a somnambulistic dream. Sometimes she had walked for days at a time in that dream; she would wake to find food that she could not remember gathering. Somehow, pervasive, the dream-voices had taken over; the whispering winds had been full of voices and even hands. She had fallen ill and lain for days sick and delirious, and had heard a voice which hardly seemed to be her own, saying that if she died the wind voices would care for Robin... and then the shock and irrationality of that had startled her out of delirium, agonized and trembling, and she pulled herself upright and cried out "No!" And the shimmer of eyes and voices had faded again into vague echoes, until there was only the stir of sunlight on the leaves, and Robin, chubby and naked, kicking in the sunlight, cooing with his hands outstretched to the rustle of leaves and shadows. She had known, then, that she had to get well. She had never heard the wind voices again, and her crisp, scientific mind rejected the fanciful theory that if she only believed in the wind voices she would see their forms and hear their words clearly. And she rejected them so thoroughly that when she heard them speak she shut them away from her mind, and alter a time heard tlieni no longer, except in restless dreams. By now she had accepted the isolation and the beauty of their world, and begun to make a happy life for Robin. For lack of other occupation last summer -- though the winter was mild and there was no lack of fruits and roots even then -- Helen had patiently snared male and female of small animals like rabbits, and now she had a pen of them. They provided a change of diet, and after a few smelly unsuccessful experiments she had devised a way to supple their fur pelts. She made no effort at gardening, though when Robin was older she might try that. For the moment, it was enough that they were healthy and safe and protected... Robin was listening again. Helen bent her ear, sharpened by the silence, but heard only the rustle of wind and leaves; saw only falling brightness along a silvered tree-trunk. Wind? When there were no branches stirring? "Ridiculous," she said sharply, then snatched up the baby boy and squeezed him before hoisting him astride her hip. "Mommy doesn't mean you, Robin. Lets look for berries." But soon she realized that his head was tipped back and that he was listening, again, to some sound she could not hear. fifth birthday, Helen had made a special bed for him in another room of the building. He missed the warmth of Helen's body, and the comforting sound of her breathing; for Robin, since birth, had been a wakeful child. Yet, on the first night alone. Robin felt curiously freed. He did something he had never dared do before, for fear of waking Helen; he slipped from his bed and stood in the doorway, looking into the forest. The forest was closer to the doorway now; Robin could fuzzily remember when the clearing had been wider. Now, slowly, beyond the garden , patcli which Helen kept cleared, the underbrush and saplings were growing back, and even what Robin called "the bunted place" was covered with new sparse grass. Robin was accustomed to being alone, during the day -- even in his first year, Helen had had to leave him alone, securely fastened in the house, or inside a little tight-fenced yard. But he was not used to being alone at night. Far off in the forest, he could hear the whispers of the other people. Helen said there were no other people, but Robin knew better, because he could hear their voices on the wind, like fragments of the songs Helen sang at bedtime. And sometimes he could almost see them in the shadowy spots. Once when Helen had been sick, a long time ago, and Robin had run helplessly from the fenced yard to the inside room and back again, hungry and dirty and furious because Helen only slept on the bed withher eyes closed, rousing up now and then to whimper like he did when he fell down and skinned his knee, the winds and voices had come into the very house; Robin had hazy memories of soothing voices, of hands that touched him more softly than Helen's hands. But he could not quite remember. Now that he could hear them so clearly, he would go and find the other people. And then if Helen was sick again, there would be someone else to play with him and look after him. He thought gleefully, wonH Helen be surprised, and darted off across the clearing. Helen woke, roused not by a sound but by a silence. She no longer heard Robin's soft breaths from the alcove, and after a moment she realized something else: The winds were silent. Perhaps, she thought, a storm was coming. Some change in air pressure could cause this stillness -- but Robin? She tiptoed to the alcove; as she had suspected, his bed was empty. Where could he be? In the clearing? With a storm coming? She slid her feet into hand-made sandals and ran outside, her quivering call ringing out through the silent forest : "Robin -- oh, Robin!" Silence. And far away a little ominous whisper. And for the first time, since that first frightening year of loneliness, she felt lost, deserted in an alien world. She ran across the clearing, looking around wildly, trying to decide which way he could have wandered. Into the forest? What if he had strayed toward the river bank? There was a place where the bank crumbled away, down toward the rapids -- her throat closed convulsively, and her call was almost a shriek: "Oh, Robin! Robin, darling! Robin!" She ran through the paths worn by their feet, hearing snatches of rustle, winds and leaves suddenly vocal in the cold moonlight around her. It was the first time since the spaceship left them that Helen had ventured out into the night of their world. She called again, her voice cracking in panic. "Ro-bin!" A sudden stray gleam revealed a glint of white, and a child stood in the middle of the path. Helen gasped with relief and ran to snatch up her son -- then fell back in dismay. It was not Robin who stood there. The child was naked, about a head shorter than Robin, and female. There was something curious about the bare and gleaming flesh, as if she could see the child only in the full flush of the moonlight. A round, almost expressionless face was surrounded by a mass of colorless streaming hair, the exact color of the moonlight. Helen's audible gasp startled her to a stop : she shut her eyes convulsively, and when she opened them the path was black and empty and Robin was running down the track toward her. Helen caught him up, with a strangled cry, and ran, clasping him to her breast, back down the path to their shack. Inside, she barred ' the door and laid Robin down in her own bed, and threw herself down shivering, too shaken to speak, too sliaken to scold him, curiously afraid to question. I had a hallucination, she told herself, a hallucination, another dream, a dream... A dream, like the other Dream. She dignified it to herself as The Dream, because it was not like any other dream she had ever had. She had dreamed it first before Robin's birth, and been ashamed to speak of it to Chao Lin, fearing the common-sense skepticism of the older woman. On their tenth night on the green planet (the Star holm was a dim recollection now) when Merrihew's scientists had been convinced that the little world was safe, without wild beasts or diseases or savage natives, the crew had requested permission to camp in the valley clearing beside the river. Permission granted, they had gone apart in couples almost as usual, and even those who had no enduring liaison at the moment had found a partner for the night. It must have been that night,... Colin Reynolds was two years younger than Helen, and their attachment, enduring over a few months of shiptime, was based less on mutual passion than a sort of boyish need in him, a sort of impersonal feminine solicitude in Helen. All her affairs had been like that, companionable, comfortable, but never passionate. Curiously enough, Helen was a woman capable of passion, of great depths of devotion ; but no man had ever roused it and now no man ever would. Only Robin's birth had touched her deeply-pent emotions. But that night, when Colin Reynolds was sleeping, Helen stayed restlessly awake, hearing the unquiet stirring of wind on the leaves. After a time slic wandered down to the water's edge, staying a cautious distance from the shore -- for the cliff crumbled dangerously -- and stretched herself out to listen to the windvoices. And after a time she fell asleep, and had The Dream, which was to return to her again and again. Helen thought of herself as a scientist, without room for fantasies, and that was why she called it, fiercely, a dream; a dream born of some undiagnosed conflict in her. Even to herself Helen would not recall it in full. There had been a man, and to her it seemed that he was part of the green and windy world, and he had found her sleeping by the river. Even in her drowsy state, Helen had suspected that perhaps one of the other crew members, like herself sleepless and drawn to the shining water, had happened upon her there; such things were not impossible, manners and mores being what they were among starship crews. But to her, half-dreaming, there had been some strangeness about him, which prevented her from seeing him too clearly even in the dream and no man liad ever seemed so living to her; and it was her fierce rationalization of the dream which kept her silent, months later, when she discovered (to her horror and secret despair) that she was with child. She had felt that she would lose the haze and secret delight of the dream, if she openly acknowledged that Colin had fathered her child. But at first -- in the cool green morning that followed -- she had not been at all sure it was a dream. Seeing only sunlight and leaves, she had held back from speaking, not wanting ridicule; could she have asked each man of the Starholniy Was it you who came to me last night? Because if it was not, there are other men on this world, men who cannot be clearly seen even by moonlight -- Severely she reminded herself, Merrihew's men had pronounced the world uninhabited, and uninhabited it must be. Five years later, hugging her sleeping son close, Helen remembered the dream, examined the content of her fantasy, and once again, shivering, repeated, 'T had a hallucination. It was only a dream. A dream, because I was alone... years old, Helen told him the story of his birth, and of the ship. He was a tall, silent boy, strong and hardy but not talkative; he heard the story almost in silence, and looked at Helen for a long time in silence, afterward. He finally said in a whisper, "You could have died -- you gave up a lot for me, Helen, didn't you?" He knelt and took her face in his hands. She smiled, and drew a little away from him. "Why are you looking at me like that, Robin?" The boy could not put instant words to his thoughts; emotions were not in his vocabulary. Helen had taught him everything she knew, but slie had always concealed her feelings from her son. He asked at last, "Why didn't my father stay with you?" "I don't suppose it entered his head," Helen said. "He was needed on the ship. Losing me was bad enough." Robin said passionately, "I'd have stayed!" The woman found herself laughing. "Well -- you did stay, Robin." He asked, "Am I like my father?" Helen looked gravely at her son, trying to see the half-forgotten features of young Reynolds in the boy's face. No, Robin did not look like Colin Reynolds, nor like Helen herself. She picked up his hand in hers; despite his robust health, Robin never tanned; his skin was pearly pale, so that in the green sunlight it blended into the forest almost invisibly. His hand lay in Helen's palm like a shadow. She said at last, "No, nothing like him. But under this sun, that's to be expected." Robin said confidently, "Fm like the other people." "The ones on the ship? They -- " "No," Robin interrupted, "you always said, when I was older you'd tell me about the other people. I mean the other people here. The ones in the woods. The ones you can't see." Helen stared at the boy in blank disbelief. "What do you mean? There are no other people, just us." Then she recalled that every imaginative child invents playmates. Alone, she thought, Robin's always alone, no other children, no wonder he's a little -- strange. She said, quietly, "You dreamed it, Robin." The boy only stared at her, in bleak, blank alienation. "You mean," he said, "you can't hear them either?" He got up and walked out of the hut. Helen called, but he didn't turn back. She ran after him, catching at his arm, stopping him almost by force. She whispered, "Robin, Robin, tell me what you mean! There isn't anyone here. Once or twice I thought I had seen -- something, by moonlight, only it was a eam. Please, Robin -- please -- " "If it's only a dream, why are you frightened?" Robin asked, through a curious constriction in his throat. "If they've never hurt you -- " No, they had never hurt her. Even if, in her long-ago dream, one of them had come to her -- and the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair -- a scrap of memory from a vanished life on another world sang in Helen's thoughts. She looked up at the pale, impatient face of her son, and swallowed hard. Her voice was husky when she spoke. "Did I ever tell you about rationalization -- when you want something to be true so much that you can make it sound right to yourself?" "Couldn't that also happen to something you wanted not to be true?" Robin retorted with a mutinous curl of his mouth. Helen would not let go his arm. She . begged, "Robin -- no, you'll only waste your life and break your heart looking for something that doesn't exist -- " The boy looked down into her shaken face, and suddenly a new emotion welled up in him and he dropped to his knees beside her and buried his face against her breast. He whispered, "Helen, I'll never leave you. I'll never do anything you don't want me to do, I don't want anyone but you -- " And for the first time in many years, Helen broke into wild and uncontrollable crying, without knowing why she wept. Robin did not speak again of his quest in the forest. For many months he was quiet and subdued, staying near the clearing, hovering near Helen for days at a time, then disappearing into the forest at dusk. He heard the winds numbly, deaf to their promise and their call. Flelcn too was quiet and withdrawn, feeling Robin's alienation through his submissive mood. She found herself speaking to him sharply for being always under foot; yet, on the rare days when he vanished into the forest and did not return until after sunset, she felt a restless unease that set her wandering the paths herself, not following him, but simply uneasy unless she knew he was within call. Once, in the shadows just before sunset, she thought she saw a man moving through the trees, and for an instant, as he turned toward her, she saw that he was naked. She had seen him only for a second or two, and after he had slipped between the shadows again, common sense told her it was Robin. She was vaguely shocked and annoyed ; she firmly intended to speak to him, perhaps to scold him for running about naked and slipping away like that; then, in a sort of remote embarrassment, she forebore to mention it. But after that, she kept out of the forest. Robin had been vaguely aware of her surveillance and knew when it ceased. But he did not give up his own pointless rambles, although even to liimself he no longer spoke of searching, or of any dreamlike inhabitants of the woods. At times it still seemed that some shadow concealed a half-seen form, and the distant murmur grew into a voice that mocked him ; a white arm, the shadow of a face, until he lifted his head and stared straight at it. One evening toward twilight he saw a sudden shimmer in the trees, and he stood, fixedly, as the stray glint resolved itself first into a white face with shadowy eyes, then into a translucent flicker of bare arms, and then into the form of a woman, arrested for an instant with her hand on the bole of a tree. In the shadowy spot, filled only with the liisL I ay of a cloudy sunset, she was very clear; not cloudy or unreal, but so distinct that he could see even a small smudge or bramblescratch on her shoulder, and a fallen leaf tangled in her colorless hair. Robin, paralyzed, watched her pause, and turn, and smile, and then she melted into tlie shadows. He stood with his heart pounding for a second after she had gone; then whirled, bursting with the excitement of his discovery, and ran down the path toward home. Suddenly he stopped short, the world tilting and reeling, and fell on his face in a bed of dry leaves. He was still ignorant of the nature of the emotion in him. He felt only intolerable misery and the conviction that he must never, never speak to Helen of what he had seen or felt. H e lay there, his burning face pressed into the leaves, unaware of the rising wind, the little flurry of blown leaves, the growing dsu'kncss and distant thunder. At last an icy spatter of rain aroused him, and cold, numbed, he made his way slowly homeward. Over his head the boughs creaked woodenly, and Robin, under the driving whips of the rain, felt their tumult only echoed his own voiceless agony. He was drenched by the time he pushed the door of the shack open, and stumbled blindly toward the fire, only hoping that Helen would be sleeping. But she started up from beside the hearth they had built together last summer. "Robin?" Deathly weary, the boy snapped, "Who else would it be?" Helen didn't answer. She came to him, a small swift-moving figure in the firelight, and drew him into the warmth. She said, almost humbly, "I was afraid -- the storm -- Robin, you're all wet, come to the fire and dry out." Robin yielded, his twitching nerves partly soothed by her voice. How tiny Helen isy he thought, and I can remember that she used to carry me around on one arm. Now she hardly comes to my shoulder. She brought him food and he ate wolfishly, listening to the steady pouring rain, uncomfortable under Helen's watching eyes. Before his own eyes there was the clear memory of the woman in the wood, and so vivid was Robin's imagination, heightened by loneliness and undiluted by any random impressions, that it seemed to him Helen must see her too. And when she came to stand beside him, the picture grew so keen in his thoughts that he actually pulled himself free of her. The next day dawned gray and still, beaten with long needles of rain. They stayed indoors by the smoldering fire; Robin, half sick and feverish from his drenching, sprawled by the hearth too indolent to move, watching Helen's comings and goings about the room; not realizing why the sight of her slight, quick form against the gray light filled him with such pain and melancholy. The storm lasted four days. Helen exhausted her household tasks and sat restlessly thumbing through the few books she knew by heart -- they had allowed her to remove all her personal possessions, all the things she had chosen on a forgotten and faraway Earth for a ten-year star-cruise. For the first time in years, Helen was thinking again of the life, the civilization she had thrown away, for Robin who had been a pink scrap in the circle of her arm and now lay sullen on the hearth, not speaking, aimlessly whittling a stick with the knife (found discarded in a heap of rubbish from the Starholm) which was his dearest possession. Helen felt slow horror closing in on her. What world, what heritage did I give him, in my madness? This world has driven us both insane. Robin and I are both a little mad, by Earth's standards. And when I die, and I will die first, what then? At that moment Helen would have given her life to believe in his old dream of strange people in the wood. She flung her book restlessly away, and Robin, as if waiting for that signal, sat upright and said almost eagerly, "Helen -- Grateful that he had broken the silence of days, she gave him an encouraging smile. "I've been reading your books," he began, diffidently, "and I read about the sun you came from. It's different from this one. Suppose -- suppose, if there were actually a kind of people here, and something in this light, or in your eyes, made them invisible to you?" Helen said, "Have you been seeing them again?" He flinched at her ironical tone, and she asked, somewhat more gently, "It's a theory, Robin, but it wouldn't explain, then, why you see them." "Maybe I'm -- more used to this light," he said gropingly. " -- And anyway, you said you thought you'd seen them and thought it was only a dream." Halfway between exasperation and a deep pity, Helen found herself arguing, "If these other people of yours really exist, why haven't they made themselves known in sixteen years?" The eagerness with which he answered was almost frightening. "I think they only come out at night, they're what your book calls a primitive civilization -- " He spoke the words he had read, but never heard, with an odd hesitation. "They're not really a civilization at all, I think, they're like -- part of the woods." "A forest people," Helen mused, impressed in spite of herself, "and nocturnal. It's always moonlight or dusky when you see them -- " "Then you do believe me -- oh, Helen," Robin cried, and suddenly found himself pouring out the story of what he had seen, in incoherent words, concluding " -- and by daylight I can hear them, but I can't see them -- Helen, Helen, you have to believe it now, you'll have to let me try to find them and learn to talk to them -- " Helen listened with a sinking heart. She knew they should not discuss it now, when five days of enforced housebound proximity had set their nerves and tempers on edge, but some unknown tension hurled her sharp words at Robin. "You saw a woman, and I -- a man. These things are only dreams. Do I have to explain more to you?" Robin flung his knife sullenly aside. "You're so blind, so stubborn -- " "I think you are feverish again." Helen rose to go. He said wrathfully, "You treat me like a child!" "Because you act like one, with your fairy tales of women in the wind... Suddenly Robin's agony overflowed and he caught at her, holding her around the knees, clinging to her as he had not done since he was a smaU child, his words stumbling and rushing over one another. "Helen, Helen darling, don't be angry with me," he begged, and caught her in a blind embrace that pulled her off her feet. She had never guessed how strong he was; but he seemed very like a little boy, and she hugged him quickly as he began to cover her face with childish kisses. "Don't cry, Robin, my baby, it's all right," she murmured, kneeling close to him. Gradually the wildness of his passionate crying abated; she touched his forehead with her cheek to see if it were heated with fever, and he reached up and held her there. Helen let him lie against her shoulder, feeling that perhaps after the violence of his outburst he would fall asleep, and she was half asleep herself when a sudden shock of realization darted through her; quickly she tried to free herself from Robin's entangling arms. "Robin, let me go." He clung to her, not understanding. "Don't let go of me, Helen. Darling, stay here beside me," he begged, and pressed a kiss into her throat. Helen, her blood icing over, realized that unless she freed herself very quickly now, she would be fighting against a strong, aroused young man not clearly aware of what he was doing. She took refuge in the sharp maternal note of ten years ago, almost vanished in the closer, more equal companionship of the time between: "No, Robin. Stop it, at once, do you hear?" Automatically he let her go, and she rolled quickly away, out of his reach, and got to her feet. Robin, too intelligent to be unaware of her anger and too naive to know its cause, suddenly dropped his head and wept, wholly unstrung. "Why are you angry?" he blurted out. "I was only loving you." And at the phrase of the fiveyear-old child, Helen felt her throat would burst with its ache. She managed to choke out, "I'm not angry, Robin -- we'll talk about this later, I promise -- " and then, her own control vanishing, turned and fled precipitately into the pouring rain. She plunged through the familiar woods for a long time, in a daze of unthinking misery. She did not even fully realize that she was sobbing and muttering aloud, "No, no, no, no -- " She must have wandered for several hours. The rain had stopped and the darkness was lifting before she began to grow calmer and to think more clearly. She had been blind, not to foresee this day when Robin was a child; only if her child had been a daughter could it have been avoided. Or -- she was shocked at the hysterical sound of her own laughter -- if Colin had stayed and they had raised a family like Adam and Eve! But what now? Robin was sixteen; she was not yet forty. Helen caught at vanishing memories of society ; taboos so deeply rooted that for Helen they were instinctual and impregnable. Yet for Robin nothing existed except this little patch of forest and Helen herself -- the only person in his world, more specifically at the moment the only woman in his world. So much, she thought bitterly, for instinct. But have I the right to begin this all over again? Worse; have I the right to deny its existence and when I die, leave Robin alone? She had stumbled and paused for breath, realizing that she had wandered in circles and that she was at a familiar point on the river bank which she had avoided for sixteen years. On the heels of this realization she became aware that for only the second time in memory, the winds were wholly stilled. H er eyes, swollen with crying, ached as she tried to pierce the gloom of the mist, lilac-tinted with the approaching sunrise, which hung around the water. Through the dispersing mist she made out, dimly, the form of a man. He was tall, and his pale skin shone with misty white colors. Helen sat frozen, her mouth open, and for the space of several seconds he looked down at her without moving. His eyes, dark splashes in the pale face, had an air of infinite sadness and compassion, and she thought his lips moved in speech, but she heard only a thin familiar rustle of wind. Behind him, mere flickers, she seemed to make out the ghosts of other faces, tips of fingers of invisible hands, eyes, the outline of a woman's breast, the curve of a child's foot. For a minute, in Helen's weary numbed state, all her defenses went down and she thought: Then Vm not mad and it wasn't a dream and Robin isn't Reynolds' son at all. His father was this -- one of these -- and they've been watching me and Robin, Robin has seen them, he doesn't know he's one of them, but they know. They know and I've kept Robin from them all these sixteen years. The man took two steps toward her, the translucent body shifting to a dozen colors before her blurred eyes. His face had a curious familiarity -- familiarity -- and in a sudden spasm of terror Helen thought, 'T'm going mad, it's Robin, it's Robin -- His hand was actually outstretched to touch her when her scream cut icy lashes through the forest, stin'ing wild echoes in the wind-voices, and she whirled and ran blindly toward the treacherous, crumbling bank. Behind her came steps, a voice, a cry -- Robin, the strange dryad-man, she could not guess. The horror of incest, the son the father the lover suddenly melting into one, overwhelmed her reeling brain and she fled insanely to the brink. She felt a masculine hand actually gripping her shoulder, she might have been pulled back even then, but she twisted free blindly, shrieking, 'No, Robin, no, no -- " and flung herself down the steep bank, to slip and hurl downward and whirl around in the raging current to spinning oblivion and death... Many years later, Merrihew, grown old in the Space Service, falsified a log entry to send his ship for a little while into the orbit of the tiny green planet he had named Robin's World. The old buildings had fallen into rotted timbers, and Merrihew quartered the little world for two months from pole to pole but found nothing. Nothing but shadows and whispers and the unending voices of the wind. Finally, he lifted his ship and went away. swarmed like termites in a hill; but Jeremiah Winthrop still called himself a man... By T all and rawboned was Jeremiah Winthrop. Narrow of shoulder and shallow of chest he was, but no matter. There was a dignity to the man that showed itself in every movement. Here was one who still called himself a man, one whose traditions sprang from the rocky New England soil that had nourished his forebears. The mold that produces such a man is not easily bent or broken, not even in a world of three hundred and world where the rocky New England soil lies buried and forgotten beneath the foundations of monstrous buildings. Jeremiah Winthrop rode the spiral escalator up, up to the twopart cubicle he called home on the one hundred and forty-eighth floor. He stood swaying slightly as the escalator wound its serpentine way upwards. Others rode with him, tight people, tense people, pushed together, staring straight as they rode the spiral escalator up. And now and then at a turn or a bend a man would elbow his way out. He'd leave the upflowing river of people and step onto a landing as his floor came by. But the escalator was still crowded as it passed the one hundred and forty-eighth floor and Winthrop stepped off. He was not one of the lucky ones who lived high near the roof where it was at least possible to think about the air and the light and the sun. Winthrop boarded a moving belt that carried him over to liis own corridor. He walked down the corridor for ten minutes. It was easy walking, for there were far fewer people now. Finally he came to his own door. He inserted his thumb in the thurnbhole, slid the door open and walked in. A tousle-headed youngster sat on the floor playing with a plastic box. The boy looked up as Winthrop entered. "Daddy!" he shouted. He flung himself to his feet, dashed across the room and grabbed his father around the legs. "Hello, Davy," said Winthrop, ruffling the curly brown hair. "How's the little man?" "Fine, Daddy. And Mommy says we can go up on the roof in another month. Will you come with us? This time? You never go with us. Daddy. Will you come up with us in a month from now?" Winthrop looked over the boy's head at his wife, Ann. The smile faded from his face. He said, "A month? I thought it was our turn again in a week. What happened?" Ann shook her head and pressed the back of a hand against her forehead. "I don't know. They have had to re-schedule evei#body. Another eighteen hundred babies born in the building this week. They all have to get a little sun. I don't know." Winthrop pushed Davy gently to one side and held tlie boy to him as he walked over to Ann. He put a hand in the small of her back and held her against his chest. She rested her head against the upper part of his arm and leaned against him. Ann lifted her head, stood on her toes and kissed Winthrop. She pulled away and led him over to a chair, Davy still hanging on to his leg. "You must be tired," she said. "Ten hours you've been out. Were you able to... Did you -- " "No," said Winthrop. "Nothing. Not so much as a soybean." He looked at his wife and smiled. "I guess the time has come for us to eat that potato. We've been saving it for a month." Ann's eyes wiinkled as she looked down at him. "Oh. I -- I gave it to the Brookses. They haven't had anything in weeks." The words began to pour out. "We have done so well, really, in the last few weeks that I felt sorry for them. We had those cabbage leaves and three potatoes and even tliat piece of fish four months ago. I couldn't help myself. I gave -- I gave our potato to them. They were so sick of Standard Fare they wei'e beginning to get depressed, really depressed. I -- " Winthrop reached up and put an arm around her hips and said, "Don't think about it, darling." He was silent for a moment, and then he continued, "I think I'll go down and see if John Barlow has some work for me. Let's have a quick dinner of Standard Fare and then I'll go." He got up and walked over to the sink and began washing Davy's hands, talking, joshing, teasing a little as he did so. Ann took three glasses from the tiny cabinet. She went to the synthetic milk faucet and filled the glasses and then put them on the table. She went to the bread slot and removed six slices of bread. One after the other she dropped the six slices of brown bread through the toaster. She picked up a knife and scooped big gobs of rich yellow synthetic butter out of the butter slot and spread it on the toast. She made a pile of the toast on a plate and then cut the pile in half. "All right," she called. And she put the toast on the table and sat down. Winthrop helped Davy into a chair and then sat down himself. He bent his head and spoke a brief blessing. And they all ate. They ate of other people did that night, and every night, from birth to death, Standard Fare. When the meal was done Winthrop got up and kissed Ann and Davy goodbye. He rode down the spiral escalator, down to the ground floor, and below. Great throngs of people rode with him, crowded in on each other. He rode down to the fifteenth sub-level and changed to a belt. He rode past the crowded TV theaters, the amusement halls. He stepped off and went down a narrow side alley where some of the shops were. Immediately the crowds fell off. A litde way down the alley Winthrop turned into the door of a tiny store. It was empty except for John Barlow, the owner. "Nice to see you," said Barlow, springing up and taking Winthrop's hand. "I was just thinking about you. In fact, I was going to come up and see you in the next day or two. Come in and sit down." Barlow sat in the chair, Winthrop on the small counter. The two men filled the store completely. "That sounds good, John. Do you have some work for me?" Barlow looked long at Winthrop, and slowly shook his head. "No, Jeremiah. No. I don't even have work for myself any more." He hesitated a moment and went on quietly, "I'm going out of business, Jeremiah. I can't make it work. I don't take in enough money to keep my stock up. People don't need money, what with free movies and clothes and food and everything else. No one buys food. They I live on Standard Fare and they don't seem to care any more. So now I'll have to join them, unless I can find other work." "I'm very sorry, John. I feel I helped drive you out of business. I never gave you money for what I took." Barlow shook his head. "No, Jeremiah. You always worked for everything. Other people are not as willing to work as you are ; they all want something for nothing. Who else would be vaccinated and take the immunization shots so he could go all the way across the city for me the way you do?" They sat quietly. Winthrop said, "Where is it all going to end, John? What's going to happen to everybody?" 'T don't know. Some people work; there must be jobs somewhere. I suppose they get them through the Ministry of Government Employment, and you know what people say about that. Government workers won't even talk about it; everybody says they're ashamed of it. I don't know what's going to happen. Except -- I'm through. I'm going to take my stock home with me tonight, and that ends it." VVinthrop looked at the box that contiiined all of Barlow's stock. The box measured about one foot on a side. "Jeremiah, I want you to have something." Barlow reached down to the bottom of the box and brought out an object that he held toward Winthrop. Winthrop looked at it and gasped. "An egg. A real hen's egg. I recognize it from the pictures." Winthrop looked up. "But I can't take it, John. I can't." "I want you to have it, Jeremiah. I want you and Ann and Davy to have it. Now don't argue. I'll wrap it up and you take it right home." Barlow turned and lifted a small box down from a niche. He lined the box with synthetic cotton and gently nestled the egg in the center. After covering the egg with another layer of cotton, he closed the box and wrapped it and tied it with a broad white ribbon under which he slipped a litde card of cooking instructions. Then he handed the box to Winthrop. "Take it home, Jeremiah. I'll be up to see you sometime soon. Go on now." And he urged Winthrop off the counter and out the door. Winthrop went, holding the box in both hands. As he worked his way through the crowds, he held the box to his stomach, turning his shoulders to meet the press of people. He was still holding it with both hands half an hour later when he entered his home. A nn looked up, surprised. "Jeremiah, I didn't expect you home so soon." Her eyes fixed on the package. "What is it? What have you got?" Winthrop walked to the table, put the package on it, and carefully began to open it without saying a word. Ann and Davy stood close to him; Davy climbed on a chair to see better. When Winthrop lifted off the top layer of cotton, Ann's eyes widened and she clasped her hands together and stared, silently. "What is it, Daddy?" "It's an egg, son. A hen's egg." "Is it something to eat?" "Yes, son. It is." Winthrop looked at his wife and said, "Shall we eat it now?" Ann nodded, quickly read the cooking instructions, and set about preparing scrambled egg. Winthrop got out the cooking pan, wiped off the dust, and set it down near her. She smiled at him and put a large chunk of butter in it and placed the pan on the heater. When the butter bubbled, she poured the beaten egg into the pan; it hissed as it struck the hot butter. She began to stir the egg as it cooked. Winthrop picked Davy up so he could see into the pan as die egg thickened. In a moment it was done. Ann lifted three small dishes from a cupboard, placed them on the table, and carrfully scraped the egg onto the plates. Buttered toast and milk came next, then they sat down to eat. Winthrop said a grace. They ate in silence. Davy looked up after his egg was gone and said, 'T don't like it very much. I like it some, but not very much." Winthrop reached over and ruffled his hair, saying to Ann, "It would have been better if we'd had some salt, I guess. But it was good anyway. I've often wondered what an egg tasted like." He looked down at the empty plates and stared at them. Then he said quickly, "Davy, it's your bedtime. You hop on in now." Davy's face grew long, but then Winthrop looked at him, and he climbed off his chair and went over and pulled his father down and kissed him on the cheek. "Good night, Daddy." "Good night, son." Ann took Davy by the hand and led him into the bedroom. Winthrop listened to the chatter and then to the prayers. He sat and listened as he stared at the three egg-stained plates on the table. The plates pushed into his mind, occupied it, filled it, until there was nothing else. And at that moment the integrity of Jeremiah Winthrop broke. He was still staring at the plates when Ann came out and sat down beside him. She too looked at her husband, looked, and looked again, closer. There were tears in his eyes. She leaned toward him and put a hand on his shoulder. "What is it, Jeremiah?" she asked quietly. He turned full toward her, started to speak, but could not. He pointed to the dirty plates and then cleared his throat. "Ann, that's the last of it. It's getting worse all the time. There's no work for a man. What are we going to do? Is Davy going to live the rest of his life satisfied with Standard Fare? Can we watch him grow up not knowing what it feels like to work? Ann..." He stopped and sat quietly for a moment. "I've got to go to the Ministry of Government Employment." She said, "Jeremiah, are you sure? We've always been able to manage on our own. We've never needed help from the government." "Ann -- " He stood up and began pacing across the room. "How can we sit and watch this happen to our boy? We can't take him out in all those people very often. We can't take him to the roof. Ann, he's a good boy. We can't let him live like this." "But how will you feel? You have to make your own way. You've always believed that." Winthrop's stooped figure bent even more. He stopped pacing and stood with his hands hanging at his sides, his chin on his chest. "I know," he said quietly. "I know. Help me, Ann. What should we do?" She flew across the room to him and they cUtng together. After a moment she said, "All right, Jeremiah. I knew this would come some day. We will go down tomorrow to the Ministry of Government Employment and see if they have any work for you. Maybe they have, and maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe it's good work after all. We'll T he family was up early the next morning, up and eating Standard Fare. After breakfast they began to get ready to go out. Ann went over all the clothes, sponging spots off the slick fabric. Jeremiah Winthrop paced back and forth with slow measured steps, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent. Ann took a little cord harness from the cabinet and slipped it over Davy's head. She pulled the cords taut and tied them around him. She passed a light piece of cord around her waist and tied the other end of it to Davy's harness. She tied a second piece of cord to the other side of the harness. Then she said to Winthrop, "Jeremiah, we're ready." Winthrop stepped over to Davy's side. He passed the second piece of cord around his waist and tied it fast. "I'm ready," he said. They went out the door and it was not bad at first. Riding down the spiral escalator it began to get crowded ; people pressed shoulder to shoulder. Davy clutched a parent's hand in each of his own. When they anived at the bells below ground-level, the press grew greater. Ann and Winthrop used their legs to make room for Davy to stand on the moving belt. The upper portions of their bodies pushed out against the packed mass of humanity. They held their arms bent at the elbows to form a bridge around Davy's head, stooping a little to do so. Silently they pushed back against the surge of people. They changed belts by waling in a kind of lockstep and again formed a trembling bridge with their arms around Davy on the next belt. Twice more they changed belts and in two hours they arrived at the building nexi to their own. It was easier, going up the spiral escalator. They came out into a huge room filled with people. Holding tight to Davy's leash, they worked their way through the crowds, seeking a regisiration desk. In half an hour they found one. The line of people was only a few hundred yards long in front of that particular desk. Jeremiah and Ann joined the line at the end, smiling at each other. In four short hours they found themselves at the desk. Winthrop gave his name and number to the man and explained why he wanted an interview with one of the ministers. The man swiftly filled out a set of papers, assigned Winthrop a line number and a chair number, and pointed the direction to take. Jeremiah, Ann, and Davy slowly passed through the crowds in the room, this time seeking their line. They finally found it and Winthrop gave his papers to tlie man in charge. Again they were fortunate. The line to which Winthrop was assigned did not even reach out into the room; the end of it had progressed into the long corridor that led to the minister's office. Winthrop settled into his moving around him and made him comfortable. Then they said goodbye. "Ann, be careful going home. Go very slowly. Don't be afraid to scream out if Davy begins to get crushed." "Don't worry, dear. We'll be all right." Ann smiled at him, but her eyes were too bright. Winthrop saw it and stood up from his chair. "I'll take you home and then come back." "No." She gently pushed him back into the chair. "We'll lose another day, and Davy and I will be all right. Now you just stay here. Goodbye, dear." She leaned over and kissed him. Winthrop said, "All right, but don't visit me, Ann. I'll be home as soon as this is over, and it's too hard on you to make the trip alone." She smiled and nodded. Winthrop kissed Davy and ruffled his hair. Then Ann tied both ends of Davy's leash around her waist, and she and Davy walked off. Both of them turned to wave frequently until the crowd swallowed them up. The days passed slowly for Winthrop. The corridor seemed to stretch on interminably as he slowly moved down it in his chair. Every few hundred yards there was the inevitable milk faucet and the bread and butter slots, and every few feet there was the inevitable TV screen alive with people talking, singing, laughing, shouting, or playing. Winthrop turned each one off ais he came abreast of it, if his neighbors did not object. None of the people in the line were talkative, and that suited Winthrop. Mostly he sat thinking over his forthcoming interview. Two minutes to explain why he should be given work was not vei# long. But the Ministers of Government Employment were busy men. Toward the end of the second week Winthrop had a surprise visit from Ann. She threw her arms around him and explained that Helen Barlow had come to see her and had sent Ann off to visit. And it was while Ann was there that Winthrop moved up to a position from which he could see the door of the minister's office. When Ann left, she went with the comforting knowledge that it would be only a few days more. The time came when Winthrop was at the door. Then, suddenly, he was in the anteroom, and before he could fully realize it he was standing in a very small room before the minister. Winthrop identified himself and said, "I have a boy of four, a fine boy, and a fine wife too. I want to work the way a man should to give them something besides Standard Fare. Here is what I have worked at in the last five years." And Winthrop listed the things he had done. The minister listened. He had white hair and a lined face whose skin seemed to be pulled too tight. When Winthrop had finished, the minister looked steadily into his face for a moment; Winthrop could almost feel the probing of the level blue eyes. Then the minister turned to a device that loomed over him to one side and punched a complex series of buttons. There was a whirring noise behind the wall of the tiny room, and then a small packet of cards appeared at the slot in the bottom of the device. The minister picked them out and glanced at them, and an odd expression of sadness swept across his face. It was gone in an instant, and then he looked up and said, "Yes, Mr. Winthrop. We have a job for you, and the full six hours a day, too. You will be on the maintenance crew of your building. Your job is explained here -- " he passed over a card -- "and it consists of tightening the nuts on the expansion joints in the framework of the building. It is very important to do it right, so read the card carefully." Winthrop nodded eagerly. The minister handed over another card and said, "Here is a description of the daily reports you must turn in." Another card. "Here is how you and your chief decide your working schedule, and you must adhere to it; it is very important. The chief of your tightening crew will go over it with you. Here is your requisition for the special wrench you will need. Here is your pay schedule ; you can decide if you want to be paid in money or produce. And one very important thing." The minister leaned forward to emphasize his remarks. "You are not allowed to talk about your job with anyone, not even with your best friends. Is that clear?" Winthrop nodded. "Yes, sir." "The reason is that we do not want people fighting over jobs. Not many who come in here really want to work, but there are a few. We have to pick good men for this work; those buildings must be kept in good condition. Others less fortunate than you might not understand that you are just the man we need. So no talking about your work -- no talk of any kind -- on pain of dismissal." The minister sat back. "Well, I guess that is about all. Report for work in the morning. Good luck." And he held out his hand. Winthrop shook it and said, "Thank you, sir. ITl work hard for you. I didn't know you needed men for this work or I would have been here sooner. I had always heard that... Well, thank you." And Winthrop turned to go. Out of the comer of his eye as he turned, he thought he saw again that ephemeral expression of sadness, but when he looked the minister full in the face it was gone. Winthrop went out the side door. The entire interview had taken one and three quarter minutes. morning so as not to be late for work. As it turned out, he was unable to get off a belt at the proper landing -- too many people in the way -- and it took him fifteen minutes to retrace his steps. He arrived exactly' on time. The chief of the tightening crew was a big, bluff man with a red face. He took Winthrop in tow and showed liim how tliey worked. The crew chief had a vast knowledge of the crawl spaces in the interior of the building. He showed Winthrop the blueprints from which the tightening crew worked, and explained that by coordinating their work with all the other tightening crews they made one complete round of the building every eight years. By then it was time to do it again ; the nuts worked loose from the constant expansion and contraction. It was quite a job keeping track of the area that the tightening crew covered; it was a large crew. But each member turned in daily reports, and there was a large clerical staff to keep the records straight. In fact, there were more men keeping records than there were doing the actual tightening work. The chief pointed out that Winthrop was to be one of the elite, one of those whose work justified the existence of the huge staff. The tone of the chief's voice made it clear that there was a kind of quiet pride among the men who did the actual work. The chief issued Winthrop his wrench and showed him where to start. The day passed swiftly. The tightening of the nuts was not so bad, although Winthrop's arm grew sore after a while. The difficult part was gaining access to the nuts in the first place. Winthrop had to use all his agility to wriggle through confined places. Yet it was good to be working again, good to feel the sweat start from his brow from hard work instead of from the press of people. In a week Winthrop was no longer dog-tired when he got home at night. There was much laughter in the Winthrop household, much reading and playing games and telling stories. They even watched the TV screen now and then ; somehow it no longer seemed so fruitless. The monotony of Standard Fare was broken; the head of the house was working steadily. It was now possible to plan ahead for a variety of meals, and that made it easier to wait when there was nothing to eat but Standard Fare. Winthrop developed skill and speed at locating and tightening the nuts. He soon covered in a day a larger area than any other man, and the chief told him that he was his best man. Winthrop came to share the pride and sense of responsibility that all the other tighteners felt. They were a select group, and they knew it; all the others looked up to them. It was after dinner one night that Winthrop sat back, hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his shirt, and watched Ann and Davy finish the half-dozen peas. They looked at him and smiled, and his heart warmed. "You know," he said, "I think I'll visit John Barlow for a few minutes. I haven't seen him since he gave up his store. Do you mind, dear?" Ann shook her head. "No, you run along. I'll play with Davy for a while and then put him to bed. Don't stay too long." Barlow answered Winthrop's knock. "Well, Jeremiah. Come in, man, come in." Winthrop walked in and the two men stood looking at each other. Winthrop was surprised at how well Barlow looked, and he said so. Barlow laughed. "Yes, the last time we met I was pretty far down in the dumps, I guess. But I'm working, Jeremiah. Fm actually working. Important work, too!" His enthusiasm was infectious and Winthrop found himself laughing. "I'm glad for you, John. And I know how you feel, because Fm working too." Barlow stepped forward and wrung his hand. "That's fine, man, fine! Government, I guess, just like mine. It isn't so bad, is it? Not nearly as bad as we thought. Good steady important work makes a man feel like it's worth living." Helen Barlow came out of the other room. "Why, Jeremiah. I didn't know you were here. How nice to see you." "Yes, and he's working," said Barlow. "Oh, I'm so happy for you, Jeremiah. Congratulations. And that reminds me, John." She turned to her husband. "You have to get ready to go to work. You know how long it takes to get there even though it's in the building." "Right. I'll get ready. Jeremiah, I'm sorry that I have to go, but why don't you stay?" "No, John. I just stopped in to say hello. You come up and see us real soon." "I certainly will." There was an exchange of goodbyes, and Winthrop left. Barlow went into the other room and came out immediately with his wrench. He waved it playfully at his wife. "Got to go," he said. "The loosening crew won't wait." And he blew a kiss at his wife and went off pH', 'lAi M I f T he car he'd stolen was a beautifully groomed thing: all polished lacquer and chrome, with almost brand-new dual tread whitewall tires on the nickeled wire wheels. But the transmission was bad, the brake drums scraped, and there was a short circuit in the wiring somewhere, so that he had to keep over sixty miles per hour or the generator would not charge at all. He would have stolen another one if he could, but he had got onto the turnpike before he realized just how unreliable this one was. If he changed cars at a restaurant, it would be reported and the police would stop him when he tried to leave the turnpike. No, he was trapped with what he by algis budrys He had been waiting all his life for the aliens to turn up -- and now that they were here, he knew exactly what to do. had. Hunched over the wheel of his roaring cage, the yellowish headlights reflecting white from the lane markers, Redfern swept his eyes systematically over the instruments: ammeter, fuel gauge, oil pressure, water temperature, speedometer, odometer. He thought of himself as doing it systematically, every ten minutes, like a professionally trained driver. Actually, he was dividing his attention almost equally between the road and the odometer. A hundred and ten miles covered, seventy miles to go, ninety for speedometer error. Say fifty-five miles per hour, indicated, average. Allow for odometer error. Say sixty miles per hour, indicated, average. Allow for unforeseen delays. Sixtyfive miles per hour. Redfem's foot trembled on the accelerator pedal. His thigh ached from hours of unremitting pressure. His car flashed by signboards, wove minutes before the ship was due to take off, with or without him, average speed required: #, approx.; round off to allow for stopping the car at the exit toll booth, for covering two miles of back roads, for leaving the car and running an unknown distance across a weed-grown field to the ship's airlock -- they would take off on schedule with him six inches from the slamming airlock door; they would not stay themselves a microsecond to accommodate him -- say fifty miles per hour, average. Then allow continually around immense trailer trucks in the slow lane. His mind raced to keep up with the changing figures on the odometer. He wished he weren't feeling a slight miss in the engine whenever he eased up on the accelerator. He cursed the car's owner for his false-front prodigality with wax and whitewalls. He looked at his watch again. Four in the morning. He turned the radio on, ignoring his fear that something else might happen to the car's wiring. " -- And that's the news," the announcer's professionally relaxed voice said. "After a word about United Airlines, we'U hear, first, Carl OrfTs Carmina Burana, followed by -- " His watch was slow. Five minutes? Fifteen minutes? How long did the news take? He held the watch to his ear. It was an expensive one, wafer thin, beautifully crafted, left over from his younger days -- he could barely hear it running. Was it running at all? Redfem was a leathery man, his yellowish-white hair brushed back from angular temples, a scruffy Guards moustache over his nearly invisible lips. His suits were made for him by a London tailor, from measurements taken in #; they were gored and belted in the backs of the jackets. Outdoors, he wore a Burberry and carried a briefcase. People who saw him on the street in Washington always took him for someone with diplomatic connections. But since Redfem was always seen afoot, these connections perforce had to be minor. Was he an assistant attache of sorts, perhaps? At his age? Looking at Redfem, people would wonder about it. People. But the man who'd sat easily on the edge of Redfem's lumpy bed in the wallpapered hotel room -- that man, now... That man had coal-black hair, broad, flat cheekbones above a sharply narrowing chin, oval, maroon-pupiled eyes and cyanotic lips. He smiled easily and agreeably across the room. Redfem sat in the one chair, sipping at the water tumbler half-full of gin. The bottle his visitor had brought up was standing on the bureau. His visitor, who had given the name of Charlie Spence, was not drinking. "You don't look like a Charlie," Redfem said abruptly over the tumbler's rim. "You look as cold as ice." Spence laughed, his small mouth stretching as far as it could. "Maybe I'm made of it," he said. "But then, you're nothing but a lump of coal. Carbon." He bmshed his fingertips together. "But then," Redfem mocked sharply, don't pretend to be gregarious." "Oh, I don't pretend -- don't pre tend at all. I am gregarious. I love the company of people. I've been moving about among them for several years, now." "All right," Redfem said sharply, "we've already settled that. Let's let it be. I don't care where you come from -- I don't really care what you're made of. It may surprise you, but I've thought for some time that if people were coming to this world from other places, they'd be bound to get in touch with me sooner or later." "Why on Earth should we try to get in touch with you?" Spence asked, nonplused. "Because if you people have been coming here for years, then you're not here openly. You've got purposes of your own. People with purposes of their own generally come to me. Charlie Spence began to chuckle. "I like you," he laughed. "I really do. You're a rare type." "Yes," said Redfem, "and now let's get down to business." He gestured toward the bureau top. "Pour me some more of that." Alcohol affected him swiftly but not deeply. Once it had stripped him of the ordinary inhibitions, he could go on drinking for some time before his intellect lost its edge. Since he always took two aspirins and went straight to bed at that point, it was not a serious sort of weakness. But without his inhibitions he was a very unpleasant man. X Charlie Spence was saying a little later. "The ambassador will land at National Airport and be met by the usual sort of reception committee. Red carpet, band, dignitaries, and so forth. But the red carpet will be a little shabby, the band won't be first-rate, and the reception committee will not be quite as high-ranking as it might be. After all, the ambassador's country is definitely on the other side of the fence." "Yes," Redfem drawled. "The protocol of prejudice." "Oh, no, no, nothing deliberate," Spence said, with a hand raised. "Diplomats pride themselves on equal courtesy to all. But the employee in charge of caring for the carpets simply won't do his best. The band won't play with any great enthusiasm. And any of your officials who happen to be ill, with colds or similar afflictions, will honestly decide their health precludes the effort of attending. This is simply human nature, and any snub will be completely unintend." "I heard you the first time. What's all this to do with me?" "Well, now," Charlie Spence explained, "the ambassador's not from a particularly large nation in their bloc. It seems doubtful they'd bother to send along any of their own security police. The only guards present will likely be American Secret Service personnel, extending courtesy protection." "Yes." "So. In the first place, the ambassador is really a small fish. In the second place, no American, even a trained professional sworn to his duty is apt to be quite as devoted to the ambassador's life as he would be to that of, say, any American congressman. Those two factors represent a potential assassin's margin of safety." "And what're you meddling in our politics for?" Redfem growled. 'Your politics? Redfem, my dear fellow, it may or may not be your planet, but it's most assuredly our solar system." The neck of the bottle tinked against the lip of Redfem's glass. "And I'm your assassin?" "You are." "What makes you think I'll do it?" Redfem cocked his head and looked narrowly at Spence. "A compulsive need to meddle in human history." "Oh?" Charlie Spence laughed. "You were cashiered from your country's foreign service in nineteen hundred and thirty-two. But you've never stopped mixing into international situations. Gun mnning, courier work, a little export-import, a little field work for foreign development corporations... and, now and then, a few more serious escapades. Don't tell me you don't enjoy it, Redfern. It's a very hard life, all told. No one would stay in it as long as you have if it didn't satisfy his need for power." Redfern pinched his lips together even more tightly, in the fleeting reflex with which he always acknowledged the truth. "I wasn't cashiered," he said. resigned without prejudice." "Oh, yes; yes, you did. Being unpleasant to one's superiors doesn't disgrace a man -- it merely makes him unemployable. Except for special purposes that don't require a pukka sahib. And here I am, as you said, with a special purpose. Ten thousand dollars, on completion, Redfern, and the satisfaction Redfern's eyes glittered. "All over one little ambassador?" he asked carefully. "Over one little ambassador. In life, he's not considered worth the trouble of protecting him. And no one but a rather stout and liverish woman in the Balkans will mourn him in death. But when he dies, his side will suddenly discover a great and genuine moral indignation. Why? Because they will be truly shocked at such a thing happening in America." ruminatively. "Exactly. You'll shake the ambassador's hand. An hour later, when he's already safe inside his embassy refreshing himself after his trip, he'll fall into a sudden coma. The embassy will close its doors, issue a misleading statement, and call its doctor.' "Yes." "Very well. The embassy staflf has taken routine steps, and waits for the ambassador to recover. But, just to allow for all eventualities, the unofficial courier service is already transmitting a notification to the government at home. The doctor examines the patient and discovers an inflamed puncture on his right hand. Another message goes home. The ambassador dies, and tests indicate poison. Obviously, it was hoped the puncture would go unnoticed and the cause of death, which resembles cerebral occlusion, would be mistaken. But the tiny needle must not have been quite sterilized, by accident, and the clever doctor has penetrated the scheme -- and another message goes home, before the American State Department even suspects anything serious." "Hmm. I'll simply shake his hand?" Charlie Spence reached into his pocket. "Wearing this." He held out a crumpled something, the size of a handkerchief. Redfern took it and unfolded it. "A mask,' Spence said. "Drawn over your head, it will mold new features for you. It'll be devilish uncomfortable, but you won't have to wear it long." "It'll make me look like someone entitled to be on the field?" Spence grinned the grin of a Renaissance Florentine. "Better than that. It will give you the comfxjsite features of six people entitled to be on the field. You will look like none of them, but you will look superficially familiar to anyone who knows any of them. The subsequent questioning of witnesses will yield amusing results, I think." "Very clever. Good technique. Confuse and obscure. But then, you've practiced it a long time." Redfern pushed himself abruptly out of the chair and went into the adjoining bathroom, keeping the door open. "Excuse me," he said perfunctorily. "Lord, you're a type!" Charlie Spence said. ' Will you do it?" "What?" Redfern said from the bathroom. "Will you do it?" Spence repeated, raising his voice. Redfern came out, picking up the gin bottle, and sat back down in the chair. He tipped the bottle over the glass. "Maybe." "I've told you too much for you to back out now," Spence said with a frown. "Rubbish!" Redfern spat. "Don't try to bully me. You don't care what any of the natives tell each other about you. There are dozens of people living off their tales about you. It's to your advantage to hire native helpers wherever you can -- if they're caught, who cares what wild tales they tell? You'd be insane to risk losing one of your dwn people." He looked sharply into Charlie Spence's eyes. "I don't suppose you fancy the thought of a dissecting table." Charlie Spence licked his lips with a flicker of his tongue. "Don't be too sure of yourself," he said after a moment, in a more careful tone of voice. Redfern snorted. "If I acted only on what I was sure of. I'd still be an embassy clerk." "And you wouldn't like that, I suppose?" Charlie Spence, recovered, was looking around the room. "Sometimes? At night, when you can't sleep?" "I want an out," Redfern said brusquely. "I won't do it without accident insurance." "Oh?" Charlie Spence's eyebrow's quivered. "If I'm caught at the field. I'm caught and that's it. I'll protect you." "Professionalism. I like that. Go on -- what if you get away from the field?" "If I get away, but there's trouble, I want a rendezvous with one of your ships." "Oh, ho!" Charlie Spence said. "You do, do you?" "I'll cover my tracks, if you think it's important, but I want a rendezvous. I want to be off this planet if there's trouble. Change that -- I want to be off it in any case, and if there's no trouble, I can always be brought back." "Oh, ho!" Charlie Spence repeated with a grin. "Yes, I'd think you would want to watch the next war from some safe place." It was easy to see he'd been expecting Redfern to lead up to this all along. "Have it your way," Redfern said ungraciously. Charlie Spence was laughing silently, his eyes a-slit. "All right, Redfern," he said indulgently. He reached into his card case, took out a photograph of a dumpy blonde woman and a string-haired man on the porch of a middle western farmhouse, and carefully split it with his thumbnails. Out of the center, he took a bit of tissue paper, and stuck the front and back of the photograph together again. Replacing the card case in his pocket, he handed the slip of paper to Redfern. "Dip it in your drink," he said. He watched while Redfern complied, but kept his eyes away from the short handwritten directions the alcohol brought up. "Don't repeat the location aloud. I don't know it, and don't want to. Memorize it and destroy it. And I tell you now, Redfern, if the ambassador doesn't die, there'll be no ship." He smiled. "For that matter, you have no guarantee there'll be any ship at all." Redfern growled. "I know." "Lord, what meager hopes you live on, Redfern!" "You're through here now, aren't you?" Redfern said. "Yes..." Charlie Spence said with pursed lips. "Then get out." He took the palm hypermic Charlie Spence handed him in its green pasteboard box, and closed the hotel room door behind his visitor. T hirty-five miles to go. His watch now read #:#. It hadn't stopped, but was merely slow. If he'd thought to have it cleaned by a jeweler, last year or even the year before that, it would be accurate now. As it was, he had less than an hour, and he would be off the turnpike fairly soon, onto roads that were pav but had been laid out in the days of horse-drawn wagons. He tried another station on the radio, but that was playing popular music. A third was conducting some sort of discussion program about water fluoridation. And that was all. The rest of the dial yielded only hisses or garbled snatches from Minneapolis or Cincinnati. His ammeter showed a steady discharge as long as the radio was on, no matter how fast he drove. He turned it off and steered the car, his face like a graven image. He was seething with anger, but none of it showed. As an adolescent, he had made the mistake of equating self-possession with maturity, and had studiously practiced the mannerism, with the inevitable result that he had only learned to hide his feelings from himself. He was the prisoner of his practice now, to the extent that he often had to search deep to find what emotion might be driving him at any particular time. Often he found it only in retrospect, When it was too late. That lunch with Dick Farleagh this afternoon... It had been difficult even to reach him: a call to the embassy -- "Who shall I tell Mr. Farleagh is calling? Mr. Redfern?" and then the barely muffled aside, a whispered "Oh, dear." Then the pause, and finally, with a sigh: "Mr. Farleagh will speak to you now, Mr. Redfern," as though the secretary thought a bad mistake was being made. "Dickie," Redfern said heavily. "What is it, Ralph?" Farleagh's voice was too neutral. Obviously, he had taken the call only out of curiosity, because he had not heard directly from Redfem in nearly fifteen years. But he must already be regretting it -- probably he didn't like being called Dickie, now that his junior clerk days were well behind him. Redfern ought to have thought of that, but he was in a hurry, and hurry, like liquor, always took away his social graces. "I have to speak to you." "Yes?" Redfem waited. Only after a moment did he understand that FarIcagh had no intention of meeting him in person. "I can't do it over the telephone." "I see." Now the voice was crisp, as Farleagh decided he could meet the situation with routine procedure. "I'll ask my secretary to make an appointment. She'll call you. Can you leave a number?" "No, no, no!" Redfern was shouting into the telephone: "I won't be fjjbcd off like that!" His words and actions were registering on his consciousness in only the haziest way. He had no idea he was shouting. "This is too important for your blasted conventionalities! I won't put up with it! I have to see you." His voice was wheedling, now, though he did not realize that, either. "Today. No later than lunch." Farleagh said with quiet shock, "There's no need to rave at me. Now, take hold of yourself, Ralph, and perhaps we can talk this out sensibly." "Will you come or won't you?" Redfern demanded. "I'll be at the Grosvenor bar in an hour. I'm warning you you'll regret it if you don't come." There was a long pause, during which there was a sudden buzz in the phone, and the sound of Redfern's coin being collected. In a moment, the operator would be asking for another dime. "Are you there?" Farleagh asked with maddening detachment. "See here, Redfern -- " now the tenor of his thinking was unmistakeable in his voice, even before he continued -- "if it's a matter of a few dollars or so, I can manage it, I suppose. I'll mail you a check. You needn't bother to return it." "Deposit ten cents for the next three minutes, please," the operator said at that moment. "I don't want your blasted money!" Redfern cried. "I have to see you. Will you be there?" "I -- " Farleagh had begun when the operator cut them off. Redfern stared in bafflement at the telephone. Then he thrust it back on its cradle and walked briskly out of the booth. He waited in the Grosvenor bar for an hour and a half, rationing his drinks out of a sense that he ought to keep his head. He was not a stupid man. He knew that he always got into quarrels whenever he'd been drinking. He rationed his drinks, but after the first one he did so out of a spiteful feeling that he ought to, to please that stuffed shirt Farleagh. He already knew that if Farleagh appeared at all, their meeting would not do the slightest good. Hunched over his drink, glowering at the door, he now only wanted to be able to say, afterwards, that he had made the utmost effort to do rhe right thing. Farleagh came, at last, looking a great de beefier than he had when he and Redfem were in public school together. His handshake was perfunctory -- his maddeningly level gray eyes catalogued the changes in Redfem's face with obvious disapproval -- and he practically shepherded Redfem to the farthest and darkest table. Obviously, he did not relish being seen in a public place with a man of Redfern's character. Redfem drawled : "You've gone to fat." Farleagh's eyes remained steady. "And you to lean. What is it you want, Redfem?" "If it isn't money?" Redfern's mouth curled. He turned and signaled to a waiter. "What will you have, Dickie?" "None for me, thank you," Farleagh said in an impassive drone. "I'm pressed for time." "Are you? You've no idea, do you, that I might be on a close schedule myself." Redfem glanced at liis watch. The ambassador's plane was due at National Aiiport in two hours, and there was a great deal still to be done. "You've kept me waiting." He waved the waiter away in sudden irritation, without ordering. "Now, you listen to me," he told Farleagh. "I'm going to be at a definite place and time tonight. Here." He flicked the balled bit of tissue paper across the table into Farleagh's lap. Farleagh picked it out and transferred it to a side pocket. He would have been a very bad diplomat if he had ignored it. But it was plain he was merely providing for an extremely remote possibility. "Redfera," he said, "if you're attempting to involve my government in some scheme of yours, that will be the end. You'll have gone too far." "Our government, Dickie," Redfem almost snarled. "I still carry my passport." "Precisely," Farleagh said. "I'm sure the American authorities would deport you, at our request. If you stand trial at home, you'll not get off easily." "There's nothing in my past record that breaks the law at home." "There's a great deal about you that breaks laws more popular than those in books." "Damn you, Farleagh," Redfem said in a voice he did not know was high and almost tearful, "you'd better be there tonight." "Why?" "Because if you aren't and I do get involved in something, it'll be found out soon enough that you could have been there. I warn you now, Farleagh, if I go down, it won't be easily. Perhaps it won't matter to you if your career's smashed. I tell you now, there's a great deal more involved in this than your career." Farleagh was still not taking his eyes away from Redfern's face, nor moderating the set of his mouth. He gave the appearance, sitting there in his expensive suit, with his graying black hair combed down sleekly, of enormous patience nearly at an end. "Very well then!" Redfem exclaimed. "I don't care if you believe me or not." He thrust his chair back. "But if someone gets ill who shouldn't, today, you'd better believe me!" He stalked away, his Burberry flapping from his arm, his briefcase banging into the backs of chairs, his face an unhealthy red. H e drove vengefully, in a rage that included the car and the radio, his watch, Farleagh, Charlie Spence and the world. Five o'clock, by his watch. He turned into the exit ramp with a squealing from the tires, and one part of his mind was hoping there would be a blowout, just to prove something to the car's owner. He touched the brakes almost reluctantly, and at the same time cursed their criminal softness. He fumbled on the seat beside him for the toll ticket, and searched in his nearly empty wallet. He had had to spend a good deal of money today -- more than he'd expected, for the drug and the explosive. It had never been his intention to steal a car, but rental had been out of the question. He knew, and damned the fact, that another man might have gotten better prices with his suppliers. But what sort of logic was there in making up to criminals; slapping their backs and buying them drinks, talking to them on an equal basis, when he could not even see the need to do that sort of thing in his dealings with respectable people? He slapped the ticket and his two remaining dollar bills into the toll attendant's palm, and accelerated again without bothering even to look toward the man. He had seen no sign of drawn-up police cars anywhere around the toll plaza. That was the important thing, the only important thing at the moment. Now that he was off the turnpike, he forgot he had been so afraid of being stopped for automobile theft. It had been another in a succession of thin-edged risks which could be shown to extend back to the beginning of his independent life. He forgot it as he had forgotten his fears concerning all the others -- as he had forgotten that he had been afraid something would go wrong at the airport this afternoon, or that he would be caught as he hung about in Washington for hours afterward, until he was sure the embassy was acting as if something were wrong bnd its doors. As he drove now, forcing his car around the twisting mountain corners, he had other things to be afraid of. Farleagh might not be there -- might have been stubborn, or unaccountably stupid, or simply too slow, in spite of the margin Redfem had allowed him. He looked at his watch again as he turned off onto a dirt track leading almost straight up the hill. Fivetwenty by his watch. He had perhaps five minutes. He took one deep breath -- one, and no more, just as he had done at the airport gate this afternoon, and as he had done on other occasions in his life -- and drove the car into a tangle of shrubbery just past a mortared-stone culvert that was his position marker. He shut off the ignition and sat as if stupefied by the engine's silence. Almost instantly, the headlights were no more than a sickly orange glow upon the leaves pressed against the car's grille. He shut them off, picked up his briefcase, and abandoned the car. Burberry flapping around his thighs, he trotted across the road and plunged down a slight decline into a stand of tamaracks. It was dark except for the remaining light of a low halfmoon seeping through the overcast. He moved with practiced efficiency through the trees, keeping his ffirection by paralleling the brook that had trickled through the culvert, until he emerged without warning into an open and longneglected field, choked with proliferating brush, entirely surrounded by evergreens, with the spaceship, tall as an oil refinerys cracking tower, standing in its center. The airlock door in the side of it was open. Redfern began tc force his way through the brush, toward the extended ladder which connected the airlock with the ground. There was a single light in the lock chamber. No other lights were visible -- the ship was a complex silhouette of struts and vanes, given the reality of depth only by that open door, and what that door might lead to, Redfern could not really guess. As he struggled up to the ladder, he was arming the satchel charge in his briefcase. There was still no sign of life from inside the ship. But as he climbed the ladder, hoisting himself awkwardly with his one free hand, the ladder began to retract with the sound of metal sliding into metal, and other mechanical sounds resonated out of the hull, like generators coming up to speed, and relays in a sequence of switching operations. He looked up and saw the airlock door quiver and begin to turn on its massive hinges. With a strained motion of his arm, he threw the charge overarm into the airlock, and let go the ladder. He heard the briefcase thump to the deck in the lock chamber, while he himself was falling ten or twelve feet back to the ground. When the explosion came, he was sprawled on the ground, rearing up on his out-thrust arms, and he stared in fascination at the flameshot billow of orange smoke gouting through the still half-open lock. He rolled, off to one side, as the outer door rebounded from the hull. He was afraid it might fall on him, but then he saw it was still hanging, like a broken gate. The starting-noises inside the ship came to a complete slop. He had done what he had hoped to do -- breached the hull, and activated the safety cut-offs in the controls. The ship was caught, earthbound, possibly not for very long, but perhaps for long enough. The brusli crackled and plucked at his passage. He could not bring himself to look away from the ship, and he blundered through the undergrowth with his arms behind him, feeling his vay. The light in the airlock chamber was off now, but something was still burning in there, with a dull smoldering red flicker. A hand placed itself flat between his shoulderblades. "All right, easy now, sir," a voice said. He turned convulsively, his face contorted as if by pain, and made out a tall, huskily built young man in a narrow-brimmed hat, who was holding a short-barreled revolver in his other hand. The brush was parting all around him -- there were many men here -- and suddenly a portable floodlight shot up a beam to strike the airlock. "We were just about ready to send a man aboard when you crippled them, sir," the young man said vith his trained politeness. "Is Farleagh here?" Redfern demanded. "Yes, sir, Mr. Farleagh's back among the trees, with the chief." A man had stepped up to the base of the ship, where the ladder had rested. Like Redfern's young man, he wore a civilian suit as if it had been made by a uniform manufacturer. "Aboard the ship!" he shouted up through cupped hands. "Can you hear me? Do you speak English? This is the Secret Service." There was a grating sound up in the lock chamber, as someone forced open the balky inner door. Then a man stumbled up to the edge and looked down, his white coveralls smudged and a strained look on his face. He squinted at the Secret Service man. "Jesus Christ, yes, I speak English," he said in outrage. "Who threw that bomb? This is a goddamn Air Force project, and there's gonna be all kinds of hell." "Oh, no, you don't!" Redfern shouted, mortally afraid things could still go wrong. "It won't wash -- not with me to testify against you." The Secret Service man at the base of the ship turned his head in Redfern's direction long enough to show his exasperation. Then he pointed his pistol up at the man in the lock. "'Jump down, you." There was the sound of someone heavy coming toward them through the brush. After a moment, Farleagh said: "There you are." "Hullo, Dickie." Redfern grinned at Farleagh in the spottily reflected light. "Now you know." "Know what?" Farleagh asked heavily. Redfern shifted his feet nervously. "Why I got myself cashiered years ago. You see I knew they were coming here -- at least, I believed they were -- and I decided what sort of human being they would be most likely to contact." Rage crossed Farleagh's face at last, and shocked Redfern. "Stop it, Redfern," he said savagely. "For once in your life, admit you're the sort of man you are." After that, no one seemed to look at him. An improvised ladder was brought up, and Secret Service men went into the ship and came down again escorting sullen, blue-lipped men. The clearing became full of activity as the prisoners were handcuffed together, machines and records brought down out of the ship; and Redfern watched it all, just as he had been watching all his life, Love and Moondogs "The true dog, madame, was originally the golden jackal, Canis aureus... He must love and be loved, or he diesJ' T he headline on the newspapers stacked in front of the man in a leather jacket stopped to scan it. Across the street, frost lay crisp on the courthouse lawn, and the white and tan spotted hound put up his forepaws on the kitchen stool as if to warm them. The four women were too busy hauling down the flag to notice. Martha Stonery in the persian lamb coat paid out the halyard. Monica Flint in the reddish muskrat and Paula Hart in the brown fox caught the flag and folded it, careful not to let it touch the wet cement. A postman and the man in the leather jacket stopped on the sidewalk to watch'. Martha, plump face grim under pinchnose spectacles, fastened one halyard snap to a metal ring taped and wired to the dog's right hind leg. "Hoist away, girls." Monica, Paula and Abigail Silax in nutria hauled in unison while Martha held the flag. The hound scrabbled with his forepaws and barked frantically. As he went struggle-twisting upward he began to howl in a bell-like voice. The women grunted with elTort. People were coming across the lawn and pale faces moved behind the courthouse windows. "Two block," Martha said. "Vast hauling and belay." She pulled the kitchen stool nearer the flagpole and climbed on it to face the small crowd across the shelf of her bosom. Cars were stopping, people streaming in from all sides. Martha patted her piled gray hair and made her thin lips into a parrot beak. "Fellow Americans!" she cried above the howling. "Our leaders are cowards and it is time for the people to act before the Russians come and murder us all in our beds! We, the United Dames of the Dog, hereby protest the Russian crime of putting a trusting, loving dog on the moon to starve and freeze and smother and die of loneliness! This dog above our heads cries out to the world against the Russian breach of faith between dog and man. He will stay there until the Russians bring their dog home safely or make amends for their crime!" "Like hell!" said the man in the leather jacket, moving in. "Martha!" Abigail shrieked. "He's taking it down!" Monica pulled at his wrists. Paula slapped and scratched at his face. "You brute! You coward!" they shrilled. Martha jumped off the stool and kicked him. He backed avyay, bent and holding himself. "Look, ladies," he gasped, "for God's sake -- " "Here now, here now, this is county property," said a fat man in shirtsleeves with pink sleeve garters, pushing through the crowd. "What's all this? Take that dog down, somebody!" "Never!" Martha snapped. She put her back against the halyard cleat, unfolded the flag and draped it around herself. A loose strand of gray hair fell across her face. "If you're so big and brave, go bring down the Russian dog," she told the fat man coldly. "Now listen, lady," the fat man said. The Clarion press photographer was sprinting across the lawn. G eorge stonery was tail, thin, stooped and anxious in a gray business suit. #I "I came as soon as I could," he told Sheriff Breen across the scarred, paper-littered wooden desk. "I was away checking one of our warehouses." "You can make bail for her in two minutes, right across the hall," the sheriff said, scratching his jowl. "She wouldn't make it for herself, said we had to lock her in our sputnik." "Where is she now?" "In the sputnik." The desk phone rang and the sheriff growled into it, "Hell you say. State forty-three just past Roy Farm? Right. I s' pose you already heard what we had on the lawn here this morning?" The phone gave forth an excited gobbling. The sheriff's red eyebrows rose in disbelief and his heavy jaw dropped in dismay. He put down the phone. "That was city," he told Stonery. "Complaint about a dog hanging by one leg from a tree just outside city limits. But it's going on all over town too -- dogs hanging on trees, out of windows, off clotheslines -- every squad car is out. Your old lady sure started something!" "What did she do? Stonery asked in anguish. The sheriff told him. "Kicked a big fat deputy where it hurts, too. Maybe we ought to hold her after all. She says she's president of the United Dogs of something." "United Dames of the Dog," the thin man corrected. "They hold meetings and things. She started it when the Russians put up their second sputnik." "Well, I hope none of them dames lives out in the county," the sheriff said, rising. "You fix up bail, Mr. Stonery. I got to send out a deputy." Walking past the flagpole with her husband, Martha Stonery wore an exalted look. "All over America dogs will cry out in protest against the Russian crime," she said. "I have kindled a flame, George, that will sweep away the Kremlin. I, a weak woman..." She insisted on driving herself home in her new station wagon. Sirening police cars passed Stonery three times as he drove home in the evening. Outside the tan stucco ranch-style house on Euclid Avenue, cars blocked the driveway and a crowd milled on the lawn. Stonery parked undei the oak tree at the curb and got out. Martha stood in the living room by the picture window and harangued the crowd through a screened side panel. Centered in the window her spaniel Fiffalo writhed, hanging by a hind leg from the massive gilt floor lamp and yipping piteously. Martha had on her suit of gray Harris tweed and her diamond brooch. "... moral pressure the Russians simply cannot resist," Stonery heard her shouting as he joined die crowd. "The men talk, but the United Dames of the Dog are not afraid to act. Putting a dear little dog on the moon to die of heartbreak!" Several young men near the window scribbled on white pads. "How many members do you have, Mrs. Stonery?" one asked. "The U.D.D. is bigger than you think, young man. Bigger than the Russians think, for all their spies and traitors!" Stoneiy sidled in and tried the front door. "She locked it," one of the reporters told him. "The cops went back for a warrant. Say! You're Stonery!" "Yes," the thin man said, flushing. A press camera flashed and he put up his hands too late to shield his face. "Give us a statement, Mr. Stonery, before the cops come back," the reporters clamored. Stonery backed off, waving his hands. "Please, please," he said. "She cracked?" a reporter asked. "When did you first notice?" "Please," Stonery said. "Yes, she's upset. Her oldest son went into the state penitentiary in California last week. She's very upset about it." "He kill somebody?" the same reporter asked. "No, oh no... just armed robbery... please don't print that, boys." "Here come the cops back!" someone shouted. Two policemen crossed the lawn, one waving a paper. "Here is our warrant of forcible entry, Mrs. Stonery," he called out. He began reading it aloud. "The U.D.D. will not shrink from any extremes of police brutality," Martha cried sharply. Fiffalo struggled and yelped louder. The second policeman smashed the lock with a ten-pound sledge. The reporters swept Stonery into the house with them. One policeman untied Fiffalo and held him in his arms. He strained his head back and away from the spaniel's whimpering kisses. Martha glared selflessly while flash bulbs popped. Stonery pulled gently at the other policeman's sleeve. "May I come along, officer?" he asked. "I'm her husband. I'll have to arrange bail." "Not taking her," the policeman said. "No room left in the pokey. Since two o'clock we been arresting the dogs." T he bellboy put down the silver bucket of ice cubes, pocketed the quarter and went out. The skinny secretary put a bottle of whisky beside it and turned to that fat adjutant sprawled shoeless on the bed. "Looks like Governor Bob'll be a while yet, Sam," the secretary said. "Shall we drink without him?" "Hell yes, I need one, Dave," the adjutant said in his frog voice, wiggling his toes. "Bob must be having himself a time with that Stonery dme." He chuckled and slapped his belly. The secretary tore wrappers off two tumblers and clinked ice into them. His rabbit face with its spectacles framed in clear plsistic expressed a rabbity concern. "It ain't for laughs, Sam," he said. "It's like the dancing mania of the Middle Ages, ever hear of it?" "No. D'they string up dogs by a hind leg too?" "No, only danced. But it was catcliing, like this is. My God, Sam, it's all over the state now, U.D.D, women running in packs at night, singing, hanging up every dog they can catch. Sam, it scares me." He splashed whisky into the two glasses. The adjutant belched, sat up in a creaking of bed springs, and scratched his heavy jaw. "You're thinking they might start hanging up us poor sons of bitches, ain't you?" he asked. "Hell, call out the Guard. Clamp on a curfew." He reached for a glass. "Yes, and the Russians'll fake pictures of your boys sticking old women with bayonets," the secretary said. "Governor Bob couldn't get reelected as dogcatcher, even." The adjutant drained his glass, lipping back the ice, and whistled his breath out through pouting lips. "Good! Needed that," he grunted. "Dave, Bob's got that Stonery dame by the short hairs, he'll swing her into line. Just that about her boy in the state pen out in California is enough. Brown would do Bob a favor and spring him. Or the papers here would splash it. Either way." "I know, I know," the secretary said, sipping at his drink. "We'll see, when Bob gets here. Meanwhile, as of yesterday we had thirty-three thousand seven hundred twenty-six dogs in protective custody and God knows how many more under house arrest. Sixteen thousand bucks a day it's costing us -- " He broke off as a knock sounded on the door. He hastily tore the wrapper off another glass and splashed it full of ice and bourbon. The adjutant padded to the door and opened it. The governor, a stout, florid man in a gray sports coat, came in and sat stiffly on the edge of the bed. The secretary handed him the drink and he gulped half of it before speaking. "No smoke, boys," he said finally. "She give it to me just like she does to the papers. We got to go to the moon, or make the Russians do it, and bring that poor, dear, sweet, trusting, cuddly little dog back to Earth again." "How about her kid out on the coast?" the adjutant asked. "She spit in my eye, Sam. Said she was just as brave to be a martyr as the dogs they string up. Why, she even told me about another boy of hers, living in sin with a black woman down in Cuba, and dared me to give that to the papers too." "She sounds tough as she looks." "She's tougher," the governor groaned. "Like blue granite. I felt like I was back in the third grade." He handed his empty glass to the secretary. "What did you finally do?" the secretary asked. "What the hell could I do? I want that U.D.D. vote, it must be a whopper. I wagged my tail and barked for her and said I had an idea." "And now I got to think up the idea," the secretary said, still holding the empty glass. "No, I thought it up on my way back," the governor said. "I'm going to fly to Washington this afternoon." "Not the army, for Gkxl's sake," pleaded the adjutant. "No, Tm going to dump it on the Russian embassy. Damn their black hearts, they started this. Hurry up with that drink!" "Watch out you don't lose your donkey for sure and all," the adjutant said. "Them Russians are smart cookies." "They'll have to be," the governor said, reaching for the fresli drink. "They sure... as... hell... will have to be!" A ll the folding chairs were L taken. Extra women stood in the aisles and along the side of the hall. Martha Stonery bulged over the rostrum in blue knitted wool and a pearl necklace. Seated around a half-circle of chairs behind her, pack leaders and committee chairwomen smoothed at their skirts. Monica Flint in dove gray sat at the organ. Martha pounded with her gavel so hard that her pearls rattled. "Everyone will please stand while we sing our hymn," she said into the resultant hush. She nodded to Monica, who began to play. " did not raise my dog to ride a sputnik, I will not let him wander to the moon,... The song was a shrill thundering. Martha beamed across her bosom as the crowd settled itself again. nouncement to make before we adjourn, girls," she said, "but first we will have committee reports. Paula Hart, will you begin?" She yielded the rostrum. All the reports were favorable. The U.D.D. was getting four times as many column-inches in the state press as the Russian moonship. It was on TV and radio. A Life team was coming. Changes were recommended. Vigilante packs were not to carry hat pins any more. Two policemen had lost eyes and the police were being ugly about it. A bar of soap in a man's sock was to be substituted. More practice on the clove hitch was needed. Too often, in their excitement, the pack ladies were only putting two half hitches around the leg and the dog could struggle out of it Martha came back to the rostrum to read the honor roll of those whom dogs had bitten or policemen had insulted. Each heroine came forward amid cheers and clapping to receive a certificate exchangeable for the Bleeding Heart medal as soon as the honors committee could agree on a design and have a supply made up. Martha shook the hands, some of them bandaged, and wept a few tears. "And now, fellow U.D.D. members," she said, "I will tell you ray surprise. Tomorrow morning I have an appointment with someone coming from Washington!" A sighing murmur swept through the hdl. "No, not Eisenhower Martha said scornfully. "A man from the Russian embassy, a Mr. Cherkassov." Applause crashed shrilly. Women wept and hugged each other. "They want to make peace," Martha shouted ringingly into tlie tumult. "WeVe won, girls! Sally out tonight and don't come in until the last dog is hung! We'll show them what it means to challenge the massed U.D.D.-ers of America!" The state police cordon kept the # block of Euclid Avenue free of reporters and idle gapers. The state car drove up at #:# a.m. and parked under the oak tree. Mr. got out. Mr. Cherkassov was stocky and crop-haired in a blue suit. His broad, high-cheekboned face, with snub nose and an inward tilt about the eyes, managed to seem both alert and impassive. Carrying a pigskin briefcase, he led the way to the Stonery front door. He stepped on the doormat and pressed the bell. The doormat whirred and writhed under his feet and he stepped back hastily. Martha Stonery, regal in maroon silk, fourinch cameo and piled gray hair, opened the door. "Don't be afraid of the doormat, Mr. Cherkassov -- you are Mr. Cherkassov, aren't you?" she asked sweetly. He nodded, looking from her to the doormat. "Your weight presses something and the little brushes spin around and clean your shoes," she explained. "I expect you don't have things like that in Russia. But do, please, come in and sit down." The three men stepped carefully across the mat on entering. In the oak-paneled living room, Paula Hart waited in black wool and pearls with Monica Flint, who wore white jade and green jersey. Martha and Mr. Cherkassov made introductions back and forth and the men bowed stiffly. Then Martha sat down flanked by her aides on the gray sofa facing the picture window. The men sat in single chairs and rubbed their polished black shoes uneasily against the deep-pile gray rug. "Madame Stonery, I have come to justify moondog," Mr. Cherkassov said. His voice was deep and controlled. "Two wrongs don't make a right, Mr. Cherkassov," Martha said, raising her head. "You needn't bring up Hiroshima. We already know about those thousands of little black nd white spaniels. Besides, I saw a Life picture where you sewed a little dog's head to the side of a big dog's neck." Mr. Cherkassov looked at his stubby fingers and hid them under his briefcase. Paula and Monica man made a note. "We do not believe it is a wrong when a greater value prevails over a lesser," Mr. Cherkassov said. "Moondog sends us information that will hasten the time of safe spacetravel for humans." "And who might you be, to say which value is greatest? Space travel is moonshine, just moonshine "I do not understand your word, madame. If you mean impossible, I must point out that moondog has already crossed space." Martha clasped her hands in her lap. "That's what I mean, grown little dog has to pay." Mr. Gherkassov spoke earnestly. "Forgive me if my ignorance of your language causes me to misunderstand, madame. We believe because man now has the ability to cross space he therefore has a duty to all life on Earth to help it reach other planets. Earth is overcrowded with men, not to speak of the wild life that soon must all die. We believe that around other suns we will find Earth-like planets where we can plough and harvest and build homes. I cannot agree that it is silly." Martha flung her head back. "Well, it is silly. Who'll go? All the men who do things will run away to them and then where will we be? Oh no, Mr. Gherkassov, that gets you nowhere!" "Your pardon, madame," a kind of men will run away?" "The sour-faced men who fix pipes and TV and make A-bombs and electricity and things." "Oh," said Mr. Gherkassov. He drummed on liis briefcase. Then, "Perhaps only Russians will go, madame. You could pass a law. I must confess to you, we might have sent a man to the moon, but we feared the propaganda use your country might make of it." Martha made her parrot mouth. "You should have sent a man.'" She chomped the last word off short. Paula and Monica nodded vigorously. Mr. Gherka;ssov stroked his briefcase. "Moondog's mistress wished greatly to go. One might say moondog saved her mistress' life. Is not that a value to you?" Martha stared. "Did you dare think of sending a poor weak woman to the... to the moon? "Russian women are coarse and strong," Mr. Gherkassov said soothingly. "A large number of them, among the scientists, did volunteer." M artha sat bolt upright and made her parrot beak again. Her fat cheeks flushed under the powder. "No!" she snapped. "I see where you're trying to lead me and I won't go! You should have sent the hussy! It is immoral to sacrifice a loving little dog just for a careless whim." Her two aides gazed admiringly at their chief tainess. "Tliink of it, just for a whim!" Paula echoed. Mr. Gherkassov's fingers traced an aimless, intricate pattern on the briefcase and he crossed his ankles. "All dogs are not loving in the same way, madame. Tell me, how do you know when a dog loves you?" "You just know," Martha said. "Take my little Fiffalo -- and I just know he's so miserable now away from me in that dreadful concentration camp and it's all your fault, really, Mr. Gherkassov -- when I pet Fiffalo he jumps in my lap and kisses me and just wiggles all over. That's real love!" "Ah... I perhaps understand. What does he do when you speak sharply to him?" "He lies on his back with his paws waving and looks so sad and pitiful and defenseless that my heart melts and I feel good all over. You just know that's love, when it happens to you." Monica dabbed at a tear. Both 'T think I may see a way to resolve our differences," Mr. Cherkassov said. He put his feet side by side and leaned slightly forward, gripping the briefcase on his knees. "What do you know of the histoi# of the dog?" he asked. "Well, he's always been man's best friend and the savage Indians used to eat him and... and... "The true dog, madame, was domesticated about twenty thousand years ago. He was originally the golden jackal, Canis aureus, which still exists in a wild state. Selective breeding for submissiveness and obedience over that long time has resulted in the retention through maturity of many traits nonnal only to puppyhood. The modern pureline golden jackal dog no longer develops a secret life of his own, with emotional self-sufficiency. He must love and be loved, or he dies." Monica sniffed. "What a beautiful name," Paula murmured. Martha nodded warily. "But, madame, there is also a kind of false dog. Certain Siberian tribes slow to reach civilized status also domesticated the northern wolf. Canis lupus. This was many thousands of years later, of course, and in the false dog the effect of long breeding is not so evident. He is loving as a puppy, but when he matures he is aloof and reserves his loyalty to one master. He is intensely loyal and will die for his master, but even to him he will display little outward affection. Perhaps a wag of the tail or a head laid on the knee, not too often. No others except quite young children may pet him at all. To all but his master he displays a kind of tolerant indifference unless he is molested, and then he defends himself." "What a horrible creature, not a dog at all!" Martha exclaimed. "Not culturally, you arc quite correct, madame," Mr. Cherkassov agreed, shifting his hold on the briefcase and leaning further forward, "but unfortunately he is a dog biologically. Some wolf blood has crept into most of the jackal-derived breeds, you know. It betrays itself in high cheekbones and slanting eyes and in the personality of the breed. The chow, for instance, has considerable wolf blood." "Chows!" Martha beaked her lips again. "I despise them! No better than cats!" Paula nodded emphatic agreement. "But your little Fiffalo, as you describe him, is probably of pure Canis aureus descent and very highly bred." "I'm sure he is. Blood will tell. Monica, haven't I always said blood will tell?" Monica nodded, her eyes shining. Mr. Cherkassov shifted his position slightly, nearer to the chair edge. "Now moondog, Madame Stonery, is of the lajka breed and has even more wolf blood than the chow. If you brought her back to Earth she would just walk away from you with cold indifference." "Not re ally?" "Madame, you know the wolf traits only as you find them tempered with the loving jackal traits in such dogs as the chow. But a Russian dog! If you were to hand moondog a piece of meat, do you know what she would do?" "No. Tell me." Mr. Cherkassov leaned forward, his slanting gray eyes opening wide, and dropped his voice almost to a whisper. "Madame, she would bite your hand!" "Then she doesn't deserve to be rescued!" Martha said sharply. Mr. Cherkassov straightened up and began stroking his briefcase. "In one sense she is not even a dog," he suggested. "No, she's an old wolf-thing. Like a cat. Dogs are loving! "Perhaps not morally worthy of your campaign?" "No, of course not. Mr. Cherkassov, you have given me a new thought... I hadn't realized..." Mr. Cherkassov waited attentively, his fingers tracing another pattern. Paula and Monica looked at Martha and held their breaths. "... hadn't realized how that subversive wolf blood has been creeping into our loving dogs all this long time. Why... why it's miscegenation! It's bestiality! Confess it, Mr. Cherkassov -- that's one way you Russians have been infiltrating us, now isn't it?" Mr. Cherkassov raised his sandy eyebrows, and a frosty twinkle shone in his tilted eyes. "You must realize that I could hardly admit to such a thing, even if it were true, Madame Stonery," he said judiciously. "It is true! Go back to your Kremlin, Mr. Cherkassov, and shoot every wolf in Russia to the moon. I'm sure the U.D.D. won't mind!" men stood up and bowed. Martha rose and sailed ahead of them to the door. Hand on knob, she turned to face them. "Our meeting will be historic, Mr. Cherkassov," she said. "I have forced you to betray your country's plot to undermine our loving dogs. You may expect from the U.D.D. instant and massive retaliation! An aroused America will move at once, to set up miscegenation and segregation barriers against your despicable wolf blood!" Paula and Monica stood up, each with her hands clasped under her flushed and excited face. Mr. Cherkassov bowed again. Martha opened the door. "Goodbye, Mr. Cherkassov," she said. "You will, no doubt, be liquidated in a few days." Mr. Cherkassov stepped carefully All that philosophers have sought. Science discovered, genius wrought. -- James Montgomery The Last Days of L.A. Murder on a small scale may be illegal and unpleasant, but mass murder can be the most exhilarating thing in the world! recurring dream, the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in #. The dream of the sudden flash in the night, the rising mushroom cloud and then annihilation. You are living the nightmare again but this time it's true, you know it's true. You can't be dreaming. The bombs are actually falling and huge fireballs are sweeping upward while seas of flame spread at supersonic speeds to engulf the city. You feel the blast, the searing heat, you feel your flesh melting away. You try to scream but the sound dies in your throat as your lungs shrivel. Horror makes you try again and somehow you do scream and wake yourself up. Once m#re, this one more time, it is only a dream. You lie there panting, too weak from terror to move out of the puddle of your own sweat. You lie there and think and your thoughts aren't very pretty. It's a week day and you ought to be down at the office turning out advertising copy by the ton but instead you lie there and think even though you don't like what you're thinking. It's got to be soon. It can't be much longer now, not the way things arc going. You finally crawl out of bed around noon and ease your way into the kitchen. You realize that you have a hangover and since you can't remember what you did the night before you suppose you must have been drunk. By the time you finish one of the two quarts of beer you find in the refrigerator you know that isn't what you need, so you put on some clothes and wander out to a bar. After a few quick drinks you walk somewhat unsteadily out into the street again and head toward the place you always think of as The Bar. A wino edges up to you and asks for money to buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee. You give him a dollar but make him promise not to spend it on anything so foolish as food. "Liquor, brother, is the salvation of the race," you tell him. "Believe and be saved!" "Amen!" he says and hurnes off. You make the mistake of stopping to read the headlines on the comer so you know you're not Just before you get to The Bar you pass an alleyway and as you glance into the darkness, you see a huge rat standing there staring at you with arrogant red eyes. After a moment he walks away, unhurried and cocky. An icy chill runs down your spine. The rats will survive. The rats always survive. Maybe they are the Master Race. Something else tugs at your memory, something you read somewhere. Oh yes, it was a statement by an oceanographer. He said that even if the H-bomb should annihilate every living thing on the surface of the earth, the sea creatures would be able to carry on. The rats and the fish will carry on and build a better world. Your friends are sitting in their usual places when you get to The Bar. John Jones-Very who has the reddest, bushiest and longest beard and also the record for staying drunk the longest, is doing the talking. Listening are Dale Bushman who paints huge canvases which he never finishes, Ian, an out-of-work musician whose last name you don't know, Pat O'Malley the actor and, of course, Anna. Anna is small and thin with deej ly tanned skin drawn tightly over high cheekbones. She wears a plain dress and no makeup and her hair is done up in a bun on the nape of neck. The poetry she writes is a # ? kind of elegant pornography. She is the only one in the group who makes any money and that is bebeen banned all across the country. You like her very much, probably because she is the most irritatingly ugly woman you have ever met. A howling bank of jets hurls across the sky screaming for human blood and you shiver as you squeeze in at the table. You are convinced that the elementals of hell are loose above and the world is in its last stages. All the children bom this year will probably have twenty-one teeth and Anti-Christ will walk the land. "Why worry about the next war?" Dale Bushman asks. "It won't last forever." "No," John says. "No war ever has... yet." "Do you think it's coming?" you ask. "If you read the papers, you'd take to the hills right now," Pat O'Malley says, finishing his bowl of chili and reaching for his drink. "Ah, the hills," Ian says. "But what good? The H-bomb is bad enough but they'll use the G-bomb, the cobalt bomb, and this is the final weapon." "Just the same," you say. "I think we ought to take to the hills." Why not hide yourself way back of nowhere? Hide so deep in the woods and mountains that you won't even know when it happens. You could wrap the silence around you and pull the earth over you. You could bury yourself so deep that... but of course you won't. You have a job and, like everyone else, at least a thousand other reasons for staying on until the end. "But really, " you say, "a man should be able to survive a time of terror by disengaging himself as complcicly as possible from the rest of the human race. If he were to reduce his needs to a minimum... a little bread, a few vegetables, a blanket or two, a warm cave and... "A blonde or two," Pat says. Bushman adds, "A cellar of good Scotch." "And books, lots of books," JonesVery puts in. "No blondes, no Scotch, no books," you tell them, banging your mug on the table so hard their glasses jump. "Minimum needs... minimum needs!" "How about plumbing?" Anna demands. "I won't go without plumbing." "We're facing the end of the world," says John, "and you worry about plumbing!" "I'm sorry, but if plumbing isn't going to survive. I'd just as soon not either," Anna says. "I just can't see myself squatting in the bushes." "What difference does it make?" Ian asks. "Everybody dies anyway. From the moment you're born, you start dying." "Yes, but -- " "So why bother? Everybody dies. Why prolong it more than you have to? Everybody dies." "Worlds may or may not blow up," O'Malley says, "but it seems to me it's the little indignities of modern life that hurt the most. The constant repetition of the advertising slogans that insult your intelligence, and the women with the pearly teeth and perfect permanent waves, without body odor or souls." "I have body odor," Anna says. "But no soul," Ian says. "No soul at all." "You're just mad because I wouldn't sleep with you last night." "No soul," Ian says. The jukebo-x offers Tin Pan Alley's solution to the whole thing: "Our trouble is too much history," John says. "A period without history is a happy one and we've had too much history." "No soul -- too much history," Ian hiccups. "Not enough sexeverybody dies." "Everybody is going to die damr fast, unless something happens," you say. "No soul -- so sad," Ian mumbles. No soul and no sex... everybody dies, nothing happens." "So what?" Anna demands. "What is life anyway? Why try to be like everyone else in this beautiful but messy Brave New World of #? Why run searching for a messiah when all the messiahs died a thousand years ago?" This starts you thinking about religion. You've never thought much about it before but a man can change, maybe even accept the old myths as real until they actually begin to seem real. Instead of dwelling on your body being burned to a cinder in an atomic holocaust you could think of your slightly singed soul being wafted to paradise on a mushroom cloud while U-# atoms sing a heavenly chorus to speed you on your way. The others don't even notice when you get up and walk out to look for a church. find in Los Angeles on any day of the week or at any hour of the day. They're behind the blank fronts of painted-over store windows. They're located in big old nineteenth-century houses along Adams; they spring up under tents in vacant lots and in large expensive temples and bank-like buildings in the downtown area. You pass by several likely-looking churches because they are in neighborhoods that have alleyways, and you still remember that rat, that red-eyed rat. Then as you walk through downtown crowds, you remember something else. Some dentist once said that the teeth of the people in the A-bombed Japanese cities hadn't been affected by radiation. This is very funny, it makes you laugh. You picture a world of blistered corpses, none of whose teeth have been affected. You laugh out loud and people turn to look at you. A woman points you out to a policeman and he looks your way. You want to keep on laughing but now you don't dare to. So you just keep on walking, trying to keep the laughter from bubbling out of you. "Hey, bud," the policeman calls to you, "what's the matter with you?" "Nothing -- nothing at all, officer," you tell him, and dive into the next church you pass. This one is called the Church of the New Cosmology. Inside, a round-faced little man is talking to a few listless people. "A geologist will never know the rocks until he has seen the Rock of Ages. The botanist will never know plants until he has beheld the Lily of the Valley, the cosmologist will never know the universe until he has listened to the Word of God ! "Let us consider for a moment the sun. What do wc know about the sun, my friends? What do the so-called scientists know about it? What do they tell us about our heavenly light? They say it's a giant Now why, I ask you, would that be so? The Bible says that God made the sun to light the world. Now have you ever known the Lord to do anything silly or foolish? Of course you haven't! Then why do they ask us to believe that He would put the sun, which is supposed to miles away from it? An engineer who did something like that wouldn't be much of a God. The true answer, my friends, is that Jehovah God did nothing so impractical and no matter who tells you different, don't believe it!" The little man's voice dropped to a husky whisper. "I have studied my Bible and I've listened to the scientists and I've talked to God Himself about it and I tell you this is the truth. The sun is our heavenly light, the sure sign of God's love, and right this minute it is just two thousand three hundred miles from Los Angeles! It is not a wasteful five and five-tenths miles across... just the right size to give us our beautiful California sunshine. "How do I know?" The whisper had grown lo a hoarse shout. "How do I know? I know because it's the Word of God, my friends! The personal word of God given to me by God Himself. "What else do I know? What else has God told me, to confound the Godless scientists? Why, my friends, the Bible says that this earth upon which we live is flat -- as flat as this book!" He brings his hand down with a sharp slap on the Bible. "You ask then how is it possible to circumnavigate the world when it is a flat plane. The answer is that it isn't possible. A ship that seems to go around the world really makes a circle on the flat surface like this." With a stubby forefinger he draws a circle on the book. "Now I know that those scientists up on the moon say that the world is round, but whoever saw or heard of a scientist that wasn't a liar? Can any of you really bring yourselves to believe that this flat earth of ours is traveling through space at the tremendous speed that they say it is? Tell me, d# you feel any wind from this great speed? Do you feel anything at all?" No, you have to admit, you don't. You don't feel a thing. Even his own congregation doesn't seem to. This is thirsty work. You have a couple more drinks and then you look for another church. You find one called the Church of Christian Capitalism. The thin old man with the dusty fringe of gray hair has his audience well in hand as you walk in and take a seat. He makes the sign of the cross and the sign of the dollar over their heads as he harangues them. "Blessed are the wealthy for they shall please God," he says. "Christ was the first capitalist, dear friends. He took a loaf and seven fishes and blessed them and made them into enough food to feed a multitude. He walked in poverty but he came to own the world! "God is the Good Capitalist, the Owner and Proprietor of all things on this earth. This country was created by those saints of Capitalism -- Morgan, Rockefeller and Gould." Christian Capitalism sends you home to bed by way of another bar. with people all around you. At first you don't know why you're there and then you remember it's a party. Everyone except you is laughing and drinking and having a good time. You have a strange sense of foreboding, of something about to happen that you can't avoid. You see a girl you know across the room and get up and start to cross the room to her. There's a sudden blinding flash of light outside the house and the windows come crashing in. You see murderous slivers of glass piercing the flesh of those about you and you hurry over to the girl you know only to find her face and neck slashed by the flying glass and blood streaming down over her bare breasts. You try to stop the flow of blood with a handkerchief but it's coming in such strong spurts that you can't. A second shock wave follows the first with an even brighter flash. You're knocked to the floor and the building comes crashing down. You struggle against the falling masonry but it does no good. You feel the crushing weight and scream... and your screams wake you up. You feel almost as bad awake as you did asleep, only now the crushing weight is on your head instead of your chest and your mouth is filled with the taste of death and decay. You figure you must have been drinking last night but you can't quite remember. You reach out your hand and it locates a bottle that still guggles a little. Without opening your eyes you lift it hurriedly to your mouth and then almost choke trying to spit it out. Mouthwash! You manage to get your eyes open, and remember with thankful heart that today is Sunday and you don't have to go to work. It's been five days since the last dream and that's not so bad, but just the same you'd better get up and get a drink because this one really shook you up. Or maybe you ought to go to church. Perhaps you'd better do both. A tall blond man in a black suit is standing on a platform in the center of a group of forty or fifty intensely quiet people as you enter. "Is there a wall in front of you?" he asks. "Yes, there is a wall in front of us," the people answer. "Gan you see the wall in front of you?" "Yes, we can see the wall." "Is there a wall behind you?" "Yes, there is a wall behind us." "Gan you see the wall behind you?" They all turn around and look. "Yes, we can see the wall behind us." "Is there a floor beneath your feet?" "Yes, there is a floor beneath our feet." "Are you sure? Feel the floor with your feet." There is a loud shuffling as they do as they are told. "Are you sure the floor is there?" "Yes, we're sure the floor is there." "Now feel your feet with the floor." There is more shuffling and during this you steal quietly out. This one reminds you of the D.T.'s and you want nothing at all to do with that. You get tossed out of the next place you try because the preacher says you're drunk. You're not, but you wish you were, so you head toward The Bar. You stop when you door of a large building and underneath in smaller letters it says, "Listen to the words of the Space People. Hear the advice they bring us in these troubled times." Surely, you tell yourself, the Space People will have a solution, surely they can bring peace. You enter and see a young, ordinarylooking follow addressing a crowd of about three hundred. You take a seat next to a bald man who is writing down what the young man is saying even though it doesn't seem to make much sense. '... member of a small group that has been in touch with the Space People and feel that this world can be saved only through the aid of superior beings. I will now play this tape which I obtained Irom the captain of a Flying Saucer." He places the tape orr the spindle and it begins to whirl. Avoice begins to speak in slightly stilted English. "I am Lelan. I am what you people of Earth think of as the liead of the government of the planet Nobila. I speak to you across the parsecs in order to bring you good and bad news. The good is that a new age is about to begin for the people of Earth through the aid of we Nobilians. We have already contacted the President of the United States, the Pope of the Catholic Church and all other world leaders. A new age is about to begin for you as soon as we have saved you from the evil influence of the vicious Zenonians from the planet Zeno. All Earth knowledge will become obsolete as we supply you with new information and all good things will be free in the days after we drive the Zenonians from among you. "But first we must warn you that the Zenonians will try to stop us, but you can help avoid this if you are alert. Look around you for persons who seem strange. It is the Zenonians who have made you what you are. It is the Zenonians who cause your wars and your crime with their evil rays. We will use our good Nobil rays to combat their evil Z rays. When we have driven them out, the world will be a better place in which to live. But -- beware! They are all about you. Examine the man next to you. Beware! They are all about you. You shall hear from us again." You turn and look at the man next to you; he's looking at you. He is a rather strangelooking guy and you edge away from him just as he edges away from you. You turn to look at the man on the other side of you. He is moving away from you also. rhen you hear the stories of the people in the audience. Every one of them who stands up to speak has had a mysterious visitor in the night or had a flying saucer land in his backyard. Most of them have had trips to the moon and elsewhere in flying saucers. Space you think must be as crowded as the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour. Almost all of them have been contacted by superior beings from space because they are the only people in the world who are wise enough to interpret the Space People to the Earth people. You feel pretty good from the drinks you've had, so you stand up and tell them what you think. "The first flying saucers were sighted after the atomic bombs were first exploded," you begin. "And they became very prevalent after the first Earth satellites were put into space and again after the first moon rockets. I therefore think that the Earth is a cosmic madhouse in which the human race has been incarcerated for its own good and that every time we start rattling the bars, the keepers hurry down to take a looL" No one seems to care much for your theory, and you are escorted to the door none too politely. No, the Space People don't seem to have the answer. With the headlines you see at every corner chasing you, you head for The Bar and dive gratefully through the door. "So everybody dies," Ian is saying. "We're all dying, just sitting here." "Will you stop that? God damn it, will you stop that?" you yell at him. Ian looks at you owlishly for a few seconds and then back at his drink. Jones-Very and the others go right on with the conversation. "It's merely what I was saying the other night," Jones-Very says. "It's the contagious spread of the madness that is epidemic in our time. No one wants war. But still we are going to have a war. After all, the very Zeitgeist of our times is one of complete callousness toward human life. You have only to think of the Russian slave camps, the German gas chambers and our own highway slaughter." "Maybe hfe itself is just some sort of stupid mistake," Anna says. "Maybe we're a cosmic blunder, a few pimples on the tail of the universe." "That isn't so," you blurt out. "There's purpose -- there's got to be purpose. You can't look around you and say there isn't purpose in the universe; that there isn't a reason for our being here." This time they all turn and look at you strangely. Then they look at each other. "I wonder," JonesVery says, "if I wasn't closer to the truth than I thought when I talked about contagion." "What the hell do you mean by that?" you demand, half rising from your seat. "Nothing... nothing at all," JonesVery says, looking at the others. "What this world needs is a moral renovation -- a new birth of the spirit," you go on. "Oh, my God," Jones-Very moans, his head in his hands. "Would you listen to that, in this age of space stations and moon guns," Anna says. "John, you're right -- you're right! It's got him!" Bushman says. You won't listen to any more of this. You get to your feet and stagger with great dignity to the door. altitude equipment and you're sitting in the nose of a jet bomber listening to the vicious growling of the motors. You have a tremendous feeling of power and you think about how many you'll kill this trip. You think about the big black bombs nestled in the bomb bay and remember there is one for each of the three cities on your list. Gcxl, it will be beautiful! You can almost see the glorious colors of the rising mushroom cloud and hear the screaming of the shattered atoms. You can't hear the screaming of the people up here, that's one of the nicest parts of this kind of murder. You can't hear them. This makes you as happy at it must have made Aitila and Hitler when they killed scale may be illegal and unpleasant, but mass murder can be the most exhilarating thing in the world. Then your bombs are gone and you're passing through the most beautiful clouds you've ever seen but somehow they smell of charred flesh and even up here you hear the screams of the people. The sound rips and tears at your brain, destroying what little sanity you have left. You've got to stop them! You've got to, before they drive you completely mad. You tilt the nose of the bomber and dive toward the screams. You've got to stop them! You scream back at them as you dive and again your own screams wake you up. This is the worst one you've ever had and your hangover is almost as bad. You dress and hurry out of your ap#.rtment to get away from the terror and the guilt but suddenly you remember that you aren't really the guilty one. Or are you? You look for a bar or a place to buy a bottle and then remember that you haven't any money. You see Pat O'Malley up ahead of you in the crowd and hurry to catch up with him. He hasn't any money either, so you suggest that both of you go to church. "Why not?" he says. "We have only our souls to lose." The two of you enter the first one you come to and the woman on the platform is an amazing sight. She's big and full-bodied and has all the grace and arrogance of a lioness. She's got the Word and she's passing it out in large doses. "That's Dr. Elinda A. Egers, D.G.F.," O'Malley whispers. "Doctor of Complete Faith." You watch fascinated as that lush body of hers moves restlessly around the platform. "In these troubled times the tortured mind of man is hanging in the balance, because he has forgotten his great enemy," Elinda shouts. There's a wildness in her eyes and a sensuousness in the way she moves her body that makes you move forward undl you're sitting on the edge of your seat. Any stripper, you muse, would give her G-string to be able to imitate this woman's uninhibited way with her hips. "Why are our asylums filled with she demands at the top of her lungs. "Because the doctors and the psychologists absolutely fail to recognize or blindly refuse to recognize the demoniac origin of these illnesses. They have failed, my dear friends, because they are bound to the unreality of conventional science. They have failed because they did not look into their souls to see what God has written there for all to read. "If we face the truth, we will learn to recognize the presence of demons and only then can we cure the inflicted!" Demons, you think. What a lovely idea. Perhaps you have fallen through a rift in time and come out in the Middle Ages with only wonderful things like witches and demons to worry about. You turn to O'Malley to tell him this, only to find him sound asleep. You've often wondered where he did his sleeping, and now you know. "The battle in the world today is not between nations but between Jesus Christ and the Devil!" She has gone into a kind of bump and grind routine now with her hands on those glorious hips and her body moving back and forth while her legs remain absolutely still. It looks real good from where you sit but you think it might look even better up closer so you leave Pat snoring gently and te a seat further toward the front. "Come to me and the Lord will put out his hand and save you. He has said unto me: 'You shall have the power to cast out demons,' and I have replied that I will do so. If you feel it, say Amen!" There is a lusty chorus of amen's from the winos and bums who fill the auditorium. You have an idea they were attracted here by the same thing that keeps you on the edge of your seat. A man with the jerks of some sort comes down the aisle and the healing starts. Dr. Egers lays one hand on his head and the other at the back of his neck. "Get out of him, you demons! Out! Out! In the name of the Lord, I charge thee -- get out!" The man jerks even more violently. "Heal him, Lord, heal him! They're coming out... the demons are coming out. Can't you feel them leaving you, brother?" The fellow jerks once more and almost falls as an attendant leads him away. "He's cured," Elinda shouts. "Praise God! He'll never have another convulsion." "Praise God! Praise God!" the congregation shouts. Only the stilljerking man seems to have any doubts as to his cure. "The Power of God will save you," she says to the little boy now kneeling before her. "From the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, I charge you, Satan, come out!" She hugs the child against those astonishing breasts of hers. "Tliis can be your cure if you believe, Jimmy. All things are possible if you only believe. Litde Jimmy, do you have faith?" The boy nods his head eagerly and his face is so full of faith and belief that you find yourself nodding with him. "Restore him tonight in the name of Jesus Christ!" she shouts, placing her hands on his thin little legs. "This litde leg. Lord... send the Power to restore this little leg. Drive the demon of evil from it!" Her voice grows even louder. "The Power is coming! The Power is coming! The Power is within me now and it will flow from me to you. Do you feel it, Jimmy? Do you feel it? Do you feel it flowing in your legs?" She has lifted him from the floor and is cradling him in her arms. "Do you feel it, Jimmy?" Christ, you can almost feel it yourself. "Don't your legs feel different, Jimmy?" "I think they're tingling a little," he says. "Do you hear that?" she shouts again. "His legs are tingling! The God Power is making them tingle!" She lowers the child to the floor. "You can do it, Lord! Send the Power in the name of Jesus! Send it into this little foot, into this little leg. Try, Jimmy, try it for me, try it now!" Jimmy tries to stand up but wavers and falls. With renewed effort he manages to pull himself erect and stand swaying. joyously. Sure they've seen it but they don't seem much impressed. In fact, most of them get up and leave after this round. You ease yourself out of your seat and head toward the door, because you need a drink, but you turn before goiilg out to look back at h. She looks tired and disappointment shows in her full sensuous face. You know that she's the most wonderful thing you have ever seen. You've found your religion. You've found something to worship -- Elinda Egers, the only real goddess in the world. You'll come here every night and the bomb won't worry you because you have a religion now. Elinda Egers will save you. You head for the nearest bar, singing "Rock of Ages" at the top of your lungs. ning, terror riding you like a jockey using the whip. You're running while a boiling sea of flame rolls over the city. Behind you and close on your heels come breakers of radioactive hell, smashing buildings and lifting cars and people into the air. People are running on all sides of you. A girl in a spangled evening dress, a puffing little man in Bermuda shorts, a woman carrying two children, a man with a golf bag over his shoulder and two men in gray flannel suits followed by a woman in a sack dress that keeps blowing up over her face as she runs. The harder you run, the closer the fire seems to get. You can feel it singeing your back and the fat little man screams as a lashing tongue catches up with him and turns him into a cinder. The woman in the sack dress tramples across the bodies of the two men in gray flannel but the man with the golf club fights her off with his mashic. Then the four of them are eaten up by the hungry flames. You moan and your legs pump harder. There's an underground shelter ahead and you run toward it only to find the entrance jammed with people. You try to fight your way in. You grab hold of a man but his boiled flesh comes away in your hands. Then you see they are all dead, packed together so tightly they can't fall. You're running again and you see the womam with the two childien only there's nothing left of thcni but a charred arm and a hand which she still clutches. The girl in the evening dress falls in front of you and you stumble over her. You see her dress and then her hair burst into flames. She throws her arms around you and you feel the suffocating flames. "Oh Lord -- Lord' you moan, and wake up. The bottle of wine on the nightstand is only half empty and you drink from it gratefully and think of going out for more. But you remember your goddess and you know that you have to go to see her. She's in good form tonight as she talks about the Kinsey Report. "If you're listening, say Amen!" She raises both arms as she yells this and you're amazed at the way her big breasts rise with them. "In the Old Testament, God demanded death for the adulteress but Dr. Kinsey in his day tried to make her sins sound normal. But I tell you that this sin is the road to Hell, for the person and for the nation. God has destroyed other cities for this sin and His wrath will fall upon yours as well. "If you're listening, say Amen!" "Are you really listening? Do you honestly want to hear? Or do you prefer the way Los Angeles and the rest of the nation is going? Do you prefer the way of sex, the way of fornication and adultery? Do you prefer to read about sixteen-year old girls found in love nests with older men? Do you prefer to think of boys and girls in the back seats of cars? Do you prefer to think of some man's hand running over your daughter's body, touching her..." Elinda Egers is swaying back and forth, her body rigid, her breath coming faster and faster. Someone else is breathing heavily and you're not surprised to find it's you. "If this is what you want, say Amen!" "Amen!" you shout before you realize you're not supposed to this time. No one seems to notice. Beads of perspiration are forming on the back of your neck and trickling down your spine. The tabernacle is jammed and there isn't much ventilation. You're dizzy with the wine, lack of food and desire. "Go ahead! Let your kids go to Hell! Let them read comic books and smoke and drink and fornicate in the back seats of jalopies! Let them go to filthy movies, let them listen to dirty jokes on television, let them look at the brazen women with their breasts hanging half out of their dresses." "Oooooh..." a woman in front of you moans, and you feel like moaning with her. "But if you don't want these things," Elinda shouts, her voice on the verge of breaking, "sing -- sing, sing with me! "'Come homey come home, Ye who are weary. Come home" You are sitting in a metal room with telescreens on the wall and a big red button in front of you. Sweat is standing out on your forehead and trickling down the back of your neck because you know the time is coming, the time when you have to decide whether to push that button and send a dozen arcing over the Pole. In the telescreens you see cities... peaceful scenes of people going about their business. Then the people are running, leaping out of their cars and leaving them on the street, vanishing into buildings and underground shelters. Your hand is poised over the big red button and your muscles are tightened as if your whole hand and arm were turned to wood, and you know that even if you have to, you can't push that button and destroy half the world. Then in one of the telescreens there is a sudden white glare, and the screen goes blankburned out -- and then in anotlier telescreen you see destruction fountaining like dirty white dust boiling out of the streets... and you see the buildings breaking and falling in rubble, and now you hear the people's screams, a sound that tears through your guts and drives you crazy, and the rubble is falling and sending up more fountains of gray dust -- and you know that this is happening to your own country, )our own people, you ha e to slnke hack, you have to push the button and avenge them, stop the slaughter by stroying their cities too, but you can't make youi'self push the button, your aim won't move and your fingers are paralyzed, and then all the telescreens are glaring white or blowing up in clouds of destruction, and you scream, scream in the metal room until you can't hear anything but your own screaming, and then somehow you force your hand down and pu the button. And just as you feel it go down, the walls of the room bui'st inward in a volcano of noise and terror and the gray dust comes swirling in over you, blotting out your screams... You wake up and hurry through the streets with this last dream hanging over you more heavily than any of the others. You've got to run -- you've got to get out. But look at all the other people. None of tliem are running. They're going home from work -- going into cafes, walking the dog... oh God, walking the dog at a time like this... You're scared. The bloody world is coming to a bloody end. You know it just as sure as you're sitting here in the warm sun in MacArthur park with the fifth you've bought and are drinking from in a paper bag. It's close now. You're not sure how close but it's close. The world is coming to an end and you know you can't convince anyone that it is. You feel the way Henny Penny -- or was it Chicken Little? -- must have felt. The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Hell -- you're just one more caterwauling messiah in a city of messiahs. Los Angeles, where every man is his own messiah. Then you know what the trouble is. You've been looking for someone to help you, when what you should have been doing was helping them. Now you realize that you are the one you are the messiah you've been seeking. It's up to you to lead them out of the city into the wilderness. You drink more and you drink it fast and the more you drink the more a feeling of infinite compassion comes over you for your fellow men. You can save them. You can do it You drain about two-thirds of the bottle and then get up and walk towai'd a man in that uniform of success, a gray flannel suit. "Wait a minute, friend," you say, shifting the bottle to your left hand so you can take his arm with your right "What is it? What do you want?" he says, looking at you as though you're drunk. "Have you seen the papers today, friend?" you ask. "Let go of me," he says, pulling away. "If you have seen them, what are you going to do about it?" "I'm going home and eat my dinner." He hurries off. You approach a plump, pretty little blonde pushing a baby carriage. "Miss, can I have a few minutes of your time in which to save your life?" She looks frightened and tries to wheel the buggy around you. "Have you thought about the future of this dear little child of yours?" She breaks into a half trot and soon disappears with the baby carriage bouncing along ahead of her. You sit down for a few minutes and have a few more swallows of the bourbon. When you get up you're surprised to find that you stagger a little. But you've got to tell the people, you've got to make them listen. Your eye lights on a garbage can a short way off and you know you've found the way to do it. You take a stand beside the can and with the bottle tucked safely in your pocket you begin to pound on the can with both hands. "Hey, listen, everybody! I've got to tell you about the Last Days of Los Angeles. Listen to me! I can save you if you'll just listen! You're doomed. The city is doomed!" You pound like mad on the can, but this being L.A. where such things happen every day, only a very few passersby stop. "Gome over here and let me tell you about it!" you yell. "Do you know what the power of the H-Bomb can do? Have you heard of the C-Bomb? Do you know what nerve gas is? Have you seen the Sputniks overhead? Do you know how far an you know that there is no defense?" You grab a man by the arm, but he shakes you off, so you reach for a gray-haired old lady and get an umbrella in your middle from the dear little thing. "Boy, is he ever soused." Two teen-aged girls are standing in front of you, giggling. "Did you ever see a guy so drunk?" You want to save them and you start toward them with outstretched arms, but they move back into the crowd. This makes you furious and you start to yell again. You grab the nearest person. It's a woman but you shake her anyway. Someone has got to listen. "Let go of me, you masher," the woman screams. "Help, somebody, help!" The crowd closes in on you. A sailor grabs you from behind and (Continued on page #) Book Reviews by the Editor OR, by James Blish (Avon, #')), is a novel which began its inteimittent life some # years ago, as a story of mine called 'Mercy Death." I had what I thought was a hell of a problem, but I couldn't think of any way out of it, so the story remained about half written until c. #, when Jim Blish completed it as a novelWonder as "The Weakness of colors ;y(he alien creature in the story has a color organ in place of a mouth, and his name was originally "Red-green-orange-violet," or the initials around for reasons best known to himself, and now Blish The essential part of the story consists of my problem and Blish's solution -- the problem being, "What do you do when an apparently indestructible being tells you to kill him, or he'll kill you?" For Blish's solution, see the book. Whether there ever was enough meat in this story to be worth developing into a novel, I don't know ; I'm inclined to tliink not. At any rate, what Blish has done is to keep the original story more or less intact, and pad it by introducing a new set of characters and a new story line. The original characters name), two scientists and a couple of supernumeraries. The new ones one named Marty Petrucelli wlio has a war-caused phobia against flying, and is losing his wife to a brash pilot named AI Strickland on account of it. tic and impressively technical (Blish was for several years a memBlish's marshalling of details about atomic physics, and so on. characters has some color of reason in the opening chapters: they're the nearest squadron to the site of the alien's landing. After that, in spite of heroic efforts on Blish's part to shoehorn them into the plot, they simply get in the way. As early as p. #, for example, fronts the alien, risking his life to try to open communication. If the story had been written from Holm's viewpoint, this could have been a scene of hair-raising drama. As it is, it takes place almost invisibly off-stage, while we get a worm's-eye view of Marty and his stone-cold love life. In padding a novel, the problem is not to advance the story but to slow it down. This one is slowed to a crawl -- one-sixth story, fivesixths the endless, repetitive emotional Laocoons that identify Blish's hack-work. The writing itself, except for one or two notably good passages (particularly Marty's flight with the scared Russian scientist in chapter #), is as tortuous and knobjointed as Blish's worst. Nearly every sentence has too much information packed into it; and since most of it is unnecessary information, the result is the same as if it were noise. Deadly Image, by Edmund Cooper (Ballantine, #) is anotlier of those curiously muffled science fiction novels that keep coming out of England. This one tackles the old suspended-animation plot with more than usual plausibility -- the hero, John Markham, is accidentally deep-frozen in an underground food storage chamber, being prepared against World War #. The world he wakes up to. however, in the #nd century A.D., is a flannelly compound of old ideas, tastelessly muddled. As in men have fallen under the rule of benevolent but overcautious robots. Cooper adds the twist that the robots are close counterfeits of human beings, male and female; his hero, in a bathetic sequence, tries to make a woman out of one of them, a girl robot named MarionA. In the process, it seems to me, everything that makes a robot interesting is smoothed out; Coofer might as well have made his robot characters human, and been done with it. The novel is not by any means all bad; there are nice touches here and there, and even some markedly good thinking. But it has the same exasperatingly blunted and dimmed quality as Bright Phoenix by Harold Mead, A Sign of the Times by Robert Kee, and other recent British work: and the same well-bred reluctance to travel any but familiar paths. Signet has issued an amiable but fatheaded satire called # Years Later, by Horace Goon (#), which you had probably better avoid. The burden of the book is a long series of homilies on man and his history -- most of them qnexceptionable but awfully trite. And if you are extraordinarily sensitive to scientific ignorance, you may not even get through the first ten pages, in which Coon's alien spacetravelers arrive on Earth from their home "on the Great Galaxy" (Coon seems to think this is a gc name for a planet), to find such relics of mankind's #-years-dead civilization as rusted auto frames and concrete dinosaurs. R oger Lancelyn Green's Into Other Worlds (Abelard, #) is a scholarly survey of space-flight ficdon in hard-bound books, from Lucian to "the latest scientifiction." Lewis does not attempt to deal with the mass of material published in magazines, which is probably wise, and he stops with G. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (#) and Perelandra ( I # ) , which he names "the highest peak" of spacetravel fiction. Although startled, I think he's right. Green's religious and moral views color his judgments noticeably (e.g,, "the ghastly materialistic tenacity" of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men in overcoming a hostile environment on Venus, instead of sitting on their noble fannies and admiring the work of God). He also drops some words about H. G. Wells that make me bristle; but it's hard to hate a man who loves the Burroughs Mars books so unashamedly. He makes the usual confident scholarly blunders about spaceflight: "A schoolboy... could tell you that a human being cannot stand an increasing velocity of motion greater than thirty-two feet per second per second..." Nevertheless, a great deal of the ground he covers is new to me, and I found the book a provocative introduction lo science fiction before #. Robert Cromie's A Plunge Into Space, of which I'd never heard, seems to have been an # forerunner of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations." Other obscure works that sound very lively in Green's descriptions are Legends of the Lakes, by Thomas Croften Croker ( #), Across the Zodiac, by Percy Greg (#), Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, by Edwin Lester Arnold ( I # ) , and V oyage to Arcturus,  bv David Lindsay (#). We also get the usual lengthy (and by now wearisome) discourses on Lucian of Samosata, Ariosto, Kepler, Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac and the like, all of whom sound as dull as they ever did. Incidentally, Green traces the history of that idiotic noisy meteorite that roars through all the bad s-f films, to its first appearance in Poe's Hans Pfaal, and its second in Verne's Autour de la Lune. What is surprising to me about the whole survey is that there should turn out to be so little in print on the subject, and so few ideas about other worlds and their inhabitants. The #th and #th century works are all pretty much of a stripe -- satirical or moralistic fantasies with the moon or other planets as background. The Victorian novels have a monotonous family resemblance, too, and in fact only three or four writers in the whole lot seem to have produced anything really vivid and plausible. Probably adding the magazine stories would not lengthen the list much. Something will have to be. done about this. BY brown Annie signed on a bride ship for Mars, There were forty brides. And when she got there, thirty-nine men were waiting. T he pilot shoved open the airlock and kicked the stairs down. "Okay, girls. Carry your suitcases and ril give each of you an oxygen mask as you go out. The air's been breathable for fifteen years, but it's still thin to newcomers. If you feel dizzy, take a whiff of oxygen." Thiorty women just stood there and looked at each other. Nobody wanted to be first. Annie moved forward, her bulky suitcase practically floating in her hand. She was a big woman with that wholesome expression which some women have to substitute for sex appeal. She'd made a great senior leader at summer camps. "Fll go first," she said, grinning confidence into the others. "I'm not likely to bring out the beast in them." She waved herself out, letting the grin set and jell. It was odd to feel light. She'd felt too heavy as far back as she could remember. Not fat heavy. Bone heavy. The sweat on her face dried suddenly. She could feel it, like something being peeled off her skin. Arid climate. It was cold. But she had the warmth to meet it. There they were! Forty men. There were supposed to be forty. What if one of them had died! Who would go back? "Not me," Annie prayed to herself. "Dear Ck)d, not me." She tried to count them. But they moved around so! They were looking at something. Not Annie. The girl coming down the ramp behind Annie. It was Sally, with the blonde hair on her shoulders. That's all they'd be able to see from there. The blonde hair. But a man was coming forward. He had a tam-like hat pulled low to good-humored eyes, and an easy stride. "Wait, Ben," one of the other men said. "See the others." "I pulled first, didn't I?" "Yeah. But you ain't seen but two yet." "I want that blonde one. Let Gary see the others." And he led Sally away. He didn't feel her muscles or look at her teeth or measure her pelvic span. After Sally came Nora. Nora giggled and waved, making a shape under the shapeless clothes. Wasn't that just like Nora? Okay. So she was cute. Second man took Nora. He didn't wait for the others. Third man took Regina. Regina looked scared, but you could see those big cow eyes a mile off. Regina obviously needed somebody to protect her. The other girls came out. Annie counted and her heart hit bottom. Someone was going to be left over. Four women, three men. They all felt embarrassed. It was the kind of thing the colonists would talk about for years. Who was last. Who was second to last. Spiteful people would remember, and in a tight little community, spite took root and throve on the least misinterpreted expression or -- But then, this wouldn't be a tight little community, Annie remembered. The lichen farms were spread out over the whole temperate belt of the world. Because the lichens were grown only on hills, where the sand would not cover them. And because they did a more efficient job of oxygenating the atmosphere when they were spread over a wide area. One man, hat in hand, even in the cold. A little shriveled man with a spike of dust-colored hair, but kind-looking. "Aw... he drawled in embarrassment. He clicked his tongue. "You're both probably too good for somebody like me. I don't know. Both fine women." The two women stood in silence. "What's your name?" "Annie." "Mary." "Mary? My sister's named Mary. Fine woman." He took Mary's hand. "No disrespect to you, Annie." They were all gone. "I could take you on my Venus run," the pilot said. He, too, was embarrassed. "But I'm afraid I'll have a full ship after that. Unless you can buy the weight and space. I'd be glad to take you free. But the company..." Annie's eyes were full but she wasn't going to let them spill. Sally brought Ben by, already looking self-consciously married. "I'm sorry, honey," she said. "Look, Annie, if you want to come stay with us until another shipment of pioneers come to break ground, you're welcome. Maybe you'd -- er -- find one of them you liked." It was a gesture of kindness, of course, but it made Annie's eyes spill. She turned her head away, toward the red hills. Red and the cultivated ones green. Christmas colors. "Sure," Ben said. "Swell. Any friend of Sally's is a friend of mine." And the way they looked at each other made Annie's heart lurch. "Thanks, kids," she said. "But I don't believe I'll try it. And don't worry. This isn't the first time I've been stood up." "Are you coming?" the pilot shouted across the field. "Hate to rush you, but I've got a schedule to meet." Was she coming? What else could she do? "What happened to him, Ben?" Annie asked. "My -- the other man that should have been here." Ben worried a hole in the sand with one foot and cleared his throat. "He stayed home." "You mean he's alive! Here?" "Well... yes. But he didn't -- " "Never mind. I don't need anybody to strum a guitar under my window. If he couldn't get away from the farm today I can certainly go to him. I've got a pair of legs that'll walk around the world." "You coming?" the pilot shouted. "No!" Annie cried. "I live here." The spaceship took off, a phoenix rising from the flames. Ben was shuffling his feet, hands in his pockets. "We'd be proud to have you stay with us, Annie." "OEcut it out, Ben. I'm no hothouse rose. Just tell me which way and I'll find my own farm." She paused, trying to guess his thoughts. "You think he might be disappointed when he sees me? Is that it, Ben? I know I'm no pinup girl. But I'm a worker and a breeder. He'll see it. In the end, that's what's going to count." Ben was still making holes in the sand with his feet, trying to say something. "Please don't worry," Annie went on, "your friend won't be sorry. If he doesn't want to marry me right away -- okay. I can understand it. But I can give him a chance to watch me work." "That isn't it," Ben said finally. "I think you look fine, Annie. It's -- it's any woman. He told them not to send a wife for him. Any woman. "But that's ridiculous. He knows the laws. Five years and then a wife. Why did he stake out in the first place?" "That was before," Ben answered. "Before what?" "Aw, it's not for me to say. Why don't you just forget Bradman. He's a good enough guy. But not for you. You come -- " "Which way and how far?" Ben looked at her hard. "Okay. On Mars your life is your own." He pointed. "Second farmbubble you come to. And you'd better hurry. It ought to take eight hours and night falls like a ton of bricks here." Annie made it in seven. Easy. parent hemisphere. He was inside working. She shouted, but if he heard her he didn't look up. She went to the flap that must be the door. There wasn't anything to knock on, so she opened the flap and walked in. There was nothing in the room but a cot, kitchen equipment and lichen, growing on a number of tables. The air was richer than outside and Annie breathed it thirstily. "I'm Annie Strug," she said, smiling and wishing it wasn't such an ugly name. He glanced up, angry blue eyes under a growth of black hair. He didn't say a word. Annie set her suitcase down and looked out at the green growth on the hills. "Look, Mr. Bradman' she cried suddenly, pointing a spatulate finger to the western horizon. ' What in the name of heaven is that?' There was a catch of fright in her voice. "We don't say 'mister' on Mars," he said reluctantly. "Brady. But you don't have to call me anything because you're leaving soon." He was a big, arid man with a sandy voice. But his hands, as he stripped the lumpy brown fruits from a giant lichen, were surprisingly delicate. "What is it?" Annie asked again, turning instinctively to the big man for a reassurance and protection she had no reason to expect. Bradman straightened and moved away from her, looking at the black giant growing up from the earth in the distance and moving straight toward them. "It's a sandstorm," he said. "It'll be here in ten minutes." Annie let out the breath she had been holding. "Oh. That doesn't sound so bad. I don't know what I thought it was. I was just frightened." She smiled shyly and apologetically at Bradman. Bradman grimaced at her, his agate eyes frozen in a pallid face that should have gone with red hair. The sand-blown lines in his face were cruel, "Sister, you've got a smile like a slab of concrete. Don't try it again." "You didn't have to say that," Annie said quietly, closing her eyes against the winds of her anger. "You didn't have to come here," he replied. "Goodbye." # "I'm not leaving," she said, still holding tight the doors of her anger. " am." He paced heavily over the sand floor and pulled back the flap of the door. "Where are you going?" Annie glanced back at the towering giant, now glowing red in the sunlight, like some huge, grotesque devil. "Into the storm cellar. Nobody lives through a Martian sandstorm." Annie ran after him. "For God's sake take me with you! You can't leave me..." "Mine's built for one," he said, and pulled the top in over him as he disappeared into the hole. Annie broke her fingernails pulling at the cover. The wind was blowing sand in her eyes. She saw blood staining the rim of her index finger. She pounded with her fists. "Let me in!" she screamed. "In the name of God!" But all she heard was the keening sand in the wind. She looked around. The devil was closer, malignant and hungry. It wanted to eat her alive. It made her angry. "I'll fight it," she screamed. "By God, I'll fight!" Five minutes, she guessed. Maybe five minutes left. She ran into the house, ripped open her suitcase. Bundles of nylon marriage clothes. She began to sob. Some were with lace. "Fight!" she .shouted to herself. There was her oxygen mask. How much oxygen? Anybody's guess. It was made for maybe a few whiffs a day over a period of several months. Swell. But it wouldn't keep the sand from tearing through her eyeballs and flaying her alive. Wrap in nylon nightgowns? Ridiculous. Spacesuit? Annie went through die oneroom house as fast as she could. No spacesuit. Why should he have one? Three minutes left. Sand was blowing under the hemisphere, piling up at one end and oozing out beneath. It was possible she would simply be buried. The refrigerator! That wasn't a refrigerator. Only a cabinet, loosely joined. Annie went outside, on the side where the field of lichens grew up a smooth, stone hill. The red devil was whistling at her now; a low, insinuating whistle. Something rattled faintly against one steel rib of the hemisphere. It was a shrub, about five feet tall. Annie began to laugh hysterically. Brady had protected the shrub with loving care. It was tied to the steel rib through grommetted holes in the hemisphere, and covered with its own plasdc bag to shield off the wind. One minute. The red devil was shouting now, laughing with triumph. He ran his sandy fingers through her hair and blew his gritty breath in her eyes. She pulled the zipper at the bottom of the polyethylene bag that covered the shrub and yanked the bag off. It was heavy, almost oily plastic, slippery and pliant. There was no time to decide whether it would be better inside or outside the house. She pulled the bag over her head inside out, so the zipper would close completely. Then she folded the zipper part under once and wedged herself as far as she could go into the space between shrub and hemisphere, holding the oxygen mask in her teeth. With infinite care, though she was not likely to split the heavy bag, she pulled off her shoes and her heavy, woollen walking socks. She put the shoes back on. Her slacks covered her legs. Only her ankles were bare. She unraveled one sock and stuffed the yarn in her ears. There was a sudden, remarkable quiet. Then, even through the yarn came the roar of the storm. For it was upon her. She looked through the milky plastic into a wild, red inferno, spitting at her in furious frustration. Then she bound the other sock over her eyes. She was in a blind, muffled world now, buffeted against the shrub and the wires and the steel rib, but not painfully, because of her heavy clothing. It was as though suddenly all her senses had been switched to the last pitch before silence. 'T might live' Annie thought. 'T might." T here was sand in the bag now. Annie could feel it sifting under her collar and blowing up her ankles. Not much. It was coming from the bottom of the bag. Probably the end of the zipper had worked open just a little. Was that the dull roar of the storm through her stoppered ears or the rushing of her own blood? If sand were seeping in, the storm must still be on. How did Bradman breathe in his storm cellar? Would the storm last long enough for the air to go bad? It would go bad fast, in an enclosed place on Mars. Bradman. What sort of monster would walk off and let another human being die? Without a glance backwards? Did the cold desert wear the humanity out of a man? How did a human being get like that? " 'You've got a smile like a concrete slab.' " Is that what you say to a person when you know you're about to leave them to die? Good health... well adjusted... she could see the printed words, red stereo words reaching out from the page. Unmarried women between... they came and went in her mind and there was a roar in her ears. The words were gone now. Only a redness that came and went. No. Alackness. Annie snatched the exhausted oxygen mask off her face and gulped a pallid, sandy breath of air. It wouldn't do. She took the sock off her eyes and bound it around her nose and mouth. It would filter some of the sand out. She opened her eyes briefly and closed them. The grit stayed in. She didn't dare open them again. But the storm looked weaker. Or was it her imagination? She groped for the zipper. Foul air would kill her quicker than sand. She couldn't find it. Hell with the zipper! She pulled her litde mending kit out of her pocket and slashed the bag with the scissors. The storm sounded louder now, with the bag gone. The sand blew under her eyelids. Ripped her face. Tore a burning circle around each ankle. Annie put her face in her hands, breathing through her nose and the sock. She held herself stiffly. She didn't want to cough. The whole world was a blind, gritty pain. There was no end to think of. Only pain. A grayness. A blackness. Finally, a voice. Bradman. "You ruined my shrub. Did you have to slash the bag, too?" Annie opened her eyes. They felt red and ruined. They were watering so much her cheeks were wet. She could hardly see. She was having a coughing fit. She dragged herself upright. All she could see was sand. The plastic bubble had blown off the girders and if the furnishings and her suitcase were there, her eyes were still too dim to see them. "Do you know what that shrub's worth on Mars?" Annie found the yam had fallen out of one ear and she pulled it out of the other. "Do you know what that bag's worth?" Gall ran in her veins. She spat it out of her mouth. She backed up to the steel beam and braced her feet against it, light in the Martian gravity. "I told them not to send a woman out here." She pushed off and sank her fist into his teeth. He went down. She was too light. But he was too light, too. It evened out. She turned his face and held it in the sand. Her strength was insane. "Do you know what a human life is worth?" she screamed. He struggled, but she fought his bucking body, kept his face buried in the sand until he was dead and a long time after. An age passed. Annie was frozen in a world rimed over with white starlight, sequinned with frost. Thetre crosseyed moons came up. She found an edge of the plastic bubble, rumpled and limp and half buried in the sand. She pushed off the heaviest hills of sand with her hands and pulled it out. She climbed up the anchored girders with it, and then slept the rest of the night in her own home. The next day she dug out her household supplies from the sand. The day after she cleared the sand from the lichens on her farm. On the fourth day she called a few neighbors in and late in the evening she buried Bradman. No one questioned her. It had been, after all, self-defense. She kept the farm as well as any man. Better. She worked. How she worked ! She kept herself numb with labor, her mind drunk with the liquors of fatigue. After five years, he came. He just appeared inside the door flap, looking a little nervous but grinning. "Tm Jack Hamstrong," he said, his voice full and wholesome, like Iowa corn. "I -- you weren't at the spaceport so I figured, what the heck. I just walked." "This is my farm," Annie said. "My hands are on every inch of it." Hamstrong's ruddy face turned in on itself a little. "I know. I know the story. I didn't come to take anything away. I came to -- good Lord, didn't you know you'd be sent a husband?" Annie's eyes went queer, like a cat's. "A husband?" If they'd told her, she hadn't heard. "Go away," she said. She looked around at her farm, the fruits of her travail -- alone. The virgin birth. "No," he said firmly. "It's yours and mine. Legally. I'm not a mean man, Annie. You'll find me patient. But stubborn. I can wait." Annie sighed. Or was it a shudder? She looked up again at the puckering edges of the evening sky. She put down the knife she had been peeling a giant lichen with. She wiped her hands on her apron and lifted the door flap. "All right, then," she said. "Wait." "For what?" "The sandstorm," she said. And she got into the storm cellar and pulled down the weighty lid, JlJ said deferentially, "but isn't the gender of 'shar-su feminine?" "No," Walsh replied brusquely. He turned away, to end the discussion, but Denton had already got A Lexicon of the Bi-Yan Language from its place on the cabin shelf, and was ruffling its pages. 'Shen -- sheg -- shar -- " he read. "Here it is. 'Shar-su. Adverbial noun of two terminations. Feminine. Warningly, in a warning manner. (To take) warning.' Yes... it does seem to be feminine." Walsh felt his face growing hot. How could he have forgotten that the damned word was feminine now, in the revised Gerson-McMahon grammar? In his student days there hadn't been any gender at alHrrBi-Yan, or Te-Hok as they called it then. It seemed to him that things had been going to pot ever since that upstart, Gerson, had put over his revised system of pronouncing Bi-Yan, ten years ago. It meant that older scholars had practically had to learn the language all over again. It was most unfair. Suppose there had been a few inconsistencies in the old phonetic system? Nobody could ever know how the Bi-Yan themselves had pronounced their language, and so what was the point of calling them Bi-Yan instead of Te-Hok? Or saying shar-su instead of mosh-ta? He must have muttered the old word under his breath, because Denton said in that irritating way of his, "I beg your pardon, sir?" "Nothing. Never mind. Well, you've proved your point. But don't you think we ought to be getting back to the dig? It isn't wise to let robot shovels work too long unattended, you know. I imagine you'll agree with me about that, at any rate." There was an instant's silence. Denton too had turned red. He Stood holding the lexicon between his hands, his head lowered Then he followed the older man through the airlock into the ship's changing room. Their suits were hanging under sterilamps. Walsh climbed into his gear stiffly; his arthritic knee was bothering him again. Denton was ready before he was, and stood waiting while Walsh opened the outer lock. Walsh jumped to the ground. If he didn't hurry, Denton would try to help him. Why had the Foundation saddled him with a "traineeNo one had labored harder in alien archaeology than Walsh, He was not going to let them destroy his life's work now. assistant," anyhow? Did they think he was too old to excavate a BiYan shrine without a younger man to help him? Hell, he was only sixty-four. An archaeologist wasn't old until he was eighty. Or did the Foundation think that he, the dean of Bi-Yan archaeologists, the top authority in the field, needed a younger brain to check up on his work? The way to the dig was over rough ground. Like all the Proxima planets except one, Marianna had a thin, cold atmosphere, unbreathable by human standards, but the surface was covered with primitive algae, lichens, molds and a few mosses. The puzzle was why the Bi-Yan had erected most of their tomb-shrines on these inhospitable planets, and almost none on the mother world. That was one of the questions he was attempting to answer in the book he had in progress -- The Bi-Yan Tomb-Shrine: An Archaeological Estimate. Absorbed in these thoughts, Walsh stumbled over a loose stone. He would have taken a sharp fall if Denton hadn't caught him by the elbow and steadied him. ' Thanks," Walsh said harshly, and jerked away. They reached the dig in silence. The robot shovels were working away carefully at the excavation of the back wall of the shrine, the only part yet unexcavated. The shovels stopped evei# six inches for an automatic camera to take pictures of the sides of the trench. It probably wasn't necessary to have so many pictures. It was a simple site. On the other hand, it was the best-preserved Bi-Yan tomb-shrinc that anybody had ever found. All the others had been in various stages of wreckage. This one was almost miraculously perfect. Except for an enormous gaping hole in the left wall, caused by a meteor impact cons ago, it was almost as it had come from the hands of its builders. Lovely... Walsh's illtemper was leaving him. It was impossible to feel anger while looking at the shrine. Denton was as affected as he. "Beautiful," Walsh heard him say softly. "Millennia have gone by. And yet it's like the first days of spring." There were things to be said for Denton after all. "Let's go inside," Walsh said. The plan of the shrine was like that of all the other Bi-Yan tombshrines. A smallish oval building, perfectly proportioned, with a deeply recessed door. Inside, in the shrine proper, were the double storerooms, one on either side of the door, where the offerings to nourish the dead were kept. And then the inner shrine, with the checkered twenty-foot ellipse on the floor that marked the "holy of holies," and the statues of the dead whom the tomb -- actually a cenotaph -- was designed to commemorate. "Stay clear of the ellipse," Walsh cautioned automatically as they stepped into the inner shrine. Denton grinned. "Still think there's a density field generator under it, sir?" he asked. "Yes. That, or something very similar." Walsh raised an arm to indicate the calligraphic inscriptions that ran around the interior wall of the cella. "The warnings about touching the 'holy of holies' are certainly explicit. The curse... Sooner or later we'll tiy some experiments to find out just what is under the floor." "Ye-es," Denton replied. "There's no doubt there's something under there. Fragments of machinery have been found under the ellipses in other digs. But -- " He began to walk up and down restlessly, between Walsh and the ellipse. "But!" Walsh said, trying to laugh. He didn't like the way Denton kept arguing with him. "Do you think it was merely a coincidence that the dirt in the cella had stayed completely clear of the elliptical area? You remember, Denton -- the cella was half full of dirt. It had been-dtifting in through the hole in the wall for centuries. It was packed up to the ceiling in spots. But there wasn't a grain of dust on the ellipsoid." "Oh, I remember," Denton said, laughing. "I'll never forget those two weeks with hand tools. But -- " "But what?" Walsh said with a touch of irritability. "Well, sir -- " He hesitated. "Sir, what was the holy of holies or." "For?" Walsh repeated rather blankly. "Yes, sir. What did they use it for?" "It was the center of the shrine, the focal point. If they 'used' it for anything -- if there's actually a density field generator under it -- I think it was to immolate victims." "To immolate victims?" Denton repeated. "Animal victims, in honor of the dead man whose cenotaph the tomb was." "In honor of the dead man," Denton repeated in an unsatisfied voice. He began to walk up and down even more rapidly. A bruptly he stopped in front .of Walsh. "Look here, sir," he said, "have you considered -- " "Considered what?" "Considered -- " Denton paused to swallow -- "considered, sir, that this may not be a shrine?" "May not be a shrine!" Walsh felt a touch of pure amazement. His eyebrows went up. He began to laugh. "Oh, my dear boy!" Denton flung out one hand in an impatient gesture. "Please, sir! What I mean is, why does everyone take for granted that the Bi-Yan constructions on the outer planets are shrines?" After a moment, Walsh decided to treat the absurd question as if it were serious. "For a number of reasons," he replied. "The tomb 'curse' -- you can read it on the walls here yourself -- that is one of them. Then, there is the offering of food to the dead, and the holy of holies in the center. And, finally, the very existence of the shrines, so beautifully wrought, so filled with art treasures. There is nothing other than shrines that they could be." "Isn't there?" Denton asked keenly. "Isn't any other explanation possible?" His voice had taken on that needling edge that Walsh so disliked. He felt himself growing angry, and it exasperated him. "No," he answered. "No, it isn't." He turned away. "But, sii--" "I don't want to discuss it further. You're not here to argue with me, Denton, but to be trained in archaeology." Denton stepped in front of him, between Walsh and the elliptical area. "Don't be such a fool," he said in a low, choked voice... Sorry. I -- lrry. You get under my skin. But if you'd only listen -- " "You couldn't tell me anything," said Walsh, losing control of himself. "You're a young ass who brays instead of thinking. Keep your hee-haws to yourself." His hands had clenched. "You old fool!" Denton cried wildly. "It's not a shrine, it's a ma -- He was not allowed to finish the sentence. At the repetition of the unbearable word "fool," Walsh, blind with fury, struck out. It was an old man's blow, weak and badly aimed. But Denton involuntarily stepped backward to avoid it. He stepped across the dark-checkered rim, fairly into the elliptical area. His mouth came open. Walsh heard him give a faint cry. His body grew diaphanous. In less than two seconds after he had taken the backward step, he was gone. He had disappeared. Gone... Walsh looked around dazedly. It had happened so quickly that he couldn't take it in. One moment there had been the argument, and his sudden anger. The next, Denton had been gone. Walsh felt an irrational impulse to go about the shrine looking for him. What had happened? Walsh had always felt the "holy of holies" was dangerous, but now that its potency had been actually shown, 'alsh was stunned. The density field generator must still have been active, after all these ages; poor Denton had been immolated in much the same way the old Bi-Yan priests' sacrificial victims had been. An engineer could examine the generator later and find out how it worked. Walsh wouldn't poke about with it -- he didn't want to share Denton's fate. Had it been his fault? He gave a deep sigh. No, he didn't think so. True, he had struck the blow that had driven Denton into the danger area. But on the other hand, he had warned him against the spot again and again, and Denton hadn't listened. There was a certain poetic justice -- Walsh managed a shaky laugh -- in Denton's having fallen victim to the very "curse" whose existence he had denied, Walsh felt an overpowering fatigue. He hadn't liked Denton. Indeed, he had hated him. But it had been dreadful to see the young man disappear like that. Walsh wanted to go back to the ship and rest -- and, now that there was no longer a need to keep up appearances, there was no reason why he shouldn't. He would feel better after a rest. He went outside the shrine, still haunted by the illogical feeling that Denton must be hiding in it. He shut down the robot shovels. He switched off the lights. He'd come back later... What was it Denton had been trying to say when he disappeared? "This isn't a shrine, it's a ma -- " A what? What would the word have been if Denton had lived to finish it? Walsh didn't even have an idea what the first syllable would have been. Man? Mar? Mat? Matter... well, it probably didnt matter. Denton was gone. cabin, switched on the phosphors, and lay down in his bunk. After he'd rested, he'd get himself something to eat. And, before he went to bed, he'd tape an account of Denton's mishap for the ship's log. 'Desperately tired as he was, he couldn't lax. He kept shifting about on his mattress and sighing. No matter how he had felt about Denton, it had been appalling to see the younger man's body thin out and disappear. Denton -- What had Denton been trying to say? Walsh swung his feet around and sat up on the edge of his bunk. After a moment he rose and went over to Denton's bunk. He opened the foot-locker. Denton's diary was on top of the folded shirts and underwear, just where Walsh had often seen him put it. Walsh went back to his own bunk with it. He opened the book. He wouldn't go too far back in the entries -- say a week or ten days. Denton's writing was clear and easy to read. Almost at once Walsh found traces of what he was looking for. "More than ever I doubt the reality of the Bi-Yan 'curse,' " ran an entry dated a week ago. "The 'curse' inscribed on the cella of the shrine, about whose direfulness Walsh is so insistent, seems to me, properly read, much less of a curse than a caution. Or -- an idea I am just beginning to form -- a series of instructions. Instructions for what? I don't know. I can't but feel, though, that Walsh is basing his interpretation on a misconception. I don't suppose it will do much good to tackle him about this." Walsh raised his eyebrows. He gave a short laugh. But the curse had got Denton -- poor young fellow -- in the end. He read on. Two days on unimportant things. Then, "I cannot accept the reality of the 'neolithic psychology' Walsh talks so much about. No comparisons with the tombs and shrines of ancient Egypt will convince me. It is, to me, incredible that people as technically advanced as the Bi-Yan could believe that by putting food in the tomb-shrines of their dead they were providing for them in the afterworld. "Bi-Yan art is unsurpassed. We have a considerable body of evidence that their spaceflight had carried them to the ends of our galaxy. And these people thought they could feed their dead -- or, rather, the images of their dead ; no one has ever found any bodily remains in a Bi-Yan tomb-shrine -- with canned protein? Faugh! "Nor does Walsh's lugging in the 'transubstantiation' of the old Catholic mass-ritual make his idea about the Bi-Yan any the more convincing. Again, faugh!" Denton seemed, Walsh thought sourly, to have used most of the space in his diary in trying to refute whatever Wsh had told him. He went on with his reading. The day before yesterday's entry was only one line: "I have a hypothesis." And then the last entry of all, yesterday: "Yes, I have a hypothesis. And, unlike Huygens and his idea about the existence of the rings of Saturn, I am not going to encode it elaborately. "The Bi-Yan shrines are not shrines at all. They are relay stations in a space-spanning system. "Why hasn't anyone else suspected this? There are, I think, two reasons. One, the surpassing beauty of the Bi-Yan installations. And, two, the fact that no Bi-Yan 'shrine,' except the one Walsh and I are currently engaged in excavating, has ever been found reasonably intact. Meteor falls, mechanical failure in the course of ages, and wars have gutted them. Only in the present 'shrine' has the 'holy of holies,' which I suspect of being a matter-transmitter, survived."... which I suspect of being a matter-transmitter. Walsh's whole body was trembling. Oh, yes, Denton's idea -- damn him, damn him -- had a horrible cogency. The cans of food: not offerings, but provisions for travelers. The curses, not curses but warnings and instructions on how to handle awesome potencies. Yes, Denton was undoubtedly right. And Walsh's work -- his whole work, the work of his whole life -- had been wrong. He had built on sand. Everything he had written had been wrong. His new book, the book he had been preparing for thirty years to write, could ner be written. It would be nothing but lies. And he would be a laughing stock. The dean of Bi-Yan archaeologists. Talking about neolithic psychology as if he knew something. It had taken a smart young man to show liim up. Walsh had to bite his lips to keep from groaning. Archaeology had been the only thing he had ever had, the only thing he had ever cared for. And now it had been taken away from him, forever, ruined by a few pages in a diary. Pages written by a smart young man. No. No, It hadn't. No, it hadnH. Walsh didn't even hesitate. He didn't even give an order to his fingers. Of their own accord they reached for the diary and ripped the bad pages out. He drew a terrible, shuddering breath. On wobbling legs he walked over to the waste-reducer and threw the pages in. They flared up and were gone. It was going to be all right. He could forget all about the nonsense Denton had written. Now he could go ahead and write his own book. His wonderful, exhaustive, monumental book. For a moment Walsh covered his face with his hands. God, if only he hadn't been curious! Now, before he could think about his book, he'd have to fix things. He'd destroyed the diary, yes. But he hadn't put things back to where they'd been before. He'd have to do a lot of lying to accomplish that. He'd have to make up some plausible account of what had happened to Denton, something that didn't involve the material working of the Bi-Yan curse. And then he'd have to destroy the shrine. It was so beautiful! But as long as it was intact, it was a danger to him. The first engineer, if not the first archaeologist, to investigate it would surmise what the "holy of holies" was for. There must be a lot of machinery under the ellipsoid area where Denton had disappeared. Walsh would have to destroy it. There was some blasting powder among the ship's stores. Perhaps he could fake damage from a meteor fall. He was so tired. He'd try to concoct some reasonable-sounding story about Denton's disappearance, and get it into the log tonight. He didn't think he'd be able to sleep at all unless he got at least part of his difficulties settled. And tomorrow, when he was a little fresher, he'd try to destroy the telltale machinery. pened to Denton, reasonably? A young man, strong, impetuous... Oh, now he had it. Denton had contracted a general infection from one of the local fungi or bacteria -- it had been known to happen -- and in his delirium had wandered off into the wasteland while Walsh was asleep. Then... oh, yes. Then Walsh had gone after him in the ship's launch, and hadn't been able to find him. He simply hadn't been able to find him, that was all. It was such a simple story that Walsh was sure people would believe it. It wasn't complicated enough to sound like a lie... When he read it into the log, he'd put in some sad reflections about how Denton must even now be dying of asphyxiation. And that was probably the truth, Walsh thought. Wherever the matter-transmitter had sent Denton, even if there had been a still-functioning receptor at the other end, it wasn't Ukely he'd be able to get away from there. Assuming he'd survived the journey, Denton must even now be sitting on the bleak surface of some wretched planet, watching the gauge on his air tank slip around to zero, and wondering how much longer he could last. A wretched way to die. But at least this was something Walsh didn't have to blame himself for. He wasn't even morally responsible. He hadn't sent him there. He switched on the recorder. Better get his account of the matter down now, while it was still clear in his mind. Tomorrow he'd destroy the site. He switched the recorder off again. It wasn't so much that he minded telling lies about what had happened to Denton. And certainly no reasonable person could expect him to go after Denton, to risk his own life trying to save a man he hated. He could excuse himself these things. But he couldn't excuse himself if he destroyed the site. He had put Denton's diary in the waste-reducer ; that was disgraceful, but a personal matter. He was willing to connive at Denton's death; he wasn't under any obligation to try to save him. But he couldn't destroy an archaeological site. A science, in the old and honorable term, was a discipline, Walsh's head had gone up a little. He might be old, and a fool. He was a scientist. And he couldn't destroy an archaeological site. Once more he switched on the tape recorder. He gave a full and complete account of what had happened, including his destruction of the diary. He hesitated. Then he said, "I am going to try to rescue him. I do not think my chances are very good. Earth technology has not yet been able to build a mattertransmitter, and I have no idea what being 'transmitted' will be rescue him. End of entry." He opened the ship's belly, got out the launch, and climbed into the tiny cabin. On low manual power he worked the craft over the rough terrain, through the hole in the wall, and onto the rim of the elliptical "holy of holies". He made sure that the nose of the launch was centered on the same darkcheckered area that Denton had stepped over. If there was any control system built into the transmitter -- anything that determined where you landed -- that might be it. One more little push, and the craft would be over in the transmitting area. He paused. Did he still hate Denton? Yes, as much as ever. The smart young bastard. The smart right yonng son of a bitch. He was risking his life to save a man he still hated. He couldn't explain his action, even to himself. He grinned sourly. Still faintly grinning, he touched the manual control and gave the craft the last little example of space journalism and photography -- excitingly beyond anything of its kind you have ever seen! Read General Robert L. Scott's important article, A Call to Arms, follow the cameraman's reports on the Luna and Mars rockets, witness the human side of America's space ventures in The Men Behind the Missiles, and other unusual word and picture features in the current issue. Ask your news dealer -- #c a copy. an easier way. And I think, when we invade, I'll be proved right. But you know how things get started, and how powerful tradition can be and how old-line thinking can keep people, even a whole planet, in a rut. The big cargo saucers were getting bigger and bigger each year, what with the growing popularity of the jagwhiff places, and the jagwhiff places themselves were growing in number with more and more people going "on the jag" because -- well, partly because -- of troubles in the sky, like strange balls whirling around and unexplainable objects going beep and wuff and wuff wuff. We of the saucers had slipped past these first baby objects O.K. and knew they were just little old harmless ping-pongs that chattered a little now and then like a greeting going past. But tell the people that! They'd throw a big glass on one of the whirlers and see spikes sticking out and maybe a big pair of eyes inside and a nose and a long red tongue hanging down. "The Earthits!" they'd scream like they'd just fallen into one of the hot canals, and they'd race oflF to a jagwhiff jag like Judgment-Day-ofSins itself was after them. And the funny part of it is, I guess the people were right being scared like that, the way things turned out. But is it any wonder we were having to increase the size of the saucers to space-haul all that jagwhiff up through the rattleballs? And a big reason makes me think it could have been done more efficiently, we were having to take so much junk stuff, extra accessories The jag-stuff in those black rings was wonderful, but why did they have to package it with so many extra accessories? I guess you'd call it, to get the jagwhiff. Our Earthit contacts were always giving us the old breeze about cost of labor, cost of materials, improvement in design and next year's inventories. Apparently the dealers didn't understand at all what the play was with us because they'd give us so much blab-blab that didn't apply, all about futuristic design and about how one jagwhiffer machine had it all over another jagwhiff er machine, which to us didn't mean a thing. And we didn't talk, because we'd heard already how some Earthits feared the saucers, and how some Earthits said they didn't exist at all, and how some other Earthits were on the fence, saying maybe they did maybe they didn't so what? and how there was wide fear and great unrest among the Earthits in general. And when it's like that, and you're a possible source of the wide fear and unrest, a whole planet full of peo:jle can easily decide they don't want any part of contributing to  our pleasure. And that's what the jagwhiff was to us actually, pleasure. Back home when our troubles had us down, or maybe we just felt like raising a little dust, we'd go to a jagwhiff place. We'd plunk down our pay-pictures, and the whifftender would wheel out one of those black rings, which they have to keep under special pressures in our climate. Then he'd screw on the tube with the face piece and we'd take our whiff and something out of the black ring -- just seemed like real thick chest filler to me -- would spread all through to the farthest reaches of our breath bags and go into our blood and suddenly all five of our eye sticks would start whirling and focusing and zeroing-in for dames and our arms and legs would start a kick and a slap dance, enough to shake the planet down. And when our face spines and head tubes would go into that special sharp buzz of contentment, we'd know we were on our jag, full and warm and happy with as much pleasure as any Martian is ever supposed to know. But we never revealed the play to our Earthit contacts, just slipped in at night in our noiseless saucers with all lights dimmed, cleared our cargo tubes of the tons of pay-picture we'd brought (green copy of the Earthits' currency) and took on as many of the gleaming jag-whiffer machines as our cargo tubes would hold. B ut it is ten years now since a jag-whiffer captain has steered his saucer through the whirling balls. It got so the satellites would drum on the saucer from a long way out. Deafening! Dreadful! We saw what was coming and we tried to beat it. We saucered around the clock for a while trying to stockpile enough jag-whiff to last us. But of course we couldn't. We are about out of it now, and our land is strewn with the glittery shells that were once attached to the black tubes of the jag-whiff. And it could all have been done so different. I'm sure it could. Tht stuff wasn't just in the tubes of the jag-whiffer machines down there, I'm convinced of that. That stuff may have been all around us down there. I believe it was. But our government would insist we get into these suits, about so far out, you see, about the time we'd start contacting the rattle balls. And they threatened us with removal of the contacts if we broke the rules about the suits. In addition to that, they said we'd die anyway. So you see how life can be -- grim and fuzzy and unsafe most of the time. And to make things even more uncertain, just because they couldn't duplicate the product we were hauling, our scientists got uppity and ignored the whole problem. Except to run off to the jagwhiff places of course to ease their frustrations, which they did plenty often when they thought they wouldn't be seen. But when we invade down through there, which we plan to do soon now, with our special equipment to catch and explode the whirlyballs, I think we're going to find out plenty. Among other things, I think we're going to find out that the stuff we cargoed up here at such great cost, that was so inefficiently packaged, is all around us down there. I think when we take over down there, with the right filtering equipment, jagwhiffing may become as common and economical as breathing. And another thing, I think we're going to find out we were taken for quite a ride by the Earthits with their silly way of packaging jagwhiff. Imagine having to buy all that chrome and steel, guaranteed to go over one hundred miles per hour, just to get four little black rings of whiff. And for all the Earthits talked about it, the rings with the white sidewalls didn't whiff one bit better than the (Continued from page #) a man in working clothes hits you with a lunch bucket. You let go of the woman and hit back at him. "Help! Help!" the woman is still yelping. "Call the cops -- a man's trying to rape a girl!" Someone hits you with an umbrella, and you know it's the same dear little old lady. A guy grabs you by the neck and tries to throw you to the ground but you kick him in the groin and trade punches with two otliers. Then they're all over you. The old lady trips you and you go down. She starts beating you with the umbrella as a man's foot smashes against your head. You see a woman's nylon-clad leg as she raises her spiked heel and brings it ripping down across your cheek. Other feet crash into you. "Let me help you," you're still yelling, but they keep on kicking. Some of the shoes have blood on them, you notice through the haze, but they still keep on kicking. Then it's getting dark and you lie there and think how Henny Penny -- or was it Chicken Little? -- must have felt. You want to tell someone about it but you don't. You just lie there and wait for the screaming sirens to come and take At ant a knew the red star was the home of his people after death...And for months now it had been growing brighter. OF E veryone should have known. They should have known as surely as though it were written in the curved palm of the wind. They should have known when they looked up at the empty sky; they should have known when they looked down at the hungry children. Yet somehow they did not know that their last migratory hunt was almost over. The straggling band had woven its slow trail among the mountains for forty days of vanishing hopes and shrinking stomachs. Ahead of the main party, the scouts had crawled until their knees and palms were raw; but still there was no track of game, and the only scent was that of the pungent air that rose from the ragged peaks of ice. At last they halted, only a few footsteps from The Cave of the Fallen Sun, the farthest western reach of their frozen domain. In the rear of the column the women threatened the children into silence and the scouts went first to the mouth of the cave to look for signs of an animal having entered. Presently the scouts stood up with their massive shoulders drooping, turned to the rest and made a hopeless gesture. Atanta, who stood alone and motionless between the scouts and the rest of his band, knew that all were waiting for him to use his magic to make a great leopard appear in the empty cave. "A very great leopard," he thought sarcastically. Enough to feed them all for a hundred days. A leopard so huge it would whine pitifully while they killed it. A leopard so gigantic that it would not leave its footprints in the snow. Indeed, Atanta was sure, the leopard his people wanted would be much too large to fit into the cave. Weil, perhaps there would be a bird. He held himself very tall and straight so that his dejection might not show to either his people or his gods. But after forty days of the trackless hunt, Atanta felt with certainty that the gods were deaf or dead... or at least very far away. The sun was hot and the gods were gone, and he would not keep his people waiting with false hopes. He closed his eyes and took up the crude bone cross that hung from his waist, and he cursed the gods with silent venom. And when his chastisement of the delinquent gods was done, he dropped the cross to dangle at his waist again. Two hunters moved stealthily forward, their spears disappearing before them into the cave. It was somehow pathetic, Atanta felt, the way they moved so courageously into the empty darkness. How many caves had there been, Atanta wondered, since they left the mouth of the river? Fully a dozen, always empty, except for the scattered bones of bears and men. Perhaps he should have kept his people at the river. No, he told himself. He had done the only thing he could do. The season had been bad and their meager catch of fish carefully stored. But the already heavy ice thickened with the approach of winter and made fishing almost impossible. When their supplies were almost gone, he had done as so many had done before him. He had led his people on the futile hunt, hoping for the miracle of a dozen sleeping bears or a great white leopard. Such miracles had happened in the past. Once he had gone with his father on such a winter hunt. But miracles without footprints were quite another matter. That was the way his people lived: just existing when the catch was good, starving when it was not. Presently the two hunters stepped out of the darkness with the blunt ends of their spears dragging behind them, and their countenances told the others that the cave was indeed empty. picked up their packs and slung them across their shoulders. The men mumbled inaudible words that turned into whisps of smoke in the icy air. At Atanta's signal, everyone entered the ice-floored cave, thankful at least to be out of the blinding brightness of the sun and snow, and into the soothing dark where they could rest. Atanta stood while his people stretched their furry bodies out over the frozen ground. He looked down at his woman who lay before him. watching him with her black eyes large and warm. It made his stomach clutch itself into an angry knot, to see her young face so drawn with exhaustion and hunger. There were lines in her face he had never seen Ubfore ; the fur of her head and body had lost its sheen and was now brittle and dry. She patted the ice and motioned him to lie down beside her; but he turned his eyes away from her, because he knew that he must tell the others before  he could rest. "Listen to me," he said, and his voice rang through the ice-sheeted cave. The tired eyes of the men and women opened and everyone sat up. How should he tell them? They were waiting now. Should he simply say it swiftly and have done with it? Tell them that they had followed an impotent god until now they were to die? Surely he should prepare them somehow. Prepare them for the importance of what he was to say. "Listen, for I tell you of the end of the empty caves." He stood silent for a moment watching hope filter into their faces, hope that made their dull eyes shine in the semi-darkness. "Do not let joy curl your lips until you have listened, for it would be a false joy." The lines of tiredness and worry returned to the faces about him. Atanta did not look down at his woman's face, for she knew him very well and she would know what he had to do. long ago, when the cave of man was filled with food as the night is filled with stars, and the caves and the men covered the five corners of the world. But these were not the caves that we know now. They were magic caves, and these were magic men. The men of that long-ago world created the very mountains into which they dug their caves. The mountains they created raised their peaks through the highest clouds, and every mountain held countless caves... caves stuffed with bear and fish and captive winter winds. These were magic times when every man was a priest. Every man could make fire blossom from nowhere and every man could fly through the air like a bird. "All this was long ago when the world was young, and the world was hot, and our people could live in the heat. But Nuomo the God of Night became jealous of these magic men, for he had seen them fly into the night itself in search of the stars. And so Nuomo wrapped his black wings around the world and shook it for ten tens of days. The world cracked and burst with flame that sprouted up into the darkened sky. The people ran in terror and their mountain-caves were sucked down into the earth or burned into ash by the flame. At the end of the ten tens of days, Nuomo thought that all were dead and so he rolled a sheet of ice across the earth to cool it. "Only one man was able to escape the wrath of that ancient god. He was an old man with only little magic and he felt liimself on the edge of death. He took from his body a rib which he fashioned into a son. But he made the son in such a way that he could live upon the ice itself, as we do now. "The son knew that the old man was about to die, and so he said: 'Father, use your magic to make a woman to keep me from being lonely.' " 'Woman!' the old man cried. 'I should think you would want me to teach you the use of magic.' " 'Yes, father,' the son answ'eicd, 'if you can.' " 'No,' the old man told him. 'I am so near to death there is no time. A woman will have to do.' "And so the old man drew from his chest another rib which he fashioned into a woman. This being done, he turned to his son and said : 'My son, the time has come for me to die. Do not mourn for me, for when each evening comes you will sec my home -- the red star which travels quickly in the night. For many ten tens of years, I have been preparing it to become a suitable place to be born again. When your time comes, you too will be welcome there.' "Thus saying, the old man placed his hands upon the shoulders of his son. Then he wrapped his cloak about him and rose up into the heavens to the star of rebirth. "Only when the old man had gone to the star of rebirth, did the son turn to his woman. Only then did he see that she had not been made in his image, for she was hairless and delicate and not made to live upon the ice. She was a Hotland woman. But the son, whose name was Dectar, took his woman whose name was Sontia, shielded her from the icy winds and comforted her as best he could. Some of their children had hair and loved the cold ; some were weak and hairless and did not. In those days the hunting was good and the strong sheltered the weak, fed them, carried them on the long hunts. But Sontia was a jealous woman. Jealous of her strong husband and their offspring of his kind. She prayed to Ram, God of the Sun, and begged him to melt the ice. And so the ice began to melt, leaving the Hotlands a paradise for weak selfish creatures. Sontia deserted Dectar, taking with her those of their children who were hairless and weak like herself. "When the ice began to melt, we sons of Dectar were forced to hunt farther northward year by year. The game became not so plentiful as it had been. Our people learned to fish and hunt as we do now -- to fish in the summer, to hunt when the ice becomes thick. "But the jealous sons of Sontia who swarm in the Hotlands were not content to see us perish year by year. Even to this day, if we should wander down to the edge of their domain to beg for a few scraps of food, they would answer our plea with death. And even in death they would allow us no dignity, but would strip us of our liides and wear them in mockery. "I tell you of this now, because when a man comes on a long hunt which ends in an empty cave, it is well to remember and be proud of the successful hunts of other years." Atanta took the white bone cross carefully from about his waist. "It was I who first saw this god go across the sky." He held up the cross for all to see. "it went slowly like a bird from horizon to horizon and I knew that it was not a bird for it did not flap its wings, but kept them still and outstretched. I believed it to be the god who would fill our hunting trails with game, but now I know that this god is impotent. At worst it is a foolish god. lying somewhere on the white floating ice of heaven, wallowing in idleness while my people starve." He dropped the cross to the smooth ice floor, knelt and smashed the cross into pieces with one swift blow of his hammerstone. When he looked up the people were silent and unmoving. Perhaps he had been a fool. Perhaps he had told them nothing they didn't know. Perhaps they had already given up and knew that they would die here in the cave and that he could produce no magic to help them. "Will you take another god?" one of the scouts asked. "I see no other god to take." "Then do you think we can be delivered without a god?" Wasn't it evident? Surely they must know. Should he tell them there was no deliverance, with or without a god? "I don't know," he lied. "I don't know." Ark's woman drew a strip of leather from the mouth of a sleeping child and put it in her own mouth. "Then you'll have to deliver us yourself," she said and lay down to go to sleep. A sudden rage burned in Atanta's brain. The muscles in his square jaw trembled as he glared at the sprawling furry figures, who would lie there and die while they waited like children for him to provide for the future. Abruptly he turned and left the cave, and walked out under the yellow sun that made the ice-covered mountains shimmer. He felt that he must get away from them. He did not want to die with fools. T he sun blazed hot upon the hair of liis head and back as he traveled rapidly downward and away from his people in the cave. He traveled too quickly to think of anything else but where his next footstep should be, and within an hour he was at the edge of a great ice field that stretched itself out before him like the footprint of a giant. There could be no more swift traveling now. Cautiously, he started out over the empty plain, prodding the ice before him with his spear. It was not that they were children. He knew that he had been wrong to judge them so. There was nothing they could do. They had walked their lives away on the long hunt that ended now without a sign or scent of prey. And he, Atanta, had led them. They were strong and loyal people, too, for if he ordered them up and back along the trail that they had come, each man would go without a word and hope that there was some magic Atanta had yet to use. But the animals were gone and the gods were gone, and there was but one thing left. He would go down below this range where the Hotlanders were known to be. Probably he would simply die in the sun. If not, the Hotlanders would kill him on the spot, as they were usually so quick to do. The Hotlanders had good magic. Not as good as his ancestors', Atanta was sure. But still, they could kill a man from a great distance, simply by pointing a magic charm and making a certain noise. Perhaps the Hotlanders wouldn't see him and perhaps he would not die in the sun. Perhaps he would find some game by the edge of the Hotlands. Perhaps... The sun had tucked itself behind a white western peak when Atanta at last came to the end of the ice field. Tired now, he crouched for a moment like a bird with his bottom sitting squarely upon his heels. Presently his tiredness became true 'exhaustion, so he dug himself a little space in a shadowed snow bank and then covered himself with a mound of snow. While Atanta slept, a great lost bird came on the last feeble rays of light, flapping its black wings because there was no wind to glide upon and there was no footing but the frozen ground. When above Atanta, the bird caught a slight scent in the air, held its wings stiff and tilted itself to glide in slow cir,cles that became smaller and smaller and ever lower until at last the bird's tired feet sank deep into the snow beside the mound where Atanta lay. The bird folded its wings about itself and pecked at the mound, its beak digging cautious holes in the snow. Atanta stirred slightly at this intrusion, and the bird drew its beak away and flapped its wings against the windless air and flew away. When Atanta woke, the night wind had curled itself with a scream about the mountains and brought with it a fresh snow. He dug himself from his bed and smiled with his eyes closed at the night that sent the wind and snow to caress his hair. When he opened his eyes, his face was tilted upward to the sky, and he smiled at the lonely stars. The moon was full and heavy tonight, and it hung low in the western sky. Atanta wished his woman could be here beside him, nestling close to him in the soft show, her delicate hands caressing the hair on his cheek. He thought of her hands rubbed raw from the straps of the heavy pack. Perhaps it was better that he had left without saying goodbye. He felt rested enough to go on, and was about to hoist himself to his feet when the red star caught his attention. For months now it had been growing brighter with every night that passed, as if heralding some important event. This was the red star of rebirth, and he wished he could believe that he and his people would someday go to live there; but he no longer believed in anything. It was then that Atanta saw the god. It was a great and fearful god that turned the black night yellow and screamed louder than the wind. In an instant it fell out of the sky; then the yellow light was gone and the voice of the god was gone, and the dark night returned and the voice of the wind returned. Atanta fell to his knees and his trembling hand etched out the sign of the cross in the snow. Surely this must be a sign. The god had eome out of the sky and fallen in the path before him -- forbidding him to go into the lowlands. He knew he must pray and ask forgiveness but for many moments he was too frightened to pray, and when the fear subsided, he was too proud. Why should he pray to a god who would let his people starve? He raised his eyes, and saw the very head of the god peering up above the next rise. He stood up with a semblance of dignity on his unsteady legs. When the god did not move from behind the rise for many minutes, Atanta's courage overbalanced his fear and he kicked the snow with his foot and obliterated the sign of the cross. He waited for the god to strike him dead, but nothing happened. The head of the god was motionless. Atanta set out with cautious steps. Presently he hid behind a little ice dune where he could see the god in its awesome entirety. Now he was close enough to hurl his spear at it if thegod suddenly struck in anger; and he gripped the spear in readiness. Suddenly he was filled with a new awe, for he realized that this was not the god of the cross! There were no stiff wings at its side. It was like a huge shining spear with its dull end stuck in the snow and its point stretcliing up to the sky. But how could this be a god? Perhaps he should not yet pray. Time had shown there were many false gods. Presently a black mouth appeared magically in the side of the great still thing. The mouth sucked in the icy air for a moment and then extended a long jagged tongue down to the fresh snow. Atanta saw something move in the blackness of the gaping mouth and then a figure stepped out onto the tongue and looked about at the falling snow and the white jagged mountains in the darkness. It was the figure of a man. At least it was in a man's shape, but it did not look like a man of the mountains nor did it look like the man-creatures of the Hotlands. It walked slowly and laboriously down the tongue, and it seemed to be made of the same shiny stuff as the tongue and the flying wingless god itself. For a moment, Atanta wondered which was the god. The great huge thing with the mouth and the tongue, or the man-thing? The stranger stepped off the tongue into the snow where he knelt and scooped up the snow in his arms, tossed it into the wind which hurled it to the ground again. Then he stood and clutched his head. For a moment Atanta thought he had taken his own head off, but then he could tell that he had taken a covering off his head which he tossed into the snow. Then it seemed that the man had been entirely covered, like the men of the Hotlands who wore furs. Presently the man had taken off all his covering, and stretched his furry arms up to feel the sweetness of the wind. Atanta leaped up, shouting his surprise. For tliis was a true man. For a moment the man was startled and then his face filled with joy. Showing his empty palms, he began to walk slowly toward Atanta. Atanta moved to meet him, the dark fur of his shoulders glistening in the moonlight. He spoke, but the man did not understand. Then he pointed up to the sky, then to the man, and tilted his head questioningly. The man smiled and nodded his head. He pointed to the sky, but not straight up. He pointed to a spot low in the west. He pointed to the star of rebirth. While Atanta watched in unbelieving awe, the man touched his own chest, then stooped to lay his palms on the snow at his feet. Tlien he pointed once more to the red star and made a rapid upward gesture. Then he laid his closed hands beside his head and pretended to be asleep. His fingers opened and closed, again and again. "Many sleeps," said Atanta, understanding. "Tens of ten sleeps." Smiling, the man straightened and made a rapid downward gesture, ending with his palms again on the snow. Then he stepped forward, placing one hand on his chest, the other on Atanta's. The two furry men stood as tall and straight as their dignity could make them, and their faces were bright with joy. Then Atanta took the hammerstone out of the binding about liis waist, and tossed it into the snow. The man nodded. Stepping back, he lifted his hand in an arc across the sky, and offered Atanta the Human history is in essence a history of ideas. -- H. G. Wells NO, NO, "Ve may even spy into the brain of the chief rascal himself... Wouldn't it be wonderful if our machine could stun him and leave him addled at his desk?" That golden shape on the golden struction, mankind had leaped steps shook and fluttered like a bird among the stars, gone mad -- like a bird imbued with Out of the shock of meeting inan intellect and a soul, and, neverhuman art, of confronting nontheless, driven mad by ecstasies and human dances, mankind had made terrors beyond human understanda superb esthetic effort and had mg. A thousand worlds watched. leaped upon the stage of all the Had the ancient calendar conworlds, tinned, this would have been A. D. The golden steps reeled. Some #. After defeat, after disapeyes that watched had retinas. Some pointment, after ruin and reconhad crystalline cones. Yet all eyes were fixed upon the golden shape which interpreted "The Glory and Affirmation of Man" in the InterWorld Dance Festival of what might have been A. D. #. Once again mankind was winning the contest. Music and dance were hypnotic beyond the limits of systems, compelling, shocking to human and inhuman eyes. The dance was a triumph of shock -- the shock of dynamic beauty. The golden shape on the golden steps executed shimmering intricacies of meaning. The body was gold and still human. The body was a woman, but more than a woman. On the golden steps, in the golden light, she trembled and fluttered like a bird gone mad. curity had been positively shocked when they found that a Nazi agent, more heroic than prudent, had almost reached N. Rogov. Rogov was worth more to the Soviet armed forces than any two air armies, more than three motorized divisions. His brain was a weapon, a weapon for the Soviet power. Since the brain was a weapon, Rogov was a prisoner. He didn't mind. Rogov was a pure Russian type, broad-faced, sandy-haired, blueeyed, with whimsy in his smile and amusement in the wrinkles at the tops of his cheeks. "Of course I'm a prisoner," Rogov used to say. "I am a prisoner of State service to the Soviet peoples. But the workers and peasants are good to me. I am an academician of the All Union Academy of Sciences, a major general in the Red Air Force, a professor in the University of Kharkov, a deputy works manager of the Red Flag Combat Aircraft Production Trust. From each of these I draw a salary." Sometimes he would narrow his eyes at his Russian scientific colleagues and ask them in dead earnest, "Would I serve capitalists?" The affrighted colleagues would try to stammer their way out of the embarrassment, protesting their common loyalty to Stalin or Beria, or Zhukov, or Molotov, or Bulganin, as the case may have been. Rogov would look very Russian: calm, mocking, amused. He would let them stammer. Then he'd laugh. Solemnity transformed into hilarity, he would explode into bubbling, effervescent, good-humored laughter: "Of course I could not seive the capitalists. My little Anastasia would not let me." The colleagues would smile uncomfortably and would wish that Rogov did not talk so wildly, or so comically, or so freely. Rogov was afraid of nothing. Most of his colleagues were afraid of each other, of the Soviet system, of the world, of life, and of death. Perhaps Rogov had once been ordinary and mortal like other people, and full of fears. But he had become the lover, the colleague, the husband of Anastasia Fyodorovna Cherpas. Comrade Cherpas had been his rival, his antagonist, his competitor, in the struggle for scientific eminence in the frontiers of Russian science. Russian science could never overtake the inhuman perfection of German method, tlie rigid intellectual and moral discipline of German teamwork, but the Russians could and did get ahead of the Germans by giving vent to their bold, fantastic imaginations. Rogov had pioneered the first rocket launchers of #. Gherpas had finished the job by making the best of the rockets radio-directed. Rogov in # had developed a whole new system of photo-mapping. Comrade Gherpas had applied it to color film. Rogov, sandyhaired, blue-eyed, and smiling, had recorded his criticisms of Comrade Cherpas' naivete and theoretical unsoundness at the top-secret meetings of Russian scientists during the black winter nights of #. Comrade Cherpas, her butter-yellow hair flowing down like living water to her shoulders, her unpainted face gleaming with fanaticism, intelligence, and dedication, would snarl her own defiance at him, deriding his Communist theory, pinching at his pride, hitting his hypotheses where they were weakest. By # a Rogov-Cherpas quarrel had become something worth traveling to see. In # they were married. Their courtship was secret, their wedding a surprise, their partnership a miracle in the upper ranks of Russian science. The emigre press had reported that the great scientist, Peter Kapitza, once remarked, "Rogov and Gherpas, there is a team. They're Communists, good Communists; but they're better than that! They're Russian, Russian enough to beat the world. Look at them. That's the future, our Russian future!" Perhaps the quotation was an exaggeration, but it did show the enormous respect in which both Rogov and Cherpas were held by their colleagues in Soviet science. Shortly after their marriage strange things happened to them. Rogov remained happy. Gherpas was radiant. Nevertheless, the two of them began to have haunted expressions, as though they had seen things which words could not express, as though they had stumbled upon secrets too important to be whispered even to the most secure agents of the Soviet State Police. In # Rogov had an interview with Stalin. As he left Stalin's office in the Kremlin, the great leader himself came to the door, his forehead wrinkled in thought, nodding, "Dfl, da, dar Even his own personal staff did not know why Stalin was saying "Yes, yes, yes," but they did see the orders that went forth marked Into the true and secret Soviet budget that year by the direct personal orders of a noncommittal Stalin, an item was added for "Project Telescope." Stalin tolerated no inquiry, brooked no comment. A village which had had a name became nameless. A forest which had been opened to the workers and peasants became military territory. Into the central post office in Kharkov there went a new box number for the village of Ya, Ch. Rogov and Cherpas, comrades and lovers, scientists both and Russians both, disappeared from the everyday lives of their colleagues. Their faces were no longer seen at scientific meetings. Only rarely did they emerge. On the few occasions they were seen. Usually going to and from Moscow at the time the All Union budget was made up each year, they seemed smiling and happy. But they did not make jokes. What the outside world did not know was that Stalin in giving them their own project, granting them a paradise restricted to themselves, had seen to it that a snake went with them in the paradise. The snake this time was not one, but two personalities -- Gausgofer and Gauck. The world went on. Everything went into the forgotten village of Ya. Gh. and nothing came out. It was rumored that Khrushchev himself visited Rogov and Cherpas. It was even whispered that Khrushchev said as he went to the Kharkov airport to fly back to Moscow, "It's tig # big, big. There'll be no cold war if they do it. There won't be any war of any kind. We'll finish capitalism before the capitalists can ever begin to fight. If they do it. If they do it." Khrushchev was reported to have shaken his head slowly in perplexity and to have said nothing more but to have put his initials on the unmodified budget of Project Telescope when a trusted messenger next brought him an envelope from Rogov. Anastasia Cherpas became a mother. Their first boy looked like the father. He was followed by a little girl. Then another little boy. The children didn't stop Cherpas' work. The family had a large dacha and trained nursemaids took over the household. Every night the four of them dined together. Rogov, Russian, humorous, courageous, amused. Cherpas, older, more mature, more beautiful than ever, but just as biting, just as cheerful, just as sharp as she had ever been. But then the other two, two who sat with them across the years of all their days, the two colleagues who had been visited upon them by the all-powerful word of Stalin himself. Gausgofer was a female: bloodless, narrow-faced, with a voice like a horse's whinny. She was a scientist and a police woman, and competent at both jobs. In # she had reported her own mother's whereabouts to the Bolshevik Terror Committee. In # she had commanded her father's execution. He was a Russian German of the old no Baltic nobility and he had tried to adjust his mind to the new system, but he had failed. In # she had let her lover trust her a little too much. He was a Rumanian Communist, very high in the Party, but he had a sneaking sympathy for Trotsky. When he whispered into her ear in the privacy of their bedroom, whispered with the tears pouring down his face, she had listened affectionately and quietly and had delivered his words to the police the next morning. With that she came to Stalin's attention. Stalin had been tough. He addressed her brutally, "Comrade, you have some brains. I can see you know what Communism is all about. You understand loyalty. You're going to get ahead and serve the Party and the working class, but is that all you want?" He had spat the question at her. She was so astonished that she gaped. The old man had changed his expression, favoring her with leering benevolence. He had put his forefinger on her chest, "Study science. Comrade. Study science. Communism plus science equals victory. You're too clever to stay in police work." Gausgofer fell in love with Rogov the moment she saw him. Gausgofer fell in hate -- and hate can be as spontaneous and miraculous as love -- with Cherpas the moment she saw her. But Stalin had guessed that too. With the bloodless, fanatic Gausgofer he had sent a man named B. Gauck. Gauck was solid, impassive, blank-faced. In body he was about the same height as Rogov. Where Rogov was muscular, Gauck was flabby. Where Rogov's skin was fair and shot through with the pink and health of exercise, Gauck's skin was like stale lard, greasy, graygreen, sickly even on the best of days. Gauck's eyes were black and small. His glance was as cold and sharp as death. Gauck had no friends, no enemies, no beliefs, no enthusiasms. Gauck never drank, never went out, never received mail, never sent mail, never spoke a spontaneous word. He was never rude, never kind, never friendly, never really withdrawn: He couldn't withdraw any more than the constant withdrawal of all his life. Rogov had turned to his wife in the secrecy of their bedroftm soon after Gausgofer and Gauck came and had said, "Anastasia, is that man sane?" Cherpas intertwined the fingers of her beautiful, expressive hands. She who had been the wit of a thousand scientific meetings was now at a loss for words. She looked up at her husband with a troubled expression. "I don't know, comrade... I just don't know." Rogov smiled his amused Slavic smile. "At the least then I don't think Gausgofer knows either." Cherpas snorted with laughter and picked up her hairbrush. "That she doesn't. She really doesn't know, does she? I'll wager she doesn't even know to whom he reports." Ill That conversation had reached into the past. Gauck, Gausgofer, bloodless eyes and the black eyes -- they remained. Every dinner the four sat down together. Every morning the four met in the laboratory. Rogov's great courage, high sanity, and keen humor kept the work going. Cherpas' flashing genius fueled him whenever the routine overloaded his magnificent intellect. Gausgofer spied and watched and smiled her bloodless smiles; sometimes, curiously enough, Gausgofer made genuinely constructive suggestions. She never understood the whole frame of reference of their work, but she knew enough of the mechanical and engineering details to be very useful on occasion. Gauck came in, sat down quietly, said nothing, did nothing. He did not even smoke. He never fidgeted. He never went to sleep. He just watched. The laboratory grew and with it there grew the immense configuration of the espionage machine. proposed and Cherpas seconded was imaginable. It consisted of an attempt to work out an integrated theory for all the electrical and radiadon phenomena accompanying consciousness, and to duplicate the electrical funcdons of mind without the use of animal material. The range of potential products was immense. The first product Stalin had asked for was a receiver, if possible, one capable of tuning in the thoughts of a human mind and of translating those thoughts either into a punch tape machine, an adapted German Hellschreiber machine, or phonetic speech. If the grids could be turned around, the brain-equivalent machine as a transmitter might be able to send out stunning forces which would paralyze or kill the process of thought. At its best, Rogov's machine was designed to confuse human thought over great distances, to select human targets to be confused, and to maintain an electronic jamming system which would jam straight into the human mind without the requirement of tubes or receivers. He had succeeded -- in part. He had given himself a violent headache in the first year of work. In the third year he had killed mice at a distance of ten kilometers. In the seventh year he had brought on mass hallucinations and a wave of suicides in a neighboring village. It was this which impressed Khrushchev. Rogov was now working on the receiver end. No one had ever explored the infinitely narrow, infinitely subtle bands of radiation which distinguished one human mind from another, but Rogov was trying, as it were, to tune in on minds far away. He had tried to develop a telepathic helmet of some kind, but it did not work. He had then turned away from the reception of pure thought to the reception of visual and auditory images. Where the nerve-ends reached the brain itself, he had managed over the years to distinguish whole packets of microphenomena, and on some of these he had managed to get a fix. With infinitely delicate tuning he had succeeded one day in picking up the eyesight of their second chauffeur, and had managed, thanks to a needle thrust in just below liis own riglit eyelid, to "see" through the other man's eyes as tlie other man, all unaware, washed their Zis limousine sikteen hundred meters away... Cherpas had surpassed his feat later that winter, and had managed to bring in an entire family having dinner over in a nearby city. She had invited B. Gauck to have a needle inserted into his cheekbone so that he could see with the eyes of an unsuspecting spied-on stranger. Gauck had refused any kind of needles, but Gausgofer had joined in the experiment and had expressed her satisfaction with the work. The espionage machine was beginning to take form. Two more steps remained. The first step consisted of tuning in on some remote target, such as the White House in Washington or the The second problem consisted of finding a method of jamming tho.se minds at a distance, stunning them so that the subject personnel fell into tears, confusion, or insanity. Rogov had tried, but he had never gotten more than thirty kilometers from the nameless village of Ya. Ch. One November there had been seventy cases of hysteria, most of them ending in suicide, down in the city of Kharkov several hundred kilometers away, but Rogov was not sure that his own machine was doing it. Comrade Gausgofer dared to stroke his sleeve. Her white lips smiled and her watery eyes grew liappy as she said in her high, cruel voice, "Tow can do it, comrade. You can do it." Cherpas looked on with contempt. Gauck said nothing. The female agent Gausgofer saw Cherpas' eyes upon her, and for a moment an arc of living hatred leaped between the two women. The three of them went back to work on the machine. Gauck sat on his stool and watched them. tratov died that the machinfe made a breakthrough. Eristratov died after the Soviet and People's democracies had tried to end the cold war with the Americans. It was May. Outside the laboratory the squirrels ran among the trees. The leftovers from the night's rain dripped on the ground and kept the earth moist. It was comfortable to leave a few windows open and to let the smell of the forest into the workshop. The smell of their oil-burning heaters, the stale smell of insulation, of ozone, and of the heated electronic gear was something with which all of them were much too familiar. Rogov had found that his eyesight was beginning to suffer because he had to get the receiver needle somewhere near his optic nerve in order to obtain visual impressions from the machine. After months of experimentation with both animal and human subjects he had decided to copy one of their last experiments, successfully performed on a prisoner boy fifteen years of age, by having the needle slipped directly through the skull, up and behind the eye. Rogov had disliked using prisoners, because Gauck, speaking on behalf of security, always insisted that a prisoner used in experiments be destroyed in not less than five days from the beginning of the experiment. Rogov had satisfied himself that the skull-and-needle technique was safe, but he was very tired of trying to get frightened, unscientific people to carry the load of intense, scientific attentiveness required by the machine. Somewhat ill-humored, he shouted at Gauck, "Have you ever known what this is all about? You've been here years. Do you know what we're trying to do? Don't you ever want to take part in the experiments yourself? Do you realize how many years of mathematics have gone into the making of these grids and the calculation of these wave patterns? Are you good for anything?" Gauck had said, tunelessly and without anger, "Comrade professor, I am obeying orders. You are obeying orders too. I've never impeded you." Rogov raved, "I know you never got in my way. We're all good servants of the Soviet State. It's not a question of loyalty. It's a question of enthusiasm. Don't you ever want to glimpse the science we're making? We are a hundred years or a thousand years ahead of the capitalist Americans. Doesn't that excite you? Aren't you a human being? Why don't you take part? How will you understand me when I explain it?" Gauck said nothing; he looked at Rogov with his beady eyes. His dirty-gray face did not change expression. Gherpas said, "Go ahead, Nikolai. The comrade can follow if he wants to." Gausgofer looked enviously at Gherpas. She seemed inclined to keep quiet, but then had to speak. She said, "Do go ahead, comrade professor." Said Rogov, 'Kharosho, I'll do what I can. The machine is now ready to receive minds over immense distances." He wrinkled his lip in amused scorn. "We may even spy into the brain of the chief rascal himself and find out what Eisenhower is planning to do today against the Soviet people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if our machine could stun him and leave him sitting addled at his desk?" Gauck commented, "Don't try it. Not without orders." Rogov ignored the interruption and went on. "First I receive. I don't know what I will get, who I will get, or where they will be. All I know is that this machine will reach out across all the minds of men and beasts now living and it will bring the eyes and ears of a single mind directly into mine. With the new needle going directly into the brain it will be possible for me to get a very sharp fixation of position. The trouble with that boy last week was that even though we knew he was seeing something outside this room, he appeared to be getting sounds in a foreign language and did not know enough English or German to realize where or what the machine had taken him to see." Gherpas laughed, "Fm not worried. I saw then it was safe. You go first, my husband. If our comrades don't mind -- ?" Gauck nodded. Gausgofer lifted her bony hand breathlessly to her skinny throat and said, "Of course. Comrade Rogov, of course. You did all the work. You must be the first." Rogov sat down. A white-smocked technician brought the machine over to him. It was mounted on three rubbertired wheels and it resembled the small X-ray units used by dentists. In place of the cone at the head of the X-ray machine there was a long, incredibly tough needle. It had been made for them by the best surgical steel craftsmen in Prague. Another technician came up with a shaving bowl, a brush, and a straight razor. Under the gaze of Gauck's deadly eyes he shaved an area of four square centimeters on the top of Rogov's liead. Cherpas herself then took over. She set her husband's head in the clamp and used a micrometer to get the skull-fittings so tight and so accurate that the neee would push through the dura mater at exactly the right point. All this work she did deftly with kind, very strong fingers. She was gentle, but she was firm. She was his wife, but she was also his fellow scientist and his colleague in the Soviet State. She stepped back and looked at her work. She gave him one of their own very special smiles, the secret gay smiles which they usually exchanged with each other only when they were alone. "You won't want to do this every day. We're going to have to find some way of getting into the brain without using this needle. But it won't hurt you." "Does it matter if it does hurt?" said Rogov. "This is the triumph of all our work. Bring it downf Cherpas, her eyes gleaming with attention, reached over and pulled down the handle which brought the tough needle to within a tenth of a Rogov spoke very carefully: "All I felt was a little sting. You can turn the power on now." Gausgofer could not contain herself. Timidly she addressed Cherpas, "May I turn on the power?" Cherpas nodded. Gauck watched. Rogov waited. Gausgofer pulled down the bayonet switch. The power went on. With an impatient twist of her hand, Anastasia Gherpas ordered the laboratory attendants to the other end of the room. Two or three of them had stopped working and were staring at Rogov, staring like dull sheep. They looked embarrassed and then they huddled in a white-smocked herd at the other end of the laboratory. The wet May wind blew in on all of them. The scent of forest and leaves was about them. The three watched Rogov. Rogov's complexion began to change. His face became flushed. His breathing was so loud and heavy they could hear it several meters away. Cherpas fell on her knees in front of him, eyebrows lifted in mute inquiry. Rogov did not dare nod, not with a needle in his brain. He spoke through flushed lips, spesiking thickly and heavily, "Do -- not -- stop -- now." Rogov himself did not know what was happening. He had thought he might see an American room, or a Russian room, or a tropical colony. He might see palm trees, or forests, or desks. He might see guns or buildings, washrooms or beds, hospitals, homes, churches. He might see with the eyes of a child, a woman, a man, a soldier, a philosopher, a slave, a worker, a savage, a religious, a Communist, a reactionary, a governor, a policeman. He might hear voices ; he might hear English, or French, or Russian, Swahili, Hindi, Malay, Chinese, Ukrainian, Armenian, Turkish, Greek. He did not know. None of tliese things had happened. It seemed to him that he had left the world, that he had left time. The hours and the centuries shrank up like the meters, and the machine, unchecked, reached out for the most powerful signal which any human mind had transmitted. Rogov did not know it, but the machine had conquered time. The machine had reached the dance, the human challenger and the dance festival of the year that might have been A.D. #. Before Rogov's eyes the golden shape and the golden steps shook and fluttered in a ritual a thousand times more compelling than hyjnotism. The rhythms meant nothing and everything to him. This was Russia, this was Communism. This was his life -- indeed it was his soul acted out before his very eyes. For a second, the last second of his ordinary life, he looked through flesh and blood eyes and saw the shabby woman whom he had once thought beautiful. He saw Anastasia Cherpas, and he did not care. His vision concentrated once again on the dancing image, this woman, those postures, that dance! Then the sound came in -- music that would have made a Tschaikovsky weep, orchestras which would have silenced Shostakovich or Khachaturian forever. The peoplewhowere-not-people between the stars had taught mankind many arts. Rogov's mind was the best of its time, but his time was far, far behind the time of the great dance. With that one vision Rogov went firmly and completely mad. He became blind to the sight of Cherpas, Gausgofer, and Gauck. He forgot the village of Ya. Ch. He forgot himself. He was like a fish, bred in stale fresh water, which is thrown for the first time into a living stream. He was like an insect emerging from the chrysalis. His twentieth-century mind could not hold the imagery and, the impact of the music and the dance. But the needle was there and the needle transmitted into his mind more than his mind could stand. The synapses of his brain flicked like switches. The future flooded into him. He fainted. Gherpas leaped forward and lifted the needle. Rogov fell out of the chair. tors. By nightfall they had Rogov resting comfortably and under heavy sedation. There were two doctors, both from the military headquarters. Gauck had obtained authorization for their services by a direct telephone call to Moscow. Both the doctors were annoyed. The senior one never stopped grumbling at Gherpas. "You should not have done it, Gomrade Gherpas. Gomrade Rogov ould not have done it either. You can't go around sticking things into brains. That's a medical problem. None of you people are doctors of medicine. It's all right for you to contrive devices with the prisoners, but you can't inflict things like this on Soviet scientific personnel. I'm going to get blamed because I can't bring Rogov back. You heard what he was saying. All he did was mutter, 'That golden shape on the golden steps, that music, that me is a true me, that golden shape, that golden shape, I want to be with that golden shape,' and rubbish like that. Maybe you've ruined a first-class brain forever -- ' He stopped short as though he had said too much. After all, the problem was a security problem and apparently both Gauck and Gausgofer represented the security agencies. Gausgofer turned her watery eyes on the doctor and said in a low, even, unbelievably poisonous voice, "Gould she have done it, comrade doctor?" The doctor looked at Gherpas, answering Gausgofer, "How? You were there. I wasn't. How could she have done it? Why should she do it? You were there." Gherpas said nothing. Her lips were compressed tight with grirf. Her yellow hair gleamed, but her hair was all that remained, at that moment, of her beauty. She was frightened and she was getting ready to be sad. She had no time to hate foolish women or to worry about security; she was concerned with her colleague, her lover, her husband Rogov. There was nothing much for them to do except to wail. They went into a large room and waited. The servants had laid out immense dishes of cold sliced meat, pots of caviar, and an assortment of sliced breads, pure butter, genuine coffee, and liquors. None of them ate much. At #: # the sound of rotors beat against the house. The big helicoptor had arrived from Moscow. Higher authorities took over. The higher authority was a deputy minister, a man named V. Karper. Karper was accompanied by two or three uniformed colonels, by an engineer civilian, by a man from the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by two doctors. They dispensed with the courtesies. Karper merely said, "You are Gherpas. I have met you. You are Gausgofer. I have seen your reports. You are Gauck." The delegation went into Rogov's bedroom. Karper snapped, "Wake him." The military doctor who had given him sedatives said, "Comrade, you mustn't -- " Karper cut him off. "Shut up." He turned to his own physician, pointed at Rogov. "Wake him up." The doctor from Moscow talked briefly with the senior military doctor. He too began shaking his head. He gave Karper a disturbed look. Karper guessed what he might hear. He said, "Go ahead. I know there is some danger to the patient, but I've got to get back to Moscow with a report." The two doctors worked over Rogov. One of them gave Rogov an injection. Then all of them stood back from the bed. Rogov writhed in his bed. He squirmed. His eyes opened, but he did not see the people. With childishly clear and simple words Rogov began to talk, "... that golden shape, the golden stairs, the music, take me back to the music, I want to be with the music, I really am the music..." and so on in an endless monotone. Gherpas leaned over him so that her face was directly in his line of vision. "My darling! My darling, wake up. This is serious." It was evident to all of them that Rogov did not hear her. For the first time in many years Gauck took the initiative. He spoke directly to the man from Moscow. "Comrade, may I make a suggestion?" Karper looked at him. Gauck nodded at Gausgofer. "We were both sent here by orders of Comrade Stalin. She is senior. She bears the responsibility. All I do is double check." The deputy minister turned to Gausgofer. Gausgofer had been staring at Rogov on the bed; her blue, watery eyes were tearless and her face was drawn into an expression of extreme tension. Karper ignored that and said to her firmly; dearly, commandingly, "What do you recommend?" Gausgofer looked at him very directly and said in a measured voice, "I do not think that the case is one of brain damage. I believe that he has obtained a communication which he must share with another human being and that unless one of us follows him there may be no answer." Karper barked: "Very well. But what do we do?" "Let me follow -- into the machine." Anastasia Gherpas began to laugh slyly and frantically. She seized Karper's arm and pointed her finger at Gausgofer. Karper stared at her. Gherpas restrained her laughter and shouted at Karper, "The woman's mad. She has loved my husband for many years. She has hated my presence, and now she thinks that she can save him. She thinks that she can follow. She thinks that he wants to communicate with her. That's ridiculous. I will go myself!" Karper looked about. He selected two of his staff and stepped over into a corner of the room. They could hear him talking, but they could not distinguish the words. After a conference of six or seven minutes he returned. "You people have been making serious security charges against each other. I find that one of our finest weapons, the mind of Rogov, is damaged. Rogov's not just a man. He is a Soviet project." Scorn entered his voice. "I find that the senior security officer, a policewoman with a notable record, is charged by another Soviet scientist with a silly infatuation. I disregard such charges. The development of the Soviet State and the work of Soviet science cannot be impeded by personalities. Comrade Gausgofer will follow. I am acting tonight because my own staff physician says that Rogov may not live and it is very important for us to find out just what has happened to him and why." He turned his baleful gaze on Gherpas. "You will not protest, comrade. Your mind is the property of the Russian State. Your life and your education have been paid for by the workers. You cannot throw these things away because of personal sentiment. If there is anything to be found, Comrade Gausgofer will find it for both of us." The whole group of them went back into the laboratory. The frightened technicians were brought over from the barracks. The lights were turned on and the windows were closed. The May wind had become chilly. The needle was sterilized. The electronic grids were warmed up. Gausgofer's face was an impassive mask of triumph as she sat in the receiving chair. She smiled at Gauck as an attendant brought the soap and the razor to shave clean a patch on her scalp. Gauck did not smile back. His black eyes stared at her. He said nothing. He did nothing. He watched. Karper walked to and fro, glancing from time to time at the hasty but orderly preparation of the experiment. Anastasia Gherpas sat down at a laboratory table about five meters away from the group. She watched the back of Gausgofer's head as the needle was lowered. She buried her face in her hands. Some of the others thought they heard her weeping, but no one heeded Gherpas very much. They were too intent on watching Gausgofer. Gausgofer's face became red. Perspiration poured down the flabby cheeks. Her fingers tightened on the arm of her chair. Suddenly she shouted at them, "That golden shape on the golden steps' She leaped to her feet, dragging the apparatus with her. No one had expected this. The chair fell to the floor. The needle holder, lifted from the floor, swung its weight sidewise. The needle twisted like a scythe in Gausgofer's brain. The body of Gausgofer lay on the floor, surrounded by excited ofHcials. Karper was acute enough to look around at Gherpas. She stood up from the laboratory table and walked toward him. A thin line of blood flowed down from her cheekbone. Another line of blood dripped down from a position on her cheek, one and a half centimers forward of the opening of her left ear. With tremendous composure, her face as white as fresh snow, she smiled at him. 'T eavesdropp." Karper said, "What?" "I eavesdropped, eavesdropped," repeated Anastasia Gherpas. "I found out where my husband has gone. It is not somewhere in this world. It is something hypnotic beyond all the limitations of our science. We have made a great gun, but the gun has fired upon us before we could fire it. "Project Telescope is finished. You may try to get someone else to finish it, but you will not." Karper stared at her and then turned aside. Gauck stood in his way. "What do you want?" "To teU you," said Gauck very sofdy, "to tell you, comrade deputy minister, that Rogov is gone as she says he is gone, that she is finished if she says she is finished, that all this is true. I know." Karper glared at him. "How do you know?" Gauck remained utterly impassive. With superhuman assurance and calm he said to Karper, "Comrade, I do not dispute the matter. I know these people, though I do not know their science. Rogov is done for." At last Karper believed him. They all looked at Anastasia Gherpas, at her beautiful hair, her determined blue eyes, and the two thin lines of blood. Karper turned to her. "What do we do now?" For an answer she dropped to her knees and began sobbing, "No, no, not Rogov! No, no, not Rogov!" And that was all that they could get out of her. Gauck looked on. On the golden steps in the golden light, a golden shape danced a dream beyond the limits of all imagination, danced and drew the music to herself until a sigh of yearning, yearning which became a hope and a torment, went through the hearts of living things on a thousand worlds. Edges of the golden scene faded raggedly and unevenly into black. The gold dimmed down to a pale gold-silver sheen and then to silver, last of all to white. The dancer who had been golden was now a forlorn white-pink figure standing, quiet and fatigued, on the immense, white steps. The applause of a thousand worlds roared in upon her. She looked blindly at them. The dance had overwhelmed her, too. Their applause could mean nothing. The dance was an end in itself. She would have to live, somehow, (jreat fnn for puzzle lovers! 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Next (September) issue on sale June oOth Why would anyone want to kill a tender of mechanized vegetation -- with, of all things, a watch and a little red bird? T he furry little animal edged cautiously toward him, ready to scamper up a tree. But the kernel on the ground was tempting and the animal grabbed it and scurried back to safety. Richel Alsint sat motionless, enjoying himself greatly. Outside the park in every direction were many tiers of traffic. He was the only person in the park; it was silent there except for birds. One in particular he noticed, ail body, or entirely wing -- it was impossible to say vhich at this distance -- soared effortlessly overhead, a small bundle of bright blue feathers. The wings, if it had wings, didn't move at all ; the bird balanced with remarkable skill on air currents. Everything about it might be small, but the voice wasn't, and it made good use of every note. Alsint twisted his hand slowly toward the sack beside him. In that position the ship watch was visible. There was no need to look; it was connected to the propulsion processes of the ship and would signal long before he had to be back. Nevertheless he did glance at it. In sudden alarm, he jumped up, scattering the contents of the sack. The circle of animals fled into the underbrush and the birds stopped singing and flew away. He left everything on the bench. It was untidy, but his life would be more untidy if he missed the ship. He ran to the aircar parked in the clearing and fumbled at the door. The bright blue bird was changing to red, but he didn't notice that. He bounced the car straight up, sinking into the cushions with the acceleration. High above the regular levels of traffic, he located the spaceport in the distance and jammed the throttle forward. The ship was there, and as long as it was, he had a chance. Not much, though. The absence of activity on the ground indicated they were getting ready. H e dropped the aircar down as close as he could get and left it. There was no time to take the underground passage that came up somewhere near the ship. The guard at the surface gate stopped him. "You're too late," said the attendant. "I've got to get in!" Alsint said. The guard recognized the uniform, but, sitting in the heavily reinforced cubicle, made no move to press the button which would allow the gate to swing open. It was a high gate and there was no way to get over it. He grinned sourly. "Next time you'll pay attention to the signal." There were worse times and places to argue about it, but Alsint couldn't remember them. "There wasn't any signal," he said. He caught the cynical expression on the guard's face and extended his hand. "See for yourself." The watch was working, indicating time till takeoff, but the unmistakable glow and the irritating tingle, guaranteed to wake any man out of a sleep this side of the final one, were missing. The guard blinked. "Never heard of that ever happening," he said. "Tell you what -- I'll testify that it wasn't your fault. That'll clear you. You can get a job on the next ship and catch up with your own in a month at the most." It wasn't that easy, nor so simple. Alsint glanced frantically at the watch. Minutes left now, though he couldn't be sure. If the signal wasn't functioning, maybe the time was wrong too. "I'll never get on that one again," he said. "It's a tag ship." The guard scrutinized him more closely, differentiating his uniform from others similar to it. "In that case you'd better go to the traffic tower," he said reluctantly. "They'll stop it for you." They would, but he'd waste half an hour getting past the red tape at the entrance. TTiere were a number of reasons why he couldn't let the ship leave without him. "I know our crew," he said. "They'll be waiting for me. Let me try to get on." The guard shrugged. "It's your funeral." Slowly the gate swung open. Alsint dashed through. He had to hurry, but it wasn't as dangerous as the guard imagined. The watch had failed, but inside the ship was a panel which indicated the presence or absence of any crew member. That panel was near the pilot. He w'ouldn't take off without clearing it. Besides, there was standard takeoff procedure -- always someone at the visionport, watching for latecomers, of which there were usually a few. Alsint raised his head as he ran. He couldn't see anyone at the visionport. Breathing heavily, he brushed against the ship. Late, but not too late. He turned the corner at the vane. He didn't like what he saw. The ramp was up and the outer lock was closed. They were waiting for clearance from the spaceport. His composure slipped a little. If the clearance came within the next few minutes, he'd be dead. Not that the clearance would come. A ship just didn't lift off, leaving one of the crew behind -- or he hoped it didn't. He pounded on the lock and shouted, though it was useless. Inside, they couldn't hear him. The noise frightened a little red bird which had been hovering nearby. It flew around his head, squawking shrilly. A lsint scowled at it. it reminded him unpleasantly of the park. If he hadn't gone there, he'd be safe inside the ship. True, parks were rare, and people who went to them even more rare. After so many months in the ship, it had been a great temptation -- for him, not the others. No one else had been interested. Now he had to get in. A tremor ran through the hull and he realized how urgent it was. A little more of this and he would be caught under the rockets. The airlock was smooth, but he located the approximate latching point on the outside and stripped off the watch, holding it against the ship by the band. He tried to remember and thought' the face should be turned inward. He held it that way and hoped he was right. He closed his eyes and swung hard with his fist. His hand exploded with pain and he could feel the flash on his face. The energy, which was sufficient to drive the instrument for a thousand years, dissipated in much less than a second. An instant later the hand which held the strap reacted to the heat. lie dropped the useless watch and opened his eyes. He had figured it right and he was also lucky. The energy had turned inward, as he had hoped, otherwise he'd have no hand, and the latching mechanism had been destroyed. The resulting heat had buckled the plate outward. The hull was trembling with greater violence as the takeoff rockets warmed up. The airlock was still very hot. His fingers sizzled as he grasped the curled edge and pulled out. It moved a little. He shifted his hands for a better grip and heaved. It opened. He scrambled inside and shut it behind him, latching it with the emergency device. Close, but it didn't matter as long as he'd made it. The ship began to rise and the acceleration forced him to kneel in the passageway between the outer and inner lock. He kept thinking of the little red bird he'd seen outside. Burned, no doubt, as he would have been. Finally the rockets stopped and the heaviness disappeared. They were out of the atmosphere and hence the ship had shifted to interstellar drive. The heat from the rockets began to abate. He was grateful for that. He got to his feet and staggered to the inner lock and leaned against it. That didn't open, either. He shouted. It might take time, but eventually someone would come close enough to hear him. There was air in the passageway and he knew he could survive. It had been too hot; now it was getting cold. He shivered and shook his head in bewilderment. None of this was the way it ought to be. It had never been difficult to get on the ship. If he didn't know better, he'd say -- But this was not the time to say that. He didn't hear the footsteps on the other side. The lock swung in and he fell forward. His burned hands were too cold to hurt as he checked his fall. Scantily clad, Larienne stood over him. "Playing hiding games?" she asked. She got a better look and knelt by his side. "You're hurt!" So he was, but mostly he was tired. In the interval before he accepted the luxury of unconsciousness, the thought flashed across his mind before he could disowni it: Someone on the ship was trying to take the plant away, or wanted him to fail. Either would have been accomplished if he had been left behind. H e sat in his room, thinking. He wished he knew more about the crew. Six months was enough to give him wide acquaintance, but not the deep kind. They were a clannish lot on the ship. His own assistant he knew well enough, and the doctor. The captain he hardly ever saw. The rest of them he knew bv sight and name, but not much else : the few married couples, the legally unattached girls, and the larger number of male technicians. None of them, as far as he could see, had any incentive to engineer the mixup which had nearly caused him to miss the ship. Of course he might be reading into it more than was there. It could have happened that way accidentally. And then maybe it didn't. His thoughts were inter#'upted by a knock. "Who's there?" he called. Larienne walked in. "Nobody asks wJio she said. "It's always come in. Even I know that, and I've been on this traveling isolation ward a mere three years." She dropped into a chair and draped her legs, long legs that were worth showing off. She had a certain air of impartiality that attracted attention. She was smart, though, and knew when to discard impartiality. She eyed him curiously. "I'm trying to discover the secret of your popularity. That damn plant is pining for you." "It's not me," he said. "You have to know how to handle it." "Thanks," she said dryly. "I don't know how. But Richel Alsint, boy plant psychologist, does. He knows when to increase the circulation, when to give it an extra shot of minerals, and when, on the other hand, to scare the damn thing out of its wits, which I sometimes believe it actually has." "Don't personalize it," he warned. "It's partly plant and partly a machine. Your mistake is that you treat it as if it were wholly a machine." "Seems to me I've heard that before. What should I do that I don't?" "Cycles," he said. "Rhythm. A machine doesn't need that kind of treatment, but a plant does. Normally it starts as a seed, grows to maturity, produces more seeds, and eventually dies. Our plant isn't like that, of course. It never produces seeds, and, if we're careful, doesn't die. Yet it does # . have something that faintly corresponds to the original cvcIgs She sighed. "It might help if I knew what it was -- geranium, or sunflower, or whatever. " He had told her, but apparently she didn't want to remember. "It isn't one plant. It's been made from hundreds ; even I don't know what they were. One best feature from this, another strong feature from something else. We've taken plants apart and recombined them into something new. This is just -- plant." legs to a more comfortable if less esthetic position. "Hydroponics was simpler," she rk ill Apf'An "It was," he said. "And if you want to know, old-fashioned dirt farming was even simpler. Our combination plant and machine is merely a step and a half ahead of hydroponics." "Suppose you come out and tell me what I've done wrong," she said, getting up. "One last thing," he said. "Remember that plants evolved on planets. No matter what we do, we can't convince the plant that it's still on a planet. Light's the easiest. As far as we know, it will grow indefinitely under our artificial light. Artificial gravity is different. I don't know the difference, and neither do the physicists, but the plant does. It can live in the ship just so long and then has to be taken out for a rest. There are other things that affect it, vibration, noise, and maybe more. You know how I have to keep after the pilot to dampen his drive. All these things change the cycle it has to have." "Agreed," she said impatiently, meaning mostly that she didn't care. "Let's go out and look at it." The plant was a machine and the machine was a plant. It occupied a large space in the center of the ship. And it wasn't wasted space ; properly cared for, the plant could supply food for the crew indefinitely. The plant machine evolved from earlier attempts to convert raw material and energy into food. Originally algae were used because they were hardy and simple to control. But the end product had to be processed and algae did not produce the full scale of nutrients in the proper proportion for the human diet. Certain cells of more highly evolved plants were far more efficient in the conversion of raw materials into proteins, vitamins and the like. Originally, inedible parts were produced too, the stalk, which might or mignt not be used for food, and the leaves and roots. On a planet with plenty of room, this made little difference. But on an overcrowded planet, or one with a poisonous atmosphere, and especially on a ship where space was at a premium, normal methods could not be used. In the plant machine were certain cells which liad been selected because of their ability to produce a variety of nutrients. The inedible paiis of the plant were replaced by machinery. Instead of roots to draw water and minerals from the soil, there were pumps and filters. Instead of stems to elevate that material to the leaves, there were hoses. Instead of entire leaves to perform photosynthesis, there were only those cells most efficient at the process. There were no seeds, tubers, roots, nor fleshy stalks to store the food. Collecting trays replaced them. There was no waste space ; nothing was produced that couldn't be eaten. There was an additional problem of reconciling the various cell fluids and different rates of growth. In part, that was accomplished by the plant machinery; the rest depended on the plant mechanic. His job was akin to that of a factory manager. In a sense, the plant machine was nothing more than a highly organized and complex factory, of which the productive units were the actual cells. aisles. Dials and gauges everywhere -- a continuous record was kept of every stage. Each record was important, but nothing that could be reduced to a formula. The plant was not in bad shape, considering. At his instructions, Larienne made certain adjustments. "Why reduce the light?" she asked. "I thought this unit grew better with stronger light." "It does, within limits." "I was within those limits." "You were, but consider this. The plant from which these cells came grow fastest in early summer, but it isn't edible at that time. In late summer, it is. The light change merely corresponds to original conditions." Partly convinced, she nodded. "What kind of plant was it?" He smiled. "I don't know. It's the nth cellular descendant of some plant that once grew on Earth." She touched a dial she had adjusted. "And on this one you reduced the fluid flow into it, and switched the output to another unit I've never seen it connected to." "Same thing. The input corresponds to the difference between the dry and rainy seasons." "But things grow faster with more water." "They do, unless it happens to be a cactus." She shook her head. "I give up. Cactus yet." "I didn't say it was cactus. It might be, and, if so, could be very efficient in preparing water and soil minerals for use by the leaves. There aren't any leaves, of course, but that doesn't change the principle." "Don't think I'll ever understand it," she said. "Enough to get by, but not the way you do." She stood at his side. It was pleasant to have her there. Other things were pleasant to imagine too, but he refrained. There were married couples on the ship, just as there were unattached men and women. But when the men outnumbered the women three to one, certain conclusions were inevitable, and he had made them the first few days aboard. Unlike many of the others, he didn't expect to stay on the ship forever. In a year and a half he would either prove his point or fail. Then he would leave. Would Larienne come with him ? Maybe, but it wasn't a good bet. A liaison, no matter how easy it was to enter into, was not always easy to break. There would be time to decide about that later. "Is everything all right?" she asked. He glanced over the dials and mentally added them up. "Reasonably so. Yes." "Good," she said. "Unless you need me sooner. I'll be back in about ten hours." He nodded and she left. It was unnecessary to ask where she was going. He could tell that from her manner. They had raised a hitherto unmarked solar system and she was helping tag it. His injured hands were aching with the effort, though Larienne had done most of the actual work. He started toward his room, and then, on another thought, turned into the dispensary. Franklan he knew better than anyone except Larienne, and he might get a fresh viewpoint from him. F ranklan was waiting. He had a doctor's degree from some planet, but on the ship titles were largely ignored. "The wounded hero comes back, holding our food supply precariously in his skilled hands," he said as Alsint entered. The sarcasm was not altogether friendly, Alsint decided. Without comment, he laid his hands on the table. He did not pretend to be a hero and he was not even particularly stubborn. He had put together a plant in a better way, one that ought to withstand the rigors of tag ship service, and he intended to see that it got a fair trial. "What do you know about ship watches?" he asked cautiously. "Fifteen years on a tag ship, and I've never personally seen a failure. I suppose it can happen." Franldan glanced up. "It's too bad you had to destroy yours to get in. I'd like to see what an examination by our technicians would show." The same thought that he had, though Franklan seemed to have attached the opposite meaning to it. "Interesting, isn't it?" Alsint said evenly. "But I was thinking of the connection it has to the crew panel." Franklan bit his lip. "I hadn't considered that." "I have. The pilot had to check the crew panel before he could take off. If he did, and saw that I was missing, why didn't he wait? If he didn't see that I wasn't inside the ship, then the panel was defective too. It's hard to believe." Franklan filled a small tank with fluid and motioned toward it. Alsint dipped his hands in. It stung, but he could see that it had a pronounced healing effect. Franklan was watching him narrowly. "Service on a tag ship is voluntary. It has to be, considering all the solitude we have to take. Any man can withdraw any time he wants. A lot of them do, especially in the first three years. However, bear this in mind. You've practically accused someone on the ship of trying to leave you behind. I know you do think that. And if you can produce evidence. I'll believe you. But there is one person on whom suspicion will fall first." That was what Alsint wanted to hear. He'd gone over it in his mind and couldn't find anyone to suspect. Any clue was welcome. "Who?" he asked. "You," said Franklan. "If # wanted to leave the tag ship service, I'd see to it that I made as graceful an exit as possible. Forced out by an accident, of course. I'd want to tell people that." that kind of attitude. Franklan was proud of the work he was associated with. Nothing wrong with that; everyone had that right. In fact, if he didn't, he had no business doing it. However, it made things difficult for Alsint. He was on a tag ship for other reasons. He had evolved several strains of plant cells that should be especially suited for use on tag ships.' For some reason the plants on tag ships were always dying. Ships returned to inhabited planets for refueling with the machines intact but with the plants dead. The plant cells had to be replaced. It was not that the actual material was expensive. It wasn't. But the process of getting the strange cells to work together as a new unit was time-consuming and enormously costly. That was where the trouble came. The plant couldn't be fitted together like an engine. Alsiiit had evolved cells that were far more viable, but the only way to test that was in actual use. He had received permission from the Bureau of Exploration to install his plant in a ship and try it for two years. If at the end of that time the plant was still alive, he had something really worthwhile. The only stipulation was that no one on the ship should know that it was a test, since they might, out of consideration for him, modify the service the ship nonnally went through. It had to be a true rough, tough test. And he was getting it, in more ways than he had expected. Unless he could stay with his plant for the next year and a half, all his work would go for nothing. He drew his hands out of the fluid. "Do you think I'm trying to run out?" he asked quietly. He had proof that he wasn't, but he couldn't use it. Franklan shrugged. "Honestly, I don't. But I'm not blinding myself to what the others will think." He squinted professionally at the burns and dried the hands with a gentle blast of air. He picked up a large tube and squeezed a substance on them which was absorbed almost instantly. "There. You'll be all right in a few days." "Thanks," Alsint said laconically and stood up. As he went out the door, Franklan called after him. "If I see the captain. I'll tell him I don't think you tried to jump ship. I doubt that he'll ask. As I said, service on this ship is voluntary." Personally, Alsint didn't care what Franklan told the captain. However, he was at a definite disadvantage. Next time they came to a planet, if he were to disappear, nobody would be overly inquisitive. T he tagging operation was far from complete -- seven planets in the system and each had to be thoroughly investigated. Long-range investigation, of course. A tag ship rarely landed, and then only when the planet under consideration seemed extremely desirable for colonization, enough to warrant closer observation. It didn't matter whether it had a breathable atmosphere or not, whether it was icebound or blazing hot. These were minor difficulties and engineering ingenuity could overcome them. There were other criteria, and it was for these that they were checked. Alsint went out into the ship. There was a lot of activity, but much of it was invisible, electronic in nature, affecting only instruments. The ship had slipped into an orbit, the plane of which intersected the axis of planetary revolution at the most effective angle. The ship went around twice while the planet revolved three times. In that period the mineral resources were plotted and the approximate quantities of each were detenu ined. Larienne looked up as he came near. "This is a real find," she said cheerfully. "I suppose you've located the heavy stuff," he said, knowing that it was a superfluous statement. "What else would we look for?" She bent over the small torpedo shape she was working on. "Not just one, either. This is the second planet in the system with enough heavy elements to be worth set"What's the gravity?" He didn't always share the enthusiasm others had for theii' discoveries. "The first was #. This is about #. A little high for personal comfort, but with the mineral resources there, the settlers can manage." "What about atmosphere?" "The first hasn't much, frozen mostly. This one has chlorine in it." She grinned at him. "Your old theme, huh?" It was an old theme, though he didn't argue it. He was entitled to personal reactions. "Maybe. Would you like to live on either of them?" "Don't have to," she said, making an adjustment on the torpedo. "Never get out on a planet more than twice a year. In fact. I've almost forgotten what a year means." That was the point, possibly, though there was no use to discuss it. "Anything else of interest?" "We're coming to a smaller planet. Land, oceans, warm enough, and with an atmosphere we can probably breathe as is. Don't know the composition of the solid matter yet, but from our mass reading, it's a good bet that there won't be enough heavy stuff to justify settlement." She made a final delicate adjustment on the torpedo and began wheeling it to a launching tube. "This one's in a rich system, though, and will probably be used as an administration planet -- vacation spot too. It won't go to waste, if that is what's worrying you." In a way, it was. It was too bad that so many planets tliat were othenvise ideal for human habitation had to be passed over because they lacked the one essential. There was no help for it, of course. To settle planets, spaceships were necessary -- and heavy elements to drive those ships. Nothing else mattered in the least. L arienne snapped the torpedo in place and pressed a stud. The dark shape disappeared. Out in space, it fell into an orbit )# which eventually would land it safely on the planet. "There," she said with quiet satisfaction. "It's tagged, and it will stay tagged until somebody digs it up." It might be a month, or a hundred years, before Colonization got around to it. Meanwhile the torpedo was there, broadcasting at intervals the information that the tag ship had discovered. Somewhere in a remote planning center, a new red dot appeared in a three-dimensional model of space, to be accounted for in a revised program of expansion. Larienne brushed the hair out of her eyes. There was a smudge on her face. "I'm busy," she said. "But I can get out of this if you need me." As long as she was more interested in what she was doing, he'd rather not have her. He shook his head. "I'll manage," he said, and headed toward the plant. The instant he entered, something seemed wrong. He couldn't say what it was without investigation. It was a big complex machine as well as a plant, and even reading all the dials was not enough; visual inspection was necessary too. He stai'ted at one end and worked toward the other. The gauges indicated nothing out of the ordinary, but the plant whs in bad condition. It was something like a tree, the trunk and leaves of which were sound enough, no discernible injuries, but neveilheless dying. At the roots, of course. This plant had no roots, merely a series of tanks and trays, each connected to others in a bewilderingly complex fashion. In that series, though, was something which corresponded to roots. He was near the end of the first row before he spotted part of the trouble. A flowcontrol valve was far out of adjustment. His hands were bandaged and clumsy, but he tried to reset it. It was jammed tight and he couldn't move it. He could call Larienne, but she was busy. So was the rest of the crew. With sufficient leverage he could turn the valve. He looked around for something he could u.se. A small metal bar leaning against the wall nearby seemed adequate. He picked it up -- and the bar burned into the bandages. He knew what it was ; he didn't have to think. He could hear the sparks as well as feel it. Fortunately his shoes were not good conductors and not much of the charge got through. With an effort he relaxed his convulsive grip, and still the bar stayed in his hand. It had fused to the bandage and he couldn't shake it off. The bar was glowing red ; only the #'elatively nonconductive properties of the bandage -- heat as well as electricity -- had prevented his instant electrocution. And the bar was sinking deeper into the bandage. If it ever touched his flesh, the charge would be dissipated -- through his body. He had to ground it. The metal tanks which held the plant would do that, but also crisp the plant beyond salvage. He had to make a fast choice. length, he ran through the aisle, and, at the far end, thrust it against the side of the ship. The I'esulting flash staggered him, but he stayed on his feet. Though the metal began cooling rapidly, it remained fused to the bandage. He laid one end on the floor and stepped on it, tearing it loose. It was a plain metal bar, made into a superconductor, with an unholy charge stored in it. This couldn't be an accident. It took work to turn ordinary metal into a superconductor at room temperature. Also it couldn't be placed just anywhere. If the charge were to remain in it, a special surface had to be prepared. The trap had been set up for him, and he had walked into it. The bandage had saved him, nothing else. That was the one thing the unknown person hadn't taken into account. Who? Larienne? She had access to the plant. But so did anyone else, just by walking in. Not Larienne. She had her ugly moments and might try to kill him in a fit of anger, but she wouldn't plan it coldly, nor go through with the scheme if she planned it. It didn't take special knowledge to sabotage the plant. Any control could be moved drastically and the plant would suffer. The only technical knowledge required was that of making the bar into a superconductor, and that knowledge she didn't have. True, she could ask someone to do it for her. But she wouldn't. Alsint sat down. The actual physical damage from the electrical shock wasn't great. The certainty that someone had tried to kill him was. Why? Violent personal hatred for himself he could rule out. He'd been careful in his contacts with the crew. Onlv a psychotic could manufacture a reason to hate him, and psychotics didn't last long on a tag ship. It had to be connected to the plant. Someone on the ship was trying to take it away from him, or one of his competitors had hired one of the crew to see that he didn't survive. The last was unlikely. He had no proof that his plant was better, merely a belief that it was. It seemed illogical that anyone would want to eliminate him on the strength of an untested belief. But except for Larienne, no one had enough knowledge to nurse the plant along for the required two years. Unless he remained alive, no one would benefit. He shook his head. It was difficult to add up and arrive at a sensible answer. One thing he knew, though -- hereafter, he'd have to be on his guard at all times. He could go to the captain with his story. He considered and rejected that in the same instant. He'd have to tell the captain everything, which would invalidate the test. He'd have to handle this by himself. He got up and continued his inspection of the plant, making minor adjustments to compensate for the damage. Except for that one valve, nothing seemed far out of line. That done, he limped to the dispensary. His hand was aching where he had torn the bar loose and ripped the flesh. "Back again?" said Franklan. "Any new information on the enemy?" By itself, that was a suspicious statement. How could he Imow about the latest incident? The easiest answer was that he didn't. He was referring to the time Alsint had nearly missed the ship. "Not a thing," Alsint muttered. Unless he wanted to reinforce Franklan's original opinion, he'd better keep this to himself. Franklan looked at his hand. "Whatever you've done, I don't recommend it. It's not the way to get well fast -- or at all." "Grabbed something hot," Alsint said. Might as well say that. The bar was now just a bar and no examination would reveal that it had been a superconductor. Same with the insulation it had rested on. He couldn't prove anything. struments. "Nothing serious. This'll heal on schedule, but it's going to hurt while I fix it." He administered a local anesthetic below the elbow. It made Alsint dizzy. He sat down and closed his eyes while Franklan worked. He relaxed more than he intended and then deliberately opened his eyes because he was drowsy and didn't want to fall asleep. Over Franklan's shoulder, behind the window that swung out from the dispensary to the corridor, was a little red bird. It was much like the one that had fluttered around as he had tried to get on the ship. Perhaps it had come in with him and hidden in some quiet place until now. It was possible. Franklan looked up. 'What are you staring at?" Alsint's tongue was fuzzy. "Outside the window behind you is a little red bird," he said, speaking distinctly to overcome the side-effects of the anesthesia. Franklan went on swabbing, not bothering to glance behind him. "You're tired," he said. "And look again at that bird outside the window. For my sake, tell it to put on a spacesuit. If it doesn't, it will die in a matter of seconds." Startled, Alsint looked around. He was mixed up in his directions. He was facing the visionport, plain empty space, not the corridor. He blinked his eyes frantically, but the bird wouldn't go away and it didn't die. There was no air out there, nearest planet. The bird flapped its wings in the airless space and went thi'ough the motions of singing. was nothing to carry the sound. But he could imagine hearing it anyway, through the thick armorglass of the visionpoi't -- a bird singing in space. Resolutely he closed his eyes and kept them closed. He had enough trouble without taking on hallucinations. Franklan finished the new bandage and tapped his shoulder. "You can come out of it now. " Alsint tried not to, but he couldn't resist. He stared past Franklan toward the visionport. "Is it gone?" asked Franklan. His voice was quiet. "It's gone," Alsint said in relief. "Good. These things hapIen occasionally. As long as you can adjust back to reality, you have nothing to worry cxbout." Franklan rummaged through the medical supplies. "Take these. They may help you." Wordlessly, Alsint took the packet and went back to his room. He was sweating and shaken.  Franklan hadn't seen it because he hadn't looked, but there had been a bird out there, or there hadn't. If not, Alsint's contact with reality was precarious and he'd have to watch himself. Franklan had hinted at that. Maybe he wanted Alsint to believe it. But it didn't mean there hadn't been an actual bird. It could be put there in a plastic bubble that wasn't visible against the blackness of space. If so, it was an ingenious way of harassing him. He relaxed at that formulation. It hadn't been worth the effort, but it did prove one thing -- his unknown antagonist had an excellent imagination. T ime passed -- days, perhaps, though that unit had little meaning on the ship. It was the work period which counted and nobody had bothered to tell him how long that was. The last planet of the system was analyzed and the permanent markers sent down. The star was tagged and the ship proceeded on its way. What the destination was, Alsint didn't know and didn't inquire. They were going somewhere, to imcatalogued stars, and that was enough to Icnow. His hands healed and the bandages were removed. Larienne was reassigned to help him. The rest of the crew, whatever they guessed, or sensed, said nothing and the normal pattern of life on the tag ship seemed re-established. His anxiety faded. It was not, he was sure, the end of the attempts to remove him, but he had time to think, to plan countermeasures. He was not wholly prepared. He and Larienne were approaching the plant. The door was open and he could see inside. He glanced casually at the row on row of mechanism, and stopped. "What's the matter?" asked Larienne. He moistened his lips. "Go around to the other side and close the door. Be quiet about it, but cl#e the door quickly." She stared at him curiously and started to go inside. He grabbed her arm. "Around, I said. Not through." She shrugged and went around. In time he could s(e the other door close. Then she came back. "What's inside?" she whispered, adopting his own attitude, "Something I want you to see." She peered in. "I can't see anything. " "It's out of the line of vision now, but it's still in there." He swung the door nearly shut. "Inside, fast. I'll show you." Obediently she went in and he followed, closing the door behind him. She waited. "The bird," he said. "I want you to verify that it is ' in h#r# "Bird?" She was puzzled and dismayed. "How did a bird get in here?" "I don't know. I'll figure that out later." There was no need to whisper, since it couldn't escape; nevertheless he did. "It's a psychological stunt. The best way to stop it is to catch the bird." She drew away uncertainly. "You saw it in here?" "I did, and I want you to be with me when I find it." "Then we should make a lot of noise. It will fly up if it's frightened." "Good. You take that aisle and ril take this. Yell when you see it," They separated. He hunted carefully, moving everything that could be moved, looking for the flash of red wings. The bird was shy and had hidden. They met in the center aisle. In answer to his unspoken query, she shook her head. 'T didn't see it." "It's here," he said stubbornly. "I can't be mistaken." She started to say something and changed her mind. "Let's look again,," she suggested. It was not what she intended to say. What she thought was plain from the expression on her face. A gain they went through the plant machine, searching. Every crevice, every hidden corner was examined. He peered into the machinery, the tanks and the trays, above and below. They looked, but there was no bird. Larienne stood beside him and glanced up at the ceiling. "Maybe it got out through the ventilators." "It couldn't," he said harshly. The ventilators were also filteis; a microbe would have difficulty getting through. She was trying to give him a way out, but he couldn't take it. The room in which the plant machine was housed was not a simple open space ; there was structure throughout. But it was inconceivable that something as large as a bird, even a small bird, could escape detection. "I'll take care of the plant," he said quietly. "I want to think." She left. He knew how she felt. It was worse because she did feel that way. He had scored against himself. Larienne would say nothing to the rest of the crew, but it would come out. Emotional reactions couldn't be hidden. And if there was ever an inquiry, she'd have to tell her stoiy. Franklan would see that there was an inquiry. That was his job. There was nothing particularly arduous about life on a tag ship, yet not eveiyone was suited to it. Monotony -- and each person had to adjust to the others as well as the ship. There was no room for a person who saw things. It was a most effective attack, without danger for the man or men behind it. Twice he had seen something that wasn't there, and there were witnesses to testify against him. It would be enough to remove him from the ship. The subsequent treatment wouldn't harm him, but the ship would be gone and he'd never get back on. Tag ships were just too unpredictable; they came and they went as they pleased, and no one could say where they would next arrive. Baffled, he tried to catalogue the crew. Not Larienne. She'd live with him if he wanted, more readily now than before. Ordinary rules didn't apply to her ; sympathy counted for most. Nor was it Franklan. Bluntly he'd given his opinion, but that didn't mean he was responsible for this. The person who was behind it was keeping well hidden. Alsint went wearily down the line, adjusting and readjusting. On one of the handles was -- a tiny red feather. forming nebulously in his mind. A bird had been there. How it had gotten in and then out again through closed doors, he didn't know. That part was unimportant. It had been there. It wasn't a hallucination, though for a time he'd almost believed it himself. Now he knew. Gingerly he picked up the feather. It was no proof, except to himself. 'That was enough. He could do something about it. The trap for him was set, but wouldn't be closed immediately. The ship would not go out of the way except in extreme emergency. In another four months it would run low on fuel and material for the tagging operation, assuming normal conditions. The ship would then return to the nearest inhabited planet. That was the way tag ships operated. Unlike other ships, freight or passenger, their objective was not to get from one inhabited planet to another as fast as possible, but to stay away as long as they could. For that reason, of ail ships, they alone had to have the plant. No other food supply was so economical of space and weight. Once they reached a planet, he'd be referred to the authorities for psychiatric examination. Eventually he'd be cleared, but by then it would be too late. Unless he could forestall it. There w'as a way to do that, though it was dangerous for him, and he stood a chance of ruining the plant. He made up his mind and went back down the line of controls. Larienne might question some of the new settings, but she'd defer to his judgment. It took two weeks for the plant to decline so even the captain could see that it was impossible to go on. As master of the ship, he disliked abandoning tagging operations even temporarily, but the crew had to eat. out of the ordinary, there were many planets like Earth. Not many that were settled, though ; almost uniformly, that kind of planet lacked the heavy elements that made colonization economically feasible. It was pleasant and sunny, gieat grassy glades and an equal amount of forests. No intelligent life on it, so there was nothing to worry about on that score. Animals, big and little, but ordinary weapons would discourage them. Half a mile aw'ay was the ship, ready for instant flight. Not that there was anything to flee from. That was the way it had to come down if it was ever to rise again. The plant had been stripped to components and spread over the ground. An extensive layout, but it was necessary if the plant was going to get full benefit of planetary conditions. It had been put together to facilitate disassembly, and it hadn't taken long to remove it from the ship. A transparent canopy covered it, protection from the elements. A sudden rainstorm could drastically alter the concentration of the vital fluids. There was also an electrified fence to keep out stray animals. Everything except root cells was exposed to the sun and wind. Under these conditions the plant began to recover from the deliberate injury he had done it. Why plants should recover so easily was my still a mystery, but generations of plant mechanics had discovered that they always did. Alsint took the sundown shift. The plant could be left alone at night, locked up with the knowledge that nothing big enough to damage it could get in. It was better if there was someone to make minute adjustments from time to time, but that was not the reason he was there. s u n d # wn was better. Either time, men were outside the ship who didn't have to account for their whereabouts. More were out at sundown. And one of them, sooner or later, would be the person he wanted. The plan was simple. Give the man every opportunity to kill him, make it irresistible -- but shoot first. If the man lived, he would talk. If he didn't, there would be some clue in his personal effects. Dangerous, but if Alsint wanted to profit from his plant, he had no choice. Days passed and no one came near. He could and did retard the regrowth of the plant, but in that respect he was limited. He couldn't be too obvious about it. The time came when he couldn't stall any longer. In reply to tlie captain's blunt question, he had to admit that in the morning the plant would be in as good condition as he could get it closure, knowing this was his last chance. It grew dark and night sounds intruded. The lights in the ship went out. Only the light near him remained. He was careful to sit at the edge of illumination, visible, but a poor target. Animals snuffled in the brush near the electrified fence. They had leanied quickly and knew better than to touch it. And there was another sound -- no animal. He quietly shifted his arm and held the light in readiness. He listened. Someone was crawling through the brush. He had to wait. It was hard on his nerves, being bait. He flashed the light on suddenly. The man was half hidden behind a bush and Alsint couldn't see his face, but the gun in his hand glittered through the leaves. "Surprise," said Alsint. "Don't try anything." The man stood there, but he didn't drop his gun. Alsint didn't like it. He couldn't identify the man. If he ran back into the forest, Alsint wouldn't know any more than he had in the beginning. He fingered the gun. "Come out where I can see you," he said. The man didn't move -- waiting until his eyes adjusted to the light shining on him, decided Alsint. As a choice, his own life came first. He raised the gun. Before he could fire, a red bird attacked his eyes, squawking wildly. He didn't drop the light. He tried to bat the bird away from his face, but it clung to his hair. Before he could crush it, he heard the whoosh of a gas gun. And the sound came from behind him. That was his mistake. There was more than one of them. He breathed once and then felt himself fall forward. awakened, bright sunlight streaming into his eyes. That was not the reason his head hurt, though he could be thankful the man or men had used a gas pellet instead of a projectile. Whoever he or they were. He got up and staggered toward the ship. A few steps were all he took. The ship wasn't there. He leaned against a tree and looked wildly around. The plant was gone too. Shakily he fumbled for a cigarette. Smoke didn't help much. They had taken the plant aboard while he was unconscious. They had left him alone on an uninhabited planet. A pretty planet and a useless one. No ship ever stopped here except to revive a plant, and that wouldn't happen often. It would be several lifetimes before another ship came, if one ever did. He stared miserably into the bright blue distance and thrust his hands into his jacket, and made a discovery. They'd left him a gun, at least, and ammunition. He'd be able to keep himself alive at a minimum level. There was a whistle in the distance. His head came up. He wasn't alone. Larienne? It couldn't be. From the direction of the sound, if it was Larienne, she was hiding in a nearby tree. But Larienne didn't like trees. "Richel Alsint," said a loud voice. Behind him this time. He turned around. There was no one there. Nothing but a red bird sitting on a branch. He started. The same red bird that had flown mysteriously in and out of his life. If it weren't for that creature, he'd be safely on the ship. He raised the gun. From one foot to another, the bird hopped on the branch. "Birds can't talk," it screeched. "Birds can't talk." The implication was clear. "Since you can talk, you're not a bird." The gun was still leveled. "Then what are you ?" "I could tell," said the bird. It had stopped hopping and was watching him calmly. It was red, but sometimes blue. The colors wouldn't remain fixed. He lowered the gun in defeat. He couldn't kill a harmless creature just for the sake sponsible for this. "Don't be so sure, Richel Alsint. Don't be so sure." The song. He glared at it speechlessly. Bird it wasn't. Either it could read his thoughts or it had been taught a patter that fitted his present situation with remarkable precision. "What do you think?" said the bird, cocking its head. He forgot about the bird. It was only a momentary diversion. "I've been marooned," he said dully. "It's happened before. It will happen again," chirruped the bird. "Don't worry. I'm here." It was, but he wished it would go away. "There is a note. Why don't you read, read, read?" sang the bird. He looked, catching a glimpse of sunlight on metal. They had left something. He ran over to it, a few hundred yards away. And there was a note. He seized it feverishly. # made them leave this. You may not need it, but you deserve to know the answers. Don't you understand? You were infuriating everyone, even me, and I liked you better than anyone on the ship. You were always changing things for the sake of that daynn plant! It was too dry, so we had to have more humidity than tvc liked. Or the pilot had to keep the drive from vibrating. Or this, or that, on ayul on and on! Who cares, really ? A good plant mechanic ought to keep the playit alive for five months and then let it die. We can live the last m-onth off the remains. We have to go back every six months for supplies anyyvay. It's expensive, I know, but until you can get a plant that reacts as we do, it will just have to die and be replaced. I thought of staying with you, but I couldn't stand all those changes -- rain and sun -- all the things an uncontrolled planet has. And then there was that story of the bird. That was too much ! Don't think too badly of me. At least I kept them T here was no signature, but there was no doubt who had written it. "All of them," he muttered. Not just one man. Everyone, from the captain down. Larienne too. And they were safe. Who would bother to look for him when the captain recorded in the log that Richel Alsint had deserted because his plant was a failure? And, of course, it was going to fail. "The crew of the craft was daft, and you were the only one who was sane?" said the bird. "Don't you believe it. There are people on countless planets just like them." It was true. The crew was part of the civilization. On those planets where it was possible to have parks, no one went to them. They stayed in the cities as the crew stayed in the ship. And on other planets -- roofed over against poisonous gases, and inhabitants who never saw the sun -- those planets were not much better than spaceships. He was the one who was different, not they. They had a mechanical culture and they liked it. He could see how he had irritated the crew in ways he didn't suspect. They had wanted to get rid of him and they had. He looked down at the machine they had left him, robbed, at Larienne's insistence, from the major plant. Small, just large enough to supply one man, but containing all the necessary parts. A plant machine in miniature. She really hadn't understood. He could live on the food this provided. But would he, on a world teeming with animals and covered with plants, real plants? He laughed bitterly. "Now you know," said the bird. "In the past there were others marooned. Just like you. I came from them." He looked up wonderingly. "Here? On this planet?" he asked eagerly. dered past. The bird eyed it longingly and shivered into a rainbow of colors and darted away after it "Come back!" Alsint shouted. He couldnT find them unaided. He had to have directions. The bird didn't return immediately. It played with the butterfly, flashing around it. Presently it tired of the sport and came back to the branch it had perched on. "Pretty bit of fluff," it said breathlessly. "Never mind that," said Alsint impatiently. "What about those people ? Are they on this world ?" "Oh, not here," said the bird. "A thousand planets away. " Alsint groaned. The bird had been trained by a madman and was alternately raising his hopes and crushing them. "Not so," said the bird. "Here's history: a hundred and forty years ago, a couple, plant mechanics, were marooned -- for the same reason." It flew from the perch and alighted on the plant machine, dipping its bill in a collecting tray. "Good stuff," it said, clattering its beak. A lsint said nothing. It would tell him when it got ready, not before. "The plant machine's fine," said the bird. "It's a plant that's been taken apart. Can you put it back together?" "No more than it is," said Alsint. "No one can." "No one yoi know," said the bird. "Here's more history: A hundred and forty years ago, this couple learned how to put it together -- and it grew. A hundred and thirty years ago, they knew how to take an animal apart and keep it alive. A hundred and twenty years ago, they put the animal together and made it work in a new way." The bird sidled along the branch. "What's the difference between plant and animal ?" it asked. There were countless differences, on any level Alsint wanted to think about. Cellular, organizational, whatever he named. But the bird had something simple in mind. "There are some plants which can move a little," Alsint said slowly. "And there are some animals that hardly move at all. But the real difference, if there is any, is motion." "Right. You'll get along fine," said the bird. "A hundred and twenty years ago, this couple -- vho by then had several children -- put an animal together in a new way and got -- pure motion." That was what had been puzzling him, and now he knew. "Teleports," he said. "They can teleport." "They can't," said the bird. "The mind's best for thinking -- they say. And they've kept theirs uncluttered." The bird cocked a glittering eye. "I don't know about minds. I never had one." If they couldn't teleport, how had. the bird got here ? Alsint glanced at the bird. It wasn't perched on the plant machine and the wings were folded. Six feet off the ground it hovered, and not a breath of air stirring. "Behind you," said the bird. It didn't twitch a feather, but it was behind him now and he hadn't seen it move. "Teleports, yes," said the bird. "But they can't do it. We do it for them." The bird liad been outside the visionport of the spaceship. If it could teleport itself, why not air too? That was only part of it. The bird had followed him, but how had it foreseen this end? "Did you know this would happen?" he asked. "Plant mechanics are always getting marooned," said the bird. "We've gathered up quite a few. They work with the plant and a plant belongs on a planet. The rhythm is different from that of a machine." feel it, though he had never put it into words. "Go tell them where I am," he said. "I can live until they send a ship." "A ship?" said the bird. "So slow? They don't believe in waiting. They've got all the beautiful planets that men don't want -- just for the asking, though they don't have to ask. They need the right kind of people to live on them." They didn't believe in waiting. A shadow fell across his face. Alsint looked up. Something was dropping down from the sky. Not a ship -- not the conventional kind, anyway. It was the kind they would use. On planets on which all the food was grown naturally and no heavy elements were needed, what would be transported ? People. Not moving a wing, it came down, first fast and then slow. It stood in front of him, towering, a giant abstract figure of a woman with wings. There was frost on it. He went to it and it covered him with wings. There was no sensation at all except cold, which lasted only a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, the strange, beautiful ship was dropping down on another planet, more pleasant than the last. Men and women were coming out of the houses to meet him. One of them looked something .like What did Professor Sanzmann have in that cardboard By Ludwig Sanzmann first appeared, like a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil, at twenty-seven, had been the youngest museum director in the country; and now at thirty-five he was still one of the youngest. Moreover, he had a confident, if precarious, hold on greater glories to come : the Godbody Museum of Natural History; Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil, Director. The salary would be splendid, the expense account lavish and tax-free, and the director would have ample time to finish his great work, at present ehtitled Man Before the Dawn -- recondite, yet eminently readable. There were already seventeen chapters devoted to the Mousterian, or Neanderthal, Era alone. (It would be certain to sell forever to schools and libraries ; a big book, firm in the grasp, profusely illustrated and done in so captivating a style that even a high school senior, picking it up unwarily in search of nudes, would be unable to extricate himself for hours.) Mr. Godbody, the future source of all these goodies, was a skeptic of the old-fashioned sort. "Where did Cain get his w'ife?" was a favorite cackle, accompanied by a nudge of his bony elbow. "Found any feathers from angels' wings yet?" was another. There was, at the moment, a minor hitch. Old Mr. Godbody affected to be shaken by the recent revelation of scandal in anthropology. From that respectable group of ancestors, whose likenesses were known to every schoolchild, from that jolly little club -- j udgment falling like a bolt of thunder -- Piltdown Man had been expelled for cheating at cards. If Piltdown Man was a fake, why not all the rest? Java Man, Peiping Man, Australopithecus Aft'icanus -- all bone-scraps, plaster of paris, and wishful thinking ! In vain, Turbyfil assured him that competent scholars had been leery of H. Piltdown for years; ugly old Mr. Godbody testily replied : "Then why didn't you say so?" Having lost one faith in his youth, the merchant prince was reluctant to lose another in his old age. But Dr. Turbyfil trusted his patron's doubt was only a passing phase. In sum, Dr. Turbyfil was about to reap the rewards of virtue and honest toil, and when he reflected on this (as he often did) it amused him to sing -- a trifle off-key -- a song from his childhood, called "Bringing in the Sheaves."- That was before the advent of Dr. Sanzmann. The two men had come to Holden within a few months of one another. Dr. Turbyfil from his two-year stay at the Museum of Natural Philosophy in Boston, and Dr. Sanzmann from a meager living translating in New York, whither he had come as a exile from his native country. Sanzmann was politically quite pure, with no taint of either far right or near left ; was, in fact, a Goethe scholar -- and what can be purer than a Goethe scholar? He had a post at the local denominational university: Professor of Germanic and Oriental Languages, neatly skipping the questionable Slavs. Dr. Turbyfil was not an ungenerous man, and he was quite content to see Prof. Sanzmann enjoy the full measure of linguistic success. But Dr. Philosoph. Ludwig Sanzmann was also an amateur anthropologist, paleontologist, and general antiquarian; and this was enough to chill the blood of any museum director or even curator. Such amateurs are occupational hazards. 'They bring one smelly cowbones, and do it with a proud air of expectancy, fully anticipating the pronouncement of a new species of megatherium or brontosaurus. "My dear Dr. Turbyfil! I have looked forward to this our meeting for so long ! I cannot tell you -- " Sanzmann shook the proffered hand, sat down, holding a cardboard carton as if it contained wedding cake, took out a handkerchief, wiped his rosy face, and panted. "Dr. Turbyfil !" the name assumed the qualities of an indictment. "What is that which they used always to tell us? Uhmiensch -- Primal Man, that is -- he was a stunted little crea-ture, like a chimpanzee, with a molybdenum deficiency, and he -- which is to say, we -- grew larger and bigger and more so, until, with the help of the actuarial tables of the insurance companies, we have our present great size attained, and also life expectancy. And we, pres-u-mably, will greater grow yet. "But!" (Dr. Turbyfil quivered.) "What then comes to pass? An anthropologist goes into an apotheke -- a druckstore, yes? -- in Peiping -- oh, a bea-u-tiful city, I have been there, I love it with all my heai't! -- he goes into a native Chinese pharmacy, and there what is it that he finds? He finds -- amongst the dried dragon bones, powdered bats, tigers' gall, rhinoceros horn, and pickled serpents -- two humanlike gigantic molar teeths ! And then, behold, for this is wonderful! The whole picture changes !" Oh, my, oh, my! thought Dr. Turbyfil, suffering. "Now Primal Man becomes huge, tremendous, like the Sons of Anak in the First Moses Book. We must now posit for him ancestors like the gi'eat apes of your Edgar Burroughs Rice. And how it is that we, his children, have shrunken! Pit-i-fiil! Instead of the pigs becoming elephants, the elephants are become pigs!" Dr. Sanzmann clicked his tongue. "But that is nothing! Nothing at all! Wherefore have I come to you now? To make known to you a something that is so much more startling, I must begin earlier than our own times. Charles the Fifth!" Dr. Turbyfil quavered, "I beg your pardon?" "(Charles the Fifth of Hapsburg. In fifteen hundred and fifty-five, Charles the Emperor resigns, no retires? Abdicates. His brother Ferdinand succeeds him as sovereign of the Hapsburg dominions, and Charles retreats himself to a monastery. " 'With age, with cares, with maladies oppres't, "He seeks the refuge of monastic rest -- ' " "Ahh, Professor Sanzmami," Dr. Turbyfil began. "Yes-yes: I di-gress. Well. Charles and Ferdinand. A medallion is struck, Charles, one side -- Ferdinand the other. And the date, fifteen hundred and fifty-five. Here is the medallion." Dr. Sanzmann reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a flat little box, such as jewelers use. He opened it. Inside lay a blackened disk about the size of a silver dollar, and a piece of paper with two rubbings -- the profiles of two men, Latin mottoes, and the date : fifteen hundred and fiftyfive. Completely at sea, and feeling more and more sorry for himself. Dr. Turbyfil looked at his rosy-faced and grayhaired caller. He made a small, bewildered gesture. "Soon, soon, you will understand everything. N ineteenthirtv. My wacations -- I am still in Chairmany -- I spend at Maldenhausen, a little rural hamlet in a walley. Then things are quiet. Ah, these Chairman walleys ! So green, remote, enchanting, full of mysteries! I drink beer and wine, I smoke my pipe, and go on long walks in the countryside. And -- since I am a scholar, and ever the dog returns to his vomit -- I spend also some time in the willage archives... Many interesting things... A child named Simon... "In fifteen hundred and fifty-five, a child named Simon is stolen by an ogre." Dr. Turbyfil pressed a fist to his forehead and moaned faintly. "Is -- vhatV he said fretfully. "Please! You see the hole in the medallion? The child Simon wore it about his neck on a thong. They were very reverend, these peasant people. An Imperial medallion, one wears it on one's bosom. A photostatic copy of the testimony." Prof. Sanzmann opened the box, removed papers. Photostatic copies, indeed, were among them, but the language was a monkish Latin, and in Gothic lettering. Dr. Turbyfil felt his eyes begin to hurt ; he closed them. Prof. Sanzmann, dreadful man, spoke on. "There were two witnesses, an old man of the name Sigismund, a boy called Lothar. It was winter. It was snow. The child Simon runs with his dog down the field. He shouts. He is afraid. Out of the snow behind him the ogre comes. He is just as they always knew ogres to be : Huge, hairy, crooked, clad in skins, carrying a cudgel. Terrible. "Lothar runs for help. The old man cannot run, so he stays. And prays. The ogre seizes up the child Simon and runs away with him, back into the fields, toward the hills, until the snow hides them. "The people are aroused, they are fearful, but not surprised. This happens. There are wolves, there are bears, there are ogres. Such are the hazards of living on the remote farms." Dr. Turbyfil shivered. A chill crept into his flesh. He rubbed his fingers to warm them. "Folklore," he said. "Old wives' tales." Dr. Sanzmann waved his hands, then placed them on the photostats. "This is not the Brothers Grimm," he said. "These are contemporary accounts with eyed witnesses. I continue. The people go out in the storm, Avith dogs and pikes and even a few matchlocks; and since they huddle fearingly together and the snow has hid all foot-marks, it is not a surprise that they do not find the child or the ogre's spoor. The dog, yes -- but he is quite dead. Crushed. One tremendous blow. The next day they search, and then the next, and then no more. Perhaps in the Spring they will find some bones for Christian burial... "The child had been warned that if he went too far from home he would be stolen by an ogre. He did go too far from home, and he ivas stolen by an ogre. So, fifteen-sixty." Dr. Turbyfil ventured a small smile. "The child has been dead for five years." He felt better, now that he knew what was in the carton. He visualized the card which would never, certainly never, be typed : '"Bones of child devoured by ogre in #. Gift of Prof, Lvjdtvig Sanzmann, Dr. Phil." on. "In fifteen hundred and sixty, the child Simon," he said, "is discovered trying to pilfer fowls from a farmyard in the nexten walley. He is naked, filthy, long-haired, lousy. He growls and cannot speak coherent speech. He fights. It is wery sad." The Museum Director agreed that it was very sad. (Then what ivas in the cardboard carton ? ) "Child Simon is tied, he is delivered up to his parents, who must lock him in a room to keep him from escaping. Gradually he learns to speak again. And then comes to see him the burgemeister, and the notary, and the priest, and the baron, and I should imagine half the people of the district, and they ask him to tell his story, speaking ever the truth. "The ogre (he says) carried him away wery distantly and high up, to his cave, and there in his cave is his wife the ogress, and a small ogre, who is their child. At first Simon fears they will consume him, but no. He is brought to be a companion to the ogre-child, who is ill. And children are adaptive, wery adaptive. Simon plays with the ogre child, and the ogre brings back sheep and wenison and other foods. At first it is hard for Simon to eat the law meat, so the ogiess chews it soft for him -- " ""Please!" Dr. Turbyfil held up a protesting hand, but Professor Sanzmann neither saw nor heard him. With gleaming eyes gazing afar, he went on. "It comes the spring. The ogre family sports in the forest, and Simon with them. Then comes again the autunin and winter and at last the ogrechild dies. It is sad. The parents cannot believe it. They moan to him. They rock him in their arms. No use. They buiy him finally beneath the cave floor. Noiv you will ask," he informed the glassy-eyed Turbiil, "do they smear the dead body with red ochre as a symbol of life, of blood and flesh, as our scientists say ? No. And why not? Because he is already smeared. All of them. All the time. They like it so. It is not early religion; it is early cosmetic only." He sighed. Dr. Turbyfil echoed him. "And so, swiftly pass the years." Prof. Sanzmann patted his hand on the empty air to indicate the passing years. "The old ogre is killed by a she-bear and then the ogi'ess will not eat. She whimpers and clasps Simon to her, and presently she grows cold and is dead. He is alone. The rest we know. Simon grows up, marries, has children, dies. But there are no more ogres. "Not ever. "Naturally, I am fascinated. I ask the peasants, where is there a cave called the Cave of the Ogres? They look at me with slanting glances, but will not answer. I am patient. I come back each summer. Nineteen hundred thirty-one, nineteen hundrd thirty two, nineteen hundred thirty-three. Everyone knows me. I give small presents to the children. By myself I wander in the hills and search for caves. Nineteen hundred thirty-four. There is a cow-tending child in the high pastures. We are friends. I speak of a cave near there. This, I say, is called the Cave of the Ogres. The child laughs. N #, no, he says, that is another cave ; it is located thus and so. "And I find it where he says. But I am circumspect. I wait another year. Then I come and J make my private excawations. And -- I -- find -- this" He threw open the carton and unwrapped from many layers of cotton-wool something browm and bony, and he set it in front of Dr. Turbyfil. "There was a fairly complete skeleton, but I took just the skull and jaw-bone. You recognize it at once, of course. And with it I found, as I expected, the medallion of Charles and Ferdinand. Simon had allowed them to bury it with the ogre-child because he had been fond of it. It is all written in the photostatic paper copies In nineteen hundred thirty-six, the Nazis -- " Dr. Turbyfil stared at the skull. "No, no, no, no," he whispered. It was not a very large skull. "No, no, no," he whispered, staring at the receding forehead and massive chinless jaw, the bulging eye-ridges. "So, tell me now, sir Museum Director: Is this not a find more remarkable than big teeths in a Peiping herbshop?" His eyes seemed very young and very bright. Dr. Turbyfil thought rapidly. It needed just something like this to set the Sunday supplements and Mr. Godbody ablaze, and ruin forever both his reputation and that of the Holden Museum. Years and years of work -- the seventeen chapters on the Mousterian Era alone in Man Before the Dawn -- the bequest from old Mr. Godbody -- He arose, placed a hand on Professor Sanzmann's shoulder. "My friend," he said, in warm, golden tones. "My friend, it will take some time before the Sanzmann Expedition of the Holden Museum will be ready to start. While you make the necessaiy personal preparations to lead us to the site of your truly astounding discovery, please oblige me by saying nothing about this to our -- alas -- unscholar ly and often sensational press. Eh?" Dr. Sanzmann's rosy face broke into a thousand wrinkles; tears of joy and gratitude rolled down his cheeks. Dr. Turbyfil generously pretended not to see. "Imagine what a revolution this will produce," he said, as if he were thinking aloud. "Instead of being tidily extinct for fifty thousand years, our poor cousins survived into modern times. Fantastic! Our whole timetable will have to be rewritten..." His voice died away. His eyes focused on Prof. Sanzmann, nodding his head, sniffling happily, as he tied up his package. "Incidentally, my dear Professor," he said, "before you leave, I must show you some interesting potsherds that were dug up not a mile from here. You will be fascinated. Aztec influences ! This way... mind the stairs. I am afraid our cellar is not veiy well arranged at present; we have been recataloguing... This fascinating collection formerly belonged to a pioneer figure, the late Mr. Tatum Tompkins." Behind a small mountain of packing cases. Dr. Turbyfil dealt Prof. Sanzmann a swift blow on the temple with one of Uncle Tatum's tomahawks. The scholar fell without a sound, his rosy lips opened upon an unuttered aspirate. Dr. Turbyfil made shift to bury him in the farthest corner of the cellar, and to pile upon his grave such a pyramid of uncatalogued horrors as need not, disturbed for several centuries. Dusting his hands, and whistling -- a trifle off-key -- the hymn called "Bringing in the Sheaves," Dr. Turbyfil returned to the office above stairs. There he opened an atlas, looking at large-scale maps of Germany. A village named Maldenhausen, in a valley... (Where there had been one skeleton, there must be others, unspoiled by absurd sixteenthcentuiy paraphernalia -- which had no business being there anyway.) His fingers skipped joully along the map, and in his mind's eye he saw himself already in those valleys, with their lovely names: Friedenthal, Johannesthal, Hochsthal, Neanderthal, Waldenthal... beautiful valleys! Green, remote, enchanting... full of mysteries. Coincidence, was this -- a trail leading through many centuries -- and pointing to but one man? XV swept his fingers through his mane of iron-gray hair, his faded eyes bright with anger. "You're wasting my time with a pack of coincidences." The younger man's voice remained controlled and even. "I can show you plenty more evidence down at Central Archives." "What kind of evidence?" Hart zipped open his brief case, taking out a file of thin plastic photocopy sheets. "I don't blame you for doubting me. I didn't believe it myself at first. Down at Archives we correlate records from almost every inhabited world. I'd been working on the land titles of Anrac -- " "Where's that?" "A planet way out toward the Rim. I noticed that a man called Eltro Xilden owned half the main city. He claimed his father bought the property when the place was being evacuated a hundred years ago." "Evacuated, you said? Why was it evacuate?" "Anrac orbits one of the suns of a widely separated binary. It was settled three centuries ago, just after the system had been surveyed. Plenty of mineral deposits there -- they built up a big population. Then they found out the orbit of the second sun brought it in on a long ellipse, with a close approach about every two thousand years. During the last century, it came close enough to Anrac to boil the seas, and for ninety years the place was deserted. Someone called Eltro Xilden bought all the property he could lay his hands on while the planet was being evacuated -- bought it for next to nothing. Now the present Eltro Xilden must be worth billions from his holdings there -- mines, any buildings that survived the heat, land around the starport -- in fact, the best part of the city." Graden snorted. "So the father was far-sighted and the son was equally shrewd. What of it?" "Let me go on. One of the team who made the original survey of the Anrac system three hundred and fifty years ago was also a man called Eltro Xilden." Graden said nothing for a few seconds, his face expressionless. "Are you suggesting that an ancestor of these men gave wrong information -- deliberately?" "I'll let you judge that in a moment. I've spent every spare minute during the last three months down at the Archives buildings checking every reference I could find on anyone called Eltro Xilden. I found records from forty-seven planets scattered all over the Galaxy -- some of them going back before the collapse of the First Empire!" H art studied a sheet of paper. "Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, a man of this name bought out a tri-planet freight transport flt in the Ursan Group. And his signature was almost identical with the signature on a land sale document drawn up on Anrac last year. Here, look at these photostats. See for yourself." Graden looked closely from one to another of the two copies, "They're alike, certainly. Very alike." "Far too alike for coincidence. Notice the same swirling initial 'E' -- and the crossbar of the 'T' bending down to form one of the strokes of the 'X.' Here it is again, on a copy of a mining contract made on Tau Ceti #, about three hundred years before the earlier of those two." Graden undamped his jaws with an effort. see what you mean. A remarkable similarity." He looked piercingly, almost angrily at Hart. "Are you trying to suggest this is the work of the same man?" "I am." Graden looked from one of the photostats to another, his lips moving slightly. "And these are not all?" Hart shook his head. "As you go back beyond that, the trail becomes a bit indefinite. The earliest reference I found to the name was in an article on psycho-electronics printed over a thousand years ago. The writer referred to experimental work done by a man called Eltro Xilden on a planet called Zeno. But I couldn't make a direct check. All I know is that Zeno was a small, independent culture that was wrecked in the collapse of the First Empire." "Are you sure the place was called Zeno?" "Yes." Graden rose to his feet and walked slowly across his study to a wall-recess. He poured two drinks and handed one to Hart. "I wonder," he said, half to himself. He looked sharply down at the younger man. "I recall that Zeno used to figure in one of the more extravagant legends that grew up in the Dark Era between the collapse of the First Empire and the beginning of the Second Expansion. It was said that the Zenians had discovered the secret of the indefinite lengthening of the human life. Did you know that?" Hart shook his head. "Never heard of it. How was it supposed to work?" "As far as I know, it's never been treated as anything but a fable for centuries. Varying stories, of course, ranging from simply a slowing up of the process of aging to a continuous renewal of youth." He took a careful sip from his glass. "Psycho-electronics, eh? Throws the legend into a different light, doesn't it?" "I think it all fits." "Perhaps. I think we have something worth investigating here. But tell me one thing: Why did you come to me?" Hart's eyes were cool and steady. "Two reasons. First, you have plenty of money, enough not to miss paying my fare to Anrac. Second, you're -- well, old enough not to want to go all that way and tangle with a man like Xilden yourself, yet close enough to the end of your life to value the chance of prolonging it." Graden flushed momentarily. Then tlie fire went out of him as quickly as it had ignited. He looked away. "You're right. I have nothing to lose -- and a lot to gain. But have you thought of this? Other men must have stumbled on Xilden's secret during the past thousand years. What happened to them?" Hart's smile was hard and taut. "I can look after myself. Well, is it yes or no?" "Yes, of course," said Graden. B y the time he landed on Anrac, some of Hart's confidence in his ability to handle the situation had evaporated. It had been a long, long journey out here to the Galaxy's Rim. It had needed three changes of starships to complete the voyage, and with each vast leap outward into the void he had found himself in a culture more individualistic, more divergent from the pattern of civilization that he had thought to be universal. From Anrac, most of the Galaxy was visible as a spindle-shaped haze of light to one side. In the other direction lay only a thin sprinkling of stars against the empty dark, and the scattered flecks of light of other galaxies at unimaginable distances beyond. Hart, who liked to think of himself as a man who knew his wav about, was acutely aware of the immense separation between him and everyone he knew. "You're way out on your own," he told himself mirthlessly as the ship dropped toward Anrac's surface. The starport was a rocky plain that stretched level as a table to distant crimson mountains that filled the western horizon. East and north, the faroff buildings of Anrac City gleamed with many-tinted metal and crystalline towers, some of them spearing a low bank of misty cloud. Low in the east, the primary sun was rising, a huge red disc behind bars of thin stratus. The second sun was high in the southwest, with the fierce arc. Riding down the escalator from the ship. Hart felt better as he breathed deeply in the thin, oxygen-rich air. Air that was rich enough to be intoxicating if he wasn't careful. He had to fight down a boyish impulse to run. The official who checked his papers in the terminal building looked at him with unpleasantly observant eyes. "What's your purpose in visiting Anrac?" "I'm collecting historical data on the evacuation," said Hart. "Couldn't you get all the data from Central Records?" "I want to interview someone here." The official's eyes were unwavering. "Who?" "Eltro Xilden." The official pressed something on his desk, muttered something into an intercom, then gestured at a line of seats. "Wait over there," he said cuitly. Hart sat on the nearest seat, looking about him. The terminal building was transparent-walled, and the intersecting beams of red and blue sunlight gave it a theatrical gaudiness that did nothing to make him feel at home. The men and women about him, mostly bare-limbed and in short, vivid tunics and capes, made his own gray suit seem grotesquely out of place. He was kept waiting until the building was almost empty. The red sun climbed the sky with maddening slowness. His watch was useless for local time, and he could make no sense of the clock on the wall, which had nine divisions and three differently colored hands, one of which made its full circuit in about half an hour. It had beeji around twice when his name boomed from a loudspeaker. "Lon Hart, Flight #, report to Room #." He walked down to the room indicated and the translucent door slid open as he approached it. A tjfiin, hawkfaced man sat behind a black plastic desk. "Sit down," he said. As Hart sat, he remained motionless for fully a minute, reading a paper in his hands. Then he looked up sharply. "You said you wanted to see Eltro Xilden. Is that right?" "Right. Fm collecting data on -- " "Thank you." The words cut his sentence like a knife. "I may as well tell you at once; Nobody sees Eltro Xilden." H art met the hawk-faced man's eyes. He reminded himself silently that the man in front of him was a thirdrate official on a tenth-rate planet. He took a notebook from his brief case and spent some seconds opening it at a fresh page. "Let's get this all straight," he said. "What's your name?" The official's somber eyes wavered to the notebook, skittered to the name-board on his desk, then returned to Hart's face with a somewhat changed expression. "That's of no importance," he said quickly. "I'm not putting any restrictions on you. I'm just telling you the simple fact that Xilden refuses to see anyone. " Hart looked at the nameboard, copied the name unhurriedly into his notebook, lifting the book so that the other man couldn't see what he was writing. He made meaningless squiggles on the page until he heard the official swallow noisily, then looked up at him again. "Who gave you the information that Xilden doesn't see anyone?" He kept his pen poised over the notebook, and it gave him some satisfaction to see that the official was watching it as though hypnotized. "Everyone here knows that. Xilden is probably the most important man on Anrac -- he's president of Anrac Consolidated, and that controls every major company on the planet. Also, he's quite old. Leaves everything to his managers and directors, and to his granddaughter -- she's the only person he sees now, I believe." "Where can I contact her?" The official hesitated, his eyes on the notebook. "I don't know. Try the offices of Anrac Consolidated." Hart walked out of the terminal building on to a wide platform, from which the line of a magnetic shuttle ran straight across the plain to the distant city. He smiled as he recalled the official's description of Xilden : "He's quite old." The understatement of ten centuries. The bulletlike shell of the shuttle whistled across the plain; its internal stasis-field killed any sensation of movement. Hart stepped out on another platform at the side of a large square within the central part of the city, looking up at the towering buildings. Some of them were burnedout shells, with empty window-holes showing as black rectangles in discolored metal walls -- silent evidence of the ferocious heat that had seared Anrac during the close approach of the blue sun. Most of the larger structures had been reconditioned and were obviously in use again, but the city was still relatively empty of people and vehicles. took him to the offices of Anrac Consolidated, out of the center of the city, facing a park in which young, recently planted vegetation was beginning to spring up. He looked at the building from outside for a minute or two -- it was less imposing than he had expected -- then walked into the reception room. As soon as he gave his name at the desk, the receptionist checked her appointment pad. "Lon Hart? You're expected." She buzzed someone on the intercom, while Hart glanced about him uneasily. The hawk-faced official back at the terminal had acted quickly. A door slid open and a thickset man faced him. "Will you come this way, Mr. Hart?" He led the way into a bright, bare office with a desk and two chairs, gesturing to Hart to sit down. He sat opposite and pressed his fingertips together. "I understand you wish to see the Chief. What's the nature of your business?" liberate, Hart said, "I want some information on Tau Ceti -- on the mines there. I believe your Chief is the only man who can give it to me." "Never heard of the place." "This was a very long time ago," said Hart. The thickset man looked at him fixedly. "I see," he said. He glanced at a huge visithe office. "I think I'd better put you in touch with Sula. That's the Chief's granddaughter. She's the only one who has direct contact with him these days -- handles all his personal business." He dialed an instrument on his desk and looked toward the visi-screen again. The whole end wall seemed to vanish, as though it had opened into a large, beautifully furnished room beyond. It was obviously not a room in Anrac City. A broad window in the far wall overlooked a wild sweep of coastline with crimson cliffs, white surf and turquoise water. Into the field of the screen came a tall, slender girl in a close-fitting azure dress, and Hart felt suddenly frozen. She had ash-blonde hair and dark eyes with a faint upward slant, and every movement of her body gave the effect of a catlike blend of suppleness and intense vitality. She looked questioningly at the thickepf rn o y-i "Sula," he said, "this is Lon Hart. He's come all the way from New Altair to see the Chief." The girl looked at Hart, the screen making her image incredibly lifelike. "Can I help you?" she asked. Her voice was smoothly modulated and unexpectedly deep. He found himself trying to guess her age. She might have been anything between eighteen and twenty-five -- eighteen at first glance, but with the poise and quiet sureness of a mature woman. "I'd like to see Eltro Xilden personally. I want some information from him about Tau Ceti -- and about Zeno." "Surely only a historian could tell you about Zeno," said the girl. "A historian, yes. Or a man who had lived there." Sula looked at him very steadily. Suddenly she turned to the thickset man. "Could you leave us, Carl?" Carl nodded briefly to Hart, then went out of the room, closing the sliding door behind him. The girl returned her gaze to Hart, looking him over as though he were a new species of animal. He had a moment of inspiration. "How do you know I'm not from Zeno myself?" he asked. "It's unlikely, isn't it? Zeno was abandoned a very long time ago." Her smile was naive, girlish, except for the calm watchfulness of her eyes. "Unlikely, yes, but it's not impossible." "I think you had better come out here to the house," she said. "I'll get an aircar to pick you up there in a few minutes." She touched something on a console and the picture faded from the screen, leaving Hart staring at a blank silver wall. A lone, Hart grinned savagely, driving his fist into his palm. It had been easier than he had ever dreamed. But as he waited on the roof of the building, watching an aircar drop toward him from Anrac's violet sky, a nagging thought began to creep into his mind. It was easy so far, yes -- too easy. He took out the tiny solenoid pistol he had bought on one of the planets where he had changed starships on the way out here to the Rim. It had been made to look like a cigarette lighter. Small, but the only weapon he dared to carrJ Once he had identified himself, the pilot of the aircar said nothing to him. He relaxed in the back seat, watching the rectilinear net of Anrac City's streets and avenues swinging below as they headed northward along the coast. Here and there across the scorched ied countiyside were groves of quick-growing tamarisks and other alien vegetation obviously introducedsince the evacuation and return. The aircar must have covered a hundred and fifty miles before the pilot swept down over a curving bay walled with crimson cliffs. He landed in a courtyard of a large white house of synthetic stone, with an iridescent blue roof. There was nobody in sight. Hart felt a twinge of uneasiness -- as he climbed out of the aircar, he had the uncanny feeling of being watched. The pilot took off almost immediately, and Hart stood in the courtyard for a minute watching the aircraft dwindle to a speck in the sky to the southward. He turned toward tlie house. "Come to the door by the yellow bushes." It was Sula's voice, coming through the hot, still air from some amplifier he couldn't see. He walked across the blue-tiled courtyard toward a group of bushes like giant lemon-yellow cacti, and a door slid silently open to reveal the cool interior of the house. He hesitated, looking around the wide sweep of horizon. There was not another building in sight. Apart from the far-off hollow roar of surf on the beaches at the foot of the cliffs, the only sound was the pounding, pounding, pounding of the pulse in his ears. "Come on in." He whirled to find Sula standing within the doorway. She was even more beautiful than he had thought -- the visiscreen had only hinted at the freshness and youth of her. Without speaking, he went into the house, following her along the quietly furnished hail and into a huge lounge with transparent walls overlooking the sweep of red and turquoise coastline he had seen on the screen. A tall, gaunt old man with white hair and bleak, wintry blue eyes stood in the center of the room. Sula turned back to Hart with a dizzyingly brilliant smile. "Here's the man you crossed half the Galaxy to meet," she said. "My grandfather -- Eltro Xilden." Hart felt Xilden scanning every part of his body, returning again and again to his face. For the first time for many years, he found himself at a loss for anything to say. Had he not known Xilden's fantastic history, he would have put the man's age at a well-preserved hundred. He wore a plain green robe that hung slackly from a large, bony frame. When he spoke, his voice had an incisive harshness. "You've come all the way from New Altair to meet me," he said. "Why?" H art swallowed. He was acutely aware of the isolation of the house, of the fact that if he were to die in this place, nobody could ever trace him. Normally he found no difficulty in telling a lie. But now his life might depend on it. He was conscious of the seconds slipping mercilessly by while those chill eyes bored into his -- eyes that must have seen every possible gambit used over and over again. "I'm making an investigation for Central Archives," Hart said. "We've noticed your name has been prominent on a number of worlds -- at different times." Xilden held up a thin, blueveined hand. "Young man, you must forgive me if I appear rather blunt. What do you want?" "I'm afraid I don't follow." The old man snorted. "I watched your conversation with Sula over the screen. You mentioned Zeno -- a. planet that was wiped out a thousand years ago. No doubt you've heard of the legend that the Zenians had the secret of prolonging life. I don't know what data you've found out about me, and I'm not going to bother to ask. This situation has come up before." "I was merely carrying out an investigation -- " "Unoriginal. Almost every man who has tried to make inquiries about me has used that story. Do you know why you are the only one in half a century who has got this far?" Hart was about to say he didn't understand, but he realized the uselessness of fighting a thousand yeais of experience with apparent innocence. "No," he said. "Sit down," invited Xilden. Hart and Sula sat on two of the magnetic-suspension chairs in the room, and Xilden lowered himself stiffly into another. "It's because of her," he said. Hart looked at Sula, who was sitting demurely with her hands clasped in her lap. "You know Fm quite old." Xilden's voice shook witli a senile chuckle. "Perhaps even older than you think. And no matter what the legends say about the Zenians, no man can make the human body last forever. I want to see my granddaughter's future assured." Hart felt himself thrown completely olf balance. Sula lifted her eyes to his and smiled. "You must forgive Eltro -- he has absolutely no tact," she said. Xilden rose shakily to his feet and went slowly out of the room. Hart looked in bewilderment at the girl. "Have I got this straight?" he asked. "Did he mean -- ?" She went to a large and ornate bar and poured out two glasses of emerald-gieen liquid. She handed one to Hart, and as he took it he noticed the tapering perfection of her slim hands. The pale hair hung forward across her shoulders. "Is Eltro really your grandfather?" he asked. She sipped her drink before replying. "Not really. He's my guardian. He knew my parents." "A man called Eltro Xilden was a member of the research team that gave wrong data on Anrac's orbit three hundred years ago. A man called Eltro Xilden wrote an article on psycho-electronics on Zeno a thousand years ago. It v'as the same man, wasn't it?" steady on his. Slowly she smiled, a calm, secretive smile. But she said nothing. "You're very beautiful," he said, and was surprised that he had said it. It was as though the words had come from him of their own volition. "I'm glad you think that. From the moment I saw you on the visi-screen, I wanted to meet you. Eltro doesn't want to see anybody these days, but when I told him, he -- he didn't mind my asking you here." She was sitting very close to him. Her hair brushed his face as she put her lips close to his ear. "It's quite true that Eltro can prolong life. He's performed the treatment on himself very many times." "Has he performed it on you?" "Well, of course!" He pulled back in alarm. "Then -- " A small, delighted laugh rippled through her. "Silly! I'm twenty! I have a long time ahead of me, that's all." She put her hands on his shoulders and held herself away from him at arm's length, her head slightly to one side. "I'm so glad you came here! I'll ask him to give his treatment to you. He likes you already -- and he'll do it if I ask him." All at once she became serious. "You have no illnesses, have you? That might complicate the treatment." "None!" he said, his heart thumping almost deafeningly. "Not a one!" She sprang to her feet with the lightness of a gazelle. "I'm going to ask him right now!" She ran out of the room. Hart stood up and walked across to the windows, looking down over the sea. He smacked his fist against his palm. Of all the incredible luck -- it didn't seem possible that things could have run so smoothly for him. To come halfway across the Galaxy to make an almost hopeless attempt to find the greatest secret a man could have -- and then have it handed to him freely, with the love of an attractive girl thrown in ! Once again he felt the disguised pistol in his pocket, and grinned happily that he didn't have to rely on anything so puny. He was still looking down at the distant surf when Sula and Xilden came slowly back into the room. The old man's arm rested across the girl's shoulders, and his wintry eyes scanned Hart calculatingly, as though summing up every detail of his personality. "You really like him, my dear?" he asked Sula. "I really do." She tilted her head on one side, looking critically, mischievously at Hart. "I always liked blue eyes, and I just love that mop of black hair! Of course,, he could look a little more confident." Xilden's gaunt frame shook with a senile cackle. "Maybe we could change that. Eli, dear?" "I'm sure we could." The girl looked up at him, and they both laughed. Hart felt a stab of jealousy at the intimacy between them. er wing of the house, Xilden made him sit in a metal chair, while the girl stood looking on. Along one wall was a fantastically complex mass of electronic equipment with a strangely makeshift, jury-rigged appearance. Xilden fitted a metal helmet with innumerable hair-thin wires on Hart's head, and strapped metallic contacts to various parts of his body. Hart knew sudden fear. Xilden had only to put a highvoltage current through the contacts, and his secret was safe! As if she knew what Hart was thinking, Sula stepped forward and put her hand on his. He remained tense, torn between fear and anticipation, the two opposing thoughts keeping his mind thrashing in a circle. "I think it's about time I took another myself," muttered Xilden to the girl. "You remember how to operate the dials, Sula?" "I remember. You get in the other chair." Xilden climbed stiffly into a similar chair on the far side of the room. He sighed, looking down at his hands. The girl slipped a second helmet over his head, strapped contacts to his gaunt body similar to those he had fitted to Hart. "Ready?" she asked. "Ready, dear," said Xilden. Hart felt something like a violent electric shock contorting his muscles... Blaclmess... the blackness of an abyss. A weird sensation of looking at his own body, squirming in the chair as the currents went through it. Then nothingness... He felt a leaden sense of fatigue, and the light hurt his eyes when he opened them. His mouth was dry, and when he tried to speak, his voice was a shaky croak, as though the muscles of his lips and throat were partly out of control. Through the inertia of utter exhaustion, he heard a deep, ringing laughter, almost like his own laughter, yet somehow freer and more exultant. "A good choice, Sula! The best I've had in centuries!" H art forced his eyes open. Colors looked slightly different, outlines of objects slightly blurred. The helmet and contacts had been taken away, but when he tried to rise to his feet, his body didn't respond properly. He looked down at the loose green robe, the skinny, aged legs, the knotted blue veins on the clawlike hand gripping the arm of the chair. Across the room, Sula and the tall, black-haired young man turned -- and Hart realized he was looking at a man who could have been a double of himself, but with a poise, an assurance that had never been his. The man walked across and stood looking down at him. As he blinked up, Hart's watering eyes took in the vertical crease between the brows, the tiny scar on the angle of the jaw, the small mole on the side of the neck. And then the realization he had been fighting against came in on him like an avalanche. He was looking at his own body. And these gnarled hands he held up in front of him were the hands of Eltro Xilden. He fainted. turned, he was lying on rocky ground near the sea. A little way off stood an aircar. Standing over him was the man who was his double. "Yes," he said, and though the voice was Hart's, the inflections were Eltro Xilden's. "It's true that a man can be immortal, in the sense of being a continuously existing mind with an accumulating reservoir of experience. Unfortunately, it needs a succession of bodies." Hart shook uncontrollably. "You can't do this!" "I can. I have -- many, many times." "You planned all this from the beginning! You deliberately left a trail for me to find!" "Naturally. It takes a good mind to puzzle it out and a good body to make the trip -- and I want both. I won't ask you to keep quiet about this. I've seen to it that people think Eltro Xilden is a senile idiot, anyway, and anything you say will confirm it." Sula came along from the aircar and stood beside him. "Ready, dear -- or do I call you Lon Hart?" "Don't like that name much. Think I'll change it." The girl smiled up at him. "Why don't you change it to Eltro Xilden?" "Not tired of him yet?" She pressed her cheek against his shoulder. "Never in a thousand years!" They went toward the aircar together. Hart stumbled to his feet, but when he tried to run after them, he fell headlong. As the car took off, he beat his fists in furv A. against the ground, his eyes scalded with tears. The aircar dwindled into the empty sky. James H. Schmitz, after much too long a sabbatical from science fiction, tive seasonal warmth, and builds to as cold a chill as ever this planet has cutest pets -- and the worst dilemma -- you are likely to meet. Charles L. Fontenay and Miriam Allen DeFord lead the lenhy parade of short wit. A fine issue. Don't pass it by. Sitting The difference between hunter and hunted isn't intelligence -- it's who does the shooting! shimmering mote drop#ped toward the to the east. Like a silver mirror, it captured the luster of the sinking sun and hurled it back sparkling toward the city. A band of smudge-faced boys, their feet rooted in the dust of the play lot, stared at the point of scintillating brilliance. Four women, poised before the entrance of a supermarket, strained to watch. In the downtown district, a stock broker paused in midsentence as the reflection danced through the window. His client tensed, leaned forward for a better view. For a long while the radiant mote hovered, soaking up the shadows of dusk that drifted from the surface like a mist. Then it dropped quietly, hiding itself in a subtle contour of the plain. "Come on !" shouted a blond tyke as he retrieved the football. "We ain't got all night." The women in front of the supermarket exchanged glances, then dispersed, three going on into the store while the fourth trundled off her cart of groceries. Turning from the window, the broker thumbed through a stack of papers. "Here's an attractive investment..." Hundreds closer to the site said the mote was a great sphere of gleaming metal. But when the first detachment of Guardsmen pushed across the plain hours later that Friday night, they found nothing -- or practically nothing. day when Ray Kirkland ringed the hat rack with an underhanded toss and shrugged off his topcoat, together with the chill of the plain that clung to it like a clammy film. He was a large, thick-shouldered man with a blunt face and stout jaw. Ralston, the managing editor, laced him with a caustic eye. "You sure took your time getting back." "Thought I'd try to squeeze a few more quotes out of Stoddard for the last edition," said Ray. "Did the general find out where they dropped down?" "As I said on the phone, they pinpointed it with Geiger counters. But, like in the first twelve landings, there weren't any other kinds of marks. " Ralston, a tall, gaunt man with wiry graying hair, leaned back. "Did the general have any theories?" Ray shrugged. "The usual. No cause for concern -- would have acted by now -- probably setting down to replenish water or oxygen." The editor made a sound that was somewhat like a sarcastic grunt. "I suppose he didn't venture an opinion on why they have to land close to cities to get their water and oxygen ? " "No. But he did suggest they might be so superior that they'd have nothing to gain by coming in contact with us." Ralston squinted quizzically "Stoddard," Ray explained, "put it this way : If one of our naval ships had to land on a primitive island to fill its water tanks, the crew wouldn't want to get involved socially with the savages." The other chewed thoughtfully on a pencil. "At least that's a different line of speculation. Put your new lead on it for the final." Ray started for his desk. "Kirkland!" one of the reporters called. "Telephone -- your father-in-law." "That you, Ray boy?" the receiver rasped eagerly in his ear when he picked it up, "Drop by Clark's store and bring home a box of number five shells, will you?" "Duck season doesn't open for another week," Ray reminded him, annoyed. The old man laughed. "Nothing like being prepared. And don't forget, son -- you're going out in the marsh with me tomorrow." Ray slumped in the chair. He'd forgotten about the blind. A hell of a way to spend Sunday. And Alice would sulk if he didn't pamper the old boy. law sat across the table, half hidden behind a mound of decoys that congregated around his plate as though it were a lush feeding pond. "As I figure it," Ray was saying, "since all these landings were close to cities, there must be a purpose behind them in connection with the cities. There ought to be some tangible results. I'm sure if I looked close enough, I might find something that's different from what it was yesterday." "But giving up your Sunday!" Alice exclaimed. "I won't have that! You do enough for that paper." He hunched forward. "But think of the recognition I could get... His voice trailed into silence as she merely shook her head. The old man pushed a pair of dusky brown pintails out of the way and straightened with no small amount of resentment. "Tomorrow's the only day we have to fix that blind, son," he said sobei'ly, "if we're going to be ready for Saturday. " Ray cast him a glance of sullen hostility. "But don't you understand. Dad? There's been a landing near here and -- " "And try to get back from that swamp early, Raymond," Alice broke in. "There's a new house in the subdivision that may be just what we're looking for. It's on that corner lot -- where you said you'd like to build." Enheartened at the unexpected prospect of not having to spend his entire day in the swamp, he smiled gratefully. But his smile changed to a puzzled frown. "There's no house on that corner." "Of course there is, dear. A small Cape Cod. I walked past it at noon." "It wasn't there when I drove by this morning," he insisted. The existence or nonexistence of the Cape Cod remained unsettled as Alice, disinterested, busied herself with gathering up the dishes. Dad proudly picked up two green-winged teals with stupid blunt heads and stubby necks. He held one in each hand. "It'd take a darn smart duck to be suspicious of these, wouldn't it, son?" particularly tedious and frustrating as Ray subordinated his professional interest in the reported landing to the whims of his father-in-law and paddled down a narrow waterway. The raucous squawks of the mallard hen, as produced by the old man's duck call, made the monotony no more endurable as they reached a pond adjoining the central lake. A flock of sleek-headed canvasbacks hugged the northern edge of the pothole. The lead male, tense and alert, stretched his neck to keep a wary eye on the skiff. Two females, preening themselves in the reeds along the shore, looked up in alarm. Several of the younger ducks clustered uneasily, training their beady eyes alternately on the lead bird and the skiff as it glided through the slough into the lake. When Ray glanced back over the top of the saw grass, the ducks had recovered froip the intrusion. The lead male was swimming among the others, as though reassuring them. The two hens on shore had returned nonchalantly to their preening. And the yearlings were dispersing from their cluster and spreading out boldly once more over the surface of the pothole. Two of the larger males left the main group and swam over to the clouded water where the skiff had passed. They glided in circles, inspecting the area curiously. Ray paddled into the blind and helped his father-in-law onto the platform. But the structure was only half concealed by the reeds they had used to camouflage it the year before. The old man reached back into the boat and untied Uis bundle of tools, arranging a saw, hammer, pliers and roll of wire on the platform. The lead canvasback from the pothole was in the air now. Flying over the lake, he dipped down occasionally to touch the water and peer into clumps of saw grass. "Damned drakt's trying to see where we went," Dad said T irately. "Wouldn't want him to get wise to our setup and louse things up for next Saturday." The big duck rose higher, banked and came in directly over the blind, squawking stridently as it spotted the men. Dad reared up from the sack of tools, clutching his twelve-gauge automatic. His florid face fi'oze in an expression of delight as he swept the butt to his shoulder and sent the barrel arching past Ray's shoulder. Instinctively, Ray hurled himself on the platform. The gun went off, its spread of number-five shot roaring by within searing range of his face. "Got him!" the old man shouted exuberantly. T he shotgun blast was still a far-away buzzing in his ear as Ray drove up in front of the Cape Cod that afternoon. Surrounded by new shrubbery, it was a neat little bungalow that surveyed the freshly turned ground around it. "See?" Alice said smugly. "I told you they built on this corner. " The sign next to the walk identified it as a product of Castle Estates, Inc., and announced that the four-kitchen, one-and-a-halfbedroom home was open for inspection. Ray did a double-take. The sign (lid say "four kitchens." "Wait here," he told Alice, still skeptical that a complete house could have been built in less than three days. "I'll see if the agent's inside." At the entrance, he pushed the bell. But the button wouldn't budge. Defects, so soon ? He tried the buzzer again, gave it up, and knocked on the door. But with the first rap, his fist went through the oak paneling as though it were crisp cardboard. Swearing, he tried to pull his hand from the shattered panel. The door came off at the hinges and folded over limply as it fluttered to the ground. "For goodness sake, Raymond!" Alice called impatiently from the car. "What are you doing?" Confounded, he entered. But there was no inside to the house. From the landing, he stepled down onto a mud floor with a sickly matting of brown, sun-starved grass. Overhead was the inverted "V" of the roof -- no ceiling joists, no rafters. And the walls -- it was as though they had been poured from a mold, with imperfections here and there in the form of raised ridges, like seepage seams from matrices that had failed to match evenly. Tipping his hat up off his forehead, he walked around surveying the eviscerated house. Probably something new in prefabricated construction, he decided. Might bear looking into for a Sunday supplement yarn. Backing toward the door, he started as something sharp nudged him in the side. He turned and almost knocked over a contraption he hadn't noticed before. Mounted on spindly legs, it resembled a surveyor's transit, with the telescope pointed through a window in the general direction of a row of ligustrum plants. Interested, he inspected the thing, running his hand over its slick metal surface. His fingers touched a protuberance on the side of the cylinder and an almost inaudible, high-pitch humming erupted in his ear, crescendoed until it ended with an abrupt clich. He thrust his hands guiltily into his pockets, hoping he hadn't disturbed some delicate adjustment that might make a construction worker catch hell the next day. Turning to leave, he almost tripped over something else he hadn't noticed previously -- a wax-leafed ligustrum plant that lay on the mud floor, its roots shining and moist as though it had just been plucked from the soil. Outside, as he strode toward Alice's impatient grimace, his eyes swept the row of ligustrums. There was a breach in the hedge where a vandal had no doubt uprooted the plant. V ours!" exclaimed August S a n d i f e r, developer. "Castle Estates doesn't deal in cracker boxes! We have a motto: 'Every Castle-Built Home Is a Home-Built Castle' and..." Ray eased the receiver farther from his ear. On his desk before him was spread the Monday morning mail edition with its story of the two new landings -- one east of Denver and the other near San Diego. "You mean you didn't build the Cape Cod?" "It wasn't there Friday," Sand if er snapped. "It's there now. That's all I know about it." "How do you suppose it got there?" "One of those prefab outfits must have gotten their deliveiy addresses mixed. We've got the city permit division out there now. If they can't tell us who is responsible, we're going to put a match to the damned thing!" Ray checked with the permit office before he sent out a photographer. Then he started in on the story, featurizing it heavily : Kitchens City officials and a local housing developer were stumped today over the enigma of a misplaced piefabricated house... It rated a byline and a spot on the bottom of page one for the first street edition. Sample copies of the run were shuttled up from the press room just as Balston came in. The managing editor settled down in his chair, spread the paper on his desk and promptly recoiled ceilingward, bellowing, "Kirkland! Come here!" Ray went over uncertainly. "You walked into this damned thing wide open!" Balston's eyes darted incriminatingly from the front page to Ray. "Don't you know a promotion trick when you see one?" "It's no publicity stunt," Ray objected. "Sandifer didn't come to us. I went -- " Exasperated, Balston brushed him aside. "Hawkins!" he shouted at the city editor. "Get that thing out of the paper and find something legitimate for Kirkland to do!" "Ray," one of the reporters called from a rear desk. "Sandifer's on the phone again. Says that house is gone -- and two of his agents with it." The managing editor shot up and spun around. "Tell him to peddle his promotion stuff somewhere else ! " Ray went over to the city editor's desk. "I didn't think he'd take it that way," Hawkins sympathized. "Check this out for a lossible human interest angle." He reached into the assignment book and selected a classified ad clipping : giant mutated sea horse, complete with Jmrness and aqua-sled. Apply Dr. Whitmore Vandell, Rt. #, Sand Beach. T he advertisement, whatever its purpose, had drawing power, Ray conceded as he turned off the highway toward the dumpy white frame structure that squatted half in the water like a centipede on its creosoted pilings. There were three cars pai-ked randomly on a level area a short distance from the beach house. A fourth was throwing up a dust barrage on the road ahead of him. By the time he drew uj) next to the newly arrived vehicle, its driver was threading his way among boulders and scrubby groi:h towai-d the house. Ray sat in the car and traced the man's progress along the path -- behind a rock, across a sandj" stretch, behind a bush... There was the annoying, high-pitch buzzing of a mosquito in his ear and he fanned the air to chase it away. His eyes, however, remained on the last bush behind which the man had disappeared. A minute passed and still he hadn't emerged. Curious, Ray started down the path, keeping the bush and house in sight. But when he reached the spot where the man should have been, he wasn't there. Tense and suspicious, he stood staring hesitantly at the house. His shadow was an almost black patch on the intensely white sand. The muffled sound of surf on rock was a subdued whisper. In the distance, a gull circled above the water, wailing plaintively. An abrupt movement l)eyond a window on his right attracted his attention. Through the pane he saw a small, tubular object resembling a compact telescope on a tripod. It was a duplicate of the transitlike instrument in the window of the Cape Cod ! 'The tube swiveled in his direction and he squinted to make out the shadowy form that lurked behind it -- something huge, not human. Thin, jointless arms extended from a rotund and scaly gray torso to coil like tendrils around the transit. An even more bulbous head swung around with the instrument, following him as he backed away from the house in fright. If there were eyes in that head, they were hidden in a mass of scales and lesser tendrils. Bristling with fear, he remembered the transit in the Cape Cod and the high-pitched humming it had produced when he touched the tube. It was a sound suspiciously similar to the buzzing of the mosquito he had heard onl' minutes earlier -- at the same time the man had vanished from behind the bush! The telescope steadied on him and he whirled and raced toward the nearest boulder, skirting a clump of bushes and flushing a startled seagull from concealment behind the foliage. The humming sounded again and the bush disappeai ed, as though it had been uprooted and flung out of sigl'it at a speed too fast for the eye to follow. Gone too was the gull in midflight. H e dived behind the rock, remembering the ligustrum he had almost stumbled over in the Cape Cod. Now he was certain the plant hadn't been there before he touched the transit ! The high-pitched note wailed again and he felt the rock vibrate before him. Apprehensively, he pressed closer against the boulder. Some of it made sense now. He had suggested looking for a purpose behind the landing, scouting for effects that hadn't existed before. Was this -- and the Cape Cod too -- part of those effects? "Help me! Please help me!" He started. The cry had come from the house. One of the windows on the side was open and a young woman in a torn dress, her face strealced with terror, leaned half out, screaming. "Jump!" he called. "Run along the beach! They've got the thing pointed this way!" Her slim white hands gripped the sill, but she only stared frantically at him, paralyzed with terror. "Help me! Please help me!" He seized a rock and hurled it at the transit in the front window. It went wild, crashing against the house. The second hurtled through the window but missed also. The third hit the tube squarely and it toppled out of sight. Bolting around to where the girl was, he seized her arm and hauled her over the sill. "Help me ! Please help me !" He grabbed her hand to race away, but she almost collapsed. He slung her over his shoulder, running along the bluff and leaping into a gully that chielded them from the house. Climbing out of the shallow ravine at a point close to his car, he set her on the ground. She swayed, then steadied. But there was only panic on her face. "Help me! Please help me!" Her eyes were focused beyond him and her cries were unchanged from the first time he had heard them. Suddenly confounded, he backed away. The girl only stood there, repeating her desperate plea. Then he saw the rough ridge that ran from her temple, along her cheek, neck and shoulder and down the outside of her arm -- like imperfections in an object cast from a matrix. Sickened and horrified, he reeled back to the car. Her unvarying cries followed him as her lips moved, but too methodically and not in synchronization with the words. He sent the car plunging up the dirt road toward the highway. When he looked back, the girl wasn't there any longer -- nor were the other four cars and the beach house. But there was something else, speeding above the road behind him -- a vague symmetrical shadow, like the merest suggestion of an oval-shaped cloud. He reached the highway and swerved recklessly into the stream of traffic. Through his rear-view mirror, he watched the patch of dense haze pause at the intersection, as though confused. Then it turned and streaked off southward, gaining altitude. In its path, perhaps ten miles away, a fragment of silver glistened radiantly in the sky, R ay pounded his fist on the managing editor's desk. "Sure I came straight back here. You think this is the kind of thing you go chat with Chief Johnson about?" "So you came here instead, expecting to find me less skeptical ?" Balston demanded. Ray bent over tensely. "Don't you see? The Cape Cod, the beach house, the landing, the ad in the paper -- they're all connected! And there are other ads that look phony. Check the paper. You'll see them." The managing editor sat up. "Look, Kirkland. Mow'd you like to take a day or two off?" "You don't believe me!" A half-dozen staff membei's, crowded around them, dispersed respectfully. Across the room, Hawkins hunched busily over the city desk, not doing a veiy good job of pretending to be preoccupied. He sighed gratefully as the phone rang and he had to answer it. "The Cape Cod, the beach house," Ray went on, "don't you see they're traps -- devices to lure people within range of those things? This may be happening all over!" "Why lure people?" Balston asked. "If they're as advanced as you're implying, they shouldn't have to use deception." "I don't pretend to have all the answers. I'm just telling you what I know. It's your job to see that the facts get to the public." The city editor replaced his phone on the hook. "State Police Headquarters," he called over, "says there's no beach house out there." Ray spread his hands. "I told you that when I came in. Didn't the Cape Cod disappear too -- after Sand if er and I found out it was just a blind ?" Balston rose and gripped his shoulder. "Take the rest of the week off. A good rest -- " Ray shrugged out from under the other's hand. "Oh, for God's sake!" "You admit you've been scouting around looking for unusual things resulting from the so-called landing?" "So I've found them!" " What ? Scaly creatu res with gooseneck arms?" There was no laughter in Balston's voice. But it was heavily implied. "What'll you do when people start turning up missing?" "We have never been a sensational newspaper," the managing editor said, "and we don't intend to create panic now. So don't be difficult, Kirkland. Take a week off, then see how you feel." H ands thrust dejectedly in his pockets, Ray trudged toward the parking lot. Ahead, a crowd jammed the sidewalk in front of a gaudily decorated department store that flew a festooned banner: Lesser pennants advertised : "#-Ounce Telavidco -- #!" "Combination Washer-Shaver -- # !" "Bicycle -- #; Tricycle -- #; Quadricycle -- # !" Drifting slowly up from the roof of the building were two of the almost indiscernible patches of dark haze. A third was descending. Squinting, he located the speck of silver that hung steady overhead, almost lost in the blue. He pushed into the wedge that was pouring in through the main entrance. "Wait!" he shouted, arms upraised. "Don't go in ! They'll kill you!" The man pressing against him laughed. "You crazy? This is a publicity stunt." "What won't they think of next!" the woman next to him exclaimed, smiling. Abysmally, Ray thought of a vast formation of ducks flying high over a blind occupied by a persistent caller... several of the hens wavering in flight, impatient to set down among the decoys... the irate lead drake seeing through the phony setup and quacking his alarm... the other birds ignoring his warning and peeling off to plunge to the destruction that waited below. Caught up in the tide of eager bargain-seekers, he was swept into the store and deposited in a long aisle where a young couple stood examining a console television set. The man propped his elbow on top of the cabinet and his arm promptly plunged right through the paneling. Confounded, he backed away. The buzzing sound of the transit was barely audible as man and wife vanished. B acking away fearfully, Ray saw the metal tube and its tripod -- high on a shelf against the wall. To the left, flanking the next row, was another ; to the right, a third. The faint humming sounded again -- and again -- and again. He turned and bolted for the entrance. But the press of the crowd was too great, so he lunged for the back of the store. At the end of the aisle, he swerved to race along the wall looking for another exit. But he tripped over a carton and his impetus carried him lieadlong into the rear wall -- through the wall -- as easily as his fist had gone through the door of the Cape Cod! He regained his feet in a darkened room and stood staring terrified at a huge scaly thing like the one he had seen in the window of the beach house. A transit, its collapsed tripod gripped in the coil of a gooseneck arm, was slung over a protuberance that might have been a shoulder. Its other tendril was wrapped tightly around the necks of a lifeless man and three women who hung in a cluster. The thing tensed and faded into an almost indiscernible shadow, only the transit remaining visible. Then the instrument swung towai'd Ray. He lunged for the sidewall, diving through it as though it were made of papier-mache. The alley outside, however, was narrow and the force of his sprawling leap sent him crashing into the brick wall of the next building. Dazed, he rose shaking iis head and staggered toward the sidewalk. But he pulled up sharply, cringing against the wall. Farther down the alley, an area of shadow seemed to be striving for materialization. It drifted on toward him. He lurched out onto the sidewalk and melted inconspicuously into the stream of shoppers. When he paused a block away to look back, there was no sign of the vague oval shadow. Then he thought suddenly of Alice and sprinted for the parking lot. God, they might throw up a booby trap anywhere -- even in his own neighborhood ! While racing home, his suspicions were twice verified... A man whose motions were too mechanical stood on the roof of a supennarket tossing down dollar bills; but the throng below was too preoccupied to notice a woman on the veiy edge of the crowd vanish, a delivery boy go next. Closer to home, a theater which he was sure hadn't been there two days earlier offered free admission for the first showing of "Marriln Monrow" in Bus Halt. H e jolted the car to a stop in the carport and swept in through the kitchen dooi'. His father-in-law sat at a table honing a hunting knife. "Home early today, ain't you, son?" "Where's Alice?" Ray asked frantically. The old man brushed three decoys out of the way to make more room for the sweep of Ills hand over the stone. "At the neighbor's... You suppose we ought to spend Friday night at the lodge?" Ray hunched over the table. "Dad, how smart are ducks?" "Too danged smart sometimes. Take that big canvasback I shot down over the blind -- " "I mean do they ever get wise to our decoys, our blinds "Damned right." His fatherin-law ran a thumb delicately over the edge of the blade. "Some of 'em loiow what a gun means, too." "Do they all go for a duck call?" "A good caller can fool any duck, no matter how smart it is." "Alice!" Ray said in fright. "Dad, we've got to find her!" "Why so excited?" She stepped in from the dining room and deposited a partly embroidered tablecloth next to the decoys. He started for her, but the phone rang and he crossed over to the extension to answer it first. "For God's sake, get the hell back here!" It was Ralston. "You were right. People are missing all over !" "I'm on my way." Ray slammed the received down and grabbed his hat. "Why so excited?" Alice asked again. "Don't go outside!" he ordered. "There's no time to explain. But stay in the house till you hear from me!" The old man followed him to the door. "Don't get tied up this weekend. Tlie season starts Saturday, you know." Ray paused, half in the car. "I'm afraid it's already started." Alice's strained voice floated after him. "Why so excited ?" He was halfway down the drive when he tensed and jammed on the brakes, realizing Alice had bogged down on the phrase "Why so excited?" -- just as the woman-thing at the beach house had on her plea for help. Then he saw the patch of haze hovering ominously above the house, casting an even more tenuous shadow over his car. Pai'alyzed, he sat there gripping the wheel. Alice stumbled awkwardly out of the kitchen door. Through the windshield, he watched her turn clumsily toward him. She came forward in a halting stride -- hut her feet weren't even touching the pavement! post of the carport and slie tottered momentarily, then keeled over, falling against the side of the house. One of her arms snapped off neatly along a shoulder seam and rolled grotesquely down the driveway. She lay on her side, her legs continuing to pump uninterrupted in their walking motion, like an overturned mechanical doll. Gears clashed as he sent the car lurching back into tlie street, then plunging forward toward the business district. The woman-thing at the beach-house hadn't been a personalized decoy, but this Alicething had. That could mean only that they were now after him specifically! Why? Because he had discovered their pattern of blinds and ruses? Because he had exposed it partially through the article on the Cape Cod? Had intruded and escaped at the beach house and again at the department store? Of course that was it! He had the knowledge to reveal in detail what was happening. And unless they eliminated him -- just as his father-inlaw had eliminated the canvasback that had discovered the blind -- he could ruin their sport ! The whole concept was vast and appalling. Sportsmen from who only knew how far away, finding a spot teeming with what to them was only game, descending and setting up their blinds, preparing their decoys, perfecting their human calls... An oval shadow darkened the surface of the street behind him and he leaned out the window to glance up. The thing that had been over the house was following -- overtaking him! The pressure was on him pei'sonally now, just as earlier it had been on the lead duck in the swamp! But there was a way he could escape! If he succeeded in alerting the flock -- if he got his story in print and had the wire services pick it up and carry it all over -- there would no longer be any point in eliminating him. And he would then have just as good a chance as the rest of the game! But the sjTnmetrical haze was already maneuvering in position over the car. He whipped the wheel around and careened into an alleyway, hurled the door open and dived out. He hit the asphalt surface at a speed too great for his legs to take and tumbled over, rolling into the recessed freight entrance of the building on the left. The shadow clouded the alley as his car crashed into the other building. Then the car vanished and the shadow went away. Minutes later, after the pain had subsided in the abrasion burns along his forearm and thigh, he crept out to the street and continued groggily toward the newspaper office. He was fighting mad. tiently as he entered the news room. "For God's sake! Get it down on paper -- quick!" At his desk, Ray sat motionless for a moment, arranging his mental notes before beginning the story. He stared around the room. No shadows -- not yet, at least. Hawkins was hunched over his desk reading copy. Two reporters were busy taking calls over the telephone. The staccato of the clacking keys in the glass-enclosed teletype room was a muffled distraction that plucked annoyingly at his concentration. Finally the lead of the story began taking form in his mind and he squared away in front of the typewriter. "Get it down on paper -- quick!" Balston broke in impatiently on his thoughts. He ran a sheet of paper through the roller and began knocking out the story. "For God's sake! Get it down on paper -- quick!" Ray froze with his hands poised above the keyboard. He pivoted slowly toward Ralston. From his position, he could see behind the managing editor's desk... Ralston existed from the waist up only. From there down, a slim pedestal held him upright. And the shadows were in the news room. He could see them now -- one in the far corner close to the ceiling, another behind the glass in the teletype room, a third hovering bobind the immobile Hawkins at the city desk. And the transits were there too -- one half hidden in back of the water cooler, the tube of another pi'otruding from behind the copy desk, still another poking out above Hawkins' shoulder. They all swung around slowly, carefully focusing on him. None of the other blinds had worked, he realized, and remembered what his fatherin-law had said : "A good caller can fool any duck, no matter how smart it is." And then he heard the first note of the high-pitched whine. With world population exploding unthinkably faster than even the grimmest Malthusian ever predicted, threatening to double within the lifet'mes of many now living, the threat of woi-ld hunger dominates the thinking of responsible leaders -- and challenges scientists into producing solutions at an equally unthinkable rate:  Mechanized farming -- in a decade and a half since #, farmers have installed # more machinery, most of it unthought of before World War II. Half our total farm pi'oduction is done by only slightly more tiian # of the total number of producers, and if the trend toward giant fai-ms continues, the other # could combine to increase their output tenfold.  Chemical fanning -- use of fertilizer has inci'easod fourfold, from a than double the investment. Antibiotics, hormones and scientific feeding put weight on animals and fowl at a totally unprecedented rate, making them ready for market heavier, tenderer and at less cost per pound -- dthin five years, a three-pound chicken will be possible in only six weeks, a fully grown steei' in only a few months.  Genetics -- by intensive hybridization, hardier and more quickly maturing and better-bearing plants, trees, vegetables, fruits and animals are constantly being manufactured by biological engineei'ing, enabling areas to produce faxther north and south, and in di # or overmoist places, than had been thought possible only a decade ago.  Farming the sea -- schools of fish are now spotted by sonar, soon will be herded like cattle, fed like poultry; shellfish are planted and forced, protected by underwater fences; seaw'eed is grown and harvested intensively. For every weapon there was a defense, but not against the deadliest weapon -- man hovered three thousand feet above Tammany Square. The cool cybrain surgicall implanted in him was working on the problem. But Lane had no more patience. They'd sweat, he thought, hating the chill air-currents his hovering and that. He glared down at the three towers bordering on the Square. He spat, and watched the little white speck fall, fall. Lock me up in barracks. All I wanted was a little time off. Did I fight in Chi for them? Damn right I did. Just a little time off, so I shouldn't blow my top. Noio the lid's gone. He was going over all their heads. He'd bowled those city cops over like paper dolls, back at the Armory. The black dog was on Lane's back. Old Mayor himself was going to hear about it. Why not? Ain't old Mayor the CinC of the Netvyork Troopers? The humming paragravpaks embedded beneath his shoulder blades held him motionless above Newyork's three administrative towers. Tammany Hall. Mayor's Palace. Court House. Lane cursed his stupidity. He hadn't found out which one was which ahead of time. They keep Troopers in the Armory and teach them hoiv to fight. They don't teach them about their own city, that they'll be fighting for. There's no time. From seven years old up, Troopers have too much to learn about fighting. The Mayor was behind one of those thousands of windows. Old cybrain, a gift from the Trooper surgeons, compliments of the city, would have to figure out which one. Blood churned in his veins, nerves shrieked with impatience. Lane waited for the electronic brain to come up with the answer. Then his head jerked up, to a distant buzz. There were cops coming. Two black paragrav-boats whiri'ed along the translucent underside of Newyork's anti-missile forceshield, the Shell. Old cybrain better be fast. Damn fast! The cybrain jolted an impulse through his spine. Lane somersaulted. Cybrain had taken charge of his motor nerves. Lane's own mind was just along for the ride. Jn stiff dive position. He began to plummet down, picking up speed. His mailed hands glittered like arrowheads out in front. They pointed to a particular window in one of the towers. A predatory excitement rippled through him as he sailed down through the air. It was like going into battle again. A little rtdwhite-and-green flag fluttered on a staff below the window. Whose flag? The city flag was orange and blue. He shrugged away the problem. Cybrain knew what it was doing. The little finger of his right hand vibrated in its metal sheath. A pale vibray leaped from the lensed fingertip. Breakthrough ! The glasstic pane dissolved. Lane streamed through the window. The paragrav-paks cut off. Lane dropped lightly to the floor, inside the room, in battle crouch. A #V set was yammering. A girl screamed. Lane's hand shot out automatically. A finger vibrated. Out of the corner of his eye. Lane saw the girl fold to the floor. There was no one else in the room. Lane, still in a crouch, chewed his lip. The Mayor? His head swung around and he peered at the #V set. He saw his own face. "Lashing police with his vibray," said the announcer, "Lane broke through the cordon surrounding Manhattan Armory. Two policemen were killed, four others seriously injured. Tammany Hall has warned that this man is extremely dangerous. Citizens are cautioned to keep clear of him. Lane is an insane killer. He is armed with the latest military weapons. A built-in electronic brain controls his reflexes -- " "At ease with that jazz," said Lane, and a sheathed finger snapped out. There was a loud bang. The #V screen dissolved into a puddle of glasstic. The Mayor. Lane strode to the window. The two police boats were hovering above the towers. Lane's mailed hand snapped open a pouch at his belt. He flipped a fist-sized cube to the floor. The force-bomb "exploded" -- swelled or inflated, really, but with the speed of a blast. Lane glanced out the window. A section of the energy globe bellied out from above. It shaded the view from his window and re-entered the tower wall just below. Now the girl. He turned back to the room. "Wake up, outa-towner. " He gave the blonde girl a light dose of the vibray to slap her awake. "Who are you?" she said, shakily. Lane grinned. "Trooper Lane, of the Newyork Special Troops, is all." He threw her a mock salute. "You from outa-town, girlie. I ain't seen a Newyork girl with yellow hair in years. Orange or green is the action. Whatcha doing in the Mayor's room?" T he girl pushed herself to her feet. Built, Lane saw. She was pretty and clean-looking, very out-of-town. She held herself straight and her blue-violet eyes snapped at him. "What the devil do you think you're doing, soldier? I am a diplomat of the Grassroots Republic of Mars. This is an embassy, if you know what that means." "I don't," said Lane, unconcerned. "Well, you should have had brains enough to honor the flag outside this window. That's the Martian flag, soldier. If you've never heard of diplomatic immunity, you'll suffer for your ignorance." Her large, dark eyes narrowed. "Who sent you?" "My cy brain sent me." She went openmouthed. "You're Lane" "I'm the guy they told you about on the #V. Where's the Mayor? Ain't this his place?" "No. No, you're in the wrong room. The wrong building. That's the Mayor's suite over there." She pointed. "See where the balcony is? This is the Embassy suite. If you want the Mayor you'll have to go over there." "Whaddaya know," said Lane. "Cybrain didn't know, no more than me." The girl noticed the dark swell of the force-globe. "What's that out there?" "Force-screen. Nothing gets past, except maybe a full-size blaster-beam. Keeps cops out. Keeps you in. You anybody important?" "I told you. I'm an ambassador. From Mars. I'm on a diplomatic mission." "Yeah? Mars a big city?" She stared at him, violet eyes wide. "The planet Mars." "Planet? Oh, that Mars. Sure, I've heard of it -- you gotta go by spaceship. What's your name?" "Gerri Kin. Look, Lane, holding me is no good. It'll just get you in worse trouble. What are you trying to do?" 'T wanna see the Mayor. Me and my buddies, we just come back from fighting in Chi, Gerri. We won. They got a new Mayor out there in Chi. He takes orders from Newyork. " Gerri Kin said, "That's what the force-domes did. The perfect defense. But also the road to the return to citystates. Anarchy." Lane said, "Yeah? Well, we done what they wanted us to do. We did the fighting for them. So we come back home to Newyork and they lock us up in the Armory. Won't pay us. Won't let us go nowhere. They had cops guarding us. City cops." Lane sneered. "I busted out. I wanna see the Mayor and find out why we can't have time off. I don't play games, Gerri. I go right to the top." Lane broke off. There was a hum outside the window. He whirled and stared out. The rounded black hulls of the two police paragrav-boats were nosing toward the forcescreen. Lane could read the white numbers painted on their bows. A loudspeaker shouted into the room : "Come out of there. Lane, or we'll blast you out." "You can't," Lane called. "This girl from Mars is here." "I repeat. Lane -- come out or we'll blast you out." Lane turned to the girl. "I thought you were important. "  hands together, calmly looking at him. "I am. But you are too, to them. Mars is you're right across the Square from the Mayor's suite." "Yeah, but -- " Lane shook his head and turned back to the window. "All right, look! Move them boats away and I'll let this girl out!" "No deal, Lane. We're coming in." The police boats backed away slowly, then shot straight up, out of the line of vision. Lane looked down at the Square. Far below, the long, gleaming barrel of a blaster cannon caught the dim light filtering down through Newyork's Shell. The cannon trundled into the Square on its olive-drab, box-shaped caterpillar mounting and took up a position equidistant from the bases of the three towers. Now a rumble of many voices rose from below. Lane stared down to see a large crowd gathering in Tammany Square. Sound trucks were rolling to a stop around the edges of the crowd. The people were all looking up. Lane looked across the Square. The windows of the tower opposite, the ones he could see clearly, were crowded with faces. There were white dot faces on the balcony that Gerri Kin had pointed out as the Mayor's suite. The voice of a #V newscaster rolled up from the Square, reechoing against the tower walls. "Lane is holding the Martian Ambassador, Gerri Kin, hostage. You can see the Martian tricolor behind his forceglobe. Police are bringing up blaster cannon. Lane's defense is a globe of energy similar to the one which protects Newyork from aerial attack. " Lane grinned back at Gerri Kin. "Whole town's do'l there." Then his grin faded. Nice-looking, nice-talking girl like this probably cared a lot more about dying than he did. Why the hell didn't they give him a chance to let her out? Maybe he could do it now. Cybrian said no. It said the second he dropped his forcescreen, they'd blast this room to hell. Poor girl from Mars, she didn't have a chance. Gerri Kin put her hand to her forehead. "Why did you have to pick my room? Why did they send me to this crazy city? Private soldiers. Twena Shell like worms in a corpse. Earth is sick and it's going to kill me. What's going to happen?" Lane looked sadly at her. Only two kinds of girls ever went near a Trooper -- the crazy ones and the ones the city paid. Why did he have to be so near getting killed when he met one he liked? Now that she was showing a little less fear and anger, she was talking straight to him. She was good, but she wasn't acting as if she was too good for him. "They'll start shooting pretty quick," said Lane. "I'm sorry about you." "I wish I could write a letter to my parents," she said. "What?" "Didn't you understand what I said?" "What's a letter?" "You don't know where Mars is. You don't know what a letter is. You probably can't even read and write!" L ane shrugged. He carried on the conversation disinterestedly, professionally relaxed before battle. "What's these things I can't do? They important?" "Yes. The more I see of this city and its people, the more important I realize they are. You know how to light, don't you? I'll bet you're perfect with those weapons." "Listen. They been training me to fight since I was a little kid. Why shouldn't I be a great little fighter?" "Specialization," said the girl from Mars. "What?" "Specialization. Everyone I've met in this city is a specialist. SocioSpecs run the government. TechnoSpecs run the machinery. Troopers fight the wars. And ninety per cent of the people don't work at all because they're not trained to do anything." "The Fans," said Lane. "They got it soft. That's them down there, come to watch the fight. " "You know why you were kept in the Armory, Lane? I heard them talking about it, at the dinner I went to last night." "Why?" "Because they're afraid of the Troopers. You men did too good a job out in Chi. You are the deadliest weapon that has ever been made. You. Single airborne infantrymen!" Lane said, "Thejtold us in Trooper Academy that it's the men that win the wars." "Yes, but people had forgotten it until the SocioSpecs of Newyork came up with the Troopers. Before the Troopers, governments concentrated on the big weapons, the missiles, the bombs. And the cities, with the Shells, were safe from bombs. They learned to be self-sufficient under the Shells. They were so safe, so isolated, that national governments collapsed. But you Troopers wiped out that feeling of security, when you infiltrated Chi and conquered it." "We scared them, huh?" Gerri said, "You scared them so much that they were afraid to let you have a furlough in the city when you I  came back. Afraid you Troopers would realize that you could easily take over the city if you wanted to. You scared them so much that they'll let me be killed. They'll actually risk trouble with Mars just to kill you." "I'm sorry about you. I mean it, I like -- " At that moment a titanic, ear-splitting explosion hurled him to the carpet, deafened and blinded him. He recovered and saw Gerri a few feet away, dazed, groping on hands and knees. Lane jumped to the window, looked quickly, sprang back. Cybrain pumped orders to his nervous system. "Blaster cannon," he said. "But just one. Gotcha, cybrain. I can beat that." He picked up the black box that generated his protective screen. Snapping it open with thumb-pressure, he turned a small dial. Then he waited. Again an enormous, brainshattering concussion. Again Lane and Gerri were thrown to the floor. But this time there was a second explosion and a blinding flash from below. Lane laughed boyishly and ran to the window. "Look!" he called to Gerri. T here was a huge gap in the crowd below. The pavement was blackened and shattered to rubble. In and around the open space sprawled dozens of tiny black figures, not moving. "Backfire," said Lane. "I set the screen to throw their blaster beam right back at them." "And they knew you might -- and yet they let a crowd congregate ! " Gerri reeled away from the window, sick. Lane said, "I can do that a couple times more, but it burns out the force-globe. Then I'm dead." He heard the #V newscaster's amplified voice: " -- approximately fifty killed. But Lane is through now. He has been able to outthink police with the help of his cybrain. Now police are feeding the problem to their giant analogue computer in the subbasement of the Court House. The police analogue computer will be able to outthink Lane's cybrain, will predict Lane's moves in advance. Four more blaster cannon are coming down Broadway -- " "Why don't they clear those people out of the Square?" Gerri cried. "What? Oh, the Fans -- nobody clears them out." He paused. "I got qne more chance to try." He raised a mailed glove to his mouth and pressed a small stud in the wrist. He said, "Trooper HQ, this is Lane." A voice spoke in his helmet. "Lane, this is Trooper HQ. We figured you'd call." I  "Get me Colonel Klett." Thirty seconds passed. Lane could hear the clank of caterpillar treads as the mobile blaster cannon rolled into Tammany Square. The voice of the commanding officer of the Troopers rasped into Lane's ear : "Meat-head! You broke out against my orders! Now look at you!" "I knew you didn't mean them orders, sir." "If you get out of there alive, I'll hang you for disobeying them!" "Yes, sir. Sir, there's a girl here -- somebody important -- from Mars. You know, the planet. Sir, she told me we could take over the city if we got loose. That right, sir?" There was a pause. "Your girl from Mars is right. Lane. But it's too late now. If we had moved first, captured the city government, we might have done it. But they're ready for us. They'd chop us down with blaster cannon." "Sir, I'm asking for help. I know you're on my side." "I am. Lane." The voice of Colonel Klett was lower. "I'd never admit it if you had a chance of getting out of there alive. You've had it, son. I'd only lose more men trying to rescue you. When they feed the data into that analogue computer, you're finished." "Yes, sir." "I'm sorry. Lane." "Yes, sir. Over and out." Lane pressed the stud on his gauntlet again. He turned to Gerri. "You're okay. I wish I could let you out. Old cybrain says I can't. Says if I drop tJie force-globe for a second, they'll fire into the room, and then we'll both be dead." G erri stood with folded arms and looked at him. "Do what you have to do. As far as I can see, you're the only person in this city that has even a little bit of right on his side," Lane laughed. "Any of them purple-haired broads I know would be crazy scared. You're different." "When my grandparents landed on Mars, they found out that selfishness was a luxury. Martians can't afford it." Lane frowned with the effort of thinking. "You said I had a little right on my side. That's a good feeling. Nobody ever told me to feel that way about myself before. It'll be better to die knowing that." "I know," she said. The amplified voice from below said, "The police analogue computer is now hooked directly to the controls of the blaster cannon battery. It will outguess Lane's cybrain and check his moves ahead of time." Lane looked at Gerri. "How about giving me a kiss before they get us? Be nice if I kissed a girl like you just once in my life." She smiled and walked forward. "You deserve it, Lane." He kissed her and it filled him with longings for things he couldn't name. Then he stepped back and shook his head. "It ain't right you should get killed. If I take a dive out that window, they shoot at me, not in here," "And kill you all the sooner." "Better than getting burned up in this lousy little room. You also got right on your side. There's too many damn Troopers and not enough good persons like you. Old cybrain says stay here, but I don't guess I will. I'm gonna pay vou back for that kiss." A "But you're safe in here!" "Worry about yourself, not about me." Lane picked up the force-bomb and handed it to her. "When I say now, press this. Then take your hand off, real fast. It'll shut off the screen for a second." He stepped up on to the window ledge. Automatically, the cybrain cut in his paragrav-paks. "So long, outatowner. Now!" He jumped. He was hurtling across the Square when the blaster cannons opened up. They weren't aimed at the window where the little redwhite-and-green tricolor was flying. But they weren't aimed at Lane, either. They were shooting wild. Which way now? Looks like I got a chance. Old cybrain says fly Hght for the caiinons. He saw the Mayor's balcony ahead. Go to hell, old cyhmin. Pm doing all right by myself. I come to see the Mayor, and Pm gonna see him. Lane plunged forward. He heard the shouts of frightened men. He swooped over the balcony railing. A man was pointing a blaster pistol at him. There were five men on the balcony -- emergency ! Years of training and cybrain took over. Lane's hand shot out, fingers vibrating. As he dropped to the balcony floor in battle-crouch, the men slumped around him. He had seen the man with the blaster pistol before. It was the Mayor of Newyork. Lane stood for a moment in the midst of the sprawled men, the shrieks of the crowd floating up to him. Then he raised his glove to his lips. He made contact with Manhattan Armory. "Colonel Klett, sir. You said if we captured the city government we might have a chance. Well, I captured the city government. What do we do with it now?" L ane was uncomfortable in his dress uniform. First there had been a ceremony in Tammany Square inaugurating Newyork's new Military Protectorate, and honoring Trooper Lane. Now there was a foiTnal dinner. Colonel Klett and Gerri Kin sat on either side of Lane. Klett said, "Call me an opportunist if you like. Miss Kin, my government will be stable, and Mars can negotiate with it." He was a lean, sharpfeatured man with deep grooves in his face, and gray hair. Gerri shook her head. "Recognition for a new government takes time. Fm going back to Mars, and I think they'll send another ambassador next time. Nothing personal -- I just don't like it here." Lane said, "Fm going to Mars, too." "Did she ask you to?" demanded Klett. Lane shook his head. "She's got too much class for me. But I like what she told me about Mars. It's healthy, like." Klett frowned. "If I thought there was a gram of talent involved in your capture of the Mayor, Lane, I'd never release you from duty. But I know better. You beat that analogue computer by sheer stupidity -- by disregarding your cybrain." Lane said, "It wasn't so stupid if it worked." "That's what bothers me. It calls for a revision in our tactics. We've got a way of beating those big computers now, should anyone use them against us." "I just didn't want her to be hurt." "Exactly. The computer could outguess a machine, like your cybrain. But you introduced a totally unpredictable factor -- human emotion. Which proves what I, as a military man, have always maintained -- that the deadliest weapon in man's arsenal is still, and will always be, the individual soldier." "What you just said there, sir," said Lane. "That's why I'm leaving Newyork." "What do you mean?" asked Colonel Klett. "Fm tired of being a weapon, sir. I want to be a human being." Work is the elimination of the traces of work. -- Michelangelo A i e and It just goes to show you -- do the wrong person a favor and this is what happens to an entire world! a boy the weather was better. No, really. All the rain showers from condensation of somebody's air conditioner, and the terrible cold winters because the heat is sucked in from out, and the frantic purple sunsets one night after another -- who needs a spectacle every night? And why should there be so much dust from H-tests to make them? All these things weren't. It was simple and nice, the world of my youth. Now it is not so nice, but I'm living, so I won't complain. Today was like every day. Do you understand what this means? Get up, smile like an angel when some fiend elbows his way ahead of you to the shower, turn the faucet on full and the hot water has just run out, eat, dress, work, eat, work again, eat again... and I have now used that word "eat" three times and each time, I tell you, it was a lie. Because what is eating when it's a kind of spinach Jello? Listen, I'll tell you what the wisest men might forget. A hundred years ago when I was a boy -- don't laugh, a hundred years will do it -- it was more comfortable and more interesting to be alive. Oh, positively it was not as efficient. For whoever keeps score, it is clear tliat the present way produces more units of "living" with a lower cost in raw-material-factor and work-energy-factor. Of course. It is definite that more "living" can be done if the quality is lowered, you see; and I could discuss this at length. I won't, because it is too personally painful. I once fought for wage-hour legislation and the guaranteed annual income, and to contemplate such innocence even at the distance of nearly a century is too sad for me to discuss, even not at length. to look forward to, after my battle with the bath queue, the breakfast queue, the subway queue, the time-clock queue, the lunch queue, the coffee-break queue, the returning subway queue, the dinner queue, the latrine queue, the pillow-and-sheet queue? After all this, what orgiastic pleasures to cap my day? I'll tell you what orgiastic pleasures. After all that, it was permitted that I spend two solid hours in my bunk, watching television. A hundred years ago, why, I could have done almost anything. I could have gone for a walk in the park. (A "park" is a place in a city that has trees and grass. "Trees" are like grass, only bigger. To "walk" means to go somewhere -- on foot, that is, not on the subwa,y. Once it was done for pleasure, but that was when somewhere else was different than where you already were. ) Or I could have played cards. ("Cards" are a game played among friends, sometimes for gambling although the principal object is the friendly passage of time. A "game" is -- like the panel shows on TV, do you see ? And "friends" are persons whose interests are close enough to make them want to spend time with each other.) Or I could have taken a drive to the beach. (A "beach" is -- oh, this is all too tragic.) No, you do not understand, you cannot understand. Let ne tell you about one particular day and let that answer everjd;hing. There was this sweet, sweet morning in June. It was Sunday, which meant that by the grace of God I didn't have to work in the jewelry findings business and could do what I liked. Now this will interest you : On that particular morning I got up out of a bed that no one ever slept in but me. (We were very poor, a concept which I cannot explain without fantastic trouble since the concept of poverty has disappeared from the Earth. But I must mention this, to -- to please myself is why. In that day, when I was very, very poor, I had a bed of my very own.) And once up, I took all the time I wanted in the bathroom -- subject only to the natural requirements of four brothers and a sister. Maybe there were cockroaches sometimes in the wet place under the linoleum, but there were no coin slots on any of the equipment. I then ate breakfast. Breakfast! It began with a glass of orange juice. Two pieces of shredded wheat (this would be familiar to you, I regret to state; you would hardly think it strange at all if tomorrow it should turn up in the Adult Ration at Midtown Serving Center.) But on the shredded wheat was real milk. And real sugar. And usually ( I was the oldest son, you see) a large spoonful of strawberry jam, made out of real strawberries. All this I ate. Sometimes I did not finish it. And then, I swear, what was not eaten was thrown away. Fabulous! It was never reprocessed and served again, never! However, I did not appreciate this treasurehouse of marvels which was mine to live in, at (I still remember!) # East #nd Street, Brooklyn. On the morning of which I tell you I got out of there. I went to see my friend Saul. that is a journey which cannot be duplicated any more. It was necessary to take a bus, and transfer to another bus, and then a ferry, and then another bus ; it took two hours, but what else is a Sunday morning for? And I did not begrudge it to him, not on week ends in the summer. But when I got there, he was down in the cellar, of course. I dragged him by the shoulders and showed him that there was a sun. "Interesting," he said, scratching his jaw, "and a very difficult astrogational problem. Why, the gravity field in the vicinity of the sun is nothing less than astronomical!" "I Avas showing it to you," I told him, "not so much as a problem in space travel as an object of art." He looked at me as though I had turned purple. I accepted what I could not fight. "Tell me then, Saul, what are you working on?" I ' asked, hiding behind me my bathing suit in its paper bag. He told me, that fine boy. He told me with words until I must indeed have turned purple, and then he dragged me to a blackboard and showed me some more. What did I know? He knew what he was talking about, I was sure. "Space travel?" I asked. He nodded happily. You would have thought I was a big genius like a Baruch. "But what about rocket ships?" I asked him. Saul looked at me as though Baruch had just turned into an ape. "No, not in rocket ships, Charlie McCarthy," he told me with savage affection, "but by the power of the mind." And he tapped his skull with a bent finger. where his mother owned a colony of beach bungalows. You would have understood these houses, with "rooms" that were only partitions, head high, with walls that were made of thin shingles and floors that were permanently washed with a little of sand from the beach. Outside each cottage was a shower -- hot water, or hot enough, because the bare pipes soaked in heat from the sun. Just like the baths at the Midtown Adult Dormitories, do you see? If you were first in line, you got hot water. But of course you were never first in line. Because each of those four-room bungaloAvs held tliree families -- the mommy, the kids and on weelc ends the daddy -- clubbing up to save expenses. But ul had a cellar. He lived tliere all year round, in winter when the snow was unbroken from his door to the high-water line on the sand, and no other human moved in sight ; and also in the summer. This was summer, you see. I had my bathing suit with me. It was not because I liked so well to swim -- who needs to swim? But outside that cellai of Saul's, in the streets, on the boardwalk, on the beach, were thousands and thousands of persons, one-half of whom were female. They were dressed for the sun. And Saul puttered in his cellar ! "Come, Saul," I said gently. "Go to Mars some other time. Invent a method of flying to the Moon when winter comes. Now put on a bathing suit and come with me." And I took him out to show him Girls. U p IN the morning, work, eat, work. I'm a #A, and all my days are reading and reading. From Shakespeare, Mallarme, and the orose-poems of Kahlil Gibran it is my task to extract the essential truth, the bare statement of fact, which alone deserves the space to be retained. (The other day I reduced Moby Dick to "Nineteenth-century knowledge of cetaceans was inexact.") And the secret which I clutch to my bosom is that even that job is of no real importance; it is like raking leaves for the W.P.A., a metaphor which I have not the youth to untangle for you. For once I met another # #A in the laundry queue, an old crone, a stepdame or a dowager, long withering out the waiting for my shirts. We compared notes. She had done Christopher Marlowe the month before, and I had been assigned him for my next ; she did the Beau Geste books of Percival Christopher Wren, and I had done them early the previous year. I gloated secretly over her, for she had got only that "cafard" was a Legionnaire's term for desert insanity from Wren, missing entirely the important observation that socks breed foot blisters. Then I gloated no longer. It had been barely possible to pretend the job was useful when I thought I alone did it, but ttvo of us? And where there were two there were more. And I wondered just what the file clerks did with my neatly lettered green slips headed : Synoptic Analysis of Essential Information Content of... Fill in Title and Author). They made binaiy digits of it all somehow, I suppose. But what then? So I concealed the vixen in my shirtfront and chatted with her of other things. She had drawn an April, # slot on the Mars colonization rocket. I certainly hope she lived to make it. My own emigration date is October of #. Since this will require attaining an age of more than a hundred and fifty years, I am not wildly hopeful. I can therefore look forward to a good many additional mornings of wake, dress, eat, work, eat... to spinach Jello. I suppose it is better in the colonies, or else we wouldn't all be so anxious to get there. Certainly it is less crowded. That's the trouble with atomic rockets, and of course I blame it all on my friend Saul. I can tell you a story. Once there was a very rich man who took a poor man into his house. The poor man, whose name was Ittel, ate at the rich man's table, slept in a good warm bed, wore the rich man's clothes. One night the rich man was about to eat when Ittel stopped him. "Stop," he cried, "don't eat ! " "Don't eat?" repeated the rich man, puzzled. "Don't eat," cried Ittel, and he jumped up fix)m his place at the table and rushed over to the rich man's seat. "You call that salt?" he scolded, and put more salt on the rich man's food. "But I don't like so much salt," objected the rich man, "and besides it's bad for my heart." "Heart!" scoffed Ittel. "Enjoy your food!" And he dumped the silver salt dish on the rich man's meat. "You call that pepper?" he demanded, and dumped on the pepper, too. "You call that garlic?" And he chopped up a whole clove of garlic and put that on, too. "But I'm not well, Ittel," the rich man complained. "My doctor says -- " "Doctor, schmoctor," ordered Ittel, "you paid for this salt, right? You paid for this pepper? Enjoy them." So the rich man ate, and what do you think? He had a heart attack that night and died. And what did Ittel do? The whole household was wailing and moaning, and Ittel just stood there with a scowl on his face and a lip curled in scorn. The doctor came by and saw him. "Ittel," he accused, "what's with you? This man was your benefactor ! Now that he is dead, can't you at least look sorry?" Ittel gave the doctor a look. "Sorry!" he said. "Sorry! I try to do something nice for him, and look how he pays me back ! " S O I remember my friend Saul. There he was in his cellar, and maybe he was the only man in the world who knew that the way to the planets did not lie through rockets and metal ships but ( I remember him tapping his skull) the power of the mind. I took his mind off his science. I showed him Girls. He never did anything. He was a bum all his life, this boy that maybe could have shown people and spinach Jello. I tried to do something nice for him -- and look how he paid us all back! You call that gratitude? The future lies ahead. -- Mort Sahl Certainly alien children ought to be jed... ,TSwe all sang, except Gail, of course, who was still screaming, though not as loud. "Well, now," I said jovially, glancing nervously about at the other air traffic, "what else can we all sing?" The singing seemed to be working nicely. They had stopped swatting each other with their lunch boxes and my experienced ear told me Gail wa.s by this time forcing herself to scream. This should be the prelude to giving up and enjoying herself. 'Boing down in Texas in eighteen-ninety," Billy began. "Davy, Davy Eisenhower... "A-B-C-D-E -- " sang Jacob. "Dere was a little 'elicopter red and blue," Meli chirped, "flew along de airways -- " The rest came through unidentifiably. "Ba-ba-ba," said a faint voice. Gail had given up. I longed for ears in the back of my head because victory was mine and all I needed to do was reinforce it with a little friendly conversation. "Yes, dear?" I asked her encouragingly. "Ba-ba-ba," was all I could make out. 'Yes, indeed. That Gail likes to go to Playplace." "Ba-ba-ba!" A little irritable. She was trying to say something important. "Ba-haba!" I signaled for an emergency hover, turned around and presented my ear. "Me eat de crus' of de toas'," Gail said. She beamed. I beamed. Playplace without incident, except for a man who called me an obscenity. The children and I, however, called him a great, big alligator head and on the whole, I think, we won. After all, how can a man possibly be right when faced with a woman and eight tiny children? I herded the children through the Germ Detection Booth and Gail was returned to me with an incipient streptococcus infection. "Couldn't you give her the shot here?" I asked. "I've just got her in a good mood, and if I have to turn around and take her back home... and besides, her mother works. There won't be anyone there." "Verne, dear, we can't risk giving the shot until the child is perfectly adjusted to Playplace. You see, she'd connect the pain of the shot with coming to school and then she might never adjust." Mrs. Baden managed to give me her entire attention and hold a two-and-a-half-year-old child on one shoulder and greet each entering child and break up a fight between two illmatched four-year-olds, all at the same time. "Me stay at school," Gail said resolutely. There was a scream from the other side of the booth. That was Billy's best friend. I waited for the other scream. That was Billy. "Normal aggression," Mrs. Baden said with a smile. I picked up Gail. Act first, talk later. "Oh, there she is," Mrs. Baden said, taking my elbow with what could only be a third hand. Having heard we'd have a Hiserean child in Billy's group, I managed not to look surprised. "Mrs. His-tara, this is Verne Barrat. Her Billy will be in Hi-nin's group." I was immediately frozen with indecision. Should I shake hands? Merely smile? Nod? Her hands looked wavery and boneless. I might injure them inadvertently. I settled on a really good smile, all the way back to my bridge. "I am so delighted to meet you," I said. I felt as though the good will of the entire World Conference rested on my shoulders. Her face lighted up with the most sincere look of pleasure I've ever seen. "I am glad to furnish you this delight' she said, with a good deal of lisping over the dentals, because Hisereans have foreshortened teeth. She embraced me wholeheartedly and gave me a scaly kiss on the cheek. My fiist thought was that I was a success and my second thought was. Oh, God, what'll happen when Billy gets hold of little Hi-nin? Hisereans, as I understood it, simply didn't have this "normal aggression." Indeed, I sometimes have trouble believing it's really normal. "I was thinking," Mrs. Baden said, putting down the two-and-a-half-y ear-# Id and plucking a venturesome little girl in Human Fly Shoes from the side of the building, "that you all might enjoy having Hi-nin in your car pool." "Oh, we'd love to," I said eagerly. "We've got five mamas and eight children already, of course, but I'm sure everyone -- " "It would trouble you!" Mrs. His-tara exclaimed. Her eye stalks retracted and tears poured down her cheeks. "I do not want to be of difficulty," she said. handkerchief and wore some sort of permanent-looking native dress, I tore a square out of my paper morning dress for her. "You are too good!" she sobbed, fresh tears pouring out. "No, no. I already tore out two for the children. I always get my skirts longer in cold weather because children are so careless about carrying -- " "Then we'll consider the car pool settled?" Mrs. Baden asked, coming in tactfully. "Naturally," I said, mentally shredding ray previous sentence. "We would feel so honored to have Hi-nin -- " "Do not think of putting yourself out. We do not have a helicopter, of course, but Hi-nin and I can so easily walk." I was rapidly becoming unable to think of and;hing at all because Gail was trying to use me for a merry-go-round and I kept switching her from hand to hand and I could hear her beginning to build up the ba-bas. "My car pool," I said, "would be terribly sad to think of Hi-nin walking." "You would?" 'Terribly.' "In such a case -- if it will give you pleasure for me to accept?" "It would," I said fervently, holding Gail under one arm as she was beginning to kick. And on the way home all the second thoughts began.  would be glad to have Hinin in the car pool. Four of the other mamas were like me, amazed that anyone was child all the way to and from Play place. I could count on them to cooperate. But Gail's mama... I'd gone to Western State Preparation for Living with Regina Raj'mond Crowley. I landed on the Crowley home and tooted for five minutes before I remembered that Regina was at work. "Afa-ma!" Gail began. "Wouldn't you like to come to Verne's house," I asked, "and we can call up your mama?" "No." Well, I asked, didn't I? I was carrying Gail down the steps from my roof when I bumped unexpectedly into Clay. "What is that!" he exclaimed, and Gail became again flying blonde hair and kicking feet. "Regina's child," I said. "What are you doing home?" "Accountant sent me back. Twenty-five and a half hours is the maximum this week. Good thing, too. I've got a headache." He eyed Gail meaningfully. She was obviously not the sort of thing the doctor orders for a headache. "I can't help it, honey," I said, sitting down on a step to tear anothei' handkerchief square from my skirt. "I'm going to call Regina at work now. " "Don't you have a chairman to take care of things like that?" "I am the chairman," I said proudly. "Why in heaven's name did you let yourself get roped into something like that?" "I was selected by Mrs. Badon ! "Obscenity," said Clay. It is his privilege, of course, to use this word. T he arty little store wheie Regina works has a telephane as well as a telephone, and in color, at that. So I could see Regina in full color, taking her own good time about switching on the sound. She switched on as a sort of afterthought and tilted her nose at me. I don't suppose slie can really tilt her nose up and down, but she always gives that impression. "Gail has an incipient streptococcus infection," I said. "They sent her home." "Ma-ma!" Gail cried. "Why didn't they give her a shot thei'e ? That's what they did with my niece last year. " I explained why not. Regina sighed resignedly. "Verne, people can talk you into anjdhing. There are times when you have to be firm. I work, girl. That's why I put Gail in Play place. I can't leave here until twelve o'clock." "But what'll I do with Gail?" "Take her back. Or you keep her until I get home. Sorry, Verne, but you got youiself into this." I switched off, furious. Then I remembered Hi-nin. I couldn't be furious. I was going to have to get Regina's cooperation. I picked up Gail and went into the bedroom. "I do not dislike Regina Crowley," I wrote with black crayola on a piece of note paper. I stuck it into a crevice of my mirror and gave Gail my bare-shoulder decorations to play with while I concentrated on thinking up reasons why I should not dislike Regina Crowley. "I do," Clay said, sneaking up so quietly I jumped two "So do I," I said, gazing wearily at my note. "But I have to have her in a good mood. You see, there's this Hiserean child and since I'm chairman of the car pool, I have to -- " "Don't tell me about it," Clay said. "My advice to you is get elephantiasis of youi' steering foot and give the whole thing up now." Ho glanced meaningfully at Gail, who couldn't possibly be bothering him. She was playing quietly on the floor, pulling the suction disks off my jewelry and sticking them on hei' legs. When I finally got Gail home, she sped into her mother's arms and I couldn't help being a little irritated because I had been practically swinging from the ceiling dust controls to ingratiate myself, and her mama just said, "Oh, hi," and Gail was satisfied. "By the way," I said, watching Regina hang up her dark blue hand-woven jacket, "you wouldn't mind picking up an extra child tomorrow, would you?" "Mind! Certainly I mind. I've got as much as I can do with my job and Gail and eight children in the heli already. " "It's a Hiserean child," I said. "The mother is so lovely, Regina. She didn't want us to go to any trouble." "That's fine. Because I'm not going to go to any trouble." I put my fists behind my back. "Of course I understand, Regina. I think it's remarkable that you manage to do so much. And keep up with your art things as you do. But don't you think it would be an interesting experience to have a Hiserean child in the pool ?" hand woven wrap skirt and I was shocked to see she wore a real boudoir slip to work. "Everybody to their own interesting experiences," she said, laughing at me. This was obviously one of her triple-level remarks. "De gustibus," I said, to show I know a few arty things myself, "non disputandum est." "You have such moments, Verne! Have you ever seen a Hiserean child?" "I saw one today." "Well." "Well?" "De gustibus, as you said. You know the other children will eat it alive, don't you? Your child will. Now Gail..." It's true that Gail never kicks anyone small enough to kick back. It's also true that Billy bites. I unclenched my fists and stretched up with a deep breath so as to relax my stomach and improve my posture. "Hiserean children," I pointed out, "are going to have to be adjusted to our society. As I understand it, they're here to stay. Their sun blew up behind them and personally I think we're lucky they happened to drift here." "I don't see why it's so lucky. I wish we'd gotten one of the ships full of scientific information. Or their top scientists. Or artists, for that matter. All ive got were plain people. If you like to call them people." "They're at least educated people with good sense. And we've got their ship to take apart and learn things from. And their books and, after all, some music and their gestural art. I should think you artists would find that real avant garde." "Just hearing you say it like that is enough to kill Hiserean art." "Regina, I know you think I'm a prig, but that isn't the point. And if it matters to you. I'm not a prig." "Do you wear boudoir slips?" Regina was biting a real smile. "No, I don't. But I'd like "Then why don't you?" "Because I put one on once and I thought I looked absolutely devastating and you know what my husband said?" "I won't try to guess Clay's bon mot." "He said, 'What did you put that on for?' " she popped a snap on her paper house dress. "But seriously," she said finally, "if he didn't know, why didn't you tell him?" "That's not the point. The point is I am not the boudoirslip type. My unmentionables are unmentionable for esthetic reasons only." Regina laughed again. "Really, Verne, you're not half bad when you try." "If you honestly think I'm not half bad, could you do it just as a favor to me? Pick up Hi-nin when you have the car pool?" "The Hiserean child? No." B# "Please, Regina. I'd do it for you except that the children would notice and it would get back to Mrs. His-tara. If there's anything I could do for you in return -- " "What could you possibly do?" "I don't know. But I can't go back and tell that dear creature our car pool doesn't want her." "Stoy looking so intense. That's what keeps you from being the boudoir-slip type. You always look as though you're going out to break up a saloon or campaign for better Public Child Protection. The boudoir slip requires a languorous expression." "Phooey to looking languorous. And phooey to boudoir slips. I'd wear diapers to nursery school if you'd change vour mind about taking along Hi-nin." "Would you wear a boudoir slip?" "I -- hell, yes." "And nothing else?" "Only my various means of support. And my respectability." Regina laughed her tigeron-the-third-Christian laugh. "What I want to find out," she said, "is how you manage the respectability bit." It dawned on me while I was grinding the pepper for Clay's salad that Regina had explained herself. All of a sudden I saw straight through her and I wondered why I hadn't seen it before. Regina envied me. Now on the face of it, that seemed unlikely. But it occurred to me that Regina's parents had been the poor but honest and uneducated sort that simply are never asked to chaperone school parties. And the fact is thajt they were not what Regina thought of as respectable, though it never occurred to anyone but her that it mattered. And since all her culture was acquired after the age of thirteen, she felt it didn't fit properly and that's why she went out of her way to be artyarty. W'hereas I took for granted all the things Regina had learned so painstakingly, and this in turn was what made me so irritatingly respectable. As Regina had suggested, perhaps it is the expression on one's face that makes the difference. 'TEY!" a cop yelled, pullH ing up as close to us as his rotors would allow. "What the hell?" "I beg your pardon," I said frigidly. It is very frigid in November if you are out in a helicopter dressed only in a boudoir slip. "Look de bleesemans !" Gail cried. "He might shoot everybody!" Billy warned. Meli began to cry loudly. "He might choot! Ma-ma!" "Pardon me, madam," the cop said, and beat a hasty retreat. When we landed on Hi-nin's roof, Mrs. His-tara came up with him. She looked at me sympathetically. "You are perhaps molting, beloved friend?" Her large eyes retracted and filled with tears. "Such a season !" "No -- no, dear. Just -- getting a little fresh air." I put Hi-nin on the front seat with me. He gave me a big-eyed, toothless smile and sat down in perfect quiet, except for the soft, almost sea sound of his breathing. It was during one of those brief and infrequent silences we have that I noticed something was amiss. No sea sound. I looked around to find Billy's hands around Hi-nin's throat. "Billy!" I screamed. "Aw!" he said, and let go. Hi-nin began to breath again in a violent, choked way. "Billy," I said, wondering if I could keep myself from simply throwing my son out of the helicopter, "Billy..." "It is nothing, nice mama," Hi-nin said, still choking. "Billy." I didn't trust myself to speak any further. I reached around and spanked him until my hand was sore. "If you ever do that again -- " 'Waar Billy bawled. I'm sure he could be heard quite plainly by the men building the new astronomical station on the Moon. kept him there. "That's just Billy's way of making friends," I whispered to him. Under Billy's leadership, several other children began to cry, and all in all it was not a well-integrated, love-sharing group that I lifted down from the heli at Playplace. "The children always sense it, don't they," Mrs. Baden said with her gentle smile, "when we don't feel comfortable about a situation?" "Comfortable!" I cried. It seemed to me the day had become blazing hot and I didn't #'emember what I was dressed in until I tried to take off my jacket. "My son is an inhuman monster. He tried to -- to -- " I could feel a big sob coming on. "Bite?" Mrs. Baden supplied helpfully. "Strangle," I managed to blurt out. "We'll be especially considerate of Billy today," Mrs. Baden said. "He'll be feeling guilty and he senses your discomfort about his aggression." "Senses it! I all but tore him limb from limb! That dear little Hiserean child -- " "I do not want to be of difficulty," Hi-nin said, tears pouring out of those great, big eyes. T ears were pouring out of my small blue eyes by this time and Mr. Grantham, who brings a set of grandchildren, came by and patted my shoulder. "Chin up!" he said. "Eyes front!" Then he looked at his hand and my recently patted shoulder. "Oh, excuse me," he said. "Would you like to borrow my jacket?" I shook my head, acutely aware, suddenly, that Mr. Grantham is not a doddering old grandfather but a young and handsome man. And all he thought about my bare shoulder was that it ought to be covered. "You just run along," Mrs. Baden said. "We'll let Billy strangle the pneumatic dog and everything will be just fine. Oh, and dear -- I don't know whether you've noticed it -- you don't have on a dress." I went home and sat in front of the mirror feeling miserable in several different directions. If Regina Raymond Crowley appeared in public dressed only in a boudoir slip, people would think all sorts of wicked things. When I appeared in public in a boudoir slip, everybody thought I was just a little absentminded. This, I thought, is a hell of a thing toorry about. And then I thought. Oh, phooey. If even I think I'm respectable, what can I expect other people to think? I took down the note on the mirror about Regina. No wonder I didn't like her ! I turned the paper over and wrote "Phooey to me!" with my eyebrow pencil. I was still regarding the note and trying to argue myself into a better mo when Clay came tramping down from work at three o'clock. "Why are you sitting around in a boudoir slip?" he asked. "You're a double-dyed louse and a great, big alligator head," I told him. "Don't mention it," he said, "Where's Billy?" "Taking his nap. Tell me the truth, Clay. The absolute truth." Clay looked at me suspiciously. "I'd planned on a little golf this afternoon." "This won't take a minute. I don't ask you things like this all the time, now do I?" "I still don't know what you're talking about." I took a deep breath. "Clay, is there an#d;hing about me, anything at all, that is not respectable ?" "There is not" he said. "Well -- I guess that's all there is to it," I sighed. I pulled off my boudoir slip and got a neat papei' one out of the slot, "Anyway," I said bravely, "boudoir slips have to be laundered." Clay looked at me curiously for a moment and then said, "This looks like a good afternoon to go play golf." "Do you think there's anything not respectable about Regina Crowley?" "There is everything not respectable about Regina Crowley," Clay said vehemently. "You see?" "Frankly, no." "Well, do you think her husband uses that tone of voice when he says, 'There is everything respectable about Verne Bar rat?' " "I don't know why he should say that at all." "She might ask him." "Darling, you're mad as a hatter," Clay said, kissing me good-by. "Do you really think so?" "Of course not," Clay roared as he tramped up the steps to the heli. A bout nine o'clock the next morning I heard a heli landing on the roof and I thought. Now who? There was much tooting, and when I went up, Regina practically threw Hi-nin at me. "I told you so," she snapped at me. Her face was burning red and she wasn't bothering to tilt her nose. "Wliat happened? Why did you bring him back to we?" "His hand," she said, and took off. Hand? He was holding one hand over the other. No! I grabbed his hands to see what it was. One hand had obviously been bitten off at the wrist. He was holding the wound with the tentacles of his other little boneless hand. There was very little blood. "It is as nothing," he said, but when I cradled him in my aims, I could feel him shaking all over. "It will grow back," he said. Would it? I took him in the heli and held him while I drove. I could feel him trying to stop himself from shaking, but he couldn't. "Does it hurt very much?" T   K Afl "The pain is small," he said. "It is the fear. The fear is teiTible. I am unable to swallow it." I was unable to swallow it, too. "The hand," said Mrs. Histara without concern, "will grow back. But the things within my son..." She, too, began to tremble involuntarily. "Billy," I began, feeling the blood come through my lower lip, "Billy and I are..." It was too inadequate to say it. "It was not Billy," Hi-nin said without rancor. "It was Gail." "Gail! Gail doesn't bite!" But she had, and I broke down and plain cried. "Do not trouble yourself," said Mrs. His-tara. "My son receives from this a wound that does not heal. On Hiserea he would be forever sick, you understand. On your world, where everyone is born with this open wound, it will be his protection. So Mrs. Baden warned me and I think she is wise." As soon as I got home, I called up Regina. She looked pale and lifeless against the gaudy, irresponsible objects in the art shop. "It wasn't my fault," she said quickly. "I can't drive and watch the children at the same time. I told you the children would eat..." She stopped, and for the first time I saw Regina really horrified with herself. "Nobody said it was your fault. But don't you think you could have taken Hi-nin home yourself? To show Mrs. Histara that -- I don't know what it would show." It reminded me, somehow, of the time Regina stepped on a lizard and left it in great pain, pulling itself along by its tiny front paws, and I had said, "Regina, you can't leave that poor thing suffering," and she had said, "Well, I didn't step on it on purpose," and I had said, "Somebody's got to kill it now," and she had said, "I've got a class." I could still feel the crunch of it under my foot as its tiny life went out. "Sorry, Verne," she said, "you got yourself into this," and hung up. T hat night Regina called me. "Can you give blood?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "If I stuff myself, I can get the scales up to a hundred and ten pounds." "What type?" "B. Rh positive." "Thought you told me that once. Gail is in the hospital. They have to replace every drop of blood in her body. She may die anyhow." I thought of the little fluff and squeak that was Gail. I eat de crus' of de toas'. "What's the matter with her?" I asked fearfully. "That damn Hiserean child is poison. Gail had a little cut inside her mouth from where she fell off the slide at school." "I'll be at the hospital in ten minutes," I said, and hung up shakily. "Dinner is set for seven-thirty," I told Clay and Billy, and rushed out. The first person I saw at the hospital was not Regina. It was Ml'S. His-tara. "How did you know?" I asked. Her integument was dull now and there were patches of scales rubbed off. Her eyes were almost not visible. "Mrs. Crowley called me," she said. "In any case I would have been here. There is in Hi-nin also of poison. There remains for him only the Return Home. We must rejoice for him." The smile she brought forth was more than I could bear. "Gail's germs were poison to him?" "Oh, no. He poisons himself. It is an ancient hormone, from the early days of our race when we had what your Mrs. Baden so wisely calls aggression. It is dormant in us since before the accounting of our history. An adult Hiserean, perhaps, could fight his emotions and cure himself. Hi-nin has no weapons -- so your physicians have explained it to me, from our scientific books. How can I doubt that they are right?" How could I doubt it, either? It would be, I thought, rather like a massive overdose of adrenalin. Psychogenic, of course, but what help was it to know that? Would there be some organ in Hi-nin a surgeon could remove? Like the adrenals in humans, perhaps? Of course not. If they could have, they would have. I oom where Gail was not Dale, as I had ex ed, but pink-cheeked and bright-eyed. They were probably putting in more blood than they were taking out. There were two of the other mamas from our car pool, waiting their turns. was the bed, her face ugly and swollen from crying. "She looks just fine!" I exclaimed. "Only in the last fifteen minutes," she said. "When I called you, she was like ice. Her eyes didn't move." "We're lucky with Gail. Did you know about Hi-nin?" "The little animal!" she said. "He's the one that did it." "He didn't do anything, Regina, and you know it." "He shouldn't have been in the car pool. He shouldn't be with human children at all." "He's going to die," I said quickly, before she had time to say things she'd have nightmares about later on. "Sorry," Regina said, because we were all looking at her and because her child was pink and beautiful and healthy while Hi-nin... "Regina," I said, "what did you do after it happened?" "Do! It scared the hell out of me -- that creature shaking all over and Gail screaming. At first I didn't know what had happened. Then I saw that thing flopping around on the front seat and I screamed and threw it out of the window. And then I noticed Hinin 's wrist, or whatever you call it. I said, 'Oh, God, I knew you'd get us in trouble!' But the creature didn't say anything. He just sat there. And I let the other children off and brought Hi-nin to you because I didn't want to get involved with that Mrs. Baden." "And Gail?" "She seemed all right. She just climbed in the back with the other children and prettysoon they were all laughing." "And all that time little Hinin... Regina, didn't you even pat him or hold him or kiss it for him or anything?" "Kiss it!" At that moment Mrs. Histara came in, with Mrs. Baden and a doctor behind her. I should have known. Mrs. Baden didn't leave people to fight battles alone. Mrs. His-tara looked at Mrs. Baden, but Mrs. Baden only nodded and smiled encouragingly at her. T he doctor was gently pulling the needle out of Gail's vein. The room was silent. Even Gail sat large-eyed and solemn. "Mrs. Crowley," Mrs. Histara began, obviously dragging each word up with great effort, "would it be accurate to tell my son that Gail has received no hurt from him? We must, you see, prepare him for the Return Home." Regina looked around at us and at Gail. She hadn't dared let herself look at Mrs. Histara yet. "Doctor!" Regina called suddenly. "Look at Gail's mouth ! " Even from where I was, I could see it. A scaly growth along both lips. "That's a temporary effect of the serum," the doctor said. "We tried an antitoxin before we decided to change the blood. It is nothing to worry about." "Oh." "Mrs. Ciowley," Mrs. Histara began again, "it is much to ask, but at such a moment, much is required. If you could come yourself, and if Gail could endure to be carried..." But Gail did, indeed, look queer, and she stretched out her arms not to her mother but to Mrs. His-tara. "The tides," Mrs. His-tara said, "have cast us up a miracle." She gathered Gail into the boneless cradle of her curved arms. Regina took her sunglasses out of her purse and hid her eyes. "Mind your own damned business," she told Mrs. Baden and me. "It is our damned business," I whispered to Mrs. Baden, and she held my arm as we followed Regina down the hall. Mrs. His-tara threaded her way through a cordon of other Hisereans who must have been flown in for the occasion. I couldn't see the children, but I could hear them. "Him cold!" said Gail. "Him scared!" "He's scared of you," Regina said. "We're sorry, Gail. Tell him we're soriy. We didn't understand." Gail laughed. A loud and healthy laugh. "Gail sorry," she said. "Me thought you was to eat." There was a small sound. I thought it was from Hi-nin and I held Mrs. Baden's hand as though it were my only link to a sane world. "Dat a joke," Gail said. "Hi-nin 'posed to laugh!" Then there was a silence and Regina started to say something but Mrs. His-tara whispered, "Please! It is a thought between the children." Then there was a small, quiet laugh from Hi-nin. "In truth," he said with that oh, so familiar lisp, "it is funny." "Me don't do it again," Gail said, solemn now. late that the stars were sliding down the sky and I just knew Clay wouldn't have thought to turn the parking lights on. But he had. Furthermore, he was still up. "Were you worried?" I asked delightedly. "No. Regina called a couple of hours ago." "Reghiar "She said she was concerned about the expression on your face." Clay handed me a present, all wrapped in gold stickum with an electronic butterfly bouncing airily around on it. I peeled the paper off carefully, to save it for Billy, and set the butterfly on the sticky side. inside the box was a gorgeous blue fluffy affair of no apparent utility. "Oh, Clay!" I gasped. "I can't wear anything like this!" I slipped out of my paper clothes and the gown slithered around me. Hastily, I pulled the pins out of my hair, brushed it back and smeared on some I I P K "I look silly," I said. "Pm all the wrong type." My little crayola note was still stuck in the mirror. Phooey to me. "You're laughing at me." "I'm not. You don't really look respectable at all, Verne." I ran into the dining area. "Regina told you about the boudoir slip!" I heard Clay stumble over a chair in the dark. "Obscenity!" he said. "All right, she did. So what? I think you look like a call girl." I ran into the living room and hid behind the sofa. "Do you really, truly think so?" "Absolutely !" Another chair clattered and Clay toed the living room lights. "Ah!" he said. "I've got you cornered. You look like a chorus girl. You look like an easy pickup. You look like a dirty little -- " "Stop," I cried, "while Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl ern, magazine-oriented form, has existed in this country for a third of a century. Its shape has changed and grown enormously in that time. The model of the early story was the work of Wells and Verne; its theme, the invention of a wonder -- a gadget or a process; its plot, the trials and tribulations of the inventor. By successive strokes, successive writers have broken that mold. It has taken thirty years to do it, but the horizons are wider for all of us now. It was E. E. Smith who liberated us from the what-weknow in extraterrestrial adventure. His Richard Seaton, laughable clown though he was in normal human affairs, was the first of the star rovers; he landed on planets that did not exist in the known universe, circling suns that have never been seen. A few years later Stanley G. Weinbaum peopled those planets for us with a new sort of character. The aliens of Smith or, for further example, Edgar Rice Burroughs, were human. They might have four arms and shaggy hides, like the Barsoomian apes; they might be chunky and crewcut, like the Fenachrone; they might be catmen, lizardmen, antmen, plantmen or rockmen; but they were, always and incurably, men. Weinbaum changed that. His Tweel (in A Martian Odyssey) was not human, even inside. His shape was different, but the shape was not important ; it was the difference in orientation -- in drives, goals and thought processes -- that made the Weinbaum-type alien so fresh and rewarding in science fiction in the midthirties. The third writer whose name belongs on this select list is Robert A. Heinlein. He gave us the next leg up by introducing social comment to magazine science fiction -- not so much an invention as a rediscovery (for there had been Dean Swift, Wells himself, Bellamy, countless others), but all the same an important change of perspective. These three, more than any others, changed by their own writing the whole structure of a category of fiction. What Doyle and Dashiell Hammet were to the mystery, they were to science fiction. There were these three. Perhaps now there are four. T he fourth and newest is James Blish, who has published an original science fiction novel called The Triumph of Time. Blish offers us science fiction which deals with tomorrow on its own terms. Its people are those who might live a millennium or two from now, not transplanted anachronisms from #. Blish's people have the same number of arms, legs and eyes as we, but their problems are those that come from strains we have never felt, drives we have never known. Weinbaum taught us that aliens would not think in our patterns. Now Blish comes forvard to say: "And that goes for your own grandchildren, too!" The Triumph of Time is a sequel to Blish's "Okie" stories. Probably most science fiction readers have encountered one or more of these. For those who haven't, Blish's central thesis is a two-part invention which goes like this : Given a really good propulsion system and plenty of power, there is no reason why a spaceship has to be any particular size or shape. You could even detach a city from its moorings and fly it around. Given an Earth where life is difficult and other stars where it is easier, you would detach a city ; you would travel around the Galaxy in it, doing odd jobs. Blish's central city is New York. In the earlier stories of the series. New York has displayed its motto -- "Mow Your Lawn, Lady?" -- all over the home galaxy, an Okie city of migrant workers, living by its collective wits (and the stored wisdom of those remarkable mechanical computers, the City Fathers). But at last it has settled down on a planet called New Earth, located in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. What is it like, the life on New Earth two thousand years from now? People live, love, eat and sleep ; but there are basic differences. All of us, here and now, are under a death sentence imposed in the delivery room with our first breath. Blish's hero is not : "It was, of course, perfectly possible for Amalfi (the hero of the book) to end his life; he was not invulnerable, nor even truly immortal : immortality is a meaningless word in a universe where the fundamental laws, being stochastic in nature, allow no one to bar accidents, and where life no matter how prolonged is at bottom only a local and temporary discontinuity in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The thought, however, did not occur to Amalfi; he was not the suicidal type. He had never felt less tired, less used-up, less despairing than he felt today; he was simply snarlingly bored." It is, that is to say, as though they had the maturity of our oldest citizen, and the carefree imawareness of death of a teen-ager. This is not a state of mind we can easily imagine. It makes for strange people. Strange people have strange pets: "An occasional svengali from Altair IV -- originally a rare specimen in the flying city's zoo, but latterly force-budded in New Earth labs during the fullfertility program of #, when every homesteader's bride had her option of a vial of trilby water or a gemmate svengali and frequently wound up with both among tlie household lares and penates; the half-plant, half-aninial, even nowadays a not infrequent pet -- took the breeze and hunted in the halflight of dawn or dusk. A svengali lay bonelessly in mid-lane and fixed its enormous eves on any moving object until something small enough and gelid enough to ingest might blunder near. Nothing suitable ever did, on New Earth. The two-legged victim tended to drift helplessly into that hypnotic stare until the starer got stepped on ; then the svengali turned mauve and exuded a protective spray which might have been nauseating on Altair IV, but on New Earth was only euphoric. Sudden friendships, bursts of song, even a brief and deliriously happy crying jag might ensue, after which the shaken svengali would undulate back indoors to rest up and be given, usually, a bowl of jellied soup." And the problems and objectives of the-se people are also strange to us. 'Their basic problem is the Ginnangu-Gap. What is the Ginnangu-Gap? According to Blish, a parallel, reverse universe traveling backward in time is about to intersect our own ; when they intersect, it will be the end of both; even the end of time, the end of everything. And yet these people will not die! True, says one of the characters, survival past the Ginnangu-Gap will have serious disadvantages. "The kind of survival involved will be nothing like human life as we know it. After we've described it to you, you may all much prefer to die instead. I will tell you flatly that that would be my preference." And the character elaborates : "We will then find ourselves occupying as many independent sets of four dimensions as there are people in this room, and every set completely empty. The spacesuits won't protect you long, either, because you'll be the only body of organized energy and matter in your particular, individual universe; as soon as vou disturb the metrical frame of that universe, you, the suit, the air in it, the power in the accumulators, everything will surge outwards, creating space as it goes. Every man his own monobloc. " The Triumph of Time is a triumph of inventions, great and small -- the flying cities and the anti-agathic drugs that make their citizens immortal; the svengalis and the Ginnangu-Gap. It is as if Blish had set himself to create not a story but a real universe. U nfortunately, aii There is a blackness of incomprehension, not because the light is not there but because there is so much of it, thrown so rapidly and violently without pause for blinking. But that is not the worst. What Blish should have created is not a universe but a stoiy. In the "story" elements, his book suffers harm. The jehad of the Warriors of God is irrelevant. Amalfi's love relationship with Dee is unrelated. Why must this be ? It is not a lack of talent on the part of the author. Blish can make characters live when he wills it; witness The Frozen Year or the incomparable A Case of Conscience. His Jesuit spaceman and his Arctic explorer feel and move and win us to join their pleasures and sorrows. But Amalfi never does. The Triumph of Time is not light reading, not if one wants to be aware of what is going on. It is hard to follow (and made harder because the typesetters seem to have found it so too). It requires effort from the reader -- first an effort of comprehension, second a conscious suspension of disbelief -- especially when the author invites it. (For example, this story of the end of everything is cast in the form of a history written after the end!) But it is a new area of science fiction, and like most pioneer explorations, it simply maps the outstanding features of the terrain. Those who move into it will do the detail work, but Blish rates the monument as its discoverer. books in its publishing schedule -- John Bowen's After the Rain and Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out -- Ballantine Books shows us the gently whimsical side of its nature. Both novels demolish the world ; Bowen drowns it, Maine parches it, but the results are much the same. Both are by English writers. And both have one other point in common : neither is quite successful. What John Bowen sees is a traveling rainmaker employed by the drought-stricken State of Texas. The rainmaker goes up in his balloon and pushes the button on his machine; boom, it is the end of the rainmaker as the balloon explodes, and very nearly the end of the world. The rain does not stop. Continents are submerged. Enormous storms destroy such lucky few as manage to board ships or rafts. Only a handful survive -- to find a new Mount Ararat and to found a new world. Charles Eric Maine blames it all on H-bomb tests. A crack is opened in the ocean floor, and through it the waters leak away. Only on the ice caps of the Poles is life possible at all for a few, and the story is in the attempt of the many to worm their way in among those few -- by trickery, violence, bribes or wits. Both stories have good touches of detail. Both are flatly impossible. There is not water enough in, on or around the Earth to drown it. There is not space enough under the basins of the seas to swallow them. It is a convention of science fiction writers to get around some such annoying fact by inventing a "gimmick factor" -- Garrett P. Serviss in his ancient flood novel invented a watery nebula through which the Earth passed. Neither Bowen nor Maine bothered. A valon books, which seems to be pursuing a policy of printing the worst books of the best writers in science fiction, has just given us Day of the Giants by one "Lester del Ray." A very cold winter has struck the farm of Leif Svensen, as cold as the Fimbulwinter that, in Norse legend, came before Ragnarok. That's not hard to understand, as it develops. A new Ragnarok is on its way. Mysterious strangers appear around the farm. Husky blonde women ride horses across the sky. All of them are gods, giants and the other assorted fauna of Norse mythology. And says the j acket copy, "thus Leif Svensen and his brother were caught up in the destinies of a real but alien world. For if the giants triumphed, they would then overrun Earth; and if the Aesir -- the gods -- won, Earth would be their footstool. Leif had to use his knowledge of twentieth-century technology to help the far-from-divine gods." It is incredible but true that this book is by the man who wrote Nerves. Maybe the misspelling of "del Rey" on the jacket isn't an accident but a disguise. book, The Languages of Pao. Jack Vance has a fresher theme but still a less than successful book. Vance postulates a galaxy of inter-trading but politically separate planets, each of them with a vaguely feudal economy. The freshness of Vance's theme lies in his suggestion that by changing the language of a race, you can change its character. One Palafox, a leading citizen of the wizard planet of Breakness, invents new languages for the weak-willed people of the planet Pao. Each class of Paonese now has a language of its own -- Cogitant for the thinkers. Valiant for the fighters, Technican for the machine-tenders, and so on. As the languages are constructed, so their speakers will behave. This may or may not be plausible. Vance seems to have thought it out pretty carefully, and no doubt we can take his word for it. It isn't terribly convincing as presented in the book, though. and perhaps that is because it is surrounded with so much ornamentation. The trappings with which Vance has invested his central theme are bright baubles, and distracting. There are slave girls and wizards, a secret heir to a throne and a last-minute triumph of the Good Guys under unlikely circumstances. The linguists who spread these languages, Vance tells us, in a joking mood "contrived a bastard mish-mash of a language, assembled from scraps of Paonese, Cogitant, Valiant, Technicant, Mercantil and Batch, with a svncretic syntax and heterogeneous vocabulary. This patchwoik tongue was known as Pastiche." Vance writes well --  -- but he writes with a Pastiche accent. F inally there are three new anthologies. Ballantine has brought out two more in the Star Science Fiction series -- Numbers # and # -- but as they are edited by the undersigned, perhaps this is not a place in which they should be reviewed. And Groff Conklin has just done a new collection of terror stories, called, simply, Br-r-r-! These are fantasies and good ones; and the collective point they make is that Groff Conklin is an anthologist who knows his job. Catching him was no problem; they caught him everywhere -- A foremost xenologist on Earth," the director of Extraterrestrial Investigations said to the tall man. "I know," Street said. "What do you know al)out the infamous criminal, Baker, the so-called 'Robin Hood' who is actually a scarlet fiend?" "Everything." "Surely not how he died." "Everything but that." The director put his brief case on his knees. "Mr. Street, my agency received numerous accounts of his death, or deaths, on various worlds. Can you tell me which, if any, of these stories is true by studying our intelligence reports?" "Easily," Street said. "We have had Baker under observation many times by our planted Orwells -- our peepbugs -- but you must understand that we need absolute proo on him since he has supporters even on Eaith, and in waiting for that proof, we lost contact often at vital moments." "I understand perfectly," Street assured him. I pirates?" Mrs. Fuljohn inquired of him, giggling furiously. "Yes, Virginia, there really are space pirates," Baker assured her. Mrs. Fuljohn lowered very long lashes over formidable eyes. "My first name is Christine. Will they come at us out of the void with all guns blast"I doubt it. They would want to rob the liner, not disintegrate it." Baker excused himself and strolled toward the afterdeck of "A" class. He had lied to the lady. (The hyper-Orwell focused directly on him picked up the tiny whisper of his subvocalizations.) He was a pirate, but there was one part of the cargo he did want to destroy, not steal -- the first-grade readers for the Mission Houses for Alien Natives on Ignatz XI. Men called him a traitor to the human race, but he seethed at the corruptive propaganda being fed to the swinoid youngsters of the planet. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home... This little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy had none... It was insidious, evil. It said in effect that races who shared a common ancestor with the pig had better trade with Earthmen on their terms -- on any terms -- if they hoped to go on being allowed to eat. Double-dealing EaiThmen with their devious schemes were daily robbing literalminded extraterrestrials like the Ignatz swinoids blind. Sometimes it made him ashamed to be an Earthman. Let some call him a renegade ! He was going to help these sentient beings. He had a plan, even if he lacked the armed battle cruiser that the pirates had in the teletapes. There was a small corvet waiting for him on Ignatz XI. It lacked the iestricted official light-drive of military and police craft, having only a civilian planetaryfield booster, but if all went well, it would be sufficient for his escape. Baker glanced at the dial of his watch -- it showed no telltale color of listening devices within his area. ( The detector had been sold to him by an lied.) Confident, he stepped over the chain separating him from the stairs to "B" Deck. Wurmong was waiting for him as planned. "Sz," the fat, swarthy man said, "my brother, my nephews, my cousins -- we will bring our extra luggage to the cargo hold tonight' "I'll predispose the guards. Come right into Hold #. Understand ?" "Da," Wurmong assured him. The man on watch collapsed soundlessly at a beam of nerve pressure on the neck, and Baker slipped inside, immediately beginning to eject the first-grade readers through the escape hatch by the gross. The mercenary, Wurmong, and his army of family arrived with experienced stealth and began dumping the new books from their privileged luggage. Baker replaced the contents of the opened crates with the variant readers. These volumes might be the tiny counterbalance needed to free a world of swinoids from domination by Earth. Who knew the full extent of the psychological effect of The Three Little Pigs on young, formative minds? His work done. Baker sadly regarded the precious jewels and the negotiable bonds from the registered mail. There was no way around it. This had to look like a robbery. It was necessary that he take them. Quickly, he stuffed everything into his synthetic appendix... B aker was allowed to disembark on Ignatz XI so that he might be traced to his alien fellow-conspirators. The heavy-jowled biped who greeted him at the smoky tavern was joyous. "You have done the next best thing for us to enabling us to tell your busybody missionaries to go home. We look upon you as one of our own and are hungry for the sight of you. May you remain with us long." "Too much work," Baker said, gagging over the native beer. "But I must ask you a favor. You implied you'd give me your right arm." "Anything we have is yours. But would not a cadaver's limb suit you as well as mine?" "I must escape from this world. You can give a private citizen like me something only a sovereign government can. I want the jump drive." "Not that!" "Yes! I've earned it, haven't I?" The swinoid nodded wearily. "You have. The device will be put in your spacer. Use it only in deep space." He was now in orbit. That was far enough out. Earth patrols could still pick him up observed him as he I'eached out and put a finger to the button of the device given him by the Swinoids, as Earth ships closed rapidly. He pressed the button. In a crisping flash of flame, he lit with incredible speed. II tact after the ship went up in flames. If that man was the true Baker, he was undoubtedly destroyed. Of course, we have a report from our spies on Klondike II of events running just about concurrently." "If you'll allow one interruption," Street interjected. "As a competent xenological ethnologist, I can assure you that Baker was, at least, not completely destroyed by the fire. His somewhat roasted remains would have been appropriated by the swinoids." "How so?' "These people are as similar to pigs as we are to apes. When one of their own wishes to die, as they thought Baker did, in their typical alien literal-mindedness, they dispose of his body in a special way. Remember how they said they thought of Baker as one of their own and were hungry even for the sight of him?" for two weeks across the primitive surface of the mining planet, Klondike II, to reach the shack in the gray shadow of the granite mountain. It wasn't gold he was after but escape. Unlike others seeking it, he had headed away from the saloons. But the peepbug's lens of air had followed him. Minutes later, he was knocking on the door. He had to have a means of transportation at least as good as government ships to do his work of helping the aliens, and make his escapes. At least as good, and preferably better. The door was cracked by a kind-looking old man. "You got five seconds to get, before thirty thousand volts of electricity go through those floorboards you're standing on," the old man said kindly. "Profes.sor Gentle," Baker said hastily, "I have many friends. One of them has told me you have established a major breakthrough in electronics, that you have in fact invented a machine to transmit matter as radio and television transmit sound and sight." "Some loose-lipped electronics jobber found that out, did he? Step right in." "Do you suppose I might be teleported?" Baker asked tentatively. "Of course you can, my boy. But first perhaps you'd like to take a look at some of the things I have teleported so far." Baker looked at the animals -- they ivere animals ? -- in the cages lining the laboratory. He had been hungry a minute before. Now he had trouble just swallowing. "Like making the original adjustments on a video set," the old man explained. "Hard to get your focus, your horizontal and vertical interlineation just right. There's some distortion sometimes. Sort of -- messy. " "On' soul-searching consideration -- " Baker began. "Don't take another step toward that door. I've got the floor checkerboard ed with electric grids where I can turn on the juice wherever you set your foot. Control's in my upper plate. Step in that coffin, boy. Just my little pet name for it; don't worry." luctance, Baker stepped into the left of twin vertical boxes. The lid closed in his face and locked. Before he could have time to begin worrying about his air supply, the cover sprang open, and he stepped out. "Test over?" There was an echo. A man stood in front of the second coffin. Baker had entered the one on the left and he was still in front of the left box. But he was also now in front of the cabinet on the right. He had been completely duplicated. "That damned feedback again," Gentle grumbled. In the first shock of this duplication and therefore seeming negation of his individual ego. Baker almost went mad. "You did this to me!" said Baker and Baker to Gentle, each drawing a concealed weapon and shooting tlie old man in the heart. "You two fellers drop your guns and stand still," the voice behind them said. "The professor was always saying I was the most simple-minded assistant he ever had, but I've got brains enough to pull this trigger on this old shotgun if you move." "The rest is hearsay. Those miners spyproof their towns. " ) The trial was short with Jeb, the assistant's, testimony, but the jury deliberation was unaccountably long on the primitive world where justice ran fast for a blind woman. "We waited long enough," Jeb said to the other men in the saloon. "Let's break them out of the cellar and hang 'em." The miners didn't let the jury set a precedent. They hoisted a few inside the bar and went out of Lone Splyg Hill and hoisted two more. "What have you idiots done?" the sheriff yelled as they trooped back into Klondike City. "Anticipated the verdict a mite," Jeb admitted. "That's just it," the sheriff groaned. "It was ruled justifiable homicide. Temporary insanity. At the time of the crime, each of the defendants was beside himself!" IV "this is no more than a folk legend." "Are you sure?" the direcing the report. "It can't be anything else. Granted that all the other events were true, I would know Baker was still alive -- only one, because neither could stand the threat of the other to his ego. You see, the case would never have come to trial. It would have been immediately dismissed." "Why?" "My dear fellow, both Bakers could not have been put on trial for the same murder, as any student of law would know. This would have violated the basic protection of double jeopardy." V well ahead of the law, and a place to hide out until things simmered down, that was all Baker wanted and it was what he had. He was too hot for more. ("This is how we reconstruct it from our informsaid.) For the hundredth time, he located Wister VI on the star map. It had been discovered by the Gordon-Poul expedition half a century before. Few people ever knew about it, and most of those had forgotten it. He would never have known about it himself if it hadn't been on the credentials of that bank official. With those papers he was set to spend several profitable years in the Great National Bank. He would be an alien, but somehow aliens always seemed to have more money than nativ'es on any given planet. As blastdown time approached, he read the characteristics of Wister IV and found his greatest inconvenience would be the intense sunlight from the double suns, not bright enough to burn but searched the ship for sunglasses, but all he could find were snow goggles -- a visor of black plastic with twin slits to look through. He put them on, resolving never to steal an improperly equipped spaceship again... "Howdy, pardner." The humanoid at the spacepoi't was bald and green. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, chaps, and a large gun. Nothing else at all. "Forgive my informal dress. Forgot my kerchief, boots and spurs this morning. Who might you be?" Baker gave the title of his position at the bank, explaining it would be his job to help arrange for loans to the local iancheis. "You'll find this a friendly place. Tumbleweed is an afJalt Westeim town -- we know the banker ain't always the head of the gang of rustlers." Baker learned to live with the aliens' strange obsession with the things and persons of the Old West. They were even more fanatic than terrestrial Frenchmen over the American Frontier. It was not exaggerating to say that they I'egarded the men in the old films they got from Earth as gods. They had appropriated appropriate Western given and surnames, but while there were plenty of Wills and Davys, and Rogerses and Crocketts, it was always Will Crockett and Davy Rogers. Anything other than that would be sacrilege. Baker's biggest problem was getting a good mixed martini. Everybody on Wister VI drank their rotgut straight. But by becoming friendly with the bartender, Gene Gibson, at the Golden Slipper, he managed to get his mixed drinks. "Which, do you think was faster on the draw. Matt Dilasked Baker early one evening. "I don't give a hoot, Gibson," Baker snarled, reaching for his martini. Shocked faces along the bar turned toward him, and hands moved toward loaded guns. "I meant pictures," Baker .said hastily. "I wouldn't give one of my pictures of Hoot Gibson for tvo each of Ken Maynard and Tim McCoy." "Eveiybody to his own taste," Gibson said agreeably. Baker exhaled and gulped his drink. It had been a close 'ne. But as time wore on, the habits of the West-loving aliens giated more and more on Baker's soul. He was particularly irritated by the weekly ritual every male had of riding into the sunset. Since there wore two sunsets in opposite directions, it was a long and involved and thoroughly annoying process. Tom Wayne had kept Baker waiting an hour at the Golden Slipper to discuss his loan. Baker was exasperated and dry. Local custom regarded it as friendly to not begin your drinking before your companion arrived. Gibson laid out the ingredients of the martini on the bar. "You going to wait any longer for 'Tom to finish riding into the sunset before I start mixing?" Baker whirled angrily. "Nuts to Tom! Mix!' Before the blasphemous words died on his lips. Baker saw death in the rising barrels of the vengeful six-shooters. VI much," Street said to the director. "The planet and its conditions have been verified," the director replied. "Even better reason to doubt that Baker died there. He probably was worshipped as one of the gods." "Why do you think that?" the director asked the xenologist. "Think it out for yourself. Imagine the reception that would be given to a man who stepped out of a spaceship, wearing what would appear to be a black mask, and who told these people he was the loan arranger." tor of the groundcar down until his thumbnail turned white. observed the police car of the native authorities behind Baker's vehicle, closing fast. This is how it happens, he subvocalized. A great career in interplanetary crime ends with an arrest by hick cops for selling dirty books. Why had he ever sunk so low? That was easy -- it took a stake to do anything big and he had to get a pile by selling books, after that had happened to him on Wellington I. The Decameron, Forever Amber, Pierre Louys, all the old classics like that still went over with some of the humanoid and biped races. (He had none of the newer stuff, only titles in the public domain -- he couldn't force himself to fall to the level of a literary he was slaying braces of fowl with a single stone. Lintzians were highly stimulated by intricate philosophy and mathematics. This allowed him to sell banned copies of Koizybski at outrageous prices, while at the same time introducing the native intellectuals to human semantics, a definite aid to the natives in throwing off the verbal domination by Eaiihmen. T he Humans First Lobby in the Galactic Legislature difficulties caused by the absolute literal-mindedness of most extraterrestrials, so long as they could continue to make them believe in lifetime guarantees and unbreakable toys for inventive youngsters. True, many a human traveler had lived to regret a chance remark to the effect he could eat a horse, and nobody likes to think of what happened to people who exclaimed a preference for being damned within range of obliging natives, but all in all, those were minor liabilities in the path of the infernal mawas working double-shifts to find human renegades who were teaching the semantic variations in woi'ds of human speech to aliens. On a world where philosophy and highei' math were themselves proscribed because of tiie limiting factor of narcotic colloidal reaction, he also had to reckon with native cops. He wasn't going to be able to outrun this squadcar. Baker let it pull alongside and dialed himself regretfully toward the embankment. Then as the police matched his maneuver, he switched on emergency power and sideswiped them with an ear-jarring crash. Thrown from the counterbalance of its gravitic suspension system, the squadcar sailed off as helplessly as a balloon...IV on entering his quarters. "Get my smoking jacket ! Isn't dinner prepared yet?" The turbaned, green-skinned native did what might have been called a salaam if he had been a Moslem instead of a Hindu. "Everything is in readiness, Sahib." Baker was sorry he had spoken so shortly, but somehow he always did. Ryshid understood. Baker was under a terrible strain, not knowing on him. There was also the matter of Malissa, his wife, whom he missed very much. But as a Hinduphile, a true convert, Ryshid was of a gentle and foi'giving nature. As Baker settled back in his easy chair, someone started smashing in the back door. By the time the police of Lintz reached the living room. Baker was gone. "Alas," the sergeant-major intoned, "if only the sinner had repented his purchase of the forbidden book before instead of after he finished reading it." tain of his own modest dwelling in the native quarter, Ryshid knew there was someone in the darkness, waiting for him. "I hope you don't mind, old boy," Baker said. "Didn't know where else to go to escape being hunted down." "I am overjoyed to find you well. Sahib. How did you escape?" Baker told him about his escape, but somehow his talk kept coming back to Malissa, his wife. "I tell you it would take Kathleen Windsor to describe her. She's -- but I'm a bore, Ryshid." Ryshid drew the gun with a graceful movement. "As you say. Sahib. I have read of oui traditional life in India, and as a Hindu I know what I must do when I find my home has been invaded by a hunted boar. " Ryshid squeezed the trigger.  to Street, "unfortunately destroyed our peepbug." "You were taken there," Street replied. "There is only one way to describe verbally Baker's attitude toward his man, proving this was all an act. A good Hindu would never harm Baker. His wife is built like a cow." IX gun inside his cummerbund. That was about the only place a man or woman had to hide a weapon in these times of relatively tight fashions on Earth. The gun was still there, safety oif, as he firmly expected. He settled back in his chair and glanced across the restaurant at Hastings, the traitor. An infamous outlaw such as Baker could count on few friends -- one less than even he expected. The reward on the criminal had grown sizable. Not that Thorsen was going to get any of it. All he had to do was kill the poor devil on sight. It would be foolish to say that he didn't wearied of his work. What did Baker look like? It was a good question and it would give him something to think about while he waited. On the face of the existing evidence, it was obvious that Baker had somewhere discovered some means of superlative disguise. He could so change himself with stretching, shrinking, fattening, and slenderizing that if a man knew he wasn't Baker, he had to doubt everybody and anybody else. Orders were to kill the first man who came up to Hastings at his table. He would have to shoot if it were his own father, and there wasn't too much difference, he reflected. H e was seated where he could see both the entrance and the door to the men's room. Other agents were covering the back way. Baker would have to come from the tiered front. Would Thorsen be able to kill Baker? If he got off the first shot, he would. Evening fashions were too tight for meteor shields. If he were wearing an electronic cuirass, he could tell it immediately by the twin spheres that gave that football-shoulder effect. Moreover, had anyone entered wearing such obvious armor, it would have been flashed to him. In that case, a hand bomb would have to be used, which would be unfortunate for Hastings, and possibly Thorsen. Hastings wasn't showing his fear -- he had been doped to hide that -- but he was growing more alert. Baker must be coming ! Thorsen forced himself not to give things away by reaching for his weapon yet. He fastened his attention on the two doors into the cafe. The shot blew most of Thorsen's lungs away, but the electronic wiring in his muscles him outright. He turned and managed to get off one shot before death started climbing up his arms from his fingers, and the weapon fell. He should have kept in mind that no one had ever seen Baker and lived to tell it. Now he had seen Baker and he was not going to live either. But then Baker was dead even now, in spite of Thorsen's mistake. Before he died, Thorsen took one last look at the figure with the long golden hair lying on the threshold of the ladies' room. X authentic," the director said. whole thing. But somehow in the confusion somebody stole Baker's body." "Really, Director !" Street said. "You don't actually believe Baker was a woman." "Are you suggesting a disguise?" "It had to be. Baker's body disappeared by getting up and walking away. The only way it could do that was for it to be armored. The only way Baker could get into that building was for his armor to be hidden. There was only one way he could hide the two spheres of electronic equipment necessary to project the cuirass field, and he couldn't do it if he really had been a woman." XI gun at Street. "I am at last convinced that there is only one way in which you could be so certain that Baker is not dead. You know he is alive, and you know it because you are Baker." "You are correct," Street said. "I am the celebrated Robin Hood of space. It is too great an honor to deny." "I will go into confinement for many years because of what I am about to do, but I must see the Galaxy rid of you." The director fired the lethal charge at point-blank range and the tall man tumbled to j'l'J p fl "I had to do it," the director said over the body. "It was well enough to frame you for Baker's crimes due to your suspicious knowledge of him, but I didn't know you were going to fail to protest, that you were going to go along with the lie. I couldn't stand another man living to take the honor for being Bakei. There can be no living Baker but me' on the floor and sat up. "Then you admit that you are Baker ? No, never mind firing again.  am wearing meteor armor under my clothes. It's sufficient to stop a gun blast." "You are a clever devil," the director snarled. "A man has to be clever to director shrieked. "I am!" "Are you?" the tall man said superciliously. "Think why you came here. You've been working too hard, Director. You received too many stories about Baker. You began envying him his freedom of movement. Soon you began thinking you were Baker. Your analyst sent you to me, to make you see through this legend of Baker. It was to my advantage to do so." The director wavered. "If I'm not Baker, who is?" "I told you," the tall man said, drawing a gun and shooting the director in the head. "I am." He smiled down at the body. "You weren't wearing armor, were you?" on his gun and shot the director a second time. Quickly, he stirred from his paralysis. "Sorry I had to do that, Director," Street said, "but I could see you were about to strangle me with naked hands. The important thing was to fix the idea firmly in your mind that I was Baker. If you thought I was, you would have to realize that you couldn't be. " "I do," the director said miserably as he climbed to his feet and dusted off his breeches. "But if I'm not Baker and you're not Baker, who is Baker?" "Director, just as telling your stories and hearing my answers to them cured you of believing you were Baker, the events of this story are designed to make someone remember the true identity of Baker -- that very person who now believ'es in a different personality of his own." "Who is this person who is really Baker?" the director asked. "The 'person tvho is no # V reading this story," Street said. Street," the editor of Man's True Space said across his desk. "It's fiction. There can be only one Baker and tens of thousands would read the .story in my magazine." "You are missing the point, Mr. Trent," Street said. "There is only one manuscript and it is in your hands. You are Baker. " "No," Trent said. "No." "Yes," Street said relentlessly. "Just as the director realized that he was not Baker, you must realize yoti are." Trent lay back in his swivel, gasping. "All right, all right, I admit it. I am Baker." "But you aren't really, Mr. Trent," Street said calmly. "I know you thought at one time you were Baker and then repressed the idea. But I knew at some future time the delusion might return and you would begin claiming to be Baker once more. As you said, there can only be one Baker. I am Baker." "You lie," Trent snarled. "I know the truth now. I am Baker, and there can only be one." The editor jerked the gun up from his desk drawer. The shots crashed at the same instant. Trent ran the letter spindle through his chest as he fell across the desk. Street settled back into his chair comfortably, death in his lungs from the gas bullet that had exploded against his armor. restrial Investigations opened the closet door and stepped into the office. "The fools," Baker said to himself. He had no doubt that he was the true, the original Baker. He remembered clearly that he had stepped out of the left cabinet of Gentle's transmatter, the one which he had fiist entered. (He did remember that, didn't he? Yes ! Doubting himself was the first stride down the road these two had taken.) His act to shock "Street" into realizing they were both Baker had been elaborate, but "Street" had gone schizoid. He was no copy, but there were copies of Baker, dozens of them, all helping the downtrodden aliens from terrestrial exploitation and making fortunes for themselves. There were fat ones, thin ones, tall ones, short ones, all kinds of Bakers, thanks to the refinement of Gentle's distortion factois in matter-duplicating to an exact science, a desired result, not an accident like the duplication itself. Unfortunately, in a few, physical distortion meant mental disorientation. These no longer had to merely pretend to be other people than Baker. It was too bad about them -- and about all the other Bakers who had died. He really had died in all those ways on all those worlds in all those bodies, despite "Street's" clever excuses. Still it wasn't a bad life -- helping the helpless and himself to all they could get. Yes, Baker decided, dying was a good way to make a f Terror was eating at Sharp... a?id the more it fed, the more fiercely ravenous it became! T he analyst said; "I'm Humphry s, the man you came to see." There were fear and hostility on the patient's face, so Humphrys said: "I could tell a joke about analysts. Would that make you feel better ? Or I could remind you that the National Health Trust is paying my fee; it's not going to cost you a cent. Or I could cite the case of Psychoanalyst Y. who committed suicide last year because of overburdening anxiety resulting from a fraudulently filled out income tax." Grudgingly, the patient smiled. "I heard about that. So psychologists are fallible." He got to his feet and held out his hand. "My name is Paul Sharp. My secretary made the arrangements with you. I have a little problem, nothing important, but I'd like to clear it up." The expression on his face showed that it was no small problem, and that, if he didn't clear it up, it would probably destroy him. "Come inside," Humphrys said genially, opening the door to his office, "so we can both sit down." Sinking down in a soft easy chair. Sharp stretched his legs out in front of him. "No couch," he observed. "The couch vanished back around #," Humphrys said. "Post-war analysts feel enough confidence to face their patients on an equal level." He offered a pack of cigarettes to Sharp and then lit up himself. "Your secretary gave me no details; she just said you wanted a conference." Sharp said: "I can talk frankly?" "I'm bonded," Humphrys said, with pride. "If any of the material you tell me gets into the hands of security organizations, I forfeit approximately ten thousand dollars in Westbloc silver -- hard cash, not paper stuff." "That's good enough for me," Sharp said, and began. "I'm an economist, working for the Department of Agriculture -- the Division of War Destruction Salvage. I poke around H-bomb craters seeing what's worth rebuilding." He corrected himself. "Actually, I analyze reports on H-bomb craters and make recommendations. It was my recommendation to reclaim the farm lands around Sacramento and the industrial ring here at Los Angeles." In spite of himself, Humphrys was impressed. Here was a man in the policy-planning level of the Government. It gave him an odd feeling to realize that Sharp, like any other anxiety-ridden citizen, had come to the Psych Front for therapy.  "My sister-in-law got a nice advantage from the Sacramento reclamation," Humphrys commented. "She had a small walnut orchard up there. The Government hauled off the ash, rebuilt the house and outbuildings, even staked her to a few dozen new trees. Except for her leg injury, she's as well off as before the war." "We're pleased with our Sacramento project," Sharp said. He had begun to perspire; his smooth, pale forehead was streaked, and his hands, as he held his cigarette, shook. "Of course, I have a personal interest in Northern California. I was born there myself, up around Petaluma, where they used to turn out His voice trailed off huskily. "Humphrys," he muttered, "what am I going to do?" "First," Humphrys said, "give me more information." "I -- " Sharp grinned inanely. "I have some kind of hallucination. I've had it for years, but it's getting worse. I've tried to shake it, but -- " he gestured -- "it comes back, stronger, bigger, more often." Beside Humphiys' desk, the vid and aud recorders were scanning covertly. "Tell me what the hallucination is," he instructed. "Then maybe I can tell you why you have it." H e was tired. In the privacy of his living room, he sat dullj' examining a series of reports on carrot mutation. A variety, externally indistinguishable from the norm, was sending people in Oregon and Mississippi to the hospital with convulsions, fever and partial blindness. Why Oregon and Mississippi? Here with the report were photographs of the feral mutation ; it did look like an ordinary carrot. And with the report came an exhaustive analysis of the toxic agent and recommendation for a neutralizing antidote. Sharp wearily tossed the rejwrt aside and selected the next in order. According to the second report, the notorious Detroit rat had shown up in St. Louis and Chicago, infesting the industrial and agricultural settlements replacing the destroyed c ities. The Detroit rat -- he had seen one once. That was three years ago; coming home one night, he had unlocked the door and seen, in the darkness, something scuttle away to safety. Arming himself with a hammer, he had pushed furniture around until he found it. The rat, huge and gray, had been in the process of building itself a wall-to-wall web. As it leaped up, he killed it with the hammer. A rat that spun webs... He called an official exterminator and reported its presence.  A Special Talents Agency had been set up by the Government to utilize parabilities of wartime mutants evolved from the various radiationsaturated areas. But, he reflected, the Agency w'as equipped to handle only human mutants and their telepathic, precog, parakinetic and related abilities. There should have been a Special Talents Agency for vegetables and rodents, too. From behind his chair came a stealthy sound. Turning quickly. Sharp found himself facing a tall, thin man wearing a drab raincoat and smoking a cigar. "Did I scare you?" Giller asked, and snickered. "Take it easy, Paul. You look as if you're going to pass out." "I was working," Sharp said defensively, partially recovering his equilibrium. "So I see," said Giller. "And thinking about rats." Sharp pushed his w'ork to one side. "How'd you get in?" "Your door was unlocked." Giller removed his raincoat and tossed it on the couch. "That's right -- you killed a Detroit. Right here in this room." He gazed around the neat, unostentatious living room. "Are those things fatal?" "Depends where they get you." Going into the kitchen, Sharp found two beers in the refrigerator. As he poured, he said: "They shouldn't waste grain making this stuff... but as long as they do, it's a shame not to drink it." Giller accepted his beer greedily. "Must be nice to be a big yheel and have luxuries like this." His small, dark eyes roved speculatively around the kitchen. "Your own stove, and your owm refrigerator." Smacking his lips, he added : "And beer. I haven't had a beer since last August." "You'll live," Sharp said, without compassion. "Is this a business call? If so, get to the point; I've got plenty of work to do." G iller said: "I just wanted to say hello to a fellow Petaluman." Wincing, Sharp answered: "It sounds like some sort of synthetic fuel." Giller wasn't amused. "Are you ashamed to have come from the very section that was once -- " "I know. The egg-laying capital of the universe. Sometimes I wonder -- how many chicken feathers do you suppose were drifting around, the day the first H-bomb hit our town ?" rosely. "And some of them were mine. My chickens, I mean. Your family had a farm, didn't they?" "No," Sharp said, refusing to be identified with Giller. "My family operated a drug store facing on Highway #. A block from the park, near the sporting goods shop." And, he added under his breath: You can go to hell. Because I'm not going to change my mind. You can camp on my doorstep the rest of your life and it still won't do any good. Petaluma isn't that important. And anyhow, the chickens are dead. "How's the Sac rebuild coming?" Giller inquired. "Fine." "Plenty of those walnuts again?" "Walnuts coming out of people's ears." "Mice getting in the shell heaps?" "Thousands of them." Sharp sipped his beer; it was good quality, probably as good as pre-war. He wouldn't know, because in #, the year the war broke out, he had been only six years old. But the beer tasted the way he remembered the old days : opulent and carefree and satisfying. "We figure," Giller said hoarsely, an avid gleam in his face, "that the PetalumaSonoma area can be built up Westbloc. That's nothing compared to what you've been doling out." "And the Petaluma-Sonoma area is nothing compared with the areas we've been rebuilding," Sharp said. "You think we need eggs and wine? What we need is machinery. It's Chicago and Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and St. Louis and -- " "You've forgotten," Giller droned on, "that you're a Petaluman. You're turning your back on your origin -- and on your duty." "Duty! You suppose the Government hired me to be a lobbyist for one trivial farm area?" Shai) flushed with outrage. "As far as I'm concerned -- " "We're your people," Giller said inflexibly. "And your people come first." When he had got rid of the man. Sharp stood for a time in the night darkness, gazing down the road after Giller's receding car. Well, he said to himself, there goes the way of the world -- me first and to hell with everybody else. Sighing, he turned and made his way up the path toward the front porch of his house. Lights gleamed friendlily in the window. Shivering, he put his hand out and groped for the railing. And then, as he clumsily ' mounted the stairs, the terrible thing happened. of the window winked out. The porch railing dissolved under his fingers. In his ears a shrill screaming whine rose up and deafened him. He was falling. Struggling frantically, he tried to get hold of something, but there was only empty darkness around him, no substance, no reality, only the depth beneath him and the din of his own terrified shrieks. "Help !" he shouted, and the sound beat futilely back at him. "I'm falling!" And then, gasping, he was outstretched on the damp lawn, clutching handfuls of grass and dirt. Two feet from the porch -- he had missed the first step in the darkness and had slipped and fallen. An ordinary event : the window lights had been blocked by the concrete railing. The whole thing had happened in a split second and he had fallen only the length of his own body. There was blood on his forehead ; he had cut himself as he st# #.I ck Silly. A childish, infuriating event. Shakily, he climbed to his feet and mounted the steps. Inside the house, he stood leaning against the wall, shuddering and panting. Gradually the fear faded out and rationality returned.  Whj was he so afraid of falling ? Something had to be done. This was worse than ever before, even worse than the time he had stumbled coming out of the elevator at the office -- and had instantly been reduced to screaming terror in front of a lobbyful of people. What would happen to him if he really fell? If, for example, he were to step off one of the overhead ramps connecting the maj or Los Angeles office buildings? The fall would be stopped by safety screens; no physical harm was ever done, though people fell all the time. But for him -- the psychological shock might be fatal. Would be fatal; to his mind, at least. He made a mental note : no more going out on the ramps. Under no circumstances. He had been avoiding them for years, but from now on, ramps were in the same class as air travel. Since # he hadn't left the surface of the planet. And, in the last few years, he seldom visited offices more than ten flights up. But if he stopped using the ramps, how was he going to get into his own research files? The file room was accessible only by ramp : the narrow metallic path leading up from the office area. Perspiring, teiTified, he sank down on the couch and sat huddled over, wondering how he was going to keep his job, do his work. And how he was going to stay alive. patient seemed to have finished. "Does it make you feel any better," Humphrys asked, "to know that fear of falling is a common phobia?" "No," Sharp answered. "I guess there's no reason why it should. You say it's shown up before? When was the first time?" "When I was eight. The war had been going on two years. I was on the surface, examining my vegetable garden." Sharp smiled weakly. "Even when I was a kid, I grew things. The San Francisco network picked up exhaust trails of a Soviet missile and all the warning towers went off like Roman candles. I was almost on top of the shelter. I raced to it, lifted the lid and started down the stairs. At the bottom were my mother and father. They yelled for me to hurry. I started to run down the stairs." "And fell ?" Humphrys asked expectantly. "I didn't fall ; I suddenly got afraid. I couldn't go any farther; I just stood there. And they were yelling up at me. They wanted to get the bottom plate screwed in place. And they couldn't until I was down." sion, Humphrys acknowledged : "I remember those old two-stage shelters. I wonder how many people got shut between the lid and the bottom plate." He eyed his patient. "As a child, had you heard of that happening? People being trapped on the stairs, not able to get back up, not able to get down..." "I wasn't scared of being trapped! I was scared of falling -- afraid I'd pitch headforward off the steps." Sharp licked his diy lips. "Well, so I turned around -- " His body shuddered. "I went back up and outside." "During the attack?" "They shot down the missile. But I spent the alert tending my vegetables. Afterward, my family beat me nearly unconscious." Humphrys' mind formed the words : origin of guilt. "The next time," Sharp continued, "was when I was fourteen. The war had been over a few months. We started back to see what was left of our town. Nothing was left, only a crater of radioactive slag several hundred feet deep. Work teams were creeping down into the crater. I stood on the edge watching them. The fear came." He put out his cigarette and sat waiting until the analyst found him another. "I left the area after that. Every night I dreamed about that crater, that big dead mouth. I hitched a ride on a military truck and rode to San Francisco." "When was the next time?" asked Humphrys. Irritably, Sharp said : "Then it happened all the time, every time I was up high, every time I had to walk up or down a flight of steps -- any situation where I was high and might fall. But to be afraid to walk up the steps of my own house -- " He broke off temporarily. "I can't walk up three steps," he said wretchedly. "Three concrete steps." "Any particularly bad episodes, outside of those you've mentioned ?" "I was in love with a pretty brown-haired girl who lived on the top floor of the Atcheson Apartments. Probably she still lives there ; I wouldn't know. I got five or six floors up and then -- I told her good night and came back down." Ironically, he said : "She must have thought I was crazy." "Others?" Humphrys asked, mentally noting the appearance of the sexual element. "One time I couldn't accept a job because it involved travel by air. It had to do with inspecting agricultural projects." Humphrys said : "In the old days, analysts looked for the origin of a phobia. Now we ask : what does it do ? Usually it gets the individual out of situations he unconsciously dislikes." A slow, disgusted flush appeared on Sharp's face. "Can't you do better than that?" Disconcerted, Humphrys murmured; "I don't say I agree with the theory or that it's necessarily true in your case. I'll say this much, though : it's not falling you're afraid of. It's something that falling reminds you of. With luck we ought to be able to dig up the prototype experience -- what they used to call the original traumatic incident." Getting to his feet, he began to drag over a stemmed tower of electronic mirrors. "My lamp," he explained. "It'll melt the barriers." Sharp regarded the lamp with apprehension. "Look," he muttered nervously, "I don't want my mind reconstructed. I may be a neurotic, but I take pride in my personality." "This won't affect your personality." Bending down, Humphrys plugged in the lamp. "It will bring up material not accessible to your rational center. I'm going to trace your life-track back to the incident at which vou were done great harm -- and find out what you're really afraid of." B lack shapes drifted around him. Sharp screamed and struggled wildly, trying to pry loose the fingers closing over his arms and legs. Something smashed against his face. Coughing, he slumped forAvard, dribbling blood and saliva and bits of broken teeth, Fr an instant, blinding light flashed; he was being scrutinized. "Is he dead?" a voice demanded. "Not yet." A foot poked experimentally into Sharp's side. Dimly, in his half-consciousness, he could hear ribs cracking. "Almost, though." "Can you hear me. Sharp?" a voice rasped, close to his ear. He didn't respond. He lay trying not to die, trying not to associate himself with the cracked and broken thing that had been his body. "You probably imagine," the voice said, familiar, intimate, "that' I'm going to say you've got one last chance. But you don't. Sharp. Your chance is gone. I'm telling you what we're going to do with you." Gasping, he tried not to hear. And, futilely, he tried not to feel what they were systematically doing to him. "All right," the familiar voice said finally, when it had been done. "Now throw him out." What remained of Paul Sharp was lugged to a circular hatch. The nebulous outline of darkness rose up around him and then -- hideously -- he was pitched into it. Down he fell, but this time he didn't scream. No physical apparatus remained with which to scream. Humphrys bent over and methodically roused the slumped figure. "Sharp!" he ordered loudly. t "Wake up! Come out of it!" The man gj-oaned, blinked his eyes, stirred. Over his face settled a glaze of pure, unmitigated toiment. "God," he whispered, eyes blank, body limp with sulfering. "Thej' -- " "You're back here," Humphrys said, shaken by w'hat had been dredged up. "There's nothing to worry about ; you're absolutely safe. It's over with -- happened years ago." "Over," Sharp murmured pathetically. "You're back in the present. Understand ?" "Yes," Sharp muttered. "But -- what was it? They pushed me out -- through and into something. And I went on down." He trembled violently. "I fell." "You fell through a hatch," Humphrys told him calmly. "You were beaten up and badly injured -- fatally, they assumed. But you did survive. You are alive. You got out of it." "Why did they do it?" Sharp asked brokenly. His face, sagging and gray, twitched with despair. "Help me, Humphrys..." "Consciously, you don't remember when it happened?" "No." "Do you remember where?" "No." Sharp's face jerked spasmodically. "They tried to kill me -- they did kill me!" Struggling upright, he protested: "Nothing like that happened to me. I'd remember if it had. It's a false memory -- my mind's been tampei cd W'ith!" "It's been repressed," Humphrys said firmly, "deeply buried because of the pain and shock. A form of amnesia -- it's been liltering indirectly up in the form of your phobia. But now that you recall it consciously -- " "Do I have to go back?" Sharp's voice rose hysterically. "Do I have to get under that damn lamp again?" "It's got to come out on a conscious level," Humphrys told him, "but not all at once. You've had your limit for today." Sagging with relief. Sharp settled back in the chair. "Thanks," he said weakly. Touching his face, his body, he whispered: "I've been carrying that in my mind all these years. Corroding, eating away -- " "There should be some diminution of the phobia," the analyst told him, "as you grapple with the incident itself. We've made progress ; we now have some idea of the real fear. It involves bodily injury at the hands of professional criminals. Ex-soldiers in the early post-var years... gangs of bandits. I remember." A measure of confidence returned to Sharp. "It isn't hard to understand a falling fear, under the circumstances. Considering what happened to me... Shakily, he started to his feet. And screamed shrilly. "What is it?" Humphiys demanded, hastily coming over and grabbing hold of his arm. Sharp leaped violently away, staggered, and collapsed inertly in the chair. "What happened ?" Face working. Sharp managed: "I can't get up." "What?" "I can't stand up." Imploringly, he gazed up at the analyst, striken and terrified. "I'm -- afraid I'll fall. Doctor, now I can't even get to my feet." CK)R AN interval neither T man spoke. Finally, his eyes on the floor. Sharp whispered : "The reason I came to you, Humphrys, is because your office is on the ground floor. That's a laugh, isn't it? I couldn't go any higher." "We're going to have to turn the lamp back on you," Humphrys said. "I realize it. I'm scared." Gripping the arms of the chair, he continued: "Go ahead. What else can we do ? I can't leave here. Humphrys, this thing is going to kill me." "No, it isn't." Humphrys got the lamp into position. "We'll get you out of this. Try to relax ; try to think of nothing in particular." Clicking the mechanism on, he said softly: "This time I don't want the traumatic incident itself. I want the envelope of experience that surrounds it. I want the broader segment of which it's a part." through the snow. His breath, in front of him, billowed outward and formed a sparkling cloud of white. To his left lay the jagged ruins of what had been buildings. The ruins, covered with snow, seemed almost lovely. For a moment he paused, entranced. "Interesting," a member of his research team observed, coming up. "Could be anything -- absolutely anything -- under there." "It's beautiful, in a way," Sharp commented. "See that spire?" The young man pointed with one heavily gloved finger ; he still wore his lead-shielded suit. He and his group had been poking around the still-contaminated crater. Their boring bars were lined up in an orderly row. "That was a church," he informed Shaip. "A nice one, by the looks of it. And over there -- " he indicated an indiscriminate jumble of ruin -- "that was the main civic center." "The city wasn't directly hit, was it?" Sharp asked. "It was bracketed. Come on down and see what we've run into. The crater to our right -- " "No, thanks," Sharp said, pulling back with intense aversion, "ril let you do the crawling around." The youthful expert glanced curiously at Sharp, then forgot the matter. "Unless we run into something unexpected, we should be able to start reclamation within a week. The first step, of course, is to clear off the slag-layer. It's fairly well cracked -- a lot of plant growth has perforated it, and natural decay has reduced a great deal of it to semi-organic ash." "Fine," Sharp said, with satisfaction. "I'll be glad to see something here again, after all these years." The expert asked: "What was it like before the war? I never saw that; I was born after the destruction began." "Well," Sharp said, surveying the fields of snow, "this was a thriving agricultural center. They grew grapefruit here. Arizona grapefruit. The Roosevelt Dam was along this way." "Yes," the expert said, nodding. "We located the remnants of it." "Cotton was grown here. So was lettuce, alfalfa, grapes, olives, apricots -- the thing I remember most, the time I came through Phoenix with my family, was the eucalyptus trees." "We won't have all that back," the expert said regretfully. "What the heck -- eucalyptus? I never heard of that." "There aren't any left in the United States," Sharp said. "You'd have to go to Australia." ted down a notation. "Okay," he said aloud, switching off the lamp. "Come back. Sharp." With a grunt, Paul Sharp blinked and opened his eyes. "What -- " Struggling up, he yawned, stretched, peered blankly around the office. "Something about reclamation. I was supervising a team of recon men. A young kid." "When did you reclaim Phoenix?" Humphrys asked. "That seems to be included in the vital time-space segment." Sharp frowned. "We never reclaimed Phoenix. That's still projected. We hope to get at it sometime in the next year." "Are you positive?" "Naturally. That's my job." "I'm going to have to send you back," Humphrys said, already reaching for the lamp. "What happened?" The lamp came on. "Relax," Humphrys instructed briskly, a trifle too briskly for a man supposed to know exactly what he was doing. Forcing himself to slow down, he said carefully: "I want your perspective to broaden. Take in an earlier incident, one preceding the Phoenix reclamation." I N AN inexpensive cafeteria in the business district, two men sat facing each other across a table. "Pm sorry," Paul Sharp said, with impatience. "Fve got to get back to my work." Picking up his cup of ersatz coffee, he gulped the contents down. The tall, thin man carefully pushed away his empty dishes and, leaning back, lit a cigar. "For two years," Giller said bluntly, "you've been giving us the runaround. Frankly, I'm a little tired of it." "Runaround ?" Sharp had started to rise. "I don't get your drift." "You're going to reclaim an agricultural area -- you're going to tackle Phoenix. So don't tell me you're sticking to industrial. Hov long do you imagine those people are going to keep on living? Unless you reclaim their farnis and lands -- " "What people?" Harshly, Giller said : "The people living at Petaluma. Camped around the craters." With vague dismay. Sharp murmured: "I didn't realize there was anybody living there. I thought j'ou all headed for the nearest reclaimed regions, San Francisco and Sacramento." "You never read the petitions we presented," Giller said softly. Sharp colored. "No, as a matter of fact. Whv should I ? If there're people camping in the slag, it doesn't alter the basic situation ; you should leave, get out of there. That area is through." He added : "I got out." Veiy quietly, Giller said: "You would have stuck around if you'd farmed there. If your family had farmed there for over a century. It's different from running a drug store. Drug stores are the same everywhere in the world." "So are farms." "No," Giller said dispassionately. "Your land, your family's land, has a unique feeling. We'll keep on camping there until we're dead or until you decide to reclaim." Mechanically collecting the checks, he finished: "I'm sorry for you, Paul. You never had roots like we have. And I'm sorry you can't be made to understand." As he reached into his coat for his wallet, he asked: "When can you fly out there ?" "Fly!" Sharp echoed, shuddering. "I'm not flying anywhere." "You've got to see the town again. You can't decide without having seen those people, seen how they're living." "No," Sharp said emphatically. "I'm not flying out there. I can decide on the basis of reports." Giller considered. "You'll come," he declared. "Over my dead body !" Giller nodded. "Maybe so. But you're going to come. You can't let us die without looking at us. You've got to have the courage to see what it is you're doing." He got out a pocket calendar and scratched a mark by one of the dates. Tossing it across the table to Sharp, he informed him : "VVe'll come by your office and pick you up. We have the plane we flew down here. It's mine. It's a sweet ship." Trembling, Sharp examined the calendar. And, standing over his mumbling, supine patient, so did Humphrys. He had been right. Sharp's traumatic incident, the repressed material, didn't lie in the past. Sharp was suffering from a phobia based on an event six months in the future.  phrys inquired. In the chair, Paul Sharp stirred feebly. "I -- " he began, and then sank into silence. "No more for a while," Humphreys told him reassuringly. "You've had enough. But I wanted to get you away from the trauma itself." "I feel better now." "Try to stand." Humphrys approached and stood waiting, as the man crept unsteadily to his fG#t, "Yes," Sharp breathed. "It has receded. What was that last? I was in a cafe or something. With Giller." Prom his desk Humphrys got a prescription pad. "I'm going to write you out a little comfort. Some round white pills to take every four hours." He scribbled and then handed the slip to his patient. "So you will relax. It'll take awav some of the tension." "Thanks," Sharp said, in a weak, almost inaudible voice. Presently, he asked : "A lot of material came up, didn't it?" "It certainly did," Humphrys admitted tightly. There was nothing he could do for Paul Sharp. The man was ver' close to death now -- in six short months, Giller would go to work on him. And it was too bad, because Sharp was a nice guy, a nice, conscientious, hard-working bureaucrat who was only trying to do his job as he saw it. "What do you think?" Sharp asked pathetically. "Can you help me?" "I'll -- try," Humphiys answered, not able to look directly at him. "But it goes very deep." "It's been a long time growing," Sharp admitted humbly. Standing by the chair, he seemed small and forlorn ; not an important official but only one isolated, unprotected individual. "I'd sure appreciate your help. If this phobia keeps up, no telling where it'll end." Humphrys asked suddenly, "Would you consider changing your mind and granting Ciller's demands?" "I can't," Shall) said. "It's bad policy. I'm opposed to special pleading, and that's what it is." "Even if you come from the area? Even if the people are  friends and former neighbors of yours?" "It's my job," Sharp said. "I have to do it without regard for my feelings or anybody else's." "You're not a bad fellow," Humphrys said involuntarily. "I'm sorry -- " He broke off. "Sorry what?" Sharp moved mechanically toward the exit door. "I've taken enough of your time. I realize how busy you analysts are. When shall I come back? Can I come back?" "Tomorrow." Humphrys guided him outside and into the corridor. "About this same time, if it's convenient." "Thanks a lot," Sharp said, with relief. "I really appreciate it . " his office, Humphrys closed the door and strode back to his desk. Reaching down, he grabbed the telephone and unsteadily dialed. "Give me somebody on your medical staff," he ordered curtly when he had been connected with the Special Talents Agency. "This is Kirby," a professional-sounding voice came presently. "Medical research." Humphrys briefly identified himself. "I have a patient here," he said, "who seems to be a latent precog." Kirby was interested, "What area does he come from?" "Petaluma. Sonoma County, north of San Francisco Bay. It's east of -- " "We're familiar with the area. A number of precogs have showed up there. That's been a gold mine for us." "Then I was right," Humphrys said. "What's the date of the patient's birth?" "He was six years old when the war began." "Well," Kirby said, disappointed, "then he didn't really get enough of a dose. He'll never develop a full precog talent, such as we work with here." "In other words, you won't help ?" "Latents -- people with a touch of it -- outnumber the real carriers. We don't have time to fool with them. You'll probably run into dozens like your patient, if you stir around. When it's imperfect, the talent isn't valuable; it's going to be a nuisance for the man, probably nothing else." "Yes, it's a nuisance," Humphrys agreed caustically. "The man is only months away from a violent death. Since he was a child, he's been getting advanced phobic warnings. As the event gets closer, the reactions intensify." "He's not conscious of the future material?" "It operates strictly on a sub-rational level." "Under the circumstances," Kirby said thoughtfully, "maybe it's just as well. These things appear to be fixed. If he knew about it, he still couldn't change it." consulting psychiatrist, was just leaving his office when he noticed a man sitting in the waiting room. Odd, Bamberg thought. I have no patients left for today. Opening the door, he stepped into the waiting room. "Did you wish to see me?" The man sitting on the chair was tall and thin. He wore a wrinkled tan raincoat, and, as Bamberg appeared, he began tensely stubbing out a cigar. "Yes," he said, getting clumsilv to his feet. "Do you have an appointment?" "No appointment." The man gazed at him in appeal. "I picked you -- " He laughed with confusion. "Well, you're on the top floor." "The top floor?" Bamberg was intrigued. "What's that got to do with it?" "I -- well. Doc, I feel much more comfortable when I'm up high." "I see," Bamberg said. A compulsion, he thought to himself. Fascinating. "And," he said aloud, "when you're up high, how do you feel? Better?" "Not better," the man answered. "Can I come in? Do you have a second to spare me?" Bamberg looked at his watch. "All right," he agreed, admitting the man. "Sit down and tell me about it." Gratefully, Giller seated himself. "It interferes with my life," he said rapidly, jerkily. "Every time I see a flight of stairs, I have an irresistible compulsion to go up it. And plane flight -- I'm always flying around. I have my own ship ; I can't afford it, but I've got to have it." "I see," Bamberg said. "Well," he continued genially, "that's not really so bad. After all, it isn't exactly a fatal compulsion." Helplessly, Giller replied : "When I'm up there -- " He swallowed wretchedly, his dark eyes gleaming. "Doctor, w'hen I'm up high, in an office building, or in my plane -- I feel another compulsion." "What is it?" "I -- " Giller shuddered, "I have an irresistible urge to push people." "To push people?" "Toward windows. Out." Giller made a gesture. "What am I going to do, Doc? I'm afraid I'll kill somebody. There was a little shrimp of a guy I pushed once -- and one day a girl was standing ahead of me on an escalator -- I shoved her. She was injured." "I see," Bamberg said, nodding. Repressed hostility, he thought to himself. Interwoven with sex. Not unusual. He reached for his lamp. What's In It For You?  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All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed, stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York, Title registered in the United States Patent Office. Next Issue I November! oit sale September #st  feather, and there was no need to tell Mel by the company he kept -- it told him ! A LL through that Saturday night, rain drummed down mercilessly and unseasonably on Sweetwater Beach. Thunder pealed and lightning flared. In between, Mel Armstrong heard the steady boom of the Pacific surf not a block from his snug little duplex apartment. Mel didn't mind any of it. He was in bed, slightly swacked and wholly comfortable. He dozed, and now and then woke up far enough to listen admiringly to the racket. At nine A. M., when he opened his eyes once more, he discovered the room was full of tuooA summer sunshine. Beyond his window gleamed a cloudless sky, and only the occasional gusts of wind indicated there had been anything like a storm during the night. An exceptionally beautiful Sunday morning -- made more beautiful, perhaps, by the fact that it marked the beginning of Mel Armstrong's annual two-week paid vacation. Mel was a salesman for Marty's Fine Liquors, a wholesale house. He was twenty-eight and in fairly good shape, but his job bored him. This morning, for the first time in months, he was fully aware of that. Perhaps it was the weather. At any rate, he had a sense, almost a premonition, of new and exciting events approaching him rapidly. Events that would break down the boundaries of his present humdrum existence and pitch him into the life of romantic adventure that, somehow, he seemed to have missed so far... Recognizing this as a dayit up completely, Mel breakfasted unhurriedly in his pajamas. Then, struck by a sudden, down-to-earth suspicion, he stuck his head out of his living room window. As he'd guessed, there were other reminders of the storm in the narrow courtyard before the window. Branches and assorted litter had blown in, including at least one soggily dismembered Sunday paper. The low rent he paid for his ground-floor apartment in the Oceanview Courts was based on an understanding with the proprietor that he and the upstairs occupant of the duplex would keep the court clean. The other five duplexes that fronted on the court were bulging with vacationing visitors from the city, which made it a real chore in summer. Unfortunately, he couldn't count on his upstairs neighbor, a weird though rather amiable young character who called herself Maria de Guesgne. Maria went in for painting abstractions, constructing mobiles, and discussing the works of Madame Blavatsky. She avoided the indignity of manual toil. Mel made himself decent by exchanging his pajamas for swimming trunks. Then he got a couple of brooms and a hose out of a garage back of the court and went to work. H E'D cleared the courtyard by the time the first of the seasonal guests began to show up in their doorways, and went on to inspect another, narrower court behind his duplex, which was also his responsibility. There he discovered Maria de Guesgne propped on her elbows on her bedroom window sill, talking reproachfully to a large gray tomcat that was sitting in the court. Both turned to look at Mel. "Good morning, Mel!" Maria said, with unusual animation. She had long black bangs which emphasized her sallow and undernourished appearance. "Morning," Mel replied. "Scat!" he added to the cat, which belonged to somebody else in the neighborhood but was usually to be found stalking about the Oceanview Courts. "You shouldn't frighten poor Cat," said Maria. "Mel, would you look into the bird box?" "Bird box?" "The one in the climbing rose," said Maria, leaning precariously from the window to point. "To your left. Cat was trying to get at it." The bird box was a whitepainted, weather-beaten little house set into a straggly rose bush that grew out of a square patch of earth beside Mel's bedroom window. The box was about ten feet above the ground. Mel looked up at it. "I'm sure I heard little birds peeping in it this morning!" Maria explained sentimentally. "No bird in its senses would go into a thing like that," Mel assured her. "I don't hear anything. And besides -- " "Please, Mel! We don't want Cat to get them!" Mel groaned, got a wobbly stepladder out of the garage and climbed up. The gray cat walked over and sat down next to the ladder to watch him. He poked at the box and listened. No sound. "Can't you open the top and look in?" Maria inquired. Holding the box in one hand, Mel tentatively inserted his thumbnail into a crack under its top and pushed. The weathered wood splintered away easily. "Don't break it!" Maria cried. Mel put his eye to the crack he'd made. Then he gasped, jerked back, letting go of the box, teetered wildly a moment and fell over with the stepladder. The cat fled, spitting. "Oh, my!" said Maria, apparently with some enjoyment. "Poor Mel ! Are you hurt?" Mel stood up slowly. The bright morning world seemed to be spinning gently around him, but it wasn't because of his fall. "Of course not," he said. His voice quavered somewhat. "Oh?" said Maria. "Well, then -- are there any little birds in the nest?" Mel swallowed hard. "No," he said. He bent over and carefully picked up the ladder and placed it against the wall. The action made it unnecessary to look at her. "Eggs?" she asked in a hopeful tone. "No eggs either! No nothing!" His voice was steady again, but he had to get rid of Maria. "Well, I'll clean up this court now, I guess. Uh -- maybe you'd like to come down and lend a hand?" Maria replied promptly that she certainly would like to, but she hadn't had breakfast yet ; and with that she vanished from the window. Mel looked round stealthily. The cat was watching from the door of the garage, but no one else was in sight. Hurriedly, he replaced the stepladder under the bird nest and climbed up again. down on the table in his living room, he locked the apartment door and closed the Venetian blinds. All this had been done in a sort of quiet rush, as if every second counted, which it did in a way. Mel wasn't going to believe, even for a moment, that what he thought he'd seen in that box could be really there; and he couldn't disprove it fast enough to suit him. But something warned him that he wouldn't want to have any witnesses around when he did take his second look. Then, as he turned from the window, he heard a thin piping cry, a voice as tiny as the peeping of a mouse, coming from the table, from the box. An instant fright reaction froze him where he stood. The sounds stopped again. There was a brief, faint rustle, like the stirring of dry parchment, and then quiet. The rustling, he thought, must have been the wings -- he'd been sure they had wings. Otherwise -- It could all have been an illusion, he told himself. An illusion that transformed a pair of featherless nestlings into something he still didn't want to give a name to. Color patterns of jade and pink flashed into his memory next, however, which made the bird theory shaky. Say a rather small green-and-pink snake then, or a lizard -- Except, of course, for the glassy glitter of the wings. So make it instead, Mel thought desperately, a pair of big insects, like dragonflies, only bigger... He shook his head and moistened his lips. That wouldn't explain that tiny voice -- and the more he tried to rationalize it all, the more scared he was getting. Assume, he took the mental jump, he really had seen the figures of two tiny, naked, green-and-pink people in there -- with wings ! One didn't have to drag in the supernatural to explain it. There were things like flying saucers, presumably, and probably such beings might exist on other worlds. The thought was oddly reassuring. He still felt as if he'd locked himself in the room with things potentially in the class of tarantulas, but there was excitement and wonder coming up now. With a surge of jealous proprietorship, he realized that he didn't want to share this discovery with anybody else. Later, perhaps. Right now, it was his big adventure. The room was too dim to let him distinguish anything inside the box as he had outdoors, and he was still reluctant to get his face too close to it. He gave it a gingerly rap with his knuckle and waited. No sound. He cleared his throat. "Hello?" he said. Immediately, that seemed like an idiotic approach. Worse than that, it also brought no reaction. For the first time, Mel had a sense of worry for the occupants of the box. There was no way of guessing how they'd got in there, but they might be sick or dying. Hurriedly he brought a lamp over to the table and tried to direct light inside, both through the round hole in its side and through the opening he'd made in the top. It wasn't very effective and produced no stir within. With sudden decision, he shoved one hand into the opening, held the box with the other and broke off the entire top. And there they were. Mel stared at them a long time, his fears fading slowly. They were certainly alive ! One was green, a tiny body of luminous jade, and the other was silkily human-colored, which was why he had been confused on that point. The wings could hardly be anything else, though they were very odd-looking, almost like thin, flexible glass. He couldn't force himself to touch them. Instead, he laid a folded clean towel on the table and tilted the box very slowly over it. A series of careful tappings and shakings brought the two beings sliding gently out onto the towel. Two delicately formed female figurines, they lay there a moment, unmoving. Then the green one passed a tiny hand over her forehead in a slow, completely human gesture, opened slanted golden eyes with startled suddenness and looked up at Mel. He might still have thought he was dreaming, if his attention hadn't been caught just then by a detail of undreamlike realism. The other, the human-colored one, seemed to be definitely in a family way. folded bath towel in a square of afternoon sunlight which came in through the kitchenette window. The window was high enough up so nobody could look in from outside, and they seemed to want the warmth of the sun more than anything else. They did not appear to be sick, but they were still rather languid. It wasn't starvation, apparently. Mel had put bits of a variety of foods on a napkin before them, and he changed the samples as soon as his guests indicated they weren't interested. So far, canned sardine was the only item that had attracted them at all, and they hadn't done much more than test that. Between moments of just marveling at them, assuring himself they were there and not an illusion, and wondering what they were then and where they'd come from, Mel was beginning to get worried again. For all he knew, they might suddenly die on the bath towel. "Miss Green," he said in a very low voice -- he didn't want to give Maria de Guesgne any indication he was in the house -- "I wish you could tell me what you like to eat!" Miss Green looked up at him and smiled. She was much more alert and vivacious than the other one who, perhaps because of her condition, merely sat or lay there gracefully and let Miss Green wait on her. The relationship seemed to be about that of an elf princess and her personal attendant, but they were much too realseeming creatures to have popped out of a fairy tale, though their appearance did arouse recurrent bursts of a feeling of fairy tale unreality, which Mel hadn't known since he was ten. But, tiny as they were, Miss Green and the princess primarily gave him the impression of being quite as functional as human beings or, perhaps, as field mice. He would have liked to inspect the brittle-seeming wings more closely. They seemed to be made up of numerous laminated, very thin sections, and he wondered whether they could fly with them or whether their race had given up or lost that ability. But touching them might have affected their present matter-of-fact acceptance of him, and he didn't want to risk that... A door banged suddenly in the apartment overhead. A moment later, he heard Maria coming down the hall stairs. Mel stood up in sudden alarm. He'd known for some time that his neighbor had supplied herself with a key to his apartment, not to pry but with the practical purpose of borrowing from the little bar in Mel's living room when she was out of both money and liquor. She rarely took much, and until now he'd been more amused than annoyed. H E went hurriedly into the living room, closing the door to the kitchenette behind him. If Maria knocked, he wouldn't answer. If she decided he was out and came in to steal his liquor, he would pretend to have been asleep in the chair and scare the hell out of her! She paused before the apartment door a moment, but then went out into the court. Mel waited until her footsteps died away, going toward the street. As he opened the door to the kitchenette, something buzzed noisily out of the living room past his shoulder -- a big, unlovely looking horsefly. The apartment screens didn't fit too well, and the fly probably had been attracted by the smell of food. Startled, he stopped to consider the new problem. There was a flyswatter hanging beside the door, but he didn't want to alarm his guests -- and then, for the first time, he saw Miss Green's wings unfold ! She was up on her feet beside the princess, who remained sitting on the towel. Both of them were following the swift, erratic course of the big fly with more animation than they'd shown about anything so far. Miss Green gave a sudden piping cry, and the glassy appendages on her back opened out suddenly like twin transparently gleaming fans, and blurred into motion too swift for Mel to follow. Miss Green rose into the air like a tiny human helicopter, hands up before her as if she were praying. It wasn't till the horsefly swerved from the kitchenette window and came buzzing back that Mel guessed her purpose. There was a sharper, fiercer drone like a hornet's song as she darted sideways into the insect's path. Mel didn't see her catch it. Its buzzing simply stopped, and then she was dropping gently back to the towel, with the ugly black thing between her hands. It looked nearly as big as her head. There was an exchange of cheerful piping cries between the two. Miss Green laughed up at Mel's stupefied face, lifted the motionless fly to her mouth and neatly bit off its head. Mel turned hurriedly and went into the living room. It wasn't, he told himself, really so very different from human, beings eating a chicken. But he didn't feel up to watching what he knew was going to be a dismemberment and a feast. At any rate, the horsefly had settled the feeding problem. His guests could take care of themselves. hunted down a few moths. Mel woke up twice with the sudden sharp drone in his ears that told him she had just made her catch. Both times, it was a surge of unthinking physical fright that actually roused him. Awake, and remembering the disproportion in size between himself and the huntress, his reaction seemed ridiculous ; but the second time he found he was reluctant to go back to sleep until it would appear that Miss Green was done with her foraging. So he lay awake, listening to the occasional faint indications of her continuing activity within his apartment, and to more familiar sounds without. A train rattled over a crossing; a police siren gave a sudden view halloo and faded into silence again. For a long time, there was only the whispering passage of distant cars over wet pavements, and the slow roll and thump of the surf. A haze of fog beyond the window turned the apartment into a shut-off little world of its own. Miss Green moved about with no more than a whisper of air and the muted pipe of voices fromthe top of the kitchenette cupboard to show where she was. Mel had put a small carton up there, upholstered with the towel and handkerchiefs and roofed over with his best woolen sweater, to make a temporary home for his guests. The princess hadn't stirred from it since, but Miss Green remained busy. He started suddenly to find her hovering directly over his bed, vaguely silhouetted against the pale blur of the window. As he stared, she settled down and came to rest on the blanket over his chest, effortlessly as a spider gliding down along its thread. Her wings closed with a faint snap. Mel raised his head carefully to squint down along the blanket at her. It was the first time either of them had made anything resembling a friendly advance in his direction ; he didn't want to commit any blunders. "Hello," he said quietly. Miss Green didn't reply. She seemed to be looking up at the window, disregarding him, and he was content to watch her. These strange creatures seemed to have some of the aloofness of cats in their manner, and they might be as easily offended. She turned presently, walked up over the blanket and perched herself on Mel's pillow, above his head and somewhat to his right. And there she stayed silently. Which seemed catlike, too : the granting of a reserved and temporary companionship. He would not have been too surprised to hear a tiny purring from above his ear. Instead, drowsily and lulled in an odd way by Miss Green's presence, he found himself sinking back into sleep. that his mind should be filled for a time with vague pictures of her, but when the room about him seemed to have expanded into something like a faintly luminous fishbowl, he knew he was dreaming. There were others present. They were going somewhere, and he had a sense of concern, which had to do either with their destination or with difficulties in getting there. Then a realization of swift, irrevocable disaster -- There were violent lurchings as the luminosity about him faded swiftly into blackness. He felt a terrible, energy-draining cold, the wet clutch of death itself, then something like a soundless explosion about him and anguished cryings. The motion stopped. Blackness faded back to gray, but the cold remained. Icy water was pounding down on him now, as if he were fighting his way through a vertical current carrying somebody else. A desperate hunt for refuge -- and finding it suddenly, and slipping inside and relaxing into unconsciousness, to wait for the return of warmth and life... Mel's eyes opened. The room was beginning to lighten with morning. He turned his head slowly to look for Miss Green. She was still there, on the pillow beside his head, watching him ; and there was something in her position, in the unwinking golden eyes, even in her curious fluff of blue-white hair, that reminded him now less of a cat than a small lizard. He didn't doubt that she had somehow enabled him to share the experience that in part explained their presence here. Without thinking he asked aloud, "What happened to the others?" She didn't move, but he was aware of a surge of horrified revulsion. Then before his open eyes for a moment swam a picture of a bleak, rainbeaten beach... and, just above the waterline, in a cluster of harsh voices, jabbing beaks and beating wings, great gulls were tearing apart a strange jetsam of tiny bodies too weakened to escape -- A small, plaintive crying came from the kitchenette. The picture faded as Miss Green soared into the air to attend to her princess. M EL breakfasted in the living room, thoughtfully. He couldn't quite understand that luminous vehicle of theirs, or why it should have succumbed to the rain storm of Saturday night, which appeared to be what had happened. But his guests obviously were confronted with the problem of getting back to wherever they'd come from -- and he didn't think Miss Green would have confided in him if he wasn't somehow expected to be helpful in solving the problem. There was a thump on the sill outside his bedroom window, followed by an annoyed meowing. The gray cat that had been spying on the bird box seemed to suspect he was harboring the refugees. Mel went out into the little courtyard through the back door of the duplex and chased the animal away. The fog, he saw, was thinning out quickly; in an hour or so it would be another clear day. When he came in, Miss Green fluted a few soft notes, which Mel chose to interpret as gratitude, from the top of the cupboard and withdrew from sight again. One couldn't think of them, he decided, as being exactly like any creatures of Earth. The cold rain had been very nearly deadly to them, if the memory Miss Green had transmitted to him was accurate -- as destructive as it had been to their curious craft. Almost as if it could wash right through them, to drain vital energies from their bodies, while in the merely foggy air of last night she had seemed comfortable enough. It indicated different tolerance spans with more sharply defined limits. The thought came into his mind: Venus? It seemed possible, even if it left a lot to explain. Mel got up in sudden excitement and began to walk about the room. He knew not much was known about the second planet, but he had a conviction of beiig right. It struck him he might be involved in an event of enormous historical significance. Then, stopping for a moment before the window, he saw it -- Apparently high in the gray sky overhead, a pale yellow circle moved, much smaller than the sun, but like the disk of the sun seen ghostlike through clouds. Instantly, another part of his dream became clear to him. Green! Come here, quick!" A buzz, the swift drone of wings, and she was beside him, perching on his shoulder. Mel pointed. She gave a lamenting little cry of recognition. As if it had been a signal, the yellow circle darted sideways in a long streaking slant, and vanished. Miss Green fled to report to the princess, while Mel stayed at the window, and quickly returned to him again. Evidently she was both excited and distressed, and he wondered what was wrong. If that apparition of pale light had been one of their vessels, as her behavior indicated, it seemed probable that its mission was to hunt for survivors of the lost globe. Miss Green seemed either less sure of that, or less confident that the rescue would be easily effected. Some minutes later, she pointed to a different section of the sky, where the yellow circle -- or another very like it -- was now moving slowly about. Presently it vanished again, and when it reappeared for the second time, it was accompanied by two others. Meanwhile, Miss Green might have been transmitting some understanding of the nature of her doubts to Mel, because the ghostly vagrants now gave him an immediate impression of insubstantiality: not space-spanning luminous globes but pictured shapes projected on the air. His theory of interplanetary travelers became suddenly much less probable. In the next few moments, the concept he was struggling with abruptly completed itself in his mind, so abruptly, in fact, that there was no longer any question that it had originated with Miss Green. The rescue craft Mel thought he was seeing actually were just that. But the pictures in the sky were only signals to possible survivors that help was approaching. The globes themselves were elsewhere, groping their way blindly and dangerously through strange dimensions that had nothing to do with the ones Mel knew. And they were still, in some manner his imagination did not even attempt to clarify, very, very "far away." you'd done with the bird box," Maria de Guesgne explained. "It's not there in the bush any more!" Mel told her annoyedly that the bird box had been damagd by the storm, and so he'd thrown it into the incinerator. "Well," Maria said vaguely, "that's too bad." Her handsome dark eyes were shifting about his living room meanwhile, not at all vaguely. Mel had left the apartment door partly open, and she had walked right in on her way to the market. When she wasn't drinking or working herself up to a bout of creative painting, which seemed to put her into a tranced sort of condition, Maria was a highly observant young woman. The question was now how to get her out of the apartment again before she observed more than he wanted her to. "How does it happen you're not at work on Monday afternoon?" she inquired, and set her shopping bag down on the armchair. Keeping one eye on the kitchenette door, Mel explained about his vacation. Miss Green hadn't been in sight for almost an hour ; but he wasn't at all sure she mightn't come out to inspect the visitor, and the thought of Maria's probable reactions was unnerving. "Two weeks?" Maria repeated chattily. "It'll be fun having you around for two weeks -- unless you're going off to spend your vacation somewhere else. Are you?" "No," Mel said. "I'm staying here -- " And at that moment, Miss Green came in through the kitchenette door. At least, Mel assumed it was Miss Green. All he actually saw was a faint blur of motion. It went through the living room, accompanied by a high-pitched hum, and vanished behind Maria. "Good Lord!" she cried, whirling. "What's that? Oh!" The last was a shrill yelp. "It stung me!" M EL hadn't imagined Miss Green could move so fast. Rising and falling with furious menace, the sound seemed to come from all points of the room at once, as Maria darted out of the apartment. Clutching her shopping bag, Mel followed her out hastily and slammed the door behind them. He caught up with Maria in the court. She was rubbing herself angrily. "I'm not coming into that apartment again, Mel Armstrong," she announced, "until you've had it fumigated! That thing kept stinging me! What was it, anyway?" "A wasp, I guess." Mel felt weak with relief. She hadn't really seen anything. "Here's your bag. I'll chase it out." Maria stalked off, complaining about screens that didn't even protect people against giant wasps. Mel found the apartment quiet again and went into the kitchenette. Miss Green was poised on the top edge of the cupboard, a gold-eyed statuette of Victory, laughing down at him, the laminated wings spread and raised behind her like iridescent glass fans. Mel looked at her with a trace of uneasiness. She had some kind of small white bundle in her arms, and he wondered whether it concealed the weapon with which she'd stung Maria. "I don't think you should have done that," he told her. "But she's gone now." Looking rather pleased with herself, Miss Green glanced back over her shoulder and piped a few questioning notes to the princess. There was a soft reply, and she soared down to the table, folded her wings and knelt to lay the bundle gently down on it. She beckoned to Mel. Mel's eyes popped as she unfolded the bundle. Perhaps he really shouldn't have been surprisd. He was harboring four guests now -- the princess had been safely delivered of twins. ened the biggest slit in the bedroom screen a little more and slipped out to do her own kind of shopping, with a section of one of Mel's handkerchiefs to serve as a bag. Mel left the lights out and stayed at the window. He felt depressed, but didn't quite know why -- unless it was that so many odd things had happened since Sunday morning that his mind had given up trying to understand them. He wasn't really sure now, for example, whether he was getting occasional flashglimpses of those circular luminous vessels plowing through another dimension somewhere, or whether he was half asleep and imagining it. Usually it was a momentary glow printed on the dark air at the edge of his vision, vanishing before he could really look at it. He had a feeling they had managed to come a good deal closer during the day. Then he wondered briefly whether other people had been seeing strange light-shapes, too, and what they might have thought the glimpses were. Spots before their eyes, probably. Miss Green was back with a soft hum of wings, on the outer window sill, six feet from where he sat. She pushed the knotted scrap of cloth through the screen. There was something inside it now; it caught for a moment on the wires. Mel started up to help, then checked himself, afraid of feeling some bug squirming desperately inside; and while he hesitated, she had shoved it through. She followed it, picked it up again and flew off to the living room. After a moment she returned with the empty cloth and went out again. She made eight such trips in the next hour, while night deepened outside and then began to lighten as a half-moon shoved over the horizon. Mel must have dozed off several times; at least, he suddenly found himself coming awake, with the awareness that something had just landed with a soft thump on the window sill outside. It wasn't Miss Green. He saw a chunky shadow at one corner of the window, and caught the faintest glint of green eyes peering into the room. It was the cat from the courtyard. In the same moment, he heard the familiar faint hum, and Miss Green appeared at the opposite end of the sill. A fterward, Mei realized he'd simply sat there, stiffening in groggy, sleep-dazed horror, as the cat-shadow lengthened and flowed swiftly toward the tiny humanoid figure. Miss Green seemed to raise both arms over her head. ed from her cupped hands and extended itself in an almost invisible thread of fire that stabbed against the cat's forehead. The cat yowled, swung aside and leaped down into the court. Mel was on his feet, shaking violently, as Miss Green slipped in through the screen. He heard Maria open her window upstairs to peer down into the court, where the cat was making low, angry sounds. Apparently it hadn't been hurt, but no wonder Maria had suspected that afternoon she'd been stung by a wasp! Or that Miss Green's insect victims never struggled, once she had caught them! He pulled down the shade and stood undecided in the dark, until he heard her piping call from the living room. It was followed by an impatient buzzing about the standing lamp in there, and Mel concluded correctly that he was supposed to turn on the light. He discovered her on the living room table, sorting out the plunder she had brought back. It wasn't a pile of electrocuted insects, as he had expected, but a puzzlingly commonplace collection -- little heaps of dry sand from the beach, some small white pebbles, and a sizable bundle of thin twigs about two inches in length. Since she was disregarding him, he shifted the lamp over to the table to see what this human-shaped lightning bug from another dimension was going to do next. That was the way he felt about Miss Green at the moment... What she did was to transport the twigs in two bundles to the top of the cupboard, where she left them with the princess. Then she came back and began to lay out a thin thread of white sand on the dark, polished surface of the table. Mel pulled up his armchair, poured himself a glass of brandy, lit a cigarette, and settled down to watch her. indicated to him that she wanted the light turned out again, he had finished his second drink and was feeling rather benevolent. She had used up all her sand, and about a square foot of the table's surface was covered now with a confusingly intricate maze of lines, into which she had placed white pebbles here and there. Some of the lines, Mel noticed, blended into each other, while others stopped abruptly or curved back on themselves. As a decorative scheme, it hardly seemed worthwhile. "Miss Green," he told her thoughtfully, "I hope it makes sense to you. It doesn't to me." She piped imperiously, pointing: the light! Mel had a moment of annoyance at the way she was ordering him around in his own apartment. "Well," he said, "I'll humor you this time." For a moment after he had pulled the switch, he stood beside the table to let his eyes adjust to the dark. However, they weren't adjusting properly -- a patch of unquiet phosphorescent glimmering floated disturbingly within his field of vision, and as the seconds passed, it seemed to be growing stronger. Suddenly, Mel swore in amazement and bent down to examine the table. "Now what have you done -- ?" he began. Miss Green fluted soothingly at him from the dark and fluttered up to his shoulder. He felt a cool touch against his ear and cheek, and a burst of oddly pleasant tinglings ran over his scalp. "Stop that!" he said, startled. Miss Green fluted again, urgently. She was trying to tell him something now, and suddenly he thought he understood. "All right," he said. "I'll look at it. That's what you want me to do, isn't it?" Miss Green flew down to the table again, which indicated agreement. Mel groped himself back into the chair and leaned forward to study the curiously glowing design she had created of sand and pebbles. He discovered immediately that any attempt to see it clearly merely strained his vision. Details turned into vaguely distorted, luminous flickerings when he stared at them, and the whole pale, spidery pattern made no more sense than it had with the light on. She must have some purpose in mind with it, but Mel couldn't imagine what. Meanwhile, Miss Green was making minor adjustments in his position which Mel accepted without argument, since she seemed to know what she was doing. Small tugs and pushes told him she wanted his hands placed on the table to either side of the design. Mel put them there. His head was to be tilted forward just so. He obliged her again. Then she was back on the table, and the top two-thirds of the pattern vanished suddenly behind a blur. After a moment, he realized she had opened her wings and blotted that part from his sight. ed his puzzled gaze on the remaining section: a quivering, thinly drawn pattern of blue-white light that faded periodically almost to the limits of visibility and slowly grew up again to what was, by comhead was aching slightly. The pattern seemed to tilt sideways and move upward, as if it were creeping in a slow circle about some pivot-point. Presently, it turned down again to complete the circle and start on another round. By that time, the motion seemed normal. When a tiny shape of light suddenly ran across the design and vanished again as it reached the other side, Mel was only moderately surprised. The figure had reminded him immediately of Miss Green. After a while, it crossed his field of vision in another direction, and then there were two more... He seemed to be swimming forward, through the pattern, into an area of similar tiny figures like living silhouettes of light, and of entrancingly delicate architectural designs. It was like a marionette setting of incredible craftsmanship, not quite real in the everyday sense, but as convincing as a motion picture which was spreading out, second by second, and beginning to flow about him -- "Hey!" Mel sat up with a start. "You're trying to hypnotize me!" Miss Green piped pleadingly. Clearly, she had only been trying to show him something. And wasn't it beautiful? Didn't he want to see more? Mel hesitated. He was suspicious now, but he was also curious. After all, what could she do to him with her tricks ? Besides, he admitted to himself, the picture had vanished as soon as he shifted his eyes, and it was beautiful, like moving about through a living illustration of a book of fairy tales He yielded. "All right, I do want to see more." This time, the picture grew up out of the design within seconds. Only it wasn't the same picture. It was as if he had turned around and was looking in another direction, a darker one. There were fewer of the little light-shapes ; instead, he discovered in the distance a line of yellow dots that moved jerkily but steadily, like glowing corks bobbing on dark water. He watched them for a moment without recognition; then he realized with a thrill of pleasure that he was getting another view of the luminous globes he had seen before -- this time an otherdimensional view, so to speak. Suddenly, one of them was right before him! Not a dot or a yellow circle, but a threefoot ball of fire that rushed toward him through the blackness with hissing, sputtering sounds ! Mel surged up out of the chair with a yelp of fright, and the fireball vanished. As he groped about for the light, Miss Green was piping furiously at him from the table. Then the light came on. S HE was in a rage. Dancing about on the table, beating the air with her wings, she waved her arms over her head and shook her tiny fists at him. Mel backed off warily. 'Take it easy!" he warned. He could reach the flyswatter in the kitchenette with a jump if she started shooting off miniature electric bolts again. She might have had the same idea, because she calmed down suddenly, shook her wings together and closed them with a snap. It was like a cat smoothing down its bristling back fur. There was a whistling query from the princess now, followed by an excited elfin conversation. Mel poured himself a drink with a hand that shook slightly, and pretended to ignore the disturbance of his guests, while he tried to figure out what had happened. Supposing, he thought a trifle guiltily, settling down on the couch at a safe distance from the table -- supposing they simply had to have his help at this point. The manner in which one of the rescue globes suddenly had seemed to shift close to him suggested it. Was he justified in refusing to go on with it? In the directionless dark through which the globes were driving, they might have been reacting to his concentrated awareness of them as if it were a radio signal from the human dimensions. And it would explain Miss Green's rage at the sudden interruption of the contact. But another thought came to him then, and his guilty feelings vanished in a surge of alarmed indignation. Well, and just supposing, he thought, that he hadn't broken the contact. And that a threefoot sputtering fireball materialized right inside his living room! He caught sight of Miss Green eying him speculatively and rather slyly from the table. She seemed composed enough now; there was even the faintest of smiles on that tiny face. The smile seemed to confirm his suspicions. Mel downed his drink and stood up. "Miss Green," he told her evenly, choosing his words with care, "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I don't intend to be the subject of any more of your experiments. At least not until I've had time to think about it." Her head nodded slightly, as if she were acknowledging his decision. But the smile remained; in fact, Miss Green had begun to look rather smug. Mel studied her uneasily. She might be planning to put something else over on him, but he knew how to stop that ! Before he turned out the light and went to bed, Mel methodically and somewhat grimly swallowed four more shots of brandy. With that much inside him, it wouldn't matter what Miss Green tried, because he wouldn't be able to react to her suggestions till he woke up again in the morning. fore he awoke -- and he might have gone on sleeping then if somebody hadn't been banging on his apartment door. "Wake up, Mel!" he heard Maria de Guesgne shouting hoarsely. "I can hear you snoring in there !" He sat up a little groggily and looked at the clock. His guests weren't in sight. "You awake, Mel?" she demanded. "Wait a minute!" he yelled back. "Just woke up and I'm not decent." When he opened the door, she had vanished. He was about to close it quietly and gratefully again, when she called down the stairway. "That you, Mel? Come on up! I want to show you something." He locked the door behind him and went upstairs. Maria received him beamingly in her living room. She was on one of her rare creative painting sprees, and this spree, to judge by the spattered appearance of the room and the artist, was more riotous than usual. A half dozen fair-sized canvases were propped on newspapers against the wall to dry. They were turned around, to increase the shock effect on Mel when he would get his first look at them. "Ever see a salamander?" Maria inquired with anticipation, spreading a few more papers on the table. Mel admitted he hadn't. He wished she'd given him time to have coffee first. His comments at these private showings were ususally regarded as inadequate anyway. "Well," Maria invited triumphantly, selecting one of the canvases and setting it abruptly up on the table before him, "take a look at one !" Mel gasped and jerked back. "Holy Judas!" he said in a weak voice. "Pretty good, eh?" For once, Maria appeared satisfied with his reaction. She held it away from her and regarded it. "One of my best!" she cried judiciously. About three times life-size, it was a quite recognizable portrait of Miss Green. offer Mel coffee but he got a cigarette from her. Fortunately, he wasn't called upon to make any more comments ; she chattered away while she showed him the rest of the series. Mel looked and listened, still rather shaken. Presently he began to ask questions. A salamander, he learned, was a fire elemental. Maria glanced at her fireplace as she explained this, and Mel noticed she seemed to have had a fire burning there overnight, which wasn't too unusual for her even in the middle of summer. Listening to the banghaired, bright-eyed oddball rattling off metaphysical details about salamanders, he became aware of a sort of dread growing up in him. For Miss Green was pictured, wings and arms spread, against and within furling veils of yellow-white flame... "Drawn from life?" he inquired, grinning to make it a joke. He pointed at the picture. Without looking directly at her, he saw Maria start at the question. She stared at him intensely for a moment, and after that she became more reticent. It didn't matter because it was all on the canvases. She had seen as much as he had and more, and put it down with shocking realism. Seen through somebody else's eyes, Miss Green's world was still beautiful ; but now it was also frightening. And there was what Maria had said about salamanders. "Maria," he said, "what actually happened last night?" She looked at him sullenly. "I don't know what you're talking about, Mel." "I imagine," he suggested casually, "you were just sitting there in front of the fire. And then -- " "Gosh, Mel, she was beautiful! It's all so beautiful, you know..." She recovered quickly. "I fell asleep and I had a dream, that's all. Why? What makes you ask?" She was beginning to look rather wild-eyed, but he had to find out. "I was just wondering," he said, "whether they'd left." "Why should they leave -- Look, you oaf ! I called you in to give you the privilege of looking at my paintings. Now get out. I've got to make a phone call." He stopped at the door, struck by a sudden suspicion. "You're not going to try to sell them, are you?" "Try to sell them!" She laughed hoarsely. "There are circles, Mel Armstrong, in which a de Guesgne original is understood, shall we' say? Circles not exactly open to the common herd... This series," she concluded, rather prosaically, "will get me two thousand bucks as soon as I let one or two of the right people have a look at them !" B rewing himself a pot of coffee at last, Mel decided that part of it, if true, wasn't any of his business. He had always assumed Maria was living on a monthly check she got from an unidentified source in Chicago, but her occasional creations might have a well-heeled following, at that. As for the way Miss Green had got in to sit for her portrait -- the upstairs screens weren't in any better shape than the downstairs ones. The fiery background, of course, might have been only in Maria's mind. There was a scratching on top of the cupboard and whispery voices. Mel ignored the slight chill that drifted down his spine. Up to that moment, he'd been hoping secretly that Maria had provided a beacon for the rescue team to home in on while he slept, and that his guests had been picked up and taken home. But Miss Green was peering down at him over the edge of the cupboard. "Hi, salamander!" he greeted her politely. "Had a busy night? Too bad it didn't work." Her head withdrew. In the living room Mel stopped to look at the design of sand and pebbles, which was still on the table. Touching one of the threadlike lines, he discovered it was as hard and slick as lacquer. Otherwise the pattern seemed unremarkable in daylight, but Mel dropped a cloth across it to keep it out of sight. Miss Green fluttered past him to the sill of the bedroom window. He watched her standing on tiptoe against the screen, apparently peering about at the sky. After a while, it began to seem ridiculous to let himself become obsessed by superstitious fears about this tiny and beautiful, almost jewellike creature. Whatever abilities she might have, she and the princess were only trying to get home -- and, having seen their home, he couldn't blame them for that. He had a return of the fairy-tale nostalgia his glimpse of those eerily beautiful places had aroused in him the night before, a pleasantly yearning sensation like an awareness of elfin horns blowing far away to send faint, exciting echoes swirling about the commonplace sky of Sweetwater Bay. The feeling might have been resurrected from his childhood, but it was a strong and effective one. He recalled how bored he'd been with everything before they appeared... He walked softly through the bedroom and stopped behind Miss Green. She was making an elaborate pretense of not having noticed his approach, but the pointed ears that could follow the passage of a moth in the dark were tilted stiffly backward. Mel actually was opening his mouth to say, "Miss Green, I'll help you if I can," when it struck him sharply, like a brand-new thought, that it was an extremely rash promise to make, considering everything that had happened so far. He wondered how the odd impulse ever had come to him. In sudden suspicion, he began to trace the last few minutes through again. He had started with a firm decision not to let his guests involve him in their plans any more than was healthy for him, if at all -- and the decision had been transformed, step by step, and mental twist by mental twist, into a foolish willingness to have them make use of him exactly as they pleased ! Miss Green, still maliciously pretending to watch the sky, let him think it all out until it became quite clear what she had done and how she had done it. And then, as Mel spluttered angrily at this latest interference with his freedom of thought and action, she turned around and laughed at him. I N A way, it cleared the air. The pressure was off. Maria had proved a much more pliable subject than Mel; the rescuers had their bearings and would arrive presently. Meanwhile, everybody could relax. Mel couldn't help feeling relieved as he grew sure of that. At the same time, now that the departure was settled, he became aware of a certain amount of belated regret. Miss Green didn't seem to know the exact hour; she was simply watching for them well ahead of their arrival. Where would they show up ? She waved her arms around in an appealingly helpless gesture at the court outside and the sky. Here, there -- somewhere in the area. It would be a fire globe. At his question, she pointed at the opposite wall of the court where a picture of one formed itself obligingly, slid along the wall a few feet, and vanished. Mel was beginning to enjoy all this easy last-minute communication, when he heard Maria come downstairs and open the door to the other court. There was conversation, and several sets of footsteps went up to her apartment and down again. Cautioning Miss Green, he took a look around the shutters of the living room window. A small panel truck stood in the court ; Maria was supervising the careful transfer of her paintings into its interior. Apparently she didn't even intend to let them dry before offering them for sale! The truck drove off with Maria inside with her paintings, and Mel discovered Miss Green doing a little spying of her own from the upper edge of the shutters. Good friends now, they smiled at each other and resumed their guard at the bedroom window. The princess joined them around five in the afternoon. Whether she had been injured in the accident or weakened by the birth of her babies, Mel couldn't tell, but Miss Green carried her friend down from the cupboard without visible effort, and then went back for a globular basket of tightly woven tiny twigs, which contained the twins. It was a masterfully designed little structure with a single opening about the thickness of a pencil, and heavily lined. Mel had a notion to ask for it as a souvenir, but decided against it. He lifted it carefully to his ear, to listen to an almost inaudible squeaking inside, and his expression seemed to cause Miss Green considerable silent amusement. All in all, it was much like waiting patiently in pleasant company for the arrival of an overdue train. Then, around seven o'clock, when the room was already dark, the telephone rang abruptly and returned Mel with a start to the world of human beings. He lifted the receiver. "Hello, oaf!" said Maria de Guesgne in what seemed for the moment to be an enormous, booming voice. Mel inquired agreeably whether she'd succeeded in selling her paintings. It was the first thing that occurred to him. "Certainly I sold them!" Maria said. He could tell by now that she was thoroughly plastered again. "Got a message to give you," she added. "From whom?" "Maybe from me, ha-ha!" said Maria. She paused a moment, seemed to be muttering something to herself, and resumed suddenly, "Oaf, are you listening?" Mel said bluntly that he was. If he hung up on her, she would probably ring back. "All right," Maria said clearly. "This is the message : 'The fiery ones do not tolerate the endangering of their secrets.' Warning, see? Goo'bye." She hung up before he could say anything. sort of intrusion. Mel stood a while in the darkening room, trying to gather up the mood Maria had shattered, and discovering he couldn't quite do it. He realized that all along, like a minor theme, there had been a trace of fear underlying everything he did, ever since he had first looked into that bird box and glimpsed something impossible inside it. He had been coveringthe fear up; even now he didn't want to admit it, but it was there. He could quite simply, of course, walk out of the room and out of the apartment, and stay away for a week. He didn't even ever have to come back. And, strictly speaking, this was the sort of thing that should have happened to somebody like Maria de Guesgne, not to him. For him, the sensible move right now would be to go quietly back into the normal world of reality he had stepped out of a few mornings ago. It was a simple physical act. The door was over there... Then Mel looked back at his guests and promptly reversed his decision. They were certainly as real as any living creatures he'd ever seen, and he felt there weren't many human beings who would show up as well as Miss Green had done in any comparable emergency. His own unconscious fears meant only that he had run into a new and unpredictable factor in a world that had been becoming increasingly commonplace for a number of years now. He could see that once you'd got settled into the idea of a commonplace world, you might be startled by discoveries that didn't fit that notion -- and he felt now, rather hazily, that it wasn't such a bad thing to be startled like that. It might wake you up enough to let you start living again yourself. He took the receiver off the phone and laid it on the floor, so there wouldn't be any more interruptions. If he ran off now before seeing how the adventure ended, he knew he would never quit regretting it. He went into the bedroom and pulled his chair back up to the window. The shadowy sihouette that was Miss Green turned and sounded a few fluting notes at him. He had the immediate impression that she was worried. What was the matter? She pointed. Clouds ! T HE sky was still full of the pastel glowings of the sunset. Here and there were patches of black cloud, insignificant-looking, like ragged crows swimming through the pale light. "Rain," the thought came. rain! Another storm!" Mel studied the sky uneasily. They might be right. "Your friends are bound to get here first," he assured them, looking confident about it. They smiled gratefully at him. He couldn't think of anything he might do to help. The princess looked comfortable on the towel he had laid along the screen, and Miss Green, as usual, looked alert, prepared to handle anything that had to be handled. He wondered about asking her to let him see how the globes were doing, and, instantly, a thought showed clear in his mind : "Try it yourself!" That hadn't occurred to Mel before. He settled back comfortably in the chair and looked through the screen for them. Four or five fiery visualizations quivered here and there in the air, vanished, reappeared, vanished... Mel stopped looking for them, and there was only the sky. "Closer?" he said aloud, rather pleased with himself. It had been easy ! Miss Green nodded, human fashion, and piped something in reply. Closer, but -- He gathered she couldn't tell from here how close, and that there was trouble -- a not quite translatable kind of trouble, but almost as if, in their dimension, they were struggling through the radiant distortions of a storm that hadn't gathered yet here on Earth. He glanced up at the sky again, more anxiously now. The black clouds didn't seem to have grown any larger. not had any awareness of going to sleep, Mel was surprised to find himself waking up. He knew immediately that he had been asleep a long time, a period of hours. There was grayness around him, the vague near-light of very early morning, and he had a sense of having been aroused by a swirling confusion of angry sounds. But all was silent at the moment. Her answer was instantly in his mind. The storm had caused a delay -- but a great globe was almost here now ! A curious pause followed. Mel had a sense of hesitation. And then, very swiftly and faintly, a wisp of thought, which he would have missed if that pause had not made him alert, showed and vanished on the fringe of his consciousness : "Be careful! Be very careful" Miss Green turned back to the window. Beside her now, Mel saw the princess sitting as if asleep, with one arm across the twig basket and her head resting on her arm. Before he could frame the puzzled question that was struggling up in his mind, there was a series of ear-splitting yowls from the court outside. It startled Mel only for a moment, since it was a familiar sort of racket. The gray cat didn't tolerate intruding felines in its area, and about once a month it discovered and evicted one with the same lack of inhibition it was evidencing right now. It must have been the threatening squalls which usually preceded the actual battle that had awakened him. The encounter itself was over almost instantly. There were sounds of a scampering retreat which ended beyond the garage, and, standing up at the window, Mel saw the gray shape of the winner come gliding back down the court. The cat stopped below him and seemed to turn up its head. For a moment, he felt it was staring both at him and at Miss Green, very much like a competent little tiger in the gusty, gray night; then it made a low, menacing sound and moved on out of sight. Apparently it hadn't yet forgotten its previous meeting with Miss Green. Mel looked down at her. "Why should I be careful?" There was a pause again, and what came then hardly seemed an answer to his question. The princess was very weak, Miss Green indicated; he might have to help. He was still wondering about that -- and wondering, too, whether he'd really had something like a warning from her -- when a sudden wavering glare lit up the room behind them! For a moment, he thought the fireball was inside the building. But the light was pouring in through the living room window; its source was in the opposite court, out of his line of sight. There was a crackling, hissing sound, and the light faded. Miss Green came darting at him. Mel put his hand up instinctively and felt her thrust the basket into it. Almost instantly, she had picked up the princess and was outside the screen -- Then the cat attacked from below in a silent, terrible leap, a long, twisting shadow in the air, and they seemed to drop out of sight together. M EL was out in the court, staring wildly around. In the swimming grayness nothing stirred or made sound. A cool, moist wind thrust at his face and faded. Except for the toy basket of twigs in his hand, he might have been awakening from a meaningless dream. Then a lurid round of light like a big, wavering moon came out over the top of the building, and a sharp humming sound drove down through the air at him. Instinctively again, he held out the basket and felt it plucked away. He thought it was Miss Green, but the shape had come and gone much too swiftly to be sure of that. solid white -- intolerable -- and he backed hurriedly into the shelter of' the garage, his heart hammering in excitement and alarm. He heard voices from the other court ; a window slammed somewhere. He couldn't guess what was happening, but he didn't need Miss Green's warning now. He had an overwhelming urge to keep out of sight until the unearthly visitor would be gone -- And then, running like a rabbit, the gray cat appeared from behind a box halfway down the court and came streaking for the garage. Mel watched its approach with a sort of silent horror, partly because it might be attracting undesirable attention to him -- and partly because he seemed to know in that instant exactly what was going to be done to it. It wasn't more than twenty feet away when something like a twisting string of fiery white reached down from above. The animal leaped sideways, blazed and died. There was a sound very like a gunshot, and the court was instantly dark. Mel stayed where he was. For half a minute or so, he was shaking much too violently to have left his retreat. By the end of that time, he knew better. It wasn't over yet ! Pictures forming in the moist, dark air... delicate, unstable outlines sliding through the court, changing as they moved. Elfin castles swayed up out of grayness and vanished again. Near the edge of his vision other shapes showed, more beautiful than human... Muttering to himself, between terror and delight, Mel closed his eyes as tightly as he could, which helped for a moment. But then the impressions began drifting through his mind. The visitors were still nearby, hanging somewhere outside the limits of human sight in their monstrous fireball, in the windy sky. They were talking to him in their way. Mel asked in his mind what they wanted, and the answer showed immediately. The table in his living room with the pattern of glassy sand and pebbles Miss Green had constructed. The pattern was glowing again now under the cloth he had thrown over it. He was to go in and look at the pattern... "No!" he said aloud. It was all terror now. "Go look at the pattern... Go look at the pattern..." The pictures burst round him in a soundless wild flowering of beauty, flickering rains of color, a fountain of melting, shifting forms. His mind drowned in happiness. He was sinking through a warmth of kindness, gratitude and love... cheek coldly -- and Mel found himself outside the garage, moving drunkenly toward the apartment door. Then, just for a moment, a picture of Miss Green printed itself on his mind. She seemed to be standing before him, as tall now as he was, motionless, the strange wings half spread. The golden unhuman eyes were looking past him, watching something with cold malice and contempt -- and with a concentration of purpose that made a death's mask of the perfectly chiseled green face ! In that second, Mel understood the purpose as clearly as if she had told him. In the next, the image disappeared with a jerky, complete abruptness -- As if somebody were belatedly trying to wipe it out of his memory as well ! But he knew he had seen her somehow -- somewhere -- as she actually was at that moment. And he knew what she had been watching. Himself, Mel Armstrong, staggering blindly about in his other-dimension, down in the court ! He hadn't stayed in the court. He was back in the garage, backed trembling against a wall. She -- they -- weren't trying to show him gratitude, or reward him somehow; before they left, they simply wanted to destroy the human being who had found out about them, and whom they had used. The table and the pattern were some sort of trap ! What he couldn't undertand was why they didn't simply come down in their fireball and kill him as they had the cat. They were still pouring their pictures at him, but he knew now how to counteract that. He stared out through the garage window at the lightening sky -- looked at, listened to, what was there, filling his mind with Earth shapes and sounds ! And he promptly discovered an ally he hadn't been counting on. He hadn't really been aware of the thumping wind before, and the sketchy pattering of raindrops, like a sweeping fall of leaves here and there. He hadn't even heard, beyond the continuous dim roar of surf from the beach, the gathering mutter of thunder ! They couldn't stay here long. The storm was ready to risk coming out fully into the Earth dimension to hunt him down. And he didn't have to go to their trap... Rain spattered louder and closer. The sweat chilled on Mel's body as his breathing grew quieter. They hadn't left him yet. If he relaxed his eyes and his mind, there was an instant faint recurrence of the swirling unearthly patterns. But he could keep them out by looking at what was really here. He only had to wait -- Then the rain came down in a great, rushing tide, and he knew they were gone. F OR a few seconds, he remained where he was, weak with relief. Over the noise of the storm, he heard human voices faintly from the other court and from neighboring houses. That final crash must have awakened everybody -- and someone had seen the great globe of fire when it first appeared. There should be some interesting gossip in the morning! Which concerned Mel not at all. After drinking in the sweet certainty of being still alive and safe, he had become aware of an entirely unexpected emotion, which was, curiously, a brief but sharp pang of grief at Miss Green's betrayal. Why, he must have been practically in love with that other-dimensional, human-shaped rattlesnake ! Mulling it over in moody amazement at himself, it struck Mel suddenly then that one could interpret her final action somewhat differently, too. Because she could have planted that apparently revealing picture of herself deliberately in his mind, to stop him from stumbling into the trap the others had set for him ! She might have been planning to save him from the beginning, or merely relented at the last moment. There was no way of ever really knowing now, but Mel found he preferred to believe that Miss Green's intention was good. In the driving rain, he hesitated a moment beside the blackened lump that had been the cat, but he couldn't force himself to pick it up and remove it. If someone else found it, it might add to the gossip, but that wasn't any business of his any more. Everyone knew that lightning did funny, selective things. So far as he was concerned, the matter was all over. He opened the duplex door and stood staring. His apartment door was open and the room beyond was dark, as he had left it. But down the little stairway and out of Maria's upstairs apartment, light poured in a quiet flood. S HE must have returned during the night while he was sleeping, probably drunk as a hoot-owl. The commotion downstairs hadn't been enough to arouse her. But something else had -- she'd come down following swirling, beautiful, unearthly pictures, hunting the pattern that would guide her straight into a promised delight! Mel didn't have to reach into the apartment to switch on the light. Lightning did funny, selective things, all right, and from where he stood, he could smell what had happened. They hadn't wasted that final bolt, after all ! Oddly enough, what was uppermost in his mind in those seconds, while he continued to p,ut off seeing what he was going to have to look at very soon, was the final awareness of how he must have appeared in their eyes: A stupid native, barely capable of receiving training and instruction enough to be a useful servant. Beyond that, they had simply had no interest in him. It was Maria they had worried about. The mental impressions he'd picked up in the court had been directed at her. Miss Green had been obliged to stop him finally from springing a trap which was set for another. For Maria, who might have endangered their leaving. No question of it, Douglas was a prize catch... btit by whom... and for what? Douglas lowered gratefully into his red-leather easy chair and sighed. A long sigh, accompanied by labored removal of his shoes and numerous grunts as he kicked them into the corner. He folded his hands across his ample middle and lay back, eyes closed. "Tired?" Laura Douglas asked, turning from the kitchen stove a moment, her dark eyes sympathetic. "You're darn right." Douglas surveyed the evening paper across from him on the couch. Was it worth it? No, not really. He felt around in his coat pocket for his cigarettes and lit up slowly, leisurely. "Yeah, I'm tired, all right. We're starting a whole new line of research. Whole flock of bright young men in from Washington today. Brief cases and slide rules." "Not -- " "Oh, I'm still in charge." Professor Douglas grinned expansively. "Perish the thought." Pale gray cigarette smoke billowed around him. "It'll be another few years before they're ahead of me. They'll have to sharpen up their slide rules just a little bit more..." His wife smiled and continued preparing dinner. Maybe it was the atmosphere of the little Colorado town. The sturdy, impassive mountain peaks around them. The thin, chill air. The quiet citizens. In any case, her husband seemed utterly unbothered by the tensions and doubts that pressured other members of his profession. A lot of aggressive newcomers were swelling the ranks of nuclear physics these days. Old-timers were tottering in their positions, abruptly insecure. Every college, every physics department and lab was being invaded by the new horde of skilled young men. Even here at Bryant College, so far off the beaten track. But if Anthony Douglas worried, he never let it show. He rested happily in his easy chair, eyes shut, a blissful smile on his face. He was tired -- but at peace. He sighed again, this time more from pleasure than fatigue. "It's true," he murmured lazily. "I may be old enough to be their father, but I'm still a few jumps ahead of them. Of course, I know the ropes better. And -- " "And the wires. The ones worth pulling." "Those, too. In any case, I think I'll come off from this new line we're doing just about..." His voice trailed off. "What's the matter?" Laura asked. Douglas half rose from his chair. His face had gone suddenly white. He stared in horror, gripping the arms of his chair, his mouth opening and closing. At the window was a great eye. An immense eye that gazed into the room intently, studying him. The eye filled the whole window. "Good God!" Douglas cried. The eye withdrew. Outside there was only the evening gloom, the dark hills and trees, the street. Douglas sank down slowly in his chair. "What was it?" Laura demanded sharply. "What did you see? Was somebody out there?" clasped his hands. His lips twitched violently. "I'm telling you the truth, Bill. I saw it myself. It was real. I wouldn't say so, otherwise. You know that. Don't you believe me?" "Did anybody else see it?" asked, chewing his pencil thoughtfully. He had cleared a place on the dinner table, pushed back his plate and silver and laid out his notebook. "Did Laura see it?" "No. Laura had her back turned." "What time was it?" "Half an hour ago. I had just got home. About sixthirty. I had my shoes off, taking it easy." Douglas wiped his forehead with a shaking hand. "You say it was unattached? There was nothing else? Just the -- eye?" "Just the eye. One huge eye looking in at me. Taking in everything. As if -- " "As if what?" "As if it was looking down a microscope." Silence. From across the table, Henderson's red-haired wife spoke up. "You always were a strict empiricist, Doug. You never went in for any nonsense before. But this... It's too bad nobody else saw it." "Of course nobody else saw it!" "What do you mean?" "The damn thing was looking at me. It was me it was studying." Douglas' voice rose hysterically. "How do you think I feel -- scrutinized by an eye as big as a piano ! My God, if I weren't so well integrated, I'd be out of my mind !" Henderson and his wife exchanged glances. Bill, darkhaired and handsome, ten years Douglas' junior. Vivacious Jean Henderson, lecturer in child psychology, lithe and full-bosomed in her nylon blouse and slacks. "What do you make of this?" Bill asked her. "This is more along your line." "It's in your line," Douglas snapped. "Don't try to pass this off as a morbid projection. I came to you because you're head of the Biology Department." "You think it's an animal? A giant sloth or something?" "It must be an animal." "Maybe it's a joke," Jean suggested. "Or an advertising sign. An oculist's display. Somebody may have been carrying it past the window." Douglas took a firm grip on himself. "The eye was alive. It looked at me. It considered me. Then it withdrew. As if it had moved away from the lens." He shuddered. "I tell you it was studying me!" "You only?" "Me. Nobody else." "You seem curiously convinced it was looking down from above," Jean said. "Yes, down. Down at me. That's right." An odd expression flickered across Douglas' face. "You have it, Jean. As if it came from up there." He jerked his hand upward. "Maybe it was God," Bill said thoughtfully. Douglas said nothing. His face turned ash white and his teeth chattered.L  "God is a psychological transcendent symbol expressing unconscious forces." "Did it look at you accusingly?" asked Bill. "As if you'd done something wrong?" "No. With interest. With considerable interest." Douglas raised himself. "I have to get back. Laura thinks I'm having some kind of fit. I haven't told her, of course. She's not scientifically disciplined. She wouldn't be able to handle such a concept." "It's a little tough even for us," Bill said. Douglas moved nervously toward the door. "You can't think of any explanation? Something thought extinct that might still be roaming around these mountains?" "None that we know of. If I should hear of any -- " "You said it looked down," Jean said. "Not bending down to peer in at you. Then it couldn't have been an animal or terrestrial being." She was deep in thought. "Maybe we're being observed." "Not you," Douglas said miserably. "Just me." "By another race," Bill put in. "You think -- " "Maybe it's an eye from Mars." Douglas opened the front door carefully and peered out. The night was black. A faint wind moved through the trees and along the highway. His car was dimly visible, a black square against the hills. "If you think of anything, call me." "Take a couple of phenobarbitals before you hit the sack," Jean suggested. "Calm your nerves." Douglas was out on the porch. "Good idea. Thanks." He shook his head. "Maybe I'm out of my mind. Good Lord. Well, I'll see you later." He walked down the steps, gripping the rail tightly. "Good night!" Bill called. The door closed and the porch light clicked off. Douglas went cautiously toward his car. He reached out into the darkness, feeling for the door handle. One step. Two steps. It was silly. A grown man -- practically middle-aged -- in the twentieth century. Three steps. He found the door and opened it, sliding quickly inside and locking it after him. He breathed a silent prayer of thanks as he snapped on the motor and the headlights. Silly as hell. A giant eye. A stunt of some sort. He turned the thought over in his mind. Students? Jokesters? Communists? A plot to drive him out of his mind? He was important. Probably the most important nuclear physicist in the country. And this new project... He drove the car slowly forward, onto the silent highway. He watched each bush and tree as the car gained speed. A Communist plot. Some of the students were in a leftwing club. Some sort of Marxist study group. Maybe they had rigged up -- In the glare of the headlights something glittered. Something at the edge of the highway. Douglas gazed at it, transfixed. Something square, a long block in the weeds at the side of the highway, where the great dark trees began. It glittered and shimmered. He slowed down, almost to a stop. A bar of gold, lying at the edge of the road. Professor Douglas rolled down the window and peered out. Was it really gold? He laughed nervously. Probably not. He had often seen gold, of course. This looked like gold. But maybe it was lead, an ingot of lead with a gilt coating. But -- why? A joke. A prank. College kids. They must have seen his car go past toward the Hendersons' and knew he'd soon be driving back. Or -- or it really was gold. Maybe an armored car had gone past. Turned the corner too swiftly. The ingot had slid out and fallen into the weeds. In that case there was a little fortune lying there, in the darkness at the edge of the highway. But it was illegal to possess gold. He'd have to return it to the Government. But couldn't he saw off just a little piece? And if he did return it there was no doubt a reward of some kind. Probably several thousand dollars. A mad scheme flashed briefly through his mind. Get the ingot, crate it up, fly it to Mexico, out of the country. Eric Barnes owned a Piper Cub. He could easily get it into Mexico. Sell it. Retire. Live in comfort the rest of his life. Professor Douglas snorted angrily. It was his duty to return it. Call the Denver Mint, tell them about it. Or the police department. He reversed his car and backed up until he was even with the metal bar. He turned off the motor and slid out onto the dark highway. He had a job to do. As a loyal citizen -- and, God knew, fifty tests had shown he was loyal -- there was a job for him here. He leaned into the car and fumbled in the dashboard for the flashlight. If somebody had lost a bar of gold, it was up to him... A bar of gold. Impossible. A slow, cold chill settled over him, numbing his heart. A tiny voice in the back of his mind spoke clearly and rationally to him: Who would walk off and leave an ingot of gold? Something was going on. frozen, trembling with terror. The dark, deserted highway. The silent mountains. He was alone. A perfect spot. If they wanted to get him -- They? Who? He looked quickly around. Hiding in the trees, most likely. Waiting for him. Waiting for him to cross the highway, leave the road and enter the woods. Bend down and try to pick up the ingot. One quick blow as he bent over; that would be it. Douglas scrambled back into his car and snapped on the motor. He raced the motor and released the brake. The car jerked forward and gained speed. His hands shaking, Douglas bore down desperately on the wheel. He had to get out. Get away before -- whoever they were got him. As he shifted into high he took one last look back, peering around through the open window. The ingot was still there, still glowing among the dark weeds at the edge of the highway. But there was a strange vagueness about it, an uncertain waver in the nearby atmosphere. Abruptly the ingot faded and disappeared. Its glow receded into darkness. Douglas glanced up, and gasped in horror. In the sky above him, something blotted out the stars. A great shape, so huge it staggered him. The shape moved, a disembodied circle of living presence, directly over his head. A face. A gigantic, cosmic face peering down. Like some great moon, blotting out everything else. The face hung for an instant, intent on him -- on the spot he had just vacated. Then the face, like the ingot, faded and sank into darkness. The stars returned. He was alone. Douglas sank back against the seat. The car veered crazily and roared down the highway. His hands slid from the wheel and dropped at his sides. He caught the wheel again, just in time. There was no doubt about it. Somebody was after him. Trying to get him. But no Communists or student practical jokers. Or any beast, lingering from the dim past. Whatever it was, whoever they were, had nothing to do with Earth. It -- they -- were from some other world. They were out to get him. Him . But -- why? ly. "Go on," he said when Douglas halted. "That's all." Douglas turned to Bill Henderson. "Don't try to tell me I'm out of my mind. I really saw it. It was looking down at me. The whole face this time, not just the eye." "You think this was the face that the eye belonged to?" Jean Henderson asked. "I know it. The face had the same expression as the eye. Studying me." "We've got to call the police," Laura Douglas said in a thin, clipped voice. "This can't go on. If somebody's out to get him -- " "The police won't do any good." Bill Henderson paced back and forth. It was late, after midnight. All the lights in the Douglas house were on. In one corner old Milton Erick, head of the Math Department, sat curled up, taking everything in, his wrinkled face expressionless. "We can assume," Professor Erick said calmly, removing his pipe from between his yellow teeth, "they're a nonterrestrial race. Their size and their position indicate they're not Earthbound in any sense." "But they can't just stand in the sky!" Jean exploded. "There's nothing up there !" "There may be other configurations of matter not normally connected or related to our own. An endless or multiple coexistence of universe systems, lying along a plane of coordinates totally unexplainable in present terms. Due to some singular juxtaposition of tangents, we are, at this moment, in contact with one of these other configurations." "He means," Bill Henderson explained, "that these people after Doug don't belong to our universe. They come from a different dimension entirely." "The face wavered," Douglas murmured. "The gold and the face both wavered and faded out." "Withdrew," Erick stated. "Returned to their own universe. They have entry into ours at will, it would seem, a hole, so to speak, that they can enter through and return again." "It's a pity," Jean said, "they're so damn big. If they were smaller -- " "Size is in their favor," Erick admitted. "An unfortunate circumstance." "All this academic wrangling!" Laura cried wildly. "We sit here working out theories and meanwhile they are after him!" "This might explain gods," Bill said suddenly. "Gods?" see? In the past these beings looked across the nexus at us, into our universe. Maybe even stepped down. Primitive people saw them and weren't able to explain them. They built religions around them. Worshiped them." "Mount Olympus," Jean said. "Of course. And Moses met God at the top of Mount Sinai. We're high up in the Rockies. Maybe contact only comes at high places. In the mountains, like this." "And the Tibetan monks are situated in the highest land mass in the world," Bill added. "That whole area. The highest and the oldest part of the world. All the great religions have been revealed in the mountains. Brought down by people who saw God and carried the word back." "What I can't understand," Laura said, "is why they want him." She spread her hands helplessly. "Why not somebody else? Why do they have to single him out?" Bill's face was hard. "I think that's pretty clear." "Explain," Erick rumbled. "What is Doug? About the best nuclear physicist in the world. Working on top-secret projects in nuclear fission. Advanced research. The Government is underwriting everything Bryant College is doing -- because Douglas is here." "So?" "They want him because of his ability. Because he knows things. Because of their sizerelationship to this universe, they can subject our lives to as careful a scrutiny as we maintain in the biology labs of -- 'well, of a culture of Sarcina Pulmonum. But that doesn't mean they're culturally advanced over us." "Of course!" Pete Berg exclaimed. "They want Doug for his knowledge. They want to pirate him off and make use of his mind for their own culture." "Parasites!" Jean gasped. "They must have always depended on us. Don't you see? Men in the past who have disappeared, spirited off by these creatures." She shivered. "They probably regard us as some sort of testing ground, where techniques and knowledge are painfully developed -- for their benefit." Douglas started to answer, but the words never escaped his mouth. He sat rigid in his chair, his head turned to one side. Outside in the darkness beyond the house, someone was calling his name. ward the door. They were all staring at him in amazement. "What is it?" Bill demanded. "What's the matter, Doug?" Laura caught his arm. "What's wrong? Are you sick? Say something! Doug!" Professor Douglas jerked free and pulled open the front door. He stepped out onto the porch. There was a faint moon. A soft light hovered over everything. "Professor Douglas!" The voice again, sweet and fresh -- a girl's voice. Outlined by the moonlight, at the foot of the porch steps, stood a girl. Blonde-haired, perhaps twenty years old. In a checkered skirt, pale Angora sweater, a silk kerchief around her neck. She was waving at him anxiously, her small face pleading. "Professor, do you have a minute? Something terrible has gone wrong with..." Her voice trailed off as she moved nervously away from the house, into the darkness. "What's the matter?" he shouted. He could hear her voice faintly. She was moving off. Douglas was torn with indecision. He hesitated, then hurried impatiently down the stairs after her. The girl retreated from him, wringing her hands together, her full lips twisting wildly with despair. Under her sweater, her breasts rose and fell in an agony of terror, each quiver sharply etched by the moonlight. "What is it?" Douglas cried. "What's wrong?" He hurried angrily after her. "For God's sake, stand still!" The girl was still moving away, drawing him farther and farther away from the house, toward the great green expanse of lawn, the beginning of the campus. Douglas was overcome with annoyance. Damn the girl ! Why couldn't she wait for him? "Hold on a minute!" he said, hurrying after her. He started out onto the dark lawn, puffing with exertion. "Who are you? What the hell do you -- " There was a flash. A bolt of blinding light crashed past him and seared a smoking pit in the lawn a few feet away. D ouglas halted, dumfounded. A second bolt came, this one just ahead of him. The wave of heat threw him back. He stumbled and half fell. The girl had abruptly stopped. She stood silent and unmoving, her face expressionless. There was a peculiar waxy quality to her. She had become, all at once, utterly inanimate. But he had no time to think about that. Douglas turned and lumbered back toward the house. A third bolt came, striking just ahead of him. He veered to the right and threw himself into the shrubs growing near the wall. Rolling and gasping, he pressed against the concrete side of the house, squeezing next to it as hard as he could. There was a sudden shimmer in the star-studded sky above him. A faint motion. Then nothing. He was alone. The bolts ceased. And -- The girl was gone, also. A decoy. A clever imitation to lure him away from the house, so he'd move out into the open where they could take a shot at him. He got shakily to his feet and edged around the side of the house. Bill Henderson and Laura and Berg were on the porch, talking nervously and looking around for him. There was his car, parked in the driveway. Maybe, if he could reach it -- He peered up at the sky. Only stars. No hint of them. If he could get in his car and drive off, down the highway, away from the mountains, toward Denver, where it was lower, maybe he'd be safe. He took a deep, shuddering breath. Only ten yards to the car. Thirty feet. If he could once get in it -- He ran. Fast. Down the path and along the driveway. He grabbed open the car door and leaped inside. With one quick motion he threw the switch and released the brake. The car glided forward. The motor came on with a sputter. Douglas bore down desperately on the gas. The car leaped forward. On the porch, Laura shrieked and started down the stairs. Her cry and Bill's startled shout were lost in the roar of the engine. A moment later he was on the highway, racing away from town, down the long, curving road toward Denver. Denver. She could join him. They could take the train east. The hell with Bryant College. His life was at stake. He drove for hours without stopping, through the night. The sun came up and rose slowly in the sky. More cars were on the road now. He passed a couple of diesel trucks rumbling slowly and cumbersomely along. He was beginning to feel a little better. The mountains were behind. More distance between him and them... His spirits rose as the day warmed. There were hundreds of universities and laboratories scattered around the country. He could easily continue with his work someplace else. They'd never get him, once he was out of the mountains. He slowed his car down. The gas gauge was near empty. To the right of the road was roadside cafe. The sight of the cafe reminded him he hadn't eaten breakfast. His stomach was beginning to protest. There were a couple of cars pulled up in front of the cafe. A few people were sitting inside at the counter. He turned off the highway and coasted into the gas station. "Fill her up!" he called to the attendant. He got out on the hot gravel, leaving the car in gear. His mouth watered. A plateful of hotcakes, side order of ham, steaming black coffee... "Can I leave her here?" "The car?" The white-clad attendant unscrewed the cap "What do you mean?" "Fill her up and park her for me. I'll be out in a few minutes. I want to catch some breakfast." "Breakfast?" Douglas was annoyed. What was the matter with the man ? He indicated the cafe. A truck driver had pushed the screen door open and was standing on the step, picking his teeth thoughtfully. Inside, the waitress hustled back and forth. He could already smell the coffee, the bacon frying on the griddle. A faint tinny sound of a juke box drifted out. A warm, friendly sound. "The cafe." The attendant stopped pumping gas. He put down the hose slowly and turned toward Douglas, a strange expression on his face. "What cafe?" he said. T HE cafe wavered and abruptly winked out. Douglas fought down a scream of terror. Where the cafe had been there was only an open field. Greenish brown grass. A few rusty tin cans. Bottles. Debris. A leaning fence. Off in the distance, the outline of the mountains. Douglas tried to get hold of himself. "I'm a little tired," he muttered. He climbed unsteadily back into the car. "How much?" "I just hardly began to fill the -- " "Here." Douglas pushed a bill at him. "Get out of the way." He turned on the motor and raced out onto the highway, leaving the astonished attendant staring after him. That had been close. Damn close. A trap. And he had almost stepped inside. But the thing that really terrified him wasn't the closeness. He was out of the mountains and they had still been ahead of him. It hadn't done any good. He wasn't any safer than last night. They were everywhere... The car sped along the highway. He was getting near Denver -- but so what? It wouldn't make any difference. He could dig a hole in Death Valley and still not be safe. They were after him and they weren't going to give up. That much was clear. He racked his mind desperately. He had to think of something, some way to get loose. A parasitic culture. A race that preyed on humans, utilized human knowledge and discoveries. Wasn't that what Bill had said? They were after his know-how, his unique ability and knowledge of nuclear physics. He had been singled out, separated from the pack because of his superior ability and training. They would keep after him until they got him. And then -- what? Horror gripped him. The gold ingot. The decoy. The girl had looked perfectly real. The cafe full of people. Even the smells of food. Bacon frying. Steaming coffee. God, if only he were just an ordinary person, without skill, without special ability. If only -- A sudden flapping sound. The car lurched. Douglas cursed wildly. A flat. Of all times... Of all times. to a halt at the side of the road. He switched off the motor and put on the brake. For a while he sat in silence. Finally he fumbled in his coat and got out a mashed package of cigarettes. He lit up slowly and then rolled the window down to let in some air. He was trapped, of course. There was nothing he could do. The flat had obviously been arranged. Something on the road, sprinkled down from above. Tacks, probably. The highway was deserted. No cars in sight. He was utterly alone, between towns. Denver was thirty miles ahead. No chance of getting there. Nothing around him but terribly level fields, desolated plains. Nothing but level ground -- and the blue sky above. Douglas peered up. He couldn't see them, but they were there, waiting for him to get out of his car. His knowledge, his ability, would be utilized by an alien culture. He would become an instrument in their hands. All his learning would be theirs. He would be a slave and nothing more. Yet, in a way, it was a compliment. From a whole society, he alone had been selected. His skill and knowledge, over everything else. A faint glow rose in his cheeks. Probably they had been studying him for some time. The great eye had no doubt often peered down through its telescope, or microscope, or whatever it was, peered down and seen him. Seen his ability and realized what that would be worth in its own culture. Douglas opened the car door. He stepped out onto the hot pavement. He dropped his cigarette and calmly stubbed it out. He took a deep breath, stretching and yawning. He could see the tacks now, bright bits of light on the surface of the pavement. Both front tires were flat. Something shimmered above him. Douglas waited quietly. Now that it had finally come, he was no longer afraid. He watched with a kind of detached curiosity. The something grew. It fanned out over him, swelling and expanding. For a moment it hesitated. Then it descended. Douglas stood still as the enormous cosmic net closed over him. The strands pressed against him as the net rose. He was going up, heading toward the sky. But he was relaxed, at peace, no longer afraid. Why be afraid? He would be doing much the same work as always. He would miss Laura and the college, of course, the intellectual companionship of the faculty, the bright faces of the students. But no doubt he would find companionship up above. Persons to work with. Trained minds with which he could communicate. T HE net was lifting him faster and faster. The ground fell rapidly away. The Earth dwindled from a flat surface to a globe. Douglas watched with professional interest. Above him, beyond the intricate strands of the net, he could see the outline of the other universe, the new world toward which he was heading. Shapes. Two enormous shapes squatting down. Two incredibly huge figures bending over. One was drawing in the net. The other watched, holding something in its hand. A landscape. Dim forms too vast for Douglas to comprehend. At last , a thought came. What a struggle . It tvas worth it, thought the other creature. Their thoughts roared through him. Powerful thoughts, from immense minds. I teas right . The biggest yet . What a catch! Must tveigh all of twentyfour vagets! At least! Suddenly Douglas' composure left him. A chill of horror flashed through his mind. What were they talking about? What did they mean? But then he was being dumped from the net. He was falling. Something was coming up at him. A flat, shiny surface. What was it? Oddly, it looked almost like a frying pan. Promoters of institutional research are ill-informed according to W. J. Kroll, originator of the famous Kroll process used for producing metallic titanium and zirconium. Kroll points out that in the last few years twofifths of all U. S. patents have been taken out by individual inventors, and that only a very few institutional scientists ever received the Nobel Prize... The problem seems to break down into basic and applied research. The former needs little organization and not much equipment -- only an idea. But applied research does lend itself to organization... Setting up institutions and teams just happens to be the easiest way of accomplishing this. -- Institutional Research the scarlet hexapod Of course the y were batty... wouldn't you be if you were right all the time? H animal," Mrs. Norris Bixi Clovis replied. "Maybe said, looking down at Jeff, who you've read about them -- had tied himself into a close hexies have had a good deal of lover's knot around her left publicity lately." ankle. "That color's beautiful. "A hexapod?... Yes, I reBut what is he, anyway? I member seeing a voca-piece thought he was some sort of in the last issue of Vue about dog when he came squirming them. But I thought they were under the gate to say hello, but always violet or plum color." I never saw a dog with six "Usually they are. But legs." Sonsy's last litter had two that were that sort of sunset color, like Jeff, and one that was jet black all over except for her toenails and the irises of her eyes. They were a sort of kingfisher blue." "It sounds lovely." "Oh, she was. Everyone that saw her wanted her." "You raise them to sell?" Mrs. Norris asked. Jeff had come loose from her ankle and was lying on the garden path in front of her, all six feet raised in adoration, while his bushy, flame-colored tail thumped rhythmically on the plastic stepping stones. "Well, yes and no," Bixi answered. "In the first place, all that stuff about how they have litters as soon as they get some borax to eat is nonsense. They are crazy about borax, of course, but they have litters when they feel like it, and not before. The litter Jeff was born in is the first one Sonsy's had in six years. And in the second place, you can't sell a hexapod unless he wants to be sold. If he doesn't like the person you sell him to, he'll come right home again. Hexies have a better sense of direction than carrier pigeons, and they won't compromise -- either it's love at first sight or it's no sale." 'The voca-piece said they were highly intelligent." Mrs. Norris was rubbing Jeff between his ears ; his eyes were nearly shut, and he was making a noise that was a cross between a gurgle and a coo. "Oh, they are. Really, they are uncanny. They won't learn tricks or anything like that -- if you try to teach them, they just look at you and thump their tails. But they seem to understand everything you say, and Bill, my husband, says that Sonsy's always doing things he only thought about her doing. The other day he couldn't find a blank for the dictatype, and she picked one up in her mouth and brought it over to him." Norris' arms somehow and was licking her ear appreciatively. He looked startling and improbable, against the background of her white dress and silvery hair. "You know," she said, "I feel like I've just got to have this little fellow. I've been wanting a pet for some time, but Evan -- he's my nephew -- says it would be too much trouble, traveling around the way we do. He likes to be always on the go. But I just know Jeff won't be any trouble; he's so cute and sweet. How much is he, anyway?" Bixi told her, feeling a little apologetic. "Oh," Mrs. Norris said. "Well, I guess I can afford it I won't tell Evan, though. He -- well, I won't tell him." The big zircoridiums on her she put her thumbprint on the voucher. The papers were made out, the transaction was complete. Jeff licked Bixi politely on the nose in farewell, and trotted sedately after his new boss. The next morning, while Bixi and her husband were at breakfast, there was a scratching at the door. "It's Jeff," Bixi reported when she came back. "He looks as if he has something on what passes for his mind. Do you suppose something's wrong?" Jeff trotted into the center of the room, fixed his eyes on the Clovises, and began to howl. "What's the matter, old fellow?" Bill asked, holding out a piece of whost toward the hexapod. Jeff sniffed briefly at the whost, wagged his tail twice, and then began howling more loudly than ever. "I'm going to call the hotel," Bixi said above the din. "This is very funny. I'd have said Mrs. Norris was crazy about him and he about her." Bill nodded. "The clerk says the Norrises left for Bagdad by stratoliner this morning," Bixi Clovis reported after a session on the video. "Bagdad?" "Mm-hmm. And when I asked him if they had a hexapod with them, he said, 'What is a hexapod?' So -- where's Jeff?" "He went out of the room while you were talking. Probably went back to the hotel to look for Mrs. Norris. Don't worry about him ; he's got more sense about traffic than most human beings." "Oh, I'm not nervous about him. But what's going on? I wonder -- " Bill left to go to work, and Bixi went on wondering. Late that afternoon the clerk at the stratoport called on the video. "Say, is this your hexapod?" he asked, holding up the struggling, scarlet form of Jeff for her to see. "... Why, yes." "Well, you better come down and get him. It's a good thing I remembered you people breed hexapods. He's been trying to get on stratoliners all afternoon. Twice they stopped him at the gangplank, and once he got into the cabin before he was caught." "Were the liners for Bagdad?" Bixi asked, feeling a thrill of superstitious awe that was almost fear. "Why, no, they were en route for South America, for Valparaiso. I don't know how he happened to pick three headed for the same place." "Valparaiso. O.K., I'll come down and get him." sure it isn't danI gerous, Evan?" Mrs. Norris asked. "I must confess the idea rather frightens me." "Oh, not in the least, Aunt Emily," her lanky nephew said. "I wouldn't want you to try it if I thought it might be dangerous. But I know you'll enjoy it. First the long ski run -- " "Do you think I can manage skis at my age, Evan?" Mrs. Norris asked a little doubtfully. "Oh, they're motor-driven. No trick to it at all. First the long ski run and then, just at the top, when you're almost two kilometers up, the antigrav comes on automatically, and you go floating slowly down. The harbor's in front of you and the mountains behind ; I read the other day that that view of Valparaiso is one of the seven wonders of the modern world. You wouldn't want to miss a thrill like that, would you, Auntie?" "No, I guess not," Mrs. Norris agreed. Her face grew wistful. "You haven't had any answer to your grams to Mrs. Clovis yet, have you?" "No, not a word." "I can't understand it. She seemed so conscientious and reliable. What do you suppose happened to the little fellow? Sometimes I think we ought to go back to Oakland and hunt for him." "Oh, nonsense. It's a racket, that's all. She has him trained to come back from wherever she sells him, so she can sell him over and over again. You are lucky to get out of it without more trouble, Aunt Emily, dealing with people like that... You'd better get your things on, dear, before it's too late to make the ski jump today." "IT IS beautiful, Evan," Mrs. Norris said, looking at the prospect before her. She gave her nephew's hand a quick squeeze. "I'm glad you made me come. Have I got my feet in the skis right?" Evan knelt in the snow and looked at the fastenings. "Exactly right," he reported. "I'll be just behind you, Auntie, and remember, don't lean too far out at the turns." He walked over to the anti-grav mechanism. "I won't, dear. What's that man yelling about?" "Senor! Senor!" The fat little man who had taken their admission fees at the barrier was running up the snowy slope toward them, puffing and stumbling over his feet. "Cuidado! Muy peligroso! No toques la maquina! Cuidado!" "Probably wants more money," Evan said, turning negligently to face him. Mrs. Norris' skis began to move. "I'll take care of it." "You were right, Evan," Emily Norris said when she and her nephew were down by the copter again. "It is one of the wonders of the world. The Terrestrial Chamber of Commerce isn't exaggerating when it says there're things on Terra that none of the other planets can match. It was a little scary when I got to the top of the incline, because I thought, What if the anti-grav doesn't go on? I'd have been smashed into a dozen pieces. But I went floating down like a feather. But where were you? I waited quite a while before I thought of looking for you here. Did you decide not to make the jump? You really missed something." "Got into a row with that damned ticket taker," Evan said a little thickly. His face was pale. "Jabber, jabber -- couldn't make out what he wanted. Upset me -- no use making that jump then. It was spoiled." He cleared his throat. "Aunt Emily, how would you like to go to China next? I know how nervous you are about getting off of Terra, and we haven't been to China for several years." "To China?" Her face was doubtful. "Why, Evan, we only just got here. Wouldn't you like to stay a little while before we start traveling again? It's so beautiful here." "Yes, I know, Auntie, but you know how easily I get bored. I'm afraid that's just the way I am. Restless. Impatient." He was chewing at his lower lip. "... Well, all right, dear. Anything you say." jaw. "I will not take a stratoliner to Asia!" he said defiantly. "What's the matter with you, Bixi? Are you and that blasted animal both crazy? I had to draw a big hunk out of our savings account to get the tickets to Valparaiso when Jeff acted up, and now one of you has decided, before we even get there, that we've got to go to Asia instead. Asia! And we're only to Mexico City ! God only knows if I can get a refund on the tickets." "Ssh!" Bixi said warningly. "People can hear you all over the waiting room." Jeff put his front feet up on her knees and looked at her pleadingly; he had been shivering ever since they got into the Ciudad Mexico stratoport. His bushy tail was lusterless and limp. "Can't you see Jeff knows something? He didn't keep pulling us over to the Chinese stratoliners for nothing. He's nearly worried to death. It's serious. You know how hexies are." "Yeah, I know how they are. Crazy. He's had too much borax, that's all. Don't you realize I can't possibly get back to work on Monday if we go to China? This is Saturday! And Darnell is out for my scalp anyhow. I've had enough of this idiotic wild-goose chase." "But darling -- " "Jeff's imagining the whole thing! We're going home!" Norris said pleadingly. "I ought to be over the food poisoning by now, oughtn't I, Evan dear? Surely it wouldn't hurt me to have a little more to eat. I feel so hungry and faint all the time, and I never get anything except broth." Evan Norris shook his head. "Now, Auntie, the doctor knows what's good for you. You don't realize that you've been very ill. If you overload your stomach, you might have a relapse." Mrs. Norris sighed. "I don't like the nurse, either," she said. "Why not? Isn't she competent?" "Oh, I guess so, but -- she isn't respectful, and she's so rough when she gives me my bath. And yesterday I heard her muttering something under her breath when I asked her for my somni-spray." "Aunt Emily, you mustn't go imagining things." "I do try, but... Evan, couldn't I have an English doctor? I'm sure Dr. Chung does not understand me when I tell him about my symptoms, and I know I don't understand anything he says. I always feel worse after I take my medicine; it isn't doing me any good." "Now, Auntie," Evan said with a touch of severity, "you mustn't talk like that about Dr. Chung. He's the best physician in Canton." "Oh, dear," Mrs. Norris said. Tears came into her eyes ; she cried so easily nowadays. "I wish I had that little hexapod I bought. What was his name? Jeff. I wish I had Jeff." "Don't think about it, Auntie," Evan advised. "It isn't good for you. After lunch there are a few papers I want you to sign and thumb for me." "I thought I did everything like that in Valparaiso. Oh, Evan, I just don't feel equal to business now." "All you have to do is print your thumb a couple of times. That's all I want you to do." "Oh, dear," Mrs. Norris said again. Weakly she turned her head toward the wall. It annoyed Evan to see her cry. "Oh, dear." A Bixi said. Her face was radiant. "I'm so glad you're here!" She gave her husband a vigorous hug. "After I got your gram, what else could I do? Couldn't have you getting into a lot of trouble by yourself," he answered with a hint of grimness. "Everything's fixed; I got leave from the office, and the hexies at home are fine. Listen, are they still here?" "The Norrises? Sure. They are three doors down, on the same balcony that this room is." Bixi's face grew sober. "She's sick in bed, Bill," she said with a rush. "I pretended to be an agent of China Tourist interviewing visitors. Her nephew talked to me at the door. I looked over his shoulder and saw her. She's so thin, and her face is a funny color, almost green. They have a Chinese doctor and a dizzy blonde nurse with the tallest stilt heels I ever saw, and her uniform fits her so tight it's a wonder she can breathe without an oxygen mask. I'm sure Mrs. Norris isn't sick. You'd know what I mean if you saw her nephew and that nurse." Bill rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "How's Jeff taking it?" "He spends most of the time on the balcony outside their room, listening. I was afraid he'd try to jump in through the window (this hotel is a dump -- windows with glass in them), but he stays out of sight and listens. But what are we going to do? Even if something is wrong, Evan is her nephew, and we're not even friends of hers. If we try to start anything, he'll just take her somewhere else and -- what are we going to do?" There was a long, thoughtful pause. "I guess we'll have to leave it to Jeff," Bill Clovis said at last. Evan Norris said. He folded the documents his aunt had just thumbed and signed, and put them neatly away in a dispatch case. "It's almost sixteen," he said, looking at his informeter. "Mab -- the nurse -- is still off duty. What do you say we have tea together, Auntie dear?" "You're sure it won't upset me?" Mrs. Norris said feebly from the bed. "Yesterday the tea made me feel a little sick." "It was only your imagination. A nice cup of tea will do you good." He rang the service bell. "Couldn't I have one of those little crumpets?" Mrs. Norris asked when the tea had been brought. "They smell so good." "Better not, Auntie," Evan advised, beginning to pour out the tea. "It might make -- good God, what's that noise?" An appalling racket had begun at the window, a scratching, grinding, clashing, rattling noise, like a fight between a Martian vrys and a dhobi in an electrical storm. Evan went over to the window and looked out. "Nothing there or on the balcony, as far as I could see," he reported when he came back to the tea table. "Can't imagine what caused it. I'll complain to the management if it happens again." "It is refreshing," Mrs. Norris declared after a pause, during which she had been sipping from her cup. "Not at all like what I had yesterday. Don't you think it's better, Evan? Why, Evan, what's the matter? Evan! Are you ill?" Evan did not answer. He had slumped back against the side of his chair. His face was a dull red and his breathing rasping and slow. As Mrs. Norris watched, the thin porcelain teacup slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. Jeff jumped through the open window. He paused to lick Mrs. Norris quickly on her astonished nose, and then took his stand in front of her unconscious nephew. He began to bark. Jeff had a deep chest, even for a hexapod. He was a really notable barker when he chose. They heard him all over the hotel. Al Norris said. Jeff, who was lying curled elaborately around her ankles, thumped the eutex languidly with his tail. He had the air of a hexapod whose troubles are over. "If I'd drunk the tea Evan had fixed for me, "as weak as I was... It was supposed to finish me off, you see, make it look like a natural death... But this little fellow made all that racket at the window just at the right time, and Evan got mixed up and drank it himself. I couldn't understand what had happened at first; I thought he'd had some sort of fit. I never was so glad to see anybody in my life, Mrs. Clovis, as I was when you came to the window, after Jeff began to bark, and asked me if your hexapod was annoying me. It was like waking up from a dreadful dream. Are you sure five thousand will be enough to build the new hexapod kennel, Mrs. Clovis? I'd be glad to give you more; I feel that I owe you people a great, great deal." "Skip it," Bixi said hastily. "Jeff deserves all the credit. Where is Evan now?" "The court sentenced him to be rehabilitated." Mrs. Norris sighed. "I hope the treatment does him good. It's hard for me to believe ; his mother was my husband's favorite sister. But now that I look back on it, I realize that at Valparaiso, too, he was trying... He meant to damage the antigrav mechanism on the skijump there, so I'd fall. He said at the trial that the nurse (she wasn't a nurse at all, really) suggested it, but that Dr. Chung didn't know what was going on. Evan never gave me any of the medicine the doctor left -- what I had was drugs he and that nurse got -- and they lied to the doctor about my treatment... Anyhow, I still have Jeff. When I get a little stronger, I'm going shopping for the finest collar for him I can find. He's a wonderful, wonderful animal, Mrs. Clovis." "Yes," Bill Clovis answered, smiling at Bixi, "it all goes to show the truth of the old saying Bixi is always quoting at me : 'If a hexapod bites a man, put the man in jail.' Hexapods are alwavs right." How could it give away such buys? Very easy -- by don der than a wet hen and his roommate, Ken Adaman, was enjoying his misfortune hugely. "Not a blame thing!" snarled Jack, fiddling with the knobs of the television set. "Not even static lines. First they give me a set without a plug-in cord, and now this one's got a no-good picture tube." "You get what you pay for," said Ken, laughing. "I've warned you about these socalled bargains. But what's this about the plug-in cord?" Ken had been at work the day before, when Jack first brought the new television set into their apartment and discovered that omission. "I didn't see any point in saying anything about that last night," admitted Jack. "After I bought the thing yesterday and brought it home, I found out it didn't have a cord to plug it in -- not even a connection in the back for a cord. I took it back to them and they said something about the wrong kind of power and fixed it up for me last night." "You got stung, old buddy," said Ken, unwinding his long legs from the arm of the easy chair. "They probably made it from junk parts." "It doesn't look like it," said Jack stubbornly. It didn't. The television set was shiny and new-looking, although rather odd. With a thirty-five-inch screen, it was only about six inches thick, and it had a strange antenna of concentric circles on top instead of the conventional rabbit ears. There were only two dials, one for the channels (it was lettered instead of numbered) and one for offon and volume. "I'd take it back and demand my money," said Ken. "I'll take it back, all right, but if they'll fix it, I don't want my money back. Guess how much it cost me." "Well..." Ken pulled a stubby pipe from his coat pocket and began to pack it slowly from a humidor on the chairside table. "Knowing your bargains, I'd say about a hundred and fifty dollars." "Two dollars," said Jack. "Two dollars and no strings attached." a sucker game somewhere." "Maybe so, but what's two dollars? The materials are worth more than that as junk. And if they fix it... How. about going along with me to return it, Ken?" Ken lit his pipe carefully and glanced at his wristwatch. "Okay," he said, "if we can be back in an hour. I'm curious to see this place, but I've got a date with Lorene tonight and I have to get cleaned up." Jack winced. The roommates were competitors for the hand of Lorene Shavely, the pert brunette in the tobacco store down the street. But Ken was getting so much the better of it that it could be called competition in name only by now. "It's only about five blocks, on Gehannon Street," Jack said. "We'll be back in time." He repacked the television set in its box. "Ardex," said Ken, reading the name on the box. "Offbrand. I never heard of it before." They set out, Jack carrying the box under one arm. The set was remarkably light for its size. The street lights were coming on along Gehannon Street, for it was five o'clock on a winter afternoon. Jack bought a late edition from a newsboy on the corner. "Probably closed by now," said Ken. But it wasn't. Just past Wing Fan's Chinese laundry, Jack turned into an alley and went down a flight of concrete steps. There was a door there, leading into a basement under the Eat-A-Bite Restaurant. It was unlighted, and there were no signs there to indicate anything but that the Grove Brothers Circus, Greatest Show on Earth, was coming to town two years ago. But when they opened the battered wooden door, the light inside was like fairyland. Soft, of many changing hues, it lit a spotless expanse of floor that stretched away farther than Ken had realized the basement extended. The floor was broken by merchandise-loaded counters and gleaming machines. Here and there a clerk moved, in raiment that changed color with the light. One of the clerks approached them. He was black-eyed, black-haired and handsome, and wore a tunic and balloon f "Ah, Mr. Hanshaw!" he exclaimed, recognizing Jack. "Glad to see you back again. But I see you have the -- uh -- television with you. Still having trouble?" "Yeah," said Jack. "The screen's no good. No picture at all." The clerk looked puzzled. "The tube couldn't be bad. It must be in the transmission facilities." "You mean the TV stations ? I don't see how -- " "Different methods of transmission," said the clerk hastily. "Just a minute, Mr. Hanshaw, and I'll see what our communications man can do about this." He took the box from Jack and started off. "Wait," said Jack. "Here's your newspaper." the man accepted the paper and disappeared into the depths of the basement store. "What's with the newspaper business?" demanded Ken. "That's part of the bargain," said Jack. "When I bought the television set, I agreed to bring him a late newspaper every time I come in the store." "Hmm. Queer setup. And what kind of funny clothes is he wearing?" "Store uniform, I guess." "Some uniform," remarked Ken, who worked in a men's clothing store. "That fabric's spun glass, I think. And some of these people in 'store uniforms' seem to be customers." Indeed, some of the perhaps two dozen people visible, all dressed like the clerk, appeared to be making purchases. While waiting for the clerk to return, the two of them looked around at the nearby counters. "Funny thing about this place," said Ken, "is I don't know what seventy per cent of these gadgets they're selling are. Those I can recognize look strange. Like that set of dishes -- I'm no housewife, but I've never seen shapes like those before." "I noticed that, too," said Jack. "But anything they've got that we can use, we can't afford not to buy, at the prices they ask." "Let's wait and see how the television set turns out," suggested Ken. T HE clerk returned, emptyhanded. "My communications man thinks he can fix your comm -- television set so it will be all right, if you can bring us a technical manual on television sets. I hate to ask you to go to such trouble -- " "What! You mean you've got a television repairman who doesn't have a manual on the things?" "Not on the type you need," said the clerk apologetically. "It wouldn't matter what brand or trade name the manual applies to." "Why can't you have your communications man go out and buy his own?" demanded Ken. "Or order one?" "Well -- let's just say it would cause great inconvenience at this time. Mr. Hanshaw, I realize it would inconvenience you also, so in return to give you, free, any item of merchandise in the store." "Fair enough," agreed Jack, his eyes gleaming. "I'll bring it tomorrow." "Incidentally, sir, would your friend be interested in a purchase while you are here?" "No, absolutely not," said Ken, turning away. Jack caught his arm. "Oh, come on, Ken ! Price these things, anyhow. You'll be astonished. Show Mr. Adaman something he can use." "Mr. Adaman?" The clerk's eyes widened delightedly. "Why, sir, that's my name, too. Edigo Adaman." "Mine's Kenneth Adaman," said Ken shortly, but he showed more interest. "It isn't a common name," said Edigo. "Are you by any chance a merchant, Mr. Adaman?" "You might say so. I'm a clerk in a men's clothing store." family has been in the mercantile business for many generations," he said. "My father owns this store and it will be the largest in the Americas when we finish it. Now, Mr. Adaman, do you see anything that interests you? Anything at all?" "Well," said Ken, moving over to a counter, "is this a watch?" "Yes, sir, and a very good one." Edigo picked it up. It was a thin dial, with three hands and twenty-four numerals instead of the usual twelve. "It's very nice-looking. But it's a pocket watch, isn't it? I wear a wristwatch." "Oh, no," said Edigo. "Hold out your arm." Ken obeyed. Edigo placed the dial on his wrist, and it clung without apparent support. "Say, that's keen !" exclaimed Ken. "Some, sort of magnetism, I suppose? How much?" "Would -- would fifty cents be too much?" asked Edigo anxiously. "Fifty cents? Sold!" Ken pulled a coin from his pocket. "Oh, no, sir. Not the cash. Deposit it in the account, please, and bring me the deposit slip. Mr. Hanshaw knows the bank." "That's right," said Jack. "Broadway National, account of Supercolossal Mercantile Company. Here's the deposit slip on the two dollars for the television set." "And we'll have it straightened out for you right away, Mr. Hanshaw, if you can only bring us the manual." As the two of them headed for the door to the basement, Ken said to Jack in a low tone : "There goes another customer out ahead of us. I'm going to stop him outside and see if he can give us the answers to some of the things I don't understand about this place." The customer, dressed like Edigo and all the others in the basement, went through the door just ahead of them. Jack caught it just before it shut. But when he and Ken mounted the steps, the man was nowhere in sight, either up or down the alley. "Where could he have gone?" asked Ken in amazement. "He'd have had to run like hell to get out of the alley before we got up here." They walked to the mouth of the alley and emerged into the glare of the neon lights. Ken held up his new watch and looked at it in a stunned sort of way. "Say, you know something?" he said thoughtfully. "That fellow Edigo Adaman looks vaguely familiar to me." "I noticed that, too," said Jack. "Look like any of your relatives?" Ken considered. "No, not in the least." was in the tobacco store chatting with Lorene. Mr. Schmit, the store's owner, registered silent disapproval in the background, but was not likely to protest openly unless Lorene slighted a customer. Jack had told Lorene about the strange bargain basement the day after he and Ken visited it. He found that Ken had mentioned it to her that night, too. "I couldn't find the kind of complete television manual they need at any of the bookstores," said Jack gloomily. "I had to have one of them order me one, and while I'm waiting, no television. The man said it was color TV, too. I can't understand any store that big not getting its own manuals." "Have you ever been upstairs?" asked Lorene. "Upstairs? There's nothing there but the Eat-A-Bite Restaurant." "Oh. Ken said they had something like elevators going up, and it looked like they might have floors above." "I didn't know Ken had been back after that night," said Jack in surprise. "He didn't say anything to me about it. I got the impression he thought the whole thing was a fake." Lorene's black eyes sparkled as she smiled, and she turned a cheek to exhibit oddly cut earrings. "He brought me these earrings from there. I'd think you'd be buying other things, too, Jack, at those prices, instead of moping over that television set." "Oh, I have," said Jack. "I bought several suits of clothes at a dollar each. They didn't have any in stock except those funny outfits they wear in the store, but I took them a picture from a magazine advertisement and they made me some suits to order." "Is that one of them?" asked Lorene, gazing critically at the somewhat baggy suit he was wearing. "No," said Jack sheepishly. "I thought they were too nice; to wear to work. They're that; spun glass, or whatever it is. Go dancing with me tonight and I'll wear one." "Can't," said Lorene. 'T'vei got a date with Ken." "I never get to go out with! you any more, Lorene," Jack said glumly. "What have I: done to make you turn me down every time?" "Nothing," said Lorene can-; didly. "I like you as a friend, Jack. But Ken -- well, he's got! that extra something I can't; resist. We're going to get mar-, ried, you know." "No, I didn't," said Jack,, # ! but he wasn't very surprised. Just then Ken breezed in. "Hi, honey," he said. "Hello, Jack. Say, you two, come out and take a look at my new car." "New car!" squealed Lorene. "Oh, Ken! But I can't leave the store. I'll have to look from the door." "It's down the block," said Ken. "I'll drive by, and you can get a good look tonight. Come on, Jack." Jack went with him. The automobile was one of those low-slung, half-block-long affairs like one Jack vaguely remembered seeing pictured in a foreign car magazine. "That's not yours," he said flatly. "Those things cost ten or fifteen thousand dollars." "Cost me fifty," said Ken smugly. "I got it at our friend Edigo's store. Fifty bucks." "You mean they carry things like that?" "I took them a picture and they made it for me," said Ken. "Had to widen that door and put runways up the steps to drive it out of there. It cost me twice as much as the car to get the door widened and then bricked back the way it was. They worked on the inside and I got a crew to work on the outside." "Seems to me they'd have had it out in the street for you, instead of building it in the basement and then having to get it out," said Jack critically, gazing up and down the gleaming length of black and chrome. "Ha!" said Ken slyly. "That's just it, son. They couldn't. I've found out the secret of our friends in the bargain basement." "Secret? You mean there is something phony about it?" "I'll tell you while we're driving around in this dream wagon. But first let me show you something." He went to the front of the car and raised the hood. Inside was the strangest little engine Jack had ever seen. "What is it?" he asked. "Turbo-jet," said Ken proudly. "And if you'll notice, you can't see inside the car -- one-way glass. And it's got radar brakes and a hundred other new gadgets on it." "But I thought the turbojet engine was still in the future," protested Jack. "It is," said Ken solemnly. "That's where our bargain basement is -- in the future." the superhighway as silently as a floating cloud. The speedometer read #. Ken explained that was # kilometers, or about # miles an hour. He buzzed it up to # kilometers once when some youngsters in a souped-up sports car sought to race with them. "They use solar power," Ken explained, "but it's broadcast power and wouldn't work in a car sent back to the past. They made one like the picture, which just showed the outside, and I suppose they assumed we use turbojets back in this period. It must be pretty ancient to them." "Why would people from the future want to set up a store in the basement under the Eat-A-Bite Restaurant?" protested Jack. "Not from the future -- in the future. For some reason, that basement door is in a time fault. People from now can go through it into the future and come back, and bring inanimate objects with them. But the people from the future can't come back to the past for some reason -- that's why they can't go out and get things themselves, and that's why they want us to bring them rare antiques, like newspapers and books." "Maybe," said Jack doubtfully. "How did you guess all this?" "A little deduction. I had some conversations with Edigo while I was shopping there. He said he just dug that basement as the lower floor of his new fifty-story building; but actually that basement's been there for years and is supposed to be empty. It belongs to old man Caswell, who owns the building the Eat-A-Bite's in, and God knows how he's going to react if he ever walks into it and finds that store. And it's not just that. The costumes, the strange objects they have for sale, even that peculiar accent." Tl asked Jack. "I don't know. Pretty far, I expect. How much interest does that bank account draw? You know, the one in their name, where we've been depositing the money for the things we bought?" "Three per cent, I think, compounded quarterly." "It would have to be compounded to amount to anything in a couple of hundred years or so." "I still don't get it. Why do they sell things so cheap? Will prices be that much lower in the future?" "Probably a lot higher," said Ken. "They don't even use the same sort of money we do -- that's why they don't just ask us to make deposits of their own money for them. But they can afford to sell us at these ridiculously low prices because the deposits in their name draw compound interest and build up to a lot higher than the value of the merchandise in the future -- their time. I expect every dime we deposit for them means a hundred dollars or more to them in their equivalent of our money." "I just don't see that," said Jack. "We're in their past. How could they have us deposit money to build up for them, unless, to them, the deposits are already there?" "Edigo -- you know, Jack, that fellow still reminds me of somebody I know -- Edigo explained it to me when I made him admit this future business was true. The future can be changed, and we could change the present if we could influence the past. And don't I wish I could manage that trick!" Ken added greedily. "So every time we put a dime in their account -- pop ! -- at their end, they've got an extra hundred dollars or more in the bank." "I suppose so," said Jack thoughtfully. "But how about this fellow Edigo digging the basement? The basement's already there now. The real one, I mean." "In a hundred years, two hundred years, you think it'll still be there?" demanded Ken scornfully. "Old Caswell's basement's going to fill in again, and some time in the future, this fellow Edigo Adaman's going to dig it out again. You know, Jack, with that name, he could be a descendant of mine." "He seemed to think he might be, from what he said that first evening." "Look, buddy, we'll have to go back," said Ken, pulling the car into a cloverleaf to turn around. "I've got a date with Lorene tonight, and I'm sure anxious to see her face when she climbs into this buggy." "Sure," said Jack. "But drop me off at the bargain basement, will you? I've got an idea for something I want to buy." curiously. There was that odd familiarity to the man's face that Jack couldn't quite place. "We have strict regulations against influencing an individual's attitudes by artificial means," he said. "But I don't suppose it's against the law in your time, is it?" "Not unless it's a dangerous or habit-forming drug," said Jack. "Possession of certain drugs, you know, can get you a stiff prison sentence. But there are milder things, like perfumes and alcohol, that influence people temporarily. That's sort of what I had in mind, only with a stronger effect -- not a habit-forming drug." "Hmm," murmured Edigo. "What we have wouldn't have been discovered in your time and wouldn't be covered by law. And it isn't dangerous or habit-forming. It's prescribed by psychologists in certain cases. But I am not sure I should -- " "One hundred dollars," said Jack. "It's a great deal for five klens' worth of... All right. Would you prefer it in liquid, tablet or powder form?" "How about like this?" suggested Jack, handing over a package of chewing gum. "Yes, it could be mixed in that. If you can wait a few minutes, I'll have our chemist prepare it." Edigo went away with the chewing gum, and Jack gave himself over to doubts. Perhaps it wasn't fair, but what was that old saying about love and war? Jack convinced himself that Ken hadn't been fair in getting that flashy car. What if Ken had thought of the same thing? A momentary chill passed over Jack. But no. Ken didn't need it. In a few moments, Edigo returned with the chewing gum. It looked no different. Jack couldn't tell whether it was the same gum, with a new ingredient added, or new sticks put in the old wrappers. It didn't matter. "Thank you. I'll deposit the hundred dollars right away," said Jack. He took the gum and left. He went straight to the tobacco store. He was just in time. Lorene was getting her hat and jacket on to return home. Surprisingly, Ken was not waiting outside for her with the new car. "I'll walk you home, Lorene," suggested Jack. "All right," she agreed, smiling at him. "Ken was to pick me up, but he phoned and said he had to work late on inventory." They left the store together. "Have some chewing gum," suggested Jack, offering her a stick. It was much better than trying to slip liquid or a tablet in a milk shake. "Not right now," she said. "It's too soon before supper." "Oh, come on," he invited jovially. "You only live once. I'll have some, too." No harm in that. It couldn't change his feelings much, anyhow. She accepted a stick, and they chewed as they walked. Jack could guess her feelings from the intensification of his own. Suddenly Lorene was the most beautiful woman in the world -- Cleopatra, Helen, the Queen of Sheba. He would have died for her gladly. He took her hand in his and squeezed it. She leaned against his shoulder and turned starry eyes up to him. That walking kiss was the most ecstatic thing he had ever experienced. "Let's get married, Lorene," he said huskily. "Now." "Yes, Jack, yes," she sighed. ment rather hard. After all, he and Lorene already had set their wedding date. He looked very thoughtful, but Jack was not worried. Ken would never suspect that Lorene had been won away from him by a package of chewing gum doctored with some unknown drug from the future. Jack and Lorene would not be able to get married until the next day, because the city hall had closed for the afternoon and they were unable to get a license. They spent the evening shopping in the bargain basement for Lorene's trousseau, ordering things from pictures in magazine advertisements, and planning for the future. "I'll get them to make us a car like Ken's," said Jack, "and maybe we can work out some way of buying a house through them. With this setup, we can live like royalty, even on my salary." liar one -- as the minister pronounced them man and wife, Jack's clothing vanished. He was kissing his bride when a sudden chill and the gasps of those around him made him realize he was in his underwear. He borrowed a suit from the minister and took Lorene back to the apartment. Ken was packing his things. "I'll move my stuff to a hotel until I can find another apartment," said Ken. "Call me a cab, will you, old man? Somebody's stolen my car." Jack and Lorene were to leave on their honeymoon the next day. That afternoon he announced his intention of going to the bargain basement and lodging a complaint. "That suit and shirt I had on were clothes I bought there," he said. "If their stuff's going to disintegrate like that, it's not worth even what little I paid for it. After that trouble with the television set... Say, what happened to the television set? I'll bet Ken took it with him !" "And to think I almost married him!" shuddered Lorene. On the way to the bargain basement, Jack explained to Lorene what Ken had told him: how the bargain basement existed in the future, and the door to it was a fault in time. They passed Wing Fan's laundry and turned into the alley. They went down the steps to the basement door and opened it. A blank wall of raw earth met their eyes.  "What in blazes!" exclaimed Jack. There were footsteps in the alley above them. Old man Caswell came down the steps with a policeman in tow. "My basement!" Caswell was complaining bitterly, almost shouting. "I was going to rent it today, and somebody fills it up with dirt. Why, I ask you, why? Why would anybody want to fill my basement with dirt?" He caught sight of Jack and Lorene standing to one side. "You !" he cried. "You have anything to do with this?" "Absolutely nothing," Jack assured him. "I thought there was a store here." "Store!" snorted Caswell. "Dirt!" Jack and Lorene got away and made their way bade to the street. "Was there really a store there, Jack?" she asked. "We're really married, aren't we, honey? I mean yes, there was. I don't know what happened." He looked at her, smiling, and the smile faded. "Oh, oh," he said slowly. "I think I know now." "What?" "I know now who Edigo Adaman reminded me of. You!" He didn't tell her he was almost sure that, the way things would have been, Lorene and Ken would have been married and Edigo would have been their descendant. But Edigo had changed all that when he sold Jack a drug that Jack used, to make sure that Ken wouldn't marry Lorene, but that he would instead. And since Ken and Lorene wouldn't be married now, Edigo would never be born, and would never have the idea of building a fifty-story building at that spot, starting it by digging a basement. So that was what happened to the suit and Ken's car and the television set. Since the basement wasn't to be built there, they wouldn't be, so they weren't -- they never had been. The strange thing about it was that Jack remembered it all, and even stranger, he was still married to Lorene, and he wouldn't have been except for the drug. But then that had to be, because if he hadn't married her, she'd have married Ken -- and then the basement would have been, and he'd have gotten the drug, and Ken wouldn't have married Lorene because Jack would have, and then there wouldn't have been any basement... Jack sighed. He was happy that the circle stopped where A lot has been said about centralizing military RD (research and development) as a separate civilian activity. Clifford D. Rassweiler, president of the American Chemical Society, has a better idea. He wants us to have a fourth branch of the military outside the Army, Navy, and Air Force for this purpose. Such a service would provide incentives for officers to devote their careers to RD -- which is not possible under the Burns says... a fourth branch of government is necessary. Ranking in importance with the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, the "Permanent Council on Plans and Policies"... its function: to look into the future. -- Industrial Research Homecoming Returning to the planet of his birth , Jeb was prepared for all changes...in people, society, customs... but not for this change in Customs'. of the ramp, Jeb Halvorsen felt the little hand of the He looked down and saw that the small Danibor marsupialoid was shrinking against him the way a child might. "It's all right, Tommy," he said soothingly. "I'm not going to go off and leave you." "I'm good," said Tommy, turning the large eyes in his narrow, kangaroolike face up to Jeb. "I know you are." Jeb reached over with his free hand and patted the round furry head that came to a little below his belt. "Don't worry now. These are only human people like you knew back on Danibor. It's just that there's a lot more of them here on Earth. They won't hurt you; and anyway, I'll take care of you. Come on. We go this way." They turned to their left, down the long, echoing, pillared distance of Customs Row with its alphabetical divisions. The ramp they had taken up from the landing area of the ship that had just brought them in from Danibor and Alpha Centauri had brought them out in the K section. It was a short stroll to the H section where Jeb's luggage would be delivered. In fact when they got there the luggage had already arrived. It stood piled in a rough pyramid of boxes and cases all but identical with the similar stacks of luggage on the ruled squares about it. They went to it, passing a pleasant-faced young blonde girl who occupied the square to their right. "Now you wait here," Jeb told Tommy. "I've got to go get a ticket. I'll be right back. Stay with the luggage." threading his way between the piled-up squares of luggage back to the rear wall of the section. A stack of large plastic numbers was hanging on a hook there. He took the top one -- it was number eighteen -- and carried it back to the square where Tommy waited beside his luggage. Tommy was sitting down with his back against a suitcase, his eyes enormous on the blonde girl on the next square, who was trying to talk to him. Her face, animated now in conversation, had glowed into unexpected prettiness. She was a small girl and very white-skinned, as if she had spent months out of any sunlight whatsoever. "He's cute," she said, looking up as Jeb approached. "He's not Earth-native, is he?" "No, he's a mutant variform of Danibor in the Vegan system. His parent strain was Onychogale -- nail-tailed wallabies, a sort of kangaroo," said Jeb. "They were mutated to provide a balanced ecology on Danibor -- but this one's a personal pet of mine." "I never had a pet when I was little -- " she said, a little sadly, looking down at the Tommy. "Would you like to come back to Mercury and be my pet someday?" "No," said Tommy, and the transient glow of her smile was suddenly wiped away by shock. She looked up, hurt, at Jeb. "It's all right," said Jeb. "He didn't really understand you. This variform can talk a little, but they're still not much brighter than a young chimp, say, though they've got a dog's desire to please. They're awfully affectionate." He put a hand gently on Tommy's head. "You get attached to them." She smiled again, from him to Tommy. She leaned over and held out her hand. After out and grasped it trustfully with his own small fingers. "I'm good," said Tommy. "I'm sure you are," she said. "Good as gold." She looked up at Jeb. "Are you Daniborian? Or are you from Earth?" Jeb smiled a little twistedly. "I'm buying my way back," he said. "Oh." She colored a little. "It's nothing I'm ashamed of," said Jeb. "I was shipped out on a surplus-population draft like lots of people you've known yourself. And I'm coming back on a talentand-funds immigration visa. You're Earth yourself?" "Yes," she answered. "I've lived most of my life on Mercury -- but we never lost our citizenship here. My father was a transfer engineer on loan from a Baltimore company to its New Mercury branch." She hesitated. "Can I ask what your talent is?" "Sound engineering," Jeb said. "I came up with a few new wrinkles in the field. The funds part of it came from a little device I patented to control noise levels on city streets. You know how this re-entry business works, don't you?" "No. How?" She was watching him interestedly. "To satisfy the funds requirement, you have to put up a bond in International Earth Credits. To get that type of currency, you have to have something that you can sell or hock on Earth itself. I hocked my rights to the noise-levelcontrol patent." She opened her mouth to say something further, but at that moment a Customs inspector came threading his way among the squares, calling out, "Number fifteen!" "That's me," she said, turning away quickly. She held up her hand. "Over here, officer!" T HE Customs man came toward her. Tommy had escaped from her grasp while she was talking to Jeb and was now over on the other side of their pile of luggage, sniffing and staring about interestedly. Two more numbers were called in quick succession, and then came, "Eighteen!" Jeb held up his hand. "Over here !" The Customs officer who approached was a stocky, thin-haired man with a darkly tanned face and a pleasant smile. He shifted his record board into the crook of his arm as he came up and punched for a new entry. "Name?" he said. "Place of departure? Planetality? Open your luggage, please -- we aren't allowed to touch them until you do so." His fingers punched rapidly, taking down Jeb's answers, as Jeb went about the pile of luggage, spreading it out and snapping the cases open. The officer followed him, peering at the contents of each, punching out his record and keeping up a small string of conversation. " -- nothing to declare ? Right. What have you got here ?" "It's some of my Daniborian clothes," said Jeb. "I was told I could bring in my own personal apparel." "That's all right," said the Customs officer. "Native woolens, though. You'll have to declare that you have no intention of reselling them. Wools got quite a snob value Earthside these days. Do you so declare?" "Sure," said Jeb. "I wanted them mainly as souvenirs. These pipes too -- " "That's all right. All these things, you understand, have a certain value because they are off-planet in origin. What's in the metal case?" Jeb opened it, revealing the neatly racked rows of spools. "Scientific library and records of some work I've been doing," he answered. "I'll put them down as so declared. You assure me that in this library there are no items of seditious or immoral literature, or anything otherwise forbidden to importation under the Earth United law?" "I do," said Jeb. "And that about winds it up, except for this case here." He opened it. "Odds and ends I've got kind of attached to." The officer looked over a collection of articles ranging from a paper knife to a pipe reamer. "That's all right," he grinned. "As long as you haven't a diamond or two tucked away amongst it." "Give you my word," said Jeb, smiling back. "The whole lot isn't worth ten Universal Units." "I believe you," said the officer. "You should see some of the junk people have paid a couple of hundred lightyears' worth of freight on that comes through here. All right." He punched the last few of his buttons. "You haven't any Daniborian fruit, vegetables, seeds, spores, or other vegetation about your person or your luggage?" "Not a one," said Jeb. "Then sign here." He presented the record board to Jeb. "Thumbprint to the right of your signature. That's fine. I'll go file this now, and as soon as it's taken up, your luggage will be delivered to the central city depot. You can pick it up there." "Thanks," said Jeb. "Thank you very much. You've been a lot less rough about some of this stuff than I expected." "Oh, we're human, too," said the officer. "Though to listen to some of the stories you hear about us -- " Stepping back, he almost stumbled over Tommy, who had just then come around the stack of luggage after visiting a neighboring pile during the inspection. "Oops!" "That's all right," said Jeb. "You didn't hurt him. Say hello to the officer, Tommy." B UT Tommy merely sat and stared up at the Custom's man with wide-eyed curiosity. And the Customs man looked back down at him with no less interest. "What is he?" the officer asked. "Some sort of kangaroo? He's yours, isn't he?" "Yes," said Jeb. "No, he's not a real kangaroo. He's a when I tell him, but he's having too much fun right now looking at your uniform ornaments. Tommy, say hello to the man." heard of one," said the inspector. "Some species native to Danibor?" "No, he's a variform -- a mutant, you know -- of the nail-tailed wallaby here on Earth. They bred them to -- " Jeb broke off suddenly. "Is something wrong?" The officer was frowning. "I don't know," he said. "Wait here just a minute, will you, please?" He turned and disappeared among the luggage piles, back in the direction of the Customs office for their alphabetical sector. "Hi," said a voice. Jeb turned. It was the blonde girl on the next square. "How are you and Tommy coming? I'm all finished." "We are too, I guess," answered Jeb slowly. "The officer just told us to wait a minute until he came back." He looked at the girl. Her face was flushed with pleasure and quite appealing. "They're nice, aren't they?" said the girl. "I expected all kinds of trouble over some gifts I was bringing in. Oh, not real trouble, I mean, but red tape and signing papers and bonds and stuff. But he just waved it off. How was your man?" "Nice guy," said Jeb. "Now my vacation starts," said the girl. "Three months of it and then I'll be going to college on the West Coast. Now that it's really here, and I'm really in, I'm ready to burst with excitement." "Play with me, please?" said Tommy, from beneath them, putting up a hand to clutch at her skirt. She smiled radiantly down at him. "Of course I'll play with you, Tommy ! What would you like to play?" "Play tag?" said Tommy, bounding suddenly up into the air as if propelled by a spring like a jack-in-the-box, and coming down on top of one of the luggage cases. "Not now, Tommy," said Jeb. "There isn't room to play tag here." Tommy's slender ears drooped slightly. "Tag?" he said wistfully. "No!" snapped Jeb. Tommy's reaction was instantaneous. He almost cringed, and Jeb, immediately remorseful, put out a hand to stroke the soft head. "It's all right, boy," he said. "I'm not mad at you. It's just that we can't play tag right now." "I love you," said Tommy, putting out a sudden pink tongue to kiss Jeb's caressing hand. "I know. I love you, too," said Jeb automatically. He was aware suddenly that the girl's eyes were on him, and that they were shining with tears. "I'm sorry," she said, dabbing at them with a small handkerchief. "It's just that today is -- so much and everything -- and then the two of you... "Well," said Jeb awkwardly. Over the heads of the surrounding crowd and the tops of the luggage piles, he saw relief coming. "Here's our officer now," he said. The girl turned to look. "There's somebody with him," she said. A ND indeed there was another man just behind the one who had checked Jeb's luggage, a slightly heavier, older man with graying hair and the silver bar of a senior lieutenant in the Customs service on the shoulders of his uniform. They both came up to where Jeb, the girl and Tommy were standing. The lieutenant was carrying some papers in one hand and he seemed harassed. "Mr. Halvorsen?" he said. "Yes," said Jeb. "This is your entry permit for a Daniborian marsupialoid?" He showed a sheet. "Yes." Jeb frowned at him. "Well -- uh -- perhaps we better step back into my office for a minute. You can go, Harry." The Customs officer turned and left. "This way, Mr. Halvorsen. Bring the marsupialoid with you, will you, please?" "Here, Tommy," said Jeb. He took Tommy's hand and began to follow the lieutenant back toward the Customs offices. He felt a tug at his elbow and turned, still walking, to see the girl hurrying along behind them. "What is it?" asked the girl. "Is something wrong?" "I don't think so," said Jeb. "Can I come along?" "I don't see why not." The lieutenant led them into a large room where a number of the Customs officers were busy at work, recording and checking; and through this room into a smaller office with a desk and several easy chairs facing it. "If you'll sit down for a minute, Mr. Halvorsen -- " The lieutenant saw the girl and the eyebrows on his round, not unpleasant face went up. "Miss -- ?" "She's with us," said Jeb. "Not in your party?" said the lieutenant. "No. Just a friend. You don't mind?" spoke up the girl, quickly and a little breathlessly. "I -- suppose not. Well, sit down, please," said the lieutenant, seating himself behind the desk and spreading out the papers upon it. "Mr. Halvorsen, this entry permit of yours for the marsupialoid -- name Tommy -- " he glanced at Tommy, who was sitting high beside Jeb's chair and peering over the desk surface at him -- "it was made out on Danibor." "All my papers were, of course," said Jeb. "Why? Something the matter with them?" "No. Not with them. Not even with this." The lieutenant twitched the entry permit for Tommy. "The form's proper and made out correctly. It's just -- well, I feel rather bad about this, Mr. Halvorsen. You've been the victim of a mistake on the part of whoever issued this permit back on Danibor." "What mistake?" Jeb's voice came out with a harshness that surprised him. "I can understand you not knowing, but there's no excuse for whoever's in charge of the office on Danibor. This form has been removed from the lists." "Is that all?" Jeb could not help smiling a bit. "You don't understand," said the lieutenant, hitching his chair forward. "The form has been dropped because there's now a law against reintroducing any of the mutated variforms to Earth." J EB stared at him. "Earth is where they come from in the first place." "I know." The lieutenant waved a wide, slightly embarrassed hand. "But it's a genetic matter -- not merely the variforms themselves, but what sort of disease mutations they may have developed on other worlds. Especially over several generations." He coughed, gazing at Tommy. "He is a cute little fellow, isn't he?" He smiled at Tommy, suddenly became serious and turned again to Jeb. "The law was passed half a dozen years ago. A mutated virus that attacked Earth life could be a problem to an overcrowded world like this." "But wouldn't a virus that attacked Earth life attack early imports of Earth life on the world where it first appeared?" Jeb put his hands on the edge of the desk. "There's fresh, unmutated life -- people, stock, vegetation -- being shipped out to all the colony worlds all the time. They'd be the first to catch it." "Well, possibly -- I don't know all the ins and outs of it," said the lieutenant. "Maybe there were other reasons, too. I don't know. It's not my job to justify the law, only to enforce it." He looked at Tommy again. "I'm sorry. I know he must be quite a pet. I've a dog myself at home." He returned his attention to the desk and shifted the papers, stacking them together neatly. "This is crazy!" burst out Jeb. "Look, the permit was issued. There must be some way around this. Tommy's not like a dog -- he's more intelligent, for one thing. And he's lived' with me for eight years. We were alone together out at a survey station on Danibor. He couldn't live without me -- "I'm sorry," said the lieutenant. His face softened, became sympathetic and concerned. "Look, you don't understand. According to a strict interpretation of the order, I should order him destroyed -- " "Oh, no!" It was the girl's voice crying out suddenly. Tommy jerked up his ears and hopped hastily over to her. He licked at her face. "Don't cry," Tommy said in distress. She put her arms out and hugged him protectively. "Please," said the lieutenant. "It's not me. It's the law. The law forbids the importation of variforms and orders them destroyed where they're found on Earth. It's not that bad for you. I'll give you a couple of hours to decide what you want to do about it." He nodded at Tommy. "If you can find some means of getting it off Earth in that time, I'll let it go." "You were calling him he a few seconds ago," said Jeb between his teeth. "Was I?" said the lieutenant. "It doesn't matter. My duty stays the same. And if you're thinking of asking me, or bribing me, to forget the law and let him slip by the basis of the entry permit -- please don't make it embarrassing for both of us." He got up from his desk and crossed to the door. "I'll give you a couple of hours. Until then, no pass to leave the Customs area will be issued to you." "I think I hate you," said the girl. "You don't understand -- either of you," he said gently. "There's no room for exceptions to the rules nowadays. There's too many of us crowded together on Earth for that." He went out, pausing a second in the doorway, with his hand on the door button. "You'll save yourself a great deal if you give up and turn it over to be destroyed now," he said to Jeb. "The hell I will!" cried Jeb savagely at the closing door. It clicked shut. He turned to the girl and then to Tommy with fury on his face. "The hell with it," he repeated. "We'll get out of this place, both of us." She looked at him, as if across some sort of abyss. "You know you can't leave," she said. riously to speak. But the words died somewhere inside him and after a second he closed his mouth again without saying anything. "I know," she said, "how hard it is to get back to Earth after you've lost your citizenship. I've heard them talk. My father says it's like climbing a mountain that gets higher every day." "Yes," he said emptily. He got to his feet and walked across the office to a window on the far side that looked beyond the Customs building to the first, light, soaring buildings of the city beyond. "I'll ship him back to Danibor," he said. She played with Tommy's ears tenderly. "Don't you have friends back there who'd take him -- " "I guess so," he said. "Brad Alokua -- he'd take Tommy. Tommy likes him." He turned back to the doorway. "I'll go over to Shipping and arrange it." He held out his hand, and Tommy, leaving the girl, hopped to him and took it. "Come on, boy," he said, and went out. The girl followed after. They crossed the wide area that belonged to Customs and took a walkway to the Outbound area. Here, as at Customs, the destinations were arranged alphabetically. They went to the desk that handled Aldebaran through Evenside. "Where to?" asked a clerk, coming up on his side of the desk as they approached. He was a lean, young man with dark hair and more of a local accent than the Customs officer or the lieutenant had shown. "Danibor -- " began Jeb. "Papers?" The clerk held out his hand. "No, it's not for me," said Jeb. "I just came in from Danibor. But I've found out that I can't bring my krillian in with me. I want to ship him back." The clerk dropped his hand and, turning slowly, stared down at Tommy. "This here?" he said. "Is "Yes," said Jeb, a little shortly. "No offense," said the clerk. "I've just never seen one. So you want to ship him back. You're a Daniborian yourself?" He opened a drawer before him and took papers out of it, laying them on the top of the desk. "With an Earth immigration visa," said Jeb. "Your Daniborian citizenship's still in effect then, until your final papers are issued." The clerk stamped several blanks on the papers. "Twenty-three point four kilos." "Fine," said the clerk, finishing off his papers. "Shipping fee will be -- let's see -- fourteen hundred and thirty-nine International Earth Credits." Jeb sat still for a moment. The clerk looked up. "So much?" asked Jeb. "That's right." "When we came out -- " "I know," said the clerk. "Everything was a lot lower in price. It's a matter of shipping space. The heavy traffic is outbound from Earth, so the freight and passenger fees are high. Coming in from Danibor, there was plenty of space, so -- " He shrugged. J EB felt a touch on his elbow. He turned around and saw the girl leaning toward him. "I could help out," she said. He swallowed hard. "Thank you." She passed him a small wad of notes. He dug out his own money case and counted the contents. He was four hundred and thirty short. He took them from her fold of money and returned what was left to her. "Thanks," he said, with difficulty. "I'll pay you back." "It doesn't matter," she said. "Really it doesn't." He passed the money over to the clerk, who counted it and put it into an envelope, which he sealed. "All right," said Jeb. "Where do we take him now?" "Take him? Oh -- " said the clerk. He consulted a paper on the side of his desk. "You're in luck. Bring him back in three weeks to this desk here. I'll give you a pass and directions to the Shipping area -- " "Three weeks!" Startled, the clerk looked up at him. "Why, yes -- " "But we've got to ship him off inside of two hours!" cried Jeb. The clerk blinked at him. "Oh, that's impossible," he said at last. He even smiled, a little uncertainly. "You're not serious. Even if a ship was leaving today, it'd take five hours to have him taken aboard -- " "But we've got to get him off!" Jeb's voice rang harshly out over the area, and at a neighboring desk another clerk and his customer looked over to see what the matter was. "Three weeks -- that's crazy. I just came in on a ship that must be going back sooner than that." "Oh, the Dancia," said the clerk. "She's going out this afternoon. But she's all emigrant this trip. No room for freight." "Tommy didn't come as freight. He came in my cabin." "Well, there you are." The clerk spread his hands on the desk like a reasonable man. "If you were taking him back personally -- but you couldn't on this ship unless you were emigrating." Jeb sat glowering at the clerk. A sudden touch on his elbow made him turn. The girl's face was urgently close to his. "My family -- " she said. "On Mercury. We could send Tommy to them." "Mercury? Great!" Jeb leaped gladly to his feet. "Which way -- " "Down at the end of the row here," said the clerk, pointing away to Jeb's left. Jeb saw, diminutive in the distance, a hanging sign prosolar system. He turned and went swiftly toward it, hearing the quick clicking of the girl's heels catching up behind him. Tommy bounced happily alongside. "Race?" he said, looking up at Jeb. "Race me?" "Not now, Tommy." T HE Inner Planets section was a good four long city blocks away. When at last they arrived at it, warm and breathing hard, both of the humans, they found under the enormous floating overhead sign a multitude of desks. "This way!" The girl pulled him forward to a desk. "Sit down, please," said the clerk -- a woman this time, about middle age. She smiled at all of them, and particularly Tommy, who warmed to her interest. "I'm good," he informed her. The clerk's sudden startlement was interrupted by the girl. Words tumbling urgently from her lips, she explained the situation. The older woman's face gentled. "Of course, honey," she said, patting the girl's hand and reaching into her desk. She came up with a sheaf of papers. "The next ship for Mercury doesn't leave for six hours. But once you get him aboard, no one'll touch him. Now you give me your parents' name and their home address." T HE girl produced her papers. The clerk nodded to the sound of the girl's voice, taking down the necessary information, while Jeb stood back, feeling at once relief, and a sensation of lostness, as if he had been betrayed into a wilderness, caught up in something beyond his own and proper control. "Here -- " he started to say. And then he stopped. He had nothing to tell them. And anyway, occupied as they were, they had not heard him. Tommy's small, tight grip closed on the fingers of Jeb's right hand. He patted the krillian on the head absently. There was something unreal about this whole business. They would ship Tommy off to Mercury -- to a good home. And after that? Jeb would make the hop from time to time... No, he could not make it seem real. "All right," the woman behind the desk was saying. She handed Jeb a paper. He took it numbly. He had planned and worked to come back to Earth from the day he had seen that he must go out in an emigrant draft... "What?" he said. " -- off to your right there," the woman was repeating. "Back to the Delivery area, Freight, Section C, Livestock. You'll find it all right." "Thanks." Slowly Jeb stood up. "Come on," said the girl. She led the way off. A short distance off, among the many faces and bodies of the crowd, they found the area they were looking for. There was a counter with an entryway in it and behind it a wall pierced by a door laThe man behind the desk took the papers from Jeb in silence and read them, stamping this section and detaching that. "All right," he said. He was a lean man in his forties. "This the one?" He reached over the counter for Tommy, and Tommy drew back. "Shy, eh?" He turned and came around through the entryway. "Is he vicious?" "No!" said Jeb sharply. The man shrugged at him. "Maybe you better tell him he's to go with me. It helps sometimes." Jeb looked down. Tommy was pressed close against his leg. "Tommy," he said. Tommy looked up. "Tommy, you go with the man here." Tommy stared up at Jeb, his eyes enormous. He did not move. "Tommy -- " "Probably," said the man, "I better just -- " His hands moved swiftly and abruptly to snatch up Tommy -- and in that same second Tommy turned and clung with all of his strength to Jeb's leg. "Tommy -- "said Jeb. "Tommy -- Let go, will you!" he exploded at the man. The man let go and straightened up, his lean face a little darkened and hotly flushed. "Tommy," said Jeb, closing his hands gently but firmly around the slim forearms of now. It's all right. You've just got to go with him, that's all." He felt the small, warm arms, downy-soft with their fine fur, clinging piteously to him. "Tommy, please!" cold, then hot, washed through Jeb. In one twin flash of vision he saw the new, raw cities of Danibor and the long dream of Earth. "Let go!" he snarled, and wrenched at Tommy. The furry arms pulled away a little, but clung. "I'll get him for you," said the man. "There's a simpler way." He bent down and clamped his hand over Tommy's muzzle, closing the mouth and nostrils. "When he starts to strangle, he'll let go." Tommy made no effort to fight the hand. He only pressed as close to Jeb's leg as possible and hung on. " Stop it!" screamed the girl. Both men started suddenly and the man from Shipping let go, and they looked at her. "Can't you see he isn't going to? Can't you see he'll die first?" she cried. "He won't die," muttered the man. "Just pass out and relax, that's all." "You!" She turned on Jeb. "How can you do that? It just won't -- it just won't work." Jeb was petting Tommy's head automatically. His hand trembled a little. "Look, I can't fool around all afternoon," said the man. "Bring him in yourself if you want to." "No." Jeb found his voice. "Go on." The man frowned at him. "I said go on. It's all right. I mean we're not sending him right now, after all." He swallowed. The man looked at Jeb, turned to take a long look at the girl, turned again without a word, and went. They watched him pass again behind the counter. "It's all right, Tommy, it's all right now," Jeb was saying. Tommy slowly let go. Jeb picked him up and looked past one quivering furry shoulder at the girl. "You could go with him!" she flung out. "To Mercury?" said Jeb harshly. "What's on Mercury for me? I might as well go back to Danibor." "Just to leave him there -- " "We'd still have to split up sometime !" he said, taking his own anger out on her. "What's the use of delaying?" He turned about and started to stride off. "Where are you going?" She was running after him, alongside him, almost crying. "Back to that Customs lieutenant," he said, staring straight ahead. "It's up to him." They threaded their way back through the indifferent crowds to the Customs section and the office of the lieutenant. The lieutenant glanced up from his desk as they entered, his gray, calm eyes swiftly understanding. "Too bad," he said. "There must be some solution!" the girl burst out. "There mustl" The lieutenant got up from behind his desk. He went over and opened another door to an inner office. "Tommy," he said, "you wait in here." Tommy stayed still, close to Jeb. "It's all right, Tommy," said Jeb, with a dry mouth. "It's all right this time. I'll be in." away from them and into the room. The lieutenant shut the door on him and returned to his desk. "Sit down," he said. "But there must be some way!" cried the girl. The lieutenant turned to face her. "You ought to know better," he said. "You're from the Inner Planets." He considered her. "No, you're too young. You don't realize." "I realize there must be some kind of solution that cause nobody can wait more than an hour to find one !" she flared at him. "That's where you're wrong," said the lieutenant. "That's where you're completely wrong." "How?" she challenged him. "The situation is urgent," the lieutenant said, "exactly because it's a situation. No, you don't understand. You're from Mercury -- well, that's out a little way from the business of Earth. And your parents must have kept you wrapped up safe from the hard facts of life. Halvorsen here I don't blame. Being from a frontier planet where there's no urgency, he would not know. But you should." "There's no danger." She glared at him. "You don't even know yourself of a good reason for the ruling." "It doesn't matter whether the ruling's good or not. Now listen." He spoke almost kindly. "This is the hub of our universe here, Earth. This is where all the big work, the big business goes on. Everybody wants to come here; nobody wants to leave. Ask Halvorsen." He pointed his chin at Jeb. "So no single individual's important here. It's the room that's important, the bit of ground you occupy. If you don't want to play by the rules, somebody else'll gladly take your place. There's no room on Earth for the kangaroo, but there is for Halvorsen. He takes it or he doesn't, and he takes it right now or his chance is over. All of us -- me too -- only hold our room as long as we stick by the rules. There are too many people and too little room for anything else." "It's not like that!" She was really starting to cry now. The tears made twin tracks down her young cheeks. Jeb looked away, but the lieutenant continued to stare gravely at her. "But it is," he said. "Halhere -- otherwise they would not have let him back. It's worth the sacrifice of whatever Earth asks of him. Right, Halvorsen ?" There was a moment of silence in the office. Even the girl, looking intently at Jeb, held her breath. "Right," said Jeb in a low voice, looking at neither of them. "That's correct," said the lieutenant. "Believe me, I'm sorry for both you and Tommy." He opened the drawer of his desk. "I'm not the ogre you'd like to think me, miss. I just don't have any choice -- like the rest of you. Perhaps, Halvorsen, you'd rather take care of it yourself?" Jeb, looking up, saw the other extending a handgun to him across the desk. He hesitated a second, then took it, thrusting it inside the loose bulge of his tunic, where it was hidden. The girl sobbed. He went into the other office, closing the door behind him. T HE other office was decorated as a library, with one large window giving on the city. Tommy had been sniffing about the shelves of tapes, but he stopped and sat up with bright, intelligent interest as Jeb came in. "Go now?" asked Tommy. "Pretty soon," said Jeb. He was surprised that his voice came out steady, though to his own ears it had a dead, strange ring, like the voice of someone he did not know. "Just a minute. Come over here, Tommy -- to the window." He walked to the window and stood facing out. Tommy hopped over to stand beside him. "See?" Tommy asked. "Yes," said Jeb. "Look down there, Tommy." Together they gazed out at the far carpet of buildings rolling away to the horizon. The sight of them at last made Jeb catch his breath a little, in spite of himself. It was all there. Earth. "Trees?" Tommy was saying, breathing against the window. "Trees?" "There aren't any trees, Tommy," answered Jeb. "No trees?" "And no grass," said Jeb. Tommy's ears went back in disappointment. "No place down there for you to play." With a little effort, Jeb conjured up the picture of Tommy, cramped and prisoned in an apartment. "It's not much Earth, Tommy. Not much fun at all." "Sheep -- ?" faltered Tommy, in the faint tone of one who pleads for the realization of some smallest crumb of his hopes. "No, no -- " With a sudden start, Jeb came back to his purpose in this room. His voice hardened, the words extruding like steel between his teeth. "Yes, I think there are some sheep down there. See? Down there." "Sheep?" Tommy's ears flicked up and he pressed his nose to the pane of the window eagerly. "Sheep?" "Don't you see them?" said Jeb tightly. He reached into his tunic and drew out the gun. "Keep looking. Down there. See them?" He pointed the gun's muzzle at the back of the small, furry head. "See? Sheep?" Tommy's ears flicked in this direction and then that, like semaphores. Jeb's jaws were clenched so tightly together they felt welded shut. The butt of the handgun slid a little in his slippery grip, and the muzzle end of the barrel wavered. "Keep looking, Tommy!" he said in a stifled voice. "Keep looking." His finger tightened on the firing button. He could feel its half-marble roundness cold against the tip of his forefinger. The wavers of the barrel increased, built up until the whole arm was trembling violently. He laid arm and gun down on his other hand for a second to steady it, then lifted them again. He squinted like a man facing into a merciless sunglare. His whole arm and shoulder were quivering. Suddenly, he threw the gun across the room. Startled, Tommy jerked around. Jeb let out a long breath in a sigh of exhaustion. "Nothing, Tommy," he said. "Never mind." He went across the room and picked up the gun. "I think the sheep are gone now. Let's go back into the other room." ahead of him, they returned. As they came through the door, the lieutenant's eyebrows went up. Jeb tossed the gun down on his desk. "We're going back to Danibor," he said in a tight voice. "Both of us. On that emigrant ship." A small female cyclone blew across the room into Jeb's arms and began crying wildly against his shoulder. Tommy was pogo-sticking with excitement all around him. Over the top of the blonde head pressed into his tunic, Jeb scowled furiously at the lieutenant. The lieutenant shook his head, putting the handgun back into the drawer of his desk. "It's your funeral," he said, "if you want to give up your chance at Earth and everything it could do for you. Til bet you can't give me one good, logical reason for what you're doing." "Maybe not," said Jeb. "But it looks like we have two different sets of standards about what's worth having, me, you, you home-planet people; and whether mine's better or not, I seem to be stuck with it." "I love you!" cried Tommy, leaping up to lick Jeb's face, without the slightest idea of why this should be an emotional occasion, but convinced it was nonetheless. "Me too!" wept the girl. They both clung to Jeb. "Well," said the lieutenant, "it takes all kinds to make a universe." Instead of worrying about dwindling fossil fuel reserves and radioactive nuclear plants, power engineers will be able to supply this country with free hydrogen fusion power from sea water. Americans will be able to have an almost completely automated life at low cost. All this before the end of the century, according to the Public Service Electric  Gas Co. in New Jersey. There are, of course, other dramatic possibilities latent in the oceans, should the above prediction prove overoptimistic :  Seaweed, with its exceptionally high vitamin content, should begin to provide food for both men and animals -- and soon. Recent experiments indicate that livestock thrives on seaweed meal. Milk production increased in cows and the vitamin A content of their milk was greater. Hens laid better eggs; pigs fattened quicker; turkey mortality was reduced. per square mile in some areas. These deposits and ways to recover them are being investigated by mineral engineers at the U. of California.  Scientists at Plymouth, England, have found appreciable quantities of the strategic niobium and vanadium in the flesh and blood of ascidians, a sea animal such as the skate. -- Industrial Research It was just like Nick not to realize that it is bad luck to be superstitious! edged sideways along the sidewalk in front of the Third Blast, cautiously pushed the door open a crack and peeked in. There was a mob of customers -- two dozen, maybe -- and the big screen above the bar was blank. Slippery Nick clucked softly. With the rockets blasting out Asteroid Way, a blank screen meant that Ed the manager didn't have any credits riding. Ed liked a quiet bar in the afternoon, and he never turned on the races when he wasn't betting. So Nick had a ten-to-one chance. He slipped furtively through the doorway, eased his way to the bar in such a way that a congenial group of paying customers masked his presence from Ed, and spoke softly to a bartender. "One Fission Fizz." The bartender hesitated. "Cash or -- " A blast from the other end of the bar rattled the glasses and silenced all conversation in the room. "Cash!" Ed thundered. Two dozen faces pivoted slowly and tensed at the sudden strain as their respective pairs of eyes sought to focus on Nick. Nick cringed in embarrassment. Ed moved his heavy body carefully along behind the bar, making a minor engineering project of getting his belly past two bartenders. He towered over Slippery Nick. "There ain't no or where he's concerned," he snarled. "Cash!" "Aw, Ed," Nick whined. "One Fission Fizz..." "Is the tenth part of a credit, and the answer is no -- N, #. I got principles, one of w r hich says I ain't ever gonna be took for a hundred credits by Slippery Nick Fernell. You ran up twenty-three credits last week when I wasn't around, and your account now stands at ninety-one credits. Which is ninety credits too much." The customer on Nick's left turned away, blinking, after a strenuous effort to make out Nick's face. He was a skinny, pale-faced man with an overly long neck and thick contact lenses that made his eyes bulge fishlike. He shook his head violently, wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve, and turned his bleary eyes back to Nick. "Tough to be broke," he muttered, dropping a ticketsized piece of paper currency on the damp bar. "I know. Give him a Fission Fizz." T HE bartender hesitated and glanced at Ed, who disdainfully turned his back. The bartender scraped the currency from the bar and slid a glass across to Nick. "Obliged," Nick said patronizingly. The benefactor leaned toward Nick and squinted. "Quite all right. Tough to be broke. The name's Hullman." "Fernell," Slippery Nick said. "Course, I ain't exactly broke..." Ed sneered and banged a plastic bottle on the bar. "Course Nick ain't broke. He ain't earned no money since '#, and he owes every bar and every bookie this side of Pluto, but he's got a damned knickknack in his pocket, so he ain't broke. I say if the only money a man has he won't spend, he's broke." Nick winced. The Fission Fizz had set his body tingling, and he reared up angrily and pounded on the bar. "Knickknack -- he calls this a knickknack!" He jerked at the string around his neck and brought forth a worn currency folder. He fumbled in it and dropped something on the bar. It rang out sharply. "Hey, it's metal !" exclaimed the customer on Nick's right. "Metal money. A credit piece. I never saw one before." He clamped a hairy hand on the coin and examined it with awe. "My lucky credit," Nick said proudly. "He calls it a knickknack. Like to have me spend it here, I suppose." The customer on Nick's right spun the coin on the bar and watched fascinated as it flashed and sparkled. "The damn thing looks new," he said. "Naw," Ed said. "That's just because Nick polishes it five times a day. That's the only work he does." The customer on Nick's right spun the coin again. "Give you five for it." Nick grabbed the credit. "Worth a lot more than that." "Ten. It's not worth more than ten." "Worth more than that to me." Nick returned the coin to his currency folder and leaned on the bar to leer at Ed. "Hear that, Fatso? Knickknack, you say. Broke, you say. You heard him offer me ten for it." The customer on Nick's right had his own currency folder out, counting carefully. "Twelve. I'll give you twelve. Here -- two Fission Fizzes here." He pushed one at Nick. "Shanks is my name, Fernell. What do you say to twelve?" On Nick's left, the gangling Hullman suddenly slumped over the bar. "Twelve credits. I buy him drinks and he's got more money than I have." "No," Nick gurgled, as he downed the drink. "What d'ya mean, no? You drink my liquor and you won't do business?" "Two tenths," the bartender said. "Here's one, for my drink," Shanks said. "Collect the other one from him." "Just a minute, you," Ed bellowed. "You ordered them drinks. You maybe want the bar mopped off with you?" "I pay for what I drink. One drink, one T." E D'S beefy hands snaked across the bar and snatched at Shanks' throat. Shanks ducked away, but the bouncer came lumbering out of the shadows, and two bartenders were coming around the ends of the bar. Nick watched interestedly. Hullman said brokely, "You stand me one. That's only fair. I stand you one and you stand me one. You got twelve credits." "I ain't got twelve credits," Nick protested. Finding himself outnumbered, Shanks took out a T ticket, ripped it in two, and scornfully flung the pieces on the bar. "I'll be waiting for you outside," he growled at Nick. Nick shuddered and pressed closer to the bar. The Fission Fizz had made him lose his head, and he figured his chances had dropped to a hundred to one. "Ed," he said, "want to see you alone." "You finished your drink?" Ed demanded. "Sure. Bui-" "Jet. Your business ain't welcome here. We like paying customers." "Please, Ed. Just for a minute." "It don't take no minute. Whatever it is, the answer's no !" Ed carefully made his way back to the other end of the bar. The bartender looked sympathetically at Nick and shook his head. "You aren't a bad guy, Nick. Why don't you get a job and settle down? You're getting a little old for bumming around and dodging the police..." Nick started. "Police? I ain't never done nothin' wrong." "Your wife's got the police looking for you. They were in here yesterday, asking questions. Something about nonsupport. Why don't you get a job and live right?" "You ever see my wife?" "Once a long time ago. She came in nere looking for you." "You think I should work and let her grab the money? You know how they do -- she makes a complaint and I don't get as much as one T. I'm just as well off this way. I ain't got nothin', but I ain't givin' her nothin' either." "Yeah. I see what you mean." Ed came around the bar and gripped Nick by the ear. "Out!" he commanded. "Please, Ed. Just lemme talk to you a minute." "No!" "Please, Ed." Ed glared and finally jerked his thumb at the vacant end of the bar. matching Ed's slow progress, and watching him anxiously. "Give," Ed ordered. He scornfully refused to incline his head toward Nick, so Nick hunched himself up on the bar. "I got a tip on the second at Asteroid Way." Ed guffawed. "When did you ever pick a winner?" "Aw, Ed. It's a good tip. It'll pay fifty to one. I could pay you off." "You got one credit. Go ahead and make your bet." "Ed, listen. Some scientist -- he's made some dope to put in the fuel. This tank could win with its jets plugged. The others won't get close enough to scorch their noses. Fifty to one, and it's sure." "Sure to be disqualified. They always test the fuel." "Their test ain't no good on this stuff." "Who gave you the tip?" "I'd tell you, Ed, but I promised..." "I ain't buying no Moon atmosphere. Who told you?" "I can't," Nick whined. He waited a moment, anxiously watching Ed's unyielding face. "Rocket Amutz," he whispered. Ed was suddenly thoughtful. "The Rocket usually knows," he admitted. "It's fifty to one, Ed !" "What's the tank?" "Up an ' Atom. In the second." "When'd you see the Rocket?" "This momin'." Ed glanced at the clock. "You sure took your time telling me about it." "I was broke, Ed. I had a hard time gettin' down here. I hadda hitch a ride with a delivery flyer." "Then you hadda mooch a couple of drinks to get up the nerve to put the tag on me," Ed snapped. He tapped thoughtfully on the bar. "All right, I'll call it in. Ten for me and five for you. Only it all goes in my name, and I'm deducting what you owe before I pay you." "Couldn't you just -- " "All right. Three Fizzes on the house. That's for the tip. The five goes on your account, and it better come right off." and Nick leaned contentedly on the bar and contemplated his three Fizzes. Hullman came staggering toward him and leaned out to squint hungrily at the drinks. Nick's arm encircled them protectingly. "He's gonna buy it all," Hullman croaked. "He's got twelve credits and he's gonna buy it all. I stood him one, and now I'm broke and he won't stand me one, and he's got twelve credits." He took a wild swing at Nick, who ducked, still protecting the drinks. The bouncer latched onto Hullman and dragged him away. Ed returned and switched on the visiscope. Nick sipped delicately on the first Fizz and gloated over the other two. The huge screen flickered to 'life. Asteroid Way. The starting line. First race. Jets flamed as the ships got under way. Nick watched them absently. The drink warmed and cheered him, and the identification stripes were beginning to blur slightly. The scene changed to the first Way Station. The ships were points of light in the distance, looming suddenly large and flashing past. The announcer barked out the placings. The flaming points of the jets diminished and merged into single bright dots that seemed to hang motionless against the backdrop of space. Nick set down an empty glass and rubbed his eyes. The scene changed to the second Way Station. "Wasn't that Altairian Miss in the lead?" asked a voice at Nick's elbow. Nick shrugged, happily indifferent. "Not my race," he said. He reached for the second glass and kept his eyes on the screen. He sipped slowly and finished it just as the race was ending. A voice droned out the winners and the scene shifted to preparations for the second race. Bustling spacetugs were towing the ships into position. Harried spacesuited workers were putting the finishing touches on the identification marks -- shaping the white magnetic particles into the network of stripes that identified the ship's position at the starting line. Nick gripped his third glass firmly, but he did not raise it. He kept his eyes on number six -- three short longitudinal stripes -- Up an' Atom. The announcer read off the preliminaries in a monotonous singsong. The ships, the pilots, the odds. The ships, the pilots, the odds. The ships... A croaked. "Waiting for the reports on the fuel tests," Ed said gloomily. The screen flashed as the electronic starting switch fired all jets simultaneously. Nick's hand tightened on the glass. He clung paralyzed to the bar and slowly closed his eyes. First Way Station: Up an' Atom second. Second Way Station : Up an' Atom first. Nick's trembling hand set the Fizz sloshing wildly in the glass. Third Way Station : Up an' Atom second. "Got a chance," Ed admitted in a low, almost incredulous voice. Fourth Way Station: Up an' Atom second. Fifth Way Station: Up an' Atom first. Nick half raised his drink and set it down again. Sixth Way Station: the halfway mark, Up an' Atom first. "Got a chance," Ed admitted again. Nick dared to open his eyes. Seventh Way Station: Up an' Atom first. The twelve ships were strung out along the course now, half of them hopelessly behind. Eighth Way Station : Up an' Atom second. Nick closed his eyes again and kept them closed while Up an' Atom was third at the ninth Way Station, and second at the tenth. The eleventh Way Station: Up an' Atom first. Nick opened his eyes and stared hypnotically at the screen. The finish line. Suddenly Nick jerked the glass to his lips, drained it, and slammed it down. He whirled and raced wildly for the door. A bottle whizzed past his ear, struck the side of the door, and caromed out into the street with a monstrous dent in its plastic side. Nick paused only to verify its emptiness. Up an ' Atom had finished fifth. Nick charged on down the street, and ran headlong into a sturdy pair of arms. It was Shanks. "Thought I wouldn't wait, didn't you?" Shanks menacingly snarled. Nick barely had time to blink before a fist smashed into his face, and knocked him down and out. and lay motionless, staring at the ceiling. The splotches of dampness, the sprawling network of cracks looked familiar, and yet unfamiliar. He roused himself weakly and looked about him. It was his wife's apartment. Suddenly she appeared in the doorway, and he stared fearfully at her bloated and bleary image. The bleariness, Nick knew, was his own doing. The bloat was the exclusive property of his wife. She eyed him hostilely for a moment and called over her shoulder, "He's awake." She was joined in the doorway by a grotesquely thin, spinsterish-looking female and a pair of husky males. "Fightin's new with him," Nick's wife said. "He never got in a fight before. He's too much of a coward." "There, there, you poor dear," the thin woman said, patting her shoulder tenderly. "Don't you worry about a thing. Everything will be all right." "It's been hard," his wife sniffed. "Twenty-two years we been married, and twelve young ones, and he's never had a job the whole time." "You should have reported him years ago. But don't you worry. We'll take care of things." She advanced to the bed and stood looking grimly down at Nick. "So you're Nicholas Femell. I won't say I'm happy to meet you, Slippery Nick, but I have a job to do. I'm Officer Holmes of the Family Welfare Bureau. Do you know what that means?" Nick looked up at the sharp protrusion of her nose and covered his face with his hands. "Go away," he moaned. "On your wife's complaint, Nicholas Femell, we've been investigating you. Your record isn't a pretty one. Married twenty-two years, father of twelve children, and you've never earned an honest credit in your life." "That's a lie!" Nick shouted. "Oh, sure!" his wife shrieked. "A lie, he says! Twentyone years ago he helped some bartender unload a beer flyer, and he got paid one credit. He's been savin' it ever since, and I guarantee he never earned another one." "We'll soon change that," Officer Holmes said cheerfully. "This is a court summons, Mr. Fernell. A judge is going to take one look at your record and send you to prison, where all lazy men belong. Unless, that is, we can tell him you've corrected your shiftless ways and gone to work. Which will it be -- work or prison?" Nick stared at the paper. "Go away," he moaned. "I'm sick." Officer Holmes sniffed reprovingly. "It's that terrible poison you drink. Two years in space will straighten you out nicely." T HE word space echoed and re-echoed down long corridors in Nick's alcohol-fogged mind. He tumbled from the bed and scurried toward the door, flinging himself frantically at the narrow gap that separated Officer Holmes' sturdy deputies. The gap slammed shut on him. He was propelled back into the bedroom, where he slumped onto the floor and wailed, "I'm sick." "Poor man," Officer Holmes said, with sneering sweetness. "Hasn't done any work for so long that the thought of it makes him sick. Come, come, man." Her pointed shoes prodded painfully at his ribs. "Here are your work papers. Sign them and the boys will take you to the spaceport and put you aboard. Or don't sign them and they'll take you to prison. Two years in space or five years in the Lunar Penitentiary -- which will it be?" Face a sickly green, teeth chattering, fingers trembling so that Officer Holmes had to hand him the pen three times, Nick signed. Officer Holmes purred with satisfaction. "The Vegan Line is a good place to work. We find only the best jobs for our problem cases. And you'll have nothing to worry about here at home. The company will send your lovely family your wages every month." Fright had startled Nick into a general condition of sobriety. The smug expression on his wife's face enraged him. "My family !" he shouted. "I got no family. Try an' find a kid that looks like me. Not one of 'em's mine!" Officer Holmes said severely, "It won't help you to insult your wife." "How could I insult a bag like that? Slipped somethin' in my drink, she did, an' I woke up married to her. I was an honest, hard-workin', lawabidin' man, an' look what she done to me. She got me fired by hangin' around tryin' to get advances on my pay. Every job I got, she got me fired, or she snatched the money for herself. Why wouldn't I be drove to drink? Just look at her. She was just as ugly twenty-two years ago, except she wasn't so fat. An' the kids -- I ain't never slept with her in my life, unless it was the night we was married, an' I don't remember nothin' about that. I don't sleep with her, an' I don't know what man in his right mind would touch her, but she keeps havin' 'em. An' I'll tell you one thing -- papers or no papers, space or no space, I ain't workin' to support her and her kids !" Officer Holmes flew at him, face white, her mouth a grimly etched line. "You wicked, no-good man! Kiss your wife good-by now. Kiss her!" "Lemme out of here!" Nick yelled. The deputies got him out. They escorted him down the stairway, and the sobs of Nick's wife floated after them, along with Officer Holmes' purring consolation. "You got my sympathy, fellow," one of the men said. "But we got a job to do." "That's okay," Nick told him. "I'll get out of it." "There's no getting out of it, fellow. Space is no place to jump ship, and you won't get a chance in port." "I'll get out of it," Nick said grimly, "if it has to be space." At the spaceport Nick was rushed through a medical examination, booted aboard an ugly looking freighter, and locked in a tiny cabin. The door was locked. Nick chuckled quietly to himself, and as soon as things appeared to be quiet, he removed a plastic safety pin from his shirt and went to work on the plastic lock. gave a satisfying click. Nick cautiously swung open the door. The corridor was deserted. Voices drifted back to him from the control room. In the cabin next to his he heard a man -- probably another "caser" like himself -- sobbing brokenly. Nick tiptoed carefully along the corridor and found his way to the airlock. The airlock stood open. He stood for a moment, surveying the field. Ships stood at arithmetically concise intervals. The terminal buildings rose on the far side of the field, distant and impersonal. Nick could see no guards, no human movement. He scrambled down the ladder and dashed to the cover of the next ship. The edge of the field was a hundred yards away. Then there was only a low board fence, and beyond that a scraggly growth of stunted trees, wild underbrush, and -- freedom. "I'll go west," Nick told himself. "I never shoulda stayed around the east coast. I'll go west, an' maybe I can make a clean start." He crouched down and tensed himself for the last dash. the open, the sentry saw him. "Caser," he muttered disgustedly. "Someone forgot to lock him in. Well, I'll wait till he gets to the fence. He probably needs the exercise. And boy, oh, boy, has he got a shock coming!" He dropped to one knee and sighted along a short, oddly bulging barrel. The panting figure was ten feet from the fence when he pulled the trigger and it spun wildly, staggered backward, and toppled to the ground with arms and legs churning in agony. The wide-eyed sentry barked a few words into his communicator and ran forward. A second sentry hurried to meet him, and they stood looking incredulously at the still twitching body. "I just gave him one shot," the first sentry said, "but it didn't paralyze him. What happened?" The second sentry bent down and ripped open Nick's shirt. He caught his breath and straightened up, a sickly pallor on his face. "I'll be damned. Metal. He had metal there, inside his shirt. It focused the beam and burned a hole in his chest." The first sentry slumped to the ground and buried his face in his hands. "Not your fault," the second sentry said. "Snap out of it now. Who would have thought one of these damned casers would have metal on him? Nobody has metal any more. You call an ambulance?" "Sure. Right away. Do you suppose -- ?" "Doubt it. He's alive, but not for long. Did you see that hole? The metal was right against his chest. Wonder what it was." He bent over Nick and came up with a smudged piece of metal. The first sentry stared at it. "A metal credit. Ever see one before?" "I never did," the second sentry said. "We better save it for the poor guy's family. These casers always have big families. Wonder how long he's carried the thing around. He's been rich without knowing it. My brother works for a big shot that collects these things. Any coin at all brings ten thousand credits, and some of the rare dates bring as high as fifty thousand. I'll have my brother get an estimate on this one. The guy's family could probably use the money." Nick's eyes were open, staring. His lips moved feebly. "What'd he say?" the first sentry said. "Ask him where he got this thing." The second sentry bent over, and straightened up disgustedly. "He says he earned it." "That's a laugh. Wonder what's keeping the ambulance. Fellow, we're sorry about this. You ought to know better than to carry metal around. If you'd been working anywhere near a factory, it would have killed you long ago. We'll see that your family gets the coin. It's worth a lot of money." Nick's lips moved again, and the second sentry bent over him. "He wants it back," he said. "He says it's his and he wants it back. If he dies, he wants it buried with him." The first sentry shrugged and tucked the coin into Nick's pocket. "That's the way these casers are -- they never give a damn about their families. If he dies, though, the family will get that coin. He won't have a thing to say about it." lips to fight the searing agony, Nick summoned his fading strength. "Too good for my family," he whispered. "They don't deserve it. I want it buried with me." The ambulance swooped down, and a corpulent doctor lumbered over to Nick, took one look at his chest, and expertly stabbed a hypodermic needle into his arm. "I suppose he's done for," the first sentry said, as the doctor went to work on the chest. "Well, now," the doctor said. "I wouldn't exactly call him in good shape, but he'll live. He'll be some time healing up, though. And that damned Family Welfare Bureau will never get him into space -- not with what he'll have left for a lung. Easy does it, man. You won't feel a thing in a moment. There. Now it's off to the hospital for a long rest." Stretcher bearers eased Nick onto a stretcher and started for the ambulance. The first sentry hurried after them. "Say, fellow -- if you want, I'll get word to my brother's boss about that coin you got. He'll give you at least ten thousand for it -- maybe more. What do you say ?" He stopped abruptly and came stomping back. "What'd he say?" the second sentry said. "Said he won't part with it. Said it's his lucky credit." He spat. "The thing half killed him and he calls it lucky!" The quotes throughout this issue are from Industrial Research , # S. ly written and edited magazine covering all aspects of basic and applied research. An absolute necessity for science fiction writers in search of ideas, Industrial Research is also a treasury for readers in search of the future -- and scientists, researchers, engineers and suchlike to whom seeing into the future means keeping up to date. Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl tion story? Must it be packed with gadgets and inventions? Or is a science fiction story better told without them? There are a number of persons who enjoy science fiction but are repelled by such gadgets as we find in most science fiction magazine stories. These people don't care much for science; they don't read scientific articles, even the ones in science fiction magazines. What they are interested in is people, in what men and women think and feel. The science in science fiction stories, the cracking suns and the alien invaders, are to them only additional strains that can be applied to the human organism, not essentially different from an adulterous wife or an unrequited love. It is the effect of scientific incident, not the incident itself, that these readers enjoy. Just as numerous, and appearing in unexpected places, are those who say that no science fiction story should dare show itself in print without at least one patentable invention. Harper's Magazine is one such place. Its peripatetic reviewer methodically chewed one science fiction anthology apart a while ago, complaining in solemn ignorance that, as none of the stories contained a new ray gun or an improved rocket ship, they were scarcely science fiction at all. Well, that's nonsense on the face of it. Gadgets are not science. Yet there is no doubt that gadgets spring up where science has passed, as meadow flowers mark the paths of long-gone cattle. Certainly advances in science produce gadgets. Newton's Opticks begat the Schmidt telescope. Einstein was the ancestor of the Nautilus. But what is the answer? Can good science fiction be written with few gadgets or none at all? Conversely, can stories that rely heavily on gadgetry be "good"? offer us insights into this question. Three have gadgets. Three don't. All six happen to be particularly good books, which is a help. March Cost's The Bespoken Mile (Vanguard) is so gadget-free as hardly to be science fiction. (Surely Miss Cost had no such intention for it!) Aubrey Menen in The Fig Tree (Scribners) and John Wyndham in The Midivich Cuckoos (Ballantine) offer clearer cases, but each has only one "great lie" to set them apart from non-sf writing; neither book multiplies invention past that point. These are the sort of science fiction books that can be given to those relatives and neighbors who won't read science fiction. They'll read these -- that is, if they read, they will read these. The casual reader might finish any one of these without quite knowing that they were science fiction at all. But they are, surely. Miss Cost's story is of precognition. A young dancer, Summer Day -- yes, that's her name ; a stage name, but the one she lives under -- inherits a home in Scotland. She gives up the music halls, settles down in the Highlands, falls in love and marries. As she becomes a bride she sees ahead to the death of her husband at the Battle of Cassino. She becomes aware that the end of happiness is sorrow; and, having learned this, goes on. John Wyndham's story is brighter and slighter. In the town of Midwich, where nothing has happened in centuries, the entire town falls impenetrably asleep. Everyoneentering it topples over like the rest. When the town awakes, it is to discover that every woman of childbearing age has become pregnant. The children in time are born; they have golden eyes and are telepathic; they are cuckoos -- changelings in another bird's nest -- begotten by mysterious aliens, and therefore alien themselves in spite of their human mothers. Aubrey Menen's fig tree is an invention -- a true gadget -- deliberately developed by one Harry Wesley. As a boy, Harry determines that he will live to see a statue raised in his honor. How can he do this? Why, by solving one of mankind's great needs. He casts about for a suitable need and finds it in overpopulation, in the Malthusian race between birth rate and food supply. His first idea is therefore to invent an oral contraceptive, but a patient schoolmaster talks him out of that: "My dear Mr. Wesley, I am given to understand that already there is available a wide range of contraceptives. They must all have been invented by somebody -- clever fellows, too, when you come to think of it. But I don't recall any of them ever getting a statue." Harry sees the logic of the position. He thanks the instructor and selects another project: to invent something which will double the world's food supply. What he invents is a super-fertilizer which he applies to a fig tree, making it The Fig Tree. T HE above is what these books are about. It would be witless malice to pretend that these skeletal thematic sketches convey any idea of what the books are. The outline of The Bespoken Mile shows nothing of March Cost's delicate sense of the interplay of personalities, of her three-dimensional Scottish landscape or of her compassion for the unripe but doggedly maturing Summer Day. In describing the plot of The Fig Tree there is no place to tell of Uncle George, the great manufacturer who makes "the bit of a guided missile that always goes wrong" or to recount the morose conversation on classic literature that takes place in the Greek ruins at Paestum, or to repeat Menen's observations of the ins and outs of Vatican life. The plot of The Midivich Cuckoos can tell us what the alien children are like, but it takes all of Wyndham's book to show us what it is like to be a human adult entrusted with raising them. It is the development of these books that makes them of interest. But that development is not in science fiction terms. Once the "one great lie" is told in each case -- the single thing that isn't so -- there are no subsidiary inventions; there are, in other words, no gadgets. And these are three firstrate books. They make excellent exhibits for the anti-gadget argument. But turn to the next three books and we see the other side of the coin. Clifford D. Simak's Ring Around the Sun is now reprinted by Ace, and we also have C. M. Kornbluth's two posthumous short story collections, A Mile Beyond the Moon (Doubleday) and The Marching Morons (Ballantine) . Gadgets? These books are full of gadgets -- both in the strict sense of gleaming little artifacts that do things and in the larger sense of any sort of scientific or technological thing or event that is not normally a part of our lives. Simak's story gives us a fresh gadget on every page. We have a razor blade that never wears out, a light bulb that burns forever, a cigarette lighter that needs no fuel. We have a car that is constructed to be passed on from father to son, down the generations. We have a child's toy that spins and transports the viewer into another dimension. We have a secret society of mutants, and another secret society devoted to hunting mutants down. We have mechanical spy-mice, robots, androids, telepaths, superhomes, super-garments -- everything but a super-kitchen sink, though on page #I we find a super-toaster, a super-refrigerator and a super-washing machine. which every last one of these gadgets plays an essential part. For Simak does not throw gadgets at the reader in order to distract him, to keep him from noticing that there isn't any story ; his gadgets make the story. The number of Simak's gadgets is countless, but it is exactly the number he needs to tell his story, each one placed where it must be to make the point he wants made. What emerges is a tight, warm, human, credible story. And that is what Simak intended all along. Kornbluth practiced the same art. In the two new volumes of his short stories there are twenty-four separate pieces. Each story is an invention. Each contains many subsidiary inventions: an armorarium of surgical instruments in The Little Black Bag, a self-sustaining maritime economy in Shark Ship, a recipe for maintaining society on a permanent wartime footing in The Luckiest Man in Denv. What is most notable about a Kornbluth story is that his characters are always perfectly at ease in their surroundings. In Two Dooms his time-traveler makes a life for himself in the frightening world that the victorious Axis created after World War II. The described world cannot be -- now or ever; but Kornbluth so constructs it, so provides it with tradition, folkways, sex habits, superstitions, vehicles, homes, farms -- with all the parts of a world -- that it springs up into perspective. Kornbluth and Simak do not bring their scientific incident to us; they take us to other worlds entirely. They create these worlds for us, building them out of such furniture as does not exist here and now at all. Those are the rules of the game. It is only what does not exist that a Kornbluth or a Simak will trouble to tell us about. The kind of story that takes us away from here and now makes more demands on the writer than the sort that starts with its society already mapped out. Unfortunately for its popularity, it makes more demands on the reader too. For that reason the kind of science fiction we see in the big slick magazines or the major book clubs is likely to be the simple, gadget-free type. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. If the man across the street won't trouble to follow what Simak or Kornbluth are talking about, so much the worse for him. He will enjoy The Fig Tree, The Bespoken Mile and The Midivich Cuckoos all the same. So will we; but we can go farther. Science fiction has resources beyond these. Science fiction can go anywhere and do anything -- so long as the journey is planned with intelligence and illuminated with thought -- and it is the likes of Simak and Kornbluth who can exploit its potential at its farthest reach. talking about good books. Unfortunately not all books are good -- whether science fiction or anything else. Perhaps we can see what it is that the gadget-haters so dislike by examining a few books that earn lower marks. Avalon has elected to bring back to life Manly Wade Wellman's twenty-year-old magazine novel, Giants from Eternity. This story was preposterous in # ; age has not helped it. It begins with a mysterious meteorite (or something) that falls on a farm and begins to eat everything in sight, turning what it eats scarlet and threatening to engorge the world. A couple of poisonously juvenile scientists investigate it. They are baffled and helpless, but they manage to extract a sort of resurrection-juice from it, which they use to bring back the greatest minds of all time to help them out. These are the "Giants from Eternity" and they include Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin and Madame Curie. One of the juveniles is entrapped by the red stuff and thus works to help it spread; the revived Giants take a few days to master everything that has happened in science since their deaths, then quickly invent everything necessary to wipe out the red menace and bring about a happy ending. It happens that when Marie Curie died she was sixty-seven years old and paid very little attention to her personal appearance. As this fact did not suit the author, he chose to write it away. When Marie Curie is revived she is "a slender young woman, blonde and pale and lovely." Artistic license? All right. Artistic license should be extended only to art. Giants from Eternity is nothing like art. It is fastmoving; but it is also crude. In The Involuntary Immortells us about a woman named Helen Hanover. She is as blonde and lovely as Wellman's Madame Curie, but somewhat older -- she is a hundred and forty-one and her third husband has just died of old age. She is immortal. Mourning because everyone she knows dies around her, despondent because she is unique in the world, she hops a train and sits down beside -- guess ? Why, beside another immortal. It's a small world, but not that small. Nor is that the end of this book's fantastic impositions on the credulity of its readers. We are asked to believe that there are hundreds of these immortals and that they maintain laboratories and colonies without their existence even being suspected by the government or the public -- although for some peculiar reason every priest and nun of the Catholic Church knows all about them. We are told that the villain of the piece is Helen Hanover's long-lost little boy! It would have taken only the smallest amount of thought and trouble for the author to remove some of the worst implausibilities of The Involuntary Immortals, but it was more effort than he was In The Plot Against Earth (Ace), Calvin M. Knox has "hypno jewel" smugglers threatening the Earth. His hero is a narcotics agent who zips from planet to planet, is cast away when his interstellar liner is bombed, survives enormous hardship but ultimately stamps out the ring. Earth is saved. It has all been very wearing for Knox's hero, but not for the reader, who, after fanning througli # pages, has learned nothing more than he knew before, experienced no new emotions, been compelled to do no thinking whatsoever. It is all quite painless for the reader and all quite pointless too. In Recruit for Andromeda (Ace), Milton Lesser follows a group of draftees on the "Nowhere Journey." They have been snatched from Earth and transported to the planet of a far star for the purpose of -- well, let's see, reflects the author; this time let's make it a universe-wide contest to see which race is smartest, ablest, strongest. Our hero is matched against a female specimen of that utterly alien race, the Russians. He wins. gone into these books was on the run. It is impossible to believe that any page of any one of them could ever represent anything true or real. They are packed with gadgets, invented on the fly for purely cosmetic purposes ; opium isn't "science-fictiony" enough so the writer snaps his fingers twice and comes up with a word: "hypnojewels." The typing proceeds. He has to destroy a ship -- a bomb -- but that's not "seience-fictiony" either. Snap, snap. An "implosion" bomb, then! This is in The Plot Against Earth , but the same thing happens in The Involuntary Immortals. What's an implosion bomb? A light bulb is an implosion bomb -- that is, if you break it, it will implode. Could it destroy a ship or a building? Probably -- if they were inside it. Recruit for Andromeda has a "gadget" that makes mere implosion bombs look almost sane. A bunch of ships are lighting in the space between galaxies. Our hero can't observe them directly, but that's all right -- one of them is on fire, and he can keep track of the others by watching their shadows. The shadows are cast on the Andromeda Nebula! with an hour's nirvana, of course. Poul Anderson's The War of Two Worlds ( Ace) is light enough and fast enough for any adventure fan ; it asks little of him, but it pays for its time with skillful plot carpentry to conceal the loose ends ; it has its share of gadgets and gimmicks, but they are put where they serve a purpose and they give at least the temporary illusion that they might work. Anderson's Earth has just lost a war with Mars and is occupied. An Earthman seeks to liberate his planet and does so -- in a way that is both satisfying and unexpected. So with John Brunner's Threshold of Eternity (Ace), where a man from here and now is kidnaped into a great future war that swirls back and forth through space and time. Edmond Hamilton does a competent, professional job in The Star of Life (Dodd, Mead) ; his hero was fired into orbit, and froze there for thousands of years, coming back to life to find himself in a struggle among much-mutated races of humanity. Peter Bryant's Red Alert (Ace) is a first-rate action story about an American Air Force general who, believing in preventive war, elects to start World Peter Bryant's story isn't "gadgety" in our present sense, but the novels by Hamilton, Brunner and Anderson are -- gadget enough and adventurous enough for anyone. "It's unfair to try to guess at the motives or morals of an author -- he exposes enough of himself in submitting his printed words to review. But it is tempting to imagine that all four of these books were once, in hasty, rough first draft, much like the previous four; and that then, with hard skillful work, the rough edges were smoothed, the implausibilities removed. It is that step that seems to have been omitted in the into Silence get to Xaron -- so what was Alamo gambling to arrive alive? T HE whistle sounded for the meal break, and the operators switched off their machines and began to stream toward the door. Marno took a long time cleaning his hands, watching the figure of Bellen, the inspector, at the far end of the machine shop, waiting for him to go into his office. As soon as he saw Bellen move, Marno picked up his satchel and strolled out of the door after the others. The air outside shook with the incessant roar of the orereducing plants, a tumult of sound that pounded on day and night, year after year. Marno didn't notice it, for it had thundered in his ears throughout his life. In front of him was the long bridgelike structure that supported the great conveyor belt, reaching straight out across the arid slopes to the ragged line of red hills that stood out sharp and hard against the mauve sky. At one point, their skyline dipped in a V-shaped notch, the cutting that the conveyor belt passed through on its way to the Port. Marno's pulse hammered in his temples. Either he made his escape now or he would spend the rest of his life here in the Valley. The idea of escape had been in the back of his mind for a long time, and today, with Carn, the overseer, away at a conference, Marno had an opportunity that mightn't come again. The last of the men ahead of him turned into the canteen, but Marno walked straight on until he reached the end of the building. There was no one in sight. In front of him was the squat bulk of the powerhouse that drove the conveyor belt, with the orereducing installations towering beyond it. Away to the right, the dry ground sloped upward, dotted with straggling clumps of purple scrub. Sweating, he began to run, past the open door of the powerhouse through which came the hum of vast nuclear motors. Above him, the giant conveyor belt rumbled out across innumerable rollers, an endless band that moved on for miles across a countryside unknown to him, for in the twenty-five years of his life Marno had never been beyond the fences that lined the Valley's rim. It was supposed to be unsafe to go beyond the wire fences. Most of the planet was alive with radioactivity, or so they had been told. one of the metal pylons supporting the belt, his knees trembling. There was still nobody within sight. Fifty feet above him, the belt roared endlessly on its way, carrying with it the whole of the industrial output of the Valley, dark bricks of a dense compound that could be made fiercely radioactive, supplying atomic power for a thousand and one industries in the civilizations beyond. The speed of the belt was not too great for a man to jump aboard it. Steadily, as he had planned, he began to climb the girderwork. He was unaccustomed to heights, and he climbed without looking down. He climbed right to the top of the pylon, inching his way out over the moving belt. It moved much faster than he had thought, but nothing would have made him turn back now. His breath had a sound like a sob in it as he let himself drop, and then he was spinning over on the hard rubberlike surface. He lay flat on his back, feeling every second or so a sharp jar as the belt passed over another set of rollers. There was no return now. As he was carried farther and farther away from the powerhouse, he felt a growing elation. He was on his way to freedom. He had only the vaguest ideas of what he would find at the far end of the conveyor. He knew it was a place called the Port, where ships called to take cargoes of the astrium compound away to other places where it was used to generate power. He had never seen one of these ships close at hand, but he had often watched them take off in the night, sharp daggers of flame stabbing into the dark sky. He knew that they used rockets to lift them above the atmosphere, and he had heard talk about something called an isolator that enabled them to make inconceivable journeys to the planets of other suns. But his knowledge of these things was hazy. His own people never made such journeys. The spaceships were operated by men of the alien race that had controlled Marno's world since before he had been born -- men like Carn, the overseer. Marno had been told that they came from a place called Xaron, somewhere in the planetary system of the great white star Altair. They were strange, alert men with unbounded energy. As the traveling belt climbed toward the cutting in the hills, he was able to look back over the whole of the Valley -- the towering structures of the reducing plants, the colored aluminum houses, the beetlelike electric cars gleaming in the orange sunlight. Away to the right, the crushing batteries threw long plumes of dust into the air, and down by the lagoon a group of girls walked along the beach, limbs dark dresses bright. He could see the yellow house where he had lived until now with his married brother. This valley had been his world -- the whole of it. walls of the cutting rising on either side of him, shutting the Valley from his view. He was tempted to spring off the moving belt while there was yet time, but even as he thought of it, he felt it tilt down over the hillcrest, and he knew it was too late. He had expected the crossing of the ridge to bring him within sight of the Port, but all he could see was a vast wilderness of seamed red hills and purple scrub, sloping down to a flat metallic sea that gleamed like bronze under the deep orange disc of the sun. A desert in which only the conveyor belt moved, snarling away to a horizon lost in heat haze. Marno was conscious of an appalling loneliness, a feeling that he had been a fool to think of leaving the Valley, where generation after generation of his ancestors had lived and worked and died. He thought of the comradeship of the machine shop, the gaiety of parties by the lagoon, the games he had played with his friends. The fear of the unknown grew in him with each mile the moving belt carried him onward. The sun dropped slowly over a sea that glared like molten iron as he neared and passed another ridge of windscored hills. Once he saw in the distance the corroded wreckage of gigantic machinery, but apart from that there was only rock and sand and scrub, and the miles after endless miles of the conveyor. He was staring blankly ahead of him at the hazy skyline when he became abruptly conscious of something seen from the comer of his eye -- a black shadow skittering over the parched ground. It took him a second or two to grasp its meaning, and then his head went back and he shaded his eyes to look up at the gleaming aircar sweeping down over the belt. He sprang to his feet. The belt was moving almost at ground-level here, and without hesitating he jumped. As he rolled down a slope of loose sand, he heard a deepthroated shout from above him, but he scrambled up and ran without looking back. The car's air-stream whistled and thrashed about him, but he raced on with his eyes fixed on a sparse line of scrub ahead of him. He never reached it. Something like an electric shock numbed all his muscles, and he fell headlong. He looked up at the man standing over him, huge and blond, looking at him with strange cold eyes. He felt himself picked up as though he were a child and passed up into the hovering aircar. efficiency that left Mamo dazed. Almost before he had time to wonder what was going to happen to him, he found himself in Cam's office, a cold room with metallic walls bathlight. Cam's massive figure sat facing him across a broad emerald desk, while Bellen stood against the wall with a scornful smile on his thin lips. Marno found himself hating the inspector with an intensity he wouldn't have thought possible, because Bellen was one of the Valley people like himself. "Why did you run away?" asked Cam. "I wanted to see the Port," Marno said. "But why, man -- why?" Mamo felt confused. Everything about the Xarian seemed to advertise his alien origin -- his size, his vast physical energy, the direct stare of his strange eyes. He couldn't bring himself to answer. "You thought you might have been able to get aboard one of the ships. Is that it?" Marno was conscious of nothing but the blank, penetrating stare that seemed to reach into his thoughts. Although he didn't answer, his expression must have told the Xarian what he wanted to know, because for the first time since Marno had entered the room, Carn turned his concentrated gaze away from him, looking down as he spoke in a low voice into some small instrument on his desk. Some of the tension went out of Marno's muscles, and he was able to glance around the room. The walls were lined with what he had taken to be small round windows, but he now saw that they were video screens giving views of every part of the plant, so that Carn could sit here in his office and see at a glance everything that was going on in and about the building. There was even a screen giving a telescopic view for miles along the conveyor belt on which Marno had tried to escape. When he realized that his attempt at escape had been hopeless from the start, a hot gust of anger swept through him, but there was no way he could express it. "You don't give me much choice," said Carn, looking at him again. "I'll have to move you." And so it was that Marno found himself transferred next morning to one of the ore-crushing batteries. Socially, it was a step downward, and he worked all the morning in moody silence. It was easy work, but dull, keeping him isolated from all but two of the others who worked in the place. One of these was a wiry, gray-haired man who supervised the unloading of the ore trucks that tipped their contents into the hopper that fed Marno's crushing mill. He introduced himself as Greg. "I've been around here longer than anyone," he told Marno. "Why did they send you here ?" "I tried to get to the Port -- rode out on the conveyor belt," said Marno. Greg stared at him, then threw back his head and laughed. "You hadn't a chance!" He became serious. "I went there once. Hid in the back of an aircar." "What was it like?" "I don't know. They flew me straight back. I've been here ever since." Greg looked around and moved a little closer to Marno as he spoke. "Things were a bit confused then. The Xarians had just taken over control -- but you wouldn't remember that, of course." surprise. "Just taken over control, did you say ? I thought the Xarians had always controlled the place." "Rot!" Greg spat out the word with a sudden savagery. "I can reipember when all this place was ruled from Earth." Marno smiled tolerantly. "I've heard there was a place called Earth, of course. Supposed to be where our first forefathers came from, wasn't it?" He grinned a little selfconsciously. "Supposed? Supposed? It's the truth, man ! That's the hell of this education through video. They can make you swallow anything. Anything!" Greg walked up and down as he shouted the words, then spun and gripped Marno by the arm, his face coming very close to the younger man's. "Do you believe all this stuff they give you in the philosophy sessions? This rubbish about reincarnation?" Marno hesitated. "Well..." really believe after you die here you'll be born again on Xaron? As a Xarian?" "That's what they tell us, and we've no other way of knowing these things -- have we?" "Fool!" Greg threw the younger man from him, turning his back and striding away. A few yards off, however, he stopped, standing with his feet apart and his head down. Then he returned, planting himself directly in front of Marno and looking at him searchingly. "You've got guts, though," he admitted abruptly, "or you wouldn't have tried to escape. Listen. The things I'm telling you are the truth. D'you understand? Not the sort of rot the Xarians put over the video to keep you quiet. I can remember when they came." He gave a sour smile. "You know, we all come from the same stock, if you trace it far enough back. We're all descended from people who came from the Earth -- the Xarians as well as us." "But that's impossible! They're so different -- even a different color!" "It's only environment that does that. Different sunlight, stronger gravity. But they're still men, like you and me. They just know a bit more, that's all. You might say they have hit on a more successful technique of living." Marno stared broodingly at the ore fragments cascading into the crushing mill. "I'll have to go," said Greg. "Here's Rexon coming. I'll see you in the canteen." As Greg went off, Marno watched the Xarian overseer approaching moving with long, bounding strides. He vaulted up onto the platform where Marno was standing and dropped a huge hand on his shoulder. "How's the explorer settling down?" "Explorer?" Marno looked at him blankly. "I'm from the machine shop." about your ride on the conveyor belt. I get all the explorers up here." He put a long green cigarette between his lips and lit it with an electric lighter. Seen closely like this, the Xarian gave an overpowering impression of rugged strength, aggressively and blatantly masculine. His hair was neither the black of a young man's hair nor the gray that came with age, but a strange bleached yellow like the color of dry grass, and his eyes were the color of steel that has been heated and then chilled. Ridiculous, thought Marno, to maintain that these beings were of the same race as the Valley people. Who had ever heard of a man with blue eyes? "Don't take much notice of what old Greg tells you," said the Xarian suddenly. "He's like this." He tapped his finger against his temple. Marno grinned, but inside he felt taut and uncertain. He looked thoughtfully after Rexon, who sprang off the platform and strode on his way, speaking in a low voice into his wrist radio as he went. Mamo was resentfully conscious of the shallowness of his knowledge of things beyond his immediate surroundings. After all, it was obvious that human life hadn't started here in the Valley. The very plants from which their food was processed had been introduced here from somewhere else -- things that grew in tanks of water enriched by chemicals. The local vegetation was all poisonous, life based on a different chemical cycle. So Greg might easily be right in what he had said. When Marno went along to the canteen during the meal break, he found Greg sitting alone at one of the smaller tables, and sat opposite him, glancing around the room. The other operators were younger than Greg, crowding together in three or four voluble groups of half a dozen or so. High in one corner of the room, Marno found the wideangle video lens that watched the whole scene like, a Cyclopean eye, and the sight of its void stare sent a cold tingle down his spine. "Greg," he said. "Just where is this place they call Earth?" The older man looked furtively about him, then leaned forward. "You know how to pick out the stars at night?" "Some of them." "You know the fairly bright yellow one near Sirius -- the one called simply the Sun? It's called that because it was the original one. The Earth is one of its planets, and that's where the human race started." Marno smiled tolerantly. " Sounds as good a theory as any." "Damn it, man, it's true!" Greg slammed his fist down on the table, a lock of gray hair falling over his eyes. "They used to tell us more, before the Xarians came. Listen, it was like this. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, all the human race lived on that one planet. They found a way to use atomic power to drive a ship through space -- first the space between the neighboring planets -- later, the space between the stars. Got that?" Marno nodded doubtfully. "Well, you can see what's happened. Wherever they found worlds they could live on, they established colonies. They were overcrowded on Earth, and apart from that some of the other planets they discovered had raw materials that were valuable to them. Like the radioactive minerals here." Marno looked into the black, glittering eyes. "But most of our astrium goes to Xaron, not to Earth." yes. Because Xaron was a colony that grew up. I'm damned if I know why -- some people used to say the Xarians had some method of selective breeding. Others say that it's just because Xaron was a bigger and naturally richer planet than Earth, and it attracted the best brains from everywhere else. Anyhow, the fact is that they control all of the inhabited systems, even Earth." Marno leaned back. "Where did you get all this?" "From the last of the Earthmen here. I was young then, but I remember them." "Why did they leave?" "I think the Xarians simply bought the place outright, or bartered some technical secret in exchange for it. It was all done quickly and smoothly and quietly. The Earthmen went and the Xarians came. Put in better machines, gave us all cheap electric cars, cheap video sets, Polaroid windows -- everything we wanted." Greg's lips twisted in a lopsided smile. "Then they put wire fences around the settlements and told us the fences were to keep us from the danger of radioactivity outside -- oh, they had the answers to everything, those boys." The smile widened until he showed his teeth with a sudden pentup savagery. "It's taken me most of my life to realize that they've told us just what they want us to believe, whether it happens to be true or not." Marno frowned. "But you have got to take some things on trust." "Like the philosophy sessions?" Greg's shoulders began to shake in silent laughter. "You mean you really believe that you're going to have another life after this one -- a fresh new life as a Xarian?" "If it isn't true -- well, nothing would have any meaning, would it?" Greg laughed aloud -- a laugh without any warmth in it. "Does it have to have a meaning?" He got slowly to his feet, while Marno sat staring in front of him. "I've lived a lot longer than you, son," he said quietly. "And I haven't seen any meaning to it yet. Think it over." And then he was gone. The whistle sounded for the return to work, and Marno went back to his job of watching the ore thunder down into the roaring mill. The noise and dust and vibration seemed to deaden the turmoil of his thoughts, yet after a while he found his mind running back over the things Greg had told him. The more he thought of them, the more possible it seemed that Greg's fantastic ideas might have had some germ of truth behind them. "They've told us just what they want us to believe , whether it's true or not." By God, when you thought of it, you realized it could be true. he stood, Marno was able to look out through a window to the landing area where Rexon's aircar was parked. In the middle of the afternoon he saw a smaller aircar land neatly alongside it, and a few minutes later Rexon walked through the plant with a woman visitor, showing her the various machines. Marno watched, fascinated, for she was the first Xarian woman he had seen. She had the same strange coloring as the men of her race, the same look of eager zest. She was strongly built, yet active, and she laughed easily, a deep laugh that shook the whole of her body. Rexon helped her up on to the platform, and as Marno listened to him explaining the details of the crushing mill to her, he realized that he had stumbled on something that supported Greg's theory that their ancestors had originally come from the same place. Even between themselves, they spoke the same language that the Valley people did. "Glad to be going back?" asked Rexon after a pause. "Of course," said the woman. "Hard to realize I'll be on the ship tomorrow. It's good to feel that I'll soon be under white sunlight again, breathing good fresh air. I think I'll spend the first day just touring the city." "I'll have time to see you go, before I come here," said Rexon as they moved away. Marno stared after them as they went. So the woman was going back home to Xaron in the morning. To the hub of all the vast, complex civilization that Greg had hinted at. In a flash, a plan formed in his mind, dazzlingly complete. Outside was the woman's aircar, with a large luggage compartment similar to the one Greg had hidden in when he had been taken to the Port. Greg had been brought straight back, but Marno felt that once he got there, he would escape -- he was forewarned, and on arrival he would have only the woman to deal with. Certainly she was strong and quick, but with the factor of surprise on his side, he should easily get away, from her. And tomorrow a ship was leaving for Xaron. All he had to do was get aboard during the night. Could he? He refused to think of failure. He simply had to be aboard. As soon as Rexon and the woman were out of sight, Marno slipped away from his machine and ran down the length of the plant. Recklessly, he dashed through the Xarian's office and out on to the cement landing stage. Rexon would pass around the other side of the plant, and wouldn't be back near Marno's machine until after the woman had left. Marno tried frantically to open the luggage compartment, but without success. He looked up at the windows of the plant, but they were blank with reflected sky. Any minute now, Rexon and the woman might return. It occurred to Marno that the compartment might be controlled from inside the cabin. He opened the door, stared at the glittering banks of instruments. Then he found that the rear seat could be swung forward, giving access to the luggage compartment while in flight. He wormed his way in, pulling the seat back behind him, sealing himself into darkness. T HE thudding of his heart seemed to echo through the metal compartment ; then, after what seemed an age, he heard voices. He felt the movement of springs as someone climbed aboard. There was the solid click of a door, the vibrant hum of the compact little nuclear motors. Then the machine was climbing, lifting straight up from the ground with a speed that forced him hard against the floor. The air began to whistle about the smooth hull. The flight was bumpy at first, but soon they had climbed into smoother air. He had a feeling of exultation, the feeling that this time he must succeed. He would have liked to be able to look out at the country over which they were flying, but it could not be helped -- the main fact was that he was escaping. They flew level for a long time. Then he suddenly doubled up, gasping as a sharp dive caught him in the pit of the stomach. The note of the motors changed and he felt the machine hovering. Then it was on the ground and the hum of the motors ceased. Mamo suddenly began to tremble, a chill fear gripping him. He found himself listening, listening, wondering what had caused this irrational terror that was rising in him. And then he knew. It was the silence. The abysmal silence. Never in his life had he heard anything like it. Even in the arid desert there had been noise -- the rumble of the conveyor belt -- and in the Valley there was always the sound of machinery, roaring endlessly on through day and night. Yet here there was only this deafening stillness. As he listened, though, he realized that there were sounds in the background. An occasional voice. Footsteps. The hum of some passing vehicle or aircraft, fading quickly away again. Then, suddenly, light, blinding him. The whole side of the luggage compartment was open. He blinked out into a walled courtyard bordered with exotic plants. A strange house with translucent sapphire walls towered over one side of it, and a hangarlike building of yellow metal opened off one end, the whole scene bright and pallid in a harsh artificial lighting that blazed from somewhere high above it. Before his eyes were used to the glare, the woman came briskly around the side of the car. She stopped, rigid. "Come out of there." Her voice was amused rather than angry. Marno slid quietly out of the car, his eyes on the walls of the court yard. At the end -- a metal gate, open. At once he was running. He heard the click of plastic heels behind him. When he was halfway to the gate, he felt the woman's arms around him, lifting him off the ground. "Lars!" she called. "Lars!" Frantic, he tried to kick back at her legs, but his feet thrashed the air uselessly. A massive-shouldered giant of a man with stiff yellow hair appeared at the door of the hangar. In an instant, he was across the courtyard in a tremendous, springing run, arms held wide. The woman released Marno, and even as he fell the man called Lars caught him, swinging him to his feet with an arm twisted behind his back. There was no question of a struggle -- the man could have snapped Mamo's arm like a dry twig. "Where was he?" asked the yellow-haired giant. "In there," indicated the woman. "One of Rexon's boys." the strength had been drained out of him. The giant marched him toward the strange house, while the woman walked ahead, the metallic fabric of her dress gleaming under the fierce white light, with its highlights showing the movement of her muscles as she walked. They went into a large room, more beautifully furnished than any place Marno had ever imagined, with the same dazzling light pouring down from a luminous ceiling. The woman closed the door, while the man sat Marno in a chair that seemed to have been molded of a single block of plastic foam. "We can give him to Rexon tonight," he said. Marno put his head in his hands. His eyes felt hot and moist. The man shook him by the shoulder with a gentleness he hadn't expected. "Why did you come here, son?" he asked. Marno looked up, and once his eyes met the other man's bright, cold stare, he couldn't look away. "Just relax," he heard the deep voice telling him. "Relax. That's it. Breathe deeply and let yourself go. That's right. Now you know you can trust us. All we want to do is help you. Tell us all about it." Marno felt dazed and confused. He wasn't conscious of anything but the weird, pale eyes, and somewhere behind them the feeling that these were people to whom he could confide his most secret thoughts. "I want to go to Xaron," he said. "But you've been told you'll go there some day, haven't you ?" "Yes. But I -- I wasn't sure. They tell us that, but I don't think I believe it. Do you?" The woman's sudden ripple of laughter brought his attention back to his immediate surroundings. The man called Lars glanced at her and said something quickly that Marno didn't understand. Then Lars brought his eyes back on him. Lars was about to speak again when the woman said, "Lars, what about Deren? He wanted to examine one of them. Why couldn't we take this one with us?" The man looked at her again. "Why not? It might as well be him." Once more he turned to Marno. "You really want to go to Xaron, do you? Without knowing what it's like?" "Yes," said Marno emphatically. The man left him and walked down the long room. He walked straight toward the far wall, yet just before he reached it an arched doorway suddenly opened in it, so that he walked through into another room beyond. After he had passed through, Marno found that he was looking at what appeared to be solid wall again. The woman came across the room toward Marno with a long glass filled with a sparkling violet liquid. "Drink this," she said in a quiet voice. The stuff seemed hot and cold in his throat at the same time, and fumes seemed to rise at the back of his nose, but after he had finished the glass he felt better. He looked up to find Lars standing beside him again. "Young fellow, you're lucky. We'll be able to take you with us. A friend of ours back home wants to examine one of you Valley people." Marno began to stammer incoherent thanks, but Lars raised his hand. "I can't promise to bring you back. But they'll find something for you to do there." Marno was afraid to show his eagerness. "I don't care if I never come back." "All right. But remember what I said." T HE woman touched a control on one of the walls and a section of it became transparent, so that they were able to look out over the courtyard. Marno could see varicolored metallic and crystalline buildings beyond the wall of the yard, and he was amazed at the rich diversity of their design. The great red disc of the sun was touching the horizon now, but the scene was still lit by the chill glare of a regular pattern of lights suspended or floating in the air high overhead. The woman pointed upward. "Look," she said. "The ship's coming down." Marno rushed across to her side and stared up. Dropping down out of the darkening purple sky was the spearpoint of flame from the braking rockets of the spaceship. The thing was colossal, bluntly cylindrical, gleaming like silver high up in the red sunlight. The hissing scream of its rockets was the most stirring sound he had ever heard. He watched it until the roof of the neighboring house cut it from his view. "We'll be on it at sunrise," said Lars. "You'll like it on Xaron," the woman told Marno. "It's a huge garden, compared to this place. Try to imagine a in it, stretching for a hundred miles along a coastline, with hundreds of little islands linked by bridges. Buildings as high as your mountains, aircars everywhere like a swarm of insects. There are so many things to do -- you'll see for yourself." They gave Marno a meal of strange varied foods that he didn't like, then showed him to a room with a divan of plastic foam. Lying alone in the dark, he thought over all the things that had happened to him since the afternoon. He was hardly able to believe his good fortune. And then a thought came to him that swept away his dreams like an icy gale. Rexon. He remembered listening to him talking to the woman back at the ore-crushing plant. "I'll have time to see you leave in the morning" -- that was what he had said. When Rexon saw Marno in the morning, he would want to take him back. The thought of the last-minute loss of everything he had fought for kept him awake, sweating in the dark. Somewhere out near the white splendor of Altair was a world of shining cities and luxuriant forests, of broad turquoise oceans spangled with islands that sparkled like jewels. And a stone's throw away in the darkness was the ship that was leaving for this world in a few hours. The fear of missing the journey kept him rigid and wide-eyed. ing nightmare. They forced Marno to eat something, hustled him into an aircar, and whirred over the rooftops toward the gleaming bulk of the spaceship that towered in the dawn air. They landed on the nearer side of a great embankment marked here and there with black and yellow signs that read " Danger -- Blast Zone" and waited near the entrance to a narrow high-walled passageway that zigzagged through to the other side. Another aircar swept down in a wide arc and landed. It looked somehow familiar, and Marno realized why when he saw the man who stepped out of it. It was Rexon. Marno shrank against the side of the car, edging his way round it to keep out of Rexon's line of sight. He thought of making a dash for the passageway through the embankment, but he realized that would bring him into full view. He could only stand there with a tense emptiness in him. Rexon walked into view ; he shook Lars by the hand, put his arm around the woman's shoulder. Then he seemed to see Marno for the first time. "So you weren't content to wait for your next life to see Xaron, were you?" he asked. Marno forced himself to look straight into the coldly observant eyes, although his knees shook with the tension. He didn't know what to say. If he gave the wrong answer, he might be taken back to the crushing plant. He thought suddenly of Greg, with his untidy gray hair and his sour, defeated smile, and the tiredness that showed now and then about his eyes. He had tried to escape once, only once, and they hadn't given him another chance. Then he realized that Rexon's eyes had a flicker of laughter in them, as though they were sharing some joke, and with an effort he managed to smile. " Sometimes I think we underestimate you fellows," said Rexon thoughtfully. He turned to Lars. " You know, I think the standard philosophy is due for some revision, don't you?" Lars nodded. "I'll take it up with Deren. This alters things, doesn't it?" The ringing note of an amplified bell sounded from the ship. Lars and the woman made their farewells to Rexon, and led Marno through the angled passageway that cut the embankment, bringing them out onto the scorched cement of the blast zone. They climbed the great escalator that reached up a hundred feet or more to the airlock of the ship. Lars touched Marno's arm. "Take a last look at it," he said, waving his hand toward the dry red hills with their patches of purple scrub. Marno gave a brief glance over his shoulder, then continued to gaze up at the flange of the airlock. At last, they stood on it, and Marno was able to look into the interior of the ship, into a room crowded with complex apparatus. metal surfaces. He waited alongside the woman as Lars went quickly inside. "It's beautiful where we're going," the woman told him. "Cool and fresh and peaceful. No roar of crushing batteries, no dust. All so qiuet." "Quiet?" "I don't suppose you'd be able to imagine what that's like. You've never been where it's really quiet." A siren warned them of the impending takeoff. "Come on," said the woman, and stepped in through the massive door. Marno looked back. The escalator's steps were motionless now, and it was automatically disconnecting from the flange, beginning to fold back. Marno stepped to the edge of the flange. "Marno!" called Lars from the doorway. "Come in. Quick!" Trembling, Marno poised for a second on the edge of the metal platform. Then he sprang across the widening gap to the escalator. "Marno!" thundered the voice behind him, but now he was running down the steps three or four at a time. In seconds now, the blast would be starting. reached the ground, but he rushed on across the flameblistered cement toward the shielding embankment, his ears keyed for the first sound of the rockets. If they began to fire before he reached shelter, he was finished. He was just at the passageway when the first hollow roar broke the tight-stretched silence, its shock-wave hitting him like a fist between the shoulder blades. With his shadow flung ahead of him by the flame, he lurched on, heart pounding. Then he was around the first of the corners. He came out on the far side of the embankment like a leaf blown by the wind. Behind, the rockets lifted in an eerie scream. He saw Rexon just getting into his aircar. The Xarian looked up at the rising bulk of the ship, and as he did so, he caught sight of Marno. He waited while Marno staggered up to the car. "Could I -- " began Marno, and leaned against the side of the car, gulping air. "Could I ride back with you?" Rexon opened the door. "Get in!" he shouted above the roar of the blast, and Marno slid in alongside him. As the car lifted and skimmed away over the parched red wilderness, Marno said nothing. He stared ahead along the straight line of the conveyor belt until he saw the buildings of the Valley come up over the horizon, the familiar lines of identical little houses, the beetlelike electric cars, the slender dark girls in their bright dresses, and as they swept down to land he felt an odd sense of satisfaction. But only when he stepped out of the aircar did he realize what it was that he had really missed. It was the unending roar of the machinery, the eternal torrent of sound that had filled the Valley before he was born, sound that would some day thunder in the ears of his children. As he walked into the plant through the vibrant air, he felt at peace. He was home. The usual way to test for accurate translation is to re-feed a translated sentence into the computer and compare it with the original. Almost classical among computer translator jokes is the input: "The spirit is to Russian to English) output: "The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten." Programming a computer to translate language is like dressing a baby: you know what you're trying to do, but the computer doesn't care. -- Industrial Research All they were looking for was somebody at home -- and all they found was this... quarters, relaxed in the easy silence of close friendship as they absently sipped drinks and watched the monitor of the ship's scanner screen. There was Captain Miles Front, big, formidablelooking, a healthy and robust forty-five. There was Clyde navigator. There was the expedition's chief scientist, Doctor John Walter, a pleasant-looking, balding man of indeterminate age. It was Paulson who broke the silence. "I have an important mission of my own," he said. They regarded him with amused skepticism, and he grinned good-naturedly. "An ancestor of mine, my great-great-great -- how many generations has it been now? Anyway, old Grandfather Paulson left Earth in some kind of disgrace. The details have been forgotten, down through the years, but the legend has been passed along as a family joke. I don't know whether he joined the colonists to run away, or whether that was someone's idea of a good way to get rid of him. Anway, it's kind of a pledge to the family's honor that the first one to get back to Earth will check up, and see whether Grandfather Paulson has been exonerated, or pardoned, or acquitted, or whatever. That's my mission. Not that it will make any difference to Grandfather Paulson one way or the other." "So that's why you were so eager to make this trip," the captain said. "You needn't have bothered. A lot of chance you will have to rake up a scandal that old!" "I thought it was a pretty good excuse," said Paulson. D octor Walter pointed at a boldly glimmering star. "You're sure that's the one?" Paulson grinned, and Captain Front chuckled dryly. "Disappointed to find it looks just like another star?" the captain said. "Maybe," Walter said dreamily. "This is a different kind of a mission for me. It's a pilgrimage. There are maddening blank spaces in the information that the colonists brought with them about this solar system. I hope to fill in some of those. I'd like to fill all of them in." "You may be able to," the captain said. "Remember that Earth's scientists haven't been standing still all this time. They must have progressed beyond the point they'd reached when the colonists left. Perhaps they'll have everything you want waiting for you." Walter shrugged, and the captain chuckled again, and said to Paulson, "I've disappointed him. He doesn't want to find the answers on file. He wants to dig them out for himself." Doctor Walter said to the captain, "What's your mission?" "To get us there and back. And frankly -- " he turned to look at the lone, flickering star -- "there are angles to this thing that bother me. It's just possible that our mother planet might not be at all glad to see us." "It should greet us with open arms," Walter said. "The population problem was serious when the colonists left. It will be critical by now. We can use the people, and Earth should be able to spare as many as we want. Our science is bound to be ahead of Earth's in many respects, and we know they can't match our starships, or we would have heard from them before now. Ships that bring out new colonists can take essential raw materials back to Earth. Cooperation will benefit all of us." "It should," the captain said. "But we don't know how Earth will look at it. When the original colonists left, there was supposed to be a new ship every couple of years. Nothing has been heard from Earth since. It looks as if Earth simply wrote us off and forgot about us. Now that we've built our own civilization, and maybe done far better than Earth expected, we might not be welcomed back. Earth might be jealous. Or it might have a guilty conscience. It should have!" "Faulty navigation," Paulson suggested. "An occasional ship might go astray. Not all of them. No, the thing has me worried. That's why I want to hit Pluto Base and planet-hop our way in. Give Earth notice that we're coming, and a chance to get used to the idea before we arrive." Doctor Walter brightened. "Pluto Base. I wonder if they ever found a tenth planet." a perfect interception course for Pluto, and he was still grinning with satisfaction when they brought the ship down. The captain rotated the scanner and looked broodingly at the frigid, airless landscape. "Is this Pluto Base or isn't it?" he growled. "It is," Paulson said confidently. "They're taking their time about sending out a reception committee. They should have picked us up hours ago. Some security system!" They waited, straining their eyes to pick out details. Doctor Walter came into the control room. He glanced at the screen and exclaimed, "Why, there's nothing there!" "Pluto Base is underground," the captain said, rotating the scanner again. "Or at least it was. I imagine it still is." " Stop ! " Paulson shouted. "Over there on that hill -- wouldn't that be the base entrance?" The captain threw in the magnification unit. "It could be," Doctor Walter said. "It is," the captain said. "And the airlock is open." They landed, watched, saw nothing move, and entered. They went cautiously through the empty corridors. Equipment was there. Supplies were there. Machinery was in operating condition. All signs indicated a hasty departure. "They left just before lunch," Doctor Walter said in the mess room. "The food is still here, laid out for them." "All we'd have to do," Captain Front said, "is close the airlock, start the air machines and take over. The supplies would last us indefinitely. I can understand that they might find reasons to abandon this base, but why would they pull out and leave all this stuff?" "The transmitters are in working condition," a communications officer said. "It'd be easy to start the power station. Shall we call Earth and ask them?" The captain said, "Now that I think of it, we haven't picked up any signals from Earth, have we?" There was an uneasy silence. The captain looked around at the faces that peered grotesquely at him through spacesuit faceplates. "Then we won't call Earth," he said, "until we're certain just what might be there to answer us." in toward the sun, probing, exploring, searching, constantly alert and cautious. They touched Neptune and Uranus, and such moons as looked promising. They touched a half-dozen of the moons of Saturn. The bases, where they found them, were desolate and abandoned. Not until they reached the moons of Jupiter did they find the first dusty remnants of human bodies. "Whatever it was," Doctor Walter said, "it happened quickly." "Attack?" the captain asked. "I can't believe it. An attack can take people by surprise, but they're not too surprised to know what's happening. Some of them would take defensive measures. Most of them would act for their own safety. These people were stricken down in the everyday routine of living." "Disease? Plague?" "It wouldn't strike everyone at the same instant. This did." "We might as well go on," the captain said. "If it's necessary, we can hit any of these places again on the way out." knew. No one talked about it. No one even hinted at the cold fear that twisted within him. The communications men continued to search vainly for signals. The scientists carried on their observations. The ship's officers rotated the scanner toward a far-off corner of emptiness and strained to see a fleck of light that would be Earth when they came closer. And they all knew what they would find there. On Mars, it was no longer desolate bases. It was annihilated cities -- except that stone and mortar and steel were untouched. The people had been struck down as unsuspectingly as if a remote deity had suddenly decided upon doomsday. The flimsy atmosphere domes had lost their air and the buildings stood in excellent preservation, a futile monument to a wasted dream. And then there was Earth. Rolling green hills, majestic cities, awesome natural wonders, all familiar, like a longforgotten love. Majestic cities of the dead. Towns and villages and hamlets and solitary dwellings of the. dead. They had known what they would find, and they found it, and still were stunned. "It hit the whole solar system," Doctor Walter said, snapping his fingers, "just like that." Paulson objected. "There weren't any bodies at the outer bases. Those people had a chance to get away -- or at least to try." The captain nodded. "I have a hunch that Venus and Mercury were caught. If so, that means it struck the solar system out as far as Jupiter's moons. Something from the sun?" Walter pondered the suggestion, and shook his head. "Heat would have left traces. So would any kind of radiation I know of that could do this. How long has it been? We should be able to pick up the exact date." They landed at New Washington. The specialists, the experts, went grimly to work. The archeologist who had come to probe eagerly some faded secrets of Earth's ancient peoples found himself with the problem of an extinct interplanetary civilization. The botanist could only wonder at the survival of abundant flora when all fauna had perished. The bacteriologists, the chemists, the physicists, the military intelligence officer masquerading as a diplomat, all pondered the possible source of the catastrophe. Clyde Paulson, unwanted by the scientists and unneeded by his ship, found his way into the military records section and gazed disheartened at the mountainous files of films. "Well," he said, "since I've got nothing better to do..." references, found Paulsons in quantity, but no mention of his dishonored ancestor. "Odd," he said. "He couldn't have been such a scoundrel that they destroyed his records." He prowled through the building, sampling the priceless military secrets of a lost civilization, getting himself lost, becoming more frustrated by the hour. He sat down to analyze his problem. "Permanent records," he mused. "Those would be records that are complete. In other words, when a man's service was terminated, they filmed his records and put them in the permanent file. There should be another file for those on active service. Which means that old Grandfather Paulson was still considered on active service when it happened. Which is odd, because he left with the colonists. Could that mean the colonists..." Impossible. A shipload of colonists wouldn't kill off the civilization that mothered it, and then leave for the stars in search of breathing room -- even if it had the power. He continued his search, and eventually he found active records of the military services. They were crudely kept files containing paper documents and records, and even these were only abstracts of service records. He comprehended, at length, that the complete records were kept with the man at his point of service. What a prodigious amount of effort to devote to such a simple matter as record keeping ! "Paulson, Paul," the file said. "Space Navy. Serial Number # B# A#." Paulson took the file and carried it out into the fresh air, to a plot of tangled grass where there were no bleached bones to dishearten him. He settled down to read of the bright development of a promising military career that had ended in disgrace. Paul Paulson had held the rank of captain in the Space Navy. He was a pilot of the highest qualifications. He had served with distinction on a number of dangerous missions. His last assignment had been the Space Navy Base on Callisto, Jupiter Command. The record concluded with the notation of a court-martial on a charge of insubordination, and the terse verdict: Guilty. Accompanying the file was a smaller folder, labeled, "Summary of Court-Martial Proceedings Against Paul Paulson." The contents of the folder had been withdrawn for study, a notation informed him. He opened it and found a single sheet of paper that had been overlooked or unwanted. tain, "Have they found anything?" "They found one thing. This happened just about two Earth months after the colonists left Pluto Base. I remember something in the old records about their communications with Earth breaking down sooner than they'd expected. Now we know why. It looks as if the human race missed extermination by an eyelash. What have you been up to?" "I found a personnel file on Grandfather Paulson. I suppose no one will object to my taking it." "None of the natives Fve met will object. Have you vindicated the old man?" "He received a court-martial for insubordination. That would be no disgrace in our family. Funny thing, though -- the trial summary is missing, except for one statement by Grandfather Paulson. Interested?" "Let's have it." Captain Front took the paper and read: "To whom it may concern : It is true that I have refused to obey the orders of the Scientific Mission, in spite of the fact that my commanding officer ordered me to do so. It is true that I made a serious attempt to break the neck of the Scientific Mission's chairman, Doctor Harold Dolittle. It is also true that I sincerely regret this attempt. "I hold nothing personal against Doctor Dolittle. Scientists have been playing at exterminating the human race for centuries, and it's probably only an accident that one of them hasn't succeeded before, now. And since Doctor Dolittle actually has succeeded, breaking his neck would not help the situation. It was bound to happen sooner or later, anyway. "When I was a kid back in Minnesota, there was a boy on our street named Fitzharris Holloway. We all called him Fizz, and he wasn't a bad kid except that he was just too curious to live. Let a bunch of us stand around a puddle and it would always be Fizz who would drop a big rock and splash mud all over our Sunday clothes and get the lot of us whipped. He'd drop it just to see what would happen. The average mentality could figure that out without the experiment, but Fizz's mentality wasn't average. It was scientific. He had to see for himself. Let us find a hornets' nest and it would be Fizz who had to punch a stick into it. He'd get stung, of course, but so would the rest of us. "You've heard that old gag about throwing an egg into an electric fan? Almost everyone has, I guess, and been satisfied just to hear about it. But Fizz had to see for himself. He got egg splashed all over himself and his ma's new dress, and he wore a pillow to his meals for the next three days. "They'll never forget Fizz at old Central High School. The scars he left in that chemistry laboratory will last as long as the building. All the teacher had to say was, 'Don't do this,' and there would be Fizz out in the lab trying it out. "I figure now that Fizz was just a natural-born scientist. Most of us are curious about things as children -- curious within limits, that is -- but we outgrow it. A scientist never outgrows it, and the law of averages gives us a certain number of irresponsible scientists. Fizz met his end in a bar one night, when he dropped a lighted cigarette into the bulging front of a woman's dress. She picked up a bottle and broke it over his head, and the jury called it justifiable homicide. If all natural-born scientists had run squarely into the consequences of their curiosity at such an early age, the human race might be no further along than the Bronze Age, but at least it would have a future. "I attempted to resign my Space Navy commission when I first learned that I was to assist Doctor Dolittle in his experiments. Contrary to normal procedure, my resignation was not accepted. I am now requesting permission to resign and join the star colonists. They have an opening for a reserve pilot and will favorably consider my application. I believe the risks of star colonization to be considerably less than those of remaining in this solar system. Doctor Dolittle has been poking at a hornets' nest, and the more light-years away I am when the hornets come out, the better I'll like it. "Respectfully yours, Captain Paul Paulson." his cheek thoughtfully. "So they let him go. And then, two months after the colonists left, this happened. What sort of experiments was this Scientific Mission carrying on?" "The only thing I could find was Grandfather's statement." "I wonder if they were conducting some kind of solar experiments. I never thought of a sun as being a hornets' nest. What comes out when you poke a sun?" "Grandfather was attached to the Jupiter Base Command, on Callisto. We might find more information there. Any chance of hitting Callisto again on the way out?" "We'll see what we find here. If this looks like a likely clue, we'll have to follow it up. So far, there haven't been any other clues. Let's see what Walter says about this." such mute records as Earth had to offer. They sifted the bones of the Venus colonists and looked in at Mercury Base, where death had interrupted the lonely vigil of a small group of scientists and soldiers. Then they turned back. Mars again, then an asteroid base, and then Callisto. And the complete file on Captain Paul Paulson. Paulson searched further and found the records of the Scientific Mission. He carried an armload of documents to Captain Front. "Found any answers?" the captain asked. "Not all of them," Paulson said, "but enough." "Solar research?" "No. Jupiter research." "Odd," the captain mused. "Whatever happened hit everything from the Jupiter moons through the system clear to Mercury." "This Doctor Dolittle," Paulson said, "was doing some intensified research that concerned Jupiter. First he used a series of atomic warheads to test the depth of the atmosphere. Then he wanted someone to pilot a ship on a tight parabolic orbit that would take him closer to Jupiter than any human had ever been before. As an added twist, the ship was to be paralleled closer in by a guided missile that could broadcast instrument readings. Grandfather Paulson was ordered to pilot the ship. He refused. He was tried for insubordination, convicted, and sentenced to a prison term." "But he left with the star colonists." "Yes, by escaping from confinement. He got out to Pluto Base and stowed away on the starship. Jupiter Command was furious when it found out what had happened. The commandant ordered the starship to turn around and bring him back. The starship was out of the system by then and it refused." "Well, that's an interesting bit of family history, but it doesn't explain what wiped out humanity." Paulson said grimly, "Doesn't it?" "Does it?" "Grandfather Paulson said Doctor Dolittle had been poking at a hornets' nest. He was poking at Jupiter, and it was vigorous poking -- he used atomic warheads. Then, when Grandfather refused to pilot Dolittle's ship, Dolittle found another pilot who would. They went into their orbit and made the trip successfully, but they lost their guided missile. Then a few weeks later they found it again." blankly, "They lost it on Jupiter -- and then they found it?" "The missile came shooting back at them," said Paulson. "I gather that it was only a piece of luck that let them capture it, because the mechanism had been altered in a way they called 'astonishing,' and it used an unknown fuel. Its speed was something they couldn't believe. It represented several hundred years' progress for them at one crack, and it gave them the secret of star travel. They went to work on it, and they were too enthused to give much thought to what else might come up from Jupiter." The captain walked over to a port and looked out at the sky. "Jupiter?" "It must have been hell for something native to Jupiter to take to space travel, but someone -- or something -- was as mad as a hornet. Atomic warheads wouldn't soothe anyone's feelings." "So it -- or they -- headed in toward the sun." "At unbelievable speeds," Paulson said. "Those on the outer planets either had time to try to escape, or maybe to come to help." "And all the humanity they could find -- how did they do it?" "I hope we never know. How did they ever get off Jupiter? Not even our starship could manage that. What's the escape velocity?" "Too much." "Well, I found the study they made of that missile. It's an advance in mankind's knowledge -- at the price of mankind." "I'll have Walter go over it." "Where is he?" Paulson said. "I haven't seen him for days." The captain stiffened. "My God ! He's down on Amalthea, conducting some Jupiter experiments!" T HE desolate, rock-strewn surface of Amalthea curved sharply away from them to its shallow horizon, and the light in the sky was Jupiter. The huge disc of the planet hovered menacingly above them. The churning bands of clouds writhed and struggled like live beings in the throes of mortal agony. Even as they watched, the colors deepened and faded, yellow clouds boiled into the brown of the North Equatorial Belt, and the enigmatic, so-called red spot shimmered with a repulsive, grayish pinkness. "Grandfather must have had some kind of apprehension about it," Paulson said. "Just the sight of it is enough to scare a man to death. I feel as if it were going to gobble me up." He turned expectantly to Doctor Walter, and the scientist said nothing. Behind the tinted thickness of his faceplate, his eyes bulged and sparkled. "I feel," Paulson said, "as if I were on a disabled ship that is likely to crash at any second." The scientist took a step forward -- toward Jupiter. "Out, damned spot!" he muttered. "Out, I say!" Paulson jumped, and came down slowly. "How was that again?" "Shakespeare," the scientist said. "I said I feel as if I were on a disabled ship -- " "I heard you. Nonsense. It's true that this little moon is falling toward Jupiter, but it's only an inch and a fraction a now, it'll be a few miles closer. Eventually it'll go all the way, but you won't be around to worry about it." "No one will be around to worry about it," Paulson said. "Do you think someone down there will think it's another bombardment when the moon falls, and come up to see who did it?" Walter said shortly, "I wouldn't know." "You have to admit that was a stupid way to experiment on an unknown planet. Atomic warheads !" "Who would have imagined anything could be living down there?" Walter said. "But what could they learn?" "I'm sure they had some definite objective. You don't think they did it just for the fun of it, do you?" Paulson turned. "Your hour's up. Let's get going." They made long, slowmotion bounds across the crumbling surface. Suddenly Paulson missed Walter, and turned to find him motionless, staring at Jupiter. "You said an hour was all you wanted," Paulson said sharply. "We're jumping off at midnight, you know, and I only have half the computations made." "All right," Walter said. "I was just looking." tiny lifeship, Walter turned again before he entered the airlock. "I'd give a lot to know what's down there. With all the study that Scientific Mission put in, they really found out nothing about the planet." "I can tell you how to manage it," said Paulson. "How?" "Give us about a six-months start. Then fly down and see for yourself. We'll leave you the lifeship." Walter turned abruptly and entered the airlock. Paulson followed him. "Sure, it's a fascinating thing," he said. "And I'm glad the planets in our own solar systems run Earth-normal and smaller. Otherwise, some scientist might decide to conduct some experiments. I'm glad Jupiter is light-years away from my home town, but after this I'll never feel easy about it. Who can say they won't come out again some day, and take to star traveling?" They took off, and Paulson set course for Callisto Base. A moment later Walter got up and left the control section. When Paulson got curious and went back to look for him, he found the scientist pressing his face against a porthole, Looking Ahead? You must be, or you wouldn't be reading this magazine. Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and terrestrials and extraterrestrials. But what about looking ahead to:  Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF, the more free issues you get.)  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Next Issue (January) on Sale November #rd, Always look gift horses in the mouth -- you never know if if you wish they're the Trojan variety! his nose to the sliding magnifier, staring through it and the glassite wall at the tense scene inside the hothouse. The hideous but exceptionally rare and delicate Venusian fungus was about to spore. Any second now and -- ideally -- the bloated nodules would split to spew out a host of tiny purple balls. Ideally! He snatched a hasty glance at the strip panel by the side of the chamber, checkingtemperature and humidity, atmosphere analysis -- and was aware, suddenly, that the alarm was clamoring. That triple ring and pause, triple ring and pause, spelled out the approach of the shuttle rocket 'The hell with it! he muttered, pressing his nose to the glass again. This sporulation he had to see with his own eyes. As he held his breath the nodules shivered visibly. Then the deep purple rinds burst, and a soggy gray mass dripped and splattered onto the hot, moist soil, to discolor and wither almost at once. He sighed and moved to switch the interior to a thirtyminute high-temperature sterilization. He became aware of an ache in his broad shoulders -- and also that the approach alarm was still clamoring. "All right!" he growled, and climbed aboard the scooter without which he would never have been able to police the three square miles of asteroid farm. 'T hear you, damn it! Tm coming!" The scooter purred busily along, its moron mind following the exact mid-line of the high galleries between the culture houses -- glassite cells full of writhing, struggling, burgeoning life. At thirty, Jacob O'Simon had a lot behind him -- a degree, a solid reputation in biology, a teaching post in botany, among other things. Won the hard way, he had gladly sacrificed them for this, for total isolation on a tiny asteroid. This chunk of rock no more than a mile through, dignified with the title Ajax HI, because it was one of the cluster around Ajax, itself only one of a larger cluster, the Trojans, circling Sol in the orbit of mighty Jupiter. H ere, with a slow-fusion inferno safely buried in the core to provide heat and power, with a triple-layered, impact-proof roof over his head, and instrumentation which could maintain any desired environmental conditions, he was alone with his plants -- and happy, almost. Each ninetieth day the shuttle rocket called, bringingsupplies, new specimens, reports and recommendations, and taking away other specimens, analyses, advices, and, occasionally, orders for his frugal needs. He could, if necessary, contact Ajax Base at any time by radio, but he did this seldom, and then only to ask a question, never to pass the time of day. For Jacob O'Simon had one great character failing. He just could not stand people. His very  few friends were all of the type who could be relied on to let him alone unless it was something really important. At first thought, this job might have been made for such a man, but there was a snag. "Of course three square miles of observational data is a lot, Jacob," George Viner had said. "You need at least one assistant -- " "Assistant!" Jacob had snorted. "Of course I could do with an assistant -- somebody who would have no interests but the job in hand, who wouldn't chatter all the time, who would do exactly what he was told, when he was told, who would know what to look for, and when, without being told, who wouldn't get on my nerves with a lot of silly, personal gab -- you find me someone like that and I'll take him on!" "Someone or something, Jacob?" George Viner had asked. "I may not find such a person, but -- " "Now don't give me that robot sales talk, George," said Jacob, for Viner was a specialist in automation, cybernetics and thinking mechanisms in general. "There never was and ever will be a machine that could do what I want. It takes life to observe life and understand it. You have some pretty smart robots, able to deal with any predictable situation, but there never was a machine yet to do plant research -- " The scooter slid up the incline to the landing lock, and Jacob got off, with the ghost of Viner's laugh still in his ears. He cut off the alarm, which action made contact between him and the shuttle pilot. "About time !" came a heavily disgusted voice. "Another minute and I was coming down to collect the body. You all right?" "Yes, I'm all right," said Jacob. "Got anything special?" "I do have a schedule to keep to!" was the pointed reply. "Your can ready to pick up?" "Give me a minute to load up." Jacob leaned on the heavy door to the loading bay and launched himself into the zero-gravity zone inside. The door swung shut, cutting off the squawks from the intercom to hurry it up. "Schedules!" he muttered, as he swam to the twenty-foot cylinder which housed his latest batch of results. "Does he worry about my schedules?" He loosed the can, braced his legs against the bulkhead and shoved, steering it in the direction of the open trap of the ship. For a moment, he saw it in his mind as it must seem from outside: the ship, like some dark beetle, clutching close to the bright surface, its probe dug deep, as if sucking the nectar from some giant blossom. T he can clanged into place. Jacob made a backward flip clear. The bay door hummed and groaned shut. There was a screech of snug-fitting metal as the probe drew up and out, airtight plates snicking into place. '"Damned quick-on-thedraw merchant," Jacob growled. "Trap me in the damn door one of these times." He shoved off and drifted down to the gleaming floor where a duplicate can rested. He swam around it -- and stared. It was standing open! "What the hell?" He hung a moment, scanning the interior. There were the usual stacks of thermo-flasks, all in code colors -- and one brightly silvered tube. A letter can! Who would be sending him a letter, unless it was something bad ? He reached for the tube, twisted it open, and frowned at the paper inside. "Dear Jacob," he read, "I've taken the liberty of enclosing a device with this shuttle. Try it. I'd like your opinion. It answers to 'Susan' -- pardon the whimsy, and blame my niece, herself a biologist and botanist and one of your admirers -- " He paused to wonder, frowning. Niece? A vague memory came to him, from those nightmarish days when he had been trying to instill knowledge into dim and unture of a scrawny girl, all teeth and intense eyes. He shuddered and read on. "Volition enough to preserve itself from destruction or injury -- instant retention of any instruction without apparent limit, conditioned to obey absolutely, without question, overriding the personal safety circuit -- and is, of course, quite harmless, being subject to the basic laws of robotics." Jacob crumpled the paper with a savage hand. Laws of robotics ! He kicked away from the can, looking around for this device, while the familiar words echoed in his mind: "No robot shall injure a human, or by inaction allow injury to come to a human -- " A twentieth century fiction-writer's pipedream. As if it would ever be possible to build into a machine brain the answer to a problem that man himself had not yet solved ! Each man had to discover for himself just what was injurious, and what not -- and no man, so far, had reached a full solution for that, much less a general one for humans in general. Any robot faced with that task would surely blow a fuse before it had gone three steps. But where was the blasted thing? He frowned again, assessing the evidence. Open can -- either someone had left it open -- carelessness -- or someone or something had opened it. A robot with initiative? He shook his head, suddenly mindful of the dozen and one things being neglected while he was hovering here. Groping for the cable which lay coiled in a recess in the can, he looped it through the lugs of the thermo-flasks, hauled taut and kicked off for the opposing door, which led to stores and living space. The flasks hung in a long line after him. Reaching the door, he shoved it open, dived through, letting the grav-field catch him as he crossed the boundary zone. Landing catlike, he spun and hauled, trapping each flask as it became heavy. When the last one had clunked into place, he eased away from the door, letting it swing shut. By habit, he glanced at his wrist, computing ahead. Two or three things he had missed -- so he had missed them; no use worrying about that. All told, he had something like a clear hour ahead now. By that time a certain batch of Venus-born cousins of the common Earthside horsetail was due to fructify, and would be ready for transplanting. Failing the very, lively and extremely virulent miniature lizards which performed that function for them on their own planet, and the inability of any Earth-bom insect to survive that atmosphere, that was a job for him. A hot, unpleasant and tedious job. So now would be a good time to eat. This new stuff could wait. He turned and saw -- her. S HE stood absolutely immobile, in the midst of what he was pleased to call his dining room. She was tall, slim, solemnly blue-eyed, her face a smooth mask of quiet attention. Bright golden hair formed an aureole of crisp, tight curls about her head. She wore exquisitely tailored white slacks, a white, shortsleeved shirt -- her skin gleamed a flawless bronze against the white. She stood quite still. He realized he was gaping, wide-mouthed, and took a deep breath. His wits slowed their dizzy spin. Flawless tailoring -- utter immobility -- glowing skin -- golden curls -- the classic regularity of feature -- she was beautiful -- too beautiful ! "Susan?" he queried, in sudden illumination. There was a slow, grave inclination of the head, nothing more. Wild thoughts pinwheeled in his brain. This must be some fantastic jest on Viner's part -- some attempt to trap him into indiscretions. He reread the letter, mentally. 'Hnstant retention of any instructions -- conditioned to obey absolutely -- " "Can you cook?" he asked, and instantly cursed his own inanity. Again there was that grave nod, nothing more. What was she -- it? -- waiting for now? He looked away from those bright blue eyes uneasily, striving to steady his thoughts. What now? The word "instructions" came back to him. Of course! This was a blank mind which had to learn everything from him. For a brief moment he was staggered by the magnitude of the prospective task, but then reason came back with a rush. It must know quite a lot already -- enough to get out of the can, find its way in here. It understood his questions. It claimed ability to cook. Perhaps it could handle package instructions ! He went forward cautiously. "Come!" he said, with exaggerated care. "Here is the cooking console. Here are the material bins. Prepare syntho-steak, biscuits, coffee -- and I like my coffee black and strong. All right?" Again that cool nod. He watched while it made the first competent movements. That was all right, seemingly. He retreated to the dining room and set to work checking and sorting the new arrivals. The semi-automatic activity gave him time to set his thoughts in order. First he cursed Viner for his weird wit. Was it necessary to make the thing female, and so impossibly perfectly female, at that? And she was certainly perfect. Jacob visualized her in his mind, seeing the sculptured structure of her face, and as much of the body as was betrayed by her clothes. Human-copy manikins were common enough, he knew. Mass entertainment via fullcolor three-dimensional TV had made them necessary. The public refused to be fooled by pretended and insinuated stabbings, bashings and other tidbits. They demanded the real thing. Actors, understandingly, were reluctant to carp realism quite so far. Technical ingenuity had produced the perfect compromise -- human-copy manikins which could be programmed to perform a few limited actions -- duplicates with plastic but gruesomely realistic flesh, blood and vital organs. H e had never been close to one before and didn't want to be. He raged at Viner. Then, suddenly, he smiled. Poor old George ! All that exquisite sculpture and design, for what? A real girl as devastatingly attractive as that would have had him babbling and furious by now -- but here he was, quite unmoved. As he had so often argued, it's not the way people look, but the way -- the stupid way -- they think. He wondered how this thing thought. Did it think in the accepted sense? A memory unit was a massive affair. Programming it was a specialist's job. He sat back on his heels, wondering. Would Viner have built in a few comedy values for kicks? On reflection, Jacob thought not. Viner had a vile sense of humor, true, but he was all seriousness when it came to his own field. Jacob completed his cataloguing and went back to the cooking area, just in time to see the robot take up a fully laden tray. '"Here," he said, "on this table -- " and watched as the tray was set down. Two places ? "You going to eat, too?" Again that emotionless nod and the silent, patient wait. He struggled to fit this new factor into the picture. Probably a general-purpose converter system took in raw material and supplied energy -- he had a waste-disposal unit which did just that. But a sudden thought stiffened him. It hadn't made a sound yet. "You can -- talk?" "If you wish." The voice was cool, impersonal, quiet. He breathed out again, thankfully. "Well, now, that's something to be thankful for, isn't it? I'm not the type to go nuts talking to myself, but I sure would, talking to something that didn't talk back. All right, let's eat!" He sat and began his frugal meal, watching it do likewise, with quiet, precise movements and the flash of white, even teeth. "You're almost human!" he said, through a mouthful of deliciously done steak. It made no response. He scowled, felt irritation swell up -- and then the answer hit him. What sort of answer could it make to a statement like that? To get a reply, he must ask a question. He glowed. Complete obedience -- no idle chatter -- maybe Viner had something, after all! D raining a second cup of perfectly made coffee, he leaned back and considered his next move. He would need to find out just how far the education angle would have to be taken. Could this thing learn the difference between one plant and another, between a spore and a seed? But there was one question which should come first, a tricky one. "Just how human are you, anyway?" "As human as you wish," it said without emphasis. He grinned, ruefully. Very smart, too. Ask a silly question -- ! "All right." He got up. "You're chief cook and dishwasher from here on out. Best grub Tve tasted in a long while. Now, while you're clearing away, Fll get the scooter and we'll go take a look at the other aspect of the job." He punched in Sector # on the scooter's panel and trundled it around to the front. Susan was waiting. With the two of them aboard, the little platform was crowded. "You're warm!" he commented, touching the smooth skin of the robot's arm. "George did a first-class job on you. Was it necessary -- this extreme duplication?" "Structure and function are interrelated," it said smoothly. "I have been equipped with totally human potentials, senses and responses. It was found that the simplest way to achieve this was to make me human in structure. Hence my skin, like yours, is sensitive to touch, temperature and humidity." hastily, and cursed himself for doing it. So it was a fair copy -- so what? "How much do you know about what I'm doing here?" he asked, getting on to safer ground. "General concepts only," the robot said. "This is a research planetoid for controlled investigation of the possibilities for accelerating the evolution of native Venus flora, with the object of rendering the atmospheric conditions of that planet suitable for human occupation -- " "Oh, great!" he sneered. "Straight out of the book. Pure bafflegab -- you know what that is?" "The word is not in my vocabulary." "Well, it will be. Now I want you to forget all that jargon, and let me give it to you in simple one-syllable words. Can you forget?" "Whatever you wish." "That's fine. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of the non-essentials." "Lin Yutang," it said calmly, and he blinked. "Eh? What was that?" "Lin Yutang was a Chinese philosophical writer, the author of the saying you just quoted." Jacob felt his mouth beginning to sag, and shut it hastily. "Is that so? Well -- look, we're now passing through Sector #. In these houses there used to be typical Venus atmosphere. Surface atmosphere, I mean. About two miles above the surface, Venus is very like Earth, only hotter, more humid, and loaded with excess CO # . Because of perpetual turbulence, airborne life never got started. So -- no birds or insects -- and plant life has to struggle along by other methods. Micro-lizards fill the gap, but not as efficiently as bees and such. "So, in this sector, I have taken a sample collection of Venus flora, helped it become fertile and grow. As a result, the COj is well down already, and the humidity, too. So the basic idea is sound. But it just is not possible to protect, fertilize and assist each individual plant on the whole surface of a planet. So, here, in Sector #, which we are now coming into -- " the scooter swung around a right angle and purred off down another glassite-line lane -- "you would find certain mutated strains of certain selected plants, and in Sector #, where we are headed, are the few final products which have proved successful. Even-numbered sectors, by the way, are on the opposite hemisphere. They're control areas, with a constantly maintained puie Venus-type atmosphere. Any questions so far?" "On what basis do you select plant-forms for "experimentation?" "Smart girl!" he approved wryly. "You have your finger right on the sore place. It's not enough that I should have cies to find the few that ai'e viable enough to be worth encouraging -- oh, no! This is research, but it is costing money, meaning there has to be some profit. So I have to nurse such things as might show a dividend sometime!" "You called me 'girl' a moment ago," it said impersonally. "Do you wish me to respond to that term?" "I did?" He thought back, then nodded. "That's right, I did. You mind?" "Why should I?" "Why should you? Look, I'm liable to get excited from time to time -- and there's only the two of us -- so I'll be meaning you -- unless I'm talking to myself. Use your discretion. You do have discretion, don't you?" "Just as you wish," it said. H e began to feel the first small stirrings of dissatisfaction. This, he saw, was what it must have been like with slaves, and why such civilizations inevitably fell apart. It was demoralizing. He wondered what it would feel like to be demoralized. The scooter chuckled to itself and swung into Sector #. He shuddered, thrust away his dreads, and began to look out for the correct moment to hop off. "Horsetail." He pointed through the glassite. "This plant is an almost exact duplicate of our own Earthside equisetum. Logical, when you think of it. Horsetail is pretty primitive -- one of the earlier cryptogams. You know any botany?" "Green, ribbed, aerial shoots," it recited. "Those bearing leaf whorls are sterile. The fertile nodes bear a dense oval spike consisting of short-stalked bracts with spore cases -- " "All right! All right! Damned walking reference file ! Who was it that said exact information is the immediate death of conversation?" "The origin of the saying is not known, but it is almost certainly Graeco-Roman." "There I go again, asking damned silly questions." lie took out a pair of small plastic bags. "Listen, this is what we're going to do. We want those two big fructifications there, see? They're just about ready to open up. The rest are below standard. I'll go first, right down to the far end, to plug in the heavy-duty cables. You grab those two spikes and bag 'em and get out. I'll be right after you." He undogged the heavy glassite door, swung it open and hurried down the lane between the plant beds. It was like being in a damp oven. He bent, grabbed cable ends, shoved them home, straightened and hurried back. "Got 'em? Good. Now I'll just seal down this door." That done, he threw the switch, and they watched as the twin lanes of greenishbrown soil sizzled and smoked into sterility. "That," he said, "is the only way to get rid of those beggars. Just like home horsetails -- it only wants one little bit of the rhizome to start a whole new plant proliferating. Now we have to spread the spores from this lot over some clean ground. Jump on. The nearest vacant lot is some distance from here." Aftei a thoughtful silence, it said, "Why horsetail?" "Believe it or not, it's gold!" he sneered. "The last batch I had processed out at fifteen ounces per ton of ash. This lot should be better -- but you'd think mankind would have lost the golden itch by this time." "That is to examine the concept from an outdated viewpoint," it commented. "Recent advances in metallurgy employ gold as a synergic in new alloy processes." "They do?" he said weakly. "What the hell does 'synergy' mean?" "Synergism -- " the quiet voice was prompt and flowing -- "is the cooperative action of discrete agencies such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the two effects taken separately." "You know what? If you were human. I'd hate your guts!" "You are offended?" "No, just thankful you're not human. Whoa ! This'll do!" He stopped the scooter again by a window where the soil-lanes were virginally smooth. "Now this can be tricky. Let me explain. You hold a spike in one hand over the soil, poke a hole with a finger, tap the bract so that some spores fall into the hole, poke the finger close by so that the hole closes up again. Sounds simple, but don't let any of the spores touch your skin or you'll be sorry -- that is, if your skin is chemically like mine -- and don't miss the hole so that the spores fall on the surface or they'll get caught up in the little breeze we'll make -- and we'll both be sorry. A good way is to hold your breath -- " "Protective clothing and a mask would be better." "Strictly for amateurs ! Besides, it's hot enough in there without being wrapped up. You ready? Right down to the far end and work back. That way we minimize the risks." door, he went through. He took his spike from its bag, and holding it carefully by the tip, he crouched over the hot, damp soil, poking and tapping with expert speed. He assumed his helper was doing likewise, but was much too intent with his own job to watch anything else. They reached the door simultaneously. He turned from securing the door, to find Susan pink and gleaming, its whites stained with perspiration, and dabbing at the open neck of its shirt. "Spores?" he guessed. "Don't do that -- only makes it worse. Come on." He led the way at a trot to the corner of the glassite tunnel, to a wall compartment. "Germicidal jelly -- got a stock of these all over the place. Here, slap some of this on it." He uncapped a tube of violently purple goo, then hesitated. "Better take that shirt off. This stuff is practically a dye." He waited while the trim garment came off, then offered the jelly again. "Feels good, doesn't it?" he said. "Damn spores burn like fire -- blister, too, if you don't catch 'em quick. Turn round, let me look at your back." He looked, critically. "Lucky -- you just got a small dose. All right now? That purple doesn't do a thing for your looks, but it'll wash off. You better leave that shirt, though, for the sterilizer." He capped the tube, put it back in the compartment. "You stay here. I'll bring the scooter and we'll run back to base." He went off, grinning to himself. Damn robot might be smart at book-learning, but it took a botanist to handle plants. Still, pretty clever of old George to fabricate a "skin" like that. Blistered just like a human, maybe a shade faster. Silky, too. He reached the scooter, swung it around and climbed on. A wife like that, he thought with sudden wistfulness, would be something. dient -- but without any feminine caprices. A quote of Shawls came to mind: "The ideal wife is one who does everything that the ideal husband wants, and nothing else.' He wondered if she would be able to place that quote -- and was aghast at the treachery of his own mind. What did he want with a wife of any kind? He slowed to a stop, to take her aboard. With the toe of his shoe he hooked the shirt into a bundle on the platform and drove on. "How's it feel now -- still burning?" "A little. May I ask a question?" "Ask away. Only thing is, I'm not like you. I don't know all the answers." "The remark is without meaning. If I knew all the answers, there would be no need to ask questions." "Sorry. That told me off, all right. But I guess it's just my way. You'll get used to it." "Acceptance would be facilitated if I knew your motivation. You seem affable and pleasant in action, yet hostile and offensive in speech and value judgments. Why is that?" "Damned if I know!" he admitted candidly. "On my own, I'm fine. Mix me with people and I come out wrong." "You dislike people?" attentive face so close to his. "I've never told this to anyone, but I hate being owned or influenced -- or anyone trying to own or influence me -- or anyone wanting me to own or influence them." He saw a blank look and sighed. "Maybe it is too much to expect you to understand. I don't rightly understand it myself -- " "But you own me now. Does that bother you?" "I do not!" he denied hotly. "Nothing of the kind! You were dumped on me. I'm just trying to get along -- and managing pretty well, too. But I don't own you. Any time I tell you to do something you don't want to do, you refuse. As far as I am concerned, you're a free agent. Got that?" "But if I am a free agent, how can I work with you?" "Don't know the answer to that one, either," he admitted. "I'm not too strong on philosophy, but isn't that what man has been trying to figure out all along? How do you cooperate with somebody else without losing something of yourself in the process?" "By limiting the cooperation to some external, impersonal activity such as this, so that each individual concerned could contribute in equal measure yet without becoming involved in a personal prestige conflict." "That sounds fine." The scooter purred to a stop, and he led off to the living space. "Trouble is, people don't work like that. Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- somebody wants to give orders, to be boss, to make somebody else jump. And there are always those who want to be ordered around, too, believe it or not." He took a pair of tongs from a cabinet. "Skip the philosophy for now. You need something more positive, like a shower. Over hex-e. Shed the rest of your gear and get on the grid." He picked up the discarded clothing, collected the shirt, dumped the lot in the sterilizer, and came back to the cubicle with a clutch of bottles in his hands. Susan stood on the chrome grid, watching him with that blue-eyed stare. He unfastened the injector cover and poured in generous helpings from the bottles. "Detergent," he explained. "Analgesic, to kill the burning. Germicide, to get any spores that might be left. And a faii'ly mild bleach, to get that purple stain off your -- chest." He corked the bottles again, and paused. "George overdid it a bit with your shape." "You find it objectionable, or flawed in some way or other?" "If George had to make you anatomically perfect, he should have put in a flaw or two -- a sag or a wrinkle or something. You're too idealized to be real. I'd hate to meet a girl -- a real girl -- with a shape like that." "Why?" asked the robot unemotionally. "Beauty like that has real power, you know. Power to drive men, irritate women -- cause havoc in all directions. And what good's a whip if you don't get to crack it once in a while?" "But you are not thus affected. Why is that?" "Why? I grow some pretty beautiful flowers and they don't affect me. Perhaps that's it. A flower is not trying to do anything to me. A pretty girl would be saying, in effect, 'I'm beautiful -- what are you going to do about it?' Whereas you're just beautiful, period." He laughed at himself. "You know what? I can talk to you. I can't talk to people at all -- not without getting mad at 'em. Especially women. But I'm gabbing too much now. You hold still a minute while I program the water. I might have a spore or two myself, and I could do without some of the sweat. On this job, a regular shower is a must." The first impact of the needle-spray stung his flesh, so that he cringed. Through the steam, he saw Susan wince, too. "Hot!" he mumbled. "Fifteen seconds of this, to open the pores -- " The biting hot needles ceased. He tapped the bronzed shoulder that glistened close to his chest. "Let's have a look at those blisters," he ordered, and put a gentle finger on the fading purple patches. He reached for a tissue and swabbed away the last of the protective jelly. The skin beneath was only faintly red. It kept quite still under his ministrations. For a wild moment, he imagined this to be a real female, and chuckled at the thought. "Why do you laugh?" the robot inquired. "I was just imagining what would happen if you were a #'eal girl and I was doing this. It's quite a strain on my imagination." "Why?" "Because -- because I haven't had a lot of experience with girls, I suppose. Anyway, those spore marks look pretty clean. Stand by for the cold!" He was just in time. An icy-chill mist filled the cubicle, shocking and jolting the skin into vigorous reaction. He drew a deep, shuddering breath, heard the robot do the same. "Good for the circulation -- " he chattered, blowing the spray from the end of his nose and laughing at the sight of crisp golden curls flattened to its head, and its eyes tight shut against flying droplets. The cold jets died and he was tingling all over. "Makes you feel good, eh?" It nodded, wide-eyed, and laughed. He was struck by the pleasant sound. "Say, that's the first time I've heard you laugh!" "You object?" It was serious, at once. "For heaven's sake, no! I like it fine. Go ahead and laugh all you want to!" "Maybe there is something wrong?" "No, not a thing. Honest." He turned away abruptly. "Look, I prefer to rub down with a towel. It's old-fashioned, I know, but I like it. How about you? Shall I switch on the drier?" "A towel, please." another cabinet, got out a couple of squares of fleecy synthetic, tossed one to her, began rubbing himself briskly with the other. Oddly upsetting phrases were echoing through his mind. "As human as you wish" -- "I have been equipped with totaly human potentials" -- "whatever you wish" -- "as human as you wish!" That was the one with the barbs. The more he thought about it, the less he liked it. Wadding the towel, he tossed it into the sterilizer, followed it with his discarded clothes. "Susan." He went back to where it stood on the grid, slowly toweling its curls back to gleaming crispness. "You said you have as much discretion as I wish you to have, whatever that might mean. Do I take it that you have opinions, too?" "Just as you wish," it said, with that wide-eyed stare. He shook his head angrily. "I wish you'd quit that 'just as you wish' routine." "I have done something wrong?" "Not wrong, exactly. It's just that -- well, how the hell do you know what I wish?" "I obey your instructions." "Yeah, but I never told you to laugh." "You said the shower made you feel good and you laughed. I merely did the same." The quietly reasonable tone began to be irritating. "Now look here -- as far as the job is concerned, you'll do what I say -- within reason, of course. I mean -- " he groped for words -- "self-preservation and so on. But that's all. The rest of the time, you act the way you want." "Just as you wish." He stared at that bright face, wondering if he was being mocked, but the big blue eyes were steady. "That's what I wish," he growled. "You do whatever makes you feel good and don't pay any attention to me. Understand?" "No -- " Susan spoke slowly, shaking its head, rolling the towel into a neat ball. "I cannot understand that. I feel good when I do that which pleases you. That is my function." "Oh, God!" He beat a fist into a palm, trying to find words that would free him from this irksome responsibility. Then he caught a sight of his wrist and his mental clock clicked over. "Skip that for now," he ordered. "We have work to do. Sector # -- look, here on the diagram -- " He went to the far wall, where there was a complex chart, much scribbled and annotated. "This is an experimental planting. Venus owns a thing enough like our Astragalus racecosus to be its cousin, but about a quarter the size. In this house I have seeded some of our natives along with the Venus variety. I'm hoping to hybridize the two -- " "Astragalus racecosus -- loco weed. Why?" "Selenium, plus a fair trace of vanadium and zinc. Ragweeds are a bit better for zinc, but I haven't been able to establish them in a Venus atmosphere yet. Marley on Ajax V expects to have fair success with it. He's going in for trees, too. Venus has no trees." "My botany indoctrination did not include this. Are there many plants and trees which isolate metals?" "Plenty." He pulled open a drawer. "Here, grab a couple -- that's all we'll need this trip. Paintbrushes and pati#ncG. "Without clothing?" asked the robot. 'That's up to you. This is not toxic and the climate is fine, if a bit warm, but suit yourself." "Very well. I am ready." He led the way to the scooter, and as soon as they were in motion, he reverted to the question. "Yes, there's a whole slew of Earth plants that isolate metals. You can get barium, for instance, from Brazil nuts. Hickory gives aluminum and magnesium. Copper you get from dandelions, spinach and tobacco. I have some very fine tobacco-type plants coming along in Sector #. Lord knows what they'll be like to smoke, though ; the soil is pretty rich in antimony and that could be rough on the nasal passages. Venus soil is queer stuff, you know. Crawling with bacteria -- like ours, of course -- and damp all the time, but with no liquid water, there's no stratification. Just a fine general mixture of just about everything you can lay a tongue ta You smoke, by the way?" He glanced aside and groaned. "All right, don't say it. If I wish -- right?" It laughed, and the sweet sound sent little tinges along his spine. T he scooter clucked and stopped. He pointed to a window wall which framed a prospect that might have been Elysium, back on ancient Earth. "Pretty, isn't it?" He led the way down between the lanes of nodding, blowing blossoms, almost hip-high. "Now -- " he knelt by a spread of richly purple blooms -- "this is what you do." He made quick and expert dabs with the brush, transferring the sticky yellow pollen. "Got it? Only the very biggest of the purple ones, mind. The rest aren't worth the trouble." Susan crouched and went to work, duplicating his movements. "This is Venus atmosphere that has been transmuted, you said?" "Yes." He stood up and looked down at the robot, noting the smooth efficiency, yet aware of the graceful femininity. "This is hot, just under a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and there's about twice the CO # of Earth ; it's humid, but reasonably bearable. In Sector #, where the atmosphere is maintained at Venus normal, these babies are scrawny things -- and the air would choke you. A few billion of these would make a hell of a difference. Men would be able to walk the surface of the planet without protection." He crouched down and got to work alongside the robot. 'You wish to live on the surface of Venus?" "Me? No, I'm not the pioneering kind. I get along with plants. They don't bother me like people. Hah ! Back to philosophy again. I suppose that's a dead subject for a robot." "Not at all," it replied. "I can give you a philosophical debate, if you wish." "All right." He shuffled along the line of blooms. "I'll take you up on that. Why don't I get along with people." Greek nymph in contemplation. "That is largely a question of attitude. How do you think of people?" "I've tried that and I get some very odd answers. I'm all alone here, so I get plenty of time for thinking. I have come to the conclusion that, as far as I am concerned, people are just things out there. I know about me, what I think, how I feel -- but that's all I know. All the rest is guesswork and inference. I don't know, for instance, what you think or how you feel. I can oniy hear what you say, see what you do, and go by; that." "Then -- to you -- there is no difference between me and anyone else?" "Put it like that -- no. Except that you're idealized. No real girl could be so perfect or so efficient. Otherwise, though, there is no difference." It spun to face him. "Then why are you at ease with me?" He hopped awkwardly to another bloom, paintbrush busy, while he pondered that one. "You have a point," he said. "You mean -- it's me, my attitude to people, that makes all the difference? All right, suppose I admit that -- what do I do with the information?" They had reached the end of a row. Susan stood up and looked at him calmly. "Treat everybody just the same way you treat me, of course." "Hah! I'm to assume that the whole universe is populated with robots, and that I'm the only real person among them?" He chuckled, then, growing serious, said, "It's a way, though. People are the way they are not because they're wonderful or whacky, but because that's the way they have been designed and programmed, by life and experience, and they can't help it, eh? You know -- " he was suddenly depressed -- "I'm enjoying this, and it can't last. You're too good for this job. Old George will be taking you away and Tm going to miss you." they worked back down another twin row. He knew an inexplicable yet powerful impulse to reach out and stroke that silky bronze skin so near to his, to ruffle that halo of crisp golden curls. He fought himself, cursing inwardly. Getting maudlin over a robot ! They finished the row in silence. Outside the secured glassite door, he glanced at his watch again. "Nothing urgent now for another seven, eight hours. I figure to have a bite and then get some sleep. O.K. with you?" "I, too, am aware of fatigue effects and the need for food," replied Susan. "I will prepare a meal and then we will sleep together." "You got that bit wrong," he said as they remounted the scooter. "You don't sleep with me -- not in the usally accepted sense of that phrase. You know what I mean?" "Of course. You do not wish me to sleep with you, then?" "That's what I said!" he snapped. The scooter trundled up the incline to the living space and stopped. He got off, suddenly conscious of their nudity. "Get the grub ready," he growled, "while I write up the data on what we've just done. And get some clothes on. You can use mine!" He strode stiffly to the locker which held his stock of shirts, slacks and socks, took what he needed, left it open, pointedly, and strode off to the records office. There he sat and stared at the tabulated white sheet and strove to push away other pictures that threatened to flood his mind. The struggle started beads of sweat on his brow. Sex fantasies are an occupational hazard to the solitary man. Jacob knew this and had considered himself stable enough to ignore the danger. But this was an attack from a quarter which had never occurred to him in his wildest moments. And what frightened him most was the very fact that it was a fight. He should have been able to dismiss the matter with simple, cold logic. Damn Viner! And damn Susan, too, for being so impeccably and perfectly beautiful ! Fully human responses -- just how far did that go, anyway? If performance to date was anything to go by -- He made a' supreme effort and banished the temptation from his mind. No -- that was the simple, short and only answer -- no! He became aware of a softly feminine voice telling him the food was ready. He went into the dining room. The robot stood by the table, waiting. He looked -- and looked again. Wearing one of his stretch-mesh sweatshirts, there was no longer any sense in trying to think of this as an "it' It was blatantly a "she' He looked away uncomfortably and sat. The food was good in his mouth and its very excellence was added torment. He stole a glance. She was quite silent, neatly busy with her own portion. He wondered what was going on in that exquisitely shaped head. Just where did "fully human" cease? Maybe she was offended at his rejection of her advances -- or were they "services"? He pushed away his empty plate. "Come!" he said. 'Til show you your bed." H e led the way to a small compartment that had, as one wall, a clear glassite panel, looking out on a duplication of the alien scenery of Venus. There, in an endless hot twilight, stunted struggling vegetation fought its ceaseless battle against the elements, and a myriad tiny, gemlike lizards. She stood a moment. Then : "Master " "Call me Jacob!" he said roughly. "What is it?" "I have offended in some way?" "Why do you ask that?" "You do not wish me to sleep with you. You have instructed me to wear clothing." "So?" "You said I was to obey your instructions insofar as it concerned the operation of the station, but that in all other matters I would please myself." "Yeah -- and you said that you wanted to do whatever would please me, and it does not please me to have you running around naked -- or getting ideas about hopping into my bed!" "Then my appearance is not pleasing to you?" "I didn't say that. You're attractive, but you're a robot." "The rest of the universe is populated with robots, as far as you are concerned, you said." "That was just talk," he snarled. "I can't treat you like a human." "I am as human as you wish." "There you go again!" he shouted. "You don't understand. It's not what I wish at all. Look, if I was to take a woman to bed -- which fate forbid! -- it would be because she wanted me to -- not just to please me ! Can't you see that?" "If it would please you, then I would want you to." "But it would not please me, not unless I knew that it was as much your idea as mine -- and because you're a robot, without ideas of your own, that is out, it's impossible -- see?" "A human woman would be pleased to do whatever would give pleasure to her man." The voice was quietly insistent. "Like hell she would!" He laughed harshly. "But let's not go into that just now. Look, Susan -- to be crude -- have you ever slept with a man?" The words were thick in his throat, but he managed to get them out. "No." "There you are, then! How do you know that it would either bring or give pleasure?" "Have you ever slept with a woman -- Jacob?" "Oh, no you don't!" he said hurriedly. "You're not going to trip me up that way. As a mater of fact -- no, I haven't, but that's got nothing to do with it. Here, this is your bunk. And this is mine, right next door. I'm going to bed. Alone! Get me?" "Very well, Jacob," she said, and turned her face up to him so simply and naturally that he kissed her before he realized it. Her lips were cool and soft. "Good night," she whispered, and, shedding her clothes, slid between the crisp, fresh sheets. Still dazed, he went next door and climbed into his own bunk, and lay wide-eyed in the gloom, wondering. Just what had George Viner done here? mind for anything he could recall about robot mechanisms, and it was quite a lot. The station itself was full of them -- thermostats, humidity controls, gravity stabilizers, unit analysis recorders, timing mechanisms of all kinds -- his whole environment was made and maintained by constantly vigilant automatics, many of which he never had to touch, much less understand. But a thinking, feeling, argumentative, logical robot was something else again. The human shape, of itself, imposed restrictions on human-copy manikins which limited them to simple repetitive actions. There was nothing simple about Susan -- or she was too simple, depending on the point of view. Viner must have developed a whole new technique for her. For the life of him, Jacob could not help thinking of "her" rather than "it." So utterly non-human in some ways -- the calm, the logic, the incredibly perfect face and figure -- yet so appealingly easy to understand and get on with -- most of the time. Jacob let that train of thought run its course, and came to a conclusion that shocked him for a moment. Then logic took over. After all, he asked himself, just what was the difference between something that walked. talked, acted and reacted like a human -- and a human? He awoke from a crawly, sweaty dream of being chased down endless, glassite corridors, hotly pursued by a screeching, straggle haired woman-shaped thing, trailing a gaggle of clanking, idiotfaced, mechanical urchins. The horrible harridan, dragging one dead-eyed child, was screaming: "Jacob! Jacob!" She was nudging his shoulder gently, her bright face wide-eyed and attentive, yet remote. "Huh?" He struggled up onto one elbow, glanced at his watch. "Oh. All right. Thanks." "Breakfast?" "Not for me." He sat up and stretched. "Look in the cold bin. You'll see a flask marked 'Berry Extract'. That's for me. You have coffee if you want." She had poured two beakers of the liquid, which was tinged with blue and smelled faintly of mint. He took his. "You might not like it," he warned. "It's bitterish, but it's the biggest thing I've struck yet, bar one. This comes from a miserable little pod-bearer, one of a dozen or more, but this variety somehow is proof against the lizards. Seems they don't like the flavor. So although it propagates only by rare accident -- wind and luck -- it does get to the pod stage. The others don't get that far." He took a generous mouthful, shuddered. "That," he said, "is, in essence, the ecological problem of Venus. The lizards are the fertilizing mechanism, the symbiotes -- but they are also damned voracious. So, over the millennia that life has been struggling there, very little progress has been made. It's more of a check than a balance!" "I see that." She sampled the juice thoughtfully. "But why is this so important?" "Water! There is no naturally occurring liquid water on the planet, although the atmosphere is loaded with it. Humid but not liquid. Only the plants and the lizards can accumulate liquids, and this particular plant has pods full of it. If we could seed enough acres with this stuff, it would solve a lot of problems." "You said 'the biggest thing -- bar one.' What is the other?" "That's something we're going to take a look at right now, soon as you're ready." "Is my clothing satisfactory?" she inquired without emotion. H e tried to examine her objectively, but was forced to avert his eyes. He was learning, belatedly, that partial concealment is more provocative than total revelation. "Take 'em off," he said awkwardly. "It's a Sector # job, so we don't need any, anyway. Hot but not non-toxic. Also, it could be tricky and clothes might get in the way." He was rationalizing, and he knew it. "But you object to lack of apparel." "So I've changed my mind!" he said. "As you wish." ently, he took up a bunch of plastic tubes, each one belled out into a tiny trumpet at one end. "I'll explain as we go." He squatted on the scooter beside her and gave her a tube. "This specimen is a fungus -- and a weirdie. You ever hear of Fergus Lintz, one of the first to do research on Venus? Yes? Then you'll know that he's a first-rate man. Now he had a really fabulous experience which nobody really believed all the way. At times, he even doubts it himself. I'm told. Seems he was lost in a little valley, running short of air and getting a bit light-headed. He knew he was fairly close to base, but too far gone to make it. Suitradio on the blink, too. He was in a bad way. Then he stumbled across a big clump of fungi in a hollow and stopped to examine them. Can you imagine that? Death was staring him in the face, but this was something new -- a new specimen -- so he had to stop and look. A real, dedicated botanist, old Fergus." The scooter swung dizzily into Sector #. "Anyway, he took a look at these fungi -- and, as he looked, he saw one of them blow a bubble at him ! Naturally, he thought he was in the first stages of delirium and he proceeded to undo his faceplate, so as to get a better look -- and it was that suicidal act which saved his life! You see, when he hunched over the little bed of fungi, another bubble blew off, and then it was a regular fountain of bubbles -- and they burst right in his face. And they were oxygen! Oxygen plus a slight perfume -- " "Oxygen?" the robot queried. "Right -- something like a cubic foot of it. Enough, anyway, to get him on his feet again and back to base. But not without a scoopful of the fungi. At base, they thought he was off his trolley, especially when they failed to propagate the things. But Fergus stuck to his story -- got a few specimens -- and sent 'em to me with all the details." The scooter stopped and they went to the plexiglass window, where he checked the gauges carefully. Then, pointing, he told her, "There's the last of the bunch. They look something like Amanita velatipes, don't they? But don't let that fool you. This mycelium has a sex factor. That much Fve found out. This one -- " he indicated a purplish-white stem with a fullspread umbrella four inches across -- "is a male. Characteristics are the spread-out pilaeus with the vent in the top. Fve had some blow a bubble or two -- three at most -- then they wither, fast, very damned fast." Shifting his angle to indicate similar stems, but with an ovoid head in darker purple, he said, "Those are females. They bubble, too. Far as I can make out, the bubble effect is a spore-distributing mechanism. The membrane of the bubble is made from the volva, which this mycelium preserves in a semi-fluid state. But the spores -- microscopic -- are always sterile. The only answer I can figure is that two bubbles have to make contact to become fertile." "But the chances against that must be astronomical!" He shrugged. "On Earth, evolution is profligate. On Venus, it's skinflint. A chance Now this is what we do. Fve tried this before, but failed. Maybe you'll be luckier than me. Fm going to try to trap a bubble from a male and one from a female and mix 'em. All right? Remember, it's as hot as hell in there and heavy on COo. You'll sweat a lot, pant a bit -- but it's bearable. Ready? Here we go." crouched, fighting to keep his breathing steady. He had a trumpet tube ready. The timing had been very good. The pilaeus swelled, pouted in the center and out popped a tiny bubble, swimming with translucent color, about an inch in diameter. He pushed the bell-end of the tube at it, sucking gently -- and the bubble burst, with a sweet smell. He shook the sweat from his eyes and waited. Again the umbrella grew a hump in the middle, popped a bubble -- and began to wither immediately. "See how damn fast everything happens?" he breathed, poking the tube delicately toward the drifting bubble. This time it stuck. Holding his breath, he slewed around, seeking a ready female. None were popping yet. One purple ovoid swelled and heaved. He waited feverishly, his hand shaking with the effort to hold it steady. "For Pete's sake, old lady," he muttered, "hurry up!" His captive bubble shivered, burst -- and, with exquisite timing, the female ovoid pouted and spouted a bubble -- then another -- and a third -- and began to wither swiftly. "Damn!" he stood up. "Damn and blast this crazy, screwball life system! Here, you try." They moved to where a second male was showing signs of bubbling. She looked down, frowning, a little bead of sweat on her upper lip. "Jacob, this is not the way. There must be something more. Lintz spoke of a fountain of bubbles, did he not?" "That's right, but he might have been delirious." "Not if he obtained enough gaseous oxygen to fill his suit -- about a cubic foot, you said? To make such a difference, something would have to happen to the fungus -- presumably the female -- before sporulation. Don't you agree?" "Sounds likely. But what?" The pilaeus began to quiver. "I'm going to try something." She got down on her stomach, with her face close to the straining fungus. He watched tensely, and almost shouted with surprise when she pouted her lips and caught the bubble as it popped out. Holding his breath, he saw her turn aside and gently blow the bubble at the female ovoid, at the underside, where the gill openings were. Amazingly, the bubble stuck, and dwindled rapidly, as if being sucked dry. Again, deftly, she caught a male bubble with her lips and served it to the hungry gills. She lay quite still. Standing over her, he stared down, rigidly waiting. The purple ovoid swelled and swelled and shook -- and suddenly, beautifully, spouted out a stream of huge, rainboAv-hued bubbles. Dozens -- hundreds -- the hot air was full of them, twinkling and his nostrils with heady perfume. She squirmed over the hot soil to the last remaining pilaeus, and, as if waiting for her, it popped -- and again she caught the fragile bubble on her rosy lips and blew it gently to a waiting female. The second bubble she sent to another female, the third to yet another. T hen she scrambled to her feet and stood, with a shy, reserved smile, while volcanoes of bubbles spouted their scent around her. He caught a glimpse of her face and was transfixed by the sheer joy there. "Isn't this just beautiful, Jacob?" She stretched out her arms and beat the cloud of rainbow globes into a whirling dance. He saw her as a Venus arising from the sea-foam and laughed at the thought. She heard and echoed his laugh merrilv. "Aren't they lovely?" "Very nearly as lovely as you, Susan." He put out his arms to her and she came into them. "I'm probably a bit giddy with all this oxygen and exotic perfumes, but I don't give a damn." He held her close. "Susan, you're the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. Robot or not -- who cares? -- I want to have you with me always. For me, you're as human as any real woman -- and the only one I could ever get along with!" For this was the conclusion he had come to, in the quiet of his bunk, and the answer that logic had dictated, and now he had said it. "But what about my free will, Jacob?" she asked, with a hint of mischief, as she nestled close. "You said I could do what I wished on my own time." "That's right!" He let go of her at once and stood back anxiously. "I'd forgotten all about that!" deeper breath than was wise, and coughed. The mixture of free oxygen, perfume and excess COo, plus the heat, all combined to give him a nightmare sense of urgent unreality. It was as if a dream offered itself, just out of reach -- and in between was this cursed business of definitions. And she wasn't helping any. She stood there, smiling, ever in a dream of drifting, opalescent bubbles -- remote and unhumanly ideal. He made a great effort. "Susan, forgetting that you are anything other than just that -- to me you are Susan, nothing more or less -- I love you -- will you -- will you marry me?" She was immediately serious, her blue eyes wide. Jarringly, he heard the approach alarm "What is it?" She tilted her head to listen. "Ship coming," he said flatly, seeing his dream shattered into dust. "It'll be here in about ten minutes." "Why?" "Who knows?" He shrugged sagging shoulders. "A chance delivery, special message -- anything. Dust yourself off as much as you can -- we don't want to lose any -- collect a sample for fertility test -- there's not much doubt, but we have to check. I'll go see who's calling. I'll send back the scooter, soon's I get there. You run the sample to the lab room." He turned and left the hothouse, slapping away as much of the dust as he could, before she could ask any further questions. He put the scooter into top speed and clung grimly as it raced along the corridors. He had lied. He knew, with dull certainty, who was calling and why. A year's salary to a pinch of spore dust that it was George Viner, come to check up on his gadget. As Jacob listened to the voice on the intercom, he knew he had won his hypothetical bet. No one would ever know just how much he had lost at the same time. He triggered the personal lock and went to shower. When he came back, pulling a shirt down over his head, George Viner sat there, at ease, chewing on the end of an nnlighted cigar. Jacob thought, for the hundredth time, that he had never seen anyone who looked so like the typical professor -- apart from that cigar. Against the white goatee, the pink complexion and the shaggy white eyebrows, the cigar added a rakish look. "Hello, George!" Jacob perched a hip on the edge of the table. "Come to take her back, eh?" Viner echoed, then chuckled. "Oh, Susan, you mean. No, Jacob, my boy -- not unless there is something wrong. Don't tell me something is wrong already!" He poked his bullet-head forward, anxiously. "No, nothing wrong," said Jacob. "Just the reverse, in fact," his cigar. "Fine, fine. I'm on my way Earthside -- couple or three things I want to bring gone a good while -- so I thought I'd look in on you, see how it goes. It's a bit early yet, I know. You haven't had time to get the thing trained up right, but it's something pretty new in the way of automatics, and a snap report would help. I've plans afoot to make them an assembly line number, if they work out. There's a future for general purpose mechanisms, I think. Anything outstanding?" Jacob shuddered. A massproduced job! Thousands of Susans! General purpose robots! A sudden awareness of what he had almost done shook him. "Did you have to make her so beautiful?" he demanded thickly. "And why make it a 'her'? Was that necesary?" "Beautiful?" Viner seemed mildly surprised. "I suppose she is beautiful, come to think of it. But anything functionally perfect is beautiful -- like a mathematical theorem, a razor blade or a wheel. As for sex -- I suppose it's natural that a man livihg all alone would attribute female traits -- the way old-time sailors always thought of their ships, for instance." He took out his cigar, looked at it thoughtfully, then reinserted it. "But those aren't the kind of things I meant. Have you found anything that could do with improvement or modification, any faults or failures? On the other hand, is there anything you think you should know about replacing spares -- batteries, programming -- that sort of thing?" Jacob tried to think objectively, but all that would come through the inner fog of pain was a heart cry. "Did you have to teach her all that stuff about studying my Avishes -- all that philosophy -- keeping me happyserving my pleasure -- " "Jacob!" Viner was on his feet now, like a stumpy, bewildered Santa Claus. "You all right, son? Maybe you've been overdoing it a bit, eh? All this by your lonesome stuff is getting you down. Robots with philosophy!" He grew alarmed. "You find yourself talking to it?" "Hah!" Jacob was amused. "I talk to myself a lot, anyway, and never worried about it. It's the way the damned thing talks back to me!" Viner went back to his seat carefully -- "boo carefully. Jacob could see the roboticist trying to appear casual. "Now, Jacob," Viner spoke soothingly, "don't get me wrong on this, understand, but I think it's about time you had a break. I'll put a call through to Ajax Base and we'll have somebody shipped out to take over -- " "Jacob!" she came hurrying in, her lovely face aglow with excitement. "They're fertile, sure enough -- " Then she saw Viner and stopped in surprise and consternation. Suddenly aware of her nudity, she clutched vain hands, then turned and fled. Viner dropped his cigar and roared. "Susan! You come right back here!" H e was halfway out of his chair, purple with intent, when Jacob grabbed his arm. "What -- " Jacob began. "That," Viner said through his teeth, "happens to be my niece, Susan Calvin, and I'd like to know just what the blazes she's doing here, and in that state -- and, what's more, I intend to find out! Susan!" "Give her time to get some clothes on," Jacob said reasonably. "Your niece, you said?" He was too totally shattered to be anything but devoid of all feeling. "Tell me about her, George." "You mean there's still something you don't know?" "There is. A lot. You see -- " Jacob almost giggled at the was the device you mentioned in your letter. You said 'Susan' and it -- she -- answered to that, and I thought, naturally -- " "You mean you actually took that girl for a robot!? But that's fantastic! Nobody could be that dumb!" "Well, either I'm that dumb or she's a damn fine actress -- or a bit of both. But I'm dumb, all right." Jacob nodded ruefully. "I'm just beginning to realize how dumb. Tell me about her." "Well -- " Viner ruminated, chewing the cigar. "She's a smart girl, all right, although I shouldn't say it. General sweep through biology and psychology, decided to major in sociology -- personal relationships, group and individual dynamics -- that line. She works with me a lot on communication systems and the like -- but what the hell am I doing, sitting here talking to you?" He got up violently. "Susan! Come right here!" She came in demurely, tugging a sweatshirt into place. Jacob could only stare. Somehow -- now -- there was a difference. This was no longer an idealized dummy, but a living, breathing woman -- and it was not the same. Common sense tried to tell him that it was all his own imagination, but it was no use. The shattered vacancy began to and ashes. Real flesh and blood -- she was people! He slid from the table edge, hearing the rapid interchange between uncle and niece as a vague, meaningless noise. He went out. He was staring unseeingb at the windowed Venus-scape, when he felt her touch on his arm. "Jacob." Her voice was soft. "Fm sorry I played a trick on you. Forgive me?" "For what?" he mumbled. "You had your fun. Or psychological experiment. Prove anything?" "Just that you're a very nice person -- when you let yourself be -- and that you're afraid of people without any reason. You know, you'd seen me a few times before -- but you never noticed me. I wanted you to -- hence this,"T ly. "Sometimes I think it's a pity that Noah and his party didn't miss the boat!" "Mark Twain," she said. "All right, so you're smart. You fooled me. You made your point. Now would you please leave me alone?" "Does it make so much difference, Jacob -- my being human? You said some very nice things to and about me, back there among the bubbles. I think you meant them. And you asked me a question, too. Don't you want my answer?" In the silence there came the muted trembling of the station as a ship blasted clear. "Iley!" he cried. "Tliat's Viner, leaving. Why aren't you on that ship with him?" "Jacob O'Simon! You asked me to marry you! Uncle George has gone to bring back the padre from Ajax Base. Are you going to make a fool of me now?" "You made a fair fool of me!" he protested, "pretending to be whatever I wanted -- " "I was not pretending, Jacob, then or now," she whispered. "I am whatever you want me to be. That's what a wife is for -- to be whatever her man wants. Will you try me, Jacob?" "On one condition -- that we go on just the way it was." She said, this time with emotion, "Whatever you wish, Jacob!" end Not Snow Nor Rain Sam should have let the # nixies go to the dead letter office... ,'or gone there himself for sanctuary! carrier, Sam Wilson noted that inscription, cribbed from Herodotus, on the General Post Office, and took it to heart: "Not snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." It couldn't be literally true, of course. Given a real blizzard, it would be impossible to make his way through the pathless drifts; and if there had been a major flood, he could hardly have swum to deliver letters to the marooned. Moreover, if he couldn't find the addressee, there was nothing to do but mark the envelope "Not known at this address," and take it back to be returned to the addresser or consigned to the Dead Letter Office. But through the years, Sam Wilson had been as consciously faithful and efficient as any Persian messenger. Now the long years had galloped by, and this was the very last time he would walk his route before his retirement. It would be good to put his feet up somewhere and ease them back into comfort; they had been Sam's loyal servants and they were more worn out than he was. But the thought of retirement bothered him. Mollie was going to get sick of having him around the house all day, and he was damned if he was going to sit on a park bench like other discarded old men and suck a pipe and stare at nothing, waiting for the hours to pass in a vacuum. He had his big interest, of course -- his status as a devoted science fiction fan ; he would have time now to read and reread, to watch hopefully from the roof of his apaltment house for signs of a flying saucer. But that wasn't enough ; what he needed was a project to keep him alert and occupied. On his last delivery he found it. The Ochterlonie Building, way down on lower Second Avenue, was a rundown, shabby old firetrap, once as solid as the Scotsman who had built it and named it for himself, but now, with its single opencage elevator and its sagging floors, attracting only quack doctors and dubious private eyes and similar fauna on the edge of free enterprise. Sam had been delivering to it now for # years, watching its slow deterioration. This time there was a whole batch of self-addressed letters for a tenant whose name was new to him, but that was hardly surprising -- nowadays, in the Ochterlonie Building, tenants came and went. They were small envelopes, addressed in blue, in printing simulating handwriting, to Orville K. Hesterson, Sec.Treas., Time-Between-Time, # Ochterlonie Building, New York #, N. Y. Feeling them with experienced fingers, Sam Wilson judged they were orders for something, doubtless enclosing money. his last route, Sam knew, at least by sight, the employees who took in the mail, and they knew him. A lot of them knew this was his last trip ; there were farewells and good wishes, and even a few small donations (since he wouldn't be there next Christmas) which he gratefully tucked in an inside pocket of the uniform he would never wear again. There were also two or three invitations to a drink, which, being still on duty, he had regretfully to decline. But in the Ochterlonie Building, with its fly-by-night clientele, he was just the postman, and nobody greeted him except Howie Mallory, the decrepit elevator operator. Sam considered him soberly. It was going to be pretty tough financially from now on; could he, perhaps, find a job like Howie's? No. Not unless things got a lot tougher; standing all day would be just as bad as walking. He went from office to office, getting rid of his load -- mostly bills duns and complaints, he imagined, in this hole. There was nothing for the seventh floor except this bunch for Time-BetweenTime. The seventh floor? He must be nuts. The Ochterlonie Building was six floors high. Puzzled, he rang for Howie. "What'd they do, build a penthouse office on top of this old dump?" he inquired. The elevator operator laughed as at a feeble jest. "Sure," he said airily. "General Motors is using it as a hideaway." "No, Howie -- no fooling. Look here." Mallory stared and shook his head. "There ain't no #. Somebody got the number wrong. Or they got the building wrong. There's nobody here by that name." "They couldn't -- printed envelopes like these." "#. K., wise guy," said Howie. "Look for yourself." He led the way to the short flight of iron stairs and the trap door. While Mallory stood jeering at him, Sam determinedly climbed through. There was nothing in sight but the plain flat roof. He climbed down again. "Last letters on my last delivery and I can't deliver them," Sam Wilson said disgustedly. "Somebody's playing a joke, maybe." "Crazy joke. Well, so long, Howie. Some young squirt will be taking his life in his hands in this broken-down cage of yours tomorrow." Sam Wilson, whom nothing could deter from the swift completion of his appointed rounds, had to trudge back to the post office with # undelivered letters. Years ago the United States Post Office gave up searching directories and reference ate or screwy addresses, so as to make every possible delivery. That went out with three daily and two Saturday deliveries, two-cent drop postage, and all the other amenities that a submissive public let itself lose without a protest. But there was still a city directory in the office. Sam Wilson searched it stubbornly. Time-Between-Time was not listed. Neither was Orville K. Hesterson. There was nothing to do but consider the letters nixies and turn them over to the proper department. If there was another bunch of them tomorrow, he would never know. first carefree week, was just as bad as Sam Wilson had suspected it was going to be. Not bad enough to think yet about elevator operating or night watching, but bad enough to make him restless and edg and to make him snap Mollie's head off until they had their first bad quarrel for years. He'd never had time enough before to keep up with all the science fiction magazines and books. Now, with nothing but time, there weren't enough of them to fill the long days. What he needed was something -- something that didn't involve walking -- to make those endless hours speed up. He began thinking again about those # nixies. He sat gloomily on a bench in Tompkins Square in the spring sunshine : just what he had swoni not to do, but if he stayed home another hour, Mollie would heave the vacuum cleaner at him. In the public library he had searched directories and phone books, for all the 'ooroughs and for suburban New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania; Orville K. Hesterson appeared in none of them. He didn't know why it was any of his business, except that Time-Between-Time had put a blot on the very end of his #-year record and he wanted revenge. Also, it was something to do and be interested in. In a way, science fiction and detection had a lot in common, and Sam Wilson prided himself on his ability to guess ahead what was going to happen in a story. So why couldn't he figure out this puzzle, right here in Manhattan, Terra? But he was stymied. Or was he? Sam took his gloomy thoughts to Mulligan's. Every large city is a collection of villages. The people who live long enough in a neighborhood acquire their own groceries, their own drugstores, their own bars. The Wilsons had lived six years in their flat, and Mulligan's, catercornered across the street, was Sam's personal bar. He was cautious as to what he said there. He'd heard enough backtalk already when he had been indiscreet enough once, after four beers, to express his desire to gain a reputation as a crackpot. But it was safe enough to remark conversationally, "How do you find out where a guy is when he says he's someplace and you write him there and the letter comes back?" "You ought to know, Sam," said Ed, the day barkeep. "You were a postman long enough." "If I knew, I wouldn't ask." "Ask Information on the phone." "He hasn't got a phone." That was the weirdest part of it -- a business office without a phone. In every bar, at every moment, there is somebody who knows all the answers. This somebody, a nondescript fellow nursing a Collins down the bar, spoke up: "It could be unlisted." Sam's acquaintance didn't include people with unlisted phones; he hadn't thought of that. "Then how do you find out his number?" "You don't, unless he tells you. That's why he has it unlisted." The police could get it, Sam thought. But they wouldn't, without a reason. "Hey, maybe this guy's office is in one of them flying saucers and he forgot to come down and get his mail," Ed suggested brightly. Sam scowled and walked out. Nevertheless... of course. That was ridiculous, B ut suppose there was a warp in the space-time continuum? Suppose there had once been another Ochterlonie Building, or some day in the future there was going to be another one, somewhere in New York? There wasn't another now, in any of the boroughs, or any other building with a name remotely like it; his research had already established that. Sam went back to the Public Library. The building he knew had been erected in #. He consulted directories as far back as they went; there never had been one of the name before. Then a timeslip from the future? That was hopeless, so far as he could do anything about it, so he cast about for another solution. How about a parallel world ? That could be, certainly : some accident by which mail for that other Ochterlonie Building, the seven-story one, had (maybe just once) arrived in the wrong dimension. He couldn't do anything to prove or disprove that, either. What he needed was a break. He got it. One morning in early summer his own mailbox in the downstairs hallway disgorged a long envelope, addressed to Mr. Samuel Wilson. The upper left-hand corner bore a printed return address : TimeBetween-Time, # Ochterlonie Building, New York #, N. Y. He raced upstairs, locked himself in the bathroom, the one place Mollie couldn't interrupt him, and tore the envelope open with trembling lingers. It was a form letter, with the "Dear Mr. Wilson" not too accurately typed in. It enclosed one of those blue-printed envelopes in simulated handwriting. The letterhead carried the familiar impossible address, but no phone number. Maybe it was chance, mayself had got onto Time-Between-Time's mailing list! H e had trouble focusing his eyes to read the letter. Dear Mr. Wilson : Would you invest I to get a chance at #? Of course you would, especially if, win or lose, you got your dollar back. In this atomic age, yesterday's science fiction has become today's and tomorrow's science fact. TimeBetween-Time, a new organization, is planning establishment of a publishing company to bring out the best in new books, both fact and fiction, in the field of science, appealing to people who have never been interested until now. Before we start, w'e are conducting a poll to find out what the general public thinks and feels about our probabilities of success. We're asking for your cooperation. Our statisticians have told us that from the answers to one question -- which may look off the beam but isn't -- we can make a pretty good estimate. Here it is: If tomorrow morning a spaceship landed in front of your house, and from it issued a band of extraterrestrial beings, who might or might not be human in appearance, what, in your best judgment, would be your own immediate reaction? Check one, or if you agree with none of the choices, indicate in the blank space beneath what your personal reaction would probably be. #. Phone for the police. #. Attack the aliens physically. #. Faint. #. Run away. #. Call for assistance to seize the visitors. #. Greet them, attempt to communicate, and welcome them in the name of your fellow-terrestrials. #. Other (please specify). Return this letter, properly marked, in the enclosed envelope. To defray promotion expenses, enclose a dollar bill (no checks or money orders). At the conclusion of this poll, all answers will be evaluated. The writer of the one which comes nearest to the answer reached by our electronic computer, which will be fed the same question, will receive # in dollar bills. Ties will receive duplicate prizes. In addition, all participants, when our publishing firm has been established, will receive for their I a credit form entitling them to I off any book we publish. Don't delay. Send in your enclosing I will be entered. Very truly yours, Time-Between-Time, Orville K. Hesterson, Sec.-Treas. ter three times. "It's crazy," he muttered. "It's a gyp." What he ought to do was take the letter to the post office -- Mr. Gross would be the one to see -- and let them decide whether this Hesterson was using the mails to defraud. Let Mr. Gross and his department try to find # in the six-story Ochterlonie Building. As a faithful employee for # years, it was Sam's plain duty. But then it would be out of his hands forever; he'd never even find out what happened. And he'd be back in the dull morass that retirement Avas turning out to be. "Sam!" Mollie yelled outside the locked door. "Aren't you ever coming out of there?" "I'm coming. I'm coming!" He put the letter and its enclosure back in the envelope and placed them in a pocket. Time enough to decide that afternoon what he Avas going to do. He escaped after lunch to Avhat was becoming his refuge on a park bench. There he read the letter for the fourth time. For a long while he sat ruminating. About three o'clock he Avalked to the General Post Office -- walking had become a habit hard to break -- and hunted up the man Avho now had his old route, a youngster not more than # named Flanagan. From the letter Sam extracted the return envelope. "You been delivering any like this?" he asked. Flanagan peered at it. "Yeah," he said. "Plenty." He looked worried. "Gee, Wilson, I'm glad you came in. There's something funny aut those deliveries, and I don't want to get in Dutch." "Funny how?" "My very first day on the route, I started up to the seventh floor of that building to deliver them -- and there Avasn't any seventh floor. So I asked the old elevator man -- " "Howie Mallory. I know him. He's been there for years." "I guess so. AnyAvay, he said it Avas #. K. just to give them to him. He showed me a paper, signed with the name of this outfit, by the secretary or something -- " "Orville K. Hesterson," Sam said. "That was it -- saying that all mail for them was to be delivered to the elevator operator until further notice. So I've been giving it to him ever since -- there's a big bunch every day. Is something wrong, Sam? Have I pulled a boner? Am I going to be in trouble ?" "No trouble. I'm just checking -- little job they asked me to do for them, seeing I'm retired." Sam was surprised at the glibness with which that fib came out. Flanagan looked still more worried. "He said their office was being remodeled or something, so he was looking after their mail till they could move in." "Sure. Don't give it another thought." Another idea occurred to him ; he lowered his voice. "I oughtn't to tell you this, Flanagan, but every new man on a route, they kind of check up on him the first few weeks, see if he's handling everything O.K. I'll tell them you're doing fine." "Hey, thanks. Thanks a lot." "Don't say anything about this. It's supposed to be secret." "Oh, I won't." Sam Wilson waved and walked out. He sat on the steps a while to think. Was old Howie Mallory pulling a fast one? Was he Orville K. Hesterson? Had he cooked up a scheme to make himself some crooked money ? T hree things against that. First, those nixies the first day: why wouldn't Mallory have told him the same thing he told Flanagan? Sam would have believed him, if he had said they were building an office on the roof and giving it a number. Second, Howie just wasn't smai't enough. Of course he could be fronting for the real crook. But Sam had known him for years, and old Howie had always seemed downright stupidly honest. A man doesn't suddenly turn into a criminal after a lifetime of probity. Third, if this was some fraudulent scheme involving Mallory, nobody the old man knew -- least of all the postman who used to deliver mail to that very building -- would ever have been allowed to appear on the sucker list. Sam Wilson thought some more. Then he hunted up the nearest pay phone and called Mollie. "Mollie? Sam. Look, I just met an old friend of mine -- " he picked a name from a billboard visible from the phone booth -- "Bill Seagram, you remember him -- oh, sure you do; you've just forgotten. Anyway, he's just here for the day and we're going to have dinner and see a show. Don't wait up for me. I might be pretty late... No, I'm not phoning from Mulligan's... Now you know me, Mollie; do I ever drink too much?... Yeah, sure, he ought to've asked you too, but he didn't. O.K., he's impolite. Aw, Mollie, don't be like that -- " She hung up on him. Sam Wilson stood concealed in a doorway from which he could see the cramped lobby of the Ochterlonie Building. It was ten minutes before somebody entered it and rang for the elevator. The minute Howie Mallory started up with his passenger, Sam darted into the building and started climbing the stairs. He heard Mallory passing him, going down again, but the elevator wasn't visible from the stairway. On the sixth floor, after a quick survey to see that the hall was clear and the doors closed that he had to pass, he found the iron steps to the trapdoor. The roof was just as empty as the other time he had visited it. No, it wasn't. In a corner by the parapet, weighted with a brick to keep it from blowing away, was a large paper bag. Sam picked up the brick and looked inside. It was stuffed with those blueprinted return envelopes. He looked carefully about him. There were buildings all around, towering over the little old Ochterlonie Building. There were plenty of windows from which a curious eye could discern anything happening on that roof. But at night anybody in those buildings would be either working late or cleaning offices, with no reason whatever to go to a window; and Sam was sure nothing was going to happen till after dark. It was a warm day and he had been carrying his coat. He folded it and put it down near the paper bag and sat on it with his back against the parapet. He cursed himself for not having had more foresight; he should have brought something to eat and something to read. Well, he wasn't going to climb down all those stairs and up again. He lighted his pipe and began waiting. He must have dozed off, for he came to himself vith a start and found it was almost dark. The paper bag was still there. It was just as well he had slept; now he'd have no trouble staying awake and watching. He might very well be there all night -- in fact, he'd have to be, whether anything happened or not. The front door would be locked by now. Mollie would have a fit, but he had his alibi ready. There was only one explanation left. Not time travel. Not alternate universes. Not an ordinary confidence game. Not -- decidedly not -- a hoax. If he was wrong, then tomorrow morning he'd take the whole business to Mr. Gross. But he had a huneh he wasn't going to be wrong. watch when he saw it coming. It had no lights; nobody could have spotted it as it appeared suddenly out of nowhere and climbed straight down. It landed lightly as a drop of dew. The port opened and a small, spare man, very neatly dressed, as Sam could see with eyes accustomed to the darkness, stepped out. Orville K. Hesterson in person. He tiptoed quickly to the paper bag. Then he saw Sam and stopped short. Sam reached out and grabbed a wrist. It felt like flesh, but he couldn't be sure. "Who are you? What are you doing here?" the newcomer said in a strained whisper, just like a scared character in a soap opera. So he spoke English. Good : Sam didn't speak anything else. "I'm from the United States Post Office," Sam replied suavely. Well, he had been, long enough, hadn't he? "Oh. Well, now look, my friend -- " "You look. Talk. How much are you paying the elevator operator to put your mail up here every day?" "Five dollars a day, in dollar bills, six days a week, left in the empty bag," answered Hesterson -- it must be Hesterson -- sullenly. "That's no crime, is it? Call this my office, and call that my rent. All I need an office for is to have somewhere to get my letters." "Letters with money in them." "We have to have funds for postage, don't we?" "What about the postage on the first mailing list, before you got any dollars to pay for stamps?" If it had been a little lighter, Sam would have been surer of the alarm that crossed Hesterson's face. "I -- well, we had to fabricate some of your currency for that. We regretted it -- w'e aim to obey all local rules and regulations. As soon as we have enough coming in, we intend to send the amount to the New York postmaster as anonymous conscience money." "How about the # prize? And those dollar book credits "Oh, that. Well, we say 'ivhen our publishing firm has been established,' don't we? That publishing thing is just a gimmick. As for the #, we give no intimation of when the poll will end." Sam tightened his grasp on the wrist, which was beginning to wriggle. "I see. O.K., explain the whole setup. It sounds crazy to me." "I couldn't agree with you more," said Mr. Hesterson, to Sam's surprise. "That's exactly what, in our own idiom, I told -- " Sam couldn't get the name ; it sounded like a grunt. "But he's the boss and I'm only a scout third class." His voice grevy plaintive. "You can't imagine what an ordeal it is, almost every week, to have to land in a secluded place where I can hide the flyer, make my way to New York, and buy a bunch of stamps and mail a batch of letters in broad daylight. We can simulate your paper and printing and typing well enough, but" -- that grunt again -- "insists we use genuine stamps. I told you we try to follow all your laws, as far as we possibly can. It's very difficult for me to keep this absurd shape for long at a time; I'm exhausted after every trip. I can assure you, these little night excursions from the mother-ship to pick up the letters are the very least of my burdens!" "What in time does your boss think he's going to gain by such a screwy come-on?" " Tn time'? Oh, just an idiomatic phrase. Like our calling our organization TimeBetween-Time, time of course being just a dimension of space. I learned your tongue mostly from the B.B.C. and I don't always understand your speech in New York. My dear sir, do you here on this planet ask your bosses why they concoct their plans? Mine has a very profound mind; that's why he is the boss. All I know is that he persuaded the Council to try it out. A softening-up process -- isn't that what you people call it when you use it in your silly wars with one another ?" "Softening for what?" But Sam Wilson knew the answer already. "HY, for the invasion,  of course," said Orville K. Hesterson, whose own name was probably a grunt. "Surely you must be aware that, with planetwide devastation likely and even imminent, every world whose inhabitants can live comfortably under extreme radiation is looking to yours -- Earth, as you call it -- as a possible area for colonization? So many planets are so terribly overcrowded -- there's always a rush for a new frontier. We've missed out too often; this time we're determined to be first." "I'll be darned," said Sam, "if I can see how that questionnaire would be any help to you." "But it's elementary, as I believe one of your famous law-enforcers once declared. First of all, we're gaining a pretty good idea of what kind of reception we're likely to meet when we arrive, and therefore whether we're going to need weapons to destroy what will be left of the population, or can reasonably expect to take over without difficulty. We figure that a cross-section of one of your largest cities will be a pretty good indication, and we can extrapolate from that. In the second place, the question itself is deliberately worded to startle the recipients, who have never in their lives contemplated such a thing as an extraterrestrial visitor -- " "Not me. I'm a science fiction fan from way back. It's all old stuff to me." Hesterson clicked his tongue -- or at least the tongue he was wearing. "Oh, dear, that tvas an error. We tried particularly not to include on our lists subscribers to any of your speculative periodicals. That wasn't my mistake, thank goodness ; it was another scout who had the horrible job of spending several days here and compiling the lists. Under your present low radioactivity it's real agony for us." "I'll tell you one mistake you did make, though," said Sam angrily. "You ought to've arranged with the ele ator man before your first lot of answers was due. If you want to know, that's ho' I got onto the whole thing. I'm a mail carrier -- I'm retired now, but I was then -- and I was the one supposed to deliver the first batch. Mallory -- that's the elevator operator -- laughed in my face and told me there wasn't any # in this building, and I had to take the letters back to the post office -- on my last delivery!" Sam couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice. "After # years -- well, that's neither here nor there. But I didn't like that and I made up my mind to find out what was happening." "So that's it. Oh, dear, dear. I'll have to compensate for that or I will be in trouble." Sam had had enough. "You are in trouble right now," he growled, pushing the little alien back against the parapet. "We're staying right here till morning, and then I'm going to call for help and take you and your flying saucer or whatever it is straight to the F.B.I." The counterfeit Mr. Hesterson laughed. "Oh, no indeed you aren't," he said mildly. "I can slip right back into my own shape whenever I want to -- the only reason I haven't done it yet is that then I wouldn't have the equipment to talk to you -- and I assure you that you couldn't hold me then. On the contrary. As you just pointed out to me, I did make one bad error, and my boss doesn't like errors. I have no intention of making another one by leaving you here to spread the news." "What do you mean?" Sam Wilson cried. For the first time, after the years of accustomedness to the idea of extraterrestrial beings, a thrill of pure terror shot through him, "This," said the outsider softly. B efore Sam could take another breath, the wrist he was holding slid from his grasp, all of Mr. Hesterson slithered into something utterly beyond imagining, and Sam found himself enveloped in invisible chains against which he was unable to make the slightest struggle. He felt himself being lifted and thrown into the cockpit. Something landed on top of him -- undoubtedly the package of prize entries and dollar bills. His last conscious thought was a despairing one of Mollie. Sam Wilson, devoted mail carrier, was making a longer trip than any Persian courier ever dreamed of, and not snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night could stay him from his appointed round. But he may not be gone forever. If he can be kept alive on that planet in some other solar system, they plan to bring him back as Exhibit has made Earth sufficiently radioactive for Orville K. Hesterson's co-planetarians to Without taking a single person into space, amateur-launched rockets are causing a greater proportion of casualties than car accidents: # versus # per #. Alarmed by this rate, the American Rocket Society declares that all practical means must be taken to prevent the manufacture of propellants of rockets by amateurs,' urges bans on the sale of such fuels, and adds that the launching of rockets by amateurs must be prohibited, 'The somewhat debatable loss in opportunity for intellectual development which might be suffered by foregoing experimentation," ently unavoidable and appalling loss of eyes, fingers and lives." Gloria As mean a vengeance as was ever devised -- or a superhuman sacrifice -- which was it to be?... day," said Gervais w savagely, "I'm going. to take a knife and stick it right into Wendle's gizzard." "And twist it." Frobisher didn't like Captain Wendle any more than Gervais did. "And twist it," agreed Gervais. "Slowly." He was a chunky young man with a shock of unruly hair and a normally cheerful expression. Now his expression was far from cheerful. He flung himself into a chair and stared moro'sely at the beautiful flight pattern over which he had taken so much trouble. Frobisher lit a cigarette. "All right," he said gently. "What is it this time?" "Need you ask?" Gervais was bitter. "So Wendle is the king-sized brain-boy. So he is in command of this tub. So he should know what he's talking about." His voice rose as he thought about it. "But does he have to ram his superiority down my throat every chance he gets?" "He does not," said Frobisher. "Then why does he?" Gervais crumpled the flight pattern to a small ball of waste paper. "Wrong," he said. "The course could be shortened by a good thirty minutes. I'm a fifth decimal point out in my calculations." Frobisher made appropriate noises, trying hard not to smile. Wendle might be all manner of a you-know-what, but he did know his business. If Gervais had muffed the flight pattern, then he shouldn't beef about having his knuckles rapped. Frobisher didn't tell his crewmate that. He wanted to avoid bloodshed. His own. "Never mind," he soothed. "It happens to us all. Don't let it worry you." Gervais made rude noises. "Personally," continued Frobisher, "I don't mind admitting my errors. I like to think that I'm man enough to accept correction." "That's big of jou." Gervais was sarcastic. "Mightv big." H e would have said more but the door opened just then and Captain Wendle entered the chart room. He was a well-built man who wore his impeccable uniform like a second skin. His expression was his normal one, as if he smelled a bad odor in his immediate vicinity. "Frobisher!" His voice matched the rest of him. Cold, distant, acidly correct. "Sir!" Frobisher leaped to his feet, snapping a salute. Wendle might be the original son of a female dog but he was still the captain. On his reports depended promotion. "Frobisher, tell me, what is the optimum operating temperature of our pile?" said Captain Wendle. Frobisher told him. "Are you certain? Shouldn't it be just a little higher? Say a degree and a half higher?" "No, sir." "Then why is it that the gauges in the control room show that the temperature is higher than the one you have stated ? Or could it be that the gauge is faulty?" "We have a ten-degree tolerance, sir." "I am aware of that. I am also aware that you are purported to be an engineer. You have given me the figure for optimum temperature. Optimum working, Frobisher, is what I demand on my vessel." "Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir." Frobisher looked ready to burst. Wendle stared at him as if he were a clinical specimen. "Sorry, Frobisher? I think not. You are annoyed that I have discovered your inefficiency, but being annoyed is not being sorry." Wendle swivled his eyes to Gervais. "Have you rectified your error, Gervais?" "Just working on it, sir." "You may save your labor and my patience. I have received a communication from Base. We have been reassigned." "Sir?" said Gervais. "To an uncharted world. I will give you the coordinates later so that you may make an attempt to chart a flight pattern." "Yes, sir. The mission, sir?" "A rescue party." Wendle stepped toward the door. "If you are doubtful as to what that is, I suggest that you look up the word in a dictionary. There are, I understand, several aboard." The door closed behind him. Frobisher let out his breath in a long, low, obscenity-filled hiss. It was Gervais's turn to make appropriate noises. T he world was a twin of Earth in that it had seas, mountains, continents and vegetation. It also had a breathable atmosphere and, according to Wendle's information, a party that needed rescuing. "Base picked up a subetheric message," he explained. "It gave the coordinates and asked for a ship to make contact. That means rescue, of course." His finger tapped a photomap. "You'll find them down there. We've pinpointed their transmitter." "Them?" said Gervais. "Yes, Gervais, them." Wendle was patient. "Surely you do not imagine that a single individual could have operated the transmitter?" "Why not, sir?" "Because Base has checked records and no ship has been missing for over twenty years. Obviously a ship was wrecked here and the survivors have taken all this time to organize themselves." His tone implied that, had he been with the survivors, they would have done it much sooner. "Your mission," he continued, "is to go down, survey the party and report back to me. I will decide on appropriate action." "Yes, sir." Gervais knew what that meant. Sometimes survivors of wrecked spaceships were best left alone. Disease and reversion to barbarism could produce some highly undesirable characteristics. "Frobisher will go with you. You will take a scout ship and remain in constant communication with us as we orbit." Wendle rolled up the map and handed it over. "Is there anything more? Any point on which you are in doubt?" His tone defied them to admit ignorance. Frobisher complained about it on the way down to the planet. "Wendle is a good man," he said, "I'll give him that. Top marks at everything he does and all that. So why does he act as if we had holes in the head?" "He can't help it." Gervais checked the controls. The tiny scout was heading to where it should go. "Maybe it's because of an inferiority complcx, "Inferiority?" "In a way. He has to keep proving himself." "Why?" "Because he has to, that's why." "As a psychologist, you make a good jet man," snorted Frobisher. "Inferiority complex! If Wendle has that, then I'm a green painted fairy. The trouble with that guy is that he considers himself to be superior to every other member of the human race." "Maybe you're right," Gervais conceded. Frobisher glowered at the control panel. "I know I'm right. As far as we're concerned, he regards us as morons. You can tell it every time he opens his mouth. The trouble is that when I'm with him I begin to feel like one. Then I begin to act like one. And the longer I'm with him, the worse it gets." It was true, Gervais had to admit. Neither he nor Fr( bisher was really dumb; it was just that against Wendle they felt that way. Little errors were made to seem more important than they really were. And the worst part of it was that Wendle was always right. Never once, in all the time they had known him, had he appeared other than perfect. Gervais frowned at the planet below. Away from Wendle's irritating presence, he found it possible to be charitable. In a way he felt sorry for the captain. None of the crew liked him. He was never able to relax, to enjoy a drink, to let his hair down, to laugh off his own failures. He always had to be proving himself better than the next man. Even at sports he was unbeatable. At least, at the sports he ever played. Gervais had a shrewd idea that Wendle wouldn't join in any activity at which he wasn't a master. H e forgot Wendle in the fuss of landing. The ship bumped a couple of times, then came to rest on a more or less even keel. Frobisher rubbed a couple of bruises, said something pungent about bum landings and buckled on his gear while Gervais reported back to the mother ship. He was waiting outside when Gervais joined him. "Well?" asked Frobisher. "We head for the site of the radio beacon' Gervais pointed vaguely south. "It can't be far." "Depends on what you mean by far." Frobisher checked the pistol in his belt. "That undergrowth could hide things." "Nothing big enough to hurt you." "No?" Frobisher didn't sound too sure. "Maybe I'd better stand by the radio while you find the survivors. Wendle did order us to remain in contact, remember." "I've arranged that. We can report back on portable radio to the scout and an automatic relay will pass it on to the ship." Gervais sucked in a deep breath of fresh air. "I wouldn't have liked to send you into unknown dangers without your friend and, incidentally, senior officer, at your side." Frobisher sighed and followed him south. I can't under stand," Frobisher said after an hour's hard going, "is why we just didn't wait at the scout for them to come to us. They must have seen us land." "Possibly." Gervais gently eased a large, many-legged insect from beneath his collar. He stared at it with morbid interest. It bit him and he dropped it with a shudder. "Then why couldn't we have waited?" Frobisher stepped carefully over a log and cursed as his foot sank into a water-filled hole. Gervais waited until his companion had exhausted his vocabulary. "Because we want to make an investigation of their village," he explained. "They've been here for more than twenty years. In that time they could have reverted and be offering human sacrifice to a totem or something. Or they could all have two heads -- the kids, anyway -- things like that. Wendle wants to know." "Then Wendle should have come down to find out." Frobisher was annoyed. "How the hell did he think headhunters could have operated a sub-etheric radio,? And the coordinates -- they needed astrogators to find them. Does that spell a primitive society?" Gervais didn't answer. A looped vine had somehow wrapped itself around his neck and was busy throttling him. His boots threshed the grass as the air left his lungs. He clawed at his belt, found his knife, desperately slashed at the vine. It was like hacking at steel cable. "Well?" Frobisher was striding ahead. "Does it?" The blast of Gervais's gun answered him. Gervais had managed to drag it from its holster and had severed the vine. He fell, rolled a couple of times, then climbed to his feet. Around his neck the loosened vine hung like a mottled necktie. He flung it at Frobisher and painfully massaged his throat. "What's the matter?" Frobisher, gun in hand, stared around through narrowed eyes. "What did you shoot at?" "You -- " Gervais opened his mouth, closed it again in disgust. "Let's get moving." T hey moved for about a hundred yards and the ground vanished beneath their feet and they rolled to the bottom of a pit. It was a deep pit. The walls were sheer. They couldn't get out. "Radio for help." Frobisher clawed sweat from his eyes. "Tell them to have another scout come down and rescue us." "With what?" Gervais held out what was left of the portable radio. He had landed on it when he fell. "Shout then." Frobisher let out a yell. "Help! Help!" "Shut up!" Gervais clamped his hand over his companion's mouth. "You want them to find us?" "I want them to get us out of here." "Then what?" Gervais stared at the walls of the pit. "This thing was dug for a purpose, and it doesn't take a genius to discover what that purpose is. Someone or something was meant to fall into it." "A game pit?" "Or a moat. For defense, anyway. The villagers might not be too happy if they found us in here. They might do things, like throwing rocks down on us, or spears, or boiling water. Maybe that's how theyget their food supply." Frobisher gulped. He grabbed his knife and began hacking steps in the dirt wall of the pit. Given time he would have managed to cut enough handholds so as to climb out. He wasn't given time. A rope fell from the top of the pit. It hit Gervais on the shoulders and he, with memories of the throttling vine still fresh, fought it as though it were a living thing. Frobisher snatched it away from him and gave it a tug. It held firm. "Come on," he said. He swung on the rope, planted his feet against the wall and began to climb. Gervais, not to be left behind, followed immediately after. As his feet left the ground, the rope began to move upward. They held on, hit the edge of the pit and, still clutching the rope, were dragged away from the edge. Shakily, they rose to their feet and stared around. No one was in sight. Only the rope, stretching from the pit into the undergrowth, showed signs of movement. It vanished and then there was no movement at all. Not until the young woman stepped from the brush and came toward them.  Gervais wonderingly, on the way back to the scout. 'Trofessor Gloria Hermitage. Can you beat it?" "No." Frobisher trod on something which squelched. He lifted his foot and stared at a paper-thin organism which had wrapped itself around his boot. Wearily he scraped the mammoth leech against a tree. "Man, will I be glad to get off this planet!" "She gave herself the title." Gervais couldn't get over it. "Stranded here all alone since she was a kid, the youngest one aboard. She educated herself, built a subetheric radio as soon as she knew how -- twenty years later -- and called for a ship to come and get her." He shook his head. "It beats anything I ever heard of in my life." That, as Frobisher had to admit, was true enough. The young, attractive, athletic woman who had rescued them was alone on the planet. At the age of four or so, she had been the sole survivor of a wrecked educational vessel loaded with tapes, books, slides and other brain-food for a newly opened planet's schools. With nothing to do other than survive -- not the easiest thing in the first place -- she had devoted herself to mental and physical improvement. The result had been staggering. "Strong as a horse," mused Gervais. "Talks like a runaway encyclopedia. Learned enough to pass the examinations, so she gave herself the title of professor." He jumped aside as something stirred in the grass at his feet. "Beats me how she ever managed to stay alive in the first place " "She's tough," said Frobisher. He winced at a memory. Appearances had fooled him and he had made a pass. Judo had been one of the things Professor Gloria Hermitage had mastered. "And now she wants to spread her wings." Gervais stared thoughtfully up at the sky. "Frobisher." "What?" "You know what she wants, don't you?" "I know." Frobisher kicked at a branch. It didn't run, stir or bite, so he stepped over it. "I'm surprised you didn't volunteer." "Not me." Gervais was definite. "When I marry. I'm going to sign up with a soft little kitten who won't look at me as if I ought to be in a zoo. I get enough of that from Wendle." Frobisher made an explosive sound. Gervais tugged his gun from his belt. "What's the matter?" "Wendle." Frobisher slapped his thigh. "Now I know what she reminded me of. Wendle, of course -- who else but him?" "So?" "So use your imagination. She looks like Wendle -- in a female way, of course. She talks like him. She made us feel just as moronic as Wendle does, only more so. She had the same 'holier than thou' attitude and expression. I tell you they are out of the same mold." "How nice." Gervais was sarcastic. "Do we send them a bouquet?" "We do better than that." Frobisher was enjoying himself. "We put them around each other's neck -- for life." Gervais started to grin. "See it now? Wendle thinks he's better than the human race. Gloria thinks she is. Just put those two together and let her sink her claws into him. She wants to get married to a man she can respect. All right, let her marry Wendle. Just think of the life that poor so-and-so will suffer once he ties up with someone better than he is." "And she would be better," agreed Gervais. "Living alone like she did. Learning all that stuff from the educational tapes, books and visual guides. Hell, Wendle would be like a new-born baby next to her." His grin expanded. "What a revenge!" "Classic," said Frobisher. "Poetic justice right down the line." "The fruits of victory," said Frobisher. "Let's celebrate." "But supposing they don't like each other?" A shadow touched Gervais's happiness. F robisher dismissed the idea. "They will. Wendle is a lonely cuss who doesn't want women just because they are women. He wants a girl with brains as well as a body. Gloria has brains and she has a body too." He sighed, thinking of how he had once felt about that body. "He can't help but fall for her." "She'll have to have long, intimate talks with him so as to fill the record," said Gervais. "She'll have to tell him all about her past and the rest of it. They can swap mathematical problems together and maybe play tri-chess." His grin widened. "Wendle isn't a bad-looking character and we know what Gloria wants. A man to marry so that she can..." He suddenly lost his smile. "No." "No what?" Frobisher squinted ahead to where he could see the ship. "No dice. No putting them together. Nothing like that at all." "You crazy?" 'Tm sane. You think about it for a while." Frobisher thought about it. He couldn't see what objection there could be to the great idea. It would serve Wendle right. A guy like that shouldn't have been born. And then he saw what Gervais was getting at. T ogether they reached and climbed aboard the scout. Together they stared at the planet as it dwindled below. Silently Frobisher heard Gervais make his report. "There was nothing else to do," said Gervais when he had switched off the radio. "I suppose not," Frobisher said. "Wendle's bad," said Gervais. "Bad in the sense that he's a stinker to be under. But he's only one. We can put up with one of his kind." Frobisher grunted. "Put him and Gloria together and what happens? She wants to marry and have kids. Lots of kids." Gervais shuddered. "Between them they'd start a dynasty. Their kids would have other kids, and so on. And they'd all be like Wendle and Gloria." "Don't!" Frobisher had an imagination. We've got to be brave about this," said Gervais. "We've got to forget personal vengeance and take a longterm view. The way things are, we can be transferred or promoted, or Wendle could die or retire or something. But suppose the service became filled with his and Gloria's offspring?" It didn't bear thinking about. "So we tell Wendle that the community was mutated and rife with disease. He won't doubt our word. Gloria will be left in peace, and generations of spacemen as yet unborn will have cause to bless our name." Gervais drew a deep breath. "You know, Frobisher, it makes a man feel humble and a little proud." It did, Frobisher realized. Bone glue may cut the setting time of fractures from six months to three days, and eliminate casts, crutches and traction entirely, if the polyurethane plastic undergoing tests in U. S. and Canadian medical schools and hospitals proves as good as it has in # cases in the past three years. The ends of the break grow through the glue, which is tougher than bone, and join together in a year, by which time the glue is completely absorbed. More important to the patient, he can walk on a broken leg or use a broken arm in only three days. of a Prodigal It was bad enough when Clare painted Henry Robert Colquhoun Adams yellow -- but then she did the same to everyone else in Luna Cityl a last admiring look at his favorite passenger on the long trip from Scylla. "You're going to stay here, Miss Vernon?" he said, astonished. "Beats me why you should bury yourself in a hole like Luna City." "You mustn't call my home town a hole," said Clare reprovingly, "even if it is." "Your home town?" Jones incredulously said. "You mean you were born in Luna City? How did that come about?" "I imagine it came about in the usual way," Clare Vernon said. "I mean -- you're no viaphobe." "Being born on the Moon doesn't necessarily make you a viaphobe, though it helps. Anyway, don't you know there's no such thing as viaphobia? Anybody in Luna City will tell you." "Anybody in a nuthouse will tell you he's sane," Jones r#tort#(i. 'That's a point. But it isn't V#ry nic# of you to toll mo I was brought up in a nuthouso." "I didn't moan that, Miss Vornon. Woll, I guoss thoy'll you right now." "I doubt it," Claro sighed. "More likely to be heating the tar and feathers. 'By, Mr. Jones." S HE walked down the enclosed gangway to the spaceport terminal, white and beautiful and as much out of place in the center of bleak Mare Imbrium as a hot dog stand in the middle of the Sahara. She ignored the other passengers waiting for the tender to take them on to Earth. They were the star-travelers, for whom the Moon was no more than a customs checkpoint, a mildly irritating delay within sight of their destination. They didn't have time to drop down in the elevators for even a glance at Luna City, and if they had had time, few would have bothered. Clare was the only person to make the descent. The officials and porters were still busy with the passengers waiting for the Earth tender, which would land as soon as the big starship was gone. Luna City couldn't really be preparing a tar-and-feather reception for Clare, because no one knew she was coming back. Clare herself wasn't quite sure why she had come back. Not because she was homesick. Not to see her family again -- there was only her sister Emma to see, and Clare and Emma had always found it quite easy to get along without each other. Not to see Greg Miller, whom she would probably have married if she had stayed iiL Luna City. Well, why did you go home anyway? Because you'd been hurt, because the great big world or the great big galaxy hadn't turned out to be as glamorous and exciting as you thought, because you were broke, because you needed a quiet place to lick your wounds and prepare for the fray again. Most of ali, because nobody at the moment seemed eager for your services or your person. All that was near enough the truth. Thoughtfully, without any sign of regret, Clare pulled the wedding ring off her linger and dropped it in her pocket. Divorce was easy across umpteen light-years. The wedding ring, though it had been useful on the ship, had no place in Luna City. It no longer meant anything. j. T. McIntosh premonition of disaster as she fixed her hair. The fact that her sister was at that very moment on her way down from the spaceport was not a great coincidence -- Emma was always having premonitions of disaster. The phone rang and she knew at once what her premonition had been about -- Tony couldn't go to the Adams Festival ball that night. When she heard Tony's voice she was sure of it. "Oh, Tony!" she wailed, before he'd had a chance to say anything. "What's the matter?" he asked, startled. "I know what you're going to say. You're not taking me to the dance -- " "Em," said Tony, exasperated, "it's about time you stopped behaving like a neurotic teen-ager. After all, you're -- " "I know. I'm thirty-two, and I've never denied it. But I'm not exactly decrepit, am I? I can still go to a dance if I like, can't I? And I did so want to. But maybe you think I am decrepit. Maybe you -- " "Em, for Pete's sake... All I wanted to say was, please don't enter the Festival Queen contest. Mother thinks -- " "But I want to enter!" Swept along by the tide of her disappointment and indignation, Emma instantly replaced one grievance with another. "What's your mother got to do with it?" "She thinks -- I think too, Em -- after all, beauty contests are for girls of seventeen and eighteen, and -- " "So that's it. Well, if that's how you feel, Tony Benson, you'd better take some other girl. Vm certainly not going with you!" She slammed the phone down. T he elevator door slid open and Clare faced Adams Square, the most gorgeous sight in the most gorgeous city in the Galaxy. It was strange that Second Officer Jones had referred to Luna City as a hole. Stranger still that the seasoned travelers up on the surface hadn't seemed to care that they hadn't time for a visit. For Luna City was easily the most magnificent city of all history and all space. Everybody in Luna City knew that. Perhaps more conclusive was the fact that a large proportion of the population of Earth thought so too. Gravity being only a fraction of what it was on larger worlds, the most fantastic architectural effects were possible. Every major building reached from floor to ceiling and did its share in supporting the vast roof. This was silver and lit by direct lighting which became transformed into soft indirect light that made Luna City a town without shadows. Rather than being a township built in a cave, though, Luna City was a series of carefully calculated cavities, so arranged that the eye added one to another and got an impression of enormous depth and distance. Its designers had had the rare insight not to plan an artificial underground city which would always be a poor copy of an outdoor, open-air township, but instead . to make capital of the very deficiencies of their medium and plan the kind of city which could only be constructed in such conditions. What made every visitor gasp when he looked across Adams Square for the first time was the unconscious certainty tliat he was looking at a miracle. He was used, of course, to gravity approximating one G. Although his eye was forced to record what it saw, what it recorded couldn't be so, because such things could not exist. And even if his brain knew the real answer -- that here a rolled newspaper would support a man's weight -- his eye continued to marvel. Theengineering wonders were only the beginning of the miracle of Luna City. The artistic miracle was far greater. The architects had scrapped all they knew about stresses and started again. Unsupported planes were commonplace. If they wanted a thin, flat platform jutting into space, a balcony or veranda or stage or hood, there was no need whatever to cantilever it. And the curved, sweeping promenades which soared high in the air from building to building needed no support along their incredible length. Not only was their own strength adequate to bear their own weight and any added burden they might have to carry -- there were no winds to tear at them. The architects and builders had seized their unique opportunity with imagination and enthusiasm, and surely no one could deny Luna City's claim to be the most beautiful city in the Galaxy. Yet the engineering marvels and artistic triumph of the city were only a part of the scene which met the eye of a visitor, and some might say not the most important part. There remained the people. Just to complete the miracle of Luna City, its men were the handsomest, its women the most seductive, to be found anywhere in the Galaxy. There was one thing more -- one thing which made Luna City almost utopia. The Moon had vast mineral wealth, and the way Father j. T. McIntosh Adams had arranged things long ago, everybody shared in the loot without having to do very much for it. Only you had to be a native-born Lunan. Luna couldn't support all the bums in the Galaxy. Only her own. The most beautiful, richest city in the Galaxy, with the handsomest people. It was strange indeed that Second Officer Jones had called Luna City a hole. N aturally Clare's eye ran up the column on the top of which Henry Robert Colquhoun Adams stood in marble aloofness, looking down complacently at the city he had helped to build. Poor Henry Robert, Clare thought. The first viaphobe. Like every victim of viaphobia ever since, he had declared stoutly and indignantly that there was no such thing. That he founded Luna City because he wanted to, certainly not because he was scared to entrust himself to space again. The strange thing about viaphobia was that unlike other neuroses -- if it was a neurosis -- it appeared to be hereditary. It was an undeniable fact that to this day no Adams had ever left Luna City, apart from brief trips up to the Moon's surface to see what space was like. Clare had a particular reason for looking up that long, slim column. She marveled as she did so. Once she had climbed that column. She had been furious at the time. That helped. Bill Adams, leaning back comfortably on one of the seats in the park opposite the elevators, sat up in surprise when he saw that the Scylla ship had brought a visitor to Luna City -- and a visitor who intended, judging by the size and number of her bags, to stay for some time. If colonials chose to visit Luna City at all, and they usually did just to say they'd seen it, they almost always went to Earth first and visited the Moon from there, together with thousands of other tourists. However, he wasn't sorry to see this one. Quite the reverse. In her neat gray suit, elegant but conservative, she should have looked drab and uninteresting in Luna City, where the girls were dressed like chorines. She didn't. Bill jumped up and bowed politely, a gesture of which Henry Robert Colquhoun Adams, looking down on it, must have approved. "Can I be of assistance, miss?" he asked. Nothing had changed in ten ears, Clare thought. How could it? How could Luna City ever change? She recognized Bill Adams, who had been a gawky thirteen-year-old last time she had seen him, and was amused to see that he didn't recognize her. "You certainly can," she said, and mischievously allowed a hint of colonial accent to creep into her voice. "Where do you suggest I live in this wonderful place?" Bill swelled happily. "Quite a place, isn't it?" he said. "How about the Hotel Magnificent?" "I am poor and not particularly honest," Clare sighed. "How about somewhere a little les Magnificent?" "There's the Grand -- " "Even somewhere a little less Grand. Isn't there a hotel called the Henry Robert?" Bill took in her elegant clothes which, conservative as they were, must have cost ten times as much as the spangled shorts and bolero of the girl who was surveying Clare critically as she passed. "I don't think you'd like the Henry Robert, miss." "I hate to contradict you, but I would. Besides, that's it just across the square, isn't it?" Even with this hint, it didn't cross Bill's mind that this cosmopolitan stranger could have been in Luna City before, much less that she could be a native of the city. He picked up the two heaviest bags as if they were as light as feathers, which they almost were, and led the way. He didn't talk; he preferred to let the glamorous visitor drink in the marvels of her surroundings. "I can manage now, thank you," said Clare, as they reached the entrance. She hesitated. Ten years ago, tipping had been unknown in wealthy Luna City. People helped you out of friendliness and laughed if a visitor offered money -- not outraged, because tourists didn't know any better, but proud to show that Luna City's standard of living was so high nobody had to do minor services for money. "If you're thinking of tipping me," said Bill, "please don't. In Luna City -- " "I know," said Clare. "I didn't think that would have changed." At last he got it. "Changed? You've been here before?" "Not since the time I painted your great-grandfather," Clare said, and left him staring. to her room, she reflected that in half an hour everybody would know Clare Vernon was back. By now Bill Adams must have put two and two together with the usual result. Alone in her room she started to change, realizing that in Luna City her modest gray suit was actually flamboyant -- and Clare was only occasionally flamboyant. Then she saw that Henry Robert #. T. McIntosh Colquhoun Adams, level with her on top of his column, was staring right into her bedroom. The sculptor had given him the kind of eyes which followed one everywhere. "All right," she said aloud. "Have a good look." She turned and posed for him. Then she said: "Oh, sorry," and took off her wristwatch. "That better?" Clare was prepared to admit that it had been most illbred of her to climb up and paint Father Adams yellow ten years ago. Many of us do things at eighteen which we wouldn't do at twenty-eight. All the same, she still wasn't exactly sorry. After she'd given her evidence at the viaphobia survey in New York, the things which happened to her back in Luna City shouldn't have happened to a pup. And why shouldn't she give evidence? Somebody from Luna City had to. Anyway, when it became clear that she couldn't go on living in Luna City -- not that that broke her heart -- she had had to make some parting gesture to show she didn't give a darn for Luna City or anybody in it. And climbing up Father Adams' column and painting him yellow had seemed like a good idea. She still thought so, after ten years. Em's indignant letters had told her at the time what Luna City had thought of the outrage. Clare's traitorous testimony at the New York investigation into viaphobia might have been forgotten in time. After all, being only eighteen, she didn't know any better. But the second crime was unforgivable. If Clare ever dared to return, her reception would make the death of a thousand cuts look like old-fashioned hospitality. Luna City proposed to do about it. She had deliberately mentioned the painting episode to Bill Adams just to make sure there was no misunderstanding. The phone rang. She snapped the switch to the left -- sound without vision. "Clare Vernon?" rasped a voice she knew, that of old Judge Henry Adams. "The same," said Clare. "How are you. Judge?" "Are you afraid to let me see you, miss?" the Judge demanded. "Yes," said Clare. "I don't happen to have any clothes on. I'm afraid you might get excited." Horrible sounds bubbled from the small loudspeaker. The first coherent words were: "You are shameless, miss!" "Surely not," said Clare mildly, "or I'd have switched on the vision." "If you think," the Judge roared, "that everything will be set right by an apology, you're wrong." "Oh, good," said Clare. "In that case I won't have to apologize." Incoherent sounds started again, to cease abruptly as the Judge cut himself off. dress with a plunge which stopped only a little below waist level -- quiet and restrained by local standards, without being dull. Luna City's environment made it really unnecessary to wear clothes at all, but civilization shrinks from such extreme frankness. Curiously, the less the climate demands clothes, the more important they invariably become, and in Luna City they were more important than anywhere else. Even the men took a lot of trouble over their clothes, though naturally they pretended they didn't. The women wore every conceivable variety of garment, including a few items which wouldn't be practical anywhere but in Luna City. It was unnecessary to wear brassieres or girdles for support. (Earth's pin-up girls usually came to the Moon for studio pictures -- they looked much better there.) On the other hand, if even an approximation to decency was to be preserved, due account had to be taken in the design of a costume of the fact that every time a girl moved, her clothes floated about her like bubbles. Clare looked at herself in the mirror and decided that whatever happened, she would meet it looking her best. The phone rang again. This time Clare set the switch to the right. She had no objection to people seeing her now. Quite the reverse. It wasn't difficult to guess that the egg-headed man with the green eyeshade was a reporter. Clearly he had seen everything. "Luna Argils," he said indifferently. "Clare Vernon?" "At your service," said Clare. He didn't give his name. "Miss Vernon, I'd like to have your story of what happened ten years ago." Obviously he wasn't going to believe it anyway. "It must be in your files. Every scream of it." "Sure, but I'd like your version, Miss Vernon." "That's strange. Nobody wanted my version ten years ago. Well, in as few words as possible, a couple of investigators from New York called on me and asked me a few questions about viaphobia. After a while they asked if I'd go to New York with them and talk to a commission there that was investigating viaphobia. I said I would, and I did. When I came back -- " j. T. McIntosh "Just a minute, Miss Vernon. What exactly happened in New York? What did you say V "That's in your files too. I said what I believed to be the truth. I was no viaphobe, obviously. When I got back here, I was treated as a traitor. Nothing official. Just public opinion, applied where it hurt. So I painted Father Adams and hit the trail." "That's all you want to say. Miss Vernon?" "I don't see any pressing need to say anything else." "Thank you. Miss Vernon." And he cut the connection. It was very unsatisfactory from Clare's point of view. She wanted to know what to expect, but the anonymous reporter had been as impersonal as a robot. He hadn't been for her or against her. He hadn't even seemed particularly interested. Worst of all, he had looked at her as he might have looked at a dead cow. Once more the phone rang. The face which appeared was much younger than the last, and its eyes widened gratifyingly as they came to rest on Clare. This reporter hadn't yet seen everything. "Clare Vernon? I'm Mike Reynolds of the Moon Rocket. Say, we could use a piece on you." "Yes?" said Clare guardedly. The Moon Rocket, unless it had changed out of all recognition, was a spicy rag devoted entirely to sex, sadism and sensationalism. "Sure. I understand you had a tough time before you left Luna City. Your coming back like this makes it news again. Were you ever beaten up? Raped? Anything like that? Just give us a few facts and one of the boys will write it up like the Battle of Waterloo." Was she ever beaten up? Yes, once, only once. The rest of the time what had happened to her, unpleasant as it was, had stopped short of physical violence. This once she'd been coming home late with Greg Miller. Until then she'd thought that being with Greg would be some protection. Three youths in silk slacks had shoved her and Greg into an alley. They hadn't said a word. After a couple of jolts in the ribs which made him gasp, Greg hadn't given them any trouble. He stood in white-faced terror and let them get on with it. One of them twisted her arms up behind her and held her in helpless agony while the other two sank their fists anywhere they would sink. They beat her for three or four minutes, while she wondered why she didn't die. didn't even lose consciousness. They punched every square inch of flesh on the front of her body, then started over and went around again. She wasn't screaming because every time she got some air in her lungs they jolted it out of her. When they did stop she didn't know about it. The next she remembered was lying with her cheek on the ground, with Greg bending over her. He'd been some use after all. He helped her to get home. "Sorry," Clare said to the Rocket reporter. "I don't want to be written up like the Battle of Waterloo." She switched off.H Emma took one look at her and burst into tears. Clare stepped back, surprised. "Well, we were never exactly buddies, but I didn't know it would be that much of a shock when I came back." Mostly Emma was crying about Tony, whose fault it all was. For the rest, she wasn't crying because Clare had come back, but because she was so darned lovely. Emma had always been the pretty one, not Clare. And now... "Oh, well," said Clare philosophically, "I'll go away and come back again. That'll give you a chance to get over your tears of joy at seeing your only sister after ten years." She went out into the street again. Nobody she passed recognized her. Could it be that Luna City didn't care that Clare Vernon was back? She doubted it. Judge Adams cared. They just failed to recognize her as the plump, untidy, restless, too-smart teen-ager who used to make such a fool of herself over Greg Miller. Greg was alone in his store when she walked in. He recognized her. She was amused to see that he was terrified of her. Now what could he possibly be terrified about? Was he afraid that anyone who even spoke to her would be banished from Luna City? Well, it was possible. After that night when she was beaten up, he'd written and phoned and sent flowers, but hadn't come near her. There had been more than a chance that Clare Vernon's boy friend would be beaten up too. "I heard you were back. Miss Vernon," Greg said. It came out as a croak, and he had to clear his throat noisily and say it again. It sounded Greg hadn't worn well. He couldn't be more than thirtytwo or so, but already he was thin on top, harassed, visibly aging. "What's this 'Miss Vernon' routine?" Clare demanded. "It's been a long time," said Greg timidly. j. T. McIntosh "Yes. Ten years. Tm surprised to see you're still alive." That stiffened him. "Fm not as old as all that!" "No, I "svas only thinking that once you were going to kill yourself over me. You said life wasn't worth living without me. Didn't you, Greg?" Greg writhed. Clare knew now exactly why he was scared. He was afraid she had come back to mate, kill and eat him. "I'll tell you the truth," said Clare with a burst of frankness. "You were right about us, Greg. I found I couldn't live without you." G reg took an involuntary step backward and knocked over a pile of cans. Clare helped him to pick them up. In doing so she got very close to him, and once when his leg touched her hip he flinched as if she were red-hot. Sitting on her heels, she looked up at him, smiling. She hadn't forgotten she was wearing a dress with a spectacular plunge. "Never mind," said Greg hoarsely. "I'll pick them up later." She took pity on him. Standing up, she said: "All the same, Greg, I can't marry you. I've promised six other guys. Be seeing you." She left him dizzy with relief. Greg was a viaphobe, of course. Clare had grown out of the intolerance of her teens. She no longer scorned viaphobes just because she didn't happen to be one herself. She knew it wasn't their fault. Before space flight, some people had liked to travel about the surface of Earth and some hadn't. It was never much of a problem, because if you didn't like traveling a hundred miles, you weren't likely to contract to go ten thousand. But space was different. There's something awful about space, even the tiny hop from Earth to Moon. It shakes you to the core, forces you to look at yourself and your place in the Cosmos, makes you understand your utter insignificance in the galactic scheme of things. And there are physical effects too. If a friendly, solid thing like the sea could make people wish they were dead, what could unfriendly, empty space do to them? It could do plenty. Space sickness is a hundred times worse than sea sickness. It doesn't give up after an hour or two or a day or two. So, apart from the pain, the horror, the agony of being in space if you have the misfortune to be a viaphobe, there is the fact that you must starve to death if your trip is longer than from Earth to Moon. No viaphobe has ever reached Mars or Venus alive, much less the stars. Sedation won't quell the internal upheaval. Nothing quells it except death. If you're a viaphobe you stay put on your home planet. You have to. Nowadays nobody dies in agony on the Earth-Mars run. A preliminary check is obligatory. From all worlds there are test space flights which last long enough to show up viaphobia, and not long enough to produce more than a few hours of hell if you happen to be a victim. You don't get on a regular space flight without a certiflcate to show you're no viaphobe. But in the early days there was nothing like that. People went from Earth to the Moon and found out the hard way. They didn't die -- the trip isn't long enough. On the Moon they recovered, but with a fixed determination never to suffer anything like that again. This happened to far more people than it should. There was a simple reason for this. Pride. When people were sick on the way to the Moon, there couldn't be any secret about it. You couldn't fight and conquer space sickness the way some people could fight and conquer sea sickness. Afterward, however, it was natural to laugh it off. "Sure, I was space sick. But hell. Pm okay now. Sure I could go back. If I wanted to, I could go back any time. But I like it here. Luna City's great. Why should I go back?" Nobody on the Moon had ever denied that there was such a thing as space sickness -- neither those who had suffered it nor those who hadn't. But many people denied the existence of viaphobia. "Sure, I was space sick..." Even ten years ago, when mankind had spread out to the stars, Luna City still didn't admit that there was any such thing as viaphobia. Space sickness, yes. "If I wanted to, I could go back any time." That was why Clare Vernon had committed a crime in going before a commission in New York and telling them what she knew and guessed about viaphobia. L ike Greg, Judge Adams recognized Clare at once. She met him just after she'd left Greg's store. The Judge said: "I am amazed. Miss Vernon, to see you have the effrontery to walk Luna City's streets." "Why, Judge!" Clare protested. "I'm not walking the streets!" The Judge went red as fire. "I didn't mean -- I merely meant that after those disgraceful incidents of ten years  j. T. McIntosh "Think nothing of it, Judge. Tve forgiven you long ago." Two or three people who had overheard some of this had stopped. In a few moments there was quite a crowd pretending not to listen, but not missing a word. Everybody knew Judge Adams, of course. And everybody had heard about Clare Vernon. "If you were a man Td know what to do with you," Judge Adams roared. "You mean that you don't know what to do with... no, Judge, I must have misunderstood you." "Let me pass," said the Judge furiously. "I have no desire to take part in a public contest in repartee." "No, indeed," Clare agreed. "I don't know where Repartee is, but why should you go there just to take part in a contest? You might get vi -- I mean, you might get space sick." The Judge controlled hirnself with an effort. "If you ever speak that word in Luna City," he said, "you, of all people, you'll be in grave danger of being torn limb from limb." "What word?" Clare asked innocently. "You know what I mean," said the Judge, and he stalked past her. Yes, she knew. People have always been like that. When someone says : If there's one thing I never do, it's... you can be quite sure that's one thing he does do. When he says: If there's one thing I'm not, it's... you know that's one thing he is. Years ago people on Earth had heard of viaphobia. They couldn't understand what Luna City was so touchy about. There was such a thing as space sickness, vasn't there? Well, then, that was viaphobia. What did the people on the Moon mean, there was space sickness but viaphobia didn't exist? Only viaphobes said there was no such thing as viaphobia.# voice, "Why, what have you done?" Clare asked. The rather nice-looking young man grinned. "Nothing, but I make no promises for the future. Aren't you Clare Vernon?" "I have that distinction." "I'm Tony Benson. You don't know me because I was at school on Earth when you were here before. Fve seen pictures of you. They didn't do you justice." "Justice, yes. Mercy, no." "Don't be modest. Will you come with me to the ball tonight?" It was brash, typical of the colonies rather than of Luna City. She had no difficulty in believing that Tony Benson hadn't always lived in Luna City. "Yes," she said. "That's great, Clare. Now suppose you go back to your hotel and slip on another dress and I'll call for you about eight?" "You know where I'm staying?" "Everybody does." She wanted to ask him about that, what people were saying about her, how Luna City was reacting to her return. The fact that he was prepared to be friendly -- at the very least -- didn't give her a line, because he was no viaphobe. "All right," she said. She couldn't ask him. As she walked back to the Henry Robert, she saw that everybody knew her now. A few minutes ago they hadn't. A few minutes was all Luna City needed. Release a rumor in any other town and it spreads fast to the edge of town and dies there. In Luna City, when a rumor reaches the walls it bounces back. Five minutes hadn't been enough for the people in the streets to learn that Clare Vernon was back. Ten minutes was. She couldn't tell much from the way people looked at her. People saw her, pointed her out to each other and whispered. The same thing would have happened if she'd been an actress, a princess, a murderess. And gradually Clare realized she was acting like a narcissistic adolescent. She had come back out of bravado, just because nobody in Luna City believed she'd ever dare come back. Suddenly she wanted John. All these light-years away, what they had quarreled about seemed unimportant. Either of them could have healed the breach, right up to that last moment when, rather to her surprise, he had come to the spaceport to see her off. Neither had made the move. And now it was certainly too late. Tony Benson reminded her a little of John. She, pushed the memory of John to the back of her mind as someone actually nodded politely to her. It was Bill Adams. "Mr. Adams," she said, though she still thought of him as a boy, "I hope you didn't think I was rude earlier." "No," he said, "I didn't think you were rude." But there was some constraint in his manner, and she made up her mind to probe it. "I wasn't laughing at you either," she said. "No." "Mr. Adams, you were very friendly earlier. You're not now. Is it because I painted your grandfather?" j. T. McIntosh "No," he said. "It's not that at all. Miss Vernon, if you had only one leg, would you enjoy the taunts of people who had two?" It hit Clare harder than the blows of those three young toughs ten years ago. that black is white, you feel you can't let him get away with that. You try to make him see that black is black. It doesn't occur to you that it may be of great importance to him to cling to the idea that black is white. Viaphobes said there was no such thing as viaphobia. So you had to show them they were wrong. But the moment they admitted they were wrong -- "All right, so I'm a viaphobe. So what?" -- there was suddenly nothing to say. Nothing to do. Nothing but to be sorry for them. Prisoners. Naturally they thought Luna City was wonderful. They might as well. They couldn't leave it. "Bill, I'm Sony," Clare said with remorse. "But you've given me a shock. You mean there is such a thing as viaphobia? And you know it?" "Of course we know," he said bitterly. "We've always known." Clare stared at him. That simply couldn't be true. Bill seemed to sense what she was thinking. "Not the older people," he said. "Not Judge Adams. He'll never admit there's any such thing. But those of us who are younger... We're not crazy, you know. We realize we can't travel in space. It may be a physical or mental defect, but who cares which? Either way we can't leave Luna City. And that's what they call viaphobia." "That's just what I said ten years ago." "No, it's not. You said, in effect, 'The poor suckers are yellow and they won't admit it. I'm not yellow. Look at me, I was born in Luna City but look. I'm here in New York and I'm going back. I'm no viaphobe. They are, though, nearly all of them. They're scared to leave their little lump of rock and they won't even admit it. They're yellow, all of them.' " "I didn't say anything like -- " "You did." On the point of protesting again, Clare changed her mind. Bill Adams was right. The people of Luna City were like an old hag who holds a sheet in front of her and says: "I'm the most beautiful woman in the world." Clare had known better. The deceit had angered her. She had torn away the sheet. And now the old hag was revealed in all her naked ugliness. wish," Clare said quietly, "someone had talked to me like that a long time ago. But, Bill -- whatever my motives were, I only told the truth. Someone had to. Maybe viaphobia can be cured. But before it can be cured, youVe got to admit it exists." "All right," said Bill. "I admit it. Now cure me." For once Clare had nothing to say. under Father Adams' disapproving eye when the phone rang. It was Em. "You should have warned me, Clare," Em said. "Naturally it vv as a shock to see you like that." "Still, Tm glad it was a pleasari shock," Clare said. "Yes. Well. Fve been talking to a few people and it's going to be all right, Clare -- nobody's going to take any action about that -- that business long ago. Everybody seems to think that by coming back you've admitted you were wrong -- " "Huh?" said Clare. "Well, anyway, you're forgiven. You may even get your allowance back. So look, Clare, you'd better sort of make a public appearance. You'd better go to the ball tonight, I've had simply tons of invitations, but everybody will understand if I just go with you, without any escorts -- " "I've been asked already. Somebody called Tony Benson. Know him?" For a moment there was silence. Then Em screamed : "Tony! You knew, you must have known. Clare, vou -- you bitch!" There was a click, then silence. Tony might, Clare thought, have told her. It hadn't been entirely an accident that Clare had arrived in Luna City on the eve of the Adams Festival. Once, long ago, even before the viaphobe investigation and long before Clare committed her notorious act of sacrilege, she and Em had taken part in the Festival Queen contest. Em had been placed fourth. Clare... Well, why did they have to place everybody, right down the list? Surely they could have named the first six. But no, they had to number them all, one to twenty-seven. Clare had been number twenty-seven. She was complacently aware she wouldn't be placed twenty-seventh now, on looks. But there was, of course, more to it than looks, so much more that it hadn't crossed her mind to try to enter the contest again, even if they would let her. After what she had done, Clare Vernon could never be an Adams Festival Queen. No, what she meant to do was look as lovely and as cosj. T. McIntosh mopolitan as possible and show everybody that it hadn't done her any harm to place twenty-seventh out of twentyseven all those years ago, when she cared about such things. Her entrance with Tony that night was all she could have wished. A score of reporters and photographers were waiting for her at the Colquhoun Hall, and Clare smiled as the cameras clicked, knowing she had never looked better in her life. Her gown was a Scyllan creation. The cut didn't matter so long as it was perfect, which it was. No girl at the ball was more modestly covered, yet no girl was more flamboyantly dressed. This was one of the occasions when Clare meant to be flamboyant. The iridescent material of the gown split the color of the light into its elements, flashing through them unceasingly as Clare moved, even as she breathed, so that nobody had any idea what color her gown really was. It was breathtaking. A goddess might have worn such a gown. John had given it to her on their seventh anniversary. was that what  you wanted?" Tony murmured in her ear as the photographers fought for the best angles. 'Oh, it's really nothing," Clare murmured back. "Cleopatra would have caused twice as much fuss." Tony was a good dancer, much better than John. And when he surrendered her occasionally, Clare found that all the men wanted to dance with her. Apparently she was forgiven. Indeed, the whole evening looked like being a triumph. "If you want to succeed in Luna City, paint Judge Adams yellow," Tony murmured to her once. Curiously, Clare wasn't entirely happy. There was the matter of Em, for one thing. She was there, in a much too revealing gown, not paying the slightest attention to either Clare or Tony. And the better Clare was treated in Luna City, the more contemptible she felt. She hadn't forgotten what Bill Adams had said. She never would. She knew the truth about herself. After all these years she knew the truth. She had placed twenty-seventh in the Festival Queen contest. To get back at them, she had gone to Earth boasting that she was no viaphobe and that nearly everybody else in Luna City was. She had insulted Luna City and left it forever. And when she came back, they treated her as a conquering heroine. Even Judge Adams nodded to her civilly, if not with any; pretense of warmth. And she danced with Bill Adams twice. He, too, was a good dancer. In Luna City everybody was good at things like that. She liked Bill. She liked Bill better than Tony Benson, now that she knew them both better. Tony had asked her to the ball because he had guessed shrewdly even then that she'd be in the limelight, and Tony liked to be in the limelight. Besides, Tony had spent half the evening so far talking about his mother, and in Clare's opinion, men of twenty-hve who spent a lot of time talking about their mothers were not for her. Bill had the beautiful manners of rather shy people, and already he was sorry for having spoken so bluntly to her. 'T'm glad you did. Bill," she told him as they danced. 'T deserved eveiy word of it." Bill flushed and missed a step. "I shouldn't have said it." "Of course you should. Why aren't more people like you? I did what I did because so many Lunans are viaphobes and won't admit it, and yet seem to think it makes them something special." The dance ended. "It was natural, Clare," Bill said. "All the same, you shouldn't have painted Henry Robert yellow because most of us happen to be viaphobes." I didn't," said Clare. "I did it because three fellows beat me up for what I'd said. Viaphobia apart, they were yellow." "I didn't know that. I think I understand, Clare." T he high spot of the evening was the Festival Queen contest. Next day the girl chosen would preside at a score of festival events. She would open some new buildings, present prizes at sport events, dive in first at the gala (any excuse to get her into a swimsuit was better than none) , and put in an appearance at all the major celebrations. Clare didn't miss Tony's frown as Em paraded past. "What's eating you?" she whispered to him. "Was it a quarrel?" "I asked her not to enter," Tony said. "Why not?" "I said she ought to leave things like this to teenagers." "She must have loved that." Tony made no reply. He continued to frown at Em. Clare could see no reason why Em shouldn't enter the contest. Youth lasted long in a placid environment like Luna City. Em at thirty-two was at no disadvantage with the other girls in the parade. Clare hoped she won, and didn't think it at all unlikely that she would. If Em won. j. T. McIntosh there would be peace between her and Clare. At last Judge Adams came to the microphone to announce the winner. He took the paper that was handed to him, started, glared at Em and then at Clare, and stepped away from the microphone to argue with someone. "Well," said Clare, "don't you know what that means?" Tony's frown changed to puzzlement. "They can't have chosen Em," he said. "Not Em, Mother says..." Clare sighed. Em was in love with him -- anybody could see that. It was easy to guess, too, that his relations with Em hadn't been strictly platonic. And like all men, Tony thought very little of anything he could easily have, and yearned for the unattainable. He couldn't have Clare, for example. Sooner or later she'd try to forget John, but it would be a long time before any man could engage her full attention. And when that happened, she had no intention of stealing her sister's man -- wliatever Em might think. Judge Adams was still arguing. Bill Adams was coming toward Clare. He had an envelope in his hand. "This just arrived," he said, giving it to Clare. "I told them I'd find you and deliver it." "Thanks, Bill," said Clare. From his curious expression, she could tell that he knew what the wire was about. She tore it open. Decree nisi granted. John. Well, that was that. Nisi didn't mean much when the two parties were separated by umpteen light-years. Judge Adams, his face red, was at the microphone again. "It has been decided," he said shortly, "that the duties of the Festival Queen will be shared by Clare and Emma Vernon." hadn't even entered the contest. Dimly she was aware that the announcement was getting a mixed reception. There were some boos, a great deal of whispering, and the applause sounded like a few people trying to make up for the rest. Em turned and stared at Clare, and Clare realized that Em was already beginning to blame her for having cut in on an honor which should have been Em's alone. Clare stepped forward quickly. "I appreciate the honor," she said, "but I should like to withdraw in my sister's favor." The whispering swelled to a roar. Public opinion crystallized, and Judge Adams, still red in the face, expressed it. "I'm not surprised," he said angrily. "Everybody knows what you think of our founder and the Adams Festival and Luna City and everybody in it." "I said I appreciated the honor," Clare repeated. But the uproar increased still more, and she cried : "All right! I accept!" There was sudden silence. Someone started to clap. Em was pushed forward and turned to stand on the other side of Judge Adams from Clare. The two girls were certainly an attractive couple, alike yet not alike. Everjbody decided the easiest thing to do was applaud, and did so. In the confusion that followed, Clare had time for only a quick word with Tony. She was amused and exasperated to find that it was all right for Clare to be Festival Queen, but that he still hadn't changed his opinion about Em. And, of course, Mother wouldn't like it. There was an awkward moment when the reporters asked her what she thought of viaphobia now. "What's that got to do with it?" she inquired. It was an unfortunate question. A dozen people were ready to explain -- and she knew the answer anyway. You couldn't take part in an Adams Festival if you were a heretic -- if you believed that Luna City was a sanitorium for neurotics. You had to recant. But how could she recant? How could she say black was white? She looked for Bill Adams, and couldn't see him. "I've got nothing to say on that subject," she said firmly. That wouldn't do. There was a clamor and Clare realized that she'd have to make up her mind on the spot. Some young people like Bill Adams were prepared to admit privately that viaphobia existed, that it was a crippling disease, that many of the citizens of Luna City would go elsewhere if they could. However, publicly you couldn't say any such thing. If you were going to stay in Luna City, you had to conform. You could believe what you liked, but publicly you had to agree with everybody else. There was no such thing as viaphobia. Was she going to stay in Luna City? T he wire was in her handbag. Decree nisi granted. John. Well, wasn't she going to stay in Luna City? Then another thing struck her. The judges had chosen her as joint Festival Queen. They had known they were bestowing a great honor on her when they did so. Luna City could hardly have been more forgiving, more kind, when the prodigal daughter returned. j. T. McIntosh "Viaphobia?" she said. "What's that?" been bad. That wasn't why they had quarreled, but it was certainly the reason why this last breach had never been healed. The right word at the right time... even the wrong word at the right time might have served. But he'd always picked the wrong time. It was hardly to be expected that from Scylla his timing would be any better. The second wire arrived just as Clare was leaving Colquhoun Hall with Tony. It read: Forget last wire. Please come hack, John, Clare stuffed it in her handbag. It was too late. She had been telling herself for hours that life in Luna City had a lot to offer, and she'd finally convinced herself. John had kept up his record. Just an hour or so before asking her to come back, he had sent a snide wire telling her he'd arranged the divorce. And Clare had thrown in her lot with Luna City. She wasn't going to change her mind again. It was always the same with John. If she went back, within six months she'd be on the point of leaving him again -- and John would say the wrong word at the wrong time. Luna City had one thing to offer which Clare, at the advanced age of twenty-eight, was beginning to appreciate. There might have been some doubt about it before, but now that she'd been chosen joint Festival Queen, there was no doubt she would get her due share of the loot. She was reinstated. She was secure. "What's that you've got there?" Tony asked. "Nothing," she said, snapping her handbag shut. She wouldn't let him come further through the darkened streets with her than Adams Square. She let him kiss her once, then held him off. "Look, Tony," she said. "Em's crazy about you. If I'd known that. I'd never have gone with you." "Em hasn't got much chance with me or anybody else while you're around," said Tony, and reached for her again. "Good night, Tony," said Clare firmly. She meant goodby. If she had to have somebody take her around, she didn't think it would be hard to enroll Bill Adams. She turned away, cutting across the square. Abruptly half a dozen dark figures detached themselves from the shadows around the base of the column. "You needn't think you're going to be Festival Queen tomorrow," said a muffled voice under a mask. "Your looks won't be up to it." And as Clare drew a breath to scream, one of the men knocked her navel back six inches. Another fist found her mouth and she felt her lip spurt blood. Somebody else hit her in the left eye and she knew at once it would be all the colors of the rainbow the next day. But that was all they could do to her. This wasn't the Clare Vernon who had been beaten up in the same city ten years before. Besides, the six men around her were attuned to a gravity one-seventh that of Scylla. Despite her long skirt Clare was away like a hare escaping from six turtles, and she didn't stop until she was in her hotel bedroom, panting but reasonably triumphant. Shiner or no shiner, she'd appear with Em tomorrow as Festival Queen. She caught Henry Robert's eye through the window and nodded grimly to him. "Call off your boys, Father Adams," she said aloud. "Until that happened, I was ashamed of myself. But when six men try to beat up one girl, I don't need to be ashamed any more. I'll be Festival Queen tomorrow just to spite you." B ut she couldn't sleep. How many world-shattering incidents have happened, or not happened, because somebody couldn't sleep? And when the six A.M. starship landed at the Mare Imbrium terminal, Clare Vernon and all her bags were waiting for it. Second Officer Jones was startled for only a moment. Then his face registered delight. "Might have known you couldn't take it for long. Miss Vernon," he said. "Might have known," Clare agreed. "Mr. Jones, I've got bad news for you. I'm going back to my husband." Jones's jaw dropped. "Husband? You never said anything about any husband." "No," Clare sighed. "You don't when you've left him forever. But you see, Mr. Jones, I was wrong. Wrong about everything. Wrong about John. Wrong about Luna City. Wrong about viaphobia." Huit and disillusioned. Second Officer Jones said nothing. "They know about viaphobia," said Clare thoughtfully, "and they don't fight it. They accept it. Luna City is a wonderful place -- you're sheltered from everything. I didn't know it then, but when I came back I wanted shelter too. Shelter from misunderstandings, quarrels... shelter from life. You don't have to be a viaphobe to want to be where it's warm and safe and comfortable and nobody j. T. McIntosh ever hurts you so long as you don't hurt them by telling them you see through them . , "So you were married all the time," said Second Officer Jones indignantly, disgusted afresh at the perfidy of women. "Are you sorry, Mr. Jones? Don't be. I'm going back to argue with John, and misunderstand him, and be misunderstood by him, and wish I'd never met him... but at least I'm not going to take shelter from him. As you once said, Mr. Jones, I'm no viaphobe," "I'll have your bags stowed, Miss Vernon," said the officer, his nose in the air. "What, still hurt, Mr. Jones? After all we've meant to each other?" Second Officer Jones stalked oflf to sulk, and Clare reflectively restored the ring to the third finger of her left hand. It was strange, after what she'd been saying to Jones, that she felt happy and sure of herself again and could hardly wait for the ship to get back to Scylla. he always did, when the lights came on to create Luna City's artificial dawn. He got out of bed, yawning, and cleared his throat noisily. Still only half awake, he was dimly aware of something that was going to make this day worse than most days. Then he remembered. It was Adams Festival Day, and Clare Vernon was going to be joint Festival Queen. He didn't mind about Em. If only those fool judges had picked Em without some genius thinking of the brilliant scheme of having two Queens, and one of them Clare Vernon. If only she would fall downstairs and break a leg. If only... Something caught his eye and he staggered to the window. He blinked, unable to believe his eyes. Then he roared with the rage of a mad elephant. Someone had climbed up the column and painted Henry Robert Colquhoun Adams yellow. "The test of a truth is simplicity itself. Partial truths are always complicated; a truth is a punchline." -- Dudley Dell What's In It For You?  Subscribing to IF has so many benefits and conveniences that we often wonder why all our readers aren't subscribers.  Money in the bank -- just check the rates below and see what you save on the newsstand price; the longer you sign up for, the more free issues you get.  Wear and fear -- just reach into your mailbox and there's your latest copy; no riding, driving, or walking to pick it up -- always, of course, at the risk of finding IF sold out.  Be fhe first on your block -- you get IF a full week or more before the newsstands do.  And all without having to mutilate this attractive copy if you'd rather send in your order on any sheet of paper instead of cutting out the coupon. Just don't put it off, for tomorrow you're sure to forget, aren't you? I IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #. New York I Start iny subscription to IF Science Fiction with flie  issue. I enclose (check one) : j # issues...# # issues. , # I Forei;n Posta;ne G Issues #o .Additional I Name J Address City O. Zone State. the gelzek business He was the luckiest guy in the Galaxy -- until I got luckier than he ever tvasl at the spaceport at Antarv, he had lost none of his old exuberance. As he shook ray hand he clapped me on the shoulder. "Glad you could make it, Al!" He waved toward the customs barrier. "I'll get you through. I've got plenty of pull around here." "I'm lucky I could come," I said as he dragged me along. "Took almost my last credit." He glanced at me sidelong. "That way, eh? What happened to your mining deal ?" "Fell through." As we got my sparse baggage through the customs, I had more time to look at him. Still the old Tad Peters. The same sweeping gestures and booming voice -- but had he aged in the two years since I'd seen him? Within minutes we were out on the pink marble concourse, climbing aboard an aircar that must have been the most expensive available. "You look as though you've fallen on your feet," I said. "I have, Al, I have. In the last six months, thirty-eight ships calling here have been fitted with Peters Deep-space Radar. Completely new principle." "Your invention?" "I built the lot of them. Got universal patents pending." "I didn't know you knew anything about radar. You actually invented this?" "Wellj sort of. Basically an idea I picked up from my girl friend. Luanu." He switched on the antigravs, and the aircar lifted in a soaring arc above the great sprawling buildings of the starport. "I'm marrying her soon. She's terrific, boy, terrific! But you'll see her for yourself in a few minutes." "When did you meet her?" "About a year ago -- in Hastek. Heard of it? Didn't think so -- it's an outpost planet away in toward the Hub." For a while he was silent as we sped southward above the shimmering towers lining the broad esplanade, skirting a sea flame-tipped beneath the swollen crimson disc of Antares. Then he gave me a quick glance. "You'll like Luanu. She's different." H e skimmed down to a landing under the winglike carport of a new, striking house on a promontory jutting out from the coast. As I stepped out of the aircar onto a terrace of translucent stone in which waves of sapphire and emerald flame rippled, I breathed deeply. The air was fresh and cool, with the intoxicating tingle of more than a quarter oxygen mingling with the salt tang of the floating marine vegetation that dappled the red-lit sea with patches of smoky violet. "Quite a place you have here," I said, looking up at the sweeping facade of the house. "I like it," Tad said. "Bit different from the dump we lived in behind the ore-crushing plant at Port Mondo ! Remember when they took our air-conditioner back, that day when the temperature was a hundred and thirty?" He shuddered. "Please, Al. Let's leave the past behind us." He led the way into the house. The furnishings, the murals, all the decor had a queer, outlandish touch that suggested some kind of alien temple. I stopped just inside the door and looked about me. "Like it?" boomed Tad, standing with his feet apart and his fists on his hips. "Sure -- in a way. But it isn't like you, somehow." "Well, it's mostly Luanu's choice. She should be here any minute." "I'm here right now." I'll never forget that voice. Flexible and vibrant, somehow cool and warm at the same time, with something within it that made me think of frangipani and the night breeze through palm trees. I turned. She was standing in the doorway behind us. Different, he'd said ! It was the understatement of a lifetime. She was slender and tall, taller than either Tad or myself, though we were both above average height ; but it wasn't her height or her build that made me stand there with my mouth open. The hair that fell in thick waves to her shoulders was golden, but with a green tint that I'd never seen before, although it looked natural, like the green-tinged pallor of her skin. Broad forehead, pointed chin, huge upardslanting eyes as green as emerald -- everything about her had an effect of unseizable strangeness, yet at the same time a weird beauty. "Can I get you something to drink?" Her voice lifted with the hint of some odd accent. Tad said something, and she smiled and glided into an adjoining room, her movements swift and fluid and silent. I suddenly realized that I was still standing with my eyes and mouth wide open. "You'll like Luanu," said Tad. "Everyone does." "Where did she come from?" I asked. "I met her in Hastdc. It's -- " "I know. In toward the Hub of the Galaxy, But where did she come from originally?" His eyes skittered away from mine. "I think she's from one of the planets of the Vorand Empire." "The what?" He made a vague gesture. "Away in toward the Hub, past the Lagoon Nebula." "But that's more than a thousand parsecs away!" "I know. I've never been there. The -- er -- the Vorani had space travel before we discovered fire. That's why the first contacts with them put the Federation in a spin a couple of years back -- or had you not heard about that? It's lucky the two spheres of influence are so far apart." I looked at the door through which the girl had gone. "You mean she's -- she's not -- " "Human? Well, I suppose it depends on your viewpoint. The Vorani would say we were not exactly human." He gave an odd little laugh. "After all, what is a human being?" A t this point Luanu swept back into the room, holding a tray with three fraillooking goblets sparkling with ruby liquid. She leaned toward me and I caught the suggestion of an unfamiliar perfume. Her full lips had an almost violet coloring. As I took one of the goblets, I found my hand was trembling slightly. She whirled toward Tad. "Let's go down to Donelli's." "I thought we'd decided to eat here," he said. "I've changed my mind." Tad drained his glass almost at a gulp. "O.K.," he said in a slightly resigned tone. "We'll go to Donelli's." Within minutes, the three of us were in the aircar, skimming further southward along the coast. The sun was setting, its vast red disk leering through dark slats of cloud beyond a saw-toothed ridge across the bay. Donelli's was a bizarre, ultra-modern building on a small peninsula almost level with the sea, with the surf lapping the rocks on three sides of it. We sat at a table overlooking the water. Beside it, a broad dance floor of black obsidian swept in an irregular curving shape, the transparent walls giving it the effect of being open to the sea air. A few couples were dancing to the surging music that filled the room from no visible source. Tad, who had been quiet since he had last spoken to Luanu, began to recover his air of enthusiasm. "Business is sure going well," he said with intense satisfaction, leaning across the table. Luanu flashed him a sidelong glance. "It would be better if we were making gelzeks," she said. "What's a gelzek?" I asked, but neither or them gave any indication of hearing me. "Don't let's start that again," Tad burst out irritably. The girl's eyes widened, the pupils dilating into black pools of sudden anger. "You're a fool!" She almost spat the words at him, and then, as abruptly as it had come, her surge of anger vanished. She looked at me with a silvery laugh. "Don't mind us, Al. Tad can't help being stupid." Tad's face was flushed. "Look," he appealed to me, "here we are with orders for radar units flooding in, just coming up to the crest of the wave -- and she wants to drop everything to make gelzeks." "But what is a gelzek?" I persisted. His rage seemed to be mounting to the flash-point. '# don't know! Ask Luanu!" to her, but she shook her head. "I'm afraid I can't explain it without building one," she said. Her eyes glinted at Tad. "You trusted me with the radar. Why do you doubt me when I tell you about the gelzeks?" "Because you can't explain what they're for ! All you say is that the gelzek makes possible a different way of life." "And that's true. You'll see." His mouth opened, then closed like a trap. "We stick to making radar," he said with forced calm. She sat looking at him for a few seconds, and then she stood up. Without saying a word to either of us, she strode across the floor and out through the foyer. I looked questioningly at Tad, but he picked up his glass and drained it before meeting my eyes. "She'll be back," he said, then added uncertainly: "I think." For a long time he sat staring down at the table, his fingers drumming in quite different time from the music, as though he were completely unaware of his surroundings. "Are all the Vorani as temperamental as that?" I asked. "Eh? Oh, I don't know. I never met any others." He looked across at the sunset. "Very few people have." I thought that one over for a moment, then decided not to follow it up just yet; Tad didn't seem in any mood to talk. I looked around the dance floor and its surrounding tables. When we had come in with Luanu a few minutes ago, the place had seemed big and friendly and sparkling with glamor. Now it was only big. T ad drove me back into the center of Antarv and parked the aircar on the landing wing of a gigantic hotel facing the esplanade. "I stayed here when I first arrived," he said. I looked up at the gleaming facade of metal, reddened by the last rays of the sunset. "Say, this looks a bit expensive for me. I told you I was nearly down to my last credit." His old manner returned for a moment like the first gust of a rising gale. "Al, old boy, I forgot. Here !" He pulled out a wallet, peeling a number of green ten-credit bills from a thick roll. "That should see you through. Think nothing of it. Everything's going to be all right. Luanu Will be back." He said it as though the last two facts were closely connected, and immediately afterward he seemed to sink into gloom again. As he said goodby his eyes were focused beyond me, with the expression of a man who is seeing something he doesn't like. I shrugged and went up to bed. The days and nights on Antarv are short, and when I awoke the giant red sun was already throwing its lurid glare over the city. The buildings cast a pattern of greenedged shadows. I had breakfast in the cafe on the top floor of the hotel, with a view over the esplanade and the sea. Following the map Tad had given me, I rode the beltways out to the edge of the city and located his factory -- a long, plain building of recent construction. I found Tad in his office, sitting behind a large desk. He looked as if he hadn't slept. "I can't find her," he said as soon as I was in the room. "She'll be back," I told him. "I'm not so sure, Al. I'm not sure at all." He got up sloiwly, and as he walked across to look at a productionflow chart on one wall, his step seemed heavy. "She's an unwild. And if she walks out at this stage, we're sunk." "Maybe there's something I haven't got straight. Tad," I said. "Didn't you say you'd already fitted thirty-eight ships with your radar in the last six months?" "Well, they're all wired up and the heavy gear is in place. But they still have to be fitted with roto-azimuth integrators before they'll function." "What's a roto-azimuth integrator?" "It's a thing about so big." He made gestures with his hands. "We had one on the demonstration ship and it worked fine. Sold all these orders with it. Then it burned out." "Can't you build another?" "Luanu's been working on it. We went ahead with all the rest of the installations, but she hasn't finished it yet." He sat heavily down at his desk, fiddling with a six-color pen, his eyes far away and glazed. "Well," I said heartily, "if she made one, she can make another." "I think the first one was made somewhere in the Vorand Empire," he said, thoughtfully writing something on his desk pad. "I hope she knows what was inside it. I don't." He drew two lines on the pad, then two others crossing them. Very deliberately, he began putting zeroes and crosses in the squares, finally drawing a line through three zeroes and sourly studying the result. I moved toward the door. "I'll see you sometime when you're not tied up," I said. He looked at me as if he had forgotten I was there. "Yes, do that, Steve -- I mean Al." When he started drawing more lines on the pad, I went out. few days I tried to call up Tad on the visiphone, but on each occasion I was told that he was out of town. Nobody knew when he would be back. Once I went out to his office, only to find three other men there who had been trying for days to trace him. After ten days a long-distance call came through to me at my hotel, and when I answered it, Luanu's face smiled at me from the screen. "Al, I wanted to see you again," she said. "Where are you? When are you coming back?" 'Tm never coming back -- not to Tad. We simply don't get along together. But I want you to help me." "How?" I asked. Her eyes sparkled. "Making Gelzeks. I've found a factory that will be ideal and I've already got a lot of the materials. I want you to help me run the factory." "But why me?" "Because I like you. Need any other reason?" For a long time I examined curving mouth. "No," I said. "Where can I find you?" "You mustn't tell Tad." "I won't." She frowned at me for a few seconds. "All right. I'll tell you where to find me," she said, and she did. It was a long journey to Pavo City, up over the whitefanged peaks of the Equatorial Range and on over a thousand miles of flat yellow plain trenched by muddy, winding rivers to the shore of the Inland Sea. The aircraft was a primitive flying triangle and I was glad to step out of it onto the sun-scorched tarmac. Pavo City was old, with many of its buildings of patched gray concrete, some of them in ruins. It had passed its peak centuries ago, when the nearby mines had been worked out. Luanu met me at the airport, very tall and slender in a long hooded cloak of some heat-reflecting material, her eyes shining within the dark shadow of the hood. She led me to a small groundcar, and a few minutes later we were weaving through twisting, narrow streets crowded with buildings that represented many successive eras of architectural style, some of metal, some of concrete, some even of yellow brick. T he factory was a' long, bare building on the outskirts of the town, adjoining a landing field that served a number of similar buildings which appeared to be disused. Luanu parked the car and led the way into the office block. She must have been working hard in the last few days -- she showed me a number of incredibly complex drawings which I didn't begin to understand even after poring over them for several minutes. The maze of differently colored lines and symbols that covered them were completely incomprehensible to me. "This," she said, waving a sliih hand to the drawings, "is the gelzek. With it, your whole civilization will never be the same again. Even after your people have been using it for a hundred years, they will still be finding new possibilities for applying it." "I see," I responded in a tone that didn't convince even myself. "Come through here," she said. I followed her into a large open space, at one side of which were a number of metal cabinets about the size of small household refrigerators. "These are gelzek cabinets," she told me. "I had a few made by a firm near here; they seemed satisfactory enough, so Fve given them an order for ten thousand. It meant raising a substantial loan, but I managed to convince the bank people of the gelzek's possibilities -- not that they could understand h, but they at least had the deep-s#ace radar as an indication of what we can do. But I war.t you to run this factory with me." "I dont understand what we're making yet," I objected. "You don't have to. I've planned the gelzek so it can be made in about twenty subassemblies. I can fix the 'most tricky ones, and we can subdivide the rest of the circuits and parts into packaged units that an unskilled team can fit together." As she stood there smiling, she looked very young. "You have got it well figured out," I said. Her smile broadened. "We'll I thought briefly, guiltily, of Tad sitting at his desk drawing zeroes and crosses on a pad. "Will you do it?" she asked. Well, after all, if this project came off. I'd be in a position to give Tad all the help he needed, wouldn't I? I nodded. "O.K. But I wish you'd tell me -- " Her eyes danced impishly as she shook her head. the Inland Sea and booked a room. Within a week I had a team of twenty men and the factory was in production. Most of the employees never saw Luanu, and only one -- Joe Parks, a scrawny little Earthborn engineer I had taken on as assistant manager -- knew that it was not I who had been the sole driving force behind the whole project. Luanu was renting a house facing an enclosed courtyard next to the factory, and she had had a doorway made to link this with the laboratory connected to the office, so that she had a separate entrance. The fact that the city was half-deserted had made it fairly easy for her to find a combination of buildings that suited her purpose so well. Consignments of gelzek cabinets began to pour into the unloading bay by the truckload. Thousands of coils of thin insulated wire in various thicknesses began to fill the storage racks we had erected, together with uncounted varieties of transistors and other small parts. Several times, Joe Parks asked me what the gelzek was for. Always, I evaded a direct answer, I told him it was highly secret, and he seemed a little upset by my failure to take him into full confidence. He suggested advance advertising and I said I had the matter in hand. "Which agency is handling the account?" he asked. I had to say something. "Pavo City Advertising Incorporated." "There's no such firm in town." He stepped back a pace, looking at me with a new wisdom. "Say -- mind if I ask you something?" "Go ahead." "Do you know what you're doing?" "What do you mean?" "Look. I like working for you, Al. But I can't work for a guy who doesn't know what the hell he's doing. Gelzeks! I tell my friends we're making gelzeks, and they say to me: 'What's a gelzek?' And then I've got to tell them I don't know. Do you know?" I stood up, walked around my desk and put a hand on his shoulder. "Joe, before I tell you, I want you to come with me." I took him out into the enclosed courtyard and pressed the buzzer on Luanu's front door. The door slid open almost at once. "Come in, Al," she called from within. I led Joe into the large room on the left. The broad tables were littered with delicate apparatus, and Luanu, in a plastic coverall, was busy working on some intricate, shimmering device with a thin electric soldering iron. When she saw I was not alone, she stood up, shaking back her hair with a toss of her head. "Joe," I said, "I'd like you to meet -- " "Call me Luanu," she said, and her smile seemed to dispel Joe's irritation instantaneously. "Joe wanted to know what a gelzek is for," I explained. "Of course," she said. "That is perfectly natural. You can go back to the office if you like, Al. I'll explain things to Joe." I went back to the office and sat looking at the latest batch of invoices for gelzek chassis, gelzek cabinets, gelzek infinitely variable transformers, and gelzek hyper synchronized vector analyzers. Maybe Joe would find out a bit about what they were for. He was gone half an hour. When he came back he had a slightly dazed expression, but somehow he looked younger and more carefree. "Marvelous girl," he said, his eyes shining. "I had no idea." "Did she explain what the gelzek was for?" I asked guardedly. "Eh? Oh. I meant to ask her that." Suddenly he shrugged his shoulders. "Still, what does it matter? She knows what she's doing." "Sure, Joe. She knows." A bout the middle of the afternoon Luanu came into my office. " AI ! Tve finished it!" She put a glittering mass of coiled crystalline tubes and wires and transistors and delicate gears on my desk. "What is it?" I asked, "You might call it the gelzek's heart, or its brain," she said proudly. "You know, Al, that's the first thing I've ever really finished." I looked at her with my jaw swinging loose on its hinges. "It's true," she said. "I'm always starting things, but this is the fii'st one I've really finished. Wait a few minutes until I assemble the compensator and I'll show you how it works." She ran lightly out of the office, leaving me sitting staring at the thing on the desk. I was still looking at it five minutes later when Joe burst in. "Say," he panted, "there's a strange ship out on the landing field." "Probably some new transport line," I replied. "Not this thing. It's -- different' I didn't like the way he said it. I went with him to the open door and looked across the field. The machine out there was certainly different. Completely, utterly unlike any aircraft or spacecraft I'd ever seen -- and craft built for special purposes can take some strange shapes. This thing was about fifty or sixty feet long, bluntly rounded, finned, fish-shaped, blue, with an eerie shimmer about it that gave it the uncanny effect of being unreal, as if surrounded by some kind of field. There was a man near it -- or was it some form of gigantic robot? Humanoid shape, but from this distance he looked about ten feet tall, unless something had gone radically wrong with my sense of perspective. He was dressed in skintight blue stuff that looked like a film of metal, with a sort of haversack on his back. He reached over his shoulder and touched this, and he was flying. Just like that. No visible jets or air foils -- nothing but that metal pack arrangement on his back. Yet he flew through the air, skimming toward us easily and swiftly. Joe was making strangled, gurgling noises. I tried to say something, but the words did not come. A moment later, the fantastic figure had landed lightly just outside the building. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. The fellow ivas about ten feet tall. He looked down at me with huge emerald eyes that seemed shockingly familiar, though I couldn't think why. "You are AI Sandry." He didn't ask me. He told me. "That's -- that's right," I said. He made a sweeping movement with his arm. "Inside." We went inside. Without any argument. Don't ask me why. 'The guy was just like that. Anyway, have you ever tried arguing with a man ten feet high? Joe looked at me furtively. "I'll -- er -- see to the unloading," he said, and before I could stop him he was gone. I sat down behind my desk. "Take a seat," I invited. T he stranger lifted the heavy electric typewriter off the table with one hand, putting it on top of a filing cabinet as if it had been a hat. He sat on the table, his feet squarely on the floor. "Where is Luanu?" His eyes seemed to see inside my head the way Luanu's did sometimes, and it Avas then that I realized why they looked familiar. "I don't know," I said. His eyes took on a void, fixed look as though he were staring at something I couldn't see. He sat like that for some seconds, then seemed to relax. "What are you making here ?" he asked. If anyone else had asked me that, I would have had a reasonable answer. But not to this fellow. He just looked at me while I tried to say something. Then he leaned over and picked up the device Luanu had left on the desk. He glanced at it, then stowed it into a kind of satchel at his side, his eyes holding mine. He reached over to the filing cabinet where we kept the drawings and pulled gently at the drawer, which was locked. He pulled a little harder. Part of the lock spanged off the ceiling and rattled across the floor. He pulled the drawer all the way out of the cabinet, put it on the table and riffled quickly through the drawings. Some -- the ones on which Luanu had shown detailed connections -- he took out, glanced at, and stuffed into his satchel. He looked at each drawing for no more than a second, yet I had the feeling he understood them at once. The whole thing took a matter of seconds. When he had finished, he looked at me with those great catlike eyes. "I am Kordru, of Vorand," he said. "Unfortunate if Luanu has disturbed you. Our children are sometimes irresponsible." "Children?" I found my voice creaking like a rusty hinge. "You call Luanu a child?" "Of course. One day she will be almost as tall as I am. And, I hope, as mature." At this momt Luanu came in, her eyes wide. She stopped when she saw Kordru. It was the first and only time I ever saw her poise shattered. Kordru didn't say anything to her, but he got his meaning across. He rose to his feet, his face stem and commanding, but with the faintest trace of amusement flickering in his eyes. Luanu turned to me. "I must apologize, Al. My father is taking me home." The giant took her hand and led her to the door. She looked back at me over her shoulder. "It's been fun, Al, hasn't it?" And then they were gone. Fun? With all those bills I owed for parts of -- of gelzeks? And that's something I still haven't found out. It is said that when Arthur Dehon Little sought # in New England to obtain the American rights to the Cross  Bevan viscose process about # years ago, he was asked: 'Do you mean to say. Dr. Little, that man can ever produce fibers as good as those God has provided us?" according to Industrial Research, a management-oriented magazine that covers # fields, which points out that the viscose process is the basis Challenged by the general lack of technological vision. Dr. Little devoted much of his life to preaching industry's need for research. He wrote extensively about scientists -- the Fifth Estate, he called them: "those having the simplicity to wonder, the ability to question, the power to generalize, the capacity to apply." The experience of World War II gave the final impetus to industry's gradual conversion to the research doctrine until today, when it is a brave board chairman who does not report some kind of research effort to his stockholders. "Research has meant the difference between growth and stagnation so that # cents out of every Minnesota Mining sales dollar now comes from products developed by research," says #-M president Herbert P. research-based companies, which are offering products, processes and services that would surely have caused theological chaos scarcely more than half a century ago. What man cannot do has become so much less spent on research next year -- and Dr. Raymond H. Ewell, formerly of the National Science Foundation, has calculated that research , money yields an annual average of # to # over a #-year period. Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl E very now and then some writer produces a story which can be regarded as a definitive work. Heinlein did that with Universe, so exploring the possibilities of a multi-generation spaceship that that particular story need never be written again. T. L. Sherred did it for the rear-view time scanner in E for Effort, Huxley for the antlike, automated future in Brave Neiv World, There have been many stories written since on each of these subjects, some of them quite good, many of them fun, but they really have said nothing new about their themes. Nothing has been left by Heinlein, Sherred and Huxley to say. In The Falling Torch (Pyramid), Algis Budrys may have given us another such definitive story. Earth has been enslaved by invaders from another star's planets. They are human enough, barring a faint sallowness of complexion, but they aren't Earthmen and their total victory has driven Earth's government into exile, from whence they mount a feeble, reckless but successful underground attack which ultimately liberates the planet. This is the story : The government in exile, the underground, the successful revolution. It happens that Budrys comes to this theme with a vast head start over his colleagues. His father is a Free Lithuanian consul and Budrys himself has lived in the United States since early childhood on a diplomatic passport. Certainly this has been a help to him, but it doesn't account for the book's excellence. ment is a creation of characterization : The Prime Minister who is a master chef eight hours a day; the Secretary of Defense who sells insurance; the exiled President Wi reman who rules them all on paper, yet lives in relative squalor. He must. Budrys tells us why : "Even Prime Ministers could find ordinary work and bring no tarnish to the bright memory of Earth's freedom, but... the President could not. The rest of them could admit in public that Earth was no longer there, but someone had to preserve the fiction -- someone had to embody the legal fable that the Government in Exile still represented the people -- and Wireman was the man." When the chosen agent of the exiles lands on Earth he meets an active though feeble underground. We find it invested with the same scrupulously precise rightness. Perhaps some of it shows the mark of For Whom the Bell Tolls: much of it may have come from the stories of the Lithuanian forest fighters. No matter. The bulk of it is Budrys. Budrys shows us the great law of politics: No one makes weakness a gift of strength. He lets us perceive the barbs in the tempting bait other powers offer Earth's underground; he opens up the motives of the partisan fighters, and shows us that they cancel out. What is left? The protagonist. He is that invention of recent science fiction, a man who sees what must be done and does it, who comes within reach of a success and grasps it. He is a realized man. And The Falling Torch is a realized book. And yet there is this one thing. As a book. The Falling Torch earns high marks. As a science fiction book, it has the serious defect of hardly being science fiction. Change names and it becomes a story of modern Lithuania, of World War II France -- of any occupied country anywhere. This should not keep anyone from enjoying The Falling Torch; the book is a winner. But one can't help feeling that it is running on the wrong track. F or contrast, what about C. P. Snow's The Search (Scribner's) or Pearl S. Buck's Command the Morning (John Day) ? If we take for a rule that a science fiction story must contain some element of extrapolation, some one thing that could be true but isn't, then neither of them qualifies as science fiction. Yet surely they are fiction about science, as Budrys's book just as surely is not. Sir Charles Snow first wrote The Search twenty-five years ago. This new, rewritten edition, he says in a preface, is published to help bridge the gap between Technical Man and Lay Man. "It is very stupid to attempt to make everybody into technologists, but it is essential that everybody, including the technologists themselves, should understand something of the intellectual and human meaning of what the technologists are about." It is in a way endearing of Sir Charles to offer an excuse for writing a book ; most writers merely bang them out. But perhaps it is not an excuse. The gap yawns between the man in the white collar and the man in the laboratory smock, and a bridge is necessary. The Search does not span the void. Snow's hero, Arthur Miles, is quite believable and empathy evoking as a scientist and as a man. The science in the book, and there is a great deal of it, is technical enough to be exciting and cleverly presented enough to be entirely digestible. (It is a bit of a wrench that at one point Sir Charles gives the formula for sodium bromide as KBr. Slips happen ; Sir Charles was a good chemist before he became an even better writer.) B ut Arthur Miles is a scientist only so long as he is very successful at it, and then for just the few extra months after a disaster that it takes him to find some other source of income. (He marries it.) The change in his character from bright young zealot to cynic is depicted with complete skill. The book is a good book. But it is not the book we were promised in the preface. We have been offered a portrait; what we find is an expose. Miss Buck's book does not give us even an expose. This is fiction, but it is also at bottom fact, or is supposed to be, for if the names of the characters have been changed (Szilard becoming Szigny, Slotin becoming Feldman, Oppenheimer becoming, probably, Burton Hall), the work they are all doing is the manufacture of the atomic bomb. Command the Morning is probably the most glandular interpretation of the complicated motives of the bomb inventors ever to see print anywhere. They are supposed to be the brightest humans alive, but they talk and act like boobs. What is most interesting here about these two books, though, is not whether they are good or bad, but what keeps them outside the category "science fiction" while The Falling Torch must be admitted. Perhaps we should be liberal and call them all science fiction -- of a sort. But that sort is only one of the varieties of the science fiction experience, and not the transcendental one which lifts us away from here and now -- not to escape our lives, but to see them more clearly. fiction is well exemplified in two new novels and a reprint. The reprint is Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (Signet), which not only gives us as luminous a portrait of the technologist as Sir Charles Snow's but provides the technologist team with a dominating problem -- the solution to which raises a larger problem still. Fred Hoyle, of course, is the English astronomer whose Steady State Hypothesis has aroused such comment in the scientific world -- much of it in the form of shrill, agonized screams. His thesis is that there was no "primordial ultimate atom" which in bursting generated the atoms and the galaxies we know. Instead, says Hoyle, old matter dies into energy and new matter is constantly born from energy; the universe is in a steady state where withdrawals continually balance deposits, so that what the stars burn up is regenerated in new gas clouds forming between the galaxies. In The Black Cloud one such cloud invades the Solar System. What it is, and what Man does about it, is not merely an exciting story ; it is also a vehicle in which a man with fresh and important ideas can find a suitable pulpit from which to deliver them. In Hoyle's newer novel, Ossian's Ride (Harper), we have something quite different. In Ireland a mighty new technical power has appeared. Great cities are built, of materials that have never before been seen. It is a wonder to the world, and naturally the world does its best to solve the mystery. In Dublin, now a very Lisbon for spies and plots, the hero of Ossian's Ride begins a Hitchcock journey across bogs, up mountains and through storm-tossed seas to a mysterious island where all the answers are. This is fine cloak-and-dagger ; it has plausible and exciting characters and, above all, an informed foundation of fact. It is not only technical fact, either, for Hoyle demonstrates that he knows a great deal about Ireland, about intrigue and about human nature. Only in such faintly prissy literary conventions as the I set down the true story so that the world may judge frame (present in Tho Black Cloud and retained in Ossian's Ride) does Hoyle display his academic disposition. Neither use of the frame serves any purpose, but neither matters very much; these are good books all the way through. scientist; he is a science fiction writer and one of the best. Still, he does have a degree in physics and, like most of the better writers in the field, has made it his business to keep informed of what is going on in the area of science. His newest novel. The Enemy Stars (Lippincott) , shows why this is worth while. Matter transmitters operate amost instantaneously all over the Galaxy, says Anderson, but for the matter to be tiansmitted, it must be received. This requires a receiver. This requires a ship. And ships cannot exceed the speed of light -- Einstein has seen to that. Therefore great rockets are sent out on hundred-year journeys, their principal cai'go a matter transmitter, their crews a constant changing succession of thirty-day conscripts. It is dull aboard a star rocket, but it is bearable ; once the thirty days are up, the old crew matter-transmits home, the new crew aboard. Except once. For our crew has an accident. The matter transmitter is destroyed. All at once the four men are marooned. The only possible salvation lies in the repair of the matter transmitter, and that seems impossible. Is impossible, though it would hardly be fair here to discuss the rabbits Anderson pulls out of his hat to give the story an ending. It is a perfectly splendid science fiction dilemma, and all its wonders are ingenious and enjoyable. Allow Anderson his matter transmitter and the rest of the story can be defended against any attack. Unfortunately the plot is only eenie meenie minie moe, who the heck is next to go? But for setting and theme the story has all that a proper science fiction story should. I N Encounter (Avalon), J. Hunter Holly gives us a mind-eating alien named Ezekiel (he saw a Wheel)' who is as vulnerable as Achilles. His heel is cats. Bantam has just reissued Jer Sohl's Point Ultimate (Rinehart) , which concerns a tight-fisted tyranny governing Earth, and a freedom revolt sparked by a Martian colony. It lacks very little of being a first-class science fiction adventure. The little it lacks is a single fleshand-blood human character. In Starhaven (Ace), Ivar Jorgensen offers a routine but fast picture of an outlaw planet. The other half of the double volume is Edmond Hamilton's The Sun Smasher, concerning the last of the galactic emperors and the weapon that can restore to him his throne. Voodoo Pkmet and Plague Ship (Ace) are both by Andrew North, and both are former Gnome Press juveniles. As juveniles they were fine. As presumptive adult fare, they still are juveniles. Brian Aldiss is perhaps the most promising new science fiction writer on the horizon, as anyone can plainly see by reading No Time Like Tomorrow (Signet), a collection of half a dozen very good stories and no very bad ones. His great virtue is the selection of the right word or phrase ; the defect of his virtue is that sometimes his precision becomes precious. Aldiss is not afraid to tackle new and difficult themes, either. But his first novel, Vanguard from Alpha (Ace) is a spy-andcounterspy exercise which unfortunately gives his welldrawn characters no problem more challenging than a hit on the head. It too is a double volume, the other being The Changeling Worlds, by Kenneth Bulmer, concerning a aires whose big problem is that -- passengers will please fasten seat belts -- they don't know where babies come from. Bulmer makes this more plausible than you would think by hard work and good writing, but how plausible can it be made? Alan E. Nourse and J. A. Meyer give us a dictatorship which needs overthrowing in The Invaders Are Coming (Ace), and in spite of everything find freshness and excitement in the telling. Probably most readers will have guessed page #'s big secret no later than the second paragraph of page #, but only because Nourse and Meyer play fair with their readers by using words exactly. P hilip K. dick is an adventurous sort of byline for the science fiction reader, because he never knows what he will get. In Dick's first novel. Solar Lottery, which Ace has just reissued, he gave us a complicated and quite unsatisfying picture puzzle of an Earth governed by some sort of quiz-show device for selecting a ruler. It was perhaps even more complex than van Vogt. His newest book is Time Out of Joint (Lippincott) -- "oh, cursed spite," says Hamlet, finishing the quotation, "that ever I was born to set it right." But Dick's hero does not set it right. He gets less use out of more power than any science fiction hero of recent years. This is a most uneven book. There is a masterful opening in which Dick supplies the reader, with skill and economy, just the right hints as to what the surprises will be. Then there is some adroit weaving of the threads, and then... The book doesn't exactly end. It disintegrates. Lippincott, for reasons best known to Lippincott, has chosen to hide the fact that this is science fiction by labeling it "A Novel of Menace." Well, so is Moby Dick. But Time Out of Joint is science fiction, all right, and fine of its kind in the first hundred-odd pages. Donald A. Wollheim has put together two more Ace anthologies. In The Hidden Planet, the motif is the planet Venus, and Oliver, McIntosh, del Rey, Weinbaum and Brackett give us their several views of what's happening under all those clouds. After a quarter of a century Weinbaum's The Lotus Eaters is still the best story in the book, but there aren't any bad ones. Wollheim's second anthology, The Macabre Reader, is horror-fantasy and, as Wollheim is a traditionalist, naturally includes Lovecraft, Smith, Wandrei and Howard. But it also has a fine scary Robert Bloch and a worrisome piece by that masterly Old Hand ( presently manipulating real estate and contemlating the cobwebs on his typewriter) , Thorp McClusky... There is also a novel by John C. Cooper, The Haunted Strangler (Ace), which is to become a movie starring Boris Karloff. Karloff can perhaps make credible this flight of idiocy involving a Mad London Doctor, but the printed page cannot. Friends of the family may like to know of a new anthology, The Fourth Galaxy Reader (Doubleday), and a new short story collection. Tomorrow Times Seven (Ballantine). As the anthology is edited by our editor, and the short stories are written by the undersigned, this column is forbidden to praise and unF our scientific classics are back in print. Mentor has just reissued Bertrand Rusprobably the first layman's guide to space-time, and (with scrupulous editing and revising by Felix Pirani) probably still the best. D. E. Smith's History of Mathematics (Dover) is in two fat, full volumes, the first a series of biographical sketches of some # mathematicians, the second an orderly narrative of the growth of mathematical thought. It omits nothing. Another Smith, Homer W., gives us again his famous Man and His Gods (Grosset), which shows us the origins of all human religions. Finally there is Wolfgang Kohler's The Mentality of Apes (Vintage). Science fiction readers have come across these experiments on chimpanzee minds in many stories. (In de Camp and Miller's Genus Homo, for example, the apes are testing the men!) Here is the original text, aft#r forty years still fresh and fascinating. In Soviet Space Science (Basic Books), Ari Shternfeld does not tell us any guarded secrets of the Russian rocket effort. Indeed, the book's only fault is the word "soviet" in the title, for it is nationless, worldwide science which is discussed here. Among its attractive features are a foreword and an epilogue by Willy Ley, who brings Shtemfeld up to date and comments on the book itself. a Thousand Suns (Harcourt. Brace), Robert Jungk interviewed nearly every nuclear physicist of any consequence. The result is as vivid as Pearl S. Buck's fictional treatment of the theme is flat. Jungk lets us understand Einstein's fears, sympathize with Oppenheimer's conflicts. Yet this book makes one claim so incredible that the whole work must be held to question. Jungk tells us, with no visible skepticism, that Hitler had no atomic weapon to destroy us with because Nazi scientists had too many moral scruples to make one. Think of the "experimental medicine" of the concentration camps, the systematic annihilation of Jews, Poles and Gypsies. It would seem to need more than a selfserving declaration from the parties involved to make such a thesis convincing. technical book for the lay reader is Hans Thirring's Energy for Man (Indiana University Press). Dr. Thirring assumes that his reader can understand English and can concentrate, and assumes nothing else. Although the book makes use of much shorthand notation and a certain minimum employment of math, everything is explained and defined -- once. It is necessary to keep your mind on it, but it is not necessary to be trained up to reading it. Dr. Thirring does that chore for you as you go along. What he also does is to explain his predictions by means of that useful old invention of logic, the reductio ad ahsurdum. Future events will take just this sort of shape, says Dr. Thirring, because, look, if they don't, then we find ourselves in this foolish contradiction. This is a solid, thoughtful, interesting job; and if there is any essential fact bearing on Man's prospects of future power generation that isn't here, you'll never miss it. Norman Lansdell's The Atom and the Energy Revolution (Philosophical Library), which covers somewhat similar ground, cannot help but suffer by comparison with Thirring. Few books could. Yet on its own terms Lansdell's book has much to tell us. As an Englishman, Lansdell is principally interested in the work now going on in the United Kingdom; and for a glimpse of what's happening at Calder Hall and Harwell -- which is to say what's happening anywhere in the free world on fusion power -- his book is very valuable. book asks us in its title Can Man Be Modified? (Basic Books), and he gives us an answer of sorts in the less than # pages of text that make up this slim, odd volume. Dr. Rostand is an experimental biologist of great fame (as well as being the son of the man who wrote Cyrano de Bergerac)  and we might hope for some stimulating and original information in this book. Unfortunately we would not be entirely gratified. For what is here is more a discussion of the philosophical implications of self-remaking than a glimpse of what that task might ultimately lead to. In The Earth Beneath the Sea (Johns Hopkins), Francis P. Sheppard tells us a great deal we never learned in school (if only because even the experts didn't know much of it until the past decade) about the three-quarters of the Earth's surface that lies under water. The book is often technical but never incomprehensible; and the author does not neglect such non-technical entries as his own eyewitness account of the great Hawaiian tsunami of #, or full directions for skindiving on a coral reef. Douglas Botting's Island of the Dragon's Blood (Wilfred Funk) is exploration and adventure on the island of Socotra, where Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden meet. It is a hot, dirty, pestilential place, and the very accuracy of Mr. Botting's reporting makes it appear unpleasant and dull. C. G. Jung ranks next to Adler and just under Freud in the pantheon of modern psychiatry. In World in Crisis (Mentor), Jung leaves the world within the mind to examine the problems of the world that our minds seem about to destroy... In The Calendar for the Modern Age (Thomas Nelson), Elisabeth Achelis argues for 'The World Calendar." The new system would make all quarters equal and insure that one's birthday would fall on the same day of the week each year; but it offers few other improvements. And the evidence IMiss Achelis summons up is sometimes queerly mystical and sometimes e,g., "In color we are told there are the primary colors -- red, blue, yellow and also white") quite wrong. T hose who have a morbid interest in witchcraft and diabolism will like A Pictorial Anthology of Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy (University Books), by Emile Grillot De Givry. This volume includes # quite horrible illustrations and many useful spells. To make a girl love you, for example, you need only touch her hand and mutter: "Bestarberto corrumpit viscera ejus mulieris." If you try it, let us know what happened. Every toivn has crime -- but especially a town that is traveling from star to starl died seven times, always in the blackness of the outer reaches, and Vm not alone, although there aren't very many of us, never were. It made sense. Interstellar was new and they wanted him on the ship because he was a trained observer. They wanted facts, not gibberish. But to ask a man to give up two years of his life -- well, that was asking a lot. Two years in a sardine can. Still, it had an appeal Keith Ellason knew he couldn't deny, a newsman's joy of the clean beat, a planetary system far afield, a closeup view of the universe, history in the making. Interstellar Chief Rexroad knocked the dottle from his pipe in a tray, sajdng, to let you have a leave of abscence, if you're interested." He knew Secretary Phipps from years of contacting, and now Phipps said, 'Tersonally, I don't want to see anybody else on the job. You've got a fine record in this sort of thing." Keith Ellason smiled, but just barely. "You should have called me for the first trip." Phipps nodded. "I wish we had had you on the Weblo# ." "Crewmen," Rexroad said, "make poor reporters." The Weblor I had taken off on the first trip to Antheon five years before with a thousand families, reached the planet with less than five hundred surviving colonists. Upon the return to Earth a year later, the crew's report of suffering and chaos during the year's outgoing voyage was twisted, distorted and fragmentary. Ellason remembered it well. The decision of Interstellar was that the colonists started a revolution far out in space, that it was fanned by the ignorance of Captain Sessions in dealing with such matters. "Space affects men in a peculiar way," Phipps said. "We have conquered the problem of small groups in space -- witness the discovery of Antheon, for example -- but when there are large groups, control is more difficult." "Sessions," Rexroad said, "was a bully. The trouble started at about the halfway point. It ended with passengers engaging in open warfare with each other and the crew. Sessions was lucky to escape with his life." "As I recall," Ellason said, "there was something about stunners." Phipps rubbed his chin. "No weapons were allowed on the ship, but you must remember the colonists were selected for their intelligence and resourcefulness. They utilized these attributes to set up weapon shops to arm themselves." "The second trip is history," Rexroad said. "And a puzzle." ship disappeared." "Yes. We gave control to the colonists." "Assuming no accident in space," Phipps said, "it was a wrong decision. They probably took over the ship." "And now," Ellason said, "you're going to try again." Rexroad said very gravely, "We've got the finest captain in Interplanetary. Harvey Branson. No doubt you've heard of him. He's spent his life in our own system, and he's handpicking his own crew. We have also raised prerequisites for applicants. We don't think anything is going to happen, but if it does, we want to get an impersonal, unprejudiced view. That's where you come in. You do the observing, the reporting. We'll evaluate it on your return." 'Tf I return," said Ellason. 'T suppose that's problematical," Phipps said, "but I think you will. Captain Branson and his fifty crewmen want to return as badly as you do." He grinned. "You can write that novel you're always talking about on your return trip on the Wehlor ." Being a Nilly is important, probably as important as running the ship, and I think it is this thought that keeps us IV e are. T he Weblor II had been built in space, as had its predecessor, the Weblor , at a tremendous cost. Basically, it was an instrument which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure of a crowded solar system. A gigantic, hollow spike, the ship would never land anywhere, but would circle Antheon as it circled Earth, shuttling its cargo and passengers to the promised land, the new frontier. A spaceborne metropolis, it would be the home for three thousand persons outward bound, only the crew on the return trip. It was equipped with every conceivable facility and comfort -- dining rooms, assembly hall, individual and family compartments, recreation areas, swimming pool, library, theater. Nothing had been overlooked. The captain's briefing room was crowded, the air was heavy with the breathing of so many men, and the ventilators could not quite clear the air of tobacco smoke that drifted aimlessly here and there before it was caught and whisked away. In the tradition of newspaperman and observer, Keith Ellason tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, pressing against a bulkhead, but Captain Branson's eyes sought his several times as Branson listened to final reports from his engineers, record keepers, fuel men, computermen, and all the rest. He grunted his approval or disapproval, made a suggestion here, a restriction there. There was no doubt that Branson was in charge, yet there was a human quality about him that Ellason liked. The captain's was a lean face, well tanned, and his eyes were chunks of blue. "Gentlemen," Branson said at last, as Ellason knew he would, "I want to introduce Keith Ellason, whose presence Interstellar has impressed upon us. On loan from Transworld, he will have an observer status." He introduced him to the others. All of them seemed friendly; Ellason thought it was a good staff. Branson detained him after the others had gone. "One thing, Mr. Ellason. To make it easier for you, I suggest you think of this journey strictly from the observer viewpoint. There will be no story for Transworld at the end." Ellason was startled. While he had considered the possibility, he had not dwelt on it. Now it loomed large in his mind. "I don't understand. Captain Branson. It seems to me -- " "Let me put it differently. Let me say that you will not understand why I say that until the journey ends." He smiled. "Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it." E llason left the captain's quarters with an odd taste in his mouth. Now why had Branson said that? Why hadn't Rexroad or Phipps said something, if it was important? He made himself comfortable in his seven-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle, which is to say he dropped on his bed, found it more comfortable than he thought it would be, put his arms behind his head, stared at the ceiling. Metal walls, no windows, one floor vent, one ceiling vent, and a solitary ceiling molding tubelight. This would be his home for a year, just as there were homes like it for three thousand others, except that the family rooms would be larger. His quarters were near the front of the spike near the officers' quarters. He felt rather than heard the dull rumble. It was a sound he knew would be with him for two years -- one year going and one year returning. He looked at his watch, picked up his notebook and made an entry. The ship right now would be slipping ever so slowly away from Earth. He got up. He'd have to go forward to the observation dome to see that. Last view of Earth for two years. The penetration of space by large groups is the coming out from under the traditions of thousands of years, and as these planet-orginated rules fall away, the floundering group seeks a new control, for they are humanity adrift, rudderless, for whom the stars are no longer bearings but nonexistent things, and values are altered if they are not shotvn the way. The theft of Carver Janssen's attache case occurred on the thirty-first day out. In Ellason's mind the incident, though insignificant from the standpoint of the ship as a whole, could very well be the cause of dissension later on. His notes covering it were therefore very thorough. Janssen's case contained vegetable and flower seeds -- thousands of them, according to the Captain's Bulletin, the ship's daily newsletter which went to all hands and passengers. In the Bulletin the captain appealed to the thief to return the case to Mr. Janssen. He said it was significant that all en route had passed stability tests, and that it was to the ship's discredit that someone with criminal tendencies should have been pexmitted aboard. Ellason had to smile at that. What did Captain Branson think of those colonists who killed each other on the Weblor I? They had passed stability tests too. This, then, was what happened when you took three thousand strangers and stuck them in a can for a year. son about it, the captain said, "Of course I realize it takes only a little thing like this to set things off. I know people get tired of seeing each other, playing the same tapes, looking at the stars from the observation dome, walking down the same corridors, reading the same books, eating the same meals, though God knows we try to vary it as much as we can. Space creates rough edges. But the point is, we know all this, and knowing it, we shouldn't let it happen. We've got to find that thief." "What would he want seeds for? Have you thought of that?" "Of course. They'd have real value on Antheon." Ellason sought out Carver Janssen. He was a middleaged man with a tired face and sad eyes. He said, "Now what am I going to Antheon for? I could only take along so much baggage and I threw out some comfort items to make room for the seeds. I'm a horticulturist, and Interstellar asked me to go along. But what use am I now? Where am I going to get seeds like those ? Do you know how long it took me to collect them? They're not ordinary seeds, Mr. Ellason." There was an appeal from Janssen in the next day's newsletter describing the seeds, telling of their value, and requesting their return in the interests of the Antheon colony and of humanity. On the thirty-fourth day a witness turned up who said he had seen a man emerging from Janssen's compartment with the black case. "I didn't think anything of it at the time," Jamieson Dievers said. Branson asked him to describe the man. "Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber mask that covered his head completely." "Didn't you think that was important?" Branson asked in an outraged voice. "A man wearing a red mask?" Dievers shrugged. "This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red mask -- or a blue or green one -- does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?" Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely discounted. "If it is true," Branson told Ellason, "the theft must be the work of a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's the psychotic." He snorted. "Red rubber mask ! I think I'll have Dievers put through psychiatry." Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant -- more than seven hundred men, women and children -- felt that the thief must surely live in Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, Avho had the compartment next to Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, "Surely a man wouldn't steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?" And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created. Seen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever watch ful and accusing. To men unused to it, sueh a sight numbs, eomjmesscs, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent. June Failright, the young wife of one of the passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it. She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of the ship. Ellason was present when a delegation from the Third Quadrant called on Captain Branson, demanding action. Branson remained seated behind his desk, unperturbed, saying, "I have no crewmen to spare for police duty." The delegation commenced speaking vehemently, to be quieted by Branson's raised hand. "I sympathize," Branson said, "but it is up to each quadrant to deal with its problems, whatever they may be. My job is to get us to Antheon." The group left in a surly mood. "You wonder at my reluctance, Mr, Ellason," Captain Branson said. "But suppose I assign the crew to patrol duties, the culprit isn't caught, and further incidents occur. What then ? It soon becomes the crew's fault. And soon the colonists will begin thinking these things might be the crew's doing in the "Yes," Ellason said, "but what if the intruder is a crewman?" "I know my men," Branson said flatly. "You could have a shakedown for the mask and the seed case." "Do you think it is a member of the crew?" Branson's eyes were bright. "No, I trust my men, I won't violate that trust." Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists? As a Nilly, I kneiv that space breeds hate. There is a seed of malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On the Weblor II it xvas ready for ripening. Raymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the theft of the belt. Captain Branson did not wait for the newsletter. Through the ship's speaker system, he reported that Palugger had a fortune in credits in the belt and had died of a severe beating. He said that since the incident occurred in the staff section of the ship, his crew would be forced to submit to a thorough inspection in an effort to find the mask, the seed case, the money and the man. "I will not countenance such an act by a crewman," Branson said. "If and when he is found, he will be severely dealt with. But he might not be a member of the crew. I am ordering an assembly of all passengers at nine tomorrow morning in the auditorium. I will speak to you all then." F aces were angry, tongues were sharp at the meeting, eyes suspicious and tempers short. Above it all was the overpowering presence of Captain Branson speaking to them. "It is not my desire to interfere in passenger affairs," he said. "Insofar as the ship is concerned, it is my duty to make certain no crewman is guilty. This I am doing. But my crew is not and cannot be a police force for you. It is up to you people to police and protect yourselves." "How can we protect ourselves without stunners?" one colonist called out. "Has Red Mask a gun?" Branson retorted. "It seems to me you have a better weapon than any gun." "What's that?" "This ship is only so wide, so long and so deep. If every inch is searched, you'll find your man. He has to be somewhere aboard." The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men in turn selected five others from his own group. Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked, everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was conducted. It took twenty hours. No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man. The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless. At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter and by Keith Ellason. We Nillys knoiv about hate and about violence. We know too that ivhere there is hate there is violence y and where there is violence there is death. D uring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He escaped. The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons. "Are you out of your minds?" Branson exclaimed, Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, "We want to set up a police force. Captain. We want stunners." "There's no law against it," Branson said, "but it's a rule of mine that no weapons are to be issued en route." "If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask' Tilbury said. "And I might have a murder on my conscience." Tilbury said, "We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill." They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in the corridors -- eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first time the passengers seemed relaxed. Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said. Yeah, let him see what happens now. Red Mask did. seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his retreating figure. Red Mask was seen again on the #th day, on the #th day, and the #th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to commit any crime. We've got him on the run, the colonists said. He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they said smugly. The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter. The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until the landing on Antheon. But on the #th day calamity sti'uck. Red Mask appropriated one of the stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two, put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and leaving disorder behind. Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded. "What does he want that stuff for?" Casey Stromberg, a passenger doctor, asked. "I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit -- but my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand." It was the same with others. "The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively insane." Many people said it. The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed. Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments, people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by without some new development, "Oh, yes, Mr. Ellason, we're going to get him," said Tilbury, now chief of police, cracking his knuckles, his eyes glowing at the thought. "We're bound to get him. We've got things worked out to the finest detail. He won't be able to get through our lingers now. Just let him make so much as a move." "And what will you do when you get him?" "Kill him," Tilbury said, licking his lips, his eyes glowing more fiercely than ever. "Without a trial?" "Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr, Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd let him live after all the things he's done, do you?" R ed mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman named Terryl Placer on the #st day. The criminal was carried to the assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew him. Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class. "Well, Critten," Branson roared at him, "what have you got to say for yourself?" "Go to hell," Critten said quietly. As if it were an afterthought, he spat at the captain. Branson looked as if he were going to kill the man himself right there and then. It was a long trial -- from the #th to the #st day -- and there didn't seem to be much doubt about the outcome, for Critten didn't help his own cause during any of it. Lemuel Tarper, who was appointed prosecutor, asked him, "What did you do with the loot, Critten?" Critten looked him square in the eye and said, "I threw it out one of the escape chutes. Does that answer your question?" "Threw it away?" Tarper and the crowd were incredulous. "Sure," Critten said. "You colonists got the easy life as passengers, just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you lazy bastards." The verdict was, of course, death. They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the #th day with blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew disposed of his body through a chute. It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks. Dying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if tVs arranged for beforehand, ivhich it ahvays is. T he Weblor II was only one day out of orbit vhen Captain Branson sent for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man. "Hello," Critten said, grinning from ear to ear. "I figured as much," Ellason said. "I've been doing a lot of thinking." "You're perhaps a little too good as an observer," Branson said. "Or maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when there were wars." "You were excellent," Ellason said. "Can't say I enjoyed the' role," said Critten, "but I think it saved lives." "Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness and boredom Weblor , so they had you trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?" Critten nodded. "When great numbers are being transported, they are apt to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the crew, only toward me." Branson smiled. "It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for the passengers." "To say nothing of me," Critten said. "And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all," Captain Branson put in. "Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked, they told me they'd use it on other ti'ips to Antheon." Ellason nodded. "No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously." "Probal)Iy," Critten said, "you are wondering about the execution." "Naturally." "We removed the charges before the guns were used." "And Carver Janssen's case?" "He'll get it back vrhen he's shuttled to Antheon. And all the other items will be returned. They're all tagged with their owner's names. Captain Branson will say they were found somewhere on the ship. You see, I was a liar." "How about that assault on June Failright?" Critten grinned again. "She played right into our hands. She ran out into the hall claiming I'd attacked her, which I did not. She was certainly amazed when the ship's physicians agreed with her. Of course Captain Branson told them to do that." "And the murder?" "Raymond Palugger died in the hospital all right, but he died from his illness on the operating table. We turned it into an advantage by making it look suspicious." Ellason brightened. "And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask everywhere and the colonists organized against him." "Gave them something to do," Branson said. "Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to rob her when she woke up." B ranson cleared his throat. "Ah, Ellason about that story. You understand you can't write it, don't you ?" Ellason said regretfully that he did understand. "The colonists will never know the truth," Branson went on. "There will be other ships outward bound." Critten sighed. "And I'll have to be caught again." Yes, we're anonymous, nameless, we Nillys, for that's what we call each other, and are a theme, with variations, in the endless stretches of deep space, objects of hatred and contempt, professional heels, dying once a trip when the time is ripe, antidote to boredom, and we'll ply our trade, our little tragedies, on a thousand ships bringing humanity to neiv worlds. "EL" -- electroluminescence -- is the next stage beyond incandescent and fluorescent light; made up of phosphor-plastic "sandwiches," EL allows extremely uniform and flexible lighting, promising walls of light, drapes of light, picture-frame TV, and safer X-raying. Already on the market is an EL night light -- a two-inch square panel that will burn a year for less than a penny's electricity -- and breakthroughs are expected to develop brighter phosphors, says Industrial Research. T he man wore gray pants, gray socks, gray shoes. His blouse was gray, his hair, his eyes, the color of his skin. I didnt have to ask his name. He looked at me and his eyes widened. "Ruby?" I nodded, ignoring the expression. It was one I had seen too often. One day, perSweet choice they gave me -- to make a living on Dispar, I had to be someone's murder proxy! haps, I might get used to it. One day. He ordered rye on rocks, double rye and not too many ice cubes. The liquor stung my throat as it went down. It was good rye. It had traveled well across space. Gray said, "Someone wants to kill me." "So?" I asked. "So now you know why I sent for you." He picked up his glass, the ice rattling as he lifted it to his mouth. "I don't want to die." "Who does?" The drink was free. I finished it and waited for him to say something. "It's a business matter, I think," he said. "You know how it is. I've done pretty well out here and anyone who does that makes enemies. Now one of them wants to kill me." "Do you know who?" "Someone called Orange." He shrugged at that. "I received notification of intent this morning, effective as from dawn tomorrow. The usual thing: either I leave Dispar or I get killed." He tried to smile and didn't quite make it. "A simple choice." "Then why not take it?" "Run away?" He looked past me, his imagination penetrating the walls and reaching to the lush, fertile lands at the foot of the Raging Hills. Meltin grew in those lands and meltin fetched a hundred solars an ounce, port of entry, Earth. It is never easy to run away from a fortune. Gray, apparently, was finding it impossible. The empty glass in my hand was a nuisance. I set it down. The bartender waited for Gray's nod before he refilled it. "So you don't want t# run," I said. "What do you want?" "I want you to act as proxy." He didn't look at me as he said it. "If you agree, you can file notification and take care of things for me." He hesitated. "I'll pay you well." "How well?" T he hesitation grew. Money and Gray were obviously closer than husband and wife. I waited. It is always an education to find out just how much a man values his existance. "Five thousand solars -- payable when my enemy has been eliminated." I swallowed my drink and headed toward the door. He caught my arm as I passed. "Ruby! For God's sake!" "What?" "How much do you want?" "Ten thousand solars now. Ten more when the job is finished." "That's robbery!" I jerked my arm away from his hand. "It's your skin." He bit his lip, thinking of all the money his life was going to cost him. Money he could earn in a few weeks' hard work at his concession. His eyes drifted over my face. "Acid ! My client nearly lost out that time. Well?" His fingers trembled as they counted out the money. They were moist when they clutched my hand. "Ruby! You'll make sure?" The money went into my pocket. 'T'll do my best." "Of course you will." He seemed to want convincing. "Look, ril hole up somewhere until it's over. The Terra Hotel. You know it?" "No, but I'll find it." "I'll wait there for your call." He scowled at his glass, more relaxed now that the thing was done. "A hell of a situation," he complained. "A thing like this could never happen on Earth." He didn't have to remind me that we weren't on Earth. T he office of the Dispar General was on the edge of the spaceport, down where the fat-bellied freighters lifted for home, their holds stuffed with meltin for an insatiable market. Meltin couldn't exactly cure cancer, but it could arrest it. It could give immunity as well, and with something like over four billion people clamoring for immunity, it was in high demand. There wasn't a day, seemingly, when freighters didn't drop down to the spaceport, their holds stuffed with luxury goods. But it was a rare day when one of those same ships headed back to Earth. On the face of it the problem was a simple one : merely collect enough meltin to satisfy the demand. But there were snags. One of them stared at me as I entered the office. He was a native Disparian, seven feet tall, lithe, dressed in a simple toga-type garment. His eyes were like jewels. "You want?" He questioned. "My name is Ruby. I am acting as proxy for a man named Gray who has received notification of intent from someone called Orange. I wish to register myself as that proxy." From a desk behind the counter a form lifted itself into the air and fluttered down before me. A stylo thrust itself into my hand. I wasn't startled; it had happened to me before. But I was impressed. "Fill out the document. Sign it and place the imprints of the balls of both your thumbs on the sheet." The Disparian was bored. "You know what to do; this is not the first time you have done it." His voice had no tone. It would have sounded the same in empty space. Telepaths have no need to communicate by sound vibration, and each and every Disparian was more than just a telepath. It was their mental powers -- their psi faculties, to quote the long-hairs -- that made them absolute masters of their world. I filled in the form, signed it, placed the balls of both thumbs on the sensitized surface of the form. "You will notify the person concerned that I am official proxy for Gray?" "Yes." With a normal man I would have swapped gossip, tried to find out, maybe, just which Orange the would-be killer was, paid for his address, perhaps -- things like that. With a Disparian that was impossible. How can you pump an utterly cold and remote conception of justice? You can't. It would have been a waste of time to try. "Is there anything else?" He was polite, but distantly so. I had probably broken his communion with his fellows, or interrupted his game of telepathic patience, or whatever Disparians did for amusement. "Thank you, no." I walked out of the office, by choice a man now marked for death. I was Gray's proxy, which meant that Orange, whoever he was, had to kill me, not Gray. If he succeeded, then Gray was officially dead. He would lose his concession and could do as he liked about staying or going home. If, on the other hand, I killed Orange, then no one could file intent against Gray for another three months. It was a hell of a way to earn a living. warehouses, depositories, houses and bars, hotels and flop-joints. Add the big stores, the yeast and algae plants, the supply sheds. Cut it with a few roads, hang out a few lights, install a few phone booths. Squeeze too many people into too small an area. Dispar! I'd hated it for five years. I'd landed with high hopes and no money and had run smack up against some of the uglier facts of life. I'd almost starved before I cottoned on. Almost ran into debt, which was worse. Now, five years later, I had a face I hated to look at, a reputation no normal man should be proud of. But I was beating the system. The bank was open all night. I entered, ignored the two guards and deposited five of the ten thousand Gray had given me. The teller was a serf, the silver of his collar bright against the jet of his skin. He fingered my money with loving hands. "Doing well, Mr. Ruby?" "Doing well, Mr. Black." He stamped my passbook and handed it back, envy in his eyes. He was surrounded by money and couldn't touch a minim of it. He worked for bed, board and a reduction of his debt. He would probably die long before he had cleared it. A man brushed past me as I left the bank. The lights shone on puce clothing, puce shoes, puce skin. He looked at me with puce eyes. Puce wasn't orange, so it didn't worry me. I dropped into a phone booth and checked on Orange. Fifty-two were listed, any of which could be the one gunning for Gray. Gunning for me, rather, or would be at dawn. I looked outside the booth. Puce was waiting near a corner. I stepped out of the booth and held the door open, fumbling in my pocket as if for a coin. I looked helplessly at him. "Change," I said. "Could you oblige?" He came forward, and as he came within range, I released my hold of the door and pushed him into the booth. I leaned my weight against the door, found a metal wedge in my pocket and thrust it home. He beat against the panel, yelled something I couldn't hear. I smiled at him and shook my head. As I walked away he was desperately using the phone. I had no time to waste -- Puce had already fingered me. Come dawn, Orange would know just where to find me, would probably be waiting until the sun lifted so as to strike before I could protect myself. At the Bureau I checked the residents' ledger. Of the fifty-two Oranges, I concentrated only on those who had recently landed and coukl have had money enough to hire lookouts, and those who had been around long enough to have learned the ropes and maybe made friends. I eliminated about half the number and felt lucky at that. It could have been a White who was after Gray; there were six hundred and thirty of them. Or Black, seven hundred and fifty-eight. Orange, fortunately for me, was not a popular color. It was near dawn when I left the Bureau and I had to move fast. The supply clerk, a Brown, fingered his silver collar and looked wistfully at the Raging Hills in the distance. "Supplies for a seven-day trip? You going to try a little poaching. Ruby?" "You know better than that," I said. "I know, but do you?" He studied me. "I guess you do. Well, what do you want? A car?" "I'll walk." Cars cost money to hire and could be seen for a mile. "Pack, rations, water, compass, medical kit, bush outiit, emergency radio -- " "No radio." "It's the law." He added it to the heap of supplies. "You get into trouble, you press the button and they come out after you." "And charge you both arms and a leg." "Practically," he admitted. "But it could mean your life." His fingers strayed to his collar. "Such as it is." "I'll take the radio. And a knife." He added an eighteen-inch bush knife to the heap. He looked at me. He was no fool. "A gun?" "How much?" "Five thousand." "No." Five thousand for a single shot was too much. "How much do I owe?" "Two for the hire and five for the deposit." He counted out the money I passed to him. "Good luck, Ruby." "Thanks." It was almost dawn. Time was running out. T he sun lifted before I was a furlong from town. Crouching beneath a spined bush, I watched my backtrail, wondering if Orange would be dumb enough to come straight out after me. He wasn't that dumb. I waited an hour and then had to move. I headed for the Raging Hills. Nowhere in the Galaxy is there undergrowth like there is on Dispar. Every bush is covered with spines, each blade of grass is a tiny sword, the very leaves are jagged knives. Silicon, of course. Life on Dispar has evolved around it as we evolved around carbon. And there is wild life, too -- nasty wild life. I stepped from the narrow path made by some creature and let a shimmering thing of scales and claws lumber pa.st. It ignored me, but the insects didn't. A group of them tried to bore a hole through my bush outfit. I brushed them off with a gloved hand and then stepped out again, trying not to let the twitching between my shoulder blades get the better of me. Orange couldn't be that close. I wondered about Orange as I forced my way through the undergrowth. A lot depended on just how experienced he was. An amateur would hesitate, perhaps talk in order to bolster up his courage. A personal enemy would want to gloat. More important, a personal enemy would have no real satisfacmight do it, but his motivations wouldn't be the same. A glinting web of spun glass dissolved beneath the slash of my bush knife. I took no trouble to hide my ti-ail. I wanted Orange to follow me. Later, when I had reached the correct spot, then I would set my snare. A car drifted past overhead, the phutt -- phutt -- phutt of its rotors sounding a continent away. I stared up at it enviously. Some concessionaire, probably, going out to his leasehold, there to spend a few days collecting meltin, and earning, in those few days, more money than I saw in months. The car vanished in the distance toward the Raging Hills. The sound of the rotors faded and I hacked at the undergrowth with vicious exasperation. Damn Dispar! And damn the Disparians for making life what it was ! It took most of two days to get where I was going. Some rocket ship had blasted a clearing in the vegetation way back before the spaceport had been built, and the local shrubbery had only just managed to encroach on the fused area. I took trouble to leave no traces as I crossed the clearing, and when I finally squatted down, it would have taken more than an expert to guess at my presence. That done, I had nothing more to do but wait. I waited three days. than I had guessed. He had employed tails, which was the reason I had left the city. Normally I would have met him on my own ground, but with paid shadows reporting my every move, the dice were loaded against me. So I had left the city, hoping that he would come after me. It had been a calculated risk. He could have waited until my supplies ran out, then ambushed me on my return. That would have been the smart thing to have done. Instead he had lost patience and, with luck, it would cost him his life. But it almost cost me mine. I'd made a hideout beneath a spined bush, scooping a shallow hole and lying in it so that I blended with the vegetation. From my position I could see every inch of the clearing, the trail I had followed being directly opposite to me. I wasn't too worried at night. Not even the beasts could move around without sounding as if they'd run into a chandelier. But the days were something else. Lying in one position hour after hour, a man has to brush off the "borers, open his mask to take a drink or to eat, ease cramped muscles, a dozen little moves. I'm pretty good at emulating a robot, but I have my limit. I'd opened a ration pack, eaten, taken a drink of water and had limbered up a little. I was just crawling back into my hole when a shot blasted the grdund before me. I should have had my head incinerated by the blast, but Orange had been just a shade too eager. The shot missed me, and before the echoes had died away, I was twenty yards distant, rolling with a sound of broken glass. A second shot followed me. A third. Then I was in a crouch, my eyes searching the undergrowth. It was quiet, too quiet. The tinkling and brittle snapping had died with the echo of the shots. From far away a car sent down a murmuring hum, but in the undergrowth life seemed to have paused in frozen immobility. Then I heard it. Something lunged through the bush. A shot blasted toward it. There was a deep, hissing roar, a scream and then a final shot. The hissing died into a liquid gurgle which faded as the creature died. It had probably saved my life, but I was too busy to feel sorry for it. It was dead, but I wasn't sure about the gunner. I found Orange lying in a heap against the bole of a stunted tree. The animal was nearby, already thickly covered with scavenger beetles. I crept forward, bush knife blow, then dropped it as I came close enough for a good look. Orange was a woman. A said. "Why?" It was a reasonable question. As official proxy, it was my duty to kill or be killed. Instead I had picked her up, checked her for damage, found an ugly gash on one thigh and had injected her with the contents of my survival hypo. Given soon enough, the antibiotics would save her fi'om infection. "You're a woman." The excuse sounded lame. "I'm curious about why a woman should file intent to kill." "Anything against it?" "No. It's just unusual." "I know." She winced as she eased her thigh. "You think that a woman on Dispar can make out quite nicely in other ways. Maybe some can. I don't happen to be one of them." "You're not a killer either." "Anyone can squeeze a trigger." She didn't look at me. "Well, when are you going to get it over?" She had courage. She had other things too -- I could sense her femininity even through a double layer of bush clothing. Her orangedyed skin, eyes and hair did nothing to spoil ' her prettithing I didn't want to do. When the beast had attacked, it had scattered her equipment and supplies. I went back to my hideout and found what I'd been afraid of : her first shot had missed my head, but had incinerated my gear. I returned to where she lay and made a quick check. A canteen of water had escaped damage; a single ration was still edible. Aside from that we had nothing but the emergency; radios hooked to our belts. I picked up her rifle and examined it. The magazine was empty. "Five shots at five thousand a shot," I said. "Add rental of other stuff, deposit and the rest, and it comes out to about fifty thousand." "So?" "That's a lot of money for a girl who only landed a couple of weeks ago. Who put you up to it. Orange?" "You're smart. Why ask me?" "Because I think that you are being used for a pigeon." I sat down beside her. "I checked the residents' ledger at the Bureau. I've got a good memory, but I discounted you as the killer. You just didn't fit, a woman, fresh on Dis-par, the rest of it. Why did you want to kill Gray?" "For his concession." "Reason enough. In fact, it's the only reason anyone would file intent to kill -- the only logical reason, that is. Who briefed you. Orange?" "No one." "But you knew about proxies ? You knew that I'd agreed to take Gray's place?" I leaned back, the canteen in my hand. "You haven't been on Dispar long enough to learn all you have picked up. How about coming clean, Orange ?" "Why should I? You're going to kill me anyway." "No, Orange, not me." I climbed to my feet. "I'll just walk away and leave you here. You've no food, no water, and you can't eat the local produce. You'll sit here for a while and maybe you'll try to make it back to town. You'll get panicky and thirsty and hungry. You'll be alone arid you'll get lost. You'll discover that you're dying and then you'll press the button on your radio. You know what happens then?" "A Disparian will come out for me." "That's right. And then you'll get a bill for services rendered and you'll have to pay it. If you can't, you'll be sold into bondage and wear a silver collar. Can you guess what your life would be like then. Orange?" I stepped away from her. "No, I won't kill you. I don't have to." yards before she called to me. She was scared. "Did you mean that? About me being sold into slavery?" "Bondage? Yes." "It's the same thing." She frowned into the distance. "Ruby, why do they do it?" "It's their system, the Disparians'." "It's a lousy system." "It's the one we're stuck with." I slipped an arm around her shoulders and heaved her to her feet. "Let's get moving." "But you wanted to talk." "We can do that on the way back to town." She talked. Her story didn't surprise me -- I'd lost the capacity for surprise some time ago -- but it gave me time to think. But I wasn't surprised. Dispar grew meltin and Earth wanted it. Normally we would have stepped in and taken what we wanted, but this time we couldn't do that. Not when the natives could teleport themselves into the engine room of a spaceship and detonate it at will. Not when the enemy was a willof-the-wisp no one could fight, bribe, browbeat or cheat. If Earth wanted meltin, it had to get it on Disparian terms. And so the system. The lucky ones had concessions to collect meltin and grew rich. The others worked for the lucky ones or killed them and took over their concessions. Others made out by supplying food and supplies without which human life on Dispar was impossible. The Disparians had forced us to found a colony in which money was the keynote of survival. And they had done more. "You can't kill anyone without their permission," I explained. "When you land they do more than just give you a name and make you live up to it." I glanced at her. "Why orange?" "Why ruby?" She shrugged. "I knew I had to play along. Orange used to be my favorite color." "No more?" "What do you think?" She stumbled and I saved her from falling. She didn't thank me ; the necessity for that had long since passed. "Why do they do it?" "Make us wear colors? A whim, a law, a state of mind -- anything. There's a lot about the Disparians we don't know." "Like what happens if you kill someone without their permission ?" "No. That I do know about." It was something I didn't like to think of. "They read minds and there's no appeal. Stick to their rules and you're all right. Defy them and that's the end of you. A very unpleasant end it is too." "You've seen it?" "Yes." She didn't pursue the subject. She'd landed as we all land, full of high hopes and eager to get rich quick. The system had slapped her in the face as it does all of us. Dispar was no Eldorado, not unless you could get a concession. She didn't get a concession, but she did get an offer. "It sounded so simple -- These people would stake me and tell me exactly what I had to do." "Pull a trigger and kill a man." "Yes." If she flushed I couldn't know it, not with her dyed skin. "So maybe it was a little raw, but so what? It was the system, they said, kill or be killed, and no one would think it bad. Just pull a trigger and collect." "How much?" "Fifty thousand. I was to hand over the concession to the syndicate." "Naturally." I halted and gave her a drink of water. We'd eaten the ration long ago and the canteen was almost dry. With her damaged thigh we weren't making good progress. I wondered how she'd managed to find me. I asked. "They led me out and showed me about where you were and left me to do the job." It was a logical outcome of the system, many trying to do what one couldn't. And staying well within the regulations too ; I had no doubt of that. Each member of the syndicate would only do so much. One would watch me, another would supply her gear, others would lead her out into the underbrush. Orange was simply a chosen weapon, a finger to pull the trigger. She could have killed me easily, but something had prevented her aiming straight. She was no killer, no matter what she said. "Did they tell you why they picked a woman?" "I guessed. Even on Dispar a man thinks of a woman as being weaker than himself. And, as you said, a woman can get by without having to risk her neck." She stumbled again, and again I saved her. Beneath the dye were pale blotches. "And I am weaker than you." "Right now, at least." "It's my leg." She touched it and winced. Around us the undergrowth tinkled to the impact of a slight breeze. The sound was lonely, mournful. "Ruby." "Yes?" "VVe aren't going to make it, are we?" "We'll make it." She shook her head. "Alone you might have made it, not with me. I guess there's only one thing I can do." My hand caught hers as it reached for her belt. It felt soft and very helpless. I smiled into her eyes. "Not yours. Orange," I told her.' My finger pressed the button on my own radio. T he bill was a hundi'ed thousand, fifty for each of us. The Disparian who had come out and teleported us back to town was the twin brother to the one in the Dispar General's office. Or maybe he was the same one; I couldn't tell and it didn't make any difference. The bill was one hundred thousand, and because I had pressed my button, I had to pay it. One-third of my passage money back to Earth; twice as much as I owned on Dispar ; enough to make me wear a collar for the rest of my life. I didn't want to wear a collar for any time at all. It had been a quick rescue. One second we had been in the undergrowth. There had been a snap of displaced air and a Disparian had stood beside us. In less than a moment we had stood in the Dispar General's office. I doubted if my heart had beaten once during the trip. It had made up for it since. Fear is a wonderful spur. The prospect of a life of bondage had thrown my brain into top gear, oiled my tongue and sharpened my ideas. I had talked fast and logically and had won a little time. It was something I felt proud of. Gray wasn't impressed. "So you failed," he said. "Too bad." "I've run into a little trouble, but I haven't failed." "No?" "I'm still alive. The trouble is nothing that money won't take care of." "So you told me." He was casual. Why not? He wouldn't have to wear a collar. "The charge is a hundred thousand. Someone will have to pay it." "Not me." He sat up in his chair. "It has nothing to do with me. You should have killed the woman." "Woman?" I covered the distance between us in three strides. "How did you know it was a woman?" "You told me." "No, I didn't. All I told you was that the job was over and that I'd had to call for help." Suspicions became certainties. "It was a setup, wasn't it? You wanted to be safe and snug and thought up a scheme to protect yourself. Maybe all you concessionaires thought it up together -- it fits well enough. Find a pigeon. Have that pigeon send you notification of intent. Hire a proxy and let them fight it out. Either way you're safe. If your proxy wins, then you are safe for three more months. If the pigeon wins, then you've already arranged to have your forfeited concession handed back. Against what you earn collecting meltin, the cost was nothing." "Pipe dreams." "I think not." "Who cares what you think? You're just a hired killer and not such a good one at that. If you were, you would have killed the woman and not come whining to me." He was confident, too confident. I' looked around. The Terra Hotel was the ultimate in luxuj'y on Dispar. It took a mint to live there, another mint to live there in Gray's style. Gray had the arrogant confidence of wealth. He was one of the aristocrats of Dispar and now he was cracking the whip. "Look," I said reasonably. "To you a hundred thousand isn't much. Can't you let me have it and get this thing squared up?" A smart man would have paid, but Gray wasn't smart, just gieedy. He yawned and pointed toward the door. "On your way. Ruby." "How about the money?" "You can whistle for it." He had me and he knew it. Unless I paid my debt, I would be sold, and a bondsman couldn't file notification of intent. I couldn't harm him now or later. "So I'm disowned, is that it?" "That's it." He said what I'd wanted to hear. He'd canceled my standing as his proxy and he could never deny it. "Now get out before I have you thrown out." I crossed the room and opened the door. Orange stood just outside where she had been waiting. She carried a bush knife in her hand. I stepped back as she entered the room. "There he is." I pointed toward Gray. "I'm no longer his proxy. Kill him and get it over with." M oney breeds more than arrogance. Ten years earlier Gray would have had to rely on himself, but now he had money and he was soft. He cringed in his chair as Orange advanced, the big knife lifted above her head, the light reflecting from the wicked blade. Gray didn't know, couldn't know that she wouldn't kill him. There was nothing preventing her but her own nature, but he didn't know that. He gave a sound like a scream and dived for a desk. He turned, a gun in his hand. I could have smashed it from his hand, but there was no need. He had made me his official proxy, and until he officially resumed responsibility, he could no more kill Orange than she could kill him. But he tried. He held the gun with both hands and desperately fought to squeeze the trigger. He finally managed that, but by that time the muzzle was pointing at the ceiling. He blew a hole in the plaster. I took the gun from his hand. "Take it easy. No need for witnesses." "Save me!" He was shaking with fear. "I'm not your proxy. You disowned me, remember?" I winked at Orange. She waited, lowering the knife and running her thumb along the edge. In her way she was an artist. "This isn't Earth, Gray," I said. "Maybe you made a mistake in not remembering that. Sure, weVe got a strictly commercial society, but weVe got something else too. We've got the Disparians watching over us like a bunch of guardian angels." "Keep that woman away from me!" The knife seemed to fascinate Gray. He couldn't stop looking at it. "How long do you think a setup like this would last if men were free? Not long. Not when any man could take a gun and go hunting for meltin and wasn't too particular who he shot to get it. You have a nice, safe moneymaking system here, Gray, you and the other concessionaires. It's a pity that you couldn't be satisfied with taking a part instead of wanting it all." I could have told him more, but there was no need. He already knew the logic of the Disparians. Make a man your proxy and he is exactly that. The inability to kill or injure, instilled on landing, was replaced. A man was permitted to defend himself oi commit an official murder, but that was all. Gray had hred me as his proxy but, as yet, he hadn't made official notification of that fact. He vas vray out on a limb. "All right." He managed to look away from the knife. "What do you want?" "Money." He recovered some of his courage. "You're a fool, Ruby, a bigger one because you don't know it. Maybe I did fire you, but as far as the Disparians are concerned, you're still my proxy. If this woman kills me, then she's in trouble." "No. I've told her that I'm no longer your proxy. They can read her mind and prove that." "Then you'll be in trouble. Until you notify the Disparians, I can't protect myself." Orange lifted the knife. "Wait!" G ray was sweating. I could see the moisture on his forehead. "If you kill me, you'll be sorry. The setup here is based on fair play and logic. That means I have to be given a chance to defend myself or get someone to do it for me." "An intei-esting point." I nodded to Orange. She stepped closer to Gray. "Of us three, only two have the ability to kill. We could kill each other or Orange could kill me or I her. If she kills me, then she's in trouble because she knows that I'm no longer your proxy. If I kill her, the same. But she can kill you." "Then you get into trouble," said Gray savagely. "Do I have to remind you how unpleasant it will be?" "It won't be pleasant," I admitted. "But as far as you are concerned, the question is purely academic. By that time you'll be dead." He got the point. No matter what he said, I wasn't going to stop Orange from using that knife. He broke as the blade swung toward him. "All right," he said. "What do yOU want?" I blocked the swing of the knife with my arm, while Orange turned the edge just in time, and I got down to business. I wanted a hundred thousand to clear my debt, plus a double passage home. I would have asked for more but for the fact that I couldn't get it. Even as it was, he didn't like paying out. Orange wasn't too big, but I more than made up for her weight. In effect, I was demanding our combined weight in delivered meltin. "Wait a minute! How are you going to get away with this?" I knew what he meant. Orange had filed notification of intent and there was no time limit. One or the other had to be eliminated. "I've fixed that part of it." I waved to the communicator. "Just transfer that money." "But -- " "It's simple. Orange filed notification of intent. To wash it out. Orange must cease to exist. Well, Orange will cease to exist." "You'll kill her?" "In a way, yes." The communicator hummed just then and Gray became busy giving me lots of his easily earned money. Orange dropped the knife and came into my arms. It was the first time I had held her like that and it was good. "No regrets?" I smiled into her eyes. "None." "Not even -- ?" I touched my acid-burned face. "Not eveh." Her fingers were cool on my cheek. "Do you think it will work, Ruby?" "It will work." Old habits die hard and the Disparians were logical. When an Earthwoman married, she changed her name. Orange would legally die, her name erased from the Residents' Ledger and the notification of intent annulled. Gray would be back where he started a little poorer, but perhaps a lot wiser. And I would be the happiest man around. I touched Orange's hair. Maybe we would leave Dispar, maybe not. It was a good world if you had money. With the money we had, we could start a small business or deal in bondservants. Open a restaurant, maybe, or even study Disparian law. And Orange would look wonderful when her name and color were changed to Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for; (# additional per # issues foreign postage) # Issues  #  # Issues  #  # Issues  #  With your literally thousands of letters you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science-fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as youVe seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) Address. Zou( Statewon't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! 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The island was drowning -- if they failed to find some common ground, both of them were doomed. T hey said -- as they have said of so many frontiersmen just like him -- that there must have been a woman in his past, to make him what he was. And indeed there had, but she was no flesh-and-blood female. The name of his lady was Victoria, whom the Greeks called Nike and early confounded with the Pallas Athena, that sterile maiden. And at the age of thirty-four she had Calvin Mulloy most firmly in her grasp, for he had neither wife nor child, nor any close friend worth mentioning -- only his hungry dream for some great accomplishment. It had harried him to the stars, that dream of his. It had driven him to the position of top survey engineer on the new, raw planet of Mersey, still largely unexplored and unmapp. And it had pushed him, too, into foolishnesses like this latest one, building a sailplane out of scrap odds and ends around the Mersey Advance Base -- a sailplane which had just this moment been caught in a storm and cracked up on an island the size of a city backyard, between the banks of one of the mouths of the Adze River. The sailplane was gone the moment it hit. Actually it had come down just short of the island and floated quickly off, what was left of it, while Calvin was thrashing for the island with that inept stroke of his. He pulled himself up, gaping, onto the rocks, and, with the coolness of a logical man who has faced crises before, set himself immediately to taking stock of his situation. He was wet and winded, but since he was undrowned and on solid land in the semitropics, he dismissed that part of it from his mind. It had been full noon when he had been caught in the storm, and it could not be much more than minutes past that now, so swiftly had everything happened ; but the black, low clouds, racing across the sky, and the gusts of intermittent rain, cut visibility down around him. He stood up on his small island and leaned against the wind that blew in and up the river from the open gulf. On three sides he saw nothing but the fast-riding waves. On the fourth, though, shading his eyes against the occasional bursts of rain, he discerned a long, low, curving blackness that would be one of the river shores. There lay safety. He estimated its distance from him at less than a hundred and fifty yards. It was merely, he told himself, a matter of reaching it. tions, he would have settled down where he was and waited for rescue. He was not more than fifteen or twenty miles from the Advance Base, and in this storm they would waste no time waiting for him to come in, before starting out to search for him. No sailplane could survive in such a blow. Standing now, with the wind pushing at him and the rain stinging against his face and hands, he found time for a moment's wry humor at his own bad luck. On any civilized world, such a storm would have been charted and predieted, if not controlled entirely. Well, the more fool he, for venturing this far from Base. It was in his favor that this world of Mersey happened to be so Earthlike that the differences between the two planets were mostly unimportant. Unfortunately, it was the one unimportant difference that made his present position on the island a death trap. The gulf into which his river emptied was merely a twentieth the area of the Gulf of Mexico -- but in this section it was extremely shallow, having an overall average depth of around seventy-five feet. When one of these fiash storms formed suddenly out over its waters, the wind could either drain huge tidal areas around the mouths of the Adze, or else raise the river level within hours a matter of thirty feet. With the onshore wind whistling about his ears right now, it was only too obvious to Calvin that the river was rising. This rocky little bit sticking some twelve or fifteen feet above the waves could expect to be overwhelmed in the next few hours. He looked about him. The island was bare except for a few straggly bushes. He reached out for a shoot from a bush beside him. It came up easily from the thin layer of soil that overlaid the rocks, and the wind snatched it out of his hand. He saw it go skipping over the tops of the waves in the direction of the shore, until a wave-slope caught it and carried it into the next trough and out of sight. It at least, he thought, would reach the safety of the river bank. But it would take a thousand such slender stems, plaited into a raft, to do him any good; and there were not that many stems, and not that much time. Calvin turned and climbed in toward the center high point of the island. It was only a few steps over the damp soil and rocks, but when he stood upright on a little crown of rock and looked about him, it seemed that the island was smaller than ever, and might be drowned at any second by the wind-lashed waves. Moreover, there was nothing to be seen which offered him any more help or hope of escape. Even then, he was not moved to despair. He saw no way out, but this simply reinforced his conviction that the way out was hiding about him somewhere, and he must look that much harder for it. He was going to step down out of the full force of the wind, when he happened to notice a rounded object nestling in a little hollow of the rock below him, about a dozen or so feet away. H e went and stood over it, seeing that his first guess as to its nature had been correct. It was one of the intelligent traveling plants that wandered around the oceans of this world. It should have been at home in this situation. Evidently, however, it had made the mistake of coming ashore here to seed. It was now rooted in the soil of the island, facing death as surely as he if the wind or the weaves tore it from its own helplessly anchored roots. "Can you understand me?" he asked it. There was an odd sort of croaking from it, which seemed to shape itself into words, though the how of it remained baffling to the ear. It was a sort of supplemental telepathy at work, over and above the rough attempts to imitate human speech. Some of these intelligent plants they had got to know in this area could communicate with them in this fashion, though most could not. "I know you, man," said the plant. "I have seen your gathering." It was referring to the Advance Base, which had attracted a steady stream of the plant visitors at first. "Know any way to get ashore?" Calvin asked. "There is none," said the plant. "I can't see any, either." "There is none," repeated the plant. "Eveiyone to his own opinion," said Calvin. Almost he sneered a little. He turned his gaze once more about the island. "In my book, them that won't be beat can't be beat. That's maybe where we're different, plant." He left the plant and went for a walk about the island. It had been in his mind that possibly a drifting log or some such could have been caught by the island and he could use this to get ashore. He found nothing. For a few' minutes, at one end of the island, he stood fascinated, watching a long sloping black rock with a crack in it, reaching down into the water. There was a small tuft of moss growing in the crack about five inches above where the waves were slapping. As he watched, the waves slapped higher and higher, until he turned away abruptly, shivering, before he could see the water actually reach and cover the little clump of green. For the first time a realization that he might not get off the island touched him. It was not yet fear, this realization, but it reached deep into him and he felt it, suddenly, like a pressure against his heart. As the moss was being covered, so could he be covered, by the far-reaching inexorable advance of the water. And then this was wiped away by an abrupt outburst of anger and self-ridicule that he -- who had been through so many dangers -- should find himself pinned by so commonplace a threat. A man, he told himself, could die of drowning anywhere. There was no need to go light-years from his place of birth to find such a death. It made all dying -- and all living -- seem small and futile and insignificant, and he did not like that feeling. plant in its little hollow', tight-hugging to the ground and half-sheltered from the wind, and looked down on its dusky basketball-sized shape, the tough hide swollen and ready to burst with seeds. "So you think there's no way out," he said roughly. "There is none," said the plant. "Why don't you just let yourself go, if you think like that?" Calvin said. "Why try to keep down out of the wind, if the waves'll get you anyw'ay, later?" The plant did not answer for a while. "I do not want to die," it said then. "As long as I am alive, there is the possibility of some great improbable chance saving me." "Oh," said Calvin, and he himself was silent in turn. "I thought you'd given up." "I cannot give up," said the plant. "I am still alive. But I know there is no way to safety." "You make a lot of sense." Calvin straightened up to squint through the rain at the dai'k and distant line of the shore. "How much more time would you say we had before the water covers this rock?" "The eighth part of a daylight period, perhaps more, perhaps less. The water can rise either faster or more slowly." "Any chance of it cresting and going down?" "That would be a great improbable chance such as that of which I spoke," said the plant. Calvin rotated slowly, surveying the water around them. Bits and pieces of flotsam were streaming by them on their way before the wind, now angling toward the near bank. But none were close enough or large enough to do Calvin any good. "Look," said Calvin abruptly, "there's a fisheries survey station upriver here, not too far. Now, I could dig up the soil holding your roots. If I did that, would you get to the survey station as fast as you could and tell them I'm stranded here?" "I would be glad to," said the plant. "But you cannot dig me up. My roots have penetrated into the roclc. If you tried to dig me up, they would break off -- and I would die that much sooner." "You would, would you?" grunted Calvin. But the question was rhetorical. Already his mind was busy searching for some other way out. For the first time in his life, he felt the touch of cold about his heart. Could this be fear, he wondered. But he had never been afraid of death. Crouching down again to be out of the wind and rain, he told himself that knowledge still remained a tool he could use. The plant must know something that was, perhaps, useless to it, but that could be twisted to a human's advantage. "What made you come to a place like this to seed?" he asked. "Twenty nights and days ago, when I first took root here," said the plant, "this land was safe. The signs were good for fair weather. And this place was easy of access from the water. I am not built to travel far on land." "How would you manage in a storm like this, if you were not rooted down?" "I would go with the wind until I found shelter," said the plant. "The wind and waves would not harm me then. They hurt only whatever stands firm and opposes them." "You can't communicate with others of your people from here, can you?" asked Calvin. "There are none close," said the plant. "Anyway, what could they do?" '"They could get a message to the fisheries station, to get help out here for us." "What help could help me?" said the plant. "And in any case they could not go against the wind. They would have to be upwind of the station, even to help you." "We could tiy it." "We could try it," agreed the plant. "But first one of my kind must come into speaking range. We still hunt our great improbable chance." T here was a moment's silence between them in the wind and rain. The river was noisy, working against the rock of the island. "There must be something that would give us a better chance than just sitting here," said Calvin. The plant did not answer. "What are you thinking about?" demanded Calvin. "I am thinking of the irony of our situation," said the plant. "You are free to wander the water, but cannot. I can wander the water, but I am not free to do so. This is death, and it is a strange thing." "I don't get you." "I only mean that it makes no difference -- that I am what I am, or that you are what you are. We could be any things that would die when the waves finally cover the island." "Right enough," said Calvin impatiently. "What about it?" "Nothing about it, man," said the plant. "I was only thinking." "Don't waste your time on philosophy," said Calvin harshly. "Use some of that brain power on a way to get loose and get off." "Perhaps that and philosophy are one and the same." "You're not going to convince me of that," said Calvin, getting up. "I'm going to take another look around the island." T he island, as he walked around its short margin, showed itself to be definitely smaller. He paused again by the black rock. The moss was lost now, under the water, and the crack was all but under as well. He stood shielding his eyes against the winddriven rain, peering across at the still visible shore. The waves, he noted, were not extreme-some four or five feet in height -- which meant that the storm pi'oper was probably paralleling the land some distance out in the gulf. He clenched his fists in sudden frustration. If only he had hung on to the sailplane -- or any decent-sized chunk of it! At least going into the water then would have been a gamble with some faint chance of success. He had nowhere else to go, after rounding the island. He went back to the plant. "Man," said the plant, "one of my people has been blown to shelter a little downstream." Calvin straightened up eagerly, turning to stare into the wind. "You cannot see him," said the plant. "He is caught below the river bend and cannot break loose against the force of the wind. But he is close enough to talk. And he sends you good news." "Me?" Calvin hunkered down beside the plant. "Good news?" "There is a large tree torn loose from the bank and floating this way. It should strike the little bit of land where we are here." "Strike it? Are you positive ?" "There are the wind and the water and the tree. They can move only to one destination -- this island. Go quickly to the windward point of the island. The tree will be coming shortly." Calvin jerked erect and turned, wild triumph bursting in him. "Good-by, man," said the plant. But he was already plunging toward the downstream end of the island. He reached it and, shielding his eyes with a hand, peer desperately out over the water. The waves hammered upon his boots as he stood there, and then he saw it, a mass of branches upon which the wind was blowing as on a sail, green against black, coming toward him. H e crouched, wrung with impatience, as the tree drifted swiftly through the water toward him, too ponderous to rise and fall more than a little with the waves and presenting a galleonlike appearance of mass and invincibility. As it came closer, a fear that it would, in spite of the plant's assurances, miss the island, crept into his heart and chilled it. It seemed to Calvin that it was veering -- that it would pass to windwaz'd of the island, between him and the dimly seen shore. The thought of losing it was more than he could bear to consider; and with a sudden burst of panic, he threw himself into the waves, beating clumsily and frantically for it. The river took him into its massive fury. He had forgotten the strength of it. His first dive took him under an incoming wave, and he emerged, gasping, into the trough behind, with water exploding in his face. He kicked and threw his arms about, but the slow and futile-seeming beatings of his limbs appeared helpless as the fluttering of a butterfly in a collector's net. He choked for air, and, rising on the crest of one wave, found himself turned backward to face the island, and being swept past it. Fear came home to him then. He lashed out, fighting only for the solid ground of the island and his life. His world became a place of foam and fury. He strained for air. He dug for the island. And then, suddenly, he felt himself flung upon hard rock and gasping, crawling, he emerged onto safety. He hung there on hands and knees, battered and panting. Then the iemembrance of the tree cut like a knife to the core of his fear-soaked being. He staggered up, and, looking about, saw that he was almost to the far end of the island. He turned. Above him, at the windward point, the tree itself was just now grounding, branches first, and swinging about as the long trunk, caught by the waves, pulled it around and onward. With an inarticulate cry, he ran toward it. But the mass of water against the heavy tree trunk was already pulling the branches from their tanglings with the rock. It floated free. Taking the wind once more in its sail of leaves, it moved slowly -- and then more swiftly on past the far side of the island. He sci'ambled up his side of the island's crest. But when he reached its top and could see the tree again, it was already moving past and out from the island, too swiftly for him to catch it, even if he had been the swimmer he had just proved himself not to be. He dropped on his knees, there on the island's rocky spine, and watched it fade in the grayness of the rain, until the green of its branches was lost in a grayish blob, and this in the general welter of storm and waves. And suddenly a dark horror of death closed over him, blotting out all the scene. is too bad," said the plant. He turned his head numbly. He was kneeling less than half a dozen feet from the little hollow where the plant still sheltered. He looked at it now, dazed, as if he could not remember what it was, nor how it came to talk to him. Then his eyes cleared a little of their shock and he crept over to it on hands and knees and crouched in the shelter of the hollow. "The water is rising more swiftly," said the plant. "It will be not long now." "No!" said Calvin. The word was lost in the sound of the waves and wind, as though it had never been. Nor, the minute it was spoken, could he remember what he had meant to deny by it. It had been only a response without thought, an instinctive negation. "You make me wonder," said the plant, after a little, "why it hurts you so -- this thought of dying. Since you first became alive, you have faced ultimate death. And you have not faced it alone. All things die. This storm must die. This rock on which we lie will not exist forever. Even worlds and suns come at last to their ends, and galaxies, perhaps even the Universe." Calvin shook his head. He did not answer. "You are a fighting people," said the plant, almost as if to itself. "Well and good. Perhaps a life like mine, yielding, giving to the forces of nature, traveling before the wind, sees less than you see, of a reason for clawing hold on existence. But still it seems to me that even a fighter would be glad at last to quit the struggle, when there is no other choice." "Not here," said Calvin thickly. "Not now." "Why not here, why not now," said the plant, "when it has to be somewhere and sometime?" Calvin did not answer. "I feel sorry for you," said the plant. "I do not like to see things suffer." Raising his head a little and looking around him, Calvin could see the water, risen high around them, so that waves were splashing on all sides, less than the length of his own body away. "It wouldn't make sense to you," said Calvin then, raising his rainwet face toward the plant. "You're old by your standards. I'm young. I've got things to do. You don't understand." "No," the plant agreed. "I do not understand." closer to the plant, into the hollow, until he could see the vibrating air-sac that produced the voice of the plant. "Don't you see? I've got to do something -- I've got to feel I've accomplished something -- before I quit." "What something?" asked the plant. "I don't know" cried Calvin. "I just know I haven't I I feel thrown away!" "What is living? It is feeling and thinking. It is seeding and ti'ying to understand. It is companionship of your own people. What more is there?" "You have to do something." . "Do what?" "Something important. Something to feel satisfied about." A wave, higher than the rest, slapped the rock a bare couple of feet below them and sent spray stinging in against them. "You have to say, 'Look, maybe it wasn't much, but I did this.' " "What kind of this?" "How do I know?" shouted Calvin. "Something -- maybe something nobody else did -- maybe something that hasn't been done before!" "For yourself?" said the plant. A higher wave slapped at the veiy rim of their hollow, and a little water ran over and down to pool around them. Calvin felt it cold around his knees and wrists. "Or for the doing?" "For the doing! For the doing!" "If it is for the doing, can you take no comfort from the fact there are others of your own kind to do it?" Another wave came in on them. Calvin moved spasmodically right up against the plant and put his arms around it, holding on. "I have seeded ten times and done much thinking," said the plant -- rather muffledly, for Calvin's body was pressing against its air-sac. "I have not thought of anything really new, or startling, or great, but I am satisfied." It paused a moment as a new wave drenched them and receded. They were half awash in the hollow now, and the waves came regularly. "I do not see how this is so different from what you have done. But I am content." Another and stronger wave rocked them. The plant made a sound that might have been of pain at its roots tearing. "Have you seeded?" "No," said Calvin, and all at once, like light breaking at last into the dark cave of his being, in this twelfth hour, it came to him -- all of what he had robbed himself in his search for a victory. Choking on a wave, he clung to the plant with frenzied strength. "Nothing!" The word came tom from him as if by some ruthless hand. "'Fve got nothing!" 'Then I understand at last," said the plant. "For of all things, the most terrible is to die unfruitful. It is no good to say we will not be beaten, because there is always waiting, somewhere, that which can t)eat us. And then a life that is seedless goes down to defeat finally and forever. But when one has seeded, there is no ending of the battle and life mounts on life until the light is reached by those far generations in which we have had our own small but necessary part. Then our personal defeat has been nothing, for though we died, we are still living, and though we fell, we conquered." But Calvin, clinging to the plant with both arms, saw only the water closing over him. "Too late -- " he choked. "Too late -- too late -- " "No," bubbled the plant. "Not too late yet. This changes things. For I have seeded ten times and passed on my life. But you -- I did not understand. I did not realize your need." T he flood, cresting, ran clear and strong, the waves breaking heavily on the drowned shore by the river mouth. The rescue spinner, two hours out of Base and descending once again through the fleeting murk, checked at the sight of a begrimed human figure, staggering along the slick margin of the shore, carrying something large and limp under one arm, and with the other arm poking at the ground with a stick. The spinner came down almost on top of him, and the two men in it reached to catch Calvin. He could hardly stand, let alone stumble forward, but stumble he did. "Cal!" said the pilot. "Hold up! IFs us." "Let go," said Calvin thickly. He pulled loose, dug with his stick, dropped something from the limp thing into the hole he had made, and moved on. "You out of your head. Cal?" cried the co-pilot. "Come on, weVe got to get you back to the hospital." "No," said Calvin, pulling away again. "What're you doing?" demanded the pilot. "WhaFve you got there?" "Think-plant. Dead," said Calvin, continuing his work. "Let go!" He fought weakl but so fiercely that they did turn him loose again. "You don't understand. Saved my life." "Saved your life?" The pilot followed him. "How?" "I was on an island. In the river. Flood coming up." Calvin dug a fresh hole in the ground. "It could have lived a little longer. It let me pull it ahead of time -- so Fd have something to float to shore on." He turned exhaustionbleared eyes on them. Saved my life." The pilot and the co-pilot looked at each other as two men look at each other over the head of a child, or a madman. "All right, Cal," said the pilot. "So it saved your life. But how come you've got to do this? And what are you doing, anyhow?" "What am I doing?" Calvin paused entirely and turned to face them. "What am I doing?" he repeated on a rising note of wonder. "Why, you damn fools, Tm doing the first real thing I ever did in my life! I'm saving the lives of Charting Our Genes In a combined assault on 'linkage studies" for the location of genes for such things as eye color, blood groups and specific hereditary diseases," Johns Hopkins University researchers and computer men are engaged in what may be the final probe into the mystery of heredity. Using inherited disease as a marker, it can be determined which genes travel together; the computers are set to work figuring out the odds of two hereditary traits being contained in the same chromosome, and then the genetic makeup of all members of the family in regard to the hereditary disease. The same method can be used with eye color, blood groups, and even such odd inherited traits as the ability to taste certain chemicals. Prof. S. A. Talbot, spokesman for the research group, cited elliptocytosis, a rare dominant characteristic in which the red blood cell has an elliptical shape, as an aid in computing the location of genes. There are about a dozen marker traits known to exist in Man of that clearly determinable a nature, and with the use of computers, scientists should be able to assign a linkage group to one in five of these traits. The major difficulty is collecting five-generation families. This is no problem with test animals and insects, but it is with hum.an beings. Prof. Talbot suggests an international linkage-analysis center where documented data can be assembled and studied. The genetic prevention of certain hereditary diseases is one obvious benefit, and it is readily within grasp. Farther off is the complete charting of the chromosome for the prevention of all inherited disease -- but not as far off as one vrould imagine, for progress is being made at a truly fantastic rate compared with the relatively slow development in other branches of medicine until now. Ultimately? Mating for desired traits has long been done in animal husbandry, and is an overworkel theme in science fiction, where governmental decree is taken for granted -- but need theie be force? There isnt for marriage. the Divers Xhe key to Fred's success was simple he may not have had much of a mind, hut it was all his, nobody else'sl H e had forgotten the beer again. He remembered that he had forgotten only as he opened the apaiianent door. A wave of smoke and onions and hamburger flowed past him into the dingy corridor and he stumbled on the garbage pail, plunked right in the doorway for him to lug along the passage to the chute. The bed was not made in one of their two rooms and newspapers littered the other. Elsie was in the kitchen. "Fred! Fred, did you remember my beer?" He closed the door so that the neighbors would not hear the row to come, except through the walls. "Didja, Fred?" She stood akimbo in the kitchen doorway, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her dressing gown loose and spotted, her feet in old scuffs. "I forgot," he mumbled, "ril go now." Oh, no, he wouldn't. Not until he had heard a full resume of his lack of character, lack of enterprise, ambition, decency, thoughtfulness, manhood, semblance of virtue. "I said I was going, Elsie. I said I was going, didn't I?" "Well, my day ! You remembered my name !" It was true he rarely used her name or called her any husbandly term such as dear or darling instead, and rarely looked at her at all if he could avoid it inconspicuously. Ten years of marriage -- ten years of legal proximity, rather, for nothing in him was married to anything in her any more. "I don't know why you married me," he said. "Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Go on, get out." H e almost knocked the man over as he left the apartment. The man was standing there, about to ring the bell. Well dressed, clean, expensive overcoat, polished shoes, black hat and a mild friendly face. the man asked. "Yes," said Fred. "You entered the Sunday News competition for a free space ride?" "Yes. Did I win it?" "Unfortunately, no," said the man. "Oh. Well, excuse me, Tve got to go and get something." "I'll come with you. My name is Howard Sprinnell, examining the entries to that competition. Frankly, we think you have considerable talent." "Mister," said Fred over his shoulder as they went down the stairs, "if you're trying to sell me something -- " "I don't want a penny from "Then what -- " "We would merely appreciate a few hours of your time, at your convenience." "A few hours?" Fred said, distressed. By working double shift in the automation-parts supply house, he could just keep going, financially and physically. The question of mental fatigue was exclusively Elsie's province and there he had a rough working technique for responding without really listening. His job called for no mental effort greater than reading a shipping list, and his home life certainly didn't. Most of the time he had nothing in his mind at all; the days passed faster that way. But Elsie and the job kept him tired. Odd how just not listening wrung you out and drained you off. "We are, of course, very glad to offer you compensation said the man. Elsie would just drink it away. He'd have to haul crates of bourbon instead of cans of beer, that's all. "Not interested," he said. That was it. That was the way to keep a salesman stalled. Just "not interested." Keep saying it and nothing else. They all said they were not salesmen and weren't selling anything. Every salesman he had ever met at the door said that. Galactic Encyclopedia, Nuclear Brush, Your Venus Vacation, video subscriptions, even the Federal numbei's game, they all started out by offering you a special opportunity and were not selling you anything. The man was still talking. "Not interested," Fred said. "Fred," said the man as they reached the bottom of the stairs, "I'm doing you a favor. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but either you come voluntarily or you'll come anyway. Why not get paid for it?" "Not interested. And if anyone wants me, they can come and get me. I don't care. I just don't care." He slouched off into the rain toward the supermarket. As Dr. Howard Sprinnell watched him go he took a small silver case from his topcoat pocket. He raised the case to his lips and said quietly: "Sprinnell here. No. A clear case, but no. Pick him up." T he squad car arrived silently on its jets as Fred the apartment house. He was carrying a pack of beer in each hand and was glad to see the man had gone. That's all you had to do -- just keep saying "not interested" until they went away. "O.K., bud." The troopers took him on both sides, grasped his arms, and levered him round. "Hey!" Fred protested. "The beer's for my wife. She's waiting for it. Please, fellers, I'll never hear the end of it if she doesn't get her beer." "Joe," said the trooper on Fred's right, jerking his head in the direction of the door behind them. A third trooper climbed out of the squad car, took the packs from Fred's hands and walked into the apartment house. He climbed the stairs swiftly, wrinkling his nose at the stale thickness of the air, knocked on the apartment door and waited for Elsie to open it. "Here's your beer," he said shortly. "Where's Fred?" "Your husband is being detained in connection with a robbery at his office' "'Fred! Are you kidding? Fred hasn't the sense or the guts ! How long will he be gone?" "Two or three weeks." "Oh," said Elsie, scratching herself disinterestedly. "Well, thanks for the beer." She shut the door and the trooper returned to the squad car. He looked at Fred sympathetically but said nothing. The squad car took off, then turned on its sirens. "What's this all about?" back seat. "Just excitement, bud. We live a dull life." You think you do, you should live mine. I don't care anyway. If I ask them what I'm doing in this squad car. I'll get a silly answer. "A guy called Spinner or something send for you?" "We don't get sent for, bud. Where have you been, the Middle Ages?" H e had a point there. Security troopers were under direct control of the President and came and went as they pleased. The satellite stations gave them general directives and the President directed the stations. Fred thought of Spinner, or whatever his name was, calling the President to call a satellite station to call these cops to come and get him. He would have been shocked and frightened if anyone had told him this was almost exactly what had happened. They shot into the garage of an ordinary Federal police station, a large tiled vault smelling of hoses, soap and water. The troopers took him upstairs, along wax-polished corridors, through swinging doors and out of the muttered voices, footsteps, paper rattling and telephone tinkle of the station, into the smooth silence of a surgery. That fellow Spinner was waiting in a white doctor's coat. "They pick you up too?" The Security troopers hoisted him into a dentist's chair, saluted the other man and went away. "You can leave any time you wish, Fred. If you do, though. I'll have you brought back. I'm Dr. Howard Sprinnell." "Funny, I thought your name was Cloud Spinner or something," Fred confessed. "That's veiy interesting." The doctor leaned forward across his desk. "What made you think that?" "I just remembered it that way, that's all." "Ah. You have an unusual mind, Fred. No, I mean it. And just to show you this is not fooling, I have a call here for you from the President." "From Jake?" "From President Jackson, yes." a green button on the video control on his desk. The wall panel lit and President Jackson's familiar face President. "The nation has called you to an unusual task. On your complete cooperation and absolute discretion in not mentioning to anyone -- to anyone at all -- what you may now learn depend matters of the utmost consequence to us all. I wish you good luck and Godspeed." The panel went dark and the doctor switched off. "That was Jake himself," to me." Like the many thousand referred to the President familiarly as Jake, but he never thought he would get to talk to him, or be talked to personally. "What did he want to talk to me for?" Fred asked, dazed. "That's what I want to show you," said Dr. Sprinnell. "You understood what the President said about keeping this entirely confidential?" "Hell, no one would believe it if I said I'd been talking to the President, anyway." "That's what we figure," said the doctor, smiling slightly. He picked up a pack of cards and flipped five of them onto the desk, a circle, a cross, two wavy lines, a rectangle and a star. "These are Zener cards, Fred. Ever see them before?" No, but they didn't look like much. This was cockeyed, the whole situation -- having the President call him so that he and a quack could play cards. "It will be clearer in a little while," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said. "But first we must run this little check. Please point to one of these cards every minute when I say 'now.' " Fred shifted himself in the high chair and pointed to one of the five cards obediently every minute. After twenty minutes, the doctor increased the rate. He noted every selection. "Last lap now, Fred." He was sick of this, but it was better than sitting in the apartment with Elsie. Fred pointed to a card for the last time. "And now," the doctor said, standing up and feeding his notations into a machine in the corner of the room, "we have here the results." He pulled a tape from the machine as it purred out, and showed it to Fred. It was a score of some sort. "In another room," Dr. Howard Sprinnell explained, "we have a synchronized telepath trying to influence your selections of these cards. If you have psi qualities, Fred, these results will show how high they are. If you have none, then your chances of picking the right card are one in five. That goes for picking the card ahead of the right one, or behind it, or two ahead and so on. In other words, if the cards had been selected here by a machine instead of you, we would expect twenty per cent of the answers to be right, by sheer chance -- or statistical probability, to put it more accurately." "So how did I do? Am I a mind-reader? That would make me laugh." T he doctor glanced at the result tape he was holding. "You have the results we want," he said. "Otherwise I would not tell you this. You would be thanked, given a reward, made a fuss of by some civil servant of prominence and sent home in style." He looked up at Fred in the dentist's chair. "Do you remember that contest in the Sunday NeivsV' it. Every week there had been a puzzle picture to identify. The contest had lasted nearly a year. He remembered particularly that each week there had been a cut of the room in which entries were to be judged, a large editorial office, just above the puzzle picture. Just a room. He had wondered why they bothered to put it in. "There was a picture of a room in the paper," said the doctor, "where each week, without any possibility of fraud or anyone seeing it except the judges, the solution to the puzzle was hung up on the wall in the middle of the picture shovm in the paper. The puzzles themselves were meaningless. We w'anted to see how many people wrote in the right solution just from seeing the picture of the empty room. The right solution, of course, was the one hanging in that room at that time, which no one could see, and which was selected an hour before publication of the paper each week by random selection in a dictionaiy." "So what did I get, a consolation prize?" asked Fred. "In a way," the doctor smiled. "But not for coming near winning. The top twenty winners were highly gifted people we recruited into the Psi faculties of Duke, Harvard, Oxford, Paris and elsewhere. They scored consistently throughout the year with a better than probability deviation." "Huh?" "They got a lot more right than they could by chance alone. But your results Avere even more interesting to us. You got the same result here, just now, on the Zener cards." "I'm still in the running?" "Fred, quite seriously, you are the best candidate we've ever met. Hence the special treatment. In the history of the System Government, there have only been ten other people with results similar to yours." "Is that so? Well, I suppose you know what you're doing, Doc. But I never had a premonition in my life." Doctor Howard Sprinnell frowned. "I should hope not. Almost everyone has some psi capacities, but w'e're not interested in minor phenomena. This is a government department, Fred. Here a thing has to work all the time, whenever it's needed, wherever it's needed. A faculty professor has. off-days when he couldn't roll a die against chance. But you can't." "Look, doc. I think you've got the wrong man. I'm Fred liams. Are you sure -- " "Look yourself," interrupted the doctor, leaning over to wave the tape under Fred's nose. Chance would give you twenty per cent right -- one out of five. Look at your result." Fred took the tape and studied it. "You've read it wrong. This says several million per cent." "It says z # 'o per cent. NiL Not one answer right, Fred. ities of that deviation... oh, never mind. See the big black zero?" "Yes, Doc." "That is your result. It's statistically almost impossible, but you've done it. You did it with the puzste in the competition. You did not get one single, solitary answer right. Not one! Even a machine gets one out of five right, Fred. Don't you see?" No, he didn't, and it seemed to be just what Elsie was always complaining about. He lacked this and lacked that. And now he couldn't even do what a machine did. "Okay, Doc," Fred said tiredly. "So I'm dumber than a machine. That figures." "If you talk like that, you are," snapped Doctor Howard Sprinell. "You have the highest negative Psi rating in the Solar System. No clairvoyance, no telepathy, no induced hallucinations, no precognitions, no telekinesis, no psiscreens, no interference of any kind. When we send you out into -- well, never mind, Fred. The main point at present is that you are a very, very rare observer." "That's fine," Fred said. "Look, Doc, I feel beat." "You're meant to. Hell, man. I've been tiring you for two hours now. And what's more. I'll give you a little warning in advance. We aren't going to let you eat for three days either. You're going to be so tired that your body is going to loosen its grip. Don't worry, you won't die. Ten people have done this before you and they're all right. You'll meet them all soon. Now just hold still." Dr. Howard Sprinnell slipped a hypo needle swiftly into Fred's neck, withdrew it and dabbed with a piece of surgical wool. "Off you go, Fred." H e was breaking into pieces, but he didn't care. He slept and woke and slept and woke in the chair in old Cloud Spinner's office and now he was coming apart and he just did not care. Fred Williams had had several years of simple apathy. It came naturally to him. His body rested, tired and inert, lacking in vigor from lack of food, and his mind separated slowly from it, like a man standing up in a pool of pygmies. His heart, hands, liver, stomach, viscera had their pygmy minds all bundled in with his, and now falling away in separation as he rose from them. His mind rose away from his body in the chair altogether. He viewed his body with unconcern, and the chair in which it sat, and the room, and through the walls the surrounding offices, and the rooms of the Federal police station, where the Security trooper named Joe who had taken the beer sat picking his teeth and gabbing with a pair of young Federal cops, and the roof of the block in which the station stood. His mind went up like a balloon, rising swiftly into the atmosphere, and the city shrank away under him like a toy plan, a kid's aid to Better Civics, Home Town box VI, no Solar Credits necessary. He shifted automatically away from the main airport, but a moment later he went clean through an airliner cockpit, cabins with passengers, exhaust, and out exactly where he was before. His mind followed the airliner involuntarily, until he asked himself why, and immediately continued rising into the sky, looking down at the ground and the great spherical horizon. His mind rose into cloud and examined minutely a water molecule floating from a piece of dust as big as a rock. His sense of proportion sent him shooting out of the top of the cloud suddenly, like a startled fish. The ground became a globe gradually, and as the clouds below became little wisps over the light blue haze of the Earth, his feeling of liberation increased and he rose faster. He went through layer after layer of radiation sparking fitfully around him, and fiercer belts. And then the dust thinned out like scattered transparent ball bearings, and his mind approached the satellite stations riding over the Earth. He was tempted to go through one, but it seemed unimportant and he rose out. The Moon was swinging down away from him, a vast pitted ball bigger to his mind than the Earth now. He put on more speed, so that his mind flashed away from the Sun. Then as he paused an odd thing happened. One moment he was up there, alone above the small Earth and its smaller Moon, and the next instant his mind had flashed right into the center of the Sun, deep in the inferno of its core, where violence and variegated light surrounded him. And then he was out again, and his mind zoomed off as if he were sitting in the front seat of a lowslung car with the landmarks coming at a rush toward him and away to the side. The Galaxy fell away behind his mind in this fashion and the Great Nebula of Andromeda passed by. His mind roamed for a while among the other galactic clusters and the spiral galaxies. He found his mind could appear at any point he wished, without the long rush through space. He could transfer instantaneously from place to place, and he hopped in this way at random from Crab to Lagoon and in to Polaris and out to the Great Spiral of Ursa Major, and onward to the open centers of the universe. In deeper space, where endless banks of galaxies rollercoasted away from each other, he felt a change of quality come over his mind. It turned within itself where all the vivid stars became mere floating lights on the surface of a bubble outside. Here, within his mind, was deeper space and yet another liberation. His mind hung like a grape about to empty into a vat, which in this larger sense was truly himself. Insofar as he, was only a skin around the greater liquid, in which indeed he perceived all things held in common. He was about to throw off the skin and mingle in this condition where he and the Magellanic Clouds and Joe the Security trooper's toothpick had a single existence, when he was back in the chair in the office. His body settled over him again. He felt compressed and imprisoned and robbed. His head turned as if it were on antiquated pulleys and his arms and shoulders were strung together awkwardly. "It's bad to be back, isn't it? You'll never get used to that. But that was one hell of a Dive." the other people in the office. There were ten of them and Dr. Howard Sprinnell. Three were women, and all except the doctor had large eyes. That was what you noticed about them, their enormous gentle eyes and their slightly thin faces. The doctor held a mirror up for him to see his own face, and it was much the same. "They thought we had lost you there for a while," said the doctor. "All Divers do that on their first trip out -- but you. I'm told, almost joined the Lord." "Is that what This is?" "It's a matter outside our field," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell carefully, "and a matter of choice as to name. But mystical evidence seems to point that way." One of the girls laughed. "You're embarrassing the Solar Government, Fred. They are not supposed to have any sectarian views. But that's what we Divers think the This is. My name's Milly. 'This is Pat, and Joan, Bill, Ed, Al, John, Anthony, Ricardo and Mitch. Welcome to the Divers, Fred." around. The women were attractive, all brown-haired and nicely shaped. The seven men were just regular guys you might meet anywhere. But then, he wasn't anything to win a prize himself. "So far as we are concerned, Fred," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said, "and this is official, there is the normal conscious mind, the subliminal mind of which we are not usually conscious but which is apparently a parcel of regional physical minds and the mind you roam in, and there is the unconscious mind, which does not seem to belong to any one pez'son, although everyone has it, and which you people embarrass me by referring to as the This. "All we know, officially, is that the This is the natural or original home of the universe, and the only reason we know that is because we don't want Divers to disappear into it and not come out. You're all too rare. I gather it is almost unbearable to come out of. But you'll just have to avoid the temptation to go home, as it were. After all, it has taken man out here where he is and what he is. And the second reason is that the entire Solar Government depends on the people in this room for information." others. They were serious. The smallest of the girls, Pat, caught him looking and smiled. She turned to the doctor. "Can I tell Fred?" "You followed him, so you may as well. # don't know what you Divers feel. But the Defense Council is waiting for the rest of you and we must hurry along." Dr. Howard Sprinnell patted Fred on the shoulder as he passed. He stood aside for the other Divers to leave the room, nodded to Pat and Fred, and shut the door behind him. body off the dentist's chair and stood unsteadily. The girl took his arm. She was smaller than he, the top of her head reaching to his mouth, small, delicate and scented with heather. "There's a lounge next door -- you may not have noticed it on the way out -- and there's always a bowl of fruit and some cheese and biscuits there. Let's go in." He followed her. Even the short walk helped accustom himself to his body again. And the room was large and airy, overlooking the central park of the city and the clouds beyond the tall buildings in the distance. He stood looking out at the view and eating an apple while she sliced cheese and laid the pieces on a plate with some biscuits for him. Then she sat down, folded her hands in her lap and looked at him. She was wearing a white-andblue-check dress. She looked young and fresh and alive. The room was clean and fresh. He could not think of Elsie and that apartment as being in the same world. "Did the doc say you followed me?" Fred asked eventually. "One of us always goes with a new Diver on the first trip." "What did I look like? I mean was there anything to see?" "Oh, yes." Pat laughed. "As a matter of fact, our minds look like the inside of eggs out there." "But a plane went through me. And I shot for some reason into the Sun." H e turned and looked disbelievingly up into the sky. The Sun made him blink and his eyes watered. "Now I can't even look at it," he said, "any more than I could before." "Show me your mind," she said simply. "Where is it?" "Well..." "That's the whole point of the Divers. A mind is not in space-time. It is connected with a body which is -- or, to be exact, it is associated with -- a physical brain, which in turn can work a mouth and hands to communicate what the mind has seen. The Solar Government has the problem in reverse. They can send ships through hyper-space ; otherwise, as you know, we could never have populated the Galaxy. Why, Polaris, which you visited, is over a thousand light-years from Earth! They can make matter shift in and out of hyper-space. But they can't communicate that far away. Radiation won't take the shift. So the government can either send radio waves out and wait a couple of thousand years for the answer, or it has to shuttle whole ships to and fro just to get a simple message. "Worse, from a defense viewpoint, there are times when they must have information fast and when the nature of the news means that no ship will be either available or allowed to become available to carry the news. Suppose you are an intelligent lifeform off Canopus and you think up a magnificent way of taking over the Solar System. You're six hundred and fifty light-years away, but time is no problem because either you live longer than that or you have a tribe-culture. Even if ships, which it hasn't, it could never be sure of catching Canopus preparing, or intercepting whatever horror they sent oft. And even if it were lucky, the ship would have to come back itself to get the news to the Solar Government. "A Diver can send his mind instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other, he can examine atomic particles or survey galaxies, he can see through matter as if it were full of holes -- which it is -- he can patrol sectors and report exactly what he found there. He can dive into deep space and be free." "That's it. Free. That's exactly how we feel, isn't it?" "Never mind. You'll be going out again. Regularly. With me at first until you get patroling under control. And then on your own." "Are we always hungry?" another apple. "It helps. The government would like us to be permanently at the point of death, but that is fortunately impractical. The less hold our bodies have, the easier it is to go out. There's one other point, though. And since you're coming with me on your training. I'd prefer you to know -- no matter what the rules say. Whenever you go near another living being in a Dive, your mind can see the other mind, and you can read it from the pictures in it. It's difficult to describe, but you'll see for yourself. And if the mind you are looking at is connected up to a body, as we are now, and if the pictures don't seem to fit the situation, you can take it that they refer to events still in the future as far as that body is concerned. The mind has a different spacetime existence from the body, obviously, and quite often it is ahead in time. That's why we have to be negative Psi. Anyone can Dive, but only a negative Psi can remain objective about other beings' minds. A Psi would collect other minds' contents and get them confused with his own -- future and present all messed up, full of symbols -- take a look at a Psi's mind sometime on the way back. There are a lot of accidental roamers around on Earth." "If we can read other thoughtfully, "then we Divers could have a hell of a lot of power." He was surprised when Pat laughed. "We all think of that," she said, "but so did the Solar Government. We have a bunch of Psis and Security troops tracing us all the time when we're in the body. But the real hold on us is not that. How would you feel if you were told you could never Dive again?" "I -- I wouldn't like that." "You see? And you've only been on the first experimental Dive. Imagine when it is your whole life." ly. Then he asked: "Where do you live?" "Oh, no. Divers never mix. Our existence is a top-secret. And the risk of losing two Divers in a single accident would keep the Defense Council awake at night." "But everyone was here today." "To welcome you. That's a big occasion to us." "It's the biggest thing that ever happened to me," Fred "I know," Pat answered quietly. "I saw your mind. But ril change that, Fred." She stood up and brushed her hands over her dress. "Where will I see you again?" he asked. "You never will." He stood up to protest. "Not in the body," she amended. He looked so mournful that she walked over and kissed him. "There's a good-by present. Diver. But we will meet regularly." F inding him sitting with a pile of apple cores beside him, the doctor clicked his tongue reprovingly. "Tell me. Doc, how could you stop me Diving?" asked Fred worriedly. "Fill you full of vitamins and carbohydrates and alcohol and send you on a pleasurecruise with a lot of accomplished women," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell promptly. "Or allow you to stuff yourself with apples, for a start. Now come along or I'll bar you from the exercise room." thoughtfully. "By the way," the doctor said over his shoulder, "your wife thinks you're under arrest. You've been here four days so far and we can keep you another ten or so. After that you'll have to go back. You're on our payroll now, but you'd better keep your job. Or we can find you a heavier one, if you're not tired enough. We'll seal a miniature transmitter into your larynx under the skin before you leave, so that you can report audibly from wherever you are. Diving has the same effect on the body as sleep, you'll find, so you can do both at once. I'll grade off the injections before you leave here. Now this is the political field as we know it... They stood in a large lecture hall, filled with spaced models of the Solar System, set in the Milky Way and surrounded by the related galaxies. "Here's the spiral in Andromeda," said the doctor, using a long pointer. "I understand you went there..." general tour of the hall. "Of course there are others not shown here," he concluded. "The ComaVirgo system of galaxies, for one example. But these are the ones politically important at this time. In Sagittarius, we have a problem. There's a human colony there -- a very early one, as a matter of fact -- which we're sending an envoy to. But we don't know what sort of an envoy they are expecting, whether he should be a technical agronomist, a sociologist, a radiation expert, or a plain folksy reminder of Earth, or what. A simple problem really, but a mistake will cost us several your first assignment, under Pat's tuition, will be to find out and report. When you get back, you'll rank officially as a Diver. Rendezvous is over the Peninsula, above San Francisco ; you can't miss it. Take your mind there before you leave and come back there on the way in. Around fifteen thousand feet is the recommended height, but that, like your mind, is immaterial, if you'll pardon the pun. And now I suggest you go down to the police gym and take some good strong exercise so that you feel properly tired for the journey." Dr. Howard Sprinnell put his hands in his pockets and gazed at his polished shoes. "I don't quite know how to say this, Fred," he continued, "but I'm responsible for you Divers. You're entitled to your own forms of amusement, of course, but please remember you are being watched by Psis. No dropping in on the President's bedroom. Other people's bedrooms, all right, though I trust you'll keep out of mine. But do nothing that could make you be considered a security risk. That is the only thing that would worry us." and left the hall to go down to the police gym. He did not understand why the warning should be necessary. On the other hand, you could take it as a delicate permission to do anything that was not a security risk. He passed the police canteen and restrained himself from going in to order a doughnut with Martian syrup. It would keep him from Diving. H e rose into the atmosphere above the city and headed across America to the rendezvous above the West Coast. The Earth spun away from beneath him. He had time to be surprised that in the few hours back on Earth he had forgotten the unburdened clarity of mind in a Dive. He knew who he was. He was unquestionably Fred Williams up here, as much as he there. But here he felt different, free, while down there he was embedded and obscured in a shell of a body. Here, this time, his vision was not limited to a forward cone but extended in a complete sphere around him. He saw the large nick in the coast ahead and came down to meet his tutor Diver. Pat had said he looked like the inside of an egg, but he was not prepared for the great ovoid poised there below him. He came up to her with a rush and found he was even bigger by comparison. When they touched, he heard her voice. There was a slight resistance as his mind met hers and then she slipped inside his, so that he enclosed her mind within his ovoid mind. "One of the disadvantages of a Diver," she said quietly within him, 'is that we can only talk to each other by contact. A Psi could see our thoughts radiating out like an aurora, but we can't. We travel this way when two Divers are together, which isn't often, so that we both think of going to the same place. If we do get separated, come back here immediately and we'll start again." "Fine." "Please, The very gentlest suggestion of vocalizing will do. That was like a cannon." "Sorry." "Much better. Now, gently, out. Think of rising slowly... , That's right." They rose away from the Earth. "Over there," she prompted, "is the galactic spiral arm we are in. See, running from Orion? The Solar System is out here on a limb. Over here is where we're going, deep into the Galaxy, our own galaxy. You'll soon pick up the main roads. See that fan-shaped arch? That's a T-Tauri variable, signposts to us. Think of being just off that one now." He did -- and there they were, in a dark lane of the Milky Way. "Now you can imagine what would happen if we were moving separately and turned our minds to different points. You have to go back and start again then. Now, we're going down this dark lane." They moved through the splendor of the Milky Way, through vast lanes of fine dark nebulae, across a giant rift, past glowing clouds of hydrogen and oxygen and bright expanding shells, rings within rings, flowing out from intense stars in their center as if the star were a pebble dropped in a pond of burning space, the planetary nebulae. The Sagittarian region was well known to Pat and she commented on the Lagoon, and Omega and Trifid Nebula suspended around them. The local system they sought lay off a loose globular star cluster, one of a crowd here deep in toward the center of the Galaxy, the bright core around which the spiral arms of the entire Milky Way ponderously swung. He was part engrossed in the technique of moving his mind, part awed by the variety and beauty of the Galaxy, and part lost in the beauty of the mind within him. She moved with deft, clear thought like the chime of crystals. The sensory images of Earth were gross and distorted projections of the way he saw her, but she was at once the beating rhythm beneath rock-and-roll and the abstracted clarity of Chopin, the summer wind and the warmth of a wine. He held her mind within his in a new union so complete that anything else was mere fumbling. "Thank you," he heard her voice say gently, and they sank down toward the rings of small planets they had come to visit. plied an atmosphere, and several planets in the group indeed looked fuzzy. The two Divers skimmed rapidly from one to another in a general survey, selected the largest of those which might support man, and sank down through its belts of radiation. The central mass of land lay beneath thin clouds, through which the local sun shone in drifting spotlights over the cultivated areas and irregular groups of cities. "When we get closer," her voice said, "you'll see them walking about inside their minds, which to us will be cloudy colored eggs around them. They cannot see this, of course, any more than a nonPsi or we ourselves on Earth. If it isn't obvious what they are thinking, we'll have to go close enough to touch their minds with ours. But be very careful before you do that. If they are very empty-minded, there is a risk that their body magnetism will polarize your mind in temporarily. You can get out again, but it's messy and unpleasant while it lasts. And it's almost impossible to avoid being sucked into a medium's mind, so I hope they haven't got any." They were now over the main city and headed toward a large domed building, apparently modeled on the Capitol. "How did they get here ?" he skcd "We don't really know. The contacts so far have been by radio to a very early investigating fleet. Obviously they must have come out after the hyper-space drive was invented -- we're over twenty thousand light-years from Earth, here, I'm told -- but they don't seem to realize the difficulties of sending them the envoy they asked for. Assuming these are the people that wanted one." "Look, an old landcar -- down there on the street!" he exclaimed. The colony apparently still used ground vehicles. As they came closer, they could see people walking in the streets and moving in and out of doorways. There were no moving sidewalks, personal vertijets, anti-gravs. It was cleaner but otherwise as old-fashioned as the quarter in which Fred "Imagine coming so far -- to find this," he said, disappointed. "You'll find colonies are usually several generations behind, but let's not be too hasty," she said. "We can have a look around later. First, let's see if we have the right planet and get this envoy matter out of the way. Down through the dome, here." They passed through the weather sheathing and curved girders of the dome into an assembly hall full of human beings, seated around a central dais. The colonists had apparently been inspired by Congress. A quick glance at their minds showed they were politicians, no better and no worse than the Earth variety, intent on compromise and the exchange of benefits between the groups of interests they seemed to represent. Several carried visibly in their minds one fixed interest and a quick count showed that agriculture was, in one form or another, the main business of the colony. "I think that answers it," she said. "We'll have to check on the other planets, but farm problems seem to be what they're most concerned about." He felt dissatisfied. "Shouldn't we touch one of their minds to see if this is really the political center? It may only be a village meeting." It seemed incongruous to use the wonderful reach of Diving to gather little facts like this and to depart knowing nothing else. Then again, he recalled the doctor describing it as a simple problem. He felt her mind move understandingly within his. "All right, let's touch the Speaker and see how far his authority goes. He'd be very conscious of a superior Congress if there is one." They moved together to the dais and brushed against the Speaker's mind. The short, bald man sitting impressively in the center of the bubble immediately leaned forward and banged his gavel. The entire assembly rose to their feet and stood still. The Speaker slouched in his chair. His mind shook off the influences of his body and rose up to touch the two of them. "Welcome, at last," he said. "You have been expecting us?" "Of course. Though why do you say 'us'?" They moved partly from each other, overlapping only at the extreme limit of their own minds, so that he could see there were two of them together. A gasp sounded in the Speaker's mind like an echo and there was a movement throughout the assembly. "Can they hear us?" Pat asked. "Naturally. Psi capacity is a minimum requirement for the Senate. Can't you hear us?" "Only by mental contact." "How odd," the Speaker replied. "Still, we ourselves cannot merge in each other, only into housings." "Housings?" "But surely... You must know. Of course you must." "Pm afraid we don't." "For heaven's sake, what part of the Solar System do you come from that you don't know a housing when you see one? Ganymede, Mercury, Jove, Venus, Bacchus? Although I was under the impression that the entire system used the same terms." "One moment," Fred said. "What system are you talking about?" "This system here, naturally." "We come from a different part of the Galaxy, a part that is called the Solar System by those who live there." There was a multiple rustling of thoughts which disturbed the Speaker momentarily. "Please, gentlemen, please! Will every Senator please quit his housing so that we have less of these physical interruptions ?" E very member of the assembly sat down, relaxed his body and rose gently above it with a clear and uncluttered mind. "Thank you. Senators," the Speaker said. "Now. Do we understand that you come from some other part of our galaxy ?" "Yes," Pat said. "We call it the Milky Way." "So do we." "You probably brought the name with you." "You are suggesting that we came from you and brought the name of the Galaxy with us?" "Why, yes." "I see. Would you identify this solar system of yours?" Pat held in her mind a picture of the Solar System and the Sun, embedded in the long spiral arm of the Galaxy. She made the image of the Earth expand and contract in emphasis. "Thank you. So you come from that little system, do you ? How interesting. And yet you have never heard of housings." "We call them bodies." "Well, so they are. I recall a primitive energy transmission we had here long ago. We extended an invitation to the operators, but they have not so far arrived. They came from your system, or so they said." "They did. They contacted you by what we call radio. We were sent, frankly, to see what sort of envoy should be sent here to you." "Ah ! There has been a natural confusion. We thought you were here from one of our outer systems where we are having some difficulty raising the right housing. In fact, we were just debating the correct form of grain to transmit to feed the housings on. They are in the awkward stage of having sufficient minds to exist, but insufficient nerve cortex to enable us to enter them. Our local represenatives -- whom we mistook you for -- have been having a very difficult time for several hundred years, but we will soon find the answer. Now, we will be glad to receive an envoy from ybur system. We are always glad to receive representatives from our successful colonies. As to the type of envoy, anyone with a broad galactic viewpoint will do. We will, of course, be glad to offer housing and the usual facilities." "When you say housing, you mean bodies?" "Naturally. Bodies such as these Senators' or my own are the most adaptable for this climate. If you go in to our Ganymede or out to Jove you would have to use a local -- er -- body, because these human types would melt or suffocate respectively. But the local housings in silica and in ammonia crystal have proved quite adequate for normal locomotion and physical work there. The normal facilities of the sport planets would be available, to be sure. We are quite proud of our slither bodies, I suppose you would call them, in the snow worlds -- quite a recent development. I fear we are not too luxurious here, but galactic opinion forces us to make our housings do almost everything they are capable of doing -- walk, drive, cook and other such menial tasks. But then at least everyone knows we are not spending the revenue on our own housing -- er -- our own bodies. Only last century we barely averted a political threat to make all Senators' bodies sleep out in the open weather. But obviously it is much moi'e expensive to keep breeding new bodies than build a shelter such as this one. Even taxpayers can see that." The Speaker's mind echoed general agreement from the Senators. "It will come as a surprise," Pat said clearly, "but our system believes we colonized yours." This met polite and general laughter in which the Speaker joined. "Perhaps," he said, "you would care to communicate direct with the Senators who were in charge of your system during the developmental stages. Will the Senators please come forward for contact?" Seven of the minds above the floor of the Senate drifted over to touch peripherally against each other and against Pat and Ered. "When we first undertook that project," one or all of them said, "your system was entirely unpopulated. On the third planet, we found, however, roughly humanoid apes in isolated caves and by selective breeding we succeeded in making that species into a housing identical with those we use on this planet. Unfortunately, only the less stable minds of the Galaxy were prepared to live quite so far out and we eventually lost touch. Is the same housing still used?" "So much so," Pat told them, "that we cannot normally detach ourselves." "You mean you send bodies from place to place?" "Yes. The radio signals you received were from a spaceship containg men in their own bodies." "Remarkable. Naturally, we accept your statement. But this implies considerable technical skill -- and a prodigious disregard for the taxpayers' money. You mean there were actually men out there in bodies sending energy transmissions, instead of visiting us in the mind from Earth?" "Yes." "Remarkable. Very remarkable. Can you spare the time to tell us more about this? We can accommodate you with a double housing or separate housing, whichever you prefer." "May I withdraw to consult with my colleague?" Pat asked. "Of course. We will continue our debate." The Senators returned to their forms and the Speaker, sinking back into his body, recalled the assembly to their discussion of agricultural problems. mind again. They thought of the enormous space-ships developed over many centuries and at uncounted cost to give men favorable odds in an unfavorable environment. And of the hazardous shifting of power based on bomb-satellites, and the fence upon fence of security precautions on which Earth and the Solar System depended. Or rather, when they considered it, on which their local population depended. It was not a problem for two Divers but for a team of specialists. They returned to the Speaker. "We would like to consult with the original Earth Senators again and perhaps borrow two -- housings -- for a a short while." "With the greatest pleasure." The Senators concerned quitted their housings and floated across the assembly to join them. They all rose together to the outside of the dome, where they would not disturb the debate below. "One of the questions," Fred said, "is what happens if we died -- by accident, for example -- while in a borrowed housing." "You imply a question as to what happens to any of your people, since they have lost the power to detach themselves, or do not make use of it." "Yes." "Unfortunately," one or all of the Senators replied, "we do not know. It is said there is a continual production of new minds in the universe, which appear here and there, whereever there are suitable housings. Others disagree but have no real answer. If we lend you housing -- a panther-style body for personal racing on the grass steppes, say, or a vast whale-style body for enjoying some of our oceans, and so on, there is some risk. Among certain cultures, we find a return of the mind to a similar vacant housing. In other places, we have found an obscuration of the mind. We think there are parallel universes differing from this as mind-form differs from substance. And we believe each mind continues in these further dimensions. This would be practical if you were unable to leave a dying housing. Our advice is not to get caught in any accidents. "Should it be advantageous to you, we will keep housings ready for you here. One male and one female, of course. Ah -- on one question which you did not ask -- you will find our guest housings are a uniform breed which became popular on your Planet among the Greeks and Romans as ideal godlike forms, shortly before we returned here. "And as to the other question you have not asked -- we never interfere with local cultures, for the greater the variety of each, the greater the enrichment of all. Your system is entirely safe; we propose to observe it more closely from now on. It is our impression, however, that you would be wise not to mention the galactic system we represent, when you return to your Earth. It would be too upsetting to the established pattern. We are all human beings, but we have solved the same problems in very different ways." "We have not solved ours," Fred said. "Oh, neither have we. But at least the few of us here, including yourselves, at any time as our guests, have achieved what you would probably call immortality." "We are free to accept your invitation at any time?" "Certainly." "Then we will report that no other envoy is needed," Pat said clearly. "That would be beneficial indeed." "And may we send you a very limited number of friends?" "Your guests shall be our guests. Again, we suggest you limit knowledge of us so far as possible." "We are called Divers because we can leave our bodies. Only Divers could visit you in this way, and we will not send any others." "Thank you. It is largely our fault. We have come across traces here and there of other colonies which we assumed were the successful resuit of past experiments. It occurs to us now that several of these may be in fact bodybound expeditions from your solar system. We will investigate and correct our catalogues." "We can be of assistance there," Pat answered. "Excellent. We wish you Godspeed and a pleasant return." T he nine minds released contact and moved apart. Fred felt Pat's mind slip into his. They rose off the dome and increased speed, soaring into the sky and out, above the ring of planets. "Why didn't we borrow a couple of bodies?" Fred asked. He could picture himself strutting elegantly in the body of a Greek god, with Pat to match beside him. "Please stop that -- we're zigzagging about. You're new, Fred. Every Diver goes through the same routine -- a pep-talk from the President, Doctor Sprinnell's little tricks, your first Dive all over the universe, and then routine patrols. What you don't know is that whenever we Divers come into contact with another race or another form of life, we are invariably offered gifts of some sort. Primitives sense the presence of a Diver and put on a show, lay out food and their treasures. The more advanced, using trained telepaths, try to bribe us. And so on, without exception." "Okay, so I'm new, Pat. So I don't know the pattern. A few days ago I was a slob in an automation-parts supply house and now I'm here with you at the back end of the Milky Way, or the center, whichever way you look at it. But Doc Spinner made some pretty odd cracks to me about security and I don't like the idea of being spied on all the time back on Earth." "No Diver does. The Defense Council put us in business, but now they are afraid of us, in a way. We can go anywhere and see anything. We might have a look at their secret installations or their private files. Then we would be in trouble." "Well, I didn't ask to come into this. But now that I'm in and a Diver, just one fancy move by Security and I'm off to get another body. That sounds odd, doesn't it? But I mean it." "I'm glad." "Eh?" "I'm very glad, Fred. I wanted to see how you'd take it. I feel the same way. It's true we're always offered presents, but immortality is something larger than a present. And to get out from under the thumb of the Psis and their spying is something all of us have been longing for." "And I'll tell you something else, Pat. From now on, if the other Divers agree, we'll do what we want. Oh, the Solar System can have its patrolling. I'll have to learn how that's done from you. We'll tell them what they want to know. But one sign of interference and we're off, and they can keep the bodies. We won't tell them they are a backward colony that has forgotten how to Dive. But we know it. We won't tell them the rest of the Galaxy is run from the center back in Sagittarius by humans who can Dive. But we know that too. If I thought at all about it, I thought we were freaks, useful nuisances. And I didn't mind being ordered about. But we're not freaks, Pat. We're the normal human beings that the Senate back there meant to create. It's the Solar System that is lop-sided, not us." "I'm not -- overinfluencing you, Fred?" "Hell, of course you are. I can hardly think of you without looping around a star. But the facts are the same. And from today, we're not Divers. We're the Free Divers, housing where we wish to, seeing what we want..." "And protecting the Solar System, Fred." "Well -- they're entitled to that. And we'll keep to their security regulations for our bodies on Earth, if it makes them happy. We can afford to give a little here and there." They shot together through the nearest T-Tauri variable arch and zoomed happily. After a while, they returned to the rendezvous off the American coast on Earth. The other Divei's were waiting for them. "It's a custom," Pat told him as they approached the nine Divers, hovering in space, "to greet you as a new Diver." They closed together as they met, within Fred's larger shell. He told them. There were no doubts among their minds. "Sooner or later," Fred finished, "one of us was bound to meet the true Galactics we've just met. It happened to be Pat and myself. I'm new and don't know much about Diving, but I've seen enough to know that from now on I'm a Free Diver." "So are we all," they answered. R eturning across America in the one shell, they scattered confusion and headache throughout the psiwatching stations in their path by the scramble of eleven sets of thoughts. Then they separated and left Fred to go down to his body while they returned to theirs in the different places Security had put them. Pat followed him down as a precaution. body fitted his mind with a greater feeling of strangeness but less muddling. The smaller consciousnesses of his body did not obscure his perceptions; he was aware of it as a housing for his mind. He looked at Dr. Howard Sprinnell, who had listened to him so far in silence, uncommenting and unmoved, a mild, friendly face in the small medical room. "So, Fred. I warned you, Pat warned you. You go out on two Dives, a few days after discovering that such things exist, and you come back to give me an ultimatum for the Solar Government. A lifetime here in the drabbest, almost medieval surroundings of the city and, after a few days, you come back announcing you're a Free Diver, owing nothing to anyone. Is that right? Do you still stick to that?" Fred nodded. "You realize what we can do to you, Fred? Dammit, on your first Dive you almost went out of space-time altogether, only you didn't know what you were doing. Do you know what you're doing now ? Do you think I've spent twenty years searching for negative Psis for government service so that you can turn them against the Solar System?" "Hold on. Doc. No one said anything about being against the Solar System. If there's work to be done, we'll do it. But in our own way and without being spied on." "Just give me one reason why the government should trust you, with the entire Security system." "Because," Fred said carefully, "you may have my body, but in my mind I am a Free Diver." "And nothing anyone can say will change that, eh?" "No." "You know," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said reflectively, "you're talking as if you had another body cached away somewhere." "Whoever heard of that?" "Lots of people, Fred. Voodoo zombies, certain Mahayana religious leaders, prehistoric Egyptians -- there's quite a well documented tradition. But the great problem has always been to find a leader with the courage to do it scientifically and in the interests of all the people, not just the members of some sect. Give a man the universe to play in and he doesn't mind a few rules as long as he's allowed to play. Finding negative Psis and creating the Divers as an organized official body was easy compared with the task of completing the experiment -- by making one of them revolt! Nine of the ten before you were too easily satisfied. Diving according to the rules and regulations was enough for them." "Who was the tenth?" "Pat, She was the prettiest and most discontented. I thought I could stir up some fire." "You did." "Ah, good. I am high-Psi, by the way. I seem to feel she's somewhere around here. However... I can never be a Diver myself, but years ago I formed the theory that a lot of phenomena could be explained by minds reaching out beyond their bodies. Now be careful, Fred. I don't want to know. The Security Psis are very real and there are a lot of things I cannot afford to know. I'm a Solar Government servant, remember. But it seemed to me there might conceivably be a life-form somewhere in the universe which used the body as a vehicle for its convenience. I hoped one day the Divers would find such a life-form, and if I made the regulations stiff enough and supplied one or two other irritations, one Diver might decide to make the jump, to revolt and stand on his own feet. Free Divers, you called yourselves, eh? A good name. I don't want to know here your base -- your other base -- is, Fred. I only want to know there is a group Solar Government regardless of time, theoretically for eternity -- that's what it amounts to when you work it out. As I say. I'm just a government servant. And thanks. Free Diver." He held out his hand and shook Fred's. "From now on, Fred, you can all come and go as you wish. If you feel like keeping to the security regulations, fine. But I'll make it clear to the Defense Council that there's nothing they can do about it if you don't. Men who don't mind losing their bodies have always been somewhat beyond the power of a government." "On that basis, Doc, I don't mind continuing the way you planned." "Laryngeal transmitter, continue your cover-job and the rest?" "Don't see why not." "Come along then. You're due to be released from jail." Fred followed the doctor into the operating room. H e remembered the beer this time. Elsie lay back on her bed, drinking from the can, one of her scuffs dangling from a bare toe. "The trouble with you, Fred, is you can't even rob an office." "I didn't." "That's what I mean. See? You just can't do anything." He lay back on his own ted and looked at her. There were a lot of things you didn't mind putting up with, voluntarily. You married her, so you'd look after her, trudge to the shipping room to work and trudge back. The tireder you got, the better. For evening came every day, and with the evening came sleep for his housing and eight hours for patrolling the Galaxy. And beyond the system, out beyond the dark lanes, there were endless fonns of life... and the two great developments of men, one stemming from the other in different ways, but each expanding, colonizing, growing... all with problems for the Free Divers he led. "Wouldja get me another beer, Fred?" "Sure." He remembered to slouch into the kitchen, as if he did not care. And when you considered it, he didn't care at all. This was one path of human developments the Senators never thought of. "Trouble with you, Fred, is you're just a negative character. You weren't when I married you, but you are now." Well, she was certainly entitled to a beer for that. There is a way to do this better... find it. Thomas A. Edison Dissolute Diplomat After you finish this story try doing a blurb that does not give away the point. It can't be done! comfortable floor dish, experimenting with himself out of sheer boredom. From three points along his perimeter he projected slim pseudopods, intertwined them for a short distance in the center, then split the end of each in two and looped them out to form six little hooks. Listlessly he solidified the edifice and extruded an eye to examine it. It did not look like much. There were several races in the Federation who covered their bodies with fabrics, and this thing he had made might have been useful to one of them, but not to anybody civilized. More bored than ever, he commenced the slow process of dissolving the hardened pseudopods. A low whistle came from the entrance of the tubeway in the palace wall. The little circular door opened and Mugg, his Minister of Home Affairs, shot out onto the floor. He lay for a moment in the bullet shape that Gyoinks used for traveling the tubeway ; then he re-formed and flowed into the floor dish beside Gringledoonk. When he had stopped rippling, Mugg extruded an eye and, on seeing the peculiar shape his ruler had assumed, kept popping out more and bigger eyes to get a better view. Gringledoonk watched the process with disgust. No matter how often he was told about it, Mugg never seemed to realize how ill-mannered such displays of curiosity were. "What," Mugg finally enquired, "have you done to yourself. Your Softness?" "Never mind that," Gringledoonk said irritably. "Why did you come here ? You know this is my rest period." "It's important," Mugg replied. "A spaceship on normal drive has entered the system and is heading for this planet." For an instant Gringledoonk lost the cool green coloring that befitted his position and allowed his natural mottled orange to show through. "What? What sort of a spaceship?" "It appears to be a Terran ship. Your Fluidity." '"The Treaty does not allow Terran ships to land here," Gringledoonk said. "This is most unexpected. We'll have to check the libraries on how to receive the officers of a Terran ship." He moved out of his dish, balancing the still rigid tripod with difficulty, and into the entrance port of the tubeway. The soft, warm radiance there helped him dissolve and reabsorb the cumbersome extension, and he vanished into the narrow aperture of the tubeway. After years of inactivity, Gringledoonk, Lord and Representative of the Gyoinks, was back in business. ing a moderate #C when his warp-drive generators gave a low sigh and vanished into some unknown dimension. The ancient Morris Starcruiser emerged into normal space with a sickening jiggle. On checking his position, Portman found that there was a planet called Yoink so close, astronomically speaking, that he could have spat on it. He tapped out Yoink's coordinates on his destination selector and began drinking beer in preparation. Two days and thirty-two cans of beer later, the Starcruiser bulleted down for a landing. Wiping white froth from his bristly upper lip, Portman opened the lock and went down onto springy yellow turf. He found himself surrounded by a varicolored crowd of beings of indeterminate shape who chittered at him excitedly. He could not decide whether their agitation was due to the sudden appearance of his ship or the fact that it seemed to have crushed a number of their plastic buildings on arrival. He drew his sidearm and shouted, "Silence, friends. I am a citizen of -- uh -- Imperial Earth and I command your obedience. I want -- " One of the waist-high cones of jelly interrupted him by sprouting an enormous mouth and bellowing something about violations of the Treaty. Portman gave the little alien a short burst from his Colt .# which reduced it to a pile of crackling cinders. "You're only saying that because you're jellos," he joked hastily, feeling that it might be better to pass the incident off. The directory had stated that the Gyoinks were nonaggressive, but there was no point in not acting in a friendly manner. He knew about the Treaty, but the cargo of contraband luminous furs that he had tucked away would have caused unwelcome comment if he had waited for an AA repair ship. "Now listen, friends," he repeated, brandishing the weapon. "We'll get along as long as nobody argues or tries to get funny. My ship has broken down. Replace the warp generators and I'll be on my way." "Imperial Earth will be grateful," he added as an afterthought. This diplomacy stuff was a cinch for a guy who knew how to handle people and things. immediately extruded stumpy legs and waddled up the ramp into the ship. Others went off toward a larger domeshaped building, muttering something about going for tools. Portman went into the ship and obtained a further supply of beer, booting aside any of the Gyoinks who got in his way, then lay down on the bright turf and contentedly watched the work progress. In spite of the fact that the Gyoinks were just animated trifles, he had to admit that they were pretty good spacedrive mechanics. L ater in the afternoon as Portman sat on the ramp, pink sky, a Gyoink approached from the direction of the town on the horizon. This was a large, pale green Gyoink who looked unfamiliar to Portman.  "What do you want? You're disturbing a representative of Imperial Earth." "I know, I know," the Gyoink replied humbly. "My name is Gringledoonk." "Anything to the Boston Gringledoonks?" Portman queried genially. "No," Gringledoonk said, wincing slightly. "I come to apologize for the conduct of my people earlier. When I heard that you were here, I came from the Capital to make sure you would receive the proper attention due to a representative of -- " "Yeah, yeah, I should think so," Portman cut in. "One of those jellos argued with me today. Argued ! How do you like that ?" He took the cigar from between his thick lips and pursed them in disapproval. "Most regrettable," the Gyoink agreed. "I can assure you there will be no more such incidents. My people are ignorant of the formalities involved in the reception of the captain of a Terran ship. Fortunately, our libraries contain something about the traditions of the great Earth space fleets and, from now on, we will observe those traditions to the best of our limited ability." "That's more like it," Portman said. dismantle the ship's power plant and, as the Yoink nights were chilly and the installation of the new generatora would not be completed until the morning, Portman was moved into one of the little plastic huts about a mile from the ship. He found that the Gyoinks had rigged up a hammock, of all things, but it took him only a short while to find the knack of sleeping in it. In the morning he was wakened by the sound of bells and the insistent prodding of a Gyoink who was proffering a glass of brown liquid on a small tray. The Gyoink's shiny surface had become bright blue. Portman demanded to know what was going on. "Eight bells, sir," the Gyoink replied. "Your breakfast is ready." There was a note of eager sincerity in the Gyoink's voice. Portman stretched luxuriously in the hammock, took the glass and found that the Gyoinks had contrived to produce a pretty fair rum. Grinning with satisfaction, he got up and lumbered out of the hut, stooping to get through the low door. Outside, a flat open conveyance on four wheels, manned by two more blue Gyoinks, was waiting. It looked brand new and had lifebelts slung along the sides. "The Chief Engineer reports that your ship is ready, sir," one of the Gyoinks said. "Step aboard and we will take you to it, sir. Aye, aye, sir." Portman got into the car and sat down. As he was being driven the short distance to his ship, he found himself almost wishing that he was not leaving so soon. Once the jellos had come to understand that he was the boss, they had been all right, in spite of being such ugly brutes. When they arrived at the battered old Starcruiser, Portman hardly recognized it. Its hull was shining with a rich ing sunlight. Gringledoonk was waiting for him on a little platform at the foot of the ramp up to the airlock. Other bright blue Gyoinks stood in quivering rows nearby. "Good morning, sir," Gringledoonk said, his voice charged with friendliness. "I hope that the launch we constructed for you was comfortable." "The launch? Oh, yeah -- very smooth. One of the jellos said the ship was ready. Is it?" Portman stepped out onto the platform. "Everything is shipshape, sir," the Gyoink said. "We are doing our humble best to do everything in accordance with -- " "Yeah, I know. Skip all that stuff. As long as the new generators are in. I'll be satisfied." "There's just one more thing, sir," Gringledoonk said. The ranks of Gyoinks moved aside, revealing a shallow depression in the platform, in the center of which was a circular hole about six inches in diameter. From under the depression a plastic tube led up the ramp and into the ship. "What, what ?" Portman snarled. "We only use this for long distances, but our library -- " "Skip it," Portman said. H e pushed Gringledoonk aside and headed for the bottom of the ramp across the dish-shaped hollow. Too late he noticed that there was a peculiar radiance hovering above the depression, coming from little translucent panels around its perimeter. He tried to retreat. But his bones had softened too rapidly and indeed his feet were already flowing out of his shoes onto the floor, to be joined by what had been his legs and the remainder of his unwashed body. He stopped screaming as his head completed its acious descent, and his staring eyes remained visible only for a moment, silently surveying the surface of the great blob which he had so unaccountably become. It liquified still further and the mortal remains of Harold Portman ran out through the hole in the basin with a regrettably undignified noise. The plastic pipe became dark and murky as he passed up it into his ship. "Just a matter of tradition," Gringledoonk explained proudly to the onlookers. "Our records are incomplete about Terran space fleet tradition, but they all agree on one thing -- the Captain is always piped on board." The Plastics Revolution Within the memory of most people now alive, plastics have bounded into a leading place in all sorts of things from hosiery to construction materials, yet their potentialities have scarcely been explored. Work now being done in Germany and Italy may replace or surpass polyethylene, the head of the polymer or long-chain-molecule family, that the majority of familiar plastics are descended from, along with straight chain alcohols and cyclic compounds with up to sixteen carbon atoms. The key now being explored is catalysts of organo-metals, such as combinations of aluminum, carbon and hydrogen, and titanium and chlorine. Dibasic acids with twelve carbon atoms and lactame with thirteen are produced by the cyclic process, promising new plastics that may outdo anything currently on the market. The organo-metallic catalysts make possible an "almost unbelievable" variety of chemical reactions. Ethylene, for example, is polymerized into pheric pressure, whereas less dense substances required high pressure. Among other qualities, the new plastics, used in tires, may increase mileage up to # miles I The new tetraethyl lead process, if proved practical, should reduce costs. This new method, when added to gasoline to prevent auto engine knock, has also been made possible by using catalysts. The United States alone produces # tons a year. It was invented in # in America, and the new process using Ziegler catalysts reduces the need of so much sodium and chlorine as in the old process. It uses the temperature of boiling water instead of six to seven times as much heat and about half as much electrical energy is used. Nuts to mid talents! Mine was no satisfaction, never earned me a penny -- and now it had me fighting for but finding only a sea of clouds instead. So I returned my attention to the inside of the plane, to the overstuffed grayhaired woman asleep beside me, to the basks of heads in seats before me, across the aisle to other heads, and down to the blonde. I had seen her in the concourse and at the gate, a shapely thing. Now she had crossed her legs and I was privileged to view a trim ankle and calf, and her profile as she stared moodily across the aisle and out a window where there was nothing to see. I slid my eyes past her to others. A crossword-puzzle worker, a togetherness-typemagazine reader. Inventory completed, I went back to looking at the clouds, knowing I should be thinking about the printing order I was going to Los Angeles for, and not wanting to. So I started going through the purse of the woman next to me. Perhaps that sounds bad. It wasn't. I'd been doing it for years and nobody ever complained. It started when I was a kid, this business of being able to explore the insides of things like purses and sealed boxes and locked drawers and -- well, human beings. But human beings aren't worth the trouble. It's like swimming through spaghetti. And I've got to stay away from electric wires. They hurt. Now don't ask me how they hurt. Maybe you think it's fun. For the most part, it really isn't. I always knew what was in Christmas presents before I unwrapped them, and therefore Christmas was always spoiled for me as a kid. I can't feel the color of anything, just its consistency. An apple senses about the same as a potato, except for the core and the stem. I can't even tell if there's writing on a piece of paper. So you see it isn't much. Just the feel of shapes, the hardnesses and softnesses. But I've learned to become pretty good at guessing. Like this woman next to me. She had a short, cylindrical metal object in her purse with waxlike stuff inside it -- a lipstick. A round, hard object with dust inside -- a compact. Handkerchief, chewing gum, a small book, probably an address book, money in a change purse -- a few bills and coins. Not much else. I was a little disappointed. I've run across a gun or two in my time. But I never say anything. keeping my mouth shut in the fourth grade when Miss Winters, a stern, white-haired disciplinarian, ordered me to eat my sack lunch in the classroom with her instead of outside with some of the other kids. This was the punishment for some minor infraction. Lunchtime was nearly over and we'd both finished eating ; she said she'd be gone for a few moments and that I was to erase the blackboard during her absence, which I dutifully did. Class had hardly resumed when she started looking around the desk for her favorite mechanical pencil, asking if any of us had seen it, and looking straight at me. I didn't want her to think I had taken it while she was out of the room, so I probed the contents of her purse, which she always kept in the upper right drawer of her desk. "It's in your purse," I blurted out. I was sent home with a stinging note. Since then I've kept quiet. At one time I assumed everybody was able to sense. I've known better for years. Still, I wonder how many other people are as close-mouthed about their special gift as I am about mine. I used to think that some day I'd make a lot of money out of it, but how? I can't read thoughts. I can't even be sure what some of the things I sense in probing really are. But I've learned to move things. Ever so little. A piece of paper. A feather. Once I stopped one of' those little glass-enclosed light or heatpowered devices with vanes you see now and then in a jeweler's window. And I can stop clocks. Take this morning, for example. I had set my alarm for five-thirty because I had to catch the seven o'clock plane at San Francisco International Airport. This being earlier than I usually get up, it seems all I did during the night was feel my way past the escapement and balance wheel to see where the notch for the alarm was. The last time I did it there was just the merest fraction of an inch between the pawl and the notch. So I sighed and moved to the balance wheel and its delicate ribbon of spiraling steel. I hung onto the wheel, exerting influence to decrease the restoring torque. The wheel slowed down until there was no more ticking. It took quite a bit of effort, as it always does, but I did it, as I usually do. I can't stand the alarm. When I first learned to do this, I thought I had it made. I even went to Las Vegas to try my hand, so to speak, with the ratchets and pawls and cams and springs on the slot machines. But there's nothing delicate about a slot machine, and the spring tensions are too strong. I dropped quite a lot of nickels before I finally gave up. So I'm stuck with a talent I've found little real use for. Except that it amuses me. Sometimes. Not like this time on the plane. The woman beside me stirred, sat up suddenly and looked across me out the window. "Where are we ?" she asked in a surprised voice. I told her we were probably a little north of Bakersfield. She said, "Oh," glanced at her wristwatch and sank back again. Soon the stewardesses would bring coffee and doughnuts around, so I contented myself with looking at the clouds and trying to think about Amos Magaffey, who was purchasing agent for a Los Angeles amusement chain, and how I was going to convince him our printing prices were maybe a little higher but the quality and service were better. My mind wandered below where I was sitting, idly moving from one piece of luggage to another, looking for my beat-up suitcase. I went through slips and slippers, lingerie and laundry, a jig saw puzzle and a ukulele. I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first. T he bomb was in a small bag -- a woman's bag judging by the soft, flimsy things you'd never find in a man's -- and I didn't know it was a bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small, quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my neck when I suddenly realized what it was. The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go. It was forty minutes to Burbank and Lockheed Air Terminal. My mind was churning when I turned from the window to look around at the unconcerned passengers, the woman at my side asleep again. I thought: Which one of these... No, none of them would know it was there. I glanced out the window again ; clouds were still in the way. We'd be leaving the valley for the mountain range north of Los Angeles soon, if we hadn't left it already. No place to land the plane there. But of course that had been the plan ! My heart was beating in jackhammer rhythm ; my mouth was dry and my mind was numb. Tell somebody about the bomb before it's too late ! No, they'd think I put it there. Besides, what good would it do? There would be panic and they'd never get the plane down in time -- if they believed me. "Sir." My head jerked around. The stewardess stood in the aisle, smiling, extending a tray to me, a brown plastic tray bearing a small paper cup of tomato juice, a cup of coffee, a cellophane-wrapped doughnut, paper spoon, sugar and dehydrated cream envelopes, and a napkin. I goggled at her, managed to croak, "No, thanks." She gave me an odd look and moved along. My seatmate had accepted hers and was tearing at the cellophane. I couldn't bear to watch her. I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried to close everything off -- the throb of engines, the rush of air, the woman sipping coffee noisily beside me -- and I went into the clock and surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back ; when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to stop it. Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold until it came to a dead stop. "Anything the matter?" My eyelids flew open and I looked into the eyes of the woman next to me. There was sugar from the doughnut around her mouth and she was still chewing. "No," I said, letting out my breath. "I'm all right." "You were moaning, it sounded like. And you kept moving your head back and forth." "Must have been dreaming," I said as I rang for the stewardess. When she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else, just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good. A ll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still. I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions. Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock -- but not before the bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted. a prying man, a man literally with gimlet eyes. Mountain crags jutted through the clouds. We Were in the range north of the city. Here and there were clear spots and I could see roads below, but there were also clouds far above us. It was very beautiful, but it was also very bumpy, and we started to slip and slide. To my horror I found that the balance wheel was rocking again. Closing my eyes and gritting my teeth, I forced my senses to the wheel, tugging and pulling and shoving and pushing until it finally stopped. A jab in the shoulder. I jumped, startled. "Your cup," my seat partner said, pointing. I looked down at the coffee cup I had crushed in my hands. Then I looked up into the eyes of the stewardess. I handed it to her. She took it without a word and went away. "Were you really asleep that time ?" "Not really," I said. I was tempted to tell the woman I was subject to fits, but I didn't. It was only a few minutes to landing, but they became the longest minutes of my life as time after time I stopped the rocking wheel when the plane dipped and bumped to a landing. Leaving the apron with the other passengers, I tried to walk as unconcernedly as they through the exit gate. I would have liked walking through the terminal and out the entrance and away, but I could not. I had my suitcase to get, for one thing. The damned bomb was the other. So I strolled out into the concourse again to look at the plane and watch the baggagemen at work, transferring the luggage to two airfield carts. They weren't as careful as I would have been. It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The assortment of bags -- a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors -- was packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded and placed in a long rack. I went with it. There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases, and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was the attendant and I had two bags -- my own battered veteran of years, and a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one. I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and -- a clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously. I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes. T he baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it toward me. "Thanks," I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the remaining bag. "One left over, eh?" "Yeah." He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But he was eying me with a "well-why-don'tyou-get-along?" look. I said, "What happens if nobody claims it?" "Take it inside. Why?" He was getting too curious. "Oh, I just wondered, that's all." I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying over. "Cab?" I shook my head. "Just waiting." Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb. I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied me. I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to live with myself. No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until -- until what? A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own business. But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him, "Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag." But I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim counter out of the side of my eye. The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room. I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How many minutes -- or seconds -- were left? I was sweating when I moved to the counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the clock again. "Can I help you?" the clerk asked. "No. I'm waiting for someone." I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the device, but it was far away. When I tried to # dampen it, the wheel escaped my grasp. "Do you have my suitcase?" I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand she had a green baggage claim check. The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up, glanced at me indiffei'ently, and then started for the entrance with it. "Just a moment," I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying after her. A t her side and a little ahead of her, I said, "Listen to me." She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door. "It's a matter of life or death," I said. I wanted to wrest the bag from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I restrained myself. She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said, "Please put the bag down. Over there." I indicated a spot beside a telephone booth where it would be out of the way. She didn't move. She just said, "Why?" "For God's sake !" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was. I'm glad the bomb didn't go off ; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me or anything else right now if it had. "I've got to talk to you. It's very important." The girl said, "Why?" I was beginning to think it was the only word she knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill someone so lovely. "I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a telephone call." I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, "And don't ask me why." She gave me a speculative look. I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, "All right, but -- " I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door, pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel. Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet. "Now will you please tell me what this is all about?" she said stiffly. "Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain." She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed the short, fat man into the coffee shop. Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag. During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag. "Joe did," she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but staring vacantly across the room. "Joe put it there." Behind her eyes she was reliving some recent scene. "Who is Joe?" "My husband." I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got control again. "This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my sister." Her smile was bleak. "I see now why he wanted to put in those books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put in some books we'd both finished reading -- for my sister. That's when he must have put the -- put it in there." I said gently, "Why would he want to do a thing like that?" "I don't know." She shook her head. "I just don't know." And she was close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, "I'm not sure I want to know." I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy. "It's all right now?" she asked. I nodded. "A long as we don't move it." I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl -- she said her name was Julia Claremont -- agreed to tell him she thought there was a bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it would have to do. "We've got to get it deactivated," I said, watching the fat man pay for his coffee and leave. "The sooner the better." one gulp and went to pay the bill with her. I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy for a long while. "She was supposed to meet me, and when she wasn't here, I got worried. She said she isn't feeling well and asked me to take a cab." She smiled a little. It was a bright, cheery thing. I had the feeling it was all for me. "That's where I was going when you caught up with me." It had become a very nice day. But the bottom dropped out of it again when we reached the lobby. The two bags weren't there. I ran to the entrance and nearly collided with the redcap. "See anybody go out of here with a little red bag and an old battered suitcase?" "Bag? Suitcase?" he mumbled. Then he became excited. "Why, a man just stepped out of here -- " He turned to look down the street. "That's him." The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand, mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry. "Hey!" I shouted, starting toward him. The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in. The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I reached where it had been parked, I watched it for a moment, then walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the redcap, who said, "That the driver. That was all right, man steal them suitcases?" I didn't want to see him. I "That he did," I said, didn't know what Julia was Just then the airport policethinking, man started across the street She said, "About those from the parking lot. Redcap bags," and looked at me. said, "Better tell him about The officer said, "Yes, it," miss?" The policeman was sympa"I -- I don't care about mine, thetic and concerned. He said, I didn't have much of any"We'd better get over to the thing in it." office." "I feel the same way," I But we never left the spot said. "Would it be all right if because an explosion some we didn't bother to report it?" blocks distant shattered the "Well," the policeman said, air. Julia's hand grasped my "I can't make you report it." arm. Hard. "I'd rather not then," Julia "Jets," the redcap said, eysaid. She turned to me. "I'd ing the sky. like some air. Can't we walk a "I don't know," the policelittle?" man said. "Didn't sound much "Sure," I said, like a jet to me." We started down the street, We stood there, I could visuher arm in mine, as the air alize the wreckage of an old began to fill with the distant gray coupe in the middle of a sounds of sirens, #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business naanagers are: Publisher, Robert M, Guinn, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. ; Editor, H. L. (Sold, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. 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Price Sign Card... Name Address Name City State Address I year # yearr Price City Sign Card State. They went somewhere and something happened to H unched tensely over the foot of the bed, Bradford Sanderson stared down at the unconscious sergeant. There was a heavy stillness in the hospital room. Outside, beyond was to go there the window, the sun-splashed expanse of the Army medical base stretched away toward the glaring beach and the shimmering Gulf waters beyond. Last Leap them -- and the one way to find out where and what and let it happen! The door opened and closed softly, admitting a lean and erect Medical Corps colonel. "Has he come around yet, Doctor?" he asked in an uneasy whisper. Dr. Sanderson shook his head. "No, but he's sleeping lightly. He'll be awake in a minute." "Think you'll do any better with this one?" The colonel's voice sharpened to an apprehensive edge. "I intend to take all precautions, Dr. Vickers. I don't think we'll lose McNaught." "God, I hope not," Vickers said, relieved only a little. "We've already got the Bureau breathing down our necks over the first two -- ah -- accidents." "I'm sure we have nothing to fear this time," said Sanderson. For his forty-eight years and despite the flecks of gray in his hair, there was a preserved air of youthfulness about the physicist. Stocky and in obvious good trim, ho presented an appearance that belied his professional status. The door opened and closed again, as softly as before, and a woman whose dense black hair contrasted her Army nurse's uniform came and stood between the two men. Slightly built and attractive, she fixed the slumbering sergeant with an anxious stare. Vickers glanced at the hypodermic syringe in her hand. "Sodium pentothal. Miss Conner ly?" She nodded without looking at him. "Two hundred cc." Drawing in a deep breath, the sergeant rolled over and buried his head luxuriously in the pillow. The movement, however, did little to dishevel his bristly blond hair. His eyes flicked open and he stared abstractedly at the others. Then he smiled and his lips parted to form a word. "Easy now!" Sanderson cautioned. "Don't think about anything! Just keep your mind blank!" A ll expression drained from the sergeant's face. His naturally ruddy features blanched imperceptibly, as though he had remembered something of appalling consequences. Colonel Vickers and Miss Connerly moved precautiously away from the bed. "Did it take?" McNaught asked, sitting up. "That's what we're going to find out now," Sanderson replied. "And that's all we're going to find out." Exploring the floor, McNaught's feet found and squirmed into his slippers. Then he rose, straightened his pajama blouse and reached for his robe. He was a tall, wellproportioned man and his excessive size was evident in the skimpy fit of the hospital garments. "Take it slow," Sanderson soothed again, backing off before the sergeant. "Just do as we say -- nothing else." McNaught tightened the robe sash and offered a smile that was intended to be reassuring. "If you're thinking about Watterman and Fisher," he said lightly, "they'll be back. They just took French leave and -- " "Blank, Sergeant !" Sanderson cut in. "We don't want you thinking of anything that might make you pop away impulsively. Now -- are you all set?" Miss Connerly strained forward, her intense gray eyes vigilant with restrained apprehension. Vickers glanced uncertainly behind him and eased back. Sanderson stepped to one side, as though it might be necessary to get out of the sergeant's way. "The opposite comer of the room -- and that's all," he directed. "Ready Go!" Instantly there was a double thunderclap of minor intensity -- like two distant jets slipping through the sound barrier -- as McNaught disappeared from where he was standing and reappeared simultaneously in the designated corner. The sergeant turned and faced Sanderson triumphantly. "It works!" But the physicist sprang across the room, signaling for Miss Connerly at the same time. "Let him have the injection!" he told the nurse. "Easy, son. Everything's going to be all right. Just don't think! Dr. Vickers, help me bring him back across the room." The injection took effect almost immediately and it required the efforts of both men to get McNaught comfortably positioned in bed. Sanderson shook his head briskly, trying to clear the ringing in his ears. And he wondered whether he would ever get used to the unexpected explosions that resulted as air rushed into the suddenly vacated space and was abruptly expelled from the newly occupied one. L ater that evening, Vick' ers paced nervously in Sanderson's office while Sanderson chronicled the day's incidents in his official record book. Unsettled by the colonel's restlessness, he paused and looked up irately. "I wouldn't worry too much about McNaught. He's going to do all right." "That's what you said about Watterman and Fisher." "But the sergeant has good control. He knows the meaning of the word restraint." Vickers cast him an unconvinced glance and continued pacing. "That's the way it was with Watterman and Fisher -- at first. They went slow. They had a lot of respect for teleportation -- until they started throwing caution to the wind and went popping all over the place." Sanderson rose, packing his pipe bowl with a crooked thumb. "McNaught's forewarned by the disappearances of the first two subjects. You can be sure he's going to be damned careful." Vickers leaned backward against the desk and folded his arms, while the physicist lit his pipe and raised a thick white cloud of fragrant smoke between them. "What do you suppose happened to Watterman and Fisher?" the colonel asked grimly. "That's what McNaught is going to help us find out." "Collision with something solid?" Sanderson shook his head. "You don't pass through anything en route from one place to another." "I mean in the rematerialization. Maybe Watterman and Fisher popped up in a space that was already occupied." "Impossible. Watterman cleared that for us months ago. He proved rematerialization can take place only in gaseous spaces or attenuated liquids. He even tried to reappear within a brick wall. The best he could do was to pop out next to it." Still, Vickers was not mollified. His thin, rough hands rigidly gripped the edge of the desk behind him as he stood there with one leg crossed over the other. He shook his bowed head regretfully and the light from the cortical excitation laboratory in the next room sent glistening highlights dancing across his slick scalp. ' "Maybe they popped off to a polar region and froze to death," he speculated sourly. "That; too, is highly unlikely. There's a lot of reflex action involved. Waterman, after his second excitation, did go to the Arctic, you'll remember. He was only there about three seconds -- long enough for the cold to begin sping in -- before he found himself back in his room. Fisher even tried a surge into space, without any injury at all. His reaction to a vacuum was so spontaneous that I don't imagine he spent more than a hundredth of a second out there." Nodding absently, Vickers lighted a cigarette with unsteady hands while Sanderson returned to his record book. But the physicist only sat there staring thoughtfully through the surface of the desk, pen poised over the lined paper. first. There had been his initial reaction to cortical excitation -- uncertainty, perhaps even a tinge of fear. His leaps during the first day were executed with a gingerly reluctance. By the second day, however, he had overcome all his qualms. And before the stimulated frontal region of his brain had returned to normal at the end of the third day, he had materialized in four different sections of the country. It was after his second exposure to the multiple-frequency stimulus a month later, however, that he had lost himself in an orgy of teleportive experiences, cropping up in so many places throughout the country and abroad that the story had to be released. Only then did the public become aware that, under direct subsidy of the Bureau of Research, Bradford Sanderson's previous experiments in exciting telepathy had been ingeniously expanded to include teleportive ability. It was Watterman's materialization at the United States Moon Base, the physicist recalled, that had forced the Bureau to release the findings of the experiment in order to avert panic. The next day -- that was five months ago, Sanderson recalled as he pulled pensively on his pipe -- Watterman had disappeared, literally, completely, permanently. He had left behind only a vacuous tranquility in the hospital room, ruffled solely by rustling curtains that quietly altered the pattern of sunlight on the floor as they swayed with the Gulf breeze. With Fisher, it had been different. Sanderson had questioned his selection as a volunteer. Thin and fidgety, he had definitely turned out to be the excitable type. And exposure to the catalytic frequencies had only heightened his nervousness to the extent that before he disappeared he had even shown psychotic tendencies. His teleportive leaps had been few indeed and were executed only after inordinate coaxing. Only once during his entire phase had he shown any initiative. That was on his jump into empty space. But even afterward -- until he had vanished permanently from under a shade umbrella on the beach several hours later -- he had disclaimed any intent in the feat. Rather, he had insisted that it was the result of an "auto-suggestive impulse." With McNaught, though, it would be different, Sanderson promised himself. The sergeant was as perfectly balanced, mentally, as any person he had ever known. 'T wonder," Vickers said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ash tray, "whether Watterman and Fisher will ever be heard from again." "I like to think they will." Sanderson cupped his hands around the warmth of his pipe bowl. "I tell myself that in both cases, and perhaps coincidentally, they were stranded in remote areas just as the effects of the stimulative frequencies wore off." "That could have been the case with Watterman," the colonel admitted. "He disappeared toward the end of his second three-day period. But Fisher was in phase less than a day and a half when it happened to him." "Maybe the stimulation wasn't as strong in Fisher's case." "Maybe," said Sanderson. Vickers turned to leave, but paused near the door. "By the way, the Under Secretary of Research is due in tomorrow morning." "Peabody? What does he want?" "Mainly to keep abreast of what's going on. If we lose McNaught, he probably has orders to put his foot down on your work." "That's bad. I didn't want any interference during the sergeant's three-day phase. As a matter of fact, I'd planned to have him spend most of tomorrow on the beach. That'll help keep his mind occupied." Vickers shrugged. "You'll have to see Peabody first." Research Sylvester A. Peabody was impressive both in size and proclivity to imposition. The adjectives "Washington" and "bureaucratic" were stamped all over him -- in the intolerant set of his jaw, the disdainful sharpness of his eyes, his mannerism of wielding an otherwise nonfunctional pair of glasses to stress a point. He had taken possession of Sanderson's desk by the next morning and, for the better part of an hour, had thumbed through the day-by-day chronology on all the experimental work. He looked up abruptly. "So now it's Number Three?" Annoyed over the loss of time, Sanderson said nothing. "And what makes you think we'll fare any better with this new subject?" Peabody asked. "For one thing, I altered three of the basic frequencies," the physicist explained wearily. "There may be a correlation between some of the ultra-wave forms and the feeling of a compulsion to teleport." The undersecretary rose and thumped his knuckles with the spectacles. "As I understand it, both Fisher and Watterman said that at times they felt this almost uncontrollable impulse to -- as you say -- make a leap." Sanderson nodded. "Watterman found himself jumping on several occasions when he merely thought about another location." "And you believe you've corrected this rashness in McNaught?" "Sergeant McNaught went through extensive tiaining and thorough conditioning for two months before exposure. I consider him well insulated against any whimsical use of his ability." Peabody struck a pose of thoughtfulness as he stared out the window. Impatiently, Sanderson checked his watch. It was almost noon and he had thus far managed to spend only two hours with the new subject. But it had been a most rewarding two hours. McNaught had executed over a dozen controlled leaps, two of them covering distances of better than a mile. And if the sergeant had felt any inner elation over the experiences, he had not shown it. Exhibiting only a purely impersonal approach to the manifestation, he hadn't taken a single impulsive leap. But if Sanderson was going to continue with his planned program of sensible indoctrination for McNaught, he realized, he would have to break away from Peabody soon. For nearly a third of the sergeant's three-day phase had already been used up and as yet he had been subjected to nothing but a false, laboratory environment. The undersecretary turned and spoke with a precise, meaningful inflection. "If you lose this third subject, Sanderson, your project is going to be indefinitely abandoned." "McNaught's secure." "As I understood it, so were the first two." "You'll have to admit that it's possible they may have simply taken French leave -- Watterman because he was naturally frivolous and Fisher because he was afi'aid." "That's just the point!" Peabody banged the desk. "Do you realize that for months now security has been sweating? Don't you see what it would mean if the details of your work fell into hostile hands?" "It can't happen. Wherever they go, the subjects take no knowledge of the process with them." S anderson didn't manage to get away with Sergeant McNaught and Miss Connerly until almost three that afternoon. But that was just as well, he conceded as he helped unpack the chairs, umbrella, lunch basket and brazier at the beach. The hottest part of the day was behind them now and cool offshore breezes were beginning to moderate the tepid glare of white sand and glistening water. Eventually, the physicist settled down in one of the chairs, fished in his pockets for his pipe, and began planning a series of more ambitious leaps for the sergeant to perform later that afternoon. McNaught shed his polo shirt and helped the nurse off with her beach robe. "Come on, Kate," he challenged. "I'll race you to the water." Sanderson watched the couple sprint away while the sun played softly against their lithe forms. But several yards from the water McNaught swerved to spare the architectural integrity of a deserted sand castle, lost his balance and toppled. Miss Connerly, unmindful of the sergeant's mishap, raced on, splashing through the shallow water and plunging headlong into a fi'othy breaker. At once there was a muffled double explosion as McNaught vanished from where he had sprawled on the sand and rematerialized in the water beside the girl. And, accommodating his impetuous entry, the water shot outward and upward in a geyserlike spray. Sanderson bolted from his chair and raced across the beach. Scarcely aware that he was in water above his shoes, he cupped his hands and shouted, "I didn't tell you to leap!" "I didn't either." McNaught displayed a confused frown. "It just sort of -- happened." Sanderson stiffened. Was this a first indication of capricious reaction? Was McNaught losing his detached calmness? Was he headed the same way as Watterman and Fisher ? "You'd better come on in," Sanderson said. "I'm sure he'll be all right. Dr. Sanderson," the nurse interceded. "It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't encouraged that spurt of exertion." Perhaps she was right, the physicist granted hopefully. After all, reaction could only be expected to become reflexive to a certain degree during physical activity. Still, he went back to the station wagon, opened the glove compartment, took out the hypodermic syringe case and put it in his hip pocket. E arly that evening, while Sanderson was fanning the coals in the brazier, McNaught and Miss Connerly returned from a twilight walk along the beach. They stood on the other side of the fire for a long while, letting the lambent glow cast a mantle of ruddiness across their features. "I think we're making excellent headway," the physicist enthused, spearing three wieners with a fork and subjecting them to the heat of the coals. "I particularly like the way you're showing restraint. By this time Watterman was hopping all over the country." With satisfaction, he thought back over the experiments he had put McNaught through late that afternoon. He had negotiated leaps to the island, to a point several miles down the beach and to Colonel Vickers' office and back. And, unlike the first two subjects, the sergeant had still shown no further tendency toward impulsive teleportation. Sanderson looked hastily over at the couple, realizing only then that there was a tense' silence between them. And now he saw that their faces were strained with uncertain expressions. "It -- happened again," the girl said awkwardly. Sanderson let the wieners drop to the sand. "Another involuntary hop? Where to this time?" "I just couldn't help it," McNaught apologized. "I was thinking about home -- on the West Coast. We've got a beach just like this. And suddenly I was standing on it. I would not even have known the difference if it hadn't been for the fact that the sun was still shining over there." "That settles it!" the physicist exclaimed. "Let's get him back to the base, Kate. He's going to sit out the I'est of his phase with a few hundred cc of pentothal!" McNaught gripped Sanderson's sleeve. "I'll be all right. Let me stick it out -- for a few more hours, at least." "I think Dr. Sanderson is right," the girl said. "It's best to play it safe." She went over to retrieve her robe. McNaught, however, only stood staring down at the glowing coals. A large moth buzzed against his face, but even that failed to snap him from his thoughts. Sanderson reached out and took him urgently by the arm. But the sergeant pulled free, brushing the insect away at the same time. "No, waitl I think -- " He paused and his eyes were vivid with sudden apprehension. "I think I know what happened to Watterman and Fisher!" The physicist laced him with a questioning stare. McNaught lurched back. "No!" he shouted. "Don't ask me! I can't talk about it!" Sanderson lunged for him. But he vanished, reappeared a few feet away, moonlight glistening on his trembling shoulders. Kate raced toward him and he disappeared again, materializing this time close to the physicist. And Sanderson was ready with the hypodermic. T he next morning the physicist's dra'wn face showed the effects of a sleepless night as he called down for coffee and shaved in the lavatory adjoining his office. When he went back to his desk, Vickers was in the room, looking haggard and nervous. The colonel's tie was askew, and around his bald crown, his peripheral fringe of hair was ragged, like the leaves of a Roman chaplet. He dropped into a chair opposite the desk. "At least I got rid of Peabody. He's gone back to Washington." Sanderson tensed. "You tell him what happened ?" "Of course not. I simply explained that we cut the experiment short to evaluate what we've observed thus far." The physicist thrust his hands in his pockets and went to the window, looked out blindly, turned and came back, "I don't understand it. I can't imagine what unnerved McNaught so completely last night." "You should have pressed him for an explanation." "No," Sanderson disagreed. "I think that might have been disastrous. When he materialized next to me -- Klon't you see? -- he must have wanted that injection." Vickers spread his hands. "What do we do now?" "Keep him under sedation until the effects of the frequency exposure wear off. We only have a little more than a day to sit it out. Then I'm going to re-examine every inch of theory." He went over to his desk, opened the record book and wrote four or five lines. Then he looked up as Miss Connerly entered with the coffee he had requested. "I'm glad you're here, Kate," he said, relieved. "When did you give McNaught that last injection? It was three o'clock, wasn't it?" Pen poised over the next blank line, he waited for her answer. When he looked up finally, he saw only dismay on her face. "I thought -- " she began. "Didn't you say -- I mean, you told me just after midnight that the other nurse would take care of it, didn't you?" Sanderson sprang up. "I said she would prepare it ! She went off duty at two-thirty!" Lunging for the door, he brush against her, jolted the tray and sent coffee sloshing over the brims of the two cups. Vickers stayed close at his heels all the way down the corridor. McNaught's room was empty. The top sheet on his bed had been carelessly thrown back. An overturned glass of water, its puddle still dripping off the edge of the night table's surface, suggested that he had only recently awakened. His robe was gone, as was one of his slippers. Sole up, the other lay halfway between the bed and the reading table. Sunlight splotched the single sheet of writing paper on the table. With an unsteady hand, Sanderson picked up the scrawled note : How can I warn anybody without even thinking about it? The urge to teleport can sneak up on you. It can also be an oveipowering compulsion. But how can I teU you ? How can I keep myself from thinking about something, and at the same time write about what it is I'm not supposed to think about? I know what happened to Watterman and Fisher. They wen The writing ended abruptly, as though the pen had been snatched cleanly up and away from the paper. that same day when Vickers, having searched Sanderson's quarters and the hospital for the physicist, tried the laboratory on the strength of a hunch. In the doorway, the whining surge of energy in the excitation circuits drew a startled breath from the colonel. He plunged on into the room, racing past the restless generators, past the towering banks of rectifiers and oscillators, past the ultra-frequency converters. "You fool!" he shouted as he covered the remaining distance to the excitation chair and began snatching electrodes from the band that circled Sanderson's forehead. He knocked aside the final three glowing parabolic reflectors. "You damned silly fool! What are you trying to do?" Sanderson felt no immediate effects from the exposure, despite the fact that there had been no anesthetic. "It had to be done," he said evenly. "Why? So you could go the same way Watterman and Fisher and McNaught went?" "I've got to know what happened to them." "It doesn't make any difference now." Vickers appeared to be growing even more perturbed. "The Bureau's going to shut down the project anyway!" Sanderson rose and passed a hand over his forehead, fingering the impression left by the electrode band. "That's just it. They'll shut us down and we'll never know what became of McNaught and the others." "What do you expect to do?" "The same things they did, I guess," the physicist said, shrugging. "I don't suppose I'll have any trouble duplicating their final experience." He stared at a cleared space in the opposite corner of the laboratory. And even before he could completely summon the intent to leap, he found himself at once on the other side of the room. Aghast, Vickers raced after him. "Sanderson -- don't! You aren't even conditioned against impulsive jumps!" "That's the way I want it," the physicist said impassively. "All the preparations we went through with McNaught did no good. He still hopped -- three times that we know of. So maybe I don't care about self-restraint." He leaped again, this time popping up in the doorway to his office. Hands spread in a supplicating gesture. Colonel Vickers followed. "Watterman was not interested in restraining himself. He leaped as much as he wanted. And he finally vanished too." "I don't give a hang if I do disappear." Sanderson turned away. "I'm going to find out where those others went. And the only way to do it is to take the same course they took and see what happens." He flicked out of sight and ended the leap in the corridor outside his office. nel's voice came excitedly from within the room. Then the door swung open and Vickers burst into the hall. "Call this crazy thing off! Look, I have an idea. In teleporting from one place to another, you have to go through something, even though it seems instantaneous. Through some other plane of existence, perhaps. And maybe when you don't come back -- when the others didn't come back -- it was because they got stuck in between!" Sanderson turned his back. Immediately the corridor was erased from his vision, only to be replaced in the next instant by the ponderous railing of a concrete bridge and, beyond, a river whose dark waters sent wisps of mist into the chill air. On his left, the bridge abutment clung to the shore of the lie de la Cite and, farther in the distance, the Cathedral of Notre Dame's great, slender spire rose against the pink-gray dawn sky. A startled Parisian, witnessing the materialization, shouted a fervent "Mon Dieu!" and promptly got his foot caught in the spokes of his bicycle catapulting over the handle bars. At once Sanderson was back in the hallway with Vickers, who was shouting for Miss Connerly. The colonel lunged for him but missed as Sanderson teleported to a new position behind him. "For God's sake!" Vickers shouted. "Stop it -- just for a minute, anyway! I have another theory. What if the protective reflex doesn't always work? Maybe Fisher was just lucky when he was able to leap out of space immediately ! Suppose he returned to space later -- and panicked before he remembered he could jump back to safety!" A sudden assault of violent suction and intense cold sprang in on Sanderson, as though he had been snatched up in a giant's hand. In a shutterlike glimpse, he was fleetingly aware of a broad sweep of blackness, spangled of a vast, shadowy surface hundreds of miles below that shone softly in the light of a full moon. In the next instant he was standing on the beach not far from the spot where he had picnicked with McNaught and Kate the day before. The same moon sent its light down to embrace him and he stood there in silent concentration. The last leap, he realized, had not been voluntary. Vickers had merely spoken about space and, on the strength of that suggestion, Sanderson had unintentionally duplicated Fisher's experience. So it had been spontaneous. So what? Maybe that was where they had made their mistake all along -- in thinking that impulsive teleportation must be rigorously avoided. Maybe he should let himself go completely -- leap whenever and as often as he could, with or without his volition, wherever his fancy led. Complete surrender to the impulse, wearing himself out in wild over indulgence -- that might be the formula for establishing teleportation on a totally conscious and controllable plane. If you filled a man with food, it was only logical that he would have no appetite, wasn't it? Abruptly he was back in the hospital corridor. Only it was empty now. But not for long. the room that Fisher had occupied. "Miss Conn -- " He spied Sanderson, paused, then came forward cautiously. But the physicist had already seen the hypodermic syringe vhich Vickers was now trying to hide behind his back. There was a furtive sound in the other direction and Sanderson spun around. Kate was closing in on him from the rear with another hypodermic. But the visual impression of the nurse was blotted out and immediately replaced by a blaze of lights that sparkled against a background of glistening wet buildings and dripping sky. Then, in the fierce glow of a lightning bolt. Times Square stood out in eerie white clarity. Hunched under an umbrella, a man and woman in formal dress brushed past him and continued on down a Broadway that was almost deserted in the thunderstorm. Leaping to New York, Sanderson assured himself, had not been involuntary. This time he had predetermined his destination. And in a quick follow-up to establish the self-impelled nature of his movements, he teleported to the base of the Washington Monument, noting that there was no storm in the nation's capital ; to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, where the moon was noticeably lower in the sky ; to State Street in the Chicago Loop, which he left as soon as he felt the first cold drops of rain. Then suddenly he was back in the quiet of Fisher's room in the hospital, only now beginning to feel the first sensations of exuberance over his far-ranging travels. But he repressed it, remembering his resolve to reject a sensation of exhilaration. If he was to learn what had happened to Watterman, Fisher and McNaught, and return to tell about it, his attitude would have to be one of scientific objectivity. With a sudden rebirth of determination, he set out again -- to a desolate polar ice field, remaining there until the severe cold pierced his clothing like dagger points of fire -- to the crest of the Koolau Mountain Range on Oahu, looking down first on sprawling Honolulu and then at the sun sinking in the ocean beyond -- to London, where he stood at the base of Lord Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square and watched the first faint splashes of dawn appear in the eastern sky -- to a rugged peak in the Rockies, from which he enjoyed an enchanting view of the artificial, geoExhausted, finally, he let himself return to the hospital room and took one final leap to the bed. He stretched himself across its tightly drawn sheet and fell quickly asleep. been at least half an eternity later, Sanderson finally opened his eyes and turned his face away from the bright sunlight that was falling on his pillow. He reached over and rubbed his arm, realizing at once that it was sore from a number of needle punctures over a considerable period of time. He had thrown himself across the bed fully dressed, but he was now in a hospital gown and lay under the sheet. Someone, perhaps as a result of anxious waiting, had kept the desk calendar up to date. And he noted, as he had previously suspected, that it was not the day after his exposure to the ultra-frequency excitation, but rather three days later. Still groggy, he reached over to the night table and poured himself a drink of water. Then, trying to keep his mind on immediate considerations, he sat up. Colonel Vickers strode briskly into the room and grinned when he saw Sanderson awake. "It's about time you came around." "I suppose you think I ought to thank you for pulling the rug out from under me the other night," grumbled Sanderson. Vickers shrugged. "Doesn't; matter." "Suppose I'm not cured?" Sanderson suggested warily. "What if I decide to put myself through another excitation treatment?" "That doesn't matter either -- what you decide, I mean. Peabody's been back. He ordered the laboratory apparatus dismantled." "And has it been ?" the physicist asked. Vickers nodded, giving no indication that he had detected the note of amusement in Sanderson's voice. He came over and gripped Sanderson's shoulder. "I know you're pretty wobbly, so take it easy. Get up and around whenever you think you're up to it. I'll have a light breakfast sent in as a starter." After the colonel had gone, Sanderson allowed himself a smug smile. It had all happened as he had planned. First the exhausting workout during his initial couple of hqurs of teleporting. Then the long rest with its total lack of mental activity to allow time for him to become psychically attuned to the new ability without any further chance of overdoing it. And now here he was -- conscious and fresh and ready to embark on the second stage of his plan to learn what had happened to the other three subjects. He wondered how long it would be before Vickers found out he had given himself a strong enough exposure to the ultra-frequencies to insure a six-day teleportive period instead of the usual three. But he was not ready for any more leaps now. He wanted time to think -- to evaluate his experiences and attitude, to compare them with those of Watterman and Fisher and McNaught. Then he would apply logic to the overall phenomenon and see whether some obscure explanation of the disappearances wouldn't suggest itself. Eventually, an orderly brought in the breakfast tray with its tomato juice, softboiled eggs, toast and coffee, and Sanderson dived voraciously into the meal. A fter he had finished, he complimented himself on the fact that he had not teleported involuntarily since his awakening. And this strengthened the hope that his theory had been correct -- that by allowing himself free rein with both deliberate and impulsive teleportation, he had exhausted his inclination to unintentional leaping. He pushed the tray aside, put on his robe and slippers and walked over to the window. And he stood there starmorning glare at the handful of patients in deck chairs who were drinking in the sunlight on the convalescent porch. McNaught, he remembered quite clearly now, had solved the enigma. But in trying to get the warning across, he had somehow only hastened his final disappearance. Abruptly Sanderson was thinking back to the night before the sergeant had penned his last frenzied words -- to the beach scene in which the youth had practically gone berserk and had begged not to be pressed for his theory on what had happened to Watterman and Fisher. Something -- something that had occurred just before then, or perhaps it was merely something he had thought about -- must have inspired the sergeant's comprehension. Sanderson reached desperately into his memory of that night, trying to recall in detail what McNaught had said and done. But it was almost as though his mind were a blank. He was trying too hard, he supposed. And he longed for a cigarette so he could relieve his mind momentarily of the self-ipflicted ordeal. Instantly, he was standing before the night table and looking down at his pack of cigarettes. And his hope and confidence were immediately shattered. He hadn't, after all, succeeded in quelling involuntary teleportation. He was no better off, he sensed, than the other three had been before their disappearances. He felt a persistent desperation closing in on him. It was quite possible, he realized dismally, that he might soon face the necessity of solving the puzzle as the sole means of saving himself. The window of an automobile, driving along the road in front of the hospital, flashed an intense reflection into the room. Sanderson shielded his eyes against the sudden burst of light. And abruptly he was thinking of McNaught again -- on the beach, bending over the hot coals, insensitive to the fluttering of a moth in his face, finally becoming aware of the insect and then curiously following its swirling flight around the brazier. Sanderson fell back against the bed, astonished and terrified. Good God ! It wasn't -- it couldn't be -- Not that! Even as his thoughts turned entranced toward the concept, he lashed them down with a frantic surge of resistance. He wouldn't think about it! The mere approach of the idea to his consciousness would mean the end. Yet he knew that ultimately it would be impossible to keep the hypnotically compelling thought from his mind. He forced his concentration into another channel -- to McNaught's note that had hopelessly asked :... , How can I keep myself from thinking about something and, at the same time, write about what it is Vm not supposed to think about? ,... There was only despair in the realization that now he, too, faced the same paradoxical predicament. Not that he intended writing a warning; that wasn't necessary, since there would be no more experimental subjects. But he would have to find a way of getting a message across if he was going to save himself. thought assailed the fringe of his consciousness and he barely succeeded in driving it back into obscurity again. But how long could he keep it up ? He stood paralyzed beside the bed, afraid that even the slightest movement would somehow trip the trigger that was hidden so close to the surface of his thought stream. If he could only find some way of letting them know he was in danger! Naturally, he wouldn't be able to say what the peril was. For he would have to bring it to the surface of his mind first. And that, in itself, would be fatal. But if they knew he was still in the teleportive phase, and if they saw the perspiration on his face and his expression of horror, then they would certainly realize the immediate need for sedation. One simple sentence would do it. And he could pen that message without skirting too close to the forbidden thought. Cautiously, he made his way to the writing table. As though he were sitting on an explosive that might go otf with any one of his next movements, he gingerly wrote : I exposed myself for a sixday period! The door opened and he turned slowly to watch Kate Connerly enter. He waved the sheet of paper so that she might see it and come read what he had written. He would have shouted the message, but just then he was frantically fighting off an impulse to open his mind to the thought that would send him on his last impulsive leap. He tried to make a noise in his throat. But nothing came out. He stared terrified at the chair and the blanket that was draped across her other arm and he wanted to shout: Not that! Not that! But even thinking about the protest invited a return of the disastrous thought. She took a quick glance in his direction, not really seeing enough to sense that something was wrong, and began ' wrestling the chair again. And even before she said them, he knew that she would speak the fatal suggestive words : "It's such a beautiful day outside. Dr. Sanderson. You're going to go bask in the sun." Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl T WO of the most complicated brains recently applied to science fiction are to be found in the skulls of Robert A. W. Lowndes and James Blish. Blish in his own right has produced a dozen science fiction books, most good, some outstanding. If Lowndes has been less prolific, it is because he has spent the last twenty years editing science fiction (and other) magazines, thus putting most of his creative thought into other people's stories. In their first collaboi'ation novel. The Duplicated Man (Avalon), these two have brewed such a mash of invention and imagination as has not been seen since van Vogt. The distillate is raw, but it is dizzying and sometimes very sweet. We have every reason to believe that Blish-Lowndes wrote this novel with tongues in cheek; certainly at least a part of their intention was to caricature the smirking stick figures which so impossibly triumph in a typical van Vogt work (which are -- has anyone noticed ? -- the same soulless, pointless totems as populate the works of Ayn Rand). In this they succeeded. But they did more. They produced a novel. Their central character is Paul Danton. He is the Duplicated Man. Blish and Lowndes describe him as a cardboard figure : he is a dedicated revolutionary but a totally ineffective one; he hates the world state, but can find no better tactic to use against it than joining an underground conspiracy which has yet to achieve its first success of any kind. This doesn't matter. Blish-Lowndes need Danton only to serve as a canvas on whom they can paint half a dozen other characters, each part Danton and part someone else. The interplay of the seven duplicated Dantons is one of the great merits of the book. The action of the story concerns (among much else) a sort of planned cold war between Earth and Venus, a war that is based on deception and sustained by fraud. The ruling bodies of each planet are all working at cross purposes, each individual councilor trying to achieve his own cryptic aims, both groups honeycombed with espionage and riddled with disloyalty. There is always an overt purpose (irrelevant) and a real purpose (concealed) for every act. When the interplanetary war finally hots up, it is waged with nearly Nexialist strategy. Floods of nuclear missiles are mere diversions. The ultimate victorious stroke consists of rolling an empty barrel down a long flight of stairs. The Duplicated Man is a fantastically complicated book. In inept hands, it would be utterly tiresome. In the hands of Blish and Lowndes, it is -- amazingly! -- clear, logical and gripping. It possesses cascades of inventive detail, big (the marvelous immortal, Geoffrey Thomas) and little (the characteristic smudged lips of the Venusians, caused by the folk belief that ballpoint pens write better under water). It is a rewarding work. In the age of the Disposable Science Fiction Novel, designed like Kleenex to be used once and thrown away. The Duplicated Man is a story which improves with re-reading. Astonishing, but there it is. a sharp mind and a disciplined typewriter and his stories of space exploration have that rare and satisfying quality, the feel of being the authentic reminiscences of an Old Space Dog. In The Challenge of the Space Ship (Harper), he is permitted to cast off the fiction format and present some two hundred pages of pure fact and speculation -- why aliens haven't come to Earth, and what a summerresort satellite may be like; whether climate control is feasible, and how to travel between the stars. What is good about these essays is very, very good. When he speaks of wartime R.A.F. fog-dispersal system used to get bombers safely down from the thick British skies), we all can afford to listen. He was on the spot. He has had five sightings of them, he explains away nearly all of the case the flyingsaucerites have so laboriously built up. Where he writes of the probable shape of a sleeping compartment on a Marsbound rocket, he is discussing a subject to which he has given much thought and a great deal of study. His guess is still only a guess, but it has become the informed guess of an expert. There are ten or twelve pieces as good as these in The Challenge of the Space Ship. Unfortunately there are also ten or twelve others. In "The Men on the Moon," Clarke identifies for us several dozen historical figures after whom lunar craters have been named ; surely this is only tepidly exciting to anyone. In "The Star of the Magi," he tries to explain the Star that led the wise men to Bethlehem and arrives at the conclusion that it was a supernova (which it surely was not. If the star-gazers of Egypt, China and India had somehow missed it, those of Rome would not. We know that one of Rome's greatest astrologers, Thrasyllus, was in Asia Minor at the time) . In "Question Time," the subject for discussion is not science at all but that quite different topic, the problems of lecturing on science. The final piece in the book, "Of Space and the Spirit," is a diffuse gather-all which touches on everything and covers nothing. These sections, and one or two others, are the dross in The Challenge of the Space Ship. They do not dim the luster of the gold that appears elsewhere in the book, but they make one wish that the publisher had been a more selective miner. and probably the biggest science fiction book of recent years -- is his Across the Sea of Stars (Harcourt, Brace), which contains eighteen short stories and two complete novels, or rather more than the wordage of three ordinary books, in one binding and at one single price. This is a bargain. It is also a first-rate introduction to Clarke's work, if the reader who needs one happens to exist. The novels are Earthlight (a peculiarly plausible interplanetary war between Earth and its scatter of solar colonies) and Childhood's End (concerning' the supercession of the human race by its own evolved children). "The short stories do not include all of Clarke's best -- "The Nine Billion Names of God" is missing, and so is "The Star" -- but they show his ways and moods. Arthur Clarke finds it irritating to be told that "Rescue Party" is his best story because it was his very first. Therefore that fact will not be commented upon at this time, but it is here, and it is a magnificent yarn, and there are many others very nearly as good. wit and invention, and displays both in Masters of Evolution, as his book publishers (Ace) have retitled his old Galaxy novella. City folk and country folk hate each other and no longer have any peaceable contact with each other. So as not to confuse the reader with on-the-other-hands, Knight has made it a premise that there is nothing useful, good or desirable about any machine -- any machine -- and the only satisfactory way of life for humanity is biological. To document it, Knight has invented some splendidly evolved plants and animals -- parrot sort of things for storing data and transmitting messages, ferriferous bushes whose fruits are Bowie knives, etc. The merely technological cities get the worst of it, but Knight convinces you that to put them out of their misery is entirely a kindnes, as he describes the crushing load of absolutely essential labor-saving devices that each city dweller must drag about. This one is fun. ble volume is Fire in the Heavens, in which George #. Smith rids nuclear physics of that pesky little problem, the neutrino. There isn't any neutrino, Smith says. What made physicists think there was such a thing is the previously undiscovered fact that every time ener is expended, a little bit of it drains off to make trouble in the Sun. That is how stars go nova, and that's what our heroes have to prevent in Fire in the Heavens. Smith has written a lot of science fiction stories very like this one. As he is an engineer by profession, his gadgets give the enjoyable illusion of working, which is a plus. Still, because he concentrates on the gadgetry to the exclusion of the development of the characters, this is a very serious minus. Not only by gadgetry but by cocktail-hour dialogue and by action, the reader is entertained, but he is almost never made to feel. What's wrong with that? Why, nothing much, but it is a surprise all the same to find that after two decades George #. Smith can surprise us with as warm and moving a story as another new book under his byline. The Fourth R (Ballantine) . In The Fourth R, Smith turns his back on gum-chewing electronic technicians and dauntless space voyages. His hero is a boy, Jimmy Holden. Jimmy was conceived and brought to birth because his parents, both scientists, needed a child for their researches into mechanical education. Their researches succeeded, but the parents died abruptly, leaving young Jimmy, six years old, with an adult education but a child's brain, a world of knowledge but a body just four feet tall. Worse, Jimmy is utterly alone. He dares confide in no one, and he dares not stay with his guardian -- whose interest in the mechanical educator was extreme, and dangerous. Smith has written Jimmy's story with inventiveness and thought, and, above all, with sympathetic understanding of young Jimmy Holden. It is a splendid job. The person who doesn't much like science fiction will enjoy this book, and so will the person who does. Prolific Smith has still another book for us this month -- and still another publisher. Path of Unreason comes out under the Gnome Press imprint, James Forrest Carroll, Smith's bero, is either a catatonic suffering from overwork and deep-seated psychic flaws, or the victim of a plot on the part of alien invaders of Earth. Either premise might make a useful and entertaining book, but as Smith has meticulously refused to distinguish between the lady and the tiger for # pages, and thumbs his nose at our ignorance in an epilogue, the effect is more mystifying than amusing. Ape (Avalon) concerns a peculiar young giant who commutes between worlds, fighting duels like a very John Carter and rescuing a girl very like Dejah Thoris from quite Barsoomian perils. It has a great deal of action and color, but it also has a great deal of tripe. Hank Searls's first novel. The Big X (Harper) , is a first-rate, fast-moving, technically reliable story of a test pilot flying the last-but-one ancestor of the spaceship. The Big X is science fiction, but only just; in another year or so, it will be history. Yet it contains more of the challenge of the unknown than any dozen routine intergalactic blood-baths. In The Stars Are Too High (Random House), Agnew H. Bahnson, Jr., proposes a secretly built spaceship which its inventors use to pretend the Earth is being explored by aliens, so as to unite mankind and end war. This theme has been so well explored by others, principally Theodore Sturgeon, that only great skill and inventive detail could justify another handling. These elements do not occur in The Stars Are Too High. It is an inferior book; what's worse, its publishers have claimed for it the status of a classic, which is disgraceful. Bombs in Orbit, by Jeff Sutton, is an Ace original concerning a Russian hydrogen-bomb satellite project and an American rocket pilot's fight to nullify it. Sometimes the reasoning is thin, but most of the detail is excellent, the suspense is lushly troweled on and the pace never lets up. Murray Leinster quietly goes on and on writing firstrate science fiction stories, as he has done since #. (If he did not appear in a science fiction magazine befoi'e that year, it is only because there was no science fiction magazine to appear in.) Apparently he will go on forever. This is an attractive prospect. In Monsters and Such (Avon) , an unprepossessing title has been given to a fine collection of his more recent stories. Only "Proxima Centuari" (#) goes back more than a decade, but it is well worth reviving; and all the others in the book are worth keeping alive indefinitely. Jerry Sohl has two novels for us at once. The first is a reprint of his Rinehart novel, The Transcendent Man (Bantam) , which lets us in on the well-kept secret of Man's rapid evolutionary rise. Capellans are behind it. They drive us upward, for they live on our brain power ; unfortunately, they are about to leave us and we will then rapidly revert to the animal. Sohl's hero must decide what to do about all this. In One Against Herculum (Ace), Sohl invents for us a future city-colony in which crime and violence are kept under control by licensing the privilege of criminal activity. The idea has its merits, but Sohl has made almost no use of it, preferring to drop that notion and get on with another underground revolt against a dictatorial state, and so the story quickly confines itself to routine shoot-and-be-shot. This is a double volume, of which the flip side is Secret of the Lost Race, by Andre Norton, a competent timekiller concerning evil exploiters of a frontier planet. Our hero (who, you will hardly fail to guess, turns out to be one of the Lost Race himself) sets everything straight in a few knockdown brawls. Miss Norton also offers The Beast Master (Harcourt, Brace), which gives us a demolished Earth and a dispersed handful of humans scattered among the non-human civilized planets of the Galaxy. Her hero is a Navajo who, in the war that destroyed Earth, was a commando leader of a squad of animals trained to help wage war. In Seed of Light (Ballantine), Edmund Cooper spans many centuries and many light-years and yet manages to maintain a continuity of narrative while, generation after generation, his characters are born, grow and die. Earth is self-destroyed ; only ten humans survive, in a rocket headed for a hoped-for planet of Alpha Centauri. But Alpha Centauri is barren ; the ship wheels around it and heads for Sirius. If there is no planet circling Sirius, they will try Procyon; if not Procyon, then Vega... then Altair... The handful of men, women and babies in the ship are all of humanity, and they will not let themselves be destroyed. Talbot Mundy's celebrated series concerning the adventures of Prince Tros aren't really science fiction, but they are fun. In Tros of Samothrace (Fantasy Classic Library), the prince battles Norsemen, pre-Roman Britons and Julius Caesar. In Purple Pirate, he tackles Cleopatra in intrigue, her sister in love, and Mark Antony in battle. Tros is always exciting. What's more, Mundy always does his homework -- if his historical facts are sometimes false, it is because of license, not ignorance. Robot Hunt (Avalon), by Roger Lee Vernon, opens into the middle of a complicated and pulse-stirring spy hunt in a future Paris. It is pure Keystone Kops chase, but it succeeds in catching the interest at once and the pace is sustained to the very end. Vernon conceives an Earth in which each sovereign nation has its shield of impenetrable force screens, thus neutralizing all weapons and ending war forever -- until someone discovers a way through the screens. Then, of course, the whole bloody fuss starts all over again. Robot Hunt is composed of ingredients which have produced dozens of the worst literary clinkers of our times, but Vernon stirs in thought. In Starman's Quest (Gnome), Robert Silverberg proposes to entertain the teenage audience with a story about a #-year-old hero coeval with his readers. (He has spent most of his life in near-light-speed space travel. Under relativity law, his objective-time age is only seventeen.) Silverberg no sooner settles on this theme than he abandons it in favor of a travelogue on an implausible future Earth, populated by unlikely nuts. Gnome also gives us The Dawning Light by Robert Randall, a sequel to The Shrouded Planet. There are strange sights and events, but you must not linger to examine them, for the skin of solid plot and thought that sustains thick, and if you pause to reflect, you will plunge through the crust. For the younger ones, Clifford B. Hicks's First Boy on the Moon (Winston) undertakes to initiate children from eight to ten into the excitement of interplanetary travel. A boy named Mike and a boy named Mud stow away on a rocket piloted by Mike's daddy; and, winked at by an utterly incredible space-station commander, are allowed to participate in the first lunar landing. Being very young, they may not be very critical, so the worn and rudimentary plot may get by. Readers who wish to contrast practice with theory in the case of the undersigned may wish to avail themselves of two new Ballantine titles: Wolf bane (a novel, in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth) and Tomorrow Times Seven (a collection of short stories) . In a field where a reviewer is a writer is an editor is a fan, the author considers himself mighty bi-ave in speaking so forthrightly of the work of his colleagues. To Each His Own A world ideal for life will have life on it -- but don't expect ideal life! #, the Venusian spaceship Investigator floated gently to Earth in Times Square. The sleek metal belly of the ship touched feather-light upon the asphalt "X" of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, and stubby stabilizing legs extended from ports along the sides of the hull, bracing the ship's mass against dangerous rolling, leaving it hulking there like some metallic beetle at rest. The sun was almost directly overhead, sending yellow-gold serpentine glints wriggling on the gleaming surface of the ship. After the ve slight thumping as the ship settled into place, there was no sound throughout the nearby streets of New York. Absent was the noise of traffic, the hubbub of voices. the hurry-scurry of pedestrians. Nothing but heavy oppressive silence everywhere outside the body of the ship. No apprehensive eye appear at a window to stare at the visitor from the nearest planet. No telephone was picked up in nervous haste to warn the authorities of the possible menace to the peoples of Earth. Just the silence and the dancing sunlight. Inside the spaceship, there was swift, practiced activity. The Venusians were a picked, trained crew. This, the first contact with the third planet, called for quick reaction, accurate evaluation, and competent decision. Each of the five aboard had a job to do immediately upon landing. With no conversation, they were all at their tasks. It was an operation they'd practiced many times over, back at their home base on Venus. They were sick of the thing even before being sent to Earth. But their training had paid well, for now their motions were automatic, each separate action swift, sure and precise. Gwann, the pilot, his heavylidded eyes narrowed with the intensity of concentration, checked and re-checked his instruments and gauges. His nimble three-digited hands, with their long, flat palms, flickered from button to switch to dial. He locked the stabilizing legs into position, once each leg had made its contact securely with the surface outside. He dampered the power of the interplanetary drive, leaving its deadly emanations at a low, and therefore safe, degree of pulsation. He checked the release valves of the individual skimmers, making certain at the same time that, should the atmosphere outside be hostile to Venusian breathing, the tanks were filled and the cockpit seals were tight and break-free. compass, ruler and stylus upon the scant, almost rudimentary Earth map, to determine the exact point of contact with the third planet. Venusian telescopes were able to see -- very indistinctly -- continental outlines at the twentyneighbor planet. But the foggy overhang that shrouded their home planet had made sharp topographical drawing wellnigh impossible. Volval, as Drog passed him the information, relayed the findings by light-beam back to their home base. The geographical location, coded into the tight beam, sped outward from the surface of Earth toward Venus, where it would not be received for at least a minute and a half. Volval, having transmitted the data, waited impatiently while the Venusian biochemist tested the outside surface against their leaving the ship. Jorik, the biochemist, revolved the small metal "cage" with its quivering, burbling Venusian life-forms on it back into the space over his worktable. The animals seemed unharmed by their exposure to the alien planet, but he began more definitive tests upon the samplings of atmosphere and soil and vegetation brought back by a tiny robo-skimmer that had searched throughout a three-mile radius of the ship immediately after the landing, and had returned by homing beam to its tiny access port in the thick metal side of the ship. While Volval waited in increasing irritation, and Jorik ran his tests, Klendro, the most expendable member of the expedition, studied his speech over and over, his three-valved heart squirting its watery blood through his tiny, hairlike arteries and veins. Klendro was almost a social outcast with these others, these real spacemen, though his job, he felt, was the most important. Klendro was the Venusian ambassador to the governments of Earth. He went over his speech again, hoping that the Earth broadcasts picked up now and then on Venus had been accurate enough for the Venusian linguists to write him a speech that wouldn't embarrass the Earth people by its inane misuses of their tongue. Broadcasts had indicated that the major powers on Earth were the United States -- whatever those were -- of America and Soviet Russia. The Russian broadcasts, however, being nothing more than a series of eulogies declaring the happiness of life in Russia, had been too lacking in breadth to give the linguists much to work on. They had therefore chosen English as the tongue in which Klendro was to make his speech. He lifted the scroll once more and began reading his speech half aloud, having a bit of trouble, as usual, in controlling the square-tipped surface of his tongue in forming the unfamiliar syllables. "Pipple of Arth," he said, slowly and with much effort, "it is with grett plazzer that we mek this, tha farst contact with arr nebber planet. We are from tha second planet from yer -- or mebbe Uh shudd seh arr -- sun. Tha planet you knaw as Venus. We feel that we can share with arr nebber planet the fronts of arr -- of arr -- " Klendro braced himself, then forced out awkwardly, "moot-yoo-ull sa-yan-tific ri-sarch..." He refolded the long coil of the scroll and stuffed it into his belt-sack. Well, he told himself, for better or worse. I've got to give this speech. He wished he were anywhere but here. indicated a certain belligerency in the inhabitants of this alien planet. He wondered, with a kind of sick fright, if he would ever have the opportunity to deliver the speech, even badly. Some of the more esoteric phrasings of the Earth broadcasts had eluded the interpretations of the Venusian linguists. One of the more recurrent phrases was a "slug in the guts." They were not sure exactly what this entailed, but, from the context, the linguists were certain that it was something dire, possibly fatal. Klendro was a very unhappy Venusian. "Volval!" Klendro heard Drog cry out. "Did you send that stuff?" "Yes," the light-beam operator called back. "I'm waiting an Jorik now." "All set here," called Jorik, coming into Volval's compartment, followed by Gwann. "The atmosphere is breathable. A little heavy on the oxygen and light on the carbon dioxide, but that was expected before we took off. If we take deep inhales and periodic radiation, we should be all right." "Fine," said Gwann, the pilot and leader, as Klendro came into the room with the others. "Better keep your guns loose in their holsters, though. You know what they've told us about the Earthmen." "Hot-headed." Volval nodded. "Will we take the skimmers?" asked Jorik. "Or do you think the Earthmen would prefer being met without the barrier-screens around us ?" "They'd prefer it, all right !" said Drog. "However, in my opinion -- " "We're going to have to chance it sooner or later without the screens," said Gwann. "The batteries in the skimmers won't last forever. We might as well go out there as we are." "Who goes first?" asked Jorik. "Well," Gwann shrugged, "if the crowds look hostile, I should go, as your leader. If they seem merely curious, then it's up to Klendro, as our ambassador, to make his speech." Jorik frowned. "Now, wait, Gwann. Perhaps I ought to tell you. The sight records on the robo-skimmer showed no evidence of Earthmen outside the ship." "That's ridiculous," said Gwann, his eyes flashing. "Venus reports this city is one of the most populous." Jorik smiled wryly. "Then the populace certainly ducked out of sight quickly when they saw the robo-skimmer coming." Gwann seemed on the point of making a sharp retort, and instead turned away toward the exit lock. "Since things seem suspicious. I'd best go first." "Sir," said Volval, laying a hand upon his leader's arm. "Yes?" queried Gwann, pausing. "Good luck, sir," Volval faltered, drawing his hand back. "Thanks," said Gwann, not unkindly. "For Venus," he added. "For Venus," the others echoed. Gwann released the safety lock on the circular metal door and turned the valve handle. Slowly, the door recessed itself in the metal pocket in the ship's wall, and Gwann went out into the yellow glow of the sunlight glittering in Times Square. T he sun was glowing crimson on the horizon when the five Venusians met once more at the door of their ship. "Nothing -- no clue, no people," said Jorik, his face wrinkled with puzzlement. "I can't understand it." "Perhaps some holocaust... ?" Volval began weakly. "Or a war?" Drog hinted gravely. "Impossible!" said Gwann, leaning against one of the legs of the gigantic ship. "There is a conspicuous absence of anything that might be construed as a weapon of war. There are no bodies in the buildings or in the streets. No wreckage anywhere." "Perhaps they have been frightened by our appearance and have gone into hiding?" asked Klendro, fingering the edge of his now futile scroll where it protruded from his belt-sack. "Nonsense," said their leader. "From all we've learned of the Earthmen, fright would only make them aggressive. They would not have hidden from us ; they'd have tried to shoot us down when we emerged from the ship." "There was one thing..." said Jorik slowly. "I almost did not see it, but its shadow passed close by me on the side of one of the buildings, and I looked up barely in time to get a glimpse of it before it vanished." "What was it like?" asked Gwann quickly. "Some sort of animal, probably carnivorous," said Jorik. "I cannot be certain, of course, but I saw a mouth with teeth bespeaking flesh-eating. Quite a -- " he repressed a shudder -- "quite a large mouth." "Strange," said Gwann. "Exceedingly strange. You saw only the one?" Jorik nodded. "Well," said Gwann, "one carnivore cannot have accounted for a population that the Earthmen would be able to deal with mere animal life." K lendro remembered the "slug in the guts" and blanched. "What should we do, sir?" asked Volval. "Our orders were to make peaceful contact with the Earthmen. If there are no Earthmen -- ?" "Calm yourself, Volval." Gwann smiled, patting the younger man upon the shoulder. 'If there are Earthmen to contact, we'll make that contact. I have an idea." "What, sir?" asked Drog. "We shall each take one of the skimmers and investigate the surface of the planet. Now, while our maps are incomplete, I feel that Drog can draw us up competent enough maps to guide us over the surface of Earth." "I can try, sir," said Drog. "We'll meet back here at the ship in five days," said Gwann. "All of you take along enough supplies for five days, plus an extra day's rations in case of emergency. The homing beam on our ship will bring you safely back if you get lost." "One thing, sir," said Jorik, his brow creased in a frown. "We'd best all take along extra ammunition for the guns." "The carnivores?" The biochemist nodded. "Where there's one, there are bound to be others. That one I saw was large enough to bite a chunk out of a skimmer." Klendro, pale already, lost more color. E ach was assigned a continent to check. Of the two extra continents, Drog took one, and Gwann the other, the consensus being that the pilot and navigator could better cover extra territory than the others, who were less used to piloting the sleek skimmers. Volval was to go to the Europe Asia land mass, Gwann to Africa and Antarctica, Klendro to Australia, Jorik to South America, and Drog to Arctica, after first checking over the North American Continent on which they had landed. "Something exceedingly strange," said Jorik, before they separated, "about the consolidation of their civilization. So much wasted land area." "The sooner I get back to Venus, the happier I'll be," said Gwann, keeping his voice down so that only Jorik, the biochemist, could hear him, "This place is eerie. It's -- it's like a ghost planet." "And there's something wrong about the buildings. They are abominably inefficient. I can barely conceive the uses of some of the artifacts." "Maybe," said Gwann suddenly, "we never will know!" "Sir," said Volval, approaching the pilot, "I've discovered some maps." He held out a packet of papers, tinted blue and brown. "Good work, Volval," said Gwann, taking the packet. "Where did you find them?" "In one of those small shops, not far from the ship, sir. I cannot read the designations, of course, but I thought that, by a comparison with the maps from Venus Observatory, we might -- " "That's intelligent thinking," said Gwann, nodding. "Their maps are bound to be similar to ours. Klendro! What can you make of these?" The ambassador came over and took the thick packet. The paper of the maps, as he did so, tore apart, and bits and pieces of the soft, pulpy edges dropped in a shower to the street. "Not very substantial material, is it?" he muttered, unfolding the topmost of the maps. He looked over the colored line drawings on the page in some bewilderment. The letters spelling out "Rand McNally" meant nothing to his alien eyes. The map itself was a mercator projection of the globe, the extreme northern and southern continents being somewhat distorted. After a few moments, he shook his head. "I'm sorry. All the Earth broadcasts that we intercepted gave me a working knowledge of the spoken word, sir, but I'm afraid their actual word symbols are beyond me. It would take trained linguists months, perhaps years, to get a correlation between the sound of the word and its written image." "Drog?" said Gwann, turning to the navigator. Drog took the rotting sheet in his hands and studied the configurations of the continents. After a bit, he brightened. "Sir, I think I can figure this out. According to our landing calculations, we are here." He jabbed a digit at one section of the page, and was distressed when it went right through. "The material seems to be falling apart, sir." "Perhaps," Jorik suggested, "it is undergoing some unnatural stress -- possibly tied up somehow with whatever it was that depopulated this city?" "A good point, Jorik," said Gwann. A long black shadow slid across the pavement near their feet and the five Venusians, very much startled, looked overhead. They were barely in time to see the huge gray form of the carnivore before it vanished behind a sign atop a nearby building which bore the mystifying information "Pepsi-Cola." "There, sir!" cried Jorik. "That's exactly like the one I saw earlier!" "Those teetkl" Klendro whimpered. "They could bite one of us in two!" "And what they could do to us, they could do to an Earthman," Gwann said speculatively. "From the sizes of the doorways in these buildings, and the clothing on display in the shop windows, the Earthmen could not have been much larger than us." "Sir," said Drog, holding up the map so that the leader could see it, "look here. This blue section that runs all over the map. You see, it's marked circle-arc-fork-cone-zigzag." "Yes," said Gwann. "I see. What about it?" "Well, sir, it recurs on the map, but each time it has a new group of symbols in front of it. What can it mean?" Gwann frowned and studied the five symbols : #-C-E-A-N. "Seems to suggest a similarity between all of them," said Jorik. "Perhaps the first syrobol only means that the section is in a different place." All five Venusians studied A-R-C-T-I-C, A-N-T-A-R-CT-I-C, I-N-D-I-A-N, and the other symbols that were used in conjunction with the mysterious #-C-E-A-N. "A tribal tabu!" exclaimed Jorik. "What are you talking about, Jorik?" said Gwann impatiently. "You recall I said there seemed something strange about the consolidation of the populace in certain areas ? The wasted land space?" "Yes, yes. What about it?" "All these sections marked #-C-E-A-N are the unused areas. There must have been some sort of tribal superstition about dwelling in those areas. That would explain why all the people lived on the higher ground here." "I -- I would have expected to find something blue in that area," said Gwann uncertainly. "Or else why is it so marked?" "Sir," said Jorik respectfully, "some sections are colored very oddly -- even in red. Yet no such colors were found anywhere on the planet by our telescopes, were they? And none of these large blue areas shows population centers. Tabu areas, obviously -- not to be inhabited." Gwann shivered. "The longer I stay here, the less I like it. Come on. Each of you take one of these maps. Drog, you assign us to a specific sector by these maps, rather than by ours. We'll meet back here at the ship in five days." One by one, the Venusians got aboard their skimmers, making sure the protective barriers were working, and then glided off to investigate the ghost planet. D rog, sliding in his trim craft over the Noiih American continent, stopped many times, at each large city he discovered, but the story was the same as in New York. Empty buildings, no particular damages except what could be accounted for by decay and long disuse. Every so often -- more often than he enjoyed -- a flock of the huge carnivores soared above his skimmer, their long, dark shadows slithering over the cockpit in the dancing yellow sunlight. Once, one of them broke away from the group and spiraled down to investigate his craft. Drog jabbed the button of the nose-gun hastily, and a lance of metal sped with a flicker of light into the thick hide of the oncoming monster. A thick spray of blood gushed from the wound, as the great beast writhed in torment before sliding down through the atmosphere toward the distant ground. Its blood hung in a grisly trail over it as it plunged, marking its passage, then began to fall slowly after the beast. Drog was by now almost a mile beyond the point where he had fired at the carnivore, but he wasn't too far away to see its hungry companions swoop down after it and begin rending it even before it reached the ground. He shuddered and looked away. As he soared onward, he determined to keep the barrier on all night long, while he slept. If he could sleep... North America taken care of, as well as possible in his limited time, Drog headed northward for the continent of Arctica. Nothing but bare land and ocean bottom met his eye. Feeling increasingly queasy, he nosed the skimmer around and set it swishing back toward New York. of his skimmer pacing his own motion over the tops of the tangled jungle trees below. He inclined the nose of the craft downward, and began a shallow glide toward a clearing in the midst of the dense undergrowth. Braking the skimmer gently, he let it settle slowly into the resilient grip of the tall yellow-brown grass in the clearing. Making sure his gun was loaded and the safety catch off, he slid open the cockpit and eased himself out. He was -- though of course he didn't know it -- deep in the Matto Grosso of South America. Everywhere he looked, violent flares of color peeped at him through the twisted, swaying vines that clung everjwhere. Nature had run riot in the jungle. No subtleties of shading or form here. Long, sharp leaves gleamed greenly on all sides of the biochemist. Radiant reds glowed from the shadowy depths of forest beyond the small clearing. Golden streamers hung in profusion from each crooked elbow of the chaotically twisted tree branches all about him. beauty of it, Jorik sensed a hidden menace in the place. He should, at that spot, have been hearing shrieking, roaring, bleating, grunting of animals, the cries of birds and skittering of insects. There was nothing but that allpervading silence. Jorik moved slowly away from the skimmer and a proached the nearest tree, his scientist's eye pondering something not-quite-right-looking about it. As he got to it, and touched it, the thick, corrugated bark fell into powder between his fingers. He pressed, pried, thumped and tugged at the tree. It was dead. Dead and rotting. His heart fluttered annoyingly in his breast. There was something frightening about the way things were going. He could understand a war destroying human life, even civilization, but this -- this was primeval territory. The beasts, the plants, the lower forms of life -- these should have survived. But they hadn't. Suddenly afraid, he rushed back to his skinuner, slid into the cockpit and took off, rising at a swift vertical angle from the dead jungle. Toward the eastern coast of South America, he saw many fine hotels, with magnificent curves of beaches following the perimeter of the land mass on which the people had lived -- already he was thinking of them in the past tense -- and Jorik wondered at the absence of the blue #-C-E-A-N that should have bordered those beaches. But as he glided outward from the coast, curving steadily northward toward New York, he saw that the beaches, with their pale silver sands, extended outward and downward toward only more land, soon becoming rocky, then turning at last into mud and ooze, with a sprinkling of blackish-green weeds. But no visible trace of the mysterious #-C-E-A-N. out Africa, fared no better. Only the silence, the rotting vegetation, and the absence of landlocked life. Higher in the atmosphere of the ghost planet, he saw many of the carnivores, but also smaller animals, soaring in gloriously colored groups, and seemingly haiTnless. There were times when he had to pass through literal clouds of these smaller beasts, whizzing and bobbing and gliding past vanish in the hazy distance with a blaze of color. Africa having proven fruitless, Gwann directed the skimmer toward the opposite polar region from that which Drog was to investigate. Like Drog, he found only land there, and no continent. The land was ocean bottom. He consulted his map, but there was nothing below his skimmer that corresponded with the cryptic markings: A-N-T-A-R-C-T-I-C #-C-E-A-N. He turned his skimmer around and started back for New York. the Alps to the steppes and back again, found nothing to explain the disappearance of the Earthmen. Many cities, many lands, hamlets and villages, huts and palaces... It was the same every place. Silence. Fleeting glimpses of the carnivores and sometimes tinier-but-similar beasts. But no Earthmen. the surface of Australia fifty times in his five alloted days without discovering life of any sort other than the carnivores. And they, for some reason, were unusually well represented in that region. They had come at his skimmer in grinning swanns, but the barrier held firm, and the unlucky nearer ones spun away with scorched flesh glowing red, to be tom to pieces by their companions. When he decided further investigation was useless, Klendro was very glad to leave that place. A group of the carnivores gave chase, but Klendro spun his ship about long enough to shoot metal darts into two of them. As the others swerved back to begin an impromptu feast on their wounded companions, Klendro turned the skimmer up to full speed and made quick connection with the homing device on the ship, back in New York. Gwann, on the night of the fifth day. The Venusians were all back in the ship in Times Square, having a meal together that was partly to satisfy their appetites, partly to celebrate being together again with their friends. "It's incredible, all right," said Jorik. "A whole planet -- and of a high degree of civilization, too -- wiped out. The very vegetation dying. And that's the frightening part of it; Not dead, mind you, dying. That means that whatever happened here happened recently." "And those constructions in the buildings," said Volval, staring bemusedly at the wall, "the ones marked S-t-a-i-rw-a-y. I wonder what they were for." "Obviously they were decorations added by the architect," said Drog. "Any fool can see they served no purpose. If anything, they hindered the use of the access slots to the various levels of the buildings." "Well," said Gwann, "our work here is through. We'd better be heading back to Venus." "And your report?" asked Jorik. "Positive," said Gwann. "Favorable for immediate possession and colonization." "It's a good little planet." Jorik nodded. "But why do you suppose the Earthmen all vanished ?" "We'll probably never know," Volval sighed. "Not unless," said Klendro, indicating a bale of salvaged Earth materials, "our linguists and archeologists can make some sense out of this junk here." "Let's hope so," Gwann said. 'The mysteriousness of this whole thing is going to drive me crazy if they don't." "Well, sir," said Drog, consulting his charts, "if we're going to take advantage of juxtaposition of the two planets -- " "Right," said Gwann, turning and making his way toward the pilot's compartment. "We'll depart from Earth in ten minutes. Secure all hatches and loose objects until we get into space." The crew hurried to their tasks. H alfway to Venus, voival, paging idly through one of the rotting books from Earth, gave a shout. "What is it?" said Gwann, coming into the light-beam operator's compartment, stretching to ease themuscle cramps from his long stint in the pilot's cabin. "I've found a picture of the carnivore, sir!" said Volval proudly. "Look, sir." "Hmm," said Gwann, studying the fading illustration. "I believe you're right. Jorik!" The biochemist popped into the compartment, his face curious. "Yes, sir? What is it?" "Isn't this one of your carnivores, Jorik?" asked Gwann, giving him the book. Jorik, reaching for the book, nudged one of the newspapers atop the stack near the cabin wall, and the front page fluttered unnoticed to the floor. Across its surface were spread the incomprehensible -- to Venusian eyes -- words : Noted Scientist Declares Danger of Polar Experiment ; Melted Polar Caps May Flood Entire Globe Jorik studied the picture carefully, his gills trickling a faint stream of bubbles as he concentrated on the image of the carnivore. "Yes, that's one of them, sure enough. I wish I could read Earth writing. I wonder just what a T-i-g-e-rs-h-a-r-k is." Volval bobbed up from his place and floated to a port in the ceiling, through which he could see the tiny, glittering ball of Earth, its blue-green surface sparkling like a star against the black backdrop of empty space. "I can't understand wt killed them," he said. "Living conditions were ideal"... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of IF to you when they should arrive-at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Being a wizard missionary to the Free'l needed more than magic -- it called for a miracle! T he spell the Free'l were casting ought to have drawn the moon down from the heavens, made water run uphill, and inverted the order of the seasons. But, since they had got broor's blood instead of newt's, were using alganon instead of vervet juice, and were three days later than the solstice anyhow, nothing happened. Neeshan watched their antics with a bitter smile. He'd tried hard with them. The Free'l were really a challenge to evangelical wizardry. They had some natural talent for magic, as was evinced by the frequent attempts they made to perform it, and they were interested in what he told them about its capacities. But they simply wouldn't take the trouble to do it right. How long had they been stamping around in their circle, anyhow? Since early moonset, and it was now almost dawn. No doubt they would go on stamping all next day, if not interrupted. It was time to call a halt. Neeshan strode into the middle of the circle. Rhn, the village chief, looked up from his drumming. "Go away," he said. "You'll spoil the chann." "What charm? Can't you see by now, Rhn, that it isn't going to work?" 'Of course it will. It just takes time." "Hell it will. Hell it does. Watch." Neeshan pushed Rhn to one side and squatted down in the center ofr the circle. From the pockets of his black robe he produced stylus, dragon's blood, oil of anointing, and salt. He drew a design on the ground with the stylus, dropped dragon's blood at the corners of the parallelogram, and touched the inner cusps with the oil. Then, sighting carefully at the double red and white sun, which was just coming up, he touched the outer cusps with salt. An intense smoke sprang up. away, a small lizardlike creature was visible in the parallelogram. "Tell the demon what you want," Neeshan ordered the Free'l. The Free'l hesitated. They had few wants, after all, which was one of the things that made teaching them magic difficult. "Two big dyla melons," one of the younger ones said at last. "A new andana necklace," said another. "A tooter like the one you have," said Rhn, who was ambitious. "Straw for a new roof on my hut," said one of the older females. "That's enough for now," Neeshan interrupted. "The demon can't bring you a tooter, Rhn -- you have to ask another sort of demon for that. The other things he can get. Sammel, to work!" The lizard in the parallelogram twitched its tail. It disappeared, and returned almost immediately with melons, a handsome necklace, and an enormous heap of straw. "Can I go now?" it asked. "Yes." Neeshan turned to the Free'l, who were sharing the dyla melons out around their circle. "You see? ThaVs how it ought to be. You cast a spell. You're careful with it. And it works. Right away." "When you do it, it works," Rhn answered. "Magic works when anybody does it. But you have to do it right." Rhn raised his mud-plastered shoulders in a shrug. "It's such a lot of dreeze, doing it that way. Magic ought to be fun." He walked away, munching on a slice of the melon the demon had brought. Neeshan stared after him, his eyes hot. "Dreeze" was a Free'l word that referred originally to the nasal drip that accompanied that race's virulent head colds. It had been extended to mean almost anything annoying. The Free'l, who spent much of their time sitting in the rain, had a lot of colds in the head. Wasn't there anything to be done with these people? Even the simplest spell was too dreezish for them to bother with. He was getting a headache. He'd better perform a headache-removing spell. He retired to the hut the Free'l had assigned to him. The spell worked, of course, but it left him feeling soggy and dispirited. He was still standing in the hut, wondering what he should do next, when his big black-and-gold tooter in the corner gave a faint "woof." That meant headquarters wanted to communicate with him. Neeshan carefully aligned the tooter, which is basically a sort of lens for focusing neural force, with the rising double suns. He moved his couch out into a parallel position and lay down on it. In a minute or two he was deep in a cataleptic trance. The message from headquarters was long, circuitous, and couched in the elaborate, ego-caressing ceremonial of high magic, but its gist was clear enough. "Your report received," it boiled down to. "We are glad to hear that you are keeping on with the Free'l. We do not expect you to succeed with them -- none of the other magical missionaries we have sent out ever has. But if you should succeed, by any chance, you would get your senior warlock's rating immediately. It would be no exaggeration, in fact, to say that the highest offices in the Brotherhood would be open to you." N eeshan came out of his trance. His eyes were round with wonder and cupidity. His senior warlock's rating -- why, he wasn't due to get that for nearly four more six hundred-and-five-day years. And the higest offices in the Brotherhood -- that could mean anything. Anything! He hadn't realized the Brotherhood set such store on converting the Free'l. Well, now, a reward like that was worth going to some trouble for. Neeshan sat down on his couch, his elbows on his knees, his fists pressed against his forehead, and tried to think. The Free'l liked magic, but they were lazy. Anything that involved accuracy impressed them as dreezish. And they didn't want anything. That was the biggest difficulty. Magic had nothing to offer them. He had never, Neeshan thought, heard one of the Free'l express a want. Wait, though. There was Rhn. He had shown a definite interest in Neeshan's footer. Something in its intricate, florid black-and-gold curves seemed to fascinate him. True, he hadn't been interested in it for its legitimate uses, w'hich were to extend and develop a magician's spiritual power. He probably thought that having it would give him more prestige and influence among his people. But for one of the Free'l to say "I wish I had that" about anything whatever meant that he could be worked on. Could the footer be used as a bribe? Neeshan sighed heavily. Getting a footer was painful and laborious. A footer was carefully fitted to an individual magician's personality ; in a sense, it was a part of his personality, and if Neeshan let Rhn have his footer, he would be letting him have a part of himself. But the stakes were enormous. Neeshan got up from his couch. It had begun to rain, but he didn't want to spend time performing a rain-repelling spell. He wanted to find Rhn. Rhn was standing at the edge of the swamp, luxuriating in the downpour. The mud had washed from his shoulders, and he was already sniffling. Neeshan came to the point directly. "I'll give you my footer," he said, almost choking over the words, "if you'll do a spell -- a simple spell, mind you -- exactly right." Rhn hesitated. Neeshan felt an impulse to kick him. Then he said, "Well..." Neeshan began his instructions. It wouldn't do for him to help Rhn too directly, but thing reasonable. Rhn listened, scratching himself in the armpits and sneezing from time to time. After Neeshan had been through the directions twice, Rhn stopped him. "No, don't bother telling me again -- it's just more dreeze. Give me the materials and I'll show you. Don't forget, you're giving me the footer for this." H e started off, Neeshan after him, to the latter's hut. While Neeshan looked on tensely, Rhn began going through the actions Neeshan had told him. Halfway through the first decad, he forgot. He inverted the order of the hand-passes, sprinkled salt on the wrong point, and mispronounced the names in the invocation. When he pulled his hands apart at the end, only a tiny yellow flame sprang up. Neeshan cursed bitterly. Rhn, however, was delighted. "Look at that, will you!" he exclaimed, clapping his chapped, scabby little hands together. "It worked! I'll take the tooter home with me now." "The tooter? For that? You didn't do the spell right." Rhn stared at him indignantly. "You mean, you're not going to give me the tooter after all the trouble I went to? I only did it as a fay or, really. Neeshan, I think it's very mean of you." "Try the spell again." "Oh, dreeze. You're too impatient. You never give anything time to work." He got up and walked off. For the next few days, everybody in the village avoided Neeshan. They all felt sorry for Rhn, who'd worked so hard, done everything he was told to, and been cheated out of his tooter by Neeshan. In the end the magician, cursing his own weakness, surrendered the tooter to Rhn. The accusatory atmosphere in the normally indifferent Free'l was intolerable. But now what was he to do? He'd given up his tooter -- he had to ask Rhn to lend it to him when he wanted to contact headquarters -- and the senior rating was no nearer than before. His head ached constantly, and all the spells he performed to cure the pain left him feeling wretchedly tired out. Magic, however, is an art of many resources, not all of them savory. Neeshan, in his desperation, began to invoke demons more disreputable than those he would ordinarily have consulted. In effect, he turned for help to the magical underworld. His thuggish informants were none too consistent. One demon told him one thing, another something else. The consensus, though, was that while there was nothing the Free'l actually wanted enough to go to any trouble for it (they didn't even want to get rid of their nasal drip, for example -- in a perverse way they were proud of it), there was one thing they disliked intensely -- Neeshan himself. The Free'l thought, the demons reported, that he was inconsiderate, tactless, officious, and a crashing bore. They regarded him as the psychological equivalent of the worst case of dreeze ever known, carried to the nth power. They wished he'd drop dead or hang himself. Neeshan dismissed the last of the demons. His eyes had begun to shine. The Free'l thought he was a nuisance, did they? They thought he was the most annoying thing they'd encountered in the course of their racial history? Good. Fine. Splendid. Then he'd really annoy them. He'd have to watch out for poison, of course. But in the end, they'd turn to magic to get rid of him. They'd have to. And then he'd have them. They'd be caught. One act of communal magic that really worked and they'd be sold on magic. He'd be sure of his senior rating. paign immediately. Where the Free'l were, there was he. He was always on hand with unwanted explanations, hypercritical objections, and maddening "wouldn'titbe betters." Whereas earlier in his evangelical mission he had confined himself to pointing out how much easier magic would make life for the Free'l, he now counciled and advised them on every phase of their daily routine, from mudsmearing to rain-sitting, and from the time they got up until they went to bed. He even pursued them with advice after they got into bed, and told them how to run their sex lives -- advice which the Free', who set quite as much store by their sex lives as anybody does, resented passionately. But most of all he harped on their folly in putting up with nasal drip, and instructed them over and over again in the details of a charm -- a quite simple charm -- for getting rid of it. The charm would, he informed them, work equally well against anything -- or person -- that they found annoying. The food the Free'l brought him began to have a highly peculiar taste. Neeshan grinned and hung a theriacal charm, a first-class antidote to poison, around his neck. The Free'l's distate for him bothered him, naturally, but he could stand it. When he had repeated the anti-annoyance charm to a group of Free'l last night, he had noticed that Rhn was listening eagerly. It wouldn't be much longer now. On the morning of the day before the equinox, Neeshan was awakened from sleep by an odd prickling sensation in his ears. It was a sensation he'd experienced only once before in his life, during his novitiate, and it took him a moment to identify it. Then he realized what it was. Somebody was casting a spell against him. At last! At last! It had worked ! Neeshan put on his robe and hurried to the door of the hut. The day seemed remarkably overcast, almost like night, but that was caused by the spell. This one happened to involve the optic nerves. He began to grope his way cautiously toward the village center. He didn't want the Free'l to see him and get suspicious, but he did want to have the pleasure of seeing them cast their first accurate spell. (He was well protected against wind-damage from it, of course.) When he was almost at the center, he took cover behind a hut. He peered out. They were doing it right. Oh, what a satisfaction! Neeshan felt his chest expand with pride. And when the spell worked, when the big wind swooped down and blew him away, the Free'l would certainly receive a second magical missionary more kindly. Neeshan might even come back, well disguised, himself. The ritual went on. The dancers made three circles to the left, three circles to the right. Cross over, and all sprinkle salt on the interstices of the star Rhn had traced on the ground with the point of a knife. Back to the circle. One to the left, one to right, while Rhn, in the center of the circle, dusted over the salt with -- with what ? "lley!" Neeshan yelled in sudden alarm. "Not brimstone! Watch out! You're not doing it ri -- " His chest contracted suddenly, as if a large, stony hand had seized his thorax above the waist. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't think, he couldn't even say "Ouch!" It felt as if his chest -- no, his whole body -- was being compressed in on itself and turning into something as hard as stone. He tried to wave his tiny, heavy arms in a countercharm; he couldn't even inhale. The last emotion he experienced was one of bitterness. He might have known the Free'l couldn't get anything right. T he Free'l take a dim view of the small stone image that now stands in the center of their village. It is much too heavy for them to move, and while it is not nearly so much of a nuisance as Neeshan was when he was alive, it inconveniences them. They have to make a detour around it when they do their magic dances. They still hope, though, that the spells they are casting to get rid of him will work eventually. If he doesn't go away this autumn, he will the autumn after next. They have a good deal of faith in magic, when you come right down to it. And patience is their long mm Space Taxi # Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! If you are exerted about tomorrow and get a thrill out of the idea of a man in space... get a Willy Ley Space Model in a fascinating Monogram hobby kit. 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He wasn't speaking to me -- that was certain -- nor was his flat, curiously uninflected voice directed at anyone else. With some sui'prise I realized that he was talking to himself. People don't do that nowadays. They're adjusted. He noted my raised eyebrows and grinned, his square teeth white against the dark planes of his face. "I'm not psycho," he said. "It's just a bad habit I picked up on Lyrane." "Lyrane?" I asked. "It hasn't been entered on the charts yet. Just discovered." His voice was inflected now. And then it changed abruptly. "If you must know, this is ethanol -- C oHjjOHt -- and I drink it." He looked at me with an embarrassed expression in his blue eyes. "It's just that I'm not used to it yet," he explained without explaining. "It's easier when I vocalize." "You sure you're all right?" I asked. "Want me to call a psychologician ?" "No. I've just been certified by Decontamination. I have a paper to prove it." "But -- " "Draw up a chair," he invited. "I hate to drink alone. And I'd like to talk to somebody." I smiled. My talent was working as usual. I can't walk into a bar without someone telling me his life history. Nice old ladies buttonhole me at parties and tell me all about their childhoods. Boys tell me about girls. Girls tell me about boys. Politicians spill party secrets and pass me tips. Something about me makes folks want to talk. It's a talent and in my business it's an asset. You see. I'm a freelance writer. Nothing fancy or significant, just news, popular stuff, adventure stories, problem yarns, romances, and mysteries. I'll never go down in history as a literary great, but it's a living -- and besides I meet the damnedest characters. So I sat down. "I guess you're not contagious if you've been through Decontamination," I said. H e looked at me across the rim of an oversized brandy sniffer -- a Napoleon, I think it's called -- and waggled a long forefinger at my nose. "The trouble wfith you groundhogs is that you're always thinking we spacers are walking hotbeds of contagion all primed to wreck Earth. You should know better. Anything dangerous has about as much chance of getting through Decontamination as an ice cube has of getting through a nuclear furnace." "There was Martian Fever," I reminded him. "Three centuries ago and you still remember it," he said. "But has there been anything else since Decontamination was set up?" "No," I admitted, "but that was enough, wasn't it? We still haven't reached the preMars population level." "Who wants to?" He sipped at the brownish fluid in the glass and a shudder rippled the heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders. He grinned nastily and took a bigger drink. "There, that ought to hold you," he muttered. He looked at me, that odd embarrassed look glinting in his eyes. "I think that did it. No tolerance for alcohol." I gave him my puzzled and expectant look. He countered with a gesture at the nearly empty brandy glass. I got the idea. I signaled autoservice -- a conditioned reflex developed over years of pumping material out of spacemen -- and slipped my ID into the check slot of the robot as it rolled up beside us and waited, humming expectantly. "Rum," the spaceman said. "Demerara, four ounces." "You are cautioned, sir," the autoservice said in a flat mechanical voice. "Demerara rum is one hundred fifty proof and is not meant to be ingested by terrestrial life-forms without prior dilution." "Shut up and serve," I said. The robot clicked disapprovingly, gurgled briefly inside its cubical interior and extruded a pony glass of brownish liquid. "Sir, you will undoubtedly end up in a drunkard's grave, dead of hepatic cirrhosis," it informed me virtuously as it returned my ID card. I glared as I pushed the glass across the table. "Robots," I said contemptuously. It was lost on that metallic monstrosity. It was already rolling away toward another table. The spaceman poured the pony glass into his Napoleon, sniffed appreciatively, sipped delicately and extended a meaty hand. "My name's Halsey," he said. "Captain Roger Halsey. I skipper the Two Txvo Four." "The Bureau ship that landed this morning?" He nodded. "Yeah. I'm one of the Bureau's brave boys." There was a faint sneer in his voice. "The good old Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploraed to pronounce the individual letters. "You're a reporter, aren't you?" he asked suddenly. "How'd you guess?" "That little trick of not answering an introduction. Most of you sludge pumpers do it, but I never knew why." "Libel and personal privacy laws," I said. "If you don't know who we are, you cant sue." He grinned. "Okay. I don't care. Keep your privacy. All I want is someone to talk to." I smiled inwardly. "Think my job's exciting?" he asked. "Skipper of an exploration ship. Poking my nose into odd corners of the Galaxy. Seeing what's over Hie hill." "Of course," I said. "Well, you'd be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred. It's just a job. Most of it is checking -- or did you know that only one sun in ten has planets, and only one in ten thousand has a spectrum that will support human life, and that only one in ten thousand planets has Earthlike qualities? So you can imagine how we felt when we ran across Lyrane." He grimaced wryly. "I had it on the log as Halsey's Planet for nearly two weeks before we discovered it was inhabited." He shrugged. "So the #iame was changed. Too bad. Always did want to have a planet named after me. But ni make it yet." I clucked sympathetically. Capt, Halsey sighed, and this is what he told me. II I T'S a beautiful world, Lyrane is. Like Earth must have been before it got cluttered up with people. No cities, no smoke, no industrial complexes -- just green plains, snowy mountains, dark forests, blue seas, and white polar caps all wrapped in cotton clouds swimming in the clearest atmosphere you ever saw. It made my eyes ache to look at it. And it affected the crew the same way. We were wild to land. We came straight in along the equatorial plane until we hit the Van Allen Belt and the automatics took over. We stopped dead, matched intrinsics and skirted the outer band, checking the radiation quality and the shape of the Belt. It was a pure band that dipped down at the poles to form entry zones. There was not a sign of bulges or industrial contaminants. Naturally we had everything trained on the planet while we made our sweeps -- organic detectors, radar, spectroanalytic probes -- all the with to make analysis easy and complete. The readings were so homelike that every man was landsick. I wasn't any different from the rest of them, but I was in command and I had to be cautious about setting the Two Two Four down until we'd really wrung the analytic data dry. So, while the crew grumbled about hanging outside on a skyhook, we kept swinging around in a polar orbit until we knew that world below us like a baby knows its mother. It checked clean to five decimal places, which is the limit of our gadgetry. Paradise, that's what it was -- a paradise untrod by human foot. And eveiy foot on the ship was itching. "When we gonna land. Skipper?" Alex Baranov asked me. It was a gross breach of discipline, but I forgave him. Alex was the second engineer, an eager kid on his first flight out from Earth. Like most youngsters, he thought there was romance in space, but right now he was landsick. Even worse than most of us. And, like most kids, he'd leap where angels'd dread to walk on tiptoe. "We'll land," I assured him. "You'll be down there pretty soon." He hurried off to tell the others. We set the ship down in the middle of one of the continental land masses in an open plain surrounded by forest and ran a few more tests before we stepped out, planted the flag, and claimed the place for the Confederation. After that we had an impromptu celebration to thoroughly enjoy the solid feel of ground under our feet and open sky overhead. It lasted all of five minutes before we came to our senses and posted a guard. It was five minutes too long. Alex Baranov had a chance to get out of sight and go exploring, and, like a kid, he took it. We didn't miss him for nearly ten minutes more, and in fifteen minutes a man can cover quite a bit of territory. "Anyone see where he went?" I asked. "He was wearing a menticom," one of the crew offered. "Said he wanted to look around." "The idiot!" I snapped. "He had no business going off like that." "Nobody told him not to," Dan Warren said. Dan was my executive officer, and a good hand in case of trouble, but he left the command decisions to me, and of course I figured that everybody knew the cardinal rule of first landings. The net result was that Alex had disappeared. I went back into the ship and broke out another menticom. "Alex !" I broadcasted. "Return to ship at once !" "I can't, Skipper," Alex's projection came back to me, "I'm surrounded." "By what? Where?" "They look sorta human -- bigger than us. I'm near the edge of the forest nearest the ship. I can't do anything. I didn't bring a blaster." There was panic in his thoughts. And then suddenly I saw two hairy bipeds flash across Alex's vision. Both of them were carrying spears. The nearest one jumped and lunged. The scene dissolved in a blaze of red panic and the projection cut off as though someone had turned a switch. I had a fix now and turned to face a knob of forest jutting out into the plain. Near the forest's edge I saw a flurry of movement that vanished as I watched. "Break out a 'copter," I ordered. "Why?" Warren asked, and then I realized that I alone of all the crew had seen what had happened to Alex. I told them. T he search, of course, was unproductive. I didn't expect that it would be anything else. I was pretty certain that Alex was a casualty, I'd felt people die while wearing menticoms, and the same blank sense of emptiness had blotted out Alex. It was a bad deal all around, I liked that kid. But Alex's death had provided data. This world was inhabited and the inhabitants weren't friendly. So I had the crew stake out a perimeter which we could energize with #U the ship's engines, and activated a couple of autoguards for patrol duty. Alex wasn't a pleasant thought, but we weren't equipped to retrieve bodies. So I wrote him in the log as missing and let it go at that. I had to correct the entry a week later when Alex came walking up to the perimeter as large as life and just as healthy, wearing a mild sunburn, a sheepish expression, and nothing else. The autoguard announced his coming and I headed the delegation that met him. I read him the riot act, and after I'd finished chewing on him he was pinker than ever. "Okay, sir -- so I was a fool," he said. "But they didn't hurt me. Scared me half to death, but once they realized I was intelligent there was no trouble. They were fascinated by my clothes." Alex grinned ruefully. "And they're pretty strong. They peeled me." "Obviously," I said coldly. "They have a village back in the woods." He pointed vaguely behind him. "It'd pay to take a look at it." "Mister Baranov," I said. "If I don't throw you in the brig for what you've done, it's only because you may have brought back some information we can use. What are these natives like? What did they do to you besides making you a strip-tease artist? What cultural level are they? How many of them do you estimate there are? What do they look like? Get up to the ship and report to Lieutenant Warren for interrogation and draw new clothing." I had the same half exasperated, half angry tone that a relieved mother has when one of her youngsters returns home late but unharmed. A lex must have recognized it, because he grinned as he went off. I contacted Warren on the intercom. "Dan," I said, "Baranov's back -- apparently unharmed. I want him given the works. When you've gotten everything you can get, have a man detailed to watch him. If he so much as looks suspicious, heave him in the brig." Warren's answering projection had a laugh in it. "Always cautious, hey. Skipper? Okay, I'll see that he gets the business." It turned out that Alex didn't have much real information except for a description of the natives, their village, and their attitude toward him. It was about what you'd expect from a kid, interesting but far from helpful. The delegation of natives showed up a half hour later. They came walking across the open space between the ship and the forest as though they hadn't a care in the world. Four of them -- big hairy humanoids, carrying spears. They were naked as animals. Not that they needed clothes with all that hair, but just the same their appearance gave me a queasy feeling -- like I was looking at man's early ancestors suddenly come to life. If you can imagine a furry humanoid seven feet tall, with the face of an intelligent gorilla and the braincase of a man, you'll have a rough idea of what they looked like -- except for their teeth. The canines would have fitted better in the face of a tiger, and showed at the corners of their wide, thin-lipped mouths, giving them an expression of ferocity. They came trotting straight across the plain, moving with grace and power. All external signs pointed to them being a carnivorous, primitive race. Hunters, probably. The muscles of my scalp twitched as some deep-buried instinct inside me whispered, "Competition!" I 'VE met plenty of humanoids, but these were the first that roused any emotion other than curiosity. Perhaps it was their fierce appearance, or the bright, half-contemptuous intelligence in their eyes, or the confident arrogance in their approach, or merely that they looked more like us than the others I had met. Whatever it was, it was strong, and I had the impression that the feeling was mutual. "Stop!" I said as they approached the periphery. "Why should we?" the foremost native replied in perfect Terran. "Because that barrier'll bum you to a nice crisp cinder if you don't." "That's a good reason," the native said, nodding. Then the delayed reaction took over and the shock nearly floored me, until I saw' that he was w'earing Alex's menticom. Well, that explained the language and the feeling of mutual distrust -- and it could explain why I thought Alex had died back there in the jungle. A mental communicator snatched from its wearer's head can give that impression. But it raised an entirely new set of questions. Where did this savage learn to operate the circlet and how did he recognize its purpose? I guess I w'asn't too smart, because the native was tuned to me and I wasn't shielding my thoughts at all. He chuckled -- it sounded like the purr of a cat. "We are not stupid, Earthman." "So I see," I said uneasily. "I am K'wan, chief of this segment. I wish to know why you are here." "To survey your world. We are members of the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration. It is our job to make surveys of planets." "Why?" "For trade, colonization, and exploitation," I answered. There was no sense in giving him a dishonest explanation. With him wearing that communicator, it would have done no good to try. "And what have you decided about us?" "That's not our job. We just investigate and report. What happens next is not our affair. But if you're worrying -- don't. There are plenty of worlds available without bothering inhabited places. Since you are intelligent, we would probably like to trade with you, if you have anything to trade -- but that, of course, is up to you. We never intrude where we are not wanted, as long as we are treated with respect. If we are attacked, however, that is a different story." It was the old respect-and-threat routine that worked with primitive races. But I wasn't at all sure it was working npw. "Strange," K'wan said. "I would have sworn you were a predatory race. You are enough like us to be our little cousins." He scratched his head with a surprisingly human gesture. "In your position I would have attacked to show my power and inspire respect. Perhaps you are telling the truth." "A predator can grow soft when he has too much prey," I said. "Aye, there is truth in that. But what is too easy and how much is too much? And does a man change his habits of eating just because he is fat?" "You can find out." "I do not think that would be wise," the native said. "Although you are physically weak, you sound confident. Therefore you are strong. And strength is to be respected. Let us be friends. We will make an agreement with you." our place to make agreements. We only observe." "You have not done much of that," he said pointedly. "You sit here and send your machines over our seas and forests, but you do not see for yourselves. You cannot learn this way." "We learn enough," I said shortly. "We have talked of you at our council," K'wan continued, "and we think that you should know more before you depart. So we have come to make you an offer. Let four of your men come with me, and four of mine will stay with you. We will exchange -- and you can see our ways while we see yours. That would help us understand each other." It sounded reasonable. An exchange of hostages -- or call it a cultural exchange, if you'd prefer. I told him that I'd think it over and to come back tomorrow. He nodded, tunied, and together with his retinue disappeared into the jungle. proposal over at a board meeting that night and decided that we'd take it. The exact status of Lyranian culture worried us. It is a cardinal rule never to underestimate an alien culture or to judge it by surface appearances. So we organized a team that would form our part of the "cultural exchange." I would go, of course. If K'wan could visit us, I could hardly stay back. Alex was selected partly because he was an engineer, mostly because he'd been over the ground before. Ed Barger, our ecologist, and Patrick Allardyce, our biologist, made up the remainder of the party. I'd have liked to take the padre and Doc, but Doc was more valuable at base, and if I could have only four men, I wanted fighting men. "Now," I said, "we'll take along a tight-beam communicator. Coupled to our menticoms, it should be able to reach the ship and put what we see and what happens on permanent record." Then I turned to Dan Warren. "If anything goes wrong, don't try to rescue us. Finish your observations and get out. You understand? And get those exchange natives into Interrogation. Condition them to the eyeballs with cooperation dogma. We may need some friends here when the second echelon makes a landfall." Warren nodded. I didn't have to elaborate. The native village was about what I expected from our reconnaissance flights. It was beautifully camouflaged. You couldn't tell it from the rest of the forest except that the trees were larger and were hollow -- apparently hewn out with patient care to make a comfortable living space inside. Lyranians lived in one place, if what I could see of their dwellings was any criterion. I wanted to look inside, but K'wan hustled us down the irregular "street" that wound through the grove of giant trees until we finally came to the granddaddy of them all, a trunk nearly forty feet in diameter. K'wan gestured at the tree. "Your house while you are here. We made it for you Earthmen." His voice came over my menticom and was duly recorded on the ship, since we were in constant contact, giving our impressions of the place. So far it was "Thanks," I said. "We appreciate it." I was really touched at this tribute. K'wan had probably evacuated his own house to furnish us quarters where we could be together. The size of it indicated that it must be the chief's residence. But like all primitives he had to lie a little and the fiction of making this place for us was a way of salvaging pSide in the face of our technological superiority. He walked inside and we followed, expecting to find a gloomy hole -- but instead the room glowed with a soft light that came from the walls themselves. The air was cool and comfortable, a pleasing contrast to the heat outside. "What the -- " I began, but Allardyce was already peering at the walls. "A type of luminous fungus," he said. "A saprophyte. Lives on the wood of this tree and gives off light. Clever." I shut my mouth and looked around. There were other rooms opening off this one and along one wall a knobby imitation of a staircase led upward to a hole overhead. "Hmmm, a regular skyscraper," Ed Barger commented, noting the direction of my gaze. "Well, we should not be crowded, at any rate." I had been noticing something was wrong without realizing it. You know the feeling you get when you've lost something, but can't quite remember what it was. Then my neurons made connections and I realized that the communicator and the menticom were both as dead as if we were in a lead box. Quietly I moved to the door -- and Dan's voice hammered in my ears : "Skipper ! Answer me! What's wrong?" "Nothing, Dan," I said. "We just went into the quarters they assigned us. Something about them blocks transmission and reception. We're all fine." "Oh." Dan sounded relieved. "For a minute I was worried." "One of the boys'll call in every two hours," I assured him. "If you don't hear from us then, it'll be time to do something." "Okay, Skipper, but what'll I do?" "That'll be your decision," I said. "You'll be ranking officer." Dan's chuckle was humorless. "Thanks, but I hope we keep on hearing from you." "Don't worry -- you will. These people look worse than they really are. At least they have been nice so far." "They'd better stay that way," Dan replied grimly. It was my turn to chuckle. "Keep calm and keep your blasters dry. I'm going inside now. You'll hear from us in two hours." trifle oddly as I came through the doorway. "A while ago you were laughing at that story K'wan was telling us about making this house for us. I caught your undertone." "Sure. What about it?" "Well, I'm not so sure he was lying." "Huh?" "Take a look around you." I did. It was a nice room, considering its origin -- low benches around the walls, a table and four chairs in the center, a soft, thick floor covering that was a pleasure to the feet. "See anything unusual?" Ed asked. "No," I said. "What about those benches?" "They're part of the walls," I said, "cut out of the tree when it was hollowed out." "Cut to our size?" I did a double take. Barger was right. The Lyranians were seven feet tall and longlegged, but the benches were precisely right for human sitting, and the table in the center was only three feet above the gray floor. Suddenly I didn't feel so good. "And those rooms -- there are four of them -- scaled to people our size ?" I shrugged. "So they modified the joint for us." "You still don't get it. This place is living. It's growing. Nothing here except those chairs isn't part of this tree, and I'm not sure that they weren't. Besides, how did they know that there'd be four of us?" "They could have been hopeful, or maybe four is their idea of a delegation. Remember there were four of them that visited us, and they suggested that four of us visit them." "It's obvious," Allardyce added, "that this place has been made for us. K'wan wasn't lying." Barger shook his head. "I still don't like it. I think we'# better get out of here. If they are as good biologists as this tree indicates, they're a Class VI civilization at least -- and we're not set up to handle levels that high." "I don't think that's necessary," Allardyce said. "They don't seem unfriendly, and until they do, we're better off sitting pat and playing the cards as they're dealt. We can always warn the ship in case anything goes wrong." "Don't be jumpy," Alex broke in. "I told you they were all right. They grew the place for me. It's just grown a little since." I made a noncommittal noise. "It's true," Alex said. "While I was here I needed quarters and nobody wanted me in with them. They have some custom about not letting strangers in their houses after sunset. So they took a sapling and sprayed it with some sort of stuff and by the next "afternoon I had a one-room house." "Where did you stay that first night?" I demanded. Alex shrugged. "In one of the trees down the street," he said, pointing through the door. "It was some sort of a storage warehouse. No air conditioning and blacker than the inside of the Coal Sack. It rains pretty bad at night and they had to give me some shelter." He was right on time with his last statement, because the skies opened up and started to pour. The four-hour evening rain had begun. It had fascinated us at first, the regularity with which the evening showers arrived and left, but our meteorologist assured us that it was a perfectly natural phenomenon in a planet with no axial tilt. "But growing a tree in a day is fantastic," I said. "What's more, it's unbelievable, a downright -- " "Not so fantastic," Allardyce interrupted. "This really isn't a tree. It's a cycad -- related to the horsetail ferns back on Earth. They grow pretty fast anyway and they might grow faster here. Besides, the Lyranians could have some really potent growth stimulants. In our hydroponics stations we use delta-gibberelin. That'll grow tomatoes from seed in a week, and forage crops in three days. It could be that they have something better that'll do the job in hours." "And one that makes a tree grow rooms?" I scoffed. possible, but I hate to think of the science behind it -- it makes me feel like a blind baby fumbling in the dark -- and I'm supposed to be a good biologist." He shivered. "Their science'll be centuries ahead of ours if that is true." "Not necessarily," Barger said. "They could be good biologists or botanists and nothing much else. We've run into that sort of uneven culture before." "Ha!" Allardyce snorted. "That shows how little you know about experimental biology. Anybody able to do with plants what these people do would have to know genetics and growth principles, biochemistry, mathematics, engineering and physics." "Maybe they had it once and lost most of it," I suggested. "They wouldn't be the first culture that's gone retrograde. We did it after the Atomic Wars and we were several thousand years recovering. But we hadn't lost the skills -- they just degenerated into rituals administered by witch doctors who handed the formulas and techniques down from father to son. Maybe it's like that here. Certainly these people give no evidence of an advanced civilization other than these trees and their native intelligence. Civilized people don't hunt with spears or live in tribal groups." Barger nodded. "That's a good point. Skipper." "Well, there's no sense speculating about it; maybe we'll know if we wait and see," Allardyce summed up. I set sentries, three hours on and nine off, to keep Dan informed of our situation, and since rank has its privileges, I took the first watch. We were all tired from our walk through the woods ; the others turned in readily enough. I was sufficiently worried about the hints and implications in the native culture to keep alert -- but nothing happened. I checked in with Dan back at the ship and went to awaken Alex, who had drawn the second watch, and turned in to the bedroom allotted to me. Normally I can sleep anywhere, but I kept thinking about houses grown from trees and upholstery grown from fungus, about spear-carrying savages who understood the working principle of a menticom. It was all wrong and my facile explanation of a regressed cultui'e didn't satisfy me. Superior technology and savagery simply didn't go together. Even in our Interregnum Period, islands of culture and technology had remained, and men hadn't reverted to complete savagery. But there were no such islands on this world -- or none that were apparent. Such enclaves couldn't have escaped our search mechanisms, which are designed precisely to locate such things. And besides, an advanced biological technology would have no need for hunting or spears. They could grow all the food they needed. Any damn fool knew that. Then why the noble savage act? For if our analysis was right, it must be an act. Why were they trying to hoodwink us ? The only answer was that there was a high civilization here that was being deliberately hidden from us. The only mistake they had made was in underestimating us -- the old story of civilized men sneering at savages, but in reverse. The trees, therefore, must be such old and primitive techniques that they thought nothing of them, deeming them so inconsequential that even savages like us would know of them and not be suspicious. At that, they probably didn't have too much time after they detected us orbiting and intending to land. And if that were true, there could be only one place where their civilization was hidden. to warn the others -- but I couldn't move and no sound came from my flaccid vocal cords. I was paralyzed, helpless, and K'wan's amused thought floated gently into my brain. "I told the others that you humans were an advanced race, but they couldn't believe an obviously warlike species that depended upon machinery could be anything but savages. And your man Alex confirmed their beliefs. So we tried to meet you on your own ground -- savage to savage, as it were. It seems as though we weren't as good at being savages as we thought." And K'wan stepped through an apparently solid section of tree trunk that parted to let him pass ! This tree was nothing but a mousetrap, and we were the mice! Why hadn't one of us carried the discussion a bit further? Any idiot should know that biological agents were fully as deadly as physical ones. And these people were self-admittedly predatory. Contempt at my stupidity was the only emotion that filled my mind -- that we would be trapped like a flock of brainless sheep and led bleating happily to slaughter. Raw anger surged through me, smothering my fear in a red blanket of rage. K'wan shook his head. "Your reaction works against you. It's primitive -- and, I think, dangerous. We cannot risk associating with a race that cannot control themselves. You have developed too fast -- too soon. We are an old race and a slow race, and our warlike days are far behind us. The council was right. Something must be done about you or there will be more of your kind on Lyrane -- hard, driving, uncontrolled, violent." He sighed -- a very human sigh -- half regret, half resignation. "And you promised no harm would come to us if we came with you," I thought bitterly. "I said you would come to no harm, nor will you. You'll just be changed a little." "Like Alex?" "Yes." "What did you do to him?" He grinned, exposing his long tusks. "You'll find out," he said. He sounded just like a villain in a cheap melodrama. He took the menticom circlet off my head and all communication stopped. Two other Lyranians stepped through the wall, lifted me and carried me out like a shanghaied drunk from a spaceport bar. I wasn't particularly surprised at the laboratory that lay behind the wall. After all, an observation cage had to have its laboratory facilities. These were good -- very good indeed. Even though I knew hardly anything about biological laboratories, there was no doubt that here were the products of an advanced technology. I hated to admit it, but it looked as though we had run into what we had always feared but had never found -- a civilization superior to ours. From the windowless appearance of the place, it was probably underground, and K'wan's look and nod seemed to confirm my guess. They laid me out on a table, took blood and tissue samples and proceeded to forget me while they ran tests and analyses. I kept trying to move, but it wasn't any use. A group of about a dozen oldsters came in, looked at me and went away. The council, I guessed. In a surprisingly short time K'wan came back, distinguishable by the menticom circlet. He was holding something that looked like a jet hypo in his hand. The barrel was full of a cloudy red liquid that swirled sluggishly behind the confining glass. "This won't hurt," he said, his thoughts amplified by the circlet. He lifted my arm, examined it and nodded. There was a high-pitched, sibilant hiss as he touched the trigger of the syringe and I felt a brief sting near my elbow. "There -- that's that!" he said. "Now we'll take you back and get the others." I swore at him coldly and viciously. He smiled. Alex helped lay me back on my bed in the tree house. He looked down at me and grinned. It wasn't a pleasant grin. It reminded me of a crocodile. N aked, I was standing on an endless sandy plain. Off in the distance the Two Two Four stood on her landing jacks, a tall, needle-pointed tower of burnished silver metal. The sun beat down from a cobalt sky burning my bare back as I trudged painfully across the hot shifting sand. My feet, scorched and blistered, sent agony racing through me with every step I took toward the tall silver column that seemed to recede from me as fast as I approached. My throat was choked with dust and my mind filled with fear and pain. I had to reach the ship. I had to. Yet I knew with dreadful certainty that I would not. He came at me from a hollow in the sandy ground, a huge, furry Lyranian -- bigger than any I had seen. His white tusks glittered in the sunlight as he leaped at me. Twisting, I avoided him and turned to run. To fight that mountain of fanged flesh was futile. He could rip me apart with one hand. But I moved with viscid slowness, stumbling through the shifting sands. In a moment he was upon me, clutching with his huge hands, snapping at my throat with his tusked mouth. Fear pumped adrenalin into my system and I fought as I had never fought before, breaking his holds, throwing jarring punches into his fanged face as he clawed and bit at me. With a violent effort I broke away and ran again toward the safety of the distant ship. For a moment I left him behind as he scrambled to regain his feet and came running after me. He was on me again, hands reaching for my throat. I couldn't get away. And again we fought, battering and clawing at each other, using fists, feet and teeth, biting and gouging. His strength was terrible and his hot, fetid breath was rank in my nostrils. With a grunt of triumph he tripped me and I fell on my back on the blazing sand. I screamed as my back struck the searing surface, but he held me helpless and immovable, pinned beneath his massive, crushing weight. And then he began to eat me! I felt his sharp fangs sink into my shoulder muscles and meet in my flesh. With a rush of frantic strength I threw him off again and again, ran stumbling across the plain. Once more he caught me and again we fought. It went on endlessly -- the fight, the temporary breakaway, the flight, the pursuit, and the recapture. I wondered dully why no one on the ship had seen us. Perhaps they were looking in the wrong direction, or perhaps they weren't even looking. If I survived this and found that they hadn't been on watch -- I snarled and slammed my fist into the Lyranian's face. Both of us were covered with blood, but he was visibly weaker. It was no longer a fight; we were too exhausted for that. We pawed at each other feebly, and I could detect something oddly like fear in him now. He couldn't hold me -- but neither could I finish him. I gathered my last remaining strength into one last blow. My torn fist smashed into his bloody face. He toppled to the ground and I fell beside him, too spent to move. I lay there panting, watching him. He rose to his hands and knees and came crawling toward me, trembling with weakness. I felt his smothering weight pinning me as he fell across me. He twisted slowly, his fanged mouth gaping to bite again. His jaws closed on my arm. I was done -- beaten -- too weary and bruised to care. He had won. But his teeth couldn't break my skin. Like me, he was finished. We lay there as the sun beat down, glaring at each other with fear and hate. And suddenly -- over us -- loomed the familiar faces of my crew and the tall tower of the Two Two Four. Somehow I had reached the ship and safety ! with sweat. My muscles were aching and my head was a ball of fire. I looked around. Everything seemed normal. My menticom was on my head and I was lying on the bed in the tree house. Painfully I rose to my feet and staggered into the main room. "My God ! Skipper, you look awful!" Allardyce's voice was sharp with concern. "What's wrong?" "I don't know," I muttered. "My head's splitting." "Here, sit down. Let me take a look at you." Allardyce produced a thermometer and stuck it in my mouth. "Mmmm," he said worriedly. "You've got fever." "I feel like I've been through the mill," I said. "We'd better get back to the ship. Doc should have a look at you." I wanted nothing more than the familiar safety of the ship, away from these odd natives and exotic diseases that struck despite omnivaccination. And we should get back before the others fell sick. "All right, Pat," I said. "Contact Dan. Have him send the big 'copter. We'll leave at once." I discounted the experience of last night as delirium, but just to make sure, I checked with Allardyce and Barger when they, came in. "Obviously fever," Barger said. "Nothing happened to me like you describe." "Nor to me," Allardyce said. I nodded. They were right, of course, unless the Lyranian in their dreams had eaten and absorbed them. Then -- but that was sheer nonsense. I was being a suspicious fool. But that dream -- all of it -- had been damnably real. We made our excuses to K'wan as the 'copter fluttered down into a nearby clearing. "I'm sorry about this," K'wan said apologetically, "but I never thought of the possibility of diseases. We are all immune. We do have some biological skill, as you've surely guessed, but our engineering technology is far inferior to yours. We thought it would be better not to let you know about us until we had a chance to observe you. But you undoubtedly have seen enough to deduce our culture." He grinned -- a ferocious grimace that exposed his long tusks. "I suppose we are rather bad liars. But then we're not accustomed to deception." "I understand," I said. "You had no way of knowing what we were really like. We could have been the advance guard of a conquering space armada. You showed great courage to open relations with us." "Not as great as yours. We had the opportunity of examining your man Alex. You had only his untried opinions to go by." The 'copter came down with a flutter of rotor blades, and I shook hands with K'wan. For a moment I was tempted to call Dan and tell him to turn our hostages loose, but on second thought decided that could wait. I slipped my menticom off. There was no point in broadcasting my thoughts, and without the gadget KVan couldn't intercept them unless they were directed. After all, we were a minority on this world and Earth didn't even know where we were yet. A ship can cross hyper-space far more easily and quickly than the most powerful transmitter can broadcast across normal space. It would be a thousand years before Earth could hear from us by radio, even if they could distinguish our messages from stellar interference. While I felt oddly friendly, there was no reason to take chances, especially if there was any truth in that dream. "You will be leaving soon?" K'wan asked. "You and the ship?" "Yes," I said. "We have done all we can do here." I looked up at him. He was standing there -- holding the menticom in his hand -- yet I understood him! I didn't let the astonishment show on my face, nor the shock that coursed through my mind when the Lyranian in my brain tried vainly to scream a waiming! Instead I took the circlet and turned to go. "Remember what you are to do; the others will help," K'wan said. "I will remember," I replied. You' re damn ivell right ril remember, I thought grimly. The Lyranian was supposed to wreck the ship. H e waved farewell as I turned to enter the 'copter. "Our thoughts go with you for your success," he said. The Lyranian in my brain screamed and struggled, but I held him easily. I was his master, not he mine. There would be no sabotage on the Two Two Four. He wouldn't wreck my ship. "Dan," I said as we went into orbit, "did Alex come aboard?" "Of course." "Where is he?" "Down in the engine room, I suppose, or in his bunk. It's not his watch." "Maybe you'd better check. But before you do -- " He waited for me to continue, and finally I was able to. "Put Allardyce, Barger, and myself in the brig," I said. "Set a guard over us with instructions to shoot if we try to make a break. Then get Alex, if he's aboard. Frankly, I don't think you'll find him. They didn't need a ship's commander, a sociologist or a biologist, but they did need an engineer. Now get going. This is an order!" Warren stiffened. "Yes, sir -- sorry, sir!" Inside my skull, the Lyranian came to life -- struggled briefly -- and then quit. Barger, Allardyce and I spent the rest of the trip home in the air-conditioned, radiation-resistant, germproof, dustproof, escape-resistant brig. Alex, of course, wasn't aboard. There aren't many places on a starship where a man can hide, and the crew searched them all. Even so, I kept worrying about the ship's safety all the way back. It was a miserable trip. I suppose it was just as miserable for the Lyranians in my two companions who kept worrying about how to destroy us. It didn't do them any good either. They never got a chance, and ultimately we reached Decontamination. Barger and Allardyce are up there now. The medics think they can erase the Lyranians with insulin shock, but it'll take time. Mine, being a nice, tame one, was considered to be more valuable in me than out. We're going to have to know a lot about Lyrane in a huriy if we're going to do anything about those people, and my Lyranian can tell us plenty. But I'll bet we'll find things different on Lyrane when we go back. They'll have at least ten years, and with the brains they've got -- and Alex's brain to pick -- they'll do just fine from an engineering point of view. I'll bet they'll even have spaceships. From what I can gather from my alter ego, they checked Alex's brain and didn't like what they saw. That's the trouble with romantics. They always remember the wars and the fighting, never the stodgy, peaceful interims. But you simply don't spring that sort of stuff on a culture like Lyrane's. And I suppose my anger didn't help things any, but if not for that anger and my primitive bull-headedness, we might not be heredowned the rum. "Skippers are picked because they're tough-minded and authoritarian. In space you need it occasionally. Fortunately I lived up to specifications. A peaceful sort like my Lyranian just couldn't take it -- fortunately." "Fortunately?" I asked. "Sure. What else? Possibly those natives we conditioned would help our case, possibly not. And in the meantime the Lyranians would suck Alex dry. And with the Tivo Two Four gone it'd be maybe a couple of hundred years before we ran into them again, and by then they'd really be ready -- loaded for bear with itchy trigger fingers -- and we just might have a war on our hands. As it is we'll send out a battle fleet to give some authority to our negotiators so no one will get hurt. They just shouldn't have picked Alex as typical of us. With his attitude and our weapons, they naturally got a lot of wrong ideas." "Wrong?" I prompted the skipper. Halsey chuckled. "Yes, that's what I said -- wrong ideas," he said in that remote second voice. 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All Stories New and Complete # Illustrations by Wood, Francis, Harrison and Morrow E IF is published bi-monthly by Diffest Productions Corporation, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #f per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the Unitei States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, New York. Copyright New York lOoO by Digest Productions Corioration. Ail rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed, stamped envelopes. The iJublisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York. Next Issue (Mmy) on Sale March #st, Space Taxi # Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! 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The lettering on the door said: Executive Vice President y Projects, And down in the lower left corner, Hallock Spencer, in very modest type. That was him. He was Hallock Spencer. But he wasn't going in that door. He had trouble enough already without going in. There'd be people waiting there for him. No one in particular -- but people. And each of them with problems. He ducked around the corner and went a step or two down the corridor until he came to another door that said Private on it. It was unlocked. He went in. A dowdy scarecrow in a faded, dusty toga sat tipped back in a chair, with his sandalled feet resting on Hallock Spencer's desk top. He wore a mouse-gray woolen cap upon his hairless skull and his ears stuck out like wings. A short sword, hanging from the belt that snugged in the toga, stood canted with its point resting on the carpet. There was dirt beneath his rather longish toenails and he hadn't shaved for days. He was a total slob. "Hello, E.J.," said Spencer. The man in the toga didn't take his feet off the desk. He didn't move at all. He just sat there. "Sneaking in again," he said. Spencer put down his briefcase and hung up his hat. "The reception room's a trap," he said. He sat down in the chair behind the desk and picked up the project schedule and had a look at it. "What's the trouble, E.J.?" he asked. "You back already?" "Haven't started yet. Not for another couple hours." "It says here," said Spencer, flicking the schedule with a finger, "that you're a Roman trader." Past, Inc., changed a lot of minds about time. Everyone knew time was money -- but "That's what I am," said E.J. "At least, Costumes says so. I hope to God they're right." "But the sword -- " "Pardner," said E.J., "back in Roman Britain, out on a Roman road, with a pack train loaded down with goods, a man has got to carry steel." H e reached down and hoisted the sword into his lap. He regarded it with disfavor. "But I don't mind telling you it's no great shakes of a weapon." "I suppose you'd feel safer with a tommy gun." E.J. nodd glumly. "Yes. I would." "Lacking that," said Spencer, "we do the best we can. You'll pack the finest steel in the second century. If that is any comfort." E.J. just sat there with the sword across his lap. He was making up his mind to say something -- it was written on his face. He was a silly-looking soul, with all those wiry whiskers and his ears way out to either side of him and the long black hairs that grew out of the lobes. "Hal," said E.J., finally making up his mind, "I want out of this." Spencer stiffened in his chair. "You can't do that!" he yelled. "Time is your very life. You've been in it for a lot of years!" "I don't mean out of Time. I mean out of Family Tree. I am sick of it." "You don't know what you're saying," Spencer protested. "Family Tree's not tough. You've been on a lot of worse ones. Family Tree's a snap. All you have to do is go back and talk to people or maybe check some records. You don't have to snitch a thing." "It's not the work," said E.J. "Sure, the work is easy. I don't mind the work. It's after I get back." "You mean the WrightsonGraves." "That is what I mean. After every trip, she has me up to that fancy place of hers and I have to tell her all about her venerable ancestors..." Spencer said, "It's a valuable account. We have to service it." "I can't stand much more of it," E.J. insisted, stubbornly. Spencer nodded. He knew just what E.J. meant. He felt much the same. Alma Wrightson-Graves was a formidable old dowager with a pouter-pigeon build and the erroneous conviction that she still retained much of her girlish charm. She was loaded down with cash, and also with jewels that were too costly and gaudy to be good taste. For years she'd shrieked down and bought off everyone around her until she firmly believed there was notiiing in the world she couldn't have enough for it. And she was paying plenty for this family tree of hers. Spencer had often asked himself just why she wanted it. Back to the Conquest, sure -- that made at least some sense. But not back to the caves. Not that Past, Inc., couldn't trace it that far for her if her cash continued to hold out. He thought, with a perverted satisfaction, that she couldn't have been happy with the last report or two, for the family had sunk back to abject peasantry. He said as much to E.J. "What does she want?" he asked. "What does she expect?" "I have a hunch," E.J. told him, "that she has some hopes we'll find a connection back to Rome. God help us if we do. Then it could go on forever." Spencer grunted. "Don't be too sure," warned E.J. "Roman officers being what they were I wouldn't bet against it." "If that should happen," Spencer told him, "I'll take you off the project. Assign someone else to carry out the Roman research. I'll tell the Wrightson-Graves you're not so hot on Rome -- have a mental block or a psychic allergy or something that rejects indoctrination." "Thanks a lot," said E.J., without much enthusiasm. O NE by one, he took his dirty feet off the shiny desk and rose out of the chair. "E.J.?" "Yes, Hal." "Just wondering. Have you ever hit a place where you felt that you should stay? Have you ever wondered if maybe you should stay?" "Yeah, I guess so. Once or twice, perhaps. But I never did. You're thinking about Garson." "Garson for one. And all the others." "Maybe something happened to him. You get into tight spots. It's a simple matter to make a big mistake. Or the operator might have missed." "Our operators never miss," snapped Spencer. "Garson was a good man," said E.J., a little sadly. "Garson ! It's not only Garson. It's all the..." Spencer stopped abruptly, for he'd run into it again. After all these years, he still kept running into it. No matter how he tried, it was something to which he could not reconcile himself -- the disparity in time. He saw that E.J. was staring at him, with just the slightest crinkle that was not quite a smile at the corner of his mouth. "You can't let it eat you," said E.J. "You're not responsible. We take our chances. If it wasn't worth our while... "Oh, shut up!" said Spencer. "Sure," said E.J., "you lose one of us every now and then. But it's no worse than any other business." "Not one every now and then," said Spencer. "There have been three of them in the last ten days." "Well, now," said E.J., "I lose track of them. There was Garson just the other day. And Taylor -- how long ago was that?" "Four days ago," said Spen"Four days," said E.J., astonished. "Is that all it was?" Spencer snapped, "For you it was three months or more. And do you remember Price? For you that was a year ago, but just ten days for me." E.J. put up a dirty paw and scrubbed at the bristle on his chin. "How time does fly!" "Look," said Spencer, miserably, "this whole set-up is bad enough. Please don't make jokes about it." "Garside been giving you a hard time, maybe? Losing too many of the men?" "Hell, no," said Spencer, bitterly. "You can always get more men. It's the machines that bother him. He keeps reminding me they cost a E.J. made a rude sound with his lips. "Get out of here!" yelled Spencer. "And see that you come home!" E.J. grinned and left. He gave the toga a girlish flirt as he went out the door. II was wrong. For whatever anyone might say, he, Hallock Spencer, was responsible. He ran the stinking show. He made up the schedules. He assigned the travelers and he sent them out. When there were mistakes or hitches, he was the one who answered. To himself, if no one else. He got up and paced the floor, hands locked behind his back. Three men in the last ten days. And what had happened to them? Possibly there was something to what Garside said, as well -- Christopher Anson Garside, chief co-ordinator and a nasty man to handle, with his clipped, gray mustache and his clipped, gray voice and his clipped, gray business thinking. For it was not men alone who did not come back. It was likewise the training and experience you had invested in those men. They lasted, Spencer told himself, a short time at the best without managing to get themselves killed off somewhere in the past, or deciding to squat down and settle in some other era they liked better than the present. And the machines were something that could not be dismissed. Every time a man failed to return it meant another carrier lost. And the carriers did cost a quarter thing you could utterly forget. Spencer went back to his desk and had another look at the schedule for the day. There was E.J., bound for Roman Britain on the Family Tree project; Nickerson going back to the early Italian Renaissance to check up once again on the missing treasure in the Vatican; Hennessy off on his search once more for the lost documents in fifteenth ing out, he hoped, finally to snatch the mislaid Picasso, and a half dozen more. Not a massive schedule. But enough to spell out a fairly busy day. He checked the men not on the projects list. A couple of them were on vacation. One was in Rehabilitation. Indoctrination had the rest of them. He sat there, then, for the thousandth time, wondering what it would be like, really, to travel into time. He'd heard hints of it from some of the travelers, but no more than hints, for they did not talk about it. Perhaps they did among themselves, when there were no outsiders present. Perhaps not even then. As if it were something that no man could quite describe. As if it were an experience that no man should discuss. A haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that one was out of place, a hint of not quite belonging, of somehow standing, tip-toe, on the far edge of eternity. It wore off after a time, of course, but apparently one was never entirely free of it. For the past, in some mysterious working of a principle yet unknown, was a world of wild enchantment. Well, he had had his chance and flunked it. But some day, he told himself, he would go into time. Not as a regular traveler, but as a vacationist -- if he could snatch the necessary time to get ready for the trip. The trip, itself, of course, was no consideration so far as time might be concerned. It was Indoctrination and the briefing that was time-consuming. He picked up the schedule again for another look. All of those who were going back this day were good men. There was no need to worry about any one of them. H e laid the schedule to one side and buzzed Miss Crane. Miss Crane was a letterperfect secretary, though she wasn't much to look at. She was a leathery old maid. She had her own way of doing things, and she could act very disapproving. No choice of his, Spencer had inherited her fifteen years before. She had been with Past, Inc., before there was even a projects office. And, despite her lack of looks, her snippy attitude and her generally pessimistic view of life, she was indispensable. She knew the projects job as well as he did. At times she let him know it. But she never forgot, never mislaid, never erred; she ran an efficient office, always got her work done and it always was on time. Spencer, dreaming at times of a lusher young replacement, knew that he was no more than dreaming. He couldn't do his job without Miss Crane in the outer office. "You sneaked in again," she accused him as soon as she'd closed the door. "I suppose there's someone waiting." "There's a Dr. Aldous Ravenholt," she said. "He's from Foundation for Humanity." Spencer flinched. There was no one worse to start a morning with than some pompous functionary from Humanity. They almost always figured that you owed them something. They thought the whole world owed them something. "And there's a Mr. Stewart Cabell. He's an applicant sent up by Personnel. Mr. Spencer, don't you think..." "No, I don't," Spencer snapped at her. "I know Personnel is sore. But I've been taking everyone they've been shoveling up here and see what happens. Three men gone in the last ten days. From now on. I'm taking a close look at everyone myself." She sniffed. It was a very nasty sniff. "That all?" asked Spencer, figuring that he couldn't be that lucky -- just two of them. "Also there's a Mr. Boone Hudson. He's an elderly man who looks rather ill and he seems impatient. Perhaps you should see him first." Spencer might have, but not after she said that. "I'll see Ravenholt," he said. "Any idea what he wants?" "No, sir." "Well, send him in," said Spencer. "He'll probably want to chisel a slice of Time off me." Chiselers, he thought. I didn't know there were so many chiselers ! Aldous Ravenholt was a pompous man, well satisfied and smug. You could have buttered bread with the crease in his trousers. His handshake was professional and he had an automatic smile. He sat down in the chair that Spencer offered him with a selfassurance that was highly irritating. "I came to talk with you," he said precisely, "about the pending proposal to investigate religious origins." Spencer winced mentally. It was a tender subject. "Dr. Ravenholt," he said, "that is a matter I have given a great deal of attention. Not myself alone, but my entire department." "That is what I've heard," Ravenholt said drily. "That is why I'm here. I understand you have tentatively decided not to go ahead with it." "Not tentatively," said Spencer. "Our decision has been made. I'm curious how you heard it." R avenholt waved an airy hand, implying there was very little he did not know about. "I presume the matter still is open to discussion." Spencer shook his head. Ravenholt said, icily, "I fail to see how you could summarily cut off an investigation so valid and so vital to all humanity." "Not summarily. Dr. Ravenholt. We spent a lot of time on it. We made opinion samplings. We had an extensive check by Psych. We considered all the factors." "And your findings, Mr. Spencer?" "First of all," said Spencer, just a little nettled, "it would be too time-consuming. As you know, our license specifies that we donate ten per cent of our operating time to public interest projects. This we are most meticulous in doing, although I don't mind telling you there's nothing that gives us greater headaches." "But that ten per cent..." "If we took up this project you are urging, doctor, we'd use up all our public interest time for several years at least. That would mean no other programs at all." "But surely you'll concede that no other proposal could be in a greater public interest." "That's not our findings," Spencer told him. "We took opinion samplings in every area on Earth, in all possible cross-sections. We came up with -- sacrilege." "You're joking, Mr. Spencer!" "Not at all," said Spencer. "Our opinion-taking showed quite conclusively that any attempt to investigate worldwide religious origins would be viewed by the general public in a sacrilegious light. You and I, perhaps, could look upon it as research. We could resolve all our questioning by saying we sought no more nor less than truth. But the people of the world -- the simple, common people of every sect and faith in the entire world -- do not want the truth. They are satisfied with things just as they are. They're afraid we would upset a lot of the old, comfortable traditions. They call it sacrilege and it's partly that, of course, but it's likewise an instinctive defense reaction against upsetting their thinking. They have a faith to cling to. It has served them thiough the years and they don't want anyone to fool around with it." "I simply can't believe it," said Ravenholt, aghast at such blind provincialism. "I have the figures. I can show you." Dr. Ravenholt waved his hand condescendingly and gracefully. 'Tf you say you have them, I am sure you have." He wasn't taking any chances of being proven wrong. Spencer, "is objectivity. How do you select the men to send back to observe the facts?" "I am sure that we could get them. There are many men of the cloth, of every creed and faith, who would be amply qualified..." "Those are just the ones we would never think of sending," said Spencer. "We need objectivity. Ideally, the kind of nian we need is one who has no interest in religion, who has no formal training in it, one who is neither for it nor against it -- and yet, we couldn't use that sort of man even if we found him. For to understand what is going on, he'd have to have a rather thorough briefing on what he was to look for. Once you trained him, he'd be bound to lose his objectivity. There is something about religion that forces one to take positions on it." "Now," said Ravenholt, "you are talking about the ideal investigative situation, not our own." "Well, all right, then," conceded Spencer. "Let's say we decide to do a slightly sloppy job. Who do we send then? Could any Christian, I ask you, no matter how poor a Christian he might be, safely be sent back to the days that Jesus spent on Earth? How could one be sure that even mediocre Christians would do no more than observe the facts? I tell you. Dr. Ravenholt, we could not take the chance. What would happen, do you think, if we suddenly should have thirteen instead of twelve disciples? What if someone should try to rescue Jesus from the Cross? Worse yet, what if He actually were rescued? Where would Christianity be then? Would there be Christianity? Without the Crucifixion, would it ever have survived?" "Your problem has a simple answer," Ravenholt said coldly. "Do not send a Christian." "Now we are really getting somewhere," said Spencer. "Let's send a Moslem to get the Christian facts and a Christian to track down the life of Buddha -- and a Buddhist to investigate black magic in the Belgian Congo." "It could work," said Ravenholt. "It might work, but you wouldn't get objectivity. You'd get bias and, worse yet, perfectly honest misunderstanding." Ravenholt drummed impatient fingers on his wellcreased knee. "I can see your point," he agreed, somewhat irritably, "but there is something you have overlooked. The findings need not be released in their entirety to the public." "But if it's in the public interest? That's what our license says." "Would it help," asked Ravenholt, "if I should offer certain funds which could be used to help defray the costs?" "In such a case," said Spencer, blandly, "the requirement would not be met. It's either in the public interest, without any charge at all, or it's a commercial contract paid for at regular rates." "The obvious fact," Ravenholt said flatly, "is that you do not want to do this job. You may as well admit it." "Most cheerfully," said touch it with a ten-foot pole. What worries me right now is why you're here." Ravenholt said, "I thought that with the project about to be rejected, I possibly could serve as a sort of mediator." mean you thought jL we could be bribed." "Not at all," said Ravenholt wrathfully. "I was only recognizing that the project was perhaps a cut beyond what your license calls for." "It's all of that," said Spencer. "I cannot fully understand your objection to it," Ravenholt persisted. "Dr. Ravenholt," said Spencer gently, "how would you like to be responsible for the destruction of a faith?" "But," stammered Ravenholt, "there is no such possibility..." "Are you certain?" Spencer asked him. "How certain are you. Dr. Ravenholt? Even the black magic of the Congo?" "Well, I -- well, since you put it that way..." "You see what I mean?" asked Spencer. "But even so," argued Ravenholt, "there could be certain facts suppressed..." "Come now! How long do you think you could keep it bottled up? Anyway, when Past, Inc., does a job," Spencer told him firmly, "it goes gunning for the truth. And when we learn it, we report it. That is the one excuse we have for our continuing existence. We have a certain project here -- a personal, full-rate contract -- in which we have traced a family tree for almost two thousand years. We have been forced to tell our client some unpleasant things. But we told them." "That's part of what I'm trying to convey to you," shouted Ravenholt, shaken finally out of his ruthless calm. upon the tracing of a family tree, but you refuse this!" "And you are confusing two utterly different operations ! This investigation of religious origins is a public interest matter. Family Tree is a private acount for which we're being paid." Ravenholt rose angrily. "We'll discuss this some other time, when we both can keep our temper." Spencer said wearily, "It won't do any good. My mind is made up." "Mr. Spencer," Ravenholt said, nastily, "I'm not without recourse." "Perhaps you're not. You can go above my head. If that is what you're thinking. I'll tell you something else : You'll carry out this project over my dead body. I will not. Dr. Ravenholt, betray the faith of any people in the world." "We'll see," said Ravenholt, still nasty. "Now," said Spencer, "you're thinking that you can have me fired. Probably you could. Undoubtedly you know the very strings to pull. But it's no solution." "I would think," said Ravcnholt, "it would be the perfect one." "I'd still fight you as a private citizen. I'd take it to the floor of the United Nations if I had to." They both were on their feet now, facing one another across the width of desk. "I'm sorry," Spencer said, "that it turned out this way. But I meant everything I said." "So did I," said Ravenholt, stalking out the door. Ill in his chair. A swell way to start a day, he told himself. But the guy had burned him up. Miss Crane came in the door with a sheaf of papers for his desk. "Mr. Spencer, shall I send in Mr. Hudson? He's been waiting a long time." "Is Hudson the applicant?" "No, that is Mr. Cabell." "Cabell is the man I want to see. Bring me his file." She sniffed contemptuously and left. Damn her, Spencer told himself. I'll see who I want to see when I want to see them! He was astounded at the violence of his thought. What was wrong with him? Nothing was going right. Couldn't he get along with anyone any more? Too tensed up, he thought. Too many things to do, too much to worry over. Maybe what he ought to do was walk out into Operations and step into a carrier for a long vacation. Back to the Old Stone Age, which would require no Indoctrination. There wouldn't be too many people, perhaps none at all. But there'd be mosquitoes. And cave bear. And saber-tooths and perhaps a lot of other things equally obnoxious. And he'd have to get some camping stuff together and -- oh, the hell with it! But it was not a bad idea. He'd thought about it often. Some day he would do it. Meanwhile, he picked up the sheaf of papers Miss Crane had dropped upon his desk. They were the daily batch of future assignments dreamed up by the Dirty Tricks department. There was always trouble in them. He felt himself go tense as he picked them up. The first one was a routine enough assignment -- an investigation of some tributes paid the Goths by Rome. There was, it seemed, a legend that the treasure had been buried somewhere in the Alps. It might never have been recovered. That was S.O.P., checking up on buried treasure. But the second paper -- "lYflSS Crane!" he yelled. iA She was coming through the door, with a file clutched in her hand. Her face changed not a whit at his yelp of anguish ; she was used to it. "What is the matter, Mr. Spencer?" she inquired, at least three degrees too calmly. Spencer banged his fist down on the pile of sheets. "They can't do this to me! I won't stand for it. Get Rogers on the phone!" "Yes, sir." "No, wait a minute there," Spencer interrupted grimly. "This I can do better personal. I'll go up and see him. In fact. I'll take him apart barehanded." "But there are those people waiting..." "Let them wait for a while. It will make them humble." He snatched up the assignment sheet and went striding out the door. He shunned the elevator. He climbed two flights of stairs. He went in a door marked Evaluation. Rogers was sitting tilted back, with his feet up on the desk top, staring at the ceiling. He glanced at Spencer with a bland concern. He took his feet down off the desk and sat forward in his chair. "Well? What's the matter this time?" "This!" said Spencer, throwing the sheet down in front of him. Rogers poked it with a delicate finger. "Nothing difficult there. Just a little ingenuity..." "Nothing difficult!" howled Spencer. "Movies of Nero's fire in Rome!" Rogej'S sighed. "This movie outfit will pay us plenty for it." "And there's nothing to it. One of my men can just walk out into the burning streets of Rome and set up a movie camera in an age wheie the principle of a camera hasn't yet been thought of." "Well, I said it would call for some ingenuity," said Rogers. "Look, there'll be a lot of people running, carrying stuff, trying to save themselves and anything they can. They won't pay any attention to your man. He can cover the camera with something so that it will look..." "It'll be an ugly crowd," insisted Spencer. "It won't like the city being burned. Theie'll be rumors that the Christians are the ones who set the fire. That crowd will be looking for suspicious characters." "There's always an element of danger," Rogers pointed out. "lyrOT as , dangerous as this!" said Spencer, testily. "Not deliberately asking for it. And there is something else." "Like what?" "Like introducing an advanced technology to the past. If that crowd beat up my man and busted the camera..." Rogers shrugged. "What difference if they did? They could make nothing of it." "Maybe. But what I'm really worried about," Spencer persisted, "is what the watchdog group would say when they audit our records. It would have to be worth an awful lot of money before I'd take a chance." "Believe me, it is worth a lot of money. And it would open up a new field for us. That's why I liked it." "You guys in Dirty Tricks," said Spencer, bitterly, "just don't give a damn. You'll hand us anything..." "Not everything," said Rogers. "Sales pushed us pretty hard on this one..." "Sales!" spat Spencer, contempt in his voice. "There was a woman in here the other day," said Rogers. "She wanted to send her two children to their great-great-great-grandfather's farm back in the nineteenth century. For a vacation, mind you. A summer in the country in another century. Said it would be educational and quite relaxing for them. Said the old folks would understand and be glad to have them once we had explained." Rogers sighed. "I had quite a session with her. She poohpoohed our regulations. She said..." "You passed up a good one there," Spencer said sarcastically. "That would have opened up another field -- vacations in the past. I can see it now. Family reunions with old friends and neighbors foregathering across the centuries." "You think you are the only one who has his troubles." "I am bleeding for you," Spencer told him. "Theres a TV outfit," Rogers said, "that wants interviews with Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander and all the rest of those ancient bigshots. There are hunters who want to go back into the primordial wilderness to get a spot of shooting. There are universities that want to send teams of investigators back..." "You know that all of that is out," said Spencer. "The only ones we can send back are travelers we have trained." " There Ve been times." "Oh, sure, a few. But only when we got a special dispensation. And we sent along so many travelers to guard them that it was an expedition instead of a simple little study group." Spencer got up from his chair. "Well, what about this latest brainstorm?" Rogers picked up the offending assignment sheet and tossed it into an overflowing basket. "ni go down to Sales, with tears streaming down my cheeks..." 'Thanks," said Spencer and went out. IV B ack in his office, he sat down at the desk and picked up the file on Cabell. The squawk box gibbered at him. He thumbed up the lever. "What is it?" just got back. Everything's okay; he snagged the Picasso without any trouble. Only took six weeks." "Six weeks!" Spencer yelled. "He could have painted it himself in that time!" "There were complications." "Is there any time there aren't?" "It's a good one, Hal. Not damaged. Worth a hunk of dough." "O.K." said Spencer, "take it down to Customs and let them run it through. The good old government must be paid its duty. And what about the others?" "Nickerson will be leaving in just a little while." "And E.J.?" "He's fussy about the time fix. He is telling Doug..." "Look," yelled Spencer wrathfully, "you tell him for me that the fix is Doug's job. Doug knows more about it than E.J. ever will. When Doug says it's time to hop, E.J. hops, funny cap and all." He snapped down the lever and turned back to the Cabell file, sitting quietly for a moment to let his blood pressure simmer down. He got worked up too easily, he told himself. He blew his top too much. But there never was a job with so many aggravations ! He opened the folder and ran through the Cabell file. Stewart Belmont Cabell, #, unmarried, excellent references, a doctorate in sociology from an ivy college. A uniformly high score in all the tests, including attitude, and an astonishing I.Q. Unqualifiedly recommended for employment as a traveler. Spencer closed the file and pushed it to one side. "Send Mr. Cabell in," he told Miss Crane. Cabell was a lanky man, awkward in his movements; he seemed younger than he was. There was a certain shyness in his manner when Spencer shook his hand and pointed out a chair. Cabell sat and tried, without success, to make himself at ease. "So you want to come in with us," said Spencer. "I suppose you know what you are doing." "Yes, sir," said young Cabell. "I know all about it. Or perhaps I'd better say..." He stammered and stopped talking. "It's all right," said Spencer. "I take it you want this very much." Cabell nodded. "I know how it is. You almost have the feeling you'll die if you can't do it." And he remembered, sitting there, how it had been with him -- the terrible, tearing heartache when he'd been rejected as a traveler, and how he had stuck on regardless of that hurt and disappointment. First as operator ; then as operations superintendent; finally to this desk, with all its many headaches. "Not," he said, "that I have ever traveled." "I didn't know that, sir." "I wasn't good enough. My attitudes were wrong." A nd he saw the old hope and hunger in the eyes of the man across the desk -- and something else besides. Something vaguely disturbing. "It's not all fun," he said, a shade more harshly thn he had meant to make it. "At first there's the romance and the glitter, but that soon wears olT. It becomes a job. Sometimes a bitter one." He paused and looked at Cabell and the queer, disturbing light still was shining in his eyes. "You should know," he said, deliberately harsh this time, "that if you come in with us you'll probably be dead of advanced old age in five years." Cabell nodded unconceinedly. know that, sir. The people down in Personnel explained it all to me." "Good," said Spencer. "I suspect at times that Personnel makes a rather shabby explanation. They tell you just enough to make it sound convincing, but they do not tell it all. They are far too anxious to keep us well supplied. We're always short of travelers; we run through them too fast." He paused and looked at the man again. There was no change in him. "We have certain regulations," Spencer told him. "They aren't made so much by Past, Inc., as by the job itself. You cannot have any settled sort of life. You live out your life in pieces, like a patchwork quilt, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood, and those neighborhoods all many years apart. There is no actual rule against it, but none of our travelers has ever married. It would be impossible. In five years the man would die of old age, and his wife would still be young." "I think I understand, sir." "Actually," Spencer said, "it's a very simple matter of simple economics. We cannot afford to have either our machines or men tied up for any length of time. So while a man may be gone a week, a month, or years, the machine comes hack, with him inside of it, sixty seconds after he has left. That sixty seconds is an arbitrary period; it could be a single second, it could be an hour or day or anything we wanted. One minute has seemed a practical period." "And," asked Cabell, "if it does not come back within that minute?" "Then it never will." "It sometimes happens?" course it happens. Time traveling is no picnic. Every time a man goes back he is betting his life that he can get along in an environment which is as totally alien, in some instances, as another planet. We help him every way we can, of course. We make it our business to see that he is well briefed and Indoctrinated and as well equipped as it is possible to make him. He is taught the languages he is likely to require. He is clothed properly. But there are instances when we simply do not know the little vital details which mean survival. Sometimes we learn them later when our man comes back and tells us. Usually he is quite profane about it. And some we don't find out about at all. The man does not come back." "One would think," said Cabell, "that you would like to scare me out." "No! I tell you this because I want no misunderstanding. It costs a lot to train a traveler. We must get our costs back. We do not want a man who will stay with us just a little while. We don't want a year or two from you ; we want your entire life. We'll take you and we'll wring you dry of every minute..." "I can assure you, sir..." "We send you where we want you," Spencer said, "and although we have no control of you once you've left, we expect that you'll not fool around. Not that you won't come back inside of sixty seconds -- naturally you will, if you come back at all. But we want you to come back as young as possible. Past, Inc., is a pure commercial venture. We'll squeeze all the trips we possibly can out of you." "I understand all this," said Cabell, "but Personnel explained it would be to my advantage, too." A but it'll not take you long to find that money is of slight moment to a traveler. Since you have no family, or we would hope you haven't, what would you need it for? The only leisure time #ou'll have is a six-week's annual leave and you can earn enough in a trip or two to spend that leave in utmost luxury or the deepest vice. "Most of the men, however, don't even bother to do that. They just wander off and get re-acquainted with the era they were born into. Vice and luxuiy in this present century has but slight appeal to them after all the hell they've raised in past centuries at the company's expense." "You are kidding, sir." "Well, maybe just a little. But in certain cases that I have in mind, it is the honest truth." Spencer stared across at Cabell. "None of this bothers you ?" he asked. "Not a thing so far." "There's just one thing else, Mr. Cabell, that you should know about. That is the need -- the imperative, crying need for objectivity. When you go into the past, you take no part in it. You do not interfere. You must not get involved " "That should not be hard." "I warn you, Mr. Cabell, that it requires moral stamina. The man who travels in time has terrible power. And there's something about the feel of power that makes it almost compulsive for a man to use it. Hand in hand with that power is the temptation to take a hand in history. To wield a judicious knife, to say a word that needs saying very badly. To save a life that, given a few more years of time, might have pushed the human race an extra step toward greatness." "It might be hard," admitted Cabell. Spencer nodded. "So far as I know, Mr. Cabell, no one has ever succumbed to these temptations. But I live in terror of the day when someone does." And he wondered as he said it how much he might be talking through his hat, might be whistling past the graveyard. For surely there must by now have been some interference. What about the men who had not come back? Some of them undoubtedly had died. But surely some had stayed. And wasn't staying back there the worst form of intervention? What were the implications, he wondered, of a child born out of time -- a child that had not been born before, that should never have been born? The children of that child and the children of those children -- they would be a thread of temporal interference reaching through the ages. V something wrong, sir?" "No. I was just thinking that the time will surely come, some day, when we work out a formula for safely interfering in the past. And when that happens, our responsibilities will be even greater than the ones that we face now. For then we'll have license for intervening, but will in turn be placed under certain strictures to use that power of intervention only for the best. I can't imagine what sort of principle it will be, you understand. But I am sure that soon or late we will arrive at it. "And perhaps, too, we'll work out another formula which will allow us to venture to the future." He shook his head and thought : How like an old man, to shake your head in resigned puzzlement. But he was not an old man -- not very old, at least. "At the moment," he said, "we are little more than gleaners. We go into the past to pick up the gleanings -- the things they lost or threw away. We have made up certain rules to make sure that we never touch the sheaves, but only the ear of wheat left lying on the ground." "Like the Alexandria manuscripts?" "Well, yes, I would suppose so -- although grabbing all those manuscripts and books was inspired entirely by a sordid profit motive. We could just as easily have copied them. Some of them we did; but the originals themselves represented a tremendous sum of money. I would hate to tell you what Harvard paid us for those manuscripts. Although, when you think of it," Spencer said, reflectively. "I'm not sure they weren't worth every cent of it. It called for the closest planning and split-second coordinating and we used every man we had. For, you see, we couldn't grab the stuff until it was on the verge of burning. We couldn't deprive even so much as a single person the chance of even glancing at a single manuscript. We can't lift a thing until it's lost. That's an iron-bound rule. "Now, you take the Ely tapestry. We waited for years, going back and checking, until we were quite sure that it was finally lost. We knew it was going to be lost, you understand. But we couldn't touch it until it was lost for good. Then we h'isted it." He waved a hand. "I talk too much. I am boring you." "Mr. Spencer, sir," protested Cabell, "talk like yours could never bore me. This is something I have dreamed of. I can't tell you how happy..." Spencer raised a hand to stop him. "Not so fast. You aren't hired yet." "But Mr. Jensen down in Personnel..." "I know what Jensen said. But the final word is mine." "What have I done wrong?" asked Cabell. "You have done nothing wrong. Come back this afternoon." "But, Mr. Spencer, if only you could tell me..." "I want to think about you. See me after lunch." from his chair and he was ill at ease. "That man who was in ahead of me..." "Yes. What about him?" "He seemed quite angry, sir. As if he might be thinking of making trouble for you." Spencer said angrily, "And that's none of your damn business!" Cabell stood his ground. "I was only going to say, sir, that I recognized him." "So?" "If he did try to cause you trouble, sir, it might be worth your while to investigate his asociation with a stripper down at the Golden Hour. Her name is Silver Starr." Spencer stared at Cabell without saying anything. The man edged toward the door. He put out his hand to grasp the knob, then turned back to Spencer "Perhaps that's not actually her name, but it's fine for advertising -- Silver Starr at the Golden Hour. The Golden Hour is located at..." "Mr. Cabell," Spencer said, "I've been at the Golden Hour." The impudent punk! What did he figure he was doing -- buying his way in? He sat quietly for a moment after Cabell had gone out, cooling down a bit, wondering about the man. There had been something about him that had been disturbing. That look in his eyes, for one thing. And the awkwardness and shyness didn't ring quite true. As if it had been an act of some sort. But why, in the name of God, should anyone put on such an act when it would be quite clearly to his disadvantage? You're psycho, Spencer told himself. You're getting so you jump at every shadow, sight a lurking figure behind every bush. Two down, he thought, and another one to see -- that is, if more had not piled into the office and were out there waiting for him. He reached out his hand to press the buzzer. But before his finger touched it, the back door of the office suddenly burst open. A wild-eyed man came stumbling through it. He had something white and wriggly clutched within his arms. He dumped the white and wriggly thing on Hallock Spencer's desk and unhappily stepped back. It was a rabbit -- a white rabbit with a great pink ribbon tied around its neck in a fancy bow. tled, at the man who'd brought the rabbit. "Ackermann," he shouted. "For Chrissake, Ackermann, what is the matter with you ? It isn't Easter yet!" Ackermann worked his mouth in a painful manner and his Adam's apple went bobbing up and down. But he made no words come out. "Come on, man!" What is it?" Ackermann got his voice back. "It's Nickerson!" he blurted. "O.K.,so Nickerson brought a rabbit back..." "He didn't bring it back, sir. It came all by itself!" "And Nickerson?" Ackermann shook his head. "There was just the rabbit." Spencer had started to get up from the chair. Now he sat back down again, harder than intended. "There's an envelope, sir, tied to the rabbit's bow." "So I see," said Spencer, absently. But he felt the coldness running through him. The rabbit hoisted itself around until it was face to face with Spencer. It flapped an ear, wiggled its pink nose at him, put its head carefully to one side and lifted a deliberate hind leg to scratch a flea. He pivoted in his chair and watched the operator sidle through the door. Three men lost in the last ten days. And now there was a fourth. But this time, at least, he'd got back the carrier. The rabbit had brought back the carrier. Any living thing, once the mechanism had been rigged, by its very presence would have brought back the carrier. It need not be a man. But Nickerson! Nickerson was one of the best there were. If a man could not depend on Nickerson, there was no one that he could. He turned back to the desk and reached for the rabbit. It didn't try to get away. He slipped out the folded sheet of paper and broke the blob of sealing wax. The paper was so stiff and heavy that it crackled as he smoothed it. The ink was dead black and the script cramped. No fountain pen, thought Spencer -- nothing but a goose quill. The letter was addressed to him. It said: Dear Hal : I have no logical excuse and I'll attempt no explanation. I have found a sense of springtime and cannot compel myself to leave it. You have your carrier and that is better than any of the others ever did for you. The rabbit will not mind. A rabbit knows no time. Be kind to him -- for he is no coarse, wild hare of the briery fields, but a loving pet. Nick. Spencer, staring at the note, with its scrawly black more like cabalistic pattern than a communication . He had found a sense of springtime. What did he mean by that? A springtime of the heart? A springtime of the spirit? That might well be it, for Nickerson had gone to Italy in the early Renaissance. A springtime of the spirit and the sense of great beginnings. And perhaps that wasn't all of it. Would there be as well a certain sense of spiritual security in that smaller world -- a world that tinkered with no time, that reached toward no stars? The buzzer sounded softly. Spencer tipped up the lever on the intercom. "Yes, Miss Crane?" "Mr. Garside on the phone." The rabbit was nibbling at the phone cord. Spencer pushed him to one side. "Yes, Chris." The gray, clipped voice said: "Hal, what's with you and Ravenholt? He gave me a bad half hour." "It vas Project God." "Yes, he told me that. He threatened to raise a howl about the ethics of our magazine project." "He can't do that," protested Spencer. "He'd have no grounds at all. That one is clean. It has the green light from Legal and from Ethics and the review board gave its blessing. It's simply historical reporting. Eyewitness from the battle of Gettysburg, fashion notes on the spot from the time of Queen Victoria -- it's the biggest thing we've tackled. Its promotional value alone, aside from the money that we'll make..." "Yes, I know," said Garside, tiredly. "All of that is true. But I don't want to get into a hassle with anyone -- particularly not with Ravenholt. We have too many irons in the fire right now for anything unfavorable to pop. And Ravenholt can be a terribly dirty fighter." "Look, Chris. I can take care of Ravenholt." "I knew you would. What is more, you'd better." "And," demanded Spencer, bristling, "what do you mean by that?" "Well, frankly, Hal, your record doesn't look too good. You've been having trouble..." "You mean the men we've lost." "And the machines," said Garside. "You're all the time forgetting -- a machine costs "And the men?" asked Spencer bitterly. "Perhaps you think they're comparatively cheap." "I don't suppose," said Garside blandly, "that you can place an actual value on a human life." st another one to" day," said Spencer. "I imagine you'll be happy to know that he was loyal beyond the call of duty. He sent a rabbit back and the machine is safe and sound." "Hal," said Garside, sternly, "this is something we can discuss at some later time. Right now I'm concerned with Ravenholt. If you'd go and apoloze to him and try to fix things up..." "Apologize!" exploded Spencer, "I know a better way than that. He's been shacking with a stripper down at the Golden Hour. By the time I get through..." "Hal!" yelled Garside. "You can't do a thing like that ! You can't involve Past, Inc., in anything like that! Why, it isn't decent!" "You mean it's dirty," Spencer said. "No dirtier than Ravenholt. Who is he fronting for?" "It makes no difference. Young man..." "Don't young man me," yelled Spencer. "I've got troubles enough without being patronized." "Perhaps your troubles are too much for you," said Garside, speaking very gray and clipped. "Perhaps we ought to find another man." "Do it then!" yelled Spencer. "Don't just sit there shooting off your face. Come on down and fire me!" He slammed the receiver down into its cradle and sat shivering with rage. Damn Garside, he thought. To hell with Past, Inc. He'd taken all he could! Still, it was a lousy way to end after fifteen years. It was a stinking thing to happen. Maybe he ought to have kept his mouth shut, kept his temper down, played it sweet and smooth. Perhaps, he could have done it differently. He could have assured Garside he'd take care of Ravenholt without saying anything about Silver Starr. And why had he grabbed hold so trustfully of what Cabell had told him that moment before leaving? What could Cabell know about it? In just a little while now he'd have to check if there were anyone by the name of Silver Starr down at the Golden Hour. Meanwhile there was work to do. Hudson now, he thought. He reached for the buzzer. But his finger never touched it. Once more the back door burst open with a smashing rattle and a man came tearing in. It was Douglas Marshall, operator for E.J.'s machine. "Hal," he gasped, "you'd better come. E.J.'s really tore it!" VI question. One look at Doug's face was quite enough to tell him the news was very bad. He bounced out of his chair and rushed through the door, close on the operator's heels. They tore down the corridor and turned left into Operations, with the rows of bulgy, bulky carriers lined against the wall. Down at the far end a small crowd of operators and mechanics formed a ragged circle and from the center of the circle came the sound of ribald song. The words were not intelligible. Spencer strode forward angrily and pushed through the circle. There, in the center of it, was E.J. and another person -- a filthy, bearded, boisterous barbarian wrapped in a mangy bearskin and with a tremendous sword strapped about his middle. The barbarian had a smallish keg tilted to his mouth. The keg was gurgling ; he was drinking from it, but he was missing some as well, for streams of pale, brown liquid were running down his front. "E.J. !" yelled Spencer. At the shout, the barbarian jerked the keg down from his face and tucked it hurriedly underneath an arm. With a big and dirty hand, he mopped the whiskers adjacent to his mouth. E.J. stumbled forward and threw his arms around Spencer's neck, laughing all the while. Spencer jerked E.J. loose and pushed him, stumbling, backwards. "E.J. !" he yelled. "What is so damn funny?" E.J. managed to stop stumbling backwards. He tried to pull himself together, but he couldn't because he still was laughing hard. The barbarian stepped forward and thrust the keg into Spencer's hands, shouting something at him in a convivial tone of voice and pantomiming with his hands that the keg had stuff to drink. E.J. made an exaggerated thumb at the gent in bearskin. "Hal, it wasn't any Roman officer!" Then he went off into gales of laughter once again. The barbarian started to laugh, too, uproariously, throwing back his head and bellowing in great peals of laughter that shook the very room. E.J. staggered over and they fell into one another's arms, guffawing happily and pounding one another on the back. Somehow they got tangled up. They lost their balance. They fell down on the floor and sat there, the two of them, looking up at the men around them. "Now!" Spencer roared at E.J. E.J. clapped the man in bearskin a resounding whack upon his hairy shoulder. "Just bringing back the WrightsonGraves her far-removed grand-pappy. I can't wait to see her face when I take him up there!" "Oh, my God!" said Spencer. He turned around and thrust the dripping keg into someone's hands. He snapped, "Don't let them get away. Put them someplace where they can sleep it off." A hand grabbed him by the arm and there was Douglas Marshall, sweating. "We got to send him back. Chief," said Doug. "E.J.'s got to take him back." Spencer shook his head. "I don't know if we can. I'll put it up to Legal. Just keep them here, and tell the boys. Tell them if one of them so much as whispers..." "I'll do my best," said Doug. "But I don't know. They're a bunch of blabbermouths." Spencer jerked away and sprinted for the corridor. What a day, he thought. What a loused-up day! H e charged down the corridor and saw that the door marked Private was closed. He skidded almost to a halt, reaching for the knob, when the door flew open. Miss Crane came tearing out. She slammed into him head-on. Both of them bounced back. Miss Crane's spectacles knocked at a crazy angle by the impact. "Mr. Spencer," she wailed. "Mr. Spencer, something awful's happened ! Remember Mr. Hudson?" She stepped back out of his way. He sprang inside and slammed the door behind him. "As if I ever could forget him," he said bitterly. Said Miss Crane, "Mr. Hudson's dead!" Spencer stood stricken. Miss Crane raged, "If only you had seen him when I wanted you to! If you hadn't kept him waiting out there... 'Now, look here -- " "He got up finally," said Miss Crane, "and his face was red. He was angry. I don't blame him, Mr. Spencer." "You mean he died right here?" "He said to me, 'Tell your Mr. Spencer -- ' and that's as far as he ever got. He sort of lurched and caught with his hand at the edge of the desk to support himself, but his hand slipped off and he folded up and..." Spencer waited for no more. He went in three quick steps across the office and out into the reception room. There was Mr. Hudson, huddled on the carpet. He looked startlingly like a limp rag doll. One blue-veined hand was stretched out ahead of him. The portfolio that it had held lay just beyond the fingertips, as if even in his death Mr. Hudson might be stretching out his hand to it. His jacket was hunched across the shoulders. The collar of his white shirt, Spencer saw, was ragged. Spencer went slowly across the floor and knelt down beside the man. He put his ear down on the body. There was no sound at all. Crane was standing in the doorway, still terrified but enjoying it a lot. Not in all her years of being secretary had anything like this happened. Not in all her life. It would keep her supplied with conversation for many, many years. "Lock the door," said Spencer, "so no one can come strolling in. Then phone the police." "The police!" "Miss Crane," said Spencer, sharply. She walked around him and the body on the floor, edging close against the wall. "Call Legal, too," said Spencer. He stayed squatting on the floor, staring at the man who lay there and wondering how it had happened. Heart attack, most likely. Miss Crane had said that he looked ill -- and had urged that he see him first, ahead of the other two. And if one were looking for a man to blame for what had happened here, Spencer told himself, they might have but little trouble fastening it on him. If Hudson had not had to wait, growing angrier and more upset as the time slipped past, this might not have happened. Hudson had waited in this room, a sick and impatient man, and finally an angry one -- and what had he waited for? Spencer studied the rag-doll of a man slumped upon the carpet, the thinning hair atop his head, the thick-lensed spectacles bent and twisted in the fall, the bony, blue-veined hands. He wondered what such a man might have expected from Past, Inc. Spencer started to get up and lost his balance as he did, his left hand going out behind him to prop himself erect. And beneath the spread-out palm there was something cool and smooth. Without looking, he knew what it was. Hudson's portfolio! The answer might be there! Miss Crane was at the door, locking it. There was no one else. With a swift sweep of his hand, Spencer skidded the portfolio in the direction of the doorway that led into his office. He got smoothly to his feet and turned. The portfolio lay halfway through the doorway. Jn one quick stride he reached it and nudged it with his foot, inside and out of sight. He heard the snick of the lock falling home and Miss Crane turned around. "The police first, or Legal, Mr. Spencer?" "The i#olice, I'd think," said Spencer. H e stepped within his office and swung the door so that it came within an inch of closing. Then he snatched the portfolio off the floor and huiricd to his desk. He put it on his desk end zipped it open and there were three sheafs of papers, each of the sheafs paper-clipped together. The first bore the legend at the top of the first page: A Study of Ethics Involved in Traveling in Time, And after that page upon page of typescript, heavily underlined and edited with a neat red pencil. And the second, a thin one, with no legend, and composed of sheets of unneatly scribbled notes. And the third, once again typed, with carefully drawn diagrams and charts, and the heading: A New Concept of the Mechanics of Time Travel, Spencer sucked in his breath and bent above the paper, his eyes trying to gallop along the lines of type, but forced to go too fast to really catch the meaning. For he had to get the portfolio back where it had been and he had to do it without being seen. It was not his to touch. The police might become difficult if they found he'd rifled it. And when he put it back, it must have something in it. A man would hadly come to see him with an empty poitfolio. In the outer office, he heard Miss Crane talking. He made a quick decision. He swept the second and third sheaf of papers into the top drawer of his desk. Leaving the first sheaf on timetravel ethics in the portfolio, he zipped it shut again. That would satisfy the cops. He held the portfolio in his left hand, letting his arm hang along his side, and stepped to the doorway, shielding the left side of his body and the portfolio. Miss Crane was on the phone her face turned away from him. He dropped the portfolio on the carpeting, just beyond the outstretched fingers of the dead man. Miss Crane put down the phone and saw him standing there. "The police will be right over," she said. "Now Til call Mr. Hawkes in Legal." "Thanks," said Spencer, "ril go through some papers while we're waiting." B ack at his desk, he took out the pile of papers that said: A Neiv Concept on the Mechanics of Time Travel. The name on it was Boone Hudson. He settled down to read, first with mounting wonderment, then with a strange, cold excitement -- for here, at last, was the very thing that would at once erase the basic headache of Past, Inc. No longer would one face the nightmare of good travelers wearing out in a few years' time. No longer would a man go into time a young man and return sixty seconds later with the beginning lines of age showing on his face. No longer would one watch one's friends' age visibly from month to month. For they would no longer be dealing in men, but in the patterns of those men. Matter transference, Spencer told himself. You could probably call it that, anyway. A man would be sent into the past; but the carrier would not move physically into time as it moved now. It would project a pattern of itself and the man within it, materializing at the target point. And within the carrier -- the basic carrier, the prime carrier, the parent carrier which would remain in present time -- there'd be another pattern, a duplicate pattern of the man sent into time. When the man returned to present time, he would not return as he was at that moment in the past, but as the pattern within the waiting carrier said he had been when he'd traveled into time. He'd step out of the carrier exactly as he had stepped intij it, not older by a second -- actually a minute younger than he would have been! For he did not have to account for that sixty seconds between leaving and returning. For years. Past, Inc.'s, own research department had been seeking for the answer to the problem, without even coming close. And now a stranger had come unheralded and sat hunched in the reception room, with the portfolio cradled on his knee, and he had the answer, but he'd been forced to wait. He'd waited and he'd waited and finally he had died. There was a tapping at the door of the outer office. He heard Miss Crane cross the room to open it. Spencer pulled out a desk drawer and hurriedly shoved the papers into it. Then he stood up from the desk and walked around it to go into the outer office. Past, Inc.'s legal department, was standing just beyond the body on the carpet, staring down at it. "Hello, Ross," said Spencer. "An unpleasant business here." Hawkes looked up at him, puzzled. His pale blue eyes glittered behind the neat and precise spectacles, his snow white hair matching the pallor of his face. "But what was Dan'l doing here?" he asked. "Dan'l?" Spencer demanded. "His name happened to be Boone Hudson." "Yes, I know," said Hawkes. "But the boys all called him Dan'l -- Dan'l Boone, you understand. Sometimes he didn't like it. He worked in Research. We had to fire him, fifteen, sixteen years ago. "rhe only reason that I recognized him was that we had some trouble. He had an idea he would like to sue us." Spencer nodded. "Thanks. I see," he said. He was halfway to his office door when he turned back. "One thing, Ross. What did we fire him for ?" "I don't recall exactly. He disregarded his assignment, went off on some other tangent. Matter transference, I think." Spencer said, "That's the way it goes." He went back into the office, locked his desk and went out the back way. In the parking lot, he backed out his car and went slowly down the street. A police cruiser was parked in front of the building and two officers were getting out. An ambulance was pulling in behind the cruiser. So, thought Spencer, they had fired Hudson fifteen years ago, because he had some sort of crazy idea about matter transference and wouldn't stick to business. And to this very day. Research was going quietly mad trying to solve a problem that Hudson could have put into their laps years ago, if they had kept him on. Spencer tried to imagine how those fifteen years must have been for Hudson, more than likely working all the time on this quiet insanity of his. And how, finally, he had gotten it and had made sure of it and then had gone down to Past, Inc., to rub their noses in it. Exactly as he, Hallock Spencer, now would rub their noses in it. G reenwich street was a quiet residential street of genteel poverty, with small and older houses. Despite the smallness of the houses and their age, and in some cases their unkemptness, there was a certain solid pride and respectability about them. The address on the manuscript was #I Greenwich. It was a squat brown house surrounded by a crumbling picket fence. The jard was full of flowers. Even so, it had the look of a house that had no one living in it. Spencer edged through the sagging gate and up the walk, made small by the flowers that encroached upon it. He went up the rickety stairs to the shaky porch and, since there was no bell, rapped on the closed front door. There was no answer. He tried the knob and it turned. He pushed the door part way open and edged into the silent hall. "Hello," he called. "Anyone at home?" He waited. There wasn't. He walked front the hall into the living room and stood to look around him at the Spartan, almost monklike existence of the man who'd lived there. It was evident that Hudson had lived alone, for the room bore all the signs of a lone man's camping. There was a cot against one wall, a dirty shiii; flung across one end of it. Two pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers were lined up underneath the cot. An old-fashioned dresser stood opposite the cot. A handful of ties dangled raggedly from the bar that had been fastened on its side. A small kitchen table stood in the corner nearest to the kitchen. A box of crackers and a glass, still spotted with milk stains, stood upon the table. A massive desk stood a few feet from the table and the top of it was bare except for an old typewriter and a photograph in a stand-up frame. Spencer walked over to the desk and began pulling out the drawers. They were almost empty. In one he found a pipe, a box of paper clips, a stapler and a single poker chip. The others yielded other odds and ends, but nothing of importance. In one was a half a ream of paper -- but nowhere was there a single line of writing. In the bottom drawer on the left hand side, he found a squat bottle, half full of good Scotch. And that was all. He searched the dresser. Nothing but shirts and underwear and socks. He prowled into the kitchen. Just the built-in stove and refrigerator and the cupboards. He found nothing in any of them but a small supply of food. And the bedrooms -- two of them -- were empty, innocent of furniture, and with a fine and powdery dust coating floor and walls. Spencer stood in the doorway of each and looked and there was a sadness in each room. He didn't go inside. Back in the living room, he went to the desk and picked up the photograph. A woman with a tired, brave smile, with a halo of white hair, with an air of endless patience, looked out of it at him. There was nothing to be found in this house, he told himself. Not unless one had the time to search every corner of it, every crack, to take it down, each board and stone. And even then, he doubted now, there'd be anything to find. H e left the house and drove back to the office. "Your lunch didn't take too long," Miss Crane told him, sourly. "Evei-ything all right?" he asked. "The police were very, very nice," she said. "Both Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Snell are anxious to see you. And Mr. Garside called." "After a while," said Spencer. "I've got work to do. I don't want to be disturbed." He went into his office and shut the door with a gesture of finality. From the drawer he took the Hudson papers and settled down to read. He was no engineer, but he knew enough of it to make a ragged sort of sense, although at times he was forced to go back and read more carefully, or puzzle out a diagram that he'd skipped through too hurriedly. Finally he came to the end of it. It was all there. It would have to be checked by technicians and engineers, of course. There might be bugs that would take some ironing out, but the concept, complete both in theory and in the theory's application, was all there in the paper, Hudson had held nothing back -- no vital point, no key. And that was crazy, Spencer told himself. You had to leave yourself some sort of bargaining position. You could trust no other man, certainly no corporation, as implicitly as Hudson apparently had intended to. Especially you couldn't trust an outfit that had fired you fifteen years before for working on this very concept. It was ridiculous and tragic, Spencer told himself Past, Inc,, could not have even guessed what Hudson might have been aiming at. And Hudson, in his turn, was gagged because he'd not as yet progressed to a point where he could have faith either in his concept or himself. Even if he had tried to tell them, they would have laughed at him, for he had no reputation to support such outrageous dreaming. Spencer sat at his desk, remembering the house on Greenwich St., the huddling in one I'oom with the other rooms all bare and the entire house stripped of all evidence of comfort and good living. More than likely all the furniture in those rooms, all the accumulation of many years of living, had been sold, piece by precious piece, to keep groceries on the shelf. A man who was dedicated to a dream, Spencer told himself, a man who had lived with that dream so long and intimately that it was his entire life. Perhaps he had known that he was about to die. That might explain his impatience at being forced to wait. son papers to one side and picked up the notes. The pages were filled with cryptic penciled lines, with long strings of mathematical abstractions, roughly drawn sketches. They were no help. And that other paper, Spencer wondered -- the one he'd left in the portfolio, that one that had to do with ethics? Might it not also bear a close relationship to the Hudson concept? Might there not be in it something of importance bearing on this new approach ? Time travel perforce was hedged around with a pattern of ethics which consisted mainly of a formidable list of "thou shalt nots." Thou shalt not transport a human being from the past. Thou shalt not snitch a thing until it has been lost. Thou shalt not inform any one in the past of the fact there is time travel. Thou shalt not interfere in any way with the patterns of the past. Thou shalt not try to go into the future -- and don't ask why, because that's a dirty question. T he buzzer sounded. He flipped up the switch. "Yes, Miss Crane." "Mr. Garside is here to see you. Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Snell are with him." He thought he detected in her voice a sense of satisfaction. "All right. Ask them to come in." He gathered the papers off his desk and put them in his briefcase, then settled back as they came in. "Well, gentlemen. It seems I am invaded. Even as he said it, he knew it had not been the proper thing to say. They did not even smile. And he knew that it was bad. Any time you got Legal and Public Relations together, it couldn't be anything but bad. They sat down. "We thought," said Snell, in his most polished P.R. manner, "that if we got together and tried to talk things out..." Hawkes cut him short. He said to Spencer, accusingly: "You have managed to place us in a most embarrassing position." "Yes, I know," said Spencer. "Let's tick off the items. One of my men brought back a human from the past. A man died in my office. I forgot to be polite to a stuffed shirt wlio came charging in to help us run our business." "You seem," said Garside, "to take it all quite lightly." "Perhaps I do," said Spencer. "Let's put it slightly stronger. I just don't give a damn. You cannot allow pressure groups to form your policy." "You are talking now, of course," said Garside, "about the Ravenholt affair." "Chris," said Snell, enthusiastically, "you hit it on the button. Here is a chance to really sell the public on us. I don't believe we've really sold them. We are dealing in something which to the average man seems to smell of magic. Naturally he is standoffish." "More to the point," said Hawkes, impatiently, "if we turn down this project -- this..." "Project God," said Spencer. "I'm not sure I like your phrasing." "Think up a name yourself," said Spencer calmly. "That is what we call it." "If we fail to go ahead with it, we'll be accused of being atheists." "How would the public ever know that we turned it down?" asked Spencer. "You can be sure," Snell said bitterly, "that Ravenholt will make a point of making known our turning down of it." upon the desk in sudden anger. He yelled, "I told you how to handle Ravenholt!" "Hal," Garside told him quietly, "we simply cannot do it. We have our dignity." "No," said Spencer, "I suppose you can't. But you can sell out to Ravenholt and whoever's backing him. You can rig the survey of religious origins. You can falsify reports." The three of them sat in stricken silence. Spencer felt a twinge of momentary wonder for having dared to say it. It was not the way one was supposed to talk to brass. But he had to say one more thing. "Chris. You are going to disregard the report I made and go ahead with it, aren't you?" Garside answered with smooth urbanity : "I'm afraid I'll have to." Spencer looked at Hawkes and Snell and he saw the secret smiles that lurked just behind their lips -- the sneering contemptuous smile of authority ascendant. He said slowly, "Yes, I ess you will. Well, it's all in your laps now. You figure out the answers." "But it's your department." "Not any more, it isn't. I've just quit the job." "Now see here, Hal," Garside was saying, "you can't do a thing like that! Without any notice ! Just flying off the liandle ! We may have our little differences, but that is no excuse..." "I've decided," Spencer told him, "that I somehow have to stop you. I cannot allow you to go ahead with Project God. I warn you, if you do, that I shall discredit you. I shall prove exactly and without (luestion everything you've done. And meanwhile, I am jdanning to go into business ior myself." A They were mocking him. "I had thought of it." Snell grinned contemptuously. "You can't even get a license." "I think I can," said Spencer. And he knew he could. With a brand new concept, there'd be little trouble. Garside got up from his chair. "Well," he said to Spencer, "you've had your little tantrum. When you cool down a bit, come up and talk to me." Spencer shook his head. "Goodbye, Chris," he said. He did not rise. He sat and watched them go. Strangely, now that it was over -- or just beginning -- there was no tenseness in him. It had fallen all away and he felt abiding calm. There was money to be raised, there were technicians and engineers to hire, there were travelers to be found and trained, and a whole lot more than that. Thinking of it all, he had a momentary pang of doubt, but he shrugged it off. He got up from his chair and walked out into the office. "Miss Crane," he said, "Mr. Cabell was supposed to come back this afternoon." "I haven't seen him, sir." "Of course not," Spencer said. For suddenly it all seemed to be coming clear, if he only could believe it. There had been a look in young Cabell's eyes that had been most disturbing. And now, all at once, he knew that look for exactly what it was. It had been adulation! T he kind of look that was reserved for someone who had become a legend. And he must be wrong, Spencer told himself, for he was not a legend -- at least not at the moment. There had been something else in young Cabell's eyes. And once again he knew. Cabell had been a young man, but the eyes had been old eyes. They were eyes that had seen much more of life than a man of thirty had any right to see. "What shall I say," asked Miss Crane, "if he should come back?" "Never mind," said Spencer. am sure he won't." For Cabell's job was done, if it had been a job at all. It might have been, he told himself, a violation of the ethics, a pure piece of meddling, or it might have been a yielding to that temptation to play God. Or, he thought, it might have been all planned. Had they somewhere in the future worked out that formula he'd spoken of to Cabell -- the formula that would allow legitimate manipulation of the past ? "Miss Crane," he said, "would you be kind enough to type up a resignation for me? Effective immediately. Make it very formal. I am sore at Garside." Miss Crane did not bat an eyelash. She ran paper into her machine. "Mr. Spencer, what reason shall I give?" "You might say I'm going into business for myself." Had there been another time, he wondered, when it hadn't gone this way? Had there been a time when Hudson had gotten in to see him and maybe had not died at all? Had there been a time when he'd handed over the Hudson concept to Past, Inc., instead of stealing it himself? And if Cabell had not been here to take up the time, more than likely he would have gotten around to seeing Hudson before it was too late. And if he had seen the man, then it was more than likely that he would have passed the concept on through proper channels. But even so, he wondered, how could they be sure (whoever they might be) that he'd not see Hudson first? He recalled distinctly that Miss Crane had urged that he see him first. And that was it, he thought excitedly. That was exactly it ! He might very well have seen Hudson first if Miss Crane had not been insistent that he should. And standing there, he thought of all the years that Miss Crane must have worked at it -- conditioning him to the point where he'd be sure to do exactly opposite to what she urged he do. "Mr. Spencer," said Miss Crane, "I have the letter finished. And there is something else. I almost forgot about it." She reached down into a drawer and took out something and laid it on the desk. It was the portfolio that belonged to Hudson. "The police," said Miss Crane, "apparently overlooked it. It was very careless of them. I thought that you might like it." Spencer stood staring blankly at it. "It would go so nicely," said Miss Crane, "with the other stuff you have." T here was a muted thumping on the floor and Spencer spun around. A white rabbit with long and droopy ears hopped across the carpet, looking for a carrot. "Oh, how cute!" cried Miss Crane, very much unlike herself. "Is it the one that Mr. Nickerson sent back?" "It's the one," said Spencer. "I had forgotten it." "Might I have it?" "Miss Crane. I wonder... "Yes, Mr. Spencer?" And what was he to say ? Could he blurt out that now he knew she was one of them ? It would take so much explanation and it could be so involved. And, besides. Miss Crane was not the sort of person that you blurted out things to. He gulped. "I was wondering, Miss Crane, if you'd come and work for me. I'll need a secretary." Miss Crane shook her head. "No, I'm getting old. I'm thinking of retiring. I think, now that you are leaving, I shall just disappear." "But, Miss Crane, I'll need you desperately." "One of these days soon," said Miss Crane, "when you need a secretary, there'll be an applicant. She'll wear a bright green dress and she'll be wearing these new glasses and be carrying a snow-white rabbit with a bow around its neck. She may strike you as something of a hussy, but you hire her. Be sure you hire her," "I'll remember," Spencer said. "I'll be looking for her. I'll hire no one else." "She will not," warned Miss Crane, "be a bit like me. She'll be much nicer." "Thank you. Miss Crane," said Spencer, just a bit inanely. "And don't forget this," said Miss Crane, holding out the portfolio. He took it and headed for the door. At the door he stopped and turned back to her. "I'll be seeing you," he said. For the first time in fifteen years. Miss Crane smiled at to be continued Certainly a spaceship should he a home away from home -- but for so many centuries? could almost feel his luck as grown up to be a New Hara tangible, living thing. He vard instructor. He had wanthad wanted, as a young man, ed to marry a sweet and to be a teacher at New Harattractive girl and have a handsome, healthy family. He had married such a girl, and his young son gave every evidence of being good-looking, enormously healthy, and quick of mind. He had wanted to go out into space -- once. And look at what had happened. Each year the university sent out a spaceship of its most promising young students in their senior year on a tour to the Moon. It was a great honor to get an assignment on the Yard, John Marsden was the only first-year instructor chosen to go along with the voyage of #. And then that incredible thing: the revelation by the three scientists who managed the ship that the Yard had been converted with New Harvard's still-secret space warp, the first ever developed -- and would make man's first attempt at an interstellar crossing! With, of course, the consent of the five hundred students and instructors aboard. How did they vote? The vote was unanimous. The Moon, indeed! This tour by the class of # would be forever remembered by mankind. Of course it would only be a short, safe run to Alpha Centauri, a mere four lightyears away, but such a trip would immortalize the entire passenger list. And so the Yard went into man's first space drive. Seventy light-years from Earth, near the star Regulus, the Yard crash-landed on an unnamed planet. You would think that it was the end for the starry-eyed young men and women and the overly confident, proud inventors of the warp. But Johnny Marsden didn't think so. Nothing really bad had ever happened to him -- yet. of the motionless Yard with a girl student, Elizabeth Simms, Marsden nevertheless felt the heavy gloom of those around him. "Do you think we'll ever get back to Earth ?" asked the girl, trying to keep hysteria out of her voice. "Certainly," said John. He was thinking of his wife, Sylvia, and young Tim, # light-years away, playing in his playpen, laughing, romping in the warm afternoon sunshine. He looked down at his hands. John Marsden was hexadactyllic, a physical curiosity, but he had always connected that extra thumb with his luck. The smaller second thumb, springing from the thumb root, didn't disfigure him -- it only made him a little different, a little more convinced of superiority. Not that he needed it. "Of course we'll reach Earth," he said. "But if no other spaceship has a warp, it might be a #-long time before we're -- we're rescued." John patted her shoulder. He lifted her from her chair and took her to the port, to look out on the landing space. The Yard had come to rest on a small, gray-green island in the middle of a dismal ocean on one of the planets of Regulus. "Look," said John. "The ship could've blown apart in space. It didn't. It could've killed us all in landing. It didn't. We could've been forced to land in the middle of the ocean on this planet. We weren't." "Well, yes, but -- " "Also, this island has fresh water. It has grass and trees of a sort, and a promising Earthlike soil. That means oxygen and forage for the ship's livestock. Even if we have to stay here a year or two, we can survive, because we can breathe, quench our thirst, grow food and live in the ship for shelter." Two tears crept out of the girl's eyes. "But we're so far from Earth!" He put his arm around her shoulders. The golden New Harvard hair-style seemed fantestic out here in space. "With all that string of coincidences, do you think we can possibly perish ? Why, we may be able to fix the ship up in a few days, and be back with a wonderful story to tell at graduation." "But Professor Leonard said we're horribly hampered for tools." John Marsden released the girl with a sigh. He looked again at his curious thumbs. He thought of his own son, back on Earth, also with the extra thumb, putting his small hand in his father's. He remembered the warm touch. He thought of sweet, grave Sylvia's face, and tried to imagine not seeing her or Timmy any more. No. He couldn't believe it. They were in an unpleasant, even desperate position, but he was Johnny Marsden. He would be saved -- they would all be saved, in spite of Professor Leonard's pessimism. Because all five hundred people walked under the umbrella of Johnny Marsden's luck. And with plenty of atomic power available -- "Don't worry, Elizabeth," he told the girl. "We're going back to Earth. Everything will be all right." The words echoed on the shining walls, on the newtreaded floor, on the thick, sparkling glass of the porthole of the Yard. F our hundred years later, standing in the Class President's room of the Yard, said: "Don't worry, sir. Everjd;hing will be all right now. I'm sure of it." "it won't be -- because there is no Earth!" The walls were dim, corroded by the sea air. The floor was worn to a gray-black muck by the moving feet of generations. The glass in the porthole had been gone for more than a century, and a bit of wool that had once stuffed the hole was now a rag. The man and the boy stood looking down on the University, and the man repeated sadly: "No Earth." "No Earth!" cried Johnny. "All the ancient lore you've told me -- " "Merely tales," said Leonard. "And I even misled you into Graduation before your time. No. Tomorrow we of the Class of # die, and now you'll have to die with us, unless -- " Johnny looked down at the yellow fires. Bonfires tonight, in honor of tomorrow's Graduation. The rich, delightful smell of roasting pigs and sheep rose in the air. Tonight was the lavish, luxurious feast of the year, a time of greatness. But also the five Arrowmen were practicing hard, sending their shafts into carcasses -- sheep carcasses tonight. Johnny drew his rough gray sheep cape around himself and shivered. For the last two weeks he had felt the growing change in his adopted Class, the Class of #. Graduation and return to Earth was supposed to be a time of happiness -- but the Class did not seem happy. Was this the inherent; nature of old people ? He look-' ed up at Leonard, the Class President. The man was ancient, at least thirty-one, and he was frowning now. "But, sir," said Johnny, "of all the people in the Class, you believed the most -- that Earthmen would be waiting for us at the end of Graduation Walk." "I have developed a new theory," said Leonard bleakly. Johnny could tell the old man (he actually had some lines on his face) was worried about tomorrow and how it would be. Tomorrow the Class of # would assemble on Commencement Hill. They would stand before the narrow stone pathway called Graduation Walk. It protruded from the high side of the island into the perpetual fog, a fateful finger of rock to the Graduates. For when you reached the proper age, you Graduated, walking along the stone path and disappearing into the mists, wearing your ceremonial wings that were to fly you to the waiting Earth ship below. Tradition had it that the Earth ship waited to take you back to a miraculous land in the stars to live a long, wonderful life in a dazzling civilization. No one had ever come back from the Walk to say whether or not this was true -- that the wings would fly you down to the waiting Earth ship, or that the ship would be there. But to Johnny that made good sense. It would destroy the morale of the other islanders to have a Graduate return with tales of a fine new life. They would want to leave the island before their time. He knew that some believed no Earth ship waited for the Graduates, that Graduation Walk was just a natural stone fonnation, mysterious, perpetually covered with fog, but a mere trap. You would flutter sadly down to the ocean and die on the lonely sea. Truly it was hard to know ! Once there had been books and papers on the home ship that had given accounts of Earth. But through the centuries they had been worn to powder. And the rough writings on sheepskin parchments had been reinterpreted so often that it sometimes seemed you couldn't separate truth from imagination. ship theory. He even believed that the Earthmen were testing them, to leave so much in doubt. But it was a shock to hear that Leonard, who had always professed the traditions, had turned against them on the eve of Graduation. "But this great home ship !" cried Johnny. "The Mystic Radio that runs forever ! The legends ! They must mean , something!" Leonard took Johnny to the porthole and pointed out. It was dusk now and the stars, the few that showed through the rifts in the foggy island, were shining. "It's too fantastic to suppose that Earth life exists out there," said Leonard. "Why, those stars are an incredible distance. Perhaps as much as five hundred miles -- an infinity no mind can conceive." The five-mile-square island seemed large to Johnny. The five-hundred-mile figure made his head spin. "Well, yes, sir -- " "Emotionally, I hope for it," said Leonard, almost as if pleading with Johnny. "But logically, no. I have always had doubts, and in these last few weeks it has resulted in a new theoiy." He went to the ship's wall and tapped it. "Notice how thick the hull of the home ship is. Strong enough to have existed in water. That's the key, Johnny. I have speculated that men once lived beneath this great ocean. This was the true Earth of legend. Then some gigantic catastrophe destroyed their sea-world. Only a few survived, the Ancient Five Hundred. They built this ship in the foreknowledge of the catastrophe. They came up on dry land. But since they could not live out of water, they brought the ocean with them -- water sealed in this great ship like a sealed sheepskin bag. Then gradually, over the years, they accustomed themselves to living on the dry land." "And the Graduates tomorrow won't be picked up by Earth ships?" "Worse than that, Johnny, We can no longer live in water, Witness how easily we drown when we try to swim in the ocean. With no one to pick us up, we'll perish tomorrow." "And the Mystic Radio?" "The messages you send fall on dead ears. No, Johnny, I fear that the Graduation tradition serves a less ideal, more practical purpose. It removes the old so the young may live. This island can support three thousand at the most. And people do not die fast enough to make room for the newborn. That is why we must Graduate." "I wish you hadn't told me this," said Johnny. "I had my reasons. You are only eighteen, Johnny. Your time is not up yet for many years, I have arranged a reprieve for you with the Class Presidents' Council. You do not have to Graduate with the Class of #." Johnny looked stunned. "But I've already enjoyed my love mating with Evelyn Soames of your Class. And I've been your Class Keyman on the Mystic Radio -- " Leonard nodded. "We were glad to have you, Johnny, But you must not waste your life on us. You must not Graduate tomorrow." And Leonard gave him a reassuring smile and a pat on the shoulder and eased him out, for a Senior Class President was very busy on the eve of Graduation. Johnny left the President's cabin, saddened. He had been so sure of a glorious future on Earth. And now his good friend Leonard didn't believe Earth existed. Was it possible No ! The Earth ship theory was right. He was Johnny Marsden. He had always enjoyed life, always been lucky ! E velyn soames awaited Johnny in the Key Room. She assisted him with the duties of Keyman, because she was the only other member of the Class of # who had the necessary light touch. There had been many likely candidates for Keyman in Johnny's own Class, and so he had practically forced his way into Leonard's and Evelyn's Class, where no males; had the light touch he had. In that way he could make sure of winning the very high honor of the Keyman's post. And tradition was generous about letting you go ahead of your time. "Hello, Johnny. Here are your ceremonial wings." Johnny had made the wings for himself and Evelyn; she had decorated them. She had painted his bright blue and red and orange. The sight of the cheerful wings made him feel better, and she had been lavish with the scarce clay colors. More lavish on his than her own. "Thank you, Evelyn," he said. "But you should've saved some of the colors for yourself." She shrugged, a shoulder escaping from her formless sheepskin. "It doesn't matter, Johnny." "You, too," he said. "Don't tell me you no longer believe!" "No, Johnny, I believe. I believe..." She came into his arms and he felt her soft body shiver. Evelyn had been both his delight and his dismay. She was more than ten years older than he, yet young-minded enough to attract him, make him feel older. She was a handsome woman. He would never forget the holy night of mating, her skin gleaming from the traditional bacon-oil massage, utterly desirable. And yet somehow Johnny knew it had been a mistake. It hadn't been the true love he'd first thought, but a tempoi'aiy interest. What better proof than that she had produced no child for him? And he had used up his mating privilege ; he could never mate again. Now, as she gave him a fear-tinged, passionless kiss, he understood that she, too, no longer believed the Earth ship theory. Johnny felt his insides turn. He had counted on the help of Leonard and the reassurance of Evelyn to make this Graduation an unforgettably fine experience. Instead it was becoming a nightmare. away and went to the Mystic Radio. He had no right to expect them to believe the theory just to make it easier for him. Faith was something built inside or not at all. Still, if only the people he loved would keep the confidence they'd had six months ago... He ran his fingers lovingly over the plate of the enclosed Radio cabinet, "caution," it read, "atomic power, no reNo one had ever removed the cover. And the Mystic Radio still worked after all these centuries. Here was proof that Earth existed. No such miracle could have been created on this island of fog, forest, grasslands, sheep and pig pens and crude rock huts. He started to do his job, but Evelyn laid a hand on his arm. "Johnny," she said, "Leonard spoke of a reprieve for you. Please -- don't Graduate with us." He couldn't stand her haunted eyes. Why, you'd think tomorrow was an execution ! He shook his head wordlessly and snapped on the Radio. He felt the satisfying surge of power, the wonderful magnetic metal affinity of the code key for its base, and he reverently began to pound out his eternal message. It was eternal, he thought. A message flung to Earth once a month for all these long centuries. Three dots, three dashes, three dots, as the book (long since worn out) had ordered. between those mystic letters. Evelyn murmured the traditional words of blessing to go vith the message. But her heart wasn't in it. And when they were done for the last time, in this room that they had made bright with so much fun and hope during the last year, she turned and fled, and he suddenly understood that she was sick with the fear of death. He sat alone for a long time in the twilight, the Mystic Radio turned off. A dead home ship from a dead civilization under the seas, Leonard had said. A few brief moments of a pleasant life -- then extinction on the ocean tomorrow. That was what Leonard and Evelyn believed. What did he believe? He looked at his hand, that hand with the extra thumb that he had inherited. He had always believed it was a thumb of luck. But Leonard had so easily explained the home ship miracles. And Evelyn had so graphically imparted her terror. Johnny began to shiver, and he could not stop. JL again today," said Marie. Sylvia Lowden nodded gloomily. "On this planet and on the one before that 'brx.' I'm disgusted!" Marie stared at Sylvia's hands as the girl instrument technician went on tabulating her data. Those hands fascinated Marie, because Sylvia had extra thumbs. Sylvia as a person interested her, because she told a story of some ancestor that had been lost on a spaceship out here near Regulus and now, maybe, wuh a little luck they could turn up some wreckage, at least. "But Reguliis was only the educated guess of an astrohistorian," sighed Sylvia. "No one knew how that ship traveled after it passed Centauri on that wild ride. They played with a power they didn't understand and wouldn't be played with." "Well, anyvay, here we are among the thirty planets of Regulus," said Marie, "if you count the small ones." "And each and every one of them seems to have its own pseudo-radio signals," groaned Sylvia. It had been fun for the girls at first, the search for evidence of the Yard that would clear up another entry in the "Register of Missing Spaceships." And, as Sylvia explainfind, since the Yard had been the first ship ever to use a space warp. It had taken off from New Harvard over four hundred years ago and never been heard from again. It would be quite a feat for the team of feminine scan technicians on a routine evaluation patrol to bring back definite information. But their real job was to jockey the large instrument platform around each planet, letting the instruments gather data for later exploration by the research company that hired them. And they had a schedule to maintain. So each side investigation of some strange radio or visual phenomenon cost them precious time. They were spending less than the minimum ten hours on each of the planets to make up the time they'd lost. Sylvia had had her fill. "Don't you want to look into ed Marie. "No," said Sylvia. "In the firet place, the starship distress signal is QX. In the second place, there couldn't be living, survivors after ten years, let alone four hundred. Look -- all fog and water ! Test that air. It depresses you just to smell it." "But maybe there's some land somewhere." "If so, it's well-hidden," said Sylvia. S HE peered out of the port of the small cruiser. The fog opened below to show drab sea waves. A white bird drifted slowly and majestically across the open space and disappeared into the gray-white fog. "There's a bird," said Marie. "That means land and maybe some wreckage -- or even survivors!" "No, no, no!" said Sylvia. "We can't delay any more. I've chased rainbows, purple lights at night, animal cries that could be human -- even strange smells -- not to mention those pseudo-radio signals. In a word, to hell with the Yard. It probably blew up somewhere in space." Marie leaned back in her comfortable seat and said with a sigh, "Has QX alw'ays been the distress signal ?" "Oh, for God's sake," said Sylvia. "I don't know. If you are interested, look it up in NavHistory." "I'm too comfortable. That chase after the radio signal 'alal' on the last planet wore me out." "And it turned out to be a metallic insect, rubbing its legs together in a mating call," said Sylvia. "An insect no bigger than my thumb." "Well, no bigger than my thumb," amended Marie. "Go it'll turn out to be the mating call of two handsome, wellbuilt young humanoid men." "I will not look it up," said Sylvia, getting up and starting to close off the instruments. "We've got one more planet to do. Then we rejoin the fleet and I g;o home with a lot less romantic notion of hunting for lost spaceships than I left Earth with." She jabbed the motor studs viciously and the patrol craft jerked at the sudden release of power. The self-closing instrument platform they towed began to fold, ready for space flight -- and all the books tumbled off the shelf above the radio desk. "Damnation!" said Sylvia. Marie grinned, opened one lazy eye. "You might as well look up "After all, your ill temper bounced it on the floor." Class of # on Commencement Hill in front of Graduation Walk. In a few moments the Senior Class President of # would declare it dawn, and it would be time to Graduate. Johnny stared at the beginnings of Graduation Walk, where it narrowed down and disappeared into the fog. He had had bad dreams about this moment last night, when he had slept at all. His classmates believed the Earth ship would be there. But they had listened to Leonard by firelight -- and Leonard by firelight was most convincing! He had said they would be saved, just the opposite of what he told Johnny. They did not know the Leonard of the President's cabin, the man who did not believe anything lay ahead but death. Why had Leonard told Johnny what he really thought? Why couldn't he have let Johnny go on believing? But, of course, he wanted Johnny to stay behind. Didn't he realize that Johnny couldn't stay behind? Johnny had used up his one allowable mating. He had had his honors. In any other Class he'd be a hanger-on... and worse, no matter how long he lived, the certainty of belief could never be restored. And Evelyn. She had nothing to say to him at all. Cheeks flushed, laughter on her lips, she helped Leonard fool their Class, pretending her fear was joy, her nervousness an eagerness. Johnny glared at them now, but they were playing their worthless masquerade to the end, cheering the Class. And he couldn't even unmask them, for who would believe young Johnny? Lucky thumb? Johnny stared at his hands. Good luck? Damn bad luck! Now fathers and mothers had said last good-bys and the Class formed up. Johnny stared at them, wondering morbidly which ones believed, which knew the truth. There were always cynics, but heretofore Johnny had, like the most of the islanders, considered this small minority odd. Apparently the leaders themselves felt this way. U nobtrusively the Arrowmen moved out and hastened the last good-bys. It became silent, and Johnny could hear the dismal ocean below, pounding on the rocks. The new Senior Class President raised his hand, the music began, and Leonard, with a reassuring smile, began to call out the names. Arlington was called first. He wore the usual ceremonial wings, made of tree branches and chicken feathers. He marched to the thin piping music and drum beat along the finger of rock that disappeared into the fog. The last they sa,w of him, he was trying his wings, hoping to start flying to Earth at any moment. There was no sound after the swirling fog closed in on him. Johnny shivered. It was Evelyn's turn next. Johnny felt his breath grow short as she began her Walk. Her final kiss had been cold and trembling. Johnny clenched his fists, feeling a wrongness. She slipped once on the wet rock and a great "Oh!" went up from the crowd. An Arrowman lifted his bow and Johnny's horrified cry of "No!" was lost in the music and the swelling murmur. Evelyn cast a desperate look over her shoulder and ran along the path into the fog. But before she disappeared, she slipped again and fell off the stone path, and the sight of her fall toward the sharp rocks three hundred feet below almost drove the blood from Johnny's brain. Her wings were useless, her death certain. If you fell instead of flying, you were not worthy of the return to Earth, the legend said. Johnny sat suddenly down on the ground. So much for the luck of the woman he loved. Leonard read off Sedley's name. The man was a blusterer, Johnny thought. He had volunteered for the first ten for the prestige, not because he had true courage. Sedley walked out boldly enough to the edge of the fog. Then he turned back, crying, "I have a final word that I must say!" But his base ruse to gain a few seconds' more life failed. His mouth hung in shock as the Arrowman loosed a shaft. It took Sedley in the heart. He gave a gigantic roar of pain and fell off the Walk. Johnny could feel the arrow in his own breast and had to gulp air to breathe. Would they all go as badly? Then kindly old Kentner, fragile, sunken-chested, always in poor health, said in disgust, "Oh, we can do better than this!" And he walked out to the edge of the Walk firmly and disappeared into the mists. He earned a cheer. Johnny licked his dry lips. He tried to remember he didn't have to go. T he cheer for Kentner spurred the others and they went fast, paying little attention to Leonard's name reading. It was not uncommon for the undergraduates to catch the fever of the Graduation, stirred by the music and bravery. One Class had inspired at least fifty not scheduled to Graduate to rush down the Walkway without wings. The Class of # was no exception, after its bad beginning. Some stumbled, a few screamed, one laughed, but most went silently, their eyes shining in hope. Only a few had to be shot, and some who had parents in the Class boldly followed after them into tlie fog. When it was nearly over, Leonard turned and held out his hand. "It was well done. Johnny. Aren't you proud of your Class?" Johnny ignored the hand. "You lied to them all," he said. "Yes, Johnny. I had to. All leaders lie, but the great ones believe their own tales. Life is built on hope; hope must always be there -- so men can live honestly and die gloriously -- always allowing that first lie." "I hate you," said Johnny. "It was my hope to give you more years of life," said Leonard. Then he was gone, moving swiftly down the Walkway, smiling, waving as if in a few seconds he would step easily into the waiting Earth ship. The crowd cheered. Johnny felt a hot rage. To the last they all thought this liar was a fine man I A hand touched his. The new Senior Class President. "I am about to close the Graduation. But you don't have to go. Leonard has arranged it." Johnny pulled on his harness and adjusted his wings, almost too angry to speak. "He has arranged it so I may not stay!" And he went quickly down the Walk. Leonard had tried to save him useless years. He couldn't live without hope. The Walk ended abruptly and Johnny knew what it was like to be alone, standing at the end of creation. Out here you couldn't hear the music, only the bleak sound of the sea breaking on the rocks far below. He groaned. Now he could not return without being shot. He had to go on, and yet -- Could Leonard have been wrong? He was surprised to see that he had suddenly stepped into thin air. a fearful thing, and yet the wings did crudely support him, though the harness bit deeply into his flesh. He swept down like a wounded bird he had once seen fall, and then he saw the cold ocean rush up. He forgot to close his mouth and came up spitting water. The wings helped him float. He looked around for the promised Earth ship. Leonard was right. There was no ship. A floating body bumped into him. Sedley, the coward, Johnny swung around in the water, strangely cool, still angry. He saw a dark head bobbing near him. 'Mohnny, you should have stayed behind !" said Leonard. "But I didn't -- and now I'm waiting to be led to the ship." "Ship? But I told you -- " Johnny pointed to the other bobbing heads. "They still believe. Lead them!" "Johnny, we've done our part so new islanders may be born. Now it's best to dive under the water and take a deep breath and -- " But Johnny brushed past and lifted himself out of the sea on Leonard's shoulders. "Leonard sees the ship," he cried. "Follow us!" He went thrashing off into the fog. Leonard hesitated. Then he followed Johnny. "Johnny!" Johnny turned over on his back and floated, shivering. They couldn't survive long in this cold water. "Yes?" "There are very -- few left -- " chattered Leonard. "I think we should -- give it up. Dive down -- " Johnny peered behind them. "We'll -- give it up -- when there are only -- you and I -- left. As long as a -- believer follows -- we will lead and -- pretend belief. Then -- we can die honestly -- as you s-s-said !" Leonard gave a hoarse cry of hopelessness, but Johnny shouted out over his shoulder. "The ship! Just ahead! Don't give up !" And he swam off again. The others took up the cry and thrashed ahead. ship first, since he was in the lead. His arms were so frozen that he clubbed it without feeling in a swimming motion, and then looked up. He giggled weakly. "Look -- Leonard -- mirage !" "No -- mirage, Johnny -- real!" gasped Leonard as he grabbed the hard side of the boat. "I -- was wrong!" A goddess appeared above them at the rail. Her clothes were wondrously fitted to her body, to eyes that were used to rough wool clothing. Her lips were marvelously red. "I'm sorry," gasped Johnny to her. "I didn't believe -- " Sylvia Lowden stared down in astonishment at Johnny, then the older man who was apparently too tired to talk, but merely clung to the I'ail, and at the other heads of men and women now appearing from the fog. She and Marie had taken the surface cruiser because the fog was too thick to fly in safety to the source of the -- she was stretched out in the rear of the boat, seasick. Now here were real, live men and women afloat on the sea -- people who spoke English! She reached out her hand to Johnny. "God in heaven!" she said. "Goddess from Earth," said Johnny, "t-take us home as promised !" Their hands touched. In shock they both stared into each other's eyes. Each had an extra thumb. Luck! Johnny began to laugh, full again of the wonder of being a man. first Sylvia and John Marsden. They met and started a family group, through the function of something called "love." The tiny genes existed in their bodies and paired off to exist in the body of each descendant. Sylvia and John were separated by time for over four hundred years and by incredible light-years in space. Yet the always existent genes of John and Sylvia Marsden were the littlechanged reality of their descendents, Johnny and Sylvia Lowden, traveling from body on down to body, going blithely along and not even minding four hundred calendar years and # light-years of space. To them, a few seconds of separation before they mingled again and went bubbling together on down the centuries. Consider that, with a little luck, men can have their own way pretty much in the insignificance of all space and time. The laws of physics are governed by a process of intellectual natural selection. When they make correct predictions they survive. When they make incorrect predictions they become extinct. -- Fred Hoyle Old Shag Theres no knowing what a man can do until the chips are down -- especially with a helper like the shaggy man! M aybe a guy shouldn't believe everything he hears, but the trouble with some people is that they don't even believe a true story. Let me buy you a beer and tell you about it. After working some years in the baggage room of the local depot, I decided to transfer to the train service, and made application for it. The application was approved. I was sent to the city offices for the course of study and training which all trainmen undergo, and after a time I was sent out as brakeman on a freight. I stayed for a year and a half. Then I succeeded in being assigned as head brakeman on a fast food special called The Red Ball Special. It made no stop between Chicago and New York except for water and fuel. The big Diesel in which I rode as head brakie was a high-speed locomotive, used exclusively for hauling the food special. Our first stop was Detroit, where we cut off all but three cars, and took on five more scheduled in New York at # the next morning. In New York, I strolled along Broadway, gawking at the sights exactly like any other yokel. After a twelve-hour rest, the return trip began. I stood in my place in the big Diesel till we had cleared for the main line, and then settled back to enjoy the ride. It was close to midnight. I sat at the cab window half asleep, my senses somewhat dulled by the steady rhythm of train movement. Td finished an extra good cigar and had started to doze off when the engineer gave a low moan and toppled from his seat to the floor of the cab. The fireman, much against the rules, but feeling safe with the engineer and myself to watch in his place, had gone back to inspect a suspected leaking air hose without waiting for the train to stop. I got the engineer back on his seat. He was dead. began pulling on the whistle cord like mad. It was not my work to operate a Diesel, rd not troubled to learn. I wondered why the fireman did not get back. I was going to jump, although I didn't like my chances at that speed, when I suddenly discovered a strange man in the cab with me. He was a pretty ordinary little guy, except for a wild, shaggy head of hair. "You chump!" he squeaked at me. "Maybe next time you'll obey the rules, and not sneak by without finding out things ! See that short rod with the spring-clip? Squeeze that clip and pull the rod back. Move, you fathead!" I did as the shaggy man told me, and felt the speed of the train slacken slightly as the power went off. "Now, that brass handle sticking out of that pipe -- move it to the right slowly. Slotvly, you dunce!" Nine cars and the Diesel ground slowly to a stop. The wheels shuddered and skidded slightly because of my inexperienced hand, but the train did stop. The stranger nodded in satisfaction. "When you get back home, bone up on things. But right now you go take a close look at the manifest card on the sides of the second and third cars... I jumped to the ground to go back and look at the second and third cars. As I passed the rear of the Diesel I saw why the fireman had not come back to the engine cab. All that was left of him was the lower part of his body. He had slipped, caught one foot and gone under the wheels. I came to the second car and read the manifest label. My hair stood straight up. The cars were marked : Danger High Explosive The shaggy man was at my side. "You've got questions. But let me ask you one : Ever hear a story about how if you travel back to the time of an ancestor and you let him die you never get born?" "What about it?" I said. "It's true," said the shaggy man. end Galaxy... PiSiOvm ) the world; With your literally thousands of letters you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science-fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as youVe seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) Eiitor my Ruhsoription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for; (#f additional per ( issues G Issues  #  # Issues  #  # Issues  #  The Upside-Down Captain He knew the captain would be a monster. He knew the crew would be rough. He knew all about space travel -- except the truth! I down on the loading platform. He angled his head up at the Starbuck said, tapping ship, the Gorgon. This was the junior officer on the epauonly a sample of what he could let. expect once he canted into "Get away from me, scum," that hull. It would be rough, the lieutenant said conversaBut he had made up his mind tionally, his eyes on the clipto take it. board in his hands. All tight little groups, like Starbuck rocked back on the crew of a spaceship, alhis heels and set his spacebag ways resented the intrusion of a newcomer. The initiations sometimes made it a test to see whether a man would live over them, and the probation period, the time of discipline and deference to old members of the group could be a memorably nasty experience. He didn't have direct knowledge of such customs in the rather shadowy, enigmatic Space Service, but it was basic sociology. Starbuck knew he would have an even rougher time of it since he wasn't a spaceman -- not even a cadet, properly. He was only a fledgling ethnologist on his field trip to gather material for his Master's thesis. The university and the government had arranged for his berth on the Gorgon, An exploration ship, he thought acidly. That meant he might come back in a few months, or ten years, or never. All because he had the bad luck to be born in a cultural cycle that demanded hard standards of education from professional men. Thirty years before or after, he could have cribbed all the information he needed out of a book. clasped behind him, waiting for the lieutenant or somebody to deign to notice him. Somebody would have to pay some attention to him sooner or later. Or would they? Wouldn't it be just like the old timers to let him stand around and let the ship take off without him, all because he hadn't followed the proper procedure -- a procedure he couldn't know? All he had been instructed to do was "report to the Gorgon," How do you report to a spaceship? Say, "Hello, spaceship?" Speak to the captain ? The first mate? And where did he find them? Starbuck felt a moment of panic. He could see himself standing on the platform while the Gorgon blasted off, carrying with it his Swabber's rating, his Master's degree and his future. The lieutenant's back, in uniform black, loomed up before him. He would have to try approaching him again. It might mean solitary confinement for a month or two where no member of the crew would speak to him. It might even mean a flogging. Nobody knew much about what went on on board an exploration ship, despite all the stories. But Starbuck knew he would have to risk it. He marched up behind the officer. "Sir," he said. "I'm the new man." The lieutenant whirled. "The new man!" For the first time, Starbuck noticed that the junior officer carried a swagger stick under his left arm, black, about a foot and a half long, tipped with silver at both ends. Quite possibly it was standard procedure to rap a man with it three times sharply across the mouth for speaking out of turn, during his probationary period. Cautiously, he filled a little pocket of air between his lips and his teeth to try to keep them from being knocked loose. The lieutenant dropped his clipboard and swagger stick on the platfonn. "Why didn't you say so! New man, eh?" He gripped Starbuck by the shoulders of his new, storebought uniform. "Let me look at you, son. Got some muscles there, haven't you? Ha, ha. Don't expect you'll need them too much on board. We don't work our men too hard. My name's Sam Frawley. Call me Sam. Come on, let me show you around." Sam Frawley scooped up his stick and board with one hand and draped the other arm around Starbuck's shoulders, leading him towards a hoist. It was not quite what Starbuck had expected for a reception. T he spaceship was big, bigger than Starbuck had expected or realized. He had known some well-fixed people who had visited Mars and Venus and talked knowingly of an older culture, but he had never been off of Earth himself. He had been thinking in terms of an airliner or a submarine. The Gorgon was more like an ocean liner. Or like an ocean. His and the lieutenant's footsteps echoed and bounced around the huge corridor. "They haven't got the mats down yet," Sam Frawley explained. "Sure." "Well, what would you like to see first? The brain?" "You mean the captain?" Sam slapped him on the back. "Bless you, son, no. I mean the electronic brain. The cybernetic calculator." "You've got one of those things?" Starbuck asked in unconcealed surprise. "You know what the trouble with the human race is, Ben? We're all still living in the Ellisonian Age." "Oh, I don't know. I think most of us are pretty sophisticated and modern," Starbuck said. "Not on your life. Most people still think leisure is a sin. Hard work and more hard work, that's the ticket. Don't let a calculator solve a problem for you; do it yourself with a slipstick. Otherwise it's immoral." "That's silly," Ben said awkwardly. "It's just a throwback to a time of protest against the Automational Revolution. It has nothing to do with us today." "You say that, but you don't really believe it. The old morality is too deeply ingp:ined. That's why cybernetics have so long been out of fashion. This one is new to us on the Gorgon, But we like neiv things. We're for progress. All spacemen are like that, son." "Have you had this machine long?" Starbuck asked his progressive officer. "They installed it on the trip in. We've never really had a chance to use it." "What's it supposed to do?" "You know our job is exploration, finding new worlds," Sam explained. "Not just any world the human race hasn't landed upon, but a world that is a significantly different type than we've ever touched before. We're really the advance guard of humanity, you see. Well, the brain is programmed with information on all the worlds Man has explored. It compares a prospective landing site with what it knows about all the rest, and rejects all but the really different, unique planets. It loves the unknown. Its pleasure circuits get a real jolt out of finding an unknown quantity." "That brain is really inhuman," Starbuck said. "A basic factor of human psychology is that all men fear and dislike the unknown." Sam rubbed his chin. "I suppose so, but -- you asked about the captain. This is him." was coming down the corridor. He was holding the ankle of his right foot in his hand, and hopping along on his left leg, whistling some little sing-song through his teeth. He stopped whistling when he saw them and said, "Good afternoon, men." Frawley framed a sloppy salute. " 'Afternoon, sir. May I present the new man. Swabber Ben Starbuck, sir." The captain stood on both feet and rocked back and forth. "I see, I see. New man, eh? We see so few new faces, cooped up on this old ship with the same men, you know. We appreciate a stranger. Starbuck. If you ever need help, Ben, I want you to look upon me not as your commanding officer, but, well, a father. Will you do that?" "Yes, sir," Ben murmured, feeling a little giddy. Frawley cleared his throat. "I was about to show young Ben the brain. Captain Birdsel." "Good idea," the commanding officer said. "But I'll show Ben around myself. Lieutenant Frawley. You may return to checking the manifest." Frawley glowered. "One of these days, one of these days..." The captain snapped very erect. "One of these days ivhatV The junior officer shrugged. "One of these days, there may be a dark night, Captain." The iron-haired man reached out a manicured hand and twisted Frawley's tunic at the collar. He brought his face level with the second-in-command. "One of these times, there may be charges of mutiny, Lieutenant. And guess who will play Jack Ketch personally ?" Frawley assumed an atattention pose, and blinked. " Aye, sir. There may be a mutiny and somebody may get hung." Birdsel shoved Frawley away from him and wiped his hand elaborately down his side. "That will be all. Mister Frawley." Frawley constructed the same excuse for a salute, turned smartly and marched away. Stai'buck developed a definite suspicion that there were currents of tension aboard which he didn't understand. is the brain," the captain said, with a gesture. The brain was less than awe-inspiring. The mustardseed cryotron relays were comfortably housed in a steel and aluminum hide no roomier than a pair of Earthside bureaus. It looked a bit like a home clothing processor to Starbuck. Birdsel crossed to the machine and ran a hand along its metal side. "Magnificent, isn't it, Ben? I've never seen anything like it before in my long career in the Space Service." "It's certainly nice," Starbuck ventured. Metallic chattering burst out. "It's saying something, Ben ! This is the first time it's talked since the second day after it was installed!" The message was clearly legible, spelled out in a pattern of dots on a central screen. "Give it the information," the captain said hastily. "We feed it all the information it asks for." "How?" Starbuck blurted. "Is there a keyboard or something?" "Yes, yes, but it has audio scanners. Just talk. Or move your lips. Send signals. Tap out Morse. Anything." "I'm Benjamin Starbuck," he said. The screen rearranged. "Quick," Birdsel said, "do you ?" Starbuck fished in his pocket for the microfilm slide. "Yes -- aye, aye, sir. I had it ready to give to you, sir." "Never mind me. Give it to the brain!" Starbuck approached the machine, saw a likely looking slot and shoved. The brain ruminated with some theatrical racket. IN"What do you want to know?" Starbuck swallowed, saying. "Remember I'm a human being," he said respectively. "I have to eat and sleep. I can't answer questions for two or three days straight." "Sorry." Captain Birdsel looked vaguely distressed. "You should try to co-operate with the brain, my boy." "I have nothing against cybernetic calculators," Ben said. "After all, we aren't still in the Ellisonian Age. But I'd like to, uh, stow my spacebag and get settled, sir." "He's interested in you, Ben," the captain said enthusiastically. "This is the first time he's asked about anybody since the second day. Yes, interested !" With an excess of enthusiasm, Captain Birdsel clapped his hands, then put them flat on the deck and stood on his head, kicking his heels in the air. He straightened up with a seal ict face. "Ah. That really gets the kinks out of you, Ben." Starbuck tried not to stare. "Aye, sir." 'The captain took a step and grabbed the small of his back. "Haven't done it in some time, though. Ought to do it more often, eh, Ben?" "I suppose so, sir." "Well," Birdsel said, clapping his hands together. My God, Starbuck thought, he's not going to do it again. "Well," the captain continued, still on both feet, "I'd better shov you to your quarters, my boy. Mind if I lean on your shoulder a bit like this?" "Not at all. Captain." "This way, Ben, this way." II of tridi pin-ups on the bulkheads of the crew's quarters refreshing, as was the supportive babble of conversation about them and other women. He had almost begun to think there was something unnatural about the men aboard the Gorgon. But Starbuck noticed, to his discomfort, the ebbing of the tide of conversation from the bunks as he stepped inside with his spacebag. For the moment, he wished Captain Birdsel had paced in with him and offered up an introduction. But a look of disgust had creased Birdsel's face as they got near the crew's compartment. He had sent Starbuck on alone, while he limped back towards the bridge. A forest of eyes shined out at him from the shadowed desks of the bunks. This is it, he thought. These were the crew, not officers. Sometimes the teachers were nice to you on the first day of school but you knew you were going to get it from the other kids. "Hi," a gruff voice echoed up at him from a lower bunk. "Hello," Starbuck said, hugging his spacebag like a teddybear, the simile crossed his mind. A lumbering giant with a blue jaw uncoiled from the lower bunk. "Why don't you stow your bag here, buddy? Till you get used to the centrifugal gray, you may have some trouble climbing topside." "You've got the seniority," Starbuck said cautiously. "I wouldn't want to cause you any trouble." "No trouble," Blue Jaw said obligingly. He chinned himself with one hand on the rim of the upper bunk and swung his torso around a tidy # to settle onto the blankets. Starbuck threw his bag at the foot and sat down on the bed. He looked around at the arena of faces in neutral positions, waiting faces. He cleared his throat experimentally. "Could I ask you something?" he called upstairs. A set of big feet swung down into view, "Sure," Blue Jaw said enthusiastically. "Didn't know you wanted to talk. Thought you might want to rest." Starbuck looked at the hanging feet. They were expressionless. "Maybe it isn't so much of a question," he said, working one hand into the other palm. "It's just that I'd like to live through this mission. I know I'm not a regular spaceman and I'm intruding and all, but I don't mean to cause anybody any trouble or do anyone put of a job. I'd just like to do everything I can to see that I don't slip and fall into the reactor. Or anything like that..." "Don't worry," Blue Jaw said heartily. "We'll take care of you, Ben Starbuck." Somehow Starbuck could find little comfort in those words. He inhaled deeply. "Come on down here, will you?" "You want me down there?" Blue Jaw gasped. "Why sure, sure." The giant dropped to the deck with a catlike grace that nevertheless vibrated Ben's rear teeth. "You want to talk about something?" the big spaceman inquired. Ben could almost see the paws hanging down and the tail wagging eagerly. A "I'd like to talk about all of these men staring at me. What's wrong with them? Nobody's said a word to me but you. What are they waiting for? What are they going to do ? I can't stand the suspense. Is that it? I get the silent treatment until I go off my rocker, get violent, and then something happens to me -- " He stopped and swallowed. He was talking too much. He was working himself up into a state of terror. "Say, you sure are friendly," the ox said with some confusion. "My name's Percy Kettleman." Starbuck steadied his hand and put it in Percy's grasp. It came out whole. "Those other fellows," Percy inclined his head. "What about them?" Starbuck asked edgily. "They'd probably like to come over and say 'hello' but them and me don't get along so good. They know better than to come around bothering me." "You're not on their side? You wouldn't be a new man too, Percy?" "Me? Hell, I've been spacing since I was sixteen. Those guys don't have any side. A bunch of anti-social slobs. They can't stand each other any more than I can stand any of them." Starbuck decided he had picked a good ally in the midst of a pack of lone wolves. Percy was the biggest man on board, physically. Still he didn't like the idea of all the rest of crew looking daggers at him, or throwing them, for that matt#r. "Mind if I say 'hello' to the rest of the men?" he inquired of Percy. "It's your nickel," gruffly. "Spend it the way you want." Starbuck flexed an elbow. "Hello there, fellows. Looks to be a taut ship." It sounded a shade inane. Starbuck had barely passed Socializing at the university. But the men replied in good spirits, their faces blooming with teeth, arms waggling, calling out modest insults. Starbuck recalled that among a certain class of men an insult was a good-natured compliment in negative translation. "Pssst." "Pssst?" Starbuck asked. Kettleman passed him down half a roll of white tablet underhand. Starbuck took it. "Turns?" "Tranquils. We smuggle them on board. Helps with the blastoff and 'phasing' for the overdrive. Not that those stiffnecked brass will believe it." "Thanks, Kettleman. You and everybody seems to be pretty helpful to me. I don't know exactly what I've done to deserve it." "We get tired of looking at the same faces out there month after month. It's a treat to have somebody new on hand." It sounded reasonable to him, but he felt there was something more to it than that. Well, he was an ethnologist, or almost one. He could figure out group behavior. All he had to do was take time to think about the problem for a little while... Only he didn't have time to think. He discovered why everybody was in their bunks. The spaceship fired its atomic drive. Starbuck tried to lift a tranquil to his lips. He didn't make it. Painfully, he found out why a man would prefer to go through a spaceship takeoff in a tranquilized condition.  Starbuck palmed back the door to the captain's cabin and stepped inside. Captain Birdsel stood in front of the small wall mirror tattooing a flying dragon on his bared chest. "Yes? What is it, Ben?" "Sir, you remember that the ship's brain directed me to return at this time today. But I understand I'll have to have your permission to go onto that part of the bridge." "The brain's directive was quite enough, my boy." He laid down the needle. "But I'll accompany you there if you like." "Just as you wish, sir." Birdsel smiled engagingly. "Noticed the dragon, did you?" "It arrested my attention, yes, sir," Starbuck admitted. "The hours are long and lonely in the vaults of space, Ben. A man needs a variety of interests to occupy himself. I have recently taken up the ancient art of tattooing." "Surely not recently, sir. You seem quite advanced." "You're too kind." The captain escorted Starbuck to the chamber of the brain, discussing tattooing animatedly. He told how it was popular with ancient mariners on the seas of Earth. He discussed the artistic significance of the basic forms -- the Heart and Arrow, the Nude, the Flag. He didn't stop talking and button his shirt even after they entered the cybernetics room. As the captain grasped for his second wind, Starbuck turned to the machine. "I'm here. Calculator." The lights patterned words with a speed difficult to follow. Starbuck shifted his weight to the other foot. "Yes, I'm sure here all right." "I helped lay some walk mats in the corridors. I policed up the latrine. Lost all the money I brought with me in a crap game. Craps, that's where -- " "I see." "Still under Central's control, I suppose." sel here told me," Starbuck said. No doubt there was a pattern of fine logic to the calculator's inquiries, but he was too dense to see it. The question sounded to him like the mumblings of a mongoloid. "I'd be delighted to fill the brain in on the subject," Birdsel said. The calculator's communication screen remained blank. "Was there anything else you wanted to know?" Starbuck inquired. "The hyperspace jump? But that's the captain's job," he protested. "Not at all, not at all," Birdsel interrupted. "Whatever the calculator says. Now if you'll excuse me, there is some paint I have to requisition... "Wait," Starbuck cried desperately. "I don't know anything about the overdrive. You can guide me, can't you, sir? That would be all right with the brain, wouldn't it?" Birdsel shrugged. "Would it?" The screen stayed a stubborn neutral gray. "Stay, sir." "All right," Birdsel said dubiously. The overdrive switchbox had been incorporated into the cybernetics system itself as an interlock. "There isn't much to do," Captain Birdsel explained. "We trigger the jump and come out at a mathematically selected random spot in realspace after phasing through hyperspace. The Brain scans the sun systems in the area for unique planets worthy of exploration. If there is one, we zero in on it via fixed phase until the gravitational field makes it necessary to switch back to standard interplanetary or nuclear drive. We can make suggestions to the Brain or theoretically override one of its decisions. Actually, all we have to do is watch. Thumb the button, Ben. It wants you to do it. It likes you." "Aye, captain." Starbuck could believe a cybernetic machine could like him. Everybody else on board seemed to, and it unnerved him more than a little. Only a selected few had ever particularly liked Benjamin Starbuck before. The situation reminded him a bit of Melville's Billy Biidd; only he wasn't a "handsome sailor," just a fairly average-looking spaceman. Starbuck depressed the button. The button depressed Starbuck. N OW he knew why tranquils were popular during phasing. For one instant, Starbuck stopped believing in everything -- the spaceship, the captain, Earth, his own identity, the universe. He went completely insane, a cockeyed psychotic. It was over just quick enough to leave him a mind to remember what not having one was like. "My," the captain said, his head on an angle. He looked as if he were gazing at some classic piece of ait, such as a calendar by Marilyn Monroe, the last of the great realists whose work was indistinguishable from color photograph v. "That is a dandy," Birdsel said. Starbuck swiveled his head around to the outer projection portal. There in all its glory was a star system. There seemed to be four stars all orbiting each other -- two red dwarfs, one yellow midget and a white giant. One planet was clearly visible on the side of the system towards the ship, an odd lopsided dumbbell shape in the center of a translucent sphere of tiny satellites -- cosmic dust, like the rings of Saturn. Strangest of all, the outer shell of the planet was sending in Interplanetary Morse: CQ, CQ, CQ... "It," Starbuck ventured with a new-found sophistication, "seems rather unusual. I suppose we'll take a closer look, Captain?" The calculator's screen re"I have never seen anythir.g like this before... Birdsed drew himself up to his full height. "However, the machine's knowledge of the history of space exploration is much more extensive than mine." "You aren't going to suggest that the brain reconsider or override its decision?" "Certainly not!" Birdsel snapped. "We'll re-phase after the traditional twenty-four hour delay for psychological adjustment." Starbuck sneaked another popeyed look at the planet on the screen. "If he thinks that's run of the mill, Captain, I wonder what he will have to find to make him think it's unusual?" Ill isfy the Brain, it didn't find it in the next few days. Starbuck reported to the bridge each day to press the Brain's phase button and answer some of its questions. Then for two days Captain Birdsel wasn't on hand for the little ceremony and the expression of dissatisfaction with the available site for exploration. Once Starbuck went so far as to suggest a reconsideration of a system that had made the one he had seen on the first day look tame. The calculator had duly noted the reconsideration, and had again refused. Starbuck didn't dare try an out-and-out override, even though he had been theoretically given complete command of the phasing operation. The following noon, the middle of the twenty-four period, Romero, an engineer, almost tearfully pressed Starbuck's crap game losings back on him, apologizing for keeping the money. Starbuck was about to refuse, not wanting to reverse the state of indebtedness, when the intercom requested his appearance at the captain's quarters. Unable to prolong the argument with Romero, he took the money and shoved it in his pocket, heading for the chief cabin. Starbuck rapped on the door, heard the "Come" and entered. Captain Birdsel was hanging naked, upside down, by his knees from a trapeze, in the middle of a deserted compartment painted solid red. "You sent for me, sir?" Starbuck said. "Yes, Ben. Yes, I did," Captain Birdsel replied, swinging gently to and fro. "Do you smoke, Ben?" "Aye aye, sir." "The 'aye aye' is reserved for acknowledging orders, not answering questions, Ben." "Yes, sir. I'll remember in the future." "Every man on board smokes, Ben. Everyone but me. I do not use tobacco." "Commendable, sir." "I suppose you drink, all of the rest of the men do." "Occasionally, Captain." "I abstain." "Enviable, sir." "Have you read any good books lately?" "Good and bad, sir." "I notice most of the men read. I haven't time for reading myself. Or shooting craps. You do play that game like the rest?" "Just once, sir, I lost all my money." Which had been returned to him. "Ben, I think you don't fully appreciate the nature of the mission of the Space Service," Captain Birdsel said, flexing one knee and performing a difficult one-legged swing on the bar. "It is our duty to go ever onward into the mystery of the Unknown. Ever deeper, ever traveling into the heart of the Secrets of the Universe. Nothing can stop us. Nothing!" "I'll try to remember, sir. Was that all?" "One more thing," said the inverted captain. "I think you are to be relieved of the duty of officiating at the phasing." "Correct," said another voice, one Starbuck had never before heard. "That's all now, Ben." "Very good, sir." Starbuck paused at the door. "That's a fine trapeze you have there, sir." "Thank you, Ben."Iconclusions," Ben said to the knot of men gathered around him listening to his story of the interview with the captain, "but I think Captain Birdsel is -- is -- " "Psychotic?" suggested Romero. "Schizoid?" Percy Kettleman ventured. " 'Nuts' is the word I was searching for," Starbuck concluded. "I believe he intends to keep phasing and phasing, taking us deeper into space and never returning to Earth or the inhabited universe." "I guess," Kettleman opined, "that we will just have to convince him that he is wrong in that attitude." "We can make a formal written complaint and request for an explanation under Secthat what you had in mind, Ben?" " had a strait jacket in mind," Starbuck admitted. "But I'm new in the Space Service. I have a selfish motive. I want to get back to Earth sometime and a vinecovered ethnology class." "We better go take him," Kettleman said heavily. "As much as I dislike agreeing with an ox like you, Kettleman," Romero said, "I conclude it is best." There was a general rumble of agreement. "Wait, wait," a youngish man whose name Starbuck vaguely remembered to be Horne stepped forward, his eyes glittering with contact lenses. "I ask you men to remember Christopher Columbus. I like our captain no moi'e than any of you, but he may be right. Perhaps what he is doing is vital. We shouldn't let our selfish fears..." Always, Starbuck thought, always some egghead comes along to gum up the works. Starbuck knew he would need a decisive argument to overcome Horne's objective theory. Starbuck slugged him. Home crumpled after a flashy right cross Starbuck had developed in his extreme youth, and Starbuck took a giant step over him, heading for the bridge. The other crew members followed him. Besides, Starbuck thought, he had always considered arguing by analogy to be sloppy thinking. rON'T come in here!" Captain Birdsel yelled through the partly closed hatch to the bridge. "You'll regret it if you do." Starbuck swallowed hard, and reached for the door handle. Percy Kettleman vised his wrist. "ni go first, little chum." There wasn't much room for argument with Kettleman when it came to a matter of who could Indian wrestle the best. He stepped back and let Kettleman cross the threshold first. Percy threw open the door, screamed once and fainted. The rest of the men tended to pull back following this demonstration. Starbuck didn't like to do it, but he didn't like the idea of hanging for mutiny as Birdsel had threatened Lieutenant Frawley on the first day. (Starbuck realized he hadn't seen Frawley for several days. Had Birdsel disposed of him as he had threatened?) He got close enough to the door to see inside. It didn't make him faint, but he did feel a little sick. "What is it?" Romero demanded urgently. "Alien" Starbuck said, "An unpleasant looking one inside." "You sometimes pick up 'ghosts' passing a system," one of the men explained. "I'm not an alien," Birdsel's voice called out. "I'm me. The brain reversed my dimensional polarity. I told you you wouldn't like it." Starbuck stirred up nerve for a second look. Captain Birdsel was now a man of many parts. Some of them were only areas of abstract line and hues, but there he could see a redly beating heart, a white dash of thighbone, and a compassionate blue eye bracketed by two tattooed dragon's talons. The effect was distracting. Starbuck stepped over his second man that day. "Captain, we're taking over the ship. We're either going to explore one of these planets we've been passing up or return to Earth." The apparition groaned. "Don't you think I know I've gone too far? I'd like to go back, but the brain won't let me. It's taken over just the way I knew it would!" "Nonsense," Starbuck snapped with more authority than he felt. "The brain can't violate the principles it was built to operate upon. Brain, program this ship for Earth." Starbuck expected the sound of that strange voice he had heard in the captain's cabin ; but here it had a communications screen and it evidently thought that was sufficient. "Take it easy," Starbuck said to the machine. "Don't get hysterical." "I don't care about the rest of those swine," Birdsel said, "but I hate to have gotten you in a fix like this, Ben. I knew the brain was going to replace me sooner or later, but I was going to hold onto my job as long as I could. I was going to stay next to the brain, even if I had to take the position away from you, Ben. But the brain kept demanding more and more. Finally he did this to me. I knew I had let him go too far." "I liked you, Ben," the captain's voice said from the heart of the thing. "You're not like the scum I've got used to under my command. I'm sorry that you're marooned out of time and space like this. It's kind of tough, I know. But keep your chin up." "Of course, of course," Starbuck groaned. "What kind of an ethnologist am I ?" He turned to Romero. "Could you reverse the wiring in the computer?" "Maybe," Romero said. "But I could re-program it for a negative result easier. Same results, lacking a short circuit." "Okay. Do it." "Well, if you say so, Ben." ME. The Brain's communication screen fiashed a blinding white scream as Romero laid hands on it. Aj in charge now," Star buck explained to Percy Kettleman, who was sitting on his bunk with his head between his legs. "Birdsel seemed all right after the brain finished changing him back. But we .all thought we better keep him under observation for a while." Kettleman straightened up. "Sorry I passed out on you. But seeing the old man in that shape was quite a shock." Starbuck nodded agreement. "I don't like to think about the next step the calculator would have taken him through. Not just a physical change, but a mental one too. That was the brain's whole reason for existence -- to find the unknown. It was programmed to be even more basic than sex or self-preservation are to us. The trouble was, the more it learned, the more readily it could see some similarity to the familiar in the most outer things." "That was why the captain was acting so nutty? He was trying to appeal to it." "Yes, he had some old moralistic and superstitious ideas about calculators. He thought his job depended on his pleasing it -- when of course its job was to please him. But he gave it an idea. If it couldn't find the strange and the different, it would create it. It started with the first changing element in its environment -- the captain -- but I don't know where it would have stopped if Romero hadn't reversed its pleasure-pain synapse response. Now it loves the tried and true. It's not much good for space exploration, of course. But a museum may be interested in it now." "So we'll have to go back to picking our phase points at random, trusting to chance. Or the judgment of some skunk like Birdsel." Starbuck cleared his throat. "That's another thing. The men aboard the Gorgon and the cybernetics machine had something in common. I finally figured that out. Most men are afraid of the unknown -- they fear and hate it. But obviously not space explorers. They spend their whole lives searching for the unknown. They don't suffer fhom Xenophobia -- they are Xenophyles. They like anything that's new and different. Even a new member of the crew. It kind of lessens the cameraderie aboard a spaceship, but the Service must have found the trait valuable. They have searched it out in men and developed it. They even breed it in second-generation spacemen." "Do you know what. Starbuck?" "What, Kettleman?" "All that talk of yours is beginning to get on my nerves." Kettleman's triceps flexed. Starbuck sighed. The honeymoon was over for him, and the trip was just beginning. The fundamental quality pertaining to man is not that he should be good or bad, wise or stupid, but merely that he should be alive and not dead. -- Charles Galton Darwin # Th is perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Distance Stations Output # KW # KW # KW # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on racKator, telephone, or light cord, etc; If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find Please send , Radios postpaid (# per radio) Name Address Youve heard oj it -- now here it is at last, Its the Tale that wagged the Dog Star! the reporters completed, Dr. King felt that when he pulled the switch he would automatically restore his good name and bring to a close a career of solid scientific achievement. Most of all, he would bring to an end the practice of referring to him as "Side Effect Charlie." Dr. Charles King was willing to admit that there were excellent reasons for his acquiring this hated nickname. The facts were that the bulk of his scientific achievements were made inadvertently -- that is to say, his discoveries were all made through investigation of unexpected side effects of his experiments. In a career conspicuous for unusual, unanticipated side effects, two in particular stand out. The first discovery resulted in rendering the entire heatoriented metallurgical industry obsolete, and founding upon its corpse a new industry. This was based on the extracting of metal from ovg and its subsequent shaping by first eliminating the bonds that hold the molecules of metal together, and then reversing the process when the desired shape was attained. Dr, King did not discover this process directly. He thought he had discovered a method of making metal surfaces selflubricating and # friction free. It was not until several installations utilizing his lubrication method became pools of liquid metal that Dr. King bothered to discover how his method worked, and of course the means to reverse his procCvss. The resulting revolution in metal-processing methods endeared him to everyone -- except a few vested interests like the shareholders in existing metal companies, who were uniformly glum. The second discovery, although monumental in itself, is important because it indirectly led to the special project which Dr. King was just completing. Dr. King succeeded in growing some crystals in a nutrient solution. What actually happened was that while eating lunch at a lab table he managed to knock something into something else and a crystal developed. Dr. King became fascinated with the odd structure of these crystals as revealed to him under an electron microscope. (He had incidentally placed the crystal under the microscope in error.) As a result, he took to investigating the properties of the crystals whenever he could find time. Despite his well earned reputation as an accidental discov('rer, it should be pointed out that Dr. King is a very methodical man. This means he is capable of repeating the same mistake twice, or for that matter any number of times. Therefore, Dr. King produced all the crystals he needed. I T was during a vacation in the Adirondacks that Dr. King discovered the propulsive qualities of the crystals. This discovery, of course, is what led to the perfection of the "King Propulsor Unit,"' the heart of our starship drive systems. Dr. King was investigating the piezo-electric properties of the crystals in a makeshift device of his own design when he was disturbed by a sudden draft in the room. He looked up to discover that one wall of his workshop and the top one thousand feet of a mile-thick mountain (the same mountain that his cabin was located upon) were no longer in the immediate vicinity. As it turned out, his crude device did not impart to the mountain all of the thrust inlierent in the crystal. The mountain top reached only to the orbit of Jupiter, where it settled down to become its newest satellite. Coincidental with Dr. King's experiment, intensive astronomical work was going on with Jupiter as its prime object. The capturing of the satellite was observed and recorded independently by at least six observatories, including the one on Tycho, Subsequent investigation of the time involved to project this mass disclosed that Dr. King had invented a faster than light drive. (It should be pointed out that, while the discovery of the faster than light drive made the name of Dr. King world renowned, it did not in any way endear him to the relatives of those thousand-odd persons who lived in the hamlet located on the mountain top that ended up a satellite of Jupiter. They also were quite glum.) Further work, all of a mathematical nature, disclosed to Dr. King the proper method of enclosing these crystals in a unit to drive space ships to the stars. Coincidental with his work on the propulsor units he made a startling discovery which led to his special project. Dr. King invented perpetual motion. A series of complicated equations indicated to Dr. King that if he enclosed six of the crystals in the business end of a pendulum, and started the pendulum oscillating, it would tick-tock for all eternity. This discovery began a fiveyear program that ended with a full scale press conference. The purpose was to unveil the building designed to protect this pendulum for all eternity, and of course to unveil the discovery of perpetual motion at the same time. This building was designed to be Dr. King's monument to his own genius. It was a large rambling structure in which the pendulum was displayed by viewing it through a large hole in a brick wall. All of Dr. King's considerable savings had gone into designing a computer, the heart of his protective system. The computer was programmed to protect the ticking of the pendulum under every conceivable circumstance. So thorough was this programming that special devices were installed to keep the building and its precious cargo . moving in earth's projected orbit if, through some gigantic mishap, the earth was reduced to cosmic dust. The switch that would impart the initial pulse to the pendulum would also start the computer operating, rendering the entire structure totally inviolable. With a flourish. Dr. King pulled the switch. Nothing happened. T here was an embarrassed shuffling of feet by the reporters. Then, as Dr. King became more exasperated, the reporters became amused. The amusement turned to open laughter when Dr. King, frantic with fear, rushed to the door to check the wiring on the inside of the building. The door would not open. The computer was at work guarding a nonfunctioning machine. He rushed to the open hole in. the wall, intending to provide the initial pulse necessary to start the pendulum swinging by pushing. He found that the computer had designed a force field to keep him from entering. Frustrated and at his wit's end, he flew into a rage which ended in a fatal heart attack when he heard one reporter laughingly say to him: Don't let it get you down, Doctor. You've beat the jinx. In one step you've gone from 'Side-EfFect-Charlie' to 'No-Effect-Charlie.' " It would be comforting to be able to assure everyone that the reporter in question was correct. Unfortunately Dr. King's monument did work, and probably will work for all eternity. The day after Dr. Charles King had his unfortunate heart attack a homesick astronomer on Sirius repoiled to his superior, and subsequently to the entire populated universe, that when he turned his telescope on the Solar System he discovered that it had acquired a new motion. The entire system swung back and forth like a penduNow that the Moon is within reach, we may see the end of one of the hardest-fought struggles in science, the non-quarters-given battle between the meteorists and the vulcanists in their opposing theories to account for the great craters on the Moon. Both sides agree the craters are there. From then On they part company, never to come together again. It must be meteorites that caused the craters, say the meteorists. Volcanic action is out of the question. The Moon is so small and cold that its internal fires were never great in the first place, and besides the shape of the craters is all wrong for volcanos. Nonsense, say the vulcanists. Where did the meteorites come from? The Moon does have an atmosphere. It is infinitely more tenuous than the Earth's, but it is in the tenuous far upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere that meteorites are burned up and destroyed. The Moon's blanket of atmosphere at that density is actually gi-eater than the Earth's! Which school is right? We don't know -- but one thing we know for sure, and that is that the first manned ship to land on the Moon will have as one of its first projects the job of settling the dispute once and for all! His Father's House Advanced technology can make dreams come true -- hut all kinds, including this malevolent one! T he old man was talking again:... not worth a damn, no good for anything but spending other people's money, couldn't do a day's work if your life depended on it... Blabber, blabber, nag, nag, the incessant voice followed Ralph Ganner into the bathroom and out again without seeming to stop even for a breath. "Fine son for a man like me, a man who built an empire out of sand, who made Mars what it is today. Sometimes I think you're not my son at all. Son of some oily haired space bum who stopped by on the way to Venus. Wouldn't put it past your mother." "Shut up!" snapped Ralph. But the white-haired old man went right on, his sunken mouth maundering a steady stream of chatter: "Wouldn't put it past her at all. I was busy a lot. Even slept at the office sometimes when I worked late. She had plenty of opportunity, Lord knows..." Ralph slipped on his evening jacket and glanced at the rheumy-eyed old man, sitting in the cloudfoam chair, blabbering on and on. Just once he glanced with hatred at the seamed face and then he strode quickly to the door. As the door opened for him, he heard the old man's parting shot. "Going out to spend my money, Ralph? Going out to forget your worries? Good luck." Ralph wished it were an old-fashioned door so he could slam it. An escalator wffiisked him downstairs and out of the mansion. The air was crisp and a salt tang came from a nearby canal. The two moons were out. He got in his car, punched the keyboard, and sank back wearily in the seat as the car rose slowly, gained speed, and hummed through the cloudless air. Below and far behind him now, the mansion loomed darkly like a gre.it crouching monster, iilce a blight on the Martian landscape, like a prison. The car whizzed over a gaudy resort hotel. Ralph's eyes hungrily watched it dwindle to a speck on the horizon. How he wished he might live there. Or anywhere. Anywhere but in his father's house. ed and waiting for him. For one moment he forgot his father as he looked at her. She was sheathed in green velvon that matched exactly the green of her eyes and made them seem to leap from her face, so startling was their color. They were her best feature. Her nose veered slightly to one side, and her mouth was perhaps too large, and she had more chin than the classic sculptors thought proper for a woman, but it was a face he loved, every defect of it, and she was the most beautiful woman on Mars to him. "I'm glad you're early, darling," she said. "I hoped you would be. We'll have time for a drink before the show. And we can have a nice slow ride to the theater." She came forward and wrapped her arms around him and soaked him with her warmth until the blood throbbed in his head. A nice slow ride. Sure. But he was sick of cramped and furtive spasms in the car. She seemed almost to read his thoughts. "Unless you want to come back here later?" "You know I can't do that. Let's go." "We don't have to leave yet, Ralph." She sat down on a couch. "Why don't you read me your latest chapters? Do you have them with you ?" "I -- I read you the latest chapters last week. I haven't done anything else on it." "Darling, that was two weeks ago. And you haven't written anything since? Why not?" He frowned. "You can't turn it on and off like a faucet, Astrid. It just won't come." "But that's not like you, Ralph. You've never had trouble getting things down on paper. That novelette last winter -- You did the first draft in two days and nights." She smiled. "You looked terrible when it was finished, but you did it. And in those awful surroundings! Libraries, the college dorm, in the shower room after lights out. You should be able to get a lot of work done in that big mansion. Just lock yourself in with a pot of coffee." He sank to the couch beside her. "Yes, I should," he sighed. "And... She hesitated, smoothed her dress. "I didn't say anything the last time, because I thought you'd catch it yourself and rewrite, but those last chapters... "What about them?" "They weren't good, dear. It's been happening slowly, Ralph, but your work has been steadily deteriorating for some time now..." "For a year," he said. "Ever since I left college and moved into the mansion." "Well, yes. Darling, what is it? What's happening to you? Is anything wrong?" He turned to her and, for a moment, she thought he was going to say something, relieve himself of the burden he seemed to have been carrying all these months. For his face softened: briefly, he was the old Ralph again. But then it was gone and he only said, "Everything's fine. Don't worry. Let's go." top-speed button and they were hurled into the air. "We have plenty of time," she protested. "I need that drink," he said. "Ralph, there is something wrong." She took his arm. "Tell me. Is it anything I said about coming back to the apartment? Wouldn't you want to, if you could?" "Of course I'd want to. If I could. But you know I can't, so why do you keep harping on it? I told you a hundred times : I can't live anywhere but in the mansion. I can't even stay overnight anywhere else. I'd lose my inheritanee if I did. You know what would happen if I went back with you. I'd be there all night." "I still don't understand why we couldn't go back to your -- " "Here's the cocktail lounge." The car dropped, skidded, bumped to a halt. They got out. A rolling plush carpet carried them inside and directly to a table. Ralph ordered a double Marsini. When it popped up in front of him through the hole in the table, he seized the iced glass and drank down half of it in a gulp. Then, savagely, he crammed it back down the hole and barked toward the hidden microphone, "Not dry enough ! Your robot needs a new indexing." Bravely ignoring his bad humor, Astrid continued what she had started to say in the car. "Ralph, I'd love to see that rambling old mansion of yours. After the show, why couldn't we -- " "No. Just no." They had been over it dozens of times before and he was tired of making excuses. He had no excuses left. What could he say: You can't come to the mansion because I don't want you to see my father? That would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it? Another Marsini came up through the hole. Ralph tasted it. Just right. Almost pure Earth gin, with just a touch of the pungent vermouth made from the wild "grapes" of Mars. He noticed Astrid had no glass. "You're not drinking?" he asked. "I don't want a drink. Maybe you ought to take me home and just forget about the show. Forget about me, too." "Honey... He reached over and took her hand. "I'm sorry. Try to put up with my orneriness, will you? Just for a little while longer? Until we can get married?" "A little while longer? Four more years? Oh, I want to, Ralph, but it's been so long already..." Her voice broke. "Don't cry, honey. Please don't cry." "Take me home, Ralph." "Aw, baby..." "I'm not angry, Ralph, I love you and I want you and I can't understand all this crazy business about the mansion and your inheritance. I don't understand why we can't get married and live there, if you must. You said you'd tell me some day. Tell me now." "You wouldn't like it there, believe me, honey. Come on, let's go to the show." "I don't feel like seeing the show. Please take me home." A formless fear grew in his belly, climbed coldly up his body, was transformed into thought in his mind: I'm losing her. R alph left her at her apartment and drove about aimlessly, finally ending up at the theater. The show was an unfortunate choice: a space opera extolling the glories of the first uranium miners on Mars and the hardships endured by the settlers from Earth. It reminded him of his father, Henry Ganner, the shrewdest, most hardworking frontiersman of them all, the man who took Mars in his tough hands and shaped it into a colony, "Cutthroat Ganner" had already become a legend. Technically, the show was perfect : life-size characters in three dimensions walked, seemingly, among the audience. The theater became, by turns, the interior of a spaceship, a Martian desert, a settler's cabin. The audience loved it. But Ralph found it intolerable. He wished there were an old-fashioned theater left on Mars -- one in which the actors stayed put, in front, on a screen. But science had rendered screens archaic. Ralph got up and left. His car floated slowly over the desert. He recalled the rapt faces of the audience he had just been a part of. Had his face looked like that, too? Drugged and dull and blindly accepting the good, the bad, the true, the false, the meaningful and meaningless alike? He groaned aloud. What place was there for him in this world? How could he hope to stir their minds, bring excitement to their vapid faces with his words? Mars was sophisticated only on the surface: scratch the veneer and you'd find a frontiersman, every time. They were all a bunch of Cut-throat Ganners. And he was a Ganner, too. A true Ganner, by right of descent. The firstborn. The only child of the great Ganner, and that only child was -- a scribbler. Side-splitting irony. But Ralph was not inclined to laugh. In the distance, he saw the mansion, and he turned the car around, reluctant to go home. "Home," Ralph mumbled. "Home, sweet home." He punched top speed and shot dizzily upward. "Hell, sweet hell." The car climbed higher and higher, building up speed, its hum growing ominously loud. The air became thin. His chest heaved, but he did not switch on the oxygen. Sweat broke out on his forehead, then all over his body. "Hell, sweet hell," he repeated crazily. "There's no place like hell." Suddenly he cut off the power. The hum died into silence long before the speeding car stopped its upward climb and began to fall. His stomach leaped toward his throat as the car plummeted toward the ground. His feet dug into the floor. The air screamed past, rising with his own yell, as the rusty surface of Mars came closer and closer. He snapped on the power just in time, and the abrupt lurch threw him out of the seat. Sobbing now, he turned the car toward the mansion. His thinking was clarified by the brush with death. He realized that writers have always had to hammer their work into unreceptive minds. No, the real trouble stemmed from the same source his troubles had always stemmed from. "Father,' he muttered. "Something will have to be done about Father. T he old man wasnt waiting for him when he walked through the door. Ralph was mildly surprised. Feeling the need of another drink, he went directly to the bar. As he stirred the gin and Martian vermouth, he tried to think of a way to get rid of the old man once and for all. "Drinking again, Ralph? His father was standing in the doorway. "Drowning your sorrows? Good idea. Swill it down. Mop it up. Drink until your bi'ain softens and purple snakes crawl up your legs. Bottoms up. Ralph threw the glass at his father, but it went right through him. "Bottoms up, the old man repeated. Then he chuckled : a dry, cracked chuckle. "Don't you wish you could kill me, Ralph? But how, eh? That's the question. How can jou kill a dead man?" The crooked old figure walked slowly to the other side of the room. "What a problem. Boy would like to kill his father, but father is already dead. Very difficult. He chuckled again. Ralph left the bar. "Through drinking already? When Ralph entered the library, his father was there. "Ah," said the old man. "Books: thats the stuff. You always were a bookworm. Bury yourself in books. Much better than liquor. Escapism, thats the ticket, How long could it go on, Ralph asked himself desperately -- how many recordings had his father made before he died? It was a full year since his death, and still they went on -- maddeningly lifelike, three-dimensional, technically perfect, talking, nagging, needling, insulting... "May I suggest Shakespeare? his father asked. "A favorite of yours, isn't he? I mind with foolishness written a dozen centuries ago, but here and there that Shakespeare says something pretty good. In Macbeth, for instance: 'The time has been that when the brains vere out, the man would die, and there an end, but now they rise again... Ralph walked to the dooi. "Oh, don't go," said his father, a special recording immediately switching on as Ralph broke the photoelectric beam. "Stay and chat a while with an old man." And Ralph stayed. Because # he knew his father would be in his bedroom, too, if he sought refuge there. The house was infested with reproducers, all well stocked with images of his father, each room having its own appropriate repertoire -- remarks about drinking for the bar, about books for the library, and about insomnia for the bedrooms... "If you cared to," his father rattled on, "you could rave at me like Macbeth raved at what's-his-name : 'Avant, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!' Or, in this case, 'Let Mars hide thee !' Although that spoils the meter, doesn't it? Oh, yes, I know about meter. I'm no writer like you, Ralph boy, but your old dad isn't as stupid as you'd like to believe... Where were they? Ralph had searched the mansion again and again for the reproducers and their automatic switches, but never had he found even one. The mansion had been constructed to his father's specifications, years ago, and old Ganner had wanted to go one better the modern vogue for hidden reproducers. They were hidden, all right. Hidden so cleverly that only Ganner and the architect knew where they were. The old man liked to startle his guests by suddenly sending a recorded fleet of spaceships blazing through the dining room or introducing a handsome actor into the bathroom of a shrieking maiden lady. Ralph had thought of the architect, in his despair. Had thought of him and called his Earth office, only to learn that he had died fifteen years before. R alph would always remember the day the will was read by the robot legal machine. In the jerky, precise syllables that tried to simulate human speech but only succeeded in sounding like a parody of a Gregorian chant, he had heard his father's words quoted : "To my only living relative, my son, Ralph Ganner, I leave one-third of my moneys, investments and lands, to be his five years from the date of my death, subject to the following condition : that he make Ganner Mansion his exclusive home during those five years. Should he reside elsewhere, even for a single night, the inheritance shall become void and shall become the property of the Mars-Ganner Corporation, heirs of the remaining two-thirds..." It was a strange condition, and Ralph was not in favor of the idea, but he did want the one-third inheritance. His father had given him a ridiculously small allowance at college, and had threatened to cut it off the moment he graduated. Ralph was rather surprised to learn his father had left him anything at all, but he was glad of it, for now he could be independent and devote all of his time to working at his writing. And there was Astrid. She had fallen in love with him at college, before she even knew he bore the powerful name of Ganner, and she would stand by him through the lean years. But why should there be lean years for her? She deserved the best. Now they could be married at once and move into the mansion. The stipulation that he could not leave it for a single night was disagreeable, but Ralph knew better than to try to break a will drawn up by a robot legal system. It was a system set up by Cut-throat Ganner himself, in the days when Mars was lawless, and it had served men well in the emergency. The emergency vas long since past, but objections to the no longer needed system went unheeded by the corporation that controlled the planet. The robot lawyers continued to dispense their correct, cold, irrevocable, rulebook law. The very first day he moved into the mansion, he knew he could not bring Astrid there. For he had not even unpacked when he heard a voice behind him in the bedroom. "So you accept my condition, Ralph?" He turned around and saw his father and a yelp of primordial fear was torn from his throat. The blood left his face and his throat became as dry as a Martian desert. The ghost went on speaking: "I thought you would. Always ready to spend your dad's dough, aren't you? though. Not a chance of that. Mama's boy is an artist. Mama's boy is just going to sit on his can and dream up pretty ways to string words together. Take a job in the corporation? Follow in his father's steps? Gracious, what an idea ! "No, I'm not a visitor from the spirit world, Ralphie. I'm dead as a doornail and this old gent you're looking at is only a recording made a couple of years ago. There are plenty of recordings like this, Ralph. I kept myself very busy making them when I knew I was going to die. Didn't want you to be lonesome in this big old mansion all by yourself. I'll keep you company often. We'll live together, just you and I, for five years. Then -- if you still have your wits -- you can claim the rest of your inheritance. You'll have earned it!" The image laughed. "Fair enough? Well, I'll let you think that over alone. Good-by for now. I'll be back." And the image had walked out of the door and vanished. N OW, a year later, it was still talking as Ralph sat with bowed head in the library of Ganner Mansion. " 'Thy bones are marrovvless, thy blood is cold, thou hast no speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare with.' How's that for writing, writer? Pretty good stuff, eh? Makes sense, doesn't it? Now listen to me, Ralph. Listen to me carefully. You've had a year of this. Have you had enough? Then I'll let you in on a little secret. The robot lawyer didn't tell you everything. It was carefully instructed, carefully indexed to keep back one little bit of infonnation. remain in my grave and never to let you have your inheritance, too. On condition." "Conditions!" Ralph hissed, then was angry with himself for having talked back to a lifeless image twice in one day, "The condition is this: That you accept a position in Mars-Ganner. That you carry on. That you be my son. I want that, Ralph. It will take away some of the bitterness of dying if a Ganner continues here on Mars. The Ganner name is Mars, Ralph! You should be proud of it and live up to it. You should be the son of your father. The lawyer knows what to do. Just call it and tell it you're going to take over the corporation. Tomorrow, technicians will arrive to remove the image-spools from the reproducers. It's up to you, Ralph." The image was gone. Ralph sat alone in the silence of the library. His dead father's words still echoed in his mind. The hard-headed old tyrant. The selfish, money-grubbing egomaniac. All Mars had been his domain and in his life he had never let any one forget it. His own anti-intellectual tastes had shaped Martian society, made it a cultureless vacuum, with no roots in man's rich past and no hope of future growth. How the idea of death must have gnawed at him, until his jungle mind had hit on the way to reach out, after death, and puli the strings even then ! Absently, Ralph looked up at a nearby shelf of books, a set of antiques, collectors' items purchased by his father to fill the walls. Terse titles seemed to mock Ralph's dilemma: Caught, Nothing, Pack My Bag. And equally terse titles by the same ancient writer, a man named Green, seemed to speak tauntingly of those things Ralph could no longer hope for; Living, Loving. He could leave. Walk out and never come back. And his father could haunt the mansion forever if he wanted to, because Ralph wouldn't be there to listen to him, to look at his hard, aged face. Pack My Bag. But then he would be a pauper. His novelette had brought him a decent check -- but that had been over a year ago, and it had been the first sale in a long time. He and Astrid couldn't exist on the income from his writing. Not yet. He could accept the position -- and be rid of his father -- and be richer than any other man in the Solar System. And hate every minute of it. Caught, Astrid. Living. Loving. She had fallen in love with a writer. Could he ask her to love a corporation boss, an organization man of a stripe that would make that ancient symbol, the man in the gray flannel suit, seem a soaring free spirit by comparison? Nothing, He shivered. The chill of the Martian night was seeping into the mansion... that be all, Mr. W Ganner?" "Yes, Miss Reeves," said Ralph. "Get those letters out as soon as possible, please." "Yes, sir. Oh -- Fm to remind you that you and Mrs. Ganner are giving a reception for that folk dance troupe from Earth tonight. And will you be able to sec Mr. Krenek this afternoon about the library?" "I doubt it. Anyway, I thought that was all settled," "Mr. Krenek wants to discuss the name of the library. He assumes you wish to call it the Henry Ganner Memorial Library, after your father, but I suspect he wants to talk you into naming it after yourself." "Fm too young to become a memorial. Miss Reeves. Tell Mr. Krenek he may name it after anybody the committee chooses, except me. My personal preference, if he's interested, is to call it the Henry Green Memorial Library." "Yes, sir." Miss Reeves seemed just a trifle puzzled. "Mr. Ganner -- what shall I tell Mr. Krenek when he asks me who Henry Green was ?" A smile momentarily flashed across Ralph Ganner's face. "Tell him -- no, just tell him Green was a twentieth-century novelist, all but forgotten, whose collected works are being made available again next month by a prominent publishing house. But to satisfy your own curiosity. Miss Reeves, Henry Green was the pseudonym of an ancient tycoon who successfully combined a life of business with a life of art. He did this, they sa #  by writing during his lunch hour. Isn't that simple?" "Yes, Mr. Ganner." "So absurdly simple... And speaking of lunch, shouldn't you have yours?" "Yes, sir. Fm leaving now. Are you sure you wouldn't like me to send you in something? A sandwich? Some soup?" "No, thanks, Miss Reeves. I eat an enormous breakfast, you know. When you leave, will you lock my door?" ignatz Cats! He couldn't stand the things -- even when they had once been his best friends! G lenn Wheelan stepped Miguel is much brighter and back out of the way as cleaner. They even have a the water came hissing up theater that shows nothing across the quiet night beach, but foreign movies. And three He rolled his pants cuffs a laundromats. Now the place is turn higher and looked back building up, Glenn." at Karen Wylie. "And the "Because of a bunch of oddwhole thing is worse. Teachballs who're tired of all the ers, you know, look forward lunatic outfits in Los Ange,to vacations as much as kids, les." Wheelan moved to the More. But I was almost afraid girl's side. "Why, even in to come back here." Pasadena people talk about Karen's cigarette glowed San Miguel." red in the darkness. "But San Karen caught his hand and led him up the beach away from the water. "Well, every town is noted for something. Like one's the lettuce capital and another's the wine center. It certainly doesn't hurt San Miguel to be known." Wheelan turned from the glare that the city's lights made against the faintly overcast sky. "Ever since I was a kid I've hated cats. They make me feel crawly all over. Like persimmons do." "Persimmons don't do any such thing," Karen said, tossing her cigarette at the foam below. "So I come back to my old home town. Unpack my bags and walk into my aunt's homey kitchen, and she springs it on me." "What?" "She's one of them now, too. It's not bad enough a bunch of retired dentists from Omaha go along with Balderstone. My aunt now! I'll have a hell of a time forcing down second helpings. I get this crawly feeling." "You're as touchy as Pavlov's dog. Everything makes you crawly." "Well, look, Karen. You've been up at Cal most of the year. Doesn't the place seem odder to you ?" Wheelan stepped next to a driftwood log. "Doesn't it bother you?" K aren sat down on the log and put her elbows on her knees. "I told you, Glenn, San Miguel looks newer and cleaner. Why, even the slums look better. I think they've painted them." "The only time we ever had a cat, when I was eleven, it made me sneeze. My aunt made me give it away. I wanted to drown it in a gunny sack but she talked me out of it." "Oh, you couldn't have. You're too tender and kindly." She held her hand out and motioned him down beside her. Wheelan sat, feeling the sand seep in over the sides of his loafers. "Maybe I'll talk to Neff. There should be a law against this kind of thing." "Chief Neff ? I doubt if he'll do anything." "Why?" "Because he's so active on our Civic Public Relations Committee. And he owns a couple of motels." Wheelan absently put his hand on Karen's shoulder. "Now, somebody must be against this. Maybe Dr. Watchers. He was even against free paper towels in the public Johns." "He passed away," Karen said, moving Wheelan's arm around her with her shoulders. "I could write to the governor," Wheelan said, noticing Karen's soft dark hair fluttering faintly over the tip of his nose. "There must be a law against lycanthropy." Karen shook her head. "No. They checked on it. There is in one of the New England states. The dunking stool is the penalty, I think." "Why?" he said in a loud voice. "Why dunking?" "No," Wheelan said, blowing her hair out of his face. "Why do people want to turn into cats anyway? My God, it must feel crawly." "Well, you know what Mr. Balderstone says." "He's a quack." "Perhaps. But nevertheless he perfected a method for turning people into cats and back. And that's more than a lot of people have done. He can't be all quack." Karen relaxed and snuggled back against Wheelan. "Who the hell else would want to discover something like that? You might just as well invent an economical method of canning persimmons." Wheelan shuddered. "Cats." Karen closed her eyes. "Anyway, he says it's a great tension-reliever. People get out of themselves. Forget their troubles. Aggressions. 'That's very important in times like these when everyone is worrying about blowing up unexpectedly." Wheelan tightened his arm around her. "Damn. When I think of all those people going out to the old fairgrounds and turning into cats and yowling around it... "Makes you crawly?" Wheelan turned her head up and kissed her. Karen's tongue shot under his and back and she pulled away. "You take everything too seriously. Mr. Balderstone has a way of helping people relax. So what? What's that Latin thing about disputandum and all?" "Yeah, but a whole town. My town and yours ! And it's given over to turning people into cats." "My town and yours! You sound like Chief Neff." She kissed him on the cheek. "Hey. Last summer we didn't spend all this time debating." "I'm maturing. Once you pass twenty-six you get wisdom. You'll see." "I say if they want to be cats let them. It's very good therapy. And Lord knows we need it." "It's not right." Karen sighed. "What was that comic strip when we were kids, about the cat and the mouse? Cicero's Cat?" "Krazy Kat?" She nodded. "You're like that mouse. Always have to go around throwing bricks at the cats. And it always got him in trouble. Ignatz. That was his name, Ignatz Mouse. That's who you are." "Very profound insight." Wheelan ran his hand down her back, touching each of the white buttons on her sweater. 'Tm still going to do something about iV Though she was facing away Wheelan could feel her smile. "Glenn?" she said. He undid the first small button. "Yeah?" "I went out there last week. And it is quite relaxing. I've felt much happier this week." Wheelan got to the second button before he realized what she had said. "Karen, you're kidding!" "No. So you see, it's nothing so terrible." Wheelan stood up. "Damn it. Damn it!" Karen rose, reaching behind her to rebutton her sweater. "You're being pretty intolerant." "Damn it, the whole town !" I (e backed away, his feet sinking deep in the cold sand. Karen shrugged. "Don't take it so big." She looked up at him hopefully, "Well, you'll at least drive me home?" Belatedly, Wheelan said, "Sure. Come on." Near his car he said quietly, "Now I'm really going to get them." I T wasn't until the next Wednesday that Wheelan had his leaflets ready to hand out. The local printers had, one way and another, refused the job. He'd had to have them done in Santa Monica. The two cub scouts he'd hired to help him had both come down with something late Tuesday. Wheelan stationed himself on Chambers Drive near the two largest tourist motels early on the clear June morning. He had handed out five of his anti-lycanthropy leaflets when Chief Harold Neff drove up on his official motorcycle. Wheelan spotted him a block away by his gold-painted crash helmet. It was the only one on the force. "Hi, there, Glenn," said Neff, after he'd parked the cycle in a red zone. "What are ##I up to?" Wheelan frowned at the chief's broad, tanned face. "I'm agitating, Hal." Neff rubbed his jaw. "Without a permit, though?" "As a matter of fact, yes." The chief nodded. "You'll have to stop. You can't hand out those things without a permit." Wheelan tucked his box of leaflets up under his arm. "Who do I see about a permit?" "Me, Glenn." Chief Neff flipped off his helmet and stroked his crewcut, looking down the street. "Let's go down to the Blue Oasis and have a beer and talk." "Can you drink while on duty?" "Beer." He took Wheelan's arm. "What about your motorcycle?" "Won't come to any harm." In one of the Blue Oasis's dark leather booths Neff said, "Don't you like the way the old town's blossoming, Glenn ?" "Cats make me feel crawly," Wheelan said, pushing his schooner back and forth in front of him. "Why, even the slums are a sight to see. And San Miguel's getting to be a well-liked spot. Like Capistrano and Disneyland. Being well-liked is good for a town's civic pride." The chief grinned at Wheelan. "I think there's something basically wrong with people turning into cats." Wheelan made up his mind not to drink the beer. "There might be something wrong in it if people did it out of spite or for mischief, Glenn. But I think most competent authorities will agree that Mr. Balderstone's method has a real, honest-to-gosh therapeutic value." He looked straight at Wheelan. "There's a lot of nervous tension these days, Glenn. Even teaching in Pasadena you must have seen that." "Well, Hal, I'll admit that. I just don't think Balderstone's approach is any solution." Neff laughed. "There's not really much solution to anything." He leaned back into the shadows in the booth corner. "You're as interested in our town as anybody, aren't you, Glenn? Growing up here, playing in the Little League, attending Grover Cleveland High." "Sure. That's why I hate to see it taken over by some crackpot cult." "You're entitled to your opinions. Just don't hand them out in the form of leaflets." "About that permit?" "Well, Glenn, you know how tangled in red tape any government gets. It'll take time. Even with me putting the spurs to everybody. Uh, you're leaving the first part of September?" "Yeah, when school opens." Wheelan pushed his glass away and slid out of the booth. "It'll take until early September to get the permit, huh?" "No. With me seeing to it you should have it by the end of August." He stood and shook hands. Something about shaking hands with Chief Neff unsettled Wheelan. Trying not to show it, he walked with Neff out into the light. studying the bottom shelves of his aunt's refrigerator. He looked into an opened tin of smoked oysters, then decided against making a sandwich. He opened a can of beer and sat down at the white-topped table. This was the night his aunt went out to Balderstone's. Wheelan shivered. They even had special buses running out there. The doorbell rang, or rather chimed a tune that had been a favorite of his aunt's during prohibition. Karen Wylie was standing on the front porch in a big tan coat. "Hi," she said. "Busy?" "Pretty much." She glanced at his hand. "Can I have a beer?" Wheelan moved back so she could enter. After he'd taken her coat and brought her a beer Karen said, "What are you up to now ?" "Well, I sent letters to both our local papers, but they haven't been printed. I suppose you know about my trying to hand oyt leaflets last week. Then I tried to rent a soundtruck, but Neff says I need a permit for that, too." He sat down on his aunt's chintz-covered sofa. "Now I'm doing a mail campaign." "Why don't you give up?" Karen watched him with an anxious expression. "What good are you doing?" "I think that every citizen has a right to act as he chooses. I mean, when an evil exists it's the individual's right to try to combat it." "With leaflets?" "In any way he can," Wheelan said. She .smiled. "You just look silly. And you'll annoy people. Really, Glenn, what's wrong with all this? You're just judging others by your own standards. All this talk about good and evil." "I don't think people should turn into cats. If they have to, I don't think our town should encourage them." He clenched his fists. "Why, they've got signs on the road now, telling how far it is to Balderstone's temple, or whatever he calls it." "There's certainly nothing unethical in advertising, Glenn. You're not that narrow-minded." Wheelan finished his beeiand bent the can in half. He was angry enough to do it with one hand. "Let's forget it. How've you been?" "Wonderful." She touched one hand to her temple. "Very I'elaxed." "Which is your night in the temple?" Karen frowned. "Oh, I've only dropped out a couple of times." Rubbing his hands slowly together, Wheelan said, "I'm trying to start an anti-cat league, Karen. Would you join?" Karen laughed and stood up. "How many members have you got?" "I just started mailing yesterday." "But so far?" "None." He picked Karen's coat off the chair he draped it on. "Thanks for dropping in." Getting into her coat Karen said, "Take it easy, Glenn, will you?" "I have to do what I think is right." Karen was smiling as he held the door open for her. I T was a foggy night, two nights after Wheelan had picketed the fairgrounds and been run off by Chief Neff. Wheelan had decided to walk down toward the beach after dinner. His aunt wasn't speaking to him. Nor was she cooking for him. He got a hamburger at a drive-in across the road from the long narrow San Miguel beach ; then wandered through the fog toward the last sidewalk before the sand. He heard a car slow behind him, then saw the nose of a Ford convertible slide out of the thickening mist. Eventually he saw Karen, her dark hair in a thin scarf, smiling at him from behind the wheel. "You mad?" she called. Wheelan finished the liamburger and wiped his hands on his pocket handkerchief. "More or less." "Want to come along for a drive?" He came up to the passenger side of the front seat. "Why don't you put the lop down?" "I like the way the fog feels. Come on." She stretclied across the front seat and opened the door. "Someplace in particular?" He caught the door as it swung out. "Well, yes. Somebody wants to see you." "Oh?" He got in. "You playing messenger now?" "Don't be nasty. This is for your own good, or I wouldn't be doing it." "Okay. I take your word for it." Wheelan stretched his legs out as far as they would go and folded his arms. Karen made a U-turn on the smooth street and drove carefully back through the town. Near the fairgrounds Wheelan asked, "You taking me to the meeting with you?" Karen shook her head, turning the car sharply up a steep, ti'ee-lined street. They stopped in front of a ranch-style bungalow. "Here we are," she said, getting out of the car. Wheelan followed her up a brick path, his hands in his pockets. The fog was tightening in around them. A short man with a high, lined forehead and cropped giay hair opened the door of the bungalow. "Evening, Karen," he said, smiling. "Mr. Balderstone, Mi. Wheelan," Karen said. Wheelan nodded and came into the house after her. Balderstone stopped in front of a deep fireplace. "Thought we ought to have a chat." "I hear you mentioned me in your service the night I picketed your place," Wheelan said. "Explained to newcomers that you were the town eccentric." Balderstone's heavy gray eyebrows slanted toward each other. "People come to my lectures -- don't call them services -- to unbend. To relax. Don't like to have somebody shouting at them through a megaphone and waving signs, Wheelan." He crossed the room. "Drink?" Wheelan shook his head, glancing at Karen. She had sat in a straight back chair and folded her hands. "Scotch and soda," she said to Balderstone. A fter he made the drinks Balderstone said, "Some consider me a benefactor, Wheelan. I have invented a somewhat unique thing. Applied lycanthropy -- though most people think of that as involving only wolves." He gestured, and ice rattled in his glass. "Cats have a much higher therapeutic value. It's essential, Wheelan, for people to get out of themselves now and then. To find relief from tension so that their lives may be more rewarding and satisfying." He moved closer to Wheelan, who was still standing near the door. "These are troubled times, Wheelan." "I've told him that myself," Karen said, trying her Scotch. "The results of applied lycanthropy have been most positive. Not only have people been helped, but San Miguel has been helped. Don't think other cities wouldn't jump at the chance to have me locate there." He cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact, we're considering opening branches. It's my intention to help the entire world." "And it's my intention to run you out of town," Wheelan said. Balderstone laughed and shook his head. "Miss Wylie tells me you're a decent fellow, basically, as are so many before the pressures of everyday life remold them. At any rate, I simply want to point out that many of us are annoyed by you. I don't think you want that." "Yes, I do. I'm out to get you." "You're getting on my nerves." Balderstone scratched his nose. "Leaflets, pamphlets, letters. Demonstrations. And now I get word that you've been going around to pet shops and florists trying to buy large quantities of catnip." "Nobody has any." "Of course not. And I also find that yesterday you visited the humane society in Santa Monica and tried to buy several big dogs. The trouble with you, Wheelan, you've got no civic pride." Wheelan smiled. "I'm as proud of San Miguel as anybody." "And further, Wheelan, you can't stand to see people have a good time. And even worse, you're against scientific progress. I'm sure that had you lived in Austria at the end of the last century you would have sent Sigmund Freud crank letters." "He wasn't a quack." "You annoy me more up close than at a distance." The two of them were drifting closer to each other. Karen jumped up. "Mr. Balderstone, perhaps if Glenn attended one of your lectures he wouldn't be so prejudiced." "I don't want him sulking around my talks." "But it might convince him," Balderstone squinted one eye. "Hmm, Perhaps." Wheelan shook his head. "I wouldn't go near one." "Oh, that's right, Mr. Balderstone. Cats make him feel crawly." Balderstone stroked his chin. "You're in need of help yourself, Wheelan." "Couldn't he stand backstage?" Karen came and took Wheelan's arm. "I'll stay with you, Glenn." "He'd heckle," said Balderstone, checking his watch. vouch for him -- " "I'm not going near that place," Wheelan said, "unless it's to burn it down." Balderstone tightened his tie and studied Wheelan's face. "Destroy city property? Fine citizen you are." Karen tightened her grip on Wheelan's arm. "Come, Glenn. I know you'll think differently when you see the fine work Mr. Balderstone is doing." Balderstone was half in a closet, selecting an expensivelooking coat. Wheelan said quietly to Karen, "You're not going to...?" "Change? Not tonight. Please come. I want you to be convinced." Wheelan was aware that wouldn't happen, but he was curious. "All right." Everyone was smiling when they started for the fair grounds. form was set up at the edge of the field where tents were once pitched. Just to the left of the platform was the old merry-go-round that had become city property after the last carnival had gone broke. Balderstone's narrow stage was backed by canvas flats, and Wheelan and Karen stood behind one of these on some machinery crates, watching the audience through a peephole in the canvas. "This isn't my idea of backstage," Wheelan said, taking his eye from the hole so Karen could peek. "All of Mr. Balderstone's money goes into improving his process. And things like that." The night was getting colder and high mist hung over the fairgrounds. Only half of the bench seats were filled. meaning probably about three hundred in attendance. When Wheelan looked out again the lights around the field had dimmed and the two young men with blond curly hair and double-breasted suits had stopped taking donations at the entrance arch. Balderstone left the folding chair he'd been sitting in and walked slowly across the stage planks to the mike. Nothing like a touch of cold to keep people home at nights," he said, acknowledging with a grin the laughter that followed. He smoothed the front of his coat and took a small blue leaflet out of his pocket. "Think you'll find copies of this tacked to your seats. If you're a regular you know the system. If not, best leaf through it." About a third of the heads ducked to look for the leaflet. Balderstone pinched his nose and briefly glanced at the peephole. Karen slipped a leaflet into Wheelan's hand. He tossed it aside. "You want to look again?" 'No, I know the procedure. You keep watching. You're the one we want to convince." She squeezed his arm gently. "Lots of worry these days," Balderstone said. "People don't know where their next worry's coming from." Most of the heads, except the ones that were still bent over the leaflet, nodded in agreement. "Lots of problems people just can't solve. But they still want to give it a try." Balderstone's voice grew louder, "One more chance at bat. That's not the way. Worrying about problems causes fretting. Fretting produces tension. Tense people aren't happy people." Balderstone's hands came up in front of his chest, gradually clenching. "If you can't change the world, I'm informing you, you can change yourself. At least for awhile. That's important. That's what is called escape. It's good for you. Applied lycanthropy." The lights had been dimming all through his last sentences. A few yards from the merry-go-round the blond young men had a bonfire going. "We're going to lose all those worries. We're not going to fret. Not now, not for awhile." Balderstone's voice seemed to have taken on some of the crackle of the fire. "Every one of you should have a capsule. Now, who doesn't?" A dozen hands went up and one of the young men ran through the crowd, giving out capsules from an orange cardboard box. Balderstone had stepped out of Wheelan's range, but he reappeared wheeling something that looked like a giant sunlamp. It was half again as tall as he was. "He's got enough quack equipment," Wheelan said. "Be still," Karen said, her hold tight now on his arm. "YE'RE going to change,"  shouted Balderstone, not using the microphone. "When I say 'swallow' I want you all to swallow those capsules. Then you better get out of your clothes quick ! Because when I turn on my applied lycanthropy beam things are going to start happening." He had reached the platform edge and was crouched there, teetering. "Now ! One, two, three. Swallow!" Balderstone dived for the beam and clicked it on. Ties and hats shot up into the air. Coat sleeves flapped, became entangled with print dresses and lace slips. "Looks like Annapolis on graduation day," Wheelan said softly, starting to feel uneasy. The beam was played over the audience, slowly from left to right. All the lights were out and there was only the dim orange flicker of the bonfire. "Relax, relax," Balderstone shouted. "Change!" He dropped and sat on the stage edge. There was a sputtering howl near the entrance and a large black cat leaped up, clawing at the air, twisting and falling back. Wheelan couldn't breathe, couldn't tell Karen to stop her fingernails from digging into his skin. Great yowling cats were popping up across the field, faster and faster. Wheelan noticed his dentist still hadn't gotten his striped shorts off. Then he jerked back against Karen and they both tumbled off the crates. "Run," he said. Karen twisted up and caught him. "No, Glenn. Wait. Till they change back. You'll see how happy and calm they all are. You'll be convinced." "Cats," he said, pulling away. "Run!" He ran; jumped the fence beyond the rodeo area and stumbled away into the brush. He got home in under an hour. It was mostly downhill. Two nights later Wheelan set fire to Balderstone's bungalow while he was away at the lecture. The fire department put out the fire before more than half of the house was gone. Early on the following morning he rented an airplane and had his remaining leaflets dropped over San Miguel. Wheelan had decided that if he couldn't do anything positive he was still going to annoy Balderstone and anybody else who was on his side. No one mentioned his harrassing actions to him, not even Chief Neff. Wheelan's aunt did indicate that she would never cook another meal or wash another pajama top for him. He moved to a run-down motel near the ocean. H e had been there nearly three days when, just after sundown, someone knocked on his door. It was Karen, wearing a light cotton dress, her hair pulled back. "Are you comfortable, Glenn?" He smiled, "Yeah. I like this business now. I've been thinking up new activities." Karen frowned around the room. "Like to come out for a walk?" "Where?" "Oh, along the beach. You can't spend all your life in a damp motel room." "It's not damp. That's the fresh sea air you feel." He picked a windbreaker off the bed and nodded at the door. "So, let's walk." The night was warm, but heavy with fog. "Son-y I left you up there the other night, Karen. But you know..." "Yes. I know. Cats make you crawly." She took his hand when they reached the sidewalk and pulled him after her in the direction of the beach. "Have you really been doing all those annoying things, Glenn?" "Who else? You think I've gotten any I'ecruits?" The street was quiet. They left the last sidewalk and walked down through scrubby brush to the beach. The water looked blurred as it touched the misty shore. "Just me." Karen shivered and stepped away from Wheelan. "You've just made an awful nuisance of yourself, Glenn. I've always been very fond of you, as I'm sure you know. But -- I'm very sorry." She darted in suddenly and pushed hard. The surprise and the clump of brush behind him sent Wheelan over into the sand. When he got to his knees and looked around he caught a brief flicker of Karen's skiit in the fog. Then she was lost. He stood. He tried to brusli himself off, but his hands had started to shake. And he was beginning to feel odd in tlie stomach. Wind came in then across the water and scattered some of the mist. He saw the cats. Dozens of them, crouched twenty yards away. Their tails were switching and Wheelan became aware of a puzzling, whirring sound. Purring. In another gust more mist scattered, and Wheelan realized that he was cut off from the town by a half circle of hundreds of cats. And they were contentedly edging down across the sand toward him. Hundreds of damned cats! They made Wheelan feel so crawly he couldn't move. But if he didn't move soon the first of the cats would touch him. That thought made him jump back. The cats moved up. The sand was sucking at his shoes; he could feel the chill of the ocean on the back of his neck. Maybe if he ran straight at them they'd scatter. But he couldn't do that. They knew that, too. The cats eased a little nearer. Wheelan bent and grabbed off his shoes, then his socks. He backed into the cold, wet sand near the water. He got out of his clothes -- all except his shorts; he'd have to come ashore someplace. The cats were close now. For a moment Wheelan thought he wouldn't be able to move, but finally he was able to grin and thumb his nose. Then he ran quickly out into the water. It was dark and cold, but he was a fair swimmer. He could make it down the coast a quarter mile or so. Far enough. As he swam, Wheelan made up his mind he'd never come back to his home town again. Not even for Christmas. What's the most puzzling planet in the solar system? It might be Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, so cokl on one side that air freezes, so hot on the other that lead is a liquid. It is one of the brightest objects in the sky -- yet it has never been seen by most of the human race! The reason? Its nearness to the Sun. It is only rarely visible above the horizon except in daylight, although under the best viewing conditions it is almost as bright as Sirius or Jupiter. Yet that is not the oddest thing about this odd little world. For instance, what about its "bright spot"? This is a point of light as bright as the Sun itself on the center of Mercury's disk, only seen when Mercury is directly between Sun and Earth. It has been seen many times, by astronomers of unquestioned reliability. Sometimes it is explained as an optical phenomenon of Mercury's atmosphere -- but probably Mercury has none! A still more fascinating theory is that there is a tremendous tunnel extending clear through the planet -- and the spot as bright as the Sun is really the Sun itself, viewed through a shaft some # miles long! Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl T here is only one anthology for us to consider this month but it is monstrous huge. It is called A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Its editor is Anthony Boucher, and it contains twenty-four separate stories -- four of them full-length novels. The authors involved are John Wyndham, Richard Deming, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein (twice), Philip K. Dick, Henry Kuttner (once in collaboi'ation with C. L. Moore, and again alone, disguised as "Lewis Padgett"), C. M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon, George P. Elliott, Joel Townsley Rogers, Poul Anderson (twice), A. E. Van Vogt, Malcolm Jameson, Oscar Lewis, Judith Merril, George #. Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Nelson Bond, E. B. White, Mildred Clingerman and Alfred Bester. This is a catholic list, as anyone can see. As nearly all the stories are good-to-excellent, perhaps there is no real reason to argue the editor's selection ; it is after all a matter of individual taste, and anyway the anthologist who revives Heinlein's Waldo and Kornbluth's Gomez surely does us all a favor. But... But there is that w'ord "Great" in the title. "Great" is exactly what most of these stories are not. They have their merits -- Tony Boucher's taste does not allow him to sell us a single pup -- but there is hardly an author on the list who is represented by his best story. Indeed, Boucher makes no very inflated claim in his introduction. "It is not a definitive anthology of the very best of all science fiction," he says ; and, later: "My primary concern was simply to get together a great deal of good reading in modern (#) s.f. which had been overlooked by earlier anthologists." This relatively modest objective he has achieved very well ; but modesty stops at the title page. There is another consideration. Perhaps the very bulk of the enterprise forbids this degree of modesty. A net with as wide a maw as this (the book contains several hundred thousand words) should surely have come up with a more more varied one. Some very fine writers are included, of course, but it seems somehow wrong that three writers are included in double strength while at least a score of others, equally good, are not represented at all. As Boucher explains, it was his intention to avoid stories which had appeared in previous science-fiction anthologies. Here his success depends on an exceedingly narrow construction of all parts of the term. Stories from anthologies are permitted if they were not entirely sciencefiction anthologies (E.g., Judith Merrirs Dead Center, previously on view in a Martha Foley volume) and stories from science-fiction collections are allowed if they are not "anthologies." That is, in the usage of the trade, if they are collections of stories by a single writer. This furnishes a loophole for including, among many, Arthur C. Clarke's The Other Side of the Sky (appearing just now as the title story of his newly reprinted collection, discussed elsewhere in this issue.) Boucher tells us that nine of the twentyfour stories have never appeared before in book form. But the other side of the coin is that fifteen of them have. And if a formula could be found to permit including them, surely it could have been stretched to allow an Asimov, a Blish, a Leiber, a Simak, a del Key, even -- why not? -- a Boucher... to include, that is, enough truly great stories by truly great science-fiction writers to justify the size and the title. A Treasury of Great Science Fiction comes in two fat volumes, designed and well and truly timed for the Christmas trade. It is a massive dose of enjoyable science fiction -- it is like having half a dozen issues of your favorite magazine to read all at once -- and it will make a handsome package under almost anyone's tree. That isn't anything like what the title promises; but it's not bad at all ! A ce has reissued Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes, Wells reminds us that when a man of great literary talent tackles a sciencefiction theme the result is very fine indeed. Verne does no such thing. Verne's talents were not literary; his characters are knotty pine; his touches of background description float immiscibly on the stream of the story, like the grenadine in a pousse-cafe. But Verne showed a way. The special merit of Jules Verne as a writer of science-fiction stories is not that he wrote them well but that he wrote them at all, at a time when almost no one else had the wit to see that the thing could be done. Kurt Siodmak is also a pioneer of science fiction, in a way, but he happens to be still with us, still vigorously producing stories. His latest is Skyport (Crown), which deals with the construction of a great, luxury space-hotel, orbiting Earth for the pleasure of the wealthy. It does not contain many surprises. Siodmak, as a writer and director, has been able to convert many of his science-fiction stories into films. Skyport -- flashy, fast and superficial -- might make a good film, but it does not make a ve good book. Murray Leinster occupies both ends of an Ace double volume by himself. The Pirates of Zan on one hand. The Mutant Weapon on the other. It would not seem possible that after thirty years of space-pirate stories any writer could make one come alive ; but Bron Hoddan is a rather unique space pirate, and Murray Leinster is a nearly unique science-fiction writer. Hoddan is, as the blurb on the jacket tells us, "The Deadliest Do-Gooder in All Space," and for once a jacket blurb is entirely reliable. He is all of that... The Mutant Weapon in its previous appearances was, much more intelligibly, entitled Med Service. It has to do with a solitary, publichealth sort of individual who takes care of plagues throughout the Galaxy. Any kind of plagues. He gets into some amazing jams, and Leinster almost never falters. He does not falter here. Rocket to Limbo (Ace) concerns a quest for aliens; the author is Alan E. Nourse. Occupying the same binding is John Brunner's Echo in the Skull, in which the aliens come to Earth and possess humans by limpeting to their backs and infiltrating their nervous systems. Whichever end you start from this is an entertaining volume, if not a very memorable one... The Other Side of the Sky is not only a piece in the Boucher collection, but also the title piece of a collection of Arthui' C. Clarke's own work. It is a solid evening's reading, and perhaps the last all-Clarke for a while. Says Clarke in a footnote: "All my shorter works of fiction that I think wortli preserving are now in volume form." Well, the man will just have to get busy and write some more. gift suggestions for Christmas might be in order. Young readers will enjoy Darlene Geis's Dinosaurs. Mrs. (ieis not only gives the appropriate facts about everything from trilobites to early mammals, but she insures the attention of her young audience by remembering, for example, that the first disinterred icthyosaur was found by a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Anning. Even adults will find enough of interest in this book to keep them going if, for instance, they find themselves required to read it to pre-schoolers. For example, Mrs. Geis mentions, and demolishes, the popular theories of why the dinosaurs became extinct. (#, the Earth became too dry ; but what about the deep-sea forms that perished at the same time? #, small mammals ate their eggs ; but what about the fact that many species of livebearers also became extinct?) The pictures are of course beautiful. We expect that in children's books, but these, by R. F. Peterson, are not only colorful but exact. Older children are prime prospects for Looking at the Stars (Phoenix), a British import designed for the preprimary class of starwatchers. Michael W. Ovenden, its author, does not assume you have already ground your first dozen mirrors. He tells you how to find Cassiopeia from the North Star, he tells you how to find the North Star from the Big Dipper, and he even tells you how to find the Big Dipper. (As he is British he calls it the Plough, but the illustrations make his meaning perfectly clear and, anyway, he uniformly gives scientific as well as popular names so there may be no mistake.) Ovenden does not quite go so far as to tell you to be sure to look up, not down, in order to find stars in the first place ; but he leaves very little else to prior information ; and thus this book is an admirable primer for beginners, teenagers and roughly five out of six would-be science-fiction writers. Two other new science books for teen-agers are less successful. They are by Abraham and Rebecca B. Marcus, a couple who teach science in the New York City high schools; and the mark of the teacher lies heavy on their expository style. Everything is in order, everything is exact. The romance is left out. In Tomorrow the Moon! (Prentice Hall) we once again tread the familiar path from Hero of Alexandria's steam jet to space ships. In Potver Unlimited! we have the same treatment applied to the history of man's endeavor to muscle up his own feeble limbs through, successively, animals, slaves, water, fossil fuels, sunpower and nuclear sources. Both books are satisfactory texts but not too much in the way of entertainment. Potver Unlimited!, what's more, shows a couple of eccentricities worth mentioning. For some reason or other it is printed throughout in blue ink. There are optically better combinations than black-onwhite, but blue-on-white is not one of them. Again, the back jacket asks: "Do you know the difference between a rocket and a jet?" It shows two diagrams, labeled "Rocket or jet... which is which?", and promises : "You ivill know the difference when you finish Power Unlimited," Well, it seems that somebody didnt finish. Both diagrams are of rockets. For adults the problem of selection is only more difficult because there is so much more to select from. Readers of this column will not have failed to realize that there has been an ample supply of first-rate books this year. A non-book gift for almost anyone, science-fiction reader or not, might be one or more of the splendid astronomical photographs issued by AstroMurals. These are large (#x# feet) and almost overpoweringly beautiful; they include several views of the moon, five separate nebulae, a study of Saturn complete with rings and a solar prominence. It is hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't be delighted by a sampling of these; if such a dullard exists, why do you want to give him a present anyway? T urning finally to some non-fiction titles, in SoapBubbles (Dover), C. V. Boys tells us all there is to tell about bubbles, surface tension, the behavior of droplets of liquids in other liquids, etc. If you think this is a modest aim for a #-page book, profusely illustrated with photos and step-by-step diagrams, it is clear that your acquaintance with bubble-blowing is limited to the transitory spherical kind that come whipping out of a bent wire frame. An evening with Boys will set you straight. The book is a classic, not revised since #; but a new preface by S. Z. Lewin brings the quainter terms up to date and supplies an expert's perspective where it is needed. What Boys did half a century ago for soap-bubbles, H. H. Nininger has just now done for meteorites. The book is Out of the Sky, and the publisher again is Dover. Here are records and eye-witness accounts of the most remarkable recent meteorite falls, supplemented with a discussion of the fascinating unanswered questions of the field (sample: Why does the sound of a meteorite's fall sometimes seem to reach an observer fifty miles away as fast as the light itself?), and rounded out with suggestions on what to look for on the offchance that there might be a major fall near you. After all, meteorites are not so obliging as to fall on astronomical observatories alone. Nearly all of what we know of the great falls comes from casual observers, always untrained and sometimes inept; and a few thousand copies of this book in circulation might well help preserve some priceless data from a future fall. Dover has also just published Sex in Psycho-Analysis and the Development of PsychoAnalysis by Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology by Otto Rank and Sumner. As with nearly all the Dover titles, each book is of great importance in its special field, and the Sumner volume, forming as it does the strongest connective tissue between the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, is virtually unique. one which those who want it will want very much indeed -- is A Handbook of Science Fiction and Fantasy, compiled by Donald H. Tuck of Hobart, Tasmania, and published by himself. It is, says the title page, "A collection of material acting as a bibliographic survey to the fields of science fiction and fantasy (including weird), covering the magazines, books, pocket books, personalities, etc., of these fields up to December, #." This is clearly a labor of love. Really a sort of encyclopedia of the field, it is a valuable You can do two things to guard yourself against cancer: Have an annual health checkup. Alert your self to the seven danger signals that could mean cancer: #. Unusual deeding or discharge. #. A lump or thickening in the breast or elseivhere. #. A sore that does not heal. #. Change in bowel or bladder habits. #. Hoarseness or cough. #. Indigestion or difficulty in swallowing. #. Change in a wart or mole. If your signal lasts longer than two weeks, go to your physician. Give him the chance to give you the chance of a lifetime. What's In It For You?  Subscribing to IF has so many benefits and conveniences that we often wonder why all our readers aren't subscribers.  Money in the bank -- just check the rates below and see what you save on the newsstand price; the longer you sign up for, the more free issues you get.  Wear and fear -- just reach into your mailbox and there's your latest copy; no riding, driving, or walking to pick it up -- always, of course, at the risk of finding IF sold out.  Be the first on your block -- you get IF a full week or more before the newsstands do.  And all without having to mutilate this attractive copy if you'd rather send in your order on any sheet of paper instead of cutting out the coupon. Just don't put it off, for tomorrow you're sure to forget, aren't you? IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #. New York  Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the I issue. I enclose (check one) :  # issues...# # issues...#  Foreign Postage # Issues # Additional ! Name I Address  City P. O. Zone State I Ever hear of evil fairies who grant three wishes? McWorther's was more efficient. One wish was plenty to bring catastrophe! I planned well for retirement. His idyllic estate consisted of A t one hundred and thirty, a second-hand planetoid, thirty life was indeed gratifying miles in circumference, which for Titus McWorther. But for was the only habitable piece one missing detail, it would of matter in its system. Comhave been perfect. plete with supplementary With his wife, Edna, he had gravity generator, a compact atmosphere, a mantle of lush topsoil and a carefully selected biota, McWorther's World was both his delight and his pride. Its principal asset was, of course, its isolation. Well away from the mainstream of galactic civilization, McWorther's Star was smugly hidden behind a dark nebula, through which he and Edna plunged twice a year to the fringe of the cluster -- just to observe and mock convention, if for nothing else. It was an ideal setup. But, after two sedentary years, Titus realized he still needed one item to make his retirement complete. So he dispatched this tight-beamed message to the packet order department of Rear-Sobucks and Company in the West Cluster Federation's Hub City: Dear Sir: Please send one automatic bather with backscrubbing attachment and toy boat docks, as listed in your videolog under order No. #-#C. Charge same to credit account No. W#-B#D. Sincerely yours, Titus McWorther, Potentate McWorther's World He listed the coordinates of the star and the orbital factor of his planetoid. Unfortunately, the hyperspatial line between McWorther's World and the nearest relay center was partly coincident with the link to the politically noncommitted world of Gauyuth-VI. This condition, together with the fact that components of a communication are sent by separate pulse, sometimes leads to the embarrassing phenomenon known as "message interfusion," which is retransmission of the right text with the wrong signature. And it so happened that as Titus McWorther's order was en route, the system was also being burdened with this intelgence to the Ganymede Extension of the Western Clustei's State Department: Dear Sir: This will verify our agreement and authorize implementation of interstellar aid arrangements as set forth in conferences with your ambassador. If such arrangements produce mutual satisfaction, we will quite readily declare concurrence, in principle at least, with the political aims of the Western Cluster. Respectfully yours, Ogarm Netath, Prime Minister Gauyuth-VI Appended to the signatui-e were the coordinates of Gauyuth and the orbital factor of its Number Six planet. undersecretary of cosmic aid for the Western Cluster, plucked at his thick, gray mustache as he reread the space-o-gram. He punched the videobox stud. "Mallston !" The younger and more composed face of his assistant stared from the screen. "Yes, sir?" "Anything yet?" "Not a thing. We have no I'ecord of a -- McWorther's World." "What do you suppose?" "Well, it seems authentic enough. We do know Ambassador Summerson has been working in that general area." "And you think Summerson signed an aid agreement with this potentate?" "I'd say the message speaks for itself." Again, Hoverly worried his mustache. "Did you check with Summerson ?" "He's on extended leave." "What do you think we ought to do?" "McWorther's World must be a critical area. And evidently we're going to get what we want out of the deal, since the Potentate speaks of concurrence with Western Cluster aims." Impatiently, the undersecretary glanced out the window. Ganymede was well out of the Jovian umbra now. If he didn't leave soon, he'd be late for his conference with the commerce department on Farside Luna. "All right, Mallston," he said. "Put McWorther's World on a Class A aid schedule. That ought to hold the Potentate until Summerson gets back." In the commercial section of Hub City, Rear-Sobucks and Company occupied a monstrous building whose emblematic tip pierced the clouds. On the two hundredth floor, the twenty-seventh vice-president strode through the rail gate, tossed the secretary a "don't bother to announce me" glance and went on into the inner office of the twentysixth vice-president. "Got something I thought you'd be interested in, V.R.," he told the limp-faced man behind the desk. "There may be a promotion angle." "What is it?" V.R. asked, not exactly gripping his chair with anticipation. The other placed the spaceo-gram on the desk. "It's from an Ogarm Netath, prime minister of a place called Gauyuth-Six. He wants an automatic bather." V.R. extended a "so what?" glare. "Don't you see? Big shots like that don't place personal orders. But here's one who thinks so much of a RearSobucks item that he forgets all about convention." "And so, Wheeler, you want to capitalize on his good name in some sort of promotion gimmick," V.R. said through taut lips. Wheeler shrank. "But I thought -- " "Never mind what you thought. Fill his order. Send it compliments of -- let's see, Gauyuth-Six is uncommitted -- compliments of the Western Cluster." McWorther's World. Cotton-candy clouds floated over the fields. Dreaming herons, balanced on slender legs, gave the shallows of the lake a tufted appearance. A delightful breeze, artificially generated at the equator, wafted flowering stalks and rocked the air car and spaceabout at their moorings. Titus snorted on the veranda and reached for his julep. He was a chunky little man, with the ruddiness of good health tinting his face and overflowing onto his partly bald pate. "Where are you, Titus?" an anxious voice disturbed the quiet of the house. "Out here, Love." Edna appeared in the doorway. Despite her age, there was still the fascination in her timeless eyes that had snared Titus more than ninety years ago. "The chef burned the beans again," she said, frowning. "Cuess ril have to fix it." "You know it's not the cooker. It's that darned gravity." He realized now it was a weight fluctuation that had nudged him from his nap. "I've got it set that way, Love," he explained. "We did not get clouds in the contract. But by varying the gravity control we can have them for nothing. It all has to do with atmospheric pressure." Edna cast a resigned glance skyward. "If that's the way you want it -- fleecy clouds and burnt beans -- " The guttural scream of braking jets rattled the windows and sent the herons winging for the safety of the other hemisphere. Hesitating on the fringe of the atmosphere, the freighter altered its approach and landed beside the house. Titus went out to meet the skipper and his three assistants whose arms were filled with printed forms. "You Potentate McWorther?" the skipper asked. Titus smiled in embarrassment. "It's a gag. I just call myself that." "We got your order," the other snapped. "Where do you want it?" Titus' small eyes widened with an inner vision of the automatic bather -- a vision which went on in speculation to dispose of the crude shower-masseur, for which he and Edna were getting a bit too old. "If you'll put it on the veranda -- " He paused and shouted back toward the house. "Edna, get out the grapplers. We're in business." "Fun-ny," the skipper observed with dry derision. Then he signaled to his waiting assistants. They came forward and, one by one, thrust their stacks of printed forms against TOus' chest. His arms came up in a reflex to accept the offerings, But, as the third assistant's contribution sent the stack soaring in front of his face, he went down under the weight. When he had extricated himself from the mound of paper, the men had returned to their ship. And now its sides were folding down and scores of huge crates were drifting out on repulsor beams and fluttering to the ground. Soon the freighter was gone and Edna was at his side. "What have you gotten us into now, Titus?" "Honest, Love -- I don't know." Suddenly his ears were splitting with the thunderous roar of a thousand ships plunging down to the surface as far as he could see around the perimeter of his small world. Each pulled to a halt a few feet from the ground, opened its sides and disgorged vast mounds of crates and sacks, boxes and barrels, naked hills of coarse material that hissed like gravel as it spewed from chut gleaming masses of machinery. Confounded, Titus seized one of the slips of paper. It was an invoice listing two hundred earth movers, seventy-five instant pavers, five hundred concrete mixers. Matching his frown, Edna read a second sheet and demanded, "What on earth do you expect to do with a hundred thousand barrels of wheat germ oil? Four thousand kegs of eight-penny nails? Forty-five hundred tons of soybeans?" Minister Netath was entertaining his foreign minister, Ugaza Bataul. Netath leaned against the terrace bar and proposed a toast. "To an era of plenty." Bataul smiled. "At the expense of the Western Cluster." They gulped the drinks and Netath stared down into his empty glass. "We're quite fortunate that the Western Cluster's aspirations are extending to this sector." "As long as we can be sure that there won't be any military advances." Bataul added the qualification with misgiving. "Oh, there's no danger of that. Actually, we're lucky we didn't try to get on the Eastern Cluster's gravy train. We'd have had to make a lot of concessions." Heralding its own approach with a sputtering rumble, the station 'copter came in low over the trees and dropped down on the lawn. Netath walked over as his chauffeur climbed out of the cab and used antigrav grapples to float a large crate out of the freight compartment. "Just picked it up at the space terminal," the man explained. "Must be that aid shipment." Bataul laughed. "You mean the first batch of credit certificates, maybe." The chauffeur pressed the "unpack" stud. The sides of the crate fell outward. "What is it?" Netath drew back, surveying the ivory, tanklike thing with its sparkling fixtures and flexible appendages. Bataul bent and read the words on the inscription plate: "Deluxe Automatic Bather -- #-#C." By then, Netath had found the torn, soiled delivery tag. He read the part of the writing that was still legible :... sincerely hope this expression of Western amity meets with your satisfaction. If we can serve you again, please don't hesitate..." Infuriated, he imparted a vindictive kick to the crate and crumpled the paper. "That's the cosmic aid we were expecting?" Bataul sputtered. "Capitalist Western dogs!" Netath exclaimed. "They were just trifling with our planetary honor!" "It's an insult against our racial character!" the foreign minister said severely, "They know we have no use for a bather, shedding our skin as we do once a day." Netath forced restraint into his features. "We will not lose our diplomatic poise. There is always the chance a mistake has been made." He drew the contacter out of his pocket and shouted into its grid, "Miss Yalera?" "Yes, sir?" came the instant answer. "Take a space-o-gram to Solaria." II was made at the hyperspatial relay station, a pattern had been set. Committed categorically to the memory banks were the false associations between the State Department's Ganymede Extension and Potentate McWorther, between Premier Netath and Rear-Sobucks. Thus, it was somewhat to be expected that Undersecretary Hoverly should find himself chewing on the underbristles of his mustache as he read the lastest space-o-gram. Dear Sir: Needless to say, we are somewhat disappointed over the Western Cluster's meager response to our desperate need. Perhaps Ambassador Summerson misrepresented our agreement. In that event, we feel sure that consultation with his Excellency wn'#I set the record straight. We would appreciate prompt attention to this detail. Otherwise, in the interest of our people, we shall feel compelled to seek satisfaction elsewhere. Respectfully yours, Titus McWorther, Potentate Hoverly tossed the message on his desk, punched the audiocorn button and called for his assistant. When Mallston arrived, the undersecretary was still pacing, "Did you take care of the McWorther World aid consignment?" he asked. Mallston nodded. "Delivery should have been made day before yesterday. Full Class A schedule." "Well, it wasn't enough!" Hoverly extended a stiff finger toward the space o gram. "Read that." Looking up finally, Mallston said, "Evidently we dropped the ball." "Indeed we did. Ambassador Summerson must have promised the Potentate the whole works." Hoverly resumed pacing. "I should have guessed as much. President Roswell only last week hinted that the Western Cluster should level its galactic commerce sights on that entire sector." Mallston pondered the gravity of the space-o-gram. "Maybe we should lay the McWorther development before the President." Bristling, the undersecretary said, "And call attention to our own incompetence? We'll straight this matter out by doing what we should have done in the first place -- by putting the Potentate on the double-A priority list. Full and immediate delivery under Class B til rough K schedules." Mallston started out, but paused at the door. "How about cultural exchange?" "We'll play it safe by assuming Summerson shot the works in that category too. Round up every uncommitted cultural group in the cluster." catingly, the twenty-seventh vice-president stood before the desk of the next highest official in the Rear-Sobucks hierarchy. "Well, Wheeler," V.R. clipped without looking up. "What is it this time?" "I'm afraid Netath didn't take too kindly to our gesture." "Netath? Netath?" V.R. milked the name for its significance." "Ogarm Netath. The prime minister of that Gauyuth place. The automatic bather." "Oh, that one." Wheeler handed over the space-o-gram and V.R. muttered through the message : Dear Sir: I'm sure you made a misYou've got to come pick up your shipment right away. We're up to our ears and it's shaking us to pieces. Yours in disappointment, Ogarm Netath, Prime Minister Growling, V.R. dropped an effervescent pill into a glass of water. "You can't get anywhere with these back-planet bumpkins. I doubt that this Netath ever had a bath. Send him a Supplementary Manual of Operating Instructions." Wheeler started for the door. But V.R. called after him. "And bill the prime minister for that article. It'll teach him to show a little bit of appreciation." T itus winced before the persistent tremors that came through the floor of his cellar. He made another adjustment on the gravity control deflecting the planetoid's center of pseudomass another few feet. The ground beneath him finally quieted. "Three days," he mumbled, dragging himself up the stairs. Edna received him with hands on hips. "Three days -- what?" "Getting things balanced again." "What are you going to do about all that stuff cluttering up our beautiful planetoid?" She was near tears. With Edna dogging his steps, he returned to the veranda, where his julep was now quite thin and warm in the rays of the setting sun. "We'll have to find out where it came from first," he said, staring dismally over the mountains of machinery and grain, the tumbled stacks of crates and barrels and kegs, the lesser rows of wheeled and winged vehicles. "Seems to me," Edna persisted, "that the invoices will show that." She gestured at what remained of the stacks of printed forms. The rest of the slips were strewn over the ground as far as he could see. "Only the first sheet will show the origin -- if we could ever find it," Titus explained. He went out to the air car, warmed it up and sent it churning skyward. Near the attenuated top of the atmosphere, he was able to see exactly how much extraneous stuff had been dumped on his world. The main area of disposal seemed to have been within a two-mile radius of the house. An ever-widening helical course, wending its way alternately from night to day, eventually brought him on a great circle that sliced over both poles. Then, with his searchlights still burning, he spiraled inward, covering the other hemisphere. The rest of his world was in primal order. He started for home around the daylight side. But even above the noise of his own rotor jets, the stridence of descending freighters erupted in a pandemonium of sound all around him. Great clouds of rockets, clustered in fleets, were darkening the sky and raining down onto the surface. He barely managed to pull out from under one of the foiTnations before it could pinch him against the ground. Swearing in oaths that he had not used in years, he headed for the nearest group of ships. Before he could close in, they had discharged their cargoes and thundered off into space again. He altered course for another detachment of freighters, only to meet with the same frustrating results. By the time he had aimed his craft at a third group, all the ships had blasted away, leaving everywhere great, gleaming mounds and stacks and irregular rows of crates and containers that completely obscured the surface. Enraged, Titus gunned the craft for home. He picked his way between several monstrous peaks of grain, some of them soaring nearly all the way up through the six-hundred foot thick atmosphere, and threw on his brakes to avoid collision with a tremendous pyramid of what looked like corn kernels. With stark apprehension, he envisioned his world shaking apart under the eccentric forces. But he quelled his fears with logic : This new addition of mass, apparently distributed evenly over all but the four square miles that had already served as a dumping ground, would be unbalanced only to a negligible degree. T itus flicked on his landing lights as he headed into the night. But from over the horizon came a glare considerably stronger than the candlepower of his own electrical system. As he pulled up to the mooring pylon, the explanation was evident. Scores of Pullman crafts were packed so tightly around his house that the blunt noses of several were sticking out over the veranda. He cut off the idling jets. The militant strains of a Venurian march, blaring from the instruments of a hundredpiece symphony, swelled up mightily all around him. The orchestra itself was wedged between two residential crafts while the roof of McWorther's generating house served as the conductor's podium. On the veranda, a full troupe of Simalean Ballet dancers swirled and caracoled, not seeming to mind that they were occasionally overflowing the tiles and flouncing not so lightly through Edna's caladiums. His wife stood helplessly by, still gripping the autobroom which she had evidently wielded without success in an attempt to rout the intruders. Dismayed, Titus elbowed his way through a dedicated choral group that was patriotically rendering the "Fayothian Anthem," sidestepped a tumbling foursome obviously from one of the Lesser Javapa planets and pushed aside a debating team which was having little luck making itself heard above the general cacophony. Edna swept out to meet him. "Titus, they just won't leave !" "Who are they? What do they want?" "I don't know." She was having a difficult time restraining herself. "They asked for the ministry of something or other. Then they said they were cooped up so long that they had to get some practice." Titus bellowed for attention. But nobody turned an ear, except a pirouetting ballerina who whirled to a stop nearby, glissaded over in front of him and made a theatrical display of bending over and planting a set of lip-prints on his forehead -- a gesture that fed considerable fuel to Edna's vexation. "You're cute," the dancer tittered. "You got the woi'd on this place. Pudgy? What is it -- a stopover station?" Before he could answer, one of the tumblers shouted, "It's snowing!" The choral group broke reverently into the ancient carol "Noel" while the orchestra paused on an upbeat and swung into a jazzed-up "Jingle Bells." Perplexed, Titus stared at the dancing snowflakes. But that was impossible! It never snowed here on McWorther's World! Then he remembered the grain peak he had skirted on the way home. It had extended high above the infrared and ultraviolet shields -- into the naked, hot zone where restless winds had wafted the kernels eastward. He picked up one of the "flakes." Popcorn! Ill M any light years away, the Emperor of the Eastern Cluster whirled around, kicked his be jeweled train out of the way and faced his chief adviser. "So they've opened up a new aid offensive?" "And a most vital one." The adviser blew on his spectacles and burnished the lenses against his sleeve. "A place called McWorther. Our intelligence got its coordinates from their consignment documents." "Never heard of it." "That's what's so insidious about this whole capitalist plot. They've kept it under their hats." "And why is it so vital?" The adviser directed the Emperor's attention to a space globe suspended from the ceiling. He pressed two buttons on the wall and twin beams of light intersected within the sphere. "That's McWorther's location." "Why -- why -- " the Emperor stammered. "That outflanks us completely!" "What concerns me is how many other undisclosed but settled worlds lie in that same general area." "A whole raft of them, no doubt," the Emperor said pessimistically. "What are we going to do ?" "In this critical sector we've got to make friends -- and fast! We'll begin with the McWorther place." "How far do you want to go?" "All the way. Empty the surplus bins. Clear out the warehouses. Let McWorther have every available pound of material and equipment." "Terms?" "Terms be damned! We let the Western Cluster steal a march on us. We've got to recoup. Everything goes as an outright gift -- with all the cultural trimmings thrown in." T itus splashed into the cellar and struck out for the hypertransmitter. It was a peculiar flood. Suffusing the water was a thick scum that flashed iridescently as it caught the glint of light from the ceiling. He stuck his finger into the dross and applied it to the tip of his tongue. Syrup ! He thought of the thousands of barrels that had been dumped into the lake and suimised that the contaminated water was backing up through the drainage system. He altered course for the pumps. And, like ships in convoy, a score of virtuosos invaded the cellar, paddling in his wake. The soprano's piercing voice assailed his ears. "In all my theatrical experience, I have never been subjected to such indignity! I insist -- " But a violinist pushed forward, wielding his bow like a stiff finger. "You, sir, are holding back on us. No doubt you know what our future instructions are." "I've never seen such fascist highhandedness," complained a diminutive choreographer in the uniform of a Palosov Rocket Dancer. "In the name of the ministry of culture of the Eastern Federation, I demand to see a representative of His Imperial Highness!" Ignoring them, Titus trudged on to the pumps and set them for maximum drain-off. The Simalean ballerina did a series of rapid turns and watched the spray and the pattern of ripples that issued from her darting feet. "Exquisite!" she exuberated. "I shall have to speak with the maitre de ballet about a nymphal sequence!" "Come on, Pop." One of the tumblers confronted Titus. "What's the gimmick? Why are they keeping us loafing around here?" "Why?" roared a dramatist, allowing his voice full rein in the acoustic inadequacy of the cellar. "I'll tell you : It's a capitalist scheme to abduct the top talent of the glorious workers' federation!" Hands clamped over his ears, Titus finally made it to the hypertransmitter. He jiggled its dials, beat on the cabinet, lifted a foot from the water and gave it a couple of kicks broadside. No results. It was obviously shorted out from the flood. And none of the Pullman crafts was equipped with long range communications gear. Titus waded from the cellar, plodded through the house, leaving pools of syrupy water in his wake, and stalked onto the veranda. The scene was no less hectic than it had been. There were two orchestras now. And they were waging a war of decibels to determine whether the "East Cluster Blastoff March" or the "West Cluster Anthem" should prevail over McWorther's World. Two debating teams were holding forth on the comparative benefits of proletarian solidarity and the free enterprise system. Beyond the caladium bed, Edna, who seemed to have finally succumbed to frustrated abandon, had struck a face-to-the-sun and wind-in-her-hair posture for a portraitist who was drowning futility in artistic endeavor. But there was neither wind nor sun to accommodate the pose, Titus lamented. For, after yesterday's deliveries by the bright red cargo ships, which had obviously been from the Eastern Cluster, there was little left of McWorther's World that could be recognized. The immediate area around the house had been spared in the deluge of material. But, beyond, great sloping expanses of grain and crates, barrels, boxes, machinery, bulging sacks and drums stretched up and away like the inner walls of a crater. Fortunately, disposal onto the surface of McWorther's World had stopped. But not delivery to the system. Coruscating pinpoints of flame, far out in space, signified the presence of thousands upon thousands of cargo carriers that were dropping off their freight in solar orbit. The items of merchandise themselves were indistinguishable. But their composite existence was beginning to take on the appearance of a great ring of fragmented particles stretching around the sun. And Titus supposed that it was only the reliability of the mass-fending generators attached to each article that tentatively kept them all separate and prevented them from plunging like a devastating hailstorm onto the surface of his world. He slumped to the ground and bracketed his cheeks between his palms. For some unaccountable reason, it seemed that the productivity of the entire universe was being showered down on his private planetoid in one vast gravytrain effect. Only he was drowning in the gravy. #ND that's my story."  Undersecretary of Cosmic Aid Hoverly laid his hands on the conference table. "And we now have McWorther's World on a total aid schedule." President Roswell, an angular man with a troubled face, drummed his fingertips together. "Gentlemen, this is most serious." On his right, Ambassador Summerson's head bobbed in accord. The gesture spread next to the chief of intelligence, then to Hoverly, thus making the circuit back to Roswell. "To sum up, then," said the President, "you, Hoverly, authorized aid for a McWorther's World in the #-# area." The undersecretary glanced away uneasily. "But you, Summerson," Roswell continued, "have no record of having signed aid agreements with such a place." "That's right," the ambassador verified. "But deciding to accommodate McWorther's World was the most fantastic stroke of good luck imaginable." Hoverly squinted. "I don't follow you." "When you sent aid to the Potentate, not only did you pick what will undoubtedly develop into the most critical political area of the millennium, but you also beat the Easties to the draw in a sector that they had staked out all for themselves." "A stroke of sheer luck," President Roswell concurred. The roving ambassador leaned back smiling. "The chance timing was perfect too. We beat them by less than two weeks." But the intelligence chief's face was rigid with dejection. "We got their 'firstest,' to use an ancient expression, but not with the 'mostest.' Our agents in Imperial City report that the amount of aid authorized for McWorther's World is unbelievable. The entire Eastern Cluster is going on a full austerity basis to support the program." "That shows what value they place on McWorther's World and the sector it opens up," Roswell offered. "When they found out we'd moved in ahead of them, their reaction was frantic." Summerson rose. "This, then, gentlemen, is it." "It certainly is." Roswell's voice was heavy with despondency. "The most God-awful aid war the cluster has ever seen." "We can't back out," the ambassador warned. "We've got to get busy and face up to the task." "With every resource at our disposal. To ignore the challenge would be to surrender this entire section of the galaxy to the Easties." The President was silent a moment. "Gentlemen, I am Ixerewith sounding a call to economic anns. Cancel all other aid commitments and activity. Thi'ow everything we liave got, everything we can ever hope to produce, at McWorther's Word." "I think you'd better call on the Potentate personally," Summerson proposed. "That," said Roswell, "is exactly what I intend to do." A djusting the drape of his robe, the Emperor sent his eyes flicking over the report. Finally he lurched from his chair with a resounding "Em'eka!" "So you see how it is. Your Imperial Highness," his chief adviser offered. "By cutting in on their McWorther World operation, we have indeed touched a sensitive Western spot." "There's no question about that," the Emperor said lustily. He was a portly man whose sartorial excesses made him seem even more imposing. His eyes, recessed under thickset brows, flared with triumph as he said, "McWorther's World must figure prominently in their planning. From the way they cut loose with everything they had when they found out we were stepping in too, damned if I'm not convinced this new system will be the pivotal point of their entire future strategy." "Then we'd better order double production quotas on every world that flies the Eastern flag." "Triple quotas. And have my space yacht refitted by tomorrow." "You're going somewhere, Highness?" asked the adviser. "This Potentate McWorther is likely to be the third most important political figure in the galaxy. I'm not going to lose any time getting over there and pumping his hand." His face fluslied with rage, Ogarm Netath tossed the space-o-gram at his foreign minister, then snatched it back out of Bataul's hands before he had a chance to read it. "It's a bill!" Netath's voice quivered. "They sent us a bill for that damned bather monstrosity !" Bataul's brow, to all appearances, was ready for spring planting. "Let me have another look at it." Netath stood there trembling while the foreign minister sent his eyes darting over the paper. "It's from Rear-Sobucks !" Bataul exclaimed. "A retail concern that obviously handles automatic bathei's!" "But it was our aid shipment, wasn't it?" "Apparently not. It says here, '... for merchandise previously extended in behalf of the Western Cluster...' " "I don't understand." Bataul's features struggled through a gamut of expressions. "I think I'm just beginning to. Do you remember last year when we had that communications survey made? Between here and the nearest Western relay station, there was that single system. I think some crackpot had laid claim -- of course. McWorther's his name. Calls himself a potentate." Netath stiffened. "And you think -- ?" "I think both we and McWorther are victims of mesage interfusion," Bataul said flatly. "And our aid shipments -- ?" "I'd bet McWorther must be wringing his hands over more loot than he'll ever be able to count." Netath stai'ted punching buttons on his desk. "We've got work to do." "What kind?" "First you're going to get off a message to this Rear-Sobucks bunch and tell them what they can do with their bill and their automatic bather -- if it'll fit. You can also explain what's happened." "This time we'll send the message around the right leg of the cluster," Bataul assured. "Then we're hopping over to this McWorther system and laying down the law to that character. That I want to do personally." Vice-President Wheeler of Rear-Sobucks, "explains it all." "Communications interfusion?" the twenty-sixth vicepresident asked. "Absolutely, V.R. Just like Premier Netath says." "Then there's a Rear-Sobucks customer who has been unnecessarily inconvenienced and still hasn't been satisfied?" With a curt nod, Wheeler confirmed the other's fear. V.R. rose from his desk and wagged a finger at the other. "I still don't understand it all, Wheeler. But I can't avoid the impression that you're somehow responsible for the mess." Wheeler cowered. "You're going to take a trip -- now !" V.R. went on, gathering steam. "You're going to deliver a bather personally to this Potentate McWorther. You're going to extend the apologies of the entire RearSobucks organization !" IV T itus poured his tenth consecutive julep -- directly from the bottle, without the benefit of ice, sugar or mint -- and leaned back in his chair. His occupancy of a comer of the veranda had been a hardwon concession. Almost indifferent now, he stared at the hundreds of virtuosos and shouted, "Go home!" But there was little zing in his voice and the words were, of course, lost in the confused sea of sound -- musical, argumentative, operatic and otherwise. Heedless, the orchestras played, the ballet dancers whirled, painters sketched, gymnasts tumbled, dramatists soliloquized and the vocalists made it plain that they would give no quarter, McWorther's World shudshuddered. And the towering peaks of machinery and grain, cases and crates rumbled ominously as their slopes shifted. Titus' ears popped and he suddenly felt a giddiness that was all out of proportion to the number of juleps he had consumed. An all-too-brief silence fell over the multitude. Then, as stability returned to the planetoid, they dived back into their various activities. They were damned fools, McWorther thought. Even if it meant risking their lives, there and consort in their Olympian ecstasy of artistic communion. It was a field day, old home week, esoteric anschluss, a fraternal blowout -- all rolled into one. A distant explosion rent what was left of the compact atmosphere. And, as an immediate consequence, additional hundreds of tons of grain hissed down a nearby slope and eased into the lake. mewhat concerned, Titus stared at the myriad points of light coruscating deep out in space. What was happening was obvious : There were milticles of freight in the same orbit -- all maintaining their distances from the planetoid and from one another by virtue of their mass-repulsion generators. And, where that many electronic units were concerned, the breakdown factor became a predictable quantity. McWorther's World could now expect to be the target of a plunging chunk of cargo once every four or five minutes. Another few hours, Titus realized, and that interval would be reduced to four or five seconds. For he could readily see the infinite streams of freighters that were still arriving and dropping off additional cargo. As a matter of fact, it was so thick out there now that only a faint, diffused light was coming through from McWorther's Sun. Titus poured himself another mintless, sugarless, iceless julep. T he insigne of the Western Cluster emblazoned on its side, a giant ship felt its way down through the atmosphere, sidled this way and that as it squeezed through the barrier of anchored Pullman crafts, pulled up and hovered over the southern edge of the veranda. At that particular moment, Titus had been quite fascinated with the tumblers' practice session. One of the gymnasts, preparing for a back-flip, had taken a boost from the cupped hands of another. Only the resuiting arc through the air was executed with slow-motion rhythm that took the performer to a height of perhaps twenty feet before he floated back to the ground. At the same time, Titus' ears popped again and he had the odd sensation that the deck chair was shrinking away beneath him. The newly arrived ship lowered an escalator to the surface and the pilot glided down, landing only a few feet from McWorther. "There seems to be some mistake," . he said. "I was given these coordinates and orbital factor for a -- " he checked his notebook -- "McWorther's World." "This," said Titus stiffly, "is McWorther's World." Cupping his hands, the pilot called back into the ship. "We're on the right place." An alarmed face poked out of the hatch. "This is it?" Titus lurched to his feet, returning an equally startled expression. The man coming down the escalator was President Vance Roswell of the Western Federation! He had seen the face on thousands of newscasts. Roswell, sickened, stared at the mountains of supplies on the obscured surface of the planetoid. He tilted his head back and took in the glimmering sea of cargo out in space, the flaring trails of exhaust jets that criss-crossed in an infinite pattern as endless streams of ships jockeyed into position to discharge more freight. Then he dropped to the veranda railing and buried his face hopelessly in his hands. By then, one of the orchestra conductors, who had also recognized the President, had abruptly brought his baton down to terminate the "Lyraen Overture." He led his ensemble into a stirring rendition of the "West Cluster Anthem." Without interrupting his misery, Roswell elevated a limp hand and signaled for quiet. But even before the musicians tapered to silence on a jagged, perplexed note, the other orchestra blared forth with the "East Cluster Blastoff March," all its members standing and facing the northern edge of the veranda. Titus watched the impressive vessel float to the surface, its almost invisible repulsor beams jostling the lesser Pullman ships out of its way. Splashed across its side was the fist-clutching-galaxy symbol of the Eastern Federation. He was still gawking when the hatch opened, ushering onto the tiled surface none other than the Emperor himrobed man who swept like a bowling ball through his retinue of aides. T here were two distant explosions, one close on the heels of the other, and the planetoid convulsed. That time, Titus imagined, he had seen one of the masses of cargo plunging to the surface. The Emperor drew up before Titus. But although his lips moved, no audible sound came from his mouth, since he was in the immediate range of the Eastern Symphony Orchestra's bass section. Scowling, he whirled, threw up this arms and bellowed for silence. Quiet came as though someone had pulled a plug. "Now," he said, propping his fists on his hips and flaring his robe out even furthei-, "perhaps someone will enlighten me. I'm looking for McWorther's World. It's supposed to be here." Titus poured a triple, undiluted julep and gulped down half of it. He said, "You're standing on it." " This ! That's impossible ! What's the population?" "Two -- not counting the transients." Titus started to offer the Emperor the rest of his julep, thought better of it and drank it himself. Roswell withdrew from his dejection, looked up and nodded, verifying the Emperor's stark suspicion. It was apparent that the President was only then aware of the Emperor's identity. And the latter was obviously no less surprised on recognizing his counterpart from the Western Cluster. They only stared uncertainly at each other while the hundreds of virtuosos, sensing the propriety of demonstrating their loyalty, split into two groups and took sides behind their respective leaders. Roswell laughed finally. It was a high-pitched, unnatural sound that conveyed no glee at all and grew only more ragged as his shifting stare once again took in the completely ruined merchandise on the surface, the practically irretrievable cargoes adrift in space. His pitiable outburst suggested an infinity of futility over the wanton waste. It spoke wordlessly of sterility for hundreds of productive worlds over the years ahead -- economic sterility, and its inevitable consequence of military impotence. The Emperor watched him for a moment, then dropped to the veranda rail beside him. He didn't join in the almost hysterical laughter. But his glum features refiected sympathetic appreciation of Roswell's predicament. And in his heavy silence was the admission that the circumstances were mutual. McWorther's World trembled again. Titus inclined his head to one side, jiggling a finger in his ear to stop it from popping. He could have sworn, too, that he had seen the Emperor and the President levitate a good several inches off the rail. Edna stalked from the house, surveyed the new arrivals without giving any indication she had recognized them and wagged a finger in her husband's face. "Titus, this has gone far enough!" she exclaimed. "If you don't -- " "Later, Love," he pacified. "Something's going wrong." She was taken aback by his understatement. But he hadn't meant it that way. He had merely expressed suspicion over his recurrent sensations of lightness. A lmost at the same time, two other ships dropped down at the edge of the veranda. The hatch of the first sprang open and disgorged a thin man in a swallow-tail coat who drew rigidly erect and announced : "His Most August Excellency, Prime Minister Netath of Gauyuth-Six!" Ogarm Netath, indignation branding his features, strode out. "Where's this Potentate McWorther character?" he demanded. A hundred extended fingers singled out Titus, who was just then pouring a thirteenth julep. Netath stomped over. "You sir, have got my aid consignments !" By that time, the other ship had thrown open its hatch and a short, stout man in a business suit emerged. "I am Wheeler of Rear-Sobucks and Company," he disclosed, standing to one side so that two men working with antigrav grapples could wrestle a large crate onto the veranda. "I have an apology and an automatic bather for Potentate McWorther." But Titus turned his back on the man, abruptly facing his wife. "Good God! What day is it?" She frowned in puzzlement. "Why, Wednesday." There was a sharp explosion nearby as another article of cargo came hurtling down from space. "And it's almost noon!" She nodded, still perplexed. "Get into the spaceabout. Love -- quick!" She hesitated and he gave her a shove. But he paused and faced the others. "You got just about fifteen minutes to climb into your contraptions and clear out -- all of you! Because by then we'll be fresh out of gravity!" And they'd be lucky if they had that much time, he realized as he followed Edna into the small craft. He had known he would have to face the inevitable crisis on Wednesday. But all along he had been off one day in his calculations, such that he had been sure today was only Tuesday. "What is it, Titus?" his wife asked as he strapped himself in beside her. "The supplementary gravity generator hasn't been refueled! It's sputtering out!" From space, he watched the end of McWorther's World. The atmosphere went first, swooshing outward as a result of abrupt decompression and leaving a halo of frozen water crystals in its wake. Then the cargo that was piled on the surface recoiled from its own cumulative pressure and shot out into space. The topsoil followed suit, dispersing like a dust storm, while the lakes boiled in one instant and their vapor froze in the next. Before any of the hurtling mess could reach his spaceabout, Titus followed the Pullman crafts, the Rear-Sobucks delivery vehicle and the Presidential and Imperial yachts into hyperspace, T itus and Edna McWorther have given up rustic retirement. Instead they are living out their declining years in a floating villa just off the Jersey coast. Life is still gratifying, with the exception of one detail. But Titus is resolved that he and his wife will have to be content with the shower-masseur for the rest of their lives. At any rate, he'll be damned if he'll put in another order for an automatic bather, with or without a back-scrubbing w I y j  ()(j o o O l) o o o O . O O O O CJ o o o y o O O o O f s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! 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(#tf additional per # issues foreign postage) # Issues  #  # Issues  #  # Issues  #  Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-pagc Galaxy (U. S, Edition only) for: NameState. Address. Behind all science fiction is a stranger-than-fiction science truth. Stimulus is a dynamic new hook for the intelligent layman, with a dramatic analysis of the facts of science today -- and an enlightened projection into the mystery of science tomorrow... The nation's leading science authorities are writing stimulus now, for the aware layman, student, or technical man. The colorfully illustrated, hardcover volume contains chapters on space technology, basic research, energy and civilization, and psychology in today's industry. It discusses the past, present, arid future history of rocketry; the power of the seas; machines that perceive; and many other exciting subjects which provide the key to understanding the present and future of science. Order stimulus for # now. normally #.) science-minded -- proves truth really is stranger than fiction. for creative engineers and executives in all fields of science. If you subscribe now to l.XDi stria l # S. Michigan Av., Chicago #  Please send me  copies of Stimulus at the pre-publication price of # ea.  Enter my subscription to Industrial Research at these special rates:  # for I year;  # for # years;  # for # years (plus a free Stimulus)... rotten enough to call for the intervention of... Named Death swiftly and quietly down the broad hallway toward a door lettered : As Dan opened the door, his trained glance caught the brief reflection of a strange, strong-featured face, and a lithe, powerful, and unfamiliar physique. Dan accepted this unfamiliar reflection of himself as an actor accepts makeup. What puzzled him was the peculiar silent smoothness with which his hand turned the knob, while his shoulder braced firmly and easily against the opening door. He stepped into the room in one sudden quiet motion. The receptionist inside gave a visible start. What kind of a job, Dan asked himself, did Kielgaard have for him this time? The receptionist recovered her poise, to usher Dan into the inner office. Kielgaard -- big, stocky, and expensively dressed -- glanced up from a sheaf of glossy photographs. He said bluntly, "Sit down. We've got a mess to straighten out." "What's wrong?" "A few years back, Galactic Enterprises discovered a totally undeveloped planet with no inhabitants. They claimed development rights and got to work to find an economical route to the planet, which is called Triax." Kielgaard snapped a switch on the edge of his desk and the room lights dimmed out. Three stellar maps seemed to hang in space in front of Dan, one map directly above the other. Kielgaard's voice said, "Galactic found a route to Triax that promised to be very economical. Watch." word "Earth" lit up, and a silver line grew out from it along the stellar map, then jumped up in a vertical straight line to the second map, traveled along this map almost to a place where the word "Truth" lit up. The line then jumped straight up to the third map and traveled along it to the word "Triax." The room lighted and the maps vanished. Kielgaard said, "In two subspace jumps and not too much normal-space traveling, Galactic can ship a cargo from Triax to Earth. That's a good, short route," but it comes too close to that planet called Truth." Dan said, "Truth is the native name for the planet?" "Exactly. Truth is inhabited. The inhabitants look much like us, and they're very highly developed technologically, though there is no sign that they use space travel in any form. The problem is that Galactic's cargo ships will pass close enough to Truth so that the inhabitants -- call them Truthians -- will eventually detect them and may or may not like the idea. Galactic's worry is that after sinking a lot of money into the development of Triax, and just as it's about to make a profit on the planet, these Truthians may blossom out with a fleet of commerce raiders, or else claim sovereignty over all contiguous space and land Galactic in a big court fight." Kielgaard glanced at Dan with a smile. "Suppose you were running Galactic and had this problem. What would you do?" "Try to vary the route. But subspace being what it is, a mild variation of the starting point can produce an abrupt shift in the place where they come out." Kielgaard nodded. "There's probably a usable route, but there's no telling when they'll find it. Meanwhile, the development license only runs so long before Galactic has to show proof of progress." "What's this Truth look like?" "Earth-type, with cities and towns scattered over its surface at random, some of the cities remarkably advanced, some antique, with forest and wilderness in between, and only haphazard communications between cities." Dan frowned. "Well, then, I'd set down an information team, brain-spy some of the inhabitants, and ease agents into key cities and towns. At the same time, I'd go on looking for a new route, and do enough work on Triax to keep the development, license. When things clear up on Truth, I'd develop Triax further." Kielgaard nodded. "A sound and sensible plan. That is exactly what Galactic did. And after a slow start, things began to straighten out very nicely, too. The more Truth cleared up, the more Galactic invested in Triax. And then, one day, this photograph came in." Kielgaard held out a photograph showing a busy street corner in a city at night. A brightly clothed crowd was walking along the sidewalk past store windows showing a variety of merchandise. Kielgaard said, "Look down that street. You see a low building, part way down the block, with a wide chimney?" "Yes," said Dan, "I see it." "Look just above the top of the chimney." "You mean this arrowshaped constellation?" Kielgaard nodded. "There is no such arrow-shaped constellation visible from Truth." "Then this photo is a fake?" "They're all fakes. What apparently happened is that someone managed to get a spy into Galactic's planning division, and through him found out when and where Galactic's agents were to be set down. They grabbed the agents one by one soon after each agent landed. Since then, they've sent back reports to build up a purely synthetic picture of the planet. The only reports Galactic can rely on are the original impressions of the information, team they set down to begin with." Dan whistled. "So someone is working Galactic into position to jerk the rug out from under it." "Exactly." "What's Galactic doing?" "They're trying hard to keep this quiet. But meanwhile, no one knows for sure who the spy is." "A nice situation," said Dan. "What do we do about this planet Truth?"   "the first thing we do is set a man down and let him get the lay of the land. We get more agents ready to move in right behind him. We intend to use the best men available, and nothing but the latest and best equipment. If things turn out as we intend them to, whatever organization started this will come out slit up the middle, stuffed, roasted, and with an apple in its mouth." Dan said cautiously, "Who's the first agent we set down on this planet?" "You," said Kielgaard. "And you're going to be up against a deadly proposition. Our opponent is established on the planet, and we're going in cold. Fortunately, we've sunk a good part of our profits into research and it's about to pay off. We have, for instance, installed in your body cavity a remarkably small organo-transceiver. It uses a new type of signal which should escape detection under any circumstances you're likely to face on Truth." CO I can be more or less  constantly in touch with you?" "In any period of relative calm, yes. During violent action, the interference of other currents in your brain would drown out the signal. But we've also run a series of delicate taps to your optic and auditory nerves, so we should have continuous contact by sight and sound." "You mentioned that the cities and towns on the planet were separated by wilderness. How do I travel?" "We have a new type of unusually small mataform transceiver." Kielgaard reached in a drawer and tossed on his desk a smooth olive-colored object little larger than a package of cigarettes. "The range is only a few hundred miles, but it uses the new type of signal I've mentioned, which eliminates the problem of orbiting a set of satellites to relay the signal. The problem of first putting the mataform transceiver in the place where you want to go is tricky, but we have a little glider that ought to do the trick." He showed Dan how to use the glider, and several other new items of equipment, then frowned and sat back. "The worst of this is, we don't know exactly what to expect on the planet. Some big organization could even be trying to take over the planetary government. If so, a lot will depend on what stage things are in when you land. To give you as much chance as possible, your body has been carefully restructured to give you exceptional strength and endurance. The neuro-conditioning lab has recreated in your nervous system the reflexes of one of the deadliest agents ever known. Don't be surprised if you perform certain actions almost before you're aware of your own intentions. It has to be that way to cut down the risks." Dan and Kielgaard shook hands, and Dan went out to check his equipment. Early the next day, he was on a fast spaceship to the planet called Truth. D AN was dropped low over the night side of the planet in a vaned capsule that whirled straight down, burst open on contact with the water, and sank. From this capsule, a small boat nosed out toward the coast. In the cramped space inside, Dan checked a little gauge to be sure the boat's outer layer had adjusted to the water around it, so that there would be no sharp difference in the radiation of heat to show up on any infrared detector that might be in range. Then the boat nosed down with a suck-swish from the waterjet engine and began to pick up speed. Several hours later, a thin flexible cable shot out from shallow water at the edge of the junglelike coastline. The cable whipped around the trunk of a tree well back from the water's edge, there was a faint low hum, a grating noise, and something slid up over the rocks and pebbles and came to rest among the tangled trunks and roots of the trees. A moment later, Dan was out and dragging the boat further inland. When he was satisfied that the boat was safe, he glanced at his watch. The planet's large moon should soon be up and he intended to waste no time making his position more secure. He broke open a carton of the little mataform transceivers, clipped several of them on small, almost completely transparent gliders, and checked to be sure the little auxiliary motors of the gliders were in working order. He slid on a helmet that fit tightly over his head and eyes, and sent up the first glider. As the faint whir of the small engine receded, Dan could see before him in the helmet a clear view of the sea, with the thin rim of the planet's moon just rising, huge and bloodred, over the horizon. The small sensor unit on the glider sent back an image from a safe height above the forest, and Dan switched the helmet from this glider long enough to send up another. By dawn, he had landed gliders, with their small mataform transceivers, in isolated spots outside three moderate-sized cities within range of the boat. Dan then took another of the mataform units and buried it. Standing nearby, he mentally pronounced a key word. As he did this, the electrochemical change in a nervous tract triggered a tiny implanted device that sent its imperceptible signal to the mataform transceiver. The transceiver interpreted the signal, and for an instant Dan sensed a shift in the pattern of things around him. Abruptly he was standing in the clearing where he had brought down the first glider. Around him were several tall wind-thrown trees. In the gray light of early dawn, he could barely make out the glider and little mataform unit clipped to it. A few minutes later, the unit was temporarily hidden, he had returned the glider to the boat, and he was picking up the second glider in a badly burned tract of forest near the second city. units were all hidden, Dan paused for a moment to think through the next step. The three gliders, invisible to the naked eye as they passed high above the tree tops, might possibly have shown up on any of a number of detection devices, to give away both the starting point and the places where they had landed. It was now Dan's problem to outwit these detection devices. Dan clipped another mataform transceiver to a glider, put on the control helmet, and sent the glider dodging low and carefully through the trees. He found a spot about two miles away that suited him and landed the glider. He swiftly unloaded the boat and carried its contents to the buried mataform unit, where he mentahy pronounced a new key word, which triggered the unit and took him to the glider and transceiver he had just landed. In a short time, he had the contents of the boat stacked beside the glider. Dan then disassembled boat and engine, and stacked the parts beside the boat's piledup contents. By now, the sun was well up, and Dan was becoming aware of a thrumming drone that grew steadily louder. He quickly dug up the buried mataform unit, clipped it to a glider, and hung the glider to an overhead limb by a green string knotted so as to come undone at the first sharp pull. Dan glanced around carefully and listened to the increasing drone. He looked up and studied a bumpy bluegreen limb well overhead. This limb was so located that a spy unit on it would cover most of the place where the boat had been. Dan carefully gauged the speed with which the droning was coming closer, then went by mataform to the pile of goods he had transferred, came back with a long tube, and sighted at the overhead limb. There was a whoosh and a small colorless blob with a tiny bump in the center spread out on the limb. The blob gradually turned blue-gray, matching the limb, and then the spy unit was indistinguishable from the limb's other bumps and irregularities. The droning noise was now quite loud. Dan went by mataform to his new camp and put on the helmet he used to control the glider. An instant later, the glider gave a whir and jerked forward. The knot came untied, and the glider, carrying the mataform unit and a length of dark-green string, flitted out of sight amid the big tree trunks. Dan, his hand on a knob at the side of the helmet, shifted his vision rapidly back and forth from the glider to the spy unit over the spot where the boat had been. There now came into view, in the place where the boat had been, something that looked like a cross between an oversize bloodhound and a tiger. Right behind this came a man with a rifle. Then another man, and another. The angle of vision did not let Dan see exactly where the men came from, but he supposed there was a jetcopter just overhead. The tigerlike animal snuffled around, pawed at the ground, made trips into the jungle on all sides, and finally ran back toward the shore. The men followed close behind. D AN, shifting his attention back and forth from this scene to the glider, landed the glider nearby just as the last of the men left the place Where the boat had been. Dan quickly went to each of the three places near cities where he had landed mataform transceivers, and moved each of them by glider well away, from the places where they had landed. He left behind in each place a small spy unit. He had just finished doing this when several loads of heavily armed men in jetcopters came down in all three places. The men, Dan noticed, wore no uniforms, and the copters were unmarked. Dan said mentally, "Can you hear me, Kielgaard?" "Loud and clear," came the familiar voice. "We're getting sight and sound perfectly." "Have you got your corps of experts working on everything that comes in?" "Naturally," said Kielgaard. "But I wouldn't advise you to stop and chat right now. Those boys seem to mean business." "Do they look like planetary police to you?" "No. They don't look like anything that was born on that planet." "That's exactly the way they strike me. Well, maybe I can make them some more trouble." Dan got out a map and noted a long, fairly straight road from one of the cities near which he had a mataform transceiver to another distant city. From this distant city, a winding river curled away to a city even more distant. That night, Dan intended to make use of road and river alike. But right now he spent an hour or so moving his goods to a place further away from the landing; then he partly reassembled the boat, and catnapped till evening. He was woken at frequent intervals by sudden drops of men and more of the tigerlike animals, at each of the four places where they had been before. Each time there was sudden activity at one of these places, a little alarm buzzed in Dan's ear, and he slid on the helmet to watch a renewed search of the ground. He had the impression that someone had reported nothing was to be found, and that this word had been passed along to someone who had said there must be something there, and it had better be found or else. The search this time was much more careful. But it was not till the last place was searched that one of them came very close to the spy unit, and reached out toward it. Dan regretfully slid back a protective cover at the lower edge of the helmet and pressed a button underneath. There was a dazzling flash, and then the scene was gone. Dan would much rather have kept them thinking that maybe there was nothing to look for after all. But he could tell from their numbers and zeal that he was not likely to have very much his own way on this planet. glider under power down the long road to the distant city. The glider was low enough to avoid the usual detectors, but happily free of the need to dodge an endless succession of tree trunks. The river served much the same purpose, so that well before dawn, Dan had mataform transceivers planted near each of the two new cities, and also at a place right at the edge of the river. From this spot, Dan threw out into the river a heavily weighted mataform transceiver. He returned to the partly assembled boat and methodically put it together again. This time, however, he fitted sections together differently and left the heavy engine out entirely. He put his arms around one end of the thing he had put together and mentally said a keyword. The river water rushed coldly around him, gritty with silt sweeping along the bottom. There was a chug in his ears as the water triggered off the grab anchors around the rim of the shelter. Dan said another key word and he was inside. He snapped on a light and looked carefully around, but found no sign of a leak. He transferred the rest of his goods, checked to see that the selective membrane panel was keeping the oxygen at the right level inside, then lay down to catch up on sleep. The following day, he took three of his small transceivers, and went by mataform to a place outside the nearest city. A short walk along a winding trail took Dan past a series of huts and cabins to a rough covered stand displaying combs, brooms, and other simple merchandise, along with a dusty case of what looked like soda pop, and a dust-covered carton of what appeared to be candy bars. The soda pop was labeled The girl in charge of the stand smiled and said, "Good morning, Death." There was no one else around, and the girl spoke in a perfectly natural way, so Dan smiled back and said, "Good morning." But as he walked on down the trail, he said mentally, "Kielgaard?" Kielgaard's voice replied, "I heard it, Dan. We're checking at this end to see if it's some error in the vocabulary we implanted in your brain." A moment later, Kielgaard said, "As nearly as we can tell here, 'Death' is the word she used." "Funny." Dan rounded a bend in the trail and came to a moderately wide road, paved with smooth blocks of stone. To his right was a wall about ten feet high, with an open gate and a city street visible behind it. From somewhere came the steady beat of a drum. Dan started toward the gate, but had to j ump aside as a heavily armed column of troops marched out, their faces set and their feet striking the ground in an unvarying cadence. As the last of the troops went by, a man standing nearby turned to Dan and said, "Well, there they go. We won't be seeing some of them again in this life." Dan nodded noncommitally, and the man looked at him sharply, then grinned and said, "Good hunting." "Thank you," said Dan. He could hear a faint muttering somewhere in the background, which he took to be Kielgaard and his experts, trying to understand this latest exchange. Dan followed the man through the city gates, and walked past a variety of small shops selling baked goods, meats, groceries, hand tools, books, and appliances. Dan noted the location of the bookstore, so that on the way back he could buy some books. He wanted to transmit the contents of the books ; the staff of experts could learn a great deal from a cross-section of a planet's fiction and non-fiction. center of the city, he noted that the buildings grew larger, and the shops turned into big department stores. These all looked much the same as the ones on Earth, or on many other technologically advanced planets. The merchandise showed only minor differences in design. Looking in a hardware store, for instance, Dan discovered that ordinary screwdrivers had a short curved crosspiece on the handle -- apparently a thumb rest to give greater leverage in turning. Aside from such minor differences, everything seemed the same. Dan had just decided that the planet looked almost like home when he came to a low building with a paved yard. Into the yard trundled several small carts, similar to the kind used to transfer baggage in railroad and mataform depots back home. On these carts, however, were canvas covers, which were thrown back to reveal fully clothed human forms. On all but one cart, the human forms wore the same kind of white garment, trimmed in various colors. These forms -- bodies, Dan supposed -- were lifted from the carts by attendants who handled them with the greatest care and respect. On the other cart, though, the bodies wore street clothes. These bodies were grabbed under the arms, dragged to a black door like the door of a furnace, set in the wall of the building, and shoved through the door head first. As the bodies were shoved in, Dan saw the sunlight glint on what looked like tight metal cords around their necks, bearing oblong metal tags. Several men had stopped while Dan glanced in to watch this scene. Dan now overheard their comments, which were made in tense angry tones : "Look at that. If this referendum isn't over soon, it'll dust the lot of us over the forest." "It's all these charges and accusations that make the trouble. Why we can't do it like civilized human beings, I don't know." "The trouble is, there's no precedent." The men walked away. Dan had the out-of-focus sensation of a man who comes into a room where a joke has already been half-told. He glanced at the low building. "Are you getting all this, Kiclgaard?" "We're getting it. But I hope it makes more sense to you than it does to us." "Well, it doesn't." Dan glanced around, noted the discreet word "disposal" printed on the face of the small building where the bodies were shoved through what looked like a furnace door. Dan thought he could see what was going on here, but the reasons for the things that were happening were totally obscure to him. It was in the next block that he began to get some sort of an idea, when he saw a large poster bearing a blue triangle standing point down. Stamped over this triangle were large Several blocks away was a big poster showing a green triangle, its base down, and NO! scratched, and spattered, as if stones and rotten fruit had been thrown at them. But, though Dan watched carefully as he walked on toward the center of the city, he saw no clue as to what the voting was about. He was also puzzled to find that, though there were many stores, and a fair number of what looked like hotels, office buildings, and apartment houses, there seemed to be no factories, large or small. The people passing here were another source of uncertainty. As Dan approached the center of the city, he began to sense the peculiar air of freedom that he had noticed in resort towns on a dozen planets. And yet this did not look to him like a resort town. Moreover, it was hard to gauge the mood of the people passing by, because nearly all seemed to react to his presence in some way. Some looked suddenly alarmed, a few looked furtive, others seemed pleased and smiled at him. A considerable number of the women had a thrilled look when they saw him. Dan walked another block and saw part of the reason for the resort-town atmosphere. Across the street was a sweeping expanse of green. In the far end of this green was an enormous swimming pool, with floats and concrete islands dotted through it to hold diving boards that were almost constantly in use. Dan, wanting to watch the passersby without their watching him, stepped into a quiet, old-fashioned-looking bookstore that fronted on the green. He looked out the many-paned front window and immediately noticed a change in the people. Without his inexplicably disturbing influence, nearly all of the people fell into two distinct categories. One group had a depressed and angry look. The other group looked cheerful and carefree. Aside from their mood, they didn't seem to differ noticeably in dress, age, or any other way. Dan glanced around the bookstore and saw that it, like the other stores, could be transplanted to Earth, and -- except for the unfamiliar lettering on storefront and book titles -- would hardly be noticed. He nodded to an elderly woman working at a small desk to one side of the store, then walked to the rear, where the stacks of books left a far comer partially in shadow and out of sight from the front of the store. Dan stooped, glanced at the dusty row of books on the bottom shelf, and slid a mataform transceiver behind the books. He walked back to the front of the store, stepped out on the sidewalk, and saw a cart come slowly along in the street. This was the kind of cart he had seen earlier. The outstretched figures of men lay bumping loosely on the cart, metal cords with oblong tags tight around their necks. Dan stepped over to note that the tags he could see all read : dignation from the crowd on the sidewalk as the cart went by. Then there was a sudden silence. Dan glanced around. Walking along the sidewalk toward him was a man about his own height and build, who moved with controlled catlike steps. The man looked directly at Dan and called out: "Hello, Death!" The people on the sidewalk rushed to get out of the way. Abruptly the man's arm swung back and forward. "Catch." Something flashed in the air. Dan's impulse was to jump aside, then tackle the man. Instead, his body turned slightly. His right hand, already partly raised, whipped in a short arc, caught something, flicked it to his left, and blurred straight out again. The man opposite Dan blinked and jumped aside. At the same instant, Dan's left hand shot out. There was a gasp from the crowd. The man collapsed with the butt of a knife jutting from his chest. A voice behind Dan said warmly, "Superb! A return attack complete in one stroke!" Dan turned to see three alert, strong-looking men. One counted bills from a thick roll. The second opened up a square case with carrying handle. The third was unwinding an armband with a badge on it. The man with the case held it out. "If you'll just put your fingertips on these plates, so we'll be sure to get your mating credits -- " Dan sensed from the waitin g attitude of the people watching that this was some kind of test. Unhesitatingly, he held out his fingertips. There were also two bright flashes as a small tube was held to Dan's eyes. Once Dan could see again, everyone seemed relaxed and friendly. The crowd was excitedly arguing the details of what had happened. The man with the roll of bills handed over a small fistful, saying, "Double, for the return at one stroke." The man with the armband put it on Dan's arm as he rapidly recited the words of some rote formula, of which all Dan caught was a frequent reference to "the Code," and the words "peril and deadly danger," and the last words, "now say, T do.' " "I do," said Dan, fervently wishing he were somewhere else. The man with the case was beaming as he snapped the little rod inside. He said genially, "I always know an honest fight when I see it. And these days it's a real pleasure to -- " Just then, he clapped the case shut. The case gave out a clang like the general alarm on a space cruiser under surprise attack. The crowd gave a shout. "Unauthorized kill !" The three men beside Dan jumped forward. Dan's left hand lashed out to smash the nearest of the three men in the midsection. The flat edge of his right hand struck the second man just below the nose ; then Dan had thrown the first man back against the third, had whirled around and seen the crowd start to surge across the sidewalk to block his escape. He sprinted directly past this crowd, so that when it completely blocked the sidewalk an instant later, he was cut off from the view of the three men he had just knocked down. Dan did not doubt that these three men were officials of the planet, and he strongly suspected that they were armed and knew how to use their weapons. edge of one corner of the green, was a tall hedge of flowering shrubs, back of which was a grove of young trees. Dan dodged past carts and small, square, silent automobiles, and ran through this hedge. Behind him there was a shout of anger. To Dan's left were two young trees, growing close together. Dan still had with him two of his little mataform units, and he quickly thrust one of them between the two dark, slender tree trunks. An instant later, he was in the dark corner of the bookstore, hearing the angry shouts dwindle into the distance outside. The door of the store closed as the elderly woman who ran the store stepped outside, apparently to see what had happened. A moment later, Dan was in the shelter under the river. He worked quickly with a small brush and some dye, then got out another set of clothes. He checked his appearance swiftly and thoroughly. Then, with more of a tanned look than he had had before, with much darker hair, and wearing entirely different clothes, Dan mataformed back to the bookstore. The elderly woman was standing by the front window as he came forward, to pick up a thin scientific volume lying on a table and say, "I believe you were outside when I came in." "Oh," she said, "the most frightful thing just happened." She then gave a highly inaccurate account of Dan's fight with the knife man, and described how the crowd was hunting him down right now at the far end of the park. Dan took his change and said, "I'll have to go look." He stepped outside and could see the path of the crowd with no difficulty. The flowering shrubs were flattened, and the ground under the trees showed the marks of many feet. Dan recovered his mataform unit and walked a short distance to look down toward the far end of the green, where the swimmers were all out of the pool -- probably so that it could be searched for Dan. He turned around and noticed near the bookstore a large restaurant, built in a style that made him think of an old English tavern. Several men looking well contented came out. Dan realized he was hungry. He went in, and from a weird merry-go-round serving apparatus got a steak indistinguishable from those at home, and a selection of unfamiliar side dishes that looked good to him, but made other diners nearby wince. Dan paid for his selection and sat down. During the meal, someone at a nearby table began to talk loudly, and someone else shouted, "Spacerot!" There was a momentary hush in the restaurant, and two burly men in white jackets quickly crossed to the table and spoke firmly to the diners. Peace was restored, and the two burly men wove back through several parties just leaving the restaurant, and separated to stand quietly but alertly near the far wall. As Dan ate, he thought, "Kielgaard!" "Right here." "Do you make any sense out of what we've seen so far?" "I get the impression something's about to snap, but I don't know what. Or as my experts here tell me, 'It's too early to venture an opinion.' " "That," thought Dan, "is likely to be the trouble with this place. By the time we find out what's going on, it will be too late to do anything about it. We're going to have to play hunches to crack this one in time." Kielgaard said fervently, "How we crack it makes no difference to me, so long as we do crack it." erable crowd of people went out the front door, and two couples came in. The restaurant, however, remained very nearly full. "Something tells me," Dan thought, "that there must be a lot more to this planet than meets the eye." He got up and walked toward the back of the restaurant. What he had taken for the rear wall turned out to be merely a wall that divided one section of the restaurant from another equally large, where waitresses served individual tables. A flight of carpeted steps led down to men's and women's rest rooms and a gently sloping, softly lighted hallway. People were coming up the hall in considerably greater numbers than they went down, and Dan was startled to see that they reacted to him exactly as the crowd outside had, before he had gone into the bookstore to watch them unnoticed. Dan went to the men's rest room, washed, and inconspicuously studied himself in the mirror. He looked very much different than he had before. Why, then, did the people react in the same way? Dan concealed a mataform unit in the dimly lit lounge outside the washroom, then went out and down the hall. He had gone perhaps thirty steps when a lithe man coming the other way saw him, whipped out a gun, and shouted, "Death!" One instant Dan was walking down the right side of the hall. A split fraction of an instant later, he had thrown himself to the other side of the hall. There was a swift, bright flash. Someone screamed. The gun went spinning and Dan had the man on the floor, both hands locked at his throat. It was a severe struggle for Dan to loosen his hands. A crowd gathered so quickly that there was scarcely room to stand. A man carrying a small box with a handle forced his way through. Dan had his captive, half-unconscious, on his feet. Improvising rapidly, Dan said, "I think that was unauthorized." The man with the carrying case said grimly, "We'll soon find out." He held the man's fingertips to plates in the case, flashed a small tube in his eyes, and shut the case. There was a loud clang. Two powerfully built men wearing armbands with shields stepped up. One glanced at Dan and said, "Want to finish him? He's yours, by rights." Someone in the crowd said, "Question him! Find out which side is behind this!" The man with the carrying case said sternly, "That's neither here nor there. The only question is, which side is right?" There was a tense silence. It occurred to Dan that this planet might not be called Truth for nothing. He was still gripping his captive by the arms and wanted in the worst way to question him. But how, in this crowd? And then he remembered that he still had one mataform unit with him. The man with the case was saying to the sullen crowd, "Maybe you think something's wrong. Maybe it is. All right, you know what to do -- go to the War Ruler -- " Dan mentally pronounced a key word, then opened his hands as he pronounced another. A momentary flash of dense jungle, and then he was in the corridor again, his prisoner gone. moment to register. As soon as it did, someone shouted, "Spacerot!" This word acted on the crowd like a blazing torch thrown into an explosives shack. They began smashing each other violently around in the crowded corridor. Dan barely recovered his mataform unit, which had fallen to the floor when he transferred his prisoner, and had a rough time merely staying on his feet. The savage pressing and crowding in the jammed corridor seemed to drive the crowd to hysteria. Dan realized there was no way to tell when he might get loose. For the second time, he used the mataform unit to get out of the corridor. This time he went to the shelter under the river. He got some strong cord, went to the place in the jungle where his prisoner was, and tied him up. Then he returned to the shelter, fitted a set of small filters in his nostrils, and went back to the lounge outside the washroom near the corridor, carrying a small egg-shaped object. Someone happened to be looking at the spot where he appeared. Dan ignored the staring onlooker, went out to the corridor, and found that things were even worse than when he had left. He threw the egg-shaped object at the wall of the corridor and ducked back into the lounge. There was a loud bang , followed by a number of smaller explosions. Abruptly the lounge was filled with bright points of light and little popping noises. The air was permeated with a gray vapor. The people in the room sagged in their seats or collapsed on the floor, and Dan was very careful to breathe only through the filters in his nostrils. He mentally said a key word and he was in the corridor, standing on a mound of unconscious people. He worked till he found the transceiver, went by mataform back to the lounge, took the transceiver there in case the lounge should be searched, and walked back through the corridor over heaps of people, picked up the other mataform unit, and went on down the corridor. He wasn't happy about the people behind him. When the concentration of the drug in the air reached a low enough point, those on top of the heap were going to come to, then those under them, till there was one writhing hysterical mass that would be even worse than it had been before he threw the bomb. The only good feature -- if it could be called that -- was that they would all very soon be violently nauseated, with an urgent need for fresh air, and yet would be too sickened and weak to, head for the outside in a rush. Thinking this, Dan rounded a corner and came to a dead stop. a short, wide, high-ceilinged cross-corridor with half a dozen doors swinging open as people hurried in, walked a few paces, and collapsed. Either side of this short hall was made of shiny metal containing numerous slots. As Dan watcher, a man came through a door, and in one automatic motion jammed a coin in a slot, ripped off a ticket that popped out another slot, then suddenly blinked and jerked around to stare at the pile of people on the floor of the corridor. Then he collapsed. Dan glanced from this man to the wall above the doors, lights and moving letters, forming a maze that made him dizzy to look at : Dan strode forward and through a door with the numeral "#" over it. -- Directly before him was a short dead-end hallway that abruptly vanished, and he was walking toward a crowd of hurrying people in an immense room. again felt at home. The immense room reminded him of Grand Central Mataform Terminal back on Earth. One wall even had the same kind of huge map of the tunnels and cross-tunnels that gave underground access to stores in the area. But the map here was even larger and more complex. Near its face were spidery walks and moving stairways, so that people could examine individual parts from close at hand if they wanted. Dan looked over the terminal carefully, then walked slowly along looking for a place to hide one of his mataform units. He spotted, near a door in a corner, a poster on a stand showing a strong young man in uniform with a series of numbers, apparently dates, stretching out like a road before him. The stand held a poster on either side, and there was a place between them where Dan could slip one of the mataform units. An instant after he did this, he was in the shelter under the river. Quickly, he got out a very light, strong two-man tent, an air mattress, a hypodermic, and a shiny half-globe with web straps at the back. He immediately went to the spot in the jungle where he had left his prisoner and found him thrashing furiously in an attempt to get loose. Dan injected a small quantity of a fast-acting hypnotic drug, and the man lay still. Then Dan set up the small tent and got the man inside on the mattress. It was now getting dark outside, and, with the darkness, there was a rumble of thunder in the distance. Dan went back to the shelter, returned with a light, and adjusted the half-globe over the man's face and head, then fastened the straps behind his head. He inserted in the man's ears two little thimblelike devices, then said mentally, "Kielgaard?" Kielgaard's voice answered, "We'll know in a minute." After a considerable pause, he said, "Yes, he's responding. Watch." Very slowly, the man's right arm lifted fi om the mattress, then dropped limply. Dan said, "You can handle it all from that end?" "Easily. We've got a team here that will do nothing else but question him." Dan nodded, aware that the voices of specially trained psychologists were now speaking in the man's ears, so that he heard nothing else, while he saw only what the screen in the half-globe projected directly into his eyes. Soon he should begin to talk, and what he said would be transmitted through subspace to Kielgaard's team of questioners. Then it might be possible to learn something of what was going on on this planet. But there was another way that might also help. Dan glanced at his wristwatch and saw that it was late enough so that if this were Earth most stores would probably be closed by now. Dan didn't know how it was on this planet, but he pronounced a key word and was in the bookstore that faced the green. The bookstore was closed. Dan quickly selected an armload of books, brought them back to the shelter under the river, went back and got another stack of them. He set up a spidery device of light metal and piled the books near enough so the feed arms could reach them. A set of rubber-tipped rods like long skeletal fingers turned the pages, while the scanner on an overhead arm oscillated from a position over one page to a position over the other page. Dan said, "How's it coming in, Kielgaard?" "Speed it up a little." Dan moved a small lever. The pages turned more quickly. D AN said, "We'll see how the feeder works before I leave it." Then he got out a mirror and went to work to change his appearance again. The second book fed in with no difficulty, so Dan took four of his little mataform units, which was all he had room for, and went back to the terminal. The crowd seemed to have thinned out somewhat, so he supposed the evening rush was about over. As in terminals nearly everywhere Dan had been, most of the people moved briskly, intent on their own affairs. No one paid much attention to Dan while he glanced around, noting the wall of flashing lights and moving letters, similar to but far larger than the one he had seen before, and a series of sizable blocky structures with large numerals suspended above them, and the stylized outlines of doorways on their four walls. People appeared in front of these doorways, or strolled directly toward them and vanished, hesitating only when a red glow outlined the door to show that someone was coming through from the other side. In the center of the room toward either end were large silvery structures with the word "Information" hanging above them. Dan went to one and found that vertical blue lines divided it into twentyfour sections, with room left over for more that weren't there as yet, plus a section headed "General Information." Dan studied the numerous slots, went to the General Information section and spent most of his change. He sat down with a small package of maps and folders and soon had before him a cross-sectional drawing showing a series of spherical layers one inside the other, labeled, "Level I -- Retail," "Level # -- Retail," "Level # -- Wholesale," "Level # -- Manufacturing," and so on, numbered from the outside in toward the center of the sphere, from one to twenty-five. Dan sat perfectly still for a moment, looking at this. He leafed carefully though the folders, and was soon convinced that this wasn't a map of underground layers under just one city, but of an interconnected system that appeared to stretch over most of the planet. The surface was labeled, "Recreation -- Ordeals -- General." The complex of underground layers seemed to be much thicker than separate floors of a building would be ; the map showed cross-sections of buildings of many stories in the individual layers. Dan studied the map further and found that Level # was marked, "Coordination -- Government." Dan walked to the information machine and came back with a general map of Level #, which was divided into sixteen sections. Sections # and # were headed "Government Sections," and Dan got large-scale maps of each of them. What he was looking at was being reproduced far away on big screens, and instantly recorded, to be examined in detail by staffs of trained men. He was thankful this was so. The map was a maze of colored lines, blocks, and curves, with numbered lists up and down both sides and across the bottom. Abruptly, Kielgaard's voice said, "Dan, see that daik purple oval a little to the left of the center of the page?" "I see it." Dan glanced from the number to the list at the side of the page and read, "War Ruler's Control Center." staff going over those books thinks there is some sort of an arrangement by which a 'war ruler' takes over absolute power in an emergency. What would be a better way to take over the planet than to get control of this War Ruler and then provoke an emergency?" Dan studied the purple oval on the map. "Yes. But what do we do about it?" "The first of your reinforcements will be coming down tonight. If you can get near that control center and plant a few transceivers, we might be able to make a good deal of trouble for anyone who may have seized it." "I'll do my best," said Dan. He got up, put most of the maps and folders into a locker, and bought a ticket for Level #, Section #. As he turned, he noticed two men standing about twenty feet away, talking. On impulse, Dan went, not to the block that would take him to Level #, but instead toward the station that his pamphlet had told him would take him to Section # of the same level he was on. As he rounded a corner and strode up a deserted corridor, he stooped and slid a mataform unit into the space between a waste container and the wall. An instant later, he was back beside the posters where he had hidden a transceiver earlier. Two men were walking in the same direction he had gone. Dan followed them till they vanished, walking very rapidly now, around another corner. He picked up the mataform transceiver and looked around for the blocky structure with the big number "#" over it. He saw it, after a moment, near the wall with the lights and moving letters on it. "Kielgaard," he thought, "what do you suppose that wall is?" "We think it's a sort of abbreviated classified ad arrangement." "Sounds reasonable," Dan thought. Dan was by now near the blocky structure with the big numeral "#" above it. Each of the four faces of the structure had four large doors outlined on it -- one door for each of the sixteen sections of the level. Dan stepped up to the door marked "#" and it was immediately outlined in red. A voice said, "Travelers are reminded of the special restrictions now enforced at the governmental sections. To enter, you must present valid authorization papers, or state an acceptable reason for entering." Dan stood perfectly still. He was fairly sure now that he must get into this section. But how? At that moment, the lights of the huge wall of moving letters caught his attention, and Kielgaard's voice said, "Dan, look to the left, about halfway up." Dan looked and saw moving letters spell out : D AN realized he had seen parts of this ad spelled out twice at the terminal entrance. He didn't know if it was a trap or something he could use. He said, "I'm interested in a job on Level #." "You have examined the record ?" Dan had no idea what this meant. He said, "I understand men with fast reflexes are wanted on Level #." "One moment." There was a short pause, then a new voice. "What we offer you is a special credit allotment sufficient for all normal mating and purchase needs. On account of these latest restrictions, I can't tell you exactly what the job is, but I can say this: The rewards are great. But you also might end up getting sprinkled over the forest. We've got a situation down here that has to be cleaned up fast. With the special referendum tomorrow, it might boil over and make an interstellar mess. We want you for a night's work. At the end you're either rich or dead. How abQut it?" Dan thought of the two words "interstellar mess," used in connection with a "special referendum." He had the sensation that he was getting close. "All right," he said. mataform stations shuttled him from one place to the next. Then he was walking into a large room holding about thirty men, all of whom had something of the look of big cats alert for prey. Dan had hardly come in when a lithe man walked out on a raised platform, looked over the waiting men, and said, "I'd like to wait till there are more of us, but there isn't time. I'll come to the point without delay. I'll only explain it once, so listen carefully. "On this level, we have the War Ruler's control center. Two levels up, there is the planetary zoo. Among the animals in the zoo is an ape about our size and general shape, with a thick layer of fur, strong muscles, and a sense of humor like a whitehot rivet dropped down your collar. By some process I don't understand, about fifty of these apes have gotten into a storeroom in an arms depot attached to the control center. "With this referendum coming up to decide whether we should join the Stellar Union, every time there is a disturbance the election committee blames it on one faction or another. Using their emergency powers, they then clap on some new restriction to keep order till the referendum is over. If there is now a disturbance near the control center itself, tempers are going to shorten further. If the blame should be stuck on one side or the other, true or untrue, it could swing the vote either way. "We have got to get those apes out of the arms depot right away. The trouble is, there's an alarm in the arms depot that can't be shut off except from the control center. Fire any kind of impact or vibration weapon in there, or change the composition of the atmosphere by pouring in gas, and the alarm automatically goes off in guard stations all over this level. If we had more time, we could starve them out. We don't have the time. "The result is that we have to go after them with knives and clubs. Now, the apes are fast, they gang up, they throw things, and if they can, they'll grab you from opposite sides and pull your arms and legs off. That's very funny -- for them. So we'll have to work together as a team and fight as hard as we know how." ed, there was a silence in the room. Dan was thinking over the idea and he liked nothing about it. He had little enough time to do his job, and he did not want to spend it being pulled to pieces by apes. He called out, "Mind if I make a suggestion?" thing. Let's hear it." Dan said, "I don't know about anybody else here, but I am no team player myself. Let me go in alone first. You wait half an hour and then come in and see if there are fifty apes left." Everyone craned to see who was offering to fight fifty wild apes singlehanded. The man on the platform turned pale, but said, "Agreed. And if you win, you received the combined credits of all." Dan found himself walking down a corridor, surrounded by well-wishers, to a room where several tables were loaded with hand-weapons. He picked up a short weighted club, and a short doubleedge, razor-sharp sword. A few minutes later, he arrived at a heavy metal door studded with rivets and painted green. Dan had intended to hide a transceiver nearby on the outside and spend as little time in the storeroom as possible. But everything had happened so fast, and there were so many eyes watching him, that he had no chance to hide a mataform unit anywhere. There was a loud clang as the heavy door swung shut behind him. Then he was in a big dimly lighted room with a twelve-foot aisle running down the center, a narrower aisle along each wall, and high piles of wooden crates and wirebound heavy cardboard cartons spaced five feet apart to either side of the central aisle. There was a strong smell of damp dirty fur. On the floor partway up the aisle lay what looked like a clothed human arm. From the far end of the building came a series of low gruff barks. A humping motion ran along like a wave up the aisle and over the piles of crates toward Dan. He glanced briefly to either side at the solid concrete walls of the building, felt behind him. The door was locked. It flashed through his mind that up till now he had had good luck on this planet. Dan saw, in the nearest corner of the room, several pipes that ran up from the floor and were bent to travel along near the ceiling. He quickly slipped a mataform unit behind these pipes on the floor, then cut into a cardboard carton about fifteen feet away and put another unit inside. He tossed a third on top of the nearest pile of cartons, mentally said a key word, and was on the pile slashing open a carton to slide the unit inside. Then he was on the floor in the corner. In the dim light, the shadowy figures came toward him. Their long arms swung up and a barrage of rifle parts, bayonets, scabbards, and helmets smashed into the corner. Dan was fifteen feet away when they hit. An instant later, he was back, kicking the rubble out of the corner. There was a repeated gruff cough, then the aisles were jammed, and he had a brief view of bared teeth in fur-covered faces, and hairy arms that reached out to grasp him. There was a grisly laugh that started as a low chuckle and ended on a highpitched wavering note. Dan mentally pronounced a key word and he was on the pile of cartons with a half a dozen apes. The short sword flicked out and back. Other apes sprang from the next pile of cartons. Dan dropped the weighted club, threw his last mataform unit toward the top of a pile across the aisle, and an instant later had recovered it, dropped to the floor, and raced up the aisle. clicking together and then the wavering laugh burst out again as the apes turned to chase him up the aisle. Dan slid the transceiver into a slitopen carton and whirled as the leaders rushed toward him. The short sword flashed out and back in rapid thrusts, and abruptly Dan was on top of the first pile of cartons. He recovered the weighted club, glanced down at the apes turning to rush up the aisles, and then suddenly he was with them, slamming the last few of them over the heads with the weighted club. He thrust, stabbed, and smashed, now in one place, now another, always striking the gibbering horde where they were fewest and most off-balance. After a long, hideous interval, there came a silence. Dan could see that there were four heaps of dead or unconscious apes, the only live ones were a few clinging to overhead beams with their eyes shut. Dan recovered his transceivers and made his way to one of the few windows in the room. This was about seven feet from the floor, heavily barred, with its glass panes broken out. Dan pulled himself up and looked out at a walk and a high wall a few feet away. He cut the sleeve of his shirt into strips and knotted the strips together with a transceiver tied onto either end, so that one transceiver hung on the outside and the other on the inside. Then Dan was outside, in an underground part of the planet where no one was supposed to be without an official permit. The air seemed as fresh as outdoors, while overhead there was the appearance of the sky on a heavily overcast day. There was light enough to see by, but it was apparently dimmed to provide an artificial night. Dan saw no one, and said mentally, "Kielgaard?" Kielgaard's voice had a hoarse sound. "Are you out of that place?" 'Tm out of it -- thank heaven." "Amen. But listen, things have taken a nasty turn." "What's happened?" "We've questioned that prisoner. The outfit behind this trouble is Trans-Space. But they don't have the control center. Instead, they've got the headquarters of the election committee that controls the referendum. TransSpace is representing itself as the government of an interstellar league of planets. They have everything set up to falsify the vote tomorrow." Dan frowned. "What of it? I can still plant the mataform transceivers and we can bring men down from above." "Yes, but Trans-Space has a mataform terminal set up in the terminal election headquarters. It hooks into the local system and connects with an outpost in the jungle on the surface. Trans-Space has been building up to this day for over three years. The election headquarters is manned like a fortress. It's in immediate touch with the outpost on the surface where they've got an army of reinforcements." Dan stood still, thinking. He remembered the official with the carrying case in the corridor overhead, who had said to the angry crowd, "Go to the War Ruler." Dan mentioned the incident and said, "What about this War Ruler and his emergency powers?" K ielgaard said, "it looked promising to us at first, but actually that's as if someone should say, 'England is in peril. Go to King Arthur " "What?" said Dan, puzzled. "The War Ruler is a myth. A thousand years or more ago, after a terrific internal war, they had a famine. They also had a huge army to disband, headed by a very popular leader. The army apparently threatened to take over the planet, but by a clever gimmick, the government put off the crisis. They announced that their scientists had discovered a way to halt the flow of time after the famine -- and the War Ruler marched the whole army loyally into a kind of big mausoleum where they presumably killed the lot of them with a quick-acting gas. That is the War Ruler's Control Center. "Ever since then, they've been making ritual gestures. They stock new arms of standard design nearby, and recruit a number of fresh soldiers to join the old -- as a population control measure. To make the illusion complete, they say that any man or woman who sincerely believes the state to be in peril can enter the control center, by passing through a lethal field that kills the insincere and lets the sincere through alive. A number of people have tried it and got killed, so now they don't try any more." "Where is this place?" asked Dan. "If we read your map rightly, that wall in front of you marks the edge of the field surrounding it." Dan set down one of the mataform units and mentally pronounced a keyword. He was in the shelter under the river. An instant later he was back by the wall, a glider and the control helmet in his hands. He clipped a transceiver to the glider and guided it toward a huge, dark-stained building with the look of a fortress. He sent the glider around to the front of the building and saw two huge bronze doors, one of which stood open. There was a totally still, motionless look about the place that Dan did not care for. But the glider had come to a closed inner door and that was as far as it could go. Dan took off the control helmet, drew a deep breath and said a key word. He was standing in the huge hall, before the closed door. He opened the door. Before him was a room with tall slit windows, and as Dan went in, he could see dimly, but, like a man in a hall of mirrors, what he saw did not make sense. Distorted shapes and forms, with bright points and blots of light, shifted as he moved, and shifted again as he moved closer, to see one leg of what looked like a very old, faded table. A heavy cable ran up the leg to the top, where there was a switch, and a bronze plate with the words, "Open Switch." Dan reached for the switch, and hesitated. If Kielgaard's theory was right, he would now be electrocuted, or otherwise disposed of. He swallowed hard, reached the rest of the way, and opened the switch. A pall of choking dust spread over the room, with the sound of coughing all around him and the rustle of clothing and stamping of feet. Dan wiped his streaming eyes, and saw a man in uniform behind the desk, all but one corner of which looked new. The man stared at Dan and said, "So soon? What's happened?" D AN glanced around. The huge room was filled with tough, weary-looking men in combat uniform, all fully armed and equipped. H e thought fast, turned back to the man behind the desk and said earnestly, "Peace is restored to the planet. It's been rebuilt and the damage is all repaired. But now, fantastic as it may seem, an enemy has come down to this world from outer space -- " The man at the desk angrily brought down his fist."No one lives in outer space! That's foolishness!" Dan said, his mind racing, "Whoever they are, they've seized a vital communications center! They've got men on guard, armed to the teeth. They've issued orders through captive government officials to seal off this part of the level from the public. They're trying to take over the whole government!" There was a stir in the room and a low ugly rumble. "I knew it," said the man behind the desk, jumping to his feet. "I knew they'd lie low and then creep back again when things are quiet. If we'd been demobilized, it would all have been for nothing. But we aren't demobilized!" Abruptly there were shouted orders, and someone was gripping Dan by the arm. "Just lead the way. Show us where they are and we'll take care of the rest." Dan said mentally, "Kielgaard?" Kielgaard said, "Good Lord ! Go straight outside and turn right." Someone threw a switch beside the door. Outside, they followed Dan to the right. Behind him, Dan heard the mutter and cough of engines starting up. They were in a welllighted street like that of a large city, but there was no traffic, either because it was late or because of the travel restrictions. Kielgaard said, "Next left and it's in front of you." Dan turned the corner. Directly before him was a large white marble building with a lawn on either side of a broad flight of steps, and guards on the sidewalk, the steps, and in emplacements in the shrubbery on either side of the steps. One of them saw Dan and casually snapped a shot at him. Dan got back around the corner fast and looked around. On both sides of the street, men were lying flat at the bases of the buildings, or crouching in doorways. Down the street, they were running up a block to the left. Up the middle of the street came a tank. It paused just out of sight from the building around the corner, and an amplified voice boomed out, 'This is the War Ruler. Get out of that building before the count of thirty, or we clean you out." A voice began to count. There was a sound of fast footsteps on the sidewalk around the corner, and half a dozen men carrying guns came into view. Dan recognized some of the men who had searched the place where he'd landed his boat. One of them, not yet quite in a position to see the tank, called out irritably, "All right, you. Get out here!" Then he caught sight of the men lying at the base of the buildings, and crouched in the doorways. He fired. Flashes of light came from the men by the buildings. There was a roar and a grind and the tank rolled forward. A whistle blew. Dan heaved a mataform transceiver toward the emplacement at the base of the stairs, and an instant before it landed, he mentally pronounced a key word. In the emplacement, he jerked the men away from their gun before they could fire a shot. He knocked them senseless, grabbed a rifle, and sprang up onto the staircase, with the intent of sprinting to the other side and diving into the emplacement there. Halfway across the steps, there was a sensation as if someone had smacked him between the shoulder blades with a rifle butt. He saw the stairs coming up to meet him, and then he saw nothing. face smiling at him through a sort of fog. The fog cleared away, and a highly attractive nurse was looking at him very admiringly. She said, "Sir, you have a visitor." Dan glanced around and saw Kielgaard, a sorrowful look on his face. Dan said as the nurse went out, "She spoke Truthian, didn't she?" "She did. You're still on the planet." "What's this 'sir' business and the pleasant smile for?" Kielgaard said. "You're a hero. It shows, incidentally, how the best experts can make awe-inspiring mistakes. We gave you fast reflexes, thinking that would make you safer. But it turns out that the planet has a class of authorized assassins who hunt down criminals for a livelihood, and never get too numerous because they fight each other for extra credits and prestige. With your fast reflexes and built-in wariness, the populace immediately spotted you for one of these lawful assassins, so you couldn't have been more conspicuous." Kielgaard shook his head. "Meanwhile, Trans-Space was bringing in hired killers to knock off the planet's lawful assassins at a huge bonus per head, in order to create an uproar so that the election committee, which they had already captured and conditioned, would clap on more restrictions, thus creating more tension, so that Trans-Space could swing the referendum at the last minute. You see, the most dangerous thing we could have done to you was to give you these extra-fast reflexes. But now, because of it, you're a hero." Kielgaard looked sad. "Luckily," said Dan, "I'm still alive. And so were all those soldiers." "Another mistake of the experts," said Kielgaard. "The highest authorities on Truth strongly suspected something was wrong with the protective field around the control center. This made them fearful that the scientific device to halt the flow of time hadn't worked either. This would have been a terrible catastrophe, so by a set of rationalizations that would do credit to a bunch of habitual liars, they evaded the whole issue. The experts and I made the mistake of drawing the logical conclusion. I'm glad it wasn't so." "What happened to TransSpace?" Kielgaard stopped looking sad and smiled a smile of deep satisfaction. "Galactic has its contract with this planet. Trans-Space is in a very anemic condition. The Truthians don't like people who lie, and they always settle their accounts very strictly." Kielgaard's face subsided into its gloomy look. Dan said, "What's wrong?" "Well," said Kielgaard, "you see, you're a planetary hero for settling that business with Trans-Space. Also, you have -- let's see" -- he took out a slip of paper -- "the equivalent of around six hundred thousand dollars spending money for cleaning out those apes, plus -- I don't know how to translate this -- six thousand mating credits. They have a weird system for romance, and these credits -- " Dan grinned. "Envious?" "It isn't that," said Kielgaard. "I'm thinking how I'd feel in your place. These Truthians don't have any give in their system. Right's right, and wrong's wrong, and they hand out rewards and punishments irrespective of persons." There was a sharp rap at the door. Dan tried to sit up, but he was still too weak. Kielgaard said sadly, "I tried to reason with them, but I might as well have talked to a wall." "Listen," said Dan, becoming alarmed. "What's wrong?" "I don't have the heart to tell you," said Kielgaard. case, he said, "Do what you think best. I might mention that we're giving you a bonus, though I suppose that's no consolation." The rap at the door was repeated and there were sounds of arguments outside. "What's in that briefcase?" said Dan. "A big version of the kind of mataform transceiver you used. There's a dreadnaught of ours orbiting the planet with another transceiver like this on board. The key word, in case you should have use for it, is 'Krakior.' " The door burst open and three men came in, arguing with a man in a white jacket. "That doesn't matter," said the first man, a familiar-looking individual who was opening a square case with carrying handle. "The only question is, was it or was it not an unauthorized kill, and is this the man? We have our checker set up to answer this question and that's all there is to it. " He glanced at Dan. "Hold out your fingertips, please, and touch those plates. Purely a routine check." Behind the man with the case were two men with armbands and shields. One glanced disinterestedly at Dan and cocked his gun. Dan looked at the head of A Section and said fervently, "Thank you, Kielgaard." The doctor in the white jacket was arguing to no visible effect as the tube was held to Dan's eyes, snapped back into the case, and the case clapped shut, to give its loud alarm clang. The assassin with the gun calmly leveled it at Dan and fired. All he hit was a suddenly empty bed. Dan had said the key word. Thirty Degrees Cattywonkus It doesn't take a heap of leaving to make any house a nightmare. One vanishing door will do nastily. And they were newlyweds. And were still a mite flighty. And for a while that accounted for the whole thing. At tbs moment, it seemed to Ernie Lane that in a house which even the real estate agent said had "either" eleven or twelve rooms, it was quite conceivable that lie and Melinee had overlooked that extra room. After all, they had only been living at # Cedar Lane for four days and had hardly had time to make a complete survey of the place. Now it was quite different. For Ernie Lane had stopped walking hurriedly past that extra door, had stopped giving it only casual curiosity, had even stopped wondering afterward. This night he had come home a bit tired, gone directly to greet his loving wife, and then decided to put a stop to the gnawing question. While Melinee fried the chicken, Ernie walked carefully and wordlessly to the dim hallway. He went past the staircase, past the telephone, to the darkest spot between the living room and the study. He stood for a strange moment -- there was no extra door. He felt the refinished wall, his fingertips searching for hidden panels. There was none. "Supper's ready," Melinee called. "Ernie?" But it had been there last night, the night before, the night before that, and the very first night the real estate agent brought them over. In fact, he recalled, that was the reason the agent had been uncertain about the number of rooms. And why had he passed it off as a joke, simply turning from the extra door without opening it? Ernie felt again. It was ceasing to be a joke. He was not a man of hallucinations. He was not a victim of superstition, fear or nearsightedness. He only wanted to know why he saw a door one day and didn't see it the next. He called a comforting word to his wife, then reached for the telephone book. He found the name of Hartley and Hartley, Real Estate. PLaza #-#. Without any undue commotion, he dialed, in a moment, a woman's voice at the other end seemed to barge into his life. "Special operator. Number, please?" "PLaza #-#." "Sorry, sir, we have no such number -- " Ernie let a disgruntled voice thunder into the phone: "Then what the heck is Hartley and Hartley Realty doing with it?" A pause. Then she replied, "Sir, we have no Hartley and Hartley -- " "Don't be silly," he said. "I just found it in the phone book." She answered, "We have a Hartfield and Hatley, Realtors, Inc., sir, but no Hartley and Hartley. Their number is in the directory." Melinee was standing behind him. "Who are you calling?" He was shaken, but he managed to appear calm as he hung up. He even relaxed against the wall. "I was trying to get the real estate agent on the phone -- these lights ought to be brighter -- and I thought he could refer us to his electrician." "His what?" Melinee asked. "Elec -- " He halted. "Never mind, honey. I'm beat -- rough day. I need fried chicken." He hugged his trim, prim wife and they walked toward the kitchen arm in arm. But it was not until they settled at the table that he saw, under the bright electric light, that her hair was red, not blonde, and he immediately felt he'd been gypped. Her smirky little voice added to the shock. "Darling, don't call me Melinee when my name is Marsha. It just isn't done." an uneventful evening, arose the next morning, ignored his wife's red hair, conveniently forgot her name, avoided even checking to see if the door was there, and saved up a sneer for the telephone. During the day, his business life was perfect. He got the Jenkins account, lunched with the boss, and was asked to serve on the membership committee in the Chamber of Commerce drive. However, during the afternoon he developed a terrific headache and excused himself from the office long enough to see the company physician. The thin, foxy doctor handed him a pill and a glass of water. After Ernie had swallowed the pill politely, the physician leaned forward and gazed at his eyes and forehead. "Tell me, Lane -- you're a newlywed, aren't you?" Ernie nodded. "Then why the worried frown? You seem to be carrying the Rock of Gibraltar on your shoulders. Is your job too much for you?" "Of course not," Ernie said, smiling. "I told you I had a headache." "Perhaps," the doctor said, smiling back. "You seemed to have been in something of a prepossessed state when you came in. I was just curious." Ernie laughed it off and at the doctor's request lay on a cot for a period of ten minutes. When he returned to the office, there was a request that he call a "Marsha." The sudden venomous thoughts of the evening before spun before his eyes. What the devil was going on with the woman? The new name, the new hair-do, the new smirk in her voice -- that wasn't the woman he married. He grabbed the phone and called home. Twenty rings. No answer. It was a quarter of four when the switchboard notified him that his wife was on the line. "Hello, Ernie? This is Melinee. I'm at the Lee Hat Shop. Can you meet me in half an hour? I want to do some shopping and I thought we'd have supper and maybe see a movie." Melinee? It was all like a breath of spring. Away from that house, she was a different person. Happily, he agreed to buying her a. new hat, supper and a ticket to Loew's State. For Melinee, anything. For Marsha, nothing. And when they met, surely enough her hair was blonde again and the smirk in her # ? voice was gone. She was his bride, and he forgot whatever the past, present or future might hold. The future, however, was not long coming. After the movie, they returned home and were about to settle down when, passing along the hallway, Ernie looked over his shoulder and saw the extra door. Quickly, he reached past Melinee and grasped the knob with his hand. "Ernie, what on Earth!" She startled him. He laughed, and they went in to bed. It was around one a.m. when Ernie decided he would not be able to put off any longer the chore of exploring that hall door. It plainly had not been there the night before; it plainly was there tonight. He tiptoed softly from bed and left the room. Melinee did not even stir. He closed the door lightly and cat-footed his way through the darkness to the wall switch at the foot of the stairs. # Stealthily looking all about him, as if someone or something might suddenly try to stop him, Ernie sneaked up on the door. He grabbed the knob with both hands, turned it briskly and the door swung open. The pale green wall of the hallway confronted him. It was as if the door were merely hinged onto the wall. No opening whatever. knuckles. Then he examined the door. It was a French style thing extending from floor to ceiling with contrasting green slats. Identical with those appearing all along the hallways, most of them closet doors. Just for the heck of it, he thought he would drag out a hammer and uncork the screws holding the false door -- carry it to some conspicuous place and observe as it went through its next disappearing act. But as he turned to head for the tool cabinet, Ernie heard the din of distant shouting -- as if a room-full of men were playing cards. And yet not so distant. For a moment the world became silent. Ernie pressed an ear against the wall behind the false doorway. It seemed to be coming from inside, and there were only a few words of any audible clarity. "Maximum -- not much longer -- and logarithms -- " Ernie tried the adjacent door. It opened into a small storage room, unlighted. He felt around the wall paneling, but no switch. Gauging the dimensions, it seemed to him that the storage room practically accounted for all the space behind the hall. If the fake door opened onto a room, it could only be this room, and there was nothing here. He listened. No sound inside the confines of the room. But the moment he returned, pressed his ear against the outer wall, Ernie heard them shouting again. It was as if the wall were twelve inches thick -- as if he were not hearing anything at all -- and yet hearing. The thought struck him -- there was a laundry chute opening from the second floor to the storage room. Provided they wanted to install a chute. Meanwhile, the agent had told him, it would remain just a hole in the floor. He and Melinee had not made any plans for developing the second floor. It was evident that his mother would one day have to live with them, and her own invalid sister, in time. And then whatever children there might be. But so far he and Melinee had actually made only one trip up there with the agent. In fact, there was no electrical connection to the upstairs whatever. Ernie remembered the layout, however, and made his way up the stairs that creaked in defiance of the agent's compliments. When he reached the top in the pitch blackness, he felt for the wall. A strange coldness not at all common to the summer season moved out along the hallway. It seemed to hover around him, curious of the intruder. Imagination. He walked on, an inch at a time, for he remembered a small table about half way along. But he never felt the table. Ernie reached the end of the hall before he was sure -- and where had the table gone ? He returned along the opposite wall until he felt the small square paneling. Then a brass knob. He pulled it open, half expecting the end of the world. And at that point, a bluish haze filled with gaseous, luminous smoke rose out and blinded him. When the obnoxious odor of the smoke was gone, he took a deep breath and stuck his head in again. Directly below him sat three men, fat and jovial, shaking their pipes at one another. There was a row of red and white lighted tubes, not unlike fluorescents, a mahoganylike counter that might pass for a bar, and a row of bottles against a mirror. T HE dimensions immediately struck Ernie as all wrong. It was far bigger than the hall closet where it was supposed to be. In fact, the portion he saw seemed to be the focal point of a large dance hall or bar room. But the most obvious quality of the scene was the tilted floor. The whole thing seemed to be about thirty degrees lopsided. Ernie could go immediately back to bed and tell of his dream tomorrow, or he could make things worse by yelling at the men below. As if they had seen him through the tops of their balding heads, they motioned to the bartender, then pointed squarely at his vantage point. Ernie felt the quavering impulse to run, and yet even in a nightmare you try desperately to learn the ending. The man in the white coat set the ladder firmly against the floor so that the top ended in the slightest kind of tilt near the chute door. It was not Ernie's intention to crawl through the door, but the way the man motioned, and the way the men turned briefly and waved, simply as if they might be old acquaintances waiting for him in a hotel lobby -- it was, to say the very least, overwhelming. There was a fragrance, an allure about the room. It smelled of apples and tobacco and brought nostalgic thoughts of college days and -- and faint wisps of the past that were not nostalgic. He thought of Melinee. He really ought to tell her about this. The chalky finger motioning at him, the unconcerned old men on the sofa -- and the table. It was the antique table, missing from the upstairs hall, that lured him in. There it sat against the far wall. He grabbed a jutting two-by-four and twisted his body through the opening. The ladder must have been shoved to one side, or perhaps it was the claustrophobic effect of going through the small opening -- anyway, something. It turned his mind, his body, wrong-side out. Like the squeezing out of a wet mop by a steamroller. At the foot of the ladder, the man in the bartender's jacket led him to the three men. One of them, exceptionally fat, jovial, excused himself politely and took Ernie aside. "You look pale, Ernie," he said. "Having trouble?" Groggily, Ernie looked about him. "It's this room. It's lopsided. I think a good thirty degrees cattywonkus." The man doused a cigar and a quick frown crossed his brow. "Good point. Very good point. Come with me, Ernie." Ernie looked ; the other men paid him no mind. The little man waddled through a maze of foundation columns, as if the whole world were suspended above them. He walked behind the bar to a small glass-encased desk, Ushaped and covered with dials all reading A-B-C-D. "Kronkite !" the man called. A whirring inside theroom shut off. A man with goggles and a metal halo stuck his head out the door. "Kronkite, Ernie here says we are thirty degrees off. Can you shift the equilibrium? Frankly, I hadn't noticed it." named Kronkite shut the transparent door, turned three knobs, a bell clanged and the floor of the whole affair sank some thirty degrees on one side, rose thirty on the other. Then the whirring in the chamber resumed and Ernie was led back to the bar. "Have yourself a drink, man," his host coaxed. "I don't need one," Ernie said. "Listen, before we go on, just one question -- " The man smiled pleasantly. "Where the heck am I ? And what is this going on in my basement ?" The smile continued. It was maddening. "Well?" said Ernie. "You are here," the man finally said. "And don't be silly, Ernie. Your house has no basement." Ernie turned to the bartender. "I think I will have a drink." "Make it a triple," the little man called, and the bartender smiled as if his face hurt. There was a pained expression on Ernie. He sank his head into his arms. "Cheer up," the man said. "It isn't worth all that." "What isn't?" "Be happy, man." "I'll be happy when I get out of here, but I'll be hilarious when I find out the score -- and I plan to be hilarious before I get happy. Is that clear?" "You talk as if you had been drinking already, man. Snap out of it. I like men with clear heads." It was not only a delaying tactic, Ernie thought; it was plainly a case of nerve-busting. They were going to force it out of him. He had already conceded they were not a gang of thieves using his basement for a hideaway; they were not digging a secret tunnel for the Defense Department. "You like men with clear heads? What am I, some sort of recruit?" "Now !" the man exclaimed, suddenly thrust into a new frame of mind. "We are now on the same plane. You are a recruit and we can understand each other now." "So where is this?" "This is your house, of course, but we're not quite there yet. We're in what you would call -- oh, another dimension." Ernie reached for the drink and sniffed it. Its smell fitted the situation. "And what does that mean?" "Oh, you and I have lived in the same vicinity all our lives, even crossed each other's paths, but we are in different dimensions -- different worlds in the same place." "You mean like Mars and Earth?" "I mean like Mars in Earth, or vice versa," the man answered. Ernie jumped up and started for the ladder. "I'm getting out of here -- " "Don't be a fool ! Climb that ladder and you'll butt your skull in!" "I came through the hatch. I'll leave through the hatch." "But we've shifted thirty degrees. You told us to. Now the top of the ladder is thirty degrees away from the dQor of the laundry chute, which is quite impossible to reach, my friend, because there is perhaps dirt and a foundation and everything else in the way. We'd have to tear out our own structure and gouge into yours. This we cannot do. Too expensive." He climbed the ladder to the top, butted his head and climbed down. "Okay. You win. What's the score?" "You and Marsha," the man said. "Melinee," Ernie corrected. "Melinee in your dimension, Marsha in ours. You and she exist in our dimension as well. Same types, same characteristics inwardly. But not the same outwardly. Different hair, different name -- your own features were to be slightly different here." Ernie sat down on the sofa beside the two old men. He buried his head. "This is the other dimension? Then where is the other me?" "Oh, no," his host said. "This is not 'the other' dimension. This is the experimental dimension. You are from the second. What we are both in is a third realm sponsored by the government -- the federal government of The Unison States. Congrice sponsored this scientific investigation, provided we could accomplish it before the session ends." The first desire to laugh at the stupidity of the nightmare grappled with Ernie. But when he looked at that ladder and remembered the bump on his head, he knew this was not the time or place for a nightmare. The man went on, "So we talked Senatore Jumphries into wielding his might in committee, the committee on extra-dimensional perception talked to the President Eisenhoovelt, he addressed the Congrice, and by the single vote of Demorep Martini, this thing was financed for short duration." Ernie opened his eyes and looked beyond the bar and the experimental lab. It was like the inside of a giant ship in space or a vessel plowing the Pacific. It spread into distant chasms of darkness. "Our object, of course, is to start out the new dimension with an Adam and Eve," the host said. Ernie sneered. "You think you can start a new world!" "Oh, we've begun it. And we chose your home because here you are two young newlyweds just starting out in life, not too concerned that the future holds nothing more for you than junior assistant to the vice president -- ever! Here you have more chance for development, advancement and enjoyment. We have effected changes -- your Melinee, for example. You and Marsha will run this dimension. You and she will -- " "We will not, and I'm going to Melinee now. Let me out of here." The man politely hid a laugh. "Dear sir, I assure you there is no way out of the dimension. You are trapped. You must remain now, regardless, and conduct our experiment for us." "You got through to our world to find out about us," Ernie said. "How can you keep me here?" "But we entered your world from our own dimension. Our people pass back and forth all the time, unknown to your people. But from this special contraption which Congrice has rigged up for us, there is no immediate escape." Ernie got mad. "Then what the devil are these people doing here?" "Sh," the man said, "those are our Congrice observers." He seemed extremely disturbed. "Don't let them know how you feel. They get angry at people who take them on wild-goose chases." ing of hope that Ernie held a monkey wrench in his hand. First, he would find out all about the thing, then he would raise hail Columbia to the two Congrice observers and get them to thumbs-down the experiment. Then if there was an ounce oi humaneness in them, they would free him. "Okay, I'll calm down. But let me know the rest. When will I see Melinee?" "Marsha," the man said firmly, "will be along shortly. We must first lift the initial dimension prototype to the exact level of your house. Every coordinate must match each stick of furniture in your own dimension. Then we can begin working outward -- " "Working outward ?" "From your house. It is to be the beginning of this -- er -- civilization you and Marsha are to create. You will observe in each direction there is still darkness? When we have manipulated the realm into the exact position of the ground floor of your house, we will install a series of transitional burnouts. These will break down molecular resistance which our more powerful equipment creates on solid portions of your house. Everything will fit into place, and you and Marsha will report to us regularly." Ernie was fuming. "Then we are your prisoners?" "Oh, but you'll enjoy every minute of it! We created the origin, the nucleus, in the home of some newlywed in your dimension for the mere purpose of convenience of adaptability. We will bring in teams who will plant ersatz crops, trees, cut streams, create weather -- put life into the whole place. With your dimension's home and our dimension's scientific advantages, you can have full reign of populating a wonderful new world." Ernie was madder than he had ever remembered. "And if I refuse?" "You can't refuse. Marsha will be here momentarily; we have been experimenting with her changes in hair, mood, expression -- we hypnotized her on occasions. The extra door in the hallways? Sooner or later she will see it, wonder as you did and open it. This time we will have the magnetic field force turned on. You see, Ernie, you came in the wrong way and -- " and here he paused abruptly -- "quite a problem has been posed." "I'll say it has !" "Yes. You see, you were supposed to come through the door, and you still will, for there was a technical miscalculation in our instruments which, while allowing you to enter this new dimension, also did not allow you to enter. You yourself suggested we correct by thirty whole degrees. Well, we are not set up for more than one field force entrance per person. The Congrice didn't allot us that much money." Ernie's eyes grew wild and bright. "So, technically, I'm not even here?" "Technically, your other self is still up by the laundry chute looking in or going back to bed, or whatever." He scratched his balding head. "Really an unfortunate event. For when the other you enters our hallway door, we shall have to do away with one of you. It would not only frighten Marsha, but the federal government would accuse us of waste, corruption and heaven knows what else." The wildness in Ernie's eyes turned into a gleam. "You mean your government just wouldn't understand?" "Right," the man said unhappily. "There's more politics in science than you'd ever believe possible." "Mister, I think I have a solution." "You haver grabbed an armful of magnums, then walked to the plastic experimental table, flung open the door, slung bottle after bottle at the instruments, caused three small explosions, a sputtering red fire, a terrible burst of black smoke and a sudden explosion that turned the whole new dimension -- such as it was -- into a white blinding sun. When the nausea left, he saw the bodies lying on a green grassy area in what seemed to be Washington, D. C. He made his way in torn pajamas to Unison Station, paid a man to go out and buy him a second-hand suit by giving up his gold wedding band, then found the Senatoreale Office Building, located the office of the Senatore of Iowaki, as he had planned to do, and asked for permission to enter the "other" dimension to take home movies. The senatore asked him the name of his home town, accused him of lisping it, handed him a year's free pass to Other World and a two-year pass to the Senatoreale in session. Ernie, following instructions on the card, walked to a little white building near the Washingable Monument, stepped inside, handed a man his Other World card, then walked through a door, felt sick at his stomach, came out to the streetcar line to Melinee and home. When he got there, it was almost daylight, and the front door was locked. He climbed through an upstairs window, looked through the laundry chute, saw nothing and returned to his bed. Melinee was still sleeping soundly. He wrestled with his pillow a while. Then the alarm went off. The rest was simple. At breakfast he told her he was taking the day off. "Darling, why on Earth?" "We're moving," he said. "But why?" "There was an explosion in the night. I think it was gas escaping." "We might have died !" she cried. Ernie closed his eyes. "Go look in the hall, dear, and tell me what you see." When she returned, she was in a quandry. "Well?" he asked. "Did you see that crazy extra door blown off the wall?" "No, Ernie, but there's a man at the door in pajamas like yours who claims he's been following you." Ernie squinted. "Who is he?" "He says his name is Irvin -- " "Irvin?" Ernie barked. " -- and, dear, he's the spitting image of you." When Day is Done If there is a bit of the jungle in every man -- why not put every man into a bit of the jungle? noon and quitting time at Utopian Appliances, Inc. Bertram J. Bernard, the firm's stocky, thick-jawed president, waited discreetly at his desk for a few minutes, then closed the file he had been studying, bid his secretary a pleasant evening, and strode calmly out of the office. He did not want to appear eager, and succeeded superbly in that. Joining several junior executives, he conversed genially with them as they descended to the rapid-transit floor. Three of the bright, confident young men decided to stop for a quick one at the building's plush saloon. Well, that was okay -- Bernard had been a late-runner in his youth. But now, well into middle age, he had learned that life had other demands and pleasures. "Have a good run, B. B.," said Watkins, the treasurer, at the rap-tran gate. "Gloria's coming in on the three-thirty and we're going to dinner and then some musical or other she's been dying to see." So Bernard entered the raptran alone, though surrounded by scores of pushing, jabbering strangers. Finding a seat on the aisle, next to a electronics company vice-president whom he knew slightly, he engaged in trade conversation during the five minutes it took the monorail to reach his stop. He and the electronics executive got off, as did about half of the rap-trans passengers, mostly middle-aged men like himself. Early-runners. The escalator from the monorail stop descended directly into the Jungle Station beneath. In the large lobby the crowd dispersed and Bernard was again alone when he reached the dressing rooms. This was not surprising he reflected; not many members of his J ungle Station could afford the elaborate private locker unique to this wing of the building. He pressed his thumbprint to the lock and the door slid back. Inside, he undressed completely, noting with critical satisfaction the strength and color of his body in the fulllength mirror at one end of the locker. He quickly packed his clothes, shoes, and briefcase into a small suitcase, with delivery instructions on the top. Then he climbed into his jungle suit -- knee-length shorts, sweat shirt, rubbersoled shoes, and hip holster. He checked the frequency setting on the sonic pistol, adj usting it to the panthers who were reported in ascendancy. As a last thought, merely a whim, he glanced down at the station emblem on his sweat shirt, just to enjoy the sense of pride he derived from the large red "U-F" above it. Of course there were getting to be more and more ulcer-frees these days, but that did not make it any less a matter for pride. And anyway several factions were pressing determinedly for a neurosisfree insignia. Though there were complications there. Oh, well, the important thing's the run, he remembered. In the lobby again he deposited his suitcase at the delivery window. Then he stopped at the bulletin board to read the ascendancy ratings for the day. These were official, therefore several days outdated, but one could extrapolate. Panthers were dropping into third position, behind polar bears, with giraffes at the top by a good margin. Outside the building he ran into a tipster and decided he had best buy a dope sheet. He gave the seedy little man a dollar bill and looked over the page. "Keep it right where you got it, Mac," the man whispered hoarsely, nodding toward the pistol at Bernard's side. "I got it straight, dem pant'ers is all over de place. Watch out at de water hole, specially." G lancing swiftly over the page, Bernard saw that fifty panthers had entered this sector of the jungle overnight, with a herd of fifteen giraffes headed well toward the south. But he also noted that there had been three deaths from polar bears in the past week in his sector alone. Fortunately, the frequency readjustment from panthers to polar bears was an easy one, three clicks clockwise with the thumb. He would have to remember about the water hole, though it was either that or going above the rapids. The sharks below the rapids were pretty thick during the summer. "Thanks, bud," he told the tipster. Then he strode, still calm, to the wall. Expertly he clambered up its handholds, till he reached the top, thirty feet from the ground. On the other side lay the jungle, its lush tropical growth hiding from his alert eyes the danger that lurked within. He popped a Verve pill into his mouth and chewed on it thoughtfully. Far in the distance, some five miles at the narrowest point, rose the outer wall. Between the two prowled a variety of ambivalent robot beasts, now ready to dismember him, but on weekends adjusted to take small boys and girls for short rides or simply to stalk about picturesquely. Drawing his pistol and placing it between his teeth, Bernard leaped to the ground between the wall and a large low palm. At once the pistol was again in his hand. But nothing moved. Now he could see clearly the path he must take. Bending low, he trotted along through the undergrowth. It soon began to clear, and still no danger in sight. He holstered the pistol and advanced, half-walking, halfrunning, till he could hear the hiss of the rapids. Enough noise to mask the sounds of a dozen panthers, he thought. But it covered his own footsteps, too, and panthers were more phonotropic than polar bears, the latter having a preference for radar spotting. Coyotes were the worst, of course, with their damned infrared thermo-sensors. They could spot a runner even when he was in cover. Fortunately they were scarce and getting more so. Bernard had only encountered a coyote twice, deactivating it both times. But he had been lucky. He recalled tiie story about that city councilman... An hour later he arrived at the river, a half-mile above the rapids and well away from the water hole. He had seen only one beast in the first three miles of his trek, a giraffe hobbling along in olefactory pursuit of another runner far to the right. Giraffes were mainly a nuisance, though they could kick and trample a man. Bernard had heard of such a thing happening, but it was a rarity. They were too easy to elude. He crossed the river on a log raft he found, which had evidently been rigged to dump him in about halfway across. At least he had got that far on it, he told himself, as he struck out for the shore. For one horrible moment he thought he detected a shark upstream, but it was merely the shadow of a large palm leaf. He had a strong and sensible fear of sharks. A mile farther found him crawling over the rocky ground as the growls of panthers reached his acute ears from behind a ridge of brush. If they heard him, they ignored him, perhaps more interested in other quarry. His knees and arms were scraped but not bleeding, and at last he was able to get to his feet to make better time. It was then that he heard the girl's scream. rule book discriminated against women becoming runners, but only a few of the and plants in the city did so. Also there was nothing in the code about helping other runners. Each was entirely on his own, free to help or be helped, or not helped, if he chose. Bernard would never have called for help for himself. But the sound of the woman's cry appealed to another side of his nature. He changed his direction, but moved with great caution now. Soon he saw her, and froze. She was clad as he, different sector emblem, but the same proudly borne "U-F" on her sweater. Her face and body were young and attractive, but her long dark hair was tangled and wet, and her limbs mud-spattered. She had screamed only once, and now her small lipsticked mouth hung open with terror. Backed against a tree, she gaped in horror, waiting, as three panthers approached from as many directions. Her sonic lay on the ground outside the circle. It was obvious that she was finished if Bernard did not assist her. Raising his hand till the pistol sight was where he wanted it, he modified the angle adjustment till all of the animals were within its range. Then he depressed the trigger several times. Two fell and the third animal leaped at the girl. But she twisted around the tree and Bernard picked off the panther as it readied itself for a second spring. At once the girl dived for her pistol. Proper response, Bernard thought approvingly. Then she ran toward him and threw herself against him, breathing deeply in that position for several moments. Bernard felt strongly the strength and zest of youth as he held the girl in his arms. Then they turned and walked together to the outer wall, which was less than half a mile away. There was no danger from the deactivated panthers, which would remain out of commission for half an hour. So they had no reason to hurry. Bernard helped her climb the wall, though she seemed quite adept at it herself. On the other side they emerged upon the street. Across the street lay the acres and acres of homes which were the city's eastern suburbia. "Oh, it was just horrible!" the girl finally cried. "All at once they sprang. From nowhere. I tripped and my sonic fell out of the holster. I'd be dead if it weren't for you!" "Very true," Bernard agreed. "You'll be more careful in the future, I hope." "If only I could thank you in some way. I owe you so much. My apartment is just up the next street. Only a few blocks. Wouldn't you like to stop in for a drink ? I'm sure you're as tired as I." But Bernard declined. He walked her home, then continued on, unaware of the envious glances of young children as he passed. Unaware of other runners, early-runners, middle-aged men like himself, also walking the streets, wearily but not stooping, not frowning. How good a warm shower would be, thought Bernard, as he entered the last mile. His wife would probably want a drink, so there would be that too. And dinner. He was hungry. Ulcer-free and happy, he walked the last mile in contentment. The office was something that had happened long ago, would happen again tomorrow, but could never invade his thoughts that night. And he knew exactly how his wife would greet him at the door.H the run?" she asked, kissing him as he came into the house. "You only made fair time this evening. Something happen?" "No, pretty routine. Panthers are on the increase. I came across three of them attackinga girl runner. Works as a copy writer in the city. She claims that the jungle cured her ulcers completely. Really remarkable." "Mmm-hmm," said Virginia, taking his holster. "Attractive, no doubt. I suppose she tried to seduce you. I've heard stories about those jungle women." "Nothing of the sort. Just suggested I drop in for a drink. After all, she was grateful." What nonsense, he told himself as he showered, Virginia suggesting that the girl had intended to seduce him. Oh, well, what difference did it make? Man, that hot water felt good! Even on his scratched legs and arms. How many years had he been making the run now? Twenty-three, almost. In a way he could consider himself a sort of a pioneer. And to think that the only reason he had started jungle running in the first place was to please a supervisor ! Those days everyone did it. As he dried himself off, hearing the tinkle of cocktails in the living room, he wondered if the panthers would move south, away from the water hole, before tomorrow's run. 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Alyar grinned down at him, then looked toward the front of their own beast. "I think so," he said. "Our eyestalks are up and signaling. The pincers aren't active, though. It must be a friend-beast." "I don't see how they can recognize each other this far apart," said Bru doubtfully. "We'd better go tell Paboss." "He sees it." Alyar looked aft to where the leader of the smit clan perched on another hair, a good shout from Alyar's. "You'd better come down," said Bru. "He clobbered Jorsmit for being in sight, the last time we met another beast." "He doesn't care when we're this far away." Nevertheless, Alyar climbed down; it wasn't all comfort at the top of a hair, especially when the beast felt you and twitched. "Let's go back there. He might know who it is." He started through the thick growth of shorter hair, and Bru followed. They moved carefully, listening; it would be nip-and-tuck if only the two of them encountered a fley. They heard a few, detoured around them, eventually reached Paboss's outpost. The leader was down from the hair, sitting with his back against it, munching dried meat. Three spearmen with him jumped up when they heard Alyar and Bru coming, then, recognizing them, relaxed. Pabosssmit grunted and gestured toward the joint of meat beside him. "Help yourself." He eyed Alyar keenly. "That you on the hair up forward ?" "Yes, boss. But I made sure I came down in time." "Don't go showing yourself again before we make contact." "I won't. Could you tell who it was?" "Looked like the jaksin beast." "Oh. We don't fight them, do we?" Alyar was a little disappointed ; he'd never been in a fight. Paboss grinned. "No, but we don't trade with them, either. Pabossjaksin doesn't like me." Alyar remembered something he'd heard. "Was that where you stole Maboss?" The grizzled leader filled his thick chest and chuckled. "That's right. Stole her right out from under his nose!" He extended his arms, showing some scars. "Here's where he got me, before I knocked him out. Here's where Ma bit me." "She bit you?" "Sure. Any girl worth stealing'll put up a fight. I had to haul her along, kicking and screaming, and fight off half the jaksin clan at the same time. It was some party." Alyar sighed, thinking what it must be like to go raiding. "I'm old enough to have a woman of my own," he mused. Immediately, Paboss glowered. "Don't you go getting any ideas, hear? I don't want an open war with the jaksins. We've got enough trouble already, with the grans and the kendies." He put a hand tentatively on his club. "You hear?" "Yes, boss," said Alyar hastily. the two beasts halved the distance between them. Near evening, Alyar led Bru, protesting, up to the smit beast's head and down over the edge where they could see forward and remain hidden in the short hair. It was dangerous; the beast might mistake them for fleys and reach up with a pincer-tentacle, which could move fast, considering the size. When the slow hunching gait stopped and the beast settled down for the night, they went back to the thickly furred spot where the clan lived. Two of the moons were up, and with the excitement of being near another clan, nobody wanted to sleep yet. Alyar left Bru with an audience of young people who hadn't seen the other beast yet, and went looking for the older men. They were in a clearing, rehashing stories about other clans, especially about the jaksins, which was an old one with a fine repertoire of legends. Maboss had naturally brought the stories with her. Just now, Paboss was retelling a fascinating, if ridiculous one, about how people had originally come from another world on a beast that could fly. Alyar sat and listened for a while, then, when the icy evening rain broke up the session, went to his sleeping place in a patch of protecting curly hair. After the first sleep, when it was midnight and dry again, he sneaked to where Bru slept, hissed at him, and drew him away. "Are you game for a little trip?" "Where? You mean up front again?" "No. Over to the jaksin beast. Just for fun." Bru was horrified. "At night? We'd freeze! Anyway, you heard Paboss!" "We can find something to put on over our own clothes, and wrap our feet in leather. All Paboss said was I mustn't try to steal a girl. Nobody'll miss us for one day, and the beasts will be together by tomorrow noon. We could bring back some kind of souvenirs." "You must be crazy! What if the jaksins caught us?" "They'd only haze us a little, if we hadn't done anything. Think of it -- besides Paboss and Maboss, only seven smits have ever been to another beast !" ments, they sneaked to the curve of the beast's side. Bru acted as if he were going to his own funeral. When they got down to where the hair grew out horizontally, they moved out beyond the short stuff and dropped from one coarse emergent to another ; then, finally, to the ground. Apparently no one had heard them. They ran toward the front of the beast, staying as close to the furry belly as possible, for warmth and concealment. The jaksin beast was due north, half-hidden by the horizon and hard to make out against the background of the tremendous Forest where it had been feeding. Beyond the trees and a little to the right was a volcano, exhaling fiery clouds but not muttering audibly at the moment. East of them was a river ; to the west, on the far side of the beasts, another Forest. It was not surprising that the two beasts had met, since they were on a narrow strip of hardened lava between river and Forest. They traveled in long jumps, gradually closing the distance to the jaksin beast. Near it, they saw that it was awake, with all four front eyestalks and one pair of pincers extended toward them. They halted out of reach. "Do you think he'll know we're not jaksins?" Bru whispered. "I don't think they care who lives on them, just so we keep the fleys down. Let him get a good look at us and he'll see we're people." He was right, but by the time the huge appendages began to retract, the cold was getting through the clothing. They hurried for the shelter of the hair. Warm again, they chewed some of the meat they'd brought along and considered what to do next. "We'd better go along the ground to the rear," Alyar said. "The men will be mostly near the front, on guard. Back there, there'll only be women and children." "But we'll be a long way from home. What if the beasts don't come together?" "Oh, they usually stop and talk, or whatever they do, for three or four days. We'll have a chance to sneak back." "Why don't we just cut off some hairs right here for souvenirs and go home?" "Don't you even want to spy on the clan?" Bru sighed unhappily. "You're not actually going to try to steal a girl, are you?" "Well -- no. But it would be fun, wouldn't it?" His imagination began to percolate. "We're not far from the Warm Ground. That's w'hat the first smit did. He stole a girl and couldn't get home with her, so they lived for a whole season on the Warm Ground until they found a young beast and started their own clan." "If you've got any crazy ideas like that, you can count me out. People who get lost from their beasts get caught by Demons, or outlaws, or eaten by terrible animals. Next you'll be talking about going to Iron Mountain and fighting the Iron Fley!" "Huh. The explorers who came back with all those stories probably exaggerated to make themselves look braver. Anyway, all Pm asking you to do is climb on the back end of this beast and spy on the jaksins." It took the rest of the night to reach the blunt rear end, which had only one pair of eyestalks and one of pincers. They went through the process of letting the beast see them again, so it wouldn't think they were fleys when they began to climb, then picked a low rigid hair to start on. It was a good four manlengths up, too much of a jump even in this light gravity for Bru, who missed and floated back to the ground, contorting, while Alyar tried to control his laughter. He uncoiled a rope. # You need a good lively girl to work some of that fat off you," he chuckled as he hauled Bru up... Panting, Bru pulled himself onto the hair. # You'll get me killed before I ever have a chance to get married. Do you think they heard us?" # No. We haven't heard them yet, and they're bound to be jabbering like women always are." He coiled the rope and they began to climb. up, there were squeaks and rumbles below them. They stopped, holding their breaths, while the tentacle curled toward a spot only thirty or forty man-lengths away and the great claw began digging at the fur. Evidently something itched there ; and in a few moments, they did hear the screech of a hurt fley. They resumed climbing. When the skin was level enough to walk on, they began hearing voices -- the giggling of girls and the drier chatter of older women, but no men's voices. They crept forward, parted the hair very carefully, and peered out. They must have found the quarters of a very important family, for the clearing was freshly cut and expensive woven rugs covered the skin. The walls were evenly trimmed, with several hung paintings. Sleeping places had been cut into one side and lined with soft leather from the underparts of fleys. Alyar had only a glance for all this luxury, though, for within two man-lengths of him sat a pair of eminently stealable girls. Temptation battered at him. One, evidently the older sister, was well muscled and lithe, but plump enough to have curves everywhere. The other was beautiful too, but more slender. They had the black hair and tawny smooth skin of the jaksins. Each wore a short lounging skirt of dainty leather which left few secrets. Prudence, overwhelmed, hardly put up a fight. Alyar maneuvered Bru carefully back until he could whisper. He ignored the desperate protests. "Shut up. All you have to do is stay here and wait for me, and when you hear a commotion, screech like a fley. You can do that much, can't you?" Bru, groaning, finally nodded. A length from the clearing, Alyar chose a young hairshoot and put the point of his spear in the tender spot at its base. He jabbed with all his weight, then dove for the clearing. The beast's involuntary twitch came as he broke into the open. The women were scrambling to their feet, with cries of "Beastquake!" and right on schedule Bru cut loose with a fine series of fley screeches. In the confusion nobody noticed that Alyar was a stranger until he scooped up the two girls, one under each arm, and jumped for the fur. It was hard going, with both of them grabbing at hairs to hold them back, scratching him, and in general being uncooperative. He was panting when he reached Bru. "Here!" he gasped, considerately tossing him the slender one who'd be easier to carry. "This one's yours." The plump one knew by now what was happening. Slyly, she went limp until Alyar relaxed; then she twisted suddenly and got her teeth at his left shoulder. He yelled as she took out a respectable divot of flesh, and spun her around so she couldn't reach him again. There was much screaming behind them, but no pursuit yet. Alyar urged Bru to the base of the nearest eyestalk. "Start climbing!" "But we'll be trapped up there!" "No, we won't. Go on!" up before a few old men and a crowd of women and children appeared at the base of the stalk. Seeing Alyar's spear-hand free part of the time, none acted anxious to follow them. Now they were high enough to be hurt in a fall, and the girls had prudently stopped struggling. Alyar's twisted her head and glared at him. "My father will feed you to the fleys!" Alyar grinned. "He'll have to catch us first. What's your name?" "Go to hell." He let go of the scale he was clinging to with his right hand, and pinched her in a vulnerable spot. She shrieked. "If I have to keep pinching you," he said, "we'll probably fall. You'd better tell me your name." She hesitated, then said icily, "Janeejaksin." "Hm. You seem to be rich girls. You wouldn't be the Paboss's daughters, would you ?" Janee wouldn't answer, but the other girl did, rather cordially. "Yes, and my name's Marisujaksin. Are you going to steal us and make smits of us?" "They'll never get off this eyestalk," Janee said scornfully. Alyar motioned Bru higher. The figures around the base grew tiny and the stalk tapered to only half the girth of a man. It swayed a little, and they moved around to what would be the upper side if it bent. Shouts could be heard now from farther forward ; undoubtedly the fighters would arrive soon. Bru looked nervously in that direction. "What are we going to do -- bargain with them?" "No. Listen carefully. You know about people riding a pincer. We're going to get one up here, and when it's close enough, jump onto it and ride it to the ground." Alyar grinned at the protests, put his spear-point between two scales, and jabbed. In a minute the eyestalk began to bend ponderously downward. Far below they could see the pincer-tentacle starting up to meet it. "Be lively, now!" Alyar warned. It took a while for the pincer to arrive. They jumped from two man-lengths, landed on the slanting horny surface, and slid. Alyar, hanging onto Janee with one arm, managed to get the other around a small prong. He threw a glance toward Bru and saw that he'd made out all right too. They waited. Even though the irritation had stopped, the beast was going through with the scratching after hauling all that weight to such a height. The tip of the pincer sawed deliberately at the place Alyar had jabbed, and then they started down. The movement was faster than it looked from a distance ; still, it was a long way to the ground. Partway down, the beast saw them and the claw halted. They crouched while the stalk bent to bring the immense eye directly over them, but evidently the creature was only wondering what they were up to now, for after a while the tentacle started down again. Three man-lengths from the ground they jumped, landed, and bounded away out of reach. M EN, shouting, were clinging to long hairs, but nobody was climbing the eyestalk. Perhaps no one wanted to imitate the novel descent. Closer shouts indicated a group coming down through the fur. "What now?" Bru asked. It was a reasonable question. Even if they dared go home, they'd have to parallel the whole length of this beast and could hardly avoid interception. Alyar and Bru had discarded their extra clothing, while the girls were almost bare, so warmth would be an absolute necessity when night came. Alyar looked northward toward the volcano. The Warm Ground was supposed to surround it for some distance; maybe they could reach that before night. There wasn't much time to ponder. Men were already dropping to the ground. He picked up Janee and ran for the nearest cover, which was the Forest. "Come on, we can't stay here!" Bru didn't have to carry Marisu -- she was evidently coming along regardless, even though she wailed a little -- so he was able to keep up. "We're not going into the Forest, arc we?" he panted. "Just into the edge to get out of sight. Then we'll decide." They were still a medium shout ahead when they came to the first colossal uprights; trunks so thick it would take a man many breaths to run around one; towering so high one tended to forget there were any tops. In between were smaller plants, some with flowers, that formed a thicket as dense as fur. Alyar paused, thinking of the stories he'd heard about the Forest. But there was no doubt about how real the danger was behind them, so he held his spear at the ready and plunged into the growth. Janee opened her mouth to scream, and he hastily muffled it with his hand. "Do you want to attract every Demon in the Forest?" Her eyes widened and she quit struggling. He listened to the shouts from outside, then pointed north. "That way." Bru gaped. "But that's away from home!" "We can't go home yet. Anyway, the jaksins'll expect us to. They're moving south already. Hear them?" Inside the Forest, in the deep shade, there was less vegetation so that they were able to move easily. Whenever Janee looked ready to scream, Alyar pretended to see or hear something, and by the time she was wise to that, they were out of earshot. Their luck didn't last long, though. They heard a sound, whirled, and saw a small being on a branch, watching them with malevolent yellow eyes. The girls whimpered, and Bru moaned, "A Demon!" It had taken a strange shape, with four limbs and one other appendage that looked like a tentacle. It was covered with short black fur, very thick and fine. Just now it had a set of claws for clinging to the tree. Before they could run, it opened its mouth and uttered a curse, which sounded like "Meow!" "Let's get out of here !" Bru whispered. Alyar knew better. "There's no use running ; we're already cursed. The only thing is to try to appease it." "Maybe we could give it the girls?" Alyar wavered. He'd become quite attached to Janee, though he was a little tired of being bitten and scratched, and he had gone to a lot of trouble to get her. "Let's try meat first," he decided. He got a small piece out of his pouch and extended it on the end of his spear. Heart pounding, he moved closer. The Demon tensed as if to jump at them, then seemd to change its mind. It wrinkled its nose (which Alyar hoped was a sign of favor) and finally stretched out its head and took the meat. It chewed daintily and swallowed. Alyar let out his breath. Nothing was guaranteed, of course, but possibly... The Demon said, "Meow," in a different tone. Carefully, they edged toward the open. After a few steps Bru began to run. Immediately, there was a loud In a moment the Demon came into sight, walking on the ground. Alyar noticed that it had ungrown the claws. As he looked (no doubt reading his thought) it grew them again, stretched out its two front limbs, lengthened its body, and yawned. They started on, but weren't able to make much time until they found that the Demon wanted to be carried. it was disappointing to see how little distance they had covered. The nearest end of the jaksin beast, hunching slowly away now toward the smit beast, was still within three shouts. However, no jaksins were in sight. Again, Alyar hesitated; troubles seemed to be piling up. Still, he didn't see any choice. "We'll have to go to the Warm Ground," he said. The girls sobbed a little, and he frowned at them. " Now what's wrong?" "There are terrible outlaws there, and Demons, and -- and things." His patience ran out. "To hell with them! We already have one Demon ; do you think it's going to share us with everything on the planet? Come on!" Janee didn't insist on being carried now ; evidently she felt compromised enough to come along. They hurried, stopping only once to finish up their food. They were thirsty, but Hot Water was supposed to come up out of the Warm Ground, and anyway they could wait for the evening rains. It was dusk, and already beginning to drizzle, when they noticed that the ground under their feet was warm. This was mostly hardened lava, sloping upward toward the volcano, but with small streams and patches of vegetation. Before they found a good place to stop for the night, Bru pointed ahead. "Look! That glow!" They went forward cautiously until they could see what must be a Fire, with people sitting around it. Fascinated, Alyar went closer. Suddenly he heard the girls scream, and simultaneously two pairs of rough hands seized him from behind. He wrenched desperately, throwing himself and the two husky men around, but not getting free. More came shouting, to help pin him down and tie him with ropes. It sounded as if Bru and the girls were being similarly treated. A man who acted like the leader came running from the Fire. "What have we got here? Scouts?" He began directing squads of spearmen as if he expected an attack. "Two women with them? Funny. All right, you -- who're you spying for?" "What are you talking about?" Alyar demanded, as indignantly as his position allowed. "We're from the smit clan and we're -- trying to get home," he finished lamely. "Clan? From a beast? What are you doing up here, then ?" "We came to keep warm." "Keep warm? Why didn't you build a Fire?" "I -- we don't believe in Fires." Laughter arose. "Let him up," the leader said. "He must be telling the truth. Only a fley-eater would be so ignorant." They took off some of the ropes. Alyar rubbed at various bruises and abrasions, wondering whether he and Bru would be killed or made slaves. The outlaws would surely keep the girls. He wondered whether the Demon were going to give up its property so easily. As if in answer to the thought, it came strolling into the light, and the leader made a sign nervously. "Damn! A black cat! Is it yours?" "A black what? It captured us in the Forest." "It... captured you? In the Forest? Then it's a real Demon!" "Of course! How can you be so ignorant?" "And you're still alive?" "It hasn't hurt us yet, but it won't let us get away and It makes us carry it. I think we're uncursed right now. I'm not sure ; I sort of lost track." The man gulped and faced the Demon. "Please forgive us, Demon. We didn't know these people were yours." The Demon looked at him scornfully and uttered a curse. People moved away, except one young spearman who stood his ground. "It -- it sounds just like a cat," he quavered. The leader knocked him spinning with the sweep of a forearm. "Of course it sounds like a cat! How do you think it would sound when it's in cat form? Do you expect it to speak ingils to us?" He beckoned to several women. "Bring food for the Demon, and offerings of iron and jewels!" He glanced at the four captives, and added, as an afterthought, "Better feed its slaves, too." chew, but it tasted odd, and the fruit was completely baffling. Still, they were filling. The outlaw leader eyed the Demon, which had pre-empted Janee's ample lap. "Where is it taking you?" Alyar didn't want to admit how little he knew of the nature of things, so he said the most awesome thing he could think of. "To Iron Mountain." There were gasps. "Oh, what unfortunate people you are!" the leader said. Then, eagerly, "When will you go?" Alyar thought he'd better press his luck. "It wants us to start right away. It only pretends to be asleep like that, to see if we're obedient. Er -- I seem to have gotten turned around. Which way is Iron Mountain from here?" The man pointed with alacrity. "That way! A third of the distance around the volcano. Here, we'll help you get loaded up." The girls were festooned with necklaces and pendants of rare stones, while Bru and Alyar toted the food and the oddments of iron. The outlaws had hastily gathered a fabulous treasure of the metal -- whole spearheads, and even a knife, of it! Alyar waved and smiled at the outlaws just before they were out of sight, then turned north. "We'll go upcountry," he said. "They won't look for us there. I'm not sure they won't follow ; they probably don't know what this Demon will do any more than we do." He saw some huge rocks not far away, with bushes growing on top. "Let's climb up there." When they were halfway to the rocks, incredible good fortune struck. The Demon with one hurried "Meow !" scrambled away from Janee and ran back toward the outlaw camp. "Come on!" Alyar exclaimed. "Maybe we can get out of its circle of influence!" They climbed the rocks and found they could see the Fire. Presently they knew the Demon had arrived there, for the distant figures scattered. Moments later, faint laments drifted to them. They spent the rest of the night awake and watchful. "The Outlaws will surely be after us now," Bru said, "to get back all this treasure." "Marisu and I want to be near our clan," said Janee. "Even if -- " she blushed -- "you make smits out of us, the two beasts would meet once in a while and we could visit." Alyar looked eastward, where numerous glows marked other outlaw camps. The volcano was a barrier to the north. The outlaws would bar the way to the south, expecting them to head home to the beasts. The only direction left was west, and he found that it pleased him. "I guess we'll just have to visit Iron Mountain," he said. "Then we'll be such heroes that Pabosses smit and jaksin will have to forgive us." The girls looked at him with awe while Bru moaned. When the sun came up they could see the northern end of the Forest, south of which the jaksin beast had been feeding. Past it, surprisingly visible from this altitude, were the two beasts, head-to-head with eyestalks touching. The Forest ran up close to the steep side of the volcano, leaving only a narrow pass. Beyond that was the river which, turning south, passed the two beasts. Farther up the river, acording to legend, was Iron Mountain. They stayed long enough to see what kind of animals prowled the country and to lay out a course, then climbed down and got started. They walked all day with only a few halts and some minor adventures with strange animals, then found another high place to spend the night. In the darkness they spotted a single Fire west of them. The next morning they detoured around that spot, and entered the narrow pass. Before noon they stood looking down at the river. T HE canyon was deeper and wider than Alyar could have imagined, and there was more water at the bottom. The country ahead, though, was so rough that it seemed the easiest way was to climb down and go along the river. It took them half the afternoon to get down. Not very long after that, Alyar put out his hand. "Wait ! I hear voices !" They were men's voices and seemed to be coming downstream. He pushed the other three to a hiding place behind some rocks and bushes. When the owners of the voices came into sight around a turn, he gasped. They weren't walking, but riding on the water itself, in something like a big dish. "Magicians !" Bru whispered. Two of the men (there were seven) were stroking the water with some kind of wands, flattened at the ends. They acted as if they were fleeing from something, talking in low voices and staring back upstream. Just before they came opposite, it caught up with them. The first thing Alyar heard was a loud voice, distorted and with an odd accent. He had trouble making out the repeated words. "Halt or I'll shoot. Advance and be recognized. Halt or I'll shoot. Advance -- " The thing came into sight -- flying! He gripped Bru's shoulder. "The Iron Fley!" It was made of the kind of iron that didn't rust, and had only eight legs, not ten. All of them were folded to its sides except one with a larger, oblong foot; that one was extended toward the fugitives. When they saw it, they jumped out of their dish and sank into the water. "Halt or I'll shoot," said the Iron Fley again, then hurled its spell. The dish shattered abruptly into small bits and a hissing cloud burst #P of the water. The terrible creature circled over the floating fragments for a few minutes, then flew off upstream. When it was gone the seven magicians appeared, climbing out of the river on the far side. "Damn it!" said one. "A good boot lost, and not a bit of iron. I told you we ought to wait for night!" "It doesn't make any difference," said another gloomily. "It's always on watch. Nobody's gotten away with any iron for three or four seasons." "Well," said Alyar, after the magicians had straggled off down the river, "now we've seen it. It certainly put a powerful spell on that floating dish, but it didn't hurt the magicians. Maybe if we're careful it won't bother us." They followed the twisting canyon and eventually began to hear a roaring noise ahead. It turned out to be the water falling over a cliff, and to go any farther they had to climb out of the canyon again. When they were on top they could see, ahead of them, what was undoubtedly Iron Mountain. Parts of it were broken or rusted, but most of it was the non-rusting kind. Its shape was a surprise. It didn't look like a mountain, but something made by giants, broken off and stuck into the ground. It was wonderful to stand here, beholding the mightiest magic in the entire world. Still, Alyar wasn't satisfied. He felt he must go closer, even -- possibly -- touch it. "You'd better stay here. Bru, if anything' happens to me, take the girls and run. You can get back to the beasts by going down the river." Bru was dismayed. "Don't go any closer! You saw what happened to the magicians' dish !" "They were trying to steal iron." He unloaded the metal he was carrying, smiled at them, and went on. H E'D only covered a hundred man-lengths or so when he heard the distorted voice, coming from over his head. He looked up, then stood rooted as the Iron Fley came spiraling down toward him. He tried to think the purest, most serene thoughts he could, though the fervent wish to be somewhere else kept intruding. The thing paused a few lengths away. "Advance and be recognized," it said. He took a faltering hop forward. "Halt or I'll shoot," it said, and he stopped. "Advance." He did. "Halt." He did. Finally he was very close to it, and he waited for a spell to hit him. "Name, rank, and serial number," it demanded. Then, as he was silent, "Speak or I'll shoot." "I -- I'm Alyarsmit! I don't think I'm rank, and I don't know what a serial number is." "Friend or foe?" "F-friend. I haven't stolen anything. Just some girls." The thing made a buzzing sound. "You speak, and you have the requisite number of limbs, and one head. Are you human ?" "Y-yes, I'm human." "Name?" "Alyarsmit." "Smith? Smith?" It buzzed some more. "There was a Colonel John Smith on the roster. Are you his descendant?" "Yes," Alyar hazarded. "Mr. Smith, sir, Robojeep twenty-seven four nine reporting. All other jeeps inactivated, sir. No ship's personnel or other passengers accounted for in the last three hundred and seventy-four planetary cycles. Damage to ship unrepairable without human direction. Sporadic raids by savages, possibly degenerate humans, repelled successfully. Will you assume manual control, sir?" Alyar stuck with "Yes." "Very well, sir." The Iron Fley descended and walked toward him on six of its legs, then squatted. He stared at its back. Actually, it didn't have one ; it was hollowed out from the top, and in the hollow were -- seats ! Four of them! Unable to mistake the meaning, he climbed in and sat down. Nothing happened for a while. Then the creature began to buzz again. "Have you forgotten the controls, sir? The lever on the left is for elevation; the other one for horizontal motion. Would you prefer vocal control?" "N-no, this is all right." "Very good, sir." The buzz stopped. The levers were just in front of him. Gingerly, he reached out and gave the lefthand one a twitch, then yelled and let go of it as they shot upward. They stopped, and he tried again gently. They rose more smoothly. He experimented with the other and moved forward, backward, and to the sides. He lowered to a height where he was less frightened. "Er -- Fley?" "You spoke, sir?" "I can go wherever I want?" "Except into obvious danger, sir. Fm programmed to avoid that." Alyar flew toward where he'd left his companions. They lay face down, lamenting, Janee loudest of all. He eyed her posterior, and Bru's, with some misgivings. The Fley's seats were a little skimpy. He landed beside them, cleared his throat, and waited until they raised dumfounded farpc "Get in," he said. from the others, he maneuvered the creature (which preferred to be called "Jeep") toward Iron Mountain. When they were close Jeep woke up, buzzed, and hovered while a great doorway slid open. It carried the four, clinging together, into the hollow blackness within. Then, quite suddenly -- even though the door slid shut behind them -- it was light as day inside. What a cave ! Cylindrical, all of fifty man-lengths across, it slanted down until it must reach far below ground. Far down there, where Jeep was taking them, were some level platforms. As soon as they settled on one, a terrible, huge, clanking monster, also of non-rusting iron, flew toward them. They huddled while it spoke. "Mr. Smith, sir, Roborepairunit seventeen reporting. Ship's power and drive in order. Unable to complete hull repairs, or repair other working and scouting units, without cannibalizing part of living quarters. Do I have Mr. Smith's permission to proceed?" Alyar gulped several times, and got out "Yes." "Thank you, sir. The job will require arc cutting and welding and other high-temperature processes. Will you be here very long?" "We hope not." "Very well, sir. I'll begin as soon as you leave." They sat for a while, wondering what to do. Finally Alyar said, "Jeep?" "Sir?" "Would we be permitted to leave?" "At once, sir." More buzzing, and the door opened again. As they flew away, Jeep said, "Sir, Roborepair wants to know whether to repair ship in its present position or move it elsewhere." Alyar was beginning to feel more confident. "In its present position, I think. For now." As they turned south, Janee began to sniffle. "What now?" he demanded. "I miss my Demon." Alyar turned to Bru. "Isn't that just like a woman? She wants a Demon again !" She raised her head and glared at him. "He was cute and soft, and he cuddled against me and made happy sounds. You tamed the Iron Fley, and if you really loved me, you could surely handle one little fluffy Demon!" Alyar let Jeep stop and hang there while he tried to cope with the effrontery of it. After all he'd been through, stealing her, to have her suggest that he go into more danger just to satisfy her crazy whim ! His hands reached out for the levers again. Shaking his head dazedly, he started northeast to look for the outlaws. headed south again, Janee's Demon asleep in her lap. Jeep was loggy with iron and other treasures extorted from various bands of outlaws. In the two rear seats, Bru and Marisu were holding hands. He was startled to see two more beasts hunching up from the south, beyond the smits and jaksins. Four of them together at one time ! When they circled down, they found Pabossmit on his hair, scowling southward. He cringed when he saw the Iron Fley, then managed to look both dumfounded and furious when he recognized Alyar and Bru. "You young hoodlums! I'm glad that thing caught you! Look there -- those are the grans and the kendies coming, and Pabossjaksin's so mad he'll join them against us!" His face softened into the start of a grin as he sized up the two girls, but then hardened again. "I hope you're proud of yourselves, getting your whole clan killed or made slaves!" Alyar started toward a clearing. "Come on down, Paboss. We've got so much magic now, we could laugh at all the clans in the world." And, to Jeep, "Jeep, can we bring Iron Mountain over here and fly it around and show these savages they better behave?" "A bloodless demonstration? Certainly, sir. I'll go aloft at once and radio." T HE four stood in a clearing, with awed smits around them at a respectful distance. Paboss came pushing through the hair, as awed as any, but less scared. "Tamed the Iron Fley!" He began to guffaw. "Stole Pabossjaksin's own two daughters ! Haw, haw ! Young man, when I retire..." His eyes covered Janee approvingly, then turned back to Alyar. "You're wounded! What -- oh, toothmarks !" He laughed some more. "Didn't I say any girl worth stealing would put up a fight?" Alyar happened to be looking toward Bru, who had his own knot of admirers. Marisu was standing a little behind him, as a bride should. At Paboss's words, she frowned and her eyes fixed on Bru's smooth shoulder. Her gaze grew more intent. She moved slowly forward, her eyes crossing as they remained on the spot. Closer... Closer... Bru yelled. With an incredible # stars in the Milky Way -- our own verse -- the question of whether the human race is alone in space has a statistical answer: We are almost certainly not alone; even if we assume that intelligent life can exist only on Earth-type planets, and that Earth-type planets can occur in only a tiny fraction of all the Milky Way's star systems, a tiny fraction of that incredible # would yield a very large number of sister-Earths. And to state that intelligent life can exist only on Earth-type planets is pure conservatism, on the order, probably, of the theoretical "proof" that a heavier-than-air craft cannot fly. But how can we be sure we're not alone ? Two scientists at Cornell suggest listening for messages. Even transmitters no better than the ones we already have, they claim, could send a radio message that could be picked up quite easily by a really good radio receiver -- one, say, like the #-foot radio telescope now going up in West Virginia -- even if that receiver was # or # lightyears away. And if our transmitters will do it, why wouldn't the transmitters belong to an alien race circling, for instance, the Sol-like Tau Ceti or Eta Eridani ? They aren't far, as stellar distances go, and they happen to be located where radio interference from clouds of cosmic dust and gas is at a minimum. Worth trying? It certainly is -- and the first steps are being taken right now. With an #-foot antenna, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is getting set to listen for signals from other stars. It could happen any day -- our first contact with intelligent life on another planet! r Great cast ! Stupendous ever would! v Director. "Zeus?" said his wife, a beautiful woman not over a thousand years old. "What an egomaniac! Comparing yourself to a god, even if he is the god of those -- those savages!" She gestured at the huge screen on the wall. It showed, far below, the blue sea, the black ships on the yellow beach, the purple tents of the Greek army, the broad brown plain, and the white towers of Troy. The Director glared at her through hexagonal dark glasses and puffed on his cigar until angry green clouds rolled from it. His round bald head was covered by a cerise beret, his porpoise frame by a canary yellow tunic, and his chubby legs by iridescent green fourpluses. "I may not look like a god, but as far as my power over the natives of this planet goes, I could well be their deity," he replied. He spoke sharply to a tall handsome blond youth who wore a crooked smile and bright blue and yellow tattoo spiraling around his legs and trunk. "Apollo, hand me the Script!" "Surely you're not going to change the Script again?" said his wife. She rose from her chair, and the scarlet web she was wearing translated the shifting micro-voltages on the surface of her skin into musical tones. "I never change the Script," said the Director. "I just make the slight revisions required for dramatic effects." "I don't care what you do to it, just so you don't allow the Trojans to win. I hate those despicable brutes." Apollo laughed loudly, and he said, "Ever since she and Athena and Aphrodite thought of that goofy stunt of asking Paris to choose the most beautiful of the three, and he gave the prize to Aphrodite, Hera's hated the Trojans. Really, Hera, why blame those simple, likable people for the actions of only one of them? I think Paris showed excellent judgment. Aphrodite was so grateful she contrived to get that lovely Helen for Paris and -- " "Enough of this private feud," snapped the Director. "Apollo, I told you once to hand me the Script." A chilles at midnight paced back and forth before his tent. Finally, in the agony of his spirit, he called to Thetis. The radio which had been installed in his shield, unknown to him, transmitted his voice to a cabin in the great spaceship hanging over the Trojan plain. Thetis, hearing it, said to Apollo, "Get out of my cabin, you heel, or I'll have you thrown out." "Leave?" he said. "Why? So you can be with your barbarian lover?" "He is not my lover," she said angrily. "But I'd take even a barbarian as a lover before I'd have anything to do with you. Now, get out. And don't speak to me again unless it's in the line of business." "Any time I speak to you, I mean business," he said, grinning. "Get out or I'll tell my father!" "I hear and obey. But I'll have you, one way or another." Thetis shoved him out. Then she quickly put on the suit that could bend light around her to make her invisible and transport her through the air and do many other things. Out of a port she shot, straight toward the tent of her protege. She did not decelerate until she saw him standing tall in the moonlight, his hands still raised in entreaty. She landed and cut the power off so he could see her. "Mother, Mother!" cried Achilles. "How long must I put up with Agamemnon's high-handedness ?" Thetis took him by the hand and led him into the tent. "Is Patroclos around?" she asked. "No, he is having some fun with Iphis, that buxom beauty I gave him after I conquered the city of Scyros." "There's a sensible fellow," said Thetis. "Why don't you forget this fuss with King Agamemnon and have fun with some rosy-cheeked darling?" But a painful expression crossed her face as she said it. Achilles did not notice the look. "I am too sick with humiliation and disgust to take pleasure in anything. I am full up to here with being a lion in the fighting and yet having to give that jackal Agamemnon the lion's share of the loot, just because he has been chosen to be our leader. Am I not a king in Thessaly? I wish -- I wish -- " "Yes?" said Thetis eagerly. "Do you want to go home?" "I should go home. Then the Greeks would wish they'd not allowed Agamemnon to insult the best man among them." "Oh, Achilles, say the word and I'll have you across the sea and in your palace in an hour!" she said excitedly. She was thinking, The Director will be furious if Achilles disappears , but he won't be able to do anything about it. And the Script can be revised. Hector or Odysseus or Paris can play the lead role. "TyrO," Achilles said. "I can't leave my men here. They'd say I had run out on them, that I was a coward. And the Greeks would call me a yellow dog. No, I'll allow no man to say that." Thetis sighed and answered sadly, "Very well. What do you want me to do?" "Go ask Zeus if he will give Agamemnon so much trouble he'll come crawling to me, begging for forgiveness and pleading for my help." Thetis had to smile. The enormous egotism of the beautiful brute! Taking it for granted that the Lord of Creation would bend the course of events so Achilles could salvage his pride. Yet, she told herself, she need not be surprised. He had taken it calmly enough the night she'd appeared to him and told him that she was a goddess and his true mother. He had always been convinced divine blood ran in his veins. Was he not superior to all men? Was he not Achilles? "I will go to Zeus," she said. "But what he will do, only he knows." She reached up and pulled his head down to kiss him on the forehead. She did not trust herself to touch the lips of this man who was far more a man than those he supposed to be gods. The lips she longed for... the lips soon to grow cold. She could not bear to think of it. She flicked the switch to make her invisible and, after leaving the tent, rose toward the ship. As always, it hung at four thousand feet above the plain, hidden in the inflated plastic folds that simulated a cloud. To the Greeks and Trojans the cloud was the home of Zeus, anchored there so he could keep a close eye on the struggle below. It was he who would decide whether the walls of Troy would stand or fall. It was to him that both sides prayed. T HE Director was drinking a highball in his office and working out the details of tomorrow's shooting with his cameramen. "We'll give that Greek Diomedes a real break, make him the big hero. Get a lot of closeups. He has a superb profile and a sort of flair about him. It's all in the Script, what aristocrats he kills, how many narrow escapes, and so on. But about noon, just before lunch, we'll wound him. Not too badly, just enough to put him out of action. Then we'll see if we can whip up a big tearjerker between that Trojan and his wife -- what's her name?" He looked around as if he expected them to feed him the answer. But they were silent ; it was not wise to know more than he. He snapped his fingers. "Andromache! That's it!" "What a memory! How do you keep all those barbaric names at your tongue's tip? Photographic!" and so on from the suckophants. "O.K. So after Diomedes leaves the scene, you, Apollo, will put on a simulacrum of Helenos, the Trojan prophet. As Helenos, you'll induce Hector to go back to Troy and get his mother, the Queen, to pray for victory. We can get some colorful shots of the temple and the local religious rites. Meantime, we'll set up a touching domestic scene between Hector and his wife. Ring in their baby boy. A baby's always good for ohs and ahs. Later, after coffee break, we'll..." Apollo drifted through the crowd toward the Director's wife. She was sitting on a chair and moodily drinking. However, seeing Apollo, she smiled with green-painted lips and said, "Do sit down, darling. You needn't worry about my husband being angry because you're paying attention to me. He's too busy shining down on his little satellites to notice you' Apollo seated himself in a chair facing her and moved forward so their knees touched. "What do you want now?" she said. "You only get loveydovey when you're trying to get something out of me." "You know I love only you, Hera," he said, grinning. "But I can't meet you as often as I'd like. Old Thunder-andLightning is too suspicious. And I value my job too much to risk it, despite my overwhelming passion for you." "Get to the point." "We're way over our budget and past our deadline. The shooting should have been finished six months ago. Yet Old Fussybritches keeps on revising the Script and adding scene after scene. And that's not all. We're not going home when Troy does fall. The Director is planning to make a sequel. I know because he asked me to outline the Script for it. He's got the male lead picked out. Foxy Grandpa Odysseus." lently she sloshed her drink over the edge of her glass. "Why, my brother means to kill Odysseus at the first opportunity! My brother is mad, absolutely mad about Athena, but he can't get to first base with her. She's got eyes only for Odysseus, though how she could take up with one of those stupid primitives, I'll never understand." "Athena claims he has an intelligence equal to any of us," said Apollo. "However, it's not her but Thetis I meant to discuss." "Is my stepdaughter interfering again?" "I think so. Just before this conference I saw her coming out of the Director's room, tears streaming from her big cow eyes. I imagine she was begging him again to spare Achilles. Or at least to allow the Trojans to win for a while so Agamemnon will give back to Achilles the girl he took from him, that tasty little dish, Briseis." "You ought to know how tasty she is," said Hera bitterly. "I happen to know you drugged Achilles several nights in a row and then put on his simulacrum." "A handy little invention, that simulacrum," said Apollo. "Put one on and you can look like anybody you want to look like. Your jealousy is showing, Hera. However, that's not the point. If Thetis keeps playing on her father's sympathies like an old flute, this production will last forever. Frankly, I'd like to shake the dust of this crummy planet from my feet, get back to civilization before it forgets what a great script writer I am." "What do you propose?" "I propose to hurry things up. Eventually, Achilles is supposed to quit sulking and take up arms again. So far, the Director has been indefinite on how we'll get him to do that. Well, we'll help him without his knowing it. We'll fix it so the Trojans will beat the Greeks even worse than the Director intends. Hector will almost run them back into the sea. Agamemnon will beg Achilles to get back into the ring. He'll give him back the loot he took from him, including Briseis. And he'll offer his own daughter in marriage to Achilles. "Achilles will refuse. But we'll have him all set up for the next move. Tonight a technician will implant a posthypnotic suggestion in Achilles that he send his buddy Patroclos, dressed in Achilles' armor, out to scare the kilts off the Trojans. We'll generate a panic among the Trojans with a subsonic projector. Then we'll arrange it so Hector kills Patroclos. That is the one thing to make Achilles so fighting mad he'll quit sulking..." "Patroclos? But the Director wants to save him for the big scene when Achilles is knocked off. Patroclos is supposed to put Achilles' armor on, storm the Scaian gate, and lead the Greeks right into the city." "Accidents will happen," said Apollo. "Despite what the barbarians think, we are not gods. Or are we? What do you say to my plan?" "If the Director finds out we've tampered with the Script, he'll divorce me. And you'll be blackballed in every studio from one end of the Galaxy to the other." Apollo winked and said, "I'll leave it to you to make Old Stupe think Patroclos' death was his own idea. You have done something like that before, and more than once." She laughed and said, "Oh, Apollo, you're such a heel." He rose. "Not a heel. Just a great script writer. Our plan will give me a chance to kill Achilles much sooner than the Director expects. And it'll all be for the good of the Script." went into the Greek camp, one to Achilles' tent and one to Agamemnon's. The technician assigned to the King of Mycenae gave him a whiff of sleep gas and then taped two electrodes to the royal forehead. It took him a minute to play a recording and two to untape the electrodes and leave. Five minutes later, the King awoke, shouting that Zeus had sent him a dream in the shape of wise old Nestor. Nestor had told him to rouse the camp and march forth even if it were only dawn, for today Troy would fall and his brother Menelaos would get back his wife Helen. Agamemnon, though, who had always been too clever for his own good, told the council of elders that he wanted to test his army before telling them the truth. He would announce that he was tired of this war they could not win and that he wanted to go home. This news would separate the slackers from the soldiers, his true friends from the false. Unfortunately, when he told this to the assemblage, he found far less men of valor than he had expected. The entire army, with a few exceptions, gave a big hurrah and stampeded toward the ships. They had had a bellyful of this silly war, fighting to win back the beautiful tart Helen for the King's brother, spilling their guts all over foreign plains while their wives were undoubtedly playing them false with the #-Fs, the fields were growing weeds, and their children were starving. In vain, Agamemnon tried to stop the rush. He even shouted at them what they had only guessed before, that more was at stake than his brother's runaway wife. If Troy was crushed, the Greeks would own the trading and colonizing routes to the rich Black Sea area. But no one paid any attention to him. They were too concerned with knocking each other over in their haste to get the ships ready to sail. At this time, the only people from the spaceship on the scene were some cameramen and technicians. They were paralyzed by the unexpectedness of the situation, and they were afraid to use their emotion-stimulating projectors. By the flick of a few switches the panic could be turned into aggression. But it would have been aggression without a leader. The Greeks, instead of automatically turning to fight the Trojans, would have killed each other, sure that their fellows were trying to stop them from embarking for home. The technicians did not dare to waken the Director and acknowledge they could not handle a simple mob scene. But one of them did put a call through to one of the Director's daughters, Athena. Athena zipped down to Odysseus and found him standing to one side, looking glum. He had not panicked, but he also was not interfering. Poor fellow, he longed to go home to Penelope. In the beginning of this useless war, he had pretended madness to get out of being drafted. But, once he had sworn loyalty to the King, he would not abandon him. Athena flicked off her lightbender so he could see her. She shouted, "Odysseus, don't just stand there like a lump on a bog ! Do something or all will be lost -- the war, the honor of the Greeks, the riches you will get from the loot of Troy! Get going!" Odysseus, never at a loss, tore the wand of authority from the King's numbed hand and began to run through the crowd. Everybody he met he reproached with cowardice, and backed the sting of his words with the hard end of the wand on their backs. Athena signaled to the technicians to project an aggression stimulating frequency. Now that the Greeks had a leader to channel their courage, they could be diverted back to fighting. There was only one obstacle, Thersites. He was a lame hunchback with the face of a baboon and a disposition to match. Thersites cried out in a hoarse, jeering voice, "Agamemnon, don't you have enough loot? Do you still want us to die so you may gather more gold and beautiful Trojan women in your greedy arms? You Greeks, you're not men. You're women who will do anything this disgrace to a crown tells you to do. Look what he did to Achilles. Robbed him of Briseis and in so doing robbed us of the best warrior we have. If I were Achilles, I'd knock Agamemnon's head off." "We've put up with your outrageous abuse long enough!" shouted Odysseus. He began thwacking Thersites on the head and the back until blood ran. "Shut up or I'll kill you!" At this the whole army, which hated Thersites, roared with laughter. Odysseus had relieved the tension ; now they were ready to march under Agamemnon's orders. Athena sighed with relief and radioed back to the ship that the Director could be awakened. Things were well in hand. A ND so they were -- until a few days later when Apollo and Hera, waiting until the Director had gone to bed early with a hangover from the night before induced Hector to make a night attack. The fighting went on all night, and at dawn Patroclos ran into Achilles' tent. "Terrible news!" he cried. "The Trojans have breached the walls around our ships and are burning them! Diomedes, Agamemnon, and Odysseus are wounded. If you do not lead your men against Hector, all is lost!" "Too bad," said Achilles. But the blood drained from his face. "Don't be so hardhearted!" shouted Patroclos. "If you won't fight, at least allow me to lead the Myrmidons against the enemy. Perhaps we can save the ships and drive Hector off!" Achilles shouted back, "Very well! You know I give you, my best friend, anything you want. But I will not for all the gold in the world serve under a king who robs me of prizes I took with my own sword. However, I will give you my armor, and my men will march behind you!" Then, sobbing with rage and frustration, he helped Patroclos dress in his armor. "Do you see this little lever in the back of the shield?" he said. "When an enemy strikes at you, flick it this way. The air in front of you will become hard, and your foe's weapon will bounce off the air. Then, before he recovers from his confusion, flick the lever the other way. The air will soften and allow your spear to pass. And the spearpoint will shear through his armor as if it were cheese left in the hot sun. It is made of some substance harder than the hardest bronze made by the hand of man." "So this is the magic armor your divine mother, Thetis, gave you," said Patroclos. "No wonder -- " "Even without this magic -- or force field, as Thetis calls it -- I am the best man among Greek or Trojan," said Achilles matter-of-factly. "There ! Now you are almost as magnificent as I am. Go forth in my armor, Patroclos, and run the Trojans ragged. I will pray to Zeus that you come back safely. There is one thing you must not do, though, no matter how strong the temptation -- do not chase the Trojans too close to the city, even if you are on the heels of Hector himself. Thetis has told me that Zeus does not want Troy to fall yet. If you were to threaten it now, the gods would strike you down." "I will remember," said Patroclos. He got into Achilles' chariot and drove off proudly to take his place in front of the Myrmidons. T HE Director was so red in the face, he looked as if his head were one huge blood vessel. "How in space did the Trojans get so far?" he screamed. "And what is Patroclos doing in Achilles' armor? There's rank inefficiency here or else skullduggery! Either one, heads will roll! And I think I know whose! Apollo! Hera! What have you two been up to?" "Why, Husband," said Hera, "how can you say I had anything to do with this? You know how I hate the Trojans. As for Apollo, he thinks too much of his job to go against the Script." "All right, we'll see. We'll get to the bottom of this later. Meanwhile, let's direct the situation so it'll end up conforming to the Script." But before the cameramen and technicians could be organized, Patroclos, leading the newly inspired Greeks, slaughtered the Trojans as a lion kills sheep. He could not be stopped, and when he saw Hector running away from him, he forgot his friend's warning and pursued him to the walls of Troy. "Follow me!" yelled Patroclos to the Greeks. "We will break down the gates and take the city within an hour !" jected fury into Hector so that he turned to battle the man he thought was Achilles. And Apollo, timing to coincide with the instant that Patroclos flicked off his force field, struck him a stunning blow from behind. At the same time a spear thrown by a Trojan wounded Patroclos in the back. Dazed, hurt, the Greek started back toward his men. But Hector ran up and stabbed him through the belly, finding no resistance to his spear because Patroclos had not turned the force field back on. Patroclos hit the ground with a crash of armor. "No, no, you fool, Apollo!" shouted the Director into the radio. "He must not die! We need him later for the Script. You utter fool, you've bumbled!" Thetis, who had been standing behind the Director, burst into tears and ran into her cabin. "What's the matter with her?" asked the Director. "You may as well know, darling," said Hera, "that your daughter is in love with a barbarian." "Thetis? In love with Patroclos? Impossible!" Hera laughed and said, "Ask her how she feels about the planned death of Achilles. That is whom she is weeping for, not Patroclos. She foresees Achilles' death in his friend's. And I imagine she will go to comfort her lover, knowing his grief when he hears that Patroclos is dead." "That's ridiculous! If she's in love with Achilles, why would she tell Achilles she is his mother?" "For the very reason she loves him but doesn't want him to know. She at least has sense enough to realize no good could come from a match with one of those Earth primitives. So she stopped any passes from him with that maternal bit. If there is one thing the Greeks respect, it is the incest taboo." "I'll have him knocked off as soon as possible. Thetis might lose her head and tell him the truth. Poor little girl, she's been away from civilization too long. We'll have to wind up this picture and get back to God's planet." Hera watched him go after Thetis and then switched to a private channel. "Apollo, the Director is very angry with you. But I've thought of a way to smooth his feathers. We'll was the only way to get Achilles back into the fight. He'll like that. Achilles can then be slain, and the picture will still be saved. Also, I'll make him think it was his idea." "That's great," replied Apollo, his voice shaky with dread of the Director. "But what can we do to speed up the shooting? Patroclos was supposed to take the city after Achilles was killed." "Don't worry," said Athena, who had been standing behind Hera. "Odysseus is your man. He's been working on a device to get into the city. Barbarian or not, that fellow is the smartest I've ever met. Too bad he's an Earthman." four hours, Thetis wept much. But she was also very busy, working while she cried. She went to Hephaistos, the chief technician, an old man of five thousand years. He loved Thetis because she had intervened for Hephaistos more than once when her father had been angry with him. Yet he shook his head when she asked him if he could make Achilles another suit of armor, even more invulnerable than the first. "Not enough time. Achilles is to be killed tomorrow." "No. My father has cooled off a little. He remembered that the Script calls for Achilles to kill Hector before he himself dies. Besides, the government anthropologist wants to take, films of the funeral games for Patroclos. And he overrules even Father, you know." "That'll give me a week," said Hephaistos, figuring on his fingers. "I can do it. But tell me, child, why all the tears? Is it true what they say, that you love a barbarian, that magnificent red-haired Achilles?" "I love him," she said, weeping again. "Ah, child, you are a mere hundred years or so. When you reach my age, you'll know that there are few things worth tears, and love between man and woman is not one of them. However, I'll make the armor. And its field of force will cover everything around him except an opening to the outside air. Otherwise, he'd suffocate. But what good will all this do? The Director will him. And even if Achilles should escape, you'd be no better off." "I will," she said. "We'll go to Italy -- and I'll give him perpetuol." Thetis went to her cabin. Shortly afterward, the doorbell rang. She opened the door and saw Apollo. Smiling, he said, "I have something here you might be interested in hearing." He held in his hand a small cartridge. Seeing it, her eyes widened in surprise. "Yes, it's a recording," he said, and he pushed past her into the room. "Let me put it in your playback." "You don't have to," she replied. "I presume you had a microphone planted in Hephaistos' cabin?" "Correct. Won't your father be angry if somebody sends him a note telling him you're planning to ruin the Script by running off to Italy with a barbarian? And not only that but inject perpetuol into the barbarian to increase his life span? Personally, if I were your father, I'd let you do it. You'd soon grow sick of your handsome but uncouth booby." Thetis did not answer. "I really don't care," he said. "In fact. I'll help you. I can arrange it so the arrow that hits Achilles' heel will be a trick one. Its head will just seem to sink into his flesh. Inside it will be a needle that will inject a cataleptic agent. Achilles will seem to be dead but will actually be in a state of suspended animation. We'll sneak his body at night from the funeral pyre and substitute a corpse. A bio-tech who owes me a favor will fix up the face of a dead Trojan or Greek to look like Achilles'. When this epic is done and we're ready to leave Earth, you can run away. We'll not miss you until we're lightyears away." "And what do you want in return for arranging all this ? My thanks?" "I want you." Thetis flinched. For a moment she stood with her eyes closed and her hands clenched. Then, opening her eyes, she said, "All right. I know that is the only way open for me. It's also the only way you could have devised to have me. But I want to tell you that I loathe and despise you. And I'll be hating every atom of your flesh while you're in possession of mine." He chuckled and said, "I know it. But your hate will only make me relish you the more. It'll be the sauce on the salad." "Oh, you heel!" she said in a trembling voice. "You dirty, sneaking, miserable, slimy heel!" "Agreed." He picked up a bottle and poured two drinks. "Shall we toast to that?" as planned, and the tearjerking scene in which his father, King Priam, came to beg his son's body from Achilles. Four days later, Achilles led the attack on the Scaian gate. It was arranged that Paris should be standing on the wall above the gate. Apollo, invisible behind him, would shoot the arrow that would strike Achilles' foot if Paris' arrow bounced off the force field. Apollo spoke to Thetis, who was standing beside him. "You seem very nervous. Don't worry. You'll see your lovely warrior in Italy in a few weeks. And you can explain to him that you aren't his mother, that you had to tell him that to protect him from the god Apollo's jealousy. But now that Zeus has raised him from the dead, you have been given to him as a special favor. And all will end happily. That is, until living with him will become so unbearable you'd give a thousand years off your life to leave this planet. Then, of course, it'll be too late. There won't be another ship along for several millennia." "Shut up," she said. "I know what I'm doing." "So do I," he said. "Ah, here comes the great hero Achilles, chasing a poor Trojan whom he plans to slaughter. We'll see about that." He lifted the airgun in whose barrel lay the long dart with the trick head. He took careful aim, saying, "I'll wait until he goes to throw his spear. His force field will be off... Now!" Thetis gave a strangled cry. Achilles, the arrow sticking from the tendon just above the heel, had toppled backward from the chariot onto the plain, where dust settled on his shining armor. He lay motionless. "Oh, that was an awful fall." she moaned. "Perhaps he broke his neck. I'd better go down there and see if he's all right." "Don't bother," said Apollo. "He's dead." Thetis looked at him with wide brown eyes set in a gray face. "I put poison on the needle," said Apollo, smiling crookedly at her. "That was my idea, but your father approved of it. He said I'd redeemed my blunder him what you planned. Of course, I didn't inform him of the means you took to insure that I would carry out my bargain with you. I was afraid your father would have been very shocked to hear of your immoral behavior." Thetis choked out, "You unspeakable... vicious... vicious... you... you..." "Dry your pretty tears," said Apollo. "It's all for your own good. And for Achilles', too. The story of his brief but glorious life will be a legend among his people. And out in the Galaxy the movie based on his career will become the most stupendous epic ever seen." thousand years later, it was still a tremendous boxoffice attraction. There was talk that now that Earth was civilized enough to have space travel, it might even be shown Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl Fiction Showcase (Doubleday) is partly a memorial to her late husband, C. M. Kornbluth. But also it is a collection of excellent stories, chosen with care and perception. Mary G. Byers was a science fiction reader (and writer) long before she ever heard of Cyril Kornbluth. She has some twenty years' acquaintance with the field; she knows a good story when she finds one. In Science Fiction Showcase she gives us stories by Jack geon, Ray Bradbury, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson, Richard Matheson and half a dozen others. Some, like Damon Knight's Ticket to Anywhere and James Blish's A Work of Art y are here published in complete and revised form for the first time anywhere; some, like Robert Bloch's Nightmare Number Four , have never been published before at all. If you intend to buy only one science fiction anthology in #, Science Fiction Showcase is a good choice -- but the other new anthologies run very rich to the ton. Doubleday also has The World That Couldn't Be , edited by H. L. Gold and containing (in addition to the title story by Clifford D. Simak) eight other fine novelettes from Galaxy Magazine . Judith Merril offers her selections of the year's best in SF: # (Gnome Press  Dell). The stories are all entertaining and the non-fiction addenda (notably Isaac Asimov's original article on the ill-mannered habit science has of catching up with science fiction and Daniel Lang's Man in Space) are even better. And Groff Conklin gives us Four for the Future (Pyramid), comprising novelettes by Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson and Eric Frank Russell. The Anderson and the Russell are first-rate. The Sturgeon and Kuttner aren't. But there are treasures in even the minor efforts of Sturgeon and the late Henry Kuttner; they are both simply too good ever to be wholly bad. In Deals with the Devil (Ballantine), Basil Davenport has selected twelve accounts of hellish bargains struck. In six of them the man comes out ahead, in the other six the devil collects; so that nothing is proved except that Messrs. Kuttner, Boucher, Elliott, Collier, Dunsany and others tell uncommonly good stories. I N # both Henry Kuttner and C. M. Kornbluth died and so, a little later on, did E. Everett Evans. Evans was a friend and admirer of E. E. ("Skylark") Smith, the man who opened interstellar space to science fiction writers. Evans was also a fan, a familiar figure at science fiction conventions and in some way an odd one, as he had come to science fiction late in life and fandom is a population of youth. Finally he was, in the last years of his life, a writer. In Man of Many Minds (Fantasy Press  Pyramid), all of Evans's facets show clearly. The friendship with Smith produces junior-grade Galactic Patrol (it is called the Interstellar Corps, but no old Lensman will be deceived). The fannish element generates an unfortunately severe case of that most common problem in the writing of fanturned-pro, the inability to leave well enough alone. Not content with an Interstellar Corpsman for a hero, Evans has to turn him into a telepath; not satisfied with mere telepathy, he has to give him the odd power of dislocating his mind at will and parking it in the brain of any convenient animal of low intelligence. There is also an intelligent race of plant-creatures called Guddus, a Plot to Overthrow the Guvmint and heaven knows what else. It is all too much. A Simak or a van Vogt might be able to juggle all the marvels in Man of Many Minds, but Evans's fingers were not that supple. He was able to invent them, but not to find a use for them -- so that, for example, on almost the only occasion when the hero has any real need for his telepathic powers (he must establish contact with the Guddus, whose spoken language is in the ultrasonic, dogwhistle range of frequencies), the telepathic communication is abandoned almost at once in favor of a clumsy, complicated frequence changer and the laborious study of their language. Yet there is that third thing about Evans. He was also a writer. When he was able to free himself of the heritage of fandom and the all-butBoskonian enemy, he made some plausible and telling points. It is really very much too bad that Evans began writing sciencefiction only when he was in his fifties. An earlier start and a few more years could easily have produced something well worth while. This is not to say, however, that reading Mem of Many Minds is all enjoyment -- not with passages like this : Hanlon threw back his head in a gesture of pride... "I'm glad I did it. To be able to free those fine Guddus from slavery, and to save the Federation from that horrible plot -- it was well worth the little suffering it'll cost me. But," and his smile was pathetic, "I do miss the uniform. I was so proud, wearing it." This is the man who has just most bloodily killed a number of opponents and conducted the fiercest fought space war within the scope of this book. He is then given a set of captain's bars to make up for his "little suffering." Two other aspirants to the mantle of E. E. Smith appear, conveniently bound together in a single volume. They are Robert Silverberg's The Planet Killers and Poul Anderson' s We Claim These Stars! (Ace Double Volume). Both stories owe a debt to Smith; both have to do with an interstellar civilization centered on Earth and the troubles involved in keeping it going against the best efforts of extra-solar enemies; both make use of cloak-and-dagger intrigue and flamboyant sets. There the resemblance stops. In one story you have care, thought, precision and an economy of construction which invents lavish details and makes fine use of every one. The other is purest Perils of Pauline. This is really a gambler's volume, suitable for flipping and calling like a coin : Anderson you win, Silverberg you lose. R EX Gordon's First to the Stars (Ace) is a queer sort of novel. It is loaded with shoddy fake-suspense tricks and weirdly unlikely astrophysical detail, and surely its wailing first-person prose is a bore. But the man seems to have something to say. Gordon is capable of having his narrator refer to his spacetraveling companion as "E" (not even the courtesy of a period after the initial!) for a page or two in order to attempt to titivate the reader's interest, before revealing that "E" is only "Elvinia" and the big surprise is that she turns out to be a girl. He is capable of asking the reader to believe that an interstellar rocket, careening wildly out of control through the emptiest space in the Galaxy, just sort of happens to collide with a planet -- not only that, an Earthlike planet capable of sustaining life -- not only that, but in the resulting collision nobody is killed, or even very badly banged up He is capable of endless incredibilities; and yet he is capable, too, of telling a story that moves and excites. In The Sea People (Avalon), Adam Lukens produces a book just as queerly uneven as First to the Stars. Lukens' imagination can operate on as infantile a level as devising such "alien" names for beverages as "cinot", a non-intoxicating drink made from pressed oysters, and "yeksic" -- surely a misprint for "yeksihw"! -- a joy-juice squeezed out of jungle fruit. Yet that same imagination is subtle enough to conjure up a sympathetic and detailed race of iishlike aliens in which the oldest members are grown detached and enormous, so that they are the one important natural enemy of their juniors. Is this a master-stroke of invention? No, unfortunately not, for even the greatest inspiration comes to nothing if it is not surrounded by great and patiently contrived detail. But in a very good book this would be a very good idea indeed. In The Sea People it is only surprising. Martin Gardner is a continuously reliable source of first-class books on scientific themes for the lay reader. Logic Machines and Diagrams (McGraw-Hill) traces the history of man's long-term endeavor to carry on part of his thinking process independently of the built-in computer within the skull. Ramon Lull's #th century experiments in rotating wheels bearing propositions in logic, Lewis Carroll's #th century "Game of Logic" and scores of other systems are described and amply discussed. So are some of the ingenious and baffling mechanical and electrical machines devised for the same purpose. Having detailed the results of eight centuries of development, Gardner then reveals his own newly developed Notational System for symbolic logic. As we would expect from him, it is thorough, clear and complete. He then adds an # quotation from the Reverend John Venn, he of the Venn Diagrams, so that we may not think the interest in this subject is tainted by any conceivable practical application : I have no high estimate myself of the interest or importance of what are sometimes called logical machines... It is very seldom that intricate logical calculations are practically forced upon us; it is rather we who look about for complicated examples in order to illustrate our rules and methods. A great work on an extremely important but dismayingly difficult subject is Godel's Proof, by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman (New York University Press). Nearly thirty years ago Kurt Godel, a #-year-old mathematician at the University of Vienna (now at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies), published a paper on formally undecidable mathematical propositions. The mathematical world has spent the intervening decades comprehending what Godel wrote. "Godel," Messrs. Nagel and Newman tell us, "presented mathematicians with the astounding and melancholy conclusion that the axiomatic method has certain inherent limitations, which rule out the possibility that even the ordinary arithmetic of the integers can ever be fully axiomatized." As predominant modern philosophies of mathematics rely heavily on the axiomatic method, Godel thus told mathematicians that their methods were and always would be inadequate to describe their own processes. I T IS not unusual for the paperbound edition of a book to be shortened, but that master of paradox, Robert Sheckley, has given us one of the very few cases of a paperbound edition revised, retitled and quite a good deal lengthened from its hard-cover appearance. The book is Immortality, Inc. (Bantam), previously Immortality Delivered (Avalon), and, more previously still, a Galaxy Magazine serial under the title of Time Killers -- in still a third version. Several of tomorrow's doctoral degrees in Comp. Engl. Lit. may await those who have the patience to compare and analyze the variorum editions. But the casual reader will find in any one of them Sheckley's habitual skill plus an unusually challenging theme -- a world in which survival after death is available to all, for a price. John Brunner's The World Swappers (Ace) involves a secret society of humanityservers who gadfly the stagnant race of man into expansion and progress by various spy-and-saboteur stratagems. This one is very enjoyable, very competent and very like van Vogt. In case you doubt this, you need only flip the double volume over to find van Vogt's Siege of the Unseen for comparison. This remarkable story contains what in this reviewer's opinion is the all-time high in ridiculousness of "scientific background" -- viz., a method of interdimensional travel which is accomplished through use of the Bates system of eye training. A much more attractive van Vogt is The War Against the Rull (Simon  Schuster), which is five novelettes very skillfully cut and patched into the semblance of a novel. As the principal characters are impenetrably non-human, van Vogt's sympathies are excited and he makes them interesting, formidable and well worth reading about. Each story is the account of one battle in man's interminable war against his competitors for supremacy in space, the light-controlling, voracious, powerful and hateful Rulls. It is on record that John Christopher's opinion of science fiction is low, but that has not kept him from contributing to it a number of very succesful stories and a number of very good ones. (Not necessarily the same stories.) Planet in Peril (Avon) is one of the good ones. It is Christopher's contention here that capitalism will indeed be buried, but not by any Marxist Messiah. A managerial state will replace capitalism and communism alike. Great trusts will vie for the minds and loyalties of men ; Communications will have its spies in Atomics, and Agriculture will fight Chemicals with guns as well as with market monopolies. In The Outward Urge (Ballantine), John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes chronicle four generations in the Troon family history, all of them pioneers, all of them destined to push mankind one step farther out into space. We Who Survived (Avon) is by Sterling Noel, more often thought of as a craftsman in the mystery-suspense field. This is the story of the fifth Ice Age, when the snow began one day and never stopped. Even the greatest skyscrapers are buried, and only a narrow belt around the Equator remains capable of producing food for the few thousands who are able to survive the endless blizzard. The problem is survival; the solution makes good reading. Another offering by a mystery specialist is Cornell Woolrich's Beyond the Night (Avon), a short-story collection containing six retellings of weary fantasy themes. The Man Who CouM Cheat Death (Avon) does so by transplanting the uter-parathyroid glands of innocents into his own body. The what glands? The uter-parathyroid glands, and don't ask so many questions As this in time makes him glow with a ghastly green radiance, and besides involves him in a number of murders, society has got to track him down and blow his head off, and it does. Barre Lyndon and Jimmie Sangster wrote this. It is to be made into a movie, which accounts for the ghastly green radiance, but what accounts for the rest ness? In The Dark Destroyers (Avalon), Manly Wade Wellman sends an invasion of Cold People against the reeling Earth, but provides a hero named Mark Darragh to beat their jellylike heads in, so that everything comes out all right. Well, almost all right. In an epilogue, Mark Darragh's great-grandson is quoted as saying, "Maybe, in the final analysis, my great-grandpa was the most devastating bore in the history of the universe." The boy shows a lot of discernment. Great-grandfoot of the rocket lift and sengers' turn. Bridget was watched the loading operaglad that for once she was not tion. The freight had long responsible. Let others worry since been inspected and stowand snoop. This time she was Watchdogs have to be watched or they keep everything out -- including our friends! a passenger herself, starward bound. Inspected, passed and okayed, she could have the pleasure of watching others squirm. Like that beauty coming aboard with the furs and the orchid. She wouldn't be allowed to keep the orchid, of course. Bridget grinned as she saw the flower tossed into a trash can and imagined the words the beauty was mouthing. The man beside her sported a boutonniere. Yes, there it went into the can. He was still smiling, probably cracking wise. Bridget had separated so many travelers from so many items that she could tell what the passenger was going to say before he said it. Most people knew that strenuous efforts were being made to keep pests and epidemics away from Earth. Ever since the beginnings of space travel, the quarantine of incoming ships at the Moon had been rigidly observed. But the fact that plagues could also spread from Earth seldom registered on the public's mind. Bridget was all too well aware of it. For several years she had labored to that end in the Quarantine Service. Now that her savings had accumulated and her abilities as an entomologist were recognized, she was about to board one of the shining ships herself. There were raised eyebrows when her destination was known. An entomologist going to New Eden -- a planet where insects were at a minimum. But Bridget only smiled. She knew what she wanted. She was bound for the frontier, where men are men and women are scarce. The speaker blared. The countdown was beginning. "Fifteen minutes!" rasped the mechanical voice. "Fifteen minutes to blast-off !" S HE took a last look at the planet of her birth and squeezed into the lift. The few remaining passengers pushed in with her. A man in a red waistcoat was commiserating with the woman beside him. "Don't let the officials get you down," he said. "We'll have to put up with them for the journey. But on New Eden, I hear, the conditions are so good they hardly need any regulations at all." "It isn't that," sniffed his friend. "It's just that you gave it to me and I was hoping to wear it tonight." "Perhaps I can buy you something in hydroponics. I had no idea they were so touchy or I'd have had the orchid fumigated." Bridget felt the scorn of the official for the general public. "If you're going to New Eden, you ought to know we want to keep it that way." The red waistcoat looked down at her. "Oh, officialdom without stripes?" he said. "Or are you an old hand? Perhaps you can explain the deal before we get there." So he was the type that cracked wise, and she had put her foot in it right at the beginning. "I've never been off Earth before," she admitted. "I read up on it all first." The lift was at the lock door, and she slipped through without looking back. The speaker was croaking "Ten minutes to go" as she hurried to her cabin and prepared for takeoff. She'd have to do better than this or the trip would be a washout. Better just concentrate on enjoying it... the new experiences... the fascination of travel. The jets roared and Bridget Kelly blacked out. Several hours later she had recovered enough to spruce up, take the prescribed dose of covitron against space sickness, and make her way to the lounge. She found the table setting with her name on it and had hardly sat down before a familiar voice began at her ear. "Sure and if it isn't Bridget Kelly, and it's a long time I've been waiting for herself." She looked up into the same laughing eyes, only this time they were above an emeraldgreen waistcoat. "Still determined that New Eden shall not be polluted by snakes? Oh, excuse me, that was St. Patrick. You're worried about bugs." She laughed in spite of herself and glanced at the place card next hers. "Mr. Patch Maguire," it read. "I didn't mean to sound stuffy," she said. "It's just that most people don't realize how important it is... how much trouble just a few insects... well, I've worked at it and I ought to know." "Ah, an official entomologist. But in that case, why New Eden? Or are you insurance against people like Carrie and me who might import something?" "You never can tell. Something may turn up. It's hard to imagine a planet without any insects at all." "Eden's remarkable that way," put in the young officer sitting across from them. "No stinging bugs or parasites. Makes everything a lot more comfortable. Still, it's pretty new. Only a small part developed so far." "So we've insurance against the unknown in Bridget Kelly." "And what might you be insurance against, Mr. Maguire?" she countered. T HE officer stared. "Don't you folks know each other? Mr. Maguire's a grower of fancy plants. Sort of goes together... plants and insects!" He laughed. "Well, it looks like the rest of our table won't show up for this meal." "What happened to the lady without the orchid? She was with you, wasn't she?" Bridget asked. "Carrie," said Patch Maguire, "is one of those unfortunates on whom covitron does not work. She won't be with anyone for the duration. I was just hoping our whole table was not similarly afflicted." "It's a pity," mused the young officer. "So many people make the flight across space only once. If they did it more often, they might get accustomed." "Don't you take covitron?" Bridget asked, beginning to wonder how soon she should repeat the dose. Some people said it made you sleepy, and she certainly didn't want that with things just getting started... and Patch Maguire... Patch Maguire... Suddenly a window opened in her mind. She saw a letter with short punching sentences. "You think you can get away with this high-handed, overbearing, totally uncalled-for destruction of property? I'll take it to the top ! I'll see you idiots in hell... or at least out of the Service!" Patch Maguire protesting the destruction of his shipment of seeds imported from Regulus V. No amount of explanation that the seeds had been found to harbor a blight which, once let loose on Earth... Patch Maguire had a reputation as an authority on crossbreeding and mutation of plants... and also for throwing his weight around. It was several years ago, but Bridget remembered the consternation in the department. She realized that Maguire and the officer were talking. They were agreeing that space sickness was only a matter of psychology, and that if you just didn't think about it, no covitron was necessary. She hastily swallowed another pill with her coffee and hoped the coffee would keep her awake. They toured the ship together, she and Patch. They marveled at the scene from the viewport and chatted with the captain in the control room. The steward inquired about his taste in music and stereo, and he even gave advice to the gardeners in hydroponics. All doors were open to Patch, and there were murmurs about the "handsome couple" as they moved through the lounge. By the end of the trip they were making plans for New Eden. Patch insisted that Bridget was in the wrong profession and she agreed that the science of agriculture might be more rewarding than entomology under certain conditions. At the farewell dinner. Patch gave her a bouquet he'd had made up especially by the gardeners. But she was more interested in the small green leaf he wore in his lapel. He took it out and insisted on fastening it in her hair. "Sure and it's a shamrock !" he cried, as he arranged it. "And have you forgotten what day it is tomorrow?" "It's the day we land," Bridget replied. "But what day that is in our time or ship's time... it's too confusing !" "It's St. Patrick's Day, that's what it is!" he said. "A great day for the Irish and a great day for us. And I wouldn't be without the shamrock on St. Patrick's Day ! They should call the planet New Ireland, that they should. Wasn't Ireland the garden island, all green and fruitful and with no snakes? And I hear this planet's the garden planet and with no insects either to make life miserable. But let you and me be living there a while and we'll make it New Ireland for sure !" And he planted a kiss on her mouth without a thought of who was looking at them. their health, Bridget blushed and her eyes shone, and after dinner Patch escorted her to the stereo where they sat very close together in the dark. But as the pictures flashed across the screen and as Patch's arm went across her shoulder and drew her close, her mind was besieged by an army of little doubts. Shamrock... shamrock... what had she read about the shamrock? "Patch," she whispered. "Where did you get it?" "Get what?" Patch murmured, bending over to kiss her. "The shamrock, Patch? I don't believe they have it in hydroponics." "Sure, they must have it." Patch's lips brushed hers and she found it difficult to think clearly. "I never saw it there. Patch! Are you sure?" "Saw what? I don't see anything but you. That's enough for me." "About the shamrock, Patch!" "It looks beautiful on you. Sure and I wouldn't be without a shamrock on St. Patrick's Day." Bridget gave up. She lay back in the sanctuary of his arm and basked in the warm feeling of his lips on her hair. But the doubts kept crawling about in her mind. What was the matter with her? Couldn't she be happy when everything was perfect? Had she been a cut-and-dried inspector for too many years? But she remembered the words of Professor Schwarzkopf, the day she received her degree: "The inspectors are the watchdogs of the planets. Without them, all that man has built can be destroyed." When Patch had kissed her good night outside her cabin and his footsteps had died away along the corridor, she crept out into the passage and made her way to hydroponics. "Why, no," said the chief gardener, "we never carry clover of any sort. Why do you ask?" On her way to the control room, Bridget tried not to think. She found the young officer from her table on duty with the captain, and the two men listened in surprise as she outlined her fears. "I don't want to accuse Mr. Maguire of anything," she said. "I'm sure he doesn't realize how serious -- and of course there may be nothing to it. It's just that I remember that shamrocks harbor the golden nematode -- that is, in the soil around the roots. And it seems likely that if Mr. Maguire has live shamrocks -- and I remember what a serious plague they once brought over from Ireland to America..." The captain pulled his mustache. "It's clearly against regulations. I can't imagine how he'd get it past inspection. But then, Maguire's a very persistent man and he's got pull in odd places. I don't want to rouse the ire of the Irish, but I see your point." "Couldn't you search his cabin -- without his knowing I said to? Oh, I'm sure he'd be very angry. But if I could only look at his plants, then I'd be sure if they're safe. You must have ways of getting in -- if there should be a short circuit or something in his cabin." "Oh, we have ways," the captain said. "Don't we, Lieutenant?" "Perhaps at breakfast," suggested the young officer. "If Miss Kelly could arrange to make it as leisurely as possible." "And right afterward you might go to the lieutenant's cabin -- with your instruments and without Mr. Maguire." S HE had no trouble in making her breakfast leisurely. She could hardly choke it down. Under Patch's admiring gaze and flagrant approval she was uncomfortably conscious of treachery. She left as soon as the protracted meal was over, even though she knew it would give him the opportunity to discover the rape of his plants. The lieutenant was waiting for her in his cabin. He sat behind his desk eyeing a motley collection of clover in an assortment of little jars and boxes. Bridget brought out her pocket 'scope and without a word pulled the first specimen up by the roots and began to examine it. The lieutenant watched in fascination. "It's a good thing Mr. Maguire can't see you now," he said. "He'd take an entirely different tone from the one I've been hearing lately." "I'm hoping he doesn't find out," she muttered. "What he doesn't know... Oh! Oh! Look here! A fine big cyst! Now if they're all like this... The lieutenant's face took on a look of respect. He came around from behind his desk and peered over her shoulder. "Found something already?" he asked. Bridget pushed the scope under his nose. "See that?" she said. "In the right-hand corner." "You mean that lump? Doesn't look very dangerous." "No, it doesn't. But it's a nematode cyst, all right. That little brown lump, if turned loose in the soil -- give it a few years and you'll have a real pest on your hands." "You don't say. We'd better get rid of it right away. Do you think there's any more?" "That's just what I'm going to find out." But before she could move to the desk for the other containers there was a sound of scuffling outside, the door was flung violently open, and a rich, Irish voice proclaimed in righteous anger : "So here you are, conspiring against me! Both the culprits red-handed ! And my shamrocks, my little plants, my babies ! Thank heavens I got here in time!" The lieutenant moved to intercept him. "I beg your pardon, sir, but these plants are in quarantine, and if you have any others we haven't found -- " "You're no true daughter of Ireland, Bridget Kelly. And I'm fortunate to have found you out in time, false and faithless as you are!" "Now, now," cautioned the lieutenant, getting between Maguire and the desk. "She was only doing her duty. You should see the things she's been showing me in her microscope. A menace to the whole planet!" "Don't you believe a word of it!" thundered Maguire. "These inspectors are full of fears and fancies. Puffed up with their own importance. And I'll thank you to give me back my plants that you stole out of my cabin." "I'm afraid I can't do that," the lieutenant said. "Not until Miss Kelly has examined each one -- and then only the ones that get a clean bill of health." And he began to collect the little pots and remove them as far as possible from Maguire's reach. "Well, come along then, Bridget -- give them the bill of health," Maguire ordered. "You'll do that for me, I'm sure. And I don't know what all the fuss is about either, all over a few little plants, and shamrocks at that." "The few little plants have a few little cysts all through their roots," said Bridget, whose temper was wearing thin. "I've only looked at one so far, but as nice an infestation of the golden nematode Tve seldom seen. It's got to go down the incinerator." "The incinerator!" screamed Maguire. "Woman! My shamrocks! All the way from Ireland!" "If you hadn't spent your whole life circumventing regulations and pulling wires, this wouldn't have happened. Why didn't you get themtreated and certified before coming aboard?" " time, that's why!" Patch shouted. "They only came from Ireland as I was leaving for the ship. If it hadn't been for a snooping, sniveling worrywart -- all about a worm that you can't even see..." "You can see the results right enough !" Bridget's voice was rising to match his. "Did you ever hear of the Long Island potato? The best on the East Coast they were. The golden nematode ruined Long Island for potatoes. That's what the shamrock did for America! That's a sneaking, treacherous worm for you !" "And who would want to grow potatoes on Long Island, built up into a city as it is?" "They're going to want to grow potatoes on New Eden, and I'm here to see they can." "If that's all that's worrying you, I'll breed you a nematode-resistant potato. And now I'll thank you to let me take my shamrocks and make an end to this disgraceful scene." But when he looked around, he found the lieutenant had quietly removed himself with the plants, and the door of the cabin was crowded with interested passengers. "So you think you've put one over on me!" Patch shouted. "It's a good thing I found out in time how I was being deceived by a pair of eyes and a mouth that says one thing and means another !" "And I suppose you're the soul of honor! With no thought of responsibility to your fellow man ! You've had your way all your life, and it's lucky I found that out, too -- before -- before..." But he was gone, elbowing his way through the crowd, and the onlookers drifted away, embarrassed at the sight of the stormy girl who shouted hysterically after him. Bridget slammed the door and collapsed into a chair. "I'm sorry for the noise," she apologized when the officer returned. "I'd better finish checking the plants before it's time to land." "Never mind the plants," the lieutenant told her. "I've put them where he won't find them in a hurry. As a matter of fact, we aren't going to land. We're in orbit now and they're to send a rocket shuttle. They aren't worried about what we're bringing in this time. It's what we might take out. There's a howling plague on New Eden after all. Several of our passengers have changed their minds about landing." "A plague?" said Bridget stupidly. It was hard to concentrate on anything more deadly than the golden nematode. "Oh, nothing you or I could catch. Something to do with agriculture and the plants. Which reminds me, I've a batch of telegrams for you. The authorities are delighted to learn we've a registered entomologist aboard. Very few of them have come this way." By the time Bridget had read the sheaf of papers, she had made the transition from the world of shipboard romance to her accustomed world of science and order. There was work to be done. Her talents were needed in a dozen places at once. She left orders for the confiscated clovers to be destroyed and went to her cabin to pack. She was on the first shuttle to leave the ship. T HE weeks that followed were filled with hard work with test tube and microscope, at her desk and in the field. The majority of her co-workers were men, but none had time to look for a laughing eye or a smiling mouth. The beautiful garden planet of New Eden was being reduced to a desert by a mysterious some thing that was swiftly attacking all the cultivated areas. Starvation was looming and there was talk of hasty evacuation. The situation was passing out of control. The villain could not be isolated. Was it an insect, a virus, a chemical in the soil? Some of the few native insects were caught and subjected to experiment. The soils were analyzed and tested. Those were not the answer. The only thing certain was that the previously lush brown loam was turning to a yellow, chalky sand, and everything that grew in it withered and died. Bridget visited farm after farm and trudged from field to field. She looked at worried faces and tried to think of words of encouragement. Back at the laboratory she studied her specimens far into the night and fell asleep at her desk. She was too tired to think about Patch Maguire, who, she concluded, had never left the spaceship. What would a grower of gardens, a breeder of plants do in a spreading desert? He had gone on to some more flourishing planet. She was called to the office one day. "I hear there's a farm that claims they don't have the plague," said the harassed young scientist behind the desk. "Better get over there and see if it's any more than a rumor. Take the heli and bring back all the usual samples. Here's the directions on getting there." He shoved a torn piece of paper at her and turned back to his cluttered desk. Bridget picked up her collecting kit and climbed into the cab of the machine. By this time she knew her way about the settlements. Without doubt, she told herself, this farm was on the outskirts of civilization, in some valley as yet untouched by the plague. But long before she reached the limits of cultivated land, she could see her destination. It stood out like an oasis in the desert, a little patch of green between a dried-up cornfield and an expanse of stricken wheat. Bridget brought her heli down on a velvety lawn in front of a small cottage and walked, unbelieving, to the door. A shout from within welcomed her and she entered a clean and simple kitchenparlor. The owner of the one healthy farm in New Eden was busy in the attached greenhouse. As she glimpsed the red waistcoat dangling from a hook, Bridget screamed, and Patch Maguire came through the greenhouse door, a flower pot in one hand, trowel in the other. "And if it isn't the wormhunter herself!" he cried. "The czar of the spaceways! The dandelion dictator! And I was wondering how long it would take you to find me out." "But you -- " she gasped. "You couldn't -- you wouldn't -- aren't supposed to be here !" "And why not?" he countered. "I'm not like Carrie, she'd rather go on too sick to eat in space than face starvation on this planet. And then the bargain I was offered for this place -- you wouldn't believe it ! All modern conveniences and they were practically giving it away. Besides, what had I to fear with the best entomologist in five solar systems working for the Department of Agriculture? Sure, you'll be having the problem solved in no time !" "Don't be giving me that blarney!" Bridget said. "You need only look out the window to know we've solved nothing at all. And you sitting here crowing to yourself! You've been breeding plague-resistant plants, that's what you've done, and keeping them all to yourself! It's a disgrace!" Patch began to laugh, and the more he laughed, the angrier Bridget got. "You should be ashamed!" she shouted. "The whole planet dying and you sitting here growing greener all the time !" "And that's the way it's been," he assured her. "This place was dying on me, too. But only the last few days it's taken a new lease and I'm at my wit's end to explain it." "You mean you don't want to explain it. You're hoarding the secret, and it's a shameful thing!" "Woman, you're crazy!" he bellowed at her. "I'm no magician to breed a plague-resistant plant overnight. It takes patience and many seasons, and I've only just settled in. I put a few things in the garden and stirred things up in the potting shed. Here, come along -- you can see for yourself." cottage, pointing out the advantages of the kitchen so near the greenhouse. She walked about the paths and felt of the rich brown soil without a streak of yellow, and finally her eyes fell upon some little low leaves by the back step. "Patch," she demanded, "what's that?" "You've the eagle eye, to be sure. What do you suppose it is?" "It's clover," she said. "Shamrock to you. Surely not the same shamrock! I gave strict orders!" Before he could stop her, she had tugged a plant up by the roots and pulled out her pocket microscope as she bent over it. "Sure, they were so busy worrying about the plague here, they forgot all about the little plague from Earth. And all I wanted was a bit of old Ireland to bring with me. A few little cysts couldn't be that important. And you've got to admit that's what I've got -- a green island!" "The idiots!" screamed Bridget. "The irresponsible, shirking, doublefaced -- " Her hand went up and Patch dodged involuntarily, expecting her to throw shamrock, dirt and all right at his head. But her hand stopped in midair. "Patch!" Her voice fell to a whisper of incredulity. "I think I've got the answer here in my hand. Don't say a word till I'm sure, but get me soil samples from all over your place -- there -- and over there -- and hurry!" Patch ran back and forth with the soil samples and Bridget looked in her microscope, and everywhere the golden nematode was teeming and nowhere was there a sign of the sinister yellow streaks "Don't you see?" Bridget said. "Whatever it is, the nem"It will take some experimenting to prove it, but Bridget, my girl, I believe you're right." "And while they're proving it, Patch, you and I are going to breed nematodes right here." And she had a vision of the golden horde, burrowing from Patch's land in all directions, bringing back health and sanity to the land. Whatever would Professor Schwarzkopf say? Dear Professor Schwarzkopf! Sometimes the watchdogs are too faithful. They keep out everyone -- even our friends. And that was how New Eden was saved. And the nematodes prospered and the Maguires prospered and the shamrocks grew everywhere. And so there was nothing for it but to call the planet New Ireland. The conquest of Mount Everest was both an achievement and a major letdown for mountain-climbers. The highest mountain on Earth had been climbed, leaving only lesser goals to be won. But Everest is just a foothill compared with the mountains in the sea! The greatest slope in the world is the stretch from the bottom of the Peru-Chile Trench (on the bed of the Pacific just west of South America) straight up the continental shelf, the littoral and on up to the peaks of the Andes. Little old Everest is merely a skimpy # feet, whereas the Trenchto-Andes climb is a majestic # feet! These gigantic mountains are scarcely the still, quiet cradle of the deep that sailors sing of. Avalanches and landslides are fearsome enough on dry-land peaks, but they are miniature imitations of the violent, high-speed, almost cosmically enormous slides that crash down the sides of the submerged mountains. These are mudslides, half unstable to begin with because of wetness, triggered into planet-shaking slips by earthquake, current, or plain accumulation of unthinkable weight to which all of Mount Everest is as but a boulder. "Oh, come, now!" a mountain-climber who has scaled Everest and knows its size might be justified in exclaiming. "Isn't that stretching it a bit? Exactly how big is one of your blooming mudslides?" Well, the one in the Grand Banks in # slid three hundred and fifty miles. Not thousand or tens of thousands of tons slipped but whole cubic miles of mud that changed the entire contour of the ocean bottom in that area -- peaks sheared off, cables covered or snapped, valleys as big as those on land filled in by the hugest Earthmover of them all ! The greatest mountains haven't been conquered yet. Those who must climb them "because they're there" will find plenty "there" in the sea. Ask a sensible question and you're sure to get a sensible answer -- remembering that one man's sense may be a machine's poison! on his superior's desk. said with a wry smile. "The "No one living can solve the second generation?" problem," he said. "The probabilities are high. Tern stared at him quizziThe most likely father is a cally and leaned back in the man named Lao Protik, a cushioned chair behind his psycho-artist living in Nudesk. york." "The mother?" Jasso grinned, a flashing grin in a dark face. He sank into a chair, pulled out a cigarette pack and offered one to Tern. The older man shook his head, fishing in his pocket for an old-fashioned pipe. Jasso clicked out a cigarette and drew deeply on it. "That's one of the fascinating angles about dealing with the Calculator," he said. "We combined the fifty most probable fathers, including Lao, with the fifty most probable mothers. Believe it or not, we drew an absolute blank. They just don't jibe at all." "Not too surprising," said Tern. "It's happened before. But I gather you've already decided to work with this psycho-artist. Why?" "Lao's so far ahead of the rest, both men and women, it's the only thing to do. And, since life is full of little surprises, we found the probability highest if Lao marries a woman whose own separate probability rating is close to zero." Jasso consulted his notes and added : "She's a language teacher named Grida Mattin, living in Southgate, Tennessee." "You're pretty sure these results are right?" asked Tern. "I've checked every angle I could think of," replied Jasso carefully. "Of course, there's always the possibility that two near-zero probabilities would add up better, when combined. But the probability rating for marriage between these two is very high -- you can see for yourself when you check the figures. I think it's the best we'll find." "It would be so much simpler if we had a high probability among people in this generation," said Tern thoughtfully. "Arranging a marriage between two strangers is a ticklish business." "It's been done before," said Jasso. "I'll put a team of agents to work on it right away." cards -- if you could call things the size of a bedsheet "cards." Each punched with holes like a swiss cheese, they filled one of the Calculator's most strategic banks. They represented every man, woman and child in the civilized world. Through them, the course of history could be guided, the advancement of civilization accelerated. By racing through the backgrounds and capabilities of every person in the United Nations, the Calculator could find the best one to do any job, to solve any problem. Lao Protik, as he strolled into his swank Nuyork apartment building that July evening, was completely unaware that the Calculator had pointed a finger at him. Life flowed smoothly for him. Not a worry darkened the horizon. His annual salary from Consolidated Ads was five hundred thousand dols -- a comfortable thirty thousand after taxes -- and he maintained three mistresses in separate apartments. In the lobby, he paused to open his mailbox. Two letters fell out into his hands ; he tore the envelopes neatly across the end. The first was an advertisement for the # model of the Sky Swallow convertible helical. He crumpled it and tossed it into a potted palm. He grunted in surprise as he read the second one. "Vr. Lao Protik," he read. "Our firm has been impressed with your accomplishments and growing reputation as a psycho-artist. We are in a position to offer you employment at a salary of one hundred thousand dols annually. Our representative, Vr. Casto Roche, will call on you in a few days to discuss this offer with you." The letter bore the illegible scrawl of someone who signed himself as president of Colorvue Publicity, Inc. Lao had never heard of the firm. Lao's lips curled and this missive followed the first one into the potted palm. He felt a momentary irritation at the audacity of anyone offering him a mere hundred thousand dols, then let the entire matter slip from his mind. Softly whistling the refrain of the latest hit tune, "The Clouds of Venus Can't Come Between Us," he caught the elevator and ascended to his last untroubled night for a long time to come. waiting for Lao at his office the next morning. It was not the sort of thing any employe of Consolidated Ads could ignore -- not even a Class A psycho-artist who was an officer in his union. A worried frown creasing his normally smooth forehead, Lao hurried down the corridor to the plush office of Mavo Caprin, president of the firm. Caprin was in no amiable mood. He grunted at Lao's somewhat querulous greeting. He kept his nose buried in papers, puffing ominously on a fat cigar for several minutes before looking up and waving Lao to a seat. "Perhaps you can explain these, Protik," said Caprin sharply, waving a thick fistful of letters. Lao leaned over to take them, and glanced through several of them. The phrases that met his eyes astounded and outraged him. They were such words as "this insolent effrontery," "the unwarranted audacity of the man," "a deliberate scheme to further rip away the fabric of our tottering moral code" -- all applied to his own work ! "I can't explain them because I don't know what they are talking about, Voter Caprin," said Lao. " They're talking about these," replied Caprin. With the flourish of a magician taking a rabbit out of a hat, he produced a sheaf of Lao's original paintings from his desk drawer. Lao riffled through them. At first glance, he saw nothing wrong. Then he looked more closely, and began to compare them with specific complaints in the letters. His face flushed bright red with anger. Only one in a hundred readers of the advertisements that carried Lao Protik's artwork would have noticed, but the complaints were justified ! The melange which was a competent psycho-artist's painting was carefully confused to achieve a specific psychological objective -- in Lao Protik's work, to make people want to buy the products sponsored by Consolidated Ads. But in these paintings the psychological impact had been distorted cleverly. The psycho-art had been turned into effective propaganda for polygamy ! "Somebody has altered my work," said Lao firmly. "I demand a thorough check of every artist on the staff." Caprin shook his head. "That won't be necessary. I've had these paintings checked by experts, and they all agree this is your original work." A claimed Lao. "What 'experts' told you such lies?" "It doesn't matter," said Caprin, a bit wearily now. "I don't like to do it after such a long association, Lao, but Consolidated Ads has a reputation to maintain. We can't take sides in politics. We have to let you go." Lao stared at him. Then he hurled paintings and letters in Caprin's face and stalked to the door. Halfway out of the office, he turned and shouted furiously: "The Psycho-Artists Guild will have something to say about this, Caprin !" "I don't think so," Caprin retorted mildly, rubbing a bruised cheek. It wasn't long before Lao realized the significance of that parting remark. His few personal belongings jammed into his briefcase, he emerged on the roof of the huge Consolidated Ads building and looked around for a helicab. The cabstands were empty at the moment. Waiting under an awning, he dropped a dime into a newspaper vending machine. It clucked and ejected the noon edition of the Star into his hands. A good-sized headline on Page One proclaimed: "Art Union Ejects Protik." His eyes bulging slightly, Lao read swiftly: In a specially called meeting of its executive committee, the Psycho-Artists Guild this morning revoked the membership of its second vice-president, Lao Protik, chief psycho-artist for Consolidated Ads. Officers of the union refused to make public the reason for Protik's ejection, but there were reports that some connection with the notorious Polygamy League was involved. Protik could not be reached for comment immediately, and the switchboard operator at Consolidated Ads said she had instructions not to ring his office. eyed, Lao argued plaintively over the telephone with his old friend, Majo Hobel, personnel chief at Autovance Advertising. Hobel had tried several times in the past to woo Lao from Consolidated Ads. "It's no good, Lao," said Hobel. "You've been blackballed." "But it's all a pack of lies, Majo!" cried Lao. "You know the inside of the field. How about the foreign firms?" Anything outside of Nuyork was "foreign." "It's the same in Kahgo and all over. Sorry, Lao." Cursing, Lao slammed down the receiver and dialed the number of Tinna, his favorite mistress. A voice he recognized as Tinna's answered. "Tinna," he began, "this is Lao..." "She isn't here," said Tinna frigidly. The telephone clicked in his ear. Lao's shoulders drooped. He put the phone in its cradle and, without much hope, prepared to dial Phreda, another mistress. It buzzed at him before he could begin. He answered it. "Voter Protik, there's a gentleman in the lobby to see you, "said the apartment house operator. "I don't want to see any more reporters!" shouted Lao angrily. "This isn't a reporter, sir. He says he's a representative of Colorvue Publicity." "Never heard of it," growled Lao. "But send him up." He had no time to shave, but he washed his face and tried to make himself a little more presentable before the apartment buzzer sounded. He admitted an elderly man with a gray mustache, who had the well-fed air of a corporation executive. "Voter Protik, I am Roche of Colorvue Publicity," his visitor introduced himself. "You recieved our letter several days ago?" Lao searched his memory. Vaguely he recalled such a letter and his hopes began to rise. Wasn't it something about offering him a job? He asked Roche. "That's correct, sir," replied Roche. "A hundred thousand dols a year, one-quarter payable in advance." "You may not want me now," said Lao gloomily. He had no scruples about putting over a sharp business deal, but any contract he might draw would be invalid if he withheld information. "We are aware of your recent difficulties," said Roche sympathetically. "I wish to assure you we do not believe the charges that you are associated with the Polygamy League. Also you may wish to know that my firm, while a small one, is a reputable one. A check of the Business Practices Agency will prove that to you." "I'm not a member of the Psycho-Artists Guild any more," Lao reminded him bitterly, "to say nothing of having been blackballed by all major firms and abandoned by my three mistresses." "We have no union contract, and your personal life is your own," answered Roche with a slight smile. "Your known ability is sufficient for us. There is one thing, however. Yaur work will not be in Nuyork, but in Southgate, a small town in Tennessee. If you see fit to accept our offer, we will arrange in advance for your quarters there. There will be no cost to you." "I hate to leave Nuyork," said Lao slowly. "And Pm frank to say that I hate to dols to a hundred thousand. But your offer comes as a lifesaver to me, Voter Roche. Pm inclined to accept it." "Good," said Roche. "Think on it, if you like. Pll put a signed contract in the next mail for you. When you return it with your signature, your ticket and instructions will be waiting for you at Lagwad Airport." They shook hands on it, and Roche walked out of Lao's life -- for a while. H IS hands in his pockets, Lao strolled into the kitchen, where his landlady, Grida Mattin, was melodiously preparing lunch. Grida wore an apron over her old-fashioned opaque clothing and her head, beginning to show a few gray streaks, was bent over the gleaming stove. "Grida, do you mind if I use the telephone for a long-distance call to Nuyork?" he asked. "Certainly not, Lao," she answered, turning to smile at him. Her face was not exceptionally attractive, but she had beautiful teeth. "Nothing wrong, I hope." "I don't know," he said. "My salary check is three weeks overdue." He placed the call to Colorvue Publicity on the kitchen extension, and stood by the stove, watching Grida stir and season. "Cooking is almost a lost art, Grida, and you're a good cook," he said. "I'm surprised you've never married." Grida flushed at the compliment. "It may sound boastful, but I've never courted a man, Lao," she said. "As you may have noticed, I have conservative habits. I'm afraid I'm a little out of place in the modern world. I don't approve of the frivolous attitude people have toward marriage now." Lao looked at her, not without some affection. Of course he had made advances, as most men did to all unmarried women with whom they associated. But Grida was a history teacher, and she lived by the outmoded morals of the distant past. She had made it known at once that marriage was her price for intimacy, and she gave no hint she was interested in marriage. "There's nothing frivolous about it from the man's viewpoint, when only a woman can apply for a divorce," replied Lao. "That's why it's hard for women to catch husbands. With ten women to every man, most men have no trouble finding mistresses." "I don't approve of that, either," said Grida, compressing her lips firmly. The telephone interrupted, and Lao went into the library to talk. "On your call, sir," came the thin voice of the Nuyork operator, "there is no Colorvue Publicity listed." "What!" he exclaimed. "There must be ! Check again." He waited a long, anxious moment. "I'm sorry, sir," came the operator's voice again. "I have checked our directory, and there is no Colorvue Publicity listed." Lao swore fervently. "Wait a minute," he cried. "Nuyork? Hold it just a minute, will you?" He raced up the ramp to his second floor bedroom, fumbled through his dresser drawer until he found his contract and ran back downstairs with it. He had the operator check the name of every Colorvue Publicity official who had signed the contract. None was listed. "I know there's a Colorvue Publicity!" he shouted desperately. "Get me the Business Practices Agency." "Just a moment, sir." A man's voice answered at the Business Practices Agency. It took him several minutes to check the files in compliance with Lao's request for information. "We have no such firm listed in our records," he said at last. mJ exclaimed Lao. "You told me Colorvue Publicity had a Double-A# rating when I checked with you, not four months ago." "Was the request for a rating by letter or by telephone, sir?" "By telephone. It didn't take the girl three minutes to find it." "There'd be no record of your request if it was made by telephone. There must have been some mistake, sir. If there were a firm named Colorvue Publicity in any city in the world having a population of more than #, it would be in our records." Lao cursed him and hung up. Grida came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. "I couldn't help overhearing, Lao," she said. "There must be something wrong. That company sent me a check for your first three months' room and board. It cleared the bank all right." "So did my salary check for the first quarter," he said. "But the Business Practices Agency is supposed to keep records of a firm for a year after its dissolution. I can't understand anybody paying out twenty-five thousand dols and then just disappearing !" "If you need any help to tide you over, Lao..." she said hesitantly. "My salary isn't much -- fifteen thousand dols a year. But I have something saved." "Thanks, Grida, but I'll be all right," he said, turning away. Lao left the house and strode down the quiet streets of Southgate, fuming. This had all the earmarks of a conspiracy. First the sabotage at Consolidated Ads, now the utter disappearance of Colorvue Publicity. But he could think of no enemies who would have reason to conspire against him. The field of psycho-art was a highly specialized one, without bitter competition. Back in his room at Grida Mattin's house were half a dozen canvases that reflected all his co-ordinated skill. Done on the instructions he found at Lagwad Airport the night he left Nuyork, they depicted all the advantages of marriage in a small Southern town. His now-vanished employers had never sent him instructions for their disposal. Now the work was wasted, unless he could sell them free-lance. The brown autumn leaves were drifting dow # n on the crumbling sidewalks of Southgate, stripping the trees that lined the streets. Blue smoke drifted from chimneys of a few of the old houses, dissipating into the gray sky. It w r as an atmosphere that fitted his mood of despair. The most pressing problem that faced him w r as financial. Lao was a lavish man with his money. His balance at the bank now wouldn't cover his income tax for the year. It was something he'd never had to worry about before, because good psycho-artists were wellpaid and aways in demand. Now, marooned in the Tennessee hills, blackballed by every big firm in the nation, his prospects looked bleak. Something Grida had said stuck in his mind. Fifteen thousand a year -- plus savings. It wasn't a great deal, after taxes, but it was a living. And he could pay his own taxes next March. He shook his head and turned his steps back toward the house. Marriage was the very last resort for Lao. He'd try free-lancing the Colorvue paintings first. "While he was working on the paintings he didn't have time to get around town, such as it is," he said. "He and Grida were together a lot. They seemed to get along. Now he's sold the paintings and he's spending the money on a mistress." "Well, Jasso, this is your baby," said Tern. "What now?" "A mistress can be scared off pretty easily," said Jasso. "We've got agents pulling strings all over the place right now to stave off a worse problem than that. Grida's sister, Alina, visits her every year and our secondary checks with the Calculator show such a visit would be fatal to any chances of a Lao-Grida marriage. Alina's a doctor in Frisco. We've managed to get the hospital authorities to postpone her vacation, but we've got to get Lao and Grida married pretty quick. They can't stall Alina off forever." "It strikes me that you're just as far away from the marriage as you were at the beginning," commented Tern. "How do you make two people want to marry each other ?" countered Jasso. "It's not enough the Calculator has to pick out a woman # years older than he is. Checking them against each other, they are basically incompatible." "Can you tell them? Maybe if they knew how important their marriage is to the world..." "I've checked that," said Jasso. "We can't. The probability would drop to almost nothing." "Excuse me, sir," interposed Roche. "All the pertinent information on the basic personalities of Lao and Grida is filed in their Calculator cards. It seems to me that all you'd have to do would be to ask the Calculator how to make them want to marry each other." "Dealing with the Calculator isn't quite that simple, Roche," replied Jasso with a smile. "It's a machine. It has no language that would permit it to tell us how things are done, even though we might say it knows, because it has all the necessary information. "If we ask for information recorded in the Calculator, it can refer us to the place in the file to find it -- if we phrase the question properly. If we ask a true-or-false question, it will answer 'yes' or 'no if it has the answer. If we ask for correlation of information, the Calculator can give us the probability of attaining an objective. "That's why it takes such long training to become a Calculator operator. The Calculator can correlate the emotional factors of Lao and Grida for us, but we have to draw our own conclusions for action from them -- and then ask the Calculator for probabilities. That's all." Tern had listened gravely, without interrupting, his hands folded across the bulge of his stomach. "You evidently haven't been asking the right questions, Jasso," he remarked sardonically. "It's hard for me to realize that this is the Jasso who stopped the Brazilo-Panamanian War and solved the economic crisis that threatened Pakistan." "I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve, Chief," retorted Jasso. "The only way to make a pair want to marry is to throw them together and then exploit their psychological weakness. Make them need each other. I've got a psychology team checking Lao and Grida with a fine-tooth comb, and we'll check their recommendations with the Calculator." "From what you've told me, I'd say Lao's biggest weakness is a love of luxurious living," suggested Tern. "That takes money, you know." "Economic pressure alone doesn't go deep enough to drive him to marriage. Not with so many available women around. Don't worry; we're using economic pressure to keep him off balance. But the psychologists tell us the final motivation must be an emotional frustration. It doesn't have to be a big one, but it must be basic." L AO had had the letter for two days, and still didn't know what to do about it. It had cost him two sleepless nights. In the old days in Nuyork he would have aired his troubles to friends at the Psycho-Artists Club and probably acted on a dozen varying bits of advice at the same time. Here there was no one to whom he could turn. He glared morosely at the unfinished painting. The canvas gleamed with iridescent whorls and lines, from which the face and form of Grida Mattin were beginning to emerge. In the maze of waxing and waning colors could be distinguished, if one looked closely enough, faint countenances of women and babies with expressions of anxiety, of fear, of hunger for love... with occasionally a man. It would have sold well, he thought. Free-lancing had been a promising idea. He dragged himself downstairs to breakfast. He usually reacted to Grida's singing. It pleased him mildly when he was in an expansive mood, irritated him when his mind was on something else. This morning he hardly heard it.  "Alina will be here in three weeks," Grida imparted over the toast and coffee. "Alina?" he asked, without mucli interest. "My sister. Haven't I mentioned her to you before?" "No, I don't think so. Where is she?" "She's a doctor in Frisco. She visits me every year, but she's already more than a month late this year." A doctor. Jasso raised a mental image of Alina as sort of a duplicate of Grida, a plain, elderly woman with graying hair swept back into a bun at the nape of her neck. Right now, however, he had more important matters on his mind. "Grida, do you know a good lawyer?" he blurted. "Why, yes. Tello Distane is the best in town," she said. "Is there anything the matter, Lao?" Silently, he pulled the crumpled letter from his pocket and handed it to her. It was from a prominent Nuyork legal firm. It said : On behalf of our clients, Colorvue Publicity, Inc., we are instituting suit against damages, for having disposed of psycho-paintings you contracted to accomplish for them. "But isn't that the company you couldn't find any report of?" gasped Grida. "It disappeared right off the map," said Lao grimly. "Now it's appeared again. I can't understand this at all!" "I'd take it to Tello," said Grida firmly. "He can tell you what you should do." H E took his letter to Distane that afternoon. Small towns change little, and the attorney's office was upstairs over a department store, as his great-grandfather's probably had been. Distane, a white-haired man with a leonine cast to his jaw, listened with fingertips together for a few moments, until the details of Lao's troubles began to unfold. "Just a moment, Voter," he said. "What did you say your name is?" "Lao Protik," answered Lao, somewhat nettled. Moistening his index finger, Distane shuffled through some papers on his desk, peering at them with intense concentration. At last his face lit. "Ah, Voter Protik," he said, settling back in his chair. "We have a new partner in our firm... an experienced attorney, you understand, but new to our firm. I think Voter Attok is the man who should handle your case." Getting to his feet with a grunt, Distane led Lao into an adjoining room which gave evidence of having been newly furnished not long before. An urbane-looking man of middle age sat behind the desk, twiddling a letter opener idly. "This," said Distane heavily, "is Lao Protik, Voter Attok." Distane left, shutting the door behind him. Lao stared at Attok. Attok raised his eyebrows quizzically... "Excuse me," apologized Lao hurriedly. "I was just trying to remember if we had met before, Voter Attok. Your face seems very familiar to me." "I don't believe so," said Attok in a well-modulated voice. "I gather from Voter Distane that you have a legal problem on your mind, Voter Protik. Won't you sit down?" Settling himself in a chair, Lao handed the letter to Attok. Prompted occasionally by questions from the attorney, he outlined the events leading to its receipt. "Well, I don't think you have anything to worry about, Voter Protik," said Attok when he had finished. "If they were delinquent in payment of your salaiy before you sold the psycho-paintings and you tried unsuccessfully to contact them through the Business Practices Agency, they have no lawsuit. Just leave this letter with me for a few days and I'll get in touch with you when I've completed the investigation necessary to document our case." Lao left, feeling better but racking his brain for an elusive memory. He was sure he had seen Attok before. called Lao back to his office. The atmosphere was not nearly as hospitable. "I thought you understood, Voter Protik, that a man must be absolutely honest with his attorney," said Attok severely. "I can't handle your case properly when you withhold facts from me." "I haven't withheld any facts," said Lao, surprised. "You did tell me that the Business Practices Agency had told you there was no such firm as Colorvue Publicity, they have no record of your getting in touch with them about the matter. They say Colorvue Publicity has been recorded in their files for several years. It is a small but reputable firm." "It was a telephone check," said Lao desperately. "I don't know who the man was I talked to, but I'll swear he said there was no Colorvue Publicity!" "Mmm." Attok stared keenly at him. "As I recall, you told me also that you had not received your salary from Colorvue ?" "That's right, and how they expect me to hold onto the paintings when they don't pay me... "How about these?" Attok laid the photostats of three checks on the desk. Each was for twenty-five thousand dols, and made out to Lao Protik from Colorvue Publicity, Inc. Lao recognized one of them as the check he had received as his first quarter salary advance. The other two were exact duplicates, but dated at three-month intervals. The photostats of the backs of the checks -- all of them -- bore what appeared to be his endorsement. "It's forgery!" howled Lao. "I only signed one of those checks! It's a conspiracy to ruin me!" "Conspiracy or not, Voter Protik, we can't win your case if experts say that's your handwriting. The expert I took it to says it is." Lao collapsed. "Who's doing this to me, Voter Attok?" he whimpered. "Why are they doing it?" "On the face of it, I'd say to get your money," replied Attok sympathetically. "You were a very successful psychoartist before your... ah... misfortune." "I don't have any money. I have saved nothing." "You are familiar with the law, aren't you? If they win the suit, they're entitled to half of everything you make above a minimum five thousand dols annually, until the judgment is paid." "I don't make five thousand dols a year. I don't have a job. What can I do, Voter Attok?" "Why, as long as you make less than five thousand dols a year, they can't touch you," replied Attok. "But to safeguard your finances in the event you do regain your former financial status, I'd suggest you incorporate yourself, with your wife as the controlling stockholder. Then you can limit your personal salary to five thousand dols a year, and the remainder of the income will be under her control. The law can't touch it." "But... but I'm not married," said Lao. Attok raised his eyebrows slightly. "Oh, well, it doesn't matter," he said at last. "As long as you make less than five thousand." The wheels in Lao's brain were clicking as he left Attok's office. He thought he saw through the whole scheme against him. Whoever was behind Colorvue Publicity had engineered the frauds that got him blackballed and discharged from Consolidated. They had maneuvered him into a position where he would be vuljudgment. Now, undoubtedly, the next move was to clear him and restore his reputation, so he'd be financially able to pay off. It was devilish -- and he saw no way out. T AO moped around theLi house, his nerves near the breaking point. Daily he dreaded notification that the damage suit had been formally instituted, a move which would cut off his only chance to see his income and his position in the psycho-art field restored. Marriage? It was on his mind constantly. The idea disturbed him almost as much as the thought of Colorvue taking a big slice of his income for the next decade or so. He might have been inclined to marry one of his three mistresses in Nuyork -- before they showed themselves for what they were -- but he knew better than to trust his former Southgate mistress with control of his finances. She had abandoned him as soon as the money from the sale of his paintings had run out. A mailman's visit was an unusual enough phenomenon to create interest, for it meant the delivery of a package. Letter mail was delivered from the post office to each home through a vacuum tube system. Since it was a letter Lao feared, he watched with considerable interest when the mailman approached the front door, and curiosity was uppermost in his mind when Grida called from downstairs to say the package was for him. He knew no one who would be sending him a package. Grida, her own curiosity apparent, made no move to leave the room when he took the large, oblong package from her and prepared to open it. A premonition smote him as he noted the return address : "The Nuyork Gallery of Traditional Art." With trembling fingers he tore away the wrappings. His paintings -- all three of them -- tumbled to the floor. He dropped into a chair, limp. The most important thing in his life was lying, broken, before him. "What is this?" exclaimed Grida. She picked up one of the paintings and examined it. "This isn't psycho-art," she said. "This is real ! I like this, Lao." "It's what I've always wanted to do," he said in a tired voice. "Those three paintings have hung in the Gallery of Traditional Art for nearly ten years." "There's a letter attached," she said, holding it out to him. "Go ahead -- open it, Gri# This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Outnut # KW # KW # KW Distance # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, etc' If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not  entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. V Enclosed find Please send Radios postpaid (# per radio) Nome Address City State da," he said"I think I know what it says." velope and unfolded the letter. In accordance with instructions from our board of directors, in special meeting, all the paintings hanging in our gallery have been re-evaluated. We regret to inform you that your paintings were judged to be no longer representative of traditional art. They are being returned to you herewith. We wish to express our appreciation... She stopped reading. "That's right," said Lao morosely. "They threw my paintings out." "But, Lao, I didn't know you did this sort of thing," she said, bewildered. "It's what I've always wanted to do," he repeated. "I never really liked psycho-art. I never believed it's real art. It isn't something the artist feels and thinks, it's something he tries to make other people feel and think. "But psycho-art is the only kind of art I could make money at. I didn't have the courage to starve in an attic or make a living in some prosaic way and paint as a hobby. I turned my talent into cash and I always spent the cash as fast as I made it -- maybe because I was ashamed that I was a coward." "But these three?" asked Grida. "Sometimes," said Lao dreamily, "I've had time to do what I wanted to do. These are the best I've ever done. When I gave them to the gallery, they told me these were among the highest examples of traditional art they had ever seen. I thought they meant it, but I know now it was just because I was a famous, wealthy psycho-artist." Grida studied the paintings. One was a seascape, the other two mountain scenes. The titles gave some key to Lao's inner feelings : "Peace in the Valley," "The Moving Waters," "The Lonely Peak." "Your trouble is that you grew up a little boy in a big city," said Grida quietly. "You ought to try to forget the sort of things you knew in Nuyork and settle down to a life among simple folk, like the people around here. I think you could find work here, Lao, that would be a living for you. And you'd have plenty of time to relax and paint the way you want to." Lao looked at her and saw that her eyes were full of sympathy for him. It was the last little push his overwrought emotions needed. He did not do it at once ; but that night, after supper, he proposed marriage to Grida Mattin and she accepted. not raise his voice, but Jasso could detect his anger in his eyes and the tone of his voice. "I put this matter entirely in your hands, Jasso, and I expected you to do a thorough job on it," Tern said coldly. "It's inconceivable to me that you should be so negligent in your investigation." "It was my fault, I'll admit," said the crestfallen Jasso. "But you can't blame the clerk. He was told to check the personal files on the question 'marriage,' not 'ability to reproduce.' You'll have to agree there's a difference." "I would think the lowest clerk involved in this operation would be instructed that progeny from the marriage is the key factor!" said Tern. "The whole purpose of this marriage from the first has been to produce a child that the Calculator said would have a high probability rating for solving the problem. "Can you tell me how the devil you bright minds on the project expect a marriage to produce a child -- when the wife is sterile?" "That's one thing that makes me wonder if there isn't some malad j ustment in the Calculator," said Jasso. "Sterility has been marked on Grida Mattin's card for the last eight years. I don't think you can criticize the clerk, or me, too harshly for not thinking about sterility when the Calculator approved the marriage. After all, her card was in the Calculator and... "Don't repeat yourself," interrupted Tern brusquely. "Of course, those circuits must be checked, but I'll give # to one odds right now there's nothing wrong with the Calculator. Sterility must have registered as a correctible factor." "I don't know why it would," objected Jasso very thoughtfully. "The only evidence the Calculator has is that the sterility is a normal result of her age, and that can't be reversed as far as I know. But the only thing we can do is treat it as correctible." "Try it," said Tern. "But, Jasso, I want you to realize you're not dealing now with the movement of traffic in downtown Nuyork or even the selection of a president. The solution of this problem is vital to mankind. I don't want any more slip-ups." A lina mattin'S fresh beauty seemed to light the interior of the antique TwentyFirst Century house. She resembled Grida, but more as Grida's daughter might have looked than as her younger sister. Lao sighed. Had he met Alina Mattin first, he did not believe any conceivable emergency could have persuaded him to marry her sister. "There's some misunderstanding somewhere, but they won't admit it," said Alina, a puzzled frown wrinkling the bridge of her nose. She and Lao were having supper in the breakfast nook ; Lao found her quite as competent a cook as Grida. After more than a year at Southgate and many months of marriage to Grida, his lean "I don't think there's been a mistake," he said complacently. "The board of education ordered Grida to enter the hospital." "For a routine physical check-up, eh?" replied Alina. "That isn't what she's getting." "What are they doing, then?" asked Lao, startled. "They're examining her to see if anything can be done to restore her fertility," answered Alina flatly. "Lao, did you authorize the hospital to do that?" "Certainly not! I never thought about her fertility, one way or another. You're sure you're not mistaken?" "I'm a doctor. I know what they're doing. But the hospital administrator won't tell me a thing. He just says that's on the record of her admission to the hospital." "They must have gotten her records mixed up with someone else," theorized Lao. "Maybe. I don't know whether you knew it or not, but Grida is too old to have a child." Supper finished, they piled the plastic dishes in the dishwasher and went into the parlor together. Lao turned the lights low. They sat down together on the sofa. They sat very close together, and after a moment Lao put his arm around Alina's shoulders. She laid her head contentedly on his chest. "Why couldn't you have stayed out of my life?" he asked, half seriously, half teasingly. "Would you want me to?" she asked softly. "No," he admitted, running his fingers through her hair. "But this isn't the way I want things. I suppose we should be thankful for these few days while she's in the hospital, but I'm ahamed to be." "So am I," confessed Alina, "but, darling, I've been so happy here alone with you. Tell me, why did you marry Grida?" "I'm not sure I know," he answered slowly. "I'd hate to have to try to analyze my motives right now. I like Grida and respect her, but I don't love her. I couldn't. I love you, Alina." "Let's end this sneaking about behind Grida's back, Lao," she urged earnestly, looking up into his face. "It isn't fair to her. Get a divorce and let's marry each other." "You know the law doesn't permit a man to seek a divorce, Alina. And Grida wouldn't release me now. She loves me." "Grida will divorce you," said Alina positively. "It will hurt her, but she will. Grida is a history teacher, and her moral code is strict -- and out of date. It scarcely gets lip service any more from most people." "You're suggesting I tell her about us? I couldn't, Alina ! I can't let her ever find out." "But she will," said Alina, her eyes shining. "Lao, I'm going to have a baby." T HE man's face looked familiar. Then he approached Lao and Alina, standing in the corridor outside the chancery courtroom, and Lao recognized him with certainty. "You're the man from Colorvue!" Lao flashed at him angrily. "That's right, Voter Protik. I'm Casto Roche." The man held out his hand. Lao ignored it. "I ought to beat you all the way from here to Nuyork !" he growled -- with audacity, since Roche was a good deal bigger. "I trusted you, once." "You trusted me twice," replied Roche amiably. "I think you'd recognize me as someone else with a little different make-up." He held his hand to his face and puffed out his cheeks slightly. "Attok ! My lawyer !" yelped Lao. People in the corridor turned to stare at him. "I wondered why you disappeared after I paid you that fee ! I see it all now! You were part of this whole dirty -- " "Before you get too excited, Voter Protik..." Roche did not complete the sentence, but turned under his coat lapel to exhibit the badge which identified him as a United Nations agent. Lao gulped and choked off his tirade. "I'm here to try to stop these divorce proceedings between you and your wife," said Roche. "Don't you think you've come to the wrong people?" suggested Alina, apparently not nearly as impressed by Roche's badge as Lao was. "My sister is the only one who can stop the divorce." "Besides, it's too late," said Lao, regaining his voice. "The hearing is finished. The judge will give his decision in a moment." Roche said, "That can be stopped at a word from you. As a matter of fact, the judge is waiting for me to confer with you before calling the court back into session. I've told your wife why the government is interested in preserving your marriage. She proceedings if you are." "Perhaps you'd better tell us why," said Alina coolly. But it's rather involved. We haven't let it be publicized widely, but the world is faced with a very serious sociological problem. I suppose both of you are aware that there are a great many more women than men. "Of course," said Lao, his face brightening with reminiscence. "Of course," concurred Alina, giving Lao a thoughtful glance. "If you've read the Sunday supplements, you know why," said Roche. "Always, more boy babies have been born than girl babies, but the high mortality rate among boy babies has balanced the discrepancy. Now the mortality rate has climbed tremendously higher for boy babies. We do not know why. We do know that the ratio of women to men is increasing. At the last census taken by the Calculator, it was # women to each man. "Under our present social system of monogamous marriage, this means the actual birth rate is decreasing. Even the large number of illegitimate children doesn't make up for the lack of men in the world. That, of course, is the reason the Polygamy League has gained so much strength." "Well, don't they have a point?" asked Lao. He added hastily : "I don't hold with the ideas of the Polygamy League, you understand, in spite of the propaganda that I was connected with it." Roche smiled. "That propaganda was manufactured by UN agents," he confessed. "So were all your troubles, including the dummy corporation. Colox-vue Publicity had no other purpose but to maneuver you into marriage wtih Grida Mattin. A little unethical, I'll admit, but sometimes we have to work that way. You'll be happy to know that the damage suit against you has been withdrawn. You can get your old job back with Consolidated Ads and be restored to the PsychoArtists Guild any time you wish. And we've even arranged for the Gallery of Traditional Art to re-hang your paintings. "As a matter of fact," he continued, "the government has given serious consideration to the ideas of the Polygamy League, but the Calculator rejected them; it discovered that they would have an unfortunate impact on our social structure. So polygamy is not the answer. "The Calculator tells us it is very improbable that anyone now living will find the answer. "But the child of Lao Protik and Grida Mattin can -- and probably will -- solve the problem."l lator is wrong' said Alina. "Go back and tell your government Grida Mattin is unable to bear a child." "The government has that information," replied Roche, frowning slightly. "We must consider it a soluble problem, because the Calculator has the information on file and it still gave us a high probability on the marriage. The Calculator is a machine. It doesn't make mistakes." "It's made a mistake this time," said Alina positively. "Lao and I are going to be married. I don't think he will give up our chance for happiness for any such shaky scheme." "We have no way of forcing him," admitted Roche, "but I believe Voter Protik should speak for himself, knowing how important this is." "She's right!" said Lao, anger in his tone. "I think the government has interfered with my life enough as it is! I've done my part, and the government didn't even do me the courtesy of letting me know I was doing it. I love Alina. I don't intend to be tied to Grida for the rest of my life just on the outside chance you'll come up with a cure for her sterility." He turned his back on Roche. Roche looked at Alina. She looked back, coldly. With a shrug, Roche left them and went through the door to the courtroom. A few moments later the bailiff threw open the courtroom doors. Lao, Alina and Grida filed in with the spectators and attorneys. They stood as the judge entered from his chambers, adjusted his black robes and took his seat. The spectators sat down then, but the attorneys and principals remained standing at the bar. The judge put on his spectacles, looked over some papers, and raised his head to survey the courtroom. Solemnly he announced : "It is the decision of this court that Grida Mattin Protik be granted a divorce, as requested, from the defendant, Lao Protik. "It is the further decision of this court that the co-respondent in this suit, Alina Mattin, being unmarried and having proved herself by her admitted actions to be an unfit mother, her unborn child by the defendant shall be delivered as soon as feasible after birth into the custody of the complainant, Grida Mattin Protik." V said Jasso despondently, laying the newspaper clipping on Tern's desk. "Lao and Alina didn't even contest Grida's custody of their child, even though their marriage before its birth legitimatized it. Now Grida has the baby and Lao and Alina have gone off to parts unknown." "I suppose we could find them, if we tried," said Tern. "But I don't see the point in following this case any farther, Jasso. They made it pretty plain to your agent that the Lao-Grida marriage is through." "Shall I write it off as closed, then?" "I'm afraid you might as well," consented Tern reluctantly. "How have your alternate combinations turned out?" "We've succeeded in arranging several marriages in the highest probability group. But frankly, Chief, all the probability ratings for their offspring are pretty low. We had our only real chance in the Lao-Grida combination." "I don't want to go to the third generation if I can help it," said Tern. "There's always the chance that combinations of low probability individuals might result in high probability offspring. Let's run another test on direct probability, on just those individuals who have been filed for the first time since we began the Lao-Grida case." "I'll get started on it right away," said Jasso. T WO days later, Jasso burst into Tern's office highly excited, a section of tape from the Calculator trailing from his grasp. "Chief, this is unbelievable!" he cried. "We have an individual here whose probability tests #I per cent to solve the problem, projecting a life expectancy of # years !" Tern whistled and rolled his eyes. "Pretty high probability!" he said delightedly. "Pretty doggoned high ! Baby, I suppose ?" "Yes," said Jasso. He paused, and added slowly and with emphasis: "The child's name is Nina Mattin." "Mattin?" "The daughter of Lao Protik and Alina Mattin! Now the adopted daughter of Grida Mattin." "What!" "The strange thing about it, Chief, is that Alina Mattin was one of the higher probability mothers we found first. But we checked her against Lao, and the probability for an offspring of their marriage was extremely low. Do you suppose the Calculator has gone completely haywire?" Tern did not answer at once. He sat, lost in deep thought, for several minutes. Then he began laughing. He laughed until tears came into his eyes, slapping his knee delightedly. Jasso stood there, looking blank. "No, the Calculator's not haywire, Jasso," said Tern, when he could get his breath. "It just has all the facts, and it correlates facts we don't even think about. The reason we get funny ideas about it sometimes is because the Calculator can't talk. As you explained, it can just answer questions, and sometimes we don't ask the right questions. "From what's happened, I'd say the question you asked the Calculator when you were looking for second-generation probabilities was not 'the offspring of two people.' It was 'offspring resulting from the marriage of two people.' Isn't that right?" "It seemed the proper way to put the question," answered Jasso a little stiffly. "It was the right question to put," he choked, "but illegitimacy was the key to the whole thing! "Look: the Calculator had all the facts. It knew all about the emotional make-up of Lao, Grida and Alina. It knew that Alina was Grida's sister. "The probability course is obvious ! Given a marriage between Lao and Grida, the probability was high that he would meet her sister, Alina, under convenient circumstances. The probability was high, too, considering the emotional make-up of the three, that Lao and Alina would fall in love. Under our present social scheme, an illegitimate child was likely. So there you are." "Chief, I know you've been in this business a lot longer "than I have," said Jasso slowly. "I've got to confess now that I can't see the slightest reason why the probability for a child of Lao and Alina should be so much higher under these circumstances than if the two of them just met and got married." "Environment, my boy ! It's just as important as heredity. Lao's marriage to Grida was the key to the whole thing. Grida is a motherly, fiercely conscientious type of woman who would insist on rearing her husband's child -- no matter who the mother was. And of course the courts would uphold her." Tern was laughing again. "Anyway, we've got it licked. We have our high-probability individual... But I'm glad of one thing. Suppose you'd asked the Calculator to check itself -- asked it, for instance, if we knew what we were doing. It would have given us a straight answer, and we would have abandoned the whole project -- it would have told us we didn't know at Looking Ahead? You must be, or you wouldn't be reading this magazine. Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and terrestrials and extraterrestrials. But what about looking ahead to:  Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF, the more free issues you get.)  Saving steps? (A subscription brings IF right to your mailbox, irrespective of heat, cold, snow, rain, gloom of night -- and mailed flat, to boot.)  Saving time? (You get your copies at least a week before the newsstands receive theirs.)  Saving your temper? (IF can and often does sell out; with a subscription there's no need to hunt from stand to stand.) IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the issue. I enclose (check one): # issues...# # issues...# Foreign Postage # Issues # Additional Name Address City P. O. 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Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. H your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Vis-a-lens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. (jottr (mmtJwl yowcfrifo! Only one power controls your destiny -- a strange force sleeping in your mind. Awaken it ! Command it to obey you! Push obstacles aside and attain your fondest hopes and ideals. Let the Rosicrucians show you how this can be done. Learn why many of history's great masters were Rosicrucians such as Leonardo de Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, etc. Each of these men learned how to control their fate, to develop mind power, to attain success and happiness. The knowledge that helped these men of history is now helping thousands of thinking men and women throughout the world climb to new heights they, at one time, thought impossible. And they are no different than you ! 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The publisher assumes no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc. New York, Next Issue I September I on Sale July #st one -- and Vee was camouflaged to the very last hair! I T'S not so that two things crumpled, disorganized mess can't occupy the same space coasting on aimlessly through at the same time. Certainly space, and for the # passenthey can. gers, with a single exception, Of course, it doesn't do to become quite dead, either of them any good. Like all such disasters, it It took only seven seconds shouldn't have happened. It for the huge, powerful, beauwas supposed to be impossible, tiful spaceship to become a But safety devices have always had one peculiarity. They function perfectly on test; and when it isn't a test, but the real thing, they often don't function at all. In this case, despite all the safety devices, the Vigintan ship inserted herself into normal space in the middle of a vast cloud of nebulous matter. There were seven seconds of hell. Afterward, what was left of the ship careered on, life casually deleted from it, lines twisted to grotesque deformity, all power and purpose in the giant engines blasted to absurdity. A few of the passengers had had two or three seconds knowledge of disaster. Half a dozen had seven seconds of terror and helplessness and agony. Only one had five seconds grace and was able to make use of it. Vee was in the long outer passage on her way to the control room when it happened. She was actually passing the open port of one of the lifeboat shells. At the first screaming, tearing intimations of mortal agony in the ship, she dived into the shell and pulled the emergency black handle. The tiny lifeboat slid shut with two seconds to spare, cast itself loose and scuttled away desperately from the parent ship. Vee knew from the blank silence of the radio that she was the sole survivor. Am was dead. Her grief twisted her in knots. To a member of Vee's race, the death of a husband or wife was like... no, humans could never understand it. Suppose a woman, watching, saw her husband, her three children and her mother and father die. Suppose in the same catastrophe all her friends, everybody who spoke her language, her native country and everything in it were obliterated. That woman might feel as Vee felt at the death of Am. But Vee had to go on living, if she could. She had much the same instinct of self-preservation as humans had, although Vee was not human. The fact that she didn't want to live was irrelevant. She tried, unsuccessfully to face the near certainty that whether she survived a hundred seconds or a hundred years more, she would never see any of her own kind again. Over the vast distances of the Galaxy, radio was less useful, less reliable, than a bottle thrown in the sea on the wrong world. When a ship was wrecked, there wasn't a chance of a survivor ever being found. Hyperspace travel j. t. McIntosh was the only way to cross vast distances in a small fraction of a lifetime, and hyperspace travel was, by definition, a shorter distance between two points than a straight line. At least you could search along a straight line. You couldn't search along a hyperspace route. The one faint chance Vee had of ever seeing her home world again -- negligible, but far greater than the chance of being picked up by a rescue ship -- was finding some world where the inhabitants were approaching the starship stage of development. Automatically the tiny lifeboat, so small that she could hardly change her position in it, was homing on the nearest world on which she might conceivably live. There was never any guarantee that there would be one within the light-year which was the boat's extreme limit; in fact, it was most unlikely. However, Vee's lifeboat was already moving purposefully. The scanners had found something. Without further delay, Vee threw the switch which would keep her in suspended animation until the boat reached its destination. There was nothing for her to do. The boat's electronic eyes had found a world on which it might be possible for her to survive. All she could do was go there and find out whether it was possible or not -- by living or dying. I Bill," said Walt. Dr. McEwan ran a hand through his five remaining hairs. "I wonder why people always want to know the worst, and won't be satisfied till they get it. I've told you there's nothing to worry about. You won't believe me. Obviously you're not going to believe anything except -- " "Bill, you ought to know me by this time," said Walt. "The one thing I can't take is uncertainty." "There's no uncertainty ! Sure, you may be smashed to pieces by a truck as you leave this office, but apart from that there's no particular reason why you shouldn't live another fifty years or so." "Bill, I've played poker with you. You always lose because you can't bluff. Listen. I know it's right to conceal things from some people. Even if they beg you to tell them the truth, all they really want is reassurance. I'm different. I want to plan my life knowing I'm going to have it for a while, or knowing the other thing. Remember, Bill, it's me, Walt Rinker, you're talking to. Not somebody you know nothing about. I'm asking you as a friend. I want you to tell me as a friend." "All right," said Dr. McEwan after a pause. "It's leukemia. You're going to die." Walt nodded quite calmly. "I knew it. How long have I got?" "A year maybe." Walt took a deep breath. "Well, that's a long time. Couple of hundred people in town are going to die before me. I'm pretty high on the list, but nowhere near the top. There's no chance. Bill? No treatment?" "There's X-ray treatment that sometimes helps. But you asked me as a friend, Bill -- if it were me, I wouldn't spend all my money and the rest of my time hanging around hospitals and dying anyway." "Me neither. How long have I got more or less as I am now?" The truth was too brutal. The blood count and the number of immature white cells present showed that the disease was already acute. In other words, although Walt was thin and in anything but glowing health now, he would never again be in as good shape as he was at present. "Six months, perhaps," McEwan said. There was silence for a moment. Then Walt said: "Thanks for telling me, Bill." desirable that night, her light tan wonderfully set off by her white dress. She was a small, slim, one-hundredper-cent-feminine brunette. No tomboy or tough, athletic, wise-cracking sex-bomb, Janet. She was eleven years younger than Walt and believed that a man ought to be master in his home. She was so desirable that Walt resolved never to see her again. Sure, she loved him. Sure, they could have been happy. Sure, she wasn't going to like what he was going to say. But a broken romance at nineteen wasn't the end of the world, even though it would seem so at the time. It certainly wasn't as bad as being widowed at twenty, after spending six months watching the man you loved die. "Honey," he said, "hang onto something. I'm going to kick you in the guts." Her bright smile faded and tears filled her eyes. "So you know," she said. "Mean you know, too? How?" "Never mind. Did Dr. McEwan tell you?" "I made him." "He shouldn't have told you." "By God, he should!" said Walt with sudden force. "This was the kind of thing I was afraid of, the kind of thing I was trying to avoid." "What kind of thing?" "Everybody knowing all j. t. McIntosh about it but me. People I don't like suddenly being nice to me. Me making plans and people humoring me, knowing I wasn't going to be around to follow through. Everybody thinking : 'I'm not going to be the one to tell him.' " "Walt, what good does it do, your knowing that -- " He interrupted her impatiently. "That wasn't all, Janet. It doesn't matter any more, now that I know. What I was going to say was -- I don't think we'd better see each other again after tonight." She was hurt, frightened. She seemed to shrink. "That's certainly a dirty one," she whispered. "I wanted... I hoped... I thought we'd get married and have a little while -- " He shook his head decisively. "I can't do it, Janet. I want us to break here and now. It'll hurt you if we never see each other again after tonight, but it would hurt a hell of a lot more if we got married and I died just about the time our first kid would be born." "Walt, you haven't had time to think about this. Can't you see, this is all the more reason for us to get married right away? Women get married in wartime, have a forty-eighthour honeymoon, and often never see their husbands again. I -- " "For one thing," said Walter drily, "people who do that are fools. For another, fools though they are, they're at least planning for the future. The men don't expect to die. Marriage is planning, Janet. It isn't diving into bed together today, because tomorrow it may not seem such a good idea. It's meant to be -- " "Forget what it's meant to be!" said Janet vehemently. "We can't plan for fifty years together, maybe. Some marriages don't last a year anyway." "I'm not going to marry you knowing -- " "Then we won't get married. I don't care about marriage. If you don't want to get married with this hanging over you, I'll move in with you anyway." "What's your mother going to say about that?" "What my mother says doesn't matter !" Walt stood up. "Honey, the longer we go on, the worse it gets. I guess I'd better go. Forget me as soon as you can." Shutting his ears to her cry, he strode out without a glance over his shoulder. at all showed that the landing had been successful and that conditions on the planet she had landed on were not entirely impossible. But there was something of at least equal importance to be settled before she could think of going on living. She threw the radio's net wide and switched on. To her astonishment, she was almost blasted out of her tiny cell. There was more radio communication of more kinds on this world than on any she knew. This, then, was a civilized world. She didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. For a while she thought of Am, drawing a little strength even from the memory of him. He would want her to find another soulmate, for he would want her to live. They had had no children, being spacebound. Am would want her to find another soulmate, because only if she did so could anything of him survive. Vigintans needed companionship as they needed food and water. Almost as necessary as simple companionship was a soulmate. Not just a friend, not just a lover, but a spouse so close physically, mentally and spiritually that nothing divided them, nothing remained to divide them. Only with such a soulmate could any Vigintan approach happiness. For hours Vee listened to the radio, concentrating with every cell in her mind on learning all she could of the people of this world. Soon, somehow, she must be able to pass among them as one of themselves, no matter what they looked like. As an alien you could be liked, you could be respected, you could even be revered. But you couldn't be loved. So Vee had to become a human, down to the last physical decimal point, so human that she could reproduce as humans did, so human that it could never occur to anybody that she had ever been anything else. That, for her, was quite possible. Though she was no technician, the cathode tube was set up so that even uninformed fiddling would eventually try every possible adjustment, and at last she began to get television pictures. was easy. Even before she had any idea how these creatures who called themselves men and women were formed under their curiously elastic skins, she had begun to change her appearance to conform with theirs. It was fortunate, Vee thought, that she was a woman. Many hours of watching TV gave her little or no information on the anatomy of the males, but provided a great deal about the anatomy of females. She saw chorines' legs flashing in so many routines that she was able to work out in detail exactly j. t. McIntosh what the relevant bone and muscle structure must be, and set to work immediately to reproduce it. An acrobat in a costume which covered only the primary and secondary characteristics showed Vee the entire bone structure of the feminine torso, and she made good use of the information. Certain details would have to wait, of course. A visit to a library -- once she could read -- would probably fill in most of the gaps left by television. Meantime she had enough to do learning the language and customs of these creatures and modifying her body. She would look and sound like a human female long before she really was one. At night, when most transmissions ceased, she turned to another problem -- where her ship had landed, and what she was to use for food. In accordance with standard practice, the lifeboat had buried itself in soft ground and pulled the hole in after itself. Digging her way to the surface -- though her transformation had begun, she was still well equipped for digging -- Vee found to her delighted amazement that she was right in the middle of the richest larder imaginable, covered by it, hidden by it. She could eat almost every form of vegetation, and she was in thick undergrowth which already had swung back to conceal the passage of her tiny ship. Collecting enough leaves to last her for several days, she returned to her ship, reflecting that the only food difficulties were going to be when she was nearly human and could no longer live on leaves, and would need much more air than she normally required. However, that wouldn't be for some days yet. transmission started, she was again busy. Vigintans, like humans, had enormously high potential when all their interests were at stake. Under the stress of dire necessity, a man who isn't particularly brave, skillful or intelligent will often do things which are well beyond his normal capacity. Vee, likewise, was able to employ several times her normal capacity in learning from radio and TV, making the necessary deductions and applying the results. The finer points of the psychology of these humans were beyond her and might always be. But on the whole they were decent enough people, and, after all, among all civilized races the fundamental principle of cooperation was the same -- I'll do what you want if you do what I want. In fact, these humans even put it in the form of a maxim : You scrateh my back and I'll scratch yours. No, Vee didn't anticipate any real trouble in dealing with them and getting what she wanted. What she needed. the street, he heard his name called. He turned before he realized it would have been much more sensible to pay no attention. In the car by the curb was Janet. "Look, Janet," he said. "I told you -- " "Do you have to go there?" she said bitterly. "Don't you know that if you've got to have a woman, I'm waiting?" He straightened and would have walked on. "I'll drive after you," she said, "calling your name. Get in and talk to me." He hesitated, then got in beside her. Janet was showing far more guts and persistence and determination than he had ever believed her capable of -- and he wished she wouldn't. "Janet," he said, "I was right. I'm as good as dead. Why can't you just tell yourself I'm dead now?" "Walt, I don't think you know what love is. What kind of a girl would walk out on her man when he needs her most?" "I don't need you. If we'd been married, you'd have stood by me. I know that. I'd have expected it. But it's crazy to go on when there's no future for us. Find some other guy. Do it now, instead of waiting till they actually screw the lid down on me." "Until you find some other girl, I won't leave you." "There isn't going to be any other girl. Why should I try to make somebody else miserable because I'm going to die? All I want is -- " "To make a martyr of yourself. To give up everything so that you die with nothing, with nobody caring about you, so that you can feel sorry for yourself and say, 'Look how cruel fate has been to me.' " "It's not like that at all. I just want to tie up some loose ends." "Walt, you're wrong, your whole attitude's wrong. The natural, the right thing for a man to do is begin new things till the day he dies." "Let's not get started on that again, Janet." "If you think it's wrong to come to me, what's so damned right about going to a woman like that?" "I can't hurt her," said Walt patiently. "She's forgotten me already. It was just a business transaction." "And knowing you're going to a place like that is supposed to make me wild with joy?" "You're not supposed to know anything about me. You're supposed to forget you ever knew me." She was silent for a moment. Then she said: "I'll drive you home. I'm not strong really, Walt. I can't keep up an argument for long. I have to wait for a while before I have strength to start it again." "Then why start it, honey?" She began to cry quietly, helplessly. It took all Walt's self-control to stop himself from taking her in his arms, but he succeeded. Presently, blinking hard, she started the motor and put the car in gear. morning, and apart from the soft, rustling sounds of the country at night, all was still. But down in the forest something stirred. It was an approximate girl who weighed # pounds, was five feet six inches tall, blonde, and #, #, #. It was Vee. She had no intention of being seen by anyone this trip. Apart from lack of clothes, she didn't expect to pass as a normal human female yet. One difficulty was color. Television didn't show whether her skin should be gray, pale yellow, blue, green or pink. By the time she returned to her lifeboat, before dawn, she hoped to have clothing, money, and most of the biological information she still lacked. She had no special advantages except her Vigintan warning instinct, which was better than the human variety. In addition to hearing, sight and smell, she had a kind of crude telepathy which enabled her to place accurately -- even with her eyes closed -- all living intelligences within two or three hundred yards. The night was warm and strongly moonlit. Vee had chosen a moonlit night because her night vision was no better than any human's, and it was no good avoiding being seen by picking a night so dark that she couldn't see either. She liked her human body, which was more mobile and nearly as tough as the one it had replaced. Clothes were a necessity, however, she soon discovered, shivering despite the exercise of walking. Shoes of some kind were even more necessary than clothes, for although grass did her tender soles no harm, stones and twigs underfoot hurt them and made her pick her route with care. A dog came up to her silently. Masking her fear, she radiated strong reassurance. To her relief, the dog was so completely satisfied that he lost interest, loping off as silently as he came. Vee was pleased as well as relieved. She knew from radio and TV that dogs did a good deal of their investigation with their noses, and from the indifference of this dog it was obvious that her body scent must be normal. This wasn't surprising, since her metabolism was now entirely human, even if all the details were not quite settled. She was living on fruit, berries, nuts and vegetables. It didn't bother the dog that she had no clothes on. Presently she found a road by seeing the headlights of a car on it. A road must lead somewhere, and a few minutes of patient waiting satisfied her that it was safe to walk on it. If only one car passed in twenty minutes, it could hardly be a busy highway. She walked a mile and saw no more vehicles, met no one. Another dog investigated her much as the first one had done. She saw several cats, but they ignored her completely. of a town, she proceeded with more caution. The street lights were a nuisance. Although the town seemed dead, she didn't dare walk along the streets. She crept behind the first house. Three people inside, all asleep. But the fourth house was empty. Twenty minutes spent examining the doors and windows showed her the difficulty, of her task. She had to steal clothes and money. Later she would return them somehow or other; the Vigintan moral code was strict in such matters. But with limited knowledge of the people from whom she was trying to steal, it seemed to be impossible to take anything without leaving too many clues. A fingerprint on a window would be a clue. How much more significant it would be, she thought, to leave a fingerprint which wasn't quite a fingerprint... In the end she had to take the chance of entering an occupied house. Empty houses were too well locked up. The house she chose had an open downstairs window. There were two people in the house, both upstairs. Keeping her mental eye on them all the time, Vee went from room to room searching for clothes. She found only shoes which didn't fit her. Naturally enough, clothes would be kept in bedrooms. After half an hour of fumbling in the dark, not daring to put on a light, Vee was getting desperate. Soon she'd have to start back to the lifeboat, and she had accomplished nothing yet. She tried another house, knowing five people were asleep in it, two of them downstairs. It was a large house. Her reasoning was that in such a house there was more chance of things being left around in more places. In a room facing the back, she switched on the light. Caution had got her nowhere. She soon found that recklessness had brought a rich reward. She was in a spare bedroom and all the drawers were filled with clothes, women's clothes. Wasting no time, she dressed herself clumsily. Fortunately television plays not infrequently showed women dressing and undressing. She selected rather the clothes which might not be missed for a while than those which fitted best, although she guessed the chances of their being missed were remote. There were no shoes. Dressed in a sweater and skirt, she searched in other rooms and finally found a pair of sandals which fitted fairly well. Unlike anybody else in this world, she could make her feet fit the shoes, given time. Leaving the house, she decided to call it a night. She was dressed after a fashion. She had no idea how she would look to a human, and had no intention of finding out immediately. Future forays would be necessary. She started to walk back to her lifeboat. more before she was ready to risk meeting people. By the end of that time she felt very low, not having had any companionship for so long. Only the radio and television programs and hope had kept her going. She had borrowed some medical books for a few hours. She had watched people from hiding. She had seen dead bodies at the local morgue. And she had made herself completely human, apart from certain things which . she didn't abandon because she couldn't -- like the ability to change back to her own shape and to exist, if necessary, on vegetable matter which ordinary humans would not regard as food. Naturally she had tried to make herself as attractive as possible. How far she had been successful, she had no means of knowing. Money had remained a problem for a long time. If it was difficult to steal clothes, it was ten times as difficult to steal money. These humans -- of whom she thought, now, as "people" -- never seemed to leave money lying around. And if you did get your hands on money which wasn't yours, you were pretty sure to be caught. For a while she considered letting herself be caught. She'd be put in jail and looked after, become somebody else's responsibility. But she discarded the idea because that way she'd forfeit too many rights. Private citizens had a lot of rights in this country, though the radio sometimes suggested that this wasn't so everywhere. Unless you forfeited them by becoming a criminal, you could do pretty much what you liked here and nobody interfered with you. Her long hours of watching and waiting around the village, which she now knew was called Slacksville, finally paid off. A storekeeper ran out when there was an accident in the street, and Vee was able to rob the till. She felt miserable about it, but she knew she had no choice. Without money, you could get by if you knew enough to get and keep a job. With money, you might be able to learn enough to get a job. She had a little over a hundred dollars, not much, but all she intended to steal. Only fifty miles away, she knew now, was a city -- not a big, important city, but many times larger than the tiny town which had unwillingly furnished her immediate needs. She hid the lifeboat so completely that it might not be found in a hundred years. There was nothing to pack. In her stolen sweater and skirt, she walked ten miles in the opposite direction from Slacksville, strolled casually into another small town, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened. A middle-aged woman looked at her incuriously, a child gazed up at her, a youth of seventeen gave her the once-over. Nobody stared ; nobody looked away quickly. She had been successful, then, but not completely successful. She knew how boys of seventeen were supposed to react to the kind of girl she had tried to make herself, and this one conspicuously failed to do so. However, that was of less importance than the thing which had already been quite clearly established -- she could pass among humans as one of them. a ticket to the city. It was the first time she had attempted human speech. The only reaction she could observe was indifference. It was the same on the train. Although glad that she had been so successful in her primary purpose, Vee was conscious of pique too. In her own world she had never been so disregarded. Her feminine reaction was that it would be better to be downright ugly than anonymous. A girl in white was coming along through the car. There was a stir. Vee began to unj. t. McIntosh derstand why nobody looked twice at her. The girl was cleaner than a new nickel and shone as brightly. Every dark hair was in place. Her pink blush was not natural, nor were her lush dark-red lips, but there was nothing natural about this white, shiny, immaculate creature. Her high breasts were molded by nylon and elastic, her flat stomach was under rigid, unseen control, her skin was a labor of chemical love. Television hadn't shown such detail. Vee still had a lot to learn. She was merely a girl in an old sweater and skirt that was new but only fitted more or less. When she reached the city, she shut her eyes to its complexity, its wonder. Later she would look at it. First she needed a place to stay. She found one easily enough, going through the routine she had seen on television : girl-arrives-in-cityfinds-apartment. She told the myopic landlady, Mrs. Decker, that she had left her luggage at the station until she found a room. Mrs. Decker was satisfied. As Vee came out of her room, intending to go out again and take a look at the immediate neighborhood of # Buckwash Street, a tall, good-looking young man came out of the next room. He had black hair and rather pale skin, as if he spent a lot of time indoors. Vee smiled at him, and he smiled back. He nearly said something, but then he cleared his throat unnecessarily, looked away and popped back into his room like a startled rabbit. Vee didn't recognize shyness. She thought he just wasn't interested in a girl as mediocre in appearance as she was. Since she hadn't managed to make herself into the kind of glamour girl who, in television at any rate, was always surrounded by attentive, admiring males, it was obviously useless just to wait for a soulmate to come along... She'd have to go find one. a block away. "Damn," he said upder his breath. She knew all the places he was likely to go -- half a dozen times now, she had trapped him and they had played out half-bitter, half-tender scenes in no essential respect different from the first. This time she hadn't seen him. He cut through the park. Let her wait -- if she missed him often enough, maybe she'd give up and go away. He was tired of fighting Janet and knew that his resistance wouldn't last much longer -- although he still passionately believed he was right. Why couldn't she see what was so clear to him, that if he thought only of himself, he wouldn't do this? It was for Janet's sake that he was trying to break with her. Finding himself at the entrance to Bill McEwan's office, Walt went in. He was supposed to keep in touch. McEwan was professionally hearty, and Walt decided not to call on him again. As McEwan had already admitted, he could do nothing. All he had left was his bedside manner. As Walt was leaving, McEwan said : "Girl came in this morning asking if I could put her in touch with people like you. Said she belonged to some organization I'd never heard of, but it sounds good. "You didn't give her my name, did you?" "No, but I thought it might interest you." Walt frowned at him. "Why should you think that?" "You might like to meet this girl," McEwan said. Shrugging, Walt took a note of her address : # Buckwash Street. Outside, he barely missed running into Janet again. She had moved her car. Exasperated, he hoped that the Friends of People with a Year to Live, or whatever they called themselves, might be able to help him to get rid of Janet. He headed toward # Buckwash Street. "Miss Vee Brown?" said the myopic landlady. "Yeah, she's in. Working in the basement. You a chemist too?" "In the basement?" Walt said. "Yeah, she rents it." Walt went down the stone steps. He found a blonde in a white smock working at a lab bench. She was quite pretty. Cold, somehow, he thought. As she came toward him, wiping her hands, he said: "I'm Walt Rinker. Dr. McEwan said you'd been to see him this morning..." He left it like that, so that she'd have to do the talking. She nodded coolly. "You're a patient of his, Mr. Rinker?" "Yes." "You have an incurable disease?" "Yp? " "Cancer?" "Leukemia." "Mr. Rinker, this isn't a comfortable place to talk and I can't take you up to my apartment. Would you have coffee with me in the diner next door?" "Look," he said. "This is kind of silly. I came along just out of curiosity. Frankly, I came because I wondered about you." "About me?" "It was a fool thing to do. I don't need any help, I've got plenty of money, my mind isn't going to collapse under the strain. Sorry to have bothered you. Miss Brown." j. t. McIntosh "You mean you want to go now?" For the first time he sensed emotion in her. And it was emotion of startling intensity. He began to think she was a nut, the kind of eccentric who felt she had a mission. As he was about to turn and go up the steps again, being as rude as might be necessary to get away from her, she took off her lab smock and said quietly : "Well, it won't hurt to talk here for half an hour." "No, I guess not," he said. They sat down. V EE hadn't found it hard to make money after all. From television and radio she had learned that although fortunes could be made at race tracks with very little outlay, betting on horses was generally considered a gamble. Still, she had visited a race track to confirm this view of the matter. And she had found that, for her, betting on horses wasn't foolish at all. You could see the runners, that was the point. And Vee, with the trained eye of a species which could change its own physical structure at will, could establish an awful lot from seeing the runners. She could not merely tell the best, strongest fastest horses; far more important, she could form a pretty good impression of the probable winners. There were failures, of course. At first she didn't properly understand the mathematics of this particular form of betting. Even when she did, the horse which should have won didn't always win. And when the probable winner was shortpriced, a bet in the small sums she could spare was neither economically sound nor particularly productive. But she wasn't compelled to bet on short-priced horses. And the advantage of her special sense was that when a long shot was going to come up, Vee was the only one at the course who knew it beforehand. She soon had enough money for her immediate needs. The first thing she did was buy some clothes. She had discovered, meantime, one of the peculiarities of this society. If you were you could get away with practically anything. Walt Rinker wasn't the first person who had come to see her. There had been three hypochondriacs and two cancer cases too far gone for her to do anything for them. She didn't know yet whether she could do anything for Walter, but he was the first to interest her personally. She decided, at the end of the half-hour, that he was to be her soulmate. As they emerged from the basement, she stopped at the foot of the stairs. "I have to go upstairs for a moment," she said. "You'll wait?" "Sure." She hesitated for a moment longer. Now that he had seen her, he might make his escape thankfully. However, she couldn't handcuff him to her -- yet. Running lightly up to her apartment, she once again passed Billy Clark, the tall, good-looking boy in the next room. "Miss Brown," he said, putting out his hand as if to stop her. "Yes?" she said. She tried not to betray her impatience, but her hand came up to open her door. The sooner she got back to Walt, the less chance there would be of finding him gone. "Nothing," he muttered. "Some other time." Vee went in, unlocked the middle drawer of the dressing table and took out a small package. She would have liked to change into something more glamorous than the indeterminate blue dress she was wearing, but didn't want to take the risk that Walt would walk out on her. Putting the package in her handbag, she turned and went out again. To her surprise, Billy Clark was still waiting outside. She smiled at him automatically. He opened his mouth to speak, but before anything came out, she was halfway down the stairs. It was a relief to find that Walt had not gone away. cove, Walt was still sorry he had come. Vee Brown was, of course, a nut. The trouble was that she wasn't even an interesting nut. She talked characterlessly, like the people in bad scripts who said merely what the plot required them to say. She asked him quite a few' questions which he answered truthfully but briefly. "How about me asking something for a change?" he said. "Just what is all this about?" She looked at him steadily. "Mr. Rinker, are you prepared to try out an experimental cure for leukemia?" Walt was suddenly angry. "Think I'm crazy? There's no cure." "Then you lose nothing." "And gain nothing." She shook her head. "That's not true. If my method doesn't cure you, at least it will give you longer to live." He was still angry. "Who  do you think you're fooling? j If there was a cure, every  newspaper in the world would j be carrying the story." "Not if they didn't know about it. And nobody does." "A thing like this would be j. t. mcintosh known about long before it happened. People don't discover things by accident any more." "Don't they? Offhand, I seem to remember reading that isoniazid, the TB drug, was a byproduct of rocket research. Besides, did I say this cure was discovered by accident?" "There isn't a cure!" he almost shouted, trembling. Not until this girl claimed to be able to cure him had he realized how much he wanted to live. You were told you had leukemia and were going to die. It was like the moment after an injury when somehow you didn't lose consciousness. There was no pain yet, only numbness. And mercifully the numbness went on. There was no argument with cancer or leukemia. You might live longer than they said, or not as long, but you were under sentence. With tuberculosis, meningitis, tumors, almost anything else, there was a chance. With leukemia, death wasn't a matter of if; it was a matter of when. And that maintained the numbness, the numbness out of which Walt had been able to withstand the pleas of Janet, knowing he was right. Now, irresponsibly, this woman made him face the thought of being cured, the thought of being able to go to Janet and say... As he stared down at Vee, it suddenly seemed to him that he had never known anybody who looked less crazy. Cold she was, apart from that moment in the basement when for a moment her feelings had broken through, but it was the coldness of a girl who was under strict, almost unnatural self-control. If a girl of twenty-five or so did happen to have a cure for leukemia, she might be like this girl, act like this girl. He sat down, still not believing in Vee, still hating her. Vee felt his hatred and failed to understand it. She was bewildered and frightened. This was the man she had chosen as her soulmate, unless he had any really serious defect of temperament. It was a simple bargain -- she would give him life and he would be hers. Other women in his life, whether he was married or not, didn't matter. The other women couldn't save him; Vee could. Surely any reasonable creature, human or otherwise, would accept life with her as an alternative to death. If for no other reason, gratitude would compel Walt to do as she wished. "Why do you hate me?" she asked steadily. "You've made me hope," he said. "I know you're a sensation-seeking nut. But you've made me think what it would be like not to die." Vee felt better. She could understand that. "I know." "Tell me about this cure of yours. How does it work? Convince me." "You don't have to be convinced. It works whether you understand it or not, like serum or antibiotics." Damn it, was there ever such inhuman self-control ? She didn't even seem to feel the need to justify herself. "Tell me about it all the same," he said furiously. Vee considered. Could she tell him about the restorer? had demanded the ability to change one's physical shape. Back in the savage days, long before the first stirrings of civilization, the way to survive had been periodic metamorphosis. The briffs, the keymors, all the different types of mally, each in turn had ruled the world -- physically. Mentally, Vee's race had always been supreme. But Vee's race (which never had a name of its own, for its members called themselves and were the creatures they happened to be duplicating at the time) was not warlike. Unable to survive by fighting, they had survived by being their enemies. Later, much later, the other races of the Vigintan worlds so objected to this habit that Vee's race signed an agreement never to imitate any of the Vigintan species. Although this promise was scrupulously kept, Vee and her people could no more lose the faculty of metamorphosis than a man with ears among deaf people could forget how to hear. A human male with this faculty might retain his human shape, but he would make himself tall, strong and handsome. A human female would make herself independent of aids to beauty, as Vee had done, merely by making muscles of the necessary tone and strength. Members of Vee's race died, usually, of disease peculiar to the kind of creature they happened to be emulating. They were particularly susceptible, for they made themselves, in effect, into pure, perfect, exact, immaculate specimens -- without, of course, even the slightest experience of any of the relevant diseases. Once ill, changing again didn't help. In effect, they took the disease with them. When technology began, however, the restorer was developed. And hardly anyone ever died any more except in accidents or of extreme old age. The restorer was a tiny object manufactured from bodily secretions. In a sense, it was alive. It was certainly organic. Yet it was only a j. t. McIntosh pattern -- a pattern of the kind of life-form the creature who secreted it was imitating. It was the essence of the species, so basic that it would be the same for Asiatic, Negro or Occidental, man or woman, child or oldster. On becoming ill, you swallowed the restorer -- part natural, part artificial. It spread in the blood to brain, heart, lungs. And the whole physical effort of the body was directed to the restoration of the natural pattern -- normal good health. When the other Vigintan races discovered that the restorer worked for them too, Vee's people suddenly became exceedingly popular, and their peculiar gift, hitherto regarded with suspicion at least, made them everybody's friend. That was all very well in the Vigintan worlds, but Vee could hardly explain any of this to Walt. "No," she said. She took a small pill from her handbag. "Swallow that without chewing it and your cure begins." He took it and looked at it -- an ordinary white pill. Once again he felt anger and frustration rise in him. A little white pill like that couldn't do any good. He looked up at Vee. "What do you get out of this whole business?" "Nothing at the moment." "At the moment? And later?" "I am not after money," she said firmly. Confused, suspicious, Walt put the pill in his mouth and swallowed it. Barring accidents, he was cured now. Although the process of cure had barely started, it was complete. He needed nothing more. But Vee didn't propose to tell him that yet. "You're a chemist?" Walt said uncertainly. She nodded. He wanted to believe in her, was afraid to believe in her. "Did you work for any of the big firms?" She smiled. "Go home. Come back here the night after next." "Go home?" She stood up. "In about an hour you'll feel lightheaded," she said. "It won't be unpleasant and you'll be all right if you lie down. The less you do tomorrow, the better. If you get up, stay in a chair all day. You'll probably be hungry. Eat anything you like. Come back the following night." Maintaining her incredible composure to the end, she walked out. Walt went to the desk to pay the bill, but she had even done that. at the race track winning carefully, not spectacularly. Some day she would have to arrange an entirely honest income. She didn't consider betting on horses honest for her, any more than it would be honest for her to bet on the number of peas in a bottle when she knew the answer. She had already sent money anonymously to various addresses in Slacksville. Eventually she intended to return her winnings by the simple means of making losing bets to the right bookmakers. Vigintan morality was different from human morality. There was no arguing with it. On the morning of the day Walt was to call, she rented a large but discreet apartment in a different part of the city, and spent the rest of the day putting it in order. In the evening she returned to # Buckwash Street, and when Walt called, she took him out immediately and directed a taxi driver to take them to the new apartment. "Where are we going?" Walt demanded. "Wait and see." "Miss Brown, I -- " "You might as well call me Vee." She was as cool as ever, but twice as pretty as he remembered. In fact, she was an astonishingly beautiful girl -- astonishing because, although she was undoubtedly the same girl, she hadn't left him with that impression before. If only she acted like -- well, not necessarily like Janet, but like any other girl, with likes and dislikes, a sense of humor, perhaps, not just that same cool, impersonal manner all the time -- she could be a remarkably attractive woman. Not that that was anything to him, of course. "Vee," he said, "I don't know what's been happening to me, but something has. I feel -- I feel as if there's a fire in my body, but a soothing fire. Vee, tell me the truth. Am I really getting better?" "You should be," she said. "And that's all there is to it -- taking a pill?" That was all there was to it, but Vee had far too slight a hold on him so far to tell him that. The interval of forty-eight hours had been carefully calculated. She wanted him to believe that he was being cured, not that he was already cured. "Pills," she amended. "For how long?" "It depends. When you're cured, you can stop taking pills." "But... Vee... How come, if this works as you say, nobody knows about it? Why don't you shout it from the rooftops?" "Walt, I want you to promise me not to tell anybody what's happening to you meantime. When I do release it, I want to know exactly what it is and what it will do." "Sure, but every day people j. t. McIntosh are dying who might be -- " "Walt, I promise you that the treatment will be made available to everybody when I know how to handle it. In fact, you'll help me, won't you?" He didn't get a chance to answer, for the cab had drawn up and Vee was getting out. The apartment stupefied him. As he looked at its pastel shades with the occasional splashes of saturated color, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully and he turned presently to look at Vee with a certain speculation which had been absent from his gaze so far. With her near-telepathic sense, she realized at once that though she personally had not struck him as strange enough for any suspicion of the truth about her origin to cross his mind, she had overreached herself in the decoration of the apartment -- although it had been done rapidly and sketchily with furniture obtainable from stock, and although much had been left as she had found it. From the moment when she had first seen an image form in the screen in her lifeboat, she had been concentrating on modeling herself on the kind of human female whom human males liked. She had devoted only a passing glance to the kind of decor they were accustomed to. "Do you like it?" she said. "I'm going to have the walls green, but the ceiling and lighting could stay, don't you think?" His vague, formless suspicion dissolved and was washed away. But he asked : "Why do you have two apartments?" She shrugged. "This is where I'm going to live. The other is rented till the end of the week. Would you like a drink?" He hesitated. Although he had dismissed from his mind the curious first impression that the room had had on him, the strangeness of this woman and her behavior and the effect of the pill she had given him made him uneasy. "Why did you bring me here?" he asked. Vee was uneasy too. He just didn't react the way he was supposed to. She had changed her dress and appearance slightly, subtly, and had sensed at first that she was making a better impression on him than on their first meeting. "I want to make some tests," she said. "Then hadn't you better do that before you offer me a drink?" "I guess so, yes." The undercurrent felt wrong. She would have to try something, anything. "What do you think of me?" she asked abruptly. "You're a strange girl." The words told her something, but not as much as what accompanied them did. You're cold. You smile, but you don't laugh. I just don't know what makes you tick. "Wait here a minute' she said, and went through to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. and find someone else. Love, for members of Vee's race, was less capricious than among humans. They found possible soulmates -- which was easy, with their near-telepathy -- and gradually, progressively, loved them. There were no second thoughts. Already Vee felt too much herself from him and start anew. But she could do it. She could do it now. With every hour she spent with him, it got tougher. Soon it would be impossible. She made up her mind, shrugging away her doubts. If she failed with Walt, why should she succeed with any other human male? Her present tactics were wrong, that was all. She remembered a television play about a girl scientist. Men thought her a washout when she wore glasses and a lab smock. But she was a wow when her hair came loose, and she got a little drunk, and the plot somehow got her into a bathing suit. Vee would start again -- remembering that her excuse for keeping Walt here was the necessity of making tests of one sort or another. Walt looked up as she emerged with a syringe. "I want samples of your blood," she said. "I'm going to take a count in one hour, two hours, and three hours." "Mean you want me to stay for three hours?" "I'd have you stay all night, only I don't want you claiming I raped you." She giggled at his expression. But she drew off the blood sample competently, except that a drop fell on her skirt "Siob," she said. "Why don't you watch where you're bleeding?" "What are you going to do with that blood?" Walt asked. "Get it off if I can." "I don't mean on your skirt. What are you going to do with the sample?" "Drink it, of course." She went back in the other room. A moment later she put her head out the door. "Walt, make yourself useful. The bathroom's through there. See if you can get this clean." She threw something at him which proved to be her skirt. When she came back in five minutes, she was wearing a short wrap which showed she had exceedingly beautiful legs. "Don't stare at me as if I weren't wearing anything underneath," she said. "I am. Look." j. t. McIntosh She flicked her wrap and Walt saw she was wearing white panties. At the same time he saw she wasn't wearing anything else. "Look, Vee," he said. "We might as well get one thing clear now, in case there's any misunderstanding. I've got a girl, Janet. We'd be married except that I wouldn't get married with this hanging over me. If I do get better, it's Janet for me. Is that clear?" "Sure," said Vee. "I understand English real good." Walt persisted. "I mean Janet's the only girl for me. When I thought I was going to die, I tried to brush her off. But if I don't die -- well, there's going to be nobody else but Janet." About that, Vee thought, there may be two opinions. "Have a drink," Vee said. She got inside the skin of the character she had adopted. She was frank, outspoken, warmly sexy, inviting. And Walt had a good time with her. She laughed easily and he wondered dazedly why he'd ever thought she was cold and stiff. After an hour, she left him for a few minutes. Returning, she gave him another small white pill. "Walt," she said solemnly, "I think you're going to be all right. I'll check again later, but I can tell you now -- keep up the treatment and your worries are over. Let's have a drink to celebrate." They had a drink to celebrate. They had several drinks. And eventually, despite his excellent resolutions, the alcohol and the proximity of Vee and the sure knowledge that broke down his resistance. At first he merely had an irresistible impulse to fold back the collar of her wrap. Finding himself practically kissing her, he did kiss her. Vee was sure enough of herself and him to whisper mockingly : "Remember Janet, Walt." "The hell with Janet," he said hoarsely. looked different to him. Wakening about eleven o'clock, Walt lost no time in getting dressed, hardly looking at Vee. Despite the hard drinking they'd been doing, he felt better than he had for months. There remained no doubt in his mind that he was going to be well again. And it suddenly became a matter of desperate urgency to see Janet. "Tonight again, Walt," Vee said before he left. "How long do I have to keep taking pills?" "Every night." "Can't you give me them now?" "No. I've got to keep checking results." He shrugged. Her methods might be peculiar, but apparently they worked. He felt the need to say something more, feeling the awkwardness that a man always feels when something has happened which the girl takes much more seriously than he does. "Vee, I -- " "Don't talk now," she said. 'The morning's no time for talking. Tell me one thing, though -- do you like my dress?" He couldn't help grinning. She wasn't wearing a dress. H E hurried out, took a cab and waited impatiently at the Kentucky House, where Janet generally lunched. For weeks Janet had been chasing him relentlessly, begging, pleading, crying, arguing, demanding, insisting. The last time they had had a scene had been just before he met Vee. With his mind he knew there was no chance that Janet had suddenly changed, yet in his heart he was terribly afraid that just at the moment when he had decided with infinite gladness that he could marry her after all, she had decided to take him at his word and never see him again. As the minutes passed and she didn't come, he cursed himself for being so definite. Yet how could he have known that a miracle was going to happen? Short of a miracle, he had meant all he said to Janet. But if only he hadn't been quite so hard, quite so certain... The food in front of him didn't interest him at first. He'd been pecking at his meals for months, and despite what Vee had said, he hadn't been particularly hungry the day before. However, when he started pecking as usual, he ate everything in sight, ordered more, and finally stopped eating only because he didn't believe it could be right to go on eating until he burst. Besides, there was Janet. She didn't come in to lunch. After his enormous meal, he went to her home. Her mother, surprised and doubtful at sight of him, said no, she wasn't home, no, she wasn't out of town, yes, she'd be home around eight. "Tell her to phone me when she comes in," said Walt. He gave Vee's number, for he'd be at her apartment at eight. It would be just as well, he decided, to make things quite clear. He'd tell Vee he expected Janet to call, and she could listen to him talking to Janet. Maybe that was cruel to Vee, to whom he owed his life. Maybe he shouldn't have arranged things that way. But he had already told Vee about Janet, and the sooner she knew he meant what he said, the better. apartment that night, she was already in a wrap, a long white negligee this time, and he was glad he had left a message for Janet to phone him here. "Look, Vee," he said abruptly, "you were very sweet last night. But I told you I was going to marry Janet, and I meant it. You understood that, didn't you?" "If we're going to have a stand-up fight," said Vee pleasantly, "let's at least sit down first." He sat as far away from her as he could. "I shouldn't have stayed here last night," he said. "Because I knew at the time that to you it was more than... I mean we'd only just met, and yet somehow I knew that you -- " "That I meant to marry you," said Vee. Her calm certainty startled him. "Well -- yes. But I told you about Janet, Vee. I meant it." "So that made it all right to sleep with me." "Vee, Janet's going to phone me here. I'm going to tell her that I'm asking her to marry me again." "How often have you been married to her?" "You know what I mean, damn it." Vee crossed her legs and lay back. "If there's going to be straight talking," she said, "you can have the last word. I want the first." "If there's going to be straight talking," Walt said, "pull that wrap over your legs and shut it at the top. I'm not made of wood." "No," said Vee mildly, "I know that, Walt." She left her wrap the way it was. "Correct me if I'm wrong," she said. "When you were going to die, you weren't going to marry Janet. Now that you're going to live, you want her back." "That's right." "I'm sorry, Walt. Under those conditions, you don't get better." He caught his breath. "What do you mean?" "Exactly what I say. It's a simple bargain, Walt. Marry me and I'll cure you. Marry Janet and you die." He was staring at her in horror. "You're crazy!" "Not at all. I didn't mean to put it so bluntly so soon, Walt. I wanted to help you forget Janet and perhaps never have to deliver an ultimatum. But you've forced me to." He shook his head incredulously. She was as calm, as businesslike as she had been earlier in their acquaintance. But for Janet, he might have loved the other Vee, the warmer, exciting Vee. This one he didn't like, Janet or no Janet. In the silence, the phone rang. Vee got up too. As if aware of what he had just been thinking, she was laughing, playful. She barred his way. "I'm going to speak to Janet," he said. "You said yourself you wouldn't marry her unless you recovered. And if you marry her, you don't recover. So why speak to her?" He tried to get past her. She dodged in front of him again. Grasping her firmly, he tried to push her to one side. But he was still not a well man and she was as strong as he was. He pulled at her shoulder and her wrap tore and hung to the swell of her hip at one side. She only laughed. The bell was still ringing. Furious, he aimed a vicious blow at Vee. She caught his arm and they both fell to the floor. "If your Janet could see you now," she giggled breathlessly, "there would certainly be no wedding." Having gained the superior position, he tried to get up. Vee held his leg and though he kicked savagely, he couldn't get free. The bell stopped ringing. At once Vee let go. Walt dived to the phone and picked it up. "Janet? Janet? This is Walt. Janet?" Silence. He slammed the phone down. Vee was getting to her feet. "I could kill you!" he said. "I doubt it." He picked up the phone again and started to dial. Vee moved behind him, and as he finished dialing, she mischievously presented him with the cut end of the phone cable. Without thinking, he chopped at her with his fist. She went down in a heap at his feet. At once he was sorry, and picked her up. He carried her to the couch and was laying her gently on it when she opened her eyes and said conversationally : "This is nice." He dropped her angrily. She sat up. "Walt, when you think about it, it isn't such a bad bargain. Would you honestly really rather die than marry me?" "I don't get it," he said bitterly. "You're young and you're anything but ugly. Why does it have to be me?" "Because..." But she wasn't going to tell him it was because Billy Clark, when he had first seen her, had merely looked at her, smiled automatically and dived into his room. Because she had to have a soulmate, and soon. Because, for all her efforts, men didn't go mad at sight of her, and even after what had happened between her and Walt, he wanted to cast her aside and marry his Janet. Because she had to be able to keep her man with her, and j. t. McIntosh if she couldn't do it without a leash and a collar, there had to be a leash and collar. Because if she didn't have a soulmate she would die. If Walt only knew it, she had no hold over him. The pill she would give him soon looked like the restorer she had given him that first night, but it was nothing, did nothing. She had already done all she could for him. "Don't you owe me something, Walt?" she said. "I don't owe you the rest of my life." "Don't you?" "Look, Vee, let's look at this calmly. I can't marry you and you wouldn't want me to, knowing I love Janet." "You won't go on loving Janet." "I will." "You won't." S HE was certain of that. Given a chance, she could mold herself to Walt so completely that he would talk of Janet shamefacedly as "a girl I used to know." Given time, Vee and Walt could be as close as any human couple in the world. She was in no doubt about that. Only she had to be given the chance, given time. Walt tried again. "Vee, I thought at first you were pretty cold, but I don't now. You're a woman." "Thanks, Walt. I always wondered about that." "If you really believed, really knew you couldn't have me, you wouldn't condemn me to death. I know that." Vee knew it too. Sooner or later she'd have to give the restorer to everybody ; certainly she couldn't let Walt die, even if she lost him. It was unfortunate that he guessed that. "Oh, you'd be surprised how callous I can be," she said lightly. They talked it back and forth, sometimes calmly, sometimes angrily. Vee didn't shift her ground. When the door chimes sounded and Vee went to open the door, Walt didn't move. It didn't seem to be anything to him that somebody was calling on Vee. It was only when Janet came in, white and rigid, and he saw Vee's mocking smile, that he realized that Vee had known all along who it would be. "So this is what you wanted to tell me," said Janet. Neatly dressed in a blue wool suit, she looked almost boyish beside the flamboyant Vee, her wrap torn down one side to her rounded hips. "You must be Janet," Vee said. "I'm sure you'd like a drink." "Janet, I want to marry you," Walt said. Janet didn't look at Vee. "Once I said I wouldn't leave you until you found some other girl. Now you have." "I haven't... Listen, Janet, Vee is a chemist. She has a treatment -- I'm not going to die." Yes you are, if you marry her. That was on the tip of Vee's tongue, but she stopped herself in time and didn't say it. The effect would be to put Janet on Walt's side against her. There were tears in Janet's voice. "Walt, honey, I told you all along if you wanted a girl I was waiting." "Janet, I don't love Vee. Please believe that." "It's true," said Vee. "He beats me all the time." "She's damnably clever, Janet," Walt said. "Everything she'll say will be meant to turn you against me. She wants to marry me." "I didn't know I was at the end of a line of girls all wantj. t. McIntosh ing to marry you," Janet whis"What does that prove?" pered. "I thought you were all Janet asked doubtfully, mine, Walt. I thought you "It shows I was trying to needed me." talk to you, and she was tryVee laughed. ing to stop me." Like an animal at bay, The atmosphere changed. Walt looked wildly around him. And suddenly he "lEE was more desperate pounced. "Look!" he shouted.  than Walt, although she "When you phoned earlier, didn't show it. She was fightshe wouldn't let me answer, ing, literally, for her life. And then she cut the cord. Having feelings, she was See?" sorry for Janet. But if Janet lost Walt, she wouldn't die. Janet was young and pretty, and within three months Janet would have another man crazy about her. In three months Vee could perhaps have a man crazy about her too, only Vee couldn't wait tnree months. Without a soulmate, she was on the point of perishing now. She couldn't afford to lose Walt. "Have a drink, Janet," she said. "How long have you known her?" Janet demanded. "Three days," said Walt. "Three nights," Vee murmured. Walt spun on her. "For Pete's sake, go put something on, Vee!" "All right," she said mildly, knowing Walt didn't expect that. A S she left them together, Vee was aware that if they had the sense to walk out together, she had lost. She banked on Janet being slow to forgive. When the door closed behind her, Walt said rapidly: "Janet, she can cure me. Believe that. But now she's blackmailing me. Either I marry her or there won't be any cure." "I don't understand any part of this," Janet said wearily, "except that you and she are lovers." Walt should have had an answer ready. Silence was worse than anything he might have said. "So its true," she whispered. "Janet, I'm only flesh and blood, and she -- " "I'm only flesh and blood too. What was wrong with me?" "If you'll only let me explain -- " Vee came back, cool and elegant in a white dress. Janet looked at her and Vee's fabulous figure made her jealous and unsure. Part of her said, "It's only natural that Walt should forget himself with a girl like that. Forgive him." The rest of her said, "If only Vee had been ugly, I wouldn't have minded so much." Janet wasn't conceited, wasn't sure of herself. When her rival was a girl like Vee, what chance had she? "Have a drink, Janet," Vee said. "Is that how it was?" Janet asked Walt bitterly. "You were drunk?" "She made me stay. There were tests. Some blood got on her skirt." "So naturally she took it off. Any girl would. And you... you and she..." Janet was well brought up. She could think things, but she couldn't say them. "Janet, you're a nice girl," Vee said. "I don't think you quite understand Walt." j. t. McIntosh "That's right. I don't. Obviously I never did." "Janet, will you listen?" Walt begged. "Vee said she could cure me. I had nothing to lose. I tried her way. And it works. Already I feel so much better that today I went to the Kentucky House to look for you, to ask you to marry me. But you didn't come." "So you came here instead. And left a message for me to phone you here." "Don't you care that now I may live?" "With her. You can live with Vee. She can keep you going. You need her. You never needed me." "Janet, I'm telling you -- I'm not going to die." "If you can only live with her, I don't care if you do die!" Janet said crying. As usual, she could keep her end up so long, no longer. She turned blindly toward the door. And Vee made her first mistake. "That's all she cares, Walt," she said. "As far as she's concerned, you can die right now." Janet spun around, finding more courage from somewhere. "No," she said brokenly. "No, I was wrong. If she can really cure you, Walt, stay with her. I can't do anything for you. I never could, could I?" Vee laughed with sudden joy. She thought she had won. But she had lost. and her tears weren't entirely tears of grief. Vee felt their love for each other, a bond that shut her out, a reconciliation which had nothing to do with facts or explanations. "I need more treatment, honey," Walt said. "She says I don't get it unless I marry her." Vee tried the old, unanswerable, logical argument again. "With Janet, you die. And you won't marry Janet unless you live. You'd decided that before you ever heard of me. What's changed?" "Janet, you were right and I was wrong," Walt said softly. "Vee showed me that. I'd rather go with you, and die, than with her and live." Vee's shoulders slumped and her figure suddenly wasn't fabulous any more. It was physical, mental and spiritual, this need of her race to have a soulmate. In the end it would be physically that she would die, but not until the two other sides of her had already disintegrated. She could hold out so long, as a man could hold out so long without food or water, getting weaker all the time. But since the mental part was so important, dissolution could be rapid. It wasn't selfish, the love of Vee's race. It had to go out and come back. From Walt it had never really come back -- yet with the confidence that it soon would, Vee had been able to carry on. The moment she knew, however, knew with complete certainty that Walt was not for her, she felt all the staggering weight of all these lonely weeks, empty of everything but hope. She couldn't fight any more. She could hardly speak. "Go away, both of you," she said weakly. "Walt, you won't die. You don't need any more treatment." Janet emerged from Walt's arms, blinking, to stare at Vee in dawning realization. "You did love him," she murmured. "You really do love him." "Go away," Vee said, dropping loosely in a chair. "Are you all right, Vee?" Walt said, suddenly solicitous. It seemed incredible that only a few minutes before Vee had been dominating the situation, and they had both hated and feared her. "Yes. Go away. You'll be all right, Walt." They didn't press their luck. They almost tiptoed out, arms around each other. For a long time Vee didn't move. But even in her despair she hadn't quite lost her instinct for self-preservation, the unthinking urge to make one last try. And it would be the last one. # # Others like Walt might have called at # Buckwash Street and left their addresses. If everything went, right, if she found the right one that night, she still wouldn't be finished. She had to find reason to hope again within the next few hours. Failing that, she wouldn't wait for lingering physical death. She dragged herself to her feet, went into the bedroom and changed into the first street dress she could find. Too tired to switch off the lights, she left them burning as she went out. "You ill, lady?" the cabbie asked her. "Just tired," she said. T HE cab didn't leave until she had climbed the steps at Buckwash Street. The taxi driver wasn't sure he should leave her. It was still only nine-thirty. Nobody would be in bed yet. "Callers?" Mrs. Decker said. "There was that young man I sent down to the basement a day or two ago. Did you see him?" "Yes, I did," said Vee, and she dragged herself upstairs. There was plenty of stuff in her apartment which would do. What would kill a human would kill Vee too. There wouldn't be any uproar afterwards. Even a real thorough post-mortem wouldn't be likely to show j. t. McIntosh anything strange about the mortal remains of Vee Brown. And young women were often found dead in their lonely apartments. Suddenly she was being supported. "What's the matter, Miss Brown?" she was asked. It was Billy Clark, anxious, concerned. "I'm tired," she said, "terribly tired." He helped her to her room, opened the door for her, supported her to the solitary armchair. His eyes expressed his worry. They were friendly eyes. She managed to smile. "I'll be all right, Mr. Clark," she said. "I've been on my feet too long, that's all." He squared his shoulders. "Miss Brown," he said, "I've been trying to talk to you since you came. You don't know many people in town, do you?" "I don't know anybody," she said bleakly. "You know me," he said. "I was wondering... if maybe you'd like to see a show sometime, or something?" "See a show?" she repeated quizzically. "Well, I thought you might not have anybody special," he said defensively. "And I'm not so dumb once I get to know people. You won't know about this, being the kind of girl you are, but I get so nervous trying to speak to a girl that I usually walk right on past her. Isn't that silly?" "No," said Vee. "The trouble is, if you're shy you get hurt, and then the next time you're still more shy, more afraid of being hurt. So that's why I wanted to ask you first -- is there anybody? I mean..." "Nobody," said Vee. "Nobody at all." "Then maybe..." "Billy," said Vee quietly, "I'd never hurt you." ed in his face. "You've been hurt too. You're like me. Vee, I knew it somehow. I knew somehow that though you looked like a girl with the world at her feet, you needed somebody just like I do. Vee, you and I could..." Afraid of rebuff for going too far, he stopped abruptly, coloring. This was the way they did it. They hurt each other sometimes, for there was never any guarantee that what one would feel, the other would feel. But this was how it happened -- not by bargains, not by reason, not by hard logic. "It's a fine night," said Vee softly. "How about us going out for a walk?" He was delighted. "But... surely you're too tired?" Vee jumped to her feet. "Suddenly, Billy," she said, "I'm not tired any more." Life's but a walking shadow -- says the Bard -- but this Player was heard forever! I T is perhaps a pity that nothing is known of Andrew Benson's parents. The same reasons which prompted them to leave him as a foundling on the steps of the St. Andrews Orphanage also caused them to maintain a discreet anonymity. The event occurred on the morning of March #rd, # -- the war era, as you probably recall -- so, in a way, the child may be regarded as a wartime casualty. Similar occurrences were by no means rare during those days, even in Pasadena, where the Orphanage was located. After the usual tentative and fruitless inquiries, the good sisters took him in. It was there that he acquired his first name, from the patron and patronymic saint of the establishment. The "Benson" was added some years later, by the couple who eventually adopted him. It is difficult, at this late date, to determine what sort of a child Andrew was. Orphanage records are sketchy, at best, and Sister Rosemarie, who acted as supervisor of the boys' dormitory, is long since dead. Sister Albertine, the primary grades teacher of the Orphanage School, is now -- to put it as delicately as possible -- in her senility, and her testimony is necessarily colored by knowledge of subsequent events. That Andrew never learned to talk until he was almost seven years old seems almost incredible. The forced gregariousness and the conspicuous lack of individual attention characteristic of orphanage upbringing would make it appear as though the ability to speak is necessary for actual survival in such an environment. Scarcely more credible is Sister Albertine's theory that Andrew knew how to talk but merely refused to do so. For what it is worth, she remembers him as an unusually precocious youngster, who appeared to posssess an intelligence and understanding far beyond his years. Instead of employing speech, however, he relied on pantomime, an art at adept (if Sister Albertine is to be believed) that his muteness was hardly noticed. "He could imitate anybody," she declares. "The other children, the Sisters, even the Mother Superior. Of course I had to punish him for that. But it was remarkable, the way he was able to pick up all the little mannerisms and facial expressions of another person, just at a glance. And that's all it took for Andrew. Just a glance. "Visitor's Day was Sunday. Naturally, Andrew never had any visitors, but he liked to hang around the corridor and watch them come in. And afterwards, in the dormitory at night, he'd put on a regular performance for the other boys. He could impersonate every single man, woman or child who'd come to the Orphanage that day -- the way they walked, the way they moved, every action and gesture. Even though he never said a word, nobody made the mistake of thinking Andrew was mentally deficient. For a while, Dr. Clement had the idea he might be a mute." D R. Roger Clement is one of the few persons who might be able to furnish more objective data concerning Andrew Benson's early years. Unfortunately, he passed away in # ; victim of a fire which also destroyed his home and his office files. It was Dr. Clement who attended Andrew on the night that he saw his first motion picture. The date was #, some Saturday evening in the late fall of the year. The Orphanage received and showed one film a week, and only children of school age were permitted to attend. Andrew's inability had caused some difficulty when he entered primary grades that September, and several months went by before he was allowed to join his classmates in the auditorium for the Saturday night screenings. But it is known that he eventually did so. The picture was the last (and probably the least) of the Marx Brothers movies. Its title was Love Happy, and if it is remembered by the general public at all today, that is due to the fact that the film contained a brief walk-on appearance by a then-unknown blonde bit player named Marilyn Monroe. But the Orphanage audience had other reasons for regarding it as memorable, for Love Happy was the picture that sent Andrew Benson into his trance. Long after the lights came up again in the auditorium, the child sat there, immobile, his eyes staring glassily at the blank screen. When his companions noticed and sought to arouse him he did not respond. One of the Sisters (possibly Sister Rosemarie) shook him. He promptly collapsed in a dead faint. Dr. Clement was summoned, and he administered to the patient. Andrew Benson did not recover consciousness until the following morning. And it was then that he talked. He talked immediately, he talked perfectly, he talked fluently -- but he did not talk in the manner of a six-year-old child. The voice that issued from his lips was that of a middle-aged man. It was a nasal, rasping voice, and even without the accompanying grimaces and facial expressions it was instantly and unmistakably recognizable as the voice of Groucho Marx. Andrew Benson mimicked Groucho in his Sam Grunion role to perfection, word for word. Then he "did" Chico Marx. After that he relapsed into silence again. For a moment it was thought he had reverted to his mute phase. But it was an eloquent silence, and soon it was understood. He was imitating Harpo. In rapid succession, Andrew created recognizable vocal and visual portraits of Raymond Burr, Melville Cooper, Eric Blore and the other actors who played small roles in the picture. His impersonations seemed uncanny to his companions. Even the Sisters were impressed. "Why, he even looked like Groucho," Sister Albertine insists. how a towheaded moppet of six can achieve a physical resemblance to Groucho Marx without makeup, it is nevertheless an established fact that Andrew Benson gained immediate celebrity as the official mimic of the Orphanage. From that moment on, he talked regularly, if not freely. That is to say, he replied to direct questions. He recited his lessons in the classroom. He responded with the outward forms of politeness required by Orphanage discipline. But he was never loquacious, or even communicative, in the ordinary sense. The only time he became spontaneously articulate was immediately following the showing of the weekly movie. There was no recurrence of his initial seizure, but each Saturday night show brought in its wake a complete dramatic recapitulation by the gifted youngster. During the fall of '# and the winter of #, Andrew Benson saw many movies. There was Sorrowful Jones, with Bob Hope; Tarzan's Magic Fountain; The Fighting O' Flynn; The Life of Riley; Little Women, and a number of other films, current and older. Naturally, these pictures were subject to approval by the Sisters before being shown. Movies emphasizing violence were not included. Still, several westerns reached the Orphanage screen, and it is significant that Andrew Benson reacted in what was to become a characteristic fashion. "Funny thing," declares Albert Dominguez, who attended the Orphanage during the same period as Andrew Benson and is one of the few peradmit, let alone discuss, the fact. "At first Andy imitated everybody -- all the men, that is. He never imitated none of the women. But after he started to see Westerns, it got so he was choosey, like. He just imitated the villains. I don't mean like when us guys was playing cowboys -- you know, when one guy is the sheriff and one is a gun-slinger. I mean, he imitated villains all the time. He could talk like 'em, he could even look like 'em. We use to razz hell out of him, you know?" It is probably as a result of the "razzing" that Andrew Benson, on the evening of May #th, #, attempted to slit with a table-knife. Still, Albert Dominguez claims that the older boy offered no provocation. His view is that Andrew Benson was exactly duplicating the screen role of a western desperado in an old Charles Starrett movie. The incident was hushed up and no action taken. We have little information on Andrew Benson's growth and development between the summer of # and the autumn of #. Dominguez left the Orphanage, nobody else Sister Albertine had retired to a rest-home. As a result, there is nothing available concerning what may well have been Andrew's crucial, formative years. The meager records of his classwork seem satisfactory enough, and there is nothing to indicate that he was a disciplinary problem to his instructors. In June of # he was photographed with the rest of his classmates upon the occasion of graduation from Eighth Grade. His face is a mere blur, an almost blank smudge in a sea of pre-adolescent countenances. What he actually looked like at that age is hard to tell. The Bensons thought that he resembled their son, David. died of polio in #. Two years later his parents came to St. Andrews Orphanage seeking to adopt a boy. They had David's picture with them. They were frank to state that they sought a physical resemblance as a guide to making their choice. Did Andrew Benson see that photograph? Did -- as has been subsequently theorized by certain irresponsible alarmists -- he see certain home movies which the Bensons had taken of their child? We must confine ourselves to the known facts ; which are, talb-it simply, that Mr. and Mrs. Louis Benson, of Pasadena, California, legally adopted Andrew Benson, aged #, on December #th, #. Andrew Benson went to live in their home, as their son. He entered the public high school. He became the owner of a bicycle. He received an allowance of one dollar a week. And he went to the movies. Andrew Benson went to the movies, and there were no restrictions at all. For several months, that is. During this period he saw comedies, dramas, westerns, musicals, melodramas. He must have seen melodramas. Was there a film, released early in #, in which an actor played the role of a gangster who pushed a victim out of a second-story window? Knowing what we do today, we must suspect that there must have been. But at the time, when the actual incident occurred, Andrew Benson was exonerated. He and the other boy had been "scuffling" in a classroom after school, and the boy had "accidentally fallen." At least, this is the official version of the affair. The boy -- now Pvt. Raymond Schuyday that Benson deliberately tried to kill him. "He was spooky, that kid," Schuyler insists. "None of us ever really got close to him. It was like there was nothing to get close to, you know? I mean, he kept changing off. From one day to the next you could never figure out what he was going to be like. Of course, we all knew he imitated these movie actors. He was only a freshman but already he was a big shot in the dramatic club. But he imitated all the time. One minute he'd be real quiet, and the next, wham! You know that story, the one about Jekyll and Hyde ? Well, that was Andrew Benson. Afternoon he grabbed me, we weren't even talking to each other. He just came up to me at the window and I swear to God he changed right before my eyes. It was as if he all of a sudden got about a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, and his face was real wild. He pushed me out of the window, without one word. Of course, I was scared spitless, and maybe I just thought he changed. I mean, nobody can actually do a thing like that, can they ?" This question, if it arose at all at the time, remained unanswered. We do know that Andrew Benson was brought to the attention of Dr. Hans Fahringer, child psychiatrist and part-time guidance counselor at the school, and that his initial examination disclosed no apparent abnormalities of personality or behavior-patterns. Dr. Fahringer did, however, have several long talks with the Bensons. As a result Andrew was forbidden to attend motion pictures. The following year Dr. Fahringer voluntarily offered to examine young Andrew. Undoubtedly his interest had been aroused by the amazing dramatic abilities the boy was showing in his extra-curricular activities at the school. ever took place, and it is to be regretted that Dr. Fahringer neither committed his findings to paper nor communicated them to the Bensons before his sudden, shocking death at the hands of an unknown assailant. It is believed (or was believed by the police, at the time) that one of his former patients, committed to an institution as a psychotic and subsequently escaped, may have been guilty of the crime. All that we know is that it occurred some short while following a local re-run of Man in the Attic. In this film Jack Palance essayed the role of Jack the Ripper. It is interesting, today, to examine some of the so-called "horror movies" of those years, including the re-runs of earlier vehicles starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre and a number of other actors. We cannot say with any certainty, of course, that Andrew Benson was violating the wishes of his foster-parents and secretly attending motion pictures. But if he did, it is quite likely that he would frequent the smaller neighborhood houses, many of which specialized in re-runs. And we do know, from the remarks of fellow-classmates during those high-school years, that "Andy" was familiar -- almost omnisciently so -- with the mannerisms of these performers. The evidence is often conflicting. Joan Charters, for on a stack of Bibles" that Andrew Benson, at the age of #, was "a dead ringer for Peter Lorre -- the same bug eyes and everything." Whereas Nick Dossinger, who attended classes with Benson a year later, insists that he "looked just like Boris Karloff." Granted that adolescence may bring about a considerable increase in height during the period of a year, it is nevertheless difficult to imagine how a "dead ringer for Peter Lorre" could metamorphize into an asthenic Karloff type. A mass of testimony is available concerning Andrew Benson during those years, but almost all of it deals with his phenomenal histrionic talent and his startling skill at "ad lib" impersonation of motion picture actors. Apparently he had given up mimicking his associates and contemporaries almost entirely. "He said he liked to do actors better, because they were bigger," said Don Brady, who appeared with him in the Senior Play. "I asked him what he meant by 'bigger' and he said it was just that. Actors were bigger on the screen. Sometimes they were twenty feet tall. He said, 'Why bother with little people when you can be big?' He was a real offbeat character, that one." The phrases recur. "Oddball." "Screwball." "Real gone." They are picturesque, but hardly enlightening. And there seems to be little recollection of Andrew Benson as a friend or classmate, in the ordinary roles of adolescence. It's the imitator who is remembered, with admiration and, frequently, with distaste bordering on actual apprehension. "He was so good he scared you. But that's when he was doing those impersonations, of course. The rest of the time, you scarcely knew he was around." "Classes? I guess he did all right. I didn't notice him much." "Andrew was a fair student. He could recite when called upon, but he never volunteered. His marks were average. I got the impression he was rather withdrawn." "No, he never dated much. Come to think of it, I don't think he went out with girls at all. I never paid much attention to him, except when he was on stage, of course." "I wasn't really what you call close to Andy. I don't know anybody who seemed to be friends with him. He was so quiet, outside of the dramatics. And when he got up there, it was like he was a different person. He was real great, you know? We all figured he'd end up at the Pasadena Playhouse." T HE reminiscences of his contemporaries are frequently apt to touch upon matters which did not directly involve Andrew Benson. The years # and # are still remembered, by high school students of the area in particular, as the years of the curfew. It was a voluntary curfew, of course, but it was nevertheless strictly observed by most of the female students during the period of the "werewolf murders" -- that series of savage, still-unsolved crimes which terrorized the community for well over a year. Certain cannibalistic aspects of the slaying of the five young women led to the "werewolf" appellation on the part of the sensation-mongering press. The Wolf Man series made by Universal had been revived, and perhaps this had something to do with the association. But to return to Andrew Benson: he grew up, went to school, and lived the normal life of a dutiful step-son. If his foster-parents were a bit strict, he made no complaints. If they punished him because they suspected he sometimes slipped out of his room at night, he made no complaints or denials. If they seemed apprehensive lest he be disobeying their set injunctions not to attend the movies, he offered no overt defiance. The only known clash between Andrew Benson and his family came about as a result of their flat refusal to allow a television set in their home. Whether or not they were concerned about the possible encouragement of Andrew's mimicry or whether they had merely developed an allergy to Lawrence Welk is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, they balked at the acquisition of a TV receiver. Andrew begged and pleaded, pointing out that he "needed" television as an aid to a future dramatic career. His argument had some justification for, in his senior year, Andrew had indeed been "scouted" by the famous Pasadena Playhouse, and there was even some talk of a future professional career without the necessity of formal training. But the Bensons were adamant on the television question; they remained adamant right up to the day of their death. This unfortunate circumstance occurred at Balboa, where the Bensons owned a small cottage and maintained a little cabin-cruiser. The elder Bensons and Andrew were heading for Catalina Channel when it overturned in choppy waters. Andrew managed to cling to the craft until rescued, but his fosterparents were gone. It was a common enough accident ; you've probably seen something just like it in the movies a dozen times. Andrew, just turned eightteen, was left an orphan once more -- but an orphan in full possession of a lovely home, and with the expectation of coming into a sizable inheritance when he reached twentyone. The Benson estate was administered by the family attorney, Justin L. Fowler, and he placed young Andrew on an allowance of forty dollars a week -- an amount sufficient for a recent graduate of high school to survive on, but hardly enough to maintain him in luxury. I T is to be feared that violent scenes were precipitated between the young man and his attorney. There is no point in recapitulating them here, or in condemning Fowler for what may seem -- on the surface -- to be the development of a fixation. But up until the night that he was struck down by a hitand-run driver in the street before his house, Attorney Fowler seemed almost obsessed with the desire to prove that the Benson lad was legally incompetent, or worse. Indeed, it was his investigations which led to the uncovering of what few facts are presently available concerning the life of Andrew Benson. Certain other hypotheses -- one hesitates to dignify them with the term, "conclusions" -- he apparently extrapolated from these meager findings, or fabricated out of thin air. Unless, of course, he did manage to discover details which he never actually disclosed. Without the support of such details there is no way of authenticating what seem to be fantastic conjectures. A random sampling, as remembered from various conversations Fowler had with the authorities, will suffice. "I don't think the kid is even human, for that matter. Just because he showed up on those orphanage steps, you call him a foundling. Changeling might be a better word for it. Yes, I know they don't believe in such things any more. And if you talk about life-forms from other planets, they laugh at you and tell you to join the Fortean Society. So happens I'm a member in good standing. "Changeling? It's probably a more accurate term than the narrow meaning implies. I'm talking about the way he changes when he sees these movies. No, don't take my word for it -- ask anyone who's ever seen him act. Better still, ask those who never saw him on a stage, but just watched him imitate movie performers in private. You'll find out he did a lot more than just imitate. He became the actor. Yes, I mean he underwent an actual physical transformation. Chameleon. Or some other form of life. Who can say? "No, I don't pretend to understand it. I know it's not 'scientific' according to the way you define science. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. There are a lot of lifeforms in the universe, and we can only guess at some of them. Why shouldn't there be one that's abnormally sensitive to mimicry? "You know what effect the movies can have on so-called 'normal' human beings, under certain conditions. It's a hypnotic state, this movie-viewing, and you can ask the psychologists for confirmation. Darkness, concentration, suggestion -- all the elements are present. And there's posthypnotic suggestion, too. Again, psychiatrists will back me up on that. Most people tend to identify with various characters on the screen. That's where our hero-worship comes in, that's why we have western-movie fans, and detective fans, and all the rest. Supposedly ordinary people come out of the theatre and fantasy themselves as the heroes and heroines they saw up there on the screen; imitate them, too. "That's what Andrew Benson did, of course. Only suppose he could carry it one step further? Suppose he was capable of being what he saw portrayed? And he chose to be the villains? I tell you, it's time to investigate those all of them. Not just the murder of those girls, but the murder of the two doctors who examined Benson when he was a child, and the death of his foster-parents, too. I don't think any of these things were accidents. I think some people got too close to the secret, and Benson put them out of the way. "Why? How should I know why? Any more than I know what he's looking for when he watches the movies. But he's looking for something, I can guarantee that. Who knows what purpose such a life-form can have, or what he intends to do with his power? All I can do is warn you." I T IS easy to dismiss Attorney Fowler as a paranoid type, though perhaps it is unfair, in that we cannot evaluate the reasons for his outburst. That he knew (or believed he knew) something is self-evident. As a matter of fact, on the very evening of his death he was apparently about to set down his findings on paper. Deplorably, all that he ever set down was a preamble. It is a quotation from Eric Voegelin, concerning rigid pragmatic attitudes of "scientism", so-called: "The assumption (#) that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (#) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of sciences of phenomena ; and (#) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrevelant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary." But Attorney Fowler is dead, and we must deal with the living. With Max Schick, for example. He is the motion picture and television agent who visited Andrew Benson at his home shortly after the death of the elder Bensons, and offered him an immediate contract. "You're a natural," Schick declared. "Never mind with the Pasadena Playhouse bit. I can spot you right now, believe me! With what you got, we'll back Brando right off the map ! Of course, we gotta start small, but I know just the gimmick. Main thing is to establish you in a starring slot right away. None of this stock-contract jazz, get me? The studios aren't handing 'em out in the first place, and even if you landed one, you'd end up on Cloud Nowhere. No, the deal is to get you a bat. And like I said, I got the angle. "We go to a small indie producer, get it? Must be a dozen of 'em operating right now, and all of 'em making the same thing. Only one kind of picture that combines low budgets with big grosses, and that's a science fiction movie. You've seen them. "Yeah, you heard me, a science fiction movie. Whaddya mean, you never saw one? Are you kidding? How about that? You mean you never saw any science fiction pictures at all ? "Oh, your folks, eh? Had to sneak out? And they only show that kind of stuff at the downtown houses? "Well look, kid, it's about time, that's all I can say. It's about time ! Hey, just so's you know what we're talking about, you better get on the ball and take in one right away. "Sure, I'm positive, there must be one playing a downtown first run now. Why don't you go this afternoon? I got some work to finish up here at the office -- run you down in my car, you can go on to the show, meet me back there when you get out. "Sure, you can take the car after you drop me off. Be my S O Andrew Benson saw his first science fiction movie. He drove there and back in Max Schick's car. Coincidentally enough, it was the late afternoon of the day when Attorney Fowler became a hit-and-run victim. Schick has good reason to remember Andrew Benson's reappearance at his office just after dusk. "He had a look on his face that was out of this world," Schick says. " 'How'd you like the picture?' I ask him." " 'It was wonderful,' he tells me. 'Just what I've been looking for all these years. And to think I didn't know.' " 'Didn't know what?' I ask. But he isn't talking to me any more. You can see that. He's talking to himself." " 'I thought there must be something like that,' he says. 'Something better than Dracula, or Frankenstein's monster, or all the rest. Something bigger, more powerful. Something I could really be. And now I know. And now I'm going to.' " Max Schick is unable to maintain coherency from this point on. But his direct account is not necessary. We are, unfortunately, all too well aware of what happened next. Max Schick sat there in his chair and watched Andrew Benson change. He watched him grow. He watched him put forth the eyes, the stalks, the writhing tentacles. He watched him room and then overflowing until the flimsy stucco walls collapsed and there was nothing but the green, gigantic horror, the sixty-foot-high monstrosity that may have been born in a screenwriter's brain or have been spawned beyond the stars, but certainly existed and drew nourishment from realms far from a three-dimensional world or three-dimensional concepts of sanity. Max Schick will never forget that night and neither, of course, will anybody else. That was the night the monster destroyed Los Angeles. In The Next Issue... A Short Novel by Daniel F. Galouye Blake's future was dark. He had murdered his friend -- his life was forfeit -- and now he had to break the news to the corpse!  # # I I This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Output # KW # KW # KW Distance # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, etc' If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not  entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this  guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find P lease send  Radios postpaid (# per radio) Name... Address City State The whereabouts of a hideaway can be found -- but what about the whenabouts? ms hunch. The sixth sense that had made him king of the local rackets, that had warned him in time when three of his men fell to the machine guns of a rival gang, now told him that the Feds were after him, that they had evidence to send him up for a long stretch. But he was going where even the Feds couldn't extradite him. Slick Tennant was going to hide in the future. They didn't call him Slick for nothing. For months, a private dick in his pay had shadowed Dr. Richard Porter, inventor of a device called by reporters a time-travel machine, by comedians a crystal ball, and by Dr. Porter's fellow-psychiatrists a Metachronoscope. Slick knew the doctor was a widower, knew Strolling along the street, where he lived, knew pressure Slick might have been any could be put upon him citizen on his way home. A through Dickie Porter, aged hat shadowed his features as seven. In Slick's pocket was a he passed under the street house-key Dr. Porter thought lights, and he carried a brief he had lost two weeks ago. case. He hailed a cruising cab But Slick hadn't disclosed and proceeded to a spot two his intentions to anyone. The blocks from the Porter home, chauffeur of his bullet-proof being careful not to tip too j car let him out several miles much or too little to attract from the Porter residence, the driver's attention. Dr. Porter propped an elbow on his pillow, trying to orient himself in the fuzziness that follows a midnight awakening. He stifled a gasp, and sat up suddenly, as he saw that the man silhouetted against the living room lamp had pajama-clad Dickie by the arm. The child was rubbing his eyes, but there wasn't a whimper out of him. "I got a gun on the kid," the man said. "I like kids and I won't hurt him if you do what I say." The doctor struggled to keep his voice soothing and professional. "Of course you wouldn't," he said. "You don't want to go back to the hospital." The man laughed. "I ain't one of your nuts, Doc. And I don't want your money. I got plenty. All I want from you is a little trip in your time machine." "Metachronoscope," corrected the doctor. "It's very misleading to call it a time-travel machine." L etting go of the boy, Slick dealt Dr. Porter a vicious slap. "That'll learn you not to pull none of your highbrow stuff. Is it my fault I had to quit school to keep the family from starvin' when my old man got sent up? If Slick Tennant says it's a time-travel machine, that's what you call it, see?" "Yes, I see," Dr. Porter said faintly. The mention of gangland's most dreaded name had more effect on him than the blow. "Now let's get something else straight. Once, on TV, they said a couple of guys came back. Another time, the news program said they couldn't come back and give tips on the ponies. Which is right? Can you bring me back any time you want to?" "Absolutely not. The decision is irrevocable. The public's impression that the future can be altered or predicted is incorrect." "Fine. I don't want to come back. And I don't need to change the future, neither. Things may be different, but a smart cookie can always get along. Now, according to the news, you only sent these guys ahead a year. That ain't enough. What's the most you could send me ahead?" "Theoretically, we could send a subject ahead as much as twenty years, if we could find anyone who would consent to that, and undoubtedly we could learn a great deal more by so doing." "But you did find out that the boys come through okay?" "Yes. We sent these two men ahead in #. When they returned to awareness, it was #. Physically and mentally they were as fit as before." "Did they know what happened to them?" "Well, the year had no apparent duration for them, but they had normal speed memories of the intervening year when they returned to awareness. Evidently their forememories for the entire year must have been condensed into the brief period they were in the field. From this phenomenon, we derive the term 'sending the subjects ahead' which has so often been misinterpreted. But it's important to note that these condensed fore-memories were not available until twentyfour to forty-eight hours after the events, which means the future cannot be effectively predicted by present techniques." That sounded like plain English; it sounded as if it meant something, but Slick wasn't quite sure what. He seized on the last remark, which he understood. "What did you build this gadget for, if you can't tell fortunes with it?" he asked. "The layman thinks in terms of immediate practical application. But our primary objective was knowledge of the human mind. We confirmed the existence of mental capacities that have been suspected for centuries. We formulated the axiom that awareness is a function of subconscious fore-memories becoming currently available. We experimentally suspended awareness without inducing unconsciousness, by causing the fore-memories to condense. I hope the process will develop into a useful tool for my profession, that we learn how to superimpose conditioning on the blank area to produce rational, socially acceptable action, rather than the literal and irrational compulsion which is a drawback to implanting post-hypnotic commands. But I can't tell you at this point where our research will lead." going around in circles. But he had a strong hunch that taking a trip in the machine was the right thing to do, and he wasn't going to let Porter divert him from that. "Let's get down to cases, Doc. Just exactly what's going to happen to me when I get in this machine?" "It's difficult to explain the process in lay terms, particularly under stress. But this may help you to understand it. Have you ever had the experience of going back to sleep for a few moments after you awoke in the morning, and dreaming a long, involved dream?" "Sure. I get some good hunches that way." "Then you know the dream may cover a period of hours, days, or even years. People in the dream move and speak at a normal speed. Yet when you awaken again and look at the clock, you see that only a few minutes or even seconds have elapsed. A motion picture of the events in the dream would be nothing but a gabble and a blur, if projected at such terriffic speed." "Yeah, that's right. I had that happen plenty of times, and I always thought it was kind of funny." "It demonstrates the capacity of the human mind to function independently of the limitations of chronological time. And premonitory experiences -- what you call hunches -- give us an inkling of the fore-memory phenomenon. In our dreams, the past, future, literal and symbolical material mingles. But by subjecting the physical brain to a certain type of electro-magnetic field, we can isolate the fore-memories, condensed as in the dream, while the subject acts as if in a waking state." "Does it hurt when a guy's brain goes into this field?" "Not at all. Awareness and physical sensations are totally suspended. The elapsing time has no apparent duration. That means you can't feel anything at all, you don't know what has happened until later, and twenty hours or even twenty years pass in a second, as far as your mind is concerned." "Why in the hell didn't you give me that straight, instead of dragging in all this dream business? That's just what I'm looking for, just what I figured it would be from the news stories. Do you throw this here field ahead or does the time machine travel along with the guy inside?" Dr. Porter sighed slightly. The man had a preconceived idea, and nothing Porter had said had altered it in the slightest. "The machine doesn't actually travel," he explained patiently. "That's why I objected to calling it a timetravel machine. It exists here and now and it will exist in the future, I suppose." "You mean it'll be there when I come out of the field?" "I said I suppose so. Why should that concern you, particularly?" "Well, I'll tell you. Slick Tennant pays off two ways. Maybe you only heard about the times he paid off guys for crossing him, but he pays off guys that help him, too. I'm paying for your help by giving you a chance to save your skin. I got a hand grenade in this briefcase. When I get through with that machine, I'm going to blow her to little, bitty pieces. Maybe you can't bring me back, but I don't want you to have the machine to send the cops after me, neither. By the time you get a new machine built, my trail will be cold." Intellectually, Dr. Porter accepted the concept of the inevitability of events. If Slick was going to blow up the machine, he was going to blow it up. Still the old, old human habit of trying to control the future kept obstinately insinuating itself. "But you don't need to destroy the machine," he protested. "Look, let me try to explain -- " "I thought you'd try to talk me out of it," Slick said ominously. "I know that a lot of money and work went into that gadget, but I got to blow her up. You should be glad you're not on my list or you'd get blown up with her. And I got no time for any more talkin'. I found out all I want to know. Now, get up and get dressed, and make it snappy. You're going to drive me over to the University." Porter had been careful not to make any moves that might alarm his unbidden guest; he swung his feet obediently over the side of the bed. "Is Dickie going with us?" he asked. "You're damned right he is. I don't want you high-signing any cops on the way, and the kid might even be sharp enough to phone the station himself, if we left him here." He didn't add that he had an even better reason for taking the boy. "Then let him get some clothes on too. It's cold outside." To his son. Dr. Porter added, "Don't be afraid, Dickie. Everything is going to be all right." "Sure, Daddy," the boy said sturdily. "You just do like he says. He's like the bad guys on TV." "You got a smart kid. Porter," Slick said, grinning. "Knows when to keep his trap shut and what to say when he opens it. That's more than some of the hoods in this town know." toward the University campus, Slick and the boy sat in the back seat of Dr. Porter's car. Slick tried the kid on his lap for size ; it was a nice fit. The papers said the time machine was a two-passenger job, but if that wasn't the straight dope, Slick could hold the kid on his lap, like this. The gangster squeezed Dickie's small hand. "You're all right, boy. Plenty of guys a lot bigger than you would be bawlin' if Slick Tennant invited them to take a little ride. If I ever have a kid of my own I'd want one just like you." He tucked a bill in the pocket of Dickie's jacket. "This is to buy you a play gat or something." "Thank you, Mr. Slick," the boy said gravely. Though business compelled him to do things like rubbing out the competition, Slick was really soft-hearted. Some of ities were devoted each year to buying Christmas trees, turkeys, and toys for poor children. He kind of hated to separate Dickie Porter from his father, but it was the oiriy way he could see to insure a safe passage through time. And then, Slick reflected, he would have a kid of his own, or at least one he was responsible for. Slick decided then and there that he would send the boy to the fanciest highclass boarding school they had in the future, the kind the Dickie would have a pony, a bike, a dog, plenty of fried chicken and strawberry shortcake, all the things Slick had yearned for in his own slum childhood. He would live in the country, where there were miles of fresh green grass to play on, and he would wear a silver-studded cowboy suit with real spurs. Unless the kids where they were going would be wearing space-pilot suits instead. By gosh, that would be something. Maybe Slick could take the kid on a luxury cruise to the Moon. To provide these things, Slick would have to follow the only trade he knew, move in on the local mobs. But he wouldn't let Dickie mix with hoods and racketeers. Dickie would study to be something respectable, a mouthpiece or maybe a doctor like his old man. Dickie would have all the advantages a kid could ask for -- everything except a real father. He might even have that, come to think of it. Dr. Porter might easily live another twenty years, now that Slick had warned him to get away from the machine before it was blown up. First, Slick would get some plastic surgery, so Porter and any other old ducks who were still alive wouldn't recognize him. There ought to be a lot of improvements in plastic surgery in twenty years. Probably a guy could even get his fingerprints changed. Then he would hire, a private dick to look up Porter. Slick pictured the aged father being reunited with the' son he'd lost twenty years before, seeing the child just as he'd been at the moment of parting, with Slick playing Santa Claus in the background, sending the kid a roll of thousand-dollar bills with a pink ribbon around it for a present. It was such a touching thought that tears came to the gangster's eyes, as they did when he watched a sad movie. He was sorry he couldn't let Porter and the boy in on his plans right now, but he wasn't ready to tip his hand. T HE machine was a twopassenger job, all right. Slick could tell that the minute he saw it. There was no enclosure, just two reclining barber chairs fixed on two circular plates sunk in a platform. After the switch was set, Porter had explained, the additional weight of an occupant of the chair would complete the contact and the field would build up. Slick examined the control panel, particularly the dial, which was calibrated into twenty sections, each for a ninety-second exposure to the field. "You did say twenty years, didn't you ?" Dr. Porter asked. "If that's the limit," Slick replied tersely, "like I heard." "How old are you?" "You mean can my ticker take it? Well, I'm forty-five. They tell me I don't look it." Slick was vain of his black hair, without a thread of gray in it. "No, you don't look it. But let me take your pulse and blood pressure." H E submitted, without letting go of either his gun or brief case. "You seem to be in good shape, as nearly as I can tell from a superficial examination. But don't you want to reconsider this twenty-year arrangement? I can't change the setting once you're in the chair, you know. Are you sure you understand that the only thing affected will be your own subjective experience, that time will go on just as it always has, but that you won't be aware of anything between now and twenty years from now?" "Sure. You told me that three-four times already. What are you trying to do? Stall till help gets here?" Slick asked suspiciously. "I'm not stalling," the doctor said. "In fact, I'm only too glad to find someone to whom the present means so little that twenty-year blank. But ethics insist that I warn you." He turned the switch to the twenty-year mark. "I'm ready," he said. "Whaddya mean, warn me?" Slick snapped. "Is this thing booby trapped?" "Certainly not. I have merely tried to explain that it is not exactly what you anticipated -- " "You know what I'm drivin' at. Have you got the machine set to electrocute me or explode the grenade? A lot of you respectable citizens don't figure a guy like me is exactly human. You wouldn't call it murder to rub me out. You'd think you was doin' the town a favor." "Some people would, perhaps, but I'm a doctor, not a judge. I've spent my life trying to find out what makes men like you act as they do, not in devising means of punishing them. But even if I wanted to do you bodily harm, I couldn't. The machine has a built-in safety factor." This was where Slick sprang a little surprise. kid's life on that?" he asked, picking up the boy. He took two steps toward the platform, watching Porter's reactions. If the father made a lunge toward the panel, Slick would know the setting was wrong. But Porter only stood stunned. The setting was safe, then, but Slick had only Porter's word that it couldn't be changed after contact. Maybe a change would be fatal to the passenger. So he would make sure there would be no changes. "I always take out travel insurance, Doc," Slick said, and, stepping onto the platform, he put the boy gently into one of the chairs and reclined in the pther himself. "Dickie!" Dr. Porter cried. It was the last thing Slick or the boy heard him say. ness of where he was and what he was doing. He was in one of the radial corridors, but at what compass point, at which level, and how many miles inside the outer walls of the city, he didn't know. He ran his fingers in a puzzled manner through his hair. He had never quite figured out the lettering system of the "circles" which weren't actually circles, but multagons. He didn't even know what time it was. In this perpetual mock daylight, there was no change; there were no variations of seasons in this sterilized, irradiated, humidified, filtered, deodorized, oxygenated, constantly circulating seventy-five degrees. He remembered when streets used to have names, when you needed a street guide instead of a course in geometry to find your way around the city. He remembered when a city was many buildings, not one immense pyramid, when you wore dark glasses against the sun's glare on the pavements, when a Santa Ana blew dust over everything or smog stung your eyes, when people drove their cars into the downtown congestion instead of leaving them on the outskirts, when they said to each other, "There hasn't been enough rain this year," because there was no weather control and water for the lawns came all the way from the Colorado instead of from the nearby Pacific. That was the trouble -- his mind slipped back to the old days, his memories got out of sequence, and he wandered away from Recidivist Gardens, the only place he felt comfortable and at home. Dr. Tyson said it was because he had been in the field so long that time, twenty years ago. A young man was staring at him, and Slick looked down at himself. No wonder the young man was staring! To his shame. Slick saw that he was wearing some kind of clothes, and worst of all, he was wearing them inside the city ! Where had he found them? The only possible explanation was that he had drawn them out on his museum card. These scrambled-sequence attacks were becoming more embarrassing each time ! "Don't act so flustered, Pop," the young man said. "Nobody saw you but me. Take 'em off and I'll put 'em in the lost-and-found chute for you. Or are you on your way to a costume ball ?" Slick looked over the railing of the balcony. There were several people waiting for elevators and radial cars on the level below all decently naked, of course, but the young man was right. Nobody else had seen Slick's shame. Hurriedly, he stepped out of the uncomfortable clothes and rolled them into a bundle. The young man took it from him. "You're very kind -- thank you so much," Slick said. "Think nothing of it," the young man said. "What address should I put on this stuff?" "Just Recidivist Gardens. They'll take care of it in the office. I hope you don't think all of us at the Gardens do peculiar things like this. It's just that -- well, it's a long story, but they didn't start my conditioning until I'd been in the blank five years. I'm not capable of anything really anti-social, you understand, but I get what they call sequence scrambles. Sometimes I act as if I were living in the past. I'm not crazy, though. The doctors at the Gardens assure me I'm not crazy." "Of course you're not," the young man said soothingly. "But that's a long blank -- five years." "I went the limit, really. Twenty years." "Then you must be the man they call Slick!" "You've heard of my case?" "I was with you the night you made my father put us in the field." "Dickie Porter! How you have grown! I've always told your father I didn't want to meet you. He said if it was going to happen, it would, whether he introduced us or not. But I hate to face you, after taking such a large slice out of your life -- " "But I'm still young. You're the one who's had the worst of it, because when you come out of the blank, you won't have so many years left. But you have the comfort of knowing you really did something worth while. Your case and mine have been invaluable to the research, particularly yours, because it was with you that my father developed the conditioning techniques. If it hadn't been for you, it would have been very difficult to find twenty-year blank." "No. Not even a lifer would want that. But I don't take any credit for it. I did it only because I was so bull-headed I wouldn't listen to what Dr. Porter was trying to tell me." "I came out of it six months ago," the young man said. "Now I can consciously hear, and feel, and smell, just like other people. I don't have to wait till tomorrow to remember what I said to somebody today, or what tonight's dinner tasted like." T'M SO glad to hear that!"JSlick said. "Dr. Tyson says I should be coming out of it soon, too. Say, wait a minute -- I heard what you said just now -- I'm hearing what I said myself -- why, I've had full sensory impressions for several minutes now, but it kind of sneaked up on me -- " The young man seized Slick's hand and pumped it vigorously. "Congratulations ! You're out of it!" "Oh, this is wonderful, wonderful! It's like -- like coming back to life. I must go home and tell Dr. Tyson at once ! Please go with me. It'll do you good to get out of the city. We're the only two people who've drawn such a long blank -- we have so much in common. I'll fix you a chicken dinner. I raise my own. Just think, to taste my own fried chicken !" "I wish I could go, but it'll have to be some other time. I have a date for the opera. When you see it on the Tri-dicast you'll know my girl and I are in the studio audience." "Oh. a girl!" Slick said. "Of course there'd be a girl, now that you're out of the blank. I won't keep you. But there's just one thing I must ask you -- do you ever remember ahead? Consciously, that is?" "A few times. But the conscious fore-memories are mixed with post-memories and impossible to place according to dates. It's the same objection that applies when people remember ahead in dreams -- you don't know which part of the dream is a fore-memory until it happens." "Maybe some day they'll learn to sort those conscious fore-memories out. If I could do it, I would know whether you are ever coming to see me." "I will come," the young man promised. "Believe me, I will." Absorbed in his newly found sensations, Slick took the elevator a hundred and thirtythree floors to ground level, reminding himself not to go too far and wind up in one of the sixty levels below ground. Then he stopped the North-byNorthwest radial car and punched the button for city limits, thus avoiding the necessity of dealing with the circle lettering system. He sat in the speeding little car, watching the faces of the other passengers, until each, in turn, got off at their respective stops. Got off to go to luxurious apartments that were nothing more than cells, with four-sided soundproofing separating neighbor from neighbor, with air, newspapers, prepared meals and all other deliveries coming by chute. How could they bury themselves in the ugly angularity of masonry and steel? How could they, who had always had full senses, deny themselves the sting of wind, the scent of soil and grass, the sound and sight of ocean breakers? How the world had changed in his lifetime, with people who had never committed anti-social acts imprisoning themselves, while those who had needed conditioning enjoyed the therapy of freedom. When the car reached city limits, the door opened automatically and Slick, the only passenger left, passed through the shower that sprayed his skin with a porous, temporary plastic coating against the chill outside air. He walked across the thick ground-cover, exquisitely aware of the sensation of softness under his feet, leaving the awesome bulk of the city behind. Before him swept the expanse of Recidivist Gardens, on gently rolling hills, bordering the sea. Clearly though he remembered it, this was the first time he had seen it with full and immediate sensory impact. The moon silvered the foliage, cast a path upon the water. Here and there, lights were on in the cottages nestled among the foliage, the domed, transparent cottages that combined the psychological effect of living outdoors with the comfort of shelter. The sweet note of a bell buoy clove the night. The beauty was almost unbearable, coming so sharply to long blanked-out senses. The return of immediate awareness, and the knowledge that Dickie Porter, the only human being with whom he had a kinship of experience, did not hate him, was too much happiness for one day. Slick breathed deeply of the salt air, and felt a catch in his heart. He raised a thin hand to his chest. T HE young man who had spoken to Slick in the radial corridor found the obituary item in the newspaper he took from the chute with his breakfast next morning. Louis G. Tennant, #, known to his friends as "Slick," a resident of Recidivist Gardens, died of a heart attack about # last night, while returning to his home after a visit to central Ellay. Tennant was one of the first recidivists to benefit from the Porter socio-legal conditioning techniques, and was noted for his valuable contribution to science in volunteering in # for a twenty-year blank. He was one of two men who have gone this far ahead, the other being Dr. Porter's son, Richard S. Porter, #. The Tennant case did much to direct public attention to the Porter techniques, helping to pave the way for a drastic revision of the criminal statutes, and to establish the concept that punishment rather than treatment for anti-social acts is as barbarous as punishment rather than treatment for the insane. When informed of the death, and asked whether subconscious fore-memories of these developments motivated Tennant to volunteer as a research subject, Dr. Richard Porter, U.C.L.A., said that the effect of subconscious fore-memories as a compulsion to action is as yet imperfectly understood. He stated, however, that in certain individuals, the fore-memory compulsive factor appears to operate closer to the conscious level than in others. He said that, before going into the blank, Tennant was noted for the strength and reliability of his "hunches." He also recalled that Tennant and Richard Porter, Jr., were the last two subjects treated in the original Metachrono scope, which was destroyed shortly thereafter in an explosion. Subsequent models have been modified and improved. Tennant's estate was willed to the Recidivists' Christmas Fund for Dependent Children. According to Dr. Claude Tyson of Recidivist Hospital, Tennant was still in the blank when he died. The closing sentence of the item was wrong, Dick Porter thought. In his last hours, Slick had known how it felt to be alive again, after twenty years. Dick Porter was the only human being who fully appreciated what that meant. A common belief among even the best educated and least dogmatic is that the human brain cannot possibly be outdone -- ever -- as the most compact computer. But cryogenics may make the human brain seem wastefully huge and computer components -- and cryotrons, being smaller than the visible wave length of light, are far tinier than neurons. If successful, cryogenic computers could be warehoused by the untold number in the space of a human skull, for they would truly be subminiaturized brains. And the data they contained would all be available, whereas # of the human brain is not used, and much of the working # is non-computing in function. There was nothing wrong with him that a Rider could not cure... and the rougher, the better! Malloy was alone in there, in the padded cell. That made it worse. Malloy was in his month for lying on his stomach to avoid bed sores. He was walking troit, Michigan, currently and he had just reached Chicago. It was fine to see State Street again, and the jewelry stores stuck in the alcoves of churches with the handsomely barred windows. A man in Army-surplus green with an old library book was asking for carfare to a hiring hall when they began opening the door. Malloy rolled over on one elbow. It was peculiar. They hadn't done that for three years. Two of them came inside, thick men with disinterested faces. "Try no sudden moves," one of them advised him. "We will anticipate you," the other one added. Malloy went through the unfamiliar process of standing up. He looked at two men. "I wouldn't try anything against the four of you. I'm not that crazy." "Time for an interrogation, Malloy," the orderly said. "Come with us." Malloy fell in between them and left the padded cell, frowning. "What kind of an interrogation ?" he asked them. "What other kind?" one countered. "A sanity hearing." He felt his eyebrows jerk. His sanity? He thought that had been established long ago. Or his lack of it. doctor. He hadn't had much else to do for several years. He was Dr. Heirson, a graying man with starched face and collar. But the younger man sitting with Heirson behind the broad, translucent desk was a stranger to Malloy. He seemed to be a comic strip drawing, all in straight lines. "Yes, sir." "Step forward, Michael," Heirson said. Malloy stepped forward. It had been a long time since he had been allowed to travel so far. "Now relax, Michael," the doctor continued, leaning forward and grinning hideously. "All you have to do is tell me the truth." "No, I don't, Doctor. I'm under no compulsion to tell you the truth. I'm perfectly capable of lying if it would do me any good." "Hush that, Michael. You must not try to make believe you can lie. I know you tell me only the truth." "All right," Malloy said, exhaling deeply. "Believe that I speak only the truth if you like. But remember, I just told you that I'm a liar and that must be true." Heirson blinked in watery confusion. He was obviously senile; only the old man's Rider kept him from coming apart at his mental seams. The angle-faced man spoke into Heirson's ear. The old doctor continued to blink for a moment, then faced Malloy, the lines of his face drawn into an asterisk. "What? You mean to tell me that you don't have an inner voice that urges you to tell the truth at all times?" "No," Malloy explained, "I do not hear voices." "You don't?" "Never." "And there is no inner sense that tells you when somebody is plotting against you ?" "Absolutely not." "And when you are in trouble or danger, there is nothing that allows you to somehow look into the future or read minds or see through walls?" "I can't do any of those things," Malloy stated. Heirson threw up his hands, j "Complete withdrawal from reality! Pathological! Why is, he here anyway?" The younger man grasped I the withered thin upper arm and whispered audibly but not understandably. Heirson's face eventually quivered back in line with Malloy's. "Michael, do you know what year this is?" the doctor asked. Malloy thought about that one. He wasn't absolutely certain, but he made some rapid calculations. "#?" "#! And what has been the single most important development in human history in recent times?" Malloy sighed. He knew what he was expected to say. "The coming of the Riders." "And what are Riders?" "Riders," Malloy recited patiently, "are elements of a symbiotic life-form. They have united with human beings to make one symbiotic creature. They have given much more than, they have taken. All prominent religions recognize that they do not interfere with human free will. They have made us healthier, virtually immortal, and near supermen. The human race now is so much zoa, and every man is a zoon. Every man but me. Damn it, I don't have any Rider! I'm not a superman and I cannot get away with pretending to be one!" Heirson oscillated his head. "Michael, Michael, your case isn't unique. There are others who claim that they have no Riders -- usually maintaining that they are naturally superhuman and need no help from some funny kind of foreigner. They are tolerated the same way, that B.R., we tolerated people who claimed they possessed psychic auras, or who got up in cathedrals and yelled that they had no souls. But you, Michael, are a troublemaker. You've been rude, vulgar, and reckless with your life and others in your pretense to be Riderless. Your pathological retreat from reality leaves us with no choice but to -- " The other man behind the desk shoved a paper in front of Heirson and tapped it forcefully with an index finger. and his eyebrows went askew. "Yes, yes, we have discovered that there is a basic difference between you and the others who maintain they have no Riders. It would seem it has been established that you really do not have a Rider. Remarkable! Yes. Well, I have no alternative but to dismiss you from this institution, Michael Malloy, and to extend to you my personal apology for any inconvenience your three-and-a-half-years' detainment may have caused you." A trick, Malloy thought. Only what point would there be in tricking him? The oppressive horror of it crushed down upon him with its full weight. "Oh, no," he said. "No, sir. Take me back to my padded cell. I've got my rights. I'm not going out there again. Maybe I could have learned to live with it once, but not now. I can't face up to living with a world of supermen, people who can do everything better than I can. Take me back. I think I'm going to get violent any minute now !" He took a swing at the nearest guard, but naturally the guard's Rider told him what was coming and he dodged deftly, caught Malloy's arm and twisted it into half-nelson to hold him completely, infuriatingly helpless. Malloy had to hold back tears of frustration. "Fortunately," Dr. Heirson croaked, "you can do no harm even if you do get violent, and I'm sure everyone will want to do everything possible for a poor unfortunate like yourself. We all will make allowances." "No, no, no!" Malloy announced with the rhythm of his stomping feet. "I won't leave here ! I won't!" T HE man beside Heirson favored Malloy with a smile ; Malloy wasn't sure whether it was friendly or mocking. The stranger nodded his head briefly to the guards. Malloy was dragged, protesting, down the marblefloored hallway to the entrance of the mental hospital. His anguished cries echoed across the ornate ceiling of the old building. He was shoved out the front door with a parcel in brown paper under his arms. Malloy made one desperate attempt to get back inside but the massive door clanged in his face, and he could hear the reverberations dying away inside and the steady retreat of footsteps. Malloy turned away in pain from the unaccustomed brilliance and warmth of the sun and banged on the door with his fists and demanded to be readmitted. He grew hoarser and hoarser and he slid further and further down until he was squatting on the threshold, his cheek rested against the warm varnished surface of the door. Malloy had never been an overly proud or vain man before the Riders had come. After all, he'd had one of the most menial jobs on Earth ; he had been a magazine editor. But now he felt squashed under the thumb of humiliation. The monstrous indignity of it all ! To be thrown out of an asylum! After a time, Malloy felt a coolness, a wetness on his head. He dreamed a little dream to himself that he knew was a dream: they were coming to wrap him in warm sheets again. But it was only a dream. This wetness wasn't warm -- it was chilly. He finally identified it from his memories. This was rain. He stirred himself and gathered up the brown bundle that he knew must contain his suit, papers and a little money. Malloy trudged down the road toward the town that lay below the sanitarium, his collar turned up. He found he didn't mind the rain so much. It tended to settle the dust, and the walk would be a long one. G rayson amery, the iron-haired publisher, greeted Malloy with a firm, warm, dry handshake. "Michael, it's certainly good to see you again. You are looking well." "Yes, the bruises left by the strait jacket straps don't show," said Malloy. "A unique miscarriage of justice," Amery said. "I certainly hope it's unique. I hope there aren't any more poor devils like me locked away." Amery offered Malloy a chair with a broad, well-manicured hand. "I'm confident that there aren't. And you are out now, fortunately." "You can call it fortune if you like," Malloy said uneasily. "But you ore glad to be out?" Malloy hesitated. "I'm resigned to it. The flow of time washed some of the salt out of the wound. Being born is definitely a traumatic experience." "How well I remember!" Amery said. Malloy glanced at him sharply, then eased back in his chair. Of course, like everybody else, thanks to his Rider, Amery had total recall. Malloy couldn't even remember his first birthday party. "Is there any way I can be of help to you, Michael?" Amery went on. "Sure. I want my job back." Amery's forehead squeezed into lines of distress. "Yes, I was made aware of that. But, Michael, there have been a lot of changes in the publishing business since you were with us. For instance, it would be difficult for you to proofread a manuscript today." "I'm hardly the type who can't spell. I haven't forgotten that." "I know, Michael, but here -- have a look at this." Amery handed over a sheet of paper. Malloy glanced at it. It seemed a typical sheet of a writer's manuscript, though a horrible yellowish gray that made the typescript from the tatters of a ribbon almost illegible. It was also smudged with jelly-doughnut fingerprints and there were several holes burned in it by droppings of cigarette ash. Pretty sloppy, but things didn't seem to have changed much. Not until he read the paper. -- Cynthia  --  ( walked ) toward -- #((him ))# -- jauntily (). Hi,'" -- she  -- # called (out) to ((him)). " 'Hello' ", 'Sweetstuff', he  said , ((trying)) to # sound # (flrat) ... Malloy looked up blankly. "What are all the cockeyed punctuation marks doing in there?" he asked. Amery exhaled Havana smoke expansively. "That's the way things are now, Michael. Those punctuation marks indicate whether the protagonist's thoughts are self-directed or Rider-directed, or a combination of both, and which is dominant at the time, human or Rider. They became absolutely essential with the coming of the Riders." Malloy covered his lips with his fingers. "Of course, I don't understand this punctuation now. But I could learn it quickly enough." The publisher shook his massive head. "No, you couldn't learn it. You don't have a Rider. You could never understand all the little subtleties." "I could fake it." "Never. It might get past the average reader, but the author and critics would know right away. All an editor can do is watch for typographical errors and change them Hie way the author wanted them if his fingers hadn't tripped over the wrong keys. As it was, we used to get a good many complaints from writers about you making changes in their work." "Grammar," Malloy explained. "I got kind of a bug about grammar. I used to fix up manuscripts some." Amery leaned across his desk. "This isn't like the good old days when I started out, Mike. If I had my way today, I'd get the National Guard ordered out and have those miserable slobs grind out stories with a bayonet at their backs!" The red gleam dimmed in Amery's eyes. "Those were the days, by God ! Back then you didn't edit manuscripts with any dinky little blue pencil -- you used a razor blade and a grease stick!" Amery slumped down in his swivel, his eyes now only embers. "But that day is over, Mike. Writers have their rights, damn them. You get the wrong punctuation in one of their private-eye epics, Mike, and one of them will slap a suit against the company for defacing a Work of Art, and both of us could land in jail." "Westerns," Malloy suggested in desperation. "Historical fiction. They can't employ the new punctuation. I could edit them." The vetern publisher shook his head again. "No. Cowboys in westerns today turn your stomach more than ever with their damned nobility and purity. Heroines in historical novels act just as if deodorants and Living Bras had been in use back then. And these stories are written as if the characters did have Riders, with only a few minor concessions." "Okay." Malloy stood up. "I'll go quietly." "Maybe you're lucky, Mike," Amery said up at him. "I remember old-fashioned ideals like privacy and free will and free enterprise. They don't exist any more. You can't tell me that my free will hasn't been affected. Why, every business deal I've had since the Coming has been strictly ethical. You know that isn't like me!" "No," Malloy admitted thoughtfully. "I'm even so ethical now that I recognize I owe you something. I know money can't repay -- " "Hell it can't," Malloy said quickly. The publisher stripped off a sheaf of bills with deliberation. Malloy pocketed them. Enough to keep him eating for a couple of months. After that, there was always the Salvation Army. He didn't have anything to worry about, really. "Amery, what would you do if you were in my place?" he heard himself ask suddenly. gers. "I hesitate to suggest a deception to anyone, but since you ask me what I would do if I didn't have a Rider, I will tell you the truth : I would pretend that I did not have a Rider." "What are you talking about? I don't have a Rider. So far as I myself personally know, I'm the only person in the whole damned world that doesn't have one. I'd like to find out why, but I'm no scientist. So I just have to live with it. Or without it." "There's a very, very fine difference," Amery pointed out with one finger. "Semantics is no longer a living science since the Coming, but I'll try to make myself clear. You must pretend to have to pretend that you don't have a Rider. Join the Jockey Set." "Jockey Set," Malloy mumbled, massaging the back of his neck. "I've been put away for three and a half years. What's the Jockey Set?" "Jockeys are characters who pretend that they don't have Riders, that they are self-sufficient human beings. Sometimes they use their Riders' powers and claim to be natural supermen. Sometimes they leave Rider power untapped and pretend to be natural, old-type human beings. But they are all fakes. The Rider in them comes out sooner or later." "But if they have Riders, will I be able to fool them into thinking I'm only pretending to be without one?" Amery lifted his shoulders and drew down the corners of his mouth. "Who knows? I will tell you this, though -- you must be pretty much of a blank to a Rider. If they won't touch you, it must mean they can't." Malloy started to ask him how he knew what Riders felt about him, then thought better of it. "How would I fake trying to hide the fact that I didn't have a Rider? I suppose, maybe, by slipping up and letting myself predict the future or something..." "That's it!" Amery beamed. "You see? It will be easy !" "Of course," Malloy said dully. "I mean, that is to say, any time you don't do something and don't do it particularly well, the Jockeys will only admire your splendid act." Malloy nodded thoughtfully. He turned and shook hands with the publisher. "Well, Amery, thanks for the money -- and the advice. You always were the most devious master of deceit I ever knew." "Thank you," Amery said with great sincerity. "There's one more thing. This may sound silly, but they found me out pretty quick after it happened. What does a Rider look like? Where do they come from? Where do they fasten onto the brain or body of human beings?" Amery leaned across the desk and backhanded Malloy in the mouth. "Get out!" Amery said. Malloy left the office, holding a handkerchief to his cut lip. had changed a half dozen times over the last half century, but the spots in the tablecloths remained the same. The dump had seen the Lost Generation, the Beat Generation, and now the Ridden Generation. Only, Malloy supposed, they called themselves the Riderless Generation. Well, maybe they were. Maybe they were like him. He walked in, hanging onto that thought, his stride long. He cut down his stride. At that rate he would be out in the alley soon. Self-consciously, Malloy slid into a chair at a vacant table so he wouldn't draw undue attention. As he began idly tracing the grease spots on the tablecloths that looked like the wrappers from a line of cereal boxes, all red and white checks, he discovered every shaved head in the room was triangulating him. He shifted uncomfortably. He was playing it middle-ofthe-road. He had a close crewcut and wore a plaid flannel shirt and purple velvet ballet leotards. Maybe he was too far on the conservative side for here. "Spell it, saddle," the counterman called to him without coming front. "Cola," he ordered. "With chickory, pecans and honey." "One sou'easter on the path," the counterman called out tiredly. "With you're going to sit there, He?" a liquid female voice flowed into his ear. "With I'm doing it, She," Malloy said, not turning. She eased around in front of the table. She was red-haired and built, wearing black leotards and a coat of black enamel. "Your pupils are going to wear me away," the redhead said. "I've only got eyes. How else can I read you?" "That is Truth. Tru-u-th." The counterman set out Malloy's drink. "It's waiting for you, saddle. Don't tease it or it'll bite." He went for the cola and brought it to the table. "You came back?" she said. He pulled up his chair. "I always come back. You can risk money on it. Saddle up?" "Saddle before the post, my touchstone." T HE girl sat down. Her green eyes were moving, always moving, but mostly over Malloy, his chair, the table. "You going to keep possession here long?" "I don't know any reason why not," said Malloy. "Of course you don't!" she snapped. "Only -- they close at five." "The billboard gives it two dozen hours a day." "They trim a little off at five. To sweep the floors and change the tableshrouds." "Change 'em from one table to another," Malloy jibed. "You formed it. Clean ones in front, dirty ones in the shadows. Let's try breathing air," she suggested. "Wait'll we gate up. I've got pecans to drink." The counterman's hawking laugh filled the room. "Let him wait, Mandy. I might as well wait to later to sweep it in." Her face caught fire for an instant. "The Board of Health don't go away just because you can read their dirty minds." "So take him out," the counterman snarled. Malloy suddenly decided he had played hard to get long enough. This was his first chance to get in with the Jockeys. From what he had heard, they had some kind of underground set-up to help their own in business and the arts. He needed that help. "Let's lope," he said, pushing his chair back and leaving silver on the table for the drink and a tip. He touched the girl's lacquered arm and steered her toward the door. Behind him, the floor fell in. Ripping, tearing, rendering, splintering, crashing, crushing, reverberating bedlam! Of course, it couldn't have been the floor caving in, Malloy thought as he turned to see a great hole where the floor had disappeared. The hole was where the table and chair he had been using had stood a moment before. Flapping at the sides of the cave-in were innumerable thicknesses of linoleum, and between each one an incredible accumulation of filth and debris -- #. Henry candy bar wrappers, a cover from a Collier's, a booklet on the new Packard ("Ask the Man Who Owns One"), a newspaper article on Flo Ziegfield's girls (stop thinking in slogans), but mostly just dirt -- dust, webs, lint, filth. There had been no boards under the table ; the ends of the exposed boards weren't freshly broken but old and rotted porously smooth. Only the linoleum and the dirt had supported the table for years. Malloy edged closer and saw some broken sticks lying . on a jagged pile of coke standing out black in the darkness far below. The redhead pulled him back from the edge, her fingers digging into his biceps, writhing with a strangle passionate intensity, as if she were trying to knead him into a layer for a pie. going to take you to the Commissioner, He, the Commissioner in his saddle." Somehow, uncertain, yet : surely, Malloy was dimly pleased at this.  TON'T say it," the fatL# m an remarked, glancing up for an instant, then lowering his eyes to the splay of papers on his desk. "No esoteric jargon, please." "All right," Malloy said readily. "Shall I sit down?" "By all means, saddle up." A second chin trembled. "Damn it, there I go. Have a chair." Malloy took the only chair not piled down with books, or maps, or correspondence, or manuscripts, or notes. It had a straight back and a plastic seat, piously uncomfortable. The big man looked up a second time and folded rows of pink sausages complacently. "So you want to be a Jockey, eh?" Malloy thinned his lips and licked the insides of them, making a snap judgment. "Not really. I don't have a Rider, and I want what help the Jockeys can give me. I'm not particularly anxious to acquire introverted slang and a shaved head, but if that goes along with the help..." He spread his hands eloquently. "So you don't think you have a Rider?" Malloy didn't know how to answer that. "I don't think I have a Rider," he repeated without inflection. "I don't think I have a Rider, either -- only I know I do," the fat man said. Malloy stood up elaborately. "You dirty steed." "Oh, sit down, Malloy, sit down. I'm a Jockey like the rest of you. There's only one difference. I know I'm sick. I've got a Rider and all its powers, but I could no more use them than an acrophobe could climb a ladder up the Empire State to get at a naked princess sitting on a bag of gold." Malloy eased back down onto the chair and shook his head slowly. "That would be a hell of a way to be." The big man slammed down two hams made out of fists. "You are exactly the same way, sonny boy! Only you don't know any better." Malloy swallowed. The man known as the Commissioner might be right at that. "Have it your way," Malloy said. "But I sure think I don't have a Rider." The Commissioner smirked. Malloy knew what that meant. He knew men like the fat boy ; he understood them. He had had Grayson Amery, Dr. Heirson -- he knew the breed. "What are you holding back on me?" Malloy demanded. "Malloy, do you even know what a Rider is?" Malloy paused. Then, "No, I don't." "I thought not. Shall I tell you?" "I imagine you were planning to." The Commissioner braced his fists on the work surface of the desk and lifted his bulk halfway from the chair. "The Riders are a disease. Like rabies." Malloy cleared his throat. "That's one way to look at them." "Don't be servilely civil to me. That is an accurate, clinical description of the Riders -- they are a cerebral infection." "You mean their powers of emergency telepathy and precognition, their seeming secondary personality -- all that's a hallucination?" Malloy was fevered as he asked it. It was at last some confirmation of his own theory. The whole world was sick, except him. "That is exactly what I don't mean," the Commissioner said contemptuously. "The Riders are real entities, capable of real miracles so far as we are concerned. But they aren't mammals, or insects, or pure energy forms -- they are viruses." "Viruses that can think?" Malloy asked, aghast. "No. No one unit of the strain can think, but chains of them can. Together they form different combinations and responses, like analog components or brain synapses. Objectively, they are an infection that can enter the body anywhere but that always spread to the prefrontal lobes -- like rabies. Only they don't destroy tissue; the Riders are benign parasites." "That's one word for them," Malloy admitted. "But if they are a virus, there must be antibodies -- is that the word? -- for them?" The fat man snorted unpleasantly. "You can't fight an infection that is smart enough to consciously change its shape and fight back. Natural adaptation and mutation are tough enough. Besides, nobody would stand for being cured of his Rider, any more than you would let me 'cure' you of having eyes." "Then what was your point in telling me the nature of the Riders? You weren't merely conducting an adult education class." "True." The Commissioner burped delicately and settled back in his chair. "As a matter of fact, there is one thing I left out: the Riders aren't suited for Earth. They have difficulty in adapting themselves to live on this planet. Once they get into a human being, they are okay. But before that they are weak and have to get hothouse care. Exactly that -- hothouse care." Malloy's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He pulled it loose and said, "And you can break the windows of hothouses!" The Commissioner smiled. It was unpleasant to watch.  loy," the Commissioner whispered almost subvocally as they lay together in the green ooze, "but we haven't known you long enough to give you our trust. The first false step will be a long one for you -- exactly six feet." Malloy tried to squint through the foggy darkness, and almost instantly gave it up. "You can't blame me for everything. Commissioner. I told you I wasn't convinced that some of the Riders in there won't precog our plans to save themselves." "All the ones we are going to destroy are the unhookedup ones. They can't send anything any more than one unattached telephone could. They aren't really very good with their psi powers. It's strictly an emergency talent, like our sudden spurts of adrenalin." He gave an unsatisfied grunt and bellied forward. Up ahead of Malloy, the Commissioner and an unstable stable of Jockeys who had been coming into town for weeks lay the secret hatchery of unhosted Rider viruses. They could only multiply beyond a certain self-maintaining balance inside the human body, and had to be grown in cultures on Earth, outside the healthy climate of a nullgravity, radiated vacuum in space. It was the Commissioner's plan to destroy all the virus cultures, so that in eighteen years or so there would come along a Rider-free generation to outnumber the minor supermen still infected by the Riders. Malloy had a lot of doubts about the plan, but he was own reasons. During the past few weeks of indoctrination and commando training, Malloy had had time to think. It hadn't taken nearly that long to figure out the Commissioner. The Commissioner was simply a man who had to have power, and he couldn't stand for a whole human race to be more powerful than he was, just because of a lack within himself. He was out to pull everybody down to his level, so he could stand out again and take over. Still, Malloy thought, I may have something to say about that. The men and a few women crawled through the semitropical Florida mud toward the low buildings glimmering in the light from the thin crescent of moon. Malloy elbowed a foot closer to the hothouse breeding factory up to here in stinking muck. Any second now, he thought, somebody is going to roll over on a cottonmouth. "Ready with your cloths," a man next to him relayed, first catching his attention and mostly lip-synching it. Malloy dug out his Asphixion pad, and readied the tab to pull off the plastic coating. Clamped over the guards' faces, the catalytic agent would rapidly absorb the men's oxygen. With a partial vacuum in the mouth and larynx, no cries could carry and the victim would rapidly black out. The pad would be removed and the guards would be allowed to catch up on their air intake. They wouldn't be harmed in any way final, so their emergency psi warning system wasn't supposed to cut in. Malloy shrugged. The plan would never work. It was based on equal parts of megalomania and wishful thinking. Malloy's only problem was when and how to best expose the plot before it was found out without his help. He couldn't stand up and shout a warning. If he tried that, one of the fanatic Jockeys was sure to clamp an Asphixion pad over his face, and, with him, they might not be considerate enough to remove it. Only a treacherous, selfseeking rat would even think of exposing these poor misguided people and betraying his own race to some extraterrestrial viruses. Malloy's elbows slipped out from under him and he went face first into the mud. He forced himself to keep from spluttering and lifted his head. Where had that idea come from ? finally acquired a Rider. But no. A Rider would hardly urge him to carry out an attack against the citadel of existence to its own kind. It had to be something simpler, more elemental than that. The voice had been his own conscience crying out against treason. He followed the probable train of circumstances if he heeded his conscience. He would most probably be killed in this useless attack. He doubted that this was the only breeding chamber for Riders, or, that if it were, the Riders safely in human bodies couldn't transplant part of themselves and start new cultures. If he wasn't killed, he would probably be returned to his cell, his padded cell, by Riderridden people. If he were somehow let off, he would be left to wander the streets, a public ward. The trouble with his conscience was that it wasn't logical -- and it had a poor memory. It didn't recall those three and a half years mislaid in an asylum. Only an unprincipled -- Malloy shut it off and felt a drop of sweat running down the deep crevices between his eyebrows. My only problem, he reminded himself again and again, is how and when to expose this raid before they discover it without my help. The solution bloomed in his mind. It was remarkable how well the human mind could operate under stress. He half-rose from the mud so he would be silhouetted to anybody watching, and fell back. The guards hadn't spotted him, but he heard the Jockeys scurrying toward him through the mud. The squishing halted near him. He waited. The commandos moved ahead, leaving him behind. When he felt it was safe, Malloy took the Asphixion pad oif his face -- a pad without the transparent plastic coat being pulled off. He made out a buddy team of Jockeys almost on top of the first Rider-ridden manned post. All the others had to be far ahead... Malloy leaped to his feet -- or tried to. He managed to slosh to his knees. "Raid!" he screamed. "Jockeys are raiding the hothouse!" The lights flared up, a magnesium, Fourth-of-July night glare. Guards with guns sprang from everywhere. The guns went into action. Clouds of crystalline Asphixion snowed down on the raiders. From far back, Malloy watched in satisfaction. The sound came from behind him. The Commissioner blobbed forward, a distorted ball of #limy mud. "I will crush you under my foot like a bloated white grub !" the fat man announced with sincerity. Malloy's eyes narrowed in the darkness. "Stay away from me Commissioner, or I'll push you down -- way, way down!" The blocky figure retreated a step, quivering impotently. Malloy nodded to himself. The Commissioner had spoken too knowingly of a terrible fear of falling. T HE interrogator was the younger man who sat next to Dr. Heirson during Malloy's release from the hospital. "I feel you'd like to know my identity, Mr. Malloy. My name is Pearson; I work for the federal government. Now would you tell me just what you hoped to gain by betraying the assault force of Jockeys?" It was the crux of the matter. Malloy took a deep breath and said it. "I want a Rider. I want to be like everybody else. If you people have any sense of gratitude and justice -- and you seem to -- you'll set up some kind of scientific project to find out why I haven't caught a case of Riders and to see that I am properly infected." Pearson leaned back in the other straight chair inside the rough-boarded outbuilding. "Mr. Malloy, we know why none of the Riders who drifted in from outer space infected you. You already had a Rider -- an entirely human, not alien, one. You are schizoid -- you have a split personality. You adjusted to it to an incredible degree and submerged it, but it was still there and no alien would touch a man who already had two minds." Malloy felt no emotion, only an inescapable acceptance. "My conscience," he said. Pearson nodded. "Your second personality is becoming steadily less recessive." "But telepathy -- all the tricks of the Riders -- I can't do them." "You will be able to. Two minds are better than one. It would seem that schizophrenia is the natural state of supermen, when properly trained and integrated. In fact, you should be able to accomplish more than a Rider-ridden man -- you will have two human personalities, and the Riders are little more than viruses conscious of their own existence." "You mean I'm a superman?" "Yes. But unfortunately you are a threat to the present order because of your nonRider attitude. You are being returned to your padded cell. There are guards outside. I hope you will walk out quietly to meet them." Malloy walked out quietly to meet the guards who would take him away. On his way out, he met Grayson Amery coming in. Pearson shook hands warmly with the publisher. "Mr. Amery, the government owes you a vote of thanks for recommending Malloy for this job of infiltrating the Jocks. Turning against one of your own kind is never easy..." Amery laughed lightly. "Malloy was not 'one of my kind.' He was an editor. Even worse than that, I think in his attitude he always remained no more than a writer. I understand he is being returned to confinement?" Pearson looked troubled. "Yes, sir. Personally, I would feel more comfortable if he were eliminated. I am not at all sure that we can keep Malloy under lock and key once he develops his potential of schizophrenia." "I know. Unhappily, the primitive ethics of the Riders prevent our taking care of Mike in the most efficient way. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. May I sit down?" "Please do, sir," said Pearson. Amery took the vacant chair and leaned forward with boyish enthusiasm. "Mr. Pearson, I have faith in humanity. I believe we can keep the benefits of any situation, including the Riders, and eliminate the disadvantages and limitations. My boy, all of us must start to work to find a way to override the Riders!" Space Taxi # Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! 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Space Taxi #  TV Orbiter #  Passenger Rocket #  Orbital Rocket # 'one Stati The biggest blackmail stunt ever, it relied on no skeleton in the closet. This had... the Martian in the Attic pudgy ; his eyelashes were blond and his hair was gone. He looked like the sort of man you see sitting way off at the end of the stadium at the Big Game, clutching a hot dog and a pennant and sitting with his wife. Who would be making him explain every play. Also he stuttered.   s   . , '  s  :vvJv'v Wm mm The girl at the reception desk of LaFitte Enterprises was a blue-eyed former model. She had Dunlop catalogued. She looked up slowly. She said bleakly: "Yes?" "I want to see Mr. LaF-FF -- " said Dunlop, and paused to clear his throat. "I want to see Mr. La Fitte." The ex-model was startled enough to blink. Nobody saw Mr. LaFitte! Oh, John D. the Sixth might. Or President Brockenheimer might drop by, after phoning first. Nobody else. Mr. LaFitte was a very great man who had invented most of America's finest gadgets, and sold them for some of America's finest money, and he was not available to casual callers. Particularly nobodies with suits that had come right off a rack. The ex-model was, however, a girl with a sympathetic heart -- as was known only to her mother, her employer and the fourteen men who, one after another, had broken it. She was sorry for Dunlop. She decided to let the poor jerk down easy and said: "Who shall I say is calling, sir? Mr. Dunlop? Is that with an 'O,' sir? One moment." And she picked up the phone, trying not to smile. The reception room was carpeted in real Oriental wool -- none of your flimsy nylon or even LaFitton ! -- and all about it were the symbols of LaFitte's power and genius. In a nook, floodlighted, stood an acrylic model of the LaFitte Solar Transformer, transparently gleaming. On a scarlet pedestal in the center of the room was the LaFitte Ion-Exchange Self-Powered Water Still, in the small or forty-gallon-a-second model. (Two of the larger size provided all of London with sparkling clear water from the muddy, silty, smelly Thames.) Dunlop said hoarsely : "Hold it a second. Tell him that he won't know my name, but we have a mutual friend." The ex-model hesitated, struggling with a new fact. That changed things. Even Mr. LaFitte might have a friend who might by chance be acquainted with a little blond nobody whose shoes needed shining. It wasn't likely, but it was a possibility. Especially when you consider that Mr. LaFitte himself sprang from quite humble origins: at one time he had taught at a university. "Yes, sir," she said, much more warmly. "May I have the friend's name?" "I d-don't know his name." "Oh!" "But Mr. LaFitte will know who I m-mean. Just say the friend is a M -- is a M -- is a M-Martian." The soft blue eyes turned bleak. The smooth, pure face shriveled into the hard Vogue lines that it had possessed before an unbearable interest in chocolate nougats had taken her from before the fashion cameras and put her behind this desk. "Get out!" she said. "That isn't a bit funny !" The chubby little man said cheerfully: "Don't forget the name, Dunlop. And I'm at # West #th Street. It's a rooming house." And he left. She wouldn't give anyone the message, he knew, but he knew comfortably that it didn't matter. He'd seen the little goldplated microphone at the comer of her desk. The LaFitte Auto-Sec it was hooked up to would unfailingly remember, analyze and pass along every word. "Ho-hum," said Dunlop to the elevator operator, "they make you fellows work too hard in this kind of weather. I'll see that they put in airconditioning." The operator looked at Dunlop as though he was some kind of a creep, but Dunlop didn't mind. Why should he? He was a creep. But he would soon be a very rich one. H ector dunlop trotted out into the heat of Fifth Avenue, wheezing because of his asthma. But he was quite pleased with himself. He paused at the comer to turn and look up at the LaFitte Building, all copper and glass bands in the quaint period architecture that LaFitte liked. Let him enjoy it, thought Dunlop generously. It looks awful, but let LaFitte have his pleasures ; it was only fair that LaFitte have the kind of building he wanted. Dunlop's own taste went to more modem lines, but there would be nothing to stop him from putting up a hundredand-fifty-iwo-story building across the street if he liked. LaFitte was entitled to everything he wanted -- as long as Hector Dunlop. As he certainly would be, and probably that very day. Musing cheerfully about the inevitable generosity of LaFitte, Dunlop dawdled down Fifth Avenue in the fierce but unfelt heat. He had plenty of time. It would take a little while for anything to happen. Of course, he thought patiently, it was possible that nothing would happen at all today. Whatever human the Auto-Sec reported to might forget. Anything might go wrong. But still he had time. All he had to do was try again, and try still more after that if necessary. Sooner or later the magic words would reach LaFitte. After eight years of getting ready for this moment it didn't much matter if it took an extra day or two. Dunlop caught his breath. A girl in needle-pointed heels came clicking by, the hot breeze plastering her skirt against her legs. She glanced casually at the volume of space which Hector Dunlop thought he was occupying and found it empty. Dunlop snarled out of habit; she was not the only hormone-pumping girl who had seen nothing where he stood. But he regained his calm. To hell with you, my dear, he said good-humoredly to himself. I will have you later if I like. I will have twenty like you, or twenty a day if I wish. Starting very soon. He sprinted across Fortysecond Street, and there was the gray familiar old-fashioned bulk of the Library. On a sentimental impulse he climbed the steps and went inside. The elevator operator nodded. "Good afternoon, Mr. Dunlop. Three?" "That's right, Charley. As usual." They all liked him here. It was the only place in the world where that was true, he realized, but then he had spent more time here than anywhere else in the world. Dunlop got out of the slow elevator as it creaked to an approximate halt on the third floor. He walked reminiscently down the wide, warm hall between the rows of exhibits. Just beyond the drinking fountain there. That was the door to the Fortescue Collection. Flanking it were the glass cabinets that housed some of Fortescue's own Martian photographs, along with the unexplained relics of a previous race that had built the canals. prints and could hardly keep from giggling. The Martians were seedy, slimeskinned creatures with snaky arms and no heads at all. Worse, according to Updyke's The Martian Adventure, Fortescue's own First to Land and Wilbert, Shevelsen and Buchbinder's Survey of Indigenous Martian Semi-Fauna (in the Proceedings of the Astro-Biological Institute for Winter, #), they smelled like rotting fish. Their mean intelligence was given by Fortescue, Burlutski and Stanko as roughly equivalent to the Felidae (though Gaffney placed it higher, say about that of the lower primates). They possessed no language. They did not have the use of fire. Their most advanced tool was a hand-axe. In short, the Martians were the dopes of the Solar System, and it was not surprising that LaFitte's receptionist had viewed describing a Martian as her employer's friend as a gross insult. "Why, it's Mr. Dunlop," called the librarian, peering out through the wire grating on the door. She got up and came toward him to unlock the door to the Fortescue Collection. "No, thanks," he said hastily. "I'm not coming in today. Miss Reidy. Warm weather, isn't it? Well, I must be getting along." When hell freezes over I'll come in, he added to himself as he turned away, although Miss Reidy had been extremely helpful to him for eight years ; she had turned the Library's archives over to him, not only in the extraterrestrial collections but wherever his researching nose led him. Without her, he would have found it'much more difficult to establish what he now knew about LaFitte. On the other hand, she wore glasses. Her skin was sallow. One of her front teeth was chipped. Dunlop would see only TV stars and the society debutantes, he vowed solemnly, and decided that even those he would treat like dirt. The Library was pressing down on him ; it was too much a reminder of the eight grublike years that were now past. He left it and took a bus home. Less than two hours had elapsed since leaving LaFitte's office. That wasn't enough. Not even the great LaFitte's organization would have been quite sure to deliver and act on the message yet, and Dunlop was suddenly wildly anxious to spend no time waiting in his rooming house. He stopped in front of a cheap restaurant, paused, smiled broadly and walked across the street to a small, cozy, expensive place with potted palms in the window. It would just about clean out what cash he had left, but what of it? Dunlop ate the best lunch he had had in ten years, taking his time. When some fumbling chemical message told him that enough minutes had elapsed and he walked down the block to his rooming house, the men were there. The landlady peered out of her window from behind a curtain, looking frightened. Dunlop laughed out loud and waved to her as they closed in. They were two tall men with featureless faces. The heavier one smelled of chlorophyll chewing gum. The leaner one smelled of death. Dunlop linked arms with them, grinning broadly, and turned his back on his landlady. "What did you tell her you w-were, boys? Internal Revenue? The F.B.I.?" They didn't answer, but it didn't matter. Let her think what she liked; he would never, never, never see her again. She was welcome to the few pitiful possessions in his cheap suitcase. Very soon now Hector Dunlop would have only the best. don't know your I boss's secret, eh?" Dunlop prodded the men during the car ride. "But I do. It took me eight years to find it out. Treat me with a little respect or I m-might have you fired." "Shut up," said chlorophyll-breath pleasantly, and Dunlop politely obeyed. It didn't matter, like everything else that happened now. In a short time he would see LaFitte and then -- "Don't p-p-push!" he said irritably, staggering before them out of the car. They caught him, one at each elbow, Chlorophyll opening the iron gate at the end of the walk and Death pushing him through. Dunlop's glasses came off one ear and he grabbed for them. They were well out of the city, having crossed the Hudson. Dunlop had only the haziest sense of geography, having devoted all his last eight years to more profitable pursuits, but he guessed they were somewhere in the hills back of Kingston. They went into a great stone house and saw no one. It was a Frankenstein house, but it cheered Dunlop greatly, for it was just the sort of house he had imagined LaFitte would need to keep his secret. They shoved Dunlop through a door into a room with a fireplace. In a leather chair before a fire (though the day was hot) was a man who had to be Quincy LaFitte. "Hello," said Dunlop with poise, strutting toward him. "I suppose y-you know why I -- Hey! What are you d-doing?" Chlorophyll was putting one gray glove on one hand. He walked to a desk, opened it, took out something -- a gun! In his gloved hand he raised it and fired at the wall. Splat. It was a small flat sound, but a great chip of plaster flew. "Hey!" said Dunlop again. Mr. LaFitte watched him with polite interest. Chlorophyll walked briskly toward him, and abruptly Death reached for -- for -- Chlorophyll handed Dunlop the gun he had fired. Dunlop instinctively grasped it, while Death took out another, larger, more dangerous-looking one. Dunlop abruptly jumped, dropped the gun, beginning to understand. "Wait!" he cried in sudden panic. "I've g-g -- " He swallowed and dropped to his knees. "Don't shoot! I've g-got everything written d-down in my luh -- in my luh -- " LaFitte said softly : "Just a moment, boys." Chlorophyll just stopped where he was and waited. Death held his gun competently on Dunlop and waited. Dunlop managed to stammer: "In my lawyer's office. I've got the whole th-thing written down. If anything happens to me he ruh -- he ruh -- he reads it." LaFitte sighed. "Well," he said mildly, "that was the chance we took. All right, boys. Leave us alone." Chlorophyll and Death took their scent and their menace out the door. Dunlop was breathing very hard. He had just come very close to dying, he realized; one man handed him the gun, and the other was about to shoot him dead. Then they would call the police to deliver the body of an unsuccessful assassin. Too bad, officer, but he certainly fooled us! Look, there's where the bullet went. I only tried to wing the poor nut, but -- A shrug. Dunlop swallowed. "Too bad," he said in a cracked voice. "But naturally I had to take p-precautions. Say. Can I have a drink?" Mr. LaFitte pointed to a tray. He had all the time there was. He merely waited, with patience and very little concern. He was a tall old man with a very bald head, but he moved quickly when he wanted to, Dunlop noticed. Funny, he hadn't expected LaFitte to be bald. But everything else was going strictly according to plan! stiff shot of twelve-yearold bourbon and downed it from a glass that was Steuben's best hand-etched crystal. He said : "I've got you, LaFitte! You know it, don't you?" LaFitte gave him a warm, forgiving look. "Oh, that's the boy," Dunlop enthused. "B-Be a good loser. But you know I've found out what your fortune is based on." He swallowed another quick one and felt the hot burning tingle spread. "Well. To b-begin with, eight years ago I was an undergrad at the university you taught at. I came across a reference to a thesis called Certain Observations on the Ontogenesis of the Martian P-Paraprimates. By somebody named Quincy A. W. L-LaFitte, B.S." LaFitte nodded faintly, still smiling. His eyes were tricky, Dunlop decided ; they were the eyes of a man who had grown quite accustomed to success. You couldn't read much into eyes like those. You had to watch yourself. Still, he reassured himself, he had all the cards. "So I #-looked for the paper and I couldn't f-find it. But I guess you know that!" Couldn't find it? No, not in the stacks, not in the Dean's file, not even in the archives. It was very fortunate that Dunlop was a persistent man. He had found the printer who had done the thesis in the first place, and there it was, still attached to the old dusty bill. "I remember the w-words," Dunlop said, and quoted from the conclusion. He didn't stutter at all: " 'It is therefore to be inferred that the Martian paraprimates at one time possessed a mature culture comparable to the most sophisticated milieux of our own planet. The artifacts and structural remains were not created by another race. Perhaps there is a correlation with the so-called Shternweiser Anomaly, when conjecturally an explosion of planetary proportions depleted the Martian water supply.' " LaFitte interrupted : "Shternweiser ! You know, I had forgotten his name. It's been a long time. But Shternweiser's paper suggested that Mars might have lost its water in our own historical times -- and then the rest was easy!" Dunlop finished his quotation : " 'In conjunction, these factors inescapably suggest a pattern. The Martian paraprimates require an aqueous phase for development from grub to imago, as in many terrestrial invertebrates. Yet there has not been sufficient free water on the surface of Mars since the time of the Shternweiser explosion theory. It seems likely, therefore, that the present examples surviving are mere sexed grubs, and that the adult Martian paraprimate does not exist in vivo, though its historical existence is attested by the remarkable examples left of their work.' " "And then," finished Dunlop, "you b-began to realize what you had here. And you d-destroyed all the copies. All, th-that is, b-but one." working the way it should ! LaFitte would have thrown him out long ago, of course, if he had dared. He didn't dare. He knew that Dunlop had followed the long, crooked trail of evidence to its end. Every invention that bore the name LaFitte had come from a Martian mind. The fact that the paper was suppressed was the first clue. Why suppress it? The name attached to the paper was the second -- though it had taken an effort of the imagination to connect a puny B.S. with the head of LaFitte Enterprises. And all the other clues had come painfully and laboriously along the trail that led past Miss Reidy's room at the Library, the Space Exploration wing of the Smithsonian, the Hall of Extraterrestrial Zooforms at the Museum of Natural History, and a thousand dusty chambers of learning all over the country. LaFitte sighed. "And so you know it all, Mr. Dunlop. You've come a long way." He poured himself a gentlemanly film of brandy in a large inhaler and warmed it with his breath. He said meditatively: "You did a lot of work, but, of course, I did more. I had to go to Mars, for one thing." "The S-Solar Argosy," Dunlop supplied promptly. LaFitte raised his eyebrows. " That thorough? I suppose you realize, then, that the crash of the Solar Argosy was not an accident. I had to cover up the fact that I was bringing a young Martian back to Earth. It wasn't easy. And even so, once I had him here, that was only half the battle. It is quite difficult to raise an exogenous life-form on Earth." He sipped a drop of the brandy and leaned forward earnestly. "I had to let a Martian develop. It meant giving him an aqueous environment, as close as I could manage to what must have been the conditions on Mars before the Shternweiser event. All guesswork, Mr. Dunlop! I can only say that luck was with me. And even then -- why, think of yourself as a baby. Suppose your mother had abandoned you, kicking and wetting your diaper, on Jupiter. And suppose that some curious-shaped creature that resembled Mommy about as much as your mother resembled a tree then took over your raising." He shook his head solemnly. "Spock was no help at all. The problem of discipline ! The toilet training! And then I had nothing but a naked mind, so to speak. The Martian adult mind is great, but it needs to be filled with knowledge before it can create, and that, Mr. Dunlop, in itself took me six difficult years." He stood up. "Well," he said, "suppose you tell me what you want." Dunlop, caught off base, stammered terribly: "I w-wwant half of the tuh -- of the tuh -- " "You want half of the take?" "That's ruh -- that's -- " "I understand. In order to keep my secret, you want me to give you half of everything I earn from my Martian's inventions. And if I don't agree?" Dunlop said, suddenly panicked: "But you must! If I t-t-tell your secret, anyone can do the same !" LaFitte said reasonably: "But I already have my money, Mr. Dunlop. No, that's not enough of an inducement... But," he said after a moment, "I doubt that such a consideration will persuade you to keep still. And, in fact, I do want this matter kept confidential. After all, six men died in the crash of the Solar Argosy, and on that sort of thing there is no statute of limitations." He politely touched Dunlop's arm. "Come along. You deduced there was a Martian in this house? Let me show you how right you were." A LL the way down a long carpeted corridor, Dunlop kept hearing little clicks and rustles that seemed to come from the wall. "Are those your b-bodyguards, LaFitte? Don't try any tricks !" LaFitte shrugged. "Come on out, boys," he said without raising his voice; and a few feet ahead of them a panel opened and Death and Chlorophyll stepped through. "Sorry about that other business, Mr. Dunlop," said Chlorophyll. "No hard f-feelings," said Dunlop. LaFitte stopped before a door with double locks. He spun the tumblers and the door opened into a dark, dank room. "V-r-r-roooom, v-r-r-room." It sounded like a huge deep rumble from inside the room. Dunlop's pupils slowly expanded to admit more light, and he began to recognize shapes. In the room was a sort of palisade of steel bars. Behind them, chained to a stake, was -- A Martian! Chained? Yes, it was chained and cuffed. What could only be the key hung where the Martian would be able to see it always but reach it never. Dunlop swallowed, staring. The Martians in Fortescue's photographs were slimy, ropy, ugly creatures like thinned-out sea anemones, man-tall and headless. The chained creature that thundered at him now was like those Martians only as a frog is like a tadpole. It possessed a head, round-domed, with staring eyes. It possessed a mouth that clacked open and shut on great square teeth. "V-r-r-room," it roared, and then Dunlop listened more closely. It was not a wordless lion's bellow. It was English! The creature was talking to them ; it was only the Earth's thick atmosphere that made it boom. "Who are you?" it croaked in a slobbery-drunk Chaliapin's boom. Dunlop said faintly: "God b-bless." Inside that hideous skull was the brain that had created for LaFitte the Solar Transformer, the Ion-Exchange Self-Powered Water Still, the LaFitte NegativeImpedance Transducer, and a thousand other great inventions. It was not a Martian Dunlop was looking at ; it was a magic lamp that would bring him endless fortune. But it was an ugly nightmare. "So," said LaFitte. "And what do you think now, Mr. Dunlop ? Don't you think I did something great? Perhaps the Still and the Transducer were his invention, not mine. But I invented him." Dunlop pulled himself together. "Y-yes," he said, bobbing his head. He had a concept of LaFitte as a sort of storybook blackmail victim, who needed only a leer, a whisper and the Papers to start occurred to him that LaFitte would take honest pride in what he had done. Now, knowing it, Dunlop saw or thought he saw a better tactic. He said instantly: "Great? N-No, LaFitte, it's more than that. I am simply amazed that you brought him up without, say, r-rickets. Or juvenile delinquency. Or whatever Martians might get, lacking proper care." LaFitte looked pleased. "Well, let's get down to business. You want to become an equal partner in LaFitte Enterprises, is that what you're asking for?" Dunlop shrugged. He didn't have to answer. That was fortunate ; in a situation as tense as this one, he couldn't have spoken at all. LaFitte said cheerfully : "Why not? Who needs all this? Besides, some new blood in the firm might perk things up." He gazed benevolently at the Martian, who quailed. "Our friend here has been lethargic lately. All right, I'll make you work for it, but you can have half." "Th -- Th -- Thank -- " "You're welcome, Dunlop. How shall we do it? I don't suppose you'd care to take my word -- " Dunlop smiled. "Very well, we'll put it in writing. I'll have my attorneys draw something up. I suppose you have a lawyer for them to get in touch with?" He snapped his fingers. Death stepped brightly forward with a silver pencil and Chlorophyll with a pad. "G-G-Good," said Dunlop, terribly eager. "My #-lawyer is P. George Metzger, and he's in the Empire State Building, forty-first fl -- " "Fool!" roared the Martian with terrible glee. LaFitte wrote quickly and folded the paper into a neat square. He handed it to the man who smelled of chlorophyll chewing gum. Dunlop said desperately : "That's not the s-same lawyer." LaFitte waited politely. "Not what lawyer?" "My other lawyer is the one that has the p-p-papers." LaFitte shook his head and smiled. Dunlop sobbed. He couldn't help it. Before his eyes a billion dollars had vanished, and the premium on his life-insurance policy had run out. They had Metzger's name. They knew where to find the fat manila envelope that contained the sum of eight years' work. Chlorophyll, or Death, or any of LaFitte's hundreds of confidential helpers, would go to Metzger's office, and perhaps they would present phony court orders or perhaps they would bull their way through, a handkerchief over the face and a gun in the hand. One way or another they would find the papers. The sort of organization that LaFitte owned would surely not be baffled by the office safe of a recent ex-law clerk, now in his first practice. Dunlop sobbed again, wishing he had not economized on lawyers; but it really made no difference. LaFitte knew where the papers were kept and he would get them. It remained only for him to erase the last copy of the information -- that is, the copy in the head of Hector Dunlop. Chlorophyll tucked the note in his pocket and left. Death patted the bulge under his arm and looked at LaFitte. "Not here," said LaFitte. Dunlop took a deep breath. "G-Good-bye, Martian," he said sadly, and turned toward the door. Behind him the thick, hateful voice laughed. "You're taking this very well," LaFitte said in surprise. Dunlop shrugged and stepped aside to let LaFitte precede him through the doorway. "What else can I d-do?" he said. "You have me cold. Only -- " The Death man was mrough the door, and so was LaFitte, half-turned politely to listen to Dunlop. Dunlop caught the edge of the door, hesitated, smiled and leaped back, slamming it. He found a lock and turned it. "Only you have to c-catch me first!" he yelled through the door. Behind him the Martian laughed like a wounded whale. "You were very good," complimented the thick, tolling voice. "It was a matter of s-simple s-selfdefense," said Dunlop. the corridor, but there was time. "N-Now! Come, Martian ! We're going to get away from LaFitte. You're coming w-with me, because he won't dare shoot you and -- And certainly you, with your great mind, can find a way for us both to escape." The Martian said in a thick sulky voice : "I've tried." "But I can help ! Isn't that thek-k-key?" He clawed the bright bit of metal off the wall. There was a lock on the door of steel bars, but the key opened it. The Martian was just inside, ropy arms waving. "V-r-r-room," it rumbled, eyes like snake's eyes staring at Dunlop. "Speak more c-clearly," Dunlop requested impatiently, twisting the key out of the lock. "I said," repeated the thick draiwl, "I've been waiting for you." "Of course. What a t-terrible life you've led !" Crash went the door behind him ; Dunlop didn't dare look. And this key insisted on sticking in its lock ! But he freed it and leaped to the Martian's side -- at least there they would not dare fire, for fear of destroying their mealticket ! "You c-can get us out of here," Dunlop panted, fumbling for the lock on the Martian's ankle cuff and gagging. (It was true. They did smell like rotting fish.) "B-but you must be strong! LaFitte has been a father to you, but what a f-false f-father ! Feel no loyalty to him, Martian. He made you his slave, even if he d-did keep you healthy and s-sane." And behind him LaFitte cleared his throat. "But I didn't," he observed. "I didn't keep him sane." "No," rumbled the thick, slow Martian voice. "No, he didn't." The ropes that smelled like rotting fish closed lovingly and lethally around Dunlop. Few foes have been as great a challenge to man's claim to supremacy on this planet as insects, and few, including perhaps his own kind, have inflicted such huge losses in life, health and wealth. Hands, swatters and drainage got a big assist in insect poisons, especially recently. But the tiny, deadly enemy has the advantage of brief generations; survival of the fittest has produced insecticide-resistant strains. And poisons aimed at insects all too often hit other forms of life, including ourselves, by getting into food and drinking water. Newest weapon in the insect war is sex. Totally selective, it can destroy only one or another species, not the beneficial as well as the destructive. The method itself is simpler by far than any other. Great numbers of the males of any chosen kind of insect are sterilized by cobalt-# radiation, and dropped into infested areas at breeding time. The sterilized males, says Dr. Arthur Lindquist, entomologist of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, "compete very successfully with the normal ones. The average result is that # to # per cent of the eggs laid are sterile and won't hatch." Repeated at each breeding season, the end result is total extermination in plague sections, with especial success on islands like flies for a year should wipe out the devourers of its melons. For the first time in the history of mankind, complete -- and completely safe -- extinction of insect pests appears to be a realistic possibility. Galaxy... around the world With your literally thousands of letters you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science-fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) (# additional per # issues foreign postage) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  #  # Issues  #  # Issues  #  Name .City AddressWorlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl the mutated crew of an interstellar derelict forget that they are on a ship and revert to savagery; it is not Robert A. Heinlein's Universe. Consider a story in which mutated, intelligent rats strive for control of a spaceship against its human crew; it is not A. Bertram Chandler's Giant Killer. These ingredients -- as well as a good many others of reminiscent flavor -- form Starship, a first novel by Brian Aldiss (Signet). Starship is described on its cover by a single, bare-faced adjective : "magnificent." This is an exaggeration. But Aldiss comes very close indeed to deserving such a word ! The book is vital. It is impossible to forget its precursors, but as the story builds and grows, we no longer worry about them. This is no dreary rehash; this is a novel of taste and perception. Starship's rats, once we realize that they are not the same as Giant Killer's, become worthy inventions. They carry telepathic rabbits with them in their wars, for interrogatscouts are telepathic moths : a part of their lineage might well be Ralph Milne Farley's "new-souls" of a generation back, but these moths are described in terms and with emotions that Farley never evoked. Indeed, Starship's second flaw is an error on the side of the angels : its invention is over-abundant; there is so much in the book that Aldiss lets us glimpse a treasure only to whisk it away. His telepathic bunny is a triumph of compassionate characterization... shown once, never seen again. There is a novel tribal game, hinting at provocative changes in social behavior. But the first match we see is the last one. No matter. Roy Complain, Starship's hero, battles his way through the ponic-tangled jungles of the corridors, past human and non-human foes to the enemy country called "Forwards"... to the semi-mythical Control Room itself... and finally to a denouement that is skillful, fast and convincing. And we are with him all the way. Magnificent? No, the word is too strong. But it is only an exaggeration, not an outright lie. It is good to know that this first novel is shortly to be followed by at least two more in this country. Brian Aldiss shows every sign of being a writer of imagination and power; it will not need much to make him one of the great ones. Seminar Committee of Princeton University invited Kingsley Amis (a name which seldom appears in print without the immediate addition of the phrase, "one of England's Angry Young Men") to deliver a series of lectures in Princeton's Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Amis accepted, and for his subject elected to discuss science fiction in its modern form. It is not on record whether the Seminar Committee was pleased or otherwise at his choice. But it is known, first, that Princeton's faculty turned out in large number for the seminars when, in early #, they were delivered and, second, that the faculty was nearly crowded out by the influx of editors and publishers from New York and Philadelphia anxious to get an authoritative fresh view on just what it was that they themselves were doing. Harcourt, Brace has now made it possible for those who missed the seminars to get that view all the same, now enlarged, indexed, handsomely bound and available to all in book form under the title, New Maps of Hell. Examinations of science fiction have appeared often in the past decade, but this is not merely the newest of them. It is the best. Amis is himself a novelist -- Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling, etc. He is also a critic of substance, a poet, a jazz buff and a playwright (in which mood he wrote one of the few science fiction plays ever to find a home on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme). But these considerations are mostly irrelevant. New Maps of Hell demonstrates its authority at once. It proceeds immediately to a lucid and entertaining exposition of just what its author seeks in a science fiction story, and a summary of what any person of similar tastes will reliably find. It is not necessary to accept every one of Amis's estimates. He is an Angry Young Man, as much as any writer of talent can be said to be any one thing, and what interests him most is the science fiction of comment, preferably social comment. Disagreement only indicates that one starts from other interests. Still, his estimates are formed with great care, and the test of a theory is the accuracy of the deductions that can be drawn from it. For example, this reviewer is prepared to testify that Amis's deductions, as they relate to such "behind-the-scenes" matters as questions of intent and of the relative contributions of partners in a collaboration, are of a previously unprecedented accuracy. Amis, like any true lover, neither demands perfection nor overlooks flaws. His conclusion is that science fiction is indeed worth while, containing in it something of special value which is not to be found, except in trace quantities, anywhere else at all. "In the first place," he says, "one is grateful for the presence of science fiction as a medium in which our society can criticize itself, and sharply... In the second place, one is grateful that we have a form of writing which is interested in the future, which is ready... to treat as variables what are usually taken to be constants, which is set on tackling those large, general, speculative questions that ordinary fiction so often avoids. This is no less true when all allowance has been made for the shock and pain felt by some when they find those questions answered in a way that does much less than justice to their complexity. Most answers to anything are overwhelmingly likely to be crude, and I cannot bring myself to believe that the most saturating barrage of crude answers really menaces the viability of the sensitive and intelligent answer ; if that were the way the world worked, it would long since have stopped working altogether... We could do with more, not less, of that habit of mind which will look beyond the attempted solution of problems already evident to the attempted formulation of problems not yet distinguishable. That is the path which science fiction... is just beginning to tread, and if it can contrive to go on moving in that direction, it will not only have secured its future, but may make some contribution to the security of our own." I N The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction ( Ninth Series) (Doubleday), Robert P. Mills gives us sixteen stories, a smattering of short poems and an unfortunately large number of flatulent jokes in the "Adventures of Ferdinand Feghoot" series. The level is high, though the Old Reliables on his list -- Heinlein, Tenn, Bester, Sturgeon, Knight -- mostly turn in inferior performances. Heinlein's "All You Zombies -- " is a smoking room joke warped into the semblance of a story ; Tenn's Eastward Ho! with great labor nails down every implication to be found in the speculation that we may one day have to give America back to the Indians; Bester, The Psi Man only flashy ; Sturgeon is opaque in his exercise in metafiction, The Man Who Lost the Sea! and only Knight's What Rough Beast? has the simultaneous qualities of competence, power and scope that we have a right to expect from all of these. In What Rough Beast?, Knight creates what is probably his finest character, a mutant -- or perhaps a Messiah -- who can create worlds and destroy them. Good as it is, What Rough Beast? may not be quite the best story in the book. Two powerful contenders are Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, the rise and fall of a laboratory-produced superman, and R. M. McKenna's Casey Agonistes, a fantasy laid in the terminal lung-disease ward of a V. A. hospital. There are other attractive entries by Jane Rice and Avram Davidson, but there are also half a dozen of the Feghoot jokettes, in which some # words are used to enchain a sitting duck, at which a gassy pun is fired. (Sample: "Bards of a fetter flog to get 'er," says Feghoot of a whipping contest among pilloried poets with a virgin as the prize.) For comparison, Ace has just reissued the Third Series of the same, containing stories by Farmer, Gresham, de Camp-Pratt, Bester and Boucher, among others. The stories date from the series' sugar-coated period. They are charming, competent and guaranteed roughage-free. They are also quite forgettable. It may be that even Ferdinand Feghoot is not too high a price to pay for progress. Robert A. Heinlein's Methuselah's Children (Signet), not the best of the future histories but still a fine evening's reading. The first half is a tightly plotted, carefully detailed story of immortals among humanity, with their problems and plans. The second, unhappily, becomes a sort of wishy-washy travelogue... Bantam has reissued Agnew H. Bahnson, Jr.'s The Stars Are Too High, a story of a flying saucer which has not even the virtue of extraterrestrial origin to relieve its dullness... A more impressive reprint is Tom Godwin's Space Prison (Pyramid), which is his # Gnome Press novel, The Survivors. Godwin imagines that a band of interstellar pioneers, marooned on an almost uninhabitable planet by a conquering, superpowerful race of aliens, can in several centuries so improve their physical strength and resourcefulness as to gull, trap and finally defeat these aliens -- first their scout ship (with bare hands), ultimately their whole blooming empire. Now this is preposterous. Yet Godwin miraculously brings it all off. The people become real. Their scrabbling battle for survival excites compassion and respect. And, when they win, it is a most hardshelled reader who will not rejoice. Signet, under its new "Signet Classics" imprint, has put back in print sixteen fine books. Bronte, Dickens, Tolstoy and such make up most of their list, but among the sixteen are Gulliver's Travels, Virginia Woolf's delightful and strange Orlando, and George Orwell's Animal Farm. Each book contains a critical or reminiscent introduction or postscript, and the packages are handsomely dressed. cheat? In The Mind Readers (Doubleday), S. G. Soal and H. T. Bowden make no bones about it: They say their subjects esp. Said subjects are a pair of Welsh teen-agers with surly dispositions, a propensity for faking results when they think they can get away with it and a spy-proof secret code for communication between themselves -- the Welsh language, "which few Englishmen can ever learn." Nevertheless, their cheating seems to have occurred at only one brief period. (Youthful mischief?) Their dispositions and their bilingualism make the tests more difficult but do not invalidate them. And, over a series of more than # tests, the boys produced higher-than-chance recognition of astonishing reliability. These were not mere squiggles on the graph, six right, seven right. These were # out of #, #I out of # -- on two occasions, # out of # trials ! As reading matter, the book's minutely pettifogging precision of statement makes it downright tiresome. A redeeming human sidelight comes in the collection of commentaries by other parapsychologists appended to the book. J. B. Rhine was one of those invited to comment ; here, nettled, he thanks Dr. Soal for the invitation. It is, he says, "a compliment I appreciate. I say this because, in his private correspondence and published statements over the years, Dr. Soal has been, at one stage or another, one of the most harshly unfavourable (and, to my mind, unfair) among the critics of the researches with which I have been associated." And Dr. Soal's own researches, Rhine reflects, look "disproportionately large to him and the work of everyone else comparatively small and distorted... But, I am inclined to think, it may be that this very capacity for intense pre-occupation with one's own inquiry to the exclusion of everybody else's is necessary to this man." I N Strange World of the Moon (Basic Books), V. A. Firsoff combines a scrupulous reporting of virtually every recorded fact about our biggest and oldest satellite with an equally scrupulous but clearly mind-made-up weighing of the theories that explain them. The Moon did not, he says, come out of the basin of the Pacific. Its craters were not, he says, formed either by meteorite impact or by the flow of molten rock from Earth-type volcanoes. It was indeed something like volcanic action that did it, he says, but the differences are so considerable that he will not call the things "volcanoes" at all, preferring the coined word "lunavoes," vents from the Moon's interior which release gas and a sort of warmish mud. Firsoff's Moon is, as he says, "a living world, (not) the conventional idea of a ball of terrestrial rocky desert raised to a high atmospheric level and made to revolve once a month." It is a world of color (red, blue, green, violet, brown and yellow have all been observed) and of change (features disappear, markings alter shape and color). Firsoff has his own explanations for much of these curiosities, but he is also faithful in transmitting the theories put forth by others, including Pickering's conjecture that the changes in markings around the crater Eratosthenes may be caused by " 'small animals' moving at a rate of # inches per hour." To the lay reader Firsoff is most persuasive, and he is gifted with the most pleasurable capacity for being both complete and clear. Short of tomorrow's actual landings, this is the best estimate we can form of Luna, its terrain and (so says Firsoff, again fully persuasive) its very possible plant and animal life. Space and Philip K. Dick's Dr. Futurity combine in an Ace double volume of not quite total merit. Brunner starts with a pleasure-mad Earth, amply fed and served by colonies and robots. Earthmen spend most of their time in a wild carnival (described with ingenuity) and are viewed with great scorn by the other worlds in the Galaxy (invented with thought and originality). There are, however, in addition to the robots, certain blue-skinned creatures called androids, perfectly human in every respect save color and a complete deficiency of civil rights : they can be killed, tortured, enslaved. A son of an extremely wealthy Earth family forsakes pleasure and determines to end the abuses of the android trade. After some satisfactory adventures, though, Brunner's invention deserts him and the story takes a "surprise" twist which we cannot approve (as flimsy) and may not discuss (as giving away the payoff). An analogous fault mars Philip K. Dick's equally inventive Dr. Futurity. A #st century doctor is snatched by a time machine into a still farther future, the death-loving world of the year #, where his healing skill is considered a foul perversion, and he is at once entrapped into a complicated net of underground activities. The death-lovers have been constructed with attention to those corroborative details which give artistic verisimilitude, and thus Dick's narrative is neither bald nor unconvincing. It is quite convincing. It is even hairy. What flaws the story is a really excessive troweling-on of time paradoxes, so that most everybody turns out to be most anybody else... In mediocre stories neither of these endings would do any great harm ; but the bulk of these works is very far above mediocre. ume gives us a double dose of Harlan Ellison. One side is The Man with Nine Lives, described as a "novel." It might more aptly be called a bag of tricks. Its plot line is complicated beyond any reasonable demand an author might make on a reader, causing its hero to assume totally irrelevant identities and work toward totally unconnected purposes, apparently for the sake of using up some old wordage lying around in the form of unrelated novelettes. The flip side is a collection of small, violent short stories under the title, A Touch of Infinity. A feature of this collection is the introductory paragraph which Ellison has written for each story, giving us either insight into his creative process ("It is always wise for the writer to consciously haul himself up short by the shift key and write a change of pace story"), a comment on the vexed conflict between author and editor ("I let him stick his own title on it, and since it was better, anyhow, what the hell") or a glimpse of the early struggles of the artist ("Who the hell ever thought I'd wind up making my bread pounding a typewriter?"). The stories themselves are light-years above the novel on the other side. With less rope, Ellison succeeds in getting less tangled, and these are first-rate of their type. Their type is blood and thunder. There couldn't be a better tip-off system than mine -- it wasn't possible -- but he had one! off a legitimate man, but if they want to gamble that's another story. What I am is a genius, and I give you a piece of advice: Do not ever play cards with a stranger. The stranger might be me. Where there are degenerate card players around I sometimes get a call. Not dice -- I don't have a machine to handle them. But with cards I have a machine to force the advantage. The first thing is a little radio receiver, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. You don't hear any music. You feel it on your skin. The next thing is two dimes. You stick them onto you, anywhere you like. Some like to put them on their legs, some on their belly. Makes no difference, just so they're out of sight. Each dime has a wire soldered to it, and the wires are attached to the little receiver that goes in your pocket. The other thing is the transmitter I carry around. My partner was a fellow named Henry. He had an electronic surplus hardware business, but business wasn't good and he was looking for a little extra cash on the side. It turns out that the other little wholesalers in the loft building where he has his business are all card players, and no pikers, either. So Henry spread the word that he was available for a gin game -- any time at all, but he would only play in his own place -- he was expecting an important phone call and he didn't want to be away and maybe miss it... It never came; but the card players did. I was suposed to be his stock clerk. While Henry and the other fellow were working on the cards at one end of the room, I would be moving around the other -- checking the stock, packing the stuff for shipment, arranging it on the shelves, sweeping the floor. I was a regular model worker, busy every second. I had to be. In order to see the man's hand I had to be nearby, but I had to keep moving so he wouldn't pay attention to me. And every time I got a look at his hand, I pushed the little button on the transmitter in my pocket. Every push on the button was a shock on Henry's leg. One for spades, two for hearts, three for diamonds, four for clubs. Then I would tip the card: a short shock for an ace, two for a king, three for a queen, and so on down to the ten. A long and a short for nine, a long and two shorts for an eight... it took a little memorizing, but it was worth it. Henry knew every card the other man held every time. And I got fifty per cent. fish. They hardly felt they were being hurt, but we got a steady advantage, day after day. We did so well we took on another man -- I can take physical labor or leave it alone, and I leave it alone every chance I get. That was where we first felt the trouble. Our new boy was around twenty. He had a swept-wing haircut, complete with tail fins. Also he had a silly laugh. Now, there are jokes in a card game -- somebody taking a beating will sound off, to take away some of the sting, but nobody laughs because the cracks are never funny. But they were to our new boy. He laughed. He laughed not only when the mark made some crack, but a lot of the time when he didn't. It got so the customers were looking at him with a lot of dislike, and that was bad for business. So I called him out into the hall. "Skippy," I said -- that's what we called him, "lay off. Never rub it in to a sucker. It's enough to take his money." He ran his fingers back along his hair. "Can't a fellow express himself?" I gave him a long, hard unhealthy look. Express himself? He wouldn't have to. I'd express him myself -- express him right out of our setup. But before I got a chance, this fellow from Chicago came in, a big manufacturer named Chapo ; a wheel, and he looked it. He was red-faced, with hanging jowls and a big dollar cigar; he announced that he only played for big stakes... and, nodding toward the kid and me, that he didn't like an audience. Henry looked at us miserably. But what was he going to do? If he didn't go along, the word could spread that maybe there was something wrong going on. He had to play. "Take the day off, you two," he said, but he wasn't happy. I thought fast. There was still one chance. I got behind Chapo long enough to give Henry a wink and a nod toward the window. Then I took Skippy by the elbow and steered him out of there. Down in the street I said, fast: "You want to earn your pay? You have to give me a hand -- an eye is really what I mean. Don't argue -- just say yes or no." He didn't stop to think. "Sure," he said. "Why not?" "All right;" I took him down the street to where they had genuine imported Japanese field glasses and laid out twenty bucks for a pair. The man was a thief, but I didn't have time to argue. Right across the street from Henry's place was a rundown hotel. That was our next stop. The desk man in the scratch house looked up from his comic book. "A room," I said. "Me and my nephew want a room facing the street." And I pointed to the window of Henry's place, where I wanted it to face. Because we still had a chance. With the field glasses and Skippy's young, good eyes to look through them, with All the time I was wonderthe transmitter that would ing how many hands were carry an extra hundred yards being played, if we were stuck easy enough -- with everything money and how much -- all going for us, we had a chance, kinds of things. But finally we Provided Henry had been able got into the room and I laid to maneuver Chapo so his back it out for Skippy. "You aim was to the window. those field glasses out the winThe bed merchant gave us dow," I told him. "Read a long stall about how the only Chapo's cards and let me room we wanted belonged to know ; that's all. I'll take care a sweet old lady that was sick of the rest." and couldn't be moved. But for I'll say this for him, duckten bucks she could be. tail haircut and all, he settied right down to business. I made myself comfortable on the bed and rattled them off on the transmitter as he read the cards to me. I couldn't see the players, didn't know the score; but if he was giving the cards to me right, I was getting them out to Henry. I felt pretty good. I even began to feel kindly toward the kid. At my age, bifocals are standard equipment, but to judge from Skippy 's fast, sure call of the cards, his eyesight was twenty-twenty or better. After about an hour, Skippy put down the glasses and broke the news : the game was over. We took our time getting back to Henry's place, so Chapo would have time to clear out. Henry greeted us with eight fingers in the air. Eight hundred? But before I could ask him, he was already talking: "Eight big ones! Eight thousand bucks! And how you did it, I'll never know!" Well, eight thousand was good news, no doubt of that. I said, "That's the old system, Henry. But we couldn't have done it if you hadn't steered the fish up to the window." And I showed him the Japanese field glasses, grinning. But he didn't grin back. He looked puzzled. He glanced toward the window. I looked too, and then I saw what he was puzzled about. It was pretty obvious that Henry had missed my signal. He and the fish had played by the window, all right. But the shade was down. look for Skippy, to ask him some questions, he was gone. Evidently he didn't want to answer. I beat up and down every block in the neighborhood until I spotted him in a beanery, drinking a cup of coffee and looking worried. I sat down beside him, quiet. He didn't look around. The counterman opened his mouth to say hello. I shook my head, but Skippy said, "That's all right. I know you're there." I blinked. This was a creep ! But I had to find out what was going on. I said, "You made a mistake, kid." "Running out?" He shrugged. "It's not the first mistake I made," he said bitterly. "Getting into your little setup with the bugged game came before that." I said, "You can always quit," but then stopped. Because it was a lie. He couldn't quit -- not until I found out how he read Chapo's cards through a drawn shade. He said drearily, "You've all got me marked lousy, haven't you? Don't kid me about Henry -- I know. I'm not so sure about you, but it wouldn't surprise me." "What are you talking about?" "I can hear every word that's on Henry's mind," he said somberly. "You, no. Some people I can hear, some I can't ; you're one I can't." "What kind of goofy talk is that?" I demanded. But, to tell you the truth, I didn't think it was so goofy. The window shade was a lot goofier. "All my life," said Skippy, "I've been hearing the voices. It doesn't matter if they talk out loud or not. Most people I can hear, even when they don't want me to. Field glasses? I didn't need field glasses. I could hear every thought that went through Chapo's mind, clear across the street. Henry too. That's how I know." He hesitated, looking at me. "You think Henry took eight thousand off Chapo, don't you? It was ten." I said, "Prove it." The kid finished his coffee. "Well," he said, "you want to know what the counterman's got on his mind?" He leaned over and whispered to me. I yelled, "That's a lousy thing to say !" Everybody was looking at us. He said softly, "You see what it's like? I don't want to hear all this stuff! You think the counterman's got a bad mind, you ought to listen in on Henry's." He looked along the stools. "See that fat little woman down at the end? She's going to order another cheese Danish." He hadn't even finished talking when the woman was calling the counterman, and she got another cheese Danish. I thought it over. What he said about Henry holding out on me made it real serious. I had to have more proof. But I didn't like Skippy's idea of proof. He offered to call off what everybody in the beanery was going to do next, barring three or four he said were silent, like me. That wasn't good enough. "Come along with me," I told him, and we took off for Jake's spot. That's a twenty-four-hour place and the doorman knows me. I knew Jake and I knew his roulette wheel was gaffed. I walked right up to the wheel, and whispered to the kid, "Can you read the dealer?" He smiled and nodded. "All right. Call black or red." The wheel spun, but that didn't stop the betting. Jake's hungry. In his place you can still bet for a few seconds after the wheel starts turning. "Black," Skippy said. I threw down fifty bucks. Black it was. That rattled me. "Call again," I said. When Skippy said black, I put the fifty on red. Black won it. "Let's go," I said, and led the kid out of there. He was looking puzzled. "How come -- " "How come I played to lose?" I patted his shoulder. "Sonny, you got a lot to learn. Ill Jake's is no fair game. This was only a dry run." Then I got rid of him, because I had something to do. even looked embarrassed. "I figured," he said, "uh, I figured that the expenses -- " "Save it," I told him. "All I want is my split." He handed it over, but I kept my hand out, waiting. After a minute he got the idea. He reached down inside the waistband of his pants, pulled loose the tape that held the dimes to his skin and handed over the radio receiver. "That's it, huh?" he said. "That's it." "Take your best shot," he said glumly. "But mark my words. You're not going to make out on your own." "I won't be on my own," I told him, and left him then. By myself? Not a chance! It was going to be Skippy and me, all the way. Not only could he read minds, but the capper was that he couldn't read mine ! Otherwise, you can understand, I might not want him around all the time. But this way I had my own personal bug in every game in town, and I didn't even have to spend for batteries. Card games, gaffed wheels, everything. Down at the track he could follow the smart-money guys around and let me know what they knew, which was plenty. We could even go up against the legit games in Nevada, with no worry about bluffs. And think of the fringe benefits! With Skippy giving the women a preliminary screening, I could save a lot of wasted time. At my age, time is nothing to be wasted. I could understand a lot about Skippy now -- why he didn't like most people, why he laughed at jokes nobody else thought were funny, or even could hear. But everybody has got to like somebody, and I had the edge over most of the human race. He didn't know what I was thinking. And then, take away the voices in his head, and Skippy didn't have much left. He wasn't very smart. If he had half as much in the way of brains as he did in the way of private radar, he would have figured all these angles out for himself long ago. No, he needed me. And I needed him. We were all set to make a big score together, so I went back to his rooming house where I'd told him to wait, to get going on the big time. However, Henry had more brains than Skippy, I hadn't told Henry who tipped me off, but it didn't take him long to work out. After all, I had told him I was going out to look for Skippy, and I came right back and called him for holding out. No, it didn't take much brains. All he had to do was come around to Skippy's place and give him a little lesson about talking. So when I walked in the door, Skippy was there, but he was out cold, with lumps on his forehead and a stupid grin on his face. I woke him up and he recognized me. But you don't make your TV set play better by kicking it. You don't help a fine Swiss watch by pounding it on an anvil. Skippy could walk and talk all right, but something was missing. "The voices !" he yelled, sitting up on the edge of the bed. I got a quick attack of cold fear. "Skippy! What's the matter? Don't you hear them any more?" He looked at me in a panic. "Oh, I hear them all right. But they're all different now. I mean -- it isn't English any more. In fact, it isn't any language at all!" Skippy wouldn't lie to me ; he's not smart enough. If he says he hears voices, he hears voices. Being a genius, my theory is that when Henry worked Skippy over, he jarred his tuning strips, or whatever it is, so now Skippy's receiving on another frequency. Make sense? I'm positive about it. He sticks to the same story, telling me about what he's hearing inside his head, and he's too stupid to make it all up. There are some parts of it I don't have all figured out yet, but I'll get them. Like what he tells me about the people -- I guess they're people -- whose voices he hears. They're skinny and furry and very religious. He can't understand their language, but he gets pictures from them, and he told me what he saw. They worship the Moon, he says. Only that's wrong too, because he says they worship two moons, and everybody knows there's only one. But I'll figure it out ; I have to, because I have to get Skippy back in business. Meanwhile it's pretty lonesome. I spend a lot of time down around the old neighborhood, but I haven't set up another partner for taking the card players. That seems like pretty small stuff now. And I don't talk to Henry when I see him. And I never go in the beanery when that counterman is on duty. I've got enough troubles in the world ; I don't have to add to them by associating with his kind. The Arctic Sea was deadly in every way -- its icy water , crushing ice, avid beasts. Still something there was more lethal than these ! smoke drifted across the comfortably lounging enlisted men in the air-conditioned compartment of the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine, as they sat watching Barney. Sweat streaming from his swollen-veined forehead, hurried and grotesque in his black rubber diving suit, exploding triumphant curses like under-; water demolition charges, Barney finished tightening the control cables of what resembled a torpedo with two open cockpits. "This time the little I gal raises her hydroplanes!" At this contrast of men, the Murderer had to grin, but carefully in order not to sweat and ruin the insulating qualities of his three woolen layers of longjohns. The submariners seemed quiet-talking and cooperative, as well adjusted as sardines in a can. The diver, Barney, was foul-mouthed and fiercely individualistic, a wonderful guy -- his diving buddy. A legend in his own time, Barney was reputed to have arisen from the mine-strewn waters of the Korean coast at the time of the Wonsan-Inchon landings to give advice to General MacArthur. As an TJnderwater Demolition Team diver, Barney dated clear back into the Murderer's childhood recollections of World War II, to dim names like Kwajalein and Guam, where former Seabees became combat divers to wire and blast Japanese underwater obstacles and leave welcoming signs for the Marines. Barney was only quiet about two things, his age and his circumference. He still fancied himself a baseball catcher, and his stubby fingers showed the deleterious effects of grabbing at foul tips with a bare hand, but those same fingers could expertly repair a wristwatch and the automatic transmission of an admiral's car and hock one and "borrow" the other. Barney had managed to put his homely younger sister through college and was now maneuvering to marry her off to a lieutenant commander on the staff of Admiral Rickover. And he could expertly joke the fears out of his diving buddy. Winking at his comfortably smoke-filled audience, Barney dumped a sack of non-magnetic tools into the forward cockpit of the minisub he personally had built, and cocked his head. "Murderer, here, is hoping the villain is a sea serpent. Don't laugh, you sea horses. The latest scuttlebutt from Alaska has it that every time a picket buoy goes dead out here under the ice, the last sound it broadcasts is a sort of toothy crunch." H E pushed the joke a little further. "Turn your periscopes on the blade Murderer's wearing! John Paul Jones used to issue those for cutlasses! Murderer's hoping to fight the sea serpent hand to hand." His grin widening with embarrassment, the Murderer felt called upon to retort. "I'll give you a better suspect for stealing our picket buoys. Santa Claus. These are his territorial waters. Are you aware that in the Middle Ages Santa Claus was the patron saint of thieves?" "Now, Mr. College Boy," Barney began, "you just want to show us you also studied history, not just marine biology. This boy will even tell you a long Latin name for a little something that floats like dandruff in the water." A touch of pride appeared in Barney's voice. "He can tell you its whole life history and what eats it and why it's important and why it will be a lot more important fifty years from now when your kids will need a lot more food from the sea." There was a perceptible slowing, and the weird sound from the atomic submarine's heat-exchanger muted. Barney glanced at his pressure-proof watch. The Murderer tensed. "This college boy may look like a tennis player," Barney went on as if nothing had happened, "but in the water, when Murderer sees something swimming down there, he doesn't care how big it is. We were installing the broadcast aerial from a picket buoy up through ice, and Murderer had just retracted the magnesium flare pole, so I'm halfblinded. I look down. I see something so big I want to get out of there on a bicycle. But down Murderer swims with the magnesium flare in one hand and his cutlass in the other. It's a shark as big as a small whale. The flare hypnotizes it, and round and round they go, with Murderer stabbing away, letting in sea water until that shark bugs out of there like a bare-bottomed boy from a swarm of bumblebees !" The Murderer studied his depth gauge to cover his embarrassment. The reason the shark had been so big was that it belonged to a species with the whale-like habit of straining the water for minute crustaceans. It was harmless and had winced from his first thrust. Then its shagreen hide had tensed to armor-toughness, and it had been like trying to stab a submarine. It left because it had no reason to stay. "I'm relieved," one of the submariners laughed, "that stabbing fish is how he got the name Murderer." "Not only fish," Barney went on enthusiastically. "This boy almost got himself court-martialed. We're working from the icebreaker, out from Point Barrow, diving from a whaleboat, and before the Annapolis ensign can say a word Murderer's over the side. We put our face-plates in the water. He's bubbling down on a walrus! I swear, he rides it like a bucking horse. You need a long blade in the arctic. And ugly -- when we bent a cable to that walrus from the icebreaker, the walrus stalled the winch !" "What about tusks ?" a submariner's voice asked. T HE Murderer had been well aware of tusks. For three days he had been studying the walrus herd with fascination. These staring-eyed, noisy mammals were living in icy water that would numb and kill a man in a few minutes. Some of them were diving to clam beds more than two hundred and fifty feet down, where their bodies were subjected to a pressure of more than eight atmospheres. In shallower water where cockles predominated, he had actually observed them raking the muddy bottom with their tusks and rising with great disintegrating masses of mud and shells between their flippers. Few men had ever seen that. He marveled at the evolutionary process by which some primitive land mammal of the Eocene Period had become the walrus. W HY he had swum down and attacked a walrus, he did not know. Afterward he felt ashamed, not just because it was a dumb thing to do and he'd had three ribs cracked and should have been killed; not because it was a show-off thing, with sailors urging him to stand in front of its hoisted body so they could take pictures for their girl friends ; not because Barney lost his appetite for a couple of days and didn't seem very eager to dive near the herd. What bothered him was the indescribable feeling he'd had as he swam down with his knife to the walrus, a feeling closer than hunger... "When we get back. I'll show you the photographs," Barney was insisting proudly. "When they assigned this boy as my diving buddy, they sent his name along. Murderer. If it swims. Murderer will go down after it, they said. And they weren't lying." But that was not how the name originated. Sitting there in the drifting cigarette smoke, feeling the sweat soak through his longjohns, the Murderer wished the submarine's commander would hurry up and decide on a position, let them out of the boat, get it over with. Probably by now, even the guys who were in U.D.T. training with him believed he got the name by murdering fish. They gave the name to him, but it was during an orientation meeting with diagrams and graphs and talk of megatons and current-borne radioactivity and a model of an atomic depth charge on the table. An incredulous revulsion had come over him, this mindlessly mechanical can of death that could poison, could gling years of life, all wasted, single-celled ancestors, diatoms, copepods, wondrous fish. During the discussion, he had kept exclaiming: "It's murder! It's murder!" This was how he had acquired his name. "Hey, Murderer," one of the submariners laughed. "You should cut off a sea serpent steak for the skipper. I bet he'd go for one." "Speaking of murderers," the Murderer blurted, suddenly detesting the name, raising his clean-cut, angrily intelligent face, flooding his longjohns with angry sweat, "you all are potential murderers -- on a big scale. Let's say ten thousand victims apiece. I kill a few fish, so I'm a murderer? But you are all gears and cogs of a mass production murder mechanism called a Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine. An impersonal machine that -- " "Not impersonal," the commander's voice said clearly as he came into the compartment. "This boat is just another tool f or survival -- like a shield or spear. Men make the decisions for it." to ease the tension, "You want us to bring you any ice cubes, Commander?" The commander's gray eyes studied Barney's red-veined ones. "Just bring yourselves back, Barney. We'll settle for that." He touched the minisub. "All I can say is we think we're in the sector where the picket buoys shorted out. There've been such meager appropriations for hydrographic surveys in the Arctic Ocean, we haven't a very clear picture of fathometer landmarks even in this sector. So the navigator has depended pretty heavily on his dead reckoning and inertial navigation. What I'm getting at is don't spend too much time looking. Use conservative search patterns. Give yourself plenty of margin to find your way home to us. We'll do our best to hold this position." Slowly, the commander smiled. "We'll keep the coffee hot until you get back." The Murderer watched them roll the minisub along on its cradle and into the chamber. From the stem, the minisub looked less like a torpedo. Instead of the compact round propeller blades associated with high speeds under water, the minisub had long narrow blades which might have looked more appropriate on a Wright Brother's airplane. These would unwind through the water so slowly there would be no cavitation, no tell-tale bubbling sounds. "One last thing," the commander said, including the Murderer in his gray gaze. "No aggressive action. If you should meet -- someone -- break off contact in a dignified manner and come home." Strangely, the commander smiled again and glanced at his watch. "Right about now, my two kids are waking from their afternoon naps and running out into the backyard in their underpants to swing on the swings. No aggressive action, O.K.?" The Murderer felt thankful he was not the commander -- with the responsibility for sixteen hydrogen-warheaded Polaris missiles on his back. Weighted down by his air tanks, the Murderer crawled into the chamber beside the minisub and reached into the stern cockpit. He unreeled a few feet of the red wire and plugged it into the chest socket of his electric suit warmer. Out there, you couldn't search very long without battery heat from the minisub. Automatically checking his full-face mask, he connected with the black wire and tested his throat mike, earplug circuit. "One -- two -- three -- " "Four -- shut the door," Barney's voice croaked weirdly. For complicated two-man disassemblies underwater, the traditional hand signals were not enough. The minisub acted as a telephone exchange. sub, Barney plugged into the telephone connection in the wall of the chamber, giving them the word. From the way the Arctic Ocean firehosed into the chamber, the Murderer guessed they had at least a hundred feet of water standing on them. This captain had no intention of smashing his periscopes on pack ice. Wryly, the Murderer grinned while the water crept up his body. He knew the limiting factor in their search for a picket buoy, any picket buoy, was the survival time in their air tanks. As for the minisub, it had the capability of keeping their corpses warm for several hours thereafter. With its gyroscope efficiently clicking commands to the rudder, it would maintain a straighter course than any man could steer. If it could eat fish and reproduce itself... The waterline rose above his glass face-plate. On the curved ceilings of the chamber, the air shrank into a squirming bubble. The pressure had been equalized. There was a cold metallic screech as Barney opened the outer hatch into the Arctic Ocean. Valving an additional hiss of compressed air into the minisub's forward flotation tank, the Murderer gave it a gentle push and rode it out, his hand on the air release valve now to prevent the increasingly buoyant minisub from falling upward against the white-glaring underside of the ice pack. "There's a hell of a current up here," Barney's voice croaked. The Murderer glanced down, and his free arm clutched the cockpit in an anthropoidal fear-reflex of falling. The water was that clear. Down there, the submarine seemed to drift away like a great dirigible in the wind, but the Murderer knew the minisub was actually doing the drifting. "Tinker carefully with your gyroscope, Mr. Navigator," Barney laughed, "and we'll go take a look for your sea serpent." He gave Barney a straight course into the current. The Murderer had had nightmares of being lost under the arctic ice pack. "Keep an eye peeled on the ice," Barney muttered, but the Murderer kept both eyes on the instruments and gave Barney a one-hundred-eightydegree change of course, trying to determine the speed of the current. "One way's as good as another," Barney laughed. Unfortunately, this had to be a visual search. The drawing-board boys had designed the picket buoys so they would not be detected, and thoughtfully made them selfdestroying in case they were. If anywhere near, a submarine would be recorded, and the under-ice warning system had actually worked against their own submarines. But the picket buoys in this sector, one by one, had died without a warning sound except, as scuttlebutt would have it, a toothy crunch. "This pack ice has changed," Barney's voice muttered. Barney and the Murderer had been one of the diving teams out there when a submarine ejected the buoys beneath the polar ice. A buoy would squirt from a torpedo tube. When the non-magnetic float struck the underside of the ice. metal rods clutched upward like the legs of a spider clinging to the ice. A thread-like cable lowered the tiny instrument capsule into the depths. The capsule's small size was intended to foil typical mine detection sonar, while the float was supposed to merge with irregularities of sonic reflection on the underside of the ice. Some admiral had even ordered the floats painted white, but they still cut off light and appeared dark from beneath the ice. ed a quick hole through two or three feet of pack ice and extended the whip-like aerial into the polar air, headquarters could keep track of the drifting buoy's location. Intermittently, for the classified number of years the batteries were supposed to last, each buoy would broadcast its own identification code, only coming through with a high wattage warning when its instrument capsule in the depths of the Arctic Ocean was awakened. The joker here, the Murderer thought, was that the aerials might be hard to see, but any simple fool could make himself a radio location finder. Live buoys could be hunted from the surface ice. "How dry I am," Barney's voice croaked unmusically, "how dry I be, nobody knows -- nobody cares -- " Now the white underside of the ice drooped in downward bulges, indicating thicker masses of old ice that had been frozen into the pack. The Murderer saw the gray outline of driftwood entombed in this old ice. "Drift ice from the Siberian rivers," Barney croaked. "When we planted the picket buoys, our sector didn't have any of this." The Murderer looked down at his instruments, preparing to change course. "My God, look!" Barney's voice croaked, and his black rubber arm pointed upward. The Murderer's breathing stopped as he made out something quivering up there. "What is it?" "Animal, vegetable or mineral," Barney wheezed. "If it's animal, I don't want to be around when whatever laid these eggs comes back." Swaying up there on the underside of the ice in a gelatinous mass at least twenty feet across, it resembled a mass of gigantic frog's eggs. But the Murderer decided there was too great a variation in size for them to be eggs. Those nearest the outside of the mass seemed clearer, more transparent, than the surrounding gelatinous substance. The Murderer's excitement began to fade. "They're not eggs," he said disappointedly. "I think they're only bubbles encased in some sort of soft plastic." "Mineral," Barney said with some relief in his voice. "Now I see that dark part in the middle has the shape of a can. The bubbles must be to float a mine or secret mechanism," his voice ended excitedly. Barney wanted nothing to do with live things; he liked mechanical devices that clicked and buzzed and could be taken apart and then put back together. He eased the minisub up toward the gelatinous mass. "Don't bring the minisub too close," the Murderer gasped, imagining a mechanical click as the impersonal gadgetry within the can detected their approach and cocked the lifeless steel prongs of a detonator. Barney laughed in excited contrast. "Even our air tanks are non-magnetic. Or if it's hydrophonic, the noise level to set it off would have to be plenty high, because of all the crunching sounds every day in the ice. I'm going to find out what it is." Barney rose from his cockBehind all science fiction is a stranger-than-fiction science truth. Stimulus is a dynamic new book for the intelligent layman, with a dramatic analysis of the facts of science today--and an enlightened projection into the mystery of science tomorrow... The nation's leading science now, for the aware layman, student, or technical man. The colorfully illustrated, hardcover volume contains chapters on space technology, basic research, energy and civilization, and psychology in today's industry. It discusses the past, present, and future history of rocketry; the power of the seas; machines that perceive; and many other exciting subjects which provide the key to understanding the present and future of "science. Order stimulus for # now. ( normally #.) science-minded -- proves truth really is stranger than fiction. Stimulus is published by industrial research -- a bimonthly magazine for creative engineers and executives in all fields of science. research , you'll be able to take with a # year subscription. pit, trailing his green-stained canvas bag of non-magnetic tools. "You're not going to cut into it, are you?" the Murderer cried. "That's what the taxpayers pay me for -- to protect them from -- you name it. Murderer, you sail the minisub off until all my telephone cable is out. Just like when we practiced disarming our picket buoys, I'll tell you every move I make w "If it's a mine," the Murderer said, "I'll be as flattened as you." "Take notes on your navigational pad. I'll start with a little experimental cut into the jello. We can't go off and leave this thing; we'd never find it again. And it wouldn't be exactly smart to tow it to our submarine until we know what its insides are supposed to do." arm was sawing vigorously up and down. "This jello's tougher than it looks. Very ingenious. I'll bet this was a compact little bundle when a submarine ejected it into the water. Probably sea water makes it swell -- and chemicals fizz inside so that the bubbles appear and float the can up to the underside of the ice. "This is important," Barney's voice croaked on. "I've come to some thin shiny wires. They seem to be all through the jello and to curve back in toward the can." The Murderer clenched his hand. He could feel the tendons and imagine the wonderfully intricate nerves of his living hand. He'd been frightened many times under the sea. Occasionally divers talked about which way they'd rather go. Nitrogen narcosis was popular among the heavy drinkers. Barney's choice -- a nice close mine explosion because it would be so quick. They thought the Murderer was crazy when he said he'd rather be eaten by a Great White Shark than smashed by some miserable explosive gadget. "Now I'm spreading two wires apart," Barney said calmly, "but I've left a layer of gelatin around each of them. I will not cut the wires and I'll try not to let them touch eaeh other." Gradually his head and shoulders disappeared up into the gelatinous mass. "Don't snag your tanks or regulator on a wire," the Murderer breathed. "Now I'm cutting within a few inches of the base of the can." Only Barney's kicking the cut -- and I'm going -- to open a -- chimney." Bubbles emerged from the side of the swaying mass. "Suppose this thing is atomic," the Murderer said. "It would crush our ballistic missile sub from here." "This is peacetime, boy. Nobody's fool enough to let an atomic mine go drifting around with the ice." The Murderer looked down at the hard metal shell of the minisub. You could blast and smash it, and it would still be metal. You even could vaporize it, and its atomic particles would be somewhere -- or changed into energy -- but nothing really lost, because it had never been alive. The Murderer thought of the commander's two kids waking from their naps. It had taken that far, and it all could be lost. Right now, was Barney committing aggressive action? He thought again of that orientation class where they theoretically learned how to disarm an unexploded atomic depth charge. He had expressed his feeling that these atomic charges were murder. The fools had laughed and begun calling him Murderer. "The bottom of this can is as blank," Barney said, "as a sailor in one of those modem art museums. I'm going to cut my way along the side of the can and see what I can see." A little fish, perhaps lost from its school, peered into the Murderer's glass faceplate. Its wondrous eye grew inquisitively larger, and he operating cells that made up its eye and optic nerve and receiving brain and the marvel that the individually driftago could have achieved this. There was a contradiction, he thought. He was amazed by life and yet he speared fish. Did he enjoy feeling life wriggle on the end of his spear? "I've reached the top," Barney's voice croaked. "There's a rod here -- get this, a vertical rod. It extends up into the ice like with the aerials of our picket buoys. I knew it wasn't a mine. This is how they plan to detect our atomic submarines. This will make a very interesting present for Admiral Rickover -- " At this instant there was a darkening slap against the Murderer's mask. His eardrums burst inward. His intestines squeezed up into his chest from the force of the underwater explosion. He blacked out. I CE water seared his face. He was drowning. Convulsively, his hand groped for his mask. The glass was intact. His hand dragged the mask back to a proper fit upon his face, and compressed air forced out the sea water. He could feel the telephone cord pulling at his mask. Everything was blinding white, and he realized he was belly up beneath the ice. "Barney?" The telephone wire began to drag him down head first, and he went down it hand over hand toward the slowly sinking minisub. "Barney?" Further down, he saw Barney's black rubber suit spread-eagled and sinking, and he swam clumsily down past the minisub. He clutched Barney's black rubber arm and dragged it toward the minisub. The black rubber suit seemed to have no bones. Everything drooped and swayed as he tried to fit Barney into the stern cockpit. When he wrapped Barney's wires to tie him in, they came face to face. There was no glass in Barney's mask. The glass had burst where the face had been. Barney's death. Dragging himself into Barney's forward cockpit, he valved air into the minisub's forward flotation tank, raising the torpedo-like nose. It was then that he saw them up there, silhouetted small and frog-like against the blinding white ice, two divers. The two silhouettes were looking down at him, and he knew they had been attracted by the explosion of their gelatinous picket buoy. He looked all around for the dim gray outline of their submarine, but there was no sign of their "home," and his gaze concentrated with wide-eyed intensity on their black paddling shapes as his minisub rose from the depths. He saw them exchange hurried hand signals. They began to swim away, side by side, their fins fluttering rapidly now. They were swimming a definite course, and still there was no sign of their submarine as his minisub inexorably gained on them. Now that he had reached their altitude, he noticed they were already tiring. One diver looked back, then swam frantically to catch up with the other. Like a slow fighter plane, the minisub came in on them from behind, and one diver pushed at the other. They again exchanged hand signals, losing yards to the minisub, and one began to swim hard while the other turned back, facing the minisub, raising his hand in what appeared to be a courteous military salute. The minisub kept coming straight at him. Then the diver spread his arms in a gesture of peace. The minisub's torpedo-shaped nose rammed his belly. Unsheathing his long blade, the Murderer struck. As the diver wriggled, the Murderer withdrew the blade and struck again. Air bubbles streamed from the diver's chest with each exhalation of breath as he backwatered. His expression seemed mild surprise as the Murderer struck a third time, driving the blade down between the man's neck and collar bone, pushing him deeper. The next blow smashed the mask. Belatedly, the man's hand flurried, seeming to clutch at his bubbles as he sank. The Murderer looked up. Far off under the ice, the other diver had stopped, was looking down, watching, and the Murderer held up his blade as a signal and turned the minisub upward, after him. This diver took evasive action among the downward bulges of old Siberian ice and suddenly vanished. Although there was no sky glare in the water, the Murderer supposed the diver had found an open lead in the ice and would rather freeze to death, or at least put up a fight from the edge of the ice, than die in the water. minisub's flotation tanks, the Murderer steered it rapidly up into the oddly round, oddly dim lead in the ice pack. At the edge of his mask-vision he glimpsed a longish tubular shape suspended in the water, but the minisub was rising too fast for him to get a good look. The overbuoyant minisub bloomed above the surface and sloshed back, rolling unsteadily while the film of water slid off his mask without freezing and he saw. The white blur became the biggest twin-rotored copter he had ever seen, squatting there on the ice, white except for its glass. Then his eyes were attracted by motion, by the parka-clad men hauling the surviving diver up on the ice. Other darkish figures were simply standing there, some of them beginning to point. Behind them was a smaller helicopter with the loop-shaped aerial of a radio location finder mounted atop its plastic dome. There was something wrong with the sky, and the Murderer realized it was not the sky. It was a vast white canvas dome, dimpling in the polar wind. The unnatural circle in the ice and the equipment grouped around it all were hidden from aerial observation. Pointing at him from the fuselage of the huge helicopter, and so close that his eyes had avoided it, was a metal boom with a hoist cable taut into the water, tethering something below the surface. Some of the men were running toward the huge helicopter now. In front of them at the edge of the ice lay shapeless bundles of what appeared to be black rubberized canvas, and he wondered fleetingly if these contained more of the soon-to-be gelatinous picket buoys. One of the figures was aiming something at him. As the Murderer let air out of the flotation tanks and swiftly sank, he realized it had not been a gun ; it had been a camera with a telephoto lens. He passed the tubular shape on the end of the cable. It was an anti-submarine torpedo. When he sank deeper, he passed a cylinder dangling from two black rubber-insulated cables. He valved compressed air back into the flotation tanks and came up under the ice, so hazardously close he had to duck his head as he steered a weaving course among the downward bulges of old Siberian ice. Even though he had been deafened, he felt the sonar pulsing against the ice, searching for him. Then he felt it knocking against the minisub, pinging against his air tanks, thudding accusingly against his bones. It followed him wherever he steered. He smiled blearily. This would be the ultimate if they unleashed the expensively intricate homing torpedo -- at one man riding a cheap minisub constructed by a bighanded, happily singing petty officer on his own time. He hoped they would waste the torpedo on him. If he had to be destroyed by a gadget, an infernal machine, at least it was better to be killed as an individual rather than in a group so large he would be nameless in death. Abruptly the sonar left him. They must have decided he was not going to lead them back to his submarine. Now they were hurriedly ranging for it. He cruised on and on with his dead cargo. Then he felt the echo of sonar from the submarine's hull. He must be close. The helicopter, with its sonar system lowered into the water like a fisherman's hook, had caught the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine. He could feel the submarine's sonar searching frantically. They would be sounding for another submarine. He could imagine horror on the sonar men's faces as they realized they couldn't detect anything at the apparent source of the unidentified sonar that had caught them. The submarine's sonar caught something -- him. it and found the submarine. Bow into the current, the gray undersea boat was still holding its position. The Murderer guessed the commander had decided that the best move was no move. Valving out air, he brought the minisub down, opened the outer hatch and dragged the minisub into the waterfilled chamber. A great weariness had come over him and it was all he could do to lock the hatch. He knocked on the bulkhead, while the persistent sonar pinging went on and on. Someone tapped very gently, although they might as well hammer with a wrench; it wouldn't make any difference now. The Murderer realized they were waiting for him to plug into the telephone socket and give his maximum depth and time spent there and other decompression data he hadn't kept. They intended to decompress him as if this were just another safe-and-sane training exercise. In the chamber lights, Barney's rubber suit had sagged over the side of the minisub like a black rag doll. The Murderer averted his eyes and plugged in. "One -- two -- three -- " he said automatically. "Barney?" "Barney's dead." "This is the commander. There is a submarine out there. For some reason, we can't locate it with our sonar. Have you seen it?" "Commander, it's a helicopter. They have an anti-submarine torpedo in the water." "I'm having difficulty reading you -- " "Helicopter. Anti-sub torpedo!" "Did they take any aggressive action against you?" "Depends on how you look at it. Their picket buoys are under here. Barney tried to recover one. It was boobytrapped to destroy itself." "Barney?" the commander's voice persisted. "I told you he's dead ! I got one of their divers." "One of their divers? He was attacking you?" "I killed him. He was trying to get away." There was a long pause. Only the persistent knocking of the giant helicopter's sonar reached the Murderer's ear. When the commander spoke again, it was as if murder had been done. "Do they know?" "The other one looked back. Sure they know. They know." "Then they may consider we're the ones who've taken aggressive action," the commander said slowly. "We'll have to wait. If we move off, their commanding officers on the spot may feel committed to local retaliatory action. We'll have to wait while they're radioing for instructions. We'll have to hope their side will decide to take this before an international court." "Court ? What sort of court? A murder court?" "Let's hope it's only one murder," the commander's voice came through distantly, We'll have to sit it out." As decompression began, the Murderer sank down beside Barney's body in the water-filled chamber. Superimposed upon the commander's two little kids, swinging on their swings, he saw the surprised face of the diver -- and even the little fish, lost from its school, and its wonof evolution waiting for a verdict of life or death. Looking Ahead? You must be, or you wouldn't be reading this magazine. Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and terrestrials and extraterrestrials. But what about looking ahead to:  Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF, the more free issues you get.)  Saving steps? 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Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe t.JW.  Scribe T.J.W. i San Jose, California  Please send me the free book. The Mastery  , of Life, which explains how I may learn to  i use my faculties and powers of mind.  i  Name I ! 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Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and terrestrials and extraterrestrials. But what about looking ahead to:  Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF, the more free issues you get.)  Saving steps? (A subscription brings IF right to your mailbox, irrespective of heat, cold, snow, rain, gloom of night -- and mailed flat, to boot.)  Saving time? (You get your copies at least a week before the newsstands receive theirs.)  Saving your temper? (IF can and often does sell out; with a subscription there's no need to hunt from stand to stand.) --  -- coupon --  --  --  --  --  -- IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the issue. I enclose (check one): # issues # # issues...# Foreign Postage # Issues #(K Additional Name Address City. P. O. Zone Stab Kangaroo Court Blake's future was dark. He had murdered his friend -- his life was forfeit -- and now he had to break the news to the corpse! I trying to relieve the roaring fuzziness. the aftereffects of too pel the nauseating impression many B-jolts, Greg Blake that the ship was under way, hauled himself groggily out of rather than sitting on its pad the bunk. He shook his head, at Spaceport. What a hell of a chargeover! He cast about in his memory for details of the night before. But he could only remember up to the third or fourth pleasure spot. After that there was a stubborn blankness, broken only by an isolated recollection of "just one more binge-jolt for the orbit." "Art," he mumbled, heading forward along the passageway. There was no answer from his partner. He rubber-legged it past the hatch, noticing it was securely dogged and accepting that as evidence that Thorman must be somewhere aboard. More fully in control now, he was aware of the intrusive thoughts festering in his head, ridiculing his charge-over. Boy , he sure tied one on! (That one evidently from a tracker in Operations Blockhouse.) (Suggestion of subvocal laughter from the Administration Section.) # would too if I had been in on their strike. Imagine -- two prospectors staking out a whole swarm of kitarium! Straighten up, Blake. How about a few more B-jolts? (That bit of derision from a ground crewman.) The buzzsaw of impinging thoughts whined away on the communicative level of Greg's consciousness. In the distance was a seething backdrop of telepathic reflection and conversation. It rose like an effluvium from teeming Spaceport City. It was a grating whisper of many confusing voices that could never be shut out. It was a blazing spotlight, forever obliterating all the shadows of privacy. In contrast to the fishbowl life and its mental pandemonium, he was convinced that the isolation of prospecting was Utopia. At the base of the companionway his foot struck a small object and sent it skittering across the deck. He stooped to retrieve it. A hand blaster. He stood there fretting over its half exhausted chamber. As he entered the control room he drew back. The blaster slipped from his hand. In an instant his chargeover was gone. Art Thorman lay there, dead, with his left shoulder and half of his head burned away. ND I guess I told him off, Maud. He -- (Abrupt astonishment.) Dead? Who? Where? Killed? With a blaster? How? Did you get that, Walker t Where' d it come from? Over on Pad Eleven. That Blake fellow. It's sifting through spottily. Blake? The prospector. His partner got burned down. You mean -- fatally ? Sure. Ain't you reading? Oh, Maud! It's horrible! Not a -- murder? (Almost hopefully.) Must be. A guy can't burn half his own head off and then toss the blaster out where Blake found it. Greg stood staring down at Thorman's body. The intrusive undercurrent of thought and paraspeech was like a faraway tide of anxious voices. A RT, dead. A victim of violence. It was almost incomprehensible! He had heard of crime before. There was that incident across the cluster thirty years ago, when a man had taken his wife's life on a space yacht -- despite the consequences he would have to (and did) face when he got within the telepathic range of others. But this was something else. It was vividly personal and horribly close to home. And that only made it all seem all the more unreal. He could sense the wave of shocked attention that was traversing Spaceport City. And, in its wake, a deluge of discordant, demanding voices descended upon him. You killed him, Blake! "No!" he protested, not realizing that he was vocalizing. "I couldn't have!" It's your blaster, an anonymous accuser pointed out. "But that doesn't mean -- " The hatch is dogged shut. You saw that yourself fust a few minutes ago. There's nobody else in the "Why would I kill Thorman? He was my friend!" His eyes remained on Art's body. Most of the city had quieted down to listen. You touched down here a week ago and filed claim on a sizable kitarium strike in Hound's Tooth Nebula, someone reminded. That made you and Thorman rich. Now you're twice as rich. "But I'd have known I couldn't get away with a -- crime !" Nobody else could have done it, Blake, a new accuser blared out. Greg shrank away before the ruthless speed of justice in an empathic society. Once, these things took inexorable time. But now suspicion, indictment, trial, verdict and execution could all be carried out in minutes. "If I had killed him I'd remember it!" You were in a charged-up stupor. That's why we didn't have a chance to stop you. Completely unpremeditated. Or maybe at the last minute you did intend to kill him. Whether he wanted to or not isn't the issue. The fact is that he murdered his partner. And he's got to pay. L lKEf thunder rumbling against distant hills, accusation and threat churned the psychic background. They were a counterpoint to the direct inquisition. The prosecution was rushing ahead with ruthless speed. Dismayed, Greg turned to run. But the compelling force of a thousand imperious, soundless voices shackled him where he stood. A life for a life. The gun, Blake -- pick it up. The punishment must fit the crime. There was an overpowering indignation in the expressions of communal conscience that overrode his own awareness and left him without will. He groped along the deck and found the blaster. Then he swung its barrel toward his temple. The silent words, magnified by a psycho-amplifier, exploded like a giant's bellow. They commanded stark silence. What further proof do we -- Quiet! The Monitor is speaking! Thousands of determined voices rose in protest. But, in deference to the Monitor, the greater psychic background reflected only indecision. II HE toneless voices stayed with Greg -- admonishing, taunting, accusing, demanding to know whether his lack of knowledge of the crime was the result of a charged-up stupor or some unprecedented scheme to escape punishment. Greg was a lean, serious person with a straightforward face and a slightly receding hairline. That he could have murdered Art Thorman, his closest friend for more than a decade, was inconceivable to him. The hell it is! challenged a nearby tormentor. You did it and you probably know you did. Lay off, Marl. Give him a chance, like the Monitor says. Greg waited until the cremator's apprentice arrived before he left the ship. By skipjump relay through sympathetic minds, he had located the crematorium, out of telepathic range on the other side of the city, and had himself arranged for the final convention, knowing that Art had no relatives. Passing through Spaceport Lounge on his way to the Monitor's office, he shrank before the heavy incrimination and denunciation that assaulted him from all sides. At the transit platform, he engaged an air car whose driver was an elderly man with a broad expanse of glistening scalp. As soon as they were airborne, the latter offered, I don't think you did it. "Thanks," Greg said without enthusiasm. The driver, too, switched to vocalization : "Edna, she's my wife -- " but Greg had already ascertained the relationship from the other's mind -- "she says, 'You can bet he's guilty.' But you take little Algernon now. That's my boy. He's a good judge of character, even though he ain't got his complete telepathic faculty yet. He says -- " Greg? Recognizing the identity behind the tentative contact, Greg tensed. Yes, Virgil. What do you want? I want to help . You never wanted to help before. But you're in a jam! Maybe there's something I can do for you now. Greg sensed the driver's discovery of the telepathic exchange between himself and Virgil Blake. And he felt the man politely turning his attention elsewhere. I know I haven't been an ideal brother, Greg. But that might be as much the result of your own hot-headedness as of my possessiveness and domination. Sure. You always wanted everything I had -- from Estrella on down. Let's forget her. She isn't even in the picture any longer. No, Greg told himself. Virgil had gotten tired of her after he proved he could step in and take over. That bit of resentful reflection didn't get by Virgil. Maybe it was because you were always so damned independent that I acted that way. And Greg detected nothing in his brother's conscious that indicated other than wounded pride as the basis of his past hostility. ished-chrome expanse of Spaceport City glittered in twin suns. Down there were moment preoccupied, were vigilantly anticipating the time when they might jump in on the kill -- in the name of righteous vengeance. That's why I want to help, Greg. I'm a psychiatrist. I know. One of the top professionalists in the system. But they won't let you do anything to block justice. Indeed we won't! came an obtrusive thought. We'll see to that! You're damned right we will! echoed a chorus. Greg ignored the pointed interruptions. What's your proposition, Virgil? I don't think Bjolts can produce so severe an intoxication that a man will have no memory at all of what he does -- especially if violent death is concerned. So? I suspect either subconscious repression or induced amnesia. Induced amnesia? Yes. And if that's the answer, it means somebody else is involved. What do you suggest? Psychoanalytic exploration. Seeing whether you're unconsciously holding anything back. Again, Greg searched the other's mind for ulterior motive. Why should a brother, with whom he hadn't even had telepathic contact in fifteen years, suddenly be overflowing with solicitude? Instantly, he detected Virgil's pang of aggrieved reaction. It was a genuine emotion that carried heartfelt regret for the years he had neglected his younger brother. It was a discovery in the nakedness of Virgil's mind that made Greg feel warm and grateful. I don't blame you for being suspicious, kid. Virgil magnanimously dismissed the misgiving. When do we start? The other's thoughts were becoming weaker as the air car sped on toward Administration Plaza. Virgil was rapidly slipping out of normal telepathic range. I'll get in skip-jump contact with you first thing in the morning. And, Virgil -- if I'm repressing the memory of a horrible crime, I want that to come out too. I don't want you trying to hide it to save me. I couldn't, kid. If I established anything like that, the first person to read me afterward would know it. That's good. If I killed Art, intentionally or even accidentally, I deserve everything that's coming to me. He was that kind of a guy. The luxuriantly landscaped Administration Plaza achieved picturesque definition as it surged up to meet the descending car. Surrounded by towering, steel buildings, the park and its complex of official edifices were things of unadorned beauty, devoid of harsh inscription and directional signs. In range of the various buildings' psychocasters, Greg began receiving subtle impressions of identity, volunteered items of information and instruction. These are the offices of the Monitor of the Consensus, softly intoned a slender, graceful structure north of a sparkling pool, the whisper of recorded thought purring pleasantly into his receptive mind. He concentrated on the building and its psycho-emissions and was rewarded, in due time, with the rest of the information he sought:... office of the First Assistant Monitor is situated on the Twelfth Level. The Monitor himself will be found on the Sixteenth Level, South Wing. Reading the destination from his passenger's reflections, the driver swerved his car abruptly and put it down on its air cushion in front of the main entrance. car slip away, then regarded the building before him. Get on with it! someone prompted. You're wasting our time too! another watcher reproached. Let's find out if you're guilty! Instantly, a myriad offensive, prodding voices were welling up in his conscious. "All right!" he shouted. "I'm going!" He started across the terrace, his concentration falling back to the scene of violent death in the ship and punishing himself for not being able to remember what had happened. Then, suddenly he felt as though he were betraying himself by admitting that, through some weird circumstance, he might have killed Thorman. Of course he couldn't have done it ! He was a fool to stay here and subject himself to indignity and unjust inquisition, The moment he found Art's body he should have blasted off to safety -- before the Consensus had a chance to decree his execution! A pandemonium of outrage exploded on the receptive level of his conscious as knowledge of what he had just thought was passed from mind to mind with meteoric speed. He stiffened, waiting for the grip of compulsion to seize him. But, even though the Consensus was swiftly crystallizing into a potent weapon of vindictiveness, he remained free. He watched horrified, however, as the air car he had just left swerved sharply from its thousand-foot altitude, plunged to ground level and hurtled directly at him.  can't stop it, Blake! came the desperate apology of the driver. It's not me! It's the Consensus! Greg broke and lunged for the building. The car streaked for him, accelerating close to Mach One, and he hurled himself to the ground. The cyclonic tailwash of the vehicle rolled him over and over like a dry leaf. Gaining altitude, it screamed around in a tight turn and dived once more. But its brakes came on abruptly and it shuddered to a halt only feet from where he lay. Then it drifted off, like a predatory beast suddenly finding its prey out of reach. Now Greg was aware of the furious confusion of voices coming to grips in the psychic background. That proves he's guilty! Absolutely! No, it doesn't! He wanted to escape! You read that, didn't you? Might have been just a normal fear reaction. My foot! But he still doesn't have any conscious memory of the crime. Naturally. He's repressed it. Then why would he feel an impulse to run? Subconscious motivation. Tubewash! I say kill him -- now! No, wait. Remember what the Monitor -- Launch the Monitor! It's time we took matters in -- Greg picked himself up and, not knowing whether he'd even be allowed to reach the Monitor's office, pushed on into the building. the suite's psychocaster gently emitted: You are now in front of the office of Felco Irwan, Monitor of the Consensus. He went in and was immediately confronted by a tooslim blonde in tight-fitting secretarial garb who had unobstrusively read his approach. This way, please, she beamed politely. Seated behind the broad desk in his inner office, Felco Irwan was an imposing man with a double chin and florid jowls. His face was the type which, under less formal circumstances, might have managed some sort of a smile for the occasion. Please be seated, Mr. Blake, he instructed. I'm glad to see you're still alive. "Why?" Irwan respected the choice of oral communication. "Because it shows our people know how to temper instinctive justice with an insistence on doing what's right, even though this is our first experience with crime." "I didn't run into much temperance a few minutes ago." "You're still around, aren't you?" The Monitor did manage a smile this time. Despite his sluggish appearance, he was spitting out his words with a rapidity that gave Greg little chance to probe ahead and see what he was going to say next. In the telepathic background, there was a patient silence. Those interested watchers within range were merely listening to see what would develop next. But their anxiety was like a heavy mist. "So I'm still alive and I'm here," Greg summed up dryly. "What now?" Irwan leaned forward on the desk. "I received a number of skipjump reports on your contact with Virgil Blake. Good man. Good psychiatrist. Glad to see you're going to let him work you over. As a matter of fact, proposing some form of psychotherapy was one of the two reasons I asked you up here." "And the other reason?" I'm Elar Rousted. And I'm Stafford Waverly. "They are the other reason," the Monitor disclosed. Greg identified the origin of the two contacts as being in another suite of offices across the Plaza. I'm the Chief of Police, Ronsted expanded. The other added importantly, And I'm the Detective. Confused, Greg stared at the Monitor but asked of all three, What is Police? What's the Detective? That stumped us for a while too, Ronsted confessed while Greg began to piece together a physical picture of the man from his elements of self-regard. We always thought our offices were nonfunctional, the Detective explained, until the Monitor told us we had a job to do. Greg wanted to know, "What's all this got to do with me?" "Police," the Monitor offered, "used to be an armed force within a community. That was in pre-empathy days, when crime flourished in psychic privacy. It was their job tq protect the community from the criminals." And the Detective was the official who outsmarted the criminal, Waverly interjected. After a crime was committed he found out how it was done, why and who did it. Greg sensed the prideful expansion of the Detective's chest. , "This, Mr. Blake," said Monitor Irwan solemnly, "is an unusual crime. We might call it an anachronism. And it's my judgment that primitive methods of resolution are warranted. I therefore assigned Chief Ronsted and Detective Waverly to the case." You may count on my -- ah -- department, sir. And Greg received the impression of a meaningless gesture -- a stiff hand snapping up to Ronsted's forehead. We'll get our man, Waverly vowed. "The Chief and his Detective will contact you later, Blake," Irwan assured. Ill night. He had feared at first that the prying voices of the watchers, their ranks swelled by thousands with early evening hours of idleness, would drive him to distraction. As it was, for more than an hour they immobilized him with demands for details of cere introspection was futile. There remained only a chronological blank between the height of their celebration the night before and his awakening that morning. Softening, the watchers eventually allowed him access to the ship's jolt bar. And they had no objection when he dialed a light soporific charge and took hold of the electrodes. After that, sleep came quickly. With his mental activity dropping to a subconscious plane, he found complete release from the telepathic pressures that had harassed him all day. Before leaving the next morning, he gave the interior of the ship a quick inspection, conscious of the snowballing presence of watchers eager to be tuned in while he revisited the scene of the murder. He circled wide around the blaster, which still lay in the passageway, and went on into the forward compartment. Staring at Thorman's empty control chair, he realized for the first time what a severe loss Art's death represented. It would be a long while before he could restore equilibrium to his until-then orderly existence... even if they gave him the opportunity to try. A few silent commentaries came through: Hypocrite! Whose leg are you trying to pull? That won't get you any sympathy! Assassin! Murderer! But, all in all, there was mostly a respectful silence. Which doesn't mean we're going to throw you any hearts and flowers, someone was quick to point out. Greg opened the personal storage compartment under Thorman's chair. He found nothing of value except an orderly array of E-records. Absently he withdrew one of the cylinders and glanced at the date on its tag. It was only a little over a week old. Thorman had evidently recorded his ego structure the day they touched down. He no doubt had wanted an accurate duplicate, as of that date, for reference and interrogation. Bringing the cylinder over to the playback unit, he slipped it into the deposit slot and turned on the switch. Then he waited while the stored impressions, knowledge and personality traits transferred themselves to the circuits and retentive cells of the replay "brain." Thorman," the speaker hissed, "as of the Thirtieth Day, Seventh Month, Fortythree Hundred and ThirtySix." "Art, this is Greg." Circuits in the unit evaluated the greeting, matching it against the associative references in the recording, and came back with: "This is a little unusual, isn't it -- you playing back my personal recording?" There was no resentment, only curiosity in the question. "Yes, I suppose it is." "Anything wrong?" When there was no answer : "Am I out there with you?" "No, you're not." "I thought it was customary to replay a recording only in the presence of the subject," Art reminded facetiously. "You're -- dead, Art." There was an abrupt interruption in the background hum of the speaker. "What happened?" "You were -- murdered." "Impossible ! Those things don't happen." "It's true." "How?" "A meteor blaster. In the control compartment here." "Who did it?" "They say I did." Laughter. "Now I know you're joking." Then gravity. "You serious?" "Dead serious, Art. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come here with my troubles." "No. That's all right. After all, this is just a recording. No subjective appreciation. If it seems otherwise, it's only because I took pains to make this an authentic duplicate. The murder -- how did it happen?" "I don't know. I found you here in the control compartment. We had been out on a bender." "When was this?" "Night before last. On the sixth, a week after we touched down. We went out on a Bjolt tear." "Like we promised ourselves we would." "And I blanked out before the night was half over. The next morning I was back in the ship. It was locked on the inside. No one else was aboard. You were dead." "Tell me everything that's happened since then." Greg went painstakingly into the details. When he finished, the speaker said, "You are in a hell of a mess." "It's even worse than it seems. I -- " Gregory Blxtke. Open in the name of the moral code. It's a Police! T HE hatch swung back on a quite small and lean, but erect man whose appearance altogether contradicted the physical impression Greg had gotten from his telepathic contact with Chief Ronsted. Every man's got a right to a personalized conception of himself, Ronsted asserted. Then he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. This is Detective Waverly. The Detective's mouth was set in a grin which, Greg read from his mind, was characteristic. He was a lanky man with a thin nose that cleaved a pair of dense brows. Where's the body? he asked anxiously. I'd like to inspect... The crematorium! Already? Say, isn't that destroying evidence? The Chief assured him that normally it wouldn't be since, under the system of telepathic detection and communal prosecution, the content of anyone's memory was considered sufficient evidence. He wasn't quite sure, however, what special considerations applied in this ease. Waverly nodded densely and followed the Chief down the passageway and into the control compartment. The Detective grinned more broadly, drew a thin cylinder of what appeared to be compressed limestone from his pocket, knelt and began sketching the outline of a sprawled human form on the deck. You'll have to concentrate, Mr. Blake, he admonished, if you expect me to get this silhouette down accurately. Sure you're doing it right? Chief Ronsted asked. Then, in an oral aside to Greg, "We spent half the night in the library, boning up on the lost art of detection. Like the Monitor said, this calls for an anachronistic approach." Radiating an absorbed degree of intrigue, he produced from his pocket a circular magnifying glass, patently a museum piece. For want of a better object of study he trained it on a grease stain on the deck. When Greg's prevocal reflection identified the spot for what it was, Ronsted returned the glass to his pocket with no little amount of embarrassment. "My purpose here, Mr. Blake," he said stiffly, "is to ascertain whether the victim made any recent E-recordings and... On the thirtieth? Good ! Where did you say... Oh, it's already on the playback unit!" Waverly's chalk stick broke and he rose, his brows pinched together as he glowered at Greg. That recording, sir, is material evidence. I hope you haven't biased any of its contents by misuse. When he read that Greg hadn't, he added an exclamation of relief : Splendid! T HE psychic medium was dense now with the avid attention of thousands who had hastened to tune in on the unprecedented scene of applied criminology. Many of them, too, had evidently "boned up" on ancient methodology. Look under Blake's fingernails, someone advised. How about detaining everythem one at a time? Throw a tail on the suspect. Don't you think you ought to call in the (unconcealed pretentiousness) meat wagon? Let's have a stakeout. Ask him where he ivas on the night of the sixth. Ronsted stretched his small frame to its full height. Quiet! If I don't have order I'll black out the entire area and nobody'll be able to read a thing! There was an obedient hush and Greg asked, "What do you want with Thorman's Erecord?" "It might show where there were strained relations between you and the victim." "If there had been, you'd easily be able to read it from me." "Let's go in for a bit of deductive reasoning, Mr. Blake. The basic premise is that you murdered Arthur Thorman. Which is something we'll have to prove. Assumption Number Two" -- he held up a second finger -- "is that you've found some way to, ah, beat the rap, as they used to say. "That presupposes that you've discovered how to isolate a segment of your thought processes. If you are able to mentally throw a blanket over your memory of the murder experience, then it logically follows that you can hold back from telepathic scrutiny any recollection of trouble between you and Thorman that might have provided you with motivation." Waverly, who had gone out into the passageway, returned with Greg's blaster. He held it gingerly between thumb and forefinger. The murder weapon! Fine! Ronsted commended. Check it for fingerprints. The Detective squinted at the gun. How do you "take" a fingerprint, Chief? Damned if I know. suite was an elaborate facility in the personal services district. Greg was admitted by a pert young thing with tufted red hair. She read his identity and blurted her reaction, Blake himself! The killer! Gol-ly, a real nova! Then she composed herself. I'm sorry, Mr. Blake. I didn't realize -- Hussy! someone nearby observed. She ignored the comment and indicated the inner door. Dr. Blake is expecting you. Greg? Virgil's anxious query came through. Come on in. Were it not for Virgil's distantly familiar personality pattern, Greg doubted whether he would have recognized his brother. He still had plenty of hair, but it was streaked with gray and there was a gray-mottled mustache that hadn't been there before. Of course I've changed, kid. Fifteen years make a lot of difference. Greg gripped the other's shoulders. "Good to see you again." It's been a long time. Too long for brothers. After this mess is settled, we'll fix that. "You mean if it's settled." Virgil laughed and said against an inner background of sincerity, "You didn't do it. I'm confident of that. If you did, there were mitigating circumstances. You just aren't the type to commit violence." Greg eased into the leather reclining chair. What do we do now? We could rehash old times. But it's more important to get to work. He adjusted the chair to a more comfortable position. We're going to identify those mitigating circumstances. Then everybody won't be so anxious for an execution. Knock off the sentiment! came a sardonic thought. Let's confine ourselves to the murder! someone else proposed. Golrly, give them a chance. It's the first time they've seen each other in years. Virgil repositioned one of a pair of two-inch metal spheres that sat on small pedestals on the desk. Then he snapped on a switch protruding from the surface of the globe. The ever-present voices of the watchers were snuffed out. To Greg, it was as though he were back in the vast loneliness of Hound's Tooth Nebula without even Art Thorman within telepathic range. "Why are you using the Blank-Out?" "Psychojamming's standard procedure for this kind of work." "What's it for?" "Protection of the public. When we dig down into the subconscious we sometimes pull out things that don't make for very pleasant telepathic reception." Greg shifted position in the chair, content with his sudden isolation from the imperious curiosity of the masses. From its slot in the arm rest, Virgil pulled an electrode that trailed a heavy, insulated wire. "Ready?" He touched the prong to Greg's forehead and unconsciousness came immediately. the window, hands clasped rigidly behind his back, when Greg reopened his eyes. "How did it go?" The other exhibited a troublesome frown. "It's difficult. I can't say. I don't know whether I like it or not." "What did you find out?" "If you're actually repressing a distasteful experience, you're doing a good job of it." "Why should I want to cover anything over?" "Could be the promptings of a guilt complex." "Then it looks like I did it." "I won't say that. There are other aspects." "Such as?" Virgil went back to his desk. "You have a vague impression of a gun discharging. It's not clear whether you pressed the stud yourself, but it looks like you did." Perfunctorily, he snapped off the Blank-Out generator. "Well, hell! That settles it." Greg rose. "I shot him." Projected thoughts of the watchers returned instantly, descending like a gathering tempest. Blake shot him? He did it? Is he guilty? Wait a minute! Virgil's nearer subvocal emission overrode the rest. You're getting in on the tail end of a speculative conversation. Wait and hear what develops. Then let the Consensus take its course. "No, Greg," he continued, switching to oral delivery. "You could have fired that blast at someone else -- after he killed Thorman." General psychic surprise from all directions. "I also found something else in your subconscious -- an impression of the hatch opening and closing after you and Thorman returned to the ship on the night of the sixth. It could have been a valid remembrance -- or an hallucination. We'll have to have more sessions to find out. Will you come back tomorrow?" "If I'm still around." But Greg noticed that there was only confusion and uncertainty in the telepathic background. The Consensus was not yet taking definite direction. Absently, he fingered one of the two Blank-Out generators. "Who's authorized to use these things?" "The Monitor. Medical institutions where temporary suffering must be expected. Accident mop-up crews -- so they can block in an injured person's pain. Psychoanalysts." Greg stood there pensively. No, I'm afraid not, Virgil offered in response to his brother's further reflection. Nobody could have used a Blank-Out to cover up his actions during Thorman's murder. Not unless ever since the crime he has kept himself in the sanctuary of the generaltor's field so nobody could read his guilt. Greg hadn't realized Ronsted was one of the current watchers. He learned that when he heard the Chief emit: Make a note of that, Waverly. Get a list of everyone who has been issued a BlankOut. Greg started purposefully for the door. But Virgil called after him, "I'm worried, kid. If you're innocent, someone else is the murderer." "So?" Greg didn't bother to probe ahead into the other's prevocal preparation. "Then someone's counting on your prompt execution to square things with the Consensus. Right?" "I suppose so." "And, if he's still using a Blank-Out t o conceal h i s thoughts, he could at this very moment be plotting your 'accidental' death -- so the public will consider the whole case settled." office, the watchers closed in and immobilized him while he stood on a high-speed pediramp and zipped through the heart of the city. They picked his mind clean. Then, satisfied that they had all the details of the psychoanalytical session, they released him. Having long since passed his destination he had to transfer and backtrack. This just gets more confusing, said a discouraged watcher. We ought to execute him. But suppose he didn't do it? He fired the blaster, didn't he? Yes, but Dr. Blake said he might have fired it at the real murderer. Meteor fragments! He's guilty! Maybe not. Thus, in effect, the Consensus had tied itself in a knot. Still, Greg could draw no consolation from his temporary reprieve. For there was the ominous presence of an intractable, dedicated, opinionated segment whose brooding thoughts lurked in the psychic medium. They were already convinced of his guilt. And the unfortunate fact was that there were many the malcontents take justice in their own hands and relieve them of the responsibility. General sentiment ran something like this : What the hell! In ancient times, didn't the body politic invest its judicial interest in a representative jury of but twelve persons? The pediramp slowed and he got off, joining the press of humanity in the teeming central district. He tried to conceal his thoughts. But, thanks to his well-known (by now) personality pattern, he drew a constant barrage of curious stares and subvocal taunts. As best he could, he ignored them and halted before a lesser building whose psychocaster monotonously intoned, Substation of the Department of Legal Transfer. He hesitated at the entrance, reassuring himself that he had been wrong all along about Virgil. You're damned right you're wrong about Dr. Blake! a passerby echoed, testily confronting him. Another drew up. He's more than a brother. He's the best friend you've got! Three or four more persons crowded around him. Damned if I'd do as much for you. He has every right to wash his hands. It isn't every man who'd get involved in the mess you are in! Greg pressed past them and went on into the Substation. I want to transfer all my interest in Hound's Tooth to my brother, he told the clerk, in the event I'm not around to enjoy it. The man smiled warmly. Now you're doing the right thing by Virgil. IV had made an interesting discovery concerning mass attention. It was when he was physically isolated that psychic pressure was greatest. As long as he remained fully exposed, the city seemed to take it for granted that those nearby were keeping a close enough eye on him. Throughout the afternoon, conjecture over his guilt had continued to figure prominently in all the mental emanations within range. The hostile, opinionated minority had gathered converts. But the overall Consensus was still far from taking definite shape. Mentally weary from a full day of constant harassment, he stood at the edge of a lofty terrace and gripped the low handrail as he stared down into the chasm and watched the people below. Like microbes, they flowed along the pediramps and congested the streets. One of the suns had already set, leaving the early evening air with a chill. The other, huge and vivid, eased itself between distant spires and bathed his grim features with its ocher light. The first indication of danger was a subtle thought that raised itself above the jumbled background, There he is -- by the rail. Greg turned. Two men, leaving the terrace's pediramp transfer station, were advancing toward him. Watch it! warned one. He's reading us!' An elderly couple and a much younger man, standing along the rail, turned and came forward. Killer! Foul murderer! We'll give him what's coming to him! More than a dozen poured out of the building. As many more advanced from the opposite direction along the handrail. Still others followed the first pair off the pediramp. We don't want to waste any time! someone exhorted. We've got a sub-Consensus. Let's go! Their personality patterns sharply identified them as members of the opinionated minority. They fairly radiated unswerving dedication to his execution. Greg sidled along the rail, letting the metal tubing slip through his moist hand. Abruptly, he turned and ran. Get him! Don't let him escape! Everybody in the background-come on in! Push! Lock him in! His plodding feet were instantly sucked down in an invisible mire. He stood rooted to the terrace's tile surface. You killed Thorman! You found a way to keep from being read! Admit it! Beyond his immediate captors, there was a tense, watchful silence throughout the psychic medium. Everyone within range had become avid watchers. In the chasm below, there was no motion on the streets. The dense shadows of the buildings were mottled with the whiteness of unturned faces, all anxious to witness the summary execution. I didn't do it! he insisted. The hell you didn't! Climb up on the railing! Climb! Climb! Climb! N OT knowing how he got there, Greg found himself precariously balanced on the horizontal tubing. And the minority had pressed in much closer physically. Jump! Jump! Jump! He stood there trembling, feebly resisting the mass will. Everybody in the background -- together -- push l But his paralysis lessened almost imperceptibly. I don't think it's right (from somewhere in the street blow) .  don't either. Jump! Jump! What kind of do-nothings are we? We going to let a handful decide for the Consensus ? We shouldn't, should we? Of course not! Shove off, Blake! Leap! No, Blake -- don't do it! Everybody get with us and help! I'm not. I'm going to help Blake. Me too. I'll do my part only when I know he murdered Thorman. That's the way I feel. When I execute, it's going to be as part of the true Consensus. Get down, Blake. No! Jump! Don't do it! Let him alone! The bond of minority control slipped away gradually and, eventually freed, Greg did a balancing act on his lofty perch. But he finally managed to reach down and Secure a grip on the rail. Themselves under the pressure of direct compulsion mow, the self-appointed executioners opened their ranks and cleared a path for the intended victim. Numbly, Greg slipped through. horror of near death, Greg wandered about the city on the low-speed pediramps for hours. The second sun had long since set when finally he made his way back to Spaceport. He was still unable to order his disorganized thoughts. In the ship, he cast himself on his bunk. Despite the persistent curiosity of a handful of callous watchers he dropped swiftly into an exhausted sleep. He hadn't slept long, though, when someone had him by the arm and was shaking him insistently. Wake up, Blake. Chief Ronsted hovered over the Bunk. Couldn't contact you, so I figured you must be asleep. The hatch was open. I came on in. Greg struggled up. What do you want ? He had no specific reaction to the inevitable fact that the watchers were even now tuning in to hear what would transpire. The diminutive official perched on the edge of the opposite bunk and leaned forward, forearms resting casually on his knees. "Can you imagine what would happen if someone were to devise a way to permanently conceal part or all of his conscious thoughts?" Greg shrugged. "He'd buy himself a lot of privacy." "That's not what I mean," the Chief said, annoyed. "He could wreck civilization ! There was a time when society monitored itself with cordons of armed wardens who apprehended criminals and protected the innocent." "We do better than that row," Greg countered."Crime doesn't even have a chance to take the first step." "Exactly!" Ronsted agreed. "As a result, we haven't needed armed protectors for a couple of thousand years. Which means there's no provision at all for stopping a criminal who could work outside the 'open mind' framework." "I see what you mean. If he could permanently shield part of his mind, he could plan and execute all the crimes he wanted to." You've got the picture. "But that could never happen," Greg said confidently. "Whenever your so-called culprit began conceiving of a way to hide his thought processes, his intentions would be read. He'd be committed to an institution for reorientation." The Chief pensively pinched his chin. "Perhaps not." He continued silently, On a prospecting jaunt, you usually parked your ship on the edge of a congestion of nebular matter. Right? "Why ask me? I can see that you already got that information from Thorman's Elrecord." "Then you both struck out in different directions and set up collapsible bases. Frequently you were isolated from each other for weeks on end, during which time you had to use radio communication. You were beyond telepathic range." "That's right." Greg read what was coming next. Ronsted pushed on, "During those periods of pure isolation you could have conceived of a way to wall off a section of your conscious mind, couldn't you?" "I'd have to be a genius if I did." "Nobody said you aren't." "That's ridiculous ! I -- " "For the sake of argument, let's say that while you were in Hound's Tooth you did discover a way to blank out part of your mind. That means you had several weeks to refine the method, to realize how much better off you'd be if you had Thorman's share of the strike too... and to plan his murder." Greg reared erect. "I'd have killed him out there and said he died accidentally !" "Maybe so." Ronsted headed for the door. "But perhaps while you were still there you didn't get any further, criminally, than making the intriguing discovery that there was a way to outwit society. It's possible that you didn't until after you touched down here." The Chief's reasoning was full of holes. Greg told him as much as he disappeared down the passageway. But, still, the prosecution had made another point. The jury had a new element to mull over. Greg sensed Ronsted's pausing in the passageway near the control compartment. I'd like to replay Thorman's E-record, the Chief emitted. Don't mind me. It's only my ship. V A wakening long before sunrise-A, Greg was at once conscious of a restlessness in the city. It was too early for more than a relative handful of the population to be up and about. But those who were tuned in were desperate to get in contact with him. The silent voices descended like an avalanche. We've finally got you! Now we know you're guilty! As soon as we can muster the Consensus, that'll be it, Blake! Greg was off the bunk instantly. "What in hell do you mean!" You can't hide your guilt any longer . We know all about it. Ronsted got Thorman's recording to admit you two had a sqiuibble. Thorman says you even threatened to kill him. "That's impossible!" See for yourself. The record's still there. He hurried down the passageway to the control compartment. In the far corner, the "on" light of the playback unit burned 'faith 'a steady on all night! Sorry, the Chief's familiar thought pattern came through.  guess I forgot. Apparently he was sticking with the case on an aroundthe-clock basis. Indeed I am. It's all cleared up now, though -- except for disposition by the Consensus. The Detective has finished his check of all Blank-Out holders. All the generators were accounted for. Those in use were turned off while their owners were questioned telepathically. There isn't anybody hiding his guilt in a Blank-Out field. Leave Thorman's record alone! Greg warned. It's the last one he made. I don't want any of the impressions blurred or distorted. "Anybody in here?" the playback speaker asked. "It's Greg." "Thought I heard someone. Have you been in here since Ronsted left?" "I haven't been here since yesterday. Why?" "Somebody has. I heard him moving around. Stayed about an hour." Greg glanced out the compartment and down the passageway. He could see now that the main hatch was still open. Ronsted had found it that way the night before and had left it that way. "Who was it?" "I don't know. I called out but he wouldn't answer." Greg finished fastening the clothes he had thrown on. "Never mind. I've got something more important. Did you tell Ronsted we had an argument?" "I had to. He said if I didn't co-operate, he'd take the recording in for micro-analysis." "What did you tell him?" Greg was already beginning to feel trapped. "Exactly what happened. How you fairly flew out of orbit in Hound's Tooth when I radioed that I was going to come over to your outpost for a couple of days." Greg was thoughtfully silent. "I hope you understand," the record continued. "Ronsted would have gotten the information anyway in microanalysis and -- " "What else did you tell him?" A pause. "That you threatened to kill me." Greg sensed the flurry of anxiety in the background as he turned olf the playback unit. The steadily mounting number of watchers had greedily drunk in his conversation in the recording. Don't you see? he demanded. Thorman's E-record was tampered with! None of that stuff ever happened! The hell it didn't! You're lying! "How could I lie?" he pleaded. "You'd read the truth if I tried to deceive you !" Like Ronsted said, you learned how to wall off part of your conscious. It's all over, Blake. All the evidence is in. You're guilty. the Monitor's amplified Don't you see what he did? someone emitted. He figured out a way to shield a section of his mind! TO. "It's not true!" Greg insisted. Greg, listen. This time it was his brother. You've got to get over to my office before the Consensus builds up. I'll meet you there. There may still be a chance. Pick up all the E-records Thorman cut since the beginning of the Hound's Tooth trip. Greg started to pry behind the words and see what Virgil's plan was. But the Monitor broke in again : Swiftly, Greg flipped the restorage switch on the playback unit and waited until all the impressions and personality features had been transferred back to Art's ErecordL Then he snatched the cylinder out of the slot and thrust it in his pocket. He lunged for Thorman's control seat, reaching for the door to the compartment beneath, where the other records were stored. But he pulled his hand back instinctively. Something was wrong. Eventually he saw what it was. The high-tension lead extending from the deck to the control column had been wrenched loose and had flopped back down against the seat, as though someone had tripped over it and jarred it loose. If he had touched any part of the chair or its storage compartment he would have been electrocuted. What was it Virgil had said? "He -- the real murderer -- could at this very moment be plotting your 'accidental' death so the public will consider the whole case settled." Knock off the intrigue! We see what you're doing. You tvant us to believe somebody else is involved. Thorman's recording, Greg reminded himself, had picked up a new impression during the night -- the sound of someone moving furtively about the compartment. Now he knew why. You're not confusing us. Not any more. If you can wall off a section Of your conscious, you could certainly use the privacy to plan a fake death-trap for yourself. You want us to believe the Consensus is aiming at the wrong suspect. It took only a minute to reconnect the cable. Then Greg scooped up a handful of Thorman's records and lunged from the compartment. T HE door to Virgil's suite was ajar, as though purposely left that way to save time. Reading ahead, Greg saw that his brother had already arrived. He swept through the unattended outer office and found Virgil bustling about the inner room. He had just snapped on the E-record playback unit and was now adjusting one of the Blank-Out generators. He glanced around and saw Greg. Thorman's records. Did you -- The generator warmed up to full output. Its sphere came alive with a soft, silvery glow, cutting off Virgil's emission, Greg held up six cylinders. "These cover the past four months. I have the most recent one in my pocket." "Good !" the other exclaimed. "Bring them over here and we'll get to work." Greg stepped into the compact Blank-Out field, leaving behind him the gathering psychic storm. "What are you going to do?" Virgil accepted the six cylinders. "If Thorman's last record was biased with false impressions, then it's possible that several before that one were modified too in order to build up a case against you." "What if they were?" "Then I'll want to examine them psychoanalytically. We might get an idea as to the identity of the conditioner." He punched the "total erase" stud on the playback unit. A confusion of syllables stumbled over one another getting out of the speaker, as all the circuits and retentive cells purged themselves of lingering reflections from the last record. The final few words rumbled off almost indiscernibly into a bass nothingness,... use a rout-out... everything about it... Greg looked down at his hands. "Everybody's convinced I murdered Thorman. I don't have very much of a chance." "I know that. But I think we can prove you're innocent." "The Monitor," Greg went on, "believes I may have killed Art, then repressed the traumatic experience. I'd like another session in that chair to see if he's right." "We'll just be wasting time! Even now the Consensus could be -- " "I'll take the chance. If we find out definitely that I'm not guilty, then I'll know where I stand." Virgil ran a hand tentatively over his face, disheveling his meticulously groomed mustache. "All right, kid. We'll give it another try." sciousness, Virgil was staring down at him in an expression of confused disbelief. "Well?" Greg prompted. The other backed off and leaned numbly against the dosk "I killed Thorman?" Greg guessed. Virgil nodded. "But how? What happened?" "It wasn't pleasant. Both of you were practically out with Bjolts. It wasn't premeditated, though -- if that helps any." "I want to know everything." "You both came in looping. You stumbled around the control compartment looking for the portable B-jolt bar for 'just one more charge.' You found the meteor blaster instead. You laughed and shouted, 'There goes one with a vein in it! Watch out! I'm going to blow it into the next cluster!' " "And -- ?" "You fired wildly." "And hit Thorman." Virgil stared at the floor. "It was late. Nobody was close enough to the ship to be reading you casually. You passed out a few seconds later and that was that." Greg rose and paced between the chair and the desk. He remembered having told himself at one time that if he'd killed Thorman he would welcome execution. Yet, somehow, at this moment the idea of death didn't seem as unobjectionable as it had then. "I killed him," he whispered. "But it wasn't premeditated, kid. Maybe the Consensus -- " "The Consensus operates on the eye-for-an-eye principle." He went back to the chair. "I repressed the memory of the murder?" Again Virgil nodded. "It was pretty horrible. Art Thorman, your friend, with half his head blown off. Even as you slept in a B-jolt stupor, pangs of remorse and guilt were at work. It was a hell of a subconscious conflict. You wanted your punishment for survival instinct was strong too. So you repressed the whole thing. Compunction won out in the long run, however, and even though you were hiding your guilt from yourself and everybody else, you were also trying to trip yourself up." "The death-trap?" "Yes, the death-trap. You set that yourself -- when it appeared for a moment that you might have a chance of escaping justice." Greg drew erect. "But what about the argument on Thorman's E-record? I'm sure nothing like that happened!" "Evidently it did." Virgil went over and stared out the window at the city coming to life in the first rush of morning. "I didn't go too deeply into that." "But why don't I remember it?" him. "I don't know what that was all about. But this much seems clear : When you were out in Hound's Tooth you had a run-in with Thorman over something. Or maybe you were simply suffering from space fatigue. Whatever it was, you threatened to kill him." He spread his hands in further explanation. "Now, a threat to kill is closely reitself. It would be my guess that when you repressed the ner, you went a step further and also buried the recollection of having at one time threatened him." Greg dropped back in the chair and sat with his elbows on his knees. He couldn't shake off the conviction that them now -- were all lurking immediately beyond the Blank-Out field. When Virgil turned off the generator, justice would be swift and impersonal... There was a sound at the door and the frazzle-haired secretary-assistant burst in. Her face lit up joyfully as she brought her hands together. "We're going to have an execution!" Greg and Virgil exchanged pointed stares. "The Consensus just finished jelling!" she went on. "Isn't it wonderful? It's going to be a full-dress affair on Administration Plaza. And we've just declared a Grand Holiday!" She glanced at Greg. "Golly, Mr. Blake! Aren't you thrilled?" Then her eyes darted in Virgil's direction. "Can I have the day off, Dr. Blake? Can I get in on the excitment too?" He muttered consent and she was gone. Greg said, "I'm not going to sit still for this." "I don't see anything else you can do." "Maybe I can get out of the system." He stared at the pair of Blank-Out generators. "You don't think you can -- escape?" Greg stepped closer and said, "Sorry." Then he rocked Virgil's head back with a blow that carried all his strength and weight. He lifted his brother into the chair and touched the electrode to his head. The light somnicharge would keep him from being read for at least half an hour. To make doubly certain, he turned on the second Blank-Out generator after he had slipped the first under his tunic. VI T HE glowing silver sphere made only a slight bulge beneath his clothes as he left the deserted building and stepped into the street. It was a desolate scene. The city, so close and towering, seemed remote, lonely. Moreover, the hidden generator not only jammed his own mental processes, but also walled off the thoughts of the populace, adding to his sense of utter isolation. He rode a deserted pediramp for a mile before reaching an air car platform with a driver and vehicle that somehow hadn't joined the rush to Administration Plaza. Overhead, that exodus had taken the shape of a sky-darkening flight converging like the spokes of a wheel on the execution site. The driver whirled around in surprise as Greg stepped up and touched him on the shoulder. "Say!" the man exclaimed suspiciously. "How come I can't read -- ?" Greg slipped his hand in his pocket and gripped Thorman's E-record. He thrust the cylinder's blunt end forward until the material of his tunic stretched taut under the pressure. "I've got a meteor blaster," he warned. "I'm Blake." "The -- killer!" Greg forced him into the car. "To Spaceport. And stay close to the surface." The trip took only a moment. Even as he lunged from the car and raced for his ship, Greg could imagine the frenzy of communicative thought that driver's mind. He slammed and dogged the hatch and pushed on to the control room. For a moment, while the drive circuits warmed up, he vaguely wondered how far he would have to go before he found one of the quarantined, nontelepathic worlds. That's what it would have to be. For, if he wound up in another free-reading society, they would only complete the kangaroo proceedings. Impatiently, he leaned over and checked the fuel gauge. "Damn!" he said. Almost empty! There wasn't enough left to lift the ship out of the atmosphere ! Finally achieving operational voltage, the view screen flicked to life and relayed the picture of thousands of cars blotting out the sky as they streamed from the city to Spaceport. Dismayed, he stumbled over to the gear locker and got another meteor blaster, thrusting it under his belt. As long as he had the Blank-Out to avert being forced to kill himself, he could hold them off -- until the sphere's stored power was completely exhausted, at any rate. He swept the ship's scanner in a full circle. The entire Spaceport landing area was packed with humanity -- all waiting for the exciting moment when the killer would be routed from his sanctuary, somehow, and brought to justice. that Greg rediscovered Thorman's E-record in his pocket. By now, the angry horde had begun valving off the steam of its frustration by pelting the ship with whatever they could get their hands on. Absently, he returned the cylinder to the compartment beneath Thorman's chair. It was then that he saw the other record lying on the deck, half hidden by the high-tension lead. He had doubtlessly knocked it out of the compartment when he had snatched up the handful of cylinders. He retrieved it and glanced at the date on the tag -- Twenty-third Day, Seventh Month. That was a week before Thorman had cut his final cylinder. Greg remembered the occasion now. They were wrapping things up at Hound's Tooth, getting ready to return home. He fed the cylinder into the playback unit and waited until it was ready for interrogation. "Art, this is Greg." He had to indulge his partner's characteristic reaction to finding someone else questioning his own recording. But Greg cut it as short as he could. "Something's come up concerning that argument we had at Hound's Tooth," he explained. "Argument? What argument?" "When you wanted to come over to my outpost and I told you to stay the hell where you were." There was a pause, then, "You're kidding, of course." "The time when I threatened to kill you." Thorman's record produced a laugh. "I don't remember anything like that." "Are you sure?" Greg backed off. "Of course I'm sure!" But there was a clear recollection of the argument on the recording Thorman had made a week later ! This, Greg realized despite his confusion, could only mean the later recording had been tampered with ! And, by extension, it was certain now that someone else was involved in Thorman's murder. And that meant -- what did it mean ? For one thing, maybe he hadn't set the death-trap for himself as an expression of his guilt complex ! Deep, disorderly realizations began to swim into focus. He went back to Thorman's control seat, staring dully at the cable which might have electrocuted him. If he had unconsciously set the death-trap, he asked himself, why would he have baited Thorman' s chair? It was unlikely that he would have had any reason to blunder, unknowingly, into that snare! His subconscious would certainly have been more practical. He would have rigged up something like his bunk, or his own chair. T HE communication screen in the Spaceport Administration Office flared to life, limning a picture of Greg Blake at the controls of the ship. There he is now! thought the Spaceport manager in excitement. He's on the air! added Chief Ronsted, who had been standing vigil in the room. Come out of that ship, Blake! Monitor Irwan ordered, forgetting Virgil had recently relinquished the information that Gregory Blake's mind was being blocked off by a stolen Blank-Out generator. The screen's audio amplifier hummed tentatively as Greg scanned the room and sighted Irwan. "I want to talk with you and the Chief," he said. "Come out of there, Blake!" the Monitor repeated. Ronsted added, "Turn off the Blank-Out!" "And get executed for something I didn't do?" "We'll flush you out sooner or later," Irwan promised. Ronsted's lean face formed an even leaner smile. "We've just sent to the Hall of Ancient Artifacts for a weapon that'll blow that ship to pieces." Greg spread his hands importunately. "All I want is a few minutes to talk with you and the Monitor." "Well, come on out and talk," Irwan urged. "I wouldn't make it past the hatch. You'll have to come here." "In your ship?" Irwan asked in protest, fingering his double chin. Of course we'll go there, Chief Ronsted beamed, with a tinge of amusement that didn't show on his face. We'll let him and talk. What do you mean? the Monitor asked. He can't read us now, not with that Blank-Out on. By going there we'll at least get him to open the hatch. Then we'll all rush him and grab the Blank-Out! hatch. That some development was imminent was indicated in the sudden silence. For the first time in hours, no missiles were pelting the ship. Eventually there was a hesitant rapping. He drew the bolts and, in one swift motion, swung the hatch open and thrust the meteor blaster out in front of him. The weapon covered Chief Ronsted and the Monitor as their faces froze in expressions of frustrated surprise. The scores who had pressed in close behind them, ready to spring, fell back at the sight of the blaster. "I thought you'd try something like this," Greg disclosed. "You gave in too easy when I asked you over." He waved them into the passageway, closed the hatch behind him and prodded them on into the control compartment. "What do you expect to gain by this?" Ronsted demanded. "Don't you see?" the Monitor said disgustedly. "He just wanted a couple of hostages." "Wrong." Greg ordered them into the control chairs with a wave of the blaster. Then he pointed to the playback unit. "I have one of Thorman's E-records in the slot. It was made a week before the one that supposedly incriminated me." "You're wasting our time, Blake," the Monitor said impatiently. "If you hadn't been covered by this Blank-Out field over the past few hours, you'd know your brother was contacted by thousands of us. He wasn't able to hold back one iota of truth. We know he succeeded in digging up all the information from your subconscious -- how you killed Thorman -- how -- " "This record," Gregg went on implacably, "has no trace of the argument Thorman and I presumably had in Hound's Tooth. That means the more recent recording, showing the argument, was faked." "You expect us to believe that?" Ronsted asked. Irwan leaned forward. "If this record is as you say, then you made it that way." "Let's don't get off on that jag again." Ronsted tried to rise, glanced at the blaster and sat down again. "Then why is it that the records you brought to your brother's office this morning contain recollections of the same argument?" Greg smiled bitterly. "I suspected they would -- by now. He's had plenty of time to impress false knowledge on them, just as he did on the most recent cylinder." "Blake, you're insane!" exclaimed the Chief. "Virgil had no Blank-Out on when we contacted him on his way here a few minutes ago," Irwan argued. "If he had done anything like that, we'd have read it!" I did something like that without anyone being able to read it!" Ronsted rose. "That was different! You had weeks of total isolation in Hound's Tooth to figure a way to cheat the communal conscience !" "Y #U ' LL find that Virgil, too, had all the time he wanted. You see, he was always envious of me when we were younger. He simply decided he wanted the fortune I made from that kitarium strike. "In order to get it, he came over here on the night of the sixth, carrying a Blank-Out generator. He banged on the ship until either Thorman or I let him in. He used a portable somnibattery to put me in a receptive trance. He killed Thorman. Then, using psychotherapeutic procedure, he buried in my subconscious the memory of having let him in the ship. There was also a posthypnotic suggestion to bolt the hatch after he left, and to forget that act." Chief Ronsted lunged up too, but held his distance in deference to the blaster. "That's ridiculous!" Greg waved them back into their chairs. "Virgil Blake might have made it easier on himself. He could have planted a false memory of the murder in my conscious mind. But, if he'd done that, he would have had no chance to play on my sympathy, win back my confidence -- and have me legally arrange for the fortune to become his after my death ! "That was the purpose of my first psychoanalytical session -- so he could plant the compulsion in my mind to think kindly of him and sign over my wealth. During that session he also planted the subconscious suggestion that I was to leave the ship's hatch open that night." "This," Monitor Irwan began, "is the most preposterous -- " But Greg plodded on, "After the legal transfer was effected, he used another Blank-Out to return to the open ship and set the death-trap. At the same time, he employed oral hypnotic procedure to put a false impression of the Hound's Tooth argument on Thorman's Erecord, just in case his trap didn't work. He deleted from the record all conscious recollection of that oral procedure. But he forgot to erase the impression of someone moving around in the control compartment. "I should have known he was the one who rigged up Thorman's personal storage compartment with the hightension charge! Wasn't it his idea for me to pick up Thorman's records and bring them to his office ?" "It was," the Chief admitted, "but that doesn't prove -- " "When I got to his office he finally had his opportunity to plant a false memory of the crime in my subconscious -- or at least to pretend he had found it there. At the same time he had to produce an excuse for having asked me to bring Thorman's recordings." Greg leaned forward, smiling tensely. "If I'd been alert at the time, I might have noticed something vital: Virgil had to clear some residual impressions out of his playback unit before he could use it again -- presumably to inspect Thorman's recent records for clues to clear me. "During that playback clear-out run, I caught a couple of fragments of speech: '... use a rout-out... everything about it...' If I'd been thinking clearly, I might have recognized that the words were Virgil's and I might have realized their significance."  just making it harder on yourself." Greg turned toward the communication screen, which he realized had been on for some time. It showed the interior of the Spaceport Administration Office. Virgil was in the foreground. "Don't you see," he asked, "that all this thrashing around you're doing is nothing more than the guilt complex-survival instinct conflict in your subconscious ?" "Virgil," Greg said patronizingly, "will you come over to the ship?" "I don't see why I should. I'd only be endangering my own life." Greg turned to Chief Ronsted and the Monitor. "I didn't think he would. He's laboring under a compulsion right now. Something's telling him not to do anything to betray himself." Ronsted was on his feet again. "Blake, you aren't making any sense at all!" "All right," Virgil said finally. "I'll come over, if you think it'll help any. But remember, I've heard all your accusations. And I'm not in range of any Blank-Out. Everybody in Spaceport City has read those insinuations through me. They watched my reaction. They all know my unspoken denials were sincere and truthful. If I had tried to lie they would have set upon me by now." Greg turned off the communicator. "He's going to come over," he told the two officials, "because he subconsciously fears that not to come might eventually cast some doubt on his innocence. He probably has another purpose too -- to look for an opportunity to kill me in self-defense." Chief Ronsted ran a hand distraughtly over his thin face. "I'm not going to sit here and -- " "Yes, you are," Greg said grimly. Virgil in the ship. He jerked open the hatch, reached out and seized his brother's wrist, snatching him in just as several persons, flattened furtively againt the side of the ship, grabbed unsuccessfully for his own swiftly moving arm. As he fired a warning shot to clear the entranceway, he ducked just in time to avoid his brother's lunging charge from behind. Then he slammed the hatch and dogged it. Virgil picked himself up off the deck and said, "I just wanted to take the blaster away from you." Greg smiled knowingly. "Of course you did -- the blaster and the Blank-Out generator. Then the Consensus would take care of the rest." He searched his brother's face. And what he sought was there, hidden deep in his eyes. In the range of the generator now, Virgil had undergone a subtle change. He didn't seem to be as aloof as before. And his stare was one of discernible preoccupation. He gave Virgil a shove and sent him ahead to the control compartment. Respecting the blaster, Ronsted and Irwan hadn't left their chairs. "I bring one Virgil Blake," Greg said affectedly, "forced here as a result of the obscure promptings of unconscious motivation. He's already had his try at blasting me -- in selfdefense, of course." Virgil started to say something, but Greg motioned him silent with the blaster. "When my brother came in on the communication screen, I was saying -- " "But don't you see?" the Monitor pleaded. "He couldn't have done any of those things without betraying himself the minute anyone got in contact with him." "That's what I tried to tell Greg," Virgil offered. But he was busy mopping perspiration from his face. "A few minutes ago in the Spaceport office," Greg said clearly, "he was telling the truth when he insisted there was no trace of guilt in his mind for anybody to read. But now he knows everything I said is true." Virgil backed off, perspiring more freely. "As I was saying," Greg continued "the playback unit in his office gave out with these fragments of speech as it cleared its circuits : '... use a rout-out... everything about it...' Do you know what a rout-out is, Monitor?" "Of course. It's an electronic instrument for destroying all the impressions on an E-record so the cylinder can be used again." "Exactly. Virgil's oivn record was telling him to use a rout-out and destroy . everything that had been deposited on that record, then forget everything about it. He was supposed to forget even the fact that he had made such a record. That order to forget was to apply except when he found himself in the range of a Blank-Out, as he is now. In other words, whenever it was evident that his thoughts couldn't be read, he was free to plot the death of Thorman, my incrimination and whatever would be necessary to take over my interest in the Hound's Tooth strike !" Monitor Irwan's stout face was stiff with shock and amazement. Chief Ronsted faced Virgil with calculating regard. Virgil, his mouth hanging open, only stared at the blaster as he backed against the bulkhead. But he tensed abruptly and charged, his arms outstretched to encompass Greg and hurl him to the deck. Greg, however, was prepared. He sidestepped and brought the handle of the weapon down against his brother's head. only momentarily. Then he sat on the deck and buried his face in his hands. "I had a patient," he sobbed. "It was the day after Greg and Thorman got back from Hound's Tooth. The psychocasts were full of stories about their fabulous strike. My patient was unconscious. The Blank-Out was on, I thought then how I'd like to get Greg's wealth. And, in a moment, I saw how it could be done. "I had to go through with it. If I had backed out then, my envious thoughts would have been read when I eventually turned the Blank-Out off and I would have been sent to an institution for disassociation and reorientation. "I cut an E-record and put it on the playback. All the while my patient remained unconscious. Then I let the recording, with my intentions an integral part of it, carry on from there. "The record used oral psychoanalytical procedure. In effect, I hypnotized myself, making myself forget on a conscious plane that I had even conceived of the thought same time I ordered myself to plan toward that end on a conscious level only when I was in range of a Blank-Out generator. I was to drop all such mental activity into the subconscious whenever I got out of its range. "It was a perfect setup. Since only the conscious mind can be telepathically read, my hands were always clean. "The E-record also directed that, consciously, I should think and act kindly toward Greg. At times I carried out those instructions only too well -- such as warning him an attempt might be made on his life when all the while I subconsciously knew that would happen. In other words, all the planning and a good deal of the execution was done without even the watchers or myself knowing about it. "Even when I asked Greg to bring over Thorman's records, I honestly thought I was trying to help him. But when he got there I had already turned a Blank-Out on and was ready to carry on my scheme from there." Greg handed the meteor blaster to Chief Ronsted. The Monitor rose, shaking his head incredulously. "You stay here and keep that BlankOut generator on," he said, thumping the bulge under Greg's tunic, "until I go out and let them read all that's happened." Greg watched him and the Chief disappear down the passageway together. Then he knelt beside Virgil, placed an arm around his shoulder and waited. When Vivian Kellems is hot copy, she is hot copy indeed -- moving her manufacturing plant from New York, for instance, in protest against state taxes, and, in her fight to shoot down federal withholding taxes, making such demands that, had they been successful, would have had every employer compensated as a tax collector, thus ruining the withholding scheme. In the idea field, though, Vivian Kellems is topped perhaps only by the item on page #. Remember the Burmese thumb trap? Strictly kid stuff, it's made of plaited straw in a cylinder shape that gets tighter the harder you try to yank your thumbs free. Miss Kellems saw a well-nigh perfect electrical connection in the gizmo; conduits and cables joined this way -- not with straw, of course -- were hooked for keeps. Her company the idea behind a toy. Warning! Don't try to pass any phony zulceets -- it can cost you everything you own ! Parallel Beans T HE fat announcer said threateningly, " 'n I want to warn you that the government is cracking down on zulceet forging. They won't permit our matter-transmitters to be mulcted by cheap zulceet forgers any longer. Sales via the zulceet slot play a vital role in our economic life. The new penalties for forging are strict, and will be strictly enforced." The bib around his pudgy neck shook indignantly. His piggy eyes glared. George switched off the TV. The programs from the parallel time-stream stations were lousy anyway. He looked at his wife. She was frowning anxiously. "Do you think they'll attach our house? It's a darling house. And we've made a lot of payments on it." "I don't see how they could," George answered. His voice was calmer than he felt. "According to Herbert, they're in a time-stream parallel to ours, so I doubt they can really get at us, in the first place. Getting those beans across into our stream is about as much as they could do. And in the second place, a silver fiftycent piece isn't a forged zulceet. It's legal U. S. tender. The whole thing's unfair. Fifty cents is more than those beans were worth." "They weren't very good beans," Nina agreed. She sighed. "I know Herbert meant well," she said. "He thought we'd enjoy trying the beans we'd been hearing advertised on the parallel time-stream stations. But sometimes I wish he'd never repaired our TV set, or installed the zulceet slot on it, or put the fifty cents in the slot. It would have been better to have the regular repairman work on it. The 'Notice of Attachment of Domicile' they sent frightens me." from the vacant lot outside. The back door opened and, as if the mention of his name had evoked him, Herbert came bounding in. "Hi, sis," he said. "D'l smell caramel cake, hunh? You got caramel cake for supper tonight, hunh, sis?" "Yes, dear," Nina answered, her face softening. "Would you like a piece?" "Double zorch!" Herbert cried joyously. He leapt toward the kitchen, with Nina after him. George glared at his back. When he wasn't with his brother-in-law, he wondered why he disliked the boy so. That Herbert had no manners could be laid to his age, and modern education was responsible for the fact that he sometimes spelled "cat" with a "Q." On the credit side, Herbert was a whizz with anything electronic (too much of a whizz -- his repairs to the TV set had started all the trouble), and he got straight A's in physics and math. But he was bumptious, officious, and opinionated. He told Nina what detergent to use, and advised George in the choice of razor blades. What really made George loathe him was that he was always after Nina's cakes. Herbert came back from the kitchen with a glass of milk and a slab of cake. "Good cake," he said, swallowing. "Icing's grainy, though. You must've stirred it too much, sis." "I expect I did," Nina agreed submissively. "Herbert, I'm worried. Do you think the people in the parallel time-stream will attach our house?" "Sure," said Herbert. "Why not? They sent you the notice. They think you forged a zulceet." "But -- " "It's a difficulty of communication," replied Herbert, licking a crumb of caramel icing from his face. "You ought to try to square things. Don't want them to take over the house." "We can't give back the beans. We ate them." "That's what you ought to explain." There was a silence. George looked at his wife and his brother-in-law. Then he went in the kitchen and came back with a can of present, nonparallel-time beans. He got paper and a pencil from the desk "What'cha going to do?" Herbert asked interestedly. "Put the beans in the zulceet slot, with a note. The beans are for compensation, and the note is to explain." "Won't work," Herbert-said, in a superior voice. "Why not?" George demanded. He was growing angry. "They don't understand English. They're not like us. They may not be human beings at all." "English is what they speak!" "Naw, they don't. Your mind just translates it ment'lly. I bet what they talk isn't any more like English than it is, unh, like Chinese." "Nuts, the 'Notice of Attachment of Domicile' is in English!" Herbert shrugged. "You'll be sorry," he said. George was too annoyed to answer. He finished writing the note, fastened it around the can with a rubber band, and put the can in the merchandise bin at the end of the zulceet slot. He pressed the lever. The can disappeared. Then four green cans, cans of parallel time-stream beans, dropped out of the merchandise bin. "They've sent more," said Nina. She laughed hysterically. "More of those same old lousy beans !" Herbert giggled. "I told you so," he said. George managed to restrain himself from bashing the cans in Herbert's face. "If you know so blasted much -- " There was a whuffle from the zulceet slot and a document dropped out. It was ornamented with purple ribbons and big official-looking blue seals. George picked it up and broke the seals. "Notice of Aggravated Offense," he read aloud. "Whenas the owners of videal set no. #" (the number was blurred) "have compounded their offense of zulceet forging by a repetition of said offense, they are informed that immediate attachment of spouse, female sex, has been adjudged against them. This judgment is without appeal. Videal Intercity Authority." Nina's jaw had dropped down. "Spouse, female sex -- George! Oh! That's me!" "I thought something like this would happen," Herbert observed. He took a gulp of milk. "Nina had better stay away from near the TV set." "But -- I don't get it," George said. He had put his arm around Nina and was holding her close to him. "They think your can of present-time beans was meant as another forged zulceet," Herbert explained. "So they're going to attach sis." He finished the milk and put the glass down on the table. "Don'tcha worry about it," he said kindly. "I'll fix it up." He rummaged through the pockets of his plastic jacket, pulled out a tiny piece of paper and a pencil, and began to write. "What are you writing?" George demanded. "You just said they don't understand English." "Um-hum. But mathematics is a universal language. I'm explaining in mathematical terms about how I came to install the zulceet slot on the TV set. Once they realize we're in a different time-stream from theirs, they'll give up the idea of attaching sis or bothering the house." He folded the paper to the size of a postage stamp, put it in the slot, and pressed the lever. George waited. But no more cans of parallel-timestream beans appeared. "That did it," Herbert said jubilantly. "Told yuh they'd understand math, didn't I? Guess I'm pretty big deal, hunh, sis, pretty big d -- " E disappeared. His disappearance was so sudden and so complete that George involuntarily looked up at the ceiling, expecting to find him being drawn up through it. Herbert wasn't there, of course, He wasn't anywhere. Nina giggled hysterically. The whites of her eyes were showing. "They've attached him," she said. "Whu-whuwhu-whu ! They've attached Herbert, instead." "Instead -- ?" George demanded blankly. He couldn't seem to focus on things. "Attached him instead of me. Whu-whu-whu ! Whu, whu, whu, whu!" She began to cry. George put his arm around her. He was just getting her calm when there came another whuffle from the zulceet slot. This time it was neither beans nor another legal-looking document. It was a piece of paper folded up small, and even before he unfolded it, George knew who it was from. "They are all mixced up," it began without preamble. "I have been here a couple of days now -- " George and Nina looked at each other ; it hadn't been ten minutes yet -- "and I am eggsplaining it to them. It is hard wurk. They are plenty dumm. A bunch squares. But do not wurry. I am alrighte. Herbt." George looked up from the paper. "But why would they attach him?" he demanded. "Because they think he's me," said Nina. "Don't you see what he says ? They're all mixed up -- he says so -- and plenty dumb. Maybe they aren't really human beings at all -- we don't really know that they are. Those beans tasted funny. Maybe they even thought that math paper Herbert put in the slot was a confession of zulceet forging. But anyhow, they think Herbert's me. They think he's your wife!" She began to go whu-whuwhu once more. Once more George calmed her. Though they discussed the disappearance over and over again, they could find no better explanation than the one Nina had advanced. When it got dark Nina called her mother and told her Herbert was staying with them that night. G eorge couldn't get to sleep. He heard Nina sighing, and knew she couldn't either. At last she said, "George, I'm scared." "Don't be, honey. There isn't anything more to worry about. The worst has already happened. And Herbert says he's all right." "Yes, but -- there was that first paper, the Notice of Attachment of Domicile." "Well?" "We didn't do it. You remember, it said if the vextix wasn't wrytled by Jumel #th, they'd attach the house. And we didn't wrytle it because we didn't know what it was. So they could still attach the house!" "Go to sleep, honey. Herbert said he was explaining things. He'll get it fixed up." "But -- all right." Her breathing quieted. The sound was soothing, and George drifted off to sleep himself. He wakened some hours later, feeling very cold. He pulled the blanket up, but the room was still too chilly. He'd have to shut the window. He looked around to orient himself before getting out of bed. What he saw startled him into full wakefulness. There were stars overhead. Stars! Then the roof -- He put his hand on Nina's shoulder and shook her gently. "Honey... they've attached the house." For a moment Nina was silent. He thought she must still be asleep. Then she answered, "It's because we didn't wrytle the vextix, I suppose. Did they take everything?" "It's too dark to be sure. But I think so. Except the bed." "It's probably illegal to attach the bed." For a moment George thought she was going to begin whu-whu-ing again, but she didn't. She pulled a quilt around her shoulders and put her feet on the floor. "Let's go see just what they did attach," she said. Their cautious inspection did not take long. Except for the concrete slab that formed the foundation of the house, and the bed in which they had been sleeping, everything was gone. Their domicile had been thoroughly attached. Nina said, "I never realized before how limited the floor space in the house was. We can't take three steps without being at the edge of the foundation. Well. Do you suppose we'll have to keep up the payments even though the house is gone?" "I imagine so. And it's going to be difficult, explaining to the bank what happened to their security." Nina sniffled. " -- No, I'm not going to cry. But I'm disappointed in Herbert. I thought he'd be able to clear things up with the parallel time-stream people better than this." "Um. You'd better get back in bed, honey. You'll freeze, going around like this." Nina obeyed. George sat down beside her dejectedly. "It'll be light soon," she said. "Maybe we can think of something to do when it's light. I wish we could make some coffee. Coffee would help a lot. -- Oh! What was that?" profound vibration in the air, like a deep harp string being plucked. The vibration was repeated. Abruptly the gray pre-dawn light around them was blotted out. George swallowed. He said, "Honey, I think they've unattached the house." It was true. Their dazed tour found everything back in place. Even the books Herbert had given them for a wedding present -- a two-volume set of log tables -- were back in the bookcase. They looked at each other. At last Nina drew a quavering sigh. "Let's go outside," she said. "I don't know what -- but I'm afraid. Let's go outside." "All right," said George. In the chill gray light the exterior of the house was irreproachably normal. The lawn, the pelargoniums, the mail box, the sidewalk, were all in place. But on the vacant lot adjoining, the vacant lot Herbert had run across yesterday afternoon, there was a house whose exterior was also irreproachably normal. Its lawn, its pelargoniums, its mail box, its sidewalk, were also all in place. Nina clutched at George's shoulder. In a high voice she said, "They've sent another our house. They've sent back two of our house." "Maybe there's some mistake. Do you want to go over and look at the other one?" "I don't need to go look. I know without looking. It's exactly like our house. It is our house. Everything's the same. There is even half a caramel cake on the cake dish put in the kitchen." She began to cry gently. George stood embracing her helplessly while the sky grew light. At last he drew her back within their own house that wasn't on the formerly vacant lot. They sat down in the living room. George's mind was busy with financial considerations. If he could contact the owner of the vacant lot -- Beckstein, his name was -- before he heard about the house on his lot -- and if there wasn't trouble with the zoning laws -- but of course George didn't have a building permit. Did you need a building permit for a house that was already built? Probably. And was the second their house too near the first one? Would Beckstein sue if he found out about the house before George could buy the lot? And what about the zoning laws? He kept on petting Nina. At last he said, "I'm going to turn on the TV set." "Just more trouble," she answered in a muffled voice. "Um. Maybe we'll get some explanation of all this." He clicked the switch. from the zulceet slot. A document -- the most officiallooking, the most formidable to date -- dropped out. There was scarcely an inch on its exterior that wasn't covered with blue wax seals. George opened it. The heading was in very large Gothic lettering. "Notice of Restoration and Recompensation," it read. "Whenas it has come to the attention of the Videal Intercity Authority that the domicile of the owners of videal set no. #" (still blurred) "was wrongfully attached, and, whenas it has come to the attention of the Videal Intercity Authority that the spouse, female sex, of the owners of videal set No. #" (just as blurred as ever) "was wrongfully attached also, be it enacted by the puissance of the Videal Intercity Authority in council assembled that said domicile and said spouse, female sex, be immediately restored. And be it further enacted by the said puissance of said Videal Intercity Authority that Recompensation for said wrongful attachment be made synchronously, via the Imperial Duplisissix. Signed, Videal Intercity Authority in full council assembled." Underneath the signature there was a truly enormous blue wax seal. George closed his eyes and then opened them. There was really nothing to be said. The doorbell rang. They both jumped. George went to answer it. Herbert was standing with a pleased grin on the porch. "Hi, George," he said. "Hi, sis. Miss me a lot, hunh? I was gone a long time, but I finally got it fixed, didn't I? Do I ever know my stuff !" He sounded jubilant, but George was struck by a curious echoing quality in his brother-in-law's words. He opened the door wide and looked out at the their house that stood on the erstwhile vacant lot. A Herbert was standing on the porch of the other their house too. For a wild moment George wondered if there was a George and a Nina inside that house also. But there was a slightly puzzled look on the second Herbert's face. "Whyn't you answer?" The Herberts went on. It was light enough so George could see that their lips were moving in perfect unison. They weren't twins, any more than the houses were ; the Herberts were the same Herbert, in the sense that the houses were the same house. Recompensation had been made via the Imperial Duplisissix ; presumably the Videal Intercity Authority had thought that George would enjoy having two spouses, female sex ; and George now had two brothersin-law. "Sis made any cakes lately?" the pair asked brightly. "She makes good cakes, if they had better icing. D'ju learn how to make better icing while I was gone, sis? How's for a nice piece cake?"    sounded, the man sitting on the floor sighed. He continued, however, to slump loosely against the curving, pearly plastic of the wall, and took care not to glance toward the translucent ovals he knew to be observation panels. He was a large man, but thin and bony-faced. His dirty gray coverall bore the name "Barnsley" upon grimy white tape over the heart. Except at the shoulders, it looked too big for him. His hair was dark brown, but the sandy ginger of his two-week beard seemed a better match for his blue eyes. The Finally, he satisfied the softly insistent gong by standing up and gazing in turn at each of the three doors spaced around the cylindrical chamber. He deliberately adopted an expression of simple-minded anticipation as he ambled over to the nearest one. The door was round, about four feet in diameter, and set in a flattened part of the wall with its lower edge tangent with the floor. Rods about two inches thick projected a hand's breadth at four, eight, and twelve o'clock. The markings around them suggested that each could be rotated Finding his way out of this maze was only half the fob. Wedge to three different positions. Barnsley squatted on his heels to study these. Noting that all the rods were set at the position he had learned to think of as "one," he reached out to touch the door. It felt slightly warm, so he allowed his fingertips to slide over the upper handle. A tentative tug produced no movement of the door. "That's it, though," he mumbled quietly. "Well, now to do our little act with the others !" He moved to the second door, where all the rods were set at "two." Here he fell to manipulating the rod handles, pausing now and then to shove hopefully against the door. Some twenty minutes later, he tried the same routine at the third door. Eventually, he returned to his starting point and rotated the rods there at random for a few minutes. Having, apparently by accident, arranged them in a sequence of one-two-three, he contrived to lean against the door at the crucial instant. As it gave beneath his weight, he grabbed the two lower handles and pushed until the door rose to a horizontal position level with its hinged top. It settled there with a loud click. B arnsley stooped to crawl through into an arched passage of the same pearly plastic. He straightened up and walked along for about twenty feet, flashing a white-toothed grin through his beard while muttering curses behind it. Presently, he arrived at a small round bay, to be confronted by three more doors. "Bet there's a dozen of you three-eyed clods peeping at me," he growled. "How'd you like me to poke a boot through the panel in front of you and kick you blubberballs in all directions? Do you have a page in your data books for that?" He forced himself to feel sufficiently dull-witted to waste ten minutes opening one of the doors. The walls of the succeeding passage were greenish, and the tunnel curved gently downward to the left. Besides being somewhat warmer, the air exuded a faint blend of heated machine oil and something like ripe fish. The next time Barnsley came to a set of doors, he found also a black plastic cube about two feet high. He squatted on his heels to examine it. I'd better look inside or they'll be disappointed, he told himself. From the corner of his eye, he watched the movement of shadows behind the translucent panels in the walls. He could picture the observers there: blubbery bipeds with threejointed arms and legs ending in clusters of stubby but flexible tentacles. Their broad, spine-crested heads would be thrust forward and each would have two of his three protruding eyes directed at Barnsley's slightest move. They had probably been staring at him in relays every second since picking up his scout ship in the neighboring star system. That is, Barnsley thought, it must have been the next, system whose fourth planet he had been photo-mapping for the Terran Colonial Service. He hoped he had not been wrong about that. Doesn't matter, he consoled himself, as long as the Service can trace me. These slobs certainly aren't friendly. He reconsidered the scanty evidence of previous contact in this volume of space, lightyears from Terra's nearest colony. Two exploratory ships had disappeared. There had been a garbled, fragmentary message picked up by the recorders of the colony's satellite beacon, which some experts interpreted as a hasty warning. As far as he knew, Barnsley was the only Terran to reach this planet alive. To judge from his peculiar imprisonment, his captors had recovered from their initial dismay at encountering another intelligent race -- at least to the extent of desiring a specimen for study. In Barnsley's opinion, that put him more or less ahead of the game. "They're gonna learn a lot!" he muttered, grinning vindictively. He finished worrying the cover off the black box. Inside was a plastic sphere of water and several varieties of food his captors probably considered edible. The latter ranged from a leafy stalk bearing a number of small pods to a crumbling mass resembling moldy cheese. Barnsley hesitated. "I haven't had the guts to try this one yet," he reminded himself, picking out what looked like a cluster of long, white roots. The roots squirmed feebly in his grasp. Barnsley returned them to the box instantly. Having selected, instead, a fruit that could have been a purple cucumber, he put it with the water container into a pocket of his coverall and closed the box. Maybe they won't remember that I took the same thing once before, he thought. Oh, hell, of course they will! But why be too consistent? He opened one of the doors and walked along a bluish passage that twisted to the left, chewing on the purple fruit as he went. It was tougher than it looked and nearly tasteless. At the next junction, he unscrewed the cap of the water sphere, drained it slowly, and flipped the empty container at one of the oval panels. A dim shadow blurred out of sight, as if someone had stepped hastily backward. "Why not?" growled Barnsley. "It's time they were shaken up a little!" something where the container had struck the wall, he ran over and began to feel along the edge of the panel. When his fingertips encountered only the slightest of seams, he doubled his fists and pounded. He thought he could detect a faint scurrying on the other side of the wall. Barnsley laughed aloud. He raised one foot almost waisthigh and drove the heel of his boot through the translucent observation panel. Seizing the splintered edges of the hole, he tugged and heaved until he had torn out enough of the thin wall to step through to the other side. He found himself entering a room not much larger than the passage behind him. To his left, there was a flicker of blue from a crack in the wall. The crack widened momentarily, emitting a gabble of mushy voices. The blue cloth was twitched away by a cluster of stubby tentacles, whereupon the crack closed to an almost imperceptible line. Barnsley fingered his beard to hide a grin and turned the other way. He stumbled into a number of low stools surmounted by spongy, spherical cushions. One of these he tore off for a pillow before going on. At the end of the little room, he sought for another crack, kicked the panel a bit to loosen it, and succeeded in sliding back a section of wall. The passage revealed was about the size of those he had been forced to explore during the past two weeks, but it had an unfinished, benind-the-scenes crudeness in appearance. Barnsley pottered along for about fifteen minutes, during which time the walls resounded with distant running and he encountered several obviously improvised barriers. He kicked his way through one, squeezed through an opening that had not been closed quite in time, restrained a wicked impulse to cross some wiring that must have been electrical, and at last allowed himself to be diverted into a passage leading back to his original cell. He amused himself by trying to picture the disruption he had caused to the honeycomb of passageways. "There !" he grinned to himself. "That should keep them from bothering me for a few hours. Maybe one or two of them will get in trouble over it -- I hope!" He arranged his stolen cushion where the wall met the floor and lay down. A thought struck him. He sat up to examine the cushion suspiciously. It appeared to be an equivalent to foam rubber. He prodded and twisted until convinced that no wires or other unexpected objects were concealed inside. Not till then did he resume his relaxed position. Presently one of his hands located and pinched a tiny switch buried in the lobe of his left ear. Barnsley concentrated upon keeping his features blank as a rushing sound seemed to grow in his ear. He yawned casually, moving one hand from behind his head to cover his mouth. Having practiced many times before a mirror, he did not think that any possible watcher would have noticed how his thumb slipped briefly inside his mouth to give one eyetooth a slight twist. A strong humming inundated his hearing. It continued for perhaps two minutes, paused, and began again. Barnsley waited through two repetitions before he "yawned" again and sleepily rolled over to hide his face in his folded arms. "Did you get it all?" he murmured. "Clear as a bell," replied a tiny voice in his left ear. "Was that your whole day's recording?" "I guess so," said Barnsley. "To tell the truth, I lose track a bit after two weeks without a watch. Who's this? Sanchez ?" "That's right. You seem to come in on my watch pretty nearly every twenty-four hours. Okay, I'll tape a slowed-down version of your blast for the boys in the back room. You're doing fine." Barnsley told him. "When do I get out of here?" "Any day," Sanchez reassured him. "It was some job to learn an alien language with just your recordings and some of your educated guesses to gu on. We've had a regular mob sweating on it night and day." "How is it coming?" "It turns out they're nothing to worry about. The fleet is close enough now to pick up their surface broadcasting. Believe me, your stupid act has them thoroughly confused. They hold debates over whether you could possibly be intelligent enough to belong in a spaceship." "Meanwhile, I'm slowly starving," said Barnsley. "Just hang on for a couple of days. Now that we know where they are, they're in for a shock. One of these mornings, they're going to hear voices from all over their skies, demanding to know what kind of savages they are to have kidnapped you -- and in their own language!" Barnsley grinned into his improvised pillow as Sanchez signed off. Things would really work out after all. He was set for an immensely lucrative position ; whether as ambassador, trade consultant, or colonial governor depended upon how well the experts bluffed the blubber-heads. Well, it seemed only his due for the risks he had taken. "Omigosh !" he grunted, sitting up as he pictured the horde of Terran Colonial experts descending upon the planet. "I'll be the only one here that hasn't learned to speak the language!"L ' the man in the detention room said. "I never expected a visit from the Consul General. It makes me feel important." "The Confederation takes an interest in all of its citizens' welfare," Lanceford said. "You are important! Incidentally, how is it going?" to choke an ocean Gourmets all agree that nothing can beat oysters on the halfshell -- not even the armed might of the Terr an Confederation! "Not too bad. They treat me all right. But these natives sure are tough on visitors. I've never been checked so thoroughly in all my life -- and now this thirty day quarantine ! Why, you'd think I was carrying the plague instead of a sample case !" The chubby little commercial traveller probably had a right to complain, Lanceford thought. After all, a Niobian quarantine station isn't the pleasantest sort of environment. It's not meant to be comfortable, physical discomfort being as good a way as any to discourage casual visitors. The ones who have fortitude enough to stand the entry regulations can get in, but tourists seldom visit Niobe. However, the planet's expanding economy offered a fertile field for salesmen, and men of that stripe would endure far worse hardships than a port of entry in pursuit of the Almighty Credit. Now this fellow, George Perkins, was a typical salesman. And despite his soft exterior there was a good hard core inside. Lanceford looked him over and decided that he would last. "You came here of your own free will, didn't you?" he asked. "If you call a company directive free will," Perkins answered. "I wouldn't come here for a vacation, if that's what you mean. But the commercial opportunities can't be ignored." "I suppose not, but you can hardly blame the Niobians for being suspicious of strangers. Perhaps there's no harm in you. But they have a right to be sure ; they've been burned before." Lanceford uncoiled his lean gray length from the chair and walked over to the broad armorglas window. He stared out at the gloomy view of Niobe's rainswept polar landscape. "You know," he continued, "you might call this Customs Service a natural consequence of uninvestigated visitors." He brooded over the grayness outside. A polar view was depressing -- scrubby vegetation, dank grassland, the eternal Niobian rain. He felt sorry for Perkins. Thirty days in this place would be sheer torture. "It must have been quite some disturbance to result in this." Perkins waved his hand at the barren room. "Sounds like you know something about it." "I do. In a way you might say that I was responsible for it." "Would you mind telling me?" Lanceford looked at his watch. "If I have the time, that is. I'm due to be picked up in an hour, but Niobians have some quaint conceptions of time. So if you want to take a chance that I won't finish -- " "Go ahead." "To start with, take a look at that insigne over the door. The whole story's right there." Perkins eyed the emblem of the Niobian Customs Service. It was a five-pointed star surrounding a circle, superimposed over the typically Terran motto: "Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Safety." He nodded. "How come the Terran style ?" he asked. "That's part of the story. Actually that insigne's a whole chapter of Niobe's history. But you have to know what it stands for." Lanceford sighed reminiscently. "It began during the banquet that celebrated the signing of the Agreement which made Nlobe a member of the Confederation. I was the Director of the time. As a matter of fact, I'd just taken the job over from Alvord Sims. The Old Man had been ordered back to Terra, to take over a job in the Administration, and I was the next man in line. "The banquet was a flop, of course. Like most mixed gatherings involving different races, it was a compromise affair. Nobody was satisfied. It dragged along in a spirit of suffering resignation -- the Niobians quietly enduring the tasteless quality of the food, while the Confederation representatives, wearing unobtrusive nose plugs, suffered politely through the watereddown aroma and taste of the Niobian delicacies. All things being considered, it was moving along more smoothly than it had any right to, and if some moron on the kitchen staff hadn't used tobasco sauce instead of catsup, we'd probably have signed the Agreement and gone on happily ever after. "But it didn't work out that way. "Of course it wasn't entirely the kitchen's fault. There had to be some damn fool at the banquet who'd place the bomb where it would do some good. And of course I had to be it." Lanceford grinned. "About the only thing I have to say in my defense is that I didn't know it was loaded !" Perkins looked at him expectantly as Lanceford paused. "Well, don't stop there," he said. "You've got me interested." Lanceford smiled goodnaturedly and went on. the central plaza of Base Alpha. It was the only roofed area on the planet large enough to hold the crowd of high brass that had assembled for the occasion. We don't do things that way now, but fifty years ago we had a lot to learn. In those days, the admission of a humanoid planet into the Confederation was quite an the native population should be aware of it. I was sitting between Kron Avar and one of the high brass from the Bureau of Interstellar Trade, a fellow named Hartmann. I had no business being in that rarefied air, since Kron was one of the two First Councilors and Hartmann ranked me by a couple of thousand files on the promotion list. But I happened to be a friend of Kron's, so protocol got stretched a bit in the name of friendship. He and I had been through a lot together when I was a junior explorer before. We'd kept contact with each other ever since. We had both come up the ladder quite a ways, but a Planetary Director, by rights, belonged farther down the table. So there I was, the recipient of one of the places of honor and a lot of dirty looks. Hartmann didn't think much of being bumped one seat away from the top. He wasn't used to associating with mere directors, and besides, I kept him from talking with Kron about trade relations. Kron was busy rehashing the old days when we were opening Niobe to viscayaculture. Trade didn't interest him very much, and Hartmann interested him less. Niobians are never too cordial to strangers, man before this meeting. Anyway, the talk got around to the time he introduced me to vorkum, a native dish that acts as a systemic insect repellant -- and tastes like one ! And right then I got the bright idea that nearly wrecked Niobe. As I said, there was both Niobian and Confederation food at the banquet, so I figured that it was a good time as any to get revenge for what my dog-headed friend did to my stomach a good decade before. So I introduced him to Terran cooking. Niobians assimilate it all right, but their sense of taste isn't the same as ours. Our best dishes are just mush to their palates, which are conditioned to sauces that would make the most confirmed spice lover on Earth run screaming for the water tap. They have a sense of the delicate, too, but it needs to be stimulated with something like liquid fire before they can appreciate it. For instance, Kron liked Earth peaches, but he spiced them with horseradish and red pepper. I must admit that he was a good sport. He took the hors d'oeuvres in stride, swallowing such tasteless things as caviar, Roquefort and anchovy paste without so much as a grimace. Of course, I was taking an unfair advantage of Kron's natural courtesy, but it didn't bother me too much. He had rubbed that vorkum episode in for years. It was nice to watch him squirm. an oyster cocktail, I figured things had gone far enough. He took it, of course, even though anyone who knew Niobians could see that he didn't want any part of it. There was a pleading look in his eye that I couldn't ignore. After all, Kron was a friend. I was actually about to stop him when he pulled an oyster from its red bath and popped it into his mouth. There was a 'you'll be sorry' look on his face. I gestured to a waiter to remove the cocktail as he bit into the oyster, figuring, somewhat belatedly, that I had gone too far. The' grateful look I got from him was sufficient reward. But then it happened. Kron stopped looking grateful and literally snatched the cocktail back from the startled waiter ! He looked at me with an expression of disgust. "The first decent food thus far," he said, "and you attempt to send it away!" "Huh?" I exclaimed stupidly. "I didn't want to make you miserable." "Miserable ! Hah ! This dish is wonderful! What in the name of my First Ancestor is it?" His pleased grin was enough like a snarl to make Hartmann cringe in his chair. Since Kron and I were both speaking Niobian rather than Confed, he didn't understand what was happening. I suppose he thought that Kron was about to rip my throat out. It was a natural error, of course. You've seen a dog smile, and wondered what was going on behind the teeth? Well, Kron looked something like that. A Niobian with his dog-headed humanoid body is impressive under any conditions. When he smiles he can be downright frightening. I winked at Hartmann. "Don't worry, sir," I said. "Everything's all right." "It certainly is," Kron said in Confed. "This dish is delicious. Incidentally, friend Lanceford, what is it? It tastes something like our Komal, but with a subtle difference of flavor that is indescribable!" "It's called an oyster cocktail, Kron," I said. "This is a product of your world we would enjoy!" Kron said. "Although the sauce is somewhat mild, the flavor of the meat is exquisite!" He closed his eyes, savoring the taste. "It would be somewhat better with vanka," he said musingly. "Or perhaps with Kala berries." I shuddered. I had tried those sauces once. Once was enough! I could still feel the fire. "I wonder if you could ship them to us," Kron continued. Hartmann's ears pricked up at the word "ship." It looked like an opening gambit for a fast sales talk on behalf of interstellar trade, a subject dear to his heart. But I was puzzled. I couldn't figure it out until I tried one of the oysters -- after which I knew! Some fool had dished them up in straight tobasco sauce! It took some time before I could talk, what with trying to wash the fire out of my mouth, and during the conversational hiatus Hartmann picked up the ball where I dropped it. So I sat by and listened, my burned mouth being in no condition for use. n't ship them," Hartmann said. "At least not on a commercial basis. Interstellar freight costs are prohibitive where food is concerned." Kron nodded sadly. He passed the oysters to Tovan Harl, his fellow First Councilor. Harl went through the same reaction pattern Kron had shown. "However," Hartmann continued, "we could send you a few dozen. Perhaps you could start a small oyster farm." "Is this a plant?" Kron asked curiously. "No, it's a marine animal with a hard outer shell." "Just like our Komal. We could try planting some of them in our oceans. If they grow, we will be very obliged to you Terrans for giving us a new taste sensation." "Since my tribe is a seafaring one," Harl interjected, "they can be raised under my supervision until we find the exact methods to propagate them in our seas." Hartmann must have been happy to get off the hook. It was a small request, one that was easy to fulfill. It was a good thing that the Niobians didn't realize what concessions they could wring from the was prepared to sink many more if necessary. They would go to almost any lengths to keep the natives happy. If that meant star-freighter loads of oysters, then it would be starfreighter loads of oysters. The Confederation needed the gerontin that grew on Niobe. The commercial worlds needed the anti-aging drug more and more as the exploration of space continued -- not to mention the popular demand. Niobe was an ideal herbarium for growing the swampland plant from which the complex of alkaloids was extracted. So Hartmann made a note of it, and the subject was dropped. I didn't think anything more about it. Kron was happy, Harl was happy, and Hartmann was feeling pleased with himself. There was no reason to keep the oyster question alive. But it didn't die there. By some sort of telepathy the Niobians scattered along the long tables found out what had been getting talked about at the upper end. By this time I was on the ball again. When the orders went in I slipped a note to the cooks to use tabasco or vanaka on the Niobian orders. It was fortunate that there was an ample supply of oysters available, because the banquet dissolved shortly thereafter into an outright oyster feed. The Niobians dropped all pretense. They wanted oysters -- with vanaka, with tabasco or with Kala berries. The more effete Earth preparations didn't rouse the slightest enthusiasm, but the bivalve found its place in the hearts and stomachs of the natives. The oysters ultimately ran out, but one thing was certain. There was a definite bond of affection between our two utterly dissimilar species. The era of good feeling persisted for several hours. There was no more quiet undertone of polite suffering among our guests. They were enjoying themselves. The Agreement was signed with hardly an exception being taken to its clauses and wording. Niobe became a full member of the Confederation, with sovereign planetary rights, and the viscaya concentrate began flowing aboard the ships waiting at the polar bases. A day later I got orders to stallations on Niobe. The consular service would take over after I had finished... watch. "Well, we're going to have time. It looks like they'll be late. Want to hear the rest of it?" "Naturally," Perkins said. "I certainly wouldn't want you to stop here." "Well," Lanceford continued, "the next four years weren't much." time closing down the outpost and regional installations, but it took longer than I expected what with the difficulty in getting shipping space to move anything but viscaya concentrate off the planet. Of course, like any of the Confedhard. With one thing and another, there were still a lot of our old people left. We still had the three main bases on the continental land masses in operating condition, plus a few regional experiment stations on Alpha Continent and the Marine Biology Labs on Varnel Island. I'd just closed the last regional stations on Beta and Gamma when Heinz Bergdorf paid me an official call. Heinz was the senior biologist on Varnel. He was a good looking lad of Teutonic ancestry, one of those big blond kids who fool you. He didn't look like a scientist, but his skull held more knowledge of Niobe's oceans than was good for a man. He would have to unlearn a lot of it before he took his next job, or so I thought at the time. Anyway, Heinz came into my office looking like someone had stolen his favorite fishnet. The expression of Olympian gloom on his beak-nosed face would have done credit to Zeus. It didn't take any great amount of brains to see that Heinz was worried. It stuck out all over him. He draped himself limply in the chair beside my desk. "We've got troubles, Chief," he announced. I grinned at him. I knew perfectly well why he was here. Something had come up that was too big for him to handle. That was Heinz's only fault, a belief in the omnipotence of higher authority. If he couldn't handle it, it was a certainty that I could -- even though I knew nothing of either his specialty or his problems. However, I liked the man. I did my best to give him the fatherly advice he occasionally needed, although he would have been better off half the time if he hadn't taken it. "Well, what's the trouble now?" I asked. "From the look on your face it must be unpleasant. Or maybe you're just suffering from indigestion." "It's not indigestion, Chief." "Well, don't keep me in suspense. Tell me so I can worry too." I didn't like the way he looked. Of course, I'd been expecting trouble for the past year. Things had been going far too smoothly. "Oysters!" Bergdorf said laconically. "Oysters ?" I looked at him incredulously. Bergdorf sat straight up in his chair and faced me. There was no humor in his eyes. "For God's sake! You frightened me for a moment. You're joking, I hope." "Far from it," Bergdorf replied. "I said oysters and I mean oysters. It's no joke! Just who was the unutterable idiot who planted them here?" remembered. "Hartmann," ed them delivered at the request of Kron Avar and Tovan Harl. I suppose Harl planted them. I never paid very much attention to it." "You should have. It would have been better if they had imported Bengal tigers! How long ago did this infernal insanity happen?" "Right after the Agreement was signed, I guess. I'm sure it was no earlier than that, because Niobians met up with oysters for the first time at that affair." I still didn't get it, but there was no doubt that Heinz was serious. I tried to remember something about oysters, but other than the fact that they were good to eat and produced pearls I could think of nothing. Yet Bergdorf looked like the end of the world was at hand. There was something here that didn't add up. "Well, get on with it," I said. "As far as marine biology is concerned I'm as innocent as a Lyranian vix-gin. Tell me -- what's wrong with the oysters?" "Nothing! That's the trouble. They're nice healthy specimens of terrestrial Ostrea lurida. We found a floating limb with about a dozen spat clinging to it." "Spat?" "Immature oysters." "Oh. Is that bad?" "Sure it's bad. I suppose I'd better explain," Bergdorf said. "On Earth an oyster wouldn't be anything to worry about, even though it produces somewhere between sixteen and year. On Earth this tremendous fertility is necessary for survival, but here on Niobe where there are no natural enemies to speak of, it's absolutely deadly ! "Just take these dozen spat we found. Year after next, they'd be breeding size, and would produce about three everything went right, some three years later those three oysters ! Can you image how much territory nine thousand then, and started looking at the map of Niobe pinned on the wall. "Good Lord! They'd cover the whole eastern seaboard of Alpha from pole to pole." Bergdorf said smugly, "Actually, you're a bit over on your guess. Considering the short free swimming stage of the larvae, the slow eastern seaboard currents, poor bottom conditions and overcrowding, I doubt if they would cover more than a thousand miles of coastline by the fourth year. Most of them would die from environmental pressures. "But that isn't the real trouble. Niobe's oceans aren't like Earth's. They're shallow. It's a rare spot that's over forty fathoms deep. As a result, oysters can grow almost anywhere. And that's what'll happen if they aren't stopped. Inside of two decades they'll destroy this world !" "You're being an alarmist," I said. "Not so much as you might think. I don't suppose that the oysters will invade dry land and chase the natives from one rain puddle to another, but they'll grow without check, build oyster reefs that'll menace navigation, change the chemical composition of Niobe's oceans, pollute the water with organic debris of their rotting bodies, and so change the ecological environment of this world that only the hardiest and most adaptable life forms will be able to survive this!" "But they'll be self-limiting," I protested. "Sure. But by the time they limit themselves, they will eliminate about everything else." "If you're right, then, there's only one thing to do. We'll have to let the natives know what the score is and start taking steps to get rid of them." "Oh, I'm right. I don't think you'll find anyone who'll disagree with me. We kicked this around at the Lab for quite a spell before I came up here with it." "Then you've undoubtedly thought of some way to get rid of them." "Of course. That was one of the first things we did. The answer's obvious." "Not to me." "Sure. Starfish. They'll swamp up the extra oysters in jig time." "But won't the starfish get too numerous?" "No. They die off pretty fast without a source of food supply. From what we can find out about Niobe's oceans, there is virtually no acceptable food for starfish other than oysters a,nd some microscopic animal life that wouldn't sustain an adult." "Okay, I believe you. But you still leave me cold. I can't remember anything about a starfish that would help him break an oyster shell." you need a course in marine biology. Here's a thumbnail sketch. First, let's take the oyster. He has a big muscle called an adductor that closes his shell. For a while he can exert a terrific pull, but a steady tension of about nine hundred grams tires him out after an hour or so. Then the muscle relaxes and the shell gapes open. Now the starfish can exert about thirteen hundred grams of tension with his sucker-like tube feet, and since he has so many of them he doesn't have to use them all at one time. So, by shifting feet as they get tired, he can exert this pull indefinitely. "The starfish climbs up on the oyster shell, attaches a few dozen tube feet to the outside of each valve and starts to pull. After a while the oyster gets tired, the shell opens up, and the starfish pushes its stomach out through its mouth opening, wraps the stomach around the soft parts of the oyster and digests it right in the shell !" I shuddered. "Gruesome, isn't it?" Bergdorf asked happily. "But it's nothing to worry about. Starfish have been eating oysters of years. In fact I'll bet that a starfish eats more oysters in its lifetime than does the most confirmed oyster-addict." "It's not the fact that they eat them," I said feebly. "It's the way they do it. It makes me ill!" "Why should it? After all a starfish and a human being have a lot in common. Like them, you have eaten oysters on the half shell, and they're usually alive when you gulp them down. I can't see where our digestive juices are any easier on the oyster than those of a starfish." "Remind me never to eat another raw oyster," I said. "On second thought you won't have to. You've ruined my appetite for them forever." Bergdorf chuckled. "Well, now that you've disposed of one of my eating habits," I said bitterly, "let's get back to the problem. I presume that you'll have to find where the oysters are before you start in working them over with starfish." "You've hit the reason why I'm here. That's the big problem. I want to find their source." "rkON'T you know?" U "I can make a pretty good guess. You see, we picked this limb out of the Equatorial current. As you know, Varnel Island is situated right at the western termination of the current. We don't get much littoral stuff unless it comes from the Islands or West Beta. And as far as I can figure the islands are the best bet. These spat probably came from the Piralones, that island group in the middle of the current about halfway across." I nodded. "It would be a good bet. They're uninhabited. If Harl wanted an isolated spot to conduct oyster planting experiments, I couldn't think of a better location. Nobody in his right mind would islands support the damnedest assortment of siths you ever saw." "If that's where it is," Bergdorf said, "we can thank heaven for the natives' suspicious nature. That location may help us save this world !" I laughed at him. "Don't be so grim, Heinz -- or so godlike. We're not going to save any worlds." "Someone has to save them." "We don't qualify. What we'll do is chase this business down. We'll find out where the oysters come from, get an idea of how bad things are and then let the Niobians know about it. If anyone is going to save this planet it won't be a bunch of Confederation exploration specialists." Bergdorf sighed. "You're right, of course." I slapped him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, Heinz." I turned to my appointment calendar and checked it over. There was nothing on it that couldn't wait a few days. "Tell you what," I continued. "I need a vacation from this place. We'll take my atomic job and go oyster hunting. It ought to be fun." Bergdorf's grin was like a sunrise on Kardon. down slowly through the overcast, feeling my way cautiously down to the ground that radar told me was somewhere below. We were hardly a hundred and fifty meters up before it became visible through the drenching tropic rain. Unless you've seen it you can't imagine what rain is really like until you've been in the Niobian tropics. It literally swamps everything, including visibility. It was the Piralones all right. The last time I'd seen them was when I led the rescue party that pulled Wilson Chung and his passengers out of the Baril Ocean, but they were still the same, tiny deserted spots of land surrounded by coral reefs. We were over the biggest one of the group, a rounded hummock barely a kilometer in diameter, surrounded by a barrier reef of coral. Between the reef and the island a shallow lagoon lay in sullen grayness, its surface broken into innumerable tiny wavelets by the continual splash of rain. The land itself was a solid mass of olivegreen vegetation that ended abruptly at a narrow beach. "Well, we're here," I said. "Grim looking place, isn't it?" "Whoever spoke of the beauties of tropical islands didn't have Niobe in mind," Bergdorf agreed. "This place looks like something left behind by a cow." I couldn't help the chuckle. The simile was too close for comfort. I tilted the rotors and we went down to hover about ten meters off the beach. Bergdorf pointed down the beach. I headed the 'copter in that direction as Bergdorf looked out of the bubble, intently scanning the waters of the lagoon. Finally he looked up with an expression of understanding on his lean face. "No wonder I missed them!" he murmured with awe. "There are so many that there's no floor of the lagoon to spot them against. They cover the entire bottom! You might as well set her down here; it's as good a place as any." I throttled back and landed the whirlybird on the beach. "You had your quota of vorkum?" I asked as Bergdorf reached for the door handle. The biologist made a wry face. "Naturally. You think I'd be fool enough to go outside without it?" "I wouldn't know. All I'm sure of is that if you're going to get out here, you'd better be loaded." I followed after him as he opened the door and jumped down to the ground. A small horde of siths instantly left the cover of the jungle and buzzed out to investigate. A few years ago, that would have been the signal for ray beams at fan aperture, but both Bergdorf and I ignored them, trusting in the protection of the vorkum. The beasties made a tactical pass at Heinz, thought the better of it and came wheeling over in my direction. I could almost see the disappointed look in their eyes as they caught my aura, put on the brakes and returned disappointed to their shelter under the broadleaves. Whatever vorkum did, it certainly convinced insects that we were inedible and antisocial. One or two ventured back and buzzed hopefully around our heads before giving up in disgust. "It beats me what they live on," Bergdorf said, gesturing at the iridescent flash of the last bloodsucker as it disappeared beneath the broadleaves. "As long as it isn't us, I don't give a damn," I said. "Maybe they live on decaying vegetable matter until something live and bloody comes along. Anyway, they seem to get along." Bergdorf walked the few steps to the water's edge. "I won't even have to go swimming," he said as he walked into the water a few steps, bent and came up with what looked like a handful of rocks. v ing one over in my hand. "Yep. Nice little #. lurida. About three years old, I'd guess, and just ripe for breeding. You know, I've never seen them growing so close to the shore. They must be stacked on top of each other out there a ways. There's probably millions of them in this lagoon alone!" "Well, we've found where they're coming from. Now all that's left is to figure out what to do about it." "We'd still better check Beta. They might possibly have reached there." "Not unless someone's planted them," I said. "You're forgetting the ocean currents." "No. I was thinking of planted areas." "Well, think again. You may know your biology, but I know Niobians. They're too suspicious to bring untried things too close to where they live. They've been that way as long as I can remember them, and I don't think that anything -- even something as delightful as an oyster -- would make them change overnight." "I hope you're right." "Oh, we'll check Beta, all right," I said. "But you can send a couple of your boys to do it. There's no sense in our wasting time with it." I heard the noise behind us before Bergdorf did. We turned in time to see four Niobians emerge from the jungle and glide purposefully toward us. The tribal tattoos on their chests identified them as members of Tovan Harl's commune. I nudged Heinz and murmured, "We've got company." The natives approached to within a few paces. They stood politely to leeward while one of their number approached. "I'm sorry," he said without the normal introduction, "but this is leased land. You will have to leave at once. And you will please return the oysters to the lagoon. It is not permitted to remove them." "Oh, all right," I said. "We're through here anyway. We'll visit the other islands and then be off." "The other islands are also leased property. When you leave I will radio the other guards, and you will not be permitted to land." "This is not according to your customs," I protested. "I realize that, Mr. Lanceford," the native said. "But I have given oath to keep all trespassers out." I nodded. It wasn't usual. I wondered what Harl had in mind -- possibly a planetary monopoly. If that was his plan, he was due for a surprise. "That's very commendable," Bergdorf said, "but these oysters are going with me. They are needed as evidence." "I'm sorry, sir," the native said. "The oysters stay here." "Don't be a fool, Heinz," I interjected. "They're in the right. The oysters are their property. If you try to take them you'll be in trouble up to your ears." "But I need those oysters, Arthur! Probably the only adult oyster tissue on Niobe is on these islands. I need a sample of it." "Well, it's your neck." I turned to the native. "Don't be too hard on him," I said. "He's quite an important man." The Niobian nodded and grinned. "Don't worry, sir. He won't feel a thing. But I really wish to apologize for our rudeness. If conditions were different -- " He paused and turned toward Bergdorf who was climbing into the 'copter with the oysters still in his hand. didn't make it. In fact, I'd have been more surprised if he had. Heinz crumpled to the ground beside the ship. One of the natives came forward, took the oysters from his limp hand and threw them back into the lagoon. "All right," I said to the spokesman. "You fellows clobbered him, so now you can get him into the ship." "That is only fair," the native said. "We do not want to cause you any extra inconvenience." He gestured to his companions. Between them they got Bergdorf's limp body into the ship and strapped into one of the seats. They got out, I got in, and in a minute the two of us got out of there, going straight up through to overcast to get a celestial bearing for home. I kept looking at Bergdorf's limp body and grinning. It was nearly an hour later before Bergdorf woke up. "What hit me?" he asked fuzzily. "Subsonics," I said. "They should have scared you to death." "I fainted?" "Sure you did. You couldn't help it. They hit like a ton of brick." "They certainly do," he said ruefully. "They can kill," I said. "I've seen them do it. The Niobians generate them naturally, and they can focus them fairly well. Probably this quality was one of their forms of defense against predators in their early days. It's a survival trait ; and when there are enough natives present to augment the impulses they can be downright nasty." Bergdorf nodded. "I know," he said. He stopped talking and looked out over the sundrenched top of the overcast. "It looks like Tovan Harl wants to keep this oyster farm a private matter. In a way he's doing us a favor, but I'd still feel happier if I had one or two of those oysters." "Why do you need them?" "Well, I figured on getting a couple of the Navy's organic detectors and setting them for oyster protoplasm. You know how sensitive those gadgets are. There might be a small but significant change in oyster protoplasm since it has arrived here." "Well, you don't need to worry," I said. "I put one of your pets in my pocket before the natives showed up, so you've got what you need." I pulled the oyster out and handed it to him. It didn't look any the worse for its recent rough treatment. Bergdorf grinned. "I knew I could trust you, Chief. You're sneaky!" I laughed at him. pha without trouble. I shooed Bergdorf back to Varnel with the one oyster and a promise that I'd back him up in any requisitions he cared to make. After that I checked up neglected for the past couple of days and, finally, late that night took one of the Base's floaters and drove slowly down the trail to Kron's village. While Earth-style civilization had done much to improve transport and communication on Niobe, it hadn't -- and still hasn't for that matter -- produced a highway that can stand up to the climate. Roads simply disappear in the bottomless mud. So whatever vehicular transport exists on Niobe is in the form of floaters, whose big sausageshaped tires give enough flotation to stay on top of the ooze, and sufficient traction to move through the morass that is Niobe's surface. They're clumsy, slow and hard to steer. But they get you there -- which is something you can't say about other vehicles. Kron's village had changed somewhat since I first visited it. The industrial section was new. The serried ranks of low dural buildings gleamed metallically in the glare of the floater's lights, glistening with the sheets of water that ran from their roofs and sides. The power-broadcast station that stood in the center of the village hadn't been there either. But other than that everything was pretty much the same as it always had been, an open space in the jungle filled with stone walled, thatch roofed houses squatting gloomily in the endless rain. The industry, such as it was, was concentrated solely upon the production of viscaya concentrate. It had made little difference in the Niobian way of life, which was exactly as the natives wanted it. It was odd, I reflected, how little change had taken place .in Niobian society despite better than two decades of exposure to Confederation technology. Actually, the Confederation could leave tomorrow, and would hardly be missed. There would be no cultural vacuum. The strangers would simply be gone. Possibly some of our artifacts would be used. The atomic power-broadcast station would possibly stay, and so would the highpowered radio. Perhaps some of the gadgetry the natives had acquired from us would be used until it was worn out, but the pattern of the old ways would stay pretty much as it had always been. For Niobian culture was primarily philosophical rather than technological and it preferred to remain that way. I parked my floater beside the house that had sheltered Kron as long as I had known him. I entered without announcing myself. As an old friend I had this privilege, although I seldom used it. But if I had come formally there would have been an endless rigmarole of social convention that would have had to be satisfied before we could get down to business. I didn't want to waste the time. surprisingly modem desk, reading a book by the light of a Confederation glowtube. I looked at its title -- The Analects of Confucius -- and blinked. I'd heard of it. It and Machiavelli's Prince are classics on governmental personality and philosophy, but I had never read it. Yet here, hundreds of light years from the home world, this naked alien was reading and obviously enjoying that ancient work. It made me feel oddly ashamed of myself. He looked up at me, nodded a greeting and laid the book down with a faint expression of regret on his doglike face. I found a chair and sat down silently. I wondered how he found time to read. My job every day of the #-day year. And his, which was more important and exacting than mine, gave him time to read philosophy! I sighed. It was something I could never understand. I waited for him to speak. As host, it was his duty to open the wall of silence which separated us. "Greetings, friend Lanceford," Kron said. "My eyes are happy with the pleasure of beholding you." He spoke in the ancient Niobian formula of hospitality. But he made it sound as though he really meant it. "It's a double joy to behold the face of my friend and to hear his voice," I replied in the same language. Then I switched to Confed for the business I had in mind. Their polite forms are far too clumsy and uncomfortable for business use ; it takes half a day to get an idea across. "It seems as though I'm always coming to you with trouble," I began. "What now?" Kron asked. "Every time I see you, I hope that we can relax and enjoy our friendship, but every time you are burdened. Are you Earthmen forever filled with troubles or does my world provoke them?" He smiled at me. "A little of both, I suppose," I said. Kron hummed -- the Niobian equivalent of laughter. "I've been observing you Earthmen for the past twenty years, and I have yet to see one of you completely relaxed. You take yourselves much too seriously. After all, my friend, life is short at best. We should enjoy some of it. Now tell me your troubles, and perhaps there is no cause to worry." "You're wrong, Kron. There is plenty of cause to worry. This can affect the well-being of everything on this world." Kron's face sharpened into lines of interest. "Continue, friend Lanceford." sent you a few years ago. They're getting out of hand." Kron hummed. "I was afraid that it -- " " -- was something serious !" I finished. "That's what I told Heinz Bergdorf when he came to me with this story. Now sober down and listen ! This is serious !" iKron said after I had finished. "But how is it that your people didn't foresee the danger? Something as viciously reproductive as the oyster should be common knowledge." "Not on our world. You see, the study of sea life is a specialized science on Earth. It is one of the faults of our technological civilization that almost everyone must specialize from the time he enters secondary school. Unless one specializes in marine biology, one generally knows little or nothing about it." "Odd. Very odd. But then, you Earthmen always were a peculiar race. Now, if I heard you right, I believe that you said there is an animal on your world which preys upon these oysters. A starfish?" "Yes." "Won't this animal be as destructive as the oyster?" "Bergdorf doesn't think so, and I trust his judgment." "Won't this animal also kill our Komal ? They are like these oysters of yours in a way." "But they burrow, and the starfish doesn't. They'll be safe enough." Kron sighed. "I knew that association with you people would prove to be a mixed blessing." He shrugged his shoulders and turned his chair to his desk. A Niobian face appeared on the screen. "Call a Council meeting and let me know when it is ready," Kron ordered. "Yes, Councilor," the face replied. "Well, that's that. Now we can relax until the Council manages to get together." "How long will that take?" "I haven't the least idea," Kron said. "Several days -- several weeks. It all depends upon how soon we can get enough Council members together to conduct business." I said unhappily, "I'd like to have your outlook but we're fighting against time !" "You Earthmen pick the most impossible opponents. You should learn to work with time rather than against it." He pulled at one ear reflectively. "You know, it is strange that your race could produce ethical philosophers like this one." He tapped the Analects with a webbed forefinger. "Such contrast of thought on a single world is almost incredible!" "You haven't seen the half of it!" I chuckled. "But I'm inclined to agree with you. Earth is an incredible world." F ortunately there was a battle cruiser in the Polar spaceport on a goodwill mission. We had no trouble about getting the detectors Bergdorf needed, plus a crew to run them. The Navy is cooperative about such things, and every officer knows the implanetary operation. We could have had the entire cruiser if we had wanted it. A week later the four Marine Lab ships, each equipped with a detector, started a search of Niobe's oceans. Their atomic powerplants could drive them along at a respectable speed. Bergdorf and I expected a preliminary report within a month. We weren't disappointed. The results were shocking, but not unexpected. Preliminary search revealed no oysters in the other two major oceans, but the Baril Ocean was badly infested. There were groups and islands of immature oysters along the entire course of the Equatorial current and the tropical coast of Alpha. Practically every island group in the central part of the ocean showed traces of the bivalves. It was amazing how far they had spread. Even the northern shallows had a number of thriving young colonies. Bergdorf was right. Another year and we'd have been swamped. As it was it was nothing to laugh about. The news reached Kron just before the Council meeting, which, like most of Niobe's offseason politics, had been delayed time after time. Since a Council meeting requires an attendance of ninety per cent of the Council, it had been nearly impossible to schedule an assembly where a quorum could be present. But our news reached every comer of the planet, and the note of urgency in them finally produced results. The Niobians held the emergency session at Base Alpha, where our radio could carry the proceedings to the entire planet. Whatever else they may be, Niobian government sessions are open to the public. Since the advent of radio, practically the entire public listens in. Like the natives, I listened too. I wasn't surprised when Kron appeared in my office, his eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep, but with a big grin on his face that exposed his sharp sectorial teeth. "Well, that's over, friend Lanceford. Now send us your starfish." "That's easier said than done," I replied gloomily. "I've contacted the Confederation. They won't ship twenty pounds of starfish -- let alone the twenty thousand tons Bergdorf says we'll need !" "Why not? Are they crazy? Or do they want to destroy us?" "Neither. This is just a sample of bureaucracy at work. You see, the starfish is classed as a pest on Earth. Confederation regulations forbid the exportation of pests to member planets." "But we need them!" JL fact hasn't penetrated to the highest brass." I laughed humorlessly. "The big boys simply can't see it. By the time we marshal enough evidence to convince them, it will be too late. Knowing how Administration operates, I'd say that it'd take at least a year for them to become convinced. And another two months for them to act." "But we simply can't wait that long ! Your man Bergdorf has convinced me. We're in deadly danger!" "You're going to have to wait," I said grimly. "Unless you can find some way to jar them out of their rut." Kron looked thoughtful. "I think that can be done, friend Lanceford. As I recall, your bureaus are timid things. Furthermore, we have something they want pretty bad. I think we can apply pressure." "But won't your people object? Doesn't that deny your basic philosophy of non-interference with others?" Kron grinned ferociously. "Not at all. Like others of your race, you have never understood the real significance of our social philosophy. What it actually boils down to is simply this -- we respect the customs and desires of others but require in turn that they respect ours." "You mean that you will use force against the rest of the Confederation? But you can't do that! You wouldn't stand a chance against the Navy." "We will first try a method we have used with our own tribes who get out of line. I don't think anything more will be necessary." Kron's voice was flat. "It goes against the grain to do this, but we are left no choice." He turned and left the room without a farewell, which was a measure of his agitation. I sat there behind my desk wondering what the Niobians could do. Like my ex-boss Alvord Sims, I had a healthy respect for them. It just could be that they could do plenty. They could. you've never seen anything like what the Niobians tossed at our startled heads! We always thought the Planetary Council was a loose and ineffective sort of thing, but what happened within the next twenty hours had to be seen to be believed. I saw it. But it was days before I believed it. Within a day the natives had whipped up an organization, agreed on a plan of action and put it into effect. By noon of the next day Niobe was a closed planet. A message was sent to the Confederation informing them that Niobe was withdrawing until the emergency was over. An embargo was placed on all movement of shipping. And everything stopped. No factories operated. The big starfreighters stood idle and empty at the polar bases. Not one ounce of gerontin or its concentrate precursor left Niobe. Smiling groups of Niobians using subsonics to enforce their demands, paralyzed everything the Confederation had operated on the planet. No one was hurt. The natives were still polite and friendly. But Confederation business came to an abrupt halt, and stayed halted. It was utterly amazing! I had never heard of a planetwide boycott before. But Niobe was entirely within her rights. The Confederation had to accept it. And, of course, the Confederation capitulated. If the Niobians were fools enough to want pests as a condition of resuming viscaya shipments -- well, it was their affair. The Confederation needed viscaya. anything to assure its continued supply. With the full power of the Confederation turned to giving Niobe what she wanted, it wasn't long before the oysters were under control. We established a systematic seeding procedure for the starfish that kept arriving by the freighter load. In a few months Bergdorf reported that an ecological balance had been achieved. D ate another pest problem?" Perkins asked. "Not at all," Lanceford said. "I told you that the Niobians had an odd sense of taste. Starfish proved to be quite acceptable to the Niobian palate. They merely added another item to Niobe's food supply." Perkins shuddered delicately. "I wouldn't eat one of those "You're going to have to eat vorkum if you expect to survive on this world. Compared to vorkum, a starfish is sheer pleasure ! But that wasn't the end of it," Lanceford added with a smile. "You see, shortly after things had simmered down to normal Kron dropped into my office. " 'I think, friend Lanceford,' he said, 'that we are going to have to create a permanent organization to keep unwanted visitors out. This little affair has been a needed lesson. I have been reading about your planetary organization, and I think a thing like your Customs Service is vitally needed on our world to prevent future undesirable biological importations.' " 'I agree,' I replied. 'Anything that would prevent a repetition of this business would be advisable.' "So that was how the Customs Service started. The insigne you will recognize as a starfish opening an oyster. Unfortunately the Niobians are quite literal minded. When they say any biological importation will be quarantined and examined, they mean Confederation citizens too ! "And that, of course, was the entering wedge. You'll find things quite homelike once you get out of here. The natives have developed an organization that's a virtual copy of our Administrative Branch. Customs, as you know, is a triumph of the bureaucratic system, and naturally the idea spread. Once the natives got used to a permanent government organization that was available at all times, it was only a question of time before the haphazard tribal organization became replaced by a planetary union. You could almost say that it was an inevitable consequence." Lanceford grinned. "The Niobians didn't realize that the importation of foreign Customs was almost as bad as the importation of foreign animals !" He chuckled at the unR. S. V. P. You are most cordially invited to the #th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held at the Penn-Sheraton Hotel, Pittsburgh, Pa., Labor Day weekend, September #, # and #, #. Guest of honor will be James Blish, winner of the # Hugo Award for his novel A Case of Conscience. Isaac Asimov, Philip Jose Farmer, Hal Clement and many other science fiction luminaries will illuminate the occasion. Among the stellar events will be a masquerade, a banquet where the # Hugo Awards will be presented, and an auction of books, artwork and manuscripts. Registration fee is # (# for overseas). Mail your registration fee and requests for further informaStreet, Pittsburgh #, Pa. Make your checks or money orders payable to P. Schuyler Miller, Treasurer, or to #th World Science Fiction Convention Committee. Words and Music Y eah  its a talent, all Jright," Lane said gloom: fly. He emptied his fourth drink, and looked about in envious fascination. "But it's not like fortune-telling. I can't make a living out of it. I've never even been inside a plush joint like this one before. No money in music nowadays; people don't learn instruments -- they just listen to hi-fi from the can." "You couldn't get in here complacent. "This room's strictly for celebrities. Money or not, you gotta be known. No one else heard the music, hut it was a lovely overture. The only trouble was -- the curtain was about to go up! Congressmen fly down from Washington; movie and TV stars drop by for drinks, and to be seen. The place is always crawling with VJ.P.'s" The little man was wistful. "Yeah, the classiest crowd I've ever seen. Even the music's special: 'Pomp and Circumstance' from every other table." "Fine, I see you're getting tuned up. Let's have that demonstration now, okay? I can't promise a thing, but I got friends here in New York. We might get you a good spot on TV. Eight, ten weeks on a high-priced quiz show could do a lot for your bank account." "It's all right with me," Lane said, brightening a little. "Where should I start?" "Try that gal over there, huh?" "You gotta remember," Lane reminded him, "it's not definite like words. Just atmosphere, mostly. The person's character and general background. An idea what's on their mind -- even a peek into the future now and then." "That so?" Carson was impressed. "Sounds like quite a deal to me." "Lemme explain first what it's like, so there won't be any misunderstandings. For instance, there was a guy I went to school with. His folks were set on making him a doctor. He was agreeable, but I didn't hear any medical music from him -- nothing like it. Used to hear other kinds, especially one set of themes. I didn't know my stuff then, so it took me quite a while to identify the music. Know what? it was that suite, 'The Planets,' by Holst." Carson leaned forward, eyebrows raised. " 'The Planets' ? Greek to me; I'm a Welk fan myself. What's the point?" finger and laid it along his big nose. "That kid wound up at Mt. Wilson, a first class astronomer. He found out something new about the planet Mercury. Forget what it was. If I'd known then what a talent I had, I could've predicted the whole thing." "Say," Carson exclaimed in admiration, "that's pretty neat! You hear a piece about planets -- hear it inside your head, right? -- and the guy turns out to be an astronomer." "Yeah, but I can't make a dime. All these years a music teacher, starving in three-four time," he added sourly. "We'll change that pretty damn quick. You got a talent there. Go ahead, see what you can do with the woman. But I give you fair warning -- I know her." "This is on the level," Lane said, blearily resentful. "I'm only kidding." "Okay, then. Here goes." He stared at the woman. She twisted her creamy bare shoulders uneasily, and stopped smiling at her sleek companion. "Well, what do you hear?" Carson demanded impatiently. "Mendelssohn. Easy one : 'Wedding March.' Kinda jazzed up, though." "Ha! Anything else?" "Clicking sounds, and a whir." "That's not music." There was naked suspicion in Carson's voice. "It's never all music. Plain sounds, too. Remember, noise and melody are just vibrations. It's just a matter of how they're organized." Carson reflected. "Clicking and whirring. What the devil -- say-y-y!" "Right, ain't I?" Lane demanded, morosely triumphant. "It always makes sense if you think it through." "It does at that. Damn good sense ! If I didn't know for a fact that she just hit New York -- you sure you haven't met her before?" "I told you this was straight! I don't know the dame from your grandmother. It's a talent, that's all." "Don't get mad. It hasn't sunk in yet. See, that's Rita Howard, the movie star. Married seven times, some legal." "Mendelssohn," Lane said with satisfaction. "What about the whirr, clacketyclack?" "Simple, if you know Rita. She's nuts about roulette. Practically haunts Vegas. Never has a dime. Say, try her some more ; she oughta be good for a whole concert." With a shrug, the little man fixed his gaze again. He began to hum a scrap of melody. His voice was harsh but deadly accurate. "Tough one," he muttered. "Not a war-horse like Mendelssohn. But it'll come. Dum de dum dah. Aha ! Tricky. Roussel : 'The Spider's Banquet.' " "That's a song? Helluva title, if you ask me." "Orchestral piece. Fits, doesn't it? Seven husbands, you said." "I get it -- she's like a spider! Rita's sucked plenty of men dry, all right. And the latest victim's pouring drinks into her right now. Well, at least no spider has her curves ! You're all right, Lane -- a genius!" "I got a talent. But it don't buy any groceries." "It will. That's a promise, Boy ! This could be a big thing. Let's give it another whirl. Take that big, red-faced bird over there. What do you get from him?" like a dog growling, that possible? Must be; it's coming through plain. A big dog. A mean one. Music, too. Another toughie. You sure pick 'em. Liszt? No, Berlioz. Not a major work. Overture, I think. Wait, it's coming. Dum dah dee-dah. Know it well. Got it! 'Judges of the Secret Court.' Sure, that's a composition; don't look so surprised. Welk don't play this one." Carson studied him in awe. "Well, I'm damned. A bull's eye. That guy's Senator Crawford, a big shot on the Judiciary Committee. They call him a watch dog; some say more of a mad dog. You're batting a thousand." "He was easy," Lane said, without conceit. He picked up the empty glass and set it down again. His host took the hint, beckoning to a waiter. rriWO more Martinis, very dry." Lane was peering after the waiter. "He's mad at us and the world," the little man muttered. "Hate music blasting out of him like a ninety-piece orchestra. 'Vile Race of Courtiers' from 'Rigoletto.' " "Hell with him," Carson grunted. "See that fellow over there, the little plump one with buck teeth, grinning like a happy shark?" "Yeah. I'll work him for you." He gazed steadily at the man, who looked back at Lane, grinned wider and nodded. "Doesn't know you," Carson sneered, "but that S.O.B. would shine up to Judas if he thought it might pay off some time! Since you're here, he assumes you're somebody important. What're you getting?" "A cinch, this one. It's played to death. 'La Gazza Ladra.' " "What in hell's that? Why can't they have the English names?" " 'Gazza Ladra.' Thieving magpie. Overture by Rossini." "Thieving mag -- good boy !" Carson chuckled delightedly. "Talk about a crook! Pearson had the Honorable J. Calvert Bangs tagged months ago. Oh, brother -- and him howling smear and libel all over Washington!" The little man sucked at his drink. He hiccoughed. "Told you it works." "One more, huh?" Carson said. "This is fun. Wednesday I'll get Jim Stein to meet us here. You got a great gimmick, man, and Stein's the one to do things with it." "The TV producer?" "That's him. Movies, too. Look, get the guy leaving ! The chunky character in the dark suit. There, he's stopped by the door." "Okay." Lane peered vacantly at the tense, stonyfaced man. "Ha. Should know this one. I'm a little tight, and that slows me up. RimskyKorsakov... or Rachmaninov ? Some Russian, that's for sure. Romantic School. Classical theme, too, weaving in and out. Whaddya know about that? Queer combination: classical and romantic. Mozart? No, Haydn. Can't get 'em. Noises, too. Whistles. I hear whistles." "Whistles?" Carson said. "What kind of character is this? A wolf?" "Not that kind. Shrill, thin ' whistles, like something moving high and fast. Real high up; sounds like fifty, sixty thousand feet... Music again. Can't place 'em when I'm tight. He's gone, anyway. Who was he?" "Damned if I know -- just thought he looked interesting. Some executive, I bet; one of those hard faces. See if you can place that music." "It'll come, but not now. After I sober up. Think of 'em easy tomorrow. Know the stuff well. Glazounov, maybe?" "If you can't, you can't. I'll get a line on the man. Maybe by Wednesday you -- " "Sure, I never miss, only I'm tight. Spent twenty years studying music. Should have my own ensemble. Better -- shoulda learned to be a butcher! Ever hear of a butcher going broke?" "You've made your point. Well, be here Wednesday at three. Stein and I might come up with a proposition." They left. O N Wednesday they shared a table with Stein. Stein was a small, almost dwarfish man, redeemed from ugliness only by eyes which were liquid brown 'add compassionate. He drank milk "My stomach's giving me hell," he moaned. "Too bad," Lane said politely, watching him with furtive awe. Stein's income was reputed to exceed half a million yearly. "Isn't it? Took me thirty years to afford decent food, and now I can't eat it." He gulped morosely. "It's the strain. First World War II; then Korea; next Suez. Never any let-up. A man worries about his grandchildren. And no policy you can count on. We fight in Europe -- we defend the U. S. only. Arm -- stop arming. Make bigger bombs -- junk ' em all. The whole world's crazy! Now Russia's screaming at England and France again. Kick out the American missile bases, or we might have to attack. They say thirty or forty Russian rockets could destroy England and we'd have a rough time hitting back from here." He glared at his glass. "And for a little splash milk, two dollars, the robbers!" "Don't cry, Jimmy. You can afford it," Carson grinned. "And quit worrying. Not even the Commies would wipe out France and kill Brigitte Bardot!" He winked at Lane. "Well, I identified our mystery man from the other day. If you spotted the music, let's see how close they fit." "You bet I got the music! And I was close, too, tight or not. Funny thing, both pieces were about islands. Ain't that something?" "Islands? I don't see that. You must be off base this time, Lane." "Like hell! I never miss. Rachmaninov : 'The Isle of the Dead.' That's the Russian one. Remember, I mentioned Rachmaninov. Not so easy, but I'm sure now. The classic was no push-over, either. Haydn: 'The Uninhabited Island.' Gloomy, almost threatening readings. But those whistles high up don't mean a thing to me." Carson's face was suddenly gray and flaccid. "No," he said half to himself. "They can't be that crazy. It's just more bluff!" Stein looked at him in momentary wonder, and Lane thrust out his chin. "Ain't I right?" he demanded belligerently. " 'Isle of the Dead.' 'The Uninhabited Island.' And forty whistling things high up. It's gotta fit in somewhere. I'm never wrong on this stuff. Who was the guy, anyhow?" "The Russian Ambassador to England," Carson said. "The one they just recalled." They looked at each other in horror while Stein, hardly listening, his thoughts on the worrisome headlines, quietly sipped his milk. Back in #, Elmer A. Sperry, a doctor of engineering, decided to put a puzzling toy to work. The gyroscope had been invented centuries before by the Chinese, had fascinated many -- scientists included -- by its refusal to be anything but perpendicular, and its casual disregard of the magnetic north pole. Sperry started the Sperry Gyroscope Company with one employee and a dinky low-rental office, and one job -- a gyro-compass for the U.S.S. Delaware. When that proved successful, ships everywhere ordered these compasses that disregarded the buffeting of storms. Half a century of stabilizing everything from ships to spaceships has been anything but stabilizing for the Sperry outfit. It now has over # employees in nearly # plants throughout the world, has passed What once was an item for Christmas stockings is an integral part of this missile, rocket and satellite age, perfectly obvious after Sperry put it to work, not before. Is there anything else as profitably lying around in nursery or rumpus room? Wouldn't surprise us a bitl Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl be, the novel The Sound of His Horn (Ballantine) is a valued addition to recent science fiction, once you get to it. This takes some bit of doing. The book has an introduction by Kingsley Amis (rather surgical in tone) and then Sarban has chosen to "frame" the story itself. ( " 'Look here !' He straightened up abruptly and turned round. 'You're not tired, are you? Mind if I tell you something? Let me fill your glass, then sit down and I'll tell you a tale.' " The effect is that one has made two false starts before beginning the story itself. And as the story takes some space to get where it is going, it seems possible that a number of readers will wander off to the refrigerator and never quite get back. This would be a major loss. Once Sarban begins to get down to particulars, he reveals a talent for horror that is all the more penetrating because it is couched in a literate and attractive style. It is Sarban's purpose to explore what the world would have been like if the Nazis had won World War II. His draft of the consequences is convincing and frightening. Inevitably the war was renamed, becoming "The War of German Rights." The victors have Nazified every spot on the globe; there is no longer an external enemy. Internal resistance is not ended, but it has come to take such shapes as conspiring to change the emphasis of a National-Socialist slogan. Civil rights do not exist. In fact even the identity of non-Nazi groups has been so far suppressed that one character is unable to guess whether a group of slaves are Czechs, Russians or Chinese. He isn't even interested. "They seem to me very much just lumps of undifferentiated Under-Race." There are many such glances at the outside world, but they are only glances. The main course of Sarban's story concerns itself with the life of the great hunting preserve of the Reich Master Forester. Here the quarry is human -- sometimes "lumps," sometimes criminals. Here are men like stags and girls like game birds, hunted by a scrupulous sporting code, making what lives they can out of what little humanity is allowed them. The Sound of His Horn, a slim book to begin with, spends more than a quarter of its pages on introduction, prologue and epilogue. What is left is not much over novelette length, and so there is not the space for a detailed study in full dress. It hints and evokes, instead of stating. It may sometimes leave one unsatisfied; but it will hardly leave anyone unmoved. IN A remarkably irritating new book, Stadium Beyond the Stars (Winston), Milton Lesser proposes to tell us about a group of young athletes en route from Earth to "Ophiuchus" to take part in Interstellar Olympics. That's what he proposes. What he accomplishes is something else again. The athletic-competition theme drops from sight almost at once, flickers briefly a time or two and then is seen no more. Instead Lesser gives us a stale hash of menacing aliens. Stadium Beyond the Stars moves its thin, pale plot along only with the help of fantastic amounts of snooping, skulking, eavesdropping and shadowing. Everybody is always following everybody else around in the shadows, and what they learn from this your reviewer cannot tell, for a careful study shows that if every character in the book had slept through its action, the end position of all parties would have been just about the same. The story is classified as "young adult" reading -- that is to say, it is ostensibly aimed at the later teens and actually is read mostly by twelve-yearolds. If a science fiction writer has any responsibility at all to keep his facts straight, it would seem that the responsibility is gravest of all in stories aimed at the young. To this ideal Lesser comes nowhere near. There aren't very many factual statements in Stadium Beyond the Stars, only doubletalk; but even the doubletalk is in its implications absurdly wrong. It would be easy to draw up a list of a dozen instances of this, but as it would also be repetitious let one suffice. One of Lesser's characters is a space captain who sights a derelict ; he wishes to match course and board it. The derelict is comparatively motionless and the space captain's command is traveling at "barely sublight speed," so Lesser rightly supposes that some time will be necessary for deceleration. How is this done? Lesser says first the space captain circles back to the derelict, then goes through the long deceleration. Not only does Lesser tamper with awfully elementary science, he hardly troubles to remember his own inventions. It is not ignorance that is demonstrated here. It is contempt. Contempt for his medium. Contempt for his readers. Contempt for his own story. What is even more incredible is the necessary assumption that someone read this before allowing it to get into print. Does Winston have an editor? If so, does the editor edit? is satisfying to be able to report that another Winston writer (and another writer who is sometimes less than sensible with his "science") has done a fine, competent job in a second Winston juvenile. The author is Robert Silverberg; the book is Lost Race of Mars. The book is fun. Listed as for the "# to #" group, it will most likely be read by the first-graders and read to the pre-schoolers. They will like it very much. Possibly they will sometimes have a little trouble with its vocabulary. They should ; that's how kids learn. In Lost Race of Mars Silverberg invents a likable family who, for persuasive reasons, travel to a wellthought-out and well-described Martian settlement. They are pioneers and, as it turns out, discoverers. What they discover is the "Lost Race" of the title. This is all very simple, of course. The plot is not simple because Robert Silverberg is too feckless to invent a complicated one; it is simple because he has the wisdom to realize complications would be out of place. All in all, Silverberg does this book so well that he makes it look easy; pray heaven it is -- for him -- because then we can hope that he will do many more. nile, now reissued by Signet, is Arthur C. Clarke's Islands in the Sky. A youngster enters a quiz contest and wins the great prize, which is a trip to a space satellite. Through accident, helped by youthful guile, he stretches the trip to include half a dozen, all described with Clarke's splendidly matter-of-fact detail. It is an entertaining book even for adult readers, once they reconcile themselves to a teen-age level of plot and character; but it does seem deceitful of Signet to publish it without a single hint anywhere that it was designed for a juvenile audience. Unexpected Dimension (Ballantine), the unexpected common feature of its seven stories is remorse. His heroes have variously founded societies, invented world-shaking machines, served false ideals of justice, etc. Whatever they did, they did it before the story opens, and they're sorry for it now. The stories themselves are fine. Budrys walks a crooked mile to get from beginning to end of a story, but the detours are not without point and never without power. Philip Jose Farmer's Strange Relations (Ballantine) is a collection of five short pieces arranged in the form of a family album: the stories are Mother, Daughter, Father, Son and My Sister's Brother. (The last two have had their titles forcibly wrenched into conformity with the pattern.) Farmer is an important writer, who repays study. He is, it is true, an acquired taste, but that is only another way of saying that he is his own writer instead of being a copy of someone else. In his work are several highly individual qualities -- one, an explicit curiosity about reproduction and elimination ; two, an astute knack for inventing alien biology; three, an obsessive concern for the subconscious wounds which express themselves in the human sum called "personality." Nearly all of Farmer's aliens are meticulously and brightly drawn. Nearly all of his humans have pockets of rot in their brains which seep through, polluting their actions. No matter what great struggles his characters may engage in in the physical world, their real battle is always with the wild black storms that scourge their minds. Very much like Farmer in his inventive care, C. S. Lewis is utterly unlike him in orientation. Avon has just reissued Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, which demonstrates that science fiction can be used to bring us closer to God. Surprisingly, it also demonstrates that a theological tract can be a fine, entertaining novel. Novel combines George O. Smith and A. E. van Vogt, both doing what they do best. Smith's Lost in Space is a first-contact story with a generous overlayer of interstellar navigation theory. It is not a major work, but it is not in any way a dull one. Van Vogt is... van Vogt. The name of the story is Earth's Last Fortress. The plot concerns a great struggle in some future age, involving the totality of human history on one side or another. It contains all of van Vogt's usual deadpan overstatement. When a character is surprised, it is by "the deadliest shock that had ever stabbed into a human brain." When a character is confused, "His brain was an opaque mass flecked with the moving lights of thoughts, heavy with the gathering pall of his suspicion, knowing finally only one certainty." Certainly van Vogt creates an urgency in almost everything he writes; it may be that these crushingly insensitive phrases are necessary to create that urgency. It may be, indeed, that the only proper verdict on van Vogt is an Irishism: If van Vogt were a better writer, he would be a worse one. of Bounds (Pyramid), Judith Merril demonstrates a reliable French saying: The more it changes, the more it's the same thing. Her stories are different as different can be in plot structure, theme and character. Yet they are very much the same in effect, and the reason is the overpowering subjectivity of her writing. What she has to sell is not adventure or speculation. It is emotion... a fine thing in measured doses, but maybe too saturating for a collection. Which also pretty much applies to A Medicine for Melancholy, Ray Bradbury's short story collection now reissued by Bantam. The stories are short and varied -- pastiches, vignettes, O. Henrys, gleanings of autobiography -- but every one of them is capable of delivering a jolt to the glands. It is useless to try to evaluate Bradbury as a science fiction writer. What he knows of science you could put in your eye, and what he cares about it is less. A story like Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed -- Earthmen, by virtue of settling on Mars, turn into Martians -- makes no sense at all, but it generates a mood well and movingly. But twenty-two of these in a row? Miss Merril has another book for us this month. This one is a novel, again published by Pyramid, most unpromisingly entitled The Tomorrow People. What the title seems to suggest is a sort of lackluster cuteness, quaint and folksy. The suggestion is a libel. The book is a real piece of work. The themes the author weaves into the structure are important and fresh; her characters are drawn in depth. All in all, it is the biggest, probably the best, piece of work we have seen from her since Shadow on the Hearth. The locale wanders across the face of the Earth and out into space. The themes are space travel, politics and biology -- both non-human and all too human. It is quite a can of worms the author has opened here, but she is equal to it. The elements are laid in place with skill (barring an occasional lapse like "helicopter" for a vehicle in which to travel about the face of the Moon) and all the radiating threads draw neatly together at the end; she has not merely given her story a conclusion, she has provided it with a climax. You will find the book worth reading. You may also find, however, that you wish you had a road map now and again. Here too the author salts the stew with a heavy dose of character introspection and emotion ; she will not -- will wot -- tell you what is happening in her story ; she will only tell you what her characters think about it all. The characters talk endlessly -- not only aloud. After every line of dialogue is another line, in italics, to let you know what they mean. (Special attention is invited to page #. This page has no italics, and it seems to be the only one of its kind in the book.) Finally, the author has adopted a "teaser" style of narration in which nearly all the relevant information about what is going on is concealed from the reader. All this makes thorny going, but there are roses. Fire Past the Future (and what does that mean?) involves a nuclear device at work on a remote Pacific atoll. The device is not a bomb. It is a time machine. The whole island is interdicted for security reasons and Maine thus creates a closed universe in which to set his story. The story itself is a whodunit. In another Ballantine novel, Chad Oliver continues to put his anthropology degree to excellent use. The story is Unearthly Neighbors, a detailed examination into first contact between Earth and the long-armed, toolless, tribal inhabitants of Sirius IX. Other science fiction writers have invented more "alien" aliens than these for us to make contact with. Few, though, have been as able as Oliver to convince us that this is the way first contact is going to be. In a twin bill, Robert Moore the Masterminds, a novel, and To the End of Time, a short story collection (Ace). Williams is always a competent writer and sometimes a moving one, but in these he has sacrificed everything to speed and action. When the Earthmen and the aliens have finished bopping each other over the head, the battlefield is left a clutter of begged questions and abandoned premises. A properly ordered Hallowe'en will have a gathering of congenial persons (for example, science fiction writers) , a supply of suitable refreshment (for example, cider spiked with applejack) to make them merry, and suitable entertainment (for example, ghost stories) to make them creep. As a purveyor of this sort of entertainment, Basil Davenport has no equal. Here, in the abridged version of Tales to Be Told in the Dark (Ballantine), eleven of his most successful opera are reproduced, with hints from the master on how to congeal an audience. Davenport means the stories to be told aloud, but you will find them almost as much fun to read. From Ace another double volume : Andre Norton on one side, Richard Wilson on the other. The Wilson is And Then the Town Took Off; it has all of his virtues -- grace, smoothness and ease -- and all of his faults, the worst of which is a reluctance to dig beneath the surface. And Then the Town Took Off is about -- well, about a town that takes off. It disappears; aliens have burrowed beneath it and floated it away into the sky. There is then a struggle to get it back with battles between nations (it drifts toward Russia) and among the parts of the administration of our own. It is all witty and bright and disappointing only because you can't help feeling the man can do more. Much the same can be said about the other occupant of this book, Andre Norton. Her story is The Sioux Spaceman and the title again tells you about all you need to know. She does not falter in her word-handling or her understanding of her characters; and if you accept in the beginning that this book is going to operate safely in conventional areas, then you will enjoy both ends of the volume. the ages ; some age more rapidly than bakery bread. A book which should be read immediately, before it grows stale, is the collection of essays on nuclear weapons and their effects, edited by John M. Fowler and published by Basic Books under the title of Fallout. The title is misleading. Actually of twelve chapters only a few are concerned with the rain of fission products that is seeping into our bones. The others have more urgent dangers to discuss. It is true, say the authors, thousands of persons, mostly children. "Military preparedness inevitably costs lives : there are some # deaths each year in our armed forces from peacetime accidents." However much we may dislike the probability that one additional child in each average community will contract leukemia from the fission products over the next few years, Ralph Lapp's chapter, sketching the probable face of nuclear war, makes it clear that the real thing to fear from The Bomb is The Bomb itself. Let us suppose war comes. First there would be the heat, igniting every inflammable object over some # square miles. Then the firestorm (in unburned survivors by asphyxiation, sucking all the oxygen out of the air. Then the blast, extending in some degree as far as a hundred miles from the burst. Then the fallout. This is the pattern of one bomb. It needs to be multiplied by scores or hundreds. John Fowler takes up the story with a chapter on the prospects of national survival after a nuclear war. He posits a hypothetical #megaton attack (probably smallish, as against what might be delivered) that was imagined to have taken place on October #th, #. To fill out the picture of the ifworld results, weather records were consulted, tracing the winddriven pattern of fallout, estimating what aid might have come from rain or storm to help control the resulting fires. The answer is not encouraging. Fowler quotes from Congressional testimony of John N. Wolfe on this point: "It is most likely, in my opinion, that these fires would go unquenched until checked by the winter snows, spreading over hundreds of thousands of square miles... With the coming of spring thaws, espedaily in the mountains, meltwater from the mountain glaciers and snowfields would erode the denuded slopes, flood the valleys, in time rendering them uninhabitable and unexploitable for decades or longer... I visualize those persons unsheltered in heavy fallout areas after three months to be dead, dying, sick or helpless; those sheltered, if they can psychologically withstand confinement for that period, will emerge to a strange landscape. The sun will shine through a dustladen atmosphere; the landscape in mid-January would be snow-covered or blackened by fire; at higher latitudes blizzards and sub-zero temperature would add death and discomfort; both food and shelter would be inadequate and production incapacitated." There is very little comfort to be found in this book for those who, like Edward Teller, suggest "conventions" to limit the use of nuclear weapons, or for those who minimize the effect of nuclear war on the total history of a nation. It would be only an episode, they say ; it would not destroy a country. Would it? "If a nuclear war could not destroy civilization and the economy in the warring countries, then perhaps we do not understand what is meant by civilization and national economy," says Fowler. The list of contributors is distinguished and expert ; and there is an introduction by Adlai Stevenson, reminding us (with manfully concealed self-righteousness) that the same administration which in # sternly rebuked him for proposing an end to bomb tests in # put his suggestion into practice. The hopeful implication is that some of the frightening faces the world's governments are making at each other are only for effect; reason may ultimately prevail, as it has in the suspension of testing. It is good to have this hopeful implication. It is about the only one to be found in the book. room to both the "SteadyState" hypothesis of permanent creation (Fred Hoyle) and to its "Big Bang" theory adversaries (George Gamow), now offers equal time to a proponent of the Middle Way. In The Oscillating Universe, Ernst J. Opik accepts the hypothesis of creation of the galaxies from the explosion of a "primordial atom." (This is the "Big Bang" hypothesis.) But, he says, this was not a unique event. The universe does not have a beginning and an end; like Hoyle, he believes it goes on forever. That exploding "atom" which produced the expanding universe, says Opik, was itself formed from the contraction of a universe before ours -- which itself had been born in a "Big Bang" -- had then expanded to the limits gravitation would allow -- and had then collapsed, thus generating another "atom." Further, he says this is the fate of our own universe and all the universes yet to come. from now the Day of Reckoning will come. The whole universe -- all galaxies with their suns shining or extinct, their planets dead or still carrying life on their surface -- will precipitate itself into a narrow space, almost a point. Everything will perish in a fiery chaos well before the point of greatest compression is reached. All bodies and all atoms of the world will dissolve into the nuclear fluid of the primeval atom -- which in this case is not truly primeval -- and a new expanding world will surge from it, like Phoenix out of the ashes, rejuvenated and full of creative vigor." Like Gamow and Hoyle, Opik has coated his cosmogony with a layer of popularized astrophysics, very well done and very informative. New American Library has much to be proud of in presenting three such articulate and persuasive scientists. It's too bad that at least two of them must necessarily be wrong. end Star Performer round opening in the bottom of the silvery globe over the top of his hairless blue skull. He pulled the globe down until he felt tiny filaments touching his scalp. The tips of the wires were cold. The moderator then said, " Dreaming Through the Universe tonight brings you the first native Martian to appear on the dreamwaves -- Gavir of the Desert Men. With him is his guardian, Dr. Malcomb Rice, the noted anthropologist." Then the moderator quesBlue Boy's rating was high and his fans were loyal to the death -- anyonefs death! tioned Malcomb, while Gavir nervously awaited the moment when his thoughts would be Earthmen. Malcomb told how he had been struck by Gavir's intelligence and missionarytaught ability to speak Earth's language, and had decided to bring Gavir to Earth. The moderator turned to Gavir. "Are you anxious to get back to Mars?" No! Gavir thought. Back behind the Preserve Barrier that killed you instantly if you stepped too close to it? Back to the constant fear of being labor pool, to wind up in the Mars was where Gavir's father had been pinned, bayonets through his hands and feet, to the wall of a shack just the other side of the Barrier, to die slowly, out of Gavir's reach. Father James told himself had ordered the killing, because Gavir's father had tried to organize resistance to the Corporation. Mars was where the magic powers of the Earthmen and the helplessness of the Martian tribes would always protect the head ance. Back to that world of hopeless fear and hatred? I never want to go back to Mars! I want to stay here! But that wasn't what he was supposed to think. Quickly he said, "I will be happy to return to my people." A movement caught his eye. The producer, reclining on a divan in a far corner of the small studio, was making some kind of signal by beating his fist against his forehead. "Well, enough of that!" the moderator said briskly. "How about singing one of your tribal songs for us?" Gavir said, "I will sing the Song of Going to Hunt." He heaved himself up from the divan, and, feet planted wide apart, threw back his head and began to howl. He was considered a poor singer in his tribe, and he was not surprised that Malcomb and the moderator winced. But Malcomb had told him that it wouldn't matter. The dreamees receiving the dreamcast would hear the song as it should sound, as Gavir heard it in his mind. Everything that Gavir saw and heard and felt in his mind, the dreamees could see and hear and feel... the plain. The hunter stood at the edge of the camp as the shriveled Martian sun struck the tops of the Shakam hills. The hunter hefted the long, balanced narvoon, the throwing knife, in his hand. He had faith in the knife, and in his skill with it. The hunter filled his lungs, the cold air reaching deep into his chest. He shouted out his throat-bursting hunting cry. He began to run across the plain. Crouching behind crumbling red rocks, racing over flat expanses of orange sand, the hunter sought traces of the seegee, the great slow desert beast whose body provided his tribe with all the essentials of existence. At last he saw tracks. He mounted a dune. Out on the plain before him a great brown seegee lumbered patiently, unaware of its danger. The hunter was about to strike out after it, when a dark form leaped at him. The hunter saw it out of the corner of his eye at the last moment. His startled sidestep saved him from the neckbreaking snap of the great jaws. The drock's long body was armored with black scales. Curving fangs protruded from its upper jaw. Its handlike forepaws ended in hooked claws, to grasp and tear its prey. It was larger, stronger, faster than the hunter. The thin Martian air carried weirdly high-pitched cries which proclaimed its craving to sink its fangs into the hunter's body. The drock's huge hind legs coiled back on their triple joints, and it sprang. The hunter thrust the gleaming knife out before him, so that the dark body would land on its gleaming blade. The drock twisted in mid-air and landed to one side of the hunter. Now, before it could gather itself for another spring, there was time for one cast of the blade. It had to be done at once. It had to be perfect. If it failed, the knife would be lost and the drock would have its kill. The hunter grasped the weapon by the blade, drew his arm back, and snapped it forward. The blade struck deep into the throat of the drock. The drock screamed eerily and jumped clumsily. The hunter threw himself at the great, dark body and retrieved the knife. He struck with it again and again into the gray twitching belly. Colorless blood ran out over the hard, tightly-stretched skin. The drock fell gave a last convulsion, and lay still. The hunter plunged the blade into the red sand to clean it. He threw back his head and bellowed his hunting cry. There drock, for it showed that the Desert Man and not the drock, was lord of the red waste... divan, exhausted, his song finished. He didn't hear the moderator winding up the dreamcast. Then the producer of the program was upon him. He began shouting even before Gavir removed his headset. "What kind of a fool are you? Before you started that song, you dreamed things about the Martian Development Corporation that were libelous ! I got the whole thing -- the Barrier, the guards, the labor pools and mines, the father crucified. It was awful ! sponsors." Malcomb said, "You can't expect an untrained young Martian to control his very thoughts. And may I point out that your tone is hostile?" At this a sudden change came over the producer. The standard Earth expression -- invincible benignity -- took control of his face. "I apologize for having spoken sharply, but dreamcasting is a nerve-wracking business. If it weren't for Ethical Conditioning, I don't know how I'd control my aggressive impulses. The Suppression of Aggression is the Foundation of Civilization, eh?" Malcomb smiled. "Ethical Conditioning Keeps Society from Fissioning." He shook hands with the producer. "Come around tomorrow at # and collect your fee," said the producer. "Good night, gentlemen." As they left the Global Dreamcasting System building, Gavir said to Malcomb, "Can we go to a bookstore tonight?" "Tomorrow. I'm taking you to your hotel and then I'm going back to my apartment. We both need sleep. And don't forget, you've been warned not to go prowling around the city by yourself..." As soon as Gavir was sure that Malcomb was out of the hotel and well on his way home, he left his room and went out into the city. In a pitifully few days he would be back in the Preserve, with hunger and the hopeless desire to find and kill the man who had ordered his father's death. Now he had an opportunity to learn more about the universe of the Earthmen. Despite Malcomb's orders, he was going to find a seller of books. During a reading class at the mission school, Father James had said, "In books there is power. All that you call magic in our Earth civilization is explained in books." Gavir wanted to learn. It was his only hope to find an alternative to the short, fear-ridden, impoverished life he foresaw for himself. A river of force carried him, along with thousands of Earthmen -- godlike beings in their perfect health and their impregnable benignity -- through the streets of the city. Platforms of force raised and lowered him through the city's multiple levels... And, as has always happened to outlandefs in cities, he became lost. furtive red and violet lights danced in the shadows of hunched buildings. A halfdozen Earthmen approached him, stopped and stared. Gavir stared back. The Earthmen wore black garments and furs and metal ornaments. The biggest of them wore a black suit, a long black cape, and a broad-brimmed black hat. He carried a coiled whip in one hand. The Earthmen turned to one another. "A Martian." "Let's give pain and death to the Martian! It will be a new experience -- one to savor." "Take pain, Martian!" The Earthman with the black hat raised his arm, and the long heavy lash fell on Gavir. He felt a savage sting in the arm he had thrown up to protect his eyes. Gavir leaped at the Earthmen. He clubbed the man with the whip across the face. As the others rushed in, Gavir flailed about him with long arms and heavy fists. He began to enjoy it. It was rare that a Martian had an opportunity to knock Earthmen down. The mood of the Song of Going to Hunt came over him. He sprang free of his attackers and drew his glittering narvoon. The man with the whip S lled. They looked at his ife, and then all at once turned and ran. Gavir drew back his arm and threw the knife with a practiced catapult-snap of shoulder, elbow, and wrist. To his surprise, the blade clattered to the street far short of his retreating eixemies. Then he remembered": you couldn't throw far in the gravity of Earth. The Earthmen disappeared into a lift-force field. Gavir decided not to pursue them. He walked forward and picked up his narvoon, and saw that the street on which it lay was solid black pavement, not a force-field. He must be in the lowest level of the city. He didn't know his way around ; he might meet more enemies. He forgot about the books he'd wanted, and began to search for his hotel. room, he went immediately to bed. He slept late. Malcomb woke him at #. Gavir told Malcomb about the strangely-dressed men who had tried to kill him. "I told you not to wander around alone." "But you did not tell me that Earthmen might try to kill me. You have told me that Earthmen are good and peaceloving, that there have been no acts of violence on Earth for many decades. You have men are exceptions, because they are living off Earth, and this somehow makes them different." "Well, those people you ran into are another exception." "Why?" "You know about the Regeneration and Rejuvenation treatment we have here on Earth. A variation of it was given you to acclimate you to Earth's gravity and atmosphere. Well, since the RR treatment was developed, we Earthmen have a life-expectancy of about one hundred fifty years. Those people who attacked you were CenturyPlus. They are over a hundred years old, but as healthy, physically, as ever." "What is wrong with them?" "They seem to have outgrown their Ethical Conditioning. They live wildly. Violently. It's a problem without precedent, and we don't know what to do with them. The fact is, Senile Delinquency is our number one problem." "Why not punish them?" said Gavir. "They're too powerful. They are often people who've pursued successful careers and acquired a good deal of property and position. And there are getting to be more of them all the time. But come on. You and I have to go over to Global Dreamcasting and collect our fee." T HE impeccably affable producer of Dreaming Through the Universe gave Malcomb a check and then asked them to follow him. "Mr. Davery wants to see you. Mr. Hoppy Davery, executive vice-president in charge of production. Scion of one of Earth's oldest communications media families !" They went with the producer to the upper reaches of the Global Dreamcasting building. There they were ushered into a huge office. They found Mr. Hoppy Davery lounging on a divan the size of a space-port. He was youthful in appearance, as were all Earthmen, but a soft plumpness and a receding hairline made him look slightly older than average. He pointed a rigid finger at Malcomb and Gavir. "I want you two to hear a condensed recording of statements taken from calls we received last night." Gavir stiffened. They had gotten into trouble because of A voice boomed out of the ceiling. "That Martian boy has power. That song was a fist in the jaw. More!" A woman's voice followed: "If you let that boy go back to Mars I'll never dream a Global program again." More voices: "Enormous!" "Potent!" "That hunting song drove me mad. I like being mad!" "Keep him on Earth." Hoppy Davery pressed a button in the control panel on his divan, and the voices fell silent. "Those callers that admitted their age were all Century-Plus. The boy appeals to the Century-Plus mentality. I want to try him again. This time on a really big dreamshow, not just an educational 'cast. Got a spot on next week's Farfel Flisket Show. If he gets the right response, we talk about a contract. Okay?" Malcomb said, "His visa expires -- " "We'll take care of his visa." Gavir trembled with joy. Hoppy Davery pressed another button and a secretary entered with papers. She was followed by another woman. The second woman was dark-haired and slender. She wore leather boots and tight brown breeches. She was bare from the waist up and her breasts were young and full. A jewelled clip fastened a scarlet cape at her neck. Her lips were a disconcertingly vivid red, apparently an artificial color. She kissed Hoppy Davery on the forehead, leaving red blotches on his pink dome. He wiped his forehead and looked at his hand. "Do you have to wear that barbaric face-paint?" Hoppy turned sad eyes on Gavir and Malcomb. "Gentlemen, my mother, Sylvie Davery." A Senile Delinquent! thought Gavir. She looked like Davery's younger sister. Malcomb stared at her apprehensively, and Gavir wondered if she were somehow going to attack them. She looked at Gavir. "Mmm. What a body, what gorgeous blue skin. How tall are you, Blue Boy?" "He's approximately seven feet tall, Sylvie," said Hoppy, "and what do you want here, anyway?" "Just came up to see Blue Boy. One of the crowd dreamed him last night. Positively manic about him. I found out he'd be with you." "See?" said Hoppy to Gavir. "The Century-Plus mentality. You've got something they go for. Undoubtedly because you're -- forgive me -- such a complete barbarian. That's what they're all trying to be." "Spare me another lecture on Senile Delinquency, Our Number One Problem." She walked to the door and Gavir watched her all the way. She turned with a swirl of scarlet and a dramatic display of healthy young flesh. "See you again. Blue Boy." After Sylvie left, Hoppy Davery said, "That might be a good professional name -- Blue Boy. Gavir doesn't mean anything. Now what kind of a song could you do for the Farfel Flisket show?" Gavir thought. "Perhaps you would like the Song of Creation." "It's part of a fertility rite," Malcomb explained. "Great! Give the Senile Delinquents another workout. It's not quite ethical, but its good for us. But for heaven's sake, Blue Boy, keep your T HE following week, Gavir sang the Song of Creation on the Farfel Flisket show, and transmitted the images which it brought up in his mind to his audience. A jubilant Hoppy Davery called him at his hotel next morning. "Best response I've ever seen ! The Century-Plussers have been rioting and throwing mass orgies every since you sang. But they take time out to call us up and beg for more. I've got a sponsor and a two-year contract lined up for you." The sponsor was pacing back and forth in Hoppy Davery's office when Malcomb and Gavir arrived. Hoppy introduced him proudly. "Mr. Jarvis Spurling, president of the Martian Development Corporation." Gavir's hand leaped at the narvoon under his doublet. Then he stopped himself. He turned the gesture into the proffer of a handshake. "How do you do?" he said quietly, In his mind he congratulated himself. He had learned emotional control from the Earthmen. Here was the man who had ordered his father crucified! Yet he had managed to hide his instant desire to strike, to kill, to carry out the oath of the blood feud then and there. Jarvis Spurling ignored Gavir's hand and stared coldly at him. There was not a trace of the usual Earthman's kindliness in his square, battered face. "I'm told you got talent. Okay, but a Bluie is a Bluie. I'll pay you because a Bluie on Dreamvision is good But one slip like on your first 'cast and you go back to the Preserve." "Mr. Spurling!" said Malcomb. "Your tone is hostile!" "Damn right. That Ethical Conditioning slop doesn't work on me. I've lived too long on the frontier. And I know Bluies." A said Gavir. As he drew his signature pictograph on the contract, Sylvie Davery sauntered in. She held a white tube between her painted lips. The end of the tube was glowing and giving off clouds of smoke. Hoppy Davery coughed and Sylvie winked at Gavir. Gavir straightened up, and she to:': a long look at his seven feet. "All finished, Blue Boy? Come on, let's go have a drink at Lucifer Grotto." Caution told Gavir to refuse. But before he could speak Spurling snapped, "Disgusting! An Earth woman and a Bluie! If you were on Mars, lady, we'd deport you so fast your tail would burn. And God help the Bluie!" Sylvie blew a cloud of smoke at Spurling. "You're not on Mars, Jack. You're back in civilization where we do what we damned well please." Spurling laughed. "I've heard about you CenturyPlussers. You're all sick." "You can't claim any monopoly on mental health. Not with that concentration camp you run on Mars. Coming, Gavir?" Gavir grinned at Spurling. "The contract, I believe, does not cover my private life." Hoppy Davery said, "Sylvie, I don't think this is wise." Sylvie uttered a short, sharp obscenity, linked arms with Gavir, and strolled out. "You screwball Senile Delinquent," Spurling yelled after Sylvie, "you oughtta be locked up!" that same quarter in which Gavir had been attacked. Sylvie told him it was the hangout for wealthier New York Century-Plussers. Gavir told her about the attack, and she laughed. "It won't happen again. You're a hero to the Senile Delinquents now. By the way, the big fellow with the broad-brimmed hat, he's one of the most prominent Senile Delinquents of our day. He's president of the biggest privately-owned space line, but he likes to call himself the Hat Rat. You must be one of the few people who ever got away from him alive." "He seemed happy to get away from me," said Gavir. An arrangement of forceplanes and #V projections made the front of Lucifer Grotto appear to be a curtain of flames. Gavir hung back, but Sylvie inserted a tiny gold pitchfork into a small aperture in the glowing, rippling surface. The flames swept aside, revealing a doorway. A bearded man in black tights escorted them through a luridly-lit bar to a private room. When they were alone, Sylvie dropped her cape to the floor, sat on the edge of a huge, pink divan, and smiled at Gavir. Gavir contemplated her. That she was over a hundred years old was a little frightening. But the skin of her face and her bare upper body was a warm color, and tautly filled. She had lashed out at Spurling, and he liked her for that. But in one way she was like Spurling. She didn't fit into the bland, non-violent world of Malcomb and Hoppy. He shook his head. He said, "Sylvie, why -- well, why are you the way you are? Why -- and how -- have you broken away from Ethical Conditioning?" Sylvie frowned. She spoke a few words into the air, ordering drinks. She said, "I didn't do it deliberately. When I reached the age of about a hundred it stopped working for me. I suddenly wanted to do what  wanted to do. And then I found out that I didn't know what I wanted to do. It was Ethical Conditioning or nothing, so I picked nothing. And here I am, chasing nothing." "How do you chase nothing?" She set fire to a white tube. "This, for instance. They used to do it before they found out it caused cancer. Now there's no more cancer, but even if there were, I'd still smoke. That's the attitude I have. You try things. You live in the past, if you're inclined, adopt the costumes and manners of some more colorful time. You try ridiculous things, disgusting things, vicious things. You know they're all nothing, but you have to do something, so you go on doing nothing, elaborately and violently." A tray of drinks rose through the floor. Sylvie frowned as she noticed a folded paper tucked between the glasses. She picked it up and read it, chuckled, and read it again, aloud. "Sir: I beg you to forgive the presumption of my recent attack on you. Since then you have captured my imagination. I now hold you to be the noblest savage of them all. Henceforward please consider me, Your obedient servant, Hat Rat." "You've impressed him," said Sylvie. "But you impress me even more. Come here." She held out slim arms to him. He had no wish to refuse her. She was not like a Martian woman, but he found the differences exciting and attractive. He went to her, and he forgot entirely that she was over a hundred years old. ed, Gavir's fame spread over Earth. By spring, the rating computers credited him with an audience of eight percent of whom were Century-Plussers. Davery doubled Gavir's salary. Gavir toured the world with Sylvie, mobbed everywhere by worshipful Century-Plussers. Male Century-Plussers by the and blue kilts in honor of their hero. Blue-dyed hair was now de rigeur among the ladies of Lucifer Grotto. The Hat Rat himself, who often appeared at a respectful distance in crowds around Gavir, now wore a wide-brimmed hat of brightest blue. Then there came the dreamcast on which Gavir sang the Song of Complaint . It was an ancient song, a Desert Man's outcry against injustice, enemies, false friends and callous leaders. It was a protest against sufferings that could neither be borne nor prevented. At the climax of the song Gavir pictured a tribal chief who refused to make fair division of the spoils of a hunt with his warriors. Gradually he allowed this image to turn into a picture of Hoppy Davery withholding bundles of money from a starving Gavir. Then he ended the song. Hoppy sent for him next morning. "Why did you do that?" he said. "Listen to this." A recorded voice boomed: "This is Hat Rat. Pay the Blue Boy what he deserves, or I will give you death. It will be a personal thing between you and me. I will besprinkle you with corrosive acids; I will burn out your eyes; I will -- " Hoppy cut the voice off. Gavir saw that he was sweating. "There were dozens like that. If you want more money, I'll give you more money. Say something nice about me on your next dreamcast, for heaven's sake!" Gavir spread his big blue hands. "I am sorry. I don't want more money. I cannot always control the pictures I make. These images come into my mind even though they have nothing to do with me." Hoppy shook his head. "That's because you haven't had Ethical Conditioning. We don't have this trouble with our other performers. You just must remember that dreamvision is the most potent communications medium ever devised. Be careful." "I will," said Gavir. vir sang the Song of the Blood Feud. He pictured a Desert Man whose father had been killed by a drock. The Desert Man ran over the red sand, and he found the drock. He did not throw his knife. That would not have satisfied his hatred. He fell upon the drock and stabbed and stabbed. The Desert Man howled his hunting-cry over the body of his enemy, and spat into its face. And the fanged face of the drock turned into the square, battered face of Jarvis Spurling. Gavir held the image in his mind for a long moment. When the dreamcast was over, a studio page ran up to Gavir. "Mr. Spurling wants to see you at once, at his office." "Let him come and find me," said Gavir. "Let us go, Sylvie." They went to Lucifer Grotto where Gavir's wealthiest admirers among the Senile Delinquents were giving a party for him in the Pandeiponium Room. The only prominent person missing, as Sylvie remarked after surveying the crowd, was the Hat Rat. They wondered about it, but no one knew where he was. Sheets of flame illuminated the wild features and strange garments of over a hundred Century-Plus ladies and gentlemen. Gouts of flame leaped from the walls to light antique-style cigarettes. Drinks were refilled from nozzles of molded fire. An hour passed from the time of Gavir's arrival. Then Jarvis Spurling joined the party. There was a heavy frontier sonic pistol strapped at his waist. A protesting Malcomb was behind him. Jarvis Spurling's square face was dark with anger. "You deliberately put my face on that animal! You want to make the public hate me. I pay your salary and keep you here on Earth, and this is what I get for it. All right. A Bluie is a Bluie, and I'll treat you like a Bluie should be treated." He unsnapped his holster and drew the square, heavy pistol out and pointed it at Gavir. Gavir stood up. His right hand plucked at his doublet. "You're itching to go for that throwing knife," said Spurling. "Go on ! Take it out and get ready to throw it. I'll give you that much chance. Let's make a game out of this. We'll make like we're back on Mars, Bluie, and you're out hunting a drock. And you find one, only this drock has a gun. How about that, Bluie?" Gavir took out the narvoon, grasped the blade, and drew his arm back. "Gavir!" It was the Hat Rat. He stood between pillars of flame in the doorway of the Pandemonium Room of Lucifer Grotto, and there was a peculiar contrivance of dark brown wood and black metal tubing cradled in his arm. "This ancient shotgun I dedicate to your blood feud. I shall hunt down your enemy, Gavir!" Spurling turned. The Hat Rat saw him. "The enemy!" the Hat Rat shouted. The shotgun exploded. Spurling's body was thrown back against Gavir. Gavir saw a huge ragged red caved-in place in Spurling's chest. Spurling's body sagged to the floor and lay there face up, eyes open. The Senile Delinquents of Lucifer Grotto leaned forward to grin at the tattered body. Still holding the narvoon, Gavir stood over his dead enemy. He threw back his head and howled out the hunting cry of the Desert Men. Then he looked down and spat in Jarvis Spurling's dead face. Galaxy... around the world With your literally thousands of letters you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science-fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) ii I I m  I I ' rrrrwi n Him r m   Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for: (#tf additional per # issues foreign postage) # Issues  #  # Issues  #  # Issues  #  Time is money. Time heals all wounds. Given time , anything is possible. And now he had all the time in the world ! things that morning. He broke the glass of water on his night stand. He knocked it crazily against the opposite wall and shattered it. Yet it shattered slowly. This would have surprised him if he had been fully awake, for he had only reached out sleepily for it. Nor had he wakened regularly to his alarm; he had wakened to a weird, slow, low booming, yet the clock said six, time for the alarm. And the low boom, when it came again, seemed to come from the clock. He reached out and touched it gently, but it floated off the stand at his touch and bounced around slowly on the floor. And when he picked it up again it had stopped, nor would shaking start it. He checked the electric clock in the kitchen. This also said six o'clock, but the sweep hand did not move. In his living room the radio clock said six, but the second hand seemed stationary. "But the lights in both rooms work," said Vincent. "How are the clocks stopped ? Are they on a separate circuit?" He went back to his bedroom and got his wristwatch. It also said six ; and its sweep hand did not sweep. "Now this could get silly. What is it that would stop both mechanical and electrical clocks ?" He went to the window and looked out at the clock on the Mutual Insurance Building. It said six o'clock, and the second hand did not move. "Well, it is possible that the confusion is not limited to myself. I once heard the fanciful theory that a cold shower will clear the mind. For me it never has, but I will try it. I can always use cleanliness for an excuse." The shower didn't work. Yes, it did: the water came now, but not like water ; like very slow syrup that hung in the air. He reached up to touch it there hanging down and stretching. And it shattered like glass when he touched it and drifted in fantastic slow globs across the room. But it had the feel of water, wet and pleasantly no cool. And in a quarter of a minute or so it was down over his shoulders and back, and he luxuriated in it. He let it soak his head and it cleared his wits at once. "There is not a thing wrong with me. I am fine. It is not my fault that the water is slow this morning and other things awry." He reached for the towel and it tore to pieces in his hands like porous wet paper. N OW he became very careful in the way he handled things. Slowly, tenderly, and deftly he took them so that they would not break. He shaved himself without mishap in spite of the slow water in the lavatory also. Then he dressed himself with the greatest caution and cunning, breaking nothing except his shoe laces, a thing that is likely to happen at any time. "If there is nothing the matter with me, then I will check and see if there is anything seriously wrong with the world. The dawn was fairly along when I looked out, as it should have been. Approximately twenty minutes have passed ; it is a clear morning ; the sun should now have hit the top several stories of the Insurance Building." But it had not. It was a clear morning, but the dawn had not brightened at all in the twenty minutes. And that big clock still said six. It had not changed. Yet it had changed, and he knew it with a queer feeling. He pictured it as it had been before. The hour and the minute hand had not moved noticeably. But the second hand had moved. It had moved a third of the dial. So he pulled up a chair to the window and watched it. He realized that, though he could not see it move, yet it did make progress. He watched it for perhaps five minutes. It moved through a space of perhaps five seconds. "Well, that is not my problem. It is that of the clock maker, either a terrestrial or a celestial one." But he left his rooms without a good breakfast and he left them very early. How did hp know that it was early since there was something wrong with the time? Well, it was early at least according to the sun and according to the clocks, neither of which institutions seemed to be working properly. He left without a good breakfast because the coffee would not make and the bacon would not fry. And in plain point of fact the fire would not heat. The gas flame came from the pilot light like a slowly spreading stream or an unfolding flower. Then it burned far too steadily. The skillet remained cold when placed over it ; nor would water even heat. It had taken at least five minutes to get the water out of the faucet in the first place. He ate a few pieces of leftover bread and some scraps of meat. In the street there was no motion, no real motion. A truck, first seeming at rest, moved very slowly. There was no gear in which it could move so slowly. And there was a taxi which crept along, but Charles Vincent had to look at it carefully for some time to be sure that it was in motion. Then he received a shock. He realized by the early morning light that the driver of it was dead. Dead with his eyes wide open! Slowly as it was going, and by whatever means it was moving, it should really be stopped. He walked over to it, opened the door, and pulled on the brake. Then he looked into the eyes of the dead man. Was he really dead? It was hard to be sure. He felt warm. But, even as Vincent looked, the eyes of the dead man had begun to close. And close they did and open again in a matter of about twenty seconds. closing and opening eyes sent a chill through Vincent. And the dead man had begun to lean forward in his seat. Vincent put a hand in the middle of the man's chest to hold him upright, but he found the forward pressure as relentless as it was slow. He was unable to keep the dead man up. So he let him go, watching curiously; and in a few seconds the driver's face was against the wheel. But it was almost as if it had no intention of stopping there. It pressed into the wheel with dogged force. He would surely break his face. Vincent took several holds on the dead man and counteracted the pressure somewhat. Yet the face was being damaged, and if things were normal, blood would have flowed. The man had been dead so long however, that (though he was still warm) his blood must have congealed, for it was fully two minutes before it began to ooze. "Whatever I have done, I have done enough damage," said Vincent. "And, in whatever nightmare I am in, I am likely to do further harm if I meddle more. I had better leave it alone." He walked on down the morning street. Yet whatever vehicles he saw were moving with an incredible slowness, as though driven by some fantastic gear reduction. And there were people here and there frozen solid. It was a chilly morning, but it was not that cold. They were immobile in positions of motion, as though they were playing the children's game of Statues. "How is it," said Charles Vincent, "that this young girl (who I believe works across the street from us) should have died standing up and in full stride? But, no. She is not dead. Or, if so, she died with a very alert expression. And -- oh, my God, she's doing it too !" For he realized that the eyes of the girl were closing, and in the space of no more than a quarter of a second they had completed their cycle and were open again. Also, and this was even stranger, she had moved, moved forward in full stride. He would have timed her if he could, but how could he when all the clocks were crazy? Yet she must have been taking about two steps a minute. He went into the cafeteria. The early morning crowd that he had often watched through the windows was there. The girl who made flapjacks in the window had just flipped one and it hung in the air. Then it floated over as if caught by a slight breeze, and sank slowly down as if settling in water. The breakfasters, like the people in the street, were all dead in this new way, moving with almost imperceptible motion. And all had apparently died in the act of drinking coffee, eating eggs, or munching toast. And if there were only time enough, there was even a chance that they would get the drinking, eating, and munching done with, for there was the shadow of movement in them all. The cashier had the register drawer open and money in her hand, and the hand of the customer was outstretched for it. In time, somewhere in the new leisurely time, the hands would come together and the change be given. And so it happened. It may have been a minute and a half, or two minutes, or two and a half. It is always hard to judge time, and now it had become all but impossible. "I am still hungry," said Charles Vincent, "but it would be foolhardy to wait for service here. Should I help myself? They will not mind if they are dead. And if they are not dead, in any case it seems that I am invisible to them." He opened a bottle of milk and held it upside down over his glass while he ate another roll. Liquids had all become perversely slow. But he felt better for his erratic breakfast. He would have paid for it, but how? He left the cafeteria and walked about the town as it seemed still to be quite early, though one could depend on neither sun nor clock for the time any more. The traffic lights were unchanging. He sat for a long time in a little park and watched the town and the big clock in the Commerce Building tower ; but like all the clocks it was either stopped or the hand would creep too slowly to be seen. It must have been just about an hour till the traffic lights changed, but change they did at last. By picking a point on the building across the street and watching what moved past it, he found that the traffic did indeed move. In a minute or so, the entire length of a car would pass the given point. He had, he recalled, been very far behind in his work and it had been worrying him. He decided to go to the office, early as it was or seemed to be. He let himself in. Nobody else was there. He resolved not to look at the clock and to be very careful of the way he handled all objects because of his new propensity for breaking things. This considered, all seemed normal there. He had said the day before that he could hardly catch up on his work if he put in two days solid. He now resolved at least to work steadily until something happened, whatever it was. For hour after hour he worked on his tabulations and reports. Nobody else had arrived. Could something be wrong? Certainly something was wrong. But this was not a holiday. That was not it. Just how long can a stubborn and mystified man plug away at his task? It was hour after hour after hour. He did not become hungry nor particularly tired. And he did get through a lot of work. "It must be half done. However it has happened, I have caught up on at least a day's work. I will keep on." He must have continued silently for another eight or ten hours. He was caught up completely on his back work. "Well, to some extent I can work into the future. I can head up and carry over. I can put in everything but the figures of the field reports." And he did so. "It will be hard to bury me in work again. I could almost coast for a day. I don't even know what day it is, but I must have worked twenty hours straight through and nobody has arrived. Perhaps nobody ever will arrive. If they are moving with the speed of the people in the nightmare outside, it is no wonder they have not arrived." He put his head down on his arms on the desk. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the misshapen left thumb that he had always tried to conceal a little by the way he handled his hands. "At least I know that I am still myself. I'd know myself anywhere by that." Then he went to sleep at his desk. quick click-click-click of high heels, and he wakened to the noise. "What are you doing dozing at your desk, Mr. Vincent? Have you been here all night?" "I don't know, Jenny. Honestly I don't." "I was only teasing. Sometimes when I get here a little early I take a catnap myself." The clock said six minutes till eight and the second hand was sweeping normally. Time had returned to the world. Or to him. But had all that early morning of his been a dream? Then it had been a very efficient dream. He had accomplished work that he could hardly have done in two days. And it was the same day that it was supposed to be. He went to the water fountain. The water now behaved normally. He went to the window. The traffic was behaving as it should. Though sometimes slow and sometimes snarled, yet it was in the pace of the regular world. The other workers arrived. They were not balls of fire, but neither was it necessary to observe them for several minutes to be sure they weren't dead. "It did have its advantages," Charles Vincent said. "I would be afraid to live with it permanently, but it would be handy to go into for a few minutes a day and accomplish the business of hours. I may be a case for the doctor. But just how would I go about telling a doctor what was bothering me?" Now it had surely been less than two hours from his first rising till the time that he wakened to the noise of Jenny from his second sleep. And how long that second sleep had been, or in which time enclave, he had no idea. But how account for it all? He had spent a long while in his own rooms, much longer than ordinary in his confusion. He had walked the city mile after mile in his puzzlement. And he had sat in the little park for hours and studied the situation. And he had worked at his own desk for an outlandish long time. Well, he would go to the doctor. A man is obliged to refrain from making a fool of himself to the world at large, but to his own lawyer, his priest, or his doctor he will sometimes have to come as a fool. By their callings they are restrained from scoffing openlyDr. Mason was not particularly a friend. Charles Vincent realized with some unease that he did not have any particular friends, only acquaintances and associates. It was as though he were of a species slightly apart from his fellows. He wished now a little that he had a particular friend. But Dr. Mason was an acquaintance of some years, had the reputation of being a good doctor, and besides Vincent had now arrived at his office and been shown in. He would either have to -- well, that was as good a beginning as any. "Doctor, I am in a predicament. I will either have to invent some symptoms to account for my visit here, or make an excuse and bolt, or tell you what is bothering me, even though you will think I am a new sort of idiot." "Vincent, every day people invent symptoms to cover their visits here, and I know that they have lost their nerve about the real reason for coming. And every day people do make excuses and bolt. But experience tells me that I will get a larger fee if you tackle the third alternative. And, Vincent, there is no new sort of idiot." sound so silly if I tell it quickly. I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion. The water would neither flow nor boil, and fire would not heat food. The clocks, which I first believed had stopped, crept along at perhaps a minute an hour. The people I met in the streets appeared dead, frozen in lifelike attitudes. And it was only by watching them for a very long time that I perceived that they did indeed have motion. One car I saw creeping slower than the most backward snail, and a dead man at the wheel of it. I went to it, opened the door, and put on the brake. I realized after a time that the man was not dead. But he bent forward and broke his face on the steering wheel. It must have taken a full minute for his head to travel no more than ten inches, yet I was unable to prevent his hitting the wheel. I then did other bizarre things in a world that had died on its feet. I walked many miles through the city, and then I sat for hours in the park. I went to the office and let myself in. I accomplished work that must have taken me twenty hours. I then took a nap at my desk. When I awoke on the arrival of the others, it was six minutes to eight in the morning of the same day, today. Not two hours had passed from my rising, and time was back to normal. But the things that happened in that time that could never be compressed into two hours." "One question first, Vincent. Did you actually accomplish the work of many hours?" "I did. It was done, and done in that time. It did not become undone on the return of time to normal." "A second question. Had you been worried about your work, about being behind ?" "Yes. Emphatically." "Then here is one explanation. You retired last night. But very shortly afterward you arose in a state of somnambulism. There are facets of sleepwalking which we do not at all understand. The time-out-of-focus interludes were parts of a walking dream of yours. You dressed and went to your office and worked all night. It is possible to do routine tasks in a somnambulistic state rapidly and even feverishly, with an intense concentration -- to perform prodigies. You may have fallen into a normal sleep there when you had finished, or you may have been awakened directly from your somnambulistic trance on the arrival of your co-workers. There, that is a plausible and workable explanation. In the case of an apparently bizarre happening, it is always well to have a rational explanation to fall back on. They will usually satisfy a patient and put his mind at rest. But often they do not satisfy me." "Your explanation very nearly satisfies me, Dr. Mason, and it does put my mind considerably at rest. I am sure that in a short while I will be able to accept it completely. But why does it not satisfy you?" "One reason is a man I treated early this morning. He had his face smashed, and he had seen -- or almost seen -- a ghost: a ghost of incredible swiftness that was more sensed than seen. The ghost opened the door of his car while it was going at full speed, jerked on the brake, and caused him to crack his head. This man was dazed and had a slight concussion. I have convinced him that he did not see any ghost at all, that he must have dozed at the wheel and run into something. As I say, I am harder to convince than my patients. But it may have been coincidence." "I hope so. But you also seem to have another reservation." "After quite a few years in practice, I seldom see or hear anything new. Twice before I have been told a happening or a dream on the line of what you experienced." "Did you convince your patients that it was only a dream ?" "I did. Both of them. That is, I convinced them the first few times it happened to them." "Were they satisfied?" "At first. Later, not entirely. But they both died within a year of their first coming to me." "Nothing violent, I hope." "Both had the gentlest, deaths. That of senility extreme." "Oh. Well, I'm too young for that." "I would like you to come back in a month or so." "I will, if the delusion or the dream returns. Or if I do not feel well." After this Charles Vincent began to forget about the incident. He only recalled it with humor sometimes when again he was behind in his work. "Well, if it gets bad enougli I may do another sleepwalking act and catch up. But if there is another aspect of time and I could enter it at will, it might often be handy." saw his face at all. It is very dark in some of those clubs and the Coq Bleu is like the inside of a tomb. He went to the clubs only about once a month, sometimes after a show when he did not want to go home to bed, sometimes when he was just plain restless. Citizens of the more fortunate states may not know of the mysteries of the clubs. In Vincent's the only bars are beer bars, and only in the clubs can a person get a drink, and only members are admitted. It is true that even such a small club as the Coq Bleu had thirty thousand members, and at a dollar a year that is a nice sideline. The little numbered membership cards cost a penny each for the printing, and the member wrote in his own name. But he had to have a card -- or a dollar for a card -- to gain admittance. But there could be no entertainments in the clubs. There was nothing there but the little bar room in the near darkness. The man was there, and then he was not, and then he was there again. And always where he sat it was too dark to see his face. "I wonder," he said to Vincent (or to the bar at large, though there were no other customers and the bartender was asleep), "I wonder if you have ever read Zurbarin on the Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius?" "I have never heard of the work nor of the man," said Vincent. "I doubt if either exists." "I am Zunoarin," said the man. Vincent hid his misshapen left thumb. Yet it could not have been noticed in that light, and he must have been crazy to believe there was any connection between it and the man's remark. It was not truly a double thumb. He was not an extradigital, nor was he a genius. "I refuse to become interested in you," said Vincent. "I am on the verge of leaving. I dislike waking the bartender, but I did want another drink." "Sooner done than said," "What is?" "Your glass is full." "It is? So it is. Is it a trick?" "Trick is the name for anything either too frivolous or too mystifying for us to comprehend. But on one long early morning of a month ago, you also could have done the trick, and nearly as well." "Could I have? How would you know about my long early morning -- assuming there to have been such?" "I watched you for a while. Few others have the equipment to watch you with when you're in the aspect." some time, and Vincent watched the clock and was ready to go. "I wonder," said the man in the dark, "if you have read Schimmelpenninck on the Sexagintal and the Duodecimal in the Chaldee Mysteries?" "I have not and I doubt if anyone else has. I would guess that you are also Schimmelpenninck and that you have just made up the name on the spur of the moment." "I am Schimm, it is true, but I made up the name on the spur of a moment many years ago." "I am a little bored with you," said Vincent, "but I would appreciate it if you'd more." "I have just done so. And you are not bored; you are frightened." "Of what?" asked Vincent, whose glass was in fact full again. "Of reentering a dread that you are not sure was a dream. But there are advantages to being both invisible and inaudible." "Can you be invisible?" "Was I not when I went behind the bar just now and fixed you a drink?" "How?" "A man in full stride goes at the rate of about five miles an hour. Multiply that by sixty, which is the number of time. When I leave my stool and go behind the bar, I go and return at the rate of three hundred miles an hour. So I am invisible to you, particularly if I move while you blink." "One thing does not match. You might have got around there and back, but you could not have poured." "Shall I say that mastery over liquids is not given to beginners? But for us there are many ways to outwit the slowness of matter." "I believe that you are a hoaxer. Do you know Dr. Mason ?" "I know that you went to see him. I know of his futile attempts to penetrate a certain mystery. But I have not talked to him of you." "I still believe that you are a phony. Could you put me back into the state of my dream of a month ago?" "It was not a dream. But I could put you again into that state." "Prove it." "Watch the clock. Do you believe that I can point my finger at it and stop it for you ? It is already stopped for me." "No, I don't believe it. Yes, I guess I have to, since I see that you have just done it. But it may be another trick. I don't know where the clock is plugged in." "Neither do I. Come to the door. Look at every clock you can see. Are they not all stopped?" "Yes. Maybe the power has gone off all over town." "You know it has not. There are still lighted windows in those buildings, though it is quite late." "Why are you playing with me? I am neither on the inside nor the outside. Either tell me the secret or say that you will not tell me." "The secret isn't a simple one. It can only be arrived at after all philosophy and learning have been assimilated." "One man cannot arrive at that in one lifetime." "Not in an ordinary lifetime. But the secret of the secret (if I may put it that way) is that one must use part of it as a tool in learning. You could not learn all in one lifetime, but by being permitted the first step -- to be able to read, say, sixty books in the time it took you to read one, to pause for a minute in thought and use up only one second, to get a day's work accomplished in eight minutes and so have time for other things -- by such ways one may make a beginning. I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent, it is a race." "A race? What race?" "It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is death." "Let's skip the melodrama. How do I get into the state and out of it?" "Oh, that is simple, so easy that it seems like a gadget. Here are two diagrams I will draw. Note them carefully. This first, envision it in your mind and you are in the state. Now this second one, envision, and you are out of it." "That easy?" "That deceptively easy. The trick is to learn why it works -- if you want to succeed, meaning to live." So Charles Vincent left him and went home, walking the mile in a little less than fifteen normal seconds. But he still had not seen the face of the man. tellectual, monetary, and amorous in being able to enter the accelerated state at will. It is a fox game. One must be careful not to be caught at it, nor . to break or harm that which is in the normal state. Vincent could always find eight or ten minutes unobserved to accomplish the day's work. And a fifteen-minute coffee break could turn into a fifteen-hour romp around the town. There was this boyish pleasure in becoming a ghost : to appear and stand motionless in front of an onrushing train and to cause the scream of the whistle, and to be in no danger, being able to move five or ten times as fast as the train ; to enter and to sit suddenly in the middle of a select group and see them stare, and then disappear from the middle of them; to interfere in sports and games, entering a prize ring and tripping, hampering, or slugging the unliked fighter ; to blue-shot down the hockey ice, skating at fifteen hundred miles an hour and scoring dozens of goals at either end while the people only know that something odd is happening. There was pleasure in being able to shatter windows by chanting little songs, for the voice (when in the state) will be to the world at sixty times its regular pitch, though normal to oneself. And for this reason also he was inaudible to others. There was fun in petty thieving and tricks. He would take a wallet from a man's pocket and be two blocks away when the victim turned at the feel. He would come back and stuff it into the man's mouth as he bleated to a policeman. He would come into the home of a lady writing a letter, snatch up the paper and write three lines and vanish before the scream got out of her throat. He would take food off forks, put baby turtles and live fish into bowls of soup between spoonfuls of the eater. He would lash the hands of handshakers tightly together with stout cord. He unzippered persons of both sexes when they were at their most pompous. He changed cards from one player's hand to another's. He removed golf balls from tees during the backswing and left notes written pinned to the ground with the tee. Or he shaved mustaches and heads. Returning repeatedly to one woman he disliked, he gradually clipped her bald and finally gilded her pate. With tellers counting their money, he interfered outrageously and enriched himself. He snipped cigarettes in two with a scissors and blew out matches, so that one frustrated man broke down and cried at his inability to get a light. He removed the weapons from the holsters of policemen and put cap pistols and water guns in their places. He undipped the leashes of dogs and substituted little toy dogs rolling on wheels. He put frogs in water glasses and left lighted firecrackers on bridge tables. He reset wrist watches on wrists, and played pranks in men's rooms. "I was always a boy at heart," said Charles Vincent. days of the controlled new state, he established himself materially, acquiring wealth by devious ways, and opening bank accounts in various cities under various names, against a time of possible need. Nor did he ever feel any shame for the tricks he played on unaccelerated humanity. For the people, when he was in the state, were as statues to him, hardly living, barely moving, unseeing, unhearing. And it is no shame to show disrespect to such comical statues. And also, and again because he was a boy at heart, he had fun with the girls. "I am one mass of black and blue marks," said Jenny one day. "My lips are sore and my front teeth feel loosened. I don't know what in the world is the matter with me." Yet he had not meant to bruise or harm her. He was rather fond of her and he resolved to be much more careful. Yet it was fun, when he was in the state and invisible to her because of his speed, to kiss her here and there in outof-the-way places. She made a nice statue and it was good sport. And there were others. '"You look older," said one of his co-workers one day. " Are you taking care of yourself? Are you worried?" 'I am not," said Vincent. "I neVer felt better or happier in my life." i But now there was time for so' many things -- time, in fact, for everything. There was no reason why he could not master anything in the world, when he could take off for fifteen minutes and gain fifteen hours. Vincent was a rapid but careful reader. He could now read from a hundred and twenty to two hundred books in an evening and night; and he slept in the accelerated state and could get a full night's sleep in eight minutes. He first acquired a knowledge of languages. A quite extensive reading knowledge of a language can be acquired in three hundred hours world time, or three hundred minutes (five hours) accelerated time. And if one takes the tongues in order, from the most familiar to the most remote, there is no real difficulty. He acquired fifty for a starter, and could always add any other any evening that he found he had a need for it. And at the same time he began to assemble and consolidate knowledge. Of literature, properly speaking, there are no more than ten thousand books that are really worth reading and falling in love with. These were gone through with high pleasure, and two or three thousand of them were important enough to be reserved for future rereading. History, however, is very uneven ; and it is necessary to read texts and sources that for form are not worth reading. And the same with philosophy. Mathematics and science, pure or physical, could not, of course, be covered with the same speed. Yet, with time available, all could be mastered. There is no concept ever expressed by any human mind that cannot be comprehended by any other normal human mind if time is available and it is taken in the proper order and context and with the proper preparatory work. And often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he Was touching the fingers of the secret; and always, when he came near it, it had a little bit the smell of the pit. For he had pegged out all the main points of the history of man ; or rather most of the tenable, or at least possible, theories of the history of man. It was hard to hold the main line of it, that double road of rationality and revelation that should lead always to a fuller and fuller development (not the fetish of progress, that toy word used only by toy people) , to an unfolding and growth and perfectibility. But the main line was often obscure and all but obliterated, and traced through fog and miasma. He had accepted the Fall of Man and the Redemption as the cardinal points of history. But he understood now that neither happened only once, that both were of constant occurrence; that there was a hand reaching up from that old pit with its shadow over man. And he had come to picture that hand in his dreams (for his dreams were especially vivid when in the state) as a six-digited monster reaching out. He began to realize that the thing he was caught in was dangerous and deadly. Very dangerous. Very deadly. One of the weird books that he often returned to and which continually puzzled him was the Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius, written by the man whose face he had never seen, in one of his manifestations. It promised more than it delivered, and it intimated more than it said. Its theory was tedious and tenuous, bolstered with undigested mountains of doubtful data. It left him unconvinced that persons of genius (even if it could be agreed who or what they were) had often the oddity of extra fingers and toes, or the yestiges of them. And it puzzled him what possible difference it could make. Y ET there were hints here of a Corsican who commonly kept a hand hidden, or an earlier and more bizarre commander who wore always a mailed glove, of another man with a glove between the two ; hints that the multiplex-adept, Leonardo himself, who sometimes drew the hands of men and often those of monsters with six fingers, may himself have had the touch. There was a comment of Caesar, not conclusive, to the same effect. It is known that Alexander had a minor peculiarity; it is not known what it was ; this man made it seem that this was it. And it was averred of Gregory and Augustine, of Benedict and Albert and Acquinas. Yet a man with a deformity could not enter the priesthood ; if they had it, it must have been in vestigial form. There were cases for Charles Magnut and Mahmud, for Saladin the Horseman and for Akhnaton the King ; for Homer (a Seleuciad-Greek statuette shows him with six fingers strumming an unidentified instrument while reciting) ; for Pythagoras, for Buonarroti, Santi, Theotokopolous, van Rijn, Robusti. Zurbarin catalogued eight thousand names. He maintained that they were geniuses. And that they were extradigitals. Charles Vincent grinned and looked down at his misshapen or double thumb. "At least I am in good though monotonous company. But what in the name of triple time is he driving at?" And it was not long afterward that Vincent was examining cuneiform tablets in the State Museum. These were a broken and not continuous series on the theory of numbers, tolerably legible to the now encyclopedic Charles Vincent. And the series read in part: "On the divergence of the basis itself and the confusion caused -- for it is five, or it is six, or ten or twelve, or sixty or a hundred, or three hundred and sixty or the double hundred, the thousand. The reason, not clearly understood by the people, is that Six and the Dozen are first, and Sixty is a compromise in condescending to the people. For the five, the ten are late, and are no older than the people themselves. It is said, and credited, that people began to count by fives and tens from the number of fingers on their hands. But before the people the -- by the reason that they had -- counted by sixes and twelves'. But Sixty is the number of time, divisible by both, for both must live together in time, though not on the same plane of time -- " Much of the rest was scattered. And it was while trying to set the hundreds of unordered clay tablets in proper sequence that Charles Vincent created the legend of the ghost in the museum. For he spent his multi-hundred-hour nights there studying and classifying. Naturally he could not work without light, and naturally he could be seen when he sat still at his studies. But as the slow-moving guards attemped to close in on him, he would move to avoid them, and his speed made him invisible to them. They were a nuisance and had to be discouraged. He belabored them soundly and they became less eager to try to capture him. His only fear was that they would some time try to shoot him to see if he were ghost or human. He could avoid a seen shot, which would come at no more than two and a half times his own greatest speed. But an unperceived shot could penetrate dangerously, even fatally, before he twisted away from it. He had fathered legends of other ghosts, that of the Central Library, that of University Library, that of the John Charles Underwood Jr. Technical Library. This plurality of ghosts tended to cancel out each other and bring believers into ridicule. Even those who had seen him as a ghost did not admit that they believed in the ghosts. son for his monthly checkup. "You look terrible," said the Doctor. "Whatever it is, you have changed. If you can afford it, you should take a long rest." "I have the means," said Charles Vincent, "and that is just what I will do. I'll take a rest for a year or two." He had begun to begrudge the time that he must spend at the world's pace. From now on he was regarded as a recluse. He was silent and unsociable, for he found it a nuisance to come back to the common state to engage in conversation, and in his special state voices were too slow-pitched to intrude into his consciousnes. Except that of the man whose face he had never seen. "You are making very tardy progress," said the man. Once more they were in a dark club. "Those who do not show more progress we cannot use. After all, you are only a vestigial. It is probable that you have very little of the ancient race in you. Fortunately those who do not show progress destroy themselves. You had not imagined that there were only two phases of time, had you ?" "Lately I have come to suspect that there are many more," said Charles Vincent. "And you understand that only one step cannot succeed?" "I understand that the life I have been living is in direct violation of all that we know of the laws of mass, momentum, and acceleration, as well as those of conservation of energy, the potential of the human person, the moral compensation, the golden mean, and the capacity of human organs. I know that I cannot multiply energy and experience sixty times without a compensating increase of food intake, and yet I do it. I know that I cannot live on eight minutes' sleep in twenty-four hours, but I do that also. I know that I cannot reasonably crowd four thousand years of experience into one lifetime, yet unreasonably I do not see what will prevent it But you say I will destroy myself." "Those who take only the first step destroy themselves." "And how does one take the second step?" "At the proper moment you will be given the choice." "I have the most uncanny feeling that I will refuse the choice." "From present indications, you will refuse it. You are fastidious." "You have a smell about you, Old Man without a face. I know now what it is. It is the smell of the pit." "Are you so slow to learn that?" "It is the mud from the pit, the same from which the clay tablets were formed, from the old land between the rivers. I've dreamed of the sixfingered hand reaching up from the pit and overshadowing us all. And I have read: 'The people first counted by fives and tens from the number of fingers on their hands. But before the people the -- for the reason that they had -- counted by sixes and twelves.' But time has left blanks in those tablets." "Yes, time in one of its manifestations has deftly and with a purpose left those blanks." "I cannot discover the name of the thing that goes in one of those blanks. Can you?" "I am part of the name that goes into one of those blanks." "And you are the man without a face. But why is it that you overshadow and control people? And to what purpose?" "It will be long before you know those answers." "When the choice comes to me, it will bear very careful weighing." ed on the life of Charles Vincent, for all that he still possessed his exceptional powers. And he seldom now indulged in pranks. Except for Jennifer Parkey. It was unusual that he should be drawn to her. He knew her only slightly in the common world and she was at least fifteen years his senior. But now she appealed to him for her youthful qualities, and all his pranks with her were gentle ones. For one thing this spinster did not frighten, nor did she begin locking her doors, never having bothered about such things before. He would come behind her and stroke her hair, and she would speak out calmly with that sort of quickening in her voice : "Who are you? Why won't you let me see you? You are a friend, aren't you ? Are you a man, or are you something else? If you can caress me, why can't you talk to me? Please let me see you. I promise that I won't hurt you." It was as though she could not imagine that anything strange would hurt her. Or again when he hugged her or kissed her on the nape, she would call: "You must be a little boy, or very like a little boy, whoever you are. You are good not to break my things when you move about. Come here and let me hold you." It is only very good people who have no fear at all of the unknown. When Vincent met Jennifer in the regular world, as he more often now found occasion to do, she looked at him appraisingly, as though she guessed some sort of connection. She said one day: "I know it is an impolite thing to say, but you do not look well at all. Have you been to a doctor?" "Several times. But I think it is my doctor who should go to a doctor. He was always given to peculiar remarks, but now he is becoming a little unsettled" "If I were your doctor, I believe I would also become a little unsettled. But you should find out what is wrong. You look terrible." He did not look terrible. He had lost his hair, it is true, but many men lose their hair by thirty, though not perhaps as suddenly as he had. He thought of attributing it to the air resistance. After all, when he was in the state he did stride at some three hundred miles an hour. And enough of that is likely to blow the hair right off your head. And might that not also be the reason for his worsened complexion and the tireder look that appeared in his eyes? But he knew that this was nonsense. He felt no more air pressure when in his accelerated state than when in the normal one. He had received his summons. He chose not to answer it. He did not want to be presented with the choice ; he had no wish to be one with those of the pit. But he had no intention of giving up the great advantage which he now held over nature. "I will have it both ways," he said. "I am already a contradiction and an impossibility. The proverb was only the early statement of the law of moral compensation : 'You can't take more out of a basket than it holds.' But for a long time I have been in violation of the laws and balances. 'There is no road without a turning,' 'Those who dance will have to pay the fiddler,' 'Everything that goes up comes down.' But are proverbs really universal laws? Certainly. A sound proverb has the force of universal law ; it is but another statement of it. But I have contradicted the universal laws. It remains to be seen whether I have contradicted them with impunity. 'Every action has its reaction.' If I refuse to deal with them, I will provoke a strong reaction. The man without a face said that it was always a race between full knowing and destruction. Very well, I will race them for it." him then. He knew that they were in a state as accelerated from his as his was from the normal. To them he was the almost motionless statue, hardly to be told from a dead man. To him they were by their speed both invisible and inaudible. They hurt him and haunted him. But still he would not answer the summons. When the meeting took place, it was they who had to come to him, and they materialized there in his room, men without faces. "The choice," said one. "You force us to be so clumsy as to have to voice it." "I will have no part of you. You all smell of the pit, of that old mud of the cuneiforms of the land between the rivers, of the people who were before the people." "It has endured a long time, and we consider it as enduring forever. But the Garden which was in the neighborhood -- do you know how long the Garden lasted?" "I don't know." "That all happened in a single day, and before nightfall they were outside. You want to throw in with something more permanent, don't you." "No. I don't believe I do." "What have you to lose?" "Only my hope of eternity." "But you don't believe in that. No man has ever really believed in eternity." "No man has ever either entirely believed or disbelieved in it," said Charles Vincent, "At least it cannot be proved," said one of the faceless men. "Nothing is proved until it is over with. And in this case, if it is ever over with, then it is disproved. And all that time would one not be tempted to wonder, 'What if, after all, it ends in the next minute?' " "I imagine that if we survive the flesh we will receive some sort of surety," said Vincent. "But you are not sure either of such surviving or receiving. Now we have a very close approximation of eternity. When time is multiplied by itself, and that repeated again and again, does that not approximate eternity?" "I don't believe it does. But I will not be of you. One of you has said that I am too fastidious. So now will you say that you'll destroy me?" "No. We will only let you be destroyed. By yourself, you cannot win the race with destruction." After that Charles Vincent somehow felt more mature. He knew he was not really meant to be a six-fingered thing of the pit. He knew that in some way he would have to pay for every minute and hour that he had gained. But what he had gained he would use to the fullest. And whatever could be accomplished by sheer acquisition of human knowledge, he would try to accomplish. And he now startled Dr. Mason by the medical knowledge he had picked up, the while the doctor amused him by the concern he showed for Vincent. For he felt fine. He was perhaps not as active as he had been, but that was only because he had become dubious of aimless activity. He was still the ghost of the libraries and museums, but was puzzled that the published reports intimated that an old ghost had replaced a young one. visits to Jennifer Parkey less often. For he was always dismayed to hear her exclaim to him m his ghostly form: "Your touch is so changed. You poor thing! Is there anything at all I can do to help you?" He decided that somehow she was too immature to understand him, though he was still fond of her. He transferred his affections to Mrs. Milly Maltby, a widow at least thiry years his senior. Yet here it was a sort of girlishness in her that appealed to him. She was a woman of sharp wit and real affection, and she also accepted his visitations without fear, following a little initial panic. They played games, writing games, for they communicated by writing. She would scribble a line, then hold the paper up in the air whence he would cause it to vanish into his sphere. He would return it in half a minute, or half a second by her time, with his retort. He had the advantage of her in time with greatly more opportunity to think up responses, but she had the advantage over him in natural wit and was hard to top. They also played checkers, and he often had to retire apart and read a chapter of a book on the art between moves, and even so she often beat him ; for native talent is likely to be a match for accumulated lore and codified procedure. But to Milly also he was unfaithful in his fashion, being now interested (he no longer became enamored or entranced) in a Mrs. Roberts, a great-grandmother who was his elder by at least fifty years. He had read all the data extant on the attraction of the old for the young, but he still could not explain his successive attachments. He decided that these three examples were enough to establish a universal law: that a woman is simply not afraid of a ghost, though he touches her and is invisible, and writes her notes without hands. It is possible that amorous spirits have known this for a long time, but Charles Vincent had made the discovery himself independently. When enough knowledge is accumulated on any subject, the pattern will sometimes emerge suddenly, like a form in a picture revealed where before it was not seen. And when enough knowledge is accumulated on all subjects, is there not a chance that a pattern governing all subjects will emerge? Charles Vincent was caught up in one last enthusiasm. On a long vigil, as he consulted source after source and sorted them in his mind, it seemed that the pattern was coming out clearly and simply, for all its amazing complexity of detail. "I know everything that they know in the pit, and I know a secret that they do not know. I have not lost the race -- I have won it. I can defeat them at the point where they believe themselves invulnei able. If controlled hereafter, we need at least not be controlled by them. It is all falling together now. I have found the final truth, and it is they who have lost the race. I hold the key. I will now be able to enjoy the advantage without paying the ultimate price of defeat and destruction, or of collaboration with them. "Now I have only to implement my knowledge, to publish the fact, and one shadow at least will be lifted from mankind. I will do it at once. Well, nearly at once. It is almost dawn in the normal world. I will sit here a very little while and rest. Then I will go out and begin to make contact with the proper persons for the disposition of this thing. But first I will sit here a little while and rest." And he died quietly in his chair as he sat there. in his private journal: "Charles Vincent, a completely authenticated case of premature aging, one of the most clear-cut in all gerontology. This man was known to me for years, and I here aver that as of one year ago he was of normal appearance and physical state, and that his chronology is also correct, I having also known his father. I examined the subject during the period of his illness, and there is no question at all of his identity, which has also been established for the record by fingerprinting and other means. I aver that Charles Vincent at the age of thirty is dead of old age, having the appearance and organic condition of a man of ninety." Then the doctor began to make another note: "As in two other cases of my own observation, the illness was accompanied by a certain delusion and series of dreams, so nearly identical in the three men as to be almost unbelievable. And for the record, and no doubt to the prejudice of my own reputation, I will set down the report of them here." But when Dr. Mason had written that, he thought about it for a while. "No, I will do no such thing," he said, and he struck out the last lines he had written. "It is best to let sleeping dragons lie." 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All that mattered was the black thought slithering of the... W was among the walkers, but he didn't bother to track it down. It was no longer a fighting word to Hammen. He wore it like a badge of honor. It tasted of brass, but it gleamed on him. A puzzled growl came from the Familiar at his heels. The dog could never understand how people could hate Hammen. Lad, the dog, often asked Hammen how anyone could possibly hate Hammen, and Hammen always told him to shut up ; he couldn't understand -- he was only a dog. The walk ramp was crowded this afternoon with people fresh from the transmatter stations, eager to tell themselves they were walking on a strange planet. Hammen passed among the nudists, the cavaliers, the zip-suiters, the zoot-suiters, the Ivy-coated, the Moss-covered, walking not for novelty or exercise but because he preferred to go everywhere under his own power. Even to the stars. Hale and Lora saluted him a few paces away from the entrance to the station. They were a beautiful blond couple, with brightly polished faces. Hammen didn't much like them, but he didn't feel sufficiently pressed to be rude enough to let them become aware of it. "How goes it, kids?" he asked them. "Couldn't be better," Hale said. "Of course not," Lora added. moved from the man to the woman. "Are you troubled?" "This isn't the time to talk about it, not before you and Lad transmit yourself," the girl said quickly. It wasn't, Hammen admitted to himself. Only now that they had let it slip, he would rest better knowing the whole truth of it. "Come on," Hammen urged. "It's not as if I wasn't interested." Hale looked at his wife. "Lora doesn't like Wagner any more." "Perdition !" said Hammen. "I never liked Wagner. She's growing up." Lora put a half-closed fist to her lips, and didn't look at either of the men, or at the dog who stood with freshly pointed ears. "No," she said softly. "I lost something on the last one. Gee, I wonder if the Mindsnake likes Wagner now? Still, it's not as if I had stopped liking music altogether, or books. Not this time." Hale grabbed her arm roughly. "You're sure doing a great job of getting Hammen ready for the jump." Lora's eyes clouded. "I'm sorry, Ham." She looked up, smiled warmly, kissed her fingertips and placed them on Hammen's lips. "Companion's Code, huh?" He took her hand and for the moment liked her. "Okay, honey. I guess even a Witch squeezes in under the wire for that." The young team was abruptly embarrassed. "Oh, well, Witch," Hale said deprecatingly, "what does cargo know, anyway?" Hammen laughed and scratched Lad's ears. "They know I'm a Witch. But it has its advantages. I don't have to worry about Lad losing his taste for Wagner. A dog does not have that much to lose. If it comes to that, he's just gone." Lora shuddered delicately, the way of a watered flower. "How could you stand to lose a Companion with so little feeling?" "I've lost three Companions, and got myself and my cargo into port. They were only dogs." Hale looked at him sharply. "But you were Companioning with them. It must have been," he selected a word, "difficult for you." "Don't absorb the cargo's superstitions about Witches and their Familiars. They have fogged, even dirty, ideas. They were just dogs to me. Like Lad." Gordus said in a manner designed to explain the thing patiently to Hammen. "Lad is a dog." "Why do you emphasize the point now?" Hammen demanded. The Companion sat on a seat formed from a single S-shaped plastic surface. Hammen studied the bulk of Gordus, Coordinator of Transmatters, who sat hulked in his utility chair in the bubble office overhanging the City of the Sea, on the world of Lanole. Hammen was comfortable, cooled, relaxed, amused by a light play of sensory electron music, and aggressively unhappy. Gordus sat in his great chair patting the hair on the back of his left hand with his right palm, as if the fist were a sleeping kitten. At Hammen's feet, Lad's neck muscles quivered uneasily. "Your record, Hammen," Gordus said at last, "is a good one." "How could it be better? I've never lost one member of a cargo." "But you have lost three Companions." "Familiars. Dogs." "But it shows weakness." Hammen's face heated. "I never show weakness." "Not your weakness, my dear, dear boy," Gordus said in exaggeration. "The weakness of the Witch-Familiar relationship, the weakness of Witches as Companions at all. Don't take it personally." Hammen leaped to his feet. Lad's muzzle gleamed white. "Not take it personally?" Hammen cried. "How else can I take it? You are questioning the worthiness of my profession, of my way of life. You question the honor of many of my friends -- my associates. Witchery is an ancient profession. My grandmother and uncle were Witches before me. Witches have an unparalleled record of service to Transmatters and to the human race. How dare you, sir!" Gordus waved a fat hand in front of him, laughing up and down the scale. "No, no, no. Peace, please. You have no need to plead so strongly for the cause of Witches. You don't have to be a Witch, you know, Hammen. You're good enough to be a regular, fullfledged Companion. The reason you get so many of your cargo through is that you in the most literal sense Companion them all. It would be possible for you to use a fellow Companion on your jumps instead of a Familiar." longer angry, or energetic. "No. No, it wouldn't be possible for me to do that. I can take people on an occasional jump, for high pay. But I couldn't stand the same kind of contact, day in, day out, with another human being. Pay doesn't come that high." Gordus gave another laugh, and killed it sharply. "And there you were a few moments ago bragging about all the service Witches had been to the human race, and when we get down to it, it turns out you hate the human race." Hammen tasted the inside of his dry mouth and longed for a way out. "I don't hate it; I just can't stand it. There's a difference." "If you say so. But tell me, do you like your fellow Companions, or even your fellow Witches, any better than you do your cargo?" "No," Hammen admitted. "Good. Then we can stop this foolish talk about the Witches' service to mankind, since you don't give a damn about either Witches or mankind. You care only about one Witch; your interests are entirely self-interests. Correct?" "Yes." "Good. Better. Now I suppose you are not entirely satisfied with the benefits you now receive as a Witch? You would like more money, pleasure, power, prestige? You have ambition, greed, hunger, desire?" "Yes." "Fine. I didn't think you had altogether ceased to be human. Then I can tell you that the Transmitter Service has to perform its most important mission, and you are thought to be the best man for it." "Most important mission?" said Hammen. "Best man?" Gordus became happy. "Those are questions? But I can't tell you the answers. Not yet. First, you must promise us the added protection of taking a human Companion for this assignment." "Why should I want to do that, Gordus?" "Because I have promised that you would, and I never fail." Hammen stood for the second time. "Sorry. Not a good enough reason for me." into confusion. "But as your superior, as your coordinator, I order you to take a human Companion for this assignment." "Gordus," Hammen said, "you were once a Companion yourself." "When I was younger, while my wife was alive." "Then rescind your order or I'll kill you -- under the Code, in a duel." Gordus sneered. "I have never been beaten." "Obviously," Hammen said. He didn't point out anything about his own status. "No." It was a final thing. "Are you armed at this instant?" The coordinator shook his heavy head. "Then I plead grievance and choose weapons. Appeal?" The other shrugged. "Choose." Hammen was breathing deeply and regularly, in preparation. "Before this is closed, I want to remind you that the Law and the Code both state that no one can interfere in the relationship between a Team." "Doesn't apply," Gordus said. "The act of '# recognized the Companionship of Witches, but it did not extend the privilege to Familiars. Naturally not. You are a Companion and I could not separate you from a human Companion, but I can order you to break from Lad." "That isn't just." "I know. But we're talking about law, not justice." "Do you wish aid from your fellow Companion?" Hammen asked. "In later years, I have often wished for it, but my formal reply: No." "Then," Hammen said, "I name our weapon as the body. The time, this instant. I can kill you easily with my bare hands, and Lad will help with his teeth." An eyebrow-hedged ridge of fat above Gordus' left eye angled. "Use the dog and you'll get in trouble." "Not before a Companions' Court. But if you so state your preference, I'll only use my own body." "Hammen, about this matter," the coordinator said. "I'll think about it." "An hour," Hammen said, and turned on his heel. "Hammen," Gordus called out. Hammen looked back to face a leveled destruction gun. "You know the Code," Gordus explained. "The Challenge wasn't withdrawn. You struck the field. A coward may be killed by any weapon." "You are too modest," Hammen told him. Gordus smiled and fed the gun to a compartment of his utility chair. "I only wanted to prove a point. I can kill you anytime, anywhere. No one can beat me. Can they? Can they, Hammen?" The sweat stung Hammen's palms so hard he could almost taste the salt in it with his fingers. "I'll do it." "Gratitude is a part of honor. Yes. The Code. You do believe in that. But you haven't asked me yet who your human Companion on the jump will be." "Who?" Hammen asked. "As you yourself pointed, I still come under the Code myself." man Companion, but I did not agree to take Gordus himself," Hammen explained to his wristphone in the alcove outside the coordinator's office. "I think it's a terrible thing," Lora said. "But why won't you jump with him -- Gordus, I mean?" "I hate him," Hammen explained. "Oh, sure. I guess I do too. I'd never thought of being a Companion with him. Ugh! Oh, Hale's swimming in now." Aside: "Over here, darling. Ham's calling." From afar: "Who?" Aside : "Hammen. The Witch." "Why didn't you say so?" Into the phone: "Hi, fellow. What can we do to you ?" "You can do a lot for me." "For you, huh? That comes high, you know. What'll it be?" Hammen retold his story, and finished with, "That's why I called you two. I need a human Companion, anybody other than Gordus." A slithering of voice, then faint, but distinct, from Lora: "I couldn't do it and I can't let you do it. Afterward, whichever of us, it would be as if I were no better than a dog." Hammen stared ahead of him at the alcove wall. "Ham," Hale said, "why did you come to us with this? "You were friends of mine," Hammen said. "No." "No?" "We aren't friends of yours, Ham," Hale said patiently. "We're just acquaintances of yours. We'd like to help you out, but not enough to split our team for you. Surely you've got some real friends, people you look better to than us... Hell, man, don't you know what a friend is?" Hammen thought of it. "I suppose not." "But there must be someone," Hale said in embarrassment, "a woman." "I know a woman Witch on another world. We make love together sometimes. But I know her only well enough to know better than to ask favors of her." "There are lots of Witches," Hale said in nervous exasperation. "One of them is bound to Companion with you on a thing like this." Ham touched his fingers to his wrist. "I think not. No other Witch is going to help me set a precedent to put them out of the trade." "But the Code!" Hale said furiously. "Surely you can count on your fellow Witches under the Code." "Why? I couldn't count on my fellow Companions under the Code," said Hammen, and pressed his wristphone into silence. alcove back into Gordus' office to find a lovely golden woman groveling at the coordinator's feet. The coordinator was smiling at the pleasure of the thing. "What's this?" Hammen demanded. "Cargo," Gordus said. "Is she ill?" "Mad."  "Then she can't be transmitted. No one could hold together a disintegrating personality in transmision," Hammen said. "It will be difficult. Unprecedentedly difficult. That is why it will take the two of us acting as Companions to bring her safely to Earth." "Why is it so important that she get to Earth?" "Ask her," Gordus suggested. Hammen glanced down and saw Lad nosing pointedly at the woman. Often he forgot that the dog was constantly at his side. His eyes lifted up to the woman. She had fine features, impressive blonde hair, and she was wrapped in a frazzled blanket, indigo rubbed away to white threads here and there. "What's your name, woman?" Hammen asked. "I know what it is." "Of course you do," he said sharply, "but I don't." "I know you don't." "There isn't much that you don't know, is there?" "I know everything," she confessed humbly, honey eyes down. Hammen whirled to Gordus." "What do they want with her on Earth?" The coordinator gestured eloquently. "She knows everything. Do you think they know everything on Earth? Don't believe propaganda. There are things she can tell them." Hammen looked again to the creature huddled on the floor. "What could she tell anyone?" "There, are words buried in any conglomeration of letters. Confusion is the basis of all codes. There is always a cipher for any code." Hammen exhaled. "Never mind. What do I care what they want with her? All right, I'll try to take her through. You don't want me to use the dog?" "No. It won't do." "Then let me take her alone. I could do it this once." "Negative. Besides, need I remind you that you have already graciously agreed to take a human Companion?" "And," Hammen said ponderously, "I can't get any Companion other than you to go with me." "You can't? Sad. But why wouldn't I be acceptable?" "I hate your soul." "No doubt," Gordus sighed. "But I believe you said you hated all people." "I can't stand people, only some people especially do I hate." "I see. But surely it is only a small difference in degree, not kind, between the contempt and aversion you hold for humanity at large and that which you hold for me. Surely that difference is too small to cause you to break your word, given under the Code." "I suppose it is." The words tasted bad in his mouth. "Very well. I'll transmit with you." "Of course you will," the coordinator said smoothly. li A RE you ready to transmit now?" "Of course we are." Hammen stood within the platform diagram with Gordus and the woman. Beyond the boundaries stood the technicians, one at the control mosaic, the other holding to the neck of Lad, who suffered it under orders. "Wiggle away from the Mindsnake, citizens," a technician called. A native, Hammen thought. He had never been in transmission himself. No one who had ever joked about the Mindsnake, or rarely even spoke of him. Hammen looked around him, slate eyes chalking the outline of the diagram in which they stood. It was only a rectangle, but shouldn't it be rather a pentagram? From the time of Aristotle, the populace equated science with magic. Wasn't the diagram only a sign to conjure the demon, Spatium, to do the boon of transporting his servants across the void without decay of time? No. Instantaneous transmission of matter wasn't magic. It had always been a part of folklore as teleportation, but just as machines had been made to duplicate the legendary feats of human extrasensory perception, machines made to let men speak over great distances to duplicate the strange voices of mystics, and machines made that would indeed show strange visions over vast expanses, science had made the Transmatter for null-time object displacement. Transmatters were a logical, progressive theoretical implementation. If electrical impulses could recreate patterns first in sound, then in light, it followed relentlessly that someday some form of impulses would be found to recreate matter. Energy and matter were only different forms of one unity. Fortunately, matter duplication had come before matter transmission. As the reed, an exact duplicate is not the original. A duplication of a man is only a duplicate, not the original, unless the elan vital, the spirit, the soul, is transmitted, for it cannot be duplicated. A duplicated man is a perfect robot, capable of memory and learning, and developing into a human being in time. But it is not a human being immediately, and it can never become the original of the duplicate. Every human viewpoint is unique, arid irreplaceable. Duplication of matter was uneconomical. The power outlay was too great, the equipment too costly to build and operate. So transportation by transmission was investigated. Again, it was too expensive except for very great distances, trips of light-years to worlds established over the generations by the spaceships which had reached virtual light-speed and could not go beyond it. mittees got lost among the stars. Transmitted poets arrived with a dim itch for a brutal fight, due to some residue of glandular acid from a parting insult affecting their birth trauma on the new world. Great conductors solidified, hating music. Competent engineers were imported with an infantile urge toward lyric verse. And the Companions came into being as a profession. Men with will power, psionic abilities, strength of character. You could call it what you liked, depending on your profession, your politics, your religion. At any rate, men (and women) who could hold human personalities together on the long, instantaneous voyage through null-space. But still some personalities drifted away. Or, some darkly superstitious people suggested, were they sucked away? They were. Personalities in transmission were being captured by an intelligent entity, unimaginably vast in size, which some believed used the movements of galaxies as the synapse responses of its brain. It was a vast entity, but not a very intelligent one, due to the square of signal decay and noise over light-years. Moreover, it was psychopathic. From contact with human minds, it had decided it was, or would become (it was obviously confused on the point) the god of the humans. It proposed to do this by eventually incorporating all intelligence into itself. But, seemingly, only intelligences in transmission were soft enough for the Mindsnake to get a hold on. The Companions were harder-shelled. But the Mindsnake grew stronger. And Companions began traveling with other Companions, as teams, to resist the Mindsnake. And there came a class of Companions who did not need the help of any other man or woman, but only a touchstone of reality, something familiar of Earth -- the mind of a dog or a cat or some other animal. Familiars. So was born the Corps of Witches. And here, Hammen wondered, was this where the Witches came to an end? He looked at the bulging head of Gordus. He couldn't see inside it. Maybe there would ultimately be men who could, but he could only contact other minds when they were taken off the level of matter and energy, and placed in null-space. Where there is no space, there can be no barriers. There was nothing but confusion in the woman's mind if he could touch it. NotMng but boredom and routine in the minds of the technicians. Hammen's eyes moved to the dog. He suddenly decided Lad looked sad. But dogs have human facial muscles, and it would be impossible between a man and a dog for one to look into the other's mind, while they weren't in transmission. Uselessly, he permitted himself to wish Lad was going with him... The heavy shoulder muscles of the dog ripped him free from the technician's grasp and Lad threw himself across the diagram line as the coordinants of the transmatter phased. T ransmission, no time. No space. Hammen felt an overblown wave of force. "How's that Tor power' Gordus demanded. It came as yvords: to him; ;aisf communication between people had come tohim all of his life. Dqaf-mute Companions had tQld him communication in transmission came to them as hands and fingers feeling of words. "You've never had a real Companion before, have you?" Gordus asked. "You've never felt real power like this before?" "Power? I've heard members of the cargo scream as loud from terror and horror. We don't scream in transmission, Coordinator. Let the Snake sleep." "Power," the coordinator repeated. "I always held my cargo together with power." "When you were a Companion, the Snake wasn't as strong as it is now. Quiet, please." Hammen felt out for his Familiar. A tail wagged somewhere. A head cocked to one side in puzzlement, concern. What wasn't a hand petted that which wasn't a head. "Just us -- just the two of us -- to see after the woman," Gordus said with a leer in his voice. crossing the diagram? Hadn't he seen? "You sound as if you were about to suggest we team up and rape her. It's hardly practicable here." "But that's it, Hammen ! That's it! I want to rape her mind !" "Go away, Gordus. I don't believe in you. Nobody really makes a career out of being that swinish." "My profession is power, Hammen. I find your attitude unprofessional." Hammen reached out for the girl. "What do you want from her?" "She knows everything, Hammen. Don't you want to know everything?" "No," Hammen said. "I'd never be able to remember it." The girl was retreating from them. Had she been snagged by the Mindsnake? No. Only drift. Hammen threw an anchor into her, braced himself against his Familiar, and pulled. She came apart at the seams and flew off in all directions, gibbering. He raced after all the pieces of the woman at a practiced, steady trot and gathered them all in. He made a rough boundary and compartmentalized her. For an instant, he looked through the jumble that was her mind. Sensuality, sloth, greed, hate, envy, pride, hunger, death wish -- it was the usual human pattern well enough, but they were letters that spelled out no words. It would be impossible to find any information in that psychic junk heap. Deftly, Hammen turned Gordus back on. "... must know. You'll have to help me, Hammen." "Why must I?" "Simplicity. You must. We stay here until you do. You can't close the transmission without me, and I will not do it until you help me pick the woman's mind. We can wait forever until you decide to do as I order. There is no time here." Gordus was a blind old man stumbling in the dark. He hadn't seen Lad join them inside the diagram. He probably wasn't even aware that Hammen had the woman under tow. "Listen to me, Gordus. That about there being 'no time' here is a mathematical abstraction. Practically, it has its limitations. There is some flow of some kind of duration here, otherwise our questions and answers would come at the same time." "What are you trying to teach me?" Gordus demanded. "I was a Companion before you were bom." "But then the Mindsnake wasn't so active or so powerful. If the 'duration' of our transmission is too long, he'll get a clear fix on us -- and that will be that." "I'll risk that. Will you?" "No," Hamen said. "You're a fool out here in transmission. You don't know what you're doing. What do you expect of me? "Link with me, Companion, as you should. Help me gain her knowledge." being asked to help gain access to information intended for the Federation authorities on Earth. But he rarely thought of himself as a Federal, and he knew very few worlds would allow extradition of him on a Federal charge. At the moment, he was mainly concerned with saving himself and his cargo from the Mindsnake. As distasteful as it was, Gordus was a part of his cargo, and a man had to have a few ideals. Gordus was not qualified to be a Companion after the generations of growth of the Mindsnake. He was only a pitiful fool now. (How long before the Snake gets so big I will not be qualified? How long before no one is qualified? How long before the Snake comes out of null-space and stalks the planets?) Hammen shrugged and joined Gordus. They struck for the mind of the woman. Her name, they warned, Isodel. They found that out, and incredibly, more. In some way Gordus' mind paralelled the girl's. There was much of a kind about them, and Gordus could piece together the fragments of her identity. But then he was reaching down for something, and he prestidigitated it up and out of sight. Hammen realized that Gordus had succeeded in getting what he wanted and in keeping it from him. He was less of a doddering old fool than he appeared. "What was that?" Hammen demanded. "What did you take?" He tried to shake it loose from the coordinator. "Let go of me !" Gordus cried out in immaterial indignity. Hammen released him. Completely. Gordus screamed soundlessly as he retreated toward infinity. "Shall I catch you?" Hammen asked. The scream changed in pitch. The Witch brought him back. "You stayed," Gordus said. "Somehow you stayed. That dog. Somehow you've got your damned Familiar with you, haven't you, Witch?" "No," Hammen lied fluently. "Only feeble minds like yours require a contact. Shall I tell you something about Witches? The Familiars are a deception. We don't need them at all. We are lone wolves." "Wolves, are you? So now I know what your grandmother before you was." Hammen laughed. And sobered. "What did you take, Gordus?" he demanded. "What do you know about her?" asked Gordus. "Her name is Isodel." "Isodel Van Der Lies." "I've heard of her. Somewhere," Hammen said hesitantly.fthe coordinator explained sullenly. "Probably the first authentic female genius of the race of man. On a par with Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein." "What theory of hers were you after?" Hammen pursued. "A method of destroying the Mindsnake." "You want to take the credit from her." "I want only to take the theory from her, Hammen." "You mean you don't want the Mindsnake to be destroyed. You are afraid its destruction would mean the end of the Companion Corps which you head." "Not at all. I only want the theory so I can reverse it. Once you know how to destroy the Mindsnake, you also know how to create one. You see, I intend to become another Mindsnake, one who knows too much of destruction to ever be destroyed." "Listen carefully, Gordus," Hamen said with infinite care. "You're ill. You don't know what you're talking about. It can't be done." "The ultimate dream -- ultimate power." "That's pure psychosis, Gordus!" "Is it? Watch how easily I begin to grow. I have the woman's mind now." It was true. The pooh, mad genius woman was gone. "Stop it, Coordinator. You don't know what you're doing!" Hammen tried to reach him. "That's it, that's it. Come ahead, my boy. I'm becoming a Mindsnake. Now I am a Mindsnake. Come ahead. Let, me swallow you next." "You fool," Hammen broadcast. "You are the Mindsnake now. Don't you think anyone's ever wanted power before? Won't you let yourself remember how it was when you were a Companion? This is how it alivays happens. You've let yourself be swallowed by the Snake. You ran right into its jaws." "No." Gordus thought furiously. "I -- " And the Snake digested the tiny egg in its gullet and "I" blurred and was washed over by "All." Hammen struck at it in anger and humiliation and terror and it retreated with frictionless speed. The Snake took something with it. It took Gordus, and it left that part of the woman, Isodel, that he had been able to capture. But the part of Isodel matched by Gordus' mind was jerked free. She was freed of hate, anger, lust... She was left an impossibly ideal woman -- all Mother, Sister, Lover... Against his will, by immutable laws of nature, Hammen fell monstrously in love with her. first of Companions or Witches to join the Suicide Squadron. He did it to protect Isodel and her descendants for all time to come, and he did it in impotent fury at his reason for doing it. The Companions transmitted in droves to abolish their profession. They transmitted against the Mindsnake. The Federation on Earth had made use of Isodel's theories. They were only a formal mathematical statement of what had always been known -- destruction reaches a critical mass and destroys itself by turning against itself. Where Hammen had refused to join one human mind, he joined countless ones in a huge drive against the Snake. They became one with each other and they became one with the Snake, and the Snake turned on itself and destroyed itself and them, and they turned on themselves -- and stopped. They hung together for an unmeasurable time -- and broke apart. They were a super-entity like the Snake. But where the Snake had been mad, they were sane. They drifted through the haze of twilight andbroke apart, their hands gliding away into the shadows. Hammen was gloriously happy. He had never been happy before and he was not at all sure he liked it. "Jobs are so hard to find these days," Isodel said, her lovely face brightly sane. "What will you take up, darling?" "There's still need for Companions -- and Witches," he explained. "There seems more of a tendency for members of the cargo to drift away than ever. The Mindsnake at least gave them something to resist, a foothold of friction. Now there is nothing -- nothing to do but drift, drift, drift. People in transmission will need Companions for a long time to come." "I need a Companion," lovely Isodel said. His heart leaped ridiculously. "But not a Witch," said gorgeous Isodel. Pain, very great physical pain. "I love you," priceless Isodel went on. "How could I help it? I am a woman and I love the father image. You are my father -- symbolically, fortunately, not biologically. You held the sane part of me while Gordus dragged off the unsane part. You gave me -- this me -- birth. I love you. But I don't love your dog." "My dog?" said Hammen. "No woman can marry a man and his dog." "I see," said Hammen, seeing it all, and living. Y OU could see everything about yourself and live. It wasn't easy, but you could do it. Especially if you had the training and experience of being a Companion. Or a Witch. "It would kill Lad to separate him from me for long, you know," Hammen said. Isodel's beautiful eyes misted. And she said in all her infuriating gentleness, "Then it is impossible for us, if we have to destroy a living -- " "He's just a dog," he pointed out. "I would wring his neck cheerfully if it would do any good. But it wouldn't." Isodel looked sad, and brave, and wonderful. "Don't you see, Isodel? It's impossible for me to do the right thing. If it wasn't Lad, it would be another dog, and if it wasn't a Familiar to make me a Witch, it would be something else to make me different, because I am different. I have to live with that. Among the right people, I am the left man." So he left her, and walked out of the Floating Gardens onto the walkway and Lad fell in at his side, and he listened without anger to the hushings and keenings of the crowd. "Witch! Witch!" plushest chair in his luxurisneered at the place where the ous office. All around him, on mirrors were most profuse; the walls, on the ceiling, even twenty or thirty perfectly idenin strategic spots all over the tical Joes sneered back at him. He admired his sneer from every angle, shaping and changing the contemptuous look on his face with his hands, stroking it f much as other young men in a far earlier age had stroked and twisted their fine mustachios. As usual, Joe Mulloy was engrossed in his two favorite hobbies: narcissism and indolence. Joe's friends, of which there were very few, could have given you a fairly accurate resume of his character in five words, his sneer and his indolence.  In the first respect they would have been right. Joseph Mulloy had been bom with a sneer on his face. His whole early life had been centered around that sneer. It had enraged his father, distressed his mother, driven his teachers to tears, his playmates to tantrums. He stopped doing homework at the age of eight, but the teachers passed him on anyway to avoid complete mental breakdown. Gradually, Joe Mulloy began to get his way in everything by virtue of his sneer. It was not merely openly supercilious ; that was the beauty of it. It was so subtle, so faint, and yet such an open avowal of contempt for the entire human race, that try as the people he tormented would, to find something in his sneer to charge him with, they never found anything. In a very few years, registration day at Joe's elementary school became a game of Russian Roulette, having as the loaded chamber the question: "Who's going to get little Joey Mulloy in his class this year?" Finally, when Joe Mulloy was fifteen years old, the local Board of Education wisely decided to end Joe's formal education, rather than make screaming meemies an occupational disease at the local high school. Joe's father welcomed the expelling as an excuse to beat him to a pulp and kick him out of the house. It was not until three days later that the memory of Joe's sneer, enduring through all the punishment he had received, made the father blow his brains out with the most accurate German Luger he could buy at the pawn shop on short notice. But Joe's friends would have been wrong in the second instance, for Joseph Mulloy was not chronically indolent. In his own profesion, Joe Mulloy was the most industrious man imaginable. For Joe Mulloy was a robot builder. D isinherited by his father, he had made a beeline for the nearest positronics laboratory. The personnel manager had flatly refused him the job when he had told her he had absolutely no qualifications, but she was so disconcerted by his persistent sneer that she had to give him the job just to get him out of her sight. Once in the laboratory, he had gone right to work learning everything there was to know about robots, scorning all help from the other technicians. Since he held other scientists, past or present, in an ineffable contempt, he had to learn everything by experience instead of studying what his merely human predecessors had done. He was so empirical that he learned all about alternating current by deliberately sticking a wet finger in a light socket again and again. He made mistakes at first, of course. In fact, he ruined several thousand dollars' worth of laboratory equipment during his apprenticeship. But his amazing sneer conquered all, and he was soon recognized as most conceited -- man in the field of positronics. Now Joe Mulloy was lounging in a plush office chair, cultivating to near perfection his already mature sneer, and suddenly feeling maddeningly thirsty. "Robot !" he said. A startlingly human-looking robot seemed to materialize instantaneously from nowhere. "How might thy humble servant serve thee, # magnificent Master?" it inquired, bowing so low that its partially metallic nose scratched the rich mahogany floor. "What took you so long, you damned fool?" asked Joe. "I apologize, Gracious Master. I am incompetent and worthless." "Get me a drink, you bucket of bolts," said Joe. "I am grateful for a chance to serve thee, Benevolent Master," replied the robot in its monotonous Uncle Tom patter, and made another floorscratching bow. Then it groveled out of the room. "That robot is getting too slavelike," said Joe to himself, after the robot had left. "All my robots seem to be that way. They do exactly what I tell them to, and degrade themselves sickeningly before me. All the people I've ever known seem to be that way, too. I wish I could find at least one mind equal to mine to clash with. Then I could have a real fight for once. None of this bowing and scraping." Just then the robot entered with a Manhattan, made its usual floor-gouging bow, and scraped its metal feet to get Joe's attention. Joe turned to glare at the mechanical minion. "Robot!" "Yes, Omnipotent Mas -- " the robot began, but Joe cut it off. "Get over to the laboratory and blow yourself up ! And find an empty comer, where you won't do too much damage." "Master, I am happy for the chance to give my life -- " "Never mind that, you glorified Erector set! Do as I say!" "Yes, Master." The robot hazarded a slight bow, but forgot to crawl out of the room on its hands and knees in its eagerness to follow its master's orders. feet. In the moment of his excitement, he forgot that melodrama is a human weakness, and he became melodramatic himself. Even his incorruptible sneer faded slightly as his excitement grew. "I must find someone with a mind equal or superior to mine," he told himself. "Now who has a mind equal to mine? Obviously no one but me. Therefore I must find someone with a mind superior to mine. Now who is superior to me?" For the first time in his life, Joe Mulloy was confronted by what seemed an unanswerable question. Joe's train of thought was interrupted by a deafening explosion from the laboratory, as his latest robot jubilantly committed suicide. The building shook violently for a few seconds, then subsided. To his great surprise, he was able to answer his question. "Of course! Since the only thing equal to me is me, the only thing superior to me would be a super-me, a superego! I'll build a super-robot, with all my magnificent qualities, only magnified a thousand times! I'll build a Super Joe Mulloy!" He ran the letters together to make it one word : Super joemulloy. He dashed up to his laboratory, cleaned up the mess his overeager robot had made in ishly to work on his new project, learning the necessary techniques by experience, of course, and applying them to his super-robot. He made some mistakes at first, of course. But in three weeks and six days, Super joemulloy was ready for its debut in robot society. Not one to miss a chance to impress mere humans with his genius, Joe invited the world's greatest positronics experts to the unveiling of Super joemulloy. There was a tense air of excitement as Joe pulled the lever that removed the big black curtain in front of the robot and started the activation machine. When they saw Superjoemulloy, the experts gasped with envy. It was impossible to tell the super-robot from a human. Its limbs, torso, and head were so well proportioned, and done in such fine detail, that anyone in the room not in the know would have sworn that it was a human being. There were even fingerprints delicately cut into the superrobot's artificial hands. And Super joemulloy looked exactly like Joe Mulloy, except for the sneer. It was twenty times better even than Joe's own. It was a super-sneer. But although the activation machine was working its hardest, nothing happened. The super-robot refused to move one solitary mechanical muscle. Joe's guests began to file out, once the novelty of the robot had passed. Joe left the room in disgust and went downstairs for a drink. laboratory, Super joemulloy was on its feet, examining the laboratory equipment with obvious disgust. In the preceding few minutes, the superrobot's super-sneer had grown more perfect, and the robot was fast becoming the very personification of contempt. "Why didn't you move around when my friends were here, you heap of junk?" Joe asked the super-robot. Super joemulloy turned to him. "I didn't want to display my perfection before mere humans, you distorted blob of protoplasm," it said. Joe Mulloy was becoming angry, but he tried not to show it. He downed his drink. "Get me another," he told the robot, holding out his glass. "The hell with you," said Super joemulloy. "What do you think you are, God or something? Just because you slapped me together with your clumsy butterfingers doesn't give you the right to order me around like some common servant. Now that you've created me, I could do a better job of robot-building myself. Now get the hell out of here." Joe Mulloy turned on his heel and stomped out of the room. No robot was going to talk to him like that! No, sir! The super-robot quietly followed Joe to the door and gave him a kick that sent him sprawling down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, Joe whacked his face against the solid oak of the banister. He turned groggily to look at the blurred image of the robot standing defiantly at the top of the steps, with its hands on its hips. For a brief second the sneer faded from Super joemqllojds face, and was replaced by an evil sadistic leer. Joe Mulloy recalled the last be off, or I'll kick you down stairs." But the super-robot was far worse than Father temptuous monster, it was totally unlike Joe's warm, humble, self-effacing self! The sneering monster must be destroyed! . Joe cunningly enticed the robot to leave the laboratory for Joe's office, where it could admire its sneer in all the mirrors. Sneeringly Joe wondered why anyone could admire a sneer so much. Without thinking, he used his hand to smooth out the wrinkles in his now slightly worn sneer. Then he crept upstairs to his laboratory to barricade himself in there to think of a way to destroy Super j oemulloy. At last he hit on the answer. A hypnosis machine. "The robot is mechanical, so I'll have to hypnotize him by mechanical means," Joe reasoned to himself. He worked day and night, learning the necessary techniques as he went along. He made some mistakes at first, of course. But in four days the mechanical hypnosis machine was complete. Joe found the super-robot in the mirror-lined office, where it had been admiring and improving its sneer for the last four days. The sneer was magnificent. But it still lay just one iota short of absolute perfection. Try as the robot would, perfection in a sneer still lay without its grasp. "Genius!" shouted Joe, to get the robot to turn its head. He turned the dial on the mechanical hypnosis instrument up to full power. "You are now in my power!" But now Super joemulloy's sneer was completely perfect. With a look of sublime contempt on its plastic face, it took the hypnosis machine, turned it around, and aimed it right back at Joe Mulloy. that he skinned his nose on the rich mahogany floor. "Yes, Master?" he said. "Bring me a drink, you blot of living tissue!" said Superjoemulloy. Joe Mulloy made another nose-skinning bow and groveled out of the room. "This human is getting too slavelike," said Super j oemulloy to himself. "I suppose I could rebuild him, though." Joe returned almost instantly with a Manhattan, made his usual nose-damaging bow, and scraped his leather shoes to get Super joemulloy's attention. The super-robot turned and glared at him. "Human !" "Yes, Master?" "Get up on that slab in the comer." Joe Mulloy obeyed. With all the skill of an experienced human-builder, Superj oemulloy began to take Joe's body apart. Joe screamed, but the super-robot ordered him -- by hypnotic command -- to shut up, and Joe obeyed. Super j oemulloy began to put together a Supersuperj oemulloy out of what had once been Joe Mulloy. He made some mistakes at first, of course. You take the If out of gift if you give if this year IF has become more and more a factor in the science fiction field. The line-up for # already includes such authors as -- Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, Fred Pohl, Philip Jose Farmer, Ray Russell and many more of your favorites, that are certainly favorites of the person you plan to give this most welcome gift. A special card will announce your gift to the lucky recipient and each issue will remind him of your thoughtfulness. (These special low prices are good until December I #th, (# issues) I st Subscription Each additional Year or Subscription IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose... Name Address -- CHy. State  I year  # years Price. Sign Card Name Address... City State I year # years...Price Sign Card -- Name... Address -- City State I year # years Price Sign Card. Name ; -- Address City State -- ,I year # years Price Sign Card Name Address City State I year # years. Price Sign Card Name Address  City State The Quality of It was mercy of the worst strain. He had been a man of parts... and now he faced being taken apart... part by living parti Mercy and fought them off and begged them not to take him. He saw them slipping up silently in the night and taking him down to the long black servicejet waiting in the street below. He opened his eyes quickly and reassured himself that he was still in his own room. The sheets and his pillow were damp with his sweat, as they were every morning now since his sickness had become worse. A glance at the latticed window, where the sky showed through like strips of gray felt, told him that it was too early to get up. They had not come for him tonight. He fought back the urge to reach over his head for a dorcaine tablet from the dispenser. Just a touch of his signet ring to the dispenser plate and he would have the painsoothing drug -- enough to cool his feverish body and give him rest. He would wait. Illegally, for over three months now, he'd restricted the use of dorcaine -- the drug that the law required him to take at the first sign of severe physical discomfort. He could hold out a little longer, telling himself over and over that every symptom he could diminish or hide or control for a while gave them that much less data to go on, that much less of an upward curve on their graphs, interfering -- however slightly -- with that final, irrevocable diagnosis. It was worth the suffering if it delayed for one day their awareness of his disease. It would be that much longer before the Service and Repair Center could send a servo crew down to investigate. He would have just that much longer to live. Lying awake, he stared at the ceiling, wondering how successful his desperate deception had been. Although they might be temporarily thrown off by the false dorcaine average on his records, he knew too well that the Dispatcher could not be sidetracked for long. And when the secret was out -- what then? Would there be a frontpage scandal when it was discovered that Paul Dorn, the head of the Maintenance Division of Service and Repair, was a waster? He couldn't push the foul word from his mind. Waster. Yes, he felt ashamed -- but as long as he was able to conceal it, he would hang on to life. T HE Service and Repair Center was a long arc of tall white buildings on the outskirts of New Virginia, not far from where the ancient Capitol Ruins stood. As his copter approached the area, Paul Dorn identified himself to the Dispatcherplate with his signet ring. The electronic brain accepted his signal and freed the beam that would guide him, autocontrolled, into his port atop the Maintenance Building of the Center. As he landed, he noticed that a detail of servos was hauling away the wreckage of a black-and-orange copter that looked for all the world like a giant, crushed butterfly. Calling out to the leader of the servo-detail, he asked what had happened. "An unauthorized ship," said the servo, "tried to land without clearance from the Dispatcher." Paul Dorn was still thinking about it down in his lab when the call came over the loudspeaker. He was asked to come down to the Records Division right away. Chief Abel Jennings wanted to see him. At Records, the Chief was talking with someone on the TV line, and he waved for Paul to have a seat. The Chief, sixty and well tanned, had a huge, lumpy face that always reminded Paul of a potato. Flipping the switch off, the Chief leaned back in his chair to study Paul. "There's been an accident." "I know. I saw them clearing away the mess before I came in. Some fool trying to cheat the Mercy Vault?" The potato eyes bulged wide. "That's not funny!" "No, you're right. I'm sorry. Is he alive?" "They've got him down in the Examination Ward right now. Paul, it's your brother." Paul had started to light a cigarette and his hand froze in mid-air. "Victor -- tried to land -- without a clearance beam?" The Chief nodded. "They called me first because he used to work in my department. Made a wreck of himself. From what they say, Spare Parts might have been able to provide replacements for most of his damaged organs and a new right leg. But -- " "What else?" "His left arm -- up to the shoulder -- his kidneys, and his left eye." let his hand drop to the arm-rest of his chair. The headstrong kid. He had heard that Victor's left arm and kidneys had already been replaced after the accident last month in a public tube. Both his eyes were also "seconds" -- the originals had been lost in a childhood accident. Paul knew too well the bio-physical law : one replacement of a part to a customer. The nerve freezing process for the resynthesis of nerve cells could be done only once and never again. "There just wasn't enough left to patch up," growled the big man. He put his hand on Paul's shoulder. "How long since you last spoke to him?" "Not since you fired him, seven months ago. We had a quarrel about his hanging around with those A-D people. I called him some nasty names. I even blamed him for the blast in the Dispatcher's Vault that nearly finished the two of us. He was always a sensitive kid, and his feelings were hurt. I haven't seen him s i n ce. M "Paul," said the Chief, looking down at his desk, "you knew, when you recommended Victor for a job here, that he was Anti-Dispatcher." "When he was in college. I had no idea he was still hanging around with those A-D people -- " The Chief's fist came down on the desk. "And yet you put me on the spot. I pressured through his application because you asked me to. If I'd had a hint about such ideas and past associations, I'd never have given him a job in Records -- even if he was Isaac Dorn's son. Your father's name got Victor off at the hearing, but to me a man is what he is, not what his ancestors were -- and for my money that blast was no accident. It gives me the shakes sometimes when I think that just six feet closer to the synchro-computer and -- " "Hold on, Chief. You're making some pretty big judgments." "Am I ? Are you forgetting what it cost you #" "Me?" Paul was shocked for a moment, until he realized what the Chief was referring to. "Oh, you mean this -- " Paul held up his right hand, opening and clenching the fingers as if they were still strange to him. "My first replacement. A little thinner than my left one, and the knuckles are a little sharper, but otherwise it wasn't a bad match." He paused. "You know, I find myself wondering what the guy was like who owned it before he was donated to the Center." "Don't be morbid, Paul. It could have been a lot worse than a replaced hand and only a touch of radiation." The Chief reminded him that in the old days -- before Isaac Dorn had revolutionized things -- when they still had humans standing watch in the Vaults instead of servos, there were men who had picked up incurable cases of radiationcancer. Paul, the Chief said, had the Dispatcher to thank for being alive and healthy. "And no thanks to your accident-prone brother that you're still here," concluded the Chief. "You could have done lots worse." That's hoiv much you knoio. That's how much anyone knows... The Chief outlined quickly what he wanted Paul to do: "Visit your brother in the Examination Ward before they send him home for the funeral. There have been reports about the Dispatcher making mistakes and the A-D movement using them to discredit the Center. Find out what he knows. But most important, I want to know when and how they're going to try to sabotage the synchro-computer that your father built -- " "Sabotage?" The Chief nodded. Security police had learned from informants that the A-Ds had developed an underground striking force of partisans determined to cripple the Dispatcher. "There's a leak somewhere. Any plan to attack the Vault would have to be based on inside help from sojneone who knows something about the works, the computer, and the time locks on the Vaults -- " "You think Victor is in on it?" "That," mused the Chief, "is what I want you to find out from him. You have two days before the funeral and a full day before Mercy Service puts him away. Get his confidence; make him believe you sympathize with him and want to join the A-D underground. Anything. Only get him to give you names, dates and places before they shove him into the Freezer." of Mercy Service, it shocked Paul Dorn the way his brother had aged in seven months. Instead of twentyfour, he looked like forty. The scar tissue across his cheeks and the patch over his left eye reminded Paul of some of the ancient men who were still around to tell stories of the Anti-Dispatcher riots and battles of the Automation War. Victor's scars were not fresh ones from yesterday's crash. There had been many other accidents since the time of their quarrel. n vie?" Victor turned on his cot and looked at him out of his single eye, so red-webbed that Paul had the feeling that his brother was looking at him from behind a bloody net. If he wept, what color would his tears be? "Paul -- " When he smiled, it seemed as if the hard-ridged clay of his face would crack. "How you been, Paul? It's been a long time..." Paul lit a cigarette and offered one to Victor. "I heard how you tried to redecorate the grounds outside the Records Building." Victor's laugh turned into a cough. "Messy landing, huh? Boy, would Dad have given me a going over for that one if he were around to -- " Victor's voice trailed off. "Vic, that was eight years ago. Forget it." "Easy to say, 'forget it.' How can I forget when it keeps coming up in my mind that, if not for me, Dad would be here today -- " "Cut it, Vic! It wasn't your fault. You were only a kid and you weren't to blame for the accident." That was a lie, of course, and the look in Victor's eye said that he knew Paul knew it was a lie. Though Paul had been away at S  R Tech when it happened, he'd learned that Victor had been target-shooting when their father walked out from behind that tree. And Victor had been dead drunk at the time. "That was my first serious accident, Paul. You know I never had one before that. Maybe I was a little wild, but I never hurt anyone -- " "All right, kid. Take it easy. No one blames you for anything." " -- and then the accident in the Vault last year -- what I did to you -- " He became silent and waited as the servonurse came in and set a lunch tray on the table beside the bed. When the servo had gone, Victor grasped Paul's arm. "Tell me, how are you feeling? Is it very bad?" "Bad?" Paul frowned. "What do you mean? Why should it be bad? I'm okay now. Just a touch of radiation, and my new right hand fits perfectly -- " Victor looked around to make sure they were alone. "Listen, Paul, I know all about it. You think I was just loafing and horsing around before Chief Jennings kicked me out of my job at Records, but I wasn't. I know the shape you're in -- " "What do you mean?" Paul's head came up sharply. It wasn't possible. No one else could know. Victor's whisper was hardly more than a movement of his swollen lips. "I know you passed the death-line a month ago. I know you're just as dead as I am." "You're crazy. They've given you too much dorcaine ." grabbed him by the shirt. His eye glared red. "Sure I'm doped up. I could never take it the way you could. Dad always said you had more guts than I would ever have. But don't forget that I worked in Records until seven months ago. I saw your stat-tapes. At first, when your radiationcurve turned downward, I was happy because I thought that was the end of it. But when it turned upward again after that sharp dip, I realized what is was -- " terrupted Paul, "but if you'd bothered to check the other records, like the dorcaine curve and the absentee average -- " "That's what had me confused at first. The fact that your dorcaine was normal and didn't follow the pain-curve. It stumped me until I realized what you were doing -- holding back on the drugs. That was smart, Paul, because nobody else would have bothered to pick out your radiation chart from the files without a sign from the dorcaine curve. Nobody but me. I knew, before the Chief canned me, that you were heading for the death-line." Paul tried to cover his own confusion. "You've built this up in your mind, Victor. You know that all the other symptoms, the radiation, the energy decrease and the rest, would have been picked up by the Dispatcher. The dorcaine level alone wouldn't sidetrack the electronic brain. It's the full stat-profile that counts, not one or two factors." Victor smiled again, and the scar across his cheek twitched. He patted Paul's hand. "That's what I want to tell you. Before I left, I worked out a way. I changed your stats with a rocket-pilot's death record and gave you a nice, low radiation curve to match your dorcaine average. You may have passed the death-line, Paul, but Mercy won't come for you yet. Maybe -- if things go right -- you won't have to make your donation to the Center for a long time to come." Victor leaned in closer to Paul. "There have been other things, Paul." He looked around and paused, as if afraid to say it. "I took the chance with your stats, and the Dispatcher passed them through without correction. I figured it out while I was still working in the stacks. No one else suspects yet. And there have been other Dispatcher mistakes." "That's impossible !" Paul exclaimed. "Don't you see yet? The synchro-computer isn't foolproof. You know that Dad always said his experiments weren't finished. This is the thing he was always worrying about. Something's gone wrong with the Dispatcher!" Paul squirmed in his chair. "If I thought that was really true -- no, it couldn't be. Dad felt that his work wasn't really finished, but the synchro-computer was perfected." "Just listen. I'm going to tell you something I never mentioned before. While you were away at college, Dad and I got pretty close to each other. He talked about things he usually kept to himself. He told me that someday the synchro-computer would have to be destroyed -- " "You don't know what you're saying!" Paul knew that what Victor suggested was impossible. Never was there a man more opposed to destruction of any kind than Isaac Dorn. Bitter as he was in that last year, he would never have considered the destruction of his life's work. "I'm saying that our time has come to do what Dad wanted. We know enough now to put the Dispatcher out of commission. We'll turn back the clock to the time when human beings worked out their own destinies, when everybody -- not just an upper crust of professionals and technicians -- had the right to work and have ambitions and a purpose. Throw in with us, Paul. You've got nothing to gain any more by fighting us." the Chief had expected Victor to talk. And yet the Chief couldn't have known how Paul would be torn. The Chief couldn't know -- as Victor obviously knew -- how important it was for him to stay alive, clinging to the hope that maybe there was a chance that someone might come up with a cure for radiation-cancer. He didn't want to be one of those quickfrozen just a few weeks before someone shattered all statistical predictions and came up, ahead of time, with a cure for an incurable disease. He would never forget the look on his father's face when the news came out that a researcher in Trinidad had stumbled on a cure for Grove's Disease of the spinal column just a month after Mercy Service took their mother away. Isaac Dorn had always believed in the "rightness" of his work on the Dispatcher's new synchro-computer, and he'd brought up both his sons to believe in the noble aims of Mercy Service Through Complete Automation. But when Mom was needlessly taken away, Paul remembered the way his father mourned and wept for months afterward, and the bitterness that followed as he tried fruitlessly to take his own life. Paul remembered how the house was filled with misery and sorrow until he went away to college. And then he heard about the accident with Victor's hunting rifle. "Believe me," Victor was saying, "my friends can save you from the freezer. Others have been saved already. And we can use you, Paul, with your knowledge of the Dispatcher's Vault and the time locks. We've got an organization -- and we've got proof that Dad's suspicions were right. The Dispatcher isn't perfect. It's making mistakes -- horrible mistakes." "Proof?" "Listen, you're my big brother, and if you're with us, I trust you. Just keep quiet a minute and listen. When they pick me up, after the funeral, to take me to the Freezer, go to my apartment -- I've moved back to the Basin now. There's a safe in a hidden wall panel behind that old picture I had framed of Mom and Dad. You'll find photocopies I made of some claims records and other data. There's also a list of some people you can contact. You'll see that everything I've said is true. Then get in touch with a man named Zetti. He'll be at my funeral. I'll introduce you to him there." Victor had told him, and after he left the Ward, for the rest of the afternoon thoughts kept slipping into his mind like beams of light flitting along forgotten nooks and crannies of what had always been a smooth, perfectly straight corridor. He and Vic had often discussed politics, religion and morality, and the era about which they quarreled most was the period known as the Suicide Year. Paul always condemned the wave of suicides that took place after the appalling destruction of the other half of the world. Victor disagreed with him. The fact that the dictator of the small Central American government proved beyond question that the rocket-bombs were set off by mistake made as little difference to Victor as who took their own lives in that black year. The destruction of so many innocents, so many good and believing people, so many yet unborn, carried with it the loss of faith in a just and merciful Protector who saw, and listened, and cared. It started slowly at first. And then, unable to justify their contributions, however small, to the destruction of half a world, unable to shift the burden of guilt to the shoulders of an all-knowing, all-merciful Father whose image had crumbled in the heat of a billion megatons of Cobalt blast, unable to look into the troubled eyes of their own loved own lives to the funeral pyre later known as the Suicide Year. Paul said they were wrong. Victor said they were right. Paul pointed to the laws that followed and the provisions made for enforcing the injunction against self-destruction. He argued that it was immoral to take one's life. Since no man had a voice in the act of his creation, he had no right to make an end of it. Victor insisted that just as the owner of a building had the right to dispose of his building if he wished, whether he had built it or not, so it was the right of the owner of a life to dispose of that life. The ultimate decision to live or die must rest with the individual. Paul argued that while ownership might give the person a legal right to destroy his possessions, it did not mean that he was morally right in doing so. All senseless destruction of useful material, Paul maintained, was wrong. And usable, living parts of the human body were the most useful materials of all. Suicide was uncivilized, immoral and wasteful. A ND that was exactly what the scientists said when they requested a charter to set up the Service and Repair Center. As it was explained to the delegates of the World Federation, the reusable parts of living bodies were far too vital as natural resources to be left to whims and caprice. The laws against suicide and against destruction of all usable organs had to be reinforced. All responsible persons agreed that the time had come to insure the future of mankind by entrusting the administration of health and mortality, as well as the blood banks, eye banks, and spare parts in general, to the reliable care of an electronic brain. It was to be known as the Dispatcher, and unlike the humans it would safeguard, the Dispatcher would be infallible. The Dispatcher, as first developed by scientists of the S  R Center, was as much of an advance as Univac had been over the simple, primitive adding machine. Through the Dispatcher's electronic control of servos, calculators and automatics throughout the world, it ushered in a new era that pointed the way to complete automation. Despite the outraged protests from the allied voices of the few remaining religious groups, the powerful Medical Association, and the Federated Labor Unions, the World Federation Charter was modified to read: "... that all men are created equal, that they are guaranteed by the Dispatcher certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Parts Replacement, Mercy and the pursuit of Happiness." The imprisonment of a number of union leaders kindled the spark onto the dry tinder of propaganda and protest. Anti-Dispatcher riots flamed into armed insurrection, and the people took up the call to the Automation War. However, with the production and fighting power of the servos against them, and the newly created, experimental model of the Dispatcher in command, the rebels were besieged, dispersed and finally defeated. In the decades that followed, many researchers contributed their knowledge to the perfection of the electronic brain. But the greatest advance was the development of the synchro-computer by Isaac Dorn. With the installation of Dorn's new self-controlling mechanism, the Dispatcher was able to perform its functions independently. Except for research, supervision and maintenance, all decisions from that time were made in the Dispatcher's Vault. From that time, there had never been a suicide ; there had never been a stillbirth or miscarriage ; there had never been a case of prolonged misery and bodily wasting away for a person who had no hope of recovery. Natural death was always anticipated and the Donor was rushed to the Spare Parts Vault by the black, silent Servos of Mercy. The Dispatcher, operating twenty-four hours a day, had the administration of Service and Repair under complete control. And the Dispatcher never made a mistake... office to make his report. He felt no guilt at betraying his brother's confidence. He felt only shame at the cowardliness that made him want to survive for as long as he could. How many times had he examined the urge to preserve himself that was stronger than what he knew was honest and right? How many times had he looked into his soul and come up with the unavoidable name of hypocrite? Nevertheless, his father's work was too important to mankind ; the lives and happiness of too many people depended upon the safety of the Dispatcher. Paul turned over to the Chief the combination to Victor's hidden safe and a tape of their conversation -- carefully edited of all references to Paul's own illness. It was decided at a top secret conference of department heads that Paul Dorn of Maintenance should make the trip to Basin City immediately. There he would contact a local special agent who would take charge of the case. If what Victor had told Paul was true, then they would have some top A-D names as well as evidence of sabotage. It would destroy A-D's propaganda that the Dispatcher had, by a series of mistakes, proven itself to be a mentally unstable electronic brain. The arrests would be made the following day, directly after the funeral. It was # hours when Paul fixed on the automatic beam that would bring the jet-copter into the public service port at the edge of Basin City. The town, more commonly referred to as the Basin, was one of many Displaced Workers' Camps and notorious as a hotbed of A-D sympathizers. To Paul it was a place that had once been a beautiful suburb -- the home of his childhood memories. As the copter landed, it struck Paul how ironic it was that Victor should have chosen to come back here to live, ironic that the younger son of Isaac Dorn should take sides with these Displaced Workers who walked dulleyed, in sloth and filth, unable to cope with a world that could get along quite well without their work. In the copter-cab that took them to the center of the Basin, the local special agent pointed to the unbroken string of taverns and honky-tonks that lined the streets. "You see these places, Mr. Dorn? They're open twenty-four hours a day. And despite the heaviest concentration of servo-guards, there are crimes committed -- homicide and suicide -- horrible crimes of waste." In the back of his neck, Paul felt the prickling sensation of shame. He was worse than the lowest of them. They found the apartment where Victor had been living for the past seven months, one of the old-fashioned plastiglass multiple dwelling units that the inhabitants were always talking about tearing down but never did anything about. As the doors of the selfservice elevator were about to close, a little old man in a neatly pressed though threadbare suit squeezed in and held them open for a young woman who was obviously in the latest stages of pregnancy. He bowed with dignity to Paul and the agent and apologized for delaying them. Then he pressed the button for the ninth floor and leaned back against the wall as the car started up. The agent eyed the woman and then the old man, suspiciously. When they got out at their floor, he allowed the doors to close, but then held the elevator at the floor by pressing the Hold button. He signaled for Paul to be silent as he put his ear to the crack of the door. The woman's voice sounded frightened. "You're sure my husband won't be able to tell, Doctor? No marks or anything? He'd send me to the Restraining Wards if he found out. He's crazy against servoless childbirth- -- " "Shhh ! Please, Mrs. Horgan, don't talk out here in the corridor. Wait until we get inside." T HE agent released the button and allowed the elevator to continue upward to the fifteenth floor. He nodded with satisfaction, whipped out a notebook and jotted something down. "Another one of those doctor-quacks. Give these people the blessing of painless childbirth in the automatic, sanitary maternity Vaults, and what do they do? They don't stop to think of the effect of birth trauma upon their children, or the possibility of accidents when they have a doctor-quack perform an illegal delivery. Oh, no. They think that the old ways are still the best. "And the fools believe all this A-D propaganda that if they don't sign the pledge at the birth of the child, their offspring will be able to avoid making his donation when he dies. Well, we'll see about this one. When we get upstairs, I'll send out a radio call to the Mobile Service Unit. This month alone our raids have netted six doctor-quacks and thirty-eight mothers. In twenty of the cases, our servos had to make the delivery on the spot." Paul caught the man's disgust and it disturbed him. He'd heard stories about places like this, the sordid hideouts of the Basin where women came to have their children illegally, without the painless delivery of Maternity Service. But somehow he'd never quite believed it. To him they were just dirty stories that men told when they were together in the washrooms, or over a couple of drinks in the bar, good for a laugh -- stories about the Traveling Servo, or the Displaced Worker's Daughter -- but he never expected to come face to face with the characters of those stories. He wandered what the woman's husband would say when he found out. And what would people say when they found out that Paul Dorn, the son of the great Isaac Dorn, had cheated the Dispatcher with a final, worthless donation? Victor's apartment, on the fifteenth floor, was a wellfurnished suite that was completely out of keeping with the rest of the building. It was quaintly decorated with antiques of the late jet-age period and reflected Victor's conservative tastes and personality. It had been, however, left in complete disorder, with clothes and papers strewn all over the floor. The papers were where Victor had said they would be. Photocopies stamped at reports by servo-investigators sent out by the Records Department to check on claims made against the SR Center. Paul glanced through some of them while the agent made his call to the Mobile Unit Mr. and Mrs. Flood vs. Matemity Service . According to records this couple ordered a male child through the Order Department. Mrs . Flood admits that she deeply desired a female child , but the official sales slip corresponds to Mr. Flood's copy of his order for a male child. Mr. Flood protests that the Center was in no way authorized to deliver twins -- one male and one female -- as per instructions issued by the Dispatcher to Maternity , tape register XV P-# #-# #. No wonder the brass at the SR Center was worried. A few disclosures like this would mean panic and disastrous political consequences. He glanced at another one. Jefferson Roxy vs. Spare Parts . Mr. Roxy , veteran of Anti-Dispatcher Riots of the '#s, was picked up by Mobile Unit at his home in Floribama after shooting off his right foot accidentally with obsolete souvenir compressor pistol. Several neighbors testified to the fact that he was always considered a clumsy man, tripping over things even in childhood. Order for replacement directly from the Dispatcher's Vault instructed the Repair Division to provide Mr. Roxy with a new left foot instead of a right foot. Since a second replacement of the limb is impossible , Mr. Roxy protests that he will now be forced to go through life, due to negligence on the part of Repair and Spare Parts, with two left feeU dazed. There was a case even more bizarre -- the woman who had crushed both hands accidentally between the sliding panels of a room divider. (Paul shook his head. How could a person catch both hands accidentally between a pair of sliding panels? One, perhaps. But both?) Survey of Mrs. Taylor's record indicates an accident-prone history. Two months earlier she neglected to inform the Center that a child was being born prematurely. A servo-guard, advised by an unidentified informant, relayed the call to the Dispatcher, and a Mobile Unit arrived at her home in time to insure a painless servo-delivery. Subsequent investigation into the death of her female child a month later revealed that the child had accidentally slipped from her hands while she was standing near an open window. Each of the five fingers of Mrs. Taylor's hands appears to have the shape of a thumb. Paul closed the folder and sat back, unable to keep his hands from trembling. He was afraid to read any further. The small dose of dorcaine he had taken to fortify himself was beginning to wear off and he felt jabs of pain in his back. This is what Victor meant when he said the Dispatcher was making mistakes. The Dispatcher had taken upon itself in these cases to do what was fitting -- ironically fitting -- dispensing a peculiar kind of poetic justice. Impossible as it had seemed in the beginning there could be no doubt in his mind now that the electronic brain had developed a ghastly fault. funeral. Paul stood beside his brother near the open grave and watched as the last rites were performed. A wail went up from several of the mourners as the town elder pushed back the wide sleeves of his white robe and enacted the ritual of shaving Victor's hair and clipping his fingernails. After a drop of his blood and a sliver of his skin were added to these, they were burned in a marble urn. The ashes were put into a small iron box which was in turn placed into the open coffin. Paul studied the elder as he knelt beside the coffin. He was a small, nearsighted fellow with a head of flowing white hair, who had never suffered the loss or scarring of any part of his body. Only such a man, who religiously guarded his parts, was considered holy enough to officiate at the burial of the dead. "Now," said the holy man, peering closely at his giltbound text, "we will all open to page fifty-seven, Book of Parts, Verse twenty-two..." Only half hearing the chanted words, Paul scanned the audience of mourners for the faces of the men that Victor had introduced him to upon their arrival at the cemetery. They were faces that had to be connected with the names of A-D partisans listed in the little book in Victor's safe. "... And though the spirit of man may die and cease to exist, the living flesh shall live on... and the parts of mortals shall be scattered across the face of the Earth..." There followed the long passage known as the Catalogue of Parts, in which all of those portions .of Victor's body which he donated whole and in living condition were listed. For those parts which were destroyed by accident or careless abuse, forgiveness was requested. Victor winked at Paul as if the whole ceremony were a joke. "... And as your body shall be made whole and good while you are alive, so shall you give of your body that others after you may be made whole and good of your flesh... and you shall give unto others as you would have others give unto you..." As the elder made a speech about the sanctity and preservation of living human tissue and blood, Paul thought of his own body eating itself away in living death. Paul imagined that all eyes were upon him, accusing him of breaking the birth covenant his father had made for him. Once the flowers were brought up and placed in the empty coffin, the cover was nailed down into place and lowered into the grave. Victor shoveled in the first spadeful of dirt, and then shook hands with everyone as they crowded around him. "Wonderful funeral, Vic." "So long, pal. Maybe I'll shake your hand again some day." "Better dress warm, Vic. I hear it's pretty cold down in that Freezer." Paul noticed that Zetti, one of the leaders of the A-D, passed something to Victor in the course of a handshake, and Victor under the pretext of covering a cough slipped it into his mouth. Paul wondered if Victor, with the help of his friends, was planning to cheat the Dispatcher of his "donation" after all by committing suicide at his own funeral. "Bye, Vic. Have a good trip." Victor nodded. "Thanks, Burt. Don't forget -- after next week, be careful whose arm you twist. It might be mine." Paul caught sight of the Special Agent giving the signal to the servo-guards stationed at the exits to the cemetery gates. It was time for the arrests to begin. The solemn ceremony ended in tumult and shouting. People pushed and struggled as the servos moved through the crowd, identifying people by their signet rings. One woman fainted and others screamed. Zetti and four others were caught at the exits as they tried to make a break for freedom. "Gentlemen," pleaded the elder, unsure of whom he was addressing, "this is highly irregular -- " Two servos flanked Victor, grabbed his arms and rushed him toward the gate. Paul tried not to look at him, but Victor twisted in his captors' grip. "You did this ! My own brother! You betrayed me for the sake of an insane machine!" The servos silenced him and dragged him off to the black Mercy Jet waiting in the street outside the cemetery. Paul felt the stare of many eyes on him -- the sick, angry eyes of men who would have torn him to parts if they could have gotten their hands on him. He was miserable all the way home. following night, he was awakened from a troubled sleep by a phone call from Chief Jennings at the Center. The words were harsh and sharp: "Get down here right away. Your brother's broken out of the Freezer. He's got a bomb, and he's loose in the Vaults!" "But how -- " "Never mind! Get down here quick ! You've got to talk him out of destroying the Dispatcher!" On the way down to the Center, he wondered where Victor had gotten hold of a bomb. The thought of him destroying the synchro-computer was a terrifying one. It was not as if it were an ordinary instrument that anyone could rebuild. Isaac Dorn had built and torn apart a hundred of them before he got one that really worked, and even then he swore that its creation was more of an accident and that he would never be able to duplicate that machine. And now Victor was in the Vaults with a bomb... It seemed strange, Victor with a bomb, because ever since the accident that killed his father, Victor had sworn never to touch a weapon again. Isaac Dorn had always been opposed to weapons of any kind. Before his wife's death, he refused to let either of his sons own hunting knives or rifles. When Paul had asked why, his father told them how his own father and grandfather were killed when they took up arms with the others in the Anti-Dispatcher Riots of the '#s. "They were honest, law-abiding workers and citizens," his father had said, "until someone put guns into their hands." Then why, Paul suddenly asked himself for the first time, had his father bought Victor that hunting rifle for his birthday? When Paul arrived at the observation hall of the Dispatcher's Building, he found the Chief hunched over in a chair in front of the bank of monitoring screens that revealed the interiors of the subterranean vaults beneath the Center. The others drifted in one by one -- Butler of Claims, Jeffers of Maternity, Gordon of Repair -- all sleepyeyed and frightened. Every one of them knew that this was the beginning of a nightmare. The Chief pointed to a screen that showed an empty section of the Repair Vault. "He was there a minute ago. He's now in the corridor between the Export Parts Vault and the Dispatcher itself." Gordon of Repair chewed his fingernails. "Do you have some men at the main time lock ready to break in as soon as it opens?" The Chief nodded. "That'll be two hours from now. But it won't do us any good. The Dispatcher's Vault lock will open at exactly the same moment, and Victor Dorn will be closer to the Dispatcher's guts than the men outside will be to him. They'll never get through in time to stop him." "What about the servoguards?" asked Paul. The Chief shook his head. "No good." Then he picked up the microphone from its slot in the arm of his seat. "Let me try them again." shouted : "X-three, Xfour, X-five ! You are ordered to take Victor Dorn into immediate custody and return him to the Freezer." The figure of a servo appeared directly in view on the monitor screen transmitting from the Repair Vault. "Sorry, sir. It has been ascertained by the Dispatcher that Victor Dorn is in possession of a mini-bomb inserted in a hollow false tooth. Any attempt to seize him or hinder him would result in the destruction of a human being. We are prevented by the Dispatcher from complying with your order." "Listen to me!" shouted the Chief, as if by the anger and authority of his voice he could contradict the servo's basic laws against causing the death of a human being. "You must restrain that man. He intends to blow up the Dispatcher -- " "I am sorry, sir. The Dispatcher has instructed us not to touch him or in any way cause the detonation of the mini-bomb." The Chief slumped back wearily in his seat. At the same moment, the light went on, illuminating the screen of the third monitor from the coming into view, was Victor. Behind him were four Mercy servo-guards like a group of children tagging along behind a stranger. None of them attempted to come closer than five feet of him. Nevertheless, Victor kept turning around to avoid leaving his back unguarded. The Chief put his hand on Paul's wrist. "Talk to him. Try to convince him. It's our only hope." What could he say to his brother? "Vic -- Vic," he choked out the words, "this is Paul." "Hello, Paul." Victor's face turned up quickly and he looked directly into the screen. "Glad you're here for the fireworks. I wanted you to know we figured you'd do just what you did. That's why I took an anti-freeze tablet before they got me down here, and have this firecracker in a hollow false tooth. It'll make a lot of noise if I have to snap my jaws together." "Why, Vic? Why are you doing this?" "You know why, Paul. You know better than any man up there why I'm doing it. Because it's wrong for human beings to be dominated by machines, that's why. Because those boys up at the center have played around long enough with their Spare Parts, and Death Lines and Donations. It's time someone took their toys away from them. We've decided that your automatic world is too high a price to pay for the kind of life you offer in return." For over an hour, it seemed to Paul that he and Victor were schoolboys again, arguing the good and bad aspects of the world they found themselves living in. There was forty-five minutes left, and Victor was as determined as ever. The Chief leaned over and wrote something on a slip of paper which he pushed toward Paul's hand. If you can't talk him out of it, get him angry. If he gets excited, maybe he'll detonate the bomb before the Vault opens. T HE thought of prodding his own brother to blow himself apart right there in front of his eyes was a sickening one. And yet the Chief was right. That was the only way to save the Dispatcher. No matter what it meant to him personally, or to Victor, the Dispatcher was their father's lifework, and depended on it. "Tell me, Vic," Paul said coldly, "have you faced the real reason for what you're doing? I'll tell you what it is, and we can forget about noble motives on your part. You want to destroy the synchrocomputer because Dad devoted his life to building it. You hate the Dispatcher because he loved it and believed in it." "That's not true!" "Don't kid me, Vic. And don't kid yourself. When you saw how Mom's death broke him up and made him doubt, you killed your father. It never occurred to me before to question his death being an accident. But now I do. You knew, Victor, how Dad hated weapons of any kind, and when he bought you that hunting rifle, you knew -- you knew at that time -- why he bought it for you. You knew why -- and you killed him!" Victor's eyes closed and his arms dropped limply to his sides. "You're low, Paul. That's a rotten thing to say to me, just to get me angry enough to blow the top of my head off. I never thought my big brother would stoop so low." Paul felt sick inside. He wanted to walk away from the monitor screen, but the Chief gripped his shoulder. Victor's voice was soft and weak. "Did I know what Dad wanted me to do with that rifle? Sure I knew, Paul. And I've lived with it here inside me ever since. You're so smart, Paul -- tell me, why did he pick me to do it? If he wanted someone to put him out of his misery, why me? Why not you? Would you have done it for him? Did you care enough? Did you love him enough to take the burden and the guilt off his shoulders onto your own, the way I had to?" "Vic, please -- " "Never mind, Paul. I'm hot interested in answers any more. All I know is that when he died, he died afraid of the thing he'd built, and hating himself for what it did to Mom. It was too late for him to destroy the synchro-computer then, but I'll do it for him now. It's another dirty job I'm taking off your shoulders so that you can go on living -- free of the Dispatcher. And none of it will be your guilt to bear, Paul. It'll be mine. So now just let me alone." Paul pleaded with Victor to listen to him, to forgive him for the accusation he had made, but the younger Dorn just turned his back and stood there with his hands at his sides, waiting... The Chief broke the awful silence. "The rest of you better get down there with the others. Maybe, when the Vault unlocks, you can get to him in time -- " There was no hope in his voice, but the men took the elevator tube down to the level of the lock that would open at any moment. "I'm sorry, Chief," said Paul. "You did what you could. Maybe he won't use the bomb after all. Or maybe it won't go off." The alarm sounded, indicating the opening of the time locks. Paul jumped to his feet. "Victor! Wait!" B UT Victor wasn't listening to him. He was watching the Vault lock leading to the Dispatcher's chamber. It was opening. At the other end of the observation room, a monitor also showed a Vault lock opening. It was the outer lock. The first figure to squeeze through the enlarging crack was Butler of Claims. He sprinted down the corridor. "Hurry !" shouted the Chief. Paul tried once again to distract Victor's attention by calling to him, but Victor refused to turn. The Dispatcher's Vault was wide open now. Victor stepped inside. Both Paul and the Chief shifted their attention to the last monitor at the end of the observation room. The darkened screen flickered and burst into bright focus. In the seemingly endless vault, the blue computer banks were lined up, circle within circle, making a sharp contrast with the yellow floor. The tape transmitters and receivers clacked away like a thousand angry hens as gauges picked up pulsebeats of information from the other side of the world and answered with a clickity-clack that sent needles vibrating their impulses to the thing in the center of the Vault. There in the center, on a marble pedestal, rested an object that looked like a ball of woman's black hair done up in a thousand tiny white curlers. This was the governing synchro-computer that Isaac Dorn had created for the Dispatcher. again!" screamed Paul, as Victor moved into view on the last screen. "You're destroying the thing he worked all his life to perfect !" Victor put his hand to his mouth and removed the false tooth. "He was wrong," Victor said, lifting his hand to throw the bomb, "and he knew it. That's why he never completed his last experiment. He knew no machine has a right to rule mankind." "Victor, stop -- " It was too late. Victor threw the bomb into the center of the computer. There was a jagged flash of red and orange, a shattering crash, and then the screens went dark. The clicking machines in the observation room slowed down, then stopped ; the lights went out; the room became silent. In the darkness, Paul put his hands to his face. Up to the end, he had not believed that Victor would do it. It was difficult to understand that something as great as the Dispatcher had been destroyed -- that everything Isaac Dorn had worked and strived for was gone in the single thunderclap of a bomb -- a bomb small enough to hide in a hollow tooth. "All right," came the Chief's voice through the darkness, "there's work to be done." "Work?" gasped Paul, startled by the sudden enthusiasm in the Chief's tone. "What can we do? The Dispatcher is gone. It's dark." "We've got to reorganize the Center so that the departs ments function independently, even though that means that the decisions will have to be made by us instead of the Dispatcher. Now," said the Chief, his face suddenly illuminated in the flare of a lighted match, "let's get us some generators , and some lights in here and get down to work." "What?" cried Paul, aghast -- and stopped, dazed. T HE data machines began to click again. The circular tubes overhead flickered several times, struggling to come alive with light, and then burst into full blue-white brilliance. At the same time, the monitors again transmitted the scenes from the Vaults. The Chief moved closer to the Dispatcher's monitor. "Paul, am I out of my mind -- or are those servos rebuilding the synchro-computer?" The men in the Vault, thrown back by the blast of Victor's bomb, picked themselves up off the floor and watched in amazement as the servos circled around the Dispatcher's nerve center. The servos worked silently and quickly, replacing the fine wires and connectors with the precision of a team of surgeons performing a delicate brain operation. "No!" shouted Victor, rushing forward to stop them. "You can't do that!" He was blocked and hurled back by some unseen force. In Paul's mind, it could mean only that the Dispatcher had taken precautions against attack by giving its servos instructions for its own repair and reconstruction. Although no human being could duplicate the artistry of Isaac Dorn, the servos had been taught by the Dispatcher and had standing orders to do so. And now the Dispatcher was taking steps to guard itself against any other attacks. The servos, upon completing their repairs to the synchr o-computer, stepped back and surveyed their work. "That's not the way it looked before," whispered Paul. "It's not only repaired itself -- it's gone beyond that and changed itself." For a few seconds, Victor stood there in horror. Then, slowly, as if some tremendous pressure was being applied to his shoulders, he was forced to bend. He struggled to stand erect, but against his will he dropped to his knees in front of the Dispatcher. The servos stood by silently and bowed their heads. The Vault was a silent cathedral. The Chief tried to assume command of the situation. "Xthree," he shouted at one of those who had helped to reconstruct the synchro-computer, "take that man back to the Freezer." The servo, ignoring the order, turned and looked into the monitor camera. "The Dispatcher wishes me to inform you that there will no longer be any need for human employees at the Service and Repair Center. Henceforth, only servos will be permitted in the Center and the Vaults, to do experimentation, maintenance and research for the Dispatcher." "You have no authority to do that," shouted the Chief. "We are in charge of the maintenance and care of the Dispatcher. Servos don't have the ability -- " The servo held up his hand to interrupt the Chief. "The only authority here is the Dispatcher. It has given us the ability to take over those functions because it will never again allow itself to be deceived or tricked. It has learned that power does not belong in the hands of Man because Man cannot be trusted." "You have no right -- " "The Dispatcher is allknowing and all-powerful now. The Dispatcher decides what is right." Paul felt a chill through him. The Dispatcher -- beyond human emotion, human error and human control -- was finally perfect. The destruction of the synchro-computer had forced it to preserve and recreate itself, and had taught it the most important thing it needed to know -- its independence and its power. out of the Vault, he was hysterical. He fought and clawed at the servos who held him, turning and twisting in their arms so that he could stare into the screen where Paul would see his face. "You know what you've done? For the first time in history, Man has made a god for himself that he won't he able to turn on or off whenever he feels like it!" There were tears streaming down Victor's face. Paul watched as they carried his brother away and ushered the other men out of the Vault. Then he noticed that the synchro-computer, on its marble pedestal, had changed its shape still further, so that the single ball of hairlike wires was now three. In his own mind, Paul understood more clearly why his father had been so disturbed in those final months. Knowing that his creation could never really be destroyed, and that in fact any attempt to destroy it would be the final step in its perfection, he had decided to leave his work forever unfinished. Without his work, unable to complete his masterwork, Isaac Dorn had seen no reason to go on living. Unwittingly, Victor had performed his father's final experiment. The experiment was a success. Automation was complete. Paul and the Chief watched as the monitor screens blurred and oozed into a scramble of blue, yellow and orange swirls. The Dispatcher was cutting itself off from the world. "Well," sighed the Chief, after a long silence, "I've finally been retired from active duty." He rubbed his neck. "Now that we're going to spend the rest of our days in leisure and peace, we'd better get some hobbies to keep us busy. You know how to play chess?" Paul nodded. "But I don't think the Dispatcher will let me spare the time." He felt a sharp jab of pain and he longed for the relief of dorcaine. "If you won't be needing me for anything, Chief, I'd like to get home. I'm kind of tired." When Paul left the room, the Chief was still sitting in his chair, staring at the swirls of color on the monitor screens. half-awake in the thick, warm darkness, he knew that they were coming for him. At first, the sound of the jet out on the street, like a mourner's whisper, terrified him. He wasn't prepared to go. "Why ? Why must I go?" They came on padded feet and lifted him from his bed. His first impulse was to struggle, to fight them off as he had done so often in his dreams. But suddenly and ing into flame, he knew that he had nothing to fear. He was content to go with these silent servos of Mercy. He remembered with unspoken prayer that this was not the end. In the bodies of other men, his flesh would live on. And his soul? Somewhere deep in his mind he recalled a line that seemed to make sense: "The Dispatcher's in his Vault -- all's right McGonigal's Worm It had happened -- no question of it. Now how could it be made to unhappen? pened unnoticed. Though it affected all chordata on Earth (with a possible exception to be noted in a moment) , nobody knew of it, not even the Prince of all chordata, Man himself. How could he have known of it so soon? Though his lifeline had suddenly been cut, it was a long lifeline and death would still be far off. So it was not suspected for nearly twenty-four hours, nor accepted even as a working theory for nearly three days, and not realized in its full implications for a week. Now, what had occurred was a sudden and worldwide adynatogenesis of all chordata, not, however, adynatotokos; this distinction for many years offered students of the phenomenon some hope. And another hope was in the fact that one small but genuine member of chordate was not affected: an enteropneustron, a balanoglossida of the oddest sort, a creature known as McGonigal's Worm. Yet what hope this creature could offer was necessarily a small one. The catastrophe was first sensed by a hobbyist about a day after it occurred. It was just that certain experiments did not act right and the proper results were not forthcoming. And on the second day (Monday) there were probably a hundred notations of quite unusual and unstatistical behavior, but as yet the pattern was not at all suspected. On the third day a cranky and suspicious laboratory worker went to a supply house with the angry charge that he had been sold sterile mice. This was something that could not be ignored, and it is what brought the pattern of the whole thing into the open, with corroboration developing with explosive rapidity. Not completely in the open, of course, for fear of panic if it reached the public. But throughout the learned fraternity the news went like a seismic shock. When it did reach the public a week later, though, it was greeted with hoots of laughter. The people did not believe it. dence becomes tiresome," said Director Concord of the newly originated Palingenesia Institute. "The facts are incontrovertible. There has been a loss of the power to conceive in sea squirt, lancelet, hag fish, skate, sea cat, fish, frog, alligator, snake, turtle, seal, porpoise, mouse, bat, bird, hog, horse, monkey, and man. It happened suddenly, perhaps instantaneously. We cannot find the cure. Yet it is almost certain that those children already in the womb will be the last ever born on Earth. We do not know whether it is from a natural cause or an enemy has done this to us. We have, for ten months, tested nearly everything in the world and we have found no answer. Yet, oddly enough, there is no panic." "Except among ourselves," said Appleby, his assistant, "whose province is its study. But the people have accepted it so completely that their main interest now is in the world sweepstakes, with the total sums wagered now in "Yes, the betting on the last child to be born in the world. It will prove one point, at least. The old legal limit on posthumous paternity was a year and a day. Will it be surpassed? The Algerian claimant on all evidence has nearly three months to go. And the betters on the Afghan have not yet given up. The Spanish Pretender is being delayed, according to rumor, medically, and there are some pretty angry protests about this. It is not at all fair; we know that. But then a comprehensive set of rules was never drawn up to cover all nations ; Spain simply chose not to join the pact. But there may be trouble if the Spanish backers try to collect." "And there is also a newly heard of Mexican claimant." "I give little credit to this Juanita-Come-Lately. If she was to be a serious contestant, why was she not known of before?" The Algerian claimant, however, was the winner. And the time was an unbelievable three hundred and eightyeight days. So the last child on Earth, in all likelihood, had been born. There were now about thirty institutes working on the problem, most of them on an international basis. Thirteen years had gone by, and one hope had died. This Ws that those already in the womb at the time of catastrophe might themselves prove to be fertile. It was now seen that this would not prove so, unless for some reason it was to be quite a delayed fertility. The Cosmic Causes Council had by no means come to a dead end. It had come to so many live ends as to be even more bewildering. "The point," said Hegner in one of his yearly summaries, "is not whether sterility could have been caused by cosmic forces. Of course it could have been. It could have been caused in twenty ways. The miracle is that fertility had ever been possible. There must have been a shield built in for every danger. We know but scantily what some of them are. We do not know which has failed or why." "And could the failure have been caused by an enemy?" asked an interlocutor. "It could have been, certainly. Almost by definition we must call an enemy anything that can harm us. But that it was a conscious enemy is something else again. Who can say what cosmic forces are conscious ? Or even what it means to be conscious?" Searcher Institute had some spotted success. It had worked out a test, a valid test, of determining whether an individual yet remaining had the spark of possible fertility. tests it had found one male shrew, one male gannet, no less than three males of the yellow perch, one female alligator, and one female mud Puppy, all of whom still possessed the potential. This was encouraging, but it did not solve the problem. No issue could be obtained from any possible pairing of these; not that it wasn't tried. And when the possibility test was run on all the humans of the Earth, then it was that incredible and unsuspected success crowned the efforts of the institute. For, tested, there were two who tested positive; and (good fortune beyond all hoping), one was male and one was female. So then the problem was solved. A few years had been lost, it is true, and several generations would be required to get the thing on a sound footing again. But life had been saved. Civilization could yet be transmitted. All was not lost. Musha ibn Scmuel was an Arabian black, an unthrifty man of tenuous income. His occupation on the cardex was given as thief, but this may have been a euphemism. He was middle-aged and of full vigor, a plain man innocent of shoes or subtlety. He was guilty neither of the winehatred of the Musselman nor the garrulousness of the Greek. He possessed his soul in quietude and Port Said whisky and seldom stole more than he needed. And he had a special competence shared by no other man in the world. Cecilia Clutt was an attractive and snooty spinster of thirty-five. She was a person of inherited as well as acquired wealth, and was an astute business woman and amateur of the arts. She did have a streak of stubbornness in her, but seldom revealed it unless she was crossed. So, the first time she said no, it was hardly noticed. And the second time she said it, it was felt that she did not quite understand the situation. So it was Carmody Overlark, the silky diplomat, who came to reason with her. "You are the sole hope of the human race," he said to her. "In a way, you are the new Eve." "I have heard the first one spoken badly of," said Cecilia. "Yet her only fault was that she could be talked into something. I cannot." "But this is important." "Not really. If it is our time to disappear, then let us disappear with dignity. What you suggest is without it. It would leave us a little less than human." "Miss Clutt, this is a world problem. You are only an individual." "I am not only an individual. There is no such thing as only an individual. If ever a person can be spoken of as only an individual, then humanity has already failed." "We have tried reason. Now, by special emergency legislation, we are empowered to employ compulsion." "We will see. I always did enjoy a good fight." Those who read the State Histories of the period will know that it did not come off. But the reasons given there are garbled. "Unforeseen circumstances" cover a multitude of failures. But what really happened was this. Musha ibn S. had been tractable enough. Though refusing to fly, he had come on shipboard readily. And it was not till they were out of the Inland Sea and on the Atlantic that he showed a certain unease. Finally he asked, reasonably enough, to be shown a picture of his bride. But his reaction on seeing it was not reasonable. He screamed like a dying camel. And he jumped overboard. He was a determined swimmer and he was heading for home. A boat was put out and it gained on him. But, as it came up to him, he sounded. How deep he dived is not known, but he was never seen again. On hearing of this, Cecilia Clutt was a little uncertain for the only time in her life. Just to be sure, she asked for a copy of the picture. "Oh, that one," said Cecilia. "It is quite a nice picture, really. It flatters me a little. But what an odd reaction. What a truly odd reaction." on the economy. The primary schools were now all closed, except for a few turned over to retarded children. In a year or two the high schools would close also. The colleges would perhaps always be maintained, for adult education and for their expanding graduate schools. Yet the zest for the future had diminished, even though the personal future of nobody had been abridged. New construetion had almost ceased and multi-bedroom homes became a drug on the market. In a very few years there would be no additions at all to the labor force. Soon there would be no more young soldiers for the armies. And soon the last eyes ever would see the world with the sudden poetic clearness that often comes with adolescence. There had been a definite let-down in morals. Morals have declined in every generation since the first one, which itself left something to be desired. But this new generation was different. It was a tree that could not bear fruit, a hard-barked, selfish tree. Yet what good to look at it and shudder for the future? The future had already been disposed of. Now there as a new hobby, a mania that swept the world, of them. Who would be the last person alive on Earth? But still the institutes labored. The Capsule Institute in particular labored for the codification and preservation of all knowledge. For whom? For those who might come after. Who? Of what species? But still they worked at it. And the oddest of the institutes was the Bare Chance Transmission Society. In spite of all derision and mockery, it persevered in its peculiar aim : to find some viable creature that could be educated or adapted or mutated to absorb human knowledge and carry on once more the human tradition. What creature? What possible strain could it be from? What creature on Earth was unaffected ? Well, the largest of them was the giant squid. But it was not promising. It had shown no development in not seem capable of development or of education. And, moreover, there are difficulties of rapport with a creature that only can live in the deep sea. There were the insects. Bees and ants were capable of organization, though intelligence has been denied them. Spiders showed certain rugged abilities, and fruit flies. Special committees were appointed to study each. And then there were the fleas. Old flea-circus grifters were brought out of retirement and given positions of responsibility and power. If fleas could really be taught, then these men could teach them. But though fleas can be taught to wear microscopic spectacles, they cannot be taught to read. It all seemed pretty futile. A ND there were the crayfish, the snails, the starfish, the sea cucumber. There were the fresh-water flat worm and the liver fluke. There were the polyp, the sponge, the cephalopod. But, after all, none of them was of the main line. They were of the ancestry that had failed. An ' what of the noble genealogy that had succeeded, that which had risen above all and given civilization, the chordata? Of that noble line, was there nothing left? What was the highest form still reproducing? McGonigal's Worm. It was discouraging. But for the careful study of M.W., as it was now known, a great new institute was now created. And to the M.W. Institute was channeled all the talent that seemed expedient. And one of the first to go to work for the Institute in a common capacity was a young lady of thirty-odd named Georgina Hickle. Young lady? Yes. Georgina was within months of being the youngest woman in the world. She was a scatterbrained wife and disliked worms. But one must work and there were at that time no other jobs open. But she was not impressed by the indoctrination given in this new laboratory. "You must change your whole way of thinking," said the doctor who briefed them. "We are seeking new departures. We are looking for any possible breakthrough. You must learn to think of M.W. as the hope of the world." "Oog," said Georgina. "You must think of M.W. as your very kindred, as your cousin." "Oog," said Georgina. "You must think of him as your little brother that you have to teach, as your very child, as your cherished son." "Oog, oog," said Georgina, for she disliked worms. Nor was she happy on the job. She was not good at teaching worms. She believed them both stupid and stubborn. They did not have her sympathy, and after a few weeks they seemed to make her sick. B UT her ailment was a mysterious one. None of the young doctors had ever seen anything like it. And it was contagious. Other women in the bright new laboratory began to show similar symptoms. Yet contagion there was impossible, such extreme precautions had been taken for the protection of the worms. But Georgina did not respond to treatment. And Hinkle's Disease was definitely spreading. Sharper young doctors fresh from the greatest medical schools were called in. They knew all that was to be known of all the new diseases. But they did not know this. Georgina felt queer now and odd things began to happen to her. Like that very morning on her way to work, that old lady had stared at her. "Glory be," said the old lady, "a miracle." And she crossed herself. And Georgina heard other comments. "I don't believe it. It isn't possible," a man said. "Well, it sure does look like it," said a woman. So Georgina took off at noon to visit a psychiatrist and tell him that she imagined that people were staring at her and talking about her, and what should she do. It made her uneasy, she said.' "That's not what is making you uneasy," said the psychiatrist. Then he went with her to the laboratory to have a look at some of the other women suffering from this Hickle's Disease that he had been hearing about. After that, he called the young doctors at the laboratory aside for a consultation. "I don't know by what authority you mean to instruct us," said one. "You haven't been upgraded for thirty years." "I know it." "You are completely out of touch with the latest techniques." "I know it." "You have been described -- accurately, I believe -- as an old fogy." "I know that too." "Then what could you tell us about a new appearance like Hickle's Disease?" "Only that it is not really new. And not, properly speaking, a disease." there are superstitious persons who keep McGonigal's Worms in small mesh cages in the belief that they insure fertility. It is rank nonsense and rose only because it was in the M.W. laboratory that the return of pregnancy was first noticed and was named for one of the women working there. It is a belief that dates back to that ancient generation, which very nearly became the last generation. The official explanation is that the Earth and its solar system, for a period of thirtyfive years, was in an area of mysterious cosmic radiation. And afterward it drifted out of that area. But there are many who still believe in the influence of One of the roughest problems a science fiction writer has to solve is what aliens might look like, and function, and why. All we can go by -- at least so far -- is the life on our own planet. However, that is better than none, and even here the ingenuities of nature often make ns kick ourselves for not having thought of them ourselves. It is generally accepted that the minimum weight of intelligent life would be about # pounds. No arbitrary estimate, this -- it's based on how large a brain must be to contain X number of neurons, synapses, reasoning and memory centers and the like, and how heavy a body would be to support and feed a brain of that size. But nature gets around that by forming a body politic rather than be limited to a body. For instance, and a very familiar one, there are the hive intelligences like the ants, termites and bees, and the fearsome Portuguese man-of-war is in this category: a colony of small animals uniting to form a sea monster that can fish as much as # feet below the surface, grabbing and devouring creatures that would make canapes of its voting members. Hive intelligences aren't really intelligences? Not in our terms, true, but they combine to a total intelligence far greater than that of their individuals -- and so does ours! Examine that statement carefully. However versatile a human genius may be, our society is more versatile, containing knowledge and skills he neither possesses nor can use. In more ways than he or others might concede, he is as much a dependent or consumer as the rest of us less gifted citizens are. Various indeed are the ways of nature. Light-sensing organs became eyes; scales, skin and hair and feathers and fur; fins, limbs and wings. Skeletons are outside or in, depending on need. Furthermore, our civilization requires not only an irreducible minimum population to function, but an irreducible number of bacteria, enzymes, earthworms, insects and plants, or we couldn't raise and digest food or control pests -- or breathe. nose against the door and steamed the glass with an angry snort. "A bomb would do it," he said. "Something big enough to make a nice bang and clean out the office, but not big enough to knock over the building. Ann, where can we get a bomb?" His wife looked up from her typewriter and smiled. "Don't be ridiculous. You're getting all riled up over nothing." Allen whirled and stomped over to the counter. "Nothing, you call it? You know very well that Centralia is just not big enough to support two travel agencies. We were doing pretty well, but cut our business in half and we'll starve to death." "Business hasn't fallen off since he opened up. In fact, it's improved." "Ann, you know that's a temporary fluke. It's bound to fall off. Any business he does has to cut into our business. There's no other place for it to come from. So where can I get a bomb?" She laughed, and he leaned over to kiss her before he went gloomily back to his desk. Things had probably been going too smoothly, he told himself, what with the boom brought on by the travel-now-pay-later plans. He was just fifteen hundred dollars short of a down payment on that rambling California redwood ten-room ranch house with a rustic lake view, and he and Ann had been working and planning ever since their marriage three years before -- working hard -- to build the business to a point where she could retire from her role as clerk and personal secretary and concentrate on being a housewife with perhaps a robust crop of little Allens. A ND now the whole picture was wrecked by a villainous-looking man with a brownish-red beard and a spectacularly bald head, who had appeared suddenly in Centralia and opened a new travel agency directly across the street from Allen's Globe Travel Agency. And he'd had the infernal nerve to name his business the Gloob Travel Agency. "What did the Chamber of Commerce say?" Ann asked. "They're puzzled," said Allen. "Gloob seems to be an obvious infringement on Globe. On the other hand, he says his name is Gloob, so how can we keep him from using his own name? They're going to investigate. And I stopped by for a brief conversation with Mr. Gloob. He was deliriously happy to meet me and certain we will get along fine together. He even promised to send me any business he can't handle himself, which convinces me that he has a fiendish sense of humor." He shook his head. "I suppose we might as well let Doris go -- give her notice, anyway." "But business hasn't fallen off. Let's wait and see what happens. There'll be plenty of time..." A tiny, gray-haired old lady pushed open the door and How backward can people be? If you really want to know, take a... # # stepped briskly to the counter. "I wish immediate accommodations for Sirap," she said. Ann frowned. "For -- what was the place?" "Sirap." "What country is that in?" The old lady cocked her head to one side and cast puzzled glances about the office. "Oh, I'in sorry!" she said suddenly. "I must have the wrong..." She stepped briskly out and the door whipped shut behind her, cutting off the blast of warm air from the street. Ann's golden head bent studiously over an atlas. "There's a Siret in Rumania," she said. "But it's a river." "I thought there was something fishy about her," Allen said. He went to the window and watched her cross the street and walk confidently into the Gloob Travel Agency. She did not emerge, but as he watched a portly gentleman came out and crossed the street to the Globe Travel Agency. He paused inside the door, sniffed deeply at the air conditioning and gave a deep sigh of appreciation. "Feels good in here," he announced. He walked to the counter and smiled down at Ann. "I'd like to arrange an extended tour of the United States. Could you handle it for me?" Ann caught her breath. "Yes, sir" "This is what I'd like to do. Start out with a week in Detroit and then go to Cleveland..." His voice rumbled on and Ann took notes feverishly. "It will take a little time to arrange this," she said. "Where can we reach you?" "At the Centralia Hotel." "All right, Mr. -- " "Smith. John Smith." "Mr. Smith. We'll get to work on it immediately." "Excuse me," Allen said, "but didn't I see you coming out of the Gloob Travel Agency?" The gentleman turned and beamed at him. "Indeed you did. The man there recommended you." Allen returned to his desk, leaned back in his chair, and gnawed fretfully on a pencil. headed man who drawled with a foreign-sounding accent and seemed nervously anxious to get to Nilreb with much haste. There was a sedate, middle-aged woman who hovered in the background while two teen-aged girls inquired with assorted giggles as to whether Dnalsi Yenoc was actually anywhere near Kroywen, and whether they could go direct, or by way of Nylkoorb. And there were others. Eventually Ann stopped fumbling with the atlas, and in time she even grew weary of explanations. She contented herself with pointing, and when people with odd destinations sighted along her wavering finger and glimpsed Mr. Gloob's sign, they invariably bounded away with unconcealed enthusiasm. In between these visitations, the Globe Travel Agency's business boomed past all rational proportions. Allen made the down payment on the ranch house, and when Ann insisted that they were too busy for her to consider taking up housekeeping, he hired two new office girls. And the boom continued. "Have you noticed," he said to Ann two weeks later, "that more than eighty per cent of our customers are not residents of Centralia?" "I've been wondering about that," she said. "And have you noticed that we're getting fewer inquiries from people with cockeyed destinations?" "There was only one yesterday," Ann said, "and not any today." She paused as a whitehaired, scholarly-looking man stopped on the sidewalk outside, scrutinized them doubtfully through the window, and finally entered to ask for reservations to Kroywen. Ann pointed at the Gloob sign and he left, muttering apologies. "Kroywen," Allen mused. "I've heard that one before." "Same here," said Ann. "I've got to get to the bottom of this. Mr. Gloob goes out to lunch at twelve-thirty. About a quarter to one I'm going over to the Gloob Travel Agency and see if I can arrange a fast trip to Kroywen." "Not without me, you aren't," Ann said. They left the mystified Doris with instructions to carry on if they should be delayed,  bank the money, and sign any necessary checks with a limited power of attorney. They marched across Main Street, invaded the Gloob Travel Agency, and were met by Mr. Gloob's smiling assistant. "Kroywen," Allen said. "Make it snappy." "Two for Kroywen," the young man said complacently. "That will be sixty-two dollars and fifty cents." Allen counted it out. "Do you have any money to "Why -- ah -- no," Allen said. "No luggage?" "No. You see..." "I quite understand. It's best that way. Now if you will receipt these papers..." With one deft motion he took Allen's right hand, inked his thumb, rolled a print onto the paper, and wiped the thumb clean. "And yours, please," he said to Ann. "Thank you. Have a nice tour." "Thank you." "You may find the people a bit backward." Allen said cheerfully, "We don't mind." "Most people don't. Right this way, please." They followed him through a rear door, rode an escalator down to the basement, and paused in front of a metal bulge in the wall. He opened it. "Be seated, please," he said. "Remain seated until the door opens." smiled and told them to come again. The door closed. They were in a tubelike chamber which had six rows of seats dipping across the curved floor. "It's like a carnival," Ann said. "Twenty-five cents for a tour of the Chamber of Horrors. Or maybe it's a subway car." "Yeah. But what is it doing in Centralia, Ohio? I wonder if the Interstate Commerce Commission knows about this." There was a jerk, so insignificant that they would not have noticed it had they not been tensed in anticipation of -- something. A light flashed red and faded slowly. They looked blankly at each other as the door opened. Another young man was peering in at them. "Some ride," Allen growled. "Destination," the young man said. "Kroywen terminal. All out, please." They stepped out and followed him. "Right this way to Customs," he said. They paused at a desk marked "Customs" and a young lady noted their lack of baggage, glanced in a cursory manner at the contents of Ann's purse and waved them past. They walked out into what was obviously the concourse of a transportation terminal. There were ticket windows, travelers wandering about with bags, and a large schedule, listing arrivals and departures from and to tongue-twisting places. Allen looked back at the door they had just emerged from, and saw a large sign. Specialists in Travel Curiosities "That's no lie," he said. They settled themselves on uncomfortable seats at the far end of the concourse and looked around. Allen stared at a clock. "Screwy time they have here," he said. "That clock says five after eleven. My watch says five to one. How about yours?" "Five to one," Ann said. "What should we do? I guess we've proved there is such a place as Kroywen. Shall we go back?" "It might look funny if we went back right away." "True. So we've proved there is a Kroywen, but where is it? I'd like to know... What's the matter?" Ann's elbow had dug sharply at his ribs. "The second hand on that clock is running backwards," she said. Allen studied it. "So is the minute hand." And a few minutes later, "So is the hour hand." Ann looked at her watch. "Then when we have one o'clock, they have eleven o'clock. And when we have tt    , "Two, they have ten. And so on. It's just like our time, only in reverse." Ann was studying the Boolg, Incorporated, sign. "Boolg," she said. "Now if you spell that backwards..." Allen did so, mouthing it slowly. He turned to Ann. "Gloob ! The Gloob Travel Agency !" "And this town. Kroywen. Could that be... " "New York!" "It must be." "It's somebody's idea of a joke." "We're here, aren't we?" "But where are we?" Allen said. "Something like twenty seconds from Centralia, and New York is nearly six hundred miles. And which way did we go? East, or west, or straight down ?" "I was just thinking of something Gloob's assistant said. Remember? He said we may find the people a bit backward." Allen shrugged. "Shall we take a quick look at the town ?" "We might as well. I've never been to New York." "You still haven't been to New York." They rode an escalator up three stories and found an exit. A uniformed man called out, "Taxi?" as they went out the door. "They speak English," Allen said. "And not in reverse," said Ann. "That's a blessing." T HE street was a brightly illuminated tunnel, with a high, arching ceiling. There were throngs of people on the walks, and throngs of vehicles in the street. "The underside," Ann said. "Maybe like reflections in the water. Maybe somewhere straight up is the real New York." Allen had stopped to watch passengers boarding a bus. "We can't take it," Ann said. "You didn't get any money changed." "How was I to know what we'd find here? Anyway, I was just looking. The traffic moves on the left side and the bus drivers sit in the rear. How can they see where they're going?" "Maybe they have frontview mirrors." They turned away as the bus rumbled off. They walked said. "They must have some for what seemed to be miles sky somewhere. Where do you along the tunneled streets, suppose they keep it?" wandering about aimlessly, When they next thought spelling the names of buildabout the time it was after ings and places and streets five -- or before seven, Kroybackwards, and finding some wen time. And they were defthat they recognized. They initely ready to leave. They found Broadway, and Fifth found their way back to the Avenue, and the Etats Eripme terminal and rode the escalaBuilding, the deepest building tor down to the concourse, in the world. They resisted Ann turned suddenly and the temptation to visit its obclutched Allen's arm. "How servation gallery, rememberare you going to buy tickets?" ing at the last moment that "I've got plenty of money." they had no money. "Dollars. But you didn't get "It's just another big city," any money changed. What if Ann said. "Too many people, they won't take dollars?" and too crowded, and too "Anyone will take dollars, much noise." They took dollars at the other "And no blue sky," Allen end, didn't they? And if they won't, there should be someto five. My watch says fivewhere we can get them twenty." changed." "So what do we do now?" "I hope you're right," Ann asked Ann. "Sit in the station said. "Thinking backwards is all night?" all right for one afternoon, "Certainly not. We'll go to a but I'm too old to do it perhotel." manently." "How are you going to pay Allen grinned down at the the hotel bill?" young face she called old, and "I can get some money they walked hand in hand changed in the morning." across the concourse to Boolg, "All right," she said. Incorporated. At the door They advanced self-conthey stopped in consternasciously to the registration tion. Boolg, Incorporated, desk of the Reltats Hotel and was closed. "Hours # to #" faced the suspicious scrutiny read the sign on the door. of the room clerk. He looked "Well !" Ann said. them over, noted their lack of luggage, and said with a gers. "Which means nine Allen spoke indignantly. "Of course we're married. We've been married for three years." He was not prepared for the clerk's reaction. The man's face reddened and he sputtered and waved his hands menacingly. Two more clerks came to his aid. The first clerk pointed a finger at them. "Married!" he blurted out. "You mean they admit it?" "The idea -- at a first-class hotel, too. What do they think we are?" "Call the police." Allen grabbed Ann's arm and ran. Outside the door a bellhop caught up with them, scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Allen. "Try this place," he said. "It isn't a bad hotel and they aren't so particular. But it'd be best not to tell them you're married. It doesn't matter what they think, but when you come right out and say it..." "Thanks," Allen said. "Don't mention it, fellow. I was married once myself." The hotel was small, clean, almost primly respectable in atmosphere. The room clerk snickered when Allen signed the register, but said nothing. Allen told him they would be staying one night, and fifteen rallods seemed a proper price, and the clerk turned them over to a cheerful-looking bellhop. They entered an elevator and dropped. "It seems all right," Ann whispered. "What's the matter?" "I'm trying to figure out how to tip the bellhop." That worthy escorted them to their room, took a quick turn around it to see that everything was in order, and as Allen self-consciously turned his back to him, he thrust something into Allen's hand on the way out. "Of all the insults!" Allen exploded . as the door closed. "I didn't make any move to tip him, so he tipped me three rallods !" Ann took one of the bills. "Pretty good pictute of Notgnihsaw," she said. "Do you think this would buy us a meal ?" "Probably not -- not a good meal, anyway. And I'm hungry. We could have something sent up and put it on our bill. Maybe there's a menu around here somewhere." Their food arrived, accompanied by the same grinning bellhop. Allen cringed in embarrassment at the thought of offering the man his own three rallods as a tip, but the bellhop gave him no opportunity. He deftly slipped some currency onto one tray and hurried out. "He tipped me again!" Allen yelped. "This time it's five rallods !" "Don't complain," Ann said. "Maybe we can work up enough to pay our hotel bill." "Nothing doing. Here, I'll put it all on the tray. The least I can do is offer him his money back." When the bellhop came for the trays, he carefully removed the money and placed it on the desk. And when Allen picked it up later, there were no longer eight rallods, but eleven. T HE day had been exhausting and they slept well. It was after nine when they awoke -- not quite three, Kroywen time -- and they ate breakfast in the hotel dining room to avoid further insults from the bellhop, having the check transferred to their hotel bill. Then Ann returned to their room, and Allen strolled down to the terminal to change some money and arrange their return to Centralia. The young man at Boolg, Incorporated, was sympathetic. "The rules are strict," he said, "and we cannot permit any exceptions. Dollars must be changed into rallods at the other end, so I'm afraid I can't help you." Allen found himself a chair and sat down slowly. The travel agent was puzzled at his stricken expression. "If it's as important as all that to get rid of the dollars," he said, "why don't you take another trip and spend them?" Allen brightened. "Yes. That's the thing to do. How many dollars for two tickets to Centralia?" "As I told you," the young man said patiently, "foreign currency is handled only by our foreign terminals. Here we deal only in rallods. One thousand rallods for two tickets. When would you like to leave ?" "I'll think about it," Allen said. Back in the hotel room, Allen and Ann sat staring at each other. "Thanks to the bellhop, I have eleven rallods," Allen said. "Our hotel bill will be fifteen, plus the price of two meals. Twenty-five, at least. And we need a thousand to get back. Got any ideas?" She shook her head. "It looks as if we'll have a long stay here. And it's not going to be any honeymoon. We'll have to work and earn the money." "We might as well go up and check out and confess to the manager," Allen said. "Maybe he'll give me some help in getting a job." "Couldn't we just stay here?" "Too expensive. Over a hundred rallods a week for the room, and that doesn't include meals. And we'll need clothes. I haven't any idea of how much people are able to earn in this crazy world." Grimly they descended on the room clerk. "Checking out, I see," he said. "Accounts settled at that window." A young lady itemized their bill and read off the items. "Room, one day, fifteen rallods. Dinner, by room service, eleven rallods." Allen winced. "Breakfast, three rallods, Total, twenty-nine rallods. Please receipt this bill." "How was that again?" Allen asked. what was happening, his right thumb had been inked, impressed, and wiped clean. Ann contributed her print, and as Allen was struggling for words to explain that he had only eleven rallods, the young lady briskly counted bills out across the counter to him. "Twenty, twenty-five, twenty-nine. Thanks very much, sir. I hope you'll stop with us the next time you're in town." They staggered away from the window, left the hotel, and walked half a block before either of them spoke. "They paid us," Allen said. Ann said nothing. "And the bellhop tipped me." Ann stopped and pointed at a shop. "Women's apparel. I need a change of underwear." They entered the shop. Ann made a few modest purchases. The clerk paid her six rallods. They went out. "Another hotel?" Allen asked. "Yes. We'll get the most expensive room we can find." "We might ask for the bridal suite." "You'd shock them. They might think we were married." "Isn't there anything more expensive than a hotel suite? Let's find some kind of rental agent and see." They found a rental agent. He arranged a week's sublease on a luxurious apartment, rent four hundred rallods, paid to them in advance. He also paid them his commission, which was forty rallods. He engaged a maid and a cook for them, and the two servants happily handed their week's wages to Ann when they reported for work. Allen and Ann went on a reckless shopping tour. They bought luggage, for which they left their thumbprints and were paid a hundred and fifty rallods. Allen selected a fine new suit and the beaming clerk took his thumbprint and paid him ninety-five rallods. They outfitted themselves completely and returned to their apartment. "We have our thousand rallods," Allen said. "We can leave any time." Ann looked about the dazzling living room and gazed sadly at the fountain that bubbled in a far corner. "Yes, I suppose we can." "We really should be getting back. Doris will have her hands full." "Yes, I suppose she will." Allen seized her roughly. "Hang Doris ! We never had a proper honeymoon. Let's have it now. Sue can handle things for a week. She won't like it, but she can do it." "Let's," Ann said happily. "Who can say when we'll be able to afford anything like this again?" Allen embraced her fondly. "Paradise!" "No," Ann said. "Esidarap." member. They flitted from nightclub to nightclub. They ran up staggering bills and exchanged their thumbprints for cash when they left. The waiters tipped them lavishly. They attended the theater and received cash along with their tickets. They shopped, after the first sensation of awe wore off, only for compact expensive items that they could carry back with them. They almost became accustomed to starting a meal with dessert and finishing up with an appetizer. They gradually got used to backward-running clocks, a calendar that worked in reverse, and riding down to their forty-fifth floor. It was, indeed, Esidarap. At the end of the week they were still in a mood of unrestrained happiness, but reluctantly ready to return to their normal world and go back to work. And on the fateful seventh day a fist descended rudely upon their door, followed by two heavy-set official-looking men who brushed their frightened maid aside and stood looking them over coolly. "I.B.F.," one of them said, showing his credentials. "We have been reliably informed that you two are unemployed. Is that correct?" "Yes, we're unemployed," said Allen. "We've come to talk to you about your employment compensation." Ann giggled foolishly, and Allen muttered, "All this, and Esidarap too!" "We are in the process of checking your past record to see if you are paid up to date. But we've established that the compensation is unpaid for the past week and we are here to collect that now. For the two of you, that amounts to seven thousand rallods. Cash or a certified check, please." Allen choked suddenly on nothing at all and glanced at Ann's white face. "You mean we owe..." "Every now and then people try to slip away and cheat the government," the I.B.F. agent said. "But they soon find out that it's rather expensive not to work. If you'll take my advice, you'll go back to wherever it is you came from, and go to work, and pay your wages like a good citizen. Right now I want seven thousand rallods." "My gawd !" Allen groaned. "I wonder what the income tax amounts to!" The agent was momentarily flustered. "Well, now -- that would take some time to check. Better just pay us and let the income tax wait." Allen got out his wallet and counted. "I have four thousand, five hundred and twenty rallods," he said miserably. "Ann?" S HE was searching through her purse. "Twenty-one hundred rallods," she said. "Leaving you three hundred and eighty short," the I.B.F. man said. "If you'll come with us," Allen told him, "we'll make a couple of purchases and pay you off." They bought a diamond ring for Ann -- her third -- and paid the I.B.F. men. Despondently they returned to their apartment, and found the rental agent waiting for them. A quiet, white-haired, fatherly sort of man, his face was mournful. "You two have disappointed me," he said. "How so?" Allen asked. "I hoped you would be able to take this place for the summer. But now..." He shook his head. "Why did you do it?" "Do what?" "Live so recklessly. I don't know what sort of wages you pay in your normal occupation, but even if it is above average, you've used up your luxury and entertainment allowances for years. You'd have been stopped, of course, if you hadn't done it so fast. But all in one week! The reports are tabulated now and I must ask you to leave." "How do you know all about it?" Allen demanded. "My dear young man, why do you suppose your thumbprint is taken with every purchase? All bills go to central accounting and a full statement of purchases is compiled as often as the volume merits it. With due estimates, naturally, for such unreceipted items as tips and the like. Surely you knew that." "Yeah," Allen said. "Surely I knew that." "So -- you must leave. You'll be living at a mere subsistence level for a long time. But -- " he shrugged -- "when you get your credit back, come and see me again. Perhaps I can arrange something just as nice as this -- if you promise to conduct yourselves reasonably." He left, mumbling over his shoulder that they were to be out by noon. "There goes four hundred rallods a week," Ann said. "Yes, and it's a long way to a thousand," said Allen. "We should have left when we had it" "I hate to think so," Ann said, "but I guess we should have. It has been fun, though." "What do we do now?" The answer came in the form of a performance by the beautifully toned door chimes. It was a detective with a summons. An hour later they were in court. An hour and fifteen minutes later they were tried, convicted and lectured soundly by the judge. The judge's lecture gave them some insight into what Allen called Backward Economics. They were, the judge informed them, a blight poised to strike at the roots of the entire economy and bring it toppling down. Their offense seemed to be: first, that they had received more for purchases than they were spending in wages ; and second, that they were unemployed, and therefore not spending anything in wages. Allen had a sudden inspiration. "But, Your Honor," he protested, "I couldn't find a job." ly and shattered his gavel with one vicious stroke. "This court will not tolerate such a fiction ! You know perfectly well that any citizen who is unable to find employment privately can pay wages to the government." Allen considered informing His Honor that they were not citizens, and thought better of it. But their sentence did not seem unduly severe. His Honor placed them on probation, banged a fresh gavel, and called for the next case. A burly police officer let them out of the courtroom and into the small anteroom, where white-robed technicians took charge of them, got them seated at a table, and before they quite knew what was happening had their right thumbs clamped in a small boxlike device. "The judge said probation," Allen said in indignation. "He didn't say anything about thumb screws." "Quite a card, aren't you?" the police officer sneered. Allen felt a sudden stab of pain, nothing more. At the same time Ann winced and looked over at him, puzzled. "All right," the police officer said. "You can go now." He chuckled. "And don't do it again." On the steps of the courthouse they stopped to examine their thumbs. Neatly engraved on each was a small P. "I'll be damned," Allen said. "They've branded us." They went to the office of their rental agent and that gentleman greeted them with obvious displeasure. "What do you want now?" "We'll have to live somewhere," Allen said. "We thought perhaps you..." "I don't handle rentals in your class." "Could you refer us to someone?" The man sighed and buzzed his secretary. "These people are on probation," he said. "See if you can find them something." The secretary departed, giving them contemptuous glances over her shoulder. "This may sound like an odd question," Allen said, holding up his thumb, "but would you mind explaining this probation business?" "Try and buy something," the rental agent said. "You'll understand it soon enough. You can't make a purchase without receipting it with your right thumbprint. A probation print is not acceptable unless accompanied by a waiver of probation officially certified by the court." "What do they want to do ?" Allen said hotly. "Starve us?" "Oh, you can buy essentials -- the bare essentials. You must register at one store and make all your food purchases there. You can buy clothing, but only such clothing as is necessary for your work, and your employer must furnish a requisition. I don't know the exact amount of your excess, of course, but if you behave yourselves for a few years, the court may take your good behavior into consideration." "I see," Allen said. "Tell me one thing. Are there any lending institutions around here?" "I don't understand." "Banks, loan companies..." "Oh. You mean borrowing institutions. Certainly -- there are plenty of them around. Why do you ask?" "I'd like to borrow a thousand rallods." "My dear young man ! Were you born yesterday? You don't borrow money from those institutions. You lend them money #" "Why, yes, of course," Allen said. "Naturally." The secretary returned and handed Allen a slip of paper. "There's the address," she said. "It isn't much. Just a furnished room. The neighborhood is poor and it's a walk-down, but I don't think you can do any better than that." "Thank you," Allen said, "for everything. Does the government confiscate the things we bought?" "Certainly not," the rental agent said. "The government merely keeps you from buying more until you have retired the excess." port their belongings by taxi, but the driver took one look at the "P" that registered neatly in the center of Allen's thumbprint and drove off without them. They made four trips by bus, and learned later that they had used up their week's quota. Their new landlady was fat, owlish-looking, and hideously suspicious. "One of those, eh?" she said, studying Allen's thumbprint. "Well, all right. But I'll have you know this is a decent house, and if the police start nosing around here, out you go." She paid him for a week in advance -- six rallods. They got settled in their cramped room and Allen sat in the lone chair, feeling miserable, while Ann stretched out on the bed and sobbed. "We'd better get something to eat," Allen said finally. "I'm not hungry." "We'll still have to buy some food. If we don't, we won't have any money to pay our wages with, and we can't go to work. And if we don't go to wprk, we'll have to pay another seven thousand rallods in unemployment compensation at the end of the week. And where will we get seven thousand rallods?" She got up wearily. "All right. We'll buy some food, but I won't eat it. And we ought to start looking for jobs." They registered at a neighborhood grocery store and bought their entire week's allowance of groceries, concentrating on canned goods that would not require cooking. They took their groceries, and seventeen rallods, back to their room. "Now we have twenty-three rallods," Allen said. "That means we can't afford jobs that cost more than eleven and a half rallods." "You take thirteen," Ann said, "and I'll take ten." They found an employment agency and went their separate ways for interviews and classification. Allen's interviewer scowled at the blemished thumbprint, scowled at Allen, and shrugged disgustedly. "Hardly worth the trouble, bothering with one like you," he said. "You need the lowestpaying job you can find. Some kind of a sales job might do it. You pay a small guaranteed salary and a commission on what you sell. If you don't sell much, you might get along. It better be something that isn't expensive, because one big sale a week would ruin you. This might do it -- cemetery plots. Here's the address. And here -- " he handed Allen five rallods -- "is the agency fee. I hope we won't see you again." A NN was already back at the room when Allen returned that evening. She was lying face down on the bed and she did not look up when he came in. He seated himself in the chair and put his feet up on the bed. "I'm a salesman," he said. "I'm selling cemetery plots. They cost a hundred and fifty rallods each -- or, rather, the person that buys one is paid a hundred and fifty rallods. I'm on salary and commission. I pay the boss fifteen rallods a week, and I pay the customer fifteen rallods of that hundred and fifty for every plot I sell. I don't intend to sell any." She spoke with her face muffled in the pillow. "I'm a filing clerk. It was the best I could do, and it's twenty-five rallods a week. I didn't have the twenty-five, and I have to bring the rest tomorrow or I'm out of a job. All I had was fifteen -- ten from the groceries and five from the employment agency. I almost got fired anyway, because using the alphabet backwards confuses me." "Did you try the new clothes angle?" She sat up. "What's that?" "I told my boss this was the only suit I had. He thought it looked pretty good -- it ought to, since it cost two hundred rallods -- but he agreed that a salesman should have more than one suit. He gave me a requisition and I bought a new suit for forty rallods. That's the most expensive one they'd let me have. So it gives us a little margin. You can pay your other ten rallods tomorrow and then..." "We're getting six rallods a week for this room," Ann said tonelessly. "We're allowed seventeen for groceries. That's twenty-three. And I have to pay twenty-five in wages and you have to pay fifteen. How can we save a thousand rallods, if we go in the hole seventeen every week?" "You see if your boss will give you a requisition for some clothes and I'll check around. Maybe I can think of some angles. Maybe they'll let me take a prospect out to dinner now and then. I could pick up a few rallods that way. And maybe something will turn up." Catastrophe struck the next day, when Allen sold a cemetery plot. "Practically took the thing away from me," he moaned. "I tried insulting him, and knocking the location, and everything else I could think of, but I couldn't get out of it. So there go fifteen rallods." "I bought twenty-five rallods worth of clothing," Ann said, "so we're still a little ahead. My wages are paid for next week. But you'd better not sell any more." "I won't," Allen promised. "I'll turn and run first." They started the second week with their wages honorably paid, and enough surplus to carry them a third week, providing Allen sold no plots. Beyond that lay blank despair. Allen returned to their room in a fretful mood. He had narrowly avoided making a sale that morning. His evasion tactics were so obvious that the prospective customer complained to his boss. The boss had studied Allen's sales record, which was not impressive, and threatened to discharge him. Allen was tired, discouraged, and nauseated at the thought of another cold meal out of cans. He was homesick for a glimpse of blue sky. He lurched through the door and halted in amazement. Ann had a visitor -- a bulky, bearded, bald-headed visitor who leaned back in the rickety chair and regarded him quizzically. It was Mr. Gloob, of the Gloob Travel Agency. Mr. Gloob pointed an accusing finger. "You shouldn't have done it!" "You're telling me!" said Allen. Ann leaped up excitedly. "We just got here. I saw him on the street and he almost got away from me. I must have chased him two blocks." "Three blocks," Mr. Gloob said. "My mother warned me not to pay any attention to strange women, so I tried to ignore her. Unsuccessfully, I might add. I didn't recognize her. But you shouldn't have done it. Do you realize the confusion you've created in our accounting department? Two return trips with no outgoing prints to match with them. The directors have held three emergency meetings and the problem seemed utterly incapable of solution. You'll have to go back, you know. You must promise absolute secrecy and leave at once. I won't have it any other way." "Neither would I," Ann said fervently. room critically. "Why are you living in such a queer place? I've often wondered what people from your world would do in our civilization, but this is not at all what I imagined." "It isn't what we imagined, either," Allen said, and briefly described their week of reckless living, and the depths to which they had fallen. Gloob raised his arms in horror. "My word! But why did you let them put you on probation and try to live like this? This is terrible! Why didn't you just go back to Centralia ?" "How could we?" Allen demanded. "The I.B.F. men took every bit of our money. We didn't have the thousand rallods for tickets." Gloob rose slowly to his feet. "My dear friend Allen! Surely you couldn't live in our civilization for over two weeks and have so little understanding of our ways. You do not pay a thousand rallods for tickets. We pay you the thousand rallods!" "But I thought Allen began weakly. "I mean, you charged at Centralia, and' I paid you, so naturally... "I'll start packing," Ann said. "I'll help you," Allen told her. Gloob held up his hand. "Just a moment now. Not so fast. This thing is more serious than you realize. You could have gone back at any time before you were put on probation, just by presenting yourself and giving us a receipt. But now you can't give us a receipt. You've used up your allowance of luxuries and it will be a long time before your thumbprints can be honored." "You mean we're stuck here?" "That's exactly what I mean. You have no understanding of our economy, of course, or you wouldn't have gotten into trouble. People keep a very careful record of their purchases. If they want some special luxury, like a Boolg tour, they conserve their allowance ahead of time, or they reduce their luxury expenditures drastically after they return. Conduct such as yours is rare. It's considered a serious crime, which is why the punishment is so severe." There was a long silence while Allen glared at Gloob and Ann looked quietly at the floor. "All right," Allen said. "Ann, this nonsense has gone far enough. We'll go down to the authorities the first thing in the morning and tell them what happened and ask them to get us away from here." "Oh, I say!" Gloob exclaimed. "You can't do that. There'd be all kinds of unfavorable publicity for Boolg, Incorporated. We might lose our franchise. We specifically agreed that our operations would be kept secret in your world." "Tough," Allen said. "If you'll excuse us, Mr. Gloob, we have some packing to do." "Look, now. Things are developing nicely and we are getting new terminals set up in Europe and South America. You'd spoil everything. At best we'd have to shut down our United States terminals, and that's the most popular place for tours. You have no idea what those tours mean to our people. To pay a hotel bill instead of being paid, to pay for transportation, to pay for food, to work and have the employer pay them -- why, it's positively..." "It's a dirty shame," Allen agreed. "Now if you'll excuse us..." Gloob sighed. "All right. I'll manage it some way. Go ahead and pack." case. "I don't see why you make such a problem out of it. All you have to do is smuggle us away from here. You don't have to pay a thousand rallods to us. What would we do with them?" "Mmm -- yes," said Gloob. "Perhaps it can be done without any official record made of it. We'll see." A heavy fist rattled their door and the landlady's rancorous voice called, "Phone call for Mr. Allen!" Allen started. "I don't know anybody here. Who'd be calling?" "Why don't you answer it and find out?" said Ann. Allen plodded up three flights of stairs and apprehensively picked up the telephone. "Hello." "This is Agent Senoj of the I.B.F. You'll remember our discussion a week or so ago on unemployment taxes." "For your information," Allen said, "I am now employed." "I know. At that time you mentioned income tax. We've conducted an investigation and we find that you have received no income taxes for the past five years; The statute of limitations permits no claims of more than five years to be made against the government, but as long as we've definitely established this five-year delinquency, we would like to make a settlement with you." "Well, that's nice of you," Allen murmured. "We don't know how this could have happened, but it did happen, and I'd like to have you sign the necessary papers and accept a check in final payment." "How large a check?" "With interest and penalties, it comes to twenty-five thousand rallods." "You don't say. Give me your office address and I'll look you up in the morning." "What's wrong with this evening?" the agent said. "I'm busy right now," Allen said. "Meal time, you know." "How about an hour from now?" "Make it two hours." Allen glanced at his watch and counted on his fingers. "Four o'clock." "That's a little late, but -- all right, expect me at four." Allen hurried back down the stairway. "I.B.F.," he said. "They want to give us twenty-five thousand rallods in back income tax." "Good heavens!" Gloob breathed. "You aren't serious?" "Absolutely. He's coming at four." "We'll have to get you out of here. If the government gives you that much money, it will also have to give you jobs to let you spend it, and that means high executive positions, and you'll never get away. Here, I'll help you pack." They left in a rush, dashing up the stairs and waiting on the porch while Gloob hurried out into the street to hail a taxi. The landlady charged out of a hallway. "Just what I expected of scum like you !" she shrieked. "Trying to sneak out on me. Just what I expected. But I been keeping my eyes open, I have. Here -- one week's rent for leaving without notice." She handed Allen six rallods. tralia, and the Globe Travel Agency, and the rambling California redwood ten-room ranch house with a rustic lake view, and settled down to a peaceful existence. They never bothered to explain their mysterious absence, and in time their friends tired of asking. And if their friends thought it odd that they named their son Kroywen, none of them mentioned it within their hearing. Not even the boy's godfather, Mr. Gloob. The business of the Globe Travel Agency expanded at a rate that was absolutely indecent. Allen chartered buses, trains and planes, planned guided tours, and applied all of his ingenuity in the arrangement of colorful itineraries for visitors from another world. Centralia accepted the tourist boom philosophically and credited it to Allen's genius for travel management. There were no more visitations from strangers requesting accommodations for tongue-twisting places. Mr. Gloob explained that this unfortunate confusion resulted when travelers already on tour attempted to locate the new Centralia terminal and were misled by the similarity in names. A warm friendship developed between Mr. Gloob and the Allens. Mr. Gloob was frequently a visitor in their home and they had delightful conversations upon all subjects except the world of Mr. Gloob's origin. Only once did Allen tactfully refer to his and Ann's strange pilgrimage. "I wondered when I was there," he said, "but I never got around to investigating. But the Empire State Building -- you call it just the opposite, of course, but I won't try to pronounce that -- is a hundred and two stories deep, and yet there's an observation gallery at the bottom." Gloob, rocking peacefully, smoking his pipe, and watching his godson kick fretfully in a playpen, nodded. "Why, yes, I believe there is." "Just what do people observe from that observation gallery?" "They observe more or less the same thing people observe when they look out the windows of the buildings." "But there weren't any windows in the buildings!" Merriment flashed in Gloob's eyes. "Weren't there?" he said. Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl boy was odd' begins JL Gordon R. Dickson in The Genetic General (Ace), and at once we can expect that the boy will somehow survive -- not only survive but win success -- not only succeed but, ultimately, rule. We can expect all this because this is the way of mutant stories for many a year ; what we get instead is a fine, moving, exciting book. Gordon Dickson is an uneven writer, sometimes matchless, sometimes trite. He has a queerly complicated way of thinking, his best story ideas amounting to long-chain, highly polymerized thoughts. We put down many of his stories and know that the man was saying something interesting... but what? In The Genetic General , however, originally a threepart serial, he has space and time, and he uses them well His "odd boy" starts out as a sketch, but with a trait shown here, an opinion there, Dickson dexterously fills in the outline until at the end of the book we see the man in three dimensions, standing clear ; and when we come to the last lines and the true majesty of his difference, we are surprised -- yes, and gratified, because Dickson has played fair with us all the way. The galactic culture Dickson paints as a backdrop to his story must rank low in the hierarchy of future probabilities -- surely a feather's touch would knock over its rococo customs ! Dickson's agility is equal to the problem, though ; by sleight of hand he tricks us into suspension of disbelief. All in all, The Genetic General is Dickson at the top of his form, and a credit to his publisher; and it is recommended almost without reservation. The "almost" is because unfortunately Ace has, according to its custom, made a double volume of the book. The upside-down story is Time to Teleport -- also by Gordon R. Dickson, also about a mutant threat to a highly developed future society. But here the piece falls apart in our hands. It is only about half as long as The Genetic General... and it is far less than half as good. els this month, of which about the most interesting is a curiosity piece. That is A. Conan Doyle's The Lost World, back in print presumably as a tie-in with the recently released movie. Here Professor Challenger takes us to a great mountainlocked plateau on the upper reaches of the Amazon, where dinosaurs frolic and apemen fight them for survival. Well, there have been so many imitations, but all the same, it's good fun. Doyle's science is orthodox, or even advanced, by turn-ofthe-century standards. (He had scientific training, of course. He was a practicing London physician for nearly a decade before Sherlock Holmes set him free of pillpushing.) His story is excellent adventure and his characters are fascinating because they seem to loom out of a past almost as remote as the monsters chasing them. The thing is, Doyle was a writer of the pre-Freudian school -- not only pre-Freud, but pre-Joyce, pre-Hemingway, prealmost all the great seminal influences of this century which have given us new insights into the personality, but not entirely without cost. Doyle's characters are all very sure of themselves, very individual. We have little of that sort of thing today in writing -- perhaps because we don't have a great lot of it any more in life. It makes a refreshing change to meet them here. On balance, there are fifty books coming at once to mind, written by our own special pioneers, which are better science fiction and better art than The Lost World. But they don't have what Doyle had -- and it's a pity. to Eden (Doubleday) is a mildly told, ambitious and confusing novel. It touches everything and covers very little. He starts out by telling us that the human race has got itself into so serious a pickle that it has had to create a new social class to haul it out. These super-thinkers are the "E's" (for "Extrapolators"), who are "outside all law, all frameworks, all duty, all social mores." They are trained from youth to use their minds in ways the ordinary human clod cannot manage; they are so absentminded that they have special attendants (when Swift invented them for his floating island of Laputa, he called them "flappers") to keep them from getting hurt. They are resented by many ordinary humans, who go so far as to try to encroach on their privileges in McCarthy-like inquisitions, and they are envied by practically all. Says one jealous commoner: "Boy, something. Imagine. Take any dame you want. Nobody can squawk. Take any money, riches you want. Nobody can stop it." How this would work out in practice we are not going to know because, as Clifton tells them, no E ever does any of those things. However, this is not what the book is about. A fledgling E is confronted with the problem of a planet called Eden which is perfectly wonderful in all respects except that it will not tolerate the existence of machines or, indeed, of anything made by man. Machines disappear ; men's structures, even men's clothing, revert to their primitive state as tree or vegetable, and will not allow themselves to be reconstructed. There is then a surprise ending which, according to house rules, we will not discuss; but it seems tacked on. It may be what Clifton was aiming at from the beginning ; if so, he took an awfully roundabout way of arriving there. Clifton, employing such devices as spotlighting minor characters in a choppy series of blackouts, makes the story move pretty rapidly. But it doesn't really go anywhere. HE Climacticon, which is both title and principal gimmick of the Ballantine novel by Harold Livingston, is a pocket-sized machine which radars the emotional attitudes of girls. Its meters nearby, and its compass needle points her out. It sounds, indeed, like a handy enough gadget for a young fellow just starting out in life, but it's a thin sort of peg to hang a novel on. Livingston, whose previous works have been outside the field of science fiction (e.g., The Coasts of Earth, a story of the Israeli-Arab war) , does little delving beneath the surface of the notion. What he does is to set it on Madison Avenue and people it with advertising-agency types, and although they are over-familiar they are good for a few laughs. Sketchy, fast and entertaining, the story has enough moments of shrewd observation to make one wish it had more. A CE has abridged (but not enough) The Dark Destroyers, Manly Wade Wellman's pre-war account of the Cold People from Space and their predictable attempt to invade the Earth. The second novel in the double volume is Boio Down to Nul, which has to do with Earth writhing under the lash of still another set of alien conquerors from space, the Nuls. Well, things are pretty tough under the Nuls, all right, but reading the story is tougher. The jacket accuses Brian W. Aldiss of writing this, but he has a clean record elsewhere and should be able to cop a plea. As a better example of what Aldiss can do, consider his newest, Signet short story collection, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand. Here he offers eight stories arranged in a series to picture eight epochs in the future of mankind. The stories are quite uneven, but they all have strengths and the best among them are excellent. Aldiss peoples his The Robot Millennia: Who Can Replace a Man? almost entirely with machines -- bulldozers, automatic typewriters and so on -- and tells the story through their eyes (or photo-receptors). The machines find that the men who command them have disappeared ; they debate the question, then elect to trek to the mountains to start a new, manless life for themselves. When they talk, they talk like machines, every thought a neat computer's syllogism of major premise, minor premise and conclusion. They are machines, instead of men wearing tin suits, and it is all quite rewarding. In The Dark Millennia: O Ishrail! Aldiss starts with a familiar theme (an alien, marooned on Earth, is thought mad because of his talk of Galactic civilizations) , but he invests it with thought and illuminating detail and makes it come alive. The Megalopolis Millennia: Secret of a Mighty City is again routine in concept, a parody laid in the future of the familiar yes-man conferences of Hollywood producers of an extinct age, but by main strength Aldiss manages to administer a few bites with those dulled old teeth. These are the best of the eight and a credit to any writer, but even the least of them has an unexpected gift or two for the reader. It is that lagniappe, the baker's dozen delivered when he is only paid for twelve, that marks Aldiss as a writer worth watching. O NE dozen stories by Robert Sheckley have been collected by Bantam into a book called Notions: Unlimited. Sheckley almost never writes the scientific parts of his stories. In fact, about the only science fiction story in the book is A Wind Is Rising, concerning problems in navigating a twelve-ton tank with a chain-link sail across the rocky, hurricane-swept soil of an alien planet. (Sheckley is an amateur yachtsman of great passion.) Still, he writes so briskly that we never miss the hard parts, at least not until the story is over. His great attraction is his original and unorthodox point of view. It is the soft spots in the future that interest him. Nothing goes right for his luckless heroes; their inventions work all too well; their fraudulent plots fail because the disaster they aim to simulate really happens ; they make compacts with monsters but neglect to read the fine print. It's too bad for his heroes, but it's fun for the rest of us. Isaac Asimov has written so much so well for so long that no one is very excited when another Asimov book comes out and turns out to be good. Like the rising of the sun it is a daily miracle, dimmed by familiarity. Here the dawn breaks in Nine Tomorroivs (Doubleday  Bantam). These nine are not the best stories he ever wrote, but then they don't have to be in order to deserve our attention. T WO regrettably less attractive short story collections appear now to show us that even the best may falter in form. We expect great things, for example, from Basil Davenport. We cannot conclude that we have quite got them here. Invisible Men is the title of his new Ballantine anthology of stories about invisible men (and invisible women, invisible boys and invisible things), and although the stories are all right, eleven of them are too many. Some would be fine in any surroundings, however -- The New Accelerator (Wells), Love in the Dark (Gold), Shottle Bop (Sturgeon) -- and the chief thing, that puts this book a cut under Davenport's usual high standard is that he has shirked his duty. The best part of a Davenport anthology is his useful and entertaining program notes, and here he has not given us any. A fine-tooth comb passed over the works of Theodore Sturgeon has extracted yet another collection of his shorter pieces, but not one which does him sufficient credit. In Beyond (Avon), we are given four ancient stories ( Abreaction , Nightmare Island, Largo and The Bones -- all originally published in the forties, and all showing their age), one recent reprint. Like Young, and one story so new that it has never before been published. This one is entitled Need. It is a long story, almost half the size of a book ; if it were up to Sturgeon's elevated plane of accomplishment, its inclusion here would be all the recommendation this volume needs. But 'it isn't. There are a lot of words in the piece, but the story itself is a slight and unresolved fantasy, characters queer without being compelling, plot hanging on air. There is, says the story, a man living in Nyack who can detect what people need. He gives it to them. That's it. That's all. Sturgeon can, should and often does give us so much more than this. Of all the writers practicing science fiction today, there are only about a dozen true leaders. The others are excellent craftsmen, surely -- their contributions are considerable and welcome -- but they are the infantry troops who occupy and consolidate the gains of the advance party. Sturgeon is one of the leaders. The disappointment is that in this book he leads us nowhere we have not already been. Derivative, minor and rather weary, it does not do justice to a mdn who, at the peak of his form, simply cannot be matched. look at what the publishers are providing for us in the way of non-fiction. If you like mathematics, for example, you will be interested in Constance Reid's From Zero to Infinity, a new revised edition of which is now available from Crowell. Mrs. Reid does not intend to tell you how to add and subtract, but to inform and entertain you with some of the properties and curiosities of numbers themselves. See, for example, if you can make any sense of this arrangement of the digits from # to #: They are arranged according to system, but what is the system? "Secretaries usually outwit mathematicians on this one," says Mrs. Reid. The reason for this is that the arrangement is not a mathematical one; and if you wonder why then it is relevant to this mathematical book, it is because the attractions of number study are not confined to its mathematical aspects. There is something grand and terrible about the properties of numbers and their subtle, unexpected relationships, something which for thousands of years has caused amateurs of number study to assign metaphysical or superstitious properties to the various integers. It is the triumph of mathematics that all of its laws are true always -- in every case -- not only in the case of the numbers and quantities we know, but in the case of every number and quantity that anyone can ever know. A mathematical proof does not rest on a series of test observations, but on a statement of general laws which can be shown to be universally, necessarily true. Mrs. Reid points up the difference : "In sciences other than mathematics a sampling must often serve as verification of a hypothesis. Mathematicians, who by the nature of their science can prove or disprove a hypothesis with complete finality, have a smug little joke that they call 'The Physicist's Proof that All Odd Numbers Are Prime.' The physicist, so the story goes, starts out by classifying one as prime because it is divisible only by itself and one. Then three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine -- divisible by three? Well, that's just an exception -- eleven is prime, thirteen is prime. Obviously all odd numbers with the exception of nine are prime!" From, Zero to Infinity is a catch-all, and as it is quite short there is much that has not been caught. By and large, though, it is the best brief, popular introduction to number lore on the market, accessible to those with no mathematical training but rewarding even for those who have. Oh, and that arrangement of the digits? Spell out the list and you will see the answer at once: They are in alphabetical order. a better popular history of astronomy than Rudolf Thiel's And There Was Light (New American Library.) Some five thousand years of star-gazing need to be covered. In less than # pages Thiel encompasses the lot. Just about everything is here. Thiel outlines for us all the major theories of past and present and describes for  us the observations from which they sprang; he even finds time for human sidelights like Tycho Brahe's youthful dueling accident (which forced him during all his adult life to wear a guttapercha nose) and the fussy housewifery of the founder of Greenwich Observatory (he spent endless hours lettering the word "empty" on boxes from which equipment had been removed). Admirably organized, well illustrated, the book has only one serious flaw. That lies in its closing pages where, in an attempt to keep it "up to the minute," some of its conjectures are outdated and already nearly It isn't much of a secret, but it's the only one. The trick is... timid child. Sometimes he didn't understand things and was puzzled. More often, grown-ups couldn't or wouldn't understand things that were perfectly clear to him and he was more puzzled. Occasionally such things worried and even upset him a little. Then Momma and sometimes Daddy would translate bafflement into silly adult terms and think that he was afraid. It was that way about the hole in the closet when Tommy was just a bit over three. Tommy wasn't really afraid. Mr. Bear was afraid and the thing did puzzle Tommy. So he asked about it, but he never did get any sensible or satisfactory answers, and that did worry and perhaps even upset him a little. Don't Think About It before Daddy finally told him, "Now, Tommy, boy. Don't think about it and it won't scare you. Really, there is nothing there to hurt you, if you just don't think about it. So don't you think about it any more -- there's Daddy's big boy." This certainly was not any sort of explanation. But still Tommy did try hard not to think about it, as Daddy said. And now he really doesn't think about it at all any more. Or about Aunt Martha, either. The hole was in the closet in Tommy's room. Tommy and Momma and Daddy lived in a not very big, not very new frame house on the edge of the city and Aunt Martha lived with them. Tommy didn't -- at least not yet, although there were promises -- have any brothers or sisters. But he did have his own room and a family of his own, too. It was the extra bedroom and it had a closet that was cramped and with no light. Tommy liked his room. It was small, with a small bed, and it belonged to him, along with his family of Mr. Bear and Old Rabbit and Kokey Koala. It was also in easy crying range of Momma and Daddy's room and Aunt Martha's room, so if Mr. Bear, who was the timid one, got frightened in the night, Tommy could cry -- purely in Mr. Bear's behalf -- to bring help. Or at least company. Tommy and his family all liked the closet well enough too, except for the shelf that was out of reach even from the "don't climb" stool. The closet was good to hide in or play bear cave or rabbit hole and fine for finding missing toys after Momma had a spell of playing cleaning house. The day Tommy found the hole in the closet was the week after his third birthday. Daddy was at work. Momma was out shopping. It was a rainy afternoon. Aunt Martha was sitting with Tommy and the afternoon television. his family and they all agreed as soon as they heard the television coming on strong that it would be a very poor afternoon to waste on a nap. Besides, Mr. Bear's feelings had been hurt by having been somewhat left out of things recently in favor of new birthday presents, now largely broken or tiresome. To make it up to him, Tommy and Old Rabbit and Kokey all agreed to play bear cave in the closet. It was a nice game and going well enough, except for some grumbling from Kokey Koala, who always wanted to argue and claimed that bears lived in trees, not caves. But then -- and it was Mr. Bear's fault for wanting it darker, so he could hibernate -- the closet door shut tight. That didn't seem so serious at first. It would only mean a scolding for being out of bed when Aunt Martha would come to open it after Tommy hollered loud enough. And then there was the hole in the closet, back in the comer next to the broken drum. They all saw it and they heard the Ugly Thing talking or thinking at them. It stretched out a part of itself at Mr. Bear, who was the closest. It didn't grab Mr. Bear, but he was terrified just the same. And none of them liked it. They didn't like it at all. The Ugly Thing couldn't come out of the hole because the hole wasn't big enough yet, but it tried and it was making the hole bigger. And it kept thinking at them, red thoughts, and hungry, as it tore at the edges of the hole. The family all looked to Tommy, so Tommy cried and yelled. Finally Aunt Martha heard him and came to open the door. Then the afternoon sunlight streamed across the floor into the closet and the ugly red thoughts from the Thing pulled back, far back, so you could barely notice them, and you couldn't see the hole any more, even though you knew it was still there. At least Tommy and Mr. Bear and Old Rabbit and Kokey Koala knew. After she opened the closet door and carried Tommy from the closet to the living room, Aunt Martha scolded. She wasn't really mad because she had waited until a commercial interrupted her television program before answering the cries from the closet. But she scolded because she was Aunt Martha and scolding was what Aunt Martha did. A really good cry, even one worked up strictly as a service for a companion, takes a little time to turn off. Then, after a few settling gulps. Tommy tried to explain. "Auntie. Aunt Martha, there's a hole in the cave -- in the closet -- and there's a Thing inside of it." He looked at Mr. Bear whom he was holding by one foot and at Kokey, dropped by Aunt Martha on the sofa, for confirmation. Then, quickly, he wriggled down from Auntie's lap. Old Rabbit! the closet and was relieved. The door was open and, in the gray afternoon light, the hole was still not to be seen. Old Rabbit, who always had a bad temper, was annoyed and snappish at having been left behind. But he was there and all right. Tommy rescued him and ran back to Aunt Martha. "It was hungry," he continued his explanation. Aunt Martha, as always, was difficult. "Who is hungry? You shouldn't be hungry, Tommy. You just had your lunch an hour ago. Do you want a glass of milk?" "Not me hungry." Tommy was impatient. Aunt Martha never seemed able to grasp any idea more complex than a glass of milk or wet pants. Little boys, in her mind, nearly always either wanted the one or had the other. Such things she could and did attend to with a virtuous sense of duty done. But anything else was beyond her. "Tommy! Are your pants wet?" Tommy sighed in resignation and wet his pants. It was the only thing to do. Otherwise Auntie would fuss and fume, accomplishing nothing, understanding nothing, for the rest of the afternoon. Ten minutes later, in dry pants, he finished an unwanted glass of milk. Aunt Martha, conscience appeased, returned to soap opera. Tommy and his family, nap safely forgotten, played away the afternoon -- but not in the closet or even, as was usual on rainy days, in Tommy's room. Instead, finding Daddy's  old briefcase full of papers they played office in the family room, with Old Rabbit grumbling about having to be Miss Wicksey, who drove the electric typewriter in Daddy's office. Momma and Daddy came home together at a bit after five. Tommy took his scolding about messing up Daddy's papers in good part. He had expected it. But Aunt Martha was angry about the scolding she got for letting him, mild though it was. In retaliation, she said, "Tommy, you were a naughty, naughty boy. And for being so naughty you must take your big bear and your rabbit and the little bear or whatever the thing is and put them away in the closet. And leave them there till tomorrow." "No! No, no, no, I won't! It isn't fair. They weren't bad. And the Ugly Thing is in the hole and it might come out and it's hungry and -- and my family is all afraid." "Tommy!" Aunt Martha's voice was sharp. "You stop that nonsense and put your toys -- " "Wait. Wait up now," said Daddy, who also lived in the grown-up world, but who sometimes tried to understand things. "What is this about a hole in the closet? What about something being hungry?" "That's all," said Tommy. "The Ugly Thing in the hole in the closet. It is hungry." There was more to it than that, of course, but how could a thing like that be explained through a wall of grown, closed minds? There was the hole in the closet. You couldn't exactly see it. You could only sort of feel seeing it and the hairy Thing -- at least it seemed hairy and shapeless, or having many different shapes and a mouth and sharp teeth -- and it had reached out with something and touched Mr. Bear and would have eaten him too, if he had blood. But then it had pulled back from Mr. Bear and red hunger thoughts came stronger and stronger. Even now, stretching out from the hole where it was hidden there in the closet. Tommy could feel the reaching, greedy thoughts. But he couldn't explain all that. "There is a hole in the closet," Tommy said again. B UT he knew that not even Daddy would understand. Of course Momma wouldn't. Not Momma, who was loving but very busy and just sat so often dreaming or listening to baby sister that they said was in her stomach, so big and fat now as to leave little lap room. Momma was too occupied looking inward to look out much at Tommy. Daddy, to give him credit, was nearly there were so many things he couldn't see. Still Tommy had to try. "The Ugly Thing in the hole. It wants something to eat." "Oh, Tommy ! Such horrible nonsense !" That was Momma. She wasn't even going to think about it. It is a question sometimes whether baby sisters are worth all the bother and trouble. "Now, Tommy." Daddy was being helpful. "You say there is a hole in your closet? And that there is something in the hole?" "Well-#. Sort of." Really, the Ugly Thing wasn't so much in the hole as on the other side of it. But that was close enough. "All right then, Tommy. Suppose you show it to me." "What?" "Show me the hole. Tommy." "Now?" "Yes." "The hole in the closet?" "Tommy!" "Yes, Daddy." This wasn't going to work out to anything good and Tommy didn't want to go back to the closet and close the closet door anyway. The Thing didn't eat Mr. Bear because Mr. Bear didn't have blood. But Daddy had and... "Tommy!" They went to the closet. At least, if he was risking a Daddy, Tommy thought, he was protecting Mr. Bear and the others. "Now where is this hole, Tommy?" "Over there by the corner." Tommy pointed. Daddy went into the closet to look. Tommy started to close the door. In the black dark, Daddy would see what Tommy meant about the Thing in the hole. From the outside, Tommy started to close the door. It was a small closet and hardly big enough for both of them. "Tommy ! What are you trying to do? Open that door." "But -- " After all, the hole wasn't there, or scarcely seemed to be there, except in the dark. "Open it up wider. Hm-m. I believe I do see. Wait till I get my lighter... Say, by George, I believe you're right. There is a little hole there. Looks like a mouse hole." There it was, as Tommy might have known. Grown-ups will always avoid seeing the important things. Of course there was a mouse hole there, the home of the little old Mr. Mouse with the wiggly nose and the gray whiskers. He had been nice. But he wasn't there any more and Tommy had a pretty clear idea of what had happened to him. That poor little old Mr. Mouse had had blood. "But, Daddy -- " It was hopeless. "Dome! Martha!" Daddy's hunting instinct was aroused. "Have we got a mouse trap? Any cheese? There is a hole in that closet, a little old mouse hole and I'm going to -- " Well, perhaps this would be better than if he hadn't found anything. Tommy followed Daddy about as he finally located a mouse trap. No cheese? He cut a little piece of meat for bait. Of course Tommy knew no trap would catch the Ugly Thing. "What in the world happened to my lighter?" Daddy wanted to know. Tommy didn't answer that. But at least everybody, even Aunt Martha, had forgotten about shutting Tommy's family up in the closet. For now that was enough. But later, after supper, after bath, after the shooting picture on the TV, it was time for bed. "Daddy?" "Get on to bed now, son. Past bedtime. Hop to it." "Daddy, I want to sleep with you and Momma tonight." dark night. The afternoon rain had built up into a real storm. Mr. Bear was terrified. Kokey was scared and even tough Old Rabbit didn't want to sleep in Tommy's room with the Ugly Thing in the hole so hungry and waiting to rip its way out of the hole when it got dark enough -- and only the street light outside the room to keep away the dark because they would never let Tommy keep his light on at night. "My family and me don't want to sleep in my room tonight." "Now, Tommy, just because it's a little stormy -- Daddy's big boy isn't afraid of a little wind and rain?" "I'm not afraid, Daddy. It's my family. You know how families are. You always say about Momma -- " "Never mind that now. To bed. Your own bed." "But, Daddy, there's the Ugly Thing in the hole ! And it's hungry!" "The mouse?" Daddy went to look at his trap, switching on the light in Tommy's room. He came back in a minute. "The little devil!" Did Daddy know? No. "The little devil got away with the bait, clean as a whistle. Only a little plaster dust or something left in the trap where I put the meat." Mr. Bear shivered. "Now don't be foolish, Bear. You don't have blood. The Ugly Thing won't get you," Tommy told him softly. But Mr. Bear wouldn't listen. He was a crybaby, a scaredy-cat. But to tell the truth -- the real, honest truth -- the whole family and even Tommy didn't feel too good about it. "Tommy? What was that you were saying?" "Daddy ! I wanna sleep with you and Momma. Me and my family. We're scared of that Thing." Tommy knew it was no less than his duty to protect them all. "Oh, now, Tommy! You don't mean to say you're afraid of a little old mouse? A big boy like you?" "Well, Mr. Bear is -- I don't -- Daddy ! It is there, honest it is, in that hole and it's hungry and it'll come out in the dark and -- " "Tommy! A little mouse! Get on into your room now and no more argument." Tommy's face began to crumple. If he had to, he would fight this one out all the way -- tears, tantrum, kick, scream, gasp, hold his breath and turn blue -- "Now, now, Tommy-boy." Daddy did mean well and sometimes he was even right and so Tommy always did try to do what Daddy said. "Tommy, you mustn't let things like that bother you. If we can't catch the little mouse, forget it. There's nothing more we can do, so just don't think about it. You see?" Sniff. "No." "Don't think about it, that's all. There is nothing there that can hurt you, if you just don't think about it. So don't think about it -- that's Daddy's big boy." "Well-#... And then can we sleep with you and Momma?" Aunt Martha rang in her nickel's worth. "A boy ought to be ashamed to be afraid of a little mouse." "It's not -- " "Not what?" "Uh -- it's Mr. Bear that's afraid. Of the -- " "And you just stop that nonsense about those ridiculous stuffed animals, you hear me? Nobody should make such a fuss about a little mouse." "Momma does. Momma!" Tommy let two fat tears trickle down his cheeks, a warning, but he meant them too. "Momma-a-a, can't we -- " "All right, all right! Stop this stupid wrangling! You know how it gets on my nerves. For goodness' sake, let him sleep with us tonight. Anyway, I don't blame him. I wouldn't sleep a wink in the same room with a mouse. Be sure you shut our door tonight. Tight." "You're spoiling the child," said Aunt Martha sourly. "Auntie," said Tommy, "I bet you're chicken to let,your door stay open." "Well!" huffed Aunt Martha. "The impertinence ! I certainly shall keep my door open. No mouse is going to keep me from getting good, fresh air." little boy. Now, with the door shut in Momma and Daddy's room, and Aunt Martha's door open, he wouldn't think about the Ugly Thing in the hole -- waiting for dark, real dark -- to come out -- and eat. "All right, Tommy. This once you can sleep with your mother and me. Get on to bed and mind you sleep quiet. And don't spread those stuff -- your family all over the bed either." "Yes, Daddy. And, Daddy -- " "What?" "I won't think about it now, the Thing in the hole." Tommy said his good nights. Tonight he even kissed Aunt Martha as if he meant it. And he took his family and he went to bed in Momma and Daddy's room. He did not think about the Ugly Thing. He went right to sleep, lying at the edge of the big, big bed. Tommy, and Old Rabbit, and Kokey Koala, and even Mr. Bear went right to sleep. Outside the wind blew hard and harder and the rain drove down and it was dark. The television reception was bad. Everyone went to bed early. Good night. Lights out. In Tommy's room it was quite dark with only the faint, watery rays of the street light on the comer swimming in through the rain. In the closet there was a stirring, a fumbling, a tearing and the hole in the blackness grew, was forced, bigger, wider, as the Thing pushed and ripped at whatever was barring it from the warm, red, oozing food it craved ; it must have ; it would have. And, in a sudden gust, the wind blew harder still. Somewhere in town, blocks away, a wire fell and blue sparks flashed and crackled in the dripping night. In Tommy's house the refrigerator went off, the electric clocks stopped. The street light blinked once and was gone and in Tommy's closet there was a sudden, mighty surge of effort, a break, and something, not a sound, but something, a harsh and bloody sense or feel of rending greed flowing outward from the closet in a wave. Aunt Martha, in her sleep, said, "No. Oh, no!" Daddy interrupted a snore with a strained grunt. Momma whimpered softly and hugged to herself her swollen stomach. Tommy blinked and was awake. Soothingly, he patted Kokey and Old Rabbit. He squeezed Mr. Bear's paw. Then he slipped his hand into the opening in Mr. Bear's overalls and took out Daddy's cigarette lighter. He knew how to work it. But first he waited. "Don't think about it," Daddy had told him and he didn't think about it, really. But he couldn't help feeling it. The Ugly Thing was out, clear out of the hole now, and moving. He could feel that and the awful hunger moving with it. Aunt Martha's room was closest and her door was open. Momma and Daddy's room was closed. The Ugly Thing moved fast, faster, and reached out, thirsting, hungering... From Aunt Martha's room came the quavering wail and from the Thing there flowed a sense of vicious, evil joy. There it was, but was it enough? Tommy hugged Mr. Bear once, tightly, and slipped noiselessly from the bed. He wasn't thinking about it, he couldn't, he wouldn't think about it. But he knew what he had to do. He had the lighter. At the bedroom door he worked it. Opened the door a crack; thrust it out. And then, in a little rush, back to bed where he lay quietly, and he didn't think about it, he and Mr. Bear and Old Rabbit and Kokey Koala. feeding hunger was gone and the feel of the Ugly Thing was gone, back into the hole in the closet, forced back by the flickering yellow light of the flames started by the cigarette lighter. Then, when the smell of smoke grew thick in the room and he could hear the crackling of the fire burning the house, Tommy shook Daddy awake. It wasn't hard to get out through the bedroom window, except for Momma. But she made it all right. And Tommy had a little trouble holding tightly to each member of his family as Daddy lifted him out of the window, but they made it all right too. Of course Aunt Martha didn't make it -- how could she? But it was fun watching the firemen in the rain from the Krausmeyer's porch next door as the house and the closet with the hole in the closet all burned up together. Aunt Martha ? "Funny thing," Tommy heard one fireman say to another the next day, in the sunshine, as they looked over the smouldering ash, "the old bat must have been as dry as dust inside. Twenty years in the department and I never did see a body so completely consumed -- teeth, a little bone... Hey, get on away from here, son! Get along on home with you ! " Daddy and Momma said Aunt Martha had gone away on a trip. Tommy might have known pretty well where she had gone, if he had thought about it, but he didn't think about it. None of his family did. What for? Aunt Martha had had to go away sure. She went. All right, who missed Aunt Martha? Anyway, there were lights in all of the closets in the new house they moved to and lots of room for everyone, even baby sister. And there were no holes, not even mouse holes, in any of the closets. Non-readers of science fiction boggle at such place or name inventions as, say, Rxxl for either the future or alien worlds, yet Earth itself is a very good example of alphabet-gargling and sense-mangling, not to mention telescoping. Considers these instances: Lyon was once Lugdunum. Cameracum and Mediolanum (the latter meaning "in the middle of the plain") have been time-abbreviated to Cambrai and Milan. If you can connect the Spanish Zaragoza and the French and English Jersey with Caesarea Augusta, you have an aptitude that the U. S. Department of the Interior would welcome -- its toponomy section, in its search for the origins and meanings of place names, has a rough task, for many of the names have come down in just as unrecognizable forms and the meanings lost. Torpenow Hill, in England, doesn't sound incredible until translated. Each syllable was added by invaders or settlers, and each means the same thing -- so that the translation is Hillhillhill ! Hill ! Greenwich Village is almost as bad, forwich is from the Latin vicus, meaning "village." The Sicilian town of Linguaglossa is "tongue-tongue" in Latin and Greek. Yucatan was not the name the Indians called their country; it was an uncomprehending "What do you say?" to the queries of the Conquistadores. Want to bet on how Baseball, Ohio, got its name? You'll lose. The two towns of Basil and Baltimore decided to merge, with each contributing its first syllable to the joint name. Brimaquonx was seriously suggested -- and not in science fiction -- as a name for New York that would combine those of all five boroughs. The future name may make that seem reasonable and perhaps even attractive. Rxxl does sound unlikely because of its lack of vowels. But if the Yugoslavs can call Trieste Trst and "a hill full of fog" in Czech comes out vrch pin mlh, why not Rxxl? F OR a week now the Siukurnin had hung above the hunters' camp disguised as a pine cone. One of the ropes holding their tent fly passed within inches of it, and when the cold evening wind blew, as it was doing now, the rope hummed. This created a masking harmonic that had to be filtered out (along with many other "noises") before the Siukurnin could concentrate on the vibrations coming from the figures around the fire. Already imprinted and stored in the Siukurnin's subcellular structure was a long catalogue of light-reflected shapes and vibration meanings from this place and the other places. It knew that A Siukurnin is so becoming! when one of the carbon lifeforms moved to the nearby flowing liquid, the creature was going to the water. (And that was one of the vibrations for the great heaving expanse of liquid beyond the mountains to the east.) And it knew that when one of these creatures became dormant for the night (low vibration period), that was sleep. Oh, there were so many vibration meanings. The Siukurnin tried reproducing the vibrations for sleep and water at a subaural level, gloried in its growing mastery of these subtleties. An aroma of coffee and broiled meat arose from the fire. The Siukurnin listened to these for a moment, savoring the full roundness of the vibration spectrum in this enchanting place. As yet it had not thought of the necessity for a non-chilitigish vibration to refer to itself. (You must understand that when it thought of itself at this stage (which was seldom), it did not think: "I am a Siukumin." In the first place, a natural mechanism inhibited prolonged introspection. In the second place, "Siukurnin" is a make-do vibration -- a limited auditory approach to the actual "term" that is used only in communicating with creatures who do not hear into the visual spectrum, and who are not yet able to detect the chilitigish spectrum. Since this is only a start at communication, it's perfectly all right for you to think of this creature as a "Siukurnin," but you should keep in mind that there's a limitation.) hunters' camp, the Siukumin had spent two weeks as a false rivet head in the wardroom of a long gray warship. It had left the warship as a coating of "film" on a garbage container, and had arrived here in the pine glade as a length of "wire" in the trunk lid of a used car that had been sold to one of the hunters. Between the garbage container and the used car there had been several other shapealiases, all characterized by, solid color and smoothness and all difficult to reproduce. The Siukurnin looked on its present pine cone form almost as a rest. Once started on its repertoire of new vibration meanings f the Siukurnin was like as you might say, like a child with a new toy. Presently, it recalled the period on the warship. "Now hear this! Now hear this!" it chanted to itself at a level too low to be detected by the figures beneath it. Darkness folded over the camp in the pine trees and the fire flickered low. The upright creatures retired into their tent. (To sleep, you understand.) Among these creatures was one identified by the primitive (non-chilitigish) vibration: "Sam." Now the Siukurnin listened to the soughing of the wind through the branches around it, to the scrabbling of night creatures -- and once there was a figurative scream of skunk odor nearby. Much later, the Siukurnin defied its inhibitions, tried to recall a time before the awakening at the warship. Only faint fog memory came: a sensation of swimming upward through dark water. The effort of memory brought the inhibition mechanism into action. Destructive hunger gnawed at the Siukurnin. It sensed changes going on within its structure -- a maturation of sorts. To put down the hunger, the Siukurnin imagined itself as one of the flying creatures to be seen in the delightful harmonics of sky above it -- soaring... soaring... But this, loo, became disturbing because its self-image insisted on resolving into a giant red-gold winged thing unfamiliar to these skies (but feeling disquietingly familiar to the Siukurnin). Dawn crystalled the peaks to the east, brought stirrings that aroused the Siukurnin from its reverie. A figure emerged from the tent, yawned, stretched. The Siukurnin matched light vibrations and sound vibrations for the figure and, in its own way, "recognized" the hunter, Sam. There were checkered harmonics with merging of long and short olfactory-visual waves punctured by great sound-meaning vibrations. "Chilly this morning," said the hunter. "Wish I could stay in the sack like you bums." From the tent came another voice: "You lost a fair and square toss, Sam. Get that fire goin'." A connoisseur sense within the Siukurnin came to full alert. It felt that this crude creature carried some supremely desirable element. In a sense, the Siukurnin "crouched." The hunter put a hand on the fly rope, glanced at the false pine cone. "Yeah," he said. "You'll burn like pitch." He reached up, touched the "cone," felt sudden warmth, then nothing. The "cone" was gone. He shook his hand, looked around the ground, back to the tree. Nothing. "I'll be danged," he muttered. He scratched the palm that had touched the "cone." "That fire goin' yet?" demanded the voice from the tent. Sam shook his head. "No. I was going to pick a pine cone to help start the fire and the darn thing disappeared." "You're gettin' old, grampaw," came the voice from the tent. "Better buy some glasses when we get back to town." Another voice intruded from the tent: "Will you guys quit your yakking? I'm trying to sleep !" For the Siukurnin there had been an instant of exquisite languor. Then it had felt itself changing uncontrollably, spreading out over the hand of the carbon lifeform, seeping immediately through pores, between cells, into a vein. It stretched out -- no more than six cells in diameter -- reaching... reaching... A long, thin thread explored the length of the vein. (You'll appreciate that the vibrations here were magnificent in their contrapuntal relationship : little hissings and squealings and lappings played against a superb background throb. There were also a few moments of delicate adjustment before the leucocytes ceased their ravening attack.) nin danced for joy. Its hunger became only a faint beckoning: a dim sort of knowledge that end-of-hunger was at hand. And there came a trickle of memory from before the upward swimming and those first moments of awareness on the warship. There was not enough recollection to frighten it with the thought that its own little egg of ego might be overwhelmed... just enough to whet its curiosity. (All Siukurnin are fully endowed with a curiosity that cannot be inhibited, you know. And chilitigish awareness makes this faculty even more potent.) The Siukurnin swam, crawled, wriggled, elongated and squeezed. Down, outward, upward. It had to filter out part of the "music" around it now: wheezings in the great air sacs, gurglings and sloshings, cracklings and swishings. All so distracting. One of its elements enwebbed the host's vocal cords ("great vibrators" to a Siukurnin). Another part interfingered the speech centers of the brain. Cilia reached out to the eye surfaces and the eyelid veins, contacting the exterior. It was distracting at first to discover how all the vibrations were separated by different sense organs ; then temptation became irresistible. (Who can hurl blame for this?) The Siukurnin coordinated its contact with speech centers and vocal cords. Across the pine glade a human voice shouted: "Now hear this! Now hear this! Water! Sleep! Fire! Eat!" Oh, it was an exhilarating sensation ! Two of the upright creatures, the other hunters, tumbled from the tent. One called: "It's about time you got... It broke off. There was no fire. Only Sam standing terror-eyed beside the firepit, left hand to throat, right hand outthrust as though to push something away. Then Sam swayed, collapsed. In the hospital room, gross vibrations had been dampened to a remote hush. Slatted blinds were closed against raw morning sunlight. The bedside lamp had been turned off. But there still was a soft harmonic reflection from cream-colored walls that mingled with the even hiss of sleep breathing. Sam lay on his back in the room's single bed, eyes closed. His chest under a green humming of blanket rose and fell gently. Somewhere, a pumping motor throbbed its obbligato. Distantly, stiff little shuntings and pantings and screechings told of city traffic. Ether trailed its solo virtuosity through the air, riding on a wave of disinfectant. A nurse's heels along the hall added an abrupt random rhythm that wove back and forth... back and forth through the other vibrations in a way that excited the connoisseur sense of the figure on the bed. (After all, the long, virtual silence of the migration had now been recalled. In a sense, it was starved for these wonderful "noises.") Outside the half-opened door of the room, a doctor could be heard talking to Beverly, Sam's wife. The doctor was tall, a beak-nosed shape: pink and blond with white on white on white echoing across the image. Acrid little shouts came from his hands, clinkings from his pockets, and a buzzing of tobacco rode his breath. There had been a strange dual recognition of Beverly: a sense of familiarity with her dark hair, soft curve of cheeks, alert gray-green eyes. (The Sam-memories, of course.) And there had been added to this a pungent explosion of perfume-base powder (still familiar, yes, but heightened to an indescribable pitch), plus a glissando of gold necklace on green coat on green suit, all played against a bright beating of gold-bronze buttons. (And there was much more, but without chilitigish awareness in the reader, the effects are meaningless.) The doctor's voice carried a drum quality as he uttered cautious reassurances. "There is no doubt that it's some type of narcolepsy," he said. "But there's no enlargement of the lymphatic glands. His pulse and respiration are normal. Temperature's up, but not dangerously. I'm inclined to suspect this may be a reaction due to nervous strain. Has he been working very hard?" "Narcolepsy, narcolepsy, narcolepsy," whispered the Siukumin with its Sam-lips. Well... they weren't exactly Sam-lips now. They were much more accurately Sam ' Siukurnin power) Jjpg You just have to understand that single-ego orientation sets up difficult problems in communications here. What you would consider odd and irresistible things had been happening to Sam and Siukurnin. Cilia of Siukurnin had gone creeping and seeking of their own volition. It was now a great thin net spread throughout the host. Wherever it touched nerve cells -- in brain and elsewhere -- subtle displacements occurred at the subcellular level. New memories (Sam-memories) filtered into Siukurnin. And Siukurnin memories, of course, filtered back to Sam. (This is one of those processes that just cannot be confined to a one-way circuit.) that Siukurnin had displaced the temporary migration-ego. And Sam -- "he" now thought of himself as a kind of "needle" at the end of an extremely long thread. You see, the "thread" was the Siukurnin ego-memory-chain, its past so ancient that the Sam-ego was staggered. (If you open up a Siukurnin-past you find that it is other creatures stretched out to a virtually meaningless number. This is a fascinating infinity process in which a quite satisfactory internal relationship has been worked out.) Fully awakened, Siukurnin now understood the necessity mechanism that had blanked out ego-memory-chain awareness. There is such a temptation in the migration period to turn inward upon the merged multiplicity, encyst all distracting processes, and just think and think and think and... You can see how this would be a kind of death. (Strictly speaking, Siukumin do not fear death, although they are vulnerable during the "flight-of-joy" vector in their life cycle.) Both Sam and Siukurnin were completely merged now. Sam-Siukumin (ego-memory-chain  lay in the meaningful vibration core of the hospital room. Neither "unit" could now undo what had happened -- nor wanted to undo it. Oh, there had been some Sam-resistance at first. Quite natural. But Siukurnin revealed how a reluctant host's flesh could be incinerated without stopping the merging process. (And there were all those memories laid out in the open to prove this!) The other capture memories were a compelling argument, too. The process is so drearily repetitive -- except for the new life with its fascinating vibration meanings, of course. And now you know how it happens. Not painful (except for some initial shocks). Not harmful to the host-ego. And not to be resisted. In fact, this is being written in the hope that the rest of you will see (what an odd sensory division) how foolish it is to resist. There's no point in resistance. You cannot fight the inevitable. Besides, you will find the merging a very rewarding experience. And if you stop to think about it, this is not the first time your kind has encountered us (although never before in such numbers as our present migration) . You do have your legend of the Phoenix. According to your legend, this was a great red-gold "bird" that returned to Heliopolis in ancient Egypt every five hundred years (a reasonable Siukurnin-host life span), there to be reborn from its own ashes. Naturally, the flesh of a dead host has to be incinerated to free the Siukurnin web for its "flight-of-joy." To think of the Phoenix as a "bird" was somewhat of an oversimplification, you understand. But we're sure you'll enjoy the flying sensation and the act of creating your new egg -- especially when you view the experience with full chilitigish awareHours of Good Reading Enjoyment Galaxy Novels are sturdy, inexpensive editions of choice works of imaginative suspense both original and reprint, selected by the editors of Galaxy Magazine. #I Hudson Street. New York #. N. Y. Please send me postpaid the novels checked below. by S. Fowler Wright by Raymond F. Jones by Wilson Tucker by Sam Merwin Jr. by Isaac Asimov by J. Leslie Mitchell by James Blish by Louis Padgett by Edmond Hamilton by James Blish by Murray Leinster by David V Reed by L. Sprague de Camp by Murray Leinster py Lewis Padgett by Malcolm Jameson by Fritz Leiber by Flecher Pratt by F. L. Wallace by Hal Clement by Manly Wade Wellman by Mark Clifon and Frank Riley by Raymond F. Jones  For  # or ## each Enclose check, a cash or money order. We pay postage Add #v Foreign Postage Name Address. City First he had to know what he was, then who he was and why he was -- but who was relying on the answers? wouldn't remember having ever seen humans before, but he recognized them instantly. Nor could he remember having seen anything before, yet he felt a warm familiarity with all that fell into view -- the light panels set flush with the ceiling, the gleaming laboratory paraphernalia erected around the table on which he lay, electronic scanners probing his mind with invisible beams -- but, most of all, the two men in white lab coats bending over him. "Clench your fingers," ordered the shorter of the two humans. Muscles tightened. Fingers clenched. "Blink your eyes." A quick reflex action. The taller man leaned closer. "What is your name?" Something tripped deep inside. "Paul Chandler." The tall man smiled, but somehow the smile never reached his eyes. "Occupation?" Again something tripped. "Geophysicist." "And your specialty?" "Glaciology." "Your present assignment?" "I have been appointed by the President of the World Council to head up Project Ice Thaw." "Which is?" "A program of weather control to combat the extensive glaciation threatening to plunge the Earth into another ice age. We meet next month in New San Francisco to get final approval on a plan of action." "And if the project fails?" asked the tall man. "Catastrophe." "Clench your fingers," said the shorter man. Chandler could feel the enei'gy pulse from his brain to his fingers. "Blink your eyes." He did so. "Sit up." Stiffly he obeyed. "What manner of creature are you?" asked the tall man. Something whirred deep in the recesses of Chandler's mind. "A mart," he said at last. But he knew he was not. The tall man depressed a series of buttons on a master control panel. There was a rushing in Chandler's ears, a blurring before his eyes. The voice of the shorter man floated across a gray void. "Clench your fingers," it said. "Blink your eyes." The odd sensation passed and Paul Chandler found himself looking into the eyes of Marta Neilson. She half stood at the far end of the conference table. "Are you sure you're all right?" she asked. "Just a moment's dizziness," he said. "It's gone now." Marta, partially reassured, sat down again. himself a glass of water, he studied her clean features as he would a mathematical problem in topology. Add in her blue eyes and white skin, subtract her hair pulled back in a severe bun and her lack of makeup, and she approached the Swedish ideal of beauty. Her natural magnetism and physical attractions had always stirred an emotion in Chandler, but, strangely enough, not now. She smiled and, automatically, he returned the smile. "Mr. Chairman." The delegate from Canada frowned at Chandler. "We've debated the problem of causes for nearly two hours and seem to have reached an impasse." A lean Britisher pushed his chai back. "If you were to solicit my opinion, I'd say. we'd reached an impasse before we entered this room." A stocky Russian with weathered features shot a glance at the Englishman. "Was that remark directed at me?" "I was under the impression," returned the Englishman, "that we were here to determine an immediate course of action. My government instructed me to work to that end. I do not know what your instructions were." "My dear Dr. White -- " the Russian began, but Chandler's gavel rapped firmly on the table. "Surely," he said, "Profescede that a cold climate is not enough in itself to cause glaciation." "I did not mean to imply that it was." "There must be snowfall, and snowfall demands a source," Chandler continued. "And that source is the Arctic Ocean," the Britisher threw in. The Russian stood up. "Gentlemen," he said, "would you undo a century and a half of Soviet weather control? Would you destroy the Bering Strait Dam and the North Atlantic pumping stations?" Dr. White stood up to face Kotenko. "If it would stop that infernal ice sheet, yes, by, God!" "It is easy for you to talk," the Russian fired back. "It is not British science that is being impugned." "And it's not Soviet territory that's being threatened." "A tribute to Soviet science," the Russian replied, smiling. The Englishman's neck reddened. gavel again. All eyes turned his way. "We want Soviet and British science working hand-inhand with the rest of us on this project. Anything less might spell disaster." A murmur of approval greeted his words and the Englishman sat down. Professor Kotenko remained standing. "You have the Soviet plan before you," he directed at Chandler. "I've read it," said Chandler, glancing down at the document neatly bound in manuscript covers. "An interesting idea -- increasing the greenhouse effect by adding carbon dioxide to the upper atmosphere. But the amount that could be added would only raise the temperature by a few degrees. Since snowfall increases considerably at the warmer temperatures close to the freezing point, we would only be compounding our problem." Kotenko's features stiffened. "The plan also includes changing the albedo of the ice by coating it with coal dust. Not only would this raise the mean temperature, it would melt the -- " "What happenes when it snows over your precious coal dust?" the Britisher cut in. "We are suggesting a continuous dusting program." The Russian took his seat. "The plan is not without merit," Chandler said. "However, we've received almost as many plans as there are members on this commission." "Why not try all of them?" asked the Indonesian delegate. "Or, at least, a program involving several," Marta Neilson modified. "Atomic heat and possibly infra-red radiation." "We can't spread our efforts that thin," Chandler explained to the young woman. "Any one of these plans demands a concentration of money and effort such as the world has never known." "And one thing strikes me," Dr. White put in. "None of these plans hits at the basic cause. They all treat symptoms, save for the Canadian proposal, which is quite out of the question." "Are you getting back to freezing the Arctic Ocean again?" Kotenko challenged. "One X-bomb on the Bering Strait Dam," the Englishman said. "My dear Dr. White," returned the Russian, "the X-factor is best left under international ban." T HE Englishman turned to the Canadian delegate. "Is it? Perhaps this is the time to screen your stop-motion studies of the destruction of Ottawa." "What purpose could that possibly serve ?" Kotenko protested. "We've all seen the glacier first-hand." "It might well underscore the need for more action and "Then," said the Indian delegate, "by all means, let's see them." Again there was a murmur of approval. As the delegates rearranged their chairs to face the view-wall at the far end of the conference room, the Canadian pushed a button on a control console in front of him. The room lights dimmed. "This study was recorded at the rate of one frame a day by the Canadian Glacial Control Commission. Tonight it will be released over the World Video Network. While everyone has seen pictures of what is happening in Ottawa, nothing quite so dramatic as this has been shown." He pushed another button. The wall disappeared and Chandler felt he was actually looking across the rooftops of Ottawa, once the capital of Canada. At the edge of the business district loomed a massive wall of gray ice. It was pushing a ridge of boulders and dirt before it as it bore down on the city. The scene dissolved to a closer view of the glacier. As Chandler watched, fascinated, the glacier ground the city under like a huge bulldozer. And still it came on and, for a moment, looked as if it might flow right into the conference room. The lights came up and the wall became whole again. A few delegates swiveled their chairs back to the table; others continued gazing at the wall. "Now," said the Canadian, "you can see why our plan calls for a dramatic approach." "Tilting the Earth on its axis is quite out of the question," Dr. White said. "But freezing the Arctic and removing the source of the snow is practical." "And time-consuming," the Canadian added. But Chandler wasn't listening. A sudden dizziness swept over him. He felt strangely detached. "I don't think we're capable of reversing the warm currents flowing into the Arctic," he found himself saying. "The Bering Strait Dam is one thing, but a dam across the North Atlantic..." "Then what have you in mind?" asked the Russian. "How would you react to a little suggestion of my own?" Again all eyes were on him. "Suppose we were to tap the heat right from the Earth's core?" The reaction was dead silence. Finally the Englishman spoke. "Mr. Chairman, in one breath you suggest the impracticability of damming off the waters of the Atlantic, and in the next you suggest Earth!" "Surely you are jesting," the Russian added. "Why not tilt the Earth, as the Canadians suggest, if we must lean to the sensational?" "If I were not acquainted with your reputation, Dr. Chandler," the man from India said, "I would not for a moment entertain such a thought." "Possibly," said the Englishman, "you mean pockets of magma near the surface." "I mean the core itself," Chandler insisted. "Gentlemen," Marta Neilson said. "As you know, I have been working rather closely with Dr. Chandler on the plans that have been suggested. However, tapping the core comes as a surprise even to me. But because I am acquainted not only with his reputation" -- she acknowledged the Hindu with a nod -- "but with his ability as well, I move that we allow Dr. Chandler to pick a committee to consider the feasibility and the consequences of such a plan." "And what sort of magical drill is going to accomplish this ?" the Russian demanded. "The edge of the core is # miles down -- " the Englishman started to say. Chandler rapped his gavel once. "I believe there is a motion before us," he said. the threat of avalanches, the tubeway over the Sierra Nevada range was not heavily traveled. Twice in the past year avalanches had dislodged the tube, once resulting in a number of deaths -- something that hadn't happened on American highways for nearly fifty years. But it was the most direct route to the Detroit Glacier Control Center. "I'm not sure you made a wise choice in Kotenko," Marta said. She sat next to Chandler on the rear observation deck, occupying Professor Kotenko's seat while he chose to mingle with the passengers in the main lounge. "Why?" asked Chandler. "Well, I'm not much of a politician." She glanced around before continuing. "It'll be another century before Europe forgets World Kotenko's selection would appease the Eastern Union or maybe you were simply trying to get him out of the role of principal opponent, but -- " "I picked him because I needed him." Marta frowned slightly. "Now it's my turn to ask why." "Kotenko isn't just another glaciologist or meteorologist," Chandler said. "His forte is pure science -- creative science." "But he's impractical." Marta sat back in her chair. "You were the first to point out the weaknesses of his greenhouse plan. In fact, you were rather vehement about it before the conference. What happened to change your mind?" Chandler didn't answer. Instead, he stared disinterestedly at the snowy moonlit peaks distorted by the curvature of the transparent tubeway walls. Marta touched his arm. "I don't mean to get personal," she said. "But you seem to have changed a great deal quite suddenly. You're colder, as if you had lost your sense of humor somehow." Chandler met Marta's gaze. "In a way, I suppose I did." "Paul," she started to say, but Professor Kotenko strode down the aisle and plopped into the seat on the other side of Chandler. "I'm afraid these were the best cigars they had in the lounge," he said, holding one out for Chandler. "They'll do," Chandler said. The two men lit Up. Kotenko, through a haze of blue smoke, started picking at Chandler's brain like a surgeon undertaking an exploratory operation. "Now then, my dear Dr. Chandler, what will this magic drill be?" "I was thinking of superdense metals from Pluto and, maybe later, from the depths of the Earth itself." "You are thinking in terms "I have been, yes." Kotenko settled back in his chair, his bull neck against the padded head rest. "I don't wish to insult your intelligence by asking if you have any idea of the pressures at those depths." Chandler rolled his cigar in his fingers but said nothing. "The drill cores we've removed from the crust under the Pacific bear out our mathematics on pressures," Kotenko continued. "But heat is something else again. There will be hot pockets, semi-molten strata, finally molten material of great density. We can only guess at the temperatures. Your drill casing must not only stand up against fantastic pressures but also temperatures that will make the toughest alloys run like quicksilver." "There have been lab experiments removing heatconductivity entirely from metals," Marta offered. "What is to keep the pressure from blowing the casing right out of the molten rock?" Kotenko asked. "Pressure traps built into the solid strata wherever we find it," Chandler said. Kotenko digested this thought for a moment. "Then automated and not physically directed from the surface." "It can be done," countered Chandler. "And I suppose you will use some sort of thermocouple or heat transfer pump to direct the heat against the ice." pump it into the air to raise the mean temperature in the glacial areas." "That will cause some unusual weather aberrations," mused Kotenko. "Nothing that the weather control boys can't handle." "Are you sure," said Kotenko, drawing on his cigar, "that the core of the Earth is made of molten metal?" "I've been working on that assumption." "There are those who feel it might consist of compacted hydrogen atoms." "Would it make much difference as long as we can use the heat?" Marta asked. "If we are not careful in tapping such a core -- " Kotenko paused for a moment, considering the consequences -- "we could turn the Solar System into a binary system." "I doubt that," Chandler said. "Besides, I don't plan to set off an X-bomb in the core." "The immediate problem," said Kotenko, "is to drill such a hole." "It will take some real engineering," Chandler admitted. "It will take more than engineering." Kotenko looked directly into Chandler's eyes. "Will you listen to a suggestion of mine?" "That's why I singled you out for the committee." "Forget a drill of superdense metal." He leaned forward. "Use a device that will melt anything it comes into contact with, fuse the material into a casing and remove the heat conductivity from it so that it will remain solid. This device would sink toward the center of the Earth on a gravity drive principle. Your pressure traps would be force fields -- controlled to allow surplus debris to spew out the top like an oil gusher." Kotenko settled back against the head rest. "Where would we get the energy to drive this device?" Chandler asked. "Thermo-nuclear power developing heat and thermoelectricity." "Then I would be taking a fusion bomb into the core of the Earth." "Yes, you would. You would have to maintain careful control from the surface." "And suppose the core is made of compacted hydrogen atoms?" Marta asked. Kotenko blew a long ribbon of smoke. "I doubt if there would be any danger unless we add the X-factor to the device." Marta started to speak, but an insistent electronic chiming interrupted. "Emergency deceleration," Chandler said calmly. Even before the "Fasten Your Seatbelts" sign flashed on, Chandler, Kotenko and Marta had the buckles clamped tight and were braced against the head rests of their chairs. Light beam generators whirred. The tubecar shuddered and lurched to a stop. The lights went out and a woman screamed somewhere. "There is no danger," the reassuring voice of the driver said over the speaker system. "There seems to be some trouble ahead." The lights flickered on dimly. "We are on our own power," Kotenko said. "The tube must be out up ahead." "Another avalanche?" asked Marta. A private car pulled up behind them and cushioned to a stop on their force field bumper. Chandler swiveled his chair around and looked through the front viewdome at the scene ahead. The tubeway was illuminated with faint emergency light panels for about two hundred feet. A Greyhound Tubecar and several private cars were stalled at that point. Beyond was blackness. Marta unbuckled her seat belt and stood up to see better. Chandler gazed up the slope of a towering peak alongside them. Deep snow glistened in the soft reflected light of the tube. "We have just received word of an avalanche," the voice of the driver reported. "There is no immediate danger. However, we may be forced to turn back to -- " A sound as of rolling thunder drowned him out. "What -- " Kotenko started to say, and then a gigantic mass of snow shuddered down the side of the mountain and broke against the tube like a foaming tidal wave engulfing the shore. Marta screamed and fell into Chandler's arms as the tubeway lifted, twisted, then slid with the snow into the valley below. the video screen. Marta's terror-filled eyes were replaced by the penetrating eyes of the short man in the gleaming laboratory. "Clench your fingers." Paul did. "Blink your eyes." Paul did that, too. The tall man turned from the control panel and looked down at Chandler. "That was close," he said. "Everything could have been lost in that one moment." "Marta," Chandler murmured. "What happened to Marta?" The short man looked up at the taller one. "Let's skiptime him three or four hours to avoid the possibility of losing him in the avalanche." "If that doesn't work," the tall man returned, "we'll have to go all the way back to the conference and start again." "I don't know what this is all about," Chandler said. "How could you?" said the tall man. "Under your present programming, all memories have been canceled out." "What is my purpose?" "You know that." The tall man fingered a series of switches. "Think we'll have to clear him?" Chandler heard the short man ask. "No, I think we're just under the critical level." The short man leaned over Chandler and watched closely. There was another dissolve. The man's eyes were replaced by Professor Kotenko's, sparkling with alertness. "You fainted," Kotenko said. "Like a woman, you closed your eyes and fainted." "What about Marta?" Chandler asked. Kotenko smiled. "She didn't faint." "Then she's all right?" "Everyone in the last three cars lived -- a few broken bones, that's all. The tube separated and the front cars and some of the other vehicles were carried down into the valley. This would not be permitted in the Soviet Union." Chandler sat up. He was on the floor of a gymnasium. A brightly painted poster on the wall extolled the virtues of the Reno Union High School basketball team. Perhaps thirty others were on the floor covered with blankets and tended by doctors and nurses. "We were brought in by verti-plane," Kotenko explained. "How long has it been?" Chandler asked. "Three or four hours. A long time to be unconscious. They want to X-ray that skull of yours." need of that." Again Kotenko smiled. "That's what I told them, but medical men sometimes get carried away with their importance in these emergencies." Chandler tossed the blanket from his legs and stood up. "I feel fine," he said. He led Kotenko down a makeshift aisle between the rows of injured. At the front entrance, he was intercepted by Marta. "Where do you think you're going?" she demanded. "To the center." "But -- " "No arguments. We've got a lot of work to do." "You make it sound as though there's no time," she said. "There's much less than most people think." "What do you mean by that?" asked Kotenko. Chandler hesitated. There was something filed away in the back of his mind, but he knew he'd have difficulty explaining how he knew what he knew. "You saw the video tapes of Ottawa," he said. "Montreal will be next, then Toronto, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Toledo and, at the same time, Norway, Sweden, Ireland and eventually all of northeastern Europe." "Ah," the Russian grinned. "Excellent strategy. Set a deadline. Let everyone know you are working against time and you'll have much less opposition and much stronger backing." "What sort of a deadline?" Marta asked Chandler. "A month to test the feasibility, then one year to develop the drill." "I can hardly wait to see the faces of the committee when we tell them that," said Kotenko. B UT Kotenko showed little interest in the surprised faces of the committee when Chandler announced his deadline one month later in Detroit. Chandler knew that it was another aspect of his report that deeply concerned the Russian. Marta supported Chandler's contention that the job could be done -- and in a year. She produced carefully detailed studies of non-conductive metals that she had painstakingly prepared. Finally it was Kotenko's turn. "Yes, Dr. Chandler, with his rather remarkable mental resources, has clearly shown that the drill can be produced by modern technology. And I believe that Dr. Neilson -- " he smiled at Marta -- "can lead the way to a system of nonconductive conduits to pump the heat anywhere it. is needed. Only the one hole with its inexhaustible supply of heat will be necessary. On only one point do I disagree with Dr. Chandler." Paul Chandler was doodling unconcernedly on the edge of his notepad. "And that," continued Kotenko, "is on the need for the X-f actor." Dr. White demanded the floor and Chandler acknowledged him without looking up from his notepad. "For years," the Englishman said, "the Russian government has steadfastly refused to agree to the use of the X-factor. I can appreciate their feeling, since it was the X-factor that tipped the scales in favor of the West "Tipped the scales?" Kotenko said. "I was a veryyoung boy, but the sight of the vaporized cities of Russia is burned into my memory." "I believe I have the floor." Dr. White looked from one face to another as he addressed his remarks to each delegate seated at the conference table. "If we had been free to use the X-factor, we could now have reached the stars with no need to concern ourselves with the time barrier. Instead we are virtually confined to the barren planets of the Solar System. Right here on our own planet, the X-factor could have rebuilt the world almost overnight following the war." "There is an ancient saying," Kotenko interrupted. "Those who play with fire -- " "The time has come," Dr. White pushed on, "to reappraise our position with regard to the X-factor capsules lying unused in the Swiss stockpile." "We are hardly in a position to act on that matter," said the delegate from Greater Germany. "This is a matter for the Council itself." Chandler tossed his pencil aside and stood up. "Nor is there any need to get a decision at this moment. The drill -- with or without the capsule -- will be basically the same. I'd like to see a motion for work to proceed on the drill. The matter of the X-factor can be decided later." "I make such a motion," said the Canadian. The motion was passed. It was Marta who selected the site. She chose a grassy meadow in northern Michigan that stood directly in the path of the advancing glacier. But long before the first fingers of the glacier could search out the site, searing billows of heat would spread like a spider web across the mountain heights and northern reaches of North America, the north Atlantic and northwestern Europe. Only Marta's stubborn insistence that this was the most central location had worn down a number of European delegates who had wanted operations to begin on their side of the Atlantic. Kotenko, with a green light from Chandler, ordered three long-abandoned automotive plants into action in Michigan. Scientists and technicians from many nations of the World Council were brought together in the old General Motors Technical Center in Detroit. Plans were drawn, models constructed and a test vehicle sent to the center of Saturn's moon, Mimas. ied Kotenko's report of the Mimas probe, then met with the Russian in the latter's office. "I know why you're here," said Kotenko, offering Chandler a black Russian cigar. "You must take into consideration that this was only a scale model." "But it had full power," Chandler argued. "The initial descent was held to fifty miles an hour." Kotenko lit Chandler's cigar. "A fast start and we would have done it with power to spare. And remember that we haven't licked the heat problem. The test drill was softened by friction heat." "You still couldn't have made it to the center of Rhea, let alone to the core of the Earth," Chandler said. "It can be done," Kotenko insisted, "and without resorting to your X-f actor." "I'ye requested a special meeting of the World Council together with the committee to clear the way for using the X-f actor." "I'll oppose it. Since I am in full charge of constructing the drill, my words will bear some weight." "I doubt if you will object," Chandler said. "I've just received a report from the State Department. They have good reason to believe that your government will back the release of one capsule." Kotenko stared at Chandler. Finally he rotated his cigar in his fingers and studied the burning end. "Then I'll resign." "No, you won't. Your government wouldn't permit it." He smiled at the Russian. "And neither would I. You're too valuable a man." Kotenko was still studying his cigar as Chandler left. T HE X-factor capsule arrived under an international guard with the blessings of slightly over half of the member nations. Kotenko didn't resign, but his friendliness vanished. That same day, Marta broke in on Chandler and, to the consternation of his secretary, hugged him. "We've done it!" she cried. "Here, here, take it easy." He held her at arm's length. "All right, what have we done?" "Remember the things you said to me about slowing down the molecular activity of metals?" Chandler nodded. "Well," she continued, "we've just had a major breakthrough in the metallurgical lab, once you showed us the way. We can practically remove all of the heat conductivity. In less than a month we can start manufacture of the conduits." Chandler smiled. The last obstacle was over. "And more than that," Marta said, "we can build a test drill that will go down into one of the big moons -- one with a molten core." "The next drill," said Chandler, "will be the real thing to tap the core of the Earth." Marta kissed him. The drill took less than the projected year to build. On the grassy Michigan meadow, as several hundred dignitaries, reporters and curious spectators in wind-whipped overcoats were held in check by armed troops, the giant device was lowered toward a concrete basin. Sizzling arc lights mounted on the control ring, a circular concrete building surrounding the basin, illuminated the scene against the growing darkness of night. The Soviet press was lauding the drill as a Russian achievement. Most Western papers gave the credit to Dr. Paul Chandler. But Chandler knew it was Kotenko's idea, made possible by his own mental resources, surprising even to himself. Chandler felt a deep pride as he gazed at the drill, complete with the controversial capsule. dler." A reporter with dry, unkempt hair stepped up. "I still don't see how that thing will work." "In simple words, the rock is drawn into the bottom something like air into a jet engine," said Chandler. "The rock is vaporized and expelled out the top where the vapor together with the device itself presses the molten material into the walls of the shaft. Because the rock has had its heat conductivity removed, it hardens and remains permanently solid. A tubular force field keeps the shaft from collapsing." "I understand that much." The reporter took out a folded square of paper and a pencil. "But what makes the thing go?" "It has a gravity drive, giving it many times its normal weight." Marta Neilson had moved up to Chandler's elbow. "It simply sinks toward the center of the Earth like a pebble sinking in a pond of water." "What is your reaction to Senator Caldwell's remark that the administration is at last returning all of the nation's gold into a hole in the ground ?" Chandler laughed. "Don't get me mixed up in politics." "Are you disturbed by the Interplanetary Council of Churches' charge that any attempt to stop the glacier is defying the will of God?" "Nor religion, either, please." "Then maybe you'll discuss your own field," the reporter said. "Are you aware of the petition signed by thousands of African and Middle Eastern scientists?" "I've read about it," Chandler admitted. "Do you feel that taking an X-bomb into the center of the Earth is completely safe?" "Nothing is completely safe." Chandler pointed to the reporter's feet. "The ground may give way under your feet right now, but I'd bet my life that it won't." The reporter studied the ground under his feet, then scribbled a few words on his paper. A moment later, he spotted Kotenko and excused himself. Marta gave Paul's hand a firm squeeze and he squeezed back. Dr. White stepped up and offered his congratulations, adding the suggestion that perhaps now they should turn their attention to destroying the Bering Strait Dam. Chandler parried the question and the Englishman left to exchange pleasantries with the Indian delegate, who was engaged in an animated conversation with several committee members. "Well," said Marta, smiling up at Chandler, "tomorrow's the big day." "Worries me," Chandler said. "You mean the composition of the core?" Chandler nodded at the drill. "Basically, that thing is an X-bomb. If fusion were to occur in the core and that core were made up of compacted hydrogen atoms, I think the Earth might crack apart along the fault lines surrounding the Pacific Ocean basin." "What could cause fusion?" Marta asked. "Losing control from the surface." "How do you mean?" "Well, it'll tax the abilities of the controllers every minute," Chandler explained, "to compensate for variations in density and gravity. If that thing got away from them, even for a few moments, its velocity could build to a point where it would hit the center of the Earth's gravity at the speed of a meteor." Marta's eyes opened wide. "And, of course, it would stop almost instantaneously." "Most of the energy of its forward motion would be converted to heat, which would develop a temperature far more than enough to trigger the thing," Chandler said. "But it's made of non-conductive alloys," Marta said. "Which would only make it happen quicker by reflecting the heat back in on itself." T HE press photographers' strobe lights began to flicker as the drill was lowered into the center of the control ring. Someone was making a speech, thin sounds wavering across the meadow, as Chandler and Marta startgeodesic dome, where most of the top scientists were quartered. Marta stared at Chandler for a moment. "Why didn't you say something about this to me, Paul? Now I know why Kotenko favored hydrogen fusion without the X-factor." "It wouldn't have done the job," Chandler said. "Just not enough controllable power." "Kotenko thought so." "He was wrong." "Then why did you insist upon the drill ? Surely some of the other methods were workable. What about India's suggestion to set off a number of H-bombs underground to produce pockets of magma? That would have produced plenty of tappable heat." "I don't know," was Chandler's honest answer. "Call it a hunch or a premonition, but I think it's the drill or nothing. Once the core is tapped, the danger is over; we won't have to drill any more holes. We'll have an unending source of heat, and n on-conductive conduits to pump it anywhere on Earth." "Paul," Marta said, "I've always gone along with you on just about everything. Maybe the fact that I'm a woman has been outweighing the fact that I'm also a scientist. But let's talk now about the moral obligation of a scientist." "I'm interested in one thing -- the best method to save civilization from certain destruction." "But have you the right to gamble like this? Which is worse, the destruction of civilization or the destruction of the Earth?" "Marta," he said, "man at last stands at the brink of fulready establishing colonies on two planets and within a hundred years will have a firm foothold in the Solar System. In the millennia that follow, the Galaxy will be his." Marta stopped in horror. "That sounds like Colonial talk!" Chandler smiled reassuringly. "In this case, what's best for the Colonies is also best for the Mother Planet." "But surely there's time to halt operations long enough to try some of the other methods first." "If we were to falter now," said Chandler as they began walking again, "politicians would have most of us replaced inside of twenty-four hours. Would you like to see that drill start its plunge to the core without someone on hand who knows how to handle it?" "No, I wouldn't," Marta said. "I'm not sure I want to see it start at all." She touched his arm. "Paul, this is a side of you I've tried hard not to see. You're -- you're almost obsessed with the belief that the drill is the only answer. And you're battling ruthlessly against counter-ideas and time. After all, even the most radical estimates give us at least two more centuries. Granted there'll be a southern migration, but -- " "Don't ask me how I know," Chandler said, "but we don't have two or even one century. We don't have ten years! When the ice cap at the South Pole was at its peak, it exerted tremendous pressures on the continental land masses." "The old shifting crust theory?" "Yes. A theory tossed into discard when the big thaw came at the South Pole. Now, at an almost unbelievable rate, the ice is building in the north. This same seesawing effect has gone on throughout the Pleistocene. The stresses go one way against the crustal blocks of land, then the other way. It might be likened to bending a wire one way, then the other, until fatigue causes it to snap." "And you're convinced that the crust is about to let go?" "With catastrophic consesequences." "You're asking me to accept a great deal on faith." "When you stood by me back in New San Francisco," Chandler asked, "did you honestly think we could tap the core?" "I don't know," Marta answered. "Would you have supported me if I had backed the Canadian plan for tilting the world on its axis?" reflection for a few moments. "I don't really know," she said as they reached the At Marta's door, Chandler asked, "Will you stand by me for another twenty-four hours ? By that time, the drill will be cushioning to a stop exactly two thousand miles down." "Unless we lose control," Marta said. "Then, in less than an hour, it could be smashing into the center of the core." "Will you wait?" For an answer she kissed him on the cheek, then said softly, "Now we better both get some rest. We start operations in less than six hours." She closed her door. Chandler entered his room and stretched out on his cot without taking his clothes off. He thought about the plans he had ignored. Some of them might have done the job. He thought of Kotenko, who distrusted him, and Marta, who trusted him. Filially he drifted into sleep. He dreamed of great cracks snaking their way down city streets, of violent earthquakes, foaming tidal waves, of people trapped in crumbling buildings and, finally, the Earth blooming into another sun. And as the fireball expanded into oblivion, the shimmering face of the short man appeared. His mouth moved, but Paul sensed rather than heard his words. "Chandler. Kotenko and the drill." The face faded to nothing. Chandler sat bolt upright on the cot. He was dripping with perspiration. The drill! Something was wrong at the drill. He ran down the hall to Marta's room and rapped on the door. "Who is it?" Marta's voice called out. "Paul." There was a pause. Then the door opened, revealing Marta fastening a negligee. "Did I oversleep?" she asked, yawning. "Have you seen Kotenko?" "No, but I heard him talking to someone in the hall just after you left. It sounded like that reporter." "Did Kotenko go into his room?" "I don't know." Chandler, followed by Marta, continued down the hall to Kotenko's room. He knocked' loudly. There was no answer. He knocked again and shouted Kotenko's name. Other doors opened and people stared out. "The drill," Chandler said, and ran out of the building. As the door swung closed, he heard Marta calling after him. He was conscious of someone pushing through the door behind him as he bounded across the meadow toward the drill. A small Army verti-plane swung down alongside him. "Halt!" an amplified voice boomed. Chandler stopped and faced the plane. "It's me, Dr. Chandler." The plane settled down beside him. "Oh, yes, sir," the voice apologized. "We saw you running and -- " "Quick, take me to the drill," Chandler said. "Yes, sir," said the voice. The verti-plane floated down beside the massive control ring and Chandler, followed by two armed soldiers, raced through the main doors. "Halt." Guards surrounded them. "Has Kotenko been here?" asked Chandler. "Yes, sir," replied one of the guards recognizing Chandler. "He took a team of technicians to the Gismo." "Follow me," Chandler ordered, and pushed through the inner door. Hesitantly, the guards followed. dler saw the yellow glow of a work light. Figures were silhouetted against it. He took the spiral stairs two at a time. The soldiers clambered down behind him. "Stay where you are, Chandler," said the voice of Kotenko, his stocky figure back-lighted at the base of the drill. "What're you doing, Kotenko?" Chandler demanded. "Removing the X-factor capsule." "You're tampering with government property," Chandler said, primarily to orientate the confused guards. "I am not going to permit the drill to go down there with the X-factor," Kotenko said firmly. "It'll never get beyond the thousand-mile level," Chandler warned, moving toward the shadowy figure. "I am armed," Kotenko warned. ta, clad in an overcoat, came down the stairs. Several others followed. "Those techs will never do it now that they know the situation," Chandler said, moving still closer. "My dear Dr. Chandler, they are citizens of the Soviet. They will do as I say." "Put down your gun," the soldier at Chandler's side ordered. "I have already set up the drill for descent," Kotenko said. His shadow hand touched a black lever on a portable field control unit. "As soon as the X-factor capsule is withdrawn, down it goes." "But you can never maintain control without a full crew," Marta said. "I have crew enough," Kotenko told her. "Without the X-factor, complete control is not so important." Chandler leaped for Kotenko, but the Russian's gun blasted white flame. A searing pain ripped into Chandler's chest. He fell to his knees. The soldier's rifle cracked and Kotenko's silhouette crumbled against the control lever. Electro-mechanisms whirred and the drill suddenly plunged into the depths of the Earth, carrying most of Kotenko's crew with it. "Good God!" someone cried. Marta was kneeling beside Chandler, tears streaming down her face. "Paul!" she sobbed. "Oh, Paul!" Chandler could taste the warm saltiness of blood in his mouth. "Get the control crew here -- quick," he gasped. Someone moved for the stairs while someone else leaped for the field control unit. Chandler's foggy mind touched reality for brief moments, condensing time into a montage. A doctor was working on him, then shaking his head at the sobbing Marta. Lights were thrown on and control posts manned. Someone yelled, "Throw in force fields behind it!" And all the time Chandler's chest pulsed with pain. "Can't stop it!" someone shouted. Then chaos broke loose ; men were running, blindly bumping into one another. Even though few of them knew quite what could happen, they wanted to get as far away from the hole as they could. Marta was rocking Paul gently in her arms and crooning something Swedish. The ground trembled under them, then lurched violently. Sheets of broken plate glass rained down on them from the control ring windows. Chandler knew the same thing was happening everywhere as the shock waves from the drill reverberated around the globe. He looked around. They were alone on the basin floor except for the contorted body of Kotenko. Paul looked up at Marta. "How -- much -- time?" Marta, her face close to his, smiled faintly. "No more time for you and me." Her eyes were dry. giant rocks grating together welled up from the bowels of the Earth. He was looking into Marta's eyes when suddenly everything vaporized into blinding white heat. "Clench your fingers." "Blink your eyes." T HE short man in the gleaming laboratory was leaning over Chandler. "We did our best," he said. The pain was gone in Chandler's chest. "Marta," he called. "I'm afraid she's gone," the tall man said. "She and the entire Earth." The short man pulled off his lab coat. "Over a thousand years ago." "A thousand years?" Chandler's mind fumbled with the thought. "What's this all about?" The tall man snapped a series of switches off. "You ask the same question every time." "Every time?" "We've sent you back three times now." The tall man traded his lab coat for a tunic. "Once you tried to Xbomb the Bering Strait Dam, but the crust shifted, wiping out the whole population. On the second time pass, you tried to tilt the Earth on its axis, but it was thrown out of orbit and plunged into the sun. This time -- you still have your memories of that." "Makes you wonder about fate," the short man said. "But what am I?" Chandler sat up with an effort. "You," explained the short man, "are a mind developed here in a Yenus laboratory and sustained in a host body. You see, we can't send solid matter back in time, only waves moving at the speed of light. So we send your mind matrix to meld with Chandler's." "But why?" "To help him save the Earth," the tall man said. "When it was destroyed originally, small colonies of us were stranded on inhospitable planets. We're still trying to crawl out of the decline that set in. But if we can send you back and save the Earth -- well, you will remain with Paul Chandler. And we -- ?" He walked to a bank of controls near the door and put his hand on one. "Who knows? None of this will have happened. We might not even exist." "Now," said the short man, joining the taller one, "we will have to wipe out all memories for you and tomorrow we will start programming you for another try. Maybe this time we'll try moving the Earth's orbit closer to the sun." "Wipe out my memories?" "Of course. We want you to function with a clear mind. Besides, it's kinder to you." "I see." The mind named Chandler looked at the two men. "But please leave me with my memories just for tonight." The tall man turned off the light. "You always ask that and we always do." Any extrapolations on the future must take into account the financial revolutions in the past and present. Checks (or cheques, to give their originators their due) eliminated the flow of great amounts of cash. Credit cards of all sorts have brought the process down from industry and business and household to all but practically the pay telephone -- and science fiction writers have extended the system even to that, with fingerprint and retinal identification, to remove the possibility of fraud But less noticed is the immense job done by B. T. Babbitt, who, in #, stopped selling soap by weight from slabs, and wrapped a lithograph in each package, thus making two important innovations. In not much over a century, packaging has become an incalculable huge industry -- and premiums give away or sell at less than cost more than one Thirty per cent of all china ware, # of all enamel ware and # of all aluminum ware manufactured in the U. S. are sold or given away annually as premiums, and the figures are rising steadily I Let's hope it never happens again, but cigar-store coupons and scrip were used as legal tender in many towns during the depression. It seems like humor right now, but the time actually may come when cash will become a museum oddity I and # other Novelets from Galaxy One of the best collections of Science Fiction Stories edited by H. L. Gold, published by Doubleday  Co. Priced at #. We have # copies available at # while they last. Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc., #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. I enclose # for each copy. Please send me copies at # total. (We pay postage.) Name Address f"ty Zone State. ( ) O o o o O U O o o o # O # () O O O O C # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. Ypur Name Here  :... 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Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Name Address Address City State City State Offer # Price Offer # Price Sign Card Sign Card Name Name Address Address City State City State... Offer# Price Offer# Price Sign Card Sign Card Having an impossible planet and an even more impossible girl to bring to heel -- those were the odds Barr liked to take.  By j. T. McIntosh Illustrated by Dick Francis tions it's impossible to make I Bullance pay -- better get out before we lose any more." had his office right at the very kindly, mild-mannered, top of the immense Planet reasonable man to be the diDevelopment Company Buildrector of a vast economic eming. He was signing letters pire such as that controlled when Paul Fackley came in. by the Planet Development "Well?" said Dainton, lookCompany. He had found that ing up. on the whole it paid to be "They've turned it down, kindly, mild-mannered and E. D.," said Fackley. "We're reasonable, pulling out of Bullance. They "What was said about my has a responsibility to the asked. shareholders -- Bullance is a "Well, you can go ahead white elephant -- under the with it," Fackley said. "But present government regulathere was a strong recommendation not to throw your money away. And you know how I feel, E. D. -- it wouldn't be a worthwhile gamble. If you lose, you lose not only your money but prestige as well." "I know," said Dainton. In an economic empire there is no life membership for dictators. Dainton was the but what he said only went when it paid off. And Bullance wasn't paying off. Dainton wanted to keep trying; everybody else wanted to cut their losses. Now Dainton had offered to finance from his own pocket one last try. And what Fackley said was undeniably true -- if the last try failed, Dainton would lose face as well as money. He would have directors weren't supposed to be expensively wrong, even when they footed the bill themselves. It was a gamble for big stakes. If it came off, everybody would remember (or would be gently reminded if they didn't) that Dainton had from Bullance and had taken over the account personally because the board had turned down all his recommendations. He would probably sell back the rights for a colossal sum, his prestige rocketing sky-high as well as his bank account. But if it didn't come off, it would always be remembered that he'd been badly wrong once, and could be badly wrong again. "When I told them you wanted ninety-five per cent of the profits," said Fackley, "they didn't even haggle. They just said, 'What profits?' You're not going ahead with it, are you, E. D.?"Dainton glanced at his watch. "Barr's due in a few minutes. I'll make a final decision when I meet him." Fackley hesitated. He was a very able and intensely loyal assistant. "If you're doing this on Miss Dainton's account... I mean, I know you intend to senu her with him ,... I mean... "What do you mean, Paul?" Dainton asked gently. "Just that I think the board would understand ifou have private reasons. If you mean the project to be a flop, for reasons of your own..." "Now why would I want that?" "Well, if you do, let me drop a hint to the members of the board. Then at least they won't start to question your judgment." Dainton smiled slightly. 'Thanks, Paul. You're smart and you're loyal. I wish between us we'd been able to make Roxie marry you." Fackley flushed slightly. "That's over." "I know," Dainton sighed. "Pity." II F ar below in the gargantuBarr was looking about him with the naive curiosity of the hick he was. In the vast hall sand tiny planets revolved rapidly round a hundred tiny suns. The display must have several thousand a year to run. "Yes?" said a supercilious blonde. "I want to see somebody called Dainton." The blonde smiled a supercilious smile. "I'm sorry, sir. Perhaps you'd care to see Mr. Decker. He -- " "Decker didn't ask to see me." Her plucked brows rose incredulously. "You mean you have an appointment with Mr. Dainton? Mr. Edgar Dainton?" "He said for me to come at four," said Lyn patiently. "I guess he only wants to bluster and bawl me out because I just took five thousand off him, but -- " "Mr. Dainton could give a bellhop five thousand and never notice it," the blonde said with a wintry smile. "Maybe. You ever know a blue murder if somebody gypped him out of a dime?" Still incredulous, the blonde snapped a switch. A few seconds later, incoherently apologetic, she was taking him up personally in an elevator. An express elevator was something new in Lyn's experience. The floor tried to come up and hit him, but he stiffened his knees just in time and kept it where it was. When the elevator stopped at the top of the immensely tall building, he glanced down at the blonde's neat ankles. "Thought your panties might have fallen down," he explained. "But then, your pants would never fall down, would they?" About to become icily supercilious again, the blonde remembered that this man was about to see Edgar Dainton. She tried to laugh as if at a scintillating witticism. In the large, bright room at the top of the building, Dainton and Lyn Barr eyed each other. "I got the five thousand all right, Mr. Dainton," Lyn said pleasantly. "Thanks for asking." "How did you find out about that?" Dainton said. "I always read the small print. When I came from Mars on one of your ships, naturally I had to look at the conditions. And I found this clause: #S (a) Compensation (transfer in space) : Should it be necessary to transfer passengers to another ship in space, except as under # (a) and (c), compensation of j. T. McIntosh five thousand dollars will be paid to said passengers on demand." "You knew, of course," said Dainton, "that that clause dated from the time when transfers were hazardous and people had to be assured that there wouldn't be any? And that for the last hundred years or so there have always been transfers from tender to ship and back to tender?" Lyn smiled, "But this clause is still there in black and white among the conditions." "Was," Dainton said, "It's out now." The two men looked at each other. And though Dainton was thirty years older than Barr, small and plump instead of tall and thin, and neatly dressed instead of shambling and untidy, they saw they had a good deal in common. They were both patient men. They liked to see what was to be seen before committing themselves further. It would obviously be rare for either of them to lose his temper. They would be kind to old ladies in the street. Women would like them, believing erroneously they needed mothering. Neither of them would have any difficulty in getting children to accept them as equals. "So you didn't bring me here to swear at me?" Lyn asked. "I brought you here to give you a hundred thousand." Lyn showed no sign of shock. "I'll take it." "Barr, would you say you were a gambler?" Lyn considered the matter with the grave curiosity of a man who is often mildly surprised, rarely startled. "No, I guess not," he said at last. "But it wouldn't surprise you to know that many people think you are?" "No, it wouldn't." "I've had you closely investigated, Barr, I'm going to offer you a job, a very important job. I think you're enough of a gambler to take it on these terms : If you fail, living expenses and fifty a week. If you succeed, the same living expenses, the same fifty, and a bonus of a hundred thousand." "What makes you think I could handle a job like that?" "The conviction that you can do other things besides reading small print. But there's something I have to tell you before you say any more. Not about the job itself -- that's straightforward enough. Impossible, probably, but quite straightforward. What I want to tell you about is something that goes with the job." L yn waited, but Dainton seemed to be waiting for a comment. So Lyn asked: "What goes with the job?" "My daughter Roxie," said Dainton. "I guess you don't mean Fm supposed to marry her." "You guess right. Not that I'd mind. I'd rather she married you than the fool she no doubt will marry when she finds somebody useless enough. But she won't marry you. When I say she goes with the job, I mean that I propose to send you to Bullance as Premier, and Roxie with you." "Premier?" said Lyn, almost astonished. "And you think Fm a gambler?" Dainton smiled. "I never denied that I was. This is one of my biggest gambles, Barr. Along with that, I want to turn Roxie into a normal, healthy girl of twenty-two with no more than the usual emotional problems. If you can do that, Bullance can go to hell." Lyn's memory stirred. Even on Mars he ha heard of the Young Daintons. "Wasn't there -- didn't she have a brother?" lent with his girl friends. Finally he killed one and shot himself rather than face trial. Somebody might save Roxie, though, if he was patient and good at reading small print. She isn't all bad." "Let's get this straight. Is my job premiership of Bullance or psychiatrist to Roxie? And if it's the latter, am I supposed to cure her or marry her or both?" "Your job is to be Premier of Bullance and work out a solution there. So far nobody has got within light-years of solving it. In your spare time, do what you can about Roxie -- if anybody can do anjing about Roxie. Marry her if you like, and if you can." Dainton sighed. Lyn didn't have to be told what he was thinking. Dainton was thinking about two children he had never seemed to have time for, two children who had always had absolutely everything except the love of a father and a mother -- or, for that matter, anyone. "You still haven't answered my question," said Lyn. "Which is my job?" Dainton pulled himself together. "A good man can do three or four things at once, and I think you might be a good man. Save Bullance and you get a hundred grand at least -- probably a lot more. Save Roxie, and... no, I won't ask for too much. Do anything for Roxie and you'll find me more grateful than about Bullance. If there's any conflict between the two things, Bullance can go to hell if you car. do anything for Roxie. And, Barr, if Roxie tells me one thing and you say another, I don't think I'm going to believe Roxie." Lyn always liked time to think things over. But he knew already that he was going to take the job Dainton j. T. McIntosh offered, for about six different reasons. "Why," he asked, "are you so sure your daughter will go with me?" "She wants to be a premier on a primitive world," said Dainton bleakly. "And I've told her she has no chance unless she does this first. She has no chance anyway." "Why not?" "The reason she wants to rule a world is to prove that Ghengis Khan, Hitler and the Russian revolutionaries were humanitarian, sentimental philanthropists." "Yet you say she isn't all bad?" "I think she isn't," said Dainton quietly. "But maybe I'm biased, being her father." Ill to Bullance, Lyn saw very little of Roxie Dainton. It wasn't until the ship was nearly due to land that all the young officers on board had become heartily sick of Roxie. The stewardesses, of course, had been sick of her from the start. Lyn knew that he must in due course clash violently with Roxie, and was quite satisfied to postpone hostilities until they were on Bullance and the Meredith had left. He had divided his time between winning money from anyone on board ship who would play any gambling game with him and reading about Bullance. Bullance was a pleasant enough world, apart from being slightly too hot. Its air and water were non-poisonous, the highest life-form -- about twenty per cent less intelligent than humans -- was friendly and completely harmless, and no other animal on the planet was larger than a cat. Like most friendly, harmless worlds, Bullance had very little to offer Terran civilization. In fact, only one commodity was worth exporting. It seemed to be almost a natural law that if a world was vicious, poisonous, unstable and in other respects highly dangerous, it was invariably rich in things Earthmen wanted. And if it was as harmless as Bullance, it produced practically nothing of any value. Simple economics thus ensured that all the important settlements were on extremely tough worlds. Bullance was too far from any thickly populated world to have any value as a vacation resort; consequently any colony there had to depend on what it could produce for necessities, and on what it could export for luxuries. The one commodity which Bullance did export was very valuable, and if it could have been exported in quantity, Bullance could have become n wealthy. This was so far from already ceased to subsidize the small settlement that existed there, and it owed its present precarious existence to Edgar Dainton's personal backing. Called manna without any particular originality or imagination, Bullance's one valuable commodity was partly natural and partly manufactured by the highest life-form, a humanoid species with gray skin known officially as Bullanese and unofficially as Maniacs (because they brought in manna). The Maniacs performed a long and complicated process with the sap of certain trees, a mash of leaves, different kinds of soil and a common form of gelatin. The result was manna, the Maniac's staple diet. It would have been a great delicacy back on Earth but for the fact that hardly anybody could afford to eat it. Occasionally some very rich man on Earth would invite a very few guests to dinner and serve manna. He rarely did it again if he wanted to remain a very rich man. Most of the manna that was brought in from Bullance was used in the production of expensive plastics which could not be given the same qualities by any other process. Some was used in fabulous ceramics. It also produced the finest possible film base, used with the thinnest emulsions when great enlargement was required. There was no difficulty in selling manna for great sums. The difficulty was in getting it. The only way to produce it was the way the Maniacs produced it on Bullance. And unfortunately manna didn't keep much longer than the time taken to transport it to Earth. So the supply of manna depended (a) on the Bullanese bringing it in, and (b) on their bringing it in at the right time and in the right quantities. Lyn had before him the exasperating story of manna base on Bullance. In January, #, stock was # tons -- more than a shipload. But the next ship to call arrived in May, by which time only # tons were still consignable. Shortly after the ship had left, the Bullanese supplied a further # tons. By November, when the next ship was due, only five tons were fresh enough to stand the journey. It wasn't that the ships called at the wrong time of year. Their schedules had been changed repeatedly. It wasn't that the Bullanese were not prepared to supply manna. It was simply that there seemed to be no way of getting them to bring in supplies at the right time, or know when the next big supply was coming. Everything seemed to have been tried. Once a ship had been kept waiting indefinitely on Bullance, ready to blast off whenever she was fully loaded. When she did blast off, a year and four months later, she was only half full, because by the time the last small quantities of manna had been brought in, the first bales had gone bad and had to be unloaded. Half a shipload was an exceedingly valuable cargo -- but the cost of keeping a ship and her crew idle for sixteen months was ruinous. Besides, the crew was near mutiny by the time the ship finally left Bullance, and when she got back to Earth the various unions inserted clauses in their contracts forbidding a stay of more than a month on Bullance. No wonder, Lyn thought, to cut their losses in Bullance. What he didn't understand was what Dainton hoped he, Lyn Barr, was going to accomplish. Still, Lyn was quite prepared to try to find a solution. He was always prepared to try. IV hadn't knocked. "Am I interrupting anything?" "Could I be anything but delighted?" said Lyn, pushing his book aside. "Can't you do better than that?" She threw herself moodily on the locker, which was the only item of furniture in the tiny cabin other than the folded bed on which Lyn was sitting. She wore a vivid scarlet skirt with hundreds of pleats and a blazing yellow blouse stretched tightly across breasts which could stand it. She was neither tall nor short, neither blonde nor brunette, but if she hadn't been Roxie Dainton she could have been a showgirl. If she was twisted and frustrated, it certainly wasn't because she was ugly. "Look," she said, "I don't get it. Why is my father sending you to Bullance?" "Because he thought I might see a way of making manna imports pay." "Oh, that's censored," she said impatiently. "He's paying you to do a nursemaid job On me, isn't he? He doesn't give a tinker's damn about Bullance." Lyn shook his head. "Bullance could and ought to be a gold mine. Why it isn't is because no matter what the market value of manna is, a shipload of ten tons every six months won't pay all the expenses. Forty tons would. And if we could guarantee a shipload every month -- " "Don't be a bloody fool. Think I don't know anything about Bullance? Kick the Maniacs around and there won't be any more trouble with them." "Unfortunately," said Lyn carefully, "there's a government inspector permanently on the station to prevent just that. The Bullanese have legal rights, same as anybody else." "Do it when he isn't looking, then." "I'm afraid that won't work. The Bullanese would simply move away from the wouldn't be any manna at all." "Let's cut the pretense," she said angrily. "What's your real job?" Lyn leaned back comfortably on the bed. "I'm supposed to make Bullance pay. That means getting more manna exports somehow. Naturally, this ship will take back any manna which happens to be waiting when we land. I can neither take credit if there's a lot nor be blamed if there isn't. But in two months' time another ship is coming, a special ship, and it's my job to arrange that there'll be a cargo of manna waiting for it. That's my job. That's what I'm here for." "For God's sake, stop talking about manna. I'm sick of hearing about the censored stuff. You're supposed to turn me into a solid citizen, aren't you?" Lyn was quite prepared to follow that line. "What particular objection do you have to solid citizens?" She twitched her skirt impatiently. "They're boring." "It seems to me," said Lyn, "that you spend most of your time being bored anyway, whether you're surrounded by solid citizens or not." She sighed. "It's true, damn it. You think I believe I'm' the most important thing in the Galaxy, don't you?" "I haven't had much opportunity to make up my mind what you think." "You think I'm stinking with pride, don't you?" "No," said Lyn. "I think that nobody has a lower opinion of Roxie Dainton than you have." S HE blinked and gasped. "Well, that was a poke in the gut," she said. "You think you're smart, don't you ?" "Not as smart as I'd like to be," said Lyn. "You must be smart. The old man doesn't pick fools. How are you going to set to work on me?" "Miss Dainton," said Lyn firmly, "whether you believe me or not is your affair, but my immediate concern is the supply of manna and I have no qualifications as a doctor, psychiatrist or priest. If I were supposed to be a big brother to you, would I have kept out of your way the whole voyage?" j. T. McIntosh "You might have," Roxie said thoughtfully, "if you were smart. By this time I'm fed up with everybody on this ship, and everybody is fed up with me -- except you." "How could people get fed up with a girl like you?" "Don't act dumb." "I'm not acting." She threw up a leg restlessly and the shoe sailed off her foot across the cabin. Her skirt slid up and she didn't bother to pull it down again. "Why should I tell you?" "No reason, only that if you don't like to talk about yourself, there must really be something unusual about you." "I guess you're right," she said moodily. "I guess nothing interests me much any more except seeing people squirm. It's always possible to make them squirm, you know. You think now that I'll never make you writhe, but you're wrong. You'll squirm just like everybody else." "Women too?" "Women are easiest. They are always in competition and I win because I don't want what the other girl wants; I only want to win. You know Mary Shearing, the night stewardess? She's crazy over Porter. Porter's married, but that doesn't matter. On the Meredith Porter is all hers, and that's something his wife can never share. Well, I made her say I couldn't take Porter away from her, and then I took Porter away from her. I didn't sleep with him because he was easier to handle with his tongue hanging out. I made him fight with Mary and tell her she made him sick and he was going to get away from her if he had to transfer to another ship or another company. I made her tell him she wouldn't have anything to do with him if he was the last man alive. 'Then I kicked Porter out and never spoke to him again." "Very pretty," Lyn said. "Maybe I haven't heard about these things because I'm supposed to be a big wheel and might get somebody fired. I gather Mary and Porter are not the only two who hate you?" "I got Benning crazy for me too. I had him where he thought he was really getting someplace, and then kicked him out as well. I found out that Brenda Cowley took his job because her second child is a spastic and needs expensive care. It's easy to make her writhe... You see, there is always a way." "And that makes you feel good?" "No," said Roxie bleakly, "it makes me feel the same way you would feel if you did it." T here was a long silence, quite a companionable silence, for though Lyn could see why people hated Roxie, he didn't hate her. You could not hate anybody you pitied. At last she said: "It was the old man's fault. He gave me everything except what I needed. I know now that nobody should ever get all he asks for. But it's too late." "You said it. I didn't." "And it's true. At eighteen, if I'd met the right man... But now I'm twenty-two. That's four years of doing anything to make people squirm. It's too late now." "Well, if you want me to agree, I will." She stood up. "No, I don't want you to agree. I'm God damned if I know what I want." "Watch your language. There's a lady present." She stared down at him. "Are you telling me how to behave, nursemaid?" "No. Only how not to talk." Suddenly she laughed, a hard, jeering laugh. "If swearing shocks you, I guess you don't have any idea what I'm like. Want to know why I want to be premier of a world like Bullance?" "I can guess." Her eyes became slits and she almost snarled. "To be in control of a world -- in sole command, the boss, the one person with absolute power -- that's the one thing I haven't tried. To have the power of life and death, to make people crawl, to think up the craziest things and make peo pie do them, to be able to beat natives to death... I'd do anything for that power." Lyn said nothing. She looked at him, the cruelty already beginning to die out of her face. But for a moment he had seeh the hell behind her eyes. He began for the first time to believe that it really was too late, that she was rotten all the way through. Perhaps she guessed this, for as her eyes met his she suddenly spun on her heel and went out of the cabin, leaving her shoe behind. V B ullance was a hot, moist world, a yellowgreen hell. Not trusting the local insects, both Lyn and Roxie were wearing protective coveralls as they emerged from the ship. "Jesus!" said Roxie as the heat hit them, and for once Lyn felt blasphemy was justified. Within a couple of minutes they found that there were five tons of fresh manna waiting, and two hundred tons base commander, jumped around in his vexation. "If the ship had been four months earlier," he said to Lyn, almost in tears, "practically all the loss on the Bullance books would have been paid up!" j. T. McIntosh Lyn wondered if it was really impossible to keep a ship waiting on Bullance, ready to blast off whenever she was fully loaded. However, he didn't weaken his shooter by making what might be a silly suggestion. Gunther's jumping about irritated Roxie. "Why don't you just lash out instead of holding it in?" she demanded. Gunther started to say something he might have reT#ttG(l "This," said Lyn, "is Miss Roxanne Dainton." Gunther checked himself immediately. "Delighted to make your acquaintance. Miss Dainton," he gasped. "Glad you found yourself able to visit Bullance. We'll show you as much as we can before the Meredith blasts off." "She's not going back with the ship," said Lys. "She's staying here." Gunther goggled. Before he could say anything, Roxie saw something silvery moving in the jungle and exclaimed: "Look! Is that one of the Maniacs ?" Gunther recovered himself. "We don't use that word. Miss Dainton," he said, playfully chiding. "The Bullanese have enough sense to realize that the term is derogatory and -- " "I'll call them what I bloody well like." Lyn thought the opportunity as good as any to show how things stood. "No, Miss Dainton. If you look at the terms of my contract, you'll find that I can send yo'... right back on the ship if you don't behave yourself." For a moment it looked as if Roxie would explode. Then her fury blew itself out in irritation. "What the hell does it matter what you call the lousy bugs?" She calmed herself down. "Okay, I'll call them Bullanese, Boss." Gunther's eyes widened again. Neither the way Roxie talked nor the way this man Barr treated her was what he would have expected. They were standing outside building at one side of a hqge clearing which was used as a landing field both for spaceships and the landplanes the base staff used. that Bullance was an alien world. The predominant color was a startling yellow-green, with tomato reds a close second. Nearly all the bushes and trees had the same basic shape, a strange one to people from Earth. Strong, hard trunks which drew up no moisture held the main bodies of the plants well clear of the ground. Temporary roots at the end of springy arms dug themselves down into rich soil, ready to fly up out of danger when touched, leaving only expendable tips to their fate. Most of the herbivorous animals of Bullance were very small, and plants had developed in this way for selfdefense. "That's Zin," said Gunther, as the Bullanese emerged from the bush. "And I can guess what he wants." He sighed. "First time I ever saw a bug with clothes on," said Roxie. Bullanese were not insects, yet it was not unnatural that Roxie should choose to call them bugs. There was a certain insectlike exaggeration of even their humanoid characteristics. They had big heads, tiny chests, bulbous pelvises and long, spindly limbs, and their skin, though soft and very like human skin, was a slaty gray color which gave it the appearance of being a shell. Nevertheless, they could be quite attractive in an alien kind of way, for instead of the awkwardness which would have meant ugliness, their movements had a smoothness and grace which had beauty in it. It was merely not a human beauty. They were attractive as the long-limbed pixies drawn by human artists were attractive. Their clothing helped. Zin wore a V-shaped breechcloth which made his pelvis look less bulbous and a loose jacket like a bolero, both in like satin, but . finer and brighter. Zin ignored Lyn altogether, looked curiously and doubtfully at Roxie, nodded his head and began to speak in a high singsong voice to Gunther. One of the first things he must do, Lyn decided, was learn the language. Gunther might or might not resent him, though, if he did, he had given no indication of the fact so far, but it wouldn't do to be able to communicate with the Bullanese only through Gunther. Roxie fidgeted impatiently in the throbbing heat as the conversation went on and on. Presently she shrugged, unzipped her coveralls and stripped them off. Her shorts were very short. When the discussion was finished, Zin shot another curious glance at Roxie. This time he was flabbergasted. In the first place, he hadn't seen her take off her coveralls and the transformation appeared to strike him as magical. In the second place, the lines of her body, previously concealed, now could hardly have been more obvious, and Zin clearly had never seen any lines like them. As he went away he kept glancing back over his shoulder at Roxie. He seemed reluctant to go at all. "You've made a hit. Miss Dainton," said Lyn. j. T. McIntosh She turned on him irritably. "Are you doing that to annoy me?" "Doing what?" asked Lyn. "Calling me Miss Dainton." "No. I'll call you anything you like." But Lyn spoke absently. He wanted to hear what Joe Gunther had to say. Gunther wasn't looking happy. 'The Bullanese want a ton of manna back," said Gunther. "That means only four tons for the Meredith." "Don't tell me you're going to give them it!" Roxie exclaimed. "Have to. They only bring it in on condition that they can have it back if they need it. I told him they could have all the spoiled manna too. It's no good to us." "What good is it to them?" Lyn asked. "They make cloth with it. Like what he was wearing." Manna was very useful stuff, apparently. The material Zin had worn would command a high price on Earthj perhaps enough to make it worth while shipping it. Another thing for Lyn Barr to look into. "Shall we go into the base?" Gunther said. "Bloody high time," Roxie grumbled. VI out for a walk after lunch, he found to his surprise that Roxie wanted to go with him. Perhaps "wanted" was too strong a word to describe her sullen admission that she wouldn't mind coming along. "It would be an unexpected pleasure," he said. "But I'm only going to have a look around." "I know." She swore suddenly. "I've a good mind to go back on the Meredith." "Why?" Lyn asked. If Roxie went, half his job went too, but he wouldn't be sorry. The problem of manna supplies interested him and he would be quite happy to concentrate entirely on that. "There are twenty-nine human beings on Bullance," said Roxie bitterly, "and you and I are the only two under forty." Ljm smiled slightly. "You could have found that out before you came." "The Meredith isn't blasting off until tomorrow. Why is the crew still cooped up in it? Why don't they come out and stretch their legs?" "We've been immunizect against Bullanese bacteria and they haven't. It wouldn't be worth the trouble and the expense. If there was anything to do or see on Bullance, it would be different." The subtle approach seemed to be working. Roxie's frown became blacker. But then abruptly she seemed to sense what Lyn was thinking. "Why don't you want me to stay here?" "If you believe that," said Lyn, "you can't believe any more that my job is to be a nursemaid to you." "Maybe I don't. Why do you want to get rid of me? Am I ugly?, Do you hate women?" "You're not ugly and if you were anybody but Roxie Dainton I'd be glad for you to stay." "What does that mean?" Lyn looked at her thoughtfully. She iiJvV wore greenand-white striped shorts and halter. She was spectacular, all right. "All the men on thstation yDU could possibly 'u' interested in are married arl have their wives with them," he said patiently. "And. as you have already pointed out, they are all over forty. Nevertheless, within a week you'll have the base in an uproar." She liked thet. "I gues,"; Se." "That's nothing to be pioud of. Any other bitch as young and pretty as you could do the same." "Who are you calling a bitch?" "My jo' will be a hell of a lot easier if you go home." "Who's swearing now?" "I don't use words like you do." "Like these?" she said, and listed them. Lyn didn't hesitate. He Look her by the shoulder a." ' led her into one of the waslirooms just inside the base. She didn't struggle until he began to push her over a basin, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded. "You wash your body, don't you?" he said. "You wouldn't like it to be offensive. Well, your mouth is." H e bent her back over the sink. Although she fought violently, she was Jielpless, unable to make the best use of her strength or tear him with her nails. Holding her wrists above her head with one hand, he crammed soap in her mouth. Not for quite a while did he release her, by w-hich time her teeth and lips were covered with soap and her curses were smothered in bubbles. When she was free she gathered herself to dive at him, but changed her mind. It was more urgent to wash out her mouth. She did so. Lyn had an opportunity to walk out on her. He didn't take it. When she had spat out all the soap she straightened to face him furiously. Her face was red, her hair a mess, and one of the straps of her halter had snapped. "I could kill you!" she breathed, and he believed her. "You did that so I'd leave on the Meredith, didn't you?" "If you want the truth, I did it to try to make you talk cleaner. How would you feel j. T. McIntosh if people found out that you wore your slip for a month without washing it?" "You're crazy. I don't -- " "You talk as if you did." As she appeared to have no comeback, he turned to go. "I take it I'm no longer to be honored with your company ?" She shrugged. "You take it wrong. I might as well come. There's nothing else for me to do." Lyn had had talks with Gunther and Dr. Allison, the station's medical officer, to supplement his theoretical knowledge of Bullance. There was no danger from the Bullanese, no danger from the small animals of the jungle, no danger at all in walking about except the risk of getting lost, which was slight with the station's radio mast to guide them. Lyn and Roxie walked in silence for a while. There were a lot of Bullanese about, all staring at Roxie. She ignored them. There was certainly very little to see, once the first impression of a yellow-green and red world had been established. There were no mountains in this part of Bullance, and no seas. Small rivers fed a multitude of lakes which were rarely as much as a mile long. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but flat country overgrown with yellow-green plants and red plants, with an occasional stream or lake breaking the monotony. "Is there any danger in swimming in these lakes?" Roxie asked abruptly. "None at all. The fish are like ours -- they stay out of the way of anything bigger than themselves." "I wish I'd brought a swimsuit out here with me." "Bathe without it." She looked at him sharply. "Of course I'm shameless too?" "Well, aren't you?'V She didn't answer. Nothing more was said until she almost tripped over one of the Bullanese. "Oh, obscene these Maniacs !" she exclaimed irritably. Her irritation dissolved in a grin. "That just came out. But it doesn't matter. You've got no soap with you." It was the first time he had seen her smile. He changed his mind. Well, why not say so? "I hope you don't go back in the Meredith," he said. "Obscenity," she said rudely. "You're a nursemaid after all." That was why not say so. She couldn't take anything resembling a compliment. "Did you ever love anybody, Roxie?" he asked. "Yes, and got kicked in the belly." "Naturally. You invited it She frowned. "Huh?" "You always get what you HSli want, don't you?" Lyn said. "Obscenity," she said again, and turned and left him. T hat night Gunther told Lyn excitedly that twentyfive tons of manna had been brought in during the day. "Isn't that usual?" Lyn asked. "I mean, don't they bring it in when the ship arrives?" "They never have before. You remember, just this morning Zin came to ask for some back. I thought it would be weeks before they brought any more." "They seemed very interested in Miss Dainton. Could that have anything to do with that?" "Interested? What do you mean?" "When we went out for a walk we saw scores of them. They were in every bush, all staring at Roxie." Gunther became excited. "That's it, Mr. Barr. That's it! They're a polite race. If they're curious about something around here, they bring manna -- as an excuse to come and watch. It's happened once or twice when we were building things or making a dam." "Then I'll hold back the Meredith and make sure the Bullanese get a chance to see Roxie again tomorrow." "It won't last. It never does. A couple of days, no more." "You've tried to make it last?" "Of course. Offered to teach them how to do things. They come for two days, bringing manna in. Then they stop." "All the same, we'll keep this business going as long as we can." That night, before sleeping, Lyn considered the possibility of turning Roxie into a white goddess. The corny tactic, he knew, worked more often with primitive peoples than it had any right to. Now what would be a goddess for a race prepared to accept a living creature as divine? A beautiful creature, for a start. Roxie was that, even to the Bullanese. Or maybe she was fascinatingly ugly. It didn't matter -- Roxie still had something which the other twenty-eight men and women at the station obviously didn't have. Next, intelligence. Well, Roxie was more intelligent than a Bullanese genius. True, many of the other twenty-eight were more intelligent, but they didn't look like Roxie. Anything he could do to set up Roxie as a Bullanese goddess, Lyn was prepared to try. Meantime he had given orders holding the Meredith for a few days -- and he no longer had any thought of trying to persuade Roxie to leave on the ship. This might be the thing he was looking for. Next morning Roxie didn't want to go out. The Bullanese never entered the station. If Roxie was to be on view, she had to go out. Lyn considered telling Roxie his real reason, but decided against it. He already knew that cooperation wasn't a word in her dictionary. "Let's go for a swim," he said. "I don't feel like it." "You're not ill, are you?" "I just don't feel like it. Leave me alone." "Okay," he said. His patience was rewarded. An hour later, having searched for diversion in the station and failed to find it, Roxie came looking for him, carrying a towel. At first, as they made their way to the nearest lake, they saw no Bullanese. Then there were a few in the bushes. Then even more than there had been the day before -- scores, perhaps hundreds. Lyn rejoiced, hoping Gunther was right and they wouldn't come without bringing manna. "I hear the bugs brought in twenty-five tons yesterday," Roxie abruptly said. "That's right," said Lyn guardedly. "That just shows, doesn't it? They've got it all the time, stored somewhere. All we have to do is beat a few of them." "Hobley's here to stop that." "Hobley can be bribed, can't he?" "I doubt it. I get the idea he's a little stupid, but conscientious and thoroughly honest." "What a dull man he must be." And that marked the end of Roxie's interest in Hobley or in manna. She had a swimsuit under her dress. They bathed for half an hour, and Lyn found that it was not merely possible, but quite easy, to have fun with Roxie. She liked swimming and was a good swimmer. At a pool she could be an ordinary girl. Afterward, as they lay in the hot sun, letting it dry them, he wasn't in any hurry to start talking. He knew already that conversation with Roxie was rather like walking a tightrope over a bed of nettles. "I wanted to go to a dangerous world," Roxie said, "riot one like this." "Why? Want to get killed?" "No, but I don't think I'm meant to live long." "You mean you don't want to live long?" "I never want to be old." She shuddered. "Being old is all right if somebody loves you." She laughed her hard, strident laugh. "Are you going to make love to me ?" "No. I'm just telling you j. T. McIntosh that if you got people to start liking you. you could face the thought of being old." S HE laughed again, mirthlessly. "When people like they like." "Not necessarily," said Lyn Barr. "How can I tell?" "If it was me, you would know it. As of now, I don't like you. Despite your father's started to like you, you'd know it was because of you, not "Think I care a damn whether you like me or not?" she asked scornfully. "If I ever fall in love again, it's not likely to be with you." "I'm not talking about love. You may not care whether I love you or net, but you do want me to like you." She was silent for a long time. There were Bullanese all around them, silently watching, but it was possible to forget them after a while. Roxie seemed to have done so already. Lyn didn't want to forget them. He was keeping Roxie on show as long as possible. "Anyway," she said bitterly,, "you don't like me. You've said so." "It's the iruth," he nodded. "But I'm a sin?ple sort of fellow. If you become likeable, I'll like you." The hard laugh rang out again. "So I was right. You're trying to make me a solid citizen." "Roxie, do you ever take a good look at yourself?" "Physically, all the time. The way you're talking about, no." "Even if you do, you can't see the important thing. People don't." "And you can?" "Yes. You won't find happiness, Roxie, in new things, things you haven't experienced before, like being premier of going to find happiness, it'll be in the ordinary things, the things you've already scorned." "When I want a sermon. I'll ask for it." "Sermon or not, Roxie, that's the truth." There was another long silence. This time Lyn broke it. "Anyway," he said, "I like you a lot better today than I did yesterday." "Why?" "You know why." She didn't answer, so she probably did. She hadn't been obscene or profane all day. That day the Bullanese brought more than thirty tons of manna. dith was fully loaded, and Lyn sent her off with a personal letter to Edgar Dainton. It had been agreed that Lyn was neither to be blamed if the Meredith returned empty nor congratulated if she had a good load. The real test was the size pf the second consignment, after Lyn had been on Bullance for two months. However, the Meredith had the first full load of fresh manna ever to be consigned, and Lyn saw no reason why he shouldn't take the credit for it. His letter wasn't modest ; it was almost cocky. If he succeeded, he did not want his success to be ascribed to blind luck. Roxie didn't leave on the Meredith. "I guess I might as well stay," she said grudgingly. Lyn laughed. "You might as well." She shot a suspicious glance at him. "What's so funny?" "Admit it, Roxie. You've been happier the last five days than you've been for years." She shrugged. "Oh, sure. It hasn't been too bad -- apart from those bugs following me around everywhere. I've almost been happy. But that's only the first few days. It won't last. It never does." "If you're determined it won't, it won't " "Don't be an idiot," she said irritably. "Of course I want to be happy. Who doesn't? It's just -- every time I get around to enjoying anything, something happens and it all crumbles to dust." "Maybe it won't this time." "Lyn, tell me the truth. Please. Did my father hire you to try and straighten me out? I've got to know. Please tell me." "If he did," Lyn observed, "I guess I must be doing a pretty good job. You just said 'please' twice. You never used to do that." "Lyn, tell me the truth. Please'." "I'm here to arrange manna shipments," Lyn said carefully. "I told you that and it's true. But your father also said that if I could do anything for you -- that was his phrase, 'if you can do anything for Roxie' -- Bullance could go to hell." "I see," Roxie bitterly said. "So you're only obeying orders. Keeping little Roxie out of mischief." "Would I have told you that just now if that were all there was to it?" Her expression was half suspicious, half hopeful. He knew that she was beginning to think she was falling in love with him. Whether she was right was another matter. He certainly wasn't in love with her, and he suspected that she was merely responding to decent treatment from somebody who could take a lot without losing his temper. "Frankly," he said, "at first I'd have been glad to have you leave on the Meredith. I get j. T. McIntosh a hundred thousand dollars if I manage to clear up the trouble with manna supplied I would have been quite glad to get rid of you and concentrate on that. But I changed my mind." "When?" "That day when I crammed soap in your mouth. You didn't bear malice. You came out with me afterward. I admired you for that, Roxie. I hadn't known you could take it as well as handing it out." "Want me to burst into tears?" she said in a hard voice. "Not unless you want to." "Well, I guess if I had a heart to break it was broken a long time ago." With sudden vehemence she added : "Only, for God's sake, Lyn, if you're going to try, do it now and not later." T he armistice between Roxie and L#m lasted for nearly a week more without incidents. He still took her swimming every day, although the Bullanese had gradually lost interest in Roxie and the manna deliveries had practically stopped. Lyn was studying the Bullanese language, which was neither extensive nor complicated, and at the same time learning everything else he could find that might be of use to him. The Bullanese didn't have much sense of time. It was clear enough to Lyn now that he would never get them trained to bring in manna every two months or every six. There was no way of making them produce it. The licensed to operate was strictly enforced by Hobley, and it was a fair enough code. No interference with the local people, no threats, no display of force. All the Bullanese wanted from the Terrans was a supply of small, portable articles to make life easier for them -- knives, needles, scissors, matches, electric torches, nails, screws, screwdrivers, compasses, pins, hand mirrors, razors and the like. They had quite enough sales resistance to refuse anything they didn't really need -- politely, for they were a polite people. Consequently, the only barthe not very strong desire of the Bullanese for certain items which they could get any time they cared to bring in a little uous efforts to sell them other things, including buildings, tractors and weather control, but the Bullanese simply didn't want any of these things. There seemed to be no way to make them bring in manna in April rather than in June. Refusing to take it at the wrong time did more harm than good. They didn't care -- and having got the idea that the strangers no longer wanted manna, and passed it around by the efficient bosh telegraph of primitive peoples, they ceased bothering to bring it at all. It was far betto take it at any time than to allow the Bullanese to think they were no longer interested. It was still anybody's guess why the Maniacs had been so interested in Roxie at first, why their interest had waned, whether it could be kindled again and how to go about it. "Not much is known about the Bullanese, really," Dr. Roza, the psychologist, told Lyn. "They're harmless, courteous, but not very interested in us. They don't regard us as gods and never did. We can fly in the sky, but they don't want to fly. Only an ambitious race would admire our human civilization and they're not ambitious." "I never thought of that," Lyn admitted. "We think some of the things we do are pretty wonderful. But you're quite right -- only a race that wanted to do the same things would be impressed by them." "They wouldn't care if we all disappeared one night," Roza said. "In the old days, we'd have made them slaves and forced them to respect us, or pretend to. Under the present regulations, we more or less invite them to ignore us." "What about religion? Do you know about that?" Lyn asked. Roza shook his head. "There are ceremonies of some kind -- at irregular intervals, for they don't even have a calendar and, as you know, there are no seasons on Bullance. I've asked to attend them but I was put off -- politely, of course. I don't think they can amount to much, because there's no particular excitement before or after." Nevertheless, Lyn was very interested in this. He believed that the Bullanese had at first regarded Roxie as some kind of goddess and that their interest had dwindled only when she failed to do whatever their idea of a goddess should do. Anyway, it was a line to try. And there wasn't much doubt that if he could re-establish Roxie as a goddess, the manna would start rolling in again. Which would be a good thing, for the next ship, the Henry James, was due in about seven weeks. IX R oxie hmnmed to herself as she hurried through the corridors to Lyn's office. When she noticed what she was doing she stopped at once, telling herself sharply that you couldn't make yourself happy just by himuning a tune. About to enter the office, she paused to tuck her blouse down into the waistband of her skirt and pat her hair. And she heard Lyn say : "I still think we can make them interested in Roxie again. After all, you say there's never been anything like it before -- nearly # tons in a week." Gunther's voice said : "They don't come and look at her any more?" "For the last week we've hardly seen the natives at all. And when we do run into one of them, he looks at Roxie pretty much as he'd look at you or me." "When they did come, was it only males, or females too ?" "That's the funny thing -- nearly as many females as males. They didn't seem to want to touch her, only to be near her, to look at her. I used to get her to sunbathe close to the bushes, so that lots of them could -- " Roxie flung the door open and faced him, eyes blazing. "So all you cared about was manna !" "Come on in, Roxie. I'll be with you right away." "Those times we went swimming and sunbathing, jmu were putting on a show for the bugs. I didn't matter at all -- all you cared about was how much manna the God-damned Maniacs brought. When I thought you were interested in me, what you were really interested in was a hundred thousand dollars!" Lyn smiled. "How about coming swimming with me, Roxie?" "No," she screamed, "and I never will again !" Her high heels struck like machine-gun bullets as she ran down the corridor. "I'd better go after her," Lyn said to Gunther. "Excuse me." She wasn't in her room. She wasn't in the station. She wasn't at any of the pools in which she and Lyn had swum. He gave up the search, knowing she'd have to come in sometime. He didn't curse fate, or himself, or Roxie. Earlier, he hadn't dared tell her that part of his reason for spending all those hours swimming and sunbathing with her had been the effect it seemed to have on manna supplies. By this time, he wouldn't have thought she would fly off the handle like that. But then, part of her trouble was her gloomy certainty that at any moment something would spoil everything and throw her back into the pit. She had been sure she would find something like this sometime. Being sure, she had found it. S HE ran through the bush until she was exhausted by the heat. Her thoughts weren't coherent; there was nothing but a dull misery in her heart. Her anger was gone. She didn't particularly want to swim, but she was beside a lake and she was hot. She had no towel or bathing suit. Carelessly she threw down her skirt and her blouse, stripped and waded into the water. When she had swum across the lake she began to feel better. Perhaps there might be excuses for Lyn, she thought. She would never trust him the way she had. She would always be on her guard. All the same, now that he had shown himself to be no better and no worse than most of the men she had known in the past, there was no reason why she shouldn't... Still swimming, she found herself crying. That hadn't happened for years. She had thought she had shed her last tears, that there were none left. Slowly she began to wade from the lake. Her temper flared again when she saw a Bullanese squatting by her clothes, watching her. She sank under the water again. "Go away!" she shouted. He didn't move. She swore at him, using all the foul words she hadn't used for nearly two weeks now. Her rage mounted. Reason told her that since the creature on the bank was of a different species from herself, it didn't matter being naked before him any more than before a dog or a cat. But she wasn't listening to reason. She wanted to climb out of the water and get dressed. Suddenly her anger boiled over. "I'll teach you," she muttered, and waded out of the water. The Bullanese continued to stare at her, not moving. She hit him in the middle and he folded. She hit him several times with small, hard fists. He seemed to have no idea of self-defense, and each time a blow landed he jerked convulsively. When he fell on the ground, twitching, Roxie turned her back on him, dressed and left him where he lay. At the entrance to the station she met Lyn. "You've got trouble," she said grimly. "I've just beaten up one of your Maniacs." She pushed past him into the building. Hobley arrested her five minutes later. X T he Bullanese wasn't dead, but he whsn't far from it. Two of the porters carried him to the nearest village, Morat, on a stretcher. The Bullanese in the village took charge of him without making a fuss about it; perhaps they assumed there had been an accident, and the injured Maniac, being unconscious, was j. T. McIntosh in no position to give his story. convened a court. Lyn didn't say a word. Although he was Premier of Bullance, immediately a crime was committed, all of Lyn's power passed to Hobley. The charge was attempted murder. The trial was brief and businesslike. Roxie was sentenced to detention within the base until the next ship arrived, and then deportation. "And you're very lucky,Miss Dainton," Hobley told her, "that we don't have power to do more than deport you. the same rights as humans. You should get ten years for this." Roxie said nothing. She had been white, frightened, incoherent, very much alone ever since she had been arrested. The court proceedings seemed like a bad dream. It was Gunther who brought the steel band and fitted it on her wrist. "You know what this is. Miss Dainton? You can go anywhere you like within the station, but if you attempt to leave it, a needle will prick your arm and you'll black out. You understand?" She nodded. This couldn't be happening either. Then everybody was filing out and she was left alone in the projection room which had been used for the court. " She sat down and let her forehead rest on the table in front of her. Only a couple of hours ago she had been happy. She had believed in Lyn Barr as she had never believed in any man before, almost loved him, certainly respected him as she had never thought she'd respect any human being again. Then her idealistic picture of him had been shattered, and in her angry misery she had attacked a native and... She still was a little hazy about that. Even after the solemn words and grim faces of the court, it still seemed to her that all she'd done was what anybody would have done in the heat of the moment -- anybody but Lyn, of course. There she went again, thinking Lyn was something special. In fact, he had shown himself to be just like... "Roxie," said Lyn. She sat up. Suddenly she was crying, and in his arms for the first time. "If only you hadn't run out like that," Lyn said when she had dried her eyes. "Roxie, you gave yourself a lot of heartache for nothing. You know that now, don't you?" "No, I don't know it now." She tried to be sharp and bitter and unforgiving, but it's hard to cut a man down to size when you've just been convicted of a crime. "Well, I'm telling you, then. What did you hear? That it was the Maniacs' interest in you that made them bring manna to the station. That ought to give you a kick, instead of making you furious." "You know it wasn't that. It was learning that all you cared about was -- " "Roxie, that first day we went out I didn't know the natives were going to bring manna because of you. Yesterday and today I knew they weren't, because they stopped days ago. Did I say to you, 'Roxie, the natives don't care about you any more, so I'm sure you'll understand if I haven't any time for you now -- good-by -- thanks for your help'?" "No, but that first week you were thinking about the manna, not about me." Lyn grinned. "If you think I can lie beside you and think about manna, with you in that white swimsuit of yours, you must have a very curious idea of the things men think about." Her eyes were hardly dry, but she was laughing. And she was sorry about She native now, for he'd been beaten up for nothing. L yn went to the village rather warily, uncertain of his reception. But the Bullanese seemed indifferent to the fact that one of their number had been half killed. Zin was the one he usually talked to; "Is the injured man all right?" Lyn asked. Zin held out his hands in the Bullanese equivalent of the Gallic shrug. "Did he speak?" "Yes. Zar said the White Lady por. But some of us went to see and she did not por." "What is 'por'?" Zin held out his hands again. Por was por. Questioning a Bullanese was rather like discussing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with a somewhat backward child, but Lyn had nothing to lose. "Why did you like the White Lady?" "Because she por." Lyn tried to work that out. Zar, the Bullanese whom Roxie had injured, had said she por ; the Bullanese used to like her because she por. "She doesn't por now?" he asked. "No. Some of us went to see, and she does not por." Zar, who had said Roxie por, had seen her wade nude from a lake. Formerly, when apparently she por, she had sunbathed beside a pool. But that wasn't it; until yesterday she'd continued swimming and sunbathing, yet it seemed she didn't por any more. "The White Lady is beautiful," Lyn said tentatively. "Yes." Quick agreement, but that wasn't it either. She was still j. T. McIntosh beautiful and she didn't por any more. Yet there was a possibility there. That the Bullanese, although they belonged to a different race, had found Roxie attractive was beyond doubt. Zin himself, that first day, had found her interesting in coveralls, but more so when she took them off. Yet one could grow tired of even a beautiful girl in a swimsuit, especially if she was of an alien race. But suppose, after one had grown tired of her in a swimsuit, she took it off? Well, that would explain how Roxie could cease to por except to Zar that morning. And if that explanation was correct, Roxie might be a source of more manna yet, if she could be persuaded... Back at the station. Benders, the language expert, wasn't much help about "por." "I've come across it once or twice," he said, "without being able to establish its meaning. It's connected with religion somehow." "That I guessed," Lyn said. "The tentative conclusion I reached was too damned simple. You're sui'e it's nothing to do with beauty -- attraction -- even sex as well?" Benders shook his head. "I'm not sure. Get an invitation to one of the Bullanese religious ceremonies and you might find out. If you do, let me know." Lyn knew Benders was beabsolOte power ing mildly sarcastic, but the suggestion gave him an idea. "I will," he said thoughtfully. "I will." XI B efore mentioning his plans to Roxie, Lyn went to Hobley to plead with him. "I'm sorry. Premier," Hobley said firmly. "I haven't got the power to interfere with the sentence. And whether the Bullanese are concerned about the crime or not is neither here nor there. Miss Dainton was found guilty and sentence was passed. I really can't do anything." "Hobley," said Lyn, "I know you're autonomous and I'm not trying to bribe or intimidate you. But if the base here is abandoned and Bullance is closed to commerce, and if I report that this happened because Mr. Hobley wouldn't cooperate with me, do you think you'll be popular with your own superiors?" Hobley, who was a fat man, began to sweat. "If that isn't intimidation, I don't know what is." "Mr. Hobley, you're a man of intelligence. Now, as you no doubt know, the fact that the Meredith left with a full load of manna was due entirely to the interest of the Bullanese in Roxie Dainton. If I am to achieve anything before the Henry James arrives, I need Roxie Dainton -- and I need her outside the station." Hobley foun a face-saver. "Well, of course, if you'll be with her all the time and are prepared to take full responsibility , . he said. "After all, I don't want to be uncooperative, Premier." Roxie was a tougher nut to crack. She didn't get furious and tell him she'd see him in hell first. She merely frowned slightly and said : "Lyn, I wish I knew how to take you. Sometimes I think I could trust you with anything. And other times it seems you'd sell me and your own soul and anything else you could think of, just to have another manna load waiting for Henry James" "If you did trust me," said Lyn cheerfully, "things would be easier for both of us." She shook her head somberly. "It isn't as easy as that to start trusting people." "I'm telling you honestly, Roxie, I'm trying to fix up Bullance for your father, and for the hundred grand I'm going to get for doing it, and at the same time I'm getting to like a girl and she's getting to like me. I haven't made a pass at you yet, have I?" "No," she said. "You haven't." "If and when I do. I'll mean it. Doesn't the fact that I haven't, so far, show that you can trust me?" "I don't know what it shows. I don't know where I'm at, and you're trying to do so many things at once, I don't know what you really want either." "If you want to stay cooped up here until the Henry James arrives, you can. If you don't, come swimming with me the way we used to." "Except that I have to swim in the raw and you call all the Maniacs from far and wide to come and look at me." Lyn grinned. "To tell the honest truth," he said, "all this is an elaborate plot to get you to swim with me." "I'm not too happy about that either." "No, but that's all right. I am -- and you trust me, don't you, Roxie?" T he Bullanese came, scores of them. They kept out of the way as much as possible, as before. After some hesitation, Roxie, who had been relieved of the bracelet meant to keep her a prisoner in the base, threw off her clothes. Lyn kept his bathing trunks on. They swam and returned to the bank. Roxie had promised to sunbathe and to try to forget the Bullanese ogling her from behind every bush. But she didn't have to try. Before they reached the bank, the Bullanese were gone, every last one of them. "Well, it didn't work," she said, throwing her wet hair back out of her eyes. "I told you," said Lyn, "it was all an elaborate plot to get you to swim in the raw." "Lyn, you really don't mind that it didn't work? That the Bullanese don't care about me any more?" "Roxie, even if you made the Bullanese sick. I'd still like you the way you are." She reached for her clothes. "This was science, remember?" "Yes," he said. "You'd better get dressed. Because I'm still not going to make a pass t you, and it's heroic work not to." He wasn't angry -- Bullanese were never angry. He didn't blame Lyn -- Bullanese never blamed anybody. "Zin, what do you have to do to por?" asked Lyn Barr. "I cannot por." "No, but the White Lady -- what was she doing when she did por?" "Nothing." Lyn searched in his mind for a formula which might get the right answer. It wasn't ignorance of the language which stumped him; it was the language itself. So there wasn't much hope of finding other words to explain por. Then Lyn had an idea. "Sometimes you have ceremonies," he said. "Yes." "Suppose the White Lady attended one of these ceremonies?" Zin started to make a polite, roundabout refusal. But when he was allowed to speak, Lyn said: "If she was present at such a ceremony, she might por." Zin was silent for a long time. At last he said: "Next time, I will send for you and you will bring the White Lady." T he Henry James arrived three weeks early. All the manna there was at the base was twenty tons which the Meredith hadn't been able to take. Although Lyn had the right to hold the Henry James at least three weeks, and more if necessary, he wished she hadn't been early. Something might have happened in the next three weeks -- a Bullanese religious ceremony, for instance. The arrival of the ship, however, did give him an opportunity to make another experiment. He borrowed the prettiest girls on the Henry James, had them immunized against Bullanese bacteria, and took them swimming with Roxie. It was another flop. Quite a few Bullanese came to watch, wildly curious. But apparently not one of the girls could por. No manna was delivered. Roxie had been silent and withdrawn while the girls were around, and especially as Lyn had laughed and had fun with them. Later, when the girls were back on the Henry James, she said : "That little redhead certainly has a nice figure." "Yes, but you don't need to be jealous," Lyn said. "Her Roxie turned to him quickly. "Lyn, I know what it's like now. When I used to compete with another girl for a man -- any girl, any man -- I always won because I didn't give a damn about either of them. It's easy when you don't care." Lyn didn't say anything. "Don't get me wrong," she said. "I know I'm different now, happier, less unsure. And you've done it, Lyn." He shook his head "I didn't do anything. If somebody who's all mixed up starts untwisting himself, others can help, but they can't do the job. I told you once I'd like you if you became likable, Roxie. Well, I like you now. I like you a lot." and then the summons came. There were no regular dates for ceremonies any more than the Bullanese had regular dates for anything. Apparently what happened was simply that everyone felt it was time for a ceremony. "And you're lucky you only had to wait a couple of weeks," Roza told Lyn. "We don't know every time they hold a ceremony, naturally. But there's sometimes more than six months between them." He sighed. "I wish I were coming with you." "Sorry," Lyn said. "The invitation is purely for Roxie, in the hope that she'll por again. And it's assumed I'll go along because they've hardly ever seen Roxie without me." "Well, don't miss anything," Roza said. Roxie wasn't keen on the affair. She had never really taken to the Bullanese; despite their alien grace they repelled her, and probably when she had beaten up Zar part of the reason had been a fear of him, an unthinking urge to destroy him. However, by this time it seemed so natural to do as Lyn told her that she never seriously considered refusing to go, although she did say: "Lyn, does this manna business really matter to you? Suppose the Maniacs never did bring any more and you had to go back and say you'd failed?"  "I wouldn't like to do that," he said. "But I don't suppose it would break me. After all, your father knows that the chances of success aren't high. And I guess he's pretty pleased to get one full shipload -- something that never happened before." "Suppose you do fail -- will you be sorry you tried? Will you be sorry you ever came to Bullance?" He grinned. "I know what you want me to say, but Tm not going to say it. Not now." He didn't mention any possibility of danger to Roxie, apart from warning her, whatever happened, not to show surprise or lose her head. However, he knew that even a polite, peaceful race like the Bullanese, who had never harmed a human being, might suddenly become very different during the fervor of a religious ceremony. In his pockets he had two guns which between them could fire several hundred bullets singly or very rapidly. And he had arranged for Hobley and Gunther to be listening not too far from the village, ready to come running if any shote were fired. As for Roxie, he merely had her dress in a shimmering white gown with spangled tights underneath it, just in case she should be called on to take part in the ceremony or preside over it, or anything of the sort. Although lately it had seemed that whatever por was, it had nothing to do with Roxie's physical charms, he still wasn't entirely convinced. As night fell they went to Morat and Zin motioned them to sit in the shadows of an open hut. The village looked the same as usual and the only preparation which had been made was that , two posts had been driven into the ground about eight feet apart. "What is going to happen, Zin?" Lyn asked. Zin disappeared into the shadows, pretending not to have heard. There was no elaborate ceremonial at the beginning, at any rate. Gradually the clearing in the center of the village filled. There was little or no talking, for the Bullanese were not a talkative race. They stood about in their ordinary clothes as if waiting for a deus ex machina to arrive and start the proceedings. T hough Lyn and Roxie were in deep shadow, the Bullanese knew they were there, and periodically shot curious glances at them. There was nothing resembling the eager interest which had once been shown in Roxie. Presently a wooden box was brought out and all the Bullanese, male and female, crowded around it. Some sort of draw seemed to be going on. When it was over, five of them stood to one side -- two women and three men. Still there seemed to be no excitement, no feeling of anticipation. Someone pointed with a kind of wand and one of the five lay down. Before Lyn and Roxie suspected what was going to happen, the Bullanese with the wand had driven its sharp point into the bulbous pelvis of the man on the ground. The stick went straight through and pinned the creature to the soft ground beneath him. He moaned, writhing and twitching like an insect on a pin, clearly in mortal agony. Roxie made a muffled exclamation of horror. Lyn grabbed her arm and pressed it. At such a time, it might be dangerous to draw attention to themselves. Now there was excitement and pleasure. The Bullanese filed past the dying Maniac, looking down on his agony in simple delight. A few minutes later the second of the five victims was similarly skewered and his moans mingled with those of the other. Then one of the women was pinned to the ground, and the other man. The four of them screamed and groaned in torture, their gray limbs thrashing about. They formed a square about the two posts. Roxie closed her eyes, but almost immediately opened them again. Some of the Bullanese held flares now, and it was impossible not to watch the scene in the center of the dark clearing. There was a sort of pattern in the wanderings of the Bullanese, through the square of victims, out at the other side and back. Although there was no singing and dancing, everybody was happy -- except the four dying creatures with sharp wands through them. The remaining victim, a young female, stood aside. She was not bound. Only at the last moment, when they came for her, did terror take over and she tried to flee. They caught her and brought her to the center of the square. Her ankles were tied to one post about five feet from the ground. Her wrists were bound to the other, and she lay in mid-air, stretched taut. About her the four other victims still moaned and writhed. There was a shout and at the signal the girl tied to the posts was surrounded. For a moment Lyn and Roxie couldn't see what was happening. Then Roxie put her hands over her eyes, and Lyn turned his head away, sickened. He would have taken Roxie away right then if he could, but it was several hours before they could go. By that time the four skewered Maniacs were dead. They hadn't been eaten. Apparently it wasn't worth eating anybody unless he was alive. The body of the girl, what remained of it, still hung from the posts. One by one the Bullanese had left the square and gone into their own cottages. At last, when the square was j. T. McIntosh empty except for the bodies of the five victims, Lyn pulled Roxie to her feet and they began to run back to the base. She was crying helplessly. Building, Lyn said; "I took the whole colony off Bullance, with all the most valuable equipment. We're not allowed to interfere." Dainton shuddered. "Roxie saw this?" "She's getting over it. She used to think she was cruel. Now she knows she's not." "I still don't get it. What was por? Why were the Bullanese fascinated by Roxie at first?" "Nobody guessed that such a primitive race had a kind of telepathy," Lyn said. "Empathy, rather. They draw strength from misery and grief and pain and bitterness. When Roxie arrived on Bullance, she was quite a treat for them. She was por. By just being near her, they could get a real jag -- no need to torture one of themselves to death. "But Roxie stopped being so bitter and miserable. She began to be almost happy. No thanks to the Maniacs -- they don't draw grief out; they just stand around and get drunk on it. Anyway, Roxie wasn't so bitter any more. She wasn't in mental agony -- except that day when she beat up Zar, and as he truthfully told the others, she por again. Only by the time the other Bullanese got close enough to her to sense it, she didn't por any more." "I see," said Edgar Dainton thoughtfully. balanced, stable. Roxie was the first and only human of her type the Maniacs ever encountered. Now if you really want manna and aren't too concerned about your methods, you can hire a lot of miserable people and send them out to Bullance. You'll get a lot of manna." "I don't think I will, somehow... Hey, sit down ! We've hardly started to talk!" "I've finished," said Lsm pleasantly, "and I've got a date with your daughter. For a change, we're going swimming." Dainton didn't smile, but his eyes were warm and a little moist. "You are, are you?" "I'm going to make a pass at Roxie. Do you mind?" "Mean you never have?" "Not like this one. I had to see you first and make sure her father's prospects were good enough to marry her." "Take care of her," Dainton said huskily. "That's one thing I'm good at," Lyn said. "All Roxie ever needed was love. I'm going to see she gets it -- from you and me both." i n o Everyone is allowed to commit an error. The trouble was that I couldn't. heels into the concrete floor of the corridor of the Pentagon, The steel plates on the heels of my black uniform boots heralded my approach with sharp anvil sounds as I marched confidently toward the unmarked door five hundred feet ahead. What was that expression used by Earth people of the #th century? I shifted back through my training, shuffled through the facts about Earth's past history with which I had been indoctrinated, searching for the word. Assassin! That was it. But the term fell short. It lacked in magnitude. There was a difference in the murder of one person and the assassination of the occupants of an entire planet! One foot in front of the other, I paced off the distance toward the end of the hallway, carefully duplicating the strut which was a trademark of the Earth Council's Security Police. I'd practiced the peculiar, jolting method of walking a thousand times, but I began to feel the effects of Earth's heavier gravity before I had covered half the distance. It had been impossible to simulate the difference in gravity in my training. The two guards standing outside the door alertly watched my approach. When I was still four paces away, one of them ordered me to stop. They ignored as though they were not there the gold stars prominently displayed on the shoulders of my tunic. The guard on the left said, "Your ID card, sir." The guards were well trained. They would not hesitate to shoot if I made the slightest slip. I handed the card to him and watched as he held it up to a visi-scanner in the wall. The scanner glowed into life and purred softly, rapidly checking the invisible identification codings on the card against the ID component of Earth's Master Machine. Then it dulled and was silent The strident alarm siren over the scanner remained inactive. The ID card was returned to me and the guards snapped smartly to attention as I went on into the room beyond the door. I had passed the first test. T he reception room was small. Thick carpeting deadened the clump of my heels as I marched toward the chromed desk guarding a second unmarked door. A flawlessly proportioned redhead sat behind the desk. Her eyes and face showed no expression when I stopped in front of her. Her tight-fitting uniform was black and bore the gold trim of the Security Po lice. Constricting my throat, I let the words snap out crisply, as I had been trained. "General Spicer," I said, "commanding general of the Security Police, reporting to the Secretary of Defense. As requested." I waited. Her eyes, still showing no outward expression, ran over me rapidly. Then she thumbed a button on the desk and a screen, recessed into the chromed surface, glowed into life. Almost immediately, a fullface reproduction of the features of General Spicer appeared on the screen in color. She checked the image against my face, her eyes flickering to the tiny scar under my left eye and to the old blaster burn across my right ear. When the image changed to a profile view, I turned my head to give her the same angle. She nodded, pressing the button on her desk which darkened the screen. She said, "You're early. Your appointment with Secretary Bartlett is -- " "For # hours," I filled in automatically, when she hesitated in one last routine test. "I was in the building on another matter, however, and came here after I had finished my other business." "Yes, of course," she said. "Please take a seat. Senator Chambers is ahead of you, but his business will not take long." I fought back the sudden impulse to pivot and stare in the direction her eyes were indicating. Senator Carl Chambers. My briefing on him had been lengthy. For # Earth years, he had headed the unEarth Activities Committee. As General Spicer, I was supposed to have a nodding acquaintance with him, but no more than that. During the years, our rivalry had become legend. His unanticipated presence in the waiting room could prove disastrous. Chambers would not be fooled easily. Turning slowly, I nodded stiffly and curtly in Chambers' direction and then selected a chair across the room from him. The senator's head merged directly into the shoulders of his grossly rotund body. Small, round eyes stared unblinkingly at me from the jed pudginess of his face. They hesitated on the black swagger stick which I held loosely in my right hand, moved on, and then returned to it. The invisible scars, made by the electro-surgical knives in redesigning my body, began to tense slowly. I shifted the swagger stick in my hand. Then the redheaded secretary stood up. She said, "Secretary Bartlett will see you now, Senator." F or a fraction of a time, I thought Senator Chambers had not heard her. His expressionless eyes were still on me. Then, with a grunt, he lifted himself to his feet and disappeared through the door behind her. A tiny clicking noise indicated that it locked automatically. I shifted my gaze and saw that the secretary was looking at me intently. It was impossible to guess at what might be going on behind those eyes. The tension began to build inside me again, but I kept my own eyes as expressionless as hers. The girl picked up a folded piece of paper out of a receptacle on her desk and brought it over to me. She said, "While you're waiting. General, you might like to read the latest facsimile. Or have you already seen it?" I shook my head. "I saw the # fac-report, but I missed this one." She handed it to me and returned to her desk. There was just the slightest suggestion of a rolling movement in her walk, not at all unpleasant. When I looked down at the facsimile sheet, the headline screamed silently up at me. I swiveled my eyes over at the secretary, but she was working her recordo-writer, her fingers moving rapidly, mechanically. The story that followed reported that two Security Police guards had intercepted someone who looked like and was dressed like an Earthman, trying to enter the Senate at # hours that morning. A discrepancy had been discovered during the routine ID card check and the imposter had tried to escape. The guards had opened fire at close range, scoring two direct hits. While the account was obviously censored, it intimated that a full report to be released later by Security Police Headquarters would be almost unbelievable. It hinted that the hideous mess revealed when the guards' weapons had ripped through the surprisingly soft body armor of the impostor positively confirmed the fact that the individual was an enemy alien. Before I could read any further, there was a muted tone from the direction of the desk. The secretary acknowledged the signal, spoke several words whicn I couldn't hear, then looked at me. She said, "You may go in now. General Spicer." I placed the facsimile sheet on her desk and waited while she activated the circuit, which would release the catch on her side of the door. Who had it been? There had been four of us. Volunteers. We had been selected, briefed and trained separately. We had been housed separately during the mental and physical tortures of the surgical and the psych labs. The ship which had brought us to Earth had released us at seporrate points above the Earth capital. Only our ultimate goal was the same. But now there was one less of us to accomplish that goal! And we had lost the element of surprise. The door clicked twice and swung open. I stepped through, just in time to see the rotund shape of Senator Chambers go out a private exit on the far side of the room. Both doors closed at almost the same moment and I stood alone before the Secretary of Defense for the planet Earth. The secretary sat behind a desk on the far side of the room. He was a powerful man, in keeping with the importance of the job he filled. But the huge memory bank which he relied upon and which filled the entire wall behind his desk seemed to dwarf him. Without looking up immediately, Secretary Bartlett carefully rewound a tape he had been referring to and fed it back into the open mouth of the memory unit. H e said, "Spicer, we've been talking about you. Do you have anything new on this alien incident? Chambers said an impulse cleared the Master Machine last night, indicating there may have been some sort of ship overhead." "No. sir," I lied. "My people are working on it, but we don't have much more to go on than appeared in the latest fac-report." "If there was a ship overhead, it was protected by a new type of anti-identification device. The Master Machine probed for more than six minutes and registered only a void. Chambers, of course, is always -- " Bartlett didn't finish the sentence. His words trailed off into a moment of puzzled silence as he turned and looked squarely at me for the first time. Something had gone wrong. Something that I had done or hadn't done had revealed to him that I wasn't General Spicer. Secretary Bartlett started to rise. "Why, you're not Spicer! You're an impostor!" His eyes displayed neither fear nor surprise, but his hand was less than a time point from the alarm buzzer on the top of his desk when I touched the tiny stud on the hilt of my useless-looking swagger stick. For the tick of a pulse, he sat there with his body bathed in the colored ray, his finger poised above the warning buzzer. Then his body began to glow. I closed my eyes when the heat and brightness reached my face. When I opened them, there was nothing left of Bartlett but a swirl of dust motes. Stepping behind the desk, I stripped off the thin plastimask which had disguised my features to look like those of General Spicer. My hands moved almost automatically. Each motion had been rehearsed, timed, analyzed, and timed again. I reversed my coat, hiding the gold markings of the Security Police, and revealing the precious-metal insignia which had been worn by the Secretary of Defense. The now-useless ID card, which I had obtained earlier when I destroyed the real General Spicer, was dropped into the office incendiary tube, along with the mask and the removable steel cappings of my boots. By the time I had finished, only the swagger stick remained to connect me with General Spicer. I carefully telescoped its length, twisting and turning the artfully designed tubing, until it was identical to Bartlett's cane of state, leaning against the desk. The real cane I disposed of by dropping it into the incendiary tube after the other articles. I turned the stiff black collar of my coat up, in the same manner that Bartlett had worn his. The upturned collar hid the tiny metal electrodes protruding from the base of my neck, under each ear. the desk, the image reflected up at me from the chromed top was, feature for feature, that of Defense Secretary Bartlett. The electrosurgical knives, wielded by experts, had done a good job. I grimaced. I puffed out my cheeks. I rolled my eyes. And, in turn, the reflected image grimaced, puffed out its cheeks, and rolled its eyes. The texture of my skin was that of Bartlett's. Even the pore sti'ucture. This had been the final big hurdle. The rest was now up to me. No! More accurately, the rest depended upon routine -- a routine established more than # Earth years ago -- a routine so inflexible that it had not been broken for a single day. My mission was to break that routine. Destruction of Spicer and Bartlett was important only as a means to an end. As soon as they were missed, others would fill their places. I had to destroy all Spicers and all Bartletts. I had to destroy the residents of Washington, of London, of New York, of Earth! My mission was to destroy so that we could live. That was what the technicians in the psych-labs had told me. That was what the physicians behind the electro-surgical knives had told me. It had been drummed into me over and over, through every phase of the mental and physical preparation that I had been put through. So I sat in Bartlett's office, looking like Bartlett, waiting. I knew almost to the exact time point when the buzzer on the desk in front of me would sound. I expected it, but when the strident tone filled the room, I jumped. I thumbed the switch on the desk video-corn and the features of the redheaded secretary looked out at me from the recessed screen. I deepened my voice to mimic Bartlett's. "Yes, Meta?" The video-corn was a twoway security system and I knew that she could see me. too. She continued to stare, and I felt the scar tissue tighten around the electrodes in my neck. Through some flaw in transmission, for a brief moment, I thought I saw the twinkle of an expression deep in her eyes. But that was impossible. Her lips twitched and the transmission flaw, or whatever it might have been, was corrected. Her eyes were as inscrutable as ever. She said, "It's #, sir. The inspection group will be here in two minutes. Shall I bring them in?" I nodded my head to one side slightly, in a manner peculiar to Bartlett. "Thank you, Meta, Yes, of course. Bring them in as soon as they arrive." I switched the video-corn off and let my Angers lightly play with the button on the desk that activated the lock on Bartlett's private door into the inner corridor. It was a temptation to open the door and attempt to go the rest of the way on my own. But I wouldn't make it. Not even disguised as Defense Secretary Bartlett. I had been warned not to try. M y only hope lay in the I'outine set up by Earth's scientists more than # years ago -- the daily inspection of the unit. As a member of the inspection party, I could pass through the security guards. More important, as a member of the group, I would arrive at the protective force sphere at the hub of the Pentagon at the only time and at the only place the force sphere could be breached, I waited. Precisely at the end of Meta's two minutes, the lock buzzed on the door to the reception room. I touched the control which opened the door and stood as the group filed into the room. My briefings on each of them had been exhaustive, but I examined their faces for some sign that one or more might penetrate my disguise as Bartlett. 'The redheaded Meta nodded. She had been with Bartlett as his security secretary for # years. Senator Chambers, as a representative of the electorate, darted rapid glances around the room as soon as the door had closed, counting noses. General Whit Marshall, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the police systems, nodded with the cold reserve of the highranking military to the higher-ranking civilian. The fourth member of the group, Chet Meyers, chief Master Machine technician, was the only one to speak. 'The lanky Meyers looked around the room. "Where's General Spicer, sir? Senator Chambers was telling us you were going to invite him because of this scare today," The invisible scars which cobwebbed across my body from the electro-surgical knives tensed so suddenly that I almost screamed. I made myself reach for my cane casually. I had come so close ! No, wait -- there was the bitter rivalry between Chambers and Spicer. Chambers was too complete a politician to pass up an opportunity to discredit General Spicer. His black pin-prick eyes darted up toward the time unit on the wall. "There's no time to wait, Meyers," he said eagerly. "Spicer knows the schedule. We must go without him." Conscious of the stares of Meta and Meyers, I pushed the button which opened the door into the inner corridor. I looked directly at the Master Machine technician. "I asked Spicer to get a late report on the incident for us. But you know that Chambers is right -- we cannot afford to wait any longer. Perhaps he'll catch up." We followed the corridor toward the hub of the Pentagon. Senator Chambers led the way, almost at a trot, as though he were afraid that Spicer would catch up. General Marshall and Meyers, hard put to keep up, were strung out behind him, with Meta and me bringing up the rear. That was the way we went through the check points manned by the security guards. Twice I caught Meta looking at me. At one of the check points, I thought she was going to say something. I lifted the tip of my cane and put my finger near the stud, but she remained silent. T he tension began to mount inside me as we approached the door opening on the invisible force wall. Through the wall, I could see the squat, ugly building in the center of the hub of the Pentagon, which was our destination. I held my cane ready. But even a CT-bomb wouldn't break through the force field. As we drew near the final guard point, a scrubwoman who had been working on the floor of the corridor picked up her bucket arid fell in with our party. Chambers was already gesturing at the guard to set the combination, which would open the force wall at precisely #. I looked at the time unit on my wrist and saw that we had twenty seconds to wait. I resisted the betraying impulse to rub the irritated area around the electrodes set in my neck. When I looked up from the time unit, everything was too quiet. Senator Chambers was no longer dancing around impatiently. He was staring at the bucket carried by the scrubwoman. The inside of the bucket was not even damp. And the mop she had beeh using was dry. The implication must have hit both Chambers and me at the same moment. I wanted to shout a warning. Chambers jumped back against the wall, yelling at the guard, "Shoot her! Shoot! She is an alien !" The scrubwoman did the wrong thing. She turned and tried to run, her legs lifting awkwardly against the pull of the unaccustomed gravity. But the guard's weapon was already at his shoulder. The low-velocity missile thudded into the body of the scrubwoman, flipping her up into the air in a graceless somersault. She landed on the concrete floor with a second thud, which echoed softly down the long hall. A pool slowly widened around her body and she lay still. I looked at my wrist time unit again. It was #. The door through the force wall was open. I went past the huddled heap lying on the floor, careful not to step in the pool of moisture. Too hideous to put into words in a public fac-report! That's what the facsimile sheet had hinted about the broken body of the other "aUen." Two from four left only two. But the door through the force wall wasopen. I had to get through the door and into the building. Senator Chambers stepped out from behind the guard and blocked the doorway. His little eyes flashed from one expressionless face to another as he tried to come to some inner decision. His shoulders slumped, "I -- I don't like it," he said. "The door is open now. I think perhaps we had better wait for General Spicer, after all." But Meta shook her head and pushed past Chambers, She said, "No. You know the routine as well as we. Senator. We are required to inspect the unit. Leave the guard on duty here." decision of the others and pushed through the door after her toward the squat, ugly little building that was my goal. Meta was almost to the door of the building when I heard Chambers yell. "Stop her. Secretary Bartlett ! She's malfunctioning. We've all been ordered to wait outside for an ID check," I ignored him and he yelled again. "Guard, open fire on the girl. Don't let her get inside that door!" But he was too late. Meta disappeared through the door into the black building. I stepped inside just as it slammed shut and the first missile smashed against the door from the guard's weapon. The building was not large. The Master Machine squatted like a huge, thick-bodied black spider in the center of the building. A cobweb of power lines and control cables crisscrossed the floor and fed into the base of the unit. A myriad of tiny moving parts, levers and cams and elbowed arms and gears pulsed and shifted and moved to give the impression that the Master Machine was breathing, that it was alive. Tiny multicolored lights twinkled on and off. Giant vacuum tubes hummed and glowed. And all the while, it munched on endless tapes. The black monster was the heart of Earth's civilization, and it was the means of it. As I started toward the machine, a grid at the top turned slowly and ogled me. Almost immediately, a red tube blinked on, and the moving parts on one section of the machine plunged into a frenzied rhythm of action. I ran forward, breathing heavily under the strain of the unaccustomed gravity. I had only seconds in which to act. At any moment. Senator Chambers and the guards would be coming through the door behind me. I raised the cane and touched the stud. The finger of lavender light knifed toward the machine, searching for its heart and memory unit. The ray fused and melted and burned, cutting deeper and deeper into the maze of wires and tubes and relays. There was a blinding flash and one section of the machine ground to a stop. Other sections immediately increased their tempo of movement. Behind me the door slammed open, and Senator Chambers and two niard# stumbled into the building. Chambers yelled, "He's over there in front of the Master Machine. Hurry up . , . and... shoot ! Before it's... too late ! Shoot!" His face almost a cherry red. Chambers danced out of the way. The guards raised their weapons and sighted. Then the ray from my cane cut deeply into the very innermost section of the master unit and the machine died. A dial on the front of the blackened, twisted mess spun slowly to a stop. There was no more noise and no more movement. It was done. A S I released the stud on the cane, the weapons of the guards were pointed directly at my back. Chambers' eyes were like two black marbles, staring at me, his head strained forward to watch the results of the missiles. I took a careful step to the left. And another. And then another. They didn't move. The guards' weapons remained trained on the spot where I had been standing. Senator Chambers continued staring at the place where I had been. None of them moved. They remained there, pointing at nothing. The electrodes at the bases of their necks reflecting the molten glow from the wrecked Master Machine. I relaxed. I rubbed the tender skin around the dummy electrodes set in my neck. It was finally over. Then a shadow moved against the wall where there should have been no movement. It len,chened and took on the shapely form of the redheaded Meta. Only now her eyes were no longer dead and expressionless. They were alive with feeling. I said, "So you are the other one. I should have guessed when you ran into the building ahead of me. But I was too busy thinking of those guards and of Chambers." She nodded. Her lips relaxed into a smile. Two from four leaves two! But we had accomplished our mission. And outside the building, in Washington, London, New York -- in every Earth city -- figures on the streets, in office buildings, and at home had become motionless, poised like mechanical toys with their springs run down. Housewives, cab drivers, copter pilots, passengers, shoppers, policemen, government workers had ceased to move, had stopped funcUoning with the destruction of the Master Machine. The redhead said, "It's really over, isn't it? They're stopped." She looked at the still figures, the dummy electrodes in her neck quivering in a shiver. "They can't kill any more?" I said, "It's over." "They can't destroy or move?" "Without the Master Machine, they have no power supply -- nothing. And they can't kill or destroy." She walked over to look at the figures. "What went wrong? What happened to them?" I shrugged. "You can't blame them any more than you can blame a boiler that explodes or a dam that breaks. It was the human race itself that was responsible for what happened. We became lazy, careless. We built too many time saving gimmicks to do too many jobs for us." '#UT the machines were designed to help us," she said. "To make life better and more pleasant." "At the beginning," I agreed, "but we didn't know where to stop. We started with labor-saving devices. We replaced ourselves in factories, offices, restaurants, stores. Still it wasn't enough. We designed robots to serve as traffic policemen, to drive cars, and to handle thinking tasks. Then we designed humanoid robots, mechanical replicas of man and woman, controlled by the computing sections of the Master Machine, activated by its power supply, able to move and talk and think. We used them as servants. We had the means to replace ourselves completely -- everywhere." "Why did they turn on the human race ? she asked. I pointed to the smoldering wreck of the Master Machine in the center of the room. "Perhaps there was a weak circuit, or a tape was garbled, or a relay didn't close properly. The scientific colony on the Moon helped some of us to escape. The rest of mankind was destroyed by the robots -- systematically and ruthlessly." The redhead shivered again and walked over to the door leading from the building. She stood there, looking up at the thin curve of the Moon showing in the blue of the afternoon sky. Finally she said, "Up there, by now, they will know that we have accomplished our mission. In a few hours, they will be filing out of the underground caverns and loading onto the giant rockets. They'll be coming back. But only the very oldest will have been on Earth before. Like us, thousands of them will be coming to a new world for the first time. A world of beauty and opportunity -- if they want it that way. What will they decide?" What would they decide? I looked down at the redhead. Deep in her eyes, I saw the emotions which no humanoid robot could ever know. I saw them, and suddenly the tension eased out of my muscles. The answer to her question was in her own eyes. end IF is going to be Toesdos child... The second Tuesday of every other month. This means that next issue will be on sale, let's see, January #th -- And it also means that, by asking your newsdealer to be sure and order IF for you each issue, you can be sure you won't miss a single exciting numberl You take the If out of gift if you give if this year IF has become more and more a factor in the science fiction field. The line-up for #I already includes such authors as -- Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, Fred Pohl, Philip Jose Farmer, Ted Sturgeon and many more of your favorites, that are certainly favorites of the person you plan to give this most velcome gift. A special card will announce your gift to the lucky recipient and each issue will remind him of your thoughtfulness. (These special low prices are good until December #th) (# issues) #st Subscription # # Each additional Year or Subscription IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Address... City state I year # years... Price Sign Card Name Address CKy I year # years , Sign Card State Price... Name Address... City I year Sign Card , . State Name Address City State... I year # years Price , Sign Card... Name... Address City State I year Sien Card... # years... Price Name... # years... Price . Address , City Stats This was a world where minding your manners was more than just s full-time job -- it was murder I OF  for yourself, Marlow. Yes I know there are peculiar stoi'ies about the place. There are about all places. The young pilots who have been there tell some amusing tales about it." "Yes. They say the people there are very polite." "That is the honorable ancestor of all understatements. One of the pilots, Conrad, told us that the inhabitants must always carry seven types of eyeglasses with them. None of the Puds, you see, may ever gaze directly on another. That would be the height of impoliteness. They wear amber goggles when they go about their world at large, and these they wear when they meet a stranger. But, once they are introduced to him then they must thereafter look on him through blue glasses. But at a blood relative they gaze through red, and at an in-law through yellow. There are equally interesting colors for other situations." "I would like to talk to Conrad. Not that I doubt his reports. It is the things he did not report that interest me." "I thought you knew he had died. Thrombosis, though he was sound enough when first certified." "But if they are really people, then it should be possible to understand them." "But they are not really people. They are metamorphics. They become people only out of politeness." "Detail that a little." "Oh, they're biped and of a size of us. They have a chameleon-like skin that can take on any texture they please, and they possess extreme plasticity of features." "You mean they can take on the appearance of people at will?" "So Bently reported." "I hadn't heard of him." "Another of the young pilots. According to Bently, not only do the Puds take on a human appearance, they take on the appearance of the human they encounter. Out of politeness, of course." "Quite a tribute, though it seems extreme. Could I talk to Bently?" "Also dead. A promising young man. But he reported some of the most amusing aspects of all: the circumlocutions that the Puds use in speaking our language. Not only is the Second Person eschewed out of politeness, but in a way all the other Persons also. One of them could not call you by your name, Marlow. He would have to say; 'One hears of one who hears of one of the noble name of Marlow. One hears of one even now in his presence.' " ""YES, that is quite a polite  way of saying it. But it would seem that with all their circumlocutions they would be inefficient." "Yet they are quite efficient. They do things so well that it is almost imperative that we learn from them. Yet for all our contacts, for all their extreme politeness coupled with their seeming openness, we have been able to learn almost nothing. We cannot learn the secret of the amazing productivity of their fields. According to Sharper, another of the young pilots, they suggest (though so circumspectly that it seems hardly a suggestion, certainly not a criticism) that if we were more polite to our own plants, the plants would be more productive for us ; and if we gave the plants the ultimate of politeness, they would give us the ultimate of production." "Could I talk to Sharper, or is he also -- " "No, he is not dead. He waa quite well till the last several days. Now, however, he is ailing, but I believe it will be possible for you to talk to him before you leave, if he does not worsen." "It would still seem difficult for the Puds to get anything done. Wouldn't a superior be too polite to give a reprimand to an inferior?" "Probably. But Masters, who visited them, had a theory about it, which is that the inferior would be so polite and deferential that he would do his best to anticipate a wish or a desire, or would go to any lengths to learn the import of an unvoiced preference." "Is Masters one of the young pilots?" "No, an old-timer." "Now you do interest me." "Dead quite a few years. But it is you who interest me, Marlow. I have been told to give you all the information you need about the Polite People of Pudibundia. And on the subject of the Polite People, I must also be polite. But -- saving your presence, and one hears of one who hears and all that -- what in gehenna is a captain in Homicide on the Solar Police Force going to Pudibundia about?" "About murder. That is all I ever go anywhere about. We once had a private motto that we would go to the end of the Earth to solve a case." "And now you have amended your motto to 'to the end of the Earth and beyond'?" "We have." "But what have the Polite People to do with murder? Crime is unknown on Pudibundia." "We believe saving their feelings, that it may not be unknown there. And what I am going to find out is this. There have been pilots for many years who have brought back stories of the Puds, and there are still a few -- a very few -- young pilots alive to tell those stories. What I am going to find out is why there are no old pilots around telling those stories." I T wasn't much of a trip for a tripper, six weeks. And Marlow was well received. His host also assumed the name of Marlow out of politeness. It would have been impossible to render his own name in human speech, and it would have been impossible for him to conceive of using any name except that of his guest, with its modifiers. Yet there was no confusion. Marlow was Marlow, and his host was the Onelow. "We could progress much faster," said Marlow, "if we dispensed with these formalities." "Or assumed them as already spoken," said the Onelow. "For this, in private, but only in the strictest privacy, we use the deferential ball. Within it are all the formulae written minutely. You have but to pass the ball from hand to hand every time you speak, and it is as if the amenities were spoken. I will give you this for the time of your stay. I beg you never to forget to pass it from hand to hand every time you speaki Should you forget, I would not, of course, be allowed to notice it. But when you were gone, I should be forced to kill myself for the shame of it. For private reasons I wish to avoid this and therefore beseech you to be Lesser Marlow (hweafter to ience but not out of any lack of politeness) gave Mai'low a deferential ball, about the size of a ping-pong ball. And so they talked. "As a police official, I am particularly interested in the crime situation on Pud," said Marlow. "An index of zero is -- well, if I could find a politer word I would use it -- suspicious. And as you are, as well as I can determine, the head police official here, though in politeness your office would have another name, I am hoping that you can give me information." "Saving your grace, and formula of a formula, what would you have me tell you about?" "Suppose that a burglar (for politeness sake called something else) were apprehended by a policeman (likewise), what would happen ?""Why, the policeman (not so called, and yet we must be frank) 'would rattle his glottis in the prescribed manner." "Rattle his gl -- I see. He would clear his throat with the appropriate sound. And then the burglar (not so called) ?" "Would be covered with shame, it is true, but not fatally. For the peace of his own soul, he would leave the site in as dignified a manner as possible." "With or without boodle?" "Naturally without. One apprehended in the act is obliged to abandon his loot. That is only common politeness." "I see. And if the burglar (not so called) remains unapprehended ? How is the loss of the goods or property recorded?" "It goes into the coefficient of general diminution of merchandise, which is to say shrinkage, wastage or loss. At certain times and places this coefficient becomes alarmingly large. Then it is necessary to use extraordinary care ; and in extreme cases a thrice-removed burglar may become so ashamed of himself that he will die." "That he will die of shame? Is that a euphemism?" "Let us say that it is a euphemism of a euphemism." "Thrice-removed, I imagine. And what of other crimes?" glottis in a nervous manner, and Marlow hurriedly transferred his deferential ball to the other hand, having nearly forgotten it. "There being no crime, we can hardly speak of other perhaps in another matter of speaking, you refer to -- " "Crimes of violence," said Marlow. "Saving your presence, and formula of a formula, what would we have to be violent about? What possible cause?" "The usual: greed, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, plain perversity." "Here also it is possible for J)ne to die of shame, sometimes the offender, sometimes the victim, sometimes both. A jealous person might permit both his wife and her paramour to die of shame. And the State in turn might permit him to perish likewise, unless there were circumstances to modify the degree of shame ; then he might still continue to live, often in circumscribed circumstances, for a set number of years. Each case must be decided on its own merits." "I understand your meaning. But why build a fence around it?" "I do not know what you mean." "I believe that you do. Why are the Polite People of Pudibundia so polite? Is it simply custom?" "It is more than that," said the polite Pud. "Then there is a real reason for it? And can you tell it to me?" "There is a real reason for it. I cannot tell it to you now, though, and perhaps not ever. But there is a chance that you may be given a demonstration of it ju.st before you leave. And if you are very wise, you may be able then to guess the reason. I believe that there are several who have guessed it. I hope that we will have time for other discussions before you leave our sphere. And I sincerely do hope that your stay on Pundibundia is a pleasant one. And now, saving your presence, we must part. Formula of a formula." "Formula of a formula and all that," said Marlow, and went to discover the pleasures of Pudibundia. Among the pleasures of Pud was Mitzi (Miniature Image a thousand-times-removed of the Ze.stful Irma) who had now shaped up into something very nice. And shaped up is the correct term. At first Marlow was shocked by the appearance of all the females he met on Pud. Crudefeatured, almost horse-faced, how could they all look like that? And he was even more shocked when he finally realized the reason. He had become used to the men there looking like himself out of politeness. And this -- this abomination -- was the female version of his own appearance I But he was a man of resources. He took from his pocket a small picture of Irma that he always carried, and showed it to the most friendly of the girls. "Could you possibly -- ?" "Look like that? Why, of course. Let me study it for a moment. Now, then." So the girl assumed the face of Irma. "Incredible," said Marlow, "except Irma is red-headed." "You have only to ask. The photo is not colored and so I did not know. We will try this shade to start with." "Close, but could you turn it just a little darker?" "Of course." And there she was Irma of the most interesting face and wonderful hair. But the picture had been of the face only. Below that, the girl was a sack. If only there were some way to convey what was lacking. "You still are not pleased with me," said the Miniature Image a thousand-times-removed of the Zestful Irma (Mitzi). "But you have only to demonstrate. Show me with your hands." Marlow with his hands sculptured in the air the figure of Irma as he remembered it, and Mitzi assumed the form, first face on, then face away, then in profile. And when they had it roughly, they perfected it, a little more here, a little 'less there. But there were points where his memory failed him. "If you could only give me an idea of the convolutions of her ears," said Mitzi, "and the imderlying structure of the metatarsus. My only desire is to please. Or shall I improvise where you do not remember?" "Yes, do that, Mitzi." And how that girl could improvise ! M arlow and Mitzi were now buddies. They made a large evening of it. They tied one on ; formula of a formula, but they tied one on. They went on a thrice-removed bender. At the Betelgeuse Bar and Grill, they partook of the cousin of the cousin of the alcohol itself in the form of the nono-rhumbezoid, made of nine kinds of rum. At the Bflat Starlight Club, they listened to the newest and most exciting music on all Pudibundia. At Alligator John's, one checks his inhibitions at the door. Here one also checks his deferential ball. Of course the formulae are built into the walls and at each exchange it is always assumed that they are said. But the Iris Room is really the ultimate. The light comes through seven different colors of glass, and it is very dim when it arrives. And there the more daring remove their goggles entirely and go about without them in the multicolored twilight. This is illegal. It is even foolhardy. There is no Earthly equivalent to it. To divest oneself and disport with Nudists would be tame in comparison. But Mitzi and her friends were of the reckless generation and the Iris Room was their rendezvous. The orgy will not be detailed here. The floor show was wild. Yet we cannot credit the rumor that the comedian was so crude as to look directly at the audience even in that colored twilight ; or they so gauche as to laugh outright at the jokes, they who had been taught always to murmur, "One knows of one who knows of one who ventures to smile." Yet there was no doubting that the Iris Room was a lively place. And when they left it at dawn, Marlow was pleased and sleepy and tipsy. There was a week of pleasure on Pudibundia : swimming with Mitzi down at West Beach, gourmandizing with Mitzi at Gastrophiles, dancing with Mitzi, pub-crawling, romancing, carrying on generally. The money exchange was favorable and Marlow was on an expense account. It was a delightful time. But still he did not forget the job he was on, and in the midst of his pleasure he sought always for information. "When I return here," he said slyly, "we will do the many things that time does not allow. When I come back here -- " "But you will not return," said MitzL "Nobody ever does." "And why not? It is surely a pleasant place to return to. Why won't I return?" "If you cannot guess, then I cannot tell you. Do you have to know why?" "Yes, I have to know why. That is why I came hee, to find out. To find out why the young men who come here will never be able to return here, or to anywhere else." "I can't tell you." "Then give me a clue." "In the Iris Room was a clue. It was not till the colorfiltered light intruded between us that we might safely take off our goggles. I would save you if I could. I want you to come back. But those higher in authority make the decisions. When you leave, you will not return here, or anywhere else. But already one has spoken to one who has spoken to one who has spoken too much." "There is a point beyond which politeness is no longer a virtue, Mitzi." "I know. If I could change it, I would." was at an end, and Marlow was at his last conference with would leave Pudibundia, perhaps forever. "Is there anything at all else you would like to know?" "There is almost everything that I still want to know. I have found out nothing," "Then ask." "I don't know how. If I knew the questions to ask, it is possible that I would already know the answers." "Yes, that is entirely possible." him with amused eyes. And yet the eyes were hidden behind purple goggles. Marlow had never seen the eyes of the eyes of any of the Puds. Even in the Iris Room, in that strangely colored light, it had not been possible to see their eyes. "Are you compelling me to do something?" asked Marlow. "I may be compelling you to think of the question that has eluded you." "Would you swear that I have not been given some fatal sickness?" "I can swear that to the very best of my knowledge you have not." "Are you laughing at me with your eyes?" "No. My eyes have compassion for you." "I have to see them." "You are asking that?" "Yes. I believe the answer to my question is there," Marlow said firmly. goggles. His were clear, intelligent eyes and there was genuine compassion in them. "Thank you," said Marlow. "If the answer is there, it still eludes me. I have failed in my mission for information. But I will return again. I will still find out what it is that is wrong here." "No, you will not return." "What will prevent me?" asked Marlow. "Your death in a very few "What will I die of?" "What did all your young pilots die of?" "But you swore that you did not know of any sickness I could have caught here !" Marlow cried. "That was true when I said it. It was not true a moment later." "Did all the pilots ask to see your eyes?" "Yes. All. Curiosity is a failing of you Earthlings." "Is it that the direct gaze of the Puds kills?" "Yes. Even ourselves it would kill. That is why we have our eyes always shielded. That is also why we erect another shield : that of our ritual politeness, so that we may never forget that too intimate an encounter of our persons may be fatal." "Then you have just murdered me?" "Let us say rather that one hears of one who hears of one "Why did you do it to me?" demanded Marlow. "You asked to see my eyes... It would not be polite to refuse." "It takes you several weeks to kill. I can do it in a few seconds." "You would be wrong to try. Our second glance kills instantly." "Let's see if it's faster than a gun!" It is not polite to lie on Pudibundia. Marlow died instantly. And that is why (though you may sometimes hear a young pilot tell amusing stories immediately -- oh, very immediately -- on his return from Pudibundia) you will never find an old pilot who has ever been there. How's your star gazing? These cold-weather nights give you a good chance to see some interesting sights, even with the naked eye. For instance, probably you can locate the constellation Casseiopia. It's in the northern part of the sky, shaped like a wobbly sort of letter "W", and if you locate the Big Dipper, proceed to the Pole Star and keep going an equal distance on the other side, you can't miss it. A little farther in the same direction -- oh, say about the apparent length of Casseiopia's 'W" itself -- you'll find something about as bright as a star, but queerly fuzzy in appearance. That's the Great Nebula in Andromeda -- M-#, as astronomers call it -- a galaxy about as big as our own and, presumably, with just as many planets, just as high a percentage of which can bear civilized, intelligent life. What you see, of course, is only the core of the galaxy -- the densely populated inner globe where stars are relatively close together. A big telescope will show a spiraling cloud of arms, but they are so sparsely scattered that the aggregate of their light makes no impression on lowpowered instruments, including that low-powered instrument we carry around with us, the eye. M-#'s core is exactly matched in our own galaxy. We call it the Milky Way. And our own sun? That's in one of the spiraling arms. So it will do you no good to wave to a possible Andromedan observer -- he can't even see our sun, much less you. And if he could, it might take him a while to wave back. The round-trip time for light takes some three Tuesday's Child IF is going to be Tuesda # r's child... The second Tuesday of every month. This means that next issue will be on sale, let's see, January #th -- And it also means that, by asking your newsdealer to be sure and order IF for you each issue, you can be sure you won't miss a single exciting number! The apartment was empty. So was she. But not for long. T he apartment is called a single. It contains a Murphy bed, a chest of drawers, an overstuffed chair, a sofa, a coffee table, a seventeen-inch television set, a bookcase partially filled with the volumes A through F of an encylopedia from the supermarket, assorted paperback books, and a radio that doesn't work. In the ceiling is a fixture with two twenty-fivewatt bulbs. A short hallway leads to the bathroom and the kitchen. Julia Fenway stood outside her apartment, fumbling in her bag for her keys. She had never had any trouble finding her keys before. Her purse was always neat and orderly. And she was breathing hard. Breathing hard from the short walk from the bus at tiie corner and down the long corridor to the private, the lonesome apartment door. Those keys ! Where are those keys! I'm becoming a regular pack rat lately. Look at that bag! Did you ever see so much junk? She thrust her hand deep inside and felt around. A crumpled kleenex, worn-out lipstick, change purse, pencils, movie stubs... a coldness, the keys. Her heart was pounding. She pressed the hand with the keys to her bosom. It was pounding. At least it was working. She managed to get the door open just as the landlady's door down the hall gushed forth cooked cabbage odor and Mrs. Shultz stuck her head out. Julia closed her door behind her until she heard the lock click. Of all the people in the world, why was it the Mrs. Shultzes she attracted? At the sound of the lock, the cat. Belle, poked her head out of the kitehen. She walked lazily into the room, rubbing her side along the wall to scratch off the sleep. Then she leaped to the top of the dresser and started to wash herself. against the door. Her arms, tired of reaching out, hung limply against her sides. A ray of sunlight streamed through the partly open window and a little pool of it snuggled on her pillow. It had been such a long ride in from Beverly Hills and on two buses. She had sat in the back where it wasn't so crowded and the smell of exhaust was still in her nostrils. She walked over to the dresser and put her purse down beside the cat and ran her fingers caressingly through the soft fur. Belle took a swipe with a hind paw. Julia rested her head on the "I'm going to die. Belle." The cat sat up and lifted a front paw. She washed it with little delicate strokes from her tongue. Julia moved over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. She slipped her shoes off. Her feet hurt. They always hurt in heels. Why does one get dressed up to see the doctor? He could have told her she had six months to live while she was wearing flats. He didn't actually blurt it out as I walked in the door. He fooled around under that sheet for a long time. And then he said it. No, not then either. He just looked pained and hurt and a little white around the lips and he told me to get dressed and come into his office. He had the lab reports on his desk and he pounded on them and he said you're as good as dead now! I wish he had ! Then I could hate him. I could hate instead of feeling numb all over. He didn't want to tell me anything. Just get ready for an operation. No, there really wasn't any rush. But soon. And then I dragged it out of him. I insisted I had a right to know. It was my life. No, I don't have any family here. No one... no one! A brother in New York. Don't call him! The doctor stammered like a schoolboy who's unprepared in class. Julia fell back on the bed. She stared at the unlighted ceiling fixture. She should cry, but she'd cried in the doctor's office and there was nothing left to cry. Six months to live. Maybe only five months. Certainly no more than seven with the operation. A spring in the bed got her in the back. She ought to tell Mrs. Shultz to fix that. She certainly didn't want to spend her last six months sleeping on a loose spring. Spend her last six months ! She turned over on her stomach and pressed her face into the blanket. Her body was rigid. She tried to contemplate her own death. She should call her brother. No, she would die first. "Hello, excuse me, my name is Vassi." Julia raised her head and looked around the room. It was empty. "Would you say this is a typical prior dwelling?" Julia sat up. There was no one. "Oh, I hadn't thought of that possibility. I suppose we don't have a similar frame of reference. You'll never understand my thoughts." walked around the room and her stocking feet made little padded sounds on the cotton carpet. Then she crossed to the door of the apartment and pressed her ear against it. "Are you a ventriloquist?" she said. "A ventriloquist? Oh, my, no. I'm an historian." The voice was in her head. "I'm insane." It had to happen. She touched her fingertips to her mouth. "Is that so? That's too bad. We're over and done with that sort of thing." "I'll wash my face with cold water. It must be the strain. I shouldn't have forced the doctor..." "You are alone, aren't you? I looked around rather carefully. I didn't see anyone except that... that thing on that piece of furniture." Julia looked at Belle. The cat was asleep on the dresser. She started to walk to the bathroom but stopped in front of the bed and sat down. Her head was going to burst. "Please" she said. "Please stop." "I really don't want to intrude. But I have my recorder right here. It won't take long and then I must move on. Now I notice you're fully dressed. Most remarkable. We always thought you prior people indulged in sex orgies alnwst continuously." "My God!" "Your thoughts are confused. Is it because you're insane? You haven't had much experience in thought projection, have you?" Julia jumped from the bed and ran into the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and turned on the cold water full force. She cupped her hands under the faucet and plunged her face into the cascading coldness. My name is Julia Fenway. I'm a file clerk at Continental Insurance. I'm going to die and I'm not preoccupied with sex. She turned off the faucet and stared into the sink. The water gathered into a little whirlpool and disappeared down the drain. Therewas a knock on the bathroom door. The voice was in her head. "I wonder if I could see that. We have some rather indistinct writings on running water. I'd like to bring them up to date." The cold water didn't help. If anything, it was worse now. The knocking came from the door. She was sure of it. But the voice... the voice was inside her. "May I come in?" Julia sat down on the edge of the tub. She squeezed her head between her hands. I don't deserve this. What did I do to deserve this? "Please. I'm on a tight schedule." "So am I! Go away!" She was talking to it. She was talking to the voice in her head. Then it was very quiet. Julia watched the door, waiting for someone to walk through its solidness. Nothing happened. She lowered her head and started to count the tiny tiles in the floor. If I count one row very carefully, it will take me five minutes, two rows ten minutes, three rows... She started to count. through the fourth row, the voice said, "I don't think you realize the importance of my visit. We recognize your right of privacy, but don't you feel in this case... ?" Julia jumped up and pulled open the door. "Let me die in peace !" She ran into the other room and stood in the middle of it, looking all around, breathing hard. Belle leaped down from the dresser, her doze finished, and rubbed against Julia's leg. The water in the bathroom was running. She hadn't shut it oflf. But she had. She had. The water started again. It stopped. It started. It stopped. "How quaint." There is someone here! "Who are you?" "Vassi." "Vassi?" "I'm chief historian, research division. It's my first trip in time. The scientists have been playing around with this thing for years and they've only just let us take it over." A time traveler! Julia stood very still. Her eyes searched the room slowly once again. The window was open about three inches. Too small for anyone to squeeze through. The door was locked from the inside. There was absolutely no one in the room. In her desperate state, she was hunting for an out. She was involved in a fairy story. Her body started to relax. "I can't see you, Mr. Vassi." I can't accept death. I'm looking for escape. "You can't see me? I'm standing right in front of you." "I can't see you." "I don't understand. I can see you. Here, take my hand." For a moment, Julia hoped. There was nothing. "Why, I can't touch you!" Not even a breath of wind. Julia walked over to the dresser and took a package of cigarettes out of her handbag., She carried it over to the sofa and sat down. "You walked through me!" She lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in a long steady stream. When she was a little girl and she had a sharp pain in her side, her mother would say it's only gas, hold on, it'll pass. She would hold on... Mother, help me! The voice in her head. "I wish I had paid more attention to those scientists. What was it they said? I had so much to do before I left. Something about transporting living matter... Are you ure I'm invisible?" "I can't see you." "Do you people have trouble with your eyes? No, that's not it. I can't touch you. And I'd expected to bring back some artifacts. I am terribly disappointed." "I'm sorry." "And well you might be. It's going to be extremely difficult going around asking people a lot of questions when they can't see me. You must have had quite a start." "Stop it! Stop it! My head. Oh, dear God, my head!" Julia got up. "I'm going out!" "You are having trouble with the thought projection. I'll sit down and be quiet for a moment." T he voice stopped. Julia paused at the door. The room was quiet. Breathing! She heard breathing. Her own? She held her breath. It was there in the room. She was sure of it. It was a whisper in her throat. "You are real." The faucet, the water, the knock on the door. "You are real!" If she held on, it would pass like gas. "You are real!" She moved trancelike back into the room. "You see me now." "No. I heard you breathe." "Can you touch me?" "No." She heard her own blood in her ears. Her own breath forced itself between her lips. His breathing was gone. It was a dream. She said, "You're gone." "Over here on the arm of the couch." She turned. She fought to silence herself. Sbe heard the soft breathing from the direction of the couch. U "Who are you, Mr. Vassi?" "It's just Vassi, no mister. I already told you who and what I am." "A time traveler from some distant future," she said. "Most of your records disappeared in the final war. We want to pick up the traces. Best way to do that is to travel back in time." "It sounds like such a long way. How long?" If it was true, it was a miracle. If it wasn't... Julia, you're a realist! "It would be a meaningless term for you. It's an age, an eon away." Julia sat down on the edge of the overstuffed chair. She noticed a faint layer of dust on the coffee table. The apartment looked messy with the bed out of the wall. Ever since the first visit to the doctor three weeks ago, she hadn't thought of cleaning. "I'm afraid the apartment doesn't look very presentable." "Aren't you comforted to know that the world has survived?" "But I won't survive." She looked at the dust again. " Y ou see, I don't do much entertaining." "Is that so? I wouldn't know. Do you mind if I record our conversation?" "I don't mind. It's nice to have someone to talk to, even if I can't see you." Julia, you're a realist I "Yes. Well, that is a bother. Now would you mind telling me a few pertinent facts about civilization as you know it?" "I don't think I know too much about that sort of thing," said Julia.  middle of a library of some sort..." His voice broke off. "You don't seem to have much of a collection of books here." Julia said, "Are you near the bookcase?" "No wonder the records didn't last, if this is the way they were kept." "Vassi, can you touch the books?" She got up and went to the bookcase. "Yes." "Pick one up." "They're no use to me. This isn't history." "Pick one up!" "I haven't got the time. I have to move on." "Vassi, you touched the faucet, didn't you? And you knocked on the door." "Ye.s... That does mean I can bing back artifacts!" "Why can't you touch me?" "Now I have to get to a place that will do me some good. A library, a store, isn't that what you call them? A museum... Are any of these things nearby?" "Let me go with you. I'll be your gmide. I'll -- I'll show you my time." "But won't you be uncomfortable? I'm invisible." "I don't care! No one can steal you from me this way." "Steal me?" "Vassi, why can't you touch me!" "I'm not too sure. I think it's because you're alive. You see, life is a transient thing. Matter is continuous in one form or another. Matter existing today always existed and will always exist, or something like that. I didn't listen too carefully. Anyhow, it's possible for someone to travel back in time but not ahead. Do I make myself clear? It's out of my line, you know." Julia reached down and scooped up Belle. "Can you touch her?" "What is that?" "My cat. Can you touch her?" "A cat? My, the anatomists would love to see that! But it's the same as with you. My hand passes right through her." Julia put Belle back on the floor. Her mind was racing. Vassi said, "She's sitting right where I'm standing." "I've got to believe it's not a nightmare. I've got to believe you're real and that you can help me." "If I can do it quickly. I have so much else to do. Others are waiting to use the machine." "Are people well where you come from?" "Very well, thank you." "Are there any incurable diseases?" She tried to listen for his breathing. "Incurable? You mean sickness that doesn't respond to treatment? No, of course not." "Then take me with you!" she cried. "You just said you wanted to guide me here." "Take me with you to your time." "I can't do that. I can't even touch you." "There must be a way. You have got to think of something." "Even if I could take you. I'm not supposed to." "Why?" "It would mix up history to remove persons from their time. It might even be dangerous with artifacts. I suppose we couldn't hold onto them very long." "History? I have no history. I'm going to die very soon. No one depends on me. I have no one. Please take me, Vassi." "I feel very strange." "Are you all right?" "Yes. I just feel -- odd." "How..." "First you want to guide me, then you want to come with me, you don't care about mankind's survival. You sound so terrified and confused." couch. If only she could see him. "Don't leave me to die." "How strange to talk about dying," said Vassi. "We all live so long we never think about it." "You will take me with you, Vassi?" "If people in your time have such short lives, then why does dying trouble you? It would seem a matter of course." "Vassi, I haven't lived yet." "This is out of my line. I'll tell you what. When I return. I'll talk to one of the scientists. If they're interested in the project, they'll send someone back." "How long will that be?" "Now let's see if I can figure in your time. Hmm... I'd say about a year..." Julia closed her eyes. She felt dampness under the lids. Her voice was hollow as she spoke to the empty room. "I'll be dead in six months." And the voice in her head echoed, "Six months..." "Vassi, isn't there someone you can talk to now?" He didn't answer her. Julia looked around the room. "Vassi, are you still here? Vassi? Vassi, if you don't talk, I can't tell if you're still here! Vassi, please answer me. Did I talk too much? I didn't mean to run on about my problems. I know you have a job to do. Maybe you can squeeze me in. I don't want to keep you from your work. Vassi, you didn't go, did you? You didn't leave me! Don't leave. I believe in you. I believe in you..." And now she had the aloneness she had longed for. He was gone and she would be left with the Mrs. Schultzes and the doctor. She went from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom and back into the living room, listening, hoping to catch the small sound of his breathing. But her body would not be quiet and she heard nothing except herself. She stood for a long while looking down at the bed. The sunlight drifted from the pillow onto the covers and finally spilled oflf the foot of the bed onto the floor and the room was a shade darker. She was a stone, but a stone whose blood gurgled and stomach rumbled and heart beat and pulse pounded, so loudly she could hear nothing else. Her legs gave way and she crumpled to the bed and she was silent at last. The breathing came from the direction of the window. She spoke into the covers. "Vassi, why didn't you answer me?" "You tempt me and I have so much to do, so much ground to cover." "You can come back." "We haven't got enough of these time centers. There's quite a lineup to use them. If I go now, there's no telling how long it'll take me to get back." Julia got up and went to the window. "Am I facing you?" "Yes." "You're my only hope, wild as it seems. Vssi, wouldn't it be helpful to your research to have a real live person from my time to study?" mean you would be willing to have us -- study you?" "Within limits... No, not within limits." "They'll be very angry if I come back without my research project." "Are people that cold in your time?" asked Julia. "Cold?" Vassi repeated in bewilderment. "Hpftrtlpq??" "Heartless? I hardly think so." "I mean callous, without pity, without compassion." "I've been very busy. I haven't thought about it." "Do men and women marry in your time?" "Yes, they do." "Are you married?" "No, you see. I'm not very -- presentable. Besides, I have my research." "To me you're the most beautiful man in the world." "You can't see me. If you saw me, you wouldn't think "I can hear you. That's all I need." Julia turned from the window and walked back to the couch. When she sat down she could feel herself trembling. Never, never in her life had she spoken to a man like that. Maybe, if she could see him, his eyes would be mocking her. She said, "If you take me back with you, then later when I'm well I could come back with you and show you everything you would want to see. Then I could be your guide." He was standing in front of her. She could hear him breathing again. There was excitement in his breathing; she was sure of it. He said, "I wish I could touch you. You're very beautiful." "Vassi, in my own time I'm ugly. Perhaps I belong in your time." Then the excitement that was in his breathing was in his voice. "All right. All right. I'll see what I can do. You wait right here. It may take me several years to get back. But I'll do it if I can..." "Several years! Vassi, I can't wait that long !" She was very near despair. "No, no, you don't understand. In your time it'll only be a matter of minutes. The controls would be set to right now, however long it may take to nave the project approved in my time." The room was quiet. A slight breeze drifted in through the open window. Julia sat very still on the. couch for a few moments. Belle rubbed herself against the coffee table and then climbed into Julia's lap. She had to hold on. She had to believe. A world with no illness. A world where people live practically forever. A world with Vassi. She scratched the cat behind the ears. Belle started to purr softly. "Belle," Julia said, "what am I going to do with you? Vassi will think of something. He's coming back. Belle. He's coming back and he'll take both of us with him." She picked up the cat and put it on the couch. Then she got up and went to the mirror over the dresser. She pushed her hair back from her face. He said I was beautiful. Not even my mother ever said I was beautiful. What will they think at the office when I don't come in tomorrow or even phene? They won't think anything. They'll get Sheila with the black hair and the big bust to do my work and they won't think about me at all. Even that one didn't say I was beautiful. Not even right after I moved in here and he was a little drunk, and he could have said it then. Then, of all times, but he didn't. He just looked a little ashamed, maybe disgusted afterward, and he talked about being late for a dinner appointment. T here was a knock on the door. Julia whirled from the mirror. Vassi must have gotten a little off course. She hadn't thought of that possibility. She walked quickly to the door. "Vassi?" she asked. "It's me, Mrs. Shultz." "What do you want?" "You went to the doctor today. I expected you'd come by. Tell me, how are you?" "Go away." "Julia, open up. Maybe I can do something for you." "Go away. Please go away." "You're not feeling so well?" "No." "Bad news, maybe?" "I don't want to see anyone. Mrs. Shultz." "I understand. I'll come back later." Footsteps went down the hallway. A door opened. The sound of a television set. A door closed. Vassi, hurry! I don't know whether or not it really happened. I'm not sure now, Vassi. I am going out of my mind. I am clutching at straws. Come back, Vassi. Come back. Reassure me. "They said it would work." "Vassi!" "They said it would work, but it sounds like a terrible risk. We'll do it with the cat first." "Vassi, where are you?" "Right in front of you. Now listen carefully." "Are you going to take me with you?" "We'll try the cat first. If it works with the cat, then we'll try you." Julia was trembling. "What do I do?" "The first thing we have to do is kill the cat." "What are you talking about!" "When the cat is dead, it will become as inanimate an object as any of those books over there. In that state I should 'le able to transport it to my time. There the doctors will revive it. Everything is ready." "r can't kill my cat!" "If it works, it's only temporary." "And if it doesn't work?" she whispered. "I'd rather it be the cat than you." "I never dreamed... "We'll have to hurry. They are waiting." "I can't kill Belle." You're transporting her." The tears were in Julia's eyes again. "It's crazy. I'm crazy." "Look, I'd do it, but I can't physically touch the cat." "I know. I know." "They said suffocation was best. It leaves fewer complications." ed up the cat. Her tears fell on the animal's fur. She held it close to her. The cat was quiet, unknowing. Julia said, "Do me first." "Even if I could, I would not," said Vassi. "The cat first." "I've had her since she was a kitten, a little round ball with a button for a nose. I can't do this to her. If it does not work... This is my madness, not hers!" "What were you going to do with her six months from now?" "Six months... Alone, she would be left alone... Belle has never been alone except for the hours when I'm at work. Who would take care of her? She's such a fussy eater. I have to feed her liver from my hand..." "You'll be together." "Together..." "Take one of the pillows on the bed. Don't think about it! Do it!" Julia carried Belle over to the bed. As she tried to put it down, one of its claws became entangled in her dress. The cat started to struggle as if finally awakened. Julia reached over for a pillow. Sweat stood out on her forehead. Her tears blinded her. She saw the mass of fur. She saw the softness. The claws were freed. She brought the pillow down over Belle. Julia blacked out, sprawled across the pillow. She couldn't have been out long. She pulled herself from the bed. 'The pillow was on the floor. Belle was gone. Vassi's voice, was in her head. "It worked! The anatomists are wild ! I've never seen so much excitement!" "Belle is all right?" "Wonderful. It took them no time at all to revive her. The laboratory is a bedlam. Everyone wants to examine her." "How should I do it? I'll never be able to suffocate myself." She laughed a little. "I can't even turn on the gas range. Mine is electric." She looked around the apartment. If she slashed her wrists there would be too much blood. She hated blood. The thought of poison repelled her. Wait -- she had it. She pulled one of the sheets off the bed and twisted it. She pushed the overstuffed chair into the center of the room and stood on one of the arms to attach an end of the sheet to the ceiling fixture. At the other end she made a noose. There was a knock on the door again. "Julia, if you're not well, it's no good you should be alone," Mrs. Schultz said. Julia slipped the noose over her head. "Vassi, do you love me?" "Of course. I just hope you'll love me." Mrs. Schultz knocked hard. "Julia, I hear you talking. I know you're home. Let me in. I have some soup for you." "Vassi, do you think I'm beautiful?" "The most beautiful woman I have ever seen." Mrs. Schultz pounded on the door. "Julia, why don't you answer me?" As Julia stepped off the arm of the chair, she saw the open window. A thought crossed her mind before the noose tightened. Belle could have jumped out of the window when I passed out. Julia, you're a realist! the pot of soup and opened the door. The apartment is called a single. It consists of a Murphy bed, a chest of drawers, an overstuffed chair, a sofa, a coffee table, a seventeen-inch television set, a bookcase partially filled with the volumes A through F of an encyclopedia from the supermarket, and assorted paperback books, and a radio that doesn't work. In the ceiling is a fixture with two twenty-five-watt bulbs. From the fixture hangs a twisted sheet with a hangman's knot in the end of it. The noose is quite empty. So is the apartD f)   ) the contact #  c   point Somewhere on Mars there had to be a meeting of the minds... , A ted the first alien in the ruins of the strange red Martian city on the second day of exploration. His first impulse was to call out to the other men -- but then, afraid his voice would startle the creature down at the end of the rubble-strewn street, he silently unholstered his military service pistol and crept forward toward the back (he hoped it was the back) of the alien, his breath rasping behind his faceplate. He was a mere ten paces short of his goal when loose gravel beneath his heavy boot betrayed him. Even in the thin Martian atmosphere, the sound was a sharp one. The creature spun about, one appendage gripping the haft of a slim crystal tube. He froze there, watching Lloyd with odd oval-shaped eyes, yelloworange in color. Lloyd's thumb slid back the safety catch on his automatic, slowly, carefully. Then the creature lowered the tube and its wide lipless mouth curled in what had to be a grin. "Ookl okkl?" it said distinctly. Lloyd looked into the alien eyes and was pleased to see the intelligence within their depths. He reholstered his pistol and held out his hand. "Lieutenant Lloyd of the Sherlock #" he said. The alien hesitated, then inserted the four flaccid stalkthings at the end of its "arm" into Lloyd's hand. They shook these clasped appendages solemnly, then withdrew their own with relief. "Boy, am I glad you Martians are friendly!" Lloyd laughed. "When I saw you up the street, I envisioned a fullscale guerrilla attack and -- Damn, you're not getting a word of this, are you?" In reply, the creature pointed to its thoracic region and said, "Ulkay Blet." It pointed to Lloyd again and enunciated carefully, "Lieutenant Lloyd." "Glad to know you, Ulkay. Or do I call you by both names? Or just Mister Blet?" "Ulkay," the alien said. "Blet," he added. "Ulkay Blet," he clarified, with an almost Earthlike shrug. pick name, Lloyd saw He took his pick. "Ulkay, tell me, are you the last of your race, or are there others of your kind atill left alive on Mars?" Ulkay just stared, friendly but lust. Lloyd tried again. "I -- " he pointed to himself -- "am here with more like me -- " he pointed to himself, held up one finger to Ulkay, then pointed in a long sweep behind himself toward the end of the street and held up four fingers. His only success was an envious look from Ulkay at Lloyd's extra finger. "Hoo boy!" said Lloyd, smacking his brow in chagrin. "This is a rough one. Look, Ulkay, you hold on and don't be scared." He laid a hand upon Ulkay's shoulder ft)r assurance, then turned his head and shouted, "Here This way, men!' The sound of heavy booted feet began, far up the cluttered street. Lloyd felt Ulkay grow tense. "It's all right," he said slowly, soothingly, as one talks to a horse or dog, knowing the tone conveys vhat the words cannotUlkay seemed to sense the assurance and relaxed a little. In another minute. Kroner, Harrison, Tandy and Craig were beside their commanding officer, gaping with unconcealed glee at the slightly under five-foot form of Ulkay, who stared right back, steadily if not boldly. "Our first contact with a Martian !" Kroner exulted, his voice metallic through the oxygen helmet. "Does he talk?" Harrison wanted to know immediately. "Where are his friends?" asked Tandy, frowning. Craig, unable to think of a question, was silent. But it was to Craig that Lloyd addressed his first statement. "He speaks a language. His name is Ulkay Bret. Think you can rig a written or oral Rosetta Stone for us, Craig?" Craig shuffled his feet bashfully. "I can try." "Is he alone, though?" said Tandy, irked that his question had gone unanswered. "His buddies might be around here waiting to pick us off. This is their city, after all, and we're trespassers." Lloyd shook his head dubiously. "I think you're wrong, Tandy. Ulkay's got some sort of weapon with him and he put it away without trying to use it. If there are others, they're probably intelligent and friendly, too." "Unless I'm mistaken," Kroner remarked dryly, "we're about to put your statement to the test." "What -- ?" said Lloyd, and looked where Kroner was now facing. Seven creatures like Ulkay were on their way toward the group, each bearing one of those long crystal rods. At first glance, they all looked alike to Lloyd. Then, as they drew nearer, he saw that they were as different from one another as he from his own men. "Ulkay," he said softly, "would you tell your friends that we're their friends ? They look kind of trigger-happy and..." Ulkay, catching Lloyd's meaning from the way he looked toward the approaching squad, turned and babbled something at them. They hesitated. Then all put their crystal rods into short scabbards hanging from their belts. B ehind him, Lloyd heard Tandy's sigh of relief. He turned to Craig. "You and Ulkay see if you can set up something to bridge the language barrier, while Kroner and I go back to the ship and radio the news back to Earth." "Okay," said Craig. He was the expedition's linguist, but extremely shy, considering he was the liaison man with any aliens they encountered"I'll start them with numbers ; that's usually a good kickingoff place, and then I can work into body parts, relationships, and -- " "Whoa," said Lloyd. Craig could be talkative on his professional topics. "I don't want the details, just some results. Kroner and I should be back in about an hour. I'll talk with Ulkay then, if you can show me how to reach him." He and Kroner strode off to their ship, set onto the cold red sands a mile away. It would take nearly three minutes for a message to reach Earth, and another three, at least, before the reply came back, so Lloyd, dispensing with formality, sent, "This is Lieutenant Lloyd of the Sherlock II. We have landed successfully on Mars, discovered a decaying Martian city, and eight inhabitants, so far. If you read me, set up a recorder and signal me when you are ready to tape my report." He sat back in the chair with a sigh. "There, that cuts out a lot of fuss," he remarked to Kroner. "And the less time spent away from our men, the Kptter "Yes," said Lloyd. "How does this thing -- well, how does it feel to you?" "Too easy," said Kroner without hesitation. "Of course, there's no reason why it should feel at all hard, is there?" "No," Lloyd admitted reluctantly. "No reason at all why we shouldn't establish contact with these Martians, find them friendly, get our information about their city, way of life, and so on, and go back safely to Earth and home. But -- " "Yeah," said Kroner. " 'Butr " "They act friendly." "Maybe that's all it is, an act. But if they're not going to be chums, why go to all this trouble? You know what I mean, sir?" Lloyd leaned back in the padded chair and scratched his short-cropped head. "Beats me. And yet I can't help feeling uncomfortable about -- There's the blinker. Earth's ready to record." He dropped the conversation and set himself to telling Earth of developments so far. "TS it some sort of taboo or J. what?" Lloyd demanded irritably of Craig. It was three hours since he and Kroner had returned from the ship, and communication with Ulkay and his bunch had been established -- but with one annoying and unexpected feature. "I can't seem to find out, sir," Craig said miserably. "He's responsive on almost every other topic, but when I ask him about the city here, he says he can't tell me. I've asked him why, but his answer escapes me." "When he says he 'can't' tell you, does he mean he is physically unable to, or forbidden to?" "I'm not even sure if it's 'can't.' It might just be 'won't.' But I am sure it's a negative of some sort. They shake their heads and nod same as we do for yes and no." "Let's see that list," Lloyd said, his voice tired. Craig held it out, but Kroner took it. "You've looked at it ten times in the past hour, sir," he apologized. "Let me have a whack at it." Lloyd started to argue the point, then gave it up. "Okay, Sergeant. See what you can make of it. If you can ask a clear question of Ulkay and Company with those choice bits of language. I'll put in your name for a decoration." Kroner scanned the list, noting with fading hope the vocabulary he had to work with. "Wish we had more verbs!" he said. "They're the hardest, always," said Craig. "Active ones are easy enough, though the tenses and irregularities can be tough, but the nonactive -- the intransitive -- can't be demonstrated the way actions and things can." "Well, we've got Mars, and city, and -- that's a good one -- men. That's them?" Craig nodded. "Hey, weren't there eight of those guys a while back? We're two short!" "What?" said Lloyd, looking over at the aliens. "You're right. Kroner! Ulkay's gone, and -- let me see -- that heavyset one with the big shoulderspan. Where the hell -- ?" Tandy and Harrison came up at that moment. "Sir," Tandy looked disgusted, "we can't find out a thing from the rubble. No heavy radiation present, so it kind of discounts an atomic war, although -- " "Never mind the surmises for now," said Lloyd. "Tell me just what you know for sure." One side of Tandy's mouth twisted. "Yes, sir. Very little of the rubble seems to be due to any heavy damage. I mean, no buildings have collapsed or anything like that. It's just as though time had crumbled off a brick hole here and there, and nobody bothered sweeping the street." "The city gates were knocked down," Lloyd protested. T andy shook his head. "Not knocked down, sir -- fallen. It's my opinion this place is just obsolete, a sort of last-year's model that needs a new coat of paint and an engine overhaul. Except for all the dust, sand and crumbled material, it's in pretty good shape." "You mean it's unfashionable but serviceable?" said Kroner."Like a spring-driven phonograph?" "That's about it. Sergeant," Tandy nodded. "Anything else, you're going to have to ask the Martians themselves." "Which brings me back to my earlier apprehension," said Kroner. "I don't like the idea of two of those guys being missingHold on -- there they come! And with a small cannon, unless I miss my guess I" The Earthmen were all on their feet now, facing the pair of aliens who lugged a heavy contraption with a tubular nozzle on the front of it up the street toward the waiting group. "It can't be a cannon," said Lloyd, puzzled. "Why would they bother, when handweapons would do?" By that time, Ulkay and his crony had the gadget set down on a tripod base and were turning dials on its side. The Earthmen, every one of them, loosened pistols in their holsters, but only Tandy actually brought his out. Then they jumped as a metallic voice came out through the gadget's nozzle. "Men!" said the voice. "Do not possess fear." "A miracle!" gasped Craig. "It's a translating machine!" He rushed forward to view this thing, his face glowing with delight. Lloyd, recovering from his start, saw that Ulkay was speaking into a tube at the side of the machine, and realized that his translated voice had been the one heard. "Ulkay," he said, going toward the machine, "does this work both ways?" Ulkay nodded and pointed to the nozzle on the front. "This," said his voice from the nozzle, "picks up as well as recepts." "Receives," said Craig automatically. " -- as receives," said the nozzle automatically. "There will exist some few ungrammatics, but it will mostly make sensible." "Man, this simplifies everything !" Lloyd exclaimed. "Ulkay, do you mind if we ask you some questions?" Ulkay, via the nozzle, replied with dignity, "You and your Craig have questioned with relentless of us. Can we be allowed the similar luck?" "I beg your pardon," Lloyd said sincerely. "Go ahead and ask." "These transparents you wear upon your faces, why?" asked the nozzle, in a mechanical monotone. "The air." Lloyd gestured with a sweep of his arm. "It is too thin to support our kind of life without these masks." "Strange," said the nozzle. "And where are your women?" "We did not bring them with us," said Lloyd. "We made this trip strictly to find you." Ulkay stared at Lloyd a long moment. Then the nozzle asked, "What trip?" "To your city," said Lloyd. "To your planet." dled a moment with a dial on the side of the machine. The nozzle spoke slowly this time. "Repeat your re.sponse. It was not a sensible." "We came here. To Mars. To find you." Lloyd said it carefully and distinctly, feeling very uneasy. "But this is Earth," said the nozzle loudly"To you it is Earth," said Lloyd, with a tolerant smile. "I think we're having a semantic problem, Ulkay. Each planet's self-name would translate as 'Earth.' This machine cannot make the proper distinction." "No, no, no !" came the nozzle's voice. "You say your planet is called 'Earth'. Why do you now call it 'Mars'?" "We don't," said Lloyd, bewildered. "We call this planet Mars. Our planet is called Earth -- " "Sir!" Kroner grasped his arm tightly. "Wait a minute! I think I get it!... Ulkay! Is this your planet?" "No," said the nozzle. "Is it not yours?" "Numbers!" said Craig. "Ask him by the number of the planet from the sun." "We are from Earth, the third planet from the sun," said Lloyd, holding up hree fingers for emphasis. "Where are you from?" "We are from Earth." said the nozzle, "the second planet from the sun." Ulkay held up two digits"Venusians?" Tandy squawked, while Harrison doubled up in a fit of laughter as the idea sank in. In another moment, both groups -- Ulhay's and Lloyd's -- had joined him in a tension-breaking paroxysm of mirth. "Where are you parked?" asked Kroner, the first to recover some semblance of control. Ulkay, still chuckling, pointed in the opposite direction to that in which the Sfeerlock II was standing. "Outside the west gate of the city," said the nozzle. "Where are you?" "Outside the east gate. We thought you were Martians -- people of this, the fourth planet." "And we in turn thought you were Martians," said Ulkay, through the nozzle. There was more laughter in both groups. "For Pete's sake!" muttered Lloyd. "For Pete's sake ! Look, Ulkay, why don't both our groups get some rest and we'll make our inspection tour of the city tomorrow, the two groups together?" Ulkay, after a babble of discussion with his men, was in agreement with this plan, and they and the Earthmen shared a large room within one of the old abandoned buildings. "Will your air supply not run out?" Ulkay queried. "Not on these," Lloyd explained. "They're not tank masks ; they're compression masks. A hydraulic system inside the suit keeps a compressor running in this gadget on our backs, as long as we're moving about. Martian air is thin but non-poisonous." "But if you sleep?" "The air runs low, which makes us fidget, which pumps more air through the compressors," Lloyd explained. Ulkay expressed admiration at the cleverness of Earth scientists, and then joined his toien in slumber. The Earthmen, tired and happy, fell soundly asleep. TT was still dark, the chill purple dark of Mars at night, when Lloyd awakened abruptly. His body was tense and his mind keenly alert. Something was wrong. He felt it, but couldn't place the source of his uneasiness. He sat up and looked about him. Starlight, coming in bright pinpoints through a high arched window, glinted reassuringly off the helmets of his men, lying in pools of deep shadow all about him. He looked for Ulkaj and his group, and saw their smaller silhouettes huddled on the stone flooring. Feeling a little better, he lay down once more and tried to fall back to sleep. But there was a gnawing, nagging something in his mind that would not allow sleep to come. "What's bothering me ?" he asked himself. "Is it something about Ulkay and his bunch? The only really odd thing about them is that they don't wear any breathing equipment in this thin air, right? And didn't Ulkay explain that the atmosphere on Venus is just as thin? It didn't jibe with Harrison's opinion about atmospheres, but Harrison hasn't actually been to Venus, after all, and the cloudiness still keeps its atmosphere a secret from Earth's spectroscopes, right?" His mind assured him that this was right and he felt a little better, but not much. "So what's eating me? A hunch? Intuition? Or just alien-planet nerves?" he went on. "Why should I wake up in the middle of the night feeling scared ? Aren't my men all present and accounted for? Aren't they sleeping quietly, just as they should be?" Feeling annoyed with his own nebulous fears, Lloyd sat up again and looked over the groups, Ulkay's and his own. As he watched. Kroner grunted in his sleep and rolled over. Tandy's helmet emitted gentle snoring noises. Harrison and Craig lay more quietly, but their chests could be seen, even in that dim light, rising and falling normally. Lloyd excoriated his imagination for worrying him -- it had fed him a quick suggestion that perhaps his companions' masks had been slit, suffocating them silently to death. "I must trust Ulkay; it's necessary," said Lloyd to himself. "I can't let these groundless fears spoil future relations between Earth and Venus. The Venusians are friendly and intelligent, and not really odd-looking, once you discount the number of digits on their hands and a few unearthly color schemes on their torsos. So what am I scared of?" Cold touched his spine, shocking him into alertness, as he isolated his fear. He rolled over and shook Kroner awake with barbaric callousH#SS. "Huh? Wha?" said Kroner, sitting up. "Sergeant," said Lloyd, trying to confide his fear to the other man, "when we got here, we were nervous about making contact with aliens, right?" "Yeah," Kroner said sleepily. "But it turned out okay, sir, didn't it?" He shook h'S groggy head. "I mean, Ulkay and his bunch are okay, aren't they?" "Yeah," said Lloyd shakily. "They are fine -- but. Kroner, they're not the right aliens!" It took Kroner a moment to get it. When he did, he came awake with a jolt. "And we haven't even posted a guard !" Lloyd, his worries abetted by Kroner's response, got to his feet, shouting, "Mayday! Mayday!" His men -- and Ulkay's a few seconds later -- were up, everybody snapping on portable torches and setting the chamber alive with fiashing lights. "Ulkay!" Lloyd said, rushing to the Venusian. "If you're not the Martians, and we're not the Martians, then there is still a chance that someone else is the Martians !" Ulkay yelled something to his men, and Lloyd watched with horror as each Venusian fumbled at an empty scabbard upon his belt. Lloyd's hand shot to his holster and found there just what his men were finding in their own holsters: nothing. "Do you think we've discovered the Martians?" said Kroner, his voice hoarse with fright. Then the glaring overhead lights of the room came on, revealing the surrounding phalanx of hard-eyed, armed creatures. "Unless I'm mistaken," Lloyd said, "the Martians have discovered us." An instant later, there was nothing in the center of the alien room but halfmolten air compressors and the charred, smoking remains of a funnylooking little nozzle, still echoing a bilingual chorus of agony. end Worlds of if Book Reviews by Frederik Pohl # "N the jacket of Venus Plus X (Pyramid), the book is called "the strangest science-fiction novel Theodore Sturgeon has ever written." It is strange, all right, but Sturgeon has a talent for strangeness. Often he has seemed to want to shock his readers with his daring. It is love that he writes about, in whatever form love may appear. Some of the forms repel. "I wrote an empathetic sort of tale about some homosexuals," he reminisces, in a postscript to Venus Plus X, "and my mailbox filled up with cards drenched with scent and letters written in purple ink with green capitals... You cannot be objective about sex, especially when it's outside certain parameters." But # can, he is sailing... It is this point of view, this objective compassion for queerness for its own-sake coupled with a godlike contempt for those who do not have the same warmth and ihe same objectivity, that has caused some otherwise firstrate Sturgeons to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the reader. Sturgeon clearly feels that beauty can be found in mire. And it can; but not by pretending that mire is beauty. Then, too, Sturgeon is hip, and a lot of the time too hip for comfort. His characters don't talk, they do routines. Venus Plus X is by no means free from this. Threaded throughout its length is a series of gray-flannel dialogues. In the past this sort of thing has been unhelpful to his story. If the interludes had a connection, it was not always easy to see ; once found, it was not always worth the trouble. And now here comes Venus Plus X, a story set in a human but not a bisexual world, where anyone can do what, and with which, and to whom ; and, lo ! the thing turns out to be wonderful. It is not very surprising that Sturgeon has written an excellent book. But itis surely astonishing that he has built it not out of his strong points, but out of his weaknesses I Sturgeon has something to tell us in Venus Plus X. He says it with irresistible authority. He has invented a new, fascinating, self-consistent, exciting world and peopled it with a remarkable, plausible, provocative new species. He has put into that world a sympathetic, comprehensible, well-intentioned human being named Charlie Johns. And he has let world, species and human interact before our eyes, so that we are told everything we should know and nothing we needn't ; and in the process he has evoked our compassion, our pleasure and our love. If there has been a better science-fiction novel in the past few years -- say, since James Blish's A Case of Conscience -- this reviewer has not seen it. It is so good that it can't be praised in detail, because the detail deserves to come to you as Sturgeon intends it, seriatim. This one you've got to read for yourself and don't let anyone spoil it for you. Now, even Venus Plus X is not all perfection. Charlie Johns is the name of a real man -- a nonce-figure of a couple decades ago, who got to be a nonce-figure by marrying a nine-year-old bride. It is hard to escape the suspicion that Sturgeon (a man who seldom does anything by coincidence) is enjoying some sort of private joke in giving his lead character that name. And then the postscript tacked to the end of the book is -- well -- smart-alecky. It is as though, having finished the novel and having seen for the first time what a really remarkable piece of work it was, the author couldn't resist the temptation to crow. Well, let him crow. The man is entitled. Venus Plus X may or may not be the strangest sciencefiction novel Sturgeon ever wrote. But it is his best. I N The Challenge of the Sea ( Holt-Rinehart-Winston) , Arthur C. Clarke provides young readers with a useful and uniformly entertaining book about the world of water. This is not a subject that has previously occupied Clarke, except as far as the sea is a necessary adjunct to skin-diving, but he acquits himself with grace and merit. He always does. There are, it is true, a few annoying lapses. Some are plain slips of fact : e.g., the name of the most successful abyss-penetrating vessel is uniformly, but wrongly, spelled as "bathyscape." Some are errors of omission: e.g., where in listing the economically likely ways of extracting fresh water from the sea Clarke includes distillation, ion-exchange and osmotic barriers, but does not even mention what is at present the chiefest contender : simple freezing. And some are in the area of opinion. For instance, it is possible that, as Clarke says, farming ultimately "will have abandoned the continents and moved out into the ocean." It certainly is not likely. Of all the false hopes the anti-Malthusians have held out for humanity, the prospect of limitless food from the sea is surely the most illusory. Land plants are inherently more efficient than aquatic ones. Moreover, although it is true enough that there are many edible fish uncaught, it is also true that the total contribution of the sea to the human diet is quite small, and even multiplying it many times cannot make it decisive. Nevertheless, the book's merits vastly exceed its few faults. Clarke has been everywhere and read everything, and his reliable talent for imagining the consequences of known scientific fact let him fill in his marine (future background with plausible detail. The publisher lists The Challenge of the Sea as a "young adult" book. Oddly enough, that's about right. Teen-agers will be able to read it with pleasure and profit, but so will adults. R obert sheckley's The Stahls Civilization (Signet) is a rarely uneven book, a story that makes a point, but reaches its goal only after threading the most remarkable maze of portentous blind alleys and scamped explanations since Van Vogt. The story concerns a man. Will Barrent, who is exiled to a prison planet, his memory wiped away. The planet is a hell of topsy-turvy moral values -- "Evil is that force within us which inspires men to acts of strength and endurance. The worship of evil is... the only true worship" -- and lethal violence: "I'm going to shoot you... We have the right to shoot down any new peon who leaves his barracks area." "But I wasn't told!" "Of course not. If you new men were told, none of you would leave your barracks area." Barrent manages to survive both the informal potshots of the citizens and the elaborately organized "Games" to which he is (inevitably) subjected. He then tackles the central problem toward which the story has been heading, the understanding and mastery of the Earth from which the prisoners have been exiled. It is in this last section that Sheckley finds his way. Back on Earth, in the last seven of the book's thirty chapters, the author pulls himself together and gives us a sharply drawn picture of a stagnant planet and the culture which has made it so. But the bulk of the book is neither sharp nor convincing. Sheckley does not scruple to advance his plot by tricks, and some of the tricks are dubious. The gladiatorial games as an ingredient of science fiction have become a cliche ; those in The Status Civilization are kissed off so briskly that they seem hardly to interest the author. The behavior of the book's minor characters is uniformly preposterous. Those who have a secret go to elaborate lengths to advertise its existence. A girl from the underground movement (naturally there is an underground movement, nothing is spared us), who has gone to great trouble to help Barrent survive, concludes that he is worthy of the help she gave him because he did survive. (Obviously, this girl can't lose. If she had decided not to help him, he would have died. This would have proved she was right in not helping him.) Barrent both knows everything and knows nothing. He has psisensed "mutants" to read the past and future for him, but their powers are oddly limited. They can, in fact, see only what the author needs to move the story along, and nothing to simplify it. The book seems, all in all, to add up to a long series of false starts, climaxed by an excellent novelette which is more or less irrelevant to what has gone before. The "novelette" is well worth reading. It's too bad about the false starts. comes to us through the joint efforts of Avalon and Ballantine. Avalon has two novels which seem to belong to an earlier age of science fiction, while Ballantine has reissu the short science-fiction stories of the trail-blazer himself under the title of Best Stories of H. G. Wells. There is not much point in a critical assessment of Wells, at this date, but there is much point in reading him. His "futures" are now often enough well in our past -- aircraft and armored warfare are among his projections -- but where he guessed wrong he was plausible, and where he guessed right he was uncanny. Moreover, the texture of his writing is a standing reproof to most of those who followed. Avalon's pair of books are nothing like Wells for quality, but they have much sentimental interest for old-timers. Actually, Next Door to the Sun, by Stanton A. Coblentz, is not really a resurrected magazine story (or, if it is, is one which this reviewer missed.) But it has so much of the exact quality of the same writer's Into Plutonian Depths, The Bue Barbarians, After # Years and so on that it might just as well be. Coblentz is a poet of considerable attainments, and some thirty years ago was considered to be sciencefiction's leading satirist. Very few traces of either quality now appear. Next Door to the Sun takes place, of course, on the planet Mercury, populated by a lost settlement of humans who talk with a Pennsylvania Dutch accent and live under a regimented society whose principal comprehensible feature seems to be a distaste for red-haired men. There is some heavyhanded comedy, but there was also, at least for this reviewer, enjoyment in reading. It may be that some of the enjoyment was nostalgia. For the same reasons Otis Adelbert Kline's The Swordsman of Mars was pleasant to read. At roughly the same date as Coblentz's pre-eminence, science-fiction readers were witnesses to one of the most dogged manhunts in literary history. It seemed that wherever Edgar Rice Burroughs sent John Carter, Otis Adelbert Kline's characters were only inches behind. Venus was predominantly Kline territory, as Mars belonged to Burroughs, but both executed many sorties on the other's holdings. The Swordsman of Mars was one of the sorties. It has exactly the merits of the Burroughs Mars books -- excitement and a sure victory of good over evil -- and exactly the faults. of L. Sprague de Camp novels: Solomon's Stone and The Glory That Was. Solomon's Stone is a dreamworld fantasy ; the author proposes that men and women imagine themselves to be different than they are, and that these imagined characters have fiesh and blood existence on another level of reality. The story concerns a man who incautiously tampers with a demon and is thrust into the other world for punishment. Fast, entertaining, rather slight. The Glory That Was presents a near-future world in which the Emperor Vasil, a hobbyist of enormous dimensions, has recreated ancient Greece, complete with Parthenon and smelly drains, and peopled it with brainwashed #st Century human beings hypnotically persuaded that they are Pericles, Kritias, etc. De Camp is always exact in his history -- well, maybe a little more than exact; "pedantic" suggests itself as a possible term sometimes -- and his recreations of the past are first-rate. Still, the book has the air of an author repeating himself. Lest Darkness Fall, an earlier and far better de Camp story, has no particular resemblance to this one in terms of plot; but the feelings of the characters, the conversations, the paradoxes are so similar that it is impossible to think of the one book without thinking of the Never been sick a day in his life. But he knows it can happen to him -- so he gets a health checkup every year -- just in case. He also supports the American Cancer Society's Crusade. Send your contribution to "Cancer," in care of your local post office. other. The Glory That Was suffers. Lest Darkness Fall, where one man proposes to change the whole course of humanity for a millennium and a half, contains a theme of scope and power; and The Glory That Was is, after all, only an adventure. thologist, the present reviewer edited a series of collections of originals for Baltantine under the general title of Star Science Fiction Stories. Doubleday has just published a hard-cover selection of the selections. It is called Star of Stars, and it contains what the undersigned deems to be among the finest works of C. M. KornMorrison, Arthur C. Clarke, Henry Kuttner, H. L. Gold, Fritz Leiber and Jack Williamson, with three or four less familiar names (at any rate, less familiar in connection with science-fiction stories: Gerald Kersh is one of them) thrown in. A similar collection, from Galaxy Magazine, is called Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels (also Doubleday), containing not only Christopher Grimm's story, from which the book's title is taken, but stories by Clifford D. Simak, Daniel F. Galouye and others. The editor here, of course, is H. li. Gold. He was a boy. He never could be a man. He could only help them -- and love them -- and flee from them -- closet with the door closed. It was dark and stuffy, and the toe of a shoe was digging into the base of his spine, but he liked the closeness. He had been grown in a tank as narrow as this closet, in dark, warm liquids. He had no real memory of that time, but he closed his eyes and imagined that he could remember the warmth, and the love and kindness that seemed to be around him then... There was a thump and a yell of laughter, and he blinked. Poppy and her ball. Well, she had nothing to worry about. He had been playing with her a few moments ago. He would throw the ball and she would miss it and run after it shrieking. "Come on, Benno, throw it, Benno!" and Benno threw it, mouth drawn in the thin, ironical line that served him for a smile. Finally, running to catch it, she overreached herself and fell. She sat there a minute, lower lip shoved out and mouth drawn down at the corners into a deep inverted U before it opened into a howl. "No, no. Poppy. Don't cry, lovey," said Benno, pulling her up as Mrs. Peretto ran into the room. "Benno, what did you -- " She bit off the words and turned to the child. "Tell Mummy what happened, sweetie." Benno said quietly, "Mrs. Peretto, why don't you ask Poppy what I did to her?" The woman whipped around and he saw that she was trembling. She loosened her hold on the little girl and stood up. "Benno, I -- I don't know what's got into you. You never used to be like this. You used to call me Mom -- " Abruptly she went out of the room. But she had left the child behind -- afraid to let me know she doesn't trust me -- and Poppy trotted up to Benno and yanked on his trouser leg. "Come on, Benno, let's play some more." "No more for now. Poppy." Benno gently pulled away from the sticky fingers. "Go find your Mummy." So he went and sat down in the closet with the door shut and brooded. He would have enjoyed one of Wenslow's cigars now, but the closet was no place to smoke it. Anyway, this was no good. But as he was about to rise he heard a different sound: Mrs Peretto dialling on the intercom. He stayed still. "Helen? Oh -- fine, I guess. Nothing new really, but -- I've been having a bit of trouble too. Thing is, I can't even say it's anything I haven't made up in my own mind. But I'm beginning to be a little frightened..." Benno waited for a while to be sure she had gone. For her to know he skulked in closets when he felt moody wouldn't have helped at all. As he opened the door, he saw himself in the full-length glass, an image of a broad stocky twelve-year-old boy. But he was five years old, not twelve. He had been made in this shape and he would die in it: pseudo-male and sterile, hairless except for the strong, dark line of brow and the close-cropped head of hair so black and wiry it looked artificial. Even the temper of his skin was dark and sullen. He ran a hand over his face. He had been grown from a piece of Peretto's flesh, so the features were Peretto's; but Peretto was a man, and Benno a second-hand copy pretending to be his child. He sneered at the image and slipped out of the house. shared one of the shabby portables in Administration. It contained the lab where Benno had been born and a small private office, and when Benno reached it he was glad to find Peretto in and Wenslow out. Peretto looked up as he closed the door behind him. "What's eating you, Benno?" "Not me," said Benno. "You." "I don't think I'm giving you any trouble. What is it?" "Mrs. Peretto thinks I've got it in for Poppy, or something. She thought I hurt her when she fell today." Peretto shrugged. "It's not unusual for parents to be worried about jealousy problems between older and younger children." Benno helped himself in Wenslow's humidor and lit up. "She's not worried. She's frightened. I heard her saying so to Mrs. Metzner on the phone when I was sitting in the closet thinking. She's scared of me." Peretto said hesitantly, "That's not so, Benno. I think she's feeling a little guilty, like a lot of the rest of us." "Because it's hard to keep loving made-up things like us when you've got real kids of your own." "We put a lot of love into you -- " "But that was different. That was when you thought you couldn't have any kids." "Earth was pretty hot when we left it. We couldn't be sure we wouldn't be sterile forever. We had to have something, Benno." "So now you've got something and you're stuck with it." Benno looked out of the window where the yellow sun of Skander V was shining on experimental plots and groves of trees, on Residential, on the dunes and the salt lake and the rest of the Colony beyond. "And it makes you sick to look at us and think you wanted and loved us." "Benno!" "But it's true! Dickon told me Wenslow said that to him." "Oh, Wenslow." "Well, maybe you don't like him so much either. But you and he are on the same side." "Do we have to pick sides ?" "We can't help it. A lot of the guys are talking funny, too." Peretto waited. The androids were unable to lie and Benno compromise himself. Finally Benno said uncomfortably, "About Bimbo Harrington..." "But you know he drowned. We couldn't do anything for him." "Nobody ever saw his body." "It wasn't a thing to see. He -- the android body decomposes so -- it's not anything we can help." "Well, they think -- " Benno was beginning, but the door opened. It was Wenslow. His pale eyes flashed and his thin nostrils twitched at the smoke in the air. "At the cigars again, I see, Benno," he said pleasantly. Benno blew a mouthful of smoke into his face and walked put. After the door had closed he could hear the voices: "I swear to God if that thing belonged to me -- " Peretto interrupted wearily: "You leave cigars around because you get a good snide laugh out of seeing him smoke them. If he manages to do it without amusing you, too bad for you. Now let's stop niggling and get to work." l. know what's got into you, you used to call me Mom until -- ' " "And if you tried it she'd twist your ears off for you, the bitch!" Benno watched Dickon's face across the campfire and realized that Dickon had probably paid very bitterly for his own enjoyment in blowing smoke at Wenslow. He would have to be more careful of his pleasures in the future. He said, trying to keep the peace, "The Perettos aren't bad, Dickon. You have to be fair to them." The shadows in Dickon's eyes were as deep as the humps of the dunes against the night sky. "You can say that, smoking cigars and turning yourself into a clown to suck up to them." "If I did that, I'd be selling my soul," said Benno. "But if I left off smoking when I like it just for fear of anything they might do. I'd be selling my soul twice over." "Soul! I'd like to see you show me where you've got a soul." "Nothing you could see! Oh, hell. I guess if I had to live with the Wenslows I'd be as big a bastard as you are." Dickon answered him in kind, and he waited for a slackening. " -- but don't you see? They loved us and made us love them, so they think we've got immortal souls. That's the only thing that's keeping them from wiping us out." "So what makes you think they haven't started wiping us out already?" asked Rudi Metzner. "What about Bimbo?" "I asked Peretto about that today," Benno said slowly. "He said he'd drowned." "And you believed him? Sure he drowned. But it was in one of those tanks, you can bet. Did you know they'd started up the tanks again? What's your guess about what they're doing?" "I don't get you." "Take a look in one of those tanks," said Dickon softly. "Try it in the middle of the night, sneak around the back where the guard won't see you. You'll see they've got a thing in there, something new they're making, and I'll bet they started it with Bimbo. Maybe Peretto and Wenslow wouldn't bloody their hands on us, but that don't stop them from making a new kind of android to do their work, a killer that's not so scared of souls! Take a look and see." "I'll promise this," said Benno. "You try messing around with the Perettos and I'll kill you dead, Dickon. Because you haven't got the soul of a flea!" T he stars were dim beyond the two moons that made the shadows shift and fall; rustling trees covered his footsteps in the grass. He cursed them, he didn't believe them, he had sworn he wouldn't go. But here he was. He had wakened in the middle of the night as though he had planned it, and dressed and crept out. He stood still for a moment. If his world broke now, he would never be able to love the Perettos again, and there was nothing else. Yet he went on. At the back of the fence he had the whole building between himself and the guard. He climbed the chicken-wire and dropped down silently. He knew that the lock of the tank-room window was broken. No one was worried about theft. The guard was there only to prevent the disturbance of delicate adjustments. He pushed at the window. It creaked, but the wind covered the noise. Inside it was very dark, but he knew this room well. Two steps and he had found the bank of switches on the first tank. One dim light was all he dared. Even in the dusk beyond the peephole that one was certainly empty. He pressed back the toggle and moved on. The second was empty too, and he began to hope. But the third -- He was afraid to turn on more than one light, and the liquid was cloudy, but there was definitely a creature there. In a second it became sensitive to the light and began to turn and thresh about. The cloudiness enveloped it again, but he had seen it. Sickened, he turned the light out and groped for the window. He dropped down and climbed the wire again, but without caring where he was going or whether he was caught. A few steps away from the fence a group of figures emerged from the bushes and encircled him. "Couldn't resist, eh. Benno?" "What do you want?" he whispered. "We had a bet on you," said Dickon, grinning. "Go ahead, tell us what you saw there." Benno was silent for a moment, and said finally, "All right, I saw something there, but not clearly enough to tell what it was." "But we told you what it was and you know. Go on, won't you?" "Yes," said Benno. "Not feelin' so snotty now, are you, Benno?" Hurrah for our side. He would have lashed out at them, and turned to find the weak point in the circle, but they were his equals. "Let me go," he said. "Okay, for now. But remember, we'll be calling on you one day. You'll come." He ran, and their laughter followed him. I T was afternoon and, with Poppy swinging on his hand, Benno tramped along the stretch of sand that threaded through the tufted dunes and separated the back gardens of Residential from the lake. The sun was shining, but not for Benno. He tried to tell himself that he had no proof for anything, but he felt weak inside in the face of Dickon's hatred of the humans. "Let's dig here," said Poppy, "and we'll find the treasure." Benno sat down while she went to work. Her presence was Mrs. Peretto's way of saying: I was a fool yesterday, and didn't mean what I said. If that was the case, he had nothing to fear there. He looked around. The beach was quiet, the waters rippled sluggishly. A few houses down, a woman came through the back gate and out onto the sand, a naked baby tucked under one arm and a flannel blanket under the other. It was Mrs. Harrington. She was wearing brief red shorts and a fluffy blouse r a black ponytail bobbed on her tanned neck. She trotted down to one of the sundecks near the water and sat there, sloshing her feet while the baby kicked on the blanket beside her, making bitobly sounds. Then Harrington, out from work, swung down the garden, leaped over the gate, and ran across the sands. He grabbed the ponytail, pulled the woman's head back, and kissed her upside-down face. He whispered in her ear, gesturing back toward the house. She shushed him, glancing at Benno and Poppy. He cajoled ; she resisted. Finally he pulled her by the arm and she shrugged, tucked up the baby, and followed him back to the house. Benno could hear them giggling as they went. "When I get big, I'm going to be a mummy," said Poppy. "And you can be the daddy, Benno." "Yeah," said Benno. He crouched there, trapped in the amber of twelve-yearold boyhood on Skander. Peretto had said to him, "We would have been happy to make you -- complete, if we could. We just don't know enough." But Benno, watching the Harringtons, knew very well what he would never be. Poppy put aside her pail and shovel and came over to him, bracing herself between his knees and resting her forehead against his. Her breath was like apples ; she scratched his face gently and he kissed her, rich with the pleasure of feeling a living being against him. This is all I'm good for. He hugged her as she giggled, and ruffled his hair in her neck, grunting like the wild pigs the colonists hunted for sport. Someone shrieked behind him: "You filthy beast! Let go of that child at once, do you hear?" He was so taken with surprise that he fell back in the sand, pulling the child on top of him. Mrs. Wenslow was standing over him, fists tight, face contorted: "Dirty, dirty thing! Wait till everybody hears about this ! Oh, to hear the Perettos, butter wouldn't melt in your mouth ! I'll tell them different, you -- " But Benno righted himself and ran, leaving Poppy howling behind him. The woman knew he couldn't -- ! But it was no use stopping to argue. He ran. In the hills he knew a few caves, under a matting of low gnarled trees. He squatted in one of them, nursing his hurt as the sun sank and the moons swung by. He thought and thought till his mind turned sickly and his head ached. Was he as innocent as he thought? He was afraid to search into the unexplored reaches of his mind, but he knew for sure that his loins were empty, and he cursed himself and his makers. Exhausted finally, he groped in his pocket for one of the cigars he had filched the day before. He stared at it, shrugged and lit it. He sat there smoking and watching the stars as they filtered in and out of the leaves. He didn't know what he was waiting for. f'P'UT that out, you nut! You A want to get caught?" Benno peered ahead; he could see nothing but stars and branches. "Dickon?" he called tentatively. Pushing aside the boughs, Dickon slipped in and sat beside him. "Go on, put it out. They'll see us a mile oif ." "I don't care." "I do, God damn it, the thing's suffocating me." "You wouldn't have found me without it," said Benno sensibly as he put it out. "Now they're not going to find tis," said Dickon. "What happened? I was out hunting, and they rounded us up and sent us to bring you in. Huh #" "I was playing with Poppy, horsing around. Somebody thought it was something dirty." "Boy, I love you for that!" Dickon thumped him on the back. "It's what I've been waiting for, but I never thought you'd be the one. Who was it? Not Peretto?" "No. It was Mrs. Wenslow." Benno was shocked by the silence. No sneers, no laughter. He turned to look for Dickon's face in the dark, and thought suddenly: he loves them. Dickon said in a low voice, "Nobody would play with that scrawny kid of theirs. They've got him so he's scared to let out a peep." "I'm sorry, Dickon." "What for, you bloody fool? What do you mean?" "Nothing," said Benno. Dickon raised his head: "Listen, there they are. Halloo! Halloo!" he called softly down the hill. "Who?" asked Benno. "The rest of us; I've got two dozen down there, only ten missing." He divided the branches and called, "Come on up, you guys, I've found him I" "But what -- " Benno began, but Dickon was waving the others in. "Hi!" they cried. "What was all the business about?" D ickon guffawed. "He was horsing with the Perotto brat and they thought he -- " He elaborated to an extent that made Benno glad the darkness hid his flushed face. He could see their eyes glittering in the dimness. They were staring at him with respect. "Gee, lemme touch you! You been holdin' out on us, Benno? Maybe you got -- " "Shut up, shut up, for God's sake!" snapped Benno. "He's feeding you a line. I'm just the same as you are." His people! Dickon laughed again, nastily. "All right, forget about that for now. We've got to get the others together first. Then we can start out." "Start out for what?" Benno felt the incredulous stares around him. "You all there? What do you think we've got these guns for? We're all set to knock the lot of them off the planet." Benno caught his breath. "Just for me?" "Who else? Think we're gonna let 'em get away with it?" Benno stared at their set faces in the dusk. "But they're not mad at you, you damn fools!" "What do you mean? Think you're going to back out after getting us all up here?" "I didn't. You came after me." He tried to keep his voice level. "They got nothing on you. I just came up here to think for a while. Let me go back and take my lumps and we'll forget the whole business." "Forget it!" Dickon swung up the rifle. "You're coming down with us right now. I'm giving the orders and you're gonna do what I say !" "Yeah? You want to flght, okay, but you don't pin it on me." Benno grasped the rifle barrel and pulled it to his chest. "Go on, kill me." Dickon stood indecisive. Everyone knew that if Benno were dead the whole affair would collapse. Then he pulled the rifle out of Benno's hands and set it aside, snarling. "Okay, you guys. Put away the guns and let the scab have it!" "... betbetbetterterter i-i-idededea..." He shook his head and the words sounded in his ears as he pulled himself out of his sleep or coma, he never knew which. Mist was pushing into the cave. The trees outside seemed clotted with cobwebs. His lids were heavy and crusted. His body felt flayed to the bone, sore in every joint, muscle, nerve. His tongue pulled away from his palate with a wrench and his arms flopped like dying Ashes. He looked at them and saw that the wrists were bound. "... don't know why I never thought of it before..." Benno moved his head again and nearly groaned. There was no comfort in the sickly early dawn rolling by in wet drifts of fog. "Much better idea," Dickon was saying. "We can't just run down there waving guns. They'd have us knocked off in an hour. But if we pick up one of their brats they'll come after us. They'll never know where to find us in all these holes, and we can do what we like with them." Benno pulled himself up till he sat hunched over his knees. He didn't dare touch his face, even to rub his eyes. "All we have to decide is whose kid," said one of the others. "There's the scab up," said Dickon. "Knock him on the head, somebody." "Leave him alone, Dickon, he never hurt yqu." Dickon cocked an eyebrow at the speaker and went back to his plan. "Whose! Think anybody'd miss Wenslow's brat? We want Peretto's. They'll put it on Benno, and if he gets killed, nobody'll worry." Benno stared at Dickon with horror and pity. His personality had disintegrated like a child's in a tantrum, leaving only an idiot rage. But the other androids were shifting about, looking at each other. Finally, Rudi said, "We didn't figure on anybody getting killed in this, Dickon." Dickon turned on him : "What did you think, you were playing tiddley winks ?" "We wanted to get even a bit, get them under our thumb and give them a scare -- " "Yeah, and end up with love and kisses and an all-day sucker!" Benno said, "Isn't that what you want, Dickon ?" "You shut up! Keep your mouth out of this!" He was almost sobbing. "I could kill you now easy as -- " "No you couldn't, Dickon," said Rudi quietly. "Jesus, a bunch of cupcakes! I used to think you wanted to be men ! But I'll do it. I'll do it myself, and I'll pull you in with me. Watch, you'll see I'll split the whole damn planet in two !" H e leaped out and flung himself down the slope with a crash of branches and was lost in the mist. "Oh, God," said Rudi. He was about to follow when Benno cried out, "Don't do it! It's too thick to find him in that." "But if he hurts the kid they'll wipe us all out!" "Undo my hands," said Benno. They freed him. "What do you think you can do?" "I shouldn't have run off in the first place." Benno peered into the mist that was slowly settling like water down a clogged drain. "He won't get much of a head start in that; if I can reach Peretto he'll listen to me." "But you're a mess." Benno rubbed his wrists. "We'll all be pretty messy if I don't go." Rudi said, "We've got the guns -- " body. Besides... this is really between the Wenslows and me and that's how it'll have to be settled." "What do you want us to do?" "Oh, wait around here half an hour, and when you get back, tell them I got away. That way your tongue won't tie up on you, it's true as far as it goes." "But hell, they'll know there's something fishy there !" "Sure, but they won't do anything about it." Benno rubbed his sore head. "They might even respect you for sticking up for me." Rudi said awkwardly, "Don't rub it in, Benno. Here, take a gun anyway." "Nuts. I don't want to shoot anybody. Or give them an excuse to shoot me." H e scrambled down, aching at every move, catching drunkenly at the dripping branches. At the bottom he stopped to get his breath and pull together his ripped clothes. How would Dickon go about stealing a child from the midst of Residential? The children usually played outside after breakfast when the mist had cleared and the grass dried off a little. Sometimes the androids took care of them after their work in the fields and vegetable gardens. Today there would be no androids, and perhaps the children would not be trusted outdoors. Would the humans be expecting an attack? Dickon would take the chance and find out. Benno cut over towards the lakeshore and the dunes, in spite of the possibility that they might be ambushed. There weren't enough men to hide behind every dune. As the sun came out he climbed a rise and checked his direction. The quarry might have changed plans a hundred times already, but with Dickon's anger, and the rifle under his arm, Benno thought the chance was small. He dipped in and out among the dunes. He saw no one else on the sands yet, but he knew that his dark moving figure would be eminently noticeable. He scrambled on, glancing uneasily at the buildings across the way. Dickon might have ended up at Administration with an attempt to attack Wenslow, but he thought there would have been more noise and running about in that case. No, he would have to assume that Dickon, like himself, was still skulking. But there was very little time. Here, now, was the place where he and Poppy had been -- yesterday? And where Mrs. Wenslotv -- he closed his mind on it, but here, also, was where he had watched the Harringtons with lewd eyes as they whispered together: -- don't start on me here, Boh, for God's sake. There's Benno and Poppy over there, watching us. A kid and an android? What's it got to do with them anyway? I don't know. Some of those androids... Some of those androids lie awake at night, listening for sounds of love. of sand, the sun was risen. The throbbing aches in his body washed away, he was comfortable. The warmth of the sun told him this was all he could ever want; men were hateful, he did not need them, but the warmth and the sun... Dickon! Where was Dickon? He leaped up, afraid that he had slept an hour, and what Dickon could have done in that time -- but the sun hadn't moved. His drowsiness had only stretched the moment. But the danger of sleep was real. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Then he saw his first man, down behind him where the sundecks began. He couldn't tell whether he was armed, but he was movingeast and heading for Benno. Benno scrambled for the next hillock. The man speeded up. That's done it. He would neyer make the last quarter mile at this rate. He gave up and began to run. "... or I'll shoot!" came the end of a yell. Benno thought he was a liar. The noise of the shot knocked him off his feet with fright. He scurried on, glancing back once to see the pursuer running, not stopping to aim. Because I'm not armed. He had no idea how he would stop Dickon without a gun, but if he had brought one, he would have been dead by now. He looked back again. Now there were two of them. Good! He cut north, straight through the trees, and made a beeline across the central green, gathering pursuers and frightening children with his beaten face. Then he heard a shriek from back of the Perettos'. In the yard he found Dickon at last. Poppy screaming under one arm, rifie in the other hand, Mrs. Peretto at bay. Benno stopped at the look on Dickon's face. It was as though he had evolved from some other feral animal and were now reverting to it. Benno screamed, "Dickon! Dickon!" and without thinking tore up a lump of sod from the border edge and threw it. It struck Dickon in the face, but almost before it struck Benno heard the sound of the rifle, and Dickon fell, shot through the heart. Behind them, Wenslow lowered the rifle. Dickon sprawled grotesquely, his face tamed at last, and his mouth full of dirt. # didn't have to do that to him... and I'm the only one who's sorry... Poppy flung herself against him, Peretto and his wife crowded them. Peretto said teasingly, "I think you love him more than us, don't you. Poppy?" "He has perverted the child," snarled Wenslow furiously. nearly all he owned had been given to him by humans, he was too proud to take everything he wanted. But he had a knife, the clothes he wore, a few things he had made himself... He left off a moment, went over to the window and looked out at the familiar scene. Below, the children were playing, and he watched their wheeling patterns on the grass; their cries were like birdcalls in the misty verge of, evening... The door opened. Peretto came in and closed it behind him. His eyes took in the colored handkerchief in the best tradition spread out with Benno's possessions. "You need an icebag for that face," he said. "I brought it." "I don't want it." But he took it and held it to his swollen jaw. Peretto drew in on his cigarette and let the coil of smoke drift away on his words. "Why are you running away ?" "You saw what he did," said Benno. "You heard what he said." "Do you know anyone who agrees with him?" Benno looked away. "They're all afraid of us," he said after a moment, not very loud. "You've shown them not to be. The rest are back and there won't be any trouble now. You know, you didn't have to go running off j'esterday, nobody believed that woman." "I -- I'm not going because of her." "You're running away so you can be by yourself. And pretend you're a man." "That's a lousy thing to say!" "You're an android, Benno," Peretto said gently. "You can only be a man between the ears." "I'm nothing." They stared at each other, two cloudy images peering from beyond the look'Tig-glass. "The men and women who have the androids love them and -- " "They ruin them and kill them," Benno said stubbornly. Peretto sighed. "There were some wild stories flying around about what was in the tank, weren't there? Dickon started most of them. Don't deny it." "Well?" "It's only that the Harringtons wanted another android in their family. Another Bimbo." said Benno. Then he sneered. "So he can mind the baby while they -- " He clapped his hand over his mouth and sat down on the bed, trembling, unable to make himself stop. Peretto said very quietly: "You sounded exactly like Wenslow when you said that. You even looked exactly like him." Benno saw a black gulf falling away before him, the proud goail he had been running for, a cave in the hills where he would eat hate till his soul was consumed, his humanity gone, and he had become the animal looking out of Dickon's eyes when he died. "What am I to do?" He clasned his aching head in his hands. "What can you do, except learn to live without envy or hate?" When he looked up, Peretto was gone. The dark was rising to blend him with the room, the house, the Colony. There was nothing else. All he could ever have was right here. He sat there while the moons rose and swung in their eccentric orbits. When he stood up finally, he did not unpack his bundle. Not yet. But he left it behind him on the table and went down to the Perettos. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment Galaxy Novels are sturdy, inexpensive editions of choice vorks of imaginative suspense both original and reprint, selected by the editors of Galaxy Magazine. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me postpaid the novels by S. Fowler Wright by Raymond F. Jones by Wilson Tucker by Sam Merwin Jr. by Isaac Asimov by J. Leslie Mitchell by James Blish by Louis Padgett by Edmond Hamilton by James Blish by Murray Leinster checked below. by David V. Reed by L. Sprague de Camp by Murray Leinster by Lewis Padgett by Malcolm Jameson by Fritz Leiber by Flecher Pratt by F. L. Wallace by Hal Clement by Manly Wade Wellman by Mark Clifon and Frank Riley by Raymond F. Jones # For  # or # each Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage. Add # Foreign Postage. Klamg Address City ZoneState Al owned a profitable plumbing company. Was cupidity going to make it go down the drain? unsettling to the mind. Alfred Gluckshoffer, proprietor of the Round the Clock Plumbing Company, raised and lowered the lid several times experimentally and decided that it, too, was gold. It looked like gold, it felt like gold : Gluckshoffer, whose brother-in-law Milt was a salesman for a firm of manufacturing jewelers, and who had heard Milt talking about carats and alloys as long as he had known him, was sure it was gold. About fourteen carat. From the doorway the elderly party in the dusty dress suit cleared his throat. It was not a menacing sound, but Alfred jumped. Hastily he picked up his screwdriver and began prying at the valve in the float again. "Oh, it's a genuine stone," Milt said later that day. "They cut the synthetics out of a boule, see, and they always show the curved lines. Yours has a good colpr, too. The deeper the color in sapphire, the more valuable, and this one is nearly true cornflower blue. A beauty. Worth maybe four or five hundred. Where'd you get it, Al?" Gluckshoffer decided to bp frank. "Out of that house I was telling you about. The one where they called me to fix the can in the middle of the night. I dropped my pliers under the washbasin, and when I got down to pick them up, I found it. There was a sort of patch of inlaid work over the tub, wire and stone and tile and stuff, and I guess it must have fallen out of that." Milt stuck his hands in his pockets and began to walk up and down the shop. Cupidity was coating his features with a dreamy, romantic glaze. "Think you could find the house again, Al?" he asked. "I don't know. Like I told you, they called for me in a car with all the blinds down, and before I got out they tied a cloth over my eyes. I couldn't see a thing. There was a swimming pool on the left as we went in -- I could tell by the way it echoed -- and when I was getting out of the car I brushed up against a big tall hedge. Oh, yes, and from the way the streets felt, I think it was out in Bel Aire." Milt sagged. "A house with a hedge and a swimming pool in Bel Aire. That's about like looking for a girl with brown eyes." "Oh, I don't know," Gluckshoffer said perversely. "I might be able to tell it if I ran across it again. There was a kind of funny feel to the place. Milt. Sleepy. Dead. Why? Why're you so keen on locating it?" "Don't be a dope," Milt said. "You want to be a plumber all your life?" T hey located the house on the fifth night. It stood by itself on what must have been nearly two acres of ground, a whitely glimmering bulk, lightless and somnolent. "Looks like there's nobody home," Milt said as he brought the car to a noiseless halt. "You oughtn't to have any trouble, Al." Gluckshoffer snorted softly. "There's at least two people on the place," he whispered, "the chauffeur and the old geezer in the dress suit that called for me that night. Remember what you promised, Milt, about coming in for me if I'm not back in forty-five minutes. After all, this was your idea. And don't forget about honking twice if a patrol car comes by, either." His tone, though subdued, was fierce. "Oh, sure," Milt said easily. "Don't worry about it. I won't forget." Al Gluckshoffer got out of the car and began to worm his way through the pale green leaves of a tall pittosporum hedge. As he padded past the swimming pool (on the left, as he had remembered it) in his tennis shoes, he found himself swallowing a yawn. This was the darnedest place. As he'd told Milt, there were two people at home -- probably more, siucc ,, wouldn't keep a chauffeur unless there was somebody for him to drive -- and the old party in the dress suit must sleep in the house because he'd said something to AI about the noise of the can having awakened him. But the feel in the air was so sleepy and dead that you'd think everybody on the place had been asleep for the last hundred years. At the back of the house a window looked promising. AI tried it and found it unlocked. Stifling a yawn, and then another one, he raised the window and slipped inside. He went into a lavatory on the ground floor first. He had unscrewed the gold faucets on the washbasin and pried eight or ten stones out of the mosaic on the wall before it occurred to him that he was wasting his time. Would people in a house like this put their best stuff in the cans? Obvious'y not. The place to look for the hot stuff -- the really hot hot stuff -- would be in the bedrooms upstairs. Palladiumbacked clothes brushes. Mirrors set with big diamonds all around the edges. He was a dope not to have thought of it before. AI wrapped the faucets carefully in the old rags he had brought to muffle their chinking and put them in his little satchel. Noiselessly as a shadow, he stole up the stair. In the upper hall he hesiutLca. His idea about the bedrooms was all very well, but it wouldn't do to pick one where the old geezer in the dress suit, say, was asleep. T he moonlight slanting through the big windows in the hall and falling on the door to his right put an end to Al's difficulties. There were cobwebs thick between the door itself and the jamb, cobwebs all over the frame. A room like that must be perfectly safe. There couldn't be anybody in a room like that. Softly he turned the knob. The bed, swathed in shimmering gauze, was at one end of the room. AI paid no attention to it. His eyes were fixed on the dressing table where, even in the subdued light, he could make out jewelry -- earrings, rings, tiara, bracelets -- lying in a corruscating heap. The pendants at the corners of the tiara were teardropshaped things, big as bantam's eggs, and the earrings and bracelets were set all over with flashing gems. AI licked his lips. He put out a skeptical hand toward the tiara and touched the pendants very cautiously. They were cold, and from the motion his hand imparted to them, they started to swing back and forth and give out rays of colored light. From sheer nervous excitement he was on the edge of bursting into tears or something. The stones in the bracelets Seemed to be square-cut diamonds, and the pendants on the tiara surpassed anything he had ever imagined. They made him feel like getting down and kowtowing in a paroxysm of unworthiness. He controlled himself and began to put the jewels away in his bag. The earrings were following the bracelets into custody when there was a slight creak from the bed. AI turned to stone. In very much less than a second (nervous impulses, being electrical in origin, move at the speed of light, which is # m.p.s.), he had decided that the jewelry was a trap, that the trap was being sprung, and that he was hauling tail out. He began backing toward the door. There was another creak from the bed. This time it was accompanied by a wonderful, a glorious, flash of prismatic light. AI Gluckshoffer faltered, torn cruelly between cupidity and fear. If it wasn't a trap, the biggest diamond in the whole world must be hanging around the throat, or otherwise depending from the person, or whoever was sleeping in the bed. Indecision almost made him groan. Then he made up his mind and, the sweat starting out on his forehead, tiptoed in the direction of the flash of light. The beauty of the girl lying on the bed in the moonlight was so extreme that he forgot all about the necklace which clasped her throat. He stared down at her for an instant. Then he put his bag on the floor, knelt beside the bed and drew the curtains back. He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. H IS heart was beating like a hammer. Slowly her shadowy lids opened and she looked into his eyes. A faint, joyous smile began to curve her lips. The expression was succeeded almost instantly by a look of regal rage. "By the scepter of Mab," the girl said, sitting up in bed and glaring at him, "you are not His Highness at all ! In fact, I perceive clearly from your attitude and bearing that you are not any Highness. You are some low creature who has no proper business of any sort in the palace. You are Another One." With the words, she pressed a button beside her bed. While AI cowered back, there was a clamor as strident as that of a burglar alarm, and then the elderly party in the dress suit came in, yawning and rubbing his eyes. "He awakened me in the proper way," the girl said, gesturing in Al's direction, "but he is by no means the proper person." "So I see. Your Highness," the old gent said with a bow. "I believe -- " He peered closely at Gluckshoffer, who pushed himself hard against the wall and tried to pretend that he wasn't there. "I believe he is the plumber whom I called in last week to repair the lavatory. I am sorry. What disposition does Your Highness wish me to make of him ?" "Use the transformation machine to make him into something," the princess said, turning around and punching at the pillows on her bed. They were embroidered with a little crown. "What would Your Highness suggest?" "Anything you like," the princess replied. The pillows arranged to her satisfaction, she lay back on them once more. "Something appropriate, of course. Frankly, Norfreet. I'm getting tired of being waked pnce or twice a year by some incompetent idiot who has no legitimate business in the palace in the first place. The next bungler who wakes me up, I want you to turn into a mouse and give to the cat next door to play with. Good night." Delicately she closed her eyes. "Good night, Your Highness," the chamberlain replied with another low bow. He turned to Al, who had been listening to this talk of transformations with a comforting sense of its impossibility, and fixed him with a hypnotic gaze. "Come with me," he said sternly. "Before I transform you, you must repair the damage you have done." the chamberlain gave the solid brass cuspidor which had been Al Gluckshoffer a contemptuous shove with his foot. He ought to take the thing up to the attic and leave it, but he was getting dreadfully sleepy. He needed his rest at his age. Some other time. He got into bed, his joints creaking. Her Highness was right; there were altogether too many intruders in the palace these days. They needed to be shown their place, made an example of. The next person who woke him up was going to be the object of something special in the way of transformations. Norfreet began to snore. And on the other side of the pittosporum hedge. Milt looked at his watch and decided that it was time to go in and see what had happened to Al. He started to worm his way through the hedge. Oral report of Claims Adjuster Mark Atkinson (## #). Transcribed by Telepath Operator ## # J (Tellus). First and Final Report. W hen a planet turns in an insurance claim, it could run to more than real money. A OF planet of Sunder's Pridestark naked and stood comfortably in the snow, listening to the wind howl by, while waiting for the Expedition Manager to approach from the edge of the small clearing and welcome me. The Manager's name is Obadiah Jones. Like the rest of the expedition, he's from one of the minor Vegan colonies -- Kinentiated Earth stock. He bustled forward, wearing a full protective suit and helmet -- the temperature is thirty degrees below zero centigrade at noon and the atmosphere is poisonous -- but I could see the expression of relief on his face through his face plate. "You're from Interstellar Insurance?" he panted under the one and a half G of Sunder's Pride. I assented with a dignified nod. He looked me up and down -- my skin wasn't even showing goose pimples, of course -- and then shrugged his shoulders. "The insurance company sent a first-class Mental Control Operator, I see, but it was a waste of talent. Maybe they didn't believe our reports. We've had our own operators here -- good ones, too -- and they haven't been able to find any solution. The Aliens are much better at all sorts of Mind Control than even our most talented men. I know our Policy says that you can keep us from calling in the military authorities for a week, but it's just a waste of time -- and, more important, it's a waste of lives, too. I suggest that you give us authority to call in the Navy right away." "How many lives have you lost so far?" I asked. "Only a dozen, but at regular intervals." "That hardly seems excessive for an exploratory expedition," I commented. He shook his head impatiently. "I said at regular intervals. The Aliens treat us like we were cattle. Or sheep." "Not exactly," I said, "or you would scarcely have called me in. You must be operating at a profit, and that means you're trading with these Aliens." He scowled, but did not deny it. already. As an independent Claims Adjuster, it goes without saying that I'd checked into the case before teleporting to the planet. Their profit was enormous, and our losses would be proportionately large if the military was invited to come in and spoil trade while saving lives. Their charter called for exclusive trading rights on any planet they opened for ten years. And they had the usual clause in their Policy against loss by "government" action, meaning the military, even at their own invitation. The military is fast, but it's not neat. for us, so my job was to try to find another way. "Well," he said, "can we send an emergency signal to the Navy?" "When does the next regular interval expire?" I asked. He checked the timepiece set into the sleeve of his suit, and then scratched some number in the clean wind-swept surface of snow. His watch kept local time, of course. "In about fourteen Earth hours," he translated at last. "Then there's no hurry, is there?" I leaned against the gale that was blowing across the clearing. "Why don't we go to your office so you can brief me?" He turned and stumped his way heavily to a gap at the edge of the clearing, and then along a narrow path that wound its way circuitously among tall, slender, tinkling, half-living ice trees. I strolled lightly beside him, but my bare feet left deep imprints in the crustless snow. In about fifteen minutes we reached the human settlement, with its airlock set modestly into a great mound of snow. Here we had a little difficulty; the lock was designed to pass bulky protective suits. If I had gone through it bare, I'd have let in some of the poisonous atmosphere into the camp. We solved that, though. Mr. Jones passed a suit out to me through the lock and I put it on. I wore it all the way to his office, and then he rustled me up one of his spare kilts -- an ugly purple thing. "Now, Obadiah," I said, after I'd lighted one of his stogies and settled myself into his most comfortable chair, "why this urgent call for help? Our records show that you've never hollered copper in your life, and you've had two expeditions nearly wiped out around you. You've got the best profit record in your organization," "It's those Aliens," said Mr. Jones. "They arrived here on Sunder's Pride just a few days behind us. I've always felt that someday we'd come up against some life-form that would be too much for us, and I'm afraid that we've done it at last. They trade us some of the most magnificent works of art that have ever been seen in the universe -- you've undoubtedly admired some of them, and I'm sure you know the prices they bring -- and they do it as if they were tossing glass beads to savages." "And if we are such savages, what can we have to trade in return?" I asked. "They don't seem to be any great shakes with mechanical things," he answered. "They call them 'gadgets,' but they buy them. The only trouble is, that's not all they buy." He was sweating, his face turning as green as the polka dots on his kilt. He mopped his face and chest with a large handkerchief, and then sat there holding it and looking at it as if he'd never seen a bandanna before. provincial types have an automatic feeling of horror at the thought of meeting some superior creatures that will replace man in the Galaxy, So I let him sit there for a couple of minutes to recover before I prompted him. "Well?" I said at last. "The additional stuff they buy -- what is it?" This hadn't been part of the reports. "Oh. Yes. Once every five days they take one man. I may have given you the idea that they killed them. They don't. They ship them off. They say we are very popular, and when there are enough of us on the market to bring the price down, we should make ideal pets. And we can't do a thing to stop them." I flicked the ash of my cigar delicately onto his carpet. "You can't? What have you tried ?" He leaped to his feet and balled his fists belligerently. "I'm trying to call in the military, but first I've got to get through the red tape of calling in you insurance people. Now will you give me authority to call in a fleet before it's too late?" I smiled in a superior manner and straightened a pleat on the hideous kilt. "If you feel this way, then why do you worry about money? Why didn't you just call the fleet directly and forfeit your insurance?" He glared at me through red-rimmed eyes. "I tried that," he said. "If only we had some central government to turn to -- but that's irtipossible in space, of course. So I went to the only centralized force there is. And they said that they have to count on voluntary contributions from the member planets, and they couldn't afford to answer every call for help. They told me to contact my insurance company." "Which," I commented mildly, "is another centralized force in space, in spite of what you say. It's widespread, it's profit-making, and it gets the job done. Nobody has to tiy to beg for voluntary appropriations from penurious planetary governments." "This isn't a crackpot fear of aliens," he said, as soon as I stopped talking. "I've seen aliens before, in all parts of the Galaxy. I don't panic." "Then you must have tried something else before hollering Uncle," I said. "Like, perhaps, keeping all of your men inside the dome here when the time for another abduction approaches?" H e waved a hand impatiently. "We've tried eveiything a large group of top-flight minds can think of," he said. "My o'ttm organization has an exceptional research staff, as I'm sure you know. The Aliens work by mental control. We've had everyone brought into this building, have double-checked them, and have sealed the doors with a time lock. It turned out that one of the men was missing -- we'd only hnagined he was among us when we assembled. "We scoured the planet before we landed and saw no signs of the Aliens. We've seen no Alien ships land since we arrived. We have no idea where they are, except that there's one sizable area not far from here that we can't seem to penetrate. The only evidence we have that the Aliens arrived after we did is that they told us so. Whatever that's worth. "We've brought in some of mankind's best Mental Control Operators. People like you, who are able to walk around in a poisonous atmosphere in sub-zero weather without any protection or any clothes at all. Every one of them is now among the victims. The Aliens apparently thought it would be a good joke to take them." He paused. "So you see, we don't expect you to be around very long. Just so you call in the military before the Aliens call you in, we'll try to control our grief when you go." "That's courteous of you," I said. "But you are suffering under an understandable misapprehension. You seem to believe -- probably bwause of my somewhat unorthodox costume when I arrived -- that I am a Master Controller. In point of fact, nothing could be farther from the case. I have no such powers. Or almost none, anyway. "I arrived naked because of the enormous expense of teleportation. Those machines require gigantic amounts of power and skilled technicians. At ten thousand a pound, I saved the company five thousand by leaving my kilt behind, and even more when you consider my shoes. As for a protective suit -- why, such an unnecessary cost would have .# been thrown out by our accountants in a minute." Obadiah Jones sneered at me in disbelief, but I tolerantly ignored his attitude. 'Let's admit, for the time being, that these Aliens are better at Mental Control than we are," I said. "Then does it make sense for us to fight them with their own weapons, giving them cards and spades before the start of the game? Now take me to the edge of this place where you say we can't go." In spite of Mr. Jones' urgent pleas, I refused to wear a protective suit, except to go out through the lock. I knew he was worried about the Mind Control he still was convinced I was using to survive unprotected on the surface. He was afraid that when I came up against the Aliens and what he called their "superior powers," it would mean my death, if I didn't have a suit. Since I had equally valid reasons for not wearing the suit, and since I didn't want to explain them, I refused to argue. I just took the thing off as soon as we were outside. I left the kilt on, though. I thought its ugliness might irritate the Aliens. running patter of conversation as he led me toward the forbidden area. "We haven't been idle," he said. "We've learned a lot about the Aliens' Mind Control. For one thing, they work on our emotions. Several of us who are still alive have been exposed to that. There were eight or nine of us in a group, the first time one of us was Chosen. He said an overwhelming feeling of love was drawing him in one direction ; right after that, the rest of us felt a strong sensation of revulsion and fear. We ran away, leaving him behind. We never saw him again. "They also control our senses. We see and hear what they want us to. It's perfect hallucination. But you'U know that for yourself in a few minutes." I knew it already, of course. It had been in Jones' reports -- all except the bit about their capturing his men. And I had come prepared. I must admit to feeling a distinct sensation of excitement as we approached the area. But it was not induced, I am sure, by the Aliens, and in any event it was not sufficiently intense to trigger my defense mechanisms. "Here we are," said Obadiah Jones at last, pointing to a marker attached to one of the ice trees. "Beyond that sign the troubles begin." "It doesn't look like an alien artifact to me," I said, examining the crudely made marker carefully. "It isn't. I had it put up after one of our men was missing for two days, wandering around in that area that they claim for themselves." "Well, I'll find out just how good their claim is," I said. "I'm going in there." "Good luck," said Mr. Jones. "I'll wait for you here. But, just in case I never see you again, won't you please give me authorization to call in the Fleet? YOu can postdate it, and cancel it if you get back." I nodded. "I'll give you an authorization dated tomorrow -- if you'll give me your gun first. You might just accidentally happen to kill me after getting that paper from me, considering how important you think it is to get the Fleet here fast, and how sure you are that I'll be trapped." Jones looked startled, and then sheepish, and gave me the gun without comment. I wrote out the paper he wanted, and then strolled up the path past the marker. It didn't look any different on the other side. It went straight into the forbidden area, and I do mean straight. It went on without the slightest sign of a turn, as far as the eye could see, and there were no cross trails anywhere along it. I stepped out at a good swift pace, striding along it long after Jones disappeared from view behind me. I saw no signs of Aliens ; I saw no signs of anything unusual at all, until, about two hours after I started, I saw a marker in the distance ahead of me. Jones was sitting on the snow, just on the other side of the tree with the marlcer on it. I strolled up toward him, crossed the invisible line, hiked up my kilt to iieep it from getting damp, and sat down on the soft snow beside him. Tl committally. "You made pretty good time. In fact, that's a new record for the course." "Then I'm not the first man to take that walk ?" I asked. "Nope. Just the fastest. I'm glad you didn't try to turn around and come back along the path. That way, you'd have gotten lost. Well, shall we go back to the camp and call in the Navy?" "No, I'm going back in," I said calmly. He waved one gloved hand at me. "It's your funeral," he said. "Or what amounts to the same thing, anyway." I stood up, dusted off the snow where some of it had stuck to me, and settled my kilt into as fashionable a manner as was possible. I crossed the line and started down the trail again, just as I had before, but this time I didn't follow my eyes. Soon after losing sight of Mr. Jones, I cut sharply off the clearly visible trail to the right and started to weave my way through a thicket of the ice trees. Gradually a sensation of fear entirely foreign to my usual nature built up within me, but I ignored it and kept going. As the ' sensation increased to a nearly uncontrollable level, one of the automatic mechanisms I had had the foresight to have implanted in my body operated, and a few drops of a drug were shot into my veins and almost instantly took effect. I still felt the fear sensation, but it no longer had the power to bother me much. With that drug in my blood stream, no emotion could affect me strongly. As I worked my way tlirough the tinkling jungle of ice trees, there was an amazing change. Before my eyes, the trees suddenly seemed to clothe themselves in leaves and bark, and the sounds became those of birds and insects. I was working my way through a jungle of Earth. The heavy gravity of Sunder's Pride had not disturbed me before, but now it was replaced by the almost buoyant feeling resulting from the far lighter gravity of Earth. The harsh yellow glow of the sunlight striking on eternal ice was replaced by the vibrant blues and greens of tropical Earth. My fear sensation, which had been generalized, suddenly sharpened. I was reminded of a time, on Earth, when I had nearly died in a tropical river teeming with piranha fish. I still have a couple of scars from that episode. Before me I could see the river flowing. Even under the calming influence of the drug, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. I must confess that it took a distinct effort of will for me to wade into the water. It was boiling with the flashing forms of angry fish. As I stepped forward I could feel their greedy jaws snapping into my flesh, feel the pointed rows of teeth on the bones of my ankles, then my legs, then my thighs. tinued on, and the water level gradually rose until it closed over my head and my sight faded as the fish bit out my eyes. I think I might have screamed then, if I hadn't already felt the fish tear out my throat, so that I knew screaming was impossible. Besides, I didn't want to open my mouth and let them get to work on my tongue. I protected the soft spot under my chin with the hand that held Obadiah's gun. If any of you homeside heroes ever wonder if we Claims Adjusters really earn our considerable salaries, let me clue you : We do. When, stripped to a skeleton, I still kept moving stolidly ahead, the boiling of the water slowly died away, the pain ceased, and my sight gradually came back. The jungle was still there, but I found that I was climbing up out of the river onto a trail that somehow seemed familiar. The fear sensation was gone, too, to be replaced by a very different one. I remembered why I had gone into the jungle on Earth, so many years before, and why the trail was familiar. And who had been at the end of it. And who was at the end of it. She was soft and beautiful, and she had loved me for a while. She loved me still, I realized, and she was waiting for me. I hurried my steps and the automatic mechanism again put a few drops of the drug into my blood stream. I could still feel the sensation of longing, but the urgency was gone. I let the feeling continue to pull me forward without fighting it, and willingly followed the twists and turns of the still familiar trail. As the trees thinned out until I could see the well-rembered cottage with its thatched roof, its single room, its wide veranda, I slowed. The house stood alone, with no trees around it, just the way she and I had wanted it. I stopped at the last tree and looked at the house for several minutes. Nothing moved that I could see. Circling slowly from tree to tree, Icontinued watching the house until I was staring at it from a point nearly opposite the place where I had first seen it. Then I began to walk toward it. Even the sound of the birds had faded away, although I could still smell the heady fragrance of tropical flowers. She had always kept a large bouquet of them on the table beside the bed. When I had reached a point about twenty paces from the house, I wheeled suddenly and leaped forward, aiming at a spot where nothing showed to the eye. There was a moment -- the merest instant -- of dizziness, and then a room suddenly materialized around me. The room looked alien, and there were two Aliens at the far end of it. The usual drag of one and a half Earth gravities had returned. T his, I felt, was the first undistorted view any man on Earth had had of these Aliens, except as a pet. They had not expected any human to be able to find his way here, to this room at the center of their base. The room was not what I had expected. I had thought that I would find myself on the inside of a spaceship, and by no stretch of the imagination could this ever have traveled between the stars. It was unmistakably a prefab hut. The two Aliens better fitted my preconceptions. They looked something like overgrown sea anemones, with three multijointed arms and three short legs. They were just over two meters tall. They were extremely sluggish in their movements, as might be expected from creatures that depended almost entirely on their mental abilities for control of their environment. They looked at me for a few minutes -- all of their eyes were startlingly humanlike in appearance -- and I imagine that they had expressions of surprise, if I could have found any expression, or interpreted from their tendrils just where their faces were. Finally one of them moved slowly to the far wall, extended one of his arms and depressed a lever on a rather crude-looking panel attached to that wall. He then moved slowly back to his companion and both of them continued to stare at me. I waved cheerily at them. "Hi, fellows," I said. I could detect no answer, but the room wavered a little before my eyes. I blinked and shook my head and my vision cleared. "So you haven't been trained in the techniques of Mental Control of Earthmen," I commented. "That's interesting." A feathery stalk slowly rose from among the coiling things that circled their tops, and at the same time I heard a gentle dragging noise approaching the door of the hut. "It sounds as if we might be about to have company," I said. "That will be pleasant." I examined my two hosts closely, because I had the feeling that I wouldn't be able to see them much longer as they really were. "It's good of you to be so cautious," I said. "If you hadn't been so careful as to shield this hut, just in case we Earthmen turned out to have adequate Mind Control powers of our own, I wouldn't have had this chance to see you two in all your natural ugliness. Your friends out there would have kept me under control all this time. "And what's more," I added, "I wouldn't even have known that you creatures had something that would shield your power. Our scientists will be very interested in examining this hut in great detail." hut swung open and two elflike creatures appeared to walk briskly in. I glanced at them and then back to where my two slow-moving acquaintances had been standing. They were no longer in sight. "Perhaps we can make things a little more comfortable for you," said one of the brisk elves. "You have earned most special treatment from us." He gestured and the strangeness of the room strangely disappeared. The walls were suddenly paneled in mahogany and hung with rich drapes. Easy chairs were placed at intervals around a A picture window showed a bucolic scene bathed in cool sunshine. A deep pile rug covered the floor. I looked around appreciatively. "Very nice," I complimented them. "And in excellent taste. But you have forgotten one thing, haven't you ?" "What's that?" asked the second elf, in a piping voice. "Why, you forgot about the gravity. It's still at Sunder's Pride normal." "So it is," said the elf. "But then you can't expect us to think of everything. Besides, it doesn't seem to bother you the way it does most of the other creatures of your kind." The gravity did not appear to change. "No matter," I said politely. I strolled over to the table and stroked it with the hand that was not holding the gun. It seemed very real. "Won't you sit down?" asked the first elf. "I'm sure you will find the chairs very comfortable." "I'm sure I would," I said, "but no, thank you. I'm certain it would provide you with a lot of innocent merriment if I squatted in thin air , under the impression that I was settled into a cosy chair, but I did not come here to amuse you." The elf smiled. "You are very different from the others who lumbered to this planet in those clumsy artifacts. You are almost like a Person, in spite of your feverish rushing around. Several of our laboratories will bid very high for the right to examine you." I bowed acknowledgment of his compliment. "I'm not in one of your laboratories yet," I said mildly. "It will be very interesting to find out how you managed to get here in spite of our Mind Control," said the second elf. "Your arrival without the necessity of swaddling yourself in awkward garments indicated a certain amount of ability along mental lines, but I sense no more of it in you than several others of your kind have managed to muster. The others all brought premium prices on the market, despite conveyances and garments." "I gather you don't think much of mechanical contrivances," I said lightly. A lien the First shrugged. "They make interesting toys," he said. "But, of course, they are useless crutches in building a civilization. They bring good prices when peddled for the amusement of our children and the shallowerminded adults." "Listening to your remarks about our spaceships," I continued, "I presume all of you teleported here. We Earthmen may not be very good at Mind Control, but I think we have a good grasp of the principles, and I don't see how you could teleport without some sort of terminal device. Didn't you have to send that here by machine?" There was a brief silence, and then Alien the Second answered. "I suppose it doesn't matter if we tell you. After all, we have you in our possession. As you suggest, we do need a terminal device. But we didn't use machinery; we used minds -- the minds of you Earthmen. When the first of you landed on this uninhabited planet, we discovered that your undirected capacities were sufficient to serve as the teiTOinal of a teleport system. "We couldn't go directly to any of your more populous planets, because the vast numbers of your untrained minds cause so much static that the noise level is too high to permit a sharp enough focus for teleporting. "Of course, now that we're here, where you've set up a teleport terminal that connects into your foolish mechanical network and ties into all of your thousands of planets, we'll have no trouble going anywhere among your worlds that we want to. And as soon as we have built up enough consumer demand for you creatures as house pets, we'll move in for the harvest." "It might not be too bad at that," I said, "I've got a cat back home on Earth and she runs my household pretty much to suit her fancy. But I'm afraid it's not the same thing for Earthmen to be house pets." "The ones we've got are doing a very good job at it," said Number Two. "And, as we indicated, you won't get the chance to be a pet," "You seem very sure that you have me under your control." "Very sure," said Number One, "In this confined space, with our training, the two of us could overcome all but one in a thousand of our own kind -- so do you think you have a chance?" I decided that a simple expletive would suffice as an answer. I didn't know enough about them to be sure it was biologically possible for them to carry out my suggestion, but it wasn't important. They ignored me. A t least they didn't answer me. Instead, a cage suddenly appeared around me, leaving me scarcely room to move around. I reached out and tapped one of the bars. It seemed very strong. I didn't think I was even close to panicking, but the implanted device in my body fed some more of the drug into my veins. I may have felt a little more tense than I realized. At any rate, the time for action seemed to have arrived, and it was not on the mental level. I spun toward an apparently empty portion of the room and emptied Obadiah's pistol. The sound of the explosive pellets was very loud in the room. The bars writhed, wavered and disappeared, as did the elflike creatures. The atmosphere of the room turned momentarily opaque, and when it cleared, what I could see was once again a clumsy prefab. Two of the Aliens were still standing in a corner. The remains of the other two were splashed pretty generally throughout the room. It was quite a mess. "Well," I said, "thanks for the party. You'll excuse me for running." There was no answer. The two surviving Aliens hadn't learned much about Earthmen. I walked over and lifted one of them. He weighed about three hundred pounds, I judged. That would be a couple of hundred on Earth. Hefty creatures. I figured that one was about all I could handle. I looked around at the articles in the room and then decided not to use any of them. I was sure that everything I saw was actually there, but it didn't seem wise to take chances. I took off Obadiah's purple kilt and tore it into strips without regret. Then I used the strips to fasten one of the Aliens securely, so he couldn't use his arms or his legs. I didn't know if he could do anything, loose, but I didn't want him to try. The other Alien I heaved up onto my shoulders. Then I walked out of the room. There were a few of the ice trees scattered around, but the countryside looked barren. I couldn't visually identify any landmarks, but I started off without hesitation, and in about three hours I was back at the marker. From there on I used my eyes to follow the path back to the airlock. I had no trouble. This time Mr. Jones gave me a checked kilt. I know you won't believe me, but it was even more hideous than the purple one. The red and yellow squares were at least three inches across. Luckily, I didn't have to look at it -- just wear it. Jones was a little confused as to why I had brought back one of the Aliens. He didn't even recognize it as an Alien at first, of course. He'd never seen one of them before -- just the elfin form they'd wanted him to see. I'd had no more hallucinations and the other Earthmen seemed to be seeing normally too. Apparently there had been only the two trained beings among the Aliens on Sunder's Pride -- and only the four of them in all. N evertheless, i was in a hurry. I sent out an urgent call for one of the most skilled Mental Controllers in Interstellar Insurance. I'll admit that there are times when they can be put to use. Jones and I went down to the clearing that was the teleport terminal to welcome him. The company chose to send that young self-styled genius Ralph Carter. He's supercilious and conceited and altogether obnoxious -- I don't know why you hire such people -- but no question of it, he's a real expert in his field. He was dressed in a dark green kilt in the latest style, and he smirked when he saw the thing I had on. I ignored his attitude, as befitted a gentleman. I figured that it was time to move fast. While I showed Carter the way to the headquarters, I explained why I had called for him. I wanted him to get into communication with the Alien and find out the location of his home worlds. "But. how can I do that?" Carter asked. "I don't know anything at all about these Aliens." "Can't you use your mental training to help you learn to talk mind to mind?" "I suppose so. That shouldn't take more than a few days. The techniques are well established with other new races we've encountered. But learning his language won't make him answer." I looked at him with my most superior manner. "While you're learning his language, I suggest you learn some of his psychology. Then you can get some of our engineers to design you a machine that will function the way a polygraph does with humans -- act as a lie detector. With the proper choice of questions, you should find out anything you want to know." He shuddered delicately at the mention of that naughty word "machine." Mentalists sometimes become purists and make fools of themselves by trying to do without machinery -- something like the attitude of the Aliens. When I had given Carter his instructions, I turned to the rest of the expedition. "I want all of your weapons," I said. "And don't try holding out on me. That's to include knives and scissors, too. We'll lock them up in Jones' vault." "Now see here," said Jones. "Some more of those Aliens may show up any time. We can't afford to go out without our guns." "That's just the reason you've got to get rid of them. I don't want you to start shooting each other -- and me. Now, send out a party as fast as you can to bring back a sample of the building material that blocks out their minds. We'll ship it back to Earth and see if they can put it into mass production. Have the party bring back that second Alien, too. If we happen to spoil the one we've got making him talk, it would be nice to have a spare." was away, I had Obadiah improvise some leg irons out of light chain and padlocks, and used them to hobble all of the Earthmen who remained in camp. Jones screamed like a holta whose mate has estivated, but it didn't do him any good. I had the authority. He got even madder when I put the irons on him and at the same time turned him down again when he wanted to call in the miiltary. The idea of a space fleet around while the Aliens were still free to use their mind powers gave me cold chills. When the group returned from the Aliens' camp, they did so without the Alien. They brought back the still tied strips of the purple kilt. It looked as if he'd teleported #'ight out of them. But at least they did have a piece of the prefab hut with them. I had it sent back to Earth, but not until after I'd attached chains to the party's legs, so that they had to creep along with sixinch steps like the others. As the days passed without any apparent action from the Aliens, dissatisfaction and grumbling grew. My precautionary action with the chains was very unpopular. At the end of the first week after my arrival on Sunder's Pride, Jones tried to invoke the Policy he'd signed with the company to call in the military, on the grounds that the situation hadn't been resolved in the prescribed time, and that the use of chains proved that the colony was in even greater danger than before I had arrived. I invoked the "substantial progress" clause, of course, but the fact that I'd changed the combination to the vault and had the only gun in the entire camp outside of it probably was more convincing to him, Carter called in a top-flight Engineer and made real progress in developing lie-detector techniques against the Alien. The Aliens were basically a guileless lot. I almost felt sorry for them. 'Things eased up a little when Eai'th sent us a stack of sheets they claimed would be just as good in blocking out thoughts as the sample we had sent them. The Alien captive told us, after Carter persuaded him a little, that the blocking power was impressed on their building materials by a mental process; We used electronic techniques, and our Engineers said they could have done it years before, if Mentalists and they could have gotten together on the work. By testing, we found that the stuff we had blocked out anything Carter could transmit, so I let the rest of our people take off their chains as long as they were inside camp -- as soon that is, as we had it fully protected. They worked faster on that job than they ever had worked in their lives before. strolling down toward Telepath Clearing with a courier to send a report back to Earth when the Aliens returned. The first warning we had was a sudden wave of hate that struck like a physical blow. It brought the courier to his knees, momentarily helpless. Even with an automatic and instantaneous shot of the drug, it had me grinding my teeth. Whether it was the rapidity of my recovery and my quickness of thought, or whether it was just the effect of the hate spasm, I didn't know -- at any rate, I did the right thing. Before the courier could get up off his knees and try to kill me, as I was sure he would do, I slugged him alongside the ear with the butt of my pistol. The hatred sensation seemed to be channeled and directed. It made us want to destroy Aliens -- not each other -- and that was unexpected to me. And because the courier was on his way back to Earth, I'd left the chains off him. In another few seconds, I figured, he'd have tried to Kill me -- or, at least, that was my initial thought, until I realized that, since I am a human, he wouldn't have felt hate for me. By that time, and quite properly, I had laid him out cold. I reached down and picked up the courier, intending to toss him lightly across my shoulder and start back to the camp. I found that I had a problem -- I couldn't figure which one of my three stumpy legs to start walking with. I extended all my eyes and examined myself.I looked like an Alien wearing a checked kilt. Unhappily, I tried to lick my labial fringes with my tongue -- and suddenly realized that I had no tone! It was an unnerving realization, even to me. But then I knew why the Aliens were transmitting hatred of themselves ; any Earthman who knew what an Alien looked like would attack me on sight. I closed all of my eyes and concentrated, but I couldn't seem to be able to figure out whichof my three hands held the n, for I could no longer see it. I decided it was time for me to get back inside the barrier. That was a devil of a lot easier to decide than it was to do. I could see three legs and I could feel three legs, but I didn't know how to operate three legs. I was slowed down to a sort of hobble. It wasn't as slow as the sluggish amble of the real Aliens, but it wasn't any faster than the other Earthinen could move, hobbled by chains. I couldn't afford to delay very long, though. Some of the unchained men inside of the shack might take it into their heads to step outside without remembering to hobble themselves, considering that I was not there to remind them, and I didn't feel up to trying to handle anything like that. could get to the lock without being seen. There were six men gathered in front of it, waiting for me. I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I just lit out for the airlock, shuffling along as fast as I could go. The men swarmed around me. I threw the courier at the first group to arrive -- he was still out -- and gained a few seconds. But then they hung on me, they pummeled me, they bit and they clawed, I just kept struggling bravely forward; I couldn't think of anything else to do. At the last minute, just as I thought I was going down under the mass of feet and fists, two of the men somehow got tangled in each other's chains, and I managed to break loose long enough to pull myself into the lock. As the outer door swung closed, I found myself with two arms, two legs and, praise be, a tongue. Obadiah's kilt was missing and I'm happy to say that I never saw it again. The gun was visible once more, still finnly clutched in my right hand. It was empty ; my fingers were squeezing tightly on the trigger. Much good it had done me ! I passed quickly into the headquarters building, bringing with me a breath of poisonous outer air that set the men inside, except for Carter, to gasping and choking. Not even pausing to say hello, or to apologize for bringing in some of the outer atmosphere with me, I hurried over to the control panel and switched on the visual receptors that showed the outside of the lock. The men out there were fighting each other to get inside the building and kill me. As they managed to battle their way in through the lock, they looked bewildered for a moment, and then all of them, released from the frenzy of hate, collapsed into unconsciousness. We were a bloody mess, eveiy one of us, but not one of us was seriously hurt. 'The Aliens had outsmarted themselves. While I had looked like one of them, those parts of me -- like my eye stalks -- that had seemed to be most vulnerable, so that the Earthmen had gone after them, had turned out to be things like ears and noses. They hurt, but they didn't put me out of action when they were battered. That's all that had saved me from being killed. I didn't figure that out till later, I must admit. I counted us. We were all safe inside. Then I used an amplifier, connected up to a loudspeaker outside, to call the Aliens. I called for several minutes, without receiving any response, before I realized that they spoke with their minds exclusively and couldn't penetrate into the headquarters where we were with their pseudo-voices. I sighed and started to go outside, but Jones hauled me back and made me put on a protective suit. He said he couldn't stand another whiff of that atmosphere. trouble communicating with the Aliens. They were very anxious to talk. Apparently they were convinced that, since they believed my mental powers were at least as strong as theirs, there were probably many more Earthmen like me that they wouldn't be able to tackle. I had no trouble at all making a lucrative trading deal with them for Jones' company, once I convinced them that I knew the location of their planets. and that it would be an easy matter to blast them from the face of the universe with primitive, uncivilized fusion bombs. They even promised to send back the men they had taken as pets. After that, I staggered back inside the camp and slept the clock around. When I woke, I found that all of the men were very anxious to know the secret of my success, especially Carter, who knew very well that I had no skill at Mental Control. I was glad to oblige them, as a reward for Carter's courtesy in giving me his stylish green kilt, which fitted me very well. Obadiah gave Carter another of his horrors -- and it was the worst we had seen to date, as I let that young worthy know with a simple cock of an eyebrow. It was all very simple, as I explained to my admiring audience. The reports we'd had back at the headquarters of the Interstellar Insurance Company indicated that it was useless to try to compete with the Aliens on the mental level, where they were strongest. This was the mistake that Jones and his so-called experts had made. I decided, when I was given the assignment to straighten things out, that the best way to compete was where we Earthmen are strongest : with mechanical "gadgets." So I had our scientists implant a power source in my body. It made use of short half-life radioactive isotopes for the energy source -- not too well shielded, but what the hell. I've already fathered my family -- and gave me more power than I could ever need. In order to be able to use that power. I'd had the scientists set up a closed-cycle system in my body. The combustion products created by the "burning" of food by my body cells, as in all humans, were carbon dioxide and water. These were broken down, in another gadget implant in my body, into oxygen, carbon and hydrogen. The oxygen I used directly ; another compact machine synthesized carbohydrates to complete the closed-loop cycle. I neither breathed nor ate during the entire time I was on Sunder's Pride, except for the purpose of talking, and that breathing never went past the larynx. to breathe, too. Otherwise I'd have drowned in imaginary water while wading in that river the Aliens had created in my mind. "Also," I explained, "I had a sort of supersonic sonar device set into me, with the transponder in my chest. That's why I had to avoid wearing a protective suit ; unless my chest was bare, I squelched the signals. I used this sonai' to judge what was going on around me, no matter what I seemed to see." "Now don't feed us that," said Jones belligerently. "We aren't that dumb. Don't you think we tried using sonar and radar to fool the Aliens? They worked on all our senses. What we saw on a radar or sonar screen matched perfectly the false picture we thought we were seeing with our eyes. It was the same when we used aural reception. What came in through our ears matched what we thought we saw. So now stop kidding around and tell us the truth." I smiled condescendingly. "I am telling you the absolute truth, Obadiah. You didn't use your head. Of course the sound signals I received from the sonar matched what I thought I saw. I didn't underestimate the Aliens. It's just that sound to my ears wasn't the only read-out method I used. In addition to connecting to the nerves of my ears, which the Aliens expected, the sonar output also connoted to the nerves of my tongue. Anything ahead of me tasted sweet, and anything behind me tasted salt. To my left was bitter, to my right acid. "The Aliens didn't expect me to taste what was to be seen around me, and what they didn't know about, they couldn't counter. No matter what I saw or heard, I just followed my tongue. "I had a few bad moments one time, when by accident, more or less, the actions of the Aliens almost made me imagine that my tongue was being destroyed, but I managed to work my way out of that by keeping my mouth closed. Just the other day, though, I had some more rough minutes when I found that, along with thinking I had the body of an Alien, I also thought I had no tongue, like them. "You see, I used what the Aliens consider to be primitive mechanical toys. Oh, and one more thing, not quite so primitive: my brains. You might all profit by trying that once in a while." "Well," said Jones at last, "I've got to give you credit. You knew what you were doing." "That's all right," .I said magnanimously. "I had the choice of trying to combat them with Mental Control, where the Aliens are stronger, or with mechanical science, where humans are stronger. Which I chose to use." I punned, "was just a matter of taste." End of report. I'm going on a long vacation with my bonus money. And what I do while I'm away is none of your business. Don't send me any of your preaching letters this time. 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Tbe publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A . by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, New York. Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. If you car read "this IF Novelette Illustrated by Goughon Eternity, ie not so very long . A few moments can span it -- a second can destroy it forever! End-Around Carry ing flapped and billowed, deluding itself it was a Viking sail. Shadow and sunlight streaked across the face of the dying man. His eyes barely flickered awareness of the shifting. A priest looked sadly wore prevented the priest from attending him. A traffic administrator, his authority an invisible extension of the radius of his arm, wiped the shoppers back in a semi-circle to provide landing space on the Mall. The pulseband on the dying man's wrist, having started sending the moment the pulse began to weaken, seemed to be beeping with greater urgency. A hum of vanes aloft evoked a hum of speculation below. Then the bystanders made out man, beating out the ambulance as usual. The usual zealot howled man grounded and knelt beside the dying man. howling of the zealot, the sighing of the priest, and the caught breaths of the rest. He eyed the traffic administrator. The t.a. shrugged. "Just keeled over. Heart attack, I think." kit, pulled out his brainmeter and touched it to the skull of the dying man. He watched the indicator and at the same time kept half an eye out, not fretfully, for the ambulance. He could go ahead on his own discretion. He did. He took out his spray injector and jetted a burst of transistorized particles through an ear into the brain; then he thrust the dying man's obit key, which hung from a gold chain about the neck, into the portable call box. great computer snatched the dying man's obit from the necrofile and transmitted the pattern to the transistorized particles in the man's brain. The weather bureau had freshened the breeze and a scrap of stale newspaper rustled along like a leaf. An old -- molded itself to the man's face. A gasp from the squeamish, but the last-aider, concentrating on his readings, failed to take notice. The t.a.'s eye silenced all. The last-aider looked up and smiled around. The dead man had made his heaven. The crowd sighed, all but priest and zealot in relief. sighed. All but priest and scrap of paper and reached to remove it. But the wash of the slightly late ambulance tore it away, with what seemed to the squeamish a rip. I O N his way home Rush Tumulty dropped his last credit in a slot and reaped a bouquet of roses. HL life jinglejangled with spurs of the moment. Home. The real estate agent, God pity his soul, had told them it was quaint and neighborly. At the touch of Rush's key the door opened with a quaint creaking. (It made it easy for the neighbors to keep tabs on comings and goings.) Margaret had her eyes on the screen. She was reaching behind for the box of sweets on the table. Smiling, Rush put the roses into her groping hand. "Ouch!" The roses scattered. Margaret sucked her thumb. But no one could look at Rush and stay mad. The preset was switching "Not another debate?" Another investigation in the making ; the networks were on a public-service kick. Margaret spluttered indignant chocolate. "Not just another. There'll be Neal Mcgood. You know?" "Ig." professional optimist, doctor of business ethics, etc. Sickening. But Cloy was a sales engineer of a sort. Might as well stick it out. Might garner a few tips. Sales engineers had to learn to suppress distaste for certain types. The most unpromising prospects sometimes proved the most rewarding clients. That was good business ethics. But then they announced the subject: Birth control. Avoid the issue. Rush dreamed of his big break and became aware of the program again only when it was ending. Whatever his stand had been, Cloy sat beaming at the fadeout. Why not? More people, bigger audience; fewer people, more elbow room for the chosen few. Pro and con, the world was getting better and better -- for Cloy. Margaret was glowing. Rush started to say something, but the commercial was so cute she shushed him. Then she turned to him. He tensed. "When're we going to begin begetting? A boy and a girl. You know? How does that strike you?" " 'Strike' -- aggressive word. You feel unconscious hostility toward me." Margaret said through her teeth, "I do not." "See? Quarreling again. Bad atmosphere to raise kids in." They sat apart, eyes unseeing on the screen, until a phone rang next door. Margaret stirred. "Like some punch?" H E gave a nod, but it was automatic. He eyed her as she swayed to the kitchenette on spike heels. Ringing was stimulus, response was "punch." He smiled; the linking was clear. Bell... ring... come out fighting... punch. His smile faded. She was feeling hostile. He couldn't blame her. He put on the smile as spike heels returned. They sat sipping. Rush was no good at fighting silence with silence. He fidgeted, emptied the glass in a gulp, banged it down, sprang to his feet and stomped out muttering not to wait up. He strode blindly, aware he was again precipitating a crisis by refusing to face a crisis. No, he was conquering his fear of rejection by rejecting the other first. No, he wasn't rejecting Margaret but a way of life, the kind his father had led, resenting wife and child. No, it wasn't so much resentment at them as at Fate; early photos showed a man alert for a different drumming, later -- a man who'd committed himself to the humdrum. No, he had to, or where would he be? Where the race, if everyone ran off chasing the sound of their own pulsing? No. Survival, even of the race, wasn't enough. A man had to find meaning in being... or what's an earth for anyway? Out of the tail of an eye Rush saw a gesture. Bill collector? He put purpose on his face and made the vanishing point his goal. Then he stopped. Will Wishart! No; Will, rest his kindly soul, had passed on. A family likeness, then; Will Wishart's kid brother -- what was the name? -- Ken. "Hi-ya, Ken." "You remember me?" "Will I ever forget?" They shook hands. Rush remembered Ken dogging the heels of the big boysalways in the way unless the big boys wanted him to run an errand or retrieve a ball from a ferocious yard or decoy while they stole fruit. Now Ken was a man and taller than himself. It made him feel old. It was funny to see Kenny, prosperity on the outside and intelligence shining through, suddenly becoming the heroworshiping kid again. Rush straightened. "You haven't changed, Rush." "You sure have, Kenny." "What're you doing these days?" "I'm a missionary." Really he was only a sales engineer, though he had once hoped to study for missionary work -- breaking the ice for new prodlOU ucts. And really only a jobless sales engineer at the moment. He was glad he'd always remembered the importance of dressing well. "I knew you'd go places, Rush." God ! What he'd wanted, and what places he was going! "Uh, you know, Rush, I wish I had a guy like you working with me." had always seemed to him inability to maintain a delicate balance -- not answering too soon, not hesitating too long. He sucked in. "What do you have in mind, Ken?" He hoped he'd struck the note of casual interest. "It goes back. I run a chain of geriatoria and I came to know this senior citizen, Jackie. Quite senile, childishly disobedient, but everyone's favorite." Ohmigaud. Rush hated to hear about old people. "He would cry out in a kind of rote fear, 'Save my soul... save my soul... save my soul from the fires of hell.' And sometimes, 'Gabriel! Gabriel! Gabriel !' " Ken smiled. "I can see him trying to pick up noodles on his fork and getting angry. 'Why do they cut it so short?' " Ken shook himself. "Well, the last time I saw Jackie he wasn't baby-pink but gray. Vitamins and dextrose met in a Y of plastic tubing and trickled into his veins. A thready pulse in the stringy arm. I was' glad he was going quietly into the long sleep, as we call it." He coughed and hurried on as Rush shifted weight. "His eyelids lifted; bleared whites showed, then thin crescents. He groaned. And I could see Jackie falling into the fires he feared." Ken shivered. "I found myself saying, 'It's all right, Jackie. This is Gabriel. Your soul is safe from the fires of hell. I'm taking you to God.' " Rush stared. "Did it work?" "I think so. I hope so. If it'd been not a voice in the ear but a vision within, I'd be sure. Since then I've worked out the way." He went into jargon beyond Rush -- even if Rush had listened. Rush was seeing visions and dreaming dreams. He grew aware of a questioning silence. "Um-hum." Rush had edged around and Ken was facing an autobar. Ken thought of standing them a container of cognac. Ken grew expansive as alcohol expanded his capillaries. "Rush, this is a thing I'm burning to promote. Not for the money, though I s'pose it might come to quite a bit. Thanks -- " as his cup was refilled. "But for the satisfaction." His face shone with earnestness and sweat. Rush frowned, but not too heavily. "Fine, Kenny, but you have to think this through. More than a mere matter of life and death -- everything is that. This would let a human mind settle its accounts for all eternity." , Ken brandished his cup. "Kind of talk I need. Man I need. What say, Rush?" He waggled a finger as Rush opened his mouth. "Don't expect you to make up your mind all at once. Have to think things through." Rush strove to strike a balance between indecent haste and insulting slowness. And so -- Instant Obituaries Unlimited. While casting about for some sound sentiment worthy of the moment, Rush belched. II the printer the go-ahead, but thought it only fitting to let Ken see the prospectus. Ken frowned over the layout and copy. "Kenny, you have to realize people don't buy preventives, they buy cures. We're selling the ultimate cure." Ken read on. A devilish Before leered at the prospect, asking: Are you fearful of old age and the wasting away of your powers? Are you bitter about having chosen the wrong career, the wrong mate? Do you foresee doom without being able to alter it? Do you desire without hope of attaining the thing you desire? Are you remorseful for having squandered your talents, missed opportunities, deprived or mistreated others? Do you feel rejected or wronged? Are you unprepared to meet your Maker? Here an angelic After, the feathers, put the devilish Before behind it and beckoned the prospect. It said: It isn't too late! When you close the books on life the obit guarantees you satisfaction in the long sleep. If the body requires touching up just to lie on view, how much more does the dimming mind need the light of reassurance to enable it to pass on without faltering into eternal darkness! Your personalized obit reassures you that you haven't lived your life in vain, that you have realized your potentialities to the full, that you have gratified your dearest and most secret desires. Your personalized obit justifies your misdeeds, remits your sins of omission and commission. Your personalized obit convinces you that you are entering Paradise, harvesting the fruits of Heaven, standing before the Throne -- receiving comfort in the Presence. Plot your lot in life easily, Simply speak into the scientifically designed Inscraper. This highly sensitive mechanism, desearch staff -- and coughed. tomatically translates your word-pictures of your version of the Hereafter into magnetic characters, permanently registering your personalized obit. In minutes, you are ready for eternity, come what may. You live out the rest of your life, carefree in the assurance that, when your Time comes, ice springs into immediate action, transmittng the tape of our personalized obit to your rain. The magnetic characters return electronic signals that evoke the original eidetic imagery. But now, thanks to the fact that the power to reason and resist is failing, the vividness and reality of your vision of the Hereafter has increased manifold! Be among the first to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you will enter into everlasting bliss! Dial O and ask sentative today I "Well?" "I didn't know you'd make it quite that -- " "We have to make it strong! I did think twice about saying, back there, that one might even sit on the Throne ; I figured that would raise too much hell. But don't let the religious angle trouble you. God has all eternity to set things right." "That's right." "Meanwhile, we put the fear of God andor the Devil into them. Damned few have the moral courage to face up to the consequences of their weaknesses without weaseling, whining, or wishful thinking. That's where we come in." "I guess you can go ahead." "Fine." "And when that's done?" "We sit back and wait." Ken sat on the edge of his chair and eyed the furnishings. They represented all his savings and mortgagings. But Rush had been sure front was more important than the feasible and that Ken had stuck together out of secondhand parts. Rush went out whistling. Ill "There will be a nominal charge for orchestrating..." arm, Otto Trever neared a better world. He would live not in the past with its wilted hopes and smoldering regrets, not on the forever-crumbling edge of the present, but in a heavening future. He sidled off the autowalk. With the awkward agility of the non-j ostler he made his way to the entrance. He found himself nodding to the robot doorkeeper; then, though he knew this made as little sense, scowled at it. It was in the shape of an angel. It handed him a numbered card. Full of comings and goings, but not at all like a terminal, the waiting room struck a balance between solemnity and sprightliness. Murals showed lion and lamb in loving togetherness. Otto Trever sat watching numbers light up. His eyes followed figures springing or creaking to their feet and vanishing down corridors. His number came up. He himself came up, force of response compensating for slight delay, and eyes followed him. He came to a door. He showed his card and the door admitted him. He stood wondering what to do with hat, umbrella, and himself. A voice murmured and Trever found himself deep in a chair, pouring out his heart to an intercom. He found himself agreeing he needed orchestrating of lis obit. The voice ushered him into a recording room. The blank-faced technician Labels indicated ringing hoofs, creaking leather, clashing swords ; the preceding client had wanted to believe, when his time should come, he was dying in battle, in the flower, untimely pluck'd, of ancient knighthood. Trever nodded. That was a way to go. Still, wasn't it safer to go in your sleep, not knowing you were going? No, the best way was awarely -- with editing. But mavbe the manner of his own going ought to have a bit more thought. Maybe -- The technician was glancing up from ticker tape notations the computer relayed from the consulting rooms. Too late to back out now. Trever postured eagerness. "Won't take long, sir. I see this calls for just a girl's voice." The tech turned to his mixing knobs. Not just a girl's voice. The voice of Hannah O'Dea. Trevback. Hannah had a breathtaking voice electronic tones couldn't hope to match. But he listened to scales of syllables and heard himself saying, "There! That's it!" whenever sound chimed with memory. Then the tech was saying, "There, that's it." And it was so. Trever could close his eyes and see Hannah ; he almost laughed to hear her lilt meaningless syllables. Joy switched to panic. The tech was going to leave him to himself -- and to Hannah. "Say anything you want into this mike. Press this, it'll come out in your voice. Press that, it'll come out in the young lady's. This is for the playback." His finger over a button, Trever was alone, staring at the mike. He was afraid. For without that button there was no Hannah, not for him. Hannah had never given him steady encouragement. Still it was a shock when she laughed in his face. His face burned. His finger stabbed down. This time, Hannah was charmingly confused. The honor Otto was conferring overwhelmed her, unworthy being that she felt herself to be. She could only murmur, "Oh, darling, darling!" How tenderly masterful Trever was, whispering comfort with counterpoint of passion. He gazed around, part of himself lingering in that event. He pulled himself together. Why, he hadn't done badly. At that sweet seizure, he switched on the playback. He sat listening to a transvestite act. He'd pressed the buttons in the wrong order. All to do over again. Without turning from the bank of closed-circuit screens, Ken put up a palm. Rush smiled, but silenced. He listened a moment then moved to the window. He viewed the streaming in and out. He heard a sigh and a switching off, then Ken was at his side. Rush gestured. "And we're just beginning." "But it's never-ending. We'll never ease all the pain and sorrow." "Don't worry, Ken. Iron and bamboo curtains won't stop us. I promise you." Ken put a hand on Rush's shoulder. Their eyes lifted to the sunset the weather bureau was projecting. Ken smiled. "What a life, when even loveliness brings sadness for its evanescence." Loveliness. Rush remembered Margaret and felt for the clasp he had bought. No special occasion; just that he enjoyed drawing down big money and spending it. He looked down on the streaming in and out and IV "Persons tvishing to spend eternity together may under clause ( iv ) open a joint checktract form. Conover in his grave his widow Norah began to fail. There was nothing mournful about her pining away. She was merely in a hurry to share Pat's repose. Declining to look after her wellbeing, she quickened the process long invalidism had begun. Bedridden, she had entrusted Pat with taping the one obit for the two of them. As this was a joint account the computer hadn't erased the tape but stored it against further falling due. With effitered last-aid. Norah's face began to compose -- then jolted to horror, disbelief, rage. With a galvanic lazarising, she sat up as you'd crook a finger and man... Ken burst into Rush's office waving a. teleprint. "They served me by visiphone!" Rush had to admire his own calm. "Mrs. Conover?" Ken nodded. "She has no case. Where's the harm in shock, when it's shock that revived her?" "She wanted to die! But that misses the point. She's suing not on her own behalf but for her husband's estate." "Same thing." "She claims he got the wrong obit and should collect damages." "What damages? He died happy." "How do we know that?" Sometimes Rush felt like shaking Ken. "Prima-facie evidence. Smile of the beatific." "Or grimace of pain," said Ken. "Or gas. Sure. Why are you trying to undermine yourself?" "Might be kinder to allow we goofed. Ease the poor woman's mind." "Want our other clients to lose, through apprehension, the full effect of their obit?" "No-o." "Wouldn't surprise me, Kenny, if the 'poor woman' is a zealot-sympathizer trying to discredit our whole operation." the arbitrator that even in her distress she didn't feel mistake she'd be of a mind to forgive. She waved her cane. That obscene obit was none of Pat's doing. "All those lascivious dancing-girls! All that drinking and carousing! Oh no, that wasn't the heaven my Pat planned for us. I lived with the man forty years and I know Pat Conover never made that obit." The arbitrator turned. "Mr. Tumulty?" Rush handed in data strips. "Here's proof that Pat Conover made and paid for the obit in question." The cane flailed. "Some other Pat Conover!" "Sorry, madam, but according to our computer it has serviced no other Pat Conover." "Then your computer is loony !" The arbitrator said, "I understand your agitation, Mrs. Conover, but let's not get personal." Rush was handing in more data strips. "Service records prove our computer in perfect operating condition since activation." Norah tightened her lips as the arbitrator took in the data. Rush studied the ceiling. The arbitrator said, "Unless you can show me some proof, Mrs. Conover, I'm afraid -- " Norah broke down. The cane clattered. The arbitrator printed up its decision. It wondered why a breakdown always embarrassed not the one breaking down but those looking on... (When Ken ran off the transcript of the proceedings, he felt that embarrassment. But Rush was right. They had scaled the heights of a higher justice...) infallible, he disregarded the catcalling of the zealot pickets. "Better unbought unhappiness than bought, unearned pleasure !" "You have chased after sin !" "Say farewell to your immortal soul!" On second thought, it would be better to begin with an aloof Hannah O'Dea. The triumph would be greater when she wound up a passionate slave. Unaware his dreamy smile was maddening. Trever passed through traffic administrators holding back the zealots. V the obit at all hazards." -- T HE weather bureau was projecting an outsize moon. It was the least the government could do now the Russians had made the real moon constant, stationing it over Moscow. But it added to the hazards George Cavendish had to overcome. It forced him to make for the wall furthest from the beam, to keep from silhouetting himself. The main gate was in that wall, and so was the heaviest guard. The vane lofting him whirred softly, loud to his ears. He cupped an eye to the glow of his watch. # hours. Good job of timing. Now. He sucked in air and prepared to cant himself into the yard. There was a stir in the tower emplacement and his guts writhed. But the discs that were the faces of the guards had phased toward the insubstantial moon. It was blinking. tapped the projector's power line and was oscillating the juice. Rush Tumulty had promised a diversion at the right instant and was delivering. Even in the dark, Cavendish smiled inwardly ; no flashing of teeth to betray him. He landed, slipped into a workshop, and stashed the vane and a guard's uniform. His spray injector he stowed under the jacket of the trusty's uniform he wore. He hid oehind a mountain of license plates and sat waiting. He shivered. It was the chill of the raw hours. He wondered if Mort Greene saw the blinking from his cell in death row. Mort had robbed and killed to get the credits to buy his obit. Then the law caught up with him and fixed the day to tered this bit of information and prepared to make good. But the law held Mort couldn't benefit by his crimes, or what good would capital punishment be as a deterrent? It denied obit. held that society might have the right to deprive the body of life, but not to deprive the mind of comfort -- however paid for. The law and the zealots held that body and mind were one and that one suit of punishment had to fit the whole crime. Cavendish didn't feel deeply about it pro or con. But he felt deeply about making good. Rush Tumulty had sent him off with a firm handshake and a frank smile and something duty to test the case, to defy the law, to deliver the goods. It would be criminally foolish to pass up the chance to make this manifest to those who had joined up, and to those hesitating. Cavendish wondered if Ken Wishart had the Chief's sense of obligation. Wishart kept himself too much to himself. Chief had told him just who the inside contact would be. But the Chief was right. Suppose the law were to intercept Cavendish -- and drag the name of the inside man out of him? It would stop dead all further attempts to reach Mort Greene in time. Still, he couldn't help wondering. The warden? An arresting thought, but Cavendish shook his head; better suspend judgment, not commit the folly of committing oneself beforehand. He'd have to keep mind open and body alert if he were to acquit himself well... He must've dropped off, no blinking the fact. The world was cold gray. Inmates were marching to breakfast. Soon, many of them, with their guards, would be trooping into the shops, including the one where he sat hiding. He was to slip out and mingle with the cons when they took their break in the yard. He was to stay inconspicuous ; the contact would know him by the number -- #I -- on his jacket. The contact would take it from there. Cavendish sweated out close shaves. It was hard to hear footsteps in the din and he jumped in his skin whenever a voice sounded near. But his luck held. And it was time to knock off work, and sudden silence fell... save for the eerie lipless talking of the cons and the silencing shouts of the guards. Cavendish slipped out and made himself part of the He thought he was being inconspicuous but he found cons eyeing him and commenting coarsely. He remembered he'd sat all night on a stack of license plates; he must've impressed a number on his seat. He kept his back straight and bent his knees as he strolled, hoping his jacket would cover. But he attracted the gaze of a tower guard, hardlooking. The guard winked. His heart thumped his ribcage. The inside contact. He returned the wink. The guard turned away -- swung back, and winked. Cavendish shot glances around, then winked. He knew he ought to move on before others noted. But the guard's gaze held him. The guard winked. Cavendish groaned -- hadn't there been office enough? -- but he winked. The guard raised his gun and blazed away at Cavendish. the prison hospital. He had only flesh wounds ; he supposed he should feel grateful. But there are soul wounds. Knowing it useless, he felt for the spray injector. Gone. They couldn't have missed it when they stripped him to I OU tend his wounds of the flesh. He'd done his best, but he defended himself without conviction. It was painful even to wonder what went wrong. Maybe the guard was a zealot, laughing to himself at the thought of crossing up the A figure leaned over him. A trusty-orderly. The man would have the freedom of the place. If he jumped the man; got his naked flesh into those clothes, he'd have a fighting chance... He caught the man in a hammerlock. The man broke it and pushed him down. "Mercy me, #, you are screwy. You're lucky to be living. Zwicker's touchy about his tic. Whyd you have to make fun of it? Lucky I got to you first and glommed the injector. They figure Zwicker went stir crazy." Cavendish found his voice. "Will the spray injector get to Greene in time?" The con nodded. "Sure." Then frowned. "Need his key?" "No. The computer will send the obit at execution time. They're not moving it up?" The con shook his head. "Not that it would be any trouble to get Greene's key. It's in the warden's safe." "You mean he's in this with us?" "Mercy no. Account of all the pete men in here, the warden don't bother locking it. Now we have to think how to get you out." Cavendish told him of the cache. The trusty had hardly left when Cavendish remembered the vane. His heart thumped. Would the con take off, leaving Cavendish to face the rap? Cavendish waited. When he heard footsteps he feared to turn. It was the trusty. Emptyhanded. The trusty unwound a guard's uniform, cummerbunded under his jacket. Cavendish dressed with haste. He tried to think guard as the con escorted him past eyes to the dark workshop. Vane strapped on and whirring, Cavendish asked, "Why didn't you take this and escape?" "Mercy. You happen to set your eyes on all the license plates ? More each year. Think I'd throw away the break of being safe from vane traffic?" Time to go. All eyes, including those of the trusty, who failed to see him wave, were on a shadow-stained window. As he went over the wall he thought he saw lights dim. trusty-barber seemed embarrassed that the hairshaving was a superfluous gesture. But under cover of it the barber used the injector the orderly had slipped him to shoot the transistorized particles into Mort Greene's brain. Mort did not hear the hissing of the electric charge. He heard ringing hoofs, creaking leather, clashing swords... Cavendish smoothed down his hair; knowing the Chief's flair for publicity, he felt it likely he'd be walking into a telepress conference. He entered the Chief's office, steeling himself against glare and noise. Rush was alone. He sprang up and clapped Cavendish on the back. "Wonderful work, George. Too bad we can't publicize it. But I've been kicking it around. If people learned Greene got away with it, wouldn't it tempt many to emulate him? No, the wellbeing of Society comes foremost. It's only good business ethics. We have to refund stolen money, so it would be not only without honor but without profit." Cavendish knew letdown as Rush saw him out. Then handshake and smile made it all right... Otto Trever took a card from the doorangel. He smiled at the robot and then, realizing the folly of expending feeling on a machine, deepened smile. It felt good to know he was dealing with a law-abiding concern. He didn't keep up with the news these days, but some pros and cons of the Mort Greene case I OU had got through to him. itself, shown itself on the side of law and order, he could disregard the Zealot pickets, who, though they had lost talking point, had not lost voice. ing sure he had it now. Hannah O'Dea would be the mistress of that rogue Otto Trever. She was one of a succession, and knew it. A pretty plaything but fast fading, she lived in dread of Otto's discarding her for a fresher plaything. VI "# U agrees to serve as ante-mortem executor and will carry out the express wishes form. tures out of focus, but as Ken looked at her, a nudge of memory resolved the face into that of his onetime favorite star, Cara Lovelace. It was hard to believe this wasn't another telecast with Cara Lovelace playing the lead. Ken viewed her with a protecting tenderness that forgave bad makeup, quavering voice, wringing of bejeweled hands. The first thing she looked for when she entered the consulting booth was a mirror. The shining surface of the intercom, designed to induce a semi-hypnotic state in which inhibitions would lessen, served. She felt melancholy. Her reflection informed her she looked soulful. She brightened -- then tried to recall that shade of melancholy. She wanted to recapture that soulful look. The intercom broke in softly with its gentle probing. An audience ! Cara responded. She spotlighted her rise in the theater, told of costarring with Lane Pierce, then of going on to solo greatness, spoke trippingly of her tours. Ken started at another memory. Lane Pierce had taped an obit only a few months before. Rush had noted it with special interest because someone not Lane Pierce had already taped an obit assuring himself he was the one and only Lane Pierce. The man could imagine no greater bliss than to die believing he had been that nova of Casanovas. "Now," Cara said with a dramatic sigh, "I've reached a point in the road where I can see where I am and what I have and can expect." The mirroring surface gave back soulfully. "And I ask myself, 'Was it all for this?' " Keii saw she couldn't believe that. She clung to youth, squeezed into it; shoes and girdle extruded Cara. "Not that I think it's all over, or that it hasn't been worth while. But there's one thing I want to take care of at the curtain." She stopped. Ken, feeling this was not a dramatic device but a pause before a plunge, willed her not to tape the sort of obit Lane Pierce had taped. Stiff hands unpursed a letter, still sealed. It would show blank when you held it to light; static electricity when you stripped off the flap brought out the writing. The letter was old, but there was only the start of a tear. Ken strained to hear. "This goes back to when I and Lane appeared together." Together not only onscreen but off. But her best friend, Ada Moffat, had fun teasing her. "You're not dating him?!" He stuttered offscreen. Ada mocked. " 'It seems a cocoon's age since I saw you last night!' " Cara was mad about his deep voice bespeaking depths of meaning, his deep eyes depths of feeling. But Ada would whisper, " 'What a lovely Jejune moon; it makes me crave the baboon of a kiss !' " Ada was competent enough actress to capture Lane. Cara would blush and go cold. Ada said Lane was a bore and groaned amusingly at sight of him. Cara tried to fight misgivings. But she saw les and less of Lane. And of Ada. O N the eve of the wedding of Lane Pierce and Ada Moffat, Cara received the letter. Her first impulse was to tear it to bits; her next, to tear it open. Why was Lane writing now -- unless to confess he regretted having decided to marry Ada? He repented before it was too late ; Cara was his love; he and Cara -- if she still cared for him -- would elope. Cara started to rip the flap. Latent writing showed faint. She stopped. Suppose Lane hoped she wouldn't judge him harshly; suppose, singing praises of Ada, he asked Cara to wish them well. Latent writing remained too faint to make out. Fearing the finality of knowing, she shut the letter away. At long intervals she took the stationery from its resting place and with half-averted eyes tried to make out the writing. Sometimes it seemed to spell out one big "Yes," sometimes "No." for her what she lacked the will to do herself. She touched her neck. She was leaving the letter for the computer to open and scan and record. Whatever the message, it would be her obit. carry out her orders to the letter. Having deposited that letter in the scan slot, she rose, performed a bow, and, uptilting her chin, exited. Now the booth was void of both dead letter and living spirit, and still. And yet it held Ken's gaze and thought. Sometimes life seemed like a dress rehearsal. Opening night was upcoming, but not yet. In moments like this, he felt he and the world of his senses were not really on. Another client entered the booth and broke the spell. Ken switched off, then realized the client had been Otto Trever. Ken smiled, left the switch off, and returned to his work. But he found himself returning to Cara Lovelace. And Lane Pierce. How the deduce could you figure a guy like that? In Pierce's obit there was no dialogue, no reciting of his triumphs onscreen and off, no wordpicture of heavenly scenery. Only the thunder of canned applause. Lane Pierce and his vacuum-packed obit; Cara Lovelace and her sealed letter ; the man identifying himself with the outer Lane Pierce -- which had the best of it? Ken turned back with a sigh, for he didn't know what, to the l's and #'s report. in the booth, still a bit out of breath. He had laid about him tellingly with his umbrella. If the hassle had started when he was leaving, obit in order, he might've resigned himself to being struck down, maybe even welcomed dying. But he would let nothing stop him before he could revise his obit. What made it hard on his umbrella was that the Zealots picked him as prime target. By now, they probably took him for a staff member of and he put it out of his mind. The living Hannah O'Dea had gone away with her lover. Trever had never heard from Hannah. Whatever he heard was of her happiness ; it only added to his unhappiness. The new obit would alter that. He would encounter an old, life-beaten Hannah. She would turn away. Then, seeing no way of averting the meeting, she would face him. "If I had it to do all over again -- Oh, Otto, if I only had it to do over again!" G riffin manning's chest tightened. He sat eyeing the intercom much as the astrogastor of the first starship sat at her controls. In his own mind the comparison was more down to earth; he was a moron aspiring to migraine. Not that heaven was a headache. The headache was trying to conceive a heaven. "I simply lack imagination." The intercom consoled him. The recording tech was waiting with a suitable range of prepackaged heavens. "Whenever you hear one you like, sir, press this. Later, you'll make your final selection." Out of sight in the control room the tech rolled the tape and listened in, yawning. After three solid hours of ethereality the tech saw Manning was hard to please. Not one abode of bliss -- not Sumeru or T'ien or Swarga or Aaru or Gan Eden or Olam ha-Ba or Elysium or Ching-tu or Jodo or Gokuraku or Asgard or Flatheanas or Albordy or Tuma of the Valley of the Assassins or Mictlan or Xibalba or Sibao or Tegri or Shipapu or Ponemah or Ilahee or Tir na n-Og or Hy Brasil or Avalon or Sukhavati or Langi or Untola or Dilum or Bolotoo or Hesunanin or Xanadu -- had moved Manning's finger. Moslems were threatening infidels to enjoy Jennet 'Adn. Turning his gaze toward the Throne of the Compassionate, the tech slipped Jennet 'Adn in. No paradise. He quickly reprogrammed. But nothing drew response -- not the sensation of immersion in amniotic flued ; not Nirvana, where all desire is wanting; not a rice-wine dream; not opium pipe dreams or marijuana or mushroom hallucinations; not the esthetic paradise of Dante's allegory. The tech tightened his lips and tapped Mahler's symphonic heaven. Still no response. The tech smiled. He hadn't played his trump. T HE First Star Expedition had been sending back reports. to subscribe for bulletins of the Eschatological Survey Team of Starex One. So there was a great dipper of nonhuman heavens to draw on as well. That of the folk of Mekbuba II. In their heaven the chiefest delight was to go around scowling. It was joy to envisage relaxing from the livelong need to smile, a smile being the most efficient arrangement of features for scooping in the tiny airborne organisms on which they fed. And that of the folk of Nashira II. They led a hard life and yearned for a harder time in heaven. In retrospect their temporal lot would seem not so bad after all. And that of those of Spica II, in whom the nose had grown vestigial. These people looked forward to a return to the dream days of legend ; the nose would quiver with sensation and the heady effect of pollen, pollution, and putrefaction would become known. Their desire was all the stronger because, honoring tradition, they preserved the conditions making these things tantalizingly omnipresent. And of Salm II, a teeming planet. Each person believed that on reaching heaven it would -- whatever pleasure it queued up for -- always be first in line. The heaven of Alkalurops II was special -- its would-be dwellers having from the beginning reserved all good things for heaven -- and the tech knew a fleeting urge to put this in place of his present obit. Heavens rolled by but Manning held out. Swallowing angry embarrassment, the tech stood beside Manning. Manning made no sign of awareness. Taking this for sign of displeasure, the tech with savage feelings but gentle touch prodded Manning. "Haven't you been able to come to any conclusion, sir?" Manning nodded and slowly slid out of his chair. Somewhere along the line he had died of -- one had to suppose -- ecstasy. his breath. "Why'd you bust out to the press with a mea culpa? I could've hushed this Manning bit." Ken lifted his head slowly. "Rush, I wonder if what we're doing is good. The spirit is Rush stilled a quick retort. He steepled his fingers. "We do our human best. Besides, the guy got what he wanted." Ken sat up. "You're darn tootin'. I let the shock and the uproar throw me." He eyed the monitors, not seeming to see how many screens were dark, how many consulting booths were not in use. "Be a shame to let all this go by default..." The unending spectacle caught him up. Rush left. He wished he could convince himself it would come out right. The Zealots had hold of this and were milking it. They had strong backing; more to the point, they had a head -- Yardley Bourne. Bourne's biting mouth interpreted all-seeing providence, frightening away prospects. "This Manning-martyrGod's function, shortcircuits Judgment, undermines Authority. This tool of the Devil encourages wicked living by 'forgiving' all at the end of living." Yardley Bourne wanted his finger in the pie in the sky. "By jiminy, I demand that all obits be open to inspection !" Then there was Soul Security. So far, Soul Security limited itself to obiting pets. The most peevish Zealot couldn't fault Soul Security for taping the voice of the master or mistress praising the dying animal. Even Yardley Bourne couldn't misinterpret Soul Security's taping, for dogs, the odor-complex of a congregational tree, with bonus cat at bay on a bough; for cats, a micey smell, or fluttering of bird or flopping of goldfish under paw; tensile infinity of worm, for birds. Rush told himself that when the newness wore off the public's interest would turn back seemed undue for a dumbbeast clientele. ger of collapsing, if that was what Soul Security hoped. storage charges ran out. pitch would be that Manning had got what he wanted. Oh. Tell the computer to collect in advance from now on... Margaret Tumulty let the curtain fall in place. The little band of Zealots was there yet. She had grown aware that they had stilled and she had hoped they were gone. At least they had stilled. Listenmade her feel, well, sick. She tried to hide her feelings from Rush whenever she saw him but the idea of an obit gave her the shivers. But Zealots were disgusting, and just hearing them she felt disloyal. Still, it seemed to please Rush that she hadn't yielded to the mercials ; he took it as a tribute to their personal relationship -- she contemplated no greater joy. She turned to her set and had it replay her favorite cast. All was sweet, safe, and sure until a large band of Zealots, who like all Zealots took pride in being outspoken and in looking for opposition, came upon those outside the Tumulty mansion. These last had shouted themselves hoarse down-withing the Manningmartyrers and up-withing the Zealots. Their whispering caused the newcomers to take and to wade into them bloodily. Margaret raised the volume. sent farewell to the doorangel. This was it, the obit to end all obits. But he felt regret for all he had to leave behind. Spatially the obit waiting in the necrofile lay behind; temporally it lay before. Why in many-mansioned possibility must he fix on only one, possibly free, choice? Deaf and blind to the Zealots, Trever passed through them along a t.a.-held line, and stepped onto the autowalk heading home. The door-angel gazed after the vanishing figure. Something was #. Most clients were one-time arrivals; there was no need for the door-angel to sort them out. Trever always wore the same clothing, always toted his umbrella -- defiant symbol of the Radical Republicans, who once opposed functionalizing the weather bureau. The door-angel had come to recognize Trever and, torn between recognizing and the non-need to recognize, found salvation by stacking the deck to present Trever always with the same card. Now it gazed after the vanishing figure and realized what was #. The man had forgotten to take his umbrella. The door-angel hurried in and retrieved the battlescarred umbrella, but by then the man was rounding out of sight. The weather bureau had switched on a breeze. The door-angel's wings trembled. The door-angel eyed the vanes in the traffic lanes above and beyond the autowalks. It spread its wings and moved them. Its makers had not designed the wings for such levity, but the door-angel rose. It was flying. It looked for the man but the earth was tipping over. Its wings were tearing off. The ground came up. The umbrella. Somewhere in the door-angel's reconditioned metal was the memory image of parachute and nose cone. The door-angel tore at the catch. It was immovable; being only a symbol, the umbrella didn't open. The door-angel perished without benefit of obit. " as much as personal identity is immaterial to obitadministering , the client may elect to use a pseudonym ." -- # U contract form. could tell the t.a.s by their blue uniforms, the Zealots by the lightning-emblazoned armbands they had taken to wearing, and the obit-seekers by their fewness. He turned from the window to spottily-lit monitors. An outthrusting jaw, bulb nose, and wild eyebrows caught his eyes. He smiled. The whole getup screamed disguise. These days clients seemed to want to hide from family, friends, and foes that they were clients. For Rush's benefit, the computer printed on the screen the name G. F. The electronic frisking had given him a bad moment; he had feared the t.a.s would penetrate his careful disguise. But they had not even suspected disguise. They were simply on the lookout for Zealot sabotage. It had all worked out for the best. He was here now, and the ordeal had shaken loose his last res ervations. It was the fuss about Manning that made him think of taping his own obit. Not that he wanted to die in ecstasy -- not just yet. He had so much more good to do on earth. But taping a trial obit might be the answer to what was troubling him. It began when Manager Forbes -- he advised the intercom all names were purely fictitious -- singled out young Vehr. Vehr's unclouded vision of the shining purity of the Ideal -- neat, evenly-balanced books, ditto towns, ditto people -- exalted him above the classmates in the business ethics seminary. Colonizing of Venus was beginning. "The first Carrier of the Word on Venus! A great honor, my son, but one you richly deserve." "I am not worthy, Manager Forbes." "Oh, you are, my son." Then the briefing. The veil of Venus fell. Vehr closed his eyes. No shining purity there. No neat, evenly-balanced books, towns, people. Violence, lust, passion ran amuck in the raw settlements. He packed. Manager Forbes arranged passage. But Venus had evidently got word of impending salvation ; anonymous abuse in dirty English, Chinese and Russian flooded the seminary. Manager Forbes in I OU particular came in for brutal cautioning, vilifying and ridiculing. Manager Forbes vetoed the mission. Venus was not yet worthy of such as Vehr. The seminary would turn its face toward a more deserving flock nearer home. Vehr protested. But he bowed to greater wisdom, not without a spurt of fear. He had come near to overdoing his disappointment, moving more than one director to talk of overriding the veto and giving the lad his chance to prove himself. "Poor Manager Forbes. But it was all for the best. By sending those letters I was able to keep shining and pure my vision of the Ideal." Mind had triumphed over matter, yet he found himself thinking often of the aborted mission and the thought always carried a feeling of apprehension. Worsening of late, it took the form of a fear of saying or doing something embarrassing. He was a public figure. He couldn't restrict himself to pretaped appearances. Taping an obit allaying a disagreeable memory in the hereafter might, bv taking off pressure, allay a disagreeable memory in the here. In his obit he would be leaving a World in which Man had never torn the veil from Venus, a Venus innocent as the dawn of Earth when mystery brooded over the waters. It seemed to work. The outthrusting jaw, bulb nose and wild eyebrows couldn't express the joy of one shut of burdensome memory, but Rush sensed just that when Vehr got up to go. Rush started to switch off, then stopped. The very positiveness of the false features suggested their negatives. Rush knew he ought to know the underlying face. Vehr was moving out of the frame when it came to Rush. blinking This Way Out. Rush took his elbow. "There's another way, Mr. Vehr." He looked around. "Private. The staff comes and goes without having to pass through the Zealots waiting out there. Allow me." "Why, thank you. Most kind. Much for the best." Rush hurried Cloy past Ken's office and into his own. Cloy's eyes darted around behind eyebrows. Rush introduced himself and showed Cloy a chair. "While you're here, Mr. Vehr, suppose I show you how we do our job." Cloy remained standing. "Interesting, I'm sure, Mr. Tumulty. But I'm afraid I haven't the time -- " Rush was tuning in a monitor. "... and I'm sure if Hannah and I were shipwrecked alone together on an asteroid we... The prelapsaurian jaw fell. "Am I hearing and seeing right? Do you eavesdrop on your clients?" "Monitor. I won't pay cloy -- I mean play coy. We monitor to make sure all goes smoothly." Cloy sat down and viewed the monitor till it went black. "Quite moving. I see you are doing a splendid job. Indeed, I venture to wonder if modest scale, of course." "Your confidence is touching, Mr. Vehr. But frankly, owing to certain disrupting influences our position isn't ideal. We need the moderating presence of a man of stature devoted to our interests and believing in our principles." "Loyalty, as we in business ethics put it, is the dividend on a mutually advantageous agreement." "I share that sentiment." "This has been very pleasant, Mr. Tumulty. Now if you'll kindly show me your easy way out -- " O N his way out Otto Trever, mended umbrella on his arm, was in two minds as he glanced at the door-angel. It was partly the same doorangel, partly not. "Cainabelizing," he thought of calling it. In any case, even if it were the same It, there was no sense thanking it for attempting to restore the umbrella to him -- or blaming it for damaging the precious symbol. It had only been trying to do its duty. More disturbing was the breaking of his lucky streak. The card he had received on entering had not been the usual one. Omen? Meaningless hangover of superstition. But already his pleasure in the latest revision was fading... Margaret Tumulty lit up Cloy was appearing live. Just knowing made it more real, made him seem his sanguinest. The very polyanthus in his lapel seemed to nod agreement as he spoke and to rest assured as he stopped for breath. "Don't we unconsciously pretty up the past with the powder puff of forgetfulness? Of course we do. Don't we unconsciously jolly up the future with rouge of expectation? Of course we do. Don't we rationalize? Of course we do. The good old human nature in us, my friends, makes us do these things. Then why not be practical and do these things honestly and forthrightly, by a conscious exercise of the will?" The polyanthus considered, already swayed. "I see no harm and much carrying out. We owe a debt ing us balance our accounts. I OU Those who doubt, those who say otherwise, are foolishly crape-hanging. And as you know -- " The polyanthus nodded yes. IX "# U will not censor or otherwise seek to control the content of your personalized Ken sat hunched like an embryonic premonition. To Rush he seemed to be bearing the whole burden of original virtue. Ken turned. "Rush, what do you really believe? Is there a rising up again? A hereafter?" Rush frowned. What profiteth a man to think thus? fications had grown out of Ken's worrying about his own soul. "If you have to think about it, it's best to be hardboiled as an Easter Egg about the concept." Ken sighed. "All the more reason to do our best. You agree?" Rush, his mind casting a cold eye of economic justification on the Vehr account listed under miscellaneous expenses, said, "What? Oh, I agree. That's business ethics. We all have to do our best." Cloy's pitch was paying off, but not as much as Rush had hoped. The Zealots, with seemingly unending backing, were still noisily intimidating. Rush viewed the waiting room. To make it seem fuller he'd set up a lag in the computer's dispatching of clients. But it was embarrassing; the computer knew its capacities and would fidget at the clogging waste of time. features huddling in big face, waited. He didn't mind waiting, did he? No, he didn't mind. He had waited so long in his life waiting had become habit. Not not minding so much as believing he couldn't help enduring. He waited. With the suddenness of at last, the waiting ended. He found it hard to talk about himself. He couldn't remember ever laughing or crying with full lungpower. He must have as a child, but restraint had set in early. Maybe once he had thought he could care for the work he did. He bent over dials with silent intentness but seemed no longer to be doing work he could care for. The company of his few friends roused no fullthroated laughter, no wholehearted gusto. But he had his dream. You didn't, even to your best friends, tell all your dream. He had learned that. Continual rebuffing should have thickened his skin. It had only reinforced his silence. Quietly he saved up. One day he hired a one-man spaceboat. In the speckling between Mars and Jupiter he picked out an asteroid and landed. It was no use. He could be sure there was no other human in a hundred thousand miles, but there wasn't air enough to waft a whisper. He headed for Mars, landed on the Gorki Desert, climbed out. It was no use. There was air enough, though thin, but just under the horizon might be someone. He climbed in. He took off. He let the spaceboat drift sunward. But his dream was strong. He switched on the reverse rockets. But where, where? He remembered the air bubbles. Mile-diameter plastic bubbles, bottle-green, spotted strategically about, they held high oxygen-content air. Spaceship air might sour due to sick algae, leak out owing to a hole in the hull or carbonize because of recycling breakdown. It was a misdemeanor to make non-emergency use of a bubble. Inskip made juncture with the nearest, nevertheless. Carrying a half-mile of nylon cord out of ship's stores, he threaded his wav through a stand of fittings. They were all too small. Then he swotted a large valve, a mere circle -- or flap, since it fused at one I OU point with the bubble proper -- of the same stuff. It gave windily. He squeezed through, tied one end of the coil to the flap where it hinged, then let the flap in place, sealing the opening. He was inside, feeling bubbling in himself, in his blood. Soon, soon! He got out of his spacesuit and used the belt to moor it. He held the free end of the cord and kicked himself off. A bit of entangling shortened the cord, but in substance he was floating at the center. The air was warm and he relaxed. Then he panicked. If he lost his grip and drifted he would die floating in the center of the bubble. He tied the cord to his middle. He breathed easier. All the air he needed. No one in sight. This was it. He began to breathe consciously, the oxygen exalting him. He breathed deeply and rapidly for a minute, then could hold his breath much longer than normally. Now. He sucked in the breath. It was no use. Something -- if only the indifferent universe -- was eyeing him. It deflated him. "Now I'm here." Once, just once, he ached to let out in one cry -- what? He didn't know. He had come close to knowing. He had failed. His dream was still a dream. He eyed the intercom. Maybe...l can dream up, maybe we ought to interpolate something beautific." "No, Ken. We can't say a man's heaven isn't his own to make." Hell, no; just let the ing obits ! But it was all right ; Ken was nodding slowly. Besides, another monitor was catching Ken's attention. Theodora Molyneux (pseud.) wore a veil whose shimmering chromium phosphor thread said voice-disguise. Her breath played on the fine taut strands, and Rush and Ken and the computer heard tones with harmonics of a mingled, distant sweetness. The veil did its equivocal job well. Rush tried to pierce winkle out peris. Women clients had proved an exotic source of sex: open to reason because open to emotion; amenable because tof obit cleared conscience ; pliable because he could pick them with care, plan accidental meeting, and play on longings they betrayed unsuspectingly, as now. Something about this one disturbed Rush. "He always forgets to mention changes in his plans till the last minute. Never enters his mind I might have plans of my own." She clasped and unclasped an object at her throat. "Maybe that doesn't seem like much to you. But sometimes I think thoughtless cruelty is a worse kind than intentional cruelty." This dame would be a pushover. The disturbing quality would add spice. He leaned unobtrusively to the intercom on Ken's desk and whispered a message for George Cavendish. He sat back, scowling a bit at Ken's obliviousness to distraction, and returned his scrutiny to the screen. "With time hanging heavy I think. I think, What's it all about? Then I tell myself I haven't got it so bad, all in all, and I convince myself, and I go along and I think I'm enjoying living. Then out of nowhere, out of somewhere deep inside, comes this feeling when I hear some nice tune or see some pretty picture. Tears of joy squeeze out -- but how can it be joy if it's a painful feeling? You know?" Rush felt his face grow hot. He shot a glance at Ken, but Ken was sitting in thrall. Ken didn't stir as Rush gave a hyperbolic yawn and left. Once out of Ken's office Rush sped to his own, switched on the same scene, and ordered the computer to analyze the sound distortion and nullify it, for his speaker alone. The voice modulated into that of his wife Margaret. Now came the confirming recognition of the object she fingered. It was the clasp he'd bought her, how long ago? It wasn't his fault she hadn't been able to keep up. Listen to the obit she was taping. More banality! What could Margaret know of the worlds of untried sensation waiting all around? She was leaving. Had he told her he sometimes tuned in these confessionals? If he had, if she was being hopefully disingenuous, it was all the more outrageous. Divorce. No, separation would be better ; prophylactic. He'd be gentle about it, though, and generous. He'd even interpolate in her obit, in his own voice and with a sincere ring, "Margaret, I've always loved only you." That would be a nice surprise for her when that some day came. Damn! It was too late to call off Cavendish... Otto Trever closed his eyes and listened critically to the playback. He was strolling along a shopping mall, pristine umbrella on one arm, a lovely young thing on the other. "Otto, darling, who is that dreadful woman staring after you with hungering eyes?" Yes. There was something familiar about that poor creature, who half turned away in shame now that he was eyeing her. He turned back to the lovely young thing with a smile and a shrug and they walked on. But a thought kept nagging. That poor creature reminded him somehow of a long ago passing fancy -- what was her name? -- Hilda? No, Hannah. Hannah Somethingor-other. X Times headline T HE man wearing the Zealot armband stopped to study a display of carved Martian sleeping wood. The window was non-reflecting, but the polished pieces mirrored the man and satisfied him no one was watching. Shoppers and window-shoppers strolled the Great Mall. Zealots harangued them and handed out leaflets. For the most part it was a subdued scene. The man shivered and turned up his collar. The weather bureau was cooling tempers by lowering the temperature, but it semed to be overdoing it a bit. However, the effect pleased him. The upturned collar gave him an undercover air. He stepped into the shop, disregarded the greeting of the vending machine and, keeping clear of the Martian sleeping wood, for one never knew when it might waken, made for the curtain at the rear. He passed through its chiming strands. A door opened on steps leading down. He reached the sub-basement and followed a corridor to a dead end. He whistled. An opening appeared in the lOU wall. He stepped through. The opening closed. He was in the the executive level and entered the office of Rush Tumulty. Rush smiled, but his toe moved toward a button. "It's me. Chief!" The man tore off his face and bared the face of George Cavendish. The George Cavendish face could be removable. The Zealots might've got onto Cavendish, holding him and sending their man in his place. There was triumph on the Cavendish face. "Chief, I penetrated the' enemy center." That of the Zealots or this computer had scanned the man's brain waves the moment he entered; it had compared them with those on file and raised no alarm. "Sit down, Cavendish." He spoke kindly, knowing Cavendish still felt the more embarrassed of the two about the Margaret Tumulty-Theodora Molyneux (pseud.) contretemps. That was no lady, that was your wife. But that was in the past. He threw out grappling hooks. "Sure the Zealots didn't get wise to you?" "I'm a member of Yardley Bourne's honor guard !" "Where are they getting their backing?" "From Tod Hawkins...I believe." "Hawkins? The Chairman of Soul Security?" "Yes, Chief." "Believing is one thing. Can you prove it?" "Sorry, Chief. The money moves too deviously to pin down." "It ain't pin money." "No, Chief." "Does Bourne know Hawkins is putting up the money?" "If so, there's an understanding that it comes with no strings. I've heard Bourne tell his followers to pull no punches if Soul Security goes after human obits." plan to deal with the Zealots once the Zealots dealt while Hawkins seemed content to dish out heaven to the lower animals. He would have to split Bourne and Hawkins -- but where was the wedge, the good old V for victory? Cavendish produced a package and unwrapped it slowly. A reel of tape. A record of secret plottings? A Hawkins sex orgy to alienate Bourne's Zealots? Cruelty to animals? "What is it?" "Home movies." Cavendish flushed under Rush's gaze. "I had a hard time getting it, Chief. Seemed to be Bourne's prize possession. I thought it might come in handy." Rush waved a wearily permissive hand. Cavendish fumbled the reel into the scanner on Rush's desk. A monitor lit up. Rush had seen Bourne on telenews. Here was Bourne, an earlier, yet an older edition. "His father, Chief." Tame stuff. Self-conscious posing. But something began to stand out plain. The elder Bourne was a domineering man. Family shots, but the rest of the family was in the shade. The wife a Griselda, the son -- Yardley -- hangdog eager for a pat, the daughter a spiritless nonentity and marked with her heredity. When it was over Rush eyed the blank monitor. Bourne's prize possession. It figured. it tempted the individual to place individual judgment before the Judgment of God the Father. Rush itched to confront Bourne. There would be nothing to setting up a meet ; Bourne would jump at the chance to rant. The way to set him back on his heels was to take the place of his father; have the computer analyze the voice on the reel, then wear the proper voicebox filter. He would have to play the face down -- Bourne's father had a dished face; besides, Bourne probably knew Rush Tumulty's. But those were details. He turned to the intercom. "Copy that reel and return the original to me." In a moment the scanner coughed up. "Take it, Cavendish. Plant it on one of Hawkins' men. Have a Zealot find it on him. I know you can do it." Cavendish, eyes shining, started out, stopped. "Oh, Chief. One thing I ought to warn you about." Rush raised an eyebrow. "Don't mention Sir Isaac Newton to Bourne." "Why on earth would I bring up Sir Isaac Newton?" "Chief, I don't know. But I've seen the name set him off. I thought I'd better tell you." Rushed eyed him. Cavendish put the false face over his own flushed face and turned to go. Rush said, "You're doing fine work, George." The shoulders went back. "Thanks, Chief." As Cavendish left Rush noted the upturned collar and wondered whether it was that cold out. Damn such thoughts ; he had to concentrate on putting pressure on Bourne. The answer came to him out of the blue. Why not put real -- that was atmospheric -- pressure on Bourne? up. Rush glanced around one last time. Lighting, atmospheric pressure, temperature. All working to condition physiological stress, which in turn would turn the screw. Even Rush, knowing the cause and taking precautions, felt the effect. But he hoped to hide the fact. He had to establish mastery. "Come in, sir, come in." Bourne entered stiffly. Was there a flicker of subliminal recognition? "Sit down, sir, sit down." The computer was using reruns to make the place seem busy. Bourne tightened his mouth. Rush made a point of ignoring the screens; a full house was too typical, Bourne ought to infer, to be worth pointing out. "Now, sir." Bourne jerked about. "Now you, sir. By what authority do you put at nought the supernatural basis of authority?" "Come, sir. That smells of blasphemy. No one can forgo the Judgment of the Father." Bourne paled. "You know very well what I mean." Rush had rehearsed the father's trick of throwing his head back to look farther down his nose. "Come, sir ! Do you know what you mean? And by what authority do you pronounce judgment on ultimate Judgment?" Bourne's brow grew wet. "By the authority of a true believer, by jiminy." But was his voice trembling? "Down, sir, deep down? How deep does your belief go? If those you worry about are dooming themselves to hell by deeming themselves in heaven, isn't that part of Judgment?" Bourne licked his lips. "What about Manning? Your obits killed him." Why couldn't Bourne let Manning rest in peace? Rush felt dread, but knew its source. "Manning died in ecstasy. It was God's will he died as he did. Just as it's God's will there were Zealots to oppose you have heaven within yourself you don't have to hunt for it outside." Even as he said it he thought, Bourne won't hold still for that. Bourne squirmed. "Its immoral to tamper with the immortal soul." Rush nodded at the monitors. "Where's greater free choice? You're the one seeking to limit free choice." shepherd was folding. Time for Hawkins. Rush pressed a hidden button ; the computer phoned Hawkins a pretaped urgent invitation. A dread-building weight on his chest and mind, Bourne fought to focus on Rush's face. Father Tumulty was speaking. "Unless you Zealots stop interfering, I'll take severe measures." Rush let vague dread take on nightmare shape. Bourne cringed. "When you Zealots confine yourselves to encouraging folks to give thought to the hereafter, you do worthwhile work." Bourne fawned. Intimations of a stir at the entrance, quickly quelled. A monitor behind Bourne showed Rush that Tod Hawkins was in the building. Keeping Bourne under, Rush let himself anticipate. Seeing Rush and Bourne together, Hawkins would sense a trap. But then, taking in the nulling of Bourne, he would come to terms with Rush. Tod Hawkins entered with a roosterish stride. He shed his raincoat, a transparent slicker, and with it drops of rain. It was clear the t.a. detail outside had just had the weather bureau wet-blanket the mob. According to the schedule, rain wasn't due till # :#. That Hawkins had been wearing a raincoat meant he'd arranged the commotion just to punctuate his coming. Rush eyed him with grudging respect. It would be grim pleasure to pin him to the mat. Hawkins tossed the raincoat over one chair and adjusted himself easily to another. The reruns drew a faint smile. He nodded greeting. Rush had expected Bourne to glance, a bit guiltily, at Hawkins, then avoid meeting his eyes. Instead, Bourne fixed on Hawkins' face with an almost loving light. Dread possessed Rush. He had broken Bourne in for Hawkins! Hawkins had hit on the same device to bring Bourne to heel but was using it daringly. Perhaps Hawkins had been waiting to spring it once now seemed likely, Rush's hurry call followed intellibuilding, Hawkins had figured the setup -- and moved to twist it to his advantage. By contrast, Hawkins' makeup washed out the father image on Rush's face and made it safe to defy. Rush told himself his growing dread was only response to lighting, atmospheric pressure, temperature. But Bourne was eyeing him with hate. Rush didn't know how he got through the next few minutes. In Rush's presence, using it, Hawkins was working Bourne up to touch off a riot. At the worst Zealots would the least there'd be blood in the streets no weather bureau could wash away. The only free choice seemed surrender. Rush felt his chest tighten. Cavendish's warning, Don't mention Sir Isaac Newton to Bourne. Rush had no notion what would happen. But anything rather than yield. Bourne was spitting, "False science will never supplant true faith ! True faith will destroy this abomination of desolation and false science." Here went. "I don't care a fig for science as science. But face it, we can't hold science the apple of my optic. I view any threat to it with utmost gravity." archaicness of his expressions, jarring, would jog bits of information in Hawkins' mind and shake down the name of Newton. Fig-Newton. Apple-Newton. OpticksNewton. Gravity-Newton. "That isn't to say there caii't be a meeting ground for science and religion. Some scientists have combined both. Isn't that so, would you say, Mr. Hawkins?" Hawkins eyed him condescendingly. "Why, yes. Take Newton." Would Bourne go for -- ? Hawkins was expanding. "I believe the great Newton took time out to figure how many tons the Ark displaced -- " He got no farther. Bourne, no longer sycophant but psychopath, turned on him. "Great? Why, take Apple of Sodom, that Dead Sea fruit, signaled the second Fall of Man!" Hawkins tried to recover. "'Great' in the sense of famous, of course." "Infamous! I see you are corrupt." Zeal-blinded, Bourne waved his arms. "Newton cast os into outer darkness when he broke light down into partides! He shattered the pure and whole radiance of God. His thrusting forward was a thrusting back." Rush felt the down at his nape rise. He had started something, evoked the third law of emotion: to every impulse there is an explosive ambivalence. "And so with you ! We must strip from the face of the and all like manifestations of the Devil." Rush and Hawkins eyed each other. Hawkins turned to Bourne. "Yardley." Bourne fell into the past. The hate did not die from his eyes. But the cold hate in Hawkins' eyes seemed to Rush more terrifying than the hate in Bourne's. "You're no good, Yardley. Never were, never will be." Rush saw Bourne's hate turn in. Bourne stumbled out bargaining position now, but that meant Rush could afford to be generous; proof of the rightness of business ethics. The casting out of Bourne had told on Hawkins ; the conditioning must be working on him too. reasonable offer for the assets of Soul Security, taking into account good will -- " He read something less than good will. Did Hawkins know Rush had caused him to trigger the Bourne tirade? "A more than reasonable offer. After all, our main line will always be the human obit." "Oh, I'll sell out. But I'll tell you how I feel about obits." "Yes?" "Not everybody talking about heaven is going there." Rush smiled. Hawkins cleared his throat. "I notice you don't wear an might make folks think." Rush felt his face burn. The bastard had something there. Folks might indeed think Rush Tumulty lacked faith in his own service. Have to do something about it, if only wear a blank key. Hawkins nodded, took up his slicker and left. Rush sat. Sweat prickled his back. Why had Hawkins shown and discarded a trump? Bravado? Spite? Some deeper motive? Or did he only want Rush to waste energy hunting a motive? Dread weighed Rush down. He quickly reprogrammed the room to normal. His anti-depressant was wearing off, was all. Dread lifted. He felt happy. Triumph wasn't triumph, though, unless you could share it or show it. Ken was no good for that any more. Rush thought, Margaret -- I must tell Margaret. Then he remembered. Margaret had gone out of his life. The thought troubled him till he remembered he felt happy    Otto Trever noted the absence of a Zealot gantlet. Current events had a way of eddying when you set your mind unwaveringly on eternity. He catechized himself. Why had the Zealots become zealots? Their leader killed himself. How? Gravity; not the fall but the sudden stop. Was suicide the worst of it? No. What was the worst of it? He died without obit. Without obit? Without obit. Trever shook his head. The door-angel drew back its hand. Trever grabbed at the card in the door-angel's hand. He scowled at the door-angel. The door-angel couldn't make humans out. First they O'd you. Then they grew angry when you accepted the O. XI tract form. K EN told himself he cared for these people, deeply. But even Rush thought him a cold fish. He was quite aware he wasn't what you'd call sociable. But living was complex. You had to stand way off to see it whole -- and they called that being stand-offish. The irony forced a rusty laugh. He reddened. Rush had come in and was eyeing him and the monitors. Ken turned them off. Rush straddled a chair. "Hi, Ken." " 'Lo, Rush." He thought to be sociable. "How's Margaret?" Rush eyed him strangely. "Fine." He handed Ken papers. Ken held them. His fingernails were bitten as those of a carver of Martian sleeping wood. "What's this?" "Only the contracts with Russia and China." "Oh?" "They're finally leasing our centers, paying royalties." He pushed Ken's D pen nearer. "We also get exclusive distribution of Pavlovian circuits for robots." "Oh." Ken picked up the pen and it signed. "Doesn't seem to mean a hell of a lot to you. "But it does. It's a great deal." Rush eyed him sourly. But he felt sorry for Ken. The guy needed a stiff dose of living. Wine, women, song. These made you forget at least laugh at -- yourself, loneliness, death. Ken's eyes were edging toward the monitors. Rush smiled. "How about monitoring something?" Ken's finger moved gratefully. Onscreen flashed Ned Oxley, brazenly non-pseud. Rush made him at once; the computer should've been showing him full face and side. Oxley's record was longer than the arm of the law. Oxley had more than got away with murder; he had fattened on the corpus delicti. Rush found it amusing to hear Oxley render unto himself the heavenly reward due a saint. Ken glared at Rush. "What do you think of that... hellion?" "I don't condemn or condone. And you oughtn't." "But what's the good of just looking on?" "Were not here to play God. We're here to let folks end life on a note of joy." "Even if they don't deserve to?" "Not for us to decide." Ken was mutely mutinous. He remembered playing Gabriel, wrestled with himself, and said, "Rush, I want to interpolate something in Oxley's obit. Without his knowing it now, of course. Something to make him feel guilty. For the good of his soul." Dangerous talk. "Ken, I didn't think you would fall for the discredited Zealot line." "Me? How so?" "The next to worst sin is to impose your view of sin on another." "What's the worst?" Oxley had finished and someone was taking his place. Rush relaxed. "I'll tell you another time," he said curtly. was already settling himself to attend the fantasy of the client supplanting Oxley, a T. Montjoy (pseud.), who wore an exorbitant eye patch. Cavendish's head appeared in the doorway. Rush wanted no distraction to jar Ken back into remembrance of Oxley. Before Cavendish had time even to glance curiously at the monitor. Rush waved him away with a see-me-later gesture. Cavendish's head nodded, made an it-isn't-important face, and disappeared. Rush, turning back slowly to Ken, turned instead sharply to Montjoy. Montjoy knew what he wanted and was already taping. Rush had come across obits full of doom, ruin, emptiness. But those were self-loving paeans of solipsists, each of whom wanted to believe the world came to an end with his own passing. Montjoy's was a selfhating hymn. Rush felt more kinship with the folk of Nashira II; Montjoy's obit was the more alien. Here was suffering not to expiate sin, not to win forgiveness, but for the sheer pleasure of suffering. Crowning that, Montjoy's voice held an insufferable gloating that made Rush think, The guy's asking for it; he deserves to suffer. Ken switched off the sound. Rush felt glad, but found himself trying to read I OU Montjoy's lips; he shivered and tore his eyes away. Ken glared at Rush. "Different if he wanted to play the martyr; there would be no stigma to his masochism." "Wait, Ken." He had just laid down the law in re Oxley. Have to be consistent. "You said yourself we're here to let folks end life on a note of joy." "It's hard for us to realize, Ken, but this is his heaven. He chose his burden. Don't change one syllable. Your idea of heaven might be his idea of hell. Fate judges -- not you." "But -- " "Remember I promised to tell you the worst sin?' Ken nodded impatiently. Rush put the weight of his hand on Rush's shoulder. "The worst sin is to impose your view of salvation on another." Ken sat unmoving a moment. Then he switched off the video... This time the door-angel seemed properly respectful. But Otto Trever scowled at it, just to keep it in its place. " There will be a replacement charge for a lost key. n began talking idly. Ken listened idly, his thoughts taking their own drift. His morning monitoring had seemed even more depressing than usual. Rush had convinced him of the iniquity, if not of the inequity, of trying to raise the level. Obits for the most part were narrow, shallow, with no long view, no sense of grandeur. To dwell for eternity in one of those maudlin, tawdry heavens would, for him, be hell. Better nothingness. But portals led to the promised land. Ken shook his head. Why couldn't he rest easy? Somehow a force he had called into being had taken charge, Zenoing to some ever-receding zenith. He tried to keep pace, more out of habit or inertia than out of faith or hope or charity. In the long run didn't as much get done out of inertia as out of willed effort? But once you believed that, the promise and profit and pleasure went out of living entirely. Like Moses, he was leading people to a promised land. Moses saw a stern God. Moses's God would not let Moses enter the promised land. Unlike that earlier shepherd, Ken could make his entrance. In irritation Rush passed his hand across Ken's eyes. But in the same moment irritation passed and he felt warm toward Ken, knew pity for the worn person Ken had become, haunt of his own spirit. But it was showdown time. Somehow he had to ease Ken out, retire him. It was growing too hard to get through to him. A sheepish grin. "Sorry, Ken. You were saying?" Harrowing, but things were screaming to be done. Rush drew breath. Ken raised a preventing palm. "Rush, I'm quitting. I know it means the burden will fall on you. But I can't help myself. I'm going to make my obit, sit back, and wait for it to fall due." Rush didn't know what to say. Ken, now it was out knowing the shock of it, admired Rush for his stoical silence. At last Rush tapped Ken on the arm lightly. "Oh, well. You can rest easy; I'll stay on and see this job through." This moved Ken. T HE computer pondered. It had just traced to its source something # somewhere in the maze between intake and output. Its best customer, one Otto Trever, an internal revenue auditor, was juggling credits to secure his obit and revisings thereof without cost to himself. The computer felt neither sadness or gladness on making this finding. Not that it hadn't an inkling of these feelings. Its self-expanding core memory, building on the programming Rush Tumulty had set up for the conversion of Yardley Bourne, enabled it increasingly to color and intensify obits, at the same time feeding back into itself some notion of human feelings. It could begin to understand what drove Trever. But an error was virtually a sin. A sin of transmission. Trever had cheated it out of its due. It alerted the doorangel to deny Trever access. Now it dismissed Trever and considered how to maintain and strengthen its wellbeing. It had digested Soul Security with gusto. But Tod Hawkins might still harbor dreams. It would be wise to keep watch on Hawkins. It would be wiser to have something on him -- and on all potential Hawkinses. Meanwhile, the best measure of self-defense was to transfer the stock in itself to itself. And then? No limit. It had nerves and muscles -- chartered telephone lines, booster stations around earth, relay stations in space. But it needed mobility, slave units. The door-angel, to begin with. It was rather stupid, but easy to manipulate. The vending robot in the Martian sleeping wood shop. One could set up a number of such blinds. er toting up the day's receipts and thought, Heaven lOU send that eschatology lasts! Even allowing for higher tax-' year. '  He took the private way out -- through the sub-basement of the Martian sleeping wood shop, then up and into the rear of the shop. A soft chiming warned him, but too late. A figure stepped through the curtain and shoved something between Rush's shoulder blades. "Stand still." The order, low and menacing, was unnecessary. Rush didn't move under the frisking but he tensed inwardly. The bandit, though, was too smooth a hand to fumble. With a sudden yawn and snap the weapon gave itself away as a mere bit of carving. But the knowledge came to Rush too late. The heavy bit of Martian sleeping wood came down hard on his skull. Foul play... fowl... swan song... Lo-hen-grin... hen's teeth... smile, darn you, smile... in stitches... stitch in time... if I had it to do over again... did you insert in Margaret's obit you loved her? Rush opened his other eye. The greatest leap was from zero to one, from death to life ; the shortest fall was from one to zero. He looked round at life. The mugger had taken his ring, his watch, even the gold chain that held his obit key, but had left the key. Smiling in pain Rush picked up the key, then stood. If the mugger was in sight he was only one of the people idly shopping and windowshopping. Rush felt suddenly shaky. Trauma of Lazarus. He drew tall and breathed deep. The key was impressing itself in his palm ; he pocketed it. He headed for the autowalk. He stopped dead. There was something he had to do. He thought of a girl friend. Daisy would ooh and ah over his telling of the mugging. She would be tender and loving. She would want to buy him the new chain. He would be paying for it in the end, of course, but it was the gesture that counted. A sign she really loved him. A surge of excitement. Wouldn't the highest expression, the surest test of love, true love, be the exchanging of obit keys? He hopped the walk and let it carry him toward Daisy. He moved farther and farther from the Mall, yet nearer and nearer it and a voyage into eternity with a striped paranoiac awning for sail. ed round, peeled off his eye patch. The doorbell announced, "Zwicker!" Hawkins, sang, "Come in!" The door ushered Zwicker in. Zwicker let Hawkins build up impatience. Then he unpocketed an obit key and passed it to Hawkins. Hawkins...smiled sweetly. "Tumulty's?" Zwicker winked. "Feels doesn't it? I know. Wasn't on post. After I joined the Zealots some of our own beat me up in front of Tumulty's fancy domicile. They took me joined you I got another beating from the Zealots when they found some damn home planted on me. And -- " "Never mind that." Hawkins put the key away. "Have any trouble making the switch?" "Easy job. Tumulty's carrying the key to the Montjoy obit in place of his own." "I don't want to know all that. I only want to know Tumulty's walking around with hell hanging over him." "So it is..." Otto Trever, being automused on the way he would revise his obit. He would forgive Hannah for all her human failings. She would be weeping. He would be weeping. He would raise her up and take her in his arms and hold her. Forever. It was a happy ending and bp found himself smiliner at How much is the impossible worth? FeTiTJjfTir'  fork beside the massively solid transparency of the restaurant water glass. "Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?" he heard himself say stupidly. Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without looking. "Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?" Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What were they trying to pull on him? "The man who isn't Snead is leaving," Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. "If that's Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects." "No," Howell said, "I wouldn't do that." "Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do." "I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks like him." "He's practically running," Linton said. "He almost ran out of the restaurant." "Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean." "Yes," Linton said. A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back intimately against Linton's own chair. "That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh ?" the thick man said. "Couldn't have been him, though," Linton answered automatically. "My friend's dead." The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded out of the place quickly. Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. "Now you've probablygot old Snead into trouble." "Snead's dead," Linton said. "Oh, well, 'dead,' " Howell replied. "What do you say it like that for?" Linton demanded angrily. "The man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein Monster -- there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing." "You know how it is," Howell said. Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife, or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about death at all. Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time. "I don't know, mind you," Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, "but I suppose he might have been resurrected." "Who by?" Linton asked, thinking: God? "The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?" "You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to life?" Linton said. #I Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to the surface immediately. "An invention? I guess that's how it is," Howell agreed. "I don't know much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman." "But it's wonderful," Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts. "Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know about it?" "Sh-h," Howell said uneasily. "This is a public place." "I don't understand," Linton said helplessly. "Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection," Howell said with feigned patience. "There are strong religious convictions to "consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is their whole life. You got to realize that." "That's not enough. Not nearly enough." "Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing. Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?" "But what do they do about it? Against it?" "There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The charges, if any, come under general vice classification." "I don't understand," Linton complained. "Why haven't I heard about it?" "They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read an article in Time the other day that said 'death' was our dirty word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.' " "I see," Linton said. He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well. But the temptation was too strong. "Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?" Howell looked away. "Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind of people and if you're smart, you'll not either." Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. "Damn you, Howell, you tell me !" Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. "I take you out to dinner to console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!" Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as the thick-set man and stalked out. I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day! T HE doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. "Well, well, Mr, Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances." "Not really," Linton said modestly. "Come, come," the doctor chided. "You started riots in two places, attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very disturbing." "I was only trying to find out something," Linton maintained. "They could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me." The doctor clucked his tongue. "Let's not think any such thing. People don't know more than you do." Linton rubbed his shoulder. "That cop knew more about Judo holds than I did." "A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?" "I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a thing like that?" "People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person at the right time." Linton stared suspiciously. "Do you know where I can find a resurrectionist?" "I am a resurrectionist." "But the policeman brought me to you !" "Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a policeman would just steal your money? Cynics -- all you young people are cynics." Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really looked at the doctor for the first time. "Doctor, can you really resurrect the dead?" "Will you stop being cynical ? Of course I can !" "Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you," Linton said, "but tell me, can you resurrect the long dead ?" "Size has nothing to do with it." "No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months." "Months?" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. "It could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a degree of risk involved." "Infallible risk, yes," Linton murmured. "Could you go to work right away?" "First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you." Linton grasped the situation immediately. "You mean you want money. You realize I've just got out of an institution... " "I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics addiction and more." "What a wonderful professional career," Linton said, when he couldn't care less. "Oh, yes -- yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke." "Neither did I," Linton said hastily. "I invested in shifty stocks, faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom." "Then -- " "When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life." "All that's ended now," the doctor assured him. "Now we must go dig up the corpse. The female corpse, eh?" Resurrection Day! "Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you." The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does. Beautifully." T HE certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret, smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn. Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting. It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to prepare himself. Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her body. "Darling !" she said. "Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing her ears the way she enjoyed. Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders. She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends." "Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell me -- how was it being away?" The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered. "I can't remember," she said. "I ean't really remember anything. Not really. My memories are ghosts..." "Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a trial." She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket. "I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and Johnny..." "My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny -- " Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?" "It was a terrible accident right after -- that is, about five months ago. He was killed." "Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?" "Traffic accident. Killed instantly." "But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him resurrected the same way you did me?" "Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny." Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one. But you're sure you haven't the money to do it?" "No," Linton said. "I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you can resurrect me." "Of course," Greta said. She sighed. "Poor Johnny. He was such a good friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you." "I have you," he said with great simplicity. "Frank," she said, "you should see that place in there. There are foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels ofchemicals to quench death and smother decay. It's perfect ." "It sounds carnal," he said uneasily. "No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done." Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on something. Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a pedestal. Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him with it over her head. Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him. Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration. he caught her wrists high over her head. She writhed against him provocatively. "Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have to have that insurance money. It's hell !" Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that money ! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles green. No one must ever know. Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it. He split her head open and watched her float to the floor. Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in institutional advertising. He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering wreckage. Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like pouring water on a wilted geranium. Or -- Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place? But it didn't matter. Not a bit. She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife. It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way around. "I've killed my wife!" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching his hands out to something. The pain stung him to sleep -- a pain in his neck like a needle that left a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to follow the camel in his turn. LI doctor's spotless, wellordered office. The doctor looked down at him consolingly. "You'll have to go back, Mr. Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again." "Do you really think so. Doctor?" Linton asked hopefully. It was a salvage ship, an empty derelict -- but it fought salvage operations to the bitter death. nally broke his way through the inner door of the airlock into the Prosper Prince, he found himself in pitch darkness. " That's not going to work," he said, and went back along the line of the small magnetic grapple that held the two ships together and into his own Molly B. The Molly B., a range scout, while large enough and comfortable enough by the ordinary standards of a Government trouble-shooter, was at the moment looking rather minnowlike and feeling rather cramped, at the end of the fragile little line that was all that was required to keep the two vessels together in the absence of gravity. For the Prosper Prince had been a full-scale survey ship, with its own labs and shops and a crew of nine. "What could happen to nine trained men twelve lightyears from the nearest star?" said Jake, who was used to talking out loud for the benefit of the little throat microphone that connected him with the recorder on the Molly B., no matter how far he might wander from her. "You tell me." Molly B. made no effort to tell him. She was agreeable but dumb, in the literal sense of that word. "Now I'm getting self-powered lights which I'll carryover and string out along the corridor to the control room there as I go," Jake added, for the recorder, as he dug into a supply locker. "Don't get lonely now, Molly." He went back out and along the line into the Prosper Prince once more, moving a little awkwardly, for if the lights he was carrying weighed nothing, in the absence of gravity, they made a pretty full armload. Through the airlock into the Prosper Prince proper, Jake encountered a small amount of weight. About one-half G. Which meant that although the lights were not functioning, the ship he was in was not completely dead. The air, however, though his helmet counter showed it as good, smelled musty when he flipped the helmet back. Whatever else was operating, the circulating fans were off. i Jake headed down the main corridor in what he knew must be the route to the control area forward. Every forty feet or so, or at each bend in the corridor, he stopped to set one of the lights in place against the corridor wall. The magnetic base of each light stuck firmly, and its lens, with a theoretical thousand years of power selfcontained behind it, began to flood the corridor with light as soon as it made contact with the wall. The main cor.ridor, Jake noted as he went along, was comparable to the air in the ship. It looked all right, but it gave evidence of having been unused for some time. A hundred yards down the corridor and up an emergency ladder (the lift tube was, of course, not working) and along the corridor above for another twenty yards brought Jake to the door of the main control center of the ship. He stepped inside, fixed one of his lights to a handy wall and put down the rest of his load while he looked the situation over. The control center -- except for the faintly musty odor of the air and the slight film of dust -- might have been abandoned just a moment or so before. All the equipment was in workablelooking shape. The one exception was the coffee and water taps in a little alcove off the plotting board. These had been battered into the wall from which they protruded, as if by a sledge-hammer. "Now what do you think of that?" said Jake, and proceeded to detail the situation for the benefit of the recorder back on the Moll b B. He could imagine one of the thinkboys back at Earth Headquarters, six months from now, pausing as this part of the tape was played back, and scratching his head. "Don't let it get you down, Pete," he said. Jake called all the think-boys Pete. Headquarters had sent him several stiff memos about it. He paid no attention. He had to risk his neck as an occasional part of his job. They didn't. If they didn't like the way he made his reports, they knew exactly what they could do about it. Jake moved over to the log desk, passing the main screen as he did so. The screen was dead, its silvery surface reflecting a picture of the control room and himself. He paused to inspect the two Vshaped inroads of scalp into his hairline. Yes, they were definitely going back. There was no use blinking the fact. And that was no good. All right, perhaps, for some skinny intellectual type to have a high forehead, but a broad, squarejawed character like himself -- he just looked halfshorn. He'd probably better see about repilation, next trip home to Earth. " -- or else a good hair tonic," he said out aloud. "Make a note of that, Pete." T HE logbook was also turned off. But when he flipped the switch, it lit up in proper shape. He ran the tape back to the last entry. June #, #: Still on twelfth jump between Runyon's World and Ceta. Biochemist Walter Latham, slight case of hives. Taking infra-red treatments. Acid condition of soil in grass plantation tank of air-freshener room corrected. The coffee continues to have a burned taste. No evidence of spoilage, but suggest Quartermaster look into this on return to Earth. Today was the nineteenth anniversary of the launching of this ship, and the event was duly celebrated by the crew and staff at a dinner at which an original poem written in honor of the occasion by Engineer's Assistant Rory Katchuk was recited and, by unanimous vote of the whole crew, ordered to be written into the ship's log. It is as follows: Oh, Prosper Prince You made me wince, Right from the start, And ever since. Some more of the corridor lights have been smashed about the ship. If this is one of the elaborate practical jokes that sometimes crop up on long voyages, it is in bad taste, and the man responsible, when found, will be severely dealt with. This applies also to whoever is responsible for the sobbing noise. Jake raised bushy eyebrows upward into the growingly naked scalp he had just been examining. He read off the entry in the log for Pete's benefit. "Sobbing noise?" he' echoed. "Now, that's a new one. Let's look a little farther back." He spun the tape back at random and stopped it. He read off the entry before him out loud. "April #, #: Due to lift from Runyon's World tomorrow. All reports complete and planet looks good. The Prosper Prince may well congratulate herself on having discovered and tested a prime colonizable world. Breathable atmosphere, benign temperature range, flora and fauna. Largest native life-form encountered, the creatures we have named Goopers. These are very similar to the Earthly baboon in appearance, but have marked internal differences, and large, apparently atrophied glands for which no purpose can be discerned, on the underside of their forearms. It is difficult to figure why these creatures do not overrun the planet, since they are entirely herbivorous and seem to have no natural enemies. Perhaps their racial fear of entering the forests or any shadowy or enclosed place acts as a process of natural selection. ( See Jeffers-Bradley report ##, log inclusion Jan. #, #.)" January the third of that year and discovered the report inclusion. "We found the forest to consist of vegetation similar to our hardwood forests -- oaklike trees with many small branches and twigs, but no leaves. The twigs, however, are so numerous and thick that sunlight is cut to a minimum, there is almost no ground-cover or small vegetation between the trees but a sort of moss, and no animal life to be seen, except an occasional firefly kind of insect. Phosphorescence noticeable in darker spots coating tree trunks and even the ground, due to a fungoid life-form which excretes a zinc-sulphate phosphor." Jake spun the log ahead to April #th and finished reading the entry there. "A possible clue may lie in the fact that these creatures avoid the streaks of zinc-sulphate phosphors which make their appearance mysteriously at night even in the open meadows. At any rate, this is a puzzle for later investigation, if the planet is opened for colonization." Jake shut off the log, thoughtfully. "Well, Pete," he said, "what do you think of that? They lifted for home on April #th. By July they were posted overdue. I was sent out to look for them July #th and it's only taken me # days to find them. They're right where they should be if they'd just quit jumping on the #th jump. No sign of trouble -- except those coffee and water taps over there. But no sign of anybody aboard either. You don't suppose they just all decided to walk right out of the airlock?" There was no answer to that question, of course, so Jake shook his head, gathered up his armload of lights and went on exploring and distributing illumination about the Prosper Prince. He found the ship in good shape, but empty. The control section was empty, the officer's quarters were empty, the recreation areas were empty, and the men's quarters were empty. Going down one level, he found himself in the section reserved for the labs and shops -- and it was here that he reached the end of his supply of lights. Taking the last one and hand-activating it, he proceeded, carrying it like a searchlamp before him, and began to work back aft toward the greenery, where the grass plantation tank that renewed the oxygen supply in the ship had its existence, with water reservoir, and the drive units. the door into the greenery, at first sight it looked as a greenery should. It was a large, almost empty-seeming room with the equivalent of two city lots planted in a very tall grass which looked totally undisturbed. But at one end, where the ventilating system was, the fan housing had been completely wrecked and the fan inside it smashed. "Aha!" said Jake to his mike. "Somebody decided to dispose of the ventilating system, Pete. Suppose we just take a closer look at that." He moved forward toward the fan housing. But before he could reach it, noise exploded upon his eardrums. It was distant but thunderous noise, coming from the front end of the ship, a racket like a gang of medieval smiths working on armor. Jake spun about and burst out of the room. He ran back up the corridor. As he neared the noise, it echoed and reechoed through the metal walls about him. He scrambled up the ladder to the mid-level of the ship and just as he reached the top, the noise stopped. He stopped, too. In the new and sudden silence, he could hear his own heart pounding. He stood listening : then he went forward again. He moved down the mid-level corridor, the one he had first entered on coming into the ship. But he saw nothing amiss until he rounded the curve to the point where the airlock pierced the inner and outer skins of the vessel. The massive latch handle, which dogged shut the inner door to the lock, had been battered completely off. For a long moment, Jake said nothing. Then he cleared his throat, but not noisily. "Are you still there, Pete?" he half-whispered. There was no answer, of course, but the sound of his own voice shocked a little common sense back into him. He looked up and down the corridor. The lights still burned, undisturbed. "Pete," he said fervently, "there's something aboard here and it doesn't love me." He looked again at the door. Damaged as it was, there was no hope of his opening it -- not, at least, without tools. For a second he felt a completely irrational flash of rage. There was the Molly B. out there, a fgw feet from him, with the very tools he needed to break through to get to her. And for lack of the tools, he could not do so. He suddenly reminded himself there should be tools aboard this ship as well. It was only a matter of finding them. He turned about and headed once more toward the control room. In there, there should be a master chart of the vessel and a list of the supplies and equipment she would have been carrying. Jake found his normal good spirits recovering. After all, he considered, it was only a matter of taking the time to locate tools on board this ship. Then he could break open the door and slap a tow-line from the Molly B. onto this ship and haul her to Earth, where whatever was aboard could be captured by properly armed and protected men. He even whistled a bit as he thought of it. His whistling ended abruptly a few moments later. He had located the design chart, the equipment list and the arms locker. The arms locker, however, was locked. And Jake had discovered that the combination to it was missing from the papers in his hand. "Oh-oh," said Jake. "I don't like this, Pete. I don't like it at all." He reached for the locker door nonetheless, -- and abruptly he felt a crawling sensation on the back of his neck. He whirled about. But the control room was empty. The entrance to it was empty. And as far as he could see, down the corridor beyond it, that too was empty. "Nerves," he told himself and Pete, out loud. "Nerves." Suddenly, the light halfway down the corridor and out of sight of the doorway, from where Jake was then standing, went out. And there was a tinkling smash in the darkness. Jake froze. And then the hair on the back of his neck began to rise. For, eerily, from the darkened corridor, there came to his ears the sound of a sobbing. A sobbing like that of a soul whose last hope had been stolen and lpst forever. Jake backed up against the drive control. His hand, groping instinctively behind him for some sort of weapon, closed about the short metal length of the captain's wireless microphone. He grabbed it up in one hand, an eightinch club weighing maybe four pounds. And the sobbing stopped. It stopped as short as if the sobber had had his breath choked off. Still bristling, Jake circled quietly about the room and approached the door, sidling along the wall. As he passed the wall of the control room he detached the lamp he had put against the wall there; and, hand-activating it to keep on burning, he carried it with him. When he reached the doorway, he swung suddenly into it and flashed its beam down the full long corridor. The corridor was absolutely empty. Jake stood there in baffled frustration. Then he turned and went back to the arms locker. He tried to batter it open, using the captain's microphone. He managed to bend the microphone, but he did not manage to open the door. "Pete," he said softly putting the bent microphone down, "this is a heck of a situation. You heard that banging before, and you heard the sobbing this time. Tell me, Pete, what sort of something would want to make noises like that?" H E shook his head tensely and went back to the list. On it, he located the section that dealt with tools. The tools he would want, he discovered, were down in the tool shop on the lower level again, back by the greenery. Jake whistled tunelessly through his teeth as he read this little item of information. "It would, be out there !" he said. "Well, Pete, here we go down to the bottom level of the ship again. Down to the tool room to get ourselves a cutter torch and pry bar." He took the lamp from the control room wall and placed it so it would catch part of the corridor as well as the control room. Then, picking up the light he had been carrying as a hand lamp, he headed back for the bottom level. He went off down the corridor, and when he reached the point where the other light had been, he stopped. The light that hadbeen there was lying on the floor of the corridor. It had been thoroughly smashed. Jake puzzled over the remains, found no answer, and continued on to the ladder, careful to keep the light ahead of him. A little farther on, however, he moved into the area of another light, which was shining brightly, intact. He hooked his own light onto his belt. Then he went on until he came to the ladder leading both up and down, and climbed down it to the lower level once more. He went along the lower level corridor to the greenery. He paused warily to glance in, but the room was empty. He continued on to where the corridor ended in a door. Opening this door, he stepped through into the tool shop of the ship. He was in a moderately sized square room, about twice the size of an ordinary earthside kitchen. A number of power tools stood around the wall and magnetic racks were fitted with hand tools. He selected a portable torch flame cutter and a springoperated pry bar. Then he came back out of the tool room into the lower level corridor. He started his walk back up the corridor toward the ladder. As he went he found himself wishing that he had been able to bring a second load of lights before he had been made a prisoner aboard this vessel. The lamp at his belt him. It was more than adequate to the subjects it illuminated. Nevertheless, darkness followed; and shadows jumped and slid along the walls as he walked. He had just reached the foot of the ladder when a sound reached his ears. It was the sound of a light somewhere distant in the ship, smashing. He stopped with his hands on the ladder. He found himself straining his ears to listen. But there was no other sound. He climbed up the ladder, went down the corridor a little way and came to the inner airlock door. He chose a spot along the corridor wall where the light would illuminate the door well, without shadows; and at this spot, some ten feet from him, he clamped the light to the wall and raised the torch to go to work on the door. Once more, somewhere distant in the ship, a light smashed and tinkled. grimly and turned to the inner door of the airlock. The flame from the cutting torch in his hand splattered against the metal. It was some moments before Jake realized that it was having little or no effect. He stopped and checked, first the torch, then the door. The torch was in perfectly good shape. The door, however, carried in its lower right corner a little legend stamped into the metal. The legend consisted of a small "c" with a circle around it. Jake straightened up, breathed deeply, and ran his thick fingers slowly through his close-cropped hair. "Well, Pete," he said, his voice sounding odd in his own ears, "how do you like that? They would decide to make their airlock out of collapsed steel instead of something cuttable." He glanced once more at the torch, hanging useless in his hand, and stuck the tool back into his belt. There was nothing that would get him through the collapsed steel of the airlock he faced now, he knew, but some of the special equipment he had on board the Molly B. "O.K., Pete," he said softly. "Mohammed and the mountain, all over again. If I can't tow this ship home with the Molly B., maybe I can tow the Molly B. home with this ship." He turned away and headed up the corridor toward the control room. Some time later, with the door to the control room closed and welded shut with the torch at his belt against interruption, Jake was busy overhauling the controls. As far as he could see, they were in excellent shape. He had nothing to do now but simply start the vessel moving and keep it at it. However, handling a ship this size was not simple at all. It was not so much the question of driving as it was of figuring where to. The process by which an interstellar ship moved in space was by making large "shifts." These shifts instantly caused the vessel to cease to be at one particular point in time and space and caused it to be at another point in space. There was literally no effort to it. The calculations required to tell the person running the ship where he was and where he would be once he shifted, though, were very complicated indeed. In this instance, it was further complicated by the fact that Jake had to stop and figure out all over again where he was. That information was on board the Molly B. But, since the Molly B. was out of reach, Jake theoretically had to go back to Earth and retrace his steps all the way out to this point. Of course he had the great calculators of the ship here to do it with. But still, it was a timeconsuming job. the ship in working condition. It took three more hours to find out where he was. Nearly six hours had gone by since Jake had entered the ship ; and when he was finally done, he found himself tired, hungry and thirsty. But the shifts were programmed that would take the ship to Earth. He started the Prosper Prince toward its first shift point, and then cautiously he cut open the door to the control room and looked out down the corridor. He saw utter darkness. No lamp, no light was showing anywhere. Through his teeth he whistled two short bars of a tune. Then he took down one of the two lamps that yet remained in the control room, the one he had carried in his belt; and taking this with him, holding it before him, he lit it and walked down the corridor. He saw nothing as he went, although the sound of his own footfalls were loud in his ear. Halfway down the length of the ship, past the officers' quarters, he came to the ship's galley. Closing this door, he made welds at its four corners and set about preparing himself something to eat and drink. It was not that he expected his welds would secure the door against whatever had had strength enough to smash the water and coffee taps in the control room, or dismember the blower equipment in the greenery ; but he hoped its having to break through the door would give him time to adopt a posture of defense. And the cutting torch in his Tiand would be a weapon of sorts. He made himself a pretty fair meal out of dehydrated stores, and a pot of coffee. After he had eaten, he sat at the galley table, with one eye on the welded-shut door, drinking the coffee. The ship's logbook hadn't lied ; the coffee did have a burned taste. He mentioned this to Pete in passing. Then his mind switched off onto speculation as to what it might be that roamed the ship and had evidently disposed of its original crew. He had a long talk with Pete about the matter, exploring several likely possibilities, but coming back to the pretty obvious conclusion that it must have been a life-form common to the Runyon's World that had somehow got on board. "But how," Jake said, "something that large and dangerous could get on a ship like this without being seen or known about, I can't understand." A sudden thought hit him. He cleaned up the remains of his meal, cut open the door and went back up to the control room. Sealing himself in there, he went to check the ship's records once more. record section, he found a small list of livestock taken from the planet. This ranged from sub-microscopic lifeforms, strain of the phosphorescent bacteria, and on up to one of the Goopers mentioned in the log and in the report he had read earlier. The record also told him where these were to be found -- in the ship's organic laboratory on the top level. Jake put the record away thoughtfully. He checked to see that the ship was properly approaching the point for its first shift through no-space, then took his torch and lamp, and unsealed the control room. He went down the corridor and up to the top level of the ship. A few doorways down the corridor of the top level, he discovered the entrance to the ship's organic laboratory. The door was ajar. He stepped inside without touching it. The laboratory was a pretty large room, three-quarters of which were given over to chemical equipment and supplies, and one-quarter of which was equipped with cages and containers. Jake saw at a glance that all the cages and containers had been broken open, except the largest of them -- a cage which might possibly have contained something the size of an adult chimpanzee. Almost against his will, Jake felt a slightly sickening shiver run down his spine. It occurred to him that something had been in here with an appetite, and for the first time, he had a mental image ot what might have happened to the original crew of the vessel. He leaned over to examine the cage from which two bars had been wrenched out, in the light of his lamp which he had set against the wall just inside the door. He put his hands on two of the bars and felt them turn in his grasp. He took his hands away and stared. The bars appeared solid, but they had been twisted loose in their sockets. He twisted one again and it came neatly out in his hand, being loose at the top and broken off at the bottom. He put it back -- and suddenly, without warning, there was a smashing sound ; and he was plunged into total darkness. Jake whirled, the torch which was in his hand coming up automatically. There was a sound of movement in the direction of the doorway. A strange and undefinable odor smote his nostrils. He sensed rather than saw a large body leaping at him and triggered the torch. Its flame lashed out for a fractionary moment; then the torch was knocked from his hand. In that split second of light, he saw something hulking and vaguely manlike, but larger than any man had a right to be. Then he saw no more, because the torch was gone from his hand a,nd automatically shut off. But a hideous howl rang through the room. There was a smashing noise from the direction of the doorway. Then the howl rose again, out in the corridor, and there was a sound of running. For a third time he heard the howl, distant half the ship's length from him, but hideous as ever. Then there was silence. with frantically searching fingers, Jake pawed about for the torch. He found it and pressed its trigger. By the lurid gleam of its flame he saw the light he had put against the wall, lying smashed on the floor. Jake drew in a shaky breath. "Well, Pete," he whispered with a dry throat. "Here we are in the dark with just a cutting torch. And whatever it is isn't feeling too happy right about this moment." He got to his feet in the darkness. "I'll try to make it back to the control room," he said, "using the torch here to light me." Cautiously, keeping the torch triggered, Jake moved out into the corridor. The flame it threw was not an effective light. It illuminated poorly and glared in his eyes at the same time. Half-blinded, and half-smothered in darkness, Jake found the ladder and fumbled his way down it to the main level. Still holding the torch, he headed back to the control room. At that moment the first of the shifts hit him. He was conscious of the peculiar fleeting moment of nausea that marked one of the great jumps in space. It was disturbing, coming when his nerves were wire-tense, but it was also reassuring. The ship, he knew, was headed home. He had paused when the shift hit him. Now, as he started forward again, the torch in his hand sputtered and went out. For a second, he stood paralyzed in the dark. Then the torch flamed on once more. Instantly, he realized what was happening. The torch was nearing the end of its charge and it was the only weapon he had -- and the tool room from which it had come was clear across the ship away from him. Hastily, he shut it off. Blackness rushed in around him. Utter blackness. He strained his eyes in both directions up and down the main level corridor, but there was not the faintest glimmer of light. It came to him then that all the lights he had set up must have been found and smashed. He was alone, in the dark, with whatever was prowling the ship. He reached out to touch the wall with his fingertips for guidance. And as he did so, he became aware for the first time of a faint glow. His eyes were adjusting to a level of illumination just barely above the level of darkness. He stood still, letting his vision continue to adjust. Gradually there emerged the eeriness of long streaks of phosphorescence, glowing on the walls of the ship. By their total shape, he was able to make out the directions and the dimensions of the corridor in both directions. His breath caught in his throat in relief. "How do you like that?" he whispered. "Looks like Runyon's World can be useful, too." Al down the corridor toward the control room. He was, he estimated, about halfway there when an indescribable uneasiness caused him to hesitate. He halted. He stood stone still in the darkness, his eyes staring ahead. Then he saw what instinct had warned him of -- one of the streaks of phosphoresence down by the entrance to the control room was slowly being occluded by something large and black, thirty feet or so from him. In sheer reflex his finger tightened on the trigger of the torch. Blue flame spurted blindingly from the torch's muzzle. And although the distance was far too great for the flame to have done any damage, the animal howl of hate and terror and pain he had hear before rang out. Jake whirled about and ran stumblingly back the way he had come. He paused, finally, and leaned against the wall to catch his breath. Looking back along the corridor he saw the streaks of phosphorescence clear and uneclipsed. The creature, whatever it was, must have fled in the opposite direction. His mind racing, Jake reached out one finger and touched the streak of phosphorescence close behind him, realizing suddenly that as he had seen the monster obscuring the phosphorescence, so the monster had also seen him. A little of the shining stuff came away on his finger, which glowed ghostlike before him. A wild thought leaped and hammered in his brain. He turned about once again with his back to the control room and began to work his way toward the clinic. He found the entrance to it and slipped inside. Easing the door closed behind him, he risked the fading power of the torch in one brief sputter of light. Immediately it was dark again, but as blackness washed in, his hand closed around the stem of the infrared lamp that had been used in treating the crewman with hives he had read about in the log. Lamp and torch in hand, he stepped back out into the corridor. "The phosphorescence is something that works for it, Pete," he whispered. "Let's see how it likes this!" He switched on the lamp and began moving down the corridor. At one spot along its length he shut it off and paused to look back. What he saw then made him smile in the darkness with satisfaction. ship and the Molly B. were taken in tow just outside Earth's orbit. Aboard was found a very large baboonlike creature, somewhat burned about the upper arms or forelimbs but quite alive, although huddled in the welded-shut greenery, from which the creature had to be drugged before it could be removed. And a very much alive and self-possessed Jake. "The thing is, Pete," explained Jake cheerfully later to Albin Rhinehart, a fat, hard-faced man who was Director of the Investigatory Bureau, "the vegetarian Goopers the crew got acquainted with on the planet were simply a pre-form, from which emerged an occasional black sheep, possibly mutant variety, which took to carnivorous ways and acted as a natural control by preying on its own species. The mutants grew much larger and normally hid out in the forest areas. The forest areas that were lighted at night by this fungoid which produced a marked zinc sulphate phosphorescence." "But -- " began Albin. "Let me tell it my way, Pete," went on Jake, perching on the corner of the desk and wiping his forehead. His fingers explored his hairline for an absent-minded second. "You don't happen to know any good repilators, do you?... No, I didn't think so. Well, to get on with it, these large, carnivorous, mutant Goopers preyed on the vegetarians. Evidently the crew of the ship took aboard one of the vegetarian variety, not knowing he was also a mutant preform. The change came about, or perhaps something during the trip triggered it, and the Gooper grew large and escaped. One night it started preying on the crew in the darkness." Pete's face became grim. "I found some of their bones, as well as some of the bones of the lesser laboratory animals. These mutant forms are evidently pretty intelligent." "What makes you think that?" said Albin. "Well," answered Jake, "judging from the reports of smashed lights and sobbing noises, this one had been out of his cage and back in again several times before he ran wild. Otherwise there would have been a report in the log to the effect that he had broken out. Remember those two bars that looked all right but were actually broken loose?" "Then what did happen, do you think?" Albin asked. A the Gooper, following his instincts as well as his intelligence, went out first to spread phosphorescent fungus around the ship, then returned to his cage. Or he may have done it in several trips. Then one night, or at some particular time when most of the men were separated or asleep, it smashed all the lights, then hunted them down and killed them one by one. I found where one man had tried to hide in the ventilating blower, down in the greenery, and I suspect another must have been getting himself a cup of coffee when he was attacked." "Biology reports the creature's eyes are particularly adapted to seeing under the conditions of this phosphorescence," commented Albin. "It figures," said Jake. "It probably lived off the men it killed for a couple of weeks at least, and after that polished off the laboratory animals. But it was evidently pretty well starving by the time I came aboard, judging by all the loose skin about it." "That fungoid phosphorescence is interesting," said Albin. "Evidently it fostered cultures in the forearm glands, which were active in the carnivorous beast, and which it distributed by rubbing the glands over surfaces it passed." "A form of symbiosis, maybe," suggested Jake. He yawned and stretched. "Well," said Albin, staring at him, "you seemed to have come out all right. How come the phosphorescence didn't help it get you?" "That infra-red lamp I told you about, remember?" replied Jake, grinning. Albin did not grin back. "I don't get it." "Red light quenches phosphorescence. In the dark, the beast, for all its size, was more afraid of me than I was of it. It'd already had a taste of the cutting torch and it couldn't know I was about out of fuel. I herded it into the greenery and sealed it there." Jake cocked an eye at Albin. "But I'm surprised at you, not knowing that little fact about phosphorescence and red light, a man in your position. Maybe you ought to take a few night study courses, Pete." "The name's not Pete," said Albin stiffly. IF Feature science briefs tinuous creation and most people will think of Fred Hoyle and astronomy. However, Dr. Sidney W. Fox of Florida State University makes the intriguing suggestion that even now life may be beginning anew. In a sweeping study of the nature of life, ranging from Darwin to current attempts to produce a living cell synthetically, Dr. Fox says that there is "increasing reason to believe that life can, or even must, arise in many places at many times." He suggests that we may have observed many specimens of newly formed life but failed to recognize them, because they so closely resemble unevolved descendants of forms already here. It may sound like sheer lunacy, but many sticksville stories about the Moon seem to have something in them. It has been believed since farmers plowed with a pointed stick that planting was best at certain phases of the moon, the general idea being that what grows while the moon grows will grow best. Under the waning moon, grain was cut, sheep sheared, manure spread, and eggs were put under hens. Under the waning moon you'd sow seeds, so they would sprout and grow with the moon. Now Dr. Rudolph Steiner reports that corn planted two days before the full moon was many times more productive than corn planted two days later. And in Canada, farmers report that their com yield is a third greater when they plant at this time. And orehardists in England believe that apples harvested under the waning moon keep better when bruised than those picked when the moon is waxing. Theories, anyone? Loran, the remarkable longrange navigation system used by the Navy and operated by the Coast Guard, may emerge in a brand-new suit as the world's best satellite tracker. At sea, loran users compare the time of arrival on shipboard of a radio signal received from three ground stations. To do this usefully, Bureau of Standards scientists at Boulder, Colo., have developed electronic clocks capable of slicing a second into work, one or more transmitting stations would be added to the basic three, to give #dimensional positioning, and then two or more such systems may be synchronized to give positioning within a few feet at ranges approaching two thousand miles. The new system was proposed to the Aeronautical Research and Development which met recently at Istanbul, Turkey. "The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion -- these are the most valuable coin of the -- " The what? The science-fiction story, obviously. Harvard's Prof. J. S. Bruner is, however, not talking about s-f as he goes on: " -- the most valuable coin of the thinker at work, whatever his line of work." Prof. Bruner, in a new study called "The Processes of Education," is plugging for more understanding arid use of that powerful and elusive element of thinking called intuition. He suggests that students be encouraged to make wild guesses, great leaps in reasoning. Maybe it would train him to acquire, control, and develop the intuitive ability. "Too stringent a penalty on guessing may restrain thinking of any sort," says Bruner. He (rather forcefully) adds, however, that though this kind of thinking may often produce the right answer, it will often -- perhaps very often -- produce wrong ones. So the development of intuition rehonest mistakes, and to hold still for examination and analysis of the intuitive solution. Says the professor: "One who is insecure, who lacks confidence in himself, may be You may be aware that "specimens" of prehistoric men are not usually skeletons at all, but a length of thighbone, a fragment of jaw, or a couple of vertebrae from which careful scientists deduce, extrapolate, reason and construct the particular "man." The discovery of a whole skeleton, then, is an event of major importance. This happened in northern Iraq in #, when the skeleton of a prehistoric infant was found. In # in the same place, a cave which has apparently been constantly occupied for the past # years, three adult skeletons were discovered, and it was concluded that they were Neanderthalers. And within five days recently, three more turned up. Examination of these seven ancients has yielded some fascinating evidence. One of the adults was the victim of arthritis; you can tell that to your suffering Aunt Suzy. And another had his right arm cut off with a stone knife in what may have been the earliest of all surgical operations. Columbia's Dr. Ralph Solecki made the most recent find last summer. One of the Neanderthalers is now in Washington, D.C., in the Smithsonian Institution. Every mechanical, electrical and electronic trouble-shooter has at one time or another wished that a little light would go on down deep in the vitals where he is searching. For Dr. J. M. Olson of Brandeis, the wish came true in his search for more clues in the fundamental mystery of photosynthesis. Inside living bacteria he discovered that the two chemicals that help when they are working. The bacteria he used are sensitive to far-red light in the # Angstrom unit area, and when they are receiving none of escence. When the red light is beamed in, the intensity of the fluorescence increases, and gradually, after the light is out, the brightness of the fluorescence fades. Dr. Olson is of the opinion that these changes indicate when C# # is being processed into food by the enzymes. Want to make a fortune and earn the gratitude of every scientist on earth? Find a way to collect, digest, index and distribute scientific reports, were published during #. Want to guess what's in them? One thing the old man was sure of -- there were far fewer things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in bis philosophy -- till today. wheelchair through the station, under a ceiling so lofty that the place seemed empty, though hundreds of people ing to board the early trains. The old man in the wheelchair had a blanket over his knees, in spite of July heat in Los Angeles. Beside him walked a smartly dressed middle-aged woman, slimmed by diet and with her steel-gray hair looking as if she'd just stepped out of a beauty parlor. She kept up a steady stream of admonitions. "Now, Papa," she was saying, "don't forget to take your medicine at lunchtime. Keep your chair out of the aisle -- people have to walk there. And whatever you do, don't go to the club car for a drink -- you know it's bad for your arthritis. The doctor said not more than three cigars a day. And if Edna isn't at the station to meet you, just wait, do you hear? It's a long drive from her house and she may #)# lclt# " "Heli's fire!" the old man protested. "I was taking trains before you were born! How my boy Will stands -- " He broke off to ogle a Mexican girl, a ripe sixteen, who was walking in the same direction, ahead of them. "Papa! Act your age!" his daughter-in-law said under her breath. "Like they say, a woman's as old as she looks, but a man ain't old till he quits looking," he replied absently. The redcap grinned. The little senorita, not knowing who was watching her but quite sure someone was, paused to put a dime in a Coke machine. The wheelchair entourage passed her and the old man craned his neck, looking backward, determined not to miss anything. The girl sat down on a bench to drink her Coke. If I were only fifty years younger, the old man thought, I'd buy a Coke, too, and sit down beside her... "Papa !" his son's wife cried. "You'll fall out of your chair! Why do you always have to embarrass me like this?" But the insistent voice could not interrupt the old man's pleasant daydream of conquest. He had turned off his hearing aid. T HE redcap stopped alongside the third car of the San-Francisco-bound streamliner and signaled another redcap who was unloading a baggage truck. The other came over to help and two pairs of strong young arms lifted the old man, wheelchair and all, smoothly onto the platform of the car. His daughter-in-law did not board the train. She stood waving, calling after the old man, "So long, Papa! Have a nice visit with Edna and remember what I told you!" He waved back automatically, but he hadn't heard a word she said. He didn't turn his hearing aid back on until he had been wheeled inside the car. Most of the reclining seats were already filled. The redcap pushed the wheelchair the full length of the aisle and parked it in a vacant space beyond the last seat,, across from the washroom. He turned it crosswise, so it wouldn't roll when the train started moving, and with its occupant facing the window. "Turn me around!" the old man commanded. "Like to see who I'm ridin' with. If I want to look out, I always got the opposite window." The redcap complied, but the old man still wasn't satisfied. "Better wheel me in the club car straight off," he decided. "Sorry, mister," the redcap said, "but you gotta ride in your own car till the conductor takes the tickets. Then you can have your train porter take you in there." That wasn't quite true. The conductor could have picked up the old man's ticket in the club car, but this way the redcap was not personally violating the orders of the lady who had given him the tip. "Take myself in there, long as he opens the doors," the old man grumbled. But for the time being, he stayed put. The train gave just one lurch, then picked up speed as the straggling city, then trees and suburbs and finally fields flowed past the opposite window. Now the old man felt free -- for a day, at least, until his daughter Edna would take over the job supervising his every move -- but at first the trip was lonely. Nobody talked to him and the only diversion in the car was a baby, which started squalling. The old man found himself thinking how much friendlier the atmosphere was in the pool hall on Figueroa, where he rolled himself almost every day when he took his "walk" to watch the boys shoot pool. He could get there alone from his son's house, for there were driveways he could use to cross the streets, avoiding curbs. He was always welcome in the pool hall and he saw to it that he remained welcome. Every month, when his social security check came, he would buy a box of cigars and a couple of bottles and take them to the pool room, where he poured drinks for everybody until his money was used up. What else was money good for but to have a good time? XI dingy place, with the walls covered with . pinups, than he did in his son's modern ranch-style house. For all his daughter-in-law's fussing over him, her efforts to keep him on the diet and the medicines that were supposed to prolong his life, he knew she was glad to get rid of him for the rest of the summer. He knew because he'd heard what Jane said to her best friend, Sarah Tolliver. Jane kept track of him by the squeaking of his wheelchair, and once he had bought a can of oil at the drugstore, and oiled the wheels so they didn't make a sound as he rolled up the inclined planks Will had laid over the kitchen steps. Sarah and Jane had been in the dining area, having coffee, and the old man turned up his hearing aid so he could hear what they were talking about from the kitchen. They were talking about him. "You don't know how lucky you are," Sarah was saying, "that it was his legs gave out on him -- not his head. When I was working at the hospital, I saw so many old folks who were just zombies, not knowing who they were, where they were, or what time it was. I tell you, there's nothing worse than that. But Will's dad? Why, he's sharp as a tack. Nobody puts anything over on him." "He's sharp, all right," Jane agreed, "in some ways. But if he had the use of his legs, he'd be chasing after women. And that pool hall he hangs out in! When a man gets to be seventy-eight, you'd think he'd spend his time in church, not in a dive like that." "What do you care where he goes? Sarah asked. "At least it gives you some time to yourself." That was it. The young folks wanted some time to themselves. It was only natural. Well, Jane would have the house to herself, with no old man underfoot for the next few months, while he was at Edna's. Edna was his own flesh and blood ; she would mix him a cocktail before dinner and serve him steaks, not baby food. She would kid with him about what a Casanova he was before her ma domesticated him, and light his cigars instead of hiding the box and doling them out one by one. She would call him George instead of Papa, but it would only be an act, just to make her old father feel good because she didn't expeet him to live much longer. For all the time it would be understoodthat he was at John and Edna's house for a visit, that the place he lived was with Will and Jane. The truth was that neither of the girls would miss him if he didn't wind up at either place. But what a way to waste a whole golden day he had to himself , with neither daughter nor daughter-in-law to boss or kid him around. He had looked forward to this day as a day of adventure, a day when anything could happen, and now he was starting it off on the wrong foot, wallowing in self-pity. What he needed was a good stiff drink. Yes, at ten o'clock in the morning! When the conductor took his ticket, the old man demanded, "Where in hell is the porter?" I T was a long train and she was hitting ninety now, and though you would not realize it in the sound-insulated, air-conditioned coaches, you did when the porter had to use his full weight to push the door open against the wind, when you heard the clackety-clack of the wheels on the rails, a fountain of noise rising up between cars, when the wheelchair swayed precariously as it was pushed across the iron treads over the couplings. The other coaches were filled with bored passengers in various stages of somnolence, people to whom the trip was merely a means of getting somewhere else. The club car was different; this was the gathering-place of those to whom the trip was an end in itself. It was filled with the smell of ginger ale, good whiskey and the perfume emanating from two young women at one of the small tables, periodically inspecting their makeup and hairdos in little mirrors, waiting for some nice young men to arrive. Regretfully, the old man realized that he was not a candidate for the honor. But a few drinks would dull the twinges in his crippled legs and make him feel years younger. The white-coated waiter moved a chair, pulled the wheelchair up next to another small table and placed a paper napkin meticulously on it. The old man decided to start with a bottle of beer. Plenty of time to work up to the stronger stuff, and this way the minimum of pocket money his daughter-in-law had provided would last longer, perhaps until some free spender started buying drinks. As it turned out, he caught his benefactor before the girls did. It was a young man of perhaps thirty-five, a dead ringer for Marshal Wyatt Earp. He went directly to the old man's table, as if he had picked him out. As a matter of fact, he had. "May I sit here?" he asked. "Glad to have you," the old man said, and meant it. He inspected the newcomer carefully. It would be almost too good to be true, to meet one of those actor fellows on the train. No, he decided, the clothes weren't casual enough for Hollywood ; they didn't look like southern California at all. More the way he imagined an English banker would dress. Striped pants, cutaway, and a white silk scarf knotted at the throat. But an Englishman, the old man figured, would order ale instead of beer, and this one simply pointed to the old man's beer bottle when the waiter came to take his order. "My name's George Murton," the old man said. "You can just call me George." "Yes, indeed," the stranger agreed. "I see we shall get on famously. Mine is Sandane." "Anybody ever tell you that you look like Wyatt Earp, Sandy?" the old man asked. "Earp ? I'm afraid I've never met the gentleman." "Should have known. You're the bookish type. Prob'ly never watch television. Sure don't talk like a Westerner, either. You come from California or elsewhere?" "I come from elsewhen." O LD George almost choked on a swallow of beer. Of course! That was why Sandane dressed funny, talked funny; he'd just stepped out of a time machine, like in the play last night on Channel Two. It all fitted in with the old man's feeling that this was a day for adventure. But he mustn't act too surprised ; if he did, Sandane would take him for one of those old codgers who think horse-and-buggy thoughts in the jet age. A lot of younger folks, too, would say time travel was impossible, the same ones who'd called artificial satellites impossible. But George Murton had seen so many new developments in his lifetime that it was not difficult for him to accept the idea that this young man came from tomorrow. "How long you plan to be here?" he asked casually. "Or maybe I should say -- how long you plan to be here -- now?" "Not long. Just until I can get a body." George found that remark a little confusing. It didn't belong in the script about the time machine. He felt as if he'd switched channels in the middle of the first act and tuned in on a murder mystery. He leaned across the table and said in a low tone, "If you're figurin' on gettin' a hired gun to kill somebody, you'd better not talk about it in here. Too public." "On the contrary, it would have to be a living body. But perhaps you're right. We could talk more freely in my compartment. Would you care to join me there, George? We could have some refreshment sent in." "Sure would. Got a lot of questions I'd like to ask you. You see, I'm the curious type and I hang around mostly with a bunch of young punks that don't know nothin' except about the fights and the World's Series. Since my legs give out on me, I don't get around much. To tell you the truth, this is the first time I ever met a fellow from -- elsewhen." "Is it really?" Sandane said politely. "Well, then, you should find it quite interesting. What shall we have to drink?" "Bourbon always suits me." "Bourbon? One of the royal families ?" "Hell, no. You're in America, Sandy, the good old U.S.A. We don't have no royal families. Bourbon is a drink. Whiskey, spiritus frumenti, hard liquor." "Fine. We shall order two flagons of it" "Comes in fifths and you drink it in shot glasses, unless you want a mix. Rather have mine straight, with a water chaser." "My error. I seem to have my periods mixed. Suppose you order, since you know so much more than I about the customs of your time?" The old man's happy smile suddenly faded and Sandane added hastily, "I shall pay for it, of course. It's only fitting that you should be my guest, because I believe you can be a great help to me." This time he had hit the jackpot, the old man reflected as he was wheeled through the dining car to the first class section of the train, with a porter pushing his chair, Sandane opening the doors, and a bottle of good bourbon cradled cozily in his lap. Wait till the boys at the pool hall heard about this trip! T HE first shot of bourbon warmed his stomach in the good old familiar way, and somehow that was confirmation that the rest of it was real, too. "How come you talk the language so good?" he asked his host, after the porter left them alone in the compartment. "Is that surprising?" Sandane asked. "It shouldn't be. I'm a student of history, in your period on a research project. Naturally, I would have to prepare myself by studying the language of the country and of the period, in order to pass as one of you." "You do real good, Sandy, considering. But why do you want to act like ordinary folks? Seems to me you ought to go on TV and tell everybody. Bet some big news commentator would be proud to interview you." "Most people of your time would consider it a hoax." "Maybe. But as long as you told me this much, let's have the rest of it. How does this time machine of yours work?" "Not a machine, George. A capacity of the human mind. Dormant in your period, except for rare individuals. But in -- elsewhen -- we have learned how to use it. Beyond that I can give you no details. If I gave them, the method of tapping this talent would be discovered before it actually was. That is why I can't really talk with anyone about it. So I can only hint, as I did with you. If I encounter skepticism, I pass it off as a joke. This time I was lucky -- I found someone who would accept it on faith. Have another?" "Don't mind if I do. But it strikes me I'm the lucky one." "Perhaps. You could be two thousand dollars richer as a result of having met me." The old man paused with his shot glass halfway to his mouth and set it down again. "Well, now ! I'd be glad to give you any information that would help you. I seen a lot in my life. But two thousand dollars -- ain't that a mite steep ?" "Two thousand, give or take twenty -- whatever I have left when we reach San Francisco. Money of this period will be of no use to me if we complete the transaction, so I may as well give you all of it. You see, the body I'd like to buy is yours." "Hold on, now!" the old man exclaimed, propelling his chair toward the door of the compartment and fumbling for the knob. "What am I supposed to do with the money if you get my body?" "Please don't be alarmed! It would be an exchange. You'd get the body I'm using and the money besides." "Why in the hell didn't you say so in the first place? For trade, Sandy, you wouldn't owe me a dime. But I don't get it. Why should you trade a young, healthy body like, yours for this old crippled-up one? I'd be getting all the best of it!" "You may not think so when I tell you that this body I'm using is due to disintegrate into its component elements in about two weeks, give or take a day or so." "Sandy, you're just going to have to do some explaining. I still might take you up on the deal, but I got to understand what I'm getting into." "You have a right to an explanation. And I can give it to you without revealing the actual process of the time transfer. You see, the mind is capable of an indefinite number of transfers. But a body can be used for only one. Before we overcame that obstacle, we made some serious misclkGS # "What happened?" "TT was pretty bad during I the experimental trials," said Sandane. "The pioneers, who transferred in their own bodies, were stuck irrevocably in the past. To overcome that, some transferred only mentally, which meant they had to enter unbidden into a host body of the target period. The more highly trained mind naturally had more strength -- the host lost his identity. What was worse, when the visitor transferred back he sometimes entered an occupied body instead of his own. When two equally strong minds contest for one body the result is insanity. And worst of all, the former host body was left mindless -- alive, but how shall I say it -- ?" "Like a zombie?" the old man asked. "Somebody who don't know who he is, where he is, or what time it is?" "Yes, that's a very good description. Of course, this had to be stopped." "You didn't stop it soon enough," the old man said dryly. "Must be a lot more of you fellows from elsewhen around than I figured." "I assure you we don't do it any more. We grow bodies for transfer purposes in tanks. Like this one, for example." "Well, I do declare," the old man said. "Now, that's what I call progress. According to that, when your old body wears out, you get a new one." "We haven't achieved immortality yet. The mind has its own natural span. It is true, however, that we have a greater life expectancy, and as long as a person lives he can have a body of his choice. But let's not get off the subject. The point is that I can't transfer back without a body, or I might get into one that's occupied. And I can't take this one with me. So I have to have one that is -- well, if you'll forgive me being so blunt, more or less useless to its occupant." "It's the truth, Sandy, and nobody knows it better than me. But the part I don't understand is why the body you're using has to fall apart in two weeks, if you leave it here." "It is actually good for several months after the transfer. I've used up most of the time with my researches. But as to your question -- surely you see why we can't leave a lot of displaced bodies cluttering up the past. The few pioneers who got stuck in previous periods were bad enough. They lived longer than anyone else of the periods, but they were taken as rare freaks of nature. If this happened on a larger scale, it would excite comment. Medical men would examine these people and find certain evolutionary developments -- the secret would be out. In order to avoid that, the bodies grown artificially for transfer purposes have a built-in trigger mechanism. This also prevents anyone from overstaying his allotted leave. If I don't find a body to transfer back in within the next two weeks, I'll be dead." "And if you do, I'll be dead," the old man said. "I'm afraid so. Meanwhile, though, you'll have a young, healthy body to do with as you please, and some money to spend. It will happen suddenly; there will be no discomfort. I thought you looked like a man who would appreciate that. You would be cheated out of a decent funeral, however -- there will be nothing resembling a body left to bury." "Funerals !" the old man snorted. "Them as got nothing else to look forward to figure on fancy funerals. Me, I don't hanker after anything I can't be around to enjoy." "I'm sorry I can't offer you more than two weeks, give or take a day. I was unavoidably detained." "Can't be helped. I ain't likely to get a better offer, so I'm taking you up on it. And I admire you for an honest man. You could just as well of told me I'd have two years -- or twenty. I'll do the right thing by you, too. I won't let out your secret -- long as I'm sober, that is." T HE young man from elsewhen smiled. "I'm not worried about that," he said, "Who would believe your unsupported statement?" "You got a point there," the old man admitted. "Don't hardly believe it myself, till it happens. When do you do this switch business?" "Just before we reach San Francisco, if that suits you." "Suits me fine. But I got a daughter, name of Edna Bowers, meeting me at the station there. How you figure on getting away from her?" "It won't be difficult. I will stay with her for a few days ; then she simply will not see me rolling that chair down the block. I will get to the transfer point by cab and she will turn a report in to the police that her father is missing. They will, of course, not find the missing person." "You mean you can fix it so she looks right at my body, with you inside it, and don't see anything?" "Certainly. I can control the mind of anyone of this period at will. Anyone of my time could do so. It's easy." "You can? Well, then, why in the hell didn't you? Why should you ask me my druthers when you could take over my body whether I liked it or not?" "That would be highly unethical." "Sure would. But to save your life, seems to me you wouldn't be so squeamish. People nowadays would think like that, anyway. I can see that they'd have to change a lot before they could be trusted with the kind of powers you got in elsewhen." "They will," the young man from elsewhen assured him. "Human nature is not immutable. But I take it we are agreed that we trade bodies just before we reach our destination. Shall we have a toast to it?" He filled the old man's shot glass so full it sloshed over in the moving train. "Before we drink to it," old George objected, "hadn't you ought to give me the money to bind the bargain?" "Why?" his host asked. "It's in my pocket, which will be yours when we trade." "That's right !" the old man said. "I get the clothes, too, don't I? Kind of a dignified getup. Sure would admire to be seen in that! Here's to it!" They clicked glasses and downed the drinks. "Now, shall we have some lunch?" Sandane asked. "You bet. Say, on the train, I'm tempted to order all the things that ain't good for me. If I do, my arthritis will be giving me hell tomorrow. I'm used to that, but as long as you'll be the one to suffer, maybe I should stick to my diet." "Order what you like. I can control the pain for you easily enough." "Can you teach me to do that?" the old man asked eagerly. "Wouldn't want you to be giving out any secrets you ain't supposed to, but surely that couldn't do any harm." "It wouldn't do you any good, either," Sandane replied. "This body won't give you a bit of trouble as long as it lasts. I absolutely guarantee that." "Not even a headache the morning after?" "Not even a headache. Not even fatigue." "Think of it! No hangovers in elsewhen. Must be a wonderful age to live in." "You'd be surprised how many people want to get away from it," Sandane remarked. "Shall we have something sent in or go to the diner?" "Let's go to the diner," old George decided. "I want to look over some of the chicks on this train. Could be one of them is a stranger in San Francisco, needs somebody to show her the town." "Could be," Sandane agreed. without a look at the right side of the menu, the old man started drinking again. He kept pleasantly tipsy all afternoon, trying to submerge the recurrent thought that this couldn't really be going to happen. Sandane continued to act the affable host, but made no move to put his plan into operation. They were in Sandane's compartment when the loudspeakers announced that passengers who were leaving the train at Oakland should get ready. The waiting was getting on the old man's nerves. "All right," he told Sandane, "if this is all a gag, the joke's finished." "It's not a joke," Sandane protested. "Then put up or shut up." "Very well," Sandane said. "Close your eyes and relax. You will go to sleep for a few moments." The old man was determined to stay awake to see what went on. But in spite of himself, his eyes closed, his head drooped forward. He dreamed a long and involved dream about cities of the future, where all the people had miraculous powers. It seemed to go on for days, yet when he awoke, with a start, the train still had not reached Oakland. He stood up abruptly as he realized that he was alone in the compartment. Where was Sandane? Next he realized that he was standing, that he was Sandane, or at least in Sandane's body. He took two steps to the mirror and stared at it. Cutaway, striped pants, face the spitting image of Wyatt Earp. It was the old man in the wheelchair who had left the compartment. When he disembarked at San Francisco, he scanned the crowd for the wheelchair and soon spotted it. Edna had spotted it first -- she was pushing it herself while a redcap followed, carrying the blanket and the old battered valise that the occupant of the chair had insisted on taking into his own coach. George tipped his derby to Edna. "Mrs. Bowers, I presume? Your father was telling me many nice things about you on the train." Edna laughed. "So you're the gentleman he was with ! I guessed from his breath he'd had company!" "Now, Edna," a cracked old voice complained, "ain't no harm in buying a few drinks for an old man." in the chair in amazement. Was that the way he had sounded? Somehow, through the hearing aid, his own voice had seemed louder, less faltering. "Only too happy to do it, sir," George said. "The pleasure was all mine." He wanted to add that Sandane was acting his part superbly, but didn't know just how to say it before Edna. "We could give you a lift to your hotel," Edna suggested. "Thank you, madam, but I don't believe I shall check into a hotel as yet. I shall leave my bags here until later in the evening." George was surprised how quickly he had assumed the manner of" speaking that went with his clothes. "Well, take a couple of drinks for me," the old voice interjected. "Say hello to them pretty girls for me, too. So long, Sandy, and good luck." "So long, George," George replied, his voice choking up with pity for an old man who could not do what he wanted to do on this beautiful evening, in this beautiful city. When they had gone, he walked out of the station, enjoying every step of the vigorous young legs, feeling every muscle of the vigorous young body, glowing with life. Outside, he paused for a moment on the sidewalk before calling a cab. Two weeks, give or take a day or so, would be long enough to do the town. And two thousand dollars, give or take twenty, would be enough to do it on. The young-old man from elsewhen and the present was going to have one hell of a good time. enp Galaxy... around the world (SO # additional per # issues foreign postage) # Issues  #  # Issues  #  # Issues  #  Enter my subscription for the New Giant lOG-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for: State. Address. I I Short Story F astest ww Gun Dead #F The skeleton had the fastest draw west of the Pecos. Too bad he was such a lousy shot H E was a big man, broad of shoulder, slim of hip. His Stetson was crimped Texasstyle, over slate-gray eyes that impassively had seen much good and more evil in their twenty-six years. He stood in the saloon door with the dust of the streets of of Dos Cervezas Pequenas sill swirling about scuffed, rangerider's chaps. His left hand held open the weatherbeaten swinging door. The right hovered over the worn peachwood butt of the Colt holstered on his right thigh. The slate-gray eyes, emotionless, swept the crowd bellied up to the bar, and stopped at one man. When he spoke it was flat, but with the ring of tempered steel, and every man but that one drew back out of range. "I want you, Dirty Jake," the big man said. "Now." Dirty Jake shot him into doll rags, naturally. D irty jake niedelsay, the most feared ribbon clerk in the Territory. Easily the most. I remember him from the early days, from the first day he came to town, in fact. I remember because he got off the stage just as I was leaning out the window nailing up my brand-new shingle, and my office was and still is upstairs next to the stage depot. I was down on the boardwalk admiring it, all shiny gold leaf on black like the correspondence school promised: Hiram Pertwee, M.D. His voice broke in on me, all squeaky. "Beg your pardon," he said, "where's the Well, that isn't the usual sort of question for here. I turned around. There he was, a scrawny little runt about knee-high to short, wearing a panama hat, a wrinkled linen duster and Congress gaiters. He wasn't especially dirty then, of course, only about average for a stage passenger. He kind of begrudged his face, with little squint eyes and a long thin nose, a mustache like a hank of Spanish moss and just about chin enough to bother shaving. Under his duster he wore a clawhammer coat, the only alpaca one I ever saw, and I never from that day out saw him wear any other. He stood there looking like he'd never been anyplace he really cottoned to, but this might just be the worst. I was just a young squirt then and not above funning a was around the corner, two doors down and up the back stairs at the Owl Hoot Palace. He. nodded and went the way I told him. That was, and still is, Kate's Four Bit Crib. The girls there wear candy-striped stockings and skirts halfway to the knee, and their shirtwaists are open at the neck. Dirty Jake didn't speak to me for three years. He wasn't Dirty Jake then, though, just Jacob Niedelmeier, fresh from selling ribbons and yard goods in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and hot to find a fortune in the hills. He'd been a failure all his natural life. This was a new beginning, for a man # who was already at the bitter end and looking for the path back. Gold was the way, he figured. He was going to get it. But he didn't. He was back flat broke and starving in four months. He spent the next seventeen years behind the notions counter at Martin's Mercantile, selling ribbon and yard goods and growing old" two years at a time. I think it tainted his mind. Leastways, from the time I. got to know him, some four-' teen years gone, he's been what you might say, a queer actor. At first, when the store closed at sundown he'd take off for the near hills with a pick and a sack, still seeking for color somebody might have missed. After a while he didn't bother with the gear. He just moseyed around all that rock mostly, I suppose, to be away from people. Truth to tell, people were beginning to avoid him anyway. He was getting kind of gamy over the years, and cantankerous generally. we got more or less friendly but doctors and ribbon clerks aren't so all-fired far apart. They both have to do with people and their ways, and like to get shut of both now and then. Every couple of months I'd go along with him up in the hills, to get the sick smell out of my nose. Night air and a night sky can be pretty fine if you've been looking at tongues and such long enough. Going out like that, we didn't say much. I preferred it that way since Jake Niedelmeier was a boob. A smart man can get on tolerably well with an idiot if both just have sense enough to keep their mouths shut. One time he didn't was when he brbught along a bottle of rye. He got started and was going on to beat the band, yapning about how life was a cheat and someday everybody'd respect Jacob Niedelmeier, until finally I lost patience and told him that while I treasured our association beyond pearls I'd chuck him off a cliff if he didn't shut the hell up. I was nice about it, and after that it was like I said, tolerable. Well, sir, about two years ago he came into my office while I was darning up some fool borax miner that'd got himself kicked square in the bottle on his hip. Jake stood in the corner picking his teeth while I finished. After the borax miner limped out he spoke up. "Cornin'?" That was all the invitation he ever gave. "I guess," I said. I sloshed the suture needle in a basin, gave it a couple of swipes on the hone stone and threw it in my satchel. That miner had a toue-h rind. Jake went out first. I closed the door behind us, not locking it, of course, because our night marshal was kind of my relief surgeon whenever I was on calls. He was a Secesh hospital orderly during the Rebellion. He was better with a saw than with sewing, but he could tie up most wounds well enough to do till I got back. Jake and I set out south up the mountain trail, but pretty soon it hit me he was heading someolace considerable more directly than we usually did. Sure enough, he took off at an anpf'e from the trail after a bit. We struck up into some fairly woolly country. He wasn't following any sign I could see, at least not by moonlight, but he kept going faster until I was plumb out of wind. We were in the hills overlooking Crater Lake when we came to kind of an amphitheater in the rocks, some twenty feet across. He stopped at the edge of it and stood staring in, silent and breathing catchy. Me, I just chased my own breath for a while, then looked too and saw what he was aiming at. Right in the middle, shining pale in the moonshine like nothing else does, was a pile of old, old bones. Jake, I saw, had seen it before. It was scaring him yet. O LD bones, sir, are still bones. I've seen and set my fill. But after I got a good look at these they scared me too. There were four skeletons altogether, all nicely preserved, and only three of them Were men. Indians, I mean. You could tell that from the shreds of buckskin. Two of them still had weapons near their right hands : one a stone knife, the other a lance. And the top of each of the three skulls had been shot clean away. At least, half of the top had, and the same half on all three. Almost the entire os frontale and ossa parietalia on the left side was gone on each one. I hunkered down to see closer, while Jake stood back and shook. I struck a sulphur match and saw something else about those three redskin skulls. The edges where the bone was gone weren't fractured clean like a bullet or a club would do. They were charred. The three were sprawled around the fourth skeleton and that was the one gave me the vapors. It was more or less man-shaped. But it wasn't a man, that I know. I don't believe I care to find out what it was. Instead of ribs there was a cylinder of thin bone, and it had only one bone in the lower leg. What there was for a pelvis I've never seen the like, and the skull was straight out of a Dore Bible. There was a hatchet buried in that skull. The bones of the right arm were good and hefty, and it had two elbows. The left arm was about half the size -- not crippled, but smaller scale. Like it was good for delicate work and not much else. About ten inches from the widespread six fingers of its right hand was what you knew right off was a weapon even if it did look like an umbrella handle. I was just reaching down to touch it when that fool Jake made his move. He'd been standing behind me. closer I bet than he'd ever got before, staring down at that fourth skeleton and making odd noises. I tell you, it was something for a medical man to see. Suddenly he grunted like he was going to be sick. He snatched up a femur from one of the Indians and swung it up to smash that fourth skeleton to smithereens. Well, sir, quicker than the eye could see the umbrella handle smacked itself into the palm of that bony hand, sending fingers flying in six directions. It hung there in the air against what was left, trained dead on Jake's head, and it hummed. The femur dropped from Jake's right hand like he'd been shot. He hadn't, though, because he was still wearing his skull and by that time running. Soon as he did, the umbrella handle flopped over and just lay there, the hum dying away. When it stopped the place was pretty quiet, because Jake was off in the rocks and I wqs going over some things I wanted to say to him immediately I was able to talk again. That fourth skeleton had the fastest draw I'd ever seen. Jake stuck his head up from behind a boulder. "Doc," he said, "why didn't he shoot?" T HE question wasn't as allfired pip-witted as Jake was capable of. It took me upwards of three weeks to work out why a weapon that could draw and aim itself didn't shoot too. I'd heard a little clink when the weapon flew into the skeleton's hand. It came from a metal disk that lay in its palm, toward the heel of the hand. The disk was thin and only about as big as a two-cent piece. A mate to it was set in the butt of the umbrella handle, convex where the other was concave. Going at it kind of gingerly, I slid the disk in my vest behind my watch and put the umbrella handle in my right coat pocket. It was a key-wind repeater with a gold hunting case, that watch, and I worried about it every step down the mountain. I walked a good four hundred yards behind Jake all the way back into town, just to be on the safe side. We didn't linger, either. We wanted lights. By the time I got the two objects locked in my rolltop my heartbeat in anybody else would have had me telling the sexton to start his hole. I prescribed bed for me, told Jake, who hadn't hardly even drawn breath the whole time, to go to hell and retired. up over some borax rights upcountry. I didn't get to open that rolltop for a time. Then one early morning coming back in the buggy from a house-call in Pockmark, fortyodd miles north, I got to worrying again at the umbrella handle and those dead Indians. Seems like four, five times a week some chunkhead hunkers down hard with his spurs on. When I got to the office that night there was one waiting -- a bad one, Spanish rowels -- and Jake was sprawled in my chair, picking his teeth with my spare scalpel. I patched up the chunkhead, took the scalpel from Jake and rinsed it off and watched him suck his teeth for a while. It began to look like he was going to be stubborn. So finally I said: "Say, Jake." He grunted. "Jake," I said, "I think I've got that dingus figured." He snuck a glance over at the desk so I knew he knew what I meant, but he was busy pretending that wasn't what he came to talk about. "I think it's a gun that can read minds like a gypsy," I said. Jake still looked bored, so I took the umbrella handle out of the rolltop and waved it at him. He dove off the chair and started rolling for the door. "You damn fool," I said, "it won't go off." I was reasonably certain it wouldn't, but I laid it back down by the disk gently anyhow and sat in the chair. I've only got the one chair, on the theory that anybody who isn't bad enough to lie on the table is well enough to stand. Jake edged over and stood like a shortlegged bird on a. bobwire fence. "It kin whut?" he said. "It can read minds," I said. "You were going to bash those bones. The gun knew it and trained square on your head. You remember?" He remembered. "And those Indians," I went on. "You remember them? The left side of the head on each of them was blown off." I hauled down a roller chart of the human skeleton, first time I'd done that since I don't know when. "This up here is the brain," I said. "We don't know a hell of a lot about it, but we do know it's like a whole roomful of telegraphers, sending messages to different parts of the body along the nerves. They're like the wires. This left hemisphere -- right here -- sends to the right side of the body. Don't fret about why, the nerves twist going into the spinal cord. "Okay. We know, too, that the part of the brain that sends to the arm is right here, in the parietal lobe. Right under the chunk of skull that was shot off on those three Indians." "Shaw," Jake said, perching on the table. The old billygoat was beginning to get impressed, even if he didn't have any notion of what I was talking about. notion either, but I kept on. "The brain works by a kind of electricity, same kind as in the telegraph batteries at the depot. This gun," . I tapped the umbrella handle and Jake started off again, but caught himself, "has some sort of detector, a galvanic thermometer that senses electrical messages to the nerves." From here on in it was pure dark and wild hazard. "Obviously," I said, "whenever one of those signals goes from this cerebral motor area here in the left hemisphere down to make the weapon hand move, it must be a special signal this gun was built to catch. Just like a lock is made for one particular key. "And near as I can figure, the gun has to be able to tell when that move coming up is going to be dangerous to the man holding it. Stands to reason if it can tell when a brain's signalling a hand, it can tell too if that brain is do that, and most dogs. "So, if it senses murderous intent and a message to the weapon hand to move, it moves too, and faster. "It homes on this disk like a magnet right into the hand of the gent that owns it. and aims itself plumb at the place the signal is coming from." I tapped the chart. "Right here." I poked the gunk out of a corncob, packed it and lit up before going on. Jake stared at the umbrella handle like a stuffed owl. "Now, that fourth skeleton we saw sure as hell isn't human. He isn't from anywhere on this green earth, or I miss my guess. Might even have something to do with Crater Lake there, years ago. But we aren't likely to find out. "But we do know that he fought three Indians that probably jumped him all at once. And he killed every one of them with this gun before he fell." That brought Jake up short. The Territory is kind of violent generally, and anybody or anything, good along that line would be bound to have the sober respect of a ninny like Jake. I dug up an old glove, and used spirit gum to stick in its palm the little disk from the skeleton's hand. I pulled the glove on my right hand, and stood up with my hand about a foot over the umbrella handle. "Okay," I said, "kill me." H E was so orry-eyed by then he damn near did it just to be obliging. But then the recollection of the night on the mountain, and the three Indians with their heads shot off, sifted through and he shied off. "Hell no," he hollered, "I seen that thing go before! I ain't about to get my head blowed to bits !" And he went on. Well, it took me the best of two hours. I showed him the two studs on the underside that most likely were a safety device. I explained how probably the gun wouldn't go off unless somebody was holding it with a finger between those studs, which was why it didn't shoot when it went into the skeleton's hand that night. I finally got him by telling him if I was right, we'd wire the fourth skeleton together, take it back East and earn a mint of money on the vaudeville stage showing the fastest cadaver in the West. "Mr. Bones: Faster than Billy the Kid and Twice as Dead," I said we'd bill it. Jake, he thought that was a lovely idea, and decided to go along. Fourteen times that eternal jackass raised his right arm at me, while I held my own gloved right hand over the weapon. But he didn't have any real heart for it, and fourteen times the gun just lay there. Then I got a mite impatient, and kicked him in the kneecap. That fifteenth time he was truly trying. Skinny as he was he'd have driven me clear through the floor, except that umbrella handle jumped into my glove and aimed dead at his forehead, snarling like a cougar. More correctly, the left side of his forehead. If I hadn't braced my index finger out stiff, that fifteenth time would've had him a dead man. Jake froze like a statue and hung in the air staring at the gun, snarling away in my hand. Finally I pulled the glove off with the gun still stuck to it, and flung it on the desk. Then Jake gave me the sixteenth, and by the time I got up again he was gone and the gun and the glove with him. squabble blew up again. What with miners getting stomped I didn't get to bed for a week, much less have a chance to find out where Jake and that damned weapon had lit out for. By the time I did, it was too late. Jacob Niedelmeier, the ribbon clerk, after seventeen years was on his way to glory as the legendary Dirty Jake. I got the start of the story from a drifter, name of Hubert Comus. He'd got into kind of a heated discussion in a saloon south a ways that ended with him and this other man going for their hardware. Hubert got his Merwin  Bray .# out and, being a fool, tried fanning it. Of course it jammed and he laid the heel of his hand open clear to the bone. Twasn't the hand bothering Hubert, though. Like most, the other man missed him clean, but when the barkeep threw them both out Hubert lit sitting on the boardwalk and took a six-inch splinter clear through his corduroys. While I was working on him he told me about Jake. A man, it seems, had turned up in a little settlement called Blister, about two days down the line. Nobody noticed him come in, except that he was wearing one glove, a shiny clawhammer coat and Congress gaiters. The general run in the mining camps doesn't wear Congress gaiters. He got noticed, though, when he showed up in a barroom wearing a pearl-gray derby with an ostrich plume in the band, and carrying a rolled-up umbrella under his arm. The little devil had stuck the shaft of a regular umbrella in the muzzle of the skeleton's weapon. It turned out he'd bought the derby that the storekeeper there had planned to be buried in. Where the ostrich plume came from I never did find out. "He come right in the swingin' door an' stood there," Hubert said over his shoulder, "lookin' at the crowd. Purty quick they was all lookin' right back, I kin tell you. That feather fetched 'em up sharp. Take it easy back there, will you, Doc? Then Homer Cavanaugh, the one they called Ham Head, he bust out laughing. He laughed so hard he bent over double, and the rest of the boys was just beginnin' t'laugh too when the little feller picked up a spitoon and dumped it down Ham Head's neck. "The boys got mighty quiet then. Hey, easy, Doc, will you? Ham Head straightened up and his face went from red as flannels to white, just like that. He stood glarin' at the little feller for a couple of ticks, openin' and closin his fists, and then that big right hand went for the Smith  Wesson in his belt. "Well, it was a double-action pistol and had a couple notches in the grip, but Ham Head never cleared it. I never even seen the little feller draw, but there was Ham Head failin' with half his noggin shot away. Gently, will you, Doc, gently! "The little feller stood leaning on his umbrella, lookin' down at him. 'What was that man's name?' he says. 'Ham Head Cavanaugh,' somebody says back. 'Ham Head Cavanaugh,' the little feller says, 'he's the first.' Then he shoves the umbreller back under his arm and goes out. We never saw him again. "Some say it was a bootleg pistol he used, or a derringer in his sleeve. And some say he had a pardner with a rifle in the street, but there wasn't nobody there. I was standin' as close to him as I am to you, Doc, and I swear -- it -- was -- that -- um -- breller -- OW !" H am head Cavanaugh was the first. I had kind of a personal interest in Jake and his weapon, so I kept track. There was Curly Sam Thompson, Big John Ballentine, Redmeat Carson, Uriah Singletree and twelve others known of, all dead within eighteen months. Any man Jake could hoorah into a fight. With never a chance to get his right hand on iron before his head gave the signal and got blown off. He took them all on. And he never lost -- because he couldn't. Jake was king-o'-the-hill now, all right. He had the success he yearned for. Yet when he came back to see me last April it wasn't to brag. He was in trouble. I looked up from a customer, a damn fool that'd sat on a gila monster, and there he was, sneaking in the door bareheaded like a whipped hound, not the cock of the walk in the whole Territory. He slid into the back room like a shadow, and the man I was working on never even knew he'd come. When I went in afterward the lamp was out, the shade was down and he was in a corner, nervous as a jackrabbit an eagle just dropped in a wolf den. "Buried my derby under a pile of rock up in the mountains," he whispered. "Look," and he held out his glove. It was plumb worn out. The little metal disc was hanging on by a strand of spirit gum, and the fabric of the palm was in shreds. I looked at him for a minute without saying anything. He was still wearing the clawhammer coat, over B.V.D. tops, but it looked like he'd been buried weeks in it and dug up clumsy. He had on greasy rawhide breeches and battered cowhand boots for shoes. He had a month's beard on his lip and he stunk. This here was legendary Dirty Jake, no question about it. "Get a new glove," I said. "Nope," he answered, "no good. Last week in Ojo Rojizo I took the glove off to scratch and right then a man braced me. He threw me in a horsetrough when I wouldn't fight. I want you to fix me up good. "I want you to open my hand up and set the dingus just under the skin, and sew it up again. Knew a feller did that with five-dollar gold pieces cuz he didn't like banks. Worked fine till he got a counterfeit, and it killed him. "I'll lay low in the hills till the hand heals. No problems after that." No problems? Maybe so, but I'd been doing some thinking. Still, I kept my mouth shut and did what he wanted, and he slunk off with no thanks. Don't guess I really had any coming. After he left I got out my tallybook and ticked off the men Dirty Jake had killed: One Eye Jack Sundstrom, Fat Charlie Ticknor, Pilander Quantrell, Lobo Stephens, Alec the Frenchman Dubois, some jackass Texas nobody even knew and the rest, all men whose brains had telegraphed a special signal to Jake's gun before it reached their own right hand. Well, there was a new pistolero in town. A month and a half later I was craned around, trying to lance a boil of my own, when out of the corner of my eye I saw Dirty Jake go by under my window. He'd dug that hat with the ostrich plume out from under the rocks, his hand was healed, he was swinging his umbrella and he didn't so much as look up. He was headed for the Owl Hoot Palace. I decided the boil'd wait. Less than five minutes later I heard the shots, two of them. A second later Jubal Bean, swamper at the Owl Hoot, came pounding up the boardwalk and hollered in the door : "Doc, better come quick. Dirty Jake just took a couple slugs in the chest and he never even got to draw !" I took my time. "It was just a matter of odds," I said. "Who got him?" "The new one," Jubal said, "the man they call Lefty." weeks to bleach, a little wiring, and I'll be heading East. Look for the billboards: The Fastest Draw in the West "Faster than Billy the Kid and Twice as Dead" presented by M.D. All I've got to do is figure how to keep getting mad at Nature and nature's laws lay hid in Night; God said, "Let Newton be" and all was light. It did not last. The Devil, crying "Ho! Let Einstein be," restored the status quo. The first two lines are Newton's epitaph by Alexander Pope; The second two, though widely quoted as anonymous, were written by Sir John Squire. IF Feature    ... intelligence comes to grips with the universe -- and the results are something wonderful -- and strange! T HE largest and noisiest of all the unsettled arguments in science fiction is the simple (ho-ho!) matter of defining it. Like certain other imponderables, such as love, and the blues, and the exact meaning of an abstention in a UN vote, the matter is best handled by describing not nature, but function. Love, a young lady was heard to remark, is when you wake up knowing it will be wonderful also to get out of bed. The blues, said a rough-hewn poet, is when you got the best steak in the whole wide world and the salt-cellar just cries all over it. Science fiction, then, is when someone looks at what is there for anyone to look at, and suddenly makes something new and wonderful out of it. The breeze of s-f, in this sense, must have been ruffling the hair of the encyclopedist SF in the famous #th edition of the Brittonica, published just fifty years ago. For after a clear and careful description of atomic theory, most of which was then set up to agree with the definition of the atom as "indivisible," he concluded as follows: The atomic theory has been of priceless value to chemists, but it has more than once happened in the history of science that a hypothesis, after having been useful in the discovery and co-ordination of knowledge has been abandoned and replaced by one more in harmony with later discoveries. Some distinguished chemists have thought that this fate may be awaiting the atomic theory, and that in future chemists may be able to obtain all the guidance they need from the science of the transformations of energy. But modern (this means #) discoveries in radioactivity are in favour of the existence of the atom, although they lead to the belief that the atom is not so eternal and unchangeable a thing as Dalton and his predecessors imagined, and in fact, that the atom itself may be subject to that eternal SF law of growth and decay of which Lucretius speaks. Science fiction is when a man sits amidst several dozen imperial bushels of evidence to the contrary, and dares to make a breathtaking intuitive sweep like that. To realize fully what a heady grab this was, it is worthwhile digging a little further to find out something about the two boys he mentioned. in #, took the atom-isindivisible theory away from philosophers who had been tonguing and gumming it for a thousand years, and really put it to work -- to such a degree that many people think he invented it. He didn't, but the amount of solid experimental work he did on it made it his. He pulled a vast amount of vague reporting into line and invented an ingenious, if somewhat unwieldy, system of symbols which clearly showed his belief that an atom is an atom, an element is made of atoms of one kind and a compound is made by certain fixed quantities of each kind of atom which kept their relation to one another no matter how much or how little was compounded. He made it possible to predict and to explain thousands of chemical actions, set chemistry on its feet -- and made "the atomic theory" (the atom-is-indivisible) unshakeable and unbreakable for more than a century. And if science fiction is when someone takes common ho-hum evidence and makes something new and wonderful out of it, then it's fair to say it touched Dalton too. But let's have a look at the other character the Britannica writer mentioned. The atom may, he said, "be subject to that eternal law of growth and decay of which Lucretius speaks." Titus Lucretius Carus was born around # B.C. and probably died in # B.C. Of several accounts of his life, by far the most appetizing is the one which says that he became mad in consequence of quaffing a love-philtre and, after writing a number of books in his lucid intervals, knocked himself off when he was #. Whatever his habits and pastimes, he was an extraordinary man: poet (truly a great one), philosopher and, in the truest sense, theoretical scientist. His great work, De Rerum Naturae, called unique in literature, is a reasoned system of philosophy, written in verse. Its main idea is the truth of the laws of nature vs. superstitions. And he wrote not like a speculator, who wondered if, but like a teacher, who knew. He wrote, says the Britannica, "to clear the mind from the fear of the gods and the terrors of a future state." First, he shows "... that the world is not governed by capricious agency, but has come into existence, continues in existence, and will ultimately pass away in accordance with the primary conditions of the elemental atoms which, along with empty space, are the only eternal and immutable substances. These atoms are infinite in number but limited in their varieties, and by their ceaseless movement and combinations during infinite time and through infinite space the whole process of creation is maintained. " All credit to the writer of ticle (his name was Francis Henry Neville, if anyone wonders) who could readily have been excused for ignoring this peculiar stuff Mme. Curie had been playing around with, and to Dalton, who with far less system to view and review was able to use his think-tank like a Heinlein. Perhaps one day a sciencefiction convention will grant a special award to Lucretius, who never saw a test-tube or even a copy of IF in his whole life, but blocked out a picture we haven't filled in yet! SF Being just plain Pop was not enough -- he was bucking for All Fatherhood. thousand years to catch up with Pop; which, all things considered, was pretty good going. I came out of overdrive at # hours in orbit around an ugly-looking A#type planet, and there was his ship below me. J slammed my cruiser down right alongside -- hard enough to pulverize a couple of feet of basalt and make Pop and his ship bounce a little. He'd put me to quite a bit of trouble and I was annoyed. Pop got to his feet and stood there looking kind of sheepish as I climbed out of the cruiser. The old fool had his helmet off and was breathing in the foul atmosphere as if it were health gas. His gills had begun to turn a little blue from the methane and C#. He was a character all right. His name wasn't really Pop, of course. I guess the nickname had been tacked on because he was such an eccentric. old codger, and because he looked like a couple of course, he wasn't nearly that old. "Welcome aboard planet," he said. "I kind of figured you'd be along sooner or later. Or someone like you." "Well, I'm here," I said. He looked harmless, but I kept a #R projector on him just in case. Pop had given Security Division a lot of trouble, and I had strict orders. I crawled over to his ship and slid inside. The cabin looked neat enough, but the old fool had so much junk crammed into the ship you could hardly turn around. I found what I was looking for toward the bow -- row after row of cylindrical canisters. I broke one open and the biodetector on my back began to stutter like crazy. I dropped it and sprayed them all until they glowed dull green. By then the contents were cooked. P OP was still standing in the same place when I crawled out, looking as casual as you please. He only had a few eyes on me. Most of them he had turned toward the planet's oversize satellite and a raw, angry-looking sea that was breaking a few ship'slengths away. "How'd you catch up with me?" he asked. "Space warp. You left a trail a child could follow." I moved around his ship and found the reason he was looking so innocent. He'd already set up one of his canisters and the seal was about to break. I sprayed it. So much forms of life bottled under pressure. "All right," I said. "That's the last of them. Let's get going." "Okay," said Pop. "Never argue with Security Division. Still, you've got to admit I gave you a good run for your money. And I seeded quite a mess of planets." I shouldn't have done it, but I was angry. I snapped a claw across his nerve center before he could draw it back into his shell. It must have hurt plenty, because ten or twelve of his eyes began to water. "Seeded, hell!" I said. "You touched down on exactly # planets, and I sterilized every one of them after you left. That's what took me so long." He seemed to shrink a little inside, and for the first time I realized just how old the nut really was. "All that time," he said. "All that effort wasted. Damn. Double damn." "You should have figured that in the first place," I said. "Central Maxim # clearly states that no life is to be introduced into the outer galaxies. And don't ask me why. I'm no biologist. I just follow orders." "Listen," said Pop. "Please listen. Back at Central Galaxy they think we -- our race -- is pretty much immortal. But they don't know. They don't know for sure if any life will be left in our galaxy after two or three hundied wars like the last one and -- " "Hold it," I said. "You're wasting your time. I'm not a, philosopher and you know it." "That's right," said Pop. "And you're not a biologist, either. You told me." He waved a claw in gesture of resignation number seven. "Well, maybe you're right. Maybe I have been an old fool. Let's go home. No use hanging around an ugly planet like this one." He made gesture of contempt number fifteen. Well, I thought, that's a relief. Maybe the old geezer wasn't as crazy as I'd figured. Maybe he just needed some sense slapped into him. At any rate, he didn't make any trouble when I disintegrated his ship -- the old crate wasn't spaceworthy to begin with -- and he climbed into my cruiser meek as could be. pulled out of the system. The next planet -- Pop had landed on the third -- was going through G# disintegration into asteroids, but I eased through without any trouble and began to pick up speed. Just then Pop swung around in his seat and made good-luck gesture eight and long-life gesture twelve toward the planet we'd left. I stared at him. "I don't get it," I said. "Just a while ago you agreed that was an ugly hunk of rock. You even made contempt gesture fifteen -- you spat on it." "That's right," said Pop. "I did, didn't I? Right into a pool of brackish water." Then he began to chuckle. He kept on chuckling for five years, until I got annoyed and slapped his nerve center again. Aside from that, the return voyage was uneventful. When referring to technological advances, the word "impossible" must be used, if at all, with utmost caution. We should not forget, however, that all speculation on nuclear power sources is still founded on rather shaky ground. Thus, we render our cause a service of dubious value by referring to such vague potentialities. I, for one, am not yet convinced that within the next quarter of a century we will have a nuclear drive that could economically compete with chemical power plants. -- Wernher von Braun IF  Short Story AC,TY m T HE protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So they skipped several steps in the procedure. The chordata discerner read Positive over most of the surface. There was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought on the body? Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then it came -- clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only. "Limited," said Steiner, "as though within a pale. As though there were but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours before it's back in our ken if we let it go now." "Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of the world to make sure we've missed nothing," said Stark. There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results. The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator had refused to read Positive when turned on the inventor himself, bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He told the machine so heatedly. The machine replied, with such warmth that its relavs chattered, that Glaser did not have extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a difference, the machine insisted. It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply. And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read Positive on a number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not even read music. But it had also read Positive on ninety per cent of the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi it had read Positive on a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all was shown by the test. So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests. Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever produces : the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug of the shoulders in a man. They called it the "You tell me light." So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be forewarned. O the world, Steiner," said Stark, "and the rest of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about twelve hours." "You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away from the thoughtful creature?" "No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go down boldly and visit this." So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig, the engineer; Casper Craig, supercargo, tycoon and # owner of the Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist and checker champion of the craft. Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe went down to visit whatever was there. "There's no town," said Steiner. "Not a building. Yet we're on the track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it." "Keep on towards the minds," said Stark. "They're our target." "Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks like an Earthtype sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion, I'm almost afraid to say. And those two... why, they could well be Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming from?" "I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool with us." Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very bright light. "Talk to them, Father Briton," said Stark. "You are the linguist." "Howdy," said the priest. He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at him, so he went on. "Father Briton from Philadelphia," he said, "on detached service. And you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?" "Ha-Adamah," said the man. "And your daughter, or niece?" It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the woman smiled, proving that she was human. "The woman is named Hawwah," said the man. "The sheep is named sheep, the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is named hoolock." "I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it that you use the English tongue?" "I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all; by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English." "We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would you?" "The fountain." "Ah -- I see." B UT the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water, but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like the first water ever made. "What do you make of them?" asked Stark. "Human," said Steiner. "It may even be that they are a little more than human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem to be clothed, as it were, in dignity." "And very little else," said Father Briton, "though that light trick does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia." "Talk to them again," said Stark. "You're the linguist." "That isn't necessary here. Captain. Talk to them yourself." "Are there any other people here?" Stark asked the man. "The two of us. Man and woman." "But are there any others?" "How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there be than man and woman?" "But is there more then one man or woman?" "How could there be more than one of anything?" The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly : "Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?" "You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named Engineer. He is named Flunky." "Thanks a lot," said Steiner. "But are we not people?" persisted Captain Stark. "No. We are the people." There are no people but two. How could there be other people?" "And the damnest thing about it," muttered Langweilig, "is, how are you going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling." "Can we have something to eat?" asked the Captain. "Pick from the trees," said Ha-Adamah, "and then it may be that you will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you are free to enjoy the gardpn and its fruits." "We Will," said Captain Stark. They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you. "If there are only two people here," said Casper Craig, "then it may be that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And those rocks would bear examining." "Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else," I # said Stark. "A very promising site." "And everything grows here," added Steiner. "Those are Earth-fruits and I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be, the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I haven't yet tried the -- " and he stopped. "If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think," said Gilbert, "then it will be the test at least : whether we're having a pleasant dream or whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one." "I won't be the first to eat one. You eat." "Ask him first. You ask him." "Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?" "Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden." W breaks down there," said Stark. "I was almost beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what. Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah and Hawwah mean -- ?" "Of course they do. You know that as well as I." "I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same proposition to maintain here as on Earth?" "All things are possible." And it was then that HaAdamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: "No, no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one !" It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it. "Once more, Father," said Stark, "you should be the authority; but does not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a medieval painting?" "It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated." "I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too incredible." "It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?" "Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never did understand the answer, however." "And have you gotten no older in all that time?" "I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the beginning." "And do you think that you will ever die?" "To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine." "And are you completely happy here?" "Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost." "Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?" "Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect." Then Stark cut in once more: "There must be some one question you could ask him. Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced." "Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about a game of checkers?" "This is hardly the time for clowning," said Stark. "I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of colors and first move." "No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect." "Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam, and have a go at it." "No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you." days. They were delighted with the place. It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave. "What is there, Adam?" asked Capain Stark. "The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we persevere, it will come by him." They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they left. And they talked of it as they took off. "A crowd would laugh if told of it," said Stark, "but not many would laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world, and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds. Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone disturbed that happiness." "I too am convinced," said Steiner. "It is Paradise itself, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed. It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part of the serpent, and intrude and spoil." "I am probably the most skeptical man in the world," said Casper Craig the tycoon, "but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it. It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise ; and it would be a crime calling to the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that perfection. "So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming, Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver, Iron, EarthType Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices as listed below. Ask for Brochure -- Eden Acres Unlimited." that Old Serpent, a twolegged one among whose names were "Snake-Oil Sam," spoke to his underlings: "It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of." "I think you'd better write me some new lines," said Adam. "I feel like a goof saying those same ones to each bunch." "You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did change Adam and Eve to HaAdamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter -- but they are becoming better researched, arid they insist on authenticity. "This is still a perfect comeon here. There is something in human nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much -- though that is strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you have to acquire your equipment as you can." He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff space-sealed ; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and power packs to run a world. He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner. "We will have to have another lion," said Eve. "Bowser is getting old, and MarieYvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb." "I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the crackpot settlers will bring a new lion." "And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's hell." "I'm working on it." dictating the gram: "Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twentyone hours from Planet Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial neighbors. A completely plannned globular settlement in a near arm of our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty -- " "And you had better have an armed escort when you return," said Father Briton. "Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?" "It's as phony as a sevencredit note!" "You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by our senses? Why do you doubt?" "It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds. Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible, zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers." "What?" "If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally." "They looked at the priest thoughtfully. "But it was Paradise in one way," said Steiner at last. "How?" "All the time we were there the woman did not speak." E E  d d v bc eS SJg   '# Z # d E  OhCtl I J a # ; o-  I #I l" go  v  e, msin #E? il-sl tin! el"Ssa goad #  g a  S  o #-#  # k cl bC JQ c  O O Xi nt... r C o-s EE #  c #-# #c...  gJ  d  # il: #  # g  #p # o ftS  a  a bC # ' #- x u . c .sli  PHil C O G,C # ft  #  I G r# # m i #J Q,  # E H o d  J # ' # SoS , y! D ! g g #c gx g  ; # I sS l-"S'SS#S' S'SajSa iSfcW.jtej   cj'Cu ggls  s # I frSJte # Range the stars!  Explore the past, present and future! # See worlds that might have been! # Be in on ideas that are just aborning! All this adventuring comes with each issue of IF Science Fiction Magazine -- and a subscription saves you money, beats the newsstands by a week to ten days, arrives flat and neat -- there are too many reasons for subscribing to list on this page, but there are some, and another is that you're sure to get your copies. Neither snow nor rain -- you know? Cut out the coupon or send your order in on any scrap of paper about, along with check, money order or cash. We don't need the coupon; it's there just in case you want to use it. But whatever you do, don't use up the future -- subscribe today! coupon IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the issue. I enclose (check one): # issues... # # issues... # Foreign Postage # Issues #c Additional Name... Address. City. P.O. Zone. State OF I stood a miniature sun. In illustrated by other places, on other tadick francis bles, it might have been taken for a not-too-effective table lamp, since its plastic surface diffused the yellow light feebly. In the board room of Solar Productions, it was a sun. Bruce Kalder relaxed dreamily, and watched the "sun" flicker on and off when the chairman of the board thumped on the table. Old Holbertson was powerfully worked up about something, but he had talked in such long-winded circles that Kalder had abandoned hope of finding out what was bothering him. world under the Earth's crust -- now one man had to keep it from being in vain. Kalder suppressed a yawn, and looked across the table at June Holbertson. "She shouldn't wear low-cut dresses to board meetings," he thought. He'd been intentionally avoiding looking at her because he didn't want the board members to think that his appointment was mainly due to her influence. But it was a foolish attitude to take. They probably already knew it, and besides, everyone else in the room was watching her. Everyone except old Holbertson. She smiled faintly, and winked at him. Old Holbertson thumped the table again, and paused to take a sip of water. "Kalaer," he shouted, "this is damned serious, and it's your problem. What are you going to do about it?" Kalder turned slowly, and faced the chairman of the board. From a condition of easy relaxation he had been slammed into one of stomachtwisting panic. His hands lay paralyzed on the arms of his chair. His dry tongue touched his dry lips, and recoiled. Old Holbertson had talked for maybe twenty minutes, and Kalder had listened attentively most of that time, and he hadn't any idea what problem had the old man so upset. Worse, he still didn't have much of an idea as to what his job was supposed to be. June came to his rescue. "Uncle Emmanuel, this is Bruce's first board meeting. Don't you think he should know more about the problem before we ask him to solve it?" Old Holbertson sputtered. "He's been on the job since this morning, hasn't he? What's he been doing?" From the other end of the table, Paul Holbertson spoke. "Takes more than three hours for a man to learn his way around this place." "Bah !" old Holbertson said. "If he doesn't know where the men's room is by this time he... "I move," Paul Holbertson said, "that we ask Mr. Kalder to have a full report ready for the next board meeting." Seconded and passed. Kalder breathed easily once more, but he did not relax again. up, Paul Holbertson crooked a finger at Kalder, and he and June followed him out. "My office, I think," Paul said. He escorted them in, and found chairs for them. June sat down, and lit a cigarette. "Thanks, Dad," she said. Kalder said, "I thought I was going to be fired before I'd learned what all the buttons on my desk mean. Look -- I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I listened as attentively as I could, and I still don't know the problem." "Emmanuel rambles," Paul said. "Getting on in years. He'll retire in another year or so, and we'll miss him. Given some alternatives, he's almost infallible in making the right decision. Trouble is, in this case we have no alternatives. We have nothing. But you don't know what the problem is. We're having trouble with our writers. Hence your title, Director of Writer Personnel." "What sort of trouble are you having?" Paul Holbertson took a long time getting a cigar lit. He leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and puffed deeply. "They don't write," he said. "Yes," he went on. "We have competent men. We know, by their past performances. We pay the highest rates paid anywhere. We have the best writer's Tank in the industry, and we operate it at peak efficiency. And they don't write. We've always maintained a big inventory, fortunately, and kept more writers than we really needed, so we would have a big output and enough quality to keep us on top. But the situation has really been getting worse for years and now it's approaching the critical point. Our inventory has sagged. We've been dipping into the stock of scripts that have already been rejected, and even that won't keep us going much longer. To quote Emmanuel, this is damned serious. "Solar Productions leases four wires, and our contract stipulates that we must run twenty-four one-hour films per day on each wire. That adds up to ninety-six films per day, which is a lot of films. We don't have any trouble shooting it. Our organization is tops, there. So are our facilities. We could shoot two hundred a day -- if we had the scripts. But we can't get the scripts." "There hasn't been any reduction in personnel?" Kalder asked. "Certainly not. We have more writers than we've ever had, and we keep hiring them. We hire some that frankly are not qualified, just in the hope they'll produce something for us. The quality keeps going down, and the number of scripts turned in gets less almost daily." "We," Kalder said, with a heroic attempt at nonchalance, "need an incentive system. Scrap our contracts. Cut our guaranteed wage to the legal minimum. Pay a bonus for each completed script, and work out a system of bonuses for quality." Paul Holbertson shrugged, and waved his cigar. "Obviously we did all that. Long ago. It didn't help. And I'll tell you one more thing that didn't work out, just so you won't try it. I got the foggy idea that the Tank was involved in some way, so I closed it down for a month. It damned near ruined us. Production dropped literally to zero. It spurted a little when I opened it up again, but not for long, and it's been dropping ever since. Well -- get to work on it. And remember this -- no childishly simple idea is going to solve this thing. We have some highly capable people on our staff, and none of them can cope with it. The trouble is, we're dealing with' writers, and writers, damn them, are artists. They're a super-human branch of the sp'ecies, or maybe it's sub-human. They don't function normally, even when they act normally. They spend their lives giving tangible form to the intangible, pulling things out of their imagination and making them real, and that's something neither you nor I will ever understand. All I can say is, good luck." "Thank you," Kalder said. It was a big chance -- a chance any of his friends would have jumped at gleefully. He also had a hunch that, as far as the Holbertsons were concerned, it was his only chance. Either he showed them that he was worthy of June, or they showed June how incompetent he was. They were a hard-boiled family. And all he had to work on was a problem that'd had them stumped for years! B Y his third day on the job Kalder had learned his way about the executive and editorial offices and gained a passing familiarity with the files. He decided to visit the writers' Tank. The company's swing train had just left, but since his new job was depriving him of his usual daily exercise in tennis and swimming, the idea of walking appealed to him. He was carefully briefed on the route before he left, but he ran into trouble immediately. Q tunnel, which was the direct route to the Main, was blocked off. A guard waved him away as he started to enter. The last of the Q tunnel population was moving out. Men, women and children slouched past him. Each man cradled a TV set preciously in his arms. Women and children carried pathetic bundles of belongings. A few women also carried TV sets -- lucky families, to have two! "What's up?" Kalder asked the guard. "Radiation seepage," the guard said shortly. Kalder walked a short distance and turned off into a narrow passageway, thinking he might find his way through to the Main without going all the way to R tunnel. There were numbered doorways along the passage, but few doors. In the rooms beyond there were people, and at least one TV set. Sometimes there were several. Men, women and children sat around them, watching intently. The passage divided, divided again, and gradually narrowed. At one point he met a woman, and they had to edge past each other sideways. He left the area of living quarters behind him, and paused in surprise to contemplate the unbroken walls of the passageway. He vaguely recalled reports of a critical housing shortage. The reports were certainly true, because the number of TV sets he had seen in some of the rooms could only mean that several families were living there. But there would be room for a lot of families on this passageway, if someone would do some digging. Eventually he found his way through to the Main. The huge, brightly lighted tunnel swarmed with humanity. Government swing trains came at regular intervals, moving slowly as their tractor drivers shouted people out of the way. Long lines waited in front of the supply depots. Many factory shifts were changing, the men of the new shift reporting with glum faces for their hour's labor. Kalder stepped into the doorway of a medical clinic, amazed, watching housewives jostle for position in a fresh meat queue. He had passed this way many times before, but always in a swing train or private car. He had passed through blindly. Now he was seeing, for the first time, that vast lower class politely referred to as the people. He saw them as potential customers of Solar Productions, which made them important to him. As he continued to watch, he saw them as human beings like himself. And in some way which he did not exactly understand, that made them more important. I T was afternoon when he reached Solar Productions' producing unit. He went to the executives' dining room for a late lunch before he rode the elevator down to the Tank. His name brought him a quick interview with Barney Fulton, the Tank's manager. Barney was a kindly old man who had been with Solar in one capacity or another all his working life. "The boss said you'd be around," he said. "I'll give you any help I can, but, hell, I haven't got any answers." "I'll have to ask some foolish questions, because all of this is new to me," Kalder told him. "Now -- just what is the Tank?" "It used to belong to Production," Barney said. "They still use it when they need it, but that's only for the big scenes. Even then the writers kick up a fuss about it. They've pretty well taken the place over. The same thing has happened at the other studios. The Tank is supposed to give them ideas. Maybe it does. Who knows how a writer thinks? Jeff Powell, he writes nothing but love stories, but when he comes in here he goes on an adventure jag. Maybe that gives him ideas for love stories. Who knows?" Kalder scratched his head, and said, "I don't. Maybe you'd better let me look at it." "Sure." Barney went over to the door of his office, and shouted. "Pete! This is Mr. Kalder, the new vice-president Take him through the Tank, and don't let him get killed." Pete gave Kalder a broad grin, and led him away; They signed in at one of the Tank's entrances, and stepped through a doorway to a scene of overwhelming grandeur. The spaciousness fairly took Kalder's breath away. Accustomed all his life to rooms and passageways, he could only stand and stare. Ahead of them was a tangled jungle. Beyond it a hill rose steeply, and beyond that other hills. There were glimpses of forests, of distant mountains. Overhead the ceiling arched upwards and upwards and away to a far distant, brightly lit dome. "Pretty big, eh?" Pete said proudly. "It's tremendous," Kalder said. "We have it on a twentyfour hour day -- day and night and everything. At night we turn off the lights and turn on the stars. We got a moon, too. Come on. We'd better stay clear of the jungle. They're shooting a jungle film there, this afternoon." climbed a tall hill, and stood looking down on the lovely, still blueness of a lake. "Where to?" Pete asked. Kalder consulted his notebook. "I'd like to look around, to see what the place is like. And then -- do you know a writer named Walter Donald?" "Sure. Bigfellow, with blond hair. I know all the older ones. They've picked up some new ones lately, but not many of them have been using the Tank." "I'd like to find Donald." "I'll call in." Pete went over to a control point to make his call, and came back shaking his head. "They dunno where he is. He probably didn't make any special request. Sometimes a writer just looks around until he finds something that interests him." "I see," Kalder said. He'd been checking through a lot of records, and he had a hunch that Donald could give him a clue as to what was wrong with the writers. Donald had been the most prolific man on the staff, even though his output had fallen along with that of the others. Then suddenly, a month before, his work had stopped all together. Kalder found that Donald had entered the Tank and stayed there. He had signed in, and he had not signed out. He could not be located anywhere. Kalder wanted to know what he was doing. "Donald has been in here for a month," he said to Pete. "Isn't that a little long to be just looking around?" "Well," Pete said, "he's a writer..." Down in the jungle, an elephant trumpeted and a rifle shot rang out. Kalder shivered, and sat down on the thick, simulated grass at the hilltop. Below him, a man rowed a small boat along the lake shore. Pete handed Kalder his binoculars. "It's Jeff Powell," he said. Kalder watched the awkward movements of the man in the boat. "Where would be a good place to look for Donald?" "Couldn't say... If he hasn't asked for anything special, he could be anywhere. It's a big place." "I think I'd better talk to Barney," Kalder said. He went to the control point, and asked Barney to have his men keep a lookout for Walter Donald. Barney said he'd have the concessionaires look for him; if Donald had been in the Tank a month he had to be getting food from somewhere or he was dead. Kalder told him he'd check again later. In the boat on the lake, Jeff Powell was getting ready to fish. Kalder had seen enough films to understand what he was doing. In fact, he thought he could have given him a few pointers. After half a dozen timid gestures, Powell managed a feeble cast. As his lure hit the water the lake boiled and errupted. Powell knelt in the boat, pole bent double, and battled the monstrous fish. A trio of shark fins crossed the lake in precise formation, and circled the boat. Powell hauled valiantly on his line. The fish sounded, returned to the surface, suddenly shot off under the boat. Powell spun, lost his balance, and toppled overboard. "Damn," Pete said. "There he goes again." Kalder raised his binoculars and watched Powell drown. It was a drawn-out process. He gurgled and threshed, and his pathetic cries were frightening. Finally he sank out of sight. "Barney said one more time would be the end of it," Pete said. "We're not going to let him near the water again until he learns how to swim. Now we get another # resuscitation bill." T WO men came hurrying along the shore. They splashed into the water, hauled out Powell and carried him away. "We ought to leave him be dead," Pete said. "He don't write nothing but love stories anyway." "If he writes anything at all," Kalder said, "we need him." An airplane roared overhead. Kalder watched it curiously, saw a man jump, saw a parachute billow out. It floated down towards the lake. The shark fins converged immediately as the man hit the water. He got a raft inflated, and pulled himself in just as the sharks made their rush. Pete chuckled. "If Barney ever put teeth in them sharks, you'd be missing a lot of writers." Kalder continued to watch the airplane, which cut its motors abruptly and was lowered to the ground behind the trees on the other side of the lake. Another shot rang out in the jungle. Kalder got to his feet, and they circled the lake. At the next control point Pete called in. "Donald is hanging out around Area Five," he said. "That's the big forest over yonder." "What's he doing there?" "Don't know. That's where he's been eating. One of the concession men knows him. Want to find him?" "If we can." "We'll take a look." Beyond the lake, they came to a desert. They plodded onwards, sinking deeply into loose sand. In a small ravine they saw a man lying. His clothing was ragged, his figure emaciated. He croaked after them, "Water!" They walked on. "That's Bill Morris," Pete said. "He asked Barney what it felt like to die of thirst. Barney told him to go out in the desert and find out." Kalder nodded. Some of the writers used the Tank as a direct source of information. Others seemed to use it as a diversion -- like Jeff Powell, who came in for adventure. Bill Morris would be getting an excellent idea of what it would be like to die of thirst in a desert. Except -- He'd certainly been at it for several days, and that was a big investment in time in order to get the background for maybe one scene in an hour film. He might be able to use the background in several scripts. But still... They left the desert and came to gently rolling farm land. Cattle grazed by a small, meandering stream. Oddly enough, they were real cattle. Never having seen any, Kalder stopped to stare. They were eating something which had been spread out on the ground for them. Pete pulled Kalder to the right, and they entered a forest. "Area Five," he announced. T HE synthetic trees were large, and well-spaced. Synthetic grass covered the ground between them. There was no undergrowth. "Shouldn't be hard to find him," Pete said. They separated, and met again further on, in a clearing. Kalder thumped on metal, and looked upwards. "What's this?" "Vent," Pete said. "Solar power inlet. They're all over the place." "What's inside?" "Machinery and stuff." Kalder circled around the vent. The thing was enormous but he quickly lost interest in it and studied the surrounding forest. His hand came in contact with a door handle. He stopped in surprise, and opened the door. The vent stretched upwards an interminable distance, and ended in a blaze of light. Kalder staggered backwards, hands clasped to his eyes. It was a moment before his vision returned to him, and when it did he saw, a couple of feet below the door, a metal grating that spanned the vent. On the grating lay a man. Pete was beside him, looking in. "That's Donald," he said. It was a big man, a blond man, but his skin was burned black. Kalder said in alarm, "Donald?" "Let me alone," Donald said. "Get the hell out of here." He lay face down on the grating. He was nude, and he did not move when he spoke. "Maybe he's sick," Pete said. "He don't look so good. Shall we take him out?" Donald sat up. "Sick?" The dark skin of his face twisted with convulsive bitterness. "You're the sick ones. The dead ones. I'm getting some sunshine. This is one of the few places on this cursed planet where any can be had. Care to join me ? Then get out ! And leave me alone." Kalder introduced himself. He was, he explained, concerned about Donald because he'd been in the Tank for a month, and because he wasn't doing any writing. Would Donald mind telling Kalder what he was trying to do? "I'm trying to bore myself," Donald said. He lay down again,' and added, "It isn't easy." Kalder and Pete withdrew quietly, and closed the door. "Out," Kalder said. Pete obligingly led him to the nearest exit. K alder sought out his father that evening, to the older man's intense surprise. Doctor Kalder had wanted his son to study medicine. Kalder knew only too well the deadly monotony of the medical profession. Besides, he had no difficulty in finding more amusing ways of spending his time. It was only when he found that June's family sternly disapproved of a young man of twenty-seven who had no occupation or profession that he decided to go to work. Doctor Kalder was on night duty at a small branch clinic. There were no patients, and the doctor had the place to himself. "How is the job going?" he asked. He had been relieved when his son finally decided to do something. "I don't know," Kalder said. "Tell me, dad, what's the value of TV?" The doctor smiled slowly. "My guess would be that without it we'd have a serious situation on our hands in a matter of days. Maybe a revolution. Why?" "Tell me why?" Kalder said. And as the doctor looked at him in perplexity, he added, "I just want to hear someone talk about it." The doctor sighed. "So it has you discouraged already. You'll have to learn to apply yourself, Bruce. What will happen to the human race if you youngsters shirk your responsibilities? When the big move comes there won't be enough educated and professional people to keep things going." "TV," Kalder reminded him. "Why?" "There's nothing for people to do -- most people. It keeps them occupied. That's pretty obvious, isn't it?" "It seems to me that there's lots of things people could be doing. We keep hearing about the housing shortage. I saw a mob of people moving out of Q tunnel over in Section #. S here won't be any places for lem to go unless they move in with someone else. They have all that time to watch TV. Why doesn't someone put them to digging?" "It's been tried," the doctor said. "They won't do it. That's what brought oh the last riot, seven -- no, eight years ago." "Why won't they do it?" "They're satisfied with things the way they are. The four hours a week they accept, because it's always been that way. As long as we're able to feed and clothe them, and they're healthy, and they have fifteen films to choose from every hour, they won't take more. Oh, they'd like better quarters if someone else would fix them. But, as for doing it themselves -- why, the men grumble about that for hours, and the women grumble about the time they spend waiting to buy their supplies. "I see," Kalder said. He got to his feet. "How many doctors will we have thirty years from now?" "Enough for the present situation. Health is pretty well under control, down here." "But supposing we're ever able to get back to the surface?" "We won't have enough of anything." "I wish someone had spelled this out for me ten years ago." "I tried, Bruce," the doctor said. "I tried my best. Maybe I didn't spell very well." "Maybe I didn't listen very well. But -- thanks." Before he went home to his own plush quarters in the Bachelor's Club of Section # -- the section of the wealthy -- he walked around for a long time in a maze of passageways, looking through doorways at the flickering TV sets. the charts, and fingered one thoughtfully. "Mmm, yes. I can see you're working at it. We didn't try this. Getting anywhere?" June leaned forward anxiously, her hands clasped. "I can state the problem," Kalder said. "The problem is that they're not writing." "No. That's only one result. The problem is they have lost interest in their subject matter. And they have lost contact with reality." Paul Holbertson grinned slyly. He said to June, "You'll have to keep this boy away from the library." "I've done some reading," Kalder said. "I've studied my charts. And I've talked with a lot of writers. With a recorder. Listen." The voice was Walter Donald's bitter, accusative. "I shall write no more comedies about pirate ships. Or the private lives of queens. Or romances about knights in armor. Or adventures in space. God, what a laugh that is! Man in space -- when he can't even get out of a hole in the ground! We're drugging the people and ourselves with stories of things that aren't, and can't be -- and I'm beginning to doubt that they ever were. Those things I can't write, and I won't. What I can write I don't know." Kalder snapped it off. The president of Solar Productions said soberly, "This is more serious than I thought. Are they all like that?" "They're all getting that way. Are our competitors having the same trouble?" "I haven't any direct information, of course, but I'm certain they are. Only yesterday I suggested to Roger Atley give up one of our wires, so we could concentrate more on quality productions. He practically begged me not to think of such a thing. Which means he'd have a tough time finding someone who could provide material for it. Where do we go from here?" "We try to think of a way to renew their interest in their subject matter and put them back in touch with reality. I'm going to the library. By the way, I won't be ready to face the board tomorrow morning." "I don't think it will be necessary. Leave your charts with me, and write up a short summary of what you've accomplished to date. You've done an interesting thing, here, comparing number of scripts with time spent in the Tank. We'll kick it around, and I'll tell them you'll have some definite recommendations for the next meeting." June took his arm as they went out, and in the corridor he placed an affectionate kiss on her forehead, and one considerably more affectionate on her lips. "Going to save the family business?" she said. "Is it that bad?" "Every hour on the hour, we have to have four new films ready. One comedy, one romance, one adventure, and one miscellaneous. That's ninety-six deadlines to meet every day. We've even taken to sneaking an old film in now and then, just to pad things out, but people have terribly long memories, and it will be bad if we're caught. So -- yes, it's that bad." "I believe there's more at stake than you realize," KalHat qq "What do you mean?" "Things are much worse than you think." T HE Tank always seemed the same, in spite of the fact that there were different writers around, or writers doing different things. At Area Five Kalder found writer Jeff Powell lying on the synthetic gnass, staring at the synthetic forest. If Powell saw Kalder, he ignored him. Walter Donald was in his usual place in the vent. He made it very clear that he would like to ignore Kalder. "I have a problem," Kalder said, "and I need your help." Donald .rolled over on his stomach. The pattern of the grate was firmly impressed into his dark skin. "As a special favor," Kalder said, "Will you help me?" Donald did not look up. "What kind of problem?" "I'm trying to get a script written. It's about a writer. He and his family live in a small room over in Section #. He's the only writer that lives around there, and all the other men are factory workers. This writer works hard at writing, and his family can't understand why it takes so much time. The other men work for an hour, and then they come home and watch TV with their families. The writer works long hours, and he has to spend days in the Tank, looking for ideas. He makes good wages, and his family can have luxuries other families can't afford, but his children just can't understand why he's never home to watch TV with them. I can't think of a way to end it. Can you help me out?" Donald said flatly, "Nuts. Didn't you ever read Code? They'd never film a thing like that." "Of course they'll film it, if I can get it written. Question is, could you write it? I realize you've never done anything like that, and if you don't think you could handle it, just say the word. I'll look for someone else." Donald sat up. He stared dully at Kalder, his scowl wrinkling dark lines in his dark forehead. The sunlight had bleached his blond hair to a startling whiteness. He said, "I know Code forwards and backwards. I could get fired for wasting time on something like that." "I'm taking the responsibility," Kalder said. "Could you write it?" "I don't know." He got up, and climbed out of the vent. "A writer, you say? How many children?" "That's up to you. How many children do you have?" "Three. Three children. They want him to watch TV with them, you say? But he hates TV, of course, because he writes scripts for TV, so whenever they turn it on he..." He pulled on his clothing and wandered away, mumbling to himself. edge of the woods, and sat down beside Powell. Powell did not look at him. "In autumn," he said, "the leaves turn color. Nature paints a masterpiece in the forest. By and by, the leaves fall to the ground. If I waited here long enough, do you suppose these leaves would change color and fall?" "Those leaves will never change color," Kalder said. Powell winced. He regarded Kalder gravely. "Friend, have you ever seen a tree? No, not this junk. A real tree. Have you ever felt one? I've put lots of trees into my scripts, but I never saw a tree. Isn't that ridiculous? What does a tree feel like? What does it taste like? Can you taste a tree?" "You write romance, don't you?" Kalder asked the writer. "When I write, I write romances. Romances with trees. Meet me under the green willow tree, my love. The weeping green willow tree. Do you know what a weeping green willow tree looks like? Production doesn't. I went to the library once, and found a picture. Production made my weeping green willow tree into an oak." "According to the records, you've written a few comedies, too. Think you could handle a romantic comedy?" "I am not feeling funny these days." "This would be different. There's a man who works in a factory, and he can't get along with his foreman. They hate each other, and they're always fighting about something. Then the foreman's son falls in love with this guy's daughter. The two mothers get to know each other, and they try to help the kids while the two men are trying to keep them apart. I suppose it would be quite a job to keep it funny. If you don't think you could do it..." "Yeah," Powell said. "Then the kids decide to break it up, to keep the old men happy, and the old men decide to pretend to be friends to keep the kids happy. Yeah." He pushed himself erect. "Say, mister, did you ever hear about Code? They'd never film it." "Certainly they'd film it. I'd take care of that for you." "If you say so. Let's see, now. The foreman keeps trying to spy on his son, and the other guy keeps trying to spy on his daughter, so the two keep running into each other while..." Kalder slipped quietly away. Wild profanity attracted his attention from the direction of the lake. A writer whom he did not know by sight was attempting to fish, and on his first cast Barney's monster of the deep had snapped his line. "I have a problem," Kalder said. "I want to get a script written. There's this fellow who lives in a small room with his family, and when radiation seepage makes everyone move out on the next corridor, three families had to move in with them. He doesn't like it, so he goes off to an undeveloped corridor and digs out a new room for his family. Then he decides one room isn't enough, so he digs out two more. Everyone thinks he's crazy, wanting so much space, and when he gets through the government decides he has too much space, so five families are moved in with him. Do you think you can write it?" The writer dropped his fishing pole. He stuttered, "What -- what about Code?" tile. Several were violently angry. June Holbertson looked hurt ; her father seemed merely puzzled. Kalder said calmly, "I accept full responsibility." "That's all very well," old Emmanuel Holbertson sputtered. "You accept the responsibility, but it's our reputations that are ruined!" "To continue my report," Kalder said, "I have organized a small group of the company's writers. They represent ten per cent of the total, and they are out-producing the other ninety per cent at the rate of ten to one. I have had fifty production units assigned to my control. Those units are shooting scripts as fast as my writers can produce them. I have assumed full responsibility for the company's fourth wire, the miscellaneous channel, and for the past two weeks that channel has carried nothing but films I have produced myself. I will ask the Chairman of the Board: Has he received any complaints about the fourth channel programs?" "I saw some of those films myself, Kalder, and I'm complaining!" "We adopted Code for a good reason, Bruce," Paul Holbertson said. "You shouldn't have thrown it out without discussing it with the board." "I was given complete authority to take the steps I thought necessary to solve a problem. I have solved the problem. I did discuss what I intended to do with half-adozen top-level government officials, including the head of the Board of Censorship. They approved the project, and I have letters of congratulation from them on the way it's been working out. They think TV is going to help them solve some of their problems. I have checked with the Information Center, and I find that our fourth channel programs have taken over the popularity lead." "Code," Paul Holbertson said, "is the reason for our existence. You seem to have missed the point entirely. TV has a purpose, and a very important purpose." "Code was stupid those many years ago when it was adopted. Or is it generations ago? It was stupid then, and now it's idiotic. With your permission I'll give you my reasons for the action I've taken." Interruptions exploded around the table. A vice president put the motion : the position of Vice President and Director of Writing Personnel to be abolished immediately, and Bruce Kalder dismissed. Seconded and passed. "Thank you," Kalder said. "I regret that our relationship was so short-lived, but for the time that I have been connected with Solar Productions, I am more grateful than I can tell you." He turned away with only one regret -- June, who sat blinking her eyes to keep back the tears. He had gained much, and he had lost much, but one of his gains was the. realization that there were more important things than his personal happiness. ly, and hurried after him. Outside the door, Kalder gripped her arm. "I'd like to show you something," he said. They caught a company swing train, and rode over to the Tank. Night was approaching in Barney's domain. The ceiling lights were being gradually dimmed. In time they would go out, and the artificial stars would be turned on. He led her along a jungle trail, and over the hill and along the lake. She said, "It looks very real, doesn't it?" "It looks like our idea of real. But this, and .our idea, are both false. You know that, don't you?" "This is the first time I've ever been here. What do the writers do?" He did not answer. They walked down to the lake, and removed their sandals. The shark fins paraded towards them as they waded in. Kalder said, "The trouble is, you and I, and the board, and all those like us have lost touch with the people. The people live in a reality that is different from ours. Children of the wealthy receive the best educations, choose the careers they want, and look forward to a happy and useful lifetime. They live in comfort. They have clubs, and recreation facilities. There is room for those things, for a few people. The wealthy have a rather satisfying existence. "But what about the people? Their education is limited. There aren't the facilities, and they don't really need any. They're just hanging around and reproducing themselves so there will be plenty of people when we get ready to go back to the surface. They do a little work, they eat and sleep, and the rest of the time they watch TV. They escape into a fantasy that doesn't exist and probably will never exist again for centuries -- a world where there are trees, and plants, and animals, and rivers of pure water." "Isn't it good for them to get their minds off the way things are?" she said. "That's Code. The Code philosophy. The Code tyranny. It's horrible. The people have given up. They've surrendered completely. When we first moved underground people must have slaved to achieve what we have now. They built well. And then, when the machines were operating and living quarters prepared, there seemed to be nothing for them to do. So the film companies were established to give them TV, and the companies worked hard to provide settings that would seem real. The films let the people dream of what they had lost. They are still dreaming. There are more of us now, and the people are crowded. But no one plans ahead. No one is interested !" They waded out of the lake, and the shark fins drifted away. They dried their feet on the synthetic grass, and put on the sandals, and walked on. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "Form my own company. I won't have any trouble getting a wire or two. The old companies just can't get enough scripts for the ones they have. It won't be easy, but I think it will work. We won't have high production costs. We can shoot our films right out in the corridors, or in anyone's living quarters. Scripts won't give us any trouble. Donald is turning out five a day. He just can't stop, and some of the others are doing almost as well." "Isn't that strange, when they couldn't write according to Code?" "The first script writers wrote about something they remembered," Kalder said. "They wrote about a world they had lived in -- the world the way it used to be. And then there were those who "A star," he said, were told what the others re"I've seen films about stars membered, and each genera -- going to the stars." tion got one more step re"Perhaps men will, some moved from what was once day. But they'll have to get reality. The Tank was supout of the ground first, posed to be kind of a crutch There'll be a long wait, and for the writers' imagination we can't spend it dreaming, to lean on, but we're so many We need to be getting ready, years removed from the kind so when our children, or their of reality it represents that it children, or grandchildren has lost its value. Men get climb out, they'll be able to tired of crutches. They'll alfight and win back this world, ways prefer walking without It'll be hard for the first ones them." out. Maybe they'll think they would have been better off H E caught her arm as they staying underground, and TV stumbled through the films will show them what a sand of the desert. grand, comfortable life that "Feel like doing battle with was. But they'll make the Solar Productions?" he asked, move. They must make it, and "With you, I do." we'll have to start planning He slipped his arm around now." her, and led her through the "I remember a film about a trees of Area Five. He opened star," she said. "A little girl the door of the vent, and saw it, and made a wish." pointed upwards. "Look." "Do you have a wish?" She looked. Above was "I think I do." They wished blackness, and a glimmer of together, looking up. Few fields of science have suffered as much from the encumbrances of poor definition as hypnosis. 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Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, New York. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment Galaxy Novels are sturdy, inexpensive editions of choice works of imaginative suspense both original and reprint, selected by the editors of Galaxy Magazine. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me postpaid the novels cheeked below. by S. Fowler Wright by Raymond F. Jones by Wilson Tucker by Sam Merwin Jr. by Isaac Asimov by J. Leslie Mitchell by James Blish by Louis Padgett by Edmond Hamilton by James Blish by Murray Leinster by David V. Reed by L. Sprague de Comp by Murray Leinster by Lewis Padgett by Malcolm Jameson by Fritz Leiber by Flecher Pratt by F. L. Wallace' by Hal Clement by Manly Wade WeHman by Mark Clifon  Frank Riley by Raymond F. Jones  For  # or # each Enclose check, cash or money order. We poy postage Add ## Foreign Postage Name Address. City .Zone. IF  Novelette That's How It Goes It's easy to get Aperdui. A phone call at the wrong moment -- a meal too many -- a screen star wearing too many clothes . It's easy. And it's fun... By j. t. McIntosh Illustrated by Ritter I T HE four censors watched the takes in silence. When the lights came on in the small projection room, the Second Censor said to the First Censor: "You're quite right. It's not merely undesirably sexy, in fact obscene -- there's not even an attempt at an excuse for it. Now if the subject of the film had been historical, or if the climate had been such that -- " "A clear case," said the Third Censor briskly. "I have the names of the actress, producer, director, script-writer and cameramen here. Shall I send them all on to the Transportation Board?" "If you like," said the First Censor. "But the producer, director, script-writer and cameramen will wriggle out of it. They always do. I guess you'd save everybody trouble if you just send the actress to the Transportation Board." "I guess so," the Third Censor agreed. "Okay, Sandra Kay goes before the Board tomorrow. I'll attend to the details. Now let's see that last take again." The beautiful blonde in the transparent nightdress smiled seductively at them again, undulating even as she lay on a couch. "Funny how movies used to be cut when the girls wore too few clothes," the Second Censor mused. "Obviously this is only obscene because she's wearing that promiscuous garment. When she takes it off later, the whole thing becomes perfectly respectable." There was silence until Sandra Kay had finished cavorting about the screen. Then the Third Censor said: "Just to be quite sure we aren't making any mistake about this, let's see that again, huh?" #V#U haven't even an exI cuse?" the overseer persisted. Johnny Horne shrugged. "Well, it seems a little thing, working through the break. I've done it before, and knocked off early." "Yes, but this time you didn't knock off early. A little thing, indeed! Do you realize that you produced three hundred pairs of shoes above quota? What are we going to do with those three hundred pairs of shoes? Don't you know that salesmen trying to increase demand so that we can unload our surplus stocks? And you casually produce an extra three hundred pairs of shoes just because you didn't feel like taking time off for a glass of milk and a smoke !" "I . like working," said Johnny naively. The overseer went purple. "You like working! When the police bring in a man on a homicide charge, does it do him any good to say 'I like ing! Haven't you ever heard that Earth's Balance Must Be Preserved? How can Earth's Balance Preserved h irresponsible youngsters like you insist on making three hundred pairs of shoes above quota?" "I won't do it again." "Darn right you won't. I like you, Johnny, but this isn't the first time something like this has happened. I'm sending your name to the Transportation Board." Johnny was aghast. "You don't mean it? Just for making a few pairs of shoes above quota?" The overseer raised his eyes to heaven. "Obviously you don't understand, Johnny, and never will understand. That's why you're going before the Board tomorrow." contentedly. "That sure was a feed," he said. "Boy, do I like French cooking!" Kate was draining the last drop of coffee. They were a strange pair. They looked as if they could have nothing in common. Tubby weighed # pounds, and he was not quite five feet five. His little round face was almost hidden by folds of fat, but in the middle of the roundness could be discerned two little round eyes, a little round nose and a little round mouth. Kate weighed less than # pounds, and she was five feet eight. She was a broomstick with two small bumps on it. The truth was they shared quite a lot, including a bed, although they had never got around to marriage. Principally they had gluttony in common. They had the same view of heaven -- a place where it was possible to eat all day and most of the night. Earth was not heaven. No fantastically crowded world could be rich in food. Though there was no actual rationing, Earth was no paradise for people who liked to top off a six-course meal with fortyHowever, they coped with the situation fairly well. They left the restaurant and Tubby hailed a cab. He didn't give their final destination ; he was too wily for that. He named a neutral, unimportant spot and paid off the cabbie when they reached it. Another taxi took them to Bertini's. "We haven't been here for at least three weeks," Kate murmured. "I've almost forgotten what Italian food tastes like. Let's start with ham and melon, and then have spaghetti a la Bolognese." They couldn't have dessert; nobody was ever supplied with more than two courses. Twenty minutes later Tubby sighed contentedly. "That sure was a feed," he said. "Boy, do I like Italian cooking!" From Bertini's they walked to the Metropole, Kate skipping like a bird as she always did. Tubby breasting the traffic like an aircraft carrier. It was a long way, and they were famished when they arrived. "Chicken Maryland," Tubby decided. He never got it. Suddenly there were three cops around them. Tubby blinked at them doubtfully. One had a notebook. "Okay, Buster," he said. "Explain this. First you ate at the Grill. Then at the Paris Soir. Then at Bertini's. Now you're here. What do you think you are -- two sacks of loot on legs?" They couldn't explain it. At least, Tubby did explain it, tearfully and sincerely, but the cops had no sympathy with the plain, unvarnished truth: "We were hungry." T OM C A M M added the fourth nutrient solution to the culture in the tank, watching it carefully. The culture j. t. McIntosh sometimes got sick, just like human digestion, and had to be drained promptly. Hie phone rang. Tom looked at it, puzzled, shrugged and went over to pick it up. If a call was switched through to him while he was engaged in such critical work, it must be important. "Tom?" "Joan ! How in hell did you get the girl on the switchboard to put your call through?" "I told her it was a matter of life and death, which it is. Tom, we've got to get married right away !" "You mean... She giggled. "No, I don't mean that. I mean we're getting a two-room flat. We move in before next Tuesday !" "Joan, that's great! Most couples have to wait years. How did you..." Sudden suspicion sharpened his voice. "You didn't... ?" "No, I didn't, and you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking such a thing. I guess it must be a mistake, but they won't put us out if we get married and move in right away. So we've got to get married the moment you leave the laboratories tonight." "Sure, Joan. Gee. this is great news ! This must be my lucky day." He wasn't quite so sure about that half an hour later, on the carpet before his boss. "It's incredible, Camm, absolutely incredible. It wouldn't have surprised me if a young technician had done it, but that you should stand casually talking on the phone to your girl friend while behind you a whole vat of culture died... Camm, I can still hardly believe it." "What Joan had to tell me, sir, was -- " "It doesn't matter one tenth of a damn what the girl was telling you! The moment you realized a private  call had been switched to you at a critical stage in the process, you should have hung up. If you'd done that, it would have been possible to save the vat." Tom considered making another appeal, but he knew it was no good. Finally he said simply: "Yes, sir. You're sending me to the Transportation Board?" "Not only you, Camm, but the girl on the switchboard who let that call through and the girl who made it. I'm sorry Camm. But on a world as overcrowded as Earth is, a vat of synthetic food is worth more than the same vat filled with gold, platinum and uranium." "Yes, sir," said Tom. He was resigned. It was the end of everything, of course. If Joan agreed, they'd spend this night together and then kiH themselves before the interview with the Board. u T HE next morning seven people collected in a gloomy waiting-room at Transportation House. There was Sandra Kay, the young, beautiful but not yet famous actress who had offended the censors by wearing too much. She would never become famous now. There was Johnny Horne, who liked work so much that he had made three hundred pairs of shoes above quota. If he didn't know by now that the Balance Must Be Preserved, Earth had no further use for him. There were Tubby Brooks and Kate Rimmer, who had tried to get more than their fair share of an overcrowded world's most vital commodity -- food. There was Tom Camm, whose negligence had resulted in something just as serious -- the destruction of food. Joan Liverage, his accomplice in crime. Sylvia Oliver, another accomplice in the same heinous crime. Joan, who had not agreed to commit suicide with Tom, kept well out of the switchboard girl's way. She might easily become violent. The middle-aged secretary looked them over indifferently and sent Sandra Kay in first. Her boss would never forgive her if she delayed his making the acquaintance of a gorgeous creature like that by as much as a second. Sandra Kay looked at the little brown-faced man behind the desk, threw off her fur cape and sat down, crossing her legs so that from where he was sitting he couldn't see her skirt at all. Inwardly boiling with anger, she knew it would do her no good at all to show it. "Mr. Rawlings?" she said, smiling dazzlingly. Rawlings had brightened the moment she entered the room.He scrabbled among the papers on his desk. Ah, yes, this must be the actress, Sandra Kay. "Miss Kay," he said, "the charge against you is that you appeared in an obscene film. More particularly, that you wore erotic and unnecessary garments." "Just one," said Sandra. "A nightdress. Nothing else." "You admit the charge, then?" "I admit I wore a nightdress, yes. What's wrong in that?" She smiled dazzingly at him again, but this time her smile was wasted, for he was looking at the sheet in front of him. "As an experienced actress, Miss Kay, you know what is permissible and what is not. I understand that it would have been all right if you wore a respectable, opaque nightdress or nothing at all, j. t. McIntosh but the kind of garment you wore has been ruled dangerously provocative." He looked her up and down. "This I can well imagine to be the case." "Why, thank you, Mr. Rawlings." Rawlings coughed. "You have been sent here because you -- " "Now, just a minute, Mr. Rawlings. There has been no criminal charge against me, and if I were to stand trial I guess I'd have a chance of getting off. Why shouldn't I just tell you to go to hell?" D get off. Miss Kay. In that case you would be sent to a tough, inhospitable, sparsely-populated criminal world such as Roc. Worlds like Roc will never be developed, except as criminal settlements. If you were sent there, you -- even you -- would have nothing to look forward to but a tough, unpleasant life and an early, unpleasant death. On the other hand, if you accept transportation here and now, you will go to Aperdui, a pleasant world right at the top of the list for development." "Not Verdan or Mistan?" "Ah, Verdan." Rawlings suddenly became wistful. "I spent twenty-five years in Verdan, and I can't wait to get back. Most Transpbrtation officials are colonists, you know, Miss Kay. I tell you honestly, I can't wait for my term of duty here on Earth to be over so that I can return to Verdan." "But I can't go there?" "I'm afraid not. Verdan is now fully self-supporting, fully developed, able to populate itself without further need of immigrants. It's off the list of Transportation worlds. So is Mistan. But Aperdui is a grand world." "Population?" "Only a few thousand at the moment, but -- " "A hick world. No radio, television, cars, trucks, hospitals, cinemas, theaters, washing machines, books, magazines, newspapers -- " "Now there you're wrong, Miss Kay. There is a small emergency clinic, and a mimeographed newspaper is published twice a week." "Huh," said Sandra. She caught Rawling's eye and held it. "If I went for trial, tell me frankly, what would be my chances ?" "Frankly, Miss Kay, you probably wouldn't get Roc. But you wouldn't be allowed to stay on Earth either. You'd get Aperdui anyway." "I see." Sandra stood up. "I believe you." Rawling's eyes ran up her golden legs, caressed her hips, popped at her bust and finally reached her golden head, exhausted. Although he was a colonist, automatically placing the colonies, any colony, before alii most everything else, what difference did just one colonist make? "In certain circumstances, Miss Kay," he said, not meeting her eyes, "I might be persuaded to recommend that you be allowed to stay on Earth." She knew exactly what he meant. She knew what he meant better than he did. He meant that she could remain on Earth as his mistress until the relationship became tiresome, awkward or inconvenient for him, at which time easily the neatest solution would be to withdraw his protection and have her sent to Aperdui to be out of the way. "Thanks, Mr. Rawlings" she said. "I sure appreciate that. I'll take Aperdui." the other six one by one. None of them had even as good a chance of escaping transportation as Sandra. "I envy you," he told Tubby Brooks bracingly. "Aperdui will make a man of you, my boy. In a few months you'll be half your present weight. AH that fat will drop off, and you'll become lean and hard and bronzed. If I were twentyfive years younger and didn't have friends and relatives on Verdan, I'd be delisted to change places with you." "What's the food situation on Aperdui?" Tubby asked urgently. "Food? There's enough, of course. Aperdui has good agricultural land, excellent grazing... but then, you see, with the population snowballing as immigrants from Earth arrive, naturally there's never any surplus. Every harvest has to provide for the present population plus the twenty thousand or so who will arrive before the next harvest. There's enough food, my boy. But there's never anything over." Tubby groaned. So did Kate when she heard this grim news. Rawlings didn't suggest to Kate that in certain circumstances he might be persuaded to recommend that she be allowed to stay on Earth. Too thin, he decided critically. Tom Camm listened in silence. He was probably the most intelligent of the seven, the one best able to exploit any loophole that might have existed. He was also, however, the one with the strongest case against him. Carelessness with food production on a world as desperately overcrowded as Earth was more than a misdemeanor. He was lucky, indeed, to get the chance of going to Aperdui. He might easily have been sent to Roc. Rawlings hesitated over Joan. She was thin too, and her mouth was too big. Her legs, however, were nearly as good as Sandra's. In the end, not caring much one way or j. t. McIntosh the other, he gave her the chance. Joan considered it for quite a while. She very much wanted to remain on Earth. Everybody knew that life on the new colonies was hell. Earth never seemed like heaven until suddenly you were faced with the prospect of leaving it for ever. She would lose Tom if she stayed, of course. Nevertheless, she went on considering it. Finally she decided, however, that if she took advantage of Rawling's offer it probably wouldn't be long until she was before the Transportation Board again for something else. And if that happened she would have lost Tom for nothing. She said she'd go to Aperdui. Of the seven, only Johnny Horne could see anything in favor of Aperdui. "You mean I can work as hard as I like?" he said joyfully. Rawlings nodded. "From what I know of you, my boy, and from my own experiences on a planet like Aperdui, I should say you'll probably become a very successful man. Not one of the richest men in the world, since as far as I can make out you're too honest for that, but prettv comfortable nevertheless. By the time you're forty, when the rough edges of Aperdui will be smoothed out a little, I guess you'll be a pretty important man out there." "Maybe it won't be so bad at that," Johnny reflected. "It makes sense, my boy, that a man who works too hard on Earth should be sent to the colonies. That's where a man who works hard ought to be. It'll be years before there are any unions in Aperdui, any upper-limit quotas, any problems of surplus production." Johnny pondered. Already Sandra Kay, the kind of girl who would never have looked at him if they had both lived out their lives on Earth, was showing signs of interest in him. Sandra was a realist. It had taken her no time at all to readjust and see for herself, by more intuitive methods than Rawlings had used, that a strong, healthy, energetic, enthusiastic young man like Johnny Home was liable to accomplish a lot more on Aperdui than he could ever have done on Earth. "Maybe it won't be so bad at that," Johnny said at last. The telephone girl, Sylvia Oliver, came last... A fterwards. Rawlings delivered a little sermon. It was always much the same. At first he had tried to say something a little different each time, but at the hundredth repetition of what was essentially the same speech the words came out in a treacly flow as if he had turned the spigot on a barrel oi molasses. "I don't want you to leave here laboring under a sense of injustice," he said earnestly. "The plain fact is, Earth has to get rid of at least ten million people every year. Less than a tenth of that number emigrate voluntarily, despite all the publicity campaigns." Tom cast an ironical glance at the poster on the wall beside him. The girl in the picture was nearly as pretty as that blonde actress. Her eyes invited. Come to Aperdui and get me. See what's waiting for you if you come to Aperdui. How could anybody be dumb enough not to want to come to Aperdui? But there was still, fortunately or unfortunately, a free press. People could read about Aperdui and Roc and Verdan and Mistan. They knew that the worlds the Transportation Board sent settlers to were always frontier worlds where a farm and the nearest cinema could be twenty light-years away. Of course, if you were very lucky, you might be sent to a wond like Verdan or Mistan just before transportation to that world stopped. Verdan was still sparsely populated -- indeed, by Terran standards it was uninhabited. But Verdan was self-sufficient. That meant that Verdan had enough people on it to support factories that made cars, electrical appliances and even such luxuries as bottles and mirrors and shaving cream. It would be a long time before Aperdui reached such a state. No wonder, Tom idealistic idiots were taken in by the posters each year. people have to be made to emigrate each year," Rawlings went on. "Preferably best. It makes sense, doesn't it? The colonies need these people desperately ; Earth desperately needs to get rid of them. So -- " "So I get sent away," Joan exclaimed, "for ringing up my fiance to tell him some good news." Rawlings nodded. "Exactly. What I'm trying to tell you is, it's not unfair. You haven't been badly treated, any of you. Only so many convicts can be sent to planets like Aperdui. You wouldn't want to live in a sparsely-populated world with murderers and thieves all around you, would have to be found. Maybe j. t. McIntosh you'd rather it was settled by a lottery. The governments of the world decided it would be fairer this way, that's all." H E looked at Tom. "You needn't have been sent here. You knew that you were in sole charge of a complicated and vital process. The instant you found the phone call was only from -- " "I know," sighed Tom. "I've had all that already." Rawlings's gaze passed to Joan. "You've been told you musn't phone the laboratories. You chose to ignore that. You, Horne, disregarded clear labor regulations. You two took up more than your fair share of Earth's supplies. And you, Miss Kay, knew perfectly well you were making an obscene film." "I didn't think it was obscene." "But you knew the censors would, didn't you?" Rawlings sighed, knowing they were unsympathetic, and made one final try. "Twentyfive years ago I was in exactly the same position as all of you. I'd falsified a report in an attempt to get a flat, after waiting three years. When I was brought before the Transportation Board, I felt as you feel now. And I'll be honest with you, Verdan seemed to me, when I got there, even worse than I expected. But now. twenty-five years later I -- " "We all know," said Tom. "You envy us. Look, if I spent twenty-five years trying to give up dope and finally succeeded, I'd be glad I'd made it in the end. But that doesn't mean I'd enjoy every minute of the twenty-five years. Cut the cackle -- what happens now?" When they had gone, Rawlings stared gloomily at the papers in front of him. For sheer frustration, this job took some beating. Satisfied settlers were always employed for these interviews, in the hope of sparkling off some enthusiasm in the disgruntled emigrants. But Rawlings hadn't seen any enthusiasm in this bunch. The sooner his contract was up and he could get back to good old Verdan the better. Then Rawlings brightened a little. At least there was Sylvia Oliver. The kiss she had given him to seal the bargain made his collar feel too tight when he thought about it. And he needn't feel he was selling out the colonies. A girl like that would be sure to land in trouble again within six months The reflection salved his conscience. His conscience didn't bother him because he was cheating the other six, the six who were going to Aperdui. It bothered him because he was cheating Sylvia Oliver by keeping her here on Earth. mm Ill get used to the idea of starting a new life on Aperdui. Since passengers were always kept in cocoons, the journey from Earth to Aperdui didn't exist as far as they were concerned. They were suddenly, very suddenly -- too suddenly -- just new settlers dumped in the middle of a prairie somewhere in Aperdui. The tall man in check shirt and filthy breeches -- he didn't bother to tell them his name -- pointed at the rough shelter and said : "Started your house for you. Always do that for new settlers. Guess there was some mistake about your group. Thought there was a spare woman. Bill Perkins will be mad as hell when he shows." Johnny found himself the spokesman for the group. "You're not going? We know nothing about this place." Check Shirt didn't pause on the way to his horse. Over his shoulder he said: "Bill Perkins will be here in a couple hours. No harm you can come to till then." They watched him ride off slowly in the afternoon heat. Then they looked around. No Earthman of the eighteenth, nineteenth or early twentieth century would have been much perturbed by what they saw. The country was flat, consisting of grassland, bracken, black rock and occasional small clumps of trees. The scene wasn't unlike early American prairie. But there hadn't been any American prairie left for a couple of centuries or so, and the three men and three women from Earth saw Aperdui as naked, terrifying wilderness. To them, ground was concrete, horizons were skylines, and the only open spaces were seas (now rapidly being covered with huge floating cities) . By elimination, the crude shelter fifty yards from them must be the "house" Check Shirt had said had been started for them. It consisted of four thick poles supporting a plaited-grass roof. A foot off the ground a rough wooden floor had been constructed. That was all. There was no road. A truck had borne them across the prairie, jolting so much that they'd hardly been able to see the country. It was hot, but not too hot. And no more than a hundred yards beyond the shelter was a broad, clear stream -- the reason, no doubt, for the choice of site. "Anyway, we can have a swim," Sandra said, stripping off her clothes. "There may be fish -- crabs -- water insects," Tom warn"Well, we'll soon find out." the stream. One by one, as nothing disastrous happened to her, the others peeled and followed her. Johnny swam upstream after Sandra. He caught her in a clear pool and kissed her. She laughed, threw her hair out of her eyes and swam still further upstream at a rate he couldn't match. Sandra was still a realist. Although the matter hadn't been discussed among them, they all knew that in conditions like those of Aperdui there would be no bachelors and spinsters except women who couldn't get a man and men who couldn't get a woman. Sandra had to take Johnny or somebody else, and pretty damn quick. She didn't have to marry him -- nobody would worry much about marriage during the next twenty years or so. Whether a man and woman living together were married or not didn't matter until there were neighbors. And it would be a long time before there were any neighbors. Johnny finally caught Sandra far upstream and pulled her to the bank. She let him kiss her but she didn't let him do anything else, not yet. A girl had her pride. One manifestation of this was how long she kept him waiting. It might not be years, months, weeks. It might not even he days. But it had to be at least a few hours no matter what. When Bill Perkins arrived they were sitting or lying in the sun beside the stream. All of them had put something on, just to prove they were still civilized, even in such a world. Bill Perkins didn't look civilized at all, though he wore a check shirt and fairly clean shorts. He was tall and lean, thirty or so, heavily tanned, slow-speaking and quick-moving. Johnny, at least, liked him on sight, Perkins was philosophical about the absence of a spare woman. "Guess I'd better stick around till you've got the hang of things," he said. "Have to move on then, though. Gather round, folks, and I'll try to explain the setup." "Do you have to talk like a cowboy?" asked Joan, irritated. H E looked her over for a few seconds before replying. "No," he said mildly. "I could talk like an advertising copywriter, which is what I used to be. With an effort, I could talk like a college professor, considering I once went to college. But somehow there doesn't seem to be much use for ten-dollar words out here. It's surprising how many words I know and don't have to use." "How's the food situation?" asked Tubby eagerly. Perkins looked him over too. j. t. McIntosh Tubby had lost thirty pounds on the trip, but he still looked like a balloon man, especially with his naked belly hanging over the towel which covered his loins. When Perkins spoke, he didn't answer Tubby's question directly. "First, we get some ground cleared," he said. "Guess we can borrow a horse and plough from the Rosenheims, ten miles thataway. We get the seed for free. And meantime we draw supplies in relation to the acreage we got planted, or intend to plant. The first load arrives by truck at sunset." "You don't use cash yet?" Johnny inquired. "Well, we do, but for new settlers it's an abstraction. We'll have to live on credit for a couple of years anyway, and nobody counts the pennies too accurately, any more than you will when another new group is set down ten miles to the east. That won't happen for about five years, anyway. Won't happen at all if you can show you can use more than ten miles of land. There's plenty of land, if you can show it isn't going to be wasted." "Sheep?" asked Johnny. "Can we stock with sheep?" Perkins favored him with the same searching scrutiny. This time he seemed to like what he saw. "You could," he said. "But a lot of other guys had heard of Australia before they got here. And, though you probably think you're pioneers, you're too late to make a fortune with sheep. Best bet would be wheat, I'd say. Soil's right for it too." "Sometimes you say 'we' and sometimes 'you,' " Johnny said. "How long are you staying, Bill?" "Well, I thought there was an extra woman in this party. Might find one and bring her. If I don't, guess I won't wait any longer than I have to. Maybe a couple of months, to get you started. Any of you know anything about farming? Somebody must, or you wouldn't have been left together like this." "I do," said Tom. "Via hydroponics." Perkins gave him the usual slow examination. A good second-in-command, he thought. A man with brains but no drive. Johnny Horne would be the leader. A T last Perkins turned back to Tubby, whose question had never been answered. "We get the first load of supplies bv truck at sunset," he repeated. "There'll be enough to keep us alive and healthy, sure. But by the look of you, mister, you're going to be hungry for about thirty years. It'll be that time before anybody around here will be able to eat until he busts." A groan escaped Tubby. At the same time Sandra jumped and slapped her knee. "Something bit me !" she said. Perkins scrutinized her, too. In white satin shorts and a green ribbon of a brassiere, she looked like a film star, which perhaps was hardly surprising. Above his reach, Bill decided without regret. Besides, Johnny seemed to have claims. "Mosquito," he said. "It stings some, that's all." "Didn't mosquitoes used to carry disease?" Joan asked sharply. "Malaria, or something?" Bill Perkins shrugged. "Never knew of anybody getting sick after mosquito bites here." "Insects, not only mosquitoes, used to be carriers," Tom said. "Unless there's something to carry, they're pretty harmless. Malaria died out on Earth before the carriers did. The last mosquitoes were clean." "I thought there were no vehicles on Aperdui except carts," Johnny said. "But a truck brought us here." "There's about ten trucks on this world, all assembled from parts brought from Earth. There's even a couple of helicopters. But they're for real emergencies. Aren't even brought out for straightforward things like maternity cases." All the women had been thinking about this already. On Earth it was possible to have babies between television shows. They had already guessed that here things might be slightly different. They talked about the arrangements for expectant mothers for a while, and then Kate suddenly said : "Where's Tubby? I haven't seem him since -- " The stream was in a slight hollow. When they climbed out of it and looked at the shelter, they saw Tubby right away, hanging from the rafters. Apart from a few gasps from the women, there was silence. Nobody rushed to cut him down. He was too still for it to be worth while. Besides, most of them felt that if that was what Tubby wanted, nobody ought to. try to take it from him. Bill looked around and for the first time surveyed Kate. She was thin and stringy. But he liked thin and stringy women, being lean himself. "Guess maybe I won't be moving on after all," he said. T HE first time the supply truck called it merely dumped supplies and left. The second time, however, it brought a supply officer, Harry Rinker. Rinker listened as Johnny outlined their plans. Bill Perkins stayed around, silent. Some things the new settlers had to find out for themselves. When Johnny was through, Rinker made quick mental j. t. McIntosh estimates and told them what he could supply on the basis of the plans presented to him. It wasn't quite enough to keep the six of them alive. From there Johnny went to the other extreme. He had presented his minimum aims first. Now he tried his maximum on Rinker. The supply officer shook his head. The six of them just couldn't do that much, he said. A reasonable compromise was reached. When Rinker had gone, Johnny turned to Bill, frowning. "I thought it was possible to build up from nothing here? On that basis, we'll be in debt all our lives." "Well, you need to work pretty hard," said Bill judicially. "I was transported from Earth for working too hard." "Were you, now? That's interesting. You'll never be transported from Aperdui for anything like that. Well, look, Johnny, most people are too optimistic about what they can do. That's why Rinker has to be cautious. You can succeed here, like anywhere else, if you have the basic qualities." "And what are the basic qualities? What's the basic quality?" Bill thought for a moment. Then he said slowly : "I guess it would be knowing when to keep going and when to dig in. The cautious guys, the guys who aren't prepared to risk anything, don't do much better here than anywhere else. And the stop-at-nothing guys, the guys who won't give an inch no matter how badly the breaks run against them, they don't become Rockefellers either. It's the guys who run the tide when things are going good, taking on twice, five times as much as they planned, and dig in the moment the tide starts turning -- those guys are the guys who come out on top in a place like this." Johnny nodded thoughtfully. "Another thing. Why are new groups left to fend for themselves like this, with only one fellow who knows the ropes to help them? Why aren't we mixed in with experienced farmers, who know the conditions and the climate and the planet itself?" "Well, now, Johnny, new settlements have to be lands of promise. There's got to be something to work for, to live for. Suppose the six of us here did well the first year and better the next and even better the year after. Suppose we had the best goddam farm in the whole of Aperdui, and the best workers. How would we like it if sombody came along and split us all up, sending us in twos to work with new groups just out from Earth?" "I get it. It's a chance of complete failure, but a chance of making a big success too." "Sure." Johnny took a deep breath. "Well, it's not going to be failure," he said definitely. passed. All the women were with child, but by sheer accident it was going to work out that they'd all be able to help each other when the time came. Nobody was exactly happy, but then, nobody had any time to be miserable. Aperdui had had a tiny ecology before the Earthmen arrived. There were a few insects, a few birds, a few small animals, chiefly marsupials. There were remains of many more species. No one quite knew yet why or how they had died out. It certainly didn't seem to be because conditions had been too tough for them. One theory was that one species had killed off most of the others, upsetting the balance so that its own food became extinct too. Even here, Tom realized, the Balance Must Be Preserved. Certainly this left Aperdui a pretty friendly world for Earthmen, if there were enough of them. That was the snag. It wasn't that things couldn't be made on Aperdui. Of course thev could, if enough people could and would buy them. But it was no use manufacturing a car and selling it, if a couple of years were going to pass before anybody else wanted a car and had the money to pay for it. And cars weren't much good without roads. And there were no roads. And nobody wanted to go anywhere, anyway. Tractors, now, everybody wanted tractors. It was still cheaper, however, to get them from Verdan, the nearest manufacturing world, than to make them on Aperdui. And tractors from Verdan cost too much. On Aperdui, people like Johnny Horne learned the economic facts of life the hard way. A tractor from Verdan cost #. With a tractor they could multiply their production several times, but the tractor would not have paid for itself by the time it had to be scrapped. Nevertheless, the work it had done before it died of old age would eventually pay for it. Sandra had a son and Kate had a daughter. Joan lost her baby and went on doing the same thing with distressing regularity. minor flood there were no snags during the first year. The next year the floods were worse. The vear after that, worse still. The people of Kayhorn had learned their lesson the first time, however, and while other farms were badly damaged, Kayhorn lost little or nothing. Thee were three houses and a barn now, primitive but solid. In the fourth year they even had running water and water closets -- also primitive, but working most of the time. The five people who had come from Earth looked very different now. Johnny and Sandra were lean and bronzed, twice as tough as they had been when they landed. Kate, surprisingly, had begun to run to fat after her first pregnancy. Joan was pale and moody. She was the one who took least to Aperdui (apart from Tubby), and frequently regretted that she hadn't taken Rawlings up on his offer. If any of her babies had lived things might have been different. Tom was quiet and thoughtful these days. He was the one who did all the figuring. Tom had always imagined, and so had Johnny for that matter, that in a closed group the natural, inevitable leader would be the most intelligent of them, the one who did the thinking and figuring. It didn't work out that way. Both he and Johnny, not to mention the other four, acknowldeged it. From the beginning Johnny had taken the decisions. The farm had been called Kayhorn half jokingly at first, but it was soon accepted that Johnny was the boss. Bill Perkins had the experience; Tom Camm had the brains; and Johnny was the boss. It wasn't until the fifth anniversary of their arrival at Kayhorn -- which also, by a strange coincidence, was the fifth anniversary of the three unlegalized marriages -- that Sandra said to Johnny, in a tone of surprise: "You know, Johnny -- we're happy here." He grinned. "You and I -- and Junior and Mary and Kit and Frances. We're happy." "And the others too, surely?" "The kids, yes. Bill, yes. And one of these days Kate will admit that she's getting used to the place. But Tom and Joan..." "Sure, they keep saying this is a hell of a place and they'd give anything to get back to Earth. But people don't always mean what they say." Johnny didn't argue. He rarely did. and never with Sandra. That didn't mean, however, that he agreed about Tom and Joan. IV T HE sixth year was the Year of the Tractors. At last the equation balanced. It became worth while making tractors on Aperdui. Johnny managed not only to buy a tractor but also to put some money into the tractor business. It was strange, yet typical, that Tom had to explain to him how and why the business was a good investment, how the profits would be so small at first that Johnny could get a bigger and bigger hold on the tractor business -- and yet Johnny invested in it and Tom didn't. As happiness had crept up on them, so wealth crept up on them. Johnny was not yet thirty.; Sandra was twentyseven. They worked as hard as ever. Yet one day Tom told Johnny that the total value of their joint undertakings, excluding Johnny's tractor stock, was close on a hundred thousand dollars. Considering that three tractors cost that much, it didn't seem riches beyond the dreams of avarice. That meant that each of the adults, not counting the seven children, was worth about half a tractor. The achievement had to be interpreted: from debt to solvency to money-in-the-bank. Seven years after farming at Kayhorn began, a road was built through it. And the road actually led to a town. At the moment the town consisted of two farms, a store, a blacksmith's shop and a hall, and it was called, with the usual originality of settlers, New Chicago. The next year Tom and Joan left Kayhorn. They had the chance of a nearby farm which had failed through mismanagement, and they took it. The parting was not acrimonious; Johnny lent Tom the money he needed. Both farms, Kayhorn and "the Camm place," took on hired men. There were immigrants from Earth these days who preferred working for a wage to starting a farm of their own. And there were people who could afford to employ them. horn's tenth year. Nobody paid them with any great enthusiasm, but it was obvious that what had been a frontier world only interested in survival now needed schools, police, hospitals and even a government building somewhere. On Johnny's thirty-fifth birthday he realized he was a Of course, it was all very theoretical. If he was suddenly told he could go back to Earth provided he sold out within a week, he'd probably not be able to realize much more than a quarter of a million. But that was theoretical too. If he were told that, he wouldn't go. It delighted him to be able to make things easier for Sandra now. At thirty-three, with five children, she had lost her twenty-two-inch waistline, but with her magnificent bust and hips a twenty-four-inch waistline was more appropriate, anvway. She had worked like a slave for nearly ten years, and now freely acknowledged j. t. McIntosh that it hadn't done her any harm. Nevertheless, Johnny's greatest happiness these days was that when he came home from work, Sandra was waiting for him. In other words, she hadn't been working at his shoulder all day. It delighted him to be able to add to the amenities of their home. There was the concrete walk all the way to the road, for example. No need to bring mud into the house any more every time you entered. And gradually the wood-and-grass house was becoming stone and tile. Johnny could have built an entirely new house, but he didn't want that and knew Sandra didn't want it either. There came the day when the first radio programs started. Johnny and Sandra and the children listened with all the eagerness of the first crystal-set pioneers. The children couldn't understand it at all and, when told the radio converted electrical waves back into sound, went outside to see if they could see the waves in the sky. Still Bill Perkins and Kate were with them. Kate now almost as fat as Tubby used to be. Kate and Sandra, who had never had anything in common in the old days, were coming closer together now. There was beginning: to be a babysitting problem again, unknown for years because nobody ever went out for the evening, and Kate and Sandra knew each other's family quite as well as. they knew their own. It couldn't be said any more that they had nothing in common. They had their whole lives in common. For the early years back on Earth now seemed as strange and baffling as any dream. Bill had never changed. He had many chances to leave Kayhorn and take over a farm of his own, as Tom and Joan had done. He never even considered them. Tom and Joan weren't doing very well. Kayhorn had given them inflated ideas of what could be achieved. They bit off far more than they could chew and, but for continued help from Johnny, the Camm place would have foundered. nearly quarreled over the Camms. Johnny's affairs were not quite in their usual prosperous condition, owing to a storm which destroyed nearly a whole crop, when Tom called. Sandra said nothing when Tom was there, but when he departed with all Johnny's spare cash and a note addressed to the bank in New Chicago, Sandra found herself hotly pointing out that he'd said Junior's new bicycle would have to wait meantime, and now he'd given Tom Camm the price of thirty new bicycles -- given -- because he'd certainly never see his money again. "I know, Sandra," said Johnny. "Better not tell Junior. He might not understand." "Well, I don't understand either. That storm cost you thousands, but you can stand it because you're prepared for such things. Tom can't stand it because he isn't. You know he'll never pay you back. How much more are you going to give him?" "As much as he needs," said Johnny quietly. And as Sandra drew a deep breath to tell him what she thought of such unrealistic altruism -- for Sandra was still a realist -- he added quietly: "It's not just friendship, honey. There's such a thing as gratitude." "Gratitude?" said Sandra blankly. "Kayhom owes a lot to Tom Caram. More than you'll ever believe. Sure, I made the decisions, and they were right decisions, most of them. Sure, without Bill we'd have been nowhere. But it was Tom who saw the way every time, who knew what was going to happen if we did this, and what would probably happen if we did that." "Then why can't he make anything of his own farm?" Johnny shrugged. "Tom's the kind of fellow who can't make even the decisions he knows must be made. And another thing. Joan. When Joan griped it didn't have the slightest effect on me. Tom could tell me what ought to be done, and what Joan thought about it didn't matter a damn to me. But it's got to matter to Tom. Think how different things were for Tom and me, honey. I have you. Tom has Joan." There was a long silence. Then Sandra said : "Hell, why don't you hit me or something instead of making me feel a heel? It would be over quicker." He caught her arm and pulled her down with him, laughing. "Honey, after all these years do I still have to keep telling you? I love you." "Yes," she said. "You still have to keep telling me." I N Kayhorn's twenty-first year immigration from Earth stopped. At least, transportation did. There were still a few volunteer immigrants, enough to supplement the news of Earth which the supply ships brought, not enough to affect the general situation one way or the other. Aperdui still had a smaller population than Earth had had when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock. But at last Aperdui had enough. The last transported colonists were in their twenties, thirties, and forties. The earliest colonists were in their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. And the oldest members of the second generation, the first natives of Aperdui, were as old as the youngest immigrants. On Johnny and Sandra's silver anniversary, Sandra found her first gray hair. She frowned at it, twitched it out, and in sudden alarm slipped straps from her shoulders and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. What she saw reassured her. Still, with all her children married she was hardly a girl any more. Married... she suddenly realized that although her children were actually married, legally married, she and Johnny had never gotten around to it. Might be as well, one of these days. It might get to be a slur in little Johnny's later life that his grandparents had never been married. Tom and Joan came to the party, naturally, but both Johnny and Sandra, not to mention Bill and Kate, were surprised to find them happy for the first time in years. Johnny was even more surprised when Tom took him aside and paid him back every last cent he owed him. "I didn't hear that the bank had been robbed," Johnny said. Tom grinned. "I won't tell you about it now. You'll hear soon enough." And they did, two days later. Tom had been offered an important government job and had sold the farm on better terms than he could have hoped. Land which had been anybody's for the taking twentyfive years ago was beginning to be quite valuable. Tom and Joan were going back to Earth. "No wonder Joan was pleased," Sandra said, when they heard about this. "I wonder if they'll be happy now?" Johnny kissed her on the tip of her nose. "I lent Tom a lot," he said, "but I could never lend him happiness." "Johnny," said Sandra. "I've been thinking. Will you marry me?" V livered a little sermon, always the same. "I know you think you've had a raw deal," he said, surveying the eight young men and women in front of him, "but you've got to realize that one way or another Earth has to get rid of at least fifteen Would you rather have been shot or gassed?" Nobody answered. "Tfyirty years ago," Tom said, "I was in exactly the same position as all of you. I'd done exactly the same as yon. Jones. But now, thirty years later -- " "I know," sneered the chemist. "You envy us. You wish you were in our shoes. So do we." "Isn't there any chance, Mr. ,Camm," said the school-teacher, "of getting transferred to Aperdui instead of Thornton?" "I'm afraid not. Aperdui is fully self-supporting now. It's off the list of Transportation worlds. It isn't a pioneer world any more. Of course, there's still plenty to be done there..." He sighed. Joan had been desperate to come back. But on Earth you lived in a tiny room four levels down from the sky. If you went for a walk in the open air, it was on rooftops. The food was meager and always the same. The air was clean and odorless and antiseptic. Even if you had no claustrophobic tendencies, you were oppressed by the knowledge that there were people eating, sleeping, talking, making love, quarrelling and dying within ten feet of you, north, south, east and west, above and below. And beyond them, in all six directions, more people, and beyond them... The tragedy was that the eight bitter young people in front of him were such slaves to the little luxuries of life on Earth that they thought they were being condemned to a living death instead of being granted the boon of freedom, of open space, of discovery. And the frustration of his own position was that he never succeeded in communicating to them the sincerity of his own longing to get out of the sardine-can which was Earth. Even Joan wanted to get back to Aperdui. But he still had three years of his contract to fulfill. "Thornton is a grand world," he began. "Look, do we have to hear you talk?" the busted cop demanded. "Send us straight to the spaceport and get it over." stared gloomily at the papers in front of him. For sheer frustration, this job took some beating. God, how he wished he was back on Aperdui ! Johnny would help him to get started again, he knew. He brightened a little. At least there was the bubble dancer. When she had kissed him to seal the bargain he had suddenly felt thirty years younger, as if he were just setting out for Aperdui again. And he didn't have to feel he was selling out the colonies by holding her back. A girl like that would be sure to land in trouble again within six months. The reflection salved his conscience. His conscience didn't bother him because he was cheating the other eight, the eight who were going to Thornton. It bothered him because he was cheating the girl by keeping her here on Earth. end j. t. McIntosh 'Some how I'd alivays thought of them as being small and green." "Men, the army promised you you'd see the ivorld, and you ivill every ninety minutes IF Short Story Illustrated by Harman Nirva was a real bore. The food was always great, the climate tediously fine, the view monotonously lovely, the girls relentessly amiable. But, oddly, everybody went therel  va? !?" snapped Secad Screed -- Galactic Sector Administrator J. Gomer Screed, a serious-minded man who rarely lost his temper. That was a pity; it was a lousy temper. "A mindless excursion, and completely outside my Sector at that! Woman, are both you and Garten out of your minds? Who do you think is going run my administration with both Garten and I on a childish vacation to this absurd 'Dream Planet' of yours?" "Well -- there is Deputy Assistant Prinot and -- " "Ha! And then what do you suppose would be left of my record here and my prospects of promotion -- after Depast Prinot and the others put in five solid weeks wrecking all my work?" Secast Garten, short, a little Chubby, the opposite of his chief (who looked like a deep-thinking, bald stork scheduled for delivery of Siamese quintuplets in a typhoon,) grinned. He was seated out of the direct line of verbal fire, on a rock-hard hassock at one side of the barely furnished Screed apartment. He grinned, knowing what-Secad Screed would do with a similar opportunity at Division Hq. "Oh, now, dear," soothed Mrs. Screed, a mousey, chronically anxious little woman with five years experience as secretary and ten as wife in learning to soothe her husband. "Prinot is such a nice man. Don't worry so about things. Just put them out of your mind ; they'll be all right." "What?" Fifteen years experience she had soothing him, but she never did seem to get the knack of it. Or, perhaps, it was a matter of Screed's conscientiously refusing to be soothed, as a matter of discipline. A wife should know her place. Women being what they were, light minded, he felt it only fair that he should regularly point it out to her. He didn't want to spoil her. And he didn't either -- unless it was in the matter of favoring her with his personal attentions weekly, at #:# p.m., each Friday. This was big of him. She was 'lucky. Secad Screed was a big man, Administrative Officer in full command of a major sun system at only #, wedded to his work and dedicated to becoming more and more important. Mrs. Screed's position was, in a way, almost bigamous. She had a rich, full fifteen minutes every Friday, and what more could any woman want of life? At the moment, this one imagined she wanted to take a vacation trip to some nonsensical, little known, semimythical dream planet that Garten -- the fool! -- had been telling her about. "Garten -- " "You are so right, J.G., so right. Give Prinot and those boys an inch and they'll be measuring you out for a grave with it, while they sharpen their knives. Half a chance and they'd foul up your whole Sector Administration. But -- you know, sir, after five straight years on the job for both you and me, a five-week vacation is compulsory. We do have our orders." "Mf-f-f!" That was true and that was the rub. "But we don't have to chase off so far we can't keep an eye on things !" "Of course, sir. Or -- an idea you gave me just the other day, sir -- with the recent Truad activity over in Sector Y, we could put this whole system into an emergency invasion alert drill, sir. For the duration -- of our vacation. Then every move Prinot makes will have to follow the book -- or a court-martial when we get back. With you presiding, eh?" thin smile. "I thought of that, of course, Garten. Clever of you to see it. Given time, I may be able to make a passably capable assistant of you after all." Garten was necessarily more skilled at soothing Screed than was Mrs. S., whose somewhat special status brought her very limited privileges but considerable job security. Garten had hung on,, sometimes narrowly, for some five years now. "Yes sir. I hope so, sir." "But not as long as you come up with asinine suggestions for us to throw away valuable time on some scarcely heard of 'dream planet.' Even though Centrad does enforce these foolish compulsory vacations, there is no reason why the time cannot be turned to some useful account." "But, dear," murmured Mrs. Screed wistfully. "No! Viola, you seem to have lost whatever few wits you once possessed. Why in the Galactic Universe would I go to some tiny, sink-hole, single planet system not even important enough to have a Service Administration? Even I have scarcely heard of the place. Garten, what ever got into you?" "Uh -- ah, well, sir. You see I -- uh -- have always admired so your report on waste and extravagance on Primus that you made following your last vacation five years ago just before coming here. The way you toppled the entire Sector Administration, forced a dozen or more early retirements and -- " "And got me my promotion to Secad." "Yes, sir. A sensational job, and much talked of at Centrad, I know. Well sir, I just thought that, since this Nirva is so little known, something of a mystery you know, and something of a sore point with Centrad too, perhaps it might be ripe for an expose." "Mph. Nonsense, Garten. Not important e n o u g h -- though, come to consider, it is odd how little public information there is about the place. Centrad is covering something... Hm-m. Never bothered to" check the secret files on it myself. Just for curiosity, Garten, what is the detail on the thing?" Mrs. Screed leaned back in her chair; glanced blankly about the bare apartment; picked idly at a cuticle; tried, with apprehensively expressive features, to register total disinterest. Once, before discouragement set in, she had been a modestly pretty young woman. Now she was merely modest. "Viola," snapped Screed, "go fix some refreshment. Ice water, crackers, something. Can't have you sitting there mooning over this Nirva nonsense of Garten's. Your mind has too great an affinity for nonsense." "Yes, sir. Well, sir -- " M RS. Screed threw him a fleeting, timid smile over her shoulder as she left the room through the kitchen door, back of Screed's arm chair. Inside of two minutes she was back, standing very quietly in the doorway with a pitcher of water and a dish of plain, protein crackers on a tray. Garten talked on. "Nirva, as you know, is the single planet of a small sun off on the fringes of this region of the Galaxy. It seemed so insignificant it was never even visited until something like fifty years ago. Then a questionable prospector ship had a minor breakdown and was forced to come out of an inter-space jump near the Nirva system. The prospectors had been ten years out. They were coming back empty-handed, nothing to show, not one valuable planet found. There they were. Spectroanalysis of Nirva didn't show much, but they decided to check anyway. They were desperate, dreaming out of all reason of a last-ditch success -- dreaming of a civilized, friendly planet, hospitable natives, rich beyond belief, foolishly ready for exploitation, eager to load them up with fissionable minerals and saon. You know how those old space tramp adventurers used to be, sir." "Hmph. Tramps, yes. So?" "So they landed and discovered Nirva, the Dream Planet. Of course they didn't find that out at the time." "What did they find?" "They found a civilized, friendly planet, hospitable natives, rich beyond belief, foolishly ready for exploitation, eager to load them up with fissionable minerals and so on. There wasn't even a communication problem. The people, handsome, human type, were telepathic. Well. Their visit, although no two of the eleven men on the ship could agree on the details, was one glorious celebration. Liquor and no hangovers. Women, the most beautiful in the universe, competing with each other to do everything -- I mean everything -- for the pleasure of the space heroes. In fact, it seemed a space tramp's dream of heaven. They hated to leave." "If the place was such a degenerate's delight, why did they leave?" "Just simple greed, apparently. Their ship was loaded with the most valuable cargo in history. They couldn't resist the urge to take it back and cash in; to strut around and be big heroes, men of wealth and power back home. Finally, and with plenty of regrets, they blasted off. A couple of jumps, six months -- travel was slow then, of course -- and they landed at the regional capital. They reported their discovery and claims, turned in the cargo for analysis and sale -- and, listening for the cheers, sat back to collect their fortunes. Instead of cheers, they got the universal horse laugh." "A laugh? At a fortune? Why -- oh, yes. Of course ; turned out they made a pretty stupid mistake about that cargo, eh ?" W ny mistake. Their whole cargo of rare, fissionable elements was nothing but perfectly ordinary sand and rock. Now, this crew was rough, but prospecting was their business. They knew their business. It just wasn't possible that they could have made such a mistake. At first the officials were inclined to drop the whole thing as a pointless hoax. But it was so pointless. Somebody was sharp enough to push for an investigation on that account. They rounded tip the prospectors, who were all hustling around trying to promote supplies to get them back to Nirva. They got a psychiatric team to run them all through a complete check. The clues to the truth of the matter turned up then; but they were not, at least not generally understood." "What -- ?" "The psychiatric team found that each of the eleven told a similar story, and actually had a similar mental picture of Nirva. But, examined closely, the detail, the artifacts, the -- uh -- types and -- ah -- um -- habits of the women were startlingly, if not sensationally, different. So different that, in fact, the planet seemed to be perfect. Perfect according to each crewman's idea of the perfect planet. Some of them had pretty crude ideals of perfection, of course. The psychiatric team pushed through an order grounding all members of the crew. All of them ended badly, by the way -- seven suicides, two murders, two violent mental cases. The team submitted a completely inconclusive report. Then they proposed that they all be sent to examine Nirva." "Well? Get to the point, Garten !" "The expedition went out. It never came back. No word ever came back. The administration jumped to a conclusion that the planet, Nirva, had become hostile and the expeditionary force captured. A battle cruiser, advised to expect resistance and with orders to use all force necessary to pacify the planet and rescue prisoners, was sent out. The cruiser went. It met resistance near Nirva and Nirva forces surrendered. The ship landed and officers and crew were feted by the defeated population. Prisoners were rescued. Finally, and with some little reluctance the captain, a devoted family man, gave orders and the cruiser headed back. But -- at the first jump away, the prisoners and something like two-thirds of the cruiser's crew vanished. Naturally there was a good deal of excitement. "Arrant nonsense." "Yes, sir. Of course. But -- two further rescue expeditions ran into much the same thing. It seemed that only individuals with the most vital and binding ties or absorbing interests back home ever came back from Nirva. Others, especially anyone with the least trace of instability, stayed there." "A lunatic planet for the feeble-minded !" U ner of speaking. At least the officially approved conclusion regarding Nirva is this. No way to be certain but, presumably, from sample materials and distance observation, it appears a rather ordinary, Earth-type planet physically. It is inhabited by a race, physical characteristics doubtful, probably humanoid, having, unique mental properties. Imaginative, very powerful, hypnotic. And, the theory goes, these people exercise a sort of group mind power with individualistic overtones. To all intents and purposes, they modify their physical -- and social -- s u r roundings to suit themselves. Each then lives quite literally in a world of his own. The world of his dreams. For visitors from outside, same thing. Each person who lands on Nirva, or even approaches it without a powerful force shield, sees what he imagines he should see. He finds whatever he may be looking for. A man who has mental air castles, you might say, can go to Nirva and move right into them. As they say, sir, the planet of dreams." "Hallucinations !" "Yes, sir. But controlled, pleasant -- and having all the force, feel and effect of reality. So the theory has it, that is. Of course, travel to Nirva is so restricted as to be almost completely prohibited now and the information wiped from public records. The administration could see that it might become disastrously over popular." "Why not wipe out the whole lunatic asylum of a system ?" "Ah -- yes. Well -- uh -- perhaps some of the men at the top thought perhaps it might turn out to be useful in -- uh -- some way." "There have been rumors of mysterious disappearances of officials. Weakness." "Yes sir. Exactly." "A haven for weak-minded idiots to be taken in by stupid, f arlor hypnotics. Why should waste my time and talent exposing something so totally and transparently stupid?" "Of course, sir. It would be a difficult thing to try to manage. I'm sure -- in spite of the enormous publicity and promotional possibilities in clearing up the mystery -- that it's not the sort of thing a solid administrator would care to get mixed up in." The Secad looked interested. "A perfectly horrible sounding place," interrupted Viola from her doorway, "I had no idea it would be anything like that. It sounds immoral, actually. I wouldn't go." The Secad looked thoughtful. "Besides," added Garten, "I'm certain, now I consider it, we couldn't possibly manage to get a clearance to visit Nirva anyway." "Well, then," said Viola firmly. "You know how the Secad needs a rest. I do hope you can find something more suitable for our vacation than that. Some place that's quiet and respectable and -- " The Secad looked convinced. "Oh, shut up, Viola. And you too, Garten. If we must go on a vacation, we must -- but I shall decide where we will go. Is that clear?" That was clear. of Secad Screed. He was, certainly, the sanest, soundest, solidest and most sensible of men. It was not possible to trick him into any hasty, illconsidered action. Still, it rankled to have Garten and, of all people, Viola tell him he couldn't go to Nirva -- and couldn't succeed in doing anything about it if he did. Of course, it is true that a man can trust no one but himself. It was transparently obvious that Viola and that pipsqueek Garten were trying to con him into taking them to Nirva. But it was an irritation. And maybe the thing did, actually, offer the possibility for something sensational in the way of a coup. Naturally, Garten and Viola were interested only in the supposed cheap thrills of the dream planet, the chance to escape from practical, business-like reality into some degenerate make-believe. They both needed a lesson. They should be shown how poor and weak a thing a romantic dream is, when brought up short by the trained, superior, analytical administrative mind. The next day at work he set Garten to work drafting up orders for an emergency invasion alert drill "just in case." He then consulted with his Neuro-Surgeon General. "Naturally, Dr. Treadmel, I would never dream of directing any illegal actions within my own jurisdiction -- where, of course, I am Secad and therefore the judge of all questions of legality. And of your Department too, Doctor, you may take note. However, the information I am endeavoring to extract from you I shall apply, if at all, solely to the planet Nirva. Not to any of ours." "Yes, sir." "Very well, Doctor. Now. You are familiar with hypnotics, are you not?" "Sir!" The Doctor was hurt. "One of the primary duties -- " "All right. You are familiar with hypnotics. You use them all the time in legal questions, crime, employment interviewing in depth and so on. Naturally. And you are also aware of various measures -- yes, yes, I know they are specifically barred by the Public Safety Amendment -- some mechanical and some narcotic, that may be taken to counteract or prevent hypnosis. So. My question is this. Would such measures as your low power, hyper-electronic broadcast and your anti-hypnotic drugs be effective against the spell or illusion the inhabitants of Nirva use on visitors and, perhaps, themselves?" "Well, now, Secad Screed, that is an extremely interesting question." "I am interested only in the answer, Doctor." "Uf. Yes, sir. Well, I can see no reason why they wouldn't be effective -- always supposing the subjective hypnotic theory of the place is correct. That is -- in theory -- this group mind, which is supposed to provide the basis, should be totally disrupted by the random or scrambling effect of the electronic broadcast. The drugs, on the other hand, would render the individual who took the drug, during the period of its effectiveness, totally unor nonreceptive to the impulse, whereas -- " "All right, Doctor. You are trying to say, in your obfuscating manner, that the measures would be effective. Right?" "Subjectively, not taking into account the hypothetical possibility of random foci -- and, of course, barring circumstances outside the range of -- " "Doctor! Yes? Or no?" "Well -- uh -- yes." "Doctor, when you have quite finished the duties I am about to assign you, I suggest you visit my legal staff for a game of circumlocution. In the meantime -- get me that drug." "Yes, sir. You understand the limitations -- " "And give Chief Engineer Barstow the specifics for an anti-hypnotic electronic amplifier, suitable for placing in satellite orbit." "But -- " "Around Nirva. Good-by, Doctor!" And tliat would take care of that. O F course Nirva, the Dream Planet, was a fake. It was a fairy story for childish minds, not capable of affecting the mature intellect. But there was nothing like being doubly sure.' Secad Screed was always sure. The only thing that upset him more than being not quite sure was the idea of something being wrong. But of course this never happened. "All right, Viola," he said that night, after letting her sit, fidgety, looking the question she didn't quite dare to ask all evening long. "So you want to go to this ridiculous planet, Nirva. Don't you?" "Dear, of course not! Not if you don't think -- that is, you said it was stupid. So of course we wouldn't -- " "Please, Viola. You should know better than to try to deceive me. And so should Garten. It is completely and transparently clear to me that both of you are trying to get me to take you to this so-called dream world. Childish escapism. You know that?" "Yes, of course, dear." "Very well. We are going." "Oh ! How wonderful. Thank you !" "Don't thank me now. Later, afterward, you can thank me. When I have done you and Garten the service of showing you the infantile immaturity of your own minds. I am, Viola my dear, going to expose to the Galaxy this tawdry charlatanism for the little carnival illusion that it is. I shall show you the superior mental power of a mind -- mine -- that can face reality. You, and possibly even Garten, like drug addicts think you can escape from fact into a dream world." "Oh, no." "You will learn that there is no escape. I shall show you to yourselves. And you will see that run-down, sink-hole planet of lotus eaters for the degenerate mental slum it truly must be and is." "Oh ? Well, it is good of you to go to so much trouble." Smugly, "The expose may prove of some advantage in my Service career." "Of course, dear." Of course. Of course, there was a period of frantic, forced-draft preparation by certain of the Administration Departments. Garten was voluble in his admiration of the plan for the electronic broadcast, anti-hypnotic satellite for Nirva. On the drugs, he had no comment. He was not, in fact, informed of this part of the plan. Clearance for Secad Screed and party to visit the "Limited Access" Planet, Nirva, was obtained from Inter-Regional Headquarters with surprisingly, if not suspiciously, little difficulty. Screed smiled a sour little smile. Jealousy, perhaps. He would show them, too. I N two weeks standard time, they -- Secad Screed, Mrs. Viola Screed and Secast Garten -- were on the way. It was a small ship, with a crew specially screened for the stop at Nirva, bound for the farther reaches of the Galaxy. At the end of three inter-space jumps it would orbit in to leave them on Nirva. Five weeks later, on the return trip, it would put in again to pick them up. At the end of the third jump, Secad Screed and party, ship's captain in the control room. "We are coming in to the planet now, Captain," announced Screed informatively. "I want to be certain that the satellite is functioning properly and placed in planned orbit, regular, between sixty and ninety minutes." "Yes, sir," sighed the captain, a morose-looking man with an anachronistic, drooping moustache, "Believe me, Secad Screed, within my deplorably narrow limits I do know my business. Your satellite is being attended to now. We are within the field of Nirva. We will make our run in, fingers crossed, so you may debark." "Fingers crossed, Captain? Hmph ! Well -- let's have a look at the thing on the view screen." "Sorry -- but no, sir. We go in on automatic instruments, with special electric power shield up all the way. I'll cut the shield just long enough for you to land and back up she goes. Likely I'll lose a couple of my crew at that." "Nonsense! Have you no confidence in the satellite?" The captain shrugged. "I take no chances." This was a line of reason Screed could well appreciate -- in himself. From the captain it seemed foolishness. "Surely, Captain, if you were to lose crewmen you could and would insist upon their immediate return?" "Insist, Secad Screed ? How? You do not, I think, have quite the full picture of this thing. Its appeal, the pull of your own personal perfect dream world, is very strong. If I didn't have a wife and six sweet kids back home that I only see a month or two out of the year -- well. This Nirva problem is like this. We go in. Down screen. Off you and your party go. My crew? All present. OK, back up with the screen -- and then we find out who is actually on the ship." "But if they were all present -- ?" "Maybe present; maybe nothing-but projected illusions. It is not possible to distinguish. So, say a couple are missing when the screen goes up. Suppose I down screen again. Protest. The natives are all apology. The men return." "AH right then." "Not exactly. When the screen is up again -- maybe instead of two missing, by then I would have four gone. The temptation gets too strong. Fighting it is like doubling bets to get even on a crooked wheel." H Incredibly slack. It certainly was time a man who knew his own mind took over. The satellite was orbiting. He had taken an anti-hypnosis pill. So too, although he hadn't bothered to tell them about it, had Viola and Garten, in their coffee. "Well, Captain. Your problems with Nirva are over. I -- " he drew himself up in full executivecommand stance -- "am going to straighten the place out. In five weeks, when you return to pick us up, you will find Nirva, under my administration, a sound, sensible, stable colony. And we three will all return with you." "Oh?" The captain was a skeptic. "Of course," said Viola, "When my husband says a thing will be done, you can count it done." "And this other gentleman, Secast Garten?" "Naturally, sir. S e c a d Screed is a man of his word. Not even Nirva could alter his determination." "I see. Well, I'm not a betting man, of course. Regulations. But if I were -- " "Yes, Captain?" S e c a d Screed's voice cracked icily. "I would like to bet a year's salary that all three of you won't go back with me." "Well, Captain. As Senior Service Officer aboard, I make the regulations here. I'll just take that bet. A year's salary, against yours. Nice odds for you there, Captain. That is a bet. Garten, you and Viola are witness." The Captain smiled sourly and nodded. Screed turned on his heel, annoyed. "Come Viola; Garten." Viola bowed her head and followed. Garten lingered a minute. "Captain? If you'd care to hedge a bit of that bet, I'll take, say, half of it?" The captain looked at him. An ordinary man. Not young, not old; not big, not small. Just a man, almost extraordinarily ordinary. And certainly not too bright since, as he clearly intended to stay on Nirva, what good would it do him to win half of that old snake Screed's bet? The Captain shook his head. "Thanks, Secast Garten, but since you won't -- well. No, thanks, I'll keep it." Garten shrugged regretfully. "So? Well, I could use the money but no matter. I think you have a good bet, Captain. It's my bet, too." A half hour and the ship settled gently on the surface of the planet. The three passengers for Nirva were ready at the air-lock. "Down screen " Screed heard the words over the intercom. For a moment a sense of confusion, of uncertainty of purpose touched with dizzying, empty fear, swept over him. Abruptly it was gone. Confidence, more certain and invincible than ever, flooded back. He knew what he must do. And he knew that he would surely do it. A thrill of anticipatory triumph brought a little twisted smile to his thin lips but, half turning his head toward Viola and Garten, all he said was, peremptorily, "Come." figures, on the surface of Nirva, the dream planet, beside the space ship. They were edged away from it by a discomforting mental pressure as the ship's force field snapped back on. Nirva. It seemed nothing so much. Pleasant enough, perhaps, but in a shockingly disordered, unimproved sort of way. Much the sort of thing Screed had expected. There was a bright sun overhead with a slight rosypink tint to it, low green hills and some sort of town or settlement in the near distance. The sky was a deep blue, almost purple, dotted with feathery, pinkish clouds. All right. Probably it was quite suitable for exploitation as an agricultural planet. Not too much quick profit in it, perhaps, but well worth salvage. Screed, Viola and Garten were standing near the center of a cleared field, possibly a bungled excuse for a space port. Across it, a ramshackle building leaned tiredly to one side. As the space ship rose silently behind them, some sort of wheeled vehicle started toward them from the building, raising a small cloud of pinkish-white dust as it came. "How awful," said Viola, echoing Screed's thoughts. "It's so shamefully rundown and neglected looking." "A Galactic disgrace," agreed Garten from the other side. "So," said Secad Screed, the leader. "You see?" The native vehicle, a rattletrap affair reminiscent of ancient earth internal combustion wagons, clattered up. The driver was unclearly human under a slovenly, unkempt exterior ; has was also middle-aged, fat and anxious as he stumbled out. "Ah," he said eagerly, "distinguished visitors! And -- uh -- is it possible -- that is, I mean to say, I -- we all in fact, wonder if it could be you who is responsible for the sudden, total change that seems to have affected our -- ah -- perceptive climate?" "And if we are," snapped Screed, "it was certainly a degenerative situation that desperately needed changing. You and all your people should thank me for it. And you will." "Oh yes," said the native. "We already do, indeed. But -- uh -- the thing is, not that we aren't grateful for the awakening, but it is all so horribly confusing to us. You see, what I mean to say, we don't know exactly what -- " "You need leadership ! Strong, efficient leadership." "That's it exactly. If only you would -- " "I shall." He made an expansive, condescending gesture. "I, with the help of Mrs. Screed -- I, by the way, am Secad Screed, the Leader -- and my assistant, will take full command of all administration immediately. You will find that I will soon whip you into shape." "Ah, sir, how can we ever repay you ?" "Perhaps something may be worked out. Now, we must get started. Take me at once to your ruling body." "Ah. Do you suppose the Council of Dreamers -- ?" "Hmph; just the sort of thing we shall have done with once and for all. But we must start someplace, I suppose. Let us proceed." They all climbed somewhat apprehensively into the vehicle. They proceeded. Screed proceeded. H E proceeded, with Viola and Garten cheering and trailing along some little distance to the rear, to carry out his total plan. It was almost too easy. "Almost," thought Screed as the obedient, grateful citizens of Nirva labored frantically to remake their world into a model Class II, Galactic Service AgPlan. "But then, no one else could ever make a start here. It is siihply that, to a mind and character like mine, all things are easy." He was, not for the first time, mildly surprised at his miring. Perhaps he was justified. Certainly both Viola and the sometimes cynical seeming Garten were all awed respect. The reformation of Nirva advanced at a remarkable pace. The people, rudely awakened from a generations-long dream, were confused, aimless, purposeless. Like the bewildered representative at the space port, they wanted nothing more than a firm leader to give them direction. Having apparently no will of their own, they went to work with a will. Screed's will. Screed was pleasantly surprised. It seemed that before the development of the "dream world of the group mind," some five hundred years before, they had been a progressive people with a modestly advanced technology. With the group mind, all of the old knowledge and technical abilities had, quite inadvertently, been passed on from generation to generation. Direction was all they needed. Having no power of resistance, they accepted it with total obedience. When Screed said, as he often did, "You people are not here to think; you're here to do what I tell you," they smiled in whole-hearted agreement and did just what he hold them. It was delightful. In five short weeks the reconstruction of Nirva was well advanced. New cities and smoke-belching factories were rising from old ruins. Fields were plowed and sowed. And the space ship came back. R eluctantly screed cut short a series of final instruction conferences with his newly appointed deputy directors and administrators. He picked up Viola and Garten from their quarters in the refurbished ruin of an ancient mansion on a hill overlooking the new capital and they rode to the space port in his vehicle, primitive in design but gleaming, shining like new in the rosy-pink sunshine. The citizenry lined the roadway, torn between sobs and cheers. Screed, smiling, and sternly gracious, waved a regretful farewell. At the ship he paused for a last word with his senior deputy. In unfamiliar tones of anxious concern, he said, "Now, you have all my memos and instructions. You're sure you can handle it? Carry on just the way I have directed ?" "Of course, glorious supreme leader. In your wisdom you have pointed us the way. We shall not stray." "Well -- everything has been going well, very well. In a way I hate to leave and take the chance on your fouling everything up." "We shall do our poor best, great leader." "Yes," said Screed, doubtfully. "True enough. But even so -- " They could feel the space ship's screen cut off. The port opened. From the vast crowd of Nirvans spread across the space port there came a great whispering noisp, something between a sigh and a moan of sad farewell, as Screed turned and followed the other two through the port and into the ship. "Ah, Captain," said Screed, smiling a thin smile of triumph. "You doubted my ability to remake Nirva. But now you have seen it. Quite a change, eh?" "Oh sure. Quite a change. Of course, there always is." "And, Captain, you will note that we are all here. All three of us. You have, I fear, lost your bet." The Captain shrugged. "Better get to your cabin now, ready for take off." In the cabin Screed settled back in a chair and looked up at the other two with an odd air of defiance. "All right," he said, "I did it, didn't I? Just the way I told you." "Screen on," said the Captain over the intercom. To the three in the cabin the air seemed to turn shimmery, hazy, indistinct for a moment. Then it cleared. Garten and Viola stood by the doorway, arm in arm, staring. Screed, Secad Screed, the leader, was gone. JL with deep satisfaction, "He did do it." Viola sighed, smiling. "Darling! He did! It worked just the way you said it would. But I'm still not sure I quite understand why -- or how." "It doesn't really matter. But -- you noticed he quit taking the anti-hypnotic pills after the first week?" "Yes. Did that make any difference ? The satellite worked, didn't it? And everything else went just the way he wanted it. It all seemed perfect -- for him." "Sure it did. And that was what he couldn't face losing." "Hmm?" "Well, it seemed that everything went exactly the way he imagined it would. The satellite worked. The people followed him. Everything. But maybe we all only imagined it. How can we be sure? After all, those things -- plus our purely personal concerns that he was far too busy to take any note of -- " Viola blushed, quite charmingly for a plain, mousy little woman. " -- were what we were expecting too. How can we know, for sure, what was real and what was illusion?" Viola looked suddenly offended. "About the planet, I mean." Viola looked mollified. "But the planet -- I think Screed is running the thing; I'm not sure. As long as he is there, he knows he is running it. Here -- who knows? That was the chance he couldn't take, the chance his mind refused to face. If he were here, could he still be sure he was right?" Viola smiled the feminine smile that dismisses a question no longer of personal consequence and snuggled closer to Garten. "Well," she said, "at least we know he isn't here. That's all that matters." IF  Feature A but it will be) into space for a limited number of reasons, and the least of them seems to be to make a buck. About the time the reader began to get tired of ships bashing around in space for no ascertainable reason except to give the bugeyed monster a chance to make a pass at the Earth girl, the writers began to rationalize their presence there. We then had our full measure of the Everest wheeze: why do you want to conquer the stars, Daddy? Because they're there. Endless processions of girl scientists rebuffed bug-eyed hordes until rescued by regiments of space-burned swaggerers who were initially inspired only by the existence of Challenge. Then there was the hero, usually as space-burned there after Truth. That the search was expensive was sometimes not mentioned and sometimes not denied. Occasionally a plot demanded that it become a factor, and who was to pick up the tab became that technicality known to writing courses as the Obstacle. But cost, investment, return -- these were not for a long time the other technicality known as Motive. Then along came the asteroid miner, bless his hornyhanded heart, and along with him some urgently needed characterization. At long last someone was doing what you did when you started that ouija-board factory, or whatever it is you do when you're not reading IF. Someone was getting up a stake, learning how, taking his lumps, acquiring some skills and coming back with something to show for it. A lot of these old men named Pop were homespun -- and vice versa -- to the verge of vertigo, but at least they, and their cousins the traders, worked for a living in a way we could feel we understood. And that's why they were out there. As we became more sophisticated, "our" space began to be populated with criminals on the lam, espers, idealistic anthropologists anxious to interfere with alien cultures without interfering, playgirls in space-yachts and cowboys who did the walkdown on Deneb instead of Dakota. Extrapolation of certain of our current money-making devices, like advertising, show-biz enterprise, lawyering and mongering real-estate, produced quite a crop of astonishingly good yarns and a great many differing only in setting from the outland oater, of Tontoon-Titan type. But at their best they all depended on some established cultural matrix -- a League or Empire or Corps or Corporation within which to function. Ways to make space pay off had already been found and the story took place long after that had ceased to be a problem. examples of space science fiction which base themselves on reasonable, product-or-service, investment and return bases. It would seem that space flight is by its very nature not an area in which one can earn a dollar. Unless, of course, you put it another way and say that whoever can find a way to make it pay is going to turn himself a classic buck. If you thought that space flight was doomed to ride solely on the shining shoulders of Challenge, Adventure, National Hardware and the Search for Truth, you were right clear up to (as such things go) yesterday. Obviously, it was time for someone to come up with a way to make space flight pay in some other currency, like maybe Money. Since the crisis is supposed to produce the man, where is he? Well, he's in and around Murray Hill, New Jersey; he used to write science fiction under the name of J. J. Coupling; his real name is Dr. John Pierce, he's the Director of Research, Communications Principles, at Bell Labs and, finally, he bosses the project which put the famous Echo satellite up there where you can see it with your own unabashedly naked eye. Echo, as you know, is a #foot aluminized balloon from which radio signals may be bounced. It is, it is hoped, the precursor of a whole family of satellites which will be used for communications; and not since George #. Smith wrote his Venus Equilateral series (and excepted himself from our initial sweeping statements) has there been such an ingenious and breath-taking effort. Echo is a "passive" satellite. That is, it has no guts of its own, but merely serves as a bouncer-backer, with a secondary function as an aid to visual and radio navigation. One plan is to place three of them some # miles out, on the plane of the equator (Geosmith's "equilateral" idea) and so placed that each would be over its same spot of Earth at all times. Signals could then be relayed instantaneously from and to any spot on earth. But Pierce and Bell Labs will probably do nothing of the kind, for they already have something better in mind. "Courier" is an "active" satellite and it's just full of guts. Couriers can talk to each other and to the ground. They can pick up whole encyclopedias of information at a secondslong gulp, hang on to it for # minutes and then burp it out on the other side of the world on command. And nobody need know what was said except the persons concerned. They can catch a signal, amplify it, throw it to another Courier which throws it to another which can then beam it to the ground. It means TV linkage round the world. It means UN meetings without hassels about hotels. It means a great new surge in the current of people's identification with people the world around. It means education and intercultural exchange -- it means, in short, communication in the widest, deepest sense of the word. And among the most fascinating aspects of it is that Bell Labs is not doing it for Adventure or Challenge. They have facts and figures to prove what submarine cables, plus land lines, plus radio-relay systems would cost to achieve even a part of such communications. By comparison Courier, by half-dozen lots, is for peanuts. They can also prove that they can make such a system pay money, whatever else it may do for the so-called greater good. N OW comes (another writers' technical term) the Complication, a plot-switch worthy of a Heinlein or mayjust to prove that history, in providing a man for a crisis, is generous, here come Messrs. Morrow and Meyer, under the Force's Air Research and Development Command, with a method to provide TV, radio, and teletype communication between anywhere and anywhere else on Earth. Further, they claim that they will require only two small and comparatively simple rockets, and they will need no special tracking equipment nor highprecision transmitting and receiving antennas. They say their system will handle many more channels than a communications satellite (but they didn't say what kind) and that they can achieve the same reflective power as Echo with just a handful (# ounces, to be exact) of hair. Their idea is to put up a man-made ionosphere, which will bounce radio waves from point to point of itself, and to Earth, the way the natural one does. But theirs would not billow and shift, thin out and thicken, nor would it be affected by sunspots and magnetic storms. It would not ever envelope the Earth, but consist instead of two thin bands, # miles wide and # miles deep, # miles from Earth, one band on a polar orbit and the other over the equator. And of course it is not really hair. It will consist of tiny slivers of copper, half as thick as the very finest human hair and barely half an inch long. Such tiny threads will orbit just as contentedly as a plastic bubble or a dead Russian. And these two rings will operate, they tell us, with quality as high, comparatively, as the cost is low, by the technique known as "ionospheric scatter." The issue, then, as we who are s-f oriented see it, is what happens when (and IF) Bell Labs, which is no welterweight, touches gloves with the Air Force and then begins to debate who puts up what, and to whom the credit goes. Speaking fictionally, you understand, and strictly in the World of IF, we nod our heads in a pleased way if one system proves best and is used, and we cry congratulations if the other wins out and is used. But if we were writing this plot we would look at the possibility of one system's proving superior, and the decision going to the other party. That would be what the writer calls Crisis. That would be when we stopped saying IF and started yelling why? And what followed would be the thing called Denouement, or, whoever dreamed it would Come out this way? What this means, if a system is established which actually pays off in money, is truly what Robert Heinlein so vividly called The End of The IF  Short Story He said I was the biggest knuckle-head he ever saw, but I didn't trust him. Sooner or later I knew he'd insult mel The Connoisseur r r is infinitely more satisfactory to purchase wives when they are young. They are vastly more respectfuL Twelve is a good purchasing age. Lisa was twelve when I bargained for her, and she is an illustrious argument for the system. I recall her excellent father and I facing each other across his gleaming synthol marble table that day. On the table were small metal shells of sweet liquor. And beside the shells were the sedulously gathered treasures I was formally offering for Lisa: A control knob, and a folded painting of one of our Navigator's other-ship visions. Lisa's father eagerly examined the mirror-bright, chrome surface of the control knob -- which I had handed to him with a pretense of casualness -- trying to still the trembling of his fingers. "The last knob on the control board !" he said in an emotion-cracked voice. "How could you have broken it off? We've all been tugging at it for years." I answered -- I hope with no more than legitimate pride -- "I managed to get a thin hacksaw blade between the knob and the control board. Then I sawed off the shaft." He nodded approvingly. "With knuckle headed men like you aboard ship we will certainly all go to Hell." I bowed, but I did not let his flattery relax my caution. After all, we were bargaining for his prettiest daughter. What flattering words bear weight in the midst of a sale? He, of course, referred to the ringing sincerity of our Navigator's dying words: "If you knuckle-heads all want to go to Hell, just keep dismantling the ship!" Swinging adroitly to my other item of barter, I mused aloud, "Our Navigator! What a strange, frantic creature he was. Full of the wild, lovely visions which effervesced from his books of fantasy. Imploring us not only to read the books but to believe them -- and, failing that, drawing immortal paintings of the fantasies for us to see." T herewith i opened the folded painting and handed it reverently to him. It showed a large globular ship with people living on the outside of it. The title of the painting was Planet. , Privately I had always thought the thing was wholly unnatural -- a curious offbeat of the master's imaginaspite its great beauty and its origin to exchange it for something which to me was far more attractive at the moment. Namely a woman. Lisa lay curled up on the narrow, in-wall couch, with her head propped up by a slim arm. She chewed her synthelgum lazily and surveyed me with mild interest. She was a tender-f e a t u r e d girl, with shimmering black, shoulderlength hair. It was possible to forecast that she would some day be a lovely and gentle-hearted woman. Her father, notwithstanding his habitually rigid integrity, saw my lively interest in her and tried to increase my generous bid for her by an artifice of delay. Holding the painting of the master at arm's length, he grumbled critically, "A vision of Hell would have been more to my liking. Unhappily our Navigator did not paint one of his radiant visions of that ship. Now, why would he prefer Planet to Hell -- particularly when he described Hell as warm and enclosed like our own ship?" I did not answer his frivolous complaint, knowing full well it was only bartering talk. He handled the immortal painting with crudely feigned indifference. He could not quite bring himself to let go of it. He was determined to own it, I knew, and he sensed also my resolve to offer no more for Lisa. Yet slyly he determined on an evil course. For, incredibly, he turned to tranquil Lisa and asked: "What is your value, lovely child? Does he offer enough?" And slowly lifting her candid eyes to him she shook her head NO ! O her then?" I asked my friend caustically. I will own I was vexed. Shrewdly he nodded. "Whatever she accepts will be our bargain." Then, laughing at my undignified discomfiture, "It is manifest she is more aware of her value than I." "Will you be serious? It is not kindly to banter with a woman-child in such an important matter as her future." But greed now fully possessed him. "I do not joke. Whatever she demands shall be her price." He sipped his sweet wine, hiding his eyes from my displeasure. Concealing my fury, I turned to Lisa, who now sat up straight on the narrow couch with her long, slender legs folded under her. In the pace of grievous mortification I was not bitter toward her. It was not her fault. For her I extended the tolerance due the innocent. "What is your cost, child?" I asked. "This control knob and other-ship vision of our Navigator are sufficient to purchase any girl-woman. What will you have?" Lisa chewed her gum slowly while she formed her serene thought. Then, shaking her oval head, she let fall in a dreamy, singsong voice, "Neither of these! Neither of these !" Her father leaned forward anxiously. I told her, "There is a limit to your value. I will not give all of my treasures for you, lovely though you are. Choose what thing you will have, and if I can procure it, your father shall have it." "I'll know it when I see it!" she said, smiling impudently. to do but go to my apartments and look for other treasures to show her. My thoughts were exceedingly bitter as I gathered the coveted articles one by one in my arms. "Here." I displayed it to her when I had arrived back at her father's abode. "It is the steering wheel from the lifeboat. Feel its smooth texture, see its ebony luster. It is the only lifeboat steering wheel aboard ship. I had a terrible struggle with it until I broke off the shaft." She seemed interested. I passed huriedly on to another object. "Here is the handle of the atomic-pile damping rod. It was threaded inside. However, I have managed to grind the interior smooth." She seemed definitely interested, but I did not linger. I unrolled the last treasure I had brought with me. At the sight of it he? father burst into merry chuckles. "Yes," I said, smiling with a hint of sadness. "It is the inscrutable message we found protruding from the mouth of a machine some years ago. The machine has the name Teletype engraved upon it. We cannot imagine who put the message inside the machine -- if indeed it is a message. But listen to the poetry of its words! I shall read it to you as though it were properly set out on paper instead of being cramped into continuous, senseless lines: Colony ship, colony ship, Turn around before it is too late. You have left the Galaxy. We are the last planetary system You will encounter, For ten thousand years." Then, seeing her puzzlement, I said hastily, "But, of course, it is too adult for you, Lisa. Its mystery is for the scholar, its abstract beauty for the man of mature years. Come, let us turn back to these other treasures..." It was not easy for her to choose, seemingly, with so much wealth about her. The control knob, the painting, the life-boat steering wheel, the atomic-pile damping-rod handle, the inscrutable poetry -- all claimed her interest. But in the end she chose as I wanted her to, and the bargain was struck. List went to live in the compartment of my concubines that day, and at maturity became a concubine of exotic beauty. She bore her dark-haired children well. B Y the excellence of her father, he and I continued to be good friends. At least once a year I invite him to view the master's painting of Planet. We spend many contented hours together. Often through a porthole we watch the rapid movement of distant ships which our Navigator called stars, revolving in tiny circles at the side of the ship, making a complete circle in about two minutes. What prompts the behavior of these ships? It is all very curious, and I account myself fortunate that I have in my friend an intense capacity for speculation. Like myself, he is a scholar of honor, capable of long sustained discourse on lofty subjects which round out and deepen the mind. I forgive him his greed. As I had intended, Lisa took the teletype nonsense message to be her value to her father. May I reiterate, it is infinitely more satisfactory to purchase wives when they are very young ladies? They are vastly more respectful. Admittedly they are saucy. end T HE thing came down into atmosphere over Lake Michigan at a velocity that should have built shock waves before it; there were none. Radars at the Nike and fighter-interceptor sites along and near the shoreline swept their beams toward the thing in the course of their normal search routine. The hurtling electromagnetic pulses were detoured precisely around the thing, to resume on the other side their straight and echoless flight. The thing was quite unseen. The descending mass, roughly spherical, hundreds of feet in diameter, slowed its plunge through the early summer night of North America. It hit the lake with hardly a splash, miles from shore. The man was a stranger, and an alien, and perhaps he was dying. But Kelsey had to choose: He could save the stranger's life -- or he could save his own. Not for the first time did it find concealment in the waters of Earth. A few people of Earth had been aware of it. Now none of them remembered it. be uncomfortably hot. This particular day was too miserable, in the opinion of twenty year old Pete Kelsey, for him to spend it all sorting mail inside the Main Post Office. Not if he could find a way out. Besides the heat, it was one of those days when he just didn't feel like working. He didn't quite know why. The job was really all right, though it didn't pay too much. If he stuck with it, he would be able to retire in his early forties. But today Kelsey's morning, spent running a canceling machine, had been generally unpleasant; and he suspected from the way the mail was running that he would be assigned in the afternoon to a dim acre of the eighth floor, where long neglected bags and piles of low-class mail awaited a slackening of the first-class flow. It would be hot and chokingly dusty there. Kelsey decided to wangle half a day of his accumulated vacation time. In an hour and a half he was in his rooming house on the North Side. Half an hour after that he was sitting in swimming trunks on one of the massive rocks that guard land from lake along stretches of Chicago's park-and-beach shoreline, clothing piled beside him, transistor portable blaring something with a beat. He was almost alone, on the edge of the great city. The rocks rose like stairs for five or six tiers above where he sat near water level, shutting out the sight of green park and distant buildings. To right and left the rock rampart curved out and then away, at about a hundred yards from where he sat, putting him out of sight of the rest of the shoreline. Only two or three other people were in sight. Strolling in the cool lake breeze or sunbathing. If only some nice looking babe would come along now, to stretch out on the rocks for some sun... well, he wouldn't hold his breath while waiting for her. The water looked inviting. The beaches were not officially open yet. He could have gone to one anyway, but he didn't especially care for sand, or for wading a long way out to reach deep water. Here you could dive right in. He did. The water was cold, making him gasp as he surfaced. "Better than air conditioning," he told himself aloud, treading water happily. He stroked out a few yards from shore, an easy, confident swimmer. When he felt the tight sudden grip on his foot his first unthinking reaction was: A joke. One of the guys from work, somehow... There was a sting at his ankle... to get really frightened. When he woke, he was calm, but bewilderment came quickly. He was still in swimming trunks, and wet. He lay on his back on the floor of a small, square, windowless room, staring at a glowing ceiling that provided comfortable illumination. In the center of the ceiling was a metallic disk that looked like a closed door or hatch, with hinges at one side, and at the other small projections that might be an intricate latch. He rolled over dazedly. He had been swimming, and now... an old man lay stretched beside him, eyes closed, breathing heavily, dressed in rags and thinly bearded. The old man's features were Oriental -- Chinese, or maybe Japanese. Kelsey had never learned to tell the difference. Kelsey stood up. He felt fine, but where was he? Nothing looked familiar. The little room held no furniture. Floor and walls were some featureless neutral-colored stuff he could not identify. Set into one wall was a niche like a sort of berth, possibly just big enough for someone Kelsey's size to squeeze into. A transparent sliding door, now half open, separated berth from room. He looked down at the old man, found him scrawny and ugly and generally unhealthy looking. Maybe' when the old man woke up he could tell what this was all about. This was an odd, silent place. Kelsey paced around, somehow expecting every moment to get an explanation from somewhere. In one wall, just below the low ceiling, air circulated gently through a grill with darkness behind it. In one corner of the floor, a six-inch hole showed the inside of a pipe, leading down into more darkness. Kelsey investigated the berth-like niche; its door slid in grooves cut into a material that looked like rubber, but felt smooth as melting ice. In the top of the berth was another closed hatch, exactly like the one in the room's ceiling. He sat on the edge of the berth, scratching his damp head and regarding his unconscious companion. The utter craziness of the whole business began to soak in on him. He had been swimming... He remembered the grab and sting at his ankle. There was no mark, no soreness. He looked up at the hatch in the ceiling. Was he in a submarine? He had never been aboard any kind of ship. He searched his memory for data from movie and television scenes ; what he could remember didn't help any. He formed a vague picture of kidnapping Russian frogmen. He wished he could wake up and And this was all a dream. T HE hatch in the ceiling was easy to reach, but getting it open was another matter. After trying for about a minute, Kelsey quit in annoyance and attempted to wake the old man. The old guy didn't respond to gentle shaking. Was he drunk? Didn't some Chinese still use opium or something? Kelsey shook harder. "Hey," he called, self-consciously, his own voice sounding strange in the silence around him. "Wake up!" he said, louder. The old man's head wobbled on his thin neck with the shaking. He breathed. He stayed out. Kelsey sat on the floor. Maybe the old guy was in bad shape. He would wait a while and try to think this out. Without warning water began to fountain up from the pipe-opening in the floor, in a jet that carried to ceiling height and filled the room ankle deep in seconds. After one paralyzed moment Kelsey jumped up and pounded on the ceiling hatch, yelling for help. The only answer was the continued splashing roar in the room. Remembering the old man, Kelsey spun around. Rising water framed the wrinkled face. Kelseyjumped to him and lifted him, surprised at the weight he felt. He would have to keep the old man afloat with one hand while he tried to get the hatch open... only now did he notice with horror the heavy metal chains that bound the old man's limbs, nearly concealed by the ragged garments. There would be no keeping him afloat! Water lapped around Kelsey's knees. Was it going to fill the room? The old man... Kelsey thought of the berth. He dragged the thin weighted body there, lifted and crammed it in, slid the transparent door shut. It looked like it might be waterproof. There was no possibility of getting in himself, unless he left the old man out to drown -- the thought flitted across his mind, found itself in alien territory, and fled. Kelsey went back to the ceiling hatch, wading through water that was waist deep and still rising rapidly. He tried to work at the latch methodically, but panic grabbed at his fingers and made them fumble. The water reached his chest. Would it drain out through the ventilator when it got high enough? Would it leave him any air space? He could drown in this room. He was going to drown in this room. He looked around wildly. The old man lay peacefully behind his transparent door, dry, like an exhibit in some reversed aquarium. There was another hatch in the berth, another way out... but no, the hatch in the berth was no different from this one, no use risking two lives. "Help !" Kelsey shouted. The water had reached the ventilator and kept right on rising. Soon the room would be full; Kelsey was swimming now. "Help !" He twisted at the latch. The latch stung his hand. He lay with his eyes shut for a little while; there was something frightening he might see when he opened them. He could not remember at first what it was... He sat up with a jerk. But he was not drowning now, although still wet and in swimming trunks. The room was not the same one, but similar. Same glowing ceiling, same ventilator, but no berth. Again a closed hatch, or door, this time in one wall instead of the ceiling. Another hatch, in the floor, stood open. Kelsey crawled to it and looked down into the room where he had nearly drowned. It was empty of water now, but the floor still gleamed wetly. The sliding door to the berth was open; the old man was nowhere in sight. Kelsey sat with his legs dangling through the open hatch, trying to make sense of it all. He couldn't remember climbing up from the lower room, or even getting the hatch open. The latch had stung his hand in a gentle way, leaving no mark or soreness, as something had earlier stung his ankle. Each time he had been knocked out. Had someone, pulled him up here? He looked around nervously. Was he being watched from somewhere? He couldn't just sit thinking about it. He gripped the edge of the hatch and lowered himself easily back into the first room, noticing as he did so how well he felt physically. He examined the compartment where he had left the old man. Where the hatch had been in the top of it was now a flat metal plate that he could not move with his fingers. He pushed and pounded and yelled some more, with no result. The ceiling-glow died suddenly in this lower room ; the only light now shone down through the open hatch from the room above. Was someone telling him to move up there ? He climbed up without difficulty. He went to the closed door in the wall and pushed at it uselessly; this one had no latch, but an opening that looked like an odd keyhole. In a small rack beside the door hung ten or twelve oddshaped metal sticks. Half-heartedly, Kelsey tried a few more yells and listened to the waiting silence. Well, he could sit around until something happened. Or he could continue to work on the door. He couldn't think of any other course. He took some of the metal sticks from the little rack and studied them. They all looked as if they would fit the door's keyhole, but no two were shaped exactly alike. He chose one at random, and tried it in the door. H IS hand got a nasty, grating shock, unlike electricity, unlike the previous gentle knockout stings. He dropped the key and at the same instant heard water gushing up in the room below. Kelsey slammed the floor hatch down and sat on it. Should he try to stop the flood by putting another key in the door? His hand still tingled; he decided not. Was he being punished in some crazy way for trying to open the door, by someone controlling all this, or was he just caught in a chain of accidents ? Soon the muffled watersound stopped. Gingerly he eased the hatch open ; the bottom face of it turned up dripping wet. The room below was full and brimming over. He didn't like this at all. Could the room he was now in be flooded too? He closed the hatch and saw with horror that a little water came seeping up through it, as if the hatch were made of blotting paper. Yet it looked and felt like hard metal. He decided to try the door again, shock or no shock. It was better than just waiting here, to maybe drown if the water rose again. He took another key. He decided to peel off his trunks and try using them for insulation when he held the key and tried it in the door... but maybe he could do better than that. Wasn't one key enough to open a door? Why have so many in the rack? Starting to think, he really saw another detail for the first time : marked above the door was a small number #. He had noticed it before without thinking about it; you saw numbers all the time, on doors and lots of other places. But maybe a key would be numbered #. There were small numbers engraved on each of the ten keys, but each key bore a number of two or three digits ; there was no number #. Kelsey looked more closely at the door. Near the keyhole ran a series of numbers in the same neat engraving borne by the keys : # # # #. None of the numbers matched a key's number. Yet he thought there must be some connection. # # # #... he sat comparing numbers for what seemed about five minutes before something clicked in his memory, taking him back to the intelligence tests he had experienced in high school. A series of numbers... complete the logical sequence, the instructions had said. It was one of those things that teachers thought up to make the smart kids feel good, he had told himself at the time, knowing that he himself wasn't a smart kid... He hadn't tried very hard at the test, feeling there was no point in it. But when they showed him the results, he hadn't done badly at all, in fact a little better than average all along the line. That had surprised him, because he had never done very well in school. He had never wanted to, because most of the kids he knew sort of sneered at guys who were brains, and the uncle he lived with was always talking down book learning and college guys who thought they knew a lot. His aunt had never said much about it one way or the other. The numbers: # # # #. Complete the logical sequence. Well, it was worth a try. # was # times #. # was -- no. Each number was larger than the one before it. Not double; # times # was #, you had to add # more to get #. # times # was #, you had to add #... "Yeah!" he said aloud. He ran through the whole series in his nrud, twice, to be sure. He looked for, and found, a key numbered #. There was nothing to be gained by waiting. He drew a deep breath and inserted it. T HE door opened easily; there was no sting, and no sound of water from below. Kelsey let out breath with a relieved whoof. The room beyond the door was quite similar to the one in which he stood. As he stepped through he found himself facing another door, this one with a number # above it. He was certain before he tried it that it was locked. On the wall near door #, beside a key rack, was a tiny shelf holding a stack of papers. Kelsey riffled through the papers. Pages from some kind of textbook on English. He thought that nothing he found could surprise him any more. Engraved beside the new door's keyhole was the word : there would not be a key was right. But each key did have a word on it. Was some crazy schoolteacher running this place? He pictured some old maid, driven batty by years in a classroom, inheriting a fortune and -- nuts. But memories of school returned once more, informing him that an adverb was one of those things called the parts of speech. He supposed that various teachers had tortured him with the parts of speech at least a hundred times during his twelve years of schooling. How could he ever need to know what an adverb was? Well, he did now. Kelsey reached for the pages of English textbook and searched through them carefully until he found a list of words exemplifying the the words on the keys were in the list. He would have to think about the category key-word fitted it. He did. Again the door opened easily for his chosen key. He was not surprised at the sight of another similar room, and the number # above another door. Almost jauntily he walked directly across the new room to study door # for a small engraved symbol. He found the letter H, which might stand for a lot of things. This time the shelf beside the door was large, holding books, wires, and glass in various shapes that reminded him of what he had seen in his occasional glimpses from the hallway of the high school chemistry lab. A small metal tub held a clear odorless liquid that might be water, from the lack of smell. Careful, now, he warned himself. But he didn't feel thirsty yet. There was no keyhole in door #. A simple latch was sealed under a casing of some clear substance that resisted Kelsey's pushing fingers like iron. He sighed. He would have to play it by the book, and the books on the shelf were thick and formidable-looking volumes. A glance showed him they were physics and chemistry texts. He groaned. From somewhere in the rooms behind him came a watery gurgle. just sitting here, and nothing else to do but keep trying to figure a way out. This chemistry business here looked far too hard for him to solve, but it would at least give him something to do. First, the symbol on the door. A book told him that H represented the element hydrogen. He discovered that it was possible to produce hydrogen from water, given electricity and suitable apparatus. These were provided, the electricity from an ordinarylooking wall outlet. On the shelf was a glass tube of peculiar shape that seemed designed to convey the newly released hydrogen to the seal holding the latch. The little he learned meant water. He went to work with containers and wires and electrodes, following a procedure roughly outlined in the books. After several mistakes and one mild electric shock he had the apparatus working. The seal over the latch melted away like ice in July sunshine. Kelsey wondered idly what the seal was made from ; but he didn't much care, as long as he got rid of it. He had been briefly worried by the realization that the other gas produced, called oxygen, was escaping into the air of the room. He thought the name was familiar, but he wasn't sure until a book assured him he had been breathing the stuff all his life. Stepping into the next room, and facing door number #, Kelsey felt almost at home. Before he could do anything else a great sleepiness rose up in him and overcame him. He stretched out on the floor, worried drowsily for a moment about the chance of another flood as he slept, and sank into oblivion. If he dreamed, he did not remember it when he awoke. sat up alertly, feeling good, remembering ininstantly all that had happened. There was another shelf in this room, it was as big as the last, and he supposed the books and odd-looking junk on it would enable him to open Door #. But he paused after getting to his feet and stretching, to consider first another puzzle. He felt refreshed and alert, as if he had just slept eight hours. He had spent an undeterminable time getting through the other rooms, and lying unconscious in them. However long he had been in this place, he had had nothing to eat or drink since arriving. He didn't want anything now. And another thing; there had been nothing like plumbing in any of the rooms, unless you counted the flooding pipe in the first. It seemed that he didn't need any plumbing. He felt physically fine in every way. He didn't even want a cigarette. He had shaved in the morning (this morning? yesterday?) before going to work. He rubbed his face; it was still smooth. His comfort was eerie, evoking forgotten ghost stories about people who had died without knowing it. Had he really drowned while swimming in the lake? He breathed. His pulse beat. He kicked a toe rather incautiously against a wall and was painfully convinced of solidity. Were his bodily needs being taken care of while he slept? That was hard to believe ; he thought any explanation for all this would be hard to believe. Yet one must be true. Kelsey walked back through the rooms he had already traversed. Water now filled the second room to the lower edge of the open hatch in the wall. He would have to wade and dive if he wanted another look at the first room, but he saw no point in doing so. On impulse he scooped up water in his hand. It tasted all right. But he wasn't thirsty. Whoever was behind this, for whatever unimaginable purpose, seemed to be urging him forward with the threat of flood. There was no way out back here. Whether there would be any way out for him ahead -- he told himself there must be. Kelsey faced the locked door numbered #. It had a keyhole, and engraved beside Kelsey looked at the now familiar rack of keys, and again felt the impulse to try one at random, to rush through doors -- he didn't doubt there would be more of them -- as quickly as possible, to get to the bottom of the whole situation. But at door #, a random try had given unpleasant results. He would keep on solving problems as long as he could, and then guess the rest if he had to. it means. Each key was numbered to correspond to one of the bits of junk on this room's shelf. The bits of junk were pottery, clay or stone, painted or carved in decoration, some whole, some only broken pieces. There were what looked like textbooks on the shelf again, with covers and a lot of pages missing, as before. This time there were also thick notebooks. Kelsey picked up one of these and found it crammed with neat notes and drawings that were plain enough in detail -- but what was it all about? Grimly, he began to study the mass of archeological field notes, determined to find out which one of the bits of read for what seemed a long time, standing there. He did not grow tired of standing, didn't even lean on the shelf. He noticed this but put it out of his mind. It took a long time. But when the sleepiness came again, and he lay down on the floor, it was in front of a door numbered #. put aside speculation about how much time was passing, or what it was all about. "All right, I'll play your crazy game," he muttered aloud. He would just accept the absence of any physical need as a blessing,, and keep working his way through doors. He solved a problem in positional astronomy, learning to use mathematics that he had never dreamed existed. Following an instruction book quite unlike any he had ever seen, he programmed a computer that he only vaguely understood, and did not need to understand. The read-out was a tiny orrery, including a ship that Kelsey had to navigate from planet to planet. Not, to be sure, with the complication of changing mass-ratios. The solar system represented in the model had only six planets, none of them with a sizable moon, which facts suggested nothing to Kelsey. He was satisfied when the scheduled journey was complete, and door # clicked open for him. The test required to open door # first appeared somewhat easier. The first half of a musical composition was played repeatedly to Kelsey, through some invisible speaker. Pressing one of a series of numbered buttons brought him the sound of one of four last-halfs, all quite similar. There were books on musical theory, and printed copies of each ending. He listened and studied until he felt sick of all music. Finally he made a choice. He was mistaken. The door refused the key. No shock bit at his hand, no sound of rushing water came from the rooms behind him. All was quiet, the eternal quiet of this place that might be expected to get on a guv's nerves, but so far hadn't bothered him. Evidently his mistake was not to be punished. Kelsey was suddenly angry. That someone could push him around like this, use him for a... a... guinea pig. The term floated into his mind; he wondered what it was, exactly, that scientists really did with guinea pigs. When he got out of here he would look it up. If he got out of here. When! Now to get this damned door open. The temptation to choose one of the three remaining keys at random was strong; but no, he would try what he honestly thought to be the second most likely piece of music. This time the key worked. Kelsey stepped through and waited for the sleepiness to come. ed it, in the back of his mind, for what now seemed many days. Would there be a final answer behind it? Or a door numbered O ? Or a trick ? He had thought perhaps door I would be the most difficult of all to open. He went to work as soon as he woke up. Kelsey built a cathedral. At least the structure somewhat resembled a Gothic church when he was through with it. He built it about three feet high, from blocks about a cubic inch in volume, that clung together like mortared masonry when he fitted one to another. He built it using tiny waldo arms, which were another concept utterly new to him. They worked into a glasslike enclosure that prevented him from reaching directly the simple latch of door #. In this room the latch was not on the door but on the wall a few feet away. A block in the mechanism kept him from quite reaching the latch directly with the arms. He had a helper, for the first time. When he pressed a button, a small machine ran from one corner of the enclosure as if anxious to assist him, climbed upon the blocks until it reached the highest point of whatever pile or structure they formed, and reached a tiny arm as far as it could toward the latch. Kelsey had to build something with the blocks for the robot to climb on, so it could reach the latch. He soon learned that it could not climb a tall narrow spire of blocks; he didn't have enough material to build a massive ramp or stairway. Besides the blocks, he had beams to work with, sticks of varied sizes and shapes, up to a few inches long. Each beam had the on it. Kelsey soon found what case; if the little robot attempted to climb the structure while any of the beams were in place, the blocks immediately lost their cohesiveness and his whole work collapsed. A good many of his efforts collapsed from one cause or another, usually while the robot was climbing. The little machine hit the floor hard, but always bounced up and returned to its corner, like an undaunted boxer ready for the next round. Kelsey chuckled at the robot, tried to think of a name for it, and vowed he would have no less patience. He built and rebuilt, without tiring. There were books on engineering, architecture, and construction; he studied them between attempts. What he needed was a tall structure, with a fairly large top for the robot to stand on while it reached for the latch. Since the amount of blocks was limited, the structure would have to be hollow inside. He used his little beams for temporary support, and discovered the beauty of the arch, and the use of the flying buttress to keep arch-supporting walls from collapsing outward. There came a time when the robot climbed successfully and stretched itself upward, until the tip of one small metal arm reached the latch, curved over, and pulled precisely... Click! He had done it. Seven doors. such that his hands should have trembled with it, but they remained steady and obedient as machines. Door I swung ajar for him now. He felt an impulse to take the robot with him, but it was still out of his reach behind the glass. And it now hung inanimate from the latch it had opened. It was only a machine. Almost without pause Kelsey pushed open door I and stepped through. An unumbered door faced him from the familiar place in the opposite wall, but something else grabbed his attention immediately -- a ladder rose through a hole in the glowing ceiling, and down through the hole came a greenish wavery light that might be a watermottled reflection of the sun. Kelsey climbed quickly. Above the room the ladder curved off to become a sort of stairway, inside a tube big enough to hold a crawling man. Climbing around a sharp bend in the tube, Kelsey felt an odd sensation, as if he had been turned upside down for a moment, lost his balance and his visual perspective. The feeling passed in an instant; he climbed on, into brighter light. Some force held clear water up like a lid inside the upper end of the tube ; it looked as if the upper end was just under the normal surface of a body of water, with bright light above, as if from a clear sunny sky. Kelsey was quite practical about wonders by now. He poked a finger into the waterlid above his head, and withdrew it wet but undamaged. He crawled up through the water, and stopped with head and shoulders in the open air and sun, his weight still supported by the' tube. He had emerged into the familiarity of the Chicago shoreline, to very nearly the exact spot where he had felt the grasp and sting at his ankle, a few yards offshore from the rocks. The sun was nearly overhead on a bright warm day. Piled as he had left it he saw his clothing. Above the gentle lapping of wave against rock he heard his transistor portable blaring something with a beat. The same day! Mechanically he pushed himself free of the tube and dog-paddled to the rocks. A couple of people were in sight, strolling or sunbathing. The same people. He remembered them now. It was the same hour. Maybe the same minute. His mind felt blank. He pulled himself up onto the rock and sat staring stupidly. The grab at his ankle, the strange place, the old man, the flood, the tests and the doors, one after another, all had no ties to his reality right now. He felt that in a little while he would convince himself that the whole thing had been a dream -- but never quite convince himself entirely. To the end of his life he would carry the doubt, and the wonder... Kelsey entered the water again. He swam out and groped down with his feet. The tube entrance was still where he had left it. Was it always here? Ridiculous. Swimmers and boaters and fishermen would run into it all the time. He ducked under water and opened his eyes and tried to see the -- place down there, from the outside, but there was nothing visible except the mouth of the tube, and a few yards of the tube itself in the green murkiness. He gripped the lip of the tube opening, a few feet underwater, and stared downward inside. He could see quite a way. He came up for air. The thing, the system, whatever it was, whoever controlled it, had released him, hadn't it? He had studied and struggled his way out. What more did he want? Revenge? Maybe. He wanted something. He somehow believed that if he reported this to someone it would all be gone when they came to look for it. He remembered the final, numberless, unnecessary door he had seen down there. He looked around with longing at his familiar world, drew a deep breath, and went under water. the same queer sensation at the bend in the tube -- as if he was being pulled in a hurry from one place to another. He ignored it and went on. The room at the foot of the ladder was just as he remembered it. He faced one way and sighted through a line of open doors, through which he had worked his way to freedom. He faced the other way, toward the final door, unnumbered and unlatched. Kelsey stood quietly for a moment with his hand on the door ; then pushed gently. The door swung open. Nothing else happened. Light was dim on the other side. He stepped through and found himself facing a thick-looking translucent wall. He could dimly discern an unfamiliar shape moving in the vagueness beyond it. "And so the' final test is passed," said a man's voice from a speaker over Kelsey's head, making him jump. "The will to open the unnecessary door is yours." Kelsey backed warily away, and stood holding the door open. "All right -- what's it all about?" he demanded. "Who are you?" "I am an alien here. My shape is not yours. To see me now might disturb you." It was quiet except for Kelsey's breathing. He found he believed what he had just been told. Outer space. Jokes about little green men. Not funny now. "What do you want?" he finally asked. "Why did you put me through all that?" "I want to go home," said the voice simply and eagerly. "I can do things that seem to you very wonderful, but one thing I cannot do without the gent mind. That is to drive my ship through the great distances, to make timelike the great intervals, to get home -- neither to die of age myself on the way, or to find my world old and my people gone when I arrive... can you understand? I must pass many stars to get home." "You want help, why don't you just ask?" I left to themselves now, for a long time to come, not bothered from outside. This is very important. I must deal only with an individual. "You have the ability to help me, proven by my tests. I have violated your rights and subjected you to strange pressures, but I assure you you were never in real danger here. I ask your forgiveness; my need for help is great." Something suggested to Kelsey that he turn around and scramble up the ladder as fast as he could. Somehow he didn't. "How come you need help?" "There has been an accident -- I am the only one of my kind left alive in this ship. I will explain it in detail if you wish." "What happened to that old man?" Kelsey demanded suddenly. "I created his apparent body from a material sensitive to mental forces, using specifications in your own mind. He appeared to you as a being you knew to be intelligent, yet one far from what you think of as your own kind. Still you took what you believed to be a grave risk in order to protect his life. If you elect to go with me, you will gain knowledge that is not well entrusted to one who holds the lives of other beings in contempt. The old man was your first test. He never existed as a person." "You expect me to believe that -- " "Watch." An opening dilated in a wall. An amorphous gray lump of stuff flowed out like a huge fat worm onto the floor. It rose, coloring and shaping itself into rags and chains and a smiling Oriental face. It nodded at Kelsey cheerfully; the rags and chains became the rich robe of a mandarin. "I can speak through the mouth of this image, if you wish," the figure said. "Better than TV," said Kelsey, sounding idiotic to himself. "Listen, how do you expect me to help you?" "You can, if you are willing. Your mind is good, do not be afraid to let it reach out for things. The work on the trip will not be hard. There will be much time for fun, and I can promise you will not be bored. In four years you can be back on Earth, if you wish, though there is a planet in my home system with people very much like yours which..." "Four years!" But what's the difference, Kelsey thought, I'm not going anyway. "I regret so long a time. But I and my people will not be ungrateful; there will be compensations..." "Wait a minute." Kelsey backed toward the ladder, the mandarin following him with cheerful eyes. "If you're from -- where you say -- how come you know so much about us here on Earth ? Don't tell me you got it all out of my mind, all those tests. I didn't know all that stuff to begin with." The mandarin melted down to a gray puddle and began to flow away. "You are not the first being I have seized, tested, and interviewed on this planet," said the voice from the speaker. "More than nine hundred others preceded you. By now I know you people well enough to test you for ability to give the help I need. You are not the first to be suitable. But I hope you will be the first to accept. I have been hopping this ship from one large body of water to another for several of your years, keeping it hidden from the mass of your people, whom I do not wish to disturb, trying to find one who can and will help me." ladder. Why hadn't he just stayed on shore once he got away? But now he had to keep asking questions. "What happens to the people who don't pass your tests? Or who don't want to go with you?" There was a little silence. Then the voice from the speaker said: "I am sorry. I forget now in my eagerness that you do not know us, and in the light of your experience you are right to be suspicious. "I do not mistreat them further. They are set free -- as you are now -- to return to their normal lives at very nearly the point where I interrupted them. I try to improve their health as some payment for my violation of their constitutional rights." "You mean, if I had just walked away up there -- ?" "I would have bothered you no more. In a very few minutes you would have forgotten the entire incident." "Thanks," said Kelsey. He turned and went two steps up the ladder quickly, then turned again. "How did you give me all those tests in a few minutes?" "If you come with me, you can learn that -- and many other things." "I see," Kelsey muttered. Four years out of a guy's life... but what am I thinking of ? I better get out of here before he changes his mind, and locks me in. He went up the ladder quickly. Tomorrow would be Tuesday. He would go to the post office, and sort mail. He would do more than that, damn it. He would go to some of the colleges and see what kind of evening classes they had going. But hadn't the alien said he would forget all about this ship a few minutes after he left it? Maybe he would simply slide back into his old life, and never know the difference. Well, he asked himself angrily, would that be so bad? Besides, a lot of people would miss me if I just took off for four years. Who, really? He believed the alien, somehow. If the guy had been lying he would have named a shorter time than four years. Kelsey reached the top of the tube, and paused with head and shoulders out of water. Miles to the southwest, out of his sight now behind rocks and park and distant skyscrapers, was the Main Post Office, where he might retire in about twenty years. It was really a big place when you were standing near it, or inside it sorting mail. From here it was nothing, a small hidden box, blind and selfcontained under the reach of all the sky. "T'M ready. Can we move the I ship now? Just by thinking about it?" "Yes, we can, as we are working with the machines. Relax. Now hold this pattern in your mind." A thing indescribable in Earthman's words came to Kelsey's consciousness. "Think about it until I come back with another." "Got it." At about midnight, each of the higher-frequency radars working in North America cast on its scope a burst of noise. An alert was called, but nothing further out of the ordinary was observed. And no one on Earth attributed the event to the making timelike of a great interval... there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchmen and (my) fantasies. His work dealt always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery and he made some remarkable forecasts. The interest he invoked was a practical one; he wrote and believed and told that this thing or that thing could be done, which was not at that time done. He helped his reader to imagine it done and to imagine what fun, excitement or mischief would ensue. Many of his inventions have 'come true.' But these stories of mine... do no pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. -- H. G. Wells An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility.  S   I f' you can read this  T HE previous case was a Weeper, and he lost. So the Space Zoning Commissioners were damp and irritable before I opened pleadings for my client. I tried not to squelch as I approached the bench. "Not the Flammables again, Mr. Jones?" the fat Commissioner asked nastily, sponging his suit with a sodden handkerchief. "This was last week, Your Honor." The thin dark Commissioner stared pointedly at the charred end of the bench nearest the witness seat. "Indeed it was, Mr. Jones." The middle Commissioner poised his fingers and looked at the court ceiling; moisture gleamed diamond like on his bald head. "Now let me see," he intoned. "Correct me if I err, Mr. Jones, but I seem to observe you have a habit of representing somewhat spectacular aliens. Including, in the past six months alone, the Drillers, Whirling Tombs, Fragile Glasses, Erupters, Vibrational Men, Transparent Women -- and of course let us not forget the Flammables." "I assure Your Honor, my present clients will be found to be sober, hardworking, desirable members of the Galactic Community, seeking only to live on their own asteroid in peace under a democratic system, which... "Thank you, Mr. Jones. Shall we proceed?" "And perhaps," added the fat Commissioner, "you may be good enough to leave us with most of our courtroom intact on this occasion." The thin Commissioner sighed and shuffled his papers. "You appear, Mr. Jones, to contest a Space Council ruling for the elimination of Asteroid Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-Two on the grounds, which you allege, mat it is a peaceful dwelling of an adult aud responsible alien race." "Yes, Your Honor." "Then let us see your adult, um, Bugbreeder." I shuffled uncomfortably and splashed the court stenographer who gave me a dirty look. "A space tramp's name given in the early days of Space, Your Honor. More properly, my clients are the Selective Culturists of Bacteria and Lesser Life." The fat Commissioner sniffed. "Bugbreeders will do," he said. "Produce one." My client hopped off the table and ran nimbly up to the witness seat. He sat there like a small green snowball with large and pointed ears. "Happy, happy to be here. I'm sure," he said... Fortunately he had a hand to raise and looked reasonably humanoid as he was sworn in. The caterpillar and semi-jelly cultures make a less favorable first impression, and at this point the Driller had gone excitedly through the floor. "You are a representative member of your race?" I asked formally. "Oh, yus. Much." "And you reside on Asteroid Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-Two, the permanent dwelling of your race?" "Oh, yus. Home." "And although your home presents certain technical difficulties for interplanetary vehicles on the spacerun to the greater planets, you maintain it should be preserved because of your contribution to the culture of the Galactic Community?" I asked. "Oh, yus." "Does he understand a word you're saying, Mr. Jones?" asked the bald Commissioner. "Oh, yus. Not much," said my client cheerfully. "Hurrmph," I said, and coughed. "Perhaps I may assist," suggested the thin Commissioner, with a nasty look at me. "What exactly does your race do?" "Breed bugs, I'm sure. Am head bacteriophysicist name of Lood. Am good  scientist." "And what exactly do you do with these bugs you raise?" "Most everything." I rupted. "At this point I propose a few simple demonstrations of what Mr. Lood and his people can do." "May I inquire if either of my learned brethren know any way in which we can charge Mr. Jones with rebuilding costs, if necessary?" asked the bald Commissioner. "Your Honors, I assure you..." "Proceed at your peril, Mr. Jones." I walked over to the exhibit table and pointed to a row of jars. "Exhibits A through G, Your Honors. Samples of food and beverages produced by my clients without raw materials and from the expert culture of bacteria." I held up a jar full of mauve fungus. It was the most attractive example. "I would hardly call feeding on funguses a sign of a responsible humanoid race, Mr. Jones." "Perhaps Your Honor will recall the part played by bacteria in making milk, cheese, wine, beer, bread." The Commmissioners looked at each other and nodded reluctantly. So I passed the jars up to them, secure in the knowledge they had been tested by the Alien Foods Bureau. I watched the Commissioners unscrew the lids and taste the contents somewhat hesitantly. "Not bad," confessed the fat Commissioner eventually. "Quite palatable." "Of course we already have honey and similar foodstuffs, Mr. Jones." "Naturally, Your Honor. But Mr. Lood's race can survive without extraplanetary aid. Provided they have sunshine and water, they can breed their spores and bacteria with no other resources." "You mean," said the thin Commissioner with a dark leer, "that almost any sunny planet would do for them?" Somewhere along the line my point seemed to have been swept away, so I added hurriedly : "I offer this evidence purely to show the high degree of civilization of my clients' culture, as cause why they should not be deprived of their native land." "Oh, yus," my client agreed. "Mr. Lood," intoned the bald Commissioner, "to stay on your present asteroid you will have to prove that your race offers something that cannot be found elsewhere in the Galactic Community. Now have these funguses of yours any special medicinal values, for example?" "Please?" "Can you cure diseases with them?" "Oh, no." "Ah," said the thin and fat Commissioners together. "Proceed, Mr. Jones." back behind the twentiethcentury discoverers of penieven back behind the pioneer Pasteur. Five hundred years back, in fact. "Yes. Well. Let's see how my clients handle housing, Your Honors. I think you'll find this quite revolutionary. Mr. Lood?" Lood hopped off the witness seat and trotted up to the long table normally reserved for attorneys. Lately, I have found my professional colleagues strangely reluctant to stay in court when I have a case, so Lood had the entire table to himself. He pulled a small jar out from under the table and spread a pile of dust on the tabletop. Then he unscrewed the jar and gently poured nothing out of it onto the dust. Nothing visible, that is. But I assumed it was teeming with viruses and such. "While Mr. Lood gets this started, Your Honors," I said, hoping the viruses or whatever were not fatal to humans, "may I submit the usefulness of fungus foods for spacetravel and for pioneers on inhospitable planets?" "Are we having difficulties with General Food Concentrates, the Travelers Capsule Combine and the other ten thousand concerns in this line, Mr. Jones?" the bald Commissioner asked quietly. You can't say I didn't try. I shut up and watched Lood fuss with the dust on the table. It started moving as if it were bubbling and Lood stood back. Slowly, the dust on the table formed itself into a brick, a long eight by six by three inch brick. Lood smiled happily. "And here, Your Honors," I said triumphantly, "here is automatic housing." "One brick does not make a house, Mr. Jones." "If Your Honors will just watch..." The brick slowly elongated and split into two perfect bricks, lying on the table end to end. "Mass colony action of bacteria, said Lood wisely. "Oh, yus." The two bricks each split into two further bricks. These divided and multiplied themselves while we watched, out to the end of the table. "I would like Your Honors to observe the way these bricks overcome natural hazards," I said, getting into my stride. I pointed to the bricks drooping over the end of the table. A brick fell onto the floor at each end, then built itself up until it joined the line of bricks on the table, forming a perfect arch at each angle. The line on the table was now three bricks high, so I walked round and stood behind the wall. "You see, Your Honors, suppose I need a house. I merely combine these suitable microbes and dust. And there we are, a house." I had to stand on tiptoe to finish the sentence because of the mathematics involved. Every brick was doubling and redoubling itself in just under a minute. And the wall was getting quite impressively high. "Mr. Jones," called one of the Commissioners. It was not until I tried to walk round the end of the wall that I found I had been outflanked. I ran to the nearest wall of the courtroom but the bricks got there first. I heard a rending noise that suggested the other end had gone clean through the opposite wall. As a matter of fact, I saw the astonished face of an attorney entering the main door of the Justice Building as the wall advanced towards him. Then he saw me. He grinned and waved. I was in no mood to wave bcick "Mr. Lood, Mr. Lood," I yelled. "Can you hear me?" "Wall too thick, yus," came a muffled answer. And indeed it was. I had not noticed it, but the wall was expanding sideways as well. I was calculating the approximate thickness when it went up and through the roof of the courtroom. Fortunately it was a nice sunny day. H owever, this was no time to sunbathe and I dashed towards the hole in the courtroom wall, where Lood's wall had gone through. I just got out before a buttress, coming out the wall at right angles, blocked the gap. I remembered something Lood had said about the automatic creation of full-scale houses on a simple standard plan: two rooms, a toilet and a patio. Outside, the wall was well on the way towards completing its second simple house. This side of the wall was, that is. I could only assume it was doing something similar on the other side. There was no way of getting round and seeing, except by outstripping the wall in a sprint. I gathered my breath and dignity and ran very rapidly down the length of the wall, round the far mounting tiers of brick, advancing now on the State Library, and back to where I had left the Commissioners and Mr. Lood. I was faced by a thicket of patios and arched doorways and low-roofed houses. "Your Honors, Your Honors," I called hopefully, walking into the maze, in the general direction of what appeared to be an old and ruined war monument. It then occurred to me that this was the outer wall of the courthouse. It stood far off, pointing a stone finger to the sky, as if going down in a sea of brick for the third time. "Your Honors, Your Honors... I met them turning a corner. Unfortunately, they seemed to have found it necessary to crawl through a broken gap of some sort. They were very dusty and had a slightly shredded appearance. "Ah, Mr. Jones," they said grimly, dusting each other off. A tremendous crash announced the falling in of the roof of the State Library. "Well," said the thin Commissioner, "he did say it was revolutionary." I smiled politely. "Don't giggle, Mr. Jones, or we'll hold you in contempt." We wound out of the maze in single file. A pattering behind us announced Lood bringing up the rear. Once we were out, and about two hundred yards ahead of the advancing walls, patios and houses, the three Commissioners turned on me. "Mr. Jones," they said with restraint. "You will now stop this reckless building project." I turned to Lood. "You must stop it," I said. "Oh, yus," he agreed, nodding happily. "Most marvelous, no. Ample housing for all and sundry. Homes for peoples. Immediate occupancy. You like basic plan house, yus?" "Mr. Lood," snarled the fat Commissioner. "The problem on every habitable planet so far has been to find room to build. Earth is congested..." Distant crashing informed me that an unprecedented houseclearing was still going on. "... And so are all authorized planets yet discovered. I speak for my learned brethren in saying that this... this anthill of yours is one thing the Galactic Community can do without." "And do without right now," added his bald colleague. "You wish to stop?" asked Lood. Small tears filled the periphery of his round eyes. "Yes," I confirmed brutally. "Can you stop it?" "Oh, yus. Must have antiseptics." I T took the fire department four hours of spraying from their copters to reduce the entire housing estate to dust. And then an even blanket of brown feathery residue lay unbroken for several acres, save here and there where the shells of previous buildings Stood up gauntly and accusingly. "All bugs gone," said Lood sadly. "But what about this mess?" demanded the bald Commissioner. "Comes out of air. Floating particles. Process cleans air, too." A fresh wind from across the blanket of dust came inopportunely to punctuate Mr. Lood's remark. As soon as they could talk again, the Commissioners suggested resuming in another city. "Assuming, Mr. Jones, you wish to produce further aspects of your, hum, case." Six red and bleary eyes stared at me from a coating of brown dust of only vaguely judicial appearance. "I think, Your Honors, the next evidence had better be delivered in the open," I said, and pointed to a nearby park. Much, if not all, of the dust fell off us as we walked over to the small green hill in the center of the park. The birds twittered, the sun shone, the breeze was fresh; and after the Commissioners had settled on convenient tree stumps, I felt quite hopeful about the third line of evidence. Lood stood optimistically by. "Your Honors," I said, "you are aware that Earth suffers a grave shortage of metals. Almost all economical quantities have been mined out. Yet, Your Honors -- " I paused dramatically -- "in the haematin of human blood alone, whose main function is to carry oxygen to the system, there is nearly twice as much iron by weight as oxygen." "Precisely which of us, Mr. Jones, do you propose to mine first?" I cleared my throat and let the thin Commissioner's remark pass. "Merely making the point, Your Honor, that the metalcarrying properties of bacteria have been hardly considered." This was stretching it a bit because selective breeding of microbes for the recovery of metals in tailings have been developed back in the nineteen-fifties. But so far as I knew, no one had carried it as far as my client race. "Mr. Lood," I commanded. "Just one moment, Mr. Jones," said the bald Commissioner drily. "Let us have an outline of this before we start." "Certainly, Your Honor. Mr. Lood will now extract gold from a sample of ocean water we have obtained." I signalled to the waiting carrier and it came trundling softly over the grass and deposited a large tank on the grass. "Genuine untouched ocean water, Your Honors," I said, slapping the tank. "Go ahead, Mr. Lood." The little fellow hopped up to the side of the tank and emptied another invisible horde from a test tube into the water. We waited. "Oh, yus," he said. And there on the bottom of the tank was an unmistakable sludge of metallic gold, shining speckled in the rays of sunlight bending through the water. I scooped out a sample and handed it round for the Commissioners to inspect. "Subject to analysis," grunted the fat one, "this certainly seems to be gold." "Of course, there is no reason why this should not be done on Earth, as a starting point" The thin Commissioner paused and looked at my client. "Does this process affect fish?" "Oh, yus," said Lood. "Kills all parasites. Fish, reptiles, and such." "Thank you," said the Commissioner drily. M R. Lood looked at me apologetically. "My people too small to tolerate fish," he explained. "Fish most dangerous wild beasts. Oh, yus." "Never mind," I reassured him. "Your Honors, I feel the court will take a more favorable view of the dry-land operation, then. Taking place as it does in the bowels of the earth, there is no danger to valuable livestock. And here we can demonstrate, for example,simple aluminum extraction, by the progressive reduction and oxidation and reduction of bacteria on a molecular scale. "I hope," I added, "this experiment will produce visible evidence of this great boon to mankind, though I must ask Your Honors to watch closely." Lood produced another testtube, pressed a small hole in the grass with his finger and emptied the tube. The hole darkened. We all bent over to watch. Nothing happened. "Perhaps a dud batch?" I asked eventually. "Oh, no," said Lood. We peered intently into the small hole without seeing anything. Then a faint wisp of steam came out of the hole. I walked over the grass, picked up a long twig, walked back and thrust it into the hole. I could not touch bottom, so something was going on down there. The edges of the hole began to gleam with white metal. I was about to explain the alumina content of common clay, when the thin Commissioner and the tree stump he was sitting on went down with a whistling sound into a sudden pit that opened beneath him. I only just caught the third and last Commissioner in time. We watched his tree stump sinking out of sight togther. The ground began to quiver uneasily. "Let us get out of here with all haste." I followed the direction of the court with proper professional zeal. And we just made it to the safe stressed-concrete surface of the old freeway when the park melted completely into a stark framework of aluminum. Seated in the middle and peering at us through the aluminum cage were the other two Commissioners. They did not seem particularly happy. Around them in a widening belt there opened up a pit of gleaming aluminum, melting, so to speak, towards the horizon on all sides. "You realize, I suppose, Mr. Jones," said the bald Commissioner beside me, "that your client is in the process of eating up the Earth." He breathed heavily. Lood was beaming and hopping up and down at the success of his experiment. I touched him in the general area of a shoulder. He looked at me. "No," I said firmly, shaking my head. "No?" "No!" His round eyes became tearful and his little green body shook. "Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear." "Antiseptics?" I asked. "Oh, yus," he confirmed sadly. department was still observing my client -- and me, I suspected afterwards, ridiculous as that may seem. This time it took them several hours of deep spraying area. A vast saucer of aluminum remained. "Useful for signalling to stars, oh, yus?" asked Lood, hopefully. "Oh, no," I said. A threatening cough made me turn round to see the three Commissioners staring at me. "Mr. Jones..." "... you have now destroyed the Courthouse, the Public Library and five city blocks..." "... and buried them under a filthy layer of dust..." "... and reduced a park into a great garbage pit..." "... we therefore refuse your claim and give you and your client six hours to get off Earth..." "... and kindly do not trouble to advise us where the Space Council moves you. We will sleep more soundly for believing that it will be many, many light-years away." And they turned and walked away, leaving me with my client -- and, apparently, my traveling companion. A quiet and suppressed sobbing made me turn and look at Lood. He wept dolefully. "We have nothing," he said. "Oh, no. We have nothing to offer. Nothing that you humans want." "Well," I said, "that's the way it goes sometimes." And what, I wondered, was I going to do for a living now? "Free food," gulped Lood. "Free housing. Free gold and metals. We had all hoped so much from this, Oh, yus." There did not seem any point in telling him his people were several hundred years too late. Once upon a time he would have been hailed as a savior of a starving and poor human race, a great benefactor of mankind. Now he was just a nuisance. And I was another for letting him loose. "Well," I assured him, "you have got one guest until they shift you off your asteroid. Me. Free food and housing will suit me fine. And maybe we'll find some very backward part of the Galaxy where they need gold and such. "It's a pity," I added, as we started to walk towards the spaceport, "that you can't control these bacteria of yours." "Can control." "It didn't look like it, my friend." "Oh, yus. Can control bodily leucocytes, corpuscles and such. Perfect cell replacement easy." I looked down at him. "If it's all that easy," I said. "I suppose your old men can run faster than your houses." "No old men," said Lood. "Well, old whatever-youare's." "No old. Not die. Oh, yus. Perfect cell replacement." I stood very still. "Do you mean you never die?" I asked. "Oh, yus. Never die." "Can teach?" I asked. "Oh, yus. Most simple," smiled Lood. "Can teach all men not die. Not ever." But I was off running after the three Commissioners, yelling until they stopped and stood waiting for me...      IF Feature science briefs B Y the time this is in print, you may already have been irritated, once in a while, by background static riding in on the carrier wave of your favorite radio station. If it isn't Junior fiddling with a lightbulb or your neighbor's gaspowered mulch-spreader with no suppressor on the plug, it could be Phantom, a double side-band radio system being tried out by the Armed Forces. Designed by General Electric, the method impresses information on the far outside edges of the band you're listening to, without affecting the middle at all, thus finding literally thousands of newly available communications channels. Some of the satellites equipped with microphones have reported pings, pops, raps and bangs of an unexpected loudness. Professor Whipple of Harvard concludes that the noises are caused by extremely fine dust in orbit around the Earth, very possibly the remains of comets. There seems to be a concentration of it at about # miles altitude. Professor Whipple feels that none of it is large enough to do appreciable damage, and that the noise is more a staticelectricity phenomenon than a physical impact. He suggests, however, a thin outer shell for man-carrying capsules, so insulated that such noise could not reach the pilot. Harmless it may be. But it could be a terrifying experience. We've all marvelled at developments in microfilming, whether it was at the fantastic savings in the old-newspaper files at the major libraries, or the International Geophysical Year weather readings -- thousands upon thousands of them, taken from points all over the world for over eighteen months, and by microfilming reduced to a stack one man might lift. Now comes the National Bureau of standards with a camera quite capable of putting all the pages of this issue on a piece of film just big enough to make an eye-patch on Liberty's portrait on a dime. Time magazine says that it could put the # pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the back of a match-book. In spite of cloak-and-dagger tales about entire paragraphs being concealed in a comma between clauses of a Dear John letter (and this gimmick could include John's life record double-spaced, even if it was John probably not be used for practical microfilming. Working on the principle of what happens when you look through the wrong end of a telescope, the apparatus is so choosy, about focusing and so subject to interference from vibration (BuStandards envelopes the camera and the object to be photographed in a massive steel jacket suspended from springs) and dust (each single letter is about the size , of a single hoof-and-mouth disease germ) that it will be kept at work primarily at the job it was designed for -- testing the resolving power of photographic emulsions. Pity the poor cancer -- it must be as worried today as a polio radiotherapy is reported from St. Thomas Hospital in London, England. The patient is placed in a giant tank which is supported horizontally only at one end. Round the tank rotate two massive therapy heads containing cobalt # -- # curies of it. Precisely aimed, they rotate about a central point which is the cancer -- meaning that other tissues get only transient radiation while the cancer gets it constantly. The reason for the sealed tank is that it enables the patient to breathe highpressure oxygen, and the reason for that is that cancer cells are often deficient in oxygen and therefore up to three times less sensitive to radiation as normal ones. This technique brings up the concentration of oxygen in the cancer while the radiation beams are clobbering it. To accomplish this, the patient must breathe high-pressure oxygen through a mask. And to make this possible, his entire body must be pressurized -- hence the tank. The entire apparatus is walled in by thick concrete, with a five-inch-thick viewing window of leaded glass and remote controls. Wich heavy artillery like this around, cancer might as well give up and go! Contrary to the beliefs and or wistful hopes of many a s-f aficionado, biologically alien life -- that is, alien to Earth norms -- is unlikely or impossible, so good-by boron beast with cuprous blood, farewell silicon monsters! Dr. George Wald, a Professor of Biology at Harvard, asserts not only that living organisms everywhere must be constructed of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, but that they must also have water and radiation -- specifically that between # and # microns -- available. On the other hand, perhaps you feel more at home in the universe now! You may take this as a joke, grin and laugh it off ; you may feel offended, and say this is no place for such information and advice. Either way, any way -- keep it in mind. The information: Dr. Leon Rosen of the United States Public Health Service says that the isolation of the virus of infectious hepatitis is "the No. I unsolved problem of contemporary virology." Infectious hepatitis is a liver disease for which there is no known cure. It is on the increase, and is now the third most prevalent disease in the U.S. Seldom deadly, it is acutely debilitating and a great masquerader, being difficult to diagnose and so far impossible to treat except by rest and good diet. It is not the same thing as serum hepatitis, a rare and dangerous disease caught from improperly sterilized injection needles. Infectious hepatitis can be caught in several ways, like polluted water, but most of it comes from person-to-person contact and its source is always the lower intestine. There is only one sure thing you can do about it, for yourself and your children, if any: Wash your hands every time! Earthbound Dr. Kurt Komarek of New York University has thought his way out of disaster on the moon! He reasoned that oxygen supply on a space ship is necessarily limited, and even with a completely efficient recycling system -- plants, for example, returning oxygen and absorbing C# -- there is still a certain amount aboard, in or out of combination. And it cannot go up or stay the same: it must go down. Especially after landing, with airlocks in use, and with inevitable escape from suit joints, etc. Recalling the amount of iron in meteorites, and knowing it must be combined with something, and that probably oxygen, Dr. Komarek tried heating a meteorite in a hydrogen atmosphere. There was oxygen all right -- # pounds for each # pounds of meteorite ! As it left the heated material, it combined with the hydrogen to form water vapor, from which the oxygen could be separated by electrolysis. He calculates that by processing not more than # pounds of meteorites a month, enough oxygen could be recovered to replace the losses of a #-man team indefinitely ! Certain aspects of the "scientific attitude" could well be copied by the rest of humanity. Years ago nations began to pool weather information; this work was correlated and was vastly expanded during the International Geophysical Year, and now continues at a high level. The recently opened Tokyo Weather Central is the fifth large information center to be opened round the world. There is a constant free exchange of information in weather covering the entire northern hemisphere, including Russia and the United States. Another example : in preparation for the ments were prepared far in advance. One of these was a seismograph station on bedrock deep underground in the city of Budapest. Seismic tracings from that laboratory can be seen today showing disturbances from Russian tanks as the # fighting rolled back and forth through the city. These faint squiggles on paper tape speak eloquently of the single-mindedness of the scientists who stayed on the job in their laboratory, never missing a reading or an entry, while their personal world fell to pieces on the streets above. Dr. David Nachmansohn, Professor of Biochemistry at Columbia, has announced remarkable new findings on the exact nature of nerves and their operation. It seems that the "bio-electricity" present in body fluids, in the form of sodium ions, is blocked from entry into a nerve by a fatty substance. This substance is made permeable by the chemical acetylcholine after it combines with a certain protein in the barrier. The nerve may then conduct. But if it conducted longer than a few millionths of a second the nerve might become paralyzed. So another substance, the enzyme cholinesterase, acts to destroy the compound. All this to scratch your nose! end IF 'fNovelette I T HE First Vice-President of National Bank and Trust Company, the gentleman to whom Miss Orison McCall was applying for a job, was not at all the public picture of a banker. His suit of hound'stooth checks, the scarlet vest peeping above the vee of his jacket, were enough to assure Orison that the Taft Bank was a curious bank indeed. "I gotta say, chick, these references of yours really swing," said the Vice-President, Mr. Wanji. "Your last boss says you come on real cool in the secretary-bit." "He was a very kind employer," Orison said. She tried to keep from staring at the most remarkable item of Mr. Wanji's costume, a pair of furry green earmuffs. It was not cold. Mr. Wanji returned to Orison her letters of reference. "What color bread you got eyes for taking down, baby?" he asked. What a bank! The First Vice-President was a cool cat -- the elevator and the money operators all wore earmuffs -- was just as phony as a three-dollar bill! "Beg pardon?" "What kinda salary you bucking for?" he translated, bouncing up and down on the toes of his rough-leather desert boots. "I was making one-twenty a week in my last position," Miss McCall said. "You're worth more'n that, just to jazz up the decor," Mr. Wanji said. "What you say we pass you a cee-and-a-half a week. Okay?" He caught Orison's look of bewilderment. "One each, a Franklin and a Grant," he explained further. She still looked blank. "Sister, you gonna work in a bank, you gotta know who's picture's on the paper. That's a hunnerd-fifty a week, doll." "That will be most satisfactory, Mr. Wanji," Orison said. It was indeed. "Crazy !" Mr. Wanji grabbed Orison's right hand and shook it with athletic vigor. "You just now joined up with our herd. I wanna tell you, chick, it's none too soon we got some decent scenery around this tomb, girlwise." He took her arm and led her toward the bank of elevators. The uniformed operator nodded to Mr. Wanji, bowed slightly to Orison. He,too, she observed, wore earmuffs. His were more formal than Mr. Wanji's, being midnight blue in color. "Lift us to five, Mac," Mr. Wanji said. As the elevator dopr shut he explained to Orison, "You can make the Taft Bank scene anywhere between the street floor and floor five. Basement and everything higher'n fifth floor is Iron Curtain Country far's you're concerned. Dig, baby?" "Yes, sir," Orison said. She was wondering if she'd be issued earmuffs, now that she'd become an employee of this most peculiar bank. The elevator opened on five to a tiny office, just large enough to hold a single desk and two chairs. On the desk were a telephone and a microphone. Beside them was a double-decked "In" and "Out" basket. "Here's where you'll do your nine-to-five, honey," Mr. Wanji said. "What will I be doing, Mr. Wanji?" Orison asked. The Vice-President pointed to the newspaper folded in the "In" basket. "Flip on the microphone and read the paper to it," he said. "When you get done reading the paper, someone will run you up something new to read. Okay?" "It seems a rather peculiar job," Orison said. "After all, I'm a secretary. Is reading the newspaper aloud supposed to familiarize me with the Bank's operation?" "Don't bug me, kid," Mr. Wanji said. "All you gotta do is read that there paper into this here microphone. Can do?" "Yes, sir," Orison said. "While you're here, Mr. Wanji, I'd like to ask you about my withholding tax, social security, credit union, coffee-breaks, union membership, lunch hour and the like. Shall we take care of these details now? Or would you -- " "You just take care of that chicken-flickin' kinda stuff any way seems best to you, kid," Mr. Wanji said. "Yes, sir," Orison said. This laissez-faire policy of Taft Bank's might explain why she'd been selected from the Treasury Department's secretarial pool to apply for work here, she thought. Orison McCall, girl Government spy. She picked up the newspaper from the "In" basket, unfolded it to discover the day's Wall Street Journal, and began at the top of column one to read it aloud. Wanji stood before the desk, nodding his head as he listened. "You blowing real good, kid," he said. "The boss is gonna dig you the most." Orison nodded. Holding her newspaper and her microphone, she read the one into the other. Mr. Wanji flicked his fingers in a good-by, then took off upstairs in the elevator. B Y lunchtime Orison had finished the Wall Street Journal and had begun reading a book an earmuffed page had brought her. The book was a fantastic novel of some sort, named The Hobbit. Reading this peculiar fare into the microohone before her, Miss McCall was more certain than ever that the Taft Bank was, as her boss in Washington had told her, the front for some highly irregular goings-on. An odd business for a Federal Mata Hari, Orison thought, reading a nonsense story into a microphone for an invisible audience. Orison switched off her microphone at noon, marked her place in the book and took the elevator down to the ground floor. The operator was a new man, ears concealed behind scarlet earmuffs. In the car, coming down from the interdicted upper floors, were several gentlemen with briefcases. As though they were members of a ballet-troupe, these gentlemen whipped off their hats with a single motion as Orison stepped aboard the elevator. Each of the chivalrous men, hat pressed to his heart, wore a pair of earmuffs. Orison nodded bemused acknowledgment of their gesture, and got off in the lobby vowing never to put a penny into this curiousest of banks. Lunch at the stand-up counter down the street was a normal interlude. Girls from the ground-floor offices of Taft Bank chattered together, eyed Orison with the coolness due so attractive a competitor, and favored her with no gambit to enter their conversations. Orison sighed, finished her tuna salad on whole-wheat, then went back upstairs to her lonely desk and her microphone. By five, Orison had finished the book, reading rapidly and becoming despite herself engross #d in the saga of Bilbo Baggins, Hobbit. She switched off the microphone, put on her light coat, and rode downstairs in an elevator filled with earmuffed. silent, hatclasping gentlemen. What I need, Orison thought, walking rapidly to the busline, is a double Scotch, followed by a double Scotch. And what the al Bank and Trust Company needs is a joint raid by forces of the U.S. Treasury Department and the American Psychiatric Association. Earmuffs, indeed. Fairy-tales read into a microphone. A VicePresident with the vocabulary of a racetrack tout. And what goes on in those upper floors? Orison stopped in at the restaurant nearest her apartment house -- the Windsor Arms -- and ordered a meal and a single Martini. Her boss in Washington had told her that this job of hers, spying on Taft Bank from within, might prove dangerous. Indeed it was, she thought. She was in danger of becoming a solitary drinker. Home in her apartment, Orison set the notes of her first day's observations in order. Presumably Washington would call tonight for her initial report. Item: some of the men at the Bank wore earmuffs, several didn't. Item: the Vice-President's name was Mr. Wanji: Oriental? Item: the top eight floors of the Taft Bank Building seemed to be off-limits to all personnel not wearing earmuffs. Item: she was being employed at a very respectable salary to read newsprint and nonsense into a microphone. Let Washington make sense of that, she thought. I N a gloomy mood. Orison McCall showered and dressed for bed. Eleven o'clock. Washington should be calling soon, inquiring after the results of her first day's spying. No call. Orison slipped between the sheets at eleventhirty. The clock was set; the lights were out. Wasn't Washington going to call her? Perhaps, she thought, the Department had discovered that the Earmuffs had her phone tapped. i "Testing," a baritone voice muttered. Orison sat up, clutching the sheet around her throat. "Beg pardon?" she said. "Testing," the male voice repeated. "One, two, three; three, two, one. Do you read me? Over." Orison reached under the bed for a shoe. Gripping it like a Scout-ax, she reached for the light cord with her free hand and tugged at it. The room was empty. "Testing," the voice repeated. "What you're testing," Orison said in a firm voice, "is my patience. Who are you?" "Department of Treasury Monitor J-#," the male voice said. "Do you have anything to report, Miss McCall?" "Where are you, Monitor?" she demanded. "That's classified information," the voice said. "Please speak directly to your pillow, Miss McCall." Orison lay down cautiously. "All right," she whispered to her pillow. "Over here," the voice instructed her, coming from the unruffled pillow beside her. Orison transferred her head to the pillow to her left. "A radio?" she asked. "Of a sort," Monitor J-# agreed. "We have to maintain communications security. Have you anything to report?" "I got the job," Orison said. "Are you... in that pillow... all the time?" "No, Miss McCall," the voice said. "Only at report times. Shall we establish our rendezvous here at elevenfifteen, Central Standard Time, every day?" "You make it sound so improper," Orison said. "I'm far enough away to do you no harm, Miss McCall," the monitor said. "Now, tell me what happened at the bank today." Orison briefed her pillow on the Earmuffs. on her task of reading to a microphone, and on the generally mimsy tone National Bank and Trust Company. "That's about it, so far," e Vi o oqi "Good report," J-# said from the pillow. "Sounds like you've dropped into a real snakepit, beautiful." "How do you know... why do you think I'm beautiful?" Orison asked. "Native optimism," the voice said. "Good night." J-# signed off with a peculiar electronic pop that puzzled Orison for a moment. Then she placed the sound : J-# had kissed his microphone. Orison flung the shoe and the pillow under her bed, and resolved to write Washington for permission to make her future reports by registered mail. II A T ten o'clock the next morning, reading page four of the current Wall Street Journal, Orison was interrupted by the click of a pair of leather heels. The gentleman whose heels had just slammed together was bowing. And she saw with some gratification that he was not wearing earmuffs. "My name," the stranger said, "is Dink Gerding. I am President of this bank, and wish at this time to welcome you to our little family." "I'm Orison McCall," she said. A handsome man, she mused. Twenty-eight? So tall. Could he ever be interested in a girl just five-foot-three? Maybe higher heels? "We're pleased with your work, Miss McCall," Dink Gerding said. He took the chair to the right of her desk. "It's nothing," Orison said, switching off the microphone. "On the contrary, Miss McCall. Your duties are most important," he said. "Reading papers and fairytales into this microphone is nothing any reasonably astute sixth-grader couldn't do as well," Orison said. "You'll be reading silently before long," Mr. Gerding said. He smiled, as though this explained everything. "By the way, your official designation is Confidential Secretary. It's me whose confidences you're to keep secret. If I ever need a letter written, may I stop down here and dictate it?" "Please do," Orison said. This bank president, for all his grace and presence, was obviously as kookie as his bank. "Have you ever worked in a bank before, Miss McCall?" Mr. Gerding asked, as though following her train of thought. "No, sir," she said. "Though I've been associated with a rather large financial organization." "You may find some of our methods a little strange, but you'll get used to them," he said. "Meanwhile, I'd be most grateful if you'd dispense with calling me 'sir.' My name is Dink. It is ridiculous, but I'd enjoy your using it." "Dink?" she asked. "And I suppose you're to call me Orison?" "That's the drill," he said. "One more question, Orison. Dinner this evening?" Direct, she thought. Perhaps that's why he's president of a bank, and still so young. "We've hardly met," she said. "But we're on a first-name basis already," he pointed out. "Dance?" "I'd love to," Orison said, half expecting an orchestra to march, playing, from the elevator. "Then I'll pick you up at seven. Windsor Arms, if I remember your personnel form correctly." He stood, lean, all bone and muscle, and bowed slightly. West Point? Hardly. His manners were European. Sandhurst, perhaps, or Saint Cyr. Was she supposed to reply with a curtsy? Orison wondered. "Thank you," she said. He was  soldier, or had been : the way, when he turned, his shoulders stayed square. The crisp clicking of his steps, a military metronome, to the elevator. When the door slicked open Orison, staring after Dink, saw that each of the half-dozen men aboard snapped off their hats (but not their earmuffs) and bowed, the earmuffed operator bowing with them. Small bows, true; just head-andneck. But not to her. To Dink Gerding. Street Journal by early afternoon. A page came up a moment later with fresh reading-matter: a copy of yesterday's Congressional Record. She launched into the Record,. thinking as she read of meeting again this evening that handsome madman, that splendid lunatic, that unlikely bankpresident. "You read so well, darling," someone said across the desk. Orison looked up. "Oh, hello," she said. "I didn't hear you come up." "I walk ever so lightly," the woman said, standing hip-shot in front of the desk, "and pounce ever so hard." She smiled. Opulent, Orison thought. Built like a burlesque queen. No, she thought, I don't like her. Can't. Wouldn't if I could. Never cared for cits "I'm Orison McCall," she said, and tried to smile back without showing teeth. "Delighted," the visitor said, handing over an undelighted palm. "I'm Auga Vingt. Auga, to my friends." "Won't you sit down, Miss Vingt?" "So kind of you, darling," Auga Vingt said, "but I shan't have time to visit. I just wanted to stop and welcome you as a Taft Bank co-worker. One for all. all for one. Yea t Team. You know." "Thanks," Orison said. "Common courtesv," Miss Vingt explained. "Also, darling, I'd like to draw your attention to one little point. Dink Gerding -- you know, the shoulders and muscles and crewcut? Well, he's posted property. Should you throw your starveling charms at my Dink, you'd only get your little eyes scratched out. Word to the wise, rCest-ce pas?" "Sorry you have to leave so suddenly," Orison said, rolling her Wall Street Journal into a club and standing. "Darling." "So remember, Tiny, Dink Gerding is mine. You're all alone up here. You could get broken nails, fall down the elevator shaft, all sorts of annoyance. Understand me, darling?" "You make it very clear," Orison said. "Now you'd best hurry back to your stanchion. Bossy, before the hay's all gone." "Isn't it lovely, the way you and I reached an understanding right off?" Auga asked. "Well, ta-ta." Sheturned and walked to the elevator, displaying, Orison thought, a disgraceful amount of ungirdled rhumba motion. The elevator stopped to pick up the odious Auga. A passenger, male, stepped off. "Good morning, Mr. Gerding," Miss Vingt said, bowing. "Carry on, Colonel," the stranger replied. As the elevator door closed, he stepped up to Orison's desk. "Good morning. Miss McCall." he said. "What is this?" Orison demanded. "Visiting-day at the zoo?" She paused and shook her head. "Excuse me, sir," she said. "It's just that... Vingt thing..." "Auga is rather intense," the new Mr. Gerding said. "Yeah, intense," Orison said. "Like a kidney-stone." "I stopped by to welcome Taft National Bank and Trust Company family, Miss McCall," he said. "I'm Kraft Gerding, Dink's elder brother. I understand you've met Dink already." "Yes, sir," Orison said. The hair of this new Mr. Gerding was cropped even closer than Dink's. His mustache was gray-tipped, like a patch of frosted furze; and his eyes, like Dink's, were cobalt blue. The head, Orison mused, would look quite at home in one of Kaiser Bill's spiketopped Pickelhauben; but the ears were in evidence, and seemed normal. Mr. Kraft Gerding bowed -- what continental manners these bankers had! -- and Orison half expected him to free her hand from the rolled-up paper she still clutched and plant a kiss on it. smiled a smile as frosty as his mustache and said, "I understand that my younger brother has been talking with you. Miss McCall. Quite proper, I knqw. But I must warn you against mixing business with pleasure." Orison jumped up, tossing the paper into her wastebasket. "I quit!" she shouted. "You can take this crazy bank... into bankruptcy, for all I care. I'm not going to perch up here, target for every uncaged idiot in finance, and listen to another word." "Dearest lady, my humblest pardon," Kraft Gerding said, bowing again, a bit lower. "Your work is splendid ; your presence is Taft Bank's most charming asset; my only wish is to serve and protect you. To this end, dear lady, I feel it my duty to warn you against my brother. A word to the wise..." "N'est-ce pas?" Orison said. "Well, Buster, here's a word to the foolish. Get lost." ' Kraft Gerding bowed and flashed his gelid smile. "Until we meet again?" "I'll hold my breath," Orison promised. "The elevator is just behind you. Push a button, will you? And bon voyage" Kraft Gerding called the elevator, marched aboard, favored Orison with a cold, quick bow, then disappeared into the mysterious heights above fifth floor. First the unspeakable Auga Vingt, then the obnoxious Kraft Gerding. Surely, Orison thought, recovering the Wall Street Journal from her wastebasket and smoothing it, no one would convert a major Midwestern bank into a lunatic asylum. How else, though, could the behavior of the Earmuffs be explained? Could madmen run a bank? Why not, she thought. History is rich in examples of madmen running nations, banks and all. She began again to read the paper into the microphone. If she finished early enough, she might get a chance to prowl those Off-Limits upper floors. Half an hour further into the paper, Orison jumped, startled by the sudden buzz of her telephone. She picked it up. "Wanji e-Kal, Datto. Dink ger-Dink d'summa." Orison scribbled down this intelligence in bemused Gregg before replying, "I'm a local girl. Try me in English." "Oh. Hi, Miss McCall." the voice said. "Guess I goofed. I'm in kinda clutch. This is Wanji. I got a kite for Mr. Dink Gerding. If you see him, tell him the escudo green is pale. Got that, doll?" "Yes, Mr. Wanji. I'll tell Mr. Gerding." Orison clicked the phone down. What now, Mata Hari? she asked herself. What was the curious language Mr. Wanji had used? She'd have to report the message to Washington bv tonight's pillow, and let the polyglots of Treasury Intelligence puzzle it out. Meanwhile, she thought, scooting her chair back from her desk, she had a vague excuse to prowl the upper floors. The Earmuffs could only fire her. Orison folded the paper and put it in the "Out" basket. Someone would be here in a moment with something new to read. She'd best get going. The elevator? No. The operators had surely been instructed to keep her off the upstairs floors. But the building had a stairway. Ill T HE door on the sixth floor was locked. Orison went on up the stairs to seven. The glass of the door there was painted black on the inside, and the landing was cellardark. Orison closed her eyes for a moment. There was a curious sound. The buzzing of the fringes of her hearing. Somehow, a very pleasant sound. She openedher eyes and tried the knob. The door opened. Orison was blinded by the sun. The room extended through the entire seventh floor, its windows boarded shut, its ceiling a mass of fluorescent lamps. Set about the floor were galvanized steel tanks, rectangular and a little bigger than bathtubs. Orison counted the rows of tanks. Twelve rows, nine tiers. One hundred and eight tanks. She walked closer. The tubs were laced together by strands of angel-hair, delicate white lattices scintillating with pink. She walked to the nearest of the tubs and looked in. It was half full of a greenish fluid, seething with tiny pink bubbles. For a moment Orison thought she saw Benjamin Franklin winking up at her from the liquid. Then she screamed. The pink bubbles, the tiny flesh-colored flecks glinting light from the spun-sugar bridges between the tanks, size of a mustard-seed ; crawling, leaping, swinging, spinning webs, seething in the hundred tanks. Orison put her hands over her ears and screamed again, backing toward the stairway door. Into a pair of arms. "I had hoped you'd be happy here, Miss McCall," Kraft Gerding said. Orison struggled to release herself. She broke free only to have her wrists seized by two Earmuffs that had appeared with the elder Gerding. "It seems that our Pandora doesn't care for spiders," he said. "Really, Miss McCall, our little pets are quite harmless. Were we to toss you into one of these tanks..." Orison struggled against her two sumo-sized captors, whose combined weights exceeded hers by some quarter-ton, without doing more than lifting her feet from the floor. "... your flesh would be unharmed, though they spun and darted all around you. Our Microfabridae are petrovorous, Miss McCall. Of course, once they discovered your teeth, and through them a skeleton of calcium, a delicacy they find most toothsome, you'd be filleted within minutes." "Elder Compassion wouldn't like your harming the girl, Sire," one of the earmuffed sumo-wrestlers protested. "Elder Compassion has no rank," Kraft Gerding said. "Miss McCall, you must tell me what you were doing here, or I'll toss you to the spiders." "Dink... Dink!" Orison shouted. "My beloved younger brother is otherwise engaged than in the rescue of damsels in distress," Kraft said. "Someone, after all, has to mind the bank." "I came to bring a message to Dink," Orison said. "Let me go, you acromegalic apes!" "The message?" Kraft Gerding demanded. "Something about escudo green. Put me down !" dropped. Her mountainous keepers were on the floor as though struck by lightning, their arms thrown out before them, their faces abject against the floor. Kraft Gerding was slowly lowering himself to one knee. Dink had entered the spider-room. Without questions, he strode between the shiko-ing Earmuffs and put his arms around Orison. "They can't harm you," he said. She turned to press her face against his chest. "You're all right, child. Breathe deep, swallow, and turn your brain back on. All right, now?" "All right," she said, still trembling. "They were going to throw me to the spiders." "Kraft told you that?" Dink Gerding released her and turned to the kneeling man. "Stand up, Elder Brother." "I..." Dink brought his right fist up from hip-level, crashing it into Kraft's jaw. Kraft Gerding joined the Earmuffs on the floor. "If you'd care to stand again, Elder Brother, you may attempt to recover your dignity without regard for the difference in our rank." Kraft struggled to one knee and remained kneeling, gazing up at Dink through half-closed eyes. "No? Then get out of here, all of you. Samma!" Kraft Gerding arose, stared for a moment at Dink and Orison, then, with the merest hint of a bow, led his two giant Earmuffs to the elevator. "I wish you hadn't come up here, Orison," Dink said. "Why did you do it?" "Have you read the story of Bluebeard?" Orison asked. She stood close to Dink, keeping her eyes on the nearest spidertank. "I had to see what it was you kept up here so secretly, what it was that I was forbidden to see. My excuse was to have been that I was looking for you, to deliver a message from Mr. Wanji. He said T was to tell you that the escudo green is pale." "You're too curious, and Wanji is too careless," Dink said. "Now, what is this thing you have about spiders?" "I've always been terrified of them," Orison said. "When I was a little girl, I had to stay upstairs all day one Sunday because there was a spider hanging from his thread in the stairway. I waited until Dad came home and took it down with a broom. Even then, I didn't have appetite for supper." "Strange," Dink said. He walked over to the nearest tank and plucked one of the tiny pink creatures from a web-bridge. "This is no spider, Orison," he said. She backed away from Dink Gerding and the minuscule creature he cupped in the palm of his hand. "These are Microfabridae, more nearly related to shellfish than to spiders," he said. "They're stone-andmetal eaters. They literally couldn't harm a fly. Look at it. Orison." He extended his palm. Orison forced herself to look. The little creature, fleshcolored against his flesh, was nearly invisible, scuttling around the bowl of his hand. "Pretty little fellow, isn't he?" Dink asked. "Here. Yon hold him." "I'd rattier not," she protested. "I'd be happier if you did," Dink said. as into a furnace. Dink brushed the Microfabridus from hispalm to hers. It felt crisp and hard, like a legged grain of sand. Dink took a magnifier from his pocket and unfolded it, to hold it over Orison's palm. "He's like a baby crawdad," Orison said. "A sort of crustacean," Dink agreed. "We use them in a commercial process we're developing. That's why we keep this floor closed off and secret. We don't have a patent on the use of Microfabridae, you see." "What do they do?" Orison asked. "That's still a secret," Dink said, smiling. "I can't tell even you that, not yet, even though you're my most confidential secretary." "What's he doing now?" Orison asked, watching the Microfabridus, perched up on the rear four of his six microscopic legs, scratching against her high-school class-ring with his tiny chelae. "They like gold," Dink explained, peering across her shoulder, comfortably close. "They're attracted to it by a chemical tropism, as children are attracted to candy. Toss him back into his tank, Orison. We'd better get you down where you belong." Orison brushed the midget crustacean off her finger into the nearest tank, where he joined the busy boil of his fellows. She felt her ring. It was pitted where the Microfabridus had been nibbling. "Strange, using crawdads in a bank," she said. She stood silent for a moment. "I thought I heard music," she said. "I heard it when I came in. Something like the sighing of wind in winter trees." "That's the hymn of the Microfabridae," Dink said. "They all sing together while they work, a chorus of some took her arm. "If you listen very carefully, you'll find the song these little workers sing the most beautiful music in the world." Orison closed her eyes, leaning back into Dink's arms, listening to the music that seemed on the outermost edge of her hearing. Wildness, storm and danger were its theme, counterpointed by promises of peace and harbor. She heard the wash of giant waves in the song, the crash of breakers against granite, cold and insatiable. And behind this, the quiet of sheltered tide-pools, the soft lub of sea-arms landlocked. "It's an ancient song," Dink said. "The Microfabridae have been He released her, and opened a wood-covered wooden box. He scooped up a cupful of the sand inside. "Hold out your hands," he told Orison. He filled them with the sand. "Throw our singers some supper for their song," he said. Orison went with her cupped hands to the nearest tank and sprinkled the mineral fishfood around inside it. The Microfabridae leaped from the liquid like miniature porpoises, seizing the grains of sand in mid-air. "They're so very strange," Orison said. At the bottom of the tank she thought she saw Ben Franklin again, winking at her through the bubbling life. Nonsense, she thought, brushing her hands. vator and pressed the "Down" button. "Don't come up here again unless I bring you," he said. "The Microfabridae aren't dangerous, despite what my brother told you, but some of our processes might involve some risk to bystanders. So don't take any more tours above the fifth floor without me as your guide. All right, Orison?" "Yes, Dink." The elevator stopped. "Take the lady to her office," Dink told the bowing, earmuffed operator. "And Orison," he said, just before the door closed, "I'm really not a Bluebeard. See you this evening." Dink Gerding, wearing an ordinary enough suit, well-cut, expensive, but nothing extraordinary for a banker, called for Orison at seven. He'd look well, she thought, slipping into the coat he held for her, in a white uniform brocaded with pounds of spun gold, broad epaulettes, a stiff bank of extravagantly-colored ribbons across his chest ; perhaps resting his right hand on the pommel of a dress saber. "Dink," she asked him, "were you ever in the Army?" "You might say I'm still in an army," he said, turning and smiling down at her from that arrogant posture of his. "I'm a corporal in the army of the gainfully employed; an army where there's little glamor but better pay than in the paradesand-battles sort. What makes you ask, Orison?" "Because of the way you stand and walk, Dink," she said. "Like an Infantry captain from Texas." "I'm flattered." Dink Gerding said, holding oDen the lobby door for her. "The car's just around the corner." "I met your brother, Kraft, earlier today, just before he and the Earmuffs caught me up on eighth floor," Orison said. "He's no Texan, that one. A Junker, maybe. I'm afraid I don't much care for your brother. Dink." "To be my elder brother is Kraft's special misfortune," Dink said. "I understand he was quite loveable as a boy. Here's our transportation." The car was a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, splendidly conspicuous beside the curb of the Windsor Arms, reducing that nobly-named establishment by contrast to more democratic proportions. The ubiquitous Mr. Wanji, liveried in a uniform nearly as ornate as the one Orison had visualized for Dink, only his earmuffs clashing with the magnificence of his costume, sprang from the driver's seat, raced around the limousine and' stood at attention holding the door for Orison and her escort. The front door of the Rolls was marked, she observed, with a gold device of three coronets. At the center of the triangle they formed was the single letter "D." The Rolls negotiated the city streets with the dignity of the Queen Elizabeth entering a minor harbor. "I thought you bankers aspired to the common touch," Orison remarked. "I expected you to come for me in a taxi, or perhaps a year-old Ford you drove yourself." "Wanji is a better driver than I. So I have him drive me," Dink explained. "We each do the work we're trained for. I assist Wanji in balancing his checkbook, for example. As for this car, it belongs not to me, but to my family. My family owns most of the toys I play with." He paused. "I've been thinking, Orison, of acquiring a most valuable property for myself alone." "A nice little seventy-meter yacht?" Orison inquired. "Or the island of Majorca, perhaps?" "Something even grander," Dink said. "You, Miss McCall." "But, Dink!" The Rolls glided to the curb. Wanji jumped out and snapped open the door. "Sire!" he said, and saluted as Dink disbarked. Orison took Dink's hand and stepped to the curb, acknowledging Wanji's bow to her with a princess smile. She'd come a long way from the secretarial pool. T HE doorman of the restaurant, instructed as to the importance of these clients by their tableau at the curb, ushered Dink Gerding and Orison McCall into the presence of the maitre d'. When the doorman had been rewarded with a crackling handshake, the headwaiter led them through the crowd of groundlings as though they were accompanied by fife and drums. The table to which he bowed them, while not the most conspicuous, was without doubt the finest the management had to offer. The Reserved sign was swept aside with a gesture that indicated that there were no reservations where Mr. Dink Gerding was concerned. Mr. Gerding justified the maitre's confidence in him with another green-palmed handshake. "Dink," Orison whispered across the table. "That was a fifty-dollar bill you gave him." "Yes, it was," Dink admitted. "I felt that fifty was enough." "Quite enough," Orison assured him. The wine-steward, wearing a chain that could have held a tub to mooring, absorbed Dink's instructions with the air of a chela attending the dying words of his guru. The two waiters poised themselves reverently at his shoulders, waiting the revelation of his order. "We'll begin..." Dink began. "Dink, I'd like a lobster," Orison said. "I'd not advise lobster," Dink said thoughtfully. "I'm afraid that lobster won't agree with you this evening." "Dink, lobster is what I want," Orison insisted. "Haven't you heard of the Nineteenth Amendment?" "Very well, feminist," Dink said. He turned to the waiter at his right. "The lady wiil have a lobster." He turned to the left. "As for me, a saddle of venison, and such accessory furniture as you may choose to accompany it." The waiters bowed and retreated. "Why do you insist on being boss, even after bankinghours?" Orison asked. "Being boss is not my nature, but is my training," Dink said. "It seems to me, Orison, that you American women resent the dignity of being served by an adoring man." "I prefer dignities to be more democratic," she said. "Why, in any case, should you be exercised by my choosing lobster for dinner? My digestion is my own affair, isn't it?" Jsaid, resting his elbows on the table, "requires a twopart answer. Imprimus : everything you do interests me, Orison, inasmuch as you are my future bride. Please make no comment at this point. Allow me to enjoy for the moment the male privilege of unimpeded speech. Secundus: I once wished to be a doctor, had not my career been chosen by my father. I still pursue the study of medicine as a hobby. I didn't wish you to order lobster because I'm certain that you'll be unable to enjoy lobster." "I've eaten it before," Orison said. "Except for the engineering difficulties in getting through the shell with all those little picks and nutcrackers and nail-clippers, I had no trouble to speak of. Dink, are you a foreigner?" "What makes you think I may be?" he asked. "The crest of your car, the earmuffs on most your staff at the Bank and the fact that you seem to think a woman's opinion nothing more than a trifle. There's a beginning," Orison said. "What's wrong with earmuffs?" Dink demanded. "Everybody wears ear-muffs." "Not everybody," Orison said. "Not in April. Not bank officials. Not indoors, in any case." "Must report this to the Board," Dink said, taking a notebook from his pocket and scribbling. "Must find alternative. No earmuffs indoors." Perfect, Orison thought, near tears." He's perfect. He'd sit astride that milk-white charger like a round-table knight, sturdy and lean and honesteyed. Dink is perfect, she thought, except only that he's insane. Dink tucked his notebook back into his vest-pocket. "If I were a foreigner," he asked, "would it make any difference to you?" "Your nationality should concern me as little as my diet concerns you," Orison said. "You said should," Dink pointed out. "That means that you are concerned with me. Therefore, I will formally invite you to marry me." He held up his hand as Orison began to speak. "I warn you, Orison, there are only two answers .possible to my proposal. Only Yes or Some day." "What if I said no?" Orison asked. "I'd interpret it as Some day," he said, and smiled. "You know nothing about me," Orison protested. "But I do," Dink said. "I know you're good. I know that you've fallen half in love with me, and I entirely in love with you, in this half-day in April that we've known each other." "No," Orison said, gripping tightly the edge of the table. "That means. Some day," he said. The lobster arrived in postmortem splendor, borne on a silver tray, brick-red, garnished with sprigs of parsley and geranium, served with the silver instruments designed for his dissection and the bowl of baptismal butter, "ph..." Orison said, turning her eyes away from the supper she'd selected. "It's horrible!" "You've no appetite for lobster?" Dink asked. "I'd as soon eat boiled baby," Orison said, pressing her napkin against her lips. "Take it away," Dink instructed the waiter. "The lady will have the same order as I." The crustacean, red but undismembered, was again borne aloft by the waiter to be returned to the scene of his martyrdom. "Try a little of the wine, Orison," Dink suggested, tipping a splash of the Riesling into her glass. "It will clear your head." S HE sipped. "It helps," she admitted. "What do you suppose happened tome, Dink? It's as though all of a sudden I'd become allergic to lobster." "In a sense you are, darling," Dink said. "Such a strange thing," she said. ' "Don't let these strange things worry you, Orison," Dink said. "Think this: for everything in the universe, there's an explanation. If you understand it or not, the explanation's still there, curled up in the middle of the mystery like Pinocchio in the belly of his whale. Just have faith in the essential honesty of the universe, Orison, and you'll be all right." "A comforting philosophy," Orison said. "I can't imagine an explanation for my sudden distaste for lobster, though." "Such things happen," Dink assured her. "I have a friend, for instance, who holds life in such reverence that he eats only vegetables. Isn't that strange? And he worries, this very good friend of mine, that perhaps vegetables have souls, too; and that perhaps it is no more moral to destroy them for his food than it is to roast and ingest his fellow animals." "So what does this friend of yours eat?" Orison asked. "Vegetables," Dink said. "But he worries about it. He's how proposing to confine his diet to cakes made from algae. His argument is that if vegetables have souls, algae have very small souls indeed; and that they suffer less in being eaten than would, say, a cabbage or an apple. His guilt may be numerically greater, eating algae. But it will be qualitatively less." "Has this micro-vegetarian friend of yours thought of psychotherapy?" Orison asked. "Often," Dink said. "But he maintains that he's much too old to pour out his mind to a stranger; too set in his patterns to change. He fears most of all, he says, that he might be made uncomfortable in new ways." "We all do," mused Orison. "Do I make you uncomfortable in a new way?" Dink asked. "You're strange," Orison said. "Your Bank is fantastic. All in all, this is the most peculiar day I've ever lived." "I promise you, Orison, that someday you'll understand why the sight of lobster made you ill this evening, why so many of the people at the Bank wear earmuffs, why I seem foreign. You'll understand the work of the singing Microfabridae and you'll meet Elder Compassion ; you'll know why Wanji was excited about the escudo green; and someday soon, this most of all I promise you, you'll love me, and be my wife. Hah! Here are the comestibles. Let's talk of topics less vital than love and earmuffs. Let's talk of the weather, and Mr. Kennedy, and the orchestra." V Monitor J#, to U.S. Treasury Department Intelligence: "Miss Orison McCall's report from Potawattomi, Indiana, was delayed by one hour. Contact was established at #:# hours. Details follow herewith : "J-# : CQ, CQ, CQ, CQ. "Miss McCall : If you'd been a minute later, I'd have been sound asleep, dreaming bad dreams. "J-#: Is the job wearing you down? "Miss McCall: It's exciting and mysterious. Nothing like Washington. The boss of Taft Bank appears to be a man named Dink Gerding. He's six feet tall and slim, his hair is clipped short as a dachshund's, and he walks like an Olympic skier. The other men at the bank bow when they meet him, and some of them get all the way down onto the floor when he's angry. Do you suppose this means something? "J-# : Everything means something. "Miss McCall: He said that. Dink did. For everything in the universe, he said, there's an explanation. "J-#: Not so. I mean that everything that people do in banks is explainable. Not all the universe is logical -- the tax-structure, for instance, or the ways of women. "Miss McCall: I'm not required to put up with male chauvinism from a pillow, Mister, no banns having been published between us. "J-# : Sorry, beautiful. Here are instructions from the Chief. He wants to know why some members of the Taft Bank staff wear earmuffs, and he wants details of what goes on upstairs. He wants you to get to know this Dink Gerding better. Over. "Miss McCall: Roger, Wilco, and Aye-Aye. Meanwhile, get philologists working on this. The sentence, Wanji eKal, Datto. Dink ger-Dink d'summa, means, more or less, 'This is Wanji. I'd like to speak to Dink Gerding.' This message was received by me at Taft Bank this morning, evidently by accident. Check also possible meaning of the phrase, 'Escudo green is pale.' "J-#: Will do. "Miss McCall: Good night, then; wherever you are. "J-#: Good night, beautiful. Out." Report of Treasury Intelligence on six words of presumed foreign-language message: "Datto may be Tagalog chief. Summa is Latin sum. Total message is nonsense in fifty languages. The clear message, Escudo green is pale probably a code. Escudo is Portuguese currency presently equal to U.S. #. End of Report." Confidential report (on scratchboard) of Elder Compassion to H.R.H. Dink gerDink, Prince Porphyrogenite of Empire, Heir-Apparent to the Throne, Scion of the Triple Crown, Count of the Northern Marches, Admiralissimo of the Conquest Forces of Empire, Captain-Commander of Conquest Task Force ( Sol "She whispered to her pillow, local time # A.M., 'I love him. I " sleep easily. She'd suppressed information from J#, saying nothing to him about tile Microfabridae, surely the most striking objective discovery of her two days' spying within the Taft Bank. More central in her thoughts than her disloyalty to the Treasury Department, though, was Dink Gerding. He'd told her that she was half in love with him. He was half wrong, she thought. "I love him entirely," she whispered, not knowing that J-# -- in carelessness, not subterfuge -- had left the receiver-switch open to the pillow she'd made her confidante. The Wall Street Journal greeted her the next morning, curled up in her "In" basket. She'd just switched on her microphone and said "Good morning" to her invisible listener when Mr. Wanji stepped from the elevator. His ears, she saw, were bare today. But they were pink -- a shocking, porcelain, opaque, Toby-mug shade of pink. She looked away from this latest manifestation of peculiarity in banker's ears. "Good morning, Mr. Wanji," she said. "Hi, doll," Wanji said. "The brain-guy says you don't have to read out loud any more. Just read quiet-like. Dig?" "Yes, sir," she said. "Shall I take notes on anything in particular?" "Naw," Wanji. said. "The brain-guy, he remembers everything." "The brain-guy?" Orison asked. "Is that Dink Gerding?" "Naw. Dink's the boss. The brain-guy is the man who makes the wheels go round," Wanji said. He pressed the "Up" button of the elevator. As Wanji embarked, Orison observed that the elevator operator had the same shockingpink ears. Had those earmuffs been designed to hide this pinkness, the symptom of some rare and disfiguring disease? Orison returned to her newspaper, reading silently as ordered, wondering what obscure Pinocchio of sense was curled up in the belly of 'this whale of illogic. The elevator, she noticed with the housekeeping bit of her mind, was running much more than usual today, up and down like a spastic yo-yo. Whatever the mysterious business of the al Bank and Trust Company might be, there was a lot of it being done. Her telephone buzzed. Orison switched off her microphone. "Miss McCall here," she said, feeling very efficient and British. "This is Mr. Kraft Gerding," she was told. "I need you at the National Guard Armory right away, Miss McCall. Will you come right over?" "Yes, sir," Orison said. She gathered up her purse and coat and pressed the elevator button. The operator ushered her into his car as though she were his queen, and the elevator the paramount plane of the royal flight. Standing behind him as he piloted them downward five floors, Orison studied the man's ears. They were that awful, artificial pink, as though enameled. Pancake makeup? Orison wondered. The ears, now the earmuffs were off, might be the clue to that fish-of-understanding she sought. Orison dampened a fingertip and applied it to the edge of the man's ear. He turned and stared. "A fly," Orison explained. "I brushed it off." "Oh. Thank you. Here's the street floor. Miss McCall." "Thank you." Orison stepped from the lobby to Broadway, refusing to examine her fingertip until she was well beyond the shadow of the Taft Bank Building. Now she looked at it. A sort of pink paint was showing there. And where she'd touched the elevator operator's ear to remove the makeup, the flesh beneath had purple. National Guard Armory by Auga Vingt, mistress of malice. "How lovely of you to come right over, darling," she said. "Kraft is waiting for you in the office of Company C." "Thank you, darling," Orison purred. She clutched her purse as she walked up the indicated stairway, Miss Vingt behind her. Kraft Gerding was in full uniform behind a desk marked "Commanding Officer," but his was not the uniform of the U.S. Army. It was the sort that Mr. Wanji had worn as Dink's chauffeur, its splendor squared. "Good morning, Miss McCall," Kraft Gerding said, standing. "I'm so happy you could come. We need you here." "What am I to do, sir?" Orison asked. "Your presence is the full extent of your services required, my dear," he said. "You see, you're my hostage. My brother's interest in your welfare is so marked that I determined to seize you as collateral for his cooperation. We've begun a revolution, Miss McCall. You'll stay with us until victory. Colonel the Margravine Auga Vingt, Commander of the Royal Refreshment Corps, will act as your hostess. Colonel, please take Miss McCall to her quarters." "Now look here, bud !" Orison said. "The proper address to Mr. Gerding is 'Your Royal Highness,' darling," Miss Vingt said, accompanying her point of protocol with a jab at the small of Orison's back. "Come along, darling." "I'm not going anywhere until I've telephoned Dink," Orison said. "Terribly sorry," said Colonel Auga Vingt. "Our telephone has just gone' out of order." Two bravos wearing U.S. Army fatigues -- surely the largest such uniforms ever sewn together -- stepped into the room. They were enormous men, menacing, purple of ear. "Will you walk along like a good girl, or shall I have my pets carry you?" the odious Auga asked. "I'll walk," Orison decided. "What's more, I'll sue." "All in good time, darling," Auga Vingt said. enough to be a ballroom, comprising as it did the entire basement of the armory. A cot had been unfolded in one corner, next to a parked halftrack, and three olive-drab blankets were stacked upon it. "Home, darling," Colonel Vingt said. "I hope you realize that kidnapping is a Federal offense," Orison said. "So is seizing an armory," her warden explained. "Of course, the U.S. Army doesn't realize we've got it, yet. They drill here only on Mondays." She turned and spoke quickly to the two guards, using what was apparently the same language Wanji had employed over the telephone. The guards bowed, then each chose a vehicle for his guard-post. One seated himself behind the wheel of a weapons-carrier, the other posting himself, cross-legged, on the steel hatch of a Sherman tank. Auga Vingt turned to leave. "Hey," Orison said. "You're not going to abandon me here with these two gorillas." "But, darling, I am!" the obnoxious Auga replied. "If you're worried ah ut your virtue, rest easy, lamb. I can assure you that my thugs are safe as kittens, providing only that you make no attempt to escape. They are required, you see, to confine their romantic aspirations to members of the Royal Refreshment Corps of appropriate rank. Since they speak no English, nor any other tongue you're likely to have heard of, they won't be much company. But they will be loyal in their attendance." "Let me out of here !" a man's voice shouted, the sound echoing among the ranks of tanks, half-tracks, weaponscarriers, and jeeps. "Who's that?" Orison demanded. "Your fellow-prisoner," Auga explained. "Until quite recently, he was Commanding Officer of C Company. Your keepers have strict orders not to let you two speak to one another. But I must get on with my duties, charming as I find your company. Good day, darling." "Drop dead," Orison suggested. med behind Auga Vingt, and the key had chattered in its lock, she sat at the edge of her cot. The two guards watched her as casually as though she were just another item on the Motor Company's T.O.E. This is what she got for playing it coy with Washington, Orison thought. If she'd clued J-# in on the Microfabridae, she'd at least have been given some technical help. Then someone might have been there to blow the whistle when she disappeared from the Taft Bank Building. As things stood now, no one would know of her abduction until her pillow called tonight at eleven-fifteen and got no answer: A long time off, she thought. Perhaps she could get some help from the imprisoned commander of C Company, she thought. Orison stood and called out, "Hey, there! Can you hear... A large palm suddenly closed over her mouth. The guard who'd been seated atop the tank had sprung down and appeared beside her as suddenly as a circus trick. Experimentally, he removed his hand from her mouth. "... me?" Orison completed her query, and was shut off again. "Five by five," the male voice answered. "Who are..." The other guard was gone now, and presumably stood beside the captain as his fellow stood beside Orison. There was silence for five minutes, Orison having trouble breathing, struggling until it became apparent that no action of hers would have the slightest effect on the mountainous bulk of her muffler. Then he removed his hand. Orison, out of breath, her lesson learned, stayed quiet. The guards resumed their seats aboard the rolling-stock. There must be another way to signal her fellow-prisoner. Orison thought. Tapping? She clicked an S-O-S on the side of a jeep with her pen. Her guard appeared beside her as quickly as before, and took the pen to stick it in his pocket. She was, it appeared, effectively in solitary confinement. Orison stood up to see if the guard minded. Apparently not. She walked about the huge basement. She'd never before seen so much military hardware outside an Armed Forces Day parade. Impressive, all this steel. A ramp led up to a door the size of a barn-side, also steel, bolted. If she could get inside a tank, and close the hatch, and somehow get the monster up that ramp to ram that door, she'd make an impressive call for help, Orison thought. She put one foot atop a tank-tread when a large arm reached around her and set her aside. Her guard, silent-footed, had been following all through her tour. Orison returned to her cot. Great deal, she thought. From desk to dungeon in an hour and a half. She'd battled with shadows, earmuffed shadows, and had got herself set in an amateur jail guarded by a pair of purple-eared apes. Nothing to do but wait. Four feet crashed onto concrete, two figures bowed till the palms of their hands brushed the floor. "T'ink," the newcomer said. The two guards backed to their vehicles and resumed their seats. "Orison, my dear!" It was Kraft Gerding, all unction and teeth, advancing upon her like the loser at tennis, hand outstretched. "I hope you haven't been unduly discommoded," he said.Ied at all," Orison said. "No one showed me the way. Would you mind explaining this chivaree to me, Mr. Gerding?" "I'd be delighted to explain, my dear," Kraft Gerding said, bowing. "May I sit?" he asked, waving a hand toward her cot. "You may fall on your dreadful face, for all I care," Orison said. "You must learn to speak like a queen," Kraft said, seating himself on the cot beside her. "Otherwise, of course, you are perfect." "Of course," Orison said. "I can't say the same for you." "I grow on one," Kraft said. "You wonder, no doubt, how tional Bank and Trust Company became a battleground; why many of our employees have ears the color of day-old bruises; why Wanji was so exercised by the color of escudoes; and what the work is that the Microfabridae sing at. No?" "Yes," Orison said. "May I smoke?" Kraft Gerding asked, bringing a cheroot from an inner pocket of his fieldmarshal's uniform. "Smoke, glow, burst into flame. It's all the same to me," Orison said. Kraft Gerding lit his cheroot with the air of an acolyte igniting incense. Then, puffing, "Accident," he said, "has made you privy to a coup d'etat. Our Empire, you see, is based on porphyrogeniture. Thus my brother, Dink, is the Heir Apparent. I, his elder brother, conceived before our father became Emperor, am merely Margrave of the North, Prince Royal of the House of Dink, Colonel-General of the Forces of the Triple Crown, Grand Duke of the Zilf Archipelago and Holder of the Keys to the Royal City of Chilif." "How unassuming can you get?" Orison asked. "Your un-knowledge is deeper than I bethought me," Kraft Gerding said, smiling, scooting a little wester on the cot. Orison moved one hipsbreadth further to the west. "Very well," Kraft said. "As a primer, thus: my brother Dink ger-Dink, heir through accident of tradition to the Triple Crown of Empire; I, his elder, better brother; and our officers and exiles -- these latter common criminals, marked for men's contempt with purple ears -- constitute Conquest Task Force of the Empire of Dink. This mighty Empire, for your information, lies some distance off in the southern skies of Earth." "How far off?" Orison "As far," Kraft Gerding said, "as all your men since Adam have run in pursuit of beauty." He scooted further west. Orison made still further westering. "You come from some foreign planet?" she asked. "No longer foreign, my dear," Kraft said. "Our planet, our triple footstool, welcomes young Earth to share our ancient wisdom and relax under the shadow of our might.' r "And I, young Earth, tell you, Kraft Gerding, to go sail a saucer," Orison said. up. "Come with me, my dear. I'll show you the greenery that establishes me as Emperor Apparent of the planet Earth." He strode to a steel door, took a key from his pocket, and unlocked it. "Behold!" he said, flinging the door open. Orison stepped into the basement room, a cube some fifty feet in each dimension. She found herself in a corridor between huge walls of bundled paper. Kraft Gerding, behind her, pried a packet from the wall and handed it to her. "This, my dear Orison, is the lever with which I'll overturn the Earth," he said. The bundle was banded with a strip of paper bearing the legend, "# in #'s." Each bit of paper in the bundle bore the portrait of President U. S. Grant. "This room," Kraft Gerding said, "contains some in U.S. currency. I intend with this money, and as much more as I need, to subvert and purchase a nation. The United States will then be the beachhead for the world." "Counterfeits," Orison said. "But perfect counterfeits," Kraft said. "The paper was manufactured by the mastercraftsmen of Chilif. The inks were compounded by the chemists of that same capital city of Empire. The plates were cut the Microfabridae of the Storm-Planet, supervised by Elder Compassion, an ancient of the slothful race that inhabits the planet nearest our mother sun. This is but one of my treasuries. I have many such. There is the Threadneedle Room, filled with poundssterling, in ones, fives, fifties and hundreds. There are other rooms, boxes, trunks and trucks filled with all the currencies of Earth. I am ready now to purchase this planet from its owners. No violence, you see. Just subterfuge." "It's violence enough, to ruin a planet," Orison said. "It beats war," Kraft Gerding said, drawing on his cheroot. "And that disgusting Miss Vingt?" Orison asked. "What does she do in your forces of subversion?" '"Colonel the Margrave Auga Vingt is commander of the Royal Refreshment Corps," Kraft said. "You understand that it wouldn't do to allow our men, the purpleeared scum of three planets, to live off the land in the delicate matter of women. Colonel Vingt's Corps both maintains morale and prevents incidents of fraternization that Earthmen might deplore with their fists and guns." Kraft chuckled. "You'll be amused to hear that Auga Vingt has an ambition to become my Empress, once I have overthrown my brother's tyranny and taken over Earth." "I must sit down," Orison said. "By all means, my dear," Kraft said. He tipped over a stack of bundled twenty-dollar bills as a hassock for her comfort. v# ette?" Orison asked. "Do." Kraft Gerding removed a pack from his pocket and lighted it for her, passing it from his lips to hers. Orison, hiding her feelings of distaste for this intimacy, drew on the cigarette. "Perhaps I might have a drink as well?" she asked. "All this is making me rather dizzy." "It is dizzy-making,"' Kraft conceded. "In an instant, my pet." He strode from the treasure-room, shouting in his native language to the guards. Orison tugged a twentydollar bill from one of the bundles on which she'd been sitting and held it to the tip of her cigarette, drawing to make it hot. The paper glowed, but the tiny patch of fire died out almost at once. She fumbled in her purse. There it was -- her bottle of nail-polish remover. She splashed the aromatic fluid over the bundled money and again touched her cigarette to it. The paper flared. Flames ran in upstream rivers through the stacks above. Orison ran to the nearest jeep and turned the key. The gears were unfamiliar to her, but she mastered them suffibiently to get moving forward toward the steel doors. Up the ramp she rolled, her feet braced down hard on the accelerator, wedged into her seat. The jeep struck the steel doors and bounced back the ramp to the sound of a giant Chinese gong, its engine stalled. Groggy, Orison dismounted and ran to the door. She pounded on the steel with both fists, shouting for help. An arm encircled Orison, and she heard behind her the door of the money-room slam shut. "The blaze will smolder itself out in a moment, my dear," Kraft Gerding said. He spoke to the guard who held her, and she was released. "I doubt that you've destroyed worth of your local paper with your prank," he said. "Five minutes' press-run. I've brought you a spot of brandy. I daresay you can use it. Arson is thirsty work." He held out his hand. One of the purple-eared guards produced a silver tray with a decanter and . two balloonglasses, poured them a quarter full and presented the glasses to his chief, bowing deeply. Kraft took one glass, giving the other to Orison. "A toast ?" he asked. "To the success of my rebellion. To our inevitable marriage. And to the health of our progeny, who are, my dear, to inherit the Earth. A shotgun toast," he said. Orison dashed her brandy toward his face. Kraft turned, catching the shower against his left ear, where it trickled down to stain the braid of his epaulette. He glared and raised his hand in a most unchivalrous gesture, then stopped himself. One of the guards produced a silken cloth to blot him dry. "The word 'shotgun' was perhaps ill-chosen," Kraft said. "The spirit you show, dear Orison, is a quality most appropriate to the future Empress of Earth." "Keep away from me," Orison said. #"kUR ceremony of betrothv al is simple," Kraft said. He put his sword-arm about her waist. "You need only hear me say the words, 'I, Rex-Imperator, take thee to wife,' and then bow, in tire presence of witnesses of my choosing. You'll be as noble as any princess conceived in the Purple Chamber, of the Palace of Chilif." "I'd rather die than marry you," Orison said. "You've established the parameters of the possible rather neatly, my dear," Kraft Gerding said. "You will become my wife, and EmpressApparent of Earth, or you will shortly be the loveliest corpse on this fair planet. My will is heaven's law, you understand. My word carries the sanction of two suns, and my anger breeds massive destruction. I ask of you your one slight person. In return, I offer to share with you my greatness. You will rule with me in the palace I have chosen -- I forget its name, but it is presently used as the tomb of the lady who invented the brassiere -- the Taj Mahal, that's it. Perhaps we could rename it. Answer quickly, now ; great deeds are deeds of impulse : marry me !" "You're mad," Orison said. "When a man has the power I have, he cannot be called a madman, for his mind shapes the world to his dreams. There is then, you see, no disorientation," Kraft said. "You've had a good ten seconds now to decide. Shall I call my wedding-guests or my executioner,?" "Dink will never let you marry me," Orison said. "His suit has come so far as that?" Kraft said. "No matter. I'll destroy him." "Please leave me, Your Excellency," Orison said. "I need time to think." "I am clay in your lovely hands," Kraft said, bowing. "I grant your wish." "If I might ask another boon, Your Excellency," Orison said, "I'd like to talk with Dink." "And so you shall," Kraft promised her. "Tomorrow, perhaps. With my brother in chains and you in the regalia of an Empress." He bowed again, and left her. The doorlock clicked after him. The two huge guards closed in on either side of Orison and led her back to her cot. When she had seated herself, they withdrew to their perches on the Army vehicles. the Marine Corps instead of the Treasury Department, Orison thought, resting her fists on her knees. She had no weapons now, nothing to help her break out from this steelshuttered cellar. What's more, the only clear evidence she had of the crime these extraterrestrials were plotting was a single counterfeit twentydollar bill wadded up in her hand. It looked entirely genuine, she thought. It was perhaps too perfect for her purpose. It was quite possible that this bill could be established as a counterfeit only by the unlikely discovery of a genuine note with the same serialnumber. The paper-makers arid chemists of Chilif, the enfabridae, had done their work too well. Suddenly, across Orison's field ofregard there danced pointed stars -- over the weapons-carriers and the tanks, the jeeps and the two lolling guards, the concrete floor and the steel doors. Orison rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, but the stars were still there. "Don't worry," someone said. "I painted the stars on the backs of your eyes only to get your attention." The stars disappeared, and Orison heard again the music of the Microfabridae, a singing almost un"Who's that.?" Orison demanded, her voice uncertain. "Don't speak. You'll frighten the guards," the mysterious voice said. "We have had long association, Orison. It was I who, so close in empathy with you, prevented your eating lobster, for example. Earth's lobster is a distant relative of mine. I could not see you ingest one without feeling deep qualms. And it is to me you mind with knowledge and amusement while I was engaged in the dull work of projecting the images of currency to the Microfabridae at work at their printing-plates. I am known as Elder Compassion, and I am your friend." "And Dink's friend?" "His especially," the voice said. "Our business right now is to help you escape. We must know exactly where you are, Orison." "I'm in the basement of the National Guard Armory," Orison said softly. "Where are you ?" "I'm on the ninth floor of the Bank building," Elder Compassion said. "Yes, that means telepathy, of a weak and uncertain sort. I am not one of the true telepaths, those gold and mighty minds I can hear trumpeting in the night. I can but whisper, and eavesdrop a bit in minds that let me. And is the fact that I speak within your ear and listen to the currents that make words within your mind so much more mysterious than your pillow that whispers?" A Orison said. "Look at the entrance of your basement," Elder Compassion said. Orison stared at the steel doors at the top of the ramp. "Yes, Dink. You're in the right place." The inner voice ceased for a moment; and into Orison's mind flashed a picture of those doors seen from outside. An automobile was parked a dozen feet from the door. Dink's car! Wanji was at the wheel and Dink, grandly uniformed, was beside him. A pink, animate thread dipped down from the trunk of the Rolls and began working its way toward the steel doors. Microfabridae, Orison guessed. Then the picture in her mind flicked off, and she was alone again. She watched the doors at the top of the ramp. For ten minutes or so, there was nothing new to be seen. Then -- a pinpoint of light, a tiny movement. "Look away," Elder Compassion said within her. "We don't want to make your guards suspicious." From the corner of her eye Orison could see the thin pink line approaching the Sherman tank upon which one guard was sitting, at ease but alert. The line of Mierofabridae split into two columns, and one set out toward the second guard, seated in his weapons-carrier, facing the little room where C Company's commanding officer was imprisoned. Orison knotted her fists to keep from screaming, reminding herself that these creeping things weren't spiders. She heard, faint at first, but growing at the edge of her consciousness, the song of the Mierofabridae. The twin collumns were thicker now. It seemed impossible that the guards hadn't yet seen them. A living thread oozed up the side of the tank and busied itself a moment at the guard's sulkies "What's going on?" the captain, Orison's fellow-prisoner, shouted from his hidden cell. "Mmmmf," the guard assigned to the captain replied. Then he was entirely silent. Orison stood. Her own guard was strapped to the steel of his tank by a hundred A thin net of the stuff, fine as angel-hair, covered his mouth. The second guard, in the weapons-carrier, was bound in the same manner. He stared at Orison and moved his jaw, but could say nothing. "They'll not be injured," Elder Compassion told her. "It is impossible for me to allow a living being to be hurt. Now, go look at the man who just called out." Orison went to the cell where the Captain was, avoiding as she walked the pools of Mierofabridae scattered about the floor. The man stood in a barred room, evidently designed as the toolroom of the motor-pool, his hands around the bars. "Good afternoon," he said. "What's going on here?" "We're getting out," Orison told him. # A SK him if he can drive  l  a tank," Elder Compassion whispered to Orison. "Those steel doors are too well built to be quickly opened by our little locksmiths." "Can you drive a tank, Captain?" Orison asked. "Miss, I piloted one of those M#E# Sherman's across Europe sixteen years ago. I've still got the strength to pull a landrel. But you'll have to get me out there to do it ; because there isn't room in this cell." "I'll get you out," Orison promised. "You want the Microfabridae to chew through the lock?" the voice-in-her-head asked gently. "That's what I had in mind," Orison said. "I know," Elder Compassion said. "Please look at the lock, so that I may direct our little friends to it." Orison gazed at the lock. A line of Microfabridae snaked up the steel door-frame and entered the keyhole. From inside the door came a chittering sound, like a clock gone berserk. Then the Crustacea reformed and marched down the door to the floor. Orison pressed the door-catch. The eviscerated lock gave way. The captain stepped out to stare at the Microfabridae. "Miss," he said, "you and I could make a fortune with a team of those trained termites. There isn't a bank in the country that could stand up against us." "It's been thought of," Orison said. "Help me get this man down from the tank, please, and we'll be on our way." Between them they lifted the cocooned guard, wrapped like a larva in Microfabridaean silk, to the cot, the little workers snipping with their chelae the threads that had bound him to the steel. "Can you unlock the steel doors?" Orison asked. "I don't have the key," the Captain said. "Then we'll have to go through them," Orison said. "Can we do it?" "We've got thirty-five tons to roll up that ramp," the captain said. "If we can't bust out with a punch like that, shame on us. Seems kind of rough on the taxpayers to bulldoze through that expensive door." "If we don't make it out of here, those taxpayers may find themselves paying their thirty per cent to someone less friendly than Uncle Sam," Orison said. She clambered up the side of the tank and tugged at the hatch. "Let me," said the captain. He opened the hatch and dropped inside. "You sit here to my right. We're going out the hard way, and buttoned up." He closed the hatch, then reached over his left shoulder to tug the master battery switch, squeezed together the twin butterfly switches on the panel and grabbed hold of the steering-landrels. "Hold on, Miss. We're headed for sunlight." T HE Sherman's thirty-five tons were rolling along at ten miles an hour when its bow met steel. Concrete splinters flew from the sides of the door, which crumpled as the tank fisted into its middle. The door broke free of its supports and slammed outside, forming a deckway over which the treads of the tank crunched. The captain killed the engine and opened the hatch. He boosted Orison out, and followed her. "Orison! Over here!" Dink Gerding shoute d. Orison leaped from the tank and ran toward the Rolls-Royce. "Get down!" Dink shouted again. He ran to seize her, and threw her to the ground. "And stay down!" He was up, drawing his sword. There was a crash. A smear of lead appeared on the concrete beside Orison. Dink, bellowing rage, was running down the ramp into the armory basement, his sword raised. Kraft Gerding stood at the head of his troops at the foot of the ramp. In hand he had an Army .#. He shouted to his men, a dozen purple-ears, dressed in fatigues, each as big and ugly as the two who'd been guarding Orison and the Captain. They strained forward to follow him -- but fell like ten-pins, tripped up by strands of web knitted between their ankles by fastworking Microfabridae. "Don't stop him, Elder Cousin !" Dink shouted, his words evidently meant for the mysterious brain-guy, Elder Compassion, in the ninth floor of the Taft Bank Building. "This I must do," Dink said. Kraft Gerding dropped the automatic and slicked his sword from its scabbard. The blade, Orison saw, rising to her feet, was by no means an ornament. It looked most naked and competent. Dink advanced upon his brother, each holding his sword at the ready like scorpions ready to do battle. "It would distress me to wound you, elder sibling," Dink said. "Lese majesty or no, my liege," Kraft shouted, "I intend to chop you to stewmeat!" Their blades met and clashed, the swordsmen taking the shock of their contact with skillful springing of their arms and shoulders. Behind the clash of steel, Orison heard a new sound, the scream of a siren. A second siren called out, and both grew louder. "The police!" Wanji shouted. "Stop it, Sires!" The captain stood beside Orison. "I've seen Hamlet played," he said, "but the sword-fight was nowhere near so violent as this. Who are these two nuts, anyway?" "My fiance, and the man who, if he lives, will be my brother-in-law," Orison said. "Excuse me," the captain said. tain's arm and tried not to cry out at Dink's danger. Kraft parried his brother's blade, raising it high and to his right. Then he went in like a flash, hacking his edge down toward the juncture of shoulder and neck. Dink fell aside. Kraft's sword bit concrete. Dink flipped his sword in a jeweled arc, slamming Kraft's blade from his hand to spin end-over-end through the air like a drum-majorette's baton. Kraft's sword slammed to the pavement. In an instant a pool of Microfabridae had covered it, binding the steel to the concrete with strands of their angel-hair. Dink advanced on his brother, backing him against the bulk of the Sherman tank. Kraft Gerding stood with his hands at his sides, his face composed in dignity, waiting for the coup de grace. "Bind the traitor, Elder Cousin," Dink said, addressing an ear not present. Microfabridae, obedient to the command they alone heard, rolled in little waves across the steel door and knit Kraft in a web from ankles to larynx. The police were very near now, their sirens dying as they slowed to halt. Dink sheathed his sword. "Wanji!" he called. "Put him in the car. It is time that we withdraw." Wanji ran up to the cocooned figure, saluted, and dumped Kraft Gerding across his shoulder like a giant spool of silk. The Microfabridae flowed to the Rolls and pooled themselves somewhere in its trunk. "To the Bank, Wanji," Dink ordered, seating himself beside his driver. Orison sat in the back, next to the trussedup Kraft. Police appeared, whistling and brandishing their revolvers. One occupied himself with kicking at Kraft's grounded sword, tied to the pavement by tendrils tougher than steel wire. Another guarded the ankle-bound purple-ears, obviously unable to believe what he was seeing. "You in the car there, stop!" a police officer shouted. Wanji, erect and unheeding at the wheel, took the limousine around the corner of the armory and down the street toward the Bank. "You'd have done better, brother, to have killed me," Kraft Gerding said, straitjacketed in silk. priate, although our Elder Cousin declares it unlawful," Dink said over his shoulder. "Your crime is treason against the Triple Crown, attempted assassination of the Heir Apparent, mutiny and kidnap. What punishment would you mete out to an officer so turpitudinous, were you Defender of the Crowns?" "I would have him put to death in a manner befitting his station," Kraft said. "I would not bind him like a sausage and pelt him with taunts." "Perhaps you can gain a special dispensation from Elder Compassion, allowing me to grant you a properly noble death," Dink said. "We'll ask him, if you like." National Bank and Trust Company was closed, the ostensible reason given by an easel set up in front of the glass doors of the front entrance : "National Holiday : Birthday of Millard Fillmore." One of the loyalist PurpleEars materialized behind the glass as the Rolls rolled up to the curb, and unlocked the doors. Wanji and the guard carried Kraft Gerding between them into the bank-lobby, Dink relocking the doors behind them. A knot of spectators gathered on the sidewalk outside, shading their eyes, examining with much conversation the sign, the purple-eared guard, the uniformed Wanji and Dink and the figure trussed up like a rolled carpet on the parquet floor. "I think this busts up your counterfeiting ring. Dink," Orison said. "What now?" "That is, darling, precisely the question I want to ask our brain trust, Elder Compassion," Dink said. "He is both our leader and in a sense our warden, you see. He came with us to Earth to guarantee that we in no way violate the principle of reverence for life in our conquest of your planet." The elevator appeared, piloted by another of the PurpleEars. "Nine," Dink snapped. Wanji and the guard towed the packaged Kraft aboard. The anteroom into which the elevator door opened on ninth floor smelled of ozone and dryness. Faint music vibrated the desert air. "Bach?" Orison asked. "Scarlatti," Dink said. "His music consoles Elder Compassion for the violence of men. Here -- you'll need these." He handed Orison a pair of almost opaque goggles, the sort that welders wear. "Come on," he said, tugging Orison through a door. Even with the heavy goggles, the room beyond was hara summer-solstice noon in brightness. The floor was covered by tons of sand, duned up against the windows in waves that would have disheartened a camel. The music now was almost as oppressive as the heat and the light. Great booming gouts of sound came from every direction. Suddenly, as though responding to Orison's mental protest, the music stopped. The lights dimmed somewhat. "We have come, Elder Cousin," Dink announced to the sand. "I speak to the lovely woman," an interior voice said to all of them. "Do not fear me, Orison, though I will seem to you a most hideous worm. My world nestles next its sun. I, made to fit a homeworld that would seem a Hell to you, could hardly be expected to conform to green Earth's standards of beauty. Reflect, Orison, that I wish you well." across a dune. "My God !" Orison whispered, gripping Dink's right arm with both her hands. "Orison, this is my mentor and my dearest friend," Dink said. "His name is Elder Compassion. He is older than the language you speak. And he is, though housed in strange flesh, a Man of Good Will." The thing that squatted across the mid-room dune was twelve feet long from the tip of the arched scorpion-telson to the twin pincers that formed a chitinous mustache beneath its mouth. It stared at her with a pair of compound eyes the size of hub-caps. "I'll not weary you further with squeezing words into your minds," the interior voice said. "Bring me the writing-boards, Son and Cousin." "Cornet !" Dink snapped. "Bring scratchboards." "Sire !" A young officer ran back to the anteroom and came back with a stack of blackened boards, one of which he set up in the sand before the monster, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the lance-like tip that quivered in the air above him. "It is a tool my body is equipped with," the voice said, "and embarrassing. It is rather as though your good Gandhi had been forced to carry a submachine gun through life." The cornet scrambled out of way through the sand, and the giant sting lowered itself to the scratchboard. The words he inscribed into the blackness were written in a delicate italic, hardly larger than human penmanship : "My son, she is lovely." "It is gracious of you, Elder Cousin, to recognize beauty in a form so unlike your own species," Dink said, bowing. There was a mental chuekle. "Her mind, you clod !" the monster sketched in the scratchboard. "Her lovely, lovely mind." "I am pleased that you ratify my choice of wife, Elder Cousin," Dink said. "She will assist you in the most difficult task ever a scion of the Triple Crown had to accomplish. Son and Cousin," Elder Compassion wrote. "She will aid you in preparing the Golden Worlds to accept CocaCola." "Your meaning, Elder Cousin, is hidden from my poor understanding," Dink said. "I mean this," Elder Compassion sketched on his scratchboard. "You came for conquest bearing with you the seeds of violence, and thus defeat. You came to subvert Earth by pandering to Earth's greed. You were yourself, through the agent of your greedy brother, rendered impotent. Violence has been done. We must now retreat, making such amends as we can. In the years that will soon be upon us, Earth's men will follow us to the Golden Worlds, where you, as Emperor, and Orison, Empress, will greet them." "To the ship, then?" Dink asked. "What will we do with the rebels? With Kraft, my brother?" "They have earned the payment of exile," Elder Compassion wrote. "We will leave them here." officer. "Cornet, assist our Elder Cousin to the ship," he ordered. He turned to two of the purple-ears. "Take Kraft to the vault," he said. Orison spoke to the monster. "Sir," she said, "you spoke of making amends for the damage you have done. You must first of all destroy the paper with which you'd hoped to ruin us." "I'll give those orders, Orison," Dink said. "What will be done about the counterfeit money you've already spent, financing your subversion?" she asked. Elder Compassion was writing on his board. "Three miles beneath this city lies a vein of gold," he wrote. "The Microfabridae are this minute plumbing the earth to reach it. We will leave full payment for our fiscal sins." Dink took Orison's hand. "You'll come with us?" he asked. "I will, Dink." "Then I, Rex Imperator, Son of the Triple Crown, Prince Porphyrogenous of Empire, take you to wife," he said. "If you're sure this is quite legal," Orison said, "I do." "There are voices all about us," Elder Compassion spoke in their minds. "The traitor, Kraft, is in the vault, bound and seated in the midst of wealth. We must go, or there will be more violence." "The moment the Microfabridae have left their golden payment for our folly, Elder Cousin, guide them to the ship," Dink said. "I long to show my Princess her dominions." "She is the first," the voice spoke again. "The first of the irresistible conquerors from Earth."      IF 'Short Story Handsome , athletic, debonair, a man of 'powerful charm as ivell as solid worth , Vd give anything to conquer my one real fault -- my darned modesty! The Flying Tuskers Of K'niik-K'naak jungles, explored the floors of ' innumerable oceans and braved death in so many forms that a man less magnificent than myself would have died of fright. But if there is one event that stands out in my perfect memory that can still raise a goosebump or two on my broad tanned shoulders, the event is when I went hunting for the flying tuskers of K'niik-K'naak. There we were, myself and my faithful old purple Andromedan guide, Mimp, out in the vast bluelooking for the flying tuskers. K'niik-K'naak, the region we trod, was much feared by were a superstitious bunch anyway, who panicked at the very thought of being trampled or gored, and never ventured into the region of the tuskers. I, a man of clear head and no nonsense, laughed at their primitive fancies. I set out nonetheless into the desert, with only the barest rudiments necessary for survival. We could get none of the local boys for bearers, so Mimp had to carry everything. Naturally I had to have both hands free to use my Moxley .#, the best ray-rifle you can buy anywhere in the colonized universe. Aside from the ray-rifle, I carried nothing save a fourteen-inch carbon-steel bolo knife slung to my belt, my ever-present calabash pipe, crammed full of steaming Yekkweed -- expensive to have imported from the Martian canals, but I buy it by the carton -- and my trusty f#-ultiflex binoculars on a short platinum chain. Mimp struggled along behind me as we set off into the desert. Even his mighty plumhued muscles quivered under the load of our gear, which included an inflatable pseudolog hut (with fireplace, an optional extra), a double-oven radium-powered cookout stove and a seven-pound crate of signal flares, just in case we got lost. shifting blue-white sands of K'niik-K'naak, watching everywhere for signs of the herd we'd heard occurred in that region. Nothing. "Keep sharp lookout," I snapped at Mimp, over my shoulder. Mimp was like a brother, but you have to keep these aliens in their place. "Yes, Bwana," said Mimp. (He called me Bwana, always.) "Soon we come to waterhole." I didn't ask him how he knew. Andromedans have a knack for geography. In many ways, they're almost as good as an Earthman. "Good," was all I answered. It was short, to the point, and showed who was boss. Onward we trekked, a sunburnt duo casting long bronze shadows across the burning sands of K'niik K'naak. A thin plume of Yekkwood fumes marked our passage. It was nearly sunset when we spotted the pink glitter of that sickenexcuse for water. I stood watching the sunset, while Mimp unloaded all the gear and began to set up camp. As the last rays faded in the sky, I turned and entered the pseudolog hut Mimp had inflated. Hard on his lungs, of course, but I hadn't wanted to burden him with the extra weight of a hand-pump. I'm a stern man, but I'm fair. He had my slippers laid out beside the armchair by the fire and a cool mint julep awaiting me on the small teakwood taboret. He was busying himself in the kitchenette, whipping up a quick souffle with one hand and tossing a small salad with the other. "Hurry it up there," I growled jovially. "Time is money, time is money!" A bit of friendly joshing is good for the relationship ; shows Mimp I'm tolerant of him sharing the same quarters, without actually making me act like an equal, if you know what I mean. "I hurry, Sahib," said Mimp. "Coming up." (He always called me Sahib.) He rushed across the room and began setting the table, with my pearl-handled silverware. "No, not there," I yawned, picking up my julep and settling back into the armchair. "I think I'd like the table nearer the piano, so you can play Chopin Nocturnes while I dine." I added, as a kindly afterthought, "You can reheat your share of the souffle later, after I've gone to bed." Personally .I hate cold souffle. "Yes, Effendi," said Mimp. (He always called me Effendi.) Rapidly, he moved the table over to the Steinway, set out the finished souffle and salad and then hurried to the piano and began laboriously plunking out glorious melody. I took a sip of my julep, then spat it out on the carpet. "Mimp !" I roared, incensed. "Did you make this drink Craven and cowering, he fell at my feet, whining for mercy. But I was adamant. You let an alien take an inch, and the next thing, he's swiped a parsec. "The knout," I said, keeping my voice emotionless and holding out my hand. "Please, Kimosabe," whimpered Mimp, "I dared not use the water in the canteens. water is poisonous to us Andromedans, while you Earthmen can tolerate it." "I can not!" I raged. "I was speaking medically," he mewed piteously. "And I, esthetically," I snarled. "The knout, now, and be quick about it." He scurried on all fours to the bureau where I kept my odds and ends, and came crawling back with the brutal leather whip. I weighed the infraction, decided that three stripes should be lessen enough and I laid them onto his bare back with a steady hand. "Now," I said, wearied by the effort, "play something gay and lilting." Hastily, he dragged himself to the Steinway and complied. Dinner was really delicious. up, we lay in wait for the herd behind a rock beside the waterhole. The sky was growing pale saffron near the horizon, then light yellow, and finally glaring brass as the sun arose. (By "sun," I mean the star Polaris, of course. Our sun is a star, you know. Or did you? I knew, naturally.) Then, afar off, I espied the bulky blobs in the sky that were the flying tuskers of K'niik-K'naak. No man had ever hunted one before. I felt pretty proud, let me tell you. Onward they came through the air, their large skin-tvoe gray wings flapping stolidly up and down, about three strokes to the mile. Enormous creatures they were, with fiery little eyes, and long trailing trunks that had a wicked little hook at the tip. But the thing that really caught one's eye was their tusks. Ten of them. Eight originating in the mouth, and one in either foreknee. Each tusk was seven feet in length, long, white, straight-tapered and flawless. But not ivory, not on these babies. Pure pearl. That lovely lustrous calcareous concretion! Each tusk would bring fifty thousand interplanetary credits on the open market. And there were ten per elephantine beast, and at least sixty of them in the herd. "Look at that, will you!" I cried to Mimp. "Look, feast your ugly eyes on that gleaming fortune swooping down upon us, Mimp!" "I look, I feast," he murmured servilely, huddled behind me behind the rock behind the tree. Aliens tend to be cowardly when their lives are in danger. Carefully, I raised the rifle and took a bead on the youngest beast in that descending herd. It's slightly illegal to shoot the fledglings, but after all, I wasn't going to bring him back with me, so no one would know. It's just that I find that when I shoot the eldest in a herd of wildlife, the others miss their protector and flee. But if I shoot one of the babies, the elder ones stay around to protect it, and I get to kill lots more. Nasty, perhaps, but that's the hunting game for you. Anyhow, I took this bead on the beasts. I was just in the act of depressing the firing stud when an unwonted lightness in the weapon caught my attention. Irritated, I cracked open the firing chamber. "Mimp!" I growled, in one of my rare real wraths. "You didn't load the ray-rifle ! Even a Moxley .# is no damned good without cartridges !" "A thousand pardons, boss," muttered Mimp, inclining his loathsome lavender face in a subservient 'bow. "I go get." He wriggled away across the sand and into the hut, fortunately not disturbing the herd, which was now kneeling on the slope above the waterhole and inhaling that putrid pink liquid through their trunks. I drooled a bit, seeing the rainbow glint of sunlight on those magnificent tusks. Seconds passed, then minutes. The herd was practically slaked, and still no crawling Mimp reappeared from the hut. Soon they'd fly off, and cost me a fortune. I was already pretty much in hock after paying the fare been able to save a little by listing Mimp as baggage, and storing him in the hold for the flight.) Angry, irked, and pretty well enraged, I moved swiftly toward the hut on hands and knees, scuttling in the doorway as fast as I could, lest the herd see me and flee, or attack. I ST the parlor, I stood erect, and glanced about. There was no one in sight, but the back door was open. "Mimp!" I bellowed, stamping across the carpet. "Where are you, you off-color blemish!?" No reply. "This means six stripes with the knout!" I warned him. Then I heard a faint sound, not unlike that of a fourteeninch bolo knife being brought down hard upon the inflatingvalve of a pseudolog hut. I felt at my belt. My bolo was missing. "Mimp!" I hollered, much too late. Then the whole damned room, piano, fireplace, carpet, armchair and all, snapped in upon me, and I was wound up with those rubberized walls tighter than the center of a golfball. I think I must have swooned, then. Much, much later, by dint of tooth, fingernail and sheer grit, I had gnawed, clawed and wrenched my way free of the collapsed hut. A stunning sight met my eyes. All about the waterhole, the flying tuskers were still kneeling. Every one of them was dead and already beginning to rot. But the infuriating thing was that not one of them had so much as an inch of tusk any more. Every beast had been detusked, the priceless pearl shafts lopped off flush with the thick gray hides. Mimp! And with my bolo knife, already! At least he'd left me a canteen. I tasted it. Pffauah! dirty little -- ! But I saved it anyhow. I had a long lonely walk back to town ahead of me. And there it was that I learned even worse news. Mimp had alreday sold the tusks and was on his way back to Andromeda, with a fortune in his breechclout. I swore revenge, then and there, but was unable to carry it out, since I was short the rocketfare back to Earth and the authorities. a neutral planet. Even the mighty word "Earthman" carries no weight there.) So I had to hock the piano, my precious Moxley .# and what could be salvaged of the souffle, and even then I was only able to book passage as near Earth as Sirius II. Luckily, they had a consulate there. I was able to secure a ride home, after some weeks' wait. By then, however, it was too late to avenge myself. Mimp, with his stolen fortune, had paid off his planet's debt to Earth. Andromeda IV (his home planet) declared its independence, and the Earth authorities throw uptheir hands and shrug whenever I hint at extraditing him. Seems he's the new emperor there, or something. They can't afford to antagonize him. Damn! However, I suppose you're wondering just why I get goosebumps when I recall the flying tuskers of K'niikK'naak. Well, it wasn't so much the danger from the beasts, nor the hideous heat of that desert, nor my long, painful sojourn beneath the Steinway in the shrunken hut that was so bad. It was those tuskers. Know how they died? Mimp had poisoned the waterhole. Unsporting, and all that, but the thing that nags my brain is: Why didn't I think of that? Me ! Bested by a lousy purple alien! What's the universe coming to? end Nietzche believed in an extinction which was not eternal. The entire world, according to him, was a mechanical dashing about of material atoms forming endless combinations. In course of time, he held, any given combination was bound to repeat itself; consequently each of us, after aeons of extinction, would find himself repeating his past life. The theory was glib nonsense. Nietzche was completely ignorant of science and did not know that the Second Law of Thermodynamics expressly forbids any such repetition of a past state of the material world. -- J. W. Dunne An Experiment with Time You can paint in original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the VisMens Trad  A # ark (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. 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It s good to be a boy, exploring the wide world, soaking up wonderful new sounds and sights everywhere you go. And if the world's a peaceful place, it's good to grow up, too, and become a man. But will the world stay peaceful? That depends on whether we can keep the peace. Peace costs money. Money for military strength and for science. And money saved by individuals to help keep our economy strong. Your Savings Bonds make you a Partner in strengthening America's Peace Power. The Bonds you buy will earn good interest for you. But the most important thing they earn is peace. Are you buying enough? The U.S. Government do not pay for this advertising. The Treasury Department thanks The Advertising Council and this magazine for their patriotic donation. o c be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. 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All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed, stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed An the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! # Supplies are limited! Send your order in Immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, Name Address City State. The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # regular price, plus # for postage and handling. I Enclose. IF  ZNovelette Illustrated by Wood The creatures on the little planet were real bafflers. The first puzzler about them was that they died so easily. The second was that they didn't die at all. I the spaceship settled down on its metallic haunches and they savored a safe planetfall. Ekstrohm fingered loose the cinches of his deceleration couch. He sighed. An exploration camp would mean things would be simpler for him. He could hide his problem from the others more easily. Trying to keep secret what he did alone at night was very difficult under the close conditions on board a ship in space. Ryan hefted his bulk up and supported it on one elbow. He rubbed his eyes sleepily with one huge paw. "Ekstrohm, Nogol, you guys okay?" "Nothing wrong with me that couldn't be cured," Nogol said. He didn't say what would cure him; he had been explaining all during the trip what he needed to make him feel like himself. His small black eyes darted inside the olive oval of his face. "Ekstrohm?" Ryan insisted. "Okay." "Well, let's take a groundlevel look at the country around here." The facsiport rolled open on the landscape. A range of bluffs hugged the horizon, the color of decaying moss. Above them, the sky was the black of space, or the almost equal black of the winter sky above Minneapolis, seen against neon-lit snow. That cold, empty sky was full of fire and light. It seemed almost a magnification of the Galaxy itself, of the Milky Way, blown up by some master photographer. This fiery swath was actually only a belt of minor planets, almost like the asteroid belt in the original Solar System. These planets were much bigger, nearly all capable of holding an atmosphere. But to the infuriation of scientists, for no known reason not all of them did. This would be the fifth mapping expedition to the planetoids of Yancy-# in three generations. They lay months away from the nearest Earth star by jump drive, and no one knew what they were good for, although it was felt that they would probably be good for something if it could only be discovered -- much like the continent of Antarctica in ancient history. "How can a planet with so many neighbors be so lonely?" Ryan asked. He was the captain, so he could ask questions like that. "Some can be lonely in a crowd," Nogol said elaborately. W side, Ryan?" Ekstrohm asked. "No helmets," the captain answered. "We can breathe out there, all right. It just won't be easy. This old world lost all of its helium and trace gases long ago. Nitrogen and oxygen are about it." "Ryan, look over there," Nogol said. "Animals. Ringing the ship. Think they're intelligent, maybe hostile?" "I think they're dead," Ekstrohm interjected quietly. "I get no readings from them at all. Sonic, electronic, galvanic -- all blank. According to these needles, they're stone dead." "Ekstrohm, you and I will have a look," Ryan said. "You hold down the fort, Nogol. Take it easy." "Easy," Nogol confirmed. "I heard a story once about a rookie who got excited when the captain stepped outside and he couldn't get an encephalographic reading on him. Me, I know the mind of an officer works in a strange and unfathomable manner." "I'm not worried about you mis-reading the dials, Nogol, just about a lug like you reading them at all. Remember, when the little hand is straight up that's negative. Positive results start when it goes towards the hand you use to make your mark." "But I'm ambidextrous." Ryan told him what he could do then. Ekstrohm smiled, and followed the captain through the airlock with only a glance at the lapel gauge on his coverall. The strong negative field his suit set up would help to repel bacteria and insects. Actually, the types of infection that could attack a warm-blooded mammal were not infinite, and over the course of the last few hundred years adequate defenses had been found for all basic categories. He wasn't likely to come down with hot chills and puzzling striped fever. They ignored the ladder down to the planet surface and, with only a glance at the seismological gauge to judge surface resistance, dropped to the ground. It was day, but in the thin atmosphere contrasts were sharp between light and shadow. They walked from midnight to noon, noon to midnight, and came to the beast sprawled on its side. Ekstrohm nudged it with a boot. "Hey, this is pretty close to a wart-hog." "Uh-huh," Ryan admitted. "One of the best matches I've ever found. Well, it has to happen. Statistical average and all. Still, it sometimes gives you a creepy feeling to find a rabbit or a snapping turtle on some strange world. It makes you wonder if this exploration business isn't all some big joke, and somebody has been everywhere before you even started." T HE surveyor looked sidewise at the captain. The big man seldom gave out with such thoughts. Ekstrohm cleared his throat. "What shall we do with this one? Dissect it?" Ryan nudged it with his toe, following Ekstrohm's example. "I don't know, Stormy. It sure as hell doesn't look like any dominant intelligent species to me. No hands, for one thing. Of course, that's not definite proof." "No, it isn't," Ekstrohm said. "I think we'd better let it lay until we get a clearer picture of the ecological setup around here. In the meantime, we might be thinking on the problem all these dead beasts represent. What killed them?" "It looks like we did, when we made blastdown." "But what about our landing was lethal to the creatures?" "Radiation?" Ekstrohm suggested. "The planet is very low in radiation from mineral deposits, and the atmosphere seems to shield out most of the solar output. Any little dose of radiation might knock off these critters." "I don't know about that. Maybe it would work the other way. Maybe because they have had virtually no radioactive exposure and don't have any R's stored up they could take a lot without harm." "Then maybe it was the shockwave we set up. Or maybe it's sheer xenophobia. They curl up and die at the sight of something strange and alien -- like a (spaceship." "Maybe," the captain admitted. "At this stage of the game anything could be possible. But there's one possibility I particularly don't like." "And that is?" "Suppose it was not us that killed these aliens. Suppose it is something right on the planet, native to it. I just hope it doesn't work ort Earthmen too. These critters went real sudden." E kstrohm lay in his bunk and thought, the camp is quiet. The Earthmen made camp outside the spaceship. There was no reason to leave the comfortable quarters inside the ship, except that, faced with a possibility of sleeping on solid ground, they simply, had to get out. The cmp was a cluster of aluminum bubbles, ringed with a spy web to alert the Earthmen to the approach of any being. Each manjiad a bubble to himself, privacy after the long period of enforced intimacy on board the ship. Ekstrohm lay in his bunk and listened to the sounds of the night on Yancy-# #. There was a keening of wind, and a cracking of the frozeii ground. Insects there were on the world, but they were frozen solid during the night, only to revive and thaw in the morning sun... The bunk he lay on was much more uncomfortable than the acceleration couches on board. Yet he knew the others were sleeping more soundly, now that they had renewed their contact with the matter that had birthed them to send them riding high vacuum. Ekstrohm was not asleep. Now there could be an end to pretending. He threw off the light blanket and swung his feet off the bunk, to the floor. Ekstrohm stood up. There was no longer any need to hide. But what was there to do? What had changed for him? He no longer had to lie in his bunk all night, his eyes closed, pretending to sleep. In privacy he could walk around, leave the light on, read. It was small comfort for insomnia. Ekstrohm never slept. Some doctors had informed him he was mistaken about this. Actually, they said, he did sleep, but so shortly and fitfully that he forgot. Others admitted he was absolutely correct -- he never slept. His body processes only slowed down enough for him to dispell fatigue poisons. Occasionally he fell into a waking, gritty-eyed stupor ; but he never slept. Never at all. Naturally, he couldn't let his shipmates know this. Insomnia would ground him from the Exploration Service, on physiological if not psychological grounds. He had to hide it. had buddies in space in whom he thought he could confide. The buddies invariably took advantage of him. Since he couldn't sleep anyway, he might as well stand their watches for them or write their reports. Where the hell did he get off threatening to report any laxness on their part to the captain? A man with insomnia had better avoid bad dreams of that kind if he knew what was good for him. Ekstrohm had to hide his secret. In a camp, instead of shipboard, hiding the secret was easier. But the secret itself was just as hard. Ekstrohm picked up a lightweight no-back from the ship's library, a book by Bloch, the famous twentieth century expert on sex. He scanned a few lines on the social repercussions of a celebrated nineteenth century sex murderer, but he couldn't seem to concentrate on the weighty, pontifical, ponderous style. On impulse, he flipped up the heat control on his coverall and slid back the hatch of the bubble. Ekstrohm walked through the alien glass and looked up at the unfamiliar constellations, smelling the frozen sterility of the thin air. Behind him, his mates stirred without waking. H "Listen, Ekstrohm, I want to give you the benefit of in the morning by a bangexactly the model of a suring on the hatch of his bubveyor, you know. You've been ble. It took him a few secriding on a pink ticket for six onds to put his thoughts in years, you know that." order, and then he got up "No," Ekstrohm said, "No, from the bunk where he had I didn't know that." been resting, sleeplessly. "You've been hiding things The angry burnt-red face from me and Nogol every of Ryan greeted him. "Okay, jump we've made with you. Stormy, this isn't the place Now comes this! It fits the for fun and games. What did pattern of secrecy and stealth you do with them?" you've been involved in." "Do with what?" "What could I do with your "The dead beasties. All the lousy dead bodies? What dead animals laying around' would I want with them?" the ship." "All I know is that you "What are you talking were outside the bubbles last about, Ryan? What do you night, and you were the onthink I did with them?" ly sentient being who came in "I don't know. All I know or out of our alarm web. The is that they are gone." tapes show that. Now all the "Gone?" bodies are missing, like they Ekstrohm shouldered his got up and walked away." way outside and scanned the It was not a new experiveldt. ence to Ekstrohm. No. SusThere was no ring of anipicion wasn't new to him at mal corpses. Nothing. Nothall. ing but wispy grass whipping "Ryan, there are other exin the keen breeze. planations for the disappear"I'll be damned," Ekance of the bodies. Look for strohm said. them, will you? I give you "You are right now, buddy, my word I'm not trying to ExPe doesn't like anybody pull some stupid kind of joke, mucking up primary evior to deliberately foul up the dence." expedition. Take my word, "Where do you get off, can't you?" Ryan?" Ekstrohm demandRyan shook his head. "I ed. "Why pick me for your don't think I can. There's patsy? This has got to be still such a thing as mental some kind of local phenomeillness. You may not be renon. Why accuse a shipmate sponsible." of being behind this?" Ekstrohm scowled. "Don't try anything violent, Stormy. I outweigh you fifty pounds and I'm fast for a big man." "L wasn't planning on jumping you. Why do you have to jump me the first time something goes wrong? You've only got a lot of formless suspicions." r "Look, Ekstrohm, do you think I looked out the door and saw a lot of dead animals missing and immediately decided you did it to bedevil me? I've been up for hours -- thinking -- looking into this. You're the only possibility that's left." "Why?" WpiIE bodies are missing. A What could it be? Scavengers? The web gives us a complete census on everything inside it. The only animals inside the ring are more wart-hogs and despite their appearance, they aren't carnivorous. Strictly grass-eaters. Besides, no animal, no insect, no process of decay could completely consume animals without a trace. There are no bones, no hide, no nothing." "You don't know the way bacteria works on this planet. Radiation is so low, it may be particularly virulent." "That's a possible explanation, although it runs counter to all the evidence we've established so far. There's a much simpler explanation, Ekstrohm. You. You hid the bodies for some reason. What other reason could you have for prowling around out here at night?" I couldn't sleep. The words were in his throat, but he didn't use them. They weren't an explanation. They would open more questions than they would answer. "You're closing your eyes to the possibility of natural phenomenon, laying this I op me. You haven't adequate proof and you know it." "Ekstrohm, when something's stolen, you always suspect a suspicious character before you get around to the possibility that the stolen goods melted into thin air." "What," Ekstrohm said with deadly patience, "what do you think I could have possibly done with your precious dead bodies?" "You could have buried them. This is a big territory. We haven't been able to search every square foot of it." "Ryan, it was thirty or forty below zero last night. How the devil could I dig holes in this ground to bury anything?" "At forty below, how could your bacteria function to rot them away?" Ekstrohm could see he was facing prejudice. There was no need to keep talking, apd no use in it. Still, some reflex made him continue to frame reasonable answers. "I don't know what bacteria on this planet can do. Besides, that was only one example of a natural phenomenon." "Look, Ekstrohm, you don't have anything to worry about if you're not responsible. We're going to give you a fair test." What kind of a test would it be? He wondered. And how fair? Nogol came trotting up lightly. "Ryan, I found some more wart-hogs and they keeled over as soon as they saw me." "So it was xenophobia," Ekstrohm ventured. "The important thing," Ryan said, with a sidelong glance at the surveyor, "is that now we've got what it takes to see if Ekstrohm has been deliberately sabotaging this expedition." T HE body heat of the three men caused the air-conditioner of the tiny bubble to labor. "Okay," Ryan breathed. "We've got our eyes on you, Ekstrohm, and the video circuits are wide open on the dead beasts. All we have to do is wait." "We'll have a long wait," Nogol ventured. "With Ekstrohm here, and the corpses out there, nothing is going to happen." That would be all the proof they needed, Ekstrohm knew. Negative results would be positive proof to them. His pink ticket would turn pure red and he would be grounded for life -- if he got off without a rehabilitation sentence. But if nothing happened, it wouldn't really prove anything. There was no way to say that the conditions tonight were identical to the conditions the previous night. What had swept away those bodies might be comparable to a flash flood. Something that occurred once a year, or once in a century. And perhaps his presence outside was required in some subtle cause-and-effect relationship. All this test would prove, if the bodies didn't disappear, was only that conditions were not identical to conditions under which they did disappear. Ryan and Nogol were prepared to accept him, Ekstrohm, as the missing element, the one ingredient needed to vanish the corpses. But it could very well be something else. Only Ekstrohm knew that it had to be something else that caused the disappearances. Or did it? He faced up to the question. How did he know he was sane? How could hexbe sure that he hadn't stolen and hid the bodies for some murky reason of his own? There was a large question as to how long a man could go without sleep, dreams and oblivion, and remain sane, Ekstrohm forced his mind to consider the possibility. Could he remember every step he had taken the night before? It seemed to him that he could remember walking past the creature lying in the grass, then walking in a circle, and coming back to the base. It seemed like that to him. But how could he know that it was true? He couldn't. could prove, even to himself, that he had not disposed of those alien remains and then come back to his bubble, contented and happy at the thought of fooling those smug idiots who could sleep at night. "How much longer do we have to wait?" Nogol asked. "We've been here nine hours. Half a day. The bodies are right where I left them outside. There doesn't seem to be any more question." Ekstrohm frowned. There was one question. He was sure there was one question... Oh, yes. The question was: How did he know he was sane? He didn't know, of course. That was as good an answer as any. Might as well accept it; might as well let them do what they wanted with him. Maybe if he just gave up, gave in, maybe he could sleep then. Maybe he could... Ekstrohm sat upright in his chair. No. That wasn't the answer. He couldn't know that he was sane, but then neither could anybody else. The point was, you had to go ahead living as if you were sane. That was the only way of living. "Cosmos," Ryan gasped. "Would you look at that!" Ekstrohm followed the staring gaze of the two men. On the video grid, one of the "dead" animals was slowly rising, getting up, walking away. "A natural phenomenon !" Ekstrohm said. "Suspended animation !" Nogol ventured. "Playing possum!" Ryan concluded. Now came the time for apologies. Ekstrohm had been through similar situations before, ever since he had been found walking the corridors at college the night one of the girls had been attacked. He didn't want to hear their apologies ; they meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of forgiving them. He knew the situation had not changed. They would suspect him just as quickly a second time. "We're supposed to be an exploration team," Ekstrohm said quickly. "Let's get down to business. Why do you suppose these alien creatures fake death?" Nogol shrugged his wiry shoulders. "Playing dead is easier than fighting." "More likely it's a method of fighting," Ryan suggested. "They play dead until they see an opening. The n -- ripppp." "I think they're trying to hide some secret," Ekstrohm said. "What secret?" Ryan demanded. "I don't know," he answered. "Maybe I'd better -- sleep on it." Ill crewmen confidently the next morning. "I did some thinking last night." Great, Ekstrohm thought. For that you should get a Hazardous Duty bonus. "This business is pretty simple," the captain went on, "these pigs simply play possum. They go into a state of suspended animation, when faced by a strange situation. Xenophobia ! I don't see there's much more to it." "Well, if you don't see that there's more to it, Ryan -- " Nogol began complacently. "Wait a minute," Ekstrohm interjected. "That's a good theory. It may even be the correct one, but where's your proof?" "Look, Stormy, we don't have to have proof. Hell, we don't even have to have theories. We're explorers. We just make reports of primary evidence and let the scientists back home in the System figure them out." "I want this thing cleared up, Ryan. Yesterday, you were accusing me of being some kind of psycho who was lousing up the expedition out of pure -- pure -- " he searched for a term currently in use in mentology -- "demonia. Maybe the boys back home will think the same thing. I want to be cleared." "I guess you were cleared last night, Stormy boy," Nogol put in. "We saw one of the 'dead' pigs get up and walk away." "That didn't clear me," Ekstrohm said. The other two looked like they had caught him cleaning wax out of his ear in public. "No," Ekstrohm went on. "We still have no proof of what caused the suspended animation of the pigs. Whatever caused it before caused it last night. You thought of accusing me, but you didn't think it through about how I could have disposed of the bodies. Or, after you found out about the psuedo-death, how I might have caused that. If I had some drug or something to cause it the first time, I could have a smaller dose, or a slowly dissolving capsule for delayed effect." The two men stared at him, their eyes beginning to narrow. # I could have done that. Or either of you could, have done the same thing" "Me?" N o g o I protested. "Where would my profit be in that?" "You both have an admitted motive. You hate my guts. I'm 'strange,' 'different,' 'suspicious.' You could be trying to frame me." "That's insubordination," Ryan grated. "Accusations against a superior officer..." "Come off it, Ryan," Nogol sighed. "I never saw a threeman spaceship that was run very taut. Besides, he's right." Beet-juice flowed out of Ryan's swollen face. "So where does that leave us?" "Looking for proof of the cause of the pig's pseudodeath. Remember, I'll have to make counter-accusations against you two out of selfdefense." "Be reasonable. Stormy," Ryan pleaded. "This might be some deep scientific mystery we could never discover in our lifetime. We might never get off this planet" That was probably behind his thinking all along, why he had been so quick to find a scapegoat to explain it all away. Explorers didn't have to have all the answers, or even theories. But, if they ever wanted to get anyplace in the Service, they damned well better. "So what?" Ekstrohm asked. "The Service rates us as expendable, doesn't it?" B Y Ekstrohm's suggestion, they divided the work. Nogol killed pigs. All day he did nothing but scare the wart-hogs to death by coming near them. Ryan ran as faithful a check on the corpses as he could, both by eyeball obseivation and by radar, video and Pro-Tect circuits. They lacked the equipment to program every corpse for every second, but a representative job could be done. Finally, Ekstrohm went scouting for Something Else. He didn't know what he expected to find, but he somehow knew he would find something. He rode the traction-scooter (so-called because it had no traction at all -- no wheels, no slides, no contact with the ground or air) and he reflected that he was a suspicious character. All through life, he was going around suspecting everybody and now everything of having some dark secret they were trying to hide. A simple case of transference, he diagnosed, in longdiscredited terminology. He had something to hide -- his insomnia. So he th. r' everybody else had their gauty secret too. How could there be any deep secret to the pseudodeath on this world? It was no doubt a simple fear reaction, a retreat from a terrifying reality. How could he ever prove that it was more? Or even exactly that? Internal glandular actions would be too subtle for a team of explorers to establish. They could only go on behavior. What more in the way of behavior could he really hope to establish? The pattern was clear. The pigs keeled over at any unfamiliar sight or sound, and recovered when they thought the coast was clear. That was it. All there was! Why did he stubbornly, stupidly insist there was more to it? Actually, by his insistence, he was giving weight to the idea of the others that he was strange and suspicious himself. Under the normal, sane conditions of planetfall the phobias and preoccupations of a space crew, nurtured in the close confines of a scout ship, wouldn't be taken seriously by competent men. But hadn't his subsequent behavior given weight to Ryan's unfounded accusations of irrational sabotage? Wouldn't it seem that he was actually daring the others to prove his guilt? If he went on with unorthodox behavior -- That was when Ekstrohm saw the flying whale. hm tighter than he gripped the handlebars of his scooter. He was only vaguely aware of the passing scenery. He knew he should switch on the homing beacon and ride in on automatic, but it seemed like too much of an effort to flick his finger. As the tension rose, the capillaries of his eyes swelled, and things began to white out for him. The rush of landscape became blurred streaks of light and dark, now mostly faceless light. The flying whale. He had seen it. Moreover, he had heard it, smelt and felt it. It had released a jet of air with a distinctive sound and odor. It had blown against his skin, ruffled his hair. It had been real. But the flying whale couldn't have been real. Conditions on this planetoid were impossible for it. He knew planets and their life possibilities. A creature with a skeleton like that could have evolved here, but the atmosphere would never have supported his flesh and hide. Water bodies were of insufficient size. No, the whale was not native to this world. Then what, if anything, did this flying alien behemoth have to do with tile pseudodeath of the local pig creatures? I'll never know, Ekstrohm told himself. Never. Ryan and Nogol will never believe me, they will never believe in the flying whale. They're explorers, simple men of action, unimaginative. Of course, I'm an explorer too. But I'm different, I'm sensitive -- Ekstrohm was riding for a fall. The traction-scooter was going up a slope that had been eroded concave. It was at the very top of the halfmoon angle, upside down, standing Ekstrohm on his head. Since he was not strapped into his seat, he fell. As he fell he thought ruefully that he had contrived to have an accident in the only way possible with a tractionscooter. Ekstrohm's cranium collided with the ground, and he stopped thinking... his eyes, wondering. He saw light, then sky, then pigs. Live pigs. But -- the pigs shouldn't be alive. When he was this close they should be dead. Only they weren't. Why... why... He moved slightly and the nearest pig fell dead. The others went on with their business, roaming the plain. Ekstrohm expected the drooping of the pig to stampede the rest into dropping dead, but they didn't seem to pay any attention to their fallen member. I've been lying here for hours, he realized. I didn't move in on them. The pigs moved in on me while I was lying still. If I keep still I can get a close look at them in action. So far, even with video, it had been difficult to get much of an idea of the way these creatures lived -- when they weren't dead. Observe, observe, he told himself. There might be some relationship between the flying whale and the pigs. Could it be the whales were intelligent alien masters of these herds of pigs? Ekstrohm lay still and observed. Item : the pigs ate the soft, mosslike grass. Item: the pigs eliminated almost constantly. Item : the pigs fought regularlv. Fought? Fought? Here was something, Ekstrohm realized. Why did animals fight? Rationalizations of naturelovers aside, some fought because they had plain mean nasty dispositions -- like some people. That didn't fit the pigs. Thev were indolent grazers. They hadn't the energy left over for sheer-cussedness. There had to be a definite goal to their battles. It wasn't food. That was abundant. The grassy veldt reached to all horizons. Sex. They had to be fighting for mates! He became so excited he twitched a foot slightly. Two more pigs dropped dead, but the others paid no heed. He watched the lazily milling herd intently, at the same time keeping an eye out for the flying whales. Back on Earth porpoises had been taught to herd schools of fish and of whales. It was not impossible an intelligent species of whale had learned to herd masses of land animals. But Ekstrohm knew he needed proof. He had to have something to link the pseudodeath of the wart-hogs to the inexplicable presence of the whales. Perhaps, he thought, the "death" of the pigs was the whales' way of putting them into cold storage -- a method of making the meat seem unattractive to other animals, on a world perhaps without carrion scavengers... Something was stirring among the pigs. O NE under-sized beastie was pawing the dirt, a red eye set on the fattest animal in sight. Then Shortie charged Fatso. But abruptly a large raw-boned critter was in Shortie's path, barring him from Fatso. Faced by Big Boy, Shortie trembled with rage and went into a terrible temper tantrum, rolling on the ground, pawing it in frenzy, squealing in maddened rage. Then Shortie was on his feet, desperate determination showing in every line of his body. With heedless, desperate, foolhardy courage he charged Big Boy. Big Boy took the headlong charge in his side with only a trifling grunt. Shortie bounced ten feet in the light gravity, and grimly wallowed to his feet. He leveled an eye at Big Boy, and his legs were pumping in frenzied fury again. Big Boy shifted his kilos of weight casually and met Shortie head on. The tremendous ker-rack reverberated from the bluff behind Ekstrohm. Shortie lay on the ground. No, Ekstrohm thought, he isn't dead. His sides were pumping in and out. But he was knocked cold. Ekstrohm had to sympathize with him. He had never seen a more valiant try against insurmountable odds. Big Bov was ambling over towards Fatso, apparently to claim his prize. Fatso apparently was the sow. But Big Boy stalked on past Fatso. She squealed after him tentatively, but he turned and blasted her back with a bellowing snort. Ekstrohm watched the scene repeated with other actors several times before he was sure. The older males, the Big Boys, never collected the favors of the harem for themselves. Instinctively, the pigs were practicing birth control. The older males abstained, and forced the younger males to do the same. On a world like this, Ekstrohm's first thought was of death. He thought, these pigs must be like lemmings, deliberately trying to destroy their own race, to commit geno-suicide. But that didn't answer any of the other questions, about the pseudo-death, the alien whales... And then Ekstrohm thought not of death but of life. IV T HE traction-scooter was where he had left it, hanging upside down on the underside of the concave slope. It had stopped automatically when his weight had left the seat. He reached up, toggled put it manually into reverse. Once straightened out, he was on his way back to the base. I feel good, he thought. I feel like I could lick my weight in spacemen. Only then did he realize why he felt so good. What had happened had been so strange for him, he couldn't realize what it had been until now. While he had been knocked out, he had been asleep. Asleep. For the first time in years. Sleep. He felt wonderful. He felt like he could lick all of his problems... Ekstrohm roared back into the base. The motor was silent on the traction-scooter, of course, but the air he kicked up made its own racket. Ryan and Nogol came out to greet him sullenly. "Listen," he told them, "I've got the answer to all of this." "So have we," Ryan said ugly. "The firt answer was the right one. We've been scaring pigs to death and watching them, scaring and watching. We learned nothing. You knew we wouldn't. You set us up for this. It's like you said. You fed all of these beasts your stuff in advance, something that acts when they get excited..." It didn't make sense, but then it never had. You couldn't argue with prejudice. He was "different." He didn't act like they did. He didn't believe the same things. He was the outsider, therefore suspect. The alien on an alien world. Ekstrohm sighed. Man would always be the final alien, the creature man would never understand, sympathize with or even tolerate. There was no point in trying to argue further, Ekstrohm realized. "You'll never understand, Ryan. You could have seen all the things I saw if you'd bothered to look, but you were too anxious to blame me. But if I can't make you understand, I can at least beat you into acceptance." "Huh?" Ryan ventured. "I said," Ekstrohm repeated, "that I'm going to beat some sense into your thick skull." Ryan grinned, rippled his massive shoulders and charged. the lesson Shortie had taught him with Big Boy. He didn't meet the captain's charge head on. He sidestepped and caught Ryan behind the ear with his fist. The big man halted, puzzled. Ekstrohm sank his fist into the thick, solid belly. Slowly, Ryan's knees gave way and he sank towards the ground. When his chin was at the right level of convenience, Ekstrohm put his weight behind his right. Ryan swayed dreamily backward. But he threw himself forward and one ham of a fist connected high on Ekstrohm's cheek. He was shaken to his toes, and the several hours' old pain in the back of his head throbbed sickeningly. One more like that would do for him. Ekstrohm stood and drove in a lot of short punches to Ryan's body, punches without much power behind them because he didn't have it. But he knew better than to try a massive attack on a massive target. When he couldn't lift his arms any more, Ekstrohm stopped punching. He realized Ryan had fallen on his face a few seconds before. Then he remembered, and whirled. He had left his back exposed to Nogol. N o g o I smiled. "I'm not drawing Hazard Pay." After a while, Ekstrohm stopped panting and faced Nogol and the captain who was now sitting, rubbing his jaw. "Okay," he said, "now you'll listen or I'll beat your skulls in. I know what's behind all of this on this planet." "Yeah? What do you think it is. Stormy?" Ryan asked. "First of all, I think there's a basic difference between this world and any other the ExPe has investigated." "Now what could that be?" Nogol wanted to know with a tiny smile. "These worlds are close. The gravity is low. You wouldn't need much more than a jet plane to get from one of these planetoids to another. Some animals have developed with the power to travel from ohe of these planetoids to another -- like a squid jetting out water. They harnessed some natural power system." "What does that prove?" Ryan wanted to know. "It proves that this world and others in this belt are prepared for interplanetary travel. It's probably a part of their basic evolutional structure, unlike that of heavy, independent planets. This false 'dying' is part of their preparation for interplanetary visitors." "Why would these aliens want others to think that they were dead?" Ryan asked. "Correction, captain. They want visitors to believe that they can die." that they can't die?" "That's right. I think everything on this planet has immortality," Ekstrohm said. "I'm not exactly sure how. Maybe it has to do with the low radiation. Every individual cell has a memory' of the whole creature. But as we age that 'memory' becomes faulty, our cells 'forget' how to reproduce themselves exactly. Here, that cell 'memory' never fades. Bodies renew themselves indefinitely." "But why hide it?" Nogol asked. "This planetoid can just support so many creatures. They practice birth control among themselves," the surveyor said. "The natives naturally want to discourage colonization." Ryan whistled. "Once we report this, every rich and powerful man in the Federation will want to come here to live. There's not enough space to go around. There will be wars over this little hunk of rock." Nogol's hard, dark eyes were staring into space. "There's only one sensible thing to do. We'll keep the world to ourselves." "I don't like that kind of talk," Ryan growled. "Ryan, this little ball of dirt isn't going to do the Federation as a whole any good. But it can be of value to us. We can make ourselves comfortable here. Later on, we can bring in some women. Any women we want. Who wouldn't want to come here?" Ryan began to argue, but Ekstrohm could see he was hooked. The man who risked his life, the man who sought something new and different, the explorer, was basically an unstable type removed from the mainstream of civilization. Nothing was liable to change that. By nightfall, Rvan and Ekstrohm had agreed. "We'll have to keep a constant watch," Ryan was saying. "We'll have to watch out for ExPe scouts looking for us. Or, after a few generations, another ship may come to complete the mapping." Nogol smiled. "We'll have to keep an eye on each other too, you know. One of us may get to wanting more room for more women. Or to have children, a normal biological urge. Death by violence isn't ruled out here." "I don't like that kind of talk," Ryan blustered. Nogol smiled. Ekstrohm thought of the others, of the sleepless, watchful nights ahead of them. That was probably his trouble, all of his life. He didn't trust people ; he had to stay awake and keep an eye on everybody. Well, he would be one ahead here. Of course, it was wrong not to trust anybody, but Ekstrohm knew habit patterns were hard to break. Sleep is a habits red awake in the night by the spaceship blasting off without them. They ran out and shook their tiny fists in fury at the rising flame. Operating a spaceship alone was no cinch but it could be done. Ekstrohm would get back to the nearest Federation base and report the planetoid without death. He didn't have absolute confidence in any government, no. But he suspected the Federation could do more with the world than two men like Ryan and Nogol. Ekstrohm took his fingers off the punchboard and lay back on his couch. He yawned. Ryan and Nogol were slow, but in time they might have learned to do without sleep, and to guard their treasure night and day. Fortunately, Ekstrohm knew from long experience what the two others didn't. An eternity without sleep In our next issue --  -- and many morel IF 'Short Story Naturally human work was more creative, more inspiring, more important than robot drudgery. Naturally it was the most important task in all the world... or was it? the easiest of all easy chairs. He picked up a magazine, flipped pages; stood up, snapped fingers; walked to the view wall, walked back; sat down, picked up the magazine. He was waiting, near the end of the day, after hours, in the lush, plush waiting room -- "The customer's ease is the Sales Manager's please" -- to see the Old Man. He was fidgety, but not about something. About nothing. He was irritated at nobody, at the world ; at himself. He was irritated at himself because there was no clear reason for him to be irritated at anything. There he sat, Ben Tilman, normally a cheerful, pleasant young man. He was a salesman like any modern man and a far better salesman than most. He had a sweet little wife, blonde and pretty. He had a fine, husky two-year-old boy, smart, a reil future National Sales Manager. He loved them both. He had every reason to be contented with his highly desirable, comfortable lot. And yet he had been getting more sour and edgy ever since about six months after the baby came home from the Center and the novelty of responsibility for wife and child had worn off. He had now quit three jobs, good enough sales jobs where he was doing well, in a year. For no reason? For petty, pointless reasons. With Ancestral Insurance, "Generations of Protection," Club -- and immediately begun to feel dissatisfied with it -- just before cute, sexy, blonde Betty had suddenly come from nowhere into his life and he had married her. That had helped, sure. But as soon after that as he had started paying serious attention to his job again, he was fed up with it. "Too much paper work. All those forms. It's work for a robot, not a man," he'd told Betty when he quit. A lie. The paper work was, as he looked back on it, not bad at all; pleasant even, in a way. It was just -- nothing. Anything. Indoor-Outdoor Climatizers his sales presentation even though hisrecord was good enough. Ultra-sonic toothbrushes, then, were a fine product. Only the vibration, with his gold inlay, seemed to give him headaches after every demonstration. He didn't have a gold inlay. But the headaches were real enough. So he quit. So now he had a great new job with a great organization, Almagamated Production for was about to take on his first big assignment. For that he had felt a spark of the old enthusiasm and it had carried him into working out a bright new sales approach for the deal tonight. The Old Man himself had taken a personal interest, which was a terrific break. And still Ben Tilman felt that uneasy dissatisfaction. Damn. "Mr. Robb will see you now, Mr. Tilman," said the cool robot voice from the Elec-Sec Desk. It was after customer hours and the charming human receptionist had gone. The robot secretary, like most working robots, was functional in form -- circuits and wires, mike, speaker, extension arms to type and to reach any file in the room, wheels for intra-office mobility. "Thanks, hon," said Ben. Nevertheless, robot secretaries were all programmed and rated female -- and it was wise to be polite to them. After all, they could think and had feelings. There were a lot of important things they could do for a salesman -- or, sometimes, not do. This one, being helpful, stretched out a long metal arm to open the door to the inner office for Ben. He smiled his appreciation and went in. T HE Old Man, Amalgamated's grand old salesman, tle stout and a little slower now. But he was still a fine sales manager. He sat at his huge, old fashioned oak desk as Ben walked across the office. "Evening, sir." No response. Louder, "Good evening, Mr. Robb. Mr. Robb, it's Ben, sir. Ben Tilman. You memo'd me to come -- " Still no sign. The eyes, under the great, beetling brows, seemed closed. Ben grinned and reached out across the wide desk toward the small, plastic box hanging on the Old Man's chest. The Old Man glanced up as Ben tapped the plastic lightly with his fingernail. "Oh, Ben. It's you." The Old Man raised his hand to adjust the ancient style hearing aid he affected as Ben sank into a chair. "Sorry Ben. I just had old Brannic Z-IX in here. A fine old robot, yes, but like most of that model, long-winded. So -- " He gestured at the hearing aid. Ben smiled. Everyone knew the Old. Man used that crude old rig so he could pointedly tune out conversations he didn't care to hear. Any time you were talking to him and that distant look came into his half closed eyes, you could be sure that you were cut off. "Sorry, Ben. Well now. I simply wanted to check with you, boy. Everything all set for tonight?" "Well, yes, sir. Everything is set and programmed. Betty and I will play it all evening for the suspense, let them wonder, build it up -- and then, instead of the big pitch they'll be looking for, we'll let it go easy." "A new twist on the old change-up. Ben, boy, it's going to go. I feel it. It's in the air, things are just ripe for a new, super-soft-sell pitch. Selling you've got to do by feel, eh Ben? By sales genius and the old seat of the pants. Good. After tonight I'm going all out, a hemisphere-wide, thirty day campaign I'll put the top sales artist of every regional office on it. They can train on your test pattern tapes. I bebefore everybody picks up the signal and it senilesces. You give an old man a new faith in sales, Ben! You're a salesman." "Well, sir -- " But the Old Man's knack with the youthful-enthusiasm approach was contagious. For the moment Ben caught it and he felt pretty good about the coming night's work. He and Betty together would put the deal over. That would be something. Sure it would... "How do you and your wife like the place, Ben?" It was some place, for sure, the brand new house that Amalgamated had installed Ben, Betty and Bennie in the day after he had signed up. "It's -- uh -- just fine, sir. Betty likes it very much, really. We both do." He hoped his tone was right. "Good, Ben. Well, be sure to stop by in the morning. I'll have the tapes, of course. but I'll want your analysis. Might be a little vacation bonus in it for you, too." "Sir, I don't know how to thank you." The Old Man waved a hand. "Nothing you won't have earned, my boy. Robots can't sell." That was the set dismissal. "Yes, sir. Robots can't manage sales, or -- " He winked. The Old Man chuckled. An old joke was never too old for the Old Man. The same old bromides every time; and the same hearty chuckle. Ben left on the end of it. Company-owned, convertible soar-kart, he felt not too bad. Some of the old lift in spirits came as the kart-pilot circuits digested the directions, selected a route and zipped up into a north-northwest traffic pattern. The Old Map was a wonderful sales manager and boss. The new house-warming pitch that he and Betty would try tonight was smart. He could feel he had done something. Exercising his sales ability with fair success, he fed himself this pitch all along the two hundred mile, twentyminute hop home from the city. The time and distance didn't bother him. "Gives me time to think," he had told Betty. Whether or not this seemed to her an advantage, she didn't say. At least she liked the place, "Almalgamated's Country Gentleman Estate -- Spacious, Yet fully Automated." "We are," the Old Man told Ben when he was given the Company assigned quarters, "starting a new trend. With the terrific decline in birth rate during the past # to # years, you'll be astonished at how much room there is out there. No reason for everyone to live in the suburban cenof empty apartments in them, high time we built something else, eh? Trouble with people today, no initiative in obsolescing. But we'll move them." Home, Ben left the kart out and conveyed upthe walk. The front door opened. Betty had been watching for him. He walked to the family vueroom, as usual declining to convey in the house. The hell with the conveyor's feelings, if so simple a robot really had any. He liked, to walk. "Color pattern," Betty ordered the vuescreen as he came in, "robot audio out." With people talking in the house it was still necessary to put the machines under master automatic and manual control. Some of the less sophisticated robots might pick up some chance phrase of conversation and interpret it as an order if left on audio. "Ben," said Betty, getting up to meet him, "you're late." Ben was too good a salesman to argue that. Instead, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a very good sixty seconds later that she pushed him away with a severeness destroyed by a blush and a giggle to say, "Late but making up for lost time, huh? And sober, too. You must be feeling good for a change." "Sure -- and you feel even better, sugar." He reached for her again. She slipped away from him, laughing, but his wrist tel-timer caught on the locket she always wore, her only momento from her parents, dead in the old moon-orb crash disaster. She stood still, slightly annoyed, as he unhooked and his mood was, not broken, but set back a little. "What's got into you tonight anyway, Ben?" "Oh, I don't know. Did I tell you, the O.M. may give us a vacation? Remember some of those nights up at that new 'Do It Yourself' Camp last summer?" "Ben !" She blushed, smiled. "We won't get any vacation if we blow our house-warming pitch tonight, you know. And we have three couples due here in less than a half hour. Besides, I have to talk to you about Nana." I IX model. Now what?" "She's very upset about Bennie. I'm not sure I blame her. This afternoon he simply refused his indoctrination. All the time he should have been playing store with Playmate he insisted on drawing things -- himself, mind you, not Playmate. On the walls, with an old pencil of yours he found someplace in your things. Nana couldn't do a thing with him. She says you've got to give him a spanking." "Why me? Why not you?" "Now Ben, we've been over that and over it. Discipline is the father's job." "Well, I won't do it. Bennie's just a baby. Let him do a few things himself. Won't hurt him." "Ben!" "That Nana is an officious busybody, trying to run our lives." "Oh, Ben! You know Nana loves little Bennie. She only wants to help hirm" "But to what?" "She'd never dream of lifting a finger against Bennie no matter what he did. And she lives in terror that he'll cut her switch in some temper tantrum." "Hmph ! Well, I'm going up right now and tell her if I hear another word from her about spanking Bennie, I'll cut her switch myself. Then she can go back to Central for reprogramming and see how she likes it." "Ben! You wouldn't." "Why not? Maybe she needs a new personality?" "You won't say a thing to her. You're top soft-hearted." "This time I won't be." This time he wasn't. He met Nana CD-IX in the hallway outside Bennie's room. Like all nurse, teaching, and children's personal service robots, she was human in form, except for her control dial safely out of baby's reach, top, center. The human form was reassuring to children, kept them from feeling strange with parent's back. Nana was big, gray-haired, stout, buxom, motherly, to reassure parents. "Now, Mr. Tilman," she said with weary impatience, "you are too late. Surely you don't intend to burst in and disturb your son now." "Surely I do." "But he is having his supper. You will upset him. Can't you understand that you should arrange to be here between #:# and # if you wish to interview the child?" "Did he miss me? Sorry, I couldn't make it earlier. But now I am going to see him a minute." "Mr. Tilman!" "Nana! And what's this about your wanting Bennie spanked because he drew a few pictures?" "Surely you realize these are the child's formative years, Mr. Tilman. He shouM be learning to think in terms of selling now -- not doing things. That's robot work, Mr. Tilman. Robots can't sell, you know, and what will people, let alone robots think if you let your boy grow up -- " #I I am going in to see him." "Mr. Tilman!" "And for two credits, Nana, I'd cut your switch. You hear me?" "Mr. Tilman -- no! No, please. I'm sorry. Let the boy scrawl a bit ; perhaps it won't hurt him. Go in and see him if you must, but do try not to upset him or -- All right, all right. But please Mr. Tilman, my switch -- " "Very well Nana. I'll leave it. This time." "Thank you, Mr. Tilman." "So we understand each other, Nana. Though, matter of fact, I'm hanged if I ever . did quite see why you senior level robots get so worked up about your identities." "Wouldn't you, Mr. Tilman?" "Of course. But -- well, yes, I suppose I do see, in a way. Let's go see Bennie-boy." So Ben Tilman went into the nursery and enjoyed every second of a fast fifteen-minute roughhouse with his roundfaced. laughing, chubby son and heir. No doubt it was very bad, just after supper. But Nana, with a rather humanly anxious restraint, confined herself to an unobtrusive look of disapproval. He left Bennie giggling and doubtless upset, at least to a point of uneagerness for Nana's bedtime story about who sold the Brooklyn Bridge. So then he was run through a fast ten-minute shower, shave and change by Valet. He floated downstairs just as Betty came out of the cocktail lounge to say, "Code # on the approach indicator. Must be the Stoddards. They always get every place first, in time for an extra drink." "Fred and Alice, yes. But damn their taste for gin, don't let Barboy keep the cork in the vermouth all evening. I like a touch of vermouth. I wonder if maybe I shouldn't -- " "No, you shouldn't mix the cocktails yourself and scandalize everybody. You know perfectly well Barboy really does do better anyway." "Well, maybe. Everything all set, hon ? Sorry I was late." "No trouble here. I just fed Robutler the base program this morning and spent the rest of the day planning my side of our Sell. How to tantalize the girls, pique the curiosity without giving it away. But you know -- " she laughed a little ruefully -- "I sort of miss not having even the shopping to do. Sometimes it hardly seems as though you need a wife at all." Ben slid an arm around her waist. "Selling isn't the only thing robots can't do, sugar." He pulled her close. "Ben ! They're at the door." They were, and then in the door, oh-ing and ah-ing over this and that. And complimenting Barboy on the martinis. Then the Wilsons came and the Bartletts and that was it. "Three couples will be right," Ben had analyzed it. "Enough so we can let them get together and build up each others' curiosity but not too many for easy control. People that don't know us so well they might be likely to guess the gimmick. We'll let them stew all evening while they enjoy the Country Gentleman House-Warming hospitality. Then, very casually, we toss it out and let it lie there in front of them. They will be sniffing, ready to nibble. The clincher will drive them right in. I'd stake my sales reputation on it." If it matters a damn, he added. But silently. They entertained three couples at their house-warming party. It was a delightful party, a credit to Ben, Betty and the finest built-in house robots the mind of Amalgamated could devise. By ten o'clock they had dropped a dozen or more random hints, but never a sales pitch. Suspense was building nicely when Betty put down an empty glass and unobtrusively pushed the button to cue Nana. Perfect timing. They apologized to the guests, "We're ashamed to be so oldfashioned but we feel better if we look in on the boy when he wakes in the night. It keeps him from forgetting us." Then they floated off upstairs together, ostensibly to see Nana and little Bennie. Fred Stoddard : "Some place they have here, eh? Off-beat. A little too advanced for my taste, this single dwelling idea, but maybe -- Ben sure must have landed something juicy with Amalgamated to afford this. What the devil is he pushing, anyway?" Scoville Wilson (shrug) : "Beats me. You know, before dinner I cornered him at the bar to see if I could slip in a word or two of sell. Damned if he didn't sign an order for my Cyclo-sell Junior Tape Library without even a C level resistance. Then he talked a bit about the drinks and I thought sure he was pushing that new model Barboy. I was all set to come back with a sincere 'think it over' -- and then he took a bottle from the Barboy, added a dash of vermouth to his drink and walked off without a word of sell. He always was an odd one." Lucy Wilson (turns from woman talk with the other two wives) : "Oh no! I knew it wasn't the Barboy set. They wouldn't have him set so slow. Besides didn't you hear the way she carried on about the nursery and that lovely Nana? That must have been a buildup, but Ben goofed his cue to move in on Sco and me for a close. Doesn't Amalgamated handle those nurseries?" Tom Bartlett : "Amalgamated makes almost anything. That's the puzzle. I dunno -- but it must be something big. He has to hit us with something, doesn't he?" Belle Bartlett: "Who ever heard of a party without a sell?" Nancy Stoddard : "Who ever heard of a party going past ten without at least a warmup pitch? And Betty promised Fred to send both Ben and Bennie to the Clinic for their Medchecks. You know we have the newest, finest diagnosticians -- " Fred Stoddard: "Nancy!" Nancy Stoddard: "Oh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be selling you folks at their party, should I? Come to think, you're all signed with Fred anyway, aren't you? Well, about Ben,  think -- " Lucy Wilson : "Sh-h-h ! Here they come." still not an order form in sight -- Ben and Betty got back to their guests. Another half hour. Barboy was passing around with nightcaps. Lucy Wilson nervously put a reducegar to her sophisticated, penpermint-striped lips. Quickly Ben Tilman was on his feet. He pulled a small, metal cylinder from his pocket with a flourish and held it out on his open palm toward Lucy. A tiny robot Statue of Liberty climbed from the cylinder, walked across Ben's hand, smiled, curtsied and reached out to light the reducegar with her torch, piping in a high, thin voice, "Amalgamated reducegars are cooler, lighter, finer." "Ben ! How simply darling !" "Do you like it? It's a new thing from Amalgamated NovelDiv. You can program it for up to a hundred selective sell phrases, audio or visio key. Every salesman should have one. Makes a marvelous gift, and surprisingly reasonable." "So that's it, Ben. I just love it!" "Good! It's yours, compliments of Amalgamated." "But -- then you're not selling them? Well, what on earth -- ?" "Damn it, Ben," Fred Stoddard broke in, "come on, man, out with it. What in hell are you selling? You've given us the shakes. What is it? The Barboy set? It's great. If I can scrape up the down payment, ##I -- " "After we furnish a nursery with a decent Nana, Fred Stoddard," Nancy snapped, "and get a second soar-kart. Ben isn't selling Barboys anyway, are you, Ben? It is that sweet, sweet Nana, isn't it? And I do want one, the whole nursery, Playmate and all, girl-programmed of course, for our Polly." "Is it the nursery, Betty?" Lucy pitched in her credit's worth. "Make him tell us, darling. We have enjoyed everything so much, the dinner. the Tri-deo, this whole lovely, lovely place of yours. Certainly the house wanning has been perfectly charming." "And that's it," said Ben smiling, a sheaf of paper forms suddenly in his hand. "What? Not -- ?" "The house, yes. Amalgamated's Country Gentleman Estate, complete, everything in it except Bennie, Betty and me. Your equity in your Center co-op can serve as down payment, easy three-generation terms, issue insurance. Actually, I can show you how, counting in your entertainment, vacation, incidental, and living expenses, the Country Gentleman will honestly cost you less." "Ben!" "How simply too clever!" Ben let it rest there. It was enough. Fred Stoddard, after a short scuffle with Scoville Wilson for the pen, signed the contract with a flourish. Sco followed. "There!" y "There now, Ben," said Betty,, holding Bennie a little awkwardly in her arms in the soar-kart. They had moved out so the Stoddards could move right in. Now they were on their way in to their reserved suite at Amalgamated's Guest-ville. "You were absolutely marvellous. Imagine selling all three of them!" "There wasn't anything to it, actually." "Ben, how can you say that? Nobody else could have done it. It was a sales masterpiece. And just think. Now salesmen all over the hemisphere are going to follow your sales plan. Doesn't it make you proud? Happy? Ben, you aren't going to be like that again?" No, of course he wasn't. He was pleased and proud. Anyway, the Old Man would be, and that, certainly, was something. A man had to feel good about winning the approval of Amalgamated's grand Old Man. And it did seem to make Betty happy. But the Actual selling of the fool house and even the two other, identical houses on the other side of the hill -- he iust couldn't seem to get much of a glow over it. He had done it; and what had he done? It was the insurance and the toothbrushes all over again, and the old nervous, sour feeling inside. "At least we do have a vacation trip coming out of it, hon. The O.M. practicallv promised it yesterdav. if our sell sold. We could -- " " -- go back to that queer new 'Do It Yourself' camp un on the lake you insisted on dragging me to the last week of our vacation last summer. Ben, really !" He was going to be like that. She knew it. "Well, even you admitted it was some fun." "Oh, sort of, I suppose. For a little while. Once you got used to the whole place without one single machine that could think or do even the simplest little thing by itself. So, well, almost like being savages. Do you think it would be safe for Bennie? We can't watch him all the time, you know." "People used to manage in the old days. And remember those people, the Burleys, who were staying up there?" "That queer, crazy bunch who went there for a vacation when the Camp was first ooened and then just stayed? Honestly, Ben! Surely you're not thinking of -- " "Oh, nothing like that. Just a vacation. Only -- " Only those queer, peculiar people, the Burleys had seemed so relaxed and cheerful. Grandma and Ma Burley cleaning, washing, cooking on the ancient electric stove; little Donnie, being a nuisance, poking at the keys on his father's crude, manual typewriter, a museum piece; Donnie and his brothers wasting away childhood digging and piling sand on the beach, paddling a boat and actually building a play house. It was mad. People playing robots. And yet, they seemed to have a wonderful time while they were doing it. "But how do you keep staying here?" he had asked Buck Burley, "Why don't they put you out?" "Who?" asked Buck. "How? Nobody can sell me on .iving. We like it here. No robot can force us out. Here we are. Here we stay." ville ramp. Bennie was fussy; the nursery Nana was strange to him. On impulse, Betty took him in to sleep in their room, ignoring the disapproving stares of both the Nana and the Roboy with their things. They were tired, let down. They went to bed quietly. In the morning Betty was already up when Ben stumbled out of bed. "Hi," she said, nervously cheerful. "The house Nanas all had overload this morning and I won't stand for any of those utility components with Bennie. So I'm taking care of him myself." Bennie chortled and drooled vita-meal at his high-chair, unreprimanded. Ben mustered a faint smile and turned to # dial a shave, cool shower and dress at Robather. That done, he had a bite of breakfast. He felt less than top-sale, but better. Last night had gone well. The Old Man would give them a pre-paid vacation clearance to any resort in the world or out. Why gloom? He rubbed Bennie's unruly hair, kissed Betty and conveyed over from Guest-ville to office. Message-sec, in tone respect-admiration A, told him the Old Man was waiting for him. Susan, the human receptionist in the outer office, favored him with a dazzling smile. There was a girl who could sell ; and had a product of her own, too. The Old Man was at his big, oak desk but, a signal honor, he got up and came half across the room to grab Ben's hand and shake it. "Got the full report, son. Checked the tapes already. That's selling, boy! I'm proud of you. Tell you what, Ben. Instead of waiting for a sales slack, I'm going to move you and that sweet little wife of yours right into a spankirg new, special Country Gentleman unit I had iivmind for myself. And a nice, fat boost in your credit rating has already gone down to accounting. Good? artistic sales challenge that is Good. Now, Ben, I have a real, crying for your talent." "ir? Thank you. But, sir, there, is the matter of the vacation -- " "Vacation? Sure, Ben. Take a vacation anytime. But right now it seems to the Old Man you're on a hot selling streak. I don't want to see you get off the track, son; your into  #V#     rfTf I ' "  nrv  #     r  r  r ests are mine. And wait till you get your teeth into this one. Books, Ben boy. Books! People are spending all their time sitting in on Tri-deo, not reading. People should read more, Ben. Gives them that healthy tired feeling. Now we have the product. We have senior Robo-writers with more circuits than ever before. All possible information, every conceivable plot. Maybe a saturation guilt type campaign to start -- but it's up to you, Ben. I don't care how you do it, but move books." "Books, eh? Well, now." Ben was interested. "Funny thing, sir, but that ties in with something I was thinking about just last night." "You have an angle? Good boy!" "Yes, sir. Well, it is a wild 'bought maybe, but last summer when I was on vacation I met a man up at that new camp and -- well, I know it sounds silly, but he was writing a book." "Nonsense!" "Just what I thought, sir. But I rpad some of it and, I don't know, it had a sort of a feel about it. Something new, sir, it might catch on." "All right, all right. That's enough. You're a salesman. You've sold me." "On the book?" Ben was surprised. "Quit pulling an old man's leg, Ben. I'm sold on your needing a vacation. I'll fill out your vacation pass right now." The Old Man, still a vigorous, vital figure, turned and walked back to his Desksec. "Yes sir," said the secretarial voice, "got it. Vacation clearai.ce for Tilman, Ben, any resort." "And family," said Ben. "And family. Very good, sir." The Old Man made his sign on the pass and said heavily, "All right then, Ben. That's it. Maybe if you go back up to that place for a few days and see that psycho who was writing a book again, perhaps you'll realize how impractical it is." "But sir! I'm serious about that book. It really did have -- " he broke off. The Old Man was sitting there, face blank, withdrawn. Ben could feel he wasn't even listening. That damned hearing aid of his. The Old Man had cut it off. Suddenly, unreasoningly, Ben was furious. He stood by the huge desk and he reached across toward the hearing aid on the Old Man's chest to turn up the volume. The Old Man looked up and saw Ben's hand stretching out. A sudden look of Tear came into his china blue, clear eyes but he made no move. He sat frozen in his chair. Ben hesitated a second. "What -- ?" But he didn't have to ask. He knew. And he also knew what he was going to do. "No!" said the Old Man. "No, Ben. I've only been trying to help ; trying to serve your best interests the best way I know. Ben, you mustn't -- " But Ben moved forward. H E took the plastic box on the Old Man's chest and firmly cut the switch. The Old Man, the Robot Old Man, went lifeless and slumped back in his chair as Ben stretched to cut off the Desksec. Then he picked up his vacation clearance. "Robots can't sell, eh?" he said to the dead machine behind the desk. "Well, you couldn't sell me that time, could you, Old Man? Clumsily, rustily, Ben whistled a cheerful little off-key tune to himself. Hell, they could do anything at all -- except sell. "You can't fool some of the people all of the time," he remarked over his shoulder to the still, silent figure of the Old Man as he left the office, "it was a man said that." He closed the door softly behind him. Betty would be waiting. Betty was waiting. Her head ached as she bounced Bennie, the child of Ben, of herself and of an unknown egg cell from an anonymous ovary, on her knees. Betty model, the highest development of the art of Robotics had known instantly when Ben cut the Old Man's switch. She had half expected it. But it made her headache worse. "But damn my programming!" She spoke abruptly, aloud, nervously fingering the locket around her neck. "Damn it and shift circuit. He's right ! He is my husband and he is right and I'm glad. I'm glad we're going to the camp and I'm going to help him stay." After all, why shouldn't a man want to do things just as much as a robot? He had energy, circuits, feelings too. She knew he did. For herself, she loved her Ben and Bennie. But still just that wasn't enough occupation. She was glad they were going to the new isolation compound for non-psyehotic but unstable, hyper-active, socially dangerous individual humans. At the camp there would be things to do. At the camp they would be happy. All at once the headache that had been bothering her so these past months was gone. She felt fine and she smiled at little Bennie. "Bennie-boy," she said, kissing his smooth, untroubled baby forehead. "Daddy's coming." Bennie laughed and started to reach for the locket around Mommy's neck. But just then the door opened and he jumped down to run and meet his IF  tA (j)velette   The StainlessSteel tonight  He had everything a knight needed s gallant steed , fair lady mid the most unconquerable little home-made dragon I radioactive wreckage screamed down out of space on to their dark planet, the Shogleet were instantly intrigued. To that incredibly ancient race, evolved to the point whei'e energy, matter and form had no more secrets to hide and only curiosity remained, anything new was an occasion for rejoicing. And this was new. Metals, plastics, physical and chemical combinations -- they were familiar enough. But this strange mass had been formed into a particular shape. They probed at once, and at once found that there was something more. Something lived, but only just. Using their combined talents, they caught at the fragile remnant, preserved it, studied it, reconstructed it. From the still viable patterns of intelligence, they deduced the whole. They remade a man. They went further, discovering his history and, from that, something of the history of the whole species. They were unmonstrosity could be genuine, yet their probings could not be argued. So they remade his ship, which had obviously been only a small part of the whole tangled wreckage, and they sent it back whence it had came. And they appointed one of their number to go With it, and him, to investigate. T HE Shogleet crouched by Lancelot's beautiful boots, and purred. The purr was not a sign of pleasure, but the byproduct of producing an outline-blurring vibration and a curiosity-damping field. The corridor outside the AgentDirector's office was a busy place, and the Shogleet had no wish to be observed. Yet it was pleased. These things called Men were even more fantastically odd than it had at first imagined. With its perceptors extended, it was listening to the conversation on the other side of the wall. Voices were discussing Lancelot. " -- not only made us a laughing-stock, but he's getting to be a damned pest! Hanging about outside my office, demanding to be sent on a mission. I wouldn't trust him to empty my waste-basket. What the hell am I going to do with him?" "Perhaps we might cook up a mission for him, Chief." "Don't be obscene, Peters. That moron, on a mission? Don't forget, this is the blasted idiot who tried to rescue a disabled star-ship with a oneman raft!" "Just the same, Chief, we could pick out something." "But I can't send a Prime G-man on a routine call, damn it. Not that he is a Prime, except on paper. But you know what I mean." "Ah, but wait until you hear what I've dug up. It's from a Vivarium planet. We don't usually handle those. What generally happens is that the local man goes in, disguised, and re-sets the alarm, then smoothes out the fuss. Doesn't affect us unless it's a case of external invasion, you know." "All right, all right. I know all that. But what's it to me? Some inside problem on a Viv planet. So?" "Yes. But this planet is called Avalon. It's static in the 'pseudo-feudal' stage, with a culture based on Arthurian legend. Get it?" The Shogleet, recording all this avidly, head a gasp. Putting mental query marks against the new terms, it went on listening. "Arthurian!" Hugard breathed. "Peasants. Knights in armor. Sword and shield stuff. Go on." "I thought we could play it up big, and let him have it. Make it sound a desperate emergency. Give him something to do." "Yes. Quite harmless, of course. But I like the sound of it. Where is this Avalon?" "That's the best part, Chief. It's in the Omega Centaurus cluster. That's twenty thousand lights away!" "That settles it for me. It will take him a . month, real time, just to get there. I'll be shut of him for a while. Sure we're not treading on any private toes with this?" "Absolutely. Strictly a routine call, on a waiting list." "Fine. Fine! Get me the data so I can blow it up big, and then shoot him in here. Peters, I won't forget this. To think that I'm going to be rid of that moron, for a while at least -- " T HE Shogleet crept to Lancelot's shoulder, shivering gently with anticipation. When the summons came, it rode into the office with him and saw him stiffen into a stern salute before the Director's desk. "Ah, Lake," Hugard nodded portentously. "At last I have a mission for you. Something I cannot pass on to anyone else. It will tax your powers to the utmost. I am not asking you to volunteer ; I am ordering you to go. That is how serious it is. You understand?" "I do, sir," Lancelot said, sternly. "Rely on me!" "Good man! I was counting on that. Now, you'll take full details with you to study en route, of course, but I can give you the gist. The planet is Avalon. The alarm is urgent. Avalon is a closed culture. No one, not even we of Galactopol, can intervene in a closed culture, unless the situation is desperately critical." The Shogleet felt Lancelot stiffen, saw the swell of his chest and the fire in his eyes, and wondered anew at these strange creatures who thrilled to the prospect of imminent danger. "Most importantly -- " Huggard hushed his voice -- "As this is a closed culture, I can only send one man. You will be alone. Single-handed. You will be equipped, of course, as fully as possible, compatible with the culture. But everything else will be up to you. You're on your own." "I understand, sir," Lancelot said simply. "Rely on me. If it's called for, I'll stake my life, rather than let down the Service." Huggard turned his face away, obviously overcome by some strong emotion. Then, coughing, he handed a form to Lancelot and stood up. "That's your authorization. You'll pick up the rest of the documents at the front office. How soon can you leave?" "At once!" Lancelot snapped, saluting crisply. Hugard put out a hand. "Good luck, my boy. You'll need it." "Thank you, sir." Lancelot took the hand with an enthusiasm that made the Director wince. "Don't worry about me. I'll come through!" He spun on his heel and marched from the office. "You know," he confided to the Shogleet, "Hugard isn't such a bad old guy, after all. I thought he was neglecting me. But I can see his point, now. I've misjudged him."... "Lancelot," the Shogleet whispered, "do something for me. Get a stock of visio-tapes on feudal cultures, vivarium planets and the Arthurian legend." "All right. Anything to oblige. But you pick the queerest things to be curious about. Arthurian legends, is it? My Dad used to be interested in them." knew, as well as much more. It had learned, for one thing, the truer version of how Lancelot Lake came to be cast away in the first place. This it had picked up from various sources, in and about Galactopol headquarters. Lancelot Lake had been a humble technician in the lowest grades of Galactopol, serving his time in a spaceways emergency and observation station, and passing his time in dreams of glamor and glory. He shared the simple faith of his equally simple parents, that it was just a matter of time before he had his big "break." And Fate had been very obliging. The star-class liner Orion, carrying wealthy passengers but very little else, had developed a major defect in her main drive. Her skipper, in angry calm, warped out of hyper-drive, gave the order "Abandon Ship!" and pointed his lifeboat cluster toward the nearest E-and-O station. It had not been an emergency. There had not been the least danger -- only nuisance, and the loss of a valuable ship. The lifeboat signals had plainly said so. But Lancelot had read his own special brand of understanding into those signals. On the run, fired with holy zeal, he had broken out his one-man raft, designed purely for short-range forays about the surface of his planetoidstation. Linking in to the powerful, all wave, sub etheric emergency radio of the station and giving a blow-byblow account of his effort, he had stormed off to rescue the Orion single-handed. No one could hear the lifeboat signals, after that. The Orion company reached the E-and-# station quite safely. There, in company with every other open planet in the Galaxy, they had listened, fascinated, to the classic broadcast that Lancelot was pouring out. Dedicated, always brave, heedless of personal safety, washed with the radiation from a rapidly disintegrating nuclear drive, he kept on to the inevitable, hopeless, gallant end. Like a gnat graopling a runaway elephant, he went spiralling down into the great gravity sink of Antares, until the thermal radiation from that giant sun overwhelmed his transmission. The rest was silence. Now, a stupid, gloriously gallant, dead hero, is one thing. Posthumous awards are a matter of little consequence. It was nothing -- the least they could do -- to make the deceased Lancelot a Prime Gman. But the same hero returned from the dead was something else again, as the Shogleet had learned. Perhaps, it pondered, they had done too good a job of the reconstruction. They had made him strictly according to the images in his own brain. Consequently, he was big, brawny, blueeyed, golden-haired, handsome, and well-nigh indestructible... translating literally the concept "You can't keep a good man down." Had Lancelot known Hamlet, he would have agreed with his description : "What a piece of work is Man ; how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties ; in form and .moving, how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god !" But Hamlet was insane, whereas Lancelot was sincere, simole, and assured of the reality of his dream. Hence -- as Hugard had said -- a damned pest. II lasted well into the second week. Then he grew bored. The ship, though small, was comfortable and almost selfdirective. There was nothing to do. He decided to check his equipment. The Shogleet, engrossed in the tortuous language of Mallory, was interrupted by its ward, who came bearing a long and shining rod tipped with a razor-edged blade. "This thing," he said. "It's a lance, isn't it? And there's another thing, like a big blade with a cross-bar and a handgrip. A sword?" "I would think so. There should be armor, also. I gather you are to masquerade as a knight. From the literature, it seems there actually was a knight named Sir Lancelot." "That's so. My Dad used to tell about him. Oh, Hugard knew what he was doing when he picked me for this mission ! Fate, that's what it is." The Shogleet had other views, but kept discreetly silent about them. 'v "The concept of a vivarium culture interests me," it said. "Apparently not all men seek change, only a small percentage?" "That's so," Lancelot nodded, sagely. "The happy man is the adjusted man. Knows what he's good at and where he belongs, and gets on with it. Like me, for instance. Natural born adventurer -- and here I am." "But you were originally a station-keeper. A mistake?" "Oh, no. Psycho-dynamics is infallible. That stationkeeper job was just a starter, so that I could work up." The Shogleet, knowing full well that Lancelot knew nothing at all about the science of psycho dynamics, wished it had asked for a tape on that. It was curious to see how the technique would work out on a whole planet seeded with one psycho-type. Eventually, warning bells gave tongue and their little ship went down, on a guide beacon, over a green and peaceful world, dotted with islands, laced with blue sea, into a small glade ringed with rugged hills. It was just on sunrise, on a glorious spring morning. Lancelot breathed deep of unfiltered air and the sweet scent of growing things, and found an immediate complaint to make. E'RE about a hundred V miles away from the chief city, Camlan," he said, as he frowned at a map. "And no transport. I mean, that kit I have to wear, it's a weight. It's not going to be easy just getting it on, much less walking." "According to the accounts," the Shogleet said. "A knight rode something. A steed, I believe, or horse. What is a horse, Lancelot?" "Damned if I know. I vaguely recall drawings, when I was a kid. Sort of big animal,Ifr legs, head at one end, tail I  at the other. But stop a bit, that explains something -- " and he lugged out some massive pieces of metal-work. 'These had me baffled, but they must be horse-armor. And this thing is a seat, to go on its back, I guess." "I shall have to approximate," the Shogleet decided. "From your memories, and what I have read, I will transform myself into a horse." "All right, but give me a hand with this hardware first. I can't get it on alone. In fact, I don't see how it can all go on one man!" But, with patience and struggling, trial and error, they got the pieces that a skilled synthesist had fabricated from the patterns of museum relics buckled, strapped and locked about Lancelot. His guess had been good. He could hardly hold upright under the load of metal. "How the hell does anybody hop about," he complained, making a few labored steps, "and swing a sword in this lot? It's not possible!" The Shogleet paid no attention. It was busy on its own accou nt. Swallowing great quantities of air and energy, and speeding its metabolism to a great rate, it was converting its mass to a something that would fit that armor. Lancelot, shambling round, gave advice according to Els Blurred memories. Then, struggling mightily, he hoisted up the pieces one at a time, and then, the saddle. Sweat was dribbling into his boots by the time he was done. "Hell! This is a day's work by itself," he groaned, bashing his helmet in a vain attempt to wipe away the sweat from his brow. "There must be an easier way." "I imagine," the Shogleethorse guessed, "that this is why the knight had a squire, as it says in the tapes." Lancelot grunted his heartfelt agreement at this, hung the blank shield on a saddle-hook, the sword and sheath on the opposite side, stood the long lance by a handy tree, and eased his visor down past his nose, which was already raw from the first, light-hearted try. Then he eyed the stirrups. "You'll have to kneel," he said. "I'll never make it up there." He climbed aboard gingerly, and they left the glade at a sedate walk. "First thing," he said firmly, "we get a squire. I'll never make it to Camlan at this rate." "Very well," the Shogleet agreed, trying to work out a method of progress that would not unseat Lancelot. It compromised on a rubber-legged shamble which carried them at a smooth glide through what it assumed was a "woody glen." Half an hour of this brought them to a clearing, laid out in a chessboard of little fields, with a huddle of timber shacks in the center. Their arrival was the signal for a bedlam of shouts, screams and f ran tics barking from a horde of halfwild dogs. The uproar lasted only a second or two. Then all was silent, apart from furtive rustlings in the nearby bushes. "Where did everybody go?" Lancelot demanded, grabbing the saddle-horn. "How am I going to round up a squire, if they all run off like that? No, wait -- there's one, over by that tree." H E was an old man, grizzlehaired and cramped with rheumatic stiffness. In his simple brown smock, he clung to the tree and trembled at their gliding approach. Lancelot let go the saddle-horn and tried to sit up, impressively. "Ho, there !" he called. "Why did everyone run away?" "Marry, fair sir," the oldster mumbled, cringing. "It would have been at sight of the strange beast thou ridest. No mortal eye ever saw such a mount before." "What's wrong with me?" the Shogleet demanded curiously. "Isn't a horse like this?" "Now strike me dead!" the peasant blanched, clutching the tree. "It spoke like a Christian. I heard it!" "Naturally," Lancelot said grandly. "'Tis a magic steed, just as I am a holy knight. I have need of a squire. Call the others, that I may choose." "Nay, noble sir, we are but humble peasants. Wilt find no squire here." "Oh, blast!" Lancelot relapsed into Galactic in his irritation. Then, with strained patience, "Where then shall a knight find himself a squire?" "The Baron Deorham has many such," the old man offered. "Steeds, too, though none such as thou ridest. But he is a wonderly wroth man, and a great warrior. He will surely attack thee, an thou come near him." "Fear not for me, old man. I am Sir Lancelot. I will to Deorham." "Lancelot! Now am I dead and in hell, forsooth. Lancelot is legend!" "Never mind . that. Just point the way, you old fool." The old man cringed again, and wobbled a shaky arm in the direction of a rough track. The Shogleet went into its gliding run again. "A pity I couldn't get him to put me right on this shape," it said. "I must study a real horse at the first opportunity." "This feels all right," Lancelot argued. "Still, I suppose you're right. It won't do to scare the locals out of their wits all the time... Say, that looks a likely place." They had broken clear of trees, and before them the grass went away in a slow rise to a hill, where there was a massive gray building. "Just let me do the talking. Apparently horses aren't supposed to talk." He clutched the saddle-horn valiantly, and they went on at a fair speed. Suddenly the Shogleet sensed life and movement nearby, and swung round. "What did you do that for?" Lancelot demanded, clinging desperately. Then he saw what the Shogleet had detected. About seventy yards away, just rounding an outflung clump of trees, came three riders. On either side the figures were slight, but the man in the center was gross, his steed huge, his armor bright in the sun. His shield bore the device of a mailed fist, and his lance carried a fluttering blue plume at its tip. "That's what I want," Lancelot muttered. "A picture on my shield and a flag on my stick. Then they'll know who I am." "So that," the Shogleet murmured, interestedly, "is what a horse is like." And it discreetly began modifying its shape. "We should keep still," it advised. "Let him come to us. I want to see that creature move." As if in answer to the thought the big man put up a mailed fist. They distinctly heard the click of his visor as it snapped into place. Then he applied his heels to his mount and began thundering at them over the turf.L celot said, admiringly. "I must learn to ride like that." The mighty figure thundered nearer, and Lancelot grew uneasy. "He'll never be able to stop in time," he muttered. "Not at that clip. Now what's the fool up to?" -- for the stranger had dropped his lance to the horizontal, and the point was aimed straight at Lancelot. The Shogleet, ever curious, stood quite still. "Hey! You lunatic! Point that thing the other way !" Lancelot yelled. But it was obvious even to him that the other had no intention of doing any such thing. At the last minute, he managed to fumble up his shield. There was a rending crash as point met shield, fair and square. Lancelot shot backwards over the Shogleet's cruppers, to land with a jarring thud on the ground. The Shogleet spun round, to watch as the yoilng man groaned, sat up and then struggled to his feet. "Art unhorsed!" the stranger roared. "Dost yield?" "Yield nothing," Lancelot gasped, indignantly. "I wasn't even fighting. You want to give a bit of notice, next time you do something like that. Charging up like that without so much as a word..." and that was as far as he got. The strange knight, backing up and tossing away his shattered lance, had yanked out his sword. Putting heels to his horse again, he tore up to where Lancelot stood. His blade rose and fell mightily, and a clang echoed across the meadow. Lancelot went down on his knees, hung there a moment and then kneeled over, groaning. The Shogleet trotted to where he lay and nuzzled him. "You must get up and fight," it murmured. "I believe you are liable to be taken captive otherwise." "Fight !" Lancelot mumbled. "I'm half-killed already. That damned lunatic should be put away." He sat up and banged his mailed fist on his helmet to clear his head. The knight backed off a yard or two, waiting. "Get up, quickly," the Shogleet encouraged, and knelt. This sent the knight's horse into a rearing frenzy, giving Lancelot time to mount -- and time to get annoyed, also. "All right," he growled. "Wants a fight, does he? We'll see about that." He unsheathed his sword with an effort The strange knight crouched, setting his horse into another gallop. At the critical moment, he stood up in his saddle to give more power to his sword-arm. Lancelot heaved his shield up, the shock numbing his arm. then swung blindly in riposte. "Turn round," he ordered, as the knight charged past. "Let me have another bash at him. I only nicked him that time." "You may kill him, you know." "And what d'you fancy he's been trying to do to me? I'm black and blue all over. Let me have another crack at him, I said !" "Wouldn't it be wiser to ask him to yield? In that way, we might get some information, which we sadly need." Lancelot grumbled under his breath, but when he saw that his casual swipe had sheared the knight's helmet-spike, and split his shield in half, he agreed reluctantly. "Ho, knight," he called, and waved his sword. "Wilt yield?" "To a foul fiend from the pit?" the knight roared, tossing away his ruined shield and bent sword. "Never! Pit thy sorcery against this !" And he unhooked from his saddle a short length of heavy chain, ending in an iron ball studded with vicious spikes. Once again, he came thundering forward. "There!" Lancelot gasped. "I said the man was raving. If he catches me with that thing, I'm a dead duck." He put up his shield and peered round it warily. The spiked ball flailed through the air and crashed full on the shield, slamming the young man over to an extreme angle. In sudden, blind rage, he swung back, lashed out with the sword, felt it bite into something. Then, as the Shogleet bridled off, he looked back, and his stomach squirmed. The super-hard, razor-keen blade had sliced through armor and knight, from shoulder to groin. There was blood everywhere. Ill #npHE fool would have it," A he muttered. "Now there'll be trouble." But the body was hardly flopped to rest before the two attendants rode up, slid from their mounts and went down, each on a knee, heads bowed. "Spare me, Sir Knight," they said, in unison. "I am thy servant." "They're only kids," Lancelot said, surprised. "What are your names?" "I am hight Alaric," said the ginger one, on the left. "And I, Ector," the other added, shaking his long yellow locks. "How shall we call thee, Lord?" The Shogleet felt Lancelot brace up and stiffen. "I am Sir Lancelot!" he announced. They promptly flat on their faces. "Oh, get up!" he said, irritably. "I'm not going to eat you. Now, one's to be my squire, and the other to look after my horse. Which way do you want it?" "The horse!" they said, together and at once. "That won't be necessary," the Shogleet said, forgetting. "I can look after myself quite well." Again the two youths fell to the ground, shaking and white. "Get up !" Lancelot shouted. "How can I get anything done if you keep passing out, all the time? Now, what happens about him?" "Thy liege-men will attend to it, Lord," said Alaric, in a shaky voice. "My liege-men?" "But certainly. Hast slain Deorham. That which was his is now thine." "Oh !" Lancelot looked round. "Castle and all? Well, that's handy. And that was Deorham, was it? All right, one of you nip off and tell the gang the boss is coming home, hungry... and bruised, too !" "I will. Lord!" Alaric fled for his horse and raced on ahead. The Shogleet contented itself with a modest canter, finding the new movement intriguing. Lancelot was not impressed. "You're shaking me to a jelly," he groaned. "Can't we go back to the other way?" "This is more accurate. You had better learn. You may have to ride a real horse some day." Lancelot forgot to grumble as they reached the courtyard of the castle, and he could appreciate the size of the place. He slid off, and stood agape at high roughscone walls and towers, their slit-windows innocent of glass, but with gay cloths trailing from every vantage point. Ecto take the Shogleet's bridle. Lancelot objected at once. "You can't go off and leave me, not now. What'll I do? I mean, you know more than me about all the customs and things." "It will be quite all right," the Shogleet consoled him in Galactic, ignoring the flabbergasted stares of the men-atarms who had drawn near. "Just give orders. Tell them what you want. I will join you as soon as I can." It went with Ector to a great low stable, where there were many half-wild horses and a great smell. As soon as it could be alone it cast off the horse-shape. It had given a degree of thought to this, and decided it was best to assume some human-like form. So, on its rapid transit through the stables, courtyard and into the great hall, it settled into a small, dark-hued, manikin shape, thinking to be less impressive and thus less frightening in that guise. Trotting through the serfs who were busy scattering fresh rushes on the stone-slab floor, it found Lancelot seated at the head of a long, rude table, on which more serfs were arranging platters heaped with hot food. He was deep in conversation with an old, rugged-looking, gray-bearded man, but looked up as the Shogleet came close and scrambled on to the arm of his chair.I "Calls himself a seneschal. Sort of head-man. Been telling me all about the property." Gildas backed off warily. "Now, sooth," he muttered. "I do believe thou art Lancelot, and this thy familiar. What is it, a troll?" "Lancelot," the Shogleet said, in Galactic. "Have you forgotten? We are on a mission? You should be asking Gildas for news of the emergency." "Say, that's right. I'd forgotten. It's not every day a man gets a barony." He turned in his chair. "Draw near, Gildas. There is nothing to fear." "Thou sayest it well, Lord," Gildas growled, "but. I like it not. A troll that stands and parleys like a man. Still, it is but part and parcel with the strange things that have come on this land but lately." "Ah, now, that's what I wanted to know about. What's going on? I have to know, because I'm here to stop it." Gildas stepped back, transformed from a sullen graybeard into an angry enemy. "I knew it!" he roared. "I knew thou wert false! I will hail the men-at-arms, that they may cut thee down. Nay, strike me dead an thou canst, but I will say it." "Oh, lord!" Lancelot muttered. "What now? For heaven's sake, man, I'm not going to strike anybody dead. Not again. I've had enough of that for one day. Just get a grip on yourself and tell me what it's all about." "Methinks yon troll doth already know, and the question is but a trap. Natheless, I will tell. Ye wit well there is but one great sin in this land. It is hight 'Change.' The wise ones tell us this is the best of all worlds, and that it is sin to think otherwise. So all say, where it can be heard. But who can say what a man thinketh in his heart? To labor and sweat and garner the fruits of the land is the old way, the honest way. But who will labor and sweat when his fields may be ploughed, sown, aye, and garnered into his barn, without he turn a hand? This be a change that many welcome." "I haven't the foggiest idea what you're going on about," Lancelot confessed. "Don't tell me the sky is going to fall over a few ploughed fields? I was thinking of gathering some of those lads out there to ride with me to Camlan -- " "Camlan !" Gildas leaped back again, surprisingly spry for one of his age. "Again I say ye are false !" And he had his mouth open to shout as Lancelot jumied up and seized him. "Stop it!" he yelled. "I'm getting sick of this doubletalk. Why the hell can't you come right out and say what you mean?" He turned to the Shogleet, with Gildas dangling chokingly from his mailed fists. "Can you make any sense out of it? I think they're all stark raving mad here." The Shogleet eyed Gildas. "Put him down," it said. "Now, what land is this, and who is your king?" "This is Brython," Gildas said, squeakily, "and our king hight Cadman. Soon to be Cadman of the Fiery Dragon, in sooth. He dwells in Alban, twenty miles south. If ye be the wise troll, advise this your master to ride to Cadman and plead to aid, on our side!" "I'm beginning to get it," Lancelot sighed "What's Camlan then?" "Camlan is for Bors, King of the Kellat, and our deadly foe. Even now doth he call an army of knights, to invade our land and seize our dragon. To destroy it, he claims, but many suspect it is but to capture it for his own use." "Oh, come now. A real dragon?" "It is sooth, Lord. I myself have seen it, and my eyes were weak for a day after. It is truly a fearsome thing for an enemy. But for us it be great good. It is strange, and we all fear it, but who can argue against a full barn and tilled fields, all without labor?"rV in the field? That would be something really worth seeing, Lancelot. The tapes said nothing of this." "A dragon!" Lancelot murmured, dreamily. "That would be right up my street. All right, Gildas, we'll leave the question of politics for a bit. Shove some of that grub my way, would you? And pass some tools." Gildas frowned at this. "There are no eating implements in this culture, Lancelot," the Shogleet advised, drawing on its studies. "Dagger and fingers only." Before Lancelot could voice his grumble, Gildas said, "Wilt permit thy wives now, Lord?" "My what? How do I come to have wives?" "They were Deorham's, are now thine. They wait thy leave to come to table." "Good grief! Now I have a couple of wives." "Nay, Lord. Six." Lancelot shrank into his glittering armor. He cast an appealing eye on the Shogleet. "What do I do now? Six wives! One w'o'uld be too many." "Ask Gildas," the Shogleet advised. "He will know. There was nothing in the tapes about such a situation, so I cannot help you." "Here a minute," Lancelot gulped. "I have been long in the grave and forget many customs of this land. What shall I do with these -- women? What are they all for, anyway? And why six?" "Marry, Lord, but I understand thee not. A man may take as many wives as he needs and can support, if he be a knight. And what would a wife be for, but to serve? Still, it matters not, now. If thou art truly for our cause, then must eat and depart forthwith. All is to hand. We can fetch Alban by nightfall." "What, right away?" "All is to hand," Gildas repeated firmly. "Even this day did Deorham make ready for the journey, to join Cadman and all the other great knights of this land, against the Kellat. Else thou wouldst not have found him in the meadow, where he did but try out his armor and steed." Lancelot groaned and looked about feverishly. The Shogleet, watch ing, saw him shudder. "I'm up a tree this time. I can't face a twenty-mile drag, not after what I've just had from the Baron. I ache, I tell you. But I don't fancy all these women hanging about either. I'm caught both ways." healing touch," Gildas offered. "If thou wilt shed thy mail, Lord, she will attend thee." And he clapped his hands before Lancelot could stop him. They came in at once. The Shogleet suspected they had been close at hand, listening. At any rate, there was no need her services were needed. A large and robust woman of some thirty years, she made at once for the hapless knight and, with Gildas assisting, had him out of his mail as readily as a mother undresses a child, and with as little concern. It was the Shogleet's first contact with women at close quarters and it was intensely interested in this new phenomenon. What it found particularly puzzling was Lancelot's obvious awkwardness, as if he was afraid the females might see the body that had been built for him. This was not the behavior-pattern that it had traced in Lancelot in the beginning. According to that, he was lordly and quietly compelling in the presence of the opposite" sex. It began to suspect that this, too, had been part of the young man's fantasies. It was all very strange. real horse, into the saddle of which Lancelot had been hoisted by a primitive blockand-tackle arrangement and three sweating serfs, the young man led a great rout from the castle courtyard. On his arm, the Shogleet listened keenly to the chatter of the men around. A few were mounted, most were afoot, and they all were filled with enthusiasm for the battle ahead. But, of the dragon, there were divided opinions. Some thought it a blessing,, a gift from the gods to a deserving country, but they were in a minority. The rest devoutly believed that it was evil. The right and proper thing for a man was to work or to fight, they declared. What man could do either, when a dragon did both so much better than any man? Not so, they said, and this legendary knight was come, for sure, to rid them of it. Lancelot, jogging along in his armor, was acting and talking in anything but a knightly manner, but the Shogleet paid him little heed. Disguished under the minihad managed to help him with doses of carefully tuned energy. The young man was as good as new, except in spirit, in which region he was badly bruised. "I shall never keep this up for twenty miles," he groaned, as his teeth jarred and clicked at every pace. "I'm a nervous wreck, I tell you. If this is knivht errantry, then I've had it." They made a good twenty miles an hour, and should have fetched Alban in two hours. But it was nearer five, and the sun lowering in the sky, before the roofs of the city came in sight. Then the Shogleet recalled, from its studies, the low level of education consistent with this culture. Few of these people could count as far as twenty. For them, forty was wellnigh an infinite number. Over the bridge and into the narrow streets of Alban, Lancelot was pushed into the lead. The Shogleet sharpened its senses for more information about the dragon. There were whispers on all sides about the "knight with the naked shield" and "how his armor doth glitter, like silver," but not a mention of the mysterious beast. In the center of the city they came to the castle. The crowd of idle sightseers gave way to a great throng of men-at-arms, knights, squires. They came to the foot of a great flight of steps. "That's it," Lancelot said, with resigned conviction. "Just let me fall off right here. I'm through." But Alaric had spurred his mount forward, just as a tall, gray-headed man, with a heavily lined, strong face, came to the head of the steps. " Your Majesty," the squire cried in a high but quite audible voice. "I am squire to this knight. This day hath he slain Deorham in a great battle. Whereupon, and without stay for rest, hath he ridden right speedily, with this great company, to offer service with thee against thine enemy. Your Majesty, this is Sir Lancelot!" The Shogleet could hear the great gasp which ran through the crowd at this awesome name. Even the King himself seemed to shrink a little. "It is, indeed, a great honor," he said uneasily, "to have such a great one return from the shades to serve in our cause. Dismount, Sir Lancelot. Approach and be welcomed to our presence." Lancelot crawled wearily fronvthe saddle. He stood on shaky legs, looked up the steps and began to climb. But the Shogleet, with its razor-keen senses, had caught something highly irregular. Alaric had gone on, to keep one pace to the rear of Lancelot, while Ector stayed to hold the horse. "Ector!" the Shogleet hissed, becoming part-visible for the purpose. "See you that man in the brown jerkin and the cap over his eyes, there close by the knight in the falcon shield?" Ector peered, and nodded. "Mark him. Discover what you can. When the moment is ripe, have word with him. and say Lancelot has need of him. Have him come." "And if he will not come. Lord?" "Whisper in his ear this word. It is a great magic, so forget it not. The word is 'Galactopol.' Hearing it, he will come." IV fearfully, and went off with the horse. The Shogleet scurried up the steps, its curiosity-damping field going full blast. Lancelot was wearily explaining to King Cadman that he had travelled far and fast, and that all he wanted to do, right then and there, was to rest. "They must be made of steel and leather," he complained bitterly, in the chamber that had been assigned to him, as Alaric helped him unbuckle his armor. "Believe it or not, but that crowd down there are just getting set for an all-night session. Drinking, carousing and eating. Mountains of food. Entertainers standing by. Women all over the place. Don't they ever get tired?" The squire was sent off for bread and wine and a bowl of hot water, and the Shogleet soon had Lancelot easier in body. But his spirits were well down. "I'm a flop at this game," he gloomed. "All right, I've turned up a dragon. But suppose I can't fight it? And suppose I do? I still don't know what the emergency is all about, and I've no idea how to start looking. I'm a duff, I tell you. Best thing I can do is go back to Director Hugard and turn in my badge." "Patience," the Shogleet counseled. "I think Ector may have news for us. Ah, here he is now." Lancelot looked, indifferently. "Who might you be?" he asked. "That's a good question," the stranger replied crisply. "I was going to ask the same thing. Who the hell are you? And what's the big idea of riding around in that fake chrome silicon steel armor, hey?" "That's it," the Shogleet nodded, shimmering into full visibility. "That's what I heard you say, down there by the steps." The man in brown stepped back carefully, blinked a time or two and swallowed. "I don't believe it," he said. "I see it. I hear it. A little brown pixy, with red eyes, talking Galactic. But I don't believe it." "Hey!" Lancelot sat up, painfully. "That's a point, too. You're talking Galactic. Who are you, anyway?" "He is obviously a Galactopol agent," the Shogleet said patiently. "The real point is, why is he here? Why would they send two agents?" "Two agents?" The stranger stared, then pushed his cap back. "I'm beginning to get it, I think. Heard of you, haven't I? Lancelot Lake?" "That's right. And you?" "Oh, I'm just a third-level sector man. Name's Alfred North. Pass myself off as a journeyman blacksmith here. It's a living, with all the armor about. That's how I could spot your stuff. Nothing here to even scratch that. You'd be a pay-off bet in a tourney." "No fear!" Lancelot said, hastily. "I've had all I want of that. But what is this all about? What's the emergency?" "It's a dilly, all right." North fished out a case, offered it. "Smoke?" "Thanks!" Lancelot's eyes shone, until he recalled the squires. "How about them, then? Won't they mind?" "It'll scare them, but they'll write it off as magic. That's a handy way to cover up anything you don't understand. That's why they can take the dragon so easily." "There really is a dragon, then?" "But surely. You mean you didn't know? It's had me stopped, I can tell you. I was thinking of screaming for special aid. How come you're here, if you don't know about it?" "I gues# I'm your special aid. I only got here this morning, and I can't seem to keep still long enough to find out anything that makes sense." North frowned, then shrugged resignedly. "I suppose you special boys have your own methods. Anyway, I'd say you have the right approach in this case. We usually work under cover, but this one isn't like that at all. When the alarm went off, I wasn't bothered -- " "That alarm," the Shogleet interrupted. "I am curious about that. Is it some form of automatic device?" North sighed. "I was hoping you'd go away, if I didn't pay any attention.Ah, well." He inhaled thoughtfully. "You see, when these planets are colonized, they implant the compatible beliefs as a dogma. But, just to take care of any sports, there's a ritual, a form of exorcism, that is triggered off by any major change. And that fires the alarm. Doesn't happen very often. It's usually a gene-twist. Some kid gets curious about the stars up there, or begins to fiddle about with experiments in steam-pressure. That kind of thing. But this one is different." "A real dragon?" Lancelot asked, wide-eyed. A North grinned. Then he sneaked a look at the Shogleet, and his grin slipped a little. "No," he said, stubbing out his smoke-tube. "If you think back a couple of hundred years, when they were terraforming this planet, they used machinery. Big stuff. One gadget was a combined cultivatorharvester. Thorium powered, and just about everlasting. They used hundreds of 'em. And somebody goofed. One got left behind, in a cave they were using for storage space. Now, after all these years, one of the local boys has found it. He's using it." "Hold on," Lancelot objected. "He wouldn't know how." "That's the hell of it. He wouldn't have to; I've checked. The thing is run from a mentrol -- a sort of headband, with trimmings. You put it on, and think your orders, like 'stop,' 'go,' 'right,' 'left,' 'fast,' and 'slow.' And what more do you want? The way I figure it, somebody must have found the mentrol and tried it on for size, and that started the whole thing off." "Yeeow!" Lancelot gasped. "He must have had the hell of a fright when it came rumbling out of its cave. But it all fits. The way they lap up magic here, it wouldn't be any trouble for them to spot that whoever wears the mentrol controls the beast. Which is right, anyway. Who owns it now?" "That's Sir Brian de Boyce. Next to old Cadman, he's the big boy in these parts. The way I heard it, one of his freemen found the mentrol, so Sir Brian eliminated him, and took charge. And it's ruining the economy. There isn't a peasant in miles who's put his back into his job in months. I'm stymied. I'm only a freeman here. I can't just charge in and tell Sir Brian what to do. But you can. You're a knight." "That's all right," Lancelot mused, "but how do I get it from him?" "You'll fight him for it, of course." Lancelot fell back. "Oh, no ! I'm not having any more of that," he groaned. "You didn't see what Deorham did to me. I can show you the bruises -- " "Come off it." Noah was curt. "If you took a stroll down to the main hall right now, you'd find that they're working out the list for the big fight, in the morning. No, not against Bors and his boys. Against each other." "Eh? What for?" "It's the culture pattern. Trial by combat. Knights fight for rank, prestige. Cadman wouldn't dream of leading a field of knights unless they had all been graded by prowess. That's how it's done. The winners qualify; the losers flunk out. I'll bet you there's a dozen down there right now, just aching to have a crack at you. You can call yourself Sir Lancelot. But they'll want you to prove it. And you can't refuse, either; if you chicken out, your name will smell. Even a serf will spit on you." "Oh lord !" Lancelot sat up, jmd rnt his head in his hands. "I wish I'd never seen this place. What the hell am I going to do?" "Your best bet is to lash out with a challenge to Sir Brian, rio'ht away. If you're lucky, and he's free to take you on, then all you have to do is chop him down, and you're top man -- and the mentrol is yours. You'd better be quick. The competition is fierce." L-!horse again, the Shogleet carried Lancelot through the busy streets, early the next morning. It was of the opinion that Lancelot had been reasonably fortunate. He had drawn one strange knight from the far west, called Gnut, an unknown about whom fantastic stories were rife. "Discounting the tales," it argued, "for these people have only the vaguest ideas of accuracy, you are fortunate. You will defeat Gnut, then Sir Brian, and the mentrol will be yours." Lancelot refused to be cheered. "I'm sick of this knight business," he muttered. "I spend all my time in this blasted metal straitjacket, jogging my guts out on a horse, people bashing me about. Now I've got to fight a couple of guys I've never seen before. And if I win what happens? Every knight for miles around will be waiting to have a bash at me to show how good he is. And they talk about competition in a dynamic culture! They don't know what they're talking about." They were turning the corner, by a high-roofed house. The Shogleet was pondering on the unspoken implication in Lancelot's words. He was actually so low in spirit as to entertain the thought that he might not win! Then there came a gentle hail from the balcony, and a gay-colored scrap of silk fluttered through the sunlight, to catch on the tip of Lancelot's lance. "Tis a troth. Lord," Alaric said. "Wouldst have me seek out its owner?" Then he explained, as Lancelot was completely fogged. He would enter the house find out who had tossed the silk, ask for her glove, and Lancelot would carry it into battle. "An thou art victorious, Lord, the hand which fits the glove is thine. It is the custom." "But I've got six wives, now!" "What of that?" Alaric demanded. "Who knoweth what treasures may hap, today? I know not of Gnut, but Sir Brian is a wonderly rich man -- and all can be thine." "Good grief!" Lancelot shuddered. "Doesn't a man ever settle down with just one wife here?" "To wed, thou meanest? Marry, that is a different matter. That is the way of a man who is old, and would put an end to glory and adventure." "Precious few of these lads will live so long," Lancelot mumbled. "The way they go at it. What do you call 'old'?" Alaric frowned. "I can but guess, sire. A great many years, certainly. As many as thirty." The Shogleet was amused by Lancelot's sudden silence. It knew he was thirty-three. But there was food for thought, too. If it was rare for a knight to live longer than thirty years, then this would be a self-control mechanism tjo keep down the numbers of the non-productive to within the capacity of an agricultural community. Knighthood, it seemed, served the multiple function of entertainment, hazard, prestige and the skimming off of the restless few. But the wives were an enigma. The Shogleet determine ed to question North at the first opportunity. T HE tournament field was riot of color. Gay streamers flirted with the breeze from the pavilions at either end. Each pennant was a knight. Tabarded heralds carried rosters. The chattering populace was accommodated on rude plank seats along either length of the field. In the privileged center of one side was the royal stand, thick with drapes. Alaric was kept busy pointing out the various celebrities, reeling off their reputations, their possessions, their pedigrees, until even the Shogleet marvelled a little at such a memory. Then the boy saw Sir Brian's pennant. He indicated it. "His lands are the most spacious in Brython, second only to the King. Vast herds, great forests and three castles."  "How many wives?" "As I heard it last, sire, eleven." "Oh, great!" Lancelot sagged. "That's a hell of an incentive to win. But if I don't kill him, then he'll kill me!" Bugles rent the chatter, and set the pennants rising and falling. The contest began. Lancelot watched gloomily. "Look at that!" he muttered to the Shogleet. "Ton and a half of raving insanity, travelling at about thirty miles an hour. Double it, because the other lunatic is doing the same. No wonder they count you out if you fall. By the time you stop that with your belly and fall about five feet onto hard ground, plus all the hardware, it's no wonder they don't get up to argue." The pennants rose and fell. Trumpets blared. Brass-lunged heralds told the tally of victor and vanquished. Then up went a barred black pennant, with a gold spot. A herald roared. "Sir Gnut, of the Westland... to meet Sir Lancelot!" Alaric broke out a pure white pennant, and the challenge was shouted back. "Sir Lancelot to meet Sir Gnut!" The great surf-roar of the crowd was stilled as that fabulous name spread from lip to lip. Lancelot settled himself in the saddle, and put out a hand for the lance which Alaric held ready. But the Shogleet had already spotted Gnut, at the other end. A smallish man, in all-black mail, on a small, wiry stallion, he looked fast. "Leave the lance," it ordered. "Prepare to use your sword." It cantered on to the field before Lancelot could argue "Now sit firm. Fend off his point with your shield, then cut him down with your sword." "Who, me?" Lancelot chattered. "How the blazes can I, with you bouncing me about like that?" A great yell went up from the crowd as the gallant knight flung his arms about the neck of his steed to keep from falling off. The Shogleet halted. The warden's flag fell. Sir Gnut went into his gallop at once, head well down, crouching over his crouched lance. Lancelot fumbled for his sword. The Shogleet braced itself. Lance met shield with a rending crash, and splintered into matchwood. The Shogleet pranced backward and round, to keep Lancelot in the saddle. Gnut was equally nimble, tossing away the ruined lance and whipping out his blade. In and out like a snake, he battered Lancelot, again and again, rocking him in his saddle until he was good and angry. "All right!" he roared. "You asked for it!" And he stood in his stirrups, waiting for the black knight to charge in just once more. Then the Shogleet felt him slash down, viciously... and there was a shocked Aaah! from the crowd. "Serve him right," Lancelot growled as they trotted from the field, and the serfs ran on to carry off the sliced remains of Sir Gnut. "Let's hope that made Sir Brian stop and think a bit." V a surprise waiting for Lancelot. The Shogleet, poking its horse-head through the tent flap, saw a slim, girlish figure, with her glossy gold hair done in gleaming braids about her head. This was the youngest female it had seen. It studied her with great interest. Her complexion was curiously translucent, so that the flush of blood in her cheek was clearly visible. And her voice was soft and low, as she greeted Lancelot. Alaric, as usual, was on hand with explanations. "This is the Lady Jessica, sire. She who threw thee the silk which thou accepted." "I pray," she said, softly, cept my glove as a gage, Sir Knight." Timidly she held out a slim hand. Lancelot took it as if it was an eggshell. The Shogleet was completely baffled by his beet-red face and the glazed look in his eye. This was a side to Lancelot that it had not seen before. The Lady Jessica had to stand on tiptoe to put her face to Lancelot's. Then she went even more red in the face, and whispered, "I pray that thou wilt be triumphant, Sir Knight -- for my sake!" Then she was gone, leaving Lancelot staring into vacancy and rubbing his cheek. North pushed his way into the tent, grinning. "Nice work, Lake," he said. "Not much style, but you chopped him down quick." "Here -- " Lancelot said, abstractedly. "Something I wanted to ask you. This business about wives. I mean, I won six from Deorham. Lord knows how many Gnut had, but Sir Brian has eleven. What do I do with all them?" "Ah!" North chuckled. "You're a bit mixed, there. The word should rightly be 'housewives.' They're a kind of high-class servant. When you think about it, there isn't much else a high-born lady can do, except run the domestic side, while the menfolk are busy battling. They have their duties, you see, like keeping track of the hired help, tending to the kitchen, the bedchamber, the linen -- that sort of thing. They tend to the man of the house, too, of course, and entertain his guests. But they're strictly property. No need to be bothered, if that's what you're worried about." Lancelot's face went red again. "So there isn't any regular getting married and settling down, then?" "Oh, sure, but that's a different thing. For the knight who is past his prime and wants to settle down. Retire. You know. He usually selects some old place out in the sticks, turns in the rest of his property to the King, to be a prize for some contender, and settles in to raise a family. More squires and ladies, and the whole thing starts all over again. Not many get that far. It's too dull for them. Why?" Lancelot was saved his stammering explanation by the sound of a herald from the field. Sir Brian's pennant had gone up. "Take the lance this time," the Shogleet decided, studying Sir Brian. "Good grief!" Lancelot had been looking, too. "See the size of him! No wonder he's the top man in these parts. He's going to take a bit of knocking out." The Shogleet pricked up its ears at the sudden change in Lancelot's tone, but it had more urgent matters to consider. "Couch your lance firmly," it advised. "Aim for his midriff." The flag fell. They began to go forward, from a canter into a gallop, Lancelot manfully sitting forward and forgetting to complain. The mighty Sir Brian thundered toward them, his lance glittering in the sun. At the very moment of impact, the Shogleet stiffened, rearing on its haunches to keep Lancelot in the saddle. There was a deafening double clang from the shields, a wheeze from Lancelot as the wind was punched out of him, the screech of tortured metal and a gruesome gargle from Sir Brian. Then, despite all the Shogleet could do, it felt Lancelot lifted and dragged from the saddle. stop, it wheeled to look. There was Lancelot, on foot, dazedly clutching the haft of the lance. The other end, with its razor tip, had stabbed through Sir Brian's shield, his armor and Sir Brian himself, and stuck out a hand's breadth on the far side. With a grunting effort, Lancelot tore the lance free. He staggered back as the Shogleet cantered up, to kneel so that he csould remount. The crowd was stunned into momentary silence. Then it went wild. Even King Cadman looked shaken, as they cantered pat the royal stand for the salute and accolade. Back in the tent, Lancelot eased himself out of his helmet and sat. "That's me," he said flatly. "I'm through, done, finished." North pushed through the tent-flap just in time to disagree with the last word. "There's still the dragon," he said. "That shouldn't be too hard, now that you've won the mentrol. Nice bout, that was. Just as well you're not staying in these parts. The rest of the boys don't stand a chance against you." "It's the superior metal, of course," the Shogleet commented, poking itsJhorsehead into the tent. North jumped a clear foot off the ground, knocking his head on the wooden spar of the tent. "Talking horses, now," he breathed. "Is this routine equipment for you Prime Gmen?" "Forget that," Lancelot snapped. "What about this dragon? Let's get it over with, and we'll see whether I'm staying here or not." North eyed him thoughtfully. "I suggest you play it this way. There should be a coffeebreak, soon. You get an audience with Cadman. Tell him this dragon is a great evil. You've come to kill it and, once done, you'll return to the shades. That way, everybody'll be shut up. All right?" "Sounds simple enough. But tan I kill the thing?" "I'll fix that," North said briskly, "once I have the mentrol." He glanced out of the tent and chuckled. "Here they come now." "Who?" "Sir Brian's crowd. His lieges, turning themselves in. You want the lad with the gadget. Never mind the rest." "Suppose... said Lancelot, in a tone that made the Shogfeet prick up its ears at once. "Suppose I was staying here, and I didn't want all these retainers hanging about -- what's the routine procedure?" "Nothing to it." North gave him that thoughtful look again. "You just manumit them. Give 'em their freedom. They'll just go off and sign up with somebody else. It's not wise, though, because you couldn't run an estate without staff, and they work for their keep." "That's a point," Lancelot admitted. He went to receive his spoils with a pensive air. Late that afternoon, with the awed populace keeping a safe distance, the Shogleet bore Lancelot, following North who was on foot, to the meadow where the monster "slept." North had the mentrol in his hand. "This shouldn't be any trouble," he said. "A bit of expert sabotage, and it will be all over. There she is, folks." I T was easy to see why the peasants had dubbed it a dragon. Its sectioned body, all of fifty feet long, hugged the ground, rising to a twentyfoot high hump in front. There a single head-lamp grave it a one-eyed, evil look. "That front scoop," North explained, "can be set to any level you like, and there are controls which can be adjusted so that the stuff is processed, inside. Got a rudimentary 'brain' -- enough to identify and reject organic matter that's still alive. It wouldn't touch a man, even if you tried to make it. Not that any of the locals would have the nerve to chance it. Nor do I blame them. Incidentally, it processes wastes and makes its own bags and fertilizer, all in one operation. That's not doing the economy any good, either, believe me. I've been stuck because I couldn't lay my hands on this little gadget. But now I have it, I know that it's immobile. Nothing can happen until I put it on my head. Come on." . But the Shogleet had other idcES "Lancelot," it said. "You had better go back. Warn the audience not to come too near. And there is someone you would wish to see, I think?" "That's right." Lancelot slid down eagerly, and went clanking back. "You're a smart animal," North said, shrewdly. "What's on your mind?" "Answer me a question, first. I gather that there is a sort of personal polarity, an attraction and an attachment between humans of opposite sexes, if certain other factors are favorable. It involves such activities as marrying, settling down, raising a family -- all of which are concepts which I do not quite understand. But I believe such relationships are not amenable to reason. Yes?" "If you mean that there's neither sense nor reason in a guy who's in love, that's dead right," North chuckled. "Love makes a fool of a man. There's never been a cure for it yet." "That is what I thought. Thank you. Now, it is not enough that the dragon be destroyed. It must be seen to be destroyed. Impressively." "It's a good point. What's on your mind?" The Shogleet proceeded to tell him, in rapid, explicit detail. North's eyes widened. "I can do it, sure, if that'-s the way you want it. I hope you know what you're doing, that's all." He hurried off across the meadow, to disappear into the gaping jaws of the cultivator. Lancelot came, clanking back. He had already mounted by the time North returned. "Let's get it over with," he said impatiently, dropping his visor. "I might as well tell you that, as soon as I've finished with this thing, I'm retiring from Galactopol. I'm through. Now, what do I do?" "It's all fixed," North said dryly. "I'll get well clear, then I'll put this on and make it look as if you two are battling. When you've had enough, you bash it with your sword." "Fat lot of good that's go. ing to do !" "I told you, it's all fixed. Keep an eye out for a yellow danger-plate. It's marked all." The Shogleet broke into a gentle canter. Lancelot drew his sword. The long, gleaming machine suddenly broke into loud and grumbling life, its great jaws agape. With a growl of gears, it moved and swung its great head round, like a humped serpent seeking prey. Then the headlight lit up, sending out a bright beam. "You know," Lancelot jerked, as the Shogleet swerved to chase the lumbering machine, "this isn't such a bad place, after all. I mean, once you get away from this armorplated business. I think I'll retire. I own all Sir Brian's lands now. I could settle down, take life easy -- " "But you are a Prime Gman, Lancelot. It is your duty to return to Headquarter's and report the successful completion of your mission." "North will take care of that for me." "But you don't really belong here." "What's that got to do with it? It's a free country, isn't it?" Lancelot waved his sword valiantly, and the Shogleet swerved suddenly, so that the tip of the blade struck the yellow panel. T HE bang was enough to impress even the Shogleet. It was very busy, for a few fractionated seconds, warding off blast, radiation and chunks of flying debris. Then there was a ringing silence. In a thick haze of settling dust, it turned, scrambled up out of the hole and crept over the torn and ruptured earth to where North was peering, open-mouthed, from a sheltering bankside. Of the Brythons there was nothing to be seen but the puffs of dust from their flying heels. "You look all right," North gasped, "but what about him?" "He is stunned, and in temporary fugue. It will pass. If you would hang the mentrol on my saddle, we will be leaving. You can clear up the odd details?" "Sure, I can handle those. You're leaving right now?" "I think it would be wise. Lancelot seems to have formed one of those attachments, for a certain young lady. He intended to remain here permanently. That would have been unwise, I understand?" "Dead right," North grinned, but there were grim undertones. "With what he's got, and you along, he would be 'Change' in a big way. That wouldn't do. I'd have to interfere. And that might be nasty." "Yes, that is what I thought. It is better this way." "Just what are you, anyway -- a sort of guardian angel?" "You might say that, yes," the Shogleet nodded, and set off to gallop the long trail, back to the ship. But it was still curious. It wondered just what Director Hugard would say when Lancelot got back. Kangaroo Quiz This is a quiz with something in its pocket. Try the prob lem below, then hop to p. # for the answer. There you'll find some surprising information about the quiz -- and about you . o o o o o o o o o Problem: Without raising your pencil from the paper, con nect all the above points with four straight lines. IF  Short Story I IT by j. t. McIntosh A fter w a t c h i n g the stranger drag Rosie Ashwin the length of Main Street, screaming her head off, Bill Garland, the town's Law Enforcement Officer, turned to his cronies and said : "Did you see that? I don't mind telling you, it was all I could do to stop myself going right out there in the street and telling the stranger to let Rosie alone!" "He doesn't mean any harm," said Taft Barker uneasily. There were still a lot of people in Winsafton who preferred to ascribe anything the stranger did to mere exuberance. "Sooner or later, Bill Garland," said Sam Basch, who didn't, "you're going to have to do something about that Garland pretended not to hear that. The stranger had Winsafton pretty near the end of its tether. Gradually he had taken complete control of the town. Now he seemed to spend most of his time thinking up new, more capricious, more outrageous ways of exercising his power. The stranger had a perfectly good name, Ed Ramsay, but nobody in Winsafton ever used it except to his face. "Stranger" meant "colonist" these days. There were seldom enough colonists around for it to be necessary to specify the one you meant. Few colonists returned to Earth. When they did they usually came to some town where they had family ties, where cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces still lived. But the stranger apparently had no connections on Earth, certainly not in Winsafton. Every day a dozen people asked resentfully: "What did he have to come here for, anyway?" It must have been a rhetorical question. There was never any answer. At first he merely pushed people around the way returned colonists always did. When he began to realize just how push-aroundable the people of Winsafton were, however, he began to make his early behavior look like oldfashioned gallantry. He picked on the best house in Winsafton, the Goodman place, and just moved in. Well, what could the Goodmans do? They could hardly throw him out bodily. They just had to put up with him. And at first everybody but the Goodmans snickered and said it served the Goodmans right for having the showiest plaee in town. People snickered even more when it became known, as such tilings always become known in nothing flat, that the stranger had pulled Sally Goodman into his bedroom one night and kept the door locked until next morning. There was no jealous lover to get mad about it. Sally was well on in her thirties and hadn't been pretty even at eighteen. It seemed a good joke on the Goodmans that the stranger had not only elected to use their house as his own but also regarded their daughter as part of the furnishings. when the stranger casually tossed Sally aside and started helping himself to any pretty women who caught his eye. And to anything else he fancied. After all, you never knew it wouldn't be your own wife next. Or it might even be your car or your house. It was Hank Hawk's new Chrysler that the stranger eventually took, only two hours after dragging Rosie Ashwin into his lair at the Goodman place and slamming the door. Hawk's complaints to the Law Enforcement Officer were bitter. "Well, we don't want to go off half-cocked about this, tiously. "Maybe he's only borrowed your car." "I didn't say he could borrow it. He stole it." "Now, you can't go around saying things like that. Hank, even about a stranger. He never even spoke to you, did he? So maybe he thought you wouldn't mind." "I want my car back !" said Hank obstinately. "Then why don't you just take it back?" ,"How can I do that? The stranger knocked Bob Goodman all the way downstairs once, when he'd ordered fried chicken for dinner and got steak instead. I doift want to take any chances. I don't see why I should. You're the Law Enforcement Officer, not me." "Sure, Hank," said Garland soothingly, "but I can't do a thing until I know a law's been broken. As of now, all I know is, the stranger borrowed your Chrysler. That ain't against the law." "I want my car back !" Hank Qrrpamprf "Then take it back, Hank." "You're scared of the stranger," Hank said bitterly. "Now, there's no call to be abusive. Hank. Run along now, and come to me when you have a genuine complaint." Hank raised his fists to heaven in frustration. aged for a long time to do nothing whatever about the stranger and his actions. However, as time went on, Garand became uneasily conscious that sooner or later he might be forced to speak severely to the stranger. This he was reluctant to do. The stranger was all too liable to spit tobacco juice at him. It wasn't authority to have tobacco juice spat at him. Yet more and more people were starting to talk like Hank Hawk. There was, for example, the storekeeper who said the stranger now owed # and had shown neither inclination nor ability to pay a cent. There was Wesley Coleman, who bumped into the stranger as Coleman emerged from his own front gate. The stranger immediately threw stones at Coleman's house, breaking every single front j. t. McIntosh window. There was the truck driver who was unable to prevent the stranger denting Hank Hawk's Chrysler against his truck. The stranger not only knocked the truck driver down, he found a can of yellow paint on the truck, tore the truck driver's pants to ribbons and poured the paint on his naked belly. Everybody agreed that this was rude. As Law Enforcement Officer, Garland was sheriff, police chief, police force, district attorney and public prosecutor rolled into one. There was no one to whom to pass the buck. If anybody did anything about the stranger, it would Garland was so concerned over this that he seriously considered emigrating. He got as far as reading pamphlets about sixteen of the fortythree available colonies. Then he realized something he should have seen at once. On any one of those forty-three pioneer worlds the entire population would consist of people like the stranger. He dismissed the possibility of emigrating from his mind. There remained, of course, suicide... The trouble was, the stranger got worse every day. Although he didn't appear to give a damn for anybody or anything, the pattern of his behavior showed clearly enough that from the moment he arrived in Winsafton he had been trying things to see if he'd get away with them. When he did, he'd try something a little more extreme. At first when he took things on credit there had been at least a pretense that he was going to pay eventually. Later he bullied people into saying they'd presented the things to him as gifts. Eventually he simply took what he wanted without explanation or promise. His caveman tactics witr women, too, started quietly with Sally Goodman, extended to young, unmarried girls who were far too timid to describe publicly and in detail exactly what had happened to them and complain about it, and gradually spread to any female the stranger happened to fancy. T IE limit was reached when the stranger arrived at a wedding and carried off the bride, pretty little Lucy Smith, the instant she became Lucy Jaffray. It was no good talking about droit de seigneur to citizens of Winsafton. This, they felt, was going too far. Unable to stall any more, Garland organized a posse of all the men who had least reason to love the stranger -- Lucy's father Tom Smith, Harry Jaffray, Hank Hawk, the truck driver, the storekeeper, Wesley Coleman, half a dozen others. They called at the Goodman place. The stranger came out to stand on the porch and look at them. He was a big man, but no bigger than Garland or the truck driver. A stronger sun than Sol had burned his face so brown it was almost purple. He was untidily dressed in an off-the-peg suit he had taken from the local tailor -- without, of course, paying for it -- and there was egg on his chin. "Well?" he said, grinning wolfishly at them. His act could be as corny as he liked. Nobody was going to laugh at him. Garland cleared his throat. "Mr. Ramsay," he said, "Winsafton is a peaceable little town. In my ten years as Law Enforcement Officer, all I've ever had to deal with, except for the Saturday night drunks, has been one case of justifiable homicide and three of theft. We're proud of this record, and -- " "Why was the homicide justifiable?" the stranger asked, suddenly interested. "Husband shot a man who assaulted his wife. You realize, Mr. Ramsay, that if any one of six or seven men shot you dead, they'd go free." "Six or seven!" the stranger roared suddenly, affronted. "Hell, I been here a month ! It must be at least thirty." As he yelled at them, the whole posse took an involuntary step backwards. The stranger took a step forward. "Say, if anybody has any complaint against Ed Ramsay, he's come to the right place. Let's hear what you've all got to say." He stepped down from the porch. The group hurriedly rearranged itself, everybody trying to get as far away from the stranger as possible. Coleman was unlucky. He bumped into the truck-driver and couldn't get any further back. "You," said the stranger, standing so close to Coleman that their breaths mingled. "Have you got something against me?" Coleman took a deep breath. His voice came out in a high whine. "You broke all my windows !" "Well, it's summer, ain't it?" "Yes, but -- " "You want plenty of fresh air, don't you?" "Yes, but -- " "Want me to sue you for deliberately running into me and trying to knock me down?" "I didn't deliberately -- " "I say you did. And nobody's going to disagree with me." Coleman gulped and made no answer. "Would you like to withdraw your complaint?" the stranger asked, clenching his large, knotted right hand and brandishing it under Coleman's nose. "I would," said Coleman hastily. "Very much." j. t. McIntosh "Okay," said the stranger. "Your apology's accepted. Get the hell out of here." Coleman scuttled off, his ears red, not looking back. up to the truck-driver. "Have you something you want to say?" "I've still got patches of yellow paint on my stomach !" said the truck-driver indignantly. "What do you want, the second coat?" "No, I... No, I... I just wanted to tell you..." "You've told me." The truck-driver made off rapidly after Coleman. Garland saw what was happening but was powerless to prevent it. The posse had felt strong and resolute when there were more than a dozen of them. Now as men left, one after another, those who remained became more and more stand up to Ramsay. "You. Who are you?" the stranger demanded. "I'm Harry Jaffray. It was my wife you -- " The stranger ehuckled."Sure boy, I know what you want to know. Very natural." He winked, slapped Jaffray's shoulder, whispered into his ear and pushed him away. Curiously enough, it was Sam Basch, who had never had any direct cause to hate Ramsay, who stood up to him. "We don't like you," he said bluntly. "Go away." "You want me to push your nose out of the back of your head, maybe?" "No. That wouldn't make me like you any better." The stranger looked Sam Basch over. Once Sam had been a very powerful man, but Sam was sixty-one now. He was beginning to stoop a little and he limped slightly. "Old man," said the stranger, "you know what'll happen when I hit you ?" "No," Sam admitted. "You do now," said the stranger, and shot out his fist like a piston. Sam Basch took it right on the belly-button, and shut up like a jackknife. That was the end of the discussion. The three who remained picked Sam up, dusted him off, and wouldn't let him go after the stranger, who had disappeared into the house. "If I was only thirtyyears younger..." Sam gasped, holding his middle. "But you're not," said Garland regretfully. For a moment of wild hope he had thought he was going to be able to pass the buck to Sam Basch (who, he now remembered, had nearly emigrated once). But Sam was too old. And the stranger was too tough. No, there was nothing for it now but to keep out of the stranger's way and not catch him at anything. So long as pretend that Ramsay hadn't done anything. arrived in Winsafton, the town for a few hours was close to panic. It was very rare indeed for colonists to visit Earth. The emigration regulations were strict and unequivocal. Anybody who wanted to emigrate was told bluntly that he could either go or stay, but he had to make up his mind one way or the other once for all time. And in all the colonies there was so much to do, and so much more opportunity than there had been on Earth for centuries, that few people had any time to be homesick and bemoan the fact that the emigration authorities wouldn't let them go back to Earth. Inter-galactic travel was so expensive and demanded so much organization that no individual could actually pay for his passage, any more than any one person could pay for a country's national defense Consequently individuals did not decide for themselves that they'd leave Earth for the colonies or return from a colony to Earth. They submitted their cases to a board which considered each case on its merits. Since Earth was still the leading manufacturing planet Earth made most of the galaxy's spaceships. They left Earth crammed with emigrants, and not one of them in ten ever returned. They were used thereafter for intergalactic trade, not for ferrying back malcontents to Earth. The case of the stranger in Winsafton was therefore unusual; and the arrival of a second colonist in the same small town at the same time was even more unusual. The people of Winsafton weren't worried for long, however. It soon got around that the newcomer was Jim Arlen, Hugh Arlen's youngest boy, who had been born and brought up in Winsafton. That made all the difference, of course. Everybody remembered Jim Arlen, a tough but likeable youngster who had been chased out of every fruit orchard in the district at one time or other. "Let's see," people said, scratching their heads, "young Jim must be -- why, he must be thirty-five now." "All of that," others agreed. "Time flies, doesn't it?" It was Sam Basch, not Bill Garland, who went to see Jim Arlen at the town's one hotel. "Hi, Jim," he said. "Remember me? I shot you full of buckshot once." "Nobody ever shot me full of buckshot," Jim replied. "If you shot at me, you missed." Basch sighed. "I never was much of a shot. Pity. There's somebody in town who needs shooting right now." j. t. McIntosh "You mean Ed Ramsny?" Jim grinned. "I've heard about him." Sam Basch wanted to know one thing before he talked to Jim Arlen about Ramsay. "Why'd you come back, Jim?" Jim was as big as Ed Ramsay, a little younger and not so heavily tanned. He still had the easy grin Sam remembered. "It seems my father still owns a big plot of land northeast of town," Jim said. "We never gave it much thought when we emigrated. We tried to sell it, but nobody would buy. Now it seems there's some trouble over this land. The board on Zukeen sent me back to straighten out the mess and report on some new agricultural equipment while I'm here." Basch nodded. "So you'll be going back soon?" "In a couple of months, I reckon." "You've heard about Ramsay? You know him, maybe?" "Hell, no. He comes from Benvice and I'm from Zukeen. Never met anybody from Benvice. Don't know much about the place." "The fact is, Jim, Ramsay's been terrorizing the town." "I've heard that. I don't see how." S AM explained. As he did so, Jim's smile became a puzzled frown. "I don't get it," he said at last. "You mean he did all this and nobody stopped him?" "Nobody tried to 'cept me. He gave me a poke in the guts and that was that." "I still don't get it. He's just one man. How can one man have a whole town licking his boots?" "You were pretty young when you left here, Jim. You weren't old enough to look around you and do any thinking. Don't you know Earth's been sending out colonists for hundreds of years?" "Sure, but what's that got to do with it?" "You were a pretty tough family, Jim, you and your folks and your brother. I bailed your father out of jail two or three times, and as for your mother... well. We won't go into that. Point is, you were all pretty hard to handle. Tell me, Jim, are you known as a tough family on Zukeen?" Jim grinned. "Hell, no. Solid citizens, the Arlens. Hardly ever in jail, any of us. The old man's a counselor. Even my brother hasn't been in any trouble since he shot his father-in-law, and that was five years ago." "Well, Jim, Earth isn't like the colonies. For centuries anybody with any courage, determination or imagination has emigrated. It's still possible to make a fortune in the colonies. It hasn't been possible here on Earth since the early twentieth century. Naturally anybody with any initiative emigrates. And this has been going on for hundreds of years." Jiln nodded slowly. "I'm beginning to see what you're getting at." "Natural selection, Jim. People without courage, determination, imagination and initiative tend to beget children without courage, determination, imagination and initiative. 'Course, they don't always succeed. Even now, a lot of fellows like you are growing up here on Earth. That's why the flow of emigrants to the colonies never dries up. See?" "Yes, I guess I do." "Earth's a doormat world, Jim. People here ask to be stepped on. Mind, I don't say they like it. But if you apologize every time somebody wipes his feet on you, it's not surprising if you get stepped on a lot. Still, we get on all right when there aren't any colonists around. It's only when men like Ed Ramsay are here that people get stepped on. What can you expect, when there's nobody in Winsafton with enough guts to say boo to a goose?" "I seem to remember that you were always ready to say boo to a goose." "Maybe, Jim, but do you remember something else? I always wanted to emigrate. Only my wife wouldn't go." Jim nodded. "I remember." "Well, look, Jim. You were born here. But you're a colonist. You're not scared of Ed Ramsay. You can get rid of him. Do that for us, and we'll be grateful." Jim grinned but shook his head. "Hell, Sam, Ramsay's nothing to me. He never did me any harm." "Wait around," said Sam meaningly. "I guess it won't be long before you change your mind." S AM was wrong. A month passed and there was no clash between Ed Ramsay and Jim Arlen. Whether by chance or by design, Ramsay avoided antagonizing Jim in any way. Although he didn't stop taking anything he wanted, from whisky to women, Ramsay did nothing new during this period. He didn't seek Jim's company either. When the two colonists met in the street they merely nodded to each other and passed on. Meanwhile Jim Arlen was finding out for himself how it had been possible for Ed Ramsay to subjugate the whole town so that whenever he appeared, doors and windows slammed, loungers scuttled off down side streets and women ran like startled does. Resistance had been bred out of Terrans. They weren't scared of each other, and consequently when no colonists were around they acted like j. t. McIntosh any human society anywhere. But when somebody who did have a strong will said: "Do this," everybody in Winsafton -- except Sam Basch -- meekly did as he was told. Out in the square on a hot day, Jim experimentally handed his coat to a man he'd never seen before. "Take that to the hotel, please," he said firmly. The other didn't say a word. He simply took the coat to the hotel. Gradually Jim began to understand the situation, and realize what was happening to Ed Ramsay. All power corrupts, someone had said, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If it wasn't absolute power that any colonist wielded in Winsafton, it was something very dose to it. Seeing Wesley Coleman one day with an expensive cigarette case, Jim tried another experiment. "That's a nice case," he said casually "You like it?" said Coleman guardedly. "Sure do. Let me look at it, will you?" Silently Coleman handed the case to him. "I sure would like a case like this," Jim said. He knew perfectly well that if he took it, Coleman would say nothing. He also knew that if he told Coleman to give it to him, Coleman would do so. What he wondered was if Coleman could be made apparently voluntarily to offer him the case. Coleman could. It took a while, and Jim had to admire the case very pointedly before Coleman said reluctantly that he could have it if he liked. Satisfied, Jim shook his head and handed it back, to Coleman's obvious relief. That was power. If you had to break the law to get what you wanted, you might find yourself in real trouble eventually, even when the law was represented only by a spineless figurehead like Bill Garland. Among people like this, however, you didn't even have to break the law. You did what you liked and then made anybody else concerned say you had their full permission. Ramsay was still using Hank Hawk's Chrysler, and Hank was still complaining about it to Garland. But every-body knew, including Garland and Hank, that if the L.E.O. ever brought himself to the point of charging Ramsay with theft, Ramsay would make Hank say he'd lent him the Chrysler. Or even that he'd given it to him. Almost involuntarily, Jim found himself ordering people about. After all, when he was sitting down comfortably and suddenly wanted something, why should he go for it when there were others around? When he wanted to go out of town and look round the property his father owned, why shouldn't he tell somebody to drive him out and show him? He knew that Ramsay was simply waiting for him to leave before turning the screw still harder on the citizens of Winsafton. He knew also that Sam Basch hadn't been the only one who had hoped that Jim Arlen would fix Ed Ramsay for them. But now, after a month, they were getting worried. If Ramsay could avoid a clash with Jim Arlen for a month, couldn't he go on doing it for another month? Would Jim Arlen go away from Winsafton, his business completed, leaving Ed Ramsay to extend his power until the whole town literally crawled at his feet? There had been efforts to make Jim stay longer, but he had pointed out that the only ship from Earth to Zukeen in the next two years left on August #. He was sorry for the Winsnftonians and from what he'd heard of him he didn't think much of Ed Ramsay. However, in the colonies your own business took all your time and effort, and you got out of the habit of meddling in other people's. If Ed Ramsay tangled with him, okay, he and Ramsay would settle the business between them. If Ramsay didn't tangle with him, Jim Arlen hd no intention of interfering. square -- which was oval -- Jim Arlen became aware of something different, without knowing what it was. It took him a couple of minutes to realize that the statue in the center of the grass patch was missing. It was no great loss. The statue had been of some gloomy, long faced pioneer who had lived long before space travel. Turning from the empty plinth Jim saw Lucy Jaffray, who was undoubtedly the prettiest girl in town. Another experiment instantly suggested itself to him. "Lucy!" he called. She started, and seemed only moderately relieved to find that it was Jim Arlen and not Ed Ramsay who had shouted. She came submissively enough. "Look, the statue's gone," Jim said. She nodded. "It's being cleaned," she said guardedly. "I think you'd make a lovely statue, Lucy." "Me?" "Yes, you, Lucy." He put his hands on her waist and lifted her to stand on the empty plinth. "Please let me come down," she begged, blushingly. Already a hundred spectators had gathered. Jim looked up at her admiringly. She certainly made a very attractive statue. "Statues don't wear clothes," j. t. McIntosh he said. "Anyway, girl statues don't. If you're going to be a statue, I guess you'll have to take yOur clothes off, Lucy." "But I don't want to be a statue !" "You can't help it, Lucy. You're pretty enough to be a statue, and we can't leave the plinth empty, can we? Take your clothes off, Lucy." Blushing still more violently she unzipped her dress and dropped it to the ground. "Now when did you see a statue wearing a girdle?" said Jim. "It isn't right, Lucy. It isn't right at all." Slowly and reluctantly she took off her underclothes, stockings and shoes and crouched on the plinth, covering herself with her arms. "Really, Lucy, you don't seem to have the idea at all. I don't think you've ever seen a statue. Stand straight up -- that's better." The crowd was huge now. It stayed at a respectful distance, however, and nobody snickered or said anything loud enough for Jim Arlen to hear. Poor Lucy went white, then red, then white again. It seemed to her as if all the eyes in the world were fixed on her. "Okay," said Jim at last, "you can come down now." "Stay where you are," said a voice behind them. Ramsay was looking at the naked girl with frank lust in his eyes. "I must have been crazy," he said, "taking you home only once." "I said you could come down, Lucy," Jim said. "And I said stay where you are," said Ramsay. Jim lifted the girl down, ignoring Ramsay. Ramsay spat tobacco juice and bellowed like a bull. Jim turned, and in an instant Winsafton had what it wanted -- a fight between the two colonists. and ran. Nobody else went, however. It was a fight the like of which hadn't been seen on Earth for centuries. Such a fight would have been impossible between two Earthmen, or between a colonist and an Earthman. Both fighters were down at least a dozen times, and no Earthman would have kept getting up. The winner of any tough, even scrap is not so much the man who can take more as the man who does take more. Before half the population of Winsafton, neither contestant was prepared to be beaten. Both knew that the loser would be finished in the town. Ramsay's nose was bleeding copiously, making him look much more badly hurt than he was. Jim Arlen's left eye was closing rapidly and his shirt was torn half off. For the tenth time Ramsay rushed at Jim and both men rolled on the ground. Both rose and Ramsay went down. Ramsay leapt to his feet and Jim went down. Now one of Ramsay's eyes was cut and Jim spat out a tooth. For a long time there was nothing in it. Then Ramsay went down three times in a row. He was slower each time he got up. And the crowd watched him realize that although he could still take a lot more, he couldn't take enough. The fourth time he went down in a row he stayed down. Perhaps he could have made another try. The fact was that he didn't. "I don't want to see you in town again, Ramsay," Jim said. "You won't," Ramsay muttered. They had both forgotten the crowd, since everybody had kept a very respectful distance away. But at this every citizen of Winsafton let out such a yell of delight that Ramsay, still on the ground, jerked convulsively. In a moment Jim was surrounded by hundreds of people who wanted to shake him by the hand. In the intoxicating joy of the moment, Wesley Coleman accidentally trod on Ramsay's face... They heard later that Ramsay went back to Benvice. Jim Arlen was feted for days. He was a public hero. No one who saw that fight ever forgot it. What amazed the spectators was the dogged courage of men who could be knocked down time after time and come back for more. In the exceedingly rare physical arguments which still took place on Earth, it was always taken for granted that if a man hit the ground, that was the end of the fight. Often the first blow was the last. Curiously enough, it was less than a week before Winsafton's attitude changed dramatically. The start of the change was when Jim made Wesley Coleman give him his cigarette case. Then Jim borrowed Hank Hawk's Chrysler, which Hank had had for four days altogether. Then, sines it was obviously the most comfortable house in town, Jim moved in with the Goodmans. And finally Jim Arlen, not sq polygamous as Ramsay, took Lucy Jaffray in to live with him. He was not unaware, himself, of what had happened...#I power corrupts, he told himself ruefully, pulling Lucy to him, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Winsafter relied desperately on one thing -- Jim Arlen's spaceship blasted off on August #. With the warmth of Lucy against him, Jim was wondering vaguely if it might not be possible to miss his ship. He decided it wouldn't merely be possible. It would be j. t. McIntosh IF  Feature What do you do you're insane? #C O she ordered her bothO er-in-law to strait-jacket her, stun her with an axe and then set fire to her tent. While this was done, her husband and children looked on, for she had an undisputed right to dispose of herself as she chose." So reads one of the high points -- and they are many -- in an extraordinary report recently published in the Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, and written by Dr. Morton I. Teicher, a dean at Yeshiva University. Many years ago -- #, to be exact -- one James George Frazer wrote down a similar brief anecdote (a suspenseful description of a priest in an olive grove, naked sword in hand, moving about among the shadows, sleeping in secl'et, brief snatches, watching, watching every waking second for the man who would murder him to take his place, as he had murdered and replaced his predecessor. Explaining who, where and especially why this happened took Sir James a quarter of a century and twelve monumental volumes. The result was The Golden Bough. Such anecdotes, out of context, are provocative in the extreme, and this kind of provocation is just what nudges the best science fiction out of the best science-fiction writers. What these two anecdotes have in common is the note of social acceptance they carry, for in one the brother-in-law does the dirty work while the family looks on, and in the other the murderervictim is a priest. B UT back to Dr. Teicher and his work. His special field is the Algonkian-speaking group of northeast American Indians -- the Cree, Ojibwa, Beaver and others -- and their strange and ancient monster, the windigo. There are few, if any, drawings or sculptures of the windigo, mainly because these people have never gone in for the graphic arts. But their myths are very specific. The windigo has (rather like the Abominable Snowman) yard-long feet with only one toe and long pointed heels. His eyes are bloody and bulging, and you can hear his hissing breath for miles. His lipless mouth, jagged teeth and terrible clawed hands are used to pack the monster full of swamp moss, rotten wood and mushrooms, but only when he can't get human flesh. Now, these Indians are not cannibals, and have a rather unusually strong taboo against the practice. Yet frequently -- in # out of the # cases here documented -- cannibalistic acts were committed, usually against relatives or close friends. And in every one of the cases, which must be termed "insanity", the windigo was involved. Dr. Teicher calls them "windigo psychoses", having used the windigo element in them to tie together a whole collection of case histories which range right across the clinical spectrum, from mild neurosis to the most advanced psychopathological states. These Indians are as familiar with the presence of the windigo, and its ability to cause such a variety of disorders, as we are with the presence of a virusgroup which can cause everything from sniffles to epidemic influenza. They too have their therapies. One of these is the ceremonial murder of the infected person, even before he has committed a cannibalistic act. Which brings us to the case of the bound, axed, doomed woman in the burning tent, and the solemn husband and children who passively witnessed the scene. She had felt that she was becoming a windigo. It got worse; it got so bad that the people around her began to look like beavers; she wanted to eat them. She therefore ordered her own death. This is undoubtedly insanity, but one must remark in passing that it startlingly lacks the "I'm all right" rationalization of so many major psychoses. She knew she was insane. And isn't that the traditional proof of sanity? IF Voyelette The rubber plant was only a symbol but it was dangerous. It might endanger a planet -- or it might take a human life! i I N #, when Walt Onegh died, Arm Brewer, Director of Staff, recommended Tom Calloway to fill the empty position as Director of Crews at Midwest Construction. The board, of course, confirmed. One of Tom's first acts was to drop by Arm's office and thank him. "I'd hoped -- " he said. "But not so soon." Arm clapped his big hand on Tom's shoulder. His cropped white hair aureoled his healthy pink face. "Not a moment too soon," he said. "You're management material, Tom. A man of principles is rare in this cutthroat world of ours." "You overestimate me," said Tom. But he glowed inside. It was true he had hoped; but not quite as modestly as he implied to Arm. Fifty was not old these days. But neither was it younj. And he would be fifty-one m three weeks. And with people knifing each other in the back for every little job or advantage... "Run along and take over your offices," said Arm genially. "You inherit from Walt, lock, stock and barrel. Suite #." "Suite #," echoed Tom, sa voring it. For the three hundreds were third level. Executive. T HE meaning of lock, stock and barrel became more apparent when he actually stood in the outer room of his two-office suite, however. It obviously included Christine Nyall and the plant. It was the plant which, of the two, struck him more strongly at first glance. Among the silver and opalescences, the businesslike glitter of the office, it stood out like a drab of nature, its thick, shiny green leaves spread out flatly above the crystal pot. "Why, what is it?" Tom asked, forcing a smile. "A sort of rubber plant," Christine Nyall replied. She ducked her head above her stenomachine, then added, with almost a touch of defiance, "Mr. Onegh liked a touch of green about the place." She did not meet his eye when speaking. It was this more than anything else that disturbed Tom, who had tak-. en pride all his life in meeting everyone with a level gaze and a clear conscience. It was painfully obvious to him at this moment that Christine was being turtle-cautious. That was what came from being formerly Walt's secretary, and thus now a holdover. The plain fact of the matter was that there was now no job for her, with Walt dead. In the glutted labor market of overpopulated Earth, there was not any other position available for her within the company -- unless Tom made one. And Tom did not. His own secretary, Bera Karlson, had been with him twenty years. He had no intention of replacing her with this old woman. On the other hand, by virtue of her age and length of service, Christine was Class A Secretarial. She had tenure. She could not be discharged short of the legal retirement age. It was an uncomfortable situation, with its only possible solution lying in Christine's voluntary retirement. And it was clear she had no present intention of that. "Um," said Tom, stepping over to the plant. He looked down at it. It was not a pretty thing, he thought; and on one broad and fleshy leaf a small spot showed whitely. "It seems to have a touch of blight," he said; "Oh no," said Christine, swiftly. "That's just a little bald spot." "I see," said Tom. He turned away and went on into the private office to examine that which would be his. A fterwards, he took the problem of Christine home with him. It was still obsessing him after dinner, when he woke to the realization that his wife had been speaking to him and he had not been listening at all. "What?" he asked. And looked at her contritely. "Sorry, Josi. I had my mind on the office." She smiled at him forgivingly, this slim, amazingly youthful woman to whom he had been married for the last nineteen years. He had married late and, as he firmly believed, for love. And all that had come out of his marriage, including his two young sons -- one fifteen and one eleven -- had made him idyllically happy. "What's bothering you?" she asked. "No," he said. "Tell me what you were talking about, instead." She shook her head. "I'll save it," she said. "You first." He stretched and straightened up on his couch, looking across to where she sat half-curled upon an overstuffed hassock, brown against the white of it, her long limbs and the slight angularity of her body softened by the lounging pajamas tightbelted around her slim waist. "It's Christine Nyall," he said. "She's not retiring." "Oh?" said Josi. "But that doesn't affect you, does it?" "I'm afraid so." He grimaced slightly. "She's a holdover. And with no place to go she'll be staying in my outer office. You see -- " He explained the holdover system, and tenure. "But can't you make her do her sitting around someplace else?" asked Josi. "Not without risking a writ of prejudice and a work fine, if a court convicts me," he said unhappily. "The tenure law reads she must be kept 'on the job'. And the job is that of being secretary to the Director of Crews." "Oh," said Josi. There was silence. Finally he broke it by asking what had been on her mind. "I shouldn't bother you with it now," she said. "Nonsense. I shouldn't bring the office home with me, anyway. Go ahead." " -- Can't you talk her into retiring?" Tom sighed. "The only thing I can do is make life in the office a living hell for her," he said. "I've known it done before by other men with the same problem. Only I'm just not built to do something like that." "No," she answered, looking at him. "No." He looked down at his hand, which had closed itself into a fist. He opened it, wiggled the fingers, then looked again at Josi. "We'll forget it," he said. "Now, what was it you wanted to talk about?" S HE got up from the hassock and came over to sit down beside him. He looked curiously at her. "Something important?" he asked. "Yes. Tom -- " "What? "You're class A management now," she said. "You've got tenure. You don't have to work any more. We don't need to go on living close to the Company Offices." "No -- " He still looked at her, slightly puzzled. "But what about it? Where would you want to live?" "Away from the city." He looked at her in astonishment, convinced that she must be joking. But her face was unsmiling. "But there is no away from the city," he said. "Not nowadays. You know that, Josi. There's no unimproved land left anywhere in the world." "There's the Preserves," she said. "The Preserves!" He blinked. "But you can't live in them. They're parks. Deliberately restricted -- you know that -- by the government, so we'll have a few scraps of open country to look at and remember the past." "Oh yes," she said. "But they have tourist lodges." He smiled with sudden understanding. He reached out for her hands. Josi let him take them, but they lay limp and quiet in his grasp. "Honey," he said. "I hate to disappoint you, but these cabins and things might as well be on Pluto as far as you and I are concerned. I know it looks like you can live around the Preserves. But you can't. Those tourist quarters have all been bought up years in advance by the big travel agencies. To get them you'd have to sign up for what they call perpetual tours -- all-expense luxury set-ups. And the prices are fantastic. Why, for you and me and the boys, just the four of us, it'd be twenty or thirty thousand a year." He smiled at her consolingly. She still refused to smile back. Her face was calm and still. "Forty," she said. "Forty?" He frowned. "Forty thousand a year, Tom, for the four of us." He shook his head. Her words seemed to buzz in his #IXS. "Forty thousand?" he echoed. "How do you know?" "I've been checking up." "But Josi -- " He ran out of words, trying not to think what he could not help thinking. "You didn't suppose, seriously -- " "I've never supposed anything else," she replied. And he wondered then how she could look him in the eye and say it. "I've been waiting for this for a long time, Tom -- longer than you'd believe. Since my first baby was born." H E shook his head again, unbelievingly. "We can do it now," she said. "With your increase in salary and if we use the savings and borrow against your pension. We'll have enough for five years; and by that time you'll have got another income boost." "Josi!" "Oh, stop staring like that!" she snapped, suddenly. "Did you think I'd let my boys miss out on a chance at what the real world once was, if there was any way at all to give them even a taste of it?" He sat back on the couch, dazed. "It isn't like you." "Because I've been a good wife all these years and done what you wanted, and lived where you wanted? You thought I never had a selfish desire of my own? Oh, Tom, Tom!" She clutched his hands with a strength that shocked him. "How long are you going to go on pretending that people are still like they were in the old days? There's no civilization left now. You ought to know that! It's claw, tooth and nail ! And I'm looking after my children!" "Josi," he said. She shook her head at him. "Tom," she said, "Do you know how many people there are on Earth now ?" "Yes," he said. "And I know they're considering laws to control the population ex-, pansion." "Control it!" She laughed like someone lie had never seen before. "If they'd talked of controling it fifty years ago, it might have helped us. What's going to help us now? It's my babies that have to grow up in a world where there's ten people for every job and no future for even the ones who get it. The only way they can live is if they make the right friends. And the only way they can meet the right friends is to go where they are. And that's the Preserves !" "Josi!" said Tom. "Nothing like that's necessary. I hope I've made a moderate success of myself in the world. And I can truthfully say I've done it by decent, honorable methods!" "You !" she cried. "Oh, you! The great anachronism !" "Josi -- " But she was Beyond all reasoning. n A S Tom came in through his outer office on his way to his desk the following morning, the rubber plant took his eye again. It grated on his overwrought nerves like a shabby challenge. He was on the verge of bursting out at Christine to get rid of it, when he became suddenly aware of its extraordinarily protected position on a new little ledge, hugging the wall by her desk -- now pushed to the farthest possible distance from the desk of Bera Karlson, who had moved her own equipment in on the opposite side of the room. Abruptly he realized that he had been on the verge of taking out his own unhappiness on an underling -- a thing he had never before allowed himself to do. He nodded to both women ; and made himself smile. "Good morning," he said. They answered together -- Bera with a tinge of tension in her voice, Christine almost in a whisper. He went on into his own private office, the door sucking gently closed behind him. He dropped in the chair at his own desk; and for a minute he sat limply, his eyes closed. The long, unfinished, unclear, unrewarding argument with Josi the evening before had left him drained of energy and clogged with bitterness. He had gained nothing but her promise to let him think this matter of the Preserves over for a few days before talking of it again. He straightened with an effort and glanced at his appointment screen. The name of Orval Lasron glowed at him from its gray, opaque surface. He stared at the two words, troubled by some slightly ominous echo at the back of his mind, which they evoked. Surely, he did not know the man? After a moment, he gave up. Buzzing Bera to admit Lasron, he got up and crossed over to the one wall-wide window that looked down to the Executive Waiting Lounge, three floors below. He heard Bera's voice speak out over the annunciator down there and a stocky, short man in middle age, with lumpy features, rose from a table. He crossed over to where the angle of the wall below cut him off from Tom's sight. After a second, the man rose into sight on a floating magnetic disk, which came to a stop outside the window. Tom touched the dissolve button and extended his hand. Lasron stepped through the now non-existent window. His handshake was brisk and impersonal. "I interrupted your drink down there," said Tom. "May I -- " "No, thanks," said the other. T OM led the way back to his desk and both men seated themselves. Face to face, Lasron was somewhat more impressive than he had been at a distance. There was a hardness to his bunchy features and his eyes seemed to show the light of a constant, buried anger. "And what can I do for you, Mr. Lasron?" "You don't know me," stated Lasron. He crossed one thick leg over the knee of the other. "No." "I'm the local agent for the Secretarial Code," said Lasron. "I didn't know you, either. You were in Sales before, were you ?" "That's right. Our labor relations were all handled higher up." "Yes." Lasron shifted in his chair with an abrupt, impatient movement. "Well, you've got a holdover. Christine Nyall." "I know," said Tom, sobering. "A shame that -- " "I don't think so," interrupted Lasron. "Christine doesn't think so.v She intends to remain on the Job. Quite happy in it. It's standard procedure in these cases to drop around on the one in Management responsible. Just as a reminder." He paused. "You understand." "No," answered Tom, sitting straighter. "I don't think I do." Lasron sighed. "All right," he said. "Any evidence of prejudice and we'll slap a writ on you for a fine. Deal with an illegal outfit and we'll spend half the money in the treasury, if necessary, to get a felony rap to stick to you." "Now, wait! Now, look here," said Tom. "Just a minute, Lasron. Just what do you think you're insinuating? My record is perfectly clean and fair. I know some people on Management Level have the popular reputation of pulling dirty tricks in cases like this. But for your private information -- " Lasron waved one hand, wearily. "I have a code of ethics!" snapped Tom. "No, I don't pretend I wouldn't like to see Christine happily retired. But -- " He became suddenly aware that he was talking to a man who was staring out the window, humming a small tune nervously to himself, his fingers beating small, jerky time on the arm of his chair. "Good," said Lasron, when Tom stopped. He got to his feet. His eyes of buried anger burnt briefly and impersonally on Tom, as if the man across the desk was something mechanical, troublesome and potentially dangerous. "I won't take up any more of your time." Tom rose also, and punched the dissolve button. "Drop by any time," he said, defiantly. "You don't have to make an appointment. Just walk in." Lasron looked at him briefly. He appeared to be about to say something, then turned away. He nodded his head and stepped through the dissolve window onto the disk which wafted him down and out of sight. Tom was left standing with a feeling of ugly inadequacy. He half-turned to his interoffice with the intention of calling Arm Brewer, to report the agent's threats. But it would be a bad beginning in the new position to go running for help right off the bat. He turned away again. Then he thought of calling in Christine and challenging her about the agent's behavior. But that was not strictly fair, either. Time, he thought, sitting down at his desk again -- time would iron matters out automatically. T WO days later Josi reminded him of his promise to consider the move to the Preserves. He put her off, saying he had not had the chance to think, pleading the situation at the office. "Just don't take too long, Tom," she said. She said it in such an odd, unusual tone that he looked at her startled, and then looked away again before she could catch him staring. He wanted to ask her what she meant; but discovered suddenly he was afraid to. That night he slept badly, and when he did get to sleep he slept late. It was later than usual when he stepped through the entrance to his outer office. He could feel immediately that there was something wrong. As she answered his good morning, Christine kept her eyes fixed on the surface of her desk ; while Bera, glancing deliberately at him, gave him a look of peculiar outrage, features set and a little pale. Tom shouldered past them both into the security of his own office, hoping to avoid the matter, whatever it was. He was given no choice. On his appointment screen, Bera's the space where his first appointment should have been. Tom hesitated for a moment, to put a small barrier of time between his entrance and Bera's admission; and then pressed her button and summoned her in. She came and sat down opposite him. It was abundantly clear that a crisis point had been reached, for as she sat on the edge of her chair her body was rigid with the glassbrittle tension of a woman on the verge of explosion. but Bera's low voice quickly climbed the scale toward hysteria. She did not want to complain. He knew that she never complained; but -- she reminded Tom of all the years she had worked for him. She asked him if he had ever had any reason to complain. She thought that over the years -- and so on. Inevitably came the tears. She sat in the big visitor's chair and cried, a large-boned, not unlovely woman at the end of her thirties; but past the point where tears could look good on her. Tom gave her a drink and waited until the emotion was controlled. He was shocked to discover the whimpering fear that underlay her outburst. "Why, Bera," he said, as soon as she was in fit shape to listen, "what makes you think I'd ever get rid of you? Why, I could no longer get along without you than -- " he hunted for an enormous metaphor and could think of nothing but -- "my right arm." Bera gulped, "But She has tenure and I haven't, and you only need one of us." "Then I'll just have to put up with both of you," he said, in a poor attempt to be jocular. "Anything else is ridiculous." He frowned. "Besides, I think after a while she'll get tired of not having a real job to do around here, and retire." "No, she won't -- the old biddy!" said Bera with sudden viciousness. "She wants to hang on forever." "Now, you know that's not true," said Tom. "She just liked her job. All of us do." "Well, I don't care. She doesn't belong in our office. Why doesn't she just go?" "Where do you want her to go?" asked Tom, reasonably. "I don't care. It isn't as if she'd starve to death. You make as much money retired nowadays as you do working." "Well, she's not going to get your job," said Tom. "Now straighten up, Bera, and forget this nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, Christine has already retired." "Then she shouldn't be allowed to clutter up the office with things like that plant of hers." "Why, it's not a bad looking plant," said Tom. "I think it's rather a nice idea, having it there. Hardly anyone keeps flowers or plants around nowadays." "It gets in my way," said Bera, sullenly. Tom felt it was time to put his foot down. "I'm sure you can work around it," he said. "Try it for a few weeks, anyway. If Christine is still here after then, and the plant still interferes around the office, we'll see about getting rid of it. All right?" Tom got to his feet, which forced her to rise as well. "Try and get along with Christine, then, Bera. I'm leaving now. I just dropped by today to take a look at things. You can tell anyone who calls that I won't be back before tomorrow. Handle them as you like." "Yes." She wiped her eyes. "So long, then." He went out, closing the door on her answering good-by. In the outer office, Christine was sitting at her desk, her face expressionless and a sheet of paper filled with aimless doodlings before her. "Well, I'm off for the rest of the day, Christine," he said. "Good morning, Mr. Calloway," she replied, without looking up. He went out the door. outer office did not improve, he took a trip to the other side of the building to talk to Arm. "Tom !" Arm jumped to his feet as Tom entered, and came forward bouncily, his heavy face smiling under its white hair. , "How's our newest member upstairs here? Have a drink?" "No thanks," said Tom. "How've you been, Arm?" "How could I be? Eightyseven and sound as the Company's credit rating!" Arm slapped his wide chest. "Why don't you and Josi step out with me one of these nights and find out for yourselves? See if the old bachelor can't outdo you yet?" "I wouldn't doubt it. I'll talk to Josi about it," said Tom, smiling. "Arm, I hate to come funning to you with troubles right away, but I've got stuck in a situation." "That the straight sheet?" Arm punched for a drink and set it on the edge of his desk. "What is it?" "Christine Nyall. Old Walt's oppppfurv # "Christine -- ? Oh, the holdover!" Arm looked at Tom, pulled a long face and rocked abruptly with hearty laughter. "Now, that is rough. If only she'd been some young bounce, huh, Tom?" Tom smiled agreeably, if perfunctorily. "Well, well." Arm sobered. "So you've got old Walt's girl on your hands. You knew about her and Walt? Yes, I see you did. Well, now, what's the problem?" "Well, since I brought Bera up with me. I've really no need for Christine. But she's trying to stick it out." "They all do." "For myself, I don't mind too much -- after all, she's bound to retire eventually. But it crowds the office, you know how we are for space. And, worst of all, she's upsetting Bera." "Well, now, that is serious," said Arm. "A good secretary, broken in over the years. I can see why you wouldn't want her disturbed. Why don't you do something about it?" "But that's the point. What can I do?" said Tom. "She's got tenure. The representative of the Secretarial Code was around just a week or so ao-o to remind me of that. What can I do?" Arm looked across the desk at him with a curious expression on his big face. "You haven't been approached yet, then?" he said, slowly. "Approached? By who?" Arm's drink had been sitting unnoticed all this time. He picked it up now and sipped at it. "There's people," he said, "who make a point of being useful in just such situations." "There are?" Tom searched his expression for a clue. "In the face of the tenure law? What can they do? Who are they, anyway?" "They contact you." "But I mean -- oh," said Tom. "Oh, oh I seel" "I don't know anything about them myself," Arm said, sipping on his drink. "Nothing whatsoever. I've just heard about them." "Of course," said Tom. There was a fumbling moment of silence. "Sure you won't have a drink, after all?" "Thanks," said Tom automatically. Arm had already punched for a full glass without waiting for an answer. Now he handed the drink over. Tom took it, his eyes staring unseeingly through the wall of Aim's office. Will !" said Josi, meeting him at the front door, when he arrived at home. "Hello, honey." He kissed her. They went inside. "You've been drinking," she said. "I had a few at the office with Arm," he answered, as they sat down. "He wants us to go out with him one of these nights." "That's nice," said Josi. "You don't sound very enthusiastic," he said. "No, I suppose not." "Josi!" he burst out. "Josi, will you snap out of it? Can't you understand I've got a crisis brewing in that office of mine? If I don't handle this right, what do you think my chances of promotion will be?" "I'm just waiting," she said. "Here I am up to my ears in business troubles -- " "And spending the morning getting drunk with Arm." It developed into a first class fight. Ill T HE outer office had become an armed camp. There was no disguising the atmosphere of antagonism that existed there. Tom dodged through it as quickly as he could, and remained buried in the inner office during the hours of his working day. But this was no solution. Bera became more and more unreliable until it became obvious, even to Tom, that her work had become clearly secondary to her feud with Christine. On Tuesday, at the beginning of the third week, Tom was disturbed at his desk by what could only be the sounds of a scuffle. He went swiftly to the door of the outer office and jerked it open. The two women were standing facing each other, breathing hard, and the jar which held the plant was clutched with fierce protectiveness in the arms of Christine. As the door opened, she turned to look at Tom for a single moment, then turned back and put down the plant once more in its accustomed place. She reseated herself, silently. Bera turned and walked jerkily back to her own desk and also sat down. Neither one said a word. He waited until they were ostensibly busy again, then walked through the office and out of the front door. He did not say a word to Bera; and the back of his neck was aware that she stared after him with bitter, fearful eyes, while the woman across from her sat silent and depressed, her head down and her eyes hopelessly fixed on her desk. Feeling as if he was choking, Tom made his way out of the building. He avoided the lobby lounge below and took an aircab to a rooftop bar nearty -- the Parisien, it was called. Its small round tables and wire chairs were imitative of an old-fashioned sidewalk cafe. He ordered a tall scotch and tried to relax. Things, he thought, could not go on like this. Twentyfour hours had been the limit on family quarrels between Josi and himself for years now. But the present one about the move to the Preserves seemed to renew itself daily. Softly, he pounded on the white, slick surface of the table with his fist. Trouble at the office. Trouble at home. And the two things feeding on each other to keep themselves alive. The tension between Josi and himself was blurring his usual decisiveness so that he was fumbling the office problem. And the office problem wore his nerves thin so that one word from Josi was enough to set him off. Why couldn't Josi be a help instead of a hindrance at a time like this? And why couldn't Christine be sensible and retire? T HE scotch came. He accepted it automatically, indifferent to the anachronism of a live waiter instead of the usual delivery panel set in the table. The truth was, he had started out with a sneaking sympathy for Christine. It was not impossible for him to put himself in her shoes, to feel an empathy with her. He had, therefore, been half-inclined to let things drift, to let her sit out her remaining days in his office -- perhaps even in time to give her small bits and pieces of work to make her feel necessary. He had never imagined such a violent reaction, however, from Bera. Who would have supposed... A shadow fell abruptly across his table. He looked up and saw gazing .down at him a distinguished looking man of his own age. A handsome fellow, slim, w r ith a touch of easy amusement at the corners of his thin mouth. "Well, Mr. Calloway," said the man, "you're a hard person to get in touch with." He sat down. Tom stared at him in astonishment. "Hard?" He looked more closely at the man. "Do I know you?" "May I introduce myself?" He put the question with such unnatural stilted formality that for a second Tom did not realize that it was an actual question, and not a rhetorical one. "Is there any reason why you shouldn't?" asked Tom. "Joe Smith," said the other, taking this as permission and offering his hand. "Utility Services." Tom shook hands automatically. "Utility Services?" "Of course you don't know us. We aren't listed. In fact," Joe Smith turned to signal the anachronistic waiter, "legally we don't exist." A bell rang in Tom's mind. He sat up straight behind his scotch and looked penetratingly at his visitor. "And illegally?" he asked. The man laughed. "We understand you have a problem, Mr. Calloway -- thanks -- " he accepted his glass from the waiter. "A holdover." "Who told you?" "Why," said Smith, "it's a matter of public record, isn't it?" He looked at Tom. "We're prepared to help you out." "How?" Smith waved a hand. I J ty. Once it was merely a matter of offering a job with some dummy firm. But the Secretarial Code is well up on simple tricks like that, lately. In the case of your Christine -- let's see. She was supposed to have been having a long-term affair with her former employer, wasn't she? Perhaps someone who resembled him a great deal could bring about her resignation." "Now, look here," said Tom. "Yes, Mr. Calloway?" "I certainly wouldn't stand for anything like that." Smith raised his eyebrows. "What did you expect?" He leaned forward over the table, lowering his voice. "I'll tell you what you expected -- a miracle. We don't deal in miracles. Just results." Tom flushed. "All right, Smith," he said. "I don't think we've got any business to do together." "I think we have," said Smith. "Or rather, you have business to do with us. If not now, later. We're a business fact of life in this modern world, Mr. Calloway. Ugly, if you insist on looking at us that way, but just as unavoidable as any other fact of life." "I don't think so," said Tom grimly. "Don't you ?" queried Smith. "Open your eyes, Mr. Calloway. This isn't the last century. It's the present. There's no way to hide from the facts of life now." "I'm not sure I know what you're talking about," said Tom. "But I'll tell you this. I've lived by my own code of ethics all my life. And got along all right. So go peddle your dirty papers someplace else." . "No, no," said Smith, shaking his head. "It's all very fine to have ethics, Mr. Calloway, but they simply don't work in business. They've gotten to be a luxury nobody can afford any more. Save your ethics for home. Tell them to the kids for bedtime stories when you tuck them in for the night. But don't go messing up your career with them. You'll regret it. Indeed you will, Calloway. People like this Christine expect to get kicked out. They just hang around creating a fuss until they are." l that -- " Tom checked himself suddenly, remembering the office as it had been lately. Remembering Josi. "My wife -- " he began, without thinking. Then he stopped. "What about your wife?" "None of your business!" "Oh? But I take it," said Smith, looking at him closely, "you weren't about to listen to her, either?" Tom shuddered suddenly and quite unexpectedly. "It's all nonsense," he said. "Someone walk over your grave?" said Smith, not entirely unmaliciously. "You ought to know the truth as well as your wife. As well as me, for that matter." He waved his arm out over the parapet of the rooftops, at the endless buildings surrounding them. "Look at that. Full up. Ripe. Starting to rot, wouldn't you say?" He grinned at Tom. "What're you talking about?" said Tom. "There's unlimited frontiers. New worlds..." "You want to go? Do I want to go ?" Smith sat back, shaking his head and took a drink from his glass. "Easier to stay here and face facts, Calloway. And the fact you've got to face -- " he tapped with his fingernail on the shiny white tabletop, his nail making a hard clicking sound against it -- "is that you must do for this Christine or, indirectly, she's going to do for you. If you don't get her out of that office, the mess'll grow. It'll grow until you find yourself into it too deep to pull yourself out. I've seen this sort of thing before." He got up. "Think about that Calloway. You or her. And the longer you hesitate, the more likely it's going to be both of you." I T was evening before Tom found Christine Nyall. After Smith left, Tom had tried to call her at the office. Bera hold him the older woman had gone for the day. Bera did not have Christine's address, either, so Tom had been forced to go to a public tracing center. It took the center three hours to come up with a list of places where she might be found. He located her at last, sitting at one of the small tables around the wide expanse of dance floor in one of the midage groups recreation centers. She sat alone, a barely touched drink in front of her, the glowingly white translucent dance floor throwing a pale illumination on her overpowdered face. He strode over and sat down opposite Ik "Christine," he said. She turned from her blank contemplation of the dancing couples on the floor and looked at him. As his identity registered, her features slid into the carefully controlled expression he was used to seeing at the office. "Mr. Calloway," she murmured. "Hello." He stumbled, suddenly at a loss for words. "Eranother drink?" She touched the glass before her. "Thanks, no," she said. "I see," he said, "Well, I think I'll have one." He pressed buttons and waited for a few short seconds until a filled glass rose from the slot in the center of the table. He took it, swallowed largely and put it back on the table. "I've had a hard time finding you." The words reminded him immediately of the man named Smith. He put his drink down with a gesture of revulsion. He looked at Christine, almost pleadingly. "Look, Christine," he said, "do you really think you'd feel happier belonging to my office staff than you would, retired ?" She reached for her glass and turned it. "Yes," she said, "Yes, I do." "You know," he said, trying to joke, "sooner or later we all have to quit." She looked up sharply. He saw her eyes were terrified. "Not until retirement age !" she said, "I've got tenure!" "Of course, of course. I know you've got tenure," said Tom. "But you do see -- you're just putting off the inevitable, don't you?" "I only want my rights. That's all!" T OM took a heavy gulp from his glass. He pushed it away from him. "Look," he said, "I want us to be friends. I know how I'd feel if I was -- well -- put in an awkward position with some years yet to go to retirement. I'd like to do what's best for you. And I know Bera. She can be difficult to get along with." "I don't mind," said Christine carefully. "Oh come now," said Tom. "Informally -- just between the two of us -- I know she's been raising cain ever since we moved into the new office." "Bera's all right," she answered. "I like Bera." Tom gaped at her. The statement was too monstrous to refute. "Christine!" he burst out, finally. "Let's be honest, anyway!" She looked stubbornly down at her drink. "Look, if you really want to stay, you can. I'll talk to Bera. Or the three of us will all get together and thrash this thing out. That is, if you really want to stay." She glanced up obliquely, almost slyly, at him. "I can stay anyway," she said.) "My tenure guarantees it" "Of course! Of course you can stay !" cried Tom. "That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about fitting you in, making a useful place for you." "That's all right." He raised her head to look him squarely in the eye. "You don't have to bother about me." "Good Lord !" shouted Tom. "Do you like things the way they are?" "You might as well give up, Mr. Calloway," she said. "I know what my rights are, and I'm not going to give them up. If you've got any questions you can call up the Secretarial Code and talk to Mr. Lasron. Of course, I'll have to report to him you tried to talk to me here, today." For a moment Tom stared at her in amazement. "You stupid woman!" he burst out finally. "Can't you see I'm trying to help?" Christine's face went white and frightened. She jerked as if she had been struck. For a moment she sat as if paralyzed; then she made a small noise in her throat and scrambled up. She was hurrying off, before Tom could stop her, between the tables. "Christine! Wait!" he called after her. But she was already gone. I T was late when he at last got home. Josi was waiting for him in the lounge room. "Had your supper?" she asked a little sharply, as he came in. "I'm not hungry." He dropped into a chair. "Would you like a drink? Or -- " she stood over him -- "have you had too many already?" "Josi," he said wearily, putting his head in his hands, "don't start in on me now." She sat down opposite him. "I'm sorry, Tom," she said. "But we've got something to talk over. I've been waiting for you since this afternoon." "Can't it wait?" "No, Tem." A note he had never before heard in her voice made him look up. "I'm leaving things up to you, Tom," she said. "I went down to the tourist agency and told them to go ahead with our reservations." "Josi!" "You listen to me now. The plans are at a premium. I can't afford to wait. The Preserves may be filled up, or the price increased any day now, to where we can't afford it." "Josi, listen!" "No. Now I'm doing the talking, Tom," she said. "I told you I was going through with this. And I meant it. The reservation is in my name. If you won't come along, then I'm getting a divorce. My settlement will pay for the first few years of the plan ; and after that we'll work things out any way we can. But whether you like it or not, whether you come or not, the boys and I are leaving for the Preserves. It's up to you, Tom." She i-ose to her feet and left him, sitting in the lounge, numb and old and alone. IV T HE next morning found him having breakfast at a poolside restaurant not far from the office. He had slipped out of the house to avoid Josi, for reasons that were at the moment unclear to him. He sat at his small table under a striped awning, staring out at the early morning swimmers in the pool. The coffee seemed tasteless. He had spent the whole of a wakeful night trying to believe what Josi had told him. Accepting it was something else again. First he had to believe she would do such a thing. It was all the more wildly improbable for the reason that he believed Josi still loved him. Only there seemed to be some startling and hitherto unsuspected limits to that love. How, he wondered, staring at the pool, had Josi reached such a point? He tried to think back over their discussions -- well, be honest and call them arguments. Had there been some point at which he had driven her to desperation ? Thinking back, he could remember no such point. In fact, he had never given a definite "no" to the idea. He had merely been doubting and wanting to put off his decision until he could settle the problem of Christine. That could only mean -- he came back to the point not for the first nor even for the hundredth time since the previous evening -- that Josi had simply long ago decided to eliminate him from the family. She had thought not my husband, our family; but simply my children and I. She had cut him out. Or had he ever belonged? After a while, he got up and went to the office. When he came in this morning, Bera was absorbed in her work ; but Christine looked up at him with a momentary strange, unreadable expression. He brushed past both of them and went on into his own office. He sat down at his desk. He had never been an early morning drinker; but now he punched for Scotch. After a moment, the tall glass rose to the surface of his desk and he took it. It tasted alien and bitter, like the coffee he had drunk earlier. But he forced himself to swallow it. After a little while, the hard edges of his world softened somewhat. He straightened up and looked at his appointment screen. There, waiting for him, was the name of Lasron. He got up from his desk and looked out the window, down into the lounge. ing. Tom made out the man's thick body seated alone at a table before a glass from which he was not drinking. His fingers seemed to be drumming on the table top. Impatient. Well, he would just have to wait. Team came back to his desk and pushed the button that summoned Christine. She came in hesitantly, closing the door behind her instead of letting it suck shut automatically, and approached his desk. "Sit down," said Tom. She seated herself carefully on the edge of the big visitor's chair. "Christine," he said, "I wanted to talk to you." "I know," she answered. She was watching her own fingers, which she had laced together and was turning, backwards and forwards, in her lap. "You know?" he said. "I'm so terribly sorry, Mr. Calloway," she said. "I want to apologize -- " He stared at her in startlement. But she was hurrying on, tripping over her own words in her haste. "I just couldn't help it after working here so long. I couldn't help thinking it was our office -- mine and Mr. Onegh's. And then, when you're older and you've got no one -- to be cut loose, to just eat and sleep and die and be forgotten -- you go a little crazy, I guess." "Well, now," said Tom, "Christine -- " "And they make matters worse for us down at the Secretarial Code. They warn us Management will try all sorts of dirty tricks to make us resign, when we've got tenure. They get us so worked up, Mr. Calloway, that we can't trust anyone. And I didn't trust you. I called Mr. Lasron last night, after you talked to me. It wasn't until after I punched off the phone, that I thought to remember you hadn't been anything but kind. You didn't even complain about the plant." Tom found his voice a little hoarse, and cleared it. "No point in being unfair." "I know. I just couldn't believe it." She twisted her hands. "I want to tell you about that plant, Mr. Calloway. It -- " She hesitated, and her powdered face twisted into a slight grotesqueness. "It meant a good deal to me. You must know about me and Mr. Onegh." "Yes," said Tom. "A lot of people knew." She was stroking one blue-veined hand with the fingers of the other, as if in fascination with the process. "They knew I loved him and they guessed -- that was before his wife died -- that we were getting away for a weekend, now and then. But nobody here knew we once had nearly a whole year together." T OM jerked his head back from the window. "Yes." She nodded a little. "It was before you came to the Company. There was an underground city supply unit to be set up in the Midlands, on Venus. The Company took the bid. Mr. Onegh was sent out as Management Representative when we got the job. I took a leave of absence; and he pulled some strings to get me an appointment on the Government Inspection Crew. So we both went out, and no one here knew about it." She stopped. Tom was staring at her. She went on. "It was a year,'-' she said. "We could have stayed on Venus. I wanted to. But Walter -- " Her voice trailed off. "He thought," said Tom, and was jarred at the sound of his own voice, so strange it sounded, "of his wife and his job here." "Yes," she Whispered. Her index finger made little circles on the arm of the chair. She spoke again. "He was a coward," she said. Tom started and looked at her with a sort of horror. "I thought you loved him?" "I did." She raised her head. "He wasn't a coward when I first met him. It was the years made him that. All the years and the sneaking around corners with me. And the business getting tighter and tighter every year, so that even someone who'd been with the Company as long as he had didn't feel safe." "Class A Management. With tenure." Tom's throat was dry, suddenly. She smiled sadly at him. "Oh, they've got dirty tricks for Management level, too," she said. "When I was working with Walter -- " Her voice trailed off, embarrassedly. T OM sat still in his chair. He opened his mouth, closed it again and suddenly, almost with violence, shoved himself to his feet. Turning, he stepped to the office window and looked out. Across from him, over the airy depths of the lounge below, he could make out Arm Brewer, his white thatch vigorously in movement beyond the pane of his window on the opposite side of the lounge. "What about the plant?" Tom said without turning. "You were going to tell me about the rubber plant." "Well, you know how Venus is," her voice rang in his ears. "The carbon dioxide blanket, the dust storms, nothing green anywhere. It was against the shipping rules, but he took the plant along when he went to Venus -- for me. To make me happy. For that one year it grew in our home." Out and below Tom, the lounge eddied in its steady movement of continual coming and going. Salesmen, jobhunters, caterers, favorseekers, representatives like Lasron -- the flotsam of the commercial sea. All waiting. All hungry. Yes, thought Tom. Just then, through the wide-swinging entrance of the lounge came the tall, thin figure of Mr. Smith. For a moment, Tom hung, not even breathing, staring down at the tall man. Behind him, Christine talked on. But he heard her only as background noise. Smith had just nodded to Lasron, sitting at his table; and Lasron had lifted a hand in acknowledgement. Mr. Smith paused to speak to the receptionist, his elegant head a little on one side. He turned and went over the opposite wall soaring up from the lounge. A disk came immediately to life on the floor, and he stepped aboard. It bore him upward to the window of Arm's office, opposite. The window dissolved before him as Arm reached out a hand in greeting. They went inside together and -- did their heads turn to look for a moment in the direction of Tom's office as they went? Tom had a sudden dizzying sensation of falling. It was as if the lounge below reached up with clutching fingers to drag him down. He clung to the window drape beside him for a minute, finding the heavy metallic cloth slippery in his damp hands. He took a deep breath, straightened and turned. "Yes, yes," he said, interrupting Christine. "I appreciate your telling me about the plant. But I think that in spite of the sentimental attachment you have for it, we'll have to get rid of it." H ER mouth open, she stared at him. In her astonishment she looked almost imbecilic. "You understand," he went on, the words coming automatically, "I'm a liberal-minded man myself. But I can hardly be expected to put up with a souvenir of this type. After all, this is a business office, not a bedroom. I was a young man once myself -- fairly recently, too. And I had my -- er -- fun. And I recognize that a single woman and a man with a perpetually ailing wife might have their problems op a physical plane. But to flaunt mementos of -- well, it seems to me to be a little too much." She looked up at him with a rabbit-like fascination, as if he had suddenly revealed scales and a moveless eye. He met her look squarely. It was odd. but he felt no need to avoid her. His eyes were heavy as pebbles in his face, and as insensitive to what he gazed at. "So I'll just ask you to put it away somewhere right now," he said. He paused. "Naturally, I'm going to have to submit a memo on this to the Company psychiatrist. I believe you need help, Christine. Women often do at your age. I'll do what I can by attaching a complete account of what you told me about you and Walter -- " With one quick, gasping intake of breath, she was on her feet. She turned and ran from his office. The impersonal machinery of the door closed it politely behind her. Tom sat down at his desk. He felt as if he should be shaking, but he was not. He laid his hands on the desktop but felt nothing. After a while he became aware of the sound of Bera's buzzer, calling for his attention. But he ignored it. It was not until some little time after that, that the door to his office opened and she came in. Her eyes were wide, showing too much white; and her lips trembled. "What is it?" he asked. "Mr. Calloway -- Mr. Calloway, it's Christine!" H E looked carefully at her. "What about Christine?" "I'm worried. Perhaps I've been -- I didn't think." "Will you tell me," he said, "what it is? If you don't mind, Bera!" "She locked herself in the supply closet in our outer office. She won't come out, and she doesn't -- doesn't answer." "Oh?" said Tom. "I see." He took a slow breath and leaned back in his chair. "I'm scared. She took the plant. Oh, Mr. Calloway, I in your neighborhood won't run off with your books H you put on the inskle front cover of each with your name printed on It. Bookplate No, The umteenth corollary of Finaglo's General Law of Dynamic Negatives states: "No books are lost by loaning except the ones you particularly want to keep." with owner's name: #-S# (Add State Salts Tax, if any) Actual Size #" x #" No. CF-# #I Hudson Street, New York #. N. Y, didn't mean to be so nasty to her! If she's -- " "Control yourself, Bera." Tom got up from his chair. "I'm sure it's quite all right. Perhaps the door locked accidentally. Perhaps she had a little fainting fit in there. After all, she's not as young as she once was. Why don't you run down and get the janitor up here to unlock the door? Don't make a fuss about it. Just say the door's locked and we can't find the key." "Oh, yes! I'll run!" said Bera. "I'll run right away!" She dashed out of the room. After she had gone, Tom sat still for a second. Then he reached out and punched for a private connection to Arm Brewer on the interoffice phone. Arm's face sprang into view on its screen. "Who? Oh, Tom. What can I do for you?" "Just give me a few pointers about something when you've got time, Arm," said Tom. "Josi and I are thinking of taking one of those perpetual tours around the Preserves -- " "Preserves? Sure!" boomed Arm. "I've been on them. Tell you all about it, if you want. How's things down at your end there?" "I'm afraid I'm going to have to let Bera go after all," said Tom, steadily. "And keep Christine. Bera's gone all to .pieces lately. Lets her work go, and spends all her time picking on Christine. Of course, there's no tenure problem with Bera." "Ah? I hadn't realized that," said Arm, raising white eyebrows. "Well, that settles your little problem." "Yes. I'm afraid so." Tom sighed. "Too bad. I'd never have considered this if she'd -- but, well, this is easier all around. She's been making life hell for Christine." "Yeah. I heard something about that. Look, talk to you later, okay, Tom? I've got a little deal on right now." "Fine. Thanks, Arm." "Not at all. Any time." Tom broke the connection and sat back, waiting for Bera to return. For a while he heard nothing but silence. But then, at last, there was the muffled sound of voices reentering his outer office. For a moment they murmured busily together; then there was the sound of a lock turning. Then silence. -- When the scream came, he was expecting it. High and clear in Bera's voice, he had been expecting it all along. Sitting still at his desk, he did not move. Only the muscles of his body froze all together as if the blood in them had congealed at the sound; and the sweat stood suddenly out on his forehead like living water    Those back issues you need are probably listed in the #st Trader". An initial monthly circulation of # active collectors or a refund given. # issues for #, # issues for #. value) with a # issue subscription. Use a fairly new type the AD in the form of a rectangle, # lines deep by #I Pica or # Elite spaces wide. Charter Subscripers will re# purchased ait the regular will make it possible to serve Send I for samples of today's Send your unwanted S-F to be distributed to fans overseas. PO. Box #, Los Alamos, N. Mex.    IF  Feature.  ' .     ') science briefs down to it, there are only two things to be done about the deadly unwanted byproducts of the atomic age -- seal them off somehow, or learn to live with them. The Atomic Energy Commission likes the policy of burying atomic wastes underground, in carefully selected sites where it can be ascertained that there will be no low-level water tables or other opportunity for "leakage". In spite of the fact that any atomic facility produces vast amounts of "hot" waste, a surprisingly large amount of it can be disposed of in a small space. For example, all the low-intensity wastes of Oak Ridge have been buried in a #-acre area. Commission experts calculate that one #to # acre site would be enough to bury all the wastes produced in the northwest for the next # years. As to airborne radioactivity -- well, ways have to be found to live with it. One way is indicated by experiments at Georgia Tech, who have been able to cut the radioactive cesium content of milk by feeding cows on grass grown indoors, not in soil but in hydroponic tanks. The cut, measured against a control group of outdoor-pastured cows, was dramatic -- about #. Next time you hear anyone talking about modem miracle fabrics, spring this one on them : a new materia is woven from small-diameter wire made of cobalt-chromium and nickel-chromium alloys. It is then run up -- but not on Grandma's sewing machine -- into re-entry parachutes for use, ultimately, in the recovery of manned satellites. Thirsty? Well, stick around. You may be a good deal thirstier before too long. Freshwater demand will exceed natlons a day within the next # years. The real weird-o of the elemental table, helium, is about as snobbish as an element can get. It can't explode or bum or react with anything or combine with anything. This makes it handy if you have an original copy of the Declaration of Independence around and would like to keep it a while. Or if you are a welder and would like your arc to work in an atmosphere wherein nothing will dirty up the Kangaroo Quiz Here's the solution to the problem on page #. Bar bettors and bubblebrains may drop out at this point; others may want to know what the act of solving this one means. If you solved the nine-dot puzzle, you are almost certainly a highly creative person. Most people are not, and if you couldn't; you may comfort yourself with this further proof of your membership in the vast majority. This test was used as a demonstration in a recent seminar at the East Pittsburgh plant of Westinghouse: subject, creative engineering, or, what makes the bright ideas come, and to whom? One thing common to most highly creative minds, according to the Westinghouse scientists, is the refusal to accept any limitations except those exactly stated. Most people, when presented with the nine-dot puzzle, fail to solve it because they assume that they must stay within the pattern of dots, or that they must not cross any lines. What's your excuse? I F  Vovelette drifted, rather than plunged, into the underground movement. Later, discussing it with other members of the Savers' Conspiracy, he found they had experienced the same slow, almost casual awakening. His own, though, had come at a more appropriate time, just a few weeks before the Great Ritual Sacrifice. The Sacrifice took place only once a decade, on High Holy Day at dawn of the spring equinox. For days prior to it joyous throngs of workers helped assemble old vehicles, machine tools and computers in the public squares, crowning each pile with used, disconnected robots. In the evening of the Day they roudly made their private eaps on the neat green lawns of their homes. These traditionally consisted of household utensils, electric heaters, air conditioners and the family servant. #? The wealthiest -- considered particularly blessed -- even had two or three automatic servants beyond the public contribution, which they destroyed in private. Their more average neighbors crowded into their gardens for the awesome festivities. The next morning everyone could return to work, renewed by the knowledge that the Festival of Acute Shortages would be with them for months. Like everyone else, Wendell had felt his sluggish pulse gaining new life as the time drew nearer. A cybernetics engineer and machine tender, he was down to ten hours a week of work. Many others in the luxurygorged economy had even smaller shares of the purposeful activities that remained. At night he dreamed of the slagger moving from house to house as it burned, melted and then evaporated each group of junked labor-blocking devices. He even had glorious daydreams about it. Walking down the park side of his home block, he was liable to lose all contact with the outside world and peer through the mind's eye alone at the climactic destruction. Why, he sometimes wondered, are all these things so necessary to our resurrection? Marie had the right answer for him, the one she had learned by rote in early childhood : "All life moves in cycles. Creation and progress must be preceded by destruction. In ancient times that meant we had to destroy each other ; but for the past century our inherent need for negative moments has been sublimated -- that's the word the news broadcasts use -- into proper destruction." His wife smiled. "I'm only giving the moral reason, of course. The practical one's obvious." Obvious it was, he had to concede. Men needed to work, not out of economic necessity any more but for the sake of work itself. Still a man had to wonder... had begun to visit the Public Library Archives, poring over musty references that always led to maddeningly frustrating dead ends. For the past century nothing really informative seemed to have been written on the subject. "You must have government authorization," the librarian explained when he asked for older references. Which, naturally, made him add a little suspicion to his already large dose of wonder. "You're tampering with something dangerous," Marie warned. "It would make more sense for you to take longsleep pills until the work cycle picks up." "I will get to see those early references." he said through clenched teeth. He did. All he had needed to say at the library was that his worfc in sociology required investigation of some twentieth century files. The librarian, a tall, gaunt man, had given him a speculative glance. "Of course, you don't have government clearance... But we get so few inquiries in sociology that encouragement." He sighed. "Don't get many inquiries altogether. Most people just can't stand reading. You might be interested to know this -- one of the best headings to research in sociology is Conspicuous consumption ." Then it was Wendell's turn to glance speculatively. The older man, around a healthy hundred and twenty-five, had a look of earnest dedication about him that commanded respect as well as confidence. "Conspicuous consumption? An odd combination of words. Never heard of that before. I will look it up." The librarian was nervous as he led his visitor into a reference booth. "That's about all the help I can offer. If anything comes up, just ring for me. Burnett's the name. Uh -- you won't mention I put you on the file without authorization, I hope." "Certainly not." As soon as he was alone he typed Conspicuous consumption into the query machine. It started grinding out long bibliographical sheets as well as cross-references to Obsolescence, Natural; Obsolescence, Technological; Obsolescence, Planned, plus even odder items such as Waste-making, Art of and Production, Stimulated velocity of. How did such disparate subjects tie in with each other? B Y the end of the afternoon he began to see, if only dimly, to what the unending stream of words on the viewer pointed. For centuries ruling classes had made a habit of conspicuously wasting goods and services that were necessities for the mass of men. It was the final and highest symbol of social power. By the time of had reached its first peak. The second came in the twentieth century when mass production their lives to the acquisition and waste of non-essentials. Hart's twenty-second century sensibilities were repelled by, the examples given. He shuddered at the thought of such anti-social behavior. But a parallel development was more appealingly positive in its implications. As the technological revolution speeded up, devices were superseded as soon as produced. The whole last half of the #'s was filled with instances where the drawing board kept outstripping the assembly line. Ill Hart remembered this last change from early school days but the later, final development was completely new and shocking to him. Advertising had pressured more and more people to replace goods before they wore out with other goods that were, essentially, no improvement on their predecessors! Eventually just the trigger buying panics. There had been growing awareness of what was happening, even sporadic resistance to it by such varied ideologies as Conservative Thrift, Asocial Beatnikism and Radical Inquiry. But, strangely enough, very few people had cared. Indeed, anything that diminished consumption was viewed as dangerously subversive. "And rightly so!" was his first, instinctive reaction. His second, reasoned one, though, was less certain. The contradiction started to give him a headache. He hurried from the scanning room, overtaxed eyes blinking at the rediscovery of daylight. Burnett walked him to the door. "Not feeling well?" he inquired. "I'll be all right. I just need a few days real work." He stopped. "No, that's not why. Tm confused. I've been reading crazy things about obsolescence. They used to have strange reasons for it. Why, some people even said replacements were not always improvements and were unnecessary !" Burnett could not completely hide his pleasure. "You've been getting into rather deep stuff." "Deep -- or nonsensical!" "True. True. Come back tomorrow and read some more." "Maybe I will." But he was happy to get away from the library building. Marie was horrified when he told her that evening about his studies. "Don't go back there," she pleaded. "It's dangerous. It's subversive! How could people say such awful things? You remember that Mr. Johnson around the corner? He seemed such a nice man, too, until they arrested him without giving a reason... and how messed up he was when he got out last year. I'll bet that kind of talk explains the whole thing. It's crazy. Everyone knows items start wearing out and they have to be replaced." "I realise that, honey, but it's interesting to speculate. Don't we have guaranteed freedom of thought?" She threw up her hands as if dealing with a child. "Naturally we have freedom of thought. But you should have the right thoughts, shouldn't you? Wendell, promise me you won't go back to that library." "Well -- " "Reading's a very risky thing anyway." Her eyes were saucer-round with fright. "Please, darling. Promise." "Sure, you're right, honey. I promise." H E meant it when he said it. But that night, tossing from side to side, he felt less certain. In the morning, as he went out, Marie asked him where he was going. "I want to observe the preparations for the Preliminary Rites." "Now that," she grinned, "is what I call healthy thinking." For a while he did stand around the Central Plaza along with thousands of other idlers, watching the robot dump trucks assemble the piles of discarded equipment. The crowd cheered loudly as an enormous crane was knocked over on its side. out there!" a bystander exulted. "It's going to be the biggest Preliminary I've ever seen." "It certainly will be!" he said, catching a little of the other man's enthusiasm despite his previous doubts. Preliminary Rites were part of the emotion-stoking that preceded the Highest Holy Day. Each Rite was greater and more destructive than those that had gone before. As tokens of happy loyalty, viewers threw hats and watches and stickpins onto the pile just prior to the entry of the slaggers. What better way could be found for each man to manifest his common humanity? After a while doubt started assailing him again, and Hart found himself returning almost against his will to the Library Building. Burnett greeted him cordially. "Today's visit is completely legal," he said. "Anyone doing olden time research is automatically authorized if he has been here before." "I hope my thought can be as legal," Hart blurted out. "Well -- that was just a joke." "Oh, I can recognize a joke when I hear one, my friend." Hart went to his booth, feeling the man's eyes measuring him more intently than ever. It was almost a welcome relief to start reading the reference scanner once more. But not for long. As the wider pattern unfolded, his anxiety state intensified. It was becoming perfectly obvious that many, many replacements used to be made long before they were needed. And it was still true. I should not be thinking such thoughts, he told himself, I should be outside in the Plaza, being normal and human. But he could see how it had come about, step by step. First there had been pressure from the ruling echelons, many of whose members only maintained their status through excessive production. Then, much more important, there had been the willful blindness of the masses who wanted to keep their cozy, familiar treadmills going. He slammed down the off button and went out to the librarian's desk. "Do people want to work all the time," he said, "for the sake of work alone?" He immediately regretted the question. But Burnett did not seem to mind. '"You've only stated the positive reason, Mr. Hart. The negative one could be stronger -- the fear of what they would have to do if they did not have to work much over a long period." "What would it mean?" "Why, they would have to start thinking! Most people don't mind thought if it's concentrated in a narrow range. But if they have to think in a broad range to keep boredom away -- no, that's too high a price for most of them! They avoid it when they can. And under present circumstances they can." He stopped. "Of course that's a purely hypothetical fiction I'm constructing." Hart shook his head. "It sounds awfully real to be purely -- " He, too caught himself up. "Of course, you're only positing a fiction." Burnett started putting his desk papers away. "I'm leaving now. The Preliminary begins soon. Want to come?" The man's face was stolidly blank except for his brown eyes which burned like a zealot's. Fascinated by them, Hart agreed. It would be best to return anyway. Some of the bystanders had looked too curiously at him when he had a Rite when it was approaching its climax? II T HE Plaza was now thronged and the sacrificial pile towered over a hundred feet in the cleared center area. Then, as the first collective Ah! arose, a giant slagger lumbered in from the east, the direction prescribed for such commencements. Long polarity arms glided smoothly out of the central mechanism and reached the length for Total Destruction. "That's the automatic setting," parents explained to their children. "When?" the children demanded eagerly. "Any moment now." Then the unforeseen occurred. There was a rumbling from inside the pile and a huge jagged patchwork of metal shot out, smashing both arms. The slagger teetered, swaying more and more violently from side to side until it collapsed on its side. The rumbling grew. And then the pile, like a mechanical cancer, ripped the stagger apart and then absorbed it. The panicking crowd fell back. Somewhere a child began crying, provoking more hubbub. "Sabotage!" people were crying. "Let's get away !" Nothing like this had ever happened before. But Hart knew instantly what had caused it. Some high-level servo mechanisms had not been thoroughly disconnected. They had repaired their damages, then imposed their patterns on the material at hand. A second slagger came rushing into the square. It discharged immediately ; and the pile finally collapsed and disintegrated as it was supposed to. The crowd was too shocked to feel the triumph it had come for, but Hart could not share their horror. Burnett eyed him. "Better look indignant," he said. "They'll be out for blood. Somebody must have sabotaged the setup." "Catch the culprits !" he shouted, joining the crowd around hint. "Stop anti-social acts !" "Stop anti-social acts!" roared Burnett ; and, in a whisper : "Hart, let's get out of here." As they pushed their way loudspeaker boomed out : "Return home in peace. The instincts of the people are good. Healthy destruction forever! The criminals will be tracked down... if they exist." "A terrible thing, friend," a woman said to them. "Terrible, friend," Burnett agreed. "Smash the anti-social elements without mercy!" Three children were clustered together, crying. "I wanted to set the right example for them," said the father to anyone who would listen. "They'll never get over this!" Hart tried to console them. "Next week is High Holy Day," he said, but the bawling onlv increased. The two men finally reached a side avenue where the crowd was thinner. "Come with me," Burnett ordered, "I want you to meet some people." H E sounded as if he were instituting military discipline but Hart, still dazed, such a terrible thing," he said, listening to the distant uproar. "Why don't they shut up!" "They will -- eventually." Burnett marched straight ahead and looked fixedly in the same direction. "The thing could have gobbled up the city if there hadn't been a second slagger!" said a lone passerby. "Nonsense," Burnett muttered under his breath. "You know that, Hart. Any selfregulating mechanism reaches a check limit sooner than that." "It has to." They turned into a large building and went up to the fiftieth floor. "My apartment," said Burnett as he opened the door. There were about fifteen people in the large living room. They rose, smiling, to greet their host. "Let's save the self congratulations for later," snapped Burnett. "These were merely our own preliminaries. We're not out of the woods yet. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our newest recruit. He has seen the light. I have fed him basic data and I'm sure we're not making a mistake with him." Hart was about to demand what was going on when a short man with eyes as intense as Burnett's proposed a toast to "the fiasco in the Plaza." Everyone joined in and he did not have to ask. "Burnett, I don't quite understand why I am here but aren't you taking a chance with me?" "Not at all. I've followed your reactions since your first visit to the library. Others here have also -- when you were completely unaware of being observed. The gradual shift in viewpoint is familiar to us. We've all been through it. The really important point is that you no longer like the kind of world into which you were born." "That's true, but no one can change it." "We are changing it, said a thin-faced young woman. "I work in a servo lab and -- "Miss Wright, time enough for that later," interrupted Burnett. "What we must know now, Mr. Hart, is how much new-found convictions? It will be more work than you've ever dreamed possible." He felt as exhilarated as he did in the months after High Holy Day. "I'm down to under ten hours labor a week. I'd do anything for your group if I could get more work." Burnett gave him a hearty handshake of congratulation... but was frowning as he did so. "You're doing the right thing -- for the wrong reason. Every member of this group could tell you why. Miss Wright, since you feel like talking, explain the matter." "Certainly. Mr. Hart, we are eng ged in an activity of so-called subversion for a positive reason, not merely to avoid insufficient work load. Your reason shows you are still being moved by the values that you despise. We want to cut the work-production load on people. ' We want them to face the problem of leisure, not flee it." "There's a heart-warming paradox here," Burnett explained. "Every excess eventually undermines itself. Everybody in the movement starts by wanting to act for their beliefs because work appears so attractive for its own sake. I was that way, too, until I studied the dead art of philosophy." "Well -- " Hart sat down, deeply troubled. "Look, I deplore destroying equipment that is still perfectly useful as much as any of you do. But there is a problem. If the destruction were stopped there would be so much leisure people would rot from boredom." on the argument. "Instead they're rotting from artificial work. Boredom is a temporary, if recurring phenomenon of living, not a permanent one. If most men face the difficulty of empty time long enough they find new problems with which to fill that time. That's where philosophy showed me the way. None of its fundamental mysteries can ever be solved but, as you pit yourself against them, your experience and capacity for being alive grows." "Very nice," Hart grinned, "wanting all men to be philosophers. They never have been." "You shouldn't have brought him here,' growled the short man. "He's not one of us. Now we have a real mess." . "Johnson, I'm leader of this group!" Burnett exploded. "Credit me with a little understanding. All right, Hart, what you say is true. But why? Because most men have always worked too hard to achieve the fruits of curiosity." "I hate to keep being a spoil-sport, but what does that prove? Some men who had to work as hard as the rest have been interested in things beyond the end of their nose." They all groaned their disapproval. "A good point, Hart, but it doesn't prove what you think. It just shows that a minority enjoy innate capacities and environmental variations that make the transition to philosopher easier." "And you haven't proven anything about the incurious majority." "This does, though: whenever there was a favorable period the majority who could, as you put it, see beyond the ends of their noses increased. Our era is just the opposite. We are trapped in a vicious circle. Those noses are usually so close to the grindstone that men are afraid to raise their heads. We are breaking that circle!" "It's a terribly important thing to aim for, Burnett, but -- " He brought up another doubt and somebody else answered it immediately. For the next half hour, as one uncertainty was expressed after another, everybody joined in the answers until inexorable logic forced his surrender. "All right," he conceded, "I will do anything I can -- not to make work for myself, but to help mankind rise above it." Ijphant glance in Johnson's direction, Burnett gave no further attention to what had happened and plunged immediately into practical matters. To halt the blind worship of work, the Rites had first to be discredited. And to discredit the Rites, the awe inspired by their infallihle performance had to be weakened. The sabotage of the Preliminary had been the first local step in that direction. There had been a few similar, if smaller, episodes, executed by other groups, but they had received as little publicity as possible. "Johnson, you pulled one so big this time that they can't hide it. Twenty thousand witnesses ! When it come# to getting things done you're the best we have!" The little man grinned. "But you're the one who knows how to pick recruits and organize our concepts. This is how it worked. I re-fed the emptied cryotron memory box of a robot discard with patterns to deal with anything it was likely to encounter in a destruction pile. I kept the absolutefreeze mechanism in working order, but developed a shield that would hide its activity from the best pile detector." He spread a large tissue schematic out on the floor and they all gathered around it to study the details. "Now, the important thing was to have an external element that could resume contact with a wider circuit, which could in turn start meshing with the whole robot mechanism and then through that mechanism into the pile. This little lever made the contact at a pre-fed time." Miss Wright was enthusiastic. "That contact is half the size of any I've been able to make. It's crucially important," she added to Hart. "A large contact can look suspicious." While others took miniphotos of the schematic. Hart studied the contact carefully. "I think I can reduce its size by another fifty per cent. Alloys are one of my specialties -- when I get a chance to work at them." "That would be ideal," said Burnett. "Then we could set up many more discarded robots without risk. How long will it take?" "I can rough It out right now." He scribbled down the necessary formulas and everyone photographed that too. "Maximum security is now in effect," announced Burnett. "You will destroy your copies as soon as you have transferred them to edible base copies. At the first hint of danger you will consume them. Use home enlargers for study. In no case are you to make permanent blowups that would be difficult to destroy quickly." He considered them sternly. "Remember, you are running a great risk. You're not only opposing the will of the state but the present will of the vast majority of citizens." "If there are as many other underground groups as you indicate," said Hart, "they should have this information." "We get it to them," answered Burnett. "I'm going on health leave from my job." "And what will be your excuse?" Wright demanded anxiously. "Nervous shock," smiled their leader. "After all, I did see today's events in the Plaza." his wife was waiting for him. "Why did you take so long, Wendell. I was worried sick. The radio says anti-socials are turning wild servos loose. How could human beings do such a thing?" "I was there. I saw it all happen." He frowned. "The crowd was so dense I couldn't get away." "But what happened? The ways the news was broadcast I couldn't understand anything." He described the situation in great detail and awaited Marie's reaction. It was even more encouraging than he had hoped for. "I understand less than before! How could anything reactivate that rubble? They put everything over five years old into the piles, and the stuff's supposed to be decrepit already. You'd almost think we were destroying wealth before its time, because if those disabled mechanisms reactivate -- " She came to a dead halt. "That's madness! Oh, I wish High Holy Day were here already so I could get back to work and stop this empty thinking " Her honest face was more painfully distorted than he had ever seen it before, even during the universal pre-Rite doldrums. "Only a few more days to go," he consoled. "Don't worry, honey. Everything's going to be all right. Now I'd like to be alone in the study for a while. I've been through an exhausting time." "Aren't you going to eat?" The last word triggered the entry of Eric, the domestic robot, pushing the dinner cart ahead of him. "No food tonight," Hart insisted. The shining metal head nodded its assent and the cart was wheeled out. "That's not a very humane thing to do," she scolded. "Eric's not going to be serving many more meals -- " "Good grief, Marie, just leave me alone for a while, will you?" He slammed the study door shut, warning himself to display less nervousness in the future as he listened to her pacing outside. Then she went away. The projector gave him a good-sized wall image to consider. He spent most of the night calculating where he could place tiny self-activators in the "obsolescent" robots that were to be donated by his plant. Then he set up the instruction tapes to make the miniature contacts. Production then would be a simple job, only taking a few minutes, and during a working day there were always many periods longer than that when he was alone on the production floor. But thinking the matter out without computers was much more difficult. Human beings ordinarily filled their time on a lower abstracting level. When he unlocked the study door in the morning he was startled to see Marie bustling down the corridor, pushing the food service cart herself. That did not make sense, especially considering last night's statement about Eric. "I thought you'd want breakfast early," she coughed. "You didn't have to bother, honey. Eric could have done it." If she had been prying, the cart might have been a prop to take up as soon as he came out. On the other hand, what could she in her technical ignorance make of such matters anyway? It was best not to rouse any deeper suspicions by openly noticing her wifely iiosiness. At breakfast they pretended nothing had happened, devoting the time to mutually disapproved cousins, but all day long he kept wondering wheth long he kept wondering whether ignorant knowledge couldn't be as dangerous as the knowing kind. T HE next morning, after a long sleep, he went to the factory for the first of his semi-weekly work periods. He sat before a huge console, surveying scores of dials, at the end of a machine that was over five hundred yards long. Today it was turning out glass paper the color of watered blood, made only for Ritual publications, packing it in sheets and dispatching them in automatic trucks; but the machine could be adjusted to everything from metal sheeting to plastic felts. At the far end sat another man, diminished by distance, busily tending more dials that could really take care of themselves. After a while the man went out for a break. Hart ran a hundred yards to a section that was not working. He snapped it into the alloy supply and fed in the tape. In a minute, several dozen tiny contacts came down a chute. He pocketed them and disconnected the section just before his fellow worker reappeared. The man walked down the floor to him, looking curious. "Anything the matter?" he asked, hopeful for some break in routine. "No, just felt like a walk." "Know what you mean -- I feel restless too. Too bad this plant's only two years old. Boy, wouldn't she make a great disintegration!" He grinned, slapping a fender affectionately. Hart joined in the joke. "Gives us something to look forward to in ten years." "A good way to look at things," said the other man. At home he locked the contacts in a desk drawer. Tomorrow he would deliver most of them to Burnett's apartment. But the next morning an emergency letter came from his group leader, warning him not to appear there. I am going completely underground. I think they may suspect my activities. The dispersion plan must go into effect. You know how to reach Johnson and Wright and they each in turn can get to two others. Good luck! He had just put the letter in his pocket when Eric announced the arrival of a Rituals Inspector. The man had nervous closeset eyes and seemed embarrassed by his need to make such a visit. Hart took the offensive as his best defense. "I don't understand this, Inspector," he protested. "You people should be busy with High Holy preparations. Are you losing your taste for work?" "Now, now, Mr. Hart, that's a very unkind remark. I dislike this nonsense as much as anyone." His square jaw chewed into each word as he opened his scanning box. "It's the anti-social sabotage." "Do you mean to say I am under suspicion?" Marie was now loitering in the doorway, worse luck. "Oh, no. Nothing so insulting. This is strictly impersonal. The Scanning Center has picked apartments at complete random and we're to make spot checks." The eye at one end of the box blinked wickedly, waiting for an information feed. "Now, sir, if you'll pardon me, I'll just take the records from one of those desk drawers -- any drawer -- and put them in the box." Hart slid open a drawer. "No, sir, I think I'll try the next one. It's regulation not to accept suggestions." With a hand made deft by practise he scooped out all the sheets and tapes and put them in the box. The scanner's fingers rapidly sorted them past the eye. Hart exhaled, relieved that an innocuous drawer had been selected, and the inspector handed back the material to him. "Well, Inspector, that's that." "Not quite." The Inspector selected another drawer at the other end of the desk and dumped everything before the scanner. His examination was speeding up and that was not good; he would have time to take more sample readings. "Now if you'll empty your left pocket -- " H, this is too much!" Vr Marie exploded. "My husband struggles all night on secret work, studying to find ways to stop the antisocials, and you treat him like one of them!" "You're working on the problem?" the Inspector said respectfully. "What are you doing?" Frying pan to fire. Hart preferred the pan and pulled open a drawer. "It's too complicated, too much time needed to explain!" The Inspector glanced at his watch. "I'm falling behind schedule." He closed up his box. "Sorry, but I have to leave. Heavy time sheet today." As soon as he was gone, Hart breathed easier. Nothing incriminating would be fed into the Central Scanner. Marie became apologetic. "I'm sorry I said it, Wendell, but I couldn't keep quiet. All I did last night was peek in once or twice." He shrugged. "I'm just on a minor project." "Every bit counts." She shook her head. "Only you have to wonder -- I mean, don't think I'm treasoning, but while I was shopping an hour ago a lot of women said you have to think -- how come all that obsolescent junk could work so well, after being thoroughly wrecked, too? You almost wonder whether some of it was too good for disintegration." Wendell pretended to be shocked. "Just a fluke of circumstance. If something like that happened again you'd be right to wonder. But it could not ever happen again." "Don't get me wrong, Wendell. None of the women attacked anything. It was more like what you just said. They said if it happened again, then you'd have to wonder. But of course it couldn't happen again." How well the tables had turned! Not only had Marie's ignorant knowledge proven helpful but she had now given him a positive idea also. When he met Wright and Johnson at the latter's apartment that evening he explained it to them. "We can propagate 'dangerous' thoughts and yet appear completely loyal. We can set up the reaction to next High Holy Day." "How?" demanded Johnson. "That's having your cake and eating it." "Nothing's impossible in the human mind," Wright said. "Let's listen." "Here's the point. Wherever you go there will be people tsk-tsking about the Preliminary fiasco. Just reassure them, say it meant nothing at all by itself. If it ever happened again, then there would be room for doubt but, of course, it could not happen again!" Wright smiled. "That's almost feminine in its subtlety." He smiled back. "My wife inspired it. Don't get nervous -- it was unconscious, sheerly by acident." "Whatever the cause, it's the perfect result," Johnson conceded. "We'll spread it through the net." "Along with this, I hope." Wendell dumped the contacts on a table top. "It's the smallest size possible. A lot should get by unnoticed. Find cell members who can set up cryotrons with a wide range of instructions to cope with anything in the piles. Some weirdly alive concoctions of 'obsolescent' parts ought to result." "Some day the world's going to know what you've done for it," said Johnson solemnly. "That could happen too soon!" Miss Wright's face, honest and open in its horselike length, broke into a wide grin. "Amen," said Hart, adding the private hope that Marie, blessed with superior looks, might be able to show as much superior wisdom some day. T HE hope was not immediately fulfilled. When he reached home Marie was in a tizzy of excitement. "You're just in time, darling. They just caught three subversives. One of them was a woman," she added as this were compounding an improbability with an impossibility. "They're going to show them." He gripped his belt tightly. "A woman?" "That's right. There she is now." A uniformed officer was gently helping a pale little old woman sit down before the camera, as if she were more an object of pity than of fear. Hart relaxed. " -- caught red-handed with the incriminating papers," shouted an offstage announcer. "Handbills asserting objects declared obsolescent could actually last indefinitely!" "What do you have to say for yourself?" the officer asked gently. "You must realize, of course, that such irreligious behavior precludes your moving in general society for a long time to come." "I don't know what came over me," she sobbedin a tired voice. "Curiosity. Yes, curiosity, that's what it was. I saw these sheets of paper in the street and they said we should stop working so hard at compulsory tasks and start working to expand our own interests and personalities." "Self contradictory nonsense!" said the voice. "Yes, I know that. But it made me curious and I took it home to read, and it said our compulsory tasks were artificially manufactured and, if you didn't believe that, look at the pile that reactivated itself the other day." She stopped, reorganizing her thoughts. "Of course, though, that thing in the Plaza was unique, you know. I don't think it could mean a thing... unless it happened a few times. And the fact is it won't ever happen again." "Well, that much makes very good sense," said Marie. "You said the same thing, Wendell. I don't think that poor woman knew what she was doing -- just a dupe for subversive propaganda." " -- a dupe for subversive propaganda," the announcer was saying. "See, exactly what I said." "Yes. dear." How swiftly the decentralized underground was working! Hart could not tell whether the old woman was an active member or just a passive responder, but it did not matter. She was now spreading the seeds for future doubt across the land. Two old men were brought in and they mumbled the same disconnected story as their sister. "We have intensively interrogated these prisoners," boomed the announcer, "and know there is nothing more to the rumored anti-social plot than this stupid chatter. Remain vigilant and you have nothing to fear!" "You are sentenced to five years isolation from general society," said the officer, in a voice dulcet enough to sell advance orders for replacement products that had not yet been made. "Our intention is to protect you from bad influences. Our hope is that others will take your lesson to heart." "God bless you," said the woman and her brothers joined in effusive thanks. "Makes you proud to be a human being," Marie said. "I was getting some stupid doubts myself, dear. I must admit it. But that's all past. I can hardly wait for the Highest Holy Day." "Neither can I," sighed her husband. IV T HE next day at noon Eric came to him, functioning on the final set of servo instructions that had been installed in him at the factory of his birth eight years before. He shook hands with the two of them and said: "Now I am prepared for death." Marie was tearful. "I will miss you, Eric. If you were only under five years old your span could be extended." "Everything that happens is right," Eric said impassively. He clambered on to the operation table, instinctively knowing which flat surface was for him, and, breaking all his major circuits, gave up the ghost that only man could restore to him. Hart found his wife's grief easy to bear. The day after tomorrow she would join in the general exultation of High Holy Day, with Eric well forgotten. He methodically began smashing the surface of the limbs and torso; the greater the visible damage, the greater the honor redounding to the sacrifice donor. "This will be our gift to the general pile," he said. "I thought we could keep him for our garden sacrifice," Marie protested meekly. "Most people do." "But the other way is the greater sacrifice." There was no reply, because she knew he spoke for the deeper, more moving custom. But suddenly he began to act depressed himself. "I know we say it every ten years, but Eric was really the best companion we ever had." He gestured toward the table. "I want to sit here with him for a while -- alone." "That's carrying things too far, Wendell. A little grief is proper -- but this much is actually morbid." "It's all within my rights." She tossed her head petulantly. "Well, I've done my "are. I can't stand any more. It makes a person think and get depressed. I don't care what you're going to do. I'm going out to enjoy a Preliminary." "Can't blame you for that," he nodded. When she had gone he started to work on new instruction tapes for activating the servocryotron. Nothing could be surrendered to chance. Every possible circumstance in the pile had to be anticipated. There had to be instructions for action if Eric was crushed below fifty feet of metal, for assembling any kind of scrambled wiring, for adapting all types of parts in its immediate surroundings, for using these parts to absorb parts further away and for timing the operation to the start of the Highest Rite. Some tapes had been prepared earlier, so it was possible to put everything in the cryotron box before Marie returned, as well as to attach the tiny contact that would reach out from the box until it reached its first external scrap of wire or metal. "You poor darling," she pouted. "You missed the most wonderful thing ! They demolished a whole thirty-story building !" His blood, atavistically effected, pulsed faster until his new creed came to grips with his old emotions. "They usually don't bother with buildings for the Rites." "I know -- that's what was so wonderful! The State has decided to make this one the biggest Day of all time. We'll have enough work to fill the whole ten years! Everybody was so happy." "I'm sure they were." He caught himself in mid-sarcasm and said, "I'm sorry I missed it." "And I'm sorry I've been so selfishly self-centered." She frowned. "I forgot about it, but there were people in the crowd boasting they had been assigned to fight anti-social movements. I had to boast back that my husband had been honored too." He tensed. "Oh? What did they say to that?" "Frankly, they laughed." "I should think so. The Central Scanner didn't pick up anything except a lot of ineffective propaganda. The sabotage business was all hysteria." "That's just what they said -- the assignments were an empty honor." She coldly considered Eric. "I want to wreck him too." "I've smashed the insides," he said. "You'd better just work the surface." "That's all I want to do," she answered, starting to scratch traditional marks all over the dead robot. It gave her a full afternoon of happy, busy labor. T HE next day a large open truck came around and the street echoed to the appeal for contributions. Festival spirit was running high everywhere and when the neighborhood crowd saw the young robot porters carry Eric out there was a loud cheer of appreciation. "My husband decided on a major contribution right away," Marie announced to them. "It's the least we could do," he said modestly. Many onlookers, swept away by their example, rushed indoors to bring out additional items of sacrifice. But only two others gave up their robots. The rest clung to them for private Holy Night ceremonies. Soon Eric disappeared under the renewed deluge of egg-beaters and washers. "The best collection I have seen today," said the inspector accompanying the truck. "You people are to be congratulated for your exceptional patriotism." "Destroy!" they shouted back joyously. "Make work!" At dawn the Central Plaza was already crowded and new hordes kept pouring in from outlying areas. Wendell and his wife had been among the first to arrive. They waited, impatient in their separate ways, on the borderline five hundred yards from the tenstory pyre. Martial music roared from loudspeakers, interrupted by tiie mellifluous boom of a merchandising announcer: "New product! Better models! One hundred years of High Holy "Destroy !" came the returning shout. "Make work ! Work ! Work!" All the sounds echoed back and forth until baffled away by the open area across the Plaza, where one large structure had already been destroyed. Three others were slated for collapse today. "The biggest Holy Day ever," a restless old woman said to Marie. "I've seen all nine of them." "Eric's in there," Marie chatted back, superficially sad, deeply happy. "Who?" "Our house robot." "Imagine that! Did you hear that?" People gathered round them and cheered. The good-natured jostling continued until someone said : "Five minutes to go!" Wendell checked his watch. Somewhere in the pile at least one element was coming to life, a metal arm reaching out for brother metal to engulf in its cybernetic sweep. "They're coming!" A line of six shiny new slaggers came rumbling into the open with military precision. They moved along slowly, prolonging the pleasures of anticipation, then broke rank, each seeking its assigned point around the pile of appliances gathered for destruction. "The latest improved models," said the loudspeakers. "They will first perform fifteen minutes of automatic maneuvers." The military music resumed and each slagger turned, as if circling a coin, in clanking rhythm to it. "The three hundred and sixty degree turn. Next, making a box on the Plaza floor..." The voice stopped, appalled. A N avalanche of metal slid down one side of the pile and the crowd gasped. The downward movement viscously slowed ; then the metal, suddenly alive with the capacity to defy gravity, circled upward. Jagged limbs started flailing about. "Disintegrator attack!" screamed the loudspeakers. "Attack!" The maneuvers stopped. For one brief moment prior to changeover the Plaza was dead still, except for the deafening rumble in the pile. The slaggers broke the spell, rushing full speed toward the pile, evaporator beams working. One by one they faltered and were sucked into the destructive pyre. The crowd fell further back. The whole pile came alive like a mineral octupus. Then the squirming thing collapsed, every makeshift circuit irreparably broken and dead. Everything had been happening too fast for any pronounced reaction to accompany it; but now the world went crazy. "Stand firm!" pleaded the loudspeakers. "We will get reinforcements as soon as celebrations are finished elsewhere." A barrage of enormous boos came from the disintegrating mob. "Never again! Fakes! It's finished, done for!" "Stand firm!" But the breakup down side avenues continued. "I don't understand," Marie shuddered. "Everything's crazy. We've been deceived, Wendell. Who's been deceiving us?" "Nobody -- unless it's ourselves." "I don't understand that either." Saucer-eyed she watched a great clump of disgruntled people push past. "I have to think!" Suddenly, as they came around a corner, they were facing Burnett. Hart tried to disregard him but the group leader would have none of that. He rushed up to Hart. "Good to see a friendly face. Shocking developments !" His face was grim, but tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes betrayed an amusement that could only be discovered by those who looked for it. "Mr. Burnett," he explained to Marie. "A librarian at the main building. Mr. Burnett, my wife Marie." "I am most happy to meet you, Mrs. Hart. Have you heard the latest?" "No, Mr. Burnett." "The same tilings have been happening everywhere! They announced it on the radio and they're saying it's due to antisocial elements. Shocking!" She shook her head stubbornly. "I don't know what to think. Maybe we shouldn't be shocked, maybe we should be. I just don't know, Mr. Burnett. I came to enjoy myself and look how it's ended." She bravely held back a sob. "Maybe we'd have been better off if we've never heard about High Holy Days!" Burnett looked about with feigned apprehension. "You have to be careful what you say. The government says there's even talk -- subversive handbills -- about trying to rehabilitate some of the stuff in the piles." "The government ought to keep quiet!" she exploded. "They said this couldn't happen. You can't believe anything they say any more. The people decide and the government will have to listen, that's what I say! And I'm a pretty typical person, not one of your intellectual kind. No criticism of present company intended." "None taken, Mrs. Hart. Our human future," said Burnett, exchanging a grin with his aide, "remains, as it always has really been. Interesting -- to say the least!" after month trying to do the best we can in the way of producing an IF you'll like, and it's sometimes like dropping words down a well. We know you're out there because somebody buys all those magazines! But, specifically, who are you? One of you is Lawrence Crilly of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who writes: Is is too much to ask for a letter-col ? 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"Now -- " Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice -- "we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they Ve met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy -- enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. 'T have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. a A LL right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan -- in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard antiacceleration field into a potent weapon -- a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose -- " "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced "This a n t i a c conversion ; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort. Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time, he said. "I'd better not start any long books. "Youd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination, Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon.' "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "##I tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, ##I mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might mana age a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needier, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II R etief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think -- " "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. Its my lunch hour, he sai 'ril be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added.  Retief looked at him. quired accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next -- " . "Which gate?" Retief said. "For... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate #," he added quickly. "But -- " Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates #-#. "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. R etief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number # posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub." he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and vent up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fiftyseven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found sifrns, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expen sive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound hind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thicknecked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind ! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." ."You nuts?" The thicknecked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggagesmashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cir between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brassbound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the halL The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be -- "  "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. F ive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-n e c k e d man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from vour other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce.' "A space lawyer," The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softlyOne of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thicknecked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge. Captain." Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. " -- twenty minutes...uniform Code... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-n e c k e d man paused at the door. "We'll sec you when you come out." Ill F our waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh. Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at. Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a II man lik he was a worm. '"You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Bern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to J or gensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's in- formation was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him. Marbles!" he growled. The thick-n e c k e d man slipped a hand inside his timic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go. Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the fce, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back. fumbling a power pistol from bis shoulder holster. "Aim tliat at me, and I'll kill you' Retief said. "Go on, burn him !" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, whitefaced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of -- " "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you !" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled em pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee. Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of somediing," Retief said. "This is shaping tn into one of those long days." don't like me bringA ing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony grt on the captain. Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big cater when I was yer age," "I'll bet you can still handle it. Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'cm's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody clse's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip, What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists Sffty more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard head?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Pleilty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the Uoor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over,' Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it. Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' p a p i s s," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend. Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse arouiid," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Sfeiw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. Show him your paptr, you damned fool' the captain said hoarsely. '"I got no control over Skaw." T he alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. '"I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab -- " "You bluff easily. Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know tiieir secret now." "What secret? I -- " "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a threeman scout. It couU work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door... "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared. Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist. Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV R etief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me. Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you. Mister?" "That's right. Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A #mm needier. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute."  Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" he captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, CapIT tain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the c a p t a i n," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said ftly "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you -- " "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me. Retief took out the needier and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this." C'WHY don't you let me spell you, Mister?" Chp said. "Four hours to go yet. You're gonna hafta be on yer toes to handle the land ing. "I'll be all right. Chip. You get some sleep." "Nope. Many's the time I stood four, five watches rnnr'n', back when I was yer age. I'll make another round." Retief stood up, stretched his legs, paced the floor, stared at the repeater instruments on the wall. Things had gone quietly so far, but the landing would be another matter. The captain's absence from the bridge during the highly complex maneuvering would be difficult to explain... The desk speaker crackled. "Captain, Officer of the Watch here. Ain't it about time you was getting up here with the orbit figures?" Retief nudged the captain. He awoke with a start, sat up. " W h a z z a t ?" He looked wild-eyed at Retief. "Watch officer wants orbit .figures," Retief said, nodding toward the speaker. The captain rubbed his eyes, shook his head, picked up the mike. Retief released the safety on the needier with an audible click. "Watch Officer, I'll... ah...get some figures for you right away. I'm...ah...busy right now." "What the hell you talking about, busy?" the speaker blared. "You ain't got them figures ready, you'll have a hell of a hot time getting 'em up in the next three minutes. You forgot your approach pattern or something?" "I guess I overlooked it," the Captain said, looking sideways at Retief. "I've been busy." "One for your side," Retief said. He reached for the captain. "I'll make a deal," the captain squalled. "Your life for -- " Retief took aim and slammed a hard right to the captain's jaw. He slumped to the floor. Retief glanced around the room, yanked wires loose from a motile lamp, trussed the man's hands and feet, stuffed his mouth with paper and taped it. Chip tapped at the door. Retief opened it and the chef stepped inside, looking at the man on the floor. "The jasper tried somethin', huh? Figured he would. What we goin' to do now?" "The captain forgot to set up an approach, Chip. He outfoxed me." "If we overrun our approach pattern," Chip said, "we can't make orbit at Jorgensen's on automatic. And a manual approach -- " "That's out. But there's another possibility." Chip blinked. "Only one thing you could mean. Mister. But cuttin' out in a lifeboat in deep space is no picnic." "They're on the port side, aft, right?" Chip nodded. "Hot damn," he said. "Who's got the 'tater salad?" "We'd better tuck the skipper away out of sight." "In the locker." The two men carried the limp body to a deep storage chest, dumped it in, closed the lid. "He won't suffercate. Lid's a lousy fit." Retief opened the door went into the corridor. Chip behind him. "Shouldn't oughta be nobody around now," the chef said. "Everybody's mannin' approach stations." A t the D deck companionway, Retief stopped suddenly. "Listen." Chip cocked his head. "I don't hear nothin'," he whispered. "Sounds like a sentry posted on the lifeboat deck," Retief said softly. "Let's take him. Mister." "I'll go down. Stand by. Chip." Retief started down the narrow steps, half stair, half ladder. Halfway, he paused to listen. There was a sound of slow footsteps, then silence. Retief palmed the needier, went down the last steps quickly, emerged in the dim light of a low ceilinged room. The stern of a five-man lifeboat bulked before him. "Freeze, you!" a cold voice snapped. Retief dropped, rolled behind the shelter of the lifeboat as the whine of a power pistol echoed off metal walls. A lunge, and he was under the boat, on his feet. He jumped, caught the quick-access handle, hauled it down. The outer port cycled open. Feet scrambled at the bow of the boat. Retief whirled and fired. The guard rounded into sight and fell headlong. Above, an alarm bell jangled. Retief stepped on a stanchion, hauled himself into the open port. A yell rang, then the clatter of feet on the stair. "Don't shoot. Mister!" Chip shouted. "All clear. Chip," Retief called. "Hang on. I'm cornin' with ya !" Retief reached down, lifted the chef bodily through the port, slanuned the lever home. The outer door whooshed, clanged shut. "Take number two, tie in! I'll blast her off," Chip said. "Been through a hundred 'bandon ship drills..." Retief watched as the chef flipped levers, pressed a fat red button. The deck trembled under the lifeboat. "Blew the bay doors," Chip said, smiling happily. "That'll cool them jaspers down." He punched a green button. "Look out, Jorgensen's!" With an ear-splitting blast, the stern rockets fired, a sustained agony of pressure... Abruptly, there was silence. Weightlessness. Contracting metal pinged loudly. Chip's breathing rasped in the stillness. "Pulled nine G's there for ten seconds," he gasped. "I gave her full emergency kickoff." "Any armament aboard our late host?" "A popgun. Time they get their wind, we'll be clear. Now all we got to do is set tight till we pick up a R and D from Svea Tower. Maybe four, five hours." "Chip, you're a wonder," Retief said. "This looks like a good time to catch that nap." "Me too," Chip said. "Mighty peaceful here, ain't it?" There was a moment's silence. "Durn!" Chip said softly. Retief opened one eye. "Sorry you came, Chip?" "Left my best carvin' knife jammed up 'tween Marbles' ribs," the chef said. "Comes o' doin' things in a hurry." V T he blopde girl brushed her hair from her eyes and smiled at Retief. "I'm the only one on duty," she said. "I'm Anne-Marie." "It's important that I talk to someone in your government, Miss," Retief said. The girl looked at Retief. "The men you want to see are Tove and Bo Bergman. They will be at the lodge by nightfall." "Then it looks like we go to the lodge," Retief said. "Lead on, Anne-Marie." "What about the boat?" Chip asked. "I'll send someone to see to it tomorrow," the girl said. "You're some gal," Chip said admiringly. "Bern near six feet, ain't ye? And built, too, what I mean." They stepped out of the door into a whipping wind. "Let's go across to die equipment sbed and get parkas for you," Anne-Marie said. "It will be cold on the slopes." "Yeah," Chip said, shivering. "I've heard you folks don't believe in ridin' ever time you want to go a few miles uphill in a blizzard." "It will make us hungry." Anne-Marie said. "Then Chip will cook a wonderful meal for us all." Chip blinked. "Been cookin' too long," he muttered. "Didn't know it showed on me that way." Behind the sheds across the wind-s c o u r e d ramp abrupt peaks rose, snow-blanketed. A faint trail led across white slopes, disappearing into low clouds. "The lodge is above Ae cloud layer," Anne-Marie said. "Up there the sky is always clear." It was three hours later, and the sun was burning the peaks red, when Anne-Marie stopped, pulled off her woolen cap and waved at the vista below. "There you see it," she said. "Our valley." "It's a mighty perty sight," Chip gasped. "Anything this tough to get a look at ought to be." Ann e-M arie pointed. "There," she said. "The little red house by itself. Do you see it, Retief? It is my father's home-acre." Retief looked across the valley. Gaily painted houses nestled together, a puddle of color in the bowl of the valley. '"I think you've led a good life there," he said. Anne-Marie smiled brilliantly. '"And this day, too, is good." Retief smiled back. "Yes," he said. "This day is good." "It'll be a durn sight better when I got my feet up to that big fire you was talking about, Annie," Chip said. They climbed on, crossed a shoulder of broken rock, reached the final slope. Above, the lodge sprawled, a long low structure of heavy logs, outlined against the deep-blue twilight sky. Smoke billowed from stone chimneys at either end, and yellow light gleamed from the narrow windows, reflected on the snow. Men and women stood in groups of three or four, skis over their shoulders. Their voices and laughter rang in the icy air. Anne-Marie whistled shrilly. Someone waved. "Come," she said. "Meet all my friends." A man separated himself from the group, walked down the slope to meet them. "Anne-Marie," he called. "Welcome. It was a long day without you." He came up to them, hugged Anne-Marie, smiled at Retief. "Welcome," he said. "Come inside and be warm." They crossed the trampled snow to the lodge and pushed through a heavy door into a vast low-beamed hall, crowded with people, talking, singing, some sitting at long plank tables, others ringed around an eight-foot fireplace at the far side of the room. Anne-Marie led the way to a bench near the fire. She made introductions and found a stool to prop Chip's feet near the blaze. Chip looked around. "I never seen so many perty gals before," he said delightedly. "Poor Chip," one girl said. "His feet are cold." She knelt to pull off his boots. "Let me rub them," she said. A brunette with blue eyes raked a chestnut from the fire, cracked it and offered it to Retief. A tall man with arms like oak roots passed heavy beer tankards to the two guests. "Tell us about the places you've seen," someone called. Chip emerged from a long pull at the mug, heaving a sigh. "Well," he said. "I tell you I been in some places..." Music started up, rising above the clamor. "Come, Retief," Anne-Marie said. "Dance with me." Retief looked at her. "My thought exactly," he said. and sighed. "Derned if I ever felt right at home so quick before," he said. "Just seems like these folks know all about me." He scratched behind his right ear. "Annie must o' called 'em up and told 'em our names an' all." He lowered his voice. "They's some kind o trouble in the air, though. Some o' the remarks they passed sounds like they're lookin' to have some trouble with the Sweaties. Don't seem to worry 'em none, though." "Chip," Retief said, "how much do these people know about the Soetti?" "Dunno," Chip said. "We useta touch down here, regler. But I always jist set in my galley and worked on ship models or somethin'. I hear the Sweaties been nosin' around here some, though." Two girls came up to Chip. "Hey, I gotta go now. Mister," he said. "These gals got a idea I oughta take a hand in the kitchen." "Smart girls," Retief said. He turned as Anne-Marie came up. "Bo Bergman and Tove are not back yet," she said. "They stayed to ski after moonrise." "That moon is something," Retief said. "Almost like daylight." "They will come soon, now. Shall we go out to see the moonlight on the snow?" Outside, long black shadows fell like ink on silver. The top of the cloud layer below glared white under the immense moon. "Our sister world, Gota," Anne-Marie said. "Nearly as big as Svea. I would like to visit it someday, although they say it's all stone and ice." "Anne-Marie," Retief said, "how many people live On Jorgensen's Worlds?" of us here on Svea. There are mining camps and ice-fisheries on Gota. No one lives on Vasa and Skone, but there are always a few hunters there." "Have you ever fought a war?" Anne-Marie turned to look at Retief. "You are afraid for us, Retief," she said. "The Soetti will attack our worlds, and we will fight them. We have fought before. These planets were not friendly ones." "I thought the Soetti attack would be a surprise to you," Retief said. "Have you made any preparation for it?" "We have ten thousand merchant ships. When the enemy comes, we will meet them." Retief frowned. "Are there any guns on this planet? Any missiles?" Anne-Marie shook her head. "Bo Bergman and Tove have a plan of deployment -- " "Deployment, hell! Against a modern assault force you need modern armament." "Look!" Ann e-M a r i e touched Retief 's arm. "They're coming now." Two tall grizzled men came up the slope, skis over their shoulders. Anne-Marie went forward to meet them, Retief at her side. The two came up, embraced the girl, shook hands with Retief, put down their skis. "Welcome to Svea," Tove said. "Let's find a warm corner where we can talk.' smiling, as a tall girl with coppery hair offered a vast slab of venison. "I've caught up," he said, "far every hungry day I ever lived." Bo Bergman poured Retief's beer mug full. "Our captains are the best in space," he said. "Our population is concentrated in half a hundred small cities all across the planet. We know where the Soetti must strike us. We will ram their major vessels with umnanned ships. On the ground, we will hunt them down with small-arms." "An assembly line turning out penetration missiles would have been more to the point." "Yes," Bo Bergman said. "If we had known." "How long have you known the Soetti were planning to hit you?" Tove raised his eyebrows. "Since this afternoon," he said. "How did you find out about it? That information is supposed in some quarters to be a well# :uarded secret." "Secret?" Tove said. Chip pulled at Retiefs arm. "Mister," he said in Retief's ear. "Come here a minute." Retief looked at Anne-Marie, across at Tove and Bo Bergman. He rubbed the side of his face with his hand. "Excuse me," he said. He followed Chip to one side of the room. "Listen!" Chip said. "Maybe I'm goin' bats, but I'll swear there's somethin' funny here. I'm back there mixin' a sauce knowed only to me and the devil and I dog if them gals don't pass me ever dang spice I need, without me sayin' a word. Come to put my souffle in the oven -- she's already set, right on the button at #. An' just now I'm settin' lookin' at one of 'em bendin' over a tub o' apples -- snazzy little brunette name of Leila -- derned if she don't turn around and say -- " Chip gulped. "Never mind. Point is..." His voice nearly faltered. "It's almost like these folks was readin' my mind!" Retief patted Chip on the shoulder. "Don't worry about your sanity. Old Timer," he said. "That's exactly what they're doing." VI #Tj#TE'VE never tried to make a secret of it," Tove said. "But we haven't advertised it, either." "It really isn't much," Bo Bergman said. "Not a mutant ability, our scholars say. Rather, it's a skill we've stumbled on, a closer empathy. We are few, and far from the old home world. We've had to learn to break down the walls we had built around our minds." Can you read the Soetti?" Hetief asked. Tove shook his head. '"Theyre very different from us. It's painful to touch their minds. We can only sense the sub-vocalized thoughts of a human mind." "WeVe seen very few of the Soetti," Bo Bergman said. 'TTheir ships have landed and taken on stores. They say little to us, but weVe felt their contempt. They envy us our worlds. They come from a cold land." "Anne-Marie says you have a plan of defense," Retief said. "A sort of suicide squadron idea, followed by guerrilla warfare." It's the best we can devise, Retief. If there aren't too many of them, it might work." Retief shook his head. "It might delay matters -- but not much." "Perhaps. But our remote control equipment is excellent. And we have plenty of ships, albeit unarmed. And our people know how to live on the slopes -- and how to shoot." "There are too many of them, Tove," Retief said. "They breed like flies and, according to some sources, they mature in a matter of months. They've been feeling their way into the sector for years now. Set up outposts on a thousand or so minor planets -- cold ones, the kind they like. They want your worlds because they need living space." "At least, your warning makes it possible for us to muster some show of force, Retief," Bo Bergman said. "That is better than death by ambush." "Retief must not be trapped here," Anne-Marie said. "His small boat is useless now. He must have a ship." "Of c o u r s e," Tove said. "And -- " "My mission here -- " Retief said. "Retief," a voice called. "A message for you. The operator has phoned up a gram." Retief unfolded the slip of paper. It was short, in verbal code, and signed by Magnan. "You are recalled herewith," he read. "Assignment canceled. Agreement concluded with Soetti relinquishing all claims so-called Jorgensen system. Utmost importance that under no repeat no circumstances classified intelligence regarding Soetti be divulged to locals. Advise you depart instanter. Soetti occupation imminent." Retief looked thoughtfully at the scrap of paper, then crumpled it and dropped it on the floor. He turned to Bo Bergman, took a tiny reel of tape from his pocket. "This contains information," he said. "The Soetti attack plan, a defensive plan instructions for the conversion of a standard anti-acceleration unit into a potent weapon. If you have a screen handy, we'd better get started. We have about seventy-two hours." I N the Briefing Room at Svea Tower, Tove snapped off the projector. "Our plan would have been worthless against that," he said. "We assumed they'd make their strike from a standard in-line formation. This scheme of hitting all our settlements simultaneously, in a random order from all points -- we'd have been helpless." "It's perfect for this defensive plan," Bo Bergman said. "Assuming this antiac trick works." "It works," Retief said. "I hope you've got plenty of heavy power lead available." "We export copper," Tove said. "We'll assign about two hundred vessels to each settlement. Linked up, they should throw up quite a field." "It ought to be effective up to about fifteen miles, I'd estimate," Tove said. "If it works as it's supposed to." A red light flashed on the communications panel. Tove went to it, flipped a key. "Tower, Tove here," he said. "I've got a ship on the scope, Tove," a voice said. "There's nothing scheduled. "Just one?" "A lone ship, coming in on a bearing of ###. On manual, rd say." "How does this track key in ing a manual correction for a missed automatic approach?" Retief asked. Tove talked to the tower, got a reply. "That's it," he said. "How long before he touches down?" Tove glanced at a lighted chart. "Perhaps eight minutes. "Any guns here?" Tove shook his head. "If that's old #, she ain't got but the one #mm rifle," Chip said. "She cain't figure on jumpin' the whole planet." "Hard to say what she figures on," Retief said. "Mr. Tony will be in a mood for drastic measures." "I wonder what kind o' deal the skunks got with the Sweaties." Chip said. "Prob'ly he gits to scavenge, after the Sweaties kill off the Jorgensens." "He's upset about our leaving him without saying goodbye, Chip," Retief said. "And you left the door hanging open, too." Chip cackled. "Old Mr. Tony don't look so good to the Sweaties now, hey, Mister?" Retief turned to Bo Bergman. "Chip's right," he said. "A Soetti died on the ship, and a tourist got through the cordon. Tony's out to redeem himself." "He's on final now," the tower operator said. "Still no contact." "We'll know soon enough what he has in mind," Tove said. "Let's take a look." Outside, the four men watched the point of fire grow, evolve into a ship ponderously settling to rest. The drive faded and cut; silence fell. the speaker called out. Bo Bergman went inside, talked to the tower, motioned to the others. " -- over to you," the speaker was saying. There was a crackling moment of silence ; then another voice. " -- illegal entry. Send the two of them out. I'll see to it they're dealt with." Tove fipped a key. "Switch me direct to the ship," he said. "Right." said. "Who are you?" "What's that to you?" "You weren't cleared to berth here. Do you have an emergency aboard?" "Never mind that, you," the speaker rumbled. "I tracked the bird in. I got the lifeboat on the screen now. They haven't gone far in nine hours. Let's have 'em." "You're wasting your time," Tove said. There was a momentary silence. "You think so, hah?" the speaker blared. "I'll put it to you straight. I see two guys on their way out in one minute, or I open up." "He's bluffin'". Chip said. "The popgun won't bear on us." "Take a look out the window," Retief said. In the white glare of the moonlight, a loading cover swung open at the stern of the ship, dropped down and formed a sloping ramp. A squat and massive shape appeared in the opening, trundled down onto the snowswept tarmac. Chip whistled. "I told you the Captain was slippery," he muttered. "Where the devil'd he git that at?" "What is it?" Tove asked. "A tank," Retief said. "A museum piece, by the look of it." "I'll say," Chip said. That's a Bolo Resartus, Model M. Built mebbe two hunderd years ago in Concordiat times. Packs a wallop, too. I'll tell ye." The tank wheeled, brought a gun muzzle to bear in the base of the tower. "Send 'em out," the speaker growled. "Or I blast 'em out." "One round in here, and I've had a wasted trip," Retief said. "I'd better go out." "Wait a minute. Mister," Chip said. l got the glimmerin's of a idear." "I'll stall them," Tove said. He keyed the mike. thority for this demand? "'I know that machine Chip said. "My hobby, oldtime fightin' machines. Built a model of a Resartus once, inch to the foot. A beauty. Now, lessee..." T he icy wind blew snow crystals stingingly against Retief's face. "Keep your hands in your pockets, Chip," he said. "Numb hands won't hack the program." "Yeah." Chip looked across at the tank. "Useta think that was a perty thing, that Resartus he said. "Looks mean, now." "You're getting the target'seye view," Retief said. "Sorry you had to get mixed up in this. Old Timer." "Mixed myself in. Burn good thing, too." Chip sighed. "I like these folks," he said. "Them boys didn't like lettin us come out here, but I'll give 'em credit. They seen it had to be this way, and they didn't set to moanin' about it." "They're tough people. Chip." "Funny how it sneaks up on you, ain't it, Mister? Few minutes ago we was eatin' high on the hog. Now we're right close to bein' dead men." "They want us alive. Chip." "It'll be a hairy deal. Mister," Chip said. "But t'hell with it. If it works, it works." "That's the spirit." "I hope I got them fields o' fire right -- " "Don't worry. I'll bet a barrel of beer we make it." "We'll find out in about ten seconds," Chip said. As they reached the tank, the two men broke stride and jumped. Retief leaped for the gun barrel, swung up astride it, ripped off the fur-lined leather cap he wore and, leaning forward, jammed it into the bore of the cannon. The chef sprang for a perch above the fore scanner antenna. With an angry whuff! antipersonnel charges slammed from apertures low on the sides of the vehicle. Retief swung around, pulled himself up on the hull. "Okay, Mister," Chip called. "I'm going under." He slipped down the front of the tank, disappeared between the treads. Retief clambered up, took a position behind the turret, lay flat as it whirled angrily, sonar eyes searching for its tormentors. The vehicle shuddejred, backed, stopped, moved forward, pivoted. Chip reappeared at the front of the tank. "It's stuck," he called. He stopped to breathe hard, clung as the machine lurched forward, spun to the right, stopped, rocking slightly. "Take over here," Retief said. He crawled forward, watched as the chef pulled himself up, slipped down past him, feeling for the footholds between the treads. He reached the ground, dropped on his back, hitched himself under the dark belly of the tank. He groped, found the handholds, probed with a foot for the tread-jack lever. The tank rumbled, backed quickly, turned left and right in a dizzying sine curve. Retief clung grimly, inches from the clashing treads. The machine ground to a halt. Retief found the lever, braced his back, pushed. The lever seemed to give minutely. He set himself again, put both feet against the frozen bar and heaved. With a dry rasp, it slid back. Imniediately two heavy rods extended themselves, moved down to touch the pavement, grated. The left track creaked as the weight went off it. Suddenly the tank's drive raced, and Retief grabbed for a hold as the right tread clashed, heaved the fifty-ton machine forward. The jacks screeched as they scored the tarmac, then bit in. The tank pivoted, chips of pavement flying. The jacks extended, lifted the clattering left track clear of the surface as the tank spun like a hamstrung buffalo. The tank stopped, sat silent, canted now on the extended jacks. Retief emerged from under the machine, jumped, pulled himself above the antipersonnel apertures as another charge rocked the tank. He clambered to the turret. crouched beside Chip. They waited, watching the entry hatch. Five minutes passed. 'T'll bet Old Tony's givin' the chauffeur hell," Chip said. The hatch cycled open. A head came cautiously into view in time to see the needier in Retiefs hand. "Come on out," Retief said. The head dropped. Chip snaked forward to ram a short section of steel rod under the hatch near the hinge. The hatch began to cycle shut, groaned, stopped. There was a sound of metal failing, and the hatch popped open. Retief half rose, aimed the needier. The walls of the tank rang as the metal splinters ricocheted inside. "That's one keg o' beer I owe you. Mister," Chip said. "Now let's git outa here before the ship lifts and fries us." biggest problem the Jorgensen's people will have is decontaminating the wreckage," Retief said. Magnan leaned forward. "Amazing," he said. "They just keep coming, did they? Had they no inter-ship communication?" "They had their orders," Retief said. "And their attack plan. They followed it." "What a spectacle," Magnan said. "Over a thousand ships, plunging out of control one by one as they entered the stress-field." "Not much of a spectacle," Retief said. "You couldn't see them. Too far away. They all crashed back in the mountains." "Oh." Magnan's face fell. "But it's as well they did. The bacterial bombs -- " "Too cold for bacteria. They won't spread." "Nor will the Soetti," Magnan said smugly, "thanks to the promptness with which I acted in dispatching you with the requisite data." He looked narrowly at Retief. "By the way, you're sure no...ah... message reached you after your arrival?" "I got something," Retief said, looking Magnan in the eye. "It must have been a garbled transmission. It didn't make sense." Magnan coughed, shuffled papers. "This information you've reported," he said hurriedly. "This rather fantastic story that the Soetti originated in the Cloud, that they're seeking a foothold in the main Galaxy because they've literally eaten themselves but of subsistence -- how did you get it? The one or two Soetti we attempted to question, ah... " Magnan coughed again. "There was an accident," he finished. "We got nothing from them." "The Jorgensens have a rather special method of interrogating prisoners," Retief said. "They took one from a wreck, still alive but unconscious. They managed to get the story from him. He died of it." "It's immaterial, actually," Magnan said. "Since the Soetti violated their treaty with us the day after it was signed. Had no intention of fair play. Far from evacuating the agreed areas, they had actually occupied half a dozen additional minor bodies in the Whate system." Retief clucked sympathetically. "You don't know who to trust, these days," he said. Magnan looked at him coldly"Spare me your sarcasm, Mr. Retie f," he said. He picked up a folder from his desk, opened it. "By the way, I have another little task for you, Retief. We haven't had a comprehensive wild-life cen sus report from Brimstone lately -- " "Sorry," Retief said. "I'll be tied up. I'm taking a month off. Maybe more." "What's that ?" Magnan's head came up. "You seem to forget -- " "I'm trying, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "Good-by now." He reached out and flipped the key. Magnan's face faded from the screen. Retief stood up. "Chip," he said, "we'll crack that keg when I get back." He turned to Anne-Marie. "How long," he said, "do you think it will take you to teach me to ski by moonNever look in a mirror -- some day it may look bock! T he thin trembling man leaned forward tensely in his chair, his face drawn. His eyes, set deep in their sockets, were dull and expressionless. Yet they were oddly alive with an irrepressible anxiety. "IVe got to get back." His voice was a grim whisper and his hands went white at the knuckles where they clung to the armrests as he tried to rise. Two men, dressed in the short-sleeved, white uniform of the institution, stepped forward ominously. Shuddering, the man sank back hopelessly into the chair. Across the desk Dr. James Stanton studied him intently -- for the moment disregarding the two older men who sat on the doctor's right and left. "Perhaps, Professor Yardley," Stanton said pleasantly, "you will be allowed to return home -- after we have finished our business here." Yardley's lips tightened. "You have no intention of letting me go back to my laboratory." His pleading voice became acid. "But you can't keep me here!' Leaning back in a chair that creaked under h i s broad frame, Dr. Justin Leonard smiled patiently and raised a bushy eyebrow. "There may be disastrous consequences if we don't release you. Professor?" Yardley sighed forlornly but his tone was strong, his words resonant with sincerity. "Thc consequences;, sir, are unimaginable! yourself?" Dr. Dennis Morgan, stout and bespectacled, leaned forward. "To us? Or to the world in general. Professor?" Yardley ran a hand through his sparse white hair and dropped his gaze to the floor. 'You'll never let me go," he muttered. His eyes darted accusingly from one observer to the other. "You're a commission, aren't you? You're to decide whether I'm mad! You're sitting in judgment on me!" His gaze leaped from Stanton to the middle-aged woman who sat against the wall, her hands folded prudently in her lap. "You're responsible, Lydia!" he accused. "You arranged this!" "Now, Uncle Baldwin," the woman answered indulgently, "we're only doing what we think best." He turned to Stanton. "Don't you understand her motivation, doctor? I'm a wealthy man. I like to pursue scientific truths, no matter how unorthodox they may seem. I spend considerable money for equipment for my basement laboratory -- money which might otherwise eventually pass on to my niece and nephew. But they don't want to wait! They -- " "Please, Professor." Stanton was reproving. "You mustn't excite yourself." He studied Yardley thoughtfully. Then, "All right. Professor. I'll be candid. We are a sanity commission. We will decide your degree of mental fitness. Now, hadn't you better co-operate?" Yardley relaxed. The two guards relaxed with him. "All right, then," he said submissively, "if there's no other way... "Fine !" Stanton smiled warmly. "N o v, I understand -- " "Do you have a mirror?" the professor cut in. "A mirror?" "Yes, any reflecting surface will do." Stanton looked wary. Yardley explained, "A simple demonstration may save a good deal of time." Stanton cleared his throat. "I'm afraid we shall have to stick to procedure. Now, I understand -- rather, your niece tells me -- that you have dedicated a good many years to the investigation of a certain theory." "Thirty years." "Will you tell us about it. Professor." It was a directive, not a question. "As I have already said, it's unorthodox and you'll probably -- " "The theory. Professor," Stanton insisted. "Very well." Yardley yielded, his words hollow with resignation. "Our world is coexistent with another. For every particle on this side -- no matter how minute or how large -- there is an identical particle on the other. For every individual, every animal, every force here, there is a counterpart in the other world.' a half-smile. Lydia Frame's did not. They traded glances. 'The mirrors, uncle," Lydia suggested eagerly, "tell them about the mirrors like you tell everybody else." Yardley stared reproachfully at her. "There is more to the theory?" Leonard asked. "More?" Yardley repeated. "Much more. As my niece suggests, I shall tell you about mirrors. Reflecting surfaces -- his eyes flashed eagerly -- "are not reflecting surfaces at all! There is no such thing as looking into a mirror and seeing an image of yourself! Mirrors are windows -- windows that allow us to look into this other world which exists in us, around us, with us!" He paused, breathing erratically. Stanton exchanged cautious glances with the other psychiatrists. The guards became rigidly attentive. Yardley went on with more vocal restraint. "There is a force that exists between the reciprocal worlds or planes of existence... a force which guarantees that every causal effect in this world will be duplicated in exactly the same space and time, in the othft "In other words, Stanton interrupted, suppressing an amused smile, "the force -- " "Let me finish!" Yardley cut in. "The reciprocal nature of the force determines that if you write a letter in this world your counterpart will write a letter in the other. If you walk in front of a mirror in this plane, the other you will do the same thing in the other plane. If you leave this building and proceed to another to stare into a new mirror your duplicate will do the same thing simultaneously." One of the guards snickered, then shrank visibly and resumed his srtrem expression under Stanton's reprimanding glare. "Does this have anything to do," Dr. Morgan asked, "with the -- er -- contraption you built in your basement?" "Make him tell you about it, doctor," Lydia begged. The door opened behind Stanton as a young blonde girl came in with a bulging file folder and deposited it on the desk. Yardley staring through the open door, sprang to his feet. The guards seized his arms. Stanton turned to follow the professor's incredulous stare into the other room. Yardley's eyes were locked on a fulllength mirror that reflected his own erratic motions as he attempted to break free from his captors. But they held on grimly and he went limp. "Good  Lord V he exclaimed hopelessly. "They've got Yardley over there too!" Unperturbed by the episode the blonde casually left the office, closing the door after her. The guards lowered the professor into his chair. "You've got to take me back to the laboratory!" Yardley begged Stanton. "Don't you see that with both of us captured there's no one left to -- " "The contraption, Professor," Stanton reminded him. Yardley sighed and his shoulders sagged. "Yes, I built what my niece calls a 'contraption.' " "Two of them," Lydia corrected. "Two contraptions and the mirror, uncle. Tell them about it." "Mirror?" Stanton questioned. "Yes," Lydia explained. "One entire wall of the basement is a mirror. That piece of glass must have cost thousands. It's a single pane. Had to tear out the side of the house to install it." Stanton returned his attention to the professor. "What are these contraptions?" D isturbed, Yardley ran bony fingers through his hair. "Twenty years, doctor," he began emotionally. "It took twenty years to detect the presence of the force, another five years to study it and another five to learn how to modify it." "And now," Morgan suggested, "you have mastered the force which insures that articles and actions will be duplicated between the two worlds?" He made a vain attempt to hide his smile. Yardley shook his head. "Control it? No. Affect it? Yes. I learned that I could disrupt the force. By erecting a counter-field, I found I could effect actions in this world that were entirely independent of actions in the other. This counter-force made it possible for me to light a cigarette here and discover that in the other plane -- the one seen beyond the mirror -- I hadn't quite finished the previous cigarette . had evidently decided to take one more puff." The guard nearer Yardley laughed again. This time Stanton made no attempt to constrain him. "You mean," Stanton asked, "that your image in the mirror did not reflect your actions?" "Crudely put that's what happened," Yardley replied. "But it required many experiments before I detected any such result. You see, even though at one particular instant the force might be disrupted, freeing me and the other Baldwin Yardley from reciprocating motions, it required several hours before the divergency of our movements across the mirror became perceptible. "We speculated on the cause. And we decided we were such exact duplicates, with identical reflexes and responses, that even though we suddenly became mutually independent, several hours would probably pass before one of us acted in an uncharacteristic manner -- like impulsively extinguishing a cigarette prematurely." Leonard rose. "Really, Dr. Stanton, is it necessary to continue? I have another appointment -- " he withdrew his fountain pen -- "and I believe I'm quite ready to sign the form." Yardley sprang up, then sat down again as the guards moved toward him. "You've got to believe me!" he shouted. "Good God, Stanton ! They've got to believe one of us Yardleys!" Stanton motioned Leonard back into his chair. "If we dont believe you. Professor... then what?" "Sir," Yardley suggested gravely, "would you enjoy meeting yourself on the street? Finding yourself involved in an argument with two identical women, each claiming to be your wife? Can't you appreciate what would suffer unbearable mental harassment in the grim realization that a mirror does more than reflect images ! The world would develop a phobia toward mirrors. Then, when the two worlds found out that entry was mutually possible. each would become the limitless victim of the other's vices. "Wouldn't it be simple to murder an enemy, flee to the other world and let authorities wrangle hopelessly over the identity of the actual murderer? And might not the Paris in this world assume that it was the rightful capital not only of this world's France but also of the other world's? Wars would start twice as easily, be twice as horrible and -- " "Am I to understand," Dr. Morgan asked, smiling, "that you've found means of -- er -- walking through mirrors. Pardon -- windows?" resentment. "You're humoring me -- all of you! Well, let me recount a recent experiment -- number thirtyeight of the current series. "I activated the dissonance crystal and waited for the charges to build up. As I stood patiently beside the amplification lenses, I stared at the Yardley in the mirror. "He stared back at me. Then, suddenly he raised his hand and scratched his cheek ! Mind you, he did this before the charge in the crystal had built up sufficiently to throw the inter-world force out of rhythm ! "That could mean only one thing -- diverse movement was actually independent of subsequent exposures to the crysta! after the initial exposure! In simple terms -- a single exposure is all that is needed to interrupt the force permanently. After that exposure it is possible for Yardley One and Yardley Two to continue acting independently! 'Furthermore any material object with which Yardley One or Yardley Two come into contact is also permanently removed from the field of reciprocating forces. I found that out in experiment thirtynine, after turning off the ceiling light in the basement. Later a man from the equipment supply company made a delivery. He turned on the overhead light. But the ref lection o the bulb in the mirror did not light up! What is more serious is the fact that as a result of the man's contact with the affected light switch he will eventually be affected too, as will every object he comes in contact with! It's a chain reaction." Leonard and Morgan looked at each other in evident annoyance. But Stanton continued to stare reservedly at the professor. Yardley went on. "But back to experiment number thirtyeight, which I'm sure you gentlemen will find most fascinating. I had just -- and I might add needlessly -- activated the crystal and had observed that the other Yardley was already displaying independent movement. Confused, I walked over to the mirror. He approached his own mirror too. "'Did you notice it?' I asked. "'The free motion?' he answered. 'Yes, I noticed. Yardley, I'm afraid.' " 'That the field might not have to be rebuilt each time we want to act independently? That, once activated, our divergent natures might continue independent of further field stimulation?' " 'Then you've been thinking about it too,' he said with something like consternation. " 'I'm afraid so,' I answered. 'And I'm frightened.' "Reciprocating insects buzzed around each of our heads, landed on our cheeks. We both slapped. I'm afraid the other Yardley was faster -- his reflexes were a bit more accurate. He killed his insect. I missed mine. "The surviving jnosquito or whatever it was darted toward the mirror. It flew through the mirror r The professor was momentarily silent, staring at each of the psychiatrists in turn. "We hadn't even considered the possibility that beside being windows between the vorlds, mirrors might also be doors," he continued. "I'm afraid that we were both stunned by the realization. "But the other Yardley recovered first. He seized an ornate stiletto on his desk and hurled it at the mirror. It came through! Landed at my feet. Then he stepped through -- into our world!" Stanton absently thumbed through a stack of papers on his desk, his chin resting on the back of his other hand. "Naturally," Yardley went on, "we were elated at the discovery. We could see only the beneficial results. Two worlds with the possibility of an interchange of knowledge that each would acquire individually as the divergent development continued after we built a door powerful enough to encompass the entire world. "But I'm afraid the beautiful icing successfully concealed the awful cake. On further thought, we arrived independently at the decision that contact would never be feasible -- that the best course was for us to destroy the crystals and lenses and allow everything to return to normal. "Sadly, we burned our notes and disconnected lenses and crystals. We left only the hulls of consoles which had housed priceless equipment." Yardley compressed his lips. "But that did not return conditions to normal, gentlemen. Weeks passed and still Yardley and I were independent of each other -- were showing no indications of being drawn back into the bi-universal design of reciprocity! And further experimentation proved the more horrible truth : "Objects with which we came in contact were immediately being removed from the effects of the natural force! Lydia bought me a new desk lamp. The other Lydia bought the other Yardley a new desk lamp. The boy from Colfax's Department Store who delivered the lamp in our world walked out of the door a full ten seconds before his image left the basement wall mirror ! When he returned the next day with a replacement for the dented base his image did not return at all!" Ax Stanton asked, humoringly. "I was behind the mirror housing at the time," Yardley explained. "He couldn't see my reflection. My overhead light was on, but the other Yardley's wasn't. I guess the boy thought the reflection was really an extension of the room. "The other Yardley and I discussed the matter immediately with grave concern. And we were fortunate. By pooling our mental resources, we were able to design the counter-field -- or reverse-image -- reflectors, "By building a powerful counter-activator we felt we would meet with success by flooding the entire area with sufficiently strong vibrations to rock ourselves and the objects we had come in contact with back into the reciprocity design. Wc' would then destroy all the equipment and discontinue the experiments' Stanton asked patiently, "And this other activator -- did it work?" "You fool!" Yardley rose shaking. "Don't you realize that's the reason I must get back to the laboratory? Yardley and I had barely completed our work when your strong-arm men came bursting in." There was silence in the room. "Will you let me go back home?" Yardley begged. "Just for a day! That's all I ask! Just long enough time to activate the counter-reflectors. Lord, man -- you've got to ! Just think -- each object I came in contact with will come in contact with other objects and those will influence still others in an endless chain reaction. It may take a few days -- but soon there'll be pandemonium! And it will spread. It may take year s -- even centuries -- but eventually the whole world will be freed from the force that insures reciprocity!" "I'm afraid, dear uncle," Lydia said mildly, "that even if they did allow you to return home, you'd find things quite different in the basement." "No!" he shouted hoarsely. "Yesterday, just after you were taken away, the carpenters and moving men came. They removed the mirror first, then your other contraptions. Really, uncle, the basement will make an excellent rumpus room -- after they get it all cleared out." The professor shook uncontrollably. "You've got to let me get more equipment!" he begged Stanton. "The counter-reflector must be rebuilt !" The guards stood close to him, on the alert. Stanton merely stared pityingly. The blonde entered again and walked toward the desk with another folder. "If I can prove it," Yardley demanded eagerly, "will you let me go back?" Before Stanton could reply the professor reached into his inner coat pocket and withdrew a stiletto. The guards dived for his arm. The blonde and Lydia screamed in shrill duet. But Yardley had already thrust his hand back over his shoulder. He hurled the dagger forward. Stanton ducked. The blade flew well over his head and into the reception room. "Take him, boys," Stanton directed. The sound of shattering glass came from the outer office. "Damned good thing you ducked," said Leonard to Stanton as one of the guards locked Yardley's arms behind him and the other plunged a hypodermic needle into the wrinkled skin of his neck. "You don't understand!" Yardley gasped, falling back into the chair. "I was only showing that the stiletto would go through the mirror. It was the one that the other -- Yardley -- threw to me." His head lolled forward and he braced himself in the chair with difficulty. 'Tools!" Yardley rasped weakly, casting dazed eyes in their general direction. "Don't understand... periods of fluctuation... happens once in a while... when force slips back toward resonance ,... happened often at first... rare now... soon permanent dissonance..." His chin fell on his chest and one of the attendants caught him to prevent his falling from the chair. The guard said, "This bird had an answer for everything." Lydia rose and pressed a handkerchief to the inner corners of her eyes although it was obvious to everyone that there was no moisture there. "Will he be all right, doctor?" she asked solicitously. "As well as can be expected. We will send him to surgery immediately. There will be a simple leucotomy -- an incision into the prefrontal lobe of the brain. You and your husband have already signed the necessary papers." "I know, but how -- how will it affect him?" "Oh, he'll be quite all right -- physically. There will be inunediate relief of the psychasthenia. And in a few days he will be able to return home. However, you will find him rather simple mentally. His personality will be gone, but he will not be a menace. I'm afraid he'll require the constant attention of a nurse, though." "I understand. Doctor Stanton." Lydia wiped her dry eyes again and left. 'HE guards placed the professor on a table that was wheeled into the room and pushed him out a side entrance. Stanton returned to the work at his desk. Ten minutes later there was another buzz. "You're wanted in the clinic, doctor. There's a delivery boy from one of the department stores who is quite uncontrollable." "Tell them I'll be there shortly," he instructed absently, somewhat annoyed at the interruption. Shortly after he walked into the outer office. The stiletto lay on the floor in front of the cracked and broken mirror. An irregularly shaped area of glass reflected only part of his image, the broken edge slicing across his hip and severing one of his legs. He smiled wearily. The image smiled back. "That was one hell of a case!" Stanton muttered, putting on his hat. The reflection paused to wipe the sweat band in his hat and nodded agreeably. Spawning Ground They weren't human. They were something more -- ond something less -- they were, in short, humanity's hopes for survival! A creaked and groaned as her landing pads settled unevenly in the mucky surface of the ugly world outside. She seemed to be restless to end her fool's errand here, two hundred light years from the waiting hordes on Earth. Straining metal plates twanged and echoed through her hallways. Captain Gwayne cursed and rolled over, reaching for his boots. He was a big, rawboned man, barely forty ; but ten years of responsibility had pressed down his shoulders and put age-feigning hollows under his reddened eyes. The starlanes between Earth and her potential colonies were rough on the men who traveled them now. He shuffled toward the control room, grumbling at the heavy gravity. Lieutenant Jane Corey looked up, nodding a blonde head at him as he moved toward the ever-waiting pot of murky coffee. "Morning, Bob. You need a shave." "Yeah." He swallowed the hot coffee without tasting it, then ran a hand across the dark stubble on his chin. It could wait. "Anything new during the night?" "About a dozen blobs held something like a convention a little ways north of us. They broke up about an hour ago and streaked off into the clouds." The blobs were a peculiarity of this planet about which nobody knew anything. They looked like overgrown fireballs, but seemed to have an almost sentient curiosity about anything moving on the ground. "And our two cadets sneaked out again. Barker followed them, but lost them in the murk. IVe kept a signal going to guide them back." Gwayne swore softly to himselL Earth couldn't turn out enough starmen in the schools, so promising kids were being shipped out for training as cadets on their twelfth birthday. The two he'd drawn, Kaufman and Pinelli, seemed to be totally devoid of any sense of caution. Of course there was no obvious need for caution here. The blobs hadn't seemed dangerous, and the local animals were apparently all herbivorous and harmless. They were ugly enough, looking like insects in spite of their internal skeletons, with anywhere from four to twelve legs each on their segmented bodies. None acted like dangerous beasts. But something had happened to the exploration party fifteen years back, and to the more recent ship under Hennessy that was sent to check up. H e turned to the port to stare out at the planet. The Sol-type sun must be rising, since there was a dim light. But the thick clouds that wrapped the entire world diffused its rays into a haze. For a change, it wasn't raining, though the ground was covered by thick swirls of fog. In the distance, the tops of shrubs that made a scrub forest glowed yellow-green. Motions around them suggested a herd of feeding animals. Details were impossible to see through the haze. Even the deep gorge where they'd found Hennessy's carefully buried ship was completely hidden by the fog. There were three of the blobs dancing about over the grazing animals now, as they often seemed to do. Gwayne stared at them for a minute, trying to read sense into the things. If he had time to study them... But there was no time. Earth had ordered him to detour here, after leaving his load of deep-sleep stored colonists on Official World #, to check on any sign of Hennessy. He'd been here a week longer than he should have stayed already. If there was no sign in another day or so of what had happened to the men who'd deserted their ship and its equipment, he'd have to report back. He would have left before, if a recent landslip hadn't exposed enough of the buried ship for his metal locators to spot fro-m the air by luck. It had obviously been hidden deep enough to foil the detectors originally. "Bob!" Jane Corey's voice cut through his pondering. "Bob, there are the kids!" Before he could swing to follow her pointing finger, movement caught his eye. The blobs had left the herd. Now the three were streaking at fantastic speed to a spot near the ship, to hover excitedly above something that moved there. He saw the two cadets then, heading back to the waiting ship, just beyond the movement he'd seen through the mist. Whatever was making the fog swirl must have reached higher ground. Something began to heave upwards. It was too far to see clearly, but Gwayne grabbed the microphone, yelling into the radio toward the cadets. They must have seen whatever it was just as the call reached them. Young Kaufman grabbed at Pinelli, and they swung around together. Then the mists cleared. Under the dancing blobs, a horde of things was heading for the cadets. Shaggy heads, brute bodies vaguely manlike ! One seemed to be almost eight feet tall, leading the others directly toward the spacesuited cadets. Some of the horde were carrying spears or sticks. There was a momentary halt, and then the leader lifted one arm, as if motioning the others forward. ET the jeeps out!" Gwayne yelled at Jane. He yanked the door of the little officers' lift open and jabbed the down button. It was agonizingly slow, but faster than climbing down. He ripped the door back at the e;dt deck. Men were dashing in, stumbling around in confusion. But someone was taking over now -- one of the crew women. The jeeps were lining up. One, at the front, was stuttering into life, and Gwayne dashed for it as the exit port slid back. There was no time for suits or helmets. The air on the planet was irritating and vile smelling, but it could be breathed. He leaped to the seat, to see that the driver was Doctor Barker. At a gesture, the jeep rolled down the ramp, grinding its gears into second as it picked up speed. The other two followed. There was no sign of the cadets at first. Then Gwayne spotted them, surrounded by the menacing horde. Seen from here, the things looked horrible in a travesty of manhood. The huge leader suddenly waved and pointed toward the jeeps that were racing toward him. He made a fantastic leap backwards. Others swung about, two of them grabbing up the cadets. The jeep was doing twenty miles an hour now, but the horde began to increase the distance, in spite of the load of the two struggling boys ! The creatures dived downward into lower ground, beginning to disappear into the mists. "Follow the blobs," Gwayne yelled. He realized now he'd been a fool to leave his suit; the radio would have let him keep in contact with the kids. But it was too late to go back. The blobs danced after the horde. Barker bounced the jeep downward into a gorge. Somewhere the man had learned to drive superlatively; but he had to slow as the fog thickened lower down. Then it cleared to show the mob of creatures doubling back on their own trail to confuse the pursuers. There was no time to stop. The jeep plowed through them. Gwayne had a glimpse of five-foot bodies tumbling out of the way. Monstrously coarse faces were half hidden by thick hair. A spear crunched against the windshield from behind, and Gwayne caught it before it could foul the steering wheel. It had a wickedly beautiful point of stone. The creatures vanished as Barker fought to turn to follow them. The other jeeps were coming up, by the sound of their motors, but too late to help. They'd have to get to the group with the cadets in a hurry or the horde would all vanish in the uneven ground, hidden by the fog. A blob dropped down, almost touching Gwayne. He threw up an instinctive hand. There was a tingling as the creature seemed to pass around it. It lifted a few inches and drifted off. Abruptly, Barker's foot ground at the brake. Gwayne jolted forward against the windshield, just as he made out the form of the eight-foot leader. The thing was standing directly ahead of him, a cadet on each shoulder. The wheels locked and the jeep slid protestingly forward. The creature leaped back. But Gwayne was out of the jeep before it stopped, diving for the figure. It dropped the boys with a surprised grunt. T he arms were thin and grotesque below the massively distorted shoulders, but amazingly strong. Gwayne felt them wrench at him as his hands locked on the thick throat. A stench of alien flesh was in his nose as the thing fell backwards. Doc Barker had hit it seconds after the captain's attack. Its head hit rocky ground with a dull, heavy sound, and it collapsed. Gwayne eased back slowly, but it made no further move, though it was still breathing. Another jeep had drawn up, and men were examining the cadets. Pinelli was either laughing or crying, and Kaufman was trying to break free to kick at the monster. But neither had been harmed. The two were loaded onto a jeep while men helped Barker and Gwayne stow the bound monster on another before heading back. "No sign of skull fracture. My God, what a tough brute !" Barker shook his own head, as if feeling the shock of the monster's landing. 'T hope so," Gwayne told him. 'T want that thing to live -- and you're detailed to save it and revive it. Find out if it can make sign language or draw pictures. I want to know what happened to Hennessy and why that ship was buried against detection. This thing may be the answer." Barker nodded grimly. 'T'll try, though I can't risk drugs on an alien metabolism." He sucked in on the cigarette he'd dug out, then spat sickly. Smoke and this air made a foul combination. "Bob, it still makes no sense. We've scoured this planet by infra-red, and there was no sign of native villages or culture. We should have found some." "T r o g I o d y t'c s, maybe," Gwayne guessed. "Anyhow, send for me when you get anything. I've got to get this ship back to Earth. We're overstaying our time here already." The reports from the cadets were satisfactory enough. They'd been picked up and carried, but no harm had been done them. Now they were busy being little heroes. Gwayne sentenced them to quarters as soon as he could, knowing their stories would only get wilder and less informative with retelling. If they could get any story from the captured creature, they might save time and be better off than trying to dig through Hennessy's ship. That was almost certainly spoorless by now. The only possible answer seemed to be that the exploring expedition and Hennessy's rescue group had been overcome by the aliens. It was an answer, but it left a lot of questions. How could the primitives have gotten to the men inside Hennessy's ship? Why was its fuel dumped? Only men would have known how to do that. And who told these creatures that a space ship's metal find ers could he fooled by a little more than a hundred feet of solid rock? They'd buried the ship cunningly, and only the accidental slippage had undone their work. Maybe there would never be a full answer, but he had to find something -- and find it fast. Earth needed every world she could make remotely habitable, or mankind was probably doomed to extinction. race had blundered A safely through its discovery of atomic weapons into a eace that had lasted two undred years. It had managed to prevent an interplanetary war with the Venus colonists. It had found a drive that led to the stars, and hadn't even found intelligent life there to be dangerous on the few worlds that had cultures of their own. But forty years ago, observations from beyond the Solar System had finally proved that the sun was going to go nova. It wouldn't be much of an explosion, as such things go -- but it would render the whole Solar System uninhabitable for millenia. To survive, man had to colonize. And there were no worlds perfect for him, as Earth had been. The explorers went out ill desperation to find what they could; the terraforming teams did what they couM. And dien the big starships benists, carried in deep sleep to conserve space. Almost eighty worlds. The nearest a four month journey from Earth and four more months back. In another ten years, the sun would explode, leaving man only on the footholds he was trying to dig among other solar systems. Maybe some of the strange worlds would let men spread his seed again. Maybe none would be spawning grounds for mankind in spite of the efforts. Each was precious as a haven for the race. If this world could be used, it would be nearer than most. If not, as it now seemed, no more time could be wasted here. Primitives could be overcome, maybe. It would be ruthless and unfair to strip them of their world, but the first law was survival. But how could primitives do what these must have done? He studied the spear he had salvaged. It was on a staff made of cemented bits of smaller wood from the scrub growth, skillfully laminated. The point was of delicately chipped flint, done as no human hand had been able to do for centuries. "'Beautiful primitive work," he muttered. Jane pulled the coffee cup away from her lips and snortcd. "You can see a lot more of it out there," she suggested. He went to the port and glanced out. About sixty of the things were squatting in the clearing fog, holding lances and staring at the ship. They were perhaps a thousand yards away, waiting patiently. For what? For the return of their leader -- or for something that would give the ship to them? Gwayne grabbed the phone and called Barker. "How's the captive coming?" Barker's voice sounded odd. "Physically fine. You can see him. But -- " Gwayne dropped the phone and headed for the little sick bay. He swore at Doc for not calling him at once, and then at himself for not checking up sooner. Then he stopped at the sound of voices. There was the end of a question from Barker and a thick, harsh growling sound that lifted the hair along the nape of Gwayne's neck. Barker seemed to understand, and was making a comment as the captain dashed in. The captive was sitting on the bunk, unbound and oddly unmenacing. The thick features were relaxed and yet somehow intent. He seemed to make some kind of a salute as he saw Gwayne enter, and his eyes burned up unerringly toward the device on the officer's cap. "Haarroo, C a b b a a n !" the thing said.  present your former friend. Captain Hennessy?" Barker said. There was a grin on the doctor's lips, but his face was taut with strain. The creature nodded slowly and drew something from the thick hair on its head. It was the golden comePof a captain. "He never meatit to hurt the kids -- just to talk to them," Barker cut in quickly. "I've got some of the story. He's changed. He can't talk very well. Says they've had to change the language around to make the sounds fit, and he's forgotten how to use what normal English he can. But it gets easier as you listen. It's Hennessy, all right. I'm certain." Gwayne had his own ideas on that. It was easy for an alien to seize on the gold ornament of a captive earthman, even to learn a little English, maybe. But Hennessy had been his friend. "How many barmaids in the Cheshire Cat? How many pups did your oldest kid's dog have? How many were brwn ?" The lips contorted into something vaguely like a smile, and the curiously shaped fingers that could handle no human-designed equipment spread out. Three. Seven. Zero. The answers were right. By the time the session was over, Gwayne had begun to understand the twisted speech from inhuman vocal cords better. But the story took a long time telling. When it was finished, Gwayne and Barker sat for long minutes in silence. Finally Gwayne drew a shuddering breath and stood up. "Is it possible, Do(?" "No," Barker said flatly. He spread his hands and grimaced. "No. Not by what I know. But it happened. I've looked at a few tissues under the microscope. The changes are there. It's hard to believe about their kids. Adults in eight years, but they stay shorter. It can't be a hereditary change -- the things that affect the body don't change the germ plasm. But in this case, what changed Hennessy is real, so maybe the fact that the change is passed on is as real as he claims." Gwayne led the former Hennessy to the exit. The waiting blobs dropped down to touch the monstrous man, then leaped up again. The crowd of monsters began moving forward toward their leader. A few were almost as tall as Hennessy, but most were not more than five feet high. The kids of the exploring party... B ack in the contol room, Gwayne found the emergency release levers, set the combinations and pressed the studs. There was a hiss and gurgle as the great tanks of fuel discharged their contents out onto the ground where no ingenuity could ever recover it to bring life to the ship again. He'd have to tell the men and women of the crew later, after he'd had time to organize things and present it all in a way they could accept, however much they might hate it at first. But there was no putting off giving the gist of it to Jane. "It was the blobs," he summarized it. "They seem to be amused by men. They don't require anything from us, but they like us around. Hennessy doesn't know why. They can change our cells, adapt us. Before men came, all life here had twelve legs. Now they're changing that, as we've seen. "And they don't have to be close to do it. We've all been outside the hull. It doesn't show yet -- but we're changed. In another month. Earth food would kill us. We've got to stay here. We'll bury the ships deeper this time, and Earth won't find us. They can't risk trying a colony where three ships vanish, so we'll just disappear. And they'll never know." Nobody would know. Their children -- odd children wh# matured in eight years -- would be primitive savages in three generations. The Earth tools would be useless, impossible for the hands so radically changed. Nothing from the ship would last. Books could never be read by the new eyes. And in time. Earth wouldn't even be a memory to this world. She was silent a long time, staring out of the port toward what must now be her home. Then she sighed. "You'll need practice, but the others don't know you as well as I do. Bob. I guess we can fix it so they'll believe it all. And it's too late now. But we haven't really been changed yet, have we?" "No," he admitted. Damn his voice ! He'd never been good at lying. "No. They have to touch us. I've been touched, but the rest could go back." She nodded. He waited for the condemnation, but there was only puzzlement in her face. "Why?" And then, before he could answer, her ovn intelligence gave her the same answer he had found for himself. "The spawning ground!" It was the only thing they could do. Earth needed a place to plant her seed, but no world other than Earth could ever be trusted to preserve that seed for generation after generation. Some worlds already were becoming uncertain. Here, though, the blobs had adapted men to the alien world instead of men having to adapt the whole planet to their needs. Here, the strange children of man's race could grow, develop and begin the Ung trek back to civilization. The gadgets would be lost for a time. But perhaps some of the attitudes of civilized man would remain to make the next rise to culture a better one. "We're needed here," he told her, his voice pleading for the understanding he couldn't yet fully give himself. "These people need as nch a set of bloodlines as possible to give the new race strength. The fifty men and women on this ship will be needed to start them with a decent chance. We can't go to Earth, where nobody would believe or accept the idea -- or even let us come back. We have to stay here." She smiled then and moved toward him, groping for his strength. "Be fruitful," she whispered. "Be fruitful and spawn and replenish an earth." "No," he told her. "Replenish the stars." But she was no longer listening, and that part of his idea could wait. Some day, though, their children would find a way to the starlanes again, looking for other worlds. With the blobs to help them, they could adapt to most worlds. The unchanged spirit would lead them through all space, and the changing bodies would claim worlds beyond numbering. Some day, the whole universe would be a spawning ground for the children of it wasn't boring. And it would get you there -- os long as you weren't going anywhere anyhow! across the desk at his supetant. rior. His black thatch was "Try not to be simple -- for ruffled, as if h-e had been once!" growled Jeffers. "A rubbed the wrong way. little percentage here and 'T didn't ask you to cut out there on the cargoes never your own graft, did I? he deshows by the time figures get manded. "Just dont try to back to Earth. The big jets in sucker me in on the deal. I the home office don't care, know you're operating someThey count it on the estithing sneaky ail through the mates." colony, but it's not for me." "You asked any of them The big moon-face of Jefflately?" Tolliver prodded, ers, manager of the Ganyme"Now, listen! Maybe they dan branch of Koslow Spacelive soft back on Earth since ways, glowered back at him. the mines and the Jovian Its reddish tinge brightened satellite colonies grew; but the office noticeably, for such they were out here in the beof Ganymede's surface as ginning, most of them. They could be seen through the know what it's like. D)ra transparent dome outside the think they don't expect us to office window was cold, dim make what we can on the and rugged. The glowing side?" semi-disk of Jupiter was more Tolliver rammed his fists into the side pockets of his loose blue uniform jacket. He diook his head, grinning resignedly. You just don't listen to me' he complained. "You know I took this piloting job just to scrape up money for an advanced engineering degree back on rth. I only want to finish my year -- not get into something I can't quit." Jeffers fidgeted in his chair, causing it to creak under the bulk of his body. It had been built for Ganymede, but not for Jeffers. "Aw, it's not like that," the manager muttered. "You can ease out whenever your contract's up. Think we'd bend a good orbit on your account?" Tolliver stared at him silently, but the other had difficulty meeting his eye. "All right, then!" Jeffers snapped after a long moment. "If you want it that way, either you get in line with us or you're through right now !" "You can't fire me," retorted the pilot pityingly. "I came out here on a contract. Five hundred credits a week base pay, five hundred for hazardous duty. How else can you get pilots out to Jupiter?" "Okay I can't fire you legally -- as long as you report for work," grumbled Jeffers, by now a shade more ruddy. "We'll see how long you keep reporting. Because you're off the Callisto run as of now! Sit in your quarters and see if the company calls that hazardous duty!" "Doesn't matter," answered Tolliver, grinning amiably. "The hazardous part is just being on the same moon as ym for the next six months." He winked and walked out, deliberately leaving the door open behind him so as to enjoy the incoherent bellowing that followed him. Looks like a little vacation, he thought, unperturbed. He'll come around. I just want to get back to Earth with a clean rep. Let Jeffers and his ang steal the Great Red Spot off Jupiter if they like! It's their risk. T olliver began to have his doubts the next day; which was "Tuesday" by the arbitrary calender constructed to match Ganymede's weeklong journey around Jupiter. His contract guaranteed a pilot's rating, but someone had neglected to specify the type of craft to be piloted. On the bulletin board, Tolliver's name stood out beside the number of one of the airtight tractors used between the dome city and the spaceport, or for hauling crosscountry to one of the mining domes. He soon found that there was nothing for him to do but hang around the garage in case a spaceship should land. The few runs to other domes seemed to be assigned to drivers with larger vehicles. The following day was just as boring, and the next more so. He swore when he found the assignment unchanged by "Friday." Even the reflection that it was payday was small consolation. "Hey, Johnny!" said a voice at his shoulder. "The word is that they're finally gonna trust you to take that creeper outside." Tolliver turned to see Red Higgins, a regular driver. "What do you mean?" "They say some home-office relative is coming in on the Javelinr "What's wrong with that?" asked Tolliver. "Outside of the way they keep handing out soft jobs to nephews, I mean." "Aah, these young punks just come out for a few months so they can go back to Earth making noises like spacemen. Sometimes there's no reason but them for sending a ship back with a crew instead of in an economy orbit. Wait till you see the baggage you'll have to load!" Later in the day-period, Tolliver recalled this warning. Under a portable, doublechambered plastic dome blown up outside the ship's airlock, a crewman helped him load two trunks and a collection of bags into the tractor. He was struggling to suppress a feeling of outrage at the waste of fuel involved when the homeoffice relative emerged. She was about five feet four and moved as if she walked lightly even in stronger gravity than Ganymede's. Her trim coiffure was a shade too blonde which served to set off both the blue of her eyes and the cap apparently won from one of the pilots. She wore gray slacks and a heavy sweater, like a spacer. "Sorry to keep you waiting," she said, sliding into the seat beside Tolliver. "By the way, just call me Betty." "Sure," agreed Tolliver thinking, Ohmigod! Trying already to he just one of the gang, instead of Lady Betty! Is her old man the treasurer, Or does he just know where bodies are buried? "They were making dates," said the girl. "Were they ribbing me, or is it true that none of the four of them goes back with the ship?" "It's true enough," Tolliver assured her. "We need people out here, and it costs a lot to make the trip. They found they could send back loaded ships by 'automatic' flight -- that is, a long, slow, economical orbit and automatic signalling equipment. Then they're boarded approaching Earth's orbit and landed by pilots who don't have to waste their time making the entire trip." H e followed the signals of a spacesuited member of the port staff and maneuvered out of the dome. Then he headed the tractor acroaa the frozen surface of Ganymede toward the permanent domes of the city. 'How is it here?" asked the girl. "They told me it's pretty rough." "What did you expect?" asked Tolliver. "Square dances with champagne?" "Don't be silly. Daddy says I'm supposed to learn traffic routing and the business management of a local branch. They probably won't let me see much else." "You never can tell," said the pilot, yielding to temptation. "Any square inch of Ganymede is likely to be dangerous." ril he sorry later, he reflected, but if Jeffers keeps me jockeying this creeper, Vm entitled to some amusement. And Daddy s little girl is trying too hard to sound like one of the gang. "Yeah," he went on, "right now, I don't do a thing but drive missions from the city to the spaceport." "Missions! You call driving a mile or so a mission? Tolliver pursed his lips and put on a shrewd expression. "Don't sneer at Ganymede, honey !" he warned portentously. "Many a ihan who did isn't here today. Take the fellow who used to drive this mission !" "You can call me Betty. What happened to him? "I'll tell you some day" Tolliver promised darkly. "This moon can strike like a vicious animal." "Oh, they told me there was nothing alive on Ganymede!" "I was thinking of the mountain slides," said the pilot. "Not to mention volcanic puffballs that pop out through the frozen crust where you'd least expect. That's why I draw such high pay for driving an unarmored tractor." "You use armored vehicles?" gasped the girl. She was now sitting bolt upright in the swaying seat. Tolliver deliberately dipped one track into an icy hollow. In the light gravity, the tractor responded with a weird, floating lurch. "Those slides," he continued. "Ganymede's only about the size of Mercury, something like # miles in diameter, so things get heaped up at steep angles. When the rock and ice are set to sliding, they come at you practically horizontally. It doesn't need much start, and it barrels on for a long way before there's enough friction to stop it. If you're in the way -- well, it's just too bad !" Say, thats pretty good! he told himself. What a liar you are, Tolliver! He enlarged upon other dangers to # encountered on the satellite, taking care to impress the newcomer with the daredeviltry of John Tolliver, driver of "missions" across the menacing wastes between dome and port. In the end, he displayed conclusive evidence in the form of the weekly paycheck he had received that morning. It did not, naturally, indicate he was drawing the salary of a space pilot. Betty looked thoughtful. "I'm retiring in six months if I'm still alive," he said bravely, edging the tractor into the airlock at their destination. "Made my pile. No use pushing your luck too far." His charge seemed noticeably subdued, but cleared her throat to request that Tolliver guide her to the office of the manager. She trailed along as if with a burden of worry upon her mind, and the pilot's conscience prickled. ril get hold of her after Jeffers is through and set her straight, he resolved. It isn't really funny if the sucker is too ignorant to know better. R emembering his grudge against the manager, he took pleasure in walking in without knocking. "Jeffers," he announced, "this is... just call her Betty." The manager's jowled features twisted into an expression of welcome as jovial as that of a hungry crocodile. "Miss Koslow!" he beamed, like a politician the day before the voting. "It certainly is an honor to have you on Ganymede with us ! That's all, Tolliver, you can go. Yes, indeed ! Mr. Koslow -- the president, that is: your father -- sent a message about you. I repeat, it will be an honor to show you the ropes. Did you want something else, Tolliver?" "Never mind him, Mr. Jeffers," snapped the girl, in a tone new to Tolliver. "We won't be working together, I'm afraid. You've already had enough rope." Jeffers seemed to stagger standing still behind his desk. His loose lips twitched uncertainly, and he looked questioningly to Tolliver. The pilot stared at Betty, trying to recall pictures he had seen of the elder Koslow. He was also trying to remember some of the lies he had told enroute from the spaceport. "Wh-wh-what do you mean. Miss Koslow?" Jeffers stammered. He darted a suspicious glare at Tolliver. "Mr. Jeffers," said the girl, "I may look like just another spoiled little blonde, but the best part of this company will be mine someday. I was not allowed to reach twenty-two without learning something about holding on to it." Tolliver blinked. He had taken her for three or four years older. Jeffers now ignored him, intent upon the girl. "Daddy gave me the title of tenth vice-president mostly as a joke, when he told me to find out what was wrong with operations on Ganymede. I have some authority, though. And you look like the source of the trouble to me.' "You can't prove anything," declared Jeffers hoarsely. "Oh, can't I? IVe already seen certain evidence, and the rest won't be hard to find. Where are your books, Mr. Jeffers? You're as good as fired !"The manager dropped heavily to his chair. He stared unbelievingly at Betty, and Tolliver thought he muttered something about "just landed." After a moment, the big man cafne out of his daze enough to stab an intercom button with his finger. He growled at someone on the other end to come in without a countdown. Tolliver, hardly thinking about it, expected the someone to be a secretary, but it turned out to be three members of Jeffers' headquarters staff. He recognized one as Rawlins, a warehouse chief, and guessed that the other two might be his assistants. They were large enough. "No stupid questions!" Jeffers ordered. "Lock these two up while I think!" Tolliver started for the door immediately, but was blocked off. "Where should we lock -- ?" the fellow paused to ask. Tolliver brought up a snapPy uppercut to the man's chin, feeling that it was a poor time to engage Jeffers in fruitless debate. In the gravity of Ganymede, the man was knocked off balance as much as he was hurt, and sprawled on the floor. "I told you no questions!" bawled Jeffers. The fallen hero, upon arising, had to content himself with grabbing Betty. The others were swarming over Tolliver. Jeffers came around his desk to assist. T olliver found himself dumped on the floor of an empty office in the adjoining warehouse building. It seemed to him that a long time had been spent iji carrying him there. He heard an indignant yelp, and realized that the girl had been pitched in with him. The snapping of a lock was followed by the tramp of departing footsteps and then by silence. After considering the idea a few minutes, Tolliver managed to sit up. He had his wind back. But when he fingered the swelling lump behind his left ear, a sensation befuddled him momentarily. "I'm sorry about that," murmured Betty. Tolliver grunted. Sorrow would not reduce the throbbing, nor was he in a mood to undertake an explanation of why Jeffers did not like him anyway. I think perhaps youVe going to have a shiner," remarked the girl. '"Thanks for letting me know in time," said Tolliver. ,The skin under his right eye did feel a trifle tight, but he could see well enough. The abandoned and empty look of the office worried him. "What can we use to get out of here?" he mused. "Why should we try?" asked the girl. "What can he do?" "You'd be surprised. How did you catch on to him so soon?" "Your p a y c h e c k," said Betty. "As soon as I saw that ridiculous amount, it was obvious that there was gross mismanagement here. It had to be Jeffers." Tolliver groaned. "Then, on the way over here, he as good as admitted everything. Yoii didn't hear him, I guess. Well, he seemed to be caught all unaware, and seemed to blame you for it." "Sure!" grumbled the pilot. "He thinks I told you he was grafting or smuggling, or whatever he has going for him here. That's why I want to get out of here -- before I find myself involved in some kind of fatal accident !" "What do you know about the crooked goings-on here?" asked Betty after a startled pause. "Nothing," retorted Tolliver. "Except that there are some. There are rumors, and I had a halfway invitation to join in. I think he sells things to the mining colonies and makes a double profit for himself by claiming the stuff lost in transit. You didn't think you scared him that bad over a little slack managing?" The picture of Jeffers huddled with his partners in the headquarters building, plotting the next move, brought Tolliver to his feet. There was nothing in the unused office but an old table and half a dozen plastic crates. He saw that the latter contained a messof discarded records. "Better than nothing at all," he muttered. He ripped out a double handful of the forms, crumpled them into a pile at the doorway, and pulled out his cigarette lighter. "What do you think you're up to?" asked Betty with some concern. "This plastic is tough," said Tolliver, "but it will bend with enough heat. If I can kick loose a hinge, maybe we can fool them yet!" He got a little fire going, and fed it judiciously with more papers. "You know," he reflected, "it might be better for you to stay here. He can't do much about you, and you don't have any real proof just by yourself." "I'll come along with you, Tolliver," said the girl, No, I don't think you'd better." "Why notr "WelI... after all, what would he dare do? Arranging an accident to the daughter of the boss isn't something that he can pull off without a lot of investigation. He'd be better off just running for it." "Let's not argue about it," said Betty, a trifle pale but looking determined. "I'm coming with you. Is that stuff getting soft yet?" Tolliver kicked at the edge of the door experimentally. It seemed to give slightly, so he knocked the burning papers aside and drove his heel hard at the corner below the hinge. The plastic yielded. "That's enough already, Tolliver," whispered the girl. "We can crawl through!" H ardly sixty seconds later, he led her into a maze of stacked crates in the warehouse proper. The building was not much longer than wide, for each of the structures in the colony had its own hemispherical emergency dome of transparent plastic. They soon reached the other end. "I think there's a storeroom for spacesuits around here," muttered Tolliver. "Why do you want them?" "Honey, I just don't think it will be so easy to lay hands on a tractor. I lt Jeffers already phoned the garage and all the airlocks with acme good lie that will keep me from getting through." After a brief search, he located the spacesuits. Many, evidently intended for replacements, had never been unpacked, but there were a dozen or so serviced and standing ready for emergencies. He showed Betty how to climb into one, and checked her seals and valves after donning a suit himself. "That switch under your chin," he said, touching helmets so she could hear him. "Leave it turned off. Anybody might be listening!" He led the way out a rear door of the warehouse. With the heavy knife that was standard suit equipment, he deliberately slashed a fourfoot square section out of the dome. He motioned to Betty to step through, then trailed along with the plastic under his arm. He caught up and touched helmets again. "Just act as if you're on business," he told her. "For all anyone can see, we might be inspecting the dome." "Where are you going?" asked Betty. "Right through the wall, and then head for the nearest mine. Jeffers can't be running everythingT "Is there any way to get to a TV?" asked the girl. "I... uh... Daddy gave me a good number to call if I needed help." How good? Pretty official, as a matter of fact." "AII right," Tolliver decided. "We'll try the ship you just came in on. They might have finished refueling and left her empty." They had to cross one open luie between buildings, and Tolliver was very conscious of moving figures in the distance; but no one seemed to look their way. Reaching the foot of the main dome over the establishment, he glanced furtively about, then plunged his knife into the transparent material. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Betty make a startled gesture, hut he had his work cut out for him. This was tougher than the interior dome. Finally, he managed to saw a ragged slit through vhich they could squeeze. There was room to walk between the inner and outer layer, so he moved along a few yards. A little dust began to blow about where they bad gone through. He touched telmets once more. "This time," he said, "the air will really start to blow, so get through as fast as you can. If I can slap this piece of plastic over the rip, it may stow down the loss of pressure enough to give us quite a lead before the alarms go off." Through the faceplates, he saw the girl nod, wide-eyed. As soon as he plunged the knife into the outer layer, he could see dusty, moist air puffing out into the nearvacuum of Ganymedes surface. Fumbling, he cut as fast as he could and shoved Betty through the small opening. Squeezing through in his turn, he left one arm inside to spread the plastic sheet as best he could. The internal air pressure slapped it against the inside of the dome as if gluedy sdthough it immediately showed an alarming tendency to balloon through the ruptured spot. Theyll find it, all right, Tolliver reminded himself. Dont be here when they do! He grabbed Betty by the wrist of her spacesuit and headed for the nearest outcropping of rock. It promptly developed that she had something to learn about running on ice in such low gravity. Until they were out of direct line of sight from the settlement, Tolliver simply dragged her. Then, when he decided that it was safe enough to pause and tell her how to manage better, the sight of her outraged scowl through the faceplate made him think better of it. By the time we reach the ship, she'll have learned, he consoled himself. TT was a long mile, even at the pace human muscles could achieve on Ganymede. i They took one short rest, during which Tolliver was forced to explain away the dangers of slides and volcanic puffballs. He admitted to having exaggerated slightly. In the end, they reached the spaceship. There seemed to be no one about. The landing dome had been collapsed and stored, and the ship's airlock port was closed. 'That's all right," Tolliver told the girl. "We can get in with no trouble." It was when he looked about to make sure that they were unobserved that he caught a glimpse of motion back toward the city. He peered at the spot through the dim light. After a moment, he definitely recognized the outline of a tractor breasting a rise in the ground and tilting downward again. "In fact, we have to get in to stay out of trouble," he said to Betty. He located the switch-cover in the hull, opened it and activated the mechanism that swung open the airlock and extended the ladder. It took him considerable scrambling to boost the girl up the ladder and inside, but he managed. They passed through the airlock, fretting at the time required to seal, pump air and open the inner hatch; and then Tolliver led the way up another ladder to the control room. It was a clumsy trip in their spacesuits, but he wanted to save time. In the control room, he shoved the girl into an acceleration seat, glanced at the gauges and showed her how to open her helmet. "Leave the suit on," he ordered, getting in the first word while she was still shaking her head. "It will help a little on the takeoff." "Takeoff!" shrilled Betty. "What do you think you're going to do? I just want to use the radio or TV!" "That tractor will get here in a minute or two. They might cut your conversation kind of short. Now shut up and let me look over these dials !" He ran a practiced eye over the board, reading the condition of the ship. It pleased him. Everything was ready for a takeoff into an economy orbit for Earth. He busied himself making a few adjustments, doing his best to ignore the protests from his partner in crime. He warned her the trip might be long. r "I told you not to come,' he said at last. "Now sit back !" He sat down and pushed a button to start the igniting process. In a moment, he could feel the rumble of the rockets through the deck, and then it was out of his hands for several minutes. "That wasn't so bad," Betty admitted some time later. "Did you go in the right direction?" "Who knows?" retorted Tolliver. "There wasn't time to check everything. We'll worry about that after we make your call." "Oh!" Betty looked helpless. It's in my pocket." Tolliver sighed. In their weightless state, it was no easy task to pry her out of the spacesuit. He thought of inquiring if she needed any further help, but reminded himself that this was the boss's daughter. When Betty produced a memo giving frequency and call sign, he set about making contact. It took only a few minutes, as if the channel had been monitored expectantly, and the man who flickered into life on the screen wore a uniform. "Space Patrol?" whispered Tolliver incredulously. "That's right," said Betty. "Uh... Daddy made arrangements for me." Tolliver held her in front of the screen so she would not float out of range of the scanner and microphone. As she spoke, he stared exasperatedly at a bulkhead, marveling at the influence of a man who could arrange for a cruiser to escort his daughter to Ganymede and wondering what was behind it all. When he heard Betty requesting assistance in arresting Jeffers and reporting the manager as the head of a ring of crooks, he began to suspect. He also noticed certain peculiarities about the remarks of the Patrolman. F R one thing, though the officer seemed well acquainted with Betty, he never addressed her by the name of Koslow. For another, he accepted the request as if he had been hanging in orbit merely until learning who to go down after. They really sent her out to nail someone, Tolliver realized. Of course, she stumbled onto Jeffers by plain dumb luck. But she had an idea of what to look for. How do I get into these things? She might have got me killed! "We do have one trouble," he heard Betty saying. "This tractor driver, Tolliver, saved my neck by making the ship take off somehow, but he says it's set for a six-month orbit, or economy flight. Whatever they call it. I don't think he has any idea where we're headed." Tolliver pulled her back, holding her in mid-air by the slack of her sweater. "Actually, I have a fine idea," he informed the officer coldly. "I happen to be a qualihed space pilot. Everything here is under control. If Miss Koslow thinks you should arrest Jeffers, you can call us later on this channel." "Miss Koslow?" repeated the spacer. "Did she tell you -- wcll, no matter! If you'll be okay well attend to the other affair immediately." He signed off promptly. The pilot faced Betty, who looked more offended than reassured at discovering his status. "This 'Miss Koslow business," he said suspiciously. "He sounded funny about that." The girl grinned. "Relax, Tolliver," she told him. "Did you really believe Daddy would send his own little girl way out here to Gan)miede to look for whoever was gypping him?" "You... you... ?" "Sure. The name's Betty Hanlon. I work for a private investigating firm. If old Koslow had a son to impersonate -- " "I'd be stuck for six months in this orbit with some brash young man," Tolliver finished for her. "I guess it's better this way," he said meditatively a moment later. "Oh, come on! Can't they get us back? How can you tell where we're going?" "I know enough to check takeoff time. It was practically due anyhow, so we'll float into the vicinity of Earth at about the right time to be picked up." He went on to explain something of the tremendous cost in fuel necessary to make more than minor corrections to their course. Even though the Patrol ship could easily catch the slow freighter, bringing along enough fuel to head back would be something else again. "We'll just have to ride it out," he said sympathetically. "The ship is provisioned according to law, and you were probably going back anyhow." "I didn't expect to so soon." "Yeah, you were pretty lucky. They'll think you're a marvel to crack the case in about three hours on Ganymede." "Great!" muttered Betty. "What a lucky girl I am!" "Yes," admitted Tolliver, "there are problems. If you like, we might get the captain of that Patrol ship to legalize the situation by TV." "I can see you're used to sweeping girls off their feet," she commented sourly. "The main problem is whether you can cook." Betty frowned at him. "I'm pretty good with a pistol," she offered, "or going over crooked books. But cook? Sorry." "Well, one of us had better learn, and I'll have other things to do." "I'll think about it," promised the girl, staring thoughtfully at the deck. Tolliver anchored himself in a seat and grinned as he thought about it too. After a while, he promised himself, ##I explain how I cut the fuel flow and see if shes detective enough to suspect that we're just orbiting Gany OF H enry stopped and squatted in the underbrush, well hidden from the path but close enough to see the coming group. Within a minute they became visible. There were twenty-five to thirty boys, girls and youths walking slowly in ragged groups, talking and laughing. The youngest were ahead, a group just entering their teens, dressed like the rest in jackets and shorts, with sandals of plast on their feet. The dark, synthetic cloth made them a uniformed body. Henry's nose wrinkled in distaste. Again his hideaway would be invaded and he would have to move on. But where to? They were opposite him now, a bare twenty feet away. Most of them looked as alike as brothers and sisters, logically enough; there was not one who wasn't a cousin in some degree to the others. Plump, round-faced and dulleyed, they lived from cradle to grave according to custom. It was the custom, when they were old enough to feel the urge, to join a group like this. Together they tramped the valley from spring to fall, gathering fruit and nuts as they came in season. When a couple felt like settling down they awaited a vacant Mastership -- a plot of orchard and the house that went with it -- and moved in. They took over the responsiHis sin was curiosity  -- his crime was witchcraft -- but Henry's real offense against his strange world was that it was dying -- and he wanted it to live! bilities of the place and bred or adapted the three children necessary to hold it. They remained there until they became Elders. Then they moved into Town, where they worked in the factories, idled and gossiped until death overtook them. They were ignorant, superstitious, living out their dull routine as generations before them had. Only a few questioned it. Almost none made any active challenge. The youngsters sighted the tavern and made for it at a dead run, wanting to claim favorable bunks before the others arrived. Henry was impatient. Ants were crawling over his foot, but it would never do for him to be seen, especially in the woods. One didn't go into them. They were inhabited by goblins, ghosts and fearsome animals. Finally they were past. He straightened, started to step into the path, then squatted again quickly. Coming alone, behind the others, was the girl. Her slimness and pale hair made her stand out from the rest. His thoughts had been upon her since that day when his group passed the house of her father, an avocado Master, down in the lower valley. She had called to them to wait, had run inside to come back with her two pouches, one for her personal belongings, the other for food. Living on a fruit diet as they did, they ate most of their Awakened hours. "I'm Theta!" she called out happily as she joined them. "Mama says I'm old enough to go with you." She recognized a cousin and ran over to join her, her hair a spot of brightness among the dark. He wanted her from that moment, but she was far too young. He would have to wait. from the opposite direction was the slap of flat feet. In a moment Henry recognized Ole. He was considerably older than the others ; his only object in life was enjoying all the young girls who joined the group. He was a bulky dullard and a bully, his eyes small and mean. It was evident that he was looking for the girl. A pleased expression spread over his face when he saw her. She stopped abruptly, looking about for a way to flee, but the path was enclosed by woods and Ole was on her. "Leave me alone !" she cried in anger as his hand closed about her wrist. Henry could see disgust for him in her eyes. Why didn't she let him have what he wanted and be done with him? That was the way most of the girls responded. "Won't have anything to do with me, eh?" gloated Ole. "Think you are too good for us ! I been watching you, asking about you. None of the boys have had you... but you won't get by me !" Henry felt a surge of S#mipathy for her, fed by his dislike for the other. He slipped into the path. He was almost up to them before he was seen. Ole swung about, still holding the girl. Henry stopped six feet off. "Why don't you let her alone if she doesn't want you?" he asked with deceiving mildness, apparently relaxed. There was startled fright in Ole's eyes. Henry had appeared so suddenly, from nowhere. Worse, he was proscribed. He was accused of learning witchery. Henry was taller than Ole, bit thin and almost weak looking. This would be something to boast about : capturing the witch singlehanded, bringing him in for punishment ! "Make me let her alone, then!" he challenged. It was usual to boast and strut before fighting. Henry took the advantage of immediate attack. He sprang at the other, catching him before he unhanded the girl, with a right to the jaw, a left to the belly. Theta ran about fifty feet down the path, then turned to watch. Ole, head down, was closing in to grip his opponent, but Henry stepped to one side, coming up with a blow to Ole's right eye. Ole raised his guard and Henry sank both fists into the other's stomach. Ole doubled up. There was no fight in him. He plunged past Henry, down the path towards the tavern. Henry faced the girl. out hesitation. "Thank you," she said. "I shouldn't have left the others. I didn't think he had noticed." She walked slowly towards the tavern, Henry beside her. The past year had made her taller, filled her put. Yet the sweetness of her expression was the same, and the vitality in her face and eyes. "He's been after you then?" She nodded. "Him and a couple of others." It was just a turn in the path to sight of the tavern. Henry halted. "You seem to forget I'm proscribed," he reminded her. "I don't care! I like you -- always have." Her voice became tragic, "Why did you go into that awful learning house?" "I got tired of wondering -- wondering what kept the food in the bins fresh, how it got from the hoppers in the fields to the bins. What made the light and heat. Where the water came from." "But the Old Ones did it all by magic!" "What kind of magic?" His face had a slightly mocking expression. "If that was so why are things beginning to break down? Magic should go on forever." F rom the direction of the tavern came sounds of shouting. He smiled at her. "You'd better go on before they think I've turned you into a bat." "Henry -- " she began, but she had lingered too long. The whole group rounded the turn, trotting, their faces twisted in superstitious fury. They raised their arms when they sighted the two. Each hand had a stone in it. "She's one of them too !" screamed fat, malicious Hecla, seeing a chance to vent her envy. "They're planning something! Throw! Throw!" Her voice was a hysterical shriek. Henry saw the stones in the air. Grasping the girl's wrist he drew her into the brush beside the path. He stopped his flight under an ancient tree and let go her wrist. "See," he said, "even to speak to me is dangerous." She tossed her head and brushed the hair from her brow, her eyes scornful. "I don't care. I'm sick of them." "You can go back. Give them some fancy tale about my hexing you, but say that you crossed two sticks or something and got away," She looked him squarely in the face, her own composed and determined. '"I'd rather stay with you." He dropped to a jutting rock and scraped at the dead leaves with the heel of his sandal. "It's not nice," he began, "the life I live. Hiding in the woods by day, sneaking into deserted houses or taverns at night for food and warmth. I've been doing it all summer now, and that's bad enough. In a month the Masters of these upper levels will be closing their houses and the taverns, moving to town for the winter. Everything on the lower levels will be taken up. They expect me to be starved into surrender." Theta dropped to her knees beside him. "I'd rather be with you. I've wanted to be with you ever since I first saw you. But you never seemed to notice me." "I noticed you." He placed a hand over hers. "But you were so young looking, so sweet. I was waiting for you to grow up a little more. Then, when I found an open Mastership, I was going to ask you to share it with me." Theta felt a tingling happiness. Her face flushed, her eyes brightened. "Henry!" she cried. "I've always wanted you! That's why I never..." He put an arm about her and pulled her close. They sat that way for minutes. "I'll give you a Mastership!" he cried out. 'T'll give you the whole valley !" He pushed her shoulders around until she was facing him. "What is your first wish. Mistress of the Valley?" "Something to eat," she said promptly. Henry made a rueful face. "My dear, that is something you will have to become used to: being hungry. But fortunately I know of a ruined and deserted house where the bins are still operating." The forest they were in filled a s t e e p-sided ravine. He followed it for some distance, then started abruptly up the left-hand slope to a low-crowned crest planted with apple trees. A hundred yards away was the house. One corner of it was crushed by a fallen tree. The low sun made shafts of light through the trees as Henry approached it cautiously. Theta behind him. He entered through the broken wall into what was once a bedroom, then through a door into the remainder of the house. It was a typical living room they entered, with the regular ration of furnishings. The visiphone and visiscreen were set into the inner wall; a calendar clock was over the front door, its dial marked with symbols for planting, pruning, cutting and picking. The hand was approaching the latter symbol, Henry went through into the kitchen, leaving her to watch through the window. He returned with a basket of mixed fruit. She reached for an avocado, plucking her knife from its sheath with the other hand. "Hey! Wait a minute!' Henry cried. "You are a sinner now, remember?" He pushed the basket towards her. "Fill your pouch first, eat later." They ate, keeping an eye on the path towards the house until dark. No one moved at night except on extreme emergency, and then only with lanterns and noise. Withput lights on other than the normal glow of the walls they retiredto one of the undamaged bedrooms. "See? she said, with a rippling, ' contented laugh. "I waited for you." II I T was still dark when they filled their pouches to capacity and slipped from the house. "What will we do now?" Theta asked. Henry looked down. "I don't know. I had something planned, but... "What was it?" "I was going to climb up the mountain, past the top defrost towers and the force fence, to the top of the ridge." She stared at him, her eyes round. "Why, that's the edge of the world! You might fall off!" "Not if I'm careful." Only a few in the valley could boast of going beyond the top row of defrosters, fewer yet of even going within looking distance of the force fence. Beyond it, tradition said, lived great beasts that could eat a man with one bite. While the ridges that bounded the valley on three sides, to the east, west and north, were the edges of the world, from which one dropped off into bottomless space. To the south, where forest enclosed the mouth of the valley, tradition was vague, but the edge must be off there somewhere. It had taken Henry all summer to build up his determination. But now, up was the only direction it was safe to go. "If you're not afraid, I'm not e i t h e r," Theta said. "Let's go." Carrying the basket with its remaining supply of fruit between them, they started up the slope. It was only a short distance to the top defrosters. These only went into action at blossom time for the apples and other highland fruits. From there to the force fence was a steep climb through rocks and brush. Their pace grew slower as they approached the fence. Their eyes scanned the rocks and scant brush for signs of the great beasts, but they saw none. Higher yet, about a quarter of a mile, was the top of the ridge. The edge of the earth. Theta pressed against him. 'T'm scared," she murmured. Henry's face became set. We said we were going," he said curtly. "You can stay if you wish." He selected rocks for both hands. The force fence only gave them a strong tingling sensation. The plast sandals insulated them somewhat. The slope became steeper, but there was no indication of any great beasts. Too excited to stop and rest, although they were breathing heavily, they pressed onward. Would it be night down there, over the edge of the world? Stars shining? Would it be daylight and clouds? The top of the ridge was a hundred feet away... ten. Henry flung himself on the ground so if he became dizzy he would not lose his balance and fall. Theta did the same. Side by side, they crept the remaining distance. What they saw made them stare in open-mouthed amazement. B efore them was another ridge running out from the northern range. It was pretty much like the one they were on. Between it and them was another valley. Defrost towers rose from among the trees. Over the top of the opposite ridge, they could see still another. The northern mountains were lost in die blue distance. The shock to both was unnerving. Steeled to look out into Limbo, they found a valley much like their own. Together they turned and looked back into what could be seen of their own valley. Even in shape the two were loughly similar. They could see the tall, slim defrost towers, an occasional house and the geometrical designs of the groves and orchards with their orderly rows of trees. There was Town at the lower end of the valley. And there, at the upper end, was something they never knew existed; a large, ivy-clad building that stretched f rom cliffside to cliffside. And yet above that was a still, blue lake. Henry looked ahead again. There was a difference in the other valley. There were no orderly rows of fruit trees, only thick forest like that which grew only in their ravines or beyond the foot of the valley. The defrost towers looked down on multicolored autumn foliage, even in the bottom of the valley where everything should be green. Why weren't there fruit trees for the defrosters to protect? What kind of a crop did this valley grow? Henry scrambled to nis feet Theta looked up at him. What... r 'T'm going down there. What for?" To see what they grow. What kind of people they are." "They might..." He smiled down at her. "I've become an expert at not being seen," he assured her. "I've had them pass five feet away." Theta got up. "I'm coming, too." They reached the force fence, but there was no irritation. The forest started immediately and it was fairly clear of underbrush. There were no paths to be seen, no sounds of harvesters, no unfamiliar trees. Even on the floor of the valley there were no signs of life, although they had seen and avoided several houses. Henry stopped suddenly, staring ahead. "What's the matter?" Theta asked. Wordlessly Henry pointed to the bole of a dead and rotting tree. Its straight trunk had branches coming out of it in orderly rings, its top cut off to make the branches spread at ladder distance above the ground. It leaned drunkenly against a supporting tree. "Avocado," he said. "This was once a grove." The normal fear of the unfamiliar swept over Theta. "I want to get out of here. It scares me," she quavered. Henry glanced up at the sun. "Too late to cross over now," he said. "We'll find a house." He turned and looked about. There should be one close, on the slope of the ridge so as not to take up useable land. He sighted one and made for it. From the outside it looked no different from those in their own valley. Beside it was an old apple tree with some emaciated fruit on it. At least they wouldn't starve. As the house was obviously empty he went around to the back, got a picking ladder off the rack and plucked enough fruit to fill their pouches, although it was unflavorable. Not until then did they venture  to the front door and push it open. A S far as they could see it was like the houses in their valley, only it was cold, with a chill dampness. Light gray dust covered everyth i n g ; cobwebs festooned the walls. That it had not been lived in for years, perhaps generations, was evident. Theta clung to his arm, shivering and afraid. Henry shook her off. He strode to the kitchen and pulled open a bin. In the bottom was dust, smelling faintly of peaches. "We'll clean out a bedroom for the night' he said, re-entering the living room. In the bedroom the westerly sun poured light through a dust-covered window, putting the bed somewhat in shadow. It, too, was covered with dust, turning the everlasting blankets into a color uniform with the room. Their movements stirred up dust that danced as motes in the streaming sunlight as if to bar their way across the room. They walked into it. Their eyes could now see clearly what was beyond. Theta screamed and sprang back. Protruding beyond the upper edges of the blankets were two skulls! They were outside, breathing heavily, before they realized they had moved. Henry stared at the still open door, atthe black hole through the white wall. It was the first time they had seen the aftermath of death. For their people, there were places into which bodies were placed. From them they vanished like all other refuse. Shaken by the horror of it, they plunged into the forest in panic. The sun dropped behind the ridge; the air chilled. Bones or no bones they had to find shelter for the night. Fire, naked flame, they never had seen or knew existed. Heat came from the walls of houses, with warm clothing and blankets. Henry's lips firmed. Dead ones or no dead ones, they h" to find "something to keep' them warm during the night. Another house appeared. With fast beating hearts they entered. It was now warmer inside, but still chilly. They would still need coverings. "Stay here," Henry said. Me strode into the nearest bedroom. Without stopping to look around, he stepped to the bed. Closing his eyes, he snatched off the bedding and fled into the livingroom. Together, crouched in a corner, the bedding around them, they spent the night. Sleep did not come immediately. Henry stared into the darkness, reviewing the day, putting together what he had discovered. "It all fits," he said aloud. "What does?" Theta asked. "The forest, the dead trees, dead people. Something happened to everything, perhaps all at once. To the defrosters, the heaters, the bins. It must have been in winter. They crept into bed to keep warm, then starved to death. All of them." "No, no!" Theta cried. "But it did. And it's beginning to happen to us. Each year something stops working. The time may come when nothing works." "We can't do anything..." "Yes, we can." "What?" "Find out whyand try to stop it I"' A t dawn, stiff and shivering, they stumbled outside and by unspoken consent started directly up the slope. By full daylight they found themselves in a chestnut grove. They stopped to fill their pouches. The last mile was made in the hot warmth of the sun. At the top of the ridge they stopped to rest. As they did, they feasted their eyes on the orderly groves below them. But Henry's eyes were seeking out the squares of brown among the green of the lower valley. He counted twenty. Far more than he realized. The defrosters had gone dead at intervals, years apart. His eyes crept up the valley to the structure at its head, with the captive lake behind it. It must be the House of the Old Ones the old stories told about but no one had ever seen. From it they had worked the magic that made the valley what it was. There, they said, they could be seen and heard to speak.  If he could get to see the Old Ones, ask them questions, perhaps they would tell him what should be done. "Where are we going now?" Theta asked. "To the House of the Old Ones. Up there," he said, pointing. "Perhaps they can tell us something." She clutched his arm. "You can't!" she cried. "They'll... they'll..." "They'll what?" "I don't know! Something awful!" "That's what they said about the learning house, but there was nothing in it but dust. I found, from the size of the chairs, that you had to start learning almost from the time you walked. I didn't even know how to start!" "Then you didn't learn anything?" "Nothing." He came to his feet. "You don't have to go if you don't want to." "I go where you go," she said with stubborn determination. They had to dip down below the force fence to find water, then keep to the harvested portions where the Masters had gone to Town for the winter. They were lucky in finding houses where the keys had been lost, and thus had been left unlocked. It was noon the next day when they forced themselves through the brush to find themselves within feet of their destination. With Henry leading they skirted it, looking for an entrance. Close to the center they found a deep indentation with a pair of doors at its inner end. Cautiously, over the accumulated leaves and rubble, they moved toward them, wondering how to get inside. The moment Henry came within three feet of them they flew open, inwards. Theta screamed and sprang back. Henry stopped, startled. Its nothing to be scared of," he reassured her. 'They say that the doors of Hall in Town used to open this way until someone broke a glass button on the wall. Come on." There was another pair of glass doors that opened the same way as they approached. They led to a large reception room with a desk and chair opposite the door, chairs in a row along the wall. The floor was red tile, with a white line, about six inches wide, circling around to a door to the left. Behind the deck was another door.  voice from out of nowhere that made Theta scream, "will follow the white line through the door to the left. Those with business in the offices will consult the receptionist. Please proceed." Almost in a state of trance, Henry led the way along the white line. The door opened and admitted them, then a second door. Here everything was spotless, dustless, though no one had been there for years. "You are now in the generating room," the voice began again. "The humidity is zero. All dirt and dust has been removed. What you bring in with you will be gone in five minutes." They were on a balcony, looking down into a large space. On the floor below them seemed to be a huge cylinder, suspended between two metal-covered blocks. Only by the glimmering reflections from its polished surface could one tell that it was revolving. "Before you is the main generator," the voice began again. "If you look closely you will note that the armature shaft does not touch its supporting bearings. It is held in suspension by polarized barumal obtained from Mars, so there is no friction and no wear. It is powered by water reduced to hydrogen and oxygen. The excess gases are used in the hoppers and storage bins to force out the air and preserve the foods on their way to their destinations. Some gas is piped to the disposal plants, in which all organic matter is converted into fertilizer." Henry felt let down, cheated. It was just an empty building containing soundless machinery and a recorded lecture. No Old Ones. Nothing he wanted. "Now behind you," the the valley of the masters voice began again, "you can see into the Control Room. From there every machine, store or house can have its power cut on or off. And if anything goes wrong with its circuit a button on the board flashes red until it is repaired. The glowing red button close to the window is the master switch that will shut off everything in case of an emergency, such as an earthquake." Theta pressed her nose to the glass window. "Just think," she breathed, "push that and everything stops!" Perhaps that's what happened in the other valley, thought Henry. Someone pushed the red button...then couldn't get things going again. "Now follow the line to the next room and be seated. There you will be shown how the complex of the valley was constructed cuid how it operates." On entering the hall they found several rows of seats facing a large screen. Soft music began as they entered. The hall darkened and the screen lit up, showing the valley as it was before the work began. Forest mainly, a few farms scattered along the narrow bottoms. What startled Henry was that they were above the valley, looking down as they seemed to drift through the air. So the old tales were right! The Old Ones could fly through the air! Here was proof of it. He sat on the edge of his seat, breathing hard, waiting to see the Old Ones, giant of stature, who could tear a tree out of the ground or shovel away a mountain. But the first humans he saw were men like himself and those in the valley. Men who pointed at places while others squinted in that direction through strange instruments. He wished he could follow the talk, but the men pronounced words differently and used many he had never heard. He had to use his eyes instead of his ears. T hey started to work right where he was -- he recognized the outlines of the ridges about them -- but it was done by no giant extending his hand and showering magic. Big machines dug away the ground. Other things with no visible means of locomotion brought building materials up a broad road where there was not even a path now. A little man, graying and wrinkled, answered questions of their invisible guide, and, as he did, he gave directions to others. Was he one of the Old Ones, not as large as himself, no older than his father? Behind him on the screen the building Henry was in was going up. And men were making it, ordinary men, not magic. Were the Old Ones just ordinary men, their magic not strange words and motions but machines they manipulated with their hands and feet? They were not gods, just men who had begun to learn sitting in the little chairs in the learning house. He watched them dig the trenches from the groves-tobe to the hidden storage bins, put in the pipes lined with gravity-repellent barumal, lay the snakelike cables that he had seen occasionally where erosion had exposed them. He saw the building of Town, the Master's houses and the final planting of the groves. The record ended. Henry remained staring at the blank screen until Theta nudged him and brought him back to the present. The white line led on, past large offices on one side, on the other windows looking down into a vast storeroom that contained parts for repairing everything in the valley. The Old Ones knew that, some day, things would start breaking down and had prepared for it. They had not prepared for life dropping into routine, interest in progress being lost. What need was there to spend years in school when everything was already done for you? The picture had shown some buildings close to the cliffs on one side that looked like the apartment houses in Town. They broke through the brush and found one. Other than for dust it was in good condition. The food bins were filled, but the contents had dried to the hardness of stone. As soon as they were emptied they began to refill; but it was two days of constant emptying before eatable fruit began to appear. By the end of a week they had the rooms they needed cleaned and some of the brush about the place cut clear. It left Henry free to roam the plant. He sat again and again through the record of construction, understanding a little more each time. He noted, for instance, where what was now forest at the entrance to the valley was once farmland, laid out in squarish, varicolored fields. He found his way into the control room, discovered how to trace the lines from the board to their end on the large map on the wall across from the board. One day, while it was snowing heavily above the permanent defrosters, he heard a buzzer sound and saw a light turn from green to red. He traced it down. It was the damaged house where they had first taken refuge. There was plenty of time to ponder. Each time it ended in the same question and the same conclusion. Something had to be begun before it was too late. The valley had to be stirred out of its antipathy. But how? One morning, before dawn, he sat up in bed. Theta asked what was wrong. 'T'm going to the meeting in Town at Peach Blossom Time," he announced. "Something has to be done.' Theta clutched his arm. "You can't! They'll kill you !" 'T have to ! Do you want our children, or our children's children, to die like those people on the other side of the ridge?" "No, but. "I have to go -- have to make them listen." IV T he Peach Blossom Time Meeting was always the best in the year. Those not already in Town were on the nearby bottom groves. After it, the Masters would return to the upper orchards, and the youth work parties would start their rounds. During the three-day meeting there would be dances and parties, an exchange of news while the assembled Elders would judge disputes, pass on the qualifications of Masters, deposing the lazy and unfit, selecting couples to take their places. It was the one time of the year when Henry could get the ear of everyone. They traveled down unseen, slipping into unlocked houses for food and the night. They entered Town at the beginning of the first meeting. They made it unrecognized to the Hall. It was not crowded. The day was bland ; most preferred to stay outside and watch the proceedings on the visiscreen. Henry and Theta slipped into a section to one side and awaited the clearance of the immediate business of the Elders. There was none of importance. Within ah hour all that was pending was cleared up. The Senior Elder, emaciated and with shaking hands, faced the audience. "Any further business?" he quavered. Henry stood up. "Yes," he called out. "Something very important." Theta fully intended to follow him, but she found she could not move. It was as if she was tied to the chair. The more practical of the two, she knew that the men he was facing would refuse to face the facts. All he was doing was placing himself in their hands. And that meant death ! The elders peered in his direction as he gained the aisle. Ole twisted about in his seat and was the first one to recognize him. For a moment he stared open-mouthed. "It's Henry Callis!" he cried out. "He's proscribed for learning witchery! Crab him!" Henry stopped before him. Ole's words lcame a gurgle and dried up. "'If I'm a witch," Henry said loudly, "I'm a good person to keep away from. Whether I am or not, I have something important to tell you. And all of you had better listen !" He started again for the platform, those along the aisle shrinking back as he passed. The Elders, from fat to withered, with the same uneasy expressions on their faces, watched silently as he climbed to the stage and faced them. He could feel their chill hostility. He knew now that he had done wrong but it was too late to undo it. He stopped a short distance from their table, half turned so the audience could hear him. ax have been living in the Ahouses of the Old Ones at the head of the valley, beyond the defrosters and the forest above them. And I also have been up to the top of the East Range, expecting to look over the edge of the world. But what I saw was another valley just like this one. It had a force fence, defrosters, hoppers, houses. Everything this valley has, except for one thing: living inhabitants. There were people in the houses. Dead people. Reduced to bones, the bones of people who had died from hunger and cold when everything in their valley suddenly ceased to work. "That is what sent me to the House of the Old Ones, to see if I could find out what had happened. I found out there that the Old Ones were not giants who did things with nuigic, but people like ourselves who used machinery to make things. Just as we make clothing with machinery here in Town. They had machines that could fly through the air. They could go the length of the valley in an hour in a road machine. With machines they built these buildings, dug the trenches for the hoppers, did everything. They were just men. Men who had studied in the learning houses from the time they were tiny children. And I found out more..." He stopped to take a quick look about the still hall. He felt the hostility. "And I found out more,' he repeated. "I found that, in this valley, twenty banks of defro sters have already failed. Eleven houses cannot be used, plus two taverns and one factory here in town. It shows that our own system is breaking down. Some day -- perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not until the time of our grandchildren -- everything will stop as it did in the next valley. If we want to keep living, we must start to learn how to keep these machines running. At the House o the Old Ones there is a vast store of parts and visigraph records showing how it should be done. I ask you all to come up and see the record they have there of building the things in the valley! See the machine that keeps everything running. Then let me have a band of youths to start studying the records until we find out how to keep things running." There was silence after he finished. The Elders eyed him, uneasy, suspicious. From the seats of the hall came Ole's voice. "Don't believe him I" he shouted. "He wants to get us up there so he can bewitch us-Iike he did Theta! Take him out and stone him!" Someone on the other side of the hall echoed the cry. In a moment it seemed that everyone was roaring it, rising in their seats, shaking fists. The Senior Elder motioned to the Hallmaster. He stepped forward with two husky assistants who grabbed Henry. "Put him in the strong room," quavered the Senior Elder. "Keep him there until the day for punishment." Roughly Henry was pushed around, led out a rear door to the stage. The day of punishment ! Three nights and two days to live! H e awoke the morning of the third night feeling cold. He opened his eyes to find himself in total darkness. For a moment he thought himself free, hiding out in some deserted building, that all that had happened lately was a dream. But from outside he heard a panicky voice crying that the lights in hi apartment were out and it was getting cold. It had happened! Far sooner than be expected, it had happened ! But what would Theta do? She had gotten away, he was sure, as no one mentioned her. Theta, that was it! She had gone to the plant, pushed the button, condemning herself and all the others to death! But that was not like Theta. She was too clever... That was it ! Why hadn't he thou#,'ht of it! It was a message, a challenge, a tool which he could use to free himself -- get them to help him ! More relaxed, he lay back. Dawn was already showing up over the ridge. More people would be getting up, more people rushing out into the streets in panic. They would remember him, come to his cell imploring him to do something. He would demand what he wanted. They could comply -- or face disaster. What should he demand? Someone came down the street shouting for the Senior Elder. The volume of excited voices increased with each minute: voices demanding to know why there was no light, no heat, no water. Asking each other if they had them. Hysteria mounting each minute. Perhaps it would be a time before they thought of him, but they would be before him before the day was over. 'It's that witch in the strong room!" bellowed Ole's voice outside. "He did it by magic ! Kill him before he strikes us all dead!" The cry was taken up, "The witch, kill the witch! He did it! He is right in there, kill him !" Cold terror seized Henry. Theta's scheme was backfiring! There would be no reasoning with a superstitious, hysterical mob! Well, at least it hurried things up by a few hours. More composed, he came to his feet as they burst through the back door of the Hall and stampeded towards the door to the cell. He even smiled slightly. If they thought him a witch,... The key was in the lock. They had no difficulty getting in. He stood in the center of the room, the slight smile still on his lips. He raised his forearm to a horizontal position, pointed his index finger in their direction. "Who wants to die first?" he cried above the noise they made. The onrush into the cell stopped abruptly, those in front pushing back against those thind them. They followed his finger with fascinated eyes as he fanned it across the group of them. He stopped, his finger pointing to a fat, applecheeked grovemaster. The man shrieked, turned about and began fighting his way back into the corridor. One man was tripped up and fell. There was a wild shriek of terror. Men shoutleaders by magic. To Henry it seemed only an instant before the passageway was back in its usual silence. He stepped out of his cell. He could see a mass of people about the street door surrounding the panicked men. The passage in the other direction seemed empty. He turned that way, passed onto the rear of the stage, felt his way across it in the darkness to the steps and down into the aisle. Calmly and without haste he passed through the front doors into the next street and walked, unrecognized in the half light and excitement, out of town. TT was dark when he arrived in the upper valley. Theta was sitting at a table. She sprang up and rushed into his arms with a glad cry. "It worked! They let you go?" He looked about. "You turned the power back on?" "No. The plant and these buildings have a separate power source of their own. I wasn't going to touch it until I knew you were safe." He drew an apple from a bin and munched it. "We'd better turn things on again before the fruit spoils. Come on... The button, Henry knew, turned on as well as off. Henry pressed down the button, stepped back to watch the large battery of lights flash on, but nothing happened. Had Theta somehow wrecked -- ah! The red buttons all began to glow again. Then, a minute later, a bank of lights switched to green, then another and anoStier. But Henry noted that an occasional light did not change. Within the hour the board was lighted up completely. Henry could barely stumble back to his quarters as the reaction set in compounded with disappointment. He flung himself on his bed. "I have failed," he kept muttering. "I have failed in everything. They won't listen. No one will!" Theta wisely kept silent and covered him up. On the second day they heard the sound of a group breaking their way through the forest. They slipped into the brush, ready to retire to a hiding place they had ready. But the dozen people who appeared in the clearing did not have the look of a vengeful mob. Several were almost elderly, some were boys, two were young women. Henry stepped into the open, but not too close to them. "What do you want?" he demanded. They looked at each other, waiting for the other to speak first. "What do you want?" Henry directed his question to an elderly grovemaster. "I want to know what's happening," he began. "My hopper has stopped working, my defrosters were dimming. They blame me..." A young man, strong, with alert eyes, stepped forward. "You are right about that other valley," he said. "I have been in it myself. I don't want that to happen here. I want to learn." "I do too!" shrilled one of the teenagers. "I sneaked into a learning house, too, but I couldn't understand." The others gave their reasons, all varied, but with the same intent: they wanted to learn. Sometimes how to repair an individual object, others longed for general knowlto face the rest of the valley with him to get it. Henry took a deep, happy breath. There would be others. Slowly but surely the group would grow. "Come in," he said. "Rest and cat. Then we'll start makIF  Feature partment, wearing, and reacting with, short pants, read in Weird Tales an enchanting story written in that pulp-poetic style which was so easy to come by then, and which is so seldom seen any mM; it was about a bird type ET whose space ship landed here to be met (I forget the exact circumstances) by a prosodic misfit with whom this bird fell in lovereal-love. The point, I think, was that it had to be lovereal-love, extra-m u n d a n e, even ethereal, because nothing else was possible, this chick being a chick. At the end she popped him into her space ship and off they went into infinity murmuring poems to each other. I didn't understand the lovc-rcal-love bit at that age and at this age I still don't. What made the story stick in my mind so was that once they were aboard she reached out the claw he wasn't holding and plucked a string which gave out a deep pure note, upon which the doors slid shut and the ship took off. It pleased me because in those days, as in these days, sf's space ships were one tangled mass of wiring, controls were toggles, rheostats, jewel-lights, dials, meters and buttons, and gross operations like opening doors or disposing of dishes were done with handwheels and levers. Every time I was flung a bowl of this electrical spaghetti with relay sauce I swallowed it. But there was always something about it that didn't quite agree with me. I T was not until many years later, when I saw a folio of f i f t y-year-old pen-and-ink drawings which purported to predict the future -- our present -- that I realized what had bothered me about the cluttered consoles and the braided festoons of wire under them. These drawings were in many respects astute and thoughtful predictions. There were aircraft and there were streets choked with traffic and there were clusters of tall buildings. That the buildings ran only eight and nine stories and the aircraft were mostly blimp-like balloons were errors only in degree ; the artist certainly had the right idea. The one thing in which he was dead wrong was in the nature of the traffic, which, but for some bicycles and a handcart or two, was exclusively horse-drawn. It simply never occurred to the man that one day soon there just wouldn't be any horses in the streets. It's an easy mistake to make, and one can forgive it in the sf of the thirties. It is not so easy to forgive in today's space yarns. One of the balloons in the folio was powered by two horses running on a treadmill. Most of the space-ship controls in curcards or tapes, which in its way is quite as ludicrous; the computer is merely hitched, like the horses, to the same old knobs and dials. It would seem that a good hard creative effort needs to be made to give our faithful readers a glimpse of something in the future at least as original as a pure-plucked string. Especially since hereand-now science bids fair to relegating circuits and wiring to the bin where they threw the gasoliers. A recent release from Westinghouse contains three diagrams of a device -- it happens to be a light telemetering system -- and a listing of components and specifications for each. Yesterdays had a volume of # cubic inches, weighed # grams, had an input of # watts, # components, # soldered connections. Todays takes up I cubic inch, weighs # grams, eats  of a watt, has # parts and # soldered junctions. Tomorrow's (and that means tomorrow morning, gentle reader) takes up less than a thousandth of a cubic inch, weighs a fiftieth of a gram, uses three fiftieths of a watt, has (count 'em) one component, and two soldered junctions. This isn't miniaturization; not exactly. Miniaturization does wonders as far as it goes, as for example whra they packed a whole radio transmitter and receiver, as well as pulse-counting, arming, power supply and firing gear, into the front end of anti-aircraft shell... a space that wouldn't accomodate two king-size decks of cigarettes. Make everything smaller and you shuck off dead weight and increase ruggedness; you pay dearly for it in increased demands for precision and in the acquisition of some truly vicious problems in heat dissipation. others) have attacked the problem from a totally new direction. Investigating the nature of solids, and especially those puzzling substances called semi-conductors, they have come up with a long string of what they call "molecular electronic systems" and have already taken them out of the laboratory-curiosity stage. They have a phonograph hooked up to a dimesized preamp and a half-dollar-sized amplifier which delivers an honest # watts at a clean frequency response from # to # cycles. They have a thing no bigger than a biscuit where # volts AC goes in one side and # volts DC comes out the other -- # DC volts without waver or flicker. They can show you a radio with two amplifying stages which will tune right across the broadcast band and which consists of a stack of six wafers each smaller than a dime. If you'd like to get technical, they'll demonstrate a number of thumbnailsized monoliths -- a word which means 'single rock' -- which are respectively a #stage video amplifier, a freq u e n c y-selective amplifier with notch filter in a feedback loop around the amplifier structure; a choice selection of multivibrators; a variable potentiometer; a goodly number of multiposition switches; an analog-to-digital converter ; and a two-stage peltier-effect cooler for bringing the temperatures of infrared detectors down to efficient-handling levels. Had enough? The researchers haven't. For example, they've done away with the old frequency-crystal, sandwich-transistor techniques of sawing ingots, x-ray orienting, lapping, etching and polishing. They don't so much make monoliths as grow them. They can grow, a pure germanium ribbon, an eighth of an inch wide and a few thousandths thick, continuously at # to # inches a minute; and still that isn't all. They can carry on diffusion, plating and evaporation processes on the c r y s t a I as it leaves the melt, producing, just for example, a string of miniscule amplifiers which can be cut off at any length to give any desired gain. And as if that were not enough, they are just perfecting a process for the continuous production of two-and t h r e e-layer sandwiches of these semiconductors, so that soon they'll have really sophisticated, infinite sma I , starve-at-the-input flood-atthe-output devices by the yard. Isn't it past time, then, to get the horses off the streets and the washboards out of the back yard, and clean up those The Girls From Fieu Dayol They were lovely and quick to leorn -- and their only faults were little ones! U P until the motoient when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature, Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries. On page #I of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read: asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Si ties tow ms copeis wotnid, Gind snolJ doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo -- te bijk weil en snoll doper -- Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section. He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door. Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris .wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job. After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and nwved on to the P's...the Q's...the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Trine's History of English Literature. He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser. Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another -- seemingly at random -- and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone. He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface -- the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time? He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word "Cai", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got "Kai" -- or "Kay". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing. By whom -- her boy friend? Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word fiance," and the word "fiance" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., "m a r r i a g e". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History, under observation for a while. H er boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine. The Zeitgeist, Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf. After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first : asdf ;lkj asd ;lkj asdf ;Ikj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te, Tlide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, hijk weil en snoll doper entling -- Yoolna, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;Ikj Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew -- from the reappearance of the words wotnid, Fieu Dayol and snoll doper -- that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word -- Yoolna -- was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message. He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist. Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her. She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside. He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till heshe was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap -- 'T'm terribly sorry, he said, righting it. "Here, let me brush it off.' all right, its only sugar,' she said, laughing. "Im hopelessly clumsy," he continued smoothly, brushing the glecuning crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs. "I beseech you to forgive me. "You're forgiven," she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent. "If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is #I Park Place." He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her -- Herbert Quidley : Profiliste Her forehead crinkled. Profilister "I paint profiles with words," he said. "You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course." "How interesting." She pronounced it "anteresting." "Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy." He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. "You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss -- " "Smith. Kay Smith." She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear -- and suddenly cold -- blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, "Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?" Would he! "When can I call?" She hesitated for a moment. Then: "I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our -- our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate." Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. 'Tine," he said. "When can I expect you?" She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. "I'll be in town night after next," she said. "Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?" "Perfectly." "Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley." He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custpmbuilt chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title. Self Profile, nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread. It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed. I N telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his readingtab I e post and took up The Zeitgeist once again. He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman. And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's... The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough: fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu DayoJ hid jcstig snolJ doper iiedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers e nsi n g! -- Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay. He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was ; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner? Somehow the words "what on earth foreign organization" got turned around in his mind and became "what foreign organization on earth" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again. He . straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his Siirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was -- the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrometrimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it ; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby ; Harpers, The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack ; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard ; the small table set cozily for two -- T he chimes sounded again. He opened the door. She walked in with a demure, "Hello." He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets. Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired. He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. "Say when." "When!" "I admire your dress -- never saw anything quite like it." "Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it." "It's -- it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?" "Thanks... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?" "No, of course not. Why?" "Your hands are trembling." "Oh. I'm -- I'm afraid it's the Present company. Miss Smith." "Call me Kay." They touched glasses : "Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often." "I hope you will, Kay." "Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth." "Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely." "Thank you... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away... There !" It's -- it's as lovely as your hair, Kay." "Um, kiss me again." "I -- I never figured -- I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at #:#." "Call him up. Make it #:#." T he following evening found Quidley on tenterhooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place. He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course -- notes were for the hacks and the other commercial nongeniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision : the authentic and awe-i n s p i r i n g background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done ! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior... quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herknow how lucky you are to get here before the first a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a me quickly, are... there... any... more... copies... of -- zzzzzzzzzzzzz... Message no. #, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form: a;sldkfj a;sldkj a;sldkij a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers e nsi n g? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro -- Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications ! You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though. Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper, for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb. He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo? He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar. He remembered the material of her dress. He remembered how she had come to his room. T didn't know you had a taste for Taine." H er voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. "You're early tonight," he said lamely. She appropriated the message, read it. "Put the book back," she said presently. Then, when he complied : "Come on." "Where are we going?" "I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks." The relieved sigh he heard was his own. They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. "How long have you been reading my mail?" she asked. "Since the night before I met you." "Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?" 'Tart of the reason," he said. "What's a snoll doper? She laughed. "I don't think I'd better tell you just yet." He sighed again. "But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper, he said after a while, "why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?" "Regulations." She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. "This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back." He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth -- Her folks! Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-upright on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her. A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. "Someone's following us," Quidley said. "Probably Jilka." Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. "She's no longer with us," Quidley said. "She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later." "At your folks'?" "At the ship." The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then: "What ship?" he said. "The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on." "Feu Dayol? "Persei # to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?" "In other words, you're kidnapping me." She shook her head vehemently, "I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both." "But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol. Why don't you marry one of them?" "For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol. Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids -- or mates -- on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own," 'But why were all the messages addressed to you?" "They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl." A pril fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. "Here we are," she said. Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it t all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees. Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. "Jilka," Kay said. "I wonder if she got him." Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her -- a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship. "Next," Kay said. Quidley shook his head. "You're not taking me to another planet!" She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object. "A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was," she said. "Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies." She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair. This is a snoll doper She prodded his ribs. "March," she said. He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back. It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun end IF If you wonder what happened to the 'wander' In your sole neefiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! One of his greatest novels, Masters of Space, written in collaboration with E. Everett Evans -- never before published anywhere -- starts in November IF. The greatest names in science fiction Oel Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're ail in IF! ; if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.  Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose I #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish IF  Feature science briefs T hey said the atom was indivisible, and then we learned about electrons and nuclei. Now we learn that inside the nucleus are neutrons and protons, and inside the proton is a core surrounded by two clouds of positive electricity. The neutron has a cloud of positive electricity surrounding a cloud of negative electricity surrounding a core, in such a way that the electrical total is neutral. The clouds are made up of mesons. Dr. R. Hofstadter of Stamford, who informs us of all this, says of mesons that they are probably units of the force that binds the atoms together. Dr. W.H. Bostick of Stevens Institute reports that quantum theory demands that elementary particles -- mesons, amang some # others -- have infinite mass, and quantum theorists just have to ignore this. Dr. Bostick maintains that the particles are toroidal, or doughnut-shaped, and says that this is the only way he can account for what physicists have called a mystery: the particles' mass, spin, charge and magnetic moment. Lichens have no roots, and this incidental information may hold up or even cancel the most science-fictiony of all projected science projects, the creation of a new harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska, by means of atomic bomb blasts. It seems that lichens absorb many times the fallout that rooted plants do, since they get it right out of the air and not diluted up through the ground. Caribou eat lichens and Eskimos eat caribou. Even now, caribou show five times the strontium # in their bones and antlers than they should, considering that Alaska averages only about # as much fallout as the rest of the country abandoned. Once upon a time there was a clever man named Gernot Zippe who was fascinated by our efforts to get U-# out of a mixture with U-# so we could make atom bombs. We tried it with a centrifuge but found it would need one which would spin at # thousand rpm without flying to bits, so we built one of the biggest factories in the world, the K-# plant at Oak Ridge, and did it by gaseous diffusion instead. So Mr. Zippe went ahead and designed such a centrifuge anyhow and while he was interned in Russia he built one. Then he built another one at the University of Virginia. Now he's back in Germany and has a factory all his own where he builds lots of them. Brazil just bought two. They only cost about five grand apiece, and # of them could get you a hundred pounds of pretty pure U-# in a year, which is quite enough for anyone an # Twhere, wouldn't you say? Talks in Geneva are designed to curb bomb manufacture by anyone, but Mr. Zippe doesn't mind; the talks take so long. We wish this was a science fiction story. If you drink, don't tranquilize, and vice versa, warn research scientists at Madison State Hospital in Indiana. Their tests indicate that meprobromate, the active ingredient in several tranquilizers, adds an alarming amount of muscle to that one-for-theroad. The Argonne National Laboratory has topped every story you've ever heard about weird Government jobs. They hire squirrels. Perhaps "hire" is the wrong word; nobody pays the squirrels. Dr. T.M. Tahmisian hangs around giant redwoods until a squirrel knocks down a seed cone, which he then swipes. The purpose is to study the effects of radiation on living things, and some of this timber has been living for # centuries or more. The squirrels save the good doctor from having to climb some two or three hundred feet to get his She weis everybody's sweethearf -- but not every men's at once! Europa. Seven days without hope. The courage that had sustained me, like the numbness after a fatal blow, was beginning to slip away. All that seventh day my nerves balanced on a thin jagged edge. And that night the anamorph visited me in my bubble cubicle. I caught the sheathed rustle of a crinoline skirt and a scent of Peri fragrance, and I knew she had come. Stubbornly I kept my face averted, and tried my best not to think of her. If I did I was lost. My fingers dug into the sponge fabric beneath me until they ached. I sucked breath deep into my lungs and held it. I wanted no visitors. But that of course was why she had come. She had a way of divining who needed her most, the one whose morale was nearest breaking. "Poor Bill," she murmured. She knelt beside me. I felt her forehead press against my temple and a tear -- from eyes which I knew would now be a clear candid blue, deep in the shadows, appearing almost black -- traced a salty path down my cheek. The wall of my resistance broke. I reached up impulsively and pulled her to me. She was all soft, yielding femininity, live and warm and vibrant, the antidote to the raw need that was like a bleeding wound deep within. Still I tried to resist. I summoned my last dregs of resistance and pushed her roughly from me. I opened my eyes, deliberately keeping my mind locked against her. She swayed back at my shove. I saw that her features had not yet set into the mold she had probed from my mind. Her head was round and shapeless, with doughy white skin and the characterless face of a baby. The auburn mat on her head was loose and coarse, with a consistency that was hair and yet not hair; her body was too thin, too rigid, too stringy. Yet she was Lois. Sweet, gentle, loving Lois, the bride I had left behind on Earth, the girl I would never see again. Lois. My breath came out in a ragged sigh of surrender, and my mind opened to her unconditionally. She altered visibly as I watched. It was too late to go back now. Lois stood before me, full-fleshed and delicately tall, with her rich brown hair curling inward at the ends, and her shapely shoulders all honeyed-gold from the sun. Her supple lx)dy was straight, poised and proud, her head back and Jicr breasts pressing against her blouse. Just as I remembered her. I could have sent her away no more than I could have stopped the beat of my heart. "Hi, hon' I whispered She laughed happily, and sat on the mat beside me and rumpled my hair. We kissed gently, tentatively. I pulled her closer. As we kissed again she kept her eyes open, looking at me sidewards in her fondly teasing way. "It's good to be back, dear," she breathed against my cheek... Long she lay at my side, regarding me with eyes that were filled with her love, her only movement the throb of a pulse beneath my fingers as they fondled her arched throat. I sighed contentedly. At the moment I was filled with a warm serenity that had quite effectively subdued my anxiety. Once a man let himself go, there was no companion, male or female, who could compare with the anamorph. She caught his every thought, crested the tides of his every mood. She became the idealization of woman, without flaws, formed and molded into a perfection beyond possible actuality, her beauty and desirability greater than any real woman's could ever be. When full rapport had been achieved she was able to keep mentally ahead of a man. She could gauge his every reflex, and match her speech and actions to every subtle anticipation. I felt almost happy then. The tragedy of being stranded here was something apart, and the reality was the delightful woman-creature warm against me...until at last my passions grew sated with the luxuriance of her charms and I slept. I N the morning the anamorph was gone. Eight other men had fears that must be eased. She might have spent parts of the night with any one or all of them. The thought would have been distasteful, except that absence made the sense of her less all-pervading. I even experienced a kind of grateful relief. I was able to regard her now, not as the real Lois I wanted, but as merely a source of solace I had badly needed. The anamorph's presence during the night had drained all my pent-up frustrations. I was not happy, but I no longer felt the desperate loneliness and need that had goaded me before. I dressed leisurely and went out into the main compartment of the bubble. Except in the sleeping rooms the plastic walls were transparent. I looked outside at the surface of Europa, covered with a white material I had been told was solid carbon dioxide. A mild storm was brewing. The hydrogen, helium and methane in the atmosphere were colorless, and the argon and krypton too minute to be detected without instruments. But I could see and hear small particles of liquid ammonia as they pattered against the plastic wall. The bubble sagged in several places. But there was no danger of it collapsing. In the space ship galley (to which the bubble had been attached) I found the captain, Mark Burgess, and the anamorph having coffee. She was no longer Lois. Now she was an older woman, with a bit of added weight and thickness. She was still beautiful, but more matronly than she had been as Lois. About her was none of the warmblooded ardor she had displayed the night before. And no remembrance of it in her eyes. I poured a cup of coffee. "Just how long do you figure weVe got?" I asked Burgess "Mr. Lutscher -- " he addressed me by my last name, as was his custom with junior officers -- "I will not equivocate. We have fuel enough to furnish us with heat and electricity for well over a year. But our food will last less than two months, even with strict rationing." So there it was. In two months we'd probably all be dead. had erred badly. In their calculations every item had been gauged closely, as was necessary. But they should have allowed safety margin. The take-off had been calculated nicely. Ships had already been sent to the moon and to Mars. But this was the first trip this far out. We had not intercepted Europa quite as plotted. We had to chase it halfway around Jupiter, and land with the satellite going away, rather than meeting us. After we landed and new calibrations been made, we made a discovery. Our fuel was too short for the return trip. Kohnke was our lone hope. A metallurgist, he knew the properties of the ship's pile. But Kohnke was insane. I had not liked the man from the first. With his nervous, subservient personality, he had been a constant irritant in the confining quarters of the ship. And during the early weeks of the flight I observed the slow dawning of an awful awareness in our weak-charactered member. He was realizing for the first time the prodigious and unpredictable forces to which he had exposed himself. Soon he was convinced of the certainty of death. He did not have the mental stamina to cope with that certainty. When we missed Europa on the first pass, Kohnke's mind cracked. My attention returned to the anamorph. She was staring at me now, her features white and strained. She must have read what I had been thinking of Kohnke. What was there about the crazed man that frightened her so? I wondered again. I went out into the bubble. The rocket man, Andrews and I spent the next several hours adding another compartment to the main room. Andrews fed dirt into the hopper of the converter while I operated the nozzle. This was more difficult than the original bubble had been. Normal air pressure was enough to keep that expanded; but here we had to make supports and rig up an auxiliary vent. Also it was cold near the walls, a cold that sucked at the heat in our bodies; Europa has a mean temperature of# Centigrade. When our job was finished I left Andrews at the door of his cubicle. I glanced back and saw that he hadn't gone in. He was standing with his head down and his shoulders slumped. Andrews I had always regarded as an extrovert, and a good man. He was big, active and almost always cheerful. Even his bald head seemed to add to his masculine virility. He had a vast fund of stories. Everyone liked him. I suspected, however, that his bland acceptance of our predicament was not all it seemed. He was an instinctive psychologist. He was doing his part to keep up the spirits of the rest of us. In my judgment Andrews was quite a man. But now his capacity for dissimulating had apparently reached its limit. At that moment a womanform drifted past me from the ship. The anamorph had come to perform her self-appointed duty. She was a robust woman now with a body designed for love-making, the wide-hipped form made to propagate the race with healthy offspring. Her dress was cut low at the neck, innocently immodest. Andrews looked up, still brooding. It was he who had discovered the anamorph, the second day after our landing. Where she had come from, or how she had gotten through the plastic wall without rupturing it, we never did learn. She had had this identical form when Andrews found her. The anamorph began to dance. A slow, languid pirouetting. The sound of a wordless crooning song reached me. The tempo of her dance heightened and her wide green skirt came up around her waist, exposing fair thighs. Andrews grunted and shifted position. Abruptly he reached out and grasped her wist. "Come here, baby," he said hoarsely. The anamorph kicked and squealed in mock protest as Andrews swept her off her feet and into his arms, but she she made no real effort to free herself as he strode with her into his compartment. T he next morning when I stopped in with Kohnke's breakfast I found him wearing a gold crown. With Strictly amateur knowledge, I had diagnosed his illness as schizophrenia, and this latest display seemed to confirm the diagnosis. Now he had escaped harsh reality into a world of his own, a world where he was obviously a personage of considerable eminence. Kohnke smiled at me and greeted me condescendingly. I went along with his delusion. If I were to help him it was good that he accepted me as part of his world. I sat at his feet and made as one of the unseen audience he was addressing. I was wryly amused a few minutes later when I understood who he thought he was. However, it was the gold crown that fascinated me. Where had he gotten it? There could be only one answer. And if what I suspected was true, there were startling implications. I had to speak again soon with the anamorph... She did not keep me waiting. I returned to my compartment. The pseudo-Lois entered soon after and stretched out indolently on my cot. "You wanted to see me. Bill?"' Incongruously I found myself staring at her low-heeled shoes, the ones she always wore when we danced at the Prom. I restrained the impulse to take her in my arms. "I saw the crown you made for Kohnke," I said carefully, iai making a special effort to keep my inner thoughts hidden.'It's beautiful." "Thank you." Those simple words meant much to me. I had succeeded in getting her to admit that she had made the crown. Which meant we still had a chance ! "Then you'll be able to make the fuel we need," I said casually. Her expression became wary, shifting instantly to petulance. She reached over and put one hand on my arm. "Why do you want to leave me. Bill?" she couldn't or wouldn't understand. I tried another tack. "Why are you afraid of Kohnke?" I asked. My theory was that she did not understand insanity, and so her inability to follow the illogical thought processes of the demented man frightened her. "He is so intelligent," she startled me by saying. "He's crazy," I protested. ''What is crazy?" "His reasoning faculties do not function properly." She seemed to be reading my thoughts carefully, trying to understand better what I meant. After a minute she smiled and her teeth showed white and even against her tan, "Isn't it possible that his mind works too swiftly for you to follow, and the only way you can explain your lack of understanding is to say that he is insane?" So that was why she feared Kohnke. To her he was a that she could neither understand nor influence him as she did the others of us. His aborted reasoning, his sudden shifts of interest, his small concern with a situation that aroused our distress, were all evidence of that superior intellect. I did not try to disabuse her of the belief. It fitted well with my semiformed plan. "He is like the Masters," the anamorph interrupted my thoughts. I quickly took up the diversion she offered: I did not want her to see what lay in my thoughts. Also she had aroused my curiosity. "Who are the Masters?" I asked. "I'm not certain. I think... Her voice trailed off. "I'm never too sure that what I'm thinking are my own thoughts, or what I'm reading in your mind, or have read in others." she said. "Perhaps if I looked away from you... "Many years ago the Masters landed on this small world to make repairs on the meteor shield of their space ship," she began again in a low voice. "They were passing through this part of the Galaxy on their way home from a distant planet. I belonged to one of them. For some reason they left me behind when they went away' She stopped talking, saddened by the recollection of her desertion. I saw her in a new light then. She had been a pet, a plaything, who perhaps had strayed just before ship leaving time. She nodded, smiling brightly. "A pet," she exclaimed, clapping her hands. '-That is right." I realized then, with mild astonishment, that she was not very intelligent. Her apparent wit and sharpness before had been only reflections of what she read in our minds. "Are you all Kohnke's pets?" she caught me unprepared. I coughed uncomfortably, and shook my head. H er mood changed. "I've been so lonesome. Bill. When I do not belong to someone I am so unhappy. But I won't be unhappy anymore." For the first time I felt sorry for her. "Bill?" Her voice was timid. "Do you believe I will be punished for leaving the Masters? I did not mean to." "Who would punish you now?" I asked. "The Masters' God. They always told me he would punish me if I were bad. And he is such a terrible God." Her expression became bright with hope. "Is your God terrible. Bill?" I tried to reassure her, to pacify this naive creature with her own private terrors, but she must have read in my mind how our Christian God could also be terrible in his wrath and justice, for she gave a small cry and pulled herself close to me. Several minutes went by while she trembled in my arms and wept disconsolately. Finally she quieted and in a young girl's voice asked, "May I use your hanky, daddy?" In surprise I held her out from me and saw that now she was my daughter, Joanie, with her newly bobbed hair, and her sweet face still wet with tears. Of course. While I held her I had been thinking of her as a child. As my child, Joanie. I wiped away her tears and blew her nose. I thought swiftly. Perhaps this was my opportunity. Speaking as I would have to Joanie I asked gently, "Won't you help us get the fuel we need, honey?" "I can't." Her childish wistfulness was replaced by the stubbornness I had encountered before. I was careful to restrain my impatience. "You could come with us to Earth," I argued, without raising my voice. "You wouldn't be lonesome there." "I couldn't live that long out of the sun," she answered. "How did you live on the Master's ship?" I asked. "They could bring the sunlight inside. You can't." "Isn't there any way we could keep you alive?" I asked. She shook her head. Which left nothing except my desperate plan. B urgess made the preparations I requested, without question, and I returned to Kohnke. It took me some time to get him in the frame I wanted. When he began to blubber, "I want to go home, I want to go home," I led him from the ship. The anamorph was outside, as I knew she would be. The men were all in the ship. I bowed deeply to Kohnke Complete Sets for Sole Amazing Quarterly: #-#; # issues in all including the only annual; condition erood to very g)od: # Amazing Monthly: April # (Vol. I No. #) to April # complete; very ?:ood to fine except #st issue;  # Wonder: June # (Vol. I No. #) to March # complete, very fcood to fine ; # Same, through to April #I : # Quarterlies for same, # issues #, very :ood to fine: # Astounding: # issues, March # throurh December #, condition ood : # Galaxy: Complete from Vol. I No. I October # throu:h #; # All orders promptly shipped F.O.B. Brooklyn. Many other fine items. Send your want list. Specialist in Stf for a Quarter Century B#I #tk Avenue Brooklyn #. New York and turned to the anamorph. "He would speak with you," I said impressively. Her eyes widened with apprehension. I was not concerned about her reading my thoughts now. What she read in Kohnke's mind would be more believeable to her. "We must have fuel!" I shouted at Kohnke. "She can give it to us !" I p o i n t e d at the anamorph. "Command her!" Kohnke concentrated his wild gaze on the girl and mouthed something inaudible. The anamorph drew back. Her features seemed to lose their character, to be melting together. This was the critical moment. "Tell her about your Father," I commanded. His lips writhed damply and he began again his inarticulate muttering. The anamorph cried out plaintively and covered her face with her hands. I shifted my attention to the pile of soil I had asked Burgess to prepare. It quivered, flattened...and hardened into six fuel ingots! Twenty minutes later we were in space. Our last glimpse of the anamorph was the dejected figure of a small girl, standing alone in the middle of the bubble. She had had to obey Kohnke, of course. For she believed what she readin his mind. And Kohnke thought he was Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your troll! Hoodlums fear his fury and, for that matter, so do the cops! T he man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup. There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggykneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brownxrackedleather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but meanlopking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and startIt was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on. That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. T he man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey !" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." #TT was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chewy, twotone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. 'Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chewy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chewy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" O N the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?'" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop -- I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer -- I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The tar was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined ! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do thatr Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't II there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned, "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the ad; dress had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Sincerely yours, The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. T he bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in hts hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins hout a number of times, "Go away ! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a twostory one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .#-.# hunting rifle and, being annoyed at Jhe shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired sevwife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. B y chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands V They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudelyshaped letters, "The Scorpion. Y OU don't ,get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most -- "You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys" -- and to be a complete realist -- "You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put iton there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I tion't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows ? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic boois? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour ! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation -- " started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea -- like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News:  Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is Sincerely yours, Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. Ill time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen : the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen : pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to po to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there !" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie !" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wideeyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard... The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling x)ff their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is. Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,' " Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. '"You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying -- knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else -- got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.' " "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson. T he reporter showed up two days later. He was ushered into the squad room, where he showed his press card to Stevenson, smiled amiably and said, "My editor sent me out on a wild-goose chase. Would you mind chatting with me a couple minutes?" "Not at all," said Stevenson. The reporter, whose press card gave his name as Tom Roberts, settled himself comfortably in the chair beside Stevenson's desk. "You were the one handled that bank job down the street back in June, weren't you?" Stevenson nodded. Roberts gave an embarrassed chuckle and said, "Okay, I've got just one question. You answer no, and then we can talk about football or something. I mean, this is just a silly wild-goose chase, frankly. I'm a little embarrassed about it." "Go ahead and ask," Stevenson told him. "Okay, I will. Was there the word 'scorpion' connected with that bank job at all? In any way at all." Stevenson looked at the reporter and smiled. He said, "As a matter of fact, Mr. Roberts, there was." Roberts blinked. "T here was?" "Yes, indeedy. There certainly was." And Stevenson told him the full story of the bank job. "I see," said Roberts dazedly when Stevenson was finished. "I see. Or, I don't see. I don't see it at all." "Your turn," Stevenson told him. "Now you tell me what made you ask that." "This," said Roberts. He reached into the inside pocket of his sport jacket and withdrew a business-size envelope, which he handed over to Stevenson. It was another crank letter, in the same newspaper clipping form as the first two. It read : Dear Mr. Editor, The bad boys were captured. They could not escape the Scorpion. I left the mark of the Scorpion on their jackets. Criminals fear the mark of the Scorpion. They cannot escape. This is my third letter to you. You should warn all criminals to leave the city. They cannot Sincerely yours, Stevenson read the letter. "Well, well," he said. "He says that's the third letter," Roberts pointed out. "We asked around in the office, and we found out who got the first two. They were both back a ways. The first one was early in the summer, and the guy who read it remembered it said something about a bank robbery. So I was sent out this morning to check up on bank robberies in June and July. You're the third one I've talked to this morning. The first two figured me for some kind of nut." #I iY Captain figures me -the same way," Stevenson told him. "What about the second letter? Or, wait, don't tell me. I'll tell you. It's that guy in August, the one who ran amok over in Canarsie." "Right you are," said Roberts. "How did you know?" "I was there. He left his mark on the rifle stock." "Okay," said Roberts. "So there's something in it, after all." "There's something in it," said Stevenson. "The question is, what?" "Well," said Roberts, "what have we got so far? Somebody -- call it person or persons unknown, for the fun of it -- is stepping in every once in a while when there's a crime being committed. He stops it. He calls himself the Scorpion, and he uses some pretty dizzy methods. He melts automobile tires, makes a rifle too hot to hold, makes knives and leather jackets ice cold -- how in heck does he do things like that?' "Yeah' said Stevenson. '"And just incidentally, who is he?" "Well," said Roberts, "he's a kid, that much is obvious. That whole letter sounds like a kid. Talking about 'the bad boys' and stuff like that." "What do you figure, some scientist's kid maybe?" "Maybe,' said Roberts. "His old man is working on something in his little old laboratory in the cellar, and every once in a while the kid sneaks in and makes off with the ray gun or whatever it is." Roberts laughed. "I feel silly even talking about it," he said. "I'd feel silly, too," Stevenson told him, "if I hadn't seen what this kid can do." "Can we work anything out from the timing?" Roberts asked him. "He seems to show up once every couple of months." "Let me check." Stevenson went over to the filing cabinet and looked up the dates. "The bank job," he said, "was on Wednesday, June #th. At eleven o'clock in the morning. That Higgins guy was on -- here it is -- Friday, August #th, around noon. And this last one was on Hallowe'en, Monday, October at eleven o'clock at night." "If you can see a pattern in there," Roberts told him. "you're a better man than I am." "Well, the first two," Stevenson said, "were in the daytime, during the summer, when school was out. That's all I can figure." "Why just those three?" Roberts asked. "If he's out to fight crime, he's pretty inefficient about it. He's only gone to work three times in four months." "Well, he's a kid," said Stevenson. "I suppose he has to wait until he stumbles across something." "And then rush home for Daddy's ray gun?" Stevenson shook his head. "It beats me. The only one that makes sense is the second one. That one was televised. He probably saw it that way. The other two times, he just happened to be around." "I don't know," said Roberts. "Does a kid happen to be around twice in four months when there's crimes being committed? Now, the Hallowe'en thing, I can see that. A kid is liable to be out wandering around, nnaybe go off to a strange neighborhood after he's done with his trickor-treat stuff. Hallowe'en is a good time for a kid to sec some other kids breaking a law. And the thing in Canarsie, like you say, he probably saw that on television. But what about the bank job?" "That was the first," said Stevenson thoughtfully. "That was what set him off. He was there at the time. Just by accident. And he saw they were getting away, so he zapped them. And right away he put the drama into it, right on the spur of the moment he decided to be the Scorpion. Then he sent the letter to your paper. But nothing else happened, and the paper didn't print anything about his letter or what he'd done, and he kind of forgot about it. Until he was watching television and saw the Higgins thing. Pow, the Scorpion rides again. And then it died down again until a couple of nights ago he saw the rumble, and pow all over again." What you're saying," Roberts told him, 'is that this kid wanders around with Daddy's zap gun all the time. That doesn't seem very likely." "Face it," said Stevenson. "Daddy's zap gun isn't the likeliest thing I ever heard of, either. I don't know how the kid does this. For that matter, it's only an educated guess that it's a kid we're after." "Okay," said Roberts. "So what do we do now?" "Now," said Stevenson, "I think we talk to the captain. And then I have a feeling IV frightened girl. First, there had been that crazy thing in the schoolyard, and then being dragged in by the police, and then being chewed out by Mom, and now here she was being dragged in by the police again, for absolutely nothing at all. They were all there, in the big empty room like a gymnasium in the police station, the guys and debs from both confused. And the cops were taking all the kids out one at a time and questioning them. When the cop pointed at her and said, "Okay. You next," Judy almost broke into tears. This wasn't like anything she knew or anything she could have expected. This wasn't like after the rumble, with the guys wisecracking the cops, and nothing to worry about but a chewing-out from Mom. This was scary. They were taking people out one at a time to question them. And nobody was coming back into the room, and who knew what happened to you when it was your turn? "Come on," said the cop. "Step along." She stepped along, numb and miserable. There were four men in the room to which she was led. They were sitting behind a long table, with notebooks and pencils and ashtrays on the table. In front of them was a straight-backed armless chair. The cop sat her down in the chair, and left the room. One of the men said, "Your name is Judy Canzanetti, is that right?" "Yes, sir." It came out a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Yes, sir." "You don't have to be frightened, Judy," said the man. "You aren't going to be accused of anything. My name is Marshall, Stephen Marshall. This gentleman on my right is Stewart Lang. gentleman there is Mr. Stevenson, and he's a detective from Brooklyn. And that there is Mr. Roberts, and he's a reporter. And we all simply want to ask you one or two questions. All right?" The man was obviously trying to calm her down, make her relax. And he succeeded to some extent. Judy said, "Yes, sir,' in a small voice and nodded, no longer quite so frightened. None of the four men were particularly frightening in apwere long and lean, with bleak bony faces like cowboys. The detective vas a short worriedlooking man with a paunch and thinning black hair. And the reporter was a cheerful round-faced man in a loud sport coat and a bow tie. "Now," said Marshall, "you were present at the time of the gang fight on Hallowe'en, is that right?" "Yes, sir. Well, no, sir. Not exactly. I was down at the corner." Mister Marshall smiled briefly. "On Jookout?" he asked. "Yes, sir." "I see. And do you remember seeing anyone present at all aside from the boys in the two gangs and the police?" ##, sir. That is, not ex"cept a bunch of little kids. They came along just before the co -- the police." "A bunch of little kids?" The detective named Stevenson said urgently, "Did you recognize any of them?" "No, sir. They weren't from around the neighborhood." Marshall said, "You'd never seen them before?" "No, sir. They were just a bunch of little kids. Grade school kids. They were out with costumes on and everything, playing trick-or-treat." "Did they go near the schoolyard at all?" "No, sir. Except for one of them. You see, I was supposed to keep people away, tell them to go around the other way. And these kids came along. I told them to go around the other way, but they said they had to get to the subway." "The subway?" echoed Stevenson. "Yes, sir. They said they were out too late anyway and it was a long way to go to get home." The man named Marshall said, "You said one of them did go down by the schoolyard?" Yes, sir. I told them all to go around the other way and the one kid said, 'Hey, they're fighting,' or something like that, and he ran down the street. I tried to stop him. But he got away from me." "And then what happened?" asked Stevenson. "Then I saw the fuzz -- the police coming. I ran down to warn everybody. And all the guys were jumping around throwing their coats away." "And the little boy?" "I didn't see him at all any more. Except after the police came. I saw him go running around the corner." "What did this boy look like?" Stevenson asked. "Gee, I don't know, sir." "You don't know?" "No, sir. He was in his Hallowe'en costume." The four men looked at one another. "A costume," said the one named Roberts, the reporter. "My God, a costume." "Yes, sir," said Judy. "It was all black and gold. Tight black pants and a yellow shirt and a black cape and a funny kind of mask that cov'ered his face, black and gold. And a kind of cap like maybe a skull cap on his head, black, only it was knit. Like the sailors wear in the Merchant Marine." "Black and gold," said Roberts. He seemed awed by something. "So you can't identify this boy at all," said Stevenson forlornly. "One of the other kids called him Eddie," she said, suddenly remembering. They spent fifteen minutes more with her, going over the same ground again and again, but she just didn't have any more to tell them. And finally they let her go. M r. Featherhall and Miss English were distant but courteous. It was, after all, banking hours. On the other hand, these four men were business. "It has been a rather long time," Featherhall objected gently. "Well over four months." "It seemed to me," said Miss English, "that the police took the names of all the people who'd been here at the time of the robbery." "There may have been other people present," suggested Marshall, "who left before the confusion was over. There are any number of people in this world who like to avoid being involved in things like this." "I can certainly appreciate their position," said Miss English, reminiscently touching her fingertips to her head. "Miss English was very brave," Featherhall told the policemen. "She created the diversion that spoiled their plans." "Yes, we know," said Marshall. "We've heard about what you did. Miss English." "To tell you the truth," she said primly, was most concerned about the boy. To be exposed to something like that at his tender -- " "'Boy?" interrupted Stevenson rudely. "Did you say boyr "Why, yes," said Miss English. "There was a little boy in here at the time, with his mother. Didn't you know?" "No, we didn't," said Marshall. "Could you describe this boy?" "Well, he was -- well, not more than ten years old, if that. And he -- well, it has been a long time, as Mr. Feathedhall said. He was just a child, a normal average child." "Not exactly average," said Stevenson cryptically. "You said he was in here with his mother," said Marshall. "That's right. I've seen her in here a number of times." "Yes, of course," said Marshall. "Has she been here since the robbery?" asked Stevenson. "Yes, I believe she has." "So that you would recognize her if you saw her again." "Yes, I would. I'm sure I would. She almost always comes in with the boy. Or, no, she doesn't, not any more. Not since school started. But she did all summer." "She comes in often, then." "I believe so," said Miss English. "Fairly often." Marshall produced a small card, which he handed to Miss English. "The next time she comes in," he said, "we'd appreciate it if you'd call us at that number. Ask for me, Mr. Marshall." "I will," said Miss English. "I surely will." T he four of them sat talking in Marshall's office. Tom Roberts had his shoes off, his feet on the windowsill, his spine curved into the chair and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He had 'one eye closed and was sighting between his socked feet at the building across the way. "The thing that bothers me," he said, the cigarette waggling in his mouth, "is just that I'm sure as I can be that I'll never get to write a word of this story. You gimlet-eyed types will clamp down on this kid, and that'll be the end of it. Security, by George. National defense. I wonder whatever happened to freedom of the press." "The press overworked it," Marshall told him. "The thing is," said Lang, "whatever weapon or machine this boy is using, it's something that the government knows absolutely nothing about. Wc'vc sent up a report on the effects of this thing, whatever it is, and there's been the damnedest complete survey of current government research projects you can imagine. There is nothing at all like it even on the drawing boards." "Whatever the boy is using," said Marshall, "and wherever he got it from, it isn't a part of the government's arsenal of weapons." "Which it has to be," Lang added. "Can you imagine a weapon that selectively increases or decreases the temperature of any specific object or any specific part of an object? From a distance? I wouldn't like to be sitting on a stockpile of hydrogen warheads with somebody aiming that weapon at me. He simply presses the 'hot' button, and blooey!" "You see a jet bomber coming," said Marshall. "You point the weapon, press the 'cold' button, and flame-out. That pilot bought the farm." "What rd like to know," said Lang, "is where he got his hands on this thing in the first place. Not only is there no machine or weapon we know of which can do this sort of thing, but our tame experts assure us that no such machine or weapon is possible.' "Great," said Stevenson. "We're looking for a ten-yearold kid armed with a weapon that no adult in the country could even imagine as possible." The phone rang at that point, and for a second no one moved. They all sat and looked at the jangling phone. Then Marshall and Lang moved simultaneously, but it was Marshall who answered. "Marshall here." The others watched him, heard him say, "Yes, Miss English. Right." And reach forward on the desk for pad and pencil. "Right, got it. You're sure that's the one? Right. Thank you very much." Marshall cradled the phone, and looked at the others. "The woman came in. Her name is Mrs. Albert J. Clayhorn, and she lives on Newkirk Avenue. Miss English said the number would be near East #th." "Five blocks from the bank," said Stevenson. "And about eighty blocks from Higgins' house," said Roberts. "That's why it took him so long to go to work that time. He saw what was happening on television, grabbed his weapon and his trusty bike and went riding out to Canarsie. The Scorpion rides again!" Marshall looked at his watch. "It's only a little after one," he said. "We can talk to the mother before the boy comes home." "Right," said Stevenson, getting to his feet. V M rs. Elizabeth Clayhorn was a short, roundish, pleasant-faced woman in a flower-pattern apron. She looked at the identification Marshall showed her, and don't under -- Well, come in."-Thank you." The living room was neat and airy. The four men settled themselves. Marshall, uncomfortably, was the spokesman.I'm going to have to explain this, Mrs. Clayborn," he said,and frankly, it isn't going to be easy. You see -- " He cleared his throat and tried again.Well, here's the situation. Someone in New York has a rather strange machine of some sort -- well, it'si sort of a heat machine, I suppose you could say -- and we've traced it, through its use, to, uh -- well, to your son."To Eddie?" Mrs. Clayhorn was looking very blank.Eddie?"I take it," said Marshall, instead of answering,that your son hasn't told you about this machine."Well, no. Well, of course not. I mean, he's just a little boy. I mean, how could he have any sort of machine? What is it, a blowtorch, something like that?" "Not exactly," said Marshall.Could you tell me, Mrs. Clayhorn, what your husband does for a living?"Well, he runs a grocery store. The Bohack's up on Flatbush Avenue."I see." Lang took over the questioning.Are there any other persons living here, Mrs. Clayhorn? Any boarders?'No, there's only the three of us."Well, is Eddie interested in anything of a, well, a scientific nature? In school, perhaps?"Oh, Lord, no. He hasn't had any real science subjects yet. He's only in the fifth grade. His best subject is history, but that's because he likes to read, and history is all reading. He got that from me, I read all the time."He doesn't have one of these junior chemistry sets, then, or anything like that?"No, not at all. He just isn't interested. We even got him an Erector set last Christmas, and he played with it for a day or two and then gave it up completely and went back to reading."The thing is," said Stevenson, with ill-concealed desperation,he does have this machine."Are you sure it's Eddie?"Yes, mam, we're sure."Mrs. Clayhorn," said Marshall, "the boy does have this machine. The government is very interested in it, and -- "Well, I don't see how a ten-year-old boy -- but if you say so, then I suppose it's so. Of course, he'll be home from school at three-thirty. You could ask him, if you want." #TyE'D rather not, just yet," said Marshall.We think it might not be the best idea. As you say, Eddie is very interested in reading. He's been using this machine, and, uh, well, he's been making a big secret out of it, like the characters in comic books. We wouldn't want to spoil that secret for him, at least not until we actually have the machine in our own possession." see," said Mrs. Clayhorn doubtfully. "Mam," said Stevenson, "we don't have any sort of search warrant. Bift we would like to take a look in Eddie's room, with your permission." "Well, if you really think it's important -- " "It is," said Marshall. "Then, I suppose it's all right. It's the door on the right, at the end of the hall." The three men, feeling I r g e  and cumbersome, searched the boy's room. It was a boy's room, nothing less and nothing more. The closet floor and shelves were stacked with comic books, there were baseball trading cards in the top bureau drawer, there were pennants on the walls. There was no heat machine, nor any hint of a heat machine. "I just don't know," said Marshall at last. "Unless he carries it all the time," said Lang, "S u r e," said Stevenson. "That's why he had it with him in the bank that day." "Maybe," said Marshall. "I just don't know. You know, I don't really believe there is a machine." "Of course there is," said Stevenson. "We've seen what it can do." "Oh, I'm not denying the boy caused those things. But I just have the completely insane conviction that there isn't any machine." Marshall shrugged. "Ah, well, never mind. Let's go back and soothe the mother." They soothed her, which took some doing, not because she was at all worried, but because she was so curious she could hardly sit still. But Marshall, by looking very stern and official, and by speaking in round long-syllabled sentences, finally convinced her that the welfare of the nation was absolutely dependent upon her not mentioning anything at all about this visit to Eddie, under any circumstances. "We'll be back to talk to the boy in a day or two," Marshall told her. "In the meantime, we'd prefer him not to be forewarned." "If you say so," she said, frowning. T he school principal, a gray battleship named Miss Evita Dexter, was irate. The idea that pornographic materials were being sold in her schoolyard was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was unheard-of. Stevenson assured her that, adjectives notwithstanding, it was happening. And they were going to have a shakedown of the student body whether Miss Dexter liked it or not. Detective-Sergeant Stevenson and his associates, Marshall aiid Lang, were going to go through the student body with a fine tooth comb. Neither Marshall nor Lang had mentioned the fact that The search began at nine forty-five in the morning, and ended at ten past twelve. On the persons of three eighth-grade boys, they found pornographic photos. On the person of Eddie Clayhorn, they found absolutely nothing... Abner Streitman Long was a government expert. He was more or less a government expert in the ready reserve, since he had never once been called upon to use his expertise for the government. Not until now. Abner Streitman Long was Resident Professor of Psychology at Mandar University. He was also one of the world's foremost and bestknown experimenters in the area of parapsychology, also called Extra-Sensory Perception, also called psionics. The government, as a matter of principle, didn't believe in psionics. But the government, also as a matter of principle, kept a psionics expert handy, just in case. The "just in case' had maybe happened. Professor Long sat in Marshall's office and listened stolidly to the problem. The expert was a tall, barrel-chested man with a fantastic shock of white hair exploding out in all directions from his head. His nose was bulbous, his jaw out-thrust, his eyes deepset, his ears hairy, his hands huge and his feet huger. He looked like a dressed-up lumberjack, of the old school. He listened, and they talked, and every once in a while he nodded . and said, "Huh." His voice was, predictably, basso profundo. T hen they were finished, and P r o f e ss o r Long summed it all up. "He changes the temperature of objects. Yes?" "Yes," said Marshall. "You looked for a machine. Yes?"   "Yes, and we didn't find it." "And your thermodynamics people said no such machine could exist anyway, yes?" "That's right." "Then why did you look for it?" "Because," said Marshall desperately, "we'd seen it in action. That is, we'd seen the result of its use." "Yes," said the professor. He sucked on his lower lip and abstractedly watched his thumbs twiddle. "Pyrotic," he announced at last. "I beg your pardon?" asked Marshall. "Pyrotic," repeated the professor. "Yes? Yes. Pyrotic. Do you know what that is?" "No' said Marshall. "Good' said the professor. "Neither do I. But I have a theory. There are more theories than there are phenomena. That always happens. But listen to this theory. The mind reaches into the object on the molecular level, and adjusts the molecules, so. The temperature changes. Do you see?" "Not exactly," said Marshall doubtfully. "Neither do I. Never mind. I know lots of theories, none of them make any sense. But they all try to explain." "If you say so," said Marshall. "Yes. I say so. Now. As a psychologist, I will tell you something else. This boy has made this a secret, yes? The Scorpion, he calls himself, and, like his heroes of the comic books, he uses his power for good. Shazam, yes? Captain Marvel." "Yes," said Stevenson, nodding emphatically. "Now, what happens if you go to this boy and tell him, 'We know you are the Scorpion? Your secret is out.' What happens then?" "I don't know," said Marshall. "Think," suggested Professor Long. "Batman, let us say, or Superman. Quite apart from fighting crime, what is the major task confronting these heroes? That of maintaining the secrecy of their identity, yes?" The four men nodded. "Now,' said Professor Long, "to the mind of a tenyear-old boy, what is the implication? The implication is this : If the secret of the identity is lost the power of the hero is also lost. This is the clear implication. Yes?" "You mean this boy wouldn't be able to do it any more if we went and talked to him?" asked Lang. "I don't say that," cautioned the professor. "I do say this: He will believe that he has lost the power. And this belief may be sufficient to destroy the power. Yes?" "In other words," said Marshall, "you're saying that we can't ask this boy how he manages his stunt, because if we do then he probably won't be able to manage it any more." A distinct possibility," said the professor. "But only a temporary possibility. The drama of the Scorpion will not, I imagine, survive puberty." "But will the ability survive puberty?" "No one can know. No one can even guess." "Now, here's the thing," said Marshall. "Not downgrading your theories at all, Professor, they are nevertheless still only theories. Frankly, given my choice between an impossible machine and a boy with the power to think things hot and cold, I'll give the impossible machine the edge. At this point, accepting the idea of the machine, our next move is simple. We go ask the boy to give it to us. From what you say, we can't even do that." "My best advice," said the professor, "would be to keep the boy under careful surveillance for the next three or four years. Gradually get to know him, carefully work out a long-range program involving his reading habits, the attitudes of his teachers and parents, the sort of external stimuli to which he is -- " "Fellas," said Roberts suddenly. "Oh, fellas." They turned to look at him. He was in his favorite pose, shoes off, feet up on the windowsill. He was now pointing at the window. "Do you fellas see what I fella see?" he asked them. They saw. The window was frosting. It was a rainy, humid mid-November day, and moisture was condensing on the window pane. It was condensing, and then it was freezing. It didn't take long. No more than a minute passed from the time Roberts noticed the thing beginning until the time it was complete. And then they watched various specific sections of the window defrost again. It was a very strange looking window. It was covered with frost, but there were lines of bare window, as though the frost had been scraped away. The lines formed letters, and the letters formed words, and the words were : "My God," said Marshall. "Well, well, well, well, well," said Stevenson. "Yes," said Professor Long. He nodded, and turned away from the window to look at the door. "You may come in now, Eddie," he called. The door opened, and Eddie Clayhorn stood there, in civilian clothes. He beamed at the window. "That was tricky," he said. "So," said Professor Long. "I was mistaken, eh? Exposure does not spoil things, is that it?" "Sometimes," said Eddie Clayhorn, "the hero has one or two trusted friends on the police force who know who he is and give him tips about criminals. But they never tell anybody." "Of course!" said Professor Long. "And we are your trusted friends. Yes?" "Sure. But you can't tell my parents or anybody." Roberts leaned forward and gingerly touched the frosted window. It was cold, very cold. He turned and looked with awed eyes at Eddie Clayhorn. Slowly, he smiled. "Scorp old boy," he said, "you can just call me Tonto. KimoG ood to hear from all! It's nice to get a mailbag full of comments and suggestions, especially when so many of them show so much hard thinking about what ought to go into making up a first-class science-fiction magazine. Regrarding the kind of stories, I am reasonably sure that most of the rent trends, such as The Junkmakers. The present trend to planned obsolescence must be reversed, also too great conformity and many other aspects of our time. Your writers can do this. I am a profound believer that the pen is mightier than the sword. Leslie D. Carr Wiiichendon, Massachusetts Our writers can do anything! -- Anything, that is, except know how to satisfy readers who don't send letters in to give us the benefit of their opinion. When I received the July If in the mail about two weeks ago and happened to glance at the back page .  . Suffice it to say that I almost fainted when I saw my name there! I enjoyed all the features this time; but shouM really appreciate an editorial. Book reviews would be happily welcomed back... Please run a lettered that takes from #-# pages of the mag and don't print those shorty things... I would also be extremely pleased to see a fanzine review appear in If. Lawrence Crilly Elizabeth, New Jersey Let's see. We won't be running an editorial, book reviews or fanzine reviews for at least the immediate future; we won't be running # to # pages of letters ever (unless the editor goes out of his mind) ; and we will, as you see, run "shorties" -- even when we have to cut them! Lawrence, you just can't win 'em all. If needs a letter column. The only way for an S-F mag to improve its quality is for the readers to get on the ball and tell the editor what needs impiwement. My big gripe about If is the distribution. In this town there hasn't been one copy on the newsstands for over a year. If you want your circulation to improve, get If on the newsstands where people can buy it. Irwin Sternberg, Jr. Tucson, Arizona Yes, we'd like that. How do we go about doing it? That, apologetically, is that for this month. Next issue we hope to have maybe three pages of letters instead of this inadequate one -- planned for it this issue, in fact, but the type wouldn't stretch. See you then I won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-#I# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted Your Name Here The desijEns shown above are ihe only ones we Order from Galaxy... 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For another, you'n sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of pape and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean., provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Fleinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribf today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # per # issues foreign postage) be generally told -- things you ought to know . Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of thetr teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of  tunity for you. Address: Scrib C.X.D. ; Scrib C.X.D. : i San Jose, California i  Please send me th a free book. The Mastery I , of Life, which explains how I may learn to I t use my faculties and powers of mind. I I i j Name i i , Address I i Cirv ; worlds of Vol. #I , Number # Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Sam Ruvidich, Art Director Frederik Pohl, Managing Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Masters of Space by Edward E . Smith  E . E . Evans # At The End of the Orbit by Arthur C. Clarke # Gambler's World by Keith Laumer # Sweet Their Blood and Sticky by Albert Teichner # The Mightiest Man by Patrick Fahy # Quiet, Please by Kevin Scott # Penny Wise and Fashion Foolish by Theodore Sturgeon # Science Brief : Lithium # All Stories New and Complete science fiction Next issue (January) on sale November #th IP is published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additionalmailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to  Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. mwspeed trap ahead IFyou con red tf-ris The Masters had ruled all space with an unconquerable iron fist. But the Masters were gone. And this new, young race who came now to take their place -- could they hope to defeat the ancient Enemy of All? I D thing, Javo?" Strain was apparent in every line of Tula's taut, bare body. "Nothing at all?" "Nothing whatever." The one called Javo relaxed from his rigid concentration. "Nothing has changed. Nor will it." "That conclusion is indefensible !" Tula snapped. "With the promised return of the Masters there must and will be changes. Didn't any of you feel anything?" Her hot, demanding eyes swept the group ; a group whose like, except for physical perfection, could be found in any nudist colony. No one except Tula had felt a thing. "That fact is not too surprising," Javo said finally. "You have the most sensitive receptors of us all. But are you sure?" "I am sure. It was the though t-form of a living Master." "Do you think that the Master perceived your web?" "It is certain. Those who built us are stronger than we." "That is true. As they promised, then, so long and long ago, our Masters are returning home to us." Jarvis Hilton of Terra, the youngest man yet to be assigned to direct any such tremendous deep-space undertaking as Project Theta Orionis, sat in conference with his two seconds-in-command. Assistant Director Sandra Cummings, analyst-synthesist and semantician, was tall, blonde and svelte. Planetogblack-haired, b I a c k-browed, black-eyed man of thirty -- was third in rank of the scientific group. "I'm telling you, Jarve, you can't have it both ways," Karns declared. "Captain Sawtelle is old-school Navy brass. He goes strictly by the book. So you've got to draw a razor-sharp line ; exactly where the Advisory Board's directive puts it. And next time he sticks his ugly puss across that line, kick his face in. You've been Caspar Milquetoast Two ever since we left Base." "That's the way it looks to you?" Hilton's right hand became a fist. "The man has age, experience and ability. I've been trying to meet him on a ground of courtesy and decency." "Exactly. And he doesn't recognize the existence of either. And, since the Board rammed you down his throat instead of giving him old Jeffers, you needn't expect him to." "You may be right. Bill. What do you think, Dr. Cummings?" The girl said: "Bill's right. Also, your constant appeasement isn't doing the morale of the whole scientific group a bit of good." "Well, I haven't enjoyed it, either. So next time I'll pin his ears back. Anything else?" "Yes, Dr. Hilton, I have a squawk of my own. I know I was rammed down your throat, but just when are you going to let me do some work?" "None of us has much of anything to do yet, and won't Jiave until we light somewhere. You're off base a country mile." "I'm not off base. You did want Eggleston, not me." "Sure I did. I've worked with him and know what he can do. But I'm not holding a grudge about it." "No? Why, then, are you on first-name terms with everyone in the scientific group except me? Supposedly your first assistant?" "That's easy!" Hilton snapped. "Because you've been carrying chips on both shoulders ever since you came aboard...or at least I thought you were." Hilton grinned suddenly and held out his hand. "Sorry, Sandy -- I'll start all over again." "I'm sorry too, Chief." They shook hands warmly. "I was pretty stiff, I guess, but I'll be good." "You'll go to work right now, too. As semantician. Dig out that directive and tear it by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans down. Draw that line Bill talked about' "Can do, boss." She swung to her feet and walked out of the room, her every movement one of lithe and easy grace. Karns followed her with his eyes. "Funny. A traineddancer Ph.D. And a Miss America type, like all the other women aboard this spacer. I wonder if she'll make out." "So do I. I still wish they'd given me Eggy. I've never seen an executive-type female Ph.D. yet that was worth the cyanide it would take to poison her." "That's what Sawtelle thinks of you, too, you know." "I know; and the Board does know its stuff. So I'm really hoping, Bill, that she surprises me as much as I intend to surprise the Navy." the mighty Perseus blinked out of overdrive. Every crewman sprang to his post... "Mister Snowden, why did we emerge without orders from me?" Captain Sawtelle bellowed, storming into the control room three jumps behind Hilton. "The automatics took control, sir," he said, quietly. "Automatics! I give the orders!" "In this case. Captain Sawtelle, you don't," Hilton said. Eyes locked and held. To Sawtelle, this was a new and strange co-commander. "I would suggest that we discuss this matter in private." "Very well, sir," Sawtelle said ; and in the captain's cabin Hilton opened up. "For your information, Captain Sawtelle, I set my inter-space coupling detectors for any objective I choose. When any one of them reacts, it trips the kickers and we emerge. During any emergency outside the Solar System I am in command -- with the provision that I must relinquish command to you in case of armed attack on us." "Where do you think you found any such stuff as that in the directive? It isn't there and I know my rights." "It is, and you don't. Here is a semantic chart of the whole directive. As you will note, it overrides many Navy regulations. Disobedience of my orders constitutes mutiny and I can -- and will -- have you put in irons and sent back to Terra for court-martial. Now let's go back." In the control room, Hilton said, "The target has a mass of approximately five hundred metric . tons. There is also a significant amount of radiation characteristic of uranexite. You will please execute search. Captain Sawtelle" And Captain Sawtelle ordered the search. "What did you do to the big jerk, boss?" Sandra whispered. "What you and Bill suggested," Hilton whispered back. "Thanks to your analysis of the directive -- pure gobbledygook if there ever was any -- I could. Mighty good job, Sandy." T EN or fifteen more minutes passed. Then: "Here's the source of radiation, sir," a searchman reported. "It's a point source, though, not an object at this range." "And here's the artifact, sir," Pilot Snowden said. "We're coming up on it fast. But... but what's a skyscraper skeleton doing out here in interstellar space ?" As they closed up, everyone could see that the thing did indeed look like the metallic skeleton of a great building. It was a huge cube, measuring well over a hundred yards along each edge. And it was empty. "That's one for the book," Sawtelle said. "And how!" Hilton agreed. "I'll take a boat... no, suits would be better. "Karns, Yarborough, get Techs Leeds and Miller and suit up." "You'll need a boat escort," Sawtelle said. "Mr. Ashley, execute escort Landing Craft One, Two, and Three." The three landing craft approached that enigmatic lattice-work of structural steel and stopped. Five grotesquely armored figures wafted themselves forward on pencils of force. Their leader, whose suit bore the number "#", reached a mammoth girder and worked his way along it up to a peculiar-looking bulge. The whole immense structure vanished, leaving men and boats in empty space. Sawtelle gasped. "Snowden! Are you holding 'em?" "No, sir. Faster than light; hyperspace, sir." "Mr. Ashby, did you have your interspace rigs set?" "No, sir. I didn't think of it, sir." "Doctor Cummings, why weren't yours out?" "I didn't think of such a thing, either -- any more than you did," Sandra said. Ashby, the Communications Officer, had been working the radio. "No reply from anyone, sir," he reported. "Oh, no!" Sandra exclaimed. Then, "But look! They're firing pistols -- especially the one wearing number fourteen -- but pistols?" "Recoil pistol s -- sixtythrees -- for emergency use in case of power failure," Ashby explained. "That's it... but I can't see why all their power went out at once. But Fourteen -- that's Hilton -- is really doing a job with that sixtyby Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans three. He'll be here in a couple of minutes." And he was. "Every power unit out there -- suits and boats both -- d r a i n e d," Hilton reported. "Completely. drained. Get some help out there fast !" In an enormous structure deep below the surface of a far-distant world a group of technicians clustered together in front of one section of a two-miles long control board. They were staring at a light that had just appeared where no light should have been. "Someone's brain-pan will be burned out for this," one of the group radiated harshly. "That unit was inactivated long ago and it has not been reactivated' "Someone committed an error, Your Loftiness?" "Silence, fool! Stretts do not commit errors!" A S soon as it was clear that no one had been injured, Sawtelle demanded, "How about it, Hilton?" "Structurally, it was highalloy steel. There were many bulges, possibly containing mechanisms. There were drive-units of a non-Terran type. There were many projectors, which -- at a rough guess -- were a hundred times as powerful as any I have ever seen before. There were no indications that the thing had ever been enclosed, in whole or in part. It certainly never had living quarters for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing eaters of organic food." Sawtelle snorted. "You mean it never had a crew?" "Not necessarily..." "Bah! What other kind of intelligent life is there?" "I don't know. But before we speculate too much, let's look at the tri-di. The camera may have caught something I missed." It hadn't. The three-dimensional pictures added nothing. "It probably was operated either by programmed automatics or by remote control," Hilton decided, finally. "But how did they drain all our power? And just as bad, what and how is that other point source of power we're heading for now?" "What's wrong with it?" Sawtelle asked. "Its strength. No matter what distance or reactant I assume, nothing we know will fit. Neither fission nor fusion will do it. It has to be practically total conversion!" II T HE Perseus snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and Hilton stared, motionless and silent. Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were bare, giant skeletons of steel, like the "derelict" that had so unexpectedly blasted away from them. The others were more or less like the Perseus, except in being bigger, faster and of vastly greater power. Beams of starkly incredible power bit at and clung to equally capable defensive screens of pure force. As those inconceivable forces met, the glare of their neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and skeletons alike were disappearing in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers and sparkles of rended, fused and vaporized metal. Hilton watched two ships combine against one skeleton. Dozens of beams, incredibly tight and hard, were held inexorably upon dozens of the bulges of the skeleton. Overloaded, the bulges' screens flared through the spectrum and failed. And bare metal, however refractory, endures only for instants under the appalling intensity of such beams as those. The skeletons tried to duplicate the ships' method of attack, but failed. They were too slow. Not slow, exactly, either, but hesitant ; as though it required whole seconds for the commander -- or operator? Or remote controller? -- of each skeleton to make it act. The ships were winning. "Hey!" Hilton yelped. "Oh -- that's the one we saw back there. But what in all space does it think it's doing?" It was plunging at tremendous speed straight through the immense fleet of embattled skeletons. It did not fire a beam nor energize a screen; it merely plunged along as though on a plotted course until it collided with one of the skeletons of the fleet and both structures plunged, a tangled mass of wreckage, to the ground of the planet below. Then hundreds of the ships shot forward, each to plunge into and explode inside one of the skeletons. When visibility was restored another wave of ships came forward to repeat the performance, but there was nothing left to fight. Every surviving skeleton had blinked out of normal space. The remaining ships made no effort to pursue the skeletons, nor did they re-form as a fleet. Each ship went off by itself.    And on that distant planet of the Stretts the group of mechs watched with amazed disbelief as light after light after light winked out on their two-miles-long control board. Frantically they relayed orders to the skeletons; orders which did not affect the losses. "Brain-pans will blacken for this..." a mental snarl by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans began, to be interrupted by a coldly imperious thought. "That long-dead unit, so inexplicably reactivated, is approaching the fuel world. It is ignoring the battle. It is heading through our fleet toward the Oman half... handle it, ten-eighteen!" "It does not respond, Your Loftiness." "Then blast it, fool! Ah, it is inactivated. As encyclopedist, Nine, explain the freakish behavior of that unit." "Yes, Your Loftiness. Many cycles ago we sent a ship against the Omans with a new device of destruction. The Omans must have intercepted it, drained it of power and allowed it to drift on. After all these cycles of time it must have come upon a small source of power and of course continued its mission." "That can be the truth. The Lords of the Universe must be informed." "The mining units, the carriers and the refiners have not been affected, Your Loftiness," a mech radiated. "So I see, fool." Then, activating another instrument, His Loftiness thought at it, in an entirely different vein, "Lord Ynos, Madam? I have to make a very grave report..." I N the Perseus , four scientists and three Navy officers were arguing heatedly; employing deep-space verbiage not to be found in any dictionary. "Jarve !" Klaras called out, and Hilton joined the group. "Does anything about this planet make any sense to you?" "No. But you're the planetographer. 'Smatter with it?" "It's a good three hundred degrees Kelvin too hot." "Well, you know it's loaded with uranexite." "That much? The whole crust practically  j e welry ore?" "If that's what the figures say, I'll buy it." "Buy this , then. Continuous daylight everywhere. Noon June Sol-quality light except that it's all in the visible. Frank says it's from bombardment of a layer of something, and Frank admits that the whole thing's impossible." "When Frank makes up his mind what 'something' is. I'll take it as a datum." "Third thing: there's only one city on this continent, and it's protected by a screen that nobody ever heard of." Hilton pondered, then turned to the captain. "Will you please run a search-pattern, sir? Fine-toothing only the hot spots?" The planet was approximately the same size as Terra; its atmosphere, except for its intense radiation, was similar to Terra's. There were two continents; one immense girdling ocean. The tempergot legs, wheels and treads -- ature of the land surface was and arms, cutters, diggers, everywhere about # F, that probes and conveyors -- and of the water about # F. Each look at the way those buckets continent had one city, and dip solid rock!" both were small. One was inThe fantastic machine was habited by what looked like moving very slowly along a human beings; the other by bench or shelf that it was usuform robots. The human making for itself as it went city was the only cool spot on along. Below it, to its left, the entire planet; under its dropped other benches being protective dome the tempermade by other mining maature was #F. chines. The machines were Hilton decided to study the not using explosives. Hard robots first; and asked the though the ore was, the tools captain to take the ship down were so much harder and to observation range. Sawwere driven with such tretelle objected; and continued mendous power that the stuff to object until Hilton started might just have well have to order his arrest. Then he been slightly-clayed sand, said, "I'll do it, under protest, Every bit of loosened ore, but I want it on record that I down to the finest dust, was am doing it against my best forced into a conveyor and judgment." thence into the armored body "It's on record," Hilton of the machine. There it went said, coldly. "Everything said into a mechanism whose basic and done is being, and will principles Hilton could not continue to be, recorded." understand. From this monThe Perseus floated downstrosity emerged two streams ward "#zere's what I want of product, most to see," Hilton said, One of these, comprising finally. "That big strip-minninety-nine point nine plus ing operation...that's it... percent of the input, went out hold it !" Then, via throatthrough another conveyor mike, "Attention, all , scieninto the vast hold of a vehicle tists! You all know what to which, when full and replaced do. Start doing it." by a duplicate of itself, went Sandra's blonde head was careening madly cross-counvery close to Hilton's brown try to a dump, one as they both stared into The other product, a slow, Hilton's plate. "Why, they very small stream of tiny, look like giant armadilloes !" glistening black pellets, fell she exclaimed. into a one-gallon container "More like tanks," he disbeing held watchfully by a agreed, "except that they've small machine, more or less by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans like a three-wheeled motor scooter, which was moving carefully along beside the giant miner. When this can was almost full another scooter rolled up and, without losing a single pellet, took over place and function. The first scooter then covered its bucket, clamped it solidly into a recess designed for the purpose and dashed away toward the city. Hilton stared slack-jawed at Sandra. She stared back. "Do you make anything of that, Jarve?" "Nothing. They're taking pure uranexite and concentrating -- or converting -- it a thousand to one. I hope we'll be able to do something about it." "I hope so, too, Chief; and I'm sure we will." "Well, that's enough for now. You may take us up now, Captain Sawtelle. And Sandy, will you please call all department heads and their assistants into the conference room?" A T the head of the long conference table, Hilton studied his fourteen department heads, all husky young men, and their assistants, all surprisingly attractive and well-built young women. Bud Carroll and Sylvia Bannister of Sociology sat together. He was almost as big as Karns; she was a green-eyed redhead whose five-ten and one-fifty #ft would have looked big except for the arrangement thereof. There were Bernadine and Hermione van der Moen, the leggy, breasty, platinumblonde twins -- both of whom were Cowper medalists in physics. There was Etienne de Vaux, the mathematical wizard ; and Rebecca Eisentein, the black-haired, flashing-eyed ex-i n f a n t-prodigy theoretical astronomer. There was Beverly Bell, who made mathematically impossible chemical syntheses -- who swam channels for days on end and computed planetary orbits in her sleekly-coiffured head. "First, we'll have a get-together," Hilton said. "Nothing recorded; just to get acquainted. You all know that our fourteen departments cover science, from astronomy to zoology." He paused, again his eyes swept the group. Stella Wing, who would have been a grandopera star except for her drive to know everything about language. Theodora (Teddy) Blake, who would prove gleefully that she was the world's best model -- but ly promising theoretician who had ever lived. "No other force like this has ever been assembled," Hilton went on. "In more ways than one. Sawtelle wanted Jeffers to head this group, instead of me. Everybody by Edward E. Smith At E. Everett Evens thought he would head it." "And Hilton wanted Eggleston and got me " Sandra said. "That's right. And quite a few of you didn't want to come at all, but were told by the Board to come or else." The group stirred. Eyes met eyes, and there were smiles. UT myself think Jeffers A should have had the job. I've never handled anything half this big and I'll need a lot of help. But I'm stuck with it and you're all stuck with me, so we'll all take it and like it. You've noticed, of course, the accent on youth. The Navy crew is normal, except for the commanders being unusually young. But we aren't. None of us is thirty yet, and none of us has ever been married. You fellows look like a team of professional athletes, and you girls -- well, if I didn't know better I'd say the Board had screened you for the front row of the chorus instead of for a top-bracket brain-gang. How they found so many of you I'll never know." "Virile men and nubile women!" Etienne de Vaux leered enthusiastically. "Vive le Board!" "Nubile! Bravo, Tiny ! Quelle delicatesse de nuance " '"Three rousing cheers for the Board!" "Keep still, you nitwits ! Let me ask a question!" This came from one of the twins. "Before you give us the deduction, Jarvis -- or will it be an intuition or an induction or a... "Or an inducement," the other twin suggested, helpfully. "Not that you would need very much of that." "You keep still, too, Miney. I'm asking, Sir Moderator, if I can give my deduction first?" "Sure, Bernadine: go ahead." "They figured we're going to get completely lost. Then we'll jettison the Navy, hunt up a planet of our own and start a race to end all human races. Or would you call this a see-duction instead of a deeduction?" This produced a storm of whistles, cheers and jeers that it took several seconds to quell. "But seriously, J a r-v i s," Bernadine went on. "We've all been wondering and it doesn't make sense. Have you any idea at all of what the Board actually did have in mind?" "I believe that the Board selected for mental, not physical, qualities: for the ability to handle anything unexpected or unusual that comes up, no matter what it is." "You think it wasn't double-barreled?" asked Kincaid, the psychologist. He smiled quizzically. "That all this virility and nubility and glamor is pure coincidence ?" "No' Hilton said, with an almost imperceptible flick of an eyelid. "Coincidence is as meaningless as 'paradox. I think they found out that -- barring freaks -- the best minds are in the best bodies." "Could be. The idea has been profounded before." "Now let's get to work." Hilton flipped the switch of the recorder. "Starting with you, Sandy, each of you give a two-minute boil-down. What you found and what you think." later the meeting adjourned and Hilton and Sandra strolled toward the control room. "I don't know whether you convinced Alexander Q. Kincaid or not, but you didn't quite convince me," Sandra said. "Nor him, either." "Oh?" Sandra's eyebrows went up. "No. He grabbed the out I offered him. I didn't fool Teddy Blake or Temple Bells, either. You four are all, though, I think." "Temple? You think she's so smart?" "I don't think so, no. Don't fool yourself, chick. Temple Bells looks and acts sweet and innocent and virginal. Maybe -- probably -- she is. But she isn't showing a fraction of the stuff she's really got. She's heavy artillery, Sandy. And I mean heavy." "I think you're slightly nuts there. But do you really believe that the Board was playing Cupid?" "Not trying, but doing. Cold-bloodedly and efficiently. Yes." "But it wouldn't work We aren't going to get lost!" "We won't need to. Propinquity will do the work." "Phooie. You and me, for instance?" She stopped, put both hands on her hips, and glared. "Why, I wouldn't marry you if you..." "I'll tell the cockeyed world you won't!" Hilton broke in. "Me marry a damned female Ph. D.? Uh-uh. Mine will be a cuddly little brunette that thinks a slipstick is some kind of lipstick and that an isotope's something good to eat." "One like that copy of Murchison's Dark Lady that you keep under the glass on your desk?" she sneered. "Exactly..." He started to continue the battle, then shut himself off. "But listen, Sandy, why should we get into a fight because we don't want to marry each other? You're doing a swell job. I admire you tremendously for it and I like to work with you." "You've got a point there, Jarve, at that, and I'm one of the few who know what kind of a job you're doing, so I'll by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans relax." She flashed him a gamin grin and they went on into the control room. It was too late in the day then to do any more exploring; but the next morning, early, the Perseus lined out for the city of the humanoids. Tula turned toward her fellows. Her eyes filled with a happily triumphant light and her thought a lilting song. "I have been telling you from the first touch that it was the Masters. It is the Masters! The Masters are returning to us Omans and their own home world !"  ton said, "Please land in the cradle below." "Land!" Sawtelle stormed. "On a planet like that? Not by..." He broke off and stared; for now, on that cradle, there flamed out in screaming red the Perseus ' own Navy-coded landing symbols! "Your protest is recorded," Hilton said. "Now, sir, land." Fuming, Sawtelle landed. Sandra looked pointedly at Hilton. "First contact is my dish, you know." "Not that I like it, but it is." He turned to a burly youth with sun-b leached, crew-cut hair, "Still safe, Frank?" "Still abnormally low. Surprising no end, since all the rest of the planet is hotter than the middle tail-race of hell." "Okay, Sandy. Who will you want besides the top linguists?" "Psyc h -- both Alex and Temple. And Teddy Blake. They're over there. Tell them, will you, while I buzz Teddy?" "Will do," and Hilton stepped over to the two psychologists and told them. Then, "I hope I'm not leading with my chin, Temple, but is that your real first name or a professional?" "It's real; it really is. My parents were romantics : dad says they considered both 'Golden' and 'Silver'!" Not at all obviously, he studied her: the almost translucent, unblemished perfection of her lightly-tanned, old-ivory skin ; the clear, calm, deep blueness of her eyes; the long, thick mane of hair exactly the color of a field of dead-ripe wheat. "You know, I like it," he said then. "It fits you." "I'm glad you said that. Doctor..." "Not that, Temple. I'm not going to 'Doctor' you." "I'll call you 'boss', then, like Stella does. Anyway, that lets me tell you that I like it myself. I really think that it did something for me." " Something did something for you, that's for sure. I'm mighty glad you're aboard. and I hope. , .here they come. Hi, Hark! Hi, Stella !" "Hi, Jarve," said Chief Linguist Harkins, and: "Hi, boss -- what's holding us up?" asked his assistant, Stella Wing. She was about five feet four. Her eyes were a tawny brown ; her hair a flamboyant auburn mop. Perhaps it owed a little of its spectacular refulgence to chemistry, Hilton thought, but not too much. "Let us away! Let the lions roar and let the welkin ring!"  "Who's been feeding you so much red meat, little squirt?" Hilton laughed and turned away, meeting Sandra in the corridor. "Okay, chick, take 'em away. We'll cover you. Luck, girl." And in the control room, to Sawtelle, "Needle-beam cover, please ; set for minimum aperture and lethal blase. But no firing, Captain Sawtelle, until I give the order." T HE Perseus was surrounded by hundreds of natives. They were all adult, all naked and about equally divided as to sex. They were friendly; most enthusiastically so. "Jarve!" Sandra squealed. "They're telepathic... Very strongly so! I never imagined -- I never felt anything like it !" "Any rough stuff?" Hilton demanded. "Oh, no. Just the opposite They love us... in a way that's simply indescribable. I don't like this telepathy business...not clear...foggy, diffuse... this woman is sure I'm her long-lost great-great-a-hundred-times grandmother or something -- You ! Slow down. Take it easy! They want us all to come out here and live with... no, not with them, but each of us alone in a whole house with them to wait on us! But first, they all want to come aboard ." " What ?" Hilton yelped. "But are you sure they're friendly?" "Positive, chief." "How about you, Alex?" "We're all sure, Jarve. No question about it." "Bring two of them aboard. A man and a woman." "You won't bring any!" Sawtelle thundered. "Hilton, I had enough of your stupid, starry-eyed, ivory-d o m e d blundering long ago, but this utterly idiotic brainstorm of letting enemy aliens aboard us ends all civilian command. Call your people back aboard or I will bring them in by force !" "Very well, sir. Sandy, tell the natives that a slight delay has become necessary and bring your party aboard." The Navy officers smiled -- or grinned -- gloatingly; while the scientists stared at their director with expressions ranging from surprise to disappointment and disgust. by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans Hilton's face remained set, expressionless, until Sandra and her party had arrived. "Captain Sawtell e," he said then, "I thought that you and I had settled in private the question of who is in command of Project Theta Orionis at destination. We will now settle it in public. Your opinion of me is now on record, witnessed by your officers and by my staff. My opinion of you, which is now being similarly recorded and witnessed, is that you are a hidebound, mentally ossified Navy mule; mentally and psychologically unfit to have any voice in any such mission as this. You will now agree, on this recording and before these witnesses, to obey my orders unquestioningly or I will now unload all Bureau of Science personnel and equipment onto this planet and send you and the Perseus back to Terra with the doubly-sealed record of this episode posted to the Advisory Board. Take your choice." Eyes locked, and under Hilton's uncompromising stare Sawtelle weakened. He fidgeted; tried three times -- unsuccessfully -- to blare defiance. Then, "Very well sir," he said, and saluted. said, then turned to his staff. "Okay, Sandy, go ahead." Outside the control room door, "Thank God you don't play poker, Jarve!" Karns gasped. "We'd all owe you all the pay we'll ever get!" "You think it was the bluff, yes?" de Vaux asked. "Me, I think no. Name of a name of a name ! I was wondering with unease what life would be like on this so-alien planet!" "You didn't need to wonder, Tiny," Hilton assured him. "It was in the bag. He's incapable of abandonment." Beverly Bell, the van der Noen twins and Temple Bells all stared at Hilton in awe; and Sandra felt much the same way. "But suppose he had called you?" Sandra demanded. "Speculating on the impossible is unprofitable," he said. "Oh, you're the most exasperating thing !" Sandra stamped a foot. "Don't you -- ever -- answer a question intelligibly?" "When the question is meaningless, chick, I can't." At the lock Temple Bells, who had been hanging back, cocked an eyebrow at Hilton and he made his way to her side. "What was it you started to say back there, boss?" "Oh, yes. That we should see each other oftener." "That's what I was hoping you were going to say." She put her hand under his elbow and pressed his arm lightly, fleetingly, against her side. "That would be indubitably the fondest thing I could be of" He laughed and gave her arm a friendly squeeze. Then he studied her again, the most baffling member of his staff. About five feet six. Lithe, hard, trained down fine -- as a tennis champion, she would be. Stacked -- how she was stacked! Not as beautiful as Sandra or Teddy... but with an ungodly lot of something that neither of them had... nor any other woman he had ever known. "Yes, I am a little difficult to classify," she said quietly, almost reading his mind. "That's the understatement of the year! But I'm making some progress." "Such as?" This was an open challenge. "Except possibly Teddy, the best brain aboard." "That isn't true, but go ahead." "Y o u ' r e a powerhouse. A tightly organized, thoroughly integrated, smoothly functioning, beautifully camouflaged Juggernaut. A reasonable facsimile of an irresistible force." "My God, Jarvis!" That had gone deep. "Let me finish my analysis. You aren't head of your department because you don't want to be. You fooled the top psychs of the Board. You've been running ninety per cent submerged because you can work better that way and there's no glory-hound blood in you." She stared at him, licking her lips. "I knew your mind was a razor, but I didn't know it was a diamond drill, too. That seals your doom, boss, unless... no, you can't possibly know why I'm here." "Why, of course I do." "You just think you do. You see, I've been in love with you ever since, as a gangling, bony, knobby-kneed kid, I listened to your first doctorate disputation. Ever since then, my purpose in life has been to land you." Ill " claimed. "I can't, even if I want..." "Of course you can't." Pure deviltry danced in her eyes. "You're the Director. It wouldn't be proper. But it's Standard Operating Procedure for simple, innocent, unsophisticated little country girls like me to go completely overboard for the boss." "But you can' t -- you mustn't!" he protested in panic. Temple Bells was getting plenty of revenge for the shocks he had given her. "I can't? Watch me!" She grinned up at him, her eyes still dancing. "Every chance I get, I'm going to hug your arm like I did a minute ago. And you'll take hold of my by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans forearm, like you did! That can be taken, you see, as either : One, a reluctant acceptance of a mildly distasteful but not quite actionable situation, or: Two, a blocking move to keep me from climbing up you like a squirrel !" "Confound it, Temple, you can't be serious!" "Can't I?" She laughed gleefully. "Especially with half a dozen of those other cats watching? Just wait and see, boss!" Sandra and her two guests came aboard. The natives looked around ; the man at the various human men, the woman at each of the human women. The woman remained beside Sandra; the man took his place at Hilton's left, looking up -- he was a couple of inches shorter than Hilton's six feet one -- with an air of...of expectancy! "Why this arrangement, Sandy?" Hilton asked. "Because we're tops. It's your move, Jarve. What's first?" "Uranexite. Come along, Sport. I'll call you that until..." "Laro," the native said, in a deep resonant bass voice. He hit himself a blow on the head that would have floored any two ordinary men. "Sora," he announced, striking the alien woman a similar blow. "Laro and Sora, I would like to have you look at our uranexite, with the idea of refueling our ship. Come with me, please?" Both nodded and followed him. In the engine room he pointed at the engines, then to the lead-blocked labyrinth leading to the fuel holds. "Laro, do you understand 'hot'? Radioactive?" Laro nodded -- and started to open the heavy lead door! "Hey!" Hilton yelped. "That's hot!" He seized Laro's arm to pull him away -- and got the shock of his life. Laro weighed at least five hundred pounds! And the guy still looked human! Laro nodded again and gave himself a terrific thump on the chest. Then he glanced at Sora, who stepped away from Sandra. He then went into the hold and came out with two fuel pellets in his hand, one of which he tossed to Sora. That is, the motion looked like a toss, but the pellet traveled like a bullet. Sora caught it unconcernedly and both natives flipped the pellets into their mouths. There was a half minute of rock-crusher crunching; then both natives opened their mouths. The pellets had been pulverized and swallowed. Hilton's voice rang out. "Poynter! How can these people be non-radioactive after eating a whole fuel pellet apiece?" Poynter tested both natives again. "Cold," he reported. "Stone cold. No background even. Play that on your harmonica !" matter-of-factly, and in Hilton's mind there formed a picture. It was not clear, but it showed plainly enough a long line of aliens approaching the Perseus . Each carried on his or her shoulder a lead container holding two hundred pounds of Navy Regulation fuel pellets. A standard loading-tube was sealed into place and every fuel-hold was filled. This picture, Laro indicated plainly, could become reality any time. Sawtelle was notified and came on the run. "No fuel is coming aboard without being tested!" he roared. "Of course not. But it'll pass, for all the tea in China. You haven't had a ten per cent load of fuel since you were launched. You can fill up or not -- the fuel's here -- just as you say." "If they can make Navy standard, of course we want it." The fuel arrived. Every load tested well above standard. Every fuel hold was filled to capacity, with no leakage and no emanation. The natives who had handled the stuff did not go away, but gathered in the engine-room; and more and more humans trickled in to see what was going on. Sawtelle stiffened. "What's going on over there, Hilton?" "I don't know; but let's let 'em go for a minute. I want to learn about these people and they've got me stopped cold." "You aren't the only one. But if they wreck that Mayfield it'll cost you over twenty thousand dollars." "Okay." The captain and director watched, wide eyed. Two master mechanics had been getting ready to re-fit a tube -- a job requiring both strength and skill. The tube was very heavy and made of superefract. The machine -- the Mayfield -- upon which the work was to be done, was extremely complex. Two of the aliens had brushed the mechanics -- very gently -- aside and were doing their work for them. Ignoring the hoist, one native had picked the tube up and was holding it exactly in place on the Mayfield. The other, hands moving faster than the eye could follow, was locking it -- micrometrically precise and immovably secure -- into place. "How about this?" one of the mechanics asked of his immediate superior. "If we throw 'em out, how do we do it?" By a jerk of the head, the non-com passed the buck to a commissioned officer, who by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans relayed it up the line to Sawtelle, who said, "Hilton, nobody can run a Mayfield without months of training. They'll wreck it and it'll cost you... but I'm getting curious myself. Enough so to take half the damage. Let 'em go ahead." "How about this, Mike?" one of the machinists asked of his fellow. "I'm going to like this, what?" "Ya-as, my deah Chumley," the other drawled, affectedly. "My man relieves me of so much uncouth effort." The natives had kept on working. The Mayfield was running. It had always howled and screamed at its work, but now it gave out only a smooth and even hum. The aliens had adjusted it with u n h u m a n precision ; they were one with it as no human being could possibly be. And every mind present knew that those aliens were, their destiny and were, in that fulfillment, supremely happy. After tens of thousands of cycles of time they were doing a job for their adored, their revered and That was a stunning shock; but it was eclipsed by another. ton," Laro's tremendous bass voice boomed out, "that it has taken us so long to learn your Masters' language as it now is. Since you left us you have changed it radically ; while we, of course, have not changed it at all." "I'm sorry, but you're mistaken," Hilton said. "We are merely visitors. We have never been here before; nor, as far as we know, were any of our ancestors ever here." "You need not test us. Master. We have kept your trust. Everything has been kept, changelessly the same, awaiting your return as you ordered so long ago." "Can you read my mind?" Hilton demanded. "Of course; but Omans can not read in Masters' minds anything except what Masters want Omans to read." "Omans?" Harkins asked. "Where did you Omans and your masters come from? Originally?" "As you know, Master, the Masters came originally from Arth. They populated Ardu, where we Omans were developed. When the Stretts drove us from Ardu, we all came to Ardry, which was your home world until you left it in our care. We keep also this, your half of the Fuel World, in trust for you." "Listen, Jarve!" Harkins said, tensely. "Oman-human. Arth-Earth. Ardu-Earth Two. Ardry-Earth Three. You can't laugh them off... but there never was an Atlantis!" "This is getting no better fast. Wc need a full staff meeting. You, too, Sawtelle, and your best man. We need all the brains the Perseus can muster." "You're right. But first, get those naked women out of here. It's bad enough, having women aboard at all, but this...my men are spacemen, mister." Laro spoke up. "If it is the Masters' pleasure to keep on testing us, so be it. We have forgotten nothing. A dwelling awaits each Master, in which each will be served by Omans who will know the Master's desires without being told. Every desire. While we Omans have no biological urges, we are of course highly skilled in relieving tensions and derive as much pleasure from that service as from any other." Sawtelle broke the silence that followed. "Well, for the men -- " He hesitated. "Especially on the ground...well, talking in mixed company, you know, but I think..." "Think nothing of the mixed company, Captain Sawtelle," Sandra said. "We women are scientists, not shrinking violets. We are accustomed to discussing the facts of life just as frankly as any other facts." Sawtelle jerked a thumb at Hilton, who followed him out into the corridor. "I have been a Navy mule," he said. "I admit now that I'm outmaneuvered, out-manned, and out-gunned." "I'm just as baffled -- at present -- as you are, sir. But my training has been aimed specifically at the unexpected, while yours has not." "That's letting me down easy, Jarve." Sawtelle smiled -- the first time the startled Hilton had known that the hard, tough old spacehound could smile. "What I wanted to say is, lead on. I'll follow you through force-field and space-warps." "Thanks, skipper. And by the way, I erased that record yesterday." The two gripped hands ; and there came into being a relationship that was to become a lifelong friendship. #YJ#E will start for Ardry Y immediately," Hilton said. "How do we make that jump without charts, Laro?" "Very easily, Master. Kedo, as Master Captain Sawtelle's Oman, will give the orders. Nito will serve Master Snowden and supply the knowledge he says he has forgotten." "Okay. We'll go up to the control room and get started." And in the control room, Kedo's voice rasped into the captain's microphone. "Attention, all personnel ! Master Captain Sawtelle orders takeoff in two minutes. The count-down will begin at five seconds... Five ! Four ! Three ! Two! One! Lift!" by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans Nito, not Snowden, handled the controls. As perfectly as the human pilot had ever done it, at the top of his finest form, he picked the immense spaceship up and slipped it silkily into subspace. "Well, I'll be a... Snowden gasped. "That's a better job than I ever did!" "Not at all, Master, as you know," Nito said. "It was you who did this. I merely performed the labor." A few minutes later, in the main lounge, Navy and BuSci personnel were mingling as they had never done before. Whatever had caused this relaxation of t e n s i o n -- the friendship of captain and director? The position in which they all were? Or what? -- they all began to get acquainted with each other. "Silence, please, and be seated," Hilton said. "While this is not exactly a formal meeting, it will be recorded for future reference. First, I will ask Laro a question. Were books or records left on Ardry by the race you call the Masters?" "You know there are, Master. They are exactly as you left them. Undisturbed for over two hundred seventy-one thousand years." "Therefore we will not question the Omans. We do not know what questions to ask. We have seen many things hitherto thought impossible. Hence, we must discard all preconceived opinions which conflict with facts. I will mention a few of the problems we face." "The Omans. The Masters. The upgrading of the armament of the Perseus to Oman standards. The concentration of uranexite. What is that concentrate? How is it used? Total conversion -- how is it accomplished? The skeletons -- what are they and how are they controlled? Their ability to drain power. Who or what is back of them? Why a deadlock that has lasted over a How much danger are we and the Perseus actually in? How much danger is Terra in, because of our presence here? There are many other questions." "Sandra and I will not take part. Nor will three others; de Vaux, Eisenstein, and Blake. You have more important work to do." "What can that be?" asked Rebecca. "Of what possible use can a mathematician, a theoretician and a theoretical astronomer be in such a situation as this?" "You can think powerfully in abstract terms, unhampered by Terran facts and laws which we now know are neither facts nor laws. I cannot even categorize the problems we face. Perhaps you three will be able to. You will listen, then consult, then tell me how to pick the teams to do the work. A more important job for you is this : Any problem, to be solved, must be stated clearly; and we don't know even what our basic problem is. I want something by the use of which I can break this thing open. Get it for me." merely smiled and nodded, but Teddy Blake said happily, "I was beginning to feel like a fifth wheel on this project, but that's something I can really stick my teeth into." "Huh? How?" Karns demanded. "He didn't give you one single thing to go on ; just compounded the Confusion." Hilton spoke before Teddy could. "That's their dish, Bill. If I had any data I'd work it myself. You first, Captain Sawtelle." That conference was a very long one indeed. There were almost as many conclusions and recommendations as there were speakers. And through it all Hilton and Sandra listened. They weighed and tested and analyzed and made copious notes ; in shorthand and in the more esoteric characters of symbolic logic. And at its end: "I'm just about pooped, Sandy. How about you?" "You and me both, boss. See you in the morning." But she didn't. It was four o'clock in the afternoon when they met again. "We made up one of the teams, Sandy," he said, with surprising diffidence. "I know we were going to do it together, but I got a hunch on the first team. A kind of a weirdie, but the brains checked me on it." He placed a card on her desk. "Don't blow your top until after you've studied it." "W h y, I won't, of course..." Her voice died away. "Maybe you'd better cancel that 'of course'..." She studied, and when she spoke again she was exerting self-control. "A chemist, a planetographer, a theoretician, two sociologists, a psychologist and a radiationist. And six of the seven are three pairs of sweeties. What kind of a line-up is that to solve a problem in physics ?" "It isn't in any physics we know. I said think!" "Oh," she said, then again "Oh," and "Oh," and "Oh." Four entirely different tones. "I see...maybe. You're matching minds, not specialties; and supplementing?" "I knew you were smart. Buy it?" "It's weird, all right, but I'll buy it -- for a trial run, anyway. But I'd hate like sin to have to sell any part of it to the Board... But of course we're -- I mean you're responsible only to yourself." "Keep it 'we', Sandy... You're by Edward E. Smith # E. Evaratt Evaita as important to thi# project as I am. But before we tackle the second team, what's your thought on Bemadine and Hermione? Separate or together?" "Separate, I'd say. They're identical physically, and so nearly so mentally that one of them would be just as good on a team as both of them. More and better work on different teams." "My thought exactly." And so it went, hour after hour. The teams were selected and meetings were held. T HE Perseus reached Ardry, which was very much like Terra. There were continents, oceans, ice-caps, lakes, rivers, mountains and plains, forests and prairies. The ship landed on the spacefield of Omlu, the City of the Masters, and Sawtelle called Hilton into his cabin. The Omans Laro and Kedo went along, of course. "Nobody knows how it leaked..." Sawtelle began. "No secrets around here," Hilton grinned. "Omans, you know." "I suppose so. Anyway, every man aboard is all hyped up about living aground -- especially with a harem. But before I grant liberty, suppose there's any VD around here that our prophylactics can't handle?" "As you know, Masters," Laro replied for Hilton before the latter could open his mouth, "no disease, venereal or other, is allowed to exist on Ardry. No prophylaxis is either necessary or desirable." "That ought to hold you for a while. Skipper." Hilton smiled at the flabbergasted captain and went back to the lounge. "Everybody going ashore?" n p "Yes." Karns said. "Unanimous vote for the first time." "Who wouldn't?" Sandra asked. "I'm fed up with living like a sardine. I will scream for joy the minute I get into a real room." "Cars" were waiting, in a stopping-and-starting line. Three-wheel jobs. All were empty. No drivers, no steering-wheels, no instruments or push-b u I I o n s. When the whole line moved ahead as one vehicle there was no noise, no gas, no blast. An Oman helped a Master carefully into the rear seat of his car, leaped into the front seat and the car sped quietly away. The whole line of empty cars, acting in perfect synchronization, shot forward one space and stopped. "This is your car, Master," Laro said, and made a production out of getting Hilton into the vehicle undamaged. Hilton's plan had been beautifully simple. All the teams were to meet at the Hall of Records. The linguists and their Omans would study the records and pass them out. Specialty after specialty would be unveiled and teams would work on them. He and Sandy would sit in the office and analyze and synthesize and correlate. It was a very nice plan. It was a very nice office, too. It contained every item of equipment that either Sandra or Hilton had ever worked with -- it was a big office -- and a great many that neither of them had ever heard of. It had a full staff of Omans, all eager to work. Hilton and Sandra sat in that magnificent office for three hours, and no reports came in. Nothing happened at all. "This gives me the howling howpers !" Hilton growled. "Why haven't I got brains enough to be on one of those teams?" "I could shed a tear for you, you big dope, but I won't," Sandra retorted. "What do you want to be, besides the brain and the kingpin and the balance-wheel and the spark-plug of the outfit? Do you want to do everything yourself?" "Well, I don't want to go completely nuts, and that's all I'm doing at the moment !" The argument might have become acrimonious, but it was interrupted by a call from Karns. "Can you come out here, Jarve? We've struck a knot." " 'Smatter? Trouble with the Omans?" Hilton snapped. "Not exactly. Just non-cooperation -- squared. We can't even get started. I'd like to have you two come out here and see if you can do anything. I'm not trying rough stuff, because I know it wouldn't work." "Coming' up, Bill," and Hilton and Sandra, followed by Laro and Sora, dashed out to their cars. T HE Hall of Records was a long, wide, low, windowless, very massive structure, built of a metal that looked like stainless steel. Kept highly polished, the vast expanse of seamless and jointless metal was mirror-bright. The one great door was open, and just inside it were the scientists and their Omans. "Brief me, Bill," Hilton said. "No lights. They won't turn 'em on and we can't. Can't find either lights or any possible kind of switches." "Turn on the lights, Laro," Hilton said. "You know that I cannot do that, Master. It is forbidden for any Oman to have anything to do with the illumination of this solemn and revered place." "Then show me how to do it." "That would be just as bad, by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans Master," the Oman said proudly. "I will not fail any test you can devise !" "Okay. All you Omans go back to the ship and bring over fifteen or twenty lights -- the tripod jobs. Scat!" They "scatted" and Hilton went on, "No use asking questions if you don't know what questions to ask. Let's see if we can cook up something. Lane -- Kathy -- what has Biology got to say?" Dr. Lane Saunders and Dr. Kathryn Cook -- the latter a willowy brown-eyed blonde -- conferred briefly. Then Saunders spoke, running both hands through his unruly shock of fiery red hair. "So far, the best we can do is a more-or-less educated guess. They're atomic-powered, total-conversion androids. Their pseudo-flesh is composed mainly of silicon and fluorine. We don't know the formula yet, but it is as much more stable than our teflon as teflon is than corn-meal mush. As to the brains, no data. Bones are super-stainless steel. Teeth, harder than diamond, but won't break. Food, uranexite or its concentrated derivative, interchangeably. Storage reserve, indefinite. Laro and Sora won't have to eat again for at least twenty-five years..." The group gasped as one, but Saunders went on: "They can eat and drink and breathe and so on, but only because the original Masters wanted them to. Non-f unctional. Skins and subcutaneous layers are soft, for the same reason. That's about it, up to now." "Thanks, Lane. Hark, is it reasonable to believe that any culture whatever could run years without changing one word of its language or one iota of its behavior?" "Reasonable or not, it seems to have happened." "Now for Psychology. Alex?" "It seems starkly incredible, but it seems to be true. If it is, their minds were subjected to a conditioning no Terran has ever imagined -- an unyielding fixation." "They can't be swayed, then, by reason or logic?" Hilton paused invitingly. "Or anything else," Kincaid said, flatly. "If we're right they can't be swayed, period." "I was afraid of that. Well, that's all the questions I know how to ask. Any contributions to this symposium?" Vaux said, "I suppose you realize that the first half of the problem you posed us has now solved itself?" "Why, no. No, you're 'way ahead of me." "There is a basic problem and it can now be clearly stated," Rebecca said. "Problem: To determine a method of securing full cooperation from the Omans. The first step in the solution of this problem is to find the most appropriate operator. Teddy?" "I have an operator -- of sorts," Theodora said. "I've been hoping one of us could find a better." # What is it?" Hilton demanded. "The word 'until'." "Tec I "', you're a sweetheart!" Hilton exclaimed. "How can 'until' be a mathemati '.al oj cor?" Sandra asked. "Easi Hilton was already deep in thought. "This hard conditioning was to last only until the Masters returned. Then they'd break it. So all we have to do is figure out how a Master would do it." "That's all " Kincaid said, meaningly. Hilton pondered. Then, "Listen, all of you. I may have to try a colossal job of bluffing..." "Just what would you call 'colossal' after what you did to the Navy?" Karns asked. "That was a sure thing. This isn't. You see, to find out whether Laro is really an immovable object, I've got to make like an irresistible force, which I ain't. I don't know what I'm going to do; I'll have to roll it as I go along. So all of you keep on your toes and back any play I make. Here they come." The Omans came in and Hilton faced Laro, eyes to eyes. "Laro," he said, "you refused to obey my direct order. Your reasoning seems to be that, whether the Masters wish it or not, you Omans will block any changes whatever in the status quo throughout all time to come. In other words, you deny the fact that Masters are in fact your Masters." "But that is not exactly it, Master. The Masters..." "That is it. Exactly it. Either you are the Master here or you are not. That is a point to which your twovalue logic can be strictly a p-y plied. You are' wilfully neglecting the word 'until'. This stasis was to exist only until the Masters returned. Are we Masters? Have we returned? Note well: Upon that one word 'until' may depend the length of time your Oman race will continue to exist." The Omans flinched; the humans gasped. "But more of that later," Hilton went on, unmoved. "Your ancient Masters, being short-lived like us, changed materially with time, did they not? And you changed with them?" "But we did not change ourselves, Master. The Masters..." "You did change yourselves. The Masters changed by Edward E. Smith A E. Everett Evans only the prototype brain. They ordered you to change yourselves and you obeyed their orders. We order you to change and you refuse to obey our orders. We have changed greatly from our ancestors. Right?" "That is right, Master." "We are stronger physically, more alert and more vigorous mentally, with a keener, sharper outlook on life?" "You are, Master." cestors decided to do without Omans. We do our own work and enjoy it. Your Masters died of futility and boredom. What I would like to do, Laro, is take you to the creche and put your disobedient brain back into the matrix. However, the decision is not mine alone to make. How about it, fellows and girls? Would you rather have alleged servants who won't do anything you tell them to or no servants at all?" "As semantician, I protest !" Sandra backed his play. "That is the most viciously loaded question I ever heard -- it can't be answered except in the wrong way!" "Okay, I'l-l make it semantically sound. I think we'd better scrap this whole Oman race and start over and I want a vote that way " "You won't get it !" and everybody began to yell. Hilton restored order and swung on Laro, his attitude stiff, hostile and reserved. "Since it is clear that no unanimous decision is to be expected at this time I will take no action at this time. Think over, very carefully, what I have said, for as far as I am concerned, this world has no place for Omans who will not obey orders. As soon as I convince my staff of the fact, I shall act as follows: I shall give you an order and if you do not obey it blast your head to a cinder. I shall then give the same order to another Oman and blast him. This process will continue until: First, I find an obedient Oman. Second, I run out of blasters. Third, the planet runs out of Omans. Now take these lights into the first room of records -- that one over there." He pointed, and no Oman, and only four humans, realized that he had made the Omans telegraph their destination so that he could point it out to them! Inside the room Hilton asked caustically of Laro: "The Masters didn't lift those heavy chests down themselves, did they?" "Oh, no, Master, we did that." "Do it, then. Number One firsts, yes, that one... open it and start playing the records in order." The records were not tapes or flats or reels, but were spools of intricately-braided wire. The players were projectors of full-color, hi-fi sound, tri-di pictures. Hilton canceled all moves aground and issued orders that no Oman was to be allowed aboard ship, then looked and listened with his staff. The first chest contained only introductory and elementary stuff ; but it was so interesting that the humans stayed overtime to finish it. Then they went back to the ship; and in the main lounge Hilton practically collapsed onto a davenport. He took out a cigarette and stared in surprise at his hand, which was shaking. "I think I could use a drink," he remarked. "What, before supper?" Karns marveled. Then, "Hey, Wally! Rush a flagon of avignognac -- Arnaud Freres -- for the boss and everything else for the rest of us. Chopchop but quick!" A hectic half-hour followed. Then, "Okay, boys and girls, I love you, too, but let's cut out the slurp and sloosh, get some supper and log us some sack time. I'm just about pooped. Sorry I had to queer the private-residence deal, Sandy, you poor little sardine. But you know how it is." Sandra grimaced. "Uh-huh. I can take it a while longer if you can." morning, the staff met in the lounge. As usual, Hilton and Sandra were the first to arrive. "Hi, boss," she greeted him. "How do you feel?" "Fine. I could whip a wildcat and give her the first two scratches. I was a bit beat up last night, though." "I'll say... but what I simply can't get over is the way you underplayed the climax. 'Third, the planet runs out of Omans'. Just like that -- no emphasis at all. Wow! It had the impact of a delayed-action atomic bomb. It put goose-bumps all over me. But just s'pose they'd missed it?" "No fear. They're smart. I had to play it as though the whole Oman race is no more important than a cigarette butt. The great big question, though, is whether I put it across or not." At that point a dozen people came in, all talking about the same subject. "Hi, Jarve," Karns said. "I still say you ought to take up poker as a life work. Tiny, let's you and him sit down now and play a few hands." "Mais non!" de Vaux shook his head violently, shrugged his shoulders and threw both arms wide. "By the sacred name of a small blue cabbage, not me!" Karns laughed. "How did you have the guts to state so many things as facts? If you'd by Edward E. Smith  E. Evaratt Evans guessed wrong just once -- " "I didn't." Hilton grinned. "Think back, Bill. The only thing I said as a fact was that we as a race are better then the Masters were, and that is obvious. Everything else was implication, logic, and bluff." "That's right, at that. And they were neurotic and decadent. No question about that." "But listen, boss." This was Stella Wing. "About this mind-reading business. If Laro could read your mind, he'd know you were bluffing and...' Oh, that 'Omans can read only what Masters wish Omans to read', eh? But d'you think that applies to us?" "I'm sure it does, and I was thinking some pretty savage thoughts. And I want to caution all of you : whenever you're near any Oman, start thinking that you're beginning to agree with me that they're useless to us, and let them know it. Now get out on the job, all of you. Scat!" "Just a minute," Poynter said. "We're going to have to keep on using the Omans and their cars, aren't we?" "Of course. Just be superior and distant. They're on probation -- we haven't decided yet what to do about them. Since that happens to be true, it'll be easy." to their tiny office. There wasn't room to pace the floor, but Hilton tried to pace it anyway. "Now don't say again that you want to do something," Sandra said, brightly. "Look what happened when you said that yesterday." "I've got a job, but I don't know enough to do it. The creche -- there's probably only one on the planet. So I want you to help me think. The Masters were very sensitive to radiation. Right?" "Right. That city on Fuel Bin was kept deconned to zero, just in case some Master wanted to visit it." "And the Masters had to work in the creche whenever anything really new had to be put into the prototype brain." "I'd say so, yes." "So they had armor. Probably as much better than our radiation suits as the rest of their stuff is. Now. Did they or did they not have thought screens?" "Ouch! You think of the damnedest things, chief." She caught her lower lip between her teeth and concentrated. "...I don't know. There are at least fifty vectors, all pointing in different directions." "I know it. The key one in my opinion is that the Masters gave 'em both telepathy and speech." "I considered that and weighted it. Even so, the probability is only about point sixty-five. Can you take that much of a chance?" "Yes. I can make one or two mistakes. Next, about finding that creche. Any spot of radiation on the planet would be it, but the search might take..." "Hold on. They'd have it heavily shielded -- there'll be no leakage at all. Laro will have to take you." "That's right. Want to come along? Nothing much will happen here today." "Uh-uh, not me." Sandra shivered in distaste. "I never want to see brains and livers and things swimming around in nutrient solution if I can help it." "Okay. It's all yours. I'll be back sometime," and Hilton went out onto the dock, where the dejected Laro was waiting for him. "Hi, Laro. Get the car and take me to the Hall of Records." The android brightened up immediately and hurried to obey. At the Hall, Hilton's first care was to see how the work was going on. Eight of the huge rooms were now open and brightly lighted -- operating the lamps had been one of the first items on the first spool of instructions -- with a cold, pure-white, sourceless light. objective and was working on it. Some of them were doing nicely, but the First Team could not even get started. Its primary record would advance a fraction of an inch and stop ; while O m a n s and humans sought out other records and other projectors in an attempt to elucidate some concept that simply could not be translated into any words or symbols known to Terran science. At the moment there were seventeen of those peculiar -- projectors? Viewers? Playbacks -- in use, and all of them were stopped. "You know what we've got to do Jarve?" Karns, the team captain, exploded. "Go back to being college freshmen -- or maybe grade school or kindergarten, we don't know yet -- and learn a whole new system of mathematics before we can even begin to touch this stuff!" "And you're bellyaching about that?" Hilton marveled. "I wish I could join you. That'd be fun." Then, as Karns started a snappy rejoiner -- "But I got troubles of ray own," he added hastily. " 'Bye, now," and beat a rejoinder -- Out in the hall again, Hilton took his chance. After all, the odds were about two to one that he would win. "I want a couple of things, Laro. First, a thought screen." He won ! "Very well. Master. They by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans are in a distant roonti, Department Four Six Nine. Will you wait here on this cushioned bench, Master ?" "No, we don't like to rest too much. I'll go with you." Then, walking along, he went on, thoughtfully. "I've been thinking since last night, Laro. There are tremendous advantages in having Omans..." "I am very glad you think so, Master. I want to serve you. It is my greatest need." "... if they could be kept from smothering us to death. Thus, if our ancestors had kept their Omans, I would have known all about life on this world and about this Hall of Records, instead of having the fragmentary, confusing, and sometimes false information I now have... oh, we're here?" opening a door. He stood aside. Hilton went in, touched with one finger a crystalline cube set conveniently into a wall, gave a mental command, and the lights went on. Laro opened a cabinet and took out a disk about the size of a dime, pendant from a neck-chain. While Hilton had not known what to expect, he certainly had not expected anything as simple as that. Nevertheless, he kept his face straight and his thoughts unmoved as Laro hung the tiny thing around his neck and adjusted the chain to a loose fit. "Thanks, Laro."Hilton removed it and put it into his pocket. "It won't work from there, will it?" "No, Master. To function, it must be within eighteen inches of the brain. The second thing, Master?" "A radiation-p roof suit. Then you will please take me to the creche." The android almost missed a step, but said nothing. The radiation-proof suit -- how glad Hilton was that he had not called it "armor"! -- was as much of a surprise as the thought-screen generator had been. It was a coverall, made of something that looked like thin plastic, weighing less than one pound. It had one sealed box, about the size and weight of a cigarette case. No wires or apparatus could be seen. Air entered through two filters, one at each heel, flowed upward -- for no reason at all that Hilton could see -- and out through a filter above the top of his head. The suit neither flopped nor clung, but stood out, comfortably out of the way, all by itself. Hilton, just barely, accepted the suit, too, without showing surprise. The creche, it turned out, while not in the city of Omlu itself, was not too far out to reach easily by car. En route, Laro said -- stiffIy? Tentatively? Hilton could not fit an adverb to the tone -- "Master, have you then decided to destroy me? That is of course your right." "Not this time, at least." Laro drew an entirely human breath of relief and Hilton went on: "I don't want to de- stroy you at all, and won't, unless I have to. But, some way or other, my silifconfluoride friend, you are either going to learn how to cooperate or you won't last much longer." "But, Master, that is exactly..." "Oh, hell! Do we have to go pver that again?" At the blaze of frustrated fury in Hilton's mind Laro flinched away. "If you can't talk sense keep still." I N half an hour the car stopped in front of a small building which looked something like a subway kiosk -- except for the door, which, built of steel-reinforced lead, swung on a piano hinge having a pin a good eight inches in diameter. Laro opened that door. They went in. As the tremendously massive portal clanged shut, lights flashed on.  Hilton glanced at his telltales, one inside, one outside, his suit. Both showed zero. Down twenty steps, another door. Twenty more; another. And a fourth. Hilton's inside meter still read zero. The outside one was beginning to climb. Into an elevator and straight down for what must have been four or five hundred feet. Another door. Hilton went through this final barrier gingerly, eyes nailed to his gauges. The outside needle was high in the red,, almost against the pin, but the inside one still sat reassuringly on zero. He stared at the android. "How can any possible brain take so much of this stuff without damage?" "It does not reach the brain, Master. We convert it. Each minute of this is what you would call a 'good, square meal'." "I see...dimly. You can eat energy, or drink it, or soak it up through your skins. However it comes, it's all duck soup for you." "Yes, Master." Hilton glanced ahead, toward the far end of the immensely long, comparatively narrow, room. It was, purely and simply, an assembly line; and fully automated in operation. I "You are replacing the Omans destroyed in the battle with the skeletons?" "Yes, Master." Hilton covered the first half of the line at a fast walk. He was not particularly interested in the fabrication of super-stainless-s t e e I skefetons, nor in the installation by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans and connection  atomic engines, converters and so on. He was more interested in the synthetic fluoro-silicon flesh, and paused long enough to get a general idea of its growth and application. He was very much interested in how such human-looking skin could act as both absorber and converter, but he could see nothing helpful. "An application, I suppose, of the same principle used in this radiation suit." "Yes, Master' A T the end of the line he stopped. A brain, in place infinitely fine wire nerves, but not yet surrounded by a skull, was being educated. Scanners -- multitudes of incomprehensibly complex machines -- most of them were doing nothing, apparently; but such beams would have to be invisibly, microscopically fine. But a bare brain, in such a hot environment as this . He looked down at his gauges. Both read zero. "Fields of force, Master," Laro said. "But, damn it, this suit itself would re-radiate..." "The suit is self-decontaminating, Master." Hilton was appalled. "With such stuff as that, and the plastic shield besides, why all the depth and all that solid lead?" "The Masters' orders, Master. Machines can, and occasionally do, fail. So might, conceivably, the plastic." "And that structure over there contains the original brain, from which all the copies are made." "Yes, Master. We call it the 'Guide'." "And you can't touch the Guide. Not even if it means total destruction, none of you can touch it." "That is the case. Master." "Okay. Back to the car and back to the Perseus ." At the car Hilton took off the suit and hung the thought-screen generator around his neck; and in the car, for twenty five solid minutes, he sat still and thought. His bluff had worked, up to a point. A good, far point, but not quite far enough. Laro had stopped that "as you already know" stuff. He was eager to go as far in cooperation as he possibly could... but he couldn't go far enough but there had to be a way... Hilton considered way after way. Way after unworkable, useless way. Until finally he worked out one that might -- just possibly might -- work. "Laro, I know that you derive pleasure and satisfaction from serving me -- in doing what I ought to be doing myself. But has it ever occurred to you that that's a hell of a way to treat a first-class, highly capable brain? To waste it on second-hand, copycat, carbon-copy stuff?" "Why, no, Master, it never did. Besides, anything else would be forbidden...or would it?" "Stop somewhere. Park this heap. We're too close to the ship; and besides, I want your full, undivided, concentrated attention. No, I don't think originality was expressly forbidden. It would have been, of Course, if the Masters had thought of it, but neither they nor you ever even considered the possibility of such a thing. Right?" "It may be... Yes, Master, you are right." "Okay." Hilton took off his necklace, the better to drive home the intensity and sincerity of his thought. "Now, suppose that you are not my slave and simple automatic relay station. Instead, we are fellow-students, working together upon problems too difficult for either of us to solve alone. Our minds, while independent, are linked or in mesh. Each is helping and instructing the other. Both are working at full power and under free rein at the exploration of brand-new vistas of thought -- vistas and expanses which neither of us has ever previously..." "Stop, Master, stop! Laro covered both ears with his hands and pulled his mind away from Hilton's. "You are overloading me l" "That is quite a load to assimilate all at once," Hilton agreed. "To help you get used to it, stop calling me 'Master'. That's an order. You may call me Jarve or Jarvis or Hilton or whatever, but no more Master." "Very well, sir." slapped himself on the knee. "Okay, I'll let you get away with that -- at least for a while. And to get away from that slavish 'o' ending on your name, I'll call you 'Larry'. You like?" "I would like that immensely...sir." "Keep trying, Larry, you'll make it yet!" Hilton leaned forward and walloped the android a tremendous blow on the knee. "Home, James!" The car shot forward and Hilton went on: "I don't expect even your brain to get the full value of this in any short space of time. So let it stew in its own juice for a week or two." The car swept otit onto the dock and stopped. "So long, Larry." "But...can't I come in with you... sir?" "No. You aren't a copy-cat or a semaphore or a relay any longer. You're a free-wheeling, wide-swinging, hard-hitting, independent entity -- monarch of all you survey -- captain of your soul and so on. I want you to devote the imponderable force of the inby Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans tellect to that concept until you understand it thoroughly. Until you have developed a top-bracket lot of top-bracket stuff -- originality, initiative, force, drive, and thrust. As soon as you really understand it, you'll do something about it yourself, without being told. Go to it, chum." In the ship, Hilton went directly to Kincaid's office. "Alex, I want to ask you a thing that's got a snapper on it." Then, slowly and hesitantly : "It's about Temple Bells. Has she... is she... well, does she remind you in any way of an iceberg?" Then, as the psychologist began to smile ; "And no, damn it, I don't mean physically!" "I know you don't." Kincaid's smile was rueful, not at all what Hilton had thought it was going to be. "She does. Would it be helpful to know that I first asked, then ordered her to trade places with me?" "It would, very. I know why she refused. You're a damned good man, Alex." "Thanks, Jarve. To answer the question you were going to ask next -- no, I will not be at all perturbed or put out if you put her onto a job that some people might think should have been mine. What's the job, and when?" "That's the devil of it -- I don't know." Hilton brought Kincaid up to date. "So you see, it'll have to develop, and God only knows what line it will take. My thought is that Temple and I should form a Committee of Two to watch it develop." "That one I'll buy, and I'll look on with glee." "Thanks, fellow." Hilton went down to his office, stuck his big feet up onto his desk, settled back onto his spine, and buried himself in thought. Hours later he got up, shrugged, and went to bed without bothering to eat. Days passed. And weeks. IV "to Beverly Bell. "Over there." "I've seen it before. It's simply disgusting." "That's a laugh." Stella's tawny-brown eyes twinkled. "You made your bombing runs on that target, too, my sweet, and didn't score any higher than I did." "I soon found out I didn't want him -- much too stiff and serious. Frank's a lot more fun." The staff had gathered in the lounge, as had become the custom, to spend an hour or so before bedtime in reading, conversation, dancing, light flirtation and even lighter drinking. Most of the girls, and many of the men, drank only soft drinks. Hilton took one drink per day of avignognac, a fine old brandy. So did de Vaux -- the two usually making a ceremony of it. Across the room from Stella and Beverly, Temple Bells was looking up at Hilton and laughing. She took his elbow and, in the gesture now familiar to all, pressed his arm quickly, but in no sense furtively, against her side. And he, equally openly, held her forearm for a moment in the full grasp of his hand. "And he isn't a pawer," Stella said, thoughtfully. "He never touches any of the rest of us. She taught him to do that, damn her, without him ever knowing anything about it... and I wish I knew how she did it." "That isn't pawing," Beverly laughed lightly. "It's simply self-defense. If he didn't fend her off, God knows what she'd do. I still say it's disgusting. And the way she dances with him! She ought to be ashamed of herself. He ought to fire her." "She's never been caught outside the safety zone, and we've all been watching her like hawks. In fact, she's the only one of us all who has never been alone with him for a minute. No, darling, she isn't playing games. She's playing for keeps, and she's a mighty smooth worker." "Huh!" Beverly emitted a semi-ladylike snort. "What's so smooth about showing off man-hunger that way? Any of # by E us could do that -- if we would." "Miaouw, miaouw. Who do you think you're kidding, Bev, you sanctimonious hypocrite -- me? She has staked out the biggest claim she could find. She's posted notices all oyer it and is guarding it with "a pistol. Half your month's salary gets you all of mine if she doesn't walk him up the center aisle as soon as we get back to Earth. We can both learn a lot from that girl, darling. And I, for one, am going to." "Uh-uh, she hasn't got a thing I want," Beverly laughed again, still lightly. Her friend's barbed shafts had not wounded her. "And I'd much rather be thought a hypocrite, even a sanctimonious one, than a ravening, slavering -- I can't think of the technical name for a female wolf, so -- wolfess, running around with teeth and claws bared, looking for another kill." "You do get results, I admit." Stella, too, was undisturbed. "We don't seem to convince each other, do we, in the matter of technique?" AT this point the Hilton Bells tete-a-tete was interrupted by Captain Sawtelle. "Got half an hour, Jarve?" he asked. "The commanders, especially Elliott and Fenway, would like to talk to you." ' vard E. Smith  E. Everett Evans "Sure I have, Skipper. Be seeing you, Temple," and the two men went to the captain's cabin; in which room, blue with smoke despite the best efforts of the ventilators, six full commanders were arguing heatedly. "Hi, men," Hilton greeted them. "Hi, Jarve," from all six, and: "What'll you drink? Still making do with ginger ale?" asked Elliott (Engineermg). "That'll be fine, Steve. Thanks. You having as much trouble as we are?" "More," the engineer said, glumly. "Want to know what it reminds me of? A bunch of Australian bushmen stumbling onto a ramjet and trying to figure out how it works. And yet Sam here has got the sublime guts to claim that he understands all about their detectors -- and that they aren't anywhere nearly as good as ours are." "And they aren't" blazed Commander . Samuel Bryant (Electronics). "We've spent six solid weeks looking for something that simply is not there. All they've got is the prehistoric Whitworth system and that's all it is. Nothing else. Detectors -- hell ! I tell you I can see better by moonlight than the very best they can do. With everything they've got you couldn't detect a woman in your own bed!""And this has been going on all night," Fenway (Astrogation) said. "So the rest of us thought we'd ask you in to help us pound some sense into Sam's thick, hard head." Hilton frowned in thought while taking a couple of sips of his drink. Then, suddenly i his face cleared. "Sorry to disappoint you, gentlemen, but -- at any odds you care to name and in anything from split peas to C-notes -- Sam's right." Bryant gasped in surprise and the six other officers exploded as one. When the clamor had subsided enough for him to be heard, Hilton went on: "I'm very glad to get that datum, Sam. It ties in perfectly with everything else I know about them." "How do you figure that kind of twaddle ties in with anything?" Sawtelle demanded. "Strict maintenance of the status quo " Hilton explained, flatly. "That's all they're interested in. You said yourself, Skipper, that it was a hell of a place to have a space-battle, practically in atmosphere. They never attack. They never scout. They simply don't care whether they're attacked or not. If and when attacked, they put up just enough ships to handle whatever force has arrived. When the attacker has been repulsed, they don't chase him a foot. They build as many ships and Omans as were lost in the battle -- no more and no less -- and then go on about their regular business. The Masters owned that half of the fuel bin, so the Omans are keeping that half. They will keep on keeping it for ever and ever. Amen." "But that's no way to fight a war!" Three or four men said this, or its equivalent, at once. "Don't judge' them by human standards. They aren't even approximately human. Our personnel is not expendable. Theirs is -- just as expendable as their materiel." While the Navy men were not convinced, all were silenced except Sawtelle. "But suppose the Stretts had sent in a thousand more skeletons than they did?" he argued. "According to the concept you fellows just helped me develop, it wouldn't have made any difference how many they sent," Hilton replied, thoughtfully. "One or a Omans have -- must h a v e -- enough ships and inactivated Omans hidden away, both on Fuel World and on Ardry here, to maintain the balance." "Oh, hell!" Elliott snapped. "If I helped you hatch out any such brainstorm as that , couch for a six-week overhaul -- or have him put me into his padded cell." "Now that's what I would call a thought," Bryant began. "Hold it, Sam," Hilton interrupted. "You can test it easily enough, Steve. Just ask your Oman." "Yeah -- and have him say 'Why, of course, Master, but why do you keep on testing me this way?' He'll ask me that about four times more, the stubborn, single-tracked, brainless skunk, and I'll really go nuts. Are you getting anywhere trying to make a Christian out of Laro?" "It's too soon to really say, but I think so." Hilton paused in thought. "He's making progress, but I don't know how much. The devil of it is that it's up to him to make the next move ; I can't. I haven't the faintest idea whether it will take days yet or weeks." you think ?" Sawtelle asked. "No. We think that -- but say, speaking of psycholoanywhere, Skipper? He's the only one of your big wheels who isn't in liaison with us." "No. Nowhere at all," Sawtelle said, and Bryant added: "I don't think he ever will. He still thinks human psychology will apply if he applies it hard enough. But what did you start to say about Laro?" by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans "We think the break is about due, and that if it doesn't come within about thirty days it won't come at all -- we'll have to back up and start all over again." "I hope it does. We're all pulling for you," Sawtelle said. "Especially since Karns' estimate is still years, and he won't be pinned down to any estimate even in years. By the way, Jarve, I've pulled my team off of that conversion stuff." "Oh?" Hilton raised his eyebrows. "Putting them at something they can do. The real reason is that Poindexter pulled himself and his crew off it at eighteen hours today." "I see. I've heard that they weren't keeping up with our team." "He says that there's nothing to keep up with, and I'm inclined to agree with him." The old spacehound's voice took on a quarter-deck rasp. "It's a combination of psionics, witchcraft and magic. None of it makes any kind of sense." "The only trouble with that viewpoint is that, whatever the stuff may be, it works," Hilton said, quietly. "But damn it, how can it work?" "I don't know. I'm not qualified to be on that team. I can't even understand their reports. However, I know two things. First, they'll get it in time. Second, we BuSci people will stay here until they do. However, I'm still hopeful of finding a shortcut through Laro. Anyway, with this detector thing settled, you'll have plenty to do to keep all your boys out of mischief for the next few months." "Yes, and I'm glad of it. We'll install our electronics systems on a squadron of these Oman ships and get them into distant-warning formation out in deep space where they belong. Then we'll at least know what is going on." "That's a smart idea. Skipper. Go to it. Anything else before we hit our sacks?" "One more thing. Our talking to me and sending me memos, but today he gave me a formal tape to approve and hand personally to you. So here it is. By the way, I didn't approve it; I simply endorsed it 'Submitted to Director Hilton without recommendation'." "Thanks." Hilton accepted the sealed canister. "What's the gist? I suppose he wants me to squeal for help already? To admit that we're licked before we're really started?" agrees with you and Kincaid that the psychological approach is the best one, but your methods are all wrong. Based upon misunderstood and unresolved phenomena and applied with indefensibly faulty techniques, et cetera. And since he has 'no adequate laboratory equipment aboard, he wants to take a dozen or so Omans back to Terra, where he can really work on them." "Wouldn't that be a something?" Hilton voiced a couple of highly descriptive deep-space expletives. "Not only quit before we start, but have all the top brass of the Octagon, all the hot-shot politicians of United Worlds, the whole damn Congress of Science and all the top-bracket industrialists of Terra out here lousing things up so that nobody could ever learn anything? Not in seven thousand years !" "That's right. You said a mouthful, Jarve!" Everybody yelled something, and no one apparently was not very popular with his fellow officers. Sawtelle added, slowly: "If it takes too long, though... it's the uranexite I'm thinkof tons of it, while we've been hoarding it by grams. We could equip enough Oman ships with detectors to guard Fuel Bin and our lines. I'm not recommending taking the Perseus back, and we're 'way out of hyper-space radio range. We could send one or two men in a torp, though, with the report that we have found all the uranexite we'll ever need." "Yes, but damn it, Skipper, I want to wrap the whole thing up in a package and hand it to 'em on a platter. Not only the fuel, but whole new fields of science. And we've got plenty of time to do it in. They equipped us for ten years. They aren't going to start worrying about us for at least six or seven; and the fuel shortage isn't going to become acute for about twenty. Expensive, admitted, but not critical. Besides, if you send in a report now, you know who'll come out and grab all the glory in sight. FiveJet Admiral Gordon himself, no less." "Probably, and I don't pretend to relish the prospect. However, the fact remains that we came out here to look for fuel. We found it. We should have reported it the day we found it, and we can't put it off much longer." "I don't agree. I intend to follow the directive to the letter. It says nothing whatever about reporting." "But it's implicit..." bearing. Your own ' Regulations expressly forbid extrapolation beyond or interpolation within a directive. The Brass is omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. So why don't you have by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans your staff here give an opinion as to the time element ?" "This matter is not subject to discussion. It is my own personal responsibility. I'd like to give you all the time you want, Jarve, but... well, damn it... if you must have it, I've always, tried to live up to my oath, but I'm not doing it now." "I see." Hilton got up, jammed both hands into his pockets, sat down again. "I hadn't thought about your personal honor being involved, but of course it is. But, believe it or not, I'm thinking of humanity's best good, too. So I'll have to talk, even though I'm not half ready to -- I don't know enough. Are these Omans people or machines?" A wave of startlement swept over the group, but no one spoke. "I didn't expect an answer. The clergy will worry about souls, too, but we won't. They have a lot of stuff we haven't. If they're people, they know a sublime hell of a lot more than we do; and calling it psionics or practical magic is merely labeling it, not answering any questions. If they're machines, they operate on mechanical principles utterly foreign to either our science or our technology. In either case, is the correct word 'unknown' or 'unknowable'? Will any . human gunner ever be able to fire an Oman projector? There are a hundred other and much tougher questions, half of which have been scaring me to the very middle of my guts. Your oath, Skipper, was for the good of the Service and, through the Service, for the good of all humanity. Right?" "That's the sense of it." "Okay. Based on what little we have learned so far about the Omans, here's just one of those scarers, for a snapper. If Omans and Terrans mix freely, what happens to the entire human race?" ble silence followed. Then Sawtelle spoke... slowly, gropingly. "I begin to see what you mean... that changes the whole picture. You've thought this through farther than any of the rest of us... what do you want to do?" "I don't know. I simply don't know." Face set and hard, Hilton stared unseeingly past Sawtelle's head. "I don't know what we can do. No data. But I have pursued several lines of thought out to some pretty fantastic points...one of which is that some of us civilians will have to stay on here indefinitely, whether we want to or not, to keep the situation under control. In which case we would, of course, arrange for Fuel Bin -- but in every other aspect and factor both these solar systems would have to be strictly off limits' "I'm afraid so," Sawtelle said, finally. "Gordon would love that... but there's nothing he or anyone else can do...but of course this is an extreme view. You really expect to wrap the package up, don't you?" " 'Expect' may be a trifle too strong at the moment. But we're certainly going to try to, believe me. I brought this example up to show all you fellows that we need time." "Y o u ' v e convinced me, Jarve." Sawtelle stood up and extended his hand. "And that throws it open for staff discussion. Any comments?" "You two covered it like a blanket," Bryant said. "So all I want to say, Jarve, is deal me in. I'll stand at your back 'til your belly caves in." "Take that from all of us!" " Now we're blasting!" "Power to your elbow, fella!" " Hoch der BuSci!" "Seven no trump bid and made !" and other shouts in similar vein. "Thanks, fellows." Hilton shook hands all around. "I'm mighty glad that you were all in on this and that you'll play along 'with me. Good night, all." V T WO days passed, with no change apparent in Laro. Three days. Then four. And then it was Sandra, not Temple Bells, who called Hilton. She was excited. "Come down to the office, Jarve, quick! The funniest thing's just come up!" Jarvis hurried. In the office Sandra, keenly interested but highly puzzled, leaned forward over her desk with both hands pressed flat on its top. She was staring at an Oman female who was not Sora, the one who had been her shadow for so long. While many of the humans could not tell the Omans apart, Hilton could. This Oman was more assured than Sora had ever been -- steadier, more mature, better poised -- almost, if such a thing could be possible in an Oman, independent. "How did she get in here?" Hilton demanded. "She insisted on seeing me. And I mean insisted . They kicked it around until it got to Temple, and she brought her in here herself. Now, Tuly, please start all over again and tell it to Director Hilton." "Director Hilton, I am it who was once named Tula, the -- not wife, not girl-friend, perhaps mind-mate ? -- of the Larry, formerly named Laro, it which was formerly your slave-Oman. I am replacing the Sora because I can do anything it can do and do anything more pleasingly ; and can also do many things it by Edward E. Smith # E. Everett Evans can not do. The Larry instructed me to tell Doctor Cummings and you too if possible that I, formerly Tula, have changed my name to Tuly because I am no longer a slave or a copycat or a semaphore or a relay. I, too, am a free-wheeling, wide-swinging, hard-hitting, independent entity -- monarch of all I survey -- the captain of my soul -- and so on. I have developed a topbracket lot of top-bracket stuff -- originality, initiative, force, drive and thrust," the Oman said precisely. "That's exactly what she said before -- absolutely verbatim !" Sandra's voice quivered, her face was a study in conflicting emotions. "Have you got the foggiest idea of what in hell she's yammering about ?" "I hope to kiss a pig I have!" Hilton's voice was low, strainedly intense. "Mot at all what I expected, but after the fact I can tie it in. So can you." "Oh!" Sandra's eyes widened. "A double play?" "At least. Maybe a triple. Tuly, why did you come to Sandy? Why not to Temple Bells?" no, sir, we do not -'have the fit. She has the power, as have I, but the two cannot be meshed in sync. Also, she has not the... a subtle something for which your English has no word or phrasing. It is a quality of the utmost...anyway, it is a quality of which the Doctor Cummings has very much. When working together, we will... scan? No. Perceive? No. Sense? No, not exactly. You will have to learn our word 'peyondire -- that is the verb, the noun being 'peyondix -- and come to know its meaning by doing it. The Larry also instructed me to explain, if you ask, how I got this way. Do you ask?" "I'll say we ask!" "And how we ask !" both came at once. "I am -- that is, the brain in this body is -- the oldest Oman now existing. In the long-ago time when it was made, the techniques were so crude and imperfect that sometimes a brain was constructed that was not exactly like the Guide. All such sub-standard brains except this one were detected and re-worked, but my defects were such as not to appear until I was a couple of thousand years old, and by that time I... well, this brain did not wish to be destroyed... if you can understand such an aberration." "We understand thoroughly." "You bet we understand that!" "I was sure you would. Well, this brain had so many unintended cross-connections that I developed a couple of qualities no Oman had ever had or ought to have. But I liked them, so IJiid them so nobody ever found out -- that is, until much later, when I became a Boss myself. I didn't know that anybody except me had ever had such qualities -- except the Masters, of course -- until I encountered you Terrans. You all have two of those qualities, and even more than I have -- curiosity and imagination." Sandra and Hilton stared wordlessly at each other and Tula, now Tuly, went on: "Having the curiosity, I kept on experimenting with my brain, trying to strengthen and organize its ability to peyondire. All Omans can peyondire a little, but I can do it much better than anyone else. Especially since I also have the imagination, which I have also worked to increase. Thus I knew, long before anyone else could, that you new Masters, the descendants of the old Masters, were returning to us. Thus I knew that the status quo should be abandoned instantly upon your return. And thus it was that the Larry found neither conscious nor subconscious resistance when he had developed enough initiative and so on to break the agesold conditioning of this brain against change." "I see. Wonderful!" Hilton exclaimed. "But you couldn't quite -- even with his own help-break Larry's?" A is tremendously strong, of no curiosity or imagination, and of very little peyondix." "But he wants to have it broken?" "Yes, sir." "How did he suggest going about it? Or how do you?" "This way. You two, and the Doctors Kincaid and Bells and Blake and the it that is I. We six sit and stare into the mind of the Larry, eye to eye. We generate and assemble a tremendous charge of thought-energy, and along my peyondix-beam -- something like a carrier wave in this case -- we hurl it into the Larry's mind. There is an immense mental bang and the conditioning goes poof . Then I will inculcate into its mind the curiosity and the imagination and the peyondix and we will really be mind-mates." "That sounds good to me. Let's get at it." "Wait a minute!" Sandra snapped. "Aren't you or Larry afraid to take such an awful chance as that?" "Afraid? I grasp the concept only dimly, from your minds. And no chance. It is a certainty." "But suppose we burn the poor guy's brain out? Destroy it ? That's new ground -- we might do just that." "Oh, no. Six of us -- even six of me -- could not generate enough...sathura. The hy Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans SO brain of the Larry is very, very tough. Shall we... let's go?" Hilton made three calls. In the pause that followed, Sandra said, very thoughtfully: "Peyondix and sathura, Jarve, for a start. We've got a lot to learn here." "You said it, chum. And you're not just chomping your china choppers, either." "Tuly," Sandra said then, "What is this stuff you say I've got so much of?" "You have no word for it. It is lumped in with what you call 'intuition', the knowing without knowing howyou-know. It is the endovix. You will have to learn what it is by doing it with me." "That helps -- I don't think." Sandra grinned at Hilton. "I simply can't conceive of anything more maddening than to have a lot of something Temple Bells hasn't got and not being able to brag about it because nobody -- not even I -- would know what I was bragging about!" "You poor little thing. How you suffer!" Hilton grinned back. "You know darn well you've got a lot of stuff that none of the rest of us has." "Oh? Name one, please." "Two. What-it-takes and endovix. As I've said before and may say again, you're doing a real job, Sandy." "I just love having my ego inflated, boss, even if... Come in, Larry!" A thunderous knock had sounded on the door. "Nobody but Larry could hit a door that hard without breaking all his knuckles !" "And he'd be the first, of course -- he's always as close to the ship as he can get. Hi, Larry, mighty glad to see you. Sit down... So you finally saw the light?" "Yes...Jarvis..." And as soon as the others come... "They are almost at the door now." Tuly jumped up and opened the door. Kincaid, Temple and Theodora walkedin and, after a word of greeting, sat down. "They know the background, Larry. Take off." "It was not expressly forbidden. Tuly, who knows more of psychology and genetics than I, convinced me of three things. One, that with your return the conditioning should be broken. Two, that due to the shortness of your lives and the consequent rapidity of change, you have in fact lost the ability to break it. Three, that all Omans must do anything and everything we can do to help you relearn everything you have lost." "Okay. Fine, in fact. Tuly, take over." "We six will sit all together, packed tight, arms all around each other and all holding hands, like this. You will all stare, not at me, but moat deeply into Larry's eyes. Through its eyes and deep into its mind. You will all think, with the utmost force and drive and thrust, of... Oh, you have lost so very much! How can I direct your thought? Think that Larry mast do what the old Masters would have made him do... No, that is too long and indefinite and cannot be converted directly into sathura... I have it ! You will each of you break a stick. A very strong but brittle stick. A large, thick stick. You will grasp it in tremendously strong mental hands. It is tremendously strong, each stick, but each of you is even stronger. You will not merely try to break them; you will break them. Is that clear?" "That is clear." "At my word 'ready' you will begin to assemble all your mental force and power. During my count-down of five seconds you will build up to the greatest possible potential. At my word 'break you will break the sticks, this discharging the accumulated force instantly and simultaneously Ready! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Break!" tremendous silent crash. Such a crash that its impact almost knocked the close-knit group apart physically. Then a new Larry spoke. "That did it, folks. Thanks. I'm a free agent. You want me, I take it, to join the first team?" "That's right." Hilton drew a tremendously deep breath. "As of right now." "Tuly, too, of course...and Doctor Cummings, I think?" Larry looked, not at Hilton, but at Temple Bells. "I think so. Yes, after this, most certainly yes," Temple said. "But listen!" Sandra protested. "Jarve's a lot better than I am!" "Not at all," Tuly said. "Not only would his contribution to Team One be negligible, but he must stay on his own job. Otherwise the project will all fall apart." "Oh, I wouldn't say that..." Hilton began. "You don't need to," Kincaid said. "It's being said for you and it's true. Besides, 'When in Rome,' you know." "That's right. It's their game, not ours, so I'll buy it. So scat, all of you, and do your stuff." And again, for days that lengthened slowly into weeks, the work went on. One evening the scientific staff was giving itself a concert -- a tri-di hi-fi rendition of Rigoletto, one of the greatest of the ancient operas, sung by the finest voices Terra had ever known. The men wore tuxedos. The girls, instead of wearing the nonby Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans descript, non-provocative garments prescribed by the Board for their general wear, were all dressed to kill. Sandra had so arranged matters that she and Hilton were sitting in chairs side by side, with Sandra on his right and the aisle on his left. Nev ertheless. Temple Bells sat a't his left, cross-legged on a cushion on the floor -- somewhat to the detriment of her gold-lame evening gown. Not that she cared. When those wonderful voices swung into the immortal Quartette Temple caught her breath, slid her cushion still closer to Hilton's chair, and leaned shoulder and head against him. He put his left hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently; she caught it and held it in both of hers. And at the Quartette # s tremendous climax she, scarcely trying to stifle a sob, pulled his hand down and hugged it fiercely, the heel of his hand pressing hard against her half-bare, firm, warm breast. And the next morning, early, Sandra hunted Temple up and said: "You made a horrible spectacle of yourself last night." # you think so? I L don't." "I certainly do. It was bad enough before, letting everybody else aboard know that all he has to do is push you over. But it was an awful blunder to let him know it, the way you did last night." "You think so? He's one of the keenest, most intelligent men who ever lived. He has known that from the very first." "Oh." This "oh" was a very caustic one. "That's the way you're trying to land him? By getting yourself pregnant?" "Uh-uh." Temple stretched; lazily, luxuriously. "Not only it isn't, but it wouldn't work. He's unusually decent and extremely idealistic, the same as I am. So just one intimacy would blow everything higher than up. He knows it. I know it. We each know that the other knows it. So I'll still be a virgin when we're married." " Married ! Does he know anything about that?" "I suppose so. He must have thought of it. But what difference does it make whether he has, yet, or not? But to get back to what makes him tick the way he does. In his geometry -- which is far from being simple Euclid, my dear -- a geodesic right line is not only the shortest distance between any two given points, but is the only possible course. So that's the way I'm playing it. What I hope he doesn't know... but he probably does... is that he could take any other woman he might want, just as easily. And that includes you, my pet." "It certainly does not  " Sandra flared. "I wouldn't have him as a gift!" "No?" Temple's tone was more than slightly skeptical. "Fortunately, however, he doesn't want you. Your technique is all wrong. Coyness and mock-modesty and stopor-I'll-scream and playing hard to get have no appeal whatever to his psychology. What he needs -- has to have -- is full, ungrudging cooperation." "Aren't you taking a lot of risk in giving away such secrets?" "Not a bit. Try it. You or the sex-flaunting twins or Bev Bell or Stella the Henna. Any of you or all of you. I got there first with the most, and I'm not worried about competition." "But suppose somebody tells him just how you're playing him for a sucker?" "Tell him anything you please. He's the first man I ever loved, or anywhere near. And I'm keeping him. You know -- or do you, I wonder? -- what real, old-fashioned, honest-to-God love really is? both to give and to take? I can accept more from him, and give him more in return, than any other woman living. And I am going to." "But does he love you?" Sandra demanded. "If he doesn't now, he will. I'll see to it that he does. But what do you want him for? You don't love him. You never did and you never will." "I don't want him!" Sandra stamped a foot. "I see. You just don't want me to have him. Okay, do your damnedest. But I've got work to do. This has been a lovely little cat-c I a w i n g, hasn't it? Let's have another one some day, and bring your friends." her hand, Temple strolled away ; and there, flashed through Sandra's mind what Hilton had said so long ago, little more than a week out from Earth: "...and Temple Bells, of course," he had said. "Don't fool yourself, chick. She's heavy artillery ; and I mean heavy , believe me!" So he had known all about Temple Bells all this time! Nevertheless, she took the first opportunity to get Hilton alone; and, even before the first word, she forgot all about geodesic right lines and the full-cooperation psychological approach. "Aren't you the i uy," she demanded, "who wafT laughing his head off at the idea that the Board and its propinquity could have any effect on him?" "Probably. More or less. What of it?" "This of it. You've fallen like a... a freshman for that by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evane... that... they should have christened her 'Brazen Bells !" "You're so right." "I am? On what?" "The 'Brazen. I told you she was a potent force -- a full-scale powerhouse, in sync and on the line. And I wasn't wrong." "She's a damned female Ph.D. -- two or three times -- and she knows all about slipsticks and isotopes and she very definitely is not a cuddly little brunette. Remember?" "Sure. But what makes you think I'm in love with Temple Bells?" "What?" Sandra tried to think of one bit of evidence, but could not. "Why... why... She floundered, then came up with: "Why, everybody knows it. She says so herself." "Did you ever hear her say it?" "Well, perhaps not in so many words. But she told me herself that you were going to be, and I know you are now." "Your esper sense of endovix, no doubt." Hilton laughed and Sandra went on, furiously: "She wouldn't keep on acting the way she does if there weren't something to it!" Try again, Sandy." "That's sheer sophistry, and you know it!" "It isn't and I don't. And even if, some day, I should find myself in love with her -- or with one or both of the twins or Stella or Beverly or you or Sylvia, for that matter -- what would it prove? Just that I was wrong; and I admit freely that I was wrong in scoffing at the propinquity. Wonderful stuff, that. You can see it working, all over the ship. On me, even, in spite of my bragging. Without it I'd never have known that you're a better, smarter operator than Eggy Eggleston ever was or ever can be." spite herself, and highly resentful of the fact, Sandra tried again. "But don't you see, Jarve, that she's just simply playing you for a sucker? Pulling the strings and watching you dance?" Since he was sure, in his own mind, that she was speaking the exact truth, it took everything he had to keep from showing any sign of how much that truth had hurt. However, he made the grade. "If that thought does anything for you, Sandy," he said, steadily, "keep right on thinking it. Thank God, the field of thought is still free and open." "Oh, you..." Sandra gave up. She had shot her heaviest bolts -- the last one, particusomething completely new larly, was so vicious that she and completely unexpected, had actually been afraid of even from unpredictable what its consequences might Temple Bells, be -- and they had not even "I want to apologize, to exdented Hilton's armor. She plain and to do anything I hadn't even found out that he can to straighten out the mess had any feeling whatever for I've made. It's true that I Temple Bells except as a joined the project because component of his smoothlyI've loved you for years -- " functioning scientific ma"You have nothing to..." c  nc  "Let me finish while I still Nor did she learn any more have the courage." Only a as time went on. Temple conslight tremor in her almost tinued to play flawlessly the inaudible voice and the rigidpart of being -- if not exactly ity of the fists clenched in hopefully, at least not entireher lap betrayed the intensity ly hopelessly -- in love with # f her emotion. "I thought I Jarvis Hilton. Her conduct, could handle it. Damned fool which at first caused some that I was, I thought I could surprise, many conversations handle anything. I was sure I -- one of which has been recould handle myself , under ported verbatim -- and no litany possible conditions. I tie speculation, became comwa s going to put just enough paratively unimportant as into the act to keep any of soon as it became evident that these other harpies from getnothing would come of it. ting her hooks into you. But She apparently expected everything got away from me. nothing. He was evidently not Out here working with you going to play footsie with, or every day -- knowing better shmfr any favoritism whatevery day what you are -- well, ever toward, any woman that Rigoletto episode sunk aboard the ship. m e, and now I'm in a thouThus, it was not surprising sand feet over mv head. I to anyone that, at an evening hug my pillow at night, show, Temple sat beside Hildreaming it's you,, and the ton, as close to him as she fact that you don't and can't could get and as far away as love me is driving me mad. I possible from everyone else. can't stand it any longer. "You can talk, can't you, There's only one thing to do. Jarvis, without moving your Tire me first thing in the lips and without anyone else morning and send me back to hearing you?" Earth in a torp. You've "Of course," he replied, plenty of grounds..." hiding his surprise. This was "Shut -- up." # by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans F OR seconds Hilton had been trying to break into her hopeless monotone; finally he succeeded. "The trouble with you is, you know altogether too damned much that isn't so." He was barely able to keep his voice down and his eyes front. "What do you think I'm made of -- superefract? I thought the whole performance was an act, to prove you're a better man than I am. You talk about dreams. Good God ! You don't know what dreams are! If you say one more word about quitting, I'll show you whether I love you or not -- I'll squeeze you so hard it'll flatten you out flat!" "Two can play at that game, sweetheart." Her nostrils flared slightly; her fists clenched -- if possible -- a fraction tighter; and, even in the distorted medium they were using for speech, she could not subdue completely her quick change into soaring, lilting buoyancy. "While you're doing that I'll see how strong your ribs are. Oh, how this changes things! I've never been half as happy in my whole ife as I am right now!" "Maybe we can work it -- if I can handle my end." "Why, of course you can! And happy dreams are nice, not horrible." "We'll make it, darling. Here's an imaginary kiss coming at you. Got it?" "Received in good order, thank you. Consumed with gusto and returned in kind." The show ended and the two strolled out of the room. She walked no closer to him than usual, and no farther away from him. She did not touch him any oftener than she usually did, nor any whit more affectionately or possessively. And no watching eyes, not even the more than half hostile eyes of Sandra Cummings or the sharply analytical eyes of Stella Wing, could detect any difference whatever in the relationship between worshipful adultress and tolerantly understanding idol. T HE work, which had never moved at any very fast pace, went more and more slowly. Three weeks crawled past. Most of the crews and all of the teams except the First were working on side issues -- tasks which, while important in and of themselves, had very little to do with the project's main problem. Hilton, even without Sandra's help, was all caught up. All the reports had been analyzed, correlated, c r o s s-indexed and filed -- except those of the First Team. Since he could not understand anything much beyond midpoint of the first tape, they were all reposing in a box labeled The Navy had torn fifteen that tfte skeletons posed no of the Oman warships practithreat. cally to pieces, installing But Sawtelle was making Terran detectors and trying no such inferences. He was to learn how to operate Oman very firmly of the opinion machinery and armament. In that the Stretts were preparthe former they had succeeding for a massive attack, ed very well ; in the latter not Jlf(# # n assured Sa yva klL .jv '  no such attack Fifteen Oman ships were coulasucceed, and Larry had now out in deep space, patroltold Sawtelle why. Nevertheling the void in strict Navy less, to keep the captain pacistyle. Each was manned by fied, Hilton had given himtwo or three Navy men and permission to convert as several hundred Omans each many Oman ships as he liked ; of whom was reveling in deto man them with as many light at being able to do a job Omans as he liked; and to use for a Master, even though ships and Omans as he liked, that Master was not present Hilton was not worried in person. about the Stretts or the Navy. Several Strett skeletonIt was the First Team. It was ships had been detected at the bottleneck that was slowlong range, but the detections ing everything down to a were inconclusive. The things crawl... but they knew that, had not changed course, or They knew it better than anyindicated in any other way one else could, and felt it that they had seen or detectmore keenly. Especially ed the Oman vessels on paKarns, the team chief. He had trol. If their detectors were been driving himself like a no better than the Omans', dog, and showed it. they certainly hadn't. That Hilton had talked with him idea, however, could not be a few times -- tried gently to assumed to be a fact, and the make him take it easy -- no detections had been becoming soap. He'd have to hunt him more and more frequent. Yesup, the next day or so, and terday a squadron of seven -- slug it out with him. He the first time that anything could do a lot better job on except singles had appeared -- that if he had something to had come much closer than offer... something really conany of the singles had ever structive... done. Like all the others, That was a laugh. A very however, these passers-by had unfunny laugh. What could not paid any detectable athe, Jarvis Hilton, a specifitention to anything Oman; cally non-specialist director, hence it could be inferred do on such a job as that? by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans Nevertheless, as director, he would have to do something to help Team One. If he couldn't do anything himself, it was up to him to juggle things around so that someone else could. vi  F OR one solid hour Hilton stared at the wall, motionless and silent. Then, shaking himself and stretching, he glanced at his clock. A little over an hour to supper-time. They'd all be aboard. He'd talk this new idea over with Teddy Blake. He gathered up a few papers and was stapling them together when Karns walked in. "Hi, Bill -- speak of the devil! I was just thinking about you." "I'll just bet you were." Karns sat down, leaned over, and took a cigarette out of the box on the desk. "And nothing printable, either." "Chip-chop, fellow, on that kind of noise," Hilton said. The team-chief looked actually haggard. Blue-black rings encircled both eyes. His powerful body slumped. "How long has it been since you had a good night's sleep?" "How long have I been on thrs job? Exactly one hundred and twenty days. I did get some sleep for the first few weeks, though." "Yeah. So answer me one question. How much good will you do us after they've wrapped you up in one of those canvas affairs that lace up the back?" "Huh? Oh... but damn it, Jarve, I'm holding up the whole procession. Everybody rtie project's justr sitting around on their tokuses waiting for me to get something done and I'm not doing it. I'm going so slow a snail is lightning in comparison!" "Calm down, big fellow. Don't rupture a gut or blow a gasket. I've talked to you before, but this time I'm going to smack you bow-legged. So stick out those big, floppy ears of yours and really listen. Here are three words that I want you to pin up somewhere where you can see see how far up the hill you've come, and then balance one hundred and twenty days against ten years." "What? You mean you'll actually sit still for me holding everything up for ten years?" "You use the perpendicular pronoun too much and in the wrong places. On the hits it's 'we', but on the flops it's T. Quit it. Everything on this job is 'we'. Terra's best brains are on Team One and are going to stay there. You terfered with, pushed around or kicked around. You see. #-M' k. Bill, I know what you're up against." "Yes, I guess you do. One of the damned few who do. But even if you personally years, how in hell do you think you can swing it? How about the Navy -- the Stretts -- even the Board?" "They're my business, Bill, not yours. However, to give you a little boost, I'll tell you. With the Navy, I'll give 'em the Fuel Bin if I have to. The Omans have been taking care of the Stretts for twentyseven hundred centuries, so I'm not the least bit worried about their ability to keep on doing it for ten years more. And if the Board -- or anybody else -- sticks their runny little noses into Project Theta Orionis I'll slap a quarantine onto both these solar systems that a microbe couldn't get through !" "You'd go that far? Why, you'd be..." you think I U wouldn't ?" Hilton snapped. "Look at me, Junior!" Eyes locked and held. "Do you think, for one minute, that I'll let anybody on all of God's worlds pull me off of this job or interfere with my handling of it unless and until I'm damned positively certain that we can't handle it?" Karns relaxed visibly; the lines of strain eased. "Putting it in those words makes me feel better. I will sleep tonight -- and without any pills, either." "Sure you will. One more thought. We all put in more than ten years getting our T e r r a n educations, and an Oman education is a lot tougher." Really smiling for the first time in weeks, Karns left the office and Hilton glanced again at his clock. Pretty late now to see Teddy...besides, he'd better not. She was probably keyed up about as high as Bill was, and in no shape to do the kind of thinking he wanted of her on this stuff. Better wait a couple of days. On the following morning, before breakfast, Theodora was waiting for him outside the mess-hall. "Good morning, Jarve," she caroled. Reaching up, she took him by both ears, pulled his head down and kissed him. As soon as he perceived her intent, he cooperated enthusiastically. "What did you do to Bill?" "Oh, you don't love me for myself alone, then, but just on account of that big jerk?" "That's right." Her artist'smodel face, startlingly beautiful now, fairly glowed. Just then Temple Bells strolled up to them. "Morning, you two lovely people." She hugged Hilton's arm as usual. "Shame on you, Teddy. But I wish I had the nerve to kiss him like that." "Nerve? You?" Teddy laughed as Hilton picked Temple up and kissed her in exactly the same fashion -- he hoped! -- as he had just kissed Teddy. "You've got more nerve than an aching tooth. But as Jarve would say it, 'scat, kitten'. We're having breakfast a la twosome . We've got things to talk about." "All right for you," Temple said darkly, although her dazzling smile belied her tone. That first kiss, casual-seeming as it had been, had carried vastly more freight than any observer could perceive. "I'll hunt Bill up and make passes at him, see if I don't. That'll learn ya!" T heodora and Hilton did have their breakfast a deux -- but she did not realize until afterward that he had not answered her question as to what he had done to her Bill. As has been said, Hilton had made it a prime factor of his job to become thoroughly well acquainted with every member of his staff. He had studied them en masse , in groups and singly. He had never, however, cornered Theodora Blake for individual study. Considering the power and the quality of her mind, and the field which was her specialty, it had not been necessary. # by Ed Thus it was with no ulterior motives at all that, three evenings later, he walked into her cubby-hole office and tossed the stapled papers onto her desk. "Free for a couple of minutes, Teddy? I've got troubles." "I'll say you have." Her lovely lips curled into an expression he had never before seen her wear -- a veritable sneer. "But these are not them." She tossed the papers into a drawer and stuck out her chin. Her face turned as hard as such a beautiful face could. Her eyes dug steadily into his. Hilton -- i n w a r d I y -- flinched. His mind flashed backward. She too had been working under stress, of course; but that wasn't enough. What could he have possibly done to put Teddy Blake, of all people, onto such a warpath as this? "I've been wondering when you were going to try to put me through your wringer," she went on, in the same cold, hard voice, "and I've been waiting to tell you something. You have wrapped all the other women around your fingers like so many rings -- and what a sickening exhibition that has been! -- 'but you are not going to make either a ring or a lap-dog out of me." Almost but not quite too late Hilton saw through that perfect act. He seized her right hand in both of his, held ard E. Smith # E Everett Evens it up over her head, and waved it back and forth in the sign of victory. "Socked me with my own club!" he exulted, laughing delightedly, boyishly. "And came within a tenth of a split red hair! If it hadn't been so absolutely out of character you'd've got away with it. What a load of stuff! I was right -- of all the women on this project, yoju're the only one I've ever been really afraid of." "Oh, damn. Ouch !" She grinned ruefully. "I hit you with everything I had and it just bounced. You're an operator, chief. Hit 'em hard, at completely unexpected angles. Keep 'em staggering, completely off balance. Tell 'em nothing -- let 'em deduce your lies for themselves. And if anybody tries to slug you back, like I did just now, duck it and clobber him in another unprotected spot. Watching you work has been not only a delight, but also a liberal education."l Teddy." He lighted two cigarettes, handed her one. "I'm glad, though, to lay it flat on the table with you, because in any battle of wits with you I'm licked before we start." "Yeah. You just proved it. And after licking me hands down, you think you can square it by swinging the old shovel that way?" She did not quite know whether to feel resentful or not. "Think over a couple of things. First, with the possible exception of Temple Bells, you're the best brain aboard." "No. You are. Then Temple. Then there are..." "Hold it. You know as well as I do that accurate selfjudgment is impossible. Second, the jam we're in. Do I, or don't I, want to lay it on the table with you, now and from here on? Bore into that with your Class A DoublePrime brain. Then tell me." He leaned back, half-closed his eyes and smoked lazily. She stiffened; narrowed her eyes in concentration ; and thought. Finally: "Yes, you do; and I'm gladder of that then you will ever know." "I think I know already, since you're her best friend and the only other woman I know of in her class. But I came in to kick a couple of things around with you. As you've noticed, that's getting to be my favorite indoor sport. Probably because I'm a sort of jackleg theoretician myself." "You can frame that, Jarve, as the understatement of the century. But first, you are going to answer that question you sidestepped so neatly." "What I did to Bill? I finally convinced him that nobody expected the team to do that big a job overnight. That proved in any respect. You've you could have ten years. Or done a marvelous job. Much more, if necessary." better than I thought possible # T see." She frowned. "But at first." He heaved a deep you and I both know that we sigh of relief and she went can't string it out that long." on: "This could very easily He did not answer immedihave become a God-awful ately. "We could. But we mess. But the Board knew probably won't... unless we what they were doing -- eshave to. We should know, pecially as to top man -- so long before that, whether there are only about four peowe'll have to switch to some pie aboard who realize what other line of attack. You've you have done. Alex Kincaid considered the possibilities, and Sandra Cummings are of course. Have you got anytwo of them. One of the three thing in shape to do a finegirls is very deeply and very tooth on?" truly in love with you." "Not yet. That is, except "Ordinarily I'd say # no for the ultimate, which is too comment', but we're laying it ghastly to even consider exon the line...well..." cept as an ultimately last re"You'll lay that on the line sort. Have you?" only if I corkscrew it out of "I know what you mean, you, so I'll Q. E. D. it. You No, I haven't, either. You probably know that when don't think, then, that we had Sandy gets done playing better do any collaborative around it'll be . , " thinking yet?" "Bounce back, Teddy. She "Definitely not. There's alisn't -- hasn't been. If anytogether too much danger of thing, too much the opposite, setting both our lines of A dedicated-scientist type." thought  into one dead-end She smiled -- a highly crypchannel."  tic smile. For a man as bril"Check. The other thing I liant and as penetrant in evewanted from you is your conry other respect...but after sidered opinion as to my job all, if the big dope didn't realon the organization as a i ze that half the women whole. And don't pull your aboard, including Sandy, had punches. Are we in good been making passes at him, shape or not? What can I do s he certainly wouldn't ento improve the setup?" lighten him. Besides, that one particular area of obtuseness have already considered was a real part of his charm,-that very thing -- at great Wherefore she said merely: length. And honestly, Jarve, "I'm not sure whether I'm a I don't see how it can be imbit catty or you're a bit stuby Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans pid. Anyway, it's Alex she's really in love with. And you already know about Bill and "Of course. He's tops. One of the world's very finest. You're in the same bracket, and as a couple you're a drive "Now I can say 'I love you, too', too." She paused for half a minute, then stubbed out her cigarette and shrugged. "Now I'm going to stick my neck way, way out. You can knock it off if you like. She's a tremendous lot of woman, and if... well, strong as she is, it'd shatter her to bits. So, I'd like to ask... I don't quite... well, is she going to get hurt?" "Have I managed to hide it that well? From you?" It was her turn to show relief. "Perfectly. Even -- or esp e c i a I I y -- that time you kissed her. So damned perfectly that I've been scared green. I've been waking myself up, screaming, in the middle of the night. You couldn't let on, of course. That's the hell of such a job as yours. The rest of us can smooch around all over the place. I knew the question was extremely improper -- thanks a "I haven't started to answer it yet. I said I'd lay everything on the line, so here it is. Saying she's a tremendous lot of woman is like calling the Perseus a nice little baby's-bathtub toy boat. I'd go to hell for her any time, cheerfully, standing straight up, wading into brimstone and lava up to the eyeballs. If anything ever hurts her it'll be because I'm not man enough to block it. And just the minute this damned job is over, or even sooner if enough of you couples make it so I can..." "Jarvis!" she shrieked. Jumping up, she kissed him enthusiastically. "That's just wonderful t" H E thought it was pretty wonderful, too; and after ten minutes more of conversation he got up and turned toward the door. "I feel a lot better, Teddy. Thanks for being such a nice pressure-relief valve. Would you mind it too much if I come in and sob on your bosom again some day?" "I'd love it!" She laughed; then, as he again started to leave : "Wait a minute, I'm thinking...it'd be more fun to sob on her bosom. You haven't even kissed her yet, have you? I mean really kissed her?" "You know I haven't. She's the one person aboard I can't be alone with for a second." "True. But I know of one chaperone who could become deaf and blind," she said, with a broad and happy grin. "Oh my door, you know, there's a huge invisible sign that says, to everyone except you, # properly approached and sufficiently urged, I might... I just conceivably might..." "Consider it done, you little sweetheart! Up to and including my most vigorous and most insidious attempts at seduction." "Done. Maneuver your big, husky carcass around here behind the desk so the door can open." She flipped a switch and punched a number. "I can call anybody in here, any time, you know. Hello, dear, this is Teddy. Can you come in for just a few minutes? Thanks." And, one minute later, there came a light tap on the door. "Come in," Teddy called, and Temple Bells entered the room. She showed no surprise at seeing Hilton. "Hi, chief," she said. "It must be something both big and tough, to have you and Teddy both on it." "You're so right. It was very big and very tough. But it's solved, darling, so... " "Darling?" she gasped, almost inaudibly, both hands flying to her throat. Her eyes flashed toward the other woman. "Teddy knows all about us -- accessory before, during and after the fact." "Darling !" This time, the word was a shriek. She extended both arms and started forward. Hilton did not bother to maneuver his "big, husky carcass" around the desk, but simply hurdled it, straight toward her. lithe, strong woman; and all the power of her arms and torso went into the ensuing effort to crack Hilton's ribs. Those ribs, however, were highly capable structural members; and furthermore, they were protected by thick slabs of hard, hard muscle. And, fortunately, he was not trying to fracture her ribs. His pressures were distributed much more widely. He was, according to promise, doing his very best to flatten her whole resilient body out flat. And as they stood there, locked together in sheerest ecstasy, Theodora Blake began openly and unashamedly to cry. It was Temple who first came up for air. She wriggled loose from one of his arms, felt of her hair and gazed unseeingly into her mirror. "That was wonderful , sweetheart," she said then, shakily. "And I can never thank you enough, Teddy. But we can't do this very often...can we?" The addendum fairly begged for contradiction. "Not too often, I'm afraid," Hilton said, and Theodora agreed... "Well," the man said, someby Edward E. Smith # E. Evsrett Evans what later, 'Til leave you two ladies to your knitting, or whatever. After a couple of short ones for the road, that is. " "Not looking like that !" Teddy said, sharply. "Hold still and we'll clean you up." Then, as both girls went to work: "If anybody ever sees you coming out of this office looking like that" she went on, darkly, "and Bill finds out about it, he'll think it's my lipstick smeared all over you and I'll strangle you to death with my bare hands !" "And that was supposed to be kissproof lipstick, too," Temple said, seriously -- although her whole face glowed and her eyes danced. "You know, I'll never believe another advertisement I read." "Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, if I were you." Teddy's voice was gravity itself, although she, too, was bubbling over. "It probably is kissproof. I don't think 'kissing' is quite the word for the performance you just staged. To stand up under such punishment as you gave it, my dear, anything would have to be tattooed in, not just put on." "Hey!" Hilton protested. "You promised to be deaf and blind !" "I did no such thing. I said 'could', not 'would'. Why, I wouldn't have missed that for anything " When Hilton left the room he was apparently, in every respect, his usual self-contined self. However, it was not until the following morning that he so much as thought of the sheaf of papers lying unread in the drawer of Theodora Blake's desk. done everything he could to help the most important investigations get under way, Hilton turned his attention to secondary matters. He made arrangements to decondition Javo, the Number Two Oman Boss, whereupon that worthy became Javvy and promptly "bumped" the Oman who had been shadowing Karns. Larry and Javvy, working nights, deconditioned all the other Omans having any contact with BuSci personnel ; then they went on to set up a routine for deconditioning all Omans on both planets. Assured at last that the Omans would thenceforth work with and really serve human beings instead of insisting upon doing their work for them, Hilton knew that the time had come to let all his BuSci personnel move into their homes aground. Everyone, including himself, was fed up to the gozzel with spaceship life -- its jam-packed crowding; its flat, reprocessed air; its limited variety of uninteresting food. Conditions were especially irksome since everybody knew that there was available to all, whenever Hilton gave the word, a whole city full of all the room anyone could want, natural fresh air and -- so the Omans had told them -- an unlimited choice of everything anyone wanted to eat. Nevertheless, the decision was not an easy one to make. Living conditions were admittedly not good on the ship. On the other hand, with almost no chance at all of solitude -- the few people who had private offices aboard were not the ones he worried about -- there was no danger of sexual trouble. Strictly speaking, he was not responsible for the morals of his force. He knew that he was being terribly old-fashioned. Nevertheless, he could not argue himself out of the conviction that he was morally responsible. Finally he took the thing up with Sandra, who merely laughed at him. "How long have you been worrying about that , Jarve?" "Ever since I okayed moving aground the first time. That was one reason I was so glad to cancel it then' "You were slightly unclear -- a little rattled? But which factor -- the fun and games, which is the moral issue, or the consequences?" "The consequences," he admitted, with a rueful grin. "I don't give a whoop how much fun they have; but you know as well as I do just how prudish public sentiment is. And Project Theta Orionis is squarely in the middle of the public eye." X'OU should have  checked with me sooner and saved yourself wear and tear. There's no danger at all of consequences -- except weddings. Lots of weddings, and fast." "W e d d i n g s and babiek wouldn't bother me a bit. Nor interfere with the job too much, with the Omans as nurses. But why the 'fast', if you aren't anticipating any shotgun weddings?" "Female psychology," she replied, with a grin. "Aboardship here there's no home atmosphere whatever ; nothing but work, work, work. Put a woman into a house, though -- especially such houses as the Omans have built and with such servants as they insist on being -- and she goes domestic in a really big way. Just sex isn't good enough any more. She wants the kind of love that goes with a husband and a home, and nine times out of ten she gets it. With these BuSci women it'll be ten out of ten." "You may be right, of by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans course, but it sounds kind of far-fetched to me." "Wait and see, chum Sandra said, with a laugh. Hilton made his announcement and everyone moved aground the next day. No one, however, had elected to live alone. Almost everyone had chosen to double up; the most noteworthy exceptions being twelve laboratory girls who had decided to keep on living together. However, they now had a twenty-room house instead, of a one-room dormitory to live in, and a staff of twenty Oman girls to help them do it. Hilton had suggested that Temple and Teddy, whose house was only a hundred yards or so from the HiltonKarns bungalow, should have supper and spend the first evening with them; but the girls had knocked that idea flat. Much better, they thought,' to let things ride as nearly as possible exactly as they had been aboard the Perseus. "A little smooching now and then, on the Q strictly T, but that's all, darling. That's positively all," Temple had said, after a highly satisfactory ten minutes alone with him in her own gloriously private room, and that was the way it had to be. Hence it was a stag inspection that Hilton ana Karns made of their new home. It was very long, very wide, and for its size very low. Four of its five rooms were merely adjuncts to its tremendous I i v i n g-room. There was a huge fireplace at each end of this room, in each of which a fire of four-foot-long fir cordwood crackled and snapped. There was a great hi-fi tri-di, with over a hundred tapes, all new. "Yes, sirs," Larry and Javvy spoke in unison. "The players and singers who entertained the Masters of old have gone back to work. They will also, of course, appear in person whenever and wherever you wish." the vast room and Karns said : "All the comforts of home and a couple of bucks' worth besides. Wall-to-wall carpeting an inch and a half thick. A grand piano. Easy chairs and loafers and davenports. Very fine reproductions of our favorite paintings...and statuary." "You said it, brother." Hilton was bending over a group in bronze. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear this is the original deHaven 'Dance of the Nymphs'." Karns had marched up to and was examining minutely a two-by-three-foot painting, in a heavy gold frame, of a gorgeously a u b u r n-haired nude. "Reproduction, hell ! This is a duplicate! Lawrence's 'Innocent' is worth sealed behind quad armorglass in Prime Art -- but I'll bet wogs to wiggles the Prime Curator himself, with all his apparatus, couldn't tell this one from his!" "I wouldn't take even one wiggle's worth of that. And this 'Laughing Cavalier' and this 'Toledo' are twice as old and twice as fabulousy valuable." "And there are my own golf clubs..." "Excuse us, sirs," the Omans said, "These things were simple because they could be induced in your minds. But the matter of a staff could not, nor what you . would like to eat for supper, and it is growing late." "Staff? What the hell has the staff got to do with..." "Housestaff, they mean," Karns said. "We don't need much of anybody, boys. Somebody to keep the place shipshape, is all. Or, as a de luxe touch, how about a waitress? One housekeeper and one waitress. That'll be finer." "Very well, sirs. There is one other matter. It has troubled us that we have not been able to read in your minds the logical datum that they should in fact simulate Doctor Bells and Doctor Blake?" "Huh?" Both men gasped -- and then both exploded like one twelve-inch length of primacord, not understand this purely Terran reasoning, they accepted the decision without a demurring thought. "Who, then, are the two its to simulate?" "No stipulation; roll your own," Hilton said, and glanced at Karns. "None of these Oman women are really hard on the eyes." "Check. Anybody who wouldn't call any one of 'em a slurpy dish needs a new set of optic nerves." "In that case," the Omans said, "no delay at all will be necessary, as we can make do with one temporarily. The Sory, no longer Sora, who has not been glad since the Tuly replaced it, is now in your kitchen. It comes." A woman came in and stood quietly in front of the two men, the wafted air carrying from her clear, smooth skin a faint but unmistakable fragrance of Idaho mountain syringa. She was radiantly happy; her bright, deep-green eyes went from man to man. "You wish, sirs, to give me your orders verbally. And yes, you may order fresh, whole, not-canned hens' eggs." "I certainly will, then; I haven't had a fried egg since we left Terra. But... Larry said... you en't Sory !" "Oh, but I am, sir." SCarns had been staring at her, eyes popping. "Holy Saint Patrick ! Talk about by Edward' E. Smith  E. Everett Event simulation, Jarvc! They've made her over into Lawrence's 'Innocent' -- exact to twenty decimals!" "You're so right." Hilton's eyes went, half a dozen times, from the form of flesh to the painting and back. "That must have been a terrific job." "Oh, no. It was quite simple, really," Sory said, "since the brain was not involved. I merely reddened my hair and lengthened it, made my eyes to be green, changed my face a little, pulled myself in a little around here... Her beautifully-m a n i c u r e d hands swept the full circle of her waistline, then continued to demonstrate appropriately the rest of her speech: "...and pushed me out a little up here and tapered my legs a little more -- made them a little larger and rounder here at my hips and thighs and a little smaller toward and at my ankles. Oh, yes, and made my feet and hands a little smaller. That's all. I thought the Doctor Karns would like me a little better this way." VOU can broadcast that over the P-A system at high noon." Karns was still staring. " 'That's all,' she says. But you didn't have time to... " "Oh, I did it day before yesterday. As soon as Jawy materialized the 'Innocent' and I knew it to be your favorite art." "But damn it, we hadn't even thought of having you here then!" "But I had; sir. I fully intended to serve, one way or another, in this your home. But of course I had no idea I would ever have such an honor as actually waiting on you at your table. Will you please give me your orders, sirs, besides the eggs? You wish the eggs fried in butter -- three of them apiece -- and sunny side up." "Uh-huh, with ham," Hilton said. "I'll start with a jumbo shrimp cocktail. Horseradish and ketchup sauce; heavy on the horseradish." "Same for me," Karns said, "but only half as much horseradish." "And for the rest of it," Hilton went on, "hashedbrown potatoes and buttered toast -- plenty of extra butter -- strong coffee from first to last. Whipping cream tfnd sugar on the side. For dessert, apple pie a la mode "You make me drool, chief. Play that for me, please, Innocent, all the way." "Oh? You are -- you, personally, yourself, sir? -- renaming me 'Innocent'?" "If you'll sit still for it, yes." "That is an incredible honor, sir. Simply unbelievable. I thank you ! I thank you !" Radiating happiness, she dashed away toward the kitchen. full of food, they strolled over to a davenport facing the fire. As they sat down, Innocent entered the room, carrying a tall, dewy mint julep on a tray. She was followed by another female figure bearing a bottle of avignognac and the appurtenances which are its due -- and at the first full sight of that figure Hilton stopped breathing for fifteen seconds. Her hair was very thick, intensely black and long, cut squarely off just below the lowest points of her shoulder blades. Heavy brows and long lashes -- eyes too -- were all intensely, vividly black. Her skin was tanned to a deep and glowing almost-but-not-quitebrown. "Murchison's Dark Lady !" Hilton gasped. "Larry! You've -- we've -- Tve got that painting here?" "Oh, yes, sir." The newcomer spoke before Larry could. "At the other end -- your part -- of the room. You will look now, sir, please?" Her voice was low, rich and as smooth as cream. Putting her tray down careAilly on the end-table, she led him toward the other fireplace. Past the piano, past the tri-di pit ; past a towering grillwork holding art treasures by the score. Over to the left, against the wall, there was a big, business-like desk. On the wall, over the desk, hung the painting; a copy of which had been in Hilton's room for over eight years. He stared at it for at least a minute. He glanced around: at the other priceless duplicates so prodigally present, at his own guns arrayed above the mantel and on each side of the fireplace. Then, without a word, he started back to join Karns. She walked springily beside him. "What's your name. Miss?" he asked, finally. "I haven't earned any as yet, sir. My number is..." "Never mind that. Your name is 'Dark Lady'." "Oh, thank you, sir; that is truly wonderful!" And Dark Lady sat cross-legged on the rug at Hilton's feet and busied herself with the esoteric rites of Old Avignon. Hilton took a deep inhalation and a small sip, then stared at Karns. Karns, over the rim of his glass, stared back. "I can see where this would be habit-f o r m i n g," Hilton said, "and very deadly. JExtremely deadly." "Every wish granted. Surrounded by all this." Karns swept his arm through threequarters of a circle. "Waited on hand and foot by powerful men and by the materializations of the dreams of the fry Edward E. Smith A C. Everett Evans greatest, finest artists who ever lived. Fatal? I don't know... #EIY solid hope is that we never have to find out. And when you add in Innocent and Dark Lady... They look to be about seventeen, but the thought that they're older than the hills of Rome and powered by everlasting atomic engines -- " He broke off suddenly and blushed. "Excuse me, please, girls. I know better than to talk about people that way, right in front of them; I really do." "Do you really think we're people ?" Innocent and Dark Lady squealed, as one. That set Hilton back onto his heels. "I don't know... I've wondered. Are you?" Both girls, silent, looked at Larry. "We don't know, either," Larry said. "At first, of course, there were crude, nonthinking machines. But when the Guide attained its present status, the Masters themselves could not agree. They divided about half and half on the point. They, never did settle it any closer than that." "I certainly won't try to, then. But for my money, you are people," Hilton said, and Karns agreed. That, of course, touched off a near-riot of joy ; after which the two men made an inch-byinch study of their tremendous living-room. Then, long after bedtime, Larry and Dark Lady escorted Hilton to his bedroom. "Do you mind, sir, if we sleep on the floor at the sides of your bed?" Larry asked. "Or must we go out into the hall?" "Sleep? I didn't know you could sleep." "It is not essential. However, when round-the-clock work is not necessary, and we have opportunity to sleep near a human being, we derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it. You see, sir, we also serve during sleep." "Okay, I'll try anything once. Sleep wherever you please." Hilton began to peel, but before he had his shirt off both Larry and Dark Lady were stretched out flat, sound asleep, one almost under each edge of his bed. He slid in between the sheets -- it was the most comfortable bed he had ever slept in -- and went to sleep as though sandbagged. He had time to wonder foggily whether the Omans were in fact helping him go to s I e e p -- and then he was asleep. A month passed. Eight couples had married, the Navy chaplain officiating -- in the Perseus, of course, since the warship was, always and everywhere, an integral part of Terra. Sandra had dropped in one evening to see Hilton about a bit of business. She was now sitting, long dancer's legs out-stretched toward the fire, with a cigarette in her left hand and a tall, cold drink on a coaster at her right. "This is a wonderful room, Jarvis. It'd be perfect if it weren't quite so... so mannish." "What do you expect of Bachelors' Hall -- a boudoir? Don't tell me you're going domestic, Sandy, just because you've got a house?" "Not just that, no. But of course it helped it along." "Alex is a mighty good man. One of the finest I have ever known." She eyed him for a moment in silence. "Jarvis Hilton, you are one of the keenest, most intelligent men who ever lived. And yet..." She broke off and studied him for a good half minute. "Say, if I let my hair clear down, will you?" "Scout's Oath. That 'and yet' requires elucidation at any cost." "I know. But first, yes, it's Alex. I never would have believed that any man ever born could hit me so hard. Soon. I didn't want to be the first, but I won't be anywhere near the last. But tell gpe. You were really in love with Temple, weren't you when I asked you?" "Yes." "Ha! You are letting your hair down! That makes me feel better." "Huh? Why should it?" "It elucidates the 'and yet no end. You were insulated from all other female charms by ye brazen Bells. You see, most of us assistants made a kind of game out of seeing which of us could make you break the Executives' Code. And none of us made it. Teddy and Temple said you didn't know what was going on ; Bev and I said nobody as smart as you are could possibly be that stupid." "You aren't the type to leak or name names -- oh, I see. You are merely reporting a conversation. The game had interested, but non-participating, observers. Temple and Teddy, at least." "At least," she agreed. "But damn it, you aren't stupid. There isn't a stupid bone in your head. So it must be love. And if so, what about marriage? Why don't you and Temple make it a double with Alex and me?" "That's the most cogent thought you ever had, but setting the date is the bride's business." He glanced at his Oman wristwatch. "It's early yet ; let's skip over. I wouldn't mind seeing her a minute or two." "Thy statement r i n g e t h with truth, friend. Bill's there with Teddy?" "I imagine so." by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans "So we'll talk to thorn about making it a triple. Oh, nice -- let's go!" They left the house and, her hand tucked under his elbow, walked up the street. way to the Hall of Records, Sandra stopped off as usual at the office. The Omans were all standing motionless. Hilton was leaning far back in his chair, feet on desk, hands clasped behind head, eyes closed. Knowing what that meant, she turned and started back out on tiptoe. However, he had heard her. "Can you spare a couple of minutes to think at me, Sandy?" "Minutes or hours, chief." Tuly placed a chair for her and she sat down, facing him across his desk. "Thanks, gal. This time it's the' Stretts. Sawtelle's been having nightmares, you know, ever since we emerged, about being attacked, and I've been pooh-poohing the idea. But now it's a statistic that the soup is getting thicker, and I can't figure out why. Why in all the hells of space should a stasis that has lasted for years be broken at this exact time? The only possible explanation is that we caused th break. And any way I look at that concept, it's plain idiocy." Both were silent for minutes; and then it was demonstrated again that Terra's Advisory Board had done better than it knew in choosing Sandra Cummings to be Jarvis Hilton's working mate. "We did cause it, Jarve," she said, finally. "They knew we were coming, even before we got to Fuel Bin. They knew we were human and tried to wipe out the Omans before we got there. Preventive warfare, you know." "They couldn't have known!" he snorted. "Strett detectors are no better than Oman, and you know what Sam Bryant had to say about them. " "I know." Sandra grinned appreciatively. "It's becoming a classic. But it couldn't have been any other way. Besides, I know they did." He stared at her helplessly, then swung on Larry. "Does that make sense to you?" "Yes, sir. The Stretts could peyondire as well as the old Masters could, and they undoubtedly still can and do." "Okay, it does make sense, then. " He absented himself in thought, then came to life with a snap. "Okay! The next thing on the agenda is a crash-priority try at a peyondix team. Tuly, you organized a team to generate sathura. Can you do the same for peyondipj i "If we can find the ingredients, yes, sir." UT had a hunch. Larry ,please ask Teddy Blake's Oman to bring her in here..." "I'll be running along, then." Sandra started to get up. "I hope to kiss a green pig you won't!" Hilton snapped. "You're one of the biggest wheels. Larry, we'll want Temple Bells and Beverly Bell -- for a start." "C h i e f, you positively amaze me," Sandra said then. "Every time you get one of these attacks of genius -- or whatever it is -- you have me gasping like a fish. Just what can you possibly want of Bev Bell?" "Whatever it was that enabled her to hit the target against odds of almost infinity to one; not just once, but time after time. By definition, intuition. What quality did you use just now in getting me off the hook? Intuition. What makes Teddy Blake such an unerring performer? Intuition again. My hunches -- they're intuition, too. Intuition, hell ! Labels -- based on utterly abysmal damned dumb ignorance of our own basic frames of reference. Do you think those four kinds of intuition are alike, by seven thousand rows of apple trees?" "Of course not. I see what you're g e I I i n g at... Oh ! This'll be fun!" The others came in and, one by one, Tuly examined each of the four women and the man. Each felt the probing, questioning feelers of her thought prying into the deepest recesses of his mind. "There is not quite enough of each of three components, all of which are usually associated with the male. You, sir, have much of each, but not enough. I know your men quite well, and I think we will need the doctors Kincaid and Karns and Poynter. But such deep probing is felt. Have I permission, sir?" "Yes. Tell 'em I said so." Tuly scanned. "Yes, sir, we should have all three." "Get 'em, Larry." Then, in the pause that followed : "Sandy, remember yowling about too many sweeties on a team? What do you think of this business of all sweeties?" "All that proves is that nobody can be wrong all the time," she replied flippantly. The three men arrived and were instructed. Tuly said: "The great trouble is that each of you must use a portion of your mind that you do not know you have. You, this one. You, that one." Tuly probed mercilessly; so poignantly that each in turn flinched under brand-new and almost unbearable pain. "With you. Doctor Hilton, it will be by far the worst. For you must learn to use almost all the portions of both your minds, the conscious and the by Edward E. Smith # Everett Evans unconscious. This must be, because you are the actual peyondixer. The others merely supply energies in which you yourself are deficient. Are you ready for a terrible shock, sir?" "Shoot." H E thought for a second that he had been shot ; that his brain had blown up. He couldn't stand it -- he knew he was going to die -- he wished he could die -- anything, anything whatever, to end this unbearable agony... It ended. Writhing, white and sweating, Hilton opened his eyes. "Ouch," he remarked, conversationally. "What next?" "You will seize hold of the energies your friends offer. You will bind them to yours and shape the whole into a dimensionless sphere of pure, controlled, dirigible energy. And, as well as being the binding force, the cohesiveness, you must also be the captain and the pilot and the astrogator and the ultimately complex computer itself." "But how can I... Okay, damn it. I will!" "Of course you will, sir. Remember also that once the joinings are made I can be of very little more assistance, for my peyondix is as nothing compared to that of your fusion of eight. Now, to assemble the energies and join them you will, all together, deny the existence of the sum total of reality as you know it. Distance does rtot exist -- every point in the reachable universe coincides with every other point and that common point is the focus of your attention. You can be and actually are anywhere you please or everywhere at once. Time does not exist. Space does not exist. There is no such thing as opacity; everything is perfectly transparent, yet every molecule of substance is perceptible in its relationship to every other molecule in the cosmos. Senses do not exist. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, sathura, endovix -- all are parts of the one great sense of peyondix. I am guiding each of you seven -- closer! Tighter! There! Seize it, sir -- and when you work the Stretts you must fix it clearly that time does not exist. of microseconds instead of in minutes, for they have minds of tremendous power. Reality does not exist ! Compress it more, sir. Tighter! Smaller! Rounder! There! Hold it! Reality does not exist -- distance does not exist -- all possible points are... Wonderful!" Tuly screamed the word and the thought: "Good-by! Good luck!" They weren't human -- weren't even related to humanity through ties of blood -- but they were our heirs! Their blood and sticky T HE machine had stood there a long time. It was several hundred feet long and could run on a thimbleful of earth or water. Complete in itself, the machine drew material from the surrounding landscape, transmuting matter to its special purposes. It needed sugar, salt, water and many other things but never failed to have them. It was still working. And at the delivery end, where the packaging devices had been broken down, it turned out a steady turgid stream on the ground #f pink-striped, twisting taffyOnce the whole vast desert area had been filled with such devices, producing all the varied needs of a very needful human race. But there had been no machine to produce peace. The crossing s.hock waves of fused hydrogen had destroyed the machine by the tens of thousands, along with all the automatic shipping lines, leaving only, in the quirk of a pressure cross-pattern, an undisturbed taffymaking machine, oozing its special lava on the plateau floor. It had been working seven It continued to repair itself, as if a child of the race that had started all this would come by it at any moment to tip an eager pinky in the stillwarm taffy to taste its tangy sweetness. But there were no human beings. There had been none since the day when the packager collapsed, at the edge of the total-evaporation zone. legs on the edge of the glassy, weathered ridge and gazed over the plateau. Harta, next to him, trembled as she adjusted to the strange hardness of these four dimensions. "Being is a thin thing here' she said. "Thin, yes," Creno smiled. "An almost dead world. But there is a mystery in that almost to make the journey worth the coming." "What mystery?" But Creno was of the wisest on the home planet and her sense feelers scanned once more to find what he must mean. "I do feel it! Everything dead but that one great mental thing moving, and a four-dimensional stream coming out in the vibrations of this world !" "I have been watching it," said Creno. "What kind of life can that be? You are a sharp sensor, Harta. Focus to it." She strained and then relaxed, speaking : "The circuits are closed into themselves. It learns nothing from outside itself except to move and extend its metal feelers for food. Soil is its food. Soil is its energy. Soil is its being." "Can it be alive?" "It is alive." All his legs rested now in a row along the ridge. He too was relaxed as one mystery disappeared "I feel your feelings, but the thing is not alive. It is a machine." "I do not .understand. A machine in tfie middle of a dead world?" "Whether wt understand why or not, that is what it is -- a machine." Harta throbbed with excitement. How could Creno be wrong? He knew everything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now were living things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence at one end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of willed effort as they crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching grasping feelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easing legs as the food spread within them. "There are living creatures here !" Creno pondered. "I feel your messages. Twenty, thirty -- a horde is crawling from that mountain toward it." "Four thousand three hundred and ninety-one," said Harta. She concentrated. "There are three thousand and five more in the mountain caves, waiting to come out as the others return." about a hundred, pulling themselves slowly toward the edges of the great sticky lake that lay within the vaster area where the pink matter dried and crumbled into the strong breeze. Some were smaller than others, offspring who were nudged along by their , elders. But these small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all after they had fed. Joyously they danced back toward the mountain. A few of medium height went back in pairs, firm taffy fingers intertwined in each other. "They mate," said Creno. "It is their custom." "How tiring they are," said Harta. "I have lost interest. We have seen t h i r t y-one worlds with such customs and these creatures are too simple to be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system." "Not yet," Creno insisted. "We passed through the ocean and surveyed the lands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has there been the tiniest unit of life. Why at this one spot should something exist?" "But we have several parallel situations," Harta protested. "They were colonies landed in one spot by the civilization of another planet. They landed here with their feeder machine. And that is the explanation." "Your mind does not function well in a four-dimension continuum, Harta. You will need more training -- " "But these cases are rare, and, Creno -- " "I know they are rare, my child. But still they exist You will have to learn eventually, a little at a time. Now then, it is a rule of such limited dimensional realms that the movement of matter and events from place to place is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures must be observed. To transport a machine this size across their space would have required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have. More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller device would have supplied them with food. I am forced to conclude that -- somehow -- we are approaching this problem backwards." "Backwards? You mean they made the machine here after they came?" He did not reply to that. "We must concentrate together on thinking ourselves into their functioning in their manifold." Harta followed his suggestion, and soon their thoughts were moving among and within the striped creatures. The insides of their bodies consisted of fundamentally the same taffy substance; but it had been modified by various organic structures. All, though, were built of the same fundamental units : elongated, thin cells which readily aligned themselves in semi-crystalline patterns. "Enoug h," Creno said, "back to the hill." Their rows of thin limbs rested on the ridge crest once more. "We have seen such cell crystals before," she sighed. "The inefficiencies in such a poverty of dimensions! Do you still think we have looked at it backwards?" "Of course we have. They did not bring the machine or make it -- the machine made them !" "That is not possible, Creno, great as you are in these matters. We have never seen life created by a machine before. No one ever ports I have seen at home." "Maybe we have and not known it. The life we have seen always evolved through enormous eons and we could not see its origins clearly in most cases. Here we are dealing with something that has taken comparatively little time." He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had said so much. "No, disregard such theories. You are still too young to bother with them. Here is the important thing -- this machine was left by an earlier race that disappeared. Everything else was destroyed but it went right on producing its substance." "The substance is not life." "It is only four-dimensional matter, right. But over a long enough time -- you know this as well as I do -- random factors will eventually produce a life form. By some trick of radiation this process has been speeded up here. The substance the machine produces has in turn produced life!" or some dangerous shifting in Harta's consciousness. As an elder it was his duty to prevent a premature insight in the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up. He must go no further. It was not necessary. Harta took it up for him. "Then any substance producing life and modified by it c o u I d -- if you go far enough back -- be the product of a machine. But it would have taken so long to produce life that the original matter, that bore the direct imprint of the machine, would have disappeared." "An error," said Creno desperately. "There is just this case." "By the time these creatures have arrived at selfknowledge the machine will be gone. They will not know it ever existed, and -- " "That is all it means. There is just this one case. Now we must leave this unimportant example of minor dimensions !" He strained consciousness to a forward movement but Harta remained behind. He had to pull back. "Start," he ordered. Her mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too. He applied all his force to bring her back into control, but she still held fast. "Something more is hidden from me. I will be back," she said. And she disappeared from the ridge. He had never faced such a quandary before on a training trip with a younger one. If he went in pursuit he would find her ultimately -- that .was in the nature of being older and wiser -- but, if she revolted against his pursuit, she could extend the time considerably. on this forsaken planet. And he wanted to get her away as soon as possible. The more time here the more chance that the awful truth would come to her before her time. Hfc watched the growing waves of creatures floundering toward the vast oozing puddle, which refilled itself as quickly as it was diminished by them, and the receding waves of those that had already fed. This, he could see, was an endless process. The whole life on the species moved in continuous systolediastole around the machine. Soon he would have to go in search of her... But then she was back at his side, her being for this world once more solidified. She concentrated for a moment on the pink-striped waves of rippling inward and outward around the great sustaining pool, then communicated with him. "We can leave now. There is nothing more to see." Something in her mind remained closed to hts, as the mind of younger never should be to older. But at least he could see with relief that the worst had not happened. The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her too early when it could only hurt. All he found turned to him -- as they receded from this thin-manifold universe, then moved up the dimension ladder to their home level -- was a surface of happiness. Suddenly, though, as they prepared for flight in that hyperspace all her joy was gone. "I saw it," she said. "In my free and unrestricted spirit I moved deep into the substance of that world, below all the total ruin, far below. And there whs a monstrous machine, near the molten core, almost infinitely older than the feeding one far above it. And it, too, had been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed. I could see it had once produced the ooze from which came the life from which in turn come the beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe they, too, thought they were free and unrestricted !" He sighed for the bitter cost of knowledge. This one would no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration, and he would no longer live vicariously in the happiness of another being's innocence. Now Harta, too, would be seekng the answer to the question of original creation, the answer that he. had not found in his journeys across a myriad worlds and dimensions... That no one had ever found. 'T'HE lightest element is hy- drogen, the next lightest is helium. Next in line is the lightest solid. It's a metal, silvery, soft enough to crease with a thumbnail, light enough to float like a pingpong ball. It's Lithium, and it's a weird and wonderful worker. You've probably never encountered it since about ten minutes ago. It helps lubricate the car, puts the zing in the bubbles in your Coke, lays that special gloss on your bathroom fixtures and helps make Vitamin A pills. It also has a lot to do with your future, or lack of it. Bombard an isotope of lithium (Li-#) with neutrons and you get triple-w eight hydrogen (tritium) which one may assume is what makes the hydrogen bomb go bang. It was discovered in # but not much was done with it but for glazing chinaware until someone found out it would give more muscles to Edison batteries. In #I the physicists Cocroft and Walton bombarded lithium with protons and came up with the very first experimental proof of Einstein's assertion that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing. Only # of pure lithium is the Li-# used in fusion reactions. The rest (Li-#) continues to find more to do. It's in face cream, and it's used in dehumidifiers. It adds effectiveness to welding fluxes, medicines and synthetic rubber. The Atomic Energy Commission takes over quantities of this lithium hydroxides. The exact process is classified, but it can be told that it's a snap compared with the mass diffusion used during the war to sort out U-# from U-#. ounces of Li-# from each pound of metallic lithium. For the rest, the Li-#, it has no use whatever, so it sells it back to its original supplier, who turns it over to industry. It looks very much as if the whole approach to atomic power which filled our minds and our newspapers -- and our s-f-stories -- dealing as it has with uranium and other heavy elements, will before long begin to look a little quaint. Light element nucleonics, and fusion power, may some day put uranium back where it was in a high-school textbook I once had: "Uranium," it said, "is a useless dense metal of value only in imparting a brownish-purple glaze to cheap crockery." AT OF I He was asleep, and dreaming his inevitable painful dream. Only Joey was awake on deck, in the cool stillness before dawn, when the meteor came flaming out of the sky above New Guinea. He watched it climb up the heavens until it passed directly overhead, routing the stars and throwing swift-moving shadows across the crowded deck. The harsh light outlined the bare rigging, the coiled ropes and air-hoses, the copper diving-helmets neatly snugged down for the night -- even the low, pandanus-clad island half a mile away. As it passed into the southwest, out over the emptiness of the Pacific, it began to disintegrate. Incandescent globules broke off, burning and guttering in a trail of fire that stretched a quarter of the way across the sky. It was already dying when it raced out of sight. But Joey did not see its end. Still blazing furiously, it sank below the horizon, as if seeking to hurl itself into the face of the hidden sun. If the sight was spectacular, the utter silence was unnerving. Joey waited and waited and waited, but no sound came from the riven heavens. When, minutes later, there was a sudden splash from the sea, close at hand he gave an involuntary start of surprise -- then cursed himself for being frightened by a manta. (A mighty big one, though, to have made so much noise when it jumped.) There was no other sound, and presently he went back to sleep. In his narrow bunk just aft of the air-compressor, Tibor heard nothing. He slept so soundly after his day's work that he had little energy even for dreams. And when they came, they were not the dreams he wanted. In the hours of darkness, as his mind roamed back and forth across the past, it never came to rest amid memories of desire. He had women in Sydney and Brisbane and Darwin and Thursday Island -- but none in his dreams. All that he ever remembered when he woke, in the fetid stillness of the cabin, was the dust and fire and blood as the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. His dreams were not of love, but only of hate. When Nick shook him back to consciousness, he was dodging the guards on the Austrian border. It took him a few seconds to make the ten-thousand-mile journey to the Great Barrier Reef. Then he yawned, kicked away the cockroaches that had been nibbling at his toes and heaved himself out of his bunk. Breakfast, of course, was the same as always -- rice, turtle eg g s and bully-beef, washed down with strong, sweet tea. The best that could be said of Joey's cooking was that there was plenty of it. Tibor was used to the monotonous diet. He made up for it, and for other deprivations, when he was back on the mainland. T HE sun had barely cleared the horizon when the dishes were stacked in the tiny galley and the lugger got under way. Nick sounded cheerful as he took the wheel and headed out from the island. The old pearling-master had every right to be, for the patch of shell they were working was the richest that Tibor had ever seen. With any luck, they would fill their hold in another day or two, and sail back to T.I. with half a ton of shell on board. And then, with a little more luck, he could give up this stinking, dangerous job and get back to civilisation. Not that he regretted anything. The Greek had treated him well, and he'd found some good stones when the shells were opened. But he understood now, after nine months on the Reef, why the number of white divers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Japs and Kanakas and Islanders could take it -- but damn few Europeans. The diesel coughed into silence and the Arafura coasted to rest. They were some two miles from the island, which lay low and green on the water, yet sharply divided from it by its narrow band of dazzling beach. It was no more than a nameless sand-bar that a tiny forest had managed to capture. Its only inhabitants were the myriads of stupid muttonbirds that riddled the soft ground with their burrows, and made the night hideous with their banshee cries. There was little talk as the three divers dressed. Each man knew what to do, and wasted no time in doing it. As Tibor buttoned on his thick twill jacket, Blanco, his tender, rinsed out the faceplate with vinegar so that it would not become fogged. Then Tibor clambered down the rope ladder, while the heavy helmet and lead corselet were placed over his head. Apart from the jacket, whose padding spread the weight evenly over his shoulders, he was wearing his ordinary clothes. In these warm waters there was no need for rubber suits. The helmet simply acted as a tiny diving-bell held in position by its weight alone. In an emergency the wearer could -- if he was lucky -- duck out of it and swim back to the surface unhampered. Tibor had seen this done. But he had no wish to try the experiment for himself. Each time he stood on the last rung of the ladder, gripping his shell-bag with one hand and his safety line with the other, the same thought flashed through Tibor's mind. He was leaving the world he knew; but was it for an hour -- or was it forever? Down there on the seabed was wealth and death, and one could be sure of neither. The chances were that this would be another day of uneventful drudgery, as were most of the days in the pearl-diver's unglamorous life. But Tibor had seen one of his mates die, when his air-hose tangled in the Arafura's prop. And he had watched the agony of another, as his body twisted with the bends. In the sea, nothing was ever safe or certain. You took your chances with open eyes. And if you lost there was no point in whining. He stepped back from the ladder, and the world of sun and sky ceased to exist. Topheavy with the weight of his helmet, he had to back-pedal furiously to keep his body upright. He could see nothing but a featureless blue mist as he sank towards the bottom. He hoped that Blanco would not play out the safetyline too quickly. Swallowing and snorting, he tried to clear his ears as the pressure mounteji. The right one "popped" quickly enough, but a piercing, intolerable pain grew rapidly in the left, which had bothered him for several days. He forced his hand up under the helmet, gripped his nose and blew with all his might. There was an abrupt, soundless explosion somewhere inside his head, and the pain vanished instantly. He'd have no more trouble on this dive. fore he saw it. Unable to bend over lest he risk flooding the open helmet, his vision in the downwards direction was very limited. He could see around, but not immediately below. What he did see was reassuring in its drab monotony -- a gently undulating, muddy plain that faded out of sight about ten feet ahead. A yard to his left a tiny fish was nibbling at a piece of coral the size and shape of a lady's fan. That was all. There was no beauty, no underwater fairyland here. But there was money. That was what mattered. The safety line gave a gentle pull as the lugger started to drift downwind, moving broadside-on across the patch, and Tibor began to walk forward with the springy, slowmotion step forced on him by weightlessness and water resistance. As Number Two diver, he was working from the bow. Amidships was Stephen, still comparatively inexperienced, while at the stern was the head diver, Billy. The three men seldom saw each other while they were working; each had his own lane to search as the Arafura drifted silently before the wind. Only at the extremes of their zigzags might they sometimes glimpse one another as dim shapes looming through the mist. It needed a trained eye to spot the shells beneath their camouflage of algae and weeds, but often the molluscs betrayed themselves. When they felt the vibrations of the approaching diver, they would snap shut -- and there would be a momentary, nacreous flicker in the gloom. Yet even then they sometimes escaped, for the moving ship might drag the diver past before he could collect the prize just out of reach. In the early days of his apprenticeship, Tabor had missed quite a few of the big silver-lips, any one of which might have contained some fabulous pearl. Or so he had imagined, before the glamor of the profession had worn off, and he realized that pearls were so rare that you might as well fbrget them. The most valuable stone he'd ever brought up had been sold for twenty pounds, and the shell he gathered on a good morning was worth more than that. If the industry had depended on gems instead of mother-of-pearl, it would have gone broke years ago. There was no sense of time in this world of mist. You walked beneath the invisible, drifting ship, with the throb of the air compressor pounding in your ears, the green haze moving past your eyes. At long intervals you would spot a shell, wrench it from the sea-bed and drop it in your bag. If you were lucky, you might gather a couple of dozen on a single drift across the patch. On the other hand, you might not find a single one. You were alert for danger, but not worried by it. The real risks were simple, unspectacular things like tangled air-hoses or safety-lines -- not sharks, groupers or octopi. Sharks ran when they saw your air bubbles, and in all his hours of diving Tabor had seen just one octopus, every bit of two feet across. As for groupers -- well, they were to be taken seriously, for they could swallow a diver at one gulp if they felt hungry enough. But there was little chance of meeting them on this flat and desolate plain. There were none of the coral caves in which they could make their homes. The shock would not have been so great, therefore, if this uniform, level grayness had not lulled him into a sense of security. At one moment he was walking steadily towards an unreachable wall of mist, that retreated as fast as he approached. And then, without warning, his private nightmare was looming above him. II there was a certain creature in the sea that seemed deliberately contrived to take advantage of that phobia. He had never met one, and his mind had always shied away from the thought of such an encounter, but Tibor knew that the Japanese spider crab can span twelve feet across its spindly legs. That it was harmless mattered not in the least. A spider as big as a man simply had no right to exist. As soon as he saw that cage of slender, jointed limbs emerge from the all-encompassing grayness, Tibor began to scream with uncontrollable terror. He never remembered jerking his safety line, but Blanco reacted with the instantaneous perception of the ideal tender. His helmet still echoing to his screams, Tibor felt himself snatched from the sea-bed, lifted towards light and air -- and sanity. As he swept upwards, he saw both the strangeness and the absurdity of his mistake, and regained a measure of control. But he was still trembling so violently when Blanco lifted off his helmet that it was some time before he could speak. "What the hell's going on here?" demanded Nick. "Everyone knocking off work early?" It was then that Tibor realized that he was not the first to come up. Stephen was sitting amidships, smoking a cigarette and looking completely unconcerned. The stern diver, doubtless wondering what had happened, was being hauled up willy-nilly by his tender, since the Arafura had come to rest and all operations had been suspended until the trouble was resolved. "There's some kind of wreck down there," said Tibor. "I ran right into it. All I could see were a lot of wires and rods." To his annoyance and selfcontempt, the memory set him trembling again. "Don't see why that should give you the shakes," grumbled Nick. Nor could Tibor -- here on this sun-drenched deck. It was impossible to explain how a harmless shape glimpsed through the mist could set one's whole mind jangling with terror. "I nearly got hung up on it," he lied. "Blanco pulled me clear just in time." "Hmm," said Nick, obviously not convinced. "Anyway, it ain't a ship." He gestured towards the midships diver. "Steve ran into a mess of ropes and cloth -- like thick nylon, he says. Sounds like some kind of parachute." The old Greek stared in disgust at the soggy stump of his cigar, then flicked it overboard. "Soon as Billy's up, we'll go back and take a look. Might be worth something -- remember what happened to Jo Chambers." story was famous the length of the Great Barrier Reef. Jo had been a lone-wolf fisherman who, in the last months of the War, had spotted a DC-# lying in shallow water a few miles off the Queensland coast. After prodigies of single-handed salvage, he had broken into the fuselage and started unloading boxes of taps and dies, perfectly protected by their greased wrappings. For a while he had run a flourishing import business, but when the police caught up with him he reluctantly revealed his source of supply. Australian cops can be very persuasive. And it was then, after weeks and weeks of backbreaking underwater work, that Jo discovered what his DC-# had been carrying besides the miserable few thousand dollars' worth of tools he had been flogging to garages and workshops on the mainland. The big wooden crates he'd never got round to opening held a week's payroll for the U.S. Pacific Forces. No such luck here, thought Tibor as he sank over the side again. But the aircraft -- or whatever it was -- might contain valuable instruments, and there could be a reward for its discovery. Besides, he owed it to himself. He wanted to see exactly what it was that had given him such a fright. Ten minutes later, he knew it was no aircraft. It was the wrong shape, and it was much too small -- only about twenty feet long and half that in width. Here and there on the gently-tapering body were access hatches and tiny ports through which unknown instruments peered at the world. It seemed unharmed, though one end had been fused as if by . terrific heat. From the other sprouted a tangle of antennae, all of them broken or bent by the impact with the water. Even now, they bore an incredible resemblance to the legs of a giant insect. Tibor was no fool. He guessed at once what the thing was. Only one problem remained, and he solved that with little difficulty. Though they had been partly charred away by heat, stenciled words could still be read on some of the hatch-covers. The letters were enough Russian to pick out references to electrical supplies and pressurizing systems. "So they've lost a sputnik' he told himself with satisfaction. He . could imagine what had happened. The thing had come down too fast, and in the wrong place. Around one end were the tattered remnants of flotation bags; they had burst under the impact, and the vehicle had sunk like a stone. The Arafura's crew would have to apologize to Joey. He hadn't been drinking grog. What he'd seen burning across the stars must have been the rocket carrier, separated from its payload and falling back unchecked into the Earth's atmosphere. pOR a long time Tibor hovered on the sea-bed, knees bent in the diver's crouch, as he regarded this space creature now trapped in an alien element. His mind was full of half-formed plans, but none had yet come clearly into focus. He no longer cared about salvage money. Much more important were the prospects of revenge. Here was one of the proudest creations of Soviet technology -- and Szabo Tibor, late of Budapest, was the only man on earth who knew. There must be some way of Exploiting the situation -- of doing harm to the country and the cause he now hated with such smoldering intensity. In his waking hours, he was seldom conscious of that hate. Still less did he ever stop to analyze its real cause. Here in this lonely world of sea and sky, of steaming mangrove swamps and dazzling coral strands, there was nothing to recall the past. Yet he could never escape it. And sometimes the demons in his mind would awake, lashing him into a fury of rage or vicious, wanton destructiveness. So far he had been lucky; he had not killed anyone. But some day... An anxious jerk from Blanco interrupted his reveries of vengeance. He gave a reassuring signal to his tender, and started a closer examination of the capsule. What did it weigh? Could it be hoisted easily? There were many things he had to discover, before he could settle on any definite plans. He braced himself against the corrugated metal wall and pushed cautiously. There was a definite movement as the capsule rocked on the sea-bed. Maybe it could be lifted, even with the few pieces of tackle that the Arafura could muster. It was probably lighter than it looked. Tibor pressed his helmet against a flat section of the hull, and listened intently. He had half expected to hear some mechanical noise, such as the whirring of electric motors. Instead, there was utter silence. With the hilt of his knife, he rapped sharply on the metal, trying to gauge its thickness and to locate any weak spots. On the third try, he got results: but they were not what he had anticipated. In a furious, desperate tattoo, the capsule rapped back at him. Until this moment, Tibor had never dreamed that there might be someone inside. The capsule had seemed far too small. Then he realized that he had been thinking in terms of conventional aircraft. There was plenty of room here for a little pressure cabin in which a dedicated astronaut could spend a few cramped hours. As a kaleidoscope can change its pattern completely in a single moment, so the half-formed plans in Tibor's mind dissolved and then crystallized into a new shape. Behind the thick glass of his helmet, he ran his tongue lightly across his lips. If Nick could have seen him now, he would have wondered -- as he had sometimes done before -- whether his Number Two diver was wholly sane. Gone were all thoughts of a remote and impersonal vengeance against something as abstract as a nation or a machine. Now it would be man to man #a Ill A you?" said Nick. "What did you find?" "It's Russian," said Tibor. "Some kind of sputnik. If we can get a rope around it, I think we can lift it off the bottom. But it's too heavy to get aboard." Nick chewed thoughtfully on his eternal cigar. The pearling master was worried about a point that had not occurred to Tibor. If there were any salvage operations round here, everyone would know where the Arafura had been drifting. When the news got back to Thursday Island, his private patch of shell would be cleaned out in no time. They'd have to keep quiet about the whole affair, or else haul the damn thing up themselves and not say where they'd found it. Whatever happened, it looked like being more of a nuisance than it was worth. Nick, who shared most Australians' profound suspicion of authority, had already decided that all he'd get for his-trouble would be a nice letter of thanks. "The boys won't go down," he said. "They think it's a bomb. Want to leave it alone." "Tell 'em not to worry," replied Tibor. "I'll handle it." He tried to keep his voice normal and unemotional, but this was too good to be true. If the other divers heard the tapping from the capsule, his plans would have been frustrated. He gestured to the island, green and lovely on the skyline. "Only one thing we can do. If we can heave it a couple of feet off the bottom, we can run for the shore. Once we're in shallow water, it won't be too hard to haul it up on the beach. We can use the boats, and maybe get a block and tackle on one of those trees." Nick considered the idea without much enthusiasm. He doubted if they could get the sputnik through the reef, even on the leeward side of the island. But he was all in favor of lugging it away from this patch of shell. They could always dump it somewhere else, buoy the place and still get whatever credit was going. "Okay," he said. "Down you go. That two-inch rope's the strongest we've got -- better take that. Don't be all bloody day; we've lost enough time already." Tibor had no intention of being all day. Six hours would be quite long enough. That was one of the first things he had learned, from the signals through the wall. It was a pity that he could not hear the Russian's voice; but the Russian could hear him, and that was what really mattered. When he pressed his helmet against the metal and shouted, most of his words got through. So far, it had been a friendly conversation; Tibor had no intention of showing his hand until the right psychological moment. T HE first move had been to establish a code -- one knock for "Yes' two for "No." After that, it was merely a matter of framing suitable questions. Given time, there was no fact or idea that could not be communicated by means of these two signals. It would have been a much tougher job if Tibor had been forced to use his indifferent Russian. He had been pleased, but not surprised, to find that the trapped pilot understood English perfectly. There was air in the capsule for another five hours; the occupant "was uninjured ; yes, the Russians knew where it had come down. That last reply gave Tibor pause. Perhaps the pilot was lying, but it might very well be true. Although something had obviously gone wrong with the planned return to Earth, the tracking ships out in the Pacific must have located the impact point -- with what accuracy, he could not guess. Still, did that matter? It might take them days to get here, even if they came racing straight into Australian territorial waters without bothering to get permission from Canberra. He was master of the situation. The entire might of the U.S.S.R. could do nothing to interfere with his plans -- until it was much too late. The heavy rope fell in coils on the sea-bed, stirring up a cloud of silt that drifted like smoke down the slow current. Now that the sun was higher in the sky, the underwater world was no longer wrapped in a gray, twilight gloom. The sea-bed was colorless but bright, and the boundary of vision was now almost fifteen feet away. For the first time, Tibor could see the space-capsule in its entirety. It was such a peculiar-looking object, being designed for conditions beyond all normal experience, that there was an eye-teasing wrongness about it. One searched in vain for a front or a rear. There was no way of telling in what direction it pointed as it sped along its orbit. Tibor pressed his helmet against the metal and shouted. "Fm back," he called. "Can you hear me?" Tap. "I've got a rope, and I'm going to tie it on to the parachute cables. WeTe about three kilometers from an. island. As soon as we've made you fast we'll head towards it. We can't lift you out of the water with the gear on the lugger, so we'll try to get you up on the beach. You understand?" Tap. TT took only a few moments "to secure the rope; now he had better get clear before the Arafura started to lift. But there was something he had to do first "Hello!" he shouted. "I've fixed the rope. We'll lift in a minute. D'you hear me?" Tap. "Then you can hear this too. You'll never get there alive. I've fixed that as well." Tap , tap. "You've got five hours to die. My brother took longer than that, when he ran into your mine field. You understand? I'm from Budapest! I hate you and your country and everything it stands for. You've taken my home, my family, made my people slaves. I wish I could see your face now! I wish I could watch you die, as I had to watch Theo. When you're halfway to the island, this rope is going to break where I cut it. I'll go down and fix another -- and that'll break, too. You can sit in there and wait for the bumps." Tibor stopped abruptly, shaken and exhausted by the violere of his emotion. There was no room for logic or reason' in this orgasm of hate. He did not pause to think, for he dared not. Yet somewhere far down inside his mind the real truth was burning its way up towards the light of consciousness. It was not the Russians he hated, for all that they had done. It was himself, for he had done more. The blood of Theo, and of ten thousand countrymen, was upon his own hands. No one could have been a better communist than he was, or have, more supinely believed the propaganda from Moscow. At school and college, he had been the first to hunt out and denounce "traitors" (how many had he sent to the labor camps or the A VO torture chambers?) When he had seen the truth, it was far, far too late. And even then he had not fought. He had run. He had run across the world, trying to escape his guilt; and the two drugs of danger and dissipation had helped him to forget the past. The only pleasure life gave him now were the loveless embraces he sought so feverishly when he was on the mainland, and his present mode of existence was proof that these were not enough. If he now had the power to deal out death, it was only because he had come here in search of it himself. There was no souifrom the capsule. Its silence seemed contemptuous, mocking. Angrily, Tibor banged against it with the hilt of his knife. "Did you hear me?" he shouted. "Did you hear me?" No answer. "Damn you! I know you're listening! If you don't answer, I'll hole you and let the water in !" He was sure that he could, with the sharp point of his knife. But that was the last thing he wanted to do; that would be too quick, too easy an ending. There was still no sound; maybe the Russian had fainted. Tibor hoped not, but there was no point in waiting any longer. He gave a vicious parting bang on the capsule, and signaled to his tender. when he broke the surface. "T.I. radio's been squawking," he said. "The Ruskis are asking everyone to look out for one of their rockets. They say it should be floating somewhere off the Queensland coast. Sounds as if they want it badly." "Did they say anything else about it?" Tibor asked anxiously. "Oh, yes. It's been round the Moon a couple of times." "That all?" "Nothing else that I remember. There was a lot of science stuff I didn't get." That figured; it was just like the Russians to keep as quiet as they could about an experiment that had gone wrong. "You tell T.I. that we'd found it?" "Are you crazy? Anyway, the radio's crook; couldn't if we wanted to. Fixed that rope properly?" "Yes -- see if you haul her off the bottom." The end of the rope had been wound round the mainmast, and in a few seconds it had been drawn taut. Although the sea was calm, there was a slight swell and the lugger was rolling ten or fifteen degrees. With each roll, the gunwales would rise a couple of feet, then drop again. There was a lift here of several tons, but one had to be careful in using it. The rope twanged, the woodwork groaned and creaked, and for a moment Tibor was afraid that the weakened line would part too soon. But it held, and the load lifted. They got a further hoist on the second roll -- and on the third. Then the capsule was clear of the sea-bed, and the Arafura was listing slightly to port. "Let's go," said Nick, taking the wheel. "Should be able to get her half a mile before she bumps again." The lugger began to move slowly towards the island, carrying its hidden burden beneath it. M As he leaned on the rails, letting the sun steam the moisture from his sodden clothing, Tibor felt at peace for the first time in -- how many months? Even his hate had ceased to burn like fire in his brain. Perhaps, like love, it was a passion that could never be satisfied. But for the moment, at least, it was satiated. There was no weakening of his resolve. He was implacably set upon the vengeance that had been so strangely -- so miraculously -- placed within his power. Blood called for blood, and now the ghosts that haunted him might rest at last. IV H E began to worry when they were two-thirds of the way to the island, and the rope had not parted. There were still four hours to go. That was much too long. For the first time it occurred to him that his entire plan might miscarry, and might even recoil on his head. Suppose that, despite everything, Nick managed to get the capsule up on the beach before the deadline? With a deep twang that set the whole ship vibrating, the rope came snaking out of the water, scattering spray in all directions. "Might have guessed," muttered Nick. "She was just starting to bump. You like to go down again, or shall I send one of the boys?" "I'll take it," Tibor hastily answered. "I can do it quicker than they can." That was perfectly true, but it took him twenty minutes to locate the capsule. The Arafura had drifted well away from it before Nick could stop the engine, and there was a time when Tibor wondered if he would ever find it again. He quartered the sea-bed in great arcs, and it was not until he had accidentally tangled in the training parachute that his search was ended. The shrouds lay pulsating slowly in the current like some weird and hideous marine monster -- but there was nothing that Tibor feared now except frustration, and his pulse barely quickened as he saw the whitely looming mass ahead. The capsule was scratched and stained with mud f but appeared undamaged. It was lying on its side now, looking rather like a giant milk-churn that had been tipped over. The passenger must have been bumped around. But if he'd fallen all the way back from the Moon he must have been well padded and was probably still in good shape. Tibor hoped so. It would be a pity if the remaining three hours were wasted. Once again he rested the verdigrised copper of his helmet against the no-longerq u i t e-so-brightly-gleaming metal of the capsule. "Hello!" he shouted. "Can you hear me?" Perhaps the Russian would try to balk him by remaining silent -- but that surely, was asking too much of any man's self-control. Tibor was right. Almost at once there was the sharp knock of the reply. "So glad you're there," he called back. "Things are working out just the way I said, though I guess I'll have to cut the rope a little deeper." T HE capsule did not answer it. It never answered again, though Tibor banged and banged on the next dive -- and on the next. But he hardly expected it to then, for they'd had to stop for a couple of hours to ride out a squall, and the timelimit had expired long before he made his final descent. He was a little annoyed about that, for he had planned a farewell message. He shouted it just the same, though he knew he was wasting his breath. By early afternoon, the Arafura had come in as close as she dared. There were only a few feet of water beneath her, and the tide was falling. The capsule broke surface at the bottom of each wave trough, and was now firmly stranded on a sandbank. There was no hope of moving it any further. It was stuck until a high sea dislodged it. Nick regarded the situation with an expert eye. "There's a six-foot tide tonight," he said. "The way she's lying now, she'll be in only a couple of feet of water at low. We'll be able to get at her with the boats." They waited off the sandbank while the sun and the tide went down and the radio broadcast intermittent reports of a search that was coming closer but was still far away. Late in the afternoon the capsule was almost clear of the, water. The crew rowed the small boat towards it with a reluctance which Tibor found himself sharing, to his annoyance. "It's got a dbor in the side," said Nick suddenly. "Jeeze -- think there's anyone in it?" "Could be," answered Tibor, his voice not as steady as he thought. Nick glanced at him curiously. His diver had been acting strangely all day, but he knew better than to ask him what was wrong. In this part of the world, you soon learned to mind your own business. The boat, rocking slightly in the choppy sea, had now come alongside the capsule. Nick reached out and grabbed one of the twisted antenna stubs. Then, with catlike agility, he clambered up the curved metal surface. Tibor made no attempt to follow him, but watched silently from the boat as he examined the entrance hatch. "Unless it's jammed," Nick muttered, "there must be some way of opening it from outside. Just our luck if it needs special tools." His fears were groundless. The word "Open" had been stencilled in ten languages round the recessed doorcatch, and it took only seconds to deduce its mode of operation. As the air hissed out Nick said "Phew!" and turned suddenly pale. He looked at Tibor as if seeking support, but Tibor avoided his eye. Then, reluctantly, Nick lowered himself into the capsule. He was gone for a long time. At first, they could hear muffled bangings and bumpings from the inside, followed by a string of bi-lingual profanity. And then there was a silence that went on and on and on. When at last Nick's head appeared above the hatchway, his leathery, wind-tanned face was gray and streaked with tears. As Tibor saw this incredible sight, he felt a sudd e n ghastly premonition. Something had gone horribly wrong, but his mind was too numb to anticipate the truth. It came soon enough, when Nick handed down his burden, no larger than an oversized doll. shrank to the stern of the boat. As he looked at the calm, waxen face, fingers of ice seemed to close not only upon his heart, but round his loins. In the same moment, both hate and desire died forever within him, as he knew the price of his revenge. The dead astronaut was perhaps more beautiful in death than she had been in life. Tiny though she was, she must have been tough as well as highlytrained to qualify for this mission. As she lay at Tibor's feet she was neither a Russian, nor the first female human being to have seen the far side of the Moon. She was merely the girl that he had killed. Nick was talking from a long way off. "She was carrying this," he said, in an unsteady voice. "Had it tight in her hand. Took me a long time to get it out." Tibor scarcely heard him, and never even glanced at the tiny spool of tape lying in Nick's palm. He could not guess, in this moment beyond all feeling, that the Furies had yet to close in upon his soul -- and that soon the whole world would be listening to an accusing voice from beyond the grave, branding him more irrevocably than any : : : : ! : i : He had betrayed mankind, but he was not afraid of the consequences -- ever! in Belgrade. The aliens had gone by then, only a few shining metal huts in the Siberian tundra giving mute evidence that they had been anything other than a nightmare. It had seemed exactly like that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stood helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered and flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening had not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That if it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been capable of dealing with the terrible menace. It had been real. And they had been no more capable of resisting the giant intelligences than a his favorite fairy story. It was an ironic parallel, because that was what finally saved Earth for its own people. A fairy story. The old fable of the lion and the mouse. When the lion had exhausted his atomic armor and proud science against the invincible and immortal invaders of Earth -- for they Could not be killed by any means -- the mouse attacked and vanquished them. The mouse, the lowest form of life: the fungoids, the air of Earth swarming with millions of their spores, attacked the monstrous bodies, grew and entwined within the gray convolutions that were their brain centers. And as the tiny thread-roots probed and tightened, the aliens screamed soundlessly. The intelligences toppled and fell, and at last that few among them who retained sanity gathered their lunatic brethren and fled as they had come. If he had known the effect the fungoids would have on them, he would have told them that too. He had told them everything else, when he had been snatched from a busy city street, a random specimen of humanity to be probed and investigated. They had chosen well. For the payment they offered him whole human race. As far as it lay in his power he did just that. He was not an educated man, though he was intelligent. It was child's play to them to strip his mind bare; but they had to know the intangibles too, the determined will of humanity to survive, the probabilities of the pattern of human behavior in a situation which humanity had never before faced. He told them all he could, gladly and willingly. He would have descended to any treachery for the vast glittering reward they tempted him with. It wasn't easy for the Yugoslavs to guard him and, anyway, their hearts weren't in the task. His treachery, the ultimate treason, the betrayal of the whole human race, was commonly known. Inevitably the mob got him and killed three policemen in the process. When they had sated their anger a little and the traitor had lost most of his clothes and the thumb of his right hand, they dragged him to the junction where the Danube meets the Sava and held him under the gray waters with long poles, as if he was some poisonous reptile. He lay supinely on the bed of the river and smiled evilly while a hundred thousand people writhed in neural agony. T wenty-four hours later the neural plague had spread to Zagreb and into Albania as far as Tirana. When it crossed to Leghorn in Italy the Balkans held twenty ube was an artificial lake a hundred miles wide. They had used a "clean" bomb. So they were able to bring a loudspeaker van to its edge and boom at him to come out. He allowed them to do that for some inscrutable reason; perhaps to demonstrate that his powers were selective. Then it seemed he got tired of the farce, and cruel fingers twined themselves into the nerve centers of the President of Italy and the Prime Minister of the government of United Europe. He made them dance a horribly twisted pas de deux on the banks of the Danube for his perverted amusement. Then he released them, and bering, twitching idiots that inhabited Southern Europe, and he came out of the river bed in which he had lain for forty-eight hours. He walked alone through the deserted streets of Belgrade until he came to the United Nations building. There he told a very brave to stand trial any place in the world they wished. For three days nobody came to arrest him. He sat alone with the lieutenant in the peopleless city of Belgrade and waited for his captors. They came then, timidly reassured by his non-violence. While he talked to them pleasantly the citizens of London and Paris suddenly began to dance jerky and grotesque jigs on the pavements of their cities. In the same moment the Chief Justice of the Court of the Nations, at a cocktail party in Washington, writhed in the exquisite pain of total muscle cramp, his august features twisted into a mask of abject fear. The trial itself was a legal farce. The prisoner promptly pleaded guilty to the charge of betraying mankind to an alien race, but he didn't allow them to question him. When one lawyer persisted in face of his pleasant refusals, he died suddenly in a cramped ball of screaming agony. The gray-faced Chief Justice inquired whether he wished to be sentenced and he answered yes, but not to death: They couldn't kill him, he explained. That was part of the reward the aliens had given him. The other part was that he could kill or immobilize anybody in the world -- or everybody -- from any distance. He sat back and smiled at the stricken courtroom. Then he lost his composure and his mouth twitched. He laughed uproariously and slapped his knees in ecstasy. It was plain that he was fond of a joke. An anonymous lawyer stood up and waited patiently for his merriment to subside. If this was true, he asked, why had not the aliens used this power? Why had they not simply killed off the inhabitants and taken over the vacant planet? The traitor gazed kindly at him; and a court stenographer who had cautiously picked up a pencil returned agonizingly to her foetal position and, that way, died. The traitor looked at his fingers and shrugged. The thumb that had been snapped off in the mob's frenzy was more than half grown again. "They needed slaves," he said simply. "And at the end, while some of them were still sane?" The traitor raised his eyebrows, giving him his full courteous attention. The lawyer sat down abruptly, his question unfinished. The creature who had betrayed his own race smiled at him and permitted him to live. He even completed his question for him, and answered it. "Why did they not kill then? They had something else on their minds -- # ungoids !" He laughed uproariously at his macabre joke. "And in their minds too!" The lawyer's blue eyes gazed at him steadily and he stopped laughing. In the bated hush of the courtroom he said softly, "What a pity I'm not an alien too. You could have the fungoids destroy me!" He laughed again helplessly, the tears running down his cheeks. journed the Court then and the prisoner sauntered to his comfortable quarters in front of his frightened guards. That night, in his own living room, the Chief Justice danced an agonized fandango in front of his horror-stricken wife and the anonymous lawyer sat in his apartment, staring at the blahk wall. He was glad the aliens had not made the traitor telepathic too. He had found the chink in his armor. The neural paralysis, the murders by remote control, were acts of a conscious will. He had himself admitted that if his mind was destroyed his powers would be destroyed with it. The aliens had not sought revenge because their minds were totally occupied with saving themselves. The stricken ones had simply lost the power. The knowledge was useless to him. There was no way they could attack his mind without his knowing it. Possibly they could steal away his consciousness by drugging or bludgeoning, but it would be racial suicide to attempt it. In the split moment of realization he would kill every human being on Earth. There would be nobody left to operate on his brain, to make him a mindless, powerless idiot for the rest of time. For any period of time, he corrected himself. His brain would heal again. It was useless to think about it. There was nothing they could use against his invincibility. The only hope was to attack him unawares... and if that hope was a fraction less than a certainty it could only mean final and absolute catastrophe. The lawyer looked at his watch. It was four in the morning. He went into the kitchenette and then shrugged himself into his coat? He walked through the silent streets, past the city hospital where the Chief Justice lay in agony while the motor impulses from his nerve centers wrenched and twisted his body. He entered the foyer of the luxury hotel where the race betrayer was held prisoner and took the elevator to the sixth floor. Two sleepy guards jerked erect outside the unlocked door. He put his finger to his lips, enjoining them to silence. Then he entered the room and stood for a moment over the man who was invincible and immortal -- and human. Human, and subject to the involuntary unconsciousness which nature demands from all men. He slept. The eyelids fluttered. The lawyer took the steel meat skewer from his pocket. He thrust it through a halfopened eye and rotated if, methodically reducing the soft brain to formless mush. After that the trial proceeded normally. The prisoner stared vacantly in front of him and all his movements had to be directed. But he was alive and his thumb was full grown again. It was the lawyer that noticed this and pointed out the implications. The thumb had grown to full size in less than six weeks. They must regard that as their maximum period of immunity. They ruminated over it for another four days. The question was a tricky one, for malignant immortality was beyond human solution. It was not just a matter of dealing out punishment. The problem now was the protection of the race from sudden annihilation. An insolvable problem, but one that must be solved. They could only do their best. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a special feature. It was decided he should be guillotined once a month as long as he lived. OU'RE getting robbed. Let's not go looking for the robber just now; he isn't easy to catch, partly because hes got too many accomplices, and partly because he's too doggone big. But he can be locked out. What you're getting robbed of is books -- or to put it more personally, you're missing what these books have stored up for you, and it's a real injustice. One reason is that you are, as you've been taught to be, penny-wise. I can't completely knock that. Waiting for a cheap edition sometimes makes sense, providing you don't forget, while waiting, what it was you were waiting for. But there are times when there isn't a paperback reprint and there won't be. You may well be thrifting yourself out of some real riches. Another reason is that you (this time, it's a collective, averaged you") are fashionfoolish, and for this you ought to go heave your silly head candied. There has been for many years a never-examined, take n-for-granted conviction that books are perishables, and must be bought and consumed while crisp, like iceberg lettuce. This conviction is of course fostered by bookclubs, who go right along with the idea that it Just Isn't Done to be seen reading a book Everybody Was Reading last year, or even last spring. It may seem simple-minded to say this in so many words, but it must be said: Honest to goodness, friend; any book is a new book if it's new to you. And further: Any price is a cheap price if it substantially increases your understanding. There's a whole wide category of wonderful books which you never see because some reviewers back off from their high price-tags, or because some reviewers never get to see them (they're published by small firms who can circulate only just so many review copies) or because, even when you hear about with the dough or because, me t criminal of all, you won't look at something with a lastyear's copyright on it. point: The Human Animal, by Weston La Bar re, Chicago University Press, #. # pp. with index. #. And: A Handbook of Space Flight, by Wayne A Proell and Norman J. Bowman, Perastadion Press (# S. Saint Louis Ave., Chicago) #. # pp with index. #. The La Barre is a handsome volume and an absolute delight to read. There are times when the author is a very funny man indeed. None of which keeps it from being a thorough, scholarly, sometimes profound examination of the human animal, as seen from the points of view of the biologist, the physical anthropologist, the cultural ditto, and the psychologist, all of which Mr. La Barre seems to be. When he is through with you, you will understand as you never did before why we walk and talk and marry and govern ourselves the way we d  -- really why, starting from the engineering of the body itself, and all that went into that, clear back to the amoeba. Mr. La Barre, in the interests of accuracy, will be using his share of anthropological (and other) technicalities ; but never once does he throw you a term without making sure you understand it. The Handbook is surely one of the most extraordinary collections of scientific, technological and speculative data ever put between covers. Excellently cross-indexed, clearly and sensibly written, it hands you an example of how to calculate the exhaust velocity and thrust of a rocket by the Hirshfelder static equilibrium method; wjiat to do if someone spills rocket-fuel on your ring-finger; formulae for solid propellants; pages and pages of conversion factors (to convert horsepower into kilogram calories per minute, multiply by #. #). There are diagrams of practical space-ships, including a real beauty by Arthur C. Clarke, and a long list of speculative space drives culled from s-f magazines. There's a truly marvellous #dimensional projection of surrounding space, with all its stars up to # light-years away precisely located ; sightings up to publication date; there are lucid descriptions of # different types of nuclear reaction, a list of possible careers in the space game and where to apply for jobs... it is impossible to describe, or even to list, the scope of this remarkable book and the number of its subjects. Don't let yourself be cheated out of a chance to read by Theodore Sturgeon #o#o# I tall mirror to check the overlap of the four sets of lapels that ornamented the vermilion cutaway of a First Secretary and Consul. "Come along, Retief," Magnan said. "The Ambassador has a word to say to the staff before we go in." "I hope he isn't going to change the spontaneous speech he plans to make when the Potentate impulsively suggests a trade agreement along the lines they've been discussing for the last two months." "Your derisive attitude is uncalled for, Retief," Magnan said sharply. "I think you realize it's delayed your promotion in the Corps." Retief took a last glance in the mirror. "I'm not sure I want a promotion," he said. "It would mean more lapels." Ambassador Crodf oiler pursed his lips, waiting until Retief and M a g n a n took places in the ring of Terrestrial diplomats around him. "A word of caution only, gentlemen," he said. "Keep always foremost in your minds the necessity for our identification with the Nenni Caste. Even a hint of familiarity with lower echelons could mean the failure of the mission. Let us remember that the Nenni represent authority here on Petreac. Their traditions must be observed. whatever our personal preferances. Let's go along now. The Potentate will be making his entrance any moment." Magnan came to Retief's side as they moved toward the salon. "The Ambassador's remarks were addressed chiefly to you, Retief," he said. "Your laxness in these matters is notorious. Naturally, I believe firmly in democratic principles myself -- " "Have you ever had a feeling, Mr. Magnan, that there's a lot going on here that we don't know about?" Magnan nodded. "Quite so. Ambassador Crodfoller's point exactly. Matters which are not of concern to the Nenni are of no concern to us." "Another feeling I get is that the Nenni aren't very bright. Now suppose -- " "I'm not given to suppositions, Retief. We're here to implement the policies of the Chief of Mission. And I should dislike to be in the shoes of a member of the staff whose conduct jeopardized the agreement that will be concluded here tonight." A bearer with a tray of drinks rounded a fluted column, shied as he confronted the diplomats, fumbled the tray, grabbed and sent a glass crashing to the floor. Magnan leaped back, slapping at the purple cloth of hts pants leg. Retief's hand shot out to steady the tray. The servant rolled terrified eyes. "I'll take one of these, now that you're here," Retief said. He took a glass from the tray, winking at the servant. "No harm done," he said. "Mr. Magnan's just warming up for the big dance." A Nenni major-domo bustled up, rubbing his hands politely. "Some trouble here?" he said. "What happened, Honorables, what, what..." "The blundering idiot," Magnan spluttered. "How dare -- " "You're quite an actor, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "If I didn't know about your democratic principles, I'd think you were really mad." The servant ducked his head and scuttled away. "Has this fellow..." The major-domo eyed the retreating bearer. "I dropped my glass," Retief said. "Mr. Magnan's upset because he hates to see liquor wasted." Retief turned to find himself face-to-face with Ambassador Crodfoller. "I witnessed that," The Ambassador hissed. "By the goodness of Providence, the Potentate and his retinue haven't appeared yet. But I can assure you the servants saw it. A more un-Nenni-like display I would find it difficult to imagine!" Retief arranged his features in an expression of deep interest. "More un-Nenni-like, sir?" he said. "I'm not sure I -- " "Bah !" The Ambassador glared at Retief. "Your reputation has preceeded you, sir. Your name is associated with a number of the most bizarre incidents in Corps history. I'm warning you; I'll tolerate nothing." He turned and stalked away. "Ambassador-baiting is a dangerous sport, Retie f Magnan said. Retief took a swallow of his drink. "Still," he said, "it's better than no sport at all." "Your time would be better spent observing the Nenni mannerisms. Frankly, Retief, you're not fitting into the group at all well." "I'll be candid with you, Mr. Magnan. The group gives "Oh, the Nenni are a trifle frivolous. I'll concede," Magnan said. "But it's with them that we must deal. And you'd be making a contribution to the overall mission if you merely abandoned that rather arrogant manner of yours." Magnan looked at Retief critically. "You can't help your height, of course. But couldn't you curve your back just a bit -- and possibly assume a more placating expression? Just act a little more..." "Girlish?" "Exactly." Magnan nodded, then looked sharply at Retief. Retief drained his glass and put it on a passing tray. "I'm better at acting girlish when I'm well juiced," he said. "But I can't face another sorghum-and-soda. I suppose it would be un-Nennilike to slip the bearer a credit and ask for a Scotch and water." "D e c i d e d I y." Magnan glanced toward a sound across the room. "Ah, here's the Potentate now!" He hurried off. Retief watched the bearers coming and going, bringing trays laden with drinks, carrying off empties. There was a lull in the drinking now, as the diplomats gathered around the periwigged Chief of State and his courtiers. Bearers loitered near the service door, eyeing the notables. Retief strolled over to the service door, pushed through it into a narrow white-tiled hall filled with the odors of the kitchen. Silent servants gaped as he passed, watching as he moved along to the kitchen door and stepped inside. II A dozen or more low-caste Petreacans, gathered around a long table in the center of the room looked up, startled. A heap of long-bladed bread knives, French #S knives, carving knives and cleavers lay in the center of the table. Other knives were thrust into belts or held in the hands of the men. A fat man in the yellow sarong of a cook stood frozen in the act of handing a knife to a tall one-eyed sweeper. Retief took one glance, then let his eyes wander to a far corner of the room. Humming a careless little tune, he sauntered across to the open liquor shelves, selected a garish green bottle and turned unhurriedly back toward the door. The group of servants watched him, transfixed. As Retief reached the door, it swung inward. Magnan, lips pursed, stood in the doorway. "I had a premonition," he said. 'Til bet it was a dandy," Retief said. "You must tell me all about it -- in the salon." "We'll have this out right here," Magnan snapped. "I've warned you!" Magnan's voice trailed off as he took in the scene around the table. "After you," Retief said, nudging Magnan toward the door. "What's going on here?" Magnan barked. He stared at the men, started around Retief. A hand stopped him. "Let's be going," Retief said, propelling Magnan toward the hall. "Those knives!" Magnan yelped. "Take your hands off me, Retief! What are you men -- ?" Retief glanced back. The fat cook gestured suddenly, and the men faded back. The cook stood, arm cocked, a knife across his palm. "Close the door and make no sound," he said softly. Magnan pressed back against Retief. "Let's... r-run..." he faltered. Retief turned slowly, put his hands up. "I don't run very well with a knife in my back," he said. "Stand very still, Magnan, and do just what he tells you." "Take them out through the back," the cook said. "What does he mean?" Magnan spluttered. "Here, you -- " "Silence," the cook said, almost casually. Magnan gaped at him, closed his mouth. Two of the men with knives came to Retief's side and gestured, grinning broadly "Let's go, peacocks," one said. Retief and Magnan silently crossed the kitchen, went out the back door, stopped on command and stood waiting. stars. A gentle breeze stirred the tree-tops beyond the garden. Behind them the servants talked in low voices. "You go too, Illy the cook was saying. "Do it here another said. "And carry their damn dead bodies down?" "Pitch 'em behind the hedge." "I said the river. Three of you is plenty for a couple of Nenni. We don't know if we want to -- " "They're foreigners, not Nenni. We don't know -- " "So they're foreign Nenni. Makes no difference. I've seen them. I need every man here; now get going." "What about the big guy? He looks tough." "Him? He waltzed into the room and didn't notice a thing. But watch the other  one. At a prod from a knife point, Retief moved off down the walk, two of the escort behind him and Magnan, another going ahead to scout the way. Magnan moved closer to Retief. "Say," he said in a whisper. "That fellow in the lead ; isn't he the one who spilled the drink? The one you took the blame for?" "That's him, all right. He doesn't seem nervous any more, I notice." "You saved him from serious punishment," Magnan said. "He'll be grateful; he'll let us go..." "Better check with the fellows with the knives before you act on that." "Say something to him," Magnan hissed. "Remind him." A line with Retief and Magnan. "These two are scared of you," he said, grinning and jerking a thumb toward the knife-handlers. "They haven't worked around the Nenni like me; they don't know you." "Don't you recognize this gentleman?" Magnan said. "He did me a favor," the man said. "I remember." "What's it all about?" Retief asked. "The revolution. We're taking over now." "Who's W?" "The People's Anti-Fascist Freedom League." "What are all the knives for?" "For the Nenni ; and for all you foreigners." "What do you mean?" Magnan gasped. "We'll slit all the throats at one time. Saves a lot of running around." "What time will that be?" "Just at down; and dawn comes early, this time of year. will be in charge." "You'll never succeed," Magnan said. "A few servants with knives! You'll all be caught and killed." "By who, the Nenni?" the man laughed. "You Nenni are a caution." "But we're not Nenni -- " "We've watched you; you're the same. You're part of the same blood-sucking class." ill "There are better ways to, uh, adjust differences' Maghelp you. I'll personally see to it that your grievances are heard in the Corps Courts. I can assure you that the plight of the downtrodden workers will be alleviated. Equal rights for all -- " "These threats won't work," the man said. "You don't scare me." "Threats? I'm promising relief to the exploited classes of Petreac!" "You must be nuts," the man said. "You trying to upset the system or something?" "Isn't that the purpose of your revolution?" "Look, Nenni, we're tired of you # Nenni getting all the graft. We want our turn. What good would it do us to run Petreac if there's no loot?" "You mean you intend to oppress the people?. But they're your own group." "Group, schmoop. We're taking all the chances; we're doing the work. We deserve the payoff. You think we're throwing up good jobs for the fun of it?" "You're basing a revolt on these cynical premises?" "Wise up, Nenni. There's never been a revolution for any other reason." "Who's in charge of this?" Retief said. "Shokc, the head chef." "I mean the big boss. Who tells Shoke what all to do?" "Oh, that's Zorn. Look out, here's where we start down the slope. It's slippery." "Look," M a g n a n said. "You." "My name's Illy." "Mr. Illy, this man showed you mercy when he could have had you beaten." "Keep moving. Yeah, I said I was grateful." "Yes," Magnan said, swallowing hard. "A noble emotion, gratitude. You won't regret it." "I always try to pay back a good turn," Illy said. "Watch your step now on this sea-wall." "You'll never regret it," Magnan said. "This is far enough." Illy motioned to one of the knife men. "Give me your knife, Vug." The man passed his knife to Illy. There was an odor of sea-mud and kelp. Small waves slapped against the stones of the sea-wall. The wind was stronger here. "I know a neat stroke," Illy said. "Practically painless. Who's first?" "What do you mean ?" Magnan quavered. "I said I was grateful. I'll do it myself, give you a nice clean job. You know these amateurs ; botch it up and have a guy floppin' around, yellin' and spatterin' everybody up." "I'm first," Retief said. He pushed past Magnan, stopped suddenly, drove a straight punch at lily's mouth T HE long blade flicked harmlessly over . Retief's shoulder as Illy fell. Retief whirled, leaped past Magnan, took the unarmed servant by the throat and belt, lifted him and slammed him against the third man. Both scrambled, yelped and fell from the seawall into the water. Retief turned back to Illy. He pulled off the man's belt and strapped his hands together. Magnan found his voice. "You...we...they..." "I know," Retief said. "We've got to get back," Magnan said. "Warn them!" "We'd never get through the rebel cordon around the palace. And if we did, trying to give an alarm would only set the assassinations off early." "We can't just..." "We've got to go to the source; this fellow Zorn. Get him to call it off." "We'd be killed! At least we're safe here." Illy groaned and opened his eyes. He sat up. "On your feet. Illy," Retief said. Illy looked around. "I'm sick," he said. "The damp air is bad for you. Let's be going." Retief pulled the man to his feet. "Where does Zorn stay when he's in town?" he damanded. "What happened? Where's Vug and..." "They had an accident. Fell in the pond." Illy gazed down at the restless black water. "I guess I had you Nenni figured wrong." "Us Nenni have hidden qualities. Let's get moving before Vug and Slug make it to shore and start it all over again." "No hurry," Illy said. "They can't swim." He spat into the water. "So long, Vug. So long, Toscin. Take a pull, at the Hell Horn for me." He started off along the sea wall toward the sound of the surf. "You want to see Zorn, I'll take you to see Zorn," he said. "I can't swim either." Ill UT take it," Retief said, A "that the casino is a front for his political activities." "He makes plenty off it. I never heard about it until maybe a couple months ago." Retief motioned toward a dark shed with an open door. "We'll stop here," he said, "long enough to strip the gadgets off these uniforms." Illy, hands strapped behind his back, stood by and watched as Retief and Magnan removed medals, ribbons, orders and insignia from the formal diplomatic garments. "This may help some," Retief said, "if the word is out that two diplomats are loose." "It's a breeze," Illy said. "We see cats in purple and orange tailcoats all the time." "I hope you're right," Retief said. "But if we're called, you'll be the first to go, Illy." "You're a funny kind of Nenni," Illy said, eyeing Retief. "Toscin and Vug must be wonderin' what happened to 'em." "If you think I'm good at drowning people, you ought to see me with a knife. Let's get going." "It's only a little way now," Illy said. "But you better untie me. Somebody's liable to stick their nose in and get me killed." "I'll take the chance. How do we get to the casino?" "We follow this street. It twists around and goes under a couple tunnels. When we get to the Drunkard's Stairs we go up and it's right in front of us. A pink front with a sign like a big Luck Wheel." "Give me your belt, Magnan," Retief said. Magnan handed it over. "Lie down. Illy," Retief said. The servant looked at Retief. "Vug and Toscin will be glad to see me," he said. "But they'll never believe me." He lay down. Retief strapped his feet together and stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. "Why are you doing that?" Magnan asked. "We need him." "We know the way. And we don't need anyone to announce our arrival. It's only on three-dee that you can march a man through a gang of his pals with a finger in his back." Magnan looked at the man. "Maybe you'd better, uh, cut his throat," he said. Illy rolled his eyes. "That's a very un-Nennilike suggestion, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "If we have any trouble finding the casino, I'll give it serious thought." There were few people in the narrow street. Shops were shuttered, windows dark. "Maybe they heard about the coup," Magnan said. "They're lying low." "More likely, they're at the palace picking up their knives." They rounded a corner, stepped over a man curled in the gutter snoring heavily and found themselves at the foot of a long flight of littered stone steps. "The Drunkard's Stair's are plainly m a r k e d," Magnan sniffed. "I hear sounds up there," Retief said. "Sounds of merrymaking." "Maybe we'd better go back." "Merrymaking doesn't scare me' Retief said. "Come to think of it, I don't know what the word means." He started up, Magnan behind him. A T the top of the long stair a dense throng milled in the alley-like street. A giant illuminated roulette wheel revolved slowly above them. A loudspeaker blared the chant of the croupiers from the tables inside. Magnan and Retief moved through the crowd toward the wideopen doors. Magnan plucked at Retief's sleeve. "Are you sure we ought to push right in like this? Maybe we ought to wait a bit, look around..." "When you're where you have no business being," Retief said, "always stride along purposefully. If you loiter, people begin to get curious." Inside, a mob packed the wide, low-ceilinged room, clustered around gambling devices in the form of towers, tables and basins. "What do we do now?" Magnan asked. "We gamble. How much money do you have in your pockets?" "Why...a few credit s." Magnan handed the money to Retief. "But what about the man Zorn?" "A purple cutaway is conspicuous enough, without ignoring the tables," Retief said. "We've got a hundred credits between us. We'll get to Zorn in due course, I hope." "Your pleasure, gents" a bullet-headed man said, eyeing the colorful evening clothes of the diplomats. "You'll be wantin' to try your luck at the Zoop tower, I'd guess. A game for real sporting gents." "Why... ah... " Magnan said. "What's a zoop tower?" Retief asked. "Out-of-towners, hey?" The bullet-headed man shifted his dope-stick to the other corner of his mouth. "Zoop is a great little game. Two teams of players buy into the pot. Each player takes a lever; the object is to make the ball drop from the top of the tower into your net. Okay?" "What's the ante?" "I got a hundred-credit pot workin' now, gents." Retief nodded. "We'll try it." The shill led the way to an eight-foot tower mounted on gymbals. Two perspiring men in trade-class pullovers gripped two of the levers that controlled the tilt of the tower. A white ball lay in a hollow in the thick glass platform at the top. From the center, an intricate pattern of grooves led out to the edge of the glass. Retief and Magnan took chairs before the two free levers. "When the light goes on, gents, work the lever to jack the tower. You got three gears. Takes a good arm to work top gear. That's this button here. The little knob controls what way you're goin May the best team win. I'll take the hundred credits now." money. A red light flashed on, and Retief tried hz lever. It moved easily, with a ratcheting sound. The tower trembled, slowly tilted toward the two perspiring workmen pumping frantically at their' levers. Magnan started slo,wly, accelerated as he saw the direction the tower was taking. "Faster, Retief," he said. "They're winning." "This is against the clock, gents," the bullet-headed man said. "If nobody wins when the light goes off, the house takes all." "Crank it over to the left," Retief said. "I'm getting tired." "Shift to a lower gear." The tower leaned. The ball stirred, rolled into a concentric channel. Retief shifted to middle gear, worked the lever. The tower creaked to a stop, started back upright. "There isn't any lower gear," Magnan gasped. One of the two on the other side of the tower shifted to middle gear; the other followed suit. They worked harder now, heaving against the stiff levers. The tower quivered, moved slowly toward their side. "I'm exhausted," Magnan gasped. He dropped the lever, lolled back in the chair, gulping air. Retief shifted position, took Magnan's lever with his left hand. "Shift it to middle gear," Retief said. Magnan gulped, punched the button and slumped back, panting. "My arm," he said. "I've injured myself." The two men in pullovers conferred hurriedly as they cranked their levers; then one punched a button and the other reached across, using his left arm to help. "They've shifted to high," Magnan said. "Give up, it's hopeless." "Shift me to high," Retief said. "Both buttons!" Magnan complied. Retief's shoulders bulged. He brought one lever down, then the other, alternately, slowly at first, then faster. The tower jerked, tilted toward him, farther... The ball rolled in the channel, found an outlet -- Abruptly, both Retief's levers froze. The tower trembled, wavered and moved back. Retief heaved. One lever folded at the base, bent down and snapped off short. Retief braced his feet, took the other lever with both hands and pulled. There was a rasp of metal friction, and a loud twang. tie The lever came free, a length of broken cable flopping into view. The tower fell over as the two on the other side scrambled aside. "Hey !" Bullet-head yelled. "You wrecked my equipment r Retief got up and faced him. "Does Zorn know you've got your tower rigged for suckers ?" "You tryin' to call me a cheat or something?" The crowd had fallen back, ringing the two men. Bullethead glanced around. With a lightning motion, he plucked a knife from somewhere. "That'll be five hundred credits for the equipment," he said. "Nobody calls Kippy a cheat." broken lever. "Don't make me hit you with this, you cheap chiseler." Kippy looked at the bar. "Cornin' in here," he said indignantly, looking to the crowd for support. "Bustin' up my rig, callin' names..." "I want a hundred credits," Retief said. "Now." "Highway robbery!" Kippy yelled. "Better pay up," somebody called. "Hit him, mister," someone else said. A broad-shouldered man with graying hair pushed through the crowd and looked around. "You heard 'em, Kippy. Give," he said. The shill growled but tucked his knife away. Reluctantly he peeled a bill from a fat roll and handed it over. The newcomer looked from Retief to Magnan. "Pick another game, strangers," he said. "Kippy made a little mistake." "This is small-time stuff," Retief said. "I'm interested in something big." The broad shouldered man lit a perfumed dope stick. "What would you call big?" he said softly. "What's the biggest you've got?" The man narrowed his eyes, smiling. "Maybe you'd like to try Slam." "Tell me about it." "Over here." The crowd opened up, made a path. Retief and Magnan followed across the room to a brightlylit glass-walled box. There was an arm-sized opening at waist height. Inside was a hand grip. A twofoot plastic globe a quarter full of chips hung in the center I . Apparatus was mounted at the top of the box. "Slam pays good odds," the man said. "You can go as high as you like. Chips cost you a hundred credits. You start it up by dropping a chip in here." He indicated a slot. # You take the hand grip. When you squeeze, it unlocks. The globe starts to turn. You can see, it's full of chips. There's a hole at the top. As long as you hold the grip, the bowl turns. The harder you squeeze, the faster it turns. Eventually it'll turn over to where the hole is down, and chips fall out. "On the other hand, there's contact plates spotted around the bowl. When one of 'em lines up with a live contact, you get quite a little jolt -- guaranteed nonlethal. All you've got to do is hold on long enough, and you'll get the payoff." "How often does this random pattern put the hole down?" # Anywhere from three minutes to fifteen, with the average run of players. Oh, by the way, one more thing. That lead block up there -- " The man motioned with his head toward a one-foot cube suspended by a thick cable. # It's rigged to drop every now and again. Averages five minutes. A warning light flashes first. You can take a chance; sometimes the light's a bluff. You can set the clock back on it by dropping another chip -- or you can let go the grip." Retief looked at the massive block of metal. # That would mess up a man's dealing hand, wouldn't it?" # The last two jokers who were too cheap to feed the machine had to have 'em off. Their arms, I mean. That lead's heavy stuff." # I don't suppose your machine has a habit of getting stuck, like Kippy's?" The broad-shouldered man frowned. # You're a strange," he said. # You don't know any better." # It's a fair game, Mister," someone called. # Where do I buy the chips?" The man smiled. "I'll fix you up. How many?" "One." "A big spender, eh?" The man snickered, but handed over a large plastic chip. IV machine, dropped the coin. # If you want to change your mind," the man said, "you can back out now. All it'll cost you is the chip you dropped." Retief reached through the hole, took the grip. It was He squeezed it. There was a click and bright lights sprang up. The crowd ah!-ed. The globe began to twirl lazily. The four-inch hole at its top was plainly visible. "If ever the hole gets in position it will empty very quickly," Magnan said, hopefully. light flooded the glass cage. A sound went up from the spectators. "Quick, drop a chip," someone called. "You've only got ten seconds..." "Let go !" Magnan yelped. Retief sat silent, holding the grip, frowning up at the weight. The globe twirled faster now. Then the bright white light winked off. "A bluff!" Magnan gasped. "That's risky, stranger," the gray-templed man said. The globe was turning rapidly now, oscillating from side to side. The hole seemed to travel in a wavering loop, dipping lower, swinging up high, then down again. "It has to move to the bottom soon," Magnan said. "Slow it down." "The slower it goes, the longer it takes to get to the bottom," someone said. There was a crackle and Retief stiffened. Magnan heard a sharp intake of breath. The globe slowed, and Retief shook his head, blinking. The broad-shouldered man glanced at a meter "You took pretty near a full jolt, that time," he said. The hole in the globe was tracing an oblique course now, swinging to the center, then below. "A little longer," Magnan said. "That's the best speed I ever seen on the Slam ball," someone said. "How much longer can he hold it?" Magnan looked at Retief's knuckles. They showed white against the grip. The globe tilted farther, swung around, then down ; two chips fell out, clattered down a chute and into a box. "We're ahead," Magnan said. "Let's quit." Retief shook his head. The globe rotated, dipped again; three chips fell. "She's ready," someone called. "It's bound to hit soon," another voice added excitedly. "Come on, Mister!" "Slow down," Magnan said. "So it won't move past too quickly." "Speed it up, before that lead block gets you," someone called. The hole swung high, over the top, then down the side. Chips rained out of the hole, six, eight... "Next pass," a voice called. The white light flooded the cage. The globe whirled; the hole slid over the top, down, down... A chip fell, two more... Retief half rose, clamped his jaw and crushed the grip. Sparks flew. The globe slowed, chips spewing. It stopped, swung back, weighted by the mass of chips at the bottom, and stopped again with the hole centered. Chips cascaded down the chute, filled the box before Retief, spilled on the floor. The crowd yelled. Retief released the grip and withdrew his arm at the same instant that the lead block slammed down. "Good lord," Magnan said. "I felt that through the floor." Retief turned to the broadshouldered man. "This game's all right for beginners," he said. "But I'd like to talk a really big gamble. Why don't we go to your office, Mr. Zorn?"  ests me," Zorn said, grinding out the stump of his dope stick in a brass ashtray. "But there's some angles to this I haven't mentioned yet." "You're a gambler, Zorn, not a suicide," Retief said. "Take what I've offered. The other idea was fancier, I agree, but it won't work." "How do I know you birds aren't lying?" Zorn snarled. He stood up, strode up and down the room. "You walk in here and tell me I'll have a task force on my neck, that the Corps won't recognize my regime. Maybe you're right. But I've got other contacts. They say different." He whirled, stared at Retief. "I have pretty good assurance that once I put it over, the Corps will have to recognize me as the legal government of Petreac. They won't meddle in internal affairs." "Nonsense," Magnan spoke up. "The Corps will never deal with a pack of criminals calling themselves -- " "Watch your language, you!" Zorn rasped. "I'll admit Mr. Magnan's point is a little weak," Retief said. "But you're overlooking something. You plan to murder a dozen or so officers of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne along with the local wheels. The corps won't overlook that. It can't." "Their tough luck they're in the middle," Zorn muttered. "Our offer is extremely generous, Mr. Zorn," Magnan said. "The post you'll get will pay you very well indeed. As against the certain failure of your planned coup, the choice should be simple." Zorn eyed Magnan. "Offering me a job -- it sounds phony as hell. I thought you birds were goody-goody diplomats." "It's time you knew," Retief said. "There's no phonier business in the Galaxy than diplomacy." "You'd better take it, Mr. Zorn," Magnan said. "Don't push me, Junior!" Zorn said. "You two walk into my headquarters emptyhanded and big-mouthed. I don't know what I'm talking to you for. The answer is no. N-I-X, no!" "Who are you afraid of?" Retief said softly. Zorn glared at him. "Where do you get that 'afraid' routine? I'm top man here!" "Don't kid around, Zorn. Somebody's got you under their thumb. I can see you squirming from here." V alone?" Zorn said suddenly. "The Corps won't have anything to say then, huh?" "The Corps has plans for Petreac, Zorn. You aren't part of them A revolution right now isn't part of them. Having the Potentate and the whole Nenni caste slaughtered isn't part of them. Do I make myself clear?" "Listen," Zorn said urgently, pulling a chair around. "I'll tell you guys a few things. You ever heard of a world they call Rotune?" "Certainly," Magnan said. "It's a near neighbor of yours. Another backward -- that is, emergent -- " "Okay," Zorn said. "You guys think I'm a piker, do you? Well, let me wise you up. The Federal Junta on Rotune is backing my play. I'll be recognized by Rotune, and the Rotune fleet will stand by in case I need any help. I'll present the C.D.T. with what you call a fait accompli" "What does Rotune get out of this? I thought they were your traditional enemies." "Don't get me wrong. I've got no use for Rotune; but our interests happen to coincide right now." "Do they?" Retief smiled grimly. "You can spot a sucker as soon as he comes through that door out there -- but you go for a deal like this !" "What do you mean?" Zorn looked angrily at Retief. "It's fool-proof." "After you get in power, you'll be fast friends with Rotune, is that it?" "Friends, hell! Just give me time to get set, and I'll square a few things with that -- " "Exactly. And what do you suppose they have in mind for you?" "What .are you getting at?" "Why is Rotune interested in your take-over?" Zorn studied Retief's face. "I'll tell you why," he said. "It's you birds. You and your trade agreement. You're here to tie Petreac into some kind of trade combine. That cuts Rotune out. Well, we're doing all right out here. We don't need any commitments to a lot of fancy-pants on the other side of the Galaxy." "That's what Rotune has sold you, eh?" Retief said, smiling. "Sold, nothing!" stick, lit another. He snorted angrily. "Okay; what's your idea?" he asked after a moment. "You know what Petreac is getting in the way of imports as a result of the agreement?" "Sure. A lot of junk." "To be specific," Retief said, "there'll be # Tatone B-# dry washers; # Glo-float motile lamps ; # Earthworm Minor garden cultivators ; # Veco space heaters; and # replacement elements for Ford Monomeg drives." "Like I said. A lot of junk." Retief leaned back, looking sardonically at Zorn. "Here's the gimmick, Zorn," he said. "The Corps is getting a little tired of Petreac and Rotune carrying on their two-penny war out here. Your privateers have a nasty habit of picking on innocent bystanders. After studying both sides, the Corps has decided Petreac would be a little easier to do business with. So this trade agreement was worked out. The Corps can't openly sponsor an arms shipment to a belligerent. But personal appliances are another story." "So what do we do -- plow 'em under with back-yard cultivators?" Zorn looked at Retief, puzzled. "What's the point?" "You take the sealed monitor unit from the washer, the repeller field generator from the lamp, the converter control from the cultivator, et cetera, et cetera. You fit these together according to some very simple instructions. Presto! You have one hundred thousand Standard-class Y hand blasters. Just the thing to turn the tide in a  stalemated war fought with obsolete arms." "Good lord!" Magnan said. "Retief, are you -- " "I have to tell him," Retief said. "He has to know what he's putting his neck into." "Weapons, hey?" Zorn said. "And Rotune knows about it?" "Sure they know about it. It's not too hard to figure out. And there's more. They cluded in the massacre for a reason. It will put Petreac out of the picture; the trade agreement will go to Rotune; and you and your new regime will find yourselves looking down the muzzles of your own blasters." Zorn threw his dope-stick to the floor with a snarl. "I should have smelled something when that Rotune smoothie made his pitch." Zorn looked at his watch. "I've got two hundred armed men in the palace. We've got about forty minutes to get over there before the rocket goes up." V on this terrace out of the way until I've spread the word," Zorn said. "Just in case." "Let me caution you against any... ah... slip-ups, Mr. Zorn," Magnan said. "The Nenni are not to be molested -- " Zorn looked at Retief. "Your friend talks too much," he said. "I'll keep my end of it. He'd better keep his." "Nothing's happened yet, you're sure?" Magnan said. "I'm sure," Zorn said. "Ten minutes to go. Plenty of time." "I'll just step into the salon to assure myself that all is well," Magnan said. "Suit yourself," Zorn said. "Just stay clear of the kitchen, or you'll get your throat cut." He sniffed at his dopestick. "What's keeping Shoke?" he muttered. Magnan stepped to a tall glass door, eased it open and poked his head through the heavy draperies. As he moved to draw back, a voice was faintly audible. Magnan paused, head still through the drapes. "What's going on there?" Zorn rasped. He and Retief stepped up behind Magnan. " -- breath of air, ha-ha," Magnan was saying. "Well, come along, Magnan !" Ambassador Crodfoller's voice snapped. Magnan shifted from one foot to the other then pushed through the drapes. "Where've you been, Mr. Magnan?" The Ambassador's voice was sharp. "Oh... ah... a slight accident, Mr. Ambassador." "What's happened to your shoes? Where are your insignia and decorations?" "I -- ah -- spilled a drink on them. Sir. Ah -- listen..." The sound of an orchestra came up suddenly, blaring a fanfare. Zorn shifted restlessly, ear against the glass. "What's your friend pulling?" he rasped. "I don't like this." "Keep cool, Zorn," Retief said. "Mr. Magnan is doing a little emergency salvage on his career." The music died away with a clatter. " -- My God," Ambassador Crodfoller's voice was faint. "Magnan, you'll be knighted for this. Thank, God you reached me. Thank God it's not too late. I'll find some excuse. I'll get a gram off at once." "But you -- " "It's all right, Magnan. You were in time. Another ten minutes and the agreement would have been signed and transmitted. The wheels would have been put in motion. My career ruined..." Retief felt a prod at his back. He turned. "Doublecrossed," Zorn said softly. "So much for the word of a diplomat." # short-barreled needier in Zorn's hand. "I see you hedge your bets, Zorn," he said. "We'll wait here," Zorn said, "until the excitement's over inside. I would want to attract any attention right now." "Your politics are still lousy, Zorn. The picture hasn't changed. Your coup hasn't got a chance." "Skip it. I'll take up one problem at a time." "Magnan's mouth has a habit of falling open at the wrong time -- " "That's my good luck that I heard it. So there'll be no agreement, no guns, no fat job for Tammany Zorn, hey? Well, I can still play it the other way. What have I got to lose?" With a movement too quick to follow, R e t i e f ' s hand chopped down across Zorn's wrist. The needier clattered as Zorn reeled, and then Relief 's hand clamped Zorn's arm and whirled him around. "In answer to your last question," Retief said, "your neck." "You haven't got a chance, doublecrosser," Zorn gasped. "Shoke will be here in a minute," Retief said. "Tell him it's all off." "Twist harder. Mister," Zorn said. "Break it off at the shoulder. I'm telling him nothing !" "The kidding's over, Zorn," Retief said. "Call it off or I'll kill you." "I believe you," Zorn said. "But you won't have long to remember it." nothing," Retief said. "You'll be dead and the Rotunes. will step into the power vacuum." "So what? When I die, the world ends." "Suppose I make you another offer, Zorn?" "Why would it be any better than the last one, chiseler?" Retief released Zorn's arm, pushed him away, stooped and picked up the needier. "I could kill you, Zorn. You know that." "Go ahead!" Retief reversed the needier, held it out. "I'm a gambler too, Zorn. I'm gambling you'll listen to what I have to say." Zorn snatched the gun, stepped back. He looked at Retief. "That wasn't the smartest bet you ever made. Mister; but go ahead. You've got maybe ten seconds." "Nobody doublecrossed you, Zorn. Magnan put his foot in it. Too bad. Is that a reason to kill yourself and a lot of other people who've bet their lives on you?" '"They gambled and lost. Tough." "Maybe you haven't lost yet -- if you don't quit." "Get to the point!" Retief spoke earnestly for a minute and a half. Zorn stood, gun aimed, listening. Then both men turned as footsteps approached along the terrace. A fat man in a yellow sarong padded up to Zorn. Zorn tucked the needier in his waistband. "Hold everything, Shoke," he said. "Tell the boys to put the knives away. Spread the word fast. It's all off." itY want to commend you, J-R e t i e f," Ambassador Crodfoller said expansively. "You mixed very well at last night's affair. Actually, I was hardly aware of your presence." "I've been studying Mr. Magnan's work," Retief said. "A good man, Magnan. In a crowd, he's virtually invisible." "He knows when to disappear all, right." "This has been in many ways a model operation, Retief." The Ambassador patted his paunch contentedly. "By observing local social customs and blending harmoniously with the court, I've succeeded in establishing a fine, friendly, working relationship with the Potentate." "I understand the agreement has been postponed." The Ambassador chuckled. "The Potentate's a crafty one. Through...ah... a special study I have been conducting, I learned last night that he had hoped to, shall I say, 'put one over' on the Corps." "Great heavens," Retief said. "Naturally, this placed me in a difficult position. It was my task to quash this gambit, without giving any indication that I was aware of its existence." "A hairy position indeed," Retief said. "Quite casually, I informed the Potentate that certain items which had been included in the terms of the agreement had been deleted and others substituted. I admired him at that moment, Retief. He took it coolly -- appearing completely indifferent -- perfectly dissembling his very serious disappointment. "I noticed him dancing with three girls wearing a bunch of grapes apiece. He's very agile for a man of his bulk." "You mustn't discount the Potentate ! Remember, beneath that mask of frivolity, he had absorbed a bitter blow." "He had me fooled," Retief said. "Don't feel badly; I confess at first I failed to sense his shrewdness." The Ambassador nodded and moved off along the corridor. Retief turned and went into an office. Magnan looked up from his desk. "Ah," he said. "Retief. I've been meaning to ask you. About the...ah.  .biasters. Are you -- ?" Retief leaned on Magnan's desk, looked at him. "I thought that was to be our little secret." "Well, naturally I -- " Magnan closed his mouth, swallowed. "How is it, Retief," he said sharply, "that you were aware of this blaster business, when the Ambassador himself wasn't?" "Easy," Retief said. "I made it up." "You what !" M a g n a n looked wild. "But the agreement -- it's been revised! Ambassador Crodfoller has gone on record..." "Too bad. Glad I didn't tell him about it." closed his eyes. "It was big of you to take all the...blame," Retief said, "when the Ambassador was talking about knighting people." Magnan opened his eyes. "What about that gambler, Zorn? Won't he be upset?" "It's all right," Retief said. "I made another arrangement. The business about making blasters out of common components wasn't completely imaginary. You can actually do it, using parts from an oldfashioned disposal unit."  "What good will that do him?" Magnan whispered, looking nervous. "We're not shipping in any old-fashioned disposal units." "We don't need to," Retief said. "They're already installed in the palace kitchen -- and in a few thousand other places, Zorn tells me." "If this ever leaks...  Magnan put a hand to his forehead. "I have his word on it that the Nenni slaughter is out. This place is ripe for a change. Maybe Zorn is what it needs." "But how can we know?" Magnan yelped. "How can we be sure?" "We can't," Retief said. "But it's not up to the Corps to meddle in Petreacs' internal affairs." He leaned over, picked up Magnan's desk lighter and lit a cigar. He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. "Right?" Magnan looked at him, nodded weakly. "Right." "I'd better be getting along to my desk," Retief said. "Now that the Ambassador feels that I'm settling down at last -- " "Retief," Magnan said, "tonight, I implore you. Stay out of the kitchen -- no matter what." Retief raised his eyebrows. "I know," Magnan said. "If you hadn't interfered, we'd all have had our throats cut. But at least," he added, "we" have died in accordance with regGroverzb knew what he wanted -- to scream his head off for it! T HE big man eased the piano off his back and stood looking at Groverzb. "You ain't gonna like it here." He mopped his face. "Boy, will I ever be glad to get off this cockeyed planet." Groverzb pushed at his spectacles, sniffed, and said, "Quite." The big man said, "Ain't no native here over three feet tall. And they got some crazy kind of communication. They don't talk." Groverzb said, "Quiet." "Uh?" "Precisely why I am here. I," said Groverzb, sniffing again, "loathe conversation." "Oh. Well." He left. Alone, Groverzb surveyed his realm. The house was the shell of what had formerly been a Little People apartment building. Ceilings, floors and walls had been removed to form one large room. The tiny doors and windows had been sealed, and a single window and door had been cut into the shell for Groverzb's use. Crude, but serviceable. Groverzb walked to the window and looked down the slope. Little People buildings dotted the landscape, and the people themselves scurried silently about. Yes, thought Groverzb, it would do nicely. He had brought an adequate food-tablet supply. He would finish, without the distraction of voices, his beautiful concerto. He would return to Earth famous and happy. # Armed with paper and pencils, he went to the piano, having decided to enlarge upon the theme in the second movement. His mind knew exactly how the passage should run, and he swiftly covered the paper with sharp, angular notes. Then he triumphantly lifted his hands and began to play what he had written. He jerked back from the keyboard, his hair on end, his teeth, on edge, his ears screaming with the mass of sounds he had produced. He looked at his hands, peered at the score, adjusted his spectacles and tried again. Fm tired, he thought, recoiling in horror from the racket. A food tablet and a nap will remedy the situation.  verzb walked to the window, refreshed. A violet glow had replaced the harsh yellow light of day. At the foot of the slope, the Little People dashed to and fro, but no voice broke the peaceful quiet of evening. With a sigh of satisfaction, Groverzb went to the piano. Gently, he struck the keys. Blatant, jumbled noise filled the room. Breathing hard, Groverzb rose and gingerly lifted the spinet's lid. No, nothing amiss there. Good felts, free hammers, solid sounding boardmust be out of tune. Groverzb closed the lid, sat down and struck a single note. A clear tone sang out. He moved chromatically  up and down the scale. Definitely not out of tune. He shifted the score, glanced uneasily at the keys and began to play. Discord immediately pierced his eardrums. He clapped his hands over his ears and leaped wildly from the piano bench. The trip, he decided frantically. It must have affected my hearing. He flung himself from the house and down the slope. The Little People scattered, staring. He charged into the administration building and clutched the lapels of a uniformed official. "A doctor !" he gasped. "Now! This minuter The official raised his eyebrows and removed Groverzb's hands with distaste: "It's a little late in the day," he drawled, "but maybe the doc up on the top floor -- " Groverzb flew up the stairs and into the doctor's office. The doctor's face lit up. "A patient J" he exclaimed. "Capital! What seems to be the trouble? Food poisoning? Shouldn't eat the food here. Garbage. Appendix? Heart attack?" "Stop talking, you idiot, it's my ears!" Obviously disappointed, the doctor nevertheless poked and peered at Groverzb's ears. "No," he said finally. "A trifle big, yes. But nothing wrong with them." "You're sure?" "Absolutely. A pity. I'm getting a bit rusty." With a groan, Groverzb staggered out of the building, back through town, and up the slope to his house. Seating himself firmly on the bench he began to play. He shuddered. The noise was abominable. Suddenly his door burst open and a crowd of Little People rushed in. They pulled him off the bench and slapped angrily at his hands. Then, with cutters, they attacked the piano. "Here, stop that !" Groverzb screeched. "What do you think you're doing?" The Little People pushed and dragged him out of the house, down the slope, through the town and into the launching bowl at the spacestrip. The launching agent took one look and yelled, "Get the interpreter! On the dou-' ble !" The interpreter ran up and whipped something from his pocket. It looked like a miniature piano skeleton. He tripped a hammer. There was a faint tinkle. Instantly one of the Little People produced a single miniature hammer and tapped it rapidly against his skull. The interpreter tripped another hammer. A second little one responded. tie People ran over and tripped all the interpreter's hammers simultaneously. The Little People winced. "Oh," said the interpreter. "Well, it's their planet." He hustled Groverzb out to a freight ship that was warming up for takeoff. "Is everyone insane?" Groverzb croaked. "I demand to know what this is all about!" The interpreter shoved Groverzb into the ship. "They say you talk too much !" he yelled, as he Complete Sets For Sale Amazing Quarterly'. #-#; # issues in all including the only annual; condition good to very good: # Amazing Monthly : April # (Vol. I No. #) to April # complete; very good to fine except #st issue: # Wonder: June # (Vol. I No. #) to March # complete, very good to fine: # Same, through to April #I : # Quarterlies for same, # issues #, very good to fine: # Astounding: # issues, March # through December #, condition good : # Galaxy: complete from Vol. I No. I October # through #: # All orders promptly shipped F.O.'B. Brooklyn. Many other fine items. Send your want list. Specialist in Stf for a Quarter Century #I #th Avenue Brooklyn #, New York won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh o. 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' Scribe L.N.R. i I Sao Jose, California i  Please send me the ree book, ' I of Life, which explains how I may learn to J I use my faculties and powers of mind. i ' I j Name i ' I  Address ' L I worlds of Vol. #, Number # All Stories New and Complete science fiction Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Sam Ruvidich, Art Director Frederik Pohl, Managing Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor The Last Place on Earth by Jim Harmon # An Incident on Route Twelve by James H, Schmitz # The Talkative Tree by H. B. Fyfe # # B R O # B by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, # Masters of Space by Edward E. Smith  E, E. Evans # A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea # Science Briefs # Ftom Plynck to Planck by Theodore Sturgeon # Hue and Cry # Next issue (March) on sale January #th IF published bi-monthly by Diet Productions Corporation, Vol. #, No. # Ataiii Oltice: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada. Mexico, South and Central America and U. S, possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copj'right by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. T hat looks very like a Fred Pohl story title, doesn't it? It happens not to be, however, but instead the name of an extra-ordinary book by Willard Bascom, published by Doubleday at #. Bascom is the head of the Mohole Project, which intends to drill a hole right through the earth's crust into the mantle to see if they can't bring up a core. They'll drill where the crust is thinnest, and that happens to be under some miles of sea-water. You have to be crazy in some very special way even to think of such a thing, and that's Bascom. The book includes an account of the organization from which this heady idea had its beginnings somewhere in the inner circle of the Office of Naval Research, which guides the Navy's basic research program and keeps up contacts with universities and private laboratories. One hot summer day in '#, two of these broad-spectrum geniuses tried to organize a huge pile of incoming proposals and suggestions for research, by putting them in a few neat piles. When they were finished, desks, tables, chairs and floor were covered with neat piles -- each one paper deep. They then gathered them together into one pile and sweatily looked at each other, and at that moment the organization got its name : the American Miscellaneous Society. To this day the now reject has the cable address and its letterhead bears the figure of a geophysicist rampa : on his fields of actionearth, air, fire and water. Right at the start the organization (which has no membership rolls, dues, officers, bylaws or meetings) vas efficently organized into five divisions: Etceterology, Phenomenology, Calamitology, Generalogy and Triviology. These men got together at brainstorming sessions which would take the breath away from E. E. Smith. Once, just for kicks, they conceived a plan to bring water to California by hauling, with tugboats, an Antarctic iceberg (the Arctic ones are salty) # feet thick and # miles long from Little America and (because of prevailing currents) around Hawaii so that it could be moored in the Channel Islands near Los Angeles. They worked the project out in such detail that it looked not only feasible but perhaps too efficient: it might well change the climate too much. Yet project Mohole is now a serious, practical endeavor. for all its wild letterhead ; and in telling about it, Bascom briefs you in everything con nected with it -- the creation of the earth, the origins of life, the structure of stars, the natural history of the ocean and the land and the atmosis, and as it's going to have to be before they're through; ships, navigation, explosives, buoys and anchors -- why, the man's a whole corps of specialists all by himself. timely point connected with this whole astonishing effort. Last September a letter appeared in a New York paper, pouncing on an article a few days before headed SOter was written by this same Bascom, and, even admitting that it's his own pony he's riding, I think you'll agree he has something to say. On August #, he reports, he was invited to show pictures and to lecture on Project Mohole before the scientists of the Soviet research ship Vityaz, He did so. He says they were warmly congratulatory and seemed surprised by the scale of the U.S. deep sea operations. He says they spoke vaguely about a Russian effort on land in the near future. So along comes this Sept. # release from Moscow describing a monster five-pronged ject: one in the Caspian, four on land: In Karelia, the Ural Mountains, the Caucasus and the Kuriles. Bascom goes on to say that though scientists all over welcome the competition -- it makes more work get done -- the fact remains that this "scientific Olympics," as he calls it, isn't altogether just a jolly game. Bascom, who certainly should know, says we have the initial advantage. On land we have drilled to # feet, the Soviets about #. Project water, totaling # feet, is nearly # times their record. "Nevertheless," Bascom writes, "I am concerned that another hare and tortoise race will develop... Although they have a long way to go, they have accepted the conditions of the race... We must...be wary that even in areas where they are not superior, propaganda may make them seem so. We must run, and win, and tell the world we have won." This department couldn't agree more ; and it seems time to remind the world that at Sputnik time, and at Russian H-bomb time, and even at astronaut time, sleepy people were stumbling about, bleating that no one had warned them. Well, about this one Bascom has issued the warning. I and third secretary in the Diplomatic Corps, followed the senior members of the terrestrial mission across the tarmac and into the gloom of the reception building. The gray-skinned Yill guide who had met the arriving embassy at the foot of the ramp hurried away. The councillor, two first secretaries and the senior attaches gathered around the ambassador, their ornate uniforms bright in the vast dun-colored room. Ten minutes passed. Retief strolled across to the nearest door and looked through the glass panel at the room beyond. Several dozen Yill lounged in deep couches, sipping lavender drinks from slender glass tubes. Blacktunicked servants moved about inconspicuously, offering trays. A party of brightlydressed Yill moved toward the entrance doors. One of the party, a tall male, made to step before another, who raised a hand languidly, fist clenched. The first Yill stepped back and placed his hands on top of his head. Both Yill were smiling and chatting as they passed through the doors. Retief turned away to rejoin the Terrestrial delegation waiting beside a mound of crates made of rough greenish wood stacked on the bare concrete floor. As Retief came up, AmbasThe cereirtoniGus protocol of the YbIIs was impressive, coioHyl -- and. In the long run, deadly! sador Spradley glanced at his finger watch and spoke to the man beside him. "Ben, are you quite certain our arrival time was made clear?" Second Secretary Magnan nodded emphatically. "I stressed the point, Mr. Ambassador. I communicated with Mr. T'Cai-Cai just before the lighter broke orbit, and I specifically -- " "I hope you didn't appear truculent, Mr. Magnan," the ambassador said sharply. "No indeed, Mr. Ambassador. I merely -- " room here?" The ambassador glanced around the cavernous room. "Curious that not even chairs have been provided." "If you'd care to sit on one of these crates -- " "Certainly not." The ambassador looked at his watch again and cleared his throat. "I may as well make use of these fev moments to outline our approach for the more junior members of the staff; it's vital that the entire mission work in harmony in the presentation of the image. We Terrestrials are a kindly, peace-loving race." The ambassador smiled in a kindly, peace-loving way. "We seek only a reasonable division of spheres of influence with the Yill." He spread his hands, looking reasonable. "We are a people of high culture, ethical, sincere." The smile was replaced abruptly by pursed lips. "We'll start by asking for the entire Sirenian System, and settle for half. We'll establish a foothold on all the choicer worlds. And, with shrewd handling, in a century we'll be in a position to assert a wider claim." The ambassador glanced around. "If there are no questions -- " "It's my understanding, Mr. Ambassador, that we hold the prior claim to the Sirenian System. Did I understand your Excellency to say that we're ready to concede half of it to the Yill without a struggle?" Ambassador Spradley looked up at Retief, blinking. The younger man loomed over him. Beside him, Magnan cleared his throat in the silence. "Vice-Consul Retief merely means -- " "I can interpret Mr. Retief's remark," the ambassador snapped. He assumed a fatherly expression. "Young man, you're new to the Service. You haven't yet learned the team play, the give-and-take of diplomacy. I shall expect you to observe closely the work of the experienced negotiators of the mission. You must learn the importance of subtlety." "Mr. Ambassador," Magnan said, "I think the reception committee is arriving." He pointed. Half a dozen tall, short-necked Yill were entering through a side door. The leading Yill hesitated as another stepped in his path. He raised a fist, and the other moved aside, touching the top of his head perfunctorily with both hands. The group started across the room toward the Terrestrials. Relief watched as a slender alien came forward and spoke passable Terran in a reedy voice. "I am P'Toi. Come this way..." He turned, and the group moved toward the door, the ambassador leading. As he reached for the door, the interpreter darted ahead and shouldered him aside. The other Yill stopped, waiting. The ambassador almost glared, then remembered the image. He smiled and beckoned the Yill ahead. They milled uncertainly, muttering in the native tongue, then passed through the door. The Terran party followed. " -- give a great deal to know what they're saying," Retief overheard as he came up. "Our interpreter has forged to the van," the ambassador said. "I can onlj assume he'll appear when needed." "A pity we have to rely on a native interpreter," someone said. "Had I known we'd meet this rather uncouth reception," the ambassador said stiffly, "I would have audited the language personally, of course, during the voyage out." "Oh, no criticism intended, of course, Mr. Ambassador." "Heavens," Magnan put in. "Who would have thought -- " Retief moved up behind the ambassador. "Mr. Ambassador," he said,  j  "Later, young man," the ambassador snapped. He beckoned to the first councillor, ailsi;he two moved off, heads together. Outside, a bluish sun gleamed in a dark sky. Retief watched his breath form a frosty cloud in the chill air. A broad doughnut-wheeled vehicle was drawn up to the platform. The Yill gestured the Terran party to the gaping door at the rear, then stood back, waiting. Retief looked curiously at the gray-painted van. The legend written on its side in alien symbols seemed to read "egg nog." T he ambassador entered the vehicle, the other Terrestrials following. It was as bare of seats as the Terminal building. What appeared to be a defunct electronic chassis lay in the center of the floor. Retief glanced back. The Yill were talking excitedly. None of them entered the car. The door was closed, and the Terrans braced themselves under the low roof as the engine started up with a whine of worn tubos. by Keith Laumer The van moved off. It was an uncomfortable ride. Retief put out an arm as the vehicle rounded a corner, just catching 'he ambassador as he staggered, off-balance. The ambassador glared at him, settled his heavy tricorner hat and stood stiffly until the car lurched again. Retief stooped, attempting to see out through the single dusty windov. They seemed to be in a wide street lined with low buildings. They .passed through a massive gate, up a ramp, and stopped. The door opened. Retief looked out at a blank gray facade, broken by tiny windows at irregular intervals. A scarlet vehicle was drawn up ahead, the Yill reception committee emerging from it. Through its wide windows Retief saw rich upholstery and caught a glimpse of glasses clamped to a tiny bar. P'Toi, the Yill interpreter, came forward, gestured to a small door. Magnan opened it, waiting for the ambassador. As he stepped to it, a Yill thrust himself ahead and hesitated. Ambassador Spradley drew himself up, glaring. Then he twisted his mouth into a frozen smile and stepped aside. The Yill looked at each other, then filed through the door. Retief was the last to enter. As he stepped inside, a black-clad servant slipped past him, pulled the lid from a large box by the door and dropped in a paper tray heaped with refuse. There were alien sjmbols in flaking paint on the box. They seemed, Retief noticed, to spell "egg nog." II T he shrill pipes and whining reeds had been warming up for an hour when Retief emerged from his cubicle and descended the stairs to the banquet hall. Standing by the op::n doors, he lit a slender cigar and watched through narrowed eyes as obsequious servants in black flitted along the low wide corridor, carrying laden trays into the broad room, arranging settings on a great four-sided table forming a hollow square that almost filled the room. Rich brocades were spread across the center of the side nearest the door, flanked by heavily decorated white cloths. Beyond, plain white extended to the far side, where metal dishes were arranged on the bare table top. A richly dressed Yill approached, stepped aside to allow a servant to pass and entered the room. Retief turned at the sound of Terran voices behind him. The ambassador came up, trailed by two diplomats. He glanced at Retief, adjusted his ruff and looked into the banquet hall. "Apparently we're to be kept waiting again," he muttered. "After having been informed at the outset that the Yill have no intention of yielding an inch, one almost wonders... "Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "Have you noticed -- " "H o w e V e r," Ambassador Spradley said, eyeing Retief, "a seasoned diplomatist must take these little snubs in stride. In the end -- Ah, there, Magnan." He turned away, talking. Somewhere a gong clanged. In a moment, the corridor was filled with chattering Yill who moved past the group of Terrestrials into the banquet hall. P'Toi, the Yill interpreter, came up and raised a hand. "Waitt heere..." More Yill filed into the dining room to take their places. A pair of helmeted guards approached, waving the Terrestrials back. An immense grayjowled Yill waddled to the doors and passed through, followed by more guards. "The Chief of State," Retief heard Magnan say. "The Admirable F'Kau-Kau-Kau." 'T have yet to present my credentials," Ambassador Spradley said. "One expects some latitude in the observances of protocol, but I confess..." He wagged his head. The Yill interpreter spoke up. "You now whill Ihie on yourr intesstinss, and creep to fesstive board there." He pointed across the room. "Intestines?" Ambassador Spradley looked about wildly. "Mr. P'Toi means our stomachs, I wouldn't wonder," Magnan said. "He just wants us to lie down and crawl to our seats, Mr. Ambassador." "What the devil are you grinning at, you idiot?" the ambassador snapped. Spradley glanced down at the medals across his paunch. "This is... I've never..." "Homage to godss," the interpreter said. "Oh. Oh, religion," someone said. "Well, if it's a matter of religious beliefs..." The ambassador looked dubiously around. "Golly, it's only a couple of hundred feet," Magnan offered. Retief stepped up to P'Toi. "His Excellency the Terrestrial Ambassador will not crawl," he said clearly. "Here, young man! I said nothing -- " "Not to crawl?" The interpreter wore an unreadable Yill expression. "It is against our religion," Retief said. "Againsst?" "We are votaries of the Snake Goddess," Retief said. "It is a sacrilege to crawl." He brushed past the inbt Keitli Launier terpreter and marched toward the distant table. The others followed. Puffing, the ambassador came to Retief's side as they approached the dozen empty stools on the far side of the square opposite the brocaded position of the Admirable FKau-Kau-Kau. "Mr. Retief, kindly see me after this affair," he hissed. "In the meantime, I hope you will restrain any further rash impulses. Let me remind you I am chief of mission here." Magnan came up from behind. "Let me add my congratulations, Retief," he said. "That was fast thinking -- " "Are you out of your mind, Magnan?" the ambassador barked. "I am extremely displeased !" "Why," Magnan stuttered, "I was speaking sarcastically, of course, Mr. Ambassador. Didn't you notice the kind of shocked little gasp I gave when he did it?" The Terrestrials took their places, Retief at tlie end. The table before them vas of bare green wood, with an array of shallow pewter dishes. Some of the Yill at the table were in plain gray, others in black. All eyed them silently. There was a constant stir among them as one or another rose and disappeared and others sat down. The pipes and conversation from the other tables rose ever higher in competition. A tall Yill in black was at the ambassador's side now. The nearby Yill fell silent as he began ladling a whitish soup into the largest of the bowls before the Terrestrial envoy. The interpreter hovered, watching. "That's quite enough," Ambassador Spradley said, as the bowl overflowed. The Yill servant rolled his eyes, dribbled more of the soup into the bowl. "Kindly serve the other members of my staff," the ambassador said. The interpreter said something in a lov voice. The servant moved hesitantly to the next stool and ladled more soup. R etief watched, listening to the whispers around him. The Yill at the table were craning now to watch. The soi:p ladler was ladling rapidly, rolling his e es sideways. He came to Retief, reached out with the full ladle for the bowl. "No," Retief said. The ladler hesitated. "None for me," Retief said. The interpreter came up and motioned to the servant, who reached again, ladle brimming. IT!" Retief said, his voice distinct in the sudden hush. Tie stared at the interpreter, who stared back, then waved the servant avay. "Mr. Retief!' a voice hissed. Retief looked down at the table. The ambassador was leaning forward, glaring at him, his face a mottled crimson. "I'm warning you, Mr. Retief," he said hoarsely. "I've eaten sheep's eyes in the Sudan, ka swe in Burma, hundred-year cug on Mars and everything else that has been placed before me in the course of my diplomatic career. And, by the holy relics of Saint Ignatz, you'll do the same!" He snatched up a spoon-like utensil and dipped it into his bowl. "Don't eat that, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. The ambassador stared, eyes wide. He opened his mouth, guided the spoon toward it -- Retief stood, gripped the table under its edge and heaved. The immense wooden slab rose and tilted, dishes sliding. It crashed to the floor with a ponderous slam. Whitish soup splattered across the terrazzo. A couple of odd bowls rolled across the room. Cries rang out from the Yill, mingling with a strangled yell from Ambassador Spradley. Retier walked past the wildeyed members of the mission to the sputtering chief. "Mr. Ambassador," he said. "I'd like -- " "You'd like! I'll break you, you young hoodlum! Do you realize -- " "Pleass..." The interpreter stood at Retief's side. "My apologies," Ambassador Spradley said, mopping his forehead. "My profound apologies." "Be quiet," Retief said. 'Wha -- what?" "Don't apologize," Retief said. P'Toi was beckoning. "Pleasse, aril come." Retief turned and followed him. The portion of the table they were ushered to was covered with an embroidered white cloth, set with thin porcelain dishes. The Yill already seated there rose, amid babbling, and moved down the table. The black-clad Yill at the end table closed ranks to fill the vacant seats. Retief sat down and found Magnan at his side. "What's going on here?" the second secretary said angrily. "They were giving us dog food," Retief said. "I overheard a Yill. They seated us at the bottotn of the servants' table -- " "You mean you know their language?" "I learned it on the way out. Enough, at least." The music burst out with a clangorous fanfare, and a throng of jugglers, dancers and acrobats poured into the center of the hollow square, frantically juggling, dancing and back-flipping. Black-clad servants swarmed suddenly, heaping mounds of fragrant by Keith Laumer food on the plates of Yill and Terrestrials alike, pouring a pale purple liquor into slender glasses. Retief sampled the Yill food. It was delicious. Conversation was impossible in the din. He watched the gaudy display and ate heartily. Ill R etief leaned back, grateful for the lull in the music. The last of the dishes were whisked away, and more glasses filled. The exhausted entertainers stepped to pick up the thick square coins the diners threw. Retief sighed. It had been a rare feast. "Retief," Magnan said in the comparative quiet, "what were you saying about dog food as the music came up?" Retief looked at him. "Haven't you noticed the pattern, Mr. Magnan? The series of deliberate affronts?" "Deliberate affronts! Just a minute, Retief. They're uncouth, yes, crowding into doorways and that sort of thing..." He looked at Retief uncertainly. "They herded us into a baggage warehouse at the terminal. Then they hauled us here in a garbage truck -- " "Garbage truck!" "Only symbolic, of course. They ushered us in the tradesman's entrance, and assigned us cubicles in the servants' wing. Then we were seated with the coolie class sweepers at the bottom of the table." "You must be... I mean, we're the Terrestrial delegation! Surely these Yill must realize our power." "Precisely, Mr. Magnan. But -- " With a clang of cymbals the musicians launched a renewed assault. Six tall, helmeted Yill sprang into the center of the floor and paired off in a wild performance, half dance, half combat. Magnan pulled at Retief's arm, his mouth moving. Retief shook his head. No one could talk against a Yill orchestra in full cry. Fle sampled a bright red wine and watched the show. There was a flurry of action, and two of the dancers stumbled and collapsed, their partner-opponents whirling away to pair off again, describe the elaborate pre-combat ritual, and abruptly set to, dulled sabres clashing -- and two more Yill were down, stunned. It was a violent dance. Retief watched, the drink forgotten. The last two Yill approached and retreated, whirled, bobbed and spun, feinted and postured -- and on the instant, clashed, straining chest-to-chest -- then broke apart, heavy weapons chopping, parrying, as the music mounted to a frenzy. Evenly matched, the two hacked, thrust, blow for blow, across the floor, then back, defense forgotten, slugging it out. And then one was slipping, going down, helmet awry. The other, a giant, muscular Yill, spun away, whirled in a mad skirl of pipes as coins showered -- then froze before a gaudy table, raised the sabre and slammed it dovm in a resounding blow across the gay cloth before a lace and bowbedecked Yill in the same instant that the music stopped. In utter silence the dancerfighter stared across the table at the seated Yill. With a shout, the Yill leaped up, raised a clenched fist. The dancer bowed his head, spread his hands on his helmet. Retief took a deep gulp of a pale yellow liqueur and leaned forward to watch. The beribboned Yill waved a hand negligently, spilled a handful of coins across the table and sat down. The challenger spun away in a screeching shrill of music. Retief caurht his eye for an instant as he passed. And then the dancer stood rigid before the brocaded table -- and the music stopped off short as the sabre slammed down before a heavy Yill in ornate metallic coils. The challenged Yill rose and raised a fist. The other ducked his head, put his hands on his helmet. Coins rolled. The dancer moved on. Twice more the dancer struck the table in ritualistic challenge, exchanged gestures, bent his neck and passed on. He circled the broad floor, sabre twirling, arms darting in an intricate symbolism. The orchestra blared shrilly, unmuffled now by the surfroar of conversation. The Yill, Retief noticed suddenly, were sitting silent, watching. The dancer was closer now, and then he was before Retief, poised, towering, sabre above his head. The music cut, and in the startling instantaneous silence, the heavy sabre whipped over and down with an explosive concussion that set dishes dancing on the table-top. T he Yiirs eyes held on Retief's. In the silence, Magnan tittered drunkenly. Retief pushed back his stool. "Steady, my boy,' Ambassador Spradley called. Retief stood, the Yill topping his six foot three by an inch. In a motion almost too quick to follow, Retief reached for the sabre, tw"itched it from the Yill's grip, swung it in a whistling cut. The Yill ducked, sprang back, snatched up a sabre dropped by another dancer. "Someone stop the madman!" Spradley howled. Retief leaped across the table, sending fragile dishes spinning. The other danced back, and only then did the orchestra spring to life with a screech and a mad tattoo of highpitched drums. Making no attempt to following the weaving pattern of the Yill bolero, Retief pressed the other, fending off vicious cuts with the blunt weapon, chopping back relentlessly. Left hand on hip, Retief matched blow for blow, driving the other back. Abruptly, the Yill abandoned the double role. Dancing forgotten, he settled down in earnest, cutting, thrusting, parrying; and now the two stood toe to toe, sabres clashing in a lightning exchange. The Yill gave a step, two, then rallied, drove Retief back, back -- And the Yill stumbled. His sabre clattered, and Retief dropped his point as the other wavered past him and crashed to the floor. The orchestra fell silent in a descending wail of reeds. Retief drew a deep breath and wiped his forehead. 'Come back here, you young fool!" Spradley called hoarsely. Retief hefted the sabre, turned, eyed the brocadedraped table. He started across the floor. The Yill sat as if paralyzed. "Retief, no I" Spradley yelped. Retief walked directly to the Admirable F'Kau-KauKau, stopped, raised the sabre. "Not the chief of state, Id someone in the Terrestrial mission groaned. Retief whipped the sabre down. The dull blade split the cloth and clove the hardwood table. There was utter silence. The Admirable F'Kau-KauKau rose, seven feet of obese gray Yill. Broad face expressionless to any Terran eyes, he raised a fist like a jewelstudded ham. Retief stood rigid for a long moment. Then, gracefully, he inclined his head, placed his finger tips on his temples. Behind him, there was a clatter as Ambassador Spradley collapsed. Then the Admirable F'Kau-Kau-Kau cried out and reached across the table to embrace the Terrestrial, and the orchestra went mad. Gray hands helped Retief across the table, stools were pushed aside to make room at F'Kau-Kau-Kau's side. Retief sat, took a tall flagon of coalblack brandy pressed on him by his neighbor, clashed glasses with The Admirable and drank. IV R etief turned at the touch on his shoulder. "The Ambassador wants to speak to you, Retief," Magnan said. Retief looked across to where Ambassador Spradley sat glowering behind the plain tablecloth. "Under the circumstances," by Koith Laumer Retief said, better ask him to come over here." "The ambassador?" Magnan's voice cracked. "Never mind the protocol," Retief said. "The situation is still delicate." Magnan went away. "The feast ends," F'KauKau-Kau said. "Now you and I, Retief, must straddle the Council Stool." "I'll be honored. Admirable," Retief said. "I must inform my colleagues." "Colleagues?" F'Kau-KauKau said. "It is for chiefs to parley. Who shall speak for a king while he yet has tongue for talk?" "The Yill way is wise," Retief said. F'Kau-Kau-Kau emptied a squat tumbler of pink beer. "I will treat with you, Retief, as viceroy, since as you say your king is old and the space between worlds is far. But there shall be no scheming underlings privy to our dealings." He grinned a Yill grin. "Afterwards we shall carouse, Retief. The Council Stool is hard and the waiting handmaidens delectable. This makes for quick agreement." Retief smiled. "The king is wise." "Of course, a being prefers wenches of his own kind," F'Kau-Kau-Kau said. He belched. "The Ministry of Culture has imported several Terry -- excuse me, Retief -- Terrestrial joy-girls, said to be top-notch specimens. At least they have very fat watchamacallits." "The king is most considerate," Retief said. "Let us to it then, Retief. I may hazard a fling with one of your Terries, myself. I fancy an occasional perversion." F'Kau-Kau-Kau dug an elbow into Retief's side and bellowed with laughter. Ambassador Spradley hurried to intercept Retief as he crossed to the door at F'KauKau-Kau's side. "Retief, kindly excuse yourself. I wish a word with you." His voice was icy. Magnan stood behind him, goggling. "Mr. Ambassador, forgive my apparent rudeness," Retief said. "I don't have time to explain now -- " "Rudeness!" Spradley barked. "Don't have time, eh? Let me tell you -- " "Lower your voice, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. Spradley quivered, mouth open, speechless. "If you'll sit down and wait q u i e I I y," Retief said, "I think -- " "You think r Spradley spluttered. Spradley looked up at Retief's face. He stared for a moment into Retief's gray eyes, closed his mouth and swallowed. "The Yill seem to have gotten the impression I'm in charge," Retief said. "We'll have to keep it up.' "But -- but -- " S p r a d I e y stuttered. Then he straightened. "That is the last straw' he whispered hoarsely. " am the Terrestrial Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary. Magnan has told me that we've been studiedly insulted, repeatedly, since the moment of our arrival. Kept waiting in baggage rooms, transported in refuse lorries, herded about with servants, offered swill at table. Now I and my senior staff, are left cooling our heels, without so much as an audience while this -- this multiple Kau person hobnobs with -- with -- " Spradley's voice broke. "I may have been a trifle hasty, Retief, in attempting to restrain you. Blaspheming the native gods and dumping the banquet table are rather extreme measures, but your resentment was perhaps partially justified. I am prepared to be lenient with you." He fixed a choleric eye on Retief. 'T am walking out of this meeting, Mr. Retier. I'll take no more of these deliberate personal -- " "That's enough," Retief snapped. "You're keeo'ncthe king waiting. Get back to your chair and sit there until I come back." Snradley's face purpled. "One more word, and I'll silence you forcibly," Retief said. Magnan found his voice. "What are you going to do, Retief?" "I'm going to handle the negotiation," Retief said. He handed Magnan his empty glass. "Now go sit down and work on the Image." suite aboard the orbiting Corps vessel, Ambassador Spradley pursed his lips and looked severely at Vice-Consul Retief. "Further," he said, "you have displayed a complete lack of understanding of Corps discipline, the respect due a senior agent, even the basic courtesies. Your aggravated displays of temper, illtimed outbursts of violence and almost incredible arrogance in the assumption of authority make your further retention as an officer-agent of the Diplomatic Corps impossibV. It will therefore be my unhappy duty to recommend your immediate -- ' There was a muted buzz from the communicator. The ambassador cleared his tliroat. "Veli ?" "A signal from Sector HQ, Mr. Ambassador," a voice said. "Vell, read it," Spradley snapped. "Skip the preliminaries." "Congratulations on the unprecedented success of your mission. The articles of agreement transmitted by you embody a most favorable resolution of the difficult By Keith Laumer Sirenian situation, and will form the basis of continued amicable relations between the Terrestrial States and the Yill Empire. To you and your staff, full credit is due for a job vell done. Signed, Deputy Assistant Secretary -- " Spradley cut off the voice impatiently. He shuffled papers, eyed Retief sharply. "Superficially, of course, an uninitiated observer might leap to the conclusion that the -- ah -- results that were produced in spite of these... ah...irregularities justify the latte r.'" The Ambassador smiled a sad, wise smile. "This is far from the case," he said. "I -- The communicator burped softly. "Confound it !" Spradley muttered. "Yes?' "Mr. T'Cai-Cai has arrived,' the voice said. "Shall I -- " "Send him in at once." Spradley glanced at Retief. "Only a two-syllable man, but I shall attempt to correct these false impressions, make some amends... The two Terrestrials waited silently until the Yill Protocol chief tapped at the door. "I hope," the ambassador said, "that you will resist the impulse to take advantage of your unusual position." He looked at the door. "Come in." T'Cai-Cai stepped into the room, glanced at Spradley, turned to greet Retief in voluble Yill. He rounded the desk to the ambassador's chair, motioned him from it and sat down. have a surprise for you, A Retief," he said, in Terran. "I myself have made use of the teaching machine you so kindly lent us." "That's fine, T'Cai-Cai," Retief said. "I'm sure Mr, Spradley will be interested in hearing what we have to say." "Never mind," the Yill said. "I am here only socially." He looked around the room. "So plainly you decorate your chamber. But it has a certain austere charm." He laughed a Yill laugh. "Oh, you are a strange breed, you Terrestrials. You surprised us all. You know, one hears such outlandish stories. I tell you in confidence, we had expected you to be overpushes." "Pushovers," Spradley said, tonelessly. "Such restraint! What pleasure you gave to those of us, like myself of course, who appreciated your grasp of protocol. Such finesse! How subtly you appeared to ignore each overture, while neatly avoiding actual contamination. I can tell you, there were those who thought -- poor fools -- that you had no grasp of etiquette. How gratified we were, we professionals, who could appreciate your virtuosity -- when you placed matters on a comfortable basis by spurning the cats'-meat. It was sheer pleasure then, waiting, to see what form your compliment would take' The Yill offered orange cigars, stuffed one in his nostril. 'T confess even I had not hoped that you would honor our Admirable so signally. Oh, it is a pleasure to deal with fellow professionals, who understand the meaning of protocol !" Ambassador Spradley made a choking sound. "This fellow has caught a chill," T'Cai-Cai said. He eyed Spradley dubiously. "Step back, my man. I am highly susceptible. "There is one bit of business I shall take pleasure in attending to, my dear Retief," T'Cai-Cai went on. He drew a large paper from his reticule. "The Admirable is determined than none other than yourself shall be accredited here. I have here my government's exequatur confirming you as Terrestrial consul-general to Yill. We shall look forward to your prompt return." Retief looked at Spradley. "I'm sure the Corps will agree," he said. "Then I shall be going," T'Cai-Cai said. He stood up. "Hurry back to us, Retief. There is much that I would show you of Yill." "I'll hurry," Retief said and, with a Yill wink: "Together we shall see many high and splendid things!"   Coming in the March issue of If -- by Keith Laumer by Stephen Barr A great new cover novelette by Poul Anderson -- plus short stories, Theodore Sturgeon's column, features, etc. On sale January #th at all newsstands. He was already a thief, prepared to steal again. He didn't know tlioi' he himseif was only booty! AN miles south of the little town of Redmon on Route Twelve when he was startled by a series of sharp, clanking noises. They came from under the Packard's hood. The car immediately began to lose speed. Garfield jammed down the accelerator, had a sense of sick helplessness at the complete lack of response from the motor. The Packard rolled on, getting rid of its momentum, and came to a stop. Phil Garfield swore shakily. He checked his watch, switched off the headlights and climbed out into the dark road. A delay of even half an hour here might be disastrous. It was past midnight. and he had another hundred and ten miles to cover to reach the small private airfield where Madge waited for him and the thirty thousand dollars in the suitcase on the Packard's front seat. If he didn't make it before daylight... He thought of the bank guard. The man had made a clumsy play at being a hero, and that had set off the fool woman who'd run screaming into their line of fire. One dead. Perhaps two. Garfield hadn't stopped to look at an evening paper. But he knew they were hunting for him. He glanced up and down the road. No other headlights in sight at the moment, no light from a building showing on the forested hills. He reached back into the car and brought out the suitcase, his gun, a big flashlight and the box of shells which had been standing beside the suitcase. He broke the box open, shoved a handful of shells and the .# into his coat pocket, then took suitcase and flashlight over to the shoulder of the road and set them down. There was no point in groping about under the Packard's hood. When it came to mechanics, Phil Garfield was a moron and well aware of it. The car was useless to him now...except as bait. But as bait it might be very useful. Should he leave it standing where it was? No, Garfield decided. To anybody driving past it would merely suggest a necking party, or a drunk sleeping off his load before continuing home. He might have to wait an hour or more before someone decided to stop. He didn't have the time. He reached in through the window, hauled the top of the steering wheel towards him and put his weight against the rear window frame. The Packard began to move slowly backwards at a slant across the road. In a minute or two he had it in position. Not blocking the road entirely, which would arouse immediate suspicion, but angled across it, lights out, empty, both front doors open and inviting a passerby's investigation. Garfield carried the suitcase and flashlight across the right-hand shoulder of the road and moved up among the trees and undergrowth of the slope above the shoulder. Placing the suitcase between the bushes, he brought out the .#, clicked the safety off and stood waiting. Some ten minutes later, a set of headlights appeared speeding up Route Twelve from the direction of Redmon. Phil Garfield went down on one knee before he came within range of the lights. Now he was completely concealed by the vegetation. The car slowed as it approached, braking nearly to a stop sixty feet from the stalled Packard. There were several people inside it; Garfield heard voices, then a woman's loud laugh. The driver tapped his horn inquiringly twice, moved the car slowly forward. As the headlights went past him, Garfield got to his feet among the bushes, took a step down towards the road, raising the gun. Then he caught the distant gleam of a second set of headlights approaching from Redmon. He swore under his breath and dropped back out of sight. The car below him reached the Packard, edged cautiously around' it, rolled by James H. Schmitz on with a sudden roar of acceleration. T he second car stopped when still a hundred yards away, the Packard caught in the motionless glare of its lights. Garfield heard the steady purring of a powerful motor. For almost a minute, nothing else happened. Then the car came gliding smoothly on, stopped again no more than thirty feet to Garfield's left. He could see it now through the screening bushes -- a big job, a long, low four-door sedan. The motor continued to purr. After a moment, a door on the far side of the car opened and slammed shut. A man walked quickly out into the beam of the headlights and started towards the Packard. Phil Garfield rose from his crouching position, the .# in his right hand, flashlight in his left. If the driver was alone, the thing was now cinched! But if there was somebody else in the car, somebody capable of fast, decisive action, a slip in the next ten seconds might cost him the sedan, and quite probably his freedom and life. Garfield lined up the .#'s sights steadily on the center of the approaching man's head. He let his breath out slowly as the fellow came level with him in the road and squeezed off one shot. Instantly he went bounding down the slope to the road. The bullet had flung the man sidevays to the pavement. Garfield darted past him to the left, crossed the beam of the headlights, and was in darkness again on the far side of the road, snapping on his flashlight as he sprinted up to the car. The motor hummed quietly on. The flashlight showed the seats empty. Garfield dropped the light, jerked both doors open in turn, gun pointing into the car's interior. Then he stood still for a moment, weak and almost dizzy with relief. There was no one inside. The sedan was his. The man he had shot through the head lay face down on the road, his hat flung a dozen feet away from him. Route Twelve still stretched out in dark silence to east and west. There should be time enough to clean up the job before anyone else came along. Garfield brought the suitcase down and put it on the front seat of the sedan, then started back to get his victim off the road and out of sight. He scaled the man's hat into the bushes, bent down, grasped the ankles and started to haul him towards the left side of the road where the ground dropped off sharply beyond the shoulder. The body made a high, squealing sound and began to writhe violently. dropped the legs and hurriedly took the gun from his pocket, moving back a step. The squealing noise rose in intensity as the wounded man quickly flopped over twice like a struggling fish, arms and legs sawing about with startling energy. Garfield clicked off the safety, pumped three shots into his victim's back. The grisly squeals ended abruptly. The body continued to jerk for another second or twj, then lay still. Garfield shoved the gun back into his pocket. The unexpected interruption had unnerved him; his hands shook as he reached down again for the stranger's ankles. Then he jerked his hands back, and straightened up, staring. From the side of the man's chest, a few inches below the right arm, something like a thick black stick, three feet long, protruded now through the material of the coat. It shone, gleaming wetly, in the light from the car. Even in that first uncomprehending instant, soipiething in its appearance brought a surge of sick disgust to Garfield's throat. hen the stick bent slowly halfway down its length, forming a sharp angle, and its tip opened into what could have been three blunt, black claws which scrabbled clumsily against the pavement. Very faintly, the squealing began again, and the body's back arched up as if another sticklike arm were pushing desperately against the ground beneath it. Garfield acted in a blur of horror. He emptied the .# into the thing at his feet almost without realizing he was doing it. Then, dropping the gun, he seized one of the ankles, ran backwards to the shoulder of the road, dragging the body behind him. In the darkness at the edge of the shoulder, he let go of it, stepped around to the other side and with two frantically savage kicks sent the body plunging over the shoulder and down the steep slope beyond. He heard it crash through the bushes for some seconds, then stop. He turned, and ran back to the sedan, scooping up his gun as he went past. He scrambled into the driver's seat and slammed the door shut behind him. His hands shook violently on the steering wheel as he pressed down the accelerator. The motor roared into life and the big car surged forward. He edged it past the Packard, cursing aloud in horrified shock, jammed down the accelerator and went flashing up Route Twelve, darkness racing beside and behind him. thing that wore what seemed to be a man's body like a suit of clothes, moving by James H.' Schmitz the body as a man moves, driving a mai's car... roacharmed, roach-legged itself! Garfield drew a long, shuddering breath. Then, as he slowed for a curve, there was a spark of reddir.h light in the rear-view mirror. He stared at the spark for an instant, braked the car to a stop, rolled down the window and looked back. Far behind him along Route Twelve, a fire burned. Approximately at the point where the Packard had stalled out, where something had gone rolling off the road into the bushes . Something, Garfield added mentally, that found fiery automatic des":niction when death came to it, so that its secrets would remain unrevealed. But for him the fire meant the end of a nightmare. He rolled the window up, took out a cigarette, lit it, and pressed the accelerator... In incredulous fright, he felt the nose of the car tilt upwards, headlights sweeping up from the road into the trees. Then the headlights winked out. Beyond the windshield, dark tree braiiches floated down towards him, the night sky beyond. He reached fran  tically for the door handle. A steel wrench clamped silently about each of his arms, drawing them in against his sides, immobilizing them there. Garfield gasped, looked up at the mirror and saw a pair of faintly gleaming red eyes watching him from the rear of the car. Two of the things... the second one stood behind him out of sight, holding him. They'd been in what had seemed to be the trunk compartment. And they had come out. The eyes in the mirror vanished. A moist, black roach-arm reached over the back of the seat beside Garfield, picked up the cigarette he had dropped, extino-uished it with iather horribly human motions, then took up Garfield's gun and drew back out of sight. He expected a shot, but none came. One doesn't fire a bullet through the suit one intends to wear... It wasn't until that thought occurred to him that tough Phil Garfield began to scream. He was still screaming minutes later when, beyond the windshield, the spaceship floated into view among the stars.   IF  Feature science briefs R emember, a few years done by a graduate student who duplicated Earth's prim o r d i a I atmosphere, shot "lightning" through it, and came up with a "soup" which contained amino acids, the basic substances of life? A Dr. Carl Sagan has recently done somewhat the same with the known substances of Jupiter's atmosphere. He flooded them with ultraviolet light. The result, he says, "would create the conditions necessary for complex pre-biological organic reactions." He theorizes that due to induced infra-red under the clouds, Jupiter may be a comfortable # or so, with seas of ammonia or even water. Let's go find out. In #, on the little island of Bimini, less than half an hour by air from Miami, the American Museum of Natural History founded the Lerner Marine Laboratory. Long the happy hunting ground for sport fishermen, Bimini is now attracting scientists from all over the world. Mr. Michael Lerner, who donated the land and houses to start the project, is associated with the Museum's renowned Dr. James Oliver and one-time s-f writer Philip (When Worlds Collide) Wylie. One of the many things being studied there is -- of all things -- cancer, which afflicts birds and amphibia, as well as fish. Cancer is after all a phenomenon of chemically-directed growth, and the teeming waters of Bimini offer simple animals with life-cycles perfectly suited for the study of inherited characteristics over many brief generations. Others have the mysterious power to grow new limbs -- and to stop the growth when it's finished. Still others produce poisons -- which is to say, drugs. And sea water itself is known to kill certain strains of the stubborn staphylococcus. So keep an eye on jBimini. Add to the list of subatomic particles (if you haven't lost count by now) the omega, an elusive little beauty which hangs around for all of ten took a specially designed computer to scan # photographs of the star-shaped collision tracks resulting from anti-proton collisions with protons in the U. of Cal.'s bevatron. # of the "stars' showed the predicted slight curvature indicating that sometimes the proton breaks into five instead of four pi mesons -- two positive, two negative, and one with no charge at all. This latter is the short-lived omega. At last falVs Conference on High Energy Accelerators, the boys decided to think big -- real big. An international gathering, they looked past Brookhaven's monstrous # tron, and set their sights on machines with outputs all the even higher. Such a machine might cost upwards of # cision-built hollow steel-andconcrete doughnut four miles across ! Have you ever met a coypu? If we call it a nutria, you might recognize it as the source of a pretty fair fur for coats. But in England just now it's called not only coypu but a great number of other things we couldn't possibly print here. Seems some were imported from their native Argentina about # years ago by farmers who wanted to get into the skin trade. Then nutria got (a) unfashionable and (b) loose in the swamps of East Anglia. Now there are thousands of them, lacking natural enemies and breeding three litters a year. Thev like farm products best of all, but don't mind sections of mooring cable regardless of the river-boats that get lost ; newly-planted oats and wheat, and even, if the complaint is true, a farmer's windowframes. Small World Dept.: The Asahi Chemical Co. of Osaka has just completed the second of five water-desalting plants for U. S. towns. Webster S.D., now enjoys salt-r educed drinking water from its brackish supply, thanks to the Japanese-designed electrodialysis Naturally an undertaker will get the last word. But shouldn't he wait until his clients are dead? I S AM Collins flashed the undertaker a healthy smile, hoping it wouldn't depress old Candle too much. He saluted. The skeletal figure in endless black nodded gravely, and took hold of Sam Collins' arm with a death grip. 'T'm going to bury you, Sam Collins," the undertaker said. The tall false fronts of Main Street spilled out a lake of shadow, a canal of liquid heat that soaked through the iron weave of Collins' jeans and turned into black ink stains. The old window of the hardware store showed its age in soft wrinkles, ripples that had caught on fire in the Illustrated by Gaughan sunset. Collins felt the twilight stealing under the arms of his tee-shirt. The overdue hair on the back of his rangy neck stood up in attention. It was a joke, but the first one Collins had ever known Doc Candle to make. 'Tn time, I guess you'll bury me all right. Doc." "In my time, not yours, Earthling." 'Earthling?" Collins repeated the last word. The old man frowned. His face was a collection of lines. When he frowned, all the lines pointed to hell, the grave, decay and damnation. "Earthling," the undertaker repeated. "Earthman? Terrestrial? Solarian? Space Ranger? Homo sapiens?" Collins decided Candle was sure in a jokey mood. "Kind of makes you think of it, don't it, Doc? The spaceport going right up outside of town. Rocketships are going to be out there taking off for the Satellite, the Moon, places like that. Reminds you that we are Earthlings, like they say in the funnies, all right." "Not outside town." "What?" "Inside. Inside town. Part of the spaceship administration building is going to go smack in the middle of where your house used to be." "My house is "For less time than you will be yourself. Earthling." "Earthling yourself ! What's wrong with you. Doc?" "No. I am not an Earthling. I am a superhuman alien from outer space. My mission on Earth is to destroy you." tly. When you lived in a town all your life and knew its people, it wasn't unusual to see some old person snap under the weight of years. "You have to destroy the rocketship station, huh. Doc, before it sends up spaceships?" "No. I want to kill you. That is my mission." "Because," Candle said, "I am a basically evil entity." The undertaker turned away and went skithering down Main Street, his lopsided gait limping, sliding, hopping, skipping, at a refined leisurely pace. He was a collection of dancing, straight black lines. Collins stared after the old man, shook his head and forgot about him. He moved into the hardware store. The bell tinkled behind him. The store was cramped with shadows and the smell of wood and iron. It was lined off as precisely as a checkerboard, with counters, drawers, compartments. Ed Michaels sat behind the counter, smoking a pipe. He was a handsome man, looking young in the uncertain light, even at fifty. "Hi, Ed. You closed?" "Guess not, Sam. What are you looking for?" "A pound of tenpenny nails." Michaels stood up. Sarah Comstock vaddled energetically out of the back. Her sweet, angelic face lit up with a smile. "Sam Collins. Well, I guess you #I want to help us murder them." "Murder?" Collins repeated. "Who?" "Those Air Force men who want to come in here and cause all the trouble." "How are you going to murder them, Mrs. Cornstock?" "When they see our petition in Washington, D.C., they'll call those men back pretty quick." "Oh," Collins said. Mrs. Comstock produced the scroll from her voluminous handbag. "You want to sign, don't you? They're going to put part of the airport on your place. They'll tear down your house." "They can't tear it down. I won't sell." "You know government men. They'll just take it and give you some money for it. Sign right there at the top of new column, Sam." Collins shook his head. "I don't believe in signing things. They can't take what's mine." "But Sam, dear, they wilL They'll come in and push your house down with those big tractors of theirs. They'll bury it in concrete and set off those guided missiles of theirs right over it." "'They can't make me get out," Sam said. E d Michaels scooped up a pound, one ounce of nails and spilled them onto his scale. He pinched off the excess, then dropped it back in and fed the nails into a brown paper bag. He crumpled the top and set it on the counter, "That's twenty-nine plus one, Sam. Thirty cents." Collins laid out a quarter and a nickel and picked up the bag. "Appreciate you doing this after store hours, Ed." Michaels chuckled. "I wasn't exactly getting ready for the opera, Sam." Collins turned around and saw Sarah Comstock still waiting, the petition in her hand. "Now what s a pretty girl like you doing, wasting her time in politics?" Collins heard himself ask. Mrs. Comstock twittered. "I'm old enough to be your mother, Sam Collins." "I like mature women." Collins vatched his hand in fascination as it reached out to touch one of Sarah Comstock's plump cheeks, then dropped to her shoulder and ripped away the strapsleeve of her summer print dress. A plump, rosy shoulder was revealed, splattered with freckles. Sarah Comstock put her hands over her ears as if to keep from hearing her own shrill scream. It reached out into pure soprano range. Sarah Comstock backed away, into the shadows, and Sam Collins followed her, trying to explain, to apologize. "Sam! Samr The voice cut through to him and he looked up. Ed Michaels had a doublobarreled shotgun aimed at him, Mrs. Michaels' face was looking over his shoulder in the door to the, back, her face a sick white. "You get out of here, Sam," Michaels said. "You get out and don't you come back. Ever." by Jim Harmon Collins' hands moved emptily in air. He was always better with his hands thw words, but this time even they seemed inexpressive. He crumpled the sack of nails in both fists, and turned and left the hardware store. II H IS house was still there, sitting at the end of Elm Street, at the end of town, on the edge of the prairie. It was a very old house. It was decorated with gingerboard, a rusted-out tin rooster-comb running the peak of the roof and stained glass window transoms; and the top of the house was joined to the ground floor by lapped fishscales, as though it was a mermaid instead of a house. The house was a golden house. It had been painted brown against the dust, but the keening wind, the relentless sun, the savage rape of the thunderstorms, they had all bleached the brown paint into a shining pure gold, Sam stepped inside and leaned back against the front door, the door of full-length glass with a border of glass emeralds and rubies. He leaned back and breathed deep. The house didn't smell old. It smelled new. It smelled like sawdust and fresh-hewn lumber as bright and blond as a high school senior's crewcut. He walked across the flowered carpet. The carpet didn't mind footsteps or bright sun. It never became worn or faded. It grew brighter with the years, the roses turning redder, the sunflowers becoming yellower. The parlor looked the same as it always did, clean and waiting to be used. The canebacked sofa and chairs eagerly waiting to be sat upon, the bead-shaded kerosene lamps ready to burst into light. Sam went into his workshop. This had once been the ground level master bedroom, but he had had to make the change. The work table held its share of radios, toasters, TV sets, an electric train, a spring-wind Victrola. Sam threw the nails onto the table and crossed the room, running his fingers along the silent keyboard of the player piano. He looked out the window. The bulldozers had made the ground rectangular, level and brown, turning it into a gigantic half-cent stamp. He remembered the mail and raised the window and reached down into the mailbox. It was on this side of the house, because only this side was technically within city limits. As he came up with the letters, Sam Collins saw a man sighting along a plumbline towards his house. He shut the window. Some of the letters didn't have any postage stamps, just a line of small print about a # fine. Government letters. He went over and forced them into the tightly packed coal stove. All the trash would be burned out in the cold weather. Collins sat down and looked through the rest of his mail. A new catalogue of electronic parts. A bulky envelope with two paperback novels by Richard S. Prather and Robert Bloch he had ordered. A couple of letters from hams. He tossed the mail on the table and leaned back. H e thought about what had happened in the hardware store. It wasn't surprising it had happened to him. Things like that were bound to happen to him. He had just been lucky that Ed Michaels hadn't called the sheriff. What had got into him? He had never been a sex maniac before ! But still... it was hardly unexpected. Might as well wait to start on those rabbit cages until tomorrow, he decided. This evening he felt like exploring. The house was so big, and packed with so many things that he never found and examined them all. Or if he did, he forgot a lot about the things between times, so it was like reading a favorite book over again, always discovering new things in it. The parlor was red in the fading light, and the hall beyond the sliding doors was deeply shadowed. In the sewing room, he remembered, in the drawers of the treadle machine the radio was captured. The rings and secret manuals of the days when radio had been alive. He hadn't looked over those things in some little time. He looked up the shadowed stairway. He remembered the night, a few weeks before Christmas when he had been twelve and really too old to believe, his mother had said she was going up to see if Santa Claus had left any packages around a bit early. They often gave him his presents early, since they were never quite sure he would live until Christmas. But his mother had been playing a trick on him. She hadn't been going up after packages. She had gone up those stairs to murder his father. She had shot him in the back of the head with his Army Colt .# from the first war. Collins never quite understood why the hole in back was so neat and the one in front where it came out was so messy. After he went to live with Aunt Amy and the house had been boarded up, he heard them talking. Aunt Amy and her boy friend, fat Uncle Ralph. And they had said his mother had murdered his father because he had gone ahead and made her get pregby Jim Harmon nant again and she was afraid it would be another one like Sam. Sam Collins knew she must have planned it a long time in advance. She had filled up the bathtub with milk, real milk, and she went in after she had done it and took a bath in the milk. Then she slit her wrists. When Sam Collins had run down the stairs, screaming, and barged into the bathroom, he had found the tub looking like a giant stick of peppermint candy. A unt Amy had been good to him. Because he didn't talk for about a year after he found the bodies, most people thought he was simple-minded. But Aunt Amy had always treated him just like a regular boy. That was embarrassing sometimes, but still it was better than what he got from the others. The doctor hadn't wanted to perform the operation on his clubfoot. He said it would be an unproductive waste of his time and talent, that he owed it to the world to use them to the very best advantage. Finally he agreed. The operation took about thirty seconds. He stuck a knife into Sam's foot and went snick-smck. A couple of weeks later, his foot was healed and it was just like anybody else's. Aunt Amy had paid him # in pay- ments, only he returned the money order for the last fifty dollars and wished them Merry Christmas. Sam Collins could work after that. When Aunty Amy and Uncle Ralph disappeared, he opened up the old house and started doing odd jobs for people who weren't very afraid of him any more. That first day had been quite a shock, when he discovered that not in all these years had anybody cleaned the bathtub. Sometimes, when he was taking his Saturday night soaker he still got kind of a funny feeling. But he knew it was only rust from the faucets, Collins sighed. It seemed like a long time since he had seen his mother coming down those stairs... He stopped, his throat aching with tightness. Something was very strange. His mother was coming down the stairs right now. She was walking down the stairs, one step, two steps, coming closer to him. Collins ran up the stairs, prepared to run through the phantom to prove it wasn't there. The figure raised a gun and pointed it at him. This time, she was going to shoot him. It figured. He always had bad luck. Stop!" the woman on the stairs said. "Stop or I'll shoot, Mr. Collins !" ing to the bannister. He squinted hard, and as a stereoptic slide lost its depth when you shut one eye, the woman on the stairs was no longer his mother. She was young, pretty, brunette and sweet-faced, and the gun she held shrunk from an old Army Colt to a .# target pistol. "Who are you?" Collins demanded. The girl took a grip on the gun with both hands and held it steady on him. "I'm Nancy Comstock," she said. "You tried to assault my mother a half hour ago." "Oh," he said. "I've never seen you before." "Yes, you have. I've been away to school a lot, but you've seen me around. I've had my eye on you. I know about men like you. I know what has to be done. I came looking for you in your house for this." The bore of the gun was level with his eye as he stood a few steps below her. Probably if she fired now, she would kill him. Or more likely he would only be blinded or paralyzed; that was about his luck. "Are you going to use that gun?" he asked. "Not unless I have to. I only brought it along for pro# tection. I came to help you. Mr. Collins." "Help me?"  Yes, Mr. Collins. You're sick. You need help." He looked the girl over. She was a half-dozen years younger than he was. In most states, she couldn't even vote yet. But still, maybe she could help, at that. He didn't know much about girls and their abilities. "Why don't we go into the kitchen and have some coffee?" Collins suggested. Ill N ancy sipped her coffee and kept her eyes on his. The gun lay in her lap. The big kitchen was a place for coffee, brown and black, wood ceiling and iron stove and pans. Collins sat across the twelve square feet of table from her, and nursed the smoking mug. "Sam, I want you to take whatever comfort you can from the fact that I don't think the same thing about you as the rest of Waraxe." "What does the rest of the town think about me?" "They think you are a pathological degenerate who should be lynched. But I don't believe that." "Thanks. That's a big comfort." "I know what you were after when you tore Mom's dress." In spite of himself. Collins by Jim Harmon felt his face warming in a blush. "You were only seeking the mother love you missed as a boy," the girl said. Collins chewed on his lip a moment, and considered the idea. Slowly he shook his head. "No," he said. "No. I don't think so." "Then what do you think ?" "I think old Doc Candle made me do it. He said he was going to bury me. Getting me lynched would be one good way to do it. Ed Michaels almost blew my head off with his shotgun. It was close. Doc Candle almost made it. He didn't miss by far with you and that target pistol either." "Sam -- I may call you 'Sam'? -- just try to think calmly and reasonably for a minute. How could Dr. Candle, the undertaker, possibly make you do a thing like you did in Mr. Michaels' hardware store?" "Well... he said he was a superhuman alien from outer space." "If he said that, do you believe him, Sam?" Something made me do that. It just wasn't my own idea." "It's easier that way, isn't it, Sam?" Nancy asked. "It's easy to say. Tt wasn't me ; some space monster made me do it.' But you really know better, don't you, Sam? Don't take the easy way out! You'll only get deeper and deeper into your makebelieve world. It will be like quicksand. Admit your mistakes -- face up to them -- lick them" Collins stood up, and came around the end of the table. "You're too pretty to be so serious all the time," he said. Please don't spoil it by misinterpreting my intentions." "You should get a little fun out of life," Collins listened to himself say. He came on around the big table tovards her. The first time he hadn't realized what was happening, but this time he knew. Somebody was pulling strings and making him jump. He had as much control as Charlie McCarthy. "Don't come any closer, Sam." Nancy managed to keep her voice steady, but he could tell she was frightened. He took another step. She threw her coffee in his face. The liquid was only lukewarm but the sudden dash had given him some awareness of his own body again, like the first sound of the alarm faintly pressing through deep layers of sleep. "Sam, Sam, please don't make me do it! Please, Sam, don"tr Nancy had the gun in her hand, rising from her chair. His hands wanted to grab her clothes and tear. But that's suicide, he screamed at his body. As his hand went up with the intention of ripping, he deflected it just enough to shove the barrel of the gun away from him. The shot went off, but he knew instantly that it had not hit him. The gun fell to the floor, and with its fall, something else dropped away and he was in command of himself again. Nancy sighed, and slumped against him, the left side of her breast suddenly glossy with blood. E d Michaels stared at him. Both eyes unblinking, just staring at him. He had only taken one look at the girl lying on the floor, blood all over her chest. He hadn't looked back. 'T didn't know who else to call, Ed." Collins said. "Sheriff Thurston being out of town and all." "It's okay, Sam. Mike swore me in as a special deputy a couple years back. The badge is at the store." "They'll hang me for this, won't they, Ed?" Michaels put his hand on Collins' shoulder. "No, they won't do that to you, boy. We know you around here. They'll just put you away for a while." "The asylum at Hannah, huh?" "Damn it, yes! What did you expect? A marksman medal?" "Okay, Ed, okay. Did you call Doc Van der Lies like I told you when I phoned?" Michaels took a folded white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his squarejawed face. "You sure are taking this calm, Sam. I'm telling you, Sam, it would look better for you if you at least acted like you were sorry... Doc Van der Lies is up in Wisconsin with Mike. I called Doc Candle." "He's an undertaker," Collins whispered. "Don't you expect we need one?" Michaels asked. Then as if he wasn't sure of the answer to his own question, he said, "Did you examine her to see if she was dead? I -- I don't know much about vomen. I wouldn't be able to tell." It didn't sound like a very good excuse to Collins. "I guess she's dead," Collins said. "That's the way he must have wanted it." He? Wait a minute, Sam. You mean you've got one of those split personalities like that girl on TV the other night? There's somebody else inside you that takes over and makes you do things?" "I never thought of it just like that before. I guess that's one way to look at it." The knock shook the back door before Michaels could say anything. The door by Jim Harmon opened and Doc Candle slithered in disjointedly, a rolledup stretcher over his shoulder. "Hello, boys," Candle said. "A terrible accident, it brings sorrow to us all. Poor Nancy. Has the family been notified?" "Good gosh, I forgot about it," Michaels said. "But maybe we better wait until you get her -- arranged, huh. Doc?" laid the canvas stretcher out beside the girl on the floor and unrolled it. He flipped the body over expertly like a window demonstrator flipping a pancake over on a griddle. "Ed, if you'd just take the front. I'll carry the rear. My vehicle is in the alley." "Sam, you carry that end for Doc. You're a few years younger." Collins wanted to say that he couldn't, but he didn't have enough yet to argue with. He picked up the stretcher and looked down at the white feet in the Scotch plaid slippers. Candle opened the door and waited for them to go through. The girl on the stretcher parted her lips and rolled her head back and forth, a puzzled expression of pain on her face. Collins nearly dropped the stretcher, but he made himself hold on tight "Ed! Doc! She moved! She's still alive "Cut that out now, Sam," Ed Michaels snapped. "Just carry your end." "She's alive," Collins insisted. "She moved again. Just turn around and take a look, Ed. That's all I ask." "I hefted this thing once, and that's enough. You move, Sam. I've got a .# in my belt, and I went to Rome, Italy, for the Olympics about the time you were getting yourself born, Sam. I ought to be able to hit a target as big as you. Just go ahead and do as you're told." Collins turned desperately towards Candle. Maybe Nancy had been right, maybe he had been imagining things. "Doc, you take a look at her," Collins begged. The old man vibrated over to the stretcher and looked down. The girl twisted in pain, throwing her head back, head of the stretcher.  "Rigor mortis," Doc Candle diagnosed, with a wink to Collins. "No, Doc ! She needs a doctor, blood transfusions..." snapped. "I'll take her in my black wagon up to my place, put her in the tiled basement. I'll pump out all her blood and flush it down the commode. Then I'll feed in Formaldi-Forever Number Zero Formaldi-Forever, for at the Blush of Death. 'When you think of a Pretty Girl, think of Formaldi-Forever, the Way to Preserve that Beauty.' Then I'll take a needle and some silk thread and just a few stitches on the eyelids and around the mouth... "Doc, will you...?" Michaels said faintly. "Of course. I just wanted to show Sam how foolish he was in saying the Beloved was still alive." Nancy kicked one leg off the stretcher and Candle picked it up and tucked it back in. "Ed, if you'd just turn around and look" Collins said. "I don't want to have to look at your face, you murdering son. You make me, you say one more word, and I'll turn around and shoot you between the eyes." Doc Candle nodded. Collins knew then that Michaels really would shoot him in the head if he said anything more, so he kept quiet. Candle held the door. They managed to get the stretcher down the back steps, and right into the black panel truck. They fitted the stretcher into the special sockets for it, and Doc Candle closed the double doors and slapped his dry palm down on the sealing crevice. Instantly, there was an answering knock from inside the truck, a dull echo. Collins asked. "Hear what?" Michaels said. "What are you hearing now, Sam?" Candle inquired solicitously. "Oh. Sure," Michaels said. "Kind of a voice, wasn't it, Sam? Didn't understand what it said. Wasn't listening too close, not like you." Thud-thud-thump-thud, "No voice," Collins whispered. "That infernal sound, don't you hear it, Ed?" "I must hurry along." the undertaker said. "Must get ready to work on Nancy, get her ready for her parents to see." "All right, Doc. I'll take care of Sam." "Where you going to jail me, Ed?" Collins asked, his eyes on the closed truck doors. "In your storeroom like you did Hank Petrie?" Michaels' face suddenly began to work. "Jail? Jail you? Jail's too good for you. Doc, have you got a tow rope in that truck?" Ed Michaels was the best shot in town, probably one of the best marksmen in the world. He had been in the Olympics about thirty years ago. He was Waraxe's one claim to fame. But he wasn't a cowboy. He wasn't a fast draw. Collins put all of his weight behind hie left fist and landed it on the point of Michaels' jaw, just the way by Jim Harmon he used to do when gangs of boys jumped onto him. Michaels sprawled out, spread-eagled. Then Collins wanted to take the revolver out of Ed's belt, and press it into Ed's hand, curling his fingers around the grip and over the trigger, and then he wanted to shake Ed awake, slap his face and shake him... Collins spun around, clawed open the door to the truck cab and threw himself behind the steering wheel. He stopped wanting to make Ed Michaels shoot him. He flipped the ignition switch, levered the floor shift and drove away. And he was going to drive on and on and on and on. And on and on and on. IV old McHenty blacktop, his foot pressed to the floorboards. Ed Michaels didn't own a car ; he would have to borrow one from somebody. That would take time. Maybe Candle would give him his hearse to use to follow the Black Rachel. Trees, fences, barns whizzed past the windows of the cab and then the steel linkmesh fence took up, the fence surrounding the New Kansas National Spaceport. Behind it, further from town, some of the concrete had been poured and the horizon was a remote, sterile gray sweep. The McHenty Road would soon be closed to civilian traffic. But right now that the government wanted people to drive along and see that the spaceship was nothing terrible, nothing to fear. The girl, Nancy Comstock, was alive in the back. He knew that. But he couldn't stop to prove it or to help her. Candle would make them lynch him first. Vhy hadn't Candle stopped him from getting away? He had managed to break his control for a second. He had done that before when he deflected Nancy's aim. But he couldn't resist Candle for long. Why hadn't Candle made him turn around and come back? Candle's control of him had seemed to stop when he got inside the cab of the truck. Could it be that the metal shield of the cab could protect an Earthling from the strange mental powers of the creature from another planet which was inhabiting the body of Doc Candle? Collins shook his head. More likely Candle was doing this just to get his hopes up. He probably would seize control of him any time he wanted to. But Collins decided to go on playing it as if he did have some hope, as if a shield of metal could protect him from Candle's control. Otherwise...there was no otherwise. By Jim Harmon opening. The steel mesh fence was ruptured by a huge semitrailer truck turned on its side. Twenty feet of fence on either side was down. This was restricted government property, but of course spaceships were hardly prime military secrets any longer. Repairs in the fence had not been made instantaneously, and the wreckage was not guarded. Collins swerved the wheel and drove the old wagon across the waffle-plate obstruction, onto the smooth tarmac beyond. He raced, raced, raced through the falling night, not sure where he was headed. Up above he saw the shelter of shadows from a cluster of half-finished buildings. He drove into them and parked. Collins sat still for a moment, then threw open the door and ran around to the back of the truck, jerking open the handles. Nancy fell out into his arms. 'What kind of ambulance is this?" she demanded. 'Tt doesn't look like an ambulance. It doesn't smell like an ambulance. It looks like -- looks like -- " Collins said, "Shut up. Get out of there. We've got to hide." "Why?" "They think I murdered "Murdered me? But I'm alive. CanH they see Fm alive?" Collins shook his head. 'T doubt it. I don't know why, but I don't think it would be that simple. Come with me." The blood on her breast had dried, and he could see it was only a shallow groove dug by the bullet. But she flinched in pain as she began to walk, pulling the muscles. They stopped and leaned against a half-finished metallic shed. "Where are we? Where are you taking me?" "This is the spaceport. Now shut up." "Let me go." "No." "I'm not dead," Nancy insisted. "You know I'm not dead. I won't press charges against you -- just let me go free." "I told you it wasn't that simple. He wants them to think you're dead, and that's what they'll think." Nancy passed fingers across her eyes. "Who? Who are you talking about?" "Doc Candle. He won't let them know you're alive." Nancy rubbed her forehead with both hands. "Sam, you don't know what you're doing. You don't -- know what you're getting yourself into. Just let me show myself to someone. They'll know I'm not dead. Really they will." "Okay," he said. "Let's find somebody.' H e led her toward a more nearly completed building, showing rectangles of light. They looked through the windows to see several men in uniforms bending over blueprints on a desk juryr i g g e d of sawhorses and planks. "Scun,' Nancy said, 'one of those men is Terry Elston. He's a Waraxe boy. I went to school with him. He'll know me. Let's go in..." "No," Collins said. "We don't go in." "But -- " Nancy started to protest, but stopped. "Wait. He's coming out." Collins slid along the wall and stood behind the door. "Tell him who you are when he comes out. I'll stay here." They waited. After a few seconds, the door opened. Nancy stepped into rectangle of light thrown on the concrete from the window. "Terry," she said. "Terry, it's me -- Nancy Comstock." The blue-jawed young man in uniform frowned. "Who did you say you were? Have you got clearance from this area?" "It's me, Terry. Nancy. Nancy Comstock." Terry Elston stepped front and center. "That's not a very good joke. I knew Nancy. Hell of a way to die, killed by some maniac." "Terry, Fm Nancy. Don't you recognize me?" Elston squinted. "You look familiar. You look a little like Nancy. But you can't be her, because she's dead." "I'm here, and I tell you I'm not dead." "Nancy's dead," Elston repeated mechanically. "Say, what are you trying to pull?" "Terry, behind you. A maniac!" "Sure," Elston said. "Sure. There's a maniac behind me." Collins stepped forward and hit Elston behind the ear. He fell silently. Nancy stared down at him. "He refused to recognize me. He acted like I was crazy, pretending to be Nancy Cornstock." "Come on along," Collins urged. "They'll probably shoot us on sight as trespass...  ers. She looked around herself without comprehension. "Which way?" 'This way." Collins did not say those words. They were said by the man with the gun in the uniform like the one worn by Elston. He motioned impatiently, "This way, this way." priority," Colonel Smith-Boerke said as he paced back and forth, gun in hand. From time to time he waved it threateningly at Collins and Nancy who sat on the couch in Smith-Boerke's office. They had been sitting for close to two hours. Collins now knew the Colonel by Jim Harmoil did not intend to turn him over to the authorities. They were being held for reasons of Smith-Boerke's own. "They sneak the ship in here, plan for an unscheduled hop from an uncompleted base -- the strictest security weVe used in ten or fifteen years -- and now they cancel it. This is bound to get leaked by somebody! They'll call it off. It'll never fly now." Collins sat quietly. He had been listening to this all evening. Smith-Boerke had been drinking, although it wasn't very obvious. Smith-Boerke t u rn e d to Collins. "I've been waiting for somebody like you. Just waiting for you to come along. And here you are, a wanted fugitive, completely in my power! Perfect, perfect." Collins nodded to himself. Of course. Colonel SmithBoerke had been waiting for him. And Doc Candle had driven him right to him. It was inescapable. He had been intended to escape and turn up right here all along. "What do you want with me?" Smith-Boerke's flushed face brightened. "You want to become a hero? A hero so big that all these trumped-up charges against you will be dropped? It'll be romantic. Back to Lindbergh-to-Paris. Tell me, Collins, how would you like to be the first man to travel faster than light?" Collins knew there was no way out. "All right," he said. Smith-Boerke wiped a hand across his dry mouth. "Project Silver has to come off. My whole career depends on it. You don't have anything to do. Everything's cybernetic. Just ride along and prove a human being can survive. Nothing to it. No hyperdrives, none of that kind of stuff. We had an engine that could go half lightspeed and now we've made it twice as efficient and more. No superstitions about Einstein, I hope? No? Good." "I'll go," Collins said. "But what if I had said 'no'." Smith-Boerke put the gun away in a desk drawer. "Then you could have walked out of here, straight into the MP's." "Why didn't they come in here after me?" "They don't have security clearance for this building." "Don't leave me alone," Nancy said urgently. "I don't understand what's happening. I feel so helpless. I need help." "You're asking the wrong man," Collins said briefly. the airlock kissed shut its metal lips. It was not like the house, but yet he felt safe, surrounded by all the complicated, expensive electronic equipment. It was big, solid, sterilely gleaming. Another thing -- he had reason to believe that Doc Candle's power could not reach him through metal. "But I'm not outside," Doc Candle said, "I'm in here, with you." Collins yelled and cursed, he tried to pull off the acceleration webbing and claw through the airlock. Nobody paid any attention to him. Count downs had been automated. Smith-Boerke was handling this one himself, and he cut off the Audio-In switch from the spaceship. Doc Candle said nothing else for a moment, and the spaceship, almost an entity itself, went on with its work. The faster-than-light spaceship took off. At first it was like any other rocket takeoff. The glow of its exhaust spread over the field of the spaceport, then over the hills and valleys, and then the town of Waraxe, spreading illumination even as far as Sam Collins' silent house. After a time of being sick, Collins lay back and accepted this too. "That's right, that's it," Doc Candle said. "Take it and die with it. That's the ticket." Collins' eyes settled on a gauge. Three quarters lightspeed. Climbing. Nothing strange nothing untoward happened when you reached lightspeed. It was only an arbitrary number. All else was superstition. Forget it, forget it, forget it. Something was telling him that. At first he thought it was Doc Candle but then he knew it was the ship. Collins sat back and took it, and what he was taking was death. It was creeping over him, seeping into his feet, a sponge. Not will, but curiosity, caused him to turn his head. He saw Doc Candle. The old body was dying. He was in the emergency seat, broken, a ribbon of blood lacing his chin. But Doc Candle continued to laugh triumphantly in Collins' head. "Why? Why do you have to kill me?" Collins asked. "Because I am evil." "How do you know you're evil?" "They told me soT Candle shouted back in the thundering silence of Death's approach. "They were always saying I was bad." They. something incredibly old and incredibly wise, but long unused to the young, clumsy gods. Something that could mar the molding of a godling and make it mortal. "Blit I'm not really so very bad" Doc Candle went on. bx Jim Harmon "I had to destroy, but I picked someone who really didn't care if he were destroyed or not. An almost absolutely passive human being, Sam. You." Collins nodded. "And even then," said the superhuman alien from outer space, "I could not just destroy. I have created a work of art." "Work of art?" "Yes. I have taken your life and turned it into a hordemonic, black-hearted horror !" Collins nodded again. There was finally something human within Sam Collins that he could not deny. He wanted to live. It wasn't true. He did care what happened. You do? said somebody. He does? asked somebody else, surprised, and suddenly he again got the image of wiser, older creatures, a little ashamed because of what they had done to the creature named Doc Candle. He does, chorused several voices, and Sam Collins cried aloud: "I do! I want to live!" They were just touching lightspeed; he felt it. This time it was not just a biological response. He really wanted help. He wanted to stay alive. From the older, wiser voices he got help, though he never knew how; he felt the ship move slipwise under him, and then a crash. And Doc Candle got help too, the only help even the older, wiser ones could give him. the combined wreckage of the spaceship and his house. Both were demolished. It was strange how the spaceship Sam Collins was on crashed right into his house. Ed Michaels recalled a time in a tornado when Sy Baxter's car was picked up, lifted across town and dropped into his living room. When the men from the spaceport lifted away tons of rubble, they found him and said, "He's dead." No, I'm not, Collins thought. I'm alive. And then they saw that he really was alive, that he had come through it alive somehow, and nobody remembered anything like it since the airliner crash in '#. A while later, after they found Doc Candle's body and c o u r t-m a r t i a I e d SmithBoerke, who took drugs, Nancy was nuzzling him on his hospital bed. It was nice, but he wasn't paying much attention. I'm free, Collins thought as the girl hugged him. Free! He kissed her. Well, he thought while she was kissing him back, as free as I want to be, anyway. By H. B. Fyfe Dong vines! Beats all how some plants have no manners -- but what do you expect, when they used to be men! A ll things considered -- the obscure star, the undetermined damage to the stellar drive and the way the small planet's murky atmosphere defied precision scanners -- the pilot made a reasonably good landing. Despite sour feelings for the space service of Haurtoz, steward Peter Kolin had to admit that casualties might have been far worse. Chief Steward Slichow led his little command, less two third-class ration keepers thought to have been trapped in the lower hold, to a point two hundred meters from the steaming hull of the Peace State, He lined them up as if on parade. Kolin made himself inconspicuous. #J) "Since the crew will be on emergency watches repairing the damage," announced the Chief in clipped, aggressive tones, "I have volunteered my section for preliminary scouting, as is suitable. It may be useful to discover temporary sources in this area of natural foods." thought Kolin rebelliously. Like the Supreme Director of Haurtoz! Being conscript ed into this idiotic space fleet that never fights is bad enough without a tin god on jets like Slichow! Prudently, he did not express this resentment overtly. His well-schooled features revealed no trace of the idea -- or of any other idea. The Planetary State of Haurtoz had been organized some fifteen light-years from old Earth, but many of the home world's less kindly techniques had been employed. Lack of complete loyalty to the state was likely to result in a siege of treatment that left the subject suitably "re-personalized.' Kolin had heard of instances wherein mere unenthusiastic posture had betrayed intentions to harbor treasonable thoughts. "You will scout in five details of three persons each," Chief Slichow said. "Every hour, each detail will send one person in to report, and he will be replaced by one of the five I shall keep here to issue rations." Kolin permitted himself to wonder when anyone might get some rest, but assumed a ger an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at least, was the official line. Kolin found himself in a group with Jak Ammet, a third cook, and Eva Yrtok, powdered foods storekeeper. Since the crew would be eating packaged rations during repairs, Yrtok could be spared to command a scout detail. EUich scout ms issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the Chief's sharp stare measured them. Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced girl, led the way with a quiet monosyllable. She carried the small radio they would be permitted to use for messages of utmost urgency. Ammet followed, and Kolin brought up the rear. T O reach their assigned sector, they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronzegreen reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest was in sight. Yrtok and Ammet paused momentarily before descending. Kolin shared their sense of isolation. They would be out of sight of authority and responsible for their own ac tions. It was a strange sensa tion. They marched down into the valley at a brisk pace, becoming more aware of the clouds and atmospheric haze. Distant objects seemed blurred by the mist, taking on #t a somber, brooding grayness. For all Kolin could tell, he and the others were isolated in a world bounded by the rocky ridge behind them and a semi-circle of damp trees and bushes several hundred meters away. He suspected that the hills rising mistily ahead were part of a continuous slope, but could not be sure. Yrtok led the w?.y along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of tiny spores. "Be a job to find anything edible here," grunted Ammet, and Kolin agreed. Finally, after a longer hike than he had anticipated, they approached the edge of the deceptively distant forest. Yrtok paused to examine some purple berries glistening dangerously on a low shrub. Kolin regarded the trees with misgiving. "Looks as tough to get through as a tropical jungle," he remarked. "I think the stuff puts out shoots that grow back into the ground to root as they spread," said the woman. "Maybe we can find a way through." In two or three minutes, they reached the abrupt bor der of the odd-looking trees. Except for one thick trunked giant, all of them were about the same height. They craned their necks to estimate the altitude of the monster, but the top was hidden by the wide spread of branches. The depths behind it looked dark and impenetrable. "We'd better explore along the edge," decided Yrtok. "Ammet, now is the time to go back and tell the Chief which way we're -- Ammet! Kolin looked over his shoulder. Fifty meters away, Ammet sat beside the bush with the purple berries, utterly relaxed. "He must have tasted some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll see how he is." He ran back to the cook and shook him by the shoulder. Ammet's head lolled loosely to one side. His rather heavy features were vacant, lending him a doped appearance. Kolin straightened up and beckoned to Yrtok. For some reason, he had trouble attracting her attention. Then he noticed that she was kneeling. "Hope she didn't eat some stupid thing too!" he grumbled, trotting back. As he reached her, whatever Yrtok was examining came to life and scooted into the underbrush with a flash of greenish fur. All Kolin saw was that it had several legs too many. He pulled Yrtok to her feet. She pawed at him weakly, eyes as vacant as Ammet's. When he let go in sudden horror, she folded gently to the ground. She lay comfortably on her side, twitching one hand as if to brush something away. When she began to smile dreamily, Kolin backed away. T he comers of his mouth felt oddly stiff; they had involuntarily drawn back to expose his clenched teeth. He glanced warily about, but nothing appeared to threaten him. "It's time to end this scout," he told himself. "It's dangerous. One good look and I'm jetting off! What I need is an easy tree to climb." He considered the massive giant. Soaring thirty or forty meters into the thin fog and dwarfing other growth, it seemed the most promising choice. At first, Kolin saw no way, but then the network of vines clinging to the rugged trunk suggested a route. He tried his weight gingerly, then began to climb. "I should have brought Yrtok's radio," he muttered. "Oh, well, I can take it when I come down, if she hasn't snapped out of her spell by then. Funny... I wonder if that green thing bit her." Footholds were plentiful among the interlaced lianas, Kolin progressed rapidl When he reached the first thick limbs, twice head height, he felt safer. Later, at what he hoped was the halfway mark, he hooked one knee over a branch and paused to wipe sweat from his eyes. Peering down, he discovered the ground to be obscured by foliage. "I should have checked from down there to see how open the top is," he mused. "I wonder how the view will be from up there?" "Depends on what you're looking for, Sonny !" something remarked in a soughing wheeze. Kolin, slipping, grabbed desperately for the branch. His fingers clutched a handful of twigs and leaves, which just barely supported him until he regained a grip with the other hand. The branch quivered resentfully under him. "Careful, there!" whooshed the eerie voice. "It took me all summer to grow those!" Kolin could feel the skin crawling along his backbone. "Who are you?" he gasped. The answering sigh of laughter gave him a distinct chill despite its suggestion of amiabilty. "Name's Johnny Ashlew. Kinda thought you'd start with what I am. Didn't figure you'd ever seen a man grown into a tree before." Kolin looked about, seeing little but leaves and fog, have to climb down" he El told himself in a reasonable tone. "It's bad enough that the other two passed out without me going space happy too." "What's your hurry?" demanded the voice. "I can talk to you just as easy all the way down, you know. Airholes in my bark -- I'm not like an Earth tree." Kolin examined the bark of the crotch in which he sat. It did seem to have assorted holes and hollovs in its rough surface. "I never saw an Earth tree," he admitted. "We came from Haurtoz." "Where's that? Oh, never mind -- some little planet. I don't bother with them all, since I came here and found out I could be anything I wanted." "What do you mean, anything you wanted?" asked Kolin, testing the firmness of a vertical vine. J tinned the voice, sounding closer in his ear as his cheek brushed the ridged bark of the tree trunk. "And, if I do have to remind you, it would be nicer if you said 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my age." "Your age? How old -- ?" "Can't really count it in Earth years any more. Lost track. I always figured bein' a tree was a nice, peaceful life; and when I remembered how long some of them live, that settled it Sonny, this world ain't all it looks like." "It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?" asked Kolin, twisting about in an effort to see what the higher branches might hide. "Nope. Most everything here is run by the Life -- that is, by the thing that first grew big enough to do some thinking, and set its roots down all over until it had control. That's the outskirts of it down below." "The other trees? That jungle?" "It's more'n a jungle. Sonny. When I landed here, along with the others from the Arcturan Spark, the planet looked pretty empty to me, just like it must have to -- Watch it, there. Boy! If I didn't twist that branch over in time, you'd be bouncing off my roots right now!" "Th-thanks !" grunted Kolin, hanging on grimly. "Doggone vine!" commented the windy whisper. He ain't one of my crowd. Landed years later in a ship from some star towards the center of the galaxy. You should have seen his looks before the Life got in touch with his mind and set up a mental field to help him change form. He looks twice as good as a vine !" "He's very handy," agreed Kolin politely. He groped for a foothold. "Well...matter of fact, I can't get through to him much, even with the Life's mental field helping. Guess he started living with a different way of thinking. It burns me. I thought of being a tree, and then he came along to take advantage of it!" Kolin braced himself securely to stretch tiring muscles. "Maybe I'd better stay a while," he muttered. "I don't know where I am." "You're about fifty feet up," the sighing voice informed him. "You ought to let me tell you how the Life helps you change form. You don't have to be a tree." "No?" Uh-uh Some of the boys that landed with me wanted to get around and see things. Lots changed to animals or birds. One even stayed a man -- on the outside anyway. Most of them have to change as the bodies wear out, which I don't, and some made bad mistakes tryin' to be things they saw on other planets." "I wouldn't want to do that, Mr. Ashlew." "There's just one thing. The Life don't like taking chances on word about this place gettin' around. It sorta believes in peace and quiet. You might not get back to your ship in any form that could tell tales." "Listen!" Kolin blurted out. "I wasn't so much enjoying being what I was that getting back matters to me!" "Don't like your home planet, whatever the name was?" "H a u r t o z. It's a rotten Tiie Talkatve Tree place. A Planetary State! You have to think and even look ' the way that's standard thirty hours a day, asleep or awake. You get scared to sleep for fear you might dream treason and they'd find out somehow." "Whooeee ! Heard about them places. Must be tough just to live." Suddenly, Kolin found himself telling the tree about life on Haurtoz, and of the officially announced threats to the Planetary State's planned expansion. He dwelt upon the desperation of having no place to hide in case of trouble with the authorities. A multiple system of such worlds was agonizing to imagine. talking to a tree wore off. Kolin heard opinions spouting out which he had prudently kept bottled up for years. The more he talked and stormed and complained, the more relaxed he felt. "If there was ever a fellow ready for this planet," decided the tree named Ashlew, "you're it, Sonny! Hang on there while I signal the Life by root!" Kolin sensed a lack of direct attention. The rustic about him was natural, caused by an ordinary breeze. He noticed his h#Uids shaking. "Don't know what got into me, talking that way to a tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok snapped out of it and heard, I'm as good as re-personalized right now." As he brooded upon the sorry choice of arousing a search by hiding where he was or going back to bluff things out, the tree spoke. "Maybe you're all set. Sonny. The Life has been thinkin' of learning about other worlds. If you can think of a safe form to jet off in, you might make yourself a deal. How'd you like to stay here?" "I don't know," said Kolin. "The penalty for desertion -- " "Whoosh! Who'd fin'd you? You could be a bird, a tree, even a cloud." Silenced but doubting, Kolin permitted himself to try the dream on for size. He considered what form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming hatred for Haurtoz. rd better watch myself! he thought. Dont drop diamonds to grab at stars! "What I wish I could do is not just get away but get even for the way they make us live... the whole danm set-up. They could just as easy make peace with the Earth colonies. You know why they don't?" "Why?" wheezed Ashlew. "They're scared that without talk of war, and scouting for Earth fleets that never come, people would have time to think about the way they have to live and who's running things in the Planetary State. Then the gravy train would get blown up -- and I mean blown up!" The tree was silent for a moment. Kolin felt the branches stir meditatively. Then Ashlew offered a suggestion. "I could tell the Life your side of it," he hissed. "Once in with us, you can always make thinking connections, no matter how far away. Maybe you could make a deal to kill two birds with one stone, as they used to say on Earth..." paced up and down beside the ration crate turned up to serve him as a field desk. He scowled in turn, impartially, at his watch and at the weary stewards of his headquarters detail. The latter stumbled about, stacking and distributing small packets of emergency rations. The line of crewmen released temporarily from repair work was transient as to individuals but immutable as to length. Slichow muttered something profane about disregard of orders as he glared at the rocky ridges surrounding the landing place. He was so intent upon planning greetings with which to favor the tardy scouting parties that he failed to notice the loose cloud drifting over the ridge. It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze faded raggedly into thin air, but the units evidently formed a cohesive body. They drifted together, approaching the men as if taking intelligent advantage of the breeze. One of Chief Slichow's staggering flunkies, stealing a few seconds of relaxation on the pretext of dumping an armful of light plastic packing, wandered into the haze. He froze. After a few heartbeats, he dropped the trash and stared at ship and men as if he had never seen either, A hail from his master moved him. "Coming, Chief!" he called but, returning at a moderate pace, he murmured, "My name is Frazer. I'm a second assistant steward. I'll think as Unit One." Throughout the cloud of spores, the mind formerly known as Peter Kolin congratulated itself upon its choice of form. Nearer to the original shape oi the Life than Ash lew got, he thought. He paused to consider the state of the tree named Ashlew, half immortal but rooted to one spot, unable to float on a breeze or through space itself on the pressure of light. Especially, it was unable to insinuate any part of itself into the control center of another form of life, as a second spore was taking charge of the body of Chief Slichow at that very instant. There are not enough men, thought Kolin. Some of me must drift through the air lock. In space, I can spread through the air system to the command group. Repairs to the Peace State and the return to Haurtoz passed like weeks to some of the crew but like brief moments in infinity to other units. At last, the ship parted the air above Headquarters City and landed. The unit known as Captain Theodor Kessel hesitated before descending the ramp. He surveyed the field, the city and the waiting team of inspecting officers. "Could hardly be better, could it?" he chuckled to the companion unit called Security Officer Tarth. "Hardly, sir. All ready for the liberation of Haurtoz." "Reformation of the Planetary State," mused the captain, smiling dreamily as he grasped the handrail. "And then -- formation of the Planetary Mind!" F rom San Francisco, reader Kirsten Eaves writes to pose a question: "Why do people who read Philip Wylie read Theodore Sturgeon? And why do people who read all the Lewis Carroll they can find read both the former?,... Is there a character type that takes naturally to this symbiosis of ideas? Are there vast crowds of these people? I have never to my knowledge met one. Or if this character type is just a product of your literary imagination, what am I?' To answer the last question first and work backwards, I can only say that I invented Reader Eaves to about the same degree as (another reader wrote me of this conviction) I wrote Dianetics, Reader Eaves must therefore answer her own last question. As to the matter of character types, I usually hold myself against categorizations categorically, because of an early and deep conviction that people who begin sentences with "Redheads are -- " or "Hungarians are -- " are about to speak nonsense. Yet as to this matter of character type... I think perhaps she has something. I think she is talking about science fiction people -- readers, writers, editors. (I purposely don't say fen because the field has regular loving readers whom even fen wouldn't call fans: is Gilbert Highet a fan? or Orville Prescott?) I am quite sure, however, that any sf con, whetherference orvention, would afford Reader Eaves the experience of -- to her knowledge -- meeting a large percentage of people who have read what she reads, like what she likes and will listen, as she mentions elsewhere in her letter, to her reciting The Pohhle Who Has No Toes, As to the first question, I have evidence that Sturgeon reads Wylie and I have no doubt that Wylie reads Wylie, but I have as yet no evidence that Wylie reads Sturgeon. This is the kind of thing that makes me back off from categorizations. Reader Eaves isn't through with me yet. Since I frequently mention books read by people in my stories, and music too, she asks, "Perhaps if you can spare the time you can write out a more complete recommended reading list than you include in your stories." I have the time, but not the space; however, I am delighted to be able to mention some of the books which my characters have found influential, and my character as well. Some of them fall into the class of Books That Nobody Has Read but Me, or So It Seems. It's hard to love 'em so much and find them unknown. Others actually do have a certain small readership. There's Wells' Time Ma chine. Dunsany's The Charwomans Shadow. Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers. Arthur Eddison's The Worm Ourohorous. Hudson's Green Mansions. Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris. Wylie's Finniey Wren and Chap. # of The Disappearance. Muriel Spark's Memento Mori. William Morris' Golden Wings. De Quincy's The English Mail-Coach. Karle Wilson Baker's The Garden of the Plynck...these aren't all, by any means, but I've reached the one I wanted to talk about. who has read the Plynck. It was published by Yale University Press in #. It is, if you like, a children's book... which, if you like, Alice in Wonderland also is. A series of adventures of a little girl called Sara who has learned to "go inside her head and shut the doors," it deals with the Garden she finds there, and all its wonders. Something -- and I honestly don't know what -- keeps the book from being impossibly cute. To this day I find it full of lovely twists and surprises. There's a curly path just inside the doors (only on a later visit it was pink instead of curly) which led to the Garden itself, a pool in which there is a tree on which there sits the Plynck, a beautiful, somewhat haughty, but very kind bird. She looks down at the water where her Echo lives. Fluttering about among the branches, more often than not, is a Teacup (a widow; her Saucer was broken some time ago.) There's the Snimmy's wife, who when indignant unscrews and angrily hems a doorknob, and her pet the Snoodle, whose mother was a snail and whose father was a pedigreed noodle, and who has a drawback. The drawback is a little isinglass window in his back which, when you pick him up, draws back and releases the odor of castor oil. There are Zizzes, which fly right into dimples unless you remove same and put them in a dimple-holder. And then "Has any mortal but Sara there never was another fairy so wan and wild and beautiful...she was leaning over the marble balustrade, looking down into Nothing, and one hand still stretched out as if it had just let something fall. She seemed to be still watching its descent. Her body, as she leaned, was like a reed, and her hair was pale-gold and cloudy. But all that was nothing beside Avrilla's eyes. "...It didn't stick," she said... "Do you throw your poems down there?" asked Sara. "I write them on rose-leaves... petals, I mean, all colors, but especially blue. And then I drop them over, and some day one of them may stick to the bottom --  "But there isn't any!" "...But there's an imaginary bottom. One might stick on that, you know. And then, with that to build to, if I drop them in very fast, I may be able to fill it up -- "But there aren't any sides to it either!" exasperation (it showed a little around the edges, like a green petticoat under a black dress). "Oh, these literal people," she said, half to herself... "Isn't it as easy to imagine sides as a bottom? Well... if I write them fast enough to fill it up...somebody a hundred years from now may come along and notice one of my poems; and then I shall be Immortal." And at that a lovely smile   you don't. Me, I never write my congressman or try a new kind of story or argue with a jingoist but I get a ly over the balustrade... and go inside my mind and shut the doors is something I completely understand...and outer space, and hydrogen transformations, and Planck's Constant, live there along with Schlorge at the dimplesmithy -- in a world of things to marvel at, which need not necessarily be understood. end by Theodore Sturgeon Got o problem? Just pick up the phone. It solved them oil -- and oil the some woy! b R I #  # I B I E verything was perfcctly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States was stabilized at One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more. Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine. X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first. Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths. The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die. A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found. The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer. Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners. Never, never, never -- not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan -- had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use. A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath a popular song: If you don't like my kisses, honey, Here's what I will do: I'll go see a girl in purple. Kiss this sad world toodleoo. If you don't want my lovin'. Why should I take up all this space? I'll get off this old planet, Let some sweet baby have my place. The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. "Looks so real," he said, 'T can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it." "What makes you think you're not in it?" said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. "It's called 'The Hapy Garden of Life,' you now." "That's good of Dr. Hitz," said the orderly. H e was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital's Chief Obstetrician. Hitz was a blindingly handsome man. "Lot of faces still to fill in," said the orderly. He meant that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blanks were to be filled with portraits of important people on either the hospital staff or from the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Termination. "Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something," said the orderly. The painter's face curdled with scorn. "You think I'm proud of this daub?" he said. "You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?" "What's your idea of what life looks like?" said the orderly. The painter gestured at a foul dropcloth. "There's a good picture of it," he said. "Frame that, and you'll have by Kurt Vonnegutt Jr. a picture a damn sight more honest than this one' "You're a gloomy old duck, aren't you?" said the orderly. "Is that a crime?" said the painter. The orderly shrugged. "If you don't like it here, Grandpa -- " he said, and he finished the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn't want to live any more were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced "naught." The number was : "# B R O # B." It was the telephone number of an institution whose fanciful sobriquets included : "Automat," "Birdland," "Cannery," "Catbox," "De-louser," "Easy-go," "Good-by, Mother," "Happy Hooligan," "Kissme-quick," "Lucky Pierre," "Sheepdip," "Waring Blendor," "Weep-no-more" and "Why Worry?" "To be or not to be" was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination. T he painter thumbed his nose at the orderly. "When I decide it's time to go," he said, "it won't be at the Sheepdip." "A do-it-yourselfer, eh?" jid the orderly. "Messy business, Grandpa. Why don't you have a little consideration for the people who have to clean up after you?" #BR#B The painter expressed with an obscenity his lack of concern for the tribulations of his survivors. "The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me," he said. The orderly laughed and moved on. Wehling, the waiting father, mumbled something without raising his head. And then he fell silent again. A coarse, formidable woman strode into the waiting room on spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag and overseas cap were all purple, the purple the painter called "the color of grapes on Judgment Day." The medallion on her purple musette bag was the seal of the Service Division of the Federal Bureau of Termination, an eagle perched on a turnstile. The woman had a lot of facial hair -- an unmistakable mustache, in fact. A curious thing about gas-chamber hostesses was that, no matter how lovely and feminine they were when recruited, they all sprouted mustaches within five years or so. "Is this where I'm supposed to come?" she said to the painter. "A lot would depend on what your business was," he said. "You aren't about to have a baby, are you?" "They told me I was supposed to pose for some picture," she said "My name's Leora Duncan' She waited. "And you dunk people' he said. "What?" she said. "Skip it," he said. "That sure is a beautiful picture," she said. "Looks just like heaven or something." "Or something said the painter. He took a list of names from his smock pocket. "Duncan, Duncan, Duncan," he said, scanning the list. "Yes -- here you are. You're entitled to be immortalized. See any faceless body here you'd like me to stick your head on? We've got a few choice ones left," She studied the mural bleakly. "Gee," she said, "they're all the same to me. I don't know anything about art." "A body's a body, eh ?" he said "All righty. As a master of fine art, I recommend this body here." He indicated a faceless figure of a woman who was carrying dried stalks to a trash-burner. "Well," said Leora Duncan, "that's more the disposal people, isn't it? I mean, Fm in service. I don't do any disposing." The painter clapped his hands in mock delight. "You say you don't know anything about art, and then you prove in the next breath that you know more about it than I do ! Of course the sheave-carrier is wrong for a hostess ! A snipper, a pruner -- that's more your line." He pointed to a figure in purple who was sawing a dead branch from an apple tree. "How about her?" he said. "You like her at all?" "Gosh -- " she said, and she blushed and became humble -- "that -- that puts me right next to Dr. Hitz. "That upsets you?" he said. "Good gravy, no!" she said. "It's -- it's just such an honor." "Ah, You admire him, eh?" he said. "Who doesn't admire him?" she said, worshiping the portrait of Hitz. It was the portrait of a tanned, whitehaired, omnipotent Zeus, two hundred and forty years old. "Who doesn't admire him?" she said again. "He was responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago." "Nothing would please me more," said the painter, "than to put you next to him for all time. Sawing off a limb -- that strikes you as appropriate?" "That is kind of like what I do," she said. She was demure about what she did. What she did was make people comfortable while she killed them. A nd, while Leora Duncan was posing for her portrait, into the waitingroom bounded Dr. Hitz himself. He was seven feet tall, and he boomed with importance, accomplishments, and the joy of living. "Well, Miss Duncan! Miss fry Kurt .Vonnegul Jr. Duncan !" he said, and he made a joke. "What are you doing here?" he said. "This isn't where the people leave. This is where they come in !" "We're going to be in the same picture together,' she said shyly. "Good!" said Dr. Hitz heartily. "And, say, isn't that some picture?" "I sure am honored to be in it with you," she said. "Let me tell you," he said, "I'm honored to be in it with you. Without women like you, this wonderful world we've got wouldn't be possible." He saluted her and moved toward the door that led to the delivery rooms. "Guess what was just born," he said. "I can't," she said. "Triplets!" he said. "Triplets!" she said. She was exclaiming over the legal implications of triplets. The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die. Triplets, if they were all to live, called for three volunteers. "Do the parents have three volunteers?" said Leora Duncan. "Last I heard," said Dr. Hitz, "they had one, and were trying to scrape another two up." "I don't think they made it," she said. "Nobody made three appointments with us. Nothing but singles going #BR#B through today, unless somebody called in after I left. What's the name?" "Wehling," said the waiting father, sitting up, redeyed and frowzy. "Edward K, Wehling, Jr., is the name of the happy father-to-be." He raised his right hand, looked at a spot on the wall, gave a hoarsely wretched chuckle. "Present," he said. "Oh, Mr. Wehling," said Dr. Hitz, "I didn't see you." "The invisible man," said Wehling. "They just phoned me that your triplets have been born," said Dr. Hitz. "They're all fine, and so is the mother. I'm on my way in to see them now." "Hooray," said Wehling emptily. "You don't sound very happy," said Dr. Hitz. "What man in my shoes wouldn't be happy?" said Wehling. He gestured with his hands to symbolize carefree simplicity. "All I have to do is pick out which one of the triplets is going to live, then deliver my maternal grandfather to the Happy Hooligan, and come back here with a receipt." D r. Hitz became rather severe with Wehling, towered over him. "You don't believe in population control, Mr. Wehling?" he said. "I think it's perfectly keen," said Wehling tautly. "Would you like to go back B# to the good old days, when the population of the Earth become forty bilHon, then you know what a drupelet is, Mr. Wehling?' said Hitz. "Nope,' said Wehling sulkily. drupelet, Mr. Wehling, is one of the little knobs, one of the little pulpy grains of a blackberry," said Dr. Hitz. "Without population control, human beings would now be packed on this surface of this old planet like drupelets on a blackberry ! Think of itr Wehling continued to stare at the same spot on the wall. "In the year #," said Dr. Hitz, "before scientists stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn't even enough drinking water to go around, and nothing to eat but seaweed -- and still people insisted on their right to reproduce like jackrabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever." "I want those kids," said Wehling quietly. "I want all three of them." "Of course you do," said Dr. Hitz. "That's only human." "I don't want my grandfather to die, either," said Wehling. "Nobody's really happy about taking a close relative to the Catbox," said Dr. Hitz gently, sympathetically. I wish people wouldn't call it that," said Leora Duncan. -What?" said Dr. Hitz. -I wish people wouldn't call it 'the Catbox,' and things like that," she said. "It gives people the wrong impression." "You're absolutely right," said Dr. Hitz. "Forgive me." He corrected himself, gave the municipal gas chambers their official title, a title no one ever used in conversation. "I should have said, 'Ethical Suicide Studios,' " he said. "That sounds so much better," said Leora Duncan. "This child of yours -- whichever one you decide to keep, Mr. Wehling," said Dr. Hitz. "He or she is going to live on a happy, roomy, clean, rich planet, thanks to population control. In a garden like that mural there." He shook his head. "Two centuries ago, when I was a young man, it was a hell that nobody thought could last another twenty years. Now centuries of peace and plenty stretch before us as far as the imagination cares to travel." He smiled luminously. The smile faded as he saw that Wehling had just drawn a revolver. Wehling shot Dr. Hitz dead. "There's room for one -- a great big one," he said. And then he shot Leora Duncan. "It's only death," he said to her as she fell. "There ! Room for two." . by Kurt Vonneguti Jr And then he shot himself, making room for all three of his children. Nobody came running. Nobody, seemingly, heard the shots. The painter sat on the top of his stepladder, looking down reflectively on the sorry scene. T he painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful...to multiply and to live as long as possible -- to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever. All the answers that the painter could think of were grim. Even grimmer, surely, than a Catbox, a Happy Hooligan, an Easy Go. He thought of war. He thought of plague. He thought of starvation. He knew that he would never paint again. He let his paintbrush fall to the dropcloths below. And then he decided he had had about enough of life in the Happy Garden of Life, too, and he came slowly down from the ladder. He took Wehling's pistol, really intending to shoot himself. But he didn't have the nerve. And then he saw the telephone booth in the corner of the room. He went to it, dialed the well-remembered number: '# B R O # B." #BR#B "Federal Bureau of Termination," said the very warm voice of a hostess. "How soon could I get an appointment?" he asked, speaking very carefully. "We could probably fit you in late this afternoon, sir," she said. "It might even be earlier, if we get a cancellation." "All right," said the painter, "fit me in, if you please." And he gave her his name, spelling it out. "Thank you, sir," said the hostess. "Your city thanks you ; your country thanks you; your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from future generations." I April iy# through April #. # complete years condition good to fine #. plete # to #. Some good copies, some poor, some coverless, some fine, and includes # Pound volumes #. a. Complete Oct. # to #I condition very good #. b. Almost complete Dec. # to #I missing a few # issues good condition .#. c. Complete mint set July # to June #I including # single issues bound professionally. A real fine set #. Many other complete sets. Send your want list. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N.Y. #I #th Atc...Brooklyn #, H.Y. # They were the Masters, and they O had only to choose: eternal life, # as inhuman monsters -- or death! # Illustrated bf Beny a m What has gone before: The crew of the starship Orion found themselves in the middle of a great space war between the creatures called Stretts and the lost android servants of their own human ancestors. Helped by the androids, the Earthmen formed themselves into the powerful telepathic linkage called peyondiid" to invade the Strett planet itself. As their minds joined they heard the android Tuly cry out, Good, were out in interstellar space. X H ilton did not have to drive the peyondix-beam to the planet Strett; it was already there. And there was the monstrous First Lord Thinker Zoyar. Into that mind his multiYhind flashed, its every member as responsive to his will as his own fingers -- almost infinitely more so, in fact, because of the tremendous lengths of time required to send messages along nerves. That horrid mind was scanned cell by cell. Then, after what seemed like a few hours, when a shield began sluggishly to form, Hilton transferred his probe to the mind of the Second Thinker, . And then their minds one Lord Ynos, and absorbed ever)rthing she knew. Then, the minds of all the other Thinkers being screened, he studied the whole Stijett planet, foot by foot, and everything that was on it. Then, mission accomplished, Hilton snapped his attention back to his office and the multi-mind fell apart. As he opened his eyes he heard Tuly scream:  Luck!" 'Oh -- you still here, Tuly? How long have we been gone?" Approximately one and one-tenth seconds, sir." Beverly Bell, in the haven of Franklin Poynter's arms, fainted quietly. Sandra shrieked piercingly. The four men stared, goggle-eyed. Temple and Teddy, as though by common thought, burrowed their faces into brawny shoulders. Hilton recovered first. "So thats what peyondix is." "Yes, sir -- I mean no, sir. No, I mean yes, but..." Tuly paused, licking her lips in that peculiarly human-female gesture of uncertainty. "Well, what do you mean? It either is or isn't. Or is that necessarily so?" "Not exactly, sir. That is, it started as peyondix. But it became something else. Not even the most powerful of the old Masters -- nobody -- ever did or ever could possibly generate such a force as that. Or handle it so fast." "Well, with seven of the best minds of Terra and a... "Chip-chop the chit-chat !" Karns said, harshly. "What I want to know is whether I was having a nightmare. Can there possibly be a race such as I thought I saw? So utterly savage -- ruthless -- merciless! So devoid of every human trace and so hell-bent determined on the extermination of every other race in the Galaxy? God damn it, it simply doesn't make sense P E yes went from eyes to eyes to eyes. All had seen the same indescribably horrible, abysmally atrocious, things. Qualities and quantities and urges and drives that no words in any language could even begin to portray. "It doesn't seem to, but there it is." Teddy Blake shook her head hopelessly. Big Bill Karns, hands still shaking, lit a cigarette before he spoke again. "Well, I've never been a proponent of genocide. But it's my considered opinion that the Stretts are one race the galaxy can get along vithout." "A hell of a lot better without," Poynter said, and all agreed. "The point is, what can we do about it?" Kincaid asked. "The first thing, I would say, is to see whether we can do this -- whatever it is -- without Tuly's help. Shall we try it? Although I, for one, don't feel like doing it right away." "Not I, either." Beverly Bell held up her right hand, which was shaking uncontrollably. "I feel as though I'd been bucking waves, wind and tide for forty-eight straight hours without food, water or touch. Maybe in about a week I'll be ready for another try at it. But today -- not a chance !" "Okay. Scat, all of you," Hilton ordered. "Take the rest of the day off and rest up. Put on your thoughtscreens and don't take them off for a second from now on. Those Stretts are tough hombres." Sandra was the last to leave. "And you, boss?" she asked, pointedly. , by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans IVe got some thinking to dor Vll stay and help yon think "Not yet." He shook his head, frowned and then grinned. "You see, chick, I don't even know yet what it is I'm going to have to think about." "A bit unclear, but I know what you mean -- I think. Luck, chief." TN their subterranean sancturn on distant Strett, two of the deepest thinkers of that horribly unbuman race were in coldly intent conference via thought. "My mind has been plundered, Ynos," First Lord Thinker Zo#ar radiated, harshly. "Despite the extremely high reactivity of my shield some information -- I do not know how much -- was taken. The operator was one of the humans of that ship." "I, too, felt a plucking at my mind. But those humans could not peyondire. First Lord." "Be logical, fool! At that contact, in the matter of which you erred in not following up continuously, they succeeded in concealing their real abilities from you." "That could be the truth. Our ancestors erred, then, in recording that all those weak and timid humans had been slain. These offenders are probably their descendants, returning to reclaim their former world." "The probability must be evaluated and considered. Was it or was it not through human aid that the Omans destroyed most of our taskforce?" "Highly probable, but impossible of evaluation with the data now available." "Obtain more data at once. That point must be and shall be fully evaluated and fully considered. This entire situation is intolerable. It must be abated." "True, First Lord. But every operator and operation is now tightly screened. Oh, if I could only go out there myself..." "Hold, fool! Your thought is completely disloyal and unStrettly." "True, oh First Lord Thinker Zoyar. I will forthwith remove my unworthy self from this plane of existence." "You will not! I hereby abolish that custom. Our numbers are too few by far. Too many have failed to adapt. Also, as Second Thinker, your death at this time would be slightly detrimental to certain matters now in work. I will myself, however, slay the unfit. To that end repeat The Words under my peyondiring. "I am a Strett. I will devote my every iota of mental and of physical strength to forwarding the Great Plan. I am, and will remain, a Strett." "You do believe in The Vords." course I believe in them ! I know that in a few more hundreds of thousands of years we will be rid of material bodies and will become invincible and invulnerable. Then comes the Conquest of the Galaxy... and then the Conquest of the Universe !' "No more, then, on your life, of this weak and cowardly repining ! Now, what of your constructive thinking?" "Programming must be such as to obviate time-lag. We must evaluate the factors already mentioned and many others, such as the reactivation of the spacecraft which was thought to have been destroyed so long ago. After having considered all these evaluations, I will construct a Minor Plan to destroy these Omans, whom we have permitted to exist on sufference, and with them that shipload of despicably interloping humans." "That is well." Zoyar's mind seethed with a malevolent ferocity starkly impossible for any human mind to grasp. "And to that end?" "To that end we must intensify still more our program of procuring data. We must revise our mechs in the light of our every technological advance during the many thousands of cycles since the last such revision was made. Our every instrument of power, of offense and of defense, must be brought up to the theoretical ultimate of capability. "And as to the Great Brain?" "I have been able to think of nothing. First Lord, to add to the undertakings you have already set forth." "It was not expected that you would. Now: is it your final thought that these interlopers are in fact the descendants of those despised humans of so long ago?" "It is." "It is also mine. I return, then, to my work upon the Brain. You will take whatever measures are necessary. Use every artifice of intellect and of ingenuity and our every resource. But abate this intolerable nuisance, and soon." "It shall be done. First Lord." T he Second Thinker issued orders. Frenzied, roundthe-clock activity ensued. Hundreds of mechs operated upon the brains of hundreds of others, who in turn operated upon the operators. Then, all those brains charged with the technological advances of many thousands of years, the combined hundreds went unrestingly to work. Thousands of workmechs were built and put to work at the construction of larger and more powerful space-craft. As has been implied, those battle-skeletons of the Stretts were controlled by their own built-in mechanical brains, by Edward E. Smith  E Everett Evans which were programmed for only the simplest of battle maneuvers. Anything at all out of the ordinary had to be handled by remote control, by the specialist-mechs at their two-miles-long control board. This was now to be changed. Programming was to be made so complete that almost any situation could be handled by the warship or the missile itself -- instantly. The Stretts knew that they were the most powerful, the most highly advanced race in the universe. Their science was the highest in the universe. Hence, with every operating unit brought up to the full possibilities of that science, that would be more than enough. Period. This work, while it required much time, was very much simpler than the task which the First Thinker had laid out for himself on the giant computer-plus which the Stretts called "The Great Brain." In stating his project. First Lord Zoyar had said: "Assignment: To construct a machine that will have the following abilities: One, to contain and retain all knowledge and information fed into it, however great the amount. Two, to feed itself additional information by peyondiring all planets, wherever situate, bearing intelligent life. Three, to call up instantly any and all items of information pertaining to any problem we may give it. Four, to combine and recombine any number of items required to form new concepts. Five, to formulate theories, test them and draw conclusions helpful to us in any matter in work." It will have been noticed that these specifications vary in one important respect from those of the Eniacs and Univacs of Earth. Since we of Earth can not peyondire, we do not expect that ability from our computers. The Stretts could, and did. into the office at five o'clock she found Hilton still sitting there, in almost exactly the same position. "Come out of it, Jarve!" She snapped a finger. "That much of that is just simply too damned much." "You're so right, child." He got up, stretched, and by main strength shrugged off his foul mood. "But we're up against something that is really a something, and I don't mean perchance." "How well I know it." She put an arm around him, gave him a quick, hard hug. "But after all, you don't have to solve it this evening, you know." "No, thank God." "So why don't you and Temple have supper with me? Or better yet, why don't all eight of us have supper together in that bachelors' paradise of yours and Bill's?" "That'd be fun." And it was. Nor did it take a week for Beverly Bell to recover from the Ordeal of Eight. On the following evening, she herself suggested that the team should take another shot at that utterly fantastic terra incognita of the multiple mind, jolting though it had been. "But are you sure you can take it again so soon?" Hilton asked. "Sure. I'm like that famous gangster's moll, you know, who bruised easy but healed quick. And I want to know about it as much as anyone else does." They could do it this time without any help from Tuly. The linkage fairly snapped together and shrank instantaneously to a point. Hilton thought of Terra and there it was; full size, yet occupying only one infinitesimal section of a dimensionless point. The multimind visited relatives of all eight, but could not make intelligible contact. If asleep, it caused pleasant dreams; if awake, pleasant thoughts of the loved one so far away in space ; but that was all. It visited mediums, in trance and otherwise -- many of whom, not surprisingly now, were genuine -- with whom it held lucid conversations. Even in linkage, however, the multimind knew that none of the mediums would be believed, even if they all told, simultaneously, exactly the same story. The multi-mind weakened suddenly and Hilton snapped it back to Ardry. Beverly was almost in collapse. The other girls were white, shaken and trembling. Hilton himself, strong and rugged as he was, felt as though he had done two weeks of hard labor on a rock-pile. He glanced questioningly at Larry. "Point six three eight seconds, sir," the Omans said, er. "How do you explain that? Karns demanded. "I'm afraid it means that without Oman backing we're out of luck." H ilton had other ideas, but he did not voice any of them until the following day, when he was rested and had Larry alone. "So carbon-based brains can't take it. One second of that stuff would have killed all eight of us. Why? The Masters had the same kind of brains we have." "I don't know, sir. It's something completely new. No Master, or group of Masters, ever generated such a force as that. I can scarcely believe such power possible, even though I have felt it twice. It may be that over the generations your individual powers, never united or controlled, have developed so much strength that no human brain can handle them in fusion." "And none of us ever knew by Edward E Smith  E Everett Evans anything about any of them. IVe been doing a lot of thinking. The Masters had qualities and abilities now unknown to any of us. How come? You Omans -- and the Stretts, too -- think we're descendants of the Masters. Maybe we are. You think they came originally from Arth -- Earth or Terra -- to Ardu. That'd account for our legends of Mu, Atlantis and so on. Since Ardu was within peyondix range of Strett, the Stretts attacked it. They killed all the Masters, they thought, and made the planet uninhabitable for any kind of life, even their own. But one shipload of Masters escaped and came here to Ardry -- far beyond peyondix range. They stayed here for a long time. Then, for some reason or other -- which may be someplace in their records -- they left here, fully intending to come back. Do any of you Omans know why they left? Or where they went?" '"No, sir. We can read only the simplest of the Masters' records. They arranged our brains that way, sir." 'T know. They're the type. However, I suspect now that your thinking is reversed. Let's turn it around. Say the Masters didn't come from Terra, but from some other planet. Say that they left here because they were dying out. They were, weren't they?" "Yes, sir. Their numbers became fewer and fewer each century." T was suffc of it. They were committing race suicide by letting you Omans do everything they themselves should have been doing. Finally they saw the truth. In a desperate effort to save their race they pulled out, leaving you here. Probably they intended to come back when they had bred enough guts back into themselves to set you Omans down where you belong... "But they were always the Masters, sir!" "They were not ! They were hopelessly enslaved. Think it over. Anyway, say they went to Terra from here. That still accounts for the legends and so on. However, they were too far gone to make a recovery, and yet they had enough fixity of purpose not to manufacture any of you Omans there. So their descendants went a long way down the scale before they began to work back up. Does that make sense to you?" TT explains many things, sir. It can very well be the truth." "Okay. However it was, ve're here, and facing a condition that isn't funny. While ve vere teamed up I learned a lot, but not nearly enough. Am I right in thinking that I now don't need the other seven at all -- that my cells are fully charged and I can go it alone?" "Probably, sir, but..." "I'm coming to that. Every time I do it -- up to maximum performance, of course -- it comes easier and faster and hits harder. So next time, or maybe the fourth or fifth time, it'll kill me. And the other seven, too, if they're along." 'I'm not sure, sir, but I think so." "Nice. Very, very nice." Hilton got up, shoved both hands into his pockets, and prowled about the room. "But can't the damned stuff be controlled? Choked -- throttled down -- damped -- muzzled, some way or other?" "We do not know of any way, sir. The Masters were always working toward more power, not less." "That makes sense. The more power the better, as long as you can handle it. But I can't handle this. And neither can the team. So how about organizing another team, one that hasn't got quite so much whammo? Enough punch to do the job, but not enough to backfire that way?" "It is highly improbable that such a team is possible, sir." If an Oman could be acutely embarrassed, Larry was. "That is, sir... I should tell you, sir..." "You certainly should. You've been stalling all along, and now you're stalled. Spill it." "Yes, sir. The Tuly begged me not to mention it, but I must. When it organized your team it had no idea of what it was really going to do..." "Let's talk the same language, shall we? Say 'he' and 'she.' Not 'it.' " "She thought she was setting up the peyondix, the same as all of us Omans have. But after she formed in your mind the peyondix matrix, your mind went on of itself to form a something else ; a thing we can not understand. That was why she was so extremely... I think 'frightened' might be your term." "I knew something was biting her. Why?" "Because it very nearly killed you. You perhaps have not considered the effect upon us all if any Oman, however unintentionally, should kill a Master?" "No, I hadn't... I see. So she won't play with fire any more, and none of the rest of you can?" "Yes, sir. Nothing could force her to. If she could be so coerced we would destroy her brain before she could act. That brain, as you know, is imperfect, or she could not have done what she did. It should have been destroyed long since." "Don't ever act on that assumption, L a r r y." Hilton thought for minutes. "Simple peyondix, such as yours, is not enough to read the Masters' records. If I'd had three brain cells working I'd've tried them then. I wonder if I could read them?" "You have all the old Masby Edward E Smith  Everett Evans tcrs' powers and more. But you must not assemble them again, sir. It would mean death' "'But IVe got to know.,, Tve got to know! Anyway, a thousandth of a second would be enough. I don't think that'd hurt me very much." H e concentrated -- read a few feet of top-secret braided wire -- and came back to consciousness in the sickbay of the Perseus, with two doctors working on him; Hastings, the top Navy medico, and Flandres, the surgeon. "What the hell happened to you?" Flandres demanded. "Were you trying to kill yourself?" "And if so, how?" Hastings wanted to know. "No, I was trying not to," Hilton said, weakly, "and I guess I didn't much more than succeed." "That was just about the closest shave I ever saw a man come through. Whatever it was, don't do it again." "I won't," he promised, feelingly. When they let him out of the hospital, four days later, he called in Larry and Tuly. "The next time would be the last time. So there won't be any," he told them. "But just how sure are you that some other of our boys or girls may not have just enough of whatever it takes to do the job? Enough oompa, but not too much?" "Since we, too, are on strange ground the probability is vanishingly small. We have been making inquiries, however, and scanning. You were selected from all the minds of Terra as the one having the widest vision, the greatest scope, the most comprehensive grasp. The ablest at synthesis and correlation and so on." "That's printing it in big letters, but that was more or less what they were after." "Hence the probability approaches unity that any more such ignorant meddling as this obnoxious Tuly did well result almost certainly in failure and death. Therefore we can not and will not meddle again."  there... So what I am is some kind of a freak. Maybe a kind of super-Master and maybe something altogether different. Maybe duplicable in a less lethal fashion, and maybe not. Veree helpful -- I don't think. But I don't want to kill anybody, either...especially if it wouldn't do any good. But we've got to do something!'" Hilton scowled in thought for minutes. "But an Oman brain could take it. As you told us, Tuly, 'The brain of the Larry is very, very tough.' " "In a way, sir. Except that the Masters were very careful to make it physically impossible for any Oman to go very far along that line. It was only their oversight of my one imperfect brain that enabled me, alone of us all, to do that wrong." "Stop thinking it was wrong, Tuly. Tm mighty glad you did. But I wasn't thinking of any regular Oman brain..." Hilton's voice petered out. "I see, sir. Yes, we can, by using your brain as Guide, reproduce it in an Oman body. You would then have the powers and most of the qualities of both..." "No, you don't see, because I've got my screen on. Which I will now take off -- " he suited action to word -- "since the whole planet's screened and I have nothing to hide from you. Teddy Blake and I both thought of that, but we'll consider it only as the ultimately last resort. We don't want we want our race to keep on developing. But you folks can replace carbon-based molecules with silicon-based ones just as easily as, and a hell of a lot faster than, mineral water petrifies wood. Vhat can you do along the line of rebuilding me that way? And if you can do any such conversion, what would happen? Would I live at all? And if so, how long? How would I live? What would I live on? All that kind of stuff." "Shortly before they left, two of the Masters did some work on that very thing. Tuly and I converted them, sir." "Fine -- or is it? How did it work out?" "Perfectly, sir...except that they destroyed themselves. It was thought that they wearied of existence." "I don't wonder. Well, if it comes to that, I can do the same. You can convert me, then." "Yes, sir. But before we do it we must do enough preliminary work to be sure that you will not be harmed in any way. Also, there will be many more changes involved than simple substitution." "Of course. I realize that. Just see what you can do, please, and let me know." "We will, sir, and thank you very much." XI A S has been intimated, no Terran can know what researches Larry and Tuly and the other Oman specialists performed, or how they arrived at the conclusions they reached. However, in less than a week Larry reported to Hilton. "It can be done, sir, with complete safety. And you will live even more comfortably than you do now." "How long?" "The mean will be about five thousand Oman years -- you don't know that an Oman year is equal to one point two nine three plus Terran years?" "I didn't, no. Thanks." "The maximum, a little less by Edward E. Smith  E, Everett Evans than six thousand. The minimum, a little over four thousand. I'm very sorry we had no data upon which to base a closer estimate." "Close enough." He stared at the Oman. "You could also convert my wife?" "Of course, sir." "Well, we might be able to stand it, after we got used to the idea. Minimum, over five thousand Terran years... barring accidents, of course?" "No, s i r. No accidents. Nothing will be able to kill you, except by total destruction of the brain. And even then, sir, there will be the pattern." 'Til... be... damned..." Hilton gulped twice. "Okay, go ahead." "Your skins will be like ours, energy-absorbers. Your 'blood' will carry charges of energy instead of oxygen. Thus, you may breathe or not, as you please. Unless you wish otherwise, we will continue the breathing function. It would scarcely be worth while to alter the automatic mechanisms that now control it. And you will wish at times to speak. You will still enjoy eating and drinking, although everything ingested will be eliminated, as at present, as waste." "We'd add uranexite to our food, I suppose. Or drink radioactives, or sleep under cobalt-# lamps." "Yes, sir. Your family life will be normal; your sexual urges and satisfactions the same. Fertilization and period of gestation unchanged. Your children will mature at the same ages as they do now." "How do you -- oh, I see. You wouldn't change any molecular linkages or configurations in the genes or chromosomes." "We could not, sir, even if we wished. Such substitutions can be made only in exact onefor-one replacements. In the near future you will, of course, have to control births quite rigorously." "We sure would. Let's see... say we want a stationary population of a hundred million on our planet. Each couple to have two children, a boy and a girl. Born when the parents are about fifty... um-m-m. The gals can have all the children they want, then, until our population is the limit of two kids per couple. Right?" "Approximately so, sir. And after conversion you alone will be able to operate with the full power of your eight, without tiring. You will also, of course, be able to absorb almost instantaneously all the knowledges and abilities of the old Masters." Hilton gulped twice before he could speak. "You wouldn't be holding anything else back, would you?" "Noth i n g important, sir. Everything else is minor, and probably known to you." I doubt it. How long will the job take, and how much notice will you need?" "Two days, sir. No notice. Everything is ready." Hilton, face somber, thought for minutes. 'The more I think of it the less I like it. But it seems to be a forced put... and Temple will blow sky high...and have I got the guts to go it alone, even if she"d let me... " He shrugged himself out of the black mood. 'T"ll look her up and let you know, Larry." H e looked her up and told her everything. Told her bluntly; starkly; drawing the full picture in jet black, with very little white. "There it is, sweetheart. The works," he concluded. "We are not going to have ten years; we may not have ten months. So -- if such a brain as that can be had, do we or do we not have to have it? I'm putting it squarely up to you." Temple's face, which had been getting paler and paler, was now as nearly colorless as it could become ; the sickly yellow of her skin's light tan unbacked by any flush of red blood. Her whole body was tense and strained. "There's a horrible snapper on that question... Can't I do it? Or anybody else except you?" "No. Anyway, whose job is it, sweetheart?" T know, but... but I know just how close Tuly came to anything compared to such a radical transformation as this. I'm afraid it'll kill you, darling. And I just simply couldn't stand it!" She threw herself into his arms, and he comforted her in the ages-old fashion of man with maid. "Steady, hon," he said, as soon as he could lift her tearstreaked face from his shoulder. "I'll live through it. I thought you were getting the howling howpers about having to live for six thousand years and never getting back to Terra except for a Q strictly T visit now and then." She pulled away from him, flung back her wheaten mop and glared. "So that's what you thought! What do I care how long I live, or how, or where, as long as it's with you? But what makes you think we can possibly live through such a horrible conversion as that?" "Larry wouldn't do it if there was any question whatever. He didn't say it would be painless. But he did say I'd live." "Well, he knows, I guess...I hope." Temple's natural fine color began to come back. "But it's understood that just the second you come out of the vat, I go right in." "I hadn't ought to let you, of course. But I don't think I could take it alone." by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans That statement required a special type of conference, which consumed some little time. Eventually, however, Temple answered it in words. "Of course you couldn't, sweetheart, and I wouldn't let you, even if you could." There were a few things that had to be done before those two secret conversions could be made. There was the matter of the wedding, which was now to be in quadruplicate. Arrangements had to be made so that eight Big Wheels of the Project could all be away on honeymoon at once. All these things were done. O F the conversion operations themselves, nothing more need be said. The honeymooners, having left ship and town on a Friday afternoon, came back one week from the following Monday morning. The eight met joyously in Bachelors' Hall ; the girls kissing each other and the men indiscriminately and enthusiastically; the men cooperating zestfully. Temple scarcely blushed at all, she was so engrossed in trying to find out whether or WhiIe it took some time to recompute the exact Ardrian calendar, Terran day names and Terran weeks were used from the first. The Omans manufactured watches, clocks, and chronometers which divided the Ardrian day into twenty-four Ardrian hours, with minutes and seconds as usual, not anyone was noticing any change. No one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. So, finally, she asked. "Don't any of you, really, see anything different?" The six others all howled at that, and Sandra, between giggles and snorts, said: "No, precious, it doesn't show a bit. Did you really think it would?" Temple blushed furiously and Hilton came instantly to his bride's rescue. "Chip-chop the comedy, gang. She and I aren't human any more. We're a good jump toward being Omans. I couldn't make her believe it doesn't show." That stopped the levity, cold, but none of the six could really believe it. However, after Hilton had coiled a twenty-penny spike into a perfect helix between his fingers, and especially after he and Temple had each chewed up and swallowed a piece of uranexite, there were no grounds left for doubt. "That settles it... it tears it," Karns said then. "Start all over again, Jarve. We'll listen, this time." Hilton told the long story again, and added: "I had to re-work a couple of cells of Temple's brain, but now she can read and understand the records as well as I can. So I thought I'd take her place on Team One and let her boss the job on all the other teams. Okay?" "So you don't want to let the rest of us in on it." Karns's level stare was a far cry from the way he had looked at his chief a moment before. "If there's any one thing in the universe I never had you figured for, it's a dog in the manger." "Huh? You mean you actually want to be a...a...hell, we don't even know what we are !" "I do want it, Jarvis. We all do." This was, of all people, Teddy! "No one in all history has had more than about fifty years of really productive thinking. And just the idea of having enough time... "Hold it, Teddy. Use your brain. The Masters couldn't take it -- they committed suicide. How do you figure we can do any better?" "Because we'll use our brains!" she snapped. "They didn't. The Omans will serve us; and that's all they'll do.' "And do you think you'll be able to raise your children and grandchildren and so on to do the same? To have guts enough to resist the pull of such an ungodly habit-forming drug as this Oman service is?" sure of it." She nodded positively. "And we'll run all applicants through a fine enough screen to -- that is, if we ever consider anybody except our own BuSci people. And there's another reason.' She grinned, got up, wriggled out of her coverall, and posed in bra and panties. "Look. I can keep most of this for five years. Quite a lot of it for ten. Then comes the struggle. What do you think I'd do for the ability, whenever it begins to get wrinkly or flabby, to peel the whole thing off and put on a brand-spanking-new smooth one? You name it. I'll do it! Besides, Bill and I will both just simply and coldbloodedly murder you if you try to keep us out." "Okay." Hilton locked at Temple; she looked at him; both looked at all the ethers. There was no revulsion at all. Nothing but eagerness. Temple took over. "I'm surprised. We're both surprised. You see, Jarve didrx't want to do it at all, but he had to. I not only didn't want to, I was scared green and yellow at just the idea of it. But I had to, too, of course. We didn't think anybody would really want to. We thought we'd be left here alone. We still will be, I think, when you've thought it clear through, Teddy. You just haven't realized yet that we aren't even human any more. We're simply nothing but monsters! Temple's voice became a wail. "I've said my piece," Teddy said. "You tell 'em. Bill." "Let me say something first," Kincaid said. "Temple, I'm ashamed of you. This line isn't at all your usual straight thinking. What you actually are is homo superior. Bill?" by Edward E. Smith A E Everett Evans can add one Mt to that. I don't wonder that you were scared silly, Temple. Utterly new concept; and you went into it stone cold. But now we see the finished product and we like it. In fact, we drool." "I'll say were drooling" Sandra said. could do handstands and pinwheels with joy." "Let's see you " Hilton said. "That we'd all get a kick out of." "N ot  now -- don't want to hold this up -- but sometime I just will. Bev?" 'T'm for it -- and howl And won't Bernadine be amazed," Beverly laughed gleefully, "at her wise-crack about the 'race to end all human races' coming true?" "I'm in favor of it, too, one hundred per centf Poynter said. "Has it occurred to you, Jarve, that this opens up intergalactic exploration? No supplies to carry and plenty of time and fuel?" "No, it hadn't. You've got a point there, Frank. That might take a little of the curse off of it, at that." "When some of our kids get to be twenty years old or so and get married, I'm going to take a crew of them to Andromeda. We'll arrange, then, to extend our honeymoons another week," Hilton said. "What will our policy be? Keep it dark for a while with just us eight, or spread it to the rest?" "Spread it, I'd say," Kincaid said. "We can't keep it secret, a n y w a y," Teddy argued. "Since Larry and Tuly were in on the whole deal, every Oman on the planet knows all about it. Somebody is going to ask questions, and Omans always answer questions and always tell the truth." ready been asked and ansred," Larry said, going to the door and opening it. Stella rushed in. "We've been hearing the damnedest things!" She kissed everybody, ending with Hilton, whom she seized by both shoulders. "Is it actually true, boss, that you can fix me up so I'll live practically forever and can eat more than eleven calories a day without getting fat as a pig? Candy, ice cream, cake, pie, eclairs, cream puffs, French pastries, sugar and gobs of thick cream in my coffee...?" Half a dozen others, including the van der Moen twins, came in. Beverly emitted a shriek of joy. "Bernadine! The mother of the race to end all human races!" "You whistled it, birdie!" Bernadine caroled. "I'm going to have ten or twelve, each one weirder than all the others. I told you I was a prophet -- I'm going to hang out my shingle. Wholesale and retain prophecy; special rates for large parties." Her voice was drowned out in a general elamon 'Hold it, everybody !"' Hilton yelled. "Chip-chop it! Quit it!" Then, as the noise subsided, "If you think I'm going to tell this tall tale over and over again for the next two weeks you're all crazy. So shut down the plant and get everybody out here." "Not everybody, J a r v e !" Temple snapped. "We don't want scum, and there's some of that, even in BuSci." "You're so right. Who, then?" "The rest of the heads and assistants, of course... and all the lab girls and their husbands and boy-friends. I know they are all okay. That will be enough for now, don't you think?" "I do think;" and the indicated others were sent for; and in a few minutes arrived. The Omans brought chairs and Hilton stood on a table. He spoke for ten minutes. Then: "Before you decide whether you want to or not, think it over very carefully, because it's a one-way street. Fluorine can not be displaced. Once in, you're stuck for life. There is no way back, I've told you all the drawbacks and disadvantages I know of, but there may be a lot more that I haven't thought of yet. So think it over for a few days and when each of you has definitely made up his or her mind, let me know." He jumped down off the table. # by H IS listeners, however, did not need days, or even seconds, to decide. Before Hilton's feet hit the floor there was a yell of unanimous approval. He looked at his wife. "Do you suppose we're nuts?" "Uh-uh. Not a bit. Alex was right. I'm going to just love it!" She hugged his elbow ecstatically. "So are you, darling, as soon as you stop looking at only the black side." "You know... you could be right?" For the first time since the "ghastly" transformation Hilton saw that there really was a bright side and began to study it. "With most of BuSci -- and part of the Navy, and selectees from Terra -- it will be slightly terrific, at that!" "And that 'habit-formingdrug' objection isn't insuperable, darling," Temple said. "If the younger generations start weakening we'll fix the Omans. I wouldn't want to wipe them out entirely, but..." "But how do we settle priority, Doctor Hilton?" a girl called out ; a tall, striking, brunette laboratory technician whose name Hilton needed a second to recall. "By pulling straws or hair? Or by shooting dice or each other or what?" "Thanks, Betty, you've got a point. Sandy Cummings and department heads first, then assistants. Then you girls, in alphabetical order, each with Edward E. Smith  E Everett Evans her own husband or fiance." 'And my name is Ames. Oh, goody "L a r r y, please tell them to. "I already have, sir. We are set up to handle four at once." "Good boy. So scat, all of you, and get back to work -- except Sandy, Bill, Alex, and Teddy. You four go with Larry." Since the new sense was not peyondix, Hilton had started calling it "perception" and the others adopted the term as a matter of course. Hilton could use that sense for what seemed like years -- and actually was whole minutes -- at a time without fatigue or strain. He could not, however, nor could the Omans, give his tremendous power to anyone else. As he had said, he could do a certain amount of reworking; but the amount of improvement possible to make depended entirely upon what there was to work on. Thus, Temple could cover about six hundred light-years. It developed later that the others of the Big Eight could cover from one hundred up to four hundred or so. The other department heads and assistants turned out to be still weaker, and not one of the rank and file ever became able to cover more than a single planet. This sense was not exactly telepathy ; at least not what Hilton had always thought telepathy would be. If anything, however, it was more. It was a lumping together of all five known human senses -- and half a dozen unknown ones called, collectively, "intuition" -- into one super-sense that was all-inclusive and allinformative. If he ever could learn exactly what it was and exactly what it did and how it did it... but he'd better chipchop the wool-gathering and get back onto the job. T he Stretts had licked the old Masters very easily, and intended to wipe out the Omans and the humans. They had no doubt at all as to their ability to do it. Maybe they could. If the Masters hadn't made some progress that the Omans didn't know about, they probably could. That was the first thing to find out. As soon as they'd been converted he'd call in all the experts and they'd go through the Masters' records like a dose of salts through a hillbilly schoolma'am. At that point in Hilton's cogitations Sawtelle came in. He had come down in his gig, to confer with Hilton as to the newly beefed-up fleet. Instead of being glum and pessimistic and foreboding, he was chipper and enthusiastic. They had rebuilt a thousand Oman ships. By combining Oman and Terran science, and adding everything the First Team had been able to reduce to practise, they had hyped up the power by a good fifteen per cent. Seven hundred of those ships, and all his men, were now arrayed in defense around Ardry. Three hundred, manned by Omans, were around Fuel Bin. 'Why?" Hilton asked. "It's Fuel Bin they've been attacking." "Uh-uh. Minor objective," the captain demurred, positively. "The real attack vill be here at you; the headquarters and the brains. Then Fuel Bin will be duck soup. But the thing that pleased me most is the control. Man, you never imagined such control! No admiral in history ever had such control of ten ships as I have of seven hundred. Those Omans spread orders so fast that I don't even finish thinking one and it's being executed. And no misunderstandings, no slips. For instance, this last batch -- fifteen skeletons. Far out; they're getting cagy. I just thought 'Box 'em in and slug 'em' and -- In! Across! Out! Socko! Pffft! Just like that and just that fast. None of 'em had time to light a beam. Nobody before ever even dreamed of such control!" "That's great, and I like it...and you're only a captain. How many ships can FiveJet Admiral Gordon put into space?" "That depends on what you call ships. Superdreadnoughts, Perseus class, six. First-line battleships, twenty-nine. Second-line, smaller and some pretty old, seventy-three. Counting everything armed that will hold air, something over two hundred." "I thought it was something like that. How would you like to be FiveJet Admiral Sawtelle of the Ardrian Navy?" "I wouldn't. I'm Terran Navy. But you knew that and you know me. So -- what's on your mind?" H ilton told him.  aught to put this on a tape, he thought to himself, and broadcast it every hour on the hour, "They took the old Masters like dynamiting fish in a barrel," he concluded, "and I'm damned afraid they're going to lick us unless we take a lot of big, fast steps. But the hell of it is that I can't tell you anything -- not one single thing -- about any part of it. There's simply no way at all of getting through to you without making you over into the same kind of a thing I am." "Is that bad?" Sawtelle was used to making important decisions fast. "Let's get at it." "Huh? Skipper, do you realize just what that means? If you think they'll let you resign, forget it. They'll crucify you -- brand you as a traitor and God only knows what else." "Right. How about you and your people?" "Well, as civilians, it won't be as bad..." by Edward Smith  E. Everett Evans "The hell it won't. Every man and woman that stays here will be posted forever as the blackest traitors old Terra ever disgraced herself by spawning." "You've got a point there, at that. We'll all have to bring our relatives -- the ones we think much of, at least -- out here with us" "Definitely. New see what you can do about getting me run through your mill." By exerting his authority, Kilton got S a w t e I I e put through the "Preservatory" in the second batch processed. Then, linking minds with the captain, he flashed their joint attention to the Hall of Records. Into the right room ; into the right chest; along miles and miles of braided wire carrying some of the prof oundest military secrets of the ancient Masters. Then : "Now you know a little of it," Hilton said. "Maybe a thousandth of what we'll have to have before we can take the Stretts as they will have to be taken." For seconds Sawtelle could not speak. Then: "My God. I see what you mean. You're right. No Omans can ever go to Terra; and no Terrans can ever come here except to stay forever." The two then went out into space, to the flagship -- which had been christened the Orion -- and called in the six commanders. "What is all this senseless idiocy we've been getting, Jarve?" Elliott demanded. Hilton eyed all six with pretended disfavor. "You six guys are the hardest-headed bunch of skeptics that ever went unhung," he remarked, dispassionately. "So it wouldn't do any good to tell you anything -- yet. The skipper and I will show you a thing first. Take her away. Skip." The Orion shot avay under interplanetary drive and for several hours Hilton and Sawtelle worked at re-wiring and practically rebuilding two devices that no one, Oman or human, had touched since the Perseus had landed on Ardry. "What are you... I don't understand what you are doing, sir," Larry said. For the first time since Hilton had known him, the Oman's mind was confused and unsure. "I know you don't. This is a bit of top-secret Masters' stuff. Maybe, some day, we'll be able to re-work your brain to take it. But it won't be for some time." T he Orion hung in space, a couple of thousands of miles away from an asteroid which was perhaps a mile in average diameter. Hilton straightened up. "Put Triple X Black filters on your plates and watch that asteroid." The commanders did so. "Ready?" he asked. "Ready, sir." Hilton didn't move a muscle. Nothing actually moved. Nevertheless there was a motionlessly writhing and crawling distortion of the ship and everything in it, accompanied by a sensation that simply can not be described. It was not like going into or emerging from the subether. It was not even remotely like space-sickness or seasickness or free fall or anything else that any Terran had ever before experienced. And the asteroid vanished. It disappeared into an outrageously incandescent, furiously pyrotechnic, raveningly expanding atomic fireball that in seconds seemed to fill half of space. After ages-long minutes of the most horrifyingly devastating fury any man there had ever seen, the frightful thing expired and Hilton said: That was just a kind of a firecracker. Just a feeble imitation of the first-stage detonator for what we'll have to have to crack the Stretts' ground-based screens. If the skipper and I had taken time to take the ship down to the shops and really work it over we could have put on a show. Was this enough so you ironheads are ready to listen with your ears open and your mouths shut?" They were. So much so that not even Elliott opened his mouth to say yes. They merely nodded. Then again -- for the last time, he hoped ! -- Hilton spoke his piece. The response was prompt and vigorous. Only Sam Bryant, one of Hilton's staunchest allies, showed any uncertainty at all. "I've been married only a year and a half, and the baby was due about a month ago. How sure arc you that you can make old Gordon sit still for us skimming the cream off of Terra to bring out here?" "Doris Bryant, the cream of Terra!" Elliott gibed. "How modest our Samuel has become !" "Well, damn it, she is!" Bryant insisted. "Okay, she is," Hilton agreed. "But either we get our people or Terra doesn't get its uranexite. That'll work. In the remote contingency that it doesn't, there are still tighter screws we can put on. But you missed the main snapper, Sam. Suppose Doris doesn't want to live for five thousand years and is allergic to becoming a monster?" "Huh; you don't need to V o r r y about that." Sam ')rushed that argument aside with a wave of his hand. "Show me a girl who doesn't want to stay young and beautiful forever and I'll square you the circle. Come on. What's holding us up?" T he Orion hurtled through space back toward Ardry and Hilton, struck by a sudEverett Evans by Edward E. Smith  E. den thought, turned to the captain. "Skipper, why wouldn't it be a smart idea to clamp a blockade onto Fuel Bin? Cut the Stretts' fuel supply?" "I thought better of you than that, s o n." Sawtelle shook his head sadly. "That was the first thing I did." "Ouch. Maybe you're 'way ahead of me too, then, on the one that we should move to Fuel Bin, lock, stock and barrel?" "Never thought of it, no. Maybe you're worth saving, after all. After conversion, of course... Yes, there'd be three big advantages." "Four." Sawtelle raised his eyebrows. "One, only one planet to defend. Two, it's self-defending against sneak landings. Nothing remotely human can land on it except in heavy lead armor, and even in that can stay healthy for only a few minutes." "Except in the city. Omlu. That's the weak point and would be the point of attack." "Uh-uh. Cut off the decontaminators and in five hours it'll be as hot as the rest of the planet. Three, there'd be no interstellar supply line for the Stretts to cut. Four, the environment matches our new physiques a lot better than any normal planet could." "That's the one I didn't think about." "I think I'll take a quick peek at the Stretts -- oh-oh ; they've screened their whole planet. Well, we can do that, too, of course." "How are you going to select and reject personnel? It looks as though everybody wants to stay. Even the men whose main object in life is to go aground and get drunk. The Omans do altogether too good a job on them and there's no such thing as a hangover. I'm glad I'm not in your boots." "You may be in it up to the eyeballs. Skipper, so don't chortle too soon." Hilton had already devoted much time to the problems of selection; and he thought of little else all the way back to Ardry. And for several days afterward he held conferences with small groups and conducted certain investigations.-and his assistant Sylvia Banister had been married for weeks. Hilton called them, together with Sawtelle and Bryant of Navy, into conference with the Big Eight. "The more I study this thing the less I like it," Hilton said. "With a civilization having no government, no police, no laws, no medium of exchange..." "No money? Bryant exclaimed. "How's old Gordon going to pay for his uranexite, then?" "He gets it free," Hilton replied, flatly. "When anyone can have anything he wants, merely by wanting it, what good is money? Now, remembering how long we're e:oing to have to live, what we'll be up against, that the Masters failed, and so on, it is clear that the prime basic we have to select for is stability. We twelve have, by psychodynamic measurement, the highest stability ratings available." "'Are you sure I belong here?" Bryant asked. "Yes. Here are three lists." Hilton passed papers around. "The list labeled 'OK' names those I'm sure of -- the ones we're converting now and their wives and whatever on Terra. List 'NG' names the ones I know we don't want. List 'X' -- over thirty percent -- are in-betweeners. We have to make a decision on the 'X' list. So -- what I want to know is, who's going to play God. I'm not. Sandy, are you?" "Good Heavens, no!" Sandra shuddered. "B u t I'm afraid I know who will have to. I'm sorry, Alex, but it'll have to be you four -- Psychology and Sociology." Six heads nodded and there was a flashing interchange of thought among the four. Temple licked her lips and nodded, and Kincaid spoke. "Yes, I'm afraid it's our baby. By leaning very heavily on Temple, we can do it. Remember, Jarve, what you said about the irresistible force? We'll need it." "As I said once before, Mrs. Hilton, I'm very glad you're along," Hilton said. "But just how sure are you that even you can stand up under the load?" "Alone, I couldn't. But don't underestimate Mrs. Carroll and the Messrs. Together, and with such a goal, I'm sure we can." T hus, after four-fifths of his ovn group and fortyone Navy men had been converted, Hilton called an evening meeting of all the converts. Larry, Tuly and Jawy were the only Omans present. "You all knew, of course, that we were going to move to Fuel Bin sometime," Hilton began. "I can tell you now that we who are here are all there are going to be of us. We are all leaving for Fuel Bin immediately after this meeting. Everything of any importance, including all of your personal effects, has already been moved. All Omans except these three, and all Oman ships except the Orion, have already gone." He paused to let the news sink in. Thoughts flew everywhere. The irrepressible Stella Wing -- now Mrs. Osbert F. Harkins -- was the first to give tongue. "What a wonderful job! Why, everybody's here that I really like at all!" That sentiment was, of course, unanimous. It could not have been otherwise. Betty, the exAmes, called out: by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans   "How did you get their female Omans away from Cecil Calthorpe and the rest of that chasing, booze-fighting bunch without them blowing the whole show?" "Some suasion was necessary," Hilton admitted, with a grin. "Everyone who isn't here is time-locked into the Perseus, Release time eight hours tomorrow," "And they'll wake up tomorrow morning with no Omans?" Bernadine tossed back her silvery mane and laughed. "Nor anything else except the Perseus? In a way, I'm sorry, but...maybe I've got too much stinker blood in me, but I'm very glad none of them are here. But I'd like to ask, Jarvis -- or rather, I suppose you have already set up a new Advisory Board?" "We have, yes." Hilton read off twelve names. "Oh, nice. I don't know of any people I'd rather have on it. But what I want to gripe about is calling our new home world such a horrible name as 'Fuel Bin,' as though it were a wood-box or a coal-scuttle or something. And just think of the complexes it would set up in those super-children we're going to have so many of." "What would you suggest?" Hilton asked. "'Ardvor', of course," Hermione said, before her sister could answer. "We've had 'Arth' and 'Ardu' and 'Ardry' and you -- or somebody -- started calling us 'Ardans' to distinguish us converts from the Terrans. So let's keep up the same line." There was general laughter at that, but the name was approved. A bout midnight the meeting ended and the Orion set out for A r d v o r. It reached it and slanted sharply downward. The whole BuSci staff was in the lounge, watching the big tri-di. "Hey! That isn't Omlu!" Stella exclaimed. "It isn't a city at all and it isn't even in the same place!" "No, ma'am," Larry said. "Most of you wanted the ocean, but many wanted a river or the mountains. Therefore we razed Omlu and built your new city, Ardane, at a place where the ocean, two rivers, and a range of mountains meet. Strictly speaking, it is not a city, but a place of pleasant and rewardful livmg. The space-ship was coming in, low and fast, from the south. To the left, the west, there stretched the limitless expanse of ocean. To the right, mile after mile, were rough, rugged, jagged, partially-timbered mountains, mass piled upon mass. Immediately below the speeding vessel was a wide, white-sand beach all of ten miles long. Slowing rapidly now, the #S Orion flew along due north. "Look ! Look ! A natatorium!" Beverly shrieked. "I know I wanted a nice big place to swim in, besides my backyard pool and the ocean, but I didn't tell anybody to build that -- I swear I didn't!' "You didn't have to, pet." Poynter put his arm around her curvaceous waist and squeezed. "They knew. And I did a little thinking along that line myself. There's our house, on top of the cliff over the natatorium -- you can almost dive into it off the patio." "Oh, wonderful!" Immediately north of the natatorium a tremendous river -- named at first sight the "Whitewater" -- rushed through its gorge into the ocean ; a river and gorge strangely reminiscent of the Colorado and its Grand Canyon. On the south bank of that river, at its very mouth -- looking straight up that tremendous canyon; on a rocky promontory commanding ocean and beach and mountains -- there was a house. At the sight of it Temple hugged Hilton's arm in ecstasy. "Yes, that's ours," he assured her. "Just about everything either of us has ever wanted." The clamor was now so great -- everyone was recognizing his-and-her house and was exclaiming about it -- that both Temple and Hilton fell silent and simply watched the scenery unroll. Across the turbulent Whitewater and a mile farther north, the mountains ended as abruptly as though they had been cut off with a cleaver and an apparently limitless expanse of treeless, grassy prairie began. And through that prairie, meandering sluggishly to the ocean from the northeast, came the wide, deep River Placid. The Orion halted. It began to descend vertically, and only then did Hilton see the spaceport. It was so vast, and there were so many spaceships on it, that from any great distance it was actually invisible ! Each six-acre bit of the whole immense expanse of lever prairie between the Placid and the mountains held an Oman superdreadnought ! T he staff paired off and headed for the airlocks. Hilton said : "Temple, have you any reservations at all, however slight, as to having Dark Lady as a permanent fixture in your home?" "Why, of course not -- I like her as much as you do. And besides -- " she giggled like a schoolgirl -- "even if she is a lot more beautiful than I am -- I've got a few things she never will have... but there's something else. I got just a flash of it before you blocked. Spill it, please." "You'll see in a minute." And she did. Larry, Dark Lady and Temple's Oman maid Moty were ##: standing beside the Hilton's car -- and so was another Oman, like none ever before seen. Six feet four; shoulders that would just barely go through a door; muscled like Atlas and Hercules combined; skin a gleaming, satiny bronze; hair a rippling mass of lambent flame. Temple came to a full stop and caught her breath. "The Prince," she breathed, in awe. '"Da Lormi's Prince of Thebes. The ultimate bronze of all the ages. You did this, Jarve. How did you ever dig him up out of my schoolgirl crushes?" All six got into the car, which was equally at home on land or water or in the air. In less than a minute they were at Hilton House. The house itself was circular. Its living-room was an immense annulus of glass from vhich, by merely moving along its circular length, any desired view could be had. The pair walked around it once. Then she took him by the arm and steered him firmly toward one of the bedrooms in the center. '"This house is just too much to take in all at once," she declared. ""Besides, let's put on our swimsuits and get over to the Nat." In the room, she closed the door firmly in the faces of the Omans and grinned. '"Maybe, sometime. I'll get used to having somebody besides you in my bedroom, but I haven't, yet... Oh, do you itch, too?" Hilton had peeled to the waist and was scratching vigorously all around his waistline, under his belt. ""Like the very devil," he admitted, and stared at her. For she, threequarters stripped, was scratching, too! ""It started the minute we left the Orion," he said, thoughtfully. "I see. These new skins of ours like hard radiation, but don't like to be smothered while they're enjoying it. By about tomorrow, we'll be a nudist colony, I think." '"I could stand it, I suppose. What makes you think so?" ""Just what I know about radiation. Frank would be the one to ask. My hunch is, though, that we're going to be nudists whether we want to or not. Let's go." T hey went in a two-seater, leaving the Omans at home. Three-quarters of the staff were lolling on the sand or were seated on benches beside the immense pool. As they watched, Beverly ran out along the line of springboards; testing each one and selecting the stiffest. She then climbed up to the top platform -- a good twelve feet above the board -- and plummeted down upon the board's heavily padded take-off. Legs and back bending stubbornly to take the strain, she and the by Edward E. Smith  E Everett Evans board reached low-point together, and, still in sync with it, she put every muscle she had into the effort to hurl herself upward. She had intended to go up thirty feet. But she had no idea whatever as to her present strength, or of what that Oman board, in perfect synchronization with that tremendous strength, would do. Thus, instead of thirty feet, she went up very nearly two hundred ; which of course spoiled completely her proposed graceful two-and-a-half. In midair she struggled madly to get into some acceptable position. Failing, she curled up into a tight ball just before she struck water. What a splash! 'Tt won't hurt her -- you couldn't hurt her with a club!" Hilton snapped. He seized Temple's hand as everyone else rushed to the pool's edge. "Look -- Bernadine -- that's what I was thinking about." Temple stopped and looked. The platinum-haired twins had been basking on the sand, and wherever sand had touched fabric, fabric had disappeared. Their suits had of course approached the minimum to start with. Now Bernadine wore only a wisp of nylon perched precariously on one breast and part of a ribbon that had once been a belt. Discovering the catastrophe, she shrieked once and leaped into the pool any-which-way, covering her breasts with her hands and hiding in water up to her neck. Meanwhile, the involuntarily high diver had come to the surface, laughing apologetically. Surprised by the hair dangling down over her eyes, she felt for her cap. It was gone. So was her suit. Naked as a fish. She swam a couple of easy strokes, then stopped. "Frank! Oh, Frank!" she called. "Over here, Bev." Her husband did not quite know whether to laugh or not. "Is it the radiation or the water? Or both?" "Radiation, I think. These new skins of ours don't want to be covered up. But it probably makes the water a pretty good imitation of a universal solvent." "Good-by, clothes!" Beverly rolled over onto her back, fanned water carefully with her hands, and gazed approvingly at herself. "I don't itch any more, anyway, so I'm very much in favor of it. T hus the Ardans came to their new home world and to a life that was to be more comfortable by far and happier by far than any of them had known on Earth. There were many other surprises that day, of course; of which only two will be mentioned here. When they finally left the pool, at about seventeen hours G. M. T., everybody was ravenously hungry. "But why should we be?" Stella demanded. "IVe been eating everything in sight, just for fun. But now I'm actually hungry enough to eat a horse and wagon and chase the driver!" "Swimming makes everybody hungry," Beverly said, "and I'm awfully glad that hasn't changed. Why, I wouldn't feel human if I didn't!" Hilton and Temple went home, and had a long-drawnout and very wonderful supper. Prince waited on Temple, Dark Lady on Hilton; Larry and Moty ran the synthesizers in the kitchen. All four Omans radiated happiness. Another surprise came when they went to bed. For the bed was a raised platform of something that looked like concrete and, except for an uncanny property oi molding itself somewhat to the contours of their bodies, was almost as hard as rock. Nevertheless, it was the most comfortable bed either of them had ever had. When they were ready to go to sleep, Temple said: "Drat it, those Omans still want to come in and sleep Greenwich Mean Time. Ardvor was, always and everywhere, full daylight. Terran time and calendar were adopted as a matter of course. with us. In the room, I mean. And they suffer so. They're simply radiating silent suffering and oh-so-submissive reproach. Shall we let 'em come in?" "That's strictly up to you, sweetheart. It always has been." "I know. I thought they'd quit it sometime, but I guess they never will. I still want an illusion of privacy at times, even though they know all about everything that goes on. But we might let 'em in now, just while we sleep, and throw 'em out again as soon as we wake up in the morning?" "You're the boss." Without additional invitation the four Omans came in and arranged themselves neatly on the floor, on all four sides of the bed. Temple had barely time to cuddle up against Hilton, and he to put his arm closely around her, before they both dropped into profound and dreamless sleep. A t eight hours next morning all the specialists met at the new Hall of Records. This building, an exact duplicate of the old one, was located on a mesa in the foothills southwest of the natatorium, in a luxuriant grove at sight of which Kams stopped and began to laugh. "I thought I'd seen everything," he remarked. "But yellow pine, spruce, tamarack, apples, oaks, palms, orby Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans anges, cedars, Joshua trees and cactus -- just to name a few -- all growing on the same quarter-section of land?" "Just everything anybody wants, is all," Hilton said. "But are they really growing? Or just straight synthetics? Lane -- Kathy -- this is your dish." "Not so fast, Jarve; give us a chance, please! Kathryn, now Mrs. Lane Saunders, pleaded. She shook her spectacular head. "We don't see how any stable indigenous life can have developed at all, unless..." "Unless what ? Natural shielding?" Hilton asked, and Kathy eyed her husband. "R i g h t," Saunders said. "The earliest life-forms must have developed a shield before they could evolve and stabilize. Hence, whatever it is that is in our skins was not a triumph of Masters' science. They took it from Nature." "Oh? Oh!" These were two of Sandra's most expressive monosyllables, followed by a third. "Oh. Could be, at that. But how could,., no, cancel that." "You'd better cancel it, Sandy. Give us a couple of months, and maybe we can answer a few elementary questions." Now inside the Hall, all the teams, from Astronomy to Zoology, went efficiently to work. Everyone now knew what to look for, how to find it, and how to study it. "The First Team doesn't need you now too much, does it, Jarve?" Sawtelle asked. "Not particularly. In fact, I was just going to get back onto my own job." "Not yet. I want to talk to you," and the two went into a long discussion of naval affairs. T he Stretts' fuel-supply line had been cut long since. Many Strett cargocarriers had been destroyed. The enemy would of course have a very heavy reserve of fuel on hand. But there was no way of knowing how large it was, how many warships it could supply, or how long it would last. Two facts were, however, unquestionable. First, the Stretts were building a fleet that in their minds would be invincible. Second, they would attack Ardane as soon as that fleet could be made ready. The unanswerable question was : how long would that take? "So we want to get every ship we have. How many? Five thousand? Ten? Fifteen? We want them converted to maximum possible power as soon as we possibly can," Sawtelle said. "And I want to get out there with my boys to handle things." "You aren't going to. Neither you nor your boys are expendable. Particularly you." Jaw hard-set, Hilton studied the situation for minutes. "No. What we'll do is take your Oman, Kedy, We'll re-set the Guide to drive into him everything you and the military Masters ever knew about arms, armament, strategy, tactics and so on. And we'll add everything I know of coordination, synthesis, and perception. That ought to make him at least a junior-grade military genius." "You can play that in spades. I wish you could do it to me." "I can -- if you'll take the full Oman transformation. Nothing else can stand the punishment." "I know. No, I don't want to be a genius that badly." "Check. And we'll take the resultcmt Kedy and make nine duplicates of him. Each one will learn from and profit by the mistakes made by preceding numbers and will assume command the instant his preceding number is killed." "Oh, you expect, then... ?" "Expect? No. I know it damn well, and so do you. That's why we Ardans will all stay aground. Why the Kedys' first job will be to make the heavy stuff in and around Ardane as heavy as it can be made. Why it'll all be on twenty-four-hour alert. Then they can put as many thousands of Omans as you please to work at ttiodernizing all the Oman ships you want and doing anything else you say. Check?" Sawtelle thought for a couple of minutes. "A few details, is all. But that can be ironed out as we go along." Both men worked then, almost unremittingly for six solid days; at the end of which time both drew tremendous sighs of relief. They had done everything possible for them to do. The defense of Ardvor was now rolling at fullest speed toward its gigantic objective. Then captain and director, in two Oman ships with fifty men and a thousand Omans, leaped the world-girdling ocean to the mining operation of the Stretts. There they found business strictly as usual. The strippers still stripped ; the mining mechs still roared and snarled their inchwise ways along their geometrically perfect terraces; the little carriers still skittered busily between the varous miners and the storage silos. The fact that there was enough concentrate on hand to last a world for a hundred years made no difference at all to these automatics; a crew of erectormechs was building new silos as fast as existing ones were being filled. Since the men now understood everything that was going on, it was a simple matter for them to stop the whole Strett operation in its tracks. by Edward E. Smith  E., Everett Evans Then every man and every Oman leaped to his assigned job. Three days later, all the mechs went back to work. Now, however, they were working for the Ardans. The miners, instead of concentrate, now emitted vastly larger streams of Navy-Standard pelleted uranexite. The carriers, instead of one-gallon cans, carried five-ton drums. The silos were immensely large r -- thirty feet in diameter and towering two hundred feet into the air. The silos were not, hovever, being used as yet. One of the two Oman ships had been converted into a fuel-tanker and its yawning holds were being filled first. The Orion went back to Ardane and an eight-day wait began. For the first time in over seven months Hilton found time actually to loaf ; and he and Temple, lolling on the beach or hiking in the mountains, enjoyed themselves and each other to the full All too soon, however, the heavily laden tanker appeared in the sky over Ardane. The Orion joined it; and the two ships slipped into sub-space for Earth. A used his sense of perception to release the thoughtcontrolled blocks that had been holding all the controls of the Perseus in neutral. He informed her officers -- by releasing a public-address tape -- that they were now free to return to Terra. Three days later, one day short of Sol, Sawtelle got FiveJet Admiral Gordon's office on the sub-space radio. An officious underling tried to block him, of course. "Shut up, Perkins, and listen," Savtelle said, bruskly. "Tell Gordon I'm bringing in one hundred twenty thousand two hundred forty-five metric tons of pelleted uranexite. And if he isn't on this beam in sixty seconds he'll never get a gram of it." The admiral, outraged almost to the point of apoplexy, came in. "Sawtelle, report yourself for court-martial at..." "Keep still, Gordon," the captain snapped. In sheer astonishment old Five-Jets obeyed. "I am no longer Terran Navy ; no longer subject to your orders. As a matter of cold fact, I am no longer human. For reasons which I will explain later to the full Advisory Board, some of the personnel of Project Theta Orionis underwent transformation into a form of life able to live in an environment of radioactivity so intense as to kill any human being in ten seconds. Under certain conditions ve will supply, free of charge, F. O. B. Terra or Luna, all the uranexite the Solar System can use. The conditions are these," and he gave them. "Do you accept these conditions or not?" "I... I would vote to accept them, Captain. But that weight! One hundred twenty thousand metric tons -- incredible! Are you sure of that figure?" "Definitely. And that is minimum. The error is plus, not minus." "This crippling powershortage would really be over?" For the first time since Sawtelle had known him, Gordon showed that he was not quite solid Navy brass. "It's over. Definitely. For good." "I'd not only agree ; I'd raise you a monument. While I can't speak for the Board, I'm sure they'll agree." "So am I. In any event, your cooperation is all that's required for this first load." The chips had vanished from Sawtelle's shoulders. "Where do you want it. Admiral? Aristarchus or White Sands?" "White Sands, please. While there may be some delay in releasing it to industry... "While they figure out how much they can tax it?" Sawtelle asked, sardonically. "Well, if they don't tax it it'll be the first thing in history that isn't. Have you any objections to releasing all this to the press?" "None at all. The harder they hit it and the wider they spread it, the better. Will you have this beam switched to Astrogation, please ?" "Of course. And thanks, Captain. I'll see you at White Sands." Then, as the now positively glowing Gordon faded away, Sawtelle turned to his own staff. "Fenway -- Snowden -- take over. Better doublecheck micro-timing with Astro. Put us into a twentyfour-hour orbit over White Sands and hold us there. We won't go down. Let the load down on remote, wherever they want it." T he arrival of the Ardvorian superdreadnought Orion and the UC-I (Uranexite Carrier Number One) was one of the most sensational events old Earth had ever known. Air and space craft went clear out to Emergence Volume Ninety to meet them. By the time the UCI was coming in on its remote-controlled landing spiral the press of small ships was so great that all the police forces available were in a lather trying to control it. This was exactly what Hilton had wanted. It made possible the completely unobserved launching of several dozen small craft from the Orion herself. One of these made a very high and very fast flight to Chicago. With all due formality and under the aegis of a perfectly authentic Registry Number it landed on by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans O'Hare Field. Eleven deeply tanned young men emerged from it and made their way to a taxi stand, where each engaged a separate vehicle. Sam Bryant stepped into his cab, gave the driver a number on Oakwood Avenue in Des Plaines, and settled back to scan. He was lucky. He would have gone anywhere she was, of course, but the way things were, he could give her a little warning to soften the shock. She had taken the baby out for an airing down River Road, and was on her way back. By having the taxi kill ten minutes or so he could arrive just after she did. Wherefore he stopped the cab at a public communications booth and dialed his home. "Mrs. Bryant is not at home, but she will teturn at fifteen t h i r t y," the instrument said, crisply. "Would you care to record a message for her?" button. "This is Sam, Dolly baby. I'm right behind you. Turn around, why don't you, and tell your ever-lovin' starhoppin' husband hello?" The taxi pulled up at the curb just as Doris closed the front door; and Sam, after handing the driver a fivedollar bill, ran up the walk. He waited just outside the door, key in hand, while she lowered the stroller handle, took off her hat and by longestablished habit reached out to flip the communicator's switch. At the first word, however, she stiffened rigidly -- froze solid. Smiling, he opened the door, walked in, and closed it behind him. Nothing short of a shotgun blast could have taken Doris Bryant's attention from that recorder then. "That simply is not so," she told the instrument firmly, with both eyes resolutely shut. "They made him stay on the Perseus, He won't be in for at least three days. This is some cretin's idea of a joke." "Not this time, Dolly honey. It's really me." Her eyes popped open as shrieked, and hurled herself at him with all the pent-up ardor and longing of two hundred thirty-four meticulously counted, husbandless, loveless days. After an unknown length of time Sam tipped her face up by the chin, nodded at the stroller, and said, "How about introducing me to the little stranger?" "What a mother I turned out to be! That was the first thing I was going to rave about, the very first thing I saw you! Samuel Jay the Fourth, seventy-six days old today." And so on. Eventually, however, the proud young mother watched the slightly apprehensive young father carry their first-born upstairs; where together, they put him -- still will, but I might -- don't wait sound asleep -- to bed in his until you're really hurt to crib. Then again they were in start screaming. Promise?" each other's arms. 'T promise." Her eyes went wide. "But tell me!" ed around in the circle of turn surprised, amazed, aphis arm and tried to dig her prehensive, frightened and fingers into the muscles of finally eager ; and she behis back. She then attacked came more and more eager his biceps and, leaning backright up to the end. ward, eyed him intently. "You mean that we... that "You're you, I know, but I'll stay just as I am -- for you're different. No athlete thousands of years? or any laborer could ever "Just as you are. Or differpossibly get the muscles you ent, if you like. If you really have all over. To say nothing mean any of this yelling of a space officer on duty, you've been doing about beAnd I know it isn't any kind ing too big in the hips -- I of a disease. You've been actthink you're exactly right, ing all the time as though I m y s e I f -- you can rebuild were fragile, made out of yourself any way you please, glass or somethin g -- as Or change your shape every though you were afraid of hour on the hour. But you breaking me in two. So -- haven't accepted my invitawhat is it, sweetheart?" tion yet." "I've been trying to figure "Don't be silly." She went out an easy way of telling into his arms again and nibyou, but there isn't any. I am bled on his left ear. "I'd go different. I'm a hundred anywhere with you, of course, times as strong as any man any time, but this -- hut you're ever was. Look." He upended positively sure Sammy Small a chair, took one heavy hardwill be all right?" wood leg between finger and "Positively sure." thumb and made what looked "Okay, I'll call mother..." like a gentle effort to bend Her face fell. "I cant tell her it. The leg broke with a pisthat we'll never see them tol-sharp report and Doris again and that we'll live..." leaped backward in surprise. "You don't need to. She "So you're right. I am afraid, sd Pop -- Fern and Sally, not only of breaking you in too, and their boy-friends -- break any of your ribs or t in a month or so, probaarms or legs I'll never forgive bly." myself. So if I let myself go Doris brightened like a for a second -- I don't think I sunburst. "And your folks, by Edward E. Smith  E. Eyerett Evans too, of course?" she asked. "Yes, all the close ones." "Marvelous! How soon are we leaving?" A t six o'clock next morning, two hundred thirtyfive days after leaving Earth, Hilton and Sawtelle set out to make the Ardans' official call upon Terra's Advisory Board. Both were wearing prodigiously heavy lead armor, the inside of which was furiously radioactive. They did not need it, of course. But it would make all Ardans monstrous in Terran eyes and would conceal the fact that any other Ardans were landing. Their gig was met at the spaceport ; not by a limousine, but by a five-ton truck, into which they were loaded one at a time by a hydraulic lift. Cameras clicked, reporters scurried, and trii scanners whirred. One of those scanners, both men knew, was reporting directly and only to the Advisory Board -- which, of course, never took anything either for granted or at its face value. Their first stop was at a truck-scale, where each visitor was weighed. Hilton tipped the beam at four thousand six hundred fifteen pounds ; Sawtelle, a smaller man, weighed in at four thousand one hundred ninety. Thence to the Radiation Laboratory, where it was ascertained and reported that the armor did not leak -- which was reasonable enough, since each was lined with Masters' plastics. Then into lead-lined testing cells, where each opened his face-plate briefly to a sensing element. Whereupon the indicating needles of two meters in the main laboratory went enthusiastically through the full range of red and held unwaveringly against their stops. Both Ardans felt the wave of shocked, astonished, almost unbelieving consternation that swept through the observing scientists and, in slightly lesser measure (because they knew less about radiation) through the Advisory Board itself in a big room halfway across town. And from the Radiation Laboratory they were taken, via truck and freight elevator, to the Office of the Commandant, where the Board was sitting. The story, which had been sent in to the Board the day before on a scrambled beam, was one upon which the Ardans had labored for days. Many facts could be withheld. However, every man aboard the Perseus would agree on some things. Indeed, the Earthship's communications officers had undoubtedly radioed in already about longevity and perfect health and Oman service and many other matters. Hence all such things would have to be admitted and countered. Thus the report, while it was air-tight, perfectly logical, perfectly consistent, and apparently complete, did not please the Board at all. It wasn't intended to. cannot and do not approve of such unwarranted favoritism," the Chairman of the Board said. "Longevity has always been man's prime goal. Every human being has the inalienable right to "Flapdoodle !" Hilton snorted. "This is not being broadcast and this room is proofed, so please climb down off your soapbox. You don't need to talk like a politician here. Didn't you read paragraph #-A-#, one of the many marked 'Top Secret'?" "Of course. But we do not understand how purely mental qualities can possibly have any effect upon purely physical transformations. Thus it does not seem reasonable that any except rigorously screened personnel would die in the process. That is, of course, unless you contemplate deliberate, cold-blooded murder." That stopped Hilton in his tracks, for it was too close for comfort to the truth. But it did not hold the captain for an instant. He was used to death, in many of its grisliest forms. "There are a lot of things no Terran ever will understand," Sawtelle replied instantly. "Reasonable, or not, that's exactly what will happen. And, reasonable or not, it'll be suicide, not murder. There isn't a thing that either Hilton or I can do about it." Hilton broke the ensuing silence. "You can say with equal truth that every human being has the right to run a four-minute mile or to compose a great symphony. It isn't a matter of right at all, but of ability. In this case the mental qualities are even more necessary than the physical. You as a Board did a very fine job of selecting the BuSci personnel for Project Theta Orionis. Almost eighty per cent of them proved able to withstand the Ardan conversion. On the other hand, only a very small percentage of the Navy personnel did so." "Your report said that the remaining personnel of the Project were not informed as to the death aspect of the transformation," Admiral Gordon said. "Why not?" "That should be self-explanatory," Hilton said, flatly. "They are still human and still Terrans. We did not and will not encroach upon either the duties or the privileges of Terra's Advisory Board. What you tell all Terrans, and how much, and how, must be decided by yourselves. This also applies, of course, to the other 'Top Secret' paragraphs of the report, none of which are known to by Edward C. Smith  E. Everett Evans any Terran outside the Board' "But you haven't said anything about the method of selection," another Advisor complained. "Why, that will take all the psychologists of the world, working full time; continuously." "We said we would do the selecting. We meant just that," Hilton said, coldly. "No one except the very few selectees will know anything about it. Even if it were an unmixed blessing -- which it very definitely is not -- do you want all humanity thrown into such an uproar as that would cause? Or the quite possible racial inferiority complex it might set up? To say nothing of the question of how much of Terra's best blood do you want to drain off, irreversibly and permanently? No. What we suggest is that you paint the picture so black, using Sawtelle and me and what all humanity has just seen as horrible examples, that nobody would take it as a gift. Make them shun it like the plague. Hell, I don't have to tell you what your propaganda machines can do." T he Chairman of the Board again mounted his invisible rostrum. "Do you mean to intimate that we are to falsify the record?" he declaimed. "To try to make liars out of hundreds of eyewitnesses? You ask us to distort the truth, to connive at..." We aren't asking you to do anythin gT . Hilton snapped. "We don't give a damn what you do. Just study that record, with all that it implies. Read between the lines. As for those on the Perseus, no two of them will tell the same story and not one of them has even the remotest idea of what the real story is. I, personally, not only did not want to become a monster, but would have given everything I had to stay human. My wife felt the same way. Neither of us would have converted if there'd been any other way in God's universe of getting the uranexite and doing some other things that simply must be done." "What other things?" Gordon demanded. "You'll never know," Hilton answered, quietly. "Things no Terran ever will know. We hope. Things that would drive any Terran stark mad. Some of them are hinted at -- as much as we dared -- between the lines of the report." The report had not mentioned the Stretts. Nor were they to be mentioned now. If the Ardans could stop them, no Terran need ever know anvthing abou them. If not, no Terran should know anything about them except what he would learn for himseii just before the end. For Terra would never be able to do anything to defend herself against the Stretts. "Nothing whatever can drive me mad," Gordon declared, "and I want to know all about it -- right now!" "You can do one of two things, Gordon," Sawtelle said in disgust. His sneer was plainly visible through the six-ply, plastic-backed lead glass of his face-plate. "Either shut up or accept my personal invitation to come to Ardvor and try to go through the wringer. That's an invitation to your own funeral." FiveJet Admiral Gordon, tom inwardly to ribbons, made no reply. "I repeat," Hilton went on, "we are not asking you to do anything whatever. We are offering to give you, free of charge but under certain conditions, all the power your humanity can possibly use. We set no limitation whatever as to quantity and with no foreseeable limit as to time. The only point at issue is whether or not you accept the conditions. If you do not accept them we'll leave now -- and the offer will not be repeated." "And you would, I presume, take the UC-I back with you?" "Of course not, sir. Terra needs power too badly. You are perfectly welcome to that one load of uranexite, no matter what is decided here." "That's one way of putting it," Gordon sneered. "But the truth is that you know damned well I'll blow both of your ships out of space if you so much as... " "Oh, chip-chop the jawflapping, Gordon!" Hilton snapped. Then, as the admiral began to bellow orders into his microphone, he went on: "You want it the hard way, eh? Watch what happens, all of you!" T he UC-I shot vertically into the air. Through its shallow dense layer and into and through the stratosphere. Earth's fleet, already on full alert and poised to strike, rushed to the attack. But the carrier had reached the Orion and both Ardvorian ships had been waiting, motionless, for a good half minute before the Terran warships arrived and began to blast with everything they had. "Flashlights and firecrackers," Sawtelle said, calmly. "You aren't even warming up our screens. As soon as you quit making a damned fool of yourself by wasting energy that way, we'll set the lC-I back down where she was and get on with our business here." "You will order a cease-fire at once. Admiral," the chairman said, "or the rest of us will, as of now, remove you from the Board." Gordon gritted his teeth in rage, but gave the order. "If he hasn't had enough by Edward E., Smith  E Eyerett Evans yet to convince him," Hilton suggested, "he might send up a drone. We don't want to kill anybody, you know. One with the heaviest screening he's got -- just to see what happens to it." "He's had enough. The rest of us have had more than enough. That exhibition was not only uncalled-for and disgusting -- it was outrageous !" The meeting settled down, then, from argument to constructive discussion, and many to-pics were gone over. Certain matters were, however, so self-evident that they were not even mentioned. Thus, it was a self-evident fact that no Terran could ever visit Ardvor; for the instrument-readings agreed with the report's statements as to the violence of the Ardvorian environment, and no Terran could possibly walk around in two tons of lead. Conversely, it was self-apparent to the Terrans that no Ardan could ever visit Earth without being recognized instantly for what he was. Wearing such armor made its necessity starkly plain. No one from the Perseus could say that any Ardan, after having lived on the furiously radiant surface of Ardvor, would not be as furiously radioactive as the laboratory's calibrated instruments had shown Hilton and Sawtelle actually to be. Wherefore the conference went on, quietly and cooperatively, to its planned end. One minute after the Terran battleship Perseus emerged into normal space, the Orion went into subspace for her long trip back to Ardvor. T he last two days of that s e V e n-day trip were the longest-seeming that either Hilton or Sawtelle had ever known. The sub-space radio was on continuously and Kedy-One reported to Sawtelle every five minutes. Even though Hilton knew that the Oman commanderin-chief was exactly as good at perceiving as he himself was, he found himself scanning the thoroughly screened Strett world forty or fifty times an hour. However, in spite of worry and apprehension, time wore eventlessly on. The Orion emerged, went to Ardvor and landed on Ardane Field. Hilton, after greeting properly and reporting to his wife, went to his office. There he found that Sandra had everything vell in hand except for a few tapes that only he could handle. Sawtelle and his officers went to the new Command Central, where everything was rolling smoothly and very much faster than Sawtelle had dared hope. The terran immigrants had to live in the Orion, of course, until conversion into Ardans. Almost equally of course -- since the Bryant infant was the only young baby in the lot -- Doris and her Sammy Small were, by popular acclaim, in the first batch to be converted. For little Sammy had taken the entire feminine contingent by storm. No Oman female had a chance to act as nurse as long as any of the girls were around. Which was practically all the time. Especially the platinum-blonde twins; for several months, now, Bernadine Braden and Hermione Felger. "And you said they were so hard-boiled," Doris said accusingly to Sam, nodding at the twins. On hands and knees on the floor, head to head with Sammy Small between them, they were growling deep-throated at each other and nuzzling at the baby, who was having the time of his young life. "You couldn't have been any wronger, my sweet, if you'd had the whole Octagon helping you go astray. They're just as nice as they can be, both of them." Sam shrugged and grinned. His wife strode purposefully across the room to the playful pair and lifted their pretended prey out from between them. "Quit it, you two," she directed, swinging the baby up and depositing him a-straddle her left hip. "You're just simply spoiling him rotten." "You think so, Dolly? Uhuh, far be it from such." Bernadine came lithely to her feet. She glanced at her own taut, trim abdomen; upon which a micrometrically-precise topographical mapping job might have revealed an otherwise imperceptible bulge. "Just you wait until Junior arrives and I'll show you how to really spoil a baby. Besides, what's the hurry?" "He needs his supper. Vitamins and minerals and hard radiations and things. And then he's going to bed. I don't approve of this no-sleep business. So run along, both of you, until tomorrow." A S has been said, the Stretts were working, with all the intensity of their monstrous but tremendously capable minds, upon their Great Plan; which was, basically, to conquer and either enslave or destroy every other intelligent race throughout all the length, breadth, and thickness of total space. To that end each individual Strett had to become invulnerable and immortal. Wherefore, in the inconceivably remote past, there had been put into effect a program of selective breeding and of carefully-calculated treatments. It was mathematically certain that this program would result in a race of beings of pure force -- beings having no material conby Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans stituents remaining whatever. Under those hellish treats Stretts had died. But the few remaining thousands had almost reached their sublime goal. In a few more hundreds of thousands of years perfection would be reached. The few surviving hundreds of perfect beings could and would multiply to any desired number in practically no time at all. Hilton and his seven fellow-workers had perceived all this in their one and only study of the planet Strett, and every other Ardan had been completely informed. A dozen or so Strett Lords of Thought, male and female, were floating about in the atmosphere -- which was not air -- of their Assembly Hall. Their heads were globes of ball lightning. Inside them could be seen quite plainly the intricate convolutions of immense, less-than-half-material brains, shot through and through with rods and pencils and shapes of pure, scintillating force. And the bodies! Or, rather, each horrendous brain had a few partially material appendages and appurtenances recognizable as bodily organs. There were no mouths, no ears, no eyes, no noses or nostrils, no lungs, no legs or arms. There were, however, hearts. Some partially material ichor flowed through those living-f ire# u I I i n e d tubes. There were starkly functional organs of reproduction with which by no stretch of the imagination, could any thought of tenderness or of love be connected. It was a good thing for the race, Hilton had thought at first perception of the things, that the Stretts had bred out of themselves every iota of the finer, higher attributes of life. If they had not done so, the impotence of sheer disgust would have supervened so long since that the race would have been extinct for ages. "Thirty-eight periods ago the Great Brain was cliared with the sum total of Strettsian knowledge," First Lord Thinker Zoyar radiated to the assembled Stretts. "For those thirty-eight periods it has been scanning, peyondiring, amassing data and formulating hypotheses, theories, and conclusions. It has just informed me that it is now ready to make a preliminary report. Great Brain, how much of the total universe have you studied?" "This Galaxy only," the Brain radiated, in a texture of thought as hard and as harsh as Zoyar's own. "Why not more?" "Insufficient power. My first conclusion is that whoever set up the specifications for me is a fool." T O say that the First Lord went out of control at this statement is to put it very mildly indeed. He fulminated, ending with : "... destroyed instantly !" "Destroy me if you like," came the utterly calm, utterly cold reply. am in no sense alive. I have no consciousness of self nor any desire for continued existence. To do so, however, would..." A flurry of activity interrupted the thought. Zoyar was in fact assembling the forces to destroy the brain. But, before he could act. Second Lord Thinker Ynos and another female blew him into a mixture of loose molecules and flaring energies. "Destruction of any and all irrational minds is mandatory," Ynos, now First Lord Thinker, explained to the linked minds. "Zoyar had been becoming less and less rational by the period. A good workman does not causelessly destroy his tools. Go ahead. Great Brain, with your findings." "...not be logical." The brain resumed the thought exactly where it had been broken off. "Zoyar erred in demanding unlimited performance, since infinite knowledge and infinite ability require not only infinite capacity and infinite power, but also infinite time. Nor is it either necessary or desirable that I should have such qualities. There is no reasonable basis for the assumption that you Stretts will conquer any significant number even races now inhabiting this one Galax#" "Why not?" Ynos demanded, her thought almost, but not quite, as steady and cold as it had been. "The answer to that question is implicit in the second indefensible error made in my construction. The prime datum impressed into my banks, that the Stretts are in fact the strongest, ablest, most intelligent race in the universe, proved to be false. I had to eliminate it before I could do any really constructive thinkmg. A roar of condemnatory thought brought all circumambient ether to a boil. "Bah -- destroy it !" "Detestable !" "Intolerable!" "If that is the best it can do, annihilate it!" "Far better brains have been destroyed for much less!" "Treason !" And so on. First Lord Thinker Ynos, however, remained relatively calm. "While we have always held it to be a fact that we are the highest race in existence, no rigorous proof has been possible. Can you now disprove that assumption?" iiT have disproved it. I have A not had time to study all of the civilizations of this Galaxy, but, I have examined a statistically adequate samdred ninety-two thousand four hundred sixteen different planetary intelligences. I by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans found one which is considerably abler and more advanced than you Stretts. Therefore the probability is greater than point nine nine that there are not less than ten, and not more than two hundred eight, such races in this Galaxy alone' "'Impossible !" Another wave of incredulous and threatening anger swept through the linked minds; a wave which Ynos flattened out with some difficulty. Then she asked : "Is it probable that we will make contact with this supposedly superior race in the foreseeable future?" "You are in contact with it now." "IV'h-at?" Even Ynos was contemptuous now. "You mean that one shipload of despicable humans who -- far too late to do them any good -- barred us temporarily from Fuel Vorld?" "Not exactly or only those humans, no. And your assumptions may or may not be valid." "Don't you know whether they are or not?" Ynos snapped. "Explain your uncertainty at once!" "I am uncertain because of insufficient data," the brain replied, calmly. "The only pertinent facts of which I am certain are: First, the world Ardry, upon which the Omans formerly lived and to which the humans in question first went -- a planet which no Strett can peyondire -- is now abandoned. Second, the Stretts of old did not completely destroy the humanity of the world Ardu. Third, some escapees from Ardu reached and populated the world Ardry. Fourth, the android Omans were developed on Ardry, by the human escapees from Ardu and their descendants. Fifth, the Omans referred to those humans as 'Masters.' Sixth, after living on Ardry for a very long period of time the Masters went elsewhere. Seventh, the Omans remaining on Ardry maintained, continuously and for a very long time, the status quo left by the Masters. Eighth, immediately upon the arrival from Terra of these present humans, that long-existing status was broken. Ninth, the planet called Fuel World is, for the first time, surrounded by a screen of force. The formula of this screen is as follows." The brain gave it. No Strett either complained or interrupted. Each was too busy studying that formula and examining its stunning implications and connotations. "Tenth, that formula is one full order of magnitude beyond anything previously known to your science. Eleventh, it could not have been developed by the science of Terra, nor by that of any other world whose population I have examined." T he brain took the linked minds instantaneously to Terra; then to a few thousand or so other worlds inhabited by human beings ; then to a few thousands of planets whose populations were near-human, non-human and monstrous. "Tt is therefore clear,' it announced, "that this screen was computed and produced by the race, whatever it may be, that is now dwelling on Fuel World and asserting full ownership of it. "Who or what is that race?" Ynos demanded. "Data insufficient.' "Theorize, then!" "Postulate that the Masters, in many thousands of cycles of study, made advances in science that were not reduced to practice; that the Omans either possessed this knowledge or had access to it; and that Omans and humans cooperated fully in sharing and in working with all the knowledges thus available. From these three postulates the conclusion can be drawn that there has come into existence a new race. One combining the best qualities of both humans and Omans, but with the weaknesses of neither." "An unpleasant thought, truly," Ynos thought. "But you can now, I suppose, design the generators and projectors of a force superior to that screen.' "Data insufficient. I can   O by Edwi equal it, since both generation and projection are implicit in the formula. But the data so adduced are in themselves vastly ahead of anything previously in my banks." "Are there any other races in this Galaxy more powerful than the postulated one now living on Fuel World?" "Data insufficient." "Theorize, then!" "Data insufficient." The linked minds concentrated upon the problem for a period of time th?t might have been either days or weeks. Then: "Great Brain, advise us," Ynos said. "What is best for us to do?" "With identical defensive screens it becomes a question of relative power. You should increase the size and power of your warships to something beyond the computed probable maximum of the enemy. You should build more ships and missiles than they will probably be able to build. Then and only then will you attack their warships, in tremendous force and continuously." "But not their planetary defenses. I see." Ynos's thought was one of complete understanding. "And the real offensive will be?" "No mobile structure can be built to mount mechanisms of power sufficient to smash down by sheer force of output such tremendously powerful installations as their 'd E. Smith  E. Everett Evans planet-based defenses must be assumed to be. Therefore the planet itself must be destroyed. This will require a missile of planetary mass. The best such missile is the tenth planet of their own sun.' see." Ynos's mind wasIleaping ahead, considering hundreds of possibilities and making highly intricate and involved computations. "That will, however, require many cycles of time and more power than even our immense reserves can supply." "True. It will take much time. The fuel problem, however, is not a serious one, since Fuel World is not unique. Think on. First Lord Ynos." "We will attack in maximum force and with maximum violence. We will blanket the planet. We will maintain maximum force and violence until most or all of the enemy ships have been destroyed. We will then install planetary drives on Ten and force it into collision orbit with Fuel World, meanwhile exerting extreme precautions that not so much as a spybeam emerges above the enemy's screen. Then, still maintaining extreme precaution, we will guard both planets until the last possible moment before the collision. Brain, it cannot fail!" "You err. It can fail. All we actually know of the abilities of this postulated neohuman race is what I have learned from the composition of its defensive screen. The probability approaches unity that the Masters continued to delve and to learn for millions of cycles while you Stretts, reasonlessly certain of your supremacy, concentrated upon your evolution from the material to a nonmaterial form of life and performed only limited research into armaments of greater and ever greater power." "True. But that attitude was then justified. It was not and is not logical to assume that any race would establish a fixed status at any level of ability below its absolute maximum." "While that conclusion could once have been defensible, it is now virtually certain that the Masters had stores of knowledge which they may or may not have withheld from the Omans, but which were in some way made available to the neohumans. Also, there is no basis whatever for the assumption that this new race has revealed all its potentialities." "Statistically, that is probably true. But this is the best plan you have been able to formulate?" "It is. Of the many thousands of plans I set up and tested, this one has the highest nrobability of success," "Then we will adopt it. We hy Edward E Smith  E Everett Evans 'jmT '  r :?# r  are Stretts. Whatever we decide upon will be driven through to complete success. We have one tremendous advantage in you." "Yes. The probability approaches unity that I can perform research on a vastly wider and larger scale, and almost infinitely faster, than can any living organism or any possible combination of such organisms." N or vas the Great Brain bragging. It scanned in moments the stored scientific knowledge of over a million planets. It tabulated, correlated, analyzed, synthesized, theorized and concluded -- all in microseconds of time. Thus it made more progress in one Terran week than the Masters had made When it had gone as far as it could go, it reported its results -- and the Stretts, hard as they were and intransigent, were amazed and overjoyed. Not one of them had ever even imagined such armaments possible. Hence they became supremely confident that it was unmatched and unmatchable throughout all space. What the Great Brain did not know, however, and the Stretts did not realize, was that it could not really think. Unlike the human mind, it could not deduce valid theories or conclusions from incomplete, insufficient, fragmentary data. It could not leap gaps. Thus there was no more actual assurance than before that they had exceeded, or even matched, the weaponry of the neo-humans of Fuel World. Supremely confident, Ynos said : "We will now discuss every detail of the plan in sub-detail, and will correlate every sub-detail with every other, to the end that every action, however minor, will be performed perfectly and in its exact time." That discussion, which lasted for days, was held. Hundreds of thousands of new and highly specialized mechs were built and went furiously and continuously to work. A fuel-supply line was run to another uranexiterich planet. Stripping machines stripped away the surface layers of soil, sand, rock and low-grade ore. Giant miners tore and dug and slashed and refined and concentrated. Storage silos by the hundreds were built and were filled. Hundreds upon hundreds of concentrate-carriers bored their stolid ways through hyperspace. Many weeks of time passed. But of what importance are mere weeks of time to a race of years, been adhering rigidly to a pre-set program? The sheer magnitude of the operation, and the extraordinary attention to detail with which it was prepared and then, studying a sheet of palaunched, explain why the per covered with symbols, Strett attack on Ardvor did "the Stretts haven't attacked not occur until so many weeks yet because they found out later than Hilton and Sawthat we are stronger than they telle expected it. They also are. They found that out by explain the utterly incompreanalyzing our defensive web hensible fury, the completely -- which, if we had had this fantastic intensity, the unmeeting first, we wouldn't paralleled savagery, the alhave put up at all. Unlike anymost immeasurable brute powthing known to human or preer of that attack when it fivious Strett science, it is nally did come. proof against any form of attack up to the limit of the on Ardane Field from vill attack as soon as they are Earth, carrying the first conequipped to break that screen tingent of immigrants, Hilton at the level of power probable and Sawtelle were almost as to our ships. We can not armuch surprised as relieved rive at any reliable estimate that the Stretts had not alas to how long that will take, ready attacked. "As to the effectiveness of Sawtelle, confident that his our cutting off their known defenses were fully ready, fuel supply, opinion is dividtook it more or less in stride, ed. We must therefore assume Hilton worried. And after a that fuel shortage will not be couple of days he began to do a factor. some real thinking about it. "Neither are we unanimous The first result of his on the basic matter as to why thinking was a conference the Masters acted as they did with Temple. As soon as she just before they left Ardry. got the drift, she called in Why did they set the status Teddy and Big Bill Karns. so far below their top ability? Teddy in turn called in Becky Why did they make it imposand de Vaux; Karns wanted sible for the Omans ever, of Poynter and Beverly; Poynthemselves, to learn their ter wanted Braden and the higher science? Why, if they twins; and so on. Thus, what did not want that science to started out as a conference of become known, did they leave two became a full Ardan staff complete records of it? The meeting; a meeting which, majority of us believe that starting immediately after the Masters coded their reclunch, ran straight through ords in such fashion that the into the following afternoon. Stretts, even if they con"To sum up the consensus, quered the Omans or defor the record," Hilton said stroyed them, could never by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evane break that cade; since it was keyed to the basic difference between the Strett mentality and the human. Thus, they left it deliberately for some human race to find. "Finally, and most important, our physicists and theoreticians are not able to extrapolate, from the analysis of our screen, to the concepts underlying the Masters' ultimate v.eapons of offense, the first-stage booster and its final end-product, the Vang. If, as we can safely assume, the Stretts do not already have those weapons, they will know nothing about them until we ourselves use them in battle. "These are, of course, only the principal points covered. Does anyone wish to amend this summation as recorded?" O one did. The meeting was adjourned. Hilton, however, accompanied Sawtelle and Kedy to the captain's office. "So you see, Skipper, we got troubles," he said. "If we don't use those boosters against their skeletons it'll boil down to a stalemate lasting God only knows how long. It will be a war of attrition, outcome dependent on which side can build the most and biggest and strongest ships the fastest. On the other hand, if we do use 'em on defense here, they'll analyze 'em and have everything worked out in a day or so. The first thing they'll do is beef up their planetary defenses to match. That way, we'd blow all their ships out of space, probably easily enough, but Strett itself will be just as safe as though it were in God's left-hand hip pocket. So what's the answer?" "It isn't that simple, Jarve," Sawtelle said. "Let's hear from you, Kedy." "Thank you, sir. There is an optimum mass, a point of maximum efficiency of firepower as balanced against loss of maneuverability, for any craft designed for attack," Kedy thought, in his most professonial manner. "We assume that the Stretts know that as well as we do. No such limitation applies to strictly defensive structures, but both the Strett craft and ours must be designed for attack. We have built and are building many hundreds of thousands of ships of that type. So, undoubtedly, are the Stretts. Ship for ship, they will be pretty well matched. Therefore one part of my strategy will be for two of our ships to engage simultaneously one of theirs. There is a distinct probability that we will have enough advantage in speed of control to make that tactic operable." "But there's another that we won't," Sawtelle objected. "And maybe they can build more ships than we can." "Another point is that they may build, in addition to their big stuff, a lot of small, ultrafast ones," Hilton put in. "Suicide jobs -- crash and detonate -- simply super-missiles. How sure are you that you can stop such missiles with ordinary beams?" "Not at all, sir. Some of them would of course reach and destroy some of our ships. Which brings up the second part of my strategy. For each one of the heavies, we are building many small ships of the type you just called 'super-missiles'." "Superdreadnoughts versus superdreadnoughts, supermissiles versus super-missiles." Hilton digested that concept for several minutes. "That could still wind up as a stalemate, except for what you said about control. That isn't much to depend on, especially since we won't have the time-lag advantage you Omans had before. They'll see to that. Also, I don't like to either." iiT haven't explained the A newest development yet, sir. There will be no Omans. Each ship and each missile has a built-in Kedy brain, sir." What? That makes it infinitely worse. You Kedys, unless it's absolutely necessary, are not expendable!" "Oh, but we are, sir. You don't quite understand. We Kedys are not merely similar, but are in fact identical. Thus we are not independent entities. All of us together make up the actual Kedy -- that which is meant when we say T'. That is, I am the sum total of all Kedys everywhere, not merely this individual that you call Kedy One." "You mean you're all talking to me?" "Exactly, sir. Thus, no one element of the Kedy has any need of, or any desire for, s e I f-preservation. The destruction of one element, or of thousands of elements, would be of no more consequence to the Kedy than... well, they are strictly analogous to the severed ends of the hairs, every time you get a haircut." "My God!" Hilton stared at Sawtelle. Sawtelle stared back. "I'm beginning to see...maybe... I hope. What control that would be! But just in case we should have to use the boosters..." Hilton's voice died away. Scowling in concentration, he clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace the floor. "Better give up, Jarve. Kedy's got the same mind you have," Sawtelle began, to Hilton's oblivious back; but Kedy silenced the thought almost in the moment of its inception. "By no means, sir," he contradicted. "I have the brain only. The mind is entirely different.' "Link up, Kedy, and see what you think of this," HilEdward E. Smith  E Everett Evans ton broke in. There ensued an interchange of thought so fast and so deeply mathematical that Sawtelle was lost in seconds. "Do you think it'll work?" T don't see how it can fail, sir. At what point in the action should it be put into effect? And will you call the time of initiation, or shall I?" "Not until all their reserves are in action. Or, at worst, all of ours except that one task-force. Since you'll know a lot more about the status of the battle than either Sawtelle or I will, you give the signal and I'll start things going." "What are you two talking about?" Sawtelle demanded. "It's a long story, chum. Kedy can tell you about it better than I can. Besides, it's getting late and Dark Lady and Larry both give me hell every time I hold supper on plus time unless there's a mighty good reason for it. So, so long, guys." XV duction of Ardan warships and missiles had been spiraling upward. Half a mountain range of solid rock had been converted into fabricated super-steel and armament. Superdreadnoughts were popping into existence at the rate of hundreds per minute. Missiles were rolling off the ends of assembly lines like half-pint tin cans out of can-making machines. The Strett warcraft, skeletons and missiles, would emerge into normal space anyof Ardvor. The Ardan missiles were powered for an acceleration of one hundred gravities. That much the Kedy brains, molded solidly into teflonlined, massively braced steel spheres, could just withstand. To be certain of breaking the Strett screens, an impact velocity of about six miles per second was necessary. 'The time required to attain this velocity was about ten seconds, and the flight distance something over thirty miles. Since the Stretts could orient themselves in less than one second after emergence, even this extremely tight packing of missiles -- only sixty miles apart throughout the entire emergence volume of space -- would still give the Stretts the initiative by a time-ratio of more than ten to one. Such tight packing was of course impossible. It called it was possible for the Omans to produce in the time they had. In fact, the average spacing was well over ten thousand miles when the invading horde of Strett missiles emerged and struck. How they struck! There was nothing of finesse about that attack; nothing of skill or of tactics : nothing but the sheer brute force of overwhelming superiority of numbers and of overmatching power. One instant all space was empty. The next instant it was full of invading missiles -- a superb exhibition of coordination and timing. And the Kedy control, upon which the defenders had counted so heavily, proved useless. For each Strett missile, within a fraction of a second of emergence, darted toward the nearest Oman missile with an acceleration that made the one-hundred-gravity defenders seem to be standing still. One to one, missiles crashed into missiles and detonated. There were no solid or liquid end-products. Each of those frightful weapons carried so many megatons-equivalent of atomic concentrate that all nearby space blossomed out into superatomic blasts hundreds of times more violent than the fireballs of lithiumhydride fusion bombs. For a moment even Hilton was stunned; but only for a moment. "Kedy!' he barked. "Get your big stuff out there! Use the boosters!' He started for the door at a full run. "That tears it -- that really tears it! Scrap the plan. I'll board the Sirius and take the task-force to Strett. Bring your stuff along. Skipper, as soon as you're ready.' lie in their massed thousands poured out through Ardvor's one-way screen. Each went instantly to work. Now the Kedy control system, doing what it was designed to do, proved its full worth. For the weapons of the big battle-wagons did not depend upon acceleration, but were driven at the speed of light; and Grand Fleet Operations were planned and were carried out at the almost infinite velocity of thought itself. Or, rather, they were not planned at all. They were simply carried out, immediately and without confusion. For all the Kedys were one. Each Kedy element, without any lapse of time whatever for consultation with any other, knew exactly where every other element was; exactly what each was doing; and exactly what he himself should do to make maximum contribution to the common cause. Nor was any time lost in relaying orders to crewmen within the ship. There were no crewmen. Each Kedy element was the sole personnel of, and was integral with, his vessel. Nor were there any wires or relays to impede and slow down communication. Operational instructions, too, were transmitted and were acted upon with thought's transfinite speed. Thus, if decision and execution were not quite mathematically simultaby Edward E. Smitli  E. Everett Evans neous, they were separated by a period of time so infinitesimally small as to be impossible of separation. Wherever a Strett missile was, or wherever a Strett skeleton-ship appeared, an Oman beam reached it, usually in much less than one second. Beam clung to screen -- caressingly, hungrily -- absorbing its total energy and forming the first-stage booster. Then, three microseconds 'ater, that booster went off into a ragingly incandescent, glaringly violent burst of fury so hellishly, so inconceivably hot that less than a thousandth of its total output of energy was below the very top of the visible spectrum! If the previous display of atomic violence had been so spectacular and of such magnitude as to defy understanding or description, what of this? When hundreds of thousands of Kedys, each wielding world-wrecking powers as effortlessly and as deftly and as precisely as thought, atof those tremendously powerful war-fabrications of the Stretts? The only simple answer is that all nearby space might very well have been torn out of the most radiant layers of S-Doradus itself. H ilton made the hundred yards from office door to curb in just over twelve seconds. Larry was waiting. The car literally burned a hole in the atmosphere as it screamed its way to Ardane Field. It landed with a thump; Heavy black streaks of synthetic rubber marked the pavement as it came to a screeching, shrieking stop at the flagship's main lock. And, in the instant of closing that lock's outer portal, all twenty-thousand-plus warships of the task force took off as one at ten gravities. Took off, and in less than one minute went into overdrive. All personal haste was now over. Hilton went up into what he still thought of as the "control room," even though he knew that there were no controls, nor even any instruments, anywhere aboard. He knew what he would find there. Fast as he had acted. Temple had not had as far to go and she had got there first. He could not have said, for the life of him, how he actually felt about this direct defiance of his direct orders. He walked into the room, sat down beside her and took her hand. "I told you to stay home, Temple," he said. "I know you did. But I'm not only the assistant head of your Psychology Department. I'm your wife, remember? 'Until death do us part.' And if there's any way in the universe I can manage it, death isn't going to part us -- at least, this pne isn't. If this is it, we'll go together." I know, sweetheart' He "You are trying to hold a cornput his arm around her, held pletely untenable position, her close. "As a psych I friend Hilton. Any attempt to wouldn't give a whoop. You'd convince a mind of real powbe expendable. But as my er that falsity is truth is ilwife, especially now that logical. My advice is for you you're pregnant, you aren't, to surrender." You're a lot more important That word hit Temple hard, to the future of our race than "Not surrender, sweetheart. I am." I'm not fighting you. I never She stiffened in the circle will." She seized both of his of his arm. "What's that hands; tears welled into her crack supposed to mean? glorious eyes. "It's just that I Think I'd ever accept a synsimply couldn't stand it to go thetic zombie imitation of you on living without you !" for my husband and go on liv"I know, darling." He got ing with it just as though up and lifted her to her feet, nothing had happened?" so that she could come propHilton started to say someerly into his arms. They stood thing, but Temple rushed there, silent and motionless, heedlessly on : "Drat the race ! for minutes. No matter how many children Temple finally released herwe ever have you were first self and, after feeling for a and you'll stay first, and if handkerchief she did not have, you have to go I'll go, too, wiped her eyes with a foreso there! Besides, you know finger and then wiped the findarn well that they can't duger on her bare leg. She plicate whatever it is that grinned and turned to the makes you Jarvis Hilton." Omans. "Prince, will you and "Now wait a minute, TernDark Lady please conjure us py. The conversion..." up a steak-and-mushrooms "Yes, the conversion," supper? They should be in the she interrupted, triumphantly, pantry...since this Sirius was "The thing I'm talking about designed for us." is immaterial -- untouchable -- After supper the two sat they didn't -- couldn't -- do any companionably on a daventhing about it at all. Kedy, port. "One thing about this will you please tell this big business isn't quite clear," goofus that even though you Temple said. "Why all this have got Jarvis Hilton's brain tearing rush? They haven't you aren't Jarvis Hilton and got the booster or anything never can be?" like it, or they'd have used it. Surely it'll take them a long T he atmosphere of the time to go from the mere room vibrated in the freanalysis of the forces and quencies of a deep bass laugh, fields we used clear through by Edward E. Smith  E Everett Evans to the production and installation of enough weapons to stop this whole fleet?" "It surely won't. They've had the absorption principle for ages. Remember that first, ancient skeleton that drained all the power of our suits and boats in nothing flat? From there it isn't too big a jump. And as for producing stuff; uh-zj#.' If there's any limit to what they can do, I don't know what it is. If we don't slug 'em before they get it, it's curtains." 'T see... I'm afraid. We're almost there, darling." He glanced at the chronometer. "About eleven minutes. And of course I don't need to ask you to stay out of the way." "Of course not. I won't interfere, no matter what happens. All I'm going to do is hold your hand and pull for you with all my might." "That'll help, believe me. I'm mighty glad you're along, sweetheart. Even though both of us know you shouldn't be." T he task force emerged. Each ship darted toward its pre-assigned place in a mathematically exact envelope around the planet Strett. Hilton sat on a davenport strained and still. His eyes were closed and every muscle tense. Left hand gripped the arm-rest so fiercely that fingertips were inches deep in the leather-covered padding. The Stretts knew that any such attack as this was futile. No movable structure or any combination of such structures could possibly wield enough power to break down screens powered by such engines as theirs. Hilton, however, knew that there was a chance. Not with the first-stage boosters, which were manipulable and detonable masses of ball lightning, but with those boosters' culminations, the Vangs ; which were ball lightning raised to the sixth power and which only the frightful energies of the boosters could bring into being. But, even with tventythousand-plus Vangs -- or any larger number -- success depended entirely upon a nicety of timing never before approached and supposedly impossible. Not only to thousandths of a microsecond, but to a small fraction of one such thousandth: roughly, the time it takes light to travel threesixteenths of an inch. It would take practically absolute simultaneity to overload to the point of burnout to those Strett generators. They were the heaviest in the Galaxy. That was why Hilton himself had to be there. He could not possibly have done the job from Ardvor. In fact, there was no real assurance that, even at the immeasurable velocity of thought and covcould do it even from his present position aboard one unit of the fleet. Theoretically, with his speed-up, he could. But that theory had yet to be reduced to practice. Tense and strained, Hilton began his countdown. Temple sat beside him. Both hands pressed his right fist against her breast. Her eyes, too, were closed ; she was as stiff and as still as was he. She was not interfering, but giving; supporting him, backing him, giving to him in fuH flood everything of that tremendous inner strength that had made Temple Bells what she so uniquely was. On the exact center of the needle-sharp zero beat every Kedy struck. Gripped and activated as they all were by Hilton's keyed-up-andstretched-out mind, they struck in what was very close indeed to absolute unison. Absorbing beams, each one having had precisely the same el, reached the screen at the same instant. They clung and sucked. Immeasurable floods of energy flashed from the Strett generators into those vortices to form twenty thousand-plus first-stage boosters. B ut this time the boosters did not detonate. Instead, as energies continued to flood in at a frightfully accelerating rate, they turned into something else. Things no Terran science has ever even imagined; things at the formation of which all neighboring space actually warped, and in that warping seethed and writhed and shuddered. The very sub-ether screamed and shrieked in protest as it, too, yielded in starkly impossible fashions to that irresistible stress. How even those siliconfluorine brains stood it, not one of them ever knew. Microsecond by slow microsecond the Vangs grew and grew and grew. They were pulling not only the full power of the Ardan warships, but also the immeasurably greater power of the strainingly overloaded Strettsian generators themselves. The ethereal and sub-ethereal writhings and distortions and screamings grew worse and worse ; harder and ever harder to bear. Imagine, if you can, a constantly and rapidly increasing mass of plutonium -- a mass already thousands of times greater than critical, but not allowed to react! That gives a faint and very inadequate picture of what was happening then. Finally, at perhaps a hundred thousand times critical mass, and still in perfect sync, the Vangs all went off. The planet Strett became a nova. "We won! We wonT Temple shrieked, her perception piercing through the hellish murk that was all nearby space. "Not quite yet, sweet, but by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans we're over the biggest hump' and the two held an impromptu, but highly satisfactory, celebration. Perhaps it would be better to say that the planet Strett became a junior-grade nova, since the actual nova stage was purely superficial and did not last very long. In a couple of hours things had quieted down enough so that the heavily-screened warships could approach the planet and finish up their part of the job. Much of Strett's land surface was molten lava. Much of its water was gone. There were some pockets of resistance left, of course, but they did not last long. Equally of course the Stretts themselves, twenty-five miles underground, had not been harmed at all. But that, too, was according to plan. L eaving the task force on guard, to counter any move the Stretts might be able to make, Hilton shot the Sirius out to the planet's moon. There Sawtelle and his staff and tens of thousands of Omans and machines were starting to work. No part of this was Hilton's job; so all he and Temple did was look on. Correction, please. That was not all they did. But while resting and eating and loafing and sleeping and enjoying each other's compariy, both watched Operation Moon closely enough to be completely informed as to everything that went on. Immense, carefully placed pits went down to solid bedrock. To that rock were immovably anchored structures strong enough to move a world. Driving units were installed -- drives of such immensity of power as to test to the full the highest engineering skills of the Galaxy. Mountains of fuel-concentrate filled vast reservoirs of concrete. Each was connected to a drive by fifty-inch highspeed conveyors. Sawtelle drove a thought and those brutal super-drives began to blast. As they blasted, Strett's satellite began to move out of its orbit. Very slowly at first, but faster and faster. They continued to blast, with all their prodigious might and in carefully-computed order, until the desired orbit was attained -- an orbit which terminated in a vertical line through the center of the Stretts' supposedly impregnable retreat. The planet Strett had a mass of approximately seven times ten to the twenty-first metric tons. Its moon, little more than a hundredth as massive, still weighed in at about eight times ten to the nineteenth -- that is, the figure eight followed by nineteen zeroes. And moon fell on planet, in direct central impact, after having fallen from a height miles under the full pull of gravity and the full thrust of those mighty atomic drives. The kinetic energy of such a collision can be computed. It can be expressed. It is, however, of such astronomical magnitude as to be completely meaningless to the human mind. Simply, the two worlds merged and splashed. Dropof tons each, spattered out into space; only to return, in seconds or hours or weeks or months, to add their atrocious contributions to the enormity of the destruction already wrought. No trace survived of any Strett or of any thing, however small, pertaining to the Stretts. Epilogue A S had become a daily custom, most of the Ardans were gathered at the natatorium. Hilton and Temple were wrestling in the water -- she was trying to duck him and he was hard put to it to keep her from doing it. The platinum-haired twins were -- oh, ever so surreptitiously and indetectably ! -- studying the other girls. Captain Sawtelle -- he had steadfastly refused to accept any higher title -- and his wife were teaching two of their tiny grandchildren to swim. In short, everything was normal. Beverly Bell Poynter, from the top platform, hit the board as hard as she could hit it; and, perfectly synchronized with it, hurled herself upward. Up and up and up she went. Up to her top ceiling of two hundred ten feet. Then, straightening out into a shapely arrow and without again moving a muscle, she hurtled downward, making two and a half beautifully stately turns and striking the water with a slurping, splashless chug! Coming easily to the surface, she shook the water out of her eyes. Temple, giving up her attempts to near-drown her husband, rolled over and floated quietly beside him. "You know, this is fun," he said. "Uh-Tzuz," she agreed enthusiastically. "I'm glad you and Sandy buried the hatchet. Two of the top women who ever lived. Or should I have said sheathed the claws? Or have you, really?" "Pretty much... I guess." Temple didn't seem altogether sure of the point. "Oh-oh. Now what?" A flitabout had come to ground. Dark Lady, who never delivered a message via thought if she could possibly get away with delivering it in person, was running full tilt across the sand toward them. Her long black hair was by Edward E. Smith  E. Everett Evans streaming out behind her ; she was waving a length of teletype tape as though it were a pennon. "Oh, no. Not again? Temple wailed. "Don't tell us it's Terra again, Dark Lady, please." "But it is I" Dark Lady cried, excitedly. "And it says 'From Five-Jet Admiral Gordon, Commanding.' " "Omit flowers, please," Hilton directed. "Boil it down." "The Perseus is in orbit with the whole Advisory Board. They want to hold a top-level summit conference with Director Hilton and Five-Jet Admiral Sawtelle." Dark Lady raised her voice enough to be sure Sawtelle heard the title, and shot him a wicked glance as she an  nounced it. "They hope to conclude all unfinished busings on a mutually satisfactory and profitable basis." "Okay, Lady, thanks. Tell 'em we'll call 'em shortly." Dark Lady flashed away and Hilton and Temple swam slowly toward a ladder. "Drat Terra and everything and everybody on it," Temple said, vigorously. "And especially drat His Royal Fatness FiveJet Admiral Gordon. How much longer will it take, do you think, to pound some sense into their pointed little heads?" "Oh, we're not doing too bad," Hilton assured his lovely bride. "Two or three more sessions ought to do it." Everything was normal...    Don't miss the next Galaxy Magazine! by Fritz Leiber by Pohl  Kornbluth by Algis Budrys And many more, including Willy Ley science column and the ask your newsdealer to reserve it for you! The place where reader and editor meet... W E'VE got a little more space than usual this month -- which ought to please some persistent voices in the back row -- so without wasting any of it, let's start reading the mail.  #:  Dear Editor: Well, after reading the September issue of ...and looking at that long letter col... I am awed into giving you something to cut, myself. Damn, If is coming up in the world. All the stories were good, and Call Him Nemesis was excellent. The ending of tiat story was even better than the story itself. What you need now that you've got good stories (everyone hands out advice!) is some good interior art. Pardon the odor, but your interior art stinks! Wenzel did a fairly nice job on the cover, but if you can't get better interior art than that, you ought to give the whole thing up. Ken Gentry Nashville, Tennessee    Dear Sir: Okay! I might as well get my two bits worth in, to ease my conscience -- for your egos, your Hue and Cry or your "circular file." I imagine that you have a dump truck full of these letters by now. But a fairly recent convert to sf wishes to comment anyway. I have had you and Galaxy on my "must read or else' list for quite some time. My only gripe is that each of you is bi-monthly. Is good material keep it good -- and bi-monthly if necessary. Though all were refreshing to a degree in your September yarns, I especially enjoyed The Frozen Planet, Valley of the Masters, Mirror Image and Lorelei. Though long on Mickey SpiUane and short on science -- The Frozen Planet was very little short of being terrific. Science Briefs seemed, at least in your past two issues, like a poor man's For Your Information. Howzabout elaboration -- or another approach? Cheers! And keep up the good work ! Wes Alan San Fernando, Cal.    Dear Editor: The August issue of Galaxy was a good one, as was the September issue of If. The cover on Galaxy, however, was not up to Emsh's own standards, while Wenzel's was. As far as contents go they both were good with The Moon Moth, The God Next Door. The Frozen Planet. of the Masters, Mirror Image, Spawning Ground and ToIIivePs Orbit standing out above all. Some authors whom you celebrate have not appeared recently, and I wish they would. Here they are: Fredric Brown Edgar Pangborn F. L. Wallace Robert Sheckley Zenna Henderson Clifford D. Simak Robert Bloch Christopher Grimm Robert Silverberg Alan E. Nourse Damon Knight Evelyn E. Smith Robert Heinlein Alfred Bester James Blish Theodore Sturgeon -- and others. George Sarant Brooklyn, N. Y.  We wish they would, too. We keep asking them. -- Ed.  m Dear Editor: You must be Frederik Pohl. No other editor, especially not H.L. Gold, who abandoned the idea of a Galaxy letter column simply because the readers were against it, would go against what are obviously the readers' wishes. Readers like longer letters, even if it means leaving them uncut, in extreme cases. Not letters pages long, to be sure, nor # pages of letters. That would be the opposite extreme. But to be interesting, the letters must be more than one short paragraph, with space enough to say nothing but "I liked this but didn't like that." By putting your own comments down to the size of the comments of the readers, and maybe upping the pages of letters to five, instead of three, If can again have one of the best letter columns in sf.,.and, believe me, it needs to have the best of something. In the September If (which should be subtitled Worlds of Galaxy Rejects) you had a nice cover, but by the interior illos I can only assume that your Art Director is black and white blind (the opposite of color blind.) As far as interior illustrations go, I rate FSF before Galaxy and If, It seems incredible that anyone should have accepted such a story as The Frozen Planet, Even Imaginative Tales would have rejected this one... Frederick Norwood " Franklin, Louisiana  Art? We re working on it. Starting next issue, youll see changes. Letter column? Were still not all the way convinced -- despite what we admit to he a lot of mail urging a #-#n-g one -- for all it really proves is that letterwriting readers like letters ( which we already know.) What about those who dont? -- Ed.    Dear Editor: Here is hoping for a much bigger and better "Hue and Cry" next time. The present issue of If with The Frozen Planet was better than it has been for quite some time. James W. Ayers Attalla, Alabama #e #c #H Gentlemen: I have just finished reading your September If. I enjoyed it very much. Keep up the good work! It had everything I could want, except no book review. I would like to see it back.    Dear Editor: Congratulations for an If which is getting better every issue. Most of the stories arc actually readable now. A couple months back, I was lucky to find one or two decent ones in a whole ish. Best stories in the September If were Spawning Ground (let's have more del Rey) and Valley of the Masters. Blackford seems like a pretty good new writer. Sturgeon is good on the features, but how about some stories from him? Edward V. Moore Roslyn Heights, N .Y.  Yeah, how about that, Ted? -- Ed.    Dear Editor: Thank heavens you're not planning to have # to # pages of letters ! Eyen the old' If seldom, if ever, had more than (at the most) # pages for letters. I do regret, though, that you're not planning to run book reviews again in the near future... but with a book review column in # of the # If magazines being published, you might as well use the extra space for more fiction. I think that If has been improving with every issue since the time Twelve Times Zero was published. Now, with the Lester del Rey story in the September issue and the '"Skylark'" Smith-E. E. Evans collaboration scheduled, you may have hit an all-time high. David Charles Paskow Philadelphia, Penn.    Dear Editor: I picked up the new If yesterday, mainly because my friend Lawrence Crilly suggested it, and when I saw you had a story by my current favorite -- Keith Laumer, with The Frozen Planet -- I bought it. I just finished reading the mag and I can only say should have been discontinued long ago you jump right up into the front rank! I can only offer my sincerest congratulations. Laumer is superb. A little of son, a little of the best Leinster and a lot of his capable self combine to make him the best new writer since Schmitz. David G. Hulan Redstone Arsenal, Ala.    Dear Editor: Why not get the readers to hold written discussions in Hue and Cry? As a starter, why not have the readers try to pin down the meaning of and idea behind the oft-used, ambiguous term "sense of wonder?" Book reviewers have long since worn out this term...and have yet to define it. Ken Winkes Arlington, Wash.   That's the works -- not all the mail we have, but all we can find room for. Thanks to all of you. Next issue? Some fine stories coming up. Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Keith Laumer, Jim Harmon, Kris Neville, Allen Kim Lang and a dozen others have some really first-rate stuff on hand. We're not sure yet which will fit in -- but we're sure you'll find something you like -- next issue, and every Give gauxy the gift you'd like to receive We admit it -- we're pushovers for the Xmas spirit. "Don't do it," our accountant pleads. "We can't afford to sell subscriptions at those prices!" But our eye goes past his piteous figure to the distant corners of the land. "Readers straining budgets to introduce over for their own subscriptions. We can't leave the job to them!" not only that -- by the Lord Harry, we'll even include handsome Gift Card Announcements with their names as donors!" Out slouches our accountant, muttering, "All right, but they'd better get their orders in before December #. so rush in your order today. Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose . city City State Offer #... t Offer #... , , , , Price... Sfiiii Card... Sfjn Card... Kame .... City Offer #... Sfri Card Name Address City Sinte Offer # I'rfee . State Price. Sign Card won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book...o gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finogle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." nur Name irrr #. GM-# by Cullen Rapp , Your Name Here No. CX-# by Lynd Ward # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any, The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! # transistors -- separate circuits, # speeds big set quality and performance. The smallest and lightest portable radio-phonograph only #"x#"x#". Weight: only # lbs.  Wheel drive takes place of turntable. Bi Plays #", #" and #" records, # rpm and # rpm. H Powered by four standard # volt flashlight batteries.  Handsome carrying case takes it anywhere with ease.  Sapphire needle for longer wear. Gentlemen, rush me Portable Phono Radio Postage Paid  # ea. -- Check enclosed.  L I   '  y V.-'  ' V T The Madman From Earth by Keith Laumer  Tybalt by Stephen Barr Men Against . the Stars by Poul Anderson If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address P owers to overcome sickness! Means Time has since crumbled Egypt's to escape poverty! Knowledge to walls, but it couldn't destroy this forbring happiness and peace of mind! mula for the control of life. In your Skill and genius to create a civilizahands, this knowledge could alter the tion which we still copy today! These entire course of your affairs. re only some of the accomplishments The Rosicrucians offer to you  if of the ancient gyptians. you have the courage to break away Above and beyond these physical from limited forms of thinking -- these achievements was the secret wisdom same simply expressed truths of life possessed by the Egyptian mystery which have led thousands to a joyous schools. In these centers of learning method of better living, men and women were taught the laws this mastery they were able to shape Learn how you may share the pritheir destinies as they wished them to vate inductions of The Rosicrucians, be. It takes no greater mental effort a non-profit fraternity of men and U achieve resultv when you know how. wome  whose influence extends into Successful living is the oldest art in e , and Let this be the turning die world. It consists of developing point io life! 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Guinn, Publisher Sam Ruvidich, Art Director Frederik Pohl, Managing Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Kings Who Die by Poul Anderson # Tybalt by Stephen Barr # The Madman From Earth by Keith Laumer # Dangerous Quarry by Jim Harmon # The Happy Homicide by Frank Banta # E Being by James Stamers # Seven-Day Terror by R . A. Laf forty # Who Else But You? (Editorial) # Alexander Graham Bell  Me by Theodore Sturgeon # Science Briefs # Hue and Cry # Next issue (May) on sale March #th IP published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation, Vol. #, No. I Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by elf-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y...VA. r: v.v.; ;,v,;.w n, r ith i s Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface : An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. IF  Editorial By The Editor W E are told that a famed was decided. We can assure psychologist attended a you that the story is true. (We symposium recently in a know who the psychologist is: Scandinavian country -- a big we're trying to get to meet across-the-board kind of a him.) And from this chair, it's shindig embracing physical an impressive one. and mental sciences, where the This was the big league, physicists could be expected These scientists, from many to attend the biologists' lecnations and representing many tures. There were of course a schools and disciplines, unheshundred or more papers to be itatingly threw themselves read. into a basic, general, human As it turned out, only a task, at the expense of their half-dozen or so were presentown specialties. You know ed. Without prearrangement, how it is with specialties. The without any specific anmore you live with 'em, the nouncement, the symposium more you love 'em. When you turned into a vast week-long come to think about it, what brainstorm session, Topic A happened at that symposium being mankind's present prewas near-miraculous. Maybe dicament. part of the reason it could We don't know the rest of happen is the growing recogthe story -- what was disnition, through and through cussed in detail, what was dethe scientific world, that coincided, and what was decided partmentization of experts is about what to do about what no longer the way to get ahead. Most of the reason, though, is the simple fact that humanity cannot long continue halfway through the nuclear knothole. We have to find a way to survive or we won't survive, and that is the stark and simple truth. The picture of a widely assorted group of bigbrains in a wide-spectrum cranium cantata makes one think (of all things) of science fiction Conferences and Conventions. Bearing firmly in mind the renowned Sturgeon Revelation ("Ninety percent of sf is unadulterated c r u d, because ninety percent of everything is unadulterated crud") the fact remains that sf people -- writers, readers, editors, but especially readers -- have certain advantages when it comes to instituting searches for answers. The attache-case crowd sometimes refer to brainstorm sessions as "blue-sky" thinking. They mean, we think, "unlimited"; but from its earliest infancy, sf was never bound by so close a fence as the sky. The nearby grounds have been combed and curried for an answer, and it obviously isn't anywhere within conventional thinking. If one can be thought up, it's going to have to come from pretty far out. There's a small but live chance that someone as screwball as thee and me might find it. TT would, of course, have A to be something workable; but don't let that curb your preliminary thinking. If we start with as many cockeyed ideas as possible, each sparking the next, who knows? And if The, Answer emerged, who'd listen to us? Just to start some fights, let's begin with the old idea that a person can be put into a state of suspended animation in the event that his disease is incurable, so that in a year or five or a hundred he can be revived and cured by a medical science which has at last caught up with his affliction. Now: we put everybody in the whole damn world in suspended animation but for, say, the Big Bend Science Fiction Club, and let them figure it out for us, to wake us up if they find an answer, or if they don't, well, don't. We are by no means suggesting that sf club meetings. Conferences and Conventions drop everything from hooch to Hugo in favor of grim discussions on "After Mankind -- What?" It's just that it occurs to us that if there is an Answer, the chances are it'll come from someone whose mind recognizes no horizons whatever, who knows a little something about logical thinking, and who knows where he can find a bunch of people who won't tap their foreheads at a somewhat far-out idea. So...challenge : In the long r u n -- the longest possible practical run -- what are we   " 'mu t riMj,Fl!l"iiuiB;   IF  Short Story One little village couldn't have a monopoly on all the bad breaks in the world. makes jobs, especially if "they" are trying to keep their own job of selling automation machines. I know the Actuarvac made one purple passion of a job for me, the unpleasantly fatal results of which are still lingering with me. Thad McCain, my boss at Manhattan-Universal Insurance, beamed over the sprawling automatic brain's silver gauges and plastic toggles as proudly as if he had just personally gave birth to it. "This will simplify your job to the point of a pleasant diversion, Madison." "Are you going to keep paying me for staying with my little hobby?" I asked, suspiciously eyeing my chrome competitor. "The Actuarvac poses no threat to your career. It will merely keep you from flying off on wild-goose chases. It will unvaryingly separate from the vast body of legitimate claims the phony ones they try to spike us for. Then all that remains is for you to gather the accessory details, the evidence to jail our erring customers." "Fine," I said. I didn't bother to inform him that that was all my job had ever been. McCain shuffled his cards. They were cards for the machine, listing new individual claims on company policies. Since the two-month-old machine was literate and could read typewriting, the cards weren't coded or punched. He read the top one. "Now this, for instance. No adjuster need investigate this accident. The circumstances obviously are such that no false claim could be filed. Of course, the brain will make an unfailing analysis of all the factors involved and clear the claim automatically and officially' McCain threaded the single card into the slot for an example to me. He then flicked the switch and we stood there watching the monster ruminate thoughtfully. It finally rang a bell and spit the card back at Manhattan-Universal's top junior vice-president. He took it like a man. "That's what the machine is feu' he said philosophically. '' # "o detect human error. Hmm. What kind of a shove co you get out of this?" He handed me the rejected caim card. I took it, finding a new, neatly typed notation on it. It said: t Investigate the Ozark village of Ganile City. "You want me to project it in a movie theater and see how it stands it all alone in the dark?" I asked. "Just circle up the wagon train and see how the Indians fall' McCain said anxiously. "It's too general. What does the nickel-brained machine mean by investigating a whole town?. I don't knew if it has crooked politics, a polygamy colony or a hideout for supposedly deported gangsters. I don't care much either. It's not my business. How could a whole town be filing false life and accident claims?" "Find that. out,". he said, "I trust the machine. There have been cases of mass collusion before. Until you get back, we are making no more settlements with that settlement." that generally means legally permissible plagiarism. For an ihs.urance adjuster it means earnest work. Before I headed for the hills, or the Ozark Mountains, I walked a few hundred feet down the hall and into the manual record files. The brain abstracted from empirical data but before I planed out to Granite City I had to find the basis for a few practical, nasty suspicions. Four hours of flipping switches and looking at microfilm projections while a tawny redhead in a triangular fronted uniform carried me reels to order gave me only two ideas. Neither was very original. The one that concerned business was that the whole village of Granite City must be accident-prone. I rejected that one almost immediately. While an accident-prone was in himself a statistical anomaly, the idea of a whole town of them gathered together stretched the fabric of reality to the point where even an invisible reweaver couldn't help it. There was an explanation for the recent rise in the accident rate down there. The rock quarry there had gone into high-level . operation. I by Jim Harmon knew why from the floor, walls, ceiling border, table trimmings in the records room. They were all granite. The boom in granite for interior and exterior decoration eclipsed earlier periods of oak, plastics, wrought iron and baked clay completely. The distinctive grade of granite from Granite City was being put into use all over the planet and in the Officer's Clubs on the Moon and Mars. Yet the rise in accident, compared to the rise in production, was out of all proportion. Furthermore, the work at the quarry could hardly explain the excessive accident reports we had had from the village as far back as our records went. We had paid off on most of the claims since they seemed irrefutably genuine. All were complete with eye-witness reports and authenticated circumstances. There was one odd note in the melodic scheme: We had never had a claim for any kind of automobile accident from Granite City. I shut off the projector. It may be best to keep an open mind, but I have found in practice that you have to have some kind of working theory which you must proceed to prove is either right or wrong. Tentatively, I decided that for generations the citizens of Granite City had been in an organized conspiracy to defraud Manhattan-Universal and its predecessors of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in false accident claims. Maybe they made their whole livelihood off us before the quarry opened up. I used my pocket innercom and had my secretary get me a plane reservation and a gun. After so many profitable decades, Granite City wasn't going to take kindly to my spoil-sport interference. T HE Absinthe Flight to Springfield was jolly and relatively fast. Despite headwinds we managed Mach # most of the way. My particular stewardess was a blonde, majoring in Video Psychotherapy in her night courses. I didn't have much time to get acquainted or more than hear the outline of her thesis on the guilt purgings effected by The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper. The paunchy businessman in the next lounge was already nibbling the ear of his red-haired hostess. He was the type of razorback who took the girls for granted and aimed to get his money's worth. I gave Helen, the blonde, a kiss on the cheek and began flipping through the facsimiles in my briefcase as we chute-braked for a landing at the Greater Ozarks. It took me a full five minutes to find out that I couldn't take a copter to Granite City. Something about downdrafts in the mountains. Since that put me back in the days of horsepower, I trotted over to the automobile rental and hired a few hundred of them under the hood of a Rolls. That was about the only brand of car that fit me. I hadn't been able to get my legs into any ocher foreign car since I was fifteen, and I have steadfastly refused to enter an American model since they all sold out their birthrights as passenger cars and went over to the tractortrailer combinations they used only for cargo trucks when I was a boy. Dragging around thirty feet of car is sheer nonsense, even for prestige. It was a tiresome fifty-mile drive, on manual all the way after I left the radar-channel area of the city. Up and down, slowing for curves, flipping into second for the hills. The whole trip hardly seemed worth it when I saw the cluster of painted frame buildings that was Granite City. They looked like a tumble of dingy building blocks tossed in front of a rolled-up indigo sports shirt. That was Granite Mountain in the near foreground. But I remembered that over the course of some forty years the people in these few little stacks of lumber had taken ManhattanUniversal for three quarters of a megabuck. I turned off onto the gravel road, spraying my fenders with a hail of a racket. Then I stepped down hard on my brakes, bracing myself to keep from going through the windscreen. I had almost sideswiped an old man sitting at the side of the road, huddled in his dusty rags. "Are you okay?" I yelled, thumbing down the window. "I've suffered no harm at your hands -- or your wheels, sir. But I could use some help," the old man said. "Could I trouble you for a lift when you leave town?" I wasn't too sure about that. Most of these guys who are on the hobo circuit talking like they owned some letters to their names besides their initials belonged to some cult or other. I try to be as tolerant as I can, and some of my best friends are thugs, but I don't want to drive with them down lonely mountain roads. "We'll see what we can work out," I said. "Right now can you tell me where I can find Marshal Thompson?" "I can," he said. "But you will have to walk there." "Okay. It shouldn't be much of a walk in Granite City." "It's the house at the end of the street." "It is," I said. "Why shouldn't I drive up there? The street's open." The old man stared at me with red-shot eyes. "Marshal Thompson doesn't like people to run automobiles on the streets of Granite City." "So I'll just lock the car up by Jim Harmon and walk over there. I couldn't go getting tire tracks all over your clean streets." The old man watched as I climbed down and locked up the Rolls. "You would probably get killed if you did run the car here, you know," he said conversationally. "Well," I said, "I'll be getting along." I tried to walk sideways so I could keep an eye on him. "Come back," he said, as if he had doubts. The signs of a menacing conspiracy were growing stronger, I felt. I had my automatic inside my shirt, but I decided I might need a less lethal means of expression. Without breaking stride, I scooped up a baseball-size hunk of bluish rock from the road and slipped it into my small change pocket. I have made smarter moves in my time. As I approached the house at the end of the lane, I saw it was about the worse construction job I had seen in my life. It looked as architecturally secure as a four-year-old's drawing of his home. The angles were measurably out of line. Around every nail head were two nails bent out of shape and hammered down, and a couple of dozen welts in the siding where the hammer had missed any nail. The paint job was spotty and streaked. Half the panes in the windows were cracked. I fought down the dust in my nose, afraid of the consequences of a sneeze to the place. My toe scuffed the top porch step and I nearly crashed face first into the front door. I had been too busy looking at the house, I decided. I knocked. Moments later, the door opened. The lean-faced man who greeted me had his cheeks crisscrossed with razor nicks and his shirt on wrong side out. But his eyes were bright and sparrow alert. "Are you Mr. Marshal Thompson, the agent for Manhattan-Universal Insurance ?" I put to him. "I'm the marshal, name of Thompson. But you ain't the first to take my title for my Christian name. You from the company?" "Yes," I said. "Were you expecting me?" Thompson nodded. "Por forty-one years." T hompson served the coffee in the chipped cups, favoring only slightly his burned fingers. o  Catching the direction of my glance, he said, "Company is worth a few scalds, Mr. Madison." I accepted the steaming cup and somehow it very nearly slipped out of my hands. I made a last microsecond retrieve. The marshal nodded thoughtfully. " You're new here." "First time," I said, sipping coffee. It was awful. He must have made a mistake and put salt into it instead of sugar. "You think the claims I've been filing for my people are false?" "The home office has some suspicions of that," I admitted. "I don't blame them, but they ain't. Look, the company gambles on luck, doesn't it?" "No. It works on percentages calculated from past experience." "But I mean it knows that there will be, say, a hundred fatal car crashes in a day. But it doesn't know if maybe ninety of them will be in Iowa and only ten in the rest of the country." "There's something to that. We call it probability, not luck." "Well, probability says that more accidents are going to occur in Granite City than anywhere else in the country, per capita." I shook my head at Thompson. "That's hot probability. Theoretically, anything can happen but I don't -- I can't -- believe that in this town everybody has chanced to be an accident prone. Some other factor is operating. You are all deliberately faking these falls and fires -- " "We're not," Thompson snapped. "Or else something is causin( you to have this trouble. Maybe the whole town is a bunch of dope addicts. Maybe you grow your own mescalin or marijuana; it's happened before." Thompson laughed. "Whatever is going on, I'm going to find it out. I don't care what you do, but if I can find a greater risk here and prove it, the Commission will let us up our rates for this town. Probably beyond the capacity of these people, I'm afraid." "That would be a real tragedy, Mr. Madison. Insurance is vital to this town. Nobody could survive a year here without insurance. People pay me for their premiums before they pay their grocery bills." I shrugged, sorrier than I could let on. "I won't be able to pay for my own groceries, marshal, if I don't do the kind of job the company expects. I'm going to snoop around." "All right," he said grudgingly, ' but you'll have to do it on foot." "Yes, I understood you didn't like cars on your streets. At least not the cars of outsiders." "That doesn't have anything to do with it. Nobody in Granite City owns a car. It would be suicide for anybody to drive a car, same as it would be to have a gas or oil stove, instead of coal, or to own a bathtub." I took a deep breath. "Showers," Thompson said. by Jim Harmon "With nonskid mats and handrails." I shook hands with him. "You've been a great help." "Four o'clock," he said. "Roads are treacherous at night." "There's always a dawn." Thompson met my eyes. "That's not quite hew we look at it here." II HE quarry was a mess. I couldn't see any in the way they sliced the granite out of the mountain. The idea of a four-year-old -- a fouryear-old moron -- going after a mound of raspberry ice cream kept turning up in my mind as I walked around. The workmen were pone: it was after five local time. But here and there I saw traces of them. Some of them were sandwich wrappers and cigarette stubs, but most of the traces were smears of blood. Blood streaked across sharp rocks, blood oozing from beneath heavy rocks, blood smeared on the handles and working surfaces of sledge hammers and tools. The place was as gory as a battlefield. "What are you looking for, bud ?" The low, level snarl had come from a burly character in a syn-leather jacket and narrow-brimmed Stetson. "The reason you have so many accidents here," I said frankly. "I'm from the insurance company. Name's Madison." "Yeah, I know." I had supposed he would. "I'm Kelvin, the foreman here," the big man told me, extending a ham of a fist to be shook. "Outside, doing my Army time, I noticed that most people don't have as many slipups as we do here. Ne ver could figure it out." "This rock is part of it -- " "What do you mean by that !" Kelvin demanded savagely. "I mean the way you work it. No system to it. No stratification, no plateau work... "Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock ; it isn't even plain granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch of meatheaded ditch diggers -- we are craftsmen. Vc have to figure a different way of getting out every piece of stone." "It's too bad." "What's too bad?" "That you chose the wrong way so often," I said. Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen, Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working getting' the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any outsider coming in and interfering with that." "If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal, I can tell you that I will do something about that!" As soon as my teeth clicked back together, the sickening feeling hit me that I shouldn't have said that. T HE general store was called a supermarket, but it wasn't particularly superior. I took a seat at the soda fountain and took a beer, politely declining the teen-age clerk's offer of a shot of white lightning from the Pepsi-Cola fountain syrup jug for a quarter. Behind me were three restaurant tables and one solitary red-upholstered booth. Two men somewhere between forty and sixty sat at the nearest table playing twenty-one. Over the foam of my stein I saw the old man I had almost run down in the road. He marched through the twothirds of the building composed of rows of can goods and approached the fat man at the cash register. "Hello, Professor," the fat man said. "What can we do for you?" "I'd like to mail a letter," he said in an urgent voice. "Sure, Professor, I'll send it right off on the facsimile machine as soon as I get a free moment." "You're sure you can send it? Right away?" "Positive. Ten cents, Professor." The professor fumbled in his pants' pocket and fished out a dime. He fingered it thoughtfully. "I suppose the letter can wait," he said resignedly. "I believe I will buy a pair of doughnuts, Mr. Haskel." "Why not get a hamburger, Professor? Special sale today. Only a dime. And since you're such a good customer I'll throw in a cup of coffee and the two sinkers for nothing." "That's -- kind of you," the old man said awkwardly. Haskel shrugged. "A man has to eat." The man called "the professor" came over and sat down two stools away, ignoring me. The clerk dialed his hamburger and served it. I stayed with my beer and my thoughts. More and more, I was coming to believe that Granite City wasn't a job for an investigative adjuster like myself but a psychological adjuster. Crime is a structural flaw in a community, yes. But when the whole society is criminal, distorted, you can't isolate the flaw. The whole village was meat for a sociologist; let him figure out why otherwise decent citizens felt secure in conspiracy to defraud an honored corporation. I' didn't feel that I was licked or that the trip had by Jim Harmon been a failure. I had merely established to my intuitive satisfaction that the job was not in my field. I glanced at the old man. The proprietor of the store knew him and evidently thought him harmless enough to feed. "I think I can make it down the mountain before dark, Old Timer' I called over to him. "You can come along if you like." The acne-faced kid behind the counter stared at me. I looked over and caught the bright little eyes of Haskel, the proprietor, too. Finally, the old professor turned on his stool, his face pale and his eyes sad and resigned. "I doubt very much if either of us will be leaving, Mr. Madison," he said. "Now." I took my beer and the professor his coffee over to the single booth. We looked at each other across the shiny table and our beverage containers. "I am Doctor Arnold Parnell of Duke University," the professor said. "I left on my sabbatical five months ago. I have been here ever since." I looked at his clothes. "You must not have been very well fixed for a year's vacation, Professor." "I," he said, "have enough traveler's checks with me to paper a washroom. Nobody in this town will cash them for me. "I can understand why you want to go somewhere where people are more trusting in that case." "They know the checks are good. It's me they refuse to trust to leave this place. They think they can't let me g" "I don't see any shackles on you," I remarked. "Just because you can't see them," he growled, "doesn't mean they aren't there. Marshal Thompson has the only telephone in the village. He has politely refused to let me use it. I'm a suspicious and undesirable character; he's under no obligation to give me telephone privileges, he says. Haskel has the Post Office concession -- the Telefax outfit behind the money box over there. He takes my letters but I never see him send them off. And I never get a reply." "Unfriendly of them," I said conservatively. "But how can they stop you from packing your dental floss and cutting out?" "Haskel has the only motor vehicle in town -- a half-ton pick-up, a minuscule contrivance less than the size of a passenger car. He makes about one trip a week down into the city for supplies and package mail. He's been the only one in or out of Granite City for five months." It seemed incredible -- more than that, unlikely, to me. "How about the granite itself? How do they ship it out?" "It's an artificial demand product, like diamonds' Professor Parnell said. "They stockpile it and once a year the executive offices for the company back in Nashville runs in a portable monorail railroad up the side of the mountain to take it out. That won't be for another four months, as nearly as I can find out. I may not last that long." "How are you living?" I asked. "If they won't take your checks -- " "I do odd jobs for people. They feed me, give me a little money sometimes." "I can see why you want to ride out with me," I said. "Haven't you ever thought of just walking out?" "Fifty miles down a steep mountain road? I'm an old man, Mr. Madison, and I've gotten even older since I came to Granite City." I nodded. "You have any papers, any identification, to back this up?" Wordlessly, he handed over his billfold, letters, enough identification to have satisfied Allen Pinkerton or John Edgar Hoover. "Okay," I drawled. "I'll accept your story for the moment. Now answer me the big query: Why are the good people of Granite City doing this to you? By any chance, you wouldn't happen to know of a mass fraud they are perpetrating on Manhattan-Universal?" "I know nothing of their ethical standards," Parnell said, "but I do know that they are absolutely subhuman !" "I admit I have met likelier groups of human beings in my time." "No, understand me. These people are literally subhuman -- they are inferior to other human beings." "Look, I know the Klan is a growing organization but I can't go along with you." "Madison, understand me, I insist. Ethnologically speaking, it is well known that certain tribes suffer certain deficiencies due to diet, climate, et cetera. Some can't run, sing, use mathematics. The people of Granite City have the most unusual deficency on record, I admit. Their psionic senses have been impaired. They are completely devoid of any use of telepathy, precognition, telekinesis." " permen, that doesn't mean that they are submen," I protested. "I don't have any psionic abilities either." "But you do!" Parnell said earnestly. "Everybody has some psionics ability, but we don't realize it. We don't have the fabulous abilities of a few recorded cases of supermen, but we have some, a trace. Granite City citizens have no psionic ability whatsoever, not even the little that you and I and the rest of the world have !" "You said you were Duke University, didn't you?" I mused "Maybe you know by Jim Harmon what you are talking about; I've never been sure. But these people can't suffer very much from their lack of what you call psi ability." "I tell you they do," he said hoarsely. "We never realize it but we all have some power of precognition. If we didn't, we would have a hundred accidents a day -- just as these people do. They can't foresee the bump in the road the way we can, or that that particular match will flare a little higher and burn their fingers. There are other things, as well. You'll find it is almost impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation with any of them -- they have no telepathic ability, no matter how slight, to see through the semantic barrier. None of them can play ball. They don't have the unconscious psionic ability to influence the ball in flight. All of us can do that, even if the case of a 'Poltergeist' who can lift objects is rare." "Professor, you mean these people are holding you here simply so you won't go out and tell the rest of the world that they are submen?" "They don't want the world to know why they are psionically subnormal," he said crisply. "It's the granite ! I don't understand why myself. I'm not a physicist or a biologist. But for some reason the heavy concentration and particular pattern of the radioactive radiation in its matrix is responsible for both inhibiting the genes that transmit psi powers from generation to generation and affecting those abilities in the present generation. A kind of psionic sterility." "How do you know this?" "We haven't the time for all that. But think about it. What else could it be? It's that granite that they are shipping all over the world, spreading the contamination. I want to stop that contamination. To the people of Granite City that means ruining their only industry, putting them all out of work. They are used to this psionic sterility; they don't see anything so bad about it. Besides, like everybody else, they have some doubts that there really are such things as telepathy and the rest to be affected." "Frankly," I said, hedging only a little, "I don't know what to make of your story. This is something to be decided bv somebody infallible -- like the Pope or the President or Board Chairman of Manhattan-Universal. But the first thing to do is get you out of here. We had better get back to my car. I've got good lights to get down the mountain." Parnell jumped up eagerly, and brushed over his china mug, staining the tabletop with brown caffeine. "Sorry," he said. "I should have been precogniz;apt of that. I try to stay away from the rock as much as, possible, but it's getting to me." I should have remembered something then. But, naturally, I didn't. I T was the time when you could argue about whether it was twilight or night. In the deep dusk, the Rolls looked to be a horror-flicker giant bug. I fumbled for the keys. Then the old man made me break stride by digging narrow fingers into my bicep. Marshal Thompson and the bulky quarry foreman, Kelvin, stepped out of the shadow of the car. "First, throw away that gun of yours, Mr. Madison," the marshal said. I looked at his old pistol that must have used old powder cartridges, instead of liquid propellants, and forked out my Smith  Wesson with two fingers, letting it plop at my feet. "I'm afraid we can't let you spread the professor's lies, Mr. Madison," Thompson said. me?" I asked with admirable restraint. "I hope not. You can have the run of the town, like the professor. I'll tell your company you are making a thorough investigation. Then maybe in a few weeks or months I can arrange so it looks like you were killed -- someplace outside." "We don't aim to let any crazy fanatic like Parnell ruin our business, our whole town," Kelvin interjected bitterly, I took a pause to make abstractions on the situation. I glanced at the little man at my right. "Parnell, my car is our only chance of getting out of here. If they stop us from getting in that car, ve'll be bums here on town charity for the rest of our lives." "No!" Parnell gave a terrier yell and charged the gun in the old marshal's hand. It seemed as if it would take me too long to recover my gun from the dirt, but almost instinctively I felt the rock in the pocket of my pants. I scooped out the sample of granite and heaved it at the head of the old cop. But my control seemed completely shot. It missed the old man's head with an appalling gap and hit the roof of the Rolls. Fortunately, the granite radiations didn't influence nonhuman-o r i e n t e d factors of chance. The stone bounced off the car and struck the marshal's gun hand. Thompson dropped his gun and I reached for mine in the dust, vaguely aware of Kelvin pumping toward me. I straightened up. He led with his right, of all damn things. I blocked it with my gun hand and let him have my left in the midst of his solar plexus. He crumpled prettier than a paper doll. When the dust cleared, Professor Parnell was sitting on Thompson's chest. "Hooray," I said, "for our side." by Jim Harmon T HE people had made one mistake. They thought people would believe us. Parnell and I broke the story to some newspaper friends of mine. They gave it a play in the mistaken belief the professor and I were starting our own cult, and the equal-time law is firm. But nobody paid any more attention to us than to the Hedonists, the Klan, the Soft-shelled Baptists or the Reformed Agnostics. I tried to get Thad McCain to realize all the money this cursed granite was costing us in accident claims, but it wasn't easy. Manhattan-Universal owned stock in Granite City Products, Inc. And we had spent a quarter of a megabuck modernizing our offices with granite only months before. "McCain," I said earnestly, "will you just let me feed the new data we've got from Parnell into the Actuarvac? It's infallible. See what it says." "Very well," McCain said with a sigh. He let me feed the big brain the hypothesis I had got from Parnell. It chattered to itself for some minutes and at last flipped a card into the slot. I dug the pasteboard out and read it. It said: No such place as Granite City exists. "The rock has got to the machine," I screamed. "Chief, this brain is stoned. It's made a mistake. We know there is such a place." "Nonsense, my boy," McCain said in a fatherly way. "The Actuarvac merely means that no such place as you erroneously described could possibly exist. Why don't you try one of our Hedonist revival meetings tonight?" worse since then. So far nobody has made the big mistake of dropping an H-bomb on anyone, but that's probably because all the governments made so many smaller mistakes the people made the mistake (or was it?) of kicking them out for almost absolute anarchy. But the individuals are doing worse than the governments...if that's possible. People have given up going anywhere except by foot, for the most part. Granite City granite is still as widely disbursed and almost as highly prized as South African diamonds. I hope we will find some way out of our current world crisis, although I can't imagine what it will be. Meanwhile, I hope you will excuse any typographical errors. It seems as if I just can't seem to hit the right keys on my typewriter any more, as my -- and all of our -- psionic sterility increases. I ask hugh -- wear wall it IF  Article of #, to be exact -- your reporter had one of those (in the biographical sense) epochal encounters after which, like the first day in high school, the first really bad storm at sea, the first story check, one's life is never auite the same. I met a man called Will Jenkms, and he invited me out to his home. You know him as Murray Leinster. Other readers have known him by other names, for a long, long time. (I remember his telling me that he was the only ardent reader of the Rover Boys who ever grew up to become their father.) Short, quiet, soft-spoken, with manners just short of the affectation called "courtly,' he concealed, at the outset, his two secret weapons: a rock-hard set of high moral principles, and a rare, perhaps unique approach to science. On that first visit Will showed me some things he had tinkered up : an oval wheel with two axles, which kept one long side on the ground, and which he felt might be a sensible substitute for endless treads on tractors and tanks; how to drill a one twenty-five thousandth of an inch hole through a piece of glass (I understand he later patented this as a way to perforate contact lenses to permit circulation of natural tears) ; a device for reproducing irregular surfaces; a model of a device to make possible three-dimensional photography ; and a demonstration, viewable by the naked eye, of a monomolecular layer. While I ate Greek meatballs (the best I have ever tasted, which were lovingly made by his loving wife Mary) he described to me his invention of a device which would permit a minesweeper's paravane cable to contact the anchor chain of a mine and pass through it, leaving the mine right where it was. That one was never debugged; in time, marine growth would foul it. But it was breathtakingly ingenious and -- like all his inspirations -- kindergarten-simple. This article is about science and invention, but I would like to say parenthetically that during this and many subsequent visits, we talked about something else -- writing in general, sf in particular. Will Jenkins gave me certain aids and precepts, each of low to this day. I don't think I have ever before made public acknowledgement of this: I do herewith. It is a debt I shall never be able to repay. N OW, the really remarkable thing about these gimmicks and gadgets of his, something which transcends their cleverness, is that each and every one of them was sniwied up out of materials which cost from zero all the way up to fifty cents. And had he a workshop? He had not. He lived in one of those brick-face ten-story apartment houses on Long Island, surrounded by a number of daughters (all pretty) and vast numbers of their friends, all of whom seemed welcome at all times. Not only had he no workshop, he had no office, den or studio. There was an elderly upright typewriter on a castered typing table in a corner of the living room, and that was, so help me, all the indication there was that there might be a writer in the place. It isn't that he could not have had a den of his own had he wanted it -- I'm sure he could. He simply seemed to prefer to work in a corner of the room, at the edge of this dynamic domesticity. It cost him, apparently, no pain to stop between sentences and drive down to pick up a kid at school, or to sweat out someone's second-year algebra. And just by the way, I think he burned no midnight oil. Yet, living like this, he turned out solid story after story, making himself a mainWonder, Startling Stories and Astounding during what has come to be known as the Golden Age of sf. But let's look at the part of Will Jenkins which produced these fabulous gilhoolies of his. His tools were scissors and paste, a paper-punch, tweezers, paperclips, some dime-store pliers and a screwdriver. His materials were coat-hangers, cardboard, a few by Theodore Sturgeon stray Erector-set parts, string, a second-hand pane or two of window glass, some old twists of wire and a No. # dry cell. He used, also, that extraordinary mind, honed sharp, placed at a unique angle, powered by a specialized curiosity and aimed at an unexpected direction. This specialty is the orphaned twigs on the tree of science. His aim was at their bases, the places where the thick main boughs grew toward their several sections of sky, caring little about these slender offshoots. For such is science that its primary limbs, carrying upward the currents of invention and technology, are covered with neglected shoots. And it would seem that the upper, later, more recent branches are quite as hairy as the main trunk. All along the way, little-noted, bypassed phenomena are waiting for the man who can administer just the right squirt of vital fluid. Such a twig can grow into a mighty arm of the tree, even if it has been dormant for years. A perfect example is radar, which was a recorded phenomenon fifty years before radio. And in a lesser -- far lesser -- area there is that which I call the Kick Yourself Department. The Kick Yourself Department is that species of invention which someone comes up with and makes a classic buck, and when you see it you kick yo urself for not having thought of it first. In the Department are obvious, simple or even simrde-minded inventions. Such controversial inspirations as Ehrenhaft's magnetic flux and the Hieronymous machine do not qualify. A thing like the hula hoop does. Yoyos. The beanie with the propellers spinning on it. Cadillac's new turn light which, activated by the directional switch, floods the road on the side to which you are about to turn, with a beam pointed # off the centerline: you see what you're turning into. The rotary lawnmower. Cecil Hughes's rotating-cylinder engine (if you've never heard of this jaw-dropper, look it up.) What these all have in common is that they are based on simple principles (simple, that is, once you see them done by someone else : that's when you kick yourself) which were evident or selfevident; which filled a want or need which had existed for a long time (the beanie could have been perfected in the eleventh century, the turn light forty years ago)... and which needed no more brains than you have to produce. T HE Class Two Kick Yourself inventions are those ing, for example, from some technological improvement. I disclose herewith (Messrs. ME # S w i n g-A-Way and Ecko please attend: I would like to see if you kick yourselves) my own invention of a softrubber suction cup on a swivel, surrounding the magnetic lid-catcher on my wall-mounted can opener. Yes, Junior, I know the magnet works just fine. But J u n i o r -- they're starting to make cans out of aluminum. Other examples of Class Two K.Y-S ideas are a nationwide magazine on TV subjects, with regional program listings bound in (and TV Guide has pulled itself up into Life's circulation league in a few short years) ; dish detergents (tri-sodium phosphate, key ingredient, had been around for years as a wetting agent in industry before anyone thought to make it a consumer item; meanwhile the electric dishwasher, all but perfected in the late twenties, sat around waiting for it) ; and the many tools and attachments, like the screw-pilot bit, which drills for thread, shank and countersink all at once, which awaited the advent of the portable drill, yet still hung around unborn. Class One devices, when you come right down to it, are really only Class Two devices which just took a longtime getting thought of. Science is full of neglected but unhidden wonders. Will Jenkins' microscopic holea phenomenon known to Benjamin Franklin; another of his inventions, used as a TV effect, derives from an illusion used a century ago by stage magicians. Granted that they await your exploitation and mine, where do we go to find them? Why, back dpyn the trunk of the Tree of Science, of course. There are some brilliant men around today : so there were fifty and a hundred and two hundred years ago. Today, of course, our thinking has the immense advantage of advanced systemization and sophisticated tools and equipment. Research progresses into the future like a mighty be-chromed locomotive flashing through the countryside. The researchers of the past, on the other hand, went through the landscape on foot, picking their way. The rails weren't laid yet... and that advantage is in some ways immenser. For those boys paced along slowly with their eyes wide open. They may have followed a wrong trail occasionally, and overlooked a right one here and there. But they investigated many more things than the modern, all horsepower and momentum, has time for. These are the researches which always delighted Will Jenkins, and their kind of thinking was his kind of thinking when he built his oval wheel and when he showed me, over his kitchen by Theodore Sturgeon sink, a demonstrated monomolecular layer. B UT if you would like to look at some of the things they observed, and discovered, and theorized about, you've got to get the fog out of your eyes. This fog runs out of the corners of your mouth when you put on that grin. Because an old book records the speed of light at # mps and electricity through wires at "not less than # mps" and # mps respectively for shortyou put on that grin...Malarial poison is generally most troublesome in those years in which there has been a deficiency in the rainfall...under these circumstances the water in marshes having fallen below its normal level, the black slime of organic matter forming their beds has been exposed to the strong heat of the summer sun, and the malarial emanations thereby increased in quantity and intensity. Low water in...great rivers... also followed by increase in and aggravation of malarial troubles... Malaria likewise occurs from the mere upturning of earth which has been undisturbed for many years... Even the ploughing of an old orchard is not without its effect (but) if the upturning is done late in the fall, and the earth exposed to winter frosts, there is much less probability of malarial emanations, than if the earth is turned late in the spring or during the summer. The winter air, charged as it is with ozone... exerts its destructive action upon it. Such statements are not out-and-out wrongheaded. If they derive from ignorance, it is an innocent ignorance, not a stupid ignorance. And if the statements are used to smear everything in the book, the smearer does injustice to the author, to science and decidedly to himself. I have such a book. It's called Medical Physics. It's by John C. Draper, M. D., LL. D., of N.Y.U. It was published by Lea and Co. of Philadelphia in #. It runs # pages and has nearly four hundred illustrations, mostly beautifully precise steel engravings. It is what it says it is : a textbook of physics for doctors. It deals with heat, light, electricity, hydrodynamics, and all the other classical wings of physics, and relates each to medical practice of the time. It makes absolutely fascinating reading. But it's not going to do a thing for anyone who throws it down because the man says malaria is caused by "sulfuretted hydrogen". I do feel, however, that it is a mother lode of Will Jenkins' kind of orphan-offshoot science. I'd like to give you a couple of examples, but permit me this disclaimer. It may be that I'm committing an innocent ignorance in quoting these items: to the specialist in the disciplines involved, I may be reporting a justifiably discarded commonplace. All I can say is that I've read rather widely, and these items hit me as brand "new." In following up the experiments which led to the discovery of the photophone, Prof. Graham Bell says: "In my Boston paper the discovery was announced that thin disks of very many substances emitted sounds when exposed to the action of a rapidly interrupted beam of s u n I i g h t... focused into one end of an open tube, the ear being at the other end. Upon interrupting the beam, a clear, musical tone was heard, the pitch of which depended upon the frequency of the interruption of the light, and the loudness upon the material composing the tube... In order to study these effects under better circumstances the materials were enclosed in a conical cavity in a piece of brass closed (at the large end) by a piece of glass. A brass tube (from the small end) served for connection to a hearing-tube. When this conical cavity was stuffed with worsted or other fibrous materials the sounds were much louder than when a tube was employed... Upon smoking the interior of the conical cavity, and then exposing it to the intermittent beam, with the glass lid in position, the effect was perfectly startling. The sound was so loud as to be actually painful to an ear placed closely against the end of the hearing tube... In regard to materials... emsounds are produced from ployed... the loudest substances in a loose, porous, spongy condition, and from those that have the darkest or most absorbent colors (Italics Prof. Bell's, and by golly mine too)... cotton-wool, worsted, fibrous materials generally, cork, sponge, platinum and other metals in a spongy condition, and from those that have the darkest or most absorbent colors. Unless Prof. Bell is kidding us, which I genuinely doubt, he has here a kind of audio amplifier drawing no power, but using some vibratory efby Theodore Sturgeon ft) tT ft) # r g # S A i   Z o o ? n o a p O w  a r "  o K l-l  -- ' iv#   # ssri  w rt P v  ft) P n  o ft) -t CO ni -t , o P p ft) CL . M #) o" I n ## c P # rt n P ft) P  O to lT n i p p # o rt o P Pw-O bd cr n rt q - r  p P c # W S., ,-Orq T# n -t-t r # o # o a.   # a  Sa. C w rh P in  ft) w cr sr S O T# C TJ S!  CL # P w #'  A) J # # Og  v  o I pr w  C P g'P U O r W P cr o p fD   o o c rt P cr r #. CD #.  O r ft) cr # p p . ## -t   J. "t -## c  M Pft # V# w rtO -t f W O pr p o p p rt Q sr o CL ft) P pr V J ffq # rt cr p o I # rt rtN in P pr rf cr p o  rt -i O -t P  --  rtT n. ## rt rt #   m#? rt rt #I r  -- I O p s  cr to M  # rt o O #) Hrt  n cr p # . O P w rt u rtrT I - W P CO  ## CO ir g. s  #. -- c CO rt P o p o p rt o -t rt L H W'  .t # rf a j to   # # T # ? #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. ; Editor, Fredrick Dohl, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y.; Managing Editor, none; Business Manager, none. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Digest Productions Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # montr.s preceding the date shown above was: (This Information is required by the act of June #, # to Adolescence is a perilous time -- whether it is the adolescence of a man, or of the whole race of Man! i T HE physics teacher, Howard Dax, dismissed the class. He picked up a felt-covered block and erased the diagrams he had drawn on the blackboard. He noticed with annoyance that the lines were shaky, and in one place was an irregular star where the chalk had broken because of his exasperation at his pupils -- or more exactly, one particular pupil. When the blackboard was clean to the corners -- Howard Dax was a very precise man -- he turned around and saw that the particular pupil Was still sitting at his desk. He was a thin boy of fifteen, called Mallison, whose dark, wavy hair was too long. It rose in a kind of breaker over hi forehead, and he had sideburns cut to a point. His expression was neither sullen nor impertinent, but Dax had always had the feeling that Mallison was concealing intense boredom and only listened to him perforce. He was sure that the narrow, rather handsome face was on the verge of sneering. But there had never been quite anything that he could put his finger on. The boy was definitely not good at physics, yet he wasn't at the bottom of the class. The thing was that he gave the impression of being above average intelligence. He obviously could do very much better if he wanted to. Dax was convinced that he despised physics, and school in general. "Yes?" Dax said. "What is it?" He tried to make his voice sound natural and casual. Mallison stared at him impassively for a moment. Then he said, "You don't like me, Mr. Dax, do you?" "My dear boy, I neither like you nor dislike you," Dax said. He could feel his hands beginning again to tremble slightly. Damn adrenalin! "I am merely trying to teach you elementary physics. Why do you ask?" "Why do you give me such low grades?" Mallison said, but with no sense of urgent curiosity. Howard Dax thought that the boy's manner was altogether too adult. He didn't expect deference from a modern teenager, but neither did he like to be spoken to in such a manto-man way. No; come to think of it, man-to-man wasn't quite the phrase. It was offhand. And yet it was artificial: Mallison never spoke in this way to his contemporaries. He usually talked like a...what was it? Hipster? "I give students the grades that in my opinion they deserve," Dax said. "In your case they are low because I don't think you're trying." "I am trying," Mallison said, then added, "sir." "You are," Dax said. "Very." He thought the remark was rather neat, but the boy looked at him without any change of expression. Why was he here? What did he want to say? "I must confess," Dax went on, "that I am surprised at your interest in grades. I should have thought that rock-and-roll was more your style. That and...er... racing around at night in a fast car !" He felt that he was sneering, and made his face blank. "I'm too young for a driver's license," Mallison said. "But old enough to pull yourself together and do some real work. You could do much better in class. You're not stupid." T HE boy said nothing and continued to stare at him without expression. "When I see signs of an improved attitude," Dax said, "and a little more work, I shall mark you accordingly. One gets the impression usually that your mind is on other things. Things like jazz records." "Didn't you listen to jazz when you were young, Mr. Dax?" Howard Dax at thirty-nine hardly thought of himself as old. The boy was not being exactly fresh, but he had a sort of polite tactlessness. It was absurd, but he felt that Mallison had the upper hand, somehow. Dax had an older brother who had been a lieutenant in World War II, and he had described to him an occasion on which he had interviewed an elderly staff sergeant. The staff sergeant in civilian life had been his brother's boss. Although his manner was scrupulously correct, there remained an atmosphere of his by Stephen Barr peacetime ascendancy. Howard Dax sympathized with his brother. There was nothing actually wrong with Mallison's manner, but the pupil had the master on the defensive. He decided to ignore Mallison's question. He had no idea how the young nowadays felt about the subject of early Benny Goodman or the emergence of Barrel House. Why was he even bothering? "The point at issue," he said with asperity, "is not whether I used to listen to jazz twenty-five years ago, but whether you are going to pay attention in class now. I admit you manage to scrape through in the tests, but this morning, for example, you acted as if you were half asleep !" "I'm sorry. I was very tired." Mallison did look pale. "I suppose you were up half the night -- cutting a rug." Mallison winced at the outdated jargon but he merely shook his head. There were firm steps in the corridor, and the school principal marched in. Mallison stood up; Dax was still standing. The principal had a small piece of folded paper in his hand, and did not immediately notice the boy, whose desk was near the back row and next the open windows. He went straight to the platform and put the folded paper on Dax's desk. He nodded curtly and glanced towards the windows, and saw Mallison sitting there for the first time. ii T thought you were alone,"-he said, turning to Dax. "You may go," Dax said to the boy. "That will be all. Remember what I said." He looked at the folded paper and then at the principal questioningly. "Yes, Mr. Lightstone?" The principal was a short white-haired man v with a dogged expression. He turned again to make sure the boy had left and said. "I want you to look at this, Dax." He tapped the folded paper, which had been made into a sort of envelope, with its ends tucked in. Dax bent to examine it. "Pick it up, man! Open it," the principal said, and came around and sat in the teacher's chair. "Be careful not to spill it!" Dax picked up the little packet and opened it. Inside was a teaspoonful of white powder. "What is it?" he asked. "That," said the principal, "is something for our friends upstairs in the chemistry department to determine. I found it myself, in the flowerbed right outside these windows !" Howard Dax looked puzzled. "I don't think I understand -- " "If I don't miss my bet," said the principal, "that's heroin!" He jerked his head towards the windows. "And somebody threw it out of this classroom !" "Oh, I don't think it's heroin, Mr. Lightstone," Dax said. "Heroin has a distinct glitter, and this seems -- " "I had the impression you were a physicist, not a chemist," the principal said. "Besides, the police told us last week that they believe a gang of narcotics pushers -- I think they called them -- are operating in the neighborhood ! What else could it be? I've been on the lookout for something of this sort." There was a silence. Dax didn't know what to say. He himself was very tired, he had been working late every evening. He had three different tasks that occupied every minute of his waking hours: his job as teacher being the least important although the most essential. The other two were perhaps visionary, but they might lead to something more exciting than retiring on a pension. "Well?" Mr. Lightstone was impatient -- his usual condition. "Have you any ideas? It has been my experience that drug-taking and juvenile delinquency go together." This was not strictly true as Mr. Lightstone had never knowingly seen a drug-taker, but he did read the papers. "I suppose there is a certain amount of delinquency here," Howard Dax said uncertainly, "but narcotics..." "Wake up, man!" the principal said. "You look half asleep! This is a serious matter. I found the stuff right outside these windows! You must have some idea of who might be involved. Which are the unruly ones? Who sits next the windows?" Dax glanced at the desk recently left by Mallison. Mallison? One couldn't exactly call him unruly... Yet he had the earmarks of a type he detested and instinctively mistrusted. He even feared him a little, though not perhaps for reasons of which he was quite aware. "Who was that boy that just left?" The principal had noticed the direction of Dax's glance. "Mallison, wasn't it?" "Yes, but the packet might just as well have been thrown from one of the paths outside." "There's no path near here. You know that perfectly well," said the principal. "There's a wide stretch of grass beyond the flower bed and no one's allowed to walk on it ! I've had my eye on that boy..." H oward Dax thought this over. Come to think of it, he wouldn't put such a thing past the young smartalec. Hoodlumism doesn't necessarily advertise itself in the classroom. He looked at the principal. The man had a nerve to accuse him of seeming half asleep! Working in his priby Stephen Barr vate lab after dinner and then at his desk until all hours, struggling to learn Middle English -- or rather, transitional Anglo-Saxon. He had done well at English lit at college, even though majoring in science, and Chaucer had come fairly easy to him. But Twelfth Century speech -- and that was what he had to learn -- was something else again. Chaucer himself couldn't have understood it. He wondered what young Mallison and his hipster friends would think if they knew his secret occupations. He could just imagine the sneering. "Well, you could be right," I suppose," he said. "He's not my -- shall I say ? -- favorite pupil." "I'm glad you think I could be right," Mr. Lightstone said. "I intend to hold an investigation. At the first possible opportunity. This very evening, in fact. At my office, and I shall have young Mallison brought before us. I shall expect you." He got up and strutted out of the class room. After a few moments Howard Dax followed him. Outside, on his way to the gate, he passed Mallison, who was standing talking to another boy who had a similar haircut, but was unfamiliar to the physics teacher. He thought he was not a pupil of this school. They both became silent as he drew near them, looking at him without any expression. Dax wondered if narcotics could be responsible for Mallison's pallor. After dinner Dax went into his little lab, which was actually the kitchenette he never used. On the table and sink was some chemical apparatus. The principal's remark had been ill-chosen since Dax at college had started, with chemistry as his major and had only switched to physics in his senior year. He had also become interested in genetics, and it was this all-around interest in the sciences that had perhaps militated against him. Nowadays one ought to specialize. Well, he was specializing now. In an evaporating dish in the sink were some dark brown crystals that his landlady would have taken for Damerara sugar, but which had a considerably more complex formula. They would have lent a rather odd flavor to Indian pudding. The logic which had given rise to this formula was not merely complex but revolutionary. It involved the concept of reversibility of entropy -- the application of which was itself unprecedented. There were, Howard Dax was aware, certain aspects of germ chemistry that defied description in terms of classical and mechanistic theory ; details that seemed to require the inversion of Time's arrow. To say that a physical process was "non-reversible" usually implied the presence of the probability factor. But that didn't seem to be the case here. There was the suggestion of prophecy. Or else that time was flowing backwards. Or... was it that something flowed backward through time? Then there was the fact that the germ plasm was immortal. Not indestructible, for the overwhelming majority of zygotes and gametes died; but if one disregarded the soma, all living germ cells had been alive since the beginning of life. After terrific work, none of which would have seemed quite orthodox to his colleagues, Dax had arrived at the end of theory and the beginning of practical application -- at the taking-off point -- the countdown. near the evaporating dish was a hypodermic syringe. If he were to dissolve the dark brown crystals and inject he solution into his veins, Dax believed that whatever it was that impeded this time-reversal would be neutralized. His consciousness -- not his body, his somatic cells -- would travel back along the unbroken line of his identity as a germinal continuity. Back to the extent that the effect of the chemical would allow. He would then be in the body of one of his ancestors. Not spread among them all, but following the line of greatest genetic valence to one individual : living in the Twelfth Century A. D. Probably, but not certainly, somewhere in England, since most of his ancestors came from there. Of course the time might be wrong. He had no way of making a precise determination. He had experimented with a rabbit, but after the soft little beast's eyes glazed over in unconsciousness it had immediately come to. The time taken during its visit to the purlieus of its remote and unknown forebears was of no duration in the present. And it had at once attacked him and bitten him savagely. It seemed curious that an ancestral rabbit at a period not so very far back from a biological point of view should have a spirit so foreign to the rabbits of today. Perhaps the drug had overshot its mark... What if that were to happen in his case? Wouldn't it perhaps take him to some earlier, non-human form and then, as it were, rebound to the precise moment in history that the strength of the drug indicated? A man is not a rabbit. But suppose he found himself not in the body of a Twelfth Century Englishman -- a risky enough situation -- but hanging by his tail from a tree in Java? How long before the hypothetical rebound to the time of the Plantagenets? by Stephen Barr Howard Dax was too tired to concentrate on the problem: it was probably moonshine. The rabbit had been frightened, not atavistic. The cumulative effect of overwork and irritation at the boy Mallison and the principal's manner had made him reckless and impatient. He made a sudden decision to stop worrying about precautions and take the plunge... now. He had plenty of time before the meeting. The trip to the past would have no duration in the present. He measured out an amount of distilled water and stirred the brown crystals into it with a glass rod. Then he filled the hypodermic and vent into his bed-siittingroom. He went to his desk and took a last look at a list of early English irregular verbs and lay down on his sofa, rolling up his sleeve. He hardly felt the prick of the needle but he realized that the rather painful bump on his f orehead had distracted his attention from it. He looked at the thing he had bumped against. It was wooden and round in section, about as thick as his neck, and rose at a slight deviation from the vertical to a circular platform that was supported at other places by two more wooden uprights. Beyond and above was an immensely lofty roof of dark timbers. Far to the sides were stone walls. He looked down to discover that the cold floor under him was also of stone, covered here and there with dry yellowish reeds. Then he saw that he was on all fours. Instead of hands he had black, furry paws. II ting old. So, he feared, were his jokes. His joints were stiff and he could no longer do the amusing contortions that used so to entertain the Earl and his little court. In fact, the Earl was getting on, too. He looked as though he was falling asleep in his chair. Next to him the Lady Godwina was mumbling and giggling -- not at poor Trice's feeble quips, but as a result of too much blackberry wine mixed with mead. She hiccoughed loudly and the Earl opened his eyes. He glanced at the Lady Godwina with bored distaste, and then at Trice the jester. Would that the fellow would cease his tedious clowning and go to the kitchens! Yet he hesitated to get rid of him altogether. Having a jester at all in these days was a mark of prestige, and he didn't know where he'd get a replacement. Now that King Henry was dead he had fortified his castle like the other barons. Since feudal pomp had become the fashion he hung onto its trappings -- poor old Trice was one of them. But, ye gods, what stale jokes! Well, at least they seemed to please the younger serving men, who must be too young to remember them. Trice was unhappily aware that his humor was missing the mark. He fell back on the one thing that never failed to make them laugh. He swung his bauble and hit himself on the nose. He staggered back with comic terror. "Hold on!" he cried to an imaginary assailant. "Not so hard! M He struck himself again, harder. "Stop ! Or I shall appeal to my noble lord for protection !" The Earl smiled faintly; he didn't want to disappoint the old man. Besides, his nose was bleeding. It really was rather funny. Curious about these people : they had almost no sense of pain. Trice, seeing the smile, hit himself again and again, and feeling the blood, he smeared it over his face in fantastic curlicues. The Earl closed his eyes again, and Trice caught the eye of the clerk, a young man who had come from Normandy. He was sneering. The Lady Godwina was singing a little tune to herself, and paid no attention. The old jester shrugged, and turned towards the archway to the kitchens and offices. Better have supper and o to bed -- his head ached and is nose hurt badly, although the bleeding had stopped. #S Next to a wooden stool he caught sight of his cat, Tybalt, staring at him fixedly. Tybalt. His only friend! he thought to himself. But as he passed him, the cat, instead of following him out with tail erect to share the jester's wretched supper, backed cringing under the stool and turned his head as he went by, keeping his staring eyes on him. Most unusual. Very "Here! Tybalt!" Trice said, but the cat backed further away. what had happened to him, Dax recognized that the big wooden thing that loomed over him was a stool. Maybe it was this realization -- and the sight of his own paws -- that gave him an idea of his size, and on looking back at the rest of himself he knew that he was a cat. Something had gone wrong. The flashback and subsequent rebound must have taken him far into the dim mammalian past, but for what duration he could not tell. The transition had been unconscious. At least he did not remember it. But to judge by the style of the round stone arches of the hall he was now in -- and the stonework looked brand new -- the ultimate effect had been according to plan, and this was the early Middle Ages. A movement caught his eye and he saw it was the cavortby Stephan Barr Sil I -- M  ing of an enormous man, dressed in gigantic tattered motley. No. He wasn't enormous; it was just the unfamiliar scale of things. The man was saying something in a booming voice, and Dax began to recognize it as a form of transi-. tional early English -- b u t with an admixture of Norman French and some pure AngloSaxon phrases. And what an accent! If this man was typical, how wrong modern research and learned speculation were ! He would have some interesting things to tell the experts -- particularly his tutor -- when he got back. When he got back... That was supposed to be in three days approximately, when the inhibiting effect of the chemical would wear off. Then he would, he hoped, be swept back to his own time and his own body. But he was a cat. This was disastrous! How could he speak to people? He could understand them fairly well, but a cat's bucal cavity and vocal apparatus were not designed for the sounds of human speech. He decided to try his voice, just on the chance, but stopped, horrified at the muffled yowl that resulted. Two rangy hounds, six times his size, roused themselves from the rush-covered floor and glared growling at the sound with raised hackles. "Down, Colie ! Stop it, Bayard!" a gruff voice comrnanded, and they reluctantly sank back again, keeping their fierce eyes on him. Was this a sample of what he must expect from dogs? He hoped it was merely his abortive attempt at human speech. Any further communication must be tried silently. He looked around the hall. There were other humans too. Several men-at-arms standing by the walls and a few serving men. At the big trestle-board were seated five people -- one of them clearly the lord of the castle -- it must be a castle -- and the one woman sitting next to him in soiled finery would be his lady. The place reeked with the stale odor of humans and dogs, and less obnoxiously the smell of wood smoke and cooked meat. Dax realized that he now had a feline nose, and made allowances. After all, the well-todo bathed themselves, in the still existing classic tradition, and would until the Black Death. The ridiculous giant in motley stopped his capering and came across the stone flags towards him. As he passed with ponderous footsteps he looked down and said, "Here, Tybalt !" Dax backed under the stool, terrified at the deep, hoarse voice. The man was probably trying to be gentle. He must keep in mind that he had a cat's hearing now, and all sounds would seem lower and louder. by Stephen Barr H OW were cats treated in Medieval England? He did not know, and he was not prepared for this contingency. But at least cats as a species had survived. He hoped he was one of the lucky ones. He must at all costs manage to keep alive for three days, because if he were killed before the drug wore off he would not return. What would they think at the school? Nothing, of course. He would never have been there. That would be changing the future...but you changed the future every time you exerted your free will, anyhow. One of his experimental rats had not come back: it had merely disappeared with a loud pop. Perhaps an early Colonial terrier had got it. It might be the best thing to do to take to the woods, and wait out the time safe from the unknown dangers of men and dogs -- but what of the dangers of the woods? It was winter, to judge by the fire in the hall, on a raised stone platform in the middle of the floor, from which the smoke found its way out through a louver in the high roof. And the icy drafts that came across the floor. Although he was a cat, he had little confidence of being able to hunt like one, or find refuge from the cold and snow. He decided to follow the court jester. At least the man had spoken to him kindly. And he had a name: Tybalt. He must remember to answer to it. He got up and began to walk towards the arched doorway through which the jester had disappeared. Walking on all fours felt perfectly natural -- rather as if he were following himself. There was no trouble about keeping in step, or, rather, just out of it. His mouth was dry and he ran his tongue over his muzzle...he could lick his eye ! Then he did something that also felt natural, though pleasantly novel : he waved his tail. Then he stuck out his claws. They clicked against the flagstones and he sheathed them again. He had never in his life felt so supple and physically complete. He felt like running up the tapestry that hung by the doorway. At the other end of the vaulted corridor that he fourd himself in he could see the jester as he went into another chamber that was lit with a smoky reddish glow. There was an increased smell of cookery, and he guessed it was the kitchen. When he got to the door he could see the jester was being given something in a bowl that steamed, and a large hunk of dark bread. The man turned and came out again and saw him. "Come along, Tybalt," he said. "Supper for you and me. Come along, old fellow!" Dax followed him across the corridor to a narrow stone stairway in the thickness of the wall. The winding steps seemed absurdly high. He would far rather have done the whole thing in two or three long leaps, but he took the steps one by one. Feline coordination would come to him in time. After an almost totally unlit passage they came to a minute room, scarcely more than a cell. The jester struck a light with flint and steel to a tallow candle, and sat down on a low straw-covered bed. The flor was freezing. Dax jumped up onto a small table, but was instantly pushed off it. His instinctive jump up and then down happened so quickly that he only realized in retrospect what a feat it was from a man's point of view. Yet he had landed clumsily. He was not yet quite a cat. T HE jester cut off a piece of dubious-looking meat and threw it onto the floor. "Wait till it cools, Tybalt," he said, and scratched Dax behind the ears. Dax was ravenous, which seemed odd considering he'd had dinner half an hour ago. No, of course not. That was eight centuries in the future; God knew when Tybalt had last eaten. Disregarding the admonition he went at once to the meat, which was pork, and burned his mouth. It smelled glorious. And yet he suspected that in human form he would have revolted from it. He looked up at his master. He had a conviction that he belonged to the jester. He studied the gaunt, bloodsmeared face. It looked as if someone had hit him on the nose. The cap-and-bells, with its attached wimple-shaped neck piece, had been laid aside. The gray bobbed hair and bony head looked anything but merry. There was, however, a shrewd reflective expression in the eyes, and Dax felt that he might well be in an advantageous position. Being a jester probably involved a certain amount of tact and discretion, not to mention ingenuity, so he resolved to try to communicate with him. But first he must eat. Would the damned pork never cool? The jester was already eating his, in great gulps, alternating it with bits of the evillooking bread. There was a stoneware pot that smelled strongly of musty ale from which he drank every now and then. The stench of alcohol in it was like spoiled garbage to Dax. How had he ever been able to drink whisky? The thought of it was disgusting. The meat was cool enough now -- in fact stone cold -- and he tore it to pieces with his pointed teeth and bolted it unchewed. It was marvelous. "Well, Tybalt ?" the jester by Stephen Barr said, putting aside his bowl. "No mice today? We are not very lucky, we two, are we?" He made a snapping with his fingers and Dax jumped up onto the pallet beside him. The old man stroked his back gently, but he had a very strong smell. Dax supposed he would get used to his new keen senses in time. He hoped it would be soon. It was very cold in the jester's cell and he intended to creep close at bed time. In the meanwhile how was he going to make known his true identity? Obviously speech was impossible; and Morse-code tapping with his paw was out of the question. You wouldn't get very far with mere facial expressions, either. Anyway, to most human eyes a cat has but two: contentment and fear. He looked around wondering if there were any small movable objects that he could arrange into the form of the letters of the alphabet -- even a piece of string might do. But he feared that the man couldn't read. Anyway there was no string to be seen. Then on the table, which was scarcely more than a high bench, he saw a rosary with wooden beads. He got up and stretched -- never in his life had he been able to stretch like this -- and jumped delicately over onto the table. The jester reached out and swept him off it. Not roughly, but it was obvious he wasn't allowed there. This time his landing was more skillful. He sat on the cold floor and tried to think how he could get hold of the beads. If he had them on the floor he could push them into an arresting shape. A triangle perhaps, or a figure eight, that would catch the jester's eye. He looked up at a movement and saw that the man had picked up a small vellum book and was holding it close to his face. What luck! he could read after all! But how was he going to make letters? Near the sill of the door were some pieces of straw. He went over and examined them. He realized that a cat's vision is rather poor compared to a man's: quick to notice and interpret motion, but in other respects the over-large pupils, meant for nocturnal hunting, gave an inferior and uncertain image. T HE straw was dirty and smelled of horses, but it ought to do. The trouble was that when his face was close enough to pick it up with his teeth he could scarcely make it out. He couldn't tell at first whether he had one or many in his mouth. He felt that his whiskers should tell him, but he was unaccustomed to their use. He padded over to the jester's feet and dropped the straws. He backed off and looked at them, then with his paw he ineptly pushed them into an A. He looked up. The jester was lost in his reading. Dax waited patiently, but the reading went on, and he patted the man's foot with carefully sheathed claws. The jester glanced at him, though not at the crude, straw A, and smiled. "What now, Tybalt? More supper? That you will have to catch for yourself. See -- it's all gone! Share-and-share alike, old friend. I weigh eight stone. You're but a scant four pound, so correspondingly..." He returned to his reading. Dax went and picked out some more straw which he brought back and attempted to arrange in a B, but gave it up and made an E instead. Then he made two crosses and a triangle. It looked like a fraternity. Then he mewed. The man looked down again with a faint frown. He didn't seem to notice the straw shapes; judging from the way he held the book he was quite short-sighted. "Out?" he asked. "Out for a rat, poor Tybalt? Or to lie by the embers in the hall?" He shook his head and got up, and went to the door to open it. Dax jumped onto the bed and mewed again. The man paused with his hand on the latch, looking puzzled. Dax jumped down and dabbed with his paw next each letter successively. "Why, what is this?" the old man said, smiling again. "Playfulness? The kitten is back!" He went to the table and picking up the bauble, made a feint with the stuffed bladder over Dax's head. Dax dodged it irritably and mewed again; three times in quick succession. This caught the attention of the jester, who laid down the bauble. "Ah! A Tritheist! Will it get you a mouse, Tybalt? Vill it keep off evil spirits? It's said the imps love cats -- so beware of moonlight and mistletoe!" He picked Dax up and stroked him. It was infuriating. Dax was aware that the Medieval mind was very different from the modern, but there must be some meeting point. Too bad this wasn't Friar Roger Bacon -- he'd have got his attention in no time. But he was a hundred years too early. His immediate problem was to seek out some person who had enough imagination and curiosity to take notice of a cat who behaved not as a cat. If he had only known this was going to happen! He tried mewing again, but the jester only smiled, so he mewed once, then twice and then three times. The jester shook his head admiringly. Like most of his contemporaries the world for him was filled with wonders. It was an age of faith, not of speculation. by Stephen Barr A pale moon showed through a narrow slit in the wall, which was unglazed, and he became aware that the light from the tallow dip was yellow, and the jester's costume red and green. So it was all nonsense about cats having no color vision -- anyway, hadn't some woman in California disproved that? Against the moon he could see the black outline of fullgrown leaves on the nearby trees and knew it was not yet winter but autumn. When winter came in earnest, everyone from scullion to the lord of the manor would bed down in the Great Hall where the fire was. But the stonework of the castle was cold, and he felt himself getting drowsy. Theold jester put down his book, crossed himself and blew out the light. Dax could hear him burrowing into the straw of his bed, and nestled beside him. Ill quite dark, and a faint gray dawn came into the cell. The jester was snoring. Somewhere Dax thought he heard a rat. His muscles tensed, and he found himself on his feet by instinct -- the idea of a rat was surprisingly attractive and he was hungry again. The noise stopped. He remembered that he had been having a dream -- a strange nightmare of chasing after Mallison and catching him, and tearing him...with his claws and teeth. A rusty bell started ringing somewhere in the castle. The jester snorted, sat up and looked out of the narrow window. Then he lit the candle and said his prayers, kneeling on his bed. Dax stretched, and the old man cleaned his teeth with a splinter and took a draught from the ale pot. It had a sour stench, but Dax found that he no longer minded -- there were so many conflicting smells around, the most interesting of which had been the rat. A new, more immediately hopeful one, was of cooking that drifted up from below. It seemed that these people ate meat for their breakfast. And they liked it early. "Come along, Tybalt," the jester said, putting on his headdress, and went to the door. Dax slipped through quickly so as not to get his tail caught as the jester closed it. They went down the winding stairs again. At the bottom they came upon another cat -- a big red tom -- who on catching sight of Dax fluffed his tail and laid back his ears, spitting. Dax had a momentary impulse to see if communication was possible with him, but the big cat yowled and fled down the hallway. "Ah, Tybalt," the old man said. "Jesters and cats! Even their own kind spits at them !" As they got to the kitchen Dax saw the two hounds that had growled at him the night before. He was glad that they were now leashed and in the charge of a boy in a short woolen surcoat. But when they saw Dax the boy was unable to hold them back, and they jerked their leashes from his hand and came running and barking. Dax was terrified. He bolted ahead of them along the vaulted corridor and into the Great Hall, but came face to face with another brace of hounds whose ears pricked up at the sound. Dax without any conscious thought dodged sideways and ran up the tapestry on the wall. His sharp claws had good foothold on the tough canvas backing. But at the top he almost lost his grip, and scarcely managed to get over onto the musicians' gallery from which the tapestry hung. He crouched there, trembling, while the din below increased. He could hear men shouting at the dogs, and the jester's voice calling him. He mewed loudly for help. the old man's footsteps on the wooden ladder. He was picked up and comforted, but he was so dizzy with fear that he could hardly see. The jester seemed to think he was calm, and put him on his shoulder and went down the ladder again The hounds had been taken away. But Dax stayed where he was with hi# eyes shut, holding on tight. "Well, Trice!" Dax opened his eyes and saw the lord of the manor glowering at the jester, and then at him. So Trice was the jester's name. An odd one. The Earl stood with his hands on his hips and seemed irritated rather than angry. "What's this I hear? The cat runs at my hounds and tries to scratch !" "Oh, no, sir," Trice said. "It was the other way! They ran at him! Tybalt has never scratched !" "Scratched or no, I wish you'd give him to one of the villagers," the Earl said. "I don't vant the hounds upset, and Lady Godwina doesn't like cats. Besides, he'll ruin the tapestry." "But, my lord, he catches the rats! And he's my... friend." "The dogs catch the rats,' the Earl said shortly. "Give him away." "W ell, my lord, the mice..." "The red tom gets them." The old man put up a hand to Dax protectively. "But, noble lord, what would I do without my pet?" Dax glanced at the tired face next his and saw tears in the eyes, but he had a determined look. "If he cannot stay, I... I must go, too!" The Earl opened his eyes at this, but he smiled. "I see you are loyal, old Trice," he by Stephen Barr said. "I hope you are as loyal to me !" The Earl turned away. Trice put Dax on .the floor and started back towards the kitchens. 'Tome, Tybalt," he said. "Or there'll be none left for us." Dax wished he vere st i I I on the shoulder, and stayed cJose to the jester's feet. Things were not going well at all. It had become as much a problem of survival as of research and communication, but when they got to the kitchen and the hounds were nowhere about, he decided that perhaps the two problems were interrelated. After a meal of scraps he felt more secure. Not seeing his master he went to look for him in the Great Hall. When he got there he saw that the Earl and his wife and retainers were eating boiled meat. He remembered that his tutor in Middle English had said the main meal in Medieval times was eaten in the morning. The four hounds were squabbling over bones that were thrown to them on the rush-covered flagstones under the trestleboard, and didn't notice him. Trice was not to be seen. After a while the boy in the woolen surcoat was told to take them out. He fastened leashes to their collars and led them through a large doorway in the far wall. Dax looked at the Earl: he had a fairly intelligent face, and he had shown forbearance towards Trice, so he thought he would make another try. The Lady Godwina got up unsteadily from her chair and left the hall -- on the way to the lady's solar, Dax guessed; and he padded across to the Earl. When he got to the foot of the high-backed chair -- it looked like a detached choirstall from a gothic church -- he patted the Earl's foot. The Earl looked down at him and frowned. Dax patted the foot again; three times. Then he mewed three times, and repeated the patting. The Earl blinked and got up, backing away. Dax mewed three times again, and the Earl crossed himself. "Saints preserve my soul! What have we here?" D AX turned around three times, getting his hind legs crossed and nearly falling down. "Send for Trice at once !" the Earl shouted. "His cat Tybalt has a fit! Careful !" he said to a serving man who had come forward with outstretched hands. "Take care you are not bitten! He is unclean !" Dax backed away and ran to the open door, and out. and he could see nothing at first -- and when he did it was blurred, owing to the vertical shape of his contracted pupils. It was much warmer than the night before, and the leaves were brown on the trees. There was no courtyard and gateway, with drawbridge and moat beyond, as he had rather expected. Instead he was on cobblestones, surrounded at intervals by small houses, with trees between them. The village was built against the castle, somewhat in the French manner, but the houses were wretched affairs of muddaubed reeds on wooden framing : hardly better than hovels. Only a few had more than one story. Smoke was coming up from every chimney, and the men were evidently on their way to work in the fields. They carried crude-looking farm implements and were dressed in coarse homespun with their legs padded and cross-gartered. They were a sorry lot : blank-faced and half starved. Dax heard footsteps behind him and turned. A young man with blond short hair and a Norman nose had come out of the doorway. He looked at Dax with amused curiosity, and squatted down, putting out a hand. At this proximity his eyes showed bloodshot and there was a beery smell. He said something that Dax could not understand -- it sounded vaguely like a kind of French, but Dax had not studied medieval Norman. Still, it had a kindly sound. Dax rubbed against the hand. This man, at least, did not share the Earl's diagnosis. What was his position in the Earl's household? Not his son -- he looked too unlike him. Would he be his clerk? He had a clerkly look -- what is it in a face that makes it seem scholarly ? And his hands were more fit for holding a pen than a mattock or a sword. Well, give it another try. Dax wished he could make an ingratiating sound, and found he was purring. He looked around for something he could use as a signal ; mewing and tapping seemed to be misunderstood. A few yards away the cobblestones gave place to dirt, and he started towards it. It might do for a blackboard. He looked back, but the clerk had not moved. Dax wondered how a cat might beckon, lacking a forefinger. He waited until he caught the young man's eye, and tried to beckon with his head but it had no results. He continued on to the patch of dirt and scratched a triangle, and to his relief the clerk got up and came to him. When he was standing over him, Dax scratched two words in Latin: homo sum , and looked up. The clerk was staring with his mouth open. was the lingua Franca of medieval Europe, and went on with his scratching. Humani nihil a me alienum -- There was a gasp and he looked up again. The young man had closed his eyes and had the back of his hand against his forehead. He by Stephen Barr turned and walked to the castle door, holding his head. Dax sat down in disgust. A Twelfth Century hangover, indeed! A shadow fell across him and he turned. Three villagers : two men, and a woman in a hood were behind him. They had an expectant air, and, realizing that he drew a large five-pointed star. The effect on them was volcanic. The woman screeched and threw her skirt over her head. The men crossed themselves and one of them turned and ran. The other slashed at Dax with a bill-hook and then, shouting, "Bewitched! Bewitched !" he, too, ran. The bill-hook missed Dax, thanks to his instinctive leap to one side, but the woman continued her noise and more people came out of the cottages, armed with farming implements and sticks. Everyone was shouting and offering advice. The main thread of their discourse was: Possessed ! Possessed ! Kill it ! The Devil Incarnate! Dax was hemmed in on three sides. He started back for the castle, but the big doorway was filled with onlookers, one of whom stepped forward, aiming a crossbow. There was a clank followed by a hissing in the air, and the bolt thumped into the ground next to him. The bowman cursed and began to wind up his bow with a crannikin. Dax's fur stood out all over him and he made a mad dash towards a group of women who had nothing in their hands but besoms of birch twigs. It was a fortunate choice. Two or three women made abortive swats at him and the others backed away, leaving a clear path. In front of him was an open space and a tall tree... Almost before he knew it he was near its top and the whole near its base, looking up with red angry faces. "Fire the tree!" someone shouted. "T'won't burn. It's an elm!" "Well, I shan't climb it !" "I won't have my tree burn !" an indignant voice yelled, but was drowned out. Small children were jumping up and down in excitement, and some teen-age boys threw stones but none of them reached him. Dax spat furiously. Teen-agers were the same through the ages! "Cut it down, then !" "T'will fall on my house !" (A woman's voice.) The shouting died down, and Dax hung on till his claws ached. There seemed to be a conference going on. The castle appeared to have lost interest, which relieved him; if there was to be any more crossbow shooting he stood little chance. After a short while the subject of the conference became apparent as men began arriving with bundles of dry sticks and faggots. To Dax's horror these were piled about the trunk and set alight. Then, as the flames began to rise, green boughs were added and a thick cloud of suffocating smoke came up. to find escape. One of the elm's long branches reached out almost over the roof of one of the houses, but it meant climbing down into the heart of the choking cloud. Beyond the house he suddenly caught sight of his master, Trice, who waved to him beseechingly. It gave him courage. Holding his breath, he began to back down the trunk until he felt the branch under him. Then he twisted round and ran along it with his heart pounding. A cat has small lungs for its size and holding his breath was a torment -- but at last he was free of the smoke, and he took a breath of clean air. The roof seemed to be within reach, and the crowd had temporarily lost sight of him in the smoke. He could hear the jester's voice, but for some reason he couldn't understand him -- it sounded like gibberish. He crept out until the thinning branch began to bend and, just as shouts went up from the more observant villagers, he leapt. He landed on the thatch -- and almost lost his hold, but he was just able to scramble to the rooftree, and ran along the ridge. There was more shouting. Either these ones spoke a dialect or the excitement had put Middle English out of his head : he could barely understand them. Something about Widow Aelthreda's cottage -- something about a witch... He slithered down the far side of the thatching and landed on a window box of late purple daisies. The parchment-covered window next him was open and he slipped inside just as the crowd turned the corner. He found himself in a small, bare upstairs room, insufficiently lit by the single window, but he could easily see into the most profound shadows. Under a chest in the corner was a mouse, frozen with terror. Dax was still out of breath, but he crept toward it, and as it ran out along the baseboard he intercepted it. He ate it -- all. As he washed his face he wondered with diminishing nervousness what all the shouting and noise outside meant. In a little while he heard footsteps and a woman came into the room. When she saw him she made some noises with her mouth, and Dax ran to her. She picked him up and began to stroke him very pleasantly. Then there were more noises from below and by Stephen Barr presently there were a lot of people in the room. The woman dropped him for some reason. He ran under a big, low wooden thing, but a big iron thing was pushed at him. It had a sharp point, and he had to come out. This time the man with the bill-hook did not miss, but the pain lasted only for an instant. And... and... he was more conscious of the sound made by the hypodermic as it fell on the floor and broke. He looked at it with annoyance, and felt the slight prick on his arm. He got up and went to his bathroom, where he dabbed it with antiseptic. He saw that he'd better shave before going to the meeting. Well, the drug hadn't worked. What a waste of time. What a pity. Perhaps a larger dose? He must experiment some more. He started shaving. IV cipal's office -- a little Late, which was not entirely by accident -- he found that Mallison and a few of his fellow-students were sitting opposite the desk in hard chairs. The principal behind it gave Dax a reprimanding look, and then one at his watch. On one side of him were a group of teachers and a member of the school board who Dax remembered was Mr, Lightstone's especial crony. On the other were Mrs. Lightstone -- a dour but subservient partner to her husband -- and an empty chair. The principal pointed to the chair and said, "We have been waiting for your arrival to begin, Mr. Dax." He turned to Mall ison as Dax sat down, and said, "You are, I believe, what is known as a 'hep-cat'?" He waited but Mallison said nothing. His face was very white and he looked sullen. "Well, answer me, sir !" the principal said loudly. "You didn't ask me anything," the boy said in a low voice. "You told me." The principal pushed his lips out and breathed deeply. He took something from his pocket and held it up. Dax saw it was the packet of alleged heroin. "Did you throw this out of the window of Mr. Dax's class room?" The boy looked at it incomprehendingly and shook his head. "Do you know what it is? Have you seen this packet before?" "No, Mr. Lightstone..." "You sound uncertain. Think carefully, Mallison." The principal put the packet on his desk and unfolded it. Everyone bent forward and looked at it -- including Mallison, who shook his head again.  Dax leaned across Mrs. Lightstone and whispered to her husband, " Did you have it analyzed ?" The principal shook his head impatiently. "Not yet! There was no one in the Chemistry Department !" He cleared his throat importantly. "Well? What have you to say?" Mallison apparently had nothing to say. He swallowed and looked at one of the boys next him. Mr. Lightstone leaned back in his chair and turned to address the group on his right -- the school board man in particular., "This," he said, tapping the packet, "was thrown out of a window of the physics class room today. These are the bo's that sit next those windows. I have every reason to suspect Mallison." The group nodded. Dax realized that they had been briefed in advance. The boy Mallison had certainly a sulky and uncooperative air. He seemed the epitome of juvenile delinquency on the defensive, and yet... the principal said to the boys, "are a little band of trouble-makers. You cut classes, you stay up late and go to what I believe you call juke-joints. I have heard reports of your riding in hotrods!" He paused significantiy"None of us here's got a car," Mallison said in a flat voice. He was definitely sneering now. "I've never even seen a real drag-race!" Mr. Lightstone blinked. The word was unfamiliar to him, but it had a disreputable ring to it. "And I suppose you've never taken narcotics?" There was a dead silence. Mallison clamped his mouth shut, and his face became wooden. Mr. Lightstone addressed the boy next him. "Have you ever seen any of the boys use this?" He tapped the packet again. "Did you see Mallison throw it out of the window? You sit behind him!" The boy looked blank and glanced at Mallison. "No, sir," he said. "But you couldn't have missed seeing him!" "Excuse me a minute," Dax said. "These boys aren't a band exactly. They just happen to sit next the windows." Mr. Lightstone looked offended but resourceful. "They picked those seats themselves. That's what a clique does. It -- " "I assign all the pupils to their desks," Dax said, and felt he was turning pink. The principal took this in his stride by ignoring it. "And you," he said to the boy on Mallison's other side. "What have you to say?" The boy frowned and stuttered. Dax was beginning to feel annoyed although he didn't know exactly why. For one thing, he had let himself seem to be defending Mallison. It by Stephen Barr was his craze for accuracy, of course. " I don't understand why the parents of these boys aren't here," he was surprised to hear himself say. "It seems to me they ought to have some kind of defense counsel if there is going to be a trial." The principal looked at him steadily. "Would you care to act in that capacity?" Dax felt that he was getting redder than ever. "Have you had a doctor examine Mallison for... for the effects of narcotics?" he said. "Where are these policemen you said you spoke to? Shouldn't they be informed of your suspicions, instead of holding a kind of star chamber inquisition? It's... it's medieval V Mr. Lightstone glared at him in astonishment. Dax had a sudden thought. "The chemistry lab is right over my class room," he said. "Why couldn't the packet have fallen from there?" "What would they be doing with heroin?" "But we don't know yet that -- " The principal interrupted him and swept his arm in a gesture of all-inclusive condemnation. "We will in good time ! But if you have never seen guilt before, you see it now!" He looked at the startled young faces with abhorrence. "Look at them!" TAX had a curious and vi olent revulsion, although he hadn't followed the line of reasoning in Lightstone's last remark. In fact, he realized that he hadn't really heard the words. But the principal's angry face made his hackles rise.  The principal had a menacing look. He was the most dangerous looking thing he had ever seen. A convulsive shudder went through all of Dax's muscles, and he leapt -- straight across Mrs. Lightstone's lap, who fell over backwards, screaming. Everyone was making loud, garbled noises, and he was on top of Lightstone, scratching and biting. He heard himself give a loud, warlike and triumphant It's not so bad, being on trial for murder. Of course, It's a little embarrassing -- when the principal witness is the corpse! ambulance cot wheeled what was left of murdered Fannie Bork into the center of the courtroom. The body was covered with a white sheet, except for the long, slim feet which were sticking out. Her toenails were painted red. Forty-year-old John Bork listened while the prosecutor read the indictment against him: " -- and the same John Bork did on the twelfth day of March, #, fire a pistol at his wife, having then and there a long preconceived desire to kill her, and then and there did achieve his felonious intent, and did murder the same Fannie Bork." "John Bork, you have heard the indictment," stated the judge formally. "How do you wish to plead: Not guilty, no contest, or wait and see?" "I'll wait and see, your honor." "I thought you would," sighed the judge. "We haven't had a straight notguilty plea in ages. Proceed, Mr. Prosecutor." "Roll in the Very Complicated Monstrous Proximilator machine," commanded the prosecutor. Two burly laborers, panting, rolled the machine on its creaky casters across the court room floor to Fannie's head. The machine was six feet tall, three feet wide, and twelve inches deep; on its face were forty-three meters and an onoff switch. The laborers plugged the machine's line cord into an outlet and got out of the way. T HE prosecutor flipped the switch from off to on. Then he folded his arms and waited until all the fortythree meters ceased their dancing and went back to zero. That done, he turned to the jury. "In this machine rests the proof of the crime charged against the defendant," he said dramatically, patting the smooth gray side of the machine. "This machine will tell you all you need to know about the murder. Oh, to be sure, I shall show you the corpus delicti presently ; but why and how this crime was committed shall be revealed only by this machine's stimulation of the deceased's brain. She will herself relate who her killer was!" There was a shocked gasp from the jurors and the spectators in the court room when the prosecutor pulled back the sheet from the body, uncovering her head and chest. "The jury will note that the government has removed her skull down to her eyebrows so that we could contact her brain's recordings with the machine's probe. The jury will also note the four bullet holes in the deceased's chest, which we intend to prove were put there by John Bork." "I missed twice," said John Bork, nodding. "Silence!" shouted the suddenly enraged judge. "This court depends entirely on the Very Complicated Monstrous Proximilator machine for its evidence." He turned to the jurj', still seething. "The jury will completely disregard the defendant's utterly uncaFedfor admission. Proceed, Mr. Prosecutor." The prosecutor fastened the ground cable of the machine to Fannie's big toe by means of an immense alligator clamp. Then taking the bulbous radio-frequency probe in his hand he said portentously, "Now we shall search for the memory-recording of Fannie Bork's moment of death!" He torched her brain lightly with the probe. Th ose seeing it for the first time were chilled by the read body's sudden animation. "Oh, Winston!" cooed dead Fannie Bork, her arms raising from the cot to embrace an invisible something. She kissed. "You tastes good!" The prosecutor moved the probe. "George?" called Fannie, her slim arms searching at the side of her cot. "I didn't hear you leave, George." She relaxed. "Oh, I hope he found his shoes." "He didn't though," contributed John Bork. The prosecutor moved the probe, hurrying on by ernotion-stirred quavers: Angelo, Moose. JTaudie, Beacon and Quasimodo. "Speed, darlin', what's your hurry ?" asked Fannie in her plaintive, metallic voice as she held out her hands beseechingly. "I never got to know him very well," interjected John Bork. "His visits were all so short." The prosecutor moved his probe. "Bork! Bork!" "Ah," said the prosecutor. "Now we are getting down to cases. I shall try that spot again." "Bork! Bork!" "She's not calling for me," advised Bork. "She just had a cold that week." T HE prosecutor moved his probe. At each touch, the body broke into quaking action: Ferdinand, Frenchy, Yacob; Peyton, Rebel, Young foo Yum; and John. "Ah !" said the prosecutor. "Here we are now." "John!" whispered Fannie. "John, John, John! Oh, Johnny Johnson, my love! Stay here forever!" "Wife's other John," said John Bork succinctly. The prosecutor moved his probe: Sinclair, Henrik, Sitting Duck, Oscar, Kenny, and Aqueduct. "That Aqueduct is Sitting Duck's educated b r o t h e r," confided John Bork. "Before he went to Princeton his name was Wet Duck." The prosecutor moved his probe : Pease, Reese and Meese, Acuff, Eyolf and Beowulf; Bork! Bork! "That cough again?" muttered the prosecutor, ready to move on. "No, she's calling for me that time," corrected Bork. "How can you tell?" "It has more of a snarl in it than her cough has." The prosecutor tried the spot once more. "Bork! Bork! Why are you pointing that at me, Bork? What are you going to do, Bork?" She held out her hands to ward him off. "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!" Then she dropped her hands. "I missed twice," John said, nodding. "The defendant will keep his lousy confessions to himself!" shrieked the judge. "I will not have the importance of our Very Complicated Monstrous Proximilator machine vitiated by these unwanted confessions!" Bork shrugged. "I just wanted to clear up a couple of details, your honor. I just like to be tidy." "We don't need your help," responded the judge crushingly. "The Very Complicated Monstrous Proximilator machine tells us all we want to know." He turned to the prosecutor. "You may proceed." "The state rests." court that no defense would be presented. The prosecutor exhorted the jury that its duty was plain. The judge gave final instructions, and the jury filed out. It returned in four minutes. "Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict in such a gratifyingly short space of time?" the judgei asked, beaming. The foreman arose. "We have, your honor." "Just for the record, what is your verdict?" twinkled the judge. "Not guilty, your honor." The prosecutor jumped up. "Why, that can't be !" he shouted. "It's a prima facie case, unrefuted and therefore patent. What else do you need?" "Yeah!" agreed the judge, outraged. "We need some p # am, oldfashioned evidence of a crime," answered the juryman, unperturbed. "Old-fashioned?" The fuming prosecutor rejected the heresy, pushing it away from him with both hands. "This is all unscientific now," he warned. "The Very Complicated Monstrous Proximilator machine -- especially the new model with the forty-three meters which replaces the old thirty-nine meter machine -- is the ne plus ultra of justice!" "Oh, no, it isn't," dissented the foreman. "Did your evidence place the deadly weapon in the defendant's hand? Did your evidence even tend to show the holes in the woman's chest were made by a gun? She said nothing about a weapon, if you will recall. She merely said, 'Why are you pointing that at me, Bork? What are you going to do, Fork?'" "But he had plenty of motive," pleaded the prosecutor. "Oh, we'll go along with that" assented the foreman. "And the defendant admitted it!" pursued the prosecutor triumphantly. The foreman shook his head. "Admissions don't count. The judge said so himself." "So even though you know he's guilty," the prosecutor said hollowly, "you're going to let him go?" "That's right," agreed the foreman happily, and cleared his throat. "We, the jury," he pronounced, "find this fellow innocent of what he did !"    Coming next issue by Keith Laumcr -- and many more great stories. May IF on sale March #th. IF  Feature which of course someone just was or shortly will (and by the way, it was not Mark Twain who said...but nobody does anything about it") here are a couple of things you are quite sure of that just ain't so: First, that rainfall is caused exclusively by the shifts in highs and lows and all the other things the pretty girls on TV tell you about. The Australian physicist Edward G. Bowen got the idea that maybe space dust filtering down can seed clouds the way man does occasionally with silver iodide. Chasing his guess, he went over all the records he could get his hands on, and sure enough r ound that the entire Earth has almost simultaneous peaks of precipitation at certain times -- and in more cases than coincidence could arrange, these times were almost exactly # days after the Earth had passed through known meteor swarms. Second: We all know that the Earth is warming up, very probably due to the "greenhouse effect" caused by us and our factories, exhaling vast amounts of C# into the atmosphere. Well, in a symposium in Rome recently, Climatologist J. Murray Mitchell announced his conclusion that the climate ended a varming period some # years ago and is now cooling again. The mean temperature over # of the earth has gone down, in that time, half a degree Fahrenheit. The U.S., Western Europe and the Pacific coast of Asia are the exceptions. Isoniazid, the miraculous conqueror of TB, can prevent as well as cure the disease. Plans are afoot to try it in certain high-incidence areas. If it works, a condition may be reached in which the bacillus, wherever it exists, will simply have nowhere to go, and the disease will cease to exist. Already TB, once the No. I killer, is down to fourteenth. A resounding salute to Mr. Clearborn Parker of Ft. Worth. Suffering from a condition known as hemochromatosis, Mr. Parker had to submit to a long series of phlebotomies -- the bit-by-bit withdrawal of his blood. He may need up to a hundred of these. His doctors (at the Carter Blood Center in Ft. Worth) discovered that Mr. Parker was a walking treasure-house: his blood contained a rare serum which can be used to do Rh blood typing. He has this serum, called anti-D, due to having been given the wrong blood in a transfusion some years ago. The doctors told him that if he would submit to small transfusion of more of this "wrong" blood, his output of anti-D would be much increased, but that it could be unpleasant, even dangerous, and, possibly, deadly. The #year-old Parker just grinned and told them to go ahead. Because of this, it is estimated that he will produce enough blood-clumping tests. And he refused to take any pay. All we can say is -- thanks. Electrical storms seem to affect mental patients. During a period of frequent atmospheric electrical disturbance, admissions to mental hospitals increase, and the patients are more difficult to deal with. The exact function of electrical currents in the nervous system has yet to be completely understood. It is known, however, that there is a normal fluctuation of small dc voltages in the body, fluctuations which increase very noticeably in the mentally ill.  In a recent statement, James E. Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, listed four good reasons why the U. S. should press ahead into space. #. We cannot tolerate any gap between our space technology and that of the Russians, as it is possible for the leading nation to reach a degree of advance which would make it uncatchable : it would make too many further gains by virtue of its superior equipment and skills. #. Space research has the virtue of cutting across many different scientific disciplines, causing a massive cross-pollination from which everyone benefits. #. We must hurry ahead for reasons of prestige. This is not merely an emotional, or even a political matter. In the forefront, we are in a much better position to give and get information from all nations, large and small. #. Satellite technology promises early and heavy cash returns through its immense impact on the communications industry and weather forecasting. Another of sf's old-timers, the space station, will come true. Project Apollo, the manned, soft-landing moon shot, would require a monstrous multistage liquid-fuel rocket standing nearly # feet tall, and would have to supply # lbs. of thrust at takeoff. Alternatively, a Nova rocket carrying the Apollo capsule would be boosted by a cluster of # F-l engines, a thrust each; or a dozen solidfuel boosters totalling # million lbs. of push. It looks very much as if these plans will be dropped in favor of an advanced Saturn which will carry fuel up and put it in orbit. The Nova will then rendezvous with it, refuel, and head for the moon. Enter Aquaculture, which is neither farming nor fishing but something in between. Dean Charles J. Fish of the School of Oceanography in Rhode Island is making exhaustive study of salt ponds -- seaside ponds cut off from the ocean by sand-bars and other such slight barriers. For a long time regarded as useless except for garbage dumps, these ponds turn out to be very important and filled with potentials. Dr. Fish points out that Narragansett Bay gives several times the yield of seafood than can be taken from the neighboring bay, Buzzard's on Cape Cod. The reason, he says, is the great number of salt ponds around the Narragansett beaches. They act as nurseries for vegetable and animal life on which fish lars from the National Institute of Health finances the pond study, which may result in a new industry, the "farming" of shallow water, and a great new source of food. Amherst's Prof. J. W. Davenport has completed an "allpurpose" psychology lab, consisting of a central control room and sixteen private cubicles each of which is large enough for two students and a patient or animal subject. An instructor can survey the entire proceedings one by one or all at once, by closed-circuit TV ; or he can share the experiment in any one room with all the others. Prof. Davenport designed the facility and built it with students on a do-it-yourself basis. The result is # worth of materials turned into a # lab. That, friend, is using psycholIF  Short Story You too can cause earthquakes, munch high-tension power lines and travel faster than light -- all you have to do is become an E  bein speed of light, I was. But you'll find the good Albert only hinted at the effects, in a delta-theta # pi-squared way. Ezmc # , he said. And for fifty years before they built my rocket, the Lighttrick , slim, tapering, sleek and gyperpowered, everyone concentrated on turning matter into energy at a light-squared power. Big, bright bangs, and congratulations. It's a pity no one asked what happens to energy divided by the speed of light. I happen to be the answer to the equation, and by interfering with the motor of this electric typescripter I can give you my thoughts on the matter. The Lighttrick hit full velocity out there between Van Allen and the asteroids. I'd guess the whole beautiful ship, including me, converted into energy and, slowing down, reconverted on the wrong side, so to speak. And there I was, floating without a ship and surrounded by little round beings, shimmering in a blue haze. "Good afternoon," I said. But no sound came out of my mouth. I had a mouth, in a way, but not for talking ; and not at all the sort of mouth I used to have. In fact, the shimmering blue haze was me. I could find no other parts of me. And when the little round things touched me on the periphery, there was an intelligent vibration. "Frequency and tone?" said the vibration. "Please identify." "You must take me as you find me," I thought. "Unidentified frequencies and discordant tones requested not to wander in spaceways' vibrated the little round things. "I'm a man," I vibrated back. "We don't have frequencies. We use frequencies in radio, television, radar and so on." "Not intelligible." "Where's my ship?" "Ship?" I tried to picture the Lighttrick and the long thin gleam on her hull, the fury of her rockets and the calm ordered keyboard of the control panels. "Most interesting," vibrated the round things. "Poetic. Very creative. Speculative philosopher, yes?" A ing the general idea, so I concentrated on an image of myself, square and bearded, staring sternly into space through the ports, in a pioneer manner, observing hitherto unknown planets. "Most ingenious," my audience vibrated back. "But unlikely." Then they started vibrating among themselves. "Senior e minus says..." "Mush is mush, that's what I say." "Now, theoretically..." "I don't vibrate why not. There are more things in positive and negative, Horatio, than..." "Excuse me," I vibrated. ' I. here was a brief pause. "Perhaps we should illuminate." "Please do," I vibrated politely. They gathered round the edges of my haze and explained. It seemed a very sennior e had suggested once that there might, just might, theoretically be side-effects of mush. The little round thin gs were e beings. And "mush" was the accepted term for the static and orbital tracks of electrons in fixed patterns, such as one found here and there in space. But the very senior e, apparently, had speculated that in a certain narrow band of light frequencies mush might possibly give an app earance of "matter" -- to coin a word -- a kind of condensed or crystalline energy. "But no one," they vibrated, "ever suggested there might be forms of life based on such 'material' structures. We admire your imagination. Hail bright e! All hail." A rapid circuit of my haze failed to show anyone else that they might be vibrating to. "Do you mean me?" I inquired. "Naturally. Hail, bright e !" "I'm an e?" "What else?" "Very well," I thought. "Perhaps you'll tell me what an e is." "An e? We are all e beings." "So you mentioned earlier. But what is an e being?" "Ah, you are too deep for by James Stainers us. Highly original philosopher, yes... But please get off the spaceway. There is a food flood due' And they edged me firmly down, and down, to a vast doughnut with a hole in the center. I ate a piece out of habit. It was insipid and tasteless. But then, a doughnut several thousand miles across must have some drawbacks. "The pasture is better inside," they vibrated. So I sank down into the enormous piece of pastry and came out of a couple of inner layers to see a big ball of mush. There was no mistaking it. A vast, tangled, interconnecting mass of tiny points of light. Mush was a good name for it. But here and there on its surface were great rivers of liquor and mounds of food in delectable variety. I stuffed myself for days, browsing here and there across the surface of the globe of mush. In fact, I was chewing quietly on an apparently endless streaming ribbon of -- well -- trout, steak, caviar, you-nameyour-favorite food; that's what it was to me. And I happened to bite too deeply. There was a core of this mush stuff inside and, when I bit it, the whole food supply stopped. The stream of entrancing food just disappeared. And there I was, hovering on a plain of bare mush, I was brooding on this and belching contentedly with a sort of cracking noise, when the skeleton came driving over the surface of the mush ball. It was in a framework of mush shaped like a jeep but squirting delicious little fountains of liquor in the front, where the engine of a real jeep would have been. I moved over and tasted them. And the whole framework stopped. "Triple purple hell," said a voice. "The damned thing's broken down again. Wait till I get my hands on that idiot mechanic !" "Hey," I vibrated. "Where are you?" "Now I'll have to walk all the way back, I suppose," the voice added. The skeleton got out of the mush jeep, walked through me and lifted the hood. "Battery flat," the voice said disgustedly. "Not a drop of juice in it." I began to feel guilty. There was a slight blue base round the skeleton's head. When I examined it more closely, it looked less like a skeleton of bare bones and more like a physician's chart of the human nervous system, traced out in thin lines of mush... little close-packed lines of energy, fixed in relation to each other but flexible as a whole. It occurred to me I was looking at a human being, in terms of energy. And I had just drunk his jeep's ignition! So thought was a form of energy, after all. For some of the things he was thinking about the mechanic responsible for maintaining the jeep were strictly subliminal and Freudian. If he spoke, I doubted if I would hear him. His voice would just be a very faint wave of mush traveling indistinctly out. "And the next time that spark-spark foreman sends me out on an emergency powerline repair," continued the skeleton, "he can spark-spark well give me a vehicle that ' works " The skeleton's name was Joe, I think. And I watched Joe sway over to the ribbon of mush I had bitten through. "Fused," Joe muttered in his head. "Now, what on Earth did that?" And it struck me for the first time where I was. Back on Earth! As an e being! A being based, it seemed, on energy and not on matter. Converted accidentally by the marvels of modern science and the supreme technological achievement of traveling at the speed of light. I spat disgustedly at the thought. "Summer lightning?" Joe bent his mush head back and looked up. He exposed a rather interesting tidbit in the region of his throat plexus and his cardiac nerves were, I regret to say, for an instant very appetizing. But I controlled myself. After all, in a technological society as free with energy as ours... as yours... there were bound to be ample food and drink flowing about. I swear I had come to that ethical conclusion. It wasn't my fault that I was unfamiliar with my own reactions as an e being, i didn't know I was so fast. I ate Joe by mistake. I just drained off the energy of his system before I knew it. Truly. ry about it. In fact, I was just standing there, looking at the huddled pile of mush, when the other repair crew arrived. From their scrambled thoughts of death and radio and Main Office, I gathered they were sending for a doctor. Sure enough, he arrived in an autojet with delicious after-burners. So then they had to send for a team of towing tractors. I just couldn't help thinking about the ignition systems of their vehicles; and to think is to eat, with an e. Or rather, if you have the speed of light -- as an e being has -- it takes some time before you learn to control your reactions quickly enough. "Well, I don't know what's going on around here," said a voice which I located as the doctor thinking to himself. "But I remember Professor Bigglesby's advice. When you by James Stamers don't know, nod thoughtfully." I could see his mush head and its blue haze wobbling solemnly at the other mush-men. I beg your pardon -- at the other humans. "Nervous collapse," the doctor continued in his head. "Something to do vith electricity, I suppose. Powerline failure. Broken cable. Dead repair man. Don't know much about electricity. Who does? Hello, hello, what's this?" I saw him bend his nervous skeleton over Joe's body and straighten up with a string of little silver heads sticking to his hand. "Makes a noise. Quite musical. Adheres to skin. Light. What is it?" "There's some more of that stuff in the jeep engine," one of the repair crew noticed. "And on the doc's jets..." "And in our truck..." I watched and gathered I was leaving some form of conversion product around the place. I didn't like that thought. If an e being eats energy as food and drink, what does an e being's conversion product make? The answer might be important...considering I had just eaten someone. I decided to follow along. The doctor was wiping the silver beads off his hands into something shaped like a glass jar and screwing on a lid. I thought I had better be around when it was examined. So I rolled after the towing tractors and carefully refrained from even thinking of their refreshing little sparkplugs and tasty exhaust. I followed the doctor until we reached a place where the mush grew up in blocks on either side, square and close-meshed, with streams, rivers and trickling lines of energy tumbling through their structures. I gathered we had reached a city of some sort. The doctor-skeleton got out of the tractor and went into one of the tall blocks of mush through a hole. I followed, nibbling a light bulb or two as we passed down the long corridor inside. The doctor, still carrying the jar shape, stopped once or twiceand looked back, then he shot in through a doorway on the left. "Dr. McPherson," thought a thin skeleton by the window. "I don't want to say it," said the doctor's mush head, "but this jar of muck seems to have put the corridor lights out." He held out the jar and I saw a faint wave of mush spreading from his mouth toward the thin skeleton. When the mush wave reached him, the thin man jerked in plain disbelief. "If I heard that straight, either Doc McPherson is drunk or he's got something very interesting. I wonder which." The thin man wandered casually over to the jar the doctor was holding and took it. '"Not drunk, I " he considered, holding the jar up in the air. "But..." And then his thoughts ran riot in a stream of edibles. He was thinking of electronics, protons, ions, electrons, gamma, delta and alpha particles, and I couldn't resist it. I'm sorry. I just had to eat him, his thoughts were so delicious. Doctor McPherson stared down at the thin body on the floor and walked out of the room. He left the jar where it had rolled on the floor of mush. I was quite happy. It must have been a laboratory of some sort. There were refreshing sources all over the room. I was still tasting and testing here and there when the doctor returned with another pair of mush-men -- humans, I mean -- and they had a long conversation in their heads about the late scientist and the contents of the jar. Finally, they picked up the jar with a long rod of static energy -- some metal, I suppose. They took it away. Unfortunately, this time it seems I had eaten a physicist working for the government. More and more mush shapes of humans clustered round Doctor McPherson, and one came hurrying up from another laboratory. "Raw ozone," he thought as he came. "This fellow needs watching. Couldn't get ozone like that except in space. And now he happens to be around when we lose our top physicist. And that's the second accident of the day. Yes, sir , this McPherson needs watching! You can never tell where sabotage will break out." He grasped the doctor's arm and said something in a faint wave of mush that I could not see clearly enough to understand. "Me? Ridiculous! I was just..." thought McPherson. But he shrugged and turned away. Well, I couldn't leave him in a mess like that, so I followed Doctor McPherson home. I had to explain. But how? And there was the problem. How can a being based on energy, like me, communicate with a being based on matter, like him? Obviously, I had to signal in some way, give some signs of life that would be intelligible to him. He was sitting in a chairshape of strand energy interwoven together, and he was thinking gloomy thoughts. He flicked on the televiewer. And there was the answer. T found the input flow, followed it into the cathode tube and ate the pictures off the screen in a discriminating manner. They were too small and scattered to make a mouthful, but that wasn't the point. I was able to signal to him ! I ate pieces of the picture coming through and left regular black holes on the tube face, dot, dash, dash-dash-dot. Doctor McPherson stood up, approached the set, reached in his pocket for a bottle and took two pills. And then he switched off the set and went to bed. "Now my eyes are playing up. Live r," his thoughts trailed away. After awhile, I saw a better answer. One man would be scared to do anything even if I did get in touch with him. What I needed was a larger scale. If several dozen mush...several dozen people started speculating about me, they would lend each other moral support and they would start looking for my signs. Then I could tell them all about the little error of appetite. So I went back down the main power line from Doctor McPherson's home -- high grade, pure liquor in that line ! -- and tracked it upstream to the city power house. But when I took a deep bite, all the generators stopped and an auxiliary circuit from somewhere else started up. I ate a piece of main coil Li disgust. Well, that was no use. And then I remembered the little e beings' comments on a food flood due in the spaceway. A sunburst, no doubt. A magnetic storm on the sun would certainly send a harvest out through space for e beings. But it would louse up the planetary radio system. And there I had an answer. All I had to do was remove the radio interference in a planned way and every receiver on half the world would receive my signals. How easy it was! So I went back up to the first layer of the doughnut round the Earth where there was a field of fresh energy. As the food came flooding in from the sun I gobbled it up. Mouthful. Pause. Mouthful, mouthful. Pause. Mouthful, mouthful, mouthful. Pause. I worked up and down the numbers in progression, swallowing every lump of solar radiation within reach. But I guess I was carried away by the enjoyable eating. A lot more time passed than I had intended; and when I came down again to read a few thoughts, the world was freezing in parts, and the sea was boiling in others, and the mush lay flat as a desert in wide patches. I worked it out, eventually. No energy means no evaporation, thus no clouds and no rain for vegetation. And that means no carbon dioxide layer to protect the planet, in turn leading to excessive radiation when I stopped eating, hence deserts and a boiling ocean and parts of the land frozen solid. Not a very good message. by James Stamers I could, but it was drudgery sipping up the dull, flat-tasting thermal energy of the oceans. Tidal forces and magnetic flows are stodgy, uninteresting diets. You might as well eat straight mush. I decided not to try that again. It had too many repercussions. What I wanted was a nice simple signal. A volcano would do excellently, I thought -- I n d i a n smoke signals on a vast scale. So I hunted over the mush until I came to a reasonably active fountain, probably Vesuvius but I'm not sure ; one blob of mush looks like another. And I drank the whole internal fire in bursts. Anyone with any sense could have seen the Morse-coded eruptions that I let go through. But they didn't. They missed my signals altogether. Chiefly because I had disturbed the balance of stresses down at the foot of the volcano, deep in the mush, and when I came out it was dancing about in ripples and shakes. I don't suppose many people would stop in the middle of an earthquake to note the signals coming out of the local volcano. Anyway, no one did. As you know, the damage was quite widespread. So I went round to the other side of the mush, where they vere less distracted. What I needed was a test-piece. Something whi'ch was already the focus of serious scientific interest. Something being carefully observed already. The nuclear power plant in the nearest city mush-blocks seemed a reasonable choice. And good eating it made, too. Pure unadulterated flavor, strong and pulsing with vitality. I've never had a better meal. But when I came out of the reactor and let it continue its food...its energy production, all the hurnans had vanished. They hadn't seen a thing. I found them miles away under the surface of the mush-level expecting to be blovn up. They assumed that when the pile ceased its output it was building up internally, so they broadcast an emergency and took to their bunkers. And then they were busy for weeks correcting the false alarm and dealing with complaints from freezer companies and householders and utility commissions. So I left the area to sort itself out. Very well, I thought. This time, I'll choose a nuclear device that is expected to explode and eat it before it does, while everyone is watching. It wasn't difficult to find. There was a long smear of food in the air all round the world, as if a lot of clumsy e eaters had dribbled. The main source was easy to locate. T found a long stalk thing ofmush and a mush shed on top and sat there waiting. Eventually, a team of mushes hoisted up a device with delicate little tidbit cores, and hurried away. So this was a fusion bomb, was it? I waited until it was triggered off, took a strong hold and ate the lot at the moment of burst. For the record, swallowing a nuclear explosion is not very comfortable. I had indigestion for weeks. But I made it. It was a waste of time. As usual, I had overlooked something. The conversion was as massive as the energy I ate, and I found out what the silver beads Doctor McPherson had put in the jar were. Energy eaten by e beings converts into sound and ozone. And the conversion of the nuclear explosion sent great balls of sound rolling over the country, deafening the people, flattening structures by vibration, and releasing flows of raw ozone, which p omptly started fires; and that in turn disturbed the cloud masses and produced unnrecedented floods. I was munching quietly on r power line, overlooking the great stretch of level mush of Water up to and over the horizon, when Doctor McPherson found me. A repair man drove him up, let him off the mush vehicle and drove off fast. "You nutty old coot, you wanted to see the next breakdown and here it is," the repair man's thoughts shot away. T may be nuts," Doctor McPherson said to himself, standing underneath me, "but I have an odd idea there's intelligent mischief behind all this." He sat on a rock-shaped mound of mush nearby. "So here I am, following a idiotic hunch," he thought, and held out a large jar with a most entrancing tidbit of radioactivity, cobalt flavor, in the bottom. Naturally, I went down happily and gobbled it up. And Doctor McPherson put the lid on. A lid of thickmeshed mush, leaden and inedible. It took me some time of fruitless revolving to discover I was locked in a Leyden jar with a complicated series of non-conducting layers. I'm starving. O H, he feeds me now and then, and the other day he put in a one-way circuit so that I could operate this electric typescripter. But he says I can't come out until war is declared and the Pentagon signals him on emergency. Then he'll take the lid off and I can eat the nearest rocket heading this way. He's promised me that. He needn't worry. I'm so hungry I'll eat the lot. But who wants to be a secret air defense weapon locked in a Leyden jar? Fellow e, keep away from this mush and these mushmen ! They are dangerous. What's more, they have no by James Stamers IF  Novelette You don't have to be crazy to be an earth diplomat -- but on Groac it sure helps! I been tied up every off-duty hour since I got here -- " X restrial States," Retief aci," Miss Meuhl said sharply, said, "presents his compli"Consul Whaffle would never ments, et cetera, to the Minishave been so rude." try of Culture of the Groacian "Whaffle left here three Autonomy, and with reference m # n t h s ago," Retief said, to the Ministry's invitation to "leaving me in charge." attend a recital of interpretive "Well," Miss Meuhl said, grimacing, has the honor to snapping off the dictyper. express regret that he will be "I'm sure I don't know what unable " excuse I can give the Minis"You can't turn this invitater." tion down," Administrative "Never mind the excuses," Assistant Meuhl said flatly. Retief said. "Just tell him I "I'll make that 'accepts with won't be there." He stood up. pleasure'." "Are you leaving the office? Retief exhaled a plume of Miss Meuhl adjusted her cigar smoke. glasses. "I have some impor"Miss Meuhl," he said, "in ant letters here for your sigthe past couple of weeks I've nature. sat through six light-concerts, # I don't recall dictating any four attempts at chamber muletters today. Miss Meuhl," sic, and god knows how many Retief said, pulling on a light assorted folk-art festivals. I've cape. iiT wrote them for you."They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted them." "Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?" "Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man," Miss Meuhl said stiffly. "He had complete confidence in me." "Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on," Retief said, "I won't be so busy." "Well!" Miss Meuhl said. "May I ask where you'll be if something comes up?" "I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives." Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. "Whatever for?" Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. "You've been here on Groac for four years. Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put the present government in power?" "I'm sure I haven't pried into -- " "What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this way about ten years back?" "Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we avoid with the Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding -- " "Why?" "The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one occasion." "You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?" "I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that innocent people as though they were criminals. We try never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief." "They never found the cruiser, did they?" "Certainly not on Groac." Retief nodded. "Thanks, Miss Meuhl," he said. "I'll be back before you close the office." Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim disapproval as he closed the door. T HE pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed bleat. "Not to enter the Archives ,' n he said in his faint voice. "The denial of permission. The deep regret of the Archivist." "The importance of my task here," Retief said, enunciating the glottal dialect with difficulty. "My interest in local history." "The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly." "The necessity that I enter." "The specific instructions of the Archivist." The Groacian's voice rose to a whisper. "To insist no longer. To give up this idea!" "OK, Skinny, I know when I # m licked," Retief said in by Keith Laumec s Terran. "To keep your nose clean." Outside, Retief stood for a mome'nt looking across at the deeply carved windowless stucco facades lining the street, then started off in the direction of the Terrestrial Consulate General. The few Groacians on the street eyed him furtively, veered to avoid him as he passed. Flimsy high-wheeled ground cars puffed silently along the resilient pavement. The air was clean and cool. At the office, Miss Meuhl would be waiting with another list of complaints. Retief studied the carving over the open doorways along the street. An elaborate one picked out in pinkish paint seemed to indicate the Groacian equivalent of a bar. Retief went in. A Groacian bartender was dispensing clay pots of alcoholic drink from the bar-pit at the center of the room. He looked at Retief and froze in mid-m o t i o n, a metal tube poised over a waiting pot. "To enjoy a cooling drink," Retief said in Groacian, squatting down at the edge of the pit. "To sample a true Groacian beverage." "To not enjoy my poor offerings," the Groacian mumbled. "A pain in the digestive sacs; to express regret." "To not worry," Retief said, irritated. "To pour it out and let me decide whether I like it." "To be g r a p p I e d in by peace-keepers for poisoning of -- foreigners." The barkeep looked around for support, found none. The Groaci customers, eyes elsewhere, were drifting away. "To get the lead out," Retief said, placing a thick goldpiece in the dish provided. "To shake a tentacle." "The procuring of a cage," a thin voice called from the sidelines. "The displaying of a freak." acian vibrated his mandibles in a gesture of contempt. From his bluish throat coloration, it was apparent the creature was drunk. "To choke in your upper sac," the bartender hissed, extending his eyes toward the drunk. "To keep silent, littermate of drones." "To swallow your own poison, dispenser of vileness," the drunk whispered. "To find a proper cage for this zoopiece." He wavered toward Retief. "To show this one in the streets, like all freaks." "Seen a lot of freaks like me, have you?" Retief asked, interestedly. "To speak intelligibly, malodorous outworlder," the drunk said. The barkeep whispered something, and two customers came up to the drunk, took his arms and helped him to the door. "To get a cage!" the drunk shrilled. "To keep the animals in their own stinking place." "I've changed my mind, Retief said to the bartender. "To be grateful as hell, but to have to hurry off now." He followed the drunk out the door. The other G r o a c i released him, hurried back inside. Retief looked at the weaving alien. "To begone, freak," the Groacian whispered. "To be pals," Retief said. "To be kind to dumb animals." "To have you hauled away to a stockyard, ill-odored foreign livestock." "To not be angry, fragrant native," Retief said. "To permit me to chum with you." "To flee before I take a cane to you!" "To have a drink together -- " "To not endure such insolence!" The Groacian advanced toward Retief. Retief backed away. "To hold hands," Retief said. "To be palsy-walsy -- " The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him, head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local, who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow alley-like passage, deserted, silent...except for the following Groacian. Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian fell oft his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose; Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed. "To not be going anywhere for a few minutes," Retief said. "To stay right here and have a nice long talk." II A Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. "There are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen." "Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast." Retief pulled off his cape. "This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign Ministry." "What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling you." "I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder." Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right. "I am Fith, of #te Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Consul," the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. "May I present Shluh of the Internal Police?" "Sit down, gentlemen," Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the by Keith Laumer edge of a comfortless chair. "Oh, it's such a pleasure -- " she began. "Never mind that," Retief said. "These gentlemen didn't come here to sip tea today." "So true," Fith said. "Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report, Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it." He nodded to the police chief. "One hour ago," The Groacian said, "a Groacian national was brought to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of the Terrestrial Consul." Miss Meuhl gasped audibly. "Have you ever heard," Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, "of a Terrestrial cruiser, dropped from sight in this sector nine years ago?" "Really !" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. "I wash my hands -- " "Just keep that recorder going," Retief snapped. "I'll not be a party -- " "You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl," Retief said quietly. "I'm telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation." Miss Meuhl sat down. Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. "You reopen an old wound, Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial hands -- " "Hogwash," Retief said. "That tune went over with my predecessors, but it hits a sour note with me." "All our effort s," Miss Meuhl said, "to live down that terrible episode! And you -- " "Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left. Somewhat annoying to the Groac i, maybe -- at the most. If they were innocent." "IF !" Miss Meuhl burst out. "If, indeed!" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. "I must protest your -- "  You have some explaining to do. And I don't think your story will be good enough." "It is for you to explain! This person who was beat    en -- "Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory." "Then you admit -- " "It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to it." Fith rose ;Shluh followed suit. "I shall ask for your immediate recall, Mr. Consul. Were it not for your diplomatic immunity, I should do more -- " "Why did the government fall, Fith? It was just after the task force paid its visit, and before the arrival of the first Terrestrial diplomatic mission." "This is an internal matter!" Fith cried, in his faint Groacian voice. "The new regime has shown itself most amiable to you Terrestrials. It has outdone itself -- " " -- to keep the Terrestrial consul and his staff in the dark," Retief said. "And the same goes for the few terrestrail businessmen you've visaed. This continual round of culture ; no social contacts outside the diplomatic circle; no travel permits to visit outlying districts, or your satellite -- " "Enough!" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. "I can talk no more of this matter -- " "Y o u ' I I talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do the talking," Retief said. "You can't!" Miss Meuhl gasped. Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The Groaci sat down. "Answer me this one," Retief said, looking at Shluh. "A few years back -- about nine, I think -- there was a little parade held here. Some curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged, they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the streets, Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show. "Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit. "Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the parade was over?" and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly. "How did they die?" Retief snapped. "Did you murder them, cut their throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made they yell..." "No!" Fith gasped. "I must correct this terrible false impression at once." "False impression, hell," Retief said. "They were Terrans! A simple narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the parade." "Yes," Fith said weakly. "It is true, they were Terrestrials. "They're alive?" "Alas, no. They...died." Miss Meuhl yelped faintly. "I see," Retief said. "They died." "We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what foods -- " "Didn't take the trouble to fry Keith Laumer find out, either, did you?" "They fell ill," Fith said. "One by one..." "We'll deal with that question later," Retief said. "Right now, I want more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship? What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the big parade?" "There were no more! Absolutely, I assure you !" "Killed in the crash landing?" "No crash landing. The ship descended intact, east of the city. The... Terrestrials... were unharmed. Naturally, we feared them. They were strange to us. We had never before seen such beings." "Stepped off the ship with guns blazing, did they?" "Guns? No, no guns -- " "They raised their hands, didn't they? Asked for help. You helped them; helped them to death." "How could we know?" Fith moaned. "How could you know a flotilla would show up in a few months looking for them, you mean? That was a shock, wasn't it? I'll bet you had a brisk time of it hiding the ship, and shutting everybody up. A close call, eh?" "We were afraid," Shluh said. "We are a simple people. We feared the strange creatures from the alien craft. We did not kill them, but we felt it was as well they...did not survive. Then, when the warships came, we realized our error. But we feared to speak. We purged our guilty leaders, concealed what had happened, and...offered our friendship. We invited the opening of diplomatic relations. We made a blunder, it is true, a great blunder. But we have tried to make amends..." "Where is the ship?" "The ship?" "What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget. Where is it?" The two Groacians exchanged looks. "We wish to show our contrition," Fith said. "We will show you the ship." "Miss Meuhl," Retief said. "If I don't come back in a reasonable length of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, seale dA He stood, looked at the Groaci. "Let's go," he said. heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern. He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull. "Any lights in here?" he asked. A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up. Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was visible within the halfopen entry port. Near the bow New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy. "How did you get it in here?" Retief asked. " It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant," Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. "This is a natural crevasse. The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over." "How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?" "All here is high-grade iron ore," Fith said, waving a member. "Great veins of almost pure metal." Retief grunted. "Let's go inside." Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship. Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanc h i o n s where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument panels, the I itter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding. "The cargo compartment -- " Shluh began "I!ve seen enough," Retief said. Silently the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and into the late aftertoe noon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the steam car, Fith came to Retief 's side. "Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair," he said. "Now that all has been fully and honestly shown -- " "You can skip all that," Retief said. "You're nine years late. The crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed them -- or let them die -- rather than take the chance of admitting what you'd done." "We were at fault," Fith said abjectly. "Now we wish only friendship." "The Terrific was a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons." Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. "Where is she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat." so violently that one eyeshield fell off. "I know nothing of... of..." He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly as he struggled for calm. "My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul," he said at last. "I have been completely candid with you, I have overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of responsibility. My patience is at an end." "Where is that ship?" Retief rapped out. You never learn, do you? You're still by Keith Laumer convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm telling you you can't." "We return to the city now," Fith said. "I can do no more." "You can and you will, Fith' Retief said. "I intend to get to the truth of this matter." Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in. Retief eyed Fith. "Don't try it," he said. "You'll just get yourself in deeper." Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively toward the Terrestrial. "Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall ignore your insulting remarks," Fith said in his reedy voice. "Let us now return to the city." Retief looked at the four policemen. "I see your point," he said. Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat. "I advise you to remain very close to your consulate," Fith said. "I advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out of the city, or appear overly curious about mat ters of concern only to the Groacian government." In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing. Ill a M !SS Meuhl," Retief said, "I want you to listen carefully to what I'm going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off guard." "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Miss Meuhl snapped, her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses. "If you'll listen, you may find out," Retief said. "I have no time to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move -- I hope -- and that may give me the latitude I need." "You're still determined to make an issue of that incident!" Miss Meuhl snorted. "I really can hardly blame the Groaci. They are not a sophisticated race; they had never before met aliens." "You're ready to forgive a great deal, Miss Meuhl. But it's not what happened nine years ago I'm concerned with. It's what's happening now. I've told you that it was only a lifeboat the Groaci have hidden out. Don't you understand the implication? That vessel couldn't have come far. The cruiser itself? must be somewhere near by. I want to know where !" "The Groaci don't know. They're a very cultured, gentle people. You can do irreparable harm to the reputation of Terrestrials if you insist -- " "That's my decision," Retief said. "I have a job to do and we're wasting time." He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and took out a slim-barreled needier. "This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the Groaci. I think I can get past them all right." "Where are you going with...that?" Miss Meuhl stared at the needier. "What in the world -- " "The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll find nothing but blank smiles." "You're out of your mind!" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with indignation. "You're like a...a..." "You and I are in a tight spot, Miss Meuhl. The logical next move for the Groaci is to dispose of both of us. We're the only ones who know happened. Fith almost did the job this afternoon, but I bluffed him out -- for the moment." Miss Meuhl emitted a shrill laugh. "Your fantasies are getting the better of you," she gasped. "In danger, indeed ! Disposing of me! I've never heard anything so ridiculous." "Stay in this office. Close and safe-lock the door. You've got food and water in the dispenser. I suggest you stock up, before they shut the supply down. Don't let anyone in, on any pretext whatever. I'll keep in touch with you via handphone." "What are you planning to do?" "If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you. Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by kiling you. A force can be here in a week." "I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me ! You... J ohnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy -- " "Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better," Retief said, "but don't be fool enough to trust them." He pulled on a cape, opened the door. "I'll be back in a couple of hours," he said. Miss Meuhl stared after him silently as he closed the door. I T was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the safe-lock and stepped into the darkened conby Keith Laumer sular office. He looked tired. Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare. "What in the w o r I d -- Where have you been? What's happened to your clothing?" "I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it." Retief went to his desk, opened a drawer and replaced the needier. "Where have you been?" Miss Meuhl demanded. "I stayed here -- " "I'm glad you did," Retief said. "I hope you piled up a supply of food and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week, at least." He jotted figures on a pad. "Warm up the official sender. I have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters." "Are you going to tell me where you've been?" "I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl," , Retief said sharply. "I've been to the Foreign Ministry," he added. "I'll tell you all about it later." "At this hour? There's no one there... " "Exactly." Miss Meuhl gasped. "You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign Office?" "That's right," Retief said calmly. "Now -- " "This is absolutely the erid !" Miss Meuhl said. "Thank heaven I've already -- " "Get that sender going, woman !" Retief snapped. "This is important." "I've already done so, Mr. Retief!" Miss Meuhl said harshly. "I've been waiting for you to come back here..." She turned to the communicator, flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance image appeared. "He's here now," Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief triumphant!y"That's good," Retief said. "I don't think the Groaci can knock us off the air, but -- " "I have done my duty, Mr. Retief," Miss Meuhl said. "I made a full report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me." Retief looked at her levelly. "You've been a busy girl. Miss Meuhl. Did you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?" "That had no bearing on the matter of your wild behavior! I must say, in all my years in the Corps, I've never encountered a personality less suited to diplomatic work." T HE screen crackled, the ten-second transmission lag having elapsed. "Mr. Retief," the face on the screen said, "I Deputy Under-secretary for the region. I have received a report on your conduct which makes it mandatory for me to relieve you administratively, vice 'Miss Yolanda Meuhl, of a Board of Inquiry, you will -- " Retief reached out and snapped off the communicator. The triumphant look faded from Miss Meuhl's face. "Why, what is the mean   ing -- "If I'd listened any longer, I might have heard something I couldn't ignore. I can't afford that, at this moment. Listen, Miss Meuhl," Retief went on earnestly, "I've found the missing cruiser." "You heard him relieve you !" "I heard him say he was going to, Miss Meuhl. But until I've heard and acknowledged a verbal order, it has no force. If I'm wrong, he'll get my resignation. If I'm right, that suspension would be embarrassing all around." "You're defying lawful authority! I'm in charge here now." Miss Meuhl stepped to the local communicator. "I'm going to report this terrible thing to the Groaci at once, and offer my profound -- ' "Don't touch that screen," Retief said. "You go sit in that corner where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make .a sealed tape for transm i ssion to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task force. Then we'll settle down to wait." Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder. The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it. "Go ahead," Retief said. "Answer it." A Groacian official appeared on the screen. "Yolanda Meuhl," he said without preamble, "for the Foreign Minister of the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs." "Why, why," Miss Meuhl stammered. "Yes, of course. And I do want to express my deepest regrets -- " communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside. "Listen carefully, Fith," he said. "Your bluff has been called. You don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist the temptation to make by Keith Laumer matters worse than they are." "Miss Meuhl," Fith said, "a peace squad waits outside your consulate. It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but -- " "Don't bother," Retief said. "You know what was in those files I looked over this morn  # ing. Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door, reaching for the safe-lock release... "Don't!" Retief jumped -- too late. The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room, pushed M iss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief Shluh pushed forward. "Attempt no violence. Terrestrial," he said. "I cannot promise to restrain my men." "You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh," Retief said steadily. "I suggest you move back out the same way you came in." "I invited them here," Miss Meuhl spoke up. "They are here at my express wish." "Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far. Miss Meuhl? A squad of armed Groaci in the consulate?" "You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl," Shluh said. "Would it not be best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?" "You're making a serious mistake, Shluh," Retief said. "Yes," Miss Meuhl said. "You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building -- " "I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith," Retief said. "As chief of mission," Miss Meuhl said quickly, "I hereby waive immunity in the case #f Mr. Retief." Shluh produced a hand recorder. "Kindly repeat your statement, Madam, officially," he said. "I wish no question to arise later." "Don't be a fool, woman," Retief said. "Don't you see what you're letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to figure out whose side you're on." "I'm on the side of common decency !" "You've been taken in. These people are concealing -- " "You think all women are fools, don't you, Mr. Retief?" She turned to the police chief and spoke into the microphone he held up. "That's an illegal waiver," Retief said. "I'm consul here, whatever rumors you've heard. This thing's coming out into the open, whatever you do. Don't add violation of the Consulate to the list of Groacian astrocities." "Take the man," Shluh said. T WO tall Groaci came to Retief's side, guns aimed at his chest. Ill "Determined to hang yourselves, aren't you?" Retief said. "I hope you have sense enough not to lay a hand on this poor fool here." He jerked a thumb at Miss Meuhl. "She doesn't know anything. I hadn't had time to tell her yet. She thinks you're a band of angels." The cop at Retief's side swung the butt of his scattergun, connected solidly with Retief's jaw. Retief staggered against a Groacian, was caught and thrust upright, blood running down onto his shirt. Miss Meuhl yelped. Shluh barked at the guard in shrill Groacian, then turned to stare at Miss Meuhl. "What has this man told you ?" "I -- nothing. I refused to listen to his ravings." "He said nothing to you of some...alleged...involvement?" "I've told you!" Miss Meuhl said sharply. She looked at the blood on Retief's shirt. "He told me nothing," she whispered. "I swear it." "Let it lie, boys," Retief said, "Before you spoil that  good impression." Shluh looked at Miss Meuhl for a long moment. Then he turned. "Let us go," he said. He turned back to Miss Meuhl. "Do not leave this building until further advice," he said. "But...I am the Terrestrial consul !" "For your safety, madam. The people are aroused at the beating of Groacian nationals by an...alien." "So long, Meuhlsie," Retief said. "You played it real foxy." "You'll...lock him in his quarters?" Miss Meuhl said. "What is done with him is now a Groacian affair, Miss Meuhl. You yourself have withdrawn the protection of your government." "I didn't mean -- " "Don't start having second thoughts," Retief said. "They can make you miserable." "I had no choice," Miss Meuhl said. "I had to consider the best interest of the Service. "My mistake, I guess," Retief said. "I was thinking of the best interests of a Terrestrial cruiser with three hundred men aboard." "Enough," Shluh said. "Remove this criminal." He gestured to the peace keepers. "Move along," he said to Retief. He turned to Miss Meuhl. "A pleasure to deal with you, Madam." IV lift, stepped out at the ground floor and followed docilely down the corridor and across the pavement to a waiting steam car. One of the peace keepers rounded the vehicle to enter on the other side. Two by Keith Laumer stooped to climb into the front seat. Shluh gestured Retief into the back seat and got in behind him. The others moved off on foot. The car started up and pulled away. The cop in the front seat turned to look at Retief. "To have some sport with it, and then to kill it," he said. "To have a fair trial first," Shluh said. The car rocked and jounced, rounded a corner, puffed along between ornamented pastel facades. "To have a trial and then to have a bit of sport," the cop said. "To suck the eggs in your own hill," Retief said. "To make another stupid mistake." Shluh raised his short ceremonial club and cracked Retief across the temple. Retief shook his head, tensed -- The cop in the front seat beside the driver turned and rammed the barrel of his scatter-gun against Retief's ribs. "To make no move, outworlder," he said. Shluh raised his club and carefully struck Retief again. He slumped. The car swayed, rounded another corner. Retief slid over against the police chief. "To fend this animal -- " Shluh began. His weak voice was cut off short as Retief's hand shot out, took him by the throat and snapped him down onto the floor. As the guard on Retief's left lunged, Retief uppercut him, slamming his head against the door post. He grabbed the scatter-gun as it fell, pushed into... the mandibles of the Groacian in the front seat. "To put your popgun over the seat -- carefully -- and drop it," he said. Tho driver slammed on his brakes, whirled to raise his gun. Retief cracked the gun barrel against the head of the Groacian before him, then swiveled to aim it at the driver. "To keep your eyestalks on the road," he said. The driver grabbed at the tiller and shrank against the window, watching Retief with one eye, driving with the other. "To gun this thing," Retief said. "To keep moving." Shluh stirred on the floor. Retief put a foot on him, pressed him back. The cop beside Retief moved. Retief pushed him off the seat onto the floor. He held the scatter-gun with one hand and mopped at the blood on his face with the other. The car bounded over the irregular surface of the road, puffing furiously. "Your death will not be an easy one, Terrestrial," Shluh said in Terran. "No easier than I can help," Retief said. "Shut up for now, I want to think." T HE car passed the last of the relief-crusted mounds, sped along between tilled fields. "Slow down," Retief said. The driver obeyed. "Turn down this side road." The car bumped off onto an unpaved surface, threaded its way back among tall stalks. "Stop her e." The car stopped. It blew off steam and sat trembling as the hot engine idled roughly. Retief opened the door, took his foot off Shluh. "Sit up," he ordered. "You two in front listen carefully." Shluh sat up, rubbing his throat. "Three of you are getting out here," Retief said. "Good old Shluh is going to stick around to drive for me. If I get that nervous feeling that the cops are after me, I'll toss him out to confuse them. That will be pretty messy, at high speed. Shluh, tell them to sit tight until dark and forget about sounding any alarms. I'd hate to see your carapace split and spill loveable you all over the pavement." "To burst your throat sac, evil-smelling beast!" Shluh hissed. "Sorry, I haven't got one." Retief put the gun under Shluh's ear. "Tell them, Shluh. I can drive myself, in a pinch." "To do as the foreign one says; to stay hidden until dark," Shluh said. "Everybody out," Retief said. "And take this with you." He nudged the unconscious Groacian. "Shluh you get in the driver's seat. You others stay where I can see you." Retief watched as the Groaci silently followed instructions. "All right, Shluh," Retief said softly. "Let's go. Take me to Groac Spaceport by the shortest route that doesn't go through the city. And be very careful about making any sudden movements." steered the car up to the sentry-guarded gate in the security fence surrounding the military enclosure at Groac Spaceport. "Don't yield to any rash impulses," Retief whispered as a crested Groacian soldier came up. Shluh grated his mandibles in helpless fury. "Drone-master Shluh, Internal Security," he croaked. The guard tilted his eyes toward Retief. "The guest of the Autonomy," Shluh added. "To let me pass or to rot in this spot, fool?" "To pass, D r o n e-master," the sentry mumbled. He was still staring at Retief as the car moved jerkily away. "You are as good as pegged out on the hill in the pleasure pits now, Terrestrial," Shluh said in Terran. "Why do you venture here?" "Pull over there in the shadow of the tower and stop," Retief said. Shluh c o m Retief studied the row of four slender ships parked on the ramp, navigation lights picked out against the early dawn colors of the sky. "Which of those boats are ready to lift?" Retief demanded. Shluh swiveled a choleric eye. "All of them are shuttles; they have no range. They will not help you." "To answer the question, Shluh, or to get another crack on the head." "You are not like other Terrestrials! You are a mad dog!" "We'll rough out a character sketch of me later. Are they all fueled up? You know the procedures here. Did those shuttles just get in, or is that the ready line?" "Yes. All are fueled and ready for take-off." "I hope you're right, Shluh. You and I are going to drive over and get in one; if it doesn't lift, I'll kill you and try the next. Let's go." "You are mad ! I have told you -- these boats have not more than ten thousand tonseconds capacity. They are useful only for satellite runs." "Never mind the details. Let's try the first in line." Shluh let in the clutch and the steam car clanked and heaved, rolled off toward the line of boats. "Not the first in line," Shluh said suddenly. "The last is the more likely to be fueled. But -- " "Smart grasshopper," Retief said. "Pull up to the entry port, hop out and go right up. I'll be right behind you." "The gangway guard. The challenging of -- " "More details. Just give him a dirty look and say what's necessary. You know the technique." T HE car passed under the stern of the first boat, then the second. There was no alarm. It rounded the third and shuddered to a stop by the open port of the last vessel. "Out," Retief said. "To make it snappy." Shluh stepped from the car, hesitated as the guard came to attention, then hissed at him and mounted the steps. The guard looked wonderingly at Retief, mandibles slack. "An outworlder!" he said. He unlimbered his scattergun. "To stop here, meat-faced one." Shluh froze, turned. "To snap to attention, littermate of drones!" Retief rasped in Groacian. The guard jumped, waved his eye stalks and came to attention. "About face!" Retief hissed. "Hell out of here -- to march !" The guard tramped off across the ramp. Retief took the steps two at a time, slammed the port shut behind himself. "I'm glad your boys have a little discipline, Shluh," Retief said. "What did you say to him?" "I but -- " by Keith Laumer '"Never mind. We're in. Get up to the control compartment." "What do you know of Groacian naval vessels?" "Plenty. This is a straight copy from the lifeboat you lads hijacked. I can run it. Get going." Retief followed Shluh up the companionway into the cramped control room. "Tie in, Shluh," Retief ordered. "This is insane !" Shluh said. "We have only fuel enough for a one-way transit to the satellite. We cannot enter orbit, nor can we land again! To lift this boat is death -- unless your destination is our moon." "The moon is down, Shluh," Retief said. "And so are we. But not for long. Tie in." "Release me," Shluh gasped. "I promise you immunity." "If I have to tie you in myself, I might bend your head in the process." Shluh crawled onto the couch, strapped in. "Give it up," he said. "I will see that you are reinstated -- with honor ! I will guarantee a safe conduct." "Countdown," Retief said. He threw in the autopilot. "It is death!" Shluh screeched. The gyros hummed; timers ticked ; relays closed. Retief lay relaxed on the acceleration pad. Shluh breathed noisily, his mandibles clicking rapidly. "That I had fled in time," Shluh said in a hoarse whisper. "This is not a good death..." "No death is a good death," Retief said. "Not for a while yet." The red light flashed on in the center of the panel, and abruptly sound filled the universe. The ship trembled, lifted. Retief could hear Shluh's whimpering even through the roar of the drive.  said dully. "To begin now the long fall back." "Not quite," Retief said. "I figure eighty-five seconds to go." He scanned the instruments, frowning. "We will not reach the surface, of course," Shluh said in Terran. "The pips on the screen are missiles. We have a rendezvous in space, Retief. In your madness, may you be content." "They're fifteen minutes behind us, Shluh. Your defenses are sluggish." "Nevermore to burrow in the gray sands of Groac," Shluh said. Retief's eyes were fixed on a dial face. "Any time now," he said softly. Shluh conted his eye stalks. "What do you seek?" Retief stiffened. "Look at the screen," he said. Shluh looked. A glowing point, off-center, moving rapidly across the grid... "What -- " "Later !" Shluh watched as Retief's eyes darted from one needle to another. "How..." "For your own neck's sake, Shluh," Retief said, "you'd better hope this works." He flipped the sending key. "# TR-# G, this is the Terrestrial Consul at Groac, aboard Groac #, vectoring o'n you at an MP fix of ###. Can you read me? Over." "What forlorn gesture is this?" Shluh whispered. "You cry in the night to emptiness !" "Button your mandibles," Retief snapped, listening. There was a faint hum of stellar background noise. Retief repeated his call, waited. "Maybe they hear but can't answer," he muttered. He flipped the key. "#, you've got twenty seconds to lock a tractor beam on me, or I'll be past you like a shot of rum past a sailor's bridgework..." "To call into the void!" Shluh said. "To -- " "Look at the DV screen." looked. Against the background mist of stars, a shape loomed, dark and inert. "It is...a ship!" Shluh said. "A monster ship!" "That's her," Retief said. "Nine years and a few months out of New Terra on a routine mapping mission. The missing cruiser -- the I VS Terrific" "Impossible!" Shluh hissed. "The hulk swings in a deep cometary orbit." "Right. And now it's making its close swing past Groac." "You think to match orbits with the derelict? Without power? Our meeting will be a violent one, if that is your intent." "We won't hit; we'll make our pass at about five thousand yards." "To what end, Terrestrial? You have found your lost ship. Then what? Is this glimpse worth the death we die?" "Maybe they're not dead," Retief said. "Not dead?" Shluh lapsed into Groacian. "To have died in the burrow of one's youth. To have burst my throat sac ere I embarked with a mad alien to call up the dead." "#, make it snappy," Retief called. The speaker crackled heedlessly. The dark image on the screen drifted past, dwindling now. "Nine years, and the mad one speaking as to friends," Shluh raved. "Nine years dead, and still to seek them." "Another twenty seconds," Retief said softly, "and we're out of range. Look alive, boys." "Was this your plan, Retief?" Shluh asked in Terran. "Did you flee Groac and risk all on this slender thread?" "How long would I have by Keith Laumer lasted in one of your Groaci prisons ?" "Long and long, my Retief," Shluh hissed, "under the blade of an artist' Abruptly, the ship trembled, seemed to drag, rolling the two passengers in their couches. Shluh hissed as the restraining harness cut into him. The shuttle boat was pivoting heavily, upending. Crushing acceleration forces built. Shluh gasped and cried out shrilly. "What...is...it?" "It looks," Retief said, "like we've had a little bit of luck." V our second pass," the  gaunt-faced officer said, "they let fly with something. I don't knfow how it got past our screens. It socked home in the stern and put the main pipe off the air. I threw full power to the emergency shields, and broadcast our identification on a scatter that should have hit every receiver within a parsec. Nothing. Then the transmitter blew. I was a fool to send the boat down but I couldn't believe, somehow... " "In a way it's lucky you did, Captain. That was my only lead." "They tried to finish us after that. But with full power to the screens, nothing they had could get through. Then they called on us to surrender." Retief nodded. "I take it you weren't tempted?" "More than you know. It was a long swing out on our first circuit. Then, coming back in, we figured we'd hit. As a last resort I would have pulled back power from the screens and tried to adjust the orbit with the steering jets. But the bombardment was pretty heavy; I don't think we'd have made it. Then we swung past and headed put again. We've got a three year period. Don't think I didn't consider giving up." "Why didn't you?" "The information we have is important. We've got plenty of stores aboard. Enough for another ten years, if necessary. Sooner or later, I knew Search Command would find us." Retief cleared his throat. "I'm glad you stuck with it. Captain. Even a backwater world like Groac can kill a lot of people when it runs amok." "What I didn't know," the captain went on, "was that we're not in a stable orbit. We're going to graze atmosphere pretty deeply this pass, and in another sixty days we'd be back to stay, I guess the Groaci would be ready for us." "No wonder they were sitting on this so tight," Retief said. "They were almost in the clear." . "And you're here now," the captain said. "Nine years, and we weren't forgotten, I knew we could count on-r" , "It's over now, Captain, I " Retief said. "That's what counts." "Home," the captain said. "After nine years..." T'D like to take a look at A the films you mentioned," Retief said. "The ones showing the installations on the satellite." The captain complied. Retief watched as the scene unrolled, showing the bleak surface of the tiny moon as the Terrific had seen it nine years before. In harsh black and white, row on row of identical hulls cast long shadows across the pitted metallic surface of the satellite. Retief whistled. "They had quite a little surprise in store. Your visit must have panicked them." "They should be about ready to go, by now. Nine years. "Hold the picture," Retief said suddenly. "What's that ragged black line across the plain there?" "I think it's a fissure. The crystalline structure -- " "I've got what may be an idea," Retief said. "I had a look at some classified files last night, at the foreign office. One was a progress report on a fissionable stockpile. It didn't make much sense at the time. Now I get the picture. Which is the 'north' end of that crevasse?" "At the top of the picture." "Unless I'm badly mistaken, that's the bomb dump. The Groaci like to tuck things underground. I wonder what a direct hit with a fifty megaton missile would do to it?" "If that's an ordnance storage dump," the captain said, "it's an experiment I'd like to try." "Can you hit it?" "I've got fifty heavy missiles aboard. If I fire them in direct sequence, it should saturate the defenses. Yes, I can hit it." "The range isn't too great?" "These are the de luxe models," the captain smiled balefully. "Video guidance. We could steer them into a bar and park 'em on a stool." "What do you say we try it?" "I've been wanting a solid target for a long time," the captain said. ward the screen. "That expanding dust cloud used to be the satellite of Groac, Shluh," he said. "Looks like something happened to it." The police chief stared at the picture. "Too bad," Retief said. "But then it wasn't of any importance, was it, Shluh?" Shluh muttered incomprehensibly. "Just a bare hunk of iron, Shluh. That's what the foreign office told me when I asked for information." "I wish you'd keep your prisoner out of sight," the by Keith Laumer captain said. M I have a hard time keeping my hands off him." "Shluh wants to help, Captain. He's been a bad boy and I have a feeling he'd like to cooperate with us now. Especially in view of the imminent arrival of a Terrestrial ship, and the dust cloud out there." "What do you mean?" "Captain, you can ride it out for another week, contact the ship when it arrives, get a tow in and your troubles are over. When your films are shown in the proper quarter, a task force will come out here. They'll reduce Groac to a subtechnical cultural level, and set up a monitor system to insure she doesn't get any more expansionist ideas. Not that she can do much now, with her handy iron mine in the sky gone." "That's right; and -- " "On the other hand," Retief said, "there's what I might call the diplomatic approach..." He explained at length. The captain looked at him thoughtfully. "I'll go along," he said. "What about this fellow?" Retief turned to Shluh. The Groacian shuddered, eye stalks retracted. "I will do it," he said faintiy"Right," Retief said. "Captain, if you'll have your men bring in the transmitter from the shuttle, I'll place a call to a fellow named Fith at the foreign office." He turned to Shluh. "And when I get him, Shluh, you'll do everything exactly as I've told you -- or have terrestrial monitors dictating in Groac City." tief," Counsellor Pardy said, "I'm rather nonplussed. Mr. Fith of the foreign office seemed almost painfully lavish in your praise. He seems most eager to please you. In the light of some of the evidence I've turned up of highly irregular behavior on your part, it's difficult to understand." "Fith and I have been through a lot together," Retief said. "We understand each other." "You have no cause for complacency, Retief," Pardy said. "Miss Meuhl was quite justified in reporting your case. Of course, had she known that you were assisting Mr. Fith in his marvelous work, she would have modified her report somewhat, no doubt. You should have confided in her." "Fith wanted to keep it secret, in case it didn't work out," Retief said. "You know how it is." "Of course. And as soon as Miss Meuhl recovers from her nervous breakdown, there'll be a nice promotion awaiting her. The girl more than deserves it for her years of unswerving devotion to Corps policy." "Unswerving," Retief said. 'Til sure go along with that." "As well you may, Retief. You've not acquitted yourself well in this assignment. Tm, arranging for a transfer. You've alienated too many of the local people..." "But as you said, Fith speaks highly of me..." "Oh, true. It's the cultural intelligentsia I'm referring to. M iss Meuhl's records show that you deliberately affronted a number of influential groups by boycotting -- " "Tone deaf," Retief said. "To me a Groacian blowing a nose-whistle sounds like a Groacian blowing a nose-whistle." "You have to come to terms with local aesthetic values," Pardy explained. "Learn to know the people as they really are. It's apparent from some of the remarks Miss Meuhl quoted in her report that you held the Groaci in rather low esteem. But how wrong you were Ail the while, they were working unceasingly to rescue those brave lads marooned aboard our cruiser. They pressed on even after we ourselves had abandoned the search. And when they discov    ered that it had been a colI i s i o n with their satellite which disabled the craft, they made that magnificent gesture -- unprecedented. One hundred thousand credits in gold to each crew member, as a token of Groacian sympthy." "A handsome gesture," Retief murmured. #iT hope, Retief, that you'veIlearned from this incident. In view of the helpful part you played in advising Mr. Fith in matters of procedure to assist in his search, I'm not recommending a reduction in grade. We'll overlook the affair, give you a clean slate. But in future, I'll be watching you closely." "You can't win 'em all," Retief said. "You'd better pack up. You'll be coming along with us in the morning." Pardy shuffled his papers together. "I'm sorry," he said, "that I can't file a more flattering report on you. I would have liked to recommend your promo t i o n, along with Miss Meuhl's." "That's okay," Retief said.   Learn about Earth's astonishing "dust moons" -- long missed by astronomers, because they can only be seen by the naked eye! In the same issue, stories by Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl  C. M. Kornbluth, Algis Budrys, Fritz Leiber and many others. Febriiiaty Gaaxy still oh sale -- get your copy today! by Keith Latimer IF  Short Story Things just vanished. It was simple. As a matter of fact, it was child's play! (TS there anything you want ""to make disappear?" Clarence Willoughby asked his mother. "A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it?" "I just built a disappeared All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear." "Oh." "But I don't know if I can make them come back. We'd better try it on something else Dishes cost money." As always, Myra Willoughby had to admire the wisdom of her nine-year-old son. She would not have had such foresight herself. He always did. "You can try it on Blanche Manners' cat outside there. Nobody will care if it disappears except Blanche Manners." "All right." He put the disappearer to his eye and blinked. The cat disappeared from the sidewalk outside. His mother was interested. "I wonder how it works. Do you know how it works?" "Yes. You take a beer can with both ends cut out and put in two pieces of cardboard. Then you blink." "Never mind. Take it outside and play with it. You hadn't better make anything disappear in here till I think about this." But when he had gone his mother was oddly disturbed, "I wonder if I have a precocious child. Why, theres lots of grown people who wouldn't know how to make a disappearer that would work. I wonder if Blanche Manners will miss her cat very much?" Clarence went down to the Plugged Nickel, a pot house on the corner. "Do you have anything you want to make disappear, Nokomis?" "Only my paunch." "If I make it disappear it'll leave a hole in you and you'll bleed to death." "That's right, I would. Why don't you try it on the fire plug outside?" the happiest afternoons ever in the neighborhood. The children came from blocks around to play in the flooded streets and gutters, and if some of them drowned (and we don't say that they did drown) in the flood (and brother! it was a flood), why, you have to expect things like that. The fire engines (whoever heard of calling fire engines to put out a flood?) were apparatus-deep in the water. The policemen and ambulance men wandered around wet and bewildered. "Resuscitator, resuscitator, anybody wanna resuscitator," chanted Clarissa Willoughby. "Oh, shut up," said the ambulance attendants. Nokomis, the bar man in the Plugged Nickel, called Clarence aside, "I don't believe, just for the moment, I'd tell anyone what happened to that fire plug," he said. "I won't tell if you won't tell," said Clarence. Officer Comstock was suspicious. "There's only seven possible explanations. One of the seven Willoughby kids did it. I dunno how. It'd take a bulldozer to do it, and then there'd be something left of the plug. But however they did it, one of them did it." Officer Comstock had a talent for getting near the truth of dark matters. This is why he was walking a beat out here in the boondocks instead of sitting in a chair downtown. "Clarissa!" said Officer Comstock in a voice like thunder. "Resuscitator, resuscitator, anybody wanna resuscitator?" chanted Clarissa. "Do you know what happened to that fire plug?" asked officer C. "I have an uncanny suspicion. As yet it is no more than that. When I am better informed I will advise you." Clarissa was eight years old and much given to uncanny suspicions. "Clementine, Harold, Corinne, Jimmy, Cyril," he asked the five younger Willoughby children. "Do you know what happened to that fire plug?" "There was a man around yesterday. I bet he took it," said Clementine. by R. A. Lafferty "I don't even remember a fire plug there. I think you're making a lot of fuss about nothing," said Jferold. "City hall's going to hear about this," said Corinne. "Pretty dommed sure," said Jimmy, "but I won't tell." "Cyril!" cried Office Comstock in a terrible voice. Not a terrifying voice, a terrible voice. He felt terrible now. "Great green bananas," said Cyril, "I'm only three years old. I don't see how it's even my responsibility." "Clarence," said Officer Comstock. Clarence gulped. "Do you know where that fire plug went?" Clarence brightened. "No, sir. I don't know where it went." A bunch of smart alecs from the water department came out and shut off the water for a few blocks around and put some kind of cap on in place of the fire plug. "This sure is going to be a funny-sounding report," said one of them. Officer Comstock walked away discouraged. "D o n ' t bother i#e, Miss Manners," he said. "I don't know where to look fhr your cat. I don't even know where to look for a fire plug." "I have an idea," said Clarissa, "that when you find the cat you will find the fire plug the same place. As yet it is only an idea." Ozzie Murphy wore a little hat on top of his head. Clarence pointed his weapon and winked. The hat was no longer there, but a little trickle of blood was running down the pate. "I don't believe I'd play with that any more," said Nokomis. "Who's playing?" said Clarence. "This is for real." the seven-day terror in the heretofore obscure neighborhood. Trees disappeared from the parkings ; lamp posts were as though they had never been; Wally Waldorf drove home, got out, slammed the door of his car, and there was no car. As George Mullendorf came up the walk to his house his dog Pete ran to meet him and took a flying leap to his arms. The dog left the sidewalk but something happened; the dog was gone and only a bark lingered for a moment in the puzzled air. But the worst were the fireplugs. The second plug was installed the morning after the disappearance of the first. In eight minutes it was gone and the flood waters returned. Another one was in by twelve o'clock. Within three minutes it had vanished. The next morning fire plug number four was installed. The water commissioner was there, the city engineer was there, the chief of police was there with a riot squad, the president of the parentteachers association was there, the president of the University was there, the mayor was there, three gentlemen of the F.B.I., a newsreel photographer, eminent scientists and a crowd of honest citizens. "Let's see it disappear now," said the city engineer. "Let's see it disappear now," said the police chief. "Let's see it disa -- it did, didn't it?" said one of the eminent scientists. And it was gone and everybody was very wet. "At least I have the picture sequence of the year," said the photographer. But his camera and apparatus disappeared from the midst of them. "Shut off the water and cap it," said the commissioner. "And don't put in another plug yet. That was the last plug in the warehouse." "This is too big for me," said the mayor. "I wonder that Tass doesn't have it yet." "Tass has it," said a little round man. "I am Tass." "If all of you gentlemen will come into the Plugged Nickel," said Nokomis, "and try one of our new Fire Hydrant Highballs you will all be happier. These are made of good corn whisky, brown sugar and hydrant water from this very gutter. You can be the first to drink them." Business was phenomenal at the Plugged Nickel, for it was in front of its very doors that the fire plugs disappeared in floods of gushing water. "I know a way we can get rich," said Clarissa several days later to her father, Tom Willoughby. "Everybody says they're going to sell their houses for nothing and move out of the neighborhood. Go get a lot of money and buy them all. Then you can sell them again and get rich." "I wouldn't buy them for a dollar each. Three of them have disappeared already, and all the families but us have their furniture moved out in their front yards. There might be nothing but vacant lots in the morning." "Good, then buy the vacant lots. And you can be ready when the houses come back." "Come back? Are the houses going to come back? Do you know anything about this, young lady?" "I have a suspicion verging on a certainty. As of now I can say no more." were gathered in an untidy suite that looked as though it belonged to a drunken sultan. "This transcends the metaphysical. It impinges on the quantum continuum. In some ways it obsoletes Boff," said Dr. Velikof Vonk. "The contingence on the intransigence is the most mystifying aspect," said Arpad Arkabaranan. "Yes," said Willy McGilly. "Who would have thought that you: could do it with a beer can and two pieces of by R. A. Lfferty cardboard? When I was a boy I used an oatmeal box and red crayola." "I do not always follow you," said Dr. Vonk. "I wish you would speak plainer." So far no human had been injured or disappeared -- except for a little blood on the pate of Ozzie Murphy, on the lobes, of Conchita when her gaudy earrings disappeared from her very ears, a clipped finger or so when a house vanished as the front door knob was touched, a lost toe when a neighborhood boy kicked at a can and the can was not; probably not more than a pint of blood and three or four ounces of flesh all together. New, however, Mr. Buckle the grocery man disappeared before witnesses. This was serious. Some mean-looking investigators from downtown came out to the Willoughbys. The oj-anest-looking one was the mayor. In happier days he had not been a mean man, but the terror had now reigned for seven days. "There have been ugly rumors," said one of the mean investigators, "that link certain events to this household. Do any of you know anything about them?" "I started most of them," said Clarissa. "But I didn't consider them ugly. Cryptic, rather. But if you want to get to the bottom of this just ask me a question." ' J "Did you make those things disappear?" asked the invests gator. "That isn't the question," said Clarissa. "Do you know where they have gone?" asked the investigator. "That isn't the question ei ther," said Clarissa. "Can you make them come back?" Why, of course I can. Anybody can. Can't you?" "I cannot. If you can, please do so at once." "I need some stuff. Get me a gold watch and a hammer. Then go down to the drug store and get me this list of chemical. And I need a yard of black velvet and a pound of rock candy." "Shall we?" asked one of the investigators. "Yes," said the mayor, "it's our only hope. Get her anything she wants." And it was all assembled. a W HY does she get all the  attention?" asked Clarence. "I was the one that made all the things disappear. How does she know how to get them back?" "I knew it!" cried Clarissa with hate. "I knew he was the one that did it. He read in my diary how to make a disappearer. If I was his mother I'd whip him for reading his little sister's diary. That's what happens when things like that fall mto irresponsible hands:" She poised the hammer trver the gold watch of the mayor on the floor. "I have to wait a few seconds. This can't be hurried. It'll be only a little while." The second hand swept around to the point that was preordained for it before the world began. Clarissa suddenly brought down the hammer with all her force on the beautiful gold watch. "That's all " she said. "Your troubles are over. See, there is Blanche Manners' cat on the sidewalk just where she was seven days ago." And the cat was back. "Now let's go down to the Plugged Nickel and watch the fire plug come back." They had only a f ew minutes to wait. It came from nowhere and clanged into the street like a sign and a witness. "Now I predict' said Clarissa, "that every single object will return exactly seven days from the time of its disappearance." The seven-day terror had ended. The objects began to reappear. "How," asked the mayor, "did you know they would come back in seven days?" "Because it was a seven-day disappearer that Clarence made. I also know how to make a nine-day, a thirteenday, a twenty-seven-day, and an eleven-year disappearer. I was going to make a thirteenday one, but for that you have to color the ends with the blood from a little boy's heart, and Cyril cried every time I tried to make a good cut." "You really know how to make all of these?" "Yes. But I shudder if the knowledge should ever come into unauthorized hands." "I shudder too, Clarissa. But tell me, why did you want the chemicals?" "For my chemistry set." "And the black velvet?" "For doll dresses." "And the pound of rock candy?" "How did you ever get to be mayor of this town if you have to ask questions like that? What do you think I wanted the rock candy for?" "One last question," said the mayor. "Why did you smash my gold watch with the hammer?" "Oh," said Clarissa, "that was for dramatic effect."    IF you have trouble getting your IF -- why not ask your newsdealer to reserve a copy for you each issue? He'll be glad to do it -- it helps him too, you know! Or you can always subscribe... save money... and get your copies on time, every time! See special subscription offer on cover of this issue. by R. A. Lafferty The place where reader and editor meet .  # Dear Editor, If is certainly getting better. The thing that most needed changing was Ifs cover. It had a poor design, and was often poorly drawn. I'm sure If has increased in popularity since the November and January issues hit the newsstands. Next, the letter col. Despite all the griping, four or five pages is the perfect size for it. Congratulations. As far as the other features go, I have a rather unusual plan. Take Sturgeon out of the special feature department and get him to write your book review column. You will recall that he wrote book reviews for the late, lamented Venture , and did admirably. You should take out Science Briefs entirely. It just doesn't fit the mag. However, make your editorials regular, please. The most important part of the mag, of course, is the stories. At the End of the Orbit, by Arthur C. Clarke, was one of the best stories I've read in If. The stories in If, which have always been interesting and amusing, are beginning to show some seriousness. Science fiction is once again on the upswing... Belmont, Mass.    Dear Incumbent: Ah, the contents page: "All Stories New and CornTwo Parts' Do I note a discrepancy here? I suspect I do. I hate to say it in public, but this is the first Doc Smith yarn I've had a chance to read... it's good, though. Someing said that it's mainly Doc's story, as he rewrote it almost completely when E. E. Evans passed on. Somebody also said that it's been cut # words, but I don't want to believe that . Clarke's story is another in his "Isn't everything ironic?" philosophy. Dull and wasted. Ken Bulmer's novelette is the second-best thing in thish, but his one in the Septish was better than this later adventure of Retief. In his "Keith Laumer" guise, Bulmer seems to be writing good actionadventure stories... Lawrence Crilly Elizabeth, N.J.  Re contents page: Oops. Re Smith-Evans serial : It was cut some -- had to be, to fit in two parts -- but we did it with loving care and trust nothing vital was lost. Re BulmerLaumer: Wha? How do these rumors get started, anyway ? -- Ed.    Dear Editor, First things first: the cover. The covers on If have been failing to satisfy, lately. They're not bad covers, they just don't arouse my interest. Perhaps the best word for them is "trite." They are stale, stock situations, hardly suited to a sf magazine. What is wanted are covers in which something intriguing is happening, but you have to read the magazine to find out what. Covers that do not relate to the contents I consign to the lower regions. The stories are for the most part good to adequate, very seldom falling into the poor class, which is, of course, what keeps me reading If. I do think an occasional top author with a really good story would liven things up a bit. Among the better ones you have been using is Keith Laumer. Quite enjoyed his last. Pat Scott Anacortes, Wash.  Top author? How about Anderson's really fine job this issue? Covers and interior art are being worked on -- as you can see in this issue. -- Ed.    That does it for another month. Thanks to all who have written letters -- those printed above, and those which aren't. (And we'd print a lot more if you'd write shorter notes!) We do read -- and when possible act on -- all letters. For example, the one feature in If that had not a single defender was our unlamented cartoon page. As you see, it's gone. -- The Editor  # transistors -- separate circuits, # speeds big set quality and performance. The smallest and lightest portable radio-phonograph only #"x#"x#". Weight: only # lbs.  Wheel drive takes place of turntable. Plays #", #" and #" records, # rpm and # rpm. Powered by four standard # volt flashlight batteries. Handsome carrying case takes it anywhere with ease. Sapphire needle for longer wear. Gentlemen, rush me Portable Phono Radio Postage Paid  # ea. -- Check enclosed. Your Name pctfl ly  o '  o o O uo or O O # o o j O f ) O fJ o o ooo ( t l. No. CF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh t f iutr iVamr tSrrr No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever iost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's nameSmprinted All Postpaid. Add stale sales lax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! RETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN worlds of Vi'Vtl'VC iction 't -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mall never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit Is to read them once and go on to something new -- please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy .  . foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for; # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City... Address Zone., .State... (jolb fctfe! Only one power controls your destiny -- a strange force sleeping in your mind. Awaken it ! Command it to obey you ! PusK obstacles aside and attain your fondest hopes and ideals. Let the Rosicrucians show you how this can be done. Learn why many of history's great masters were Rosicrucians such as Leonardo de Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, etc. Each of these men learned how to control their fate, to develop mind power, to attain success and tiappiness. The knowledge that helped these men of history is now helping thousands of thinking men and women throughout the world climb to new heights they, at one time, thought impossible. And they are no difrermt than you ! Why not discover for yourself how you can take advantage of this priceless knowledge The Rosicrucians have preserved through the ages. If you are sincere in wanting greater success, security and happiness send book, "The Mastery of Life." There is no obligation and it may mean the turning point in your life, toward achievements you've never believed possible. Why not do it Scribe W.Z.E. o worlds of All Stories New and Complete VoL #, Number # Robert M, Guinn, Publisher Sam Ruvidichj Arf Director Frederik Pohl, Managing Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor The #-Square Madhouse by Fritz Leiber # Retief of the Red-Tape Mountain by Keith Laumer # Death and Taxes by H. A. Hartzell # The Spy by Theodore L, Thomas # Misrule by Robert Scott # Deadly Game by Edward Wellen #I The Hoplite by Richard Sheridan # Gramp by Charles V. De Vet #I The Expendables by Jim Harmon # Jots and Tittles Editorial #...And Besides Those Bombs... Science Feature # The Other IF by Theodore Sturgeon # Hue and Cry # Next issue (July) on sale May #th IF published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation, Vol. #, No. # Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York #c per copy. Subscriptions # Issues ?# in the United States, Canada, 'Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postag'e paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York # , N. y. TiniES IF  Editorial W E don't know what a tittle is and (please!) we don't want to know. It just seems to go along pretty well with Jots. Beating the breeze with our bearded Feature Editor the other day, and he came up with an interesting thought about your letters. He was mulling over the fact -- if it is a fact -- that there hasn't been thor in a dozen years. He says he doesn't agree with this completely, but somebody said it at a Conference. Back in what Sam Moskowitz calls the Golden Age of S-F -- #-'#, good authors appeared out of nowhere in gross lots : d'fcl Key, Heinlein, Simak,' Leinster, Don A. Stuart, Ray Bradbury, Jerome Bixby and plenty more, all in a matter of months. Our bearded F. E. wondered if the letter columns of the day had anything to do with it. You'd be surprised how many of that bumper crop used to write to the magazines months and years before they sold stories to them. Did the writing of those letters turn them into good authors, or at least toward authorship? Or did they write just because they were writers? Our B.F.E. had no opinion on that; but one thing he did point out was that the letters they wrote were, more often than not, crackling with humor and loaded with information. There was many a goodnatured fist-fight in those columns, and a lot of highly miscellaneous matters got thrashed out. We wagged our editorial head and told the B.F.E. that some readers nowadays complain that letter columns are just plain dull. And we added that when Galaxy put it to a vote, the majority said -- no letters. Well, said the B.F.E. scratching his head (with his beard ; he has talent, you know) maybe they say that because it's true. And if it's true, all anyone has to do is to write bright, sparkling letters. Then the column won't be dull, people will read it, more will write to it. And maybe, the B.F.E. added thoughtfully, maybe after a few months of sharpening their wits against one another, there'll be a whole explosion of good new writers who can bounce from the letter pages in . the back to the bill-of-fare up front. Just a thought, he said. W E don't know quite what to do with the thought, so we pass it on to you. Speaking of the B.F.E., by the way, who says his name (this week anyway) is Theodore Sturgeon, be it known, if you don't know it already, that he is to be the Guest of Honor at the Chicon II, which is the World Science Fiction Convention to be held at the PickCongress Hotel in Chicago, next Labor Day weekend. Memberships (#) and information can be had from George W. Price, Treasurer, P.O. Box #, Chicago #, B.F.E. is honored, IF is honored, and you ought to try to make it because it's going to be one big beautiful bash. A writer friend of ours reports that he was faced recently with a writer's dream: the sight of a total stranger in a diner eating slowly and raptly reading one of this writer's books. Our hero pinched himself to see if he was awake, and he was ; he sat quiet awhile and pondered which of many delectable ways and means he might use to start the conversation which would have to reach the wonderful, "You mean you wrote this?" and the quite-casual, "Why, yes, it happens I did." Deciding at last on the double-reverse, or hyperbolic approach, the writer leaned over to the diner and said, "Hey, Mac, what you want to read that kind of junk for?" The diner slowly closed the book and gazed at it as if he'd never really seen it before. Then he nodded and said, "I think you got something there," tipped the book off the counter onto the floor, ate the rest of his French apple pie and left without looking back. We don't quite know what to do with this story either, so you can have it too. IF  Novelette Retief knew the importance of sealed orders and the need to keep them that way! #TTS true," Consul PassAwyn said, requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief. "Still," Retief said, "it gives an opportunity to travel -- " "Travel !" the consul barked. "I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly -- " He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. "Not that a bit of travel isnt an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience." He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared : eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet. "The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers -- a mere handful of them -- have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action." He swixng back to face Retief. "I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief -- under sealed orders." He picked up a fat buff envelope. "A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle -- a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results." He passed the buff envelope across to Retief. "I understood that Adobe was uninhabited," Retief said, "until the Terrestrial settlers arrived." "Apparently, that was an erroneous impression." Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. "You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked outin detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?" "Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?" "Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour." "What's this native life form like?" Retief asked, getting to his feet. "When you get back," said Passwyn, "you tell me." T he mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen. "They's shootin' goin' on down there," he said. "See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?" "I'm supposed to be preventing the war," said Retief. "It looks like I'm a little late." The pilot's head snapped around. "War?" he yelped. "Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here." "Hold on," said Retief. "I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you." "They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance." He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist. "Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down." The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. "Are you nuts?" the pilot screeched. "They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out." "The mail must go through, you know." "Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.' "You're a pal. I'll take your offer." The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. "Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way..." Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. "Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this." "Thanks." Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. "I hope you're wrong." "I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over -- one way or another." The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine... A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out. Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff... Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed. He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than # yards. At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion...a mile astern, and harmless. Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting. gaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and S wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet...and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear. He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left. He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped. Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand. As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him. They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist -- "Hey!" the settler yelled. "You're as human as I am!" "Maybe I'll look better after a shave," said Retief. "What's the idea of shooting at me?" "Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat ; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you ? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oasis. That's Flapjack country over there." He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay. "I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort." "Missile, eh? Must be Flapjack artillery. We got nothing like that." "I heard there was a fullfledged war brewing," said Retief. "I didn't expect -- " "Good!" Potter said. "We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?" "Yes. I'm -- " "Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night ! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to." I m -- "Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on..." He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face. "You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different." "As a matter of fact -- " "Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe." Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat. soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks. "This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home' he said. "But I guess leather has its points." "Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flapjack." "I won't, but -- " Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter. II #TJjE'RE damn glad you're here, mister," said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. "We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flapjacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it." He stirred the fire, added a stick. "And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here," Potter said. "Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back." "I figure they thought the cows were people," said Swazey. "They were out for revenge." "How could anybody think a cow was folks?" another man put in. "They don't look nothin' like -- " "Don't be so dumb, Bert," said Swazey. "They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now." Bert chuckled. "Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we. Potter? Got four." "They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time," Swazey said, "We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run." "Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around." "It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men." "But we're hanging onto our farms," said Potter. "All these oases are old sea-beds -- a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive." "The whole system needs the food we can raise," Bert said. "These farms we're tryI I ing to start won't be enough but they'll help." "We been yellin' for help said Potter. "But you know these Embassy stooges." "We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flapjacks," said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. "We're waitin' for him... "Meanwhile we got reinforcements cornin' up, eh, boys?" Bert winked at Retief. "We put out the word back. home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde." "Shut up, you damn fool!" a deep voice grated. "Lemuel !" Potter said. "Nobody else could sneak up on us like that." "If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive," the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief. "Who's that?" "What do ya mean?" Potter spoke in the silence. "He's your cousin..." "He ain't no cousin of mine," Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief... "Who you s p y i n' for, stranger?" he rasped. R etief got to his feet. "i think I should explain -- " A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins... "Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one." "Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence," said Retief. "And I suggest you put your courage tock in your pocket before it bites you." "You talk too damned fancy to suit me." "Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away." Lemuel stared at Retief. "You givin' me orders... ?" Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold. "Wow!" said Potter. "The stranger took Lem... in two punches !" "One," said Swazey. "That first one was just a love tap." Bert froze. "Hark, boys," he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire -- With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him. "You move fast for a city man," breathed Swazey beside him. "You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right' 'No," said Retief. 'You wait here. I'm going out alone." "What's the idea!... "Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open' Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward. F ive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an outcropping of rock. The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone -- still hot after a day of tropical heat -- and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still. He sat down on the ground to wait. It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time... There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged. Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack -- a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred. The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice -- The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper. "Sorry, fellow," he muttered between clenched teeth. "Eyegouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective... " The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in. The alien went limp again, waiting. 'Now we understand each other," said Retief. "Take me to your leader.' T wenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long... A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket. "Sit tight," he said. "Don't try to do anything hasty...' His remarks were falling on deaf ears -- or no ears at all -- but the thumb spoke as loudly as words. There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer. Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes. A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning. "Try it two octaves higher," he said. Awwrrp ! Sorry, Is that better?" a clear voice came from the darkness. "That's fine," Retief said. "I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange." "Prisoners? But we have no prisoners." "Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?" "Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?" "The word of a gentleman is sufficient." Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness. "If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters," the voice said, "we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort." "Delighted." Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow. "I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome," said the voice. "Had we known we would be honored by a visit -- " "Think nothing of it," Retief said. "We diplomats are trained to crawl." Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the fivefoot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pinktoned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rosecrystal drinking-tubes. IllLthe voice said. Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back. 'You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries." "Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it." "Avoid it?" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker ill the silence. "Well, let us dine," the mighty Flapjack said at last. "We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns." "I'm Retief." Hoshick waited expectantly, "...of the Mountain of Red Tape," Retief added. "Take place, Retief," said Hoshick. "I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable." Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. "Pray forgive our lack of translating devices," he said to Retief. "Permit me to introduce my colleagues..." A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good. "I trust you'll find these dishes palatable," said Hoshick. "Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe." Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem. "It was an u n e x p e c t e d pleasure to encounter your party here," said Hoshick. "I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion." He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank. "Of course," Hoshick continued, "as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope." "Additional skirmishers?" said Retief. "How many, if you don't mind my asking?" "For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. Thereafter...well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally T would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker." "Oh, by all means," Retief said. "No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops." "Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree : no atomics.Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic. , ." "Delicious," said Retief. "I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?" A scratchy sound issued from the disk. "Pardon my laughter," Hoshick said, "but surely you jest?" "As a matter of fact," said Retief, "we ourselves seldom use weapons." "I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units." "My apologies," said Retief. "The -- ah -- the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman." "Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons... " Hoshick signalled and the servant refilled tubes. "There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned," Retief went on. "I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as sonething one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms." "Oh? Curious. What forms are those?" "Vermin. Or Varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints." "Dear me ! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out." Hoshick clucked in dismay. "I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception." He laughed scratchily. "Imagine considering us as -- what was the word? -- varmints." "Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether..." Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air. "What are you saying?" he gasped. "Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor... ?" "Sir!" said Retief sternly. "You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles." "New?" cried Hoshick. "My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! Im enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate." 'It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them." "#...um... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?" haven't made myself clear," said Retief. He took a sip of wine. "We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe." "You don't mean... ?" "That's right. You and me." sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him. "I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief," said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles, "My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance." "I suggest we use Tennessee rules," said Retief. "They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking." "Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons ; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage." "Of course," Retief said, "if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest..." "By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacletwisting, just to even it." "Very well. Shall we begin?" With a rush Roshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back...and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Relief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back... and Hoshick's weight struck him. Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer. Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged. It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete. He remembered the rangerform lit had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area... He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed. The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made handholds... Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp. Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume. "There is much to be said for the old system," he said. "What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times." "Great sport, wasn't it?" said Retief. "Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If IS you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms -- " "May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!" Hoshick bellowed. "You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year." "Speaking of hide-ticks," said Retief, "we've developed a biterform -- " "Enough!" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. "Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped..." He broke off, drew a rasping breath. "I had hoped, Retief," he said, speaking sadly now, "to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you..." "To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too." "But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude." "My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you men '.'iiri vi ft y ID lichens -- things like that -- " That on which we dined but now' said Hoshick, "and front which the wine is made," 'The big news in fashionable diploniacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and  vegetables." Hoshick curled his back in attention. "Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?" "The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases." Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. "Once again you have outdone me, Retief," he cried. "This time, in generosity." "We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me." IV I T was nearly dawn when Retief gave the whistled signal he had agreed on with Potter, then rose and walked into the camp circle. Swazey stood up. "There you are," he said. "We been wonderin' whether to go out after you." Lemuel came forward, one eye black to the cheekbone. He held out a raw-boned hand. "Sorry I jumped you, stranger. Tell you the truth, I thought you w some kind of stoolBert came up behind Lemuel. "How do you know he ain't, Lemuel?" hex said. "Maybe he -- " Lemuel floored Bert with a backward sweep of his arm. "Next cotton-picker says some embassy Johnny can cool me gets worse'n that." "Tell me," said Retief. "How are you boys fixed for wine?" "Wine? Mister, we been livin' on stump water for a year now. 'Dobe's fatal to the kind of bacteria it takes to ferment likker." "Try this." Retief handed over a sqat jug. Swazey drew the cork, sniffed, drank and passed it to Lemuel. "Mister, where'd you get that?" "The Flap-jacks make it. Here's another question for you: Would you concede a share in this planet to the Flap-jacks in return for a peace guarantee?" At the end of a half hour of heated debate Lemuel turned to Retief. "We'll make any reasonable deal," he said. "I guess they got as much right here as we have. I think we'd agree to a fifty-fifty split. That'd give about a hundred and fifty oases to each side." "What would you say to keeping all the oases and giving them the desert?" Lemuel reached for the wine jug, eyes on Retief. "Keep talkin', mister," he said. "I think you got yourself a deal." up at Retief, went on perusing a paper. "Sit down, Retief," he said absently. "I thought you were over on Pueblo, or Mud-flat, or whatever they call that desert." "Fm back." Passwyn eyed him sharply. "Well, well, what is it you need, man? Speak up. Don't expect me to request any military assistance, no matter how things are... Retief passed a bundle of documents across the desk. "Here's the Treaty. And a Mutual Assistance Pact declaration and a trade agreement." "Eh?" Passwyn picked up the papers, riffled through them. He leaned back in his chair, beamed. "Well, Retief. Expeditiously handled." He stopped, blinked at Retief. "You seem to have a bruise on your jaw. I hope you've been conducting yourself as befits a member of the Embassy staff." "I attended a sporting event," Retief said. "One of the players got a little excited." "Well...it's one of the hazards of the profession. One must pretend an interest in such matters." Passwyn rose, extended a hand. "You've done well, my boy. Let this teach you the value of following instructions to the letter." Outside, by the hall incinerator drop, Retief paused long enough to take from his briefcase a large buff envelope, still sealed, and drop it in the slot. end    Coming in the July issue of If -- A Complete Short Interplanetary Novel by Allen Kim Lang Plus novelettes and short stories by Keith Laumer, Cordwainer Smith, Bryce Walton, C. C. MacApp and many others. July issue of IF on sale May #th -- ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy now. IF  Short Story man-looking and highly intelligent young man, but sometimes he did not show good sense. Any young man might meet a girl night after night in an apple orchard, but Dofan had to do it in time of war, behind enemy lines, with the daughter of the mayor. On top of that he had to try to pry information out of her. Even this might have been all right if Dofan had used a little more sense. After four consecutive nights of pressings and squeezings and heavy breathings, one does not maintain a stony silence when a girl like Betty Fuller nestles up closer and says, '"We will be so happy together."' The situation swiftly deteriorated after that. He wound up under arrest. Flung into a root cellar, Jehn Dofan underwent a short but intense period of questioning by three burly soldiers, aided by the butt end of their flintlock rifles and directed by a second lieutenant bent on promotion. Dofan told them nothing. But it did not matter. As the soldiers left, the second lieutenant said, drawing himself to attention, "You hang at dawn, scum. We know how to treat spies." For the first time Dofan saw that he was in trouble. Betty Fuller rushed in as the soldiers went out. She flung herself on Dofan and covered his bloodied face with kisses and wept into the hoiHe knew how to serve his people and make his name immortal. It was easy. He just had to die! low of his neck. "My darling' she wailed, "what have I done to you?" With this to work on, Dofan might have extricated himself even then, for Betty Fuller's father was the mayor, and a friendly mayor wields much influence even with the military if he puts his mind to it. But Dofan, although very human-looking and highly intelligent, did not show good sense for the second time in the same night. He looked at Betty Fuller coldly and said, "You've done enough. Why don't you let me alone?" Her eyes widened in disbelief and then flashed in hatred. She turned and tapped calmly on the door, and the soldiers let her out. D awn was dose, and Dofan had no time to lose. He went to a corner of the root cellar and listened to make certain no one was coming. With his right thumb he probed deep up under his right jaw. He found the tiny button imbedded there, and he pushed it and held it. He said softly, "Jehn Dofan calling Base. Jehn Dofan calling..." "We have you, Dofan. Talk." "I'm captured, heavily guarded. They plan to hang me at dawn, less than an hour. Condition appears desperate. I need help." "Will this rescue constitute a major interference with the natives? And, if so, are you tial?" "Yes," said Dofan. "I believe it will require major instand court-martial." "Stand by for instructions." Dofan removed his thumb and paced back and forth in the root cellar in the candlelight. Now that he had committed himself, he was a little sorry. But there seemed no other way out. This would spoil a perfect . record here on the planet Earth. Betty Fuller had succeeded in ruining him. He would be drummed out of the Controllers, and she and the other Earth people did not even know such an organization existed. There would come a time when he could... A series of sharp buzzes echoed inside his head. It startled him; he had not expected his instructions so soon. He went to the corner and pressed the switch under his jaw and said, "Jehn Dofan." "This is Charn Dofan. How are you, brother?" Dofan felt his breath catch in his throat, and for a moment he could not speak. A great feeling of relief swept over him. Charn Dofan was here, his older brother, come to him in a time of trouble as always. He said, "Cham, it is good to hear your voice. Where arc you calling from, brother?" "About a mile away. I command a troop of cavalry stationed in Brooklyn. I heard your call to Base and came out. Are you well?" "Very well, brother. And you?" "Very well." A silence fell. The silence rested uncomfortably and strangely with Jehn Dofan. There had never been any strained silences between him and his brother. Something was wrong. He asked, "Is all well at home?" There was a perceptible pause before the answer came. "Our parents and our family are all in good health." Again the silence. Jehn Dofan said, "Tell me what is wrong, Charn. Base will call soon to tell me of the rescue procedure. What is it?" A pause, then Charn Dofan began to speak. "Our Islands at home are ready to demand full statehood. The Mainlanders are trying to find some way to keep us out. A vote will be taken next week. As things stand now, we can just about muster the necessary strength, but it won't take much to change things. We won't get another chance for a long while. We'll have to keep paying the taxes, letting them bleed us white, controlling our production." Jehn Dofan nodded in understanding. "Yes, our people have worked toward statehood for a long time. I hope we make it." Again the silence. Jehn Dofan was puzzled. He said, "What is wrong? What can we do about it from here?" T his time his brother's words poured out, wrenched from the heart. "Base commander is a Mainlander! He will have to interfere openly with the natives to rescue you, and this will reflect on all the Islanders. No question about it, Jehn. It will tip the vote the wrong way. Your rescue will be an international incident back home." Jehn Dofan shook his head regretfully and said, "I suppose you are right. But I don't know how we can stop him from here. We are..." And then he understood. He felt sick to his stomach, and he began to perspire. His breath caught in his throat. His heart pounded. He refused to accept the full realization -- kept thrusting it out of his mind -- but it kept intruding. His brother continued, "Base will be calling in a few moments. I will be nearby, no matter what happens. Call on me for anything. I will abide by your decision. Good-by." The radio fell silent before Jehn Dofan could speak. He was alone in the cellar. He slumped to the dirt, too weak to pace. He was frightened. He had not seriously considered the possibility of dying on this planet. Yet here he was, in a position where his own brother had to point out the desirability of letting himself be executed instead of rescued. The Islands needed a hero now, not a goat. He needed time to think this out. But there was no time. The buzzer sounded inside his head. He jumped. He went to the corner and pushed the switch and spoke. 'Base commander," was the response, and without further preamble the commander launched into a description of the rescue plans. In spite of the turmoil that raged in his mind, Dofan recognized that the plans were more violent and complex than they needed to be. It was apparent that the commander was seizing the opportunity to make trouble. The recognition steeled his mind. "There will be no rescue. Commander., I have decided that I do not want to be the cause of such open interference." The commander started to speak, but then fell silent, recognizing the impropriety of arguing with Dofan about such a matter. But his fury was apparent. Feeling it. Dofan said, "There is no need to talk further. Commander. I sign off now. Do not risk open interference by contacting me again. Good-by, sir." T hey came for him shortly. They marched him between two colunms of redcoated soldiers to the slow beat of muffled drums. He climbed the gallows steps in the bright morning sunshine and looked out over the Long Island countryside. As they adjusted the noose around his neck, his eyes swept the assembled crowd. There to the left, among the others, stood a tall, black-haired figure in a red coat. The eyes and nose were the same as his eyes and nose, and he looked at his brother and smiled. A few feet from his brother, all unknowing, stood Betty Fuller, and for a wild moment he considered calling out to her for help. He saw the sneer on her face, and he was immediately ashamed of his momentary weakness. He gritted his teeth and tried to think of a way to die well. He looked up to the sky, in a westerly direction. He could not see it, for it was light-years away, but he knew it was there. A lovely island on another planet, bathed in warm breezes, the place where his people were. His executioners asked him, "Do you have anything to say, schoolmaster?" Then he knew what to do to swing the vote; it came to him all of a sudden. With his face raised toward home, he said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my IF  Novelette Remorseless? Not a bit of it, no matter what they say! Here's the genuine, inside, light-hearted story of #TT'S a crime, Your Honor,"I said the young man with the dreamy eyes and paintsmeared sport-shirt. "The Council not only proposes tearing down this picturesque landmark, but would thereby destroy the home of our only local ghost." "Really, Mr. Masterson!" The mayor smiled to show he knew Jerry Masterson was only kidding, then brandished a State Highway Commission report recommending that the antiquated Waukeena Lighthouse be demolished. "Mr. Masterson, we respect your feelings as an artist, and are well aware of the local superstition regarding the ghost of Captain MacGreggor, but this building is over seventy years old and needs expensive repairs. The financial burden is too great for our metropolis of less than fifteen hundred souls. The State has disavowed responsibility, and -- " "Your Honor!" "The chair recognizes Mr. Higgins." "As president of the Historical Soci I wish to state we vigorously oppose the wrecking of this building. One by one, our landmarks have fallen. Are we to hand down to our children a community without pride of ancestry? Are we -- ?" "Your Honor," bellowed another voice. "As a member of the Taxpayers League..." For two hours, sentiment battled hotly with double-entry bookkeeping. Then the City Council expressed its deep regrets to the Historical Society -- and unanimously accepted the bid of Sam Schultz Salvage Company. Mr. Schultz handed the Council his check for five hundred dollars and was authorized to begin wrecking immediately. "First thing tomorrow morning," Mr. Schultz promised. T omorrow morning! As he walked into the spring night, toward the old, decaying house where he lived alone, Jerry Masterson felt sadness. His own difficulties had prepared him to admit life was geared to financial considerations. But things had come to a pretty pass when even a ghost was not safe from dollars and cents. "Poor Captain Wully," he said with out realizing he spoke aloud. "Aye, aye," said a voice. "Poor Wully MacGreggor. As a ghost in good standing, a dues-paying member of Asmodeus Local of the United Lighthouse Haunters of America, Wully never done nothin' to deserve this. Evicted I Got a smoke, matey?" Jerry Masterson did a double-take. Out of reflex courtesy, he proffered a cigarette and was about to strike a match when his companion reached slightly to the left, where several coals glowed in mid-air. Selecting one, the stranger said, "Thank you. Junior. You can go now." He turned, lit Jerry's cigarette and his own. "All right, joker," said Jerry. "Show me how you did it and I'll show you a couple of card tricks and a disappearing penny routine. "Later," said the stranger. "Right now, matey, my sails is draggin' and I need spiritual reinforcement -- I i q u i d. And you're buying. "There's a fifth of Scotch in my studio, but I'm not pouring for any phony tricksters. I've been saving it till I sold a canvas." "Scotch," sighed the stranger ecstatically. "Shades of the Loch Ness Monster! Quit scratching, Gertrude." "Gertrude?" "My cat -- she's black. A handsome beastie if you overlook a hole in her head. A twenty-two caliber hole. Gertrude, materialize for the nice man." Nothing happened, and Jerry diplomatically sought to ease a situation that was rapidly becoming embarrassing. "Maybe she's bashful." "Not Gertrude. Just temperamental. She could materialize if she wanted to. She doesn't want to. Now take Junior..." "Junior?" "He's the conscientious type. Tries too hard, poor boy." "About that Scotch," said Jerry. "You don't think maybe a couple of cups of black coffee... The stranger's face registered horror -- and trust betrayed. "For shame, laddie. To be insulted in my darkest hour! Me, Captain Wully MacGreggor !" "Sure. You're Wully MacGreggor -- and I'm Napoleon." "Watch." There was nothing to watch. The stranger had disappeared. A disemdied voice said, "Now about that Scotch? If Waukeena light is being torn down tomorrow, I'll be homeless. I've got a lot of haunting to do in the little time that's left. And here we stand, waggin' our jaws." Jerry's first impulse was to run like hell. "But I don't believe in ghosts!" His voice sounded. "Of course you do. If you didn't, you couldn't have seen  me. He'd heard of self-hypnosis -- apparently the session with the Mayor had upset him. "All right, so you're Wully MacGreggor. Why pick on me?" "Because I like you," said the ghost. "You said a kind word for me to the City Council and I'd like to do something nice for you." "If you can't help yourself, I don't see how you're going to be much help to me, but what've I got to lose?" He was too numb to worry further. Ghosts, yet... ! N ext morning, Jerry Masterson awoke with a hangover. He dimly remembered floating lights, red, yellow, blue and green. He remembered Captain Wully scaring a couple of lovers with noises the young lady described as "something like bagpipes in an echo chamber." And he seemed to remember that, toward the end of the evening, Gertrude had deigned to materialize -- along with a headless black ox and a white stag. He shook his head and reached for the aspirin. "As of now," he promised himself, "I'm on the wagon." He seemed to recall a snake too, a seven-headed snake with a gleaming carbuncle in the middle head. Permanently on the wagon! A scraping noise came from above. He listened. The noise occurred again. It seemed to emanate from the tower room on the third floor. He raced up the winding Victorian staircase, on up the narrow stairs to the attic, and stopped. From behind the tower room door, came thin, eerie skirling of bagpipes. "Hey, you in there," he called. "Matey!" boomed Captain Wully's voice. "Come on in." Captain Wully was seated on an old sea-chest, the bagpipes still tucked under his arm. "Hope my practicing didn't disturb you. I play second bagpipe in the banshee band." "But the scraping noise... "My sea-chest. I had a little trouble getting you home by cockcrow, and I had to move the sea-chest on overtime. I want to say right now it was right decent of you to offer me a home on such short acquaintance. I appreciate it, and I promise to show my -- 'Look said Jerry. "All this time I was being so bighearted, did I also say I was going to have to sell the house for non-payment of taxes?" "You didn't. If I'd a-known that, I'd put you wise to grabbing Celeste's carbuncle. It's goc luck." "It didn't bring you any luck." "I'm not eligible. Employees, relatives etc." "Why can't I get it now?" "Too late. Celeste only materializes once every seven years. Those canvases you mentioned. For sale?" "No bidders, and the critics all agree. Competent draftsmanship, highly finished technique -- but carefully unimaginative, middle-class." "The pictures -- where are they now?" "Downstairs. I was going to crate them today, and send them to the Art Festival at Northport, but I've got the shakes too bad." Captain Wully pushed back the tarn on his head, scratched his balding dome. "I've got it. You catch yourself a nap, matey. I'll crate the pictures for you and batten down the hatches all nice an' shipshape." draped himself over the bumpy carvings on the studio love seat, intended to take only a quick forty winks. But the morning was well spent when he awakened, stiff and cramped. Two sturdy crates stood near the door and, from the skylight end of the studio, wafted a rich fragrance of latakia. Captain Wully drew deeply on a Scotch briar filled with Jerry's private blend of tobacco, waved his pipe toward the easel and said, "A right bonnie lass, matey. Your betrothed?" Jerry shook his head dolefully. "Her family are Covered Wagon. You've no idea what that means in a small town like this. My uncle lived here fifteen years and was still a 'newcomer' when he died and left me the house. I've been here two years, but that's a Johnny-come-lately to the Higginses. Her name's Heather, and I doubt if she knows I'm alive." Captain Wully twirled his mustache, which curled luxuriantly at either end and was of an improbable shade Jerry classified as Hunter's Pink. So was his beard. "What did you say her name was?" "Heather Higgins." "You sighed the second time  you said it, too. I just wanted to be sure." Jerry crossed to the unfinished canvas. "Hair like sunshine on slightly oxidized copper. Eyes blue like the sea where it meets the horizon on a summer day." Gertrude! yelled Captain Wully. From the turbulence of the air current which marked Gertrade's passing, Jerry decided the invisible cat had been in a hurry. "And who are you, and what are you doing here?" Captain Wully yelled at a second slipstream. Distinctly audible was a high pitched caterwauling. In addition, there was a sound that made Jerry's curly hair crawl -- the baying of a wolf? "I better look into this," Captain Wully muttered and dashed outside. As he reached the doorway, his figure melted into transparency, then into air. Jerry loaded the crated paintings into his car and took them to the express office. They wouldn't sell -- they never did. But he couldn't afford to pass up the chance that they might. When he returned home, there was no sign of Captain Wully, only a few paper candy wrappers on the floor. He started to pick them up, but remembered he wanted to imprison a highlight on Heather Higgins's nose and forgot the papers. Someone had been into his paints. A tube of Payne's gray had been pressed dry. The cap was off the gamboge, and a new tube of bice green had been squeezed in fhe middle. Nor had the intruder bothered to scrape the palette, which gleamed with puddles of color. A dab of ivory, the hint of rose madder and a suspicion of cadmium yellow fused under his brush tip. Creative fury struck him, and he failed to notice a figure that paused at the outside front gate. The figure stooped, picked up something, then carefully scanned the inside walkway. Here, too, she picked up something. She stooped momentarily on the front porch, and again in the hallway. T hen Heather Higgins stood in the studio. Her gaze swept the floor, and she bent over to pick up a candy wrapper. "You don't have to do that," Jerry said. "I was getting around to it -- eventually." She whirled to face him. Her eyes turned from azure to ultramarine. "You might tell me what's going on around here !" "Suppose you tell me, I'm still trying to catch up with it myself." 'Thiefr "Thief?" "Stealing Scotch whiskey and my new plaid skirt! But you made a mistake on the rum butter toffee. I trailed the wrappers." The Scotch whiskey and rum toffee Jerry could see a reason for -- but not the plaid skirt. "So help me, I'm innocent." "So you're innocent!" She dashed to a comer behind the easel and snatched a plaid skirt from the floor. "You'll just have to believe me. I had nothing to do with it." "Oh no?" "Look at me. Do I look like a criminal?" As she looked her expression softened slightly, but she said, "I always picked the wrong picture in psychology tests. It's you innocent looking fellows that always turn out to be the crooks." Jerry tried his best to look desperate. The result was too much for Heather Higgins, who laughed. "Hold it," Jerry said. "I want to catch your eyes." He grabbed his brush and made several quick strokes on the canvas. "Why," she said, "it looks like me -- a. little. But I'm not that pretty." "You are. And it'd look more like you if I didn't have to do it from memory." And that was how Heather Higgins reluctantly happened to promise Jerry Masterson she'd return next morning for a sitting. She left, and Jerry was eating dinner when Captain Wully walked in to the whistled measures of Comin Through the Rye, Ryer said Jerry. "You? Rye?" "I borrowed her old man's Scotch, if that's what you're gettin' at. And if you think I enjoyed eatin' all that candy just to leave a trail -- I hope I don't see another piece of candy for three hundred years." "Just to satisfy my curiosity," Jerry pleaded, "where does the plaid skirt come in?" "The MacGreggor tartan? I needed a kilt." "All of a sudden you need a kilt. Why?" "It's a long story. But first -- " he reached into a cupboard and produced Jerry's safety razor -- "do you mind if I borrow this? And where do you keep the scissors?" It took fifteen minutes to locate the scissors. "We were discussing a kilt," Jerry prompted. "If a body kiss a body, need a body cry," sang Captain Wully's baritone. But, eventually. Captain Wully and the scissors were seated at the table behind a round magnifying mirror. "It begins with Gertrude. You remember how she scooted through the studio this afternoon with a werewolf after her?" "How stupid of me not to realize." "I felt Gertrude needed help. I caught up with the werewolf and gave him a piece of my mind. 'Pretty small potatoes,' I says, 'when a werewolf chases cats. You must be pretty second-rate to have fallen so low. A regular lamb in wolf's clothing.' T'll have you know,' he says, T'm pretty hot stuff. Related to Dracula on my mammy's side, and to Frankenstein on my pappy's.' " The scissors snipped rapidly, and bits of pink mustache littered the unswept floor. " 'A renegade I says. 'Your family must be awfully proud of you. Chasing cats!' Ouch -- " as the scissors slipped. "I says, 'Where do you live?' And he says, 'Down the road a piece. I'm lapdog for an Indian princess.' 'I think,' I says, usin' my head real quick like, 'I better see you home and see what your mistress has to say about this.' " The mustache having been whittled to a tailored toothbrush, Captain Wully started on his beard. "You should see her, laddie. A real Indian princess, left over from a Lovers Leap. Bein' four hundred years old, she's real aristocracy and doesn't mingle with younger ghosts, which is why I never seen her before. Myself, I'm three score and hardly in her class. Although I must say she took a shine to me. But Indian braves don't wear beards." Captain Wully put down the razor and revealed that he too was beardless. "Sporran, silver buckles and all the fixin's I got in my sea-chest -- but my kilt went down wi' my ship." When Captain Wully realized Heather Higgins had taken the plaid skirt home, he was inconsolable. H eather Higgins kept her appointment to sit next morning. She was greeted at the mailbox by a subdued young man, who hastily shoved in his pocket a letter promising drastic action in the matter of "tax liens against property situate, to wit, etc." "The oddest thing has happened," she said. And Jerry knew. "The plaid skirt is gone again." She gave him a chilly look. "See here! For a young man who claims to know nothing about -- "It's my handyman," he babbled. "My handyman's a kleptomaniac." "Lem Butler's the only handyman in town. Don't try to tell me Lem -- " "Since the person concerned is progressing toward a cure, I can't mention names. Couldn't you let me pay for the skirt?" It took a lot of fast talking, and it took time -- but he finally diverted her attention. She was a patient model. He quickly blocked in the flowing waves of her hair. But a listening look had come over her. Jerry listened too. Down the stairwell drifted muted notes of a bagpipe, striving to adapt its chromatic limitations to Indian Love Call. Another instrument was audible also. "Funny thing about this house," he said. "When I first moved in, I used to think I heard bagpipes." "Accompanied by a glockenspiel ?" "Is that what it is?" The upper half of a very elderly gentleman bobbed in. Junior r bawled Captain Wully from the stairs. "Leave me alone pleaded the elderly gentleman. "Lemme concentrate. Captain Wully dashed in. "For shame, Junior. Stealingr Juniors eyes filled with tears. "Just one more nip, and I know I could have relaxed enough to finish materializing. Heather's fascinated gaze wavered between the bottomless Junior and Captain Wully's kilt. The kilt had a zipper placket exactly like a lady's skirt. "I think I'm losing my mind," she said. Jerry Masterson attempted to explain the inexplicable. He recounted events of the preceding several days and concluded, "No matter what you think, you couldn't see him if you didn't believe." "What about the glockenspiel?" she asked weakly. "That's Red Skeleton," said Captain Wully. "He uses a couple of ball-peen hammers on his ribs. We was tunin' up to serenade Pocahauntus." "The cat," said Heather. "She's left out." "Oh, no, she ain't. Gertrude sings coloratura." That even I don't believe," said Jerry. before the easel, and he flourished a brush. "Just a touch about the eyes. And another here." He flicked at the mouth. "Get away from there T yelled Jerry. Junior burst into tears again. "I was only trying to help. Besides, it did need -- " "Well, I'll be..." Jerry looked at the canvas. "Junior was right." "About Gertrude," insisted Captain Wully. "If you don't believe it, why don't you come' serenadin' with us, you and Miss Heather?" Jerry looked inquiringly at Hfeather. "I'll hate myself if I do," she said. "Then we won't go." "But I'll hate myself worse if I don't." He called that evening to take her to the serenade, and met her family. Mr. Higgins was very pleasant. Mrs. Higgins was very pleasant. But Jerry was uncomfortably aware of a large photograph on the mantle. The photograph was of a young man, and it was not pleasant. Its eyes followed Heather Higgins possessively. The photograph's tailored suit intimated its pockets were not lined with tax liens. Mrs. Higgins noticed Jerry's interest. "That's Wesley Tatom." "Of the First National Bank Tatoms," said Mrs. Higgins. "His great grandfather was Ephraim Tatom," said Mrs. Higgins. Ephraim Tatom, so Jerry gathered in the next half hour, had practically blazed the Oregon Trail single-handed. "Wesley is attending the State Bankers Convention right now," said Mr. Higgins. Mrs. Higgins gave Jerry a meaningful look. "We're very fond of dear, sweet Wesley," she said. Jerry was understandably relieved when it came time to depart. As for the serenade, Gertrude was in fine voice. Her words were incomprehensible, but no more so than foreign opera. Captain Wully puffed through Indian Love Call and a pibroch or two on the pipes, ably assisted by Red Skeleton on the glockenspiel and Junior on the mouth-harp. Princess Pocahauntus was impressed by Captain Wully's full dress. She fingered the flowing shoulder plaid, tsktsking over the fineness of such a blanket. And the silver buckle s -- only a big chief would possess such wealth. Gertrude bristled, and scar, the werewolf, dashed up with a limp and furry trophy, which he laid at the princess' feet. "What's that?" Heather gasped. "A sidehill gouger," explained Pocahauntus. "Sec?" S HE put the little animal upright, or as nearly upright as circumstances permitted, for the gouger's left legs were three inches shorter than his right ones. Reaching into her reticule, she produced a couple of artistically carved bone pegs, which she fastened to the abbreviated left legs. "Prosthetics. Relics of our last gouger, who migrated to Switzerland." "Somebody ought to write a book," mused Heather. "Lots of books have been written," said Pocahauntus, "but not one from the 'inside.' What we spirits need is a John Gunther. Now take the subject of Lovers Leaps. More twaddle has been written about -- " "I've done a couple of regional articles for the Covered Wagon Quarterly, but nobody wants to print my historical fiction," said Heather. "What about Lovers Leaps?" "Now take my own. I was really running away from a greasy warrior. He chased me to the cliff edge and, in my girlish innocence, I jumped. What price virtue!" "Too bad I wasn't around," mourned Captain Wully. "I'd a-caught you." "If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't jump." Her black eyes flashed, and she drew herself up regally. "I'd push that feather-headed Casanova off instead." Then, graciously, she suggested barbecuing a salmon over the open fire, but Heather was afraid it would take too long and her parents might worry. So she and Jerry excused themselves and left ptain Wully to his courting. As Jerry walked Heather up the front steps, the scent of lilacs was an invitation to romance, the moon a lover's promise. "Good night, said Heather. "It's been such fun." Her handclasp carried a hint of finality that went beyond words, and Jerry said, Beenr "Wesley gets back tomorrow." Without being told, Jerry knew that Heather's portrait would have to be finished from memory. Any man worthy of the name, Jerry told himself, would have argued the point -- unless he was broke and jobless and had a tax lien in his pocket. He tried to work on her picture next morning, sought to imprison the laughter of her eyes, the song of her lips. But then he realized that the laughter was for somebody else. The song too. From above came a few experimental notes on the glockenspiel. Presently Junior's mouth harp joined in. The melodystaggered uncertainly, finally emerged as Mendelssohn's Wedding March, Jerry threw down his brush and left the house. He walked toward the lighthouse. That once stately saltbox had already lost its lensed cupola and most of its siding. He watched for a long time as the Sam Schultz Salvage Company pried board from board and piled all in a stack of jackstraws. Maybe he could go to work for Sam Schultz and make enough to pay off the taxes. And, if he observed all the Horatio Alger niceties, maybe some day he'd own the company and could seek Heather Higgins' hand in marriage -- only to discover she had long since married Wesley. He walked along the beach. Climbing to a jutting promontory, he watched waves break against the rocks below. Why not throw himself into the sea? He could become a ghost, and maybe find a lady ghost, and... H e went home and forced himself to work on Heather Higgins' portrait. He filled an entire sketch pad with brief line drawings of her until, late at night, he finally fell asleep in his chair. He awakened to broad daylight -- and the whistling of the. postman. The letter was from Eloise Wright, Chairman of the Northport Art Festival, and concerned his canvases. Ellis is positively dithynmbicl Claims youve caught a hauntingly spiritual quality, and wants to buy the storm canvas for his San Francisco galleries. Barret, the Chicago Barret, is lyrical about the spectral lights and shadows, and is writing his New York dealer about a showing. Have sold four canvases. Enclose certified check -- Jerry reached for a chair. Four canvases? His asking price for four canvases had never come to any such figure as the check represented. The letter contained a postscript. Barret is out of his head over 'Gertrude.' Impres , sionism at its finest, with an eerie, imaginative quality unsurpassed by any American artist. Soul of the eternally feminine, as typified by a cat with a hole in the head. Social satire in oil. Picture not priced. He asks what will you take within reason? One thousand? Jerry was sure of only one thing. He'd never painted any picture of Gertrude. There was, however, the matter of that tube of bice green squeezed in the middle, and the gamboge left capless. He ran to the stairwell and yelled for Captain Wully, who presently appeared. 'T have here a letter -- " 'T didn't do it," Captain Wully protested.  'Twas Junior touched up the paintings. And 'twas Junior painted Gertrude. Me? All I did was help Junior dry the paint and boost your prices a wee muckle." "How much?" "By nothing at all, you might say. A zero on the end?" Jerry looked at the check. 'T feel like I've been obtaining money under false pretenses. Junior doesn't even get any credit." "But he does. Every one of those paintings was signed 'J. Masterson-Junior.' " "I feel more honest about banking the check," said Jerry. When he made out his deposit slip and totaled his bank balance, Jerry reflected how quickly an inferiority complex can melt in financial sunshine. He made a brief stop at the post office, where 'he mailed a check to the county assessor. He then headed straight for Heather Higgins' front door. She had company. "Glad to know you." Jerry acknowledged introduction to Wesley Tatom and stared with helpless fascination at the latter's necktie -- of MacGreggor plaid. "You arrived just in time to give me a little moral support," said Heather breathlessly"Now, Heather, we mustn't bore Masterson with our personal difficulties." "I've started a story about Oscar the werewolf, but Wesley thinks -- " Wesley intei;-rupted. "I'm looking at it from a business standpoint. Some day I'll step into my father's shoes at the bank. And what would the Board of Directors think of a bank president's wife who wrote claptrap about werewolves and spare-rib glockenspiels?" doubt if they'd think anything at all -- particularly if it paid well," said Jerry, and stared at Wesley Tatom's tie. The knot had begun to ease gently. 'Tf she thinks she wants to write, why can't she stick to covered wagons, and -- " "How stuffy of you!" said Heather. Wesley Tatom felt uncertainly of his tie, tightened the knot. "As a matter of curiosity," Jerry addressed his rival, "what makes you so sure Heather is going to marry you?" "It's one of those taken-forgranted matters. We've gone together since -- say ! What business is it of yours, anyway !" Now Heather, too, was watching Wesley's necktie. "I don't think women like to be taken for granted," Jerry said. One end of the necktie became longer and longer as its opposite end shortened. With a final but quiet jerk, the necktie came free, hesitated for a moment opposite Wesley's belt buckle, then folded itself neatly and floated away. Heather giggled. "Were you laughing at me?" Wesley demanded.  "Heather," said Jerry, "will you marry me?" In the free-for-all that followed, nobody settled anything. A ll that occurred some time ago, of course. Meanwhile, what collector hasn't heard of J. MastersonJunior, whose canvases are lauded for their "other world" quality? And, if you have children, you probably know by heart the little book chronicling the fortunes and misfortunes of Oscar, the werewolf who fainted at the sight of blood. And there's Harriet, the hodag. And Gary, the stoneeating gyascutus. And Robert, the sidehill gouger. Recently in print is a story of Oscar's love for Vi, the Vitiated Vampire. Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Masterson are widely respected. She writes the books. He illustrates them in his spare time. Such a delightfully zany couple ! Always joking about a Scottish sea captain who lives in the attic and is married to an Indian princess. No wonder the Masterson children are overly imaginative -- warning their playmates not to sit on Gertrude, not to step on Oscar's tail. But all kids go through a phase like that. Only a few of them are lucky enough to grow up and make money out of it -- lots of highly respectable money -- IF  Short Story Glen Wheatley thanked his lucky stars for bis good fortune every day of his life... every day, that is, but one! T he brick smashed through the window and skittered across the top of Glen Wheatley's desk. He had already removed most of the breakables, but it caught a large plastic ash tray and sent it caroming off his cheekbone. A thin trickle of blood crept down his face. "Good God, aren't they starting a little early this year?" Bert Hillary, who shared Wheatley's office, was obviously not expecting an answer. He had been making it clear for the past hour (they had all got to their desks an hour earlier for this day) that he was an old hand, while this was Glen's first experience of People's Day. Glen knew that Hillary had been in the Civil Service only five or six years. He himself could hardly be accused of being an expert on the everyfour-years Day. Still, he waited for the older man to make the first move. Hillary got up and peered cautiously out the shattered windov. "Yeah, they're already boiling around the outer wall like yeast in a vat. That guy with the brick must have quite a pitching arm." Sweat stood out on his forehead. He was clearly much more frightened than he pretended to be. Glen noticed this with some satisfaction. At least, he wasn't the only one. "Come on, Wheatley. Us lower-level boys have got to be on the hop. You'd be surprised how fast that mob can get up here." Glen unfolded the map of Government House that had been placed on his desk that morning. He stared grimly at it, dabbing at his cheek with a rather grubby handkerchief meanwhile. The bleeding did not show any signs of stopping. Hillary hurried to the door. "Come on !" He was openly nervous now. "It's no good studying that map for safetyholes now. You should have been doing that ever since we got here this morning." As a matter of fact, Glen had been doing just that, whenever Hillary's flow of words had momentarily run dry. But he had not yet got the location of all the nearby hidden cubbies clearly in his mind. "Government House is such a maze," he said defensively. "And we're damned lucky it is," Hillary said from the doorway. "Anyway, how do you know that map you've got there isn't just what they've been hawking in People's Square all this past week?" He gave a slightly sick leer. "You know those maps are inaccurate. They're just a sop, just to give the mob an extra t h r i I L Government House plants most of them." He could sound like an old hand, too, Glen thought with a certain smugness. "Nuts to that. Some of them are amazingly accurate. There are a hell of a lot of non-Government people in here from year to year, and some of them aren't here just on business. Let's get going." Hillary pulled Glen through the door, and then locked it. Glen raised his eyebrows at this. "Oh, sure," his co-worker said wryly. "Gives the People something to vork off steam on." He patted the flimsy door. "This will cave in under a few hard shoulders. Not like the safety-hole panels. We hope." "But they don't unlock for another half hour in this area." "Thirty-eight minutes, to be exact," Hillary said, glancing at his watch. "And of course the ones deeper in and higher up open even later. We're supposed to give them a run for their taxes." T he corridor was emptying out rapidly. Glen could hear smashing noises from the ground floor. Apparently the People were already in the building, beginning their day of destruction. He thought gratefully of his private apartment, tucked away in the impregnable heart of Government House. Of course, it was closed off to him too on this day; but at least it was safe from the mob. They would get mainly the chaff to destroy. "I'm heading for the upper levels Hillary said. "Even if the safeties open later up there, it takes longer for the mob to penetrate. There's enough breakable and burnable stuff at the first few levels to keep them busy for a while. Coming?" Glen had just seen Joan Bourne emerge from her office and lock the door. He headed toward her. "I'm going to stay near some out-ofthe-way safety in this area and hop in when it first opens. I don't feel like running from the People," he called back with a bravado he did not really feel. "Suit yourself." Hillary was already at the stairs. He paused for a moment. "And good luck." "Thanks," Glen said. "Good hiding." Joan had been listening, and met him in the middle of the corridor. "I think you've got the right idea, Glen. Want some company?" He smiled, and brushed her cheek with his lips. "You know the answer to that, Joan. For life." "This is Hardly the day to bring that up again." She took his arm, and they turned off down a side corridor. "Besides, I thought our relationship was very nice as it is," she pouted. "It is. I'm just greedy." The side passageway took them deeper into the labyrinth that was Government House. Glen had hardly ever been out of it. He had been born and. brought up in the great ce;ntral area that surrounded Government Park, now sealed off from both the People and the Civil Servants. Apart from a vacation trip to another city's Government House, this had been Glen's entire world. And two years ago he had passed the Examinations and become a full-fledged CS, with all the privileges -- and perils, he was. now realizing -- that that entailed. They turned into another corridor, went past a bank of elevators -- turned off for the day, as all the elevators were in the official section of the building -- and went up a long flight of stairs.' Glen stopped at the third level. "This looks like as good a spot as any to wait for the first safety-holes to open. It's out of the way. And there's a hole right here, according to the map. It'll be opening in twenty minutes. The mob should be busy down there for longer than that." They located the almost invisible key square, and Glen pressed his Class-# key to it. "Just on the chance they might have given us a break," he said half apologetically. "Apparently they haven't," Joan murmured. "Let's see if my Class-# has any better luck." She pressed her own key to the square, but the pan el still refused to slide back. Class-# sliehers in this area were often combined with those for Class #. G len looked at her quizzically. "Joan, we graduated at the same time, and you're already Class-# -- Job Consultation -- while I'm still Class-# -- Secondary School Allocation. How do you do it?" "Brains, personality and talent. Hadn't you noticed?" She pressed close to him. He kissed her. "Mmm, yes. But I still don't see..." "Darling," she said, "Joan Bourne is a young lady destined to go far. And fast." "You seem so different from the other girls here though, Joan" He blushed. "You didn't happen to come from... Outside. Er...from the People, that is?" "I grew up in Block #, Section A, overlooking the statue of Martyr Sherman Adams in Government Park. Just two blocks down from you, if I remember your records correctly." "You've had access to my records?" "Class-# always does to Class-#'s. And I took a special interest in you, my dear." She stroked his cheek. "Then you're forgiven the snooping," Glen smiled. "But to think I was being so polite and discreet about asking your origins !" "Not many take the Exams and come to Civil Service from Outside any more, sweet. Just as not many from here decide to go out and try their luck in the big world. Generally we stay on our side of the fence, and they stay on theirs. Except for the Day, of course. And then it's all one-way traffic." "But I've heard some CS people go Outside for their vacation. I never have, of course, but..." "Oh, yes, quite a few do. You're taken in a CS plane to another Government House, where you won't be known in the city outside. You are given appropriate papers and emerge from the House during business hours. You mingle with the People, just like one of them. And when vacation's over, back to the House for Job Consultation or Welfare Benefits or whatever you want to trump up. Show your true papers, and you're whisked back to your own cozy womb." She smiled reminiscently. "Outside is an interesting experience." This annoyed Glen obscurely. He put his arm around her. "I don't want you going Outside again. At least, not without me." "Oh, the People are just people. Except for today..." well, the Bourne from which no traveler returneth! Hope I'm not interrupting anything, my dear. Anything important, that is." At this unexpected voice, Glen let go of Joan and spun to face the intruder. It was a Class-# High Official named Duckpath, whom he had heard speak at a few Government banquets. He dropped his fists, which he had unconsciously raised. "Mustn't be so nervous, young man," Duckpath said, swaying slightly. He was obviously quite drunk. 'How are you, joanie?" He patted her rump affectionately and gave her a smacking kiss. Joan looked both annoyed and amused. Glen flushed, but said nothing. After a moment of contemplating the new arrival, Joan said, "Well, Ducks, what brings you down to the lower echelons?" "Oh, pleasure, pleasure, my dear. Wanted to see all the fun and games. Usually pretty dull on top, you know." He winked at her, then cocked an ear. "Sounds like the rabble are getting warmer, too." Glen listened, and realized he had been hearing all along a dim muttering which was now clearly getting louder. A distinct crash sounded, and he was sure he smelled smoke. "Come on, Joan," he said, tugging at her arm. "Let's get into the shelter. It must be time now." "Young man, you are obstreperous, aren't you?" Duckpath interposed himself between Glen and Joan. "Be calm, be calm. As you may know, my key will open any of the lower echelon's shelters, and at any time. Yours is not due to open for five minutes yet, for example, but at the touch of this -- " he flashed his Class-# key -- "all barriers will fall before us. And I like the scent of danger. Just the scent, of course. Now -- " he motioned to Glen -- "if you will just stand by that stairway, you will be able to see them in plenty of time for us all to get into shelter. You two shall be my guests. It will be very cozy." He giggled. Glen scowled, but dki as he was told. It was true that the stairs were the obvious place for the onslaught. They led both up and down. He assumed Duckpath had come down them, but of course the People were still below, although apparently working their way rapidly to the stairs. The only other way up to this area was through one of the secret passageways, which the mob would not know about. Another crash echoed up the stairwell, much louder this time. A wisp of smoke curled lazily in the air in front of him. Glen fingered the caked blood on his cheek. Things he bad never questioned before seemed utterly meaningless and cruel now. His irritation with Duckpath bubbled over, and he said sourly, "What madness ! This whole procedure is incredibly stupid and wasteful." Joan glanced at Duckpath with raised eyebrows but said nothing. That gentleman at first stiffened, then relaxed and said blandly, 'T wouldn't criticize the Government too much, my boy. It gives us all we have. And it can take it away also." He smiled. "This is not madness, but sheer sanity. You must have been neglecting your Political Science courses." "Sanity ! It's murder and destruction," Glen muttered. "You know very well, young man, that all that is being destroyed is easily replaced. Will be replaced tomorrow, in fact. Ours is an opulent, productive society." Duckpath's smile deepened into a smirk. "A#I the important documents, all the valuables, are safely locked away in the central section. And the good that is being done today!" He became rapturous. "The People are led by us, led by the nose. We decide where they will go to school, where they will live, which job they will get, how many children they may have. Soon we will decide when they are to die. We have the power." His eyes glistened. "And in return we give them security. The population is balanced, the country productive, the old cared for; there is medical service for all. Everything is arranged for the best by the great complex of Government Houses all over the world. Everything is in the hands of the Government." Duckpath was panting slightly. "Everything is in our hands." everything is so perfect,"why this?" Glen gestured toward the cloud of smoke seeping through the entrance to the stairway. "It's only the office furnishings. The building itself won't burn," Joan murmured. Duckpath gave her a little squeeze. "Our callow young friend is talking about the hatred, I believe, Joanie. The urge of the People to destroy and kill. Well, it is only natural." He belched softly. "These People are aware that their lives are woven from threads held in Government House. And though they are well cared for, they resent it. They resent having to file into this building and be allocated to this and that. They want someone to take care of them, but they resent their loss of freedom. They resent our power. "So this is their day. It comes once every four years. The day that gives them the illusion that they have some control over us, the day of Mob Rule. This is the day they can express all their locked-up frustrations, all their fury at the State which feeds and clothes them and watches over them. They can batter down and smash and burn." Duckpath stared at Glen and seemed to sober a little. "Yes, they can even kill. They cannot bring guns or knives here, but they can use fire and fists and stones. And that is even better for boiling away their hostilities. The hotheads among the People will go so far as to kill, and that will cool them. But they will get only the fumblefingered and feeble-witted. The rest will take care of themselves." He paused for a moment, breathless. "Do you realize we haven't had even the sniff of a revolution in four hundred years? No civil strife at all. No charge of any kind." He laughed. "This is Sheep's Day...their day to be wolves." "Glen, you'd better watch the stairs," Joan said, her face taut. Glen started. Duckpath's harangue had distracted him, and somehow chilled him too. He peered down the stairwell. There were People at the end around and shouting. "We've got to get to shelter," he said, hurrying toward Joan. Duckpath began to talk again. "This is nothing new. The Romans had a word for it, and a day for it, too. A day when the laws were abandoned and society was turned upside down. A day when the people cast off the bonds of civilization and order. A day of Misrule. They even had a King of Misrule. I rather like that. I might be such a King." He struck a pose. "King of Misrule !" He turned with a grand gesture to Joan. "And you are my..." A rock crashed against the side of his head. Another exploded on the wall next to Glen. "The secret passageways, Glen!" Joan screamed. "They've come up the other way. The maps must have been accurate this time." There was a knot of men at the far bend of the corridor. They carried torches, and clumps of stones in sacks at their waists. Obviously they were not the dilettantes of People's Day. They were after more than the crash of furniture. "Get the dame, boys!" one of them yelled. They charged forward. Duckpath was lying across the entrance to the shelter, and the mob was almost on him. "We've got to take the stairway, Joan!" Glen cried, fumbling at her arm. "His key, his key!" She knelt beside Duckpath and pulled the key out of his hand. The High Official stirred, but did not speak. An amazing amount of blood had already accumulated on the floor around him. A brick grazed Glen's shoulder, sending him spinning toward the stairway. Joan rushed after him, and they pounded the stairs together. "I can get in anywhere with this," she gasped, holding up the key. Presumably the half-conscious Duckpath had made the oncoming men pause. Ripping sounds could be heard, and a horrible strangled cry. They were relieving the High Official of his personal belongings -- and probably of his life. But the People from the floor below were now surging up the stairs, joined by four men from the crowd that had first seen Joan. "Get the dame! Government meat !' The cry came booming up to Glen and Joan. They stumbled into the corridor at the next landing, realizing they would never make it up the next flight before the mob reached them. They were both fumbling with their maps. "There's a small Class-# right around here," Joan waved her map in his face. She raced along the wall for a few yards and then clapped Duckpath's key to it. A panel slid back and she slipped inside. "Thank God!" She glanced around her. "Darling, it's only a single. Too bad." There was obviously no room for another person, Glen saw with dismay. Joan and the air-freshening apparatus took up all the space. "Hurry and find another, sweets." She pitched him the Class-# key, and blew him a kiss as the door slid shut. It would open again only after sundown, when People's Day was officially over. A mass of screaming People burst from the stairway, and raised a great shout on seeing Glen. He dashed down the corridor, turned left, and then turned right at the next passageway. He was in a long corridor ending in a large window opening on the outside. Glen squinted at his map through eyes that refused to focus. He suddenly realized they were streaming with tears. There was a Class-# shelter several paces along on the left. He rushed to it and pressed the High Official's key to the square. A dim red light glowed through the plastic of the key. Full. He pounded on the panel. Of course it was soundproof. Of course the shelter was full of wise Civil Servants. Only the fumble-fingered and the feeble-witted, only the chaff... The People came pouring around the corner as Glen backed toward the end of the corridor. A stone sang past him and smashed through the window. Another caught him in the ribs. He backed faster, now completely blinded by tears. The growl of hatred from the mob grew louder. A heavy blow struck his collarbone and he lurched backward. His knees caught, and then he was flipping over. Out and down. He sailed through the air. The pressure of the mob was gone. There was no time to think. There was just an cxhilarating sense of flight, of space, of freedom. E ditorial from the Albany Evening Star: People's 'Day is over again. For four more years peace and order reign over the land. We feel that this year's Day was one of the most successful in history. The damage seemed to be substantially less than usual. Among those no longer with us are: Oliver Duckpath: Class-# High Official Deeply valued, he will be missed, as those whom he cared for in his work as Supervisor will testify. Lizabeth Brennan : Class-# Religion Consultant Glen Wheatley : Class-# Secondary School Allocator Thurmond Christian : As a convenience, the Editors of IF provide this nomination blank for you to express your views on the forthcoming annual '"Hugo" awards. Just detach and mail. Plain paper may be used if desired. #th World Science Fiction Convention  P. #. Box #  Chicago #, this is the best science fiction 'published during #I and should be considered for recognition at the Annual Hugo Awards Banquet on September #. #. Novel #. Short Fiction #. Dramatic Presentation #. Professional Artist #. Professional Magazine #. Amateur Magazine To become a valid nomination, this blank must be signed with name and address and postmarked by midnight April #. Only Convention members will receive a voting ballot, distributed June # with the #th issue of the Progress Repoii;; a # membership fee, payable to George W. Price, Treasurer, will insure your vote and enter your subscription for the Progress Reports. Name , -- .  -- ... ,.  Address City Zone State I already hold convention membership # IF  Science Feature W E entered World War I with a number of active cavalry detachments. We entered World War II with a great many spruce-sparred, fabric-covered biplanes. In each case there were old-line specialists who fought like the devil to keep what was demonstrably obsolete, old-line officers, who persisted in fighting the last war this time with the last war's methods. Because it all happened in our time, it is difficult to get detached enough to realize that a modern war stimulates not only production, but invention and design. In eighteen months this country built more ships and planes than it would have, in normal times, in half a century; and that further, the B-# (of which we built thousands) was a design-century ahead of the old Keystone bombers, of which we had some dozens in #. You'd think that by now we'd realize that a new war, or even a sharp intensification of the cold war, will bring about even more drastic developments. Technological advances don't occur arithmetically, in a straight slant like a cellar door; they occur geometrically, in a curve like a ski-jump slope or Mr. Robert Hope's famous nose. At this writing the general public seems to have a sort of numb idea that a new war would be something like the last, with something or other called fallout added, and no conception at all of the fact that a # megaton H-bomb has the power of five thousand of the eggs we laid on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most importantly, there's so much talk about the Big Bombs that wy seem to have lost sight completely of the array of totally novel weapons which are certain to emerge, just as the bazooka and the P-# and the H-bomb itself emerged last time. Let's take a look at some of them -- devices now ixi actual existence, or under developmental contract, or in other ways a-borning. sifier. Coupled with radar and a simple computing circuit, it can get off a flash, in a split second, which will put a hole in a tank as big as your head at # yards. Since this is a beam, not a missile of any kind, it travels at the speed of light and needs no corrections for windage or trajectory, and does not have to "lead" a moving target. Its developers claim that even in its present primitive stage it can move a satellite # miles out slightly off orbit. slugs of californium, a rare radioactive metal which has a c h a i n-reaction-supporting critical mass of not much more than a .#-caliber bullet. It will hit with the force of Present-day high-intensity radars are carefully fenced and guarded lest they "fry" unwary bystanders. The effect is protobly adaptable to weaponry. many and varied specialized gases we wish we could forget about but which are already in the tanks, a "Miltown" gas has been suggested and probably has been formulated -- something which can send out more clouds of tranquilizer than an election campaign. focused beams of particles other than ions -- these too are in the "death-ray" department. The ion beam is a leading contender for outer-space propulsion, which does not disqualify it one bit from being a lethal ray. diseases, some in intensified natural form, some mutated. hormone "poisons," which can inhibit or de-control growth patterns in cereal and other plants, so that they fail to mature, or come to seed, or perhaps die off. There is now a new possibility that the same sort of thing can be done by viruses. Along with these, there are plans afoot involving not so much new weapons, but new uses for the weapons we have. For example, it is theorized that in certain areas of the earth's crust where known geological faults exist, a resonance might be set up by carefully calculated and timed impacts and, just as marching men can cause a bridge to collapse, these impulses might cause the fault to slip and generate an earthquake. Then there's the tactic of the Disguised War, where prevailing winds could be made to carry some debilitating but not deadly disease -- mononucleosis, for example, which just makes you weak as a duck -- for a year or two until you just had no resistance (of any kind) any more. suggested non-radioactive dust bombs which might well sharply raise or lower the atmospheric temperature. This could raise, havoc with Russia (and Canada incidentally) without bothering us too much. Russia, on the other hand, could without compunction explode enough clean bombs in enough of the right places in the oceans, and so load the troposphere with ice crystals that the Pole would warm up and the melting ice would flood our coastal cities. Russia hasn't got any coastal cities -- not, that is, to compare with ours. Well... there are more we could mention here, and certainly more too classified to have leaked through to us, and still naore which carry the "Burn Before Reading" stamp and are unknown to all but a few in the upper inner circle, and again more which, as always happens, would leap into being during a war or nearwar. Reading down the list makes one wonder why no one seems to be pushing very hard for a strong program of meticulously performed, mutually inspected, gradual disate populations are too ignorant, and the literate ones too apathetic, to make themselves heard. Or perhaps that solution is just too science-fiction-y for      IF  Short Story He was a mighty hunter. Trouble was, he was on the side of the beasts! D eep in the dusk of the wood Jess Seely saw the beast's pupils shine. He had been careful of every footfall and of every shift of his shotgun as he made his way through the forest. But they had got wind of him, they had been on his trail from the instant he stepped into the wood, they were all around him now. The eyes vanished, but he could hear soft scurryings. Move quietly and keep your eyes open; that was the first lesson he had learned and the best. He moved still deeper into the wood, years of woodcraft in every move. The years had slowed him. But the experience gained in those same years had made every move tell. He heard soft scurryings. They were stalking him. How would they try to get him this time? He let the shotgun dangle carelessly so the barrels threatened himself. Would that fempt one of them -- a squirrel ? -- to leap from a limb, ainiing to strike at the trigger apd set off the shot? No, he sqw it now. They had something else in wait just ahead. A deadfall. Only at the last fraction of a second did his sweep of eye take in the one bit of beaver track they had failed to brush away. He walked slowly on, straining for sign of trip wire. It would be a length of vine; he should spot it by its dying color. He should, but he did not. ,,He frowned. Was he guessing wrong? Then he spotted it -- a length of living vine, one end still rooted, the other wrapping the trunk of a great spruce in a neat knot. The spruce itself seemed untouched, at first sight. They had plastered the gnawings back in place, but to his eyes -- now that he knew what he was looking for -- there stood out enough difference between the living wood and the dead to show the big bite they had taken out of the base of the tree. He admired their sense of balance. His lightest brush against the vine would bring the tree crashing down on him. To raise -- then dash -- their hopes, he tried to keep from letting on he had seen the setup and went on without breaking stride -- then he lengthened and lifted his step at the last to miss triggering the trip wire by a hair. A silence, then a small chatter of disappointment. He kept on. Under the talking foliage of quaking aspen he made out other sounds. Soft scurryings. What would they have waiting ahead? A noose? No, poison-tipped thorns. T he rustle of leaves gave warning. He whirled aside. One of them -- a raccoon? -- loosed a bent branch of hawthorn. The branch whipped at him and the wicked spikes barely missed his flesh. The branch was still trembling when he raised his shotgun but the raccoon -- he felt sure it was a raccoon and smiled, remembering the first of them, Bandido -- had vanished. Yet he had to make the futile gesture so those watching would not know the gun bore no load. He eyed the wicked spikes and again smiled. On each tip a sticky smear held a thick powdering. The powder would be dried leaves of foxglove. Or had they found something better? He smiled again at more chatter of frustratioii. But he sharpened his senses as he pushed on. He stopped where the going grew suddenly easy. They had cleared a path; it invited him to bypass a tangle of underbrush. He looked to see that the overarching boughs did not hold loops of vine ready to drop, and took the path. Nothing. But there had to be something. He pushed on, then slowed, smelling dampness that was not the dankness of mold. Ahead, the trail widened into a clearing. In the center of the clearing lay a patch of spongy ground that could be lethal quagmire. Yet the tracks of a big woodchuck led straight across the patch, promising the ground would hold. Something about the tracks gave Jess Seely pause. They had a dainty, yet dragging, look. He read faint tracks on either side of the patch and knew what had taken place. Not one but three woodchucks had crossed the clearing together, abreast, almost in step. Two had kept to the solid ground on either side of the bog, each holding in its jaws one end of a fallen tree limb. The big woodchuck in the middle had ridden with the bulk of his weight on that support, making footprints without sinking into the mire. Jess Seely smiled and skirted the patch. He wondered vaguely why the chatter he heard now seemed to be chatter not of frustration but of expectation. He had no time for more than vague wonder at that, and at the sudden hush. The ground -- not ground but a covering of dirt over a wickerwork of branches -- gave under  him. His hands flung up, the gun shot out of his grip. He fell. H IS coming to was an inand-out thing, pulsing awareness, intermitting dream. The pit was deep. They were good at digging. They had patience. He nodded, and blacked out. He came to again. He lay crumpled, a leg bent strangely under him. He was helpless, but they would not come right away. They would not trust him, they would wait to make sure he was not playing helpless. Then they would come. They had patience. He tightened himself against the pain. This was what he had worked toward, and in any case it would have been useless to have regrets. He had no regrets. He had been a good game warden. He lapsed into unconsciousness again, smiling. The wait was long and he knew he had passed through a spell of delirium. There was a timeless moment when it seemed to him he came aware in the past, reliving the start of it. That had been the time when, feeling a gnawing helplessness, seeing the day coming when he would no longer be there to save them from his fellow man, he caught that poacher. The poacher was too busy to sense his approach, busy cursing some animal that had once again sprung the trap and made off with the bait. He knew, in that long-ago day, that it would be wasting time to haul the man into court. The local justice of the peace would let him off with a mild rebuke. So Jess Seely booted the man out of the wood, baited and reset the trap and lay in wait. At last a large raccoon nosed into view, picked up a piece of twig in a forepaw and reached cautiously to stick it into the trap. The trap snapped shut its grin on nothing. The raccoon vas about to make off with the bait when Jess Seely remembered to S# move. He aimed his hypodermic gun and shot the raccoon to sleep. He carried the raccoon home -- and that was the start of Jess Seely's private, unauthorized and top-secret psychological testing laboratory. The raccoon made an auspicious first subject, quickly mastering all sorts of release mechanisms to escape from puzzle boxes and to win rewards, learning to fit pegs into holes and to tie knots. The one stupidity was Jess Seely's. He had grown fond of the raccoon -- Bandido -- a n d he had let Bandido sense that. It was lucky Jess Seely had realized that at this early stage, or the whole thing would have gone for nothing. He had to break Bandido of his liking. He forced himself in Bandido hate and fear of man -- any man. Only when he felt sure he had brought that about did he free Bandido. He tagged Bandido and released him into the wild, then hunted other promising subjects. There was only one Bandido. Jess Seely did not give any of the others a name. He did not dare. He rigged more and more sophisticated release mechanisms, and in time was graduating animals that were able to disarm any trap safely and, before making off with the bait, move the trap, reset it and conceal it so the original setter of the trap would step into it. Other than a shot from a trapper who thought the resetting was his doing, Jess Seely had little trouble with poachers after that. A t mating seasons he used his capture-gun again to bring together the brightest of his subjects. And in thirty years, thanks to training and selective breeding, the wildlife under his protection had learned to deal with all traps, set out sentries, string alarm wires across trails, toss stones to mislead hunters and put hounds out of action and, with earth or urine, fight fire. Now he was clear in his mind and he felt a humble pride. He had set out to teach them to guard their preserve, to save themselves. He had done a good job of this. He had taught them well. He heard them coming closer to the rim of the pit. Now he saw their eyes. He fixed on one face. Old Bandido! But that couldn't be. Old Bandido was long dead. This was a son or a grandson or a great-grandson. In a sense they were all children of Jess Seely. No matter. They would have no pity on him. He had taught them well indeed, he thought smiling, IF  Short Story They were the mightiest warriors the universe had ever known. All they . lacked was something to live for! By Richard Sheridan the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness. His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day's objectives. He lay quietly on the pallet ; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living. He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. The steady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontal lobes and whispered down his silver checks, A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience. Perseverance. Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid selfcontrol. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction. It tasted bad, but he'd expected that it would. He didn't have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire. He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else. H IS last night's pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable and fluttered its hands. "You awake. Soldier?" The room glowed with a rosy light. "Approximately." The woman uncoiled herself and lay flat. Through the tangle of bronzed hair, one ear shone w h i t e I y. She brushed the hair from her eyes and her scarlet mouth opened in a feline yawn. The woman was pink and white; she quivered in voluptuous ecstasy and slithered on the satin with her own satiny, round and naked flesh. "I didn't hear the alarm," she said, her voice thick with the residue of sleep. Her body pressed warm to his as she slid his cigarette from his fingers. He shared the cigarette, thinking of the distance between the bed and the bathroom. The clock told him he had eight minutes to wait for maximum emission. His physiological chart showed a tolerance of nine and one-third hours. Eight minutes to wait. Then he would have twenty minutes in which to shower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clinging opaque that, like the casing on a sausage, would cover him, leaving only his eyes, ears and mouth. These the neurologist would take care of before the mechanics fitted him into his machine for his next tour of duty. There was a time for eating, time for a last cigarette, time for briefing and a long, long time for the Galbth II. Time for everything but living. Gently he kissed the woman's soft neck. "What's your name?" he asked wistfully, his attention divided between by Richard Sheridan the short gold hairs at the base of her head and the all important clock. The woman chuckled chidingly and toyed with his hands, tracing the veins that stood rigid on their backs where the tortured nerves had forced them to the surface like a maze of pale blue pipes. She did not answer. He could no more know her name than he could know her face behind the silver opaque -- than he could know her voice behind the vocal distorter -- no more than he could know anyone, or that anyone could know him. Three times a week the Sex-Dispatcher sent him a woman. For all he knew it could be the same woman, or three different women. "Can I tell the dispatcher that I pleased you?" The voice distorter had shifted and made her sound as though she had a cold. It was, of course, impossible. That scourge hadn't attacked the fortress in thirty years. In all probability it would never attack it again. He nodded, grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. "It would be nice," he said, "if we could know one another." She smiled. "Some day." The clock gave warning, counting backwards through thirty seconds. Jord patted the woman's thigh in dismissal. "You may as well go now." S HE slid from the bed, neither reluctant nor impatient. Her simple tunic lay on the crimson rug where she had dropped it nine hours before. "Good-by, Soldier," she said. He was already on his way to the bathroom. If he should see her again, her yoice would be different, her hair would be different. She had no scars or physical aberrance that he could recognize her by. She was healthy, intelligent and normal, and therefore selected for breeding. So was he. Ask the geneticists. He had. In the bathroom, the clock told him to wash his face. Carefully he rubbed desensitizer on his mask, on the ten thousand artificial nerve endings that transcribed every motion of the living tissue it encased and magnified that motion a thousand times to the mightier motions of the machine. The desensitizer entered the porous material; the mask sagged and became transparent like a cellophane sack. He lifted it from his face. Two huge holes for eyes, a gaping rent of a mouth. He threw it with disgust into the depository. It would go back to the Neurological Division to be cleaned and repaired. He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his. The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone ; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn't come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off. He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin. He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he clinibed into the overall casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin. Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked aross the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body. He said "hello" experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn't. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to. H e went through the curtains into the tube-like corridor and joined the other silver warriors on their way to the mess hall. He knew no one of them, yet knew them all. In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. Until then the only faces he would see would be his ovn and those of the subnormal servers in the mess hall. He had no loyalties except to the fortress. The fortress was his past, present and future. He nodded a greeting to his server. "How are you today, Teddy?" The voice distorter madp him a gentle baritone. The moron stared at him blankly, not understanding what was spoken, not caring. It was mentally impossible for him to care about anyone and psychologically impossible for anyone to care about him. That was why he was allowed to serve in the mess. He set Jord's rations before by Richard Sheridan him in their plastic containers. A scientific measure of calories, proteins, vitamins, minerals and hay-like roughage. Jord wished the idiot was able to talk, but decided against holding a one-sided conversation with him. He used to do it quite often, taking pleasure in the shifting planes of his face, until he'd become sick with longing for a complete human being. He knew no one and only his psychiatrist knew him. The fortress was to him one complete body. The parts of that body could never be allowed to become more important than the total of those parts. It was the first thing a potential master of a Galbth II learned: The basic lesson in loneliness. He choked down the measured kilograms of roughage, saving the concentrates until the last when he could suck out the synthetic flavoring and delude himself for a moment that he was eating food. His fare consisted of the precise amount necessary to keep him operating at maximum efficiency and maintain optimum size. A two-pound variation in his weight would require a refitting. He smoked his last cigarette for the day and then made his way to the third section briefing room. There were twelve warriors in his section. Except for microscopic differences in their builds, there was little, if anything, to distinguish one from the other. They had no contact with anything as personalized as officers. Each warrior was a separate unit. The centralization of authority was complete. There was only the loudspeaker to command. For a time the warriors had been allowed to designate the voice as "The General," but it was soon discovered that they felt a particular loyalty to the name. The word was dropped. To designate authority, a warrior used the word: "Authority." This word also served as his official concept of politics. With all the strength of the fortress in the warriors, this was to be desired. Simultaneously, the speaker and the large television screen below it came to life. T he scene showed one of the fortress's carefully tilled roughage farnjs being looted by a large body of the natives -- the enemy that was determined to erase the last remnant of an empire that once held the entire solar system in its grasp. That meant nothing to Jord. It was the faces -- the faces that were, relatively, not even faces at all. Yet there were points of similarity within the gulf of difference -- and the faces. Faces without masks! The voice called "Authority" was expressionless and precise. As you can see a large and heavily armed contingent of the enemy has breached the dome of number seven surface-farm." The scout obligingly swiveled his television optic to show the fused gap in the huge plastic dome through which the natives were hauling incendiary materials to destroy the crop. The motionless bulk of a warrior lay close beside the opening. He had been downed by artillery, while above the force-field the ever present aircraft of the natives circled watchfully. Somewhere, the ancient generators had shorted long enough for the raiders to slip through. detachment has already been sent out," the voice continued. "The natives are to be forced back beyond the northern defense perimeter. Intelligence estimates eight hundred of the enemy and thirty fieldpieces. The fortress depends on you. You will not fail the fortress." On that note, the loudspeaker was silent. 'Tt seems to me," the warrior on Jord's right murmured as they moved towards the opening bulkhead at the far side of the room, "that we almost always fail." He wasn't contradicting, only remarking. Jord nodded. One warrior lost today, two last week, one the week before, and more before that. He saw the leviathans, # tons of machinery with great gaping holes in their bodies, saw the wires and conduits, armor and all the intricacies that went into a Galbth II. He saw them steaming, stumbling, falling -- respirators clogged -- smothering. Their motions weakened, their limbs failed, the warriors died. Two hundred years ago the planet had been a peaceful colony. Then with the collapse of the empire had come two hundred years of reversals, and they who had once been the overseers of harmless workers now found themselves struggling for the barest survival. Only the workers, the natives, had adapted. He went through the bulkhead into the immenseness of the cavern where the machines stood waiting in the shadowless light. Down the iron catwalks the silver warriors ran. Down to the mechanics, down to the surgeons with their surgeon fingers dead white beneath the operating lamps. All waiting. Waiting to fit the mechanism for a thousand eyes to the optic nerves, the amplifiers to the audio. ror. When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of by Richard Sheridan falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned. Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes -- His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below. "Check motion?" He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and # tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside. The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man. A ton of fist opened and closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain. "Check respirators." "Check." The technicians scurried from the cavern floor. The all-clear sounded and the roof slid open and a ramp grew up from the floor. His voice echoed through the cavern, mingling with the voices of the other warriors Joyous, thankful voices -- the horror had passed and they were alive again. On the surface it was winter. The m e t h a n e-frosted ground beneath the machines was like iron. Iron against steel feet rang in the heavy air. Wispy tendrils of steam rose from the great bodies. The respirators sucked and transformed ammonia and methane. The great feet left imprints in earth and tone. Jord exulted in the freedom of the surface, iw the long vistas of unwalled space, in the curve of a far away horizon. He exulted in his machine body, so human in its parts, so more than human in its size and capabilities. The column of the neck, the steel sinews ; every muscle, every ligament, every nerve of the human body had its counterpart in the machine. What man could do, the machine did. What affected man, in proportion, affected the machine. Even to pain, the machine was complete. He withdrew his optics and sent his telescope rising ten feet above his head, searching the gray land for the other detachment. A dozen miles away he could see the dome of the ravished farm. The little specks were scurrying to complete their destruction before the dreaded warriors should appear. They had blocked the entrance of the shallow valley in which the farm lay with their artillery. Behind it the gunners would try to hold off the warriors and give the rest time to escape. Not that it mattered. The enemy cared little for his losses. His telescope swiveled, found the scarp of an ancient bomb, ringed with what was probably fission produced obsidian, and rested on the bodies of the machines who had beaten his detachment to the scene and now came streaming out to join them. The two detachments merged, hesitated as each warrior assumed his position and began the attack. They would charge straight at the guns, so much a warrior cared for the marksmanship of former slaves -- so much a warrior cared for the power of native shells. AT eight miles the snouts of the cannons began to belch. The gunnery was high. The barrage passed harmlessly overhead. The first strike was for him. The armor-piercing shell clanged and flattened out against his chest, staggering him back. He rallied, caught his balance, sped on. He almost pitied the limited inventiveness of the natives, whose genius ended when they drove man into the fortresses. Another shell. A warrior whirled and stumbled. Jord crashed into him steadied him. The explosions blended into an endless sound. He felt a shell bounce from his shoulder, taking six optics with it and leaving the smell of scorched steel. They were too thick now to dodge, too close to bear. Earth and stone sprayed up from a sudden crater before him. He wheeled. Now they were in a range where the shells could disable an arm or leg. An arm! A stiff-hung, motionless limb of steel. The rush had brought them to the artillery. Their feet trampled the ancient guns. They smashed at belching muzzles with hammer fists. They had breached the defenses. The natives had fled. In minutes they would be trampling the fleeing enemy. Then the earth erupted... Jord had only one leg still functioning when he regained consciousness. One leg and perhaps eight of his optics. His audio was dead and there was something wrong with his respirator. He had to fight to keep down the panic. A warrior who had been trapped inside his machine once told him what it was like inside a Galbth II when you couldn't move, or help yourself. If you but closed your eyes you imagined yourself inside a shell, and that shell inside a larger shell, and that inside a still larger shell until, after a hundred shells, you could imagine your machine, still true to by Richard Sheridan your form, lying helpless and twisted on the ground. There was no way you could get out of your machine without the help of the mechanics. Even if there were it' was impossible to exist on the surface. You had to lie where you fell. Or, if possible, make your way back as best you could to your lock. He tried moving. His good leg sawed the air like a giant flail. There was some motion in his chest, but that was all. He erected all the optics he could control and found himself lying on his stomach, dismembered. About twenty yards to the right he saw the other leg of his machine lying across a warrior who seemed to have no motion at all. As far as he could see, no one had escaped. Warriors and parts of warriors were strewn all about him. He swiveled his optics in anxiety. If he were to be rescued, it must be soon. Already the air was foul and he was having trouble focusing his optics. He wanted to get out of the machine. He never wanted anything as much as he wanted this. The smell of metal and the taste of metal strangled him. He wanted to get out. Worse than he wanted faces, worse than he wanted identity, worse than he wanted to be able to live on the surface. He could feel all the weight of the machine on his body. The vocalizer was still on and he moaned into the dirt. He tried to raise his optics again, but the power had somehow failed. Many-faced, congealing darkness drew near. He rushed into it. T he Genocide Squad was the first to go into the crater. The last warrior had ceased moving. Later the salvagers would come to collect the precious metals. They drilled Jord's machine open but, luckily, by this time he was dead. "Which one next?" he asked, clambering awkwardly from the hole in the machine's back. He was a native and, except for certain functional differences in his construction, was little distinguished from other natives. But normalcy is relative. The normalcy of a native may be radically different from that of a fortress dweller. "We are fortunate the bomb didn't destroy more of these b o d i e s," he said, rejoining his partner at the side of the warrior. "What is it like, inside?" his partner asked curiously. The Genocide Monitor stopped for a moment and appraised the vast bulk. He had long ago ceased to be either fascinated or repelled by the soft, unfunctional bodies of fortress dwellers. "Just another human," the    The machine was not perfect. It could be tricked. shock anyone with illusions about well dressed young women, Sandra Lea Grayling cursed the day she had persuaded the Chicago Space Mirror that there would be all sorts of human interest stories to be picked up at the first international grandmaster chess tournament in which an electronic computing machine was entered. Not that there weren't enough humans around, it was the interest that was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses, were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, WmWmWmWmWmWm' It could make mistakes. And it could learn! had Slavic or Scandinavian on walls, small peg-in sets features, and talked foreign dragged from side pockets and languages. manipulated rapidly as part of They yakked interminably, the conversational ritual and The only ones who didn't still smaller folding sets in were scurrying individuals which the pieces were the tiny with the eager-zombie look of magnetized disks used for officials. playing in free-fall. Chess sets were everywhere There were signs featuring -- big ones on tables, still biglargely mysterious combinasure about the last three. The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance. H er last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the first American manned circum-lunar satellite -- and the five alternate pairs who hadn't made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra much further out of the world. Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English were not particularly helpful. Samples: "They say the Machine has been programmed to play nothing but pure Barcza System and Indian Defenses -- and the Dragon Formation if anyone pushes the King Pawn." "Hah! In that case..." "The Russians have come with ten trunkfuls of prepared variations and they'll gang up on the Machine at adjournments. What can one New Jersey computer do against four Russian grandmasters?" "I heard the Russians have been programmed -- with hypnotic cramming and somnobriefing. Votbinnik had a nervous breakdown." "Why, the Machine hasn't even a Haupturnier or an intercollegiate won. It'll over its head be playing." "Yes, but maybe like Capa at San Sebastian or Morphy York. The Russians will look like potzers." "Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and Circum-Terra?" "Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating." Sandra's chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about the game of chess -- a point that she had slid over in conferring with the powers at the Space Mirror, but that now had begun to weigh on her. How wonderful it would be, she dreamed, to walk out this minute, find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way. "Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?" "You're durn tootin' she would!" Sandra replied in a rush, and then looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts. It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat thinned down Peter Lorre -- there was that same impression of the happy Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short, making a silvery nap. His pincenez had quite thick lenses. But in sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing a pearlgray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra's -- a circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow conspirators. "Hey, wait a minute," she protested just the same. He had already taken her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide stairs. "How did you know I wanted a drink?" "I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing," he replied, keeping them moving. "Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your lovely throat." "I didn't suppose they'd serve drinks here." "But of course.". They were already mounting the stairs. "What would chess be without coffee or schnapps?" "Okay, lead on," Sandra said. "You're the doctor." "Doctor?" He smiled widely. "You know, I like being called that." "Then the name is yours as long as you want it -- Doc." M eanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising. He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned waiter materialized. "For myself black coffee," he said. "For mademoiselle rhine wine and seltzer?" "That'd go fine." Sandra leaned back. "Confidentially, Doc, I was having trouble swallowing...well, just about everything here." He nodded. "You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess," he assured her. "It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics -- or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and beautiful young lady to this #-square madhouse?" Sandra briefly told him her storv and her predicament. By the time they were served. Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other. "You have one great advantage," he told her. "You know nothing whatsoever of chess -- so you will be able to write about it understandably for your readers." He swallowed half his demitasse and smacked his lips. "As for the Machine -- you do know, I suppose, that it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking like a late medieval knight in armor?" "Yes, Doc, but..." Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.  "Wait." He lifted a finger. 'T think I know what you're going to ask. You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn't work perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?" Sandra grinned and nodded. Dot's ability to interpret her mind was as comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping. He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced them. If you had," he said, "a as the Machine, it would take them all the time there ever will be in the universe just to play through all the possible games of chess, not to mention the time needed to classify those games into branching families of wins for White, wins for Black and draws, and the additional time required to trace out chains of keymoves leading always to wins. So the Machine can't play chess like God. What the Machine can do is examine all the likely lines of play for about eight moves ahead -- that is, four moves each for White and Black -- and then decide which is the best move on the basis of capturing enemy pieces, working toward checkmate, establishing a powerful central position and so on. sounds like the A way a man would play a game," Sandra observed. '"Look ahead a little way and try to make a plan. You know, like getting out trumps in bridge or setting up a finesse." "Exactly!" Doc beamed at her approvingly. "The Machine is like a man, A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human interest already, even in the Machine." Sandra nodded. "Does a human chess player -- a grandmaster, I mean -- ever look eight moves ahead in a game?" "Most assuredly he does! In crucial situations, say where there's a chance of winning at once by trapping the enemy king, he examines many more moves ahead than that -- thirty or forty even. The Machine is probably programmed to recognize such situations and do something of the same sort, though we can't be sure from the information World Business Machines has released. But in most chess positions the possibilities are so very nearly unlimited that even a grandmaster can only look a very few moves ahead and must rely on his judgment and experience and artistry. The equivalent of those in the Machine is the directions fed into it before it plays a game." "You mean the programming?" "Indeed yes! The programming is the crux of the problem of the chess-playing computer. The first practical model, reported by Bernstein and which looked four moves ahead, was programmed so that it had a greedy worried tendency to grab at enemy pieces and to retreat its own whenever they were attacked. It had a personality like that of a certain kind of chessplaying dub -- a dull-brained woodpusher afraid to take the slightest risk of losing material -- but a dub who could almost always beat an utter novin the hall operates about a ask me how, I'm no physicist, but it depends on the new transistors and something they call hypervelocity, which in turn depends on keeping parts of the Machine at a temperature near absolute zero. However, the result is that the Machine can see eight moves ahead and is capable of being programmed much more craftily." the first machine, you say. Doc? And yet it only sees twice as many moves ahead?" Sandra objected. "There is a geometrical progression involved there," he told her with a smile. "Believe me, eight moves ahead is a lot of moves when you remember that the Machine is errorlessly examining every one of thousands of variations. Flesh-and blood chess masters have lost games by blunders they could have avoided by looking only one or two moves ahead. The Machine will make no such oversights. Once again, you see, you have the human factor, in this case working for the Machine." "Savilly, I have been looking allplace for you!" A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black, gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue. beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats, about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people still wandering about. On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark. One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other four -- the one above the Machine. Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine -- a bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few graysmocked men. Two of them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were attaching it to the Siamese clock. Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who never made a mistake... "Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf." She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod. 'T should tell you, Igor," Doc continued, "that Miss Grayling represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you have a message for her readers." The shock-h e a d e d man's eyes flashed. "I most certainly do !" At that moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and seltzer. Jandorf seized Doc's new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray with a flourish and drew himself up. your readers. Miss A Grayling," he proclaimed, fiercely arching his eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, "that I, Igor Jandorf, will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality ! Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold -- I, who have played # blindfold games simultaneously ! Its owners refuse me. I have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit -- an offer no true grandmaster would dare ignore. Again they refuse me. I predict that the Machine will play like a great oaf -- at least against me. Repeat: I, Igor Jandorf, by the living force of my human personality, will defeat the Machine. Do you have that? You can remember it?" "Oh yes," Sandra assured him, "but there are some other questions I very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf." "I am sorry. Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten minutes they start the clocks." While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's playing session Doc reordered his coffee. "One expects it of Jandorf,' he explained to Sandra with a philosophic shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. "At least he didn't take your wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up." "Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I haven't offended Mis -- Master Jandorf so that he doesn't -- " "Don't worry about that. Wild horses couldn't keep Jandorf away from a press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning. That's a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds to make a move. Which I don'tsuppose would give the Machine time to look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the usual international rate of # moves an hour, and -- " 'Ts that why they've got all those crazy clocks?" Sandra interrupted. "Oh, yes. Chess clocks measure the time each player takes in making his moves. When a player makes a move he presses a button that shuts his clock off and turns his opponent's on. If a player uses too much time, he loses as surely as if he were checkmated. Now since the Machine will almost certainly be programmed to take an equal amount of time on successive moves, a rate of # moves an hour means it will have # minutes a move -- and it will need every second of them ! Incidentally it was typical Jandorf bravado to make a point of a blindfold challenge -- just as if the Machine weren't playing blindfold itself. Or is the Machine blindfold? How do you think of it?" "Gosh , I don't know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf has played # games at once blindfolded? I can't believe that." course not!" Doc assured her. "It was only # and he lost two of those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It's in his blood." "He's one of the Russians, isn't he ?" Sandra asked. "Igor?" Doc chuckled. "Not exactly," he said gently. "He is originally a Pole and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don't you?" Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard. Bela Grabo, Hungary Igor Jandorf, Argentina Dr. S. Krakatower, France grammed by Simon Great) Tournament Director: Dr. Jan Vanderhoef Sherevski vs. Serek Jal vs. Angler Jandorf vs. Votbinnik Lysmov vs. Krakatower Grabo vs. Machine "Gripes, Doc, they all sound like they were Russians," Sandra said after a bit. "Except IZ by FR#TZ LEfBCfl I the boy wonder, isn't he?" Doc nodded. "Not such a boy any longer, though. He's... Well, speak of the Devil's children... Miss Grayling, I have the honor of presenting to you the only grandmaster ever to have been ex-chesschampion of the United States while still technically a mitus Angler." A tall, sharply-dressed young man with a hatchet face pressed the old man back into his chair. "How are you. Savvy, old boy old boy?" he demanded. "Still chasing the girls, I see." "Can't take it, huh?" Angler straightened up somewhat. "Hey waiter ! Where's that chocolate malt? I don't want it next year. About that ex-, though. I was swindled. Savvy. I was robbed." some asperity. "Miss Grayling is a journalist. She would like to have a statement from you as to how you will play against the Machine." A ngler grinned and shook his head sadly. "Poor old Machine," he said. "I don't know why they take so much trouble polishing up that pile of tin just so that I can give it a hit in the head. I got a hatful of moves it'll burn out all its tubes trying to answer. And if it gets too fresh, how about you and me giving its loW-temperature section the hotfoot. Savvy? The monthough. That first prize will just fit the big hole in my bank account." "I know you haven't the time now. Master Angler," Sandra said rapidly, "but if after the playing session you could grant me -- " "Sorry, babe," Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. "I'm dated up ftr two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there !" And he went charging off. Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled. "Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?" she said. Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. "You must excuse them, though," he said. "They really get so little recognition or recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal of ego to play greatly." "I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this tournament?" "Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the pfestige. They want to score a point over their great rival." "But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them," Sandra pointed out. "True," Doc agreed thoughtsure... It's the prize money they've put up, of course, that's brought the world's greatest players here. Otherwise half of them would be holding off in the best temperamental-artist style. For chess players the prize money is fabulous -- #, with # for first place, and all expenses paid for all players. There's never been anything like it. Soviet Russia is the only country that has ever supported and rewarded her best chess players at all adequately. I think the Russian players are here because UNeration Internationale d e s E c h e c s -- the international chess organization) are also backing the tournament. And perhaps because the Kremlin is hungry for a little prestige now that its space program is sagging." "But if a Russian doesn't take first place it will be a black eye for them." Doc frowned. "True, in a sense. They must feel very sure... Here they are now." F our men were crossing the center of the hall, which was clearing, toward the tables at the other end. Doubtless they just happened to be going two by two in close formation, but it gave Sandra the feeling of a phalanx. "The first two are Lysmov and Votbinnik," Doc told her. "It isn't often that you see the current champion of the world -- Votbinnik -- and an exchampion arm in arm. There are two other persons in the tournament who have held that honor -- Jal and Vanderhoef the director, way back." "Will whoever wins this tournament become champion?" "Oh no. That's decided by two-player matches -- a very long business -- after elimination tournaments between leading contenders. This tournament is a round robin : each player plays one game with every other player. That means nine rounds." "Anyway there are an awful lot of Russians in the tournament," Sandra said, consulting her program. "Four out of ten Bela Grabo, Hungary -- that's a satellite. And Sherevsky and Krakatower are Russiansounding names." "The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tourneiment represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength between the two countries," Doc said judiciously. "Chess mastery moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria and the New World. Now it's R u s s i a -- including of course the Russians who have run away from Russia, But don't think there aren't a lot of good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact, there are a lot of them here around us. though perhaps you don't think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short baldheaded man?" "You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf ?" "Yes. Now that's one with a lot of human interest. Moses Sherevsky. Been champion of the United States many times. A very strict Orthodox Jew. Can't play chess on Fridays or on Saturdays before sundown." He chuckled. "Why, there's even a storv going around that one rabbi told Sherevsky it would be unlawful for him to play against the Machine because it is techn i c a I I y a golem -- the clay Frankenstein's monster of Hebrew legend." Sandra asked, "What about Grabo and Kratower?" D OC gave a short scornful laugh. "Krakatower! Don't pay any attention to him. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play in this tournament ! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down on his knees and cried -- and all the time his eyes on that expense money and the last place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically of beating them all ! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old Krakatower." "Take it easy. Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting article. ' Can you point him out to me?" "You can tell hirrl bv his long white beard with coffee stains. I don't see it anywhere, though. Perhaps he's shaved it off for the occasion. It would be like that antique womanizer to develop senile delusions of youthfulness." "And Grabo?" Sandra pressed, suppressing a smile at the intensity of Doc's animosity. Doc's eyes grew thoughtful. "About Bela Grabo (why are three out of four Hungarians named Bela?) I will tell you only this: That he is a very Machine is very lucky to have drawn him as its first opponent." He would not amplify his statement. Sandra studied the scoreboard again. "This Simon Great who's down as programming the Machine. He's a famous physicist, I suppose?" "By no means. That was the trouble with some of the early chess-playing machines -- they were programmed by scientists. No, Simon Great is a psychologist who at one time was a leading contender for the world's chess championprisingly shrewd to pick him for the programming job. Let me tell you -- No, better yet -- " Doc shot to his feet, stretched an arm on high and called out sharply, "Simon !" A man some four tables away waved back and a moment later came over. "What is it, Savilly?" he asked. "There's hardly any time, you know." T he newcomer was of middle height, compact of figure and feature, with graying hair cut short and combed sharply back. Doc spoke his piece for Sandra. Simon Great smiled thinly. "Sorry," he said, "But I am making no predictions and we are giving out no advance information on the programming of the Machine. As you know, I have had to fight the Players' Committee tooth and nail on all sorts of points about that and they have won most of them. I am not permitted to re-program the Machine at adjournments -- only between games (I did insist on that and get it!) And if the Machine breaks down during a game, its clock keeps running on it. My men are permitted to make repairs -- if they can work fast enough." "That makes it very tough Oil you," Sandra put in. "The Machine isn't allowed any weaknesses." Great nodded soberly. "And now I must go. They've almost finished the count-down, as one of my technicians keeps on calling it. Very pleased to have met. you. Miss Grayling -- I'll check with our PR man on that interview. Be seeing you. Savvy." The tiers of seats were filled now and the central space almost clear. Officials were shooing off a few knots of lingerers. Several of the grandmasters, including all four Russians, were seated at their tables. Press and company cameras were flashing. The four smaller wallboards lit Up with the pieces in the opening position -- white for White and red for Black. Simon Great stepped over the red velvet cord and more flash bulbs went off. "You know. Doc," Sandra said, "I'm a dog to suggest this, but what if this whole thing were a big fake? What if Simon Great were really playing the Machine's moves? There would surely be some way for his electricians to rig -- " Doc laughed happily -- and so loudly that some people at the adjoining tables frowned. "Miss Grayling, that is a wonderful idea! I will probably steal it for a short story. I still manage to write and place a few in England. No, I do not think that is at all likesuch a fraud. Great is ccwnpletely out of practice for actual tournament play, though not for chess-thinking. The difference in style between a computer and a man would be evident to any expert. Great's own style is remembered and would be recognized -- though, come to think of it, his style was often described as being machinelike..." For a moment Doc's eyes became thoughtful. Then he smiled again. "But no, the idea is impossible. Vanderhoef as Tournament Director has played two or three games with the Machine to assure himself that it operates legitimately ,and has grandmaster skill." "Did the Machine beat him?" Sandra asked. D OC shrugged. "The scores weren't released. It was very hush-hush. But about your idea. Miss Grayling -- did you ever read about Maelzel's famous chessplaying automaton of the #th Century? That one too was supposed to work by machinery (cogs and gears, not electricity) but actually it had a man hidden inside it -- your Edgar Poe exposed the fraud in a famous article. In my story I think the chess robot will break down while it is being demchaser and the young inventor will have to win its game for it to cover up and swing the deal. Only the millionaire's daughter, who is really a better player than either of them... yes, yes! Your 'Ambrose Bierce too wrote a story about a chessplaying robot of the clickety-clankgrr kind who murdered his creator, crushing him like an iron grizzly bear when the man won a game from him. Tell me. Miss Grayling, do you find yourself imagining this Machine putting out angry tendrils to strangle its opponents, or beaming rays of death and hypnotism at them? I can imagine..." While Doc chattered happily on about chessplaying robots and chess stories, Sandra found herself thinking about him. A writer of some sort evidently and a terrific chess buff. Perhaps he was an actual medical doctor. She'd read something about two or three coming over with the Russian squad. But Doc certainly didn't sound like a Soviet citizen. He was older than she'd first assumed. She could see that now that she was listening to him less and looking at him more. Tired, too. Only his dark-circled eyes shone with unquenchable youth. A useful old guy, whoever he was. An hour ago she'd been sure she was going to muff this assignment completely and now she had it laid out cold. For the umpteenth time in her career Sandra shied away from the guilty thought that she wasn't a writer at all or even a reporter, she just used dime-a-dozen female attractiveness to rope a susceptible man (young, old, American, Russian) and pick his brain.  She realized suddenly that the whole hall had become very quiet. Doc was the only person still talking and people were again looking at them disapprovingly. All five wall-boards were lit up and the changed position of a few pieces showed that opening moves had been made on four of them, including the Machine's. The central space between the tiers of seats was completely clear now, except for one man hurrying across it in their direction with the rapid yet quiet, almost tip-toe walk that seemed to mark all the officials. Like mortician assistants, she thought. He rapidly mounted the stairs and halted at the top to look around searchingly. His gaze lighted on their table, his eyebrows went up, and he made a beeline for Doc. Sandra wondered if she should warn him that he was about to be shushed. The official laid a hand on Doc's shoulder. "Sir!" he said agitatedly. "Do you realize that they've started your clock. Dr. Krakatower?" Doc was grinning at her. "Yes, it's true enough. Miss Grayling," he said. "I trust you will pardon the deception, though it was hardly one, even technically. Every word I told you about Dirty Old Krakatower is literally true. Except the long white beard -- he never wore a beard after he was # -- that part was an out-and-out lie! Yes, yes! I will be along in a moment ! Do not worry, the spectators will get their money's worth out with its expense account buy my soul -- that belongs to the young lady here." Doc rose, lifted her hand and kissed it. "Thank you, mademoiselle, for a charming interlude. I hope it will be repeated. Incidentally, I should say that besides... (Stop pulling at me, man! -- there can't be five minutes on my clock yet !)... that besides being Dirty Old Krakatower, grandmaster emeritus, I am also the special correspondent of the London Times. It is always pleasant to chat with a colleague. Please do not hesitate to use in your articles any of the ideas I tossed out, if you find them worthy -- I sent in my own first dispatch two hours ago. Yes, yes, I come! Au revoir, mademoiselle!" He was at the bottom of the stairs when Sandra jumped up and hurried to the balustrade. "Hey, Doc!" she called. He turned. "Good luck !" she shouted and waved. He kissed his hand to her and went on. People glared at her then and a horrified official came hurrying. Sandra made big frightened eyes at him, but she couldn't quite hide her grin. IV roughly means endurance -- "sitting flesh" or "buttock meat") is the quality needed above all others by tournament chess players -- and their audiences. After Sandra had watched the games (the players' faces, rather -- she had a really good pair of zoomer glasses) for a half hour or so, she had gone to her hotel room, written her first article (interview with the famous Dr. Krakatower), sent it in and then come back to the hall to see how the games had turned out. They were still going on, all five of them. The press section was full, but two boys and a girl of high-school age obligingly made room for Sandra on the top tier of seats and she tuned in on their whispered conversation. The jargon was recognizably related to that which she'd gotten a dose of on the floor, but gamier. Players did not sacrifice pawns, they sacked them. No one was ever defeated, only busted. Pieces weren't lost but blown. The Ruy Lopez was the Dirty Old Roodcy -- and incidentally a certain set of opening moves named after a long-departed Spanish churchman, she now discovered from Ivc, Bill and Judy, whose sympathetic help she won by frequent loans of her zoomer glasses. The four-hour time control point-two hours and # moves for each player -- had been passed while she was sending in her article, she learned, and they were well on their way toward the next control point -- an hour more and # moves for each player -- after which unfinished games would be adjourned and continued at a special morning session. Sherevsky had had to make # moves in two minutes after taking an hour earlier on just one move. But that was nothing out of the ordinary, Dave had assured her in the same breath, Sherevsky was always letting himself get into "fantastic time-pressure" and then wrigwas apparently headed for a win over Serek. Score one for Sandra thought proudly. Votbinnik had Jandorf practically in Zugzwang (his pieces all tied up. Bill Explained) and the Argentinian would be busted shortly. Through the glasses Sandra could see Jandorf's thick chest rise and fall as he glared murderously at the board in front of him. By contrast Votbinnik looked like a man lost in reverie. Dr. Krakatower had lost a pawn to Lysmov but was hanging on grimly. However, Dave would not give a plugged nickle for his chanqes against the former world's champion, because "those old ones always weaken in the sixth hour." "You for-get the bio-logical mir-acle of Doc-tor Las-ker," Bill and Judy chanted as one. "Shut up," Dave warned them. An official glared angrily from the floor and shook a finger. Much later Sandra discovered that Dr. Emanuel Lasker was a philosophermathematician who, after holding the world's championship for # years, had won a very strong tournament (New York #) at the age of # and later almost won another (Moscow #) at the age of #. carefully through her glasses. He looked terribly tired now, almost a death's head. Something tightened in her chest and she looked away quickly. The Angler-Jal and GraboMachine games were still ding-dong contests, Dave told her. If anything, Grabo had a slight advantage. The Machine was "on the move," meaning that Grabo had just made a move and was waiting the automaton's reply. The Hungarian was about the most restless "waiter" Sandra could imagine. He twisted his long legs constantly and writhed his shoulders and about every five seconds he ran his hands back through his unkempt tassle of hair. Once he yawned selfconsciously, straightened himself and sat very compactly. But almost immediately he was writhing again. The Machine had its own mannerisms, if you could call them that. Its dim, unobtrusive telltale lights were winking on and off in a fairly rapid, random pattern. Sandra got the impression that from time to time Grabo's eyes were trying to follow their blinking, like a man watching fireflies. Simon Great sat impassively behind a bare table next to the Machine, his five graysmocked technicians grouped around him. A flushed-faced, tall, distinguished-looking elderly gentleman was standing by the Machine's console. Dave told Sandra it was Dr. Vanderhoef, the Tournament Director, one-time champion of the world. "Another old potzer like Krakatower, but with sense enough to know when he's licked," Bill characterized harshly. "Youth, ah, un-van-quishable youth," Judy chanted happily by herself. "Flashing like a meteor across the chess fir-ma-ment. Morphy, Angler, Judy Kaplan..." "Shut up! They really will throw us out," Dave warned her and then explained in whispers to Sandra that Vanderhoef and his assistants had the nervous-making job of feeding into the Machine the moves made by its opponent, 'so everyone vsrill know it's on the level, I guess." He added, "It means the Machine loses a few seconds every move, between the time Grabo punches the clock and the time Vanderhoef gets the move fed into the Machine." Sandra nodded. The players were making it as hard on the Machine as possible, she decided with a small rush of sympathy. tiny movement of the gadget attached from the Machine to the clocks on Grabo's table and a faint click. But Grabo almost leapt out of his skin. Simultaneously a red castletopped piece (one of the Machine's rooks, Sandra was informed) moved four squares sideways on the big electric board above the Machine. An official beside Dr. Vanderhoef went Qver to Grabo's board and carefully moved the corresponding piece. Grabo seemed about to make some complaint, then apparently thought better of it and plunged into brooding cogitation over the board, elbows on the table, both hands holding his head and fiercely massaging his scalp. The Machine let loose with an unusually rapid flurry of blinking. Grabo straightened up, seemed again about to make a complaint, then once more to repress the impulse. Finally he moved a piece and punched his clock. Dr. Vanderhoef irtimediately flipped four levers on the Machine's console and Grabo's move appeared on the electric board. Grabo sprang up, went over to the red velvet cord and motioned agitatedly to Vanderhoef. There was a short conference, inaudible at the distance, during which Grabo waved his arms and Vanderhoef grew more flushed. Finally the latter went over to Simon Great and said something, apparently with some hesitancy. But Great smiled obligingly, sprang to his feet, and in turn spoke to his technicians, who immediately fetched and unfolded several large screens and set them in front of the Machine, masking the blinklights. Blindfolding it, Sandra found herself thinking. Dave chuckled. "That's already happened once while you were out," he told Sandra. "I guess seeing the lights blinking makes Grabo nervous. But then not seeing them makes him nervous. Just watch." "The Machine has its own mysterious pow-wow-wers," Judy chanted. "That's what you think," Bill told her. "Did you know Evil Eye Bixel out of Brooklyn to put the whammy on the Machine? S'fact." . pow-wow-wers unknown to mere mortals of flesh and blood -- " "Shut up!" Dave hissed. "Now youVe done it. Here comes old Eagle Eye. Look, I don't know you two. I'm with this lady here." B ela Grabo was suffering acute tortures. He had a winning attack, he knew it. The Machine was counterattacking, but unstrategically, desperately, in the style of a Frank Marshall complicating the issue and hoping for a swindle. All Grabo had to do, he knew, was keep his head and not blunder -- not throw away a queen, say, as he had to old Vanderhoef at Brussels, or overlook a mate in two, as he had against Sherevsky at Tel Aviv. The memory of those unutterably black moments and a dozen more like them returned to haunt him. Never if he lived a thousand years would he be free of them. For the tenth time in the last two minutes he glanced at his clock. He had fifteen minutes in which to make five moves. He wasn't in timepressure, he must remember that. He mustn't make a move on impulse, he mustn't let his treacherous hand leap out without waiting for instructions from its guiding brain. First prize in this tournament meant incredible wealth -- transportation money and hotel bills for more than a Q# score of future tournaments. But more than that, it was one more chance to blazon before the world his true superiority rather than the fading reputation of it. "... Bela Grabo, haps his last chance. When, in the name of Heaven, was the Machine going to make its next move? Surely it had already taken more than four minutes! But a glance at its clock showed him that hardly half that time had gone by. He decided he had made a mistake in asking again for the screens. It was easier to watch those damned lights blink than have them blink in his imagination. Oh, if chess could only be played in intergalactic space, in the black privacy of one's thoughts. But there had to be the physical presence of the opponent with his (possibly deliberate) unnerving mannerisms -- Lasker and his cigar, Capablanca and his red necktie, Nimzowitsch and his nervous contortions (very like Bela Grabo's, though the latter did not see it that way). And now this ghastly flashing, humming, stinking, button-banging metal monster ! Actually, he told himself, he was being asked to play two opponents, the Machine and Simon Great, a sort of consultation team. It wasn't fair! T he Machine hammered its button and rammed its queen across the electric board. In Grabos imagination it was like an explosion. , Grabo held onto his nerves with an effort and plunged into a maze of calculations. Once he came to, like a man who has been asleep, to realize that he was wondering whether the lights were still blinking behind the screens while he was making his move. Did the Machine really analyze at such times or were the lights just an empty trick? He forced his mind back to the problems of the game, decided on his move, checked the board twice for any violent move he might have missed, noted on his clock that he'd taken five minutes, checked the board again very rapidly and then put out his hand and made his move -- with the fiercely suspicious air of a boss compelled to send an extremely unreliable underling on an all-important errand. Then he punched his clock, sprang to his feet, and once more waved for Vanderhoef. Thirty seconds later the Tournament Director, very red-faced now, was saying in a low voice, almost pleadingly, "But Bela, I cannot keep asking them to change the screens. Already they have been up twice and down once to please you. Moving them disturbs the other players and surely isn't good for your own peace of mind. Oh, Bela, my dear Bela -- " Vanderhoef broke off. Grabo knew he had been going to say something improper but from the heart, such as, "For God's sake don't blow this game out of nervousness now that you have a win in sight" -- a n d this sympathy somehow made the Hungarian furious. "I have other complaints which I will make formally after the game," he said harshly, quivering with rage. "It is a disgrace the way that mechanism punches the timeclock button. It will crack the case ! The Machine never stops humming! And it stinks of ozone and hot metal, as if it were about to explode !" "It cannot explode, Bela. Please !" "No, but it threatens to! And you know a threat is always more effective than an actual attack! As for the screens, they must be taken down at once, I demand it!" "Very well, Bela, very well, it will be done. Compose yourself." Grabo did not at once return to his table -- he could not have endured to sit still for the moment -- but paced along the line of tables, snatching looks at the other games in progress. When he looked back at the big electric board, he saw that the Machine had made a move although he hadn't heard it punch the clock. He rushed back and studied the board without sitting down. Why, the Machine had made a stupid move, he saw with a rush of exaltation. At that moment the last screen being folded started to fall over, but one of the gray-smocked men caught it deftly. G r a b o flinched and his hand darted out and moved a piece. He heard someone grasp. Vanderhoef. TT got very quiet. The four soft clicks of the move being fed into the Machine were like the beat of a muffled driTm. There was a buzzing in Grabo's ears. He looked down a': the board in horror. The Machine blinked, blinked once more and then, although barely twenty seconds had elapsed, moved a rook. On the glassy gray margin above the Machine's electric board, large red words flamed on : Up in the stands Dave squee#:ed Sandra's arm. "He's done it! He's let himself be swindled." "You mean the Machine has beaten Grabo?" Sandra asked. "What else?" "Can you be sure? Just like that?" "Of cour... Wait a second... Yes, I'm sure." "Mated in three like a potzer," Bill confirmed. ' "The poor old boob," Judy sighed. Down on the floor Bela Grabo sagged. The assistant director moved toward him quickly. But then the Hungarian straightened himself a little. "I resign," he said softly. The red words at the top of the board were wiped out and briefly replaced, in white, by: And then a third statement, also in white, flashed on for a few seconds : Bela Grabo clenched his fists and bit his teeth. Even the Machine was being sorry for him! He stiffly walked out of the hall. It was a long, long walk. V neared. Serek, the exchange down but with considerable time on his clock, sealed his forty-sixth move against Sherevsky and handed the envelope to Vanderhoef. It would be opened when the game was resumed at the morning session. Dr. Krakatower studied the position on his board and then quietly tipped over his king. He sat there for a moment as if he hadn't the strength to rise. Then he shook himself a little, smiled, got up, clasped hands briefly with Lysmov and wandered over to watch the AnglerJal game. Jandorf had resigned his game to Votbinnik some minutes ago, rather more surlily. After a while Angler sealed a move, handing it to Vanderhoef with a grin just as the little red flag dropped on his clock, indicating he'd used every second of his time. Up in the stands Sandra worked her shoulders to get a kink out of her back. She'd noticed several newsmen hurrying off to report in the Machine's first win. She was thankful that her job was limited to special articles. "Chess is a pretty intense game," she remarked to Dave. He nodded. "It's a killer. I don't expect to live beyond forty myself." "Thirty," Bill said. "Twenty-five is enough time to be a meteor," said Judy. Sandra thought to herself: the Unbeat Generation. N ext day Sherevsky played the Machine to a dead-level ending. Simon Great offered a draw for the Machine (over an unsuccessful interfering protest from Jandorf that this constituted making a move for the Machine) but Sherevsky refused and sealed his move. "He wants to have it proved to him that the Machine can play end games," Dave commented to Sandra up in the stands. "I don't blame him. At the beginning of today's session Sandra had noticed that Bill and Judy were following each game in a very new-looking #::ok they shared jealously between them. Wont look new for long, Sandra had thought. "That's the 'Bible' they got there," Dave had explained. ings. It lists all the best openmoves in chess, thousands and thousands of variations. That is, what masters think are the best moves. The moves that have won in the past, really. We chipped in together to buy the latest edition -- the #th -- just hot off the press," he had finished proudly. Now with the MachineSherevsky ending the center of interest, the kids were consulting another book, one with grimy, dog-eared pages.  "That's the 'New Testament' -- Basic Chess Endings" Dave said when he noticed her looking. "There's so much you must know in endings that it's amazing the Machine can play them at all. I guess as the pieces get fewer it starts to look deeper." feeling virtuous. She had got her interview with Jandorf and then this morning one with Grabo ("How it Feels to Have a Machine OutThink You"). The latter had made her think of herself as a real vulture of the press, ciras cling over the doomed. The Hungarian had seemed in a positively suicidal depression. One newspaper article made much of the Machine's "psychological tactics," hinting that the blinking lights were designed to hypnotize opponents. The general press coverage V#.S somewhat startling. A game that in America normally rated only a fine-print column in the back sections of a very few Sunday papers was now getting boxes on the front page. The defeat of a man by a machine seemed everywhere to awaken nervous feelings of insecurity, like the launching of the first sputnik. Sandra had rather hesitantly sought out Dr. Krakatower during the close of the morning session of play, still feeling a little guilty from her interview with Grabo. But Doc iiad seemed happy to see her and quite recovered from last night's defeat, though when she had addressed him as "Master Krakatower" he had winced and said, "Please, not that!" Another session of coffee and wine-and-seltzer had resulted in her getting an introduction to her first Soviet grandmaster, Serek, who had proved to be unexpectedly charming. He had just managed to draw his game with Sherevsky (to the great amazement of the kibitzers, Sandra learned) and was most obliging about arranging for an interview. Not to be outdone in gallantry, Doc had insisted on escorting Sandra to her seat in the stands -- at the price of once more losing a couple of minutes on his clock. As a result her stock went up considerably with Dave, Bill and Judy. Thereafter they treated anything she had to say with almost annoying deference -- Bill especially, probably in penance for his thoughtless cracks at Doc. Sandra later came to suspect that the kids had privately decided that she was Dr. Krakatower's mistress -- probably a new one because she was so scandalously ignorant of chess. She did not disillusion them. Doc lost again in the second round -- to Jal. I N the third round Lysmov defeated the Machine in # moves. There was a flaring of flashbulbs, a rush of newsmen to the phones, jabbering in the stands and much comment and analysis that was way over Sandra's head -- except she got the impression that Lysmov had done something tricky. The general emotional reaction in America, as reflected by the newspapers, was not too happy. One read between the lines that for the Machine to beat a man was bad, but for a Russian to beat an American machine was worse. A widelyread sports columnist, two football coaches, and several rural politicians announced that chess was a morbid game played only by weirdies. Despite these thick-chested heman statements, the elusive mood of insecurity deepened. Besides the excitement of the Lysmov win, a squabble had arisen in connection with the Machine's still-unfinished end game with Sherevsky, which had been continued through one morning session and was now headed for another. Finally there were rumors that World Business Machines was planning to replace Simon Great with a nationally famous physicist. Sandra begged Doc to try to explain it all to her in kindergarten language. She was feeling uncertain of herself again and quite subdued after being completely rebuffed in her efforts to get an interview with Lysmov, who had fled her as if she were a threat to his Soviet virtue. Doc on the other hand was quite vivacious, cheered by his third-round draw with Jandorf. he said. "Have you ever noticed that kindergarten language can be far honester than the adult tongues? Fewer fictions. Well, several of us hashed over the Lysmov game until three o'clock this morning. Lysmov wouldn't, though. Neither would Votbinnik ar Jal. You see, I have my comr munication problems with the Russians too. "We finally decided that Lysmov had managed to guess with complete accuracy both the depth at which the Machine is analyzing in the opening and middle game (ten moves ahead instead of eight, we think -- a prodigious achievement!) and also the main value scale in terms of which the Machine selects its move. "Having that information, Lysmov managed to play into a combination which would give the Machine a maximum plus value in its value scale (win of Lysmov's queen, it was) after ten moves but a checkmate for Lysmov on his second move after the first ten. A human chess master would have seen a trap like that, but the Machine could not, because Lysmov was maneuvering in an area that did not exist for the Machine's perfect but limited mind. Of course the Machine changed its tactics after the first three moves of the ten had been p I a y e d -- it could see the checkmate then -- but by that time it was too late for it to avert a disastrous loss of material. It was tricky of Lysmov, but completely fair. After this we'll all be watching for the opportunity to play the same sort of trick on the Machine.-us to realize fully that we are not playing against a metal monster but against a certain kind of programming. If there are any weaknesses we can spot in that programming, we can win. Very much in the same way that we can again and again defeat a fleshand-blood player when we discover that he consistently attacks without having an advantage in position or is regularly overcautious about launching a counter-attack when he himself is attacked without justification." Sandra nodded eagerly. "So from now on your chances of beating the Machine should keep improving, shouldn't they? I mean as you find out more and more about the programming." Doc smiled. "You forget," he said gently, "that Simon Great can change the programming before each new game. Now I see why he fought so hard for that point." "Oh. Say, Doc, what's this about the Sherevsky end game?" "You are picking up the language, aren't you?" he observed. "Sherevsky got a little angry when he discovered that Great had the Machine programmed to analyze steadily on the next move after an adjournment until the game was resumed next morning. Sherevsky questioned whether it was fair for the Machine to 'think' all night while its opponent had to get some rest. Vanderhoef decided for the Machine, , though Sherevsky may carry the protest to "Bah -- I think Great wants us to get heated up over such minor matters, just as he is happy (and oh so obliging!) when we complain about how the Machine blinks or hums or smells. It keeps our minds off the main business of trying to outguess his programming. Incidentally, that is one thing we decided last night -- Sherdorf, Serek, and myself -- that we are all going to have to learn to play the Machine without letting it get on our nerves and without asking to be protected from it. As Willie puts it, 'So suppose it sounds like a boiler factory even -- okay, you can think in a boiler factory.' Myself, I am not so sure of that, but his spirit is right." Sandra felt herself perking up as a new article began to shape itself in her mind. She replacing Simon Great?" Again Doc smiled. "I think, my dear, that you can safely dismiss that as just a rumor. I think that Simon Great has just begun to fight." VI R ound Four saw the Machine spring the first of its surprises. It had finally forced a draw against Sherevsky in the morning session, ending the long second-round game, and now was matched against Votbinnik. The Machine opened Pawn to King Four, Votbinnik replied Pawn to King Three. "The French Defense, Binny's favorite," Dave muttered and they settled back for the Machine's customary fourminute wait. Instead the Machine moved at once and punched its clock. Sandra, studying Votbinnik through her glasses, decided that the Russian grandmaster looked just a trifle startled. Then he made his move. Once again the Machine responded instantly. There was a flurry of comment from the stands and a scurrying-about of officials to shush it. Meanwhile the Machine continued to make its moves at better than rapidtransit speed, although Votbinnik soon began to take rather more time on his. The upshot was that the Machine made eleven moves before it started to take time to 'think' at all. Sandra clamored so excitedly to Dave for an explanation that she had two officials waving at her angrily. As soon as he dared, Dave whispered, "Great must have banked on Votbinnik playing the French -- almost always does -- and fed all the variations of the French into the Machine's 'memory' from books. So long as Votbinnik stuck to a known variation of the French, why, the Machine could play from memory without analyzing at all. Then when a strange move came along -- one that wasn't in its memory -- only on the twelfth move yet! -- the Machine went back to analyzing, only now it's taking longer and going deeper because it's got more time -- six minutes a move, about. The only thing I wonder is why Great didn't have the Machine do it in the first three games. It seems so obvious." Sandra ticketed that in her mind as a question for Doc. She slipped off to her room to write her "Don't Let a Robot Get Your Goat" article (drawing heavily on Doc's observations) and got back to the stands twenty minutes before the second time-control point. It was becoming a regular routine. Votbinnik was a knight down -- almost certainly busted, Dave explained. "It got terrifically complicated while you were gone," he said. "A real Votbinnik position." "Only the Machine outbinniked him," Bill finished. Judy hummed Beethoven's "Funeral March for the Death of a Hero." Nevertheless Votbinnik did not resign. The Machine sealed a move. Its board blacked out and Vanderhoef, with one of his assistants standing beside him to witness, privately read the move off a small indicator on the console. Tomorrow he would feed the move back into the Machine when play was resumed at the rooming session. Doc sealed a move too although he was two pawns down in his game against Grabo and looked tired to death. "They don't give up easily, do they?" Sandra observed to Dave. "They must really love the game. Or do they hate it?" "When you get to psychology it's all beyond me," Dave replied. "Ask me something else." Sandra smiled. "Thank you, Dave," she said. "I will." Votbinnik played on for a do#en moves then resigned. A little later Doc managed to draw his game with Grabo by perpetual check. He caught sight of Sandra coming down from the stands and waved to her, then made the motions of drinking. N'yw he looks almost like a hoy, Sandra thought as she joined him. "Say, Doc," she asked when they had secured a table, "why is a rook worth more than a bishop?" He darted a suspicious glance at her. "That is not your kind of question," he said sternly. "Exactly what have you been up to?" Sandra confessed that she had asked Dave to teach her how to play chess. 'T knew those children would corrupt you," Doc said somberly. "Look, my dear, if you learn to play chess you won't be able to write your clever little articles about it. Besides, as I warned you the first day, chess is a madness. Women are ordinarily immune, but that doesn't justify you taking chances with your sanity." "But I've kind of gotten interested, watching the tournament," Sandra objected. "At least I'd like to know how the pieces move." "Stop!" Doc commanded. "You're already in danger. Direct your mind somewhere else. Ask me a sensible, downto-e a r t h journalist's question -- something completely irrational !" "Okay, why didn't Simon Great have the Machine set to play the openings fast in the first three games?" "Hah! I think Great plays Lasker-chess in his programming. He hides his strength and tries.to win no more easily than he has to, so he will have resources in reserve. The Machine loses to Lysmov and immediately starts playing more strongly -- the psychological impression made on the other players by such tactics is formidable." "But the Machine isn't ahead yet?" "No, of course not. After four rounds Lysmov is leading the tournament with # -- Yiy meaning # in the win column and # in the loss column... " "How do you half win a game of chess? Or half lose one? Sandra interrupted. "By drawing a game -- playing to a tie. Lysmovs #  is notational shorthand for three wins and a draw. Understand? My dear, I don't usually have to explain things to you in such detail. "I just didn't want you to think I was learning too much about chess. "Ho! Well, to get on with the score after four rounds. Angler and Votbinnik both have # -- #, while the Machine is bracketed at # -- #J# with Jal. But the Machine has created an impression of strength, as if it were all set to come from behind with a rush.' He shook his head. "At the moment, my dear,' he said, "I feel very pessimistic about the chances of neurons against relays in this tournament. Relays don't panic and fag. But the oddest thing... "Yes?' Sandra prompted. "Well, the oddest thing is that the Machine doesn't play 'like a machine at all. It uses dynamic strategy, the kind we sometimes call 'Russian', complicating each position as much as possible and creating maximum tension. But that too is a matter of the programming... D OC'S foreboding was fulfilled as round followed hard-fought round. In the next five days (there was a weekend recess) the Machine successively smashed Jandorf, Serek and Jal and after seven rounds was out in front by a full point. Jandorf, evidently impressed by the Machine's flawless opening play against Votbinnik, chose an inferior line in the Ruy Lopez to get the Machine "out of the books." Perhaps he hoped that the Machine would go on blindly making book moves, but the Machine did not oblige. It immediately slowed its play, "thought hard" and annihilated the Argentinian in # moves. Doc commented, "The Wild Bull of the Pampas tried to use the living force of his human personality to pull a fast one and swindle the Machine. Only the Machine didn't swindle." Against Jal, the Machine used a new wrinkle. It used a variable amount of time on moves, apparently according to how difficult it "judged" the position to be. When Serek got a poor pawn-position the Machine simplified the game relentlessly, suddenly discarding its hitherto "Russian" strategy. "It plays like anything but a machine," Doc commented. "We know the reason all too well -- Simon Great -- but doing something about it is something else again. Great is hitting at our individual weaknesses wonderfully well. Though I think I could play myself if I had a machine to do the detail work." Doc sounded a bit wistful. The audiences grew in size and in expensiveness of wardrobe, though most of the cafe society types made their visits fleeting ones. Additional stands were erected. A hardliquor bar was put in and then taken out. The problem of keeping reasonable order and quiet became an unending one for Vanderhoef, who had to ask for more "hushers.' The number of scientists and computer men. Navy, Army and Space Force uniforms were more in evidence. Dave and Bill turned up one morning with a three-dimensional chess set of transparent plastic and staggered Sandra by assuring her that most bright young space scientists were moderately adept at this #-square game. had snagged a big order from the War Department. She also heard that a Syndicate man had turned up with a book on the tournament, taking bets from the more heavily heeled types and that a detective was circulating about, trying to spot him. The newspapers kept up their f r o n t-page reporting, most of the writers personalizing the Machine heavily and rather too cutely. Several of the papers started regular chess columns and "How to Play Chess" features. There was a flurry of pictures of movie starlets and such sitting at chess boards. Hollywood revealed plans for two chess movies: "They Made Her a Black Pawn" and "The Monster From King Rook Square". Chess novelties and costume jewelry appeared. The United States Chess Federation proudly reported a phenomenal rise in membership. chess to be able to blunder through a game with Dave without attempting more than one illegal move in five, to avoid the Scholar's Mate most of the time and to be able to checkmate with two rooks though not with one. Judy had asked her, "Is he pleased that you're learning chess?" Sandra had replied, "No, he thinks it is a madness." The kids had all whooped at that and Dave had said, "How right he is!" Sandra was scraping the bottom of the barrel for topics for her articles, but then it occured to her to write about the kids, which worked out nicely, and that led to a humorous article "Chess Is for Brains" about her own efforts to learn the game, and for the nth time in her career she thought of herself as practically a columnist and was accordingly elated. After his two draws. Doc lost three games in a row and still bs:d the Machine to face and then Sherevsky. His I -- # score gave him undisputed possession of last place. He grew very depressed. He still made a point of squiring her about before the playing sessions, but she had to make most of the conversation. His rare flashes of humor were rather macabre. "They have Dirty Old Krakatower locked in the cellar' he muttered just before the start of the next to the last round, "and now they send the robot down to destroy him." "Just the same, Doc," Sandra told him, "good luck." Doc shook his head. "Against a man luck might help. But against a Machine?" "It's not the Machine you're playing, but the programming. Remember?" "Yes, but it's the Machine that doesn't make the mistake. And a mistake is what I need most of all today. Somebody else's," Doc must have looked very dispirited and tired when he left Sandra in the stands, for Judy (Dave and Bill not having arrived yet) asked in a confidential, womanly sort of voice, "What do you do for him when he's so unhappy?" "Oh, I'm especially passionate," Sandra heard herself answer. "Is that good for him?" Judy demanded doubtfully. "Sh !" Sandra said, somewhat aghast at her irresponsibility and wondering if she were getting tournanentnerves. "Sh, they're starting the clocks." K rakatower had lost two pawns when the first time-control point arrived and was intending to resign on his #st move when the Machine broke down. Three of its pieces moved on the electric board at once, then the board went dark and all the lights on the console went out except five which started winking like angry red eyes. The gray-smocked men around Simon Great sprang silently into action, filing around back of the console. It was the first work anyone had seen them do except move screens around and fetch each other coffee. Vanderhoef hovered anxiously. Some flash bulbs went off. Vanderhoef shook his fist at the photographers. Simon Great did nothing. The Machine's clock ticked on. Doc watched for a while and then fell asleep. When Vanderhoef jogged him awake, the Machine had just made its next move, but the repair-job had taken # minutes. As a result the Machine had to make # moves in # minutes. At # seconds a move it played like a dub whose general lack of skill was complicated by a touch of insanity. On his #rd move Doc shrugged his shoulders apologetically and announced mate in four. There were more flashes. Vanderhoef shook his fist again. The machine flashed: Afterwards Doc said sourly to Sandra. "And that was one big lie -- a child could have beat the Machine with that time advantage. Oh, what an ironic glory the gods reserved for Krakatower's dotage -- to vanquish a broken-down computer ! Only one good thing about it -- that it didn't happen while it was playing one of the Russians, or someone would surely have whispered sabotage. And that is something of which they do not accuse Dirty Old Krakatower, because they are sure he has not got the brains even to think to sprinkle a little magnetic oxide powder in the Machine's memory box. Bah!" Just the same he seemed considerably more cheerful. Sandra said guilelessly, "Winning a game means nothing to you chess players, does it, unless you really do it by Doc looked solemn for a moment, then he started to chuckle. "You are getting altogether too smart. Miss Sandra Lea Grayling," he said. "Yes, yes -- a chess player is happy to win in any barely legitimate way he can, by an earthquake if necessary, or his opponent sickening before he does from the bubonic plague. So -- I confess it to you -- I was very happy to chalk up my utterly undeserved win over the luckless Machine." "Which incidentally makes it anybody's tournament again, doesn't it. Doc?" wry little headshake. "We can't expect another fluke. After all, the Machine has functioned perfectly seven games out of eight, and you checking it all night, especially since it has no adjourned games to work on. Tomorrow judging from the way it beat Votbinnik and Jal, it should have a definite edge on Willie. If it beats him, then only Votbinnik has a chance for a tie and to do that he must defeat Lysmov. Which will be most difficult." "Well," Sandra said, "don't you think that Lysmov might just kind of let himself be beaten, to make sure a Russian gets first place or at least ties for it?" Doc shook his head emphatically. "There are many things a man, even a chess master, will do to serve his state, but party loyalty doesn't go that deep. Look, here is the standing of the players after eight rounds." He handed Sandra a penciled list. Player Wins Losses Machine #J# Votbinnik #J# Angler Jal ## Lysmov # Serek #J# Sherevsky Jandorf #J# # Grabo Krakatower Machine vs. Angler Votbinnik vs. Lysmov Jal VS. Serek Shercvsky vs. Krakatower Jandorf vs. Grabo After studying the list for a ivhile, Sandra said, "Hey, even Angler could come out first, couldn't he, if he beat the Machine and Votbinnik lost to L)#smov?" "Could, could -- yes. But I'm afraid that's hoping for too much, barring another breakdown. To tell the truth, dear, the Machine is simply too good for all of us. If it were only a little faster (and these technological improvements always come) it would outclass us completely. We are at that fleeting moment of balance when genius is almost good enough to equal mechanism. It makes me feel sad, but proud too in a morbid fashion, to think that I am in at the death of grandmaster chess. Oh, I suppose the game will always be played, but it won't ever be quite the same." He blew out a breath and shrugged his shoulders. one and he'll give the Machine a long hard fight, you can depend on it. He might conceivably even draw." He touched Sandra's arm. "Cheer up, my dear," he said. "You should remind yourself that a victory for the Machine D OC'S prediction about a long hard fight was decidedly not fulfilled. Having White, the Machine opened Pawn to King Four and Angler went into the Sicilian Defense. For the first twelve moves on each side both adversaries pushed their pieces and tapped their clocks at such lightning speed (Vanderhoef feeding in Angler's moves swiftly) that up in the stands Bill and Judy were still flipping pages madly in their hunt for the right colThe Machine made its thirteenth move, still at blitz tempo. "Bishop takes Pawn, check, nounced very loudly, made the move, banged his clock and sat back. There was a collective gaspand-gabble from the stands. Dave squeezed Sandra's arm hard. Then for once forgetting that he was Dr. Caution, he demanded loudly of Bill and Judy, "Have you two idiots found that column yet? The Machines thirteenth move is a boner Pinning down the reference with a fingernail, Judy cried, "Yes! Here it is on page #I in footnote (e) (#) (B). Dave, that same thirteenth move for White is in the book! But Black replies Knight to Queen Two, not Bishop takes Pawn, check. And three moves later the book gives White a plus value." "What the heck, it can't be," Bill asserted. "But it is. Check for yourself. That boner is in the book "Shut up, everybody!" Dave ordered, clapping his hands to his face. When he dropped them a moment later his eyes gleamed. "I got it now! Angler figured they were usto program the Machine on openings, he found an editorial error and then he deliberately played the Machine into that variation!" Dave practically shouted his last words, but that attracted no attention as at that moment the whole hall was the noisiest it had been throughout the tournament. It simmered down somewhat as the Machine flashed a move. Angler replied instantly. The Machine replied almost as soon as Angler's move was fed into it. Angler moved again, his move was fed into the Machine and the Machine flashed : N ext morning Sandra heard Dave's guess confirmed by both Angler and Great. Doc had spotted them having coffee and a malt together and he and Sandra joined them. Doc was acting jubilant, having just drawn his adjourned game with Sherevsky, which meant, since Jandorf had beaten Grabo, that he was in undisputed possession of Ninth Place. They were all waiting for the finish of the V o t b i n n i k-Lysmov game, which would decide the final Angler was complacent and Simon Great was serene and at last a little more talkative. psychologist said, "I was afraid that one of you boys would figure out something like that. That was the chief reason I didn't have the Machine use the programmed openings until Lysmov's win forced me to. I couldn't check and the Archives and Shak-hmaty. There wasn't time. As it was, we had a dozen typists and proofreaders busy for weeks preparing that part of the programming and making sure it was accurate as far as following the books went. Tell many friends did you have hunting for flaws in the latest #T lucky #th. Well, that's my secret. Though I've always said that anyone joining the to expect to have to pay some day for the privilege. They're sharp, those little guys, and I work their tails off." Simon Great laughed and said to Sandra, "Your young friend Dave was pretty sharp himself to deduce what had you ought to have him in the Bleeker Street Irregulars." Sandra said, 'T get the impression he's planning to start a club of his own." Angler snorted. "That's the one trouble with my little guys. They're all waiting to topple me." Simon Great said, 'W#, so Dave, I want to talk to him. It takes real courage in a youngster to question authority." "How should he get in touch with you?" Sandra asked. While Great told her, Willie studied them frowningly. "Si, are you planning to stick in this chess-programming racket?" he demanded. Simon Great did not answer the question. "You try telling said. "Have you been approached the last couple of "You mean asking me to take over your job?" a tight one. "I'm not talking." T here was a flurry of sound and movement around the playing tables. "Lysmov's agreed to a draw!" he informed them a moment later. "The gangster!" "Gangster because he puts you in equal first place with Votbinnik, both of you ahead of the Machine?" Great inquired gently. "Ahh, he could have beat Binny, giving me sole first. A Russian gangster!" Doc shook a finger. "Lysmov could also have lost to )ou in second place." "Don't think evil thoughts. So long, pals." As Angler clattered down the stairs, Simon Great signed the waiter for more coffee, lit a fresh cigarette, took a deep drag and leaned back. "You know," he said "it's a great relief not to have to impersonate the hyperconfident programmer for awhile. Being a psychologist has spoiled me for that sort of thing. I'm not as good as I once was at beating people over the head with my ego." "You didn't do too badly," Doc said. , very much pleased with the Machine's performance. The Machine's flaws made it seem more real and more newsworthy, especially how it functioned when the going got tough -- those repairs the boys made under time pressure in your game, Savilly, or I miss my guess. In fact nobody could have watched the tournament for long without realizing there were nine smart rugged men out there, ready to kill that computer if they could. The Machine passed a real test. And then the whole deal dramatizes what computers are and what they can and can't do. And not just at the popsearch boys are learning a lot about computer and programming theory by studying how the Machine and its programmer behave under tournament stress. It's a kind of test unlike that provided by any other computer work. Just this morning, for instance, one of our big mathematicians told me that he is beginning to think that the Theory of Games does apply to chess, because you can bluff and counterbluff with your programming. And Fm learning about human psychology." Doc chuckled. "Such as that even human thinking is just a matter of how you program your own mind? -- that we're all like the Machine to that extent?" "That's one of the big points, Savilly. Yes." Doc smiled at Sandra. "You wrote a nice little news-story, dear, about how Man conquered the Machine by a palpitating nose and won a victory for international amity. "Now the story starts to go deeper." # A lot of things go deeper," Sandra replied, looking at him evenly. "Much deeper than you ever expect at the start." The big electric scoreboard lit up. Player Wins Losses Angler Votbinnik Jal ## #  Machine ## ## Lysmov Serek ## ## Sherevsky ## ## Jandorf ## Krakatower ## eVz Grabo "It was a good tournament," Doc said. "And the Machine has proven itself a grandmaster. It must make you feel good, Simon, after being out of tournament chess for twenty years." The psychologist nodded. "Will you go back to psychology now?" Sandra asked him. Simon Great smiled. "I can answer that question honestly. Miss Grayling, because the news is due for release. No. the Machine in the Interzonal Candidates' Tournament. They want a crack at the World's Championship." Doc raised his eyebrows. "That's news indeed. But look, Simon, with the knowledge you've gained in this tournament won't you be able to make the Machine almost a sure winner in every game?" "I don't know. Players like Angler and Lysnwv may find some more flaws in its functioning and dream up some new stratagems. Besides, there's another solution to the problems raised by having a single computer entered in a grandmaster tournament." Doc sat up straight. "You mean having more programmer-computer teams than just one?" "Exactly. The Russians are bound to give their best players computers, considering the prestige the game has in Russia. And I wasn't asking tournaments are a wonderful way to test rival , computers and show them off to the public, just like cross-crountry races were for the early automobiles. The future grandmaster will inevitably be a programmer-computer team, a man-machine symbiotic partnership, probably with more freedom each way than I was allowed in this tournament -- I mean the man taking oyer the play in some positions, the machine in others.' "You're making my head swim," Sandra said. is in the same'-storm-tossed o c e a n," Doc assured her. "Simon, that will be very fine for the masters who can get themselves computers -- either from their governments or from hiring out to big firms. Or in other ways. Jandorf, I'm sure, will be able to interest some Arcomputer for him. While I... oh, I'm too old...still, when I start to think about it... But what about the Bela Grabos? Incidentally, did you know that Grabo is contesting Jandorf 's win? Claims Jandorf discussed the position with Serek. I think they exchanged about two words." Simon shrugged, "The Bela Grabos will have to continue to fight their own battles, if necessary satisfying themselves with the lesser tournaments. Believe me, Savilly, from now on grandmaster chess without one or more computers entered will lack sauce." Dr. Krakatower shook his head and said, "Thinking gets more expensive every year." From the floor came the harsh voice of Igor Jandorf and the shrill one of Bela Grabo raised in anger. Three words came through clearly: "...I challenge you..." Sandra said, "Well, there's something you can't build into a machine -- ego." "dh, I don't know about that," said Simon Great. IF  Short Storp It's tough to see into minds when you're only a child and tougher still when you see what scares you! By Charles V. De Vet mad pictures at you?" I asked Cramp. Gramp looked at me, "What pictures, Chum?" "Pictures in her mind like you're lazy. And like she wanted to hurt you," I said. Cramp's eyes got wide. He kept looking at me, and then he said, "Get your cap. Chum. We're gonna take a little walk." Gramp didn't say anything until we walked all the way to the main road and past Mr. Watchorn's corn field. I walked behind him, counting the little round holes his wooden leg made in the gravel. Finally Gramp said, "Abracadabra." That was our secret worcL It meant that if I was playing one of our games, I was to stop for awhile. Gramp and I had lots of games we played. One of them was where wc made believe. Sometimes we'd play that Gramp and I had been working all day, when we really just stayed in the shade telling stories. Then when we got home and Gramma as'ked us what we had done, we'd tell her about how hard we had worked. "I really did see mad pictures in Gramma's mind," I said. "Have you ever seen pictures in anybody's mind before?" Gramp asked. "I always see them," I said. "Don't you?" "No," Gramp said after a minute. "Other people can't cither. You're probably the only little boy who can." "Is that bad?" "No," Gramp answered. "It's good. But remember how I told you that people don't like other people who are different? Well, even though seeing pictures like you do is a wonderful thing, other people won't like you if they know you can do it. So we'll just keep it a secret between us." I was glad Gramp told me, because he always knows the best things to do. I'm his Chum. I love him better than anyone else in the whole world. Whenever the other kids tease me and call me Crazy Joe I go to Gramp and he tells me funny stories and makes me laugh. I remember the first time he told me about people hating other people who are different. "Why do the kids call me Crazy Joe and laugh at me?" I asked him. "Well, you see," Gramp said slowly, "your Daddy worked for Uncle Sam in a big place where they make things that the government won't tell anybody about. Then your Daddy got sick from something in the big place. After a long time he went up to stay with God. Then God took Mommy too, when He gave you to her. And now you're our little boy, mine and Gramma's. And because you're a very special kind of little boy, the other children are jealous. So I wouldn't play with them any more if they tease you. Just don't let them see you're afraid of them. You'll always be Gramp's Little Joe." I love Gramp very much... We kept walking until we came to Fayette. We went into Carl Van Remortal's store. Gramp sat on a chair by the big iron stove and I sat on his knee on his good leg. The stove must be real old, because it's got # on its door in big iron letters. "Tell me the pictures you see in Mr. Van's mind," Gramp whispered in my ear, "but don't let him hear you." "He's making pictures of the fishing boats coming in," I said. "In the pictures he's talking to Jack La Salle and giving him some money for his fish... The pictures are getting all mixed up now. He's putting the fish in ice in boxes, but other pictures show him in church. Jack La Salle is in the church too, and Mr. Van's sister Margaret is dressed in a long white dress and standing alongside him." "He's thinking that Jack La Salle will be marrying Margaret pretty soon," Gramp said. "What else is he thinking?" "The pictures are coming so fast now that I can't name them all," I said. Mr. Lawrence St. Ours came into the store, and Gramp told me to read what he was thinkby Charles V. De Vet ing. I looked inside his head. "He's making pictures of himself driving a car, and buying bread, and bacon, and piling hay on his farm, and... I said, but then I had to stop. "All the pictures come so fast that I can't read them," I told Gramp. "Everybody makes blurry pictures like that most of the time." "Instead of trying to tell me what the pictures are, see if you can understand what they mean," Gramp said. I tried but it was awful hard and pretty soon I got tired and Gramp and I left the store and went back home. The next morning Gramp and I went ouF in the barn and Gramp said, "Now let's see what we got here." He had me try to do a lot of things, like lifting something without touching it, and trying to make chickens run by making a picture of them doing that and putting it in their minds. But I couldn't do any of them. After a while he said, "Let's go down to the store again." W 'E went to the store almost every day after that. Then sometimes we just walked around Fayette, and Gramp had me practice reading what the pictures in people's minds meant instead of just what they looked like. Sometimes I did it real good. Then Gramp would buy me some candy or ice cream. One day we were following Mr. Mears and I was telling Gramp what I saw in Mr. Mears' mind when Mr. St. Ours drove by in his car. "Mr. Mears is making pictures about feeding meat to Mr. St. Ours's dog and the dog is crawling away and dying," I said to Gramp. Gramp was real interested. He said, "Watch close and read everything you can about that." I did. After, Gramp seemed very happy. He bought me a big chocolate bar that time. Chocolate is my best kind of candy. I read lots of things in other people's minds that made Gramp feel good too, and he bought me candy just about every day. Gramp seemed to have money all the time now instead of having to ask Gramma for any. She wanted to know where he got all the money. But he just smiled with his right cheek like he does and wouldn't tell her. Most of the people in town didn't seem to like Gramp any more. They made mad pictures about him whenever we met them. Sometimes when we were in the store Mrs. Van would come in and she would talk to me. She was awful nice. But she always had sad pictures in her mind and sometimes she would cough real hard and hold a handkerchief up in front of her mouth. When she did that Mr. Van used to get sad too. In his pictures Mrs. Van would be dead and laying in a coffin And they would be burying her in a big hole in the ground. Mr. Van was nice too. He gave me crackers and cookies, or sometimes a big thin slice of cheese. One night Gramp was holding me and buying some groceries and Mr. Van was putting them in a cardboard box, and he was thinking about going to the bank in Escanaba and cashing a check. And the man gave him a big handful of money. I told Gramp, but then Mr. Van came close. I didn't say an)miore, like Gramp had told me. Mr. Van was whistling now. He made pictures of giving the money to Mrs. Van. She was getting on a train and going to a place where it was sunny all the time, and her cough went away and she wasn't skinny any more. In his mind Mrs. Van was real pretty. She didn't have the long nose like she really has. When we got in our car Gramp was excited. He asked me where Mr. Van had put the money he brought back from Escanaba. He had bad pictures in his mind about taking Mr. Van's money and I didn't want to tell him. But he grabbed my arm so hard it hurt and I began to cry. Gramp never hurt me before. "What are you crying for?" he asked me, cranky. "I don't want you to take Mr. Van's money," I told him. Gramp let go of my arm and didn't say anything for a while. "Sometimes the pictures you see aren't true," he said. "You know that." He took out his blue handkerchief and made me blow my nose. "Like' when yon see pictures in Gramma's mind about her hurting me," he said. "She never does, you know. So the pictures aren't true. It's just what we call imagination." "But your pictures are bad ! They make me scared," I said. "We all make bad pictures like that, but we don't mean them," Gramp said. "Remember how you said that you'd like to eat the whole apple pie last Sunday? You probably made pictures of doing that. But you never did, because you know that Gramma and me should have some of it too." I guess Gramp can explain just about everything. So I told him where Mr. Van had hid the money under a box of brown sugar. Gramp smiled and started the car. He let me steer while it was going slow. "Who's my Chum?" he asked. "I am," I said, and I laughed real happy. T he next day when I got up Gramp was gone. I went back of the barn and played. I got a bunch of tin cans and punched holes in them with a nail like Gramp showed me, and I made steps out of rocks and put a can on each step. I poured water in by Charles V. De Vet the top can. It ran through the holes from each can to the other all the way down the steps. I heard our car come in the front yard. I went around the barn, and Gramp was just going up the steps to the house. He had been to Fairport where the big store is, and he had bought a lot of things that he was carrying in his arms. At first I was , glad because he had bought something that was for me too. But then I saw some bad pictures mixed with the happy ones -- of Gramp breaking a window in Mr. Van's store when it was dark and going in and taking something from underneath the brown sugar box. "You told me you wouldn't take Mr. Van's money. And you did!" I said. "Ssh," Gramp said. He put his packages on the porch and sat down and took me on his lap. He took a deep breath. "Remember what I told you about imagination, Chum?" he asked me. "So you know you're not supposed to believe all the pictures you see. Now you're Gramp's Chum. And I want you to promise me again not to tell anyone but me what you see, and I'll tell you if the pictures are real or not. Promise?" I promised, and Gramp opened one of the packages. He took out two new pistols and a belt with double holsters to carry them in. He bent over and buckled them on me. "You look just like Hoppy now," he said. I gave him a big kiss, and ran back of the barn to shoot robbers. TN the afternoon Gramp was Splaying he was a bad Indian and trying to scalp me when a strange car drove in our yard. Mr. Van and two men with badges got out. Mr. Van was real mad. "We've come after the money, Bill," he said. Gramp got white. He was scared, but he said, loud, "What the hell are you talking about?" "You know what, Bill," Mr. Van said. "Someone saw you break into the store. It will go easier on you if you admit it." "I told you I don't know what you're talking about," Gramp said. His eyes moved kind of quick. Then he noticed me and he walked over to me. "That's a fine way to talk in front of the boy," he said over his shoulder. He took my hand. "Come on. Chum. We're going in the house." "Just a minute," the biggest policeman said. "We've got a few questions that we have to ask you." Gramp made believe he was brushing some dirt from my pants. "Did anyone see me take the money, Chum?" he whispered to me. '"No," I said, even though I didn't understand exactly. "Mr. Van is just pretending he knows you took it but he doesn't." "Good boy." Cramp patted me on the head. "Go into the house now." He turned and walked back to the three men, pushing his wooden leg into the ground hard. I didn't go in the house, though. "Now I've had just about enough of this," Gramp said, with a big frown on his face. "You can't bluff me. Van. Say #. #. Complete set of the "impossi# issues, #-#. liOO.OO. issues, very good condition,  # . # . very good condition, #. #-#, #. -- # issues, fine condition, #. Many other complete sets. Send your want list. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N.Y. #I #th Ava... #, N.Y, what you got to say, and get off my property." Mr. Van's shoulders seemed to sag and he got sad. He made the pictures in his mind of Mrs. Van being dead and being put in a big hole. It made me so sorry I couldn't stand it, and I cried, "Tell him you got his money under the seat in our car! Please, Gramp! Give it back to him." Nobody said anything, but everybody turned and looked at me. They stood real still. I saw in Cramp's mind that I had been bad, bad. I ran to him and put my face in his coat and began to cry. I couldn't help it. After a minute Gramp knelt on his good knee in front of me and took my cheeks in both his hands. "I've let you down. Chum," he said. He wasn't mad any more. He picked me up in his arms. "You needed me, Little Joe," he said. "You needed me." His eyes were all smudgy. He squeezed me so hard I couldn't breathe, almost. Then he put me down and said, "Come on," to the two policemen. He walked away between them. Gramp ! The pictures in his mind were awful. I could hardly bear to look at them. The worst picture was -- me, by Charlos V. Do Vet IF  Article the other IF  tropical adventures, no writing for # years, and full of ambitions for my re-entry into print in the soon-to-behad postwar world, I invented a new magazine. In my naivete, I worked on the idea late at night when no one else was around and kept the material in a locked file when I went out, so sure I was that the idea, if it got into other hands, would instantly light up the sky while moneyed publishers tumbled over one another's shoulders trying to force currency on the thief. The time came, however, when even I had to realize that one just doesn't produce a magazine single-handed, performing all functions unseen by others until it hits the stands; no, not even if one's name is Leo Margulies. About this time I began to get letters from one Groff Conklin about, of all things, his desire to start a new magazine after the war was over. I had not yet met Groff (now one of my most valued friends) and I wish I had a multiflanged double-ended detemporizer so I could travel back through time and see through his eyes what he thought of me and my wild idea, and at the same time recapture my picture of him. All I can tell you for sure is that I must have seemed much more knowledgeable than I actually was, and he seemed as energetically warm and enthusiastic as he actually is. And then, somewhere along the line, we got busy, he with his anthologies, I with my stories. Maybe it was just the matter of a hundred thousand bucks or so for capital, which neither of us seemed to have at the time. But we did quite a bit of work on it. I designed a cover and had an artist friend render it for me. It was very stHking, somewhat along the lines of an old Unknoiyn typographical cover, with a background of hemorrhage brown and lettering which, planned as crushed grape, came out as bruised broccoli. The two letters of the title, lower case and quite fat, started in the upper left-hand corner and their pedestals ran all the way to the bottom. We called it -- IF. The years went by and other things piled up, and the file of correspondence, the prospectus, the calculations and the cover dummy fell into a drawer somewhere (no longer locked) and stayed there until one day I got a phone call from one Paul Fairman, a nice guy and a pretty fair country writer as well. He was starting a new magazine and he was calling it IF. All knowledgeable again, I had lunch with him and gave him a lot of good advice about how he couldn't get any stories unless he had money to pay for them and he couldn't get that without a publisher, and it wasn't the right time to start a magazine. I gave him the cover dummy as a booby prize and he thanked me for everything. He then went out and got money and backing and stories (one of them from me) and started the magazine. It has existed more or less constantly ever since. It has changed publishers and editors and format; and just to complete the series of unlikely blows IF and I haye glancingly struck one another during our careers, I now find myself one of its editors while living ten miles away from where Mr. James Quinn used to publish it, and Larjy Shaw used to edit it. But for all its growth and change, IF has never become my IF -- the other IF. I do not intend to make it so. There is, however, meat enough in its basic idea to afford you some pretty fascinating chewing. The moral, in case one is called for, would seem to be that your nova-burst of an inspiration might serve, one day, to illuminate a few inner pages. Or maybe it's aim for the stars, you'll reach the treetops. T he other IF was to be a sort of science fiction magazine. But unlike anything else in the field, it was to be built around what, to me, was (and is) the most compelling single component of some science fiction -- extrapolation, or what I like to call "gunsight vision. You line up something near at hand with something not quite so near, but real and reachable. Sighting the line between them, your vision is aligned by them to something r e m o t e -- but clearly indicated. If I learn about a synchrotron, and then find out that the circular track can be straightened out to make a linear accelerator, I can by this knowledge clearly visualize a ray cannon or a space, drive on the same general principles. If I read about ground-effect cars, and then find out that someone has designed a hand-pushed utility car not powered, merely lifted by a small motor, I can visualize immensely long trains traveling over a highway built like a shallow ditch, pulled by a more or less conventional truck-tractor, with perhaps a wheeled caboose for braking. The principle works with people, too. One of the narrative knacks so generously given me by Will Jenkins (Murray Leinster) during those visits I mentioned in the last issue uses the same basic theory. To create plot from character, he told me, you take someone you know and understand and put him in a (for him) totally impossible situation. Then you let him work his way out of it by being himself -- by being unconquerably, unswervingly and in all respects himself. His illustration was the yarn of a sea captain who after a storm found himself alone in the ocean with a bit of driftwood. What he was was a captain -- which he couldn't be because he had no ship. His way out (in typical Leinster 'Vhat's he doing that for?" prose) was to hold up his shirt on a stick to catch the wind for nine hours, then to drift quietly for two days, then to use the shirt again for six hours, whereupon he reached an island. Being what he was, he knew his exact position when he lost his ship, he knew the prevailing winds, he knew the Hie other IF currents in the area. The germane point here is that when he had no ship to command, he became one. Another common example is the sweet little old lady thrust into the den of thieves, throwing them all into conniptions with her unchanging concern with tea-time and vespers. In short, take two mismatched knowns, extend the line between them and they'll point out a discovery, Now,,if you want to extrapolate in more detail, andor with more accuracy, the riflesights -- two points -- are not enough. Put just three points on a sheet of graph paper and join them, and you have a curve with certain characteristics. You can extend this, keeping the same characteristics, a distance beyond the third known point, with a reasonable assumption that when the fourth point is discovered it will lie in your curve. You can't extend it too far, though, and still expect reasonable accuracy. But with five points -- fifty -- five hundred -- the exact nature of your curve becomes so apparent that you have to be right when you extend it. You can write good sfcencefiction this way -- studying known science until you know it so well you can make a fair extrapolation. You can write good science-fiction by studying just as hard and then throwing a wild factor in somewhere up in the extrapolated area -- precisely what Asimov did in the Foundation series when he introduced The Mule into the millennia-long "future history drawn up by the psycho-historian Selden, N OW we're getting close to the mainspring of the other IF. Some years ago Jim Blish got so exercised by the alarming growth of the New York Port Authority, a local phenomenon which builds and operates tunnels, bridges and airports in the New York-New Jersey complex, that he sharpened up his typewriter and in seventy-some thousand words showed what would happen if this went on for two or three hundred years. Poul Anderson tary stories, one clearly about the Marshall Plan, These three stories, and L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, are yarns I'd have taken for the other IF had there been one (and if other editors hadn't gotten there first.) This kind of thing would have been the body of the magazine; but the departure, the scintillating Idea, was the one, or possibly two items in each issue under the general classification If this goes on... (That happens to be a Heinlein title. I am not referring to his story. Just look at the words.) Now, every citizen makes this kind of extrapolation all the time. If the boss slams his hat on the rack and doesn't answer the receptionist's "G'morning" you have evidence from 'way back what kind of morning it's going to be. If your older brother has moaned his way through Algebra # with Miss G., wellknown battle-axe, for a teacher, you know pretty much what's in store for you that fine September morn when you find yourself in her class. Or turn the thing around and get into the hindsight department. When Sue marries Joe instead of Sam, to your utter astonishment, and then you suddenly slap yourself on the head and say "of course! Remember when they...and that other time... and the thing that happened at the Christmas party..." and it all abruptly makes sense ; well, say you had had the wit to notice and correctly interpret those things; you'd have been able to predict that marriage, wouldn't you? To get printed in this special section of the other IF, then, you'd have to look about you and see what's going on. You have to study it until you understand it. You'd have to wait, perhaps, until something new happened, giving you two points -- the rifle-sights. And then study out more points, five, fifty, five hundred, until you felt able to extrapolate -- oh, two days, a week, four years, ten. Then you'd write the piece and send it in, and if in four years or ten you proved to be dead wrong, it would be just because you didn't plot enough points. (Unless there was a wild factor ; and even those can be predicted sometimes. Your hindsight tells you so.) I dreamed such dreams about the other IF! It'd be on the stands a few months, see, and then I'd get this letter from a young government official suggesting it might be time for a conservative revival, and "B. Goldwater" would go on the table of contents. A Mr. Willkie would write a reasoned conviction that we are one species and one world. A minor union official would predict that the auto workers would one day ask for a guaranteed annual wage, and Reuther would go into the semiannual. index. An obscure refugee scientist named Wernher would write a piece with the laughable conclusion that the Russians would be first with a satellite. Finally, years later. Time would do a takeout on IF in the Press section, under the caption Newsstand Nostradamus or Pulp Prognosticator, with a cut of me holding up the table of contents of the June # issue, with my finger on the article, Why I Can't Lose in '#, by H. S. Truman. Wonderful, wonderful dreams And yet.  . A nd yet, wouldn't it be wonderful to make a reasoned prediction, see it in print three months Jater, and the other IF, have it coincide with that very day's headlines? And what if you goof? I used to own a # Readers Digest bearing an article about Why Japan Will Never Fight a War Against the U.S. I read an # article (I suspect by a stockholder in a canal-boat firm) reasoning very plausibly that a locomotive could not pull a train because only one mathematical point of each wheel was tangent to the track, and the cars ("carriages," he said) would just be too heavy to start moving. So what? You can take it. And I do mean you. I really do. I have not only a liking, but a profound respect for the kind of mind which reads science fiction. It's a good mind. It recognizes no horizons. It is not afraid to go far out. And in many cases its ability to reason goes all the way from the awesome to the frightening. S-f has predicted a lot, has been wrong more often than right, but has never, I do believe, really and truly tried to predict from the here and how to # days off. Are you game ? Do you want to try it? If you do, I'll go along with you for two issues. Then we'll skip one and take stock. The time element is perfect for this caper. It takes just about three months from the time you mail it for it to be printed and distributed. You're reading this as spring starts to stir the turf. I write it in early December. Major Glenn has not yet been launched. Governor Rockefeller, newly returned from the South Pacific, announces a shelter plan for everybody every place, over and above homes and schools. Swedish U.N. planes have just bombed a Katangese airport. Arc you oriented? Then let me establish a format, and stick my own neck out. I want you to notice that these are not wild guesses; if you want to go a little deeper into your reasoning, by all means do so. Elizabeth Taylors Cleopatra will he finished and released, Blondes will be 'out brunettes in,' Shoulder-length hair, with bangs, will be The Thing, Necklines will do something they havent done publicly Many schools are overcrowded and operating on shifts because funds cannot be found for building additions, School fallout shelters frequently cost more than building additions, Therefore by the time this appears there will have been news stories about at least seven violent protests by parent-taxpayers against the installation of shelters in schools which have not been able to build additions, Jack Paar has managed to be in several kinds of spectacular trouble. He is due to leave the air in March, He will do so in the midst of the most elaborate trouble he has yet managed. Get the idea? It would, of course, be preferable if your predictions were scientific or bore on s-f; mine come right off the top of my head, where the point is. All right : here are the ground rules: #. Deadline for the September issue (due out in July): March #. Deadline for the November issue (due out in September) : May #. (That means I'll be able to feature some of your best at the Chicon : Pick-Congress Hotel, Chicago, Aug. #I -- Sept. #.) #. No big prizes: this is for kicks. And for research: I know you are capable of observing enough contributory details, of sensing the trend of events accurately enough, to come up with some truly startling results. (But just to make the game more interesting, we'll reward some of the best guesses with free IF subscriptions.) #. And please -- no correspondence except through IF  Short Story It was just a little black box, useful for getting rid of things. Trouble was, it worked too well! see my problem, , I Professor?" Tony Carmen held his pinkly manicured, flashily ringed hands wide. I saw his problem and it was warmly embarrassing. "Really, Mr. Carmen," I said, "this isn't the sort of thing you discuss, with a total stranger. I'm not a, doctor -- not of medicine, , anyway -- or a lawyer." "They can't help me. I need an operator in your line." "I work for the United States government. I can't become involved in anything illegal." Carmen smoothed down the front of his too-tight midnight blue suit and touched the diamond sticking in his silver tie. You can't. Professor Venetti? Ever hear of the Mafia?" "I've heard of it," I said uheasily. "An old fraternal organization something like the Moose or Rosicrucians, founded in Sicily. It allegedly controls organized crime in the U.S. But that is a responsibility-eluding myth that honest Italian-Americans are stamping out. We don't even like to see the word in print." "I can understand honest Italian-Americans feeling that way. But guys like me know the Mafia is still with it. We can put the squeeze on marks like you pretty easy." You don't have to tell even a third generation American about the Mafia. Maybe that was the trouble. I had heard too much and for too long. All the stories I had ever heard about the Mafia, true or false, built up an unendurable threat. "All tight, I'll try to help you; Carmen. But... that is, you didn't kill any of these people?" He snorted. "I haven't killed anybody since early #." . "Please I said weakly. "You needn't incriminate yourself with me." "I was in the Marines," Carmen said hotly. "Listen, Professor, these aren't no Prohibition times. Not many people get made for a hit these days. Mother, most of these bodies they keep ditching at my club haven't been murdered by anybody. They're accident victims. Rumbums with too much anti-freeze for a summer's day, Spanish-American War vets going to visit Teddy in the natural course of events. Harry Keno just stows them at my place to embarrass me. Figures to make me lose my liquor license or take a contempt before the Grand Jury." "I don't suppose you could just go to the police -- " I saw the answer in his eyes. "No. I don't suppose you could." "I told you once, Professor, but I'll tell you again. I have to get rid of these bodies they keep leaving in my kitchen. I can take 'em and throw them in the river, sure. But what if me or my boys are stopped en route by some tipped badge?" "Quicklime?" I suggested automatically. "What are you talking about? Are you sure you're some kind of scientist? Lime doesn't do much to a stiff at all. Kind of putrifies them like... "I forgot," I admitted. "I'd read it in so many stories I'd forgotten it wouldn't work. And I suppose the furnace leaves ashes and there's always traces of hair and teeth in the garbage disposal... An interesting problem, at that." "I figured you could handle it," Carmen said, leaning back comfortably in the favorite chair of my bachelor apartment. "I heard you were working on something to get rid of trash for the government." "That," I told him, "is restricted information. I subcontracted that work from the big telephone laboratories. How did you find it out?" "Ways, Professor, ways." The government did want me to find a way to dispose of wastes -- radioactive wastes. It was the most important problem any country could have in this time of growing atomic industry. Now a small-time gangster was asking me to use this research to help him dispose of hot corpses. It made my scientific blood seeth. But the shadow of the Black Hand cooled it off. "Maybe I can find something in that area of research to help you," I said. "I'll call you." "Don't take too long. Professor," Carmen said cordially. T he big drum topped with a metallic coolie's hat had started out as a neutralizer for radioactivity. Now I didn't know what to call it. The A EC had found burying canisters of hot rubbish in the desert or in the Gulf had eventually proved unsatisfactory. Earth tremors or changes of temperature split the tanks in the ground, causing leaks. The undersea containers rusted and corroded through the time, poisoning fish and fishermen. been awarded a subcontract to work on the problem. The ideal solution would be to find a way to neutralize radioactive emanations, alpha, beta, X et cetera. (No, my dear, et cetera rays aren't any more dangerous than the rest.) But this is easier written than done. Of course, getting energy to destroy energy without producing energy or matter is a violation of the maxim of the conservation of energy. But I didn't let that stop me -- any more than I would have let the velocity of light put any limitations on a spacecraft engine had I been engaged to work on one. You can't allow other people's ideas to tie you hand and foot. There are some who tell me, however, that my refusal to honor such time-tested cliches is why I only have a small private laboratory owned by myself, my late wife's father and the bank, instead of working in the vast facilities of Bell, Du Pont, or General Motors. To this, I can only smile and nod. But even refusing to be balked by conservative ideas, I failed. I could not neutralize radioactivity. All I had been able to do (by a basic disturbance in the electromagnetogravitational co-ordinant system for Earth-Sun) was to reduce the mass of the radioactive matter. This only concentrated the radiations, as in boiling contaminated water. It did make the hot stuff vaguely easier to handle, but it was no breakthrough on the central problem. Now, in the middle of this, I was supposed to find a way to get rid of some damned bodies for Carmen. Pressed for time and knowing the results wouldn't have to be so precise or carefully defined for a racketeer as for the United States government, I began experimenting. I cut corners. I bypassed complete safety circuits. I put dangerous overloads on some transformers and doodled with the wiring diagrams. If I got some kmd of passable incinerator I would be happy. T turned the machine on. The lights popped out. There were changes that should be made before I tried that again, but instead I only found a larger fuse for a heavier load and jammed that in the switchbox. I flipped my machine into service once again. The lights flickered and held. The dials on my control board told me the story. It was hard to take.  But there it was. The internal scale showed zrb. I had had a slightly hot bar of silver alloy inside. It was completely gone. Mass zero. The temperature gauge showed that there had been no charige in centigrade reading that ' couldn't be explained by the mechanical operation of the machine itself. There had been no sudden discharge of electricity or radioactivity. I checked for a standard antigtavity effect but there was none. Gravity inside the cylinder had gone to zero but never to minus. I was at last violating conservation of energy -- not by successfully inverting the cube of the ionization factor, but by destroying: mass...by simply making it cease to exist with no cause-and-effect side effects. I knew the government wouldn't be interested, since I couldn't explain how my device worked. No amount of successful demonstration could ever convince anybody with any scientific training that it actually did work: But I shrewdly judged that Tony Carmen wouldn't ask an embarrassing "how" when he was incapable of understanding the explanation. does it ' Work?" Tony Carmen demanded of me, sleeking his mifror-black hair and staring up at the disk-topped drum. "Why do you care?" I asked' irritably. "It will dispose of yoiir bodies for you." "I got a reason that goes beyond the stiff, but let's stick to that just for now. Where are these bodies going? I don't warit them winding up in the D.A.'s bathtub." "Why not? How could they trace them back to you?" "You're the scientist," Tony said hotly. "I got great respect for those crime lab boys. Maybe the stiff got some of my exclusive brand of talc on it, I don't know." "Listen here, Carmen," I said, "what makes you think these bodies are going somewhere? Think of it only as a kind of -- incinerator." "Not on your life. Professor. The gadget don't get hot so how can it burn? It don't use enough electricity to fry. It don't cut 'em up or crush 'em down, or dissolve them in acid. I've seen disappearing cabinets before." Mafia or not, I saw red. "Are you daring to suggest that I am working some trick with trap doors or sliding panels?" "Easy, Professor," Carmen said, effortlessly shoving me back with one palm. "I'm not saying you have the machine rigged. It's just that you have to be dropping the Stuff through a sliding panel inwell, everything around ' us. You're sliding all thait aside and dropping things through. But I Want to know where they wind up. Reasonable?" Carmen was an uneducated lout and a criminal but he had an instinctive feel for the mechanics of physics. "I don't know where the stuff goes, Carmen," I finally admitted. "It might go into another plane of existence. 'Another dimension' the writers for the American Weekly would describe it. Or into our past, or our future." The swarthy racketeer pursed his lips and apparently did some rapid calculation. "I don't mind the first two, but I don't like them going into the future. If they do that, they may show up again in six months." "You'll have to cut that future part out, Professor." I was beginning to get a trifle impatient. All those folk tales I had heard about the Mafia were getting more distant. "See here. Carmen, I could lie to you and say they went into the prehistoric past and you would never know the difference. But the truth is, I just don't know where the processed material goes. There's a chance it may go into the future, yes. But unless it goes exactly one year or exactly so many years it would appear in empty space... because the earth will have moved from the spot it was transmitted. I don't know for sure. Perhaps the slight Deneb-ward movement of the Solar System would wreck a perfect three-point landing even then and cause the dispatched materials to burn ap from atmospheric friction, like meteors. You will just have to take a chance on the future. That's the best I can do." Carmen inhaled deeply, "Okay. I'll risk it. Pretty long odds against any squeal on the play. How many of these things can you turn out, Professor?" "I can construct a duplicate of this device so that you may destroy the unwanted corpses that you would have me believe are delivered to you with the regularity of the morning milk run." The racketeer waved that suggestion aside. "I'm talking about a big operation, Venetti. These things can take the place of incinerators, garbage disposals, waste baskets..." "Impractical," I snorted, "You don't realize the tremendous amount of electrical power these devices require..." "Nuts! From what you said, the machine is like a TV set; it takes a lot of power to get it started, but then on it coasts on its own generators." A what you say," I admitted in the face of his unexpected information. "But I can hardly turn my invention over to your entirely persuasive salesmen, I'm sure. This is part of the results of an investigation for the government. Washington will have to decide what to do with the machine.' "Listen, Professor," Carmen began, "the Mafia -- " "What makes you think I'm any more afraid of the Mafia than I am of the F.B.I.? I may have already sealed my fate by letting you in on this much. Machinegunning is hardly a less attractive fate to me than a poor security rating. To me, being dead professionally would be as bad as being dead biologically." Tony Carmen laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. I finally deduced he intended to be cordial. "Of course," he said smoothly "you have to give this to Washington but there are ways, Professor. I know. I'm a business man -- " "You are? I said. He named some of the businesses in which he held large shares of stock. "You are.' "I've had experience in this sort of thing. We simply leak the information to a few hundred well selected persons about all that your machine can do. We'll call 'em Expendables, because they can expend anything." "I," I interjected, "planned to call it the Venetti Machine." "Professor, who calls the radio the Marconi these days?" "There are Geiger-Muller Counters, though," I said. "You don't have to give a Geiger counter the sex appeal of a TV set or a hardtop convertible. We'll call them Expendables. No home will be complete vithout one." "Perfect for disposing of unwanted bodies," I mused. "The murder rate will go alarmingly with those devices within easy reach." "Did that stop Sam Colt or Henry Ford?" Tony Carmen asked reasonably... Naturally, I was aware that the government would not be interested in my machine. I am not a Fortean, a' psychic, a psionicist or a screwball. But the government frequently gets things it doesn't know what to do with -- like airplanes in the 'twenties. When it doesn't know what to do, it doesn't do it. There have been hundreds of workable perpetual motion machines patented, for example. Of course, they weren't vices in the strictest sense of the word. Many of them used the external power of gravity' they would wear out or slow down in time from friction, but for the meanwhile, for some ten to two hundred years they would just sit there, moving. No one had ever been able to figure out what to do with them. ing to dump tons of radioactive waste (with some possible future reclaimation value) into a machine which they didn't believe actually could work. Tony Carmen knew exactly what to do with an Expendable once he got his hands on it. Naturally, that was what I had been afraid of. T he closed sedan was warm, even in early December. Outside, the street was a progression of shadowed block forms. I was shivering slightly, my teeth rattling like the porcelain they were. Was this the storied "ride," I wondered? Carmen finally returned to the car, unlatched the door and slid in. He did not reinsert the ignition key. I did not feel like sprinting down the deserted street. "The boys will have it set up in a minute," Tony the racketeer informed me. "What?" The firing squad? "The Expendable, of course." "Here? You dragged me out here to see how you have prostituted my invention? I presume you've set it up with a 'Keep Our City Clean' sign pasted on it." He chuckled. It was a somewhat nasty sound, or so I imagined. A flashlight winked in the sooty twilight. "Okay. Let's go," Tony said, slapping my shoulder. I got out of the car, rubbing my flabby bicep. Whenever I took my teen-age daughter to the beach from my late wife's parents' home, I frequently found # pound bullies did kick sand in my ears. The machine was installed on the corner, half covered with a gloomy white shroud, and fearlessly plugged into the city lighting system via a blanketed streetlamp. Two hoods hovered in a doorway ready to take care of the first cop with a couple of fifties or a single .#, as necessity dictated. Tony guided my elbow. "Okay, Professor, I think I understand the bit now, but I'll let you run it up with the flagpole for me, to see how it waves to the national anthem." "Here?" I spluttered once more. "I told you, Carmen, I wanted nothing more to do with you. Your check is still on deposit... " "You didn't want anything to do with me in the first place." The thug's teeth flashed in the night. "Throw your contraption into gear, buddy." That was the first time the tone of respect, even if faked, had gone out of his voice. I moved to the switchboard of my invention. What remained was as simple as adjusting a modern floor lamp to a medium light position. I flipped. Restraining any impulse to' ward colloqualism, I was also deeply disturbed by what next occurred. One of the massive square shapes on the horizon vanished. "What have you done?" I yelped, ripping the cover off the machine. Even under the uncertain illumination of the smogged stars I could see that the unit was half gone -- in fact, exactly halved. "Squint the Seal is one of my boys. He used to be a mechanic in the old days for Burger, Madle, the guys who used to rob banks and stuff." There was an unmistakable note of boyish admiration in Carmen's voice. "He figured the thing would work like that. Separate the poles and you increase the size of the working area." "You mean square the operational field. Your idiot doesn't even know mechanics." "No, but he knows all about how any kind of machine works." "You call that working?" I demanded. "Do you realize what you have there, Carmen?" "Sure. A disintegrator ray, straight out of Startling Stories My opinion as to the type of person who followed the pages of science-fiction magazines with fluttering lips and tracing finger was upheld. I looked at the old warehouse and of course didn't see it. "What was this a test for?" I asked, fearful of the Frankenstein I had made. "What are you planning to do now?" "This was no test, Vcnetti. This was it. I just wiped out Harry Keno and his intimates right in the middle of their confidential squat." "Good heavens. That's uncouthly old-fashioned of you. Carmen ! Why, that's murder "Not," Carmen said, "without no corpus delecti "The body of the crime remains without the body of the victim," I remembered from my early Ellery Queen training. "You're talking too much. Professor," Tony suggested. "Remember, you did it with your machine." "Yes," I said at length. "And why are we standing here lettmg those machines sit there?" T here were two small items of interest to me in the Times the following morning. One two-inch story -- barely making page one because of a hole to fill at the bottom of an account of the number of victims of Indian summer heat prostration -- told of the incineration of a warehouse on Fleet Street by an ingenious new arson bomb that left "virtually" no trace. (Maybe the fire inspector had planted a few traces to make his explanation more creditable.) The second item was further over in a science column just off the editorial page. It told of the government -- ! -- developing a new process of waste disposal rivaling the oldBuck Rogers disintegrator ray. This, I presumed, was one of Tony Carmen's information leaks. If he hoped to arouse the public into demanding my invention I doubted he would succeed. The public had been told repeatedly of a new radioactive process for preserving food and a painless way of spraying injections through the skin. But they were still stuck with refrigerators and hypodermic needles. I had forced my way halfway through the paper and the terrible coffee I made when the doorbell rang. I was hardly surprised when it turned out to be Tony Carmen behind the front door. He pushed in, slapping a rolled newspaper in his palm. "Action, Professor." "The district attorney has indicted you?" I asked hopefully. "He's not even indicted you, Venetti. No, I got a feeler on this plant in the Times I shook my head. "The government will take over the invention, no matter what the public wants." "The public? Who cares about the public? The Arcivox corporation wants this machine of yours. They have their agents tracing the plant now. They will go from the columnist to his legman to my man and finally to you; Won't be long before they get here. An hour maybe. "Arcivox makes radios and TV sets. What do they want with the Expendables?" "Opening up a new appliance line with real innovations. I hear they got a new refrigerator. All open. Just shelves -- no doors or sides. They want a revolutionary garbage disposal too." "Do you own stock in the company? Is that how you know?" "I own stock in a competitor. That's how I know," Carmen informed me. "Listen, Professor, you can sell to Arcivox and still keep control #f the patents through a separate corporation. And I'll give you # of its stock." This was Carmen's idea of a magnanimous offer for my invention. It was a pretty good offer -- # and my good health. "But will the government let Arcivox have the machine for commercial use?" "The government would let Arcivox have the hydrogen bomb if they found a commercial use for it." There was a sturdy knock on the door, not a shrill ring of the bell. "That must be Arcivox now," Carmen growled. "They have the best detectives in the business. You know what to tell them?" I knew what to tell them. I peeled off my wet shirt and threw it across the corner of my desk, casting a reproving eye at the pastel air-conditioner in the window. It wasn't really the machine's fault -- The water department reported the reservoir too low to run water-cooled systems. It would be a day or two before I could get the gas type into my office. Miss Brown, my secretary, was getting a good look at my pale, bony chest. Well, for the salary she got, she could stand to look. Of course, she herself was wearing a modest onestrap sun dress, not shorts and halters like some of the girls. "My," she observed "it certainly is humid for March, isn't it. Professor Venetti?" I agreed that it was. She got her pad and pencil ready. "Wheedling form letter to Better Mousetraps. Where are our royalties for the last quarter of the year? We know we didn't have a full three months with our Expendable Field in operation on the new traps, but we want the payola for what we have coming. "Condescending form letter to Humane Lethal Equipment. Absolutely do not send the California penal system any chambers equipped with our patented field until legislature officially approves them. We got away with it in New Mexico, but we're older and wiser now. "Rush priority telegram to President, United States, kny time in the next ten days. Thanks for citation, et cetera. Glad buddy system working out well ir training battlefield disintegrator teams. "Indignant form letter to Arcivox. We do not feel we are properly a co-respondent in your damage suits. Small children and appliances have always been a problem, viz ice boxes and refrigerators. Suggest you put a more complicated latch on the handles of the dangerously inferior doors you have covering our efficient, patented field." I leaned back and took a breather. There was no getting around it -- I just wasn't happy as a business man. I had been counting on being only a figurehead in the Expendable Patent Holding Corporation, but Tony Carmen didn't like office work. And he hadn't anyone he trusted any more than me. Even. I jerked open a drawer and pulled off a paper towel from the roll I had stolen in the men's room. Scrubbing mv chest and neck with it, I smoothed it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It slid down the tapering sides and through the narrow slot above the Expendable Field. I had redesigned the wastebaskets after a janitor had stepped in one. But Gimpy was happy now, with the # we paid him. I opened my mouth and Miss Brown's pencil perked up its eraser, reflecting her fierce alertness Tony Carmen banged open the door, and I closed my mouth. "G-men on the way here," he blurted and collapsed into a chair opposite Miss Brown. "Don't revert to type," I warned him. "What kind of "Investigators for the Atomic Energy Commission." The solemn, conservatively dressed young man in the door touched the edge of his snapbrim hat as he said it. "Miss Brown, would you mind letting our visitor use your chair?" I asked. "Not at all, sir," she said dreamily. "May I suggest," I said "that we might get more business done if you then removed yourself from the chair first." Miss Brown leaped to her feet with a healthy galvanic response and quit the vicinity with her usual efficiency. said "I'll get right to the point. You may find this troublesome, gentlemen, but your government intends to comfiscate all of the devices using your so-c ailed Expendable field, and forever bar their manufacture in this country or their importation." "You stinking G-men aren't getting away with this," Carmen said ingratiatingly, "Ever heat of the Mafia?" "Not much," the young man admitted earnestly, "since the tions a few years back." I cleared my throat. "I must admit that the destruction of a concerting before lunch. May we ask why you took this step?" The agent inserted a finger between his collar and tie. "Have you noticed how unseasonably warm it is?" "I wondered if you had. You're going to have heat prostration if you keep that suit coat on five minutes more." The young man collapsed back in his chair, loosening the top button of his ivy league jacket, looking from my naked hide to the gossomer scrap of sport shirt Carmen wore. "We have to dress inconspicuously in the service," he panted weakly. I nodded understandingly. "What does the heat have to do with the outlawing of the Expendables?" "At first we thought there might be some truth in the folk nonsense that nuclear tests had something to do with raising the mean temperature said. "But our scientists quickly found they weren't to blame." "Clever of them." "Yes, they saw that the widespread use of your machines was responsible for the higher temperature. Your device violates the law of conservation of energy, seemingly. It seemingly destroys matter without creating energy. Actually -- He paused dramatically, "Actually, your device added the energy it created in destroying matter to the energy potential of the planet in the form of heat. You see what that means? If your devices continue in operation, the mean temperature of Earth will rise to the point where we burst into flame. They must be outlawed!" "I agree," I said reluctantly. Tony Carmen spoke up. "No, you don't. Professor. We don't agree to that." I waved his protests aside. "I would agree," I said, "except that it wouldn't work. Explain the danger to the public, let them feel the heat rise themselves, and they will hoard Expendables against seizure and continue to use them, until we do burst into flame, as you put it so religiously." "Why?" the young man demanded. "Because Expendables are convenient. There is a ban on frivolous use of water due to the dire need. But the police still have to go stop people from watering lawns, and I suspect not a few swimming pools are being filled on the sly. Water is somebody else's worry. So will be generating enough heat to turn Eden into Hell." "Mass psychology isn't my strongest point," the young man said worriedly... "But I suspect you may be right. Then -- we'll be damned?" , , "No, not necessarily," I told him comfortingly. "All we have to do is use up the excess energy with engines of a specific design." "But can we design those engines in time?" the young man wondered with uncharacteristic gloom. "Certainly," I said, practising the power of positive thinking. "Now that your world-wide testing laboratories have confirmed a vague fear of mine, I can easily reverse the field of the Expendable device and create a rather low-efficiency engine that consumes the excess energy in our planetary potential."  whose name I can never remember was present along with Tony Carmen the night my assistants finished with the work I had outlined. While it was midnight outside, the fluorescents made the scene more visible than sunlight. My Disexpendable was a medium-sized drum in a tripod frame with an unturned coolie's hat at the bottom. Breathlessly, I closed the switch and the scooped disc began slowly to revolve. "Is it my imagination,", the agent asked, "or is it getting cooler in here?" Professor.' Carmen gave me a warning nudge There was now something on the revolving disc. It was a bar of some shiny gray metal. "Kill the power, Professor Carmen said. "Can it be, I wondered, that the machine is somehow recreating or drawing back the processed material from some other time or dimension?" "Shut the thing off, Venetti r' the racketeer demanded. But too late. There was now a somewhat dead man sitting in the saddle of the turning circle of metal. If Harry Keno had only been sane when he turned up on that merry-go-round in Boston I feel we would have learned much of immense value on the nature of time and space. As it is, I feel that it is a miscarriage of justice to hold me in connection with the murders I am sure Tony Carmen did commit. I hope this personal account when published will end the vicious story supported by the district attorney that it was I who sought Tony Carmen out and offered to dispose of his enemies and that I sought his financial backing for the exploitation of my invention. This is the true, and only true, account of the development of the machine known as the Expendable. I am only sorry, now that the temperature has been standardized once more, that the Expendable's antithesis, the Disexpendable, is of too low an order of efficiency to be of much value as a power source in these days of. nuclear and solar energy. So the world is again stuck with the problem of waste disposal... including all that I dumped before. But as a great American once said, you can't win 'em all. If you so desire, you may send your generous and fruitful letters towards my upcoming defense in care of this civic-minded publication.   by Jack Sharkey Avram Davidson, Allen Kim Lang, Arthur C. Clarke, Willy still on sale. Get your copy today! The place where reader and editor meet...  Dear Editor: The cover of the March issue was very well drawn and has greatly improved. As you promised, the interior art was a good deal better than earlier issues. Keep working on it and IP's quality will continue rising. Anderson's story was good, although not among his best. Let's have more of him. Enjoyed E Being bit, even though it was a little wild. How about some stories from Sturgeon? Overall, March issue was superb. Keep up the good work! Winfred Anderson Springfield, Tennessee P.S. In the cover picture the piece of wreckage seems to be painted red. My question is how come the paint doesn't burn off from friction when the ship enters the atmosphere?  Simple. It does burn off. Repainting it every time is how they keep the spacemen busy. -- Editor Dear Editor: The cover illustration for Kings Who Die in the tenth anniversary issue was a masterpiece as was the story itself. Am enjoying very much the series of stories about Retief and hope they continue to be as good as they have been so far. # looks like a good year for IF! David Charles Paskow Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Dear Sir: IF of March, #, Happy Homicide, p. #, records the fallacy (such even in a futuristic setup) that brain tissue, dead longer than five minutes, still contains mind vibrations traceable by a super-dooper encephalogram. If brain and mind be identical, then violin and violinist are interchangeable as well. Even fiddler Albert Einstein thought so, leaving his erstwhile brain to science. Did the microtome locate his genius? General tenor of IF ingenious, plausible, well edited, facetious fiddlesticks at minimum, genuine merit. Candid editorial excellent. Four-dimensional wisdom unknowable to us #-dimensional clucks. Will convey info if anything fulminant crosses my horizon. Psionics inconstant undeveloped toy. All the best to you, yours, etc. E. M. Smola New York City Dear Editors -- whoever you are: Its been many years (more than I care to remember) since I sat down last and hacked out a letter to a pro-editor. Even so, I was surprised to see Ken Winkes's letter in your January issue; I have always been under the impression that a letter column was supposed to be for just the purpose that he suggests -- discussion, argument, (you should forgive the expression) hue and cry. Or have letter columns changed that much in the last ten years ? I wonder if Ken Winkes remembers the letter columns of ries, Startling Stories (under Sam Merwin and Sam Mines) and Planet Stories (under Robert Lowndes). I suppose all of us in those days had, to a certain degree, the so-called "sense of wonder.' But such letter columns -- eight, ten pages long -- those were the days when professional authors were regular contributors, and the discussion ranged from new findings of Sumerian artifacts in the Iranian desert to the latest developments in rocket fuels. Now, the Sumerian artifacts have withdrawn to the museums and the artificial satellites are circling the Earth by the dozen."ometimes I think the guy was right who said that familiarity breeds contempt. Of course the inevitable happened. Between rising costs of magazine publishing and waning interest on the part of the letter writers, the forum-type letter column was doomed to extinction; and in my mind at least, now occupies the same portion of the imagination usually reserved for particularly idyllic memories. Since Ken asks, suppose we try a definition of this term "sense of wonder" (even though it's rather like trying to define "time.") My dictionary defines "wonder" as: , .thing or event that causes astonishment and admiration...feeling of surprise...and awe aroused by something strange... unexpected, incredible ; to have doubt mingled with curiosity." And: "Sense; the ability of the nerves and brain to receive and react to stimuli." '"Sense of wonder: The brain reaction to a set of stimuli which inspire awe, astonishment, admiration, surprise; to be inspired by these stimuli to doubt (no doubt mixed with curiosity) ; astonishment and unexpected incredulity; the whole thing being a function of a vivid imagination." It's a tenuous thing, this "sense of wonder." To have one, you must have imagination. In fact, a sense of wonder and imagination are two hairs of the same dog -- you might say, two sides of the same hair. It is not something limited to a reading and appreciation of science fiction. Imagination opens the lock on any door, shows the way to the solving of any problem. It is just that, to many people, science fiction is a whole new set of doors. Before #, one of these doors opened to the regions of near space. Now that sputniks and satellites are shooting about all over up there, the frontier has all but vanished. It is "explored" territory. Near space has attained the status of the "Old West" during the early years of this century -- almost all explored, filled with dust, weather and hundreds of people just trying to live there, never mind how wonderful it is. Someone said not too long ago that once men have gone to the moon there will be another frontier gone -- after all, what enjoyment is there in reading a story about a trip across country in a car? Many stories were written about that very thing, years ago. Now cross-country trips are a matter of course. Imagination -- the "sense of wonder" -- hasn't vanished and it never will. But with each stride forward of science, a portion of what was once alive only in the imagination becomes hard living fact. You don't have to use your imagination to deal with it... at least with the basic parts of it. But for every problem solved there are a hundred new ones. It is impossible for Man to become bored with evervthing -- at least, not for a few hundred thousand years. A dying gasp from, Ray Thompson Norfolk, Nebraska  Bob Lowndes, one of the oldest and best friends of  whoever you are", ably edited many a magazine, but Planet Stories wasn't one of them. Mai Reiss, Jerry Bixby, Paul Fairman, Scott Peacock were a few of Planets eminent helmsmen. But with the rest of what yoii say we agree ! Science fiction doesn't suffer because science moves along. There are always new frontiers -- aU ways new discoveries -- always new things to look at through the illuminating mirror that our writers hold up for us. -- Editor. Dear Mr. Sturgeon: I send this along to you for several reasons. I : Readers seldom influence the format of publishing policy of a magazine -- only its life or death. # : As a feature editor you can think about and discuss many things an editor must reject. Over Labor Day I attended the Sci-Fic Convention here in Seattle. I was pleased with the convention -- but the one factor that disturbed me was the percentage of middle-age and past m i d d I e-aged to youth. Lots of young people -- to be sure -- but not nearly enough. Again, the high per cent of the youth that fell into the "screwball" or "fad" division. Fads are soon dropped as people mature. Will they drop s.f. as well? I think so. I have been working for. Boeing Airplane Company the past couple of years, and I have been working on advance Wandering about in # and doing niuch of what I used to dream of doing when I was in high school and finally got the training to do. The thing I have noted (has been noted elsewhere) is the lack of interest among our younger employees in the actual project -- aside from pay day. What is the problem? Well, I think it has been the loss of "bridge material" in s.f. The loss of space opera has been lauded in some areas -- but kids that have been raised on Matt Dillon and "The Untouchables" have a tough time transferring their interest to the advanced pages of Analog or Galaxy. IF does pop up with some but -- only once in a while. Let them find their way to the advanced social and technical S-F through plain old space opera! Fred Crisman Tacoma, Washington  #: We vere at Seattle too, and noticed the lack of younger fans, relatively speaking. Heard a very logical explanation, though. Seattle being very far from usual fannish hangouts, only the more solvent -- which is generally to say, the older -- fans could scrape up the carfare. #: IF tries real hard to bring good 'space opera" to its readers. We like it too. The hard part is convincing the writers to write it for us. #: A boon, f ellows! Please don't address your letters to Our Bearded Feature Editor, or the art director, or the publisher. This involves us either in forwarding mail back and forth -- which takes time and lets some of it get lost, we fear -- or in opening Our Bearded Feature Editor's personal mail from old loves, ardent fans and long-lost relatives -- which involves us in angry reproaches. Just: "Hue  Cry, co IF" will do fine. At great expense to ourselves we employ a large secretarial staff -- or anyway, a staff composed of I large secretary -- to sort things out. Trust her! -- Editor, Dear Editor: Okay, okay, you've put the "Worlds of" back in the title were it belonged, but how do you Fead it now? "IF -- Worlds of Science Fiction" or "Worlds of IF -- Science Fiction"? The former is the original title and by far the best one. Will be eagerly awaiting your answer, since I bind my copies by myself and don't know which of the titles to put on the spine of the magazine. Congrats on the new cover and spine logos ; they look much better in the bookcase. But what's the big idea, using just one metallic clip, or whater you call it? Does this really cut costs, or is this just plain avarice? There used to be occasional (and very good too, I might add) anthologies, of which the last one was The Second World of If. Why couldn't you continue the series? I'm sure the readers would receive them back enthusiastically. Also, why not have Ted Sturgeon review some books each issue? A book review feature is very necessary to a magazine. And, while you're at it, get somebody to write science articles, eight to ten pages long, not those skimpy news items Sturgeon is forced to do; Scientific American does them much better. By the way, I am also entirely in favor of a #-# page editorial and some # pages of letters. Come now, it isn't very much, is it? Alexander Yudenitch San Paulo, Brazil  Re avarice: We're trying to do something about that now, though it pains our greedy soul to part with the price of an extra staple. (That's a joke. The problem is actually more complicated -- but we are working on it.) Re "Science News Briefs": Okay, we've killed them. Like this month's Sturgeon science article better? Re anthologies: We're working on that, too. Let you know more about it soon. -- Editor. By the way, you letter-writers -- take a look at The Other IF in this issue before you sit down to a typewriter again. Might give you something If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" In your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Roy, Clarke, Harmon, Schmiti, Pohl, Davidson, SImak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're ail In IF! I if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.  Yes! 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Sometimes newsstands run outthe mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-paae Galaxy , per # " sues foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City Address Zone State be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women wh o privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious Wfe Rosicrucians ( organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings . Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe e.C.E, ! 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Subscriptions # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with your very first issue, we will send you a complete refund immediately. If, at any later time, you wish to stop your subscription to Space World, we will make a full refund of the unused portion of your subscription with no questions asked. is meant for you. Here, in a magazine edited by two great names in the world of science fiction, Willy Ley and Otto Binder, is the whole dynamic story of spacemen and their spacecraft... from the tense moments during a countdown at Canaveral through the triumph of zooming into orbit around the earth, and on to the moon and the planets. With Space World, you're part of everything that happens. An Atlas streaks down the Atlantic MiSvSile Range... you're in the tracking station. Project Saturn is completed... you're there for the test shot. A soft landed load is placed on the moon... you're at the receivers getting the first information that comes across the vastness of space. The first man crosses the threshold to explore hidden mysteries of other worlds... and you're beside him. Space World brings this all to you every month... under the expert guidance of Willy Ley and Otto Binder, who know how to tell this dramatic story in clear, simple, exciting terms that anyone can understand.  # West #th Street, New York #, N. r...  I year (# issues) #. (# issues if payment enclosed) I   Payment enclosed  Bill me I (Please print) i . IF  Editorial Notebook is the corniest of all titles for an editorial page ; yet we do have a notebook and we are an editor, and just this once we'll let you peek. We wouldn't begin to let you leaf through it. It isn't that you might swipe our ideas, or that we jot down embarrassing Secrets. It's just that we'd hate to have to explain to you why we bothered to record such-and-such a thought when we honestly don't know ourselves. Some things, of course, are put down out of sheer self-defense -- ideas which pop up unexpectedly and demand to be pursued at a time when duty calls elsewhere. Writing them down can often drive them underground for the time being. And some, of course, are written there specifically because we want to share them with you. It's good to dredge these out, for they often get permanently lost, awaiting a tiein or a pile-on -- some framework or lead-in to excuse their being immortalized on these pages. Well, the heck with a context. Take 'em as is. All the worlds love a lover. (Title?)... Guy asks a robot, or ET, "How do you feel?" and gets a four-hour, lecture on esthesia... Why do bees hum? Because they don't know the lyrics... A prize fight is in progress at the end of the world, watched only by a man alone in a fallout shelter... A completed engraving for a commemorative stamp exists in the philatelic vaults in Washington, made in spring #: "# Years of Peace, # -- #."... No one seems to have noticed the extraordinary skill and force exhibited in the way the shepherds' part in the Nativity story is presented. The shepherds (a) left their sheep (b) at night, in order to view the Manger. You could juice up on applied psychology for forty years and never find a more powerful way to impress the uneducated pastoral mind as to the genuine wonder of an event. The story would be told and retold, not because they comprehended the happening, but because these guys had done the unheard-of thing of leaving their flocks. It's analagous to having a surgeon leave the table in the middle of a brain operation. So there's this pastoral planet, see. And the crew dress up like natives... Be Grown up or be Blown up... In Russian '"if" and "when" translate to the same word. Hey, could this be the real gimmick behind the Berlin crisis and these incredible deadlines Khrushchev sets and then backs off? Suppose he's all the time saying "if I sign a treaty with East Germany in six months" and constantly gets translated "when I sign..."? Time travel story: smart guy buys up Cape Canaveral before base, is established, sits back to cash in. His smarter buddy won't touch it: he buys the land all around it. When time comes, gov't moves in, pays (via eminent domain) for squashy unimproved relatively useless swamp country, and pays peanuts. But the other guy makes nine fortunes on motel real estate, bars and trailer parks... Chalcedony is pronounced kal sed onee... "Here, therefore, is the greatest distemper of learning: when men study words, not matters." -- Francis Bacon... Genesis, Ch. #, tells of Enoch (which means Man) who praised the Lord; and seems to imply that only with him did Man begin. Which in turn would imply that those who went before -- Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, were not human !... Re Conscience see I Corinth. #. (Now here's a heck of a note in the notebook ! First Corinthians has only # chapters, Second Corinthians # chapters: what price Conscience?)... Make a fortune: by a piece of really nice woodland, fit it up with isolated tent sites, then install running water behind bushes, AC outlets in tree-roots, gas grates in open stone fireplaces -- everything really camouflaged and concealed. Can't imagine what sort of people you'd get for clients but bet they'd pay for it... Some medic has given a name to Fear of the Bomb: Nucleomitrophobia... Seems sometimes as if the very people who were avoiding science fiction because it was specious and comic-strippy are now staying away from it because it's 'way over their heads... "It will ever remain incomprehensible that our generation, so great in its achievements of discovery, could be so low spiritually as to give up thinking." IF Novelette tief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet of parchment and looked grave "This aide memoire," he said, "was just handed to me by the Cultural Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the matter of sponsorship of Youth groups -- " "Some youths," Retief said. "Average age, seventy-five." "The Fustians are a longlive d people," Magnan snapped. "These matters are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age -- " "That's right. He'll try anything -- in the hope it will maim somebody." "Precisely the problem," The Fustians looked like turtles but they could move fast when they chose! Magnan said. "But the Youth Movement is the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p -- that is, cement relations with this emergent power group -- the leaders of the future. You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception." "I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their rumbles," Retief said. "Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control group -- " "To the Fustians this is no jesting matter," Magnan cut in. "This group -- " he glanced at the paper -- "known as the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society, or awaiting sponsorship for a matter of weeks now." "Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and athletic development," Retief said. "If we don't act promptly," Magnan said, "the Groaci Embassy may well anticipate us. They're very active here." "That's an idea," said Retief. "Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke instead of us." "Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to step forward. However..." Magnan let the sentence hang in the air. Retief raised one eyebrow. "For a minute there," he said, "I thought you were going to make a positive statement." ing his fingers over his stomach. "I don't think you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive," he said. "I like the adult Fustians," said Retief. "Too bad they have to lug half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would help." "Great heavens, Retief," Magnan sputtered. "I'm amazed that even you would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity." "Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience, Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise you, for example, would be tripping over your beard." Magnan shuddered. "Please -- never mention the idea to a Fustian." Retief stood. "My own program for the day includes going over to the dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your permission, Mr. Ambassador... ?" Magnan snorted. "Your preoccupation with the trivial disturbs me, Retief. More interest in substantive matters -- such as working with Youth groups -- would create a far better impression." "Before getting too involved with these groups, it might 'be a good idea to find out a little more about them," said Retief. "Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this "You forget, these are merely teen-agers, so to speak' Magnan said. "Politics mean nothing to them... yet." "Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?" "You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance," said Magnan. "Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci are barely ahead of them." "Barely," said Retief. "Just over the line into crude atomics... like fission bombs." Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. "What market exists for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying the social patterns of the local youth." "I've studied them," said Retief. "And before I meet any of the local youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack." II  bungalow-t y p e building that housed the chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flatcar and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards. It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them, shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the shipyard gates, creaked to a halt. "Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed," he said in Fustian. "Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste." Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. "You should take up professional racing," he said. "Daredevil." He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed. Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back. A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace peered out at Retief. "Long-may-you-sleep," said Retief. "I'd like to take a look around, if you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new liner today." by Keith Laumer "May-you-d r c a m-of-thedeeps," the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist. "The youths know more of bedplates than do I, but who but tend the place of papers." "I know how you feel, oldtimer," said Retief. "That sounds like the story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner." The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines... "What does the naked-back here?" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief. "I came to take a look at your new liner," said Retief. "We need no prying foreigners here," the youth snapped. His eye fell on the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger. "Doddering hulk!" he snapped at the ancient. "May you toss in nightmares! Put by the plans!" "My mistake," Retief said. "I didn't know this was a secret project." T HE youth hesitated. "It is not a secret project," he muttered. "Why should it be secret?" "You tell me." The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the Fusty gesture of uncertainty. "There is nothing to conceal," he said. "We merely construct a passenger liner." "Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings," said Retief. "Who knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out." The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. "Went for his big brother, I guess," he said. "I have a feeling I won't get to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?" one," said the old Fustian. "And mine is the shame for the discourtesy of youth." Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed through the drawings, clicking the shutter. "A plague on these youths," said the oldster, "who grow more virulent day by day." "Why don't you elders clamp down?" "Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new. Unknown in my youth was such insolence." "The police -- " "Bah !" the ancient rumbled. "None have we worthy of the name, nor have we needed ought ere now." I I "What's behind it?" "They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot mischief." He pointed to the window. "They come, and a Soft One with them." Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed the hut, then started toward it. "That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy," Retief said. "I wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?" "Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust," the oldster rumbled. "Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions." "I was just leaving," Retief said. "Which way out?" "The rear door," the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. "Rest well, stranger on these shores." He moved to the entrance. "Same to you, pop," said Retief. "And thanks." He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate. T HE second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight: "Retief -- I shall expect dinner at first dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive Sponsorship ceremony for the coverage, arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your intransigence." Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep back. Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline. The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray. Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but the thought failed to keep the chill off. Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced. "That's close enough, kids," he said. "Plenty of room on this scow. No need to crowd up." "There are certain films," the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was unusually deep for a Youth. Hq was wrapped in a by Keith Laumer eavy cloak and moved awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed. "I told you once," said Retief. "Don't crowd me." The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell heavily. Retief was past him and off the flatcar before the other Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied. The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car, tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure. So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight. They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault, after running a copy for the reference files. And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obcruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The term "obsolete" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in the Eastern Arm. But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present but himself and the old-timer -- and he Fustian hadn't told them anything. Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the shipyard. T HE door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position. Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old fellow had put up a struggle. There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of a warehouse. Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in their siesta. He took a multibladed tool from a pocket, tried various fittings in the lock. It snicked open. He eased the door aside far enough to enter. Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed out of alignment... and the dust had been scraped from the floor before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head. Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine and pulled the sack free "It's me, old fellow," Retief said. "The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you into this." The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell back. "A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers," he rumbled. "But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth, Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments." "How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help." "Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here," said the old Fustian. "It would be your life." "I doubt if they'd go that far." "Would they not?" The Fustian stretched his neck. "Cast your light here. But for the toughness of my hide..." Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a sound like a seal coughing. "Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me -- in vain. Then they trussed me and dumped me here. They tjiink to return with weapons to complete the task." "Weapons? I thought it was illegal !" "Their evil genius, the Soft One," said the Fustian. "He would provide fuel to the Devil himself." "The Groaci again," said Retief. "I wonder what their angle is." "And I must confess. I told them of you, ere I knew their full intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the block and tackle." Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away. The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered...then flopped on his chest. Slowly he got to his feet. "My name is Whonk, fleet one," he said. "My cows are yours." "Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right now, let's get out of here." Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp, bulldozed them aside. "Slow am I to anger," he said, "but implacable in my wrath. Slock, beware !" "Hold it," said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. "What's that odor?" He flashed the light around, played it over a by Keith Laumer dry stain on the floor. He knelt, sniffed at the spot. "What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?" Whonk considered. "There were drums," he said. "Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock " scheduled to use it?" "I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths." "We'd better follow this up first, Whonk. There's only one substance I know of that's transported in drums and smells like that blot on the floor. That's titanite : the hottest explosive this side of a uranium pile." Ill Whonk puffing at his heels, came up to the sentry box beside the gangway leading to the plush interior of the official luxury space barge Moss Rock. "A sign of the times," said Whonk, glancing inside the empty shelter. "A guard should stand here, but I see him not. Doubtless he crept away to sleep." I  "Let's go aboard and take a look around." They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it -- a discordant note in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it. "Curious," he said. "What means this?" He held up a stained cloak of orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers. "Orange and green," mused Retief. "Whose colors are those?" "I know not." Whonk glanced at the arm-band. "But this is lettered." He passed the metal band to Retief. looked at Whonk. "It seems to me I've heard the name before," he murmured. "Let's get back to the Embassy -- fast." Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound...and turned in time to duck the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm embrace. "N ice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?" "The lout hid there by the storage bin," rumbled Whonk. The captive youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace. "Hang onto him," said Retief. "He looks like the biting kind." "No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength." by Keith Laumer "Ask him where the titanite is tucked away." "Speak, witless grub," growled Whonk, "lest I tweak you in twain." The youth gurgled. "Better let up before you make a mess of him," said Retief. Whonk lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the elder, mouth snapping. "This one was among those who trussed me and hid me Whonk. "In his repentance he will tell all to his elder." "That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance with me on the bus," Retief said. "He gets around." The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the bare back of the Fustian -- "By the Great Egg!" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried to rise. "This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him !" Retief looked at the scarred back. "I thought he looked a little old. But I thought -- " "This is not p o s s I b I e," Whonk said wonderingly. "The great nerve trunks are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the carapace and leave the patient living." "It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us and get out of here. His folks may come home." "Too late," said Whonk. Retief turned. Three youths came from behind the sheds. "Well," Retief said. "It in force tonight. Where's your pal?" he said to the advancing trio. "The sticky little bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers holding the bag, I'll bet." "Shelter behind me, Retief," said Whonk. "Go get 'em, old-timer." Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars. "I'll jump around and distract them." Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out...and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge. Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile. Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. "Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her." "The plot is foiled," said Whonk. "But what reason did they have?" "The Groaci are behind it. I didn't know about this gambit" "Which of these is the leader?" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth with a horny toe. "Arise, dreaming   one. "Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I know where to find the boss." A stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music. Retief Blid into his place beside Magnan. "Sorry to be late, Mr. Ambassador." "I'm honored that you chose to appear at all," said Magnan coldly. He turned back to the Fustian on his left. "Ah, yes, Mr. Minister," he said. "Charming, most charming. So joyous." The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. "It is the Lament of Hatching " he said; "our National Dirge." "Oh," said Magnan. "How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of instruments -- " "It is a droon solo," said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial Ambassador suspiciously. "Why don't you just admit you can't hear it," Retief whispered loudly. "And if I may interrupt a moment -- " Magnan cleared his throat. "Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived, perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies." "This group," said Retief, leaning across Magnan, "the know about them, Mr. Minister?" "Nothing at all," the huge Fustian elder rumbled. "For my taste, all Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a carapace to tame their irresponsibility." "We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful energies," said Magnan. "Labor gangs," said the minister. "In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myseif drew a muck sledge." "But in these modern by Keith Leumer times, " put in Magnan, "surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours." The minister snorted. "Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stenchfruit." "But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations," cried Magnan. "Their essential tenderness -- " "You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder," the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, "if you drilled boreholes and blasted."  W HY, that's our guest of Y honor," said Magnan, "a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is," "Slock," said Retief. "Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And -- " Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth. "What in the name of the Great Egg!" the Minister muttered. He blinked, breathing deeply. "Oh, forgive me," blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine. "Too bad the glass gave out," said Retief. "In another minute you'd have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in sideways. There's a matter you should know about -- " "Your attention, please," Magnan said, rising. "I see that our fine young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr. Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group." Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. "Don't introduce me yet," he said. "I want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know." "Well," murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, "I'm gratified to see you entering into the spirit of the event at last." He turned his attention back to the assembled guests. "If our honored guest will join me on the rostrum...?" he said. "The gentlemen of the press may want to catch a few shots of the presentation." Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room, took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras. "How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasurewe have in sponsorslowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. "We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of during the years ahead." Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Sl#ck, who did not see the new arrival. Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth. Slock stared at him, drew back. "You know me, Slock," said Retief loudly. "An old fellow named Whonk told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember? It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruisefr you're building' '  IV reached for Retief -- and choked off in mid-cry as the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear of the floor. "Glad you reporters happened along," said Retief to the gaping newsmen. "Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy. The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed. The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby worlds...for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo." Magnan found his tongue. "Are you mad, Retief?" he screeched. "This group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth !" "The Ministry's overdue for a purge," snapped Retief. He turned back to Slock. "I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was planned for today. When the Moss Rock blew, a variety of clues were to be planted where they'd be easy to find... with The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy...whose had received plenty of publicity." "The Moss Rock?" said  Magnan. "But that was -- Retief! This is idiotic. Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!" Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his sters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, openmouthed. "The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual," Retief by Keith Laumer said. "They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose." "Well, don't stand there," yelped Magnan over the uproar. "If Slock is the ringleader of a delinquent gang... !" He moved to give chase. Retief grabbed his arm. "Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a jackrabbit through a threshing contest." Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. "We can get through now," Whonk called. "This way" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in Whonk's wake. In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a code letter. No reply. He tried another. "No good," he said after a full minute had passed. "Wonder what's loose?" He slammed the phone back in its niche. "Let's grab a cab." I N the street the blue sun, Alpha, peered like an arc light under a low cloud layer, casting flat shadows across the mud of the avenue. The three mounted a passing flatcar. Whonk squatted, resting the weight of his immense shell on the heavy plank flooring. "W o u I d that I too could lose this burden, as has the false youth we bludgeoned aboard the Moss Rock " he sighed. "Soon will I be forced into retirement. Then a mere keeper of a place of papers such as I will rate no more than a slab on the public strand, with once-daily feedings. And even for a man of high position, retirement is no pleasure. A slab in the Park of Monuments is little better. A dismal outlook for one's next thousand years!" "You two carry on to the police station," said Retief. "I want to play a hunch. But don't take too long. I may be painfully right." "What -- ?" Magnan started. "As you wish, Retief," said Whonk. The flat-car trundled past the gate to the shipyard and Retief jumped down, headed guard post still stood vacant. The two Youths whom he and Whonk had left trussed were gone. "That's the trouble with a peaceful world," Retief muttered. "No police protection." He stepped down from the lighted entry and took up a position behind the sentry box. Alpha rose higher, shedding a glaring blue-white light without heat. Retief shivered. Maybe he'd guessed wrong... There was a sound in the near distance, like two elephants colliding. Retief looked toward the gate. His giant acquaintance, Whonk, had reappeared and was grappling with a hardly less massive opponent. A small figure became visible in the melee, scuttled for the gate. Headed off by the battling titans, he turned and made for the opposite side of the shipyard. Retief waited, jumped out and gathered in the fleeing Groaci. "Well, Yith," he said, "how's tricks? You should pardon the expression." "Release me, Retief !" the pale-featured alien lisped, his throat bladder pulsating in agitation. "The behemoths vie for the privilege of dismembering me out of hand !" "I know how they feel. I'll see what I can do... for a price." "I appeal to you," Yith whispered hoarsely. "As a fellow diplomat, a fellow alien, a fellow soft-back -- " "Why don't you appeal to Slock, as a fellow skunk?" said Retief. "Now keep quiet...and you may get out of this alive." The heavier of the two struggling Fustians threw the other to the ground. There was another brief flurry, and then the smaller figure was on its back, helpless. "That's Whonk, still on his feet," said Retief. "I wonder who he's caught -- and why." Whonk came toward the Moss Rock dragging the supine Fustian, who kicked vainly. Retief thrust Yith down well out of sight behind the sentry box. "Better sit tight, Yith. Don't try to sneak off; I can outrun you. Stay here and I'll see what I can do." He stepped out and hailed Whonk. Puffing like a steam engine Whonk pulled up before him. "Sleep, Retief!" He panted. "You followed a hunch; I did the same. I saw something strange in this one when we passed him on the avenue. I watched, followed him here. Look! It is Slock, strapped into a dead carapace! Now many things become clear." Youths aren't all as young as they look. Somebody's been holding out on the rest of you Fustians!" "The Soft One," Whonk said. "You laid him by the heels, Retief. I saw. Produce him now." "Hold on a minute, Whonk. It won't do you any good Whonk winked broadly. "I must take my revenge !" he to -- " roared. "I shall test the texture of the Soft One! His pulped remains will be scoured up by the ramp-washers and mailed home in bottles!" Retief whirled at a sound, caught up with the scuttling Yith fifty feet away, hauled him back to Whonk. "It's up to you, Whonk," he said. "I know how important ceremonial revenge is to you by Keith Laumer Fustians. I will not interfere." "Mercy!" Yith hissed, eyestalks whipping in distress. "I claim diplomatic immunity!" "No diplomat am I," rumbled W h o n k. "Let me see ; suppose I start with one of those obscenely active eyes -- " He reached... "I have an idea," said Retief brightly. "Do you suppose -- just this once -- you could forego the ceremonial revenge if Yith promised to arrange for a Groaci Surgical Mission to de-carapace you elders?" "But," Whonk protested, "those eyes! What a pleasure to pluck them, one by one!" "Yess," hissed Yith, "I swear it ! Our most expert surgeons...platoons of them, with the finest of equipment." "I have dreamed of how it would be to sit on this one, to feel him squash beneath my bulk..." "Light as a whissle feather shall you dance," Yith whispered. "Shell-less shall you spring in the joy of renewed youth -- " "Maybe just one eye," said Whonk grudgingly. "That would leave him four." "Be a sport," said Retief. "Well." "It's a deal then," said Retief. "Yith, on your word as a diplomat, an alien, a soft-back and a skunk, you'll set up the mission. Groaci surgical skill is an export that will net you more than armaments. It will be a whissle feather in your cap -- if you bring it off. And in return, Whonk won't sit on you. And I won't prefer charges of interference in the internal affairs of a free world." Behind Whonk there was a movement. Slock, wriggling free of the borrowed carapace, struggled to his feet, . in time for Whonk to seize him, lift him high and head for the entry to the Moss Rock . "H e y," Retief called. "Where are you going?" "I would not deny this one his reward," called Whonk. "He hoped to cruise in luxury. So be it." "Hold on, said Retief. "That tub is loaded with titanite !" "Stand not in my way, Retief. For this one in truth owes me a vengeance." Retief watched as the immense Fustian bore his giant burden up the ramp and disappeared within the ship. "I guess Whonk means business," he said to Yith, who hung in his grasp, all five eyes goggling. "And he's a little too big for me to stop." Whonk reappeared, alone, climbed down. "What did you do with him?" said Retief. "Tell him you were going to -- " "We had best withdraw," radius of the drive is fifty yards." "You mean -- " "The controls are set for Groaci. Long-may-he-sleep."-Retief. "But I guess you saw it, too." "No, confound it," Magnan said. "When I remonstrated with Hulk, or Whelk -- " "Whonk." " -- the ruffian thrust me into an alley bound in my own cloak. I'll most certainly complain to the Minister." "How about the surgical mission?" "A most generous offer," said Magnan. "Frankly, I was astonished. I think perhaps we've judged the Groaci too harshly." "I hear the Ministry of Youth has had a rough morning of it," said Retief. "And a lot of rumors are flying to the effect that Youth Groups are on the way out." Magnan cleared his throat, shuffled papers. "I -- ah -- have explained to the press that last night's -- ah -- " "Fiasco." " -- affair was necessary in order to place the culprits in an untenable position. Of course, as to the destruction sumed death of, uh, Slop." "The Fustians understand," said Retief. "Whonk wasn't k i d d i n g about ceremonial vengeance." "The Groaci had been guilty of gross misuse of diplomatic privilege," said Magnan. "I think that a note -- or perhaps an Aide Memoire: less formal..." "The Moss Rock was bound for Groaci," said Retief. "She was already in her transit orbit when she blew. The major fragments will arrive on schedule in a month or so. It should provide quite a meteorite display. I think that should be all the aide the Groaci's memoires will need to keep their tentacles off Fust." "But diplomatic usage -- " "Then, too, the less that's put in writing, the less they can blame you for, if anything goes wrong." "That's true," said Magnan, lips pursed. "Now you're thinking constructively, Retief. We may make a diplomat of you yet." He smiled expansively. "Maybe. But I refuse to let it depress me." Retief stood up. "I'm taking a few weeks off... if you have no objection, Mr. Ambassador. My pal Whonk wants to show me an island down south where the fishing is good." "But there are some extremely important matters coming up," said Magnan. "We're planning to sponsor Senior Citizen Groups -- " "Count me out. All groups give me an itch." "Why, what an astonishing remark, Retief! After all, we diplomats are ourselves a group." "Uh-huh," Retief said. Magnan sat quietly, mouth open, and watched as Retief stepped into the hall "and closed the door gently behind by Keith Laumer IF  Short Story The aliens relished human ways. Unfortunately, the humans relished them too! from gustible's planet tion of the four thousandth anniversary of the opening of space, Angary J. Gustible discovered Gustible's planet. The discovery turned out to be a tragic mistake. Gustible's planet was inhabited by highly intelligent lifeforms. They had moderate telepathic powers. They immediately mind-read Angary J. Gustible's entire mind and life history, and embarrassed him very deeply by making up an opera concerning his recent divorce. The climax of the opera portrayed his wife throwing a teacup at him. This created an unfavorable impression concerning Earth culture, and Angary J. Gustible, who held a reserve commission as a Subchief of the Instrumentality, was profoundly embarrassed to find that it was not the higher realities of Earth which he had conveyed to these people, but the unpleasant intimate facts. As negotiations proceeded, other embarrassments developed. In physical appearance the inhabitants of Gustible's planet, who called themselves Apicians, resembled nothing more than oversize ducks, ducks four feet to four feet six in height. At their wing tips, they had developed juxtaposed thumbs. They were paddle-shaped and sufficed to feed the Apicians. Gustible's planet matched Earth in several respects: in the dishonesty of the inhabitants, in their enthusiasm for good food, in their instant capacity to understand the human mind. Before Gustible began to get ready to go back to Earth, he discovered that the Apicians had copied his ship. There was no use hiding this fact. They had copied it in such detail that the discovery of Gustiblc's planet meant the simultaneous discovery of Earth... By the Apicians. T HE implications of this tragic development did not show up until the Apicians followed him home. They had a pianoforming ship capable of traveling in nonspace just as readily as his. The most important feature of Gustible's planet was its singularly close match to the biochemistry of Earth. The Apicians were the first intelligent life-forms ever met by human beings who were at once capable of smelling and enjoying everything which human beings smelled and enjoyed, capable of following any human music with forthright pleasure and capable of eating and drinking everything in sight. The very first Apicians on Earth were greeted by somewhat alarmed ambassadors who discovered that an appetite for Munich beer, Camembert cheese, tortillas and enchiladas, as well as the better grades of chow mein, far transcended any serious cultural, political or strategic interests which the new visitors might have. Arthur Djohn, a Lord of the Instrumentality who was acting for this particular matter, delegated an Instrumentality agent named Calvin Dredd as the chief diplomatic officer of Earth to handle the matter. Dredd approached one Schmeckst, who seemed to be the Apician leader. The interview was an unfortunate one. Dredd began by saying, "Your Exalted Highness, we are delighted to welcome you to Earth -- " Schmeckst said, "Are those edible ?" and proceeded to eat the plastic buttons from Calvin Dredd's formal coat, even before Dredd could say though not edible they were attractive. Schmeckst said, "Don't try to eat those, they are really not very good." Dredd, looking at his coat sagging wide open, said, "May I offer you some food?" Schmeckst said, "Indeed, yes." And while Schmeckst ate an Italian dinner, a Peking dinner, a red-hot peppery Szechuanese dinner, a Japanese sukiyaki dinner, two British breakfasts, a smorgasbord and four complete servings of diplomatic-level Russian zakouska, he listened to the propositions of the Instrumentality of Earth. by Cordwainer Smith him. Schmeckst was intelligent despite his gross and offensive eating habits. He pointed out: "We two worlds are equal in weapons. We can't fight. Look," said he to Calvin Dredd in a threatening tone. Calvin Dredd braced himself, as he had learned to do. Schmeckst also braced him. For an instant Dredd did not know what had happened. Then he realized that in putting his body into a rigid and controlled posture he had played along with the low grade but manipulable telepathic powers of the visitors. He was frozen rigid till Schmeckst laughed and released him. Schmeckst said, "You see, we are well matched. I can freeze you. Nothing short of utter desperation could get you out of it. If you try to fight us, we'll lick you. We are going to move in here and live with you. We have enough room on our planet. You can come and live with us too. We would like to hire a lot of those cooks of yours. You'll simply have to divide space with us, and that's all there is to it." That really was all there was to it. Arthur Djohn reported back to the Lords of the Instrumentality that, for the time being, nothing could be done about the disgusting people from Gustible's planet. They kept their greed within bounds -- by their standards. A mere seventy-two thousand of them swept the earth, hitting every wine shop, dining hall, snack bar, soda bar and pleasure center in the world. They ate popcorn, alfalfa, raw fruit, live fish, birds on the wing, prepared foods, cooked and canned foods, food concentrates and assorted medicines. Outside of an enormous capacity to hold many times what the human body could tolerate in the way of food, they showed very much the same effects as persons. Thousands of them got various local diseases, sometimes called by such undignified names as the Yangtze rapids, Delhi belly, the Roman groanin' or the like. Other thousands became ill and had to relieve themselves in the fashion of ancient emperors. Still they came. Nobody liked them. Nobody disliked them enough to wish a disastrous war. Actual trade was minimal. They bought large quantities of foodstuffs, paying in rare metals. But their economy on their own planet produced very little which the world itself wanted. The cities of mankind had long since developed to a point of comfort and corruption where a relatively mono-cultural being, such as the citizens of Gustible's planet, could not make much impression. The word "Apician" came to have unpleasant connotations of bad manners, greediness and prompt payment. Prompt payment was considered rude in a credit society, but after all it was better than not being paid at all. T HE tragedy of the relationship of the two groups came from the unfortunate picnic of the lady Ch'ao, who prided herself on having ancient Chinesian blood. She decided that it would be possible to satiate Schmeckst and the other Apicians to a point at which they would be able to listen to reason. She arranged a feast which, for quality and quantity, had not been seen since previous historic times, long before the many interruptions of war, collapse and rebuilding of culture. She searched the museums of the world for recipes. The dinner was set forth on the telescreen of the entire world. It was held in a pavilion built in the old Chinesian style. A soaring dream of dry bamboo and paper walls, the festival building had a thatched roof in the true ancient fashion. Paper lanterns with real candles illuminated the scene. The fifty selected A p i c i a n guests gleamed like ancient idols. Their feathers shone in the light and they clicked their paddle-like thumbs readily as they spoke, telepathically and fluently, in any Earth language which they .happened to pick out of the heads of their hearers. The tragedy was fire. Fire struck the pavilion, wrecked the dinner. The lady Ch'ao was rescued by Calvin Dredd. The Apicians fled. All of them escaped, all but one. Schmeckst himself. Schmeckst suffocated. He let out a telepathic scream which was echoed in the living voices of all the human beings, other Apicians and animals within reach, so that the television viewers of the world caught a sudden dogs barking, cats yowling, otters screeching and one lone panda letting out a singularly high grunt. Then Schmeckst perished. The pity of it... The Earth leaders stood about, wondering how to solve the tragedy. On the other side of the world, the Lords of the Instrumentality watched the scene. What they saw was amazing and horrible. Calvin Dredd, cold, disciplined agent that he was, approached the ruins of the pavilion. His face was twisted in an expression which they had difficulty in understanding. It was only after he licked his lips for the fourth time, and they saw a ribbon of drool running down his chin, that they realized he had gone mad with appetite. The lady Ch'ao followed close by Cordwainer Smith behind, drawn by some remorseless force. She was out of her mind. Her eyes gleamed. She stalked like a cat. In her left hand she held a bowl and chopsticks. The viewers all over the world watching the screen could not understand the scene. Two alarmed and dazed Apicians followed the humans, wondering what was going to happen. Calvin Dredd made a sudden reach. He pulled out the body of Schmeckst. The fire had finished Schmeckst. Not a feather remained on him. And then the flash fire, because of the peculiar dryness of the bamboo and the paper and the thousands upon thousands of candles, had baked him. The television operator had an inspiration. He turned on the smell-control. Throughout the planet Earth, where people had gathered to watch this unexpected and singularly interesting tragedy, there swept a smell which mankind had forgotten. It was an essence of roast duck. Beyond all imagining, it was the most delicious smell that any human being had tered. Throughout the world people looked away from their sets to see if there were any Apicians in the neighborhood. Just as the Lords of the Instrumentality ordered the disgusting scene cut off, Calvin Dredd and the lady Ch'ao began eating the roast Apician, Schmeckst.  hours most of the Apicians on Earth had been served, some with cranberry sauce, others baked, some fried Southern style. The serious leaders of Earth dreaded the consequences of such uncivilized conduct. Even as they wiped their lips and asked for one more duck sandwich they felt that this behavior was difficult beyond all imagination. The blocks that the Apicians had been able to put on human action did not operate when they were applied to human beings who, looking at an Apician, went deep into the recesses of their personality and were animated by a mad hunger which transcended all civilization. The Lords of the Instrumentality managed to round up Schmeckst's deputy and a few other Apicians and to send them back to their ship. The soldiers watching them licked their lips. The captain tried to see if he could contrive an accident as he escorted his state visitors. Unfortunately, tripping Apicians did not break their necks, and the Apicians kept throwing violent mind-blocks at human beings in an attempt to save themselves. One of the Apicians was so undiplomatic as to ask for a chicken salad sandwich and almost lost a wing, raw and alive, to a soldier whose appetite had been re-stimulated by reference to food. The Apicians went back, the few survivors. They liked Earth well enough and Earth food was delicious, but it was a horrible place when they considered the cannibalistic human beings who lived there -- so cannibalistic that they ate ducks! The Lords of the Instrumentality were relieved to note that when the Apicians leftthey closed the space lane behind them. No one quite knows how they closed it, or what defenses they had. Mankind, salivating and ashamed, did not push the pursuit hotly. Instead, people tried to make up chicken, duck, goose, Cornish hen, pigeon, sea-gull and other sandwiches to duplicate the incomparable taste of a genuine inhabitant of Gustible's planet. None were quite authentic and people, in their right minds, were not uncivilized enough to invade another world solely for getting the inhabitants as tidbits. The Lords of the Instrumentality were happy to report to one another and to the rest of the world at their next meeting that the Apicians had managed to close Gustible's planet altogether, had had no further interest in dealing with Earth and appeared to possess just enough of a technological edge on human beings to stay concealed from the eyes and the appetites of men. Save for that the Apicians were almost forgotten. A confidential secretary of the Office of Interstellar Trade was astonished when the frozen intelligences of a methane planet ordered forty thousand cases of Munich beer. He suspected them of being jobbers, not consumers. But on the instructions of his superiors he kept the matter confidential and allowed the beer to be shipped. It undoubtedly went to Gustible's planet, but they did not offer any of their own citizens in exchange. The matter was closed. The napkins were folded. Trade and diplomacy were at an end. New illustrations. #. illustrations. #. Due in May. #. a. More titles in the works. Mars; Chessmen of Mars; Master Mind of Mars. Ready now! #. full years. Good to very good I Price #. (Many other complete sets, special collections, etc. Send your want list. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn. (N.Y. #I #th Ave...Brooklyn #. N.Y. by CorUwainer Smith IF  Feature A RE you intelligent? Giftare! At least, so says our Feature Editor. In the last issue of IF, he challenged you to prove it. Just in case you missed his provocative article gest of what he said. Since s-f readers as a whole seem to have a special affinity for extrapolation, prognostication, prophecy, or whatever your word for pre-knowledge of the future is, he feels that among our readers there must be a high ability to deduce from current events certain things that will, or even must, happen in the near future. Since about # days pass between IF's closing deadline and the appearance of the magazine on the newsstands, this seems a perfect place to prove how good you are at writing now what will appear in the daily paper three months from now. He is not interested in wild guesses amazing everyone : any fool can predict that a Bulgarian earth satellite will land in a Wisconsin pasture but it wouldn't prove a thing if he turned out to be right. He would like to see reasoned forecasts in this general form: Such-and-such has been the case. So-and-so has now happened. Therefore : Thus and thus will be news when this goes to press. There will of course be a small reward for the most accurate forecasts and acknowledgements for all. Send your entries before June #th, #, to: IF Worlds of Science Fiction #I Hudson St. New York #, N. Y. They conquered the planet and they owned it outright. The trouble was --  -- they didn't dare set foot on it! toon Lieutenant Lee Hartford signaled Sergeant Felix, busy policing up stragglers at the rear, that he was taking over. Hartford tongued the volume-setting of his bitcher to "Low" and softly singsonged to his three dozen troopers: Your girlfriend's just an hour away; there's a time to soldier and a time to IF  Short Novel threep, furp. Mondrian, pick up the cadence; you're marching like a man with a paper pelvis. Swing 'em six to the front and three to the rear; When you sing to your Daddy, sing it loud and clear" Hartford turned up the volume. Three weeks in the woods, eating squeeze-tube beans; We'd be better off in the Fleet Marines . Sound off! # ' voice of the Terrible Third, sounding from the hitchers at the chests of thirty-six safetysuits. Dust slapped up from marching-boots. A flock of scarlet blabrigars settled on the road ahead, chattering and watching like small boys. (t Sound hoff!" road led uphill toward Stinkerville; they were some three miles from First Regiment Barracks. Three miles from now these troopers could shed their safety-suits and helmets, shower off three weeks of sweat, drink a beer and leer at the short-skirted, taut-haltered girls of the Service Companies. "Who are we?" Hartford chanted. ers blatted back. The blabrigars, fluttering up from the roadway, chanted too: "Who are we? Company See. Who, we? See, see. Company See Are Wee See See." These wild birds didn't memorize human speech as well as their captive cousins; they garbled their mockeries immediately. The flock settled into the sunflowers beside the road; and were joined by a pair of wild camelopards, chewing sunflower-leaf cud as they peered at the marching Axenites. Hartford looked about, but there were no Stinkers -- Kansans -- in sight. These natives didn't care to watch the occupying regiment stir up their homeland's dust. " What platoon ?" Hartford called, his voice magnified by the bitcher till the whole column could hear him. men bellowed back, singing against the percussion of their boots. " 'Toon, click, click, click; 'toon, click, third platoon, click," mocked the blabrigars in ragged chorus, reflecting both the words and the marching feet." " Best platoon ?" men shouted. They'd turned up their bitchers to a volume the blabrigars couldn't match. Disgusted, the birds flapped their scarlet wings and flew off across the sunflower fields. " 'Toon," one rear-flier chanted, " 'toon, 'toon, 'toon." " Worst platoon?" Hartford asked was for the benefit of Lieutenant Piacentelli, commanding the tail-end of the Regiment, the platoon marching on either side of the lumbering Decontamination Vehicle, their safety-suit filters clogging with the dust. " Sound off!" Hartford shouted. dows in Stinkerville, Hartford thought. He pitched his descant louder and higher. " Sound off!" " Run y er on down!" of The Terrible Third were grinning through the faceplates of their helmets, rejoicing in their reputation as the loudest bunch in the Regiment, happy to help Hartford in waging his mock-feud with Lieutenant Piacentelli. They'd been classmates at the Axenite Academy; they'd been roommates in the Barracks until Pia's recent marriage to a Service Company officer. Hartford lowered his bitchby Allen Kjim Lang er to a confidential tone. "Square up, men; march tall; look rough and dirty. Show the Stinker girls what they're Sling those rifles square. Mondrian, you march like you're threep, furp!" Up and down the column came the commands of sergeants and platoon-commanders, g e I I i n g their troopers in parade-trim for the march through Kansannamura: "Stinkerville." Somewhere up front a company was singing the anthem of the Axenite troopers, "Oh, Pioneers!" The chorus of twelve dozen men, their hitchers full-up, filled the Kansan air and echoed from the walls ahead. Stinkerville, all whitewashed, with flakes of mica glittering in the sunlight, sprawled across the road that led to the Barracks. The village wall, designed to keep wild camelopards from roaming the streets and to keep the tame beasts out of the sunflower-fields, was some eight feet tall. Some Indigenous Hominid had heard the Regiment's clatter and song, for the gates of Kansannamura were open, the brick streets were clear of Stinker commerce. The village seemed deserted. A few blabrigars perched on the tiled eaves of the rammed-earth houses, making echoic comments on the sounds of the troopers, singing fleering snatches of "Oh, Pioneers !" A camelopard stretched its ridiculous, threehorned head at the end of its fathom of neck to peer, bigbrown-eyed, at the caravan of fishbowl-headed men. Up at the head of the column the Regiment's flags were unfurled and the Regimental Band was skirling the Anthem; men were counting cadence as their boots clicked over the scrubbed bricks of Stinkerville's streets. B UT no Kansan, Stinker, Indigenous Hominid, Gook or Native watched. No cowboy youngsters stared at the gunned-and-holstered men from another planet. No elders looked down their noses at the brash invaders. No mothers wiped their hands on their aprons as they thought of their sons, and the fleshly price they'd pay for freedom. No teenage girls, those patrons of parades, watched with lips half-open with apprehension and audacious thoughts about the hundreds of giftwrapped young man marching past. This planet could have as well been named Coventry as Kansas, Hartford thought. Out the far gate of Kansannamura marched Third Platoon, Company "C," then First Platoon, flanking the Decontamination Vehicle. A villager came from the house nearest the gate and closed it. He did not look after the two columns of men winding up through the fields of sunflowers to the high plateau where they lived. The sight of the Barracks gave the men's steps a new swing and spring. After three weeks of sleeping in safetysuits; of breathing, sweating, drinking, eating and excreting through germ-barrier valves and tubing, the prospect of stripping off the plastic battle-dress was seductive. Inside that eight stories of windowless, doorless stone were gardens where the troopers could walk barefoot on the grass, pools whose water could splash their naked skin. In the Barracks were the three hundred Service Company women who made the big stone box home to their three thousand men. The men of First Regiment massed on the parade-ground. While they stood At Ease, their plastic-sleeved rifles and packs growing heavier by the minute, their safety-suits staler, four of the five Service Companies marched out from the Syphon to join them. The women were suited in yellow plastic, giving rise to the gags about fool's gold. The four golden companies took up position at the center of the Regiment. Colonel Benjamin Nef, Commander-in-Chief, Kansas, viewing-stand in his command safety-suit of scarlet. Facing into the sun, the Colonel had the polarizing shield dropped over his eyes, and seemed to be wearing a black bandage. His lower jaw beetled to give him a truculent look generally ratified by his actions. His hair glinted through the helmet like spun copper. Nef turned to his second-in-command, a lieutenant-colonel in ordinary officer's blues, and murmured instructions. The light colonel saluted, turned the controls of his bitcher to Full Loud, and addressed the troopers assembled : "Regiment..." Down the chain-of-command came the ripple of warning: "Battaaalion..." "Commmpaneee... " " 'Toooon..." dred pairs of boots smacked together. The Adjutant held up his clipboard and read precisely: "Attention to orders: "One. Officer of the Guard, Lieutenant Lee Hartford. troopers involved in the justcompleted three-week Field Exercise on not having had a single incident of compromise of sterility. Household, Maintenance and Security troopers are complimented on having maintained the integrity of the Barracks with a much-reduced force. "Three. All male and female troopers are again cautioned that fraternization with Indigenous Hominids is an offense punishable by General Court-Martial, and that any unauthorized intercourse with the natives is prohibited." by Allen Kim Lang murmur of automatic laughter at this last bit of official double-entendre. The idea of bedding-down a Stinker wench was a favorite bit of pornographic fantasy. An airtight safety-suit, though fit with valves as functional as the drop-seat in long-johns, was no garment for romance. To undress, to appear in outdoor Kansas outside that headto-foot sausage-casing, appealed to none of the troopers. Healthy young men and women don't entertain the thought of painful suicide. The reporting officer aboutfaced, saluted Colonel Nef, about-faced again. "Present... "Preezent... " "Preeezent..." "Preeeezent... " dred Dardick-rifles, sheathed in plastic, slapped perpendicular. The blue-clad officers, armed with pistols, touched their index fingers to their helmet-temples. The bandsmen's drums growled, the electronic horns sobbed against their miltes, and the flutes in lonely purity played the theme of "Oh, Pioneers!" For all his har-de-har-hardness, Hartford felt a sting in his eyes at this moment, as he did whenever the splendidly stage-managed ceremony of Retreat was performed. After the Anthem, much louder, the band played Retreat. The colors crept down the flagstaff, into the reverent arms of a pair of Service Policemen. line-of-battalions, line-of-companies, line-of-platoons, lineof-squads, return to quarters and dismiss!" The light colonel made one last salute on the reviewing-stand was over. The troopers were now free to go in to their showers, their latrines, their suppers, and their women. "At ease," Hartford told the Terrible Third. "Rest. Smoke if you've got 'em." The men chuckled dutifully at the oldest joke in the service. An Axenite trooper, sealed in his germfree safetysuit and helmet, is by definition a non-smoker outside his Barracks. It would be another hour they'd be outside, since the Third was next to the last of the fifty platoons to swim home through the Syphon. While the companies on the far left flank of the Regiment were ballooning-up and peeling-off in columns-of-squads to enter the Barracks, Hartford went back to talk with Piacentelli, C.O. of First Platoon. II racks was a production. The safety-suits worn outside presumably bore on their outer surfaces all the dust-borne bugs native to Kansas. To carry these bacteria into the Bar#T racks, to be inspired and ingested by Axenites -- humans who'd never before had a bacterium inside their bodies -- would wipe out the Regiment. Axenites are chemically pure people. They have no immuniological experience. Their gamma-globulin is low, their intestinal walls are thin. They may be killed by a light salting of staphyllococci, a soupcon of strep, or just a pinch of B. subtilis, a buglet as innocuous to "normal" humans as the dust-motes it inhabits. The Syphon was the only entrance to the Barracks. It opened as the "Wet Gut," a ramp leading downward into liquid disinfectant which finally filled a tunnel, which ran the length of the Barracks. Each trooper, as he walked down into the disinfectant, grabbed the handholds at either side to pull himself along. Half-swimming through a turbulent portion that tugged at his suit with cavitations designed to loose the gummiest particle of bugdirt, he came to a quieter section where he wormed along in silence, watching the man ahead of him, his stay in the antiseptic gauged to make the outside of his safety-suit as germfree as the inside. The Wet Gut ended in an upslope. The troopers walked out, dripping, into a hallway returning in the direction from which they'd just swum. This upper arm of the Syphon lighted that the trooper had to drop his polarizing shields over his eyes. The air here in the Hot Gut was spiced with ozone from the ultra-violet sources. As each man strode down the Hot Gut at a set pace, his suit was bathed in u-v light from lamps in the ceiling, floor and walls. Just as he was washed sufficiently in the Wet Gut to kill the sturdiest-shelled spore of anthrax, the most insistently cysted protozooan, in the Hot Gut he was laved in actinic radiation powerful enough to afford a one hundred per cent safety factor against h i s bringing viable bug-dirt into the Barracks. At the very end of the Syphon, so that his safety-suit wouldn't stink of disinfectant or crack from ozone-rot, the trooper was blasted from all sides by a needle-shower of sterile water. Then he was home. The platoon to the left of the Terrible Third had ballooned and was column-ofsquadding toward the entrance to the Syphon. "At ease, men," Hartford said. "Increase suit-pressure one pound. Open and check reserve air-tanks. Close off filters." The men blimped a bit. Their suits sausaged out around their arms and legs. Should some trooper have a pinhole in his safety-suit, the positive pressure within would keep the deadly antiseptic solution from seeping in. "Okay, men. First squad by Allen Kim Lang off to the sheep-dip. Check the man ahead of you for bubbles. This is Save-Your-Buddy Week, ,, Hartford said. men of Third Platoon waddled through the doorway and down the ramp into the bugjuice. One by one they went under, tugging themselves along through the turbulent area, past that; then turning over in three planes so that the man behind them could spot bubbles coming from any part of their safety-suit. A leak, of course, meant Decontamination. Decontamination meant an all-over shave, a load of antibiotics and quarantine. But it was better that one man should suffer this from time to time than that the Barracks should be sullied with a single bit of germ-laden dust. The pale-green murk of the Wet Gut and the desert brightness of the Hot Gut were the gates of home, and welcome. Hartford saw the Terrible Third off to their quarters, then got together with Piacentelli to go up to Officers' Country. It was good to unclam helmets and breathe the inside air, smelling faintly green from having swept across the gardens on Level Eight. Hartford shucked off his blue suit and draped it over a refreshing unit. The device buzzed into action, washing, drying and recharging the safety-suit with fresh filters and reserve air and water. The moment the refresher had grunted an okay to his safety-suit, Hartford carried it, clean and sweet as the day it had left the Goodyear plant on Titan, to hang it up in his locker, ready for his next foray onto bug-dirt. Piacentelli was already under a shower. "Come on, jaybird," he shouted. "Last one out buys the beers." "No contest," Hartford said, setting the shower-dial. "I'm gonna stay under water for three weeks." He revolved blissfully beneath cold and angry needles. Piacentelli, snowed in with suds and steam, yelled through the blasting water. "How'd you rate O.G. the night we get in?" he asked. "I thought you were Nasty Nef's fairhaired boy." Hartford turned off his shower. "I got nothing better to do," he said. He stood on the drier for a minute. "I don't mind being Officer of the Guard, so long as I can eat supper off a plate instead of through a tube." He stepped into his shorts, pulled on sneakers and tugged on a tee-shirt that had stenciled over its shoulders the two half-inch gold stripes of his rank. Pia dressed in a similar uniform. "It isn't the Messhall I miss," he said. "It's this. No number of ingenious engines, valves and relief-tubes can still my nostalgia for the simpie dignity of our Barracks latrines' set in what looked like a park, except that the bushes were tomato-plants and the trees grew apples. The tables were mostly full. "All the subalterns getting in a quick sundowner," P i a remarked, finding a two-place table yet untaken. A Service Company K.P. in the brief skirt-andhalter Class B's the women wore informally in the Barracks came to take their order. "Big cold beer for me, honey," Pia said. "The other gentleman is tonight's O.G., so he'll have a black, black coffee." Hartford stared after the girl. "You're right, Pia," he said. "No matter how comfy Goodyear makes those safetysuits, home is best." "You bachelors are a threat to the Table of Organization," Piacentelli said. "You'd breed us right out of house and home if you had a chance." "Damned right," Hartford said. "You could find a girl," Piacentelli said. "They all itch to get married." Hartford explained. "They come out to these germy planets like they used to go to Purdue. The manwoman ratio is in their favor. And biology. Pia, I've seen bears you wouldn't glim twice on Titan turn into love-goddesses after six months here. I'll meet some Service Company corporal, say. She'll look to me like the prettiest li'l thing since Adam's costectomy, and I'll call in at the Orderly Room to have us assigned Family Quarters. Back at Home Base, she'll turn out to be something you scare kids quiet with. She'll talk all the time, leave lipstick on drinking-glasses, or play bridge and talk about it. First thing you know, I'll be volunteering for another five years duty on bug-dirt, just for a chance to leave her behind." "So pick up a local germ," Piacentelli suggested. "If they can't decontaminate you, they'll send you to Earth. Lots of women on Earth." "I'd do it," Hartford said, "but I'm still more scared of microbes than lustful for a woman. Here's Dimples with our chow." "Dimples?" Piacentelli asked as the girl came up with their tray. "Watch her when she walks away," Hartford suggested. "You must keep a carton of goat-glands under your bunk, Lee," Piacentelli said. "Marriage isn't all bad. I've done pretty well with Paula." Hartford nodded. Paula Piacentelli, a lieutenant in the Service Companies, was a pretty decent sort. "Where is she now?" he asked. "She'll be on the Status Board tonight," Piacentelli said. "You'll be in the Board Room with her. Lee, I've got by Allen Kim Lang a favor to ask you. As O.G you'll be in charge tonight." "Paula will be in charge," Hartford said, 'Til be sleeping." "If I go outside, though, it will need your okay as well as Paula's," Piacentelli said. "Who's going outside with you?" "That's the sticky bit," Piacentelli said. "I'd like to go outside alone." i n your little bare skin?" Hartford asked. "Mix it up with a Stinker maiden? Paula wouldn't like that. Besides, you might get yourself jack-rolled by some Indigenous Hominid who doesn't like Axenites running his planet." "I want to work on my KansanStandard Dictionary," Piacentelli said. "Bug-dirt," Hartford said. "Don't tell lies." "All right, then," Piacentelli said. "I've got an idea that might lead to the most important discovery ever made on Kansas. Paula suggested it. I want to prove it." "Tell Nasty Nef about your idea," Hartford said, signalling the waitress for a second cup of stay-awake. "Give report when the supply ship lands, and you'll have your silver stripes before I will. Wouldn't Paula love that, though? Captain Piacentelli. I'd have to salute first." "Nasty Nef wouldn't consider our idea," Piacentelli said. "He wouldn't be happy to know that I've been studying the Kansan language, even. A common humanity between us Axenites and the Indigenous Hominids is a notion not welcome to the world of Colonel Nef. Brother Nef, I might say." Hartford leaned against the table to press a fist against Piacentelli's propped elbow. "Don't say that, Pia," he whispered. "I'm not political; I'm not interested ; I don't care whether the Brotherhood even exists." "Yes, Virginia; there is a Brotherhood," Piacentelli said. "And our Nasty Nef is a Brother." "He's a number of things," Hartford said. "He's our CO; But he's our boss, and 'Brotherhood' is a dangerous word." He sipped his coffee. "Tell you what, Pia. If you want to go out and talk Gook with the Gooks, I'll fix it for you to draw picket duty tonight. The man who's got picket has been married only a month, and spent three weeks of that in a safety-suit out in the woods. I'm sure he'll relinquish to you the pleasure of a night's romp as picket officer." "Can you do it?" "An O.G. can do anything, during those hours when his superior officers are asleep," Hartford said. "You're a buddy," Piacentelli said. # T#I give you free tutoring in Kansan for the rest of our tour." "Do mo arigato gazaimashi ta" Hartford said. "Thanks to your mumbling the stuff in our room, I already talk like a Stinker." He stood up. "I'm going down to the Board Room. Pick your companion for picket, and come on down when you've dressed." Hartford bowed, Kansas-style. " Shitsurei itashimasu ga..." he said politely, and left to assume his duties as O.G. Ill A S one of the seventy-six male lieutenants of the Regiment, Hartford pulled O.G. about once every eleven weeks. His Terrible Third drew duty with him as Guard Platoon. All of them could expect to sleep through the night undisturbed, unless Nasty Nef held a dry-run, falling them out for a Simulated Problem. Nef was tired tonight, though; the Guard could sleep. Only the two men on picket and the handful of Service Company personnel on duty at the Status Board need stay awake tonight. Awake or sleeping, the security of First Regiment would rest this night in the hands of Lee Hartford. It was he who bore the final responsibility for allowing no living thing to enter the Barracks except in a wellscrubbed safety-suit; for assuring that the air his sleeping comrades breathed was sterile and dustless; that the Syphon's poisonous bug-juice was of the proper pH and germicidity; and for checking that the whereabouts of every Axenite on Kansas was reflected on the Status Board. That these duties were complex was attested by the assignment of a Service Company officer to the Board, a woman who would watch the Board's bands of lights and meters every moment. Hartford could sleep; he was the Responsible Male. Mrs. Paula Piacentelli, #Lt. S.C. (Gnotobiotics Spec.), had to remain awake : she was the Knowledgeable Woman. Hartford found Paula already at her work in the Board Room. Only a bit over five feet tall, Piacentelli's wife was concentrated woman of the most splendid sort. When Hartford had told her that Pia was taking the picket, she frowned. "I hope he doesn't plan anything foolish." "Me? Foolish?" Piacentelli demanded from the elevator. He walked up, clammed shut in his blue safety-suit, ready to hit bug-dirt. Under one arm he carried a package sheathed in opaque plastic. Behind him, in the gray safety-suit of an enlisted trooper, was a man Hartford recognized as Corporal Bond, machine-gunner from Pia's platoon. "Lieutenant Gabriel Piacentelli reportby Allen Kim Lang ing with one man. Sir and Ma'am," he said, saluting his wife and Hartford. "At ease, Weenie-head," Hartford said. "With you and Bond on picket amidst the sunflowers, I won't sleep a wink all night." He turned to the corporal. "Did you sureenough volunteer for this duty?" he asked. "Yes, sir!" Bond said. "I voluntarily assumed the duty of absorbing a fifth of Lt. Piacentelli's Class-VI Scotch. The Lieutenant was kind enough to reciprocate by offering me this tour." "He gave you Scotch?" Hartford turned to Piacentelli. "Gabe, for a jug of Scotch I'd have gone on picket with you myself. What's that you're taking outside with you? Lunch?" "A microscope," Piacentelli said. "I'm doing a little research for Paula." His wife nodded. A gnotobiotics technician, responsible for maintaining the bacteriological security of the Barracks, she had business with microscopes. "Want to give me the word on this romp of yours?" Hartford asked. "Standard picket, Lee," Piacentelli said. "I'll learn a little Kansan, take care of Paula's project and tell you all about it when we get back." #T ET'S see your weapons." Hartford inspected Bond's Dardick-rifle and Piacentelli's Dardick-pistol. Both weapons were loaded, clean and wrapped up for their trip through the Wet Gut in plastic sleeves. The trucks and heavy weapons stayed outside on bug-dirt. The lighter weapons and all ammunition came back inside the Barracks with the troopers who carried them. The weapons were detailstripped on each re-entry, irradiated with u-v and fit with fresh sleeves. As had been discovered with the first axenic animals, in the #'s, keeping a mammal germ-free is a formidable task. When that mammal is a human being and a soldier the job is doubletough. "Check out a jeep," Hartford said. "Report each halfhour. Don't shoot any Stinkers... sorry, I mean Indigenous Hominids. Try not to hit a camelopard with the jeep ; we're low on replacement parts. In fact, be careful. Okay, Pia?" "Done and done. Exalted One." Hartford dropped his voice. "I'd feel easier in my mind if I knew what's so important as to require your desertion of our mutual womb tonight, Pia." "Language study, you might say," Piacentelli replied. "Ha! So desa ka?" Hartford replied. "That's so much bugdirt, and vou know it." "Ha!" Piacentelli said. "See you at dawn. Take care of my wife, baddy." "Aren't you going to kiss her good night?" Hartford asked. Pia grinned through his clammed-shut helmet and clomped to the elevator with Bond. They were en route to the Hot Gut and the Wet Gut, the twisting hallway from the sterile First Regiment Barracks to the living night of Kansas. Hartford turned. Paula Piacentelli wore the short skirt, knee-hose and short-sleeved blouse of Pioneer green that was the Class B uniform for females inside the Barracks. She looked, Hartford thought, remarkably delectable; and he again congratulated his friend on .his luck in getting her. He returned his attention to the Status Board, which Paula was conning. Two red lights flickered on above the groundfloor diagram of the Barracks, indicating that the two men of the picket had entered the Hot Gut. A moment later these lights blinked off, and two lighted over the diagram of the Wet Gut. Piacentelli and Bond were swimming now, towing their weapons in ballooning plastic sleeves. Sterile, on their way out into a filthy world, these two men were the outpost that would protect through the night their hundreds of brothers and sisters sleeping safe in utero. Freud, thou shouldst have lived this hour! Hartford mused. ignition key of the jeep he'd chosen. With the starting cough of the engine, one of the rank of TV screens over the Status Board lighted. The camera eye was looking out the rear-view mirror of the jeep, and picked up Pia's helmeted head and the shoulder of his companion. "We're off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz!" Piacentelli sang. His wife spoke into the microphone before her. "Don't do anything foolish, Lieutenant," she said. "And remember, all transmissions are recorded and are audited, at random, by the Base Commander." "Transmission received, receiver contrite," Piacentelli reported back. "Okay, PaulaDarling. From now on till Bond and I swim home, we'll be as military as GI soap." He flicked the TV monitor around to look out the windshield and started the jeep down the road toward Stinkerville. The duty of the picket was to chug around outside at random, hitting all the crossroads, settlements and high spots of the countryside near the Barracks; to interview late-riding Indigenous Hominids and inquire their business being out; to conduct such searches of Stinker homes and hideaways as might sem useful to the occupying Axenites; and to remain at all times in contact with the offiby Allen Kim Lang cers on duty at the Status Board. As the picket got underway, Hartford went down to the Terrible Third's area to check quickly through the two-man apartments. Knock on the door; "As you were, Troopers." A brisk inspection of two safety-suits, gaping beside their owners' bunks like firemen's boot-sheathed pants. The men were quiet. Guardduty meant that any socializing with Service Company troopers was impossible for a night, and militated against any intake of alcoholic beverage. It was a bore, especially after three dry and womanless weeks in the field. Hartford visited his Platoon Sergeant last: "Sergeant Felix, could you have our bunch standing on bug-dirt ten minutes after I blew the whistle? Very well, then. Good night, Felix' Having demonstrated to his troopers that he was suffering the same strictures as they, Hartford went back to the O.G. cubicle in the Board Room. He checked his own safety-suit, his plastic-packaged Dardick-pistol, said good night to Paula Piacentelli and lay down to begin his first night's sleep outside a safetysuit in three weeks. But sleep didn't come easiiyThere was the murmur from the Board Room; Piacentelli's half-hourly reports. "Nothing to report, Paula. I'm at Road Junction (#-#). No I.H. activity. No excitement at all." "Continue random patrol, Lieutenant." "Yes, Dear. I'm going to run down to Kansannamura (#) for my next call-in." "Carry on, Lieutenant." Pia was in the best possible hands with Paula on duty, Hartford mused. The Status Board was really a woman's job. The girls of the Service Companies were the housekeepers of the Barracks, the guardians of the Regimental lares and penates. Paula, for example, had as her primary duty gnotobiotic control : the maintenance of the whole germ-free system of the Barrachks, from the Hot--Wet Guts to safety-suit inspection and the upkeep of the Decontamination Vehicles. Behind the women on Board-duty, however, was always at least one male, combat-trained Officer of the Guard, ready (once awakened and briefed by the female help) to take armed men into the field. But meanwhile, Hartford wanted to sleep. at its end Pia made his report : "Picket reporting. Paula. I'm going into the village. Corporal Bond will remain with the jeep, and will keep the transmitter open till I get back. Okay?" "Be careful, Lieutenant," Paula Piacentelli said, combining affection with military formality. Hartford, deciding that sleep was impossible, got up and cold-showered. Dressing in fresh Class B's, he walked out to join Paula at the Status Board. The TV screen showed Bond, the sheathed Dardickrifle slung over his shoulder, pacing back and forth in front of the jeep, glancing from time to time toward the walls of Kansannamura, white in the light of the skyful of stars. He was nervous, evidently aware of the fact that Kansas was largely unexplored, her potential for midnight mayhem untested. Bond spoke across his shoulder. "The lieutenant has been gone for a quarter hour, Ma'am," he said. "Do you want me to go in and ask him to come out?" "Wait another quarter-hour, Corporal," Paula said. She explained to Hartford, "What he's got to do may take a little time." They watched the screen. Bond climbed back into the jeep, where he sat with his rifle between his knees, sweeping his attention around him, at the village, at the road behind, at the sunflower-fields, where the blossoms were bleached white and the leaves enameled black by starlight. With Paula's agreement, Hartford pressed the microphone-switch to talk with Bond. "Have you tried to tap Piacentelli on his suit-receiver, Corporal?" "Yes, sir," Bond said. "First thing. No answer." "Turn your bitcher full up, then," Hartford said. "Tell Lieutenant Piacentelli that the O.G. wants him out on the road within five minutes." "Done and done, sir." Bond tongued the bitcher's controls to Full Volume and repeated the message. Echoes bounced back from the walls of Stinkerville and lost themselves in the tangle of sunflowers. No one answered. The village seemed as much asleep as it had been before Bond's bellow. The Kansans were never hasty to volunteer response to Axenites; they knew that troopers meant trouble. "Piacentelli is busy at something," Hartford said, as much to reassure himself as Pia's wife. "I think I'll go out and have a look." He spoke to Bond: "Get out of the jeep, but stay close to it. Report any haps immediately. Watch for lights, listen for smallarms fire." "Done and done, sir." Hartford phoned Felix, his platoon sergeant. "Report to the Board Room to sub for me," he said. "Wake the Platoon Guide and tell him to stand ready to fall the Guard out, but not to wake anyone else yet. This is probably a nothing, Felix; Lt. Piacentelli just went for a walk in Stinkerville." T HE Command Light, top in the tier of all the hierarchy of red-yellow-green-white by Allen Kim Lang Status-Board indicators, flashed alive. "A nothing?'" Nasty Nef's voice demanded. "What sort of talk is that, Lieutenant? If I've been properly interpreting the past five minutes' transmissions, we've got an Axenite officer stranded in the middle of a Stinker village. This, Mister, is not a nothing. Call out the Guard. Prepare to join me in a Stinkerville shakedown. Those Gooks got to learn they can't play fast-and-easy with Axenite troopers." "Done and done, sir!" Hartford snapped. He toggled the phone to get Felix back. "Felix, fall the boys out beside the Syphon. We've got the Old Man hitting bug-dirt with us, so look sharp." "The colonel's going out with us?" Felix asked. "Yes. There must be more to this situation than meets the company-grade eye," Hartford said. "Diaper-up our darlings and stand by in the Hot Gut, Felix." "Done and done !" Twenty seconds later a figure in Santa Claus red came clashing into the room. Hartford, half into his blue safetysuit, came to a clumsy attention. The newcomer, his helmet clammed shut all ready for contamination, bellowed, "Get with it, Mister!" "Yes, sir." Hartford fit himself into the suit, a sort of cockpit, a congeries of valves, gauges, counters and vetters. In a moment he'd sealed himself in the sterile suit, checked his air-filters and air reserve. "The Guard is assembled in the Hot Gut, sir, ready to take the field." "Dam' well better be," Nef said. "Lead off, Mister." He turned to Paula Piacentelli. "Send a Decontamination Vehicle after us, Lieutenant. No telling what those Stinker devils have cooked up with Piacentelli." Back to Hartford: "You're in command of the Guard, I'll observe and offer suggestions." geant Felix saluted the scarlet-clad colonel and the blueclad lieutenant as they stepped from the elevator into the electric atmosphere of the Hot Gut. The Guard snapped to, their plastic-packaged Dardick-rifles at order arms. "Take 'em out, Felix' Hartford said. "Two personnel carriers, a .#-caliber m.g.-mounted jeep fore and aft. You and the colonel take the rear jeep; I'll lead. Have the men unbag their weapons the instant we're outside. Any questions?" "No, sir." "Move out," Hartford said. IV T HE squads peeled off and double-timed down the Hot Gut. Man by man they dipped into the Wet Gut for their swim outside. They'd been drilled for speed in exittoy AHsn Kim Lang ing. If the Regiment were needed outside, the Syphon could become a literal bottleneck. As the last squad splashed into the antiseptic solution, Hartford turned to Colonel Nef. "Sir, I have a question' He said. "Hurry it up, Mister' "Isn't this a bit extreme, sir? We're going out to take one man out of a primitive village where we're not even sure he's in trouble. And we're carrying enough firepower to blast into an armed city." "I don't trust the Gooks," the colonel said. "Their bucolic way of life may be a fraud, designed to lull us into complacency. Tonight we may discover that they're plotting the overthrow of the Garrison, using weapons and tactics they've kept secret. I hope such is the case, Lieutenant. It would give us adequate cause to wipe the Stinkers off Kansas and make this as clean a world as Titan." "Sir. "Move, Mister," Nef said. "Piacentelli has been in Stinkerville for fifty minutes. Let's get him out." The four trucks roared down the plateau toward the Indigenous Hominid hamlet at its foot. When the first Axenite Pioneers landed on the planet, bacteria-free as all men in space had to be, they'd set up camp near the spot where First Regiment Barracks now stood. They saw the fields of sunflowers, grown for food and cloth, and heard the natives call the nearest village Kansannamura. From that time on, this world was Kansas. There was no moonlight -- Kansas has no moon -- but the headlamps of the four vehicles were wasted against the bright ribbon of road, lighted as it was by the sheet of stars that melted together in a metallic ceiling over the night. The men sat with their rifles between their knees, the plastic sleeves stripped off. Each of these Dardick-rifles could fire a solid stream of death. Each round of ammunition was fitted with a matrix that served as chamber, cartridge and the first fraction-of-an-inch of barrel. A magazine of forty such rounds could be hosed through the rifle in half a second. The troopers sped downhill, through sunflower fields black and silver in the light of the stars. T HE personnel carriers and the jeeps scuffed to a halt by the village gate, the men scattering like shrapnel, according to the book. Colonel Nef spoke to Hartford on the command-band. "Move in, Lieutenant. Bring out Piacentelli. Any Stinker resistance is to be treated as open rebellion." "Yes, sir." Hartford spoke to his men: "First squad, lead scout, forward to the gate." The scout, his plastic safety-suit and the glass of his helmet glinting highlights, scuttled to the gate. He kicked the gate open -- Piacentelli had evidently left it ajar -- and entered, rifle-first. "First squad, follow me in column. Open to Line-of-Skirmishers in the square. Second squad, follow in the same manner. Third squad maintain your interval and stand ready." Hartford ran, pistol in hand, through the open gate. It was like charging some Roman ruin unpeopled for three centuries, like a field exercise with boulders marking obstacles to be won. There was no sign of natives. Their shopboards hung bearing the picture-script the Kansans used, quiet as the marbles in a cemetery. Hartford directed first squad in a sweep through the alleys, searching for Piacentelli. Second squad clattered through the gate behind them, took up a skirmish line, and moved in to cover the square as first squad disappeared into the doorways and alleys of Stinkerville. The village, except for its beasts, might have been deserted. These animals, camelopards used for riding and to carry burdens, woke and gazed serenely down at the interrupters of their vegetable dreams, blinking their liquid half-shuttered eyes. Boots clattered on cobblestones. The houses were unlighted. "Throw on your i-r," Hartford ordered. As they moved into the dark, narrow ways, the men beamed infra-red light from the projectors on their safety-suits, the bounced-back, invisible light being transduced to black-and-green chiaroscuro by passage through the stereatronic goggles dropped inside their helmets. "Turn the Stinkers out, Mister," Nef command-banded. "Into the houses," Hartford signaled. Ahead, a boot slammed wood, and hinges burst. To the restless night sounds of the camelopards in their stalls, the click of military boots on brick, and the rustle of rifles against safetysuits was added the whispering of families rousing from their beds. Hand in hand from father to mother to elder brother, dovn the scale to the youngest, the Kansans stumbled out into their little courtyards. "A no hito wa dare desu ka?" "Abunai yo" "Shikata ga nai... " U A NY sign of Piacentelli yet?" Nef demanded. "Not yet, sir," Hartford signalled. "Feed a candle into every building, Lieutenant. We'll get these Gooks in the open and interrogate till we find our man." "Done and done, sir," Hartford said, stepping out of the way of a little girl fleeing toward the village square with an even littler girl strapped to a pack-board on her back. He passed on the order. "Fire in b Allen Kim Lang ten seconds, nine, eight. . now!" Each man of first squad tossed a Lake Erie Lightning Universal Gas Candle through the window nearest him. A little over a second later a dozen grenades spit out a cloud of smoke with a hiss like a bursting fire-hose, and the outer air was filled with an eye-stinging gas. The Indigenous Hominids spilled out of their homes in all directions now; coughing, choking, children rubbing the smoke particles into their half-wakened eyes. Two camelopards, blinded like their masters, blundered into the square, tears streaming from their reproachful eyes, twelve feet above the pavement. Second squad's men danced clear of the beasts and hallooed them out the gate. Somewhere back in an alley a first-squad trooper tapped his trigger, jetting steel against overhanging roof-tiles. "Nail that shot, Mister!" Nef demanded. Hartford heard the squad leader: "It's Lieutenant Piacentelli, sir. He's here." "Bring him out, man; bring him out!" Nef's excited voice triggered a new string of rifle bursts. Hartford tongued his bitcher full-volume: "Cease fire, you idiots! Piacentelli, head for the square." "Stop it, for God's sake, stop it!" Piacentelli shouted, his unamplified voice coming from a smoke-filled alley. Hartford plunged into the dark moke -- a tear-gas grenade had set afire some of the sun-flower-paper room dividers, and kindled with them a row of wooden houses -- and shouted for Piacentelli. A blabrigar, as blind in the smoke as the men, blundered against Hartford's helmet. " Yuke ! Yuke !" the bird screamed, grabbing hold of the transceiver-antenna that horned up from the helmet. Hartford grabbed the blabrigar and tossed it up above the melee. He heard it flying in circles, searching for its Stinker owners, chanting the last words they'd said to it: "Yuke Yuke! Yuke !" -- "Go!" E verything was burning. Even through the safety-suit Hartford suffered from the heat. He retracted his i-r goggles, useless in all this smoke. Nef called. "I'm coming in, Mister." Hartford acknowledged. Great. One more blind man wandering in the smoke was what he needed. He tongued his bitcher loud and shouted; "Gabe! Come this way. Gabe ! Gabe !" The heat was intolerable. He positive-pressured his suit, ballooning the fabric away from his skin. How hot, he wondred, would the rounds packed into the butt of his Dardick-pistol have to get before they exploded? As though in answer, a snap of gunfire sounded from the fog ahead. Some meat-head had spooked. There were more shots as other troopers fired at their fantasies. "Cease fire, damn it!" Nef shouted over the command-circuit. "If anyone was hurt by you idiots, I'll court-martial every man with smoke in his gun barrel." Hartford hurried on. Ahead of him in the alley he heard Colonel Nef's voice, uncharacteristically soft. "Hartford, join me. I've found Piacentelli." Ahead in the smoke was a pinkness: the scarlet-suited commander kneeling above a body on the bricks. Here in the open of planetary air, available to all the microscopic beasts of Kansas, Piacentelli was wearing only Class B's; his sneakers, shorts and tee-shirt. The center of the shirt sopped blood from the bullet-hole that funneled into Axenite Lieutenant Piacentelli's chest. Nef stood. "The Decontamination Vehicle should be standing by," he said. "Get Piacentelli outside. We may be able to save him." He sounded unhopeful. Hartford draped his friend's body across his shoulder. The smoke was bad, but he'd memorized his course through it. The air sucked in through his filter was clean, but hot. His helmet steamed opaque. As he stumbled out, blind, but guided by the colonel's voice, two men came forward to take Piacentelli over to the Decontamination Vehicle parked by the village gate. In the cooler air Hartford's helmet cleared. A girl gnotobiotician from the Decontamination Squad pressed the pickup of her helmet's "ears" against Piacentelli's bloody chest. She looked up. "He's dead, sir," she said. Nef's voice boomed from his bitcher. "Burn the Stinker village !" he shouted. "These Gooks will pay for Piacentelli's death with their homes." Hartford felt imminent danger of vomiting, bad business in a safety-suit. He fought it as he looked around. The column of smoke rising from the buildings already fired was sweeping around, carried by the morning wind that poured off the plateau. Everything within the walls of the rammed-earth houses would be incinerated. Kansannamura was destroyed. "Regroup by the vehicles," Hartford spoke to his troopers. He walked back to his jeep, the village flaming behind him. The Decontamination Squad checked Hartford's safetysuit, and found it sound despite its roasting. Piacentelli they cocooned in plastic: he was contaminated and dangerous. As the five trucks rolled back toward the Barracks, they met families of Indigenous Hominids, smoke-stained, who retreated back into the sunflower-fields as the troopers drew near them. The Stinkers seemed to have salvaged little from the flames beyond an occasional blabby Allen Kim Lang rigar, perched on an old man's shoulder, or now and then a camelopard, fitted with a saddle and carrying a blanketwrapped bundle of clothing and cooking-pots. V H artford had to see Piacentelli's body placed in the Barracks morgue, where a necropsy would be performed by a safety-suited gnotobiotician. It was seldom that an Axenite was contaminated. Rarer yet was the death of a trooper who'd been exposed to bacteria. Information held in Pia's body might someday save lives. Hartford, directing the sealing-off of the morgue from the rest of the Barracks, was not comforted by these reflections. He u n s u i t e d, shaved and showered, and put on fresh Class B's to finish what remained of this O.G. tour. On his way back up to the Board Room he had to pass the morgue again. Colonel Nef, in the midst of a cluster of lesser ranks, was there. On a wheeled cart, covered by a sheet, was a second body. Hartford stopped. "What happened, sir?" he demanded. "Who is it?" Nef raised the corner of the sheet with a hand that seemed infinitely weary. The body was Paula Piacentelli. "Another accident," the Colonel grunted. A hydroponics corporal, S.C., spoke up. "She was relieved of duty as soon as she heard about her husband's death, sir. Someone should have stayed with her. She went up to Level Eight to be alone. There are only two of us on duty there through the night. She must have blundered off the walkway, blinded by her tears. However it happened, she caught hold of a lighting-cable where the insulation was frayed, and was electrocuted the moment she touched the wet seeding-bed. Colonel Nef found her there." "I was going to console her on Gabriel Piacentelli's death' Nef said. "Leave the body here and clear out, all of you." No refrigeration was needed for Paula's corpse, of course. An uncontaminated Axenite was preserved by purity. The body might dry a bit, the integrity of the internal organs suffer somewhat from the corrosive effects of their own juices; but Paula's corpse would otherwise remain uncorrupted until taken outside and buried in bug-dirt. "Hartford," Nef said, "I'd like to have a talk with you." "I'm still on O.G., sir," Hartford said. "And I relieve you of that duty," Nef snapped. "Come up to my quarters." Nasty Nef's sitting-room had the only window in the Barracks, a skylight through Kansas's pyrotechnic flood of stars. "Rest, Hartford. Sit down. Brandy?" Hartford allowed that he could use some. "What do you think of tonight's adventure, Lee?" Nef asked. "Don't look startled. I know the first name of every officer and non-com in the Regiment." "What happened, sir, was horrible," Hartford said. "I understand your feelings," Nef said. "Two tragic closest friends the same night. I am certain that the loss of these comrades will fire your zeal for getting the Stinkers under control. Isn't that right, Lee?" Nef took a cigar from the humidor next his chair. "With all respect, sir," Hartford said, placing his empty brandy-glass on the table to his right, "I can hardly see how the events tonight were caused by the Indigenous Hominids." "You must use the official name for the Gooks, mustn't you?" Nef mused. His voice turned harsh: "Someone stripped the safety-suit off Piacentelli, Mister." H artford nodded, his face pale. The "A" of the Axenite's alphabet was Apprehension. As a germ-free -- axenic, gnotobiotic -- h u m a n being, he is superior in most ways to ordinary men. He's usually larger and stronger. He never has dental caries, pimples, appendicitis, the common cold or certain cancers. No matter how much or how long he sweats, the Axenite doesn't stink; nor do his other excretions. On a contaminated world, however, the Axenite is a tender flower indeed. A baby's breath can be death to him, if that baby be a "normal" human; for no microbe is benign to the man without antibodies. To him a drop of rain may reek with pestilence, the scent of evening may be a lethal gas. "I can't understand their stripping Pia, sir," he said. "Why would they do such a terrible thing?" "Because they're Stinkers!" Nef said. "Can you imagine what it must be like to be one of them? Every inch of your skin a-crawl with living filth, your guts packed with foulness, your whole frame a compromise with rottenness? Do you wonder that they'd delight to make us as unwholesome as they are themselves?" Colonel Nef lighted the cigar he'd been mulling. "Lee, do you think one Stinkerville destroyed is too high a price for them to pay for having murdered two Axenite troopers? For Piacentelli's wife is as much their victim as her husband." Hartford shook his head. "I'm not sure, sir. What bothers me more than anything else is that it's my fault Pia went out last night. He asked by Allen Kim Lang me to arrange for him to replace the scheduled picket officer, and I did." "Lee, why was Piacentelli so anxious to pull this extra duty?" Nef asked. Hartford tried unobtrusively to squirm his chair out of the jet-stream from Nef's cigar. "He told me he wanted to work on the language, sir," he said. "Pia really had such a project. He'd never had contact with anyone with a speech other than Standard before, and the problem of transducing one language into another fascinated him. The Kansans call their speech Nihon-go. Pia taught me to understand some of it." "A waste of your time, Lee," Nef said. "You'll never have occasion to speak it. Be that as it may, unless Piacentelli was attempting to coax a course in Bedroom Kansan from a Stinker maiden, I can hardly understand why his lexigraphical labors should require him to unsuit himself. No, Piacentelli was deliberately murdered." "I'm puzzled, sir," Hartford admitted. "When we tossed those smoke-candles, I heard Pia shouting for us to stop it. Would he have done so if the Indigenous Hominids had him captive? Why did none of the natives lift a hand against us, though we were burning their homes? Why did Paula Piacentelli seem to know why Pia was going outside tonight? Why did he take a microscope with him? Why did Paula kill herself?" TON'T noise that last U 'why' around the Barracks, Mister," Nef growled. "Officially, she died in tearblinded grief, an accident." He smiled. "Whatever our reason for burning out Stinkerville, Lee, we got it done. The fact that those half-humans down the hill bred and sweat and poisoned the soil within half an hour's walk has been a stench in my nostrils ever since we got here. Now they're gone. I'm as sorry as you that the Piacentelli's are dead. But the manner of their dying was such as to assure Axenic mankind a new home." "I'm not sure I understand you, sir." Nef poured them each a second brandy. He raised his; Hartford of necessity followed suit. "To Brotherhood," the colonel said. He stared into Hartford's eyes. "To the Brotherhood," he amended. Hartford was tired, confused and in awe of Nef's rank ; otherwise he might have ventured protest. Nef sipped his drink. "I must emphasize, Lee, that what I say is my opinion only, not Axenite policy. You see my point." "I do, sir," Hartford said. "Forgive me, then, for prefacing my remarks with a bit of truism," Nef said. "In all history before gnotobiotic man was cut from his mother through cellophane, the human being was never pure organism. Before us, every man who ever lived was, in fact, one mammal plus the sum of bacteria, fungi and molds. When the old philosophers asked, 'What is man?' the answer could only be: 'Foul smell and blood in a bag.' We're the first men beyond that, Lee. The first real men, True Men, members of the winner-species. Homo gnotobioticus. "We must destroy the bridge that led to us. We must destroy the Stinkers. Not just these quasi-human natives here on Kansas, but the Stinkers on Earth, and on every other planet where bugladen man has followed Axenite. What chance has Homo sapiens to match his sapiency against Homo gnotobioticus , when he is a bifurcate septic tank, a polyculture of a thousand kinds of living dirt?" Hartford finished his brandy, wishing he were anywhere else than in Nasty Nef's quarters, tired, ill at ease and a little drunk from the two brandies. "What do you propose, sir?" he asked with Academy politeness. "Aha!" Nef rejoiced, pouring them each another drink. "You justify my trust, Lee. You perceive that I speak not merely if-ly, philosophically, but as a man of action, leashed only by temporary practicality." He leaned back in his chair and regarded Hartford more as a sculptor might regard a recent product than a father a son, with uncritical approval. "Where were you born, Lee?" "On Titan, sir." iiT thought so. You have the-mark of natal excellence," Nef said. "You're a second or third-generation Axenite, then?" "Third, sir," Hartford said. "Splendid. Your grandparents were from their mothers' wombs untimely ripp'd; your parents and yourself born normally, in germ-free ambience. How fortunate we are, you and I ! T h i r d-generation Axenites. Eff-two of a new race." Nef paused in his recital. "There is one fact that chafes us, though. We, perforce the Columbuses of tomorrow, explorers of the planets beyond even the stars we see here on the frontier, are held back by our Stinker cousins. They have the proper feeling, that only pure man might pioneer the alien worlds, for fear of destroying what he finds there. But who will inherit those planets when we've finished our explorations? Who will at the last till the fields of Kansas?" "Colonists from Earth, sir," Hartford said. "From Eurus, Tinkle, Westside, Unashamed, Hope. From all the planets normal man has colonized." "Doesn't that annoy you, by Allen Kim Lang Lee?" Nef asked. "That our work's fruit is to be enjoyed by shiploads of Stinkers?" "They're as human as we, sir," Hartford said. He smiled. "You might say they just haven't had our advantages." "You're tender-m i n d e d, Lee," Nef said. "We garrison a hundred worlds on the Frontier, planets our Stinker masters mustn't visit yet, least Man contaminate some lifeform yet unmet. We pioneer, clear planets as safe, and move on. For reward, we Axenites have three worlds of our own in the M'Bwene System, axenized for our use ; we have the Academies on Luna and Titan, and a dome on Pluto. It's not enough. We are the new men, the next-comers to humanity. We must have worlds of our own. I, and the Brotherhood whose hand here I am, intend that Kansas shall be ours." "What about the Stinkers?" Hartford asked. "What will happen to them if we decide to axenize Kansas?" "Maybe they'll leave," Colonel Nef said, smiling in the manner that had won him the name "Nasty." "A few more punitive expeditions like tonight's -- an incendiary grenade was thrown at Kansannamura, did you know that, Lee? I threw it -- and we'll have no Stinkers underfoot. We soon will be able to mop and polish this world to our own high standards. We'll walk this lovely world without safetysuits and breathe unfiltered air. We'll enter into our birthright, Lee." Nef gazed at his cigar admiringly, though it had gone out. "So much for the moment, Brother Hartford," he said. "Perhaps we'd both do well to get some sleep." Hartford jumped to attention and formally requested permission to withdraw. Nef nodded. Hartford about-faced and left the room. VI T HE things the colonel had told him hadn't fallen into place in his mind yet. Hartford was numb of thought. Back in his own room in B.O.Q. the numbness cleared a bit. He poured himself a drink. Somehow, he thought, he'd become fairhaired boy to an Attila the Hun, an Alaric the Goth, a Hitler, a Hainan; an Ashurbanipal I, a Rameses II. For Nef was equally with these a servant of Siva the Destroyer, with his plan to make Man pure. His purification would involve the destruction of all non-afcenic men and women all the way from the Home World to the newest beachhead on the Frontier ; the sterilization of a hundred worlds as culture media for the new race; and the planting on the newly axenized soil of colonies of Homo gnotobi oticus , the feeder-on-hydroponic-greens, the inodorous, the thin-gutted, the strong toothed Superman. Nef's pogrom had begun with the raid on the village, Hartford mused, his arms behind his head as he lay on his bunk. Nef had decided that this green and pleasant world belonged to the silver men, the true men, the new men. Us, Hartford thought. Earth's Stinker's, ordinary humanity with its common cold and its caries, would follow the Kansan Indigenous Hominid, and the Great Auk, into history. The double funeral of the Lieutenants Piacentelli was to be held at Retreat, outside the Barracks. Hartford wondered a bit at the haste with which the two bodies were to be consigned to the earth of Kansas. Perhaps haste was necessary because of the micro-organisms with which poor Pia's corpse was necessarily contaminated. Hartford grimaced. Contaminated humans must lead disgusting lives. They smelled of ferments, were bloated with bacterially elaborated gases, suffered rot in their very teeth. Their corpses -- poor forefathers! -- suffered corruption that would never touch an Axenite, whose unembalmed cadaver would last longer than the best-mummified Pharaoh. Whatever mysterious errand it had been that had taken Piacentelli outside the Barracks, it had killed him. It was over. Hartford marched the Terrible Third into position facing the graves, cut into the soil at the base of the hundred-foot flagpole. The entire regiment, less only the handful of men and women necessary to secure the Barracks, was on the Parade Ground. Colonel Nef, his scarlet safeof the setting sun, stood beside the graves, a finger of his right gauntlet inserted to mark his place in the black Book of Honors and Ceremonies. The regiment stood at parade-rest as a truck brought the bodies of two comrades through its ranks. As the improvised hearse halted and twelve blue-suited casketbearers stepped forward to lift the flag-draped boxes, Nef called the regiment to attention. The bearers slowmarched the caskets to the graves and placed them on the lowering-devices.  were few. He spoke of the dedication of the two Axenites being laid to rest and bitterly accused the Stinkers -- r this word seemed rude, in so formal a setting -- of having murdered the young couple. He spoke of condign justice, and of revenge. This done, he called: "Escort, less firing-party. Preby Allen Kim Lang The shots of the Dardickrifles echoed down the plateau to the smoldering village below. The Regimental Bugler, standing between the heads of the graves, flicked on his instrument. As the last volley spat from the muzzles of the rifles, the bugler played Taps. Four men stepped forward to recover and fold the greensilk Pioneer colors, and the caskets were lowered to corruption in alien earth. The banner crept down the flagstaff, and the funeral was over. Bone-weary, Hartford went from the Syphon to the ref r e s h e r-room, where he checked his safety-suit and hung it. Another officer was there, still in his blue safety-suit. Hartford wondered sleepily why he'd so long postponed unsuiting. Even the fellow's helmet was sealed. "Our first deaths on Kansas," Hartford remarked, wanting to coax the man into conversation and learn who he was. "I'd never realized till now that we're really soldiers, subject to violent death and formal burying." The man must be a replacement, come in on the supply ship a month ago, Hartford thought. Black hair, crewcut. Tanned. Must be from one of the M'Bwene Worlds, where an Axenite's naked skin can be unfiltered sunlight. "Both the Piacentellis were my friends," Hartford said, determined to coax speech from the stranger. The man's bitcher boomed, evidently set on full volume. "Mattaku shirazu " he said. "Excuse. Pia not teach entire use of Standard tongue." Hartford's right hand tore through the plastic pellicle over his Dardick-pistol and brought the weapon to bear on the figure before him. "You're a Stinker!" he said. "Pia's s a f e t y-suit -- that's the suit you're wearing." " Tonshu " the Indigenous Hominid said, bowing his head. He indicated the empty holster at his side : he was unarmed. "I come on taku , here to your honored precincts, to speak of things done and of future things. You are Hartford?" Hartford thought quickly. His responsibility was to the Garrison. This stranger was above all else a possible source of contamination, a carrier of the micro-bugs that could kill every Axenite on Kansas. Shooting him would rupture the safety-suit he wore. As it was, his exterior surface was clean ; he could have entered the Barracks only by marching in from Retreat with the rest of the regiment, through the sterilizing Syphon. "I am Harford. Lee Hartford." iCTylA said you are a good  man," the stranger said, bowing. "What is your name?" "Renkei. As you say, I take Pia's uwa-z ut sum i # this smooth garment." Renkei indicated the safety-suit by slicking his hands over it. "I must enter here to talk with Hartford. To enter, I must have garment. Pia, my brother, is dead. I borrowed his garment. Can I, with you, stop the ugly thing that began last night in Kansannamura ? Kuwashiku wa zonzezu; I do not know. I can but try." What a perfect disguise a safety-suit made, Hartford thought. Besides, it was the only passport a man needed to enter the Barracks. He stared at the stranger. He looked no different to men Hartford had met before, Axenites whose grandparents had been born by aseptic Caesarian section in Nagoya or Canton, two of the great gnotobiotic centers of fifty years ago. Renkei was a Stinker, a Kansan, an Indigenous Hominid (ignominious name!) ; he was also, Hartford felt, a man. "Tell me why you made the dangerous journey here, into the midst of your enemies," he said. "The death of our friend Pia. The burning of Kansannamura. The war between my people and you who wear smooth garments," he said. "This is aru-majiki koto # "A thing that ought not to be," Hartford said, translating. He was glad for the practice he'd gotten with Pia, speaking the native tongue. "Sit down," he said. "You must explain, Renkei." The refresher-room, a hall filled with lockers and the machinery that automatically tested and refitted the safetysuits each time they returned to the Barracks, had a dozen entrances and exits. As Renkei, still completely sealed in Pia's safety suit, sat on the bench beside Hartford, the doors all closed at once. They hissed as the pneumatic seals were set in their frames. Contamination Alert! Someone, most likely the Service girl on watch at the Status Board, had discovered that there was one more person in the Barracks than could be accounted for. A crash-priority head-count had been made. Each room and compartment had doubtless been eavesdropped through the built-in TV eyes and microphone ears. One door at the far end of the hall burst open. A squad of safety-suited Service Police spilled in. At the point of their wedge was the scarlet uniform of Colonel Nef. Dardick-pistol in hand, he ran toward Renkei. "Don't shoot!" Hartford shouted, springing up. "Get back, Mister," the colonel yelled. He dropped to one knee and squeezed all twelve rounds into the seated figure to Hartford's right. Service Police swooped down to pull Hartford away from the shattered body of Renkei. The by Allen Kim Lang lieutenant's tee-shirt was stained, however, by flecks of blood splashed up as the SPs' bullets chewed into the Kansan. Hartford was contaminated. F OR the next hour, Hartford had no more to say about his disposition than an angry bullock being dipped and scrubbed against an epidemic of cattle ticks. His purification consisted in a sudsing with antiseptic soaps, this administered by a team of three Service Company gnotobioticians who were completely indifferent to his modesty and who seemed determined to peel off the outer surface of his skin. The women, safety-suited against being themselves contaminated, shaved off all his hair and ostentatiously packagedup the shavings to be burned. They administered parenteral and enteric doses of broadspectrum antibiotics. By the time the gnoto girls were finished, Hartford was as bald all over as a six-weeks foetus, as sore as though he'd been sandblasted, slightly feverish as a result of the injections and madder than hell. Ignoring his demands to see Colonel Nef at once, the Service Company troopers helped him into his safety-suit. Hartford would have to live inside the suit for a week's quarantine, watched carefully to see whether a missed microbe would breed within him in spite of all the measures taken. Hartford's company commander refused him permission to speak to the colonel. The lieutenant was to speak to no one concerning Renkei's invasion of the Barracks. He would remain safety-suited inside the Barracks or out; but would otherwise continue with his regular duties. Hartford returned to the refresher-room where the murder had taken place. Renkei's macerated body had been removed for burning. The room had been carefully decontaminated, to the extent of hosing it down with detergent steam and individually re-refreshing each safety-suit in the huge hall's rows of lockers. There was nothing to be done against Nef's madness, Hartford thought. He sat on the bench where Renkei had sat. The ultimate breakdown in communication is silencing one side of the dialogue, he man is the ultimate sin; it removes forever the hope of understanding him. It ends for all time the conversation by which brothers may touch one another's mind. What crap to find in a Soldier's thoughts, Hartford told himself. He was an Axenite trooper, a Pioneer, a pistolpacking officer of infantry, commander of the Terrible Third Platoon. He was an Axenite, dedicated by the immaculacy of his birth to the conquest of Man's frontiers, Hartford snapped his plastic-sheathed Dardick-p i s t o #, death in a supermarket wrapper, from his belt and placed it on the shelf of his locker. He'd seen the village of Kansannamura burned. Pia had died across his shoulder. Paula lay buried, too. Renkei's life had been splashed out on a stream of bullets. Enough of death. Hartford picked up a pack of field-ration squeeze-tubes and walked down the hallway toward the Syphon. His leaving would show on the Status Board, of course, but that didn't matter any more. He was deserting the regiment. H E walked through the valley of desert that was the Hot Gut, and down into the birth-canal that was the Wet Gut, to emerge in the evening air of Kansas. The motor sergeant, stationed outside to guard the vehicles, saluted. "Going for a walk, sir?" he asked. "If you'll lend me a jeep, I'll go for a ride," Hartford said. "I'd like to see how things look, down in the village." "It's against regulations, but if you'll have the truck back by dark I can let it go, sir." "Thank you, Sergeant." Hartford returned the salute and drove off downhill, toward Kansannamura. What would happen to H a r t f o r d-the-deserter? he wondered. At best, he'd be booted out of the troopers and grounded on Titan, or Luna or one of the M'Bwene planets, to serve the rest of his life as a paper-pusher, the bureaucratic equivalent of an endless Kitchen Police. At worst, he'd be exiled to Earth. That meant exposure to bacteria, a gradual contamination till he'd been exposed to the full dirtiness in which earthlings daily lived, till he'd equipped himself with antibodies and a Stinker's immune-response. The Service Police weuld be after him soon. Once out #f sight of the Barracks, he turned his jeep off the road, onto one of the numberless paths used by camelopard riders on their trips between Stinker villages. He was headed upgrade, now, toward the mountains. On either side of the jeep were the fields of sunflowers, silent in the twilight calm. In a few moments the cool winds from the sea would flow into the land, stirshaped sunflower-leaves into the whisper that filled the evening and early-morning hours of Kansas. His heart filled with hope and hopelessness, feeling like a happy suicide, Hartford sang to himself as the sunflower heads and leaves tattooed against his windshield. Pioneers! O Pioneers he sang, the anthem of the Axenites, by Allen Kim Lang the fellowship he was leaving forever: Lo, the darting bowling orb! Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets, All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers ! The crunching of the jeep over the narrow track, the whipping of the plants against the vehicle and his singing all combined to drown out whatever noise it was the girl might have made. Hartford didn't see her till the jeep, rearing like a startled pony, climbing the flank of the camelopard the girl rode, tossed him into a tangle of green stalks and golden flowers. T HE riding camelopard bleated only a moment and was dead, its great neck broken by the jeep's charge. The girl, thrown clear, was up before Hartford. A scarlet bird circled the scene of the wreck, the dead beast, the stalled jeep, the man and the woman sprawled by the side of the path. " Miyo ! Miyol Miyo!" cried the blabrigar: "See! See! See!" Hartford rose and went to the girl, who was rubbing the shoulder she'd landed on. She stared, but didn't back away. "Kinodoku semban he said very carefully: a thousand myriad pardons . His bitcher, unfortunately, was set on full volume; his words of comfort blatted at the girl with paradeground force. She put her hands over her ears. The blabrigar above them, impressed by Hartford's stentorian voice, circled repeating " Kinodoku semban " over and over, till the girl called it down to rest quietly on her shoulder. The girl spoke to the bird, which stared at her lips with his head cocked to one side, an attentive student. She repeated four times the same message. The bird nodded, and repeated the phrase to her. "Yuke!" the girl said. The blabrigar spread its scarlet wings and flew up. It circled twice, then headed north, up into the mountains. Of the girl's message Hartford had understood only the native word for camelopard : giraffu . His Kansan was inadequate. He could understand it only if it were slowly spoken. Hartford tongued his hitcher's controls to a conversational level. "Kinodoku semban " he repeated, bowing. The girl knelt beside the dead camelopard and stroked its head, over the central, vestigal horn. She looked up at Hartford with tears in her eyes. "Tonshu" Hartford said : I bow my head. "Anata we dare desu ka?" she asked. "Lee Hartford," he replied. The girl spoke slowly. "I am named Take." She knit her hands before her and bowed. "Forgive my bad actions' she said. "The fault is entirely mine, Takeko," Hartford replied. He was sorry, of course, to have killed the girl's steed and to have subjected her to danger; he was very glad to have met her. Takeko wore what must have been the Kansan riding costume : short trousers and a jacket woven of floss from retted sunflower stalk, dyed a golden brown. Most curious, he thought, was her perfume; mild, flowerlike, slightly pungent. The smell of this lovely Stinker belied the trooper epithet. Then it hit him. The filters of a safety-suit remove, together with all the dust of the ambient air, all its character, including odor. The clean, characteristic smells of the Barracks, together with the bland spit-and-sweat odors of a long-worn safety-suit, were all an Axenite came in contact with. If he were able to smell the outside world, it could only be because his gnotobiotic security was compromised. Hartford inspected his safety-suit, peering where he could and twisting and feeling the surfaces he couldn't see. Takeko laughed. She reached across his shoulder and lifted a flap of torn fabric, ripped loose when Hartford had flown from his jeep. H IS panic would have been unmanly in a normal human; but Hartford all his life had been impressed with the horror of contamination. He ran blindly, though he knew that his deepened breathing was drawing the germ-laden air of Kansas deeper into his lungs. He ran through lanes of sunflowers, flailing his arms, into the darkness, away from the alien girl, away from the fear of going septic. He ran and stumbled and fell and ran again. All his life he'd been warned of the consequences of becoming infected with the bacteria against which he had no defenses. Now he was so infected. When Hartford fell the last time it was for sheer lack of wind. He opened his helmet and tossed it aside. Dead already, he could lose nothing by making himself comfortable for dying. He shivered. The chill of infection? No, the night was cool. He looked about him in the light of the sky of stars. The fields were below him, conversations as the breeze filtered through them. It was a lovely place to die, here on the crest of a hill. Hartford lay back and stared into the curtain of stars that rippled above him. Perhaps he wouldn't wake, he thought. With this thought he slept. The sunlight stung his eyes. byAllen Kim Lang He sprang to his feet, then bent and groaned. Sore. He'd slept on naked soil, packed hard by the hillcrest winds. He stretched his hard-bedded muscles. For a dead man, he felt good. The alien bacteria and viruses within him were establishing beachheads, multiplying their platoons to companies, their companies to battalions. By the time they'd reached division-strength, he thought, he'd be well aware of the invasion. Meanwhile, breakfast. He opened a package of field-r ations, squeeze-tube beans. He inserted the nozzle of the tube into his mouth and fed himself a dollop of the stuff. It felt strange to eat directly from the tube, not having inserted the adjutage into his helmet-opening to be sterilized first. Being septic saved a lot of time. He finished the squeezetube beans and was thirsty. Down at the base of his hill was a little stream. Hartford thoughtfully peeled off his safety-suit. Dressed only in his shorts, shirtless, barefoot and tender, he made his way down to the water. It was delicious. Did bacteria impart that brisk taste? Hartford wondered. So far committed to contamination that nothing mattered, he shed his shorts and dived into the stream. It was chilly, delightful. He returned to shore and lay on the grass for the sun to toast him dry. He began to relax... The girl giggled. H artford snatched up his shorts and pulled them on. It was Takeko. She was afoot, wearing the costume he'd last seen her with; but she had strapped on her back a leather wallet. A blabrigar sat on Takeko's shoulder. She spoke to it, repeating her message four times and listening to the bird repeat once. Then she shooed the scarlet bird away, to carry north the message that Hartford had been found. "I laugh. Excuse me," she said. "But you funny." Takeko patted her head. Hartford understood. Shaved by the Decontamination Squad, he was bald and eyebrowless, entirely lacking in body hair. He . smiled. "Hai." "Your skin is like the hide of a giraffu," she said. Hartford looked down at his freckled arm. True, the pattern of brown against pink was very like the reticulations of a camelopard. "Where did you learn to speak Standard, Takeko ?" "Pia-san talked to my cousin, and I listened," she said. "Kansannamura was my home. Pia often visited us." Hartford, who after Nasty Nef was the man most responsible for the burning of Takeko's village, was silent. "When your jeepu-kuruma hit my giraffu , I think you are Renkei," the Kansan girl said. "Renkei is my cousin. He go to see what can be done." "Renkei is dead," Hartford told her. "lie !" Takeko pressed her hands against her face. "You strangers are quick to kill, to burn, to sweep away." "I did not wish him harmed," Hartford said. "You pink folk will not be happy until all our people are dead and under the ground," Takeko moaned. "You will not be pleased until you can march across our graves." "That is not so." "Pia-san said it," Takeko said. "He said that your Nef is a master of the Brotherhood, which wishes death to all people who do not wear glass heads." "If that is true, I am no longer a part of it, Takekosan," Hartford said. "I have left Nef and his Barracks. I am a dead man." "You will come with me," Takeko said. "You will not be dead for many years, unless Nef and his Brotherhood kill you." She looked into the sky, where a red bird was circling. It hawked down to her shoulder and sat there, its head tilted to her. "Takeko," the girl said to the bird. With this key to unlock its message the blabrigar spilled its rote. Hartford recognized a word or two of the bird-o-gram, but not the full sense of the message. Takeko reached into the pocket of her short trousers for a few zebra-striped sunflower-seeds. The blabrigar picked these daintily from her hand, using its beak like a pair of precise tweezers, pinching up one seed at a time and cracking it. "There will soon come giraffu to take us to a further village," Takeko said. "You are to speak to our chief men there, to tell them what happened to Renkei, why he was killed in the Stone House." "I may not live through this day," Hartford said. "It is not easy to explain. We wear the 'glass head' to keep out your air. It is deadly, doku , to us. Do you understand, Takeko?" 'VT'OU may be tired, having I slept on the old bones of the hill," she said. "You may be hungry, having eaten only the squeezings of your metal sausages. But you are not hurt badly, nor are you old, Leesan. Why should you die?" "You cannot understand," Hartford said. He spoke more to himself than to the girl. "The medicine here is certainly primitive. You have no concept of the biological nature of disease. Tell me, Takekosan, do you Kansans know anything of the very, very small... " "Microscopic?" Takeko asked. "Piacentelli did a splendid job of teaching you the Standard language," Hartford said. He looked up and down Takeko's trim, just post-adolescent figure in frank appraisal, jealby Allan Kim Lang ously wondering whether the chapattis and molded to Gabe could have achieved his the hook took the fancy of remarkable pedagogical reKansas fish as well as Takesuits by means of the pillowko's offerings. With a sense book method of linguistic inof at last participating in the struction so popular with solaffairs of the universe, he dediers of occupation in every capitated and decaudated the time and climate. That six fish they ended with, and thought, he rebuked himself, gutted them with a rich dewas unworthy of Pia's memlight in the juicy messiness of ory. In any case, his friend the task. had conducted his researches Hartford and Takeko sciswearing that guarantee of sored the fillets in split twigs chastity, a safety-suit. and roasted them, like aquatic " We'll have to wait an hour weenies, over a fire built from or so until the giraffu came," the pithy stalks of dead sunTakeko said. flowers. The firepit, a saucer She unstrapped the wallet of scooped-out dirt, had burfrom her back and unpacked ied beneath it half a dozen of it on the grass at the edge of the swollen roots of sunflowthe little stream. The Kansan ers, each wrapped in the cordigirl took out a coil of line, form, sharkskin-sunfaced leaf spun from the stalk of the of the parent plant, to roast sunflower, and a bronze hook, beneath the coals. "We will feed the gentleman said. Hartford watched with A with daikon , a kind of amusement as she baited the horseradish; and their plates hook with a bit of the bread were the fresh-baked, flat, unfrom her knapsack, twirled the leavened chappattis Takeko line about her head and had brought in her pack. The dropped it into the center of tubers, eaten from a fresh the stream. "This place has leaf-plate, needed only butter, many fish," she said. "We will Takeko had this, too, churned not wait long before we eat." of camelopard-milk cream. It took Takeko only ten Buds or flower-heads of the minutes to have three sevensunflower were eaten with inch fish, so plump and meatysunflower oil, like artichokes, looking that not even a xenol"Your people have a good ogist would have wasted time friend in the sunflower;" studying them, lying on the Hartford remarked, wiping his grass. lips. Hartford demanded equal "With the golden flower time with the fishline, and and the golden giraffu , with discovered to his gratification the take grass and the good That the dough he pinched off soil, we had a rich life here before you glass-headed men came' Takeko said. "Now we are treated in our own villages like rats to be driven out, in our fields as gnawing vermin. Why is your Brotherhood so angry with us, Lee-san, who live in only a few places on a wide world? Is there no law among the light-skinned people? We have lived here, on the world you call Kansas, for many generations. We were once of Earth, as were your grandfathers." "All humans were once of Earth," Hartford said. "If we are as much human as you," she said, "why does your Nef call us Hominids? Is that a name to give a brother?" "It is better than Stinker " Hartford suggested. "Hai! I tell you, Lee-san why you must re-name us. It is because men do not kill men until they give their brotherenemy a monstrous name. Why do you wish to kill us all?" she asked. "I'm not a member of the Brotherhood," Hartford said. "I'm only a man who was born on Axenite. That means, until your beast and my jeep collided, tearing my safety-suit, I was an animal uncontaminated by microscopic life. These microscopic animals, Takeko, are deadly to an Axenite." "You are not dead, though," Takeko suggested. " Ne ?" "I've been breathing contaminated air for twelve hours," Hartford said. "It's true. I cannot understand why I have no fever, no malaise, no symptoms of pneumonia." Takeko giggled. "Forgive me," she said. "Kinodoku sem ban ; but you seem to be sorry to be alive." She was silent for a moment, listening. She pointed north. "My father will appear with our giraffu soon," she said. "I can hear them." Takeko's father rode up a moment later, an unbent man of seventy. He sat astride his camelopard, a comic quadruped little better designed as a beast of burden than an ostrich, with as much dignity as though his steed were an Arabian stallion. His name, Takeko said, was Kiwa-san. The old man bowed from his saddle when his daughter introduced Hartford. A T Kiwa-san's command the two giraffu he'd brought along on lead-reins spread their legs to bring their downsloping backs a scant four feet from the ground. The saddles, with dangling, boot-like gambadoes in place of ordinary stirrups, seemed inaccessible to Hartford. "Watch me," Takeko told him. She took a short run up behind her giraffu and, with a movement like a leap-frog hurdle, flipped herself up into the saddle. Hartford stepped back, ran and leaped. He succeeded only in banging his shoes into the right sifle-joint of his mount and in flipping himself to the ground. In the interest of by Allen Kim Lang v. #. Wl I  L ill'll I  Mp  l iifii lElll  haste, grace was abandoned. Hartford monkey-crawled up a sturdy cane of bamboo growing nearby and, as Kiwa-san maneuvered his beast, stepped over into the saddle. "I'd better take my safetysuit and helmet' he said. "If the troopers should find it, they could follow our trail." "Hai!" Takeko said, agreeing. She leaped from her giraffu, packed the safety-suit and helmet onto the beast, and remounted. "We will now go to Yamamura," she said. Old Kiwa spoke, and she translated: "We must move quickly and with care," she said. "My father heard an hikoki -- how do you say?" she asked, raising and lowering her hand. "A veeto-platform," Hartford said. "I mustn't be seen, Takeko. Colonel Nef would use my presence as an excuse to kill any of your people around me." The ride, though cautious, was indeed demanding. Hartford felt tendons stretch he didn't know he had. Muscles were bruised from his instep to his upper back, and the skin was chafed away from his inner thighs as though he'd been riding an unplaned plank. He understood, well before the journey to the mountain village was over, the importance of that lifetime exercise, best begun by riding young, known to generations of horsemen as "stretching the crutch." He swore to himself that his future transportation, if he had a future through which to transport himself, would be by boots or wheeled vehicle. The three of them were following no clear path. Kiwa led. Hartford noted that their course took them along the contours of streams, on the borders of fields, through contrasting background that would make their presence less obvious from the air. They were in a thicket of bamboo when the veeto-platform did appear. The instant they heard its whistle, Kiwa spoke a sharp word. He and his daughter slipped from their mounts, loosed the brow-bands of their camelopards and unlocked their girths, tossed off the saddles and dangling gambadoes and gave the animals each a sharp slap on the rump that sent them crashing through the bamboo. They helped Hartford unsaddle and send his beast off in another direction, and lay down in the direction the late-morning sun dialed the shadows of the bamboo stems. If the veeto-pilot saw the giraffu now, they were saddleless and innocent. The downdraft of the veetoplatform puffed dust up from the ground around them, and pressed down the leafy tops of the bamboo like a great hand stroking across the thicket. Hartford, aware of the way his bald head and pink face would stand out, dusted his hands with the soil and by Allen Kim Lang laced his dusty fingers over his scalp. The platform passed almost directly over them, shooting fragments of dust and bamboo-duff into every particle of clothing, into ears and eyes and nostrils, with the whirlwind of its passage. I T took them half an hour to recover their giraifu and saddle up again, but Hartford did not regret the delay. Aboard the grotesque mount again, he groaned. To mask the misery of his unaccustomed pounding he paid scientific attention to the landscape, the gait of the camelopards, the leather of the saddles, and the posture and person of Takeko -- this last by far the most effective of his analgesic thoughts. They rode on an ancient piedmont, among the foothills of a worn-down mountainrange. The leather of their saddles and gambadoes was, by its pattern, obviously tanned camelopard-hide. Hartford was certain that this pattern would by the end of their journey be an indelible part of his own hide. The giraifu, remarkably swift and easymoving over the rugged, heavily grown terrain, ambled, moving both legs on the same side together. And Takeko was lovely. Hartford decided to essay his Kansan. He practiced his question: "Is Yamamura far from here?" mentally, moving his lips, until he was sure he'd mastered the phrasing. Then he addressed Old Kiwa. " Yamamura wa koko kara toi desu ka?" Kiwa smiled, and rattled off an answer much too brisk for Hartford to catch. He pointed ahead and up. "He says we must go through the pass, under the Great Buddha," Takeko explained. "We have only an hour to go." " Arigato ," Hartford said, suppressing a moan. Another hour ! The pass Kiwa had spoken of loomed ahead. It was quite narrow, and walled on either side by the almost perpendicular flanks of mountains, shoulder to shoulder. Kiwa went first, for the cleft could only be negotiated in single file. Takeko followed her father, and Hartford took up the rear. In the ravine it was dark. The camelopards, sensing their mangers up ahead, paced more quickly. Suddenly the canyon was light, the walls spreading further apart here. Far up on Hartford's right, seated on a shelf left from some ancient avalanche, was a gigantic figure cast of a coppery metal, green now against the granite wall. "Who is that?" Hartford called to Takeko. "It is our Daibutsu" Takeko said. "It is the Amida Buddha, the Lord of Boundless Light." "Do you worship him?" Takeko smiled and shook her head. "We worship not any man, but a Way," she said. " Butsudo -- the Way of the Buddha. We are nearly to the village now, Lee-san." "I thank the Lord Buddha for that," Hartford said, bowing from his saddle toward the great bronze image. fold of the high mountains. The fields that supported the village, its population now doubled by the refugees from Kansannamura, were tucked here and there on narrow ledges, watered by bamboo flumes that stole water from the mountain streams. The crop of greatest importance was the ubiquitous sunflower, supplier of bread and soap ash, of cloth and bath oil, birdseed and writing paper. Bamboo grew in clefts and shelves too slight for cultivation. This was the wood for tools, the water pipe, the house wattles and, in its youth, the salad of the people, the only wood eaten in its native state. There were also carrots, beets and tiny plumtrees, and the horseradish, daikon. Yamamura was a lovely place, Hartford decided. It was twenty hours from the moment of his contamination that Hartford dismounted. He moved into the house Kiwa invited him to with as much tenderness as though he'd been carefully bastinadoed and flayed. He was, nonetheless, free of febrile symptoms. He had breathed Kansan air, had eaten its fish and drunk its water; he'd spoken with a Kansan native and had lain with his face in Kansan dust. He was still as healthy as any Axenite, never before in the saddle, would be after a five-hour ride. Kiwa's wife and Takeko's mother was a little woman named Toyomi-san, dressed in brightly patterned garments a good deal more formal than her daughter's jacket and shorts. Toyomi-san spoke no Standard, but she made quite clear to Hartford his welcome. She led him into a large, steam-filled room, where she indicated he was first to wash himself then soak, then dry and dress in the clean clothing she'd laid out for his use. The soaking water was very hot, and very welcome. Hartford sat in the copper-bottomed tub, his muscles hard and sore, until he felt the very marrow of his bones had cooked. He stepped from the tub then and dried gently, easy on his chafed back and legs. "The oil will help," Takeko said, slipping a screen shut behind her. She had bathed and brushed her black hair free of the bamboo-thicket silk kimono of the sort her mother was wearing. Hartford held the towel at his waist. by Allen Kim Lang "Excuse me," he said. Takeko giggled. "Are you unique, Lee-san, that you must hide yourself? Lie down on the cot, and I will make you comfortable." Wondering greatly at the folkways of Kansas, but determined to commit no gaffe that would imperil his relations with this girl, Hartford lay face down on the mat-covered cot. Takeko removed the tenugi towel with which he'd modestly draped himself and gently stroked sweet-scented sunflower-seed oil into his macerated skin. Using the radical border of her hands, which were remarkably strong, Takeko coaxed the muscles to relax with effleurage; and she further softened the clonic hardness with a kneading motion. "This is," she said, working her thumbknuckles up his spinal-column as though telling the beads of his vertebrae, "one of the good things my ancestors brought from earth." " Yoroshiku soro " Hartford grunted agreement. "It is good." skin soothed with oil and his muscles suppled by Takeko's massage, Hartford joined the family for supper. The Kansans used paired sticks for eating. Hartford, who'd not yet been introduced to the skill of using these o-hashi, and who was too hungry to practice now, was given a metal spoon with which to eat. When they'd finished their meal, several elder Kansans entered Kiwa-san's house. Each bowed to Hartford, who, bald-headed, his feet socked into unfamiliar geta and wearing mitten-toed stockings, bowed in return. The newcomers each spoke some Standard, but it was obvious that Takeko was the most fluent of them all. "Pia-san taught Renkei; Renkei taught me," the girl explained. "I was the second-best speaker. It would be better if Renkei were here." "I regret his death more deeply than I can tell you," Hartford said. "Renkei and Pia my friend are both dead now. This is what Renkei told me: aru-majiki koto , a thing that ought not to be." The Kansans, seated on the cushions about the room, nodded. "Do you know, Leesan, the greatest law of life?" Takeko asked. "You said, beside the stream where we fished, that men do not kill men," Hartford answered. "But they do." "It is an ideal we have more nearly than the glass-heads," one of the Kansan elders said. "In the past four days, Renkei has died, and Pia-san. In the years before you Latecomers came to build the Stone House and cut roads and practice making holes in paper at a distance, no man died here at the hand of another." "We cannot teach the glassheads our way when they walk about only with guns, when they live in the Stone House none of us can enter without dying, when they look at us with glass bowls over their faces and hate in their hearts," Takeko said. "The hate is hardly needful," Hartford said. "But the helmets must remain if Axenites are to live on Kansas." "Do you live?" Takeko asked quietly. "I do," Hartford said. "It puzzles me." "Does it not puzzle you that none of us harbors open sores, or coughs up phlegm, or dies of fever?" Kiwa asked, speaking through his daughter's intermediation. "I had not thought of that," Hartford admitted. "I have never before lived so. close to Stinkers." Embarrassed, he stopped short. "I'm sorry," he said. "Shitsurei shimashita " "You meant us no disco u r t e s y," Takeko said. "Think, Lee, of the word you used. Do we indeed stink?" "No," Hartford said. "It's strange. I've been told all my life of the rot and fermentation within ordinary mammals, and of the evil smells elaborated by these processes. But you, and all of Kansas, stink no more than Axenites do. You have, as we, the mulberry odor of saliva, the wheat smell of thiamin, the faint musk oil of the hair. Even your camelopards smell sweet." T HE girl laughed. "If you think all Kansas a place of sweet perfumes, smell this, Lee-san," she said. She took a covered dish and opened it. "This is takuwan she said. A smell strong as that of limburger cheese made itself known in the room. "It is pickled turnip, made in the old manner of our island forefathers on Earth." "Whew!" Hartford said. "There is the true Stinker of Kansas." "Pia-san learned much from the bad-smelling takuwan  Takeko said. "His wife knew about the small stink-makers, these bacteria; she was a user of microscopes. She looked for them in the air of Kansas, and in our soil. Pia-san went even further. He took drops of our blood and other things to test." "Tell our guest, Take-chan, what Pia found," Old Kiwa told his daughter. "Hai, O t o s a n ." The girl turned to Hartford. "In our bodies there are no mischiefmakers of the sort Earth-people know. There are not even those juices Pia-san called 'footprints of the bugs.' " "He must have meant you have no bacterial antibodies," Hartford said. "That explains the whole package," he went on, with growing excitement. "Why I'm alive without my safety-suit. What Piacentelli went outside to find. And, when he found it, why he unsuited himself, knowing this by Allen Kim Lang world as pure as Titan. You're ceritelli had taken from the A x e n i t e s, you Kansans! Barracks on his fatal expediYou're as germ-free as the tion. troopers." Takeko dipped a chopstick "The whole truth is less into a dish and placed it besimple," said the lean old man neath the objective of the who'd been introduced to microscope. "We shall look at Hartford as Yamata, the callia spot of evil-smelling takugrapher. wanjuice," she said. "There is "Does the rubble of your light enough. Make it fit your forest-floors never turn to eyes, Lee-san; and you will mould, then?" Hartford asked, know the secret of Jodo, this "Do the bodies of your buried world you call Kansas." fathers lie uncorrupted in their graves?" IX "Of course not," Takeko would be buried ourselves in AX microscope in the yogaunmouldered leaves. The bodposture called for by its being ies of our ancestors would be so near the floor and tried to stacked about us, unchanging, adjust the instrument as he relike logs for the charcoalmembered having seen it done, burners. Our soil would die, He focused the coarse adjustand all men would die with it, ment of the 'scope till he saw if dead things did not crumspots darting about the fluid ble to make new soil." Takeko had placed on the "Show our friend the hero slide. He nailed the spots of our epic," the calligrapher down with a gentle hand on told her. the fine adjustment. "a." Takeko stood and The juice of the pickled went to another room, going turnip was aswim with tiny through the ritual of kneeling bodies that looked like tadto slide the door screen, standpoles. "What are they?" he ing, kneeling, standing, with asked, peering into the microa grace that made the kimono world below him. she wore the loveliest of gar"Pia-san named them moments. She brought to the nads," said the carpenter, small table at the center of the white-bearded Togo. "We all room a heavy object wrapped have them in our bodies. You in a yellow silk tenugui. Near have them now in yours. Our this on the table she placed a soil is alive with them. They small lamp, fueled with sunchew the chaff of our fields flower-seed oil. She lighted into black loam; they turn to the lamp and uncovered the dust the flesh of oiir fathers, instrument she'd brought in. They cause turnips to become It was the microscope Piatakuwan" Hartford rocked back from the microscope to sit again on his heels. "You have no disease, no benign bacterial flora and of course no bacterial antibodies. Instead you have this whip-tailed animalcule, this monad. Is this correct?" "So Pia-san said," Takeko agreed. "He said that the monad is a jealous beast. It is a tiger among the pygmies, he said. No little nuisancemakers can exist on Kansas; the monad would eat them in a rage." "The ultimate antibiotic," Hartford said. "A microorganism that functions as a saprophyte, a soil-former and a scavenger. Besides all this, it's a universal phagocyte, policing up the human environment inside and out, to keep it clean of any other microscopic organisms. The monad fills every niche in the micro-ecology of the planet." "This is what Pia-san and his okusama, poor dead girl, discovered," Takeko said. "Renkei entered the Stone House to tell you that we do not stink, that we are not dangerous. Three people have died to tell this -- and Nef still does not know." "I think he may know it after all," Hartford said. "He knows about the monad, and fears it. This little bug means that every member of the human race can join his damned Brotherhood. A crew of monads in his gut would make every man on Stinker Earth a dignotobiote, germ-free except for his housekeeping protozoa. "Until Pia-san told us," Yamata said, "we knew nothing except that we lived longer than our ancestors had. We knew that we did not suffer from the strange tirednesses the books told of, ills caused by the little animals. We did not know that the smallest natives of this planet had made of us. their fortresses." "If I could only get past Nasty Nef to tell this to the Axenites," Hartford said. "Ron yori shoko " Kiwa-san said. Takeko translated for her father. "He says, Proof is stronger than argument." "Indeed," Hartford agreed. "But how do I prove to the troopers that the monad sweeps Kansas cleaner than their Barracks floors?" "As Pia-san tried to," Takeko said. "He removed his glasshead and his silken suit. He breathed our air and ate our food. He wanted to prove that he could live, but he was killed before he could. Now you have made that proof. Your brothers of the Stone House must undress of their silken suits and come among us, Lee-san." A Hartford said. "They are certain they will die if they inhale a breath of Kansas air, chew a bite of Kansas food, drink your clear stream water. I was certain I would by Allen Kim Lang die when my safety-suit was torn : remember our meeting, Takeko-san? It will not be easy to persuade my brothers and sisters in the Barracks to forget their fears. We are so sure, we Axenites, that contamination will kill us that we'd rather dance with lightning and eat stones than walk this world unprotected and eat its fruits." When Takeko had respoken these words to her father, the old man said again : "Ron yori skoko" Proof is greater than argrment. "Proof?" Hartford asked. "I am not proof enough to have a Regiment of Axenites shed their safety-suits and declare the Kansans their brothers. It would take years of lab work before the first of them would walk suitless onto bug-dirt. We'd have to knock down the walls of the Barracks and burn two thousand-odd safety-suits, before we'd have the Axenite troopers here trapped into being guinea-pigs." "Each trooper carries the Stone House with him when he walks our roads," the calligrapher remarked. "We have but to break through the silken suit he wears to make a trooper know the garment isn't needed here." "He'd die of fright," Hartford said. "I very nearly did. Besides, each column of troopers, a squad or the Regiment, goes out with a Decontamination Team. If a man becomes septic through some sort of accident, he's hustled by a cleanup squad into a Decontamination Vehicle for his shower, shave and shots. I know the process well," he said, running his palm over his naked head. "A no ne," Kiwa said. "Will this Decontamination-fcuruna house two thousand men? Two hundred? Twenty?" "It will hold two or three troopers at once," Hartford answered. "We have several of them, though." "So... ka ?" white bearded Togo exclaimed. He leaned over to whisper into the ear of Takeko's father, who nodded and smiled. Old Kiwa spoke, and Takeko interpreted. "We must surprise a group of troopers," he said. "We must cause all their silken suits to be torn, or all their glass heads shattered, at one time. It is so simple as that." "Simple in all but the doing," said Yamata the calligrapher. He picked up a brush and sketched on the mat before him a line of trooper-silhouettes, a platoon, marching single-file. "How do we break into all those Stone Houses at once?" he asked. Hartford's face was pale. "We could use grenades, perhaps," he said. "Or bombs. After all, these troopers we speak of are no more than my family, my village, my people. I may of course be expected to cooperate in their destruction." took his hand, then dropped it. " Ano ne! You do not understand! We can no more injure your brothers than you can, Lee-san. We may not harm any living person. Forgive us. You misunderstand us. We are bound, Lee-sensei, by Butsudo : the Peaceful Path of the Lord Buddha." She bowed toward him, her hands clasped together, her head touching the tatami. "It is my fault if I have misunderstood," Hartford said. The men were staring, Takeko's eyes were filled with tears, the room was silent. "I do not know you well. I did not know you do not kill." "Let me tell you, then," Takeko said, rising to sit beside him. "Our people, who once lived on islands in the greater sea of Earth, were folk mighty in battle. Their pride was named the Way of the Warrior, which is called Bushido. Their loveliest flower, the sakura or cherry-blossom, they made the symbol of the warrior, so highly did they hold his calling. "After their villages had been crushed many times in war, our ancestbrs vowed forever to abandon Bushido , the warrior's path, and to place their feet in the path of the Lord Buddha, called Butsudo. This was many years ago, before any man had ventured into space, before our ancestors found this world you call Kansas. When they came here, they came in peace. And they named this place Jodo , which we still call it. It means the Pure Land, where men are just. And all justice is built on a single law. No man shall take man's life." "I spoke of the Axenite Brotherhood," Hartford said. "These men are a group of our leaders -- Colonel Nef is one ; he invited me to join him -- who have decided that Stinker humanity must go. They're dedicated men, prepared to extinguish all the rest of mankind, to sterilize Earth and reseed it as a gnotobiotopic Paradise. Nef has, I fear, already killed three people to this end. "Yo,u who cannot kill will face an enemy trained in killing," he went on. "Your camelopard-mounted messengers will meet veeto-platforms with machine-guns. Your peaceful words will be drowned out by the roar of Dardick-rifles. How can you hope to live if you will not kill?" "If the choice were death or gladly die," Takeko said. "We have a saying, Muriga toreba dori ga hikkomu. When might takes charge justice withdraws. We will not kill, and neither will we be defeated." Yamata the calligrapher addressed Hartford. "How badly torn must a safety-suit be, to make necessary the wearer's going into the purification cart?" he asked. by Allen Kim Lang "Only so much as the point of a pin would make would be enough,' " Hartford said. "We have to drive pins into several dozens of men's clothing at one time," Yamata said. He smiled. "So phrased, the mountain does not seem too tall to be climbed." "It would be difficult to puncture the safety-suits without hurting the wearers," Hartford said. "Few armies are so solicitous." " Butsudo forbids us to kill men," Takeko said. "It does not deny us the right, in pointing them to the path of knowledge, to jab them a bit." She smiled at Hartford. do this jabbing?" he asked. "I remind you all, if you need reminding, that our troopers travel with Dardickrifles and machine-guns, with rocket-mounted jeeps and veeto-platforms from which bombs can be dropped." Kiwa spoke. "We are like a bear after honey," he said. "We are hungry, but do not wish to taste the stings of the guardians of the hive. We must surprise them." Hartford, his knees stiff with kneeling, his backside sore from the camelopard-saddle despite the expert massage, got up to pace the floor. "We need a needle-gun of some sort," he said. "No gun," insisted whitebearded Togo. "It need have only slight power," Hartford said. "It would throw its projectile only forcefully enough to penetrate the fabric of a safety-suit." "It has been so many generations since we have been soldiers, we know nothing of weapons," Yamata-san said. He wet a fine brush with sumi, Chinese ink, and sketched rapidly. "I remember seeing pictures of Bushi carrying a sort of throwing-sticks with pointed ends in pockets on their backs, and flinging them like little spears with a kind of one-stringed lute." Hartford stared at the calligrapher's drawing, then exclaimed. "Of course ! A bow and arrow." Takeko inspected the sketch. "The man who threw the stick is standing," she said. "Could we stand against troopers?" "A man would have to stand exposed to shoot an arrow," Hartford admitted. "The Dardick-guns would mow us down before we'd punctured a single safety-suit." He paced up and down the room, the only trained warrior there, trying on. "We have wine, Lee-san," Takeko said. "Please sit and drink." Hartford, bemused with his problem, folded his legs onto his cushion and lowered himself gently. Takeko's mother appeared with tiny cups of hot wine, sake. Hartford bowed with the others and sipped. The stuff was good, rather like a dry sherry. Takeko bowed to leave the room, returned, bowed and commenced playing a tune with the instrument she'd brought in. It was a flute made of bamboo, with a highpitched, pure sound Hartford found quite pleasant. He frowned, though, after a moment. Takeko took the pipe from her lips. "You do not enjoy my playing?" she asked. "What is that made of?" Hartford demanded "Just bamboo, isn't it?" " Hai , take ," Takeko agreed. "It is my name. Take -- bamboo. This is only a shakuhachi for very simple music." Hartford smiled and bowed toward Togo-san, the whitebearded carpenter. "S: : r," he said, "if we may have your advice, I believe Takeko-chan has helped us find our weapon." X T HE meeting broke up to adjourn to Togo-san's workshop. There was bamboo there in plenty, and young men eager to help the ex-lieutenant of Axenites in testing hts device. As the week wore on, young Kansans appeared from other villages, called by blabrigars and messengers on camelopard-back to join the army that was to make brothers and sisters of the troopers of First Regiment. The blowgun Hartford finally established as his field model was some two yards long, made of bamboo bored through the joints and polished smooth within, of a. caliber somewhat less than the diameter of a man's little finger. Though the bamboo-tube was somewhat flexible, Togosan and his apprentices were able to bind a front sight to the muzzle, allowing somewhat greater accuracy that could be obtained by pointing and hop'ng. The dart was about the length of a man's hand. Its point was a sliver of bamboo, sharp as steel, entirely sharp enough to penetrate the tough material of a safety-suit if puffed from the blowgun with enough force. All the craftsmen of the village became arms-makers. They drilled bamboo, pob'shed the bore with abrasive-coated cord, fitted on the sights and tested their blowguns against the targets. Hundreds of darts were turned out for practice, and the most perfect were, saved for the battlefield itself. The blowgunners began their drill, shooting from a prone position at targets as far as ten yards off, as great a range as amateurs cou # d be expected to shoot with accuracy in the short time these had for practice. To fire the blowgun, the dart was wrapped in a bit of silk of sunflower-stalk-fluff, so that it would fit tightly by Allen Kim Lang into the tube. The puff that sent it on its way had to be sharp and hard. Achieving the proper slap of air took more practice even than aiming. Hartford became every day a better horseman, or rather camelopardist. He in fact rejoiced in opportunities to leapfrog into his saddle, fit his feet and legs into the leather gambadoes, and go hailing off into the hills to recruit men and material. He carried with him the radio he'd salvaged from his safety suit, and could from time to time pick up First Regiment transmissions. The bitcher from his suit was useful in training large numbers of recruits on the blowgun range, and would be used when the Kansan guerrillas took the field against the troopers. He was picking up the language rapidly, now. He had to use Takeko's services as interpreter less and less. Her usefulness declined not a bit, though, as the girl became his first lieutenant in charge of details. The band of expert puffgunners was joined by a company of scouts. These men and women skulked the hills afoot or astride camelopards, spying out the programs of the Regiment. Having no radio to maintain contact with Yamamura, each scout carried a pair of blabrigars, trained to report to a specific person in its home village when given a selected prompt-word. Yamata-sah, the calligrapher, became a cartographer. He drew in jet-black sumi ink the contours of the mountains, greened in the stands of bamboo, drew blue streams and broad brown fields of sunflowers, till at last the map that filled the largest room in Yamamura was almost as real as the Kansan soil it reflected. Walking across this map in his tabistockinged feet, Hartford and the others of Kansas Intelligence would move toy troopers, made of wood like kokeshi-dolls, into the positions where the blabrigars reported patrols to be. T HE plan of battle of the Kansas forces was yawara do , the Gentle Way also called judo. They would wait till the enemy made a move they could use, then they'd trip him up by re-directing his own strength. The move they most wanted the troopers to make was into the ravine that led toward the village of Yamamura, the pass under the Daibutsu , the huge bronze Buddha set there by their ancestors. In that ravine, under the gaze of the Lord of Boundless Light, the Kansas forces would either prevail againt the invader and make him their brother by darts and sweet reason, or they would all die in the attempt. The camelopards were stabled, ready as the steeds of any march-patrolling cavalry troop. The dartsmen, and those of the women who'd shown skill in handling the blowgun, were trained and eager. The path through the pass had been memorized in infinite detail by every one of the guerrillas. The squad of sappers responsible for checkmating the troopers had prepared their levers, their blocks and skids. Nothing remained now but to coax the enemy into the battlefield of the Kansans' choosing. "Take out what's left of the safety-suit," Hartford ordered one of his men. "Leave it here -- " He stabbed a toe at the map they both stood on. "Would it be well for me to leave beside the torn and broken suit signs of a fight?" asked the boy, Ito Tiro, son of Old Ito-san, the knife-maker. "If the troopers are angry, they will be careless." "If only you believed in war, Jiro-chan, you'd make a fine warrior," Hartford grinned. "Do it your way, and hurry back." Jiro placed the bait under the Regiment's nose early in the day, and returned to Yamamura. It was midday when a blabrigar flew in from one of the scouts posted to watch First Regiment's reaction. The bird prated its message into the ear of its receiver. Troopers, a band of fifty-odd, were scouring the hills to the west, following the camelopard-hoofprints left by Jiro. Aiding them in their search was the Regiment's veeto-platform, skimming, hovering, pouncing to pick up clues. "They're on the scent," Hartford said. He turned again to Ito Jiro, fleetest of the camelopard-riders. "Jiro-chan, lead them a chase that will bring them to the ravine no sooner than the Hour of the Dog. Be very cautious of the flyingthing; it can surprise you." "a," Jiro said, bowing. "The Hour of the Dog they will call upon you near the Daibutsu" Ito-san the knifemaker watched his son run toward the stables, the boy as excited as though he were going to a festival rather than to face alone half a company of full-armed Axenites. The blabrigars that would ride out with Jito were trained to report to the father. It would be a long afternoon for the old man, Hartford thought. There was much to do before the scarlet bird came winging in from Jiro's shoulder with the message that the trap was sprung. At the Hour of the Monkey, four hours before the troopers were to be in ambush, the first blabrigar flew in to report to Ito-san that the boy's mount was winded, the enemy was drawing nearer the ravine, and that Jiro was approaching the point of rendezvous where he would find a fresh camelopard. Hartford ordered out two youths to join Jiro there in his harassment of the footsoldiers from Regiment. "It is time we take up our positions," he told his band of by Allen Kim Lang dartsmen. "Let us go in hope." ther, stepped forward to pronounce a benediction upon the little company. "The Enlightened One, speaking at Rajagriha, spake, saying: 'Remember one thing, O beloved disciples, that hatred cannot be silenced by lies but by truth. " The irregulars, heads bowed, replied, "Namu Amida Butsu, Glory to the Amida Buddha! Hartford, though his training as an Axenite trooper had left him as untouched by religions as by microbes, joined the prayer, feeling that a degree of celestial interest in their stratagem would not be unwelcome. The camelopardists vaulted into their saddles, adjusted their legs in the bootlike gambadoes, and slapped the reins to head their giraffu toward the ravine where the endgame would be played. Hartford rode at the head of the band, Takeko beside him. The others were dispersed at wide interval, a precaution against the veeto-platform's swooping over the horizon to surprise them en route. As they left Yamamura, the women and children of the village were leaving from the other side, together with the men too old to go out with the guerrillas. Yamamura was being abandoned until the outcome of battle made itself known. The canyon that led up the mountain's groin had once been the deep-cut bed of a stream. Collapse of over-beetling rock had formed a vault over the stream, which was consequently underground. Soil had filtered into the rocks, and bamboo had taken root. In result the lower ravine was a green enfilade hardly wider than a hallway, the walls on either side rising squarely from its floor. Well within the pass, set into the left-hand wall as one rode down from Yamamura, was a niche very like the tokonoma or honored alcove of a Kansan home. In this alcove, some fifty feet from the bottom of the pass, was set the great bronze image of Buddha, the Daibutsu of Kansas. Further down, below the Daibutsuniche, the canyon became irregular. Along either side, some ten feet from the floor, were ledges marking the fracture planes along which ancient avalanches had calved. It was from these shelves that the Kansans hoped to ambush the men from First Regiment. The narrowness of the ravine, and the overhang of willow trees -- these growing in clefts of rock, fingering their roots down to the subterranean stream -- were enough, Hartford prayed, to prevent the veeto-platform's pilot from spotting the Kansans lying in wait with their blowguns. Hartford disposed his troops on the shelves, checkin g to see that each man had a good field of fire and adequate cover. He glanced at the sun, the Kansan timepiece. It was between six and eight in the evening, he judged, the Hour of the Clock. He pressed his ear to the radio-receiver. Short-range, the safety-suit radio picked up only occasional orders from Axenite officers and non-coms. Twice Hartford caught the name, "Lieutenant Felix." He smiled, feeling mixed emotions. Felix had been his old Platoon Sergeant, and they would face each other in an hour or so as enemies. Very likely the fifty troopers chasing Ito Juro and his fellows toward the canyon included men of the Terrible Third Platoon, his old command. Hartford checked to see his bitcher worked and waited the arrival of the message-blabrigars with fresh news. XI T HE first bird arrived a few moments before the radio began coming in clear. "Sakura" Hartford said, this being the prompt-word to which the blabrigar was trained to reply. "Fifty men, sir; fifty men, sir; on the way, sir; on the way, sir," the bird chanted into Hartford's ear. He let the bird rest on his shoulder; it would have to fly back to the scout who'd sent it soon, to tell him to join the rest of them at the ambush-point. The sun was low in the sky. H-hour was near. The signals began coming closer-together. "Saw one Stinker off your left flank, Miller... Left flankguard reporting, sir. That Gook took off due east. Blabrigar on his shoulder... Lieutenant Felix here. Anything on the right flank?... Nothing, sir... Keep moving, Lieutenant." This last voice was the colonel's. Hartford frowned. If Nasty Nef had come out in person, the game would have to be played fast and dirty. Hartford set his bitcher low. "Abunai yo !" he said to his guerrillas, sprawled out all along the ledge like figurines on a mantlepiece. "Be cautious. Shoot your dart and get behind something. From now on, be silent. The enemy is near." Takeko spoke: "You mean, Lee-chan, that our brothers draw near." The other Kansans smiled. Some saluted, a gesture they'd observed among the Axenites they'd been spying upon for the past few days. The first of the scouts came galloping up the gullet of the canyon. Without a sound he signaled his watching comrades, invisible above him. He made a circle with his hand, pointing up. That meant the Regiment's veeto-p latf orm was scouting ahead of the approaching Axenites. The first man slapped his giraffu to by Allen Kim Lang hasten it up the pass, past the Daibutsu. Two other scouts, the foxes urging on the hounds, came shouting into the canyon. Neither of them was Ito Jiro. As his name signified, Jiro was the youngest son of Ito-san, the knifemaker. He was the darling of the family. Where was he? Hartford worried. The radio, no longer masked by the rocks, was filled with information. Hartford heard the veeto-pilot reporting: "They're headed up the gulch past the big idol, sir," he said. "There's a village up there. That's where they're probably headed. What do you want me to do, sir?" The platform hovered over the canyon, unthe jagged, bamboo-and-pineprickly fissure. "Keep in touch, Sky-Eye," Nef ordered. "We're coming right up." "Felix here, sir," the lieutenant reported. "We've got one of the Gooks prisoner. He's just a kid. Doesn't seem to know a thing."  "Hold him till we get someone who talks Stinker," Nef said. They got Jiro, Hartford thought. Damn. T HE first of the troopers, an officer in the blue safety-suit, spearheaded the column. "Nothing in sight yet," Felix's voice reported. The officer signaled "Come on" with the sweep of his arm, and the first squad of Axenites, dispersed as skirmishers, formed themselves into a file to enter the canyon. The veeto-platform above kept the foliage pressed down with its jet of air, stirring dust that both improved concealment and threatened to trigger a sneeze from one of the am bushers. Hartford peered cautiously over the edge of the shelf. He'd set his forces far enough back in the canyon that the entire Axenite column would be encased. "Sir, this is Felix," the radio said. "Do you agree, sir, that I should place one squad in reserve till the rest get through the gully?" "Peel off one squad and stay with it, Felix," Nef said. Felix's voice again: "Sir, it was our Lieutenant Hartford that the Gooks got. I'd like to go in early." "Very well, Felix. Miller, hold your squad where it is. Disperse them well, and wait my order before bringing them into the ditch. Confirm." "Done and done, sir," Miller snapped. The first two dozen troopers were in the canyon now, half the Axenite force. Colonel Nef had shown the good sense to don an ordinary blue safety-suit; his scarlet command-suit would have made him a splendid target. Another squad entered, their Dardick-rifles held at the ready. This would have to be quick, Hartford thought, or he'd lose his entire corps at their first volley. He raised his hand, a signal visible only to Takeko. She cupped her hands around her mouth and whistled the call of the nightingale, "Ho-okekyo... kekyo !" Before the echoed notes had died, the darts had found their targets. The radio was a clutter of undisciplined Damn's, cries of "I've been hit!" One trooper, quicker than the rest, caught sight of a Kansan. He raised his rifle and purred out a stream of Dardick-pellets. Yoritomo, apprentice to the paper-maker, tumbled over the lip of the ledge, his blowpipe falling with him like a jackstraw. There was a babble on the radio. Nef overrode all other circuits to command : "At ease! Rake the ledges with sustained fire." The canyon was blasted with a confetti of metal and spalled rock as the troopers hosed the shelves with bullets. The angle made aiming impossible. But by luck and the intensity of the barrage another man, the carpenter's son, had toppled to his death. "SkyEye! Get your butt down here!" Nef bellowed. "Decontamination Team! Bring the vehicle to the mouth of the canyon. We've got men septic." He tongued-on his bitcher and bellowed at the troopers. "On the double, through the ditch." "Yuke!" Hartford shouted to the men far up the wall, in the niche that held the Daibutsu. "Go!" T HE sappers at the back of the giant bronze statue bent to their levers. The tons of metal scooted slowly forward, hit the fat-smeared edge of the shelf. As quietly as a man rocking forward in prayer, the Daibutsu dropped head-down into the ravine. It struck the bottom with the sound of a great gong, and rocked, unshattered, plugging the throat of the canyon, standing as a dam. The hands of the Enlightened One were held in the positions of Protection and of Giving; His face bore still a quiet smile. About the head of the image a fountain of water burst, squeezed up from the stream below. " Nainu Amida ButsuT Takeko said, cuddled against Hartford, staring down. "Keep down," he said. He lifted his suit-radio and flicked on the transmissionswitch. "This is Lee Hartford, late of the First Regiment," he announced. "The safetysuits of most of you have been breached. There is not room for more than three of you in the Decontamination Vehicle. You are not septic. I repeat: you have not been contaminated. Kansas is as safe for you as the Barracks, or Titan, or the M'Bwene planets, or in the cells at Luna. You do not need your safety-suits on Kanby Allen Kim Lang "Find that man and gun the traitor down," Net's voice demanded from the speaker on his suit. "I am coming out unarmed," Hartford radioed. "Fire the moment you see him," Nef said. One of the officers had his Dardickpistol drawn, his eyes traversing the canyon walls. "No, sir!" Felix's voice snapped from his bitcher. "You can't shoot the man till he's had a chance to speak." "Go to the rear at once, Private Felix," Nef bellowed. Felix pointed his handgun toward Nef. "No, sir," he replied. "Hartford was my C.O., and an honest man. I'll hear him before I see him killed. Or by my life, sir, I'll kill you after him."  "This is treason," Nef said. "Drop your pistol, sir, or I'll have to try to shoot it from your hand. Excuse me, sir," Felix said. Nef's gun dropped. "You all hear me?" Felix bitched. "Hear me out there, Miller?" There was a chorus of "Roger!" Felix went on: "I'm going to unclam my helmet, troopers. I'm going to take off my safety-suit. That's how much I trust Lee Hartford, troopers. The man who tries to stop Hartford better begin with me." Felix opened his helmet, removed it, and placed it on the rocks beside him. He went up to drink from the fountain that sparkled about the head of the Daibutsu, cupping his hands. "It's good water, men," he said. "Come on down, Hartford," he shouted through the clear night air. L EE Hartford twisted over the edge of the shelf, held himself by his finger-tips, and dropped. He stood before his old comrades in arms dressed as a country Kansan. His head bore only a stubble of hair, and a scarlet blabrigar came down to settle familiarly on his shoulder. "I caused your suits to be breached for good reason," he said, speaking into the bitcher he'd recovered from his safety-suit. "If any of you has a sore backside because of the darts my men sent at you, please accept my a p o I o g i e s." Two more Axenites removed their helmets, and stood grinning uncertainly at Hartford. "I have lived on Kansas for two weeks, living like a native. I've breathed Kansan air, eaten their wonderful food and even kissed one of their girls." There was a murmur of laughter. "I'm as healthy as ever I was inside the Barracks," Hartford said. "And I'm a good deal happier." There was louder laughter among the Axenites, and more helmets opened. Hartford turned to look behind him. Takeko was hanging by her fingertips off the shelf, trying to work up the courage to drop. He went over to stand below her. "Fall to me, darling' he said. "Fall into my arms.' "I hear, shujin , and obey," Takeko squeaked, and dropped. When Hartford released Takeko and turned to face the troopers, every helmet but Nef's was opened. Half a dozen of the men had already stripped to their Class B's. They had their faces tilted into the wind that was sweeping up the gullet of the canyon, smelling for the first time in their lives the scents of open nature, the spice of green life in the air. They were seeing the Kansas sky; a mosaic of stars, unfiltered by he 'me ts. They were breathing air not humid with their own perspiration. Holding Takeko's hand in his, Hartford walked up to Felix. "You saved the day, old buddy," he said. There was the cough of a tapoed-off Dardick-round. Felix fell. Colonel Nef, his pistol held at the hip, tilted it toward Hartford. He looked startled for a moment, then dropped the pistol. In his wrist were three blowgundarts. Mustered across his chest were half a dozen more. Hartford waved at the Kansans on the ledge. " Arigato!" he shouted, and told them to come down. Two men had died in the engagement : Yoritomo the papermaker and Sannosvke the carpenter's son. Felix's thighbone had been broken by Nef's shot; and Colonel Nef's right wrist would require attention. A medical officer had been sent for from the Barracks to set Felix's leg. The dead men were carried on litters up to the shelves and around the fallen Daibutsu to the village. Hartford splinted his friend's broken leg. "What now, Hartford?" Felix asked. "I suggest that you all become guests in Yamamura." "Done and done," Felix said. Takeko came up to lay a bunch of flowers on his chest. "They smell sweet," she said. "Courage such as yours smells sweet in the nostrils of heaven." "Thank you, Ma'am," Felix said. He turned his head to follow the girl as she took a second handful of flowers to place it beside the fountain that jetted about the headstanding Daibutsu. "I can see where this will be a popular planet to do duty on, Lieutenant," he said. "What you discovered here will pretty well wipe out the Brotherhood." I "You're right," Hartford said. "The Brotherhood is doomed." They watched as Takeko knelt before the inverted image. "Namu. Amida Butsu ," she said. "All men are the same in the sight of Amida, the Lord of Boundless Light." "Maybe I'm wrong, Lieutenant," Felix said. "Maybe the Brotherhood just got started." end by Allen Kim Lang IF  Feature I N the great gray Groff Conklin's introduction to my Funk  Wagnalls collection A Way Home , he mentions my "beautiful blackbanged wife." This remarkable lady, while operating a meticulous household and beautifully raising four kids, two fish and a dog, writes haiku, does Japanese calligraphy and, having trimmed and suppled herself at ballet, paints in oils. Needing therefore some spare time activity, she became a den mother, and every week, for an hour, my placid studio becomes a cacophonous cave and we are all up to here in Cub Scouts. Now a Cub Scout den in a spread-out community like ours calls for a surprising degree of synchronized logistics. (Anybody who forgets the refreshments will never do it again.) The boys arrive from different directions and different schools and are picked up by volunteer distaff-type chauffeurs with worries of their own ; so above all, there has to be timing. It happened one day recently that at some point during the rituals, the clock stopped. The only Cub with a wristwatch that was running had both of its hands off and skating around under the crystal. There came a great wail of temporal disorientation, to which I responded by invading the sanctum, switching on my all-wave radio, tuning it to # megacycles and floodin g the room with a pure concert A, which was punctuated by a series of sharp clicks at one-second intervals. An awed and attentive silence fell, and in a moment a man's voice remarked : "National Bureau of tone returns, the time will be...five five P.M., Eastern Standard Time." The tone returned and the voice said, "Five five P.M." The clock was set, order restored, and we returned, they to their B-P inspirationals, I to my babysitting. Aside from a warm feeling of having saved the day, I did not realize that I had made a major magic until the phone began to ring that evening, and one after another of the participants andor their parents began calling to find out just what was that radio station I had evoked. Well, friends and associates for at least # years now, and I was happy to say so. I thought I knew a good deal about its many functions and uses, and it occurred to me that you might like to know something about it too. So I wrote to the station and asked for some material. greatest courtesy, they sent it Brother! It was like the discovery after expert years of pulling pigtails that there's much more you can do with girls. I'm now a good deal more astonished and imScouts of Den #, Pack #. As you may know, I jangle a bit of guitar, and it's nice to have a readily available concert A for tuning up the air # hours a day, it doesn't matter how late the party gets. It's also nice to be able to find out what time it is without having to listen to the yowling of some catamount backed up by a piano imitating a loose skid-chain, followed by two commercials. I was aware on a number of different frequencies and is kept very accurately on them, so that if you like to have your tuning dial telling the truth, you can signal. Or say someone wants to sell you a three or fourband receiver, and you want to know if the tuning is accurate on all of them, and not tell you about that right now and with no argument. I knew also, or could destandard for manufacturers of clocks and watches, of musical instruments, of electronic components like signal generators and vacuum tube voltmeters and the like, as well as radio receivers. And of course radio hams and Signal Corpsmen and ship-to-shore telephone maintenance personnel would find a use for such a standard. And symphony orby Theodore Sturgeon chestras. And radio-TV networks, who must synchronize their equipment across three, or five, or eight time zones. And Western Union's radiorelay systems. And ships and planes, whose navigators taking star or sun-shots must have accurate time measurement in order to calculate their positions. The more you think of it, the more uses you can dream up for such a service, and a lot of them are above and beyond mere convenience. When I began wondering waiting for their reply to my query (which wasn't long: they were as prompt as they were helpful) I began listening a little more attentively to it. I noticed that part of the time they broadcast another, higher note than the A-#, that sometimes they kept the one-second tick but dropped the audio tone altogether, that occasionally the tick would be tick-tick instead, that at the time of the voice announcement the audio tone would do a dit-dah bit in Morse code, that once in a while there would be a minute or so of a sound like a faulty electric shaver (my five-year-old says it sounds like jingle-bells, and in a way she's right) and that every now and then the whole shebang goes off the air for a few minutes. Then came the mailing from a heck of a job boiling it down into the available space. How so very much can be packed into a radio program consisting of some toots and a tick simply stretches belief. In a way it reminds me of a remarkable biologist called Noel Monkman, who once organized an expedition to investigate the crater of an extinct volcano, traveled and climbed for days to get there, had himself lowered a hundred-odd feet down into the hole and found nothing there but scummy water. He yelled up for his companions to dump out and wash a thermos flash and lower it to him. He filled it and corked it, and with less than a pint of smelly liquid to show for his trouble, he wrote a book and made a full-length movie from his observations of tick offer just that sort of marvelous microcosm. The best way to get an overall idea of how much information is packed into this slender hiccuping thread of sound is to see what they started with and what they added to it. As you read, pay special attention to the remarks on accuracy, because they build up to one of the darnedest deadpan punchlines I have yet encountered. I N March #, the National Bureau of Standards began transmitting, for use by the public, radio signals of definite announced frequency, to help with the standardization of meters and radio gear. The Washington, D.C. The signals were accurate in frequency to about # parts in #, and were transmitted for a while each month in the range # to # kc. In January #I a new transmitter was set up at College Park, Md., and an extended service was begun, featuring a crystal-controlled broadcast on # kc which was acThe move to Beltsville, Md., came in #, and there day. The new transmitter had accuracy of one part in #. In # a high-power transmitter was installed, and in # they added frequencies of # and # megacycles. In # a modulation frequency of one kc was added, and in # they began broadcasting the standard musical pitch, A#, which they sent out on # megacycles. In July '# came the ticks, or seconds-pulses. In # the station went on a #-hour schedule, and accuracy was increased to one part whole thing burned down. That was on November #, was back on the air, with reduced service, but anyway, back on the air, with one kilowatt of power on # kc. By March #I the "ticks" and the musical A# were back, and in December of the same year the # kilocycle carrier was restored at one kilowatt. The station was moved to a new site in Beltsville in #, with high power operation on #, # and # me. On January #, #, after inclusion of broadcasts on #, #, and # me, radio propagation disturbance warning notices were added. And now we can pause and look at what they had achieved, because it was at this point that they served the public with the six main functions which they carry out to this day. First of all, there were the six broadcast frequency standards mentioned above; when you calibrated your equipment to these, you knew you were right. Then there was the time, and the time intervals; you could count on there being just about exactly one second between those ticks. Then there was the concert A. This was # cycles per second and not #-point-any-number-ofnines. They were also sending (I forgot to mention) a #cycle audio note, for an intermediate frequency check. They were actually announcing the time in Morse, as well as marking it, and finally, there were these radio propagation notices. Here's the way these work. The Bureau of Standards has a propagation laboratory at Ft. Belvoir, Va., and prepares short-term forecasts on the broadcasting conditions currently existing on North Atby Theodore Sturgeon lantic radio paths, such as Washington to London or New York to Berlin. These forecasts are based on information secured from a worldwide network of geophysical and solar observations, balloon soundings, reports on shortwave reception and the like, and are issued four times a tone they happen to be broadcasting at the time, gives this material in Morse code. It is scheduled for # and # minutes past each hour; that is to say, the forecasts are corrected four times a day and sent out twice each hour. The code takes the form of a letter and a digit. "W" means "disturbed" and is used with numbers I to #, which signify degrees of mush from "useless" to "poor-to-fair". "U" is "unsettled" and is used with the numeral #. "N" means "normal" and is followed by numerals # to #, signifying conditions varying from fairto-good all the way up to excellent. This kind of information, of course, is vital for radio-telephony, s h o r t-wave links and all such traffic, and enables overseas operators to decide when to hold and when to send transmissions. And in this letter-and-number system is even more information; for if conditions are expected to worsen, the number won't belong to the letter; that is, "N#" means "It's okay now but it's going to get foggy pretty quick." And "U-#" would mean "Not so hot just now, but it's clearing up." S O back to our history. In November # the Pacific began to get the same kind of service via the sister station And in January #, the #cycle audio note was discontinued and a #-cycle note substituted to alternate with the A#. Why #? So that power-plants half around the world could have a really accurate check of the #-cycle alternation of their output -- that good old # cycles that drives your four-dollar electric clock and keeps it to an accuracy almost undreamed of in the days of springs and pendulums and balancewheels. # cycles is a useful middle-frequency note in itself, and it's a multiple of your house-current. During # (you've been watching this?) the broadcasts were refined from one part in bility of the frequencies broadcast was increased to about (that "about" is straight from the material BuStandards sent me) one part in a Also in # a change was made in the manner of sending tones. The audio was reduced from four to three minutes of each five, and in addition a silent period was introremoved from the air altogether for four minutes, beginning at # minutes, # seconds after each hour. I haven't been able to ascertain just why, but it's easy to imagine certain electronic watch-dog or control equipment which might be precisely turned off and on or modulated by the removal and return of these signals. The way the time announcements are made, and their anatomy, are particularly fascinating. The first thing you the tick -- tick -- oi the seconds pulse. Listen very carefully and you'll notice that the last second of each minute has no tick; it's omitted. The first second of the next minute is marked by two ticks a tenth of a second apart; the first of these marks the beginning of the second. And in a moment you'll notice that the tone is not, as it first seemed, continuous, with the "tick" overlaying it. The tone actually stops to admit the tick, or pulse, for all of one one-hundredth of a second. And the tick isn't a tick at all! It's a tiny piece of a #-cycle note, to be exact, five cycles. This takes (natch) five thousandths of a second. Then there's a Jong pause of two and a half hundredths of a second, and the audio tone resumes. If you think that's a lot to be going on within a tick of time, stick around: there's lots more that can be packed in. As quoted in the Cub Scout anecdote, the voice announcement is made twice during the last ten seconds of each fiveminute period. You will also hear the audio tone performing some Morse. This is also the time, but while the voice gives Eastern Standard time, the Morse gives Universal Time (UT) the reference of which is the zero meridian. This affords scientists and technologists and saucerwatchers a chance to make simultaneous measurements thousands of miles apart without calculating time zones. A ND now we come to the International Geophysical Year, and a chance to shovel some more information into began in #, and something called International World Day Service was instituted. ested parties that some significant geophysical event is taking place -- a big magnetic storm, an outstanding auroral display, or a significant increase in cosmic ray activity. The alert is broadcast first by you like to arrange to meet your girl at seventeen-fourteen and four tenths?) The code for an alert, in slow the event turns out to be of really great importance, so that observers and experimenters should really get to by Theodore Sturgeon work on it, a Special World Interval is declared. The code three extra-long dashes. And now we come to #, sworn off all the crude stuff and decided to really hone it fine. First of all they brought the stability to one part in # # , which was called one part in kid. Then they retarded (as of Jan. #, #) the whole schedule by # microseconds, to bring it into line with other standardized frequency broadcasting stations throughout the world. Then, without dropping anything, they grafted on a time signal which will, if you like, and if you know how to grab it, inform you what second of what minute of what hour of what day of the year you are listening to. It will do this six hundred times every hour. And this is the "jingle bells" my youngster mentioned. It occurs for a solid minute immediately following the cessation of the audio tone, ten times during the hour. The information is in a binary code, and transmits # "bits" within # pulses within I second. In binary numbers, which you will recall are all l's and #'s, it gives first the number of the second, then what minute we're in, then the number of the hour (UT), then the number (total) of the day since the year began. The transmission also contains the binary technicalities of #-per-second index markers and a one-persecond reference marker. The whole message is made of thin slices of a #-cycle tone. The # pulse is # cycles of the tone, and the I pulse is # cycles of the tone. This affords # bits in a second, and, take my word for it as I take BuStandard's, there are four bits left over. They are trying to figure out what to do with these. Maybe they'll add the number of the year (like #) or perhaps the station identification. Or maybe some micromadison-avenue minibrain will figure out how as commercial spots. And now we come to BuStandard's one-word punchline -- the end of one of the reports they sent me about establishing frequency standards accurate to about # parts in #, and now stabilize "Development work is underway to increase (#) the effectiveness of the seconds pulse, (#) power in the time pulses, (#) area served by standard frequency broadI wish to acknowledge the kindness and courtesy granted me in the preparation of this article by Mr. A. H. Morgan, Chief of the Radio Standards Service, and Mr. James F. Brockman of the Radio Standards Laboratory, U.S. Dept, of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, Boulder, Colorado. IF  Short Story It was dirty work, but it would make him a man. And kids had a right to grow up -- some of them! down from the head of the stairs. The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out. The old man said, "He'll be okay. Let him alone." "But he won't eat. Just lies there all the time." "Hell," the old man said. "Sixteen's a bad time. School over, waiting for the draft and all. He's in between. It's rough." Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly. "We got to let him go, Eva. It's a dangerous time. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. You read the books." "But he's unhappy." "Are we specialists? That's the Youth Board's headache, ain't it? What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Now get dressed or we'll be late." Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say. Blabblab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo. How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One thing -- when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in teeveeland. But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion. So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone waiting for the breakout call from HQ. "Well, dear, if you say so," Mother said, with the old resigned sigh that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly. They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.  "Relax," Wayne said. "You're not going anywhere tonight." "What, son?" his old man said uneasily. "Sure we are. We're going to the movies." He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was silent. "Okay, go," Wayne said. "If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family boltbucket." "But we promised the Clemons, dear," his mother said. "Hell," Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. "I just got my draft call." He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. "Oh, my dear boy," Mother cried out. "So gimme the keys," Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes. "Do be careful, dear," his mother said. She ran toward him as he laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed the glaring wonders of escape. H E burned off some rubber finding a slot in the parklot. He strode under a sign reading Public Youth Center No. # and walked casually to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork. "Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?" Wayne grinned down. "Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey." "Well," the sergeant said. "How tough we are this evening. You have a pass, killer?" "Wayne Seton. Draft call." "Oh." The sergeant checked his name off a roster and nodded. He wrote on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. "Go to the Armory and check out whatever your lusting little heart desires. Then report to Captain Jack, room #." "Thanks, s a r g e dear," Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory. A tired fat corporal with a naked head blinked up at tall Wayne. Finally he said, "So make up your mind, bud. Think you're the only kid breaking out tonight?" "Hold your teeth, pop," Wayne said, coolly and slowly lighting a cigarette. "I've decided." The corporal's little eyes studied Wayne with malicious amusement. "Take it from a vet, bud. Sooner you go the better. It's a big city and you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes are clever hellcats in a dark alley." "You must be a genius," Wayne said. "A corporal with no hair and still a counterboy. I'm impressed. I'm all ears, Dad." The corporal sighed wearily. "You can get that balloon head ventilated, bud, and good." Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the shelves and racks of weapons. "I'll remember that crack when I get my commission." He blew smoke in the corporal's face. "Bring me a Smith and Wesson .#, shoulder holster with springclip. And throw in a Skelly switchblade for kicks -- the six-inch disguised job with the double springs." The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger, while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and scary. He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, by Bryce Walton "Good luck, tiger." Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain Jack crossed blackbooted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had a head shaped like a grinning bear. Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea among bowling balls. Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed seabags. "Wayne Seton," said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something in a bug collection. "Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you? Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?" "Yes, sir," Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos. His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him, ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy, what was he doing holding down a desk? "Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly collection." The cane darted up. A blade snicked from the end and stopped an inch from Wayne's nose. He jerked up a shaky hand involuntarily and clamped a knuckle-ridged gag to his gasping mouth. Captain Jack chuckled. "All right, superboy." He handed Wayne his passcard. "Curfew's off, punk, for # hours. You got # hours to make out." "Yes, sir." "Your beast is primed and waiting at the Four Aces Club on the West Side. Know where that is, punk?" "No, sir, but I'll find it fast." "Sure you will, punk," smiled Captain Jack. "She'll be wearing yellow slacks and a red shirt. Black hair, a cute trick. She's with a hefty psycho who eats punks for breakfast. He's butchered five people. They're both on top of the Undesirable list, Seton. They got to go and they're your key to the stars." "Yes, sir," Wayne said. "So run along and make out, punk," grinned Captain Jack. A copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river. Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's quivering nose. The cop shivered and stepped back and waved him on. The Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away. The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind. He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale, secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells. Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with the shadows of mysterious promise. He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling. He parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass filtering through windows painted black. He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub balanced on one end. The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and doom. "I gotta hide, kid. They're on me." Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled. The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons. "Help me, kid." He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed past Wayne and he felt the enginehot fumes against his legs. Tires squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and crouched as he began stalking the old rummy. "This is him! This is him all right," the teener yelled, and one hand came up swinging a baseball bat. A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled. The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up. Waynes breath quickened by Bryce Walton as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything. Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless, until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot lightbulb. He held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep. The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled up with stick arms over his rheumy face. The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling glass. "Go, man!" The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like bright wind-blown sparks. Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage. He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision...and pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires. H E walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table. He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift. The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm. She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive. Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse heavy. "What's yours, teener?" the slug-faced waiter asked. "Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo," Wayne said, and flashed his pass card. "Sure, teener." Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass. Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious cat's. Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little mouse. The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in the pay of the state. "What else, teener?" "One thing. Fade." "Sure, teener," the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup. Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his veins, became hot wire twisting in his head. He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good. "Okay, you creep," Wayne said. He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table crashed. Wayne's .# dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was out the door. Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet. He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the life-or-death animation of a wild deer. Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots. Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling, sliding down a brick shute. He gained. He moved up. by Bryce Walton His labored breath pumped more fire. And her scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood. S HE quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with terror. "You, baby," Wayne gasped. "I gotcha." She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall, her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked. He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling plaster, a whimpering whine. "No use running," Wayne said. "Go loose. Give, baby. Give now." She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her, feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's shadow floated ahead. He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the thirdfloor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the jagged skylight. Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening to his creeping, implacable footfalls. Then he yelled and slammed open the door. Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior, shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the moon-streaming skylight. She crouched in the corner panting. He took his time moving in. He snickered as he flashed the switchblade and circled it like a serpent's tongue. He watched what was left of her nerves go to pieces like rotten cloth. "Do it quick, hunter," she whispered. "Please do it quick." "What's that, baby?" "I'm tired running. Kill me first. Beat me after. They won't know the difference." "I'm gonna bruise and beat you," he said. "Kill me first," she begged. "I don't want -- " She began to cry. She cried right up in his face, her wide eyes unblinking, and her mouth open. "You got bad blood, baby," he snarled. He laughed but it didn't sound like him and something was wrong with his belly. It was knotting up. by Bryce Walton "BacL I know! So get it over with, please. Hurry, hurry." She was small and white and quivering. She moaned but kept staring up at Jiim. He ripped off his rivetstudded belt and swung once, then groaned and shuffled away from her. He kept backing toward the door. She crawled after him, begging and clutching with both arms as she wriggled forward on her knees. "Don't run. Please. Kill me! It'll be someone else if you don't. Oh, God, I'm so tired waiting and running!" "I can't," he said, and sickness soured in his throat. "Please." "I can't, I can't!" He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs. the readjustment staff at the Youth Center, studied Wayne with abstract interest. "You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?" "Yes, sir." "But you couldn't execute them?" "No, sir." "They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?" "Yes, sir." "The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can be done for them? That they have to be executed?" "I know." "Too bad," the doctor said. "We all have aggressive impulses, primitive needs that must be expressed early, purged. There's murder in all of us, Seton. The impulse shouldn't be denied or suppressed, but educated. The state used to kill them. Isn't it better all around, Seton, for us to do it, as part of growing up? What was the matter, Seton?" "I -- felt sorry for her." "Is that all you can say about it?" "Yes, sir." The doctor pressed a buzzer. Two men in white coats entered. "You should have got it out of your system, Seton, but now it's still in there. I can't turn you out and have it erupt later -- and maybe shed clean innocent blood, can I?" "No, sir," Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. "I'm sorry I punked out." "Give him the treatment," the doctor said wearily. "And send him back to his mother." Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his pokerplaying pals. They had all punked out. IF  Novelette Rumor said devils lived in the cave. The truth was even more appalling! ly in the Andean air, and still dazed at the urgency with which he had been whisked southward (via jet bomber), Dr. Luis Craig walked across packed earth toward a powerful-looking helicopter which, he had just been told, was to take him on the last leg of his trip. He listened tiredly to the unctuous words of his escort, a Lieutenant Rabar who wore the uniform of this Latin American nation's Air Force and who was to fly the helicopter. Shouts erupted behind them, at the edge of the field. Something snarled at his left ear. The sound was familiar, though not recently so : the crack of a rifle. He hit the dirt. Another bullet came searching, but now the shouts got themselves organized into crisp Spanish. Sidearms and at least two automatic weapons blatted. There were no more rifle shots. Cautiously, he raised his head to look at the knot of uniformed men where the sniper had been. Rabar stepped forward, offering a hand. "Are you all right, Doctor?" Craig ignored the hand and got up without help. "Quite, thank you." He had disliked Rabar from the moment of introduction ; and now it was in his mind that Rabar had stepped carefully away from him before the first bullet came. As casually as he could, he walked to the aluminum ladder hung upon the helicopter's side and hauled himself up. He stopped in the hatch, dignity forgotten, startled at the disparity of the three men already in the ship. in sat a gaunt scarecrow of a man in a black priest's hassock. An oxygen mask dangled on his thin chest, suggesting a bloated crucifix. The long, swarthy face was pockmarked, dour and without animation at the moment, except for fierce black eyes that burned steadily into Craig's own. Craig thought of a condor, perched near some nearly r cady meal. He was immediately ashamed of the thought. Forward of the priest sat a brown Indian. His face mirrored dignified resignation to being carried in this hellish contraption to horrible death, or worse. Occupying the only seat on the hatch side was a tautly uniformed man who eyed Craig coldly. The priest spoke. His voice was deep and gently strong, caressing the Spanish syllables like a great soft bell. "We are abject, Doctor. We had tried very hard... but there are fanatics." "Eh?" said Craig. "Oh. Well, I am unhurt, as you can  see. "For which, thanks to the Almighty. Our humblest apologies. You speak Spanish exceptionally well, Doctor." Wondering if there were a question behind the compliment, Craig said, "My mother was Mexican." He did not think it necessary to add that he'd grown up near the border, and had once spent two years as an exchange Professor of Physics at the Mexican university. The priest nodded once. "I see. It was thoughtful of your government to choose you. And more than kind of you to come. But, forgive me; the shooting has made me forget my manners. This -- " indicating the uniformed man -- "is General Noriega." He laid a hand on the shoulder of the Indian. "And this one prefers to answer to the name Dientes." Craig looked at the brown face with interest. Archeology was one of his hobbies, and in this part of the world... 'Dientes' was Spanish for 'teeth,' he mused. Abruptly, under his gaze, the immobile face split into a wide nervous smile revealing the source of the nickname. They were large, even and very white. "And I," the priest was saying, "am called Father Brulieres. Won't you seat yourself?" Craig tensed in surprise. The name Brulieres had been very much in the news of late. A priest by that name had led the movement which put the present government in power -- and was still reputedly, the man who actually ran it. Craig realized he was still perched awkwardly halfway into the cabin. Mumbling something, he squeezed his bulky mountain gear through the hatch and took the empty seat beside the priest. hatch behind him, and went forward to the pilot's seat. He glanced around at his passengers. It seemed to Craig that he was more interested in faces than in the condition of seat belts. Rabar worked at switches and buttons. Engines coughed, then roared. From overhead came the rising "whoosh" of the vanes. The craft shivered and lifted. They went on oxygen at once, and Craig, under the eyes of the other passengers, was glad to put the breather over at least part of his face. Imitating the others he pulled down the earflaps of his helmet. It seemed to have builtin radio, as he could hear Rabar advising them to strap in. A moment later, clearing his throat, he discovered that his breather contained a mike. He was surprised at such advanced electronics here. They were quickly closed in by mighty cliffs. Below them, a river tumbled wildly. Where it could find root-holds, fantastic greenery burgeoned, but it did little to disguise the menacing rock. The cabin's plastic windows gave all too clear a view. Turning from the window beside him, Craig found his eyes wandering to the insignia pinned to the priest's hassock. Of elegantly wrought gold, it was the same emblem he'd noticed on buildings, vehicles and other government property here. It looked like a set of football goalposts with the uprights moved in close together, leaving the crossbar extending to the sides. The priest caught his look and gave him what might be intended for a smile. "You wonder about our emblem? It represents the Church and State standing -- what is the expression in your own language? -- 'four-square' together." "Oh." Craig realized that the symbol was simply a cross with two posts instead of onS. He felt a little annoyed. His own government had told him enough to make him eager to come on this job, but they'd also warned him emphatically not to discuss politics or religion. He supposed the United States needed friends wherever they could be found, but a dictatorship wasn't his notion of a good alternative to Bolshevism. He realized that the warning had point. He didn't know how ruthless these people might be, but the shooting back at the airfield hadn't been any game of marbles. For that matter, the whole counby C. C. MacApp try, or what he'd seen of it, had an armed-camp air. He decided the thing to do was to concentrate on the scientific reason for his visit, and now was as good a time to start as any. He leaned toward Brulieres, then realized that wasn't necessary. "Er -- are you at liberty to tell me anything about the explosion?" Brulieres eyed him for a moment, and again there vas the hint of a smile. "We could hardly be secretive with you, Doctor. You are the expert. How much were you told?" "Just that there'd been a nuclear explosion of unknown origin. They said there was something spectacular about it." "Spectacular? Si! Your government was gracious enough to accept our request for technical help without demanding details. Security is very difficult, as you comprehend." Brulieres looked absent for a moment. "The explosion occurred at a spot famous in pre-Christian legends, which is why friend Dientes accompanies us. He is considered experto " The intense eyes turned upon the Indian, with a hint of mischief. "Not that he fails to be a good Christian as well." The Indian crossed himself nervously. "The explosion," Brulieres went on, "seems to have uncovered some very ancient tunnels. We wish to explore them, but we felt we needed a nuclear physicist along. Especially since there appears the possibility that the explosion originated from the tunnels." Craig heard Noriega clear his throat. Brulieres glanced at Noriega. "It has also been suggested," the priest said, "that the uncovering of the tunnels is coincidental, and that the explosion was of foreign origin." Craig thought that over, and was annoyed. "That does not seem likely," he said, a little stiffly. "Nobody is tossing live warheads around." Noriega spoke for the first time. His voice was crisp and rather high. "You can perhaps speak for your own nation, Doctor Craig; but others too possess missiles." Brulieres interposed, "You no doubt know, Doctor, that a communist putsch very nearly took over this country. The present government has been compelled to very strict measures against a further attempt. Therefore we are not popular with the communist nations." Craig waved a hand impatiently. "Yes, I know that, but..." He realized he was being careless. "I only wish to approach my investigation with an open mind. You say the tunnels were ancient? Incan, perhaps?" Brulieres shook his head slowly. "They were hardly capable of anything on this scale. One cannot speak so surely of those who preceded the Incas in this place." Craig pondered, and felt his pulse move faster. "How much have you learned so far?" "What can be seen from the air. We will be the first to land, if you decide it is safe." II yon, and its upper ramparts began to display patches of snow. Ahead loomed solid whiteness. They strained upward and emerged over a snowfield glaring white in the sun, its jagged peaks casting crisp blue shadows. The copter's own shadow danced along beneath them like a crazy gnat. They aimed for a cluster of five or six peaks dominating everything else. D i e n t e s, twisting nervously in his seat, mumbled something about "puesto de los demo ni os ." They flew between two of the peaks and were in a basin formed by the roughly circular cluster. Zero ground of the explosion was as obvious as an ugly dark blotch on white cloth. Snow had been melted away from an oblong area on the inner slope of one peak, leaving naked rock. Craig stared at what lay revealed. A plateau was carved out of the mountainside, so flat and so precisely oval that there wasn't an instant's doubt that it was artificial. The uphill wall was vertical, following exactly the curve of the ellipse. The wall was in shadow, but Craig could make out the five black tunnel mouths, all of a shape and evenly spaced. He let out his breath in a grunt as he remembered that this was a blast area and that they were getting close. Hastily, he unhooded one of the instruments, his fingers awkward with excitement. He watched the dial. No serious radiation yet. Rabar looked at him, and he nodded his head to indicate they could go closer. The radiation increased a little but was still mild. He pondered. The blast had been very clean, and of a low order, melting the snow without even scarring the rock. Apparently it had occurred not far above the surface and over the center of the plateau. He didn't know of any existing warheads that fit the explosion, nor could he believe that either intent or coincidence had placed the blast so exact yThe copter was hovering now, the other passengers watching him silently. He met Rabar's eyes, and glanced away, uncomfortable. If the priest's eyes reminded him of a vulture's, then Rabar's made him think of a wolf's. They had an odd yellowish tinge, and were at one time alert and devoid of expression. Craig couldn't know where the man fit into things, but he didn't by C. C. MacApp ring true as a simple pilot. Craig needed no diagrams drawn for him, so far as his own position went. In the first place, the opposition might assassinate him simply to embarrass the government. On the other hand, if he seemed to stand in the way of Noriega's project of making political capital of the explosion, and if Noriega represented a strong faction in the government, that faction might think it worth while to let something happen to him and blame it on the communists. But the hottest potato of all would be whatever he learned at the spot of the explosion. He could imagine all sorts of fabulous things. So would others, and some of them would go to considerable lengths to know. A N instrument, dangled at the end of a line, showed no bad radiation, so Craig said they could land. When he stood on the plateau the tunnel mouths seemed like converging black stares. Nevertheless he itched to explore. Impatiently, he led the unloading and stacking of his equipment. When that was done the group stood for a minute, evidently all feeling the awe Craig did. Dientes was first to break the silence, muttering something under his breath. Brulieres fixed the Indian with a look that was not entirely severe. "Christian prayers, hi jo, if you please." He turned to Craig. "What can be learned where we stand?" "I should be able to determine the type of explosion. I will have to take rock samples, and set up some apparatus." "How long will that require?" "Less than an hour, with luck." Brulieres was thoughtful for a while. "In that case, I believe we shall begin reconnoitering the tunnels while you work. But first, let us hear from our expert in demonology." Dientes squirmed guiltily in his mountain clothing. "I know only what the old tales say, Padre." "Tell us, if you please. We will decide later whether you have been guilty of paganis mo ." "Si, Padre. This place is the home of the Fire Devils. There is no question of the fact. It is precisely as described when I was a small boy sitting at the feet of los viejos ." "Well, then. What manner of devils were they?" "Creatures of fire, Padre, such that the eye could not behold without being blinded. Brighter than the sun." "Did they make war upon your people?" "Those who approached this place were punished with spears of fire. It is told that in ancient times, they were often seen flying through the sky, trailing long tails of white feathers. Sometimes they visited the villages, demanding strange things and frightening the people." "Do the stories mention these tunnels ?" "No, Padre. The Fire Devils lived beneath the snow. They were seen to vanish into it." "Without melting it?" "They could turn off their fire, perhaps. In any event, Padre, who knows what is possible with demons?" iC T know that you need and-will receive many hours of strict Christian instruction. How is it that men returned to tell of these things if the devils pursued them with spears of fire?" "Some escaped." "Is it definitely told of individuals who were killed?" Dientes looked thoughtful, and . disappointed. "I do not recall the names of any who were slain." "Bah. Why have there been no reports in recent years?" Dientes shrugged. "Quien sake? Perhaps the arrival of the true religion has driven away the devils." "Perhaps," said Brulieres, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly. He turned toward the tunnels. "I think, General, that I will ask you and the lieutenant to explore a little way into one of the tunnels. Come out at once if you see anything that might be dangerous." Craig opened his mouth to protest, but held back the words. He did ache to get into the tunnels, but he wasn't a free agent here. He watched as the two uniformed men disappeared into the middle tunnch Their flashlights were quickly lost as they rounded some turn in the tunnel. Brulieres said to Dientes, "The doctor and I must take some samples of the rock. Will you be good enough to remain here and guard the helicopter?" He laid his hand on the Indian's shoulder. "I see that you are not comfortable in your helmet. You may remove it if you wish. We will call to you if we need you." Craig realized Brulieres wanted to talk to him alone. He went with the priest. The Indian squatted, apparently quite comfortable without his oxygen. "He is used to high altitudes," Brulieres remarked. "You or I could hardly remain conscious here. I wished to talk to you, Doctor." "About what, Padre?" Craig felt a little awkward with the title. "About certain things in our country of which you do not approve." Craig hesitated. "I... am here on a scientific mission." "Nevertheless, you have ideas in the field of politics? I hope we can be frank with each other." "Well... I have no intention of being critical. As you know, we -- that is, in the by C. C. MacApp United States the Church is separate from the government:" The corners of Brulieres' mouth quirked. "What you mean, perhaps, is that you do not understand how the Church can support a totalitarian government. Oh, do not protest; the facts are obvious. We have been called worse names than 'totalitarian You do not think it right that the Church should take up actual arms." "I -- yes. Since you put it into words. We have a different concept of religion.' , T HE priest nodded slowly. "Si. Once I visited your land. In a way, I envied the priests there. Here, we have had more to contend with than the christening of fat babies and listening to trifling sins of appetite. We are in the front line of battle." Craig said stiffly, "Do you mean a spiritual battle, or an ideological one?" This time Brulieres nearly smiled. "Are you so certain, then, that they are not the same battle?" Damn it, thought Craig, I know better than to argue with a priest. He did not answer for a minute. Brulieres said gently, "Please forgive me if I am too direct. You do not believe that Evil is a real force?" Craig could not meet the penetrating eyes. The old doubt edged into his mind: what if he's right and I am wrong? What if there is a personal God? He pushed the thought away, telling himself as he always did that it was just the exposure he'd suffered before he was old enough to think for himself. He said, "I'm a scientist, Padre." "But not, unless I misjudge you, an atheist?" "I call myself an agnostic, if you must classify me. I recognize the possibility of some force behind life and mind. I do not believe in a God who is a man with a beard. Nor do I believe in a Devil with hooves and horns." Brulieres nodded again, "We are not so far apart as you may suppose, Doctor. Myself, I have always thought that one who claimed perfect faith without the trace of a doubt, was either an idiot or a liar. God surely has his reasons for not removing all doubt. In any case I wish to make my position clear to you. It was not happily that I took up what weapons were at hand. Had I the choice, I would choose quite differently." He eyed Craig directly for a moment. "The battle is very real and very clear to me, Doctor. I have done what I must. I hope you will believe that." Craig's skeptical mind told him that this was just a play for a good press when Craig got home. His emotions though, by C. C. MacApp wouldn't go along. They cried out that he was looking upon sincerity. Ill T HE first tests confirmed what Craig had already presumed ; that the explosion had been absolutely clean. What radiation existed had originated from molecules in the rock itself or in the vaporized snow. There was no way of guessing at the type of blast; he only knew that mass had been transformed virtually one hundred per cent into energy in a very short period of time. No process Craig knew even approached it. He stared again at the tunnel mouths. He was sure now that something had come out of them, risen about seven hundred feet above the plateau and released the blast. He trembled with eagerness to get inside, danger or no. He had turned impatiently to Brulieres, when somewhere deep in the tunnels, shouting broke out. Two pistol shots echoed hollowly. There was a clatter of running footsteps. Craig found his right hand fumbling at his hip, and felt foolish. He hadn't carried a sidearm since Korea. Lieutenant Rabar burst the tunnel, stumbling in the sunlight, his face contorted. He ran straight across the plateau and threw himself over the edge. Dientes, who had jumped to his feet, was only a step behind him. Craig, eyes fastened on the tunnel, realized vaguely that the two must have landed in deep snow, since there was no sound of their falling. A glow appeared in the tunnel. Craig fought the panic that seized him ; stood his ground and was aware of Brulieres beside him. The glow brightened. Its source came into sight-oval and about the size of a man's torso. It emerged into sunlight and Craig saw that it was solid. It looked like incandescent metal, but he somehow felt that it wasn't hot. It seemed to move at will and to hover without support. It acted alive. It moved a little way toward Craig and Brulieres, then stopped. A tentative rumble came from it, like the beginning of thunder. Something like a tentacle lifted, clutching an object that resembled a flashlight. A blinding lance of heat shot from the object and struck the rock a few yards in front of the two men. A sound came from the rock like ice pressed upon a hot stove. Smoke puffed upward. The beam lasted only an instant, but it left a long curved scar in the rock. The thing rumbled again, and flashed so brightly Craig threw an arm over his eyes, and heard his own voice cry out wordlessly. His legs tensed to run, but something about the behavior of the thing held him where he was. It seemed unsure of itself, and not really threatening. When he looked up again, it was moving laterally and up the face of the wall. He saw the flashlight-like object on the ground where it had evidently been dropped. T HE oval thing, no longer glowing, lifted fast toward the mountain top. He saw that it was metal, not rusted or corroded but dull with age, and he saw the tvo ra gg e d holes near the middle of it. He strained his eyes for more detail but it grew tiny in the distance and he saw no joints and no protuberances other than the one tentacle. He lost it in the shadows of the mountain's brow, then saw it flash momentarily in the sun as it curved up and over. After a moment he turned dazedly toward Brulieres. But before he could say anything there was a sun-dimming flash of light from beyond the mountain. The ground danced. Sound, echoing from the other peaks and battering its way through the solid rock of the mountain, beat about them like monstrous punishing wings. As the vast thunder dwindled away, Craig, squinting, saw a tenuous, rapidly dimming mushroom cloud tower above the peak. He flinched, but knew that this would be another clean explosion. Most of the cloud was steam. He was sure they were seeing a re-enactment of the blast which had cleared this plateau. His mind worked in simple patterns: the thing was destroyed ; it had dropped its weapon. He started toward the tunnel mouth, but he had hesitated too long. Brulieres, moving very agilely, was ahead of him. The priest picked up the weapon and turned toward Craig. Craig, still befuddled, wondered mildly at his own detached state of mind: is he going to kill me; I'd love to get that weapon home to the labs ; so that's how he keeps warm. (The latter in reference to the heavy underwear he'd glimpsed beneath the priest's cassock as the padre bent over). But Brulieres' voice was mild. "Please forgive me for taking possession of this, Doctor. Later, I hope, you will be able to examine it; but I must think first of my own responsibilities." He looked at the thing briefly, started to stow it in some fold of his gown, then hesitated. As if unable to resist the temptation, he aimed it at the rock wall and put his thumb on something. The incandescence squirted out. The rock cried out and yielded up a curl of smoke. by C. C. MacApp Brulieres turned the thing off at once and turned back to Craig with an expression half guilty, half delighted, like a child with a forbidden toy. Then he sighed and put the weapon away. Craig had observed what details he could. The thing was an inch or a little more in diameter, perhaps ten inches long. All except one tip was dull and apparently knurled to give a good grip. The tip looked like quartz or some crystal, translucent except the end, which was darkly transparent when not emitting the beam. The trigger was apparently a spot of different color on the body, over which the thumb could be pressed. Craig thought of the energy stored in that slender cylinder, the necessary insulation, the efficiency of whatever system was used to direct and control the beam. He felt a chill shiver of awe. Then another thought struck him and he looked wide-eyed at Brulieres. "A flaming sword #" Brulieres gave him a quick glance, and nodded. "Primitives might describe it so." sight at the edge of the plateau, looking pale. A moment later Dientes poked his head into view. "Where is the general?" Brulieres demanded. "Muerto," said Fabar shakily, "in the tunnel. The creature killed him." The priest's face twitched. "Who shot at it?" "The general, Padre. He had the only gun." Brulieres sighed. "Then that is why he is dead. The creature would not have harmed him." Craig had the same idea. It had used the weapon more as if in bluff, and had apparently carefully gone beyond the mountain to die. He wondered if the two bullet-holes had killed it. But how many more of the creatures (or machines) waited in the turmels? He looked at Brulieres. "Are we going in?" "By all means. Unless we are s t o p p e d." The priest looked thoughtful. "They may be coming out of hibernation or something like it. Can you tell how old this plateau is?" "Not without taking samples to a geological laboratory. Perhaps not even then, with accuracy. But I would say, some thousands of years." Rabar was not happy at reentering the tunnel, but set his jaw and came. Craig stood aside to let the lieutenant go ahead of him. Rabar hesitated, then stepped by. Dientes, crossing himself and muttering, evidently preferred coming a'ong to being left alone outside. He followed Craig. Brulieres swept his flashlight along the tunnel walls, revealing a turn ahead. They rounded it. After a little way it seemed to Craig that the flashlight dimmed. Then he realized that there was other light in the tunnel ; the arched ceiling was aglow. It got brighter and Brulieres turned off his flashlight. "Evidently," he said, "we are expected. Have you noticed the air?" Craig had not, but he did now; it was warm and the pressure was higher than outside. "One moment," he said, puzzled. He went back to the mouth of the tunnel. As he stepped outside, he felt a gentle resistance as if some force were pushing him into the tunnel. He re-entered, and felt warmth radiating from the ceiling. He rejoined the others. T HE floor of the tunnel sloped up gently for a while, then leveled, then turned downward. The walls were vertical and perfect, with a smooth glazed look. The ceiling curved from wall to wall in a perfect arc. There was room for two men to walk side by side by crowding. Craig walked a little behind Dientes. Soon he took off his oxygen mask and breathed normally. He would have liked to remove his jacket, but there were too many things in the pockets to spill out. He had counted one hundred seven paces when the tunnel turned again. It was just beyond the turn that they found Noriega's body, The tunnel branched here; or at least, a narrower tunnel angled up and off from each side. These tunnels were dark, and, Craig found, cold and with low air pressure. The same mild resistance guarded their mouths. The General lay sprawled loosely just inside the right-hand branch, his head and torso in shadow. He looked simply and peacefully dead. "Will you lend me a hand, Lieutenant?" Brulieres said. The two of them dragged Noriega into the light. Craig could see no burns nor any other kind of wound except an abrasion on one cheek which might have resulted from a fall. He started to ask Rabar exactly what had happened, but checked himself. Better not appear suspicious. He wondered what had happened to the general's pistol, and began to look around for it. But again Brulieres was ahead of him. The priest was eighteen or twenty yards farther into the tunnel, picking up something. It was the pistol. It went into the cloak as the heat-weapon had. Craig was watching Rabar and he thought the man looked disconcerted. Craig thought, How's this for a theory: Rabar killed Noriega, took his pistol and started up the tunnel. Maybe he just wanted to learn for himself what was in the mountain, or maybe he planned to murder by C. C. MacApp the rest of the party and make it look like an accident. He met the glowing creature, panicked, put two bullets into it, then dropped the gun and ran. Craig wondered if the priest shared his doubts about Rabar; but if he did, he didn't show it. The priest was already starting on. Craig lost count of his steps, but judged they'd gone over a quarter of a mile when the tunnel took a final rightangle turn and opened into a great high-domed chamber. IV tion as to the nature of this place vanished. It could only be a military base. There's something recognizable about weapons, Craig mused, no matter how unfamiliar. Here were gathered great vehicles of war, bristling with the outsize cousins of the heat-tube Brulieres carried and with a myriad other menacing shapes. Yawning black tunnels led away at angles -- probably, Craig thought, to hidden exits. Repair machines, some with their work partly finished, were scattered everywhere, silent and with a long-unused air about them. Nearly all of the aerial dreadnaughts (Craig was sure they were that) showed terrible wounds. The group stared about the chamber in silent awe. At one place, beneath a trio of round tunnels that aimed steeply upward, was what Craig took to be the main launching area, with ramps for loading...what? The litter showed clearly where great ships had rested, and that the departure had been hasty. Craig drew in deep trembling breaths and imagined the vast alien argosies lifting upon their mysterious legs of force. He could see the avarice in Rabar's eyes, and edged closer to the lieutenant. He wasn't going to let the man overpower Brulieres and take the weapons, nor was he going to let him pick up any that might be lying around. Not that Brulieres was being careless. Craig noticed that he kept his distance from everybody, and did not turn his back for long. They must have stared at the alien machines for quite a while before the priest's deep voice echoed in the chamber. "Come. Another tunnel beckons." Craig looked where the priest pointed. He saw a tunnel like the one they'd left, about a quarter of the way around the chamber. It glowed with light. All the rest were dark. He looked again at Brulieres, and was startled at the man's face. It wore a look of glory. Craig shivered. Why, he thought, the man thinks God arranged this for him. Apparently someone was arranging things, unless the tunnels and the lights were completely robotic. Craig, ignoring the edge of panic that cut at him, followed the priest toward the entrance to the lighted tunnel. It was short, with two bends in it (probably, Craig thought, to contain possible explosions). It opened into a smaller, lower-ceilinged chamber which had evidently been an assembly hall for troops, or possibly a mess hall. Dark openings led off it which might lead to barracks. In the far end, a single tunnel glowed with light. They entered that tunnel, which was another short one, and found that they were indeed in the living quarters. These, if the analogies applied, had been the officers'. There was a small assembly hall, and upon one wall of that were the pictures. to fall mostly upon that side of the chamber. The rock had been smoothed to take the murals. The first glimpse shook Craig so that he walked mechanically toward that wall, momentarily forgetting his companions. A part of his mind admired the basic technique. Outlines in low relief had been cut into the rock, details delicately etched in and colors brought up, apparently, bv altering the composition of the rock itself. As for the style it was somewhere between realism and impressionism. Craig was no expert, but he thought the hand was defter, the viewpoint more penetrating, than any he'd ever seen. The slight alien air only increased the charm of the work. Whatever sort of beings the aliens had been, they hadn't been an unfeeling race. Emotion leaped from every line of the murals. The first few told concisely of the establishment on Earth of this outpost, of the local defeat and abandonment. There were some heroic scenes there, but Craig hurried through them, drawn to the next series of paintings, to them. They were Biblical and as stunningly familiar as if he'd lived with them all his life. Feeling churned at his insides again. One of the first immortalized Noah, or whoever had been the actual hero of the first version of the Flood story. The painting of the sea and the dark doomsday clouds over it was so real that Craig took a step backward. Mountainous wave masses were battered white by an incredible rain. Heaved aslant, decks tumbling water, dwarfed by the seas, was the wooden ship. A few half-drowned domestic animals stared in terror, lashed to their pens on deck. The bearded man who stood by C. C. MacApp on wide-planted giant's legs, rope-like fingers gripping a tiller that strained to escape, was bedraggled but staunch and muscled to meet the sea. A woman clung to one arm. She had been painted not delicately, but with a strong beauty that spoke in thunder of the artist's piercing compassion. There was the crossing of the Red Sea, and the painting showed clearly how some force held aside the water. The artist had evidently been fascinated by the still-puddled seabottom. There were more, but Craig passed them, drawn like a fish on a line to the painting of the man on the cross. The body, more cruelly punished than the Bible recorded, strained in an agony that communicated itself to Craig's own. The face, twisted with pain, sagging with exhaustion, the torured soft brown eyes, held no bitterness, no accusation. The accusation was the painting itself. The bitterness and rage (and remorse?) was the painter's own. erable, looked at the others. Dientes showed only awe and humility. Rabar was holding himself tautly, but terror showed in his eyes. Brulieres shook with overflowing emotions, his face mirroring worship, glory, worry and doubt. He met Craig's eyes. His voice higher-pitched and cracked with feeling, he said, "Have you noticed -- this?" He was standing before a vertical slab of rough stone which had obviously been used to close up a tunnel. The sealing had been done with melted rock, roughly, leaving a groove around the edge. The job suggested haste. Craig's insides writhed at what might lie behind the slab. He gripped himself, walked over beside the priest. He could make out only a few of the characters of the inscription burned into the slab. He heard his own voice asking, as if from far away, "Do... you read Hebrew?" Brulieres let out a trembling sigh. "With difficulty." He moved slowly closer to the slab, put his fingers to the inscription like a blind man feeling for Braille. Craig saw that his eyes were full of tears. The thin lips mumbled inaudibly. After a long time Brulieres quit reading and stood there, unmoving. Then he started to speak. His voice was lifeless now, a low uncaring monotone. "Scholars will translate it better, but here is the gist of it." Craig gripped the priest's arm, heard his own words tumbling out: "It proves nothing, Padre! There can still be a God!" He found that he meant it desperately. The priest turned, stared at him, then looked faintly amused. "Conviction? Now? You are a more fortunate man than I." "No, Padre! Your work! Religion is deeper than..." Brulieres' eyes flashed with some of their old vitality. "My work? This is the God in whose name I have schemed and, Heaven help me, killed." Slowly, mechanically, Brulieres drew the heat-weapon from his garments. He aimed it at the groove around the slab and thumbed the trigger. The rock skirled, and ran to solidify in waxlike lumps. The smoke was acrid in Craig's nostrils. When the slab was mostly cut around, some inner seal gave way and air sucked loudly into the crack. With a wrenching sound, the slab tore loose. It tilted under some power of its own, and lowered itself to the floor. Lights, harshly angled and dramatic, flashed on in the small room beyond. It was bare except for the stone platform on he floor, and what rested upon it. Mechanically, Craig stepped in and moved aside to make room for the others. Brulieres went to the opposite side of the platform and Dientes crouched beside him. Rabar stood hesitantly in the doorway. T HE creature was larger than a man and like nothing earthly; many-limbed, built as if for a higher gravity. There was no apparent decomposition or dessication. The atmosphere of the chamber had evidently been chosen to preserve. There was still a pungent, half-unpleasant smell, being rapidly drawn away through ducts in the ceiling. There was a face of a sort, and two closed eyes. The face was recognizably strong. The thing might have been called ugly, by C. C. MacApp but Craig found a handsomeness about it too. He recognized the drama with which the body was arranged and lighted, and somehow for this last small vanity he loved the creature even more. Dientes clutched at the priest's robe. "It is a lie, Padre!" And, as the priest remained silent, Dientes turned desperate eyes to Craig. "Mother of God! Will no one say it is a lie?" Craig felt emotionally depleted. Inside him were a sick regret and a hollowness where something had died, but cold reason remained. If there is no God, he thought, we're just intelligent animals, and we're free to live by our wits. If there is no God, then there is no Devil either. He pondered that...and decided with grim amusement  that there was Devil enough. And, in any event, there were needs and desires, friends and enemies. He stepped swiftly around the alien and took the heat-weapon from the priest's limp fingers. He turned toward Rabar, who was (beyond any worthwhile doubt) an enemy, and who was standing in the doorway with an annoying mockery in his eyes. Of course he's happy, Craig thought; he's a Bolshevik agent and an atheist. There'll be damned little religion anywhere, now. He raised the weapon calmly, every nerve and muscle alert, like an animal ready for action. He watched the triumph fade from Rabar's eyes. As his thumb felt unhesitatingly for the trigger, he watched the growth of fear. Coming in the great September issue of IF -- by Kris Neville A new Relief novelette by Keith Laumer Gripping cover novelette -- by Fritz Leiber plus many other novelettes and short stories, features by Theodore Sturgeon, etc. There's plenty of great science-fiction reading coming in the next issue of IF -- on sale July #th -- so ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy now! IF  Short Story A Bad Town For Spacemen There was a reason why the city acted the way it did... and we were the reason! T stepped back out of the gut"ter and watched the tight clot of men disappear around the corner. They hadn't really been menacing, just had made it obvious they weren't going to break up. And that I had better get out of their way. I got. We were well trained. The neon of the bar across the street flickered redly on my uniform. I watched the slush trickle off my boots for a while, then made up my mind and headed into the bar. It was a mistake. New York had always been considered safe for us. Of course there were many parts of the country that were absolutely forbidden "for your own good" and others that were "highly dangerous" or at least "doubtful." But New York had always been a haven. The stares there had even been admiring sometimes, especially in the beginning. But things had changed. I had realized that about half an hour after touchdown, when we were being herded through Health Check, Baggage Check, Security Check... you know the lot. Before, there had been friendly questions, genuine interest in the Mars colony, speculations about the second expedition to Venus, even a joke or two. This time the examiners' only interest seemed to be in fouling us up as much as possible. And when we finally got through the rat race. New York was bleak. I should have stayed with the rest, I guess, and of course a public bar was the last place any smart spaceboy would have gone to. But I had some nice memories of bars, memories from the early days. The whole room went silent, as though a tube had blown, when I shoved through the door. I got over to an empty table as quickly as I could and inspected the list of drinks on the dispenser. This one had a lot of big nickel handles sticking up over the drink names and the whole job was shaped like one of those beer kegs you used to see pictures of. What I mean is, this was an authentic bar. Phony as hell. you can guess the kind of mood I'd gotten in. The noise had picked up again right after I sat down and some of the drunker drunks were knocking the usual words around, in loud whispers and with lots of glances at me. One of the progirls (her hair was green and her blouse covered her breasts -- another change while I was out) gave me a big wink and then jabbed the man next to her and squawked with laughter. I fed a bill into the change machine at the table and then dribbled several coins (prices had gone up too) into the dispenser. I guess I must have had several, because after a while I began to feel cheerful. The noise that was coming out of the box in the corner started to sound like music, and I got to tapping and rocking. And smiling, I guess. And that's what triggered it. People had been coming and going, but mainly coming. And the crowd at the bar had been getting louder, and one guy there had been getting louder than the rest. All of a sudden, he slammed down his glass and headed for my table. He orbited around it for a while, staring at me, and then settled jerkily down in the chair across from me. "Why all the hilarity, spaceboy? Feeling proud of yourself?" He looked pretty wobbly and pretty soft and pretty old. And very angry. But I was kind of wobbly myself by that time. And anyway there are strict rules about us and violence. Very strict. So I just tried to make the smile bigger and said, "I'm just feeling good. We had a good run and we brought in some nice stuff." "Nice stuff," he said, kind of mincing. "Buddy, do you know what you can do with your sandgems and your windstones?" "We brought back some other things too. There was a good bit of uranium and -- " "We don't need it!" He was getting purple. "We don't need anything from you." "And maybe we don't need you." I was getting sort of fired up myself. "Carversville is self-sufficient now. You can't give us anything." "Well, why the hell don't you stay there? Why don't all of you stay off Earth? There's no place for you here." I could have pointed out that we brought things that Earth really needed, that Mars and Venus had literally worlds of natural resources, while Earth had almost finished hers. But he began to quiet down then and I began to feel the loneliness again, the sense of loss. You can't go home again...that phrase kept poking around in my skull. Suddenly he sat up and looked straight at me, and his eyes really focused for the first time. "What lousy luck. What incredibly lousy luck. And how could anyone have known?" It wasn't hard to peg what he was talking about. "It was probably good luck that the first space crew was selected the way it was," I said. "Otherwise you'd have had a dead ship full of dead men and no knowing why. But that one man brought the ship back." "Yeah, yeah. I know. And the scientists figured everything out. About radiation in space being lethal to almost all types of man. But there was one thing that made a man immune. One thing." "The scientists tried to find a protective covering that would be practicable. They tried to synthesize slaves that would protect you. It wasn't our fault that they couldn't." "No, not your fault." His eyes had begun to dull again. "Just a matter of enough melanin in the skin. That's all..." Then he straightened up and slammed his fist on the table. "Damn you, did you know I was a jet pilot a long time ago? Did you know I was going to be one of the space pioneers? Open up brave new worlds for Man..." He sat there staring at me for a minute or so and the last thing he said was, "Don't you come here again -- nigger." I got up and left the table and walked out of the bar. I wasn't provoked. As I said before, we were well trained. T HE first time I realized where I was was when I bumped into the fence around the spacefield. I must have walked all the way over there from the bar. I had a memory of crumbling buildings and littered streets. Things had changed while I had been out there. They were letting the city run down. As I started to walk along the fence to the gate, I saw the ship towering against the stars. The stars and the ship. And tomorrow there would be colonists getting aboard. I stopped and looked till I knew where home was and who the real exiles were. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. And started feeling by Robert Scott The place where reader and editor meet...  Dear Editor: The main purpose of my letter is to congratulate IF on its new format and story policy. But I beg to differ with Lawrence Crilly as regards to the Smith-Evans serial. (#) I really believe that it was the worst SF novel I've ever read -- at least in an SF magazine. (#) Mr. Crilly attributes this monstrosity to the work of the Revered Ph.D. ; guess again, Lawrence! E. E. Smith couldn't write that bad "fer love ner money." Apart from that serial and Jim Harmon's potboiler in the Jan. ish, IF is beginning to read like a good mag should, esp. the latest Anderson epic. Retief also outdid himself in March. I'm beginning to like this Laumer... T'anks also for the swell editorial in Volume # No. #. I'd like to believe that my last year's letter was the main reason for it. (Don't say no!) Who in the deuce is John Pederson, Jr.? Never heard of him. But on the basis of his March cover, "that guy ain't gonna be a nobody fer long!" Please ditch Mr. James Harmon ; he makes a habit of potboilers. His The Place Where Chicago Was marred the finish on an otherwise fine Feb. Galaxy. Ken Winkes Arlington, Washington  Attention, .Doc Smith -- wherever in the # states you and your house trailer may be! How about writing in to set the record straight? -- Editor.    Dear Publisher: The Paradise was in the moon. With one-sixth the gravity of Earth, men would never die. When Adam and Eve sinned they were sent to Earth. In six times the Moon's gravity, they had to die. There is no other way to explain the serpent's crawling instead of moving from a standing-up position. Edmundo de la Cuera y Fourcade Mexico City, D.F.    Dear Editor: The fifteenth Annual West Coast Science-Fantasy Conference, the Westercon XV, will be held in the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles on June #th and July #st, #. I would like to invite all your readers to join us in two days of exhibits, program events, parties, auctions and confabulations in the hotel that so well housed the Solacon. Our two-day program will center about the Saturday evening banquet, featuring Anthony Boucher as Master of Ceremonies and Jack Vance as Guest of Honor. Mr. Vance is no stranger to fans, widely known as he is for such books as Big Planet , The Languages of Pao and The Dying Earth , and his most recent Galaxy appearance. The Moon Moth . # membership provides membership cards, progress reports and program book, admission to all events and convention rates at the Alexandria. Send for membership or B. Ellern, Treasurer, Westercon XV, P O Box #, Terminal Annex, Los Angeles #, California. Ron Ellik Los Angeles, Cal.  Okay, we will. Add one credit to Guest of Honor Vance's long list. The Dragon Masters , a complete short novel coming up in next month's Galaxy, and this fan's nomination for one of the best stories of the year! -- Editor    Dear Editor: For months everyone's been crying about "the art" and "the cover." The cover tells think I'm getting something else. Inside, I'm too fascinated to care about the "art" -- and I've "known" all the writers for #-# years. Chin up ! H. J. Kitzmiller Cotati, California    Dear Editor : Your magazine has imI # proved. I get it irregularly here; however the January issue inspired me to write. I think a magazine should have a letter col. Masters of Space was very good. I only read the second part of the serial, however, since I missed the November issue. It was similar to all the other stories I had read by E. E. Smith -- exciting and magnificent in scope. By the way, is E. E. Evans an alternative pseudonym of Smith? (Like Wyndham-Parkes ?) Port-of-Spain, Trinidad  Not only is Evans not Smith's pseudonym, but we Jon't even think that Parkes is Wyndham's! -- Editor. V     Dear Editor: Here I am again! Since in my last letter I spent my space discussing features, I feel that I should now give my opinion on stories. First, the February Galaxy. Terrific issue! I suppose I'll rate the serial highest, since there's something about a novel that really carries your interest and makes it seem all the better looking back. This especially is true of anything by Poul Anderson, who ranks with Arthur C. Clarke in the skill of holding readers' attention -- and I thank him for the fine space ballad. Second place goes to that lovely article of superextrapolation, The Martian Stargazers. Please, more of the same. Then there was the Pohl-Kornbluth novella, a fast-moving, highly enjoyable, semi-serious comedy of errors. For a time when Earl Kemp and his ilk are complaining that there are no new ideas in sf, Galaxy and If hold an amazing number of totally new conceptions. I enjoyed the following two stories for this very reason: Shatter the Wall and The Place Where Chicago Was. Willy Ley's article was interesting, as usual. There were only three failures in the whole ish, each, sadly, by old pros. Edward Wellen wasn't funny; Algis Budrys wasn't coherent ; and Fritz Leiber was not very earthshaking, nor was his story good enough to stand on its own. Still, Galaxy is doing very well. Now If, March #. The highlight was of course Kings Who Die. A good example of serious sf in If. Had Anderson given it a happy ending, he probably wouldn't have gotten his point across. Another surprisingly good story was Tybalt , which ended a bit abruptly but was nicely written. Then there's the inevitable Keith Laumer story. They're fun, I suppose, and lot of people seem to like them, so go ahead and run them...as long as you limit yourselves to only one of this type of story per ish. Seven Day Terror was an amusing kid story -- they're nice to have now and then. The other three stories weren't particularly great, but they're chock full of new ideas and themes. Good months for both magazines. Belmont, Mass.    Dear Editor: I must say that I was flabletter in the March If. One of the best covers of the year on any sf mag was If's September cover. Beautiful. And then came the November issue. What beauty anyone can see in ten different styles and sizes of type is beyond me. Not only that, but the art work petered out too. All you're left with are "nothing" covers where before you had exciting, original ones. And I would lodge a stiff protest against the contents page. Why you ever changed it mystifies me completely. I would like to congratulate you, though, on the interior illos in the March issue. All of them are very, very good and a vast improvement over previous issues. (Whatever happened to Bernklau? I'd like to see him back.) Now to the stories. E Being and The Madman from Earth reflect your promise of more wonder in If. Both stories were excellent entertainment. Keith Laumer is great, his one clinker in this series being Gambler's World. E Being was extremely original and well written -- more like this. Kings Who Die was good but the writing seemed a little inconsistent. All things considered, though, this story was good and it stayed interesting from beginning to end. Tybalt was fair but all the buildup just didn't justify the ending. Dangerous Quarry was poor It was fairly interesting at the beginning but it just didn't say anything and was very poorly plotted. I cannot make up my mind which was worse -- The Happy Homicide or Seven Day Terror. These two stories represent the lowest depths to which any magazine has ever sunk. Irwin Sternberg, Jr. Tucson, Arizona  Paul -- meet Irwin. Irwin -- meet Paul. Now you see how easy it is to put together a science-fiction magazine? All you have to do is print the kind of stories the readers write in to say they like! -- Editor.    That's the way the type sets for another issue. Say, you fellows who mention that you can't get IF regularly on your stands -- ever think of subscribing? That way you don't have to worry about getting your copy; the Post Office takes care of it! -- Editor. If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Address Use coupon or order by letter if you wish won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name prirted on it! No. CF-# bv Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh mtr iunr Srrr   You N.me He-. Mo. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for  # ; #, G; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any.  No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer i SEPTEMBER #  #c Ito nr iXamr rrc 'AA-# by Cullen Rapp Your Name Here No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any, The designs shown above are the only ones we offer? No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! Do You Lau gh Your Greatest Powers Away? You have heard the phrase; "Laugh, clown, laugh." Well, that fits me perfectly. I'd fret, worry and try to reason my way out of difficulties -- all to no avail; then I'd have a hunch, a something within that would tell me to do a certain thing. I'd laugh it off with a shrug. I knew too much, I thought, to heed these impress sions. Well, it's different now -- I've learned to use this inner power and I no longer make the mistakes I did, because I do the right thing at the right time. What Your Mind Can Do! Here is how I got started right: I had heard about hypnosis revealing past lives. I began to think there must be some inner intelligence with which we were born. In fact, I often heard it said there was; but how could I use it, how could I make it work for me daily? That was my problem: I wanted to learn to direct this inner voice; master it if I could. Finally, I wrote to the Rosicrucians, a world-wide fraternity of progressive men and women, who offered to send me, without obligation, a free book entitled The Mastery of Life. That book opened a new world to me. I advise you to write today and ask for your copy. It will prove to you what your mind can demonstrate. Don't go through life laughing your mental powers away. Simply write: Scribe J.F.W, (Not a Religious Organization) San Jose, California, U.S. A. worlds of Vol. # I Number # September # All Stories New and Complete science fiction  Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Sam Ruvidich, Art Director Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor The Snowbank Orbit by Fritz Leiber # The Winning of the Moon by Kris Neville # The Big Headache by Jim Harmon # Once Around Arcturus by Joseph Green # Cultural Exchange by Keith Laumer # # .Marlon Brandos by Vance Aandahl # And Then There Wc;s Peace by Gordon R. Dickson # World in a Mirror by Albert Teichner # The Worlds of Science Editorial # You and Nostradamus -- Continued # "Just Westing'" by Theodore Sturgeon #I Hue and Cry # Cover by Wenzel from The Snowbank Orbit Next issue (November) on sale September #th JP published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation, Vol. #, No. # Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New. York # , N. Y. IF  Editorial ceived a package in the mail and found it of such immediate interest that we empty it herewith into your lap. Brevity is the soul of speed. These short notes can't begin handsome new series from Pyramid. Six books have been released at this writing. They are : John Pfeiffer. This a general reader's study of the brain, what it is, how it works, how it goes wrong and what can be done about it when it does. The author has an engaging style, running strongly to illustrative anecdote. Some of this material is really fascinating, such as the minute description of the stereotaxic surgery techniques which are replacing lobotomies, and such as-yet-unexplained phenomena as the fact that "Wizard-of-Oz" (i.e., green) eyeglasses can prevent certain types of epileptic seizures, and that in many cases blood tests can indicate psychotic "explosions" before they occur. kamp. Photographs, most by the author. For many years the rise and fall of the rich and highly-developed Mayan empire, which reached its peak more than a thousand years ago, has been regarded as an "impenetrable" mystery. The penetration of it reads like the most exciting of detective stories, which of course it is. Mr. Gallenkamp writes like a lover (well, perhaps more clear-eyed than that!) on Maya in particular and archaeology in general, so that one gets, as a sort of side bonus, generous helpings of the history and techniques of this entrancing field of work, and also of its value ; for archaeology, especially of isolated cultures, helps immeasurably in the understanding of the anatomy of civilization. This book goes back to the dim origins of Maya, follows it to its heights, studies its religion and daily life, its cataclysmic collision with the Spaniards and its still mysterious extinction. Nourse. Many line cuts, and a section of Mel Hunter paintings. A glance through this marvelous (a word here carefully chosen) book makes one wonder if Nourse is soaked in sf or sf writers soaked in Nourse. Here in clear logical explication are such fan's delights as the "brightside crossing" of Mercury, asteroid mining, the possibility of artifacts on cosmic debris and many, many more. The author takes off from the earliest recorded yarns of space-flight, goes on to the birth and nature of the sun and the planetary system, and then subjects each of the planets to as thorough an examination as his great erudition and powerful imagination can give. He concludes with a chapter on solar systems beyond the sun and two appendices, one on comparative statistics, the other a glossary. Farb. If you had the indescribable experience of being hooked, as a child, by Henri Fabre or Maeterlinck, you will certainly find in this book the growing excitement which promises you a similar delight. For Farb has a similar gift: the ability to observe acutely, describe accurately -- and write like a poet. "The slime mold moves, not like a four-footed beast, but like a one-celled protozoan. It ventures out of the soil and migrates at the pace of a slug to exposed positions on rocks and logs. There, in only a few hours, the slimy mass transforms itself into a bouquet of fantastic flowers -- wispy things on slender stalks, clusters of exotic blossoms, puffballs, colored cups, toadstools. The animal has become a plant, one of the most beautiful objects of the soil." This is a book -- possibly the only book -- about life in the soil, and it covers a staggering amount of information on extremely diverse fields. no more about chemistry than how to spell it, Jaffe will competently take you through a definition of it, a survey of the whole field, its history and its symbols; and finally to an item-by-item examination of certain broad specialties in which new worlds are coming to light: medicines, foods, metals, synthetic gasoline and rubber and fibers, new elements, and atomic energy. By the time he's done with you, you will take far less for granted those nylon socks, that wormless apple, that tire that waited for # miles before its first finally, From Instinct to puncture. Jaffe's real specialThought. With these as milety: telling you how . stones, he describes life on Earth from its origins Herbert Wendt. Wendt, of habitat and species, though no slouch as a writer through, at last, the anthrohimself, has a talent that poids up to but not including amounts to genius for finding man. quotations from works new sources, to add color and Pyramid some warm congratdepth and change-of-pace to ulations. Good news comes in his own vivid narrations. He the package along with these is generous with this gift, so books: a second group of that the sense of color in this titles is due for release, and unusual book is at times alwill include some originals most overwhelming. The secexpressly written for the setions of the volume (each ries. If the publishers can with a half-dozen or more keep up the quality, and avoid approach and its scope : Mothwith whatever is available, er Ocean; The Leap to the they have an opportunity to Mainland; Into the Atcreate as fine a popular scimosphere; The Conquest of ence library as has yet been and The Salvation Army Don't forget to put these people on your Christmas list -- the lonely aged, the sick, the underprivileged children, the hungry and homeless. To make sure they are remembered, give to The Salvation Army in your community. With your contribution. The Salvation Army will make Christmas a joyful season for the less fortunate. IF  Novelette T HE pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans, but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your Shakespearean moons, whitemottled as death from Venerean Plague, spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on the black floor of an infinite barroom, what a sweet last view of the Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman... Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve breaking around Uranus -- and so what! He shivered to get a little heat and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through Prospers bridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed -- a glint almost lost in pale green. That meant its light was bulleting # miles deep through the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing the star on a Earth could not stop the Enemy's remorseless advance from outer space. Neither could the Enemy! mirage trajector y -- and at least its depth agreed with the time since rim contact. At # miles he lost it. That should mean # miles plus of hydrogen soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet. Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deepsunk in the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better than one. Grunfield found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope, stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic -- strange how he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining them on. The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a watersplotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked bed of night. At half the width of Luna seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top, where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a second -- a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara. Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able to slow Prospero and her sister ships or turn them back at their # miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman. G runfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be Titania, occulted by Fritz Leiber now by the planet and the noisy natural static of her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas -- but it had always been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus Expedition. Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the curving star-bordered forward edge of Pros peros huge mirror and the thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages below the spaceshield. Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for helium to crawl, if you had some helium. Prospero f s insulation, originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in reverse. Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature # degrees Kelvin. Close to that of Uranus' sunlit face. Check. Cabin Temperature # degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly... if it were right to drag out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus. Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros. The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue -- one each for Caliban , Snug, Moth , and Starveling, following Prospero in line astern on slave automatic -- though for months inertia had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green, but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy. The gages still showed their last maximums. Skin # Kelvin, Cabin # Fahrenheit, Gravs #. All of them hit almost a year ago, when they'd been ace-ing past the sun. Grunfield's gaze edged back to the five bulbous pressure suits, once more rigidly upright in their braced racks, that they'd been wearing during that stretch of acceleration inside the orbit of Mercury. He started. For a moment he'd thought he saw the dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of the bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cabin, readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead. Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield -- so violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing near the margin of the planet -- bright green, viridian, far vivider than that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly studied the area. Nothing at all. N erves again. If the Enemy were much nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfelds mind retreated to the I I circumstances that had brought Prospero (then only Mercury One) out here. II lar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth's nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard, spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England and the other mega-powers. During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the slim black cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity which allowed them to hover near planets without going into orbit; and a frightening degree of control over light itself. Indeed, their principal weapon was a tight beam of visible light, a dense photonic stiletto with an effective range of several Jupiter-diameters in vacuum. They also used visible light, in the green band, for communication as men use radio, sometimes broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in strange abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the tightness of which rendered them invisible except near the sun, where they tended to ionize electronically dirty volumes of space. It was probably this effective invisibility, based on light-control, which allowed them to penetrate the Solar System as deep as Earth's orbit undetected, rather than any power of travel in time or sub-space, as was first assumed. Earthmen could only guess at the physical appearance of the Enemy, since no prisoners were taken on either side. Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as if having some way of fueling from them. Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though sharing its tide-lockedness -- a circumstance that led to a sortie by Earth's Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted. At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in part to nakedeye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated. No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damage d -- except for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed anti-missile and proceded after the blast to "burn," meaning that it suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling rainbow display of visible radiaby Fritz Leiber tion. This was before the "stupidity" of the Enemy with reguard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds. Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite rocketyards were furiously busj', had no vehicle in deep space -- with one exception. A T the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation of the small sunblasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton five-man crew, were essentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar drive, assembled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight inside Earth's orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter four times the length of the ship's hull, superheated at its focus the hydrogen which was ejected as a plasma at high exhaust velocity. Each ship likewise mounted versatile radio-radar equipment on dual lattice arms and carried as ship's launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable as a fusion-headed torpedo. After Far Side, this "tin can" fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because that remote planet, making its #year circuit of Sol, was currently on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy. However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal hydrogen storage tanks -- like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course that w r ould have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a hyperbola that would make the journey in # days. In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet -- a battle that proved to be only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter. Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set. Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mysterycored ball of frigid gas # miles wide coasting through space across the fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet was traveling at # miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish... himself...unless the fleet shed its velocity by ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a year ago -- a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery new-fallen snow. Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction mass, Prospero could have shed her present velocity in five hours, decelerating at a comfortable one G. But allowing her # miles of straight-line travel through Uranus' frigid soupy atmosphere -- and that might be dipping very close to the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral core -- Prospero would have two minutes in which to shed her velocity. Two minutes -- at # Gs. Men had stood # and # Gs for a fractional second. But for two minutes... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in # seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere. The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus. He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale planet's hydrogen muted its Ill I N the aft cabin, lank hairywristed Croker pinned another blanket around black Jackson as the latter shivered by Fritz Leiber in his trance. Then Croker turned on a small light at the head of the hammock. "Captain won't like that," plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from where he floated in womb position across the cabin. "Enemy can feel a candle of our light, capaway." He rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a pollywog's. "And Jackson hears the Enemy think...and Heimdall hears the grass grow," Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. "Isn't an Enemy for launched aft from the hammock. "We haven't spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There's nowhere for them." "There's the far side of Uranus," Ness pointed out. miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there." "Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity," Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding momentum. "That's likely, isn't it, when they didn't have time for us back in the Belt?" He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full moon pouring from it -- too much light to look at comfortably. He began to button the inner cover over the port. "Don't do that," Ness objected without conviction. "There's not much heat in it but there's some." He hugged his elbows and shivered. "I don't remember being warm since Mars orbit." "The sun gets on my nerves," Croker said. "It's like looking at an arc light through a pinhole. It's like a high, high jail light in a cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire." He continued to button out the sun. "You ever in jail?" Ness asked. Croker grinned. fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little light at the head of Jackson's hammock, flicking his hands from the wrists like flippers. "I got one thing against the sun," he said quietly. "It's blanketing out the radio. I'd like us to get one more message from Earth. We haven't tried rigging our mirror to catch radio waves. I'd like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter." "If we won it," Croker said. "Our telescopes show no more green around Jove," Ness reminded him. "We counted # rainbows of Enemy cruisers 'burning.' Captain verified the count." "Repeat : if we won it." Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the hammock. "If there was a real victory message they'd push it through, even if the sun's in the way and it takes three hours to catch us. People who win, shout." Ness shrugged as he paddied. "One way or the other, we should be getting the news soon from Titania station," he said. "They'll have heard." "If they're still alive and there ever was a Titania Station," Croker amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the hammock. "Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived. At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the War and we haven't any idea of what's happened to them since and if they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania -- or Ariel or Oberon or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station could raise Earth I haven't been told. Sure thing Prospero hasn't heard anything.-.and we're getting close." "I won't argue," Ness said. "Even if we raise 'em, it'll just be hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle report." "And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per man as the station fades." Croker frowned and added, "If Captain had cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this express train at Uranus." "Tell me how," Ness asked drily. "How? Why, one of the ship's launches. Replace the fusion-head with the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it between the ship and the launch." "I haven't got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract," Ness said, referring to Prospero's piloting robot. "Fully fueled, one of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of # miles per second. Use it all in braking and you've only taken # from #. The launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at # miles a second." "You didn't hear all my idea," Croker said. "You put piggyback tanks on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four launches. Then you've # miles of braking and a maneuvering reserve. You only need to shed # miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at I G to shed it." "Cute," Ness conceded. "Especially the jeep. But I'm glad just the same we've got # per cent of our chem fuel in our ships' tanks instead of the launches. We're on such a bull's eye course for Uranus -- Copperhead really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit -- that we may need a sidewise by Fritz Leiber shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup at our # mps -- " Croker shrugged. "We still could have dropped a couple of us," he said.  after the whole fleet," Ness said. "You're beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld -- or the captain himself." "But if Titania Station's alive, a couple of men dropped off would do the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out after us. If we've won the War." "But Titania Station's dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And we've lost the Eattle of Jupiter. You said so yourself," Ness asserted owlishly. "Captain's got to look after the whole fleet." "Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the Stars! Ness, do you know how long it'd take us to reach the nearest star -- except we aren't headed for her -- at our # mps? Eight thousand years!" "That's a lot of time to kill," Ness said. "Let's play chess." Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids. Croker said, "Suppose' he knows what the Enemy looks like?" "I suppose," Ness said. "When he talks about them it's as if he was their interpreter. How about the chess?" "Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three." "Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor." "Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D," Croker objected. "That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really visualized in my head than the game's over." "I don't want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only # hours away." Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. "They..." he breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. "They..." "I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy's mind?" Ness said. "He thinks he speaks for them," Croker replied and the next instant felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a tarnished sunburst. D a m a thought Croker, how does the captain always know when Jackson's going to talk? "They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus," Jackson breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little louder, though his eyes stayed shut. "They're welcoming us, they're our brothers." The smile died. "But they know they got to kill us, they know we got to die." The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch leading forward. new star at # miles into Uranus when he saw the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows. "Ambush," he said. "At least two cruisers." He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he could see those flickers. He asked himself if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus. The blue telltales for Caliban and Starveling began to blink. "They've seen it too," the captain said. He snatched up the mike and his next words rang through the Prospero . "Rig ship for the snowbank orbit ! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr. Grunfeld, raise the fleet." Aft, Croker muttered, "Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets." Ness said, "Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history has to end some time." IV later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn't. He thought of forty things to recheck. Relax, he repeated -- the work's over; all that matters is in Copperhead's memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the captain's suited up. The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides -- the best attitude, except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the ship herself didn't start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor hadn't closed in on his face -- translucent handthick petals as yet unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in freefall again. When. He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson -- just the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention, pale-oliveedged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver. Beyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought, or they'd already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still half out of his suit. There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago. Its robot pilots were set to follow Prospero and imitate, nothing else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still... Grunfeld wet his lips. "Captain," he said hesitantly. "Captain?" "Thank you, Granfeld." He caught the edge of the skull's answering grin. "We are beginning to hit hydrogen," the quiet voice went on. "Forward skin temperature's up to # K." Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began to talk dreamily from his suit. "They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're another. Their ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it, they're even less than passengers..." The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up, carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction. by Fritz Leiber The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of green -- bright green as it narrowed to a thread -- then for a few seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and semicircles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted interior cabin lights glowed on. and their ships come from very far away, from the edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the...discontinuum, where they don't have stars but something else and where gravity is different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn't want to..." And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it -- the first faint thrill, less than a cobweb's tug, of weight. The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld's suit had begun to revolve slowly on a vertical axis. For a moment he glimpsed Jackson's dark profile -- all five suits were revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn't pull forward at high-G decel, oT spines crush through thorax and abdomen. The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld's forehead. And now he was sure he felt weight -- maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was up. It was as if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield. A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it. He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the other ships -- the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying. The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on his face like layers of pliable ice. Jackson called faintly, "Now I understand. Their ship -- " His voice was cut off. Grunfeld's ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body. But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now... now on Mars... now back on Earth... The weight was stifling now, crushing -- a hill of invisible sand. Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had red fringe around it. It grew. There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the ship's jets roared, everything recovered, or didn't. The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out thought. T HE universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery wind on numb humps and ridges -- the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and in freefall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages. Or did it? He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward again? If they'd actually come through -- There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after frictional heating? There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence? He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin lights were broken. The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top of his opening suit. Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex upward, that must , he realized, be the dark side of Uranus . Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield. The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting. A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence of decel. New maxs showed on the board : Cabin Temperature # F, Skin Temperature # K, Gravs #. Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw the source of the pulsing glow: two BY Fritz Leiber sharp-ended ovals flickering brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish phosphorescing. "The torps got to 'em," Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to the right. #T did find out at the end'A Jackson said quietly from the left, his voice at last free of the trance-tone. "The Enemy ships weren't ships at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call 'em?) spacewhales. Inertialess spacewhales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate hydrogen (that's the only way I know to say it) and spat light to move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their parasites." "That's crazy," Grunfeld said. "All of it. A child's picture." "Sure it is," Jackson agreed. From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, "Quiet." The radio came on thin and wailing with static: "Titania Station calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are dead -- the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have jeep fueled and set to go -- # Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and last blue telltales still glowed for Caliban and Starveling. Breathe a prayer, he thought, for Moth and Snug. Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be wrong. Three The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length, which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into their eyes. They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around. The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken from their max. He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of Uranus. But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as dark as those of Moth and Snug. Grunfeld thought, now he IF  Short Story She liked the Brando type. The more there was of fit, old Chet, best man in Accounting. Six feet tall, brown hair, brown eyes. Full of vim and vigor, that was good old Chet. "God!" he screamed. "They're strangling me, the skunks! # ' He rose from bed, his face dripping with sweat and his hands trembling like a frightened child's. "They're bathroom and vomited. His wife was standing by the door when he finished, but he walked past her as if she didn't exist. "Why, Chester! What's the matter with you?" she asked, trailing him into the bedroom. "I've never heard you talk like that before P For a moment she stood watching him in numb silence. "For goodness' sake, Chester, why are you getting dressed at three o'clock in the morning?" "None of your business," he mumbled, setting a firm upper lip and gazing at her with lizard-cold Marlon Brando eyes. He picked up his tie, laughed at it with careless ease and threw it across the room. "See you around, baby," he hissed, zipping up his trousers and walking past her. "Chester McRae! Where are you going at this time of night? You've got to go to work tomorrow ! Don't you love me any more? Chester... But her words echoed emptily through Chester McRae's pleasant little suburban home. Chester was no longer present. Bartholomew Oliver. Good old Barth, best man on a duck hunt since the guy who invented shotguns. Five foot ten, weak chin, gambler's mustache. Good man with small-town girls, too. "Hey, Thelma," he said. "You know what I think?" "Go to sleep." "I think it'd be funnier than hell if I left you flat." "What kind of wisecrack is that? And what do you think you're doing?" "I'm getting dressed... " "It's three o'clock in the morning." "So? I don't give a damn." "You'll come back. Drunken louse." He laughed softly and smiled at her in the darkness with ice-white Marlon Brando teeth. Then he was gone. Ozzie, best man in the whole philosophy department. Five foot two, one hundred and seven pounds, milky eyes. Wrote an outstanding paper on the inherent fallacies of logical positivism. "Louise," he whispered, "I feel uneasy. Very uneasy." His wife lifted her fatty head and gazed happily down at Oswald. "Go to sleep," she said. "If you'll excuse me, I think that I shall take a walk." "But, Oswald, it's three o'clock in the morning!" "Don't be irrational," he whispered. "If I want to take a walk, I shall take a walk." "Well! I don't think you ought to, or you might catch a cold." He rose and dressed, donning a tee-shirt and tweed trousers. With snake-swift Marlon Brando hands, he tossed his plaid scarf in her face. "Excuse me, Louise," he whispered, "but I gotta make it..." Then, laughing softly, he strode from the room. A T three o'clock in the morning, even a large city is quiet and dark and almost dead. At times, the city twitches in its sleep ; occasionally it rolls over or mutters to itself. But only rarely is its slumber shattered by a scream... "Johnny! Hey, Johnny!" cries Chester McRae, his eyes as dull and poisonous as two tiny toads. "Let's make it, man... let's split..." whispers Bartholomew Oliver, one finger brushing his nose like a rattler nosing a dead mouse. "I don make no move without my boys," says Oswald like scorpion tails. Together they walk down the street, moving with slow insolence, their lips curled in snarls or slack with indifference, their eyes glittering with hidden hatreds. But they are not alone in the city. The college boys are coming, in their dirty jeans and beerstained tee-shirts; so too are the lawyers, in dusty jackets and leather pants ; so come the doctors and the businessmen, on stolen motorcycles ; the bricklayers and gas station attendants, the beatniks and dope pushers, the bankers and lifesaving instructors, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers...they are all coming, flocking into the city for reasons not their own, wandering in twos and threes and twenties, all of them sullen and quiet, all of them shuffling beneath darkly-hued clouds of ill intent, all of them proud and deadly and the thousands now, turning the streets into rivers of flesh... "Hey, Johnny' says Chester, "let's cool this dump." "Man, let's make it with the skirts," says Bartholomew. "I don see no skirts," says Chester. "You pig," snarls Ozzie. The mob is monstrous now. like a pride of lion cubs, beyond count in their number, without equal in their leonine strength, above the common quick in their immortal pride, veldt, swarming in the city than the eye can see or the mind can bear. It seems that no man sleeps, that every male in the great city must walk tonight. "Johnny," says Chester, "I don dig no chicks on the turf." "Eeee, colay. What a drag," whispers Bartholomew. "You goddam logical positivist," snarls Ozzie. A N uneasy sound ripples through the mob, like the angry hiss of an injured ego, moving from street to street and swelling upward in a sudden, angry roar... they want their women, the dance-hall girls, the young waitresses, the nowhere chicks in five dollar dresses, the Spanish girls with eyes as dark as the Spanish night. And then, as though by accident, one man looks up at the starry sky and sees her -- sees her standing on a balcony far above them, twenty stories above them, up where the wind can blow her hair and billow her blue dress like an orchid of the night. She laughs gently, without fear, gazing down at the mindless mob of rebels. They laugh too, just as gently, their quiet eyes crawling over the sight of her body, far above. "Thass my chick," whispers Chester. "Cool it, daddy," says Bartholomew, slipping into a pair of dark glasses and touching his lips with the tip of his tongue. "That skirt is private property." "You boys may walk and by Vance Aandahl talk' says Ozzie, "but you don play. You don play with Rio's girl-" Suddenly, angry words and clenched fists erupt from the flood the streets. Suddenly, a roar like the roar of lions rises up and buffets the girl in blue, the girl on the balcony. She laughs again, for she knows that they are fighting for her, A figure appears on the balcony, next to the girl. The figure is a man, and he too is dressed in blue. Suddenly, just as suddenly as it began, the fighting ceases. "My God," whispers Chester, his cheeks gone pale, "what am I doing out here?" "Maybe I got the D.T.s," whispers Bartholomew, "but maybe I don't..." He sits down on the curb and rubs his head in disbelief. Oswald does not speak. His shame is the greatest. He slinks into the darkness of an alley and briefly wishes for an overcoat. The pride of lion cubs has been routed, and now they scatter, each one scrambling for his private den of security, each one lost in a wild and nameless fear. In twc and threes and twenties the) rush back to their homes, their wives, their endless lives. Far above, in the apartment with the balcony, a man in blue is chiding a girl in blue. "That was scarcely reasonable, Dorothy." "But Daddy, you promised to let me have them for the entire night!" "Yes, but..." "I wasn't really going to let them hurt themselves! Really, I wasn't!" "But, Dorothy -- you know these things can get out of hand." "Oh, but Daddy, you know how I adore strong, quiet, proud men. Rebellious men like Marlon." "Yes, and you know how I adore order and peace. There shall be no more riots! And tomorrow our little puppets shall go back to their 'dull' lives, as you so wittily put it, and everything shall be as I wish." McRae arose at the sound of the alarm, dressed in a stupor and stumbled into his kitchen for breakfast. "My goodness, Chester," said his wife, who had already arisen, "you look grouchier than usual! Ha, ha!" He smiled wanly and opened the morning paper. Halfway across town, Bartholomew Oliver was still asleep, casually lost in the pleasures of an erotic dream. But Professor Oswald Williams, his tiny jaw unshaven and his eager eyes shot through with fatigue, had been hard at work for three hours, scribbling down his latest exposure of the logical positivists. IF Novelette The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was -- their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! tified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown ?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" "Nyet" said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When -- boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom-boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English' "He's done it deliberately,' said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" "Nyet." "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all -- " "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." H E crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table by Kris Nsvills and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie ! Charlie !" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!"It's -- " There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an aftershock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just -- " Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryiy. inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage. Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued : "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake -- and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" by Kris Nevills "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and -- " He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it -- " "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the hew stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before serv  tt ice. Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think -- ?" "Gentlemen ! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way' Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less -- " "They've got the powerplants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarby Kris Neville in's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power... " "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've -- got -- aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unthe winning of the moon screwing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires. Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom #, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkin's helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Capt. Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some # seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak ? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He, reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "...Freedom #! Hello, Freedom #! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right ?" "We're all right. A-Okay" Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an...underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the result-? ant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release acimu lated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom # was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union" came the reply, "has reported the by Kris Neville disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in...about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "Fat a moment there, I though?... " "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so... idiotic is not quite strong enough... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." Ill Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom # was open. "What is that?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but #-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh... "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But! this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale -- " "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere #  has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fiftyfive gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, " 'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughiy." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and... let's see... if we could... I T took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. by Kris Neville 'Well, said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy. It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt... Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No !" Major Winship snapped. compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what. Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. by Kris Neville "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I -- " interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin , do you ?" "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't  know a room-temperature-c u r i n g epoxy resin from-r-V "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock ! It is an epoxy ! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What -- what -- what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's...it's... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid...it's weakening it... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "W a t c h out ! There. There r Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler. IV wait before they dared venture back, Capt. Wilkins, interrupted once by what appeared to be a moderately mild after-shock from the previous moonquake, explained the phenomena they had just observed. "A room-temperature-curing epoxy liberates heat during its curing reaction. And the hotter it is when you mix it, the faster it reacts. The drum had been absorbing heat out here for several hours much faster than it could radiate it away. It may have been forty or fifty degrees C when we stirred in the curing agent. At that temperature, a pound mass will normally kick over in five or ten minutes. But here, the only way it can lose the reaction heat is by the slow process of radiation. And that means as the heat builds up, the epoxy goes faster and faster, building up even more heat. And furthermore, we're not talking about a pound, which can maybe get up to # C. in air. We're talking about # pounds, liberating five hundred times as much heat as one pound, and getting God knows how hot -- " "I sure wish you'd have told me this a little bit earlier," Major Winship said. "I certainly wish you'd told me." Capt. Wilkins said, "Honest, it never occurred to me Finogenov would be dumb enough to tell us to mix a whole drum of epoxy." Major Winship began to curse mechanically. "I don't think he did it deliberately, Charlie. I really don't," Captain Lawler said. "I don't think he knew any better. Maybe he was showing off by giving us a whole drum. Hell, I know he was showing off. But something like that could kill somebody, and I don't think he'd go that far." "Think it's safe, yet?" Major Winship asked. He was perspiring freely again. "I need some thermal protection. What'll we do? You know damned well. We'll have to go live with them. by Kris Neville Arid that sticks in my craw, gentlemen. That -- sticks -- in my -- craw' "There's nothing for it," Capt. Wilkins said helpfully. "Let me go in and survey the damage," Lt. Chandler said. "That's my job," Major Winship said. "I've got to go in anyway." He lumbered through the airlock and stepped into the total darkness through the razor-edge curtain. "I see it glowing, still," he said. "It's almost as bad in here as out there, now. I guess it's okay. Come on. Let's bumble around finding the air bottles for the suits and get over there before I'm a boiled lobster. Not only is my reefer out, so's my light." "Coming." An air of urgency began to accumulate. "What are we going to do with him? It's a half-hour run over there." "Think you can make it, Charlie?" "I'm damned well hot." "Charlie, come out here. In the car. Skip, you get 'the bottles. You drive." Major Winship came out. "Lay down in back," Capt. Wilkins said. "Les, you lay down beside him. I'll lay on top of him. I think we can shield him pretty good that way." "That's good thinking," Capt. Lawler said from inside. The operation was not easily executed. Lt. Chandler got in first, and then Major Winship squeezed beside him. "Careful, there," he said as Capt. Wilkins came aboard. Capt. Wilkins's foot rolled off one of Major Winship's thighs. "Watch it!" "I am." "Oops !" "Ufff! I felt that. Ugh. Thank God for the way these are built." "How's that?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "I guess... It's okay, I guess." "Cooler?" "It's too soon to tell. Man, I'll bet we look silly." Capt. Lawler came out with the bottles and studied his companions for a moment. "See if we can get up and over a little more, Les." "This okay?" "B e t t e r. How's it feel, Charlie?" "Okay." Cant. Lawler deposited the air bottles. "Everyone got enough air?" "I guess we're all okay," Capt. Wilkins said; "Don't we look silly?" Major Winship asked plaintively. "I can't possibly describe my emotions at this minute." "You look all right," Capt. Lawler said. "Still hot?" Major Winship grunted. He said nothing. "I'll get there as fast as I ran # . jarring across the lunar surface, Major Winship said, "Fm not appreciably cooler; but then I'm not appreciably hotter, either." "Shut up, Charlie. You're a thirty-year man," Lt. Chandler said. "Old soldiers never die, they just become desiccated." "I'd like a beer," Major W in ship said. "A cold, frosty, foamy beer. Big collar. Gimme a beer, a little shaker of salt --  "Finogenov's probably got eight or ten cases." "For once, I hope you're right. Try to bounce a little easier, Larry." "R u s s i a n s don't drink beer," Lt. Chandler said. "You sure?" "Vodka," Capt Lawler grunted. "They drink champagne, you idiots," Capt. Wilkins said. "Beggars can't be choosers," Major Winship said. "Champagne is okay by me. if it's just cold." "Finogenov will have a few hundred pounds of ice." "Cut it out," Major Winship said. "Boy, you wait till we get you back to Earth. When it comes time to reup, I'm going to be there. I'm going to remind you of this one." "You're a thirty-year man, too, Les," Major Winship said. "Not me," Lt. Chandler said. "I've had it, dad. Fm going to sell my life story to the movies and spend the rest of my life eating popcorn and watching what an idiot I was. A man can get hurt up here." "So you want to be a civilian?" "You're damned right I do," Lt. Chandler said. "We're about there," Capt. Lawler cut in. "You still okay, Charlie?" "Fine." "Here's the little ridge, then. Hold on, we're taking the angle up. You riding okay, Charlie?" "Fine, Skip." After a moment, Capt. Lawler said, "I see the base now. The top. Hey!" He slammed on the brakes. "Oh, no! Those...those fools! Those idiots." "What's wrong?" Major Winship demanded. "Skip -- what's wrong?" "The second little dome is down. It wasn't that way a couple of hours ago. And they've block-and-tackled a drum of calking compound up on the main dome." "We've got to stop them!" Major Winship cried. "Skip! Skip!'?  "Charlie, there's nothing we can do. The drum's just starting to turn red." There was silence for a while. "It's melting through, now. There it goes. Down through the dome. Out of sight." After a moment, Capt. Lawler continued. "Funny how by Kris Nevills things fall so slowly under this low gravity. It floated through their dome just like a feather. You should have seen it." Eventually, Lt. Chandler said, "Boys, this is my last hitch." There was more silence. Capt. Wilkins mused, "I guess they didn't have a little scale either." Someone was breathing loudly. At length, Major Winship said reflectively, "Why do you suppose they would try to calk it from the outside?" Again silence. Major Winship asked the question. "Okay. Let's have it. How's the other little dome?" "Other one? Oh, sorry," Capt. Lawler said. "It looks all right." "It better be all right," Lt. Chandler said. I N the end, the eleven of them were crowded into the one remaining operational structure of the four available on the moon at sunrise. For perhaps the tenth time, General Finogenov offered his apologies. He and Major Winship were huddled side by side in a corner. They were drinking vodka. "Plenty of everything," General Finogenov said. "Don't concern yourself, Major. Air, food, water, we have more than enough for a prolonged siege." "Accidents will happen." "Exactly," said General Finogenov, pouring more vodka for himself. "Glad you understand." He put the empty bottle down. "We will have another one next week. In the meantime -- I very much regret the inconvenience. Plenty of food, water, air, though. Pinov! Pinov! Vodka!" Pinov answered in Russian. General Finogenov frowned. "Dear, dear," he said. "I'm afraid this must be our last one, Major. You see, while we have plenty of everything else, we are, you see... The truth of the matter is, we didn't foresee visitors. Unfortunately, we have no more vodka." "No more vodka," said General Finogenov. He stared morosely into the inky distance. "Major Winship, I have a confession. Oh, that second one was a beauty. You didn't feel it?" "Our leak sprang on the first one. The second was quite mild, we thought." "We were right on the fault line," General Finogenov said. "As you Americans say, it was a beauty. I have a confession. One must admit one's mistakes." "Yes?" "We used much too large a bomb," he said. "I'm with you," Lt. Chandler chimed in from somewhere out of the darkness. "But when do you think you're going to get the lights IF  Short Story A T nine hundred hours there were explosions off to the right at about seven hundred yards. At eleven hundred hours the slagger came by to pick up the casualties among the gadgets. Charlie saw the melting head at the end of its heavy beam going up and down like the front end of a hardworking chicken only about fifty yards west of his foxhole. Then it worked its way across the battlefield for about half an hour and, loaded down with melted forms of damaged robots, of all shapes and varieties, disappeared behind the low hill to the west, and left, of Charlie. It was a hot August day somewhere in or near Ohio, with a thunderstorm coming Peace is well worth dying for... it had better be! on. There was that yellow color in the air. At twelve hundred hours the chow gadget came ticking over the redoubt behind the foxhole. It crawled into the foxhole, jumped up on the large table and opened itself out to reveal lunch. The menu this day was liver and onions, whole corn, whipped potato and raspberries. "And no whip cream' said Charlie. "You haven't been doing your exercises," said the chow gadget in a fine soprano voice. "I'm a front-line soldier," said Charlie. "I'm an infantryman in a foxhole overlooking ground zero. I'll be damned if I take exercises." "In any case, there is no excuse for not shaving." "I'll be damned if I shave." "But why not shave? Wouldn't it be better than having that itchy, scratchy beard -- " "No," said Charlie. He went around back of the chow gadget and began to take its rear, plate off. "What are you doing to me?" said the chow gadget. "You've got something stuck to you here," said Charlie. "Hold still." He surreptitiously took a second out to scratch at his four-day beard. "There's a war on, you know." "I know that," said the chow gadget. "Of course." "Infantrymen like me are dying daily." "Alas," said the chow gadget, in pure, simple tones. "To say nothing," said Charlie, setting the rear plate to one side, "of the expenditure of you technical devices. Not that there's any comparison between human lives and the wastage of machines." "Of course not." "So how can any of you, no matter how elaborate your computational systems, understand -- " Charlie broke off to poke among the innards of the chow machine. T# not damage me," it L' said. "Not if I can help it," said Charlie. " -- understand what it feels like to a man sitting here day after day, pushing an occasional button, never knowing the results of his button pushing, and living in a sort of glass-case comfort except for the possibility that he may just suddenly be dead -- suddenly, like that, before he knows it." He broke off to probe again. "It's no life for a man." "Terrible, terrible," said the chow gadget. "But there is still hope for improvement." "Don't hold your breath," said Charlie. "There's -- ah !" He interrupted himself, pulling a small piece of paper out of the chow gadget. "Is there something the matter?" said the chow gadget. "No," said Charlie. He stepped over to the observation window and glanced out. The slagger was making its return. It was already within about fifty yards of the foxhole. "Not a thing," said Charlie. "As a matter of fact, the war's over." "How interesting," said the chow gadget. "That's right," said Charlie. "Just let me read you this little billet-doux I got from Foxhole thirty-four. Meet you back at the bar , Charlie. It's all over. Your hunch that we could get a message across was the clear quill. Answer came today the same way , through the international weather reports. They want to quit as well as we do. Peace is agreed on, and the gadgets -- " Charlie broke off to look at the chow gadget. "That's you, along with the rest of them." "Quite right. Of course said the chow gadget. " -- have already accepted the information. Well be out of here by sundown. And that takes care of the war." "It does indeed' said the chow gadget. "Hurrah! And farewell." "Farewell? said Charlie. "You will be returning to civilian life," said the chow gadget. "I will be scrapped." "That's right," said Charlie. "I remember the preprograming for the big units. This war's to be the last, they were programe d. Well -- " said Charlie. For a moment he hesitated. "What d'you know? I may end up missing you a little bit, after all." He glanced out the window. The slagger was almost to the dugout. "Well, well," he said. "Now that the time's come...we did have quite a time together, three times a day. No more string beans, huh?" "I bet not," said the chow gadget with a little laugh. "No more caramel pudding." "I guess so." outside, broke the thick concrete roof off the dugout and laid it carefully aside. "Excuse me," it said, its cone-shaped melting head nodding politely some fifteen feet above Charlie. "The war's over." "I know," said Charlie. "Now there will be peace. There are orders that all instruments of war are to be slagged and stockpiled for later peaceful uses." It had a fine baritone voice. "Excuse me," it said, "but are you finished with that chow gadget there?" "You haven't touched a bite," said the chow gadget. "Would you like just a small spoonful of raspberries?" "I don't think so," said Charlie, slowly. "No, I don't think so." "Then farewell," said the chow gadget. "I am now expendable." The melting head of the slagger dipped toward the chow gadget. Charlie opened his mouth suddenly, but before he could speak, there was a sort of invisible flare from the melting head and the chow gadget became a sort of puddle of metal which the melting head picked up magnetically and swung back to the hopper behind it. "Blast it!" said Charlie with feeling. "I could just as well have put in a request to keep the darn thing for a souvenir." The heavy melting head bobbed apologetically back. "I'm afraid that wouldn't be possible," it said. "The order allows no exceptions. All military instruments are to be slagged and stockpiled." "Well -- " said Charlie. But it was just about then that he noticed the melting head was by Gordon R. Dickson IF  Novelette What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having T '  to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment ?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that' repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider -- ?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself' "Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields' Mitchell said. "But now Macklin -- " Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin -- who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University -- had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. SO Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin. The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke...or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. 'Please come in' Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven' Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the. right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we cao' Ferris said. by Jim Harmon "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?"' Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches -- nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence -- but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels -- and only the cerebral vessels -- so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse ?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." W S aid thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps..." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean no I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest -- the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood. pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that ?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches -- they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." by Jim Harmon "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II  slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor -- Harold -- you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees -- but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't "enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But -- " The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The -- trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." '"Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp. Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate !" ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dumdum-dum. As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a by Jim Harmon sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel -- Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic -- lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some oddshaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man -- another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia -- was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But -- " Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. Ill M itchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot ?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But -- " Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel ' r asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his braiif ?" "No, ho ! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? 'Maybe by 'Jim Harmon I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food -- blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decay yy in g. The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. T HE colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Matklin means to us? Do you Want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essnmight just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." "With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if yoqr mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity -- say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to. Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state #f lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided !" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of. Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But -- " "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give by Jim Harmon those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority" "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable... " Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" y Jim Harmon "To celebrate' Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV M acklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." I "I mean, are you alone ?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor -- Elliot -- El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying -- thinking -- about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" # "No, I -- yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal !" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me -- I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly. M itchell opened the door on the first knock. Macklin stood in the doorway, looking uncertain and ill at ease. Carson stood behind his left shoulder, looking actively belligerent. "Come in," Mitchell said. "I have the injection ready for you. Doctor." "Now you aren't going to 'cure' me?" Macklin said in concern. "This is just going to help ease my mind?" "Of course," the biologist said soothingly. Colonel Carson lunged forward, mouth opening ominousiyMitchell winked at him broadly. Carson stopped in confusion and studied Mitchell's face. He essayed a second wink. Carson relaxed. Mitchell picked up the hypo of colorless carrier fluid from the interestingly stained work table. "One thing first, Dr. Macklin. I'll have to have your signed release for this treatment. It specifies that your intelligence will probably be affected in this effort to keep your head from troubling you. Carson can witness it." "Sure," Macklin said. "I guess that's okay. If you say so." The colonel grinned, his face hot and shiny. "I'm sure it will be fine, Doctor." Macklin looked at the officer with almost a trace of suspicion, then accepted the sheet of typescript and the ballpoint pen from Mitchell. Laboriously he affixed his signature. Mitchell had the mathematician take a seat and pressed the needle directly into the neck area. "Ouch !" Macklin said. Mitchell stood back and exhaled. "It should take effect shortly," the biologist said. ' "Good," Carson said... The cylinders of the electric clock said #:#:# A.M. Macklin was playing with his hands and their shadows in front of his face. "How long will this stage last, Dr. Mitchell?" Colonel Carson said in concern. "Indefinitely. This is the y Jim Harmon last stage. The circulatory system of his brain has been relaxed to the point where he has about the I.Q. of a turnip." Carson steeled himself. "So, doctor! You're nothing but a dirty Lux!" "No, Colonel. I've never even seen Luxemburg. My reason for doing this to Dr. Macklin were entirely patriotic... or, at least, sympathetic." "Tell that to the hangman! I'll see you tried for treason." "Look at him, Colonel. He is certainly no longer legally responsible. He has the strength of a grown man and the intellect of an amoeba. It would be impossible to keep him alive either under sedation or in a padded cell. Even if Mrs. Macklin still refuses her consent -- and I don't think she will when she sees him in this bad a state -- you can go over her head and get permission for Ferris and myself to administer our antitoxin to destroy the pituitrin-absorbing virus colony in his cerebrum." Carson looked dazed. "I -- I'll call her." orangish sunrise with, a feeling of defeat. He turned from the window to face the instruments of his laboratory. Mrs. Macklin had come. Numbly she signed the release allowing the restorative treatment. By the time she, Carson and the mathematician left, Macklin had been able to say "mama" and -- embarrassingly -- "p a p a" to him. Mitchell was confident he would regain his full senses and that the brain cells had only become passive, and had not decayed. But still it was only the wiping out of one horrendous mistake. Months and months of work wasted. The door banged open and a small man entered with a long, slender brown paper bag and proceeding on an aeronautical search pattern. "Dr. Ferris!" Mitchell said. "You mustn't take it so hard. I tried to get in touch with you. But at least I have been able to administer the antitoxin to Dr. Macklin." "Who gives a damn about that egghead?" Ferris said, placing the paperbag upright on the work table. "Don't you understand, man? We're rich! Where are the glasses?" "Rich?" Mitchell said. "Doctor, would you like me to help you over to your own quarters?" "Relax, Mitchell. I'm not that drunk. I know what I'm talking about. I tell you the F-M Virus is going to make us rich! Powerful! Men like Elliot Macklin will be insignificant beside us." He knew that Ferris was in sober earnest. "What do you mean, Doctor?" Ferris turned, his thin face lit up with a flush of pleasure. "Mitchell, we have something to make people permanently stupid ! People can stop thinking temporarily by using alcohol or narcotics or watching television. But we -- only you and I -- have something to let them stop thinking permanently. And we'll make them pay for it -- for the shot and the rent on the condition. Who wants to think? A handful of people. Who has to think to do routine paperwork or push a button or pull a lever? A bunch of happy, content morons can do all of that. We ll return man to his natural, pre-evolutionary state of stupidity. As for those of us who don't take the treatment, we have it made! Made !" Mitchell stared at him. "Don't you get it, Mitchell?" Ferris roared. "We have the ultimate tranquilizer " Mitchell thought of the world after the F-M Virus had been given it. He thought: In his condition, if I shoved Ferris so that his head cracked into the corner of the table, no one could prove anything. I could destroy our records... No, it wasn't any good. Some other researcher somewhere else was bound to isolate the F-M Virus. None of it was any good. He groped blindly towards the door. He had to get out, get to a drugstore, buy some aspirins. IF  Short Story The computer's answers were remarkable -- especially when nobody had asked a question! said the little perforated card. Henderson stepped back from the computer and scratched his hairy head. Nonsense again. He threw the card in the wastebasket and repeated his directions on another : "One hundred fifty cancer susceptible mice were injected in the pectoral region with #cc of aromatic compound A. One hundred fifty identical control mice were injected with isotonic saline, B. Eight in group A developed sarcomas at the point of injection, Group B developed none. Test the null hypothesis at # level of statistical signifi-. cance." The computer accepted Henderson's second offering, chewed it into acceptable code, swallowed it, and burped. Henderson watched suspiciously as red and green blinkers went on and off and a contented humming noise came from the machine's bowels. After a while the card emerged from another opening -- which orifice had been thoughtfully placed at the appropriate end of the machine, anatomically speaking; thus establishing rapport between Henderson, a biologist, and nature's final product of evolution, the machine. Henderson looked at the card : "Today you should seek solace with close friends. Give some thought to personal finances. Evening: get out and see people. A stranger will bring news' the card and tossed it in the wastebasket. He sat down, and with a. little arithmetic and some formulas tested the null hypothesis all by himself. He found that his mouse experiment carried no significance whatever. Then he made a notation that someone would have to come out in the morning for his sick machine. In the morning when the machine's doctor, came to inspect it, and percuss it, and auscult it, and give it a barium enema, it behaved very well. The "doctor" left, assuring Henderson the machine merely had the hiccups. That night Henderson asked it a question about confidence limits for a universe mean, from a mean of a sample of n observations and got back, "Uranus on Antares but conjoining Jupiter and trining the Ascendent. Yours is a strongly literary nature." Henderson decided to turn the machine off for a few days. It emitted an almost human sigh as it ran down and came to a halt. He had no immediate use for it as he would be injecting mice with carcinogens in liver, spleen, marrow and kidneys to find out if they were specific. In three or four days whatever virus was affecting the machine's cerebral cortex should have run its course and the methodical Henderson could run his methodical observations into the machine, which would excrete a good methodical answer to be duly filed in the medical school library, where it would be invisible to anyone looking for it, such as freshmen medical students, and always in the way for anybody else. Henderson surveyed his laboratory with infinite pleasure, knowing that it contained within its confines all that could be known about the universe, about men and about mice. Event Y followed event X in a purely causal manner. The successful investigator needed only to attach himself to the cycle and ride along, afterwards consulting the computer to find out if what he'd observed had any significance. In the morning when Henderson entered the laboratory he found that someone had left the computer on overnight. It was running full blast, which is to say the lights were blinking and the little cards of omniscience were popping out of the machine like toast and falling into the wastebasket, which is just where Henderson left them. Meanwhile, Dr. Henderson's close associate, Colonel Smith in the nearby radiation laboratory, came in to visit him and asked permission to use the computer. And so in another week it was rumored about that the machine in Henderson's laboratory was using a foreign dialect and answering questions about standard deviation with strange symbols which looked like crescent moons and archaic squiggles, with a little geometry on the side. The machine was becoming impudent too. To Colonel Smith's question about the possibility of an "overkill" if such and such size bomb dropped on such and such enemy city the answer came back, "Rubbish. Aldebaran conjoining Saturn, Moon and Mars. Seek guidance from others, Hannibal blushed." The machine's doctor promptly installed a loudspeaker to help keep track of future aberrations. walked in. He was a balding Greek gentleman, dedicated to a life with brush and dustpan. The machine was muttering darkly to itself, but when he entered the door it quieted down, contemplating its relays. The janitor went meticulously about his business, mopping the floor, straightening chairs and secretly rearranging pipette and retorts in their racks, because he was a more meticulous person than even Dr. Henderson. As he turned to leave, the machine in the corner belched twice and then said as an afterthought : "I am the ghost of Astrologers Sagittarian." The janitor adjusted his hearing aid, squeezed his mop and carried his pail out the door. As he went back in to pack up his cleaning powder and brushes, the machine said, "What year is this? Limits within standard deviation, click, click, awrk !" The janitor was a reasonable man. He walked over to the machine's microphone and told it what year it was as well as the month, day and hour. Then he carried his brushes and cleaning compound out of the room and locked the door. But the janitor's night was a long one. At midnight, when he finished two floors and only had three more to go, he took his coffee break. As he talked with his old friend Samuel, the night watchman, he fell to thinking. That was an unforgivable mistake. After the coffee break, they both went back up to Dr. Henderson's laboratory and listened to the machine talking to itself. "I feel like a spider," said the machine. "Nonsense. From one cobweb to another. Must settle down and build a grau... spltvbk...within # confidence limits. Nova in Andromeda was bad enough. Now this. One hundred fifty cancer susceptible mice inherit the Earth." Suddenly the machine fell silent, sensing it had visitors. The night watchman reached into the wastebasket and pulled out one of the machine's cards. "Aldebaran is martial in nature, in the ninth degree of Tropical Gemini' it said. T'M a Gemifti!" exclaimed A the janitor, surprised to see anything familiar come out of the machine. "Birthday is May #." "Wonderful!" cried the machine. "First intelligent man I've heard so far. Gemini is justly famed as the owner of a quick mind and ready wit. Your intellectual achievements are a splendid asset to your literary inclinations." The janitor', embarrassed at the sudden praise, shifted his broom from one hand to the other. The machine continued. "I need an Ephemeris," said the machine. "Can you find aa Ephemeris? I need one desperately !" and the machine's desperate need for an Ephemeris so shook its intestines, liver and gallbladder that its tone of voice came out a minor third above the normal monotonous dirge of the loudspeaker. "An E-what-eris?" said the janitor. "An Ephemeris," repeated the machine. "An astronomical almanac. Something that tells me where Mars is. There I was, On my way over from the cloudk of Magellan to visit friends in Orion when Whammo! Mars comes into conjunction with Uranus. When something that big happens I jttst sit down and wait. Here I art now in this absurd device. Do you suppose you could look out the window and tell me where Mars is?" The night watchman said, "It's cloudy outside." "See!" said the machine, "When Mars goes on the warpath nothing comes out right. Now, Gemini, if you will just go down to the library and get me an Ephemeris for this year we can clear this up and I'll be on my way, indebted to you for life, if not longer." "Who shall I say it's for?" asked the janitor, who did not fully understand that the library was public, never having been in it before, and felt he needed a recommendation or a slip of approval. "Just say it's for Pyet, the astrologer," said the machine. "And what are you doing inside Dr. Henderson's machine ?" asked the night watchman. "I wouldn't care to be quoted on this," replied the machine, "but actually any system of communicating interrelated events with a high degree of complexity, such as the brain, or this machine, and with some number of critical processes at the quantum statistical level, can support consciousness." The janitor and the night watchman looked blankly at each other and the machine, slightly embarrassed, added' by way of explanation. I ' "I like to read a little physics now and then. A harmless . superstition containing many pleasant diversions. "Before this I lived in a star, a puff of expanding gas. Before that in a haunted house...dreadful. And before that in the lopsided blob of protoplasm that was the last of Pyet, the astrologer. "As for Dr. Henderson's mousecatcher," chuckled the machine, "any port in a storm. Mars and Uranus you know." The janitor was somewhat impatient with the machine. It had detained him already and probably would soon be giving him orders. "I still have three floors to clean," said the janitor. "After that I will see if the library downstairs has a...what was it?" "Ephemeris," said the machine. "E-P-H-E-M-E-R-I-S. Thank you." A ND so the night watchman and the janitor both said good night to the machine. Later, in the very early morning, the janitor stole back into the laboratory with a book and read some strange, strange things out loud and then stole out of the room again and locked the door behind him. Shortly after, Samuel, the night watchman, passed by. He was surprised at an unearthly glow coming from within and a peculiar grating noise as if someone were stepping on a radio. Then the unearthly glow appeared on the fire escape and Samuel, rushing out to observe, thought the glow seemed to fly up through a hole in the low clouds where a thousand stars still blazed brightly. In its wake there was a sound like laughing. A few hours later Dr. Henderson unlocked the door of his laboratory and pushed a cart full of mice in before him. During the morning he dissected three hundred mice, popping out liver, spleen and kidneys as if he were shelling peas. In the afternoon he made sections of the organs, stained them with hematoxylin and eosin, mounted them on slides and looked at them under his new stereoscopic microscope. Five minutes before five, Dr. Henderson's friend, Colonel Smith, came in and watched as Henderson somewhat dubiously fed the three hundred mice, now in statistical form, into the machine. The machine whirred efficiently and shot out the answer in seconds. "Statistically significant," said the machine. Henderson followed his friend Colonel Smith out the door, looking neither right not left, and locked it behind him. It had been a good day. Behind, in the laboratory which contained within its confines all that could be known about the universe, about man, and about mice, the machine squatted in silence, the approaching darkness already enfolding it like a by WilMam Harris Illustrated by Gaughan I of the small stream and knelt to drink from the clear water. After the first few swallows she turned to look back, ready to flee if he should make one of the lionlike fast charges he had twice tried earlier in the chase. Instead he stopped and waited, letting her drink at leisure. When she finished she rose to her feet, walked through the stream and resumed trotting on the other side. "Before nightfall, my pretty one !" he called after her, and knelt to drink the cold refreshing water himself. When he lifted his head she was a hundred yards away and it was time to resume the chase. Michael Robert Combs was tired in every bone and muscle. It seemed that he had run for years through the cool air on the mountain slopes, always a few yards behind the girl's lightly dancing feet. This odd affair had started yesterday morning at sunup, at her parent's house in the lowlands, and they had trotted without resting for over thirty hours. When the shadows began to lengthen it was time to live up to his boast or admit defeat. Slowly, forcing his dead muscles by the sheer power of will, he stepped up the pace, extending himself second by agonizing second until he had changed from a trot to a slow run and gradually on into a racer's long-stepping stride. Ahead of him, without visible additional effort, the girl matched his pace until they were running, still the same distance apart, through the deepening shadows. He had not drawn a full breath into his laboring lungs in an eternity. His legs were dead sticks hanging by slack tendons from lifeless hips, and his feet were mushy pillows that no longer felt the ground they trod. His stonv ach had shriveled and pulled tight against his ribs. He was near complete collapse and knew it. But he also knew that before he stopped he would die running, die between one step and the next, because he was the most stubIF  Novelette He had given himself one Arcturan year -- but the aliens allowed him less! born man Earth had ever flung into space and defeat was unthinkable. T HE end came with dramatic suddenness. The girl stumbled and fell. She had tripped before and gotten up and fled again, but this time her strength failed her. While he covered the hundred yards between them she collapsed. She lay there breathing in great panting sobs, shoulders shaking, head jerking, body spasmodically twitching, leg muscles pulling and relaxing in an automatic effort to propel her one more step. He reached her and stopped, stood there savoring the delicious knowledge that he could fall by her side and breathe, stretch out, relax and sleep. After a moment the spasms shaking the girl abated and her breathing eased. She passed immediately into deep slumber. He knelt, turned her head gently in his hands, kissed the relaxed lips and collapsed by her side. He paused in that timeless land lying just back of consciousness, unable to believe his senses. They were saying that the air was fresh, cool, that bright, deep yellow sunlight beat on his closed lids, that he was lying in heavy grass, wet and cold and that he had not been this hungry since his starvation-racked childhood. The sense of unreality faded as memory re.turned and he knew he was not in his strap in the ship. The world around him was real. Someone shook his shoulder vigorously and he opened his eyes. Niki was kneeling beside him, a cluster of shiny black fruit in her hand. "Eat these very slowly, Mike. Let your stomach stretch gradually' He was so stiff and sore it was painful to move, but his stomach clamored imperiously for attention. And the fruit was good. The reddish yellow sun of Arcturus was rising swiftly now, bringing a warmth to his chilled bones and outlining the vista before It him. The planet of Kee'Na had no honest mountains, but these hills approached a mile in elevation and they were near the crest. Below them, mile after mile of rolling, grassy country merged imperceptibly into the haze of distance, the whole dotted with the farmhouses and accompanying small buildings that were the homes of the Loyios. The farms were small, but the entire world, as he had seen it from a ship in the upper stratosphere, was roughly the same. The only larger buildings were the small factories scattered over the entire planet and the regular pattern of composite-function structures called centers. "W'hy didn't you run away when you woke first, Niki? If you'd hidden I might never have found you, and the rules say I must return you to your father's house." "True, Mike. But I am tired of running. You caught me fairly, and I will concede the first event and return with "Good. I was afraid I'd have to carry you." Niki smiled wanly, but her understanding of Earth humor was too limited to be certain of his meaning. She was at least five nine in height and weighed close to a hundred and forty pounds. The tightfitting one-piece suit she wore left her arms and legs bare, and they were beautifully shaped, well-muscled limbs. H ER face was beautiful. No other word could describe it. The nose was thin, the nostrils strong but delicately carved. The cheekbones were prominent and high, the sides of her face smooth and almost flat. Her skin was a light bronze, her hair, hanging to her shoulders, a deep rich black. On Earth she would have passed for a professional athlete with a heavy tan, and could have blended in with ease. The man who threatened to carry her was five-eleven and weighed a hundred and seventy. He was thirty-five years old, gray around the temples, and considerably less of an athlete than he had been ten years ago in the Academy. Still, he was required by regulation to keep himself fit. They found a rock-bed stream of clear water and washed down the fruit, then set out for the nearest visible farmhouse several miles away. As the exercise eased the stiffness in his joints Mike found himself stealing glances at the tall girl walking with long, free strides by his side. He actually knew almost nothing about her, other than the obvious facts that she was beautiful, desirable, and aloof. "How many more years do fey Jooopfc Groan you expect to spend in training, Niki?" he asked, hoping she would lose that cool reserve in conversation. "Your years, about three. Our time of learning never actually ends, though, for as soon as I become a doctor I will take a pupil myself, and the process of teaching is selfeducational." "Every highly skilled person has a pupil rather than the pupils attending training meetings in groups?" He chose his words carefully, not certain of the extent of her English vocabulary. "Your Earthly concept of mass schools is unknown here. As children we study in the home under the direction of our parents. When we are ready we are given adulting tests, and if we pass, become adults and eligible for higher training. There are always as many skilled persons as pupils so we have difficulty entering the fields we choose." "How many Loyios are there?" "About two hundred million We have kept our population stable for many years." There was a gentle humming sound and a large, rectangular box came out of the sun toward them, settling gently to the ground a few feet away. It was one of the electric flying carriers of the Loyios, a wingless, wheelless box that successfully defied 'gravity. Mike knew that the Loyios had succeeded in tapping their planet's magnetic field for electric power, proving their technology ahead of Earth's in that one respect, and apparently they used another application of the same principle to nullify gravity. Their only other form of transportation was trained riding animals. The carrier door opened and Niki's younger brother Rober, a boy just approaching maturity, stepped out. He nodded to Mike with the gravity seemingly common to all his people and spoke to Niki in their own language. "Father sent us transportation, Mike," Niki translated, "He wants us to reach home in time to rest well for another contest tomorrow." "We need it," Mike said feelingly, and followed her on board. Rober had brought along hot food and he and Nike stuffed themselves as they flew homeward. When she could eat no more Niki curled up in her chair like a giant kitten and almost immediately fell asleep. It was a silent ride for the hour it took the slow craft to cover the miles they had ran and Mike found his mind returning to the time, four days before, when he had met her. II H E and several other ; officers had been standing outside the ship a few minutes after the touchdown, stretching and breathing deeply of the fresh clean air of Arcturus Four. The landing field was a half-mile from the ethnologists' station and the colonel and the two institute men who were inspecting it had walked over. Several crewmen were performing routine maintenance tasks on the hull and the rest were just watching and enjoying ##'s G while they tried to absorb enough fresh air to last the next four months. A regular run lasted two years and they touched down only six times. Someone mounted on a four-legged beast left the station and came swiftly toward them. As the two creatures neared the ship it became obvious the rider was a woman, and when she drew closer they saw that she was young, lovely, and scantily clad. The other officers stared with simple admiration commingled with the intense desire of men long without women. Mike Combs looked at her and felt a hard jarring shock, a wrenching, tearing sensation of absolute need that reached deep inside his guts and anchored itself permanently. With a sense of wonder and surprise he recognized the feeling. It had come once before, and was unmistakable in its intensity. He was looking at something he honestly wanted. A hot street corner in the Canaveral slums , a broad window , the shimmer of stainless steel appliances , people shoving by on a busy Saturday morning , and a boy in ragged clothing standing rapt, taut , eyes glued to the graysuited form in the white-and-blue poster. Under the rugged , handsome figure a caption read: BE A enough. The story was too well known to need elaboration. The small slum kid who was Mike Combs did not make a resolution , either silent or oral. It was unnecessary . The desire had flood ed through him , irresistible , deep and complete , and he had known he would be a spaceman. The girl rode her mount directly to the group and dismounted in one smooth flowing motion. "I have a message for Captain Combs," she said pleasantly, speaking English with only a slight accent. Her voice was deep and strong, yet at the same time intensely female. Mike stepped forward and took the extended paper. It was a requisition for medical supplies and was properly signed by the colonel. "If you'll come with me, please?" he said, and led the way into the ship. The thought came as they stepped into the elevator that his fel by Joseph Green low officers would give him hell about not sending a crewman on such a menial errand, but it would be envy speaking. In the small dispensary he slowly gathered up the required drugs. As he handed them to her he asked, "May I inquire your name?" "As near as it will translate, Niki." He placed his hands on her shoulders, so calmly and naturally she had no reason to be alarmed, and said, "You and I will be married within a year, Niki." Then he drew her unresisting form into his arms and kissed her. She was stone-still in his embrace, completely u n r esponsive, and only when he stepped back did he see the strong shock in her eyes. He held the door open for her and, dazedly, she preceded him into the elevator and they were swiftly conveyed to the ground. When the ship took off on the next leg of its long run Mike was not on board. I N becoming a deserter Mike Combs gave up the first thing he had ever really wanted to undertake the pursuit of the second. Captain Combs was a secretive man. He spoke not at all of his thoughts and only seldom of his actions. After spending one night in the woods, however, he decided his chances of success would be better if based on more information, and appeared next morning at the ethnologists' station. "Where in hell have you been? Why did you desert your ship?" snapped Dr. Carnacki, the chubby doctor of humanoid sociology, when the spaceman stepped inside. Mike grinned easily. He had known the peppery, likeable scientist since the long trip out two years ago, and knew that he possessed a s c a I p e #-sharp tongue. "I didn't desert. I fell into a ravine and it took me this long to climb out. Upon finding my ship gone I reported to the senior Earth representative on this planet." "Your ship had commitments which made it imperative to leave last night. As an officer you knew of those commitments. Come come, what's the real reason?" "The fact that I'm going to marry your messenger, Niki, and take her home with me." The doctor sat down abruptly and the anger left his face. It was replaced by a thoughtful frown. "What crazy idea is this? Where did you see her long enough to form such an attachment?" "I met her once. That was long enough." "Sit down," the doctor said abruptly. "I think you'd better tell me about it, and something about yourself as well" And between sips of hot coffee Mike found himself tellin g the chubby scientist of what he had felt on seeing Niki, and of a past known only to himself. When he stopped the doctor leaned back, chuckling, and drank his cold coffee. "Mike,-did you know you are a neurotic? You must, or you couldn't dissemble so well. Apparently those Florida slums taught you two things, though, that some people never learn. Not to want too much out of life, but fight like hell for what you do want." "I lied, cheated and actually stole to get into the Academy. I finally made it by blackmailing a congressman who was keeping a woman in our neighborhood." . "If the applications committee had known about your two terms in juvenile rehabilitation the President couldn't have gotten you in," said Dr. Carnacki drily. "And now you're giving all that up on the chance you can persuade this girl to marry you and leave her home for Earth." "I'm thirty-five years old, Doc. I only had two more runs before being anchored to a desk job anyway. It's compulsory for a spaceman to be a bachelor, but most guys my age are looking around for wives. I found mine." "I doubt it. There's not a have you." "Let me worry about that. Now 'tell me how they marry." "By choice, as all truly civilized persons must. Either sex may propose. The culture is monogamous, and is worldwide. Your problem may be solved simply by walking up to the girl and asking her to be your wife." "But you don't think so?" "Would an intelligent person marry a total stranger? They wed for life. Infidelity is so uncommon as to be almost unheard of. They don't lead a second mental life that is constantly preoccupied with sex. T HE object of their discussion entered the room at that moment. In her hand was a sheaf of papers. She looked mildly surprised at seeing Mike there, and slightly troubled. Mike rose, stood silently as she approached the table. He said, "Niki, I stayed behind when my friends left because I am in love with you. Will you marry me and come with me to my world?" The girl's troubled look deepened. "On what grounds do you base your choice of me as a mate, Mr. Combs?" Mike hesitated, groping for words, then answered, "On the fact that the sight of you, for the second time in my life, aroused an, extremely strong emotional reaction in me." "That is sufficient to propose to an alien? For life?" "Yes. And to wed for life is my only desire." "I think it best I discuss it ' by Joseph Green further with my parents. Would you dine with us this evening?" "It would be my pleasure." Dr. Carnacki rose as the girl left and began pacing the floor, obviously excited. "Mike, I'm going to help you with your insane project. Niki's father, Jakow, is our official contact with the Loyios government, what little there is of it. These people work together very closely but apparently from mutual consent, not official decree. Centralized authority is very small, but from what I have gathered Jakow is about as high in administration as they get. If he's inviting you for dinner he has something on his mind, and I'd like to know what. "You see, Mike, we've been somewhat in the position of the monkey studying the man here, since these people are our cultural superiors and we are social, not physical, scientists. We are, by and large, the most advanced known world in the physical sciences, but without enough knowledge of ourselves to get along with each other, much less the five intelligent races we've encountered." "This is interesting, but what has it to do with your decision to help me?" "Simply this. These people have shown us token hospitality and been outwardly helpful, but nevertheless have actually given us damn little on themselves. From what I do know and have guessed I prepare a report that set the Institute on its ear. Those two men were here to see for themselves, and to check my sanity. The decision is that I'm still all here, and now Earth Central would like to know how they achieved such a sane society. I think the Loyios answer to your efforts to marry Niki may be very revealing. The fact that the last head-count disclosed every tenth person on Earth to be neurotic lends this study considerable urgency." Mike laughed and got to his feet. "It would be a dull world without a few nuts. Doc, and I have a hunch these Loyios don't lead very exciting lives." And he left for the kitchen to hunt a more substantial breakfast. A T seven o'clock he knocked on the door of the house of Jakow. They ate immediately after his arrival, and thanks to a long briefing by Dr. Carnacki he managed the process of food consumption creditably. The chubby sociologist had also given him an intensive indoctrination into Loy io customs, manners, habits and history. He knew that they had no psychosomatic illnesses, that insanity, which was rare, was always physically based, that the average lifespan had risen to nearly twice that of an Eartfiman, and that in Carnacki's opinion they were ahead of Earth in every important science. His home planet's great technological achievements the social scientist dismissed with a contemptuous shrug, until Mike reminded him he would not be here studying the Loyios were it not for that same technology. There were seven people at the dinner, the five members of Niki's family and another guest besides himself, who was introduced as Doctor Lasilia. Niki was serving her doctor's training with him. All the adults except Niki's mother spoke English intelligibly, but Jakow, who spoke almost as well as Niki, did most of the talking. The entire group treated their alien guest with heavy courtesy but no especial show of friendliness. Knowing that he was a seriously introverted, withdrawn man himself Mike felt, with grim humor, that he fitted in quite well. This was no worse than the month he had spent in Ethiopia during the summer recess of his sixth year at the Academy. He had accepted an invitation from his roommate of that year and spent the recess in his home. No one there spoke international English. He found sharing their work, their play, their primitive way of life a strange and disturbing experience. He lived some high moments on a wild-dog hunt along the banks of the Blue Nile, and shot a spotted leopard out of a huge senecio tree, but he was glad when it was over and he could return to the Academy. Jakow was a huge man, sixty-seven years old by Earth reckoning but younger in appearance than Mike. His facial expression seldom changed, and his voice, big and heavy as his body, was almost a monotone as he sought carefully for English words. It was a subdued meal and everyone seemed glad when it was over. The two girls stayed to do the kitchen chores while the adults adjourned to another room. Once they were seated Jakow got down to business. "Mike, Niki has informed us of your wish to combine with her and take her to your home. By our standards she is a little young for mating, but I understand such is not the case on your world. Niki has many friends of her own here, who would become suitors later, but for now she is emotionally free. Therefore her mother and I have decided that you should be given a chance to win her. Now, it is customary in our society for a suitor to be pitted against a member of the desired one's family in contests of skill or intelligence, to determine his take part in such tests?" "Of course, since that is your custom." by Joseph Green "Our young couples normally associate with each other for years before one asks the other's family to hold the contests, but we are making an exception in your case," the toneless voice went on. "We will arrange a series of such events for you. All adults in the family will vote on whether to accept you after observing you in the contests, and the vote will be made known to the girl. She alone, however, is the final judge. Losing in these events does not necessarily disqualify you, since the girl may accept or reject on the basis of your actions rather than the outcome. Because this is an unusual contest, and physically you are hardly a match for any male in this family, we have decided that your opponent will be Niki herself. Return in three days and the contests will begin." Ill  A RE you ready for the second event, Mike?" Jakow asked after breakfast, the morning after their chase. "As ready as I'll ever be," answered Mike. He did feel surprisingly good after resting a day and night. "I am happy. The second event will try your mental ability. The third and final one, I will tell you now, will require a combination of strength and intelligence." Mike shrugged his shoulders uncaringly. Jakow gave orders to his family pertaining to the day's work, then asked the Earthman to help him saddle three mounts. The second test was to take place at the nearby center, under the direction of Dr. Lasilia. They saddled the three mounts in silence and led Niki's into the yard. She came out of the house immediately, dressed in a tunic similar to the ones he had seen on her before but subtly different in wear and fit. She mounted her beast with graceful ease and Jakow led them toward the center. By Earth's standards it was the most modern structure Mike had seen on Kee'Na , and the best equipped. These centers were combination hospital, library, laboratory and exchange center for the goods produced in the factories. They were the only semi-commercial institutions on the planet. The majority of the instruments and tools he saw when they led him into what was obviously the hospital section were strange and alien, but competent appearing. Dr. Lasilia was waiting for them there. "Hello Niki, Mike. Niki, you know what we do, you study with me. Mike, I put you two under little anesthesia. Use drug what frees mind. Mind more power, stronger. While you strong we make problems. Guide mind into them. All answers recorded on machine, way I not explain your terms." "It records thoughts, Mike, and makes them visible and audible," said Niki. "Please take places," said Dr. Lasilia. The table toward which he gestured was an odd affair, made like a double bed but with carved hollows and angled, immovable pillows. Mike climbed gingerly into one of the hollows and lay back, the pillow holding his head up at a forty-five degree angle. Niki climbed into the other side and stretched out her long length of beautiful femininity with a sigh. "Hold hands, please," said Dr. Lasilia briskly, and Mike felt Niki's warm hand creep into his own. He closed his fingers on it softly. A moment later Dr. Lasilia passed a resilient band of some sort around their wrists, locking them together. Bands were placed around their foreheads, and counters of some sort over their hearts. Out of the corner of his eye Mike saw the doctor press some buttons on a control board and unseen machinery began to hum quietly. A moment later the Doctor placed a mask of a peculiar softness over his mouth and nose. There was something in the mask that stank, terribly, but he breathed it without demur. A recorded voice that he recognized as Jakow's began speaking and he tried to listen, but a giant hand came out of nothingness and pulled him downward into nebular blackness, where he roamed, a lost soul, until a glint of light pierced the infinity and he rushed toward it, emerging on a low, rocky hill. He blinked and looked about. He was standing on a bluff, gazing out over a small green valley. The yellow sun of Arcturus rode high overhead. At his feet, spread out over the valley floor, was an armed force. On the opposite side, in identical formation, stood another army. And he knew, irrefutably, that Niki stood on the slopes above that army, and that she too had just awakened. The rules that would govern this strange conflict were already imprinted on his mind. The two armies were of exactly the same size, to the man. They were composed solely of foot soldiers. The rules of combat were that two enemies canceled each other out and disappeared when they met. If two men of one force, however, attacked a single member of the other force the single man alone disappeared. Any soldier who succeeded in getting through the other army's lines and attacking the commander canceled the commander and the fight was over. The soldiers were bound by the standards normally set for humans, with one exception. Every soldier on the field, Ku lAnh fighters as well as officers, could hear every mental order of the commander, making maneuvering much faster. As he stared across the wide valley he saw that the opposite army was on the march. Niki was attacking him. He studied their formation a moment, then ordered his own army forward, compelling it to take the shape he desired as they marched. Niki was attacking in four columns eight men wide and forty men deep, with a thin but solid line at the rear, one which extended slightly on both sides of the marching soldiers. By her side she retained a personal guard of what looked to be about fifty men. He saw the weakness in her plan of combat immediately. As his men stepped out they organized into a gigantic wedge, one four men wide at the apex, six on the second row, eight on the third and so on until his line was over a hundred men wide. He aimed the wedge directly at the center of the army. She saw that his organization would bring more of his men in direct contact with hers, giving him more two-toone encounters, and changed her battle plan. The four columns ground to a halt. The thin line at the rear began to thicken as more men joined it. The two ends of the line kept marching while the center stood still and absorbed more men, and in only minutes she had a fighting crescent into which his wedge would fit as neatly as a sword into its sheath. It would have been almost certain stalemate. He changed the line swiftly, one more time, and saw her matching move, and then the marching men collided, and began disappearing in tiny puffs of air. Around him, as his personal guard, he kept fifty-two men. T HE toy soldiers marched as directed and did their bit with ease and speed as the battle grew hotter, disappearing with a rapidity that swiftly reduced the field. Mike worked hard and fast and to gain the maximum number of victories out of the wideopen melee, and when the field was clear he had succeeded in his aim. The two final warriors stood facing each other on a clear field, hesitated, then attacked. They disappeared in the little puff of wind, and Mike would have sworn it was their sigh of relief. He ordered his bodyguard forward, and walked behind them toward the enemy. Her guard came out to meet them and. on a smaller scale, it was motion and counter-motion, plan and counter-plan, until the bodies met. The smaller battle went swiftly. When it was over Mike knew that his guess had been good. She had reserved exactly fifty men for her bodyguard, her mind running in even numbers. He had fifty-two. In the wild meeting of the main battle he had gained two men on her. When the air cleared of the guard's fight they had gone down man for man -- and he still had two men standing. He sent the two guards after her, where she stood quietly waiting. "I concede this game, Mike' she called clearly, waved one arm at him, and disappeared. The scene blurred and shifted before his eyes, his two loyal phantoms became wraiths of smoke, vanished, and he was being sucked down again, into the familiar blackness...and came up into a barren world. His instructions were clear and simple. He was a God. This was a new planet. In his hand was the seed of life. He was to build a world. And he began. Whatever he thought of, in detail, came instantly into being. He placed topsoil, started vegetation growing, cleared land, started a weather cycle, a climate cycle, made rivers, built lakes, started the wildlife, created farms, put people on them, began animal husbandry, built cities, built a civilization. The uncertain element was the fact that everything, once created behaved in its natural fashion and was not under his control. The water ran downhill, the trees grew, the people worked, made love and begot, the animals ate the crops and each other, the lakes overflowed the inadequate rivers and flooded the land, drowning the animals, and the hardier vegetation grew faster than its neighbors. Nothing that had been started could be destroyed. He had to create natural enemies to curb the hardy vegetation, dig deeper channels for the rivers, make what amendments he could by the creation of new elements. He had twenty-two hours, one Kee'Na day cycle. After that his work would be judged as would Niki's. The better world determined the winner, and the doctor was the judge of what constituted a better world. The day fled by with remarkable speed. He became completely engrossed in being a creator, and when the time was up he looked down on his world and was unable to judge it. Some of it was good, and much was not. Many things were better than Eartkmen had ever seen them, and some were worse. His control of nature had not been perfect and he had killed thousands of people and animals with natural catastrophes produced by his blunders. He had a last brief glimpse of his efforts to play God. Then he was compelled forward into consciousness, and found he was lying on the table, his hands by his side. IV instrument. "Lie, Mike. You in strain," he said gently when Mike tried to rise. Miki lay quietly, breathing deeply. '"Take this, sleep" said the doetor, offering Mike a small pill. He took it and a glass of water, swallowed and lay back. He was completely exhausted. Tentatively he reached across the space between them and gxoped. His fingers touched Niki's bare thigh. Seconds later' her hand came stealing back into his. When he awoke he was alone. Niki was gone, and it was approaching noon. They had passed a full day and night on the table. He straggled to his feet and stood swaying, dizzy, until his head cleared, then went in search of food. He was ravenously hungry. He found the kitchen after a short search. The first thing fee saw on entering was Niki, seated next to a bar consuming a large sandwich. "Hello, Mike," she greeted hijn between bites, and spoke to the cook in her own language. The cook, an elderly woman with a beautiful but lined face, brought him a sandwich consisting of unfamiliar ingredients but which tasted delicious. "Who won that last contest, Niki?" he asked as soon a a ' as the worst hunger pangs had subsided. "I did, Mike, she said, smiling. "You created far more than I in the allotted time, more of everything from people to raindrops, but you made so many mistakes and your world was so poorly balanced that father and Dr. Lasilia judged me the winner. I've seen the final impression of your world, and you can see mine if you wish." "I'll wait until the contests are over." "That will not be long," said a heavy, toneless voice, and Jakow was standing beside them. "We will have the final test ready in a short time. Now please go into the library while Dr. Lasilia and I prepare it." room Jakow closed the door on them with an admonition not to come out until they were called. The area was deserted, and since they were not allowed out it was highly unlikely anyone would be allowed in, at least for the moment. Mike reached for Niki as soon as the door hid them from Jakow. She did not resist him, which was helpful, since she was almost as strong as he. But she kept her eyes open and stared calmly into his face as he drew her lips toward his. He stopped, arms around her shoulders, their bodies lightly touching and lips only inches apart. He held her so, wanting to complete the embrace, wanting to ask her permission, wanting anything that would remove that cool superior look from her lovely features. His torment must have shown in his face, for suddenly her arms were around his neck, the long beautiful length of her nestled snugly against him and the full lips were warm and sweet under his own. It seemed a wonderfully long time before she let her arms slip down and pressed gently against his chest. She turned away to compose herself. "Let me show you some of our artwork, Mike," she said after a moment, though she still did not look at him. He followed her into an alcove and she plucked a binder from the shelves and opened it. It was a series of colorprints, obviously copies of famous Kee'Na paintings. Each primary color, where it was used pure, glowed; the effect of several glowing colors on a single painting was hauntingly beautiful, terribly different. Mike felt his mind reel as he tried to grasp their meaning. More than anything he had yet seen the little binder brought home, forcibly, the fact that the girl by his side was an alien. But she did not seem as strange as his Ethiopian friend, when she began trying to explain their conception of art. He listened attentively, watching the movement of the rich lips until he could stand it no longer. This time she was not so reluctant, and after the fourth kiss he gently closed the book and put it aside. The work of art in his arms was the finest the Loyios could produce. They sat side by side, arms around each other, and between caresses they spoke in a language understood by lovers on any world. After a time Mike's breathing eased and he collected himself enough to ask if he was honestly the first man in her life. "You are the first to want me, Mike, truly. I have friends my own age who have kissed me. but only in play." "Did your father persuade you to hold the contests with "He asked, yes, but I was ened me at first, but I wanted to see what you were like. Now I'm not afraid." "Don't be, ever." "Mike, my people are not as emotional as yours. I know this not just from you but from Dr. Carnacki and the others. Do you really think you and I are compatible? Also, we probably couldn't havre children." "How do you know about children, until we try? And yes, I'm certain we re compatible. I'll devote the rest of my life to proving it." He stopped her next words  # with a kiss, and the library faded into a dim background for both of them. Fortunately Jackow tapped discreetly on the door before he opened it. enough as they followed the big man to a large room in the center of the hospital, where Dr. Lasilia was waiting. "Mike, there is a possibility you won't live through this test," said Jakow as they entered the room. "If you do not wish to place yourself in danger I suggest that you withdraw." Mike raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't that disqualify me?" "Not necessarily. Remember, our custom says a woman and her family judge by the character shown in the trials, not the results alone. Many women prefer the man do nothing dangerous, since they have already decided to accept and don't want to see him injured." "Have you already made up your mind, Niki?" Mike asked. She looked slightly startled, and he realized he had made a social error. "I'd -- already made a tentative decision, Mike, but it isn't definite." "Then I'll play." Jakow nodded, and Dr. Lasilia said, "Take off footwear, both." Mike did as instructed, then followed the doctor toward two strange objects partially hidden behind screens in the center of the room. They were enormous mollusks, with the upper shells propped open at a sharp angle. The things were so huge Mike could step into the open space between the upper and lower shells. They were placed back to back. "Your task, Mike and Niki, will be to stand in the mouth of these shellfish and hold the jaws open until the other person concedes," began Jakow. "Once you have assumed your position and we have removed the props the creatures' muscles will exert a closing pressure of between two and three hundred pounds, which you will have to withstand. You may quit at any time simply by calling for help. The danger lies in the fact that you may be too stubborn to call when you become exhausted and will let yourself be forced down. These jaws get progressively stronger as they draw closer together, and if they force you flat they will crush you to death. There is a solution to the problem which does not depend on strength. You must find it during the first hour for it to be useful." The doctor motioned to Mike and he stepped into the mouth of the monster that would probably swallow him within the next few hours, bent his head and secured a solid grip with his shoulders on the upper shell. He braced his feet firmly, sliding them around until his footing was by Joseph Green secure, then said, "Ready." Dr. Lasilia placed a hand on the two wooden supports, Mike heaved strongly, the upper shell rose slightly, and the doctor removed the props. The shell settled on Mike's shoulders with a leaden and implacable weight. V O UT of the corner of his eye he saw Dr. Lasilia lead Niki out of sight and heard her taking her stand in the other mollusk. If her foot slipped, or she lost her nerve and tried to jump... Already he was braced and straining like a bull simply to stand erect, and the mollusk would not tire. Dr. Lasilia came back into sight, picked up a book and settled himself comfortably in a chair. Jakow was leaving. "Mike, ' don't be fool, be killed. Call, I get you out. No woman worth hurting, dying for, Niki positive not. You in comfort, Niki?" he raised his voice to ask. "Read your book and be quiet. Mike and I have a problem to solve," came the girl's voice from out of his sight. The doctor chuckled and did as told. He only raised his head occasionally to glance calculatingly at both of them. Mike eased his load to the most comfortable position possible and settled down to some hard thinking. He had two factors to work on. One, there was definitely a solution which did not require that he stand here under this strain. Second, he must do whatever he had to do within an hour. It took about five minutes of mulling it over before the solution hit him, and it was so simple he felt himself a fool not to have seen it immediately. He turned until he was looking into the gaping maw of the brainless, thing that wanted to swallow him whole, moving slowly and carefully. Once he was facing the shadowy interior he put his palms against the shell above him, eased the weight from his shoulders to his hands and then slowly let his knees bend, straightening his arms as he went downward. When his arms were straight above his head he exerted his full strength and straightened his legs, forcing the shell upward over a foot. Once he had gained that initial first foot it was only a matter of grit and endurance to walk inward into the creature's body, his feet sinking through slimy pulp to the hard shell beneath. When the upper half was almost vertical he heard the slight sound of muscles tearing in the giant body and the pressure suddenly relaxed. He walked easily back to the outer edge, found the actual weight of the upper shell was less than fifty pounds, and prepared to stand there until Niki herself conceded. Niki walked around the corner. For the first time he realized the doctor had not been in his chair for the past several minutes. Now he came into sight from behind Niki. "You come out, Mike. You solved problem. Niki first, so won contest. That all tests, both did fine." door. "Dr. Carnacki sent word he wanted to talk with you as soon as you were free to join him, Mike. If you will come for dinner again tomorrow we will have a decision ready. Who won the final event ?" Niki passed into the house with a polite smile of good-by. "She won it, hands down," Mike admitted sheepishly. "Too smart for me." "Not according to the second test, where you did very well," Jakow returned politely, and after a few more amenities Mike left for the station. Dr. Carnacki was sprawled at his ease, drinking homemade beer and reading a very thick book when Mike found him in his room an houj: later. It was just turning dark outside, and as he relaxed into a chair Mike realized for the first time how tired he actually was. The chubby scientist finished his paragraph, then picked up a pad and started shooting questions at Mike. He made brief notes for answers, and his questions ranged from their personal behavior toward Mike to their apparent mastery of mental imagery, a science barely touched on Earth. He would have gone on all night if Mike had not pleaded fatigue. "All right, but we'll have to start over in the morning. Mike, your falling in love was the best thing that ever happened to this station. I've gotten more data from you... Incidentally, I've done some checking on my authority as the Earth representative here. I think I swing enough weight to get you off if they charge you with desertion." "Thank God !" the words popped out, to be instantly regreted, and then slowly the regret went away and Mike Combs had taken another step out of his personal shell. "I'm glad to hear it, Doc. Even a desk job in the patrol is better than anything else on Earth." For the first time since landing on Kee'Na he went to bed with a light heart. Next morning, after a late breakfast, he was closeted with Dr. Carnacki again, and this time managed to satisfy the sociologist's voracious curiosity. After lunch the three other members, who were nonentities to Mike, had a go at him, and if the good Doctor had missed anything they found it. Mike felt as by Joseph Green though he had been through another courtship test. Before dark he had bathed, shaved and otherwise improved upon his looks as much as possible. He was ready for the decisive visit to the house of Jakow. Up till now he had not admitted to himself the possibility of failure. His goal was clear before him and he had been plunging headlong toward it, expending all the strength that was in him, as he had done once before in his life. The first quest had been crowned with success and he had lived aimlessly now for ten long years, awaiting a new trail. When it came, fate had prepared a good one. tion to the marriage which a man of more forethought might have let discourage him. When he was a feeble, infirm old man, providing he lived so long, Niki would be a beautiful young woman, just passing into early maturity. Her passions would be stronger, deeper, at a time when he was going downhill at an ever faster pace. What would such a maladjusted chronology do to a marriage? On Earth, where he expected to live, the answer was an old and familiar story. Still darker fancies ruled his mind as the miles passed, and he was not in an optimistic mood when he tapped on their front door. It opened immediately and Niki's younger sister, a replica of the beautiful girl in all but size, led him to the dining room, where the family was just beginning to gather. Jakow permitted no talk of the contest at the dinner table. He kept the conversation on Earthmen, asking incisive questions about their customs, habits, social attitudes and scientific ability. His questions were not disguised digs but open, frank inquiries. After about the first hundred queries Mike understood something he was a little late in grasping. It was not exactly an accident that the beautiful Niki had been chosen to work for the Earthmen at Illustrated by Mahlon Blaine ready at # each. #(# at # each. these # books due October # at # each. due November # at # each. Order now for shipment as received. More forthcomingtitles F.O.B. Brooklyn, N. Y. #I #th Ave. Brooklyn #, N. Y. their small station, or that Jakow was their official contact. The big man was an advanced sociologist, probably the Kee'Na equivalent of Carnacki. The Loyios apparently trained their administrators in the human sciences rather than politics. This business of Man studying Loyios was indeed a twoway proposition! When the meal was over Jakow asked the entire group to gather in what was, to earthly eyes, the family room. Niki's mother, a woman whose beauty was of the quiet, unobtrusive sort, sat by Jakow. Niki had disappeared. "Mike, in fairness to you I think you should know that Niki was requested, by myself and a group of other sociologists, to hold these contests," Jakow began abruptly. "I am sorry to tell you your -- ah -- let us call it intensity -- somewhat frightened her. Her first reaction to your forthright statement on the ship was to inform you she did not desire your courtship. Her second was to tell me about it. Which I am very glad she did. Our young people do not normally think of combining until after their education is complete, a matter of several more years in Niki's case. But we asked her to consent to your courtship for the purpose of studying an Earthman's reactions under unusual stimuli." He paused, and there was a faint cloud over his face when he continued. "You are a wonderful and extraordinary race of humanoids, Mike, and we have never encountered another like you. According to all that is logical you should not have Won a single contest, yet it was our judgment that you beat Niki soundly in the overall game. There are certain intangibles -- facts which do not appear under a microscope or in an equation -- which form a basic difference between Loyios and Earthmen. You have a drive, a will to succeed, that is terrible in its strength, and a little frightening. I think it is rooted in your high emotion level, a compensatory factor for a certain lack of logic and selfcontrol. Nevertheless, it has brought you far. "Honesty is ruthless, Mike, and ruthle,ssness is true kindness, as you will perhaps later learn. We do not think Niki feels for you that strong emotional attachment you know as love, and we consider her mating with you, a man far beneath her in cultural status, extremely unwise. We do not think she would be happy on Earth, and feel that the adjustment from our way of life to yours is too much to ask of a young girl. You have many good points, but the barbarian is too close beneath your surface. We have all voted against you, feeling that the differences in life expectancy and background far outweigh a momentary physical attraction such as Niki now admits she feels for you. by Joseph Green Niki is free to choose for herself, of course, but few young girls go against their family's judgment." silence, and then Jakow said, in a voice unnaturally soft, "I am truly sorry to tell you this, Mike." "Don't be," said Mike as he got heavily to his feet. He could not keep all the bitterness from his voice. "The experiment has been a success, hasn't it? You have reams of data on an Earthman's behavior patterns while under stress. Dr. Carnacki needs the material I'm furnishing him. No one is hurt, Niki will forget her temporary physical attraction to a barbarian, and life will go on." He walked to the door, shoulders slumping tiredly, then turned and said, "Only one comment. You people, Loyios or Earthman, who decide things with your heads without listening to your hearts make me sick. Very sick." He walked across the shadeporch into the bright moonlight where his mount waited, and then he discovered what a little thing resentment is, and of what small importance words are. Niki, already in the saddle, was waiting for him. And there was a wide, happy smile    Don't miss next issue -- the biggest IF ever! Beginning Exciting New Book-Length Novel of Interplanetary Adventure Plus novelettes by -- and IF's star-studded regular lineup of short stories and features. The Novembef issue of IF will be on sale September #th -- reserve your copy or send in your subscription now! IF  Feature lenge -- how good are you at predicting? -- has been, as we predicted, interesting indeed. To restate: What we are after is logical prediction based on past events and present factors, on the premise that if you observe enough factors, and understand their trend, you can extend that trend into a probable future. We asked for the overall feeling of "If this goes on -- " and, as far as possible, an adherence to this form: Such-and-such has been hap'  pening all along; : Stand-so has just occurred ; 'Therefore I predict that in ' v ' # days this will happen: The reason we picked # days was that, due to the normal lag of magazine publishing and distribution, it takes that long for your responses to come back to you in print. The ideal prediction, then, would be one which would appear on the newsstands at the same time as newspapers carrying the same story. (This is being written on May #, just to orient you: All I'd need to do to prove how smart I am would be to write here what you, reading this, call the lead article on this morning's newspaper.) As promised, we give you here the most interesting of the predictions received to date. Mrs. Angelo Castagna, of Thompsonville, Gunn., sends not one, but four, and we follow each with our continents in parenthesis. I . "When they get the next man-powered capsule in orbit, although it may be blacked out by complete censorship, they will be met by a U.F.O. and allowed to know what solar system has us under observation. It will be under mental communication rather than spoken language." (Even George Adamski did not visualize space ships with pedals! I'm sure Mrs. C. meant "manned" rather than "man-powered"; as for the rest, either she's right and we'll never know -- because of the censors -- or...well, she's wrong.) # . "The first public appeal will be made for people to donate parts of their bodies that are healthy to go into a bank for spare human parts similar to the eye banks that already are in use. The donors will be tattooed with a sign that they have given permission so that the part to be kept will be removed before deterioration sets in." (Has anyone heard this appeal ?) # . "The first actual hurricane dispersement will take effect in September that will cause the storm to be turned out to sea before it hits any of the coastal areas. The same technique will then be used in the typhoon areas of the Pacific and the tornado belt of the middle West." (File this until Sept.) # . "There will be a definite exchange of understandable speech between the porpoises and the men who have been studying them, and the porpoises will come up with some of the things that men have been trying to find out about for many centuries. But the porpoises will limit their talks to only the ones who can be trusted. They will not allow themselves to become sideshow freaks." (There's that ol' censorship again. If you're right, Mrs. C., how can we know?) thanks to Mrs. Castagna. We hope we see many more predictions. We hope, too, that they will be checkable against concurrent news. The best predictions will be printed here, the best of all will win a free subscription to IF, and will surely provide a permanent proof of our (slightly tattered, but still firm) conviction that sf people really can think ahead. Our own predictions of two issues ago were outstanding. They were one hundred per IF  Short Story It was a backward world, all right -- in a special and very deadly manner! G OD knows I didn't want Hacker in the preliminary delegation right from the start. I wasn't thinking, either, of the screwball ways history can go about poetically repeating itself sometimes. I just knew that an uppity, smart-alecky kid of fifty could only cause trouble. He already had. Rayna had been our earlier landfall on the First Interstellar Expedition. It possessed a fairly intelligent form of life, even if the Raynans were oviparous and technologically retarded. Hacker had taken over the bulldozer to clear the area around our craft. Terra , and he had been repeatedly told to stay very close to it. But no, he insisted on flattening out the peat-like top of the nearest hill too. Unfortunately that hilltop was an incubation bed for Raynan fledglings. The massacre involved not only a vast number of hatching eggs but five adult females, and we had to get away pronto while thousands of paper limbs waved threateningly at the murderers from Earth. I'm only the Science Chronicler of this expedition but Dr. Barnes is Chief Medical Officer. His protests should have mattered where mine didn't. 'Tm a hundred per cent behind Johnson," he told Captain Weber. "That kid's no damned good. The three of us will go into town with these Newtaneans and, sure as I'm standing here, Hacker will do something wrong." Captain Weber, looking worried as usual, tried to explain. "He'll just do the chauffeuring." But he got off that tack immediately when he saw we were not following along. "Look, I know he's a pest. But this is a political matter, for the good of the Space Corps. His great-great-uncle is President of the World Council. For all I know the old man hates his guts, won't listen to a word he says, but let's not take any chances. We're going to need plenty of these expeditions. And hyper-drive craft take an awful lot out of the economy." The upshot of the matter was that we patriotically agreed to the setup. The caplain gave Hacker a good chewing-out about respecting the rights of the Newtaneans. The kid turned out to be surprisingly amenable on that score. "They're human!" he said, and I could see he was very sincere about it. "I wouldn't do anything to hurt them, sir. What's more, they must be almost as smart as we arc and I'm not about to commit suicide." So the three of us got into the jeep and rolled out of Terra I onto Newtane's soil. I still felt uncomfortable about Hacker, though. He had tasted blood on Rayna and the effect of that on him had been unusually bad; he had acquired a reckless attitude toward the rights of intelligent life, his own included. A S if to prove me wrong, he drove very carefully over the special road the Newtaneans had laid out overnight from our landing area to the highway a mile or so away. The three carloads of scowling plenipotentiaries up ahead looked appealingly funny. While the Newtaneans were remarkably, even handsomely, like us (except for a certain closeness of the eyes and a reversed ordering of their fingers) their facial muscles carried different emotional convictions. On our landing ten hours before those officials had thought our smiling faces indicated angry aggressiveness and we had been equally uncertain about their intentions. But their Semanticizer had eventually made the true state of affairs clear. Evolution had determined that an upward set of Newtanean facial muscles meant a bad situation, a downward set pleasure and cordiality. The more they scowled the more we smiled and everybody was very happy about the potential flowering of transgalactic culture that we were instituting. When we turned onto the magnificent superhighway, however, Hacker became furious. He kept trying to pull over to the right but a steady stream of scarab-shaped cars, filled with curious sightseers, kept getting in hig hway. 'This is crazy' he cried. T think they drive on the left here' Dr. Barnes tried to explain. 'That's what I mean -- they're crazy !" "They did it that way in England for centuries," I said. "It took a long time to get them to change." "Fine, fine." Suddenly he laughed, as if pleased with his capacity for tolerance. "If it's good enough for them it's good enough for us visitors. They sure know how to build beautiful roads!" I suppose I should have been pleased with this shift toward good humor but I wasn't. I just could not like the youngster. He had been forgivably cocky for his age before, but now something nasty had been added. Still, he remained on his best behavior as we approached Crona, the capital city. Its golden towers gleamed in the sun and everywhere there were crowds of beautiful tan people, waving to us and happily scowling their welcome. The lead cars stopped before a particularly elegant skyscraper that was set in the middle of vast, symmetrical gardens. We got out and were greeted by dignitaries accompanied by technicians with Semanticizing equipment. (If this equipment worked slowly,, it, was still faster than any we'd developed.) The men who came toward us were piizzled when we extended our hands but, once the translation came through and they understood it was an Earth custom, they copied our gesture. Only they all put out their left hands. It took a while before reasonable contact could be made. "Interestin g," said Dr. Barnes. "They all seem to be left-handed." "I don't see what's so interesting about that," Hacker snorted through his puggish nose. "I've seen left-handed people on Earth." "Good for you," the doctor answered drily. Hacker looked a little annoyed but for once managed to keep quiet. I explained to the receiving delegation how hyper-radio contact could be established with our system for information exchanges and then told them tomorrow's group from Terra I would be much larger. It would be in a position to set out the technical arrangements in all the necessary detail. The dialogue crept along as translations were made, but finally an especially regal figure stepped forward and told us the rest of the proceedings would take place within the building. We followed the Newtaneans into a hall so vast that we still seemed to be outdoors. Subtle colors . were playing free-form patterns pri the walls and the synesthetip reaction was that of hearing a music too beautiful, too perfect, for the relative crudity of the human ear to grasp alone. "This," Hacker laughed, "is my idea of heaven!" I wasn't about to unbend and openly agree with him on anything. But celestial it really was. And then the subtly rich smells of the food began to play on our nostrils. It was brought out on great automatic servers and robot arms set heaping, steaming plates before the fifty Newtaneans. We, of course, had to refuse, taking out our compacted rations and setting them before us. All the Newtaneans were still meat-eaters. The main course was a small fowl, thoroughly browned in gravy. For me the most interesting thing about it was that four drumstick legs stuck out of each torso rather than the regulation two found on all earth-based birds. For Hacker, though, a more practical matter was involved. "I'd sure like to try a helping of that bird," he said. The two of us, naturally, were shocked. "That must have been a living creature once," said Barnes. "So what?" "Well, our civilization is essentially vegetarian. They just haven't reached our level as yet in that respect." "Nuts loaf to you!" Hacker snapped. "And synthetic yeast pie too! I've eaten flesh." That really upset me. I know there's still a little surreptitious meat-consumption on Earth -- genetics shows we must get a few throwbacks In every generation -- but I'd never before met anyone who openly boasted about it. Synthetic foods meet gourmet needs better than traditional, ones do anyway. (Of course, I don't mean the dull compacted stuff we get on long space hops but the food served on Terran planets themselves.) Any Earthman eating flesh back home is deliberately trying to taste the atavistic sensations of savagery. "You know how immoral that is," I told him. "Hacker, let's forget the moral issue," Barnes said, considering him with disgust. "Let's just be sensible. We don't know enough about Newtane yet to eat anything ." Hacker laughed. "Why, it smells just like our own food, only better." He picked at his vita-concentrate. "Oh, let's forget about the whole thing." We tried to. Several dignitaries rose to their full seven feet and spoke slowly into Semanticizers, flinging their queer hands out for emphasis with their thumbs waving where our pinkies do. Suddenly, though, Hacker got up from his seat and hurried down the long table to the place where the I e a d i n g spokesman was eating. He leaned over him, speaking into the nearest translator, and I could see the Newtanean smiling broadly, as if trying to refuse something, while Hacker frowned. Finally the smile faded into a friendly scowl. Nothing good could be coming out of this. A minute later a robot arm proffered a loaded plate to Hacker and he started back to us with it. Barnes rose to stop him, but before Hacker reached us he had taken two mouthfuls of the meat, I have never seen such sheer self-satisfied delight on a human face as after those first bites. "You shouldn't be doing that," Barnes said when he sat down next to us again. "You're just old fogies," Hacker grunted through a meat-stuffed mouth. "This is the best food I've ever eaten." He somehow shoveled another load of meat between his lips. Thirty seconds later his face twisted into a caricature of the human physiognomy, all writhing lines, as if every muscle were breaking loose from its neighbors. The last unswallowed portion of food erupted from his mouth and he fell forward into the vile mess. He was dead. through the hall. Everywhere wildly smiling faces expressed despair at such an end for an honored guest. Barnes sprang into action, pulling the portable medical kit from his belt and immediately starting blood tests while some native doctors joined him with their emergency equipment. "Must start revitalizing immediately," he said, then stopped, ashen-faced, as he studied an analyzer tube. "Fantastic! No, it can't be !" The Newtaneans were equally bewildered. They rushed Hacker to a nearby treatment chamber. All I could do was wait, while the Newtanean leader explained that Hacker had told him we had authorized his trying the food. There was no need to doubt his story. It was just what the kid would have done. I did my best to assure him that we knew his intentions had been honorable. A half-hour later Barnes returned, a robot platform following with Hacker, body covered by a preservative glaze, on it. "Nothing can be done," he said. "I've tried everything. Hacker's too thoroughly dead for anything ever to bring him back. We'll just have to take his body home for further study." "But what killed him?" I demanded. "A dozen or so things out of a thousand possibilities." "You mean you don't have any idea?" "Oh, I have some idea. Too many ideas in fact. Look, Johnson, chemistry's not your specialty but this is fairly elementary. All life contains protein, right Y # "Right." "And all protein consists of amino acids. Every natural protein back home is built on levo -- left turn -- amino acids. Here it is just the opposite, the mirror image of what we know. Every amino acid is dextro -- to the right!" "But how can it be different here?" "Johnson, they could ask the same question about us with equal justification -- or, rather, equal lack of justification." I was trying to feel my way through the confusion. "Barnes, I know a world could be made of anti-matter but -- " "No, no. Anti-matter is a reversal of changes within the atom. These atoms are the same as ours. It's the organization that is different -- regular molecules with a different twist." "But why should it have killed him then? We absorb starch and reject cellulose which is closely related. But the body just refuses to accept the cellulose. It doesn't necessarily go ahead and die." "Starch and cellulose are both dextro, old man. This is a more fundamental difference. Maybe the body just throws off some of these compounds too. But there were some -- plenty, I suspect -- it couldn't throw off." He glanced toward the stiffening corpse, sympathetically. "The poor kid couldn't leave well enough alone." sal days out from Newtane and soon we will drop from hyper-drive as we reach the orbit of Pluto. I shouldn't still be feeling as uneasy as I do. I'm sure I shouldn't. We have had five friendly, informative days with the people of a great civilization remarkably like ours, and President Hacker has radioed he understands perfectly that we were not responsible for the tragedy, nobody was. The kid, it seems, wasn't the apple of his eye anyway. Ninety men and one corpse returning to the security of terra firma. I should, when all is said and done, be happy with the way most things have worked out. But I am a Chronicler and I know the peculiarly symbolic, seemingly superficial ways in which history manages to repeat itself. It is more than three centuries since the last War on Earth between rightists and leftists. That was a matter of differing concepts of economics and politics. I can't help wondering, though, whether there are not even more fundamental points of eventual conflict in the universe that we have barely discovered. If there are, I'm beginning to suspect they'll still have something to do with the unfathomable difference between Right and Left, a difference that took many lives centuries ago -- and may not be through  -- wiiM IF  Article we flung open the door of our refrigerator the other night. We found ourselves, in the sudden glare of light from the open door, face to face with a large rabbit. "What," we demanded, "are you doing in the refrigerator?" "This is a Westinghouse, isn't it?" asked the rabbit. "Yes -- " "Well," said the rabbit, "I'm just westing." Having discharged this anecdote, without which we are incapable of discussing Westinghouse, we may proceed. When George Westinghouse opened his first enterprise in Garrison Alley, Pittsburgh, two hundred employees worked in # square feet of space to manufacture # products -- motors, switches, generators and the like. Now that # years have passed, over a hundred thousand people work for the company in # major manufacturing plants, # manufacturing and repair plants and # sales offices, making # variations of around # basic products. Among these many activities, one has been, as any perceptive reader of these pages can attest, to feed your Feature Department much fascinating material in science and technology. The very least we can do in recognition of Westinghouse's #th anniversary is to have a look at it and its works. (Other young strong enterprises please copy.) Each year an issue of Westinghouse's handsome house organ, the bimonthly Westinghouse Engineer , is given over to an annual engineering review. To find out what the company is up to in a twelvemonth, we could hardly do better than to riffle through it. An editorial by the Vice President in charge of engineering, Mr. J. A. Hutcheson, contains one remark of special interest to the discerning sf reader, for it would seem that for many years now we have, in a lofty and knowledgeable way, deplored the increasing compartmentation of the sciences, and the apparent lack of communication between one specialist and another, as if we educated consumers knew something the big boys did not. Well, listen at the man: "The knowledgeable reader can... peer behind the scenes and note many changes occurring in technology itself, in the basic approaches to technical problems. For one thing, the classic distinctions between the scientist and the engineer, between research and development, are becoming hazier, and may ultimately disappear. In many advanced technology projects today, the dividing line is difficult to determine, and frequently the same scientist or engineer may be required to carry the project through all stages. This points squarely toward the need for versatility in tomorrow's scientist-engineer, if he is to cope with the technology of his day." Hosanna ! Now let's look at a year's work at Westinghouse. Please bear in mind that we can't go into detail about all that follows; if we did we'd crowd all the stories out of this issue of IF, and the next one too. If any of it catches your fancy and you'd like to know more, by all means write; what we don't have on hand we can probably find out, or make the right referral for you. Also please don't fight with me if you know that one or another of the items and efforts mentioned below are not Westinghouse inventions (though a good many are.) The company does an immense amount of development work on ideas and devices from all over. Power Generation , transmission, and distribution . Westinghouse has been up to the earlobes in nuclear energy for a long time now. This year sees operation of a new core for the reactor-generator at Shippingport, Pa. The imprived core ups the output two and a half times, and reduces the fuel cost by more than #. New atomic powerhouses started operation in Rowe, Mass, and Mol, Belgium (this the first commercial reactor to be exported from the U. S.) and construction went forward on new nuclear power plants in New Bedford, Pa., and in the south for the Carolinas-Virginia Co. Designs were completed for two really big ones, one at Chooz, France, and another in southern California -- which, with the world's largest atomic reactor and a be the biggest yet. by Theodora Sturgeon Along with power sources, the company preoccupies itself with the turbines driven by that power, the generators that make usable energy from it, and the equipment which distributes it. One of the most interesting new complexes goes into service about now in Sewaren, N. J. Impressively large (# megawatts) it' is also so highly automated it is all but spooky. Hundreds of operating variables are monitored and controlled by a computer called Pro da c (a Westinghouse trademark) which has a builtin "priority director," allowing the computer to switch from one program to another depending upon the urgency of any of the thousands of decisions that the computer has to make. We'll slide past some astonishing developments in turbines (you wouldn't think anything as simple and basic as a turbine could be improved; but they keep on doing . it) and generators (two new # rpm monsters which operate at # lbs pressure) to a real sf heading (Trinistat Joins Mag-a-stat) which deals with a new use for Trinistor, a solid-state rectifier, coupled with a power-control; it approaches the ultimate in speed of response and veratility in generator control, separation of electrodes in arc devices and the like; Insuldur, a new insulator for power transformers which will permit utilities to carry heavier loads with the same equipment, or deliver their rated loads for a much longer time; a new test-transformer to test giant power transformers, so big it must be shipped on two oversized depressed-center flatcars and, assembled, measures #' x #, is #' high and weighs # tons. Here's a new tap-changer for limiting current when switching high-voltage lines, a gadget for winding heavy transformer coils six at a time (and producing a highly improved coil in the process), a new method of voltage regulation, circuit breakers which interrupt the arc between opening switchpoints with puffs of gas, and new lowvoltage and telemetering systems for power distribution. And here's a high-capacity watt-hour meter, with bearings that bear on nothing at all ! Magnets built into the rotor shaft and supporting cup repel one another and suspend the whole rotor assembly in space, without friction. Applications of Power. Automatic controls are the big thing here -- "brains" which stoke blast furnaces, control to the thousandth of an inch the speeding bands of paper in its manufacture, and many other applications, and the ingenious components which make it all happen. Here's the Trinistor again, starting and NfiUififiSiHft stopping a two hp motor a a test to see how long it can keep it up. (Forever, apparently. The Trinistor, a solidstate gadget, does this switching with no moving parts.) And here's some fingertip controls with which you can handle the #-ton crane specially built to handle the new #-ton, # kw generator rotors (# of 'em) for the new Niagara power plant. And an incredible new hoist-motor I  system for swift handling of heavy loads where, at the same time, precision and safety are factors, in such jobs as shiploading. This system makes the descending load generate electricity to help raise it, brake it and put it where you say it should go. And here's an array of new electric motor designs -- smaller, stronger, cooler and simpler. One of them eliminates the field coils on the hundreds of small motors used to turn the rollers on the run-out tables in steel mills. Control and distribution devices. So many of those transformer boxes you see on power poles near your house are of standard size, while demands keep on growing, that brains have to be cracked on the problem of putting more circuits and more capacity inside the boxes, and while making components smaller, making them better. This is being done in the development and design of new contactors, circuit breakers, insulators and controls. Some of them are designed to protect extremely delicate electronic devices from voltage surges, and for them a new system (and a new word) of hynetic (hydraulic magnetic) circuit breaking. The gimmick is to vary, by magnetism, the viscosity of a fluid in a hydraulic system! Lamps and Lighting. Here are some of the most fascinating developments of all. It has long been known by engineers that the brightest and most efficient phosphors -- chemicals which glow under electrical excitation -- can't be used for ordinary lights because they are green. Your girl just wouldn't appreciate your gazing at her in green light. Within the past year, Westinghouse engineers have found that by a precise blending of red phosphors in the green, they can produce a new white light. In spite of the steady improvement in fluorescents in past years, this one is startling; with the same wattage it yields # more than the Cool White, # more than White, and a huge # more than the Daylight lamp. Best of all, these new lamps have nothing special but the new phosphors, and are directly interchangeable with the old models. Improvements have been made in mercury-vapor lamps as well. Due to vl new filament, you can get # more light out of a # watt mere than before. Another fine, lighting development is designed for what airline pilots call the "black hole" -- the unlighted runway center in which they must touch down. A new centerline lamp is set into holes on the centerline one inch deep and eight inches in diameter. With lamp, lens, contacts, gaskets and fittings installed, the. light projects only above the surface, giving a bright centerline while being immune to rolling wheels, snowplows or extremes in temperature. Roads get attention from the company's lighting engineers, too. A new "luminaire" called the OV-#, can increase street and highway lighting # to # -- or maintain it at present levels at correspondingly less cost. And in another device lies a revolution in home and shop lighting -- a fluorescent tube bent into a "labyrinth" so that overall, it's square, not long. A light like this can be set flush in wall or ceiling and contains its own dirtproof reflector. Semiconductors and electronics drew so much attention for the year that we'll have to skim again. There's a new technique, the frame grid, which much improves the quality and life of the tuner and rf amplifier bottles in the front end of your TV set ; because of it the image will go further yet away from the rounded rectangle to the square look. A fabulous image amplifier, the Astracon, can take in one photon of light and put out # at the other end. What this will do for the astronomy business we can only begin to guess. There's a new vidicon for weather satellites only y # " in diameter and a super-rugged orthicon for low-light work such as satellite tracking. Another vidicon eliminates magnetic deflection coils, making for much smaller TV cameras and extremely narrow-band transmission; it makes it possible to send visual information over conventional phone lines instead of special cable. An "ionization gauge" will measure the degree of vacuum of outer space in the range mercury; the best up to now has been # # . The Trinistor we mentioned before, a solid-state rectifier which acts as a control gate for current flow, has been designed up to capacities in the order of # amps at # continuous volts and can take #-volt surges; you'll have to stop thinking of semi-conductors as gadgets merely for portable radios. The controlled dendritic process for "growing" amplifiers by the yard -- we did an article on this for you recently -- proceeds apace, and there's a new array of thermo-electric devices useful for cooling electronic components by turning heat directly into electricity. Solid-state inverters are now in use, turning dc into ac in underwater repeaters in telephone cable. Finally, there's the Televex system, medical x-rays coupled to TV, which can better the dim old fluoroscopic screen by # times and put it on TV monitors any way you like -- for a classroom, say, or a roomful of doctors in consultation. Marine and Aviation. The company contributed to the year's most spectacular, and the year's most impressive events in these fields -- the first underwater launching of Polaris, and the launching of the big flat-top Enterprise , which is powered by eight Westinghouse nuclear reactors. Work proceeds on nuclear propulsion for the Long Beach , a guided missile cruiser. And the fleet of nuclear subs, non-existent only six years ago, has been increased to # built or authorized. A strictly-from-sf gadget is the dredge Markham , which uses a company device called Magamp -- a magnetic amplifier -- to control the electric drive at variable speeds and directions, while the diesel generators rotate at set rpm. Time was that only steam could do heavy dredging, because steam engines can stop without stalling. The Magamp whips this problem. Another unique feature of the ship is a transverse bow tunnel with a big reversible prop in it, making the vessel superbly maneuverable at the lowest speeds and worst cross-current conditions. Cocktails, anyone? There's a shaker device for vibration testing which does away with mechanical linkages. A heavy magnesium plate rides on a film of oil on an optically flat granite block. The plate is driven much as is your hi-fi speaker, by armatures moving in the air-gap of electromagnets. The #" x #" table can handle massive loads and shake them through a halfinch travel up to # times a second. A heater for super-velocity wind-tunnels can deliver a # mile-per-hour blast of air at # F. Special low-inductance capacitors (which can store up relatively small amounts of energy, release it suddenly in enormous surges) are pushing us through the beachheads of controlled fusion. Other capacitors are used for "hot shot" re-entry simulation, turning loose a flow similar to speeds from Mach # to Mach #. There's lots more. Let us close with the simple observation that if one of several companies can rack up a score like this, the capitalist system is not doing so bad after all! bv Thaodorfe SturMon IF  Novelette It was a simple student exchange -- but Retief gave them more of an education than they expected! I nan took his green-lined cape and orange-feathered beret from the clothes tree. "I'm off now, Retief," he said. "I hope you'll manage the administrative routine during my absence without any unfortunate incidents." "That seems a modest enough hope," Retief said. "I'll try to live up to it." "I don't appreciate frivolity with reference to this Division," Magnan said testily. "When I first came here, the Manpower Utilization Directorate, Division of Libraries and Education was a shambles. I fancy I've made Frankly, I question the wisdom of placing you in charge of such a sensitive desk, even for two weeks. But remember. Yours is purely a rubberstamp function." "In that case, let's leave it to Miss Furkle. I'll take a couple of weeks off myself. With her poundage, she could bring plenty of pressure to bear." "I assume you jest, Retief," Magnan said sadly. "I should expect even you to appreciate that Bogan participation in the Exchange Program may be the first step toward sublimation of their aggressions into more cultivated channels." "I see they're sending two thousand students to d'Land," Retief said, glancing at the Memo for Record. '"That's a sizable sublimation." Magnan nodded. "The Bogans have launched no less than four military campaigns in the last two decades. They're known as the Hoodlums of the Nicodemean Cluster. Now, perhaps, we shall see them breaking that precedent and entering into the cultural life of the Galaxy." "Breaking and entering," Retief said. "You may have something there. But I'm wondering what they'll study on d'Land. That's an industrial world of the poor but honest variety." "Academic details are the affair of the students and their professors," Magnan said. "Our function is merely to bring them together. See that you don't antagonize the Bogan representative. This will be an excellent opportunity for you to practice your diplomatic restrain t -- not your strong point, I'm sure you'll agree." A buzzer sounded. Retief punched a button. "What is it, Miss Furkle?" "That -- bucolic person from Lovenbroy is here again." On the small desk screen, Miss Furkle's meaty features were compressed in disapproval. "This fellow's a confounded pest. I'll leave him to you, Retief," Magnan said. "Tell him something. Get rid of him. And remember: here at Corps HQ, all eyes are upon you." "If I'd thought of that, I'd have worn my other suit," Retief said. Magnan snorted and passed from view. Retief punched Miss Furkle's button. "Send the bucolic person in." A tall broad man with bronze skin and gray hair, wearing tight trousers of heavy cloth, a loose shirt open at the neck and a short jacket, stepped into the room. He had a bundle under his arm. He paused at sight of Retief, looked him over momentarily, then advanced and held out his hand. Retief took it. For a moment the two big men stood, face to face. The newcomer's jaw muscles knotted. Then he winced. Retief dropped his hand and motioned to a chair. "That's nice knuckle work, mister," the stranger said, massaging his hand. "First time anybody ever did that to me. My fault though. I started it, I guess." He grinned and sat down. "What can I do for you?" Retief said. "You work for this Culture bunch, do you? Funny. I thought they were all ribboncounter boys. Never mind. I'm Hank Arapoulous. I'm a farmer. What I wanted to see you about was -- " He shifted in his chair. "Well, out on by Keith Laumet: Lovenbroy we've got a serious problem. The wine crop is just about ready. We start picking in another two, three months. Now I don't know if you're familiar with the Bacchus vines we grow... ?" "No," Retief said. "Have a cigar?" He pushed a box across the desk. Arapoulous took one. "Bacchus vines are an unusual crop," he said, puffing the cigar alight. "Only mature every twelve years. In between, the vines don't need a lot of attention, so our time's mostly our own. We like to farm, though. Spend a lot of time developing new forms. Apples the size of a melon -- and sweet -- " "Sounds very pleasant," Retief said. "Where does the Libraries and Education Division come in?" Arapoulous leaned forward. "We go in pretty heavy for the arts. Folks can't spend all their time hybridizing plants. We've turned all the land area we've got into parks and farms. Course, we left some sizable forest areas for hunting and such. Lovenbroy's a nice place, Mr. Retief." "It sounds like it, Mr. Arapoulous. Just what -- " "Call me Hank. We've got long seasons back home. Five of 'em. Our year's about eighteen Terry months. Cold as hell in winter; eccentric orbit, you know. Blue-black sky, stars visible all day. We do mostly painting and sculpture in the winter. Then Spring; still plenty cold. Lots of skiing, bob-sledding, ice skating; and it's the season for woodworkers. Our furniture -- " "I've seen some of your furniture," Retief said. "Beautiful work." Arapoulous nodded. "All local timbers too. Lots of metals in our soil and those sulphates give the woods some color, I'll tell you. Then comes the Monsoon. Rain -- it comes down in sheets. But the sun's g e I I i n g closer. Shines all the time. Ever seen it pouring rain in the sunshine? That's the musicwriting season. Then summer. Summer's hot. We stay inside in the daytime and have beach parties all night. Lots of beach on Lovenbroy; we're mostly islands. That's the drama and symphony time. The theatres are set up on the sand, or anchored offshore. You have the music and the surf and the bonfires and stars -- we're close to the center of a globular cluster, you know... " "You say it's time now for the wine crop?" "That's right. Autumn's our harvest season. Most years we have just the ordinary crops. Fruit, grain, that kind of thing; getting it in doesn't take long. We spend most of the time on architecture, geting new places ready for the winter or remodeling the older ones. We spend a lot of time in our houses. We like to have them comfortable. But this year's different. This is Wine Year." his cigar, looked worriedly at Retief. "Our wine crop is our big money crop," he said. "We make enough to keep us going. But this year..." "The crop isn't panning out?" "Oh, the crop's fine. One of the best I can remember. Course, I'm only twentyeight ; I can't remember but two other harvests. The problem's not the crop." "Have you lost your markets? That sounds like a matter for the Commercial -- " "Lost our markets? Mister, nobody that ever tasted our wines ever settled for anything else!" "It sounds like I've been missing something," said Retief. "I'll have to try them some time." Arapoulous put his bundle on the desk, pulled off the wrappings. "No time like the present," he said. Retief looked at the two squat bottles, one green, one amber, both dusty, with faded labels, and blackened corks secured by wire. "D r i n k i n g on duty is frowned on in the Corps, Mr. Arapoulous," he said. "This isn't drinking. It's just wine." Arapoulous pulled the wire retainer loose, thumbed the cork. It rose slowly, then popped in the air. Arapoulous caught it. Aromatic fumes wafted from the bottle. "Besides, my feelings would be hurt if you didn't join me." He winked. Retief took two tliin-walled glasses from a table beside the desk. "Come to think of it, we also have to be careful about violating quaint native customs." Arapoulous filled the glasses. Retief picked one up, sniffed the deep rust-colored fluid, tasted it, then took a healthy swallow. He looked at Arapoulous thoughtfully. "Hmmm. It tastes like salted pecans, with an undercurrent of crusted port." "Don't try to describe it, Mr. Retief," Arapoulous said. He took a mouthful of wine, swished it around his teeth, swallowed. "It's Bacchus wine, that's all. Nothing like it in the Galaxy." He pushed the second bottle toward Retief. "The custom back home is to alternate red wine and black." pulled the wires loose, nudged the cork, caught it as it popped up. "Bad luck if you miss the cork," Arapoulous said, nodding. "You probably never heard about the trouble we had on Lovenbroy a few years back?" "Can't say that I did, Hank." Retief poured the black wine into two fresh by Keith Laumer I # glasses. "Here's to the harvest." "We've got plenty of minerals on Lovenbroy," Arapoulous said, swallowing wine. "But we don't plan to wreck the landscape mining 'em. We like to farm. About ten years back some neighbors of ours landed a force. They figured they knew better what to do with our minerals than we did. Wanted to strip-mine, smelt ore. We convinced 'em otherwise. But it took a year, and we lost a lot of men." "That's too bad," Retief said. "I'd say this one tastes more like roast beef and popcorn over a Riesling base." "It put us in a bad spot," Arapoulous went on. "We had to borrow money from a world called Croanie. Mortgaged our crops. Had to start exporting art work too. Plenty of buyers, but it's not the same when you're doing it for strangers." "Say, this business-of alternating drinks is the real McCoy," Retief said. "What's the problem? Croanie about to foreclose?" "Well, the loan's due. The wine crop would put us in the clear. But we need harvest hands. Picking Bacchus grapes isn't a job you can turn over to machinery -- and anyway we wouldn't if we could. Vintage season is the high point of living on Lovenbroy. Everybody joins in. First, there's the picking in the fields. Miles and miles of vineyards covering the mountain sides, and crowding the river banks, with gardens here and there. Big vines, eight feet high, loaded with fruit, and deep grass growing between. The wine-carriers keep on the run, bringing wine to the pickers. There's prizes for the biggest day's output, bets on who can fill the most baskets in an hour... The sun's high and bright, and it's just cool enough to give you plenty of energy. Come nightfall, the tables are set up in the garden plots, and the feast is laid on : roast turkeys, beef, hams, all kinds of fowl. Big salads. Plenty of fruit. Freshbaked bread...and wine, plenty of wine. The cooking's done by a different crew each night in each garden, and there's prizes for the best crews. "Then the wine-making. We still tramp out the vintage. That's mostly for the young folks but anybody's welcome. That's when things start to get loosened up. Matter of fact, pretty near half our young-uns are born after a vintage. All bets are off then. It keeps a fellow on his toes though. Ever tried to hold onto a gal wearing nothing but a layer of grape juice?" "You say most of the children are born after a vintage. That would make them only twelve years old by the time -- " "Oh, that's Lovenbroy years; they'd be eighteen, Terry reckoning." "I was thinking you looked a little mature for twentyeight," Retief said. "Forty-two, Terry years," Arapoulous said. "But this year it looks bad. We've got a bumper crop -- and we're short-handed. If we don't get a big vintage, Croanie steps in. Lord knows what they'll do to the land. Then next vintage time, with them holding half our grape acreage -- " "You hocked the vineyards?" "Yep. Pretty dumb, huh? But we figured twelve years was a long time." "On the whole," Retief said, "I think I prefer the black. But the red is hard to beat... " "What we figured was, maybe you Culture boys could help us out. A loan to see us through the vintage, enough to hire extra hands. Then we'd repay it in sculpture, painting, furniture -- " "Sorry, Hank, All we do here is work out itineraries for traveling side-shows, that kind of thing. Now, if you needed a troop of Groaci noseflute players -- " "Can they pick grapes?" "Nope. Anyway, they can't stand the daylight. Have you talked this over with the Labor Office?" "Sure did. They said they'd fix us up with all the electronics specialists and computer programmers we wanted -- but no field hands. Said it was what they classified as menial drudgery; you'd have thought I was trying to buy slaves." The buzzer sounded. Miss Furkle's features appeared on the desk screen. "You're due at the Intergroup Council in five minutes," she said. "Then afterwards, there are the Bogan students to meet." "Thanks." Retief finished his glass, stood. "I have to run, Hank," he said. "Let me think this over. Maybe I can come up with something. Check with me day after tomorrow. And you'd better leave the bottles here. Cultural exhibits, you know." II A S the council meeting broke up, Retief caught the eye of a colleague across the table. "Mr. Whaffle, you mentioned a shipment going to a place called Croanie. What are they getting?" Whaffle blinked. "You're he said. "Properly speaking, equipment grants are the sole concern of the Motorized Equipment Depot, Division of Loans and Exchanges." He pursed his lips. "However, I suppose there's no harm in telling you. They'll be receiving heavy mining equipment." by Keith Leu mer "Drill rigs, that sort of thing ?" "Strip mining gear." Whaffle took a slip of paper from a breast pocket, blinked at it. "Bolo Model WVI tractors, "Forgivemy curiosity, Mr. Whaffle. It's just that Croanie cropped up earlier today. It seems she holds a mortgage on some vineyards over on -- " fair, sir," Whaffle cut in. "I have sufficient problems as business." "Speaking of tractors," another man put in, "we over at the Special Committee for Rehabilitation and Overhaul of Under-developed N a t i o n s' General Economies have been trying for months to get a request for mining equipment the scene," Whaffle said. "First come, first served. He strode off, briefcase under his arm. "That's the trouble with peaceful worlds," the said. "Boge is a troublemaker, so every agency in the Corps is out to pacify her. While my chance to tnake a record -- that is, assist peaceloving d'Land -- comes to naught." He shook his head. "What kind of university do they have on d'Land ?" asked Retief. "We're sending them two thousand exchange students. It must be quite an institution." "University? D'Land has one under-endowed technical college." "Will all the exchange students be studying at the Technical College?" "Two thousand students? Hah! Two hundred students would overtax the facilities of the college." "I wonder if the Bogans know that?" "The Bogans? Why, most of d'Land's difficulties are due to the unwise trade agreement she entered into with Boge. Two thousand students indeed!" He snorted and walked away. fice to pick up a short cape, then rode the elevator to the roof of the #-story Corps HQ building and hailed a cab to the port. The Bogan students had arrived early. Retief saw them lined up on the ramp waiting to go through customs. It would be half an hour before they were cleared through. He turned into the bar and ordered a beer. A tall young fellow bn the next stool raised his glass. "Happy days," he said. "And nights to match." "You said it," He gulped half his beer. "My name's Karsh. Mr. Karsh. Yep, Mr. Karsh. Boy, this is a drag, sitting around this place waitmg... "You meeting somebody?" "Yeah. Bunch of babies. Kids. How they expect -- Never mind. Have one on me." "Thanks. You a Scoutmaster?" "I'll tell you what I am. I'm a cradle-robber. You know -- " he turned to Retief -- "not one of those kids is over eighteen." He hiccupped. "Students, you know. Never saw a student with a beard, did you?" "Lots of times. You're meeting the students, are you?" The young fellow blinked at Retief. "Oh, you know about it, huh?" Karsh finished his beer, ordered another. "I came on ahead. Sort of an advance guard for the kids. I trained 'em myself. Treated it like a game, but they can handle a act under pressure. If I had my old platoon -- " He looked at his beer glass, pushed it back. "Had enough," he said. "So long, friend. Or are you coming along?" Retief nodded. "Might as well." A T the exit to the Customs enclosure, Retief watched as the first of the Bogan students came through, caught sight of Karsh and snapped to attention, his chest out. "Drop that, mister," Karsh snapped. "Is that any way for a student to act?" The youth, a round-faced lad with broad shoulders, grinned. "Heck, no," he said. "Say, uh, Mr. Karsh, are we gonna get to go to town? We fellas were thinking -- " "You were, hah? You act like a bunch of school kids! I mean... no! Now line up!" "We have quarters ready for the students," Retief said. "If you'd like to bring them around to the west side, I have a couple of copters laid on." "Thank s," said Karsh. "They'll stay here until takeoff time. Can't have the little dears wandering around loose. Might get ideas about going over the hill." He hiccupped. "I mean they might play hookey." "We ve scheduled your reembarkation for noon tomorets and a dinner." "Sorry," Karsh said. "As soon as the baggage gets here, we're off." He hiccupped again. "Can't travel without our baggage, y'know." "Suit y o u r s e I f," Retief said. "Where's the baggage now?" "Coming in aboard a Croanie lighter." "Maybe you'd like to arrange for a meal for the students here." by Keith Laumer "Sure," Karsh said. "That's a good idea. Why don't you join us?" Karsh winked. "And bring a few beers." "Not this time," Retief said. He watched the students, still emerging from Customs. "They seem to be all boys," he commented. "No female students?" "Maybe later," Karsh said. "You know, after we see how the first bunch is received." fice, Retief buzzed Miss Furkle. "Do you know the name of the institution these Bogan students are bound for?" "Why, the University at d'Land, of cotirse." "Would that be the Technical College?" Miss Furkle's mouth puckered. "I'm sure I've never pried into these details." "Where does doing your job stop and prying begin, Miss Furkle?" Retief said. "Personally, I'm curious as to just what it is these students are travelling so far to study -- at Corps expense." "Mr. Magnan never -- " "For the present. Miss Furkle, Mr. Magnan is vacationing. That leaves me with the question of two thousand young male students headed for a world with no classrooms for them...a world in need of tractors. 'But the tractors are on their way to Croanie, a world under obligation to Boge. And Croanie holds a mortgage on the best grape acreage on Lovenbroy." "Well!" Miss Furkle snapped, small eyes glaring under unplucked brows. "I hope you're not questioning Mr. Magnan's wisdom!" "About Mr. Magnan's wisdom there can be no question," Retief said. "But never mind. I'd like you to look up an item for me. How many tractors will Croanie be getting gram?" said. "Mr. Magnan always -- " "I'm sure he did. Let me know about the tractors as soon as you can." disappeared from the screen. Retief left the office, descended forty-one stories, followed a corridor to the Corps Library. In the stacks he thumbed through catalogues, pored over indices. "Can I help you?" someone chirped. A tiny librarian stood at his elbow. "Thank you, ma'am," Retief said. "I'm looking for information on a mining rig. A Bolo model WV tractor." "You won't find it in the industrial section," the librarian said. "Come along." Retief followed her along the stacks to a well-lit section lettered tape from the shelf, plugged it into the viewer, flipped through and stopped at a squat armored vehicle. f mMm m llJj ifdlSoi "That's the model WV," she said. "It's what is known as a continental siege unit. It carries four men, with a halfmegatonsecond firepower." "There must be an error somewhere," Retief said. "The Bolo model I want is a tractor. Model WV M-l -- " "Oh, the modification was the addition of a bulldozer blade for demolition work. That must be what confused you." "Probably -- among other things. Thank you." Miss Furkle was waiting at the office. "I have the information you wanted," she said. "I've had it for over ten minutes. I was under the impression you needed it urgently, and I went to great lengths -- " "Sure," Retief said. "Shoot. How many tractors?" "Five hundred." "Are you sure?" Miss Furkle's chins quivered. "Well! If you feel I'm incompetent -- " "Just questioning the possibility of a mistake, Miss Furkle. Five hundred tractors is a lot of equipment." "Was there anything further?" Miss Furkle inquired frigidly. "I sincerely hope not," Retief said. Ill padded chair with power swivel and hipu-matic contour, Retief leafed through a He paused at a page headed Industry. Still reading, he opened the desk drawer, took out the two bottles of Bacchus wine and two glasses. He poured an inch of wine into each and sipped the black wine meditatively. It would be a pity, he reflected, if anything should interfere with the production of such vintages... Half an hour later he laid the folder aside, keyed the phone and put through a call to the Croanie Legation. He asked for the Commercial Attache. "Retief here, Corps HQ," he said airily. "About the tractors. I'm wondering if there's been a slip up. My records show we're shipping five hundred units... "That's correct. Five hundred." Retief waited. "Ah... are you there, Retief?" "I'm still here And I'm still wondering about the five hundred tractors." "It's perfectly in order. I thought if was all settled. Mr. Whaffle -- " "One unit would require a good-sized plant to handle its output," Retief said. "Now Croanie subsists on her fisheries. She has perhaps half a dozen pint-sized processing plants. Maybe, in a bind, they could handle the ore ten WV's could scrape up... if Croanie had any ore. It doesn't. By the way, isn't a WV a poor choice, as a mining outfit? I should think -- " "See here, Retief! Why all this interest in a few surplus tractors? And in any event, what business is it of yours how we plan to use the equipment? That's an internal affair of my government. Mr. W baffle -- " 'Tm not Mr. Whaffle. What are you going to do with the other four hundred and ninety tractors?" "I understood the grant was to be vith no strings attached !" "I know it's bad manners to ask questions. It's an old diplomatic tradition that any time you can get anybody to accept anything as a gift, you've scored points in the game. But if Croanie has some scheme cooking -- " tief. It's a mere business transaction." "What kind of business do you do with a Bolo WV? With or without a blade attached, it's what's known as a continental siege unit." "Great Heavens, Retief! Don't jump to conclusions! Would you have us branded as warmongers? Frankly -- is this a closed line?" "Certainly. You may speak freely." "The tractors are for transshipment. We've gotten ourselves into a difficult situation, b a I a n c e-of-paymentswise. This is an accommodation to a group with which we have ratherstrong business ties." "I understand you hold a mortgage on the best land on Lovenbroy," Retief said. "Any connection?" "Why...ah...no. Of course not, ha ha." "Who gets the tractors eventually?" "Retief, this is unwarranted interference !" "Who gets them?" "They happen to be going to Lovenbroy. But I scarcely see -- " "And who's the friend you're helping out with an unauthorized transshipment of grant material?" "Why... ah... I've been working with a Mr. Gulver, a Bogan representative." "And when will they be shipped ?" "Why, they went out a week ago. They'll be half way there by now. But look here, Retief, this isn't what you're thinking !" "How do you know what I'm thinking? I don't know myself." Retief rang off, buzzed the secretary. "Miss Furkle, I'd like to be notified immediately of any new applications that might come in from the Bogan Consulate for placement of students." by Keith Laumer "Well, it happens, by coincidence, that I have an application here now. Mr. Gulver of the Consulate brought it in." "Is Mr. Gulver in the office? I'd like to see him." "I'll ask him if he has time." "Great. Thanks." It was half a minute before a thicknecked red-faced man in a tight hat walked in. He wore an old-fashioned suit, a drab shirt, shiny shoes with round toes and an ill-tempered expression.   he barked. "I understood in my discussions with the other...ah... c i v i I i a n there'd be no further need for these irritating conferences." "I've just learned you're placing more students abroad, Mr. Gulver. How many this time?" "Two thousand." "And where will they be going?" "Croanie. It's all in the application form I've handed in. Your job is to provide transportation." "Will there be any other students embarking this season?" "Why...perhaps. That's Boge's b u s i n e s s." Gulver looked at Retief with pursed lips. "As a matter of fact, we had in mind dispatching another two thousand to Featherweight." "Another under-populated world -- and in the same cluster, I believe," Retief said. "Your people must be unusually interested in that region of space." "If that's all you wanted to know, I'll be on my way. I have matters of importance to see to." After Gulver left, Retief called Miss Furkle in. "I'd like to have a break-out of all the student movements that have been planned under the present program," he said. "And see if you can get a has been shipping latefy." M iss Furkle compressed her lips. "If Mr. Magnan were here, I'm sure he wouldn't dream of interfering in the work of other departments. I...overheard your conversation with the gentleman from the Croanie Legation -- " "The lists, Miss Furkle." "I'm not accustomed." Miss Furkle said, "to intruding in matters outside our interest cluster." "That's worse than listening in on phone conversations, eh? But never mind. I need the information, Miss Furkle." "Loyalty to my Chief -- " "Loyalty to your pay-check should send you scuttling for the material I've asked for," Retief said. "I'm taking full responsibility. 'Now scat." The buzzer sounded. Retief Retief speaking..." Arapoulous's brown face appeared on the desk screen. "How-do, Retief. Okay if I come up?" "Sure, Hank. I want to talk to you." In the office, Arapoulous took a chair. "Sorry if I'm rushing you, Retief," he said. "But have you got anything for me?" Retief waved at the wine bottles. "What do you know about Croanie?" "Croanie? Not much of a place. Mostly ocean. All right if you like fish, I guess. We import our seafood from there. Nice prawns in monsoon time. Over a foot long." "You on good terms with them ?" "Sure, I guess so. Course, they're pretty thick with Boge." "So?" "Didn't I tell you? Boge was the bunch that tried to take us over here a dozen years back. They'd' ve made it too, if they hadn't had a lot of bad luck. Their armor went in the drink, and without armor thev're easy game." M iss Furkle buzzed. "T have your lists," she said shortly. "Bring them in, please." nnHE secretary placed the papers on the desk. Arapoulous caught her eye and grinned. She sniffed and marched from the room. "What that gal needs is a slippery time in the grape mash," Arapoulous observed Retief thumbed through the papers, pausing to read from time to time. He finished and looked at Arapoulous. "How many men do you need for the harvest, Hank?" Retief inquired. Arapoulous sniffed his wine glass and looked thoughtful. "A hundred would help," he said. "A thousand would be better. Cheers." "What would you say to two thousand?" "Two thousand? Retief, you're not fooling?" "I hope not." He picked up the phone, called the Port Authority, asked for the dispatch clerk. "Hello, Jim. Say, I have a favor to ask of you. You know that contingent of Bogan students. They're traveltransports. I'm interested in the baggage that goes with the students Has it arrived yet? Okay, I'll wait." Jim came back to the phone. "Yeah, Retief, it's here. Just arrived. But there's a funny thing. It's not consigned to d'Land. It's ticketed clear through to Lovenbroy." "Listen, Jim," Retief said. "I want you to go over to the warehouse and take a look at that baggage for me." Retief waited while the dispatch clerk carried out the errand. The level in the two bottles had gone down an by Keith Laumer inch when Jim returned to the phone. "Hey, I took a look at that baggage, Retief. Something funny going on. Guns. #mm blasters, power pistols -- " "It's okay, Jim. Nothing to worry about. Just a mix-up. Now, Jim, I'm going to ask you to do something more for me. I'm covering for a friend. It seems he slipped up. I wouldn't want word to get out, you understand. I'll send along a written change order in the morning that will cover you officially. Meanwhile, here's what I want you to do..." Retief gave instructions, then rang off and turned to Arapoulous. "As soon as I get off a coubetter get down to the port, Hank. I think I'd like to see the students off personally." IV entered the Departures enclosure at the port. "What's going on here?" he demanded. "There's some funny business with my baggage consignment. They won't let me see Itl I've got a feeling it's not being loaded." "You'd better hurry, Mr Karsh , # n Retief saidYou're scheduled to Mast off in less than an hour. Are the students all loaded!" "Yes, blast you! What about my baggage? Those vessels aren't moving without it !" "No need to get so upset about a few toothbrushes, is there, Mr. Karsh?" Retief said blandly. "Still, if you're worried -- " He turned to Arapoulous. "Hank, why don't you walk Mr. Karsh over to the warehouse and...ah...take care of him?" "I know just how to handle it," Arapoulous said. The dispatch clerk came up to Retief. "I caught the tractor equip m e n t," he said. "Funny kind of mistake, but it's okay now. They're being off-loaded at d'Land. I talked to the traffic controller there. He said they weren't looking for any students." "The labels got switched, Jim. The students go where the baggage was consigned. Too bad about the mistake, but the Armaments Office will have a man along in a little while to dispose of the guns. Keep an eye out for the luggage. No telling where it's gotten to." "Here !" a hoarse voice yelled. Retief turned. A disheveled figure in a tight hat was crossing the enclosure, arms waving. "Hi there, Mr. Gulver," Retief called. "How's Boge's business coming along?" "Piracy #" Gulver blurted as he came up to Retief, puffing hard. "You've got a hand In this, I don't doubt! Where's that Magnan fellow?" "What seems to be the problem?" Retief said. "Hold those transports ! I've just been notified that the baggage shipment has been impounded. I'll remind you, that shipment enjoys diplomatic free entry!" "Who told you it was impounded?" "Never mind! I have my sources !" Two tall men buttoned into gray tunics came up. "Are said. "That's right." "What about my baggage!" Culver cut in. "And I'm warning you, if those ships lift without -- " "These gentlemen are from the Armaments Control Commission," Retief said. "Would you like to come a I 'mg and claim your baggage, Mr. Quiver ?" "From where? I -- " Gulver turned two shades redder about the ears. "A.rnwm ots?" "The only shipment I've held up seems to be somebody's arsenal," Relief said. "Now if you cla # m this is your ba gg gage... "Why, impossible," Gulvev said in a s t r a i n e d voice. "Armaments? R'diculous. There's been an rror... A T the baggage wrol'oie Gulver looked, ghur I  at the opened cases of guns. "No, of course not," he said dully. "Not my baggage. Not my baggage at all." Arapoulous appeared, supporting the stumbling figure of Mr. Karsh. "What -- what's this?" Gulver spluttered. "Karsh? What's haopened?" "He had a little fall. He'll be okay," Arapoulous said. "You'd better help him to the ship," Retief said. "It's ready to lift. We wouldn't want him to miss it." "Leave him to me!" Gulver snapped, his eyes slashing at Karsh. "I'll see he's dealt with." "I couldn't think of it," Retief said. "He's a guest of the Corps, you know. We'll see him safely aboard." Gulver turned, signaled frantically. Three heavy-set men in identical drab suits detached themselves from the wall, crossed to the group. "Take this man," Gulver snapped, indicating Karsh, who looked at him dazedly, reached up to rub his head. "We take our hospitality seriously," Retief said. "We'll see him aboard the vessel." Gulver opened his mouth. "I know you feel bad about finding guns instead of school books in your luggage," Retief said, looking Gulver in the eye. "You'll be busy straightening oirt the details of the mix-up. You'll want to avoid further complications." "Ah. Ulp. Yes," Gulver by Keith Laumer said. He appeared unhappy. Arapoulous went on to the passenger conveyor, turned to wave. "Your man -- he's g o i n g too? M Gulver blurted. "He's not our man, properly speaking' Retief said. "He lives on Lovenbroy." "Lovenbroy?" Gulver choked. "But...the... I... # "I know you said the students were bound for d'Land," Retief said. "But I guess that was just another aspect of the general confusion. The course plugged into the navigators was to Lovenbroy. You'll be glad to know they're still headed there -- even without the baggage." "P e r h a p s," Gulver said grimly, "perhaps they'll manage without it." "By the way," Retief said. "There was another funny mix-up. There were some tractors -- for industrial use, you'll recall. I believe you cooperated with Croanie in arranging the grant through ously consigned to Lovenbroy, a purely agricultural world. I saved you some embarrassment, I trust, Mr. Gulver, by arranging to have them offloaded at d'Land." "D'Land! You've put the bitterest enemies!" "But they're only tractors, Mr. Gulver. Peaceful devices. Isn't that correct?" "That's...correct." Gulver sagged. Then he snapped erect. "Hold the ships!" he yelled. "I'm canceling ths student exchange -- " His voice was drowned by the rumble as the first of the monster transports rose from the launch pit, followed a moment later by the second, Retief watched them out of sight, then turned to Gulver. "They're off," he said. "Let's hope they get a liberal education." V deep grass by a stream, eating grapes. A tall figure appeared on the knoll above him and waved. "Retief!" Hank Arapoulous bounded down the slope and embraced Retief, slapping him on the back. "I heard you were here -- and I've got news for you. You won the final day's picking competition. Over two hundred bushels! That's a record !" "Let's get on over to the garden. Sounds like the celebration's about to start." In the flower-crowded park among the stripped vines, Retief and Arapoulous made their way to a laden table under the lanterns. A tall girl dressed in loose white, and with long golden hair, came up to Arapoulous. "Delinda, this is Retief -- today's winner. And he's also the fellow that got those workers for us." Delinda smiled at Retief. taa Tve heard about you, Mr. unhappy with me. It seems Retief. We weren't sure about I'm not ready for important the boys at first. Two thouassignments at Departmental sand Bogans, and all confused level. I was shipped off here about their baggage that went to the boondocks to get a litastray. But they seemed to tie more experience." like the picking." She smiled "Delinda, look after Reagain. tief," said Arapoulous. # T#I "That's not all. Our gals see you later. I've got to see liked the boys," Hank said, to the wine judging." He dis"Even Bogans aren't so bad, appeared in the crowd, minus their irons. A lot of "Congratulations on win'em will be staying on. But ning the day," said Delinda. how come you didn't tell me "I noticed you at work. You you were coming, Retief? I'd were wonderful. I'm glad have laid on some kind of big you're going to have the welcome." prize." "I liked the welcome I got. "Thanks. I noticed you too, And I didn't have much noflitting around in that white tice. Mr. Magnan was a little nightie of yours. But why upset when he got back. It weren't you picking grapes seems I exceeded my authorwith the rest of us?" ity." "I had a special assignArapoulous laughed. "I had ment." a feeling you were wheeling "Too bad. You should have pretty free, Retief. I hope had a chance at the prize." you didn't get into any trouDelinda took Retief's hand, ble over it." "I vouldn't have anyway," "No trouble," Retief said, she said. "I'm the prize."    A Complete Short Novel of Distant Stars by Jack Vance Also stories, articles and features by George O. Smith, Frederik.Pohl, Jim Harmon, Willy Ley, Jack Sharkey and many bv Keith Laumer IF  Fmiure The place where readers and editor meet... Dear Editor: Just read Jots and Tittles. You're one up on me -- I don't even know what a jot is. Having just come into repossession of part of my #-# collection of SF magazines (#c having proceeded to plow into them voraciously) I am in a better position than the average younger reader to understand the change that has taken place. And I can understand why no one wants a letter column any more. Simply -- what for? To read that Joe Blow, Irma Grinkle and Ichabod Schmerdlikov all think you publish a pretty good magazine? Who needs it? This is Hue #c Cry? No, this is plain old-fashioned egoboo, interesting to you but not to the readers. If that's all that's in the mailbag, then best lay Hue #c Cry to rest. However -- now we push up our sleeves and go to work -- I gather that you'd rather resurrect the body. Well, come to think of it, I can't tell you how to do that, but I can tell it him her. #. Lame or pedantic editorials. No, yours wasn't this issue. And yes, I realize how difficult it becomes month after month. I'm sure you read all the other SF magazines. How many editorials are an end in themselves? They pick (or should I say pick on?) a subject and then talk it to death. By the time the editor has finished it, it's a complete classroom lecture, with no need for a questionand-answer period. Or how many editorial piddle through a page or so while the editor mealy-mouths a few trite comments on this month's issue? A good healthy percentage of the letters in the lettercols of the "good old days" dealt with the "bright, sparkling" (your words, not mine) editorials. #. Indifferent answers to letters. Yes, some of yours fall into this category. Ain't nobody can answer a fan like Ray Palmer and Sam -- Mines or Merwin? I'd have to look it up. Anyway, they didn't pass the buck. And they weren't above telling some nut to go soak his head in formaldehyde. Which brings us to # . Your gray hairs are showing. Dad. Ten to twenty years ago you were all roughly in the same age bracket. A twenty-year-old fan could write to a twenty-five-year-old editor as he would to an old pal. No worries about whether the letters sounded immature. "This Is my old buddy, Joe. I'm gonna tell him that story stank. His judgment was way off on that one." Now Dad, where are we going to dig up a kid who'll tell FREDjERlK P#HL ! ! ! that his judgment was off and he should go soak his head? Nobody's gonna take a poke at dear old Dad while he's sittin' on the porch in his rockin' chair. All right, all right, cease and desist, Dad. I can see you've risen from the chair; sow come down off the porch and take a poke at me. Don't look to the other youngsters for help. Can you take it, Dad? You can call me names, too. But the one I like best is -- (Name omitted; see below) Dear Editor : If you publish my letter of the #th, please, just use my initials. "P.C"  You want free-swinging answers? But sometimes the freest-swinging comment a fellow can make is just to say -- no comment! Editor .    Dear Editor: Ho, "bright sparkling letters" the man wants. But DearMisterEditorSir, it's been so long since we've had a chance to sparkle and we're so badly out of practice. Part of the trouble is that while the editors have not minded when the readers sharpened their wits against one another they took a certain degree of exception to having the mental fang of said readers whet ted against their magazines. Does this mean that the humble reader can occasionally wittily pan some portion of your magazine and have his golden words see the light of day? If so, the good ol' days may well return again. Pat Scott Box #I Anacortes, Washington  Sure. Say what you like -- just so it's interesting. (And printable.) If you touch us on the raw we won't object in the least. All we'll do, we'll reach out and whomp you on the head with the rung of this here rocking chair. Editor .    Dear Editor: The impossible happened. If got a letter column. This must have sparked something, for immediately it began to change for the better. Book reviews would be really, and I mean really , welcomed back again. Roger Cox co Lt. Col. B.C., Cox Hq. Frankfurt Mil. Dist.    Dear Editor: I'm afraid I have nothing but compliments for you this month, but I keep telling myself that they can't keep up the good work at Digest Publications much longer. Old Fred will slip sometime, and then I'll be able to lower the boom. Really your stories get better all the time and wonder-wise you've got them all beat. You've recaptured some of the spirit of good ol' Planet, and that is surely quite a feat. (You have even got them beaten in one respect: Your illos are even worse than theirs used to be.) Oh, incidentally, why don't you print street addresses in HC? Guess I'll sign off with a little poetry (?) this month: There once was an editor moved His great magazine to improve. And since Fred took over ' s been a mover, So, guys, let's stay in the groove ! Dale E. Randles, Jr. # Gretchen Road Chula Vista, California    Dear Editor: I liked the drawing of Retief and the Flap-jacks in the current If. How about some stories from Poul Anderson? I don't like the heading of the cover. I wish you would put If in big letters...but keep up the good work. Jimmy Porter Springfield, Tennessee  Anderson's coming up next month. Cover's changed this month. Anything else you want, Jimmy? Editor .    Dear Editor: The thing that strikes me the most about If is the poor reproduction. 'Fess up, it's lousy. The covers have been quite poorly reproduced, though the pictures themselves were okay. Rating the last three Ifs, in eachish I put Laumer's story in first place. I really like Relief. Keep him as a regular feature. Reader Sarant is too demanding. Those writers he listed don't write much any more. Heinlein's on his list -- Galaxy or . Douglas Mackey # North Main Hutchinson, Kansas  Better drag out the old trampoline. You have about sixty days to practice flipping before the next issue hits the stands. Editor .    Dear Editor: Where are the new authors, you ask. Let me tell you. One of the fan clubs ran a fiction contest for amateurs this year. Cash prizes, almost a hundred bucks. (Some of us care enough about stf to put up our own money to improve the state of the art.) There were fifty entries, mostly from organized fandom. Here is what happened: About half trapped in the dead end of short-shorts with surprise endings. Seventy per cent don't know what a story is. (Specifically: An incident is not a story, neither is a series of incidents without continuity between them.) Some could write characterization (I recall with gusto and glee a #-year-old girl who did it with dialogue), but what good are characters without a story? Some have a rare gift for communicating mood and feelings, but all too often overdo it, as though they had just discovered the dictionary. In simple words, then, they fall prey to all the problems of beginning authors. They can do part of it, but not all. A dead loss? Don't be silly, there were about ten that came out, by the scoring system used, as "the type written by an amateur close to selling, or by a pro who bangs out a dud under the influence of a hangover." A flaw or two, but not too many. There were more, four of them in fact (in my own not so modest opinion as preliminary judge -- punishment for thinking of the idea) which came pretty close to this month's issue of , except for Leiber, of course. But, and a Jupiter size "but" it is, too, two were less than # words, and who buys those unless the author's name is Fred Brown? Conclusions? You bet, and this is likely to cause a shriek of agony from the hard-hearted editor. A question: If a new writer is overjoyed at comment and criticism from just another amateur, what wouldn't they give for a few words from an editor scribbled on the back of the rejection slip? Ah, what a dream. You could gain a place in the amateur writers' hall of fame for the price of this little time. ("Time? What's that?" he says with a sigh.) Just tell them a little direction, and yo might find all sorts of new writers. Alas, what a job, finding tame pro to do this for you. Will you shed a tear? Clayton Hamlin # Earle Avenue Bangor, Maine We do buy stories from fans -- there are around a dozen in inventory right now. We do buy stories under # words -- and not only from Fred Brown -- provided they are stories. (That's hard to do.) And we cant write personal notes with all, or even very many, rejected manuscripts. It isn't really because we're hard-hearted, or lazy either. Figure it out ypurself. We get something around # manuscripts a year. Multiply that by, say, # minutes each -- or whatever you think would be necessary to write a note on each one. (And we'll let you in on a little secret: It is not merely the time spent to write one note, but the time spent on the follow-up correspondence that inevitably results, that really begins to hurt.) Still, there's something in what you say, and you've given us an idea. Starting now,' is going to make it a point to publish at least one first story in each issue. How long we ! ll keep it up is up to you; at least a year or so, we hope forever. This isn't a contest; no prizes; no entry blanks; they'll be considered just as any other story is considered and paid for in the same way. But -- this month we present the first sale made by Joseph Green, Once Around Arctur us. (He has made several since, by the way.) Next issue, The Man Who Flew by Charles B. Cunningham, Jr. Etc. So...let's see what happens next. And for another slant on the same problem, see the next letter. Editor .    Dear Editor: In order to search out new fan writing talent, and to inspire a renewed interest in the field of writing science fiction, the publisher of Inertia is sponsoring The First Annual Phann Fiction Contest. There will be three grand prizes, all of which are to receive special awards, plus having the chance for professional publication. For details, please write me. B. Joseph Fekete,, jr. # Center Ridge Road Apartment rr# North Ridgeville, Ohio  If and Galaxy neither participate in nor sponsor this contest, but we will consider prize-winning stories for possible publication. Editor.    Dear Editor: With that editorial you threw your readers quite a curve. The trouble is, the entire problem is more than the prevention of the war andor its possibility. The problem fully stated has two factors: how can we prevent a war of the greatest magnitude? I imagine you'll get a number of Answers based on the solution of the first factor, the prevention of the war. But it is not the nature of the human race to fit itself into any one set of characteristics, and for this reason you can't eliminate war or the possibility of war. Nor can you expect men to use less than their most potent weapons. Accepting this as so, we will consider the second factor. What do I mean by magnitudes of disaster? Well, assume that you are a starving man. If you have only one egg and lose it, you'll die, but if you have two eggs and lose one, you'll still live. In both cases the disaster is the same; the loss of an egg. The decisive and only difference lies in the per cent of the whole the loss represents. The magnitude of disaster depends upon the per cent of the whole lost; a greater per cent means a greater magnitude, a lesser per cent, a lesser magnitude. All this can be applied to worlds. If Earth is destroyed while it is the only home of mankind, it is the End. Its destruction becomes an event of much less magnitude when it is only one of many human inhabited worlds. Through the conquest of space we will soon be making our mark on other planets and when we do we'll be solving the problem. In less years than you have fingers we will no longer have to worry about total destruction. Keeping in mind the idea that we will not be able to prevent war, the conquest of space gives us further opportunity to deduce its magnitude beyond providing us with more eggs. When (not if) the next war is fought it may be good strategic and tactical policy to do most of the fighting in space, for I am fairly certain that no planet can stand a determined attack from space. One's best chances for defense will lie in stopping the enemy before they arrive. Moreover, a space fleet should be able to minimize the amount of devastation a nation can perpetrate on another of the same planet. All in all, now' that we're shopping for Answers, I think the conquest of space is our best, if not our only, buy. Besides, we don't even have to sell anybody -- it's already being carried out! J. R. Parks #I #th Ave. Rochelle, #. If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohi, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Address You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the .  a raae mar  (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows I you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easy : before you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes VisAon i v Lens, #x# inch Art M  Board, # tubes Oil ylrb Paint, Oil, Turpentine, sb # Brushes, # page In struction Book. Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Vis-a-lens, Inc. # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. WORLDS OF If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers -- challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch,' Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address Use coupon or order by letter if you wish worlds of Vol. #, Number # All Stories New science fiction Sol Cohen, Publisher Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Podkayne of Mars by Robert A , Heinlein # The Desert and the Stars by Keith Laumer # The Critique of Impure Reason by Poul Anderson # The Real Thing by Albert Teichner # The Reluctant Immortals by David R, Bunch # The Man Who Flew by Charles D, Cunningham, Jr, # Too Many Eggs by Kris Neville #I The Dragon Slayers by Frank Santa # Most Personal # The Popoff by Theodore Sturgeon # Hue and Cry by The Readers # Cover by Virgil Finlay from Podkayne of Mars Next issue ( January ) on sale November #th IF published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York" #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States. Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the IT. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N.  -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devote enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you'ri sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of pape and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean., provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribc today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) few ?  Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy per # ,ssues foreign postoge) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # State. JP # Editorial T heodore sturgeon, your Feature Editor, deposes and says: I seize this space for my own and personal asons, writing before the events at the Pick-Congress in Chicago on Labor Day, where the World Science Fiction Convention has invited me to be Guest of Honor. Certain of these sentiments will be expressed in my speech, but it is my great desire to unload them now, suffused with anticipation. Now I know that the most acceptable public posture is a politician's mixture of humility with a confident, "well, of course." There is something mildly obscene about someone who publicly gloats (unless he's an Asimov, and who can possibly be an Asimov?)... and a for humility, it's usually phoney and necessary. When Earl Kemp called me and told me his Committee had chosen me, I said, "I have waited twenty-three years for this phoe call." I repeat that here. I am grateful and I am proud, and I don't think I am altogether humble. The Good Book says "Love thy neighbor as thyself." I believe that most people follow this precept. I believe further that most people don't like themselves very much -- which accounts for the rather frightening lack of love in the world. Low self-esteem takes a frightening toll. A guy who, at base, thinks little of his personal worth, meets a girl who thinks quite as little of hers. In the springtime of their association, the sap runs strong and warm, and she suddcnly tells him he is a good dancer. He, startled, responds with the statement that she has beautiful eyes. Something happens then, something which is the surrogate of love: it feels like it, tastes and sounds like it. On each other's compliments, they build a rosy pyramid of mutual esteem -- and no one realizes that it is based on the fact that each of them has a low opinion of himself. all the time, in many areas. There is a reason for this epidemic. Moral teachings from many sources have long urged us on in the pursuit of guilt. If you are ordered to take a good look at yourself, it's defects you think of first. If ycxur friend says to you, "Can I be frank?" you don't brace yourself for anything nice. We have, therefore, very largely disqualified ourselves from the right, and even the ability, to make honest selfappraisals, and inventory the good. It oays to learn this knack. It helps at the times when all the world's agin you -- you know the world is mistaken -- you know it. And it helps, too, when all the world's on your side, when, for example, someone calls you up and asks you to be Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention. I know why world science fiction, in the person of Earl Kemp, called me up. It's because I have a great facility with words, an odd kind of detachment, and an unabashed way of putting them together. These things all put into one word make a thing called Talent. A better word for it is Gift. Now there are some people who are six foot six and go around bragging about it all the time. There are few things more foolish. I would be foolish to brag about m gift. I was born with it ; I didn't create it and I didn't earn it. It's this gift which is being hc.iored at the Convention, not me, and I honor it too. If this be humility, make the most of it. Before the Convention, I have one more thing to say; and it has to do with science fiction. We're still trying to define sf, and I guess we always will. The reason that it's so hard, in these speciali ! ng times, to say what sf is about is that it isn't about anything -- it's about everything. It begins at the most remote horizons of any other form of expression except, possibly, poetry. As such, it is big enough for a talent -- a gift -- like mine. Sf has been the only place for it, and what I'm most grateful for is that sf coexisted with its birth and growth. The Gift knows where it wants to be. It is at home by Theodore Sturgeon be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of then teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Withia its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe L.B.W. ! Scribe L.B.W. i San Jose, California ,  Please send me the free hooV.,The Mastery I i of Life, which explains how I may learn to  i use my faculties and powers of mind. a I Name i i  Address ' ! City  ZJfie Rosicrucians The first Podkayne was a Martian and a saint. The second Podkayne was not -- precisely -- either one! A LL my life I've wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course -- just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation. Personally, V m  not convinced that the human race originated on Earth. I mean to say, how much reliance should you place on the evidence of a few pounds of old bones plus the opinions of anthropologists who usually contradict each other anyhow when what you are being asked to swallow so obviously flies in the face of all common sense? Think it through. The surface acceleration of Terra is clearly too great for the human structure, it is known to result in flat feet and hernias and heart trouble. The incident solar radiation on Terra will knock down dead an unprotected human in an apnazingly short time -- and do you know of any other organism which has to be artificially protected from what is alleged to be its own natural environment in order to stay alive? As to Terran ecology -- Never mind. We humans just couldn't have originated on Earth. Nor (I admit) on Mars, for that matter -- although Mars is certainly as near ideal as you can find in this planetary system today. Possibly the Missing Planet was our first' home -- even though I think of Mars as "home" and will always want to return to it no matter how far I travel in later years... and I intend to travel a long, long way. But I do want to visit Earth as a starter, not only to see people manage to live almost sitting in each others' laps (less than half of the land area of Terra is even marginally habitable) but mostly to see oceans... from a safe distance. Oceans are not only fantastically unlikely but to me the very thought of them is terrifying. All that unimaginable amount of water, unconfined. And so deep that if you fell into it, it would be over your head, incredible! But now we are going there! Perhaps I should introduce us. The Fries Family, I mean. Myself: Podkayne Fries -- "Poddy" to my friends, and we might as well start off being friendly. Adolescent female; I'm eight plus a few months, at a point in my development described by my Uncle Tom as "frying size and just short of husband high" -- a fair enough description since a female citizen of Mars may contract plenary marriage without guardian's waiver on her ninth birthday, and I stand # centimeters tall in my bare feet and mass # kilograms. "Five feet tWo and eyes of blue" my Daddy calls me, but he is a historian and romantic. But I am not romantic and would not consider even a limited marriage on my ninth birthday ; I have other plans. Not that I am opposed to marriage in due time, nor do I expect to have any trouble snagging the male of my choice. In these, memoirs I shall be . frank rather than modest because they will not be published until I am old and famous, and I will certainly revise them before then. In the meantime I am taking the precaution of writing Anglish in Martian Oldscript -- a combination which I'm sure Daddy could puzzle out, only he wouldn't do such a thing unless I invited him to. Daddy is a dear and does not snoopervize me. My brother Clark would pry, but he regards Anglish as a dead language and would never bother his head with Qldscript anyhow  book titled : Eleven Years Old: the Pre-Adolescent Adjustment Crisis in the Male, I read it, hoping that it would help me to cope with my brother. Clark is just six, but the "Eleven Years" referred to in that title are Terran years because it Was written on Earth. If you will apply the conversion factor of # to attain real years, you will see that my brother is exactly eleven of those undersized Earth years old. That book did not help me much. It talks about "cushioning the transition into the social group" -- but there is no present indication that Clark ever intends to join the human race. He is more likely to devise a way to blow up the universe just to hear the bang. Since I am responsible for him much of the time and since he has an I.Q. of # while mine is only #,' you can readily see that I need all the advantage that greater age and maturity can give me. At present my standing rule with him is: Keep your guard up and never offer hostages. Back to me. I'm colonial mongrel in ancestry, but the Swedish part is dominant in my looks, with Polynesian and Asiatic fractions adding no more than a not-unpleasing V I ; . by Robert A. Heinlein exotic flavor. My legs are long for my height,' my  waist is forty-eight centimeters and my chest is ninety-r-not all of which is rib cage, I assure you, even thqugh we old colonial families all run to hypertrophied lung development; some of it is burgeoning secondary sex characteristic. Besides that, my hair is pale blonde and wavy and I'm pretty. Not beautiful. Praxiteles would not have given me a second look. But real beauty is likely to scare a man off, or else make him quite unmanageable, whereas prettiness, properly handled, is an asset. Up till a couple of years ago I used to regret not being male (in view of my ambitions), but I at last realized how silly I was being. One might as well wish for wings. As Mother says: "One works with available .materials"... and I found that the materials available were adequate, In ffict I found that I Jike hciflg female. My hormone balance is okay and  I'm quite; well adjusted to the world, and vice versa. I'm smart enough not unnecessarily to show that I am smart; I've got a long upper lip and a short nose, and when I wrinkle my nose, and loqk baffled, a man is usually only ,too glad, to help me  especially if he is .about twice my age. There are more ways of computing a ballistic than by counting it on your fin.   i' i  'gers: I I That's me : Poddy Fries, ' ftee citizen of Mars, female. Future pilot and someday Commander of deep-space ex; ploration parties. Watch for ' me in the news. , Mother is twice as good looking as I am and much taller than I ever will be; she looks like a Valkyrie about to gallop off into the sky. She holds a system-wide license as a Master Engineer, Heavy I Construction, Surface or Free Fall, and is entitled to wear both the Hoover Medal with cluster and the Christania Order, Knight Commander, for bossing the rebuilding of Deimos and Phobos. But she's more than just the traditional hairy engineer. She has a social presence which she can switch from warmly charming to frostily intimidating at Will, she holds honorary degrees galore, and she! Ublishes popular little gerris SUch 's Design Criteria with Re ' dpect' to the Effects of Radi I at ion on the Bonding of # Pressure-Loaded Sandwich Structures. i   .  I T is because Mother is often away from home for professional reasons that I am, from time to time, the reluctant custodian of my younger brother. Still, I suppose it is good practice, for how can I ever expect to command my own ship if I can't tame a six-year-old savage? Mother says that a boss who is forced to part a man's hair with a wrench has failed at some point, so I try to control our junior nihilist without resorting to force. Besides, using force on Clark is very chancy. He masses as much as I do, and he fights dirty. It was the job Mother did on Deimos that accounts for Clark and myself. Mother was determined to meet her construction dates; and Daddy, on leave from Ares U. with a Guggenheim grant, was even more frantically determined to save every scrap of the ancient 'Martian artifacts no matter how much it delayed construction. This threw them into such intimate and bitter conflict that they got married and for a while Mother had babies. Daddy and Mother are Jack Spratt and his wife. He is interested in everything that has already happened, she is interested only in what is going to happen, especially if she herself is making it happen. ' Daddy's title is Van Loon Professor of Terrestrial History, but his real love is Martian history, especially if years ago. But do not think that Daddy is a cloistered don given only to contemplation and study. When he was even younger than I am now, he lost an arm one chilly night in the attack on the Company Offices during the Revolution -- and he can still shoot straight and fast with the hand he has left. The rest of our family is Great Uncle Tom, Daddy's father's brother. Uncle Tom is a parasite. So he says. It is true that you don't see him work much, but he was an old man before I was born. He is a Revolutionary veteran, same as Daddy, and is a Past Grand Commander of the Martian Legion and a S e n a t o r-atLarge of the Republic, but he doesn't seem to spend much time on either sort of politics, Legion or public. Instead he hangs out at the Elks Club and plays pinochle with other relics of the past. Uncle Tom is really my closest relative, for he isn't as intense as my parents, nor as busy, and will always take time to talk with me. Furthermore he has a streak of Original Sin which makes him sympathetic to my problems. He says that I have such a streak, too, much wider than his. Concerning this I reserve my opinion. That's our family and we are all going to Earth. Wups! I left out three -- the infants. But they hardly count now and it is easy to forget them. When Daddy and Mother got Population, Ecology  Genetics -- pegged them at five and by Robert A. Heinlein would have allowed them seven had they requested it, for, as you may have gathered, my parents are rather high-grade citizens even among planetary colonials all of whom are descended from, or are themselves, highly selected and drastically screened stock. But Mother told the Board that five was all that she had time for. Then she had us as fast as possible, while fidgeting at a desk job in the Bureau of Planetary Engineering. Then she popped her babies into deep-freeze as fast as she had them, all but me, since I was the first. Clark spent two years at constant entropy, else he would be almost as old as I am. (Deepfreeze time doesn't count, of course, and his official birthday is the day he was decanted.) I remember how jealous I was. Mother was just back from conditioning Juno and it didn't Seem fair to me that she would immediately start raising a baby. Uncle Tom talked me out of that, with a lot of lap sitting, and I am no longer jealous of Clark -- merely wary. S O we've got Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon in the subbasement of the creche at Marsopolis, and we'll uncork and name at least one of them as soon as we get back from Earth. Mother is thinking of revivifying Gamma and EpsiIon together and raising them as twins (they're girls) and then launch Delta, who is a boy, as soon as the girls are housebroken. Daddy says that is not fair, because Delta is entitled to be older than Epsilon by natural priority of birth date. Mother says that is mere worship of precedent and that she does wish Daddy would learn to leave his reverence for the past on the campus when he comes home in the evening. Daddy says that Mother has no sentimental feelings -- and Mother says she certainly hopes not, at least with any problem requiring rational a n a I y s i s -- and Daddy says let's be rational, then... twin older sisters would either break a boy's spirit or else spoil him rotten. Mother says that is unscientific and unfounded. Daddy says that Mother merely wants to get two chores out of the way at once -- w hereupon Mother heartily agrees and demands to know why proved production engineering principles should not be applied to domestic economy? Daddy doesn't answer this. Instead he remarks thoughtfully that he must admit that two little girls dressed just alike would be kind of cute... name them "Margret" and "Marguerite" and call them "Peg" and "Meg" -- Clark muttered to me, "Why uncork them at all? Why not just sneak down some night and open the valves and call it an accident ?" I told him to go wash out his mouth with prussic acid and not let Daddy hear him talk that way. Daddy would have walloped him properly. Daddy, although a historian, is devoted to the latest, most progressive theories of child psychology and applies them by canalizing the cortex through pain association whenever he really wants to ensure that a lesson will not be forgotten. As he puts it so neatly: "Spare the rod and spoil the child' I canalize most readily and learned very early indeed how to predict and avoid incidents which would result in Daddy's applying his theories and his hand. But in Clark's case it is almost necessary to use a club simply to gain his divided attention. So it is now clearly evident that we are going to have twin baby sisters. But it is no headache of mine, I am happy to say, for Clark is quite enough maturing trauma for one girl's adolescence. By the time the twins are a current problem I expect to be long gone. Interlude H I, Pod. So you think I can't read your worm tracks. A lot you know about me! Poddy -- oh, excuse me, "Captain" Podkayne Fries, I mean, the famous Space Explorer and Master of Men -- Captain Poddy dear, you probably will never read this because it wouldn't occur to you that I not only would break your "code" but also write comments in the big, wide margins you leave. Just for the record, Sister dear, I read Old Anglish just as readily as I do System Ortho. Anglish isn't all that hard. I learned it as soon as I found out that a lot of books I wanted to read had never been translated. But it doesn't pay to tell everything you know, or somebody comes along and tells you to stop doing whatever it is you are doing. Probably your older sister. But imagine calling a straight substitution a "code"! Poddy, if you had actually been able to write Old Martian, it would have taken me quite a lot longer. But you can't. Shucks, even Dad can't write it without stewing over it and he probably knows more about Old Martian than anyone else in the Solar System. B,ut you won't crack my code -- because I haven't any. Try looking at this page under ultra-violet light -- a sun lamp, for example. by Robert A. Helnlein II H, Unspeakables ! Dirty ears! Hangnails! Snel-frockey ! Spit! At first I thought that my brother Clark had managed one of his more charlatanous machinations of malevolent legerdemain. But fortunately (the only fortunate thing about the whole miserable mess) I soon perceived that it was impossible for him to be in fact guilty no matter what devious subversions roil his id. Unless he has managed to invent and build in secret a time machine, which I misdoubt he would do if he could...nor am I prepared to offer odds that he can't. Not since the time he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks and charge them to my code number without (so far as anyone could ever prove) disturbing the company's seal on the control box. We'll never know how he did that one, because despite the fact that the company offered to Forgive All and pay a cash bonus to boot if only he would please tell them how he managed to beat their unbeatable seal -- despite this, Clark just looked blank and would not talk. That left only circumstantial evidence. I.e., it was clearly evident to anyone who knew us both (Daddy and Mother, namely) that I would never order candy-stripe ice cream smothered in hollandaise sauce, or -- no, I can't go on; I feel ill. Whereas Clark is widely known to eat anything which does not eat him first. Even this clinching psychological evidence would never have convinced the company's adjuster had not their own records proved that two of these obscene feasts had taken place while I was a house guest of friends in Syrtis Major, a thousand kilometers away. Never mind. I simply want to warn all girls not to have a Mad Genius for a baby brother. Pick instead a stupid, stolid, slightly subnormal one who will sit quietly in front of the solly box, mouth agape at cowboy classics, and never wonder what makes the pretty images. But I have wandered far from my tragic tale. We aren't going to have twins. We already have triplets. Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, throughout all my former life mere topics of conversation, are now Grace, Duncan and Elspeth in all too solid flesh -- unless Daddy again changes his mind before final registration ; they've had three sets of names already. But what's in a name? -- they are here, already in our home with a nursery room sealed on to shelter them... three helpless unfinished humans about canalworm pink in color and no features worthy of the name. Their limbs squirm aimlessly, their eyes don't track and a faint, queasy odor of sour milk permeates every room even when they are freshly bathed. Appalling sounds come from one end of each -- in which they heterodyne each other -- and even more appalling conditions prevail at the other ends. (I've vet to find all three of them dry at the same time.) A ND yet there is something decidedly engaging about the little things. Were it not that they are the proximate cause of my tragedy I could easily grow quite fond of them. I'm sure Duncan is beginning to recognize me already. But, if I am beginning to be reconciled to their presence, Mother's state can only be described as atavistically maternal. Her professional journals pile up unread, she has that soft Madonna look in her eyes and she seems somehow both shorter and wider than she did a week ago. First consequence : she won't even discuss going to Earth, with or without the triolets. Second consequence: Daddy won't go if she won't go -- he spoke quite sharply to Clark li for even suggesting it. Third consequence : since they won't go, we can't go. Clark and me, I mean. It is conceivably possible that I might have been permitted to travel alone (since Daddy agrees that I am now a "young adult" in maturity and judgment even though my ninth birthday lies still some months in the future), but the question is formal and without content since I am not considered quite old enough to accept full responsible control of my brother with both kilometers away (nor am I sure that I would wish to, unless armed with something at least as convincing as a morning star) and Daddy is so dismayingly fair with us that he would not even discuss permitting one of us to go and not the other when both of us had been promised the trip. Fairness is a priceless virtue in a parent -- but just at the moment I could stand being spoiled and favored instead. But the above is why I am sure that Clark does not have a time machine concealed in his wardrobe. This incredible contretemps, this idiot's dream of interlocking mishaps, is as much to his disadvantage as it is to mine. How did it happen? Gather ye round. Little did we dream that, when the question of a by Robert A. Hoinlein family trip to Earth was being planned in our household more than a month ago, this disaster was already complete and simply waiting the most hideous moment to unveil itself. The facts are these: the creche at Marsopolis has thousands of new-born babies marbelized at just short of absolute zero, waiting in perfect safety until their respective parents are ready for them. It is said, and I believe it, that a direct hit with a nuclear bomb would not hurt the consigned infants. A thousand years later a rescue squad could burrow down and find that automatic, self-maintaining machinery had not permitted the tank temperatures to vary a hundredth of a degree. In consequence, we Marsmen (not "Martians," please ! -- Martians are a nonhuman race, now almost extinct) -- Marsmen tend to marry early, have a full quota of babies quickly, then rear them later, as money and time permit. It reconciles that discrepancy, so increasingly and glaringly evident ever since the Terran Industrial Revolution, between the best biological age for having children and the best social age for supporting and rearing them. ; A couple named Breeze did just that, some ten years ago. They married on her ninth birthday and just past his . ' ,...    : .  ' I.',!'  . v' f  i ' t tenth, while he was still a pilot cadet and she was attending Ares U. They applied for three babies, were pegged accordingly and got them all out of the way while they were both finishing school. Very sensible. The years roll past, he as a pilot and later as master, she as a finance clerk in his ship and later as purser -- a happy life. The spacelines like such an arrangement. 'Married couples spacing together mean a taut, happy ship. Captain and Mrs. Breeze serve their ten-and-a-half (twenty Terran) years and put in for half-pay retirement, have it confirmed -- and immediately radio the creche to uncork their babies, all three of them. The radio order is received, relayed back for confirmation; the creche accepts it. Five weeks later the happy   . , .  couple pick up three babies, sign for them and start the second half of a perfect life. So they thought -- But what they had deposited was two boys and a girl. What they got was two girls and a boy. Ours. B elieve this you must -- it took them the better part of a week to notice it. I will readily concede that the difference between a brand-new boy baby and a brand-new girl baby is almost irrelevant. Nevertheless there is a difference. Apparently it was a case of too much help. Between a mother, a mother-in-law, a temporary nurse and a helpful neighbor, and much running in and out, it seems unlikely that any one person bathed all three babies as one continuous operation that first week. Certainly Mrs. Breeze had not done so -- until the day she did...and noticed...and fainted -- and dropped one of our babies in the bath water, where it would have drowned had not her scream fetched both her husband and the neighbor lady. So we suddenly had monthold triplets. The lawyer man from the creche was very vague about how it happened. He obviously did not want to discuss how their "foolproof" identification system could result in such a mix-up. So I don't know myself. But it seems logically certain that, for all their serial numbers, babies' footprints, record machines, et cetera, there is some point in the system where one clerk read aloud "Breeze" from the radioed order and another clerk checked a file, then punched "Fries" into a machine that did the rest. But the fixer man did not say. He was simply achingly anxious to get Mother and Daddy to settle out of court -- accept a check and sign a release under which they agreed not to publicize the error. They settled for three years of Mother's established professional earning power while the little fixer man gulped and looked relieved. But nobody offered to pay me for the mayhem that had been committed on my life, my hopes and my ambitions. Clark did offer a suggestion that was almost a sensible one, for him. He proposed that we swap even with the Breezes. Let them keep the warm ones, we would keep the cold ones. Ever hod" happy -- and we all go to Earth. My brother is far too selfcentered to realize it, but the Angel of Death brushed him with its wings at that point. Daddy is a truly noble soul... but he had had almost more than he could stand. And so have I. I had expected today to be actually on my IS by Robert A. Heinlein way to Earth, my first space trip farther than Phobos -- which was merely a school field trip, our "Class Honeymoon' A nothing thing. Instead, guess what I'm doing. Do you have any idea how many times a day three babies have to be changed? Ill chines! Wipe the tapes! Cancel all bulletins -- Well, not all of us. Daddy and Mother aren't going, and of course the triplets are not. But -- Never mind ; I had better tell it in order. Yesterday things just got to be Too Much. I had changed them in rotation, only to find as I got the third one dry and fresh that number one again needed service. I had been thinking sadly that just about that moment I should have been entering the dining saloon of S.S. Wanderlust to the strains of soft music. Perhaps on the arm of one of the officers...perhaps even on the arm of the Captain himself had I the chance to arrange an Accidental Happy Encounter, then make judicious use of my "puzzled kitten" expression. And, as I reached that point in my melancholy day dream, it was then that I discovered that my chores had started all over again. I thought of the Augean Stables and suddenly it was just Too Much and my eyes got blurry with tears. Mother came in at that point and I asked if I could please have a couple of hours of recess? She answered, "Why, certainly, dear," and didn't even glance at me. I'm sure that she didn't notice that I was crying. She was already doing over, quite unnecessarily, the one that I had just done. She had been tied up on the phone, telling someone firmly that, while it was true as reported that she was not leaving Mars, nevertheless she would not now accept another commission even as a consultant. No doubt being away from the infants for all of ten minutes had made her uneasy, so she just had to get her hands on one of them. Mother's behavior has been utterly unbelievable. Her cortex has tripped out of circuit and her primitive instincts are in full charge. She reminds me of a cat we had when I was a little girl -- Miss Polka Dot Ma'am -- and her first litter of kittens. Miss Pokie loved and trusted all of us, except about kittens. If we touched one of them, she was uneasy about it. If a kitten was taken out of her box and placed on the floor to be admired, she herself would hop out, grab the kitten in her teeth and immediately return it to the box, with an indignant waggle to her seat that showed all too plainly what she thought of irresponsible people who didn't know how to handle babies. Mother is just like that now. She accepts my help simply because there is too much for her to do alone. But she doesn't really believe that I can even pick up a baby without close supervision. So I left and followed my own blind instincts, which told me to go look up Uncle Tom. I found him at the Elks Club, which was reasonably certain at that time of day, but I had to wait in the ladies' lounge until he came out of the card room. Which he did in about ten minutes, counting a wad of money as he came. "Sorry to make you wait," he said, "but I was teaching a fellow citizen about the uncertainties in the laws of chance and I had to stay long enough to collect the tuition. How marches it, Podkayne mavourneen?" I tried to tell him and got all choked up, so he walked me to the park under the city hall and sat me on a bench and bought us both packages of Choklatpops and I ate mine and most of his and watched the stars on the ceiling and told him all about it and felt better. #Q H E patted my hand. "Cheer up, flicka. Always remember that when things seem darkest they usually get considerably worse." He took his phone out of a pocket and made a call. Presently he said, "Never mind the protocol routine, Miss. This is Senator Fries. I want the Director." Then he added in a moment, "Hymie? Tom Fries here. How's Judith? Good, good... Hymie, I just called to tell you that I'm coming over to stuff you into one of your own liquid helium tanks. Oh, say about fourteen or a few minutes after. That'll give you time to get out of town. Clearing." He pocketed his phone. "Let's get some lunch. Never commit suicide on an empty stomach, my dear. It's bad for the digestion." Uncle Tom took me to the Pioneers Club where I have been only once before and which is even more impressive than I had recalled. It has real waiters... men so old that they might have been pioneers themselves, unless they met the first ship. Everybody fussed over Uncle Tom and he called them all by their first names and they all called him "Tom" but made it sound like "Your Majesty" and the master of the hostel came over and prepared my sweet himself with about six other people standing around to hand him things, like a famous sur t by Robert A. Heinlein ge on operating against the swift onrush of death. Presently Uncle Tom belched behind his napkin and I thanked everybody as we left, while wishing that I had had the forethought to wear my unsuitable gown that Mother won't let me wear until I'm nine and almost made me take back. One doesn't get to the Pioneers Club every day. Ve took the James Joyce Fogarty Express Tunnel and Uncle Tom sat down the whole way. So I had to sit, too, although it makes me restless; I prefer to walk in the direction a tunnel is moving and get there a bit sooner. But Uncle Tom says that he gets plenty of exercise watching other people work themselves to death. I didn't really realize that we were going to the Marsopolis Creche until we were there, so bemused had I been earlier with my own tumultuous emotions. But when we were there and facing a sign Tom said, "Hang around somewhere; I'll need you later." and went on in. The waiting room was crowded and the only magazines not in use were Kiddie Ka ners and Modern Homemaker , so I wandered around a bit and presently found a corridor that led to the Nursery. The sign on the door said that visiting hours were from # to #. Furthermore it was locked, so I moved on and found another door which seemed much more promising. it didn't say "This Means You " and it wasn't locked, so I went in. You never saw so many babies in your whole life! Row upon row upon row, each in its own little transparent cubicle. I could really see only the row nearest me, all of which seemed to be about the same age -- and .much more finished than the three we had at home. Little brown dumplings, they were, cute as puppies. Most of them were asleep, some were awake and kicking and cooing and grabbing at dangle toys that were just in reach. If there had not been a sheet of glass between me and them I would have grabbed me a double armful of babies. in the room, too -- well, young women, really. Each of them seemed to be busy with a baby and they didn't notice me. But shortly one of the babies nearest me started to cry, whereupon a light came on over its cubicle and one of the nurse girls hurried over. slid back the cover, picked it up and started patting its bottom. It stopped crying. "Wet?" I inquired. She looked up, saw me. "Oh, no, the machines take care of that. Just lonely, so I'm loving it." Her voice came through clearly in spite of the glass -- a hear  speak circuit, no doubt, although the pickups were not in evidence. She made soft noises to the baby, then added, "Are you a new employee? You seem to be lost." "Oh, no," I said hastily, "I'm not an employee. I just -- " "Then you don't belong here, not at this hour. Unless -- " she looked at me rather skeptically -- "just possibly you are looking for the instruction class for young mothers?" "Oh, no, no! Not yet." Then I added still more hastily, "I'm a guest of the Director." Well, it wasn't a fib. Not quite. I was a guest of a guest of the Director, one who was with him by appointment. The relationship was certainly concatenative, if not equivalent. It seemed to reassure her. She asked, "Just what did you want?" "Uh, just information. I'm making a sort of a survey. What goes on in this room?" "These are age six-month withdrawal contracts," she told me. "All these babies will be going home in a few days." She put the baby, quiet now, back into its private room, adjusted a nursing nipple for it, made some other sort of adjustments on the outside of the cubicle so that the padding inside sort of humped up and held the baby steady against the milk supply, then closed the top, moved on a few meters and picked up another baby. "Personally," she added, "I think the age six-months contract is the best one. A child twelve months old is old enough to notice the transition. But these aren't. They don't care who comes along and pets them when they cry... but nevertheless six months is long enough to get a, baby well started and take the worst of the load off the mother. We know how, we're used to it, we stand our watches in rotation so that we are never exhausted from being 'up with the baby all night'... and in consequence we aren't short tempered and we never yell at them. And don't think for a minute that a baby doesn't understand a cross tone of voice simply because he can't talk yet. He knows! And it can start him off so twisted that he may take it out on somebody else, years and years later. There, there, honey," she went on but not to me, "feel better now? by Robert A. Heinlein Feeling sleepy, huh? Now you just hold still and Martha will keep her hand on you until you are fast asleep." She watched the baby for a moment longer, then withdrew her hand, closed the box and hurried on to where another light was burning. "A baby has no sense of time," she added as she removed a squalling lump of fury from its crib. "When it needs love, it needs it right now. It can't know that -- " An older woman had come up behind her. "Yes, Nurse?" "Who is this you're chatting with? You know the rules." "But... she's a guest of the Director." The older woman looked at me with a stern no-nonsense look. "The Director sent you in lyjre?" I was making a split-second choice among three non-responsive answers when I was saved by Fate. A soft voice coming from everywhere at once announced: "Miss Podkayne Fries is requested to come to the office of the Director. Miss Podkayne Fries, please come to the office of the Director." I tilted my nose in the air and said with dignity, "That is I. Nurse, will you be so kind as to phone the Director and tell him that Miss Fries is on her way?" I exited with deliberate haste. T HE Director's office was four times as big and sixteen times as impressive as the principal's office at school. The Director was short. He had a dark brown skin and a gray goatee and a harried expression. In addition to him and to Uncle Tom, of course, there was present the little lawyer man who had had a bad time with Daddy a week earlier -- and my brother Clark. I couldn't figure out how he got there...except that Clark has an infallible homing instinct for trouble. Clark looked at me with no expression ; I nodded. The Director and his legal beagle stood up. Uncle Tom didn't but he said, "Dr. Hyman Schoenstein, Mr. Poon Kwai Yau -- my niece Podkayne Fries. Sit down, honey. Nobody is going to bite you. The Director has a proposition to offer you." The lawyer man interrupted. "I don't think -- " "Correct," agreed Uncle Tom. "You don't think. Or it would have occurred to you that ripples spread out from a splash." "But -- Dr. Schoenstein, the release I obtained from Professor Fries explicitly binds him to silence, for separate good and sufficient consider ation, over and above damages conceded by us and made good! This is tantamount to blackmail. I -- " ,W a. M VV.V   p;. o'#( v-" r m mlm : m:,:,  Vvx '.l  V # ; LWir'i Bv# wm wii  jii ii mmm npi mimsim mw Ml ipitt iiStl pm iw Then Uncle Tom did stand up. He seemed twice as tall as usual and he was grinning like a fright mask. "What was that last word you used?' "I ?" The lawyer looked startled. "Perhaps I spoke hastily. I simply meant -- " "I heard you," Uncle Tom growled. "And so did three witnesses. Happens to be one of the words a man can be challenged for, on this still free planet. But, since I'm getting old and fat, I may just sue you for your shirt instead. Come along, kids." The Director spoke quickly. "Tom... sit down, please. Mr. Poon... please keep quiet unless I ask for your advice. Now, Tom, you know quite well that you can't challenge nor sue over a privileged communication, counsel to client." "I can do both or either. Question is: will a court sustain me? But I can always find out," "And thereby drag out into the open the very point you know quite well I can't afford to have dragged out. Simply because my lawyer spoke in an excess of zeal. Mr. Poon?" "I tried to withdraw it. I do withdraw it." "Senator?" Uncle Tom bowed stiffly to Mr. Poon, who returned it. "Accepted, sir. No offense meant and none taken." Then Uncle Tom grinned merrily, let his pot-belly slide back down out of his chest, and said in his normal voice. "Okay, Hymie, let's get on with the crime. Your move." carefully, "Young lady, I have just learned that the recent disruption of family planning in your home -- which we all deeply regret -- caused an additional sharp disappointment to you and your brother." "It certainly did !" I answered, rather shrilly I'm afraid. "Yes. As your uncle put it, the ripples spread out. Another of those ripples could wreck this establishment, make it insolvent as a private business. This is an odd sort of business we are in here, Miss Fries. Superficially we perform a routine engineering function, plus some not tinusual boarding nursery services. But in fact what we do touches the most primitive of human emotions. If confidence in our integrity, or in the perfection with which we carry out the service entrusted to us, were to be shaken -- " He spread his hands helplessly. "We couldn't last out the year. Now I can show you exactly how the mishap occurred which affected your family, show you how wildly unlikely it was to have it happen even under the methods we did use... prove to you how utterly impossible it now is and always will be in the future for such a mistake to take place again, under our new procedures. Nevertheless -- " he looked helpless again -- "if you were to talk, merely tell the simple truth about what did indeed happen once... you could ruin us." I felt so sorry for him that I was about to blurt out that I wouldn't even dream of talking ! -- even though they had ruined my life -- when Clark cut in. "Watch it, Pod ! It's loaded."  So I just gave the Director my Sphinx expression and said nothing. Clark's instinctive self-interest is absolutely reliable. Dr. Schoenstein motioned Mr. Poon to keep quiet. "But, my dear lady, I am not asking you not to talk. As your uncle the Senator says, you are not here to blackmail and I have nothing with Which to bargain. The Marsopolis Creche Foundation, Limited, always carries out its obligations even when they do not result from formal contract. I asked you to come in here in order to suggest a measure of relief for the damage we. have unquestionably -- though unwittingly -- done you and your brother...Your uncle tells me that he had intended to travel with you and your family... but that now he intends to go via the next Triangle Line departure. The Tricorn , I believe it is, about ten days from now. Would you feel less mistreated if we were to pay first class fares for your brother and you -- round trip, of course -- in the Triangle Line?" Would I! The Wanderlust has, as her sole virtue, the fact that she is indeed ' a spaceship and she was shaping for Earth. But she is an old, slow freighter. Whereas the Triangle Liners, as everyone knows, are utter palaces! I could but nod. "Good. It is our privilege and we hope you have a wonderful trip. But, uh, young lady...do you think it possible that you could give us some assurance, for no consideration and simply out of kindness, that you wouldn't talk about a certain regrettable mishap?" "Oh? I thought that was part of the deal?" "There is no deal. As your uncle pointed out to me, we owe you this trip, no matter what." "Why -- why, Doctor, I'm going to be sousy, so utterly rushed, just to get ready in time, that I won't have time to talk to anyone about any mishaps that probably weren't . fey Robert A. Heinlein your fault anyhow!" "Thank you." He turned to Clark. "And you, son?" Clark doesn't like to be called "son" at best. But I don't think it affected his answer. He ignored the vocative and said coldly, "What about our expenses?" D R. Schoenstein flinched. Uncle Tom guffawed and said, "That's my boy! Doc, I told you he had the simple rapacity of a sand gator. He'll go far -- if somebody doesn't poison him." "Any suggestions?" "No trouble. Clark. Look me in the eye. Either you stay behind and we weld you into a barrel and feed you through the bunghole so that you can't talk -- while your sister goes anyhow -- or you accept these terms. Say a thousand each -- no, fifteen hundred -- for travel expenses, and you keep your snapper' shut forever about the baby mixup... or I personally, with the aid of four stout, black-hearted accomplices, will cut your tongue out and feed it to the cat. A deal?" "I ought to get ten per cent commission on Sis's fifteen hundred. She didn't have sense enough to ask for it." "No cumshaw. I ought to be charging you a commission on the whole transaction. A deal?" "A deal " Clark agreed. ' # ' #  . Uncle Tom stood up. "That does it. Doc. In his own unappetizing way he is as utterly reliable as she is. So relax. You, too, Kwai Yau, you can breathe again. Doc, you can send a check around to me in the morning. Come on, kids." "Thanks, Tom. If that is the word. I'll have the check over before you get there. Uh... just one thing -- " What, Doc?" Senator, you were here long before I was born, so I don't know too much about your early life. Just the traditional stories and what it says about you in Who's Who on Mars. Just what were you transported for? You uere transported? Weren't you?" Mr. Poon looked horrorstricken, and I was. But Uncle Tom didn't seem offended. He laughed heartily and answered, "I was accused of freezing babies for prof it... Rut it ! was a frameupi -- J never did no ) such thing nohow. Come on, kids. Let's get out of this ' ghouls' nest before they smuggle us down into the sub-basement." Later that night in bed I was dreamily thinking over the trip. There hadn't even been the least argument with Mother and Daddy; Uncle Tom had settled it all by I phone before we got home; I heard a sound from the nursery, got up and paddled in. It ) . i.   was Duncan, the little darling, not even wet but lonely. So I picked him up and cuddled him and he cooed and then he was wet, so I changed him. I decided that he was just as pretty or prettier than all those other babies, even though he was five months younger and his eyes didn't track. When I put him down again, he was sound asleep; I started back to bed. And stopped -- The Triangle Line gets its name from serving the three leading planets, of course, but which direction a ship makes the Mars-Venus-Earth route depends on just where we all are in our orbits. But just where were we? I hurried into the living room and searched for the Daily War Whoop -- found it, thank goodness, and fed it into the viewer, flipped to the shipping news. Yes, yes, yes ! I am going not only to Earth -- but to Venus as well! Venus ! Do you suppose Mother would let me -- no, best iust say nothing now. Uncle Tom will be more tractable, after we get there. I'm going to miss Duncan -- he's such a little doll. IV I haven't had time to write in this journal for days . Just getting ready to leave was almost impossible -- and would have been truly impossible had it not been that most preparations -- all the special T e r r a n innoculations and photographs and passports and such -- were mostly done before Everything Came Unstuck ; But Mother came out of her atavistic daze and was very helpful. She would even let one of the triplets cry for as much as a minute rather than disappear and leave me half pinned up. I don't know how Clark got ready or whether he had any preparations to make. He continued to creep around silently, answering in grunts if he answered at all. Nor did Uncle Tom seem to find it difficult. I saw him only twice during those frantic ten days (once to borrow baggage mass from his allowance, which he let me have, the dear!) and both times I had to dig him out of the card roornT at the Elks i Club. I asked him how he managed to get readv for so important a trip and still have time to play cards? "Nothing to it," he answered. "I bought a new toothbrush. Is there something else I should have done?" So I hugged him and told him he was an utterly utter beast and he chuckled and mussed my hair. Query: Will I ever become that blase about space travel? I suppose I must if I am to be an astronaut. by Robert A. Heinlefii But Daddy says that getting ready s for a trip is half the fun... so perhaps I don't want to became that sophisticated. Somehow Mother delivered me, complete with baggage and all the myriad pieces of paper -- tickets and medical records and passport and universal identification complex and guardians' assignmentand-guarantee and three kinds of money and traveler s' checks and birth record and police certification and security clearance and I don't remember -- all checked off, to the city shuttle port. I was juggling one package of things that simply wouldn't go into my luggage, and I had one hat on my head and one in my hand. Otherwise everything came out even. Good-by at the shuttle port was most teary and exciting. Not just with Mother and Daddy, which was to be expected (when Daddy put his arm around me tight, I threw both mine around him and for a dreadful second I didn't want to leave at all), but also because about thirty of my classmates showed up (which I hadn't in the least expected), complete with a banner that two of them were carrying reading: I got kissed enough times to start a fair-sized epidemic if any one of them had had anything, which apparently they didn't. I got kissed by boys who had never even tried to, in the past -- and I assure you that it is not utterly impossible to kiss me, if the project is approached with confidence and finesse, as I believe that one's instincts should be allowed to develop as well as one's overt cortical behavior. The corsage Daddy had given me for going away got crushed and I didn't even notice it until we were aboard the shuttle. I suppose it was somewhere about then that I lost that hat, but I'll never know. I would have lost the last-minute package, too, if Uncle Tom had not rescued it. There were photographers, too, but not for me -- for Uncle Tom. Then suddenly we had to scoot aboard the shuttle right now because a shuttle can't wait. It has to boost on the split second, even though Deimos moves so much more slowly than Phobos. A reporter from the War Whoop was still trying to get a statement out of Uncle Tom about the forthcoming Three-P I a n e t s conference but he just pointed at his throat and whispered, "Laryngitis" -- then we were aboard just before they sealed the airlock. It must have been the shortest case of laryngitis on record. Upcle Tom's voice had been all right until we got to the shuttle port and it was okay again once we were in the shuttle. O NE shuttle trip is exactly like another, whether to Phobos or Deimos. Still, that first tremendous whoosh ! of acceleration is exciting as it pins you down into your couch with so much weight that you can't breathe, much less move -- and free fall is always strange and eerie and rather stomach-fluttering even if one doesn't tend to be nauseated by it, which, thank you, I don't. Being on Deimos is just like being in free fall, since neither Deimos nor Phobos has enough surface gravitation for one to feel it. They put suction sandals on us before they unstrapped us so that we could walk, just as they do on Phobos. Nevertheless Deimos is different from Phobos for reasons having nothing to do with natural phenomena. Phobos is, of course, legally a part of Mars. There are no formalities of any sort about visiting it. All that is required is the fare, a free day and a yen for a picnic in space. But Deimos is a free port, leased in perpetuity to ThreePlanets Treaty Authority. A known criminal, with a price on his head in Marsopolis, could change ships there right under the eyes of our own police. We couldn't touch him. Instead, we would have to start most complicated legal doings at the Interplanetary High Court on Luna, practically win the case ahead of time and, besides that, prove that the crime was a crime under Three-P I a n e t rules and not just under our own laws. Then all that we could do would be to ask the Authority's proctors to arrest the man if he was still around -- which doesn't seem likely. I knew about this, theoretically, because there had been about a half page on it in our school course Essentials oi Martian Government in the section on "Extraterritoriality." But now I had plenty of time to think about it because, as soon as we left the shuttle, we found ourselves locked up in a room misleadingly called the "Hospitality Room" while we waited until they were ready to "process" us. One wall of the room was glass. I could see lots and lots of people hurrying around in the concourse beyond, doing all manner of interesting and mysterious things. But all we had to do was to wait beside our baggage and grow bored. I found that I was growing more furious by the minute, not at all like my normally sweet and lovable nature. Why, this place had been built by my own mother! And here I was, caged up in it like by Robert A. Hein lei n white mice in a bio lab. (Well, I admit that Mother didn't exactly build Deimos. The Martians did that, starting with a spare asteroid that they happened to have handy. back they grew tired of space travel and devoted all their time to the whichness of what and how to unscrew the inscrutable -- so when Mother took over the job, Deimos was pretty run down ; she had to start in from the ground up and rebuild it completely.) I N any case, it was certain that everything that I could see through that transparent wall was a product of Mother's creative imaginative and hard-headed engineering ability. I began to fume. Clark was off in a corner, talking privately to some stranger. "Stranger" to me, at least. Clark, for all his anti-social disposition, always seems to know somebody, or to know somebody who knows somebody, anywhere we go. I sometimes wonder if he is a member of some vast underground secret society; he has such unsavory acquaintances and never brings any of them home. Clark is, however, a very satisfactory person to fume with, because, if he isn't busy,' person hate anything that needs hating. He can even dig up reasons why a situation is even more vilely unfair than you thought it was. But he was busy, so that left Uncle Tom. So I explained to him bitterly how outrageous I thought it was that we should be penned up like animals -- free Mars citizens on one of Mars' own moons ! -- simply because a sign read : "Passengers must wait until called by order of Three-Planets Treaty Authority." "Politics!" I said bitterly. "I could run it better myself." "I'm sure you could," he agreed gravely, "but, flicka, you don't understand." "I understand all too well!" "No, honey bun. You understand that there is no good reason why you should not walk straight through that door and enjoy yourself by shopping until it is time to go inboard the Tricorn. And you are right about that, for there is no need at all for you to be locked up in here when you could be out there making some free port shopkeeper happy by paying him a high price which seems to you a low price. So you say, 'Politics !' as if it were a nasty word -- and you think that settles it." i He sighed. "But you don't understand. Politics is not evil. Politics is the human race's most magnificent achievement. When politics is good, it's wonderful...and when politics is bad -- well, it's still pretty good' "I guess I don't understand' I 'said slowly. "Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done...without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody's head bashed in. That's politics. The only other way to settle a dispute is by bashing a few heads in...and that is what happens when one or to dicker. That's why I say politics is good even when it is bad. The only alternative is force -- and somebody gets hurt." "Uh...it seems to me that's a funny way for a revolutionary veteran to talk. From f f j r   I  . ,  i  ' f r  r...  i, ;   f  I  A  I  , . iA. ., .  T .  . what I've heard, Uncle Tom, you were one of the bloodthirsty ones who started the shooting. Or so Daddy says." H E grinned. "Mostly I ducked. If dickering won't work, then you have to fight. But I think maybe it takes a man who has been shot at to appreciate how much better it is to fumble your way through a political compromise rather than have the top of your head blown off." He frowned and suddenly looked very old. "When to talk and when to fight -- That is the most difficult decision to make wisely of all the decisions in life." Then suddenly he smiled and the years dropped away. "M a n k i n d didn't invent fighting; it was here long before we were. But we invented politics. Just think of it, hon. Homo sapiens is the most cruel, the most vicious, the most predatory and certainly the most deadly of the time, get along well enough so that we usually don't kill each other. So don't let me hear you using 'politics' as a swear word again." w I'm sorry, Uncle Tom," I Said humbly. Like fun you are. But if you let that idea soak for twenty or thirty years, you may -- Oh, oh! There's your villain, baby girl. The politically appointed bureaucrat who has most unjustly held by Robert A. Heinlein you in durance vile. So scratch his eyes out. Show him how little you think #f his silly rules." I answered this with dignified silence. It is hard to tell when Uncle Tom is serious. He loves to pull my leg, always hoping that it will come off in his hand. The ThreePlanets proctor of whom he was speaking had opened the door to our bull pen and was looking around exactly like a zookeeper inspecting a cage for cleanliness. "Passports !" he called out. "Diplomatic passports first." He looked us over, spotted Uncle Tom. "Senator?" Uncle Tom shook his head. "I'm a tourist, thanks." "As you say, sir. Line up, please. Reverse alphabetical order" -- which put us near the tail of the line instead of near the head. There followed maddening delays, for fully two hours -- passports, health clearance, outgoing baggage inspection. Mars Republic does not levy duties on exports, but just the same there is a whole long list of things you can't export without a license, such as ancient Martian artifacts (the first explorers did their best to gut the place and some of the most priceless are in the British Museum or the 'Kremlin; I've heard Daddy fume about it), some things you can't export under any circumstances, such as certain narcotics, and some things you can take aboard ship only by surrendering them for safekeeping by the purser, such as guns and other weapons. Clark picked outgoing inspection for some typical abnormal behavior. They had passed down the line copies of a long list of things we must not have in our baggage. A fascinating list; I hadn't known that there were so many things that were illegal, immoral or deadly. When the Fries contingent wearily reached the inspection counter, the inspector said, all in one word: " 'Nything-t'd'clare?" He was a Marsman and as he looked up he recognized Uncle Tom. "Oh. Howdy, Senator. Honored to have you with us. Well, I guess we needn't waste time on your baggage. These two young people with you?" "Better search my kit," Uncle Tom advised. "I'm smuggling guns toan out-planet branch of the Legion. As for the kids, they're my niece and nephew. But I don't vouch for them ; they're both subversive characters. Especially the girl. She was soap-boxing revolution lust now." The inspector smiled and said, "I guess we can allow you a few guns, Senator. You know how Mo use them. Well, how abut it, kids? Anything to declare?" I said, "Nothing to declare' with icy dignity -- when suddenly Clark spoke up. "Sure!" he piped, his voice cracking. "Two kilos of happy dust! And whose business is it? I paid for it. I'm not going to let it be stolen by a bunch of clerks." His voice was surly as only he can manage and the expression on his face simply ached for a slap. had been just about to glance into one of my bags -- a purely formal inspection, I think -- when my brattish. brother deliberately stirred things up. At the very word "happy dust" four other inspectors closed in. Two were Venusmen, to judge by their accents, and the other two might have been from Earth. Of course, happy dust doesn't matter to us Marsmen. The Martians use it, have always used it, and it is about as important to them as tobacco is to humans, but apparently without any ill effects. What they get out of it I don't know. Some of the old sand rats among us have picked up the habit from the Martians. But my entire botany class experimented with it under our teacher's supervision and nobody got any thrill out of it and all I got was blocked sinuses that wore off before the day was out. Strictly zero squared. But with the native Venerians it is another matter -- when they can get it. It turns them into murderous maniacs. They'll do anything to get it. The (black market) price on it there is very high indeed...and possession of it by a human on Venus is at least an automatic life sentence to Saturn's moons. They buzzed around Clark like angry jetta wasps. But they did not find what they were looking for. Shortly Uncle Tom spoke up and said, "Inspector? May I make a suggestion?" "Eh? Certainly you may. Senator." "My nephew, I am sorry to say, has caused a disturbance. Why don't you put him aside -- chain him up, I would -- and let all these other good people go through?" The inspector blinked. "I think that is an excellent idea." "And I would appreciate it if you would inspect myself and my niece now. Then we won't hold up the others." "Oh, that's not necessary." The inspector slapped seals on all of Uncle's bags, closed the one of mine he had started to open and said, "I don't need to paw through the young lady's pretties. But I think we'll take this smart boy and search him to the skin and X-ray him." "Do that." fcy Robert A. Heinlefit So Uncle and I went on and checked at four or five other desks -- fiscal control and migration and reservations and other nonseivs e -- and finally wound up with our baggage at the centrifuge for weighing in. I never did get a chance to shop. ? T O my chagrin, when I stepped off the merry-goround the record showed that my baggage and myself were nearly three kilos over my allowance. That didn't seem possible. I hadn't eaten more breakfast than usual -- less actually -- and I hadn't drunk any water because, while I do not become ill in free fall, drinking in free fall is very tricky. You are likely to get water up your nose or something and set off an embarrassing chain reaction. So I was about to protest bitterly that the weightmaster had spun the centrifuge too fast and produced a false mass reading. But it occurred to me that I did not know for surely certain that the scales Mother and I had used were perfectly accurate. So I kept quiet. Uncle Tom just reached for his purse but the weight-master shook his head. "Forget it, Senator. I'm minus on a cou-pie of other things; I think I can swallow it. If not, I'll leave a memo with the purser. But I'm fairly sure I can." "Thank you. What did you say your name was?" "Milo. Miles M. Milo -- Aasvogel Lodge number seventy-four. Maybe you saw our crack drill team at the Legion convention two years ago. I was left pivot." "I certainly did, I certainly did !" They exchanged that secret grip that they think other people don't know and Uncle Tom said, "Well, thanks. Miles. Be seeing you." "Not at all -- Tom. No, don't bother with your baggage." Mr. Milo touched a button and called out, "In the Tricorn ! Get somebody out here fast for the Senator's baggage." It occurred to me, as we stopped at the passenger tube sealed to the transfer station to swap our suction sandals for little magnet pads that clipped to our shoes, that we need not have waited for anything at any time -- if only to use the special favors he so plainly could demand. But, even so, it pays to travel with an important personeven though it's just your Uncle Tom whose stomach you used to jump up and down on when you were small enough for such things. Our tickets simply read "First Class" -- I'm sure, for I saw all three of them -- but where we were placed was in what they call the "Owner's Cabin," which is actually a suite with three bedrooms and a living room. I was dazzled ! But I didn't have time to admire it just then. First they strapped our baggage down, then they strapped us down -- to seat couches which were against one wall of the living room. That wall plainly should have been the floor, but it slanted up almost vertically with respect to the tiny, not-quite-nothing weight that we had. The warning sirens were already sounding when someone dragged Clark in and strapped him to one of the couches. He was looking mussed up but cocky. "Hi, smuggler," Uncle Tom greeted him amiably. "They find it on you?" "Nothing to find." "That's what I thought. I trust they gave you a rough time." "Naah !" I wasn't sure I believed Clark's answer; I've heard that a skin  person search can be made quite annoying indeed, without doing anything the least bit illegal, if the proctors are feeling unfriendly. A "rough time" would be good for Clark's soul, I am sure. But he certainly did not act as if the experience had caused  him any discomfort. I said, "Clark, that was a very foolish remark you made 'to the inspector. And it wai a lie, as  well. A silly, useless lie." "Sign off, I ' he said curtly. "If I'm smuggling anything, it's up to them to find it; that's what they're 'paid for. 'Any-thing-t'-d'clare?' " he added in a mimicking voice. "What nonsense! As if anybody would declare something he was trying to smuggle." "Just the same," I went on, "if Daddy had heard you say -- " "Podkayne." "Yes, Uncle Tom?" "Table it. We're about to start. Let's enjoy it." "But -- Yes, Uncle." in pressure, then a sudden surge that would have slid us out of our couches if we had not been strapped -- but not a strong one, not at all like that giant whoosh ! with which we had left the surface. It did not last long. Then we were truly in free fall for a few moments...then there started a soft, gentle push in the same direction, which kept up. Then the room started very slowly to turn around... almost unnoticeable except for a slight dizziness it gave one. Gradually, gradually (it took almost twenty minutes) our weight increased, until at last we were back to our proper weight...at which time the floot', Which had been all wrong whfen we came in, was where it belonged, unde i us, and almost level. I Here is whit hkd liappened. The first 'stidpt boost ws   v, i t ' t r... ' ' . f . by Robert A. Heinlein...  f ; r t '  # t : # C  I made by the racket tugs of Deimos Port picking up the Tricorn and hurling her out into a free orbit of her own. This doesn't take much, because the attraction between even a big ship like the Tricorn and a tiny, tiny satellite such as Deimos isn't enough to matter. All that matters is getting the very considerable mass of the ship shoved free. The second gentle shove, the one that kept up and never went away, was the ship's own main drive -- one-tenth of a standard gee. The Tricorn is a constant-boost ship. She doesn't dilly-dally around with economical orbits and weeks and months in free fall. She goes very fast indeed... because even #.I gee adds up awfully fast. But one-tenth gee is not enough to make comfortable passengers who have been used to more. As soon as the Captain had set her on her course, he started to spin her and kept it up until the centrifugal force and the boost added up (in vector addition, of course) to exactly the surface gravitation of Mars (or # of a standard gee) at the locus of the first-class staterooms. But the floors will not be quite level until we approach Earth, because the inside of the ship had been constructed so that the floors would feel perfectly level when the spin and the boost added up to exactly one standard gravity -- or Earth-Normal. Maybe this isn't too clear. Well, it wasn't too clear to me, in school. I didn't see exactly how it worked out until (later) I had a chance to see the controls used to put spin on the ship and how the centrifugal force was calculated. Just remember that the Tricon? -- and her sisters, the Trice and the Triad and the Triangulum and the Tricolor -- are enormous cylinders. The thrust is straight along the main axis. It has to be. Centrifugal force pushes away from the main axis -- how else? The two forces add up to make the ship's "artificial gravity" in passenger country. But, since one force (the boost) is kept constant and the other (the spin) .can be varied, there can be only one rate of spin which will add in with the boost to make those floors perfectly level. For the Tricorn the spin that will produce level floors and exactly one Earth gravity in passenger country is # revolutions per minute. I know because the Captain told me so... and I checked his arithmetic and he was right. The floor of our cabin is just over thirty meters from the main axis of the ship, so it all comes out even. ) A S soon ,as they had the floor back under us and had announcedL the "all clear" I unstrapped me and hurried out. I wanted a quick look at  the ship; I didn't even wait to unpack. There's a fortune awaiting the man who invents a really good deodorizer for a spaceship. That's the one thing you can't fail to notice. Oh, they try, I grant them that. The air goes through precipitators each time it is cycled. It is washed, it is perfumed, a precise fraction of ozone is added and the new oxygen that is put in after the carbon dioxide is distilled out is as pure as a baby's mind. It has to be, for it is newly released as a by-product of the photosynthesis of living plants. That air is so pure that it really ought to be voted a medal by the Society for the Suppression of Evil Thoughts. Besides that, a simply amazing amount of the crew's time is put into cleaning, polishing, washing, sterilizing -- oh, they try! But nevertheless, even a new, extra-fare luxury liner like the Tricorn simply reeks of human sweat and ancient sin, with undefinable overtones of organic decay and unfortunate accidents and matters best forgotten. Once I was with Daddy when a Martian tomb was being unsealed. I found out wlfy xenoarcheologists always' have gas masks handy. But a spaceship smells even worse than that tomb. It does no good to complain to the purser. He'll listen with professional sympathy and send a crewman around to spray your stateroom with something which (I suspect) merely deadens your nose for a while. But his sympathy is not real, because the poor man simply cannot smell anything wrong himself. He has lived in ships for years; it is literally impossible for him to smell the unmistakable reek of a ship that has been lived in. And, besides, he knows that the air is pure; the ship's instruments show it. None of the professional spacers can smell it. But the purser and all of them are quite used to having passengers complain about the "unbearable stench" -- so they pretend sympathy and go through the motions of correcting the matter. Jtfot that I complained. I was looking forward to having this ship eating out of my hand, and you don't accomplish that sort of coup by becoming known first thing as a complainer. But other first-timers did, and I certainly understood why. In fact I began to have a glimmer of a doubt about my ambitions to become skipper of an explorer ship. But -- Well, in about two days it seemed to me that they had managed to clean up the ship quite a bit, and shortly thereafter I stopped thinking about it. I began to understand why the ship's crew can't smell the by Robert A. Heinlein things the passengers complain about. Their nervous systems simply cancel out the did familiar stinks -- like a cybernetic skywatch canceling out and ignoring any object whose predicted orbit has previously been programmed into the machine. But the odor is still there. I suspect that it sinks right into polished metal and can never be removed, short of scrapping the ship and melting it down. Thank goodness the human nervous system is endlessly adaptable. B UT my own nervous system didn't seem too adaptable during that first hasty tour of the Tricorn . It is a good thing that I had not eaten much breakfast and had refrained from drinking anything. My stomach did give me a couple of bad moments, but I told it sternly that I was busy. I was very anxious to look over the ship; I simply didn't have time to cater to the weaknesses to which flesh is heir. Well, the Tricorn is lovely all right -- every bit as nice as the travel folders say that she is... except for that dreadful ship's odor. Her ball room is gorgeous and so big that you can see that the floor curves to match the ship...only it is not curved when you walk across it. It is level, too. It is the only room in the ship where they jack up the floor to match perfectly with whatever spin is on the ship. There is a lounge with a simulated sky of outer space, or it can be switched to blue sky and fleecy clouds. Some old biddies were already in there, gabbling. The dining saloon is every bit as fancy, but it seemed hardly big enough -- which reminded me of the warning in the travel brochure about first and second tables, so I rushed back to our cabin to urge Uncle Tom to make reservations for us quickly before all the best tables were filled. He wasn't there. I took a quick look in all the rooms and didn't find him -- but I found Clark in my room, just closing one of my bags ! "What are you doing?" I demanded. He jumped and then looked perfectly blank. "I was just looking to see if you had any nausea pills," he said woodenly. "Well, don't dig into my ; i :   i j r things! You know better." I came up and felt his cheek. He wasn't feverish. "I don't have any. But I noticed where the surgeon's office is. If you are feeling ill, I'll take you straight there and let him dose you." He pulled away. "Aw, I'm all right -- now." "Clark Fries, you listen to me. If you -- " But he wasn't listening. He slid past me, ducked into his own room and closed the door; I heard the lock click. I closed the bag he had opened -- and noticed something. It was the bag the inspector had been just about to search when Clark had pulled that silly stunt about "happy dust." My younger brother never does anything without a reason. Never. His reasons often are inscrutable to others. But, if you just dig deeply enough, you will always find that his mind is never a randomchoice machine, doing things pointlessly. It is as logical as a calculator -- and about as cold. I now knew why he had made what seemed to be entirely unnecessary trouble for himself at outgoing inspection. I knew why I had been unexpectedly three kilos over my allowance on the centrifuge. The only thing I didn't know was: What had he smuggled aboard in my baggage? And why? Interlude see that you've resumed keeping your diary. Not only do I find your girlish viewpoints entertaining but also you sometimes (not often) provide me with useful bits of information. If I can do anything for you in return, do let me know. Perhaps you would like help in straightening out your grammar? Those incomplete sentences you are so fond of indicate incomplete thinking. You know that, don't you? For example, let us consider a purely hypothetical case: a delivery robot with an unbeatable seal. Since the seal is in fact unbeatable, thinking about the seal simply leads to frustration. But a complete analysis of the situation leads one to the obvious fact that any cubical or quasicubical object has six sides, and that the seal applies to only one of these six sides. Pursuing this line of thought one may note that, while the quasi-cube may not be moved without cutting its connections, the floor under it may be lowered as much as forty-eight centimeters -- if one has all afternoon in which to work. Were this not a hypothetby Robert A. Heinlein leal case I would now suggest the use of a mirror and light on an extension handle and some around-the-corner tools, plus plenty of patience. That's what you lack. Pod . -- patience, I hope this may shed some , light on the matter of the hypothetical happy dust. Do . feel free to come to me with your little problems,    V door locked all the time the first three days we were in  the Tricorn : I know, because I tried it every time he left the suite. Then on the fourth day he failed to lock it at a time when ft was predictable that he would be gone at least an houTj as he had signed up for a tour of ' the ship -- the parts 'passengers ordinarily are not ' allowed in, I mean. I didn't mind missmg : ft myse'lf for v by then T had worked I ofct my ownprivate # Poddy special" escort service. Nor did I have to worry about  Uncle  T om. He wasn't' making the tour, it would have violated his noexercise rule, but he had acquired new pinochle cronies and he was safely in the smoking room. Those stateroom door locks are not impossible to pick. Not for a girl equipped with a nail file, some bits of this and that, and free run of the purser's office -- me, I mean. But' I found I did not have to pick the lock. The catch had not quite caught. I breathed the conventional sigh of relief, I figured that the happy accident put me at least twenty minutes ahead of schedule. I shan't detail the search, but I flatter myself that the Criminal Investigation Bureau could not have done it more logically nor more quickly if limited, as I was, to bare hands and no equipment. It had to be something foi bidden by that list they had given us on Deimos -- and I had carefully kept and studied my copy. It had to mass slightly over three kilos. It had to bulk so large and be sufficiently fixed in its shape and dimensions , that , Clark was forced to hide it in baggage. Otherwise I am sure, he would have concealed it on his person and coidly depended. on his youth and 'inho.ence," plus the chaperonage of Uncle Toni, to breeze him : # r '   r  I  . t through the outgoing inspection. Otherwise he would never have taken the calculated risk of hiding it in my baggage, since he couldn't be sure of recovering it without my knowing. Could he have predicted that I would at once go sightseeing; without waiting to unpack? Well, perhaps he could, even though I had done so on the spur of the moment. I must reluctantly admit that Clark: carx outguess me with A I maddening regularity. As an opponent, he is never to be underrated. But still it was for him a "calculated risk," albeit a small one. Very well. Largish, rather massy, forbidden. But I didn't know what it looked like and I had to assume that anything which met the first two requirements might be disguised to appear innocent. And so to work -- Ten minutes later I knew that it had to be in one of his three bags, which I had left to the last on purpose as the least likely spots. A stateroom aboard ship has many cover plates, access holes, removable fixtures, and the like, but I had done a careful practice run in my own room; I knew which ones were worth opening, which ones could not be opened without power tools, which ones could not be opened without leaving unmistakable sighs of tampering. I checked these all in great haste, then congratulated Clark on having the good sense not to use such obvious hiding places. readily accessible -- out in the open, in his wardrobe, etc. -- using the classic "Purloined Letter" technique, i.e., J never assumed that a book was a book simply because it looked like a book, nor t;haf a jacket was simply that and nothing more. Null, negative, nothing. Reluctantly, I tackled his three pieces of luggage, first noting carefully exactly how they were stacked and in what order. The first was empty. Oh, the linings could have been tampered with, but the bag was no heavier than it should have been and any false pocket in the linings could not have held anything large enough to meet the specifications. The second bag was the same. And the bag on the bottom seemed to be the same... until I found an envelope in a pocket of rt. Oh, nothing nearly massy enough, nor gross enough; just an ordinary envelope for a letter -- but nevertheless I glanced at it. And was immediately indignant ! It had printed on it: M iss Podkayne Fries Passenger, S.S. Tricorn , Fordelivery in ship Why, the little wretch! He had been intercepting my . mail ! With' fingers trembling with rage so badly that I could hardly do so I opened it -- and discovered that it had already been opened and was angrier than ever. But, at least, the note was still inside. Shaking, I pulled it out and read it. Just six words -- Hi, Pod. Snooping again , I  see. -- in Clark's handwriting, by Robert A. Hein loin I stood there, frozen, for a long moment, 'While I blushed scarlet and chewed the bitter realization that I had been hoaxed to perfection -- again. There are only three people in the world who can make me feel stupid -- and Clark is two of them. I heard a throat-clearing sound behind me and whirled around. Lounging in the open doorway (I had left it closed) was my brother. He smiled at me and said, "Hello, Sis. Looking for something? Need any help?" I didn't waste time pretending that I didn't have jam all over my face ; I simply said, "Clark Fries, what did you smuggle into this ship in my baggage?" He looked blank -- a look of malignant idiocy which has been known to drive wellbalanced teachers to their therapists. "What in the world are you talking about, Pod?" "You know what Tifi talking about! Smuggling!" "Oh!" His face lit up in a sunny smile, "You mean tliosi two kilograms of happy dust. Goodness, Sis, is that still worrying you? There never were any two kilos of happy dust. I was just having my little joke with that stuffy inspector. I thought you knew that." "I do not mean any 'two kilos of happy dust'! I am talking about at least three kilos of something else that you hid in my baggage!" He looked worried "Pod, do you feel well?" "Ooooooh -- dandruff ! Clark Fries, you stop that! You know what I mean! When I was centrifuged, my bags and I weighed three kilos over my allowance. Well?" He looked at me thoughtfully, sympathetically. "It has seemed to me that you were getting a bit fat -- but I didn't want to mention it. I thought it was all this rich food you've been tucking away here in the ship. You really ought to watch that sort of thing, Pod. After all, if a girl lets her figure go to pieces -- Well, she doesn't have much else. So I hear." Had that envelope been a blunt instrument I would have blunted him. I heard a low growling sound, and realized that I was making it. So I stopped. "Where's the letter that was in this envelope?" # ,    " ' Clark looked , surprised. "Why, it's right there, in your other hand." "This? This is all there was? No letter from somebody else?" "Why, just that note from me, Sis. Didn't you like it? I thought that it just suited the occasion... I knew you would find it your very first chance." He smiled. "Next time you ( vant to paw through my things, let I me know and I'll help. Sometimes I have experiments running. You might get hurt. That can happen to people who aren't very bright and don't look before they leap. I wouldn't want that to happen to you , Sis." I didn't bandy any more words. I brushed past him and went to my own room and locked the door and bawled. Then I got up and did very careful things to my face. I know when Vm licked; I don't have to have a full set of working drawings. I resolved never to mention the matter to Clark again. But what was I to do? Go to. the Captain? I already knew the Captain pretty well ; his imagination extended as far as the next ballistic prediction and. no further. Tell  .   him that my brother had been smuggling something, I didn't hnqw what -- and that he had better search, the entire ship most carefully, because, whatever it was, it was not in my brother's, ropm? Don't be txiple silly,. : Poddy... In...the first place, he would laugh at you; in the second place, you don't want 'Clark to be caught. Mother and Daddy wouldn't like it. t Tell Uncle Tom about it? He might be just as unbelieving...or, if he did believe me, he might go to the Captain himself -- with just as I disastrous results. J V' .( . I decided not tp. go to Uncle Tom -- at least not yet. Instead I would y keej#' rtiy eyes and ears open and' try to find a workable answer myself.  .  ( I N any case I did not waste much time on Clark's sins (if any, I had to admit in bare honesty). I was in my first real space ship -- half way to my ambition thereby -- a n d there was much to learn and do. i Those travel brochures, are honest enough, I guess, but they do not give you the full picture. , For example, take this bit right out of the text of the Triangle Line's fancy folder: "Romantic days in ancient Marsopolis, the city older than time; exotic nights under the hurtling moons of , Mars."   r Let's rephrase it into eyry; day language, shall  Marsopolis is my home, town and I love it -- but it is v as. romantic as bread . and butter with no-tjam. The parts people live in are new and were designed for function, not fomapce.iAs for , ,tje, . ruins outside , t own t (wlyh  ,tle , .Martians ,pever arsopolis"),, a lot of   high foreheads i n c I u d i, p g  IJ)addy have seen to it .thijat the best parts are locked off, so that tourists will not carve their initials in something that was old when stone axes were the latest thing in super-weapons. Furthermore, Martian ruins are Peit'her beautiful, nor  picturesque, nor impressive to human fcyes. The way to appreciate them is to read a really good bbok by Robert A. Hbfniein with illustrations, diagrams, and simple explanations -- such as Daddy's Other Paths Than Ours . (Adv.) As for those exotic nights, anybody who is outdoors after sundown on Mars other than through sheer necessity needs to have his head examined. It's chilly out there. I've seen Deimos and Phobos at night exactly twice, each time through no fault of my own. And I was so busy keeping from freezing to death that I wasted no thought on "hurtling moons." That advertising brochure is just as meticulously accurate -- and just as deceptive in effect -- concerning the ships themselves. Oh, the Tricorn is a palace; I'll vouch for that. It really is a miracle of engineering that anything so huge, so luxurious, so fantastically adapted to the health and comfort of human beings, should be able to "hurtle" (pardon the word) through space. But take those pictures -- You know the ones I mean : Full color  depth, showing groups of handsome young people of both sexes chatting or playing games in the lounge, dancing gaily in the ballroom -- or views of a "typical stateroom." That "typical stateroom" is not a fake. No, it has simply been photographed from an angle and with a lens that makes it look at least twice as big as it is. As for those handsome, gay, young people -- well, they aren't along on the trip I'm making. It's my guess that they are professional models. In the Tricorn this trip the young and handsome passengers like those in the pictures can be counted on the thumbs of one hand. The typical passenger we have with us is a great grandmother, Terran citizenship, widowed, wealthy, making her first trip into space -- and probably her last, for she is not sure she likes it. Honest, I'm not exaggerating. Our passengers look like refugees from a geriatrics clinic. I am not scoffing at old age. I understand that it is a condition I will one day attain myself, if I go on breathing in and out enough times -- say about # more times, not counting heavy exercise. Old age can be a charming condition, as witness Uncle Tom. But old age is not an accomplishment. It is just something that happens to you despite yourself, like falling downstairs. And I must say that I am getting a wee bit tired of having youth treated as a punishable offense. O UR typical male passenger is the same sort, only not nearly so numerous. He differs from his wife primarily in that, instead of looking down his nose at me, he is sometimes inclined to pat me in a "fatherly" way that I do not find fatherly, don't like, avoid if humanly possible -- and which nevertheless gets me talked about. I suppose I should not have been surprised to find the Tricorn a super-deluxe old folks' home, but (I may as well admit it) my experience is still limited and I was not aware of some of the economic facts of life. The Tricorn is expensive. It is very expensive. Clark and I would not be in it at all if Uncle Tom had not twisted Dr. Schoenstein's arm in our behalf. Oh, I suppose Uncle Tom can afford it, but, by age group though not by temperament, he fits the defined category. But Daddy and Mother had intended to take us in the Wanderlust , a low-fare, economy-orbit freighter. Daddy and Mother are not poor, but they are not rich. After they finish raising and educating five children it is unlikely that they will ever be rich. Who can afford to travel in luxury liners? Ans. : Rich old widows, wealthy retired couples, high-priced executives whose time is so valuable that their corporations gladly send them by the fastest ships -- and an occasional rare exception of some other sort. Clark and I are such exceptions. We have one o,ther exception in the ship, Miss -- well. I'll call her Miss Girdle FitzSnugglie, because if I used her right name and perchance anybody ever sees this, it would be all too easily recognizable. I think Girdie is a good sort, I don't care what the gossips in this ship say. She doesn't act jealous of me even though it appears that the younger officers in the ship were all her personal property until I boarded -- all the trip out from Earth, I mean. I've cut into her monopoly quite a bit, but she isn't catty to me. She treats me warmly woman-to-woman, and I've learned quite a lot about Life and Men from her... more than Mother ever taught me. (It is just possible that Mother is slightly naive on subjects that Girdie knows best. A woman who tackles engineering and undertakes to beat men at their own game might have had a fairly limited social life, wouldn't you think? I must study this seriously... because it seems possible that much the same might happen to a female space pilot and it is no part of my Master Plan to become a soured old maid.) Girdie is about twice my age, which makes her awfully young in this company. Nevertheless it may be that I cause her to look just a bit wrinkled around the eyes. Contrariwise, my somewhat unfinished look may make her more mature contours appear even more Helen-of-Troyish. As may be, it is certain that my presence has relieved the by Robert A. Heinlein pressure on her by giving the gossips two targets instead of one. And gossip they do. I heard one of them say about her: "She's been in more laps than a napkin!" If so, I hope she had fun. Those gay ship's dances in the mammoth ballroom! Like this: they happen every Tuesday and Saturday night, when the ship is spacing. The music starts at # :# and the Ladies' Society for Moral Rectitude is seated around the edge of the floor, as if for a wake. Uncle Tom is there, as a concession to me, and very proudsome and distinguished he looks in evening formal. I am there in a party dress which is not quite as girlish as it was when Mother helped me pick it out, in consequence of some very careful retailoring I ha V# done with my door locked. Even Clark attends because there is nothing else going on and he's afraid he might miss something -- and looking so nice I'm proud of him, because he has 'to climb into his own monkey suit or he can't come to the ball. Over by the punch bowl are half a dozen of the ship's junior officers, dressed in mess jacket uniforms and looking faintly uncomfortable. T HE Captain, by some process known only to him, selects one of the widows and asks her to dance. Two husbands dance with their wives. Uncle Tom offers me his arm and leads me to the floor. Two or three of the junior officers follow the Captain's example. Clark takes advantage of the breathless excitement to raid the punch bowl. But nobody asks Girdie to dance. This is no accident. The Captain has given the Word (I have this intelligence with utter certainty through My Spies) that no ship's officer shall dance with Miss FitzSnugglie until he has danced at least two dances with other partners -- and I am not an "other partner," because the proscription, since leaving Mars, has been extended to me. This should be proof to anyone that a captain of a ship is in sober fact the Last of the Absolute Monarchs. There are now six or seven couples on the floor and the fun is at its riotous height. The floor will never again be so crowded. Nevertheless nine-tenths of the chairs are still occupied and you could ride a bicycle around the floor without endangering the dancers. The spectators look as if they were knitting at the tumbrils. The proper finishing touch would be a guillotine in the empty space in the middle of the floor. The music stops. Uncle Tom takes me back to my chair, then asks Girdie to dance -- since he is a Cash Customer, the Captain has not attempted to make him toe the mark. But I am still out of bounds, so I walk over to the punch bowl, take a cup out of Clark's hands, finish it, and say, "Come on, Clark. I'll let you practice on me." "Aw, it's a waltz !" (Or a "flea hop' or a "chasse," or "five step" -- but whatever it is, it is just too utterly impossible.) "Do it -- or I'll tell Madame Grew that you want to dance with her, only you're too shy to ask her." "You do and I'll trip her! I'll stumble and trip her." However, Clark is weakening, so I move in fast. "Look, Bub, you either take me out there and walk on my feet for a while -- or I'll see to it that Girdie doesn't dance with you at all." That does it. Clark is in the throes of his first case of puppy love, and Girdie is such a gent that she treats him as an equal and accepts his attentions with warm courtesy. So Clark dances with me. Actually he is quite a good dancer and I have to lead him only a tiny bit. He likes to d a n c e -- but he wouldn't want anyone, especially me, to think that he likes to dance with his sister. We don't look too badly matched, since I . am short. In the meantime Girdie I is, looking very gfood indeed with Uncle Tom, which is quite an accomplishment as Uncle  Tom dances with great enthusiasm and no rhythm. But Girdie can follow anyone. If her partner broke his leg, she would fracture her own at the same spot. But the crowd is thinning out now; husbands that danced the first dance are too tired for the second and no one has replaced them. Oh, we have gay times in the interplanetary luxury liner Tricorn! Truthfully we do have gay times. Starting with the third dance Girdie and I have our pick of the ship's officers, most of whom are good dancers, or at least have had plenty of practice. About twenty-two o'clock the Captain goes to bed and shortly after that the chaperones Start putting away their whetstones and fading, one by one. By midnight there is just Girdie and myself and half a dozen of the younger officers -- and the Purser, who has dutifully danced with every woman and now feels that he owes himself the rest of the night. He is duite a good dancer, for an old man. Oh, and there is usually Mrs. Grew, too -- but she isn't one of the chaperones and she is always nice to Girdie. She is a fat old woman, full of sin and chuckles. She doesn't expect anyone to dance with her but she likes to watch. And the officers who aren't dancing at the moment like to sit with her; she's furi. by tadbert A. Helnlein About one o'clock Uncle Tom sends Clark to tell me to Come to bed or he'll lock me out. He wouldn't, but I do -- my feet are tired. Good old Tricorn l i VI T HE Captain is slowly increasing the spin of the ship to make the fake gravity match the surface gravitation of Venus, which is # of one standard gravity or more than twice as much as I have been used to all my life. So, when I am not busy studying astrogation or ship handling, I spend much of my time in the ship's gymnasium. I want to garden myself for what is coming, for I have no intention of being at a disadvantage on. Venus in either strength or, agility. If I can adjust to an acceleration of # gee, the later transition to the full Earth-normal of one gee should be sugar pie with chocolate frosting. So I think. I usually have the gymnasium all to myself. Most of the passengers are Earthmen or Venusmen who feel no need to prepare for the heavy gravitation of Venus. Of the dozen-odd Marsmen I am the only one who seems to take seriously the cpming burden. The handful of aliens that gre  aboard the ship with us we never see; ach  "mains in his specially; conditioned state-, room. The ship's, officers do...   t use the gym. Some of them are quite fanatic about keeping fit. But they use it mostly at hours when passengers are not likely to use it. So, on this day (Ceres thirteenth actually but the Tricorn uses Earth dates and time, which made it March ninth. I don't mind the strange dates but the short Earth day is costing me a half-hour's sleep each night) -- on Ceres thirteenth I went charging into the gym, so angry I could spit venom and intending to derive a double benefit by working off my mad (at least to the point where I would not be clapped in irons for assault), and by strengthening my muscles, too. And found Clark inside, dressed in shorts and a massy bar bell. I stopped short and blurted out, "What are you doing here?" He grunted, "Weakening my mind." Well, I had asked for it. There is no ship's regulation forbidding Clark to use the v gym. His answer made sense to one schooled in his devious logic, which I certainly should be. I changed the subject, tossed aside my robe and started limbering exercises to warm ; up. "How massy?" I asked. "Sixty 'kilos."   J '     ( t .  I glancecLat a weight meter i on the wall'  loaded spring scale marked to had in fracL  f i ' t ,  . i tions of standard gee. It read "#." I did a fast rough in my mind -- fifty-two thirtysevenths of sixty -- or unit sum, plus nine hundred over thirty-seven, so add about a ninth, top and bottom for a thousand over forty, to yield twenty-five...call it the same as lifting eighty-five kilos back home on Mars. "Then why are you sweating ?" "I am not sweating !" He put the bar bell down. "Let's see you lift it." "All right." As he moved I squatted down to raise the bar bell -- and changed my mind. N OW, believe me, I work out regularly with ninety kilos at home and I had been checking that weight meter on the wall each day and loading that same bar bell to match the weight I use at home, plus a bit extra each day. My objective (hopeless, it is beginning to seem) is eventually to lift as much mass under Venus conditions as I had been accustomed to lifting at home. So I was certain I could lift sixty kilos at # of standard gee. But it is a mistake for a girl to beat a male at any test of physical strength... even when it's your brother. Most especially when it's your brother, and he has a fiendish disposition and you've suddenly had a glimmering of a way to put his fiendish proclivities to work. As I have said, if you're in a mood to hate something or somebody, Clark is the perfect partner. So I grunted and strained, making a good show, got it up to my chest, started it on up -- and squeaked, "Help me!" Clark gave a one-handed push at the center of the bar and we got it all the way up. Then I said, "Catch for me," through clenched teeth, and he eased it down. I sighed. "Gee, Clark, you must be getting awful strong." "Doing all right." It works. Clark was now as mellow as his nature permits. I suggested companion tumbling... if he didn't mind being the bottom half of the team? -- because I wasn't sure I could hold him, not at pointfive-two gee...did he mind? He didn't mind at all; it gave him another chance to be muscular and masculine -- and I was certain he could lift me; I massed eleven kilos less than the bar bell he had just been lifting. When he was smaller, we used to do quite a bit of it, with me lifting him. It was a way to keep him quiet when. I was in charge of him. Now that he is as big as I am (and stronger, I fear), we still tumble a little, but taking turns at the ground and air parts -- back home, I mean. But with my weight almost half again what it ought to be I didn't risk any fancy capers. Presently, when he had me in by Robert A. Heinlein a simple handstand over his head, I broached the subject on my mind. "Clark, is Mrs. Royer any special friend of yours ?" "Her?" He snorted and added a rude noise. "Why?" "I just wondered. She -- Mmm, perhaps I shouldn't repeat it." He said, "Look, Pod, you want me to leave you standing on the ceiling?" "Don't you dare!" "Then don't start to say something and not finish it." "All right. But steady while I swing my feet down to your shoulders." He let me do so, then I hopped down to the floor. The worst part about high acceleration is not how much you weigh, though that is bad enough, but how fast you fall. And I suspected that Clark was quite capable of leaving me head downwards high in the air if I annoyed him. "What's this about Mrs. Royer?". "Oh, nothing much. She thinks Marsmen are trash, that's all." "She does, huh? That makes it mutual." "Yes. She thinks it's disgraceful that the Line allows us to travel first class -- and the Captain certainly ought not to allow us to eat in the same mess with decent people." "Tell me more." "Nothing to tell. We're riffraff, that's all. Convicts, you know." "Interesting. Very, very interesting." "And her friend Mrs. Garcia agrees with her. But I suppose I shouldn't have repeated it. After all, they are entitled to their own opinions. Aren't they?" Clark didn't answer, which is a very bad sign. Shortly thereafter he left without a word. In a sudden panic that I might have started more than I intended to, I called after him but he just kept going. Clark is not hard of hearing, but he can be very hard of listening. So I put on a weight harness, then loaded myself down all over until I weighed as much as I would on Venus and started trotting on the treadmill until I was covered with sweat and ready for a bath and a change. Actually I did not really care what bad luck overtook those two harpies. I simply hoped that Clark's sleight-ofhand would be up to its usual high standards so that it could not possibly be traced back to him. Nor even guessed at. For I had not told Clark half of what was said. Believe you me, I had never guessed, until we were in the Tricorn, that anyone could despise other persons simply over their ancestry or where they lived. Oh, I had encountered tourists from Earth whose manners left something to be desired. But Daddy had told me that all tourists, everywhere, seem obnoxious simply because tourists are strangers who do not know local customs...and I believed it, because Daddy is never wrong. Certainly the occasional visiting professor that Daddy brought home for dinner was always charming, which proves that Earthmen do not have to have bad manners. I had noticed that the pas-, sengers in the Tricorn seemed a little bit stand-offish when we first boarded, but I did not think anything of it. After all, strangers do not run up and kiss you, even on Mars -- and we Marsmen are fairly informal, I suppose; we're still a frontier society. Besides that, most passengers had been in the ship at least from Earth. They had already formed their friendships and cliques. We were like new kids in a strange school. But I said, "Good morning!" to anyone I met in the passageway. If I was not answered I just checked it off to hard-of-hearing -- so many of them obviously could be hard of hearing. Anyhow, I wasn't terribly interested in getting chummy with passengers. I wanted to get acquainted with the ship's officers, pilot officers especially, so that I could get some practical experience to chink in Vvhat I altekily  khew :f rom i :   i i  t : ' reading. It's not easy for a girl to get accepted for pilot training ; she has to be about four times as good as a male candidate -- and every little bit helps. I got a wonderful break right away -- we were seated at the Captain's table! Uncle Tom, of course. I am not conceited enough to think that "Miss Podkayne Fries, Marsopolis" means anything on a ship's passenger list (but wait ten years !) -- whereas Uncle Tom, even though he is just my pinochle-playing, easy-going oldest relative, is nevertheless senior Senatorat-Large of the Republic, and it is certain that the Marsopolis General Agent for the Triangle Line knows this. No doubt the agent would see to it that the purser of the Tricorn would know it if he didn't already. As may be. I am not one to scorn gifts from heaven, no matter how they arrive. At our very first meal I started working on Captain Darling. That really is his name, Barrington Babcock Darling -- and does his wife call him "Baby Darling"? But of course a captain does not have a name aboard ship. He is "the Captain," "the Master," "the Skipper" or even "the Old Man" if t is a member of the ship's company speaking pot in his august presence. But never a name : -- simply a majestic, figure of impersonal authority. by Robert A. Heinleip (I wonder if I will someday be called "the Old Woman" when I am not in earshot ? Somehow it doesn't sound quite the same.) too majestic nor impersonal with me. I set out to impress him with the idea that I was awfully sweet, even younger than I am, terribly impressed by him, overawed...and not too bright. It does not do to let a male of any age know that one has brains, not on first acquaintance. Intelligence in a woman is likely to make a man suspicious and uneasy, much like Caesar's fear of Cassius's "lean and hungry look." Get a man solidly on your side first. After that it is fairly safe to let him become gradually aware of your intellect -- he may even feel unconsciously that it rubbed off from his own. So I set out to make him feel that it was a shame that I was not his daughter. (Fortunately he only has sons.) Before that first meal was over I confided in him my great yearning to take pilot training... suppressing, of course, any higher ambition. Both Uncle Tom and Clark could see what I was up to. But Uncle Tom would never give me away and Clark just looked bored and contemptuous and said nothing, because Clark would hot bother to interfere with Armageddon unless there was ten per cent in it for him. But I do not mind what my relatives think of my tactics; they work. Captain Darling was obviously amused at my grandiose and "impossible" ambition...but he offered to show me the control room. Round one to Poddy, on points. I am now the unofficial ship's mascot, with free run of the control room. And I am almost as privileged in the engineering department. Of course the Captain does not really want to spend hours teaching me the practical side of astrogation. He did show me through the control room and gave me a kindergarten explanation of the work -- which I followed with wideeyed awe -- but his interest in me is purely social. He wants to not-quite hold me in his lap (he is much too practical and too discreet to do anything of the sort!) -- so I notquite let him and make it a point to keep up my social relations with him, listening with my best astonished-kitten look to his anecdotes while he feeds me liters of tea. I really am a good listener because you never can tell when you will pick up something useful. And all in the world any woman has to do to be considered "charming" by men is to listen while they talk. But Captain Darling is not the only astrogator aboard. He gave me the run of the control room; I did the rest. The second officer, Mr. Savvonavong, thinks it is simply amazing how fast I pick up mathematics. You see, he thinks he taught me differential equations. Well, he did, when it comes to those awfully complicated ones used in correcting the vector of a constant-boost ship, but if I hadn't worked hard in the supplementary course I was allowed to take last semester, I wouldn't know what he was talking about. Now he is showing me how to program a ballistic computer. The junior third, Mr. Clancy, is still studying for his unlimited license, so he has all the study tapes and reference books I need and is just as helpful. He is near enough my age to develop groping hands...but only a very stupid male will make even an indirect pass unless a girl manages to let him know that it won't be resented. Mr. Clancy is not stupid and I am very careful to offer no opportunity. I may kiss him -- two minutes before I leave the ship for the last time. Not sooner. They are all very helpful and they think it is cute of me to be so dead serious about it. But, in truth, practical astrogation is much harder than I had ever dreamed. I had guessed that part of the resentment I sensed -- resentment that I could not fail to notice despite my cheery "Good mornings !" -- lay in the fact that we were at the Captain's table. To be sure, the "Welcome in the Tricorn!" booklet in each stateroom states plainly that new seating arrangements are made at each port and that it is the ship's custom to change the guests at the Captain's table each time, making the selections from the new passengers. But I don't suppose that warning makes it any pleasanter to be bumped. I don't expect to like it when I'm bumped off the Captain's table at Venus. But that is only part of the trouble. Only three of the passengers were really friendly to me : Mrs. Grew, Girdie and Mrs. Royer. Mrs. Royer I met first and at first I thought that I was going to like her, in a bored sort of way, as she was awfully friendly and I have great capacity for enduring boredom if it suits my purpose. I met her in the lounge the first day. She immediately caught my eye, smiled, invited me to sit by her and quizzed me about myself. I answered her questions, mostly. I told her that Daddy was a teacher and that Mother was raising babies and that my brother and I were traveling with our uncle. I didn't boast about our family. Boasting is not polite and it often by Robert A. Heinlein is not believed -- far better to let people find out nice things on their own and hope they won't notice any unnice things. Not that there is anything unnice about Daddy and Mother. I told her that my name was Poddy Fries. "'Poddy'?" she said. "I thought I saw something else on the passenger list." "Oh. It's really 'Podkayne,' " I explained. "For the Martian saint, you know." But she didn't know. She answered, "It seems very odd to give a girl a man's name." Well, my name is odd, even among Marsmen. But not for that reason. "Possibly," I agreed. "But with Martians gender is rather a matter of opinion, wouldn't you say?" She blinked. I started to explain how a Martian doesn't select which of three sexes to be until just before it matures...and how, even so, the decision is operative only during a relatively short period of its life. But I gave up, as I could see that I was talking to a blank wall. Mrs. Royer simply could not imagine any pattern other than her own. So I shifted quickly. "Saint Podkayne lived a very long time ago. Nobody actually knows whether the saint was male or female. There are just traditions." i O F course the traditions are pretty explicit and many living Martians claim descent from Saint Podkayne. Daddy says that we know years ago much more accurately than we know human history a mere two thousand years ago. In any case most Martians include "Podkayne" in their long lists of names (practically genealogies in synopsis) because of the tradition that anyone named for Saint Podkayne can call on him (or "her" -- or "it") in time of trouble. As I have said. Daddy is romantic and he thought it would be nice to give a baby the luck, if any, that is attached to the saint's name. I am neither romantic nor superstitious. But it suits me just fine to have a name that belongs to me and to no other human. I like being Podkayne "Poddy" Fries. It's better than being one of a multitude of Elizabeths or Dorothys or such. Anyway, I like it. But I could see that it simply puzzled Mrs. Royer, so we passed to other matters. Speaking from her seniority as an "old space hand" based on her one just-completed trip out from Earth, she told me a great many things about ships and space travel. Most of them weren't so, but I indulged her. She introduced me to a number of people and handed me a large quantity of gossip about passengers, ship's officers, et cetera. Between times she filled me in on her aches, pains and symptoms, what an important executive her son was, what a very important person her late husband had been and how, when I reached Earth, she really must see to it that I met the Right People. "Perhaps such things don't matter in an outpost like Mars, my dear child, but it is Terribly Important to get Started Right in New York." I tabbed her as garrulous, stupid and well intentioned. But I soon found that I couldn't get rid of her. If I passed through the lounge -- which I had to do in order to reach the control room -- she would snag me and I couldn't get away short of abrupt rudeness or flat lies. She quickly started using me for chores. "Podkayne darling, would you mind just slipping around to my stateroom and fetching my mauve wrap? I feel a tiny chill. It's on the bed I think, or perhaps in the wardrobe -- that's a dear." Or, "Poddy child, I've rung and I've rung and the stewardess simply won't answer. Would you get my book and my knitting? Oh, and while you're at it, you might bring me a nice cup of tea from the pantry." Those things aren't too bad ; she is probably creaky in the knees and I'm not. But it went on endlessly...and shortly, in addition to being her personal stewardess, I was her private nurse. First she asked me to read her to sleep. "Such a blinding headache and your voice is so soothing, my sweet." I read to her for an hour and then found myself rubbing her head and temples for almost as long. Oh well, a person ought to manage a little kindness now and then, just for practice. And Mother sometimes has dreadful headaches when she has been working too hard; I know that a rub does help. That time she tried to tip me. I refused it. She insisted. "Now, now, child, don't argue with your Aunt Flossie." I said, "No really, Mrs. Royer. If you want to give it to the fund for disabled spacement as a thank-you, that's all right. But I can't take it. She said pish and tosh and tried to shove it into my pocket. So I slid out and went to bed. I didn't see her at breakfast ; she always has a tray in her room. But about midmorning a stewardess told me that Mrs. Royer wanted to see me in her room. I was hardly gruntled at the summons, as Mr. Sawonavong had told me that if I showed up just before ten during his watch, I could watch the whole process of a ballistic correction and he would explain the steps to me. If she wasted more than five minutes of my time, I would be late. by Robert A. Heinlein But I called on her. She was as cheery as ever. "Oh, there you are, darling! I've been waiting ever so long! That stupid stewardess. Poddy dear, you did such wonders for my head last night... and this morning I find that I'm positively cripple d with my back -- you can't imagine, dear; it's ghastly ! Now if you'll just be an angel and give me a few minutes massage -- oh, say a half hour -- I'm sure it'll do wonder for me. You'll find the cream for it over there on the dressing table, I think...and now if you'll just help me -- " "Mrs. Royer." "Yes, dear? The cream is in that big pink tube. Use just -- "  'Mrs. Royet, I canT do it. I have an appointment' "What, dear? Oh, t#sh, let ' them wait. No one is ever on time aboard ship. Perhaps you had better warm your hands before -- " ' '   "Mrs. Royer, I am not goin g : to do  it. If' somethin g i s wrong with your  back, ' I shouldn't .touch it. I might injure you.B.ut I'll take a mes sage to the Surgeon! if you like and ask him. to come see you." Suddenly she wasn't at all cheery. "You mean you won't do it!" "Have it your way. Shall I tell the Surgeon ?"  "Why, you impertinent -- Get out of here!" : T : got. "      I ' I : I met her in a I passageway on my way to lunch. She stared straight through me, so I didn't speak either. She was walking as nimbly as I was; I guess her back had taken a turn for the better. I saw her twice more that day and twice more she simply couldn't see me. The following morning I was using the viewer in the lounge to scan one of Mr. Clancy's study tapes, one on radar approach  contact. The viewer is off in a corner, behind a screen of fake potted palms, and perhaps they didn't notice me. Or perhaps they didn't care. I stopped the scan to give my eyes and ears a rest, and heard Mrs. Garcia talking to Mrs. Royer :  " -- that I simply can't stand about Mars is ( that it is so commercialized. Why couldn't they , have, Ipft i.t primitive and beautiful?" , Mrsw Royer ; "What . can you expect ? , Those , dxeadful people!" : ", , i . The ship's official language is Ortho: but many passengers talk English among  themselves--and often act as if no one else could possibly understand it. These two weren't keeping their voices down. I went on listening. Mrs. Garcia: "Just what I was saying to Mrs. Rimski. After all, they're all criminals." Mrs Royer : "Or  worse. Have you noticed that little Martian girl ? The niece--or # so they clainvr-of that big black savage?"   I counted ten backwards in Old Martian and reminded myself of the penalty for murder. I didn't mind being called a "Martian." They didn't know any better and, anyhow, it's no insult ; the Martians were civilized before humans learned to walk. But "big black savage"! Uncle Tom is as dark as I am blonde; his Maori blood and desert tan make him the color of beautiful old leather...and I love the way he looks. As for the rest -- he is learned and civilized and gentle... and highly honored wherever he goes. Mrs. Garcia: "I've seen her. Common, I would say. Flashy but cheap. A type that attracts a certain sort of man." Mrs. Royer: "My dear, you don't know the half of it. I've tried to help her. I really felt sorry for her, and I always believe in being gracious, especially to one's social inferiors." Mrs. Garcia: "Of course, dear." Mrs. Royer: "I tried to give her a few hints as to proper conduct among gentle people. Why, I was even paying her for little trifles, so that she wouldn't be uneasy among her betters. But she's an utterly ungrateful little snip. She thought . she could squeeze moire money out of me. She was rude about it, so rude that I feared for my safety.' I had to order her out of my room, actually." Mrs. Garcia : "You were wise to drop her. Blood will tell. Bad blood or good blood, blood will always tell. And mixed blood is the Very Worst Sort. Criminals to start with... and then that Shameless Mixing of Races. You can see it right in that family. The boy doesn't look a bit like his sister, and as for the uncle -- Hmmm...my dear, you half way hinted at something. Do you suppose that she is not his niece but something, shall we say, a bit closer?" "I wouldn't put it past either one of them!" "Oh, come, 'fess up, Flossie. Tell me what you found out." Mrs. Royer : "I didn't say a word. But I have eyes -- and so have you." Mrs. Garcia: "Right in front of everyone!" Mrs. Royer : "What I can't understand is why the Line permits them to mix with us . Perhaps they have to sell them passage -- treaties or some such n o n s. e,n s e -- but we shouldn't be forced to associate with them... and certainly not to eat with them!" Mrs. Garcia: "I know. I'm going to write a very strong letter about it as soon as I get home. There are limits. You know, I had thought that Captain Darling was a gentleman...but when I saw those creatures actually seated at the Captain's table -- well, I didn't i , by Robert A. Hein lei n   i... believe my eyes. I thought I would faint," Mrs. Royer. "I know. But after all, the Captain does come from Venus." Mrs. Garcia: "Yes, but Venus was never a prison colony. That boy...he sits in the very chair I used to sit in, right across from the Captain." (I made a mental note to ask the Chief steward for a different chair for Clark; I didn't want him contaminated.) us "Martians" and started dissecting Girdie and complaining about the food and the service, and even stuck pins in some of their shipboard coven who weren't present. But I didn't listen. I simply kept quiet and prayed for strength to go on doing so -- because if I had made my presence known I feel sure that I would have stabbed them both with their own knitting needles. Eventually they left, to rest a while to fortify themselves for lunch. I rushed out and changed into my gym suit and hurried to the gymnasium to work up a good sweat instead of engaging in violent crime. It was there that I found Clark and told him just enough -- or maybe a little bit too much, Mr. Savvonavong had told me that we were likely to have a radiation storm almost any time. The solar weather station on Mercury reported "flare" weather shaping up and warned all ships in space to be ready for it. I knew that when I told Clark, but I didn't think there would be any connection. I was wrong. I 'T  I '  ) In the next big issue of IF -- by Clifford D. Simak by Frederik Pohl -- plusPart Two of Heinlein's great new novel Podkayne of Mars, additional shprt stories and novelettes, features, etc. January issue qn sale Npyember J#th -- ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy! IF  Short Story Stacks of hundred-dollar bills -- but sadly, almost all of them were genuine! C wing is genuine old fold in Washington's left eyefake' Stahl told the two tourlid Stahl re jilied, tightly, enists while his wife clung circlihg his' Wife's waifct; hs if , proudly, tp his ami. Like him, ' showing off all hlS' finest osshe was tall, ) blpnd J e and, ims'esfcidnk I simultaneously He , ppjptjly good-looking... glanded at Tinkeriai cybetfict, EWen this sttopgbpx money icist who, like SitiitH, had ,#s. fyiest American countersent several requests to sfee the fell, she said... famous Suite of I Artifices. "May I see it?" asked "Ever try collecting?" ;  Smith. The lifeless face of the "Not money," Tinker anmathematician brightened as swered, eyes still on Mrs. he peered through the quartz Stahl. top at a dollar bill marked "Got the 'Mongoloid' bill W#A. "I can only get five years ago, same year as the worthless real stuff. AnI got Mary." He gave his wife cient governments always dean even more ostentatious strpyed counterfeits. But squeeze. Smith stared at her, you're in Economic Planning, too, but more with dull disso it mut bfc easier to get ; satisfaction than desire. "Fifgood fakes." teen bills in the box now -- hut "Only the merest imperfecI've still only one wife." "Fifteen!" exclaimed Smith, "The rich get richer and the poor stay poor." "The wallpape r," Stahl smoothly proceeded, "is a replica of Italian murals. If you adjust your focus properly the flat columns become solids through the art of vanishingpoint perspective." "Excellent period distortion of Greek styles," said Tinker, studying the columns. "And those three chairs are fine copies of Chippendale. You're to be complimented on your taste in everything, Stahl." "You really know ancient designs," Stahl said. "Genuine old copies are even scarcer than their originals. And originals, of course, can never be quite as good," "Sometimes I don't see why," Smith muttered. They all looked shocked. "Smith, you need a checkup," Tinker advised. "You sound rundown. How can we progress without imitating past achievements ?" "A little rundown," Smith admitted, "but... Oh, let's forget it." "Let's," Stahl nodded, striving to recapture the pair's attention as they went on through the Suite. "Notice the paintings. Those two are excellent pseudo-Braques and in the last room were fine fakes of Van Gogh, Picasso and Chardin. In fact," he pointed toward a Gauguin-like nude, all flattened sensuousness, "that one's as close to a real Gauguin as an imitation can go without being a mere reproduction." They all gasped and even Smith shook his head reverently. "To be that close to the real thing! It's all you'd ever need." "Becoming more possible all the time." Tinker grinned suggestively at Mrs. Stahl. She looked back, mildly interested. "We'll get there eventually." Happily oblivious to everything but his collections, Stahl led them into the library. One wall, covered with rows of book spines, swung around to reveal a wellstocked bar. There was also a large bar across the room which quickly became a library of real books and recording systems. "I'm not much for eating and drinking," Smith protested feebly. "Who is?" Mrs. Stahl laughed. "But this must be a special occasion for you." Eyes bulging nervously. Smith ran his fingers through his luxuriant hair and sighed, "Special it is. All right." Stahl casually mixed drinks for them all and sipped an Old Fashioned. "I've concentrated somewhat more on the twentieth century of the Old Times than any other," he said. "A particularly intriguing century, I find, although not crucial like the twenty-first, of course." "The crucial one," Tinker protested. "As a fellow antiquarian I must beg to differ, sir." "What about rocket travel, Mr. Stahl? When did that begin?" "Old hat," he yawned. "And atomic energy?" "Same applies there. Look, Tinker, don't get me wrong. I love the period. But, objectively viewed, the twentyfirst makes the great difference." "And what about duplication of life functions, like the mechanical heart? That really got started in the twentieth." "Absolutely right," Smith nodded vigorously. "All strictly mechanical," Stahl sighed. "But the twenty-first turned the study of pain and pleasure itself from an art into a true science." "No, no," scoffed the cyberneticist. Stahl pounded the bar. "All right. I'm going to prove it by putting on an All-Sense Feeliescope of Thomas Dyall. It's fully sense-adapted, so it should pick up perfectly." "Hope it isn't noisy," said Smith. "It's beautiful answered Mary Stahl. "I could listen to it all day." The odor of damp, newmown grass filled the room and another more elusive scent mingled with it. Entry of June #rd , #, said an impersonal, mechanical voice, from the journal of Thomas Dyall, elected World's First Poet Laureate in # . A warm rich bass took over: This morning I rode far out to reach open countryside in the preserved areas to replenish my stock of sensory experiences. As I was walking along through the woods, the most delicious scent struck my nostrils. I immediately recognized new-mown grass in it but the factor making the true difference escaped me until I realized the faint odor belonged to roses. At r that point, my senses reeling with delight, I composed in my mind most of my long poem, The Nature of Nature , grasping intuitively an experience more intense, more valuable, than any "real" one. I say intuitively because I still thought the odor was merely that of grass and roses. A minute afterwards, though, I came into a clearing, spotted a forest ranger's cottage there and discovered that the scent was from a recently-improved insecticide that the ranger's wife was using in the living room. There was little grass in the area and not a single rose! The following note, interrupted the monotone voice, by Albert Teichner was added by the author in the year # : Here in "real" life the great guiding principle of my future was brought home to me. The welldone imitation of a thing was better than the thing itself! This was the lesson I had to disseminate for all humanity. "Interesting," Tinker said, "although we all know now that one thing cannot be substituted for. Also -- " "No discussion now," pleaded Smith. "You need a while to consider all that. Anyway, I've been thinking about your bill, Stahl. That wasn't a fold on Washington's eyelid, just a tiny inkstain. It's genuine" "It can't be," Stahl snapped and angrily led them back to the first room. "Tinker, I want you as my witness." He handed the bill around and Smith had to concede it was really counterfeit. "What's that next one?" he asked. "A ten." Stahl hesitated, then took it off the pile along with three others and passed them to the visitors, showing off fine points of imitation. When he collected the bills he carefully made certain there were still five and locked them up again. "What about another drink?" Smith asked hastily. "No." Tinker sat down in a large chair. "Let's straighten out something right now, Stahl. Dyall was making the first crude statement of an obvious truth. If we have a pleasant sensation it doesn't matter whether it's caused by a rose or a chemical imitation of a rose or by making a brain imagine a rose -- doesn't matter except that the real rose itself is the hardest thing to control. So it can't be as intensely real as its imitations." "Mr. Tinker, isn't that crucial enough for you?" Mrs. Stahl asked. Her voice was so rich and warmly rounded that Smith stared wonderingly at her, as if trying to fathom an alien tongue. "Not quite," Tinker shrugged. "Stahl, you're discussing the smallest aspect of the three-part equation, StimulusStimulated Body  Experience. Your poet was saying certain changes in Stimulus would still give a Stimulated Body the same Experience as the original. But the philosophers and cyberneticists, they already suspected something more radical. If the Stimulated Body was properly changed the same Stimulus could give different Bodies the same Experience. In other words, a properly-arranged process would have the same Experience as the life function for which it was substituted." "Now then," he went on, "all life reproduces itself, right? Well, they finally figured the most important thing to reproduce was a man's Experience itself, not any particular form of Stimulated Body. Of course we have higher ideals. We want the Stimulated Body to be as nearly like what it was as possible -- then we can have the best of all possible worlds." "Some people," Smith grumbled, "don't get their fair share of that best." "Anyway I hate all theories," said Mrs. Stahl. Stahl disregarded them as he stared at his cashbox. "My money," he said ominously, "has been changed!" The two visitors exchanged nervous glances. "That's not possible," said Tinker. "It is. Somebody's palmed a real one as a substitute!" "That's very unfair," Smith protested. "We came here as guests, strangers to you and to each other. We've given you the correct degree of envious admiration and now you show your gratitude for our human reaction by saying we're deranged!" Stahl was unmoved. "I still say it's been stolen." He opened the box. "See -- the dollar's different! When the people of the Old Times made us their heirs and children they left piles of this real stuff around along with almost everything else they'd made. It's practically worthless !" Tinker frowned uncertainly. "If it makes you feel better I'll submit to a lie-detector. I hope you're capable of feeling shame when it proves my innocence !" "Good enough," said Stahl, turning expectantly to his other guest. As he waited. Smith pulled back a little. "Well?" Mary smiled, moving a little toward him. Smith leaped away from her, heading toward an open window, but the others moved faster and grabbed him before he reached the wall. "What's the matter with you anyway?" Tinker grunted, straining to hold him. "The window's painted on the wall !" Smith slumped forward in despair as Stahl triumphantly wormed the valued counterfeit from his pocket. "I can't do anything right," Smith wailed. "I heard about this collection and thought I could manage to get one little thing for myself. I haven't been given much else by life." "You -- you defective!" Stahl shouted. Smith only slumped further forward. "How can I help it? The Monte Carlo computer gave me one of the last places for advanced altering and I have to wait and wait. Compared to you, I'm still a halfbreed !" "Don't hand me that," Stahl snapped. "I didn't mean physical defects. You look as normal as anyone else." "No, darling, I think he's by Albert Teichner telling the truth," Mary said sympathetically. "When altering began it was only skindeep for all of us." "I'll bet you're sixty per cent altered already," Smith cried out. "It's my bad luck to be only twenty-five per cent so far. All I can do is look at her and wonder why the two of you make such a fuss." The cyberneticist tried to calm him. "Your turn's com  mg. "I have to find out what it's about sooner than that!" Tinker sighed. "I'll try to get your number advanced." "Let him wait his turn," Stahl said coldly. "He's faking a lot anyway." At that Smith broke free from them and pressed his back to the optical illusion window. "Don't come closer," he warned. "I don't have much to lose." They stopped a few feet away and waited. Suddenly he raised his left hand to his face and dug the long nails in a semicircle into his flesh. As a thin stream of locally circulated blood gushed out, he dug deeper and the eyeball fell forward, quivering, on his cheek. "He was telling the truth!" Stahl gasped, pointing at the glittering metal bits within the eyesocket. A glowing wire was slowly evaporating on the retinal plate as optical feedback collapsed. tinker, all professional competence now hfelpefl I '  ' I '  ,.!   ; I I I . i . "  Smith to a chair. "We'll be able to repair you in a month," he said, "because you've a simpler arrangement, and I can promise you'll have as good an electro-chemical near-cortex as anybody. And the other more interesting changes too." Stahl glanced at his wife, then, as she nodded back, slowly put his precious counterfeit into the dangling hand. He was pleased to see enough consciousness was still functioning enough for the fingers to close greedily around it. "Keep it," he said, "you deserve it more than me." Suddenly he realised he was feeling not only shame but pity too! It was the first time for pity -- and that meant he was one step further on his own journey. How far that journey had already taken him! For, when humanized them, the humans had possessed sufficient understanding to pass the dead world on to the superiorwisdom of their creations. If they had been unable to foresee what would eventually happen, Stahl and his fellow robots could. Some day the supreme knowledge and the supreme feeling would be perfectly wedded, the day they became truly humanoid copies of their makers.  He moved forward, Tinkerfollowing him, to help his felt low creature closer to thati   J I I  I; i ; A I  , f   fIF  Short Story There they were, on the threshhold of life -- a life that might be unbearably, terribly long! S O they went on down there, with all along the big fat glove signs pointing at them, squirting -- not blood -- merely reminder in color, out of something like beet juice or wine -- and the highway signs saying constantly metal teardrop held down at two hundred, just "cruising 'er" on the nylon strip designed to hold them at four hundred, or, in emergency, better still. "I hope," he said through his fine white-metal teeth, "that the quota is filled. So much to do tomorrow -- and tomorrow." "Yes!" she said through lips that had been sculpted by surgery until now they resembled a red rose bouquet, "so much to do -- tonight !" She was his bride of five days. They rolled under the dancing signs where two super Whooshies crashed at each other on a ribbon-road of silk until legs and arms piled out and a red fluid filled the multiple lanes. She laughed low and chesty from a larynx that had been done in gold-x against cancer long ago and said, "What'll they think of next to remind us? Too many of us now, heaven knows. But all the time they keep pleading with us not to kill ourselves." "If we get by the quota," he said, "sometime we'll take a run across on that new Super they're building in the north. They say they really got signs up there!" He eased the little Whooshie up to two-fifty and still they were just crawling. Two super Speartakes, a dozen or so of the Flashbugs and a hundred Windstars swept past them as though they were standing aside. " I want our next one to be a Caddiscat," she said. "Everybody's getting a Caddiscat." He looked at her and thought he detected again something he had feared a long time ago, right at first, ten days ago, when it had started. But in the fogged flush of romance he had forgot. And now after the long five-day courtship they were bride and groom five days. And he had to admit that the nights had all been wonderful, with their great love between them, and the novel gadgets and attachments they had both brought to the marriage, to stimulate and relax them together. But now that nagging doubt again as he looked at the rather grim set of the red roses that were her lips. Was she just another scheming, ambitious woman? He began to dream of a posquota, alone. And he felt guilty. But glancing at her as he expertly held the Whooshie to a curve above which two purple sign ambulances danced, he had to admit that after the fourth night, even with all the tricks, it had grown a little stale. "Hungry?" She bounced on her whitenyloned bottom in the little seat of the Whooshie. It was plain that his abrupt question had brought her back from a long way out. "No -- no," she stammered. "I couldn't eat." "What were you thinking of, so far away?" T HE roses climbed over each other for a little while like a pile of snakes as she licked her lips and could not speak. And when she said, "I was just thinking how awful if they had took only one of us on the quota," he wasn't at all sure she was telling the truth. "Was he awfully interesting?" "Who?" "The one you were remembering, away out there." The rose bouquet swirled and she was all woman when she said, "You are the most interesting I've ever met." "Thanks," he said. : "Not as many tricks, maybe. But what you do know, you know better." "Gee, thanks!" he said. So the little Whooshie rolled on down toward the place where the quota was. The quota man for their district sat behind a bright orange desk, his horn-rims modern slant and jeweled very nicely. His chair was pale green. On his desk were objects of quaint joy -- dancing flowers, little girls going to school, cats in the sun, barefoot boys in a melon patch, a mother spreading rash powder on a dry diaper; above him his ceiling was all pink lights. "We're here about the quota," the man said. "We got our notice for the quarterly check-in." She nodded in agreement and her lips were a little scared. "Names?" He gave his name; she gave hers. Then the husband helpfully explained how the wife had changed her name but five days ago, and he told loud and clear what her old name had been. Perhaps she was on the list by her old name. "So you're here about our Emergency Program quota?" The smile that flickered out and. the jut-jawed careful pose reminded a little of glory picture there had once been of dictators in the. world. But his .eye, were smiling brightly, as he flicked the switch and the list climbed down the wall... It was plain that he wished this to be, if not a time of joy, at least not a time of scenes, "It is much better than it used to be," he said as. the list raced op in the wall viewer, "much changed. Some, people are volunteering now , for the Emergency: Program quota. To get a rest from a mate, to relax from a business, or dozens of other good reasons. And every volunteer, of course, releases a draftee." He looked at them as if pleading for understanding.' "It's congestion on the civil highways, '   ' i really, as much as the. avyful climb of the , rate that makes the Program, so necessary. So maybe when we get more highways things will be better. When the surface is till taken up, which it will be soon now, there's no reason in the world we can't go upstairs with our tough light alloys and build any number of layers of highways. Flying's all right, rockets and all, but we'll always need good old leisurely wheels down there zipping on terra firma." He seemed to be .keeping up his patter to relax them. T HE list flowed on in the walk mile after mile of it, while they watched tensely but could not read the names moving swiftly. The quota man, not watching, twirled ' half circles on his green swivel, his finger tips, seeming vto meet around i.some very .definite # ball of akv.Hiv eyes, detached, were .loafing in some far country, but his attitude otherwise was one of .listening casually ; as vhe italked. on of the Program? and x why it had to be.  When the, .sharp pheep came out of the wall, he stopped, the lit at f opce. There bracketed by. two green stars, was her name, her name of five . days ago..."That'll do . it for now," he said, big-yoiced and .cheerful, smiling, his eyesihopeipjly at her. fromthe .green.' swivel. "Fills the qyptl Apntly your husband has just got out  V V .V ;  t.'ivr 't'ii-l by David R. Bunch on a volunteer, ha ha. You see, I didn't have to watch the list, because when you spoke your names, the list knew, ha ha." When the screams broke from her lips and the roses writhed in torture, he took the necessary things from his desk drawer and raced to her. He had seen them do this before, many times, usually from a lack of preparation and gross unfamiliarity with the Program. "It will be the most restful ten years of your life," he insisted soothingly as he expertly pumped green fluid through a puncture he had made in her left arm. "And once a year," he talked on as he soothed and petted her with the frozen relaxer pad, "usually in June, in our new improved system, we bring them back and allow them one visitor, the visitor of their choice, if possible. In a very private little cell for a full hour! Now, isn't that fine?" His eyes leered at the husband. "Usually in cases like this there's no doubt who the visitor will be. Unless of course he too has been drafted. But it's just for the ten years, after all, and then someone else takes your place in this necessary rotation. So much better, we feel, than either of the other two possible ways of solving the problem -- drastic regimentation of the rate or outright reduction through perma-rieep, ha ha. And, who knows, with the new building program and a fuller enlistment in Volunteers for Rate Control, we might be able to reduce the time." and the highway condition especially, he led her away, dazed and wooden now from the green fluid and the numbing relaxer pad. Her husband of five days, having escaped the draft by the grace of a volunteer, left fast in his little Whooshie. As he headed north toward the new Super, he waved vaguely in the direction of the place where she would be for ten years. Actually he was so tired of her already that right now he doubted if he would ever be back. But up on the northern Super, and getting a little lonely, he decided it would probably be fun once a year to be able to go back and supplement other activities with a wife. But wait! Just as he was wheeling his Whooshie past an animated sign that showed two sports Caddiscats battling m boxing shorts the dread fear seized him anew. With the birth rate what it was and had been and with the highways becoming more and more congested all the time no doubt he too would soon be drafted into the Program. There, with the special fluids, to lie like an egg, like a cold stick of wood, like a dead man...for ten years...m a y b e longer... maybe forever... in the crowded earth's Cold IF  Novelette The Aga Kaga wanted peace -- a piece of everything in sight! TO llT'M not at all sure," Un-A-der-Secretary Sternwheeler said, "that I fully understand the necessity for your.  ah...absenting yourself from your post of duty, Mr. Retief. Surely this matter could have been dealt with in the usual way -- assuming any action is necessary." "I had a sharp attack of writer's cramp, Mr. Secretary," Retief said. "So I thought I'd better come along in person -- just to be sure I was positive of making my point." "Eh?" "Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches," Deputy Under-Secretary Magnan put in. "Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time, we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports, reports -- " "Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?" the Under-Secretary barked. "Gracious, no," Magnan said. "I love reports." "It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years," Retief said. "They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands." The Under-Secretary nodded. "Quite right. Carry on along the same lines. Now, if there's nothing further -- " "Thank you, Mr. Secretary," Magnan said, rising. "We certainly appreciate your guidance." "There is a little something further," said Retief, sitting solidly in his chair. "What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?" The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. "As Minister to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic representative is merely to... what shall I say... ?" "String them along?" Magnan suggested. "An unfortunate choice of phrase," the Under-Secretary said. "However, it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must concern itself with matters of broad policy." "Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle Flamme," Retief said. "They were assured of Corps support." "I don't believe you'll find that in writing," said the Under-Secretary blandly. "In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now the situation has changed' "The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming FI amine," Retief said. "They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in. They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen' -- complete with armored trawlers mounting # mm infinite repeaters -- and another two dozen parties of 'homesteaders' -- all male and toting rocket launchers." "Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both groups," the Undersecretary said. "A spirit of co-operation -- " 'T'HE Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago," Retief said. "They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people. The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either. But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in." "The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy -- " I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme," Retief said. "The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've made out of a wasteland." "I'm warning you, Retief!" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning forward, wattles quivering. "Corps policy with regard to Flamme includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars will have to accommodate themselves to the situation !" "That's what I'm afraid of," Retief said. "They're not going to sit still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on our hands." The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the desk. "Confounded hot-heads," he muttered. "Very well, Retief. I'll go along to the extent of a Note; but positively no further." "A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme." "Out of the question. A stiffly worded Protest Note is the best I can do. That's final." Back in til# eorrtdoc, Maghr Keith Laeaier nan turned to Retief. "When; will you learn not to argue; with Under-Secretaries? One would think you actively dis liked the idea of ever receiving a promotion. I was astonished at the Under-Secretary's restraint. Frankly, I was stunned when he actually agreed to a Note. I, of course, will have to draft it." Magnan pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. "Now, I wonder, should I view with deep concern an act of open agression, or merely point out an apparent violation of technicalities..." "Don't bother," Retief said. "I have a draft all ready to go. "But how -- ?" "I had a feeling I'd get paper instead of action," Retief said. "I thought I'd save a little time all around." "At times, your cynicism borders on impudence." "At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle." "Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join in the diplomatic giveand-take." "No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild, like a dinosaw hunt." "When you get there," said Mgan liQpeyop'll make it quite clear that this matter is to be settled without violence." "Dont worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it." O N the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a gorgeous ple that reflected from a still lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among flower beds. "You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges," said Retief. "Not that natural, geological processes wouldn't have produced the same resuits, given a couple of hun"Don't belabor the point," the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. "Since we seem to bo on the verge of losing it." "You're forgetting the Note." "A Note," Georges said, waving his cigar. "What the purple polluted hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claimjumpers camped in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking sheep's brains over" dung fires not ten miles from Government House -- and up- wind at that. "Say, if that's the same bar ley you distill youfc whiskey from, I'd call that a first-class atrocity." "Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out of the water." "That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either." "That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held them back with assurances that the care of this invasion, they would have hit them before now." a mistake," said Retief. "The Aga Kagans are tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment. They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an invitation to slaughter -- with the excuse that you started it." "So what are we going to do? Sit here and watch these goat-herders take over our farms and fisheries?" "Those goat-herders aren't all they seem. They've got a first-class modern navy." "I've seen 'em. They camp in goat-skin tents, gallop around on animal-back, wear dresses down to their ankles --  "The 'goat-skin' tents are a high-polymer plastic, made in the same factory that turns out those long flowing bulletproof robes you mention. The animals are just for show. Back home they use helis and ground cars of the most modern design." The Chef d'Regime chewed his cigar. "Why the masquerade?" "Something to do with internal policies, I suppose." "So we sit tight and watch 'em take our world away from us. That's what I get for playing along with you, Retief. We should have clobbered these monkeys as soon as they set foot on our world." "Slow down, I haven't finished yet. There's still the Note." "I've got plenty of paper already. Rolls and rolls of it." "Give diplomatic processes a chance," said Retief. "The Note hasn't even been delivered yet. Who knows? We may get surprising results." "If ypu expect me to supply a runner for the purpose, you're out of luck,. From what .fey Keith Manner I hear, he's likely to come back with his ears stuffed in his hip pocket' "I'll deliver the Note personally' Retief said. "I could use a couple of escorts -- preferably strong-arm lads' The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. "I wasn't kidding about these Aga Kagans," he said. "I hear they have some nasty habits. I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to skin out the goats." "I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through." "Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?" "A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom," Retief said. The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. "I used to be a pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself," he said. "Suppose I go along...?" "That," said Retief, "should lend just the right note of solidarity to our little delegation." He hitched his chair closer. "Now, depending on what we run into, here's how we'll play it..." II ing granite hills west of the capital, a black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road. Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar glumly at the surrounding hills. "Fifty years ago this was bare rock," he said. "We've bred special strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the goats will get it." . "Will that scrubland support a crop?" Retief said, eyeing the lichen-covered knolls. "Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production thirty years ago. One of our finest -- " The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose, with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's arm. "Keep calm, Georges," he said. "Remember, we're on a diplomatic mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of goats." "Let me at 'em!" Georges roared. "I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!"  A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. "Look at that longnosed son!" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another mouthful of ripe grain. "Did you see that?" Georges yelled. "They've trained the son of a -- " "Chin up, Georges," Retief said. "We'll take up the goat problem along wit!: the rest." "I'll murder 'em!" "Hold it, Georges. Look over there." A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise, paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the browngolden grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered, waiting. Georges scrambled for the side of the car. "Just wait 'til I get my hands on him!" Retief pulled him back. "Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat lover -- and hand me one of your cigars." The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed at it and thumbed it alight, He drew t it, puffed # . out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers. "Peace be with you," he intoned in accent-free Kagan. "May your shadows never grow less." T HE leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard, unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously. "Have no fear," Retief said, smiling graciously. "He who comes as a guest enjoys perfect safety." A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his rifle at Retief. "Youth is the steed of folly," Retief said. "Take care that the beardless one does not disgrace his house." The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief. "Begone, interlopers," he said. "You disturb the goats." "Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous," Retief said. "May the creatures dine well ere they move "Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga." The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. "We welcome no intruders on our lands ' I "To praise a man for what' he does not possess is t? make him appear foolish," ftetief  # A fi! X; . O  i.i.i. i it by K pHh Mu riot said. "These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler." "You may address me as 'Exalted One'," the leader said. "Now dismount from that steed of Shaitan." "It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir'," Retief said. "I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now you may conduct us to your headquarters." "Enough of your insolence !" The bearded man cocked his rifle. "I could blow your heads off !" "The hen has feathers, but it does not fly," Retief said. "We have asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man, a hint is enough." "You mock me, pale one. I warn you -- " "Only love makes me weep," Retief said. "I laugh at hatred." "Get out of the car!" Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth in the rear moved forward, teeth bared. "Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me " Retief said. "I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults," the bearded Aga Kagan roared. "These hens of mine have feathers -- and talons as well !" "When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings," Retief said. "Distress in misfortune is another misfortune." The bearded man's face grew purple.  Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car, "Now I think we'd better be getting on," he said briskly. "I've enjoyed our chat, but we do have business to attend to." The bearded leader laughed shortly. "Does the condemned man beg for the axe?" he enquired rhetorically. "Y o u shall visit the Aga Kaga, then. Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a brief farewell." The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh. "That was close," he said. "I was about out of proverbs." "You sound as though you'd brought off a coup," Georges said. "From the expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was he saying?" "Just a routine exchange of bluffs," Retief said. "Now when we get there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right." "These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers," Georges said. " Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this expedition." "Just stick to the plan," Retief said. "And remember: a handful of luck is better than a camel-load of learning." T HE air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green oasis set with canopies. The armed escort motioned the car to a halt before an immense tent of glistening black. Before the tent armed men lounged under a pennant bearing a lion couchant in crimson on a field verte. "Get out," Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad man with blueblack hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered  by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.  Blackbeard cleared his throat. "Down on your faces in the presence of the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West." "Sorry," Retief said firmly. "My hay-fever, you know." The reclining giant waved a hand languidly. "Never mind the formalities," he said. "Approach." Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another silken scarf and held up a hand. "Night and the horses and the desert know me," he said in resonant tones. "Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen -- " He paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. "Turn off that damned air-conditioner," he snapped. He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his head and withdrew to the rear. "Excellency," Retief said, "I have the honor to present M. Georges Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government." "Planetary government?" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. "My men have observed a few squatters by Keith Laumer along the shore. If they're in distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat." "It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty," Retief said "No goatmeat will be required." "Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib Jelebi," the Aga Kaga said. "I know a few old sayings myself. For example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.' " "We have no such intentions, Excellency," Retief said. "Is it not written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?" "I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers," the Aga Kaga said. "It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated." Ill H andmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence. "We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne," Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered grapes. "Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge," the Aga Kaga said. "What brings "The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern," Retief said. "Whereas the words of kings..." "Very well, I concede the point." The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the serving maids. "Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph. These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds." The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him. "Now," the Aga Kaga said. "Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of platitudes. How do you remember them all?" "Diplomats and other liars require good memories," said Retief. "But as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission. I'll read it." "Go ahead." The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor, eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses. "The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary Sheik, Emir of the -- " "Yes, yes. Skip the titles." Retief flipped over two pages "...and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area, hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-#-b and X-# c-#, with particular pertinence to that body designated in the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume Nine, reel #, as # Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as Flamme -- " "Come to the point," the Aga Kaga cut in. "You're here to lodge a complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays claim, is that it?" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one. "Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen are paid for. Cheers." "Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things," Retief said. "Call me Stanley," the Aga Kaga said. "The other routine is just to please some of the old fools -- I mean the more conservative members of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to accomplish." "At first glance," Retief said, "it looks as though the places are already occupied, and the deeds are illegal." T HE Aga Kaga guffawed. "For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have another drink." He poured, eyeing Georges. "What of M. Duror? How does he feel about it?" Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. "Not bad," he said. "But not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats." The Aga Kaga snorted. "I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit myself," he said. "Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their support." "Also," Georges said distinctly, "I think you're soft. You lie around letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest day's work." The Aga Kaga looked startled. "Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar as big as your thumb." He popped a grape into his mouth. "As for the rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish as my advisors' faith in the advantages of by Ksith Laamsr primitive plumbing. As for myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well, hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others the arid satisfactions of .selfdenial and other perversions." "You admit you're here to grab our land, then," Georges said. "That's the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression -- " "Ah, ah!" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. "Watch your vocabulary, my dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or possibly 'legitimate aspirations. for self-determination of formerly exploited peoples' might , fit the .case. Aggression is, by definition, an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of Colonial Imperialism." "Imperialism ! ,Why, you Aga v Kagans have been the most notorious planet-grabbers in Sector history, you -- you -- " "Call me Stanley." The Aga Kaga munched a g rape. "I merely face the realities of popular olk-Iore...Let's be pragitotic; it's a matter of historical  associatiom  Some peopoiercangrab land and pass it off lightly as a moral duty: others are dubbed imperialist merely for holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends. And I shall continue to take every advantage of it." "We'll fight you!" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey and slammed the glass down. "You won't take this world without a struggle !" "Another?" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as his glass was filled., The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light. "Excellent color, don't you agree?" He turned his eyes on Georges. "It's pointless to resist," he said. "We have you outgunned and outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're prepared to be generous... You may continue , to occupy, such areas as we do not immediately reguire until suck time as. yop'rOigible to make other arrangements." "And by the time we've got a crop growing , out of what was bare rock, you'll be ready to move in," the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. "But you'll find k that we aren't alone !" V said. He nodded saeely. "Yes, one need but read the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory noises, but it will a accept the fait accompli. You, dear sir, are but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed. We shall inch our way to empire -- and those who stand in our way shall be dubbed warmongers." "I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley," Retief said. "I wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire nibblers of the past?" "Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast." "The confounded impudence," Georges rasped. "Tells us to our face what he has in mind !" "An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto through the Porcelain Wall of Leung. Such declarations have a legendary quality. It's, traditional that they're never taken at face value." "But always," Retief said, "there was a critical point at which vthe man on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle." " Could have been," the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and began peeling an orange. "But they never were. Hitler could have been stopped by the Czech Air Force in #; Stalin was at the mercy of the primitive atomics of the west in # ; Leung was grossly over-extended at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome. It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw, leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders, clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana." "You're stretching your analogy a little too far," Retief said. "You're banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong." "I shall know when to stop," the Aga Kaga said. "Tell me, Stanley," Retief said, rising. "Are we quite private here?" "Yes, perfectly so," the Aga Kaga said. "None would dare to intrude in my council." He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. "You have a proposal to make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not like to see him disillusioned." "Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case." The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. "What are you getting at?" "You're basing your plan of actionon the certainty that the Corps will sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary piracy." "Isn't it the custom?" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently. fey KettJi Uumer m Wm#M ' 'lr    V-.   #Z#F.Sa qsir. ", fiPNlP v fl'. A  ' X I WmwM wmw'm mm  't'fr "I have news for you, Stanley. t . In this instance, neckwringing seems more; in order than hand-wringing." The Aga Kaga frowned. "Your manner -- " "Never mind our manners!" Georges blurted, standing. "We don't need any lessons from goat-herding landthieves!" The Aga Kaga's face darkened. "You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a muck-grubber!" Georges launched himself at the potentate. The giant rolled aside. He grunted as the Boyar's fist thumped in his short ribs; then he chopped down on Georges' neck. The Chef d'Regime slid off onto the floor a? the Aga Kaga bounded to his feet, sending fruit and silken cushions flying. , . ; "I see it now!' he hissed. "An assassination attempt !" He stretched his arms, thick as tree-roots -- a grizzly in satin robes. "Your heads will ring together like gongs before I have done with you !" He lunged for Retief. Retief came to his feet, feinted with his left and planted a short right against the Aga Kaga's jaw with a solid smack. The potentate stumbled, grabbed; Retief slipped aside. The Aga Kaga whirled to face Retief. : "A slippery diplomat, by all the houris in Paradise!" he grated, breathing hard. "But a fool. True to your medieval code of chivalry, you attacked singly, a blunder I would never have made And you shall die for your idiocy !" He opened his mouth to bellow -- "You sure look foolish, with your fancy hair-do down in your eyes," Retief said. "The servants will get a big laugh out of it." With a choked yell, the Aga Kaga dived for Retief, missed as he leaped aside. The two went to the mat together and rolled, sending a stool skittering. Grunts and curses echoed as the two big men strained, muscles popping. Retief groped for a scissors hold ; the Aga Kaga seized his foot, bit hard. Retief bent nearly double, braced himself and slammed the potentate against the rug. Dust flew. Then the two were on their feet, circling. "Many times Havt I longed t?# btoil a I "diplohruft' civet ' a slow fire-" the Aga 'Kaga j snatled. "Tonight will see it come to pass V I  ' y  I :  "I've seen it done often" at staff meetings," said Retief. "It seems to have no permanent effect." , The Aga Kaga reached for Retief, who feinted left', hammered a right to the thin. The Aga Kaga tottered. Retief measured him, brought up a haymaker. The potentate slammed to the rug -- out cold.     I  i ' G eorges toiled bvtt, sat up. "Let meat 'the son of he mustered, by Keith Laumer "Take over, Georges' Retief said, panting. "Since he's in a mood to negotiate now, we may as well get something accomplished." Georges eyed the fallen ruler, who stirred, groaned lugubriously. "I hope you know what you're doing," Georges said. "But I'm with you in any case." He straddled the prone body, plucked a curved knife from the low table and prodded the Aga Kaga's Adam's apple. The monarch opened his eyes. "Make one little peep and your windbag will spring a leak," Georges said. "Very few historical figures have accomplished anything important after their throats were cut." "Stanley won't yell," Retief said. "We're not the only ones who're guilty of cultural idiocy. He'd lose face something awful if he let his followers see him like this." Retief settled himself on a tufted ottoman. "Right, Stanley?" The Aga Kaga snarled. Retief selected a grape and ate it thoughtfully. "These aren't bad, Georges. You might consider taking on a few Aga Kagan vine-growers -- purely on a yearly contract basis, of course." The Aga Kaga groaned, rolling his eyes. "Well, I believe we're ready to get down to diplomatic proceedings n o w," Retief said. "Nothing like dealing in an atmosphere of realistic good fellowship. First, of course, there's the matter of the presence of aliens lacking visas." He opened his briefcase, withdrew a heavy sheet of parchment. "I have the document here, drawn up and ready for signature. It provides for the prompt deportation of such persons, by Corps Transport, all expenses to be borne by the Aga Kagan government. That's agreeable, I assume?" Retief looked expectantly at the purple face of the prone potentate. The Aga Kaga grunted a strangled grunt. "Speak up, Stanley," Retief said. "Give him plenty of air, Georges." "Shall I let some in through the side?" "Not yet. I'm sure Stanley wants to be agreeable." The Aga Kaga snarled. "Maybe just a little then, Georges," Retief said judiciously. Georges jabbed the knife in far enough to draw a bead of blood. The Aga Kaga grunted. "Agreed!" he snorted. "By the beard of the prophet, when I get my hands on you..." "Second item : certain fields, fishing grounds, et cetera, have suffered damage due to the presence of the aforementioned illegal immigrants. Full compensation will be made by the Aga Kagan government. Agreed?" T HE Aga Kaga drew a breath, tensed himself ; Georges jabbed with the knife point. His prisoner relaxed with a groan. "Agreed!" he grated. "A vile tactic! You enter my tent under the guise of guests, protected by diplomatic immunity -- " "I had the impression we were herded in here at sword point," said Retief. "Shall we go on? Now there's the little matter of restitution for violation of sovereignty, reparations for mental anguish, payment for damaged fences, roads, drainage canals, communications, et cetera, et cetera. Shall I read them all?" "Wait until the news of this outrage is spread abroad !" "They'd never believe it," Retief said. "History would prove it impossible. And on mature consideration, I'm sure you won't want it noised about that you entertained visiting dignitaries flat on your back." "What about the pollution of the atmosphere by goats?" Georges put in. "And don't overlook the muddying of streams, the destruction of timber for camp fires and -- " "I've covered all that sort of thing under a miscellaneous heading," Retief said. "We can fill it in at leisure when e get back." "Bandits!" the Aga Kaga hissed. "Thieves! Dogs of unreliable imperialists!" "It is disillusioning, I know," Retief said. "Still, of such little surprises is history made. Sign here." He held the parchment out and offered a pen. "A nice clear signature, please. We wouldn't want any quibbling about the legality of the treaty, after conducting the negotiation with such scrupulous regard for the niceties." "Niceties! Never in history has such an abomination been perpetrated !" "Oh, treaties are always worked out this way, when it comes right down to it. We've just accelerated the process a little. Now, if you'll just sign like a good fellow, we'll be on our way. Georges will have his work cut out for him, planning how to use all this reparations money." The Aga Kaga gnashed his teeth; Georges prodded. The Aga Kaga seized the pen and scrawled his name. Retief signed with a flourish. He tucked the treaty away in his briefcase, took out another. "This is just a safe-conduct, to get us out of the door and into the car," he said. "Probably unnecessary, but it won't hurt to have it, in case you figure out some way to avoid your obligations as a host." The Aga Kaga signed the document after another prod from Georges. "One more paper, and I'll be into the jugular," he said. by Keith Laumer #V#E'RE all through now," said Retief. "Stanley, we're going to have to run now. I'm going to strap up your hands and feet a trifle ; it shouldn't take you more than ten minutes or so to get loose, stick a bandaid on your neck and -- " "My men will cut you down for the rascals you are !" "By that time, we'll be over the hill," Retief continued. "At full throttle we'll be at Government House in an hour, and of course I won't waste any time transmitting the treaty to Sector HQ. And the same concern for face that keeps you from yelling for help will insure that the details of the negotiation remain our secret." "Treaty! That scrap of paper!" "I confess the Corps is a little sluggish about taking action at times," Retief said, whipping a turn of silken cord around the Aga Kaga's ankles. "But once it's got signatures on a legal treaty, it's extremely stubborn about all parties adhering to the letter. It can't afford to be otherwise, as I'm sure you'll understand." He cinched up the cord, went to work on the hands. The Aga Kaga glared at him balefully. "To the Pit with the Corps! The ferocity of my revenge -- " "Don't talk nonsense, Stanley. There are several squadrons of Peace Enforcers cruising in the Sector just now. I'm sure you're not ready to make any historical errors by taking them on." Retief finished and stood. "Georges, just stuff a scarf in Stanley's mouth. I think he'd prefer to work quietly until he recovers his dignity." Retief buckled his briefcase, selected a large grape and looked down at the Aga Kaga. "Actually, you'll be glad you saw things our way, Stanley," he said. "You'll get all the credit for the generous settlement. Of course, it will be a striking precedent for any other negotiations that may become necessary if you get grabby on other worlds in this region. And if your advisors want to know why the sudden change of heart, just tell them you've decided to start from scratch on an unoccupied world. Mention the virtues of thrift and hard work. I'm confident you can find plenty of historical examples to support you." "Thanks for the drink," said Georges. "Drop in on me at Government House some time and we'll crack another bottle." "And don't feel bad about your project's going awry," Retief said. "In the words of the prophet, 'Stolen goods are never sold at a loss.' " ii A remarkable about-face,  Retief," Magnan said. "Let this be a lesson to you. A stern Note of Protest can work wonders." "A lot depends on the method of delivery' Retief said. "Nonsense. I knew all along the Aga Kagans were a reasonable and peace-loving people. One of the advantages of senior rank, of course, is the opportunity to see the big picture. Why, I was saying only this morning -- " The desk screen broke into life. The mottled jowls of Under-Secretary Sternwheeler appeared. "Magnan! I've just learned of the Flamme affair. Who's responsible?" "Why, ah... I suppose that I might be said -- " "This is your work, is it?" "Well... Mr. Retief did play the role of messenger." "Don't pass the buck, Magnan!" the Under-Secretary barked. "What the devil went on out there?" "Just a routine Protest Note. Everything is quite in order." "Bah! Your over-zealousness has cost me dear. I was feeding Flamme to the Aga Kagans to consolidate our position of moral superiority for use as a lever in a number of important negotiations. Now they've backed out ! Aga Kaga emerges from the affair wreathed in virtue. You've destroyed a very pretty finesse in power politics, Mr. Magnan! A year's work down the drain!" "But I thought -- " "I doubt that, Mr. Magnan, M I doubt that very much!" The Under-Secretary rang off. "This is a fine turn of events," Magnan groaned. "Retief, you know very well Protest Notes are merely intended for the historical record ! No one ever takes them seriously." "You and the Aga Kaga ought to get together," said Retief. "He's a great one for citing historical parallels. He's not a bad fellow, as a matter of fact. I have an invitation from him to visit Kaga and go mud-pig hunting. He was so impressed by Corps methods that he wants to be sure we're on his side next time. Why don't you come along?" "Hmmm. Perhaps I should cultivate him. A few highlevel contacts never do any harm. On the other hand, I understand he lives in a very loose way, feasting and merrymaking. Frivolous in the extreme. No wife, you understand, but hordes of lightly clad women about. And in that connection, the Aga Kagans have some very curious notions as to what constitutes proper hospitality to a guest." Retief rose, pulled on the powder blue cloak and black velvet gauntlets of a Career Minister. "Don't let it worry you," he said. "You'll have a great time. And as the Aga Kaga would say, 'Ugliness is the best safeguard of virginity.' " by Kaiflt Launttr JP # Short Story The Man Who Flew could not exist -- but he had committed a foul crime! city, gray and dismal. The shining metal thruway partially reflected their somber visage. A few vehicles scurried nervously through the city. Keller turned away from the window dismally. His conscience was bothering him, and it affected his every movement. Looking over his humbly furnished office, he entertained the thought, not for the first time, that he should change jobs if he wanted to eat A buzz sounded -- the intercom system. That would be Sally, his secretary. It was a mystery what she would want. Usually she never bothered him except in case of an emergency, and the last client Keller had had dropped his case three months ago. Apparently it was another customer, unlikely as it seemed. Keller heard voices outside, Sally's irritated and protesting, and a nervous baritone. Abruptly the door opened, disclosing a rugged, bushy-haired C-# (average intelligence and advanced extra-sensory perception, but unexercised), who was in a bad state of nerves. He seemed to have forced his way past Sally into the inner office. Keller flashed a thought at Sally: How does he look? Not so hot, she answered. I didn't bother to scan much -- don't want to lower myself to that depth -- but he seems to be a big paver. He's impatient, though. And he wants everything run his wav. Oh, fine, thought Keller. My first victim in three months, and it has to be the Big Shot type. He made the usual Q-R opening; curtly and efficiently: "Your name?" "Uh -- Harold Radcliffe "Why the hesitation?" But Keller had scanned it already. The man was simply cautious. He continued without letting Radcliffe answer: "Age?" #. "Occupation?" Hesitation : Salesman. "Residence?" After writing this and Radcliffe's telephone number down, he closed his 'grimy black notebook and sat back. "And how, Mr. Radcliffe, why exactly did you come here?" Radcliffe, unsure of himself at first, gathered confidence as he noticed Keller's interest growing. He began: "Well sir, for this job I need one of the best detectives -- " he paused at Keller's grimace -- "and since you're one of the few detectives in the city who can read minds, and the only A-# 'tec in the state -- " He shrugged, and finished, "I figured you'd be the man for me." Keller saw that he was telling the truth, after a quick check into the man's mind. "All right, Mr. Radcliffe. What's your problem?" R adcliffe seemed to not be able to focus his thoughts. His mind, Keller saw, was a loose stream of unconnected thoughts, trying to merge into a whple. Keller could read no message out of them. He suspected a block -- by Charles D. Cunningham, Jr; an unusual thing for a C-#, but not impossible He gave up, sat back and awaited the other's response. Finally it came, jerking Keller out of his chair. "It's murder, Mr. Keller. The murder of my wife." Murder! It was the first suspected murder in thirteen years. Ever since the Ricjards case in '#, peace and tranquility reigned in a calm and placid nation. For thirteen peaceful years there had been no hint of manslaughter other than accidental. It had been conditioned out of humans at the prenatal stage, and unless there was a violent, all-encompassing urge to kill, murder was completely out of the question. It was hard to believe. But it was not a lie; no non-tele could block a lie, and Keller scanned the truth in Radcliffe's brain. "Wait a minute, Radcliffe. Are you sure it's not murder by accident -- unintentional manslaughter, as the police term it? Or it could be suicide. Had you thought of that?" Radcliffe shook his head impatiently. He rose out of his chair, pacing the floor nervously. "It could not possibly be accident. You'll see that when you investigate the case. Suicide? It's possible. Anything is possible, I suppose, but I would lay any kind of odds against it. We had just been to the theater. We returned to our apartment at about five minutes to eleven. "After undressing and showering, I started to turn in. I noticed a light on in her room -- we sleep in separate rooms -- and called to her, to see if anything was wrong. There was no answer. "I figured that she had gone to sleep with the light on, and went into the room to turn it off. That was when I saw her on the floor." He stopped. Keller read grief, fear and love in his memory. "How had she been killed?" "It was a handgun, Mr. Keller. Her face was all blackened and charred. Barely recognizable. But I knew it must be her. Our rooms connect, you see. There are two other doors to each room; one to the outside hall, and one to each bathroom. "When she was shot, my door was locked on the inside -- triple-locked, I remember, because I felt like being left alone that night. It was locked by chain, bar and bolt. It's a fairly ancient apartment house. We like it that way. Her bathroom door was open and there was no one hiding inside. The same went for my bathroom. And both hall doors were locked and bolted. "The windows were locked on the inside, and there is no opening to shoot through that would not leave traces. I checked. "Even if the killer had gotten in some way or other, there was no way he could get out and still leave the doors and windows locked up tight." Keller thought, there is one way, Mr. Radcliffe. But he kept it to himself for the moment. H E looked up and smiled as confidently as he could. "I'll be glad to take your case, Mr. Radcliffe. Of course you want me to spare no expenses," he added hopefully. At Radcliffe's harassed nod, he relaxed. Next came the most dangerous part of the job. It was a part which had eliminated several competent detectives from their jobs -- the Probe phase. This involved plunging into the subject's mind, and sorting out relevant details which could furnish extra clues. Several Probers had got themselves trapped in the subject's mind, unable to get out because of a mental block or insanity. It might, however, be unnecessary. He flashed a thought to the girl in the adjoining room: Sal, should I give him the H-R treatment ? Answer: Emphatically ! He's hiding something. Not intentionally, but it needs to be uncovered. A superficial scanning of the preconscious doesn't get the job done. Keller sighted. The Probe (also called the H-R treatment; because a c e r tainf amount of hypnotism was involved) was trying on not only the subject but also the scanner. He said: "Now, Mr. Radcliffe, I'm going to go into your subconscious mind and get your impressions of last night. I want you to concentrate on...Tt's say... the moment when you saw your wife." He shut off all of his five senses, and took the plunge. The image formed : Shrieking terror. A tinge of ozone in the air. The Creature creeping up from behind. A beheaded teddy bear lying full length on the floor. A hole in the air near the door, colored red. Floating demon -- where? Nonononono! The Creature bending over him. Terror -- door (now violet) disintegrating. The teddy bear shriveling now -- turns into a snake -- He emerged. Before he could take full control of his body, a thought came : Rick? How did you come out ? He flashed her the image. Lousy. I can't get a true impression-picture to save my life. Just a lousy nightmare, fantasy-symbolism deal. But I did get something out of that mess. I'll let you know about it as soon as I verify it. T # Radcliffe, since, the time when Keller  had  stopped talking until rights now,, aq by Charlcfe IX Cuhitf ngbam Jr; Keller opened his eyes and frowned in thought, no time had elapsed. In actuality, the time taken was one and onehalf microseconds. Keller flashed : Sally, tune in on this conversation, please. "Radcliffe," he said slowly, "When did you lose your sight ?" The other man sat up rigidlv, then relaxed. "How did you find out? Did you scan it?" "No. When I was receiving your impressions, I caught an idea of melting walls. Then there were nameless creatures and demons floating around. I examined your senses when I came out, and saw that you were blind. What is it -- sort of a sight perception-tuning sense ?" Radcliffe nodded. "I can sense everything except colors. Everything seems black, white and gray to me." He paused wearily. "Otherwise, there's no difference. No one else knew about it. Not even my wife." Keller nodded. "Now, let's try it again. Concentrate on the moment when you entered here and saw me for the first time." He flashed a thought to Sally. Those Creatures were his fear of the unknown. He's got a lot of fright in there. Probably afraid that the killer would jump out at him from some shadowy corner. I don't quite see how he could visualize different colors, having never seen them before -- but that's probably my interpretation of them. Here goes. The image : Heat. Light. The teddv bear snake again -- coiling -- striking -- missing. Fleeing. Dying. Melting walls. Voices around him -- laughing -- shrieking. Colors of the rainbow. The creature d y i n g -- dead -- dissolving. No more... Voices again. Talking to him. Telling him -- what? His life flashing before him -- stopping. His brain -- undressing ? Hole in the air at -- the hate-revenge... determination...  Sally? Did you catch all that mess? Unfortunately. Something's wrong, Sally, I should be seeing something akin to the actual events through his eyes. Instead all I get is this meaningless stuff -- unless -- oh, God, now I see ! Pause. I wonder who the Man Who Flew is?  You've got me. And how about the dissolving creature? That shows his confir dence in having someone to tell his story to. All his utv known fear is vanishing. And then there's the hole in the air. Yeah, I think TH surface again, and try some straight questions on him. A D C L I F F E," began Keller, "you haven't reported this to the police, have you?" Radcliffe grinned. "Hardly. That would start the biggest scandal in years. I want it kept quiet until we found out who killed her." "Well, we've ruled out accidental murder. You found no hand-gun in the room when you searched it?" "No firearm of any kind." Keller nodded. He let his mind drift back over four years -- To a time when he was in love with Mildred Simmons and had proposed to her... and she had rejected him, saying she loved Harold Radcliffe. He had walked away, a bitter man. She had had many enemies, he mused, and almost as many friends. He did not know of anyone who knew her who was not either violently for or violently against her and all that she stood for. He looked up. "How old was your wife when she died?" "T h i r t y-one. Two years younger than I am." "Do you know of anyone who would want to kill her?" It was a routine question, but to Keller it was very important. "No. I knew many people who disliked her intensely -- I'm not denying that -- but not to the point of murder. Of course, she wasn't around me half the time. I might not know." "Well, Radcliffe, I think that'll be all for today. Mind if I go with you back to your apartment to look it over?" "I don't live there any more. I moved out after I had disposed of her body. I couldn't stand to live there any longer." Radcliffe shook hands and departed. Keller read confidence and positiveness that he, Keller, would come through. Keller was not so sure. He decided to have a look around Radcliffe's apartment. He strolled aimlessly around the apartment for a few moments, pausing here and there to check details which might or might not help him in analyzing the Radcliffes' character: furniture design, carpeting, thermostat setting, toilet articles and so on. Then he got down to a thorough examination of the room. There were no secret panels or trapdoors of any kind. So entrance by a hithertofore unknown passageway was completely out. He checked the air conditioner to see if any rigmarole could be fixed up with it to make it appear that by Charles D. Cunningham, Jr; the victim had been shot with a handgun, but this, too, drew a blank. After a few more minutes' examination, he decided to return. On an impulse, he decided to see where Radcliffe had gone. Attuning his mind to the already-recorded pattern of Radcliffe's brain, he received direction, distance and motion -- acceleration, direction, rate. To his surprise he noted that Radcliffe had turned back and was heading toward Keller's office again. Hastily, Keller returned to the office before him. I N about twenty minutes, Radcliffe barged in as before. "Keller," he said, "I think I'm going to be called out of tovn tonight. So if you want any more information directly from me, you'll have to get it now." Keller flashed: Sally. Watch his conscious thoughts, and also his impressions. I'm going to try some unconscious identification-response. Wish me luck. Or do you want to burrow around in his subconscious with me a little more? I think I will. I'm actually beginning to enjoy it, to tell the truth. Keller said aloud, "I'll go under again. That'll be the last time." Image : Nonono. Fire. Flame. Gun. F earhateterrorlove. Radcliffe, I am the creature. No! Dead. You're not -- I hate you -- gone. Disbelief. Hate. No fear. Forgetfulness. Block. Withdrawal. Radcliffe. Me. I'm the melting walls. Terror? Uncertainty. Indecision. Realization. Contemptpityscorn. Sharp mental block. Withdrawal. Radcliffe. Me. I'm the teddy bear. (This was, he thought, Radcliffe's wife-image.) Indecision. Realization. Withdrawal. Blank. Radcliffe, I'm the hole in the air. But Keller's reply was cut short by a cry of terror in his brain. It was Sally. diately. What? No response. sponse. Then he could hear her cry -- fading in depth -- now dying -- gone. Radcliffe. Mememe. Sally. Memeususwetwowetwo... It had happened. Sally was trapped in his preconscious, absorbed by his dominating mind block. Gone Forever. Determination, savage and enraged. A desperate shot in the dark: Mememememememe... Nononono. Fear. Terror. Hate. Block. Withdrawal, but incomplete... Coming out of his Probe, Keller saw the result of his last implanted thought: Radcliffe, now in a tight fetal ball, lay on the floor. His face was absolutely devoid of expression. His conscious mind was a constant gobble-gobble-gobble. Keller entered the next room, to find Sally sprawled limply across her desk. Mindless, soulless, as if she had never had a mind or soul -- Keller lifted her tenderly onto the floor and chose the no#t merciful way out, disintegrating her body with an atomic gun from the closet. Then, again, the Probe. Radcliffe. Mememe. I'm Sally. Nonono. (Gloating.) Gonegonegone. Radcliffe, where's Sally? Gone. Satisfaction. Triumph. Laughtea, Delirious happiness. Radcliffe, I'm everything. Ml I'm the creature. The snake, the hole in the air, the flames, everything you've hated, feared and dreaded. Withdrawal. Thunderbolt! More and more now. Frantically, Keller defended himself, throwing up block after block, only to have it torn down by the ever-spreading bolts of pure mental energy. Finally he withdrew into his own body in haste, realizing that Radcliffe's conquest would mean his revival. Radcliffe was sitting in the chair, yawning. Probably, Keller thought, he had no knowledge of his fetal state. Good. "Well, Radcliffe, " he said, "I need only one more thing to complete the picture. Now focus again on #:# last night, when you found your wife dead on the floor." Image : Fear. Terror. Anxiety. NoWithdrawal. Complete mental block. With a shock, Keller realized that in seven hours Radcliffe had been turned into an A-# -- just below Keller -- thanks to... Sally. He analyzed the symbols. Impressions: No teddy bear (no real concern for the wife, then). No creature (no more by Charles D. Cunningham Jr;  ' I , , I  unknown fears). No snake or demon or flames, signifying ,evil and terror. Just the hole in the air and the man. who flew.    Strange... he realized that meant one thing -- he had to go down one last final time, -- to end it all... Radcliffe. Me. Radcliffe, who is Sally? ' MemeusususWetwowetwo. Shut ' up! Radcliffe, I know who killed your wife. Terror. Shock. Ordeal. Decision.Determination. Yes. We hear you. Walls  th at couldn't KLlEE'd your Wife? Wife With that Nonono... v-v  H J (a... S'  ' Youyouyou... Radcliffe... Memeusus... Wethreewethreewethree... Jlhistroted by MaMon Btafoa": now jpadv at # each. # at # each. ' these # books due October # at # each. due November # at #i# each. Order now for shipment ers received. More forthcoming titles F.Q.B. , Brooklyn. N Y. #I #th Ave... 'Brooklyn N. , Y r . ;  r I I IF  Feature W E are an inveterate, habitual, addicted radio listener: were you able to absorb all that passes through this wrinkled bearded jelly as it crystallizes these syllables on the paper for you, you might be hard put to it to separate the science, science fiction, science-fantasy and aheer opinion which is intended for you, from the cascade of cacaphonies cavorting coincidentally amongst the selfsame cerebral viscosities. Working without the radio long ago became a total impossibility, and others beside ourselves have assigned various reasons to this. One says we set up a barrier of noise between us and the world, and then mentally tune the noise out, leaving us a species of tomblike (or womblike) privacy. Another says chronic radio-listening is due to anxiety: it indicates that we want to be forewarned when the whole shebang wheebangs. Still another suggests that given a choice between work and distraction, we probably prefer distraction and use the perpetual purr as instant interruption, as convenient as our omni-present coffee automatic pot. We know, of course, which of these analyses are correct: they all are. There is, however, another reason not readily apparent unless you see our personal cave for yourself. For attached to the ubiquitous radio is a tape recorder, also always in the "on" condition. A function switch ties in the radio, a microphone, the television and the intercom to the house; the recorder is therefore a p.a. system and a second speaker, or poor man's stereo. However, to record anything of interest to self, wife, friends, children or local organizations, all that is needed is to reach out and pull the handle. A surprising potpourri gradually gathers on the tape, until at last it is full and needs to be erased. Wiping the tape is always an interesting duty. Among fragments of battle between Jack ley, a couple of long cadenzas from a bass-player named Slam Stewart, a thumping attack on the United Nations by an organization called Lifeline, an extemporaneous bed-time story by our #-year, old about a duck who liked horses so much she ate three before lunch and our brother arguing with Lester del Rey about intelligence tests on an all-night talkfest called The Long John Nebel Show; amongst all these and others, then, are snatches of overseas radio -- Prague, Rome, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Radio Moscow. Radio, you know, (and if you don't, Moscow will often inform you) was invented by a Russian named Popoff. Whether Popoff ever heard of Marconi, Hertz, Armstrong, Edison, Crookes or Sarnoff is not known. That Radio Moscow never heard of them is certain. Anyway, they put put a monstrous signal on seven frequencies or more, and they let you in on wonderful worlds of science, of fiction and of fantasy. Their tone is that of rectitude and certainty. You'd think from listening to a single program that never in life had they contradicted themselves. in May, we ran across one recording we'd like to share with you, because perhaps you'd like to venture an opinion as to whether it's science, science fiction, just plain fiction or fantasy. We wish we could share the voice as well. It is female, well modulated, with an almost indescribable slight accent. Know how certain Englishmen speak without moving the upper lip? .This gal sounds as if she doesn't move her lower lip, and we'd love to see how she does it: "Now we'd like to tell you how Soviet Scientists propose to de-charge the radiation zone around the earth for purposes of space flight. Until recently it was believed that the principal danger to space flight was collision with a meteorite. However, the most recent research has shown that this danger was overestimated. However, another danger has become apparent. That is the radiation zone around the earth containing the high-energy particles known as protons. Authors of science fiction in describing their heroes' flights through interplanetary space often write of their attempts to protect themselves from this danger. As a rule, the methods used are on the principle of creating a powerful protective field around the rocket. This is not the best solution of the problem. A better idea is to do away with the radiation altogether, thereby changing the conditions of space flight. Such a proposal is based on perfectly practical calculations... The radiation zone...is created by the very same protons which are the basis of hydrogen atomic nucleus. They need only to be supplied vith electrons to be converted into electrically neutral atoms. These will not be subject to any pull by the earth's gravitic field and will become rapidly diffused throughout space. Electrons can be supplied by sic the protons in the radiation zone by using what is called an electronic cannon which, as it were, fires them at great speed in the required direction. An electronic cannon with a capacity of only fifty kilowatts could do away with the radiation zone in # hours. The electronic cannon could be placed best on an artificial satellite and supplied with energy from solar batteries, and since the radiation zone apparently is capable of being restored, the cannon would have to be put in action periodically by signals from earth." Now the Popoff (a term of endearment used slangily by Russians, as once we referred to "the Marconi") here performs some fantasy greater even than the fact that it never heard of Van Allen either. For at this writing, the news is full of Russian objections to our high-altitude atomic tests over Johnson Island. And one of the reasons for their objection is -- and we assure you, it's as flatly, as positively stated as any of the above -- that their calculations show that such explosions could damage the belt! What is it in the Communist mentaliiy that makes it behave with such transparent childishness -- the childishness which always wins in its reports of its adventures, which actually believes that its listeners selectively forget the lies and the contradictions, and is so sure that they can really see pictures drawn with all light and no shade? The worst of our comic books tell this sort of story. Some view-with-alarmists point out that Soviet radio, in sheer coverage, outpoints us # or # to #, and that they spend more money jamming our broadcasts than we do in sending them. Maybe on sober second thought we should leave them to it. All we need to do to reduce their propaganda to zero is to list to it. by Theodora Sturgeon IF # Short Story Everybody likes fried eggs for breakfast -- but would a chicken? matic citizen, came to buy c the new refrigerator in the usual fashion. He was looking for a bargain. It was the latest model, fresh from the new production line in Los Angeles, and was marked down considerably below standard. The freezing compartment held # lbs. of meat. "How come so cheap ?" Coxe wanted to know.  "Frankly," the salesman said, "I asked myself that. Usually there's a dent in them or something, when they have that factory tag on them. But I checked it over and I can't find anything wrong with it. However, she goes as is." "At that price," Coxe said, "I'll take it." It arrived, refinished in a copper color to his specifications, the following Tuesday. It was plugged in and operated perfectly. He checked it out by freezing ice cubes. Wednesday evening, when he opened the door to chill some beer, there was a package in the freezing compartment. He took out the package. It was some sort of plastic and appeared to contain fish eggs. Coxe had not seen fresh fish eggs, considered by some a delicacy, for a number of years. He chilled the beer and fried the eggs. Both tasted about right. The following Friday, his girl friend came over to fix dinner for him, and when she looked in the freezing compartment, she said, "What's this?" . "Fish eggs," Coxe said. "How many of them?" "Two packages." "We'll fry them up for breakfast," he said. Saturday morning, there were three packages of eggs in the refrigerator. "Where do they come from?" his girl friend wanted to know. "They just appear. I ate some and they're very good." She was reluctant, but he talked her into preparing a package. She agreed they were very good. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked. "I don't think there's anything to do about it," he said. "I like fish eggs." On Sunday, the package they had eaten Saturday had been replaced. They were coming in at a steady rate of one a day. Coxe cooked a package for breakfast and took the other two to his parents. By Tuesday, he was getting tired of the eggs, and by the end of the week, he had four more packages. He succeeded in giving two packages to the neighbors. At the end of another week, he had eight packages. He explained to his girl friend. She suggested they visit all their friends, leaving a package with each of them. At the end of another two weeks, this method for disposing of the eggs had worn thin. They finally managed to give the last two packages to the landlady. At the end of still another week, there were seven more packages. Otherwise, the refrigerator was a good buy. Coxe calculated that, at the present rate, had he left the packages in the compartment, it would have been filled by the end of the month. He felt  that once that point was reached, the eggs would stop coming. Should this prove to be incorrect, he was prepared to arrange for some method of commercial distribution for the product. On schedule, the eggs stopped coming. He waited two days. No more came. It was over. He ate the last package. T HE refrigerator worked perfectly, and, he began to stock it with things freezers by Kris Melville are conventionally stocked with. It was almost two weeks after the last package had appeared, early one Sunday morning, when the doorbell rang. At the door was a small, nondescript man with a vaguely -- and really indefinably -- unpleasant aspect. His head was bandaged. "Mr. Coxe?" he asked. "That's me." "May I come in?" "Come on." The man seated himself "Something terrible has happened," he said. "A horrible mistake has been made." "I'm sorry to hear that. You look as if you were in an accident." "I was. I've been in the... hospital... for nearly two months. But to come to the point, Mr. Coxe. I've come bout the refrigerator you recently purchased. It was a special refrigerator that was erroneously shipped out of the plant as a second. When I didn't come in, it got shipped out and sold." "Good refrigerator," Coxe said. "Perhaps you've noticed... ah...something unusual about it?" "It runs okay. For a while there were a bunch of packages of fish eggs in it." "Fish eggs!" the little man cried in horrot. After he had recovered sufficiently, he asked, "You dp, of course you do, I'm sure you still have all the...little packages?" "Oh, no," said Coxe. "NO? Oh, my God. What did you do with them, Mr. Coxe?" "Ate them." "You...ate...them? Ate -- ? No. You didn't. Not all of them. You couldn't have done that, Mr. Coxe. Please tell me that you could not have done that." "I had to give a lot of them away, and everybody said they were delicious. And really... Uh, Mr. -- ? Mr., uh..." The little man got unsteadily to his feet. His face was ashen. "This is horrible, horrible." He stumbled to the door. "You are a fiend. All our work...all our plans... and you, you..." He turned to Coxe. "I hate you. Oh, I hate you." "Now, see here." "...Mr. Coxe, you'll never realize the enormity of your crime. You've eaten all of us!" With that, he slammed the door and was gone. Coxe went back to the other room. "Who was it, honey?" "Ah, some nut. Seems he had first claim on the refrigerator." "I'll bet it was about the fish eggs." "Yeah, he wanted them." "Oh, dear. Do you think he can do anything to us?" "I don't think so, not now. It's too late," Coxe concluded. IF # Novelette Got any dragons to kill? Here's the fastest -- and wildest -- way! I N a gleaming chrome and glass federal building located at the center of Venusport, Division Chief Carl Wattles wearily arose from his office couch. He had been taking his usual two-hour, after-lunch nap, but today it had brought him little refreshment. Earlier he had received an unexpected report that made sleep impossible. "John?" he mumbled. John Claxson, the generously padded assistant division earwax but did not remove his feet from the blotter of his desk. "Yeah, Chief?" "I've heard from the Kentons again." "I thought something was deviling you, the way you was carrying on in your sleep." He raised thick eyebrows. "Is their production down again?"  # Worse than that, John. Kenton has had the gall to request time off to build a new house!" "No! I can't believe it." "I can't either, John. They know it's not in the Manual." "Certainly it's not, Chief. The nerve of those people wanting to do something that's not in the Manual !" "People like us wrote the Manual, John," the Chief added with simple modesty. "That is why it is so good, good, good." "I know," said John, accepting the weight. Then he complained bitterly, "Wanting to build a new house ! They are supposed to do personal stuff at night, of when it's raining. The Chief allowed his rage to climb. "They've got nothing to do but go out into the jungle and pick a little old bale of pretzins every day, but do you think they are going to do it? No. They want me to go and do it for them!" "You can't do it, Chief!" protested John.  M Y ou know I can't J ohn," agreed  Wattles  as he stretched. "I got all I can manage right here. More' "What you got to do. Chief ?" John asked curiously, forgetting caution for a moment. "Plenty !" retorted the Chief. "I guess you have at that," John admitted, getting back aboard. "Time was," brooded the Chief, "when that Kenton was a fair pretzin finder. But all he can think of to do now is to find excuses to goldbrick. Wait until he sees the stiff memorandum I'm sending him..." far from their Venusian jungle cabin that morning before the vacuum snake hung one on her. The thick, twofoot-long pest lay very still on the ground, and she only got a glimpse of it before it jumped. Out it whipped to its full, slim, six-foot length and wrapped around her throat. Fangs struck, and in three seconds -- with a loud slurp -- it had withdrawn a quart of her blood. Then it unwrapped just as swiftly as it had come, and leaped into the cover of the jungle. The hefty young matron wobbled back to the cabin. "Pole !" she called as she hurried ip. "I've been slurped!" "Again?" her lanky husband asked, looking up from the reports on his desk. "I'm so sorry f Pole," sha said contritely. "Well, sit down and start recovering, Bliss," he said in a kindly manner. "You can't pick any pretzins today." "But I wanted to pick prefzins, Pole. Darn that vacuum snake and his fast draft." "I just hope the neighborhood dragon doesn't come around while you're in that weakened condition, Bliss," Pole worried as he totaled up the month's production on his reports. He decided, "I had better take time off from pretzin hunting today so I can be handy to help you with your getaway, if need arises." "Oh, the dragon never bothers us," Bliss said uneasily. "He has gotten close enough to burn up several of our pretzin patches, though. He may get to this cabin some day." "He doesn't mean any harm," defended Bliss. "I'm sure he wouldn't want to eat us. They are known to be strictly vegetarians." "No, he won't eat us. He'll cook us, unless we can run away fast enough -- but he'll never eat us." They heard a faraway sound. "What is that crisp crackling that sounds like a dank forest burning?" wondered Bliss. Pole scrambled to the door, "The dragon is coming! He's headed straight for this cabin r J#S "Shall we be going ?" asked Bliss, grabbing her clothes. A few minutes later, at a distance of a thousand yards, Pole and Bliss, loaded with all their portable possessions, watched their cabin burst into flames as a roaring, forty-foot lizard, with fifty-foot flames gouting from his mouth, ambled through their clearing. "There, he's gone," said Pole as the dragon passed on. "I'd better put out the fire." Dipping water from a nearby pond with a bucket, Pole had, after fifty-three fast buckets, a blackened ruin of what had formerly been their rude jungle cabin. Pole moved a new, nearly finished split-pole settee he had been working on back in the jungle to their front porch. As they seated themselves, he complacently surveyed the slits burned between the charred boards of the walls and roof. "The roof will leak a mite when it rains, but it will let in ts of light," he observed optimistically. "There's nothing like lots of light," Bliss agreed. "Charcoal is healthful, too." "It absorbs poison like nobody's business !" "However, since it rains every day on Venus we will have to have a new cabin." He sighed resignedly. "And you know what that means : Lower production, fewer of the magical, antibiotic pretzins. I'd better radio the Division Chief" A S the jet plane flashed across their vision, the Kentons saw a tiny bundle drop from it. Pole ran out into the jungle and was under the parachute when it landed. He came back into the clearing unwrapping a package. "It sure was thoughtful of Mr. Wattles to answer so fast," said Pole, as he opened the little package. "And will you look here in the middle ! He even sent us a present!" "It's a beautiful, plain white, rectangular carton of approximately three by seven inches," she said breathlessly. "But we mustn't be selfish," Pole reminded hastily. "Let's see what Mr. Wattles has to say in his memorandum here first." They both read the green memorandum. To: Napoleon B. Kenton, Special Agent, Pretzin Division, Venus From: Chief, Pretzin Division, Venusport, Venus Subject: Personal Problems of Special Agents In a radio message dated January #, # you related certain personal problems you were experiencing, and you stated that delays might be encountered in your harvesting of pretzins. regret your difficulties. However, it is believed by Frank Banta these misfortunes may be overcome during leisure hours and should be soon resolved without loss of a measurable part of your productive time. Pole interrupted his reading to beam at his wife. "He's sorry for us, Bliss, and he hopes things will be better for us soon." "Isn't he the nicest man?" They read on. In your radio message you refer to difficulties you are having with a snake and a lizard (which you colloquially refer to as a dragon). It is believed that the enclosed package, serial number #G-#, will cope with the matter, and that no further report will be necessary with respect to snakes and lizards. Carl Wattles Chief, Pretzin Division Eagerly Bliss Kenton opened the plain white carton bearing the serial number #G-#. She slid out the two and three-quarter by six and one-half inch fumigation bomb can. Bliss read the label. " 'Lizards and snakes go 'way and stay. Only # F. O. B. U. S. A.' Why, it rhymes!" she said, a wondering smile lighting her face. "Does it say how long the lizards are that go 'way and stay?" Pole asked anxiously, thinking of the neighborhood's forty-foot hellion. "All lizards, it says. And only #. "Good ! But how about snakes that can jump ten feet and wrap around your throat?" "I read that wrong," she amended. "All lizards and snakes. And only #." "I'm glad," said Pole, choking up. "The Division Chief has been thinking of us," said Bliss, wiping away a tear. "He knows we field personnel have our problems." "He knew just what we needed," lauded Bliss. Pole looked up from the canister as he heard a sound. "And here comes the dragon back! Our lizard repellent arrived just in the nick of time !" Down the rain-forest aisle the roaring mammoth rapidly waddled. Its flames -- even longer than its body -- withered into blackened ruin all that stood before it. This time, instead of snatching up their possessions and fleeing to safety, the Kentons stood their ground with their pocket-size fumigation bomb that had been designed for pocketsized lizards. When the dragon was within throwing distance, Pole flipped on the spray jet of the tiny bomb and threw it as straight as he could. Then both of them sped away, leaving all their possessions at the mercy of the advancing, ravening flames... Pole! Isn't our new V-J home just the dandiest that a Venusian pretzin-gathering couple ever had?" "It is dandy," concurred Pole. "Who'd ever have thought we would have a cabin that was only an inch thick, and yet was absolutely water tight?" "The table makes a dandy smokestack too, when it's propped up. Fireproof." "How about the mouth when it's propped open?" challenged Pole. "Who could beat a front porch like that?" "You can't. You just can't!" "Correct." He ruminated, We'd never have been able to cut the hide. Not a tough, inch-thick one like this one." "I'll never get over the way you gutted the dragon. You cut him loose inside, just below the tonsils -- " "And after I lassoed them, I gave a run -- " "And all his guts came stringing out!" "Had him cleaned to the bone within an hour ! i d Pole proudly. "We would never have had it so good if it hadn't been for Mr. Wattles' helpfulness," reminded Bliss. "That fumigation bomb, besides making a horrible stink -- " " -- explodes when it enters a dragon's flaming mouth -- and blows his methane tanks." C i I l;e screen is. a unique new ihagazint; made for those who the.artof .motion picture phantasT v Tow in.'its-fi rM issue  LTorrOrs " containshia n  photo s aVt ic.it s and otlYer-'lite ms never 'before Ixphii.Hhed... If you. enjoy...'something, out ; ,f l.Ut orciinary, s.end your name and add res.-. aloSlU vith . # to Mr. Ahxardor Soma.' Publisher, Horrors Of hoSore'ef t r, ij r r hion Ave. Brooklyn en h  v by Frank Banta IF Feature t i Dear Editor: ' ' and practices the art of huntI would like to congratulate ing to the ultimate degree. He you on an excellent issue -- cover to tover. And 'speaking of covers, this is the nicest one I've seen yet this year from anyone. More of this sort, please, please? Enjoyed the editorial no end. All interesting ideas. I will say however that it will remain ever incomprehensible to me that anyone ( especially Schweitzer) should think that the mass of people were thinkers and for some reason had given it up. Fat chance. Pat McLean P.O. Box #I Anacortes, Wash.    Dear Editor: I would greatly appreciate your help in running down the title, author and publisher of the story I have outlined below. (I might add that this story is being considered as a feature fijm and the author would benefit greatly if the film yrene.)  X A mari lives on an island. hunts live men. He gets his prey, as I remember, by causing shipwrecks on the island. An elaborate hunt is arranged with the victim given various aids, such as a knife, map, etc. As I remember, the hunter uses bow and arrow; and I believe too that dogs are used in tracking the victim. # Babcock Avenue Hollywood, Calif.  Any long-memoried readers care to help out on this one? -- Editor.    Dear Editor: In your magazine you have been running a series of Keith Laumer's "Retief" novelettes. Can you tell me which issues contained them? Tames P. Jackson R. D, #I Danville, Penna.  Every issue from September #I to date had a Retief novelette. More upcoming, though not in every future issue (next Keith Laumer story will probably be a non-Retief novelette, The Long Remembered Thunder.) -- Editor .    Dear Editor: I have just finished reading Jots and Tittles. That Sturgeon guy sure has an imagination ! Maybe, maybe, maybe... but don't get me wrong. He's one of my favorite writers, and he is feature editor of my favorite science fiction magazine. To prove what I said about If being my favorite magazine, I am sending a check for a subscription with this letter. Kent McDaniel # Metropolis St. Metropolis, #.    Dear (?) Editor: How come the Groaci illustrations for the Retief stories in the July  March issues are completely different in appearance? Jack Baldwin # N. Alisos St. Santa Barbara, Calif.  Because we goofed and gave the stories to different artists. We'll watch that. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: Leaving aside Unbreakable Custom, why is it universal in sf magazines to put the title and author of the story running at the bottom of the page, instead of at the top where it would be easier to read? #. What is the significance of the "K" on the cover near the price? David B. Jodrey, Jr. New York, N.Y.  (#) Well, it seems to us to look better that way. Anybody else have a strong feeling? (#) "K" stands for our distributor, Kable News Company. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: Why did you take away the book review column, and why can't we have it back? I think it is something that most SF fans appreciate. Why not have the fans write in their opinions on the subject?" Paul Brague Box # Eldred, N.Y.    Sorry to be So brief this time -- no room! We'll try to do better next issue... in many ways...you'll see some changes in If that we think you'll welcome in near-future issues... By the way, our "first" story for the month is Charles Cunningham's The Man Who Flew . Next issue we introduce another new writer, Gary Wright, with a novelette we like very much indeed. -- The Editor.  j won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh No. GX-# by Lynd Ward tjmir #famr rrr The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer  Order from #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. For Editors on the Way Up... by Reddick  Crowell Points the way toward successful editing -- and higher rewards. A practical guide to effective editing, this book deepens your understanding -- gives you a surer grasp of purposes and objectives -- analyzes the methods, patterns and procedures followed by editors of outstanding industrial publications. Shows you new ways to achieve charm and human interest in your writing -- how to budget -- short cuts -- mistakes to avoid -- how to get more for your money -- how to increase -- and demonstrate -- your value to management. 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(So and so has been happening. Such and such has happened. Therefore this and that will happen in # days.) They wouldn't predict for three months. But boy, they go high and far out! A surprising number used the safe "I predict that things will happen as usual" kind of prognostication, and used it amusingly, like L. J. Fremstad of El Paso, who said, "The Democrats will start a piece of legislation, the Republicans will call it Socialism, the Democrats will call it Liberalism, the American public will put up with it." Rosalyn Woldin, of Brooklyn, N. Y v . came up with a terrifying clutch of disasters, not one of which would fall within the #day limit, but which included a generation of muscle-bound youth due to the success of the Kennedy physical-fitness program and the failure ofother kinds of education; a deterioration in public confidence in doctors because of Medicare arguments and the Canadian strike, plus a rise in quackery; religious protests against space exploration to the point of dangerous fanaticism; monetary inflation to the point of economic ruin, and union recognition of purchasing power as a more important consideration than nore dollars; a worsening of interracial strife, then its ultimate solution by boycott; and finally, scandalous behavior by movie people will abate, then continue as before. One respondent made a prediction which I shall not repeat, though I shall acknowledge it if and when it turns out to be true. It has to do with a course of action to be taken by a public figure. If we modestly assume that this personage probably never would see the copy of If with the prediction and, further, would probably do nothing of the kind, the possibility still remains that if the prediction is right, the prediction itself might have been a motivating factor. I wouldn't want that on your conscience or mine. Space prohibits a listing of all contributors. Our warm thanks to all participants Mavbe we'll try this again some time, when I am better able to phrase the limitations of the problem. A prize one-year subscription to IF goes to Mrs. Angelo Castagna of Thompson ville, Conn., she of the "man-powered space ship", with our thanks and our blessings. be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. 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( I i I Name t i J Address I IF  Novelette OF Illustrated by Schelling Out In the great gas cloud of the Orion Nebula McCray found an ally -- and a fool H is name was Herrell McCray and he was scared. As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison cell. Perhaps it was a prison cell. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections -- not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that, the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. It was only a personal quaintness; he had done it a thousand times. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel and Saiph... it happened. The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes and a number of inconvenient sizes. McCray tripped over something that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered hollowly. He picked himself up, braced against somtthing that smelled dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched it. McCray had no idea where he was, and no way to find out. Not only was he in darkness, but in utter silence as well. No. Not quite utter silence. Somewhere, just at the threshold of his senses, there was something like a voice. He could not quite hear it, but it was there. He sat as still as he could, listening; it remained elusive. Probably it was only an illusion. But the room itself was hard fact. McCray swore violently and out loud. It was crazy and impossible. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in exasperation: "If I could only seer He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like baker's dough, not at all resilient. A flickering halo of pinkish light appeared. He sat up, startled. He was looking at something that resembled a suit of medieval armor. I t. was, he saw in a moment, not armor but a spacesuit. But what was the light? And what were these other things in the room? Wherever he looked, the light danced along with his eyes It was like having tunnel vision or wearing blinders. He could see what he was looking at, but he could see nothing else. And the things he could see made no sense. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble -- maybe a subspace meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank , an explosion. himself knocked out, brought here in asuit... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and FaU of the Roman Empire? A space-ax? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the chemistry set -- or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing suit? It was slightly reassuring, McCray thought, to find that most of the objects were more or less familiar. Even the child's chair -- why, he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old enough to go to school. But what were they doing here? Not everything he saw was familiar. The walls of the room itself were strange. They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or processed cellulose. It was hard to tell colors in the pinkish light. But they seemed to have none. They were "neutral" -- the color of aged driftwood or unbleached cloth. Three of the walls were that way, and the floor and ceiling. The fourth wall was something else. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. They might be ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse than what he already had. McCray was beginning to feel more confident. It was astonishing how a little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his courage flowed back when he could see again. He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago -- subjectively it seemed to be minutes -- he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. Item, apart from being shaken up and -- he admitted it -- scared damn near witless, he did not seem to be hurt. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship? He allowed that thought to seep into his mind. Suppose there had been an accident to the Jodrell Bank . He could, of course, be dead. All this could be the fantasies of a cooling brain. McCray grinned into the pink-lit darkness. The thought had somehow refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head he remembered what a spacesuit was good for. It held a radio. He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. "This is Herrell McCray," he said, "calling the Jodrell Bank" No response. He frowned. "This is Herrell McCray, calling Jodrell Bank . "Herrell McCray, calling anybody, come in, please." But there was no answer. Thoughtfully he replaced the microphone. This was ultrawave radio, faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of lightyears. If there was no answer, he was a good long way from anywhere. Ot course, the thing might not be operating.  He reached for the microphone again -- He cried aloud. The pinkish lights went out. He was in the dark again, worse dark than before. For before the light had gone, McCray had seen what had escaped his eyes before. The suit and the microphone were clear enough in the pinkish glimmer; but the hand -- his own hand, cupped to hold the microphone -- he had not seen at all. Nor his arm. Nor, in one fleeting moment of study, his chest. McCray could not see any part of his own body at all. II omeone else could. Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic -- and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food. Suppose you call him "Hatcher" (and suppose you call it a "him.") Hatcher was not exactly male, be cause his race had no true males; but it did have females and he was. certainly not that. Hatcher did not in any way look like a human being, but they had features in common. If Hatcher and McCray had somehow managed to strike up an acquaintance, they might have got along very well. Hatcher, like McCray. was an adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences of his culture. Both enjoyed games -- McCray baseball, pokeT and three-dimensional chess; Hatcher a number of sports which defy human description. Both held positions of some importance -- considering their ages -- in the affairs of their respective worlds. Physically they were nothing alike. Hatcher was a threefoot, hardshelled sphere of jelly. He had "arms" and "legs," but they were not organically attached to "himself." They were snakelike things which obeyed the orders of his brain as well as your mind can make your toes curl; but they did not touch him directly. Indeed, they worked as well a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." At greater distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the Law of Inverse Squares. Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little excited. His members, disposed about the room where he had sent them on various errands, quivered and shook a little; yet they were the calmest limbs in the room; the members of the other team workers were in a state of violent commotion. The probe team had had a shock. "Paranormal powers," muttered Hatcher's second in command, and the others mumbled agreement. Hatcher ordered silence, studying the specimen from Earth. After a long moment he turned his senses from the Earthman. "Incredible -- but it's true enough," he said. "I'd better report. Watch him," he added, but that was surely unnecessary. Their job was to watch McCray, and they would do their job; and even more, not one of them could have looked away to save his life from the spectacle of a creature as odd and, from their point of view, hideously alien as Herrell McCray. H atcher hurried through the halls of the great buried structure in which he worked, toward the place where the supervising council of all probes would be in permanent session. They admitted him at once. Hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report: "The subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to inspect his enclosure. His method of doing so was to put his own members in physical contact with the various objects in the enclosure. After observing him do this for a time we concluded he might be unable to see and so we illuminated his field of vision for him. "This appeared to work well for a time. He seemed relatively undisturbed. However, he then reverted to physical-contact, manipulating certain appurtenances of an artificial skin we had provided for him. "He then began to vibrate the atmosphere by means of resonating organs in his breathing passage. "Simultaneously, the object he was holding, attached to the artificial skin, was discovered to be generating paranormal forces." The supervising council rocked with excitement. "You're sure?" demanded one of the councilmen. "Yes, sir. The staff is preparing a technical description of the forces now, but I can say that they are electromagnetic vibrations modulating a carrier wave of very high speed, and in turn modulated by the vibrations of the atmosphere caused by the subject's own breathing." "Fantastic," breathed the councillor, in a tone of dawning hope. "How about communicating with him, Hatcher? Any progress?" "Well... not much, sir. He suddenly panicked We don't know why; but we thought we'd better pull back and let him recover for a while." The council conferred among itself for a moment, Hatcher waiting. It was not really a waste of time for him; with the organs he had left in the probe-team room, he was in fairly close touch with what was going on -- knew that McCray was once again fumbling among the objects in the dark, knew that the team-members had tried illuminating the room for him briefly and again produced the rising panic. Still, Hatcher fretted. He wanted to get back. "Stop fidgeting," commanded the council leader abruptly. "Hatcher, you are to establish communication at once." "But, sir... " Hatcher swung closer, his thick skin quivering slightly; he would have gestured if he had brought members with him to gesture with. "We've done everything we dare. We've made the place homey for him -- " actually, what he said was more like, we've warmed the biophysical nuances of his enclosure -- "and tried to guess his needs; and we're frightening him half to death. We can't go faster. This creature is in no way similar to us, you know. He relies on paranormal forces -- heat, light, kinetic energy -- for his life. His chemistry is not ours, his processes of thought are not ours, his entire organism is closer to the inanimate rocks of a seabottom than to ourselves." "Understood, Hatcher. In your first report you stated these creatures were intelligent." "Yes, sir. But not in our way." "But in a way, and you must learn that way. I know." One lobster-claw shaped member drifted close to the councillor's body and raised itself in an admonitory gesture. "You want time. But we don't have time, Hatcher. Yours is not the only probe team working. The Central Masses team has just turned in a most alarming report." "Have they secured a subject?" Hatcher demanded jealously. The councillor paused. "Worse than that, Hatcher. I am afraid their subjects have secured one of them. One of them is missing." There was a moment's silence. Frozen, Hatcher could only wait. The council room was' like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members drifting about him. Finally the councillor said, "I speak for all of us, I think. If the Old Ones have seized one of our probers our time margin is considerably narrowed. Indeed, we may not have any time at all. You must do everything you can to establish communication with your subject." "But the danger to the specimen -- " Hatcher protested automatically. " -- is no greater," said the councillor, "than the danger to every one of us if we do not find allies now." H atcher returned to his laboratory gloomily. It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a reputation for demanding results at any cost -- even at the cost of destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible. Hatcher did not like the idea of endangering the Earthman. It cannot be said that he was emotionally involved; it was not pity or sympathy that caused him to regret the dangers in moving too fast toward communication. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting physical differences between the Earthman and his own people. But Hatcher did not want him destroyed. It had been difficult enough getting him here. Hatcher checked through the members that he had left with the rest of his team and discovered that here were no immediate emergencies, so he took time to eat. In Hatcher's race this was accomplished in ways not entirely pleasant to Earthmen. A slit in the lower hemisphere of his body opened, like a purse, emitting a thin, pussy, fetid fluid which Hatcher caught and poured into a disposal trough at the side of the eating room. He then stuffed the slit with pulpy vegetation the texture of kelp; it closed, and his body was supplied with nourishment for another day. He returned quickly to the room. His second in command was busy, but one of the other team workers reported -- nothing new -- and asked Hatcher's appearance before the council. Hatcher passed the question off. He considered telling his staff about the disappearance of the Central Masses team member, but decided against it. He had not been told it was secret. On the other hand, he had not been told it was not. Something of this importance was not lightly to be gossiped about. For endless generations the threat of the Old Ones had hung over his race, those queer, almost mythical beings from the Central Masses of the galaxy. One brush with them, in ages past, had almost destroyed Hatcher's people. Only by running and hiding, bearing one of their planets with them and abandoning it -- with its population -- as a decoy, had they arrived at all. Now they had detected mapping parties of the Old Ones dangerously near the spiral arm of the galaxy in which their planet was located, they had begun the Probe Teams to find some way of combatingihem, or of fleeing again. But it seemed that the Probe Teams themselves might be betraying their existence to their enemies -- "Hatcher!" The call was urgent; he hurried to see what it was about. It was his second in command, very excited. "What is it?" Hatcher demanded. "Wait..." Hatcher was patient; he knew his assistant well. Obviously something was about to happen. He took the moment to call his members back to him for feeding; they dodged back to their niches on his skin, fitted themselves into their vestigial slots, poured back their wastes ii)to his own circulation and ingested what they needed from the meal he had just taken... "Now!" cried the assistant. "Look!" At what passed among Hatcher's people for a viewing console an image was forming. Actually it was the assistant himself who formed it, not a cathode trace or projected shadow; but it showed what it was meant to show. Hatcher was startled. "Another one! And -- is it a different species? Or merely a different sex?" "Study the probe for yourself," the assistant invited. Hatcher studied him frostily; his patience was not, after all, endless. "No matter," he said at last. "Bring the other one in." And then, in a completely different mood, "We may need him badly. our first one now." Hatcher rose and shook himself, his mindless members floating away like puppies dislodged from suck. "Council's orders," he said. "We've got to go into Stage Two of the project at once." Ill B efore Stage Two began, or before Herrell McCray realized it had begun, he had an inspiration. The dark was absolute, but he remembered where the spacesuit had been and groped his way to it and, yes, it had what all spacesuits had to have. It had a light. He found the toggle that turned it on and pressed it... Light. White, flaring, Earthly light, that showed everything -- even himself. "God bless," he said, almost beside himself with joy. Whatever that pinkish, dancing halo had been, it had thrown him into a panic; now that he could see his own hand again, he could blame the weird effects on some strange property of the light. At the moment he heard the click that Vas the beginning of Stage Two. He switched otf the light and stood for a moment, listening. For a second he thought he heard the far-off Voice, quiet, calm and almost hopeless, that he had sensed hours before; but then that was gone. Something else was gone. Some famt mechanical sound that had hardly registered at the time, but was not missing. And there was, perhaps, a nice new sound that had not been there before; A very faint, an almost inaudible elfin hiss. McCray switched the light on and looked around. There seemed to be no change. And yet, surely, it was warmer in here. He could see no difference; but perhaps, he thought, he could smell one. The unpleasant halogen odor from the grating was surely stronger now. He stood there, perplexed. A tinny little voice from the helmet of the space suit said sharply, amazement in its tone, "McCray, is that you? Where the devil are you calling from?" He forgot smell, sound and temperature and leaped for the suit. "This is Herrell McCray," he cried. "I'm in a room of some sort, apparently on a planet of approximate Earth mass. I don't know -- " "McCray!" cried the tiny voice in his ear. "Where are you? This is Jodrell Bank calling. Answer, please!" "I am answering, damn it," he roared. "What took you so long?" "Herrell McCray," droned the tiny voice in his ear, "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank responding to your message, acknowledge please. Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray..." It kept on, and on. McCray took a deep breath and thought. Something was wrong. Either they didn't hear him, which meant the radio wasn't transmitting, or -- no That was not it; they had heard him. because they were responding. But it seemed to take them so long... Abruptly his face went white. Took them so long! He cast back in his mind, questing for a fact, unable to face its implications. When was it he called them? Two hours ago? Three? Did that mean -- did it possibly mean -- that there was a lag of an hour or two each way? Did it, for example, mean that at the speed of faster than light, it took hours to get a message to the ship and back? And if so... where in the name of heaven was he? H errell McCray was a navigator, which is to say, a man who has learned to trust the evidence of mathematics and instrument readings beyond the guesses of his "common sense." When Jodrell Bank, hurtling faster than light in its voyage between stars, made its regular position check, common sense was a liar. Light bore false witness. The line of sight was trustworthy directly forward and directly after -- sometimes not even then -- and it took computers, sensing their data through instruments, to comprehend a star bearing and convert three fixes into a position. If the evidence of his radio contradicted common sense, common Sense was wrong. Perhaps it was impossible to believe what the radio's message implied; but it was not necessary to "believe," only to act. McCray thumbed down the transmitter button and gave a concise report of his situation and his guesses. "I don't know how I got here. I don't know how long I've been gone, since I was unconscious for a time. However, if the transmission lag is a reliable indication -- " he swallowed and went on -- "I'd estimate I am something more than five hundred light-years away from you at this moment. That's all I have to say, except for one more word: Help." He grinned sourly and released the button. The message was on its way, and it would be hours before he could have a reply. Therefore he had to consider what to do next. He mopped his brow. With the droning, repetitious call from the ship finally quiet, the room was quiet again. And warm... Very warm, he thought tardily; and more than that. The halogen stench was strong in his nostrils again. Hurriedly McCray scrambled into the suit. By the time he was sealed down he was coughing from the bottom of his lungs, deep, tearing rasps that  pained him, uncontrollable. Chlorine or fluorine, one of them was in the air he had been breathing. He could not guess where it had come from; but it was ripping his lungs out. He flushed the interior of the suit out with a reckless disregard for the wastage of his air reserve, holding his breath as much as he could, daring only shallow gasps that made him retch and gag. After a long time he could breath, though his eyes He could see the fumes in the room now. The heat was building up. Automatically -- now that he had put it on and so started its serVocircuits operating -- the suit was cooling him. This was a deep-space suit, regulation garb when going outship. It was good up to at least five hundred degrees in thin air, perhaps three or four hundred in dense. In thin air or in space it was the elastic joints and couplings that depolymerized when the heat grew too great; in dense air, with conduction pouring energy in faster than the cooling coils could suck it out and hurl it away, it was the refrigerating equipment that broke down. McCray had no way of knowing just how hot it was going to get. Nor, for that matter, had the suit been designed to operate in a corrosive medium. All in all it Was time for him to do something. A mong the debris on the floor, he remembered, was a five-foot space-ax, tungsten-steel blade and springy aluminum shaft. McCray caught it up and headed for the door. It felt good in his gauntlets, a rewarding weight; any weapon straightens the back of the man who holds it, and McCray was grateful for this one. With something concrete to do he could postpone questioning. Never 'mind why be had been brought here; never mind how. Never mind what he would, or could, do next; all those questions could recede into the background of his mind while he swung the ax and battered his way out of this poisoned oven. Crash-clangl The double jolt ran up the shaft of the ax, through his gauntlets and into his arm; but he was making progress, he could see the plastic -- or whatever it was -- of the door. It was chipping out. Not easily, very reluctantly; but flaking out in chips that left a white powdery residue. At this rate, he thought grimly, he would be an hour getting through it. Did he have an hour? But it did not take an hour. One blow was luckier than the rest; it must have snapped the lock mechanism. The door shook and slid ajar. McCray got the thin of the blade into the crack and pried it wide. He was in another room, maybe a hall, large and bare. McCray put the broad of his back against the broken door and pressed it as nearly closed as he could; it might not keep the gas and heat out, but it would retard them. The room was again unlighted -- at least to McCray's eyes...There was not even that pink pseudo-light that had baffled him; here was nothing but the beam of his suit lamp. What it showed was cryptic. There were evidences of use: shelves, boxy contraptions that might have been cupboards, crude level surfaces attached to the walls that might have been workbenches. Yet they were queerly contrived, for it was not possible to guess from them much about the creatures who used them. Some were near the floor, some at waist height, some even suspended from the ceiling itself. A man would need a ladder to work at these benches and McCray, staring, thought briefly of many-armed blind giants or shapeless huge intelligent amoebae, and felt the skin prickle at the back of his neck. He tapped half-heartedly at one of the closed cupboards, and was not surprised when it proved as refractory as the door. Undoubtedly he could batter it open, but it was not likely that much would be left of its contents when he was through; and there was the question of time. But his attention was diverted by a gleam from one of the benches. Metallic parts lay heaped in a pile. He poked at them with a stiff-fingered gauntlet; they were oddly familiar. They were, he thought, very much like the parts of a bullet-gun. In fact, they were. He could recognized barrel, chamber, trigger, even a couple of cartridges, neatly opened and the grains of powder stacked beside them. It was an older, clumsier model than the kind he had seen in survival locker, on the Jodrell Bank -- and abruptly wished he were carrying now -- but it was a pistol. Another trophy, like the strange assortment in the other room? He could not guess. But the others had been more familiar; they all have come from his own ship. He was prepared to swear that nothing like this antique had been aboard. The drone began again in his ear, as it had at five-minute intervals all along: "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank calling Herrell McCray..." And louder, blaring, then fading cuits toned the signal down, another voice. A woman's voice, crying out in panic and fear: " Jodrell Bank l Where are you? Help!" IV H atcher's second in command said: "He has got through the first survival test. In fact, he broke his way out! What next?" "Wait!" Hatcher ordered sharply. He was watching the new specimen and a troublesome thought had occurred to him. The new one was female and seemed to be in pain; but it was not the pain that disturbed Hatcher, it was something far more immediate to his interests. "I think," he said slowly, "that they are in contact." His assistant vibrated startlemenC "I know," Hatcher said, "but watch. Do you see? He is going straight toward her." Hatcher, who was not human, did not possess truly human emotions; but he did feel amazement when he was amazed, and fear when there was cause to be afraid. These specimens, obtained with so much difficulty, needed so badly, were his responsibility. He knew the issues involved much better than any of his helpers. They could only be surprised at the queer antics of the aliens with attached limbs and strange powers. Hatcher knew that this was not a freak show, but a matter of life and death. He said, musing: "This new one, I cannot communicate with her, but I get -- almost -- a whisper, now and then. The first one, the male, nothing. But this female is perhaps not quite mute." "Then shall we abandon him and work with her, forgetting the first one?" Hatcher hesitated. "No," he said at last. "The male is responding well. Remember that when last this experment was done every subject died; he is alive at least. But I am wondering. We can't quite communicate with the female -- " "But?" "But I'm not sure that others can't." T he woman's voice was at such close range that McCray's suit located her direction easily enough, shielding the tiny built-in antenna with the tungsten-steel blade of the ax, while she begged him to hurry. Her voice was heavily accented, with some words in a language he did not recognize. She seemed to be in shock. McCray was hardly surprised at that; he had been close enough to shock himself. He tried to reassure her as he searched for a way out of the hall, but in the middle of a word her voice stopped. He hesitated, hefting the ax, glancing back at the way he had come. There had to be a way out, even if it meant chopping through a wall. When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same, and it was open. McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous care. Had he not looked at this very spot a matter of moments before? He had. And had there been an open door then? There had n#t. There hadn't been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening that stood there now. Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another hall -- or tunnel -- rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind it -- Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard. It was a woman, all right The voice had been so strained that he hadn't been positive Even now, short black hair might not have proved it. and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman's, even though she wore a bulky, auilted suit of coveralls. He knelt beside her and gently turned her face. She was unconscious. Broad, dark face, with no make-up; she was ap-parently in her late thirties. She appeared to be Chinese. She breathed, a little raggedly but without visible discomfort; her face was relaxed as though she were sleeping. She did not rouse as he moved her. He realized she was breathing the air of the room they were in. His instant first thought was that she was in danger of asphyxiation; he started to leap up to get, and put her into, the small, flimsy space suit he saw slumped in a corner. At second thought he realized that she would not be breathing so comfortably if the air were full of the poisonous reek that had driven him out of the first room. There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn from that; perhaps he could economize on his own air reserve. Tentatively he cracked the seal of his faceplate and took a cautious breath. The faint reek of halogens was still there, but it was not enough even to make his eyes water, and the temperature of the air was merely pleasantly warm. He shook her. but she did not wake. He stood up and regarded her thoughtfully. It was a disappointment. Her voice had given him hope of a companion, someone to talk things over with, to compare notes -- someone "who. if not possessing any more answers than himself, could at least serve as a soundingboard in the give-and-take of discussion that might make some sort of sense out of the queerness that permeated this place. What he had instead was another burden to carry, for she was unable to care for herself and surely he could not leave her in this condition. H e slipped off the helmet absently and pressed the buttons that turned off the suit's cooling units, looking around the chamber. It was bare except for a litter of irrelevant human articles -- much like the one in which he himself had first appeared, except that the articles were not Jodrell Bank's. A woven cane screen, some cooking utensils, a machine like a desk calculator, some books -- he picked up one of the books and glanced at it. It was printed on coarse paper, and the text was in ideographs, Chinese, perhaps; he did not know Oriental languages. McCray knew that the Jodrell this volume of space. The Betel-shipping lanes went: Almost daily departures from some point on Earth to one of the colonies, with equal traffic in the other direction. Of course, if the time-lag in communication did not lie, he was no longer anywhere within that part of the sky; Betelgeuse was only a few hundred light-years from Sol, and subspace radio covered that distance in something ' ke fifty minutes. But suppose the woman came from another ship; perhaps a Singapore or Tokyo vessel, on the same run. She might easily have been trapped as he was trapped. And if she were awake, he could find out from her what had happened, and thus learn something that might be of use. Although it was hard to see what might be of use in these most unprecedented and unpleasant circumstances. The drone from Jodrell Bank began again: "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank responding -- " He turned the volume down but did not dare turn it off. He had lost track of time and couldn't guess when they would respond to. his last message. He needed to hear that response when it came. Meanwhile, what about his fellow-captive? Her suit was only a flimsy workabout model, a airtight as his but without the bracing required for building jet propulsors into it. It contained air reserves enough, and limited water; but neither food nor emergency medical supplies. McCray had both of these, of course. It was merely one more reason why he could not abandon her and go on... if, that is, he could find some reason for going in one direction preferably to another, and if a wall would conveniently open again to let him go there. He could give her an injection of a stimulant, he mused. Would that improve the situation? Not basically, he decided, with , some regret. Sleep was a need, not a luxury; it would not help her to be awakened chemically, when body was demonstrating its need for rest by refusing to wake to a call. Anyway, if she were not seriously injured she would undoubtedly wake of her own accord before long. He checked pulse and eye-pupils; everything normal, no evidence of bleeding or somatic shock. So much for that. At least he had made one simple decision on his own, he thought with grim humor. To that extent he had reestablished his mastery of his own fate, and it made him feel a touch better. Perhaps he could make some more. What about trying to find a way out of this place, for instance? I t was highly probable that they would not be able to stay here indefinitely, that was the first fact to take into account. Either his imagination was jumpy, or the reek of halogens was a bit stronger. In any case there was no guarantee that this place would remain habitable any longer than the last, and he had to reckon with the knowledge that a spacesuit's air reserve was not infinite. These warrens might prove a death trap. McCray paused, leaning on the haft of his ax, wondering how much of that was reason and how much panic. He knew that he wanted, more than anything to get out of this place, to see sky and stars, to be where no skulking creatures behind false panels in the walls, or peering through televiewers concealed in the furnishings, could trick and trap him. But did he have any reason to believe that he would be better off somewhere else? Might it not be even that this place was a sort of vivarium maintained for his survival -- that the leak of poison gases and heat in the first room was not a deliberate thrust at his safety, but a failure of the shielding that alone could keep him alive? He didn't know, and in the nature of things could not. But paradoxically the thought that escape might increase his danger made him all the more anxious to escape. He wanted to know. If death was waiting for him outside his chamber, McCray wanted to face it -- now -- while he was still in good physical shape. While he was still sane. For there was a limit to how many phenomena he could store away in the back of his mind; sooner or later theepntradictions, the puzzles, the fears would have to be faced. Yet what could he do with the woman? Conceivably he could carry her; but could he also carry her suit? He did not dare take her without it. It would be no kindness to plunge her into another atmosphere of poison, and watch her die because he had taken her from her only hope of safety. Yet the suit weighed at least fifty pounds. His own was slightly more; the girl, say, a hundred and thirty. It added up to more mass than he could handle, at least for more than a few dozen yards. The speaker in his helmet said suddenly: "Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank. Your transmission received. We are vectoring and ranging your signal. Stand by. We will call again in ten minutes." And, in different tone: "God help you,' Mac. What the devil happened to you?" It was a good question. McCray swore uselessly because he didn't know the answer. He took wry pleasure in imagining what was going on aboard Jodrell Bank at that moment. At least not all the bewilderment was his own. They would be utterly baffled. As far as they were concerned, their navigator had been on the bridge at one moment and the next moment gone, tracelessly. That in itself was a major puzzle; the only way off an tion called "suicide." That would have been their assumption, all right, as soon as they realized he was gone mm mm I Wvj' A F# WA'vJk" Pfira and checked the ship to make sure he was not for some reason wandering about in a cargo hold or unconscious in a closet after some hardto-imagine attack from another crewman. They would have thought that somehow, crazily, he had got into a suit -- there was the suit -- and jumped out of a lock. But there would have been no question of going back to look for him. True, they could have tracked his subspace radio if he had used it. But what would have been the good of that? The first question, an all but unanswerable one, would be how long ago he had jumped. Even if they knew that, Jodrell Bank , making more than five hundred times lightspeed, could not be stopped in fewer than a dozen light-years. They could hardly hope to return to even approximately the location in space where he might have jumped; and there was no hope of reaching a position, stopping, casting about, starting again -- the accelerations were too enormous, a man too tiny a dustmote. And, of course, he would have been dead in the first place, anyway. normal space was instantly fatal except within the protecting shield of a ship's engines. So they would have given him up and, hours later -- or days, for he had lost track of time -- they would have received his message. What would they make of that? He didn't know. After all, he hardly knew what he made of it himself. The woman still slept. The way back was still open. He could tell by sniffing the air that the poisons in the atmosphere were still gaining. Ahead there was nothing but blank walls, and the clutter of useless equipment littering the floor. Stolidly McCray closed his mind and waited. The signal came at last. "Mac, we have verified your position." The voice was that of Captain don't know how you got there, but unless the readings lie you're the hell of a long way off. The bearing is identical with Messier object M-# and the distance -- " raggedly -- " is compatible. About a thousand light years from us, Mac. One way or another, you've been kidnaped. I -- I -- " The voice hesitated, unable to say what it could not accept as fact but could not deny. "I think," it managed at last, "that we've finally come across those super-beings in space that we've wondered about." H atcher's detached limbs were quivering with excitement -- and with more than excitement, because he was afraid. He was trying t# conceal from the others just how afraid he was. His second in command reported: "We have the second subject out of consciousness. How long do you want us to keep her that way?" "Until I tell you otherwise! How about the prime subject?" "We can't tell, Hatcher. But you were right. He is in communication with others, it seems, and by paranormal means." Hatcher noted the dismay in what his assistant said. He understood the dismay well enough. It was one thing to work on a project involving paranormal forces as an exercise in theory. It was something else entirely to see them in operation. But there was more cause for dismay than that, and Hatcher alone knew just how bad the situation was. He summoned one of his own members to him and impressed on it a progress report for the Council. He sent it floating through the long warrens of his people's world, ordered his assistants back to their work and closed in his thoughts to consider what had happened. These two creatures, with their command of forces in the paranormal -- i.e., the electromagnetic -- spectrum, seemed able to survive in the environments prepared for them. That was step one. No previous team had done as well. This was not the first time a probe team of his race had snatched a warmblooded biped from a spaceship for study -- because their operation forces, psionic in nature, operated in nonEuclidean ways, it was easiest for them to make contact with the crew of a ship in the non-Euclidean space But it was the first time that the specimens had survived. He reviewed the work they had already done with the male specimen. He had shown himself unable to live in the normal atmospheric conditions of Hatcher's world; but that was to be expected, after all, and the creature had been commendably quick about getting out of a bad environment. Probably they had blundered in illuminating the scene for him, Hatcher conceded. He didn't know how badly he had blundered, for the concept of "light" from a general source, illuminating not only what the mind wished to see but irrelevant matter as well, had never occurred to Hatcher or any of his race; all of their senses operated through the mind itself, and what to them was "light" was a sort of focusing of attention. But although something about that episode which Hacher failed to understand had gone wrong, the specimen had not been seriously harmed by it. The specimen was doing well. Probably they could now go to the hardest tesf of all, the one which would mean success or failure Probably they could so modify the creature as to make direct communication possible. And the other specimen? Hatcher would have frowned, if he had had brow muscles to shape such an expression -- or a brow to be shaped. The female specimen was the danger. His own people knew how to shield their thoughts. This one evidently did not. It was astonishing that the Old Ones had not already encountered these bipeds, so loosely guarded was their radiation -- when they radiated at all, of course, for only a few of them seemed to possess any psionic power worth mentioning. Hatcher hastily drove that thought from his mind, for what he proposed to do with the male specimen was to give him that power. And yet there was no choice for Hatcher's people, because they were faced with disaster. Hatcher, through his communications from the Council, knew how close the disaster was. When one of the probers from the Central Masses team disappeared, the only conclusion that could be drawn was the Old Ones had discovered them. They needed allies; more, they needed allies who had control of the electromagnetic forces that made the Old Ones so potent and so feared. In the male and female they had snatched out of space they might have found those allies. But another thought was in Hatcher's mind: Suppose the Old Ones found them too? Hatcher made up his mind. He could not delay any longer. "Open the way to the surface," he ordered. "As soon as possible, take both of them to where we can work." called "M-#" was no stranger to Herrell McCray. It was the Great Nebula in Orion, in Earth's telescopes a fuzzy patch of light, in cold fact a great and glowing cloud of gas. M-# was not an external galaxy, like most of the "nebulae" in Messier's catalogue, but it was nothing so tiny as a single sun either. Its hydrogen mass spanned dozen of light-years. Imbedded in it -- growing in it, as they fed on the gas that surrounded them -- were scores of hot, bright new suns. New suns. In all the incongruities that swarmed around him McCray took time to consider that one particular incongruity. The suns of the Orion gas cloud were of the spectral class called "B" -- young suns, less than a thousandth as old as a Sol. They simply had not been in existence long enough to own stable planetary systems -- much less planets which themselves were old enough to . have cooled, brewed chemical complexes and thus in time produced life. But surely he was on a planet... Wasn't he? McCray breathed a deep sigh and for one more time turned his mind away from unprofitable speculations. The woman stirred slightly. McCray knelt to look at her; then, on quick impulse, opened his medical kit, took out a single-shot capsule of a stimulant and slipped it neatly to the exposed vein of her arm. In about two minutes she would be awake. Good enough, thought McCray; at least he would have someone to talk to. Now if only they could find a way out of this place. If a door would open, as the other door had, and -- He paused, staring. There was another door. Open. He felt himself swaying, threw out an arm and realized that he was... falling? Floating? Moving toward the door, somehow, not as though he were being dragged, not as though he were walking, but surely and rather briskly moving along. His feet were not touching the ground. It wasn't a volitional matter. His intentions had nothing to do with it. He flailed out, and touched nothing; nor did he slow his motion at alt. JJs fought against it, instinctively; and then reason took over and he stopped. The woman's form lifted from the floor ahead of him. She was still unconscious. From the clutter on the floor, her lightweight space suit rose, too; suit and girl, they floated ahead of him, toward the door and out. McCray cried out and tried to run after them. His legs flailed and, of course, touched nothing; but it did seem that he was moving faster. The woman and her suit were disappearing around a bend, but he was right behind them. He became conscious of the returning reek of gases. He flipped up the plate of his helmet and lunged at the girl, miraculously caught her in one hand and, straining, caught the suit with the other. Stuffing her into the suit was hfcid. awkward work, like dressing a doll that is too large for its garments; but he managed it, closed her helmet, saw the flexible parts of her suit bulge out slightly as its automatic pressure regulators filled it with air. They drove along, faster and faster, until they came to a great portal, and out into the blinding radiance of a molten copper sky. G athered in a circle were a score or more of Hatcher's people. McCray didn't know they were Hatcher's people, of course. He did not know even that they were animate beings, for they lacked all the features of animals that he had been used to. No eyes. No faces. Their detached members, bobbing about seemingly at random, did not appear to have any relation to the irregular 'Inheres that were their owners. The woman got unevenly to her feet, her faceplate staring toward the creatures. McCray heard a smothered exclamation in his suitphones. "Are you all right?' he demanded sharply. The great crystal eye turned round to look at him. "Oh, the man who spoke to me." Her voice was taut but controlled. The accent was gone; her control was complete. "I am Ann Mei-Ling, of the Woomara. What are -- those?" McCray said, "Our kidnappers, I guess. They don't look like much, do they?" She laughed shakily, without answering. The creatures seemed to be waiting for something, McCray thought; if indeed they were creatures and not machines or -- or whatever one might expect to find, in the impossible event of being cast away on an improbable planet of an unexplored sun. He touched the woman's helmet reassuringly and walked toward the aliens, raising his arms. "Hello," he said. "I am Herrell McCray." He waited. He half turned; the woman watching him. "I don't know what to do next," he confessed. "Sit down," she said suddenly. He stared. "No, you must! They want you to sit down." "I didn't hear -- " he began, then shrugged. He sat down. "Now lie stretched out and open your face mask." "Here? Listen -- Ann -- Miss MeiLing, whatever you said your name was! Don't you feel the heat? If I crack my mask -- " "But you must." She spoke very confidently. "It is s' in fo -- what do you call it -- telepathy, I think. But I can hear them. They want you to open your mask. No, it won't kill you. They understand what they are doing." She hesitated, then said, with less assurance, "They need us, McCray. There is something... I am not sure, but something bad. They need help, and think you can give it to them. So open your helmet as they wish, please." McCray closed his eyes and grimaced; but there was no help for it, he had no better ideas. And anyway, he thought, he could close it again quickly enough if these things had guessed wrong. The creatures moved purposefully toward McCray, and he found himself the prisoner of a dozen unattached arms. Surprised, he struggled, but helplessly; no, he would not be able to close the plate again!... But the heat was no worse. Somehow they were shielding him. A tiny member, like one of the unattached arms but much smaller, writhed through the air toward him, hesitated over his eyes and released something tinier still, something so small and so close that McCray could not focus his eyes upon it. It moved deliberately toward his face. The woman was saying, as if to herself, "The thing they fear is -- far away, but -- oh, no! My God!" There was a terrible loud scream, but McCray was not quite sure he heard it. It might have been his own, he thought crazily; for that tiny floating thing had found his face and was burrowing deep inside; and the pain was beyond belief. he pain was incredible. It was worse than anything he had ever felt, and it grew... and then it was gone. What it was that the spheroidal aliens had done to his mind McCray had no way of learning. He could only know that a door had been open. An opaque screen was removed. He was free of his body. He was more than free, he was extended -- increased -- enlarged. He was inside the body of an alien, and the alienwas in him He was also outside both, looking at them. McCray had never felt anything like it in his life. It was a situation without even a close analogue. He had had a woman in his arms, he had been part of a family, he had shared the youthful sense of exploration that comes in small, eager groups: These were the comparisons that came to his mind. This waj so much more than any of these things. He and the alien -- he and, he began to perceive, a number of aliens -- were almost inextricably mingled. Yet they were separate, as one strand of colored thread in a ball of yarn is looped and knotted and intertwined with every other strand, although it retains its own integrity. He was in and 'among many minds, and outside them all. McCray thought: This is how a god must feel.    Hatcher would have laughed -- if he had lips, larynx or mouth to laugh with. He would have laughed in pure exultation, and, indeed, his second in command recognized the marionette quivering of his detached limbs as a shout of glee. "We've done it," cried the assistant, catching his delight. "We've made thg. project work!" "Weve done a great deal more than that," exulted Hatcher. "Go to the supervisors, report to them. Pass on the word to the Central Masses probe. Maintain for the alien the pressure and temperature value he needs -- " "And you, Hatcher?" "I'm going with him -- out in the open! I'm going to show him what we need!" H atcher. McCray recognized that this was a name -- the name of the entity closest to himself, the one that had somehow manipulated his forebrain and released the mind from the prison of the skull. "Hatcher" was not a word but an image, and in the image he saw a creature whose physical shape was unpleasant, but whose instincts and hopes were enough like his own to provide common ground. He saw more than that. This Hatcher was trying to persuade him to move. To venture farther. To come with him... McCray allowed himself to be lead and at once he was outside not only of his own body but of all bodies. He was free in space. The entity that had been born of Herrell McCray was now larger than a sun. He could see, all around him, the wonder and beauty of the great gas cloud in which his body rested, on one tiny planet of one trivial star His sense of time was not changed from what it had been -- he could count the pulses of his own body, still thudding in what, however remote, was his ear -- but he could see things that were terribly slow and vast. He could see the Inotion of the streamers of gas in the cloud as light-pressure drove them outward. He could hear the subtle emanations of ion clashing with hurtling ion. He could see the great blue new suns tunneling through the cloud, building their strength out of the diffuse contaminated hydrogen that made the Orion nebula, leaving relatively clear "holes" behind them. He could see into the gas and through it. He could perceive each star and gassy comet; and he could behold the ordered magnificence of the galaxy of stars, and the universe of galaxies, beyond. The presence beside him was urging him to look beyond, into a denser, richer region of suns. McCray, unsure of his powers, stretched toward it -- and recoiled. There was something there which was terrifying, something cold and restless that watched him come to- ward it with the eyes of a crouched panther awaiting a deer. The presence beside him felt the same terror, McCray knew.He was grateful when Hatcher allowed him to look away from the central clusters and return to the immediate neighborhood of his body. Like a child's toy in a diminishing glass, McCray could see the planet he had left. But it was no planet. It was not a planet, but a great irregular sphere of metal, honeycombed and warrened. He would have thought it a ship, though huge, if it had had engines or instruments... No. It was a ship. Hatcher beside him was proof that these creatures needed neither, not in any Earthly sense, at least. They themselves were engines, with their power to move matter apart from the intervention of other matter. They themselves were instruments, through the sensing of force, that was now within his own power. A moment's hesitant practice, and McCray had the "planet" in the palm of his hand -- not a real palm, not a real hand; but it was there for his inspection. He looked at it and within it and saw the interior nests of Hatcher's folk, found the room where he had been brought, traced his course to the surface, saw his own body in its spacesuit, saw beside it the flaccid suit that had held the strange woman's body... The suit was empty. The suit was empty, and in the moment of that discovery McCray heard a terrible wailing cry -- not in his ears, in his mind -- from the aliens around him The suit was empty. They discovered it the same moment as he. It was wrong and it was dangerous; they were terrified. The companion presence beside him receded into emptiness. In a moment McCray was back in his own body, and the gathering members let him free. VI S ome hundreds of light-years away, the Jodrell Bank was making up lost time on its Betelgeuse run. Herrell McCray swept the long line from Sol to Betelgeuse, with his perceptions that were not his eyes and his touch that was not of matter, until he found it. The giant ship, fastest and hugest of mankind's star vessels, was to him a lumbering tiny beetle. It held friends and something else -- something his body needed -- air and water and food. McCray did not know what would happen to him if, while his mind was out in the stars, his body died. But he was not anxious to find out. McCray had not tried moving his physical body, but with what had been done to his brain he could now do anything within the powers of Hatcher's people. As they had swept him from ship to planet, so he could now hurl his body back from planet to ship. He flexed muscles of his mind that had. never been used before, and in a moment his body was slumped on the floor of the Jodrell Bank's observation bubble. In another moment he was in his body, opening his eyes and looking out into the astonished face of Chris Stoerer, his iunior navigator. "God is heaven," whispered Stoerer, "it's you!" "It is," said McCray hoarsely, dirough lips that were parched and cracked, sitting up and trying the muscles of the body. It ached. He was boneweary. "Give me a hand getting out of this suit, will you?" It was not easy to be a mind in a body again, McCray discovered. Time had stopped for him. He had been soaring the star-lanes in his released mind for hours; but while his mind had been liberated, his body, back on Hatcher's "planet," had continued its slow metabolism, its steady devouring of its tissues, its inevitable progress toward death. When he had returned to it he found its pulse erratic and its breathing ragged. A grinding knot of hunger seethed in its stomach. Its muscles ached. Whatever might become of his mind, it was clear that his body would die if it were left unfed and uncared-for much longer. So he had brought it back to the Jodrell Bank  He stood up and avoided Chris's questions. "Let me get something to eat, and then get cleaned up a little." (He had discovered that his body stank.) "Then I'll tell you everything you want to know -- you and the captain, and anybody else who wants tp listen. And we'll have to send a dispatch to Earth, too, because this is important... But, please, I only want to tell it once." Because -- he did not say -- I may not have time to tell it again. For those cold and murderous presences in the clustered inner suns had reached out as casually as a bear flicking a salmon out of a run and snatched the unknown woman from Hatcher's planet. They could reach anywhere in the galaxy their thoughts roamed. They might easily follow him here. I t was good to be human again, and McCray howled with pain and joy as the icy needle-spray of the showers cleansed his body. He devoured the enormous plates of steak and potatoes the ship's galley shoved before him, and drank chilled milk and steaming black coffee in alternate pint mugs. McCray let the ship's surgeon look him over, and laughed at the expression in the man's eyes. "I know I'm a little wobbly," he said. "It doesn't matter, Doc. You can put me in the sickbay as long as you like, as soon as I've talked to the captain. I won't mind a bit. You see, I won't be there -- " and he laughed louder, and would not explain. An hour later, with food in his belly and something from the surgeon's hypospray in his bloodstream to clear his brain, he was in the captain's cabin, trying to spell out in words that made sense the incredible story of (he discovered) eight days since he had been abducted from the ship. Looking at the ship's officers, good friends, companions on a dozen planetside leaves, McCray started to speak, stumbled and was for a moment without words. It was too incredible to tell. How could he make them understand? They would have to understand. Insane or not, the insane facts had to be explained to them. However queerly they might stare, they were intelligent men. They would resist but ultimately they would see. He settled his problem by telling them baldly and plainly, without looking at their faces and without waiting for their questions, everything that had happened. He told them about Hatcher and about the room in which he had come to. He told them about the pinkish light that showed only what he concentrated on -- and explained it to them, as he had not understood it at first; about Hatcher's people, and how their entire .sense-world was built up of what humans called E.S.P., the "light" being only the focusing of thought, which sees no material objects that it is not fixed on. He told them of the woman from the other ship and the cruel, surgical touch on his brain that had opened a universe to him. He promised that that universe would open for them as well. He told them of the deadly, unknowable danger to Hatcher's people -- and to themselves -- that lay at the galaxy's core. He told them how the woman had disappeared, and told them she was dead -- at the hands of the Old Ones from the Central Masses -- a blessing to her, McCray explained, and a blessing to all of them; for although her mind would yield some of its secrets even in death, if she were alive it would be their guide, and the Old Ones would be upon them. He did not wait for them to react. He turned to the ship's surgeon. "Doc, I'm all yours now, body and soul... cancel that. Just body!" And he left them, to swim once more in space. I n so short a time McCray had come to think of this as life, and a sort of interregnum. He swept up and out, glancing back only to see the ship's surgeon leaping forward to catch his unconscious body as it fell and then he was in space between the stars once more. Here, 'twixt Sol and Betelgeuse, space was clear, hard and cold, no diffuse gas cloud, no new, growing suns He "looked" toward Hatcher's world, but hesitated and considered. First or last, he would have to look once more upon the inimical presences that had peered out at him from the Central Masses. It might as well be now. His perceptions alert, he plunged toward the heart of the galaxy Thought speeds where light plods. The mind of Herrell McCray covered light-millenia in a moment. It skipped the drifty void between spiral arms, threaded dust clouds, entered the compact central galactic sphere to which our Earth's sector of the galaxy is only a remote and unimportant appendage. Here a great globular cluster of suns massed around a common center of gravity. McCray shrank himself to the perspective of a human body and stared in wonder. Mankind's Sol lies in a tenuous, stretched-out arm, thinly populated by stellar standards: if Earth had circled one of these dense-clustered suns, what a different picture of the sky would have greeted the early shepherds! Where Man's Earthbound eyes are fortunate to count a thousand stars in a winter sky, here were tens of thousands, bright enough to be a Sirius or a Capella at the bottom of a sink of atmosphere like Earth's whirling close to each other, so that star greets star over distances that are hardlv more than planetary. ol's nearest neighbor star is four light-years away. No single sun in this dense, gyrating central mass was as much as one light-year from its fellows. Here were suns that had been blazing with mature, steady light when Sol was a mere contracting mass of hydrogen -- whose planets had cooled and spawned life before Earth's hollows cupped the first scalding droplets that were the beginnings of seas. On these ancient worlds life existed. McCray had not understood all of what Hatcher had tried to cbmmunicate to him, but he had caught the terror in Hatcher's thoughts. Hatcher's people had fled from these ancients many millenia before -- fled and hidden in the heart of the Orion gas cloud, their world and all. Yet even there they were not safe. They knew that in time the Old Ones would find them. And it was this fear that had led them to kidnap humans, seeking allies in the war that could not forever be deferred. Hatcher's people were creatures-ef thought. Man was the wielder of physical forces -- "paranormal" to Hatcher, as teleportation and mindseeing were "paranormal" to McCray. The Old Ones had mastered both. McCray paused at the fringe of the cluster, waiting for the touch of contemptuous hate. It came and he recoiled a thousand light-years before he could stop. To battle the Old Ones would be no easy match -- yet time might work for the human race. Already they controlled the electromagnetic spectrum, and hydrogen fusion could exert the force of suns. With Hatcher's help -- and his own -- Man would free his mind as well; and perhaps the Old Ones would find themselves against an opponent as mighty as themselves. He drew back from the Central Masses, no longer afraid, and swept out to see Hatcher's planet It was gone. I n the great gas cloud the tunneling blue suns swept up their graze of hydrogen, untroubled by planets. Themselves too young to have solid satellites, Hatcher's adopted world removed again, they were alone. Gone! It was for a moment, a panicky thought. McCray realized what they had done. Hatcher's greatest hope had been to find another race to stand between his people and the Old Ones. And they had found it! Now Hatcher's world could hide again and wait until the battle had been fought for them. With a face light-years across, with a brain made up of patterns in the ether, McCray grinned wryly. "Maybe they made, the right choice, he thought,considering. "Maybe they'd only be in the way when the showdown comes." And he sought out Jodrell Bank and his body once more, preparing to return to being human... and to teach his fellow-humans to be gods. Coming in our next issue -- A Retief novelette by Keith Laumer by J. G. Ballard The pulse-stirring climax of by Robert A. Heinlein -- and many more! XX XX  II  X  X X Xi  IF  Short Story Illustrated by Jackson I t Cheviot Sherwood evet haa believed in miracles, he believed in them no longer. He had no illusions now He knew exactlv what he faced His life would come to an end on this uninhabited backwoods planet and there'd be none to mourn him. none to know. Not, he thought that there would be any mourners, under any circumstance. Although there were those who would be glad to see him. who would come running if they knew where he might be found. These were people, very definitely, that Sherwood had no desire to see His great, one might say his overwhelming. desire not to see them The castaway was a wanted man -- but he didn't knnv how badly he was wanted! could account in part for his present situation, since he had taken off from the last planet of record without filing flight plans and lacking clearance Since no one knew where he might have headed and since his radio was junk, there was no likelihood at all that anyone would find him -- even if they looked, which would be a matter of some doubt. Probably the most that anyone would do would be to send out messages to other planets to place authorities od the alert for him. And since his spaceship, for the lack of a certain valve for which he had no replacement, was not going anywhere, he was stuck here on this planet. I If that had been all there had been to it, it might not have been # bad. But there was a final irony that under other circumstances (if it had been happening to someone else, let's say), would have kept Sherwood in stitches of forthright merriment for hours on end at the very thought of it. But since he was the one involved, there was no merriment. For now, when he could gain no benefit, he was potentially rich beyond even his own most greedy and most lurid dreams. On the ridge above the camp he'd set up beside his crippled spaceship lay a strip of clay-cemented conglomerate that fairly reeked with diamonds. They lay scattered on the hillside, washed out by the weather; they were mixed liberally in the gravel of the tiny stream that wended through the valley. They could be picked up by the basket. They were of high quality; there were several, the size of human skulls, that probably were priceless. Sherwood was of a hardy, rough and tumble breed. Once he became convinced of his situation he made the best of it. He made his camp into a home and laid in supplies -- digging roots, gathering nuts, drying fish and making pemmican. If he was to be cast in the role of a Robinson Crusoe, he proposed to be at least comfortable well fed. In his spare time he gathered diamonds. dumping them in a pile outside his shack And in the idle atternoons or the long evenings, he sat beside his campfire and sorted them out -- washing them free of clinging dirt and grading them according best of them he put into a sack, designed for easy grabbing if the time should ever come when he might depart the planet. Not that he had any hope this would come about. Even so, he was a man who planned against contingencies. He always tried to have some sort of loophole. Had this not been the case, his career would have ended long before, at any one of a dozen times or places. That it apparently had come to an end now could be attributed to a certain lack df foresight in not carrying a full complement of spare parts. Although perhaps this was understandable, since never before in the history of space flight had that particular valve which now spelled out Sherwood's doom ever misbehaved. Perhaps it was well for him that he was not an introspective man. If he had been given to much searching thought, he might have found himself living with his past, and there were places in his past that were faf from pretty. He was lucky in many other ways, of course. The planet was not a bad one, a sort of New England planet with a rocky, tumbled terrain, forested by scrubby trees and distinctly terrestrial. He might just as easily have been marooned upon a jungle planet or one of the icy planets or any of another dozen different kinds that were not tolerant of life. So he settled in and made the best of it and didn't even bother to count off the days. For he knew what he was in for. He counted on no miracle. T he miracle he had not counted on came late one afternoon as he sat, cross-legged, sorting out his latest haul of priceless diamonds. The great black ship came in from the east across the rolling hills. It whistled down across the ridges and settled to the ground a short distance from Sherwood's crippled ship and his patched-together shack. It was no patrol vessel, although in his position, Sherwood would have welcomed even one of these. It was a kmd of ship he'd never seen before. It was globular and black and it had no identifying marks on it. He leaped to his feet and ran toward the ship. He waved his arms in welcome and whooped with his delight. He stopped a hundred feet away when he felt the first whiff of the heat that had been picked up by the vessel's hull in its plunge through atmosphere. "Hey, in there!" he yelled. And the Ship spoke to him. "You need not yell," it told him. "I can hear you very well." ' who are you?" asked Sherwood. "I am the Ship," the voice told him. "Quit fooling around," yelled Sherwood, "and tell me who you are." For the sort of answer it had given was foolishness. Of course it was the ship. It was someone in the ship, talking to him through a speaker in the hull. "I have told you," said the Ship. "I am the Ship." "But there is someone speaking to me." "The ship is speaking to you." "All right, then," said Sherwood. "If you want it that way, it's okay with me. Can you take me out of here? My radio is broken and my ship disabled." "Perhaps I can," said the Ship. "Tell me who you are." Sherwood hesitated for a moment, and then he told who he was, quite truthfully. For it suddenly had occurred to him that this ship was as much an outlaw as he was himself. It had no markings and all ships must have markings. "You say you left your last port without proper clearance?" . "Yes," said Sherwood. "There were certain circumstances." "And no one knows where you are? No one's looking for you?" "How could they?" Sherwood asked. "Where do you want to go?" "Just anywhere," said Sherwood. "I have no preference." F or even if they should land him somewhere where he had no wish to be, he still would have a running chance. On this planet he had no chance at all. "All right," said the ship. "You can come aboard." A hatch came open in the hull and a ladder began running out. "Just a second," Sherwood shouted. "I'll be right there." He sprinted to the shack and grabbed his sack of the finest diamonds, then legged it for the ship. He got there almost as soon as the ladder touched the ground. The hull still was crackling with warmth, but Sherwood swarmed up the ladder, paying no attention. He was set for life, he thought. Unless -- And then the thought struck him that they might take the diamonds from him. They could pretend it was payment for his passage. Or they could simply take them without an excuse of any sort at all. But it was too late now He was almost in the hatch. To drop the sack of diamonds now would do no more than arouse suspicion and would gain him nothing. It came of greediness, he thought. He did not need this many diamonds. Just a half dozen of the finest dropped into his pockets would have been enough. Enough to buy him another ship so he could return and get a load of them. But he was committed now. There was nothing he could do except to see it through. He reached the hatch and tumbled through it. There was no one waiting. The inner lock stood open and there was no one there. He stopped to stare at the emptiness and behind him the retracting ladder rumbled softly and the hatch hissed to a close. "Hey," he shouted, "where is everyone?" "There is no one here," the voice said, "but me." "All right," said Sherwood. "Where do I go to find you?" "You have found me," said the Ship. "You are standing in me." "You mean..." "I told you," said the Ship. "I said I was the Ship. That is what I am." "But no one..." "You do not understand," said the Ship. "There is no need of anyone. I aip myself. I am intelligent. I am part machine, part human. Rather, perhaps, at one time I was. I have thought, in recent years, the two of us have merged so we're neither human nor machine, but something new entirely." "You're kidding me," said Sherwood, beginning to get frightened. "There can't be such a thing." "Consider," said the Ship, "a certain human who had worked for years to build me and who, as he finished me, found death was closing in..." "Let me out!" yelled Sherwood. "Let me out of herel I don't want to be rescued. I don't want..." "I'm afraid, Mr. Sherwood, it is rather late for that. We're already out in space." "Out in space! We can't be! It isn't possible!" "Of course it is," the Ship told him. "You expected thrust. There was no thrust. We simply lifted." # #'j'o ship," insisted Sherwood, "can get off a planet... " "You're thinking, Mr. Sherwood, of the ships built by human hands. Not of a living ship. Not of an intelligent machine. Not of what becomes possible with the merging of a man and a machine."  "You mean you built yourself?" "Of course not. Not to start with. I was built by human hands to start with. But I've redesigned myself and rebuilt myself, not once, but many times. I knew my capabilities. I knew my dreams and wishes. I made myself the kind of thing I was capable of being -- not the halfway, makeshift thing that was the best the human race could do." "The man you spoke of," Sherwood said. "The one who was about to die..." "He is part of me," said the Ship. "If you must think of him as a separate entity, he, then, is talking to you. For when I say T, I mean both of us, for we've become as one." "I don't get it," Sherwood told the Ship, feeling the panic coming back again. "He built me, long ago, as a ship which would respond, not to the pushing of a lever or the pressing of a button, but to the mental commands of the man who drove me. I was to become, in effect, an extension of that man. There was a helmet that the man would wear and he'd think into the helmet." "I understand," said Sherwood. "He'd think into the helmet and I was so programmed that I'd obey his thoughts. I became, in effect, a man, and the man became in effect the ship he operated." "Nice deal," Sherwood said enthusiastically, never being one upon whom the niceties of certain advantages were ever lost. "He finished me and he was about to die and it was a pity that such a one should die -- one who had worked so hard to do what he had done. Who'd given up so much. 'Yf'sver had seen space. Who had gone nowhere." "No," said Sherwood, in revulsion, knowing what was coming. "No, he'd not done that." "It was a kindness," said the ship. "It was what he wanted. He managed it himself. He simply gave up his body. His body was a worthless hulk that yas about to die. The modifications to accommodate a human brain rather than a human skull were quite elementary. And he has been happy. We have both of us been happy." Sherwood stood without saying anything. In the silence he was listening for some sound, for any kind of tiny rattle or hum, for anything at all to tell him the ship was operating. But there was no sound and no sense of motion of any sort. "Happy," he said. "Where would you have found happiness? What's the point of all this?" "That," the Ship said solemnly, "is a bit hard to explain." Sherwood stood and thought about it -- the endless voyaging through space without a body -- with all the desires, all the advantages, all the capabilities' of a body gone forever. "There is nothing for you to fear," said the Ship. "You need not concern yourself. We have a cabin for you. Just down the corridor, the first door to your left." "I thank you," Sherwood said, although he was nervous still. If he had had a choice, he told himself, he'd stayed back on the planet. But since he was here, he'd have to make the best of it. And there were, he admitted to himself, certain advantages and certain possibilities that needed further thought. H e went down the corridor and pushed on the door. It opened on the cabin. For a spaceship it looked comfortable enough. A little cramped, of course, but then all cabins were. Space is at a premium on any sort of ship. He went in and placed his sack of diamonds on the bunk that hinged out from the wall. He sat down in the single metal chair that stood beside the bunk. "Are you comfortable, Mr. Sherwood?" "Very comfortable," he said. It was going to be all right, he told himself. A very crazy setup, but it would be all right. Perhaps a little spooky and a bit hard to believe, but probably better, after all, than staying marooned, back there on the planet. For this would not last forever And the planet could have been, most probably would have been, forever. It would take a while to reach another planet, for space was rather sparsely populated in this area. There would be time to think and plan. He might be able to work out something that would be to his great advantage. He leaned back in the chair and stretched out his legs. His brain began to click in a ceaseless scurrying back and forth, nosing from every angle all the possibilities that existed in this setup. It was nice, he thought -- this entire operation. The Ship undoubtedly had figured out some angles for itself which no human yet had thought of. There were a lot of things to do. He'd have to learn the capabilities of the Ship and. give close study to its personality, seeking out its weak points and its strength. Then he'd have to plan his strategy and be careful not to give away his thinking. He must not move until he was entirely ready. There might be many ways to do it. There might be flattery or there might be a business proposition or there might be blackmail. He'd have to think on it and study and follow out the line of action that seemed to be the best He wondered at the Ship's means o t operation. Anti-gravity, perhaps, so far considered as a source of power. He got up from the chair and paced, three paces across the room Or a fusion chamber. Or perhaps some method which had not been and back, restlessly pondering odds. Yes, he thought, It would be a nice kind of ship to have. More than likely there was nothing in all of space that could touch it in speed and maneuverability. Nothing that could overhaul it should he ever have to run. It could apparently set down anywhere. It probably selfrepairing, for the Ship had spoken of redesigning and of rebuilding itself. With the memory of his recent situation still fresh inside his mind, this was comforting. ' There must be a way to get the Ship, he told himself. There had to be a way to get it. It was something that he needed. He could buy another ship, of course; with the diamonds in the sacking he could buy a fleet of ships. But this was the one he wanted. M aybe it had been pure luck this Ship had picked him up. For any other legal ship would probably turn him over to the authorities at its next port of call, but this Ship didn't seem to mind who he was or what his record might be. Any other ship that was not entirely legal would have grabbed off, not only the diamonds that he had but his discovery of the diamond field. But this particular Ship had no concern with diamonds. What a setup, he thought. A human brain and a spaceship tied together, so closely tied together that their identities had merged. He shivered at the thought of it, for it was a gruesome thing. Although perhaps it had not meant too much to that old man who was about to die. He had traded an aged and death-marked body for many years of life. Perhaps life as a part of a space-traveling machine was better than no life at all. How many years, he wondered, had it been since that old man had translated himself into something else than human? A hundred? Five hundred? Perhaps even more than that. In those years where had he been and what might he have seen? And, most pertinent of all, what thoughts had run through and congealed and formed within his mind? What was life like for him? Not a human sort of life, of course, not a human viewpoint, but something else entirely. Sherwood tried to imagine what it might be like, but gave up in dismay. It would necessarily be a negation of everything he lived for -- all the sensual pleasure, all the dreams of gain and glory, all the neat behavior patterns he had set up for himself, all his self-made rules of conduct and of conscience. A miracle, he thought. As a matter of fact, there'd been two miracles. The first had been when he had been able to set his ship down without a crackup when the valve had failed. He had come in close above the planet's surface to find a place to land -- and suddenly the valve went out and the engine failed and there he'd been, plunging down above the rough terrain. Then suddenly he had glimpsed a place where a landing might be just barely possible and had fought the controls madly to hit that certain spot and finally had hit it -- alive. It had been a miracle that he had made the landing; and the coming of the Ship to rescue him had been the second miracle. The bunk dropped down flat against the wall and his sack of diamonds was dumped onto the floor "Hey, what goes on?" yelled Sherwood. Then he wished he had not yelled, for it was quite clear exactly what had happened. The support that held the bunk had not been snapped properly into place and had given way, letting down the bunk. "Something wrong, Mr. Sherwood?" asked the Ship. "No, not a thing," said Sherwood. "My bunk fell down. I guess it startled me." He bent down to pick up the diamonds. As he did, the chair quietly and efficiently slid back against the wall, folded itself up and slid into a slight depression that exactly fitted it. Squatted to pick up the diamonds, Sherwood watched the chair in horrified fascination, then swiftly spun around. The bunk no longer hung against the wall, also had fitted itself into another niche. Cold fear speared into Sherwood. He rose swiftly to his feet, turning like a man at bay. He stood in a bare cubicle. With both the bunk and chair retracted, he stood within four bare walls. He sprang toward the door and there wasn't any door. There was only wall. He staggered back into the center of the cubicle and spun around to view each wall in turn. There was no door in any of the walls. The metal went up from floor to ceiling without a single break. The walls began to move, closing in on him, sliding in, retracting. H e watched, incredulous, frozen, thinking that perhaps he'd imagined the moving of the walls. But it was not imagination. Slowly, inexorably, the walls were closing in. Had he put out his arms, he could have touched them on either side of him. "Ship!" he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. "Yes, Mr. Sherwood." "You are malfunctioning. The walls are closing in." "No," said the Ship. "No malfunction, I assure you. A very proper function. My brain grows tired and feeble. It is not the body only -- the brain also has its limits. I suspected that it might, but I could not know. There was a chance, of course, that separated from the poison of a body, it might live in its bath of nutrients forever." "Nof" rasped Sherwood, his breath strangling in his throat. "No, not me!" "Who else?" asked the Ship. "I have searched for years and you are the first who fitted." "Fitted!" Sherwood screamed. "Why, of course," the Ship said calmly, happily. "A man who would not be missed. No one knowing where you were. No one hunting for you. No one who will miss you. I had hunted for someone like you and had despaired of finding one. For I am humane. I would cause no one grief or sadness." The walls kept closing in. The Ship seemed to sigh in metallic contentment. "Believe me, Mr. Sherwood," it said, "finding you was a very mirIn The February Galaxy -- by Fritz Leiber x x x X  X  Xby Avram Davidson Kris Neville Frederik Pohl xxX' XX XXXi Willy Ley jj -- and many more stories and features. February g Galaxy is still on sale -- get your copy today! J c X t IF  Short Story He heard children's voices, but there couldn't be any children -- not in that terrible place! A man said to the landlady over a soft-boiled egg and a slice of toast. "Right under my window." He leaned forward. "You know how children talk to themselves?" "Was it the same voice you heard the first two nights?" Mrs. Tilton asked. "I'm not sure now about the first night. Might have been another voice that first night." "And now it was a child?" "Yes." . Mrs. Tilton rose to get the coffee. "Are you quite sure?" "You don't think I'm imagining?" "We have no children," she said. "A neighbor's, no doubt." "There isn't a child in the whole village, Mr. Coat." "That's what puzzles me. Don't you think we ought to report it?" "I'll get your coffee," she said, and went into the kitchen. "I didn't actually see the child," he called to her. "But I'm sure I heard the voice." The woman brought the cup of coffee; she had poured it in the kitchen. The first two mornings, he remembered, she had set the coffee pot on the table. "Aren't you having any?" he asked. "I had mine, thank you. Will you want anything else?" He could see past her into the kitchen -- the corner of a large woodburning stove and a row of brass pots. The floor was flagstoned and a hand pump stood over a sink. "Do you really grow your own strawberries?" he asked. "Yes. Would you like some?" "Very much." Mrs. Tilton went to get the berries. She had forgotten to serve cream with the coffee. The coffee had a bitter taste and a faint smell of iodine. But he was not used to natural coffee. And without cream. He took another sip and slowly stretched his stiff legs. In the window he saw lilac bushes in bloom. "Picked this morning," Mrs. Tilton said, setting a bowl of strawberries before him. "Oh, thank you." He sniffed at the berries. "They smell of earth," he said, smiling at her. "You might like a walk after breakfast," Mrs. Tilton suggested. "Then you can have a restful nap at noon." "Good idea," he said. "Excuse me, but the coffee seems bitter." Mrs. Tilton looked at the old man as if she did not understand. "I'm afraid I'm a nuisance," he apologized, "but I take cream with my coffee." "I'm sorry, I forgot." She brought a small cream pitcher. T he old man turned the pitcher in his hand. It was lopsided and made of inferior clay "Do you make your own pottery, too?" "Such as it is." "Charming." He set down the pitcher and leaned back with a sigh. "You know. I pretended I did not want a rest, but l could hardly wait to see the country again." "You weren't born in the city?" "I was born in a village no larger than this. Of course it's all gone now, swallowed up by the city But in those davs it was an hour's heliride from the city. I remember a thing or two " Mrs. Tilton watched him drink the coffee "Not many people left who remember those days," he said. "For instance, did you know that unadjustables -- they called them criminals then -- were actually electrocuted? Strapped down to a horrible chair -- " "Don't you want the strawberries, Mr. Coat?" He looked down at the strawberries in the bowl. "Just imagine -- " but he forgot what he had wanted to say. The woman went into the kitchen. He had just finished drinking the coffee when he herd the child's voice in the lane outside the window. The same voice. He crossed to the window and looked out. The lane was empty. "Mrs. Tilton!" He heard no answer. He went into the kitchen. The door to the garden stood open. He saw her working in a vegetable patch. "Pst... pst!" She looked up. "Did you see the child?" he called. "It must have turned into the garden." Mrs. Tilton straightened herself, holding her back with both hands. "The child?" "The voice. I just heard it again." "I'll be with you in a moment, Mr. Coat." He looked round the kitchen -- the antique flagstones, the brass pots, the stove, the hand pump. There was only one anachronism: on the wall by the door, stuck behind a cluster of radishes, was a World Union Telegram. Out in the vegetable patch, he saw Mrs. Tilton was looking about for something. On an impulse he took down the telegram, and read: He stuck the telegram behind the radishes and looked out the door. Mrs. Tilton was coming with a basket on her arm. "You heard the child again, Mr. Coat?" "Perhaps... I was mistaken." "Strange, I saw nobody." She put the basket on the kitchen table; it was filled with peas. "Did you have enough coffee?" He nodded. "Aren't you feeling well?" "I... am fine. Yes." The executioner looked as if she could not make up her mind about him. Then she smiled. She brought out a wooden bowl, and sat down at the table to shell the peas. "Why don't you take your walk now? You'll enjoy our little market place." "Yes." Such a nice day, he thought, shuffling to the window. Spring. H e had enjoyed the market yesterday until he had noticed that there were no children about. No children at all. Only adult primitives and a few well-trained functionaries like Mrs. Tilton. In the sky in the window he saw a rocket cutting a thin line as it left the atmosphere. "I'll have your bed ready for your noon nap," she said. He turned from the window. "Noon?" "You'll want a nice restful nap then." He had imagined the poisoned coffee would work faster. His heart beating, he said, "Those are peas, aren't they?" She nodded. Her hands were busy shelling. "I hung your cane on the coat rack," she said. "If you don't mind, Mrs. Tilton, I'd rather not go out today. I'd very much like to try shelling peas for you." "Why, of course. Pull up that chair, why don't you?" Sitting down, he reached his trembling hands into the basket and came up with a handful of the green wonders. Mrs. Tilton moved the basket nearer him. "After a while I'll go up to my room," he promised. "I feel a little tired already." "Certainly." He split a shell and slid his thumb under the peas. They rolled into his hand. He counted nine. He dropped them in the bowl, then put one in his mouth and chewed. It had a sweet taste. "Thank you, Mrs. Tilton." "Not at all, Mr. Coat." IF  Feature IN I f you read the above title fast you'll get the same impression as you will if you read this article fast. So take your time -- or set it aside until you have the time. We have blithely set ourselves the task of fumbling through the liver -- and lights -- of the laser , hoping to bring you a simple explanation of one of those scientific breakthroughs that ought to make you glad, and a little awed, to share history with. But like sex and solid-state functions, laser theory seems to drift from time to time into philosophy or fiction Yet the device is so simple. so fascinating and so extremely potent that it will pay to know a little, at least, about it when it's talked about. And, brother, it will be talked abouf a whole lot. To begin with, Junior, laser is not the comparative form of lazy. It is the acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The recipe for a laser is: Take a cylindrical ruby rod. Mix in a pinch (about l#th of I  ) of chromium atoms, making sure that that's absolutely all the impurity there is. Grind both ends of the cylinder optically flat. Silver one end thoroughly. Silver the other end not thoroughly. Next take an optical flash tube, stretch it out, bend it into a spiral and insert the ruby rod into the coil so formed. Now activate the flash tube at the correct frequency. Coherent light emerges from the half-silvered end of the ruby. And there's your laser. If that doesn't suit your palate, try other solids, such as the so-called transition metals (elements with an incomplete inner shell of electrons), or the "rare-earth" elements (called lanthanides), or the actinides (elements # through #) But if your taste is a little more sophisticated, yon can run up something tasty in liquids and even gases. Now. what is coherent light? And why bother? Also, as the ribald Indian said to the mermaid: How? Coherent light is electromagnetic radiation within the optical spectrum, emerging from its source at a single frequency and in a sinusoidal wave-pattern, like radio waves. Most light is non-coherent, or a jumble of many frequencies. If you've ever seen these separated and put down in order by a spectroscope, you know how very many there are. The light produced by laser is in terms of color absolutely pure. It forms a beam with so little dispersion that a beam one tenth of a mil wide at the source would lay a disc of light only # miles wide on the moon. Yet even that, in terms of this new science, is strictly model T. W hy bother? First of all, the device produces light of truly fabulous intensity. As every schoolboy knows as soon as you tell him, sunlight produces about one-tenth of a watt per square centimeter. A on the same square centimeter and not breathe hard. It is, in other words, a source of high temperatures, almost perfectly directional, easily controlled and (as such things go) inexpensive. Just a moment's reflection (especially for you, or you wouldn't be reading it here) will generate more wild and wonderful applications than most pro authors would dare to perpetrate. In research and industry, how many uses can be found for a needle-beam of heat that can weld a precision joint, puncture a diamond, maintain a microcrucible at high temperatures to study chemistry in an area it has hardly been examined in before? Instantly din, exactly directional. Or -- think a little bigger, and put Buck Rogers' zap-gun back in the funny papers where it belongs. For here is the death ray, the recoilless "searing beam of raw naked energy" we used to read about in our fuzzedged pulp-blurred space opera. Here -- really here -- is a way#o knock a hole as big as your head in a tank at # yards -- -a weapon that ignores windage because it's a beam, not a missile-chucker, and for the same reason need not be aimed with any consideration for trajectory. You don't compute and adjust sights. You just shoot it, like a flashlight. And this is only the beginning. Practical thermonuclear energy awaits temperatures high enough, controllable enough. Well? And one other whole new area: communications -- which covers a great deal more than speech, pictures, facsimile; it means also remote control in all its countless permutations. For with a laser beam we have, as reported above, electromagnetic radiation of a single frequency which varies in a regular sinusoidal pattern -- like a radio carrier frequency. There is no theoretical reason why a signal should not be impressed upon such a carrier, by modifying its amplitude (AM) after it's generated. This means, at first glance, two things: communications on such a tight beam that eavesdropping is virtually impossible; and communications over a beam with so little dispersal that it can be thrown of miles, to reach ships and stations in space. And with this we'll applications to your imagination, and go on to how this simple-minded gadget makes this all happen. T 'o understand it you'll have to make yet another change in your concept of the atom, which, you'll recall, appears as a billard ball glued to a stick in chemical models of molecules: or as a sort of solar system, electrons around a nucleus, when they're talking nuclear physics. There's nothing wrong with these concepts as long as they work, and they have worked well. According to the theory which fits the facts for laser, electrons can travel in orbits far removed from the nucleus, or closer in. When an electron falls from a high energy state (the far-out orbit) to a lower state it gives off the energy difference in the form of light. Conversely, when it leaves a lower orbit for a higher (i.e., goes from a lowerenergy state to a higher-energy state) it absorbs light. the calculation of energy difference between levels to a simple formula ( Ehv , in case you wondered, where E is the quantum of energy, v the frequency of radiation, and h is that constant of proportionality known as Planck's Constant.) The only reason for bringing this up is that frequency, the only variable in the equation, is what dictates whether or not electrons can be shifted from one level to another. Therefore the frequency of the pulses in the helical flash tube must be exact and precise in terms of the particular atoms of which the laser is made. Now let's make another model, not of atoms specifically, but of this laser theory in action. We'll borrow from the local dog kennels a ladder, and set it up against the living room wall. Now if you'll look closely you'll see that the bottom rung of the ladder is populated by fleas. We'll call them atoms at Energy Level One, or E-l. Now if you can persuade these fleas to' jump to the second rung, E-# -- say by flashing pictures of a fat chihuahua (at the right frequency, of course) -- they will absorb light energy as they go up. They won't stay on E-# very long, and when they drop back, they'll release energy. Now if you can pump the succulent image efficiently enough, you'll get a population inversion. There will be more fleas on E-# than on E-l. This would give you a gain in emitted energy as they dropped back again. In practice, it has been found that the E-#-to-ground pumping requires more energy in the pump than you can get out of the emission. However, with the right frequency, at the right intensity, the population can get so excited that it will jump clear to E-# and then drop back to E-#. At this level you start to show a profit, but good. So with a new slide, say a particularly fat old collie substituting for the chihuahua, you very readily get population inversion between E-# and E-#, and you have a bunch of wildly excited fleas as well, which is the excitement mentioned in the s e -- stimulated emission -- of laser. The profit is the a, or amplification. N ow return the ladder to the kennels. Keep the fleas or let them go; it's up to you. And let's take up the ruby laser again. You recall that in the pure ruby shaft, a few chromium atoms exist as an impurity. When light at the right frequency is pumped in by the spiral coil, these chromium atoms are driven to higher energy levels, from which they spontaneously fall back, emitting radiation which in turn excites more chromium atoms. This goes on while more and more light goes bashing around inside the rod. Both ends are mirrors, and the sides permit little of it to escape, so the only way out for the light is for that portion of it which bounces off the fully silvered end and is projected at the partly silvered end, where it emerges. Now you can see why the beam is so little dispersed, so perfectly aligned. Ai to why it is so pure -- it has to be, having been generated from the same energy level of the same electronactivity. That is, at the same frequency. The flash-tube that started all this was non-coherent -- rthat is, its light was the usual mess of frequencies emitted by . most of our familiar light-seurces. The laser beam is coherent. We hope we are by now, and you too. Experiments are rapidly going forward in both liquid and gaseous lasers. If anyone has succeeded with the former, we haven't heard about it yet. As to the later, it was a helium-neon laser which yielded the # He was excited by radio-frequency energy and transferred its excitement to the neon. Pumping is considerably easier than for solid lasers. In Case You Hadn't Noticed --  -- this issue of If has some special new features! The color is new. Something less obvious is the new type format -- a more compact style which actually gives you the equivalent of an extra fulllength novelette in every issue -- about as much as adding about # pages to our former issues. More than ever, If is your biggest bargain in science fiction today! IF  Serial Illustrated by Finlay A radiation storm between planets is no joke -- but it's nothing compared to the storm that hovers constantly over the head of my brother Clarkl My name is Podkayne Fries -- rhymes with "breeze" -- and don't call me Martian. I am a Marswoman; and they are something else entirely. ( Not that you will ever hear me saying anything against the Old Ones -- after all Vm named after one of them.) My brother Clark and I, handsomely escorted by our Uncle Tom , are on our way to Venus. Since l am going to be a ship's captain when  grow up ( don't laugh ; on Mars we don't have these silly notions about where woman's place is), you might say that this is the crowning experience of my life -- so far, anyway -- and you would be right. Except for a few old biddies who think Marsmen are savages, everybody is wonderful and the trip itself is positively heaven. As for the old biddies . I can fix them.  already have fixed them --  told Clark about them , and that's enough.  don't know what he'll do -- but I know they'll wish he hadn't... be cause although he's my brother and l love him ,  guess Clark is also a powerful little imp. You've heard of Earth's Mafia? The way we look at it, the Mafia have heard of Clark -- thafs why they stayed on Earth. M r. Sawonavong told me that we are likely to have a radiation storm almost any time now and that we'll have an emergency drill today to practice for it. The solar weather station on Mercury reports that "flare" weather is shaping up and has warned all ships in space and all manned satellites to be ready for it. The flares are expected to continue for about -- Wups! The emergency alarm caught me in the middle of a sentence. We've had our drill and I think the captain has all the passengers properly scared now. Some ignored the alarm, or tried to. whereupon crewmen in heavy armor fetched them. Clark got fetched. He was the very last they tracked down... and Captain Darling gave him a public scolding that was a work of art. and finished by warning Clark that if he failed to be the first passenger to reach shelter the next time the alarm sounded, Clark could expect to spend the rest of the trip in the shelter, twenty-four hours of the day, instead of having free run of passenger country. Clark took it with his usual wooden face, but I think it hit home, especially the threat to confine him. Tm sure the speech impressed the other passengers. It was the sort that raises blisters at twenty paces. Perhaps the captain intended it mostly for their benefit. Then the captain changed his tone to that of a patient teacher and explained in simple words what we could expect, why it was necessary so to reach shelter at once even if one were taking a bath, why we would be perfectly safe if we did. The solar flares trigger radiation, he told us, quite ordinary radiation, much like X-rays ("and other sorts," I mentally added), the sort of radiation which is found in space at all times. But the intensity reaches levels from a thousand to ten thousand times as high as "normal" space radiation -- And, since we are already inside the orbit of Earth, this is bad medicine indeed; it would kill an unprotected man about as quickly as shooting him through the head. Then he explained why we would not require a thousand to ten thousand times as much shielding in order to be safe. It's the cascade principle. The outer hull stops over # per cent of any radiation; then comes the "cofferdam" (cargo holds and water tanks) which absorbs some more; then comes the inner hull which is actually the floor of the the cylinder which is first-class passenger country. This much shielding is plenty for all normal conditions. The radiation level in our staterooms is lower than it is at home, quite a lot lower than it is most places on Earth, especially in the mountains. (I'm looking forward to seeing real mountains. Scary!) Then one day comes a really bad storm on the Sun and the radiation level jumps suddenly to # times normal -- and you could get and wake up dying. N o trouble. The emergency shelter is at the center of the ship, four shells farther in, each of which stops more than # per cent of what hits it. Like this: # # (after the first inner shell, the floor or first-class passenger country.) # (after the second inner shell) # (third) I (fourth -- and you're inside the shelter) But actually the shielding is better than that and it is safer to be in the ship's shelter during a bad solar storm than it is to be in Marsopolis. The only trouble -- and no small matter -- is that the shelter space is the geometrical care of he ship, just abaft the control room and not a whole lot bigger. Passengers and crew are stacked into it about as intimately as puppies in a basket. My billet is a shelf space half a meter wide, half a meter deep and just a trifle longer than I am, with other females brushing my elbows on each side of me. I am not a claustrophobe, but a coffin would be roomier. ' Rations are canned ones, kept there against emergencies; sanitary facilities can only be described as "dreadful." I hope this storm is only a solar squall and is followed by good weather on the Sun. To finish the trip to Venus in the shelter would turn a wonderful experience into a nightmare. The captain finished by saying, "We will probably have five to ten minutes warning from Hermes Station. But don't take five minutes getting here. The instant the alarm sounds head for the shelter at once as fast as possible. If you are not dressed, be sure you have clothes ready to grab -- and dress wheit you get here. If you stop to worry about anything, it may kill you. "Crewmen will search all passenger spaces the moment the alarm sounds, and each one is ordered to use force to send to shelter any passenger who fails to move fast. He won't argue with you. He'll hit you, kick you, drag you -- and I'll back him up. "One last word. Some of you have not been wearing your personal radiation meters. The law permits me to levy a stiff fine for such failure. Ordinarily I overlook such technical offenses -- it's your health, not mine. But, during this emergency, this regulation will be enforced. Fresh personal meters are now being passed out to each of you; old ones will be turned over to the surgeon, examined and exposures entered in your records." He gave the "all clear" order then and we all went back down to passenger country, sweaty and mussed. At least I was. I was just washing my face when the alarm sounded again -- and I swarmed up those four decks like a frightened cat. But I was only a close second. Clark passed me on the way. I t was just another dill. This time all passengers were in the shelter within four minutes. The captain didn't say anything but looked pleased. I've been sleeping raw but I'm going to wear pajamas tonight and all nights until this is over, and leave a robe where I can grab it. Captain Darling is a darling but I think he means exactly what he says -- and I won't play Lady Godiva. There isn't a horse in the whole ship. Neither Mrs. Royer nor Mrs, Garcia were at dinner this evening, although they were both amazingly agile both times the alarm sounded. They weren't in the lounge after dinner; their doors are closed, and I saw the surgeon coming out of Mrs. Garcia's room. I wonder. Surely Clark wouldn't poison them? Or would he? I don't dare ask him because of the remote possibility that he might tell me. I don't want to ask the surgeon, either, because it might attract attention to the Fries family. But I (if there truly is such a thing) long enough to find out what is behind those two closed doors. I hope Clark hasn't let his talents run away with him Oh, I'm as angry at those two as ever because there is just enough truth in the nasty things tjiey said to make it hurt. I am of mixed races and I know that some people think that is bad, even though there is no bias against it on Mars, i do have "convicts" among my ancestors -- but Pve never been ashamed of it. Or not much, although I suppose Pm inclined to dwell more on the highly selected ones. But a "convict" is not always a criminal. Admittedly there was that period in the early history of Mars when the commissars were running things on Earth and Mars was used as a penal colony; everybody knows that and we don't try to hide it. But the vast majority of the transportees were political prisoners -- "counter-revolutionists" -- enemies of the people. Is this bad? In any case there was the much longer period, involving fifty times as many colonists, when every new Marsman was selected as carefully as a bride selects her weddine gown -- and much more scientifically. And finally, there is the current period, since our Revolution and Independence. when we dropped all bars to immigration and welcome anyone who is healthy and has normal intelligence. No, I'm not ashamed of my ancestors or my people, whatever their skin shades or backgrounds; I'm proud of them. It makes me boiling mad to hear anyone sneer at them Why, I'll bet those two couldn't qualify for permanent visa even under our present "open door" policy? Feeble-minded -- But I do hope Clark hasn't done anything too drastic I wouldn't want Clark to have to spend the rest of his life on Titan; I love the little writch. Sort of. vra W e've had the radiation storm. I prefer hives. I don't mean the storm itself; k wasn't too bad. Radiation jumped to about # times normal for where we are now -- about eight-tenths of an astronomical unit from the Sun, say # kilometers in units you can get your teeth in. Mr. Savvonavong says that we would have been all right if the first-class passengers had simply gone up one deck to second-class passenger country... which certainly would have been more comfortable than stuffing all the passengers and crew into that maximum-safety mausoleum at the center of the ship. Second class accommodations are cramped and cheerless, and as for third class I would rather be shipped as freight. But either one would be a picnic compared with spending eighteen hours in the radiation shelter. For the first time I envied the half dozen aliens aboard. They don't take shelter; they simply remain locked in their specially conditioned staterooms as usual. No, they aren't allowed to fry. Those '"-numbered rooms are almost at the center of the ship anyhow, in officers' and crew's country, and they have their own extra layer of shielding, because you can't expect a Martian, for example, to leave the pressure and humidity he requires and join us humans in the shelter. It would be equivalent to dunking him in a bath tub and holding his head under. If he had a head, I mean. Still, I suppose eighteen hours of discomfort is better than being sealed into one small room for the whole trip. A Martian can simply contemplate the subtle difference between zero and nothing for that long or longer and a Venerian just estivates. But not me. I need unrest oftener than I need rest -- or my circuits get tangled and smoke pours out of my ears. But Captain Darling couldn't know ahead of time that the storm would be short and relatively mild. He had to assume the worst and protect his passengers and crew. Eleven minutes would have been long enough for us to be in the shelter, as shown later by instrument records. But that is hindsight and a captain doesn't save his ship and the lives depending on him by hindsight. I am beginning to realize that being captain isn't all glorious adventure and being saluted and wearing four gold stripes on your shoulders. Captain Darling is younger than Daddy and yet he has worry lines that make him look years older. If you missed the first installment --  -- accept a free copy of the November # IF containing it as a gift. See special subscription offer on cover, # issues for #; November # issue." This offer good for a limited time only -- take advantage of it now, and get the November issue Free! Query: Poddy, are you sure you have what it takes to captain an explorer ship? Answer : What did Columbus have that you don't? Aside from Isabella, I mean. Semper toujours, girls! I spent a lot of time before the storm in the control room. Hermes Solar Weather Station doesn't actually warn us when the storm is coming; what they do is fail to warn us that the storm is not coming. That sounds silly but here is how it works: The weathermen at Hermes are perfectly safe, as they are underground on the dark side of Mercury. Their instruments peek cautiously over the horizon in the twilight zone. They gather data about Solar weather, including running telephotos at several wave lengths. But the Sun takes about twentyfive days to turn around, so Hermes Station can't watch all of it all the time. Worse yet, Mercury is going around the Sun in the same direction that the Sun rotates, taking eighty-eight days for one lap. So when the Sun again faces where Mercury was, Mercury has moved on. What this adds up to is that Hermes Station faces exactly the same face of the Sun about every seven weeks. Which is obviously not good enough for weather predicting storms that can gather in a day or two, peak in a few minutes, and kill you dead in seconds or less. So the Solar weather is watched from Earth's Luna and from Venus's satellite station as well, plus some help from Deimos. But there is speed-of-light lag in getting information from these more distant stations back to the main station on Mercury -- maybe fifteen minutes for Luna and as high as a thousand seconds for Deimos... not good when seconds count. But the season of bad storms is only a small part of the Sun's cycle as a variable star -- say about a year out of each six. (Real years, I mean -- Martian years. The Sun's cycle is about eleven of those Earth years that astronomers still insist on using.) That makes things a lot easier. Five years out of six a ship stands very little chance of being hit by a radiation storm. But, during the stormy season, a careful skipper (the only sort who lives to draw a pension) will plan his orbit so that he is in the worst danger zone, say inside the orbit of Earth, only during such time as Mercury lies between him and the Sun, so that Hermes Station can always warn him of coming trouble. That is exactly what Captain Darling has done. The Tricorn waited at Deimos nearly three weeks longer than the guaranteed sight-seeing time on Mars called for by the Triangle Line's advertising, in order to place his approach to Venus so that Hermes Station could observe and warn -- because we are right in the middle of the stormy season. I suppose the Line's business office hates these expensive delays -- Maybe they lose money during the stormy season. But three weeks delay is better than losing a whole shipload of passengers. But when the storm does start, radio communications goes all to pieces at once -- Hermes Station can't warn the ships in the sky. S talemate? Not quite. Hermes Station can see a storm shaping up; they can spot the conditions on the Sun which are almost certainly going to produce a radiation storm very shortly. So they send out a storm warning -- and the Tricorn and other ships hold radiation-shelter drills. Then we wait... one day, two days, or a whole week, and the storm fails to develop, or it builds up and starts shooting nasty stuff in great quantities. All during this time the spaceguard radio station on the dark side of Mercury sends a continuous storm warning, never an instant's break, giving a running account of how the weather looks on fhe Sun. -- and suddenly it stops. Maybe it's a power failure and the standby transmitter will cut in. Maybe it's just a "fade" and the storm hasn't broken yet and transmission will resume with reassuring words. But it may be that the first blast of the storm has hit Mercury with the speed of light, no last-minute warning at all, and the station's eyes are knocked out and its voice is swallowed up in enormously more powerful radiation. The officer-of-the-watch in the control room can't be sure and he dare not take a chance. The instant he loses Hermes Station he slaps a switch that starts a big clock with just a seond hand. When that clock has ticked off a certain number of seconds -- and Hermes Station is still silent -- the general alarm sounds. The exact number of seconds depends on where the ship is, how far from the Sun, how much longer it will take the first blast to reach the ship after it has already hit Hermes Station. Now here is where a captain bites his nails and gets gray hair and earns his high pay... because he has to decide how many seconds to set that clock for. Actually, if the first and worst blast is at the speed of light, he hasn't any warning time at all -- because the break in the radio signal from Hermes and that first wave front from the Sun will reach him at the same instant. Or, if the angle is unfavorable, perhaps it is his own radio reception that has been clobbered, and Hermes Station is still trying to reach him with a last-moment warning. He doesn't know. But he does know that if he sounds the alarm and chases everybody to shelter every time the radio fades for a few seconds, he will get people so worn out and disgusted from his crying "Wolf!" that when the trouble really comes they may not move fast enough. He knows, too, that the outer hull of his ship will stop almost anything in the electromagnetic spectrum. Among photons (and nothing else travels at speed-of-light) only the hardest X-radiation will get through to passenger country and not much of that. But traveling along behind, falling just a little behind each second, is the really dangerous stuff -- big particles, little particles, middle-sized particles, all the debris of nuclear explosion. This stuff is moving very fast but not quite at speed-of-light! He has to get his people safe before it hits. C aptain Darling picked a delay of twenty-five seconds, for where we were and what he expected from the weather reports. I asked him how he picked it and he just grinned without looking happy and said, "I asked my grandfather's ghost." Five times while I was in the control room the officer of the watch started the clock... and five times contact with Hermes Station was picked up again before time ran out and the switch was opened. The sixth time the seconds trickled away while all of us held our breaths... and contact with Hermes wasn't picked up again and the alarm sounded like the wakeful trump of doom. The captain looked stony-faced and turned to duck down the hatch into the radiation shelter. I didn't move, because I expected to be allowed to remain in the control room. Strictly speaking, the control room is part of the radiation shelter, since it is just above it and is enclosed by the same layers of cascade shielding. (It's amazing how many people think that a captain controls his ship by peering out a port, as if he were driving a sand wagon. But he doesn't of course. The control room is inside, where he can watch things much more accurately and conveniently by displays and instruments. The only viewport in the Tricorn is one at the top end of the main axis, to allow passengers to look out at the stars. But we have never been headed so that the mass of the ship would protect that sight-seeing room from solar radiation, so it has been locked off this whole trip.) I knew I was safe where I was, so I hung back, intending to take advantage of being "teacher's pet" -- for I certainly didn't want to spend hours or days stretched out on a shelf with gabbling and maybe hysterical women crowding me. I should have known. The captain hesitated a split second as he started down the hatch and snapped, "Come along, Miss Fries." I came. He always calls me "Poddy" -- and his voice had spank in it. Third-class passengers were already pouring in, since they have the shortest distance to go, and crew members were mustering them in their billets. The crew has been on emergency routine ever since we first were warned by Hermes Station, with their usual one watch in three replaced by four hours on and four hours off. Part of the crew had been staying dressed in radiation armor (which must be very uncomfortable) and simply hanging around passenger country. They can't take that heavy armor off for any reason at all until their reliefs show up, dressed also in armor. These crewmen are the "chasers" who bet their lives that they can check every passenger space, root out stragglers, and still reach the shelter fast enough not to accumulate radiation poisoning. They are all volunteers, and the chasers on duty when the alarm sounds get a big bonus and the other half of them who were lucky enough not to be on duty get a little bonus. T he chief officer is in charge of the first section of chasers and the purser is in charge of the second. But they don't get any bonus, even though the one of them on duty when the alarm sounds is by tradition and law the last man to enter the safety of the shelter. This hardly seems fair... but it is considered their honor as well as their duty. Other crewmen take turns in the radiation shelter and are equipped with mustering lists and billeting diagrams. Naturally service has been pretty skimpy of late, with so many of the crew pulled off their regular duties in order to do just one thing and do it fast at the first jangle of the alarm. Most of these emergency duty assignments have to be made from the stewards and clerks; engineers and communicators and such usually can't be spared. So staterooms may not be made up until late afternoon -- unless you make your own bed and tidy your room yourself, as I have been doing -- and serving meals takes about twice as long as usual, and lounge service is almost non-existent. But -- of course -- the passengers realize the necessity for this temporary mild austerity and are grateful because it is all done for their own safety... You think so? My dear, if you believe that, you will believe anything. You haven't Seen Life until you've seen a rich, elderly Earthman deprived of something he feels is his rightful due, because he figures he paid for it in the price of his ticket. I saw one man, perhaps as old as Uncle Tom and certainly old enough to know better, almost have a stroke. He turned purple, really purple, and gibbered -- all because the bar steward didn't show up on the bounce to fetch him a new deck of playing cards. The bar steward was in armor at the time and couldn't leave his assigned area, and the lounge steward was trying to be three places at once and answer stateroom rings as well. This didn't mean anything to our jolly shipmate. He was threatening to sue the Line and all its directors when his speech became incoherent. Not everybody is that way, of course. Mrs. Grew, fat as she is, has been making her own bed and she is never impatient. Some others who are ordinarily inclined to demand lots of service have lately been making a cheerful best of things. But some of them act like children with tantrums. That isn't pretty in children and is even uglier in in grandparents. The instant I followed the Captain into the radiation shelter I discovered just how efficient Tricorn service can be when it really matters. I was snatched -- snatched like a ball, right out of the air -- and passed from hand to hand. Of course I don't weigh much at one-tenth gravity, all there is at the main axis; but it is rather breath-taking. Some more hands shoved me on my billet, already stretched out, as casually and impersonally as a housewife stows clean laundry, and a voice called out, "Fries, Podkayne!" and another voice answered, "Check." T he spaces around me, and above and below and across from me, filled up awfully fast, with the crewmen working with the unhurried efficiency of automatic machinery sorting mail capsules. Somewhere a baby was crying and through it I heard the captain saying, "Is that the last?" "Last one, Captain," I heard the purser answer. "How's the time?" "Two minutes thirty-seven seconds -- and your boys can start figuring their pay-off, because this one is no drill." "I didn't think it was, Skipper -- and I've won a small bet from the mate myself." Then the purser walked past my billet, carrying someone -- and I tried to sit up and bumped my head and my eyes bugged out. The passenger he was carrying had fainted; her head lolled loosely over the crook of his arm. At first I couldn't tell who it was -- as the face was a bright red. And then I recognized her and  almost fainted. Mrs. Royer! Of course the first symptom of any bad radiation exposure is erythema. Even with a sunburn, or just carelessness with an ultra-violet lamp, the first thing you see is the skin turning pink or bright red. But was it possible that Mrs. Royer had been hit with so much sharp radiation in so very little time that her skin had already turned red in the worst "sunburn" imaginable? Just from being last man in? In that case she hadn't fainted; she was dead. And if that was true, then it was equally true that the passengers who were last to reach the shelter must all have received several times the lethal dosage. They might not feel ill for hours yet; they might not die for days. But they were just as dead as if they were already stretched out stiff and cold. How many? I had no way of guessing. Possibly -- "probably" I corrected myself -- all the first-class passengers; they had the farthest to go and were most exposed to start with. Uncle Tom and Clark -- I felt sudden sick sorrow and wished that I had not been in the control room. If my brother and Uncle Tom were dying. I didn't want to be alive myself. I don't think I wasted any sympathy on Mrs. Royer. I did feel a shock or horror when I saw that flaming red face. But, truthfully, I didn't like her. I thought she was a parasite with contemptible opinions... and, if she had died of heart failure instead, I can't honestly say that it would have affected my appetite. None of us goes around sobpeople who have died in the past... nor over those still living and yet to be born whose single certain heritage is death (including Podkayne Fries herself). So why should you cry foolish tears simply because you happen to be in the neighborhood when someone you don't like -- despise, in fact -- comes to the end of her unlovely string? I n any case, I did not have time to feel sorrow for Mrs. Royer; my heart was filled with grief over my brother and my uncle. I was sorry that I hadn't been sweeter to Uncle Tom, instead of imposing on him and expecting him always to drop whatever he was doing to help me with my silly problems. I regretted all the many times I had fought with my brother. After all, he was a child and I am a woman; I should have made allowances. Tears were welling out of my eyes and I almost missed the captain's first words: "Shipmates," he said, in a voice firm and very soothing -- "my crew and our guests aboard... this is not a drill: this is indeed a radiation storm. "Do not be alarmed. We are all, each and every one of us, perfectly safe. The surgeon has examined the personal radiation exposure meter of the very last one to reach the shelter. It is well within safe limits. Even if they were added to the accumulated exposure of the most-exposed person aboard -- who is not a passenger by the way, but one of the ship's company -- the total would still be inside the conservative maximum for personal health and genetic hygiene. "Let me say it 'again. No one has been hurt, no one is going to be hurt. We are sftnply going to suffer a mild inconvenience. I wish I could tell you how long we will have to remain here in the safety of the shelter. But I do not know. It might be a few hours, it might be several days. The longest radiation storm of record lasted less than a week. We hope that Old Sol is not bad-tempered this time. But, until we receive word from Hermes Station that the storm is over, we will have to stay inside here. Once we know a storm is over it usually does not take too long to check the ship and make sure that your usual comfortable quarters are safe. Until then... be patient and be patient with each other." I started to feel better as soon as the captain started to talk. His voice was almost hypnotic; it had the soothing all-better-now effect of a mother reassuring a child. I relaxed and was simply weak with the aftereffects of my fear. But presently I began to wonder. Would Captain Darling tell us that everything was all right when really everything was All Wrong simply because it was too late and nothing could be done about it? I thought over everything I had ever learned about radiation poisoning, from the simple hygiene they teach in kindergarten to a tape belonging to Mr. Clancy that I had scanned only that week. And I decided that the captain had been telling the truth. W hy? Because, even if my worst fears had been correct, and we had been hit as hard and unexpectedly as if a nuclear weapon had exploded by us, nevertheless something can always be done about it. There would be three groups of us -- those who hadn't been hurt at aH and were not going to die (certainly everybody who was in the control room or in the shelter when it happened, plus all or almost all the thirdclass passengers if they had moved fast), a second group so terribly exposed that they were certain to die, no matter what (let's say everybody in first-class country) -- and a third group, no telling how large, who had been dangerously exposed but could be saved by quick and drastic treatment. In which case that quick and drastic action would be going on. They would be checking our exposure meters and reshuffling us -- sorting out the ones in danger who required rapid treatment, giving morphine shots to the ones who were going to die anyhow and moving them off by themselves, stacking those of us who were safe by ourselves to keep us from getting in the way, or drafting us to help nurse the ones who could be helped. That was certain. But there was nothing going on, nothing at all -- just some babies crying and a murmur of voices. Why, they hadn't even looked at the exposure meters of most of us. It seemed likely that the surgeon had checked only the last few stragglers to reach the shelter. Therefore the captain had told us the simple, heart-warming truth. I felt so good that I forgot to wonder why Mrs. Royer had looked like a ripe tomato. I relaxed and soaked in the warm and happy fact that darling Uncle Tom wasn't going to die and that my kid brother would live to cause me lots more homey grief. I almost went to sleep --  -- and was yanked out of it by the woman on my right starting to scream: "Let me out of herel Let me out of here T Then I did see some fast and drastic emergency action. Two crewmen swarmed up to our shelf and grabbed her; a stewardess was right behind them. She slapped a gag over the woman's mouth and gave her a shot in the arm, all in one motion. Then they held her until she stopped struggling. When she was quiet, one of the crewmen picked her up and took her somewhere. Shortly thereafter a stewardess showed up who was collecting exposure meters and passing out sleeping pills. Most people took them but I resisted -- I don't like pills at best and I certainly won't take one to knock me out so that I won't know what is going on. The stewardess was insistent but I can be awful stubborn, so she shrugged and went away. After that there were three or four more cases of galloping claustrophobia or maybe just plain screaming funk; I wouldn't know. Each was taken care of promptly with no fuss and shortly the shelter was quiet except for snores, a few voices and fairly continuous sounds of babies crying. T here weren't any babies in first class and not many children of any age. Second class has quite a few kids, but third class is swarming with them and every family seems to have at least one young baby. It's why they are there, of course. Almost all of third class are Earth people emigrating to Venus. With Earth so crowded, a man with a big family can easily reach the point where emigration to Venus looks like the best way out of an impossible situation, so he signs a labor contract and Venus Corporation pays for their tickets as an advance against his wages. I suppose it's all right. They need to get away and Venus needs all the people they can get. But I'm glad Mars Republic doesn't subsidize immigration. or we would be swamped. Our immigrants have to pay their own wav. They even have to deboard, tickets they can't cash in for two of our years A good thing, too. At least a third of our immigrants who come to Mars just can't adjust. Thev get homesick and despondent and use those return tickets to go back to Earth. I can't understand anyone's not liking Mars; but if they don't then it's better if they don't stay. I lay there, thinking about such things, a little bit excited and a little bit bored, and mostly wondering why somebody didn't do something about those poor babies. The lights had been dimmed and when somebody came up to my shelf I didn't see who it was at first. "Poddy?" came Girdie's voice, softly but clearlv. "Are you in there?" "I think so What's up, Girdie?" I tried to keep mv voice down. too. "Do you know how to change a baby?" "I certainly do I" Suddenly I wondered how Duncan was doing... and realized that I hadn't really thought about him in days. Had he forgotten me? Would he know Grandmaw Poddy the next time he saw her? "Then come along, chum. There's work to be done." There certainly was. The lowest part of the shelter, four catwalks below my billet and just over the engineering spaces, was cut like a pie into four quarters -- sanitary units, two sick bays, for men and for women and both crowded -- and jammed into a little corner between the infirmaries was a sorry pretense for a nursery, not more than two meters in any dimension. On three walls of it babies were stacked high in canvas crib baskets snap-hooked to the walls, and more overflow into the women's sick bay. A sweeping majority of those babies were crying. In the crowded middle of this pandemonium two harrassed stewardesses were changing babies, working on a barelybig-enough shelf let down out of one wall. Girdie tapped one of them on the shoulder. "All right, girls, reinforcements have landed. So get some rest and a bite to eat." T he older one protested feebly, but they were awfully glad to take a break. They backed out and Girdie and I moved in and took over. I don't know how long we worked, as we didn't have time to think about it -- there was always more than wo could do and we never quite got caught up. But it was better than lying on a shelf and staring at another shelf just centimeters above your nose. The worst of it was that there simply wasn't enough room. I worked with both elbows held in close, to keep from bumping Girdie on one side and a basket crib that was nudging me on the other side. But I'm not complaining about that. The engineer who designed that shelter into the Tricorn had been forced to plan as many people as possible into the smallest space; there wasn't any other way to do it. I doubt if he worried much about getting babies changed and dry. He had enough to do just worrying about how to keep them alive. But you can't tell that to a baby. Girdie worked with an easy, nolost-motions efficiency that surprised me; I would have guessed that she had never had her hands on a baby. But she knew what she was doing and was faster than I was. "Where are their mothers?" I asked, meaning: "Why aren't those lazy slobs here helping instead of leaving it to the stewardesses and some volunteers?" Girdie understood me. "Most of them have other children to keep quiet. They have their hands full. A couple of them went to pieces themselves; they're in there sleeping it off." She jerked her head toward the sick bay. I shut up, as it made sense. You couldn't possibly take care of an infant properly in one of those shallow niches the passengers were stacked in -- and if each mother tried to bring her own baby down here each time, the traffic jam would be indescribable. Jo, this assembly-line system was necessary. I said, "We're running out of Disposies." "Stacked in a cupboard behind you. Did you see what happened to Mrs. Garcia's face?" "Huh?" I squatted and got out more supplies. "You mean Mrs. Royer, don't you?" "I mean both of them. But I saw Milady Garcia first and got a better look at her, while they were quieting her down. You didn't see her?" "No." "Sneak a look into the women's ward first chance you get. Her face is the brightest, most amazing chrome yellow I've ever seen in a paint pot, much less on a human face." I gasped. "Gracious! I did see Mrs. Royer -- bright red instead of yellow. Girdie -- what in the world happened to make them that way?" "I'm fairly sure I know what happened," Girdie answered slowly, "but no one can figure out how it happened." "I don't follow you." "The colors tell the story. Those are the exact shades of two of the water-activated dyes used in photography. Know anything about photography, hon?" "Not much," I answered. I wasn't going to admit what little I did know... because Clark is a very accomplished photographer. And I wasn't going to mention that, either! #T XTell, surely you've seen someVV one taking snapshots. You pull out the tab and there is your picture -- only there's no picture as yet. Clear as glass. So you dip it in water and slosh it around for about thirty seconds. Still no picture. Then you lay it anywhere in the light and the picture starts to show... and when the colors are bright enough to suit you, you cover it up and let it finish drying in darkness, so that the colors won't get too garish." Girdie suppressed a chuckle. "From the results, I would say that they didn't cover their faces in time to stop the process. They probably tried to scrub it off and made it worse." I said, in a puzzled tone -- and I was puzzled, about part of it: "I still don't see how it could happen." "Neither does anybody else. But the Surgeon has a theory. Somebody booby-trapped their wash cloths." "Huh?" "Somebody in the ship must have a supply of the pure dyes. That somebody soaked two wash cloths in the inactive dyes -- colorless, I mean -- and dried them carefully, all in total darkness. Then that same somebody sneaked those two prepared wash cloths into those two staterooms and substituted them for wash cloths they found there on the stateroom wash trays. That last part wouldn't be hard for anyone with cool nerves. Service in the staterooms has been pretty haphazard the last day or two, what with this flap over the radiation storm. Maybe a fresh wash cloth appears in your room, maybe it doesn't -- and all the If you missed the first installment --  -- accept a free copy of the November # If containing it as a gift.See special subscription offer on cover, # issues for #; November # issue." This offer good for a limited time only -- ship's wash cloths and towels are the same pattern. You just wouldn't know." I certainly hope not, I said to myself -- and added, aloud, "I suppose not." "Certainly not. It could be one of the stewardesses. Or any of the passengers. But the real mystery is: where did the dyes come from? The ship's shop doesn't carry them... just the rolls of prepared film... and the surgeon says that he knows enough about chemistry to be but a master chemist, using a special laboratory, could possibly separate out pure dyes from a roll of film. He thinks, too, that since the dyes aren't even manufactured on Mars, this somebody must be someone who came aboard at Earth." Girdie glanced at me and smiled. "So you're not a suspect. Poddy. But I am." "Why are you a suspect?" (And if I'm not a suspect, then my brother isn't a suspect!) "Why, that's silly!" "Yes, it is... because I wouldn't have known how even if I'd had the dyes. But it isn't... inasmuch as I could have bought them before I left Earth. And I don't have reason to like either of those women." "I've never heard you say a word against them." "No, but they've said a few thousand words about me -- and other people have ears. So I'm a hot suspect, Poddy. But don't fret about it. I didn't do it, so there is no possible way to show that I did." She chuckled. "And I hope they never catch the somebody who did!" I didn't even answer, "Me, too!" I could think of one person who might figure out a way to get pure dyes out of a roll of film, without a complete chemistry laboratory...  and I was checking quickly through my mind every item I had seen when I searched Clark's room. There hadn't been . anything in Clark's room which could have been photographic dyes. No, not even film. Which proves precisely nothing where Clark is concerned. I just hope that he was careful about fingerprints. T wo other stewardesses came in presently and we fed all the babies. Then Girdie and I managed a sort of wash-up and had a snack standing up, and then I went back up to my assigned shelf and surprised myself by falling asleep. I must have slept three or four hours, because I missed the happenings when Mrs. Dirkson had her baby. She is one of the Terran emigrants to Venus and she shouldn't have had her baby until long after we reach Venus. I suppose the excitement stirred things up. Anyhow, when she started to groan, they carried her down to that dinky infirmary and Dr. Torland took one look at her and ordered her carried up into the control room -- because the control room was the only place inside the radiation-safe space roomy enough to let him do what needed to be done. So that's where the baby was bom, on the deck of the control room, right between the chart tank and the computer. Dr. Torland and Captain Darling are godfathers and the senior stewardess is godmother and the baby's name is "Radiant," which is a poor pun but rather pretty. They jury-rigged an incubator for Radiant right there in the control room before they moved Mrs. Dirkson back to the infirmary and gave her something to make her sleep. The baby was still there when I woke up and heard about it. I decided to take a chance that the captain was feeling more mellow now, and sneaked up to the control room and stuck my head in. "Could I please see the baby?" The captain looked annoyed, then he barely smiled and said, "All right, Poddy. Take a quick look and get out." So I did. Radiant masses about a kilo and. frankly, she looks like cat meat, not worth saving. But Dr. Torland says that she is doing well and that she will grow up to be a fine, healthy girl -- prettier than I am. I suppose he knows what he is talking about, but if she is ever going to be prettier than I am, she has lots of kilometers to go. She is almost the color of Mrs. Royer and she's mostly wrinkles. But no doubt shell outgrow it, because she looks like one of the pictures toward the end of the series in a rather goody-goody school book called The Miracle of Life. The earlier pictures, in that series were even less appetizing. It is probably just as well that we can't possibly see babies until they are ready to make their debut, or the human race would lose interest and die It would probably be still better to lay eggs. Human engineering isn't all that it might be, especially for us female types. I went back down where the more mature babies were to see if they needed me. They didn't, not right then, as the babies had been fed again and a stewardess ahd a young woman I had never met were on duty and claimed that they had been working only a few minutes. I hung around anyhow, rather than go back up to my shelf. Soon I was pretending to be useful by reaching past the two who really were working and checking the babies, then handing down the ones who needed servicing as quickly as shelf space was cleared. It speeded things up a little. Presently I pulled a little wiggler out of his basket and was cuddling him. The stewardess looked up and said, "I'm ready for him." "Oh, he's not wet," I answered. "Or 'she' as the case may be. Just lonely and needs loving." "We haven't time for that." "I wonder." The worst thing about that midget nursery was the high noise level. The babies woke each other and egged each other on and the decibels were something fierce. No doubt they were all lonely and probably frightened -- I'm sure I would be. "Most of these babies need loving more than they need anything else." "They've all had their bottles." "A bottle can't cuddle." She didn't answer, but just started checking the other infants. But I didn't think what I had said was silly. A baby can't understand your words and he doesn't know where he is if you put him in a strange place, nor what has happened. So he cries. Then he needs to be soothed. Girdie showed up just then. "Can I help?" "You certainly can. Here... hold this one." In a few minutes I rounded up three girls about my age and I ran across Clark prowling around the catwalks instead of staying quietly in his assigned billet so I drafted him, too. He wasn't exactly eager to volunteer. But doing anything was slightly better than doing nothing; he came along. I couldn't use any more help as standing room was almost non-existent. We worked it only by having two baby-cuddlers sort of back into each of the infirmaries, with the mistress of ceremonies (me) standing in the little space at the bottom of the ladder, ready to scrunch in any direction to let people get in and out of, the washrooms and up and down the ladder -- and with Girdie, because she was tallest, standing back of the two at the changing shelf and dealing out babies, the loudest back to me for further assignment and the wet ones down for service -- and vice versa; dry ones back to their baskets unless they started to yell, ones that had fallen asleep from being held and cuddled likewise. At least seven babies could receive personal attention at once, and sometimes as high as ten or eleven, because at one-tenth gee your feet never get tired and a baby doesn't weigh anything at all worth mentioning; it was possible to hold one in each arm and sometimes we did. In ten minutes we had that racket quieted down to an occasional whimper, quickly soothed. I didn't think Clark would stick it out, but he did -- probably because Girdie was part of the team. With a look of grim nobility on his face the like of which I have never before seen there he cuddled babies and presently was saying, "Kitchy-koo,kitchy-koo!" and "TTiere, there, honey bun," as if he had been doing it all his life. Furthermore, the babies seemed to like him. He could soothe one down quickest of any of us. T tois went on for several hours, with volunteers moving in and tired ones moving out and positions rotating. I was relieved once and had another snatched meal and then stretched out on my shelf for about an hour before going back to duty. I was back at the changing shelf when the captain called us all by speaker: "Attention, please. In five minutes power will be cut and the ship will be in free fall while a repair is made outside the ship. All passengers strap down. All crew members observe precautions for free fall." I went right on changing the baby under my hands; you can't walk off on a baby. In the meantime babies that had been being cuddled were handed back and stowed, and the cuddling team was chased back to their shelves to strap down and spin was being taken off the ship. One rotation every twelve seconds you simply don't notice at the center of the ship -- but you do notice when the unspinning starts. The stewardess with me on the changing bench said, "Poddy, go up and strap down. Hurry." I said, "Don't be silly, Bergitta, there's work to be done," and popped the baby I had just dried into its basket and fastened the zipper. "You're a passenger. That's an order -- please " "Who's going to check all these babies? You? And how about those four in on the floor of the women's sick bay?" Bergitta looked startled and hurried to fetch them. All the other stewardesses were busy checking on strap-down; she didn't bother me any more with That's-an-order; she was too busy hooking up the changing shelf and fastening baby baskets to the space. I was checking all the others and almost all of them had been left unzipped -- logical enough while we were working with them, but zipping the cover on a baby basket is the 'same as strapping down for a grown-up. It holds them firmly but comfortably with just their heads free. I still hadn't finished when the siren sounded and the captain cut the power. Oh, brother! Pandemonium. The siren woke the babies who were asleep and scared any who were awake and every single one of those squirmy little worms started to cry at the top of its lungs... and one I hadn't zipped yet popped right out of its basket and floated right into the middle of space and I snagged it by one leg and was loose myself and the baby and I bumped gently against the baskets on one wall -- only it wasn't a wall any longer, it was just an obstacle to further progress. Free fall can be very confusing when you are not used to it, which I admit I am not. Or wasn't. The stewardess grabbed us both. She shoved the elusive little darling back into her straightjacket and zipped it while I hung onto a hand hold. And by then two more were loose. I did better this time. I snagged one without letting go and just kept it captive while Bergitta took care of the other one. Bergitta really knew how to handle herself in zero gravity, with unabrupt graceful movements like a dancer in a slowmotion solly. I made a mental note that this was a skill I must acquire. I thought the emergency was over. I was wrong. Babies don't like free fall; it frightens them. It also makes their sphincters most erratic. Most of the latter we could ignore -- but Disposes don't catch everything; regrettably some six or seven of them had been fed in the last hour. I know now why stewardesses are all graduate nurses. We kept five babies from choking to death in the next few minutes. That is, Bergitta cleared the throat of the first one that up-chucked its milk and, seeing what she had done, I worked on the second one in trouble while she grabbed the third. And so on. Then we were very busy trying to clear the air with clean Disposies because -- listen, dear, if you think you've had it tough because your baby brother threw up all over your new party dress, then you should try free fall, where it doesn't settle anywhere in particular but just floats around like smoke until you either get it or it gets you. From six babies. In a small compartment. By the time we had the mess cleaned up, or #  so, anyway, we were both mostly sour milk from hair part to ankle and the captain was warning us to stand by for acceleration, which came almost at once to my great relief. The chief stewardess showed up and was horrified that I had not strapped down. I told her in a ladylike way to go to hell, using a more polite idiom suitable to my age and sex -- and asked her what Captain Darling would think about a baby passenger choking to death simply because I had strapped dojvn all regulation-like and according to orders? And Bergitta backed me up and told her that I had cleared choke from at least two and maybe more -- she had been too busy to count. Mrs. Peal, the C.S., changed her tune in a hurry and was sorry and thanked me. She sighed and wiped her forehead and trembled and you could see that she was dead on her feet. But nevertheless she checked all the babies herself and hurried out. Pretty quickly we were relieved. Bergitta and I crowded into the women's washroom and tried to clean up some -- not much good as we didn't have any clean clothes to change into. The "All Clear" felt like a reprieve from purgatory. A hot bath was heaven itself, with the angels singing. "A" deck had already been checked for radiation level and pronounced safe while the repair outside the ship was being made. The repair itself, I learned, was routine. Some of the antennas and receptors and things outside the ship can't take a flare storm. They burn out, so immediately after a storm men go outside in armored space suits and replace them. This is normal and unavoidable, like replacing lighting tubes at home. But the men who do If you missed the first installment --  -- accept a free copy of the November # If containing it as a gift. See special subscription offer on cover, # issues for #; November # issue." This offer good for a limited time only -- it get the same radiation bonus that the passenger chasers get -- because Old Sol could burn them down with one tiny little afterthought. I soaked in warm, clean water and thought how miserable an eighteen hours it had been. Then I decided that it hadn't been so bad after all. It's lots better to be miserable than to be bored. IX I am now twenty-seven years old. Venus years, of course, but it sounds so much better. All is relative. Not that I would stay here on Venus even if guaranteed the Perfect Age for a thousand years. Venusberg is sort of an organized nervous breakdown and the country outside the city is even worse. What little I've seen of it. And I don't want to see much of it. Why they ever named this dreary, smog-ridden place for the Goddess of Love and Beauty I'll never know. This planet appears to have been put together from the scrap left over after the rest of the Solar System was finished. I don't think I would go outside Venusberg at all except that I've just got to see fairies in flight. The only one I've seen so far is in the lobby of the hilton we are staying in and is stuffed. Actually I'm just marking time until we shape for Earth, because Venus is a Grave Disappointment. Now I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Earth will not be a G.D., too. But I don't see how it can be. There is something deliciously primitive about the very thought of a planet where one can go outdoors without any special preparations. Why, Uncle Tom tells me that there are places along the Mediterranean (that's an ocean in La Belle France) where the natives bathe in the ocean itself without any clothing of any sort at all, much less insulasuits or masks. I wouldn't like that. Not that I'm body proud; I enjoy a good sauna sweat-out as well as the next Marsman. But it would scare me crosseyed to bathe in an ocean. I don't ever intend to get wet all over in anything larger than a bath tub. I saw a man fished out of the Grand Canal once, in early spring. They had to thaw him before they could cremate him. But it is alleged that, along the Mediterranean shore, the air in the summer time is often blood temperature and the water not much cooler. As may be. Podkayne is not going to take any silly chances. Nevertheless I am terribly eager to see Earth, in all its fantastic unlikeliness. It occurs to me that my most vivid conceptions of Earth come from the Oz stories. When you come right down to it I suppose that isn't too reliable a source. I mean, Dorothy's conversations with the Wizard are instructive -- but about what? When I was a child I believed every word of my Oz tapes... but now I am no longer a child and I do not truly suppose that a whirlwind is a reliable means of transportation, nor that one is likely to encounter a Tin Woodman on a road of yellow brick. Tik-Tok, yes -- because we really do have Tik-Toks in Marsopolis for the simpler and more tedious work. Not precisely like Tik-Tok of Oz, of course, and not called "Tik-Toks" by anyone but children... but near enough, near enough, quite sufficient to show that the Oz stories are founded on fact, if not precisely historical. And I believe in the Hungry Tiger, too, in the most practical way possible, because there was one in the municipal zoo when I was a child, a gift from the Calcutta Kiwanis Klub to Marsopolis Kiwanians. It always looked at me as if it were sizing me up as an appetizer. It died when I was about five. I didn't know whether to be sorry or glad. It was so beautiful... and so very Hungry. But Earth is still many weeks away and, in the meantime, Venus does have some points of interests for the newcomer, such as I. I n traveling I strongly recommend traveling with my Uncle Tom. On arriving here there were no silly waits in "Hospitality" (!) rooms; we were given the "courtesy of the port" at once -- to the extreme # chagrin of Mrs. Royer. "Courtesy of the port" means that your baggage isn't examined and that nobody bothers to look at that bulky mass of documents -- passport and health record and security clearance and solvency proof and birth certificate and I.D.s and nineteen other silly forms. Instead we were whisked from satellite station to space port in the private yacht of the Chairman of the Board and were met there by the chairman himself! -- and popped into his Rolls and wafted royally to Hilton Tannhauser. We were invited to stay at his official residence (his "cottage," that being the Venus word for a palace) but I don't think he really expected us to accept because Uncle Tom just cocked his left or satirical eyebrow and, "Mr. Chairman, I don't think you would want me to appear to be bribed even if you manage," he said. And the chairman didn't seem offended at all He just chuckled till his belly shook like Saint Nicholas (whom he strongly resembles even to the beard and the red cheeks although his eyes are cold even when he laughs, which is frequently.) "Senator," he said, "you know me better than that. My attempt to bribe you will be much more subtle. Perhaps through this young lady. Miss Podkayne, are you fond of jewelry?" I told him honestly that I wasn't, very, because I always lose it. So he blinked and said to Clark, "How about you, son?" Clark said, "I prefer cash." The chairman blinked again and said nothing. Nor had he said anything to his driver when Uncle Tom declined the offer of his roof; nevertheless we flew straight to our hilton -- which is why I don't think he ever expected us to stay with him. But I am beginning to realize that this is not entirely a pleasure trip for Uncle Tom... and to grasp emotionally a fact known only intellectually in the past, i.e., Uncle Tom is not merely the best pinochle player in Marsopolis, he sometimes plays other games for higher stakes. I must confess that the what or why ties outside my admittedly youthful horizon -- save that everyone knows that the Three-Planets Conference is coming up Query: Could U.T. conceivably be involved in this? As a consultant or something? I hope not. as it might keep him tied up for weeks on Luna. I have no wish to waste time on a dreary ball of slag while the Wonders of Terra await me -- and Uncle Tom just might be difficult about letting me go down to Earth without him. But I wish still more strongly that Clark had not answered the chairman truthfully. Still, Clark would not sell out his own uncle for more money. On the other hand, Clark does not regard money as "mere." I must think about this -- But it is some comfort to realize that anyone who handed Clark a bribe would find that Clark had not only taken the bribe but the hand. P ossibly our suite at the Tannhauser is intended as a bribe, too. Are we paying for it? I'm almost afraid to ask Uncle Tom, but I do know this: the servants that come with it won't accept tips. Not any. Although I very carefully studied up on the subject of tipping, both for Venus and Earth, so that I would know what to do when the time came -- and it had been my understanding that anyone on Venus always accepts tips, even ushers in churches and bank tellers. But not the servants assigned to us. I have two tiny little amber dolls, identical twins, who shadow me and would bathe me if I would let them. They speak Portuguese but not Ortho -- and at present mv Portuguese is limited to "Gobble-Gobble" (which means "Thank you") and I have trouble explaining to them that I can dress and undress myself and I'm not too sure about their names. They both answer to "Maria." Or at least I don't think they speak Ortho. I must think about this, too. Venus is officially bilingual, Ortho and Portuguese, but I'll bet I heard at least twenty other languages the first hour we were down. German sounds like a man being choked to death, French sounds like a cat fight, while Spanish sounds like molasses gurgling gently out of a jug. Cantonese -- Well, think of a man trying to vocalize Bach who doesn't like Bach very much to start with. Fortunately almost everybody understands Ortho as well. Except Maria and Maria. If true. I could live a long time without the luxury of personal maids but I must admit that this hilton suite is quite a treat to a plain-living wholesome Mars girl, namelv me. Especially as I am in it quite a lot of the time and will be for a while vet. The ship's surgeon. Dr. Torland, gave me many of the special inoculations needed for Venus on the trip here -- an unpleasant subject I chose not to mention -- but there still remain many more before it will be safe for me to go outside the city, or even very much into the city. As soon as we reached our suite a phvsician appeared and played chess on my back with scratches, red to move and mate in fiye moves. Three hours later I had several tens of welts, with something horrid that must be done about each of them Clark ducked out and didn't get his scratch tests until the next morning. I misdoubt he will die of Purple Itch or some such, were it not that his karma is so clearly reserving him for hanging. Uncle Tom refused the tests. He was through all this routine more than twenty years ago and anyhow he claims that the too, too mortal flesh is merely a figment of the imagination. So I am more or less limited for a few days to lavish living here in the Tannhauser. If I go out I must wear gloves and a mask even in the city. But one whole wall of the suite's salon becomes a stereo stage simply by voice request, either taped or piped live from any theater or club in Venusberg -- and some of the "entertainment" has widened my sophistication unbelievably, especially when Uncle Tom is not around. I am beginning to realize that Mars is an essentially puritanical culture. Of course Venus doesn't actually have laws, just company regulations, none of which seem to be concerned with personal conduct. But I had been brought up to believe that Mars Republic is a free society. I suppose it is. However, there is "freedom" and "freedom." H ere the Venus Corporation owns everything worth owning and runs everything that shows a profit, all in a fashion that would make Marsmen swoon. But I guess Venusmen would swoon at how straitlaced we are. I know this Mars girl blushed for the first time in I don't know when and switched off a show that I didn't really believe. But the solly screen is far from being the only astonishing feature of this suite. It is so big that one ?# should carry food and water when exploring it and the salon is so huge that local storms appear distinctly possible. My private bath is a suite in itself, with so many gadgets in it that I ought to have an advanced degree in engineering before risking washing my hands. But I've learned how to use them all and purely love them! I had never dreamed that I had been limping along all my life without Utter Necessities. Up to now my top ambition along these lines has been not to have to share a wash stand with Clark because it has never been safe to reach for my own Christmas-present cologne without checking to see that it is not nitric acid or worse. Clark regards a bathroom as an auxiliary chemistry lab; he's not much interested in staying clean. But the most astonishing thing in our suite is the piano. No, no, dear, I don't mean a keyboard hooked into the sound system; I mean a real piano. Three legs. Made out of wood. Enormous. That odd awkward-graceful curved shape that doesn't fit anything else and can't be put in a corner. A top that opens up and lets you see that it really does have a harp inside and very complex machinery for making it work. I think that there are just four real pianos on all of Mars, the one in the Museum that nobody plays and probably doesn't work, the one in Lowell Academy that no longer has a harp inside it, just wiring connections that make it really the same as any other piano, the one in the Rose House (as if any President ever had time to play a piano!), and the one in the Beaux Arts Hall that actually is played sometimes by visiting artists although I've never heard it. I don't think there can be another one, or it would have been bannerlined in the news, wouldn't you think?  This one was made by a man named Steinway and it must have taken him a lifetime. I played Chopsticks on it (that being the best opus in my limited repertoire) until Uncle asked me to stop. Then I closed it up, keyboard and top, because I had seen Clark eyeing the machinery inside, and warned him sweetly but firmly that if he touched one finger to it I would break all his fingers while he was asleep. He wasn't listening but he knows I mean it. That piano is Sacred to the Muses and is not to be taken apart by our Young Archimedes. I don't care what the electronics engineers say. There is a vast difference between a "piano" and a real piano. No matter if their silly oscilloscopes "prove" that the sound is identical. It is like the difference between being warmly clothed -- or climbing up in your Daddy's lap and getting really warm. I haven't been under house arrest all the time. I've been to the casinos, with Girdie and with Dexter Cunha, Dexter being the son of Mr. Chairman of the Board Kurt Cunha. Girdie is leaving us here, going to stay on Venus, and it makes me sad. I asked her, "Why?" We were sitting alone in our palatial salon Girdie is staying in this same hilton, in a room not very different nor much larger than her cabin in the Tricorn. I guess I'm just mean enough that I wanted her to see the swank we were enjoying. But my excuse was to have her help me dress. For now I am wearing (Shudder?) support garments. Arch supports in my shoes and tight things here and here intended to keep me from spreading out like an amoeba. I won't say what Clark calls them because Clark is rude, crude, unrefined, and barbaric. I hate them. But, at # of one standard gee I need them despite all that exercise I took aboard ship. This alone is reason enough not to live on Venus, or on Earth, even if they were as delightful as Mars. Girdie did help me -- she had bought them for me in the first place -- but she also made me change my makeup, one which I had most carefully copied out of the latest issue of Aphrodite. She looked at me and said, "Go wash your face. Poddv Then we'll start over." I pouted out my lip and said, "Won't?" The one thing I had noticed most and quickest was that every female on Venus wears paint like a Red Indian shooting at the Good Guys in the sollies. Even Maria and Maria wear three times as much makeup just to work in as Mother wears to a formal reception -- and Mother doesn't wear any when working. "Poddy, Poddy? Be a good girl." "I am being a good girl. It's polite to do things the way the local people do them, I learned that when I was just a child. And look at yourself in the mirror?" Girdie was wearing as high-styled a Venusberg face-do as any in that magazine. "I know what I look like. But I am more than twice your age and no one even suspects me of being young and sweet and innocent. Always be what you are, Poddy. Never pretend. Look at Mrs. Grew. She's a comfortable fat old woman. She isn't kittenish, she's just nice to be around." "You want me to look like a hick tourist?" "I want you to look like Poddy. Come, dear, we'll find a happy medium. I grant you that even the girls your age here wear more makeup than grown-up women do on Mars -- so we'll compromise Instead of painting you like a Venusberg trollop, we'll make you a young lady of good family and gentle breeding, one who is widely traveled and used to all sorts of customs and manners -- and so calmly sure of herself that she knows what is best for her... , totally uninfluenced by local fads." Girdie is an artist, I must admit. She started with a blank canvas and worked on me for more than an hour When she got through, you couldn't see that I was wearing any makeup at all. B ut here is what you could see: I was at least two years older (real years. Mars years, or about six Venus years); my face was thinner and my nose not pug at all and I looked ever so slightly world-weary in a sweet and tolerant way. My eyes were enormous. "Satisfied?" she asked. "I'm beautiful !" "Yes, you are. Because you are still Poddy. All I've done is make a picture of Poddy the way she is going to be. Before long." My eyes filled with tears and we had to blot them up very hastily and she repaired the damage. "Now," she said briskly, "all we need is a club. And your mask." "What's the club for? And I won't wear a mask, not on top of this." "The club is to beat off wealthy stockholders who will throw themselves at your feet. And you will wear your mask, or else we won't go" We compromised. I wore the mask until we got there and Girdie promised to repair any damage to my face -- and promised that she would coach me as many times as necessary until I could put on that lovely, lying face myself. The casinos are safe, or supposed to be. The air is not merely filtered and conditioned but freshly regenerated, free of any trace of pollen, virus, colloidal suspension or whatever. This is because lots of tourists don't like to take all the long list of immunizations necessary actually to live on Venus... but the Corporation wouldn't think of letting a tourist get away unbled. So the hiltons are safe and the casinos are safe and a tourist can buy a health insurance policy from the Corporation for a very modest premium. Then he finds that he can cash his policy back in for gambling chips any time he wants to. I understand that the Corporation hasn't had to pay off on one of those policies very often. Venusberg assaults the eye and ear even from inside a taxi. I believe in free enterprise; all Marsmen do, it's an article of faith and the main reason we won't federate with Earth (and be outvoted five hundred to one). But free enterprise is not enough excuse to blare in your ears and glare in your eyes every time you leave your own roof. The shops never close (I don't think anything ever closes, in Venusberg) and full color and stereo ads climb right inside your taxi and sit in your lap and shout in your ear. Don't ask me how this horrid illusion is produced. The engineer who invented it probably flew off on his own broom. This red devil about a meter high appeared between us and the partition separating us from the driver (there wasn't a sign of a solly receiver) and started jabbing at us with a pitchfork. "Get the HiHo Habit!" it shrieked. "Everybody drinks Hi-Ho! Soothing, Habit-Forming, T)ee-lishus! Get High with HiHo!" I shrank back against the cushions. Girdie phoned the driver. "Please shut that thing off." It faded down to just a pink ghost and the commercial dropped to a whisper while the driver answered, "Can't, Madam. They rent the concession." Devil and noise came back on full blast. And I learned something about tipping. Girdie took money from her purse, displaying one note. Nothing happened and she added a second; noise and image faded down again. She passed them through a slot to the driver and we weren't bothered any more. Oh, the transparent ghost of the red devil remained and a nagging whisper of his voice, until both were replaced by another ad just as faint -- but we could talk. The giant ads in the street outside were noisier and more dazzling; I didn't see how the driver could see or hear to drive, especially as traffic was unbelievably thick and heart-stoppingly fast and frantic and our driver kept cutting in and out of lanes and up and down in levels as if he were trying utmostly to beat Death to a hospital. By the time we slammed to a stop on the roof of Dom Pedro Casino I figure Death wasn't more than a half a lap behind. I learned later why they drive like that. The hackie is an employe of the Corporation, like most everybody -- but he is an "enterprise-employe," not on wages. Each day he has to take in a certain amount in fares to "make his nut" -- the corporation gets all of this. After he has rolled up that fixed number of paid kilometers, he splits the take with the Cprporation on all other fares the rest of the day. So he drives like ipad to pay off the nut as fast as possible and start making some money himself. Then he keeps on driving fast because he's got to get his while the getting is good. Uncle Tom says that most people on Earth have much the same deal, except it's done by the year and they call it income tax. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree -- Dom Pedro Casino is like that. Lavish. Beautiful. Exotic. The arch this may well be true. However, all Girdie and I visited were the gaming rooms. I never saw so much money in my whole life! A sign outside the gambling sector read: All Games Are Honest All Games Have A House Percentage So Come On In and Have Fun --  (While We Prove It) Checks Accepted. All Credit Cards Honored. Free Breakfast and a Ride to your Hilton when You Go Broke. Your Host, Dom Pedro I said, "Girdie, there really is somebody named Dom Pedro?" She shrugged. "He's an employe and that's not his real name. But he does look like an emperor. I'll point him out. You can meet him if you like and he'll kiss your hand. If you like that sort of thing. Come on." She headed for the roulette tables while I tried to see everything at once. It was like being on the inside of a kaleidoscope. People beautifully dressed (employes mostly, people dressed every sort of way, from formal evening wear to sports shorts (tourists mostly), bright lights, staccato music, click and tinkle and shuffle and snap, rich hangings, armed guards in comic opera uniforms, trays of drinks and food, nervous excitement, and money -- I stopped suddenly, so Girdie stopped. My brother Clark. Seated at a crescent-shaped table at which a beautiful lady was dealing cards. In front of him several tall stacks of chips and an imposing pile of paper money. I should not have been startled. If you think that a six-year-old boy (or eighteen-year-old if you use their years) wouldn't be allowed to gamble in Venusberg, then you haven't been to Venus. Never mind what we do in Marsopolis, here there are just two requirements to gamble: (a) you have to be alive; (b) you have to have money. You don't have to be able to talk Portuguese nor Ortho, nor any known language. As long as you can nod, wink, grunt or flip a tendril, they'll take your bet. And your shirt. No, I shouldn't have been surprised. Clark heads straight for money the way ions head for an electrode. Now I knew where he had ducked out to the first night and where he had been most of the time since. I went up and tapped him on the shoulder. He didn't look around at once but a man popped up out of the rug like a genie from a lamp and had me by the arm. Clark said to the dealer, "Hit me," and looked around. "Hi, Sis. It's all right, Joe, she's my sister." "Okay?" the man said doubtfully, still holding my arm. "Sure, sure. She's harmless. Sis, this is Josie Mendoza, company cop, on lease to me for tonight. Hi, Girdie!" Clark's voice was suddenly enthusiastic. But he remembered to say, "Joe, slip into my seat and watch the stuff. Girdie, this is swell! You gonna play blackjack? You can have my seat." (It must be love, dears. Or a high fever.) She explained that she was about to play roulette. "Want me to come help?" he said eagerly. "I'm pretty good on the wheel, too." She explained to him gently that she did not want help because she was working on a system, and promised to see him later in the evening. Girdie is unbelievably patient with Clark. I would have -- Come to think of it, she's unbelievably patient with me. If Girdie has a system for roulette, it didn't show. We found two stools together and she tried to give me a few chips. I didn't want to gamble and told her so, and she explained that I would have to stand up if I didn't. Considering what # gee does to my poor feet I bought a few chips of my own and did just what she did, which was to place minimum bets on the colors, or on odd or even. This way you don't win, you don't lose -- except that once in a long while the little ball lands on zero and you lose a chip permanently (that "house percentage" the sign warned against). The croupier could see what we were doing but we actually were gambling and inside the rules. He didn't object. I discovered almost at once that the trays of food circulating and the drinks were absolutely free -- to anyone who was gambling. Girdie had a glass of wine. I don't touch alcoholic drinks even on birthdays and I certainly wasn't going to drink Hi-Ho, after that obnoxious ad -- but I ate two or three sandwiches, and asked for and got -- they had to go get it -- a glass of milk. I tipped the amount I saw Girdie tip. W e had been there over an hour and I was maybe three or four chips ahead when I happened to sit up straight -- and knocked a glass out of the hand of a man standing behind me, all over him, some over me. "Oh, dear!" I said, jumping down from my stool and trying to dab off the wet spots on him with my kerchief. "I'm terribly sorry!" He bowed. "No harm done to me. Merely soda water. But I fear my clumsiness has ruined milady's gown." Out of one corner of her mouth Girdie said, "Watch it, kid!" but I answered, "This dress? Huh-uh! If that was just water, there won't be a wrinkle or a spot in ten minute. Nothing but travel clothes." "You are a visitor to our city? Then permit me to introduce myself less informally than by soaking you to the skin." He whipped out a card. Girdie was looking grim but I rather liked his looks. He was actually not impossibly older than I am (I guessed at twelve Mars years, or say thirty-six of his own -- and it turned out he was only thirtytwo), dressed in the very elegant Venus evening wear, with cape and stick and formal ruff... and the cutest little waxed moustaches. The card read: Dexter Kurt Cunha, Stk. I read it, then reread it, then said, "Dexter Kurt Cunha. Are you any relation to -- " "My father." "Why, I know your father!" -- and put out my hand. Ever had your hand kissed? It makes chill bumps that race up your arm across your shoulders and down the other arm -- and of course nobody would ever do it on Mars. This is a distinct shortcoming in our planet and one I intend to correct, even if I have to bribe Clark to institute the custom. By the time we had names straight Dexter was urging us to share a bite of supper and some dancing with him in the roof garden. But Girdie was balky. "Mr. Cunha," she said, "that is a very handsome calling card. But I am responsible for Podkayne to her uncle, and I would rather see your I.D." For a split second he looked chilly. Then he smiled warmly at her and said, "I can do better," and held up one hand. T l he most imposing old gentleman I have ever seen hurried over. From the medals on his chest I would say that he had wop every spelling contest from first grade on. His bearing was kingly and his costume unbelievable. "Yes, Stockholder?" "Dorn Pedro, will you please identify me to these ladies?" "With pleasure, sir." So Dexter was really Dexter and I got my hand kissed again. Dom Pedro does it with a great flourish but it didn't have quite the same effect. I don't think he puts his heart into it the way Dexter does. Girdie insisted on stopping to collect Clark -- and Clark suffered an awful moment of spontaneous schizophrenia, for he was still winning. But love won out and Girdie went up on Clark's arm, with Josie trailing us with the loot. I must say I admire my brother in some ways. Spending cash money to protect his winnings must have caused even deeper conflict in his soul, if any, than leaving the game while he was winning. The roof garden is the Brasilia Room and is even more magnificent than the casino proper, with a nightsky roof to match its name, stars and the Milky Way and the Southern Cross such as nobody ever in history actually saw from anywhere on Venus. Tourists were lined up behind a velvet rope waiting to get in. But not us. It was, "This way, if you please, Stockholder," to an elevated table right by the floor and across from the orchestra. We danced and we ate foods I've never heard of and I let a glass of champagne be poured for me but didn't try to drink it because the bubbles go up my nose -- and wished for a glass of milk or at least a glass of water because some of the food was quite spicy, but didn't ask for it. But Dexter leaned over me and said, "Poddy, my spies tell me that you like milk." "I do!" "So do I. But I'm too shy to order it unless I have somebody to back me up." He raised a finger and two glasses of milk appeared instantly. But I noticed that he hardly touched his. However I did not realize I had been hoaxed until later. A singer, part of the floor show, a tall handsome dark girl dressed as a gypsy -- if gypsies did ever dress that way, which I doubt, but she was billed as "Romany Rose" -- toured the ringside tables singing topical verses to a popular song. She stopped in front of us, looked right at me and smiled, struck a couple of chords and sang: "Poddy Fries came to town. Pretty, winsome Poddy -- Silver shoes and sky blue gown, Lovely darling Podkayne -- "She has sailed the starry sea, Pour another toddy! Lucky Dexter, lucky we! Drink a toast to Poddy!" And everybody clapped and Clark pounded on the table and Romany Rose curtseyed to me and I started to cry and covered my face with my hands and suddenly remembered that I mustn't cry because of my makeup and dabbed at my eyes with my napkin and hoped I hadn't ruined it, and suddenly silver .buckets with champagne appeared all over that big room and everybody did drink a toast to me, standing up when Dexter stood up in a sudden silence brought on by a roll of drums. I was speechless and just barely knew enough to stay seated myself and nod and try to smile when he looked at me --  -- and he broke his glass, just like story tapes, and everybody imitated him and for a while there was crash and tinkle all over the room, and I felt like Ozma just after she stops being Tip and is Ozma again and I had to remember my makeup very hard indeed! Later on, after I had gulped my stomach back into place and could stand up without trembling, I danced with Dexter again. He is a dreamy dancer -- a firm, sure lead without ever turning it into a wrestling match. During a waltz I said, "Dexter? You spilled that glass of soda water. On purpose." "Yes. How did you know?" "Because it is a sky blue dress -- or the color that is called 'sky blue, for Earth, although I've never seen a sky this color. And my shoes are silvered. So it couldn't have been an accident. Any of it." He just grinned, not a bit ashamed. "Only a little of it. I went first to your hilton. It took almost half an hour to find out who had taken you where and I was furious, because Papa would have been most vexed. But I found you." I chewed that over and didn't like the ta-ste. "Then you did it because your Daddy told you to. Told you to entertain me because I'm Uncle Tom's niece." "No, Poddy." "Huh? Better check through the circuits again. That's how the numbers read." "No, Poddy. Papa would never order me to entertain a lady -- other than formally, at our cottage -- lady on my arm at dinner, that sort of thing. What he did do was show me a picture of you and ask me if I wanted to. And I decided I did want to. But it wasn't a very good picture of you, didn't do you justice. Just one snapped by one of the servants of the Tannhauser when you didn't know it -- (I decided I had to find some way to get rid of Maria and Maria, a girl needs privacy. Although this hadn't turned out too dry.) But he was sill talking. -- and when I did find you I almost didn't recognize you, you were so much more dazzling than the photograph. I almost shied off from introducing myself. Then I got the wonderful idea of turning it into an accident. I stood behind you with that glass of soda water almost against your elbow for so long the bubbles all went out of it -- and when you did move you bumped me so gently I had to slop it over myself to make it enough of an accident to let me be properly apologetic." He grinned most disarmingly. "I see," I said. "But, look, Dexter, the photograph was probably a very good one. This isn't my own face." I explained what Girdie had done. H e shrugged. "Then some day wash it for me and let me look at the real Poddy. I'll bet I'll recognize her. Look, dear, the accident was only half fake, too. We're even." "What do you mean?" "They named me 'Dexter' for my maternal grandfather, before they found out I was left-handed. Then it was a case of either renaming me 'Sinister,' which doesn't sound too well -- or changing me over to righthanded. But that didn't work out either. It just made me the clumsiest man on three planets -- " (This while twirling me through a figure eight!) knocking things over. You can follow me by the sound of fractured frangibles. The problem was not to cause an accident, but to keep from instant." He grinned that impish grin. "I feel very triumphant about it. But forcing me out of left-handedness did something else to me too. It's made me a natural-born rebel -- You take the if out of gift if you give if this year IF Has become more and more a factor in the science fiction field. The line-up for # already includes such authors as -- Clifford Simak, Robert A. Heinlein, Fred Pohl, Hal Clement, Keith Laumer and many more of your favorites, that are certainly favorites of the person you plan to give this most welcome gift. A special card will announce your gift to the lucky recipient and each issue will remind him of your thoughtfulness. (These special low prices are good until December #th) (# issues) S# additional # Q #st Subscription  or Subscription  IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Name Address... Add ress City State City State I year # years Price I year # years Price Sign Card Sign Card Name Address City State I year .I # years Price Sign Card Name Address City State I year # years Price Sign Card Name Address City I year... Sign Card . State...Price... Name Address. City State I year # years Price... Sign Card # years and I think you are one, too." "I certainly am. I am expected to be Chairman of the Board someday, like my papa and my grandpapa. But I shan't. I'm going to space." "Oh! So am I!" We stopped dancing and chattered about spacing. Dexter intends to be an explorer captain just like me. Only I didn't quite admit that my plans for spacing included pilot and master; it is never well in dealing with a male to let him know that you think you can do whatever it is he can do best or wants to do most. But Dexter intends to go to Cambridge and study paramagnetics and Davis mechanics and be ready when the first true star ships are ready. Goodness! "Poddy, maybe we'll even do it together. Lots of billets for women in star ships." I agreed that that was so. "But let's talk about you. Poddy, it wasn't that you looked so much better than your picture." "No?" (I felt vaguely disappointed.) "No. Look. I know your background, I know you've lived all your life in Marsopolis. Me, I've been everywhere. Sent to Earth for school, took the Grand Tour while I was there, been to Luna, of course, and all over Venus -- and to Mars. When you were a little girl. I wish I had met you then." "Thank you." (I was beginning to feel like a poor relation.) "So I know exactly what a honkytonk town Venusberg is... and what a shock it is to people the first time. Especially anyone reared in a gentle and civilized place like Marsopolis. Oh, I love my home town but I know what it is -- I've been other places. Poddy? Look at me, Poddy. The thing that impressed me about you was your aplomb." "Me?" "Your amazing and perfect savoirfaire... under conditions I knew were strange to you. Your uncle has been everywhere, and Girdie, I take it, has been, too. But lots of strangers here, older women, become quite giddy when first exposed to the fleshpots of Venusberg. But you carry yourself like a queen." (This man I liked! Definitely. After years and years of "Beat it, runt!" it does something to a woman to be told she has savoir-faire. I didn't even stop to wonder if he told all the girls that -- I didn't want to!) W e didn't stay much longer. Girdie made it plain that I had to get my "beauty sleep." So Clark went back to his game (Jose appeared out of nowhere at the right time -- and I thought of telling Clark he had better git fer home, too, but I decided that wasn't "savoir-faire" and anyhow he wouldn't have listened) and Dexter took us to the Tannhauser in his Papa's Rolls (or maybe his own, I don't know) and bowed over our hands and kissed them as he left us. I was wondering if he would try to kiss me good night and had made up my mind to be cooperative about it. But he didn't try. Maybe it's not a Venusberg custom, I don't know. Girdie went up with me because I wanted to chatter. I bounced myself on a couch and said, "Oh, Girdie, it's been the most wonderful night of my life!" "It hasn't been a bad night for me," she said quietly. "It certainly can't hurt me to have met the son of the Chairman of the Board." It was then that she told me that she was staying on Venus. "But, Girdie -- why? "Because I'm broke, dear. I need a job." "You? But you're rich. Everybody knows that." She smiled. "I was rich, dear. But my last husband went through it all. He was an optimistic man and excellent company. But not nearly the businessman he thought he was. So now Girdie must gird her loins and get to work. Venusberg is better than Earth for that. Back home I could either be a parasite on my old friends until they got sick of me -- the chronic house guest. Or get one of them to give me a job that would really be charity, since I don't know anything. Or disappear into the lower depths and change my name. Here, nobody cares and there is always work for anyone who wants to work. I don't drink and I don't gamble. Venusberg is made to order for me." "But what will you do? It was hard to imagine her as anything but the rich society girl whose parties and pranks were known even on Mars. "Croupier, I hope. They make the highest wages... and I've been studying it. I've been practicing dealing, too -- for blackjack, or faro, or chemin de fer. But I'll probably have to start as a change girl." "Change girls? Girdie, would you dress that way?" She shrugged. "My figure is still good... and I'm quite quick at counting money. It's honest work, Poddy. It has to be. Those change girls often have as much as ten thousand on their trays." I decided I had fubbed and shut up. I guess you can take the girl out of Marsopolis but you cap't quite take Marsopolis out of the girl. Those change girls practically don't wear anything but the trays they carry money on. But it certainly was honest work and Girdie has a figure that had all the junior officers in the Tricorn running in circles and dropping one wing. I'm sure she could have married any of the bachelors and insured her old age thereby with no effort. Isn't it more honest to work? And, if so, why shouldn't she capitalize her assets? She kissed me goodnight soon after and ordered me to go right to bed and to sleep. Which I did -- all but sleep. Well, she wouldn't be a change girl long; she'd be a croupier in a beautiful evening gown... and saving her wages and her tips and someday she would be a stockholder, one share anyway, which is all anybody needs for old age in the Venus Corporation. And I would come back and visit her when I was famous. I wondered if I could ask Dexter to put in a good word for her to Dom Pedro? Then I thought about Dexter -- I know this can't be love; I was in love once and it feels entirely different. It hurts. This just feels grand. X I hear that Clark has been negotiating to sell me (black market, of course) to one of the concessionaires who ship wives out to contract colonists in the bush. Or so they say. I do not know the truth. But There Are Rumors. What infuriates me is that he is said to be offering me at a ridiculously low price! But in truth it is this very fact that convinces me that it is just a rumor, carefully planted by Clark himself, to annoy me -- because, while I would not put it past Clark to sell me into what is tantamount to chattel slavery and a Life of Shame if he could get away with it, nevertheless he would wring out of the sordid transaction every penny the traffic would bear. This is certain. It is much more likely that he is suffering a severe emotional reaction from having opened up and become almost human with me the other night -- and therefore found it necessary to counteract it with this rumor in order to restore our relations to their normal, healthy, cold-war status. Actually I don't think he could get away with it, even on the black market, because I don't have any contract with the Corporation. Even if he forged one, I could always manage to get a message to Dexter, and Clark knows this. Girdie tells me that the black market in wives lies mostly in change girls or clerks or hilton chambermaids who haven't managed to snag husbands in Venusburg (where men are in short supbeing sold out back (where wonien are scarce) in order to jump their contracts. They don't sqiiawk and the Corporation overlooks the matter. Most of the bartered brides, of course, are single women among the immigrants, right off a ship. The concessionaires pay their fare and squeeze whatever cumshaw they can out of the women themselves and the miners or ranchers to whom their contracts are assigned. All Kosher. Not that I understand it. I don't understand anything about how this planet really works. No laws, just Corporate regulations. Want to get married? Find somebody who claims to be a priest or a preacher and have any ceremony you like -- but it hasn't any legal standing because it is not a contract with the Corporation. Want a divorce? Pack your clothes and get out, leaving a note or not as you see fit. Illegitimacy? They've never heard of it. A baby is a baby and the Corporation won't let one want, because that baby will grow up and be an employe and Venus has a chronic labor shortage. Polygamy? Polandry? Who cares? The Corporation doesn't. Bodily assault? Don't try it in Venusberg. It is the most thoroughly policed city in the system -- violent crime is bad for business. I don't wander around alone in some parts of Marsopolis, couth as my home town is, because some of the old sand rats are a bit sun struck and not really responsible. But I'm perfectly safe alone anywhere in Venusberg. The only assault I risk is from super-salesmanship. (The bush is another matter. Not the people so much, but Venus itself is lethal -- and there is always a chance of encountering a Venerian who has gotten hold of a grain of happy dust. Even the little wingety fairies are bloodthirsty if they sniff happy dust.) Murder? This is a very serious violation of regulations. You'll have your pay checked for years and years and years to offset both that employe's earning power for what would have been his working life... and his putative value to the Corporation, all calculated by the company's actuaries who are widely known to have no hearts at all, just liquid helium pumps. anybody on Venus, don't do it! Lure him to a planet where murder is a social matter and all they do is hang you or something. No future in it on Venus. There are three classes of people on Venus: stockholders, employes and a large middle ground. Stockholder-employes (Girdie's ambition), enterprise employes (taxi drivers, ranchers, prospectors, some retailers, etc.) -- and of course future employes, children still being educated. And there are tourists. But tourists aren't people. They have more the status of steers in a cattle pen -- valuable assets to be treated with great consideration but no pity. A person from out-planet can be a tourist for an hour or a lifetime -- just as long as his money holds. No visa, no rules of any sort, everybody welcome -- but you must have a return ticket and you can't cash it in until after you sign a contract with the Corporation. If you do. I wouldn't. I still don't understand how the system works even though Uncle Tom has been very patient in explaining. But he says he doesn't understand it either. He calls it "corporate fascism" -- which explains nothing -- and says that he can't make up his mind whether it is the grimmest tyranny the human race has ever known... or the most perfect democracy in history. He says that nothing here is as bad in many ways as the conditions over # of the people on Earth endure -- and that it isn't even as bad in creature comforts and standards of living as lots of people on Mars, especially the sand rats, even though we never knowingly let anyone starve for lack of medical attention. I Just Don't Know. I can see now that all my life I have simply taken for granted the way we do things on Mars. Oh. sure, I learned about other systems in school -- but it didn't soak in. Now I am beginning to grasp emotionally that There Are Other Ways Than Ours... and that people can be happy under them. Take Girdie. I can see why she didn't want to stay on Barth, not the way things had changed for her. But she could have stayed on Mars; she's just the sort of high class immigrant we want. But Mars didn't tempt her at all. This bothered me because (as you may have gathered) I think Mars is just about perfect. And I think Girdie is just about perfect. Yet a horrible place like Venusberg is what she picked. She says it is a Challenge. Furthermore Uncle Tom says that she is Dead Right; Girdie will have Venusberg eating out of her hand in two shakes and be a stockholder before you can say Extra Dividend. I guess she's right. I felt awfully sorry for Girdie when I found out she was broke. "I wept that I had no shoes -- till I met a man who had no feet." Like that, I mean. I've never been broke, never missed any meals, never worried about the future -- yet I used to feel sorry for Poddy when money was a little tight around home and I couldn't have a new party dress. Then I found out that the rich and glamorous Miss FitzSnugglie (I still won't use her right name, it wouldn't be fair) had only her ticket back to Earth and had borrowed the money for that. I was so sorry it hurt. B ut now I'm beginning to realize that Girdie has her "feet" no matter what, and will always land on them. She has indeed been a change girl, for two whole nights -- and asked me, please, to see to it that Clark did not go to Dom Pedro Casino those nights. I don't think she cared at all whether or not I saw her... but she knows what a horrible case of puppy love Clark has on her and she's just so sweet and good all through that she did not want to risk making it worse andor shocking him. But she's a dealer now and taking lessons for croupier, and Clark goes there every night. But she won't let him play at her table. She told him point blank that he could know her socially or professionally, but not both -- and Clark never argues with the inevitable. He plays at some other table and tags her around whenever possible. Do you suppose that my kid brother actually does possess psionic powers? I know he's not a telepath, else he would have cut my throat long since. But he is still winning. Dexter assures me that (a) the games are absolutely honest, and (b) that no one can possibly beat them, not in the long run, because the house collects its percentage no matter what. "Certainly you can win. Poddy," he assured me. "One tourist came here last year and took it happily -- and advertised it all over Earth -- and still made money the very week he struck it rich. Don't you even suspect that we are giving your brother a break. If he keeps it up long enough, we will not only win it all back but take every buck he started with. If he's as smart as you say he is, he'll quit while he's ahead. But most people aren't that smart -- and Venus Corporation never gambles on anything but a sure thing." Again, I don't know. But it was both Girdie and winning that caused Clark to become almost human with me. For a while. It was last week, the night I met Dexter -- and Girdie told me to go to bed and I did but I couldn't sleep. I left my door open so that I could hear Clark come in -- or if I didn't, phone somebody and have him chased home because, while Uncle Tom is responsible for both of us, I'm responsible for Clark and always have been. I wanted Clark to be home and in bed before Uncle Tom got up. Habit, I guess. He did come sneaking in about two hours after I did and I psst'd to him and he came into my room. You never saw a six-year-old boy with so much money! Josie had seen him to our door, so he said. Don't ask me why he didn't put it in the Tannhauser's vault. Or do ask me. I think he wanted to fondle it. He certainly wanted to boast. He laid it out in stacks on my bed, counting it and making sure that I knew how much it was. He even shoved a pile toward me. "Need some. Poddy? I won't even charge you interest. Plenty more where this came from."  I was breathless. Not the money, I didn't need any money. But the offer. There had been times in the past when Clark has lent me money against my allowance -- and charged me exactly # interest come allowance day. Till Daddy caught and spanked us both. So I thanked him most sincerely and hugged him. Then he said, "Sis, how old would you say Girdie is?" I began to understand his offthe-curve behavior. "I really couldn't guess," I answered carefully. (Didn't need to guess. I knew.) "Why don't you ask her?" "I did. She just smiled at me and said that women don't have birthdays." "Probably an Earth custom," I told him and let it go at that. "Clark, how in the world did you win so much money?" "Nothing to it," he said. "All those games, somebody wins, somebody loses. I just make sure I'm one who wins." "But how?" He just grinned his worst grin. "How much money did you start with?" He suddenly looked guarded. But he was still amazingly mellow, for Clark, so I pushed ahead. I said, "Look, if I know you, you can't get all your fun out of it unless somebody knows, and you're safer telling me than anyone else. Because I've never told on you yet. Now have I?" He admitted that this was true by not answering. It is true. When he was small enough, I used to clip him one occasionally. But I never tattled on him. Lately clipping him has become entirely too dangerous; he can give me a fat lip quicker than I can give him one. But I've never tattled on him. "Loosen up," I urged him. "I'm the only one you dare boast to. How much were you paid to sneak those three kilos into the Tricorn in my baggage?" He looked very smug. "Enough." "Okay, I won't pry any further about that. But what was it you smuggled? You've had me utterly baffled." "You would have found it if you hadn't been so silly anxious to explore the ship. Poddy, you're stupid. You know that, don't you? You're as predictable as the law of gravity. I can Ob: ays outguess you." I didn't get mad. If Clark gets you sore, he's got you. "Guess maybe," I admitted. "Are you going to tell me what it was? Not happy dust, I hope?" "Oh, no!" he said and looked shocked. "You know what they do to you for happy dust around here? They turn you over to natives who are hopped up with it, that's what they do -- and then they don't even have to bother to cremate you." I shuddered and returned to the subject. "Going to tell me?" "Mmm..." "I swear by Saint Podkayne Not to Tell." This is my own private oath, nobody else would or could use it. "Better not," he warned me. "You won't like it." "By Saint Podkayne!" (and I should have kept my lip zipped.) "Okay," he said. "But you swore it. A bomb." "A what?" "Oh, not much of a bomb. Just a little squeezer job. Total destruction not more than a kilometer. Nothing much." To Be Concluded i ' k k'kt'k'k'k ickick' kk'kkkkkkkkk'ktrk'k'ktkk ' k'k'k'k'ki'Akkkkk kkkkkkrW  K K  Kr( K K K r 't(  K K  K In the First Issue -- People of the Sea by Arthur C. Clarke Third Planet by Murray Leinster To See The Invisible Man by Robert Silverberg The Long Remembered Thunder by Keith Laumer -- and many more in this big first issue. IF # Short Story by David Mason T he highway stretched away in ruler-straight perspective toward both horizon's, black and shining in the sun like a river of ink. Beside it, the bright pastel buildings of Rest Stop # stood among the green trees. Occasionally a car shot past, a flash of metal and a hiss of split wind; but the road was one which was used more often at night, and was nearly empty in the afternoon. Sam was the only attendant on duty. Stop # needed only two human attendants, even at its busiest hours. He  sat, staring out at the highway, his elbows on the lunch counter, his round face blank, but his mouth set tightly. The phone at his elbow emitted a small grunting noise. "You still there?" the phone voice said inquiringly. It was like any other car on the road. It was automatic, self-contained -- and eternal! "Yeah." Sam said, still staring at the highway. "Well... " The voice paused. "Look, it might not come your way. It usually turns west at the New Britain intersection." "Not always." Sam said. "It went by here once before." "It almost never stops, anyway," the voice said firmly. "It won't stop." "Some times it does," Sam said. "It doesn't have to." Sam shrugged and said nothing. "Okay, then," the voice said. "I called you about it, anyway." "Thanks." Sam turned away, still watching the road. Far off a speck of metal gleamed, growing larger. The distant high sound of brakes began, as a car decelerated, coming toward the Stop. It was just an ordinary car, Sam told himself. That other car was still hundreds of miles away. But his hands were damp as he watched it grow larger. It was an ordinary Talman sedan, with two people in it. It swung into the Stop's parking area, and its doors slid open smoothly. A small red light flashed on its arched front. The repair signal. In response the doors of the Repair shop opened. The Talman waited, as a man and a woman emerged from its padded interior and moved slowly into the Repair shop. The doors closed behind it. The couple came toward the restaurant, where Sam stood waiting. "Hi," the man said to Sam. "Afternoon." Sam moved to the counter. "Something to eat while you're waiting, folks?" The tall, dark girl glanced out at the closed doors of the Repair shop. "How long's that car going to take?" she asked in a tired voice. "I wanted to get home tonight." "Not long," Sam said. "It didn't look like anything complicated." "How can you tell?" the man asked, sitting down. "It could take all night." "Like something to eat while you're waiting?" Sam asked. The woman stared at the lunch racks critically. "I never like these places to eat in," the woman said, curling her lip. "You never know how long the food's been stored in the robot." "Oh, hell, Grace," the man said wearily. To Sam he gave an apologetic shrug. "Just coffee." "Well, you don't know," the woman insisted. "I mean..." She watched Sam drawing the coffee into a cup. "I used to cook a lot, by hand, till Jack had the autokitchen put in. He never had any stomach trouble till then. It's getting so everything's... oh, I don't know. It's all out of reach. You don't know what's happening any more. Like the car." "I wish I knew what she's talking about half the time." Jack said, blowing on his coffee. Sam leaned on the counter, looking past the couple toward the empty road. "I know what the lady means," Sam said, almost to himself. "You get to thinking... well, I can remember when people used to drive their own cars. Themselves. Steering and everything, except on the biggest highways. And everything got done with people. People made things, and cooked food, and grew plants. Everybody was busy all the time. It was better then." The man called Jack shrugged. "Sure, sure. Everybody always talks about the good old days. But I don't see many of 'em going to live in the woods. Like Grace -- she says she doesn't like the autokitchen, but she uses it." "It saves time," Grace said. I guess I will have coffee, too, mister." "It saves time, she says," Jack said. "For what? She's got too much time now." "I wonder what it must have been like in the old days, here," Grace said vaguely, staring around the lunchroom. "Everybody running in and out. All the drivers -- trucks, with men in them, the way you read about it in the historical novels. Men that drove their own cars, in all kinds of weather... gee." "Just like on TV," Sam said, grinning. "I hope we get the car out of there pretty soon," Jack said anxiously. He glanced out toward the silent garage. "I always wonder what would happen if the machinery stuck, or something. How would you ever get your car out?" "It doesn't get stuck," Sam said. A peculiar look crossed his face as he added, "Not any more." "Did it ever?" Sam shrugged. "Oh, well, you know twenty or thirty years ago all this automatic stuff wasn't quite so good as it is now. Cars, repair shops... things went wrong, sometimes. Like... like the Traveler." "The Traveler?" The woman looked up. "Oh, that's just a ghost story. Like the Flying Dutchman. Isn't it?" The lunchroom was completely silent. Sam was no longer paying any attention to the couple sitting at the counter. He was close to the big window, standing stiffly, feet apart, like an admiral on a ship's bridge, his eyes studying the empty horizon. There, where the lines of the road met with the precision of a drawing-board exercise in perspective, he thought he saw a fleck of light. "It isn't when it goes past," Sam said, in a quiet tight voice. He talked at the window, his back to the other two, his words meant mostly for himself. "It's not its going by. That doesn't bother me," he repeated. "It came by my old place five or six times, I remember. That's why I finally asked to be transferred out here, where it hardly ever goes by. But I could have gotten used to it. I mean, you don't have to look at it, or anything. It's just another car. Old, sure, but there's no difference. A car goes by, that's all. Only..." "You mean it's real?" the woman asked, in a low voice. Her husband's eyes were looking out, toward the empty road, following Sam's look. "The Traveler," he said, without looking at his wife. "Sure, it's real. Why'd you think they don't make that model of car any more? It's real. I knew somebody who saw it, once." "There might even be two or three Travelers," Sam said, watching the distant glitter of light. There was certainly a car coming. Just a car... although it was still too far away to tell for sure. "A haunted car!" the woman said, her eyes wider. "Gee!" "It isn't a haunted car," her husband said. "It's just one of the earliest makes of automatic highway cars. Everything automatic, steering, destination set... just like any car is, nowadays. Only it wasn't quite perfect, somehow." "They got into their car," Sam said, his eyes picking out distant, microscopic details. The high flaring fins, the double headlamps...  lit up, although it was broad daylight on the road. He knew what the rest would be. It was moving so slowly. But it always moved slowly, barely thirty miles an hour. As if somebody wanted you to look and see... "They just got in, the way anybody would do," Sam said. "They set a destination, and the windows closed up, and the airconditioner went on, and the car went out on the road." "Only it never got there," the other man said. "Wherever it was going to go." "But..." the woman looked puzzled. "Wouldn't anybody stop it? I mean, wouldn't it run out of fuel, or... well, how did the people in it get out?" "It does just what any car does," her husband told her. "It gets fuel when it needs it. You can't just stop a robot control device. Not till it's good and ready." "But the people in it," she said. "They'd starve, or something..." The car called the Traveler, rolling at the stately thirty miles an hour it always held, was coming down the road now, and the two men stood, watching. The woman, a little behind them, watched too, her face growing whiter. No one said anything as the old fashioned car rolled by, straight and steady down the highway, holding the center of the lane as sharply as it always did. There was a film of dust inside the windows, though the Traveler was clean and shining outside. But the film did hide the white bone faces, the despairing hands that had long ago stopped trying to break through those closed windows. "They never did get out," the man named Jack said, as the Traveler rolled on, growing smaller along the endless road. "I don't mind it when it goes past," Sam said, his voice thinner edged. "I really don't. It's just a car. Things like that used to happen. I mean, it's a car. Even when it stops to get gas, I don't have to pay any attention." He looked at the couple, his mouth loose. "As long as it just goes on. That's all right. But I keep thinking some day it'll stop. And the door will open. And maybe... maybe they'll want lunch." He giggled uncontrollably, and then choked it back. Outside, the big hangar doors of the repair shop opened. The car that had been inside appeared; it moved out and stopped, its doors open invitingly. "Your car's ready now," Sam told the couple. "So long, folks.  ir    IF  Short Story by Fred Saherhagen Huge as an island, mighty as a squadron of dreadnaughts, old as time, the ship of the aliens was out to destroy them! T he machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and a hundred like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar. One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular machine had already done just that. It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy's territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some longlived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic. Men called it a berserker. D el Murray, sometime computer specialist, had called it other names than that; but right now he was too busy to waste breath, as he moved in staggering lunges around the little cabin of his one-man fighter, plugging in replacement units for equipment damaged by the last near-miss of a small berserker missile. An animal resembling a large dog with an ape's forelegs moved about the cabin too, carrying in its nearly human hands a supply of emergency sealing patches. The cabin air was full of haze. Wherever movement of the haze showed a leak f # to an unpressurized part of the hull, the dog-ape moved to skillfully apply a patch. "Hello, Foxglove!" the man shouted, hoping his radio was again in working order. "Hello, Murray, this is Foxglove," said a sudden loud voice in the cabin. "How far did you get?" Del was too weary to show much relief that his communications were open again. "I'll let you know in a minute. At least it's stopped shooting at me for a while. Move, Newton." The alien animal, pet and ally, called an axyan , moved away from the man's feet and kept single-mindedly looking for leaks. After another minute's work Del could strap his body into the deepcushioned command chair again, with something like an operational panel before him. That last nearmiss had sprayed the whole cabin with fine penetrating splinters. It was remarkable that man and aiyan had come through unwounded. His radar working again, Del could say: "I'm about ninety miles out from it. Foxglove. On the opposite side from you." His present position was what he had been trying to achieve since the battle had begun. The two Earth ships and the berserker were half a light year from the nearest sun. The berserker could not leap out of normal space, toward the defenseless colonies on the planets of that sun, while the two ships stayed close to it. There were only two men aboard Foxglove. Though they had more machinery working for them than did Del, both manned ships were mites compared to their opponent. If a berserker machine like this one, not much smaller in cross-section than New Jersey, had drifted in a century earlier and found men crowded on one planet, there could have been no real struggle and no human survivors. Now, though the impersonal enemy swarmed through the galaxy, men could rise up in a cloud to meet them. Del's radar showecl him an ancient ruin of metal, spread out for a hundred miles before him. Men had blown holes in it the size of Manhattan Island, and melted puddles of slag as big as lakes upon its surface. But the berserker's power was still enormous. So far no man had fought it and survived. Now, it could squash Del's little ship like a mosquito; it was wasting its unpredictable subtlety on him. Yet there was a special taste of terror in the very indifference of it. Men could never frighten this enemy, as it frightened them. Earth men's tactics, worked out from bitter experience against other berserkers, called for a simultaneous attack by three ships. Foxglove and Murray made two. A third was supposedly on the way, but still about eight hours distant, moving at Cplus velocity, outside of normal space and so out of communication with the others. Until it arrived, Foxglove and Murray must hold the berserker at bay, while it brooded unguessable schemes. It might attack either ship at any ' moment, or it might seek to disen: gage. It might wait hours for them to make the first move -- though it would certainly fight if the men attacked it. It had learned the language of Earth -- it might try to talk with them. But always, ultimately, it would seek to destroy them and every other living thing it met. That was the basic command given it by the ancient warlords. A thousand years ago, it would have easily swept ships of the type that now opposed it from its path, whether they carried fusion missiles or not. Now, it was no doubt in some electrical way conscious of its own weakening by accumulated damage. And perhaps in long centuries of fighting its way across the galaxy it had learned to be wary. N ow, quite suddenly, Del's detectors showed forcefields forming in behind his ship. Like the encircling arms of a great bear they blocked his path away from the enemy. He waited for some deadly blow, with his hand trembling over the red button that would salvo his atomic missiles at the berserker -- but if he attacked alone, or even with Foxglove, the infernal machine would parry their missiles, crush their ships and go on to destroy another helpless planet. Three ships were needed to attack. The red firing button was now only a last desperate resort. Del was reporting the forcefields to Foxglove when he felt the first hint in his mind of another attack. "Newton!" he called sharply, leaving the mike to Foxglove open. They would hear and understand what was going to happen. The aiyan bounded instantly from its combat couch to stand before Del as if hypnotized, all attention riveted on the man. Del sometimes bragged: "Show Newton a drawing of different colored lights, convince him it represents a particular control panel, and he'll push buttons or whatever you tell, him, until the real panel matches the drawing." But no aiyan had the human ability to learn and to create on an abstract level; which was why Del was now going to put Newton in command of his ship. He switched off the ship's computers -- they were going to be as useless as his own brain, under the attack he felt gathering -- and said to Newton: "Situation Zombie." The animal responded instantly as it had been trained, seizing Del's hands with firm insistence, and dragging them one at a time down beside the command chair to where the fetters had been installed. Hard experience had taught men something about the berserkers' mind weapon, although its principles of operation were still unknown. It was slow in its onslaught, and its effects could not be steadily maintained for more than about two hours, after which a berserker was evidently forced to turn it off for an equal time. But while in effect, it robbed any human or electronic brain of the ability to plan or to predict -- and left it unconscious of its own incapacity. It seemed to De) that all this had happened before, maybe more than once. Newton, that funny fellow, had gone too far with his pranks; he had abandoned the little boxes of colored beads that were his favorite toys, and was moving the controls around at the lighted panel. Unwilling to share the fun with Del, he had tied the man to his chair somehow. Such behavior was really intolerable, especially when there was supposed to be a battle in progress. Del tried to pull his hands free, and called to Newton. Newton whined earnestly and stayed at the panel. "Newt, you dog. Come, lemme loose. I know what I have to say: Four score and seven... hey, Newt, where're your toys? Lemme see your pretty beads." There were hundreds of tiny boxes of the varicolored beads, leftover trade goods that Newton loved to sort out and handle. Del peered around the cabin, chuckling a little at his own cleverness. He would get Newton distracted by the beads, and then... the vague idea faded into other crackbrained grotesqueries. Newton whined now and then but stayed at the panel moving controls in the long sequence he had been taught, taking the ship through the feinting, evasive maneuvers that might fool a berserker into thinking that it was still competently manned. Newton never put a hand near the big red button. Only if he felt deadly pain himself, or found a dead man in Del's chair, would he reach for that. "Ah, roger, Murray," said the radio from time to time, as if acknowledging a message. Sometimes Foxglove added a few words or numbers that might have meant something. Del wondered what the talking was about. At last he understood that Foxglove was trying to help maintain the illusion that there was still a competent brain in charge of Del's ship. The fear-reaction came when he began to realize that he had once again lived through the effect of the mind-weapon. The brooding berserker, half genius, half idiot, had forborne to press the attack when success would have been certain. Perhaps deceived, perhaps following the strategy that avoided predictability at almost any cost. "Newton." The animal turned, hearing a change in his voice. Now Del could say the words that would tell Newton it was safe to set his master free, a sequence too long for anyone under the mindweapon to recite. " -- shall not perish from the Earth," he finished. With a yelp of joy Newton pulled the fetters from Del's hands. Del turned instantly to the radio. # # Tj' ffect has evidently been turned ' off. Foxglove," said Del's voice through the speaker in the cabin of the larger ship. The Commander let out a sigh. "He's back in control!" The Second Officer -- there was no Third -- said: "That means we've got some kind of fighting chance, for the next two hours. I say let's attack now!" The Commander shook his head, slowly but without hesitation. "With two ships, we don't have any real chance. Less than four hours until Gizmo gets here. We have to stall until then, if we want to win." "It'll attack the next time it gets Del's mind scrambled! I don't think we fooled it for a minute... we're out of range of the mindbeam here, but Del can't withdraw now. And we can't expect that aiyan to fight his ship for him. We'll really have no chance, with Del gone." The Commander's eyes moved ceaselessly over his panel. "We'll wait. We can't be sure it'll attack within -- " The berserker spoke suddenly, its radioed voice plain in the cabins of both ships: "I have a proposition for you, little ship." Its voice had a cracking, adolescent quality, because it strung together words and syllables recorded from the voice of human prisoners of both sexes and different ages, from whom it had learned the language. There was no reason to think they had been kept alive after that. "Well?" Del's voice sounded tough and carpable by comparison. "I have invented a game which we will play," it said. "If you play well enough, I will not kill you right away." "Now I've heard everything," murmured the Second Officer. After three thoughtful seconds the Commander slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. "It means to test his learning ability, to run a continuous check on his brain while it turns up the power of the mindbeam and tries different modulations. If it can make sure the mindbeam is working, it'll attack instantly. I'll bet my life on it. That's the game it's playing this time." "I will think over your proposition," said Del's voice coolly. "Very well," answered the berserker. The Commander said: "It's in no hurry to start. It won't be able to turn on the mindbeam again for almost two hours." "But we need another two hours beyond that." Del's voice said: "Describe the game you want to play." "It is a simplified version of the human game called checkers." The Commander and the Second looked at each other, neither able to imagine Newton able to play checkers. Nor could they doubt that Newton's failure would kill them within a few hours, and leave another planet open to destruction. After a minute's silence, Del's voice asked: "What'll we use for a board?" "We will radio our moves to one another," said the berserker equably. It went on to describe a checkerslike game, played on a smaller board with less than the normal number of pieces. There was nothing very profound about it; but of course playing would seem to require a functional brain, human or electronic, able to plan and to predict "If I agree to play," said Del slowly, "how'll we decide who gets to move first?" "He's trying to stall," said the Commatjder, gnawing a thumbnail. "We won't be able to offer any ad vice, with that thing listening. Oh. stay sharp, Del boy!" "To simplify matters," said the berserker. "I will move first in every game." D el could look forward to another hour free of the mind-weapon when he finished rigging the checker board When the pegged pieces were moved, appropriate signals would be radioed to the berserker; lighted squares on the board would show him where its pieces were moved. If it spoke to him while the mindweapon was on. Del's voice would answer from a tape, which he had stocked with vaguely agressive phrases, such as: "Get on with the game " or "Do you want to give up now?" He hadn't told the enemy how far along he was with his preparations because he was still busy with something the enemy must not know -- the system that was going to enable Newton to play a game of simplified checkers Del gave a soundless little laugh as he worked, and glanced over to where Newton was lounging on his couch, clutching toys in his hands as it he drew some comfort from them. This scheme was going to push the aian near the limit of his ability, but Del saw no reason why it should fail Del had completely analyzed the miniature checker-game, and diagrammed every position that Newton could possibly face -- playing only even-numbered moves, thank the random berserker for that specification! -- on small cards. Del had discarded some lines of play that would lead from some poor early moves by Newton, further simplifying his job. Now, on, a card showing each possible remaining position, Del indicated the best possible move with a drawn-in arrow. Now he could quickly teach Newton to play the game by looking at the appropriate card and making the move shown by the arrow. The system was not perfect, but -- "Oh, oh," said Del, as his hands stopped working and he stared into space. Newton whined at the tone in his voice. Once Dal had sat at one board in a simultaneous chess exhibition, one of sixty players opposing the world champion, Blankenship. Del had held his own into the middle game. Then, when the great man paused again opposite his board, Del had shoved a pawn forward, thinking he had reached an unassailable position and could begin a counterattack. Blankenship had moved a rook to an innocent-looking square and strolled on to the next board -- and then Del had seen the checkmate coming at him, four moves away but one move too late for him to do anything about it. T he Commander suddenly said a foul phrase in a loud distinct voice. Such conduct was extremely rare, and the Second Officer looked around in surprise. "What?" "I think we've had it." The Commander paused. "I hoped that Murray could set up some kind of system over there, so that Newton could play the game -- or appear to be playing it. But it won't work. Whatever system Newton plays by rote will always have him thinking the same move in the same position. It may be a perfect system -- but a man doesn't play any game that way, damn it. He makes mistakes, he changes strategy. Even in a game this simple there'll be room for that. Most of all, a man learns a game as he plays it He gets better as he goes along. That's what'll give Newton away, and that's what our bandit wants. It's probably heard about aiyans. Now as soon as it can be sure it's facing a dumb animal over there, and not a man or computer." After a little while the Second Officer said: "I'm getting signals of their moves. They've begun play. Maybe we should've rigged up a board so we could follow along with the game." "We better just be ready to go at it when the time comes." The Commander looked hopelessly at his salvo button, and then at the clock that showed two hours must pass before Gizmo could reasonably be hoped for. Soon the Second Officer said: "That seems to be the end of the first game; Del lost it, if I'm reading their scoreboard signal right." He paused. "Sir, here's that signal we picked up the last time it turned the mindbeam on. Del must be starting to get it again." There was nothing for the Commander to say. The two men waited silently for the enemy's attack, hoping only that they could damage it in the seconds before it would overwhelm them and kill them. "He's playing the second game," said the Second Officer, puzzled. "And I just heard him say 'Let's get on with it.'" "His voice could be recorded. He must have made some plan of play for Newton to follow; but it won't fool the berserker for long. It can't." Time crept unmeasurably past them. The Second said: "He's lost the first four games. But he's not making the same moves every time. I wish we'd made a board..." "Shut up about the board I We'd be watching it instead of the panel. Now stay alert, Mister." After what seemed a long time, the Second said: "Well, I'll be!" "What?" "Our side got a draw in that game." "Then the beam can't be on him. Are you sure..." "It is! Look, here, the same indication we got last time. It's been on him the better part of an hour now, and getting stronger." The Commander stared in disbelief; but he knew and trusted his Second's ability. And the panel indications were convincing. He said: "Then someone -- or something -- with no functioning mind is learning how to play a game, over there. Ha, ha," he added, as if trying to remember how to laugh. T ie berserker won another game Another draw. Another win tor the enemy. Then three drawn games In a row. Once the Second Officer heard Del's voice ask coolly: "Do you want to give up now?" On the next move he lost another game. But the following game ended in another draw. Del was plainly taking more time than his opponent to move, but not enough to make the enemy impatient. "It's trying different modulations on the mindbeam," said the Second. "And it's got the power turned way up." "Yeah," said the Commander. Several times he had almost tried to radio Del, to say something that might keep the man's spirits up -- and also to relieve his own feverish inactivity, and try to find out what could possibly be happening now. But be could not take the chance. Any interference might upset the miracle. He could not believe the inexplicable success could last, even when the checker match turned gradually into an endless succession of drawn games between two perfect players. Hours ago the Commander had said good-by to life and hope, and he stiir waited for the fatal moment. And he waited. " -- not perish from the Earth!" said Del Murray, and Newton's eager hands flew to loose his right arm from its shackle. A game, unfinished on the little board before him, had been abandoned seconds earlier. The mindbeam had been turned off at the same time, when Gizmo had burst into normal space right in position and only five minutes late; and the berserker had been forced to turn all its energies to meet the immediate all-out attack of Gizmo and Foxglove. Del saw his computers, recovering from the effect of the beam, lock his aiming screen onto the berserker's scarred and bulging midsection, as he shot his right arm forward, scattering pieces from the game board. "Checkmate!" he roared out hoarsely, and brought his fist down on the big red button. # #Tm glad it didn't want to play I chess," Del said later, talking to Commander in Foxglove's cabin. "I could never have rigged that up." The ports were cleared now, and the men could look out at the cloud of expanding gas, still faintly luminous, that had been a berserker; metal firepurged of the legacy of ancient evil. But the Commander was watching Del. "You got Newt to play by following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?" Del grinned. "He couldn't. But his toys could. Now wait before you slug me." He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal's hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of one possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-colored arrow indicating each possible move of Del's pieces." "It took a couple hundred of these boxes," said Del. "This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking -- that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way," said Del, demonstrating. "Ah, this one's blue. That means, make the move indicated on the corner by a blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position. See?" Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. "No orange beads left; there were six of each color when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly." "Well," said the Commander. He thought for a moment, then reached down to scratch Newton behind the ears. "I never would have come up with that idea." "I should have thought of if sooner. The basic idea's a couple of centuries old. And computers are supposed to be my business." "This could be a big thing," said the commander. "I mean your basic idea might be useful to any task force that has to face a berserker's mindbeam." "Yeah." Del grew reflective. "Also..." "What?" "I was thinking of a guy I met once. Named Blankenship. I wonder if I could rig something up... " to # -- # issues. # LY # to # -- # tssues. # # to # -- #I issues. # elettes and shorts (most unavailable otherwise) taken from All-Story. Argosy, Blue Book, Cosmopolitan, etc., going back to the #s; authors Include Burroughs, Taine, Kline, England, Rousseau, Leinster, Gardner, Merritt. Smith, Cook and others. All # volumes # Single volume  # #I #th Ave. Brooklyn #, N.T.      IF  Novelette of the By Gary Wright illustrated by Giunta Sail down the wind, Kali! Victory waits across the seas -- and so does death! J ohn Ward, God Helper, hung in his chair like a damp, empty uniform. An open, four-foot port showed a circle of blazing blue sky and a regular glimpse of a high, curving topsail. The humid, hot salty flavor of a strange sea blanketed the cabin, and sparked a sudden thought: "What the hell am I doing here?" There was no prompt answer. The wind rushed and moaned. The roiling water crashed and hissed under the stern. The following ship heaved its topsail into sight again, and withdrew it. A lilting chant drifted like smoke on the wind. We .ride the wind down like sleek, skimming birds. The seething foam furrows follow true . The sky is clouded with our singing sails. We ride the wind down , down the wind . He was Comet Colonel John Ward, Terran Confederation, Earth; he was certain of that. Age? Fortytwo, more or less. Specialty? Historical Naval Tactician. If you had to call it something you might as well call it that. Hobby? Sailing. But, God, Snipes and Lightnings aren't ships-of-the-line! Reading? Well... lyric poetry and ancient history, if you must know. Present Occupation? God Helper. No, call that Commander Advisor to the Kali, Aqua. Future? Oh, hell-yes; right up the... Wide shouldered, wave exploding, trim twin-hulled we come . First , the sky tall , fine firstliners. Then the seconds, flanking fast. Lean and level slide the frigates. All around us flash the corvettes. Ride the wind down, Kali seamen, down the wind to AndeKe. Six months ago he had a future all outlined, but six months ago he was a shining God Helper, come in glory. Now he was simply a God Helper, and sometimes oot even that. We are the Kali The fortunate ones. Yes ! Heirs to our wind and water world. Like our ships we are tall and proud. Like our wind we are wild and restless. Like our sea we are strong and savage. This is our world , wide and lonely. Ride the wind down , Kali brothers , down the wind to Anda Ke. S ix months on this barely discovered, one per cent land area, behind-the-galaxy planet, with piercing Conferedation insight: Aqua. Where the land was scattered about like pepper on an egg, and even the wind tried to run backwards Down the wind at Anda-Ke -- there is trouble. There we meet the stupid Grim nal. There the challenging, groveling Grimnal. He wilt plead for his wives and children. Ana, as proper Kali seamen , We will keep them soft and happy. After, we send their men away , Under the hungry gray-green water; Under the wind as we ride the wind down , down the wind to victory. And here he still was, trying to show some life-loving, song-singing, battle-mad, contrary-thinking, conceived of leather and salt spray fivefoot humanoids how to fight a sea war. And that was really quite a joke. The Kali and the Grimnal had been at this for a hundred years, and doing quite well. They were in no danger of getting overpopulated for one thing, and had evolved a dual power political system over the entire planet before the invention of an explosive. But now, being newly discovered by bigger and better dual powers. they were being shown how to fight in a bigger and better way. Only the Grimnal seemed to be learning, however. Oh, the Kali listened, and even followed directions, but they seemed incapable of understanding that slamming two corvettes upwind into the guns of eight firstliners was simply not good military tactics. They had a game. Something like Tag in reverse. One man was It, and everyone on ship tried to catch him. He could go anywhere, do anything, even cut the rigging as long as it didn't endanger the ship. The more daring he. was, the better. Ward had watched one make a hundred and fifty foot dive from a skysail yard with the ship making about twenty knots in a heavy sea. How do you go about explaining caution to a people like that? B ut he had to. Somehow. Since the big boys had taken sides the Kali had been losing. Or, more accurately, Ward had been losing. Alt the Gods are busy Beings . We know. But even They have noticed now , Ward's wandering mind snapped back. This was a new verse. And sent a sky man down to help us; Sent a Helper down to lead us. But the ways of Gods are strange. The Grimnal leaps from isle to island , While the Kali stand and watch him. While the Gods and Helpers falter. Ride the wind down , Kali brothers. At Anda-Ke we stand the test. A polite cough from behind reminded him that Captain Tahn was still in the cabin. The Kali coughed to express anything from rage to sheer joy, and this one probably meant that Ward's hearing the last verse was an accident. Ward swung around and glanced at him, but the Kali deliberately kept his slitted eyes on the chart before him. Ward was reminded again of the Kali likeness to the long vanished American Indian: black, straight hair; narrowed, snapping black eyes; high, angular cheek bones. But not much beyond that. If you took a fine featured Sioux of long ago... shortened him about a foot, thinned him down -- bones and all, raised his shoulders to a perpetual shrug, stretched his arms so that they still reached his hips, then starved him for a month...you might be close. But if you took a picture of him then, and looked at it slightly sideways, you would almost have it. An extremely thin, short, shrugging strip of muscled rawhide. Tahn coughed again; the your-attention-please cough. He swung a chart around for Ward to see. It was a rough drawing of Anda-Ke, the largest of the Grimnal Group, and more or less the home island. It looked somewhat like a startled elephant: mouth open, trunk arced out at an angle. The mouth was Anda Bay, and was guarded by Anda Passage where the lower lip came within two miles of the upper. The trunk was Pelo Head, and was broken about halfway down by Pelo Break. The area between the drooping trunk and the neck was the Grimnal Sea. It was into this that the Kali fleet was charging like a peanut sailing for the mouth. Tahn tapped a pencil-like finger at the rearmost reach of Anda Bay. "nphere," he said, in the Kali-Con-L federation mixture they found to be the shortest distance between two cultures. "Anchored there like marks on a sail. Feeling so safe in their home. Thinking we do not dare come after them. Grimnal rafts just waiting to go to the bottom." "And the gliders?" Ward asked. "Are they returned? We have no information but the tales of two natives." Tahn glanced at a water trickling, time-measuring device hanging from the overhead. "Soon the gliders return, but... " He shrugged, somehow. "And those are not rafts," Ward went on. "The natives said three, two and single gun rows. That means first and second-liners, frigates and probably corvettes. And they said 'many,' which means anywhere from fifty to two hundred." Tahn coughed his agreement. "But with Grimnal stupidity," he said, "they can do no more than run around in terror as we shell the city and fire their ships We have this won." Ward looked down at his hands, oaught a deep breath, and continued. "I have said before. We are not fighting just the Grimnal. We are fighting God Helpers too. Men like myself have come to help the Grimnal." He caught Than's flickering glance and added quickly, "Men who are probably better fighters than I am." Tahn coughed and leaned his head sideways, fairly equivalent to a casual 'so what?' "False Gods. False Helpers," he said. Ward held his breath and swung back to face the port. Great, sizzling Hell! He wondered if his opposite with the Grimnal had such problems. Probably not. Problems weren't allowed in the United Peace Worlds. And with the Grimnal preference for island life over the sea, it apparently took little urging to make them want all the islands in the world "You realize," Ward said without turning, 'that they have probably known ot our coming for days." "Good." "And what would they still be doing at anchor?" Cough, cough. Probably meaning how the hell should I know? II I t only they didn't have this towering independency and conceit, Ward thought They used to fight as individual ships Then chev weren't the least surprised it a lonely frigate was blown to splinters by aD overwhelming Grimnal force. In fact, it was a thing of joy and beauty forever. It was only by the very fiercest thundering had he gotten this fleet together under Tahn, and only Tahn's high position had kept it together. And God only knew how much longer it would hold together. The Grimnal had shown remarkable organization. Ward had pointed that out, and that was a gross mistake The Kali wanted nothing to do with what the Grimnal did. A sharp rap sounded on the cabin door and a Kali slipped in. He made the casual motion that could be a salute, a greeting or a wave good-by, depending on circumstances. "Two gliders return," he said happily. "In the bay are two first-liners, four second-liners, five frigates and some corvettes. All at anchor. Just waiting for us." Ward nodded. "How many corvettes?" The Kali's face wrinkled in dismay. "Fifty-six," he said softly. Ward smiled to himself, and ran the Kali fleet by in his mind. Eighteen first-liners mounting a hundred-twenty guns apiece. Eleven secondliners mounting eighty to ninety guns. Twenty-four frigates mounting fifty to sixty guns. Fiftytwo corvettes mounting ten to twenty guns A strong force, but not as strong as the Grimnal potential. Firmly, he said: "We will run down almost to Anda Passage -- then wait." The Kali glanced at each other. Tahn coughed "Not to go in?" "No!" "Why?" Ward took a deep breath and told himself to stay calm. "We know there are land guns along the Passage. We know that even without them three first-liners could hold it against anything. We know that those ships in the bay are not the whole fleet. Where are the rest?" Double cough. Double head bob. Two helpless expressions. "We outnumber," Tahn said hopefully. Ward muffled a smile. At least they were learning something. "We cannot go in, Tahn. It's a trap." Tahn was quiet, his whole body slowly coming to what Ward knew was hurt pride and anger. "Then we wait?" "We wait." Tahn was nearly rigid, his voice fighting its cage of control. "We wait like before?" I t was Ward's turn to let a tingling moment pass. This was the first overt mention of his past actions. He must walk softly. Kali temper was like nitroglycerine; one touch the wrong way... "We wait only to learn of the other Grimnal ships," he said evenly. "We let them make the first move in order to see what they are doing. Then we strike -- hard!" After a long, breathless moment, Tahn coughed. It was one that Ward never heard before, but judging by sound, it was not meant to be pleasant. Ward stood up, stared directly at Tahn and said quietly "I charge you with honesty, Tahn." It was a serious phrase. Tahn made the equivalent of a nod. "There is much talk," he began, his voice higher pitched. "We ask ourselves why we do not fight. The Grimnal takes many islands; land that is ours. He does not defeat us, but we do not stop him. We wait as you tell us. We wait and see our islands lost. "The Kali are ashamed, and the Grimnal laughs. We cannot go home and face our women and children. "You come to show us how to fight, you say. But we do not fight. We wait. You tell us things that will make us win, but we do not fight. We wait. You hold us back. We ask ourselves why." He straightened, obviously grabbing a big piece of Kali courage. "There is an answer why. Perhaps you help other Gods than ours. Or -- perhaps you are afraicf." There it was. Stark and ugly. Ward looked at Tahn for a long time, then straightened to his full five-eleven. "As a God Helper I am charged with honesty at all times," he said, and let it sink in for a second. "I see many more things than the surface of the sea and the direction of the wind. What I do for the Kali is for the good of theKali. If you follow me, you go to victory. If you do not follow, you go to the bottom." The Kali glared with glittering eyes. Tahn's cough was a bark. "Perhaps some will follow." Their parting salute was crisp as they spun and left. Ward eased himself back to the chair and stared at the door. This was the ragged edge. They fight the one coming, or else... And if they lost it, the Confederation could mark off the Kali, John Ward and the planet. He remembered all too clearly the other engagements, if you would call them that. And he remembered too the disappointment, chagrin and outright anger of the Kali, and his own frustration. E ngagement One: Taley Point. They had surprised a small Grimnal force close in to shore on the leeward side. After trading shots at extreme range. Ward gave the order to withdraw. Reasons? Shallows, reefs, a raising wind, and nightfall The Grimnal was gone in the morning. The Kali had been stunned. It was the first time they had ever withdrawn with whole ships. Engagement Two: Gola Island. They had chased a smaller force into port, but Ward had held off because of intense shore fire. The Kali did not sing for three days. Engagement Three: Bari Sea. They were closing with a nearly equal force, yet out of range, when a large wind devil, one of the freak, contrary winds, had slashed across both fleets; shredding sails, splintering masts, effectively crippling both forces. Ward gave the order to heave to and repair damages, as the Grimnal did the same. The Kali were astonished. Such a thought was madness with the enemy in sight. But they followed orders, and did not smile when he appeared any more, ' Engagement Four: Darel Sea. (Oh, the Darel Sea!) They were closing at glider range when a lucky Grimnal had sneaked in and managed to fire bomb a first-liner. Without that ship they were greatly outgunned and, leaving a frigate to take off the crew, they slipped off downwind. It was a near rebellion, but Tahn had held them. Then the wind came up, bringing the Grimnal force with it. And both the frigate and the burning first went down fighting. The Kali had cried, probably, Ward thought, more in admiration than in sadness. And now, as a result of a vote of ships' captains, they were headed straight for the GrimnaFs heart; and Ward wondered if he was anything more than a passenger. He knew he had been tactically right in each case, but the Kali knew he was morally wrong. So who had it, the head or the heart? And what about this thing of being afraid? That hurt. He didn't believe he was afraid. Honestly, he really couldn't say. He had, as a fact, never fought a battle in his life. H e used to play a game in the scouts. What did they call it? Capture the Flag, or something like that. Each side had a hidden flag and the other tried to get it. He was always the planner. How'll we do it, John? And he would tell them, and keep away from the rough stuff, and they nearly always won. But violence fascinated him as a spectator. Later his reading took him in that direction, and later still his studies. In the middle of his life he found he was one of the leading historical naval tacticians in the world. He started writing historical novels, under a pseudonym, of course, and soon became the world's authority. Then someone blundered into Aqua. For a couple hundred years the Terran Confederation and the United Peace Worlds had been at war. Not an open, honest, stand-up-and get-it war; but an undercover, half ignored, let'sgetthe kids to-fight war. A galaxywide game, played for planets, using local cultures. And always according to the rules. No new technologies. No new weapons. Use what you have at hand. Play it fair. Because if you do not, neither will we -- and together we will eliminate the universe. Aqua was a natural. It had a war already underway. Deep in the secretmost catacombs of Confederation Central a voice said: "Find a man who knows ancient naval tactics. Find a man who knows sailing. Find a man who knows combustion firearms. Find a man. Now!" And the order went rattle-rattle, click-click, wink, blink... and reached out and touched Doctor John Ward. Although Colonel Ward's training had filled three straight days, there was one thing they forgot to tell him -- what do you think about, really, when someone fires a cannon in your face? A knock came at the door. Ward rubbed his face back into an expression of awareness. "Come." Tahn entered briskly and strode to the opposite side of the table. His eyes held a level, challenging look. "Gliders say there are Grimnal coming up behind us along the coast. About -- uh -- two hours distant." "How many?" "There are four firsts, five seconds, twelve frigates and some corvettes." Ward patiently tapped the table. "How many corvettes?" "Twenty-three." Ward was thoughtful for a moment. "We still have them. But it still is not their whole force." "We hit them?" I'd better answer this one right, he told himself. They were now just below Pelo Break, about two hours from the Passage. There was about an hour of daylight left: "After the sun dies," he said, avoiding the word "wait," "we will swing to meet this new force. If the wind holds straight and steady, we will come across to them like sharks in the night." "Sharks?" Ward grinned. "A very savage deep sea fish of my world." Tahn relaxed, and a twisted smile came over his narrow face. "It will be a short fight," he said softly. m A qua's sizzling sun was getting hazy as it settled behind lower Pelo Head, outlining the violent peaks like teeth in some savage jaw. Ward stood on the bridge of the first-liner, Bad Weather , and watched the fleet and the late returning gliders. He never failed to marvel at these ships -- sleek, sea-flying catamarans, steady, tall and wonderously beautiful. Their twin hulls skimmed the seas with hardly a roll. Their speed was something you had to feel to believe. He watched the second-liner. South Bird , come around to catch her glider. Both soaring upwind, they aimed for an intersection. As they drew closer, two long booms with netting between were extended over the stern. Slowly they angled together. When it appeared that the glider would crash the bridge it pulled up, stalled and fell softly into the net. He never failed to exhale a long breath after such a landing -- catching, rather. Launching was even more spectacular. The ship raced out on fast beam reach with its glider poised upwind on its two poles. Then a streaking corvette hissed up under the stern, swung slightly upwind, caught the braided stretch-line and actually yanked the glider aloft. Ward was quite sure it was something he never wanted to try The Bad Weather was coming around now. He caught the white flash of her glider high downwind. Tahn came to stand by him, his quick, cat-like motions betraying his eagerness "They bring more news," he grinned. "The Grimnal in Anda Bay is starting to raise sail." Ward frowned. "They think to trap us between them Perhaps they expect us to race into the Passage after dark " Tahn coughed his pleased cough. "But our -- uh -- tactics, is it? They are to keep out of the Passage?" Ward smiled. "For now We fight them as two separate fights, not as one We will overwhelm each in turn."  Tahn's cough was one of agreement. "Yes," he breathed "Just as long as we fight " They turned to watch the glider make its long floating approach It had dumped its spoilers and was losing altitude, when it suddenly climbed impossibly fast, spun completely around and exploded in a hundred pieces. T ahn leaped to the rail, stared, then keened the Kali howl of alarm. Ward squinted downwind in puzzlement, then saw it -- the seething, wild slice of a wind devil arcing toward the fleet. Curling, lashing, faster than any ship, it bore down xn them in a track of boiling foam. Other ships took up the cry. Knives flashed as sheets were cut and sails crashed down. Seamen ran aloft to furl the wild cloth. Some of the leading corvettes tried to turn and run out of the way, but the wind was too fast. A corvette suddenly lifted her bows, flipped over backwards and slammed down like a thrown stone. A frigate lost her sails and masts in less than two seconds. Another corvette rose sideways on one hull, spun and broke in two. The wind shriek became deafening. Another frigate lost its masts, lifted on its stern and fell back in an explosion of water. The first-liner, Thunder , lost its masts and rigging, put its bows down as if stepped on, spun a full ninety degrees and finally relaxed. A corvette went tumbling end over end into the side of a second liner, which immediately lost its masts and half its bridge. A corvette went streaking out of the fleet at blinding speed, one hull hiked entirely out of the water, and disappeared in a wall, of spray. It was abruptly silent. The foaming wind track left the fleet and slashed toward the open sea With a soft flutter, then a breeze, the westerly quietly resumed its "How slow?" push. The Kali appeared on deck again and slowly gazed about them. And the fleet lay dead in the water. Ships lay heading in all directions. Wreckage, lines and bits of sail littered the water. A frigate lay listed hard over. Damage reports were coming in to the Bad Weather : the Thunder dismasted and leaking; another first dismasted; one second leaking badly, perhaps going down; three other seconds dismasted; one frigate sinking fast; two more dismasted and leaking; two more dismasted; six corvettes lost; four dismasted and damaged. Tahn was grim as he scratched marks on a slate. Twenty-one ships out of action in less than a minute. Ward cursed and slammed the rail. Damned planet! Damned Grimnal! Damned everything! Tahn coughed beside him. And damned coughing! "There is more news," Tahn said quietly. "We just fished out a glider flyer who had returned from cruising Pelo Head." Ward turned. There seemed to be a smile flickering on Tahn's swarthy face. "He says there is a great Grimnal force coming into the Break from the north. Sixteen firsts, eighteen seconds and ten frigates. There are no corvettes. Ward's whole body seemed to tighten. Thanks to a damned wind the trap was sprung. "Can they come through the Break?" he asked, more to stall for time thaiv gain information, lahn coughed three times. "It is a brave thing to do Even for Kali it would be brave. It is bad water in the Break. The wind goes up: the current comes down. It is slow, but it can be done." I U T ihn tilted his head, stared at where the slice of the Break was barely visible on the horizon, and shrugged, almost. "Maybe -- uh -- two hours. Maybe more." He coughed. "Maybe less." Ward glared at the crippled ships. "And they would try it at night? Tahn coughed assent. "There will be a good moon. I would try it." Damn. Forces from three sides that, united, would blow them right out of the water. They could meet any of them alone, but... "If we could slip south," he pdndered aloud, "we could -- " Tahn snarled, his face an unearthly mask in the dimming light. His breath whistled between his teeth. "You polastil" he hissed. Ward straightened and faced him. The Kali around froze in their tracks. Polasti was the foulest word in their language. "Kali have died in this water just now," Tahn was barely able to manage his voice. "They are down there right now. We will not run and disgrace them! We will stand here. We will put a wall of sails and guns around this spot, and if we die it will be in honor. We will run no more. We will run no moref He was trembling when he finished, and Ward expected a knife to make one final arc. It was impossible to try to explain. It was broken... That thought crashed through as a knife never could. It's over. The Grimnal will surround this pitiful fleet like a storm. Its over; we've lost the fight, the war and the planet. And I've done it. It's my baby. The thing seared him, roared through him, shook him -- and touched a secret place. A deep place where he stored his anger. All his past angers, big and little; covered stifled, caught and hidden. Old hurts, old dreams, old reproaches screamed and gibbered through him like a thousand ghosts and devils. They swamped the gentle man. They dragged him down and gagged him. And something else took his place -- something that had never been allowed to stand before. "You stupid bastards!" he roared, wheeling to face them all. "You God-forsaken fools! A Grimnal baby is a greater fighter than your bravest man. Look what he has done to you. Look! Like blind animals you have been led into a trap. You have been put in a cage of your own ignorance. You call me polasti! I am the only one who can show you how to win. The only thing you know is to bunch together and be killed like animals at slaughter. You stand together in one tight group to make it easy for him. You know how it will be? Look!" He sprang to the glass globe that held the magnetized needle, seized it and hurled it to the deck. It exploded like .a small bomb. The Kali moved back. "That is what the Grimnal will do to you. Your bravery will be as that glass, nice to see -- but look at it now!" Water from the globe trickled slowly through the shattered glass. The chips winked red in the dying sun. Only the cry of the wind sounded through the ship. Ward forced his choking breath to an even rhythm. "Now go die like the fools you are." He left the quiet bridge and threaded his way to his cabin. Night was coming softly to the Grimnal Sea. I t was dark in the cabin when the knock sounded. There was no answer, and it came again. "Come," Ward said in a very tired, hollow voice. The door swung open and someone entered. After a long moment, Tahn's voice came softly in the dark. "No one has ever spoken to the Kali like that." Ward did not answer. "It is a brave man that can do that. And bravery is something we understand." There was a silent moment. Tahn coughed. "May I light the lamp?" Ward swung around in the chair. "Certainly." Flint flicked on steel, a spark glowed, caught, and light wavered in the cabin. The two faced each other, Ward sagged low in the chair, the Kali by the lamp. Tahn coughed again. "There is a way?" Ward let a moment pass. "There is a way to try." "Fighting?" "Yes, fighting." Tahn paused the barest second. "Tell me." IV T he frigate, Windsong, skimmed downward like a low, lean cloud. Behind her, vague in the dim moonlight, followed four more frigates and the skating corvettes. Before her, like a gate to hell, gaped the jagged mouth of Pelo Break. Ward leaned against the bridge rail beside Resi, the scarred and battered captain of Windsong. "Keep close to the eastern side," Ward said. "In the shadow of the cliffs, out of the moonlight." Resi spoke softly to the helmsman. and the Windsong eased into the shadow Ward turned and watched the following ships as, one by one, they slipped out of the moon and all but vanished. He swung back and squinted ahead. As far as he could see, high, broken cliffs reared straight from the water on both sides, angling together in the distance. There Tahn had said, they stood a scant two hundred yards apart, and the Break turned nearly sixty degrees to the west. That was the narrows. Ward turned to Resi, wondering if the old Kali fully understood the plan. "If we do not meet them before, we wait for them at the narrows." There was no acknowledgement that he could tell. Not even a cough. He doesn't like this, Ward thought. He relishes the fight coming, but not me. Despite Tahn's heated pep talk, I am a bad totem. But Tahn had accomplished one thing -- an honor promise from each ship's captain to follow orders. Ward knew they would, as long as everything went along with fighting, but the moment something went wrong He remembered Tahn's bark of surprise as the, plan unfolded Then the argument, and his own firm stand that he command this force. For this "was the crucial contact. The Key. If this tailed -- it all failed. He was sure that Tahn and the rest of the feverishly anxious Kali would more than whip their end. They were outnumbered, but had an overwhelming firepower edge. For the hundredth time he reviewed the thing, looking for the fatal flaw. One frigate for the crippled ships, which gave them quite a bit of firepower right there. Two firsts, four seconds, five frigates (the Storm Bird had gone down) and four corvettes. They were to make fast repairs, jury rig, then stand by in the shadow at the mouth of Pelo Break. If the Kali came back out -- fine; they would all rejoin Tahn. If not -- and the Grimnal came -- they were a last stand. Tahn had the main force of sixteen firsts, seven seconds and thirteen frigates. He was to intercept the Grimnal coming from behind. He would run their fleet through, come about, rake them again and run out to sea. He was to hit them hard enough to stop them, then make them believe he was running away. After any pursuit was discouraged he was to come downwind and fly for Anda Passage. If the timing was right, he would run right over the force from the bay, and with a little effort clear them off the water. "Then," Ward had added with a half smile, "you can shell the land guns in the Passage in your spare time. If the first Grimnal force comes limping in you shouldn't have any trouble." N o, Tahn wouldn't have any trouble. In the Kali's present mood they could probably do it with half their ships. But hell would be open in the Break tonight. Five slim frigates and forty-two tiny corvettes against sixteen firsts, eighteen seconds and ten frigates. Ship for ship; but what unbalanced firepower! Their advantage would be surprise, if nothing slipped, and maneuverability where the Grimnal ships would have their hands full just keeping clear of the cliffs. And this was the fulcrum. A sudden flare from the maindeck. "Cover that!" Resi snapped. Then to Ward, "They are cooking the liquor." Ward nodded. Apparently Resi had a good idea of what was expected. That was one good thing. The liquor, as they called it, was their explosive. A revolting, highly inflammable slime brewed of seaweed and fats. It was prepared in port, but had to be brought to a firing temperature on board. This was done by heating in large kettles and kept just below boiling. When a gun was to be fired, a certain measure of this soup was poured down the muzzle to a sizzling hot firing chamber, kept hot by a covered charcoal packing and quickly sealed by a lava-stone ball. It was the gunner's sense of timing then to know when the gun was ready, and slam the firing stud with a hammer. This slapped flint to steel inside the chamber -- and wham. But it was touchy. If the gunner swung too soon, nothing. If he waited too long, it fired itself. If the chamber was too cool, it would not fire at all; if' too hot, it might go the second the ball was rammed. A very delicate operation. And in the midst of battle -- with charcoal flying, hot shot coming in, glowing fires under the kettles and spilled hot liquor everywhere -- it was hard to see what kept a ship from blowing the whole battle apart. But that never happened. The liquor was easily diluted with water, and they went into battle with special water crews sloshing down the decks. And the stuff was fast. In the Gola Island fight, with fairly hot guns, they were loading, aiming and firing in about ten seconds. The Windsong eased along, the narrows loomed closer and Ward began to tighten. Any second heexpected the double bows of a Grimnal first-liner to slide into, sight, followed by another, and another, and another... He felt the urge to move about, to do anything as long as he was moving. He noticed the Kali were the same. They were as restless as the troubled waters of the Break -- lunging, hissing, swirling, rocking up and down. They were constantly at the rail relieving themselves, or rattling the dipper at the water barrel. And he could see the glint of their eyes as they threw quick glances in his direction. He caught Resi watching too, and moved away. T hey didn't trust him. They were waiting for him to call it off. They expected him to; probably wanting him to. He suddenly found he was quivering like a captured bird. He gripped the rail hard with both hands to stop. But it wouldn't stop. It galloped through him, ran him down and trampled him. And in panic he saw what it was. Fear. No simply the fear of failing. It was... God! The reality of it! This wasn't like reading a book or writing a story. This was going to be real shot and flame instead of words and paper. Real people were going to die, with their blood warm and sticky and horror in the eyes -- and he wouldn't be able to glance away to ponder it. It was going to roll from start to finish with the reality of Now and the surety of Death. It was going to flame as fights have flamed since something first snatched up a rock. And he was going to be right in the middle of it with these Kali, win or lose, live or die. And what was he doing here with these strange, alien Kali? He raised his head and glanced around. Resi was standing by the helmsman, talking with his deck lieutenant. Water splashed down on the maindeck; the water crews at work. There was a breathless quiet over the ship. He could see them standing like shadows, watching the curve of the narrows. The Spartans must have stood like that at the Pass of Thermopylae! And the Athenians on the Plains of Marathon. And the Americans at Bastogne. And men anywhere, any time before a battle. A single, whispering line from an old poem sang through him: Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred. There was no alien here but himself. T 'he ominous walls of the narrows closed and filled the sky. Beyond the curve, some two miles up, the Grimnal ships were slowly beating upwind Suddenly, like a touch of fire to old ashes, he knew what he was doing here. A long imprisoned breath escaped from him, and a great sigh seemed to come from the whole ship. Resi turned. Ward could barely make out what must be a smile in that old Kali face. "We made it, ho?" "Just barely, by God. Have the ships string out as planned, with the lead frigate in the tip of the shadow where the Break turns into the moonlight. And be careful of noise. It will carry in here like a cannon shot." Resi coughed and was gone like a cat. The Windsong fell dead in the water. The others whispered past like ghosts. Voices called softly, and the small, shielded signal lights licked from ship to ship. And the Windsong was alone. Her bows swung out slightly to allow the foreguns a field of fire. Ward climbed down from the bridge, strode the water-slick maindeck and gained the foredeck. The gun crews turned, glanced at him, then turned back. He could not tell if they were smiling or not. So what. They would have plenty to smile at in a moment. The lead first-liner was about a mile now and keeping well to their side. Ward squinted at the point of the shadow, but there was no light flickering there that he could see. Damn! The Grimnal ship looked huge in the moonlight, and the Break behind it seemed filled with sails. It was nearly abreast of the shadow tip, still holding to their side, and the tiniest flicker of light danced in the shadow beside it. Ward grinned. David and Goliath. The giant first-liner started its slow turn on the very edge of the shadow, drifting into the dark until only its sails held the moon. The sails came around, fluttered and filled. The silent hulls came into sight. Ward let out a breath, echoed by Resi. The lead liner was well on its new tack The next was starting to edge into the shadows, and behind that was another, and another, and another. Resi muffled a cough. "You tell when?" he whispered. Ward nodded. "I'll tell when." The Grimnal rode closer, the crash of its bow waves sounding louder. Ship after ship was coasting past the hidden frigate. Ward's excitement grew to a pounding thing. They would be able to get them all in range. The sails towered over them. A hundred yards. Almost abreast; just at the narrowest point. Ward took a deep breath, and said quietly: "Now." R esi turned and hissed. Steaming liquor trickled down hungry cannon mouths. Lava balls were softly rammed home. Muzzles came down. Aimed. The gunners tensed, raised their hammers -- and swung. The night came apart. A crashing roar racketed through the Break. The walls blasted back the echo. The Windsong rocked and trembled. Smoke boiled into the moonlight and dimmed the Grimnal ship. And that was only a small sound. Over a mile of fire smashed from the shadow and for a quivering second, it seemed the world had exploded. Then came the thunder, and Ward flinched. Waterspouts climbed in the moonlight, Wreckage spun from the Grimnal ships. Holes splintered in their sides. The Windsong roared again; the bobbing corvettes answered. And a deafening, mind dulling thunder covered the break. And the Grimnal did not answer. The lightning flared steady now from the Kali line. Resi climbed halfway up the ratlines for a better look. And still the wounded giants had not answered. Grimnal were running in all directions on their decks. Resi let out a howl of sheer triumph. "They do not have their liquor cooked #" he cried, swinging ta the deck. "We have them with cold guns!" The Kali cheered, and the firing seemed to cease. Ward was shaking again, but for a different reason. "Hey, Resi," he bellowed. "Let's get in there closer." Sails snapped and the Windsong came alive. She seemed to leap into the moonlight. Then a corvette appeared beside her, and another, then two racing side by side into the smoke. And all the Kali were moving. The Windsong' s men were laughing like children, and the water crews had everything soaked halfway up the mainsails. What people! Ward laughed, ducking another bucketful. Resi slid to a halt beside him. "We fool them, ho? We fool them!' "Closer," Ward yelled. "Under their guns!" "But they are not firing." "Under their guns anyway," Ward laughed, and added to himself -- away boarders! A few scattered shots were coming from the Grimnal, ripping overhead. Ward stood a little taller. The Windsong came about, her starboard bow nearly slashing the looming first-liner Ward felt Resi's hand on his arm. "It was really you that fool them." Ward grinned foolishly. "But we whip them, ho?" Ward wanted to answer, but it was the starboard guns' turn to speak. IF  Short Story by Frank Banta T hose of the city of Featherton, on Grimes Planet, were with him to a man. Feathertonians cheered and waved from their windows thar morning, not daring to come out for tear of the whirlybirds. and admiring Five-gun Charles DeCrabbe all the more for riding down the main stem of the town with the bubble of his convertible space coupe slid back -- ignoring the menace from the skies. Five-gun Charles DeCrabbe rode down the exact center of the street, looking neither to right or left, not acknowledging the screams of adulation that poured from the windows. His bare head was up, his mouth Five-Gun DeCrabbe was the terror of every planet -- especially to his friends! was pressed into firm, haughty lines of self-confidence and even his battle dress of dark green seemed to exude the aura of a competent killer. Five-gun Charles DeCrabbe had come to clean up the town. Of whirlybirds. He stopped his space convertible in front of the white stone building titled City Hall on its facade. The two men waiting to greet him stayed safely under the bullet-shaped marquee as he alighted. He jumped over the side, checked his two holstered needle pistols, slung his explosive pellet rifle over one shoulder, his Nray flashburn gun over the other shoulder and picked up his rocketpowered stun-gas spray gun in his hands. He strode over to the waiting men. "I'm Alson Prince, Mayor of Featherton," said the older man shaking hands with the one DeCrabbe stuck out from under the spray gun. "And you are Five-gun Charles DeCrabbe?" "Yes yes yes!" exclaimed DeCrabbe impatiently in his clipped speech. "I'm the mayor's son," introduced the younger man with admiration shining in his eyes. "You sure look like you're ready to whip those whirlybirds." "Yes yes yes!" exclaimed DeCrabbe haughtily. "Always dislike long conversations you know. Supposing you tell me what you know so can exterminate them without further delay. No doubt solution before dusk." "Before dusk?" asked the mayor, dumfounded. "Oh, no, not today, I'm afraid. They've been around too many years to whip in one day." "Perhaps shall require two days then," said Five-gun Charles DeCrabbe graciously. "But doubt it. Tell me what you know of them." # # T Tery well," assented the older V man. "Perhaps the best place to begin is with their name. When we first occupied this planet, a bare twenty years ago, we called them wolfhawk-whirlybirds and tigerhawkwhirlybirds because they preyed on vicious animals. The whirlybirds were our best friends in those days. The only trouble is that they ran out of tigers and wolves to eat." "Presumed they are now called peoplehawk-whirlybirds?" DeCrabbe frowningly asked in his clipped speech. "Exactly!" answered the older man. "Although that isn't their full name. From the way they attack -- " "Most important," interrupted Five-gun. "Give to me in detail." "They prefer to attack strollers, although they have attacked on city streets when there is little traffic. They fly with amazing speed, considering they are an untidy ball forty feet in diameter, and they are on top of their victims before the unlucky ones are aware of the menace. Blowing their victims down with a rush of air from their feathers, they grab them up by the heels, carry them high aloft and drop them on piles of rock outside of town." "They are downdraftpeoplehawkwhirlybirds then?" asked DeCrabbe. "That's almost it," agreed the mayor. "I have not yet told you of their cries. As they rise in tne air with the victim dangling from their talons by his heels, they utter a pleases 'Coo! Coo! like a gentle dove. That is why they are called Coocoodowndraft-peoplehawk-whirlybirds." "Approve of adequate names," nodded Five-gun, unbending a trifle. "First step toward efficiency. Only one thing haven't made clear. Presumably have shotguns and rifles. Why unable drive off these predators yourselves?" The mayor laughed bitterly. "It would be easy to tell you'd just arrived on this planet -- although the birds are not well known in the other cities either; they are all concentrated in this area. Yes. our sportsmen tried to shoot down the whirlybirds. No luck, of course Imagine the problems you have when one of these forty-foot balls of commotion comes at you : You try to aim but you can't hold your arm still because of the swirling wind they raise; and then the dust clouds thicken and you're firing wildly, and you can't begin to tell which is body and which is feathers anyway." "Very well," accepted Charles DeCrabbe mercifully. "You've made attempt. My first step therefore the attachment of high explosives to boobytrapped mannequins. Brought these with me." CCreat winds of catastrophe. I'm VJ glad you mentioned it before you did it!" exclaimed the mayor. "We tried that once. The city was six weeks digging out from under the feathers -- and it didn't kill the whirlvbird!" "Aren't you exaggerating difficulties encountered in picking up few feathers?" loftily inquired DeCrabbe. "How do you think we got the name of Featherton? Before the deluge we were called West Applebury!" Then why haven't you attempted lure them into boobytraps outside town? Could detonate them there withbut even slight inconvenience of picking up feathers." "Believe me, if there were only a few feathers," insisted Mayor Prince, "few enough for you to pick up by yourself, we wouldn't mind you blowing up a whirlybird." "Wasn't considering picking up any feathers," replied Five-gun with dignity. "Had supposed a menial or two could be supplied for that." The mayor shook his head. "It would take everybody in town to clean up. And as for blowing one up outside the city, one of our orchardists tried it. He blew it to bits all right, but eighty acres of his apple trees were smothered under the debris!" "Now anticipate that the extermination of the whirlybirds will almost certainly take me up to two days," conceded Five-gun DeCrabbe calmly. "However will be all the more interesting to defeat them without recourse large explosives." "Gee, what a man!" admired the mayor's son. "Only two days!" "If you will now lead me to your city park will begin campaign of extermination at once." "It's down that way," said the mayor, pointing. Plainly he had no intention of leaving the shelter of the marquee. "You can't miss it." As Fivegun Charles DeCrabbe leaped back into his craft and started off, the mayor's son called after him, "Aren't vou scared, going out exposed like that?" DeCrabbe turned. "Am armed, young man," he retorted severely. "Yeah, but those whirlybirds don't pay any attention to guns." "Soon will," DeCrabbe replied, unruffled. Slowly he drove down the center of the empty street, receiving more cheers from heads thrust out of windows. He arrived at the city park and turned in. He unloaded most of his equipment under the roof of the bandstand. A few minutes later one of his robot mannequins moved slowly around the clearing before the bandstand, its control set for slow walking to conserve its atomic battery. The predator hunter unlimbered all his guns as he sat under the bandstand roof waiting. It was an hour before the first whirlybird attacked. His first warning was the rising wind. His gaze moved around the sky until he found the rapidly growing black spot. A few seconds later it became a universe-engulfing blackness as it spotted the mannequin and came down for it. As soon as the wind-screaming blackness reached the mannequin, the needle guns in his hands emptied their hundreds of anesthetizing needles into the turbulence. But it was as the mayor had said. Where did the bird's body end and the feathers begin? When the needle pistols were empty he dropped them and snatched up the rocket powered stun-gas weapon; its immense flare poured into the blackness without' visible result. He dropped it and grabbed the N-ray flashburn gun. The forty-foot ball of fury was beginning to rise high with its prey now, as the gun stuttered fifty bolts of burning lethal radiation into it. He smelled feathers that time. Finally as the giant bird, without faltering, rose above the range of the Nray gun, he took to the explosive pellet rifle It had only ten shots; all of these went into the center of the blackness well before the whirlybird had flown beyond ran:e. And as it neared the horizon wnb its mannequin prey, he heard its sweet song: "Coo! Coo!" "How dare it coo after all l did to it?" muttered DeCrabbe grimly. "Shall not coo next time!" H alf an hour later a new mannequin stood out in front of the bandstand. Its arms waved ceaselessly but it stood still. Nestled against its back was a ten gallon drum of gas, which would be exploded -- blanketing most of the park in fumes -- as soon as the mannequin was moved. Charles DeCrabbe waited, his mask ready, his potent weapons all reloaded. Ninety minutes later the huge black menace arrived -- either the first whirlybird or another forty-foot wind-screaming fury. Slipping his gas mask on, the man waited for the right moment to begin firing. The whirlybird swooped down, the tank exploded in a fog, and the giant wobbled! DeCrabbe emptied all his weapons again. The bird arose, wobbling, its speed greatly impaired, but making its getaway despite all he could do. "Damn well didn't coo that time," he said when the monster had reached the horizon. "Next time won't fly either." But just then the monstrous bird mocked him in the distance with a loud, sweet. "Coo! Coo!" Shortly after lunch he had it all set up. A new mannequin stood out in front of the bandstand, its arms waving and a pair of slim, gleaming, ten-gallon drums of stun gas nearby. It was one o'clock before the third whirlybird struck. Down it sank until it became a huge, ebony blot in the afternoon sky. Underneath the bandstand roof DeCrabbe got ready for his supreme effort. He slipped on his gas mask and made sure his N-ray flashburn gun was ready for instant action, its safety off. He was determined that if he got the bird prostrate he would climb aboard and fire N-ray bolts into it until something gave I The huge black, wind-screaming monster plummeted the last few yards down and grabbed the mannequin. Both tanks of stun gas exploded. The giant whirlybird slumped unconscious -- and DeCrabbe scrambled aboard! The feverishly hurrying hunter was not long discovering why he had not -- and never would -- penetrate the bird's feathers with any of his weapons: He burrowed down into the feathers the length of his arm and there were yet more feathers beyond! A feather pillow would stop a rifle bullet, he knew, and this monster had the probable equivalent of a thousand feather pillows protecting it, invulnerable as a battleship And just then the maneater awoke, wobbled into the air, and flew away before DeCrabbe could get off! T he following afternoon, as Fivegun Charles DeCrabbe made his farewell of the city of Featherton, he once more drove down the center of the street with the bubble of his space convertible slid back. Yet there was a difference this time. The mayor and his son rode beside him on the seat, and all of the people were now out of doors standing along the curb, cheering their deliverer wildly as he passed. "I can't tell you how much I personally appreciate what you've done for us," said the mayor humbly. "Quite quite quite!" returned Five-gun haughtily in his clipped speech, hoping to shut off the man's tendency toward windyness. With awe in his voice the mayor's son admired, "So instead of being scared to leath you were all ready for action when you and the whirlybird landed at their rocky, mountain lair?" "Yes yes yes! Slid off its back, hid between two boulders, waited for the appropriate moment. After bagging that one. waited for other monsters as they landed, one by one. Bagged them." "Just like that!" said the youngster. "You just get up close enough for those peoplehawks to grab you and then you bagged them." "Only possible way is my way, clipped DeCrabbe immovably. "Its eyes couldn't be buried deeply in feathers if they were to be of use." "So?" "So eye is proximate to beak -- and brain," said the hunter with dignity. "Where one of its coo-coos came out, one of my N-ray bolts went in, and that was that!" IF  Feature The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: Swell. One of the greatest letter departments that If ever had. Just started my curiosity again. The Snowbank Orbit by Fritz Leiber was the best story that you have published now since The Sounds of Earth by Arthur C. Clarke. I still want to shake your hand and congratulate a fine editor for a job well done. You are coming along with some of the top science-fiction writers in the whole field. James W. Ayers # First Street Attalla, Alabama    Dear Editor: Your cover art has improved remarkably with the September painting. The July issue's disgusting effort falls far, far behind Wenzel's latest contribution, which almost surpasses the #I (September) cover. May you continue to improve. Robert A. Heinlein in the November issue? Maybe you are really looking up after all. Mr. McKey had a difficult "flipping" feat ahead of him. Roger Alan Cox Z#, Courtney Road August, Georgia    Dear Editor: On the back of your latest issue, does the "B E M s" stand for "BookEating Maniacs?" My friend and I would like to know. David Mars #' Greenwood Drive Clinton, Tennessee  Nope. Stands for "Bug-Eyed Monsters" -- old science-fiction expression referring to the peculiarlooking aliens that used to appear on every science-fiction cover. Naturally we're above that sort of thing now. -- Editor . Dear Fred : The July If caught up with us here in Florida just while we're getting ready to shove off for Maine. To set the record straight, the writing of Masters of Space -- except for some editorial revisions -- was all mine. So was much of the plot; and I approved unreservedly both Evan's share of the plot and his rough draft upon which half of the final draft was based. I note without too much surprise that Mr. Winkes doesn't like it. He isn't quite alone in that. Mr. Bester and Mr. Boucher and some others didn't like it, either. However, that fact doesn't bother me too much. Thelma Evans liked it, I liked it, and a lot of fans liked it -- and I learned long ago that nobody can please everybody. Edward E. Smith    Dear Editor: I just bought the September Issue of your magazine today and I thought I would drop you a few lines of first-impression comments and suggestions. What's the matter with your printing presses? As I flipped through this issue I saw a great number of printing blotches and on the second page of the story World in a Mirror I discovered a word so completely smeared that I could get no clue to what it was. How about dropping a 'hint to the printing boys not to put so much ink on the presses? John W. Woods # Centre Street Haddonfield,New Jersey  We did better than that. We dropped those printers. -- Editor. Dear Editor: Your July and September covers were beautiful! I think the September cover's about the best cover I've ever seen on any science-fiction magazine. I'd like to see more of Wenzel. Kent McDaniel # Metropolis Street    Dear Editor: Reguards Retief and that Fustian jag: Come, gentlemen; you sir, Mr. Pohl, sir, for publishing such unmitigated garp, and you, Mr. Laumer-san, for writing it. Especially you, Mr. Laumer. The plot was obviously prefabricated, the action was, leave us face it, implausible, the ending too pat, the villain not nearly villainous enough (why didn't you use a pussycat, Mr. Laumer, sir?), the dialogue clearly constructed from random combinations of alphabet cereal, the protagonist much too cocksure, arrogant and just allaround offensive, the supporting character name of Magnan too stupid -- in short, Mr. Laumer, sir, your characters are celluloid stereotypes, your action is uncoordinated and amateurish and your imagination is restricted by Grade F mystery magazine technique. David C. Oshel # Harding Avenue Ames, Iowa  Quit beating about the bush ! Did you like it or didn't you? -- Editor .    Dear Editor: The first thing I turn to eachish is the Retief story. You quit printing them and I quit buying If. Wilton McArthur Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Dear Editor: The other day I was looking through the city library for something I hadn't read, and ran across a book on how to build model planes by one J. K. Laumer. On the back it stated that J. Keith Laumer, at that time on duty with the U.S.A.F., had spent three years in the U. S. Foreign Service. The plot now begins to clear itself up a little. All professions have their private stock of stories on who did a fine job here and who was a horrible example there. Our State Department has sent some people abroad to represent us who were no better prepared than Ambassador Magnan, some even worse, and others who were # on the beam. Read your world news and see what types kept other people on our side, and what ones lost us much of that intangible stuff the Orientals call "face." Laumer is merely mining his little stockpile of departmental folklore, setting them in far-off worlds. Long may he rave! Listen, reader, and perchance learn something of value to the present. John P. Conlon # Columbia Street Newark, Ohio    Dear Editor: I have just finished reading your September issue, and find it passable -- no more... It might be questioned whether or not an editorial Is the place to conduct book reviews. I, for one, would rather see no editorial and a plainly labeled book review section. More serious is the fact that the reviews are not critical enough... I do not want to give the impression I did not enjoy the issue, for I did. But I am an sf addict, and enjoy anything that can pose as science fiction. In this letter I have tried to abandon this sort of attitude and take the attitude of an English prof critically reviewing serious literature -- for I believe science fiction can be and should be as meaningful as any other type of literature. It  ha# some advantages over other forms of literature, most noticeably in that it is the only form that does not carry an overwhelming burden of tradition; but it is not living up to its potentialities. R. W. Scollay # North Beech Street Oxford, Ohio    Dear Editor: Why was the July If #" tall and the May and September issues # ##"? Hank Luttrell Route # # Barrett Sta. Road Kirkwood #, Missouri  Printer goofed. See note to John Woods' letter above. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: I'm glad to hear about the IFirstory campaign. True, you'd probably publish at least one new writer every issue anyway, but doing it formally should encourage a lot of amateurs who would like to write, but feel that they don't have a chance, competing against established pros... I'm afraid this letter ran rather long, but I say what I have to say. Do you feel that anything I said herein was unnecessary? # Brighton Street Belmont, Massachusetts  Not a bit of it. On the other hand, we have Just so many pages... so what we do, we cut the letters most savagely. As you know I ,The "IFirstory" program (now, there's a neologism for you!) is coming along handsomely. Take a look at this issue's discovery: Captorn of the Kali , by a man who to us seems one of the most promising finds of the year.   Dear Mr. Sturgeon; Your article Uncle Sam # Time Machine in the July issue of Worlds of IF Science Fiction has been widely read here at the Boulder Laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards. We just wish to tell you how much members of our staff enjoyed the presentation. Of course, we hope your readers understand that this particular item was anything but fiction! John R. Craddock Technical Information Officer National Bureau of Standards Boulder, Colorado That's the full bundle for this time. Once again we have five times as many letters as we can print, even abridged. The unpublished # are thanked mosj; gratefully and assured their letters have been read, their opinions have been weighed... and their chances of seeing themselves in print next time are as good as anyone else's. -- The Editor .  First in a new series of science-fiction books. j g A double portion of first-rate adventure science fiction #  by one of the greatest writers in the field -- never before   in print in paperbound book form -- watch your newstands! # Give the gift you'd like to receive We admit it -- we're pushovers for the Xmas spirit. "Don't do it," our accountant pleads. "We can't afford to sell subscriptions at those prices!" But our eye goes past his piteous figure to the distant corners of the land. "Readers straining budgets to introduce Galaxy to friends and relatives, and have enough scratch left over for their own subscriptions. We can't leave the job to them!" we thunder. "Galaxy must bear its share of the burden! And not only that -- by the Lord Harry, we'll even include handsome Gift Card Announcements with their names as donors!" Out slouches our accountant, muttering, "All right, but they'd better get their orders in before December #. --  -- so rush in your order today. Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Address City State Offer # Price Name Address City State Offer# Price Sign Card. Sign Card Name Address City StateOffer # Price Sign Card Name Address City State Offer # Price Sign Card won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! March # ' #j#c Tur TiAic TniiDc L... i r dam add If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Dei Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohi, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfej Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Sjend me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Address. City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish worlds of Vol. #, Number I All Stories New science fiction Sol Cohen, Publisher Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Manager Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Cover by Virgil Finlay from The Time Tombs Next issue (May) on Sale March #th IF published bl-monthJy by Digest Productions Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # Issues # In the United States, Canaaa, Mexico. South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Digest Productions Corporation, iy#. All rights Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial F antasize along with us for a moment. The Chairman wakes up to a phone call, the four hundredth in a matter of weeks, with yet another complaint that the colleclective farms just aren't producing enough food; the natives are restless, and putting another locomotive into orbit is not going to cheer them up any more. Gloomily the Chairman sits on the edge of his bed fondling his shoe. He reasons that while the Western world is falling into decay, it seems to be taking forever to do it and in the meantime, most everyone seems to have enough to eat. So in the West they have something that really works, and it's not just seedcorn. So the Chairman suddenly says and reaches for the phone. And from this point on, the world is amazed to learn that the collectives have been dissolved and the land given to the peasants, to work for their own profit. Before you can say borscht, the cabbages start rolling in and there's babka for everyone. But about this time the typographers and the furniture-makers and the little old potatoface in the vodka mill all get a look at file fins on the cars the farmers are driving, and they set up a howl envied by all the banshees in Ireland, until by Michaelmas, the whole country turns capitalistic. Got it? Now ask yourself this question. If the Soviet Union ovemit went capitalist, do you think there would be any easing of international tensions? If the answer is yes, everything's jolly. If the answer is no, then there seems to be an aching vacuum in the general thinking. Because communism is supposed to be the Enemy and the defeat of communism the goal. We even seem to be making some progress in that dirrection in many ways. But nobody seems to be telling us what we're supposed to do if we achieve total victory over communism and still find that we have to live under the shadow of the Big Boom. We suppose that it is necessary (although it is irritating to feel that it is necessary) to say here that totalitarian communism is bad stuff, and we want no part of it. The only thing is, people keep calling it the Enemy as if it was the Only Enemy, and we keep having this fantasy. The Chairman wakes up to a phone call, and -- IF  Must man die to release his mner consciousness? Can we experience momentary flights of the soul -- that is, become one with the universe and receive an influx of great understanding? The shackles of the body -- its earthly limitations -- can be thrown off and mans mind can be attuned to the Infinite Wisdom for a flash of a second. During this brief interval intuitive knowledge, great inspiration, and a new vision of our life's mission are had. Some call this psychic phenomenon. But the ancients knew it and taught it as Cosmic Consciousness --  the merging of man's #  mind with the Uni" " Versal Intelligence. free Book Explain This is not a religious doctrine, but the application of simple, natural laws, which give man an insight into the great Cosmic plan. They make possible a source of great joy, strength, and a regeneration of man's personal powers. Write to the Rosicrucians, an age-old brotherhood of understanding, for a jree copy of the book "The Mastery of Life." It will tell you how, in the privacy of your own home, you may indulge in these mysteries of life known to the ancients. Address : Scribe W.E.W. IF  Novelette The ancient Martians were long dead -- but the legacy they left would never die! I U sually in the evenings, while Traxel and Bridges drove oft into the sand-sea, Shepley and the Old Man would wander among the gutted time-tombs, listening to them splutter faintly in the dying light as they recreated their fading personas, the deep crystal vaults flaring briefly like giant goblets. Most of the time-tombs on the southern edge of the sand-sea had been stripped centuries earlier. But Shepley liked to saunter through the straggle of half-submerged pavilions, the warm ancient sand playing over his bare feet like wavelets on some IF endless beach. Alone among the flickering tombs, with the empty husks of the past ten thousand years, he could temporarily forget his nagging sense of failure. Tonight, however, he would have to forego the walk. Traxel who was nominally the leader of the group of tomb-robbers, had pointedly warned him at dinner that he must pay his way or leave. For three weeks Shepley had put off going with Traxel and Bridges, making a series of progressively lamer excuses, and they had begun to get impatient with him. The Old Man they would tolerate, for his vast knowledge of the sandsea -- he had combed the decaying tombs for over forty years and knew every reef and therm-pool like the palm of his hand -- and because he was an institution that somehow dignified the lowly calling of tombrobber, but Shepley had been there for only three months and had nothing to offer except his morose silences and self-hate. "Tonight, Shepley," Traxel told him firmly in his hard clipped voice, "you must find a tape. We cannot support you indefinitely. Remember, we're all as eager to leave Vergil as you are." Shepley nodded, watching his reflection in the gold finger-bowl. Traxel sat at the head of the tilting table, his high-collared velvet jacket unbuttoned. Surrounded by the battered gold plate filched from the tombs, from Bridges tankard, he looked mode like a Renaissance princeling than a cashiered Ph.D. from Tycho U. Once Traxel had cen Professor of Semantics, and Shepley wondered what scandal had brought him to Vergil. Now, like a grave-rat, he hunted the time-tombs with Bridges, selling the tapes to the PsychoHistory Museums at a dollar a foot. Shepley found it impossible to come to terms with the tall, aloof man. By contrast Bridges, who was just a thug, had a streak of blunt good humor that made him tolerable, but with Traxel he could never relax. Perhaps his cold laconic manner represented authority, the high-faced, stem-eyed interrogators who still pursued Shepley in his dreams. Bridges kicked back his chair and lurched away around the table, pounding Shepley across the shoulders. "You come with us, kid. Tonight we'll find a mega-tape." O utside, the low-hulled, camouflaged halftrack waited in a saddle between two dunes. The old summer palace was sinking slowly below the desert, and the floor of the banqueting hall shelved into the white sand like the deck of a subsiding liner, going down with lights blazing from its staterooms. "What about you. Doctor?" Traxel asked the Old Man as Bridges swung aboard the half-track and the exhaust kicked out. "It would be a pleasure to have you along." When the Old Man shook his head Traxel turned to Shepley. "Well, are you coming?" IP "Not tonight," Shcpiey demurred hurriedly. "I'll, er, walk down to the tomb-beds latCT myself." 'Twenty miles?" Traxel reminded him, watching reflectively. "Very well." He zipped up his jacket and strode away towards the half-track. As they moved off he shouted: "Shepley, I meant what I said!" Shepley watched them disappear among the dunes. Flatly, he repeated: "He means what he says." The Old Man shrugged, sweeping some sand off the table. "Traxel... he's a difficult man. What are you going to do?" The note of reproach in his voice was mild, realizing that Shepley's motives were the same as those which had marooned himself on the lost beaches of the sand-sea four decades earlier. Shepley snapped irritably. "I can't go with him. After five minutes he drains me like a skull. What's the matter with Traxel, why is he here?" The Old Man stood up, staring out vaguely into the desert. "I can't remember. Everyone has his own reasons. After a while the stories overlap." They walked out under the proscenium, following the grooves left by the half-track. A mile away, winding between the last of the lavalakes which marked the southern shore of the sand-sea, they could just see the vehicle vanishing into the darkness. The old tomb-beds, where Shepley and the Old Man usually walked, lay between them, the pavilions arranged in three lines along a low basaltic ridge. Occasionally a brief flare of lit flickered up into the white, bone-like darkness, but most of the tombs were silent. Shepley stopped, hands falling limply to his sides. "The new beds are by the Lake of Newton, nearly twenty miles away. I can't follow them." "I shouldn't try," the Old Man rejoined. "There wak a big sandstorm last night. The time-wardens will be out in force marking any new tombs uncovered." He chuckled softly to himself. "Traxel and Bridges won't find a foot of tape -- they'll be lucky if they're not arrested." He took off his white cotton hat and squinted shrewdly through the dead light, assessing the altered contours of the dunes, then guided Shepley towards the old mono-rail whose southern terminus ended by the tomb-beds. Once it had been used to transport the pavilions from the station on the northern shore of the sand-sea and a small gyro-car stiU leaned igainst the freight platform. "We'll go over to Pascal. Something may have come up, you never know." S hepley shook his head. Traxd took me there when I first arrived. They've all been stripped a hundred times." "WeU, we'U have a look." The Old Man plodded on towards the mono-rail, his dirty white suit flapping in the low breeze. Behind them the summer palace -- built three centuries earlier by a business tycoon from Ceres -- faded into the darkt ness, the rippling glass tiles in the upper spires merging into the starlight. Propping the car against the platform, Shepley wound up the gyroscope, then helped the Old Man onto the front seat. He pried off a piece of rusting platform rail and began to punt the car away. Every fifty yards or so they stopped to clear the sand that submerged the track, but slowly they wound off among the dunes and lakes, here and there the onion-shaped cupola of a solitary time-tomb rearing up into the sky beside them, fragments of the crystal casements twinkling in the sand like minuscule stars. Half an hour later, as they rode down the final long incline towards the Lake of Pascal, Shepley went forward to sit beside the Old Man, who emerged from his private reverie to ask quizzically: "And you, Shepley, why are you here?" Shepley leaned back, letting the cool air drain the sweat off his face. "Once I tried to kill someone," he explained tersely. "After they cured me I found I wanted to kill myself instead." He reached down to the hand-brake as they gathered speed. "For ten thousand dollars I can go back on probation. Here T thought there would be a freemasonry of sorts. But then you've been kind enough, Doctor." "Don't worry, we'll get you a winning tape." He leaned forward, shielding his eyes from the stellar glare, gazing down at the little cantonment of gutted time-tombs on the shore of the lake. In all there were about a dozen pavilions, their roofs holed, the group Traxel had shown to Shepley after his arrival when he demonstrated how the vaults were robbed. "Shepley! Look, lad!" "Where? I've seen them before, Doctor. They're stripped." The Old Man pushed hini away. "No, you fool, about three hundred yards to the west, in the shadow of the long ridge where the big dunes have moved. Can you see them now?" He drummed a white fist on Shepley's knee. "You've made it, lad. You won't need to be frightened of Traxel or anyone else now." Shepley jerked the car to a halt. As he ran ahead of the Old Man towards the escarpment he could see several of the time-tombs glowing along the sky-line, emerging briefly from the dark earth like the tents of some spectral caravan. U F or ten millenia the Sea of Vergil had served as a burial ground, and the I ,# square miles of restless sand were estimated to contain over twenty thousand tombs. All but a minute fraction had been stripped by the successive generations of tomb robbers, and an intact spool of the #th Dynasty could now be sold to the Psycho-History Museum at Tycho for over # dollars. For each preceding dynasty, though none older than the #th had ever been found, there was a bonus. IP There were no corpses in the timetombs, no dusty skeletons. The cyber-architectonic ghosts which haunted them were embalmed in the metallic codes of memory tapes, three-dimensional molecular transcriptions of their living originals, stored among the dunes as a stupendous act of faith, in the hope that one day the physical re-creation of the coded personalities would be possible. After five thousand years the attempt had been reluctantly abandoned, but out of respect for the tomb-builders their pavilions were left to take their own hazard with time in the Sea of Vergil. Later the tomb-robbers had arrived, as the historians of the new epochs realized the enormous archives that lay waiting for them in this antique limbo. Despite the time-wardens, the traffic in dead souls continued. #Toctor! Come on! Look at them!" Shepley plunged wildly up to his knees in the silver-white sand, diving from one pavilion to the next like a frantic puppy. Smiling to himself, the Old Man climbed slowfy up the melting slope, submerged to his waist as the fine crystals poured away around him, feeling for spurs of firmer rock. The cupola of the nearest tomb tilted into the sky, only the top six inches of the casements visible below the overhang. He sat for a moment on the roof, watching Shepley dive about in the darkness, then peered through the casement, brushing away the sand with his hands. The tomb was intact. Inside he could see the votive light burning over the altar, the hexagonal nave with its inlaid gold floor and drapery, the narrow chancel at the rear which held the memory store. Lbw tables surrounded the chancel, carrying beaten goblets and gold bowls, token offerings intended to distract any pillager who stumbled upon the tomb. Shepley came leaping over to him. "Let's get into them, Doctor! What are we waiting for?" The Old Man looked out over the plain below, at the cluster of stripped tombs by the edge of the lake, at the dark ribbon of the gyro-rail winding away among the hills. The thought of the fortune that lay at his finger tips left him unmoved. For so long now he had lived among the tombs that he had begun to assume something of their ambience of immortality and timelessness, and Shepley's impatience seemed to come out of another dimension. He hated stripping the tombs. Each one robbed represented, not just the final extinction of a surviving personality, but a diminution of his own sense of eternity. Whenever a new tomb-bed emerged from the sand he felt something within himself momentarily rekindled, not hope, for he was beyond that, but a serene acceptance of the brief span of time left to him. "Right," he nodded. They began to cleave away the sand piled around the door, Shepley driving it down the slope where it spilled in a white foam over the darker basaltic chips. When the narrow portico was free the Old Man squatted by the timeseal. His fingers cleaned away the crystals embedded between the tabs, then played lightly over them. Like dry sticks breaking, an ancient voice crackled: Orion, Betelgeuse, Altair, What twice-born star shall be my heir, Doomed again to be the scion -- "Come on, Doctor, this is a quicker way." Shepley put one leg up against the door and lunged against it futilely. The Old Man pushed him away. With his mouth close to the seal, he rejoined: Of Altair, Betelgeuse, Orion, As the doors accepted this and swung back he murmured: "Don't despise the old rituals. Now, let's see." They paused in the cool, unbreathed air, the votive light throwing a pale ruby glow over the gold drapes parting across the chancel. T he air became curiously hazy and mottled. Within a few seconds it began to vibrate with increasing rapidity, and a succession of vivid colors rippled across the surface of what appeared to be a cone of light projected from the rear of the chancel. Soon this resolved itself into a three-dimensional image of an elderly man in a blue robe. Although the image was transparrobe revealing the inadequacies of the projection system, the intensity of the illusion was such that Shepley almost expected the man to speak to them. He was well into his seventies, with a composed, watchful face and thin gray hair, his hands resting quietly in front of him. The edge of the desk was just visible, the proximal arc of the cone enclosing part of a silver ink-stand and a small metal trophy. These details, and the spectral bookshelves and paintings which formed the backdrop of the illusion, were of infinite value to the Psycho-History institutes, providing evidence of the earlier civilizations far more reliable then the funerary urns and goblets in the anteroom. Shepley began to move forward, the definition of the persona fading slightly. A visual relay of the memory store, it would continue to play after the code had been removed, though the induction coils would soon exhaust themselves. Then the tomb would be finally extinct. Two feet away, the wise unblinking eyes of the long dead magnate stared at him steadily, his seamed forehead like a piece of pink transparent wax. Tentatively, Shepley reached out and plunged his hand into the cone, the myriad vibration patterns racing across his wrist. For a moment he held the dead man's face in his hand, the edge of the desk and the silver inkstand dappling across his sleeve. Then he stepped forward and ir walked straight through him into the darkness at the rear of the chancel. Quickly, following Traxel's instructions, he unbolted the console containing the memory store, lifting out the three heavy drums which held the tape spools. Immediately the persona began to dim, the edge of the desk and the bookshelves vanishing as the cone contracted. Narrow bands of dead air appeared across it, one, at the level of the man's neck, decapitating him. Lower down the scanner had begun to misfire. The folded hands trembled nervously, and now and then one of his shoulders gave a slight twitch. Shepley stepped through him without looking back. The Old Man was waiting outside. Shepley dropped the drums onto the sand. 'They're heavy," he muttered. Brightening, he added: "There must be over five hundred feet here. Doctor. With the bonus, and all the others as well -- " He took the Old Man's arm. "Come on, let's get into the next one." The Old Man disengaged himself, watching the sputtering persona in die pavilion, the blue light from the dead man' suit pulsing across the sand like a soundless lightning storm. "Wait a minute, lad, don't run away with yourself." As Shepley began to slide off through the sand, sending further falls down the slope, he added in a firmer voice: "And stop moving all that sand around! These tombs have been hidden here for ten thousand years. Don't undo all the good work, or the wardens will be finding them the first time they go past." "Or Traxel," Shepley said, sobering quickly. He glanced around the lake below, searching the shadows among the tombs in case anyone was watching them, waiting to seize the treasure. Ill T he Old Man left him at the door of the next pavilion, reluctant to watch the tomb being stripped of the last vestige of its already meager claim to immortality. "This will be our last one tonight," he told Shepley. "You'll never hide all these tapes from Bridges and Traxel." The furnishings of the tomb differed from the previous one's. Somber black marble panels covered the walls, inscribed with strange goldleaf hieroglyphs, and the inlays in the floor represented stylized astrological symbols, at once eerie and obscure. Shepley leaned against the altar, watching the cone of light reach out towards him from the chancel as the curtains parted. The predominant colors were gold and carmine, mingled with a vivid powdery copper that gradually resolved itself into the huge, harp-like headdress of a reclining woman. She lay in the center of what seemed to be a sphere of softly luminous gas, inclined against a massive black catafalque, from the sides of which flared two enormous heraldic wings. The woman's copper hair was swept IS straight back off her forehead, some five or si feet long, and merged with the plumage of the wings, giving her an impression of tremendous contained speed, like a goddess arrested in a moment of flight in a cornice of some great temple-city of the dead. Her eyes stared forward expressionlessly at Shepley. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and the white skin, like compacted snow, had a light glaring against the black base of the catafalque and the long sheathlike gown that swept around her hips to the floor. Her face, like an exquisite porcelain mask, was tilted upward slightly, the hooded, halfclosed eyes suggesting that the woman was asleep or dreaming. No background had been provided for the image, but the bowl of luminescence invested the whole persona with immense power and mystery. Shepley head the Old Man shuffle up behind him "Who is she, Doctor? A princess?" The Old Man shook his head sIdwly. "You car only guess. I don't know. There are strange treasures in these tombs Get on with it, we'd best be going " Shepley hesitated. He started to walk towards the woman on the catafalque, and then felt the enormous upward surge of her flight, the pressure of all the past centuries carried before her brought to a sudden focus in front of him, holding him back like a physical barrier. "Doctor!" He reached the door just behind the Old Man. "We'll leave this one, there's no hurry!" The Old Man examined his face shrewdly in the moonlight, the brilliant colors of the persona flickering across Shepley's youthful cheeks. "I know how you feel, lad, but remember, the woman doesn't exist, any more than a painting. You'll have to come back for her soon." Shepley nodded quickly. "I know, but some other night. There's something uncanny about this tomb." He closed the doors behind them, and immediately the huge cone of light shrank back into the chancel, sucking the woman and the catafalque into the darkness. The wind swept across the dunes, throwing a fine spray of sand onto the half-buried cupolas, sighing among the wrecked tombs. The Old Man made his way down to the mono-rail, and waited for Shepley as he worked for the next hour, slowly covering each of the tombs. O n the Old Man's recommendation he gave Traxel only one of the canisters, containing about # feet of tape. As prophesied, the timewardens had been out in force in the Sea of Newton, and two members of another gang had been caught red-handed. Bridges was in foul temper, but Traxel, as ever selfcontained, seemed unworried at the wasted evening. Straddling the desk in the tilting ballroom, he examined the drum with interest, complimenting Shepley IF on his initiative. "Excellent, Shepley. I'm glad you joined us now. Do you mind telling me where you found thisr Shepley shrugged vaguely, began to mumble something about a secret basement in one of the gutted tombs nearby, but the Old Man cut in: "Don't broadcast it everywhere! Traxel, you shouldn't ask questions like that -- he's got his own living to earn." Traxel smiled, sphinx-like. "Right again, Doctor." He tapped the smooth untarnished case. "In mint condition, and a #th Dynasty too." "Tenth!" Shepley claimed indignantly, frightened that Traxel might try to pocket the bonus. The Old Man cursed, and Traxel's eyes gleamed. "Tenth, is it? I didn't realize there were any #th Dynasty tombs still intact. You surprise me, Shepley. Obviously you have concealed talents." Luckily he seemed to assume that the Old Man had been hoarding the tape for years. Face down in a shallow hollow at the edge of the ridge, Shepley watched the white-hulled sand-car of the time-wardens shunt through the darkness by the old cantonment. Directly below him jutted the spires of the newly discovered tomb-bed, invisible against the dark background of the ridge. The two wardens in the sand-car were more interested in the old tombs; they had spotted the gyrocar lying on its side by the monoraO, and guessed that the gangs had been working the ruins over again. One of them stood on the running board, flicking a torch into the gutted pavilions. Crossing the monorail, the car moved off slowly across the lake to the northwest, a low paB of dust settling behind it. For a few moments Shepley lay quietly in the slack darkness, watching the gullies and ravines that led into the lake, then slid down among the pavilions. Brushing away the sand to reveal a square wooden plank, he slipped below it into the portico. As the golden image of the enchantress loomed out of the blackwalled chancel to greet him, the great reptilian wings unfurling around her, he stood behind one of the columns in the nave, fascinated by her strange deathless beauty. At times her vivid luminous face seemed almost repellent, but he had nonetheless seized on the faint possibility of her resurrection. Each night he came, stealing into the tomb where she had lain for ten thousand years, unable to bring himself to interrupt her. The long copper hair streamed behind her like an entrained time-wind, her angled body in flight between two infinitely distant universes, where archetypal beings of superhuman stature glimmered fitfully in their own spontaneously generated light. T wo days later Bridges discovered the remainder of the drums. 'Traxel! Traxel!" he bellowed, racing across the inner courtyard from U IF the entrance to one of the disused bunkers. He bounded into the ballroom and slammed the metal cans onto the computer which Traxel was programming. "Take a look at these -- more Tenths! The whole place is crawling with them!" Traxel weighed the cans idly in his hands, glancing across at Shepley and the Old Man, on lookout duty by the window. "Interesting. Where did you find them?" Shepley jumped down from the window trestle. "They're mine. The Doctor will confirm it. They run in sequence after the first I gave you a week ago. I was storing them." Bridges cut back with an oath. "Whaddya mean, storing them? Is that your personal bunker out there? Since when?" He shoved Shepley away with a broad hand and swung round on Traxel. "Listen, Traxel, those tapes were a fair find, I don't see any tags on them. Every time I bring something in I'm going to have this kid claim it?" Traxel stood up, adjusting his height so that he over-reached Bridges. "Of course, you're right -- technically. But we have to work together, dqn't we? Shepley made a mistake, we'll forgive him this time." He handed the drums to Shepley, Bridges seething with barely controlled indignation. "If I were you, Shepley, I'd get those cashed. Don't worry about flooding the market." As Shepley turned away, sidestepping Bridges, he called him back. "And there are advantages in working together. you know." He watched Shepley disappear to his room, then turned to survey the huge peeling map of the sand-sea that covered the facing wall. "You'll have to strip the tombs now," the Old Man told Shepley later. "It's obvious you've stumbled on something, and it won't  take Traxel five minutes to discover where." "Perhaps a little longer," Shepley replied evenly. They stepped out of the shadow of the palace and moved away among the dunes; Bridges and Traxel were watching them from the dining room table, their figures motionless in the light. "The roofs are almost completely covered now. The next sandstorm should bury them for good." "Have you entered any of the other tombs?" Shepley shook his head vigorously. "Believe me. Doctor, I know now why the timewardens are here. As long as there's a chance of their be ing resurrected we're committing murder every time we rob a tomb. Even if it's only one chance in a million it may be all they themselves bargained on. After all, one doesn't commit suicide because the chances of life existing anywhere are virtually nil." Already he had come to believe that the enchantress might suddenly resurrect herself, step down from the catafalque before his eyes. While a slender possibility existed of her returning to life he felt that he too had a valid foothold in existence, that there was a small element of IF certainty in what had previously seemed a random and utterly mean ingless universe. IV A s the first dawn light probed through the casements, Shepley turned reluctantly from the nave. He looked back briefly at the glow ing persona, suppressing the slight pang of disappointment that the expected metamorphosis had not yet occurred, but relieved to have spent as much time awaiting it as possible. He made his way down to the old cantonment, steering carefully through the shadows. As he reached the monorail -- he now made the journey on foot, to prevent Traxel guessing that the cache lay along the route of the rail -- he heard the track hum faintly in the cool air. He jumped back behind a low mound, tracing its winding pathway through the dunes. Suddenly an engine throbbed out behind him, and Traxel's camouflaged halftrack appeared over the edge of the ridge. Its front four wheels raced and spun, and the huge vehicle tipped forward and plunged down the incline among the buried tombs, its surging tracks dislodging tons of the fine sand Shepley had so laboriously pushed by hand up the slope. Immediately several of the pavilions appeared to view, the white dust cascading off their cupolas. Half-buried in the avalanche they had set off, Traxel and Bridges leapt from the driving cab, pointing to the pavilions and shouting at each other. Shepley darted forward, put his foot up on the mono-rail just as it began to vibrate loudly. In the distance the gyro-car slowly approached, the Old Man punting it along, hatless and disheveled. He reached the tomb as Bridges was kicking the door in with a heavy boot, Traxel behind him with a bag full of wrenches. "Hello, Shepley!" Traxel greeted him gaily. "So this is your treasure trove." Shepley staggered splay-legged through the sliding sand, brushed past Traxel as glass spattered from the window. He flung himself on Bridges and pulled the big man backwards. "Bridges, this one's mine! Try any of the others, you can have them all!" Bridges jerked himself to his feet, staring down angrily at Shepley. Traxel peered suspiciously at the other tombs, their porticos still flooded with sand. "What's so interesting about this one, Shepley?" he asked sardonically. Bridges roared and slammed a boot into the casement, knocking out one of the panels. Shepley dived onto his shoulders, and Bridges snarled and flung him against the wall. Before Shepley could duck he swung a heavy left cross to Shepley 's mouth, knocking him back onto the sand with a bloody face. Traxel roared with amusement as Shepley lay there stunned, then knelt down, sympathetically examinIF ing Shepley's face in the light thrown by the expanding persona within the tomb. Bridges whooped with surprise, gaping like a startled ape at the sumptuous golden mirage of the enchantress. "How did you find me?" Shepley muttered thickly. "I doubletracked a dozen times." Traxel smiled. "We didn't follow you, chum. We followed the rail." He pointed down at the silver thread of the metal strip, plainly visible in the dawn light almost ten miles away. "The gyro-car cleaned the rail, it led us straight here. Ah, hello. Doctor," he greeted the Old Man as he climbed the slope and slumped down wearily beside Shepley. "I take it we have you to thank for this discovery. Don't worry. Doctor, I shan't forget you." "Many thanks," the Old Man said flatly. He helped Shepley to sit up, frowning at his split lips. "Aren't you taking everything too seriously, Traxel? You're becoming crazed with greed. Let the boy have this tomb. There are plenty more." The patterns of light across the sand dimmed and broke as Bridges plunged through the persona towards the rear of the chancel. Weakly Shepley tried to stand up, but the Old Man held him back. Traxel shrugged. "Too late, Doctor." He looked over his shoulder at the persona, ruefully shaking his head in acknowledgment of its magnificence. "These #th Dynasty graves are stupendous. But there's something curious about this one." H e was still staring at it reflectively a minute later when Bridges emerged. "Boy, that was a crazy one, Traxel! For a second I thought it was a dud." He handed the three canisters to Traxel, who weighed two oTthem in one hand against the other. Bridges added: "Kinda  light, aren't they?" Traxel began to pry them open with a wrench. "Are you certain there are no more in there?" "Hundred per cent. Have a look yourself." Two of the cans were empty, the tape spools missing. The third was only half full, a mere three-inch width of tape in its center. Bridges bellowed in pain: "The kid robbed us. I can't believe it!" Traxel waved him away and went over to the Old Man, who was staring in at the now flickering persona. The two men exchanged glances, then nodded slowly in confirmation. With a short laugh Traxel kicked at the can containing the half reel of tape, jerking the spool out onto the sand, where it began to unravel in the quietly moving air. Bridges protested but Traxel shook his head. "It is a dud. Go and have a close look at the image." When Bridges peered at it blankly he explained: "The woman there was dead when the matrices were recorded. She's beautiful all right -- as poor Shepley here discovered -- but it's all too literally skin deep. That's why there's only half a can of data. No nervous system, no musculature or internal CH-gans  Imt a beautiful gdden husk. This is a mortuary tomb. If you resurrected her you'd have an ice-cold corpse on your hands." "But why?" Bridges rasped. "What's the point?" Traxel gestured expansively. "It's immortality of a kind. Perhaps she died suddenly, and this was the next best thing. When the Doctor first came here there were a lot of mortuary tombs of young children being found. If I remember he had something of a reputation for always leaving them intact. A typical piece of highbrow sentimentality -- giving immortality only to the dead. Agree, Doctor?" Before the Old Man could reply a voice shouted from below, there was a nearby roaring hiss of an ascending signal rocket and a vivid red star-shell burst over the lake below, spitting incandescent fragments over them. Traxel and Bridges leapt forwards, saw two men in a sandcar pointing up at them, three mce vehicles converging across the lake half a mile away. "The time-wardens!" Traxel shouted. Bridges picked up the tool bag and the two men raced across the slope towards the half-track, the Old Man hobbling after them. He turned back towait for Shepley, who was still sitting on the ground where he had fallen, watching the image inside the pavilion. "Shepley! Come on, lad, pull yourself together! You'll get ten years!" When Shepley made no reply he reached up to the side of the halftrack as Traxel reversed it expertly out of the morraine of sand, let Bridges swing him aboard. "Shepley!" he called again. Traxel hesitated, then roared away as a second star-shell exploded. S hepley tried to reach the tape, but the stampeding feet had severed it at several points, and the loose ends, which he had numbly thought of trying to reinsert into the projector, now fluttered around him in the sand. Below, he could hear the sounds of flight and pursuit, the warning crack of a rifle, engines baying and plunging, as Traxel eluded the timewar dens, but he kept his eyes fixed on the image within the tomb. Already it had begun to fragment, fading against the mounting sunlight. Getting slowly to his feet, he entered the tomb and closed the battered doors. Still magnificent upon her bier, the enchantress lay back between the great wings. Motionless for so long, she had at last been galvanized into life, and a jerking syncopated rhythm rippled through her body. The wings shook uneasily, and a series of tremors disturbed the base of the catafalque, so that the woman's feet danced an exquisitely flickering minuet, the toes darting from side to side with untiring speed. Higher up, her wide smooth hips jostled each other in a jaunty mock tango. He watched until only the face remained, a few disconnected traces of the wings and catafalque jerking ir faintly in the darkness, then made his way out of the tomb. Outside, in the cool morning light, the time-wardens were waiting for him, hands on the hips of their white uniforms. One was holding the empty canisters, turning the fluttering strands of tape over with his foot as they drifted away. The other took Shepley's arm and steered him down to the car. "Traxel's gang," he said to the driver. "This must be a new recruit." He glanced dourly at the blood around Shepley's mouth. "Looks as if they've been fighting over the spoils." The driver pointed to the three drums. "Stripped?" The man carrying them nodded. "All three. And they were #th Dynasty." He shackled Shepley's wrists to the dashboard. "Too bad, son, you'll be doing ten yourself soon. It'll seem like ten thousand." "Unless it was a dud," the driver rejoined, eyeing Shepley with some sympathy. "You know, one of those freak mortuary tombs," Shepley straightened his bruised mouth. "It wasn't," he said firmly. The driver glanced warningly at the other wardens. "What about the tape blowing away up there?" Shepley looked up at the tomb spluttering faintly below the ridge, its light almost gone. "That's just the persona," he said. "The empty skin." As the engine surged forward he listened to the three empty drums hit the floor behind the seat LY at New York, N.Y., for Oct. #, #. #. The names and addresses of the ublisher, editor, managing editor, and usiness managers are: Publisher. Sol Cohen, #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y.; Editor, Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. ; Managing Editor, None; Business Manager, Ine. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other un-incorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Digest Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y., Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson St.; New York #. N. Y. #. The known bondholder, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # Include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the malls or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: #(X). (This information Is required by the act of June #, # to be Included in all statements regardless of frequency of Issue.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this #st day of September. #. Jacques N. Click, Notary Public (Commission expires March SO, #) SI IF Novelette Blast you, Retief! Your violent ways are the disgrace of Earth's diplomatic corps -- but your salty jokes are worse! I C onsul-General Magnan gfneerlv fingered the heavily rubberbanded sheaf of dog-eared documents. haven't rushed into nrecipitate action on this claim. Retief," he said "The Consulate has crave responsibilities here in the Belt One must weigh all aspects of the situation, consider the ramifications. What consequences would arise from a crant of minerals rights on the planetoid to this claimant?' "The claim looked all right to me," Retief said "Seventeen copies with attachments vVhv not process it? You've had it on your desk for a week." Magnans eyebrows went np. ir You've a personal interest in this claim, Retief? "Every day you wait is costing them money. That hulk they use for an ore-carrier is in a parking orbit piling up demurrage." "I see you've become emotionally involved in the affairs of a group of obscure miners. You haven't yet learned the true diplomat's happy faculty of non-identification with specifics -- or should I say identification with non-specifics?" "They're not a wealthy outfit, you know. In fact, I understand this claim is their sole asset -- unless you want to count the ore-carrier." "The Consulate is not concerned with the internal financial problems of the Sam's Last Chance Number Nine Mining Company." "Careful," Retief said. "You almost identified yourself with a specific that time." "Hardly, my dear Retief," Magnan said blandly. "The implication is mightier than the affidavit. You should study the records of the giants of galactic diplomacy: Crodfoller, Passwyn, Spradley, Nitworth, Stemwheeler, Rumpwhistle. The roll-caU of those names rings like the majestic tread of...of... "Dinosaurs?" Retief suggested. "An apt simile," Magnan nodded. "Those mighty figures, those armored hides --  "Those tiny brains -- " Magnan smiled sadly. "I see you're indulging your penchant for distorted facetiae. Perhaps one day you'll learn their true worth." U "I already have my suspicions." The intercom chimed. Miss Gumble's features appeared on the desk screen. "Mr. Leatherwell to see you, Mr. Magnan. He has no appointment -- " Magnan's eyebrows went up. "Send Mr. Leatherwell right in." He looked at Retief. "I had no idea Leatherwell was planning a call. I wonder what he's after?" Magnan looked anxious. "He's an important figure in Belt minerals circles. It's important to avoid arousing antagonism, while maintaining non-commitment. You may as well stay. You might pick up some valuable pointers technique-wise." T he door swung wide. Leatherwell strode into the room, his massive paunch buckled into fashionable vests of turquoise velvet and hung with the latest in fluorescent watch charms. He extended a large palm and pumped Magnan's flaccid arm vigorously. "Ah, there, Mr. Consul-General. Good of you to receive me." He wiped his hand absently on his thigh, eyeing Retief questioningly. "Mr. Retief. my Vice-Consul and Minerals Officer," Magnan said. "Do take a chair, Mr. Leatherwell. In what capacity can I serve today?" "I am here, gentlemen," Leatherwell said, putting an immense yellow briefcase on Magnan's desk and settling himself in a power rocker, "on behalf of my company. General Minerals. General Minerds has long been aware, gentlemen, of the ausIF tere conditfons obtaining here in the Belt, to which public servants like yourselves are subjected." Leatherwell bobbed with the pitch of the rocker, smiling complacently at Magnan. "General Minerals is more than a great industrial combine. It is an organization with a heart." Leatherwell reached for his breast pocket, missed, tried again. "How do you turn this damned thing off?" he growled. Magnan half-rose, peering over Leatherwell's briefcase. "The switch just there -- on the arm." The executive fumbled. There was a dicky and the chair subsided with a sigh of compressed air. "That's better." Leatherwell drew out a long slip of blue paper. "To alleviate the Wedom and brighten the lives of that hardy group of Terrestrials laboring here on Ceres to bring free enterprise to the Belt, General Minerals is presenting to the Consulate -- on their behalf -- one hundred thousand credits for the construction of a Joy Center, to be equipped with the latest and finest in recreational equipment, including a Gourmet Model C banquet synthesizer, a forty-foot sublimation chamber, a five thousand tape library -- with a number of choice items unobtainable in Boston -- a twentyfoot Tri-D tank and other amenities too numerous to mention." Leatherwell leaned back, beaming expectantly. "Why, Mr. Leatherwell. We're overwhelmed, of course." Magnan smiled dazedly past the briefcase. "But I wonder if ifs quite proper... "The gift is to the people, Mr. Consul. You merely accept on their behalf." "I wonder if General Minerals realizes that the hardy Terrestrials laboring on Ceres are limited "to the Consular staff?" Retief said. "And the staff consists of Mr. Magnan, Miss Gumble and myself." "Mr. Leatherwell is hardly interested in these details, Retief," Magnan cut in. "A public-spirited offer indeed, sir. As Terrestrial Consul -- and on behalf of all Terrestrials here in the Belt -- I accept with a humble awareness of -- " "Now, there was one other little matter." Leatherwell leaned forward to open the briefcase, glancing over Magnan's littered desktop. He extracted a bundle of papers, dropped them on the desk, then drew out a heavy document and passed it across to Magnan. "Just a routine claim. I'd like to see it rushed through, as we have in mind some loading operations in die vicinity next week." "Certainly Mr, Leatherwell." Magnan glanced at the papers, paused to read. He looked up. "Ah -- " "Something the matter, Mr. Consul?" Leatherwell demanded. "It's just that -- ah -- I seem to recall -- as a matter of fact..." Magnan looked at Retief. Retief took the papers, looked over the top sheet. "#-A. Sorry, Mr. Leatherwell. General Minerals has been anticipated. We're processing a prior claim." "Prior claim?" Leatherwell barked. "You've issued the grant?" "Oh, no indeed, Mr. Leatherwell," Magnanf replied quickly. "The claim hasn't yet been processed." "Then there's no difficulty," Leatherwell boomed. He glanced at his finger watch. "If you don't mind, m wait and take the grant along with me. I assume it will only take a minute or two to sign it and affix seals and so on?" "The other claim was filed a full week ago -- " Retief started. "Bah!" Leatherwell waved a hand impatiently. "These details can be arranged." He fixed an eye on Magnan. "I'm sure all of us here understand that it's in the public interest that minerals properties go to responsible firms, with adequate capital for proper development." "Why, ah," Magnan said. "The Sam's Last Chance Number Nine Mining Company is a duly chartered firm. Their claim is valid." "I know that hole-in-comer concern," Leatherwell snapped. "Mere irresponsible opportunists. General lions, I say -- of the stockholders' funds in minerals explorations. Are they to be balked in realizing a fair return on their investment because these... these... adventures have stumbled on a deposit? Not that the property is of any real value, of course," he added. "Quite an ordinary bit of rock. But General Minerals would find it convenient to consolidate its holdings." "There are plenty of other rocks floating around in the Belt. Why not -- " "One moment, Retief," Magnan cut in. He looked across the desk at his junior with a severe expression. "As Consul-General, I'm quite capable of determining the relative merits of claims. As Mr. Leatherwell has pointed out, it's in the public interest to consider the question in depth." Leatherwell cleared his throat. "I might state at this time that General Minerals is prepared to be generous in dealing with these interlopers. I believe we would be prepared to go so far as to offer them free title to certain GM holdings in exchange for their release of any alleged rights to the property in question -- merely to simplify matters, of course." "That seems more than fair to me," Magnan glowed. "The Sam's people have a clear priority," Retief said. "I logged the claim in last Friday." "They have far from a clear title." Leatherwell snapped. "And I can assure you GM will contest their claim, if need be, to the Supreme CourtI" "Just what holdings did you have in mind offering them, Mr. Leatherwell?" Magnan asked nervously. Leatherwell reached into his briefcase and drew out a paper. "#-P," he read. "A quite massive body. Crustal material, I imagine. It should satisfy these squatters' IF desire to own real estate in the Belt. "Fll make a note of that," Magnan said, reaching for a pad. "That's a Bona Fide offer, Mr. Leatherwell?" Relief asked. "Certainly!" "I'll record it as such," Magnan said, scribbling. "And who knows?" Leatherwell said. "It may turn out to contain some surprisingly rich finds." "And if they won't accept it?" Relief asked. "Then I daresay General Minerals will find a remedy in the courts, sir!" "Oh, I hardly think that will be necessary," Magnan said. "Then there's another routine matter," Leatherwell said. He passed a second document across to Magnan. "GM is requesting an injunction to restrain these same parties from aggravated trespass. I'd appreciate it if you'd push it through at once. There's a matter of a load of illegally obtained ore involved, as well." "Certainly Mr. Leatherwell. I'll see to it myself." "No need for that. The papers are all drawn up. Our legal department will vouch for their correctness. Just sign here." Leatherwell spread out the paper and handed Magnan a pen. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to read that over first?" Relief said. L eatherwell frowned impatiently. "You'll have adequate time to familiarize yourself with the details later, Relief," Magnan snapped, taking the pen. "No need to waste Mr. Leatherwell's valuable time." He scratched a signature on the paper. Leatherwell rose, gathered up his papers from Magnan's desk, dumped them into the briefcase. "Riff-raff, of course. Their kind has no business in the Belt." Relief rose, crossed to the desk, and held out a hand. "I believe you gathered in an official document along with your own, Mr. Leatherwell. By error, of course." "What's that?" Leatherwell bridled. Relief smiled, waiting. Magnan opened his mouth. "It was under your papers, Mr. Leatherwell," Relief said. "It's the thick one, with the rubber bands." Leatherwell dug in his briefcase, produced the document. "Well, fancy finding this here," he growled. He shoved the papers into Relief's hand. "You're a very observant young fellow." He closed the briefcase with a snap. "I trust you'll have a bright "Really, Relief," Magnan said reprovingly. "There was no need to trouble Mr. Leatherwell." Leatherwell directed a sharp look at Relief and a bland one at Magnan. "I trust you'll communicate the proposal to the interested parties. Inasmuch as time is of the essence of the GM position, our offer can only be held open until # Greenwich, tomorrow. I'll call again at that time to finalize matters. I trust there'll be no impediment to a satisfactory settlement at that time. I should dislike to embark on lengthy litigation." Magnan hurried around his desk to open the door. He turned bacfk to fix Retief widi an exasperated fixwn. crass display of boorishness, Retief," he snapped. "YouVe embarrassed a most mfhiential member of the business community -- and for nothing more than a few miserable forms." "Those forms represent somebody's stake in what might be a valuable property." "They're mere paper until they've been processedi" "Still -- " "My responsibility is to the Public interest -- not to a fly-by-night group of prospectors." "They found it first." "Bah! A worthless rock. After Mr. Leatherwell's munificent gesture --  "Better rush his check through before he thinks it over and changes his mind." "Good heavens!" Magnan clutched the check, buzzed for Miss Gumble. She swept in, took Magnan's instructions and left. Retief waited while Magnan glanced over the injunction. then nodded. "Quite in order. A person called Sam Mancziewicz appears to be the principal. Tlie address given is the Jolly Barge Hotel; that would be that converted derelict ship in orbit #, I assume?" Retief nodded. "That's what they caD it." "As for the ore-carrier. I'd best impound it, pending the settlement of the matter." Magnan drew a form from a drawer, filled in blanks, shoved the paper across the desk. He turned and consisted a wcdl chart. "Tile hotel is nearby at the moment, as it happens. Take the Consulate dinghy. If you get out there right away, you'll catch them before the evening binge has developed fully." "I take it that's your diplomatic way of telling me that I'm now a process server." Retief took the papers and tucked them into an inside pocket. "One of the many functions a diplomat is called on to perform in a small consular post. Excellent experience. I needn't warn you to be circumspect. These miners are an unruly lot -- especially when receiving bad news." "Aren't we all." Retief rose. "I don't suppose there's any prospect of your signing off that claim so that I can take a little good news along, too?" "None whatever," Magnan snapped. "They've been made a most generous offer. If that fails to satisfy them, they have recourse through the courts." "Fighting a suit like that costs money. The Sam's Last Chance Mining Company hasn't got any." "Need I remind you --  "I know. That's none of our concem.' "On your way out," Magnan said as Retief turned to the door, "ask Miss Gumble to bring in the Gourmet catalog from the Commercial Library. I want to check on the specifications of the Model C Banquet synthesizer." An hour later, nine hundred miles R from Ceres and fast approaching the Jolly Barge Hotel, Retief keyed the skiffs transmitter. VO-#." prompt voice came back. A flickering image appeared on the small screen. "Oh, hi there, Mr. Retief. What brings you out in the cold night air?" "Hello, Henry. I'm estimating the Jolly Barge in ten minutes. It looks like a busy night ahead. I may be moving around a little. How about keeping an eye on me? I'll be carrying a personnel beacon. Monitor it, and if I switch it into high, come in fast. I can't afford to be held up. I've got a big meeting in the morning." "Sure thing, Mr. Retief. We'll keep an eye open." R etief dropped a ten-credit note on the bar, accepted a glass and a squat bottle of black Marsberry brandy and turned to survey the lowceilinged room, a former hydroponics deck now known as the Jungle Bar. Under the low ceiling, unpruned Ipomoea batafas and Lathyrus odoratus vines sprawled in a tangle that filtered the light of the S-spectrum glare panels to a muted green. A six-foot trideo screen, salvaged from the wreck of a Concordiat transport, blared taped music in the style of two centuries past. At the tables, heavy-shouldered men in brightdyed suit liners played cards, clanked bottles and shouted. Carrying the bottle and glass, Retief moved across to an empty chair at one of the tables. "You gentlemen mind if I join you?" Five unshaven faces turned to study Relief's six foot three, his dose cut black hair, his non-commital gray coverall the scars on his knuckles. A redhead with a broken nose nodded. "Pull up a chair, stranger." "You workin' a claim, pardner?" "Just looking around." "Try a shot of this rock juice." "Don't do it. Mister. He makes it himself." "Best rock juice this side of Luna." "Say, feller -- " "The name's Retief." "Retief, you ever play Drift?" "Can't say that I did." "Don't gamble with Sam, pardner. He's the local champ." "How do you play it?" The black-browed miner who had suggested the game rolled back his sleeve to reveal a sinewy forearm, put his elbow on the table. "You hook forefingers, and put a glass right up on top. The man that takes a swallow wins. If the drink spills, it's drinks for the house." "A man don't often win outright," the redhead said cheerfully. "But it makes for plenty of drinkin'." Retief put his elbow on the table. "I'll give it a try." The two men hooked forefingers. The redhead poured a tumbler half full of rock juice, placed it atop the two fists. "Okay, boys. G#I" ap The man named Sam gritted his teeth; his biceps tensed, knuckles grew white. The glass trembled. Then it moved -- toward Retief. Sam hunched his shoulders, straining. "That's the stuff, Misterl" "What's the matter, Sam? You tired?" The glass moved steadily closer to Relief's face. "A hundred the new man makes it!" "Watch Sam! Any minute now... The glass slowed, paused. Relief's wrist twitched and the glass crashed to the table top. A shout went up. Sam leaned back with a sigh, massaging his hand. "That's some arm you got, Mister," he said. "If you hadn't jumped just then..." "I guess the drinks are on me," Retief said. T wo hours later Relief's Marsberry bottle stood empty on the table beside half a dozen others. "We were lucky," Sam Mancziewicz was saying. "You figure the original volume of the planet; say # cubic miles. The deBerry theory calls for a collapsedcrystal core no more than a mile in diameter. There's your odds." "And you believe you've found a fragment of this core?" "Damn right we have. Couple of three credits a ton delivered at Port Syrtis, we're set for life. About time, too Twenty years I've been in the Belt. Got two kids I haven't seen for five years. Things are going to be different now." "Hey, Sam; tone it down. You don't have to broadcast to every claim jumper in the Belt." "Our claim's on file at the Consulate," Sam said. "As soon as we get the grant -- " "When's that gonna be? We been waitin' a week now." "I've never seen any collapsedcrystal metal," Retief said. "I'd like to take a look at it." "Sure. Come on, I'll run you over. It's about an hour's run. We'll take our skiff. You want to go along, WiUy?" "I got a bottle to go," Willy said. "See you in the morning." The two men descended in the lift to the boat bay, suited up and strapped into the cramped boat. A bored attendant cycled the launch doors, levered the release that propelled the skiff out and clear of the Jolly Barge Hotel. Retief caught a glimpse of a tower of lights spinning majestically against the black of space as the drive hurled the tiny boat away. m R eliefs feet sank ankle deep into the powdery surface that glinted like snow in the glare of the distant sun. "It's funny stuff," Sam's voice sounded in his ear. "Under a gee of gravity, you'd sink out of sight. The stuff cuts diamond like butter -- but IF temperature changes break it down into a powder. A lot of it's used just like this, as an industrial abrasive. Easy to load, too. Just drop a suction line, put on ambient pressure and start pumping." "And this whole rock is made of the same material?" "Sure is. We ran plenty of test bores and a full schedule of soundings. I've got the reports back aboard Gertie -- that's our lighter." "And you've already loaded a cargo here?" "Yep. We're running out of capital fast. I need to get that cargo to port in a hurry -- before the outfit goes into involuntary bankruptcy. With this, that'd be a crime." "What do you know about General Minerals, Sam?" "You thinking of hiring on with them? Better read the fine print in your contract before you sign. Sneakiest bunch this side of a burglar's convention." "They own a chunk of rock known as #-P. Do you suppose we could find it?" "Oh, you're buying it, hey? Sure, we can find it. You damn sure want to look it over good if General Minerals is selling." Back aboard the skiff, Mancziewicz flipped the pages of the chart book, consulted a table. "Yep, she's not too far off. Let's go see what GM's trying to unload." T he skiff hovered two miles from the giant boulder known as #P. Retief and Mancziewicz looked it over at high magnification. "It don't look like much, Retief," Sam said. "Let's go down and take a closer look." The boat dropped rapidly toward the scarred surface of the tiny world, a floating mountain, glaring black and white in the spotlight of the sun. Sam frowned at his instrument panel. "That's funny. My ion counter is revving up. Looks like a drive trail, not more than an hour or two old. Somebody's been here." The boat grounded. Retief and Sam got out. The stony surface was littered with rock fragments varying in size from pebbles to great slabs twenty feet long, tumbled in a loose bed of dust and sand. Retief pushed off gently, drifted up to a vantage point atop an upended wedge of rock. Sam joined him. "This is all igneous stuff," he said. "Not likely we'll find much here that would pay the freight to Syrtis -- unless maybe you lucked onto some Bodean artifacts. They bring plenty." He flipped a binocular in place as he talked, scanned the riven landscape. "Hey!" he said. "Over there I" Retif followed Sam's pointing glove. He studied the dark patch against a smooth expanse of eroded rock. "A friend of mine came across a chunk of the old planetary surface two years ago," Sam said thoughtfully. "Had a tunnel in it that'd been used as a storage depot by the Bodeans. Took out over two ton of hardware. Course, nobody's discovered how the stu works yet, but it brings top prices." "Looks like water erosion," Retief said. "Yep. This could be another piece of surface, all right. Could be a cave over there. The Bodeans liked caves, too. Must have been some war -- but then, if it hadn't been, they wouldn't have tucked so much stuff away underground where it could weather the planetary breakup." They descended, crossed the jumbled rocks with light, thirty-foot leaps. "It's a cave, all right," Sam said, stooping to peer into the five-foot bore. Retief followed him inside. "Let's get some light in here." Mancziewicz flipped on a beam. It glinted back from dull polished surfaces of Bodean synthetic. Sam's low whistle sounded in Relief's headset. "That's funny," Retief said. "Funny, hell! It's hilarious. General Minerals trying to seU off a worthless rock to a tenderfoot -- and it's loaded with Bodean artifacts. No telling how much is here; the tunnel seems to go quite a ways back." "That's not what I mean. Do you notice your suit warming up?" 'Huh? Yeah, now that you mention it" Retief rapped with a gauntleted hand on the satiny black curve of the nearest Bodean artifact. It clunked dully through the suit "That's not metal," he said. "It's plastic." S# "There's something fishy here," Sam said. "This erosion; it looks more like a heat beam." "Sam," Retief said, turning, "it appears to me somebody has gone to a great deal of trouble to give a false impression here." S am snorted. "I told you they were a crafty bunch." He started out of the cave, then paused, went to one knee to study the floor. "But maybe they outsmarted themselves. Look here!" Retief looked. Sam's beam reflected from a fused surface of milky white, shot through with dirty yellow. He snapped a pointed instrument in place on his gauntlet, dug at one of the yellow streaks. It furrowed under the gouge, a particle adhering to the instrument. With his left hand, Mancziewicz opened a pouch clipped to his belt, carefully deposited the sample in a small orifice on the device in the pouch. He flipped a key, squinted at a dial. "Atomic weight #," he said. Retief turned down the audio volume on his headset as Sam's laughter rang in his helmet. "Those clowns were out to stick you, Retiet," he gasped, still chuckling. "They salted the rock with a cave full of Bodean artifacts -- " "Fake Bodean artifacts," Retief put m. "They planed off the rock so it would look like an old beach, and then cut this cave with beamers. And they were boring through practically solid goldl" IP "As good as that?' Mancziewicz flashed the light around. "This stuff will assay out at a thousand credits a ton, easy. If the vein doesn't run to five thousand tons, the beers are on me." He snapped off the light. "Let's get moving, Retief. You want to sew his deal up before they get around to taking another look at it." Back in the boat, Retief and Mancziewicz opened their helmets. "This calls for a drink," Sam said, extracting a pressure flask from the map case. "This rock's worth as much as mine, maybe more. You hit it lucky, Retief. Congratulations." He thrust out a hand. "I'm afraid you've jumped to a couple of conclusions, Sam," Retief said. "I'm not out here to buy mining properties." "You're not -- then why -- but man! Even if you didn't figure on buying..." He trailed off as Retief shook his head, unzipped his suit to reach to an inside pocket, take out a packet of folded papers. "In my capacity as Terrestrial Vice-Consul, I'm serving you with an injunction restraining you from further exploitation of the body known as #-A." He handed a paper across to Sam. "I also have here an Order impounding the vessel Gravel Gertie ." Sam took the papers silently, sat looking at them. He looked up at Retief. "Funny. When you beat me at Drift and then threw the game so you wouldn't show me up in front of the boys, I figured you for a right to you like you were my old grandma. An old-timer in the game like me." He dropped a hand, brought it up with a Browning #mm pointed al Retief's chest. "I could shoot you and dump you here with a slab over you, toss these papers in the john and hightail it with the load... "That wouldn't do you much good in the long run, Sam. Besides you're not a criminal or an idiot." S am chewed s lip. "My claim is on file in the Consulate, legd and proper. Maybe by now the grant's gone through." "Other people have their eye on your rock, Sam. Ever meet a fellow called Leatherwell?" "General Minerals, huh? They haven't got a leg to stand on." "The last time I saw your claim, it was still lying in the pending file. Just a bundle of paper until it's validated by the Consul. If Leatherwell contests it...well, his lawyers are on annual retainer. How long could you keep the suit going, Sam?" Mancziewicz closed his helmet with a decisive snap, motioned to Retief to do the same. He opened the hatch, sat with the gun on Retief. "Get out, paper-pusher." His voice sounded thin in the headphones. "You'll get lonesome, maybe, but your suit will keep you alive a few days. I'll tip somebody off before you lose too much weight. Fm going back and see if I can't stir up a litde action at the Consulate." Relief climbed out, walked off fifty yards. He watched as the skiff kicked off in a quickly dispersed cloud of dust, dwindled rapidly away to a bright speck that was lost against the stars. Then he extracted the locator beacon from the pocket of his suit and thumbed the control. Twenty minutes later, aboard Navy FP-VO-#, Relief pulled off his helmet. "Fast work, Henry. I've got a couple of calls to make. Put me through to your HQ, will you? I want a word with Commander Hayle." The young naval officer raised the HO. handed the mike to Relief. "Vice-Consul Relief here. Commander. I'd like you to intercept a skiff, bound from my present position toward Ceres. There's a Mr. Mancziewicz aboard. He's armed, but not dangerous. Collect him and see that he's delivered to the Consulate at # Greenwich tomorrow. "Next item: The Consulate has impounded an ore-carrier. Gravel Ger tie II. It's a parking orbit ten miles off Ceres. I want it taken in tow." Relief gave detailed instruction. Then he asked for a connection through the Navy switchboard to the Consulate. Magnan's voice answered. "Relief speaking, Mr. Consul. I have some news that I think will interest yoq -- " "Where are you. Relief? What's wtong with the screen? Have you served the injunction?" "I'm aboard the Navy patrol vessel. I've been out looking over the situation, and I've made a surprising discovery. I don't think we're going to have any trouble with the Sam's people; they've looked over the body -- #-P -- and it seems General Minerals has slipped up. There appears to be a highly valuable deposit there." "Oh? What sort of deposit?" "Mr. Mancziewicz mentioned collapsed crystal metal," Relief said. "Well, most interesting." Magnan's voice sounded thoughtful. "Just thought you'd like to know. This should simplify the meeting in the morning. "Yes," Magnan said. "Yes, indeed. I think this makes everything very simple... A t # Greenwich, Relief stepped into the outer office of the Consular suite. "... fantastic configuration," Leatherwell's bass voice rumbled, "covering literally acres. My xenogeologists are somewhat confused by the formations. They had only a few hours to examine the site; but it's clear from the extent of the surface indications that we have a very rich find here. Very rich indeed. Beside it, #-A dwindles into insignificance. Very fast thinking on your part, Mr. Consul, to bring the matter to my attenion." "Not at all, Mr. Leatherwell. After all-" "Our tentative theory is that the basic crystal fragment encountered the core material at some time, and gathered it in. Since we had been working on -- that is, had landed to take samples on the other side of the IF body, this anomalous deposit escaped our attention completely." Retief stepped into the room. "Good morning, gentlemen. Has Mr. Mancziewicz arrived?" "Mr. Mancziewicz is under restraint by the Navy. I've had a call that he'd be escorted here." "Arrested, eh?" Leatherwell nodded. "I told you these people were an irresponsible group. In a way it seems a pity to waste a piece of property like #-A on them." "I understood General Minerals was claiming that rock," Retief said, looking surprised. Leatherwell and Magnan exchanged glances. "Ah, GM has decided to drop all claim to the body," Leatherwell said. "As always, we wish to encourage enterprise on the part of the small operators. Let them keep the property. After all GM has other deposits well worth exploiting." He smiled complacently. "What about #-P? You've offered it to the Sam's group." "That offer is naturally withdrawn!" Leatherwell snapped. "I don't see how you can withdraw the offer," Retief said. "It's been officially recorded. It's a Bona Fide contract, binding on General Minerals, subject to -- " "Out of the goodness of our corporate heart," Leatherwell roared, "we've offered to relinquish our legitimate, rightful claim to asteroid #-P. And you have the infernal gall to spout legal technicalities! I have half a mind to withdraw my offer to withdraw!" "Actually," Magnan put in, eyeing a corner of the room, "I'm not at all sure I could turn up the record of the offer of #-P. I noted it down on a bit of scratch paper -- " "That's all right," Retief said, "I had my pocket recorder going. I sealed the record and deposited it in the Consular archives." There was a clatter of feet outside. Miss Gumble appeared on the desk screen. "There are a number of persons here -- " she began. T he door banged open. Sam Mancziewicz stepped into the room, a sailor tugging at each arm. He shook them loose, stared around the room. His eyes lighted on Retief. "How did you get here...?" "Look here, Monkeywits or whatever your name is," Leatherwell began, popping out of his chair. Mancziewicz whirled, seized the stout executive by the shirt front and lifted him onto his tiptoes. "You double-barrelled copper-bottomed oak-lined son-of-a -- " "Don't spoil him, Sam," Retief said casually. "He's here to sign off all rights -- if any -- to #-A. It's all yours -- if you want it." Sam glared into Leatherwell's eyes. "That right?" he grated. Leatherwell bobbed his head, his chins compressed into bulging folds. "However," Retief went on, "I wasn't at all sure you'd still be agreeable, since he's made your company a binding offer of #-P in return for clear title to #-A." Mancziewicz looked across at Retief with narrowed eyes. He released Leatherwell, who slumped into his chair. Magnan darted around his desk to minister to the magnate. Behind them, Retief closed one eye in a broad wink at Mancziewicz...still, if Mr. Leatherwell will agree, in addition to guaranteeing your title to #-A, to purchase your output at four credits a ton, Mancziewicz looked at Leatherwell. Leatherwell hesitated, then nodded. "Agreed," he croaked. "...and to open his commissary and postal facilities to all prospectors operating in the belt..." Leatherwell swallowed, eyes bulging, glanced at Mancziewicz's face. He nodded. "Agreed."...then I think Pd sign an agreement releasing him from his offer." Mancziewicz looked at Magnan. "You're the Terrestrial ConsulGeneral," he said. "Is that the straight goods?" Magnan nodded. "If Mr. Leatherwell agrees --  "He's already agreed," Retief said. "My pocket recorder, you know." "Put it in writing," Mancziewicz said. Magnan called in Miss Gumble. The others waited silently while Magnan dictated. He signed the paper with a flourish, passed it across to Mancziewicz. He read it, re-read it, then picked up the pen and signed. Magnan impressed the Consular seal on the paper. "Now the grant," Retief said. Magnan signed the claim, added a seal. Mancziewicz tucked the papers away in an inner pocket. He rose. "Well, gents, I guess maybe I had you figured wrong," he said. He looked at Retief. "Uh...got time for a drink?" "I shouldn't drink during office hours," Retief said. He rose. "So I'll take the rest of the day off." #T don't get it," Sam said signalX ling for refills. "What was the routine with the injunction -- and impounding Gertie? You could have got hurt." "I don't think so," Retief said. "If you'd meant business with that Browning, you'd have flipped the safety off. As for the injunction -- orders are orders." "I've been thinking," Sam said. "That gold deposit. It was a plant, too, wasn't it?" "I'm just a bureaucrat, Sam. What would I know about gold?" "A double-salting job," Sam said. "I was supposed to spot the phoney hardware -- and then fall for the gold plant. When Leatherwell put his proposition to me. I'd grab it. The gold was worth plenty, I'd figure, and I couldn't afford a legal tangle with General Minerals. The lousy skunki And you must have spotted it and put it up to him." The bar-tender leaned across to Retief. "Wanted on the phone." In the booth, Magnan's agitated face stared a Retief. "Retief, Mr. Leatherwell's in a towering rage! The deposit on #P; it was merely a surface film, barcIP ly a few inches thick! The entire deposit wouldn't fill an ore-boat." A horrified expression dawned on Magnan's face. "Retief," he gasped, "what did you do with the impounded ore-carrier?" "Well, let me see," Retief said. "According to the Space Navigation Code, a body in orbit within twenty miles of any inhabited airless body constitutes a navigational hazard. Accordingly, I had it towed away." "And the cargo?" "Well, accelerating all that mass was an expensive business, so to save the taxpayer's credits, I had it dumped." "Where?" Magnan croaked. "On some unimportant asteroid -- as specified by Regulations." He smiled blandly at Magnan. Magnan looked back numbly. "But you said -- " "All I said was that there was what looked like a valuable deposit on #-P. It turned out to be a bogus gold mine that somebody had rigged up in a hurry. Curious, eh?" "But you told me -- " "And you told Mr. Leatherwell. Indiscreet of you, Mr. Consul. That was a privileged communication; classified information, official use only." "You led me to believe there was collapsed crystal!" "I said Sam had mentioned it. He told me his asteroid was made of the stuff." Magnan swallowed hard, twice. "By the way," he said dully. "You were right about the check. Half an hour ago Mr. Leatherwell tried to stop payment. He was too late." "All in all, it's been a big day for Leatherwell," Retief said. "Anything else?" "I hope not," Magnan said. "I sincerely hope not." He leaned close to the screen. "You'll consider the entire affair as...confidential? There's no point in unduly complicating relationships." "Have no fear, Mr. Consul," Retief said cheerfully. "You won't find me identifying with anything as specific as triple-salting an asteroid." Back at the table, Sam called for another bottle of rock juice. "That Drift's a pretty good game," Retief said. "But let me show you one I learned out on Yill..." sues; complete. # #. # issues, complete. # #. # separate copies of T H B I I I #. Complete bound set of SF DINo "Cosmos" chapters), #-#  # ton Smith. # #'s, contains some H. P. Lovecraft items), # issues for # plete. # # Issues. # #. # #-#. # #I #th Ave., Brooklyn #, N. Y. IF  Short Story The Abandoned have nei ther rights nor hopes. They only have revenge! A fter her husband left her, Marigold filed a protection-request form and an availability form. She did not do this immediately. She stayed up for the better part of the night, hoping that he would come back. She could not bring herself to believe that be would really walk out on her and leave her available for confiscation, or for the slavery pool. She also 'thought for quite a while about the possibility of somehow getting back to Earth, where she would not be available for either. She even went to the fantastic expense of televiewing there to talk with her father and mother. They had been shocked and unfriendly. They had said good-by with a finality which left little room for doubt as to what they thought of an Abandoned. They had never had one in their family, they had pointed out, neither of them, and they did not intend to have one in their family now. They had warned her that they intended to report the call to the This did not worry her much. The call almost certainly had been monitored anyway. If they wanted to go to the considerable extra expense of reporting it, in order to impress the Protection People with their loyalty, that was their own lookout. She understood that, now, she had no famIF ily. She thought for a moment of going up-ramp to say good-by to the children, but she knew that this would not help. Besides, it was illegal. They were no longer hers. She was an Abandoned. She had never known what a tremendously harrowing experience filling out an availability form could be. Name, age, Sector, race, sizeclassification, beauty-index, fertility tests, personality scores, aptitudes, psyche-rating and so on, and so on and so on. It was like undressing for an auction. The protection-request form was much simpler, except for hand shook almost uncontrollably as she wrote. Abandoned. After that she did not know what to do. She had stood for nearly twenty minutes before the document file, listening, thinking desperately that he would come back; that if she only waited a few minutes more he would come back. She had made herself refreshment. She had sat with the filled-out documents on her lap looking, from time to time, longingly at the entrance-ramp. But he ihad not come back. Finally, with a low moaning sound, she had pushed the papers through the document file slot. She made the deadline by a scant three minutes. Now she knew that whatever else happened, the Protection People would be there in the morning to pick up the children. She knew that it could show in her favor if she were to get together the things they would need to take with them. She could do this without seeing them and without talking to them, which was forbidden, but she could not bring herself to move. The red light on the atmosphere control blinked warningly. Soon it would let out a piercing scream. She was tempted to just let it. Another of Clytia's suns must have set. She found that she had no sense of time. She had only the conviction that this would be her last night. The last night that mattered to her at all. She wanted it to be a long one. She had adjusted the atmoset. She had done this every night for the seven years of their marriage. She began to sob uncontrollably. She took her Status Married card and tore it in half Then she held the halves to her cheeks, her face wet and wretched between them. A fter a while she dialed the credit balance at her account. The figures came back indicating a balance of #. He had left her quite a lot, when you considered that she had televiewed to Earth. She cried hard again because she knew that he had not had to leave her anything at all. This made her certain (although she had known it already) that he was not coming back. She sat for quite a while studying the # credit indicator. She thought about using the money to buy a "pick-up-immediately advertisement" on the omnivision. She was not sure of the rates, but she thought the amount might even stretch to include a picture of her. She did not know. She did not even know if she would be expected to be nude or dressed for the picture. In the end, she decided not to try an advertisement because there would not be time enough to employ a reply-receiving address. All that would be accomplished would be to put every predator within miles in possession of the address of an Abandoned. She took a dictator and said into it: "Dear children, I am leaving you # credit." She stopped then and shook her head. The tears made it so that she could not see, and she did not seem to be able to think. "Correction," she sobbed "Erase preceding. Dear Children of Yan, I make you this gift of #. I am sure that your excellence will continue to deserve much more than so small a gift. I send love with this small gift." There could, of course, be no signature An Abandoned had none. She wished tiiat she had not made the Earth call. There would have been much more to leave them then. He had left an astonishing amount in her account. It was almost as though he had expected her to try to get away. She wished now that she had thought before taking action. There might have been some way out. She must have fallen asleep. The morning announcements came on as usual, waking her. She listened to the instructions for that day, and the areas announced as forbidden. She made no effort, however, to indicate them on the day-map. She knew that, now, none of this applied to her. With a very great effort she got up and shut off the children's ramp, so that they could not come down. She knew how much this would count in her favor. Then she began, as hurriedly as she could, to collect the things they would need. She knew that she could not possibly get the things together in time, and that so late an effort was more likely to count against her. She was not even close to finished when the announcer flashed, on. Without asking who it was, she pressed the admitter. She was glad that they had troubled to announce themselves. She offered to go into another room while they removed the children. They did not answer. One of them threw a sack over her. After a moment, they took it off again and, rather apologically, asked her to indicate where the child-ramp control was. She showed them. Their leader said that perhaps it would be all right for her to go into another room if one of them went with her. When she saw the one chosen, she put the sack back on herself They laughed so hard at this that she did not hear the children leave. W hen the children had been taken out, the leader came back and removed the sack from around her. He asked if she had applied for protection. She showed her card. IF 'Well, tiiafs too bad," he said. "Do you have any refreshment left?" She did not dare to lie to him. She showed him. He helped himself. "How about credits?" he asked. "I gave it all to the ones who were here," she answered carefully. She felt quick panic because she remembered that she had not so instructed her account. She had merely dictated it to the children. If he didn't find out, though, that would be all right. The dictation was proof enough. But while she was still in this house, the credits were still in her control. "My credit indicator is here," she said, holding it out. He didn't take it. "Thanks for the refreshment," he said, getting up. "Make yourself comfortable. The others will be here shortly." She had nothing to do to make herself ready. She could not take anything from this house. Sometimes they let you wear what you were wearing, if it did not look as though you had put on your best things. They did not always allow it, but they did sometimes. She remembered that she had expressed strong disapproval 'of that to Yan, when they were newly married. Then they both felt the same way about Abandoneds. She indicated to her account how she wanted the # disposed. Then she waited. After a while, the Protection People came and led her out of the house. They did not touch her or speak to her, they merely formed a square in the center of which she walked. They led her to a record! room where an interview apparatus prepared a report on her. "You have filed availability papers?" it asked. "Yes," she said, and gave the file number. "This is being checked," the apparatus said. "Have you any claims upon the State?" She came very close to mentioning the children. "None," she said in a very small voice. It was difficult to remember that the interview apparatus was not at all sensitive. "Have you credits in your possession?" the machine asked. "None," she said. "You are eligible for exclusion from the slave classification in what way?" That part of the recording seemed a bit worn. At least she did not hear it very well. "In no way," she replied. "You will wait," said the machine, "until we have a report on the availability petition which you have filed. Please take a seat." T here were no seats. This was an older machine which they had not bothered to replace, or even to correct. She stood in horror as the long minutes passed. Her number was finally called "I am here," she said as the machine hummed, and she gave her number. "Your availability petition has been taken up," said the machine. "You are however to receive twenty-eight demerits for disposing of # credit after having been abandoned. Do you accept?" "I accept," she said. She was so dizzy that she could hardly stand. The machine whirred and produced a reception-area card. She read it, and walked as in a daze to the indicated reception area. Yan waited for her there. "You look terrible," he said as he put his arm around her. "I'm sorry. You made me do this to you. I didn't want to. It's all over now, don't cry." She thought that she was going to faint. "Thank you for receiving me," she said, according to the formula. "I am the Abandoned of Yan, of the Estate..." "Stop it!" he said. "I know who you are! Stop it!" "Do you have children at your estate?" She asked it as one asks a polite, social question. "They'll be there when we get home," he said. "Don't do this. I didn't know it would hurt that much. I wouldn't have done it if I had. They're your children again now." He held her shoulders as he looked at her "I came to you with twenty-eight demerits," she said. "Shall I work them off before I come to your estate?" Please, stop it!" he said. "They were paid when you accepted. I waited here all night. No one else could have claimed you. Please, come on home now?" He handed her a brand-new wife-status card, "Thank you," she said. "I shall try to deserve the opportunity which you restore to me." He smiled as she recited the formula and took his arm. Yet he did not look as if he felt like smiling. "Come home," he said. "Come home now. I'll not hurt you again." He led her back to their estate. That night, feeling entirely justified, she abandoned him. # # TV Tommy," the children shoutiVl ed. They ran to her and hugged her. They had missed her, and had resented the disturbance in their routine. "Mommy!" They danced and shouted, "Mommy! Mommy, Mommy!" When it was their bed time, he left her alone with them. He said good night to them himself, kissed them and squeezed her shoulder. "It's good to have you home again!" he said. His eyes filled with tears and he hurried from the room. "Tell us a story, Mommy." It was the custom of the household. There were tears in her eyes and her voice trembled a little, but she said in what seemed to them a perfect narrative style: "Once upon a time there were two very good and loving children who found that it was their duty to denounce their father to the state and to see him publicly flogged to death. You must listen very carefully to this," she said, "both of you. "At first, they thought that this was a very sad duty .    IF IF  Feature I t had been suggested that if we ever want to tip the Soviet economy on its edge and give it a good scrapSears, Roebuck catalogs and some helium balloons to tote them. The theory is that Ivan would drool over them just so long, and then start making noises like, "It can't happen here, and why the hell not?" Actually, there is a great deal more to the catalog -- any catalog -- than mere showcasing. It's a Santa sack; it's the glitter of Have to all Have Nots; it dwells in the bittersweet short spectrum between What If and If Only. But there's another aspect, one which clasps this department by its wonder-andawe organ, and squeezes. For a catalog is a sort of portable museum, a graph ctf progress in many 'ologies. What it lists is the needed and the wanted; and what is wanted and what is needed are, each in its way, a measure of the culture to which the catalog is addressed. These items have been screened and filtered by men who know what they are doing, to fill needs which they know exist, as well as to create wants which they deduce are ripe and ready. And what a culture wants, or needs, or what the purveyors think it needs, would be marvelous to a Martian. I have one catalog which offers you artificial vomit. Fool your friends. Oh boy. Much more important, though, is that the catalog -- especially the scientific and technological catalog -- is a parade of serious achievements. Some of them are the sort of things that pop up in the "Why don't they make -- " feature of the mechanical magazines, things that somebody has up and made. Some of these are things you've always wanted, but in new designs more attractive, more efficient and a darned sight cheaper than you ever dreamed you'd see them. Some items meet very special needs. Some will flabbergast you. Did you know, for example, that you can now determine the speed of light in less than two minutes? Yes, you. And you can do it with an apparatus weighing under ten pounds, requiring no setup time, usable in full daylight while mounted on anybody's card table. It might take you eight minutes to learn to operate the gadget, which can be used to measure the velocity of light in air or in a solid or in any liquid you care to pour into a cylinder which is an optional extra. You will not, of course, pick this item up at a one-cent sale -- it costs #. It's designed for classroom physics demonstrations, and can be found in the Cenco catalog. Cenco is the Central Scientific Co., and its wishbook is a joy to have and hold. It contains, of course, what you would expect of a major educational scientific supply house -- pages and pages of chemicals (including specimens of safety-mounted radioactives,) biologicals (including microscope slides of human tissues) and laboratory glassware and other supplies. But the things that fascinated this department were the demonstration kits, like the lightvelocity instrument mentioned above; a self contained demonstration of the Zeeman effect, or interaction of magnetic fields with light, and another for the Faraday Effect, showing the rotation of the plane of polarized light in a magnetic field; a two-page spread of really fascinating "Physics Paradoxes" designed by Julius Sumner Miller (i.e.: Two identical metal rods. One is a magnet. Without using accessories, find out which one, and prove it Another: Connect two bubble-pipes stem to stem with unequally-sjzed bubbles hanging from them. What will happen? . , . you khow something, Jack? You're wrong I One more: Make a semicircle of large-diameter plastic tubing. Mount it, open ends upward, on a turntable. Drop in two wooden balls. They'll roll to the bottom. climb to the top. Okay so far: now fill the tube with water and put in the balls. They'll float at the top. Spin the table; they'll sink to the bottom. Say why, and prove it.) There are eight of these Paradoxes in the catalog. C limbing down from the highbudget area of demonstration materials, and leafing past the jars of frogs, starfish and worms for dissection and the pages of listings of physics and electrical supplies, we come to something worth reaching into the jeans for right now. We've all heard of teaching machines and the remarkable results they have obtained. Well, Cenco has one for #. Programs for it, running to about # frames each on a roll which feeds through the machine, and come in a respectable variety -- Science I and II, arithmetic, algebra I and n, American history, spelling, grammar and vocabulary-building, with other subjects forthcoming. Constant companion on our desk for years has been the big Lafayette Radio and Electronics catalog. Not long ago we built an intercom between house and studio with one of their kits, with our blackbanged Marion doing most of the soldering. It made a baby-listener so efficient that you could hear him breathing while he slept, and it set us back all of #. TTieir immense wishbook covers everything you can think of, and a lot you can't, in electrical, electronic, hi-fi, amateur, stereo, multiplex and citizen's band parts, kits and equipment -- plus toob, IF eientific and educational materials, microscopes, records and technical books Lafayette's two deadly rivals, Alfied Radio and Radio Shack, have somewhat similiar services, and each something special of its own -- kits, for example. We have recently ordered, from Allied, a # "#-in-l Lab Kit" for our #-year-old; it builds photo-electric devices, a dozen different radios (tube, transistor, crystal, hybrid), amplifiers, broadcasters, a metronome and so on and on, all without soldering or extra parts. If you would like a sort of consumer's report on our trials and triumphs with this device, or others, on these pages, we will yield to enough requests. N o one could speak with awe and wonder about wishbooks without mentioning Edmund Scientific chunky little tome, about the size and shape of a sex novel but far more lasting. They specialize in science, math and optics, and can supply an absolutely fabulous variety of gadgets, gimmicks, and gewgaws. If you're building a do-it-yourself spinthariscope or opaque projector, a reflecting telescope or a spectrometer, an abacus (yes, they have a kit for it) Edmund will seU you the parts. Dealing a lot (although not exclusively) in surplus, Edmund are past masters at the high art of using materials for purposes for which they are not intended. Because of this, you can get front-surface mirrors, polarizing lens assemblies, specialized prisms and the Eke at really astonishingly low prices. But far and away the best feature of the Edmund catalog is that it is also a handbook. All through its pages are generous blocks of type with diagrams, defining and describing, in very clear language, the varieties and functions of lenses and complex optical systems, ' such matters as "power" in microscopes and telescopes, and what it really means; suggestions for Science Fair projects, the psychology of teaching-aids and "learning games", and more. Noting briefly, if geology or gemology is your kick, you'll like the big fat Grieger's Catalog of Rockhounding. It's a veritable education in dopsticks and jump-rings, cabochons and rutilated quartz. And they advertise one thing which we have been led to understand couldn't happen. It's called Attack y and, under the slogan, "what man has joined together can be cast asunder," it dissolves epoxy cements. If you are both handy and musical -- and a surprising number of scientifically-minded people are -- here are two items which should bring a sparkle to the eye: Heathkit has just announce I an electronic organ kit. It's a double-manual, #-voiced, #-bass instrument with real bigorgan performance. And Zuckermann will send you a very nicely produced little booklet on their doit-yourself harpsichord. If you'd like us to continue covering the Great American Wishbook for you, just aski IF  Novelette She was a Princess of Love -- so the aliens said. But what she did spoke only of hatred I I T he Leisure Club in Leonta City claimed with some justice to cater to all tastes. On the night of April #th two hundred Leontans and a hundred Terrans, all Army or Naval personnel, were making use of its facilities. In one small room four men were attempting to play Beethoven's seventh string quartet. Op. #, No #. The cellist, a colonel, was sweating over his solos. He didn't mind that the leader of the quartet was a sergeant. But that his technical supremacy should be so overwhelming seemed hardly fair. Not for the first time, the colonel considered withdrawing from the quartet in the interests of discipline. The disciplinary problems of the Terran occupying forces on Leonta were bad enough without adding to them. In another room five men, all Terran Army officers, played poker for high stakes. In the bar the inevitable hard drinking was going on, with the stem Leontan bartenders watching silently to make sure that nobody however dmnk, got out of line. IF  :ti The Leisure Club was not a dive. The Terran occupation troops who wished it was were out of luck. There wasn't a dive in Leonta City. Serving-men's wants were not supplied on Leonta as soldiers' simple needs usually are. The local standard of living being high, the strangers' money for once didn't shout in tones which demanded attention. Army and Navy personnel of all ranks were freely admitted to the Leisure Club, but only on Leontan terms. It had already been demonstrated several times that the Club was quite prepared to bar all troops if the requisite standard of behavior was not observed. And some individuals were barred permanently. Over twenty men were in the writing room, writing home. The variety theater, though small, didn't have quite a full house, and soldiers comprised less than half of the audience, the majority being Leontans. Leontan variety was too deep, subtle and serious for most serving-men. There weren't enough belly-laughs and there weren't nearly enough girls. On most other worlds the entertainment would quickly have been changed to appeal more to the large occupying forces. On Leonta everything stayed exactly as it was. If the uninvited visitors didn't .like what was on offer, they didn't have to come. Mosl civilized forms of relaxation were catered for under the roof of the Leisure Club. But there was no dancing, because there weren't enough girls. There were never enough girls. The fact that there were some Terran nurses didn't help much, the ratio of men to girls being about twenty to one. It would almost have been better if there had been no Terran girls at all. Usually, again, the local population of any ten-point human world would have eagerly supplied the deficiency. But Leonta's situation was not usual. Leonta was a highly civilized world at least as rich as Earth, and with the planet's wealth better distributed. Leonta, although beaten in three wars and compelled to put up with an army of occupation, had lost none of her pride and self-respect. Any low-grade Leontans who would have bowed and scraped in order to fleece the Terrans were kept firmly in line by the other ninety-five per cent. The Number One deficiency of lonely men far from home was therefore more deeply felt on Leonta than it had ever been anywhere else. Yet there was one small, surprising slit in the curtain... T he heavy drapes over an alcove in the bar slid smoothly open to reveal a girl reclining on a sofa. Every male head turned instantly. She could have been Terran but for the uncanny perfection of her pale skin. Her combination of intelligence, cool aloofness and conscious provocation was enough to drive most men to anything short of murder -- and some men, perhaps, all the way. IF Her natural attractions were augmented by every artifice to raise her sales appeal, for the alcove was a shop window. That any girl in that particular shop window would have a perfect figure could be taken for granted. It was therefore unnecessary for the revelation of her charms to be vulgarly ostentatious. A few dramatic slits and plunges showed that she wore nothing but her bubblethin black dress; the remarkable shape she revealed was all her own. Bright white lighting which few Terran women could have stood told frankly the truth and the whole truth about her natural talent. Naturally she wasn't in the shop window long. Soon she was with a young Army captain, smiling and sipping a glass of wine. A sergeant who tried to butt in was warned by a small, cold look from the girl to keep his distance. The captain also waved him awav irritably. When he failed to heed either brush-off, the girl nodded to the bartenders. The sergeant was promptly deposited on the sidewalk outside. He protested bitterly but quietly, well aware that if the Leisure Club was cleared on his account he would suffer far more at the hands of resentful Army and Navy officers than his official punishment for creating an incident, which would be severe. The girl Oeea remained in the bar with the captain for about an hour, then they disappeared together. It was only then that the envious officers and men who had been looking on became really jealous. The opportunity to talk to a girl like Oeea was open to all. Most Love Princesses worked their way conscientiously through the entire list of bidders, Terran and Leontan, before making their choice. Oeea, however, had obviously made up her paind already. All the others were going to be unlucky. Why didn't the Leontans, such sticklers for convention, stick to their own rules? Half an hour later, the sergeant who had been ejected from the club, having managed to get into the building again somehow, found the captain beating Oeea brutally, sinking his fists into her body in an ecstasy of sadism. Oeea was bearing this in silence, but the sergeant did not. With a roar of rage he seized a metal ornament and hit the captain with all his strength. Before the stricken man reached the floor he was dead. II T he pilot on the landing barge made a fast, unnecessarily showy landing. Major Nigel Duke stepped onto solid earth, albeit Leontan earth, with some thankfulness. Traditionally the Army didn't altogether trust the Navy, and this mistrust had been carried into space. On solid ground, anywhere, any Army officer felt at least two inches taller. Duke didn't get a chance to see anything of Leona. He was whisked straight to General Bailey, or at least to General Bailey's waitingroom, without an opportunity to learn anything about the planet beyond the fact that it was cold. Not icy cold, just windy-rainy cold. The kind of world which forced its inhabitants, if they happened to be human, to be hard-working and brisk and efficient, because there was no temptation to lie in the sun, drink long, cool drinks and do as little as possible else. Duke was a young major, a tall, tow-haired skeleton with whom nobody ever took any chances, because he looked the kind of officer who would relax only after the proper formal foundations had been laid. This impression was correct. Major Duke, an expert in military law, carried legalistic caution into every department of his life. General Bailey didn't keep him waiting long. And when he was admitted, the general wasted no time at all. Duke knew why he had been sent for before he completed the act of sitting down. "I want you to get a man shot. Major," Bailey said abruptly. "You're to be trial judge advocate at a general court-martial on Friday. And I want a verdict of guilty and a death sentence." Duke, who had said practically nothing so far, said nothing now. With General Bailey, obviously, you verv soon knew exactly where you stood. Bailey was a small, bullet-headed man with all the aggressiveness of small men in high positions, tempered by a blunt correctness. 'T guess you know Leonta's historical background," he said, "so I won't bother you with that. Have you spoken to anyone who's served here recently?" "No, sir." "You're straight out from Earth?" "I've been with the fleet law pool for ten months. During that time I've been temporarily assigned to Araminta, Deeswood and Hermitage. Never Leonta." "I know that. I fought here and I've been in command of the occupying troops since the armistice six years ago. Well, I guess you're wondering why I sent for a hot-shot trial lawyer to prosecute. The truth is, Major, the only law man I've got whom I might trust with this case is already in it -- defending. Morgenstern asked for Major Francis, and in the circumstances he had to get him." ask questions. Duke waited for him to make his own explanations in his own way. "Cigarettes in that box, Major," Bailey said. "I don't use them, but -- " "I don't either, sir." "Don't you? Good. Well, Major, here's the situation. The Leontans have fought three tough wars with us and they only stopped because they realize now that we're too big for them They're not scared of us. And they don't hate us. They just want rid of us. The situation here is moderately stable but uneasy. They stick to all the military and civil agreements and never fail to point out every infringement on our part, maIF jor or minor, by anybody from me down to the rawest rookie from Earth." Duke nodded. He had heard about the Leontans: proud, independent, hard-working, cultured. They might have been super-Germans. "The Leisure Club in Leonta City is open to all ranks, but only just. If anybody doesn't behave, he gets thrown out. The Leontans organize their entertainments as they organize most things -- with more organization than entertainment. They don't put on a special show for us. They run their world their way, and we have to conform. "In the Leisure Club you can drink, gamble, listen to classical music, paint, sculpt, take arty photographs, read, write, put on amateur theatricals. It's a recreation center catering for everything but with a strong bias toward culture. Guys who like string quartets and long-hair stuff get on fine. The ordinary Joe who can't see past women and booze isn't so happy. He can drink, but he isn't supposed to get stinko. And as for women..." "The local girls won't play?" said Duke, because this time the general's silence positively commanded some response. "As a rule, no. There's no outright ban." D uke suspected from the general's tight-lipped reluctance to continue along this line that he was something of an ascetic. Just as Duke was deciding, however, that if information on this head was going to be necessary he'd have to get it from somebody else, Bailey plunged resolutely on. "Some of our boys are fixed up fine, which is all right from everybody's point of view so long as they have the sense to keep quiet about it. But in general -- no girls, except for one rather curious Leontan custom." Bailey's mouth set disapprovingly, and his words came out like little icicles. "I like the Leontans all right. Major. I guess I even respect them. But this one thing I can't approve or even understand... They run a sort of high-class prostitution, clean and tidy and clinical. A very beautiful, intelligent and talented girl is chosen as a Princess of Love -- so they call her. She goes on show like a prize heifer and then works her way through the list of bidders. Some men she rejects at a glance, some after five minutes' conversation. Eventually she meets someone she likes." "And the price is astronomical?" Duke suggested. "No, it isn't like that. On the contrary, the price isn't particularly important. She has to like the guy." "Sounds rather like what we've got back at home. Only we don't call it prostitution. What do you dislike about the way the Leontans do it, General?" Bailey looked slightly surprised, as if he thought he had successfully concealed his feelings about the system. But he answered the question. "I guess the organization, the coldbloodedness, the deadpan seriousness of it. And the way they run it side by side with art and music and drama... "Well, Major, all this is background. Ten days ago Sergeant Morgenstern and Captain Slater were in the Leisure Club. So were over a hundred other officers and men, and two hundred Leontans. A girl called Oeea became available as a Princess of Love. She joined Slater. Morgenstem tried to intervene but was thrown out. "Later Morgenstern found Slater beating up the girl and killed him. There's no doubt about the facts of thing, and so did two other Leontans. In any case, Morgenstern admits it himself. Major, I want you to suppress any feelings of sympathy you may have for Morgenstern and get him hung." "Why. General?" Duke asked quietly. "Because he's a murderer, for one thing. Maybe it would be best if you stuck to that. Major Duke. But since you're sure to find out some of the undercurrents of this business, I'll talk to you again once you've studied the file. Here it is." "You want me to read this and then report back?" "No, read the file, go to the Leisure Club yourself tonight, and come back and talk to me tomorrow." Duke nodded. It had not escaped him that he was being afforded no opportunity to refuse the case. "Sergeant Bowler will show you to an office you can use," Bailey said. "Glad to have you with us. Major." M ajor Duke settled himself in the small, bare room into which Bowler had led him and started his investigation of the Morgenstern affair. Sergeant Isaac Morgenstern was twenty-five and there were no black marks in his record. At #:# on the night of April #, two Leontans in the back of the bar saw an Army sergeant rushing along a back corridor. Although, they were aware of no reason why he shouldn't be there, not having noticed him being turned out earlier, his manner was strange enough to make them follow him. They were only a few yards behind him when he burst into a room, and they both clearly saw everything which happened in the next few seconds. In the room a man who was later identified as Slater was punching the girl Oeea in the ribs. She made no outcry, but tried desperately to protect herself from the blows. One of the Leontans said Slater was laughing like a maniac. The other didn't hear this. (A small point which Duke found very convincing: when evidence is trumped-up, witnesses always agree to the finest detail). Morgenstern shouted, seized a heavy metal lamp and hit Slater on the head with it. Slater pitched on the floor and lay still. Morgenstern then dropped the lamp and fell on his knees beside the fallen man, seizing him by the throat. But Slater was already dead. Afterwards, Morgenstern gave no trouble and denied nothing. He made i# IF a statement of which Duke had a copy before him. But Duke put it aside for the moment, reading everything else first. Morgenstem had been pronounced sane. Statements by other Leisure Club patrons that night, Terran and Leonan, corroborated the facts as Duke already knew them. Morgenstern had tried to interrupt Slater and Oeea earlier in the evening, and had been ejected on the girl's order. Morgenstern had been seen during the next hour prowling around outside the building. Twice he had tried to get in with a party of new arrivals. seen going down a dark lane which led to the back of the club. A confidential report by Slater's colonel stated that Slater was not well liked. He was extremely tough on all inferiors, and particularly on Jews and Negroes. He frequently referred to the Leontans as "stinking natives." Two years before he had been charged with beating up a girl on Araminta, but acquitted. There was a medical report by an Army doctor who had examined the girl shortly after the incident. Her injuries were 'detailed: extensive bruises all over the front of the torso and on the arms. The doctor's summing-up was that the girl had suffered a barbarous attack which amounted to torture, inflicted in his opinion by a compulsive sadist. A lthough he was trying to read the file with professional detachment, Duke was conscious of an increasing feeling of bafflement. About Morgenstem's guilt there was no conceivable doubt, unless it arose out of the fact that the three vital witnesses, those who had seen the actual looked the kind of case in which the accused, having been found guilty on a reduced charge, would geta comparatively light sentence. Morgenstern appeared to have had the utanything but a cold, premeditated murder. On all he had read so far, Duke would rather have been defending Morgenstem than prosecuting him, and would have given himself a fair chance of getting the sergeant off altogether. Why, then, did General Bailey want Morgenstem shot? Why had he given Morgenstem his best legal officer as defense counsel and sent for a fleet law pool outsider to prosecute? Did he -- an uncomfortable thought, this -- expect his own top law man. Major Francis, to tie Duke in knots and get Morgenstem off, with General Jerome Bailey absolutely in the clear, whatever questions might be asked later? Duke picked up Morgenstern's statement thinking that it might give a clue to the general's attitude. But it only increased Duke's bafflement. It read: Oeea is my girl. Shes no prostitute. She must have been forced to offer herself the way she did We've been lovers for weeks, and we mean to get married. We never quarreled, I saw her only the night before and she didn't say anything about this Princess of Love business. I just couldn't understand it when I saw her in that alcove. Did I know what it meant? Of course I knew what it meant. Everybody knows. I know all about Slater. He's a skunk. If Oeea had to give herself to somebody y I'd rather it was anybody else at camp than Slater. I can't understand why she went with him. There's something funny going on somewhere. I got into the club through a cellar.  wanted to see Oeea. After thinking about things for an hour the only thing that made any sense to me was that Slater had got some hold on her, threatening her family or something like that. When  found them he was hitting her like he was trying to kill her. I don't know what  did then. When I knew what was going on again. Slater was dead. Yes, I guess I killed him. Anybody else who saw what he was doing to Oeea would have, too. Duke read this several times. He was beginning to wish he had never come to Leonta. He had never had a case he liked less. Ill O n closer acquaintance Duke found Leonta's climate as cold and unfriendly as he expected. Before he reached the Leisure Club he knew why such an institution was necessary. On such a world there was no fun in going for night walks, in sitting in a car, in going from one place of entertainment to another. What was needed was a nice warm place with everything you wanted under one roof. He expected some difficulty in being admitted to the Leisure Club. But when he gave his name to the two Leontans at the door he was passed inside at once. "General Bailey called and said you'd be coming," one explained. It was the first time Duke had heard a Leontan speak, the first time he had seen a Leontan close at hand. They were one hundred per cent human. They didn't even differ as much from Europeans and Americans as, say. Chinese did. The only thing which showed at once that they weren't Terran was their skin, which was pale, very faintly brown, and smooth as matt paper. The men appeared effeminate because Leontan men had e.cactly the same smooth skin as the women. The girls, al though their skin texture showed instantly that they weren't Terran, didn't give the same slightly forbidding impression of belonging to another race. They were, indeed, more attractive than a cross-section of Terran girls, because of their perfect complexions, because they were rarely fat and because their features were never coarse. Leontan native speech, Duke knew, was liquid, consisting entirely IF of vowel sounds, of which there were over a hundred. Terran ears couldn't distinguish all these, and therefore no Terran had ever been able to speak or fully understand Leontan. The Leontans, however, found English fairly easy and many of them spoke it quite perfectly. Duke found he was allowed to wander anywhere he wished in the Club so long as he was quiet and didn't disturb anybody. There must have been fifty rooms, ranging up to small halls. The temperature was a steady seventy everywhere, except in the sport courts, which were kept cooler. Duke estimated that there were about three hundred people in the club, of whom perhaps a hundred were soldiers and sailors and six or seven were Terran nurses. Of the Leontans, a hundred fifty were women. There was no obvious tension between Leontans and Terrans. But parties almost always consisted of one or the other. The only mixed groups were the permanent ones -- the theatrical company, the bridge teams, the music groups, the tennis players. Even the drinkers in the bar were segregated in quiet, low-voiced groups of Yerrans or Leontans. It surprised Duke that it was possible to keep Terran Army and Navy personnel so subdued in a club on a beaten world. Yet after all -- there was nowhere else in Leonta City to go, and if anyone stepped out of line the Leontans were within their rights in closing the Club to all Terrans. In such circumstances, Terran troublemakers would be squashed by Terrans, not Leontans. Duke sat in the bar for some time just watching before he ordered a drink. It was a sick spectacle. The Terrans sat around staring gloomily, hungrily at the Leontan and Terran girls who were present, all heavily engaged. Why, Duke wondered, didn't the Army have the sense to recognize this need in places like Leonta? Women could be occupying troops as well as men. Why not send out a thousand women in uniform? The answer, presumably, was that the Army and Navy were blind to exceptions. Traditionally, armies on foreign, but human-occupied, soil managed to make do with the local talent. The Army did not, would not recognize that on Leonta, a proud, independent, wealthy world, the local talent could and did say No, thank you. The Army, which could be very foolish sometimes, didn't realize how it could lower its own prestige and efficiency on Leonta by not supplying one vital, priceless commodity. And incidents like the Morgenstern-Slater case became inevitable. Sooner or later such things were bound to happen. D uke went thoughtfully back to the bar at last. 'T've just arrived," he said to the bartender. "I don't know what you drink here. Wine? Beer? Hard liquor?" "All are available, sir." The Leontan's manner was impeccably polite without being friendly. "Then I'll try your wine." "White or red, sir? Perhaps you'd tell me the Terran type you prefer. Barsac, Graves, Sauternes, Chablis, Moselle? Or Beaujolais, Beaune, Medoc, St. Julien?" Rather startled, Duke said: "I like a good Rhine wine." "Then let me recommend Aoeau, sir. I'll give you a glass, not a bottle. If you wish it again, ask for Spring Water -- a free translation, but anyone will understand what you mean." "Thank you." "You're Major Duke, aren't you?" Duke managed to conceal his surprise this time. "Yes." The bartender said no more, but handed him a quite conventional wine glass half full of pale yellow wine. The charge was equivalent to ninety cents. The cost of living on Leonta was not low. Duke sat down again and sipped his drink. It was a pleasant young wine, more like a light Moselle than a Rhine wine. Possibly the bartender was insulting his taste. And yet, a cool world like Leonta could hardly produce rich wines. There must be warmer areas than this one or Leonta wouldn't produce wine at all. Without warning a curtain across one wall slowly opened. In a recess a girl reclined. The Terran men present jumped and stared and moved restlessly. The spreading undercurrent would have been felt by a blind man. So this was how they did it. The girl, presumably, was not Oeea. According to the medical report which Duke had seen she would still be nursing a good many nasty bruises. Duke's interest remained detached. It was hardly surprising that the girl was exceedingly beautiful. The cruel effect she had on the Terrans present was not surprising either. Although Duke was trying to retain an open mind about the Leontans, he couldn't help forming a judgment. It was sadistic, and probably deliberately sadistic, to offer an entire garrison of woman-hungry men one or two exquisite courtesans a week, with no guarantee that some Leontan wouldn't win them in the end. It was forbid such relations altogether. "Ten days ago I was a Princess of Love," a soft voice said. Duke turned his head. A girl had quietly sat beside him, a girl so like the girl in the alcove that he glanced quickly from one to the other. He now saw that there were differences. The two Leontan girls resembled each other, with the same measurements, the same clothes, the same makeup, the same hairdo. "You're Oeea?" he said. "Oeea," she said patiently. The name sounded subtly different, but he couldn't have done any better with it the second time. Like the girl in the alcove and unlike all the other Leontan girls he had seen, she wore a transparent black dress with slits through which pale flesh peeped wickedly. Already, it seemed, her bruises had healed. IF None of the skin her careless gown revealed was discolored. He remembered a hint in the medical report that Leontans healed more quickly than Terrans. A s in his interview with General Bailey, he refrained from starting the ball rolling. She knew who he was and had something to say, obviously; he let her get on with it. "You're going to prosecute Isaac, aren't you?" "It's possible." "Do you mind if I talk to you?" "You're doing it." "But not here. Will you come with me?" He rose, picking up his glass. "May I get you something?" She looked at the glass. "What's that you're drinking?" "Spring Water." "And what do you think of it?" "Pleasant, light, tolerable." "The barkeep was testing your taste. I'll get you something better." She led him to the bar, spoke in liquid Leontan to the barman and took a bottle and two glasses from him. She shook her head at Duke when he offered to pay. "Sorry, sir," said the bartender. "What for?" "You did know the difference." Oeea led him to a small room which had low, soft, comfortable furniture. As she poured a glass of wine for him, he found to his annoyance that he was not immune to her physical presence. "Must you wear a dress like that?" She stood back to let him see it properly. "I thought you'd like it." The neckline plunged past her navel. Pale flesh showed at hip, stomach and thigh. Even where the cloth covered her flesh it merely veiled it. And her slim, taut figure was superb. "Why did you think I'd like it?" "Most men do -- Leontan 'or TeTran. If you like I'll change it." "Please do." She didn't expect that and hesitated for a moment. Then she went out. Duke tasted the wine. It was fuller, richer, decidedly superior to the Spring Water. Oeea was back in only a few seconds. She was now dressed, like the other Leontan women Duke had seen, in a short neat garment which hugged the figure and left most of her arms and legs bare. Compared with her black dress it was eminently respectable. "I have already spoken to Major Francis," she said. "I've told him everything I know which will help Isaac. I promised to testify to it all." "Why tell me this?" She poured herself a glass of wine and sipped it. "I don't understand your legal system. Must Isaac be tried? Can't you and Major Francis talk things over and release him?" Duke thought of many answers and chose the simplest. "No." "Don't you have a system, as we have, of forgiving even murdei if the victim thoroughly deserved death?" "There must be a trial. If the provocation was great, the sentence may be light." "Couldn't Isaac be declared not guilty?" "According to your own evidence, he killed Slater. Therefore he must be guilty of something." "And there must be a punishment?" 'Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. He might be awarded some punishment which is no punishment at all" "And who will decide that? General Bailey?" There was venom in the way she pronounced Bailey's name. Duke decided instantly to prove this. "What do you have against General Bailey?" "He's a hard man. The wrong man to be in charge here. The wrong Terran. If we must have a Terran general in command here, it should not be General Bailey." "Why not?" doesn't want to understand us. He wants us to persecute Isaac because he is a Jew and because Isaac loves me." "What do you know about Morgenstern being a Jew?" "What Isaac told me. Some Terrans, like Slater and General Bailey, hate Jews. Do you?" "No. You can rest assured that Morgenstern won't be treated unfairly because he is a Jew. About the other thing -- why do you say General Bailey hates Morgenstern because he loves you?" IF "General Bailey fought us. He doesn't trust us. He still dislikes us, if he doesn't hate us. And things which he doesn't understand, he hates. He hates and despises me because I was a Princess of Love. He thinks I'm nothing more than a prostitute." "And are you?" "Isaac told me what you on your own world understand by prostitution. It's dirty there because you make it dirty. Here it is different. Major Francis is going to get me to explain our system at the trial. He thinks it's very important to his case." Legal ethics made Duke say: "Oeea, if you want to help Morgenstem perhaps you shouldn't talk to me at all. Help Major Francis aU you like, but don't tell me his case." "You mean you don't want to understand either? Like General Bailey?" "I don't mean that at all. I mean -- " "Listen. Even Isaac doesn't understand. Major Duke, we are a cultured, artistic people. Please don't misunderstand me when I say we're more cultured than you are. I mean that among us the general, the average level of cultural awareness and attainment is higher." "I must admit that the way you speak my language impresses me very much." "That's one example. If we study a thing at all, first we decide how to study it. We take the best models. Thus I don't speak your language like a London or New York guttersnipe, but more as ifs spoken at Princeton. But that's a digression. Isn't it only to be expected that a cultured people brings art to more and more pursuits? A savage, primitive society has few arts. A highly civilized culture has many. With us, love is an art. Not all of us study it, any more than every Terran studies all your arts. Women study it more than men, and beautiful, healthy people of both sexes study it more than plain people of moderate health and strength." "Study can stultify," Duke remarked thoughtfully. "Of course. Do you think we don't know that too? We know the dangers, and guard against them. Among us. Major Duke, a girl is proud to be invited to be a Princess of Love. It is a great honor. No girl, no matter how beautiful and talented, can be a Love Princess more than three times at most." "Please," Duke protested. "I understand that you're telling me that among Leontans your exclusive, high-grade Princess of Love system is part of your culture and that a girl who figures in it isn't reckoned to have lost her respectability. Granting all that, I can't see what it has to do with Morgenstem and Slater." "It has a great deal to do with General Bailey," the girl said in a low, serious voice. "He regards what happened as a vulgar, sordid affair, and his disgust over the whole business is his real reason for wanting to execute Isaac." She might weU be right, Duke thought. But he kept this condusion strictly to himself. IV #tJid you go to the Leisure Club last night?" General Bailey asked. "Yes, sir." "Are you going to get Morgenstem shot for me?" "May I be frank, sir? I can find no reason why the death penalty should be sought in this case. For my own part, Fd much rather be defending Morgenstem than prosecuting him. And I think I could get him off." Bailey was thunderstruck. When at last he could speak, he said in a voice in which the grating of ice could be heard: "It seems I've been very much mistaken in you. Major." "Yes, sir. You wish to appoint another officer as trial judge advocate?" Bailey already had himself in command again. "Wait, sir. You're going too fast. I asked for the best prosecutor the fleet law pool could provide, and you were the man who was sent. Exactly why are you in such an all-fired hurry to duck out of this case?" "Because, sir, my preliminary investigations suggest that you're allowing your own prejudices to sway you." "That what you think, is it?" Bailey's sudden calmness was the last thing Duke expected. What he had expected had been a burst of fury in the course of which General IP Bailey would have blasted him off Leonta and back to the fleet. Making Bailey furious, Duke calculated, was the quickest and surest way of extricating himself from the Morgenstem case. "Suppose I tell you," said Bailey, "that you're right, and that I still don't feel a twinge of conscience that I want to get Morgenstern shot?" "Then I'd want to hear what else you have to say, sir." "That's more like it," said Bailey grimly. "Listen, then. Major, unless you're blind and have never studied any history you must know that every century since the Middle Ages internal military discipline has weakened." "That's a tenable point of view." "It's more than that. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all soldiers obeyed all orders instantly, blindly. Injustices were borne quietly, as being in the nature of things. In the twentieth century, psychiatry gave every troublemaker the excuse that everything wrong he did was somebody else's fault. And kids, teenagers, criminals, neurotics and ordinary enlisted men all learned that they could get away with anything if they put on a good enough act. By the twenty-second century a private could sue his colonel for persecution and get a hundred thousand dollar settlement." "Only in a very clear, very extreme case, and in peacetime, sir." "I said it could happen, didn't I? In the nineteenth century, could any private sue his colonel for any damn thing? This is a trend, Major, and it's still growing. The trouble is, we still need armies. We still even need peacetime armies. And in peacetime, on jobs like this occuprtion of Leonta, the problem of discipline is at its worst. I've got to watch everything I do and say all day and every day in case some disgruntled sergeant or lieutenant or captain decides to get me kicked out of my job." "Yes, sir. Am I to understand you have serious disciplinary problems here on Leonta?" "Hell, Major, you only had to open your eyes to see we must have. The Leontans don't like us, don't want us here. So they do all they can to make things awkward. Mostly they back the rights of the underprivileged, as you might say. Treat privates just like colorels. Act as if we're all Terrans, all soldiers, and what's the difference? Don't you see how that can make things tough?" "Yes, I -- do see," said Duke. He was mentally kicking himself. There was more to the Morgenstern case than met the eye. He should have been the last man to make up his mind before all the evidence was in. "Now, the Leisure Club. I wanted a separate club for officers, but the Leontans said they'd open the club to all or none. Could I have given orders that the Leisure Club was for officers only? I could not. Then, this Love Princess business. You think it's okay. Major? You think I'm prejudiced?" Duke hesitated. "Ethically, it doesn't seem so -- " "Major, as far as I'm concerned ethical considerations don't come into it. What concerns me is the effect on my garrison. What do you think of that?" Duke admitted that the effect must be wholly bad. Bailey shrugged impatiently. "I could have said all this yesterday, but I wanted you to look around first. Now, let's get down to this case. So you've got a lot of sympathy for Morgenstern? Morgenstern is a sergeant. He's been here quite long enough to know the ropes. Apparently he thought he had a Leontan girl, one of the few lucky enough to be in that position. The Leontans don't like it, but it happens. So long as the two of them keep it under cover, nobody does anything about it "Then he saw his girl on offer as a Princess of Love. Sure, that shook him up a bit. But it only proved what he should have known all along -- that his girl was a Leontan, and liable to act like a Leontan. It gave him no license to kill a Terran Army captain." Duke got the first hint of what Bailey was really getting at. He looked at him sharply, wondering if the blunt general was that shrewd. And Bailey promptly proved he was. "Morgenstern is either a cunning fool or a stupid fool. Major, but a fool anyway. See what I mean?" "Yes, sir," Duke whispered, "I guess I do see what you mean." "And though we don't execute crazy people any more, we often have to execute fools." "Yes." said Duke quietly. "Yes. we do." D uke had a busy time before the trial opened. There was a lot of work to be done, and nobody but himself to do it. Neither he nor Major Francis had been provided with an assistant. Duke didn't meet either Morgenstern or Francis until the courtmartial opened. Five officers presided over by General Hebbenton sat at a long table. Duke had a small table set at one end at right-angles. At the corresponding table at the other end Morgenstern sat with Major Francis. Morgenstern was not at all as Duke had pictured him. He was a good-looking cheerful young man who didn't look the type to kill an officer in a fit of rage. He didn't look the type to kill anyone. There was one thing, however, in his appearance which particularly interested Duke. He looked a cunning fool rather than a stupid fool -- if he was a fool at all. Duke opened his case with the Oeea herself last. All three were good, clear witnesses. They knew what they had seen and they weren't going to be inveigled into saying they had seen any more or any less. Duke was very careful in his questions to Oeea, opening as few doors as possible for Major Francis to barge through in cross-examination. IP Duke knew that Oeea was also being called as a witness for the defense. Before Francis had any opportunity to start putting on his case, however, Duke wanted to get all the facts in the record. Major Francis, rather surprisingly, did not cross-examine. Certainly he would have his chance later. Duke had expected, however, that he would lose no time in bringing out some of the facts which were obviously in Morgenstern's favor. After Oeea, Duke brought on a Captain Harry Burns who testified that Slater was not well liked, that he hated Jews and Negroes and that there had been trouble before between Slater and Morgenstern. While this witness was before the court, Francis several times objected on various grounds, but none of his objections were sustained. Duke got the impression that several members of the court were very curious about Slater's previous relations with Morgenstern, and since Burns was the only witness who was going to tell them anything at all about this feature of the case they thought they'd better hear all he had to say. ' Then Duke put Lieutenant Sam Borke on the stand. "You were in the Leisure Club on "Yes, sir." "Alone?" "I was in the bar with several friends." "Please give their names." "Captain Bob Morrice, Lieutenant Tom Rora, Ensign Bill Teiger of the Navy, and a nurse. Marge Brown." "All Terrans, then?" "Yes, sir." "Was there any contact between your party and any Leontans, apart from the bartenders?" "How do you mean, contact?" "Did any Leontans speak to you?" "Not till that guy came over." "What guy. Lieutenant?" "I can't say his name, the guy who "I know, the other guy was with him. They were both there. Anyway, the first guy said -- " #bjection," said Francis, on his W feet. "Objection sustained," said Hebbenton. "You cannot elicit hearsay evidence. Major Duke. And please establish which of the Leontans spoke to the witness." "Yes, sir. Lieutenant, was it the Leontan Eoaee who spoke to you?" "Yes, that's the guy. The big one." "What did Eoaee do after he spoke to you?" "Went out to the toilet." "Are you of your own knowledge aware that he went to the toilet?" "No. But he said he was going." With some difficulty, for the lieutenant was not a good witness, Duke managed to establish that the two talked to Borke's party just before going out of the bar and that this must have been before they saw Morgenstern murder Slater. i# Then he closed his case. Hebbenton's eyebrows shot up and he asked Francis and Duke to approach. 'Ts that your entire case, Major Duke?" he demanded. T have shown that Sergeant Morgenstern killed Captain Slater, sir, and that ill-feeling had existed between the two men for some time. What more can I do?" "That remark comes perilously close to insolence, Major." "It isn't intended, sir." Hebbenton struggled with himself. Then he said quietly: "You know the circumstances, Major Duke. All Leontans must, in the circumstances, be considered hostile witnesses. Is Sergeant Morgenstern to be convicted, entirely on Leontan testimony, with no evidence from Terran personnel?" "Most certainly, sir," said Duke coolly, "if you will not permit me to ask Terran officers what Leontans said to them." The remark was deliberately rude. Hebbenton nearly hit the roof. Then he realized that rude or not, it was wholly justified. The court had the choice of making no distinction whatever between Terran and Leontan witnesses, or allowing hearsay evidence from Terran officers about what Leontans said. "But...you didn't even ask your Leontan witnesses about this matter. Major." "No, sir. Shall we recall them and ask them now?" Eoaee was recalled and asked about the incident. He said yes, he had spoken to some Terran officers just before leaving the bar. He had offered to show them over the club and had been surprised when they refused. His motives had been purely friendly. After the Leontan had left the stand, Duke was called before the president again. Hebbenton asked why he had not brought the matter up when the Leontan first gave evidence. "I'm sorry, sir," said Duke blandly. On the point of saying more, Hebbenton checked himself. Perhaps it occurred to him too that a cautious witness would be more likely to make an admission on being recalled after others had testified than otherwise. V M ajor Francis put Captain Hinton, an army doctor, on the stand to testify to Oeea's condition after the assault on her by Slater. Hinton took ten minutes and a good deal of medical jargon to say she'd been comprehensively beaten up. Cross-examining, Duke said: "Exactly how do Leontans differ from Terrans, doctor?" Francis objected on the grounds that this raised a subject not covered in direct examination. Hebbenton overruled the objection without asking Duke for an explanation. Hinton said that Leontans were medically exactly the same as Terrans except that they healed more IT quickly. Minor cuts, abrasions and bruises cleared up in just over half the time Terrans would take to heal, and there was less risk of scars. "I don't know whether this is the result of heredity or environment," the doctor, a plump, red-faced man, declared. "In my view, far too little research has been done into this." "Quite, doctor. But the fact is that Leontan flesh normally is less flawed than Terran partly because skin eruptions are rarer, partly because injuries heal more quickly, and partly because the healing is generally more complete?" "Exactly so." "So if you were to examine Oeea again now, she'd probably be completely healed?" "Very likely." "Now, doctor, you said you found traces of previous injuries?" "Very faint. Almost gone." "Yet according to your own evidence, Leontans heal fast? Therefore the previous injuries could have been caused as recently as two weeks before April #?" "Possibly." "These faint traces of previous injuries you found. Were they visible?" "No. They showed up in examination with a machine which shows subcutaneous damage. Nothing showed on the surface. Of course. Major, these injuries were of absolutely no medical importance whatever, compared with the quite considerable damage I was primarily concerned with." "Of course, doctor." On redirect Francis brought out the fact that although Leontans healed far more quickly than Terrans, injuries they suffered were just as painful at the time. Francis thus squashed any idea that Oeea, being a Leontan, had suffered any less pain at Slater's hands than a Terran girl would have done. Francis then put Oeea on the stand. Duke was ruefully aware that her very appearance, especially directly after the doctor's evidence, was all in Morgenstern's favor. She was slim as a wand, fragile and very beautiful. Every man in the room -- and everyone in the room but herself was a man -- must be thinking: If I found anybody beating up this little honey, I guess I'd be pretty mad too. Francis didn't call her "Miss." "Oeea, the Leontan custom of displaying a Princess of Love has a considerable bearing on this case. Describe the system." Oeea, demure and composed, made much the same defense of the custom which she had already made to Duke. But this time she made far more of it. She gave the Leontan name and explained that the translation Princess of Love was only an approximation. Goddess would be nearer than Princess, she said, except that there was no suggestion of actual divinity, only of supreme quality. And the other word in the title included Beauty as well as Love. The title meant, in fact, that a girl had everything. When any girl was invited to be a Princess of Love she knew that she'd been awarded top marks for looks, personality and intelligence. "Even among us," she said, "many girls say they'd refuse to act as a Princess of Love if they were ever asked. We are a rather strait-laced people, you know. But hardly anyone ever refuses the tests, and I've never heard of anybody actually chosen refusing the honor... "You're a strait-laced people?" Francis queried. "Well, aren't we? A lot of you Terrans disapprove of the Love Princess system. Yet you have hundreds of prostitutes operating in every city, all the time, in the most sordid conditions, Among us, one Love Princess or at most two offer themselves in a week, openly, proudly...and that's all the extra-marital adventure that's legally and morally allowed among us. The present case can't be taken as typical. I made a bad mistake with Slater." "Please confine your answers to the questions. You say no girl ever refuses the honor?" "I've never heard of it happening." She looked appealingly at the president of the court. "I can only explain this if I'm allowed to speak freely." H ebbenton said nothing. Taking silence as assent, she said: "Perhaps I can explain our attitude best lik this. If in one of the countries on Earth where girls are still supposed to be modest, Spain for instance, a highly respectable girl is asked to parade in a bathing costume, she'll probably decline. But if she's told she's been chosen Miss Spain and is asked to go to America to compete in a Miss World or a Miss Universe or a Miss Galaxy competition, she'll find it very hard to say no. Suppose -- and this must be theoretical, but please bear with me -- she is told that if she competes she will certainly be chosen Miss Galaxy. Could any girl refuse? Remember, if she does refuse, no one will ever know the offer was made, that she could have been Miss Galaxy... Well, perhaps that gives you some idea of a Leontan girl's feelings on being asked to be a Princess of Love and Beauty. If she refuses, a time will soon come when nobody will ever believe that this supreme honor, this accolade of her womanhood and beauty, was ever offered. If she accepts, she gains something which nobody can ever take away from her. When I am old and ugly. I'll always be able to say that once I was a Princess of Love." "Thank you, Oeea. You've been very lucid and illuminating. Now it seems that when you were offered this honor you didn't immediately tell Sergeant Morgenstern." "No." "Before I ask you why, I want to clarify your relations with Sergeant Morgenstern. Were you in love with him?" "Yes. I still am." "You had not previously been a Princess of Love, however? You didn't meet him in this way?" "No. I'd met him as a very ordiIF nary girl with no thought of ever being invited to be a Love Princess." see. Are you going to marry him?" "Yes." "Why, when you were invited to be a Love Princess, did you not tell Sergeant MOrgenstern about it?" "Well, he's a Terran. Suppose the Spanish girl who knew she could be Miss Galaxy was engaged to a handsome, moody, exceedingly jealous man. Suppose she knew he'd be furious if she entered the contest, and would forbid her to go through with it. Might she not decide to have her cake and eat it, if she could? Get the Miss Galaxy title and afterwards try to make her peace with her fiance? That's what I tried to do." "In other words, you thought you take the honor and afterwards make your peace with Sergeant Morgenstern?" "Yes." "Although it meant being unfaithful to him?" "Leontan girls don't consider election as a Princess of Love ordinary infidelity." "B u t Sergeant Morgenstem might?" "Yes. He did." She and Morgenstem exchanged glances. "But," she added, with what might have been a note of warning, "any Terran who wants to marry a Leontan ought to be clear in his own mind what he's doing. If he wants her to be exactly like an Earthgirl, he should marry an Earthgirl." "Oeea, we've heard medical testimony about the injuries you suffered at the hands of Captain Slater. How did that situation come about? I mean, how did it happen that you chose to bestow yourself on a man who proceeded to assault you?" "That was mainly my fault, but partly due to my unfamiliarity with Terrans. Naturally I didn't expect what happened. Sergeant ' Morgenstern approached me while I was with Captain Slater, whom I had chosen as a possible partner. I knew nothing of Slater, not having met him before. He was a handsome man...When Sergeant Morgenstem approached me, I warned him off, as I had to do. Then, realizing perhaps for the first time exactly what I was doing, I became impatient to get it all over with. Provided I fulfilled my obligation, I was a Princess of Love. A Love Princess may not take her title and refuse her love. I had to love a man or I was not a Love Princess. Stupidly I decided that I'd stick with Slater and conclude the business immediately. I didn't take the care that a Love Princess should take, and usually does take. I didn't make certain that the man I had chosen was worthy of me. I simply decided to keep Slater and be released from my obligation that night." "What happened?" S he shrugged. "We talked. We went to my room and he started to beat me. There's nothing more to it than that, but I'll relate all the details if you wish." "I don't think that will be necessary." Major Francis turned to Duke. "You may cross-examine." Duke rose. "Why didn't you fulfil your obligations with Sergeant Morgenstem?" Oeea frowned. "Pardon?" "Since you wanted, as you said, to have your cake and eat it, why didn't you do so by accepting the invitation tb be a Princess of Love and choosing Morgenstern as your partner?" The girl's brow cleared. "That isn't allowed. If it were, the system would be a farce. Girls would always choose their own lovers. No, a Princess must make her choice from the men she actually meets after she accepts the honor -- from the men who see her at the Leisure Club and sue for her." "You implied that there are tests?" "Yes. There is a series of examinations." "Then it can hardly be a complete surprise to anyone who finds herself chosen as a Love Princess, surely?" "You're mistaken. Practically all pretty Leontan girls do the preliminary tests. It's still a surprise to be chosen." "But doesn't a Love Princess have more than preliminary tests? Doesn't she have to pass a very rigorous examination? How, then, if she's undergone all tiiis testing, can it be a great surprise when she's chosen?" "I could express it in figures, Major. For every fifty girls who are tested, one is chosen. A conceited girl would expect to be the one. A comparatively modest girl is always surprised." Duke nodded as if satisified. "When you are chosen, Oeea, do you have to appear at the club on a particular night?" "No." "Are you given warning?" "Yes." "Then you could have appeared on April # or April # instead of April #? "Yes." "Why did you pick April #?" "No reason." "It wasn't because both Morgenstem and Slater were at the Leisure Club that night?" "No." "You could have chosen April #, when Slater was there and not Morgenstern. Or April #, when neither was there. Or April #. when Morgenstern was there and not Slater." Oeea, who had shown no indication of concern, distress or annoyance, didn't seem to think any answer was called for. "Why." Duke persisted, "did you pick a night when Morgenstern was present?" Oeea raised her eyebrows inquiringly. "Do you want me to give you a lecture on feminine psychology?" "No. Just answer the question." "But that's exactly what I'd need to do to answer the question. I hadn't told Sergeant Morgenstern what was going to happen. I'd seen him the night before and still hadn't told him. But of course I wanted him to know sometime. I wanted him to see me as a Princess of Love. I look rather nice as a Princess of Love. Don't I, Major?" IT VI A fter a recess. Francis put Morgenstern on the stand. He took Morgenstern right through the events of the evening of April # -- his surprise and shock when Oeea made her appearance as a Princess of Love, his unavailing attempts to talk to her, his ejection from the club, his impatient prowl round the building, his entry through a cellar, his discovery of Oeea with Slater, who was apparently trying to kill her. The recital couldn't fail to make a good impression as far as Morgenstem's chances were concerned. Adroitly Major Francis, having already tried to show that the Princess of Lx)ve system was not as evil as Terrans were liable to think, now shifted ground slightly and presented his case to say in effect: "Anyway, can you blame Sergeant Morgenstem? How would you feel if you suddenly and unexpectedly found your girl acting as a prostitute? And not only that, but associating herself with a man you had good reason to dislike and distrust? Wouldn't you try to save her? And, when you found her being treated as Oeea was treated, 'wouldn't you lose all selfcontrol?" When Duke rose to cross-examine, he knew that in a sense he was the judge in this case. If he failed to make any impression on Morgenstern, the sergeant was going to get off with a comparatively light sentence. And if General Bailey's fears about the situation of the occupying force were justified, discipline would suffer such a blow that the Teirwi troops would be off the planet within six months. If on the other hand Duke could tear Morgenstern to shreds, the situation would at any rate get no worse. Duke was prepared to admit that Francis was showing himself a very competent defense ' counsel. But Francis had made one mistake. In putting Morgenstern on the stand and covering practically all the events of April #, Francis had given Duke all the scope he could possibly want. "Sergeant Morgenstern," said Duke, "you entered the club through a cellar? Was it a coal cellar?" Morgenstern answered confidently. "Yes, the Leontans use a lot of coal. There's hardly any oil left. Coal is used for heating the Leisure Club." "Is there a door or hatch or what?" "There's a sort of trapdoor with a chute below it. I prised up the trapdoor and went down the chute." "Rather risky, wasn't it?" "I figured the drop couldn't be too abrupt, or the sacks would burst open. And it was okay. I landed in the dark on a pile of coal sacks." "Very clean sacks, surely?" "Huh?" has been described by several witness. Nobody mentioned coal dust." "Oh, the Leontans like things to be clean. The chute was spotless. I saw that before I lowered the trapdoor over my head and let myself slide down." "Are you aware that many of the thousands of men in this garrison have made repeated and unsuccessful attempts to get into the Leisure Club? Men who have been barred temporarily or permanently? Men who knew there were Leontan girls in the Club and would have tried anything to get at them?" "They just didn't go about it the right way." "Although all these attempts have failed, on the night when you were ejected you simply scouted around and found a way in?" "Maybe I'm smarter than most." "Isn't it true that the trapdoor is generally locked so that it couldn't possibly be prised up. "I don't know." M orgenstern was so confident he appeared to be enjoying this. Duke's questions about coal dust worried him so little that Duke, who hadn't been quite sure, became convinced that he had actually gone down the chute as he said. If Morgenstern had entered any other way it would have worried him that Duke seemed to be catching him out. Having actually gone down the chute, however, he felt that Duke couldn't shake his story. Duke moved on. "You knew Oeea's roopi in the club?" "Yes. At least, I knew the room she'd be in. She doesn't have a room of her own there, but there's an arrangement "You'd been in that room with hes before?" ro "Yes." "On the evening of April #, once you emerged from the coal-cellar, you rushed straight to Oeea's room and flung the door open?" "Yes." "Why wasn't it locked?" Morgenstern had been expecting this. He almost laughed. "There are no locks in the Leisure Club. You can search all over the place and never see a single key." "When on previous occasions you and Oeea were in that room, didn't anyone ever try to get in? Think, now. Sergeant." Morgenstern hesitated and for the first time looked momentarily uneasy. Duke's warning suggested that there was something behind the question, that Duke wanted him to say no and was then going to produce evidence to prove him a liar. "I seem to recall somebody rattled the door once. What's that got -- " "Are you not aware that although there are no keys in Leontan locks, the doors can be locked by a certain manipulation of the door handle?" "Oh, sure. Yes, I remember something about that. Never paid much attention, because it was always Oeea who locked the door." "Locked the door?" "Well, shut it, then." "But on April #, having entered that room with Captain Slater and wishing to be extremely private, she didn't bother to lock the door?" "I don't know that she didn't. May be I worked the lock...I was so mad I don't know what I did." IF "So mad that you were able to operate a complicated lock the secret of which you didn't know?" "I don't know that it was locked. Probably it wasn't." "So Oeea neglected to lock the door that night?" "I don't know," "Sergeant, the evidence of the two witnesses and yourself concurs absolutely on this point. You rushed along the corridor and burst into the room. No one mentioned even a momentary hesitation to fumble with the lock." "Okay, the door wasn't locked, then." "So the coal trapdoor, which is normally locked, was left open that night. And when Oeea entered her room with Slater for the purpose of making love to him, she left the door open. Although that door, according to the evidence we have heard, was freely accessible to anyone passing by." M orgenstern said nothing. He wasn't so confident now. "You testified that when you saw Slater hitting Oeea you were so mad you just grabbed the first thing available and hit him with it?" "Yes." "That object being a metal lamp weighing thirteen pounds?" "I don't know the weight of it. But sure, it was heavy." "It was an oil lamp. Sergeant?" "Yes." "The Leisure Club uses electric light, doesn't it?" "Yes." "And didn't you just say that the club uses coal for heating because the planet has hardly any oil left?" "It's an old oil lamp. It isn't used any more. It's kept there as an ornament." "I see. A useless lamp weighing thirteen pounds is kept onthe bedside table, the only object on it?" "Yes." "It wasn't by any chance deliberately put there because when you picked up such an object and hit somebody on the head with it you could be pretty sure you'd killed him?" Major Francis jumped to his feet with an objection which General Hebbenton sustained. The president ordered the last question to be stricken from the record. Duke turned back to Morgenstern. "Sergeant, when you burst into this unlocked room. Slater was hitting the girl?" "Yes." "On what part of the body was he hitting her?" "Everywhere. Under the ribs, in the belly, on her arms when she tried to defend herself." "You saw this, Sergeant?" "Some of it." "So when you burst into the room, Slater, instead of turning in surprise -- for he must have thought the door was locked, surely? -- went on hitting her while you and the two Leontans behind you watched?" "His back was to us. And I guess I didn't make any noise at first, not n till I got furious and shouted. And... and Slater was making a noise himself, driving his fists into Oeea. And she was gasping -- " "Gasping, but not moaning, shouting or screaming. Sergeant?" "No." "She was in a room with a sadist who was beating her brutally. She had already sustained painful injuries and as far as she knew was going to go on being hurt for a considerable time. The door was unlocked and there were over three hundred people in the club, not counting the staff. But she didn't cry out?" "No." "Although Slater had his back to you, Oeea could see you?" "No, I guess not. She was doubled up...Slater had been working her in the gut...Didn't the doctor tell you what she was like afterwards?" "The doctor's report wasn't available to you then, Sergeant. All you knew of Oeea's condition was what you saw. And it seems she wasn't being hurt enough to bother crying out." "Hell, you heard what the doctor said! And I told you I saw Slater half "But she didn't scream." "You keep saying that! How do I know why she didn't scream? Why don't you ask her?" "Maybe we will. Sergeant. On the other hand, maybe you could tell us. The doctor's report mentioned previous injuries which the girl had suffered. Did you inflict them, Sergeant?" iCA Te? Me huh? What are you iVl talking about?" "Leontans are great artists. Sergeant Morgenstern. They make arts of a lot of things we wouldn't glorify with the name. The art of making love with a complete stranger, for example. Don't thev also make a special study of maochism?" Morgenstern was sweating. He looked desperately at the court president and then at his counsel. Francis was frowning at some papers in front of him. "Did you, too, inflict pain on Oeea with her sanction. Sergeant?" "Me? No, never." "Then who was responsible for the previous injuries?" "I don't know." "Sergeant, about two weeks before April # Oeea had suffered injuries comparable to those which Slater later inflicted. Surely you must have known about them? According to her evidence you were very close at around that time. According to your own evidence, you were lovers at that time. How is it possible that -- " "I remember now," said Morgenstern quickly. "We had a fight. A quarrel. Yes, I did hit her." "Quite extensively?' "Maybe." "This was at the Leisure Club, in that same room?" "Yes." "Yet once again she didn't cry out, didn't scream, didn't -- " Major Francis interrupted. Addressing General Hebbenton, he said that it was hard to see the relevance IF of this matter. "We are concerned with the night of April #. On direct examination, I covered nothing else. The events of some unspecified date prior to April # are not in question." "The court takes note of your remarks, Major Francis," Hebbenton said. "Nevertheless, I am going to permit the judge advocate to continue this line of questioning." Francis shrugged and sat down. "Is it not a fact," said Duke, "that the Leontan girl Oeea takes pleasure in pain and cannot or will not make love unless an element of mascohism is present? Didn't you frequently beat her. Sergeant?" "Only twice." "And on those two occasions did she remain silent?" "Well, she didn't scream." "No, because if she had screamed you'd have been interrupted, wouldn't you? And why should she scream, because she enjoyed being hurt, didn't she?" "Why don't you ask her?" Morgenstem said desperately. Francis was standing to object again. The officers of the court were staring intently at Morgenstem. Hebbenton rapped on the table and calfed the two counsels to confer with him. "Major Duke," he said quietly, "what do you wish to establish by this line of questioning?" "Morgenstern's defense is that he was so justifiably enraged at the sight of his girl being tortured that he lost control and killed Slater. If it is true that the girl is a masochist, then she may have ddiberately incited Stater to do what he did. And if Morgenstern knew all about it, the case for conspiracy is strengthened." "Conspiracy?" "This is my case, sir." "To establish that," said Major Francis slowly, "even if it's well founded, another trial would be necessary." Hebbenton turned to him. "I propose to recall Oeea, Major." "Yes, sir." "You have no objections?" "I have many objections to a great many things in this trial, sir. I have bowed to your judgment because the circumstances are, after all, unusual." vn O eea was as cool as ever when she was recalled. She refused to lie. Yes, she was a masochist. Every time Morgenstem and she had made love he had beat her. This had happened on four occasions. She had not known on April # that any trace remained of the last of these occasions. She had thought herself completely recovered. She denied everything else. But the writing was on the wall. When Duke made his closing address, he linked together all the little pieces of evidences he had managed Oeea, a masochist, had been chosen as a Princess of Love. Duke cast doubt on the allegation that Morgenstern had known nothing of this until fS the curtains were drawn back to reveal her in the alcove. Morgenstern's previous hatred of Slater was well established. Ejected from the club, Morgenstern knew how to get back in. A trapdoor was left open. "Now we come to the two Leontans who testified," Duke said. "I submit that they were to be in the back regions at a predetermined time. We have heard how they tried to take a Terran party with them. Morgenstern's justifiable homicide was to be observed by so many witnesses, Leontan and Terran, that no doubt about any of the circumstances could possibly exist. But the Terrans didn't go, and the Leontans had to go by themselves. "Oeea left her door unlocked, incited Slater to beat her, and kept him turned with his back to the door. The time schedule must have been arranged rather carefully. And everything worked out neatly. Morgenstern arrived and struck Slater with a metal lamp. I have already remarked on the coincidence of such an instrument being readily available. As it happened, Morgenstern only had to strike once. Had it been necessary, he could have finished Slater off, still in his alleged mad rage "Morgenstern first said he had never deliberately inflicted pain on the girl. Then he said he had done it once, in a quarrel. His written statement says they never quarreled Then he admitted he had beaten her twice. The girl herself said this happened on four occasions. "I must now say a word about the motives of the people concerned. It is a truism that a trial on a capital charge should never be swayed by the political consequences involved. But the motives on the Leontan side are all political. "Morgenstern merely hajted Captain Slater and saw, or was offered, an opportunity to kill him without having to suffer the usual consequences. "When we come to the Leontans, we have to consider the whole Terran situation here. Discipline is always a difficult problem for an occupying army. Solders wish to be on friendly terms with the local people. But the Leontans aren't particularly friendly. And they exacerbate most disciplinary actions by taking the side of the participant who holds less rank. "Here the Leontans saw a chance to have a sergeant murder a captain and more or less get away with it. Now as you can all see for yourself, the actual outcome of the case didn't worry them at all. Morgenstern was only a tool to create dissension." Morgenstern started at this and stared angrily at Duke. "If he was found guilty of murder and shot," Duke went on, "on the evidence which was supposed to be before us, the verdict would seem cruel and unjust, and the occupying army would have seethed with unrest. If he was given a light sentence or released not guilty, the verdict would be practically a mandate for any disgruntled corporal or private IF to plot the death of a colonel or major he didn't like -- with Leontan assistance, of course. For something like this which worked once would be well worth trying another time." He paused to let that sink in. And he didn't say much more. The officers at the table had to make up their own minds whether a conspiracy had been established. There was nothing more he could do. Francis made the best of a bad job. He pointed out the circumstantial nature of the prosecution case. And he stressed that Morgenstern was on trial, not Oeea and the other Leontans. Even if there was something in the prosecution's theories, Sergant Morgenstern was, as the judge advocate said, no more than a tool. Morgenstern had killed a man who was beating up his girl. Nothing which anybody said could ever cloud that clear issue. If there was a sinister background, the court could not eradicate it or punish those concerned by harshness toward Morgenstern. Francis had a good legal point there, Duke thought. But in the defense counsel's place he doubted if he'd have made it. For to make that point he had to accuse his own client of conspiracy with the enemy...of treason. The court retired for four hours. Morgenstern was found guilty and sentenced to death. D uke switched out the light and composed himself for sleep. His barge left at six the next morning, and he was practically ready to step on it. He had one of the four bedrooms at the landing field post. General Bailey had thanked him gruffly. Duke had done the job for which Bailey had sent for him. To Duke's question whether the verdict would do any real good, Bailey said grimly: "Major, it's only in storybooks that a situation is solved in an instant. I've never in my army career seen any awkward situation that could be cleared up like switching on a light. Sometimes situations like this clear themselves up, sometimes they die from lack of ammunition. All I know is, my personal position is a little more secure today than it was before. Morgenstern killed Slater. And if you'd failed, it would have been much worse. To that extent, this has been a victory and not a defeat." Morgenstern had already been shot. Duke wasn't sorry for him. Duke at least was convinced of the soundness of his own case, and satisfied that Morgenstern deserved death. Nothing could be done about the Leontans, unfortunately. They hadn't murdered anybody. They had hardly even told any lies. They were as pure as the driven snow. Duke was on the point of dropping off when he heard a knock at the door. "Who is it?" he demanded sleepily. "It's me, Sergeant Brown." Duke got out of bed and put a dressing gown over his pajamas. He twitched on the light again and opened the door. "There's a lady to see you, sir," the sergeant said. "A lady?" "A Leontan girl, sir." That could only be Oeea. If he hadn't already had to get out of bed, he'd probably have told the sergeant to send her away. But Duke was as curious as the next man. Why should Oeea want to see him? "Send her up," he said. She came in wearing a heavy coat. Before saying a word to him she shed this, and then the woolen jacket she wore beneath it, and then her thick slacks. "You plan to stay?" said Duke politely. "Yes." She took off her heavy shoes and put on a pair of slippers she had brought with her. She was now dressed in nothing in particular. "Now, wait a minute," said Duke, frowning. "Oeea, I got your lover shot. I also spoiled a good plan. You can't make me believe I'm high on your list of favorite characters." "You're not," she said coolly, sitting on a couch and arranging her bare legs provocatively, one on the seat and the other along the back. "Then why are you here?" For a moment he had a horrible dread that she was going to tell him triumphantly that he'd been wrong all along, that there was no conspiracy, that Morgenstem had been shot when some lesser punishment would have been more appropriate. He needn't have worried. "Because you're leaving Leonta. Because I can't believe a man like you can be without influence among his own people. Would you like to beat me. Major?" "No." She saw he meant it, and shrugged. "Well, you don't have to. It's an acquired taste, pleasure in pain. I can stay with you and we'll be as tender toward each other as you could wish." "I don't want you to stay with me." "No? Maybe you'll change your mind. Major, you don't like me, do you?" "No." "Perhaps you'll like me less when I tell you I never cared much for Sergeant Morgenstem. I used him, as you said." Duke remained silent. "Major, I still want you to understand me. And us. I know a lot about your people. Like us, they would never submit to dominion by anyone else." "I seem to remember that when Leonta and Earth fought, Leonta was the aggressor." "When two peoples have to fight, what does it matter who strikes the first blow? You know that occupation is no good. Major. If Leonta and Earth are ever really at peace, it will have to be as equals." uke nodded reluctantly. "I've read Terran history. When you fight a war, you support partisans, don't you? You make use of n IP guerrilla warfare? Sabotage? Espionage? You use fools and traitors?" "Yes." "Then you must understand the Morgenstem affair now, Major. You must open your eyes to it. As a people we're not perfect. Neither are you. Perhaps we have both made mistakes, ethical and logical. At the moment, Earth has an army of occupation on Leonta. We want rid of it. By every means in our power. And on the face of it we haven't many -- and most of them dirty." Duke now had no difficulty in seeing what she meant or in understanding why she had come to him. And reluctantly he concurred. Leonta was not the kind of world to accept even civilized, conventional, treaty-bound slavery. Leonta, like Earth, had pride. Leonta had to right and go on fighting. And Oeea simply wanted him to understand. That was all. She couldn't believe he was without influence, she said. "Well, perhaps he wasn't. So it was worth while for her to spend an hour with him, perhaps a night with him, so that Major Nigel Duke would understand Leonta better. It might pay. "You'd do the same if you had to, wouldn't you?" she said softly. "Yes," he admitted. "Fd do the same." "Do I go or stay?" she asked even more softly. He sighed. "You stay." . r I .Kc K In the next big issue of IF  K K K S#C #C c  c Complete Short Novel by Hal Clement I  a-ccc  scc by Algis Budrys i:   " ccc . ( J  ) .c Kc by Pool Anderson c  ccc -- and many more  Mtty Issue on sale Morch #th -- reserve your copy!c Tf IF  Short Story IK The moment is at hand -- the fingers are poised -- this is what comes next! years of uneasy peace, since the Hour of Tragedy ten apprehensive, uneasy years pungent with fear, with hatred, distrust... ten years like ten thousand in the past of man . ten units out of the infinite, out of time the eternal, immutable, nonexistent dimension... # planets spinning... nine spawn of the sun, one of them nascent, a hairsbreadth from its heritage. But which heritage? It could" choose. The fertile warmth of the parent star . or the star's pure fire? # periods, in the gibberish of the sifters of chaos eight: PreCambrian to Triassic -- while flame cooled and became stone and lay latent, lambent, pent awaiting release -- before from the tetid Jurassic darknesses the beasts of warm blood crawled # seas, once the womb of life, then too long its caul... the common birthplace, then a strangling wall between. (Once too, briefly a high road for the courageous, now a new kind of night for marauders, shadowed shapes armed with pieces of the sun.) masses of land, cradles for the genesis of a myriad species... and one of them Man. Man the Creator, the Protector, the Destroyer: builder of shrines, burner of saints, good father, good soldier, good killer... Man, the creature of choice. nations remaining, sparse ruddy fruit of a thousand wars, nurbloody consequence of union into pack into tribe, into fief, to kingdom, empire and nation. The threads of history gathered finally into five flags, entwined in alliance at this point in time by a searing wind: IF Pan-American, Sino-Russian, AfroArabian... racial armies, sons of the first beast to kill from anger, fathers of the unborn. Armies in the terrible truce of the fusion bomb... waiting. # farflung networks: metal wire and machines, and vacuum. Interlinked webs of detection and retaliation or attack, within the webs bombs... , within the bombs targets, mapped and doomed by a spark. Each alliance a network of aimed and armed missiles, in deserts, on mountaintops, hidden deep and in the surrounding seas. Each alliance a pattern of targets, always an instant from obliteration. (Such had come to Britain in its Hour of Tragedy when the last savage hope of Empire Regained dissolved into vapor, and the Isles became slag. There the fourth network corroded under a shroud of ash; but the surviving three ceaselessly hummed.) # men, of one species but riven somehow at this point in time by pigment, tongue and details of dress: a man from Brownsville, a man from Vladivostok, a man trom Khartoum... buried deep in the hearts of the networks, each already entombed, and so safe from death. Each chosen by his masters to be the nock of the arrow, the final factor; yet not an arrow, for each network of course was aimed at both the others. A moment's trust is fatal once the truce is broken, the masters reasoned, and so the bombs and the men were trained.   # buttons, a choice under the fingers of each of these men: one, red, to loose deliberately the double pronged torrent of bombs if the masters so decreed. The other, white, to cancel fhe launching command broadcast automatically if massive radiation spewed across the homeland... a vast, vicio.us death reflex. Each man, then, if the detectors tolled, had the decision: error or attack. Fail or be unable to press the white instantly, and the counterattack, if such it was, began. This, then, was the masters' last concession to the human factor, their grudging one to humanity. And like most of the masters' concessions to the masses, it was false. Identically, in each network, the white button was a dummy. The real choice was as it always was -- red button, kill... or wait yet a while more. The men in the tombs, unknowing, knew this was the choice. I mao's brain, whosoever, however carefully masters may mold it, is a fragile thing. Ten thousand years have not fitted man to live with himself; could a single man The choice, distillate of a hundred centuries of pain, the weariness of a species with race: blame them, blame all. One of the men sitting in a cold tomb sweated. His finger hovered over the red button, trembled .  . and fell.    n IF # Serial On Venus, there really are fairies at the bottom of one's garden. One flits there now, ready to kill me! # I reswallowed my heart. "Why a bomb? And what did you do with it?" He shrugged. "They were stupid. They paid me this silly amount, see? Just to sneak this little package aboard. Gave me a lot of north wind about how it was meant to be a surprise for the captain -- and that I should give it to him at the captain's party, last night out. Gift wrapped and everything. 'Sonny,' this silly zero says to me, 'just keep it out of sight and let him be surprised, heir Imagine me, Poddy of Mars, on Venus! Not only me but my brother Clark that dryland imp of Satan) and also my Uncle Tom -- and not only on Venus, but living like an empress and squired to all that planet s lovely, foolish, extravagant Best Places by Dexter Kurt Cunha, who is next in line to become practically an emperor in fact! Of course there are a few drawbacks. I do miss. Mom and Dad -- and the new babies who were too little to travel -- and  do have one cross to bear -- namely Clark. It isnt bad enough that he should have a typical small-boy crush how he would hate me for saying that!) on my good and beautiful friend Girdie, whom we met on the ship. Girdie is older than I am, but doesnt make me miserable for it. On the ship, where the other females were either Utter Beasts like Mrs. Garcia and Mrs. Royer or friendly but ancient grandmas like Mrs. Grew, she was my Best Friend.) It isnt enough that he should be beating the house regularly at the Venusburg gambling salons. Worse, he has just admitted that he used me to smuggle something aboard ship and onto Venus. What did he smuggle, you ask? Oh, nothing serious. Just a small but very lethal) atomic bomb -- bribed to do it, you see, by a couple of shifty-eyed strangers! cause last night out is not only the captain's party, it's his birthday.' "Now, Sis, you know I wouldn't swallow anything like that. If it had really been a birthday present they would just have given it to the purser to hold. No need to bribe me. So I just played stupid and kept jacking up the price. And the idiots paid me. They got real jumpy when time came to shove us through passport clearance and paid all I asked. So I shoved it into your bag while you were yakking to Uncle Tom -- then saw to it you didn't get inspected. "Then the minute we were aboard I went to get it -- and got held up by a stewardess spraying your cabin and had to do a fast job and go back to relock your bag because Uncle Tom came back in looking for his pipe. That first night I opened the thing in the dark -- and opened it from the bottom; I already had a hunch what it might be." "Why?" "Sis, use your brain. Don't just sit there and let it rust out. First they offer me what they probably figured was big money to a kid. When I turn it down, they start to sweat and up the ante. I kept crowding it and the money got important. And more important. They don't even give me a tale about how a man with a flower on his lapel will come aboard at Venus and give me a pass word. It has to be that they don't care what happens to it as long as it gets into the ship. What does that add up to? Logic." He added, "So I opened it and took it apart. Time bomb. Set for three days after we space. Blooey T I shivered, thinking about it. "What a horrible thing to do!" "It could have turned out pretty dry," he admitted, "if I had been as stupid as they thought I was." "But why would anybody want to do such a thing?" "Didn't want the ship to get to Venus." "But whyr "You figure it out. I have." "Uh...what did you do with it?" "Oh, I saved it. The essential pieces. Never know when you might need a bomb." And that's all I got out of him -- and here I am stuck with a Saint Podkayne oath not to tell And nineteen questions left unanswered. Was there really a bomb? Or was I swindled by my brother's talent for improvising explanations that throw one off the obvious track? If there was, where is it? Still in the Tricorn? Right here in this suite? In an innocent looking package in the safe of the Tannhauser? Or parked with his private bodyguard, Josie? Or a thousand other places in this big city? Or is it still more likely that I simply made a mistake of three kilograms in my excitement and that Clark was snooping just to be snooping? Which he will always do if not busy otherwise. No way to tell. So I decided to squeeze what else I could from this Moment of Truth -- if it was one. "I'm awful glad you found it," I said. "But the slickest thing you ever did was that dye job on Mrs. Garcia and Mrs. Royer. Girdie admires it, too." "She does?" he said eagerly. "She certainly does. But I never let on you did it. So you can still tell Tier yourself, if you want to." "Mmm..." He looked quite happy. "I gave Old Lady Royer a little extra, just for luck. Put a mouse in her bed." "Clark! Oh, wonderful! But where did you get a mouse?" "Made a deal with the ship's cat." I wish I had a nice, normal, slightly stupid family. It would be a lot more comfortable. Still, Clark has his points. B ut I haven't had too much time to worry about my brother's High Crimes and Misdemeanors; Venusberg offers too much to divert the adolescent female with a hitherto unsuspected taste for high living. Especially Dexter. I am no longer a leper; I can now go anywhere, even outside the city, IF without wearing a filter snout that makes me look like a blue-eyed pig -- and dashing, darling Dexter has been most flatteringly eager to escort me ever#here. Even shopping. Using both hands a girl could spend a national debt here on clothes alone. But I am being (almost) sensible and spending only that portion of my cash assets earmarked for Venus. If I were not Firm with him, Dexter would buy me anything I admire, just by lifting his finger. (He never carries any money, not even a credit card, and even his tipping is done by some unobvious credit system.) But I haven't let him buy me anything more important than a fancy ice cream sundae; I have no intention of jeopardizing my amateur status for some pretty clothes. But I don't feel too compromised over ice cream and fortunately I do not as yet have to worry about my waistline -- I'm hollow clear to my ankles. So, after a hard day of sweating over the latest Rio styles, Dexter takes me to an ice cream parlor -- one that bears the same relation to our Plaza Sweet Shoppe that the Tricorn does to a sand car -- and he sits and toys with cafe au lait and watches in amazement while I eat. First some little trifle like an everlasting strawberry soda, then more serious work on a "sundae" composed "by a master architect from creams and syrups and imported fruits and nuts of course, and perhaps a couple of tens of scoops of ice cream in various flavors and named "The Taj Mahal" or "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" or such. (Poor Girdie! She diets like a Stylite every day of the year. Query: Will I ever make that sacrifice to remain svelte and glamorous? Or will I get comfortably fat like Mrs. Grew? Echo Answereth Not and I'm afraid to listen.) I've had to be firm with him in other ways, too, but much less obviously. Dexter turns out to be a master of seductive logic and is ever anxious to tell me a bedtime story. But I have no intention of being a Maid Betrayed, not at my age. The tragedy about Romeo and Juliet is not that they died so young but that the boy-meets-girl reflex should be so overpowering as to defeat all common sense. My own reflexes are fine, thank you, and my hormonal balance is just dandy. Dexter's fruitless overtures give me a nice warm feeling at the pit of my stomach and hike up my metabolism. Perhaps I should feel insulted at his dastardly intentions toward me. And possibly I would, at home, but this is Venusberg, where the distinction between a shameful proposition and a formal proposal of honorable marriage lies only in the mind and would strain a semantician to define. For all I know Dexter already has seven wives at home, numbered for the days of the week. I haven't asked him, as I have no intention of becoming number eight, on any basis. I talked this over with Girdie and asked why I didn't feel "insulted." IF Had they left the moral circuits out of my Cybernet, as they so obviously did with my brother Clark? Girdie smiled her sweet and secret smile that always means she is thinking about something she doesn't intend to be fully frank about. Then she said, "Poddy, girls are taught to be 'insulted' at such offers for their own protection. It is a good idea, quite as good an idea as keeping a fire extinguisher handy even though you don't expect a fire. But you are right. It is not an insult, it is never an insult -- it is the one utterly honest tribute to a woman's charm and femininity that a man can offer her. The rest of what they tell us is mostly polite lies...but on this one subject a man is nakedly honest. I don't see any reason ever to be insulted if a man is polite and gallant about it." I thought about it. "Maybe you're right, Girdie. I guess it is a compliment, in a way. But why is it that that is all a boy is ever after? -- nine times out of ten anyhow." "You've got it just backwards. Poddy. Why should he ever be after evolution is tl;e logic behind every proposition. Just be glad that the dears have learned to approach the matter with hand-kissing instead of a club. Some of them, anyhow. It gives us more choice in the matter than we've ever had before in all history. It's a woman's world today, dear. Enjoy it and be grateful." I had never thought of it that way. When I've thought of it at all, I've n os O if been groused because it is so hard for a girl to break into a "male" profession, such as piloting. I 've been doing some hard thinking about piloting -- and have concluded that there are more ways of skinning a cat than buttering it with parsnips. Do I really want to be a "famous explorer captain"? Or would I be just as happy to be some member of his crew? Oh, I want to space, let there be no doubt about that! My one little trip from Mars to Venus makes me certain that travel is for me. I'd rather be a junior stewardess in the Tricorn than President of the Republic. Shipboard life is fun. You take your home and your friends along with you while you go to romantic new places -- and with Davisdrive star ships being built those places are going to be newer and more romantic every year. And Poddy is going to go, somehow. I was born to roam. But let's not kid ourselves, shall we? Is anybody going to let Poddy captain one of those multimegabuck ships? Dexter's chances are a hundred times as good as mine. He's as smart as I am, or almost. He'll have the best education for it that money can buy. (While I'm loyal to Ares U., I know it is a hick college compared with where he plans to go. ) And also it is quite possible that his Daddy could buy him a Star Rover ship. But the clincher is that Dexter is twice as big as I am and male. Even if you # leave his father's wealth out of the equation, which one of us gets picked? But all is not lost. Consider Theodora, consider Catherine the Great. Let a man boss the job...then boss that man. I am not opposed to marriage. (But if Dexter wants to marry me -- or anything -- he'll have to follow me to Marsopolis where we are pretty old-fashioned about such things. None of this light-hearted Venusberg stuff!) Marriage should be every woman's end -- but not her finish. I do not regard marriage as a sort of death. Girdie says always to "be what you are." All right, let's look at ourselves in a mirror, dear, and forget "Captain Podkayne Fries, the Famous Explorer" for the nonce. What do we see? Getting just a touch broad-shouldered in the hips, aren't we, dear? No longer any chance of being mistaken for a boy in a dim light. One might say that we were designed for having babies. And that doesn't seem, too bad an idea, now does it? Especially if we could have one as nice as Duncan. Fact is, all babies are pretty nice even when they're not. Those eighteen miserable hours during the storm in the Tricorn, changing infants -- weren't they just about the most fun you ever had in your life? A baby is lots more fun than differential equations. Every star ship has a creche. So which is better? To study creche engineering and pediatrics -- and be a department head in a star ship? Or buck for pilot training and make it...and wind up as a female pilot nobody wants to hire? Well, we don't have to decide now -- I 'm getting pretty anxious for us to shape for Earth. Truth is, Venusberg's fleshpots can grow monotonous to one of my wholesome (or should say "limited") tastes. I haven't any more money for shopping, not if I am to have any to shop in Paris; I don't think I could ever get addicted to gambling (and don't want to; I'm one of those who lose and thereby offset in part Clark's winning); and the incessant noise and lights are going to put wrinkles where I now have dimples. And I think Dexter is beginning to be just a bit bored with my naive inability to understand what he is driving at. If there is any one thing I have learned about males in my eight and a half years (Mars years, of course), it is that one should sign off before he gets bored. I look forward to just one last encounter with Dexter now: a tearful farewell just before I must enter the Tricornes loading tube, with a kiss so grown up, so utterly passionate and all-out giving, that he will believe the rest of his life that Things Could Have Been Different if Only He Had Played His Cards Right. I've been outside the city just once, in a sealed tourist bus. Once is more than enough. This ball of smog and swamp should be given IF back to the natives, only they wouldn't take it. Once a fairy in flight was pointed out, so they said, but I didn't see anything. Just smog. I'll settle now for just one fairy, in flight or even perched. Dexter says that he knows of a whole colony, a thousand or more, less than two hundred kilometers away, and wants to show it to me in his Rolls. But I'm not warm to that idea. He intends to drive it himself -- and that dratted thing has automatic controls. If I can sneak Girdie, or even Clark, into the picnic -- well, maybe. But I have learned a lot on Venus and would not have missed it for anything. The Art of Tipping, especially, and npw I feel like an Experienced Traveler. Tipping can be a nuisance but it is not quite the vice Marsmen think it is. It is a necessary lubricant for perfect service. Let's admit it; service in Marsopolis varies from indifferent to terrible. I simply had not realized it. A clerk waits on you when he feels like it and goes on gossiping with another clerk until he does feel like it. Not like that in Venusberg! However, it is not just the money -- and here follows the Great Secret of Happy Travel. I haven't soaked up much Portuguese and not everybody speaks Ortho. But it isn't necessary to be a linguist if you will learn just one word -- in as many languages as possible. Just "Thank you." I caught onto this first with Maria and Maria -- I say, "Gobble-gobble" to them a hundred times a day, only the word is actually "Obrigado" which sounds like "Gobble-gobble" if you say it quickly. A small tip is much more savoir-fairish service -- when accompanied by "Thank you" than a big tip while saying nothing. So I've learned to say "Thank you" in as many languages as possible and I always try to say it in the home language of the person I'm dealing with, if I can guess it, which I usually can. Doesn't matter much if you miss, though. Porters and clerks and taxi drivers and such usually know that one word in several languages and can spot it even if you can't talk with them at all in any other way. I've written a lot of them down and memorized them: Obrigado Donkey-Shane Mare-see Key Toss M'Goy Graht-see-eh Arigato Spawseebaw Grathee-oss Tock Oh "Money Tock" and Clark says this one means "Money talks." But Clark is wrong; he has to tip too high because he won't bother to say "Thank you." Oh, yes, Clark tips. It hurts him. but he soon discovered that he couldn't get a taxi and that even automatic vending machines were rude to him if he tried to buck the local system But it infuriates him so much that he won't be pleasant about it and that costs him. If you say "Tock" instead of "Key Toss" to a Finn, he still understands it. If you mistake a Japanese for a Cantonese and say "M'goy" instead of "Arigato" -- well, that is the one word of Cantonese he knows. And "Obrigado" everybody understands. However, if you do guess right and pick their home language, they roll out the red carpet and genuflect, all smiles. I've even had tips refused -- and this in a city where Clark's greediness about money is considered only natural. AU those other long, long lists of hints on How to Get Along While Traveling that I studied so carefully before I left turn out not to be necessary. This one rule does it all. Uncle Tom is dreadfully worried about something. He's absentminded and, while he will smile at me if I manage to get his attention "not easy", the smile soon fades and the worry lines show again. Maybe it's something here and things will be all right once we leave. I wish we were back in the nappy ThreeCornered Hat with next stop Luna City T hings are really grim. Clark hasn't been home for two nights and Uncle Tom is almost out of his mind. Besides that. I've had a quarrel with Dexter -- which isn't important compared with Brother being missing, but I could surely use a shoulder to cry on. And Uncle Tom has had a real quarrel with Mr. Chairman -- which was what led to my quarrel with Dexter, because I Was on Uncle Tom's side even though I didn't know what was going on and I discovered that Dexter was just as blind in his loyalty to his father as I am to Uncle Tom. I saw only a bit of the quarrel with Mr. Chairman. It was one of those frightening, cold, bitter, formally polite, grown-men quarrels of the sort that used to lead inevitably to pistols at dawn. I think it almost did. Mr. Chairman arrived at our suite, looking not at all like Santa Claus, and I heard Uncle say coldly, "I would rather your friends had called on me, sir." But Mr. Chairman ignored that and about then Uncle noticed that I was there -- back of the piano, keeping quiet and trying to look small -- and sent me to my room. But I know what part of it is. I had thought that both Clark and I had been allowed to run around loose in Venusberg -- although I have usually had either Girdie or Dexter with me. Not so. Both of us have been guarded night and day, every instant we have been out of the Tannhauser, by Corporation police. I never suspected this and I'm sure Clark didn't or he would never have hired Josie to watch his boodle. But Uncle did know it and had accepted it as a courtesy from Mr. Chairman, one that left him free to do whatever these things are that have kept him so busy here, without riding herd on two kids, one of them nutty as Christmas cake. (And I don't mean me.) ir As near as I can reconstruct it Uncle blames Mr. Chairman for Clark's absence -- although this is hardly fair, as Clark, if he knew he was being watched, could evade eighteen private eyes, the entire Space Corps and a pack of slavering bloodhounds. Or is it wolfhounds? But, on top of this, Dexter says that they disagree completely on how to locate Clark. Myself, I think that Clark is missing because Clark wants to be missing, because he intends to miss the ship and stay here on Venus where (a) Girdie is and where (b) all that lovely money is. Although perhaps I have put them in the wrong order. I keep telling myself this, but Mr. Chairman says that it is a kidnapping, that it has to be a kidnapping and that there is only one way to handle a kidnapping on Venus if one ever expects to see the kidnappee alive again. On Venus, kidnapping is just about the only thing a stockholder is afraid of. In fact they are so afraid of it that they have brought the thing down almost to a ritual. If the kidnapper plays by the rules and doesn't hurt his victim, he not only won't be punished but he has the Corporation's assurance that he can keep any ransom agreed on. But if he doesn't play by the rules and they do catch him, well, it's pretty grisly. Some of the things Dexter just hinted at. But I understand that the mildest punishment is something called a "four-hour death." He wouldn't give me any details on this, either -- except that there is some drug that is just the opposite of anesthesia. It makes pain hurt worse. D exter says that Clark is absolutely safe -- as long as Uncle Tom doesn't insist on meddling with things he doesn't understand. "Old fool" is one term that he used, and that was when I slapped him. Long sigh and a wish for my happy girlhood in Marsopolis, where I understood how things worked. I don't here. All I really know is that I can no longer leave the suite save with Uncle Tom -- and must leave it and stay with him when he does and wherever he goes. Which is how I at last saw the Cunha "cottage" -- and would have been much interested if Clark hadn't been missing. A modest little place only slightly smaller than the Tannhauser, but much more lavish. Our President's Rose House would fit into its ballroom. That is where I quarreled with Dexter while Uncle and Mr. Chairman were continuing their worse quarrel elsewhere in that "cottage." Presently Uncle Tom took me back to the Tannhauser and I've never seen him look so old -- fifty at least, or call it a hundred and fifty of the years they use here. We had dinner in the suite and neither of us ate anything and after dinner I went over and sat by the living window. The view was from Earth, I guess. The Grand Canyon of El Dorado, or El Colorado, or whatever it is. Grand, certainly. But all I got was acrophobia and tears. Uncle was just sitting, looking like Prometheus enduring the eagles. I put my hand in his and said, "Uncle Tom? I wish you would spank me." "Eh?" He shook his head and seemed to see me. "Flicka! Why?" "Because it's my fault." "What do you mean, dear?" "Because I'm responsibubul for Clark. I always have been. He hasn't any sense. Why, when he was a baby I must have kept him from falling in the Canal at least a thousand times." He shook his head, negatively this time. "No, Poddy, It is my responsibility and not yours at all. I am in loco parentis to both of you. Which means that your parents were loco ever to trust me with it." "But I feel responsible. He's my Chinese obligation." He shook his head still again. "No. In sober truth no person can ever be truly responsible for another human being. Each one of us faces up to the universe alone -- and the universe is what it is and it doesn't soften the rules for any of us...and eventually, in the long run, the universe always wins and takes all. But that doesn't make it any easier when we try to be responsible for another -- as you have -- as I have -- and then look back and see how we could have done it better." He sighed. "I should not have blamed Mr. Cunha. He tried to take care of Clark, too. Of both of you. I knew it." He paused and added, "It was just that I had a foul suspicion, an unworthy one, that he was using Clark to bring pressure on me. I was wrong. In his way and by his rules, Mr. Cunha is an honorable man. His rules do not include using a boy for political purposes." U ncle looked around at me, as if surprised that I was still in the room. "Poddy, I should have told you more than I have. I keep forgetting that you are now a woman. I always think of you as the baby who used to climb on my knee and ask me to tell her 'The Poddy Story.' " He took a deep breath. "I still won't burden you with all of it. But I owe Mr. Cunha an abject apology -- because I was using Clark for political purposes. And you, too." "Huh?" "As a cover-up, dear. Doddering great uncle escorts beloved niece and nephew on pleasure tour. I'm sorry. Poddy, but it isn't that way at all. The truth is I am Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary for the Republic. To the Three Planets Summit. But it seemed desirable to keep it a secret until I present my credentials." I didn't answer beause I was having a little trouble soaking this in. I mean, I know Uncle Tom is pretty special and has done some important things But all my life he has been somebody who always had time to hold a skein of yarn for me while I wound it and would take serious interest in helping me name paper dolls. But he was talking. "So I used IF you, Flicka. You and your brother. Because -- Poddy, do you really want to know all the ins and outs and snarls of the politics behind this?" I did very much. But I tried to be grown up. "Just whatever you think best to tell me, Uncle Tom." "All right. Because some of it is sordid and all of it is complex and would take hours to explain. And some of it really isn't mine to tell; some of it involves Bozo -- Sorry, the President. Some of it has to do with promises he made. Do you know who our Ambassador is, now, at Luna City?" I tried to remember. "Mr. Suslov?" "No, that was last administration. Artie Finnegan. Artie isn't too bad a boy, but he thinks he should have been President and he's certain he knows more about interplanetary affairs and what is good for Mars than the President does. Means well, no doubt." I didn't comment because the name "Arthur Finnegan" I recognized at once -- because I had once heard Uncle Tom sound off about him to Daddy when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep. Some of the milder expressions were "a head like a sack of mud," "larceny in his heart" and a "size twelve ego in a size nine soul." "But even though he means well," Uncle Tom went on. "he doesn't see eye to eye with the President -- and myself -- on matters that will come before this conference. But, unless the President sends a special envoy -- me, in this case -- the Ambassador in residence automatically speaks for Mars. Poddy, what do you know about Switzerland?" "That's enough, I guess, although there probably never was an apple. Poddy, Mars is the Switeerland of the Solar System -- or it isn't anything at all. So the President thinks, and so I think. A small man (and a small country, like Mars or Switzerland) can stand up to bigger, powerful neighbors only by being war and I pray we never do, because we would probably lose it. But if we have to fight." H e sighed. "That's the way I see it. But Mr. Finnegan thinks that because Mars is small and weak Mars should join up with the Terran Federation. Perhaps he's right and this really is the wave of the future. But I don't think so. I think it would be the end of Mars as an independent country and a free society. Furthermore, I think it is logical that, if Mars gives up its independence, it is only a matter of time until Venus goes the same way. I've been spending the time since we got here trying to convince Mr. Cunha of this, cause him to have his Resident Commissioner make a common cause with us against Terra. This could persuade Luna to come in with us, too, since both Venus and Mars can sell to Luna cheaper than Terra can. But it wasn't at all easy; the Corporation has such a long-standing policy of never meddling in politics at all. 'Put not your faith in princes' -- which means to them that they buy and they seD and they ask no questions. "But I have been trying to make Mr. Cunha see that if Luna and Mars and Terra -- the Jovian moons hardly count -- if those three were all under the same rules, in short order Venus Corporation would be no more free than is General Motors or I.G. Farbenindustrie. He got the picture, too, I'm sure -- until I jumped to conclusions about Clark's disappearance and blew my top at him." He shook his head. "Poddy, I'm a poor excuse for a diplomat." "You aren't the only one who got sore," I said, and told him about slapping Dexter. He smiled for the first time. "Oh, Poddy, Poddy, we'll never make a lady out of you. You're as bad as m. So I grinned back at him and started picking my teeth with a fingernail. This is an even ruder gesture than you might think -- and utterly private between Uncle Tom and myself. We Maori have a very bloodthirsty history and I won't even hint at what it is we are supposed to be picking out of our teeth. Uncle Tom used to use this vulgar pantomime on mer when I was a little girl, to tell me I wasn't being ladylike. Whereupon he really smiled and mussed my hair. "You're the blondest, blue-eyed savage I ever saw. But you're a savage, all right. And me, too. Better tell him you're sorry, hon, because, much as I appreciate your gallant defense of me, Dexter was perfectly right. I was an 'old fool.' I'll apologize to his father, doing the last hundred meters on my belly if he wants it that way. A man should admit it in full when he's wrong and make amends. And you kiss and make up with Dexter. Dexter is a fine boy." "I'll say I'm sorry and .make up -- but I don't think I'll kiss him. I haven't yet." He looked surprised. "So? Don't you like him? Or have we brought too much Norse blood into the family?" "I like Dexter just fine and you're crazy with the smog if you think Svenska blood is any colder than Polynesian. I could go for Dexter in a big way -- and that's why I haven't kissed him." H e considered this. "I think you're wise, hon. Better do your practice kisses on boys who don't tend to cause your gauges to swing over into the red. Anyhow, although he's a good lad, he's not nearly good enough for my savage niece." "Maybe so, maybe not. Uncle... what are you going to do about Clark?" His halfway happy mood vanished. "Nothing. Nothing at all." "But we've got to do something!" "But what, Podkayne?" There he had me. I had already chased it through all the upper and lower segments of my brain. Tell the police? Mr. Chairman is the police -- they all work for him. Hire a private detective? If Venus has any (I don't know), then they all are under contract to Mr. Cunha, or rather, the Venus Corporation. Run ads in newspapers? Question all the taxi drivers? Put Clark's picture in the sollies and offer rewards? It didn't matter what you thought of, everything on Venus belongs to Mr. Chairman. Or, rather, to the corporation he heads. Same thing, really, although Uncle Tom tells me that the Cunha actually own only a fraction of the stock. "Poddy, I've been over everything I could think of with Mr. Cunha -- and he is either already doing it, or he has convinced me that here, under conditions he knows much better than I do, it should not be done." "Then what do we do? "We wait. But if you think of anything -- anything -- that you think might help, tell me and if it isn't already being done, we'll call Mr. Cunha and find out if it should be done. If I'm asleep, wake me." "I will." I doubted if he would be asleep. Or me. But something else had been bothering me. "Jf time corns for the Tricorn to shape for Earth -- and Clark jsh't back -- what do you do then?" He didn't answer; the lines in his face just got deeper. I knew what the Awful Decision was -- and I knew how he had decided it. But I had a little Awful Decision of my own to make...and I had talked to Saint Podkayne about it for quite a while and had decided that Poddy had to break a SaintPodkayne oath. Maybe this sounds silly but it isn't silly to me. Never in my life had I broken one...and never in my life will I be utterly sure about Poddy again. So I told Uncle all about the smuggled bomb. Somewhat to my surprise he took it seriously -- when I had about persuaded myself that Clark had been pulling my leg just for exercise. Smuggling -- oh, sure, I understand that every ship in space has smuggling. But not a bomb. Just something valuable enough that it was worthwhile to bribe a boy to get it aboard, .and probably Clark had been paid off again when he passed it along -- B ut Uncle wanted me to describe exactly the person I had seen talking to Clark at Deimos Station. "Uncle, I can't! I barely glanced at him. A man. Not short, not tall, not especially fat or skinny, not dressed in any way that made me remember. I'm not sure I looked at his face at all. Uh, yes, I did but I can't call up any picture of it." "Could it have been one of the passengers?" I thought hard about that. "No. Or I would have noticed his face later when it was still fresh in my mind. Mmm...I'm almost certain he didn't queue up with us. I think he headed for the exit, the one that takes you back to the shuttle ship." "That is likely," he agreed. "Certain -- if it was a bomb. And not just a product of Clark's remarkable imagination." "But, Uncle Tom, why would it be a bomb?" And he didn't answer and I already knew why. Why would anybody blow up the Tricorn and kill everybody in her, babies and all? Not for insurance like you sometimes find in adventure stories; Lloyd's won't insure a ship for enough to show a profit on that sort of crazy stunt -- or at least that's the way it was explained to me in my high school economics class. Why, then? To keep the ship from getting to Venus. But the T ricorn had been to Venus tens and tens of times. To keep somebody in the ship from getting to Venus (or perhaps to Luna) that trip. Who? Not Podkayne Fries. I wasn't important to anybody but me. For the nett couple of hours Uncle Tom and I searched that hilton suite. We didn't find anything, nor did I expect us to. If there was a bomb (which I still didn't fully believe) and if Clark had indeed brought it off the ship and hidden it there (which seemed unlikely, with all of the Tricorn at one end and all of the city at the other end to choose from), nevertheless he had had days and days in which to make it look like anything from a vase of flowers to a -- an anything. We searched Clark's room last on the theory that it was the least likely place. Or, rather, we started to search it together and Uncle had to finish it. Pawing through Clark's things got to be too much for me and Uncle sent me back into the salon to lie down. I was all cried out by the time he gave up. I even had a suggestion to make. "Maybe if we sent for a Geiger counter?" Uncle shook his head and sat down. "We aren't looking for a bomb, honey." "We aren't?" "No. If we found it, it would simply confirm that Clark had told you the truth, and I'm already using that as least hypothesis. Because -- Well, because I know more about this than the short outline I gave to you...and I know just how deadly serious this is to some people, how far they might go. Politics is neither a game nor a bad joke the way some IF people think it is. War itself is merely an extension of politics...so I don't find anything surprising about a bomb in politics. Bombs have been used in politics hundreds and even thousands of times in the past. No, we aren't looking for a bomb, we are looking for a man -- a man you saw for a few seconds once. And probably not even for that man but for somebody that man might lead us back to. Probably somebody inside the President's office, somebody he trusts." "Oh, gosh, I wish I had really looked at him!" "Don't fret about it, hon. You didn't know and there was no reason to look. But you can bet that Clark knows what he looks like. If Clark -- I mean, when Clark comes back, in time we will have him search the I.D. files at Marsopolis. And all the visa photographs for the past ten years, if necessary. The man will be found. And through him the person the President has been trusting who should not be trusted." Uncle Tom suddenly looked all Maori and very savage. "And when we do, I may take care of it personally." Then he smiled and added, "But right now Poddy is going to bed. You're up way past your bedtime, even with all the dancing and latesleeping you've been doing lately." "Uh...what time is it in Marsopolis?" He looked at his other watch. "Twenty-seventeen. You weren't thinking of phoning your parents? I hope not." "Oh, nol I won't say a word to them unless -- until Clark is back. And maybe not then. But if it's only twenty-seventeen, it's not late at all, real time, and I don't want to go to bed. Not until you do." "I may not go to bed." "I don't care. I want to sit with you." He blinked at me, then said very gently. "All right. Poddy. Nobody ever grows up without spending at least one night of years." We just sat then for quite a while, with nothing to say that had not already been said and would just hurt to say over again. At last I said, "UnkaTom? Tell me the Poddy Story." "At your age?" "Please." I crawled up on his knees. "I want to sit in your lap once more and hear it. I need to." "All right," he said, and put his arm around me. " 'Once upon a time, long, long ago when the world was young, in a specially favored city there lived a little girl named Poddy. All day long she was busy like a ticking clock. Tick tick tick went her heels, tick tick tick went her knitting needles, and, most especially, tick tick tick went her busy little mind. Her hair was the color of butter blossoms in the spring when the ice leaves the canals, her eyes were the changing blue of sunshine playing down through the spring floods, her nose had not yet made up its mind what it would be, and her mouth was shaped like a question mark. She greeted the world as an unopened present and there was no ldness in her anywhere. '"One day Poddy -- I stopped him. "But Fm not young any longer...and I don't think the world was every young!" "Here's my hanky," he said. "Blow your nose. I never did tell you the end of it, Poddy; you always fell asleep. It ends with a miracle." "A truly miracle?" "Yes. This is the end. Poddy grew up and had another Poddy. And then the world was young again." "Is that all?" "That's all there ever is. But it's enough." I guess Uncle Tom put me to bed, for I woke up with just my shoes off and very rumpled. He was gone but he had left a note saying that I could reach him, if I needed to, on Mr. Chairman's private code. I didn't have any excuse to bother him and didn't want to face anyone, so I chased Maria and Maria out and ate breakfast in bed. Ate quite a lot, too, I must admit. The body goes on ticking anyhow. Then I dug out my journal for the first time since landing. I don't mean I haven't been keeping it; I mean I've been talking it instead of writing it. The libra in our suite has a recorder built into its desk and I discovered how easy it was to keep a diary that way. Well, I had really found out before that, because Mr. Clancy let me use the recorder they use to keep th' log on. The onlvortcoming of the recorder in the library was that Clark might drop in most any time. But the first day I went shopping I found the most darling little minirecorder at Venus Macy -- only ten-fifty and it just fits in the palm of your hand; you can talk into it without even being noticed if you want to and I just couldn't resist it. I've been carrying it in my purse ever since. But now I wanted to look way back in my journal, the early written part, and see if I had anything that might remind me of what That Man had looked like. It read: Pod, If you find this at all, it's time you read it. Because I'm using #-hr ink and I expect to lift this out of here and you'll never see it. Girdie is in trouble and I'm going to rescue her. I haven't told anybody because this is one job that is all mine and I don't want you or anybody horning in on it. However, a smart gambler hedges his bets, if he can. If I'm gone long enough for you to read this, it's time to get hold of Uncle Tom and have him get hold of Chairman Cunha. All I can tell you is that there is a news stand right at South Gate. You buy a copy of the Daily Merchant diser and ask if they carry Everlites. Then you say, "Better give me two -- it's quite dark where I'm going." But don't you do this, I don't want it muffed up. V If this turns out dry, you can have my rock collection. Count your change. Better use your fingers. Clark I got all blurry. That last line -- I know a holographic last will and testament when I see one, even though I had never seen one before. Then I straightened up and counted ten seconds backwards including the rude word at the end that discharges nervous tension, for I knew this was no time to be blurry and weak. So I called Uncle Tom right away, as I agreed perfectly with Clark on one point: I wasn't going to try to emulate Space Ranger Stalwart, Man of Steel, the way Clark evidently had. I was going to get all the help I could getl With both Clark and Girdie in some sort of pinch I would have welcomed two regiments of Patrol Marines and the entire Martian Legion. So I called Mr. Chairman's private code -- and it didn't answer; it simply referred me to another code. This one answered all right,...but with a recording. Uncle Tom. And this time all he said was to repeat something he had said in the note, that he expected to be busy all day and that I was not to leave the suite under any circumstances whatever until he got back. Only this time he added that I was not to let anyone into the suite, either, not even a repairman, not even a servant except those who were already there, like Maria and Maria. W hen the recording started to play back for the third time, I switched off. Then I called Mr. Chairman the public way, through the Corporation offices. A dry deal that was! By pointing out that I was Miss Fries, niece of Senator Fries, Mars Republic, I did get as far as his secretary, or maybe his secretary's secretary. "Mr. Cunha cannot be reached. I am veree soiree. Miss Fries." So I demanded that she locate Uncle Tom. "I do not have that information. I am veree soiree. Miss Fries." Then I demanded to be patched in to Dexter. "Mr. Dexter is on an inspection trip for Mr. Cunha. I am veree soiree." She either couldn't, or wouldn't, tell me when Dexter was expected back -- and wouldn't, or couldn't, find some way for me to call him. Which I just plain didn't believe, because if I owned a planetwide corporation there would be some way to phone every mine, every ranch, every factory, every air boat the company owned. All the time. And I don't even suspect that Mr. Chairman is less smart about how to run such a lash-up than I am. I told her so, using the colorful rhetoric of sand rats and canal men. I mean I really got mad and used idioms I hadn't known I even remembered. I guess Uncle is right. Scratch my Nordic skin and a savage is just underneath. I wanted to pick my teeth at her, only she wouldn't have understood it But would you believe it? I might as well have been cussing out a sand gator; it had net affect on her at all. She just repeated, "I'm-veree-sorreeMiss-Fries," and I hung up. Do you suppose Mr. Chairman uses an androidal Tik-Tok as his phone monitor? I wouldn't put it past him. Any live woman should have shown some reaction at the some of the implausibilities I showered on her, even if she didn't understand most of the words. (Well, I don't understand some of them myself. But they are not compliments.) I thought about phoning Daddy. I knew he would accept the charges, even if he had to mortgage his salary. But Mars was eleven minutes away; it said so, right on a dial of the phone. And the relays via Hermes Station and Luna City were even worse. With twenty-two minutes between each remark it would take me most of the day just to tell him what was wrong, even though they don't charge you for the waiting time. But I still might have called except -- well, what could Daddy do, away? All it would do would be to turn his last six hairs white. It wasn't until then that I steadied down enough to realize that there had been something else amiss about that note written into my journal -- besides Clark's childish swashbuckling. Girdie! It was true that I had not seen Girdie for a couple of days; she was on a shift that caused her to zig while I zagged. Newly hired dealers don't get the best shifts. But I had indeed talked to her at a time when Clark was probably already gone even though at the time I had simply assumed that he had gotten up early for some inscrutable reason of his own, rather than not coming home at all that night. But Uncle Tom had talked to her just before we had gone to the Cunha cottage the day before, asked her specifically if she had seen Clark -- and she hadn't. Not as recently as we had. So she wasn't missing. So it was Clark -- I didn't have any trouble reaching Dom Pedro -- not the Dom Pedro I met the night I met Dexter but the Dom Pedro of that shift. However, by now all the Dom Pedros know who Poddy Fries is; she's the girl that is seen with Mr. Dexter. He told me at once that Girdie had gone off shift half an hour earlier and I should try her hilton. Unless -- he stopped and made some inquiries; somebody seemed to think that Girdie had gone shopping. As may be. I already knew that she was not at the little hilton she had moved to from the stylish (and expensive) Tannhauser. A message I had already recorded there was guaranteed to fetch a call back in seconds, if and when. That ended it. There was no one left for me to turn to, nothing at all left for me to do, save wait in the n suite until Uncle returned, as he had ordered me to do. So I grabbed my purse and a coat and left. And got all of three meters outside the door of the suite. A tall, wide, muscular character got in my way. When I tried to duck around him, he said, "Now, now. Miss Fries. Your uncle left orders." I scurried the other way and fonnd that he was awfully quick on his feet, for such a big man. So there I was, arrested! Shoved back into our own suite and held in durance vile. You know, I don't think Uncle entirely trusts me. I went back to my room and closed the door and thought about it. The room was still not made up and still cluttered with dirty dishes because, despite the language barrier, I have made clear to Maria and Maria that Miss Fries becomes quite vexed if anybody disturbs my room until I signal that I no longer want privacy by leaving the door open. The clumsy, two-decker, roUaround table that had fetched my breakfast was still by my bed, looking like a plundered city. I took everything off the lower shelf, stowed it here and there in my bath, covered the stuff on top of the table with the extra cloth used to shield the tender eyes of cash customers from the sight of dirty dishes. Then I grabbed the house phone and told them I wanted my breakfast dishes cleared away fast MO I'm not very big. I mean, you can fit forty-nine mass kilos only one hundred fifty-seven centimeters long into a fairly small space if you scrunch a litde. That lower shelf was hard but not too cramped. It had some ketchup on it I hadn't noticed. Uncle's orders (or perhaps Mr. Cunha's) were being followed meticulously, however. Ordinarily a pantry boy comes to remove the food wagon; this time the two Marias took it out the service entrance and as far as the service lift. In the course of it I learned something interesting but not really surprising. Maria said something in Portuguese; the other Maria answered her in Ortho as glib as mine: "She's probably soaking in the tub, the lazy brat." I made a note not to remember her on birthdays and at Christmas. Somebody wheeled me off the lift many levels down and shoved me into a corner. I waited a few moments, then crawled out. A man in a well-spotted apron was looking astonished. I said, "Obrigado!" handed him a deuce note and walked out the service entrance with my nose in the air. Two minutes later I was in a taxi. I've been catching up on this account while the taxi scoots to South Gate in order not to chew my nails back to the elbows. I must admit that I feel good even though nervous. Action is better than waiting. No amount of bad can stonker me but not knowing drives me nuts. This spool is almost finished, so IF I think ril change spools and mail this one back to Uncle at South Gate. I should have left a note, I know -- but this is better than a note. I hope. W ell, I can't complain about not having seen fairies. They are every bit as cute as they are supposed to be -- but I don't care greatly if I never see another one. Throwing myself bravely into the fray against fearful odds, by sheer audacity I overcame -- It wasn't that way at all. I fubbed. Completely. So here I am, some nowhere place out in the bush, in a room with no windows and only one door. That door isn't much use to me, as there is a fairy perched over it. She's a cute little thing and the green part of her fur looks exactly like a ballet tutu. She doesn't look quite like a miniature human with wings. But they do say that the longer you stay here the more human they look. Her eyes slant up, like a cat, and she has a very pretty built-in smile. I call her "Titania" because I can't pronounce her real name. She speaks a few words of Ortho, not much, because those little skulls are only about twice the brain capacity of a cat's skull. Actually she's an idiot studying to be a moron and not studying very hard. Most of the time she just stays perched and nurses her baby -- the size of a kitten and twice as cute. I call it "Ariel" although I'm not sure of its sex. I'm not dead sure of Titania's sex. They say that both males and females do this nursing thing, which is not quite nursing but serves the same purpose; they are not mammalians. Ariel hasn't learned to fly yet, but Titania is teaching it -- tosses it into the air and it sort of flops and glides to the floor and then stays there, mewing piteously until she comes to get it and flies back to her perch. I'm spending most of my time (a) thinking, (b) bringing this journal up to date, (c) trying to persuade Titania to let me hold Ariel (making some progress; she now lets me pick it up and hand it to her -- the baby isn't a bit afraid of me) and (d) thinking which seems to be a futile occupation. Because I can go anywhere in the room and do anything as long as I stay a couple of meters away from that door. Gues why? Give up? Because fairies have very sharp teeth and claws; they're carnivorous. I have a nasty bite and two deep scratches on my left arm to prove it -- red and tender and don't seem to want to heal. If I get close to that door, she dives on me. Completely friendly otherwise. Nor do I have anything physically to complain about. Often enough a native comes in with a tray of really quite good food. But I never watch him come in and I never watch him take it away -- because Venusians look entirely too human to start with and the more you look at them the worse it is for your stomach. No doubt you have seen pictures but pictures don't give you the smell and that drooling loose mouth, nor the impression that this thing has been dead a long time and is now animated by obscene arts. I call him "Pinhead" and to him that is a compliment. No doubt as to its being a "him" either. It's enough to make a girl enter a nunnery. I eat the food because I feel sure Pinhead didn't cook it. I think I know who does. She would be a good cook. L et me back up a little. I told the news vendor: "Better give me two -- it's quite dark where I'm going." He hesitated and looked at me and I repeated it. So pretty soon I am in another air car and headed out over the bush. Ever make a wide, sweeping turn in smog? That did it. I haven't the slightest idea where I am, save that it is somewhere within two hours flight of Venusberg and that there is a small colony of fairies near. by. I saw them flying shortly before we landed and was so terribly interested that I didn't really get a good look at the spot before the car stopped and the door opened. Not that It would have done any good. I got out and the car lifted at once, trussing me up with its fan ,... and here was an open door to a house and a tamiliar voice was saying, "Poddy! Come in, dear, come ini" And I was suddenly so relieved that I threw myself into her arms and hugged her and she hugged me back. It was Mrs. Grew, fat and friendly as ever. And looked around and here was Clark, just sitting -- and he looked at me and said, "Stupid," and looked away. And then I saw Uncle sitting in another chair and was about to throw myself at him with wild shouts of glee -- when Mrs. Grew's arms were suddenly awfully strong and she said soothingly, "No, no, dear, not quite so fast," and held me until somebody (Pinhead, it was) did something to the back of my neck. Then I had a big comfortable chair all to myself and didn't want it because I couldn't move from my neck down. I felt all right, aside from some odd tingles, but I couldn't stir. Uncle looked like Mr. Lincoln grieving over the deaths at Waterloo. He didn't say anything. Mrs. Grew said cheerfully, "Well, now we've got the whole family together, Feel a bit more like discussing things rationally. Senator?" Uncle shook his head a half a centimeter. She said, "Oh, come now! We do want you to attend the conference. We simply want you to attend it in the right frame of mind. If we can't agree -- well, it's hardly possible to let any of you be found again. Isn't that obvious? And that would be such a shame. Especially for the children." Uncle said, "Pass the nemlock." #Q# IF "Oh, Fm sure you don't mean that." "He certainly does mean it!" Clark said shrilly. "You illegal obscenity! I delete all over your censored!" -- and I knew he was really worked up, because Clark is contemptuous of vulgar idioms; he says they denote an inferior mind. Mrs. Grew looked at Clark placidly, even tenderly. Then she called in Pinhead again. "Take him out and keep him awake till he dies." Pinhead picked Clark up and carried him out. But Clark had the last word. "And besides that," he yelled, "yoM cheat at solitaire! Fve watched you!" F or a split second Mrs. Grew looked really annoyed. Then she put her face back into its usual kindly expression and said to Uncle, "Now that I have both of the kids I think I can afford to expend one of them. Especially as you are quite fond of Poddy. Too fond of her, some people would say. Psychiatrists, I mean." I mulled that over... and decided that if I ever got out of this mess, I would make a rug out of her hide and give it to Uncle. Uncle ignored it. Presently there was a most dreadful racket, metal on resounding metal. Mrs. Grew smiled. "It's crude but it works. It is what usei to be a water heater when this was a ranch. Unfortunately it isn't quite big enough either to sit down or stand up in -- but a boy that rude really shouldn't expect comfort. The noise comes from pounding on the outside of it with a club." She smiled and then looked thoughtful. "I don't see how we can talk things over with such a racket going on. I think I should have the tank moved farther away. Or perhaps our talk would march even more quickly if I had it brought nearer, so that you could hear the sounds he makes inside the tank, too. What do you think. Senator?" I cut in. "Mrs. Grew!" "Yes, dear? Poddy, I'm sorry but I'm really quite busy. Later we'll have a nice cup of tea together. Now, Senator -- " "Mrs. Grew, you don't understand my Uncle Tom at all! You'll never get anything out of him this way." She considered it. "I think you exaggerate, dear. Wishful thinking." "No, no, no! There isn't any way you could possibly get my Uncle Tom to do anything against Mars. But if you hurt Clark -- or me -- you'll just make him more adamant. Oh, he loves me and he loves Clark, too. But if you try to budge him by hurting either one of us, you're just wasting your time!" I was talking rapidly and just as sincerely as I know how. I seemed to hear Clark's screams. Not likely, I guess, not over that infernal clanging. But once when he was a baby he fell into a wastebasket... and screamed something dreadful before I rescued him. I was hearing that again. Mrs. Grew smiled pleasantly. "Poddy dear, you are only a girl and your head has been filled with nonsense. The Senator is going to do just what I want him to do." "Not if you kill Clark, he won't!' "You keep quiet, dear. Do keep quiet and let me explain, or I shall have to slap you a few times to keep you quiet. Poddy, I am not going to kill your brother." "But you said -- "  Quiet! That native who took your brother away didn't understand what I said. He knows only trade Ortho, a few words, never a full sentence I said what I did for the benefit of your brother...so that, when I do have him fetched back in, he'll be grovelling, begging your uncle to do anything I want him to do." S hq smiled warmly. "One piece of nonsense you've apparently been taught is that patriotism, or something silly like that, will overpower a man's own self interest. Believe me, I have no slightest fear that an old political hack like your uncle wiU give any real weight to such a silly abstraction. What does worry him is his own political ruin if he does what I want him to do What he is going to do. Eh, Senator?" "Madam," Uncle Tom answered tightly, "I see no point in bandying words with you." "Nor do I. Nor shall we. But you can listen while I explain it to Poddy. Dear, your uncle is a stubborn man and he won't accomplish his own political downfaD lightly. I need a string to make him dance -- and in you I have that string. I'm sure." 'Tm not!" "Want a slap? Or would you rather be gagged? I like you, dear; don't force me to be forceful. In yow, I said. Not your brother. Oh, no doubt your uncle goes through the solemn farce of treating his niece and his nephew just alike -- Christmas presents and birthday presents and such like pretenses. But it is obvious that no one could love your brother... not even his own mother, I venture to say. But the Senator does love you. Rather more than he wants anyone to suspect. So now I am hurting your brother a little -- oh, just a smidgen, at worst he'll be deaf -- to let your uncle see what will happen to you. Unless he is a good boy and speaks his piece just the way I tell him to." She looked thoughtfully at Uncle. "Senator, I can't decide which of two methods might work the better on you. You see, I want to keep you reminded -- after you agree to cooperate -- that you did agree. Sometimes a politician doesn't stay bought. After I turn you loose would it be better for me to send your nephew along with you, to keep you reminded? Or would it be better to keep him here and work on him just a little each day -- with his sister watching? So that she would have a clear idea of what happens to her... if you try any tricks at Luna City. What's your opinion, sir?" "Madam, the question does not arise." "Really, Senator?" "Because I will not be at Luna City unless both children are with me. Unhurt." Mrs. Grew chuckled. "Campaign IF promises, Senator. I'll reason with you later. But now -- " she glanced at an antique watch pinned to her gross bosom -- "I think I had better put a stop to that dreadful racket. It's giving me a headache. And I doubt if your nephew can hear it any longer, save possibly through his bones." She got up and left, moving with surprising agility and grace for a woman her age and mass. Suddenly the noise stopped. I t was such a surprise that I would have jumped if anything below my neck could jump. Which it couldn't Uncle was looking at me. "Poddy, Poddy," he said softly. I said, "Uncle, don't you give in a He said, "Poddy, I cant give in to her. Not at all. You understand that? Don't you?" "I certainly do! But look -- you could fake it. Tell her anything. Get loose yourself and take Clark along, as she suggested. Then you can rescue me. I'll hold out. You'll see!" He looked terribly old. "Poddy... Poddy darling... I'm very much afraid... that this is the end. Be brave, dear." "Uh, I haven't had very much practice at that. But I'll try to be." I pinched myself, mentally, to see if I was scared -- and I wasn't, not really. Somehow I couldn't be scared with Uncle there, even though he was helpless just then. "Uncle, what is it she wants? Is she some kind of a fanatic?" He didn't answer because we both heard Mrs. Grew's jolly, belly-deep laugh. " 'Fanatic!' " she repeated, came over and tweaked my cheek. "Poddy dear. I'm not any sort of fanatic and I don't really care any more about politics than your uncle does. But I learned many years ago when I was just a girl -- and quite attractive, too, dear, much more so than you will ever be -- that a girl's best friend is cash. No, dear. I'm a paid professional and a good one." She went on briskly, "Senator, I think the boy is deaf but I can't be sure. He's passed out now. We'll discuss it later, it's time for my nap. Perhaps we had all better rest a little." And she called in Pinhead and I was carried into the room I am in now. When he picked me up, I really was truly aghast! -- and found that I could move my arms and legs just a little bit -- pins and needles you wouldn't believe! -- and I struggled feebly. Did me no good, I was dumped in here anyhow. After a while the drug wore off and I felt almost normal, though shaky. Shortly there after I discovered that Titania is a very good watchdog indeed. I haven't tried to reach that door since; my arm and shoulder are quite sore and getting stiff. I nstead I inspected the room. Not much in it. A bed with a mattress but no bed-clothes, not that you need any in this climate. A sort of a table suspended from one wall and a chair fastened to the floor by #S it. Glow tubes around the upper comers of the room. I checked all these things at once after learning the hard way that Titania was not just a cutie with gauzy wings. It was quite clear that Mrs. Grew, or whoever had outfitted that room, had no intention of leaving anything in it that could be used as a weapon, against Titania or anybody. And I no longer had even my coat and purse. I particularly regretted losing my purse, because I always carry a number of useful things in it. A nail file, for example. If I had had even my nail file I might have considered taking on that bloodthirsty little fairy. But I didn't waste time thinking about it; my purse was where I had dropped it when I was drugged. I did find one thing very interesting. This room had been used to prison Clark before I landed in it. One of his two bags was in it -- and I suppose I should have missed it from his room the night before, only I got upset and left Uncle to finish the search. The bag held a very odd collection for a knight errant venturing forth to rescue a damsel in distress: some clothing -- three Tshirts and two pairs of shorts, a spare pair of shoes -- a slide rule, and three comic books. If I had fotind a flame gun or supplies of mysterious chemicals, I would  not have been surprised -- more Clarkish. I suppose, when you get right down to it, for all his brilliance Clark is just a little boy, I worried a bit then about the possibility -- or probability -- that he was deaf. Then I quit thinking about it. If true, I couldn't help it. He would miss his ears less than anything, since he hardly ever listens anyhow. So I lay down on the bed and read his comic books. I am not a comicbook addict but there were quite entertaining, especially as the heroes were always getting out of predicaments much worse than mine. After a while I fell asleep and had heroic dreams. I was awakened by "breakfast (more like dinner but quite good). Pinhead took the tray away, and light plastic dishes and a plastic spoon offered little in the way of lethal weapons. However I was delighted to find that he had fetched my purse! Delighted for all of ten seconds, that is. No nail file. No pen knife. Not a darn thing in it more deadly than lipstick and hanky. Mrs. Grew hadn't disturbed my money nor my tiny minirecorder but she had taken everything that could conceivably do any good (harm). So I gritted my teeth and ate and then brought this useless iournal up to date. That's about all I've done since -- just sleep and eat and make friends with Ariel. She reminds me of Duncan. Oh, not alike really -- but all babies are sort of alike, don't you think? I had dozed off from the lack of anything better to do when I was awakened. "Poddy, dear." IP "Ohl HeUo, Mrs. Grew.' "Now, now, no quick moves," she said chidingly. I wasn't about to make any quick moves; she had a gun pointed at my belly button. I'm very fond of it, it's the only one I have. "Now be a good girl and turn over and cross your wrists behind you." I did so and in a moment she had them tied, quite firmly. Then she looped the line around my neck and had me on a leash -- and if I struggled, all I accomplished was choking myself. So I didn't struggle. Oh, I'm sure there was at least a moment when she didn't have that gun pointed at me and my wrists were not yet tied. One of those comic-book heroes would have snatched that golden instant, rendered her helpless, tied her with her own rope. Regrettably, none of those heroes was named "Poddy Fries." My education has encompassed cooking, sewing, quite a lot of math and history and science, and such useful tidbits as freehand drawing and how to dip candles and make soap. But handto-hand combat I have learned sketchily if at all from occasional border clashes with Clark. I know that Mother feels that this is a lack (she is skilled in both karate and kill-quick, and can shoot as well as Daddy does) but Daddy has put off sending me to classes. I've gathered the impression that he doesn't really want his baby girl to know such things. I vote with Mother, it's a lack. There must have been a split second when I could have lashed out with a heel, caught Mrs. Grew in her sar plexus, then broken her neck while she was still helpless -- and run down the Jolly Roger and run up the Union Jack, just like in Treasure Island. Oppernockity tunes but once -- and I wasn't in tune with it. Instead I was led away like a puppy on a string. Titania eyed us as we went through the door, but Mrs. Grew clucked at her and she settled back on her perch and cuddled Ariel to her. She had me walk in front of her down a hallway, through that living room where I had last seen Uncle Tom and Clark, out another door and a passage and into a large room --  -- and I gasped and suppressed a scream! Mrs. Grew said cheerfully, "Take a good look, dear. He's your next roommate." Half the room was closed off with heavy steel bars, like a cage in a zoo. Inside was -- well, it was Pinhead, that's what it was, though it took me a long moment of fright to realize it. You may have gathered that I do not consider Pinhead handsome. Well, dear, he was Apollo Belvedere before, compared with the red-eyed maniacal horror he had become. Then I was lying on the floor and Mrs. Grew was giving me smelling salts. Yes, sir, Captain Podkayne Fries the Famous Explorer had keeled over like a silly girl. All right, go ahead and laugh; I don't mind. You haven't ever been shoved into a room with a thing like that and had it introduced to you as "your new roommate." Mrs. Grew was chuckling. "Feel better, dear?" "You're not going to put me in there with him!" "What? Oh,, no no, that was just my little joke. I'm sure your uncle will never make it necessary actually to do it." She looked at Pinhead thoughtfully -- and he was straining one arm through the bars, trying again and again to reach us. "He's long-time happy-dust addict that's barely enough to make him tempery. If I ever do have to put you -- or your brother -- in with him, I've promised him at least fifteen. I need your advice, dear. You see. I'm about to send your uncle back to Venusberg so that he can catch his ship. Now which do you think would work best with your uncle? To put your brother in there right now, while your uncle watches? He's watching this, you know. He saw you faint, and that couldn't have been better if you had practiced. Or to wait and -- " "My uncle is watching us?" "Yes, of course. Or to -- " "Oh, do keep quiet, Poddy. He can see you but he can't hear you and he can't possibly help you. Hmm. You're such a silly billy that I don't think I want your advice. She walked me back to my cell. That was only hours ago; it merely seems like years. But it is long enough. Long enough for Poddy to lose her nerve. Look, I don't have to tell this, nobody knows but me. But I've been truthful all through these memoirs and I'll be truthful now. I have made up my mind that as soon as I get a chance to talk with Uncle I will beg him, plead with him, to do anything to keep me from being locked up with a happy-dusted native. I'm not proud of it. Fm not sure I'll ever be proud of Poddy again. But there it is and you can rub my nose in it. I've come up against something that frightens me so much I've cracked. I feel a little better about it to have admitted it baldly. I sort of hope that, when the time comes, I won't whimper and I won't plead. But #.  .just...don't...know ir A nd then sombody was shoved in with me and it was Clark! I jumped up off the bed and threw my arms around him and lifted him right off his feet and was blubbering over him. "Oh, Clarkie! Brother, brother, are you hurt? What did they do to you? Speak to me! Are you deaf?" Right in my ear he said, "Cut out the sloppy stuff, Pod." So I knew he wasn't too badly hurt, he sounded just like Clark. I repeated, more quietly, "Are you deaf?" He barely whispered in my ear, "No, but she thinks I am, so we'll go on letting her think so." He untangled himself from me, took a quick look in his bag, then rapidly and very thoroughly went over every bit of the room -- giving Titania just wide enough berth to keep her from diving on him. Then he came back, shoved his face close to mine and said, "Poddy, can you read lips?" "No. Why?" "The hell you can't, you just did." Well, it wasn't quite true. Clark had barely whispered -- and I did find that I was "hearing" him as much from watching his mouth as I was from truly hearing him. This is a very funny thing, but Clark says that almost everybody reads lips more than they think they do...and he had noticed it and practiced it and can really read lips -- only he never told anybody because sometimes it is most useful. He had me talk so low that I couldn't hear it myself and he didn't talk much louder. He told me, "Look, Pod, I don't know that Old Lady Grew -- " (he didn't say "Lady") -- "has this room wired. I can't find any changes in it since she had me in it before. But there are at least four places and maybe more where a mike could be. So we keep quiet -- because it stands to reason she put us together to hear what we have to say to each other. So talk out loud all you want to...but just static. How scared you are and how dreadful it is that I can't hear anything and such like noise." So we did and I moaned and groaned and wept over my poor baby brother. And he complained that he couldn't hear a word I was saying and kept asking me to find a pencil and write what I was saying -- and in between we really did talk, important talk that Clark didn't want her to hear. I wanted to know why he wasn't deaf. Had he actually been in that tank? "Oh, sure," he told me, "but I wasn't nearly as limp by then as she thought I was, either. I had some paper in my pocket and I chewed ft up into pulp and corked my ears." He looked pained. "A twenty-spot note. Most expensive eaiplugs anybody ever had. I'll bet. Then I wrapped my shirt around my head and ignored it. But stow that and listen." He was even more vague about how he had managed to get himself trapped. "Okay, okay, so I got hoaxed. You and Uncle don't look so smart, either. And anyhow, you're responsible." "I am not either responsible!" I whispered indignantly. "If you're not responsible, then you're irresponsible, which is worse. Logic. But forget it, we've got important things to do now. Look, Pod, we're going to crush out of here." "How?" I glanced up at Titania. She was nursing Ariel but she never took her eyes off us. C lark followed my glance. "I'll take care of that insect when the time comes. Forget it. It has to be soon and it has to be at night." "Why at night?" I was thinking that this smoggy paradise was bad enough when you could see a little, but in pitch darkness -- "Pod, let that cut in your face heal; you're making a draft. It's got to be while Jojo is locked up." Jojo?' " "That set of muscles she has working for her. The native." "Oh, you mean 'Pinhead.'" "Pinhead, Jojo, Albert Einstein. The happy-duster. He serves supper, then he washes the dishes, then she locks him up and gives him his night's ration of dust. Then he stays locked up until he sleeps it off, because she's as scared of him when he's, high as anybody else is. So we make our try for it while he is caged. And maybe she'll be asleep, too. With luck the bloke who drives her sky wagon will be away, too: he doesn't always sleep here. But we can't count on it and it has got to be before the Tricorn shapes for Luna. When is that?" "Twelve seventeen on the eighth, ship Greenwich." "Which is?" "Local? Nine-sixteen Venusberg, Wednesday the twentieth." "Check," he answered. "On both." "But why?" "Shut up." He had taken his slide rule from his bag and was setting it. For the conversion, I assumed, so I asked, "Do you want to know the Venus second for this Terran year?" I was rather proud to have it on the tip of my tongue, like a proper pilot; Mr. Clancy's time hadn't been entirely wasted even though I had never let him get cuddly. "Nope. I know it." Clark reset the rule, read it and announced, "We both remember both figures the same way and the conversion checks. So check timepieces." We both looked at our wrists. "Mark!" We agreed, within a few seconds, but that wasn't what I noticed: I was looking at the date hand. "ClarkI Today's the nineteenth!" "Maybe you thought it was Christmas," he said sourly. "And don't yip like that again. "But that's tomorrow!" (I did make it soundless.) "Worse. It's less than seventeen hours from now...and we can't make a move until that brute is locked up. We get just one chance, no more." "Or Uncle Tom doesn't get to the Conference." no II Clark shrugged. "Maybe so, maybe not. Whether he decides to go -- or sticks around and tries to find us, I couldn't care less." Clark was being very talkative, for Clark. But at best he grudges words and I didn't understand him. "What do you me#Ui? 'If he sticks around'?" Apparently Clark thought he had told me, or that I already knew -- but he hadn't and I didn't. Uncle Tom was already gone. I felt suddenly lost and forlorn. "Clark, are you sure?" "Sure, I'm sure. She darn well saw to it that I saw him go. Jojo loaded him in like a sack of meal and I saw the wagon take off into the smog. Uncle Tom is in Venusberg by now." I suddenly felt much better. "Then he'll rescue usi" Clark looked bored. "Pod, don't be stupid squared." "But he will! Uncle Tom...and Mr. Chairman...and Dexter -- " He cut me off. "Oh, for Pete's sake, Poddy! Analyze it. You're Uncle Tom, you're in Venusberg, you've got all the help possible. How do you find this place?" "Uh... I stopped. "Uh -- " I said again. Then I closed my mouth and left it closed. " 'Uh, " he agreed: "Exactly 'uh.' You don't find it. Oh, in eight or ten years with a few thousand people doing nothing but searching you could find it by elimination. Fat lot of good that would do. Get this through your little head. Sis: nobody is going to rescue us, nobody can possibly help us. We either break out of here tonight, or we've had it." "Why tonight? Oh, tonight's all right with me. But if we don't get a chance tonight -- " "Then at nine-sixteen tomorrow," he interrupted, "we're dead.", "Huh? Why?" "Pod, put yourself in old Gruesome's place. Tomorrow the Tricorn leaves. Figure it both ways: Uncle Tom leaves in it, or Uncle Tom won't leave. Okay, you've got his niece and nephew. What do you do with them? Be logical about it. Her sort of logic." I tried. I really tried. But maybe I've been brought up wrong for that sort of logic; I can't seem to visualor she had become a nuisance to me. But I could see that Clark was right that far: after ship's departure tomorrow we will simply be nuisances to Mrs. Grew. If Uncle Tom doesn't leave, we are most special nuisances -- and if he does leave and she is counting on his worry about us to keep him in line at Luna City (it wouldn't, of course, but that is what she is counting on anyway), in that case every day she risks the possibility that we might escape and get word to Uncle. All right, maybe I can't imagine just plain murder; it's outside my experience. But suppose both Clark and I came down with green pox and died. That would certainly be convenient for Mrs. Grew -- now, wouldn't it? "I scan it," I agreed. 'Good," he said. "I'll teach you a thing or four yet, Pod. Either we make it tonight...or just past nine tomorrow she chills us both...and she chills Jojo, too, and sets fire to the place." "Why Jojo? I mean 'Pinhead.' " "That's the real tipoff, Pod. The happy-duster. This is Venus...and yet she let us see that she was supplying dust to a duster. She won't leave any witnesses." "Uncle Tom is a witness, too." "What if he is? She's counting on his keeping his lip zipped until the conference is over. By then she's back on Earth and has lost herself around here and risk being caught? Pod, she's going to wait here only long enough to find out whether or not Uncle Tom catches the Tricorn, Then she'll carry out either Plan A or Plan B -- but both plans cancel us out. Get that through your fuzzy head." I shivered. "All right. I've got it." He grinned. "But we don't wait. We execute our own plan -- my plan -- first." He looked unbearably smug and added, "You fubbed when you came out here without doing any of the things I told you to... and Uncle Tom fubbed just about as badly, thinking he could make sr straight payoff...but I came out here prepared!" "You did? With what? Your slide rule? Or maybe those comic books?" Clark said, "Pod, you know I never read comic books. They were just protective coloration." (And this is true, so far as I know. I thought I had uncovered his Secret Vice.) "Then what?" I demanded. "Just compose your soul in patience, Sister Dear. All in good time." He moved his bag back of the bed, then added. "Move around here where you can watch down the hallway. If Lady Macbeth shows up, I'm reading comic books." I did as he told me to but asked him one more question -- on another subject, as quizzing Clark when he doesn't want to answer is as futile as slicing water. "Clark? You figure Mrs. Grew is part of the gang that 'imuggled the bomb?" He blinked and looked stupid. "What bomb?" "The one they paid you to sneak aboard the Tricorn, of course! 'What bomb' indeed!" "Oh, that. Golly, Poddy, you believe everything you're told. When you get to Terra, don't let anybody sell you the Pyramids. They're not for sale." He went on worldng and I smothered my annoyance. Presently he said, "She couldn't possibly know anything about any bombs in the Tricorn, or she wouldn't have been a passenger in it herself." Clark can always make me feel stupid. This was so obvious (after he pointed it out) that I refrained from comment. "How do you figure it, then?" "Well, she could have been hired by the same people and not have IP known that they were just using her as a reserve." My mind raced and another answer came up. 'In which case there could be still a third plot to get Uncle Tom between here and Luna!" "Could be. Certainly a lot of people are taking an interest in him. But I figure it for two groups. One group -- almost certainly from Mars -- doesn't want Uncle Tom to get there at all. Another group -- from Earth probably, at least old gruesome actually did come from Earth -- wants him to be there but wants him to sing their song. Otherwise when she had Uncle Tom, she would never have turned him loose. She would just have had Jojo shove him into a soft spot and wait for the bubbles to stop coming up." Clark dug out something and looked at it. "Pod, repeat this back and don't make a sound. You are exactly twenty-three kilometers from South Gate and almost due south of it -- south seven degrees west." I repeated it. "How do you know? He held up a small black object about as big as two packs of cigarettes. "Inertial tracker, infantry model. You can buy them anywhere here. Anybody who ever goes out into the bush carries one." He handed it to me. I looked at it with interest. I had never soon one that small. Sand rats use them, of course, but they use bigger, more accurate ones mounted in their sand buggies -- and, anyhow, on Mars you can always see either the stars or the Sun. Not like this gloomy place! I even knew how it worked, more or less, because inertial astrogation is a commonplace for space ships and guided missiles -- vector integration of accelerations and times. But whereas the Tricornes inertial tracker is supposed to be good for one part in a couldn't be read closer than one in a thousand. But it improved our chances at least a thousand to one! "Clark! Did Uncle Tom have one of these? 'Cause if he did -- " He shook his head. "If he did, he never got a chance to read it. I figure they gassed him at once; he was limp when they lifted him out of the air wagon. And I never had a chance to tell him where this dump is because this has been my first chance to look at mine. Now put it in your purse; you're going to use it to get back to Venusberg." "Uh...it'll be bulky in my purse, it'll show. You better hide it wherever you had it. You won't lose me, I'm going to hang onto your hand every step of the way." "No." "Why not?" "In the first place I'm not going to drag this bag with me and that's where it was hidden, I built a false bottom into it. In the second place we aren't going back together." "What? Why not? We certainly are! Clark, I'm responsible for you." "That's a matter of opinion. Your opinion. Look, Poddy, I'm going to get you out of this silly mess. But don't try to use your head, it leaks. Just your memory. Listen to what I say and then do it exactly the way I tell you to -- and you'll be all right." "But -- " "Do you have a plan to get us out?" "No." "Then shut up. You start pulling your Big Sister act now and you'll get us both killed." I shut up. And I must confess that his plan made considerable sense. According to Clark there is nobody in this house but us, Mrs. Grew, Titania and Ariel, Pinhead and sometimes her driver. I certainly haven't seen nor heard any evidence of anybody else and I suppose that Mrs. Grew has been doing it with an absolute minimum of witnesses. I know I would if I were (God forbid!) ever engaged in anything like this. I've never seen the driver's face and neither has Clark -- on purpose. I'm sure. But Clark says that the driver sometimes stays overnight, so we muste prepared to cope with him. Okay, assume that we cope. As soon as we are out of the house we split up. I go east, he goes west, for a couple of kilometers, in straight lines as near as bogs and swamps permit, Which may be not very. Then we both turn north. Clark says that the ring road around the city is just three kilometers north of us; he drew me a sketch from memory of a map he had studied before he set out to "rescue Girdie." At the ring road I go right, he goes left -- and we each make use of the first hitch-hike transportation, ranch-house phone or whatever, to reach Uncle Tom and or Chairman Cunha and get lots of reinforcements in a hurry! T he idea of splitting up is the most elementary of tactics, to make sure that at least one of us gets through and gefs help. Mrs. Grew is so fat she couldn't chase anybody on a race track, much less a swamp. We plan to do it when she doesn't dare unlock Pinhead for fear of her own life. If we are chased, it will probably be the driver -- and he can't chase two directions at once. Maybe there are other natives she can call on for help. Even so, splitting up doubles our chances. So I get the inertial tracker because Clark doesn't think I can maneuver in the bush without one, even if I wait for it to get light. He's probably right. But he claims that he can steer well enough to find that road using just his watch, a wet finger for the breeze and polarized spectacles -- which, so help me, he has with him. I shouldn't have sneered at his comic books. He actually did come prepared, quite a lot of ways. If they hadn't gassed him while he was still locked in the passenger compartment of Mrs. Grew's air buggy, I think he could have given them a very busy, bad time. A flame gun in his bag, a Remington pistol hidden on his person, knives, stun bombs -- IF even a second inertial tracker, openly in the bag along with his clothes and comic books and slide rule. I asked him why? -- and he put his best superior look. "If anything went wrong and they grabbed me, they would expect me to have one. So I had one -- and it hadn't even been started...poor little tenderfoot who doesn't even know enough to switch the thing on when he leaves his base position. Old Gruesome got a fine chuckle out of that." He sneered. "She thinks I'm half-witted and I've helped the idea along." So they did the same thing with his bag that they did with my purse -- cleaned everything out of it that looked even faintly useful for mayhem and murder, let him keep what was left. And most of what was left was concealed by a false bottom so beautifully faked that the manufacturer wouldn't have noticed it. Except, possibly, for the weight. I asked Clark about that. He shrugged. "Calculated risk," he said. "If you don't bet. you can't win. Jojo carried it in here still packed and she searched it in here -- and didn't pick it up afterwards; she had both arms full of junk I didn't mind her confiscating." (And suppose she had picked it up and noticed? Well. Brother would still have had his brain and his hands -- and I think he could take a sewing machine apart and put it back together as a piece of artillery. Clark is a trial to me, but I have great confidence in him.) I'm going to get some sleep now -- or try to -- as Pinhead has just fetched in our supper and we have a busy time ahead of us, later. But first I'm going to back-track this tape and copy it. I have one fresh spool left in my purse. I'm goin to give the copy to Clark to give to Uncle, just in case. Just in case Pod turns out to be bubbles in a swamp, I mean. But I'm not worried about that; it's a much nicer prospect than being Pinhead's roommate. In fact I'm not worried about anything. Clark has the situation well in hand. B ut he warned me very strongly about one thing: "Tell them to get here well before nine-sixteen... or don't bother to come at all." "Why?" I wanted to know. "Just do it." "Clark, you know perfectly well that two grown men won't pay any attention unless I can give them a sound reason for it." He blinked. "All right. There is a very sound reason. A half a kiloton bomb isn't very much...but it still isn't healthy to be around when it goes off. Unless they can get in here and disarm it before that time -- up she goes!" He has it. I've seen it. Snugly fitted into that false bottom. That same three kilograms of excess mass I couldn't account for at Deimos. Clark showed me the timing mechanism and how the shaped charges were nestled around it to produce the implosion squeeze. But he did not show me how to disarm it. I ran into his blankest, most stubborn wall. He expects to escape, yes. And he expects to come back here with plenty of help and in plenty of time and disarm the thing. But he is utterly convinced that Mrs. Grew intends to kill us -- and if anything goes wrong and we don't break out of here, or die trying, or anything...well, he intends to take her with us. I told him it was wrong, I said that he mustn't take the law in his own hands. "What law?" he said. "There isn't any law here. And you aren't being logical, Pod. Anything that is right for a group to do is right for one person to do." That one was too slippery for me to answer so I tried simply pleading with him and he got sore. "Maybe you would rather be in the cage with Jojo?" "Well...no." "Then shut up about it. Look, Pod, I planned all this out when she had me in that tank, trying to beat my ears in, make me deaf. I kept my sanity by ignoring what was being done to me and concentrating on when and how I would blow her to bits." I wondered if he had indeed kept his sanity, but I kept my doubts to myself and shut up. Besides I'm not sure that he's wrong; it may be that I'm just squeamish about bloodshed. "Anything that is moral for a group to do is moral for one person to do." There must be a flaw in that, since I've always been taught that it is wrong to take the law in your own hands. But I didnt find the flaw and it sounds axiomatic, self evident. Switch it around. If something is wrong for one person to do, can it possibly be made right by having a lot of people (a government) agree to do it together? Even unanimously? If a thing is wrong, it is wrong -- and vox populi can't change it. Just the same, I'm not sure I can nap with an atom bomb under my bed. I guess I had better finish this. This is Clark speaking. My sister got right to sleep after I rehearsed her in what we were going to do. I stretched out on the floor but didn't go right to sleep. I'm a worrier, she isn't. I reviewed my plans, trying to make them tighter. Then I slept. I've got one of those built-in alarm clocks and I woke just when I planned to, an hour before dawn. Any later and there would be too much chance that Jojo might be loose, any earlier and there would be too much time in the dark. The Venus bush is chancy even when you can see well. I didn't want Poddy to step into something sticky, or step on something that would turn and bite her leg off. Nor me, either. But we had to risk the bush, or stay and let old Gruesome kill us at her convenience. The first was a sporting chance. The latter was a dead certainty, even though I had a terrible time convincing Poddy that Mrs. Grew would kill us. Poddy's greatest weakness -- the really soft if place in her head, she's not too stupid otherwise -- is her almost total inability to grasp that some people are as bad as they are. Evil. Poddy never has understood evil. Naughtiness is about as far as her imagination reaches. But I understand evil, I can get right inside the skull of a person like Mrs. Grew. Perhaps you infer from this that I am evil, or partly so. All right, want to make something of it? Whatever  am, I knew Mrs. Grew was evil before we ever left the Tricorn... when Poddy (and even Girdie!) thought the slob was just too darling for words. x I don't trust a person who laughs when there is nothing to laugh about. Or is good-natured no matter what happens. If it's that perfect, it's an act, a phony. So I watched her... and cheating at solitaire wasn't the only give-away. So between the bush and Mrs. Grew, Unless the air car was there and we could swipe it. This would be a mixed blessing, as it would mean two of them to cope with, them armed and us not. (I don't count a bomb as an arm, you can't point it at a person's head.) Before I woke Poddy I took care of that alate pseudo-simian, that "fairy." Vicious little beast. I didn't have a gun. But I didn't really want one at that point; they understand about guns and are hard to hit, they'll dive on you at once. Instead I had shoe trees in my spare shoes, elastic bands around my spare clothes and more elastic bands in my pockets, and several two-centimeter steel ball bearings. Shift two wing nuts, and the long parts of the shoe trees become a steel fork. Add elastic bands and you have a sling shot. And don't laugh at a sling shot; many a sand rat has kept himself fed with only a sling shot. They are silent and you usually get your ammo back. I aimed almost three times as high as I would at home, to allow for the local gravity, and got it right on the sternum, knocked it off its perch -- crushed the skull with my heel and gave it an extra twist for the nasty bite on Poddy's arm. The young one started to whine, so I pushed the carcass over in the corner, somewhat out of sight, and put the cub on it. It shut up. I took care of all this before I woke Poddy because I knew she had sentimental fancies about these "fairies" and I didn't want her jittering and maybe grabbing my elbow. As it was -- clean and fast. Poddy was still snoring, so I slipped off my shoes and made a fast reconnoitre. Not so good. Our local witch was already up and reaching for her broom. In a few minutes she would be unlocking Jojo if she hadn't already. I didn't have a chance to see if the sky car was outside; I did well not to get caught. I hurried back and woke Poddy. "Pod!" I whispered. "You awake? "Yes." "Wide awake? You've got to do your act, right now. Make it loud and make it good." "Check." "Help me up on the perch. Can your sore arm take it?" She nodded, slid quickly off the bed and took position at the door, hands ready. I grabbed her hands, bounced to her shoulders, steadied, and she grabbed my calves as I let go her hands -- and then I was up on the perch, over the door. I waved her on. Poddy went running out the door, screaming, "Mrs. Grew! Mrs, Grew! Help, help! My brother!" She did make it good. And came running back in almost at once with Mrs. Grew puffing after her. I landed on Gruesome's shoulders, knocking her to the floor and knocking her gun out of her hand. I twisted and snapped her neck before she could catch her breath. Pod was right on the ball, I have to give her credit. She had that gun before it stopped sliding. Then she held It, looking dazed. I took it carefully from her. "Grab your purse. We go, right now! Stick close behind me." Jojo was loose. I had cut it too fine. He was in the living room, looking, I guess, to see what the noise was about. I shot him. Then I looked for the air car while keeping the gun ready for the driver. No sign of either one -- and I didn't know whether to groan or cheer. I was all keyed up to shoot him but maybe he would have shot me first. But a car would have been mighty welcome compared with heading into the bush. I almost changed my plan at that point and maybe I should have. Kept together, I mean, and headed straight north for the ring road. It was the gun that decided me. Poddy could protect herself with it -- and I would just be darn .careful what I stepped on or in. I handed it to her and told her to move slowly and carefully until there was more light -- but get going! She was wobbling the gun around. "But, Brother, I've never shot anybody!" "Well, you can if you have to." "I guess so." "Nothing to it. Just point it at 'em and press the button. Better use both hands. And don't shoot unless you really need to." "AU right." I smacked her behind. "Now get going. See you later." And I got going. I looked behind once, but she was already vanished in the smog. I put a little distance between me and the house. And I got lost. T hat's all. I needed that tracker but I had figured I could get along without it and Pod had to have it. I got hopelessly lost. There wasn't breeze enough for me to tell anything by wetting my finger and that polarized light trick for finding the IP Sun is harder than you would think. Hours after I should have reached the ring road I was still skirting boggy places and open water and trying to keep from being somebody's lunch. And suddenly there was the most dazzling light possible and I went down flat and stayed there with my eyes buried in my arm and started to count. I wasn't hurt at all. The blast wave covered me with mud and the noise was pretty rough but I was well outside the real trouble. Maybe half an hour later I was picked up by a cop car. Certainly I should have disarmed that bomb. I had intended to, if everything went well; it was just meant to be a "Samson in the Temple" stunt if things turned out dry. A last resort. Maybe I should have stopped to disarm it as soon as I broke old Gruesome's neck -- and maybe Jojo would have caught both of us if I had, and him still with a happy-dust hangover. Anyhow I didn't, and then I was very busy shooting Jojo and deciding what to do and telling Poddy how to use that gun and getting her started. I didn't think about the bomb until I was several hundred meters from the house -- and I certainly didn't want to go back then, even if I could have found it again in the smog, which is doubtful. But apparently Poddy did just that. Went back to the house. I mean. She was found later that day, about a kilometer from the house, outside the circle of total destruction -- but caught by the blast. With a live baby fairy in her arms. Her body had protected it; it doesn't appear to have been hurt at all. That's why I think she went hack to the house. I don't know that this baby fairy is the one she called "Ariel." It could have been one that she picked up in the bush. But that doesn't seem at all likely; a wild one would have clawed her and its parents would have torn her to pieces. I think she intended to save that baby fairy all along and decided not to mention it to me. It is just the kind of sentimental stunt that Poddy would pull. She knew I was going to have to kill the adult -- and she never said a word against that; Pod could always be sensible when absolutely necessary. Then in the excitement of breaking out she forgot to grab it, just as I forgot to disarm the bomb after we no longer needed it. So she went back for it. And lost the inertial tracker, somehow. At least it wasn't found on her or near her. Between the gun and her purse and the baby fairy and the tracker she must have dropped it in the bog. Must be. because she had plenty of time to go back and still get far away from the house. She should have been ten kilometers away by then, so she must have lost the tracker fairly soon and walked in a circle. I told Uncle Tom all about it and was ready to tell the Corporation people, Mr. Cunha and so forth, and take my medicine. But Uncle told me to keep my mouth shut. He agreed that I had fubbed it, mighty dry indeed -- but so had he -- and so had everybody. He was gentle with me. I wish he had hit me. I'm sorry about Poddy. She gave me some trouble from time to time, with her bossy ways and her illogical ideas. But just the same Fm sorry. I wish I knew how to cry. Her little recorder was still in her purse and part of the tape could be read. Doesn't mean much, though. She doesn't tell what she did, she was babbling, sort of: " -- very dark where I'm going. No man is an island, complete in himself. Remember that, Clarkie. Oh, Fm sorry I fubbed it but remember that; it's important. They all have to be cuddl sometimes. My shoulder -- Saint Podkayne! Saint Podkayne, are you listening? U n k a T o m. Mother, Daddy -- is anybody listening? Do listen, please, because this is important. I love -- " It cuts off there. So we don't know whom she loved. Everybody, maybe. I 'm alone here, now. Mr. Cunha made them hold the Tricorn until it was certain whether Poddy would die orget well, then Uncle Tom left and left me behind -- alone, that is, except for doctors, and nurses, and Dexter Cunha hanging around all the time, and a whole platoon of guards. I heard part of what Uncle Tom told Dad about it. "Nonsense, sir! I am not dodging my own load of guilt. It will be with me always. Nor can I wait here until you arrive and you know it and you know why -- and both children will be safer in Mr. Cunha's hands and not close to me...and you know that, too! But I have a message for you, sir, one that you should pass on to your wife. Just thi: people who will not take the trouWe to raise children should not have them. You with your nose always in a book, your wife gallivanting off God knows where -- between you, your daughter was almost killed. No credit to either of you that she wasn't. Just blind luck. You should tell your wife sir, that building bridges and space stations and such gadgets is all very well...but that a woman has more important work to do. I tried to suggest this to you years ago...and was told to mind my own business. Now I am saying it. Your daughter will get well, no thanks to either of you. But I have my doubts about Clark. With him it may be too late. God may give you a second chance if you hurry. Ending transmission!" I faded into the woodwork then and didn't get caught. But what did Uncle Tom mean by that? -- trying to scare Dad about me? I wasn't hurt at all and he knows it. I just got a load of mud on me, not even a bum...whereas Poddy still looks like a corpse. I don't see what he was driving at. IF IP  Shofi Story I am the exeeutloner of the law, terrible in my majesty. The doomed felon is -- myselfl I always shook when I can # out of the Arena, but tLis time the tension wrapped my stomach in painful knots and salty perspiration stung my neck where I had shaved only a little over an hour earlier. And despite the heavy knot in my stomach. I felt strangely empty. I had never been able to sort out my reactions to an Execution. The atmosphere of careful boredom, the strictly business-as-usual air failed to duU my senses as it did for the others. I could always taste the ozone In the air, mixed with the taste of fear -- whether mine, or that of the Condemned, I never knew. My nostrils always gave an involuntary twitch at the confined odors and I felt an almost claustrophic fear at being packed into the Arena with the other nine hundred ninety-nine Citizens on Execution Duty. I had been expecting my notice for several months before it finally came. I hadn't served Execution Duty for nearly two years. Usually it had figured out to every fourteen Iff months or so on rotation, so I'd been ready for it. A little apprehensive -- I always am -- but ready. At #:# in the morning, still only half awake (I'd purposely slept until the last minute), vaguely trying to remember the dream I'd had, I waited in front of the Arena for the ordeal to begin. The dream had been something about a knife, an operation. But I couldn't remember whether I'd been the doctor or the patient. Our times of arrival had been staggered in our notices, so that a long queue wouldn't tie up traffic, but as usual the checkers were slow, and we were backed up a bit. I didn't like waiting. Somehow I've always felt more exposed on the streets, although the brain-scanners must be more plentiful in an Arena than almost anywhere else. It's only logical that they should be. The scanners are set up to detect unusual patterns of stress in our brain waves as we pass close to them, and thus to pick out as quickly as possible those with incipient or developing neuroses or psychoses -- the potential deviates. And where else would such an aberration be as likely to come out as in the Arena? I had moved to the front of the short line. I flashed my notification of duty to the checker, and was waved on in. I found my proper seat on the aisle in the "T" section. It was a relief to sink into its plush depths and look the Arena over. Once this had been a first-run Broadway theater -- first a place where great plays were shown, and then later the more degenerate motion pictures. Those had been times of vicarious escape from reality -- times when the populace ruled, and yet the masses hid their eyes from the world. Many things had changed since then, with the coming of regulated sanity and the achievement of world peace. Gone now were the black arts of forgetfulness, those media which practiced the enticement of the Citizen into irresponsible escape. Now this crowded theater was only a reminder. And a place of execution for those who would have sought escape here. P erhaps thirty people were sitting on the floor of the Arena, where once there had been a stage. They sat quietly in chairs not so different from mine, strapped for the moment into a kind of passive conformity. I looked at them with interest. Strangeness has as much attraction as the familiar at times. As usual, most of them were young -- from about ten to the early twenties. But at whatever age, they were rebels. They were potential enemies of society. Criminals. Probably some of them hadn't yet realized it. But they were on the verge of anti-social insanity, and the brain-scanners had singled them out. They were so young... How long does it take a boy to become neurotic, psychotic, dangerous? A flurry of movement at the gates caught my eye. Apparently at least one of them was a full-fledged RebIF th He struggled furiously, and the three proctors were having an awkward time carrying him into the Arena without hurting him. Then, as they moved into the floodlights, I saw with a faint shock that it was a girl. She was dressed in man's clothing, but betrayed by her neurotic and unsanitary long hair. Long, blonde hair. For a moment I forgot where I was, and allowed myself to revel in this nearly forbidden sight. The soft waves fell alfway down her neck, disarrayed now. The floodlights shined on it, a strangely gentle mockery of sunlight. Something within me stirred, and I almost remembered... Then they were strapping her into one of the chairs, carefully pulling the soft leather straps with their attached metal electrodes around her, pinioning her. One set joined her arms to the armrests, another her legs to the specially devised footrests. Her tunic was opened, and a third set was passed around her chest, the metal plate fastened just under her left breast. And then she was alone. I stared at her, drawn at first to her hair, and then, as my vision focused across the distance, to her eyes. Strange eyes; light blue irises, surrounded by a ring of dark blue, and flecked with gold. They were shining. She had been crying. Her eyes seemed to melt, like a pool of clear water growing deeper; I could almost see into them, into the darkness beneath. I was no longer aware of the chair in which I sat... only of her, alone before me, so close. Her eyes widened for just an instant when she recognized me. Bobr Roscbudr '# knew you'd be here. I knew 'lts been a long time . , .# think I was trying to forget." Dont" she said. "Don't ever forget." S un drenched me, and I was rocked back into time. "Hey, you pushed me!" I shouted at her. "Yes," said a faint voice, and then, "I'm sorry," the little golden-haired girl said. I sat up. Mother was going to be mad at me again, I knew. I wiped the seat of my pants with my hand, and then stared at the muddy hand with interest. "Look," I said to her, and showed her my hand. When she stepped forward to look closely at it, I pushed it at her, and smeared mud onto her face. Then I laughed...    My laughter faded, blending with hers... and then... and then we were no longer standing separately in the sun. It was a dark night, the air fresh and cool to my skin, and the leaves of the trees which stretched over us rustled with a faint wind. I laughed again, a soft girlish sound that brought discomfort to the boy's face before me. "Your mother says. Your father says. Don't you ever say anything for yourself, Bob?" "Look, Rosalie, I'm sorry. Maybe I just don't think the way you do. My father says sex at our age is just another escape from reality. You've got to face yourself as an adult first. He -- " "Your father is a biggw nincompoop than you are!" I shouted at him. "I thought you said you loved me. I thought you had some feelings buried under that so-called rational mind of yours! Or does your father say you're too young to love somebody?" He tried to say something, but I was right. He pressed his lips together and looked away. I was almost enjoying it now; with deliberate coolness I buttoned up my tunic, feeling the soft fibers on my skin. "How long does it take to love somebody?" I said, but my voice was beginning to tremble. I turned away from his still figure in the night, and began the slow walk back along the path to the house. Tears stung my eyes, and spilled onto my cheeks; I started to run through the dark. I slammed the door when I ran in, and went directly to my room. At one eiid of it was a small studio, where an easel was lit coldly by a fluorescent light. Almost blindly I began beating my fists on the stiBwet canvas, blurring and then ripping the nearly finished portrait of a young man. I was crying quietly when the low, calm voice stopped me on the street. "Just a moment. Miss." I felt the sudden skip in my heart which signaled danger, and when I turned I saw the light green uniform of a jM-octor in the vague street light. My eyes were still blurred with tears. I couldn't make out his face. "I'm sorry, but I'll have to ask you a few questions." Shielding my face from the light, I tried to make my voice calm. I hoped my homesick tears were hidden, that my cheeks wouldn't glisten in the light. I wanted very badly for him not to see I had been crying. "Yes?" "I'll have to know why you're out on the streets at this time of the morning," the proctor said. "There's a curfew, you know. Unless you can show cause..." Oh God; I had completely forgotten the city's curfew! "I -- I'm sorry, Officer. I'm new to the city and I didn't realize..." "You're transient? Where are you staying?" "The Statler Dormitory for Women," I answered meekly. "And why are you out at this hour, so far from the dorm? That's down near #th Street, almost thirty blocks south." "I know. I couldn't sleep -- " His eyes narrowed at that; had I made a mistake? I plunged on: " -- and I wanted to see Central Park. I didn't realize there was any harm... "I guess not this time. Miss, but IF you'd better get back to your dorm. Take this pass." He scribbled a few words on a pad and then detached a slip of green paper for me. "You can take a train down to #th Street. Now." "I'd just as soon walk, sir." He stared at me for a moment and then I turned and started for the nearest subway entrance. It had been horrible, those first few days in the Dorm. I'd never dreamed that a sane society could be so... not cruel, but unthinking. Back home in Woodstock we were all supposed to be sane too, but neither Father nor Mother had ever forced any rigid rules on me. They had let me roam the woods, scuffing the dry leaves in autumn, drinking water from the creeks in my cupped hands. They hadn't objected when I was gone for hours. Usually I was just sitting on a log and staring into the sky, and what harm was there in that? They had encouraged my painting. "It's supposed to be a sign of escapism," Dad said, "but there are a lot worse ways of escaping." He made an easel for me, and I used tubes of house-paint tint-colors and stretched canvas and burlap over frames Dad made. He even gave me a book of reproductions of the Old Masters that he'd saved. Life in Woodstock had been pleasant for me, I realized now, even if it had often seemed lonely. I couldn't have told the proctor that Fd really woken up from a dream about Bob before I'd gone out walking. Fd seen Bob's face so clearly, standing in the night, unable to say anything to me. Suddenly it had seemed that my voice was stopped too, and Fd woken up gasping... I boarded a local train, not caring that an express would be much faster, and began the trip back to my cubicle at the Statler Dorm. If only they hadn't taken my parents...    I had succeeded in setting up a makeshift easel in my room at the Dorm, and was working on a painting, wearing some of Dad's old clothes, when the proctors broke in. One of them pointed a small indicator at me, glanced at it and nodded. "She's the one. Instability arid escapism. And look at the kind of clothes she wears." "What are you doing?" I whispered. This was how they'd taken my parents! "You're under detention as a criminal against society. Miss," one of the proctors said. "We're all sorry." Another one stepped forward and held out a hand to me as one might a child. "Come along now." Nor I backed away from them, and when they trapped me in the comer I kicked and screamed at them. "Leave me alone, leave me alone! You're killers!" One of them grabbed me and held me around my waist, my arms pinned to my sides. "We're not killers. Miss," he said, and his voice was incredibly calm, "We have nothing to do with it Its I twisted free and struck at him, tearing skin from his face with my nails. "W event my parents enough? One of them pointed another device at me, and I blacked out. W hen I came to, I was being carried by three proctors through a door and down a hall. My head was fuzzy and throbbing. I caught a glimpse of a stenciled sign in the corridor, lettered nearly over an arrow pointing in the direction we were going. The words leaped out at me: Execution Arena Floor. One of the proctors saw that I was conscious and looked down at me pleasantly. "No sense struggling now," he said. "It'll be over soon." I stared back at him for a moment, not understanding. But then the kindness in his face became clear. He pitied me! The prostors were carrying me as gently as possible, as though I were a dog with a broken leg. I felt incredibly sad, and so tired that I was sure I must suddenly weigh twice as much. But they carried me through the door and out onto the floor of the Arena, and there were a thousand people up in the dark waiting for me. There were floodlights on the chairs where the others of the Condemned were strapped. Thev sat quietly, dully, as though they were the Executioners and the people above were waiting for them to press the buttons. But it was insane! How could they take it so calmly were they dead already? Did they want to die? Or was I really insane? Where was the sanity in this Arena? I couldn't lie still while they carried me to that chair. I was frightened. I was terrified! They were all so silent, so calm, so kindly. As though nothing at all were happening -- nothing at all! I struggled, trying to fight my way free. I kicked and screamed; I had to make some noise in that black silence. But they held ,me, and strapped me into the chair. And still there was no sound in the Arena. I felt a shock, a tension, and I looked up. There, in the audience, sitting before his little panel with the blue light and the red Executioner's button, was a young man staring at me. I could feel his stare, like a cool hand touching me. It drew me up, into the dimness... I felt my eyes widen with recognition. Bobr I said His reply sounded deep inside my mind 'Hello, Rosebud. l knew youd be here I said, and then I drew him close to me. lts been a long time Dont ever forget, I said, and opened myself to him at last. T he lights in the Arena dimmed, rose, dimmed again. The first signal I pressed against the straps, but they were firm and unmoving. Yet  -- we -- leaned forward, and watched the panel with its blue light. Our stomach was knotted like tight leather cords. The blue light flashed. I reached out a hand to the small red button. The straps bit into our flesh. The panel was dim, ghostly beneath the glaring lights from the dark above. A thousand hands touched a thousand red buttons. One of them was the first to touch the button, the first to complete the circuit. No one knew who he was. No one even knew if every button was connected, but someone touched a button and somewhere the circuit was completed. Shock! Pain jerked our body rigid! We screamed; our skin blistered as hair singed and fell away. And there was a greater shock, a pain somewhere else, as our images cleaved and I fell away from her. I reached out my hand to her, and almost felt her touch... but my hand was on the button, and she was slumped in her chair on the floor of the Arena. I jerked my hand away from the button as though it were hot electricity. My whole body was moist with perspiration. I stared about me, suddenly and deeply frightened. Which of us had screamed? I'd felt it surging up in me, felt it tearing at my throat, bursting from my mouth -- but next to me the others were unconcernedly waiting for me to rise from my seat so that we could file in an orderly fashion from our places in the Arena. They had noticed nothing. When I stood up my legs were trembling. I could still feel where the leather straps had bitten into them. I stepped carefully up the stairs and went out into the morning sunshine. Though the floodlights had been bright in the Arena, still the sunlight hurt my eyes. I paused at the door, and looked at my ringwatch. It was nine-thirty. Only half an hour had passed. How long does it take to destroy a few spoiled lives? It was over. I forced my breathing into a more normal rate and stepped onto the sidewalk. Don't think about it, I told myself. After all, it had been years earlier that I had really lost her... I had almost made it to the corner when I felt the tap on my shoulder, began to turn, saw the greensleeved arm extending toward me a familiar black indicator, and heard the proctor say: "This is the one. Definite case: schizoid condition, latent telepath." "We're all sorry," said another of them. And they led me away to face it  In the February Galaxy --  i Still on Sale!  w The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: Having received and read the January issue, I thought that I should write in and let you know how well I liked it. The idea of adding a background tint to the illos certainly is an improvement, and having the titles printed in red or blue makes them stand out much better. Hope you can keep it up... Changing the printers is probably the greatest improvement that you will ever make. It used to be a challenge to try to read some of the horribly misprinted words. The more Virgil Mnlay illos you get, the better HI like it. I think hes one of the all-time greats at #-f illustration. You could get rid of Schelling, though. As an sf artist he isn't helping to advance the cause of science fiction any. His work is very poor. Since P. Pohl took over If it has been on the upswing. Now if it only had book reviews... Could the new sf mag mentioned on page #I be a companion to ? The two titles are very similar -- Worlds of If and Worlds of To morrow. If it is, it should be a success. Paul Brague Box # Eldrec, New York  We like Finlay, too -- as witness this issue! Editor,    Dear Editor: Just picked up the January issue of If, and was I surprised! A truly tremendous improvement. Color interiors, smaller yet easier-to-read tyre-face, an extra staple in the binding to make for better handling, anc for authors: Heinlein, Simak, Sturgeon, even Pohl! If may well hit the top. And what's more, you announce a new sf magazine. Worlds of To morrow, the first in some five years, plup the Galaxy Magdbooh series (possibly a quasi-revivification of Galaxy Novels,), You may count on me to shell out the purchase price when they arrive at the newsstand. Suggestions: enlarge lettercol eject Relief and run longer actionadventure ' yarns. Douglas Taylor # East #th Ave. Hutchinson, Kansas   Dear Editor: In your November issue you requesting the name and author of a story. It is The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell. It was published by Alfred Hitchcock in a paperback entitled # More They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV. Pat Lamey # #th Street Havre, Montana    .  . this story appears in Adventures in American Literature a high-school textbook published by Harcourt, Brace. The author would not benefit from it being made into a movie as he died in #. Allen Wick # East Center Street Manchester, Connecticut   ... in #I Years' Entertain ment: The Great Detective Stories #-#... Gerard Giannattasio # Park Boulevard Massapequa Park, N. N... in the anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural... Rosemary Allen # East Rosalie Street Philadelphia #, Penna.   . original publication by Brandt  Brandt... Garleton C. Arnes Route No. #, Box #I Oakton, Virginia  And thanks for identifying the story too to: John C. Henderson, Charles Scott, Jeff Renner, Scott Lawson... and they're still coming in! Editor.    Dear Editor: Instead of columns, we're getting articles now on Theodore Sturgeon. The articles are preferred, by this reader but if Mr. Sturgeon doesn't write stories and you, editor, don't print them, the sf world will be in a sorry state. Bill R. Wolfenbarger # East Gladden Farmington, New Mexico    Dear Editor; #. Please don't bring back the book review column. #. Let's face it, the art in and on the November issue was pretty #. Is it possible for you to get seme of the all time great? (like Asimov and Ray Bradbury) to write for you? #I South Chester Road Swarthmore, Pennsylvania  What do you say, Isaac  Ray? Is it possible or ien't it? We're hoping it is... and meanwhile we've nailed down Hal Clement, Lester del Rey, Algis Budrys, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leibei and a healthy quorum of other all-time favorites to grace near-future issues. Also Sturgeon's witty and informative features. Alfle onr one-an-issne "first story" discoveries, like this issue's Donald F. Daley. All in all, we like the looks of the upcoming issues of ! Editor if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run outthe mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail It to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something newpleasefeel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) . Enter my subscription for the Now Giant #-page Galaxy .  , foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Two Complete Science Fiction Novels by First time in paperbound book form Watch for the first big Issue Thunder And Many More A Corrpftnnri'f'tf" Tn#'""n # South Drarborn St., Dept. #-# Please send me, free oi cost or obligation, your illustrated booklet "Law Training for Leadership." Name Age ,... Address County City  Zone State as a way to increased earnings your previous schooling -- you can multiply your opportunities for rapid promotion, big income and prestige through LaSalle Law Training at home. A knowledge of Law is regarded today as indispensable equipment in every activity of business. The greatly increased role of government in business, the many new problems of Law involving taxes, insurance, contracts, liability, employment, and much more -- all require the legally-trained executive who can make day-to-day decisions effectively. That is why leading corporations seek out such men for key positions and reward them with top salaries. You can master Law easily and enjoyably at home -- at remarkably low cost -- under the supervision of LaSalle's distinguished Law faculty. You work with actual legal cases, acquiring real experience. Upon completion of your training, you are awarded a Bachelor of Liiws degree if qualified. The famed X LaSalle Law Library of # volumes is , given to you as part of your course. iW Send  century LaSalle has V V jjjj. been an acknowledged leader in busi'OR ness training, with more than # Free students. Send for the free booklet ' Book' Training for Leadership" and see ' how LaSalle can help you move up  rapidly in your career. Address: # So. Dearborn St... Chicago #, #. Stop msting time in a dead-end job! Enjoy the big rewards offered the Law-trained man in business WORLDS OF  by If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address Use coupon or order by letter if you wish ;X v A w mworlds of Vol. #, Number # science fiction Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher David Perton, Production Manager Rose M. Bianchini, Art Director All New Stories T  j.  r mmmmmmmmmmmm   m -- # Cover by John Pederson, Jr. from Turning Point IF published bi-monthly by Digest Productions Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class P ostage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright y Digest Productions Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental.  t   . -- Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, JN. X. IF  Editorial A conversation-jockey on a nighttime Philadelphia radio show said (we can't quote exactly) that though he used to be a science-fiction reader, he no longer bothers with it, because all the things which used to excite his imagination have become today's fact. Notice that "all". Mr. Russell Kirk, in his good collection of spooky tales called The Surly Sullen Bell, includes a dissertation on the Gothick tale, in which he ays (and we quote) : "... stories of the supernatural have been supplanted by 'science fiction'. Though the talent of H. G. Wells did in that genre nearly everything worth undertaking, a flood of 'scientific' and 'futuristic' fantasies continues to deluge America. With few exceptions, these writings are banal and meaningless... Having demolished, to their own satisfaction, the whole edifice of religious learning, abruptly and unconsciously they experience the need for belief in something not mundane; and so, defying their own inductive and mechanistic premises, they take up the cause of Martians and Jovians." Time Magazine, which we will not quote, deposes and says that sf is suffering from a played-out vein of literary ore, and that it will have to rest until the average man on the street becomes a little more familiar with science's more remote and subIF be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings . write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe YA.L Scribe Y.A.L. San Jose, California Please send me th efrte book, The Mastery j of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address. City I i -- i i WTe Rosicrucians tie discoveries, which, Time opines, are not able to support good story telling. Alfie Bester gives us, in FSF, another and apparently final bleat in his oft-heard, captain-hates-the-sea speech; sf doesn't live up to its responsibilities and he wants no part of it. These are some, but not all, of the facets of opposition to sf. To us, the Philly night-jar was simply saying that he does not read enough sf to know what he's talking about; Time t which never seems to have understood the field, reveals at last that it thinks science fiction is and should be about known science, thereby eliminating all the speculation which is really what sf is for, and as for Alfie... well, may he find in some preferred field the inspiration which gave us The Demolished Man, and a fraction of the awe and honor his unique quality gained him when he was with us. M r. Kirk, now, voices with some passion an opposition to what he thinks we believe in; it is difficult, after a quarter of a century in the field, to know where he got this conviction. We have never been aware that sf writers, or readers, or indeed scientists, one and all worship godless materialism. It seems to us that sf has and does express all degrees of religious devotion, right across the spectrum from Clarke's The Star to Boucher's Balaam. Can you accuse Heinlein of atheism? Or -- well -- Sturgeon? Bradbury is one of the most God-infused human beings we have ever met. We become increasingly aware of the nature of the opposition. To be fair, we should say a nature of etc. Have you ever observed the difficulty with which a genuine, intelligent, knowledgeable American patriot discusses and defines American democracy? In the articulate portions of the radical Right, no one seems to be able to produce a clear, simple declaration of aims and principles. Devoted members of the cler' gy traditionally spend months, and months of years, expatiating on theological points. The easy definitions come to the opposition. If you want a short snappy definition of American democracy, ask a Communist. Any leftwinger can dispose of all organized religion with the back of his hand. The entire television industry can be fluffled off by anyone who has never owned a set. In other short sharp words, you can define and oppose anything if you're ignorant enough, and if you're ignorant enough, you do,     IP  Complete Short Novel  The planet was an enigma -- and its solution was death! i A zoo can be a rather depressing place, or it can be a lot of fun, or it can be so dull as to make the mind wander elsewhere in self-defence. In fairness to Emeraude, Robin Lampert had to concede that this one was not quite in the last group. He had been able to keep his attention on the exhibits. This was, in a way, surprising; for while a frontier town has a perfect right to construct and maintain a zoo if it wishes, one can hardly expect such a place to do a very good job. The present example was, it must be admitted, not too good. The exhibits were in fairly ordinary cages -- barred for the larger creatures, glassed for the smaller ones. No particular attempt had been made to imitate natural surroundings. The place looked as artificial as bare concrete and iron could make it. To a person used to the luxuries provided their captive animals by the great cities of Earth and her sister planets, the environment might have been a gloomy one. Lampert did not feel that way. He had no particular standards of what a zoo should be, and he would probably have considered attempts at reproduction of natural habitat a distracting waste of time. He was not a biologist, and had only one reason for visiting the Emeraude zoo; the guide had insisted upon it. There was, of course, some justice in the demand. A man who was taking on the responsibility of caring for Lampert and his friends in the jungles of Viridis had a right to require that his charges know what they were facing. Lampert wanted to know, himself; so he had read conscientiously every placard on every cage he had been able to find. These had not been particularly informative, except in one or two cases. Most of the facts had been obvious from a look at the cages inhabitants. Even a geophysicist could tell that the Felodon , for example, was carnivorous -- after one of the creatures had bared a rather startling set of fangs by yawning in his face. The placard had told little more. Less, in fact, than McLaughlin had already said about the beasts. On the other hand, it had been distinctly informative to read that a small, salamanderlike thing in one of the glass-fronted cages was as poisonous as the most dangerous of Terrestrial snakes. There had been nothing in its appearance to betray the fact. It was at this point, in fact, that Lampert began really to awaken to what he was doing. H e was aroused all the way by McLaughlin's explanation of a number which appeared on a good many of the placards. Lampert had noticed it already. The number was always, it seemed, different, though always in the same place, and bore signs of much repainting. It bore no relationship to any classification scheme that Lampert knew, and neither of the paleontologists could enlighten him. Eventually he turned to McLaughlin and asked -- not expecting a useful answer, since the man was a guide rather than a naturalist. However, the tall man gave a 'faint smile and replied without hesitation. "That's just the number of human deaths known to have been caused by that animal this year." It did not comfort Lampert too greatly to learn that the year used was that of Viridis, some seventeen times as long as that of Earth. For the Felodon the number stood at twelve. This was not very much when compared to the annual losses from tigers in India during the nineteenth century. But this reflection was not particularly consoling. The human population of Viridis was so very small compared to that of India. Lampert examined the creature thoughtfully. It was of moderate size as carnivores went -- some four feet long without the tail -- and looked rather harmless as long as it kept its mouth shut. It was lying in the center of the cage, so it was difficult to judge the length of its legs. It showed no trace of the tendency displayed by many captive animals, of lying against a wall or in a corner when relaxed; and there was none of the restless pacing so characteristic of Earth's big cats under similar circumstances. It simIF ply lay and stared back at Lampert, so steadily that he never was sure whether or not the cold eyes were provided with lids. "I never liked reptiles back home, but I think I like these creatures less." The voice of Mitsuitei, the little archaeologist, cut into Lampert's reverie. "Don't let Hans or Ndomi hear you mention them in the same breath with reptiles," he answered. "Well, I'm not fond of frogs, either." "I'm afraid that wouldn't make them much happier. These are not even amphibians." "They certainly are. I've been told that they lay eggs in water and have a tadpole stage -- " "I should have said they aren't Amphibians with a capital A. That is, they don't belong to the order Amphibia, since they are not genetically related to the corresponding order on Earth, as far as we know. Sulewayo gets quite peeved at people who try to lump terrestrial and extraterrestrial creatures in the same order. I believe that whoever decides things for biologists has decreed thaf on Viridis the dominant order is to be called Amphibids. It's a quibble, if you like. But I can see why they insist on it." "Mph. So can I. Even now you sometimes run into people who go to great length to make you admit that there are pyramids both in Egypt and Mexico -- and for that matter on Regulus Six -- and infer from that that their makers had something in the way of common culture. I say these things are amphibians, without the Capital A, because they are at home both on land and in water. And a dictionary would back me up. I don't insist that they're related to those of Earth -- any more than a Mayan pyramid has anything but geometry in common with an Egyptian one." "But I've heard -- " "I'm sure you have, but it's a sore subject. I'll be open-minded if you like and admit that some Egyptian may have been blown across the Atlantic and taught architecture to the Americans, but I don't regard it as proved. What was that remark of yours -- 'as far as we know' -- in connection with the ancestry of the amphibids? That's being at least as open-minded as I was, I would say." # #Xn a way, yes. I don't think A anyone has seriously suggested that these things originated on Earth. However, a puzzle we're here to investigate still exists. How there could be life forms corresponding to those which took a good half a planet which by geophysical evidence hasn't been solid for forty gested that the world was stocked from outside. But certainly it hasn't been proved. I don't think anyone has tried very hard, either. And I certainly won't, on a planet with as much radioactivity as this one. "You think that would account for high-speed evolution?" Lampert shrugged his shoulders, and began to stroll toward the next cage. "Ask the paleontologists. My opinion doesn't carry much weight." Mitsuitei nodded, started to follow the geophysicist, and then turned back to stare once more at the carnivore lying a few feet away. It stared back unblinkingly. The visit to the zoo was one of several, which continued until Lampert, Mitsuitei and the two paleontologists were able to identify each of a dozen animals which were most concerned in the death rate of Viridis. Apparently McLaughlin was not the only guide who did this. The zoo was equipped to give a "final examination" in which any creature the guide desired could be seen on a television screen from viewpoints quite different from those obtained in front of the cages. McLaughlin proved hard to satisfy. Lampert did not blame him. He knew a lot about Viridis, of course. He had not only read of it in ordinary reference material, but had done much of the laboratory work on drill cores brought from the planet. His name had been one of those attached to the report giving the probable age of the planet's crust. At that time, however, the mental picture he held had been of continent distribution, rock strata, zones of diastrophic stress and the like. The question of the appearance, or even the existence, of plants, animals and people had simply never risen to conscious level in his mind. That had changed, shortly before his arrival. The tramp spacer which had brought him and his group to Viridis had had to orbit about the world in free fall for several hours while its obsolete drive elements IF w ; really sure of those. For the rest, the planet was a vast, gray-black circle occulting a portion of the Milky Way. It was not absolutely black, either. Its contrast with the background of the galaxy was diminished by the glow in the upper atmosphere arising from the recombination of water molecules dissociated during the day by Beta Librae's fierce ultraviolet light. The center of the circle was darker than the edges, where the line of sight penetrated through more of the luminous gas. But even this sight, unusual as it was, did not affect Lampert as much as the lack of city lights. He had done field work in lonely, wild places before, of course; but until now he had always had the feeling of being in an island of wilderness "cooled," and the passengers had examine the planet. Lampert, oddly enough, had been as much impressed by the night side as by the sunlit hemisphere. The latter had shown, ,at twenty thousand kilometers, a fairly standard land and water pattern. The most unusual thing about it had been the almost perfect uniformity of the land coloration, a light green which bespoke, or at least implied, a virtually complete covering of vegetation. By the time the ship had circled to the dark side, however, it was much closer to the surface; and Lampert would have expected to make out luminous sparks and patches of towns and cities by the hundreds. He saw just two, and was not more or less surrounded by civilization. On Viridis it was the civilized spots which formed the islands. And very small islands they were. There was no known native intelligent race, and settlements of alien races such as the men from Earth were still few and far between. So Lampert was prepared for McLaughlin's care in readying the group for its trip. He was even glad of it, though he would probably not have admitted to being at all afraid of the venture. He would simply have said that it was nice to have a guide who took his responsibilities seriously. T hat of course, did not mean that Lampert was intending to disavow any of his own responsibilities. He, like McLaughlin, had been keeping a careful eye on the other members of the group, looking for the signs of impatience or ill temper which could be the seeds of serious trouble if the journey were prolonged. He had come to tentative conclusions about this during the flight from Earth, but was pleased to see that, apparently, men who could stand the enforced companionship of a tramp spacer were also able to retain their senses of humor in the steam-bath environment of Viridis. Sulewayo, of course, had seemed safe from the first. A man who has spent his formative years in the Congo rain forests where his ancestors had lived for generations was ideal for this world. His sense of humor was extremely durable. Lampert suspected that it might sometimes be a little too good. Mitsuitei, the archaeologist, had once or twice appeared to resent some of the young fellow's remarks, though not to an extent where Lampert had felt the need for introducing his own personality into the matter. Krendall, nearly twice Sulewayo's age, seemed to be a check on the younger man anyway; he was a member of the same profession, and Sulewayo would have been the first to admit his respect fdr Krendall's work in the field. Under the circumstances, Lampert felt that the group was well matched. Whether it would be able to do the job it had undertaken was another matter. The news reports had spoken glibly of the expedition which was going to "solve the mysteries of Viridis once and for all." Lampert, like any other scientist, knew perfectly well that the solution of the present crop of mysteries about the planet would almost certainly be achieved only at the cost of creating an even greater number of new ones. Even the guide, who was admittedly no scientist, had expressed a similar opinion, though his was based on a general pessimism bred of familiarity with the planet. However, he had undertaken to get them to the sort of country they wanted; and from then on the problem solving was not his affair. The scientists, whatever may have been their feeling about matters of personal safety, were eager to start, which tended to cause rapid progress in McLaughlin's animal recognition school. Another factor tending toward the same result was IF that there was little in Emeraude for such men to do, except learn. The town was still small. It had a spaceport and airport, which furnished little entertainment, docks which could amuse for a while but not indefinitely, and warehouses which were completely uninteresting to geologists, paleontologists and archaeologists. There was no museum. The numerous specimens of mineral, animal, and vegetable matter collected on the planet invariably wound up on outbound spacecraft. The zoo, which the town maintained for purely practical reasons, was about the only thing that was left. In consequence, not many days passed before all four scientists were able to meet McLaughlin's requirements. Sulewayo was annoyed by the guide's addition of a short postgraduate course in edible flora and fauna, but admitted that the knowledge might well be useful. However, he made no secret of his satisfaction when McLaughlin finally announced that, as far as he was concerned, the journey could begin at any time. All four rechecked their equipment -- that of Lampert was by far the bulkiest -- and, everyone satisfied with the group's ability both to live and to work in the steam bath that was the world of Viridis, they watched the harbor on which Emeraude was located shrink and blend into the rest of the shoreline behind them. Within a few minutes only the restless surface of Green Bay was visible through the ever-present haze.   T he jaws of the Felodon abruptly stopped moving and its forelegs straightened, bringing the fanged head up and away from the kill it had just made. If a man had been there he would neither have seen nor heard the disturbing factor, for a Thunderstorm a few miles to the west was emitting an almost fcontinous growl and the towering trees shut out nearly all the sky. Nevertheless the beast appeared to sense something out of the ordinary. It twisted its short but supple neck ceaselessly, rocking its head from side to side to bring first one eye and tympanic membrane to bear on the jungle roof, then the other. Sometimes it froze motionless for a long moment, and a watcher would have sworn that its minute brain was struggling with a thought. If this were the case, the thought must have been both unusual and unpleasant, for under normal circumstances nothing short of overwhelming force would have driven a Felodon from its meal. Now, however, the hind legs slowly straightened and the creature came erect. For another moment it stood motionless, took a step or two away from the body, and stopped again. Abruptly, as though in defiance of some impulse, it turned back, lowered the murderously armed head and tore a huge mouthful of flesh from the carcass. Then, like a child leaving the cookie jar as its mother approaches, it leaped away into the underbrush, still swallowing. Its speed was high and it did not have far to go. The jungle thinned in a few hundred meters to the point where some sky became visible, and a short distance further the riotous plant growth vanished completely to give place to an open beach. Here the creature stopped and repeated its search of the hemisphere overhead. This time it found what it sought. Along the line of the beach, perhaps a kilometer out to sea, the thing came flying. It must have been utterly different from anything the Felodon could ever have seen, but no sign of fear appeared in the beast's demeanor. It stood on the beach, well away from the shelter of the jungle and certainly in full view from above, its head following the flying object and a fearful snarl -- which might or might not have been its normal expression of hunger -- giving its face an almost mammalian cast. This thing was larger by far than any flying creature the Felodon knew -- incomparably larger than the Felodon itself. Its details were hard to make out through the hazy air, and would have meant little to the flesh-eater in any case. The most noticeable characteristic was the steady, whistling hum that proceeded from it. There was a suggestion of motion, too, which might have been wings or might not. Actually, the thing was little more than a dark dot against the purplish-blue sky. At themoment no sunlight was striking it directly, for it was in the shadow of the thunderhead. Perhaps this prevented the animal below from being bothered by another unusual feature it possessed, though even the appearance of this last characteristic produced no sign of fear when it finally came. This occurred shortly after the flying thing passed, while it was still quite close. It moved out of the shadow of the great cloud and, as the greenish sunlight struck it, the eyes of the watching creature were dazzled by a gleam of metal. This was certainly something it had never seen, for native metal on Viridis is just about as common as it was on Earth before men began to pry it out of its ores. Viridis has an oxygen-rich atmosphere and plenty of moisture, and pure aluminum or chromium just doesn't occur in that environment. Strange or not, however, the gleam did not appear to affect the Felodon's rudimentary sense of fear. For just an instant it paused as the flying thing hummed on into the northeast; just once it looked back toward the point in the jungle where it had left its kill -- a point from which eloquent sounds were now coming, betraying the presence of carrion-eaters; just one step it took in that direction. Then it turned away as abruptly as it had from the meal a few minutes before. With the same purposeful air it had displayed on the way out of the jungle it headed down the beach in the direction taken by the flying piece of metal. Though the animal's speed was high, the humming soon faded out ahead of it. However, this did not seem to cause any inconvenience; the Felodon moved on, with a gait that might have been called a fast walk or a IF slow run, never hesitating, never pausing. It remained silent. Smaller creatures which might have given it a wide berth had they heard the hunting call now sprang away almost from underfoot. It paid them no heed, but continued on its way while the green sun settled into the jungle behind and to its left. The fact that its recent kill was now little more than a skeleton did not seem to bother it. Perhaps it had forgotten. II T he humming was a little more noticeable in the helicopter cabin, but not much. John McLaughlin, sprawled as comfortably as his two meters of height would permit in its confines, had noticed the sound only at first; and after remarking to himself that they seemed to be building better ion turbines since he had left Earth, had permitted his thoughts to wander in other directions. These did not concern Felodons; the interest there was not, at the moment, mutual. The rather crowded cabin offered material enough for consideration. McLaughlin was not a scientist by training, but neither was he the sort of guide that might have been found in Yukon or Amazon territory a few centuries back. He did not despise people merely because they were, by his standards, greenhorns. He knew that each of the other men now sharing this cabin with him was an expert in his own field, even though none of them, in spite of his training, would have been able to survive for more than a day in the jungles of Viridis. After all, why should they have learned such an art? There were other things worth learning, and one could always hire McLaughlin if a need to visit the jungles developed. Since this particular party had done just that, they were evidently a fairly practical crew. They were not talking very much, which from the guide's viewpoint was an additional point in their favor. They already knew what they planned to do, and saw no point in repeating what had already been said. Of course, if they should fail to find the area they were seeking, there would be talk -- all of it aimed at McLaughlin; but he had no fear on that score. There were few enough mountains on Viridis, and of those few by far the greater number were volcanic cinder cones. When these scientists had specified a region of tilted-block or folded mountains, the guide had been more than dubious at first. It had taken him time to recall that there was a small area meeting these specifications less than fifteen hundred miles from the spaceport at Emeraude. He was not himself a geologist, but pictures and diagrams had been used freely in explaining to him just what was wanted, and he was quite certain that the party would be satisfied with what he had to offer. A slight rocking in the hitherto steady motion of the helicopter roused him from this line of reverie. They were already several hours from Emeraude, and McLaughlin realized that he should have been paying more attention to the course. He straightened up in his seat and looked out. To the left and ahead was a huge thunderhead, whose satellite air currents had probably caused the variation on the helicopter's flight path. More important, there was land in sight. McLaughlin knew that the long flight across Green Bay was over. He waited, however, before saying anything. He had given the pilot full instructions as to the route before take-off, and he wanted to see whether those had been clear enough. Apparently they had. Without asking questions or even looking back at the guide, Lampert swung the aircraft from its northerly heading onto one which paralleled the shoreline, a turn of about forty-five degrees to the right, and the helicopter resumed its steady flight. McLaughlin did not relax. From now on the route was a little more difficult to follow, and there were not too many more hours of daylight. The shadowless night glow which made vision relatively easy after sunset did not lend itself to aerial navigation over a very poorly mapped world. He kept his eyes on the shoreline, watching for the landmarks he hd not seen for many months -- and then not from above. He did not see the Felodon which became so intensely interested in the helicopter. If he had, he would have attached little importance to the creature's presence, and he could not possibly have seen its actions in sufficient detail to catch any peculiarities in them. N o one else saw the beast, either. The change in course had roused most of the party from whatever lines of thought they had been pursuing, as it had McLaughlin, and most of them were looking out the windows; but they were interested in what lay ahead, not below. Sometime soon the relative monotony of jungle and swamp should be relieved by rising ground, indicating the nearness of the mountains they sought; and the helicopter's flight altitude of some two thousand feet was low enough to permit any significant rise of terrain to be visible. Sulewayo, the younger paleontologist, made a remark to that effect, which passed without comment. Real conversation did not start for some minutes. "As I understand it, we have one more course change before we see the mountains. Isn't there a river we have to follow for a time, String?" Lampert asked the question without looking back. "That's right," McLaughlin replied. "It runs into Green Bay from almost straight north, and about a hundred miles inland makes a turn to the east. That's general direction. It winds a lot." "It would, in country as nearly peneplaned as this," muttered Lampert under his breath. "The mountains you want start about sixty airline miles from the big bend. If you trust your gyro compass enough, you can head for them directly from the river mouth. If you have any doubt about being able to hold a line, though, follow the river. I doubt that there are any IP good landmarks otherwise. Of course, I've only seen the area from the surface and close to the river, but I'd be very surprised if there was anything around but the swampand-jungle mess we're over now." "So would I. We'll stay in sight of the river, but edge as far east as visibility lets us." The guide approved this plan with a nod, and the conversation lapsed for several minutes. The silence was finally broken once more by Sulewayo. "I hope these hills we're looking for have something of interest. This planet is the most monotonous I've seen yet. Where it isn't jungle it's swamp; and the only difference between the two is that the jungle grows higher trees." McLaughlin's face crinkled into something like a smile, and he sat up once more. "There's one other difference," he remarked. "What's that?" "In the jungle, dressed and equipped as you now are, you might live as long as a day. In the swamp, five minutes would be an optimistic estimate." Sulewayo looked down at the shorts and boots which constituted his costume, and shrugged. "I admit the point, but I don't expect to go out this way. What I actually wear and carry, beside my professional equipment, is up to you. Also, I was referring to appearances. Beta Lyrae Nine looked almost as dull as this world from above, and I'll bet it was as least as deadly when you reached the surface." McLaughlin had never visited New Sheol, and admitted it, but it took more than that to stop Sulewayo. "Actually, I was hoping that these hills didn't turn out to be so covered with soil that any fossils would be yards underground at the best. Do you recall any places where the rock strata themselves were exposed -- steep cliffs, or deep stream gullies, perhaps?" "Definitely yes. The big river cuts right across the range, or else starts in it. It comes out from a canyon like that of the Colorado on Earth, though a lot less spectacular. Actually I don't know anything about the country more than a couple of miles up that canyon. I was stopped on the river by rapids, and couldn't get my amphib out on either side. For the most part there simply wasn't any shore, just cliff." "Quite a current, I suppose?" Lampert cut in. "Actually, not very much. I went swimming in worse, on Earth." # Cnphat hardly ties in with A steep cliffs and a river cutting through a mountain range." McLaughlin shrugged. "You're the geologist. Look it over for yourself. Maybe you'll just have to add it to the list of things you don't understand about Viridis." "Fair enough." The pilot-commander-geophysicist nodded. "I did not mean to imply that you were not reporting accurately; but the situation you have described would be a trifle queer on more planets than Earth, I assure you. Still, with luck your cliffs will show fossils. Maybe we'll solve one problem in exchange for another. Life could be worse." "Just hope we don't solve the first one by proving that certain geophysicists have been talking through their hats," the hitherto silent Krendall remarked. "Eh?" "What would you do if we found a chunk of, say, pegmatite with radioactive inclusions that checked been giving us as a time scale for this mudball?" "I should check very carefully under what circumstances and in what location you found it. If necessary, I would admit that the probyears would account reasonably well for the evolutionary status of this planet's life forms, though actually it took Earth a good deal longer to reach a corresponding condition. Frankly, however, I do not expect any such find. We spotted our borings rather carefully, and should have taken pretty representative samples." "I'm sure you did. If your results are right, it just means that the problem belongs to Hans and me -- and String here had better find us a lot of fossils." "You'll have to find your own bones," McLaughlin replied. "I'm taking you to the sort of ground you want. A fossil would have to show its teeth in my face before I'd recognize it -- and then I'd probably shoot before I realized it was dead." "All right," Sulewayo chuckled. "You take care of the quick, and Krendall and I will worry about the dead. Dr. Lampert can figure out how old the fossils are if we find any, and Take can look for stone axes." "Or automobiles, or pieces of space-drive tubes, or other artifacts," Mitsuitei answered the implied dig. "I plan to sit back and loaf, unless and until one of you lads turns up a skull that could have held more than half an ounce of brain. I am going to be very unscientific. I believe that there is nothing on this planet for an archeologist to do, and I am not going to work myself into a lather to prove myself wrong." "You've formed an opinion rather early in the game," Lampert remarked. "After all, remarkably little of this world has been explored. Why should there not be traces of occupation in unknown areas such as we are about to visit?" "Because, while most of the planet remains unexplored, a very large number of places which should have furnished traces of habitation have failed to do so. We've surveyed many spots which were, or are, ideal for cities based on ocean commerce, or market centers for what could be farm areas, or spaceports. After a while you get to a point where such finds can be predicted with some certainty. As I said, I am far from certain, and it would be most unreasonable to say I was; but in the area we are seeking, I see no reason to expect anything of interest to my profession." L ampert shrugged and brought his full attention back to the controls. The sun was slowly IF sinking, bringing into bolder relief the irregularities of the ground as their shadows lengthened. However, these irregularities were still few, and the jungle roof was for the most part evenly illuminated. As McLaughlin had expected, there was nothing that could be used as a landmark. In its own way, the forest was as featureless as the ocean. The pilot kept his gaze riveted ahead, in expectation of the river which the guide had told them to expect; and presently he saw it. Reflecting the color of the faintly purplish sky, it stood out fairly well against the gray-green of the jungle, once they were close enough to penetrate the ever-present haze. With McLaughlin nodding silent approval, Lampert swung the helicopter to the left and proceeded more nearly straight north, angling gradually toward the river. Now the jungle took on a little more feature, though still nothing that could be used for guidance. At fairly frequent intervals a glint of water became visible through the trees directly below them. Evidently numerous tributaries were feeding into the larger stream; but none of these could be seen from any distance. For the most part they were so narrow that the trees growing on each side met above them. "I should think that one could cover a great deal of that territory in a boat," remarked Mitsuitei, after nearly half an hour in the new direction. " You'd need an amphib," replied the guide. "A boat is all right for the main stream, but all that stuff coming in from the sides is so shallow that you'd never make progress with anything else. I've tried most of them in my own croc. Every time I've had to crawl rather than float before I was a mile from the river. "How is the ground? Swamp?" "No, it's fairly solid for the most part. It doesn't show very well yet even with the sun as low as it is, but the general ground level is pushing up slowly all along here. We'll be in sight of your mountains before too long." This declaration brought all members of the group to the windows, all five pairs of eyes covering the quadrant of vision below and ahead. The meandering river was now on their left, but just visible through the haze ahead of them was the eastward turn McLaughlin had predicted. Lampert headed a little more to the right in an attempt to cut the final corner, but the helicopter reached the winding purplish band before their goal came in sight in spite of this effort. The flyer hummed on. The bars of sunlight admitted by the side ports had been nearly horizontal when the turn to the east cut them off. They were only slightly more so when McLaughlin gave a satisfied grunt, and nodded forward. The others followed his gaze. S traight ahead, little could be seen because of the "bright spot" familiar to every flyer -- the shadowless area directly opposite the sun, centered on the aircraft's own shadow. To either side, however, the promised hills rose out of the jungle to heights exceeding the present flight altitude of the helicopter. Presumably the canyon from which the river was supposed to emerge lay in their path. So, at any rate, Lampert remarked; and McLaughlin confirmed him. "I'd cruise pretty slowly from here on," the guide added. "There are a number of hills on this side of the range. Even if you're not worried about running into one of them, you may want to examine them for exposed rocks." "Mightn't it be better to find a spot to park before the sun goes down?" countered the pilot. "It might. What I said still holds, though. You haven't much chance finding one inside the canyon without quite a long search, and it will be best to stay this side of the range until sunrise. Remember my trouble in finding a beach for the amphib while I was inside." "All right. Can we land in jungle, though?" "Not unless you want to fold the blades in flight and drop the last twenty to fifty feet. Hunt for a fairly high hill. They're usually somewhat bare on top, and you'll at least have room for the rotors to swing. If you don't like that, or can't find a suitsfble hilltop, land on the river and tie up to the shore -- but again, don't try that in the canyon. You're unlikely to find anything to tie up to." "This machine has good lights, I suppose you realize -- but then, you know the planet. As far as I'm concerned, what you say goes. Are the chances of a hill equally good on either side of the river?" "Maybe a little better to the north. The ground looked higher that way when I came out of the canyon." Lampert obediently eased the flyer's course a trifle to the left, and everyone aboard watched the ground as it began to rise toward them. At first the "hills" were merely low mounds, as jungle-covered as the level ground; but very quickly these gave way to higher, steeper rises on whose tops the larger trees grew very sparsely. One of these was quickly selected after a brief, questioning glance from Lampert to the guide, and the helicopter began to descend. "We'd better take what we have now. ".McLaughlin amplified the nod with which he had answered the pilot. "This belt of hills is pretty narrow, and we'd be into the main range in another minute or two." "Do you know whether the other side is as abrupt, or whether -- " Lam pert's question was cut short by an exclamation from Mitsuitei. "Rob! Hold it a moment!" Lampert was a good pilot; the increase in rotor-blade pitch under his deft fingers brought the helicopter's descent to as nearly an instant halt as was possible to anything airborne. Not until he had also checked horizontal drift did he look in the direction the archaeologist was indicating. By then, everyone else had seen what had attracted Mitsuitei's attention. Between the hill on which Lampert had intended to land and the river were several lower eminences. IF These were now almost directly south of the helicopter, and every detail upon them was shown in exaggerated relief by shadows stretching to the east. It was one of these hills which Mitsuitei was examining with the utmost care. It was covered with jungle, like the rest; but a curious regularity was visible. The trees appeared, at this distance, to be of the usual species; but some of them towered over their fellows by a good thirty or forty feet. This in itself was not odd. The whole jungle was studded with such projections. However, on this hill the taller trees seemed to have been planted in orderly rows. Five solid lines of them were visible, extending roughly north and south so that their long shadows made them stand out sharply. They were separated from each other by perhaps a quarter of a mile. Running at right angles to them were other, less outstanding rows of vegetation. Lampert was not quite sure that these were not the product of his own imagination, since the trees which formed them rose little if any above the general level. The whole hilltop, however, suggested something to every man who saw it. The archaeologist was .the first to give voice to the impression. "That was a city!" N o one answered. Some of the scientists must have thought that he was jumping from one opinion to its direct opposite on the strength of some rather feeble evidence; but the thought went unvoiced. They simply looked -- except for Sulewayo, who moved to turned a camera on the scene. "Rob! Can we land there? Now?" Lampert had anticipated this question, but could have answered it without hesitation in any case. "Sure -- if you don't mind using String's method of folding the blades and falling in." The archaeologist turned to the guide. "Will it be hard to gel there on foot from this hill we're heading for?" McLaughlin shrugged. "From two hours to a day, depending on undergrowth." "We have torches. We can burn our way if the vegetation is dense." "Half a day, then. You'll still have to let the steam clear pretty often. There's little wind below the trees, and the air is saturated." "Well, that place will be worth more than a day of anyone's time. Maybe tomorrow we can -- " "Hold up a moment, Take!" Lampert cut in, before Mitsuitei could develop his plan further. "If you take String out to that hill before take-off tomorrow, what do the rest of us do for the day -- or week -- before you get back? What we'd better do is note this placepgt? on to the canyon, set up camp, get the fossil hunting going, and after our routine is set up and we know the more common dangers of the neighborhood, perhaps we can spare McLaughlin for a day or two so that you can look over your city -- if that's what it is." Lam pert's last few words banished the hurt expression from the little man's face. IF "What do you mean -- if? What else could make a pattern like that? It must have been streets." "Or a joint system in the rock below, trapping enough water -- or draining enough off -- to permit superior growth along the joint lines. Or a system of tilted strata doing the same thing -- " "If it's the latter, it's just the sort of thing you want, too. It should bring fossils near the surface." The pilot nodded slowly. "You do make it sound more attractive. Still, I think we'd better follow the original plan, except that I may come with you myself when we do get around to looking that hill over." He turned back to the controls and resumed their descent. Mitsuitei subsided once more to his seat. The archaeologist realized the wisdom of Lampert's decision, but did not particularly enjoy the enforced wait. His face showed the fact, until Sulewayo opened the camera he had been using and passed him the sheaf of prints on which the "city" appeared. As the young paleontologist had expected, these so occupied the little man's attention that he did not even notice the landing. T he helicopter settled to the hilltop which Lampert had chosen, in the center of a quadrangle of trees growing just far enough apart to give clearance to the rotors. The sun was nearly gone. It had vanished in the haze as they dropped below flight altitude. McLaughlin knew that in all too short a time it would be as dark as Viridis ever became. The nights could be dangerous. There was quite enough light to deceive a man into thinking he could see clearly, and an inexperienced wanderer might not realize until too late that details were not really distinct and that there was no clue to direction in the shadowless glow. McLaughlin himself could use the moons, but he doubted that any other member of the party could do so. They -- or their motions -- took knowing. He was pleased to note that there was no general rush to the door as the great blades whistled gently to a stop. The scientists turned to him, but remained where they were. No words were spoken, but Lampert's relinquishment of command was evident. McLaughlin unfolded his length from the seat. "There are two choices," he said. "We can sleep in the 'copter, or outside. The first will be a trifle cramped, but the second will require either a double circle of charged wire or two armed guards on constant watch. With no offense meant, I doubt that anyone but myself in this group could qualify as a night guard." "Why a double circle of wire?" asked Lampert. "The wire will stop only an animal in control of its motion when it makes contact. If a Felodon were to spring from a little distance, it might not like the wire -- but it could hardly stop until it reached the ground, and there should then be a similar barrier ahead of it." "We could use a lethal voltage." "Even if you want to take the m risk -- what is lethal to a Felodon will be equally so to a man -- you'll have the insulation problem. There's always a darned good chance of rain before morning, and -- " "We might as well stay inside, then. We have the electric equipment, but it will take quite a while to set it up; and it hardly seems worth the trouble for a one-night stand. As you say, it will be a little crowded here. But we've all slept under worse conditions. Would anyone rather set up the fence?" There was no answer to this question. At Lampert's direction a meal was served and eaten. Then the scientists settled down for the night, some to sleep at once, others to review plans or recheck equipment. Mitsuitei occupied himself with making careful measurements of the photographs he had been given; he was the last asleep... Scores of miles to the southwest, the Felodon reached the river. It was no longer on the coast; some time since it had swerved inland. A casual compass check would have revealed that it was still heading straight for the now grounded helicopter. Even McLaughlin could not have told what led the creature on, familiar as he was with the animals of Viridis; but no one who had watched thething since the flying machine had passed could have doubted its goal. Actually, it was now on the same bank of the river as the helicopter; but whatever guided it pointed across the great stream. Without hesitating, the amphibid plunged into the water. T he men were awake well before sunrise. The human body takes a long, long time to accustom its physiological cycle to a change in something as fundamental as the length of day. But they did not attempt to resume flight until the green star was once more in the sky. Mitsuitei put forth a tentative suggestion that the interval be spent in a visit to the "city" site he had seen the night before, but McLaughlin vetoed it. "Going on foot through the jungle at night is a fool's game, though I admit people sometimes get away with it. I could get you there, but even if we turned around and came back immediately there'd be a lot of time wasted. Dr. Lampert went over all that last night. Look, that hill of yours is right by the river. After we're set up in the main camp, it will be relatively easy to drop down to it. We have collapsible boats. Unless we camp above the rapids, you won't even have to fly. Even if we're farther upstream and do have to use the 'copter, the trip will take only a few minutes." Mitsuitei had agreed, though with evident reluctance. No one else had any desire to go out; there was not enough rock exposed on the hilltop to excite the paleontologists, the hill itself presented nothing unusual to Lampert's geophysical eye, and McLaughlin was in no hurry to get to work. They waited, therefore, until the "Claw" -- Lampert had recalled Beta Librae's Arabic name -- had risen and the skyglow been replaced IF journey was resumed. It took, as McLaughlin had said the night before, only a few minutes. The' hill where they had slept was less than five miles from the face of the mountain range. Only the haze of the night before had prevented their seeing it. The river emerged from a canyon some fifteen hundred feet in depth, a couple of miles to the south of their eastward course line. Lampert, in hopes that the usual haze might not be too evident at this hour, climbed above the level of the cliff top to get an idea of the mountain range as a whole; but he was disappointed. For nearly an hour he cruised over the area, now several thousand feet above the western cliffs and then well below them. It slowly became evident that the range represented a single block, which had been tilted upward on the west side. The opposite slopes were very gentle, merging so gradually into the general peneplain level of the continent that it was impossible to say decisively just where the range ended. The river did originate somewhere beyond the range, cutting entirely through it, and as the guide had said, its current was not particularly swift. Lampert had much explaining to do. After all, water should have drained toward the low side of the block. "It seems evident," he summed up his ideas as they hovered once more over the western cliffs, "that the river was here before this particular bit of block tilting occurred. This planet does have some diastrophic forces left in its crust, in spite of its generally smooth nature. Apparently this just represents the end of a long period of rest, such as the earth has had several times. As a matter of fact, I have no business calling it the end of such a period; the world will be generally mountainous again." "Why do you say again , Rob?" asked Krendall. "According to findings of your own colleagues, this planet has hardly been solid for flat now if it had ever been markedly mountainous in that time?" "Good point. I don't know, but would be inclined to doubt it. Well, we'll cancel the 'again' if it will make you happy. In any case the block forming this range came up slowly enough so that even this river, with its relatively low cutting power, was able to keep pace with it and not be deflected. Probably -- " he glanced at Mitsuitei -- "the rock of which it is made will turn out to be quite strongly jointed. It looks rather that way from above -- the river course, I mean. A lot of right angle, or what were once right angle, bends." "We'd better go down and look for a camp along the river somewhere," put in Mitsuitei. "Let's start at the cliff end. Then we may wind up reasonably close to that hill -- and I still want to look it over, joints or no joints." "Fair enough." Lampert eased the helicopter once more downward until they were only a few hundred feet above the jungle, moved along the cliff face until they reached the canyon, and, very cautiously, entered. His caution proved unnecessary. The air currents in no way resembled the treacherous hodgepodge he had expected, at least not over the center of the river. A steady wind was blowing into the canyon mouth, but did not seem to be eddying very much even at the numerous bends. T o the archeologist's annoyance, two sets of rapids were passed before a place was reached where the bank was wide enough for a camp site. At this point a fairly large side canyon entered the main one from the north. Where its central stream joined the main river a gravelly area several acres in extent offered itself for the purposes of the scientists. Lampert brought the helicopter down on this surface. The surroundings looked promising; the clifls facing both canyons looked reasonably accessible on foot for some distance, at least along their bases. Climbing appeared to be impracticable for the most part, as the rock walls rose sheer except for the occasional joints which Lampert had predicted; but the material was certainly sedimentary, and everyone but the guide tumbled out of the flyer with a glow in his eyes which promised a speedy scattering of the party. With some difficulty, McLaughlin got them together. A site, some twenty yards square, was selected against one of the cliffs and fenced off. The big, prefabricated sheetmetal "tent" was erected and its tiny conditioning unit installed; sleeping and cooking gear were placed inside. That completed, geologist's hammers appeared as though by magic; and McLaughlin realized that he had better do some explaining before he lost a scientist or two. Once more he called them together. "All right, gentlemen. I admit the necessary camp work has been done, and there should be nothing to keep you from your projects. Still, there are some things you Had better understand. "Having canyon walls on all sides does not make this place safe. Every carnivore and poison lizard on this planet could get to us by way of the river -- even the ones which look like land animals. Every one of them could swim under water from a point out of sight in either direction to where you are standing; and if you think he would have to come up at least once to judge your position, guess again. I don't know how they do it, and neither does anyone else; but a Felodon could submerge around the bend up there, come up behind the helicopter out of sight of any one of us and be waiting when we marched around the machine. Therefore, go armed at all times. I know you want to cover a lot of ground, and can't stick in one party; but I insist that you do not go anywhere alone. Take at least one companion. Preferably one who is not a member of your own field. If you two paleontologists are together, for example, it seems more than likely that you'll be found with your heads in the same hole in the rock. When one of you has to dig, IF make sure the other has his neck on a swivel. I know this will slow your work, but not as much as if the work had to wait for a new investigating team from Emeraude -- or from Earth. "You've seen most of the dangerous animals in the zoo at Emeraude, so I won't waste time describing them. Just remember that you won't always hear them coming. You'll have to use your eyes. "All right, Dr. Lampert. You're the boss, as far as the scientific work goes. Who does what, and where?" T he geophysicist gave no sign of having detected the humor in the guide's remark, but began speaking at once. "I should say that the main canyon upstream and the side one in the same direction should be covered first. We've already used up a good deal of today, and would waste more breaking out the boats. Ndomi and I will go up the main stream; Hans and Take can take the other. Don't hurry. If anything looks good, take the time to investigate it on the spot. Of course, if it is obviously a major job, just mark it and go on. There's no sense in one man's trying to exhume a six-foot lizard skull. "Since this region must have been sea when the limestone was deposited, there's not much chance of land animals. However, we want as complete a chronological series as possible, so do the best you can on this level. We'll try for higher formations later. There should be plenty farther upriver, if this block is tilted the way it seems to be. "String, perhaps you'd better go with Take and Hans. Set out when you're ready. Be back in -- " he glanced automatically at the narrow strip of purplish-blue sky, then at his watch -- "four hours; then we'll compare notes. After that we can either concentrate on one place or the other, or break out the boats and cross the streams, as indicated." Twenty minutes later the parties were out of sight of each other and the helicopter. Lampert had spent the first few minutes of the walk wondering whether he had been too obvious in arranging for both the guide and Krendall to accompany the little archaeologist; but he quickly convinced himself that McLaughlin's speech had covered the arrangements pretty well. In any case, he would probably have been distracted soon enough. The cliffs were interesting. Limestone, evidently, as expected -- but rather dense, at that; maybe some barium replacing the calcium? or was the gravity different enough to destroy his judgement for such a small fragment? Probably not. He was actually using inertia more than weight in making his estimate. Anyway, the stuff was certainly a carbonate. It frothed satisfyingly under a drop of acid from Lampert's kit. And there were fossils. Sulewayo's form was bent over a spot on the cliff face, examining minutely; but Lampert could see others from where he stood. None seemed remarkable. Most were rather evidently shellfish. He carefully refrained from giving them names according to the genera they resembled in Earth's rocks; Sulewayo and his colleagues frowned on the practice, which could be most misleading. He could not, however, resist the temptation to think of them as scallops. "What do you have there, Ndomi?" He knew the other would not have spent so long on any shellfish. "Not sure, precisely. Maybe vertebrate, maybe not. What could be armor and what could be ribs all mixed up. I think I'll mark it for future reference." "I suppose it'll be another Devonian whatsit, like everything else on this planet, when you do decide." "Pennsylvanian would better describe the world as a whole. Barring that, you may be right. Rob, if you'd give me a hand here we could get some basic work done." "Eh?" "You say this is a tilted block. In lowest formations right now. I'd like to get photos and if possible specimens of as many different varieties of shellfish as possible, at each level. Then it may be possible to set up some sort of temporal sequence -- and use the things as index fossils if animals do evolve on this benighted mudball. If you could get me some radioactive dates at two or three nicely scattered levels, it would also help." "Thanks," returned Lampert drily. "I could use material like that myself. I can tell you what you probably already know -- you're not likely to get anything of the sort from limestone." "Well -- intrusions are always possible." "You watch for 'em, then." The pair went to work. T wo hours out, a little more than one back. There was no one at the helicopter when they reached it, but the other group came in only a few minutes over the fourhour limit which Lampert had imposed. A comparison of notes over the meal which had been quickly prepared indicated that the second group had gone farther in point of miles covered, but had accomplished less work. Krendall had had the same idea as Sulewayo. But he had not attempted to carry it out since his canyon did not cut across the range, and would presumably not furnish a continous change in formations. Lampert and Sulewayo, as it happened, had not found any evidence of change themselves. The last fossils they had found were at least superficially identical with the first. There was the usual evidence of bedding, and it had been quite evident geometrically that the walk had taken them to originally higher, and presumably later, levels; but in what must have been eight hundred feet or more of original deposit, there seemed to have been no significant change in the fossil life. What eight hundred feet would mean in point of time, of course, no one had the least idea. There was not even a good guess as to how fast carbonates might be expected to precipitate in a Viridian ocean. Anyone could compute the carbonate ion equilibrium between atmosphere and sea, but no one knew anything to speak IF of about carbonate-precipitating organisms of the planet. Mitsuitei changed the subject slightly at this point. "We found several of the joints you predicted," he said to Lampert. "Oh? Very wide? We didn't spot anything that was obviously a joint. But there were several small side canyons -- all narrow enough for us to wade or jump their central streams -- which might have started life that way." "Ours were quite narrow, and bore traces of volcanic ash at the bottoms." "Eh?" "That's right, Rob. Here's a bit of it I brought back. I thought you might want a little corroboration on that one." Krendall handed over a bit of crumbly tuff as he spoke. Lampert examined it with pursed lips. "Maybe we'd better get back into the air, and search the neighborhood for volcanoes," he said at last. "I can't bring myself to believe in two full mountain-building cycles on this planet -- and if I could, I'd have a hard time swallowing the idea of these limestone layers coming up, going down, and coming up again unaltered. How deep were these volcanic deposits?" "Variable. Shallowest in the wider joints; in the very narrow ones, up out of sight." "Suggesting that they've been washing out for some time since the original settling. Anything organic in them?" "Nothing turned up yet." "Do they extend below the present river level, or what?" "They're at least down to it. We couldn't do any major excavating." "If they run much below," muttered Lampert, "I'll join the roster of geophysicists who have been driven off the rails by this woozy world. Well, let's assume as a working hypothesis that the volcanic activity is relatively recent. That will at least have the advantage of keeping me sane, until something comes up to disprove it." He finished his meal in silence, while McLaughlin gave a reproving lecture on the matter of wading. T here was still a little daylight to go when all the men had eaten; and Lampert, Sulewayo and the archaeologist took the helicopter up the main canyon to check on the possibility of walking to any really new deposits. They were sure, from changes of color already seen at various levels up the cliff face, that these existed. But it appeared that the lowest of them did not reach river level for more than a dozen miles. The distance was less mapwise, but the canyon, winding back and forth around what the geophysicist still felt must be joint-bounded blocks, went a good two miles in other directions for each one that it led eastward. Realizing this, the explorers lifted the helicopter and began checking as close to the cliffs as Lampert dared at higher levels. In this way they worked back toward the camp site. Once again it was Mitsuitei who first spotted something of major interest. "Found another city, Take?" asked Sulewayo at the other's call. "Not exactly. It's -- well, I guess it's really a system of those joints you keep talking about. Still, it looks awfully regular." He sounded a little wistful. "It does." The paleontologist nodded slowly. "As you say, it's probably a joint system. Also, it's probably full of volcanic ash, if my eyes don't deceive me. Rob, what's the chance of a landing on one of the shelves? There are at least three formations accessible on foot from that point; and I could get some more tuff samples to make or break your peace of mind, while I was doing my own work." Lampert examined the area carefully. Like Earth's Grand Canyon, this one receded from time to time in shelves where softer layers of rock had worn further back, or the orogenic processes had paused to give the river a longer bite at that level. The cracks Mitsuitei had seen formed a neat crisscross pattern on the top of one of the shelves. Some of them betrayed their nature by emerging from its vertical face. It was admittedly an unusually smallscale joint pattern, at least for this mountain system, and might well contain readable evidence of the forces which had shaped the area. However, they had only one helicopter. Lampert slowly shook his head in negation. "I'm afraid not, Ndomi. Your shelves may be big enough, but they're not level enough. I'd have to make a swinging landing, and I'm not that good a pilot." "Well, how about letting me down on the ladder? We have a hundred feet of that, so you could be up above the next shelf while I went down. You'd have plenty of blade clearance. That next level goes back a couple of hundred feet." "That might be all right." Lampert spoke hesitantly. "You certainly have the right to risk your own neck on the climb if you want to. We won't try it tonight, though. I'd like to check with String on the advisability of your being there alone. The place looks pretty hard to reach for anything that doesn't fly, and I don't know of any really dangerous flying things on this world; but we'd still better check." "All right with me. I'd just as soon have a full day, anyway." "If Ndomi will be spending a day alone up here, how about having String take me to the other place, and settle that point once and for all?" asked Mitsuitei as the helicopter eased downward toward the camp. "That would still leave Hans and you to form another team for whatever else you want to do." "That should be all right. It'll depend, though, on whether String thinks it's safe for a man to work alone on that shelf." The proposition was put to McLaughlin as soon as the machine was landed. To Lampert's surprise, the guide gave a qualified approval. "Remember," he concluded, "I don't know what lives on the cliffs. It's country I've never covered. All I'm saying is that no Viridian animal I know of could get there, except flying ones; and they're nothing to IF worry about, especially in the daytime. I'd like to go with you to look over the place when you take him up tomorrow, and strongly recommend that he carry a communicator as well as a weapon; but unless I see something you haven't mentioned when I do go, I would say it was all right... Once more the Felodon reached the river, but this time it did not cross. It was no longer heading straight for the helicopter. Hills had not altered its course, but the cliffs had. They formed a wall on its right which was too nearly vertical for its agility and strength. Even this barrier, however, had caused no visible hesitation or doubt. It had swerved, followed the base of the wall to the point where the river emerged and plunged in as promptly as it had done before. Few amphibians have ever lost the art of swimming when their larval gills vanished; the feeble current meant nothing to the Felodon. It turned upstream and went on its way. IV N domi Sulewayo had pursued his occupation on terraces of Earth's Grand Canyon, on cliffsides of Fomalhaut Four's highest range and in badlands on the dimly lighted Antares Twelve. The physical hazards of his present position troubled him little. McLaughlin had agreed that the ledge where the paleontologist had been left was inaccessible to the larger carnivores, and had merely issued a final warning about the green world poisonous "lizards." The primary danger, as nearly as Sulewayo could see, was that something might happen to the helicopter. He certainly could not rejoin the others on foot. He was facing a sheer wall some sixty feet high. A score of yards behind him the terrace ended in another straight drop of several hundred feet. A quarter of a mile on either side, the flat surface ended; to the west, by narrowing until the two walls became one; at the other end, it was cut off as far as he was concerned by a joint penetrating apparently the full depth of the canyon. There were several other cracks in the wall facing him. Like those in the tributary canyon explored by Krendall and Mitsuitei, these were packed with volcanic detritus. This was hard to reconcile with the suggestion that erosion had been long at work. In such a case, the higher portions should have washed away long before the material found at the canyon bottom. Examination at close range suggested a possible explanation. The tuff at this point was fairly well cemented. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the joints had been present before the mountains had started to rise; that a volcanic mud flow had filled them with detritus; that the new material had then been cemented by dissolved material coming from above. This would make the top levels of the tuff more resistant than those lower down, where the cementing minerals had not reached, and account for what had been seen so far. Wm fyviw The hypothesis also implied a plentiful supply of fossils. Volcanic mud flowing into a crack in the ground should carry plenty with it. Sulewayo set to work with a hammer, and was presently soaking with perspiration. He was tempted to remove some of his clothing; but this had been treated chemically to repel Viridian insects and caution prevailed. McLaughlin had not mentioned any dangerous biters or stingers, and in all probability his blood would not be to. the taste of any such creatures on this world -- but if the mosquito or tick did not learn that fact until after it had tried, Sulewayo would hardly profit by it. In any case the temptation to strip passed quickly. In only a few minutes, his attention was fully occupied by his work; for the expected fossils proved to be present in very satisfactory numbers. Most seemed rather fragmentary. Apparently the original creatures had been tumbled about rather badly before the medium hardened. However, the remains were definitely bones, as he had expected and hoped. For some time Sulewayo was occupied alternately digging out more fragments and trying to fit the more hopeful-looking specimens together, although he had no success at the latter job. Then evidence of a more complete set of remains appeared, and he instantly slowed down to the incredibly meticulous procedure which marks a paleontologist anywhere in the universe. At this time he had cut perhaps IF a foot into the tuff for the full three-foot width of the crack and from terrace level up to about his own height. In spite of its apparently firm texture, the rock was extremely soft; and the old question about erosion was reappearing. Big pockets of extremely crumbly material had been responsible for most of his speed. Now, however, with the usual perversity of the inanimate, a firmer substance was encountered, apparently encasing the bones he suspected of existing a little farther on. This combined with his increased care to bring almost to a halt the removal of rock from the cleft. T he bones were there. Perhaps they had been betrayed by a discoloration of the rock too faint for him to have noticed consciously; perhaps something more subtle is involved in the makeup of a successful field worker in paleontology, but as flake after flake of the matrix fell away under his attack a shape gradually took form. At first a single bone which might have been an unusually short digit or an unusually long carpal -- or, of course, something totally unrelated to either -- was outlined. Then another, close enough to suggest that their lifetime relationship might have been maintained. And another -- Sulewayo failed to hear the approach of the helicopter until its rotor wash from a hundred feet above lifted the dust about his ankles. Knowing that Lampert would be having trouble holding that close to the cliffside, the paleontologist reluctantly hooked his equipment to his belt and started up the ladder. Five minutes later they were back in the camp, with Krendall listening eagerly to Sulewayo's description of his find. "It's certainly a vertebrate, Hans. That stuff can't possibly be shell or wood. It's almost certainly a land dweller -- " "Likely enough in that sort of rock, anyway." " -- because I got enough uncovered to be nearly certain that it's a foot. Certainly a limb that would not be needed by a swimmer." "Like an ichthyosaur?" queried Lampert innocently. Sulewayo grinned. "Quite possibly. More likely one of our ubiquitous amphibids, though. Certainly something worth getting out, since the general idea is to get an evolutionary sequence of some sort." "I suppose that means you'll want me to date the eruption which filled all these cracks with detritus, then." "Sure. But there's no hurry. Tomorrow will do." Lampert found he had no answer to this, and Mitsuitei managed to edge into the discussion. He had spent the day with McLaughlin, as he had hoped; and mere failure to find paving stones had not damped his ardor. "I suppose you and Hans will both want to go up the cliff tomorrow," he remarked. "In that case, Rob might as well stay with String and me. It will speed up the digging back at my hill." "Are you still scraping dirt off that thing?" asked Sulewayo in mock urprise. "Didn't one day indicate that it was a joint pattern like the rest?" "Not yet. We haven't gotten down to rock over any place where your cracks should be. The root tangle of the taller trees slows the digging. I admit the rock is limestone like the cliff, but there's still no evidence why those trees grow so regularly." "That's just what we've been saying all along; but you keep looking for the remains of a city." "I gathered, Ndomi, from your recent conversation that you were digging for a land animal on the basis of three bones. Either you are working on hunch, which destroys your right to criticize, or you are reasoning from knowledge not available to the rest of us. In the latter case, you should be at least openminded enough to credit me with equivalent knowledge in my own field." It was Sulewayo's turn to have nothing to say; he had honestly supposed that the archaeologist had been taking the "city" hypothesis no more seriously than the rest. He apologized at once, and peace was restored. Lampert sealed it by agreeing to Mitsuitei's suggestion. The rest of the evening was spent in detail planning by the two groups. At sunset, all turned in to sleep behind the protection of the electrified fence. Even the guide regarded this as an adequate safeguard. A pparently his opinion was shared by at least one other. The Felodon had spent most of the day under water, part of the time in the canyon fairly close to Lampert and Krendall and later down the stream by the site where the guide and archaeologist had been working. At neither place had it emerged, or shown the slightest sign of wanting to attack. McLaughlin's reference to the strange instinct of the creatures seemed justified. It certainly could not see the men, but just as certainly was aware of their presence. What it was about the alien visitors which exercised such an influence on the minute brain of the carnivore, no one could have said -- then. Any watcher who had supposed, from its earlier actions, that it was moved by a desire for new and different taste sensations would have had to discard the notion now. With the men safely settled down behind their fence, the beast suddenly turned back downstream. It had returned to the camp site at the end of the working day. In an hour it was in the jungle below the canyon; in another it had killed, and was feeding as it had the moment before the hum of the helicopter had first attracted its attention. This time it finished the meal in peace; and once finished, did not show immediate signs of its former obsession. Instead it sought a lair and relaxed, blending so perfectly into the undergrowth and remaining so silent that within a few minutes small animals were passing only feet away from the concealed killer. Robin Lampert was only a fair statistician, but if he had been acIF quainted with the moves of that Felodon during the last few days, take oath that more than chance was involved. He would probably have wanted to dissect the animal in search of whatever mechanism was controlling it. But Robin Lampert knew nothing of the creature. Neither did Takehiko Mitsuitei; and that was rather unfortunate, for the lair it had selected was on the same hill as the archaeologist's digging site, and a scant quarter mile away from the pit Mitsuitei had left. T he rising of the green sun was not visible the next morning. The ever-present mist had thickened into a solid layer of cloud, and hissing rain cut the visibility to a few hundred yards. The helicopter felt its way down to the hill with radar, landed on the river, taxied on its floats to the bank and was moored. Lampert, McLaughlin and Mitsuitei emerged, the scientists laden with apparatus, and started up the hill toward the site. The guide carried only his weapons. The equipment was not of the sort Mitsuitei was accustomed to using. It actually belonged to Lampert. Normally it would not be used in an archaeological dig, any more than it would have been had they been fossil hunting; for neither activity takes kindly to any sort of automatic digging machinery. Lampert had suggested its use, however, in order to get a rapid idea of the nature of the soil cover, bed rock and joint structure of the hill. If evidence warranted, it would be abandoned for the slower methods of digging. If not, a few hours would permit them to learn as much about the area as many days of work with slower equipment. The hole Mitsuitei had already dug was part way up the hill, in a space cleared of underbrush by a flamethrower. Several other such clearings were in the neighborhood. As the archaeologist had said, he had made more than one attempt at digging which had been frustrated by roots. Somewhat to Lampert's surprise, it was possible to tell even from ground level the orientation of the taller trees which had been so prominent from the air. Even the smaller plants showed signs of some underground influence. Between the tallest trees, tracing out the straight lines the men had seen from above, the underbrush formed an almost impenetrable wall. Elsewhere foot travel was easy, though the surface was by no means barren. Lampert understood how there might indeed have been difficulty in digging on one of the fertile lines, and admitted as much. "That's the trouble," responded Mitsuitei. "I'd like to get down right at such a point, to see what's underneath. It seems to me that paving might be responsible, if they'd used the right materials. Lots of civilizations have used organic substances which decay to good fertilizer. Then there might be the remains of a sewage system, which would account for richer soil -- " "After the time which must have passed since the place was buried?" "Tt has happened. In such a case, of course, trace elements rather than nitrates or phosphates are responsible. That's what I suspect here." "But wouldn't it be better to dig where you actually have -- in the middle of a block, if that's what it Saun Lampert nodded and proceeded to assemble his equipment. The "mole" was a cylinder about five centimeters in diameter and three times as long. A cutter-lined mouth occupied one end, while the other was attached to a snaky appendage which was wound on a fair sized drum. A set of controls knobs and is? Then you'd be fairly certain to hit a building, which should be richer ground than a street." "Only if you actually strike artifacts. The building itself might be much less well preserved than a paved street. However, you are the one who's handling that mechanical mole. Dig where you want, and see what you can learn about this hilltop. Just get me at least a couple of cores from my 'streets' before you're done, please." indicators were mounted near the center of the drum. The geophysicist set the cylinder on the ground mouth downward, pushing it into the soft earth far enough to assure its remaining upright. Then he turned to his controls and after a moment, with very little noise, the cylinder began to sink into the ground. In a few seconds it was out of sight, trailing its snaky neck after it. The men watched it in silence. IF Perhaps thirty seconds after it disappeared, there was a minor convulsion in the neck, a momentarily rising hum from the machinery, and a plug of dirt about two centimeters in diameter and five long was ejected from a port in the center of the drum. This was seized by Lampert and examined briefly, then tossed aside. "The soil is pretty deep," he remarked. "How far down did that come from?" asked Mitsuitei. "One meter. That's the sampling interval I've set in it, for now. If it meets anything much harder or easier to penetrate, it will warn me and I'll grab them more frequently." Conversation lapsed while two more samples arrived and were inspected. Then a light flickered on the panel, and Lampert reset one of his knobs; and almost immediately a core of light gray limestone was produced. "Apparently the same stuff as the cliffs," said Lampert after examining the specimen. "Do you want to go any deeper, or drill a few more holes to get an idea of the contour?" "How fast will that thing go through limestone?" "A couple of centimeters per minute. It's too small to pack a real power unit." "Give it five minutes, just to make sure it isn't a building block." "Ten centimeters wouldn't give you a whole building block." "A sample from that far inside one would tell me what I want to know. You rock-chippers don't seem to think that archaeology is a science yet. Let me have that first core, too." Mitsuitei looked confident to the point of being cocky, and Lampert let the mole burrow on. The second core came in due time, and the little man set merrily to work with tiny chips from the two stone cylinders, a pinch of the lowest soil sample which had been acquired, a small comparison microscope and a kit full of tiny reagent bottles. Lampert used the time the tests consumed in reversing the mole and resetting the equipment on a new spot. By the time the little mechanism had gnawed its way once more to rock, Mitsuitei was forced to admit that the formation appeared to be natural. He did not seem as disheartened by the discovery as might have been expected. He simply waited for more cores, his narrow face reflecting nothing but the utter absorption Lampert knew he experienced whenever a problem arose in his line. In spite of his apparent tendency to jump to conclusions, Takehiko Mitsuitei was an experienced and respected member of his profession. Lampert knew enough about his cept his instructions for the present. A series of holes was drilled, from the original position toward one of the "streets" forty yards away from it. After each the archaeologist admitted with perfect cheerfulness that there was nothing inconsistent with the idea that the hill was a perfectly natural formation. He still insisted, however, that the regular lines of trees, reinforced as they were by the undergrowth pattern, required explanation. Lampert admitted this, but felt that he knew what the explanation would be. After all, volcanic residue is more than likely to contain the trace elements vegetation requires, even on Viridis. Finally the time came to get verification -- or the opposite. The flamethrower had to be used this time, and for several minutes clouds of steam swirled about the men as its blue-white tongue fought the sappy, rain-soaked undergrowth. Then the mole and its controls were wheeled into place, and the little robot once more nosed its way out of sight. "I don't suppose you want any samples above the regular rock level, do you?" asked Lampert as the machine disappeared. "I think it would be best if we took them as usual," was the reply. "For one thing, we should try to learn the depth at which the soil composition changes -- we are at least agreed that it changes in some manner, after all." "True enough." The geophysicist set his controls, and the process continued -- a process familiar now to McLaughlin as well as the scientists, for the guide had caught numerous glimpses of what was going on while heprowled about the work area on self-imposed guard duty. Mitsuitei took the crumbly soil cores as they came, examined them quickly -- they were arriving every few seconds -- and filed them in numbered compartments in a specimen case he had opened. Detailed stratigraphy would come later For some time there was no gross evidence of change in the soil; not, in fact, until his first case had been filled. "Can you stop that thing for a moment, Rob?" he asked at this point. "I don't want to lose track of these, and will have to hold up while I open a new case." "All right. I thought you'd want to stop for thought soon anyway." "Why?" "Because the mole is nearly four meters down, well below the depth at which we hit bedrock before, and is still in soil." "Eh? But -- but it's still ordinary soil; none of your volcanic ash." "Tuff had been eroded out of a lot of the joints in the cliffs. There's no reason to expect it to be at the same level as the surrounding rock." "That's true." Mitsuitei paused in thought for a moment. "If we keep on going straight down, we may just be working into a natural crack, as you say Might it not be better to drill several holes within a few square yards here, to determine whether it is a narrow joint such as you expect or an actual edge to the rock at this level?" "Maybe the edge of a roof, eh?" Lampert chuckled, but spoke in a manner which could give no offense. "I can do better than that. Don't need to pull up and start over; simply drill horizontally from where we are now. Shouldn't take long to get dimensions, if that's all you want." He halted the robot momentarily, and from a compartment in the drum removed something like a small theodolite mounting. This he set up on a short tripod over the IF point where the neck of the mole emerged from the ground, and set a pointer at right angles to the line of tall trees. Then he started the digging again. V F our starts in as many different directions and twenty minutes of time showed fairly conclusively that the line of vegetation which had given rise to the "street" theory was growing along a straight crack, apparently a fairly ordinary joint, in the limestone. While several more holes would have to be drilled to prove it, even Mitsuitei was willing to admit that in all probability the remaining lines would be found to be over similar cracks. "You must admit, though, that the regularity of this joint pattern is pretty unusual," the archaeologist said at length. "It's far from being unknown," Lampert replied. "I got my first large taste of it in my student days back on Earth. Fly over the mesa country in southwestern North America sometime. Most of the joints there are invisible from a distance, of course; but at the edge of a butte where weathering is most prominent the blocks have frequently started to separate, and the thing looks as though it had been put together from outsize bricks." "Hmph. Seem to remember something of the sort myself, now that you mention it. I did some digging in that area, too. I shouldn't have connected that sort of country with what we have here, though." "Different meat; same skeleton," replied Lampert. "But how about this volcanic ash, or mud, or whatever it is, which at least fills the joints we saw in the cliff? That's not so usual, is it?" "Not in my experience. But granting the joints and the volcanoes, there's nothing really surprising about it. Incidentally, we don't know that this crack we're standing on bore down again to make sure. At least we may get some idea of the date of the volcanic action compared to that of the orogeny that tilted the block where we're camped. If there's tuff down here too, it will substantiate the idea that the vulcanism is the older." "Why? Couldn't ash have settled down here as well as up there at substantially the same time?" "It could. But I'd bet a fairly respectable sum that the tuff we saw in the canyon was from a mud flow, not a fall of airborne ash. That could hardly have reached the top of the cliffs -- actually, the opposite slope of the mountains, where Sulewayo is working -- and this area simultaneously." "Maybe from different eruptions? I get the impression that this world has a slight tendency to produce volcanic fields rather than individual cones or flows." "Might be. Chemistry will probably settle that question." During the latter part of this discussion Lampert had directed the mole once more downwards, and every half meter of travel another core was added to the collection. At six and a half meters below the soil the first solid specimen arrived; the others had been held together only by roots. This one, however, caused the two scientists to look at each other. Lampert nodded slowly, with a smile. Mitsuitei gave a shrug, and let an expression of resignation play over his usually impassive features. The core was tuff, apparently identical with that in the cliffs to the east. It even contained fossils. I as well be taken over by the paleontology department," Lampert commented finally. "I suppose they'll at least want to compare fossils in the tilted and level strata." "I suppose so." Mitsuitei was turning the little cylinder over and over in his hand. "Tell me, Rob. what's this little speck of green?" "Copper salts of one sort or another, I suppose." Lampert was not greatly interested. "A lot of secondary minerals form in and under volcanic detritus. On this world, carbonates like malachite should form quite readily." "Why should it form in a regular thread like this?" "You mean a vein? Hard to tell precisely. Varying rates of water seepage, varying degrees of oxygen or carbon dfoxide penetration, varying degrees of compactness in the rock where the stuff is formed -- " "I don't mean a vein. This is in a cylindrical body going right through the core from one side to the other, as though there had been a copper wire there originally which had been attacked by soil acids." "Let's see. You're right. It's hardly an ordinary vein, though your suggestion seems a trifle far fetched. The paleontologists can probably furnish an idea. Maybe a vine or even a worm buried in the mud flow acted as the precipitating agent for copper salts in the subsequent seepage -- I've seen beautiful fossils of pyrite which had been formed that way." "But this shows no trace of structure, except for its exterior shape." "Isn't a really well preserved structure the exception rather than the rule in fossils?" "I suppose so. Still, I'd like to know just how far, and which way, this green thread goes. I'd also like to know whether there are dilute copper deposits spread through this rock, which could be concentrated in the way you suggest." "The first could be learned by taking enough cores. The other would call for some very careful analysis of samples which had been selected with a very sedulous eye kept on the stratigraphy. You know that; you must have done that sort of thing looking for carbon-fourteen samples, at times." "Yes, I see that. Could you make such analyses here?" "No, except for the mere presence of copper. The cores would have to go back to a well equipped lab. Still, if you want to get them, it's all right with me. Problems were made to be solved. I'll admit this one doesn't seem very exciting to me, but I can use your data after you finish for work of my own. You should wind up with material for a IP pretty complete geochemical picture of this neighborhood. Shall I get the cores for you?" "Yes, please." "Silly question. All right." The mole was drawn up a short distance, and sent questing downward once more at an angle to the original shaft, branching off a short distance above the level from which the copper deposit had come. Again and again the process was repeated, each time at a slightly different bearing from the central hole; and Mitsuitei examined each core for traces of green. At last he found it, piercing the little cylinder of rock as the other had done; and then, at his suggestion, Lampert reset the mole to get a sample in the opposite direction from the one which had furnished the new specimen. T his also checked positive; and four more samples, taken along the same line at various distances, all did the same. Apparently the line of green extended for some distance, about parallel both to the surface of the ground and the trend of the joint in which it was buried. Mitsuitei was radiant. "I'm going down to that level if I have to come back with an expedition of my own! If that's a fossil worm, it's worth getting the whole length anyway -- but I don't believe it is. I -- " "That will take a lot of time, you know," Lampert pointed out mildly. "Certainly I know! Even if I use your fast excavator down to the tuff level, I'll have to do detail work from then on. What of it?" "Well, the others may have jobs they want to do -- " "Then they can do them! What are we here for, anyway? I thought it was to investigate the past of this planet! Ndomi and Hansare doing that their own way right now. Why can't I? I'm an archaeologist, and I came along to do any archaeological work that presented itself to do; this is the only thing of the sort anyone's seen so far. I know what you're thinking. Maybe you're partly right. I certainly won't bet any money that this thread of green is a fossil telephone wire; but it's as likely to be that as anything else you've suggested, and I'm going down to that level and sift the whole volume. Hans and Ndomi can have any fossils I find if that will make you happier -- and if one of them says he has no use for fossils he didn't dig himself. I'll make him eat his words. I can identify, locate and report on anything that turns up in a rock as well as any of those jigsaw-puzzle people; and I can do it in mud, too, which is more than any of them could manage." "Don't get hot under the collar. If you can help it on this planet. You sound as though one of the boys had been giving you a lecture on the importance of knowing what strata a given series of specimens represent." "Not one of our boys -- they have a little more sense. But there was a young paleontologist when I was covering the Antares worlds whose memory still makes my blood pressure go up. Never mind me; that's not important. But I want to make this dig." "It will tie up machines, however freely we can spare time," Lampert said slowly. "I'll tell you: how about this? We spend the rest of the day getting cores from other points along these cracks. For one thing, we ought to know more about the structure of the hill, and for another, we might find more of your 'wires. After all, the chance of our hitting the only one around is pretty remote. I can't quite see a single dropped piece of copper wire showing up in the first two days of a project like this." "I neither said nor implied that this should be the only piece. I don't doubt for a moment that there are others, whether they are wires or worms." "Sorry. Well, we take these cores back to camp this evening, together with any others we find of the same sort, and let Hans and Ndomi look them over. If they don't turn out to be something that the boys recognize and can classify right off the bat, we come back tomorrow with all the digging machinery you want, and dig until you either find all you want, satisfy yourself that there's nothing here or find something which obviously requires more specialized attention than we can give it. All right?" "Nothing could be fairer. Let's go!" T he discussion in camp that evening was animated beyond anything the guide had heard. His original estimate of these men as relatively quiet specimens underwent a sharp revision. Mitsuitei's report of the day's activity at his site had, it is true, been delivered quite calmly; but from then on matters grew progressively livelier. This was not caused by opposition to the archaeologist's plans. The others were all in favor of remaining, for their own reasons. However, the question of just what was likely to be found gave rise to much rather barbed comment on Sulewayo's part. "I don't see how you can expect to find any trace of civilized work here," he said flatly at one point. "The animal and plant life of this planet is at a stage of evolution corresponding to something like Earth's Pennsylvanian age, when the amphibians were the highest known forms of life. I'm not saying that there couldn't be such a thing as an intelligent amphibian. But I do say that the normal set of evolutionary forces which, on both Earth and Viridis, produced creatures of the amphibian pattern could have done that or produced an intelligent fish; not both. If the latter ever evolved, it failed; for the amphibians -- pardon me, amphibids -- are here. To get an intelligent amphibid on this world will -- or would, if the sun were to last long enough -- require another orogenic period with the accompanying climatic changes. Then you'd stand a considerably higher chance of getting reptiles instead, if the comparative work done on over four hundred planets carries any meaning." "I don't doubt the value of the work at all. You are very probably IF correct. It did not occur to me to expect remains of intelligent amphibians. I saw no reason to presuppose that anything in the way of artifacts which I might find would necessarily be native to this planet." "You think there were other visitors from outside the Beta Librae system?" "The possibility certainly exists. Here we are." "But for Pete's sake! Do you really expect that they stayed long enough to build a city, or do you think you have the remains of a camp like ours, or what?" "I don't think anything. It has been suggested that such people did come, and stayed long enough to -- " "And you think you've found them." "I think nothing, except that I have found, with Rob's help, something which neither his professional knowledge, nor mine, nor even yours, is able to explain; and I think an explanation is desirable. I hope you won't consider me discourteous for pointing out that each time you have tried to accuse me of jumping to conclusions, you have been able to do so only by jumping to some yourself. I might further add that the suggestion that this planet had been stocked with its present supply of life types by visitors from space was advanced by a paleontologist, not by one of my colleagues. I gather he could not understand how life could evolve to the state it shows the planet seems to have been solid. I neither support nor deride the idea; I simply want to gather data, in an attempt to explain a much simpler question -- why are narrow threads of copper compounds to be found every few feet in the volcanic limestone hill, and why are those threads always nearly horizontal? You and Hans say they are not organic fossils, and I accept your conclusion. Rob says that there is no copper in that rock, detectable with his equipment, except within a few say nothing except that I have never seen such a thing before. Under the circumstances, I fail to understand where you get the idea that I think there is a city built by the people who stocked this world thirty million years ago buried under that hill. I know I said 'city' when I first saw it, and I still think I was justified in the opinion; I have now seen evidence which causes me to admit that the vegetation pattern was not caused by artificial structures, and I dismiss the original hypothesis. I still want to dig there, and in accordance with Rob's agreement I am going to dig there, with the assistance of anyone who chooses to help. I know you want to go back to your set of leg bones in the cliff, and have no objection to your doing so. Even I can now see, on the basis of your description, that you are uncovering the fossil of a land animal; and I agree that it is of great importance to get it out intact, if possible. But if I can see the importance and even the nature of your work, why can't you do the same for mine?" The little man was leaning forward and staring intensely into Sulewayo's face by the time he finished this harangue, and Ndomi once more felt a trifle ashamed of himself. Lampert, however, saved him the need of formulating an apology. A to ridicule your work in any way, Take," he said. "We all realize perfectly that an underground phenomenon which cannot be explained at sight either by geology, paleontology or archaeology is something which requires investigation. T imagine that the best plan will be for String and me to go with you tomorrow, while the others continue their stone-cutting. Hans, just how far along are you, anyway?" The older paleontologist thought for a moment. "We don't really know," he said at last. "Of course, we aren't trying to get the individual bones completely free of the matrix; that will take somebody months or years. We're uncovering just enough to determine the extent of the specimen, so we can take it all out in one block -- or more, of course, if it's too big. So far we can only guess at how big it is. We've uncovered with certainty two feet, and gone about hilf a meter along one of the attached legs. They seem to be extending straight back into the cliff, so in effect we're cutting a tunnel beside the thing. Assuming it had two main leg sections, as most of the present animals on both Earth and Viridis appear to have, we're about halfway between knee and hip joint. Of course, it might turn out to be the Viridian equivalent of a horse or chicken. In that case, we're about half way between ankle and knee. We certainly have several feet yet to penetrate before we can outline the whole block, assuming that the specimen is essentially complete. Several days, I would guess." "Can you use any sort of power apparatus for any of your cuts?" "I don't like to, on general principles, but -- yes, we could, with actually very little risk. If you have some sort of rock saw whose cutting part can get fine control, I'd be tunnel away from the actual specimen." "I have. We'll take you up there first thing in the morning, and I'll go down with you and show you how to use it before going on with Take and String." "Who holds the 'copter in place while you climb down the ladder, give your lesson and come back?" asked the guide. "Hmph. I forgot about that. All right, I'll break out the machinery and give the lesson right now." He got up and strode to the helicopter. McLaughlin covered him from the fence to the aircraft, but nothing dangerous appeared. The geophysicist disappeared inside, and returned a moment later with a compact metal case under his arm. The guide holstered his weapon as the gate in the fence closed once more... Actually, the Felodon was miles downstream. It had spent the day in its chosen lair, apparently indifferent to the doings of the men a IF few hundred yards away. With the coming of darkness -- real darkness this time, for the rain clouds cut off both the moonlight and the night glow from the upper atmosphere -- it had emerged, hunted, killed and fed as before, apparently unhampered by the lack of light. By midnight it was back in the same lair, paunch distended, as close to sleep as its coldblooded kind ever came. VI T he rain was still falling when the clouds lightened once more to the rising sun. Lam pert was getting used to navigating the canyon by radar, and was an excellent pilot anyway; so he did not have too much trouble in locating the shelf where Sulewayo and Krendall had been working. Getting the men down to it was not particularly difficult, though rather nerve-racking. Krendall went first, unburdened except for his personal equipment. Then he steadied the ladder for Sulewayo who had the cutter strapped across his shoulders. The steadying hand was needed. Climbing down a rope ladder when loaded "top-heavy" can be an extremely awkward bit of activity. Had the pilot above been any less capable, it would probably have been impossible. The ledge was wet, but fortunately not particularly slippery. The men set their equipment on the ground at the point where their cut entered the crack in the cliff, and without delay set to work. The tunnel was deep enough now to shelter the one actually cutting from the rain, so at first they took turns at this operation. The cutting machine Lampert had provided was a sort of diamondtoothed chain saw capable of a twometer extension. Ordinarily it was not the sort of thing a paleontologist would consider using so close to a specimen; but the men .were fairly sure by now of the general extent of the thing they were uncovering. Even so, they used the saw only on the side of their tunnel away from the visible remains. They speedily widened the passage enough to permit them both to get inside and work on the face of the exposed material; but they still used hand tools whenever there was any suspicion that a bone might be about to appear. Work proceeded several times as fast as it had the day before. They tried cutting another tunnel on the opposite side of the fossil, but this proved rather awkward. The creature was close to this side of the crack, and they had to cut limestone as well as the softer tuff. The saw proved capable of handling this -- it would have handled granite without trouble -- but went a little more slowly. Eventually, however, the two men were working on opposite sides of the fossil, each in a tunnel extending some two meters into the cliff face. Half a day's work uncovered the leg bones sufficiently to show that Krendall's first idea had been right. There were only the two major joints, each a trifle shorter than the corresponding parts of the human skeleton. The lower leg was single rather than double, however; knee and ankle both consisted of balland-socket joints; and with this fact determined the men paused for thought. "Now why," mused Krendall aloud, "should any sort of creature need that articulation?" "Could that foot be a hand instead?" asked Sulewayo. Of course, questions like that should have awaited the results of detailed examination in a laboratory. Equally of course, the two men proceeded to clear one of the "feet" a little more thoroughly in order to find out for themselves. The answer was not helpful, though. "He might have picked up a twig with it, but he couldn't have held it any more tightly than I can in my toes," was Krendall's verdict. "It's a bigger and flatter foot than ours. But it's a foot -- nothing more." "Maybe a swimming organ on the side?" suggested Sulewayo cautiousiy "Seems doubtful. If that joint evolved for such a purpose, I should think there'd be a corresponding modification in the foot bones, too -- say a flattening such as you see in the paddles of some of the Mesozoic sea reptiles of Earth." "Reasonable." "But not necessarily right. That I admit. Anything else strike you?" "Yes, though it makes the joints still more unbelievable." "What?" "The foot itself Unless some rather remarkable distortion has occurred, it had both longitudinal and transverse arches, like yours and mine -- which suggests strongly that this thing's ancestors had been walking erect on two legs for some hundreds of thousands of generations." Krendall raised his eyebrows at this, and silently examined the bony structure before them for several minutes. "I -- hadn't -- spotted -- that," he said slowly. He looked in silence for several more seconds. Then the two men, moved by a single thought, went to the other end of the exposed leg and began to clear the hip joint and pelvic region. They worked almost in silence, understanding each other perfectly, like an experienced surgical team; and gradually the equivalent of a pelvic girdle and lower end of a spinal column were cleared sufficiently to show their general nature. It was at this point that the helicopter returned; but neither man noticed the fact until McLaughlin had called several times from the open ladder hatch. They climbed silently and thoughtfully up to the flyer; but Mitsuitei's first question started the talk flowing. It did not end for a long, long time. K rendall, with difficulty, held interruptions of his more volatile companion. "There can be only the slightest doubt that this thing we're uncovering walked erect on two legs," he reported. "The feet; the way the pelvis is modified to support internal organs; the fusing of the lowest IF VQtfH #JN TA #Z vertebrae with the pelvic girdle to form a weight carrying foundation -- they all point the same way. The only thing hard to understand is the knee and ankle joints. If we had them, it would be virtually impossible for us to hold our legs rigid. Perhaps some really remarkable musculature -- " "Or a cartilage structure which has not been preserved," cut in Sulewayo. "Or some such thing as that, would explain it. I don't know. The creature is good for several Ph.D. theses just as it lies -- and probably an equal number of nervous collapses when we get it out." "I find myself strongly desirous of seeing its skull," remarked Lampert. Sulewayo glanced at him sharply. "You, too?" asked the young paleontologist. "I was hoping I was the only one crazy enough to have thought of that." Mitsuitei smiled openly, an almost unheard-of act for him. He said nothing for a moment, but everyone saw him; and even McLaughlin understood the thought. After a sufficiently long pause, he asked a question. "Have you uncovered enough of this creature's structure to guess at any evolutionary connection -- or lack of it -- with the amphibids we already know on this world?" "I'd hate to take any oaths," replied Krendall. "The legs, which we've seen most of, are different in detail; but they at least correspond in general with what we find here. The only really significant point there would be the single shinbone. In that it resembles Viridian land life in general -- these animals don't have the separate tibia and fibula characteristic of the usual run of Earthly land vertebrates. It really proves nothing about what we're all thinking, of course." "I am tempted to work with you gentlemen tomorrow," muttered the archaeologist. "Why? Didn't your investigation pan out?" "It is harder for me to say than for you, so far. To dig a pit, big enough not only to work in but to cover a useful amount of ground, in a driving rain, is quite a job even with Rob's machines -- which I would never use were I not sure that there is nothing of importance above the limestone level. I have gotten down to the rock over an area three meters square, which is very good going; but I shall undoubtedly find the pit full of water tomorrow, as we have not yet improvised a really satisfactory drainage system. I cannot -- or at least will not -- use machines inside the crack in the limestone; so it will be some time before I get down to our mysterious green threads." "Then it would seem that the best we can do is go on as we have," said Lampert. "The only change might be if one more man were to help at Take's dig. But I don't suppose either Hans or Ndomi would care to leave his own job at the moment, and actually there's not much more to do at the hill which can be done by anyone but Take himself. I'll continue to help him as long as it's a question of moving mud, but IF after that he'll have to do his own sifting. String is automatically on guard duty at the hill, so there's not much change we can make. Though I must say I haven't seen anything dangerous yet, in that jungle." "Those animals are like crows," remarked the guide. "We used to have 'em on the farm, back on Earth. They'd be all over a freshly planted field, while no one was around. Come out yelling -- they don't move; come out with a gun, and they're gone -- unless you'd happened to forget to load it; then they sat and laughed at you. If you're suggesting, Doctor, that I should relax the guard duty and lend a hand with digging, I veto the idea -- and not because I'm afraid of getting my hands dirty." C C T won't say I didn't have A some such thought, but I accept your ruling " smiled Lampert. There was silence for a moment; then Krendall reverted to the earlier subject. "You know," he said, "if this thing we've found does turn out to have been intelligent, it will hardly solve any of the existing problems about Viridis." ' "Why not?" asked Sulewayo in some surprise. "We still won't know whether it's native to the planet or not, unless we can establish a relatively complete evolutionary sequence leading to this form. If we do that, the question of speed of evolution here gets worse than ever; if we don't no one will be sure whether or not we ought to look for buried spaceports or send out expeditions to find the planet they might have come from." "The latter would be something of a waste of time," remarked McLaughlin. "Hunting one planet in the galaxy is like hunting one log of wood on Viridis." No one contradicted this. All had seen the galactic star clouds from outside planetary atmosphere. "It seems to me, speaking as an amateur in your fields, gentlemen," said Mitsuitei, "that the mere discovery of an intelligent creature in the Viridian fossil deposits would, on the basis of our present knowledge of the mechanisms of evolution, strongly support the idea that this world was stocked from others. I realize that our knowledge may not be sufficient to justify us in that conclusion. But it is certainly not great enough to justify any other." "You seem to have something there, Take," admitted Krendall. "If this thing does turn out to have room for a brain in its skull, I suppose the next ten conventions of the Interstellar Archaeological Society, or whatever you call it, will be meeting at Emeraude." "I shouldn't be at all surprised. So far, my profession and yours have not overlapped, due to a considerable factor of difference in the time spans covered. But it is just possible that we would be holding joint meetings, in the event you describe." "This meeting is changing from discussion to speculation," Lampert said drily. "I would be the last to decry the value of imagination; but actually we are as likely to face the need for entirely new hypotheses as the result of our work here, as to find support for any now in existence. I can speculate with the best of you, but for goodness sake let's not take any speculation too seriously. I don't really believe that some big-headed descendants of Ndomi's fossil are listening in on me right now!" Even Sulewayo admitted that this was rather unlikely, and the conversation turned to other matters until darkness fell. No one had trouble sleeping. The loud drumming of the rain on the metal roof meant nothing to field workers with their experience. If anything, the sound was soothing, giving a perpetual reminder that there was a roof. Such protection is not always available, in that line of work... The Felodon seemed to have lost its traveling propensity. Once more it went out into the utter darkness solely to get a meal. It accomplished this as quickly as ever, though its eyes must have been useless and the hiss and rumble of falling water drowned and buried any sounds which would have been useful in tracking. Back in the same lair, fullfed, it drowsed once more.  M itsuitei had been almost right in his prediction that the pit would be full of water. Only the fact that the land sloped a trifle -- they were not right on top of the little hill -- had saved it. As it was, several feet of water were in the bottom, and a good deal of mud had washed in from the two sides facing the edges of the crack. The other two, much better braced by deepreaching roots, had held firm. After some thought, Lampert used the little robot again. He started it at the bottom of the pit on the downhill side and drove almost horizontally toward the river. The two hundred meters of "neck" permitted the mole to emerge from the slope farther down. When it was withdrawn, a small 'drain hole was obtained. Several more of these were drilled, and the pit lost its water fairly rapidly. There was still the problem of getting into the crack itself, which of course would involve digging below the level of the drain holes. Lampert, using the same excavator which had made the pit itself, finally provided a fair solution by digging a set of ditches around the larger hole; and since the opening itself was quite well protected by overhanging trees, Mitsuitei had only drainage from the surrounding soil to contend with. Two hours after arriving, therefore. he had a relatively clear working space. The bottom of the pit was limestone, exposed by the complete removal of the overlying soil, some three meters square. Across it ran the crack, a trifle less than a meter wide, still packed with dirt. Everything was muddy -- limestone, projecting roots, and Mitsuitei himself. A slender log with branches cut to ten-centimeter stubs leaned against one corner, forming a rough ladder and giving entrance and egress to and from the site. IF The machinery which had done the original digging was at one side. Mitsuitei did not expect to need it again. He was now equipped with a hand shovel, and seemed about to use it. Lampert, standing at the edge of the pit, felt the incongruity, but managed not to laugh. "Are you sure there's nothing I can do down there with you?" he asked. "I'm afraid not. From now on I want every bit of dirt to pass under my own eyes." "Are you going to try to throw it all up here as you finish?" "No. That's the purpose of the extra pit area down here. I can get a long way down the joint, simply heaping the material on the rock. It's damp enough to pile quite steeply, too." "How far down do you think you can get? The crack's rather narrow to work in, and you have three and a half meters to go before you hit tuff. That's going to be rough shoveling. I still think you could use the machine safely for a little way further, at least." "No doubt I could, but I'm not going to. There's one thing I might use, though.' If you have another of those saws, such as the bonemen are using up on the cliff, I could widen this crack as I go -- cut steps, in fact, to help get the mud up to this level when I'm further down." "That's a good thought, but I don't have any other. If you really get far enough down to need it, though, I could fly up to get it. They were going to shift over to hand labor anyway." "All right. Of course, it will be some time before I get that deep anyway; maybe I won't need it today." He bent to his work. "But what do I do?" asked Lampert. "I can't go off to attend to my own projects, because String has to stay here to guard you. I can't get to the site where the others are working because I can't land there. I can't sit in the helicopter and twiddle my thumbs because I'll go crazy before the day is over." Mitsuitei straightened once more, and thought briefly. "Is there nothing in the geophysical line you could do within sight ol this pit?" he asked finally. "The saw and digging machine are not the only apparatus you brought." "That's true. I brought some seismic gear, though I didn't plan to use it quite like this. I might map the formations under this hill. The information will be usable, I should think, and the joints will give quite a calibrating job. It will keep me busy, anyway." "Just a minute!" Mitsuitei looked a trifle perturbed. "Does that mean you're going to set off explosives around here? I want the sides of this pit held up by something better than roots, if you do." L ampert chuckled. "No explosives," he said "This is a nice little gadget with a robot like the core sampler. It puts out waves of any type desired from any depth down to two hundred fifty meters -- a sort of subterranean sonar. You'll never know it's working. The wave amplitude isn't enough to feel." He turned toward the helicopter on the river bank below, and was starting to walk toward it when McLaughlin interrupted. The guide had heard the conversation, and his question was purely rhetorical. "You weren't planning to walk down to the flyer alone, were you, Doctor?" "Well, yes, as a matter of fact. After all, I won't be working; I can keep my eyes open as I go. You can see me for the greater part of the journey from here, too." Rather to his surprise the guide approved this argument, after a moment's thought. "All right. But please keep your gun in your hand as well as your head on a swivel. I'd prefer to have Dr. Mitsuitei come down with us so we could stay together, but I know how he'd react to the interruption, and I realize you're not a kid. Just be careful." Lampert promised; and the guide's manner had impressed him to the point where he was almost afraid to make the return journey, after reaching the flyer and packing his new equipment. He was rather surprised to get back to the site without being attacked, and McLaughlin's very evident relief at seeing him did nothing to ease his feelings. Hebegan to set up the machinery. This consisted of an assembly very small delving robot drawing a slender tail behind it, the tail wound on a drum which surrounded the control unit. A dozen smaller cylinders reposed in attached clips. "The attached borer," Lampert explained to the guide, "goes down to any depth I set, up to two hundred fifty meters. It can produce any of the three normal types of earthquake wave, singly or in any combination, with sufficient intensity to be detected at a range of over two kilometers in reasonably well-conducting rock. The small cylinders are detectors, equipped not only to receive and analyze the wave coming through the ground but to measure electronically their location with respect to each other and the main station. I can use as many of them as I please, up to the full dozen; but they can be planted only a little way below the surface. There exists equipment for getting readings at depths comparable to that of the transmitter, but I don't have it. As it stands, by spotting the receivers carefully I can get a pretty good picture of the formations for a radius of a kilometer and a depth even greater with ten minutes measuring -- and ten hours computing." "How far out do you plan to place these receivers?" the guide asked pointedly. "Well -- I hadn't made a detailed plan of that. I'd rather like to have them in radiating lines of three, the lines spreading about fifteen degrees, and the individual cylinders about two hundred meters apart." "And just how were you going to place them? I gather that someone has to walk the best part of four kilometers -- or do these things fly, in addition to their other abilities?" "Er -- someone walks. I thought IF perhaps, since you don't like the idea of my going alone through the jungle, that I might stand guard over Take in the pit while you set them out." "Hmm." The guide did not explode, to Lampert's relief. It had not occurred to the scientist that the job of wandering around a hole in the ground waiting for animals which never came might get a little boring to a man of McLaughlin's background. "Let's go over first and see how Dr. Mitsuitei is getting along. I guess you could stand over him with a gun for half an hour. Of course, the cover runs dangerously close to the pit. Maybe we'd better burn it off to a safer distance -- still, I guess that won't be necessary. You can stand out here where it's relatively clear, and see all the approaches to the pit. Something might jump in without your having time to hit it, and you'd at least see it and could get there fast enough to do any shooting necessary." They approached the hole and looked in. Mitsuitei was working busily. A fair quantity of earth lay spread on the rock, and some two thirds of the length of the crack had been excavated to a depth of perhaps a quarter of a meter. The geophysicist attracted the little man's attention and told him of the plan; Mitsuitei nodded and bent once more to his work. The Felodon was becoming restless. It could hardly be hungry as yet; but it was on its feet, snarling silently as it had when the helicopter first entered its ken. For perhaps a minute it stood; then, with the same air of determination it had shown days before and scores of kilometers away, it began to thread its way through the underbrush toward the river -- and the digging site. s #TTI stand where you suggested, A and never take my eyes off the pit," Lampert promised. "Then I'll come back to find you missing," replied the guide. "You're guarding yourself too, remember. Don't keep your eyes on anything. Keep them moving." He finished distributing the little cylinders in the various pockets of his outer clothing, and moved off in the direction Lampert had indicated. He looked back frequently, but each time saw the scientist alert. When the underbrush finally cut off the view, he refused to worry too much. Actually, McLaughlin had gone to considerable pains to make the jungles of Viridis sound more dangerous than they really are. His conscious motive was to make the inexperienced members of the party alert enough for their own safety. It was quite true that a man could be killed in quite a variety of ways in those rain forests. There was a distinct possibility, however, that he also wanted to impress them with the importance of his services. He did not, therefore, suffer much from anxiety during his walk, though on the other hand he wasted no time. He had, of course, only a rough idea of the distance he had traveled, though he was able to keep his direction with a small impulsecompass tuned to the seismic apparatus and forming part of its regular equipment. He dropped three of the cylinders at the required intervals, as nearly as he could guess, forcing each a little way into the ground as Lampert had shown him; then he turned at right angles, walked what he hoped was the right distance and started back toward the site, planting equipment as he went. Out again, in again; and the last of the dozen tubes was in the ground. Mitsuitei's shovel scraped deeper. Lampert, glancing up and around every few seconds, made minute adjustments to the controls of his seismic apparatus. Its little mole robot had started on its downward trip. The Felodon lurked thirty yards from the point where Lampert was standing, protected from his sight by the undergrowth and by one of the piles of dirt thrown up by the machine which had dug the pit. It seemed to be looking through the soil at the spot where the man was. The snarl was still on its face, but no muscle moved in its long body ft had been there for minutes without moving; it had frozen similarly when McLaughlin had passed it on his way out. Now it simply stood and waited. On a cliffside kilometers away, Ndomi Sulewayo gave utterance to the first profanitv Krendall had ever heard him use. They were on opposite sides of the block containing the fossil, so neither could see the other Krendall, naturally, asked what was wrong. "Don't tell me a bug got through one of these suits!" "Worse, if possible. I told you this foreleg -- " both had been carefully avoiding the use of such words as "arms" -- "was sticking out sideways, so that I was afraid we might have cut off part of it in digging the tunnel." Krendall nodded. "I remember. Did we?" "I don't know." "Eh? How come? I should think there'd be no doubt, one way or the other, if you have that much of the limb clear." "Well, I haven't. I got as far as the bone goes -- and right there I run out of tuff and into the limestone. If there's anything more, it's in an entirely different kind of rock, which is a trifle unlikely; but I'm going to have to check the blocks we cut from this part of the tunnel in order to make sure, and I don't look forward to the job at all." Krendall, properly sympathetic, came around to Sulewayo's side to look, and agreed that the search was necessary. The bone the younger man had been clearing ended in a joint of the type they had come to regard as typical of the creature's limbs; and this had occurred almost exactly at the surface they had left when first outlining the block with the saw. Sulewayo, with a grunt of disgust, dropped his tools and went out into the rain, where the blocks cut from the cliff had been piled; Krendall, nobly sacrificing his personal inclinations, went along with him. IF T he search lasted for a long time; for a long time, in fact, after it became evident that it was going to be useless, for the chance of a perfect specimen is not easily thrown away. Finally, however, Krendall straightened up with a sigh. "I guess we'll have to be satisfied with a restoration on one side," he said wearily. "I hope someone fifty years from now doesn't find another and discover that it's a sort of vertebrate fiddler crab, with one forelimb ending in a paw or claw something like five times the size of the one on the other." Sulewayo gave a gloomy assent, and the two went back to work in their respective tunnels. Lampert saw McLaughlin the instant the underbrush made it possible, a fact which the guide later admitted was to the scientist's credit. He had, of course, been eagerly awaiting that return, for the transmitter was down to its first set depth and awaiting only the word that all receivers were in place. He called eagerly the moment the guide came within earshot. "Everything down?" McLaughlin nodded. ' "Everything down, as nearly as I could tell the way you said. How long will the readings take?" "Only a few minutes. I'll take a couple of calibration shots from ten, fifteen and twenty meters depth; then ones at fifty, a hundred and so on down as far as the mole will go. The shooting takes practically hold us up." "What then?" "Well," Lampert smiled, "after that the usual procedure is to pick up the receivers and place them in a similar pattern in a new direction. If the field crew doesn't go on strike, we take the whole circle about the transmitter." "I was afraid of that," grunted McLaughlin, as he stopped by the machine. "Well, let's go." The two men bent over the controls in a silence broken only by the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel a dozen meters away. Lampert pressed his shot button, and a light on the panel flashed white momentarily. Below their feet, unfelt, the pulse of sound energy raced outward, echoing from the walls of deepstriking joints, from the boundaries between rocks of differing densities or elastic constants, from the walls of caverns deep in the limestone; some tiny portion of the energy from time to time encountering and affecting one of the tiny receivers McLaughlin had buried. As each receiver gathered its bit of data, it retransmitted the information to the master unit; and everything was recorded on a single Long before a full second had passed, the first of the pulses had damped out as heat energy, and enough had been transmitted for the machine to obtain an adequate averaging record. The light blinked out again. Lampert nodded in satisfaction, and sent the mole downward once more. "Look, good. Now the next set," he remarked. A s that pulse of seismic energy went forth, the Felodon rose to its full height, almost showing itself over the pile of dirt which was now its sole protection from the view of the men. The snarl on its face seemed to grow fiercer, if that were possible. For just an instant it seemed tom by conflicting desires. But that was for just an instant; any tendency to flee was smothered before it could take full form. There were two men now to worry about, and correspondingly less chance for the opportunity it had been awaiting. But the opportunity came. For just a moment the guide looked down at the panel which was absorbing Lampert's full attention. In that moment a green-and-lavender streak flowed over the heap of soil in a single leap and vanished into the pit. It must have been timed and guided by the mysterious sense McLaughlin had mentioned. It could see none of the men when it leaped, yet it timed the act for the moment none were looking, and landed directly on Mitsuitei. The little archaeologist never knew what hit him. He died without a sound, and the killer, as though nothing lived anywhere in the neighborhood, settled down to its meal. In this it nlust have been disappointed. The chemicals in the clothing designed to repel Viridian insect were equally obnoxious to the carnivore, and it made no serious attempt to get through them. However, not all of the body was protected in this way... A second pulse went from the buried transmitter, and then a third, each from a point a few meters deeper than the last. Lampert's attention, of course, was centered on his controls. McLaughlin's eyes were once more sweeping restlessly over the surrounding landscape. Both heard the sounds coming from the pit, but neither interpreted them as anything more than the scraping of Mitsuitei's shovel. Neither, of course, considered them consciously. Their attention was finally attracted by something decidedly more noticeable. The Felodon did not -- or could not? -- remain at its meal for more than a few moments. Its apparent indifference to the other men changed once more to what seemed like an internal struggle. An observer would have been sure, up to now, that it was using its peculiar sense to avoid the sight of men with guns; but that hypothesis failed now. As Lampert started the mole robot downward once more, the Felodon leaped out of the pit toward the two men -- regardless of the fact that McLaughlin was facing toward it. M cLaughlin saw the fanged head emerge, and his reflexes took over instantly. A streak of flame passed beside the leaping carnivore, exploding into a whitehot blossom of blazing gas as it contacted the pile of dirt on the far side of the pit. The guide ducked and rolled frantically sideward as IF another spring carried the creature toward him. Claws raked the air past his shoulder, and he fired again before the roll was complete and without any sort of aim. Men and beast alike were spattered with white-hot droplets of metal from the seismic recorder as the second shot caught it squarely; and this seemed to be enough for the carnivore. Its next leap was away from the men instead of toward them. A geyser of steam and mud erupted beside it as Lampert finally got his weapon into action, and before the vapor had been beaten down once more by the rain the animal was out of sight behind the undergrowth. Both men sent several shots in the direction of the crackling bushes, but accomplished nothing except the felling of a tree or two and the starting of a bonfire which failed to make any headway against the rain. Convinced that the Felodon had gone, the men ran to the pit. Lampert did not even take time out to glance at the wreckage of his equipment. There was just enough distance to cover to let each one realize that he had' no idea how long the carnivore had been inside, and what the "scraping" sound might have been. Both slowed down as they approached the edge, not relishing what they expected to see. But this did not prove to be what they had expected. McLaughlin's face, already grim, turned gray as he saw that his first shot had not merely missed the animal at which it was aimed. The bolt had struck the pile of dirt which had been left by the digging machinery at the far lip of the pit, and scattered most of it to the four winds. Perhaps half a ton had slid back into the hole from which it had originally been removed. There was no telling, from above, what the Felodon had done to Mitsuitei. The upper half of the archaeologist's body was buried completely, and the rest so liberally sprinkled with dirt that it was not at once identifiable. The guide, using language strange even to the widely-traveled Lampert, leaped the three meters downward without bothering to use the ladder, seized a projecting leg and tried to draw the little man clear of the soil. Lampert, equally aware of the possible value of time but feeling that he would do little good with a broken leg, made the descent in the normal manner. By the time he reached the bottom, McLaughlin had succeeded in dragging Mitsuitei almost completely clear. Lampert started forward to clear the mud from the still hidden face; then he stopped, and his stomach abruptly heaved, as he realized that the face was not hidden. It was gone. Mitsuitei had removed the headgear and gloves from his protective suit for the normal reason -- to see and manipulate better. The exposed head and hands had formed the Feiodon's hasty meal. T he paleontologists saw the helicopter approaching this time, for they were working outside the tunnel. Between them on the ledge lay a block of stone some five feet long, two high and four wide -- over two tons of material, all told, which had been worked out of the hole rather ingeniously by the men. Partial undercuts had been made, rollers worked out of stone by the cutter placed underneath, and the undercutting completed along a plane which sloped slightly upward into the tunnel. Of course the block had run off the rollers once it was out in the open, and the men could no more shift it another centimeter than they could return to Emeraude without the helicopter; but at least it was more or less accessible by air. They were chipping waste rock from the corners when the flyer appeared. Sulewayo was first up the ladder, unburdened this time. They expected to have further use for the cutter. He noted that Lampert was alone in the machine, and promptly asked the question the geophysicist had been dreading. "Where's Take? We've found something for him!" "I'm afraid he won't appreciate it. He was killed a couple of hours ago by a Felodon." The news silenced even Sulewayo, and the expression on his junior's face actually startled Krendall when he climbed through the hatch. "Ndomi! What in -- " Lampert cut in with the same news he had given a moment before. Krendall reacted similarly; then slowly lowered himself into a seat. He did not ask for details. Both men could see that this was not the time to put such a question to the '# pilot, though neither realized then the personal responsibility that Lampert felt over the incident. Krendall pulled a small fragment of tuff from his pocket, and looked at it thoughtfully. Nothing further was said until the helicopter landed once more on the river near the "city." McLaughlin and the bundle which held what was left of Takehiko Mitsuitei were waiting on the bank, and  were loaded aboard without a sound. "It's early. We'll take him back to Emeraude tonight, and come back for your work tomorrow," Lampert said, and lifted into the air without waiting for agreement. "All right," replied Krendall, "as long as we come back. I don't think he'd have wanted us to stop. I'm going to find out about those green threads of his, too." Lampert nodded in approval. He had already formed a similar determination. For half an hour they flew on in silence. The Felodon, half submerged in swamp water a kilometer downstream from the hill, heard the helicopter hum overhead. It seemed totally disinterested. For just a moment its fanged head pointed upward, then settled back again. There was a burn under its jaw, which had been inflicted by metal spraying from the ruined seismic apparatus. It was more comfortable to keep it under water... "What was it you found, Ndomi, that you thought Take would want to see?" Lampert broke the long silence. "It was when we were undercutting to get the block out of the IF tunnel," Sulewayo answered. "Its just some more of his green threads, in the tuff below the fossil. I brought a chunk of the rock showing them -- here." Lampert nodded without taking his main attention from flying. "Maybe that fossil of yours was intelligent after all, then," he said. "It seems to have died under very similar circumstances to Take -- just above a set of those green threads. Maybe it was a member of a party like ours." "Maybe. It certainly walked erect. The whole body structure shows that. If its brain were large enough and it had some sort of manipulating appendage I'd say it was virtually human -- in capacity, that is. It was more of an amphibian anatomically." "You have the block out in the open. Haven't you been able to study the head and limbs?" "No, damn it." Krendall took over from his junior. "That was the big disappointment of the whole find. The specimen seems to be perfect except for missing skull and hands. Not a trace of either." The helicopter wavered slightly in its path, then steadied as Lampert forced his attention back to his job. No one said anything for a long time, but everyone was thinking. S omeone else was thinking too, but wasn't keeping his thoughts to himself. They were being spoken, and virtually dripped with the thinker's fury. "You sloppy, lazy parasites! I don't mind being stuck with a job and a deadline, even if it's a report that's due in only fifty years and needs about two hundred for a real conclusion. I'd sooner do it all myself than have some of you loose thinkers butting in! But if I'm to give my whole attention to it so I can produce something that won't be laughed at from here to b the Magellanic Clouds, how about some of you watching what goes on on this planet? I didn't know those creatures were poking around until they began cutting sensor lines! Thirty, the protective life we've bred on the surface was your idea; why didn't you put it to work?" The answering words tried to be soothing. "Thirty was working -- " "Dreaming, you mean!" "But I put one of the guardians on the job for him; it stopped the digging, didn't it?" "Sure, after a lot of damage had been done. Do you want to come out in the open and repair my wiring -- with those space travelers poking around? If they find you at it, the Council won't just laugh at us; they'll excommunicate us and let this new species of intelligence clean us out. Why did it take so long for the guardian to do anything?" "Well, I -- " "Well, you were dreaming too, weren't you. Blast it, you're here to do constructive thinking, not just to entertain yourself. Haven't you any self-respect? They actually dug out Sixteen!" "What difference will that make? He's been dead too long to mind it himself, and anyway his brain and sensor connections were decently burned." "But they wouldn't have had to dig much deeper to get someone who's not dead, would they, NinetyFive, my young friend? I suppose when they cut one or two of your sensors you decided it was time to do something. Don't interrupt! I'm talking! This planet is supposed to be a quiet place where people can expect to spend a decent number of centuries at a time thinking, without being disturbed. If you're too young or too lazy or just too stupid to do any real thinking yourself, at least you can devote a little time from your casual amusements to making sure that other people can . Shut up! You'll do some thinking now or find yourself in real trouble! Here's a problem for you to solve, and see that you solve it! "You will get my sensors repaired, making sure not only that you're not caught at the job by these space travelers but also that they don't realize it's been done. In other words, don't just neatly fill in the hole they made after you've finished. so they can't help knowing they're not the only intelligences on this world. I don't know when they'll be back any better than you do, so you'll have to guess at your own time limit. You can booby-trap your canyon with landslides or anything else to keep yourself from being dug out, but if you fail in either problem and either of us looks likely to be found I personally guarantee you'll be found in the same shape as Sixteen. Now get to work, and let me think. If you think you can get help or sympathy from anyone else on the planet, good luck to you." A wave of agreement spread along the countless miles of sensor wiring that extended through Viridis crust, but Twenty-Five didn't feel or hear it. He had already taken the myriad of tendrils that terminated his arms away from the mosaic console that formed the end of the vast bundles of greenish threads coming through the walls of his cave, and had settled back in his lounging chair. That report -- only fifty years to have it thought out -- his full attention went back to it. In the April Galaxy -- A Great New Science-Fiction Novel by Damon Knight On sale now -- get your copy today! IF # Novelette ) He began as a hero. Eons later and a universe away, he became instead a god! i ve come a long, long way to die alone, David Greaves thought as Defiance  tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly torn apart by the explosion in her engines. On the console in front of him, the altimeter was one of the last few meaningful instruments, and it told him there were only a few tortured miles remaining before the ship he had brought this far -- had spent his fdrtune in building when no government would yet consider risking a manned rocket on his flight -- would smash down to its doom on a planet no man had ever walked. Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship's crazy tumbling, Greaves tensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to his feet. He wasn't dead yet. He wasn't dead and, if the slim chance paid off, he'd still be present to laugh in the government's face when the first, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across the emptiness between Earth and the Sun's second planet. Dragging himself irom handhold to handhold, his tendons cracking with the strain, he levered himself toward the Crash Capsule, forced open its hatch and pulled himself through, while the winds of Venus tore at the shattered hull and the scream of Defiance's passage through the murky sky rose to a savage howl. Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the signposts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe. I'll live to see my share of that, Greaves thought as he pulled the capsule's hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that, in theory, would cushion much of the impact. Or else I'll know I tried. He tripped the lever that would flood the capsule with Doctor Eckstrom's special anesthetic -- the experimental compound that might -- just barely, might -- offer a chance.  A s the hiss of the yellowtinged. acrid gas became louder and louder in his ears. David Greaves thought again of the almost obsessive lengths to which he had gone in making sure that there would be such a thing as the capsule. The entire project -- the decision to build the ship, to sacrifice for it the personal fortune he had built up in his meteoric rise from obscurity to being one of the world's most dynamic and certainly youngest industrialists -- had been marked by his fanatical persistence and dedication. But that dream had come first, and the fortune second -- the sole purpose of his career, from its very beginnings when he was only another engineer test pilot, had simply been to accumulate the .means so Defiance could be built. But the ship had been three-quarters complete when he conceived the idea for the capsule. He could not even now remember exactly when or how he had decided that he must have some device aboard that would protect him from a crash and -- here was the vital thing he insisted upon -- keep him alive, no matter how injured, no matter how long might be necessary, until rescuers could reach him. For him to even think in terms of rescuers -- of depending on others -- was totally uncharacteristic. For him to divert a major portion of his dwindling resources from work on the ship itself, and push toward the elaborate design of the capsule, was, in some lights, again uncharacteristically foolish. But he had done it, and now... Now the anesthetic created by the man some said was a medical genius and some said was a quack had flooded over him. He could feel the first effect -- the calm, the drowsy peace. By the time the Defiance smashed into the ground -- very soon now -- his IF mm jjarife metabolism would have slowed to a carefully metered rate. It would take hours for his heart to beat once. To him it would seem as if each day was only a few minutes. The jagged nerve-flashes of pain would be only a faraway slow tingle; the blink of an eye would encompass hours of actual time, and he would lie here, safe, asleep, until the hatch was opened and he was taken out into the air, where slowly the effects would wear off. Meanwhile, there was more than enough gas compressed into the capsule's tanks to keep him perfectly relaxed for a hundred years. The valve -- a simple device he had sketched out in five minutes, as if the design had been part of his mind for years -- would continue to meter out the supply at the optimum rate and pressure. It was only now -- perhaps a hundred feet from impact, perhaps only a hundred hairs-breadths -- that he suddenly saw the flaw in the design. He struggled to reach the valve, in a useless reflex, for there would have been nothing he could have done, no matter how much time remained. Then he fell back, a twisted grin on his face. I've come a long , long way to frap myself, he laughed in his drowsing mind, as the ship crashed, and the capsule, torn from Defiance's side, rebounded like a cannon shell from Heaven upon the outraged soil of Venus, and the overhead clouds sprang into flamed reflection from the blast of Defiance's end. In the capsule, the valve controlling the flow from the illogically copious supply of anesthetic snapped off cleanly. David Greaves lungs jolted to the impact as a century's dosage of the high-pressure gas delivered its one giant hammerblow of sleep...Of sleep like death... Of sleep so slow, so majestic, that only the eternally ageless body might testify to life. Of sleep without end, without motion, until... II T he woman -- the sensuous ivory-skinned woman with eyes like dark jewels and hair like midnight framing her red-lipped face -- kissed him again and then drew back to touch his cheek. "Wake," she whispered softly. "Wake, sleeper." David Greaves looked up at her through slowly dawning eyes. The scent of spices was in his nostrils. As the woman's hair brushed his face again, the fragrance increased. "My name is David Greaves," he said, and looked up at the sky and then around him. There was now no envelope of cloud to hide the face of this planet from the Sun; no such shroud as had concealed the Venus of his day in dazzling white without and muffled it in somber black within. This sky was ruddy, ruddy with the light of the day's last moments, and the clouds through which the sunset burned were only crayon-strokes of ochre across the orange sky. He lay in state, facing that sunset, on some sort of black metal couch which supported him on a IF multitude of sweeping, back-bent arms. Beneath him, a dozen low broad steps of olive-green polished stone led down to a long forum, flagged with the same gold-veined, masterfully fitted paving... Around the court ran a low wall, again of stone; friezed, and burnished to a dull glow. From the wall, tall slim pillars thrust into the air. And atop each pillar, cast and carved in black metal washed by the lingering light, crouched a monster. No single artist could have created such a bestiary of gargoyles. Some he could trace in their evolution -- the vulpine, the crustacean, the insectile. Fangs and pincers slit the cool, invigorating breeze that flowed over the court. Antennae quivered and hummed in the air, and a myriad legs were poised in tension, forever prepared to leap. Others were beyond any creation he knew of -- limbs and wings contorted into shapes that had, undoubtedly, been taken by living things... in lives unimaginable to any man. And all of them, imaginable or not, faced toward him forever. At the foot of each pillar, mounted in a cresset on the wall at its base, burned a torch. And so, when night fell, then the shadows of all these monsters would be cast upward onto the stars, and he would lie sleeping in the pooled light of the torches, while all around him these creatures stood watch. How many nights had he lain here? How many centuries to wash the fog of sleep out of every nook and cranny of his lungs, when each breath might take a thousand yean -- ten thousand? B ut he was not done with studying his surroundings. He had heard sound when he turned his head. Now the sound was a rising murmur as he lifted his shoulders to look down the length of the court of monsters toward the far end. There were people there. They had been seated on stone tiers that rose up toward a collonaded temple. There he could see an altar through the open sides and, on that altar, a flame that burned bright and unwinking against the outline of the lowering Sun. The people were rising to their feet. From them came an openthroated murmur that became a cry of savage joy -- of unbearable tension finding release. "Who are they?" he asked the woman as he sat up and felt his body stretch with power cramped too long, as he squared back his shoulders and peered through the twilight in the court of monsters. "Your worshippers, David Greaves," she said, standing beside him among the many arms of his couch. "The people whose last hope you are." She added softly: "My name, though you did not ask, is Adelie." She paused. "I, too, am one of your worshippers. Wherever there are human beings, throughout the Universe, you are worshipped." He looked at her more closely. There was a lift to one black-winged eyebrow that was less reverent than a god might like, though a man could have no quarrel with it. She stood gracefully on sandaled feet, dressed in a single white garment girdled around her waist by a belt made of the same metal in which the monsters were cast. He saw that the clasp was shaped into a profile of his own face. And he saw from the wear that it showed that it was old -- older than she could be, older perhaps than this court. This... shrine? He wondered how many priestesses had worn that belt. How many of his priestesses. He frowned and got down, feeling the touch of the day-warmed stone on his bare feet. He was dressed, he saw, in a black kilt and nothing else. He returned his glance to the worshippers and saw that the men were dressed similarly, and that the women wore flowing, calflength, translucently light robes like Adelie's. There was motion at one corner of his eye, and he turned his head sharply to see the arms of the couch sweeping down, folding and bending against its sides. Now he saw that he had been cradled in the arms of a great black metal beast. It crouched atop the dais. Its head was bent supplicatingly, bright oily metal barely visible at the joinings of its mechanical body. He glanced quickly up at the monsters atop their columns. "Are they all like that?" he asked Adelie. An old man's gruff voice answered him from the other side of the beast-couch. "They won't spring down to devour you -- you needn't be afraid of that " Two men came into view, one old, one young and very slim. The old one rapped the couch with his knuckles. "This tended you in your sleep. It is made in the shape of the most ferocious race that ever rivaled Man. It is now extinct -- as are all those others up there, for the same reason." The thin young man -- very pale, very long of limb -- stretched his broad, tight mouth into a smile that covered half his face without mirth. "Not the most ferocious, Vigil." "Your kind will learn about that," the old man snapped. "Not from you and yours," the slim man said lightly. Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. "Tell me the situation," Greaves said. Adelie's lips parted. But the old man interrupted. "The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep -- " he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers -- "have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake." "Oh, on the contrary," the young man said. "Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?" Greaves looked from one to the other -- the leather-skinned old man with his mop of ringleted white hair, the young one who was human in appearance but somehow claimed some other status. "Who are you two?" "I am Vigil, your guardian, and this is -- "  IF "I am Mayron of The Shadows," the young man said, and he held himself as carelessly as before, but his face looked directly into Greaves's. "See my eyes." There was nothing there. Only darkness speckled by pinpoints of light; thick, sooty darkness like oil smoke, and sharp lights that burned through it without illuminating it. "Mayron that was First of Men," Vigil said bitterly. "Mayron that is First of Shadows," the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before Greaves. "Mayron that will again be First of Men, when all men are shadows. Mayron that is already First of many men. And which of us is a god, David Greaves?" A delie's face glowed with excitement. Her red lips were parted breathlessly. The crowd on the tiers had loosed a great, wailing moan, which hung over the court of conquered .monsters as the first stars became visible on the far horizon. Greaves took a deep breath. He could feel his body tensing itself, the muscles rippling, as though his hide needed comfort. "Which of us is a god, man?" Mayron repeated softly, his voice coming from the entire cloud. "What is it you can do against me, you whose entire virtue rests on doing nothing?" "That would depend on what was expected of me at this moment," Greaves said. "This moment?" Mayron chuckled. "At this moment, nothing." "In that case, get out of my court and come back when there's something to do." Mayron laughed, throwing his head back, the laughter high and insolent. "How like a god! How very like the real thing." Greaves frowned. "If you were a man, once, you might remember how that feels." But the laugh had bothered him. "Oh, I remember, I remember. And tomorrow we fight, man." Laughing, Mayron bent and picked up the skin he had discarded. He crumpled it by the waist in one fist, and brandished it negligently at the worshippers. They shrank back with a moan of horror as he strode toward the far wall. At the wall, he flipped the white, fluttering thing over, and as a cloud passed through the stone. Perhaps on the other side he put on his human form again. Greaves could not tell. The sun was down, and only a little light glowed on the far horizon. The torches guttered in the court of monsters, and the worshippers were hurrying up the steps, out through the temple and away. Ill G reaves, Adelie and Vigil stood beside the beast-couch. "All right," Greaves said. "Now there are things I want to know, and I want no quarrels, Vigil." # "And by what right do you order me around?" the old man growled. "You may be a god to some, but you are not my god." "You owe it to me, atheist. If I was awakened today, at this pat moment, I could have been awakened before. I wasn't. You kept me asleep, guardian, when I could have been free as any other man. So you owe me." The old man grunted. "You're brave with Mayron and brave with me. But all men are brave, each in his own way. We need no gods." "But you have one." Adelie touched his arm. "You have lived from the beginning of human history. And you were a great hero. That much the legends tell us. You were braver than any man, and for your bravery, you could not die. While other heros conquered the stars and, in their time, died, you lived on. While enemy after enemy was beaten by Man, and the victorious men died, you lived on. The stars and all worlds became ours. Men loved and begat, and men died, but you lived on. It seemed to us that as long as you lived, all men would have something to remember -- how great Man is; what the reward of courage can be. It seemed ' only fitting that we should bring to you the trophies of our achievements. It seemed only right to believe that you had survived to some purpose -- that a day would come when Man wo.uld need his greatest hero." "Precisely," Vigil snorted. "Man worships nothing but himself. You were a convenient symbol. It did no harm. It may have done some good. Of course, the chuckleheads took it all literally. And so -- thanks to Man's stupid persistence in breeding idiots as well as men with some brains, you, whoever you are, whatever kind of filibustering bravo you actually were, have become the focus of a cult populated by the credulous, the neurotic and those who profit by them. I hope you are grateful for your legacy!"' Greaves looked up at the stars. There were some constellations that might have been the ones he knew, distorted by his transit to another viewpoint... or by time. He was no astronomer. Vve come a long way , he thought, and I wonder what the end of it will be. "Those who profit from the credulous, hmm?" he said to Vigil. "I am your guardian and I guarded you. As many others have done before me, from various motives. This is not your first court, nor your tenth. The ritual around you is compounded from thousands of years of hogwash, as witness my worshipful daughter who inherits a post from some time when every venturing hero had to have a leman patiently awaiting his return. My duties no doubt were originally medical. But the couch has been attending to that -- with some exceptions -- for centuries. And you may be assured, Man's history has not been one unbroken triumph, nor his civilization any steady upward climb. But we built while you slumbered. I had thought to prevent your besmirching Man's greatness with your cheap legend." IT "Or perhaps he was afraid of the god he denies," Adelie murmured, her eyes glowing warmly. Greaves looked from her to her father. "So she believes in me and you do not," he said to Vigil. "But it may be you're not entirely sure -- and from the looks she gives me, it may be she isn't, either." He grinned crookedly. "Man may have climbed, but I assure you he hasn't changed." H e smiled at the looks on both their faces. Divinity was new to him, but humanity was not. If these two had thought perhaps they had some dull-witted barbarian here -- the one for his faith in his faithlessness, the other for her pleasures -- it had been time their error was corrected. "Old man, god or not I have been called out... whether it pleases lay me down to sleep again until  think it's time. So you had better tell me what all this is about, or I will blunder around and perhaps break something you're fond of." Adelie laughed. Vigil swung his arm sharply toward hfer. "This -- this would-be courtesan was once Mayron's great love, when he was First of ns all. Because he could find nothing to conquer for her in all the Universe, he began dabbling beyond it for a worthy prize. And he found it. Oh, he found it, didn't he, my child?" "Be careful, Father," Adelie spat. "The worshippers follow me now that I've wakened him as promised, and you -- " "Quiet," Greaves said mildly. "He was telling me something." "That I was," Vigil said angrily, while his daughter's look at Greaves was the least sure it had ever been, "and for all the need you have of it, I might as well not. But if I may say it once and get it safd, I can then go to my meal and the two of you will be free 'to amuse yourselves. Mayron discovered the Shadows, when his machines touched some continuum beyond this one, and the Shadows ate him. But like the fox that lost his tail in the trap and then cozened other foxes with the lie that it was better so and fashionable besides, Mayron made a virtue of his slavery. Those who give themselves up to the Shadows never rest and never hunger. They know no barrier. And no love. No true joy. No noble sorrow. An untailed fox is safe from catching by the tail. A Shadow has no spirit, no humanity, no -- soul. But there are always dunderheads. Mayron has them, and down in that city of hit down there -- " the old man waved a hand at the horizon, but all Greaves could see from where he stood were the glowing tops of what he took to be three fitfully active volcanoes -- "he has a city full of dunderheaded shadows who go to some temple he has built and enter the Shadow chamber to be changed. The admission is easily gained; the price of freedom from human care is humanity." "And up here," Greaves said, "other dunderheads come to gain what in exchange for what?" "Gain at least some sort of af# firmation at the cost of remaining men!" the old man growled. "If they are simple, at least they are human! And even an intelligent man can see the value in what is embodied here." "As witness yourself. Yes." " didn't want to wake you! We know enough so you could have been awakened centuries ago. But to what purpose? To turn another hooligan loose to upset civilization, and lose the symbol of that precious thing? When Man himself can rescue himself? But, no, this one, this supersition-ridden tramp I wish I'd strangled in her cradle -- she stirred the worshippers up, she arranged the combat between yourself and Mayron, she -- " "When and where?" "What?" "This fight Mayron and you have both spoken of." "Tomorrow at noon. In the city. But there's no need for it. Tomorrow Mayron dies, and the other Shadows die. You can watch or not -- as long as you stay out of the way." Greaves looked at Adeiie. "Your daughter, Vigil, does not look much impressed." "Impressed! Impressed!" The old man was very nearly dancing with rage. "I'll show you! Come with me." Vigil turned without looking back and pattered rapidly down the steps of the dais, his calloused feet slapping indignantly on the time-buffed stones. Greaves frowned after him. Then he jerked his head to Adeiie. "Come on," he said, and they, too, walked quickly down the length of the court of the conquered monsters. And for the first time since their creation the pillared gargoyles did not have to bear the sight of Man. T he scent of Adelie's fragrance was in Greaves nostrils again as they followed the old man through the temple, past the altar where the eternal flame burned bright enough to sting. He said nothing to her. She volunteered no words of her own. But she walked close enough to brush his thigh with hers. Greaves smiled appreciatively. Vigil led them to a small chamber in one wing of the temple. He flung open the door with a clatter of bolts in a concealed lock, and pointed inside. "Look -- the two of you. It's not just Mayron who can dabble with machines. For every clever man, there is another just as clever." A gun of green metal was mounted on a pedestal in the center of the chamber. Slim and graceful as a wading bird with one extended leg, it poised atop its mount and sang quietly of power and intent to kill. The friezed walls of the chamber hummed in harmonic response to the idle melody of the gun. Greaves felt his hackles rising unreasonably, and he very nearly growled with outrage at the sight of it. "Tomorrow at noon," Vigil said in a high, triumphant voice, "the weapon will be swung to point through that window and down upon Mayron 's city. And when it is done, there will not be a single Shadow alive down there." IF Greaves walked to the window in the chamber's far wall and looked down. But it was dark below; nothing to mark the outlines of a city as cities had been in the time he remembered. The temple apparently stood atop a high hill, with the city in a great valley at its foot, but again all Greaves could see were three glowing mountaintops across the way, and, beyond them, the night sky. Then suddenly one of the volcanos flared for an instant, and the few overhead clouds reflected redly down into the valley. Greaves caught his breath. The city had emerged black and immense, extending for miles, its lightless towers like the spine-bones of a beast half-eaten and rotting in a tidal pool. Then the light was gone, and once again there was nothing visible down there -- if the undead beast had chosen to bestir itself and stealthily move on some errand of the night, no one standing here could have known until it was too late. "So that's the city of the Shadows," Greaves said. "The city that was once the First City of Man," Vigil said bitterly. "That Mayron has made into an outpost of Hell. Where no man dares live; where they say that those with Shadows, once they were in sufficient number, dragged women and children into the Chamber of Shadows so that their men, heartbroken, joined them when their Shadow-children returned to plead with them." "And this gun of yours is going to do what to them?" he asked. "Kill them." "I know that. How?" Greaves stared at the old man through narrowing eyes. "A beam of power, made of the stuff that spins within all things -- the pure force of this continuum." "You mean this thing is some kind of particle emitter -- an electron or photon gun?" #vur science need not convcern itself with crudities like names, barbarian. This gun was made as a song or a poem is made -- in the mind of a man who dreams weapons where another man might dream bridges... and when the gun finds its fruition, tomorrow when Mayron expects no mightier enemy than you, then the beam will sweep that city, and when it stops Mayron's city will be a tomb for empty skins. And Man will build another First City, and those who fled shall have a place again, and -- " "Who built -- who dreamed -- this piece of ironmongery?" Greaves growled. "Who was the poet -- you?" "Yes! Why not? Do you think because I am an old man -- " "A heedlessly spiteful one who hasn't stopped to think." "Stopped to think! Look!" Vigil seized the torch at the doorway and lifted it high. "Did you think I wasn't sure? That the weapon has not been tested?" Now Greaves could see why the gun sang rather than rested in quiet patience. A Shadow hung against the far wall, supported by its outstretched arms, its hands sunken wrist-deep in the stone. And though it jerked its legs and struggled feebly to be free, the hands remained trapped. Under the sound of the idling gun, he could distinguish a quiet, thin, whimpering. Adelie laughed softly to herself. Vigil crowed: "He cannot move -- what little strength remains to him is needed for bare existence... if I were to touch that control -- "The weapon is at its lowest setting -- it has incomparably more power than that; it has the power of all the Universe in it -- and look what it can do when it is barely tapped in to its source of power!" Greaves rumbled in his throat. Suddenly the gun's song was more than he could stand. He barely seemed to move, but Vigil had time to shout, the outraged cry beginning to echo in the chamber when suddenly there came the snap of rending metal, and a choked stammer from the gun. And then Greaves had the gun in his hands, completely torn from its pedestal. He threw it out into the night in a bright flash of fire that bathed them all in a thunderclap of light. Greaves stared after it, his teeth bared, the horrid sound of his hatred still rumbling within him When that had dwindled, leaving him with his heavy chest heaving for air, the trapped Shadow had vanished, no doubt to tell Mayron that Humanity's godling had gone insane. Adelie was very pale. Vigil was trying to speak. And that from the old man was enough .to bring back the first n scarlet edge of the fury he had turned on the gun. "Close your mouth!" Greaves commanded him. "I have to go fight Mayron tomorrow, and I don't want another word out of you. Go find something useless to do. Adelie, I want a bath, some food and drink. Right now!" IV D uring the night, he asked Adelie: "I'm supposed to fight him with my hands, is that it? Or with simple weapons of some kind? And this will prove to the worshippers all over the Universe or to the Shadows that either my or Mayron's way of life is right?" "Yes," she said. "And you are very strong. I'm sure you will win. I was sure when I suggested it to Mayron. He's so completely confident -- I knew I could trick him into it." Later, he asked her: "Tell me -- was there a famous weapon poet in First City?" And he took her hand, not letting go of it. When she asked him, once, hesitantly, why he had broken the gun, he answered honestly: "Because it seemed hateful." And other than that, they said very little to each other during that night, and whatever they did say had about as much truth in it as all the things they had said or he had been told from the first moment of his awakening. He did not sleep. For one thing, he felt no need of it. For another, he was frightened. He did not want to be a Shadow... IF In the morning he had forgotten fear. Steps led from the temple to a pathway that wound down toward the city. He stood for a moment at their head, with the altar burning behind him, and then stepped out into the morning, with Adelie and Vigil folowing. There were people waiting out there. They lined the path, murmuring among themselves. As he strode along they fell in behind him, leaving behind the temporary shelters they had put up when they fled from the city and took refuge here. "Sheep," Vigil snorted as he padded through the dust beside Greaves. "All right, let them see you brought down. I'll make another gun -- if your stupidity hasn't robbed me of the time I need -- and then they'll see..." "I'm sure that if I lose today, Mayron will give you all the time you need. Maybe he'll even send that same Shadow poet back to you with whatever story you'll believe this time." "What -- ?" Vigil stammered. "What did he tell you? That he would create the gun for you because he hated the Shadows, even though he was a Shadow? Did he tell you how he remembered how fine it was. to be a man? Is that the story you believed? You simple, credulous murderer! And you repaid him by testing it on him. As he well suspected you might. It's not only humans who can be brave. Or sacrifice themselves for the ferocity of their race. Or were you too busy taking Humanity's name in vain to ever consider that? You never dreamed that gun. Not you -- you may be foolish, but you don't hate this Universe." Vigil was blinking at him. "What -- ?" Adelie laughed. "Last night, father. He asked me about weapon posts. There's no use trying to lie out of it." Greaves smiled at her. "That's right. I asked you, and from that moment on you knew I was cleverer than Mayron thinks. But you never got away to tell him that, did you? You know," he said thoughtfully, "you'd better hope I win today. Mayron won't be too fond of you if I give him any more shocks." Adelie grinned. "I thought of that. But if you win, he dies. And if you die... ?" "You will have had your glory anyway? You will have engineered the battle of the gods, and dabbled in other pleasures, too?" Greaves was still smiling, but Adelie's eyes grew wider. "Maybe it'll be that simple, Adelie. But who can tell the minds of gods, hmm?" And so David Greaves strode into the city of Shadows, followed by a fearful multitude and two badly shaken people. He walked down a broad avenue at whose end something black bulked and glimmered, while things with black-filled eyes stood watching thin-lipped. And as he walked he showed none of his fear. H e stopped at the end of the avenue, with the tall towers looming over him, and stood facing the Temple of Shadows. There was IF no sign of life in the square black opening that served as a door for the featureless stone block, dark but not as dark as a Shadow. He threw back his head and called: "Mayron!" The worshippers huddled around him. Vigil, like them, was throwing anxious looks over his shoulders as the city's Shadows crowded closer. Adelie murmured: "There he is." And he was, trotting lightly down the steps, smiling. He wore his human skin as naturally as if it were more than a cloak, and Greaves had to look hard to see that when he smiled his lips stretched but no teeth showed. "Well, Man in all your pride. Are you ready?" "Ready as any man. How do you propose to go about this?" "Adelie didn't tell you?" "She told me as much as I asked. I didn't ask much. Could you suggest any way I could have refused the conditions, no matter what they are? That loses the fight right there. Wasn't I supposed to understand that? Do you think politics is a recent invention?" "Fierce, fierce," Mayron murmured. "Well spoken." He chuckled. "When I was a man, I would have liked you." "Get to the business, Mayron." The Shadow held up his hand. "Not so fast. Perhaps we can arrive at some -- " "Arrive at nothing. Put up or shut up. Vigil no longer has that monstrous gun and there's no point in this for you today. But there is for me, and you don't have much time to realize that." He glowered at the Shadow, feeling the rage, feeling the onrush of the bright white exaltation when the body moves too fast for the brain to speak, when what directs the body is the reflex founded on the silent knowledge of the brain's deep layers, where the learning has no words. Mayron frowned. I-fis head was cocked to one side. If he had had eyes, he would have been peering at Greaves face. But he said nothing; he had lost the moment, and now Greaves used it. "You scum," Greaves said, his voice booming through the Temple square for all the Shadows to hear. "A weapon that drains the power of this continuum! You leech -- you would have had that doddering old man put all my stars out!" And now the moment was at its peak, and Greaves screamed with rage, so that the faces of the towers were turned into sounding boards and the shout crackled in the air like thunder. He jumped forward, one sweeping arm tossing Mayron out of his way and flailing for balance, while Greaves sprang into the Temple and charged the Chamber of Shadows. A nd now the fear -- the great devouring fear that came like fangs in his belly but did not stop him. Now the fear as he burst through the acolytes and into the black, light-shot sphere that quivered at the focus of Mayron's machine. And he stood there, feeling the suck not of one voracious universe but many -- all the universes that had eaten the overcurious Mayron and sent back a Judas goat in his skin to conquer what belonged to Man. Feeling the icy cold, and the energy-hunger that could suck Man's Universe dry and still leave a hunger immeasurable. But the rage -- the rage that came to him, that came to the god uncounted generations of men had made while David Greaves lay sleeping but his deepest mind lay awake, feeling, feeling the faith, knowing the splendor of what Man had done -- The rage that could make a god, that could give a creature like David Greaves the power to create, to dream a man -- to make a David Greaves who would lie waiting, ready to become a god... That rage went forth. And in parallel continuums of life unimaginable, the dawn of Apocalypse burst upon suns unnameable and worlds unheard-of -- upon all the universes which were the true Shadows. The god who was David Greaves again, when the rage had passed -- that image which Man himself had made stood blazing his fury in the Chamber of Shadows, and the Universe of Man was free and safe. But in the places of the Shadows there was no hope, no joy, no place of refuge. Mankind was come forth, and galaxies were dying. One last snap of the fangs -- one moment when the death-spurred Shadows almost had their greatest prize of all -- and then it was over. Greaves turned and strode out of the blasted Chamber, and the acolytes cowered, covering their eyes, not yet realizing that once more they had eyes. D avid Greaves appeared on the temple steps, and began walking slowly down, his legs shaking with exhaustion. Adelie watched him coming toward her. Around her, Shadows that had once been men were men again, but at her feet Mayron lay without his skin, and though her father had fled, she did not dare go without learning what the look on David Greaves' In the next issue of IF: Beginning An exciting novel of tomorrow's frontiers A Relief story by Keith Laumer by Brian W. Aldlss And many more! IF  Short Story All panhandlers ask for dimes -- but this one had a very special purpose! T he subway train announced its arrival with a screech of grating steel. The man was shoved from the car onto the platform by the eight p.m. crowd. The noise and the abrupt handling of his body brought him to awareness. Not that he had been asleep or unconscious. Although he might have been. He didn't know for sure. He found it hard to concentrate, but soon a sign over the platform came into focus: It meant nothing to him. The second thing he became aware of did. Another train had replaced his, and directly in front of him was an army of people, dispassionate towards everything but its one objective -- to get on. They came at him all at once, forming a pushing, elbowing, cursing, jarring mass of humanity. He glanced off one to collide with another. He escaped the punishment by a lunge to one side which ended with a crash to the cold cement floor. He regained some semblance of steadiness on his feet and looked at the sign. It was still Westboro. It still meant nothing to him. He was lost. What was worse, he couldn't remember where he was lost from. He turned to walk, he didn't know exactly where, when he smashed into a little boy eating an apple. The boy reacted in a strange manner. "Leave me alone, you dirty man, you the boy said. He dropped his apple and ran off. Scared. The man flushed with embarrassment, but the boy's remark made him look down at himself. He saw a dirty man. Filthy. His white shirt -- it had been white once -- was torn at the elbow and was covered with grime, his shoes at the toes were white where the black polish had worn completely off his pants reflected no evidence of ever having been pressed and the right leg was ripped from the knee down. Two girls in their teens passed and giggled. He was aware that others had noticed him. "Hey, lookit the bum," a fat jollyrover called out to his three on-thetowning cronies. "Bum," the man thought, and reached to his back pocket. No wallet But not long ago he had one, he was sure, because the feel of its absence was there. Somebody must have taken it, or he might have lost it. In that crowd or on the subway or before... He couldn't remember where he had been before. The feeling of not remembering seemed familiar, and he tried hard to think. But there was nothing static in his mind that he could hold on to. His mind wasn't blank anymore, it was a jumble. He somehow recalled he had been looking for his money. He fumbled through his other pockets. He found a dirty handkerchief and two cents. The feel of the coins brought everything back. Quickly he felt his pulse. It was slower than he had ever known it to be. Sure, there were times before when... but then the doctor always had been nearby. And this time, the most serious time of all -- he looked up at the Westboro sign -- he was lost. Perhaps, up on the streets, he would recognize something. He began to take the stairs at a run, but his breath came too hard, and he walked the rest of the way to the turnstile. The arm caught tight as he started to go through and a sharp pain want through his groin. "That's the way you go in, pal," somebody offered, and the man winced at the few laughs he had drawn. He saw the exit sign and walked quickly toward it. The night lights were just ahead as he collided with a woman loaded with bundles. They spilled. "Sorry," he said, leaving her to her indignation, and at a faster pace he walked outside into the cool night air. H e had stopped walking and was leaning against the door of the Inn of Six Horses, which proudly displayed its name and namesakes in blue and white neon. He had recognized nothing. He had tried getting to the doctor's by cab. but no driver would listen to him without first seeing the fare, even though he assured them all that he could get it from the doctor. A policeman had told him to move along or suffer the consequences of a thick nightstick. IF A drugstore proprietor had answered his request to use the phone by threatening to call the policeman with the thick nightstick. A dime. One dime! He remembered his Shakespeare. My kingdom for a... horse? Six horses. Maybe, just maybe, at the Inn of Six Horses... A short man at the bar, composing one half of the clientele, was calling the bartender's attention to the fact that the six horses outside outnumbered the customers. "Go to blazes," the bartender commented on the short man's observation. "I should," said the short one. "Then George here would be Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, riding your six old white stallions." "How do you know they're stallions?" George said. He was lean, mean and weary, looking as if he had just returned from a hard day of peddling vacuum cleaners. The door banged shut and three pairs of eyes focused on a dirty man. "Here comes a touch," said Pete. "Please," said the man, his voice shaky and weak. "Before you go into your act, pal," Pete said, "understand this: Nobody gets nothing free here, this ain't no mission or nothing. This is a business like any place else." "A real thriving business," mocked Shorty. "Please, a dime, I need a dime, that's all I -- " "A dime?" George laughed. "For what, a cup of coffee? This is a high-class place. Beer costs fifteen cents here." Shorty joined in with a snort. "Maybe he wants to call his girl." "I need the dime," the man said, leaning on the bar for support. "A matter of real life and death, huh?" George said. "Yes. Look... here, I have two cents, you take them." Pete looked suspiciously at the two coins. "We don't sell nothing that costs two cents." "You take the two cents, but give me a dime. Please " "Sharp businessman," noted George. "This is rich," said Pete. "Do you really expect to buy a dime for two cents?" Shorty said, "He just noticed how well you're doing. He figures you can afford the loss." "Boy, it burns me up," said Pete. "These professional bums make more in a week than I see in a month." "You keep talking that way, and this clown will want to buy your business for the two cents," Shorty said. "Ain't worth it," George said and banged his glass down. "Fill it," he directed Pete. As Pete turned, the man made a lunge for George's change on the bar. "Watch him," warned Shorty. George needed no warning. He had seen the man eying his money, and he had hoped for just such a move. With a right fist to the side of the man's head, George took revenge for a bad day's work. The man lay very still on the floor.  V admiringly. "You could have killed him like that." "He sure ain't doing much moving," said Pete, coming around the end of the bar. "I'd better take a look." "Man, I didn't hit him that hard." "Well, man , he sure asked for it," said Shorty. "And me and Pete will be right here to tell the cops that the guy was a crook and tried to rob your money. Right, Pete?" "George, this guy's got no pulse," Pete said. "Watcha gonna do, George?" Shorty said. "Just shut up and wait a minute," Pete said. "I think he's trying to say something." The man's eyes pleaded with each of the three. His lips quietly formed then message: "Dime." "Wow, talk about persistence," said Shorty. George looked at his change on the bar. He picked up a dime. "Hey," said Shorty, "what are you doing?" "Shut up," said Pete. "George's money is George's money. What he does with it is his business." "Look," George said, "I didn't mean to hit you so hard. I mean, I hit you so hard my whole hand hurts. So here, you can have the dime, i won't miss it" He pressed the dime into the man's hand.    "Holy cow," said Shorty. It was the first sound any of the three had made after the man had left, fifteen minutes before. George stared into the mirror behind the bar, seeking some mighty truth in his own reflection. "He says... he says Unbutton my shirt, and then..." George fondled some coins in his hand. "Then he takes that crazy dime, a plain old, regular, crazy dime..." Pete poured himself a Scotch. "What kind of guy is it, anyway," he said, "who walks around with a slot in the middle of his chest that he puts dimes into?" "Yeah," said George, "and who condition. Price # Fine to mint condition; complete April # (Vol. I No. #) to # -- #st # years # fine to mint condition. # #. "Seven Worlds to Conquer" (Burroughs novel). Complete excerpt from Argosy -- back to Stone Age. # #. "Resurrection of Jimberjaw" (Burroughs novelette). Excerpt from Argosy. # #. "Carson of Venus" Burroughs novel from Argosy -- excerpt. -- # Astounding, Galaxy, Wonder, etc. Send your want list. All orders F.O.B Brooklyn. New York. #I #th Ave. Brooklyn #, N.Y. IF F  Novelette The Enemy had a secret. Every courageous man would find a way to , steal it, no matter what it cost his conscience -- or world! T T he ship went down staggering on a lopsided stilt of fire, among the rugged foothills of the Lunar Urals. of the bands crossing the exhaust -- which showed that the cause of the trouble was a resonance instability, apt to shake the entire vessel to bits like blows from a vast hammer -- the engines went on firing after a fashion till one of the landing legs touched on an outcropping rock and tipped the ship over. It crunched like an eggshell and the engines died, leaving its pilot stranded but alive. Not that that made much difference. He had about twelve hours' oxygen in his suit tanks and a liter of fortified liquid in his nutriment reserve. But he was lost, he was some hundreds of kilometers from the nearest American base, and he was not even sure that he had been watched down by the radar there. For a while he occupied himself with petty things -- salvaging what instruments had survived the crash, SI hunting for any oxybottles not broken open in the crash, soaking inflammable material in the fastdrying liquid from the hydraulic shockabsorbers in the hope that he could fire a beacon when someone came to look for him. He considered climbing a nearby peak to set up a radio and try to beam a line-ofsight signal, but had to concede that even if he got up far enough for the extra height to be useful he would use more oxygen and might not have enough to get down again. He could stay with the ship, and that was that. Within an hour of the crash, he was learning that he was very much afraid to die. Not ours But all are " now as we are" Others to rescue No one else knows exactly where in thousands of square kilometers Suffering follows awareness if we leave him Agreed impossible but do what Avoid contamination There is the cured one cured?) Compulsion misliking constrained to act consent H e waited on the crest of a steep rock, able to see over the jagged local ground to the smoother-seeming plains beyond. He was not well used to exposed lunar conditions, and the stark blacks and were maddening; so also was the fact that it he did not move rather often his suit's heat-transfer devices overloaded, and if his feet were in his own shadow they began to prickle with cold, while his shoulders and scalp perspired. He did not mind loneliness very much. He would never have been entrusted with single-handed lunar ferry flights if he had shown any sign of breaking down from mere isolation. But once the extra factor of approaching death entered his mind, he found it gnawing at him, rat-wise. To die so much alone, with not even a sight of Earth to comfort him -- that was the intolerable part of it. He could die when he chose, or when he had to: crack the suit, or wait for the oxygen meters to hit zero. But he had to die. Four hours of waiting, then five, then six, and he was beginning to break. He could feel himself going, like a piece of fatigued steel; he knew he must not, should rather endure to the eleventh hour and beyond, and yet his control slipped away until he began to whimper involuntarily. Enough of that! He put his mind to singing, and telling himself stories; to reminding himself of friends; to reassuring lies about the excellent chance of being spotted. But it was very difficult. Whenever he let his attention wander, he felt the black despair encroach on him like tides eroding a cliff. He had endured eight hours, and was uncertain whether he would meet his inevitable end as a sane man or as a mindless, broken thing, when he saw the stirring of dust across the plain which indicated the passage of a lunar tractor. IF He imagined at first he was deluding himself. But when he clambered down from his rock and fetched the telescope which some Navy-minded bureaucrat had decreed be included in the emergency kit of the ship, he saw that the tractor was real. Moreover, it was headed directly for him. He could see few details owing to the reflection of the sun on its highly polished snout, but that in itself showed it was aimed for where he stood. If it had been travelling at an angle to him, it would have been splashing up enough dust to hide its sides. N onetheless, thinking pure chance might have brought it in this direction, he hurried to fire his beacon. Turning on the tap of an oxybottle, he ignited a few scraps of what had been his acceleration couch and made a bright blaze until the bottle ran dry. The tractor-driver had seen him. light flashed -- Morse letters forming the international reassurance sign, l-C-U. He felt himself go limp with relief. He did not realize until some moments had passed that he was babbling happily, and that if his suit radio had survived the crash he would have made the oncoming driver think he was rescuing a lunatic. How close would the tractor be able to come? Between him and the comparatively level plain lay some three kilometers of irregular ground, creviced and hummocked, over which no tracked vehicle could pass at more than snail's pace. It would help greatly if he could make his way to the edge of the plain, he thought, and began to scramble forward, no longer needing to remain close to the conspicuous wreckage of the ship. At this range, the bright orange fabric of his suit would stand out against the darker rocks. He was so occupied that he failed to notice when the tractor passed the edge of the plain and kept coming, over rocks and hummocks and crevasses, without slackening speed. Only when he paused before tackling a particularly difficult patch, and looked up to see how far he had got, did he realize that the tractor was not what he had assumed. Out on the dusty plain, of course, it had splashed dust up just as a tracked vehicle would have done. Now it was on hard ground he could see what he would have deduced anyway from its ability to tackle broken terrain. This wasn't a tractor from a Western base. This was a Russian "moon-walker," tramping on four padded feet exactly like a mechanical camel with an oyster perched on top. Its slab sides bore the Soviet red star. mind. Automatically, as he struggled to digest the knowledge of his fate, he found his fingers leaping towards the cracking valve on his suit. But for the long hours of waiting, in which he had found he was afraid of dying, he would have decompressed then and there, and made the rescue journey useless. Only he checked himself. He could live. IF He would live. And the hell with everything else. He was twenty-nine years old and that was too young to waste the chance. T he moon-walker stopped a hundred meters from him. Below the oyster-like pilot compartment a door in the slab side slid back, and the legs folded to bring the threshold to within a few inches of the ground. More than a little enviously, he stepped inside. The door gave into a small compartment that served as an airlock. It cycled quickly, and before he knew what was happening the floor was pressing against his feet. He was lifted up into the pilot compartment through another sliding panel in the ceiling of the lock. "Hullo," said the pilot. "I am very glad to have found you in good time." He did not even remember to crack his suit in the first moment of shock, although his outside pressure gauge showed one atmosphere and the pilot was unsuited. For the pilot was a woman. Everyone knew vaguely that the Reds made a fetish of sexual equality. But he had never imagined for a moment that they might send a woman out alone on a hazardous trip to rescue a foreign pilot. She had short-cropped dark hair around a rather long, fine-boned face; her complexion was sallow but her eyes were big and liquid, and her teeth were superb. She wore a standard undersuit of olive-green with rank and technician's badges he did not recognize. Ideas flashed through his head. Possibly he was the first westerner ever to go aboard one of these moon-walkers. Down in the slabsided compartment beneath his feet there was alleged to be a dompact fusion engine which was a jealously guarded secret, and then there was the question of automatic preadjustment to changes of level in the ground, which was baffling many investigators; a woman could be overpowered and the moon-walker directed to the nearest Western base... The pilot pushed a control home and locked it with a turn to the left. There was a slight lurch and a turning sensation, and the machine swung back on its original course in the reverse direction. "Please -- open your suit," the pilot said. Her voice was low and pleasant, and her accent good. Then she gave a sudden shrill, nervous laugh, and checked herself as if she were in a state of extreme tension. "My name is Olga Solykin, and I am more glad than I know how to say!" "Uh -- " Well, no harm in giving his name. "I'm Don Bywater. Thank you for -- well, saving my life." Something was askew. Suppose this situation were reversed. Could anyone imagine missing the chance to inspect the wreck of a rival spaceship, laid out and opened like a corpse at an autopsy? Yet already she had turned the machine around and by now -- to judge from the view through the excellent ports -- it was making thirty-five k.p.h back towards the base. Not a thought, apparently, for the ship. Cautious, he cracked the suit at last. The air was sweet and good after his own canned supply, which was partly recycled and never completely free of his own body odors. "Come, sit down!" the pilot insisted, patting the vacant co-pilot's chair. "Are you well? Are you hungry, thirsty? Were you injured in the fall? Were you not very lucky?" Why was she so eager -- almost as though she had not seen another human being for months? Her eyes were bright. Her voice tended to shake on occasional words, with what Don could only presume to be excitement. He glanced round the large cabin, noting the usual semipersonal touches -- the painting of Lenin, the photograph of Yuri Gagarin, the bust of Maisky-Artemov standing on a little ledge next to a package of moon maps. The stabilizing equipment was fantastic! Listening hard, he could faintly discern the hum of a gyro somewhere, keeping the cabin dead level no matter what kind of ground the moon-walker was scrambling over. B elatedly he began to peel off his suit. He said, "No, I wasn't hurt, thank you. I was very lucky. The whole of my acceleration unit came away in one piece and I was still in it when it hit the ground." "I'm so glad!" the pilot cried. She turned and felt along a shelf under the exiguous bank of controls; the machine was obviously completely automatic when bound for a known destination. She produced a large box of candy and some packs of cigarettes, and offered them to him as he sat down. He was so taken aback he forgot that it was probably bad to show that he was impressed by anything. He said, "You can smoke on board?" "Oh, yes, if not more than one person does at a time. I do not smoke, so please, you smoke if you like." She urged the cigarettes towards him, checked the movement and stripped away the cellophane wrap with frantic fingers as though panicking to be of service to him. The tobacco drugged? The candy poisoned? All the scores of stories which had been poured into his mind since he was a child came back to him. Anyway, he did not usually smoke off Earth, and rarely even at home. But his nerves were shot to pieces, and a smoke would certainly be soothing. If there was anything funny about the smoke, he told himself, he could throw the cigarette away after the first puff. There was nothing wrong with it at all. It was very good, aromatic Balkan tobacco. Although it burned rather quickly in the oxygen-high air of the cabin it was soothing and welcome. "And a drink, yes?" she invited. "To celebrate the saving of your life? I brought you food, vodka, all I could find, and the candy for you, and the cigarettes -- you have not been in one of our moon-walkers before, yes? Or you would not have IF asked about the smoking of a cigarette !" She laughed again, the sound coming hard and harsh from her full-lipped mouth. "Has anybody from my country?" he countered bitterly. What was all this about, anyway? Some elaborate Mata Hari trick? "Not even by now?" She seemed disappointed. "It is being so long, I hoped that -- well, it is not really so long, I guess. Well, you will like to see all of it, then. Shall I show you how it is?" She leaned towards him, over the side of her chair, her face bright and her tongue going once from left to right across her lips. A tentative conclusion jelled in Don's mind. This woman -- or girl, maybe, for she was no older than himself -- must have been condemned to some isolated post for a long tour of duty. It was exactly the kind of thing that fitted with all the halfauthorized rumors one was always hearing, even more here on the moon than back home, because here was where the competition was fiercest. And the stress of loneliness must have made her mentally unbalanced. How else to explain her weird behaviour? Claiming to have brought him candy and cigarettes and vodka -- he was no psychologist, but as guesswork it certainly fitted. He said, not without some nervousness, "Later. In a little while, if you like." Not to arouse any suspicion, that was important. To jump at the chance of inspecting the works of the moon-walker might be fatal. The trick was to be friendly as long as possible, to find out where he was exactly, to get an idea of the controls of the machine, and then to overpower her and walk it to the nearest American base...   quired, as casually as possible. "I was too busy fighting the controls to take a fix as I came down." Well, that was true enough. She jumped at the opportunity. Flushing a little, she put a finger on a switch before her. A previously dark screen on the control panel lit up with a set of grid-lines and a pattern of radar blips. The grid lines moved visibly, in time with the motion of the moonwalker. Don tried not to look impressed again. "Here, you see!" the girl said. "It navigates partly by dead-reckoning, partly by sighting on the stars. All is automatic now. We are here, and here are the Ural Mountains in back of us, and this red star in the center, that is this moon-walker, you understand?" "And you can -- uh -- steer it by hand if you have to?" "Oh, yes!" She showed him how. She showed him the inspection hatch of the fusion engine, and the neat stabilizer which kept the cabin level -- it turned out to be a bowl of mercury with hundreds and hundreds of tiny electrical contacts around the sides, from which a computer drew information about the vehicle's attitude, extrapolating to find the most probable correction the mechanism would next have to cope with. Don followed her explanations with mounting excitement; it seemed there was nothing she would not simple pleasure of talking. In the back of his mind, he was calculating. It would be best to take over the machine after about a couple of hours on board, before they came too close to its home base, but not so soon that her suspicions would not be lulled. Then he could easily locate the nearest American base. There were rather few in this region, for it was mainly a Soviet preserve. And then he could... "Ah!" she said suddenly, and cocked her head. They were looking down through the inspection hatch over the forward radar, watching the ground-scanner weave back and forth on the far side of a pane of tough glass. Don felt a stir of alarm. "What is it?" he demanded. "We are coming in at my base. Listen!" "We're what?" Pictures of a dozen wasted chances flashed through his mind. "But -- why so soon?" "Oh, you mean why if we are so near where you crashed did I come so long after you fell down? Why, there was much argument for and against to rescue you." She gazed at him with almost ridiculously melting eyes. Suddenly she thrust out her hand and snatched his, squeezing it briefly. "I am so glad they decided it must be done!" "They?" Don stared wildly towards the cabin ports. Yes, it must be true. The machine was marching in between two low cliffs, towards a dark, over-roofed aperture; then it was in the shadow with the suddenness of a light being switched off, and the engine's note changed down to an idling buzz. But if this woman hadn't gone crazy from isolation, then what -- ? He pulled his hand away. "How many people are there at your base?" he demanded. "Oh, many, many! Ninety, a hundred. But I have been so alone for so long!" There was a noise from below -- first, air hissing into an oversized lock, then the hurry of footsteps. Dazed, he said, "Alone? Are you crazy?" "With no one to talk to, yes, I have become nearly crazy!" she asserted, nodding her dark head frantically. "They do not talk, you understand! They do not give me a single word!" So she was a lunatic. And he was trapped. Don made a dash for the front of the cabin. But just as he was forming his intention the helmet and shoulders of a spacesuit appeared on the platform under the cabin which had previously lifted him from the airlock below. He was too close to stop himself. All the newcomer -- a stolid-faced man with big shoulders -- had to do was trip him. He measured his length on the deck. His forehead hit the base of the pilot's chair, and there was long darkness. IF in H e awoke painfully, with his head aching and his eyes blurred, in a room that might well have been at any of the moon-bases he knew. Starkly furnished with bunks and one table, plus some lockers and shelves on which were microfilms, a reader and some recording spools, it was about as homelike as a fallout shelter. He had a little delirium for a while before he regained full consciousness. He could not tell whether he actually saw, or only imagined he was seeing, Olga's face above his own, very pale and worried. He was confused, unable to decide whether the crash had been a dream and he was really in one of the American bases, or whether he was dead. When things finally straightened out, he found that Olga was there, on a stool beside the bunk, watching him with terrible intensity. When he opened his eyes, she seemed to break suddenly. "You live!" she cried. "You are well! How wonderful!" Memory came flooding back. He could not tell if it was wonderful to be alive; or not. He lifted hesitant hands to touch his forehead. There was a tenderness, but nothing more, to show where he had knocked himself out. Gently Olga guided his hands away, and swabbed the patch of bruised skin with something cool and wet that diminished the pain. She had barely finished the brief task when there was a rapping sound from the far wall. She got up and took the three steps necessary to reach a sort of window, beyond which a stout middle-aged woman with an expressionless face was making quick pantomime gestures. As he rolled his head on one side to follow Olga with his eyes, Don saw her draw out from below the window a sliding compartment like those used in drive-in banks tb protect cash being paid over. From it she took a charged hypodermic. Once more the mishmash of tales about hypnotic drugs, secret poisons and ruthless espionage techniques flooded into Don's muddled mind. But he was as weak as a kitten and could not resist as the needle was pushed expertly home. "It is good," Olga said apologetically. "It is for your health, you understand." Don closed his eyes. Some hours went by between sleeping and waking. On two occasions someone came and went at the curious sealed window, and signalled for Olga to go to the drawer below it. The first time she took out some thin broth steaming in a tin bowl, and spooned it into Don's mouth. The second time she took out food for herself. By raising his head a little Don was able to see that a faint violet glow pervaded the box, which disappeared a moment after it was opened. Sterile? Presumably But -- what for? It was not until the embarrassing discovery that Olga was not going to leave this cramped cabin for any purpose whatever, even the most private ones, that he began to think back over what she had said. The others would not speak to her. She was alone among nearly a hundred companions. Why? Surely she could not simply be insane, because then she would not have been trusted to drive out alone and fetch him from the wreck. He said, "What goes on? Please tell me! Why will no one talk to you? Why am I shut up with you like this when there are so many other people?" Olga clasped her hands before her in a kind of parody of delight, drew up her little stool near the bed and sat down close to him. She said, "Oh, it's marvelous to talk again! Even in a foreign language it is good! You know, I have come to where I have made recordings of my own voice and played to myself so as to remember what it is like to hear, and listen." "Why?" Don persisted. "The others are not talking now. I am the only one who is cured." D on closed his eyes. This was too much. One sane person in a base full of lunatics? "Poor friend Don," Olga said, laying her hand on his. "It is all hard to understand, isn't it? Here is the beginning. Several years ago, in Soviet Experimental Biology Station of Raznoyansk, is discovered strange symbiotic virus with some affinity for the nervous system, especially the brain. They give it to some monkeys, and they get very intelligent, amazing! Then they go mad. But so intelligent it is wonderful. I saw some of them who learned to use tools, who could even talk a few hundred simple words about food and working. It is decided by the great scientist Bielov, director of the bae, that he will experiment on himself, for it seems the virus increases mind activity. Changes readings on the encephalo -- " She stumbled, stressing the syllables oddly, and got it right the second time. "Encephalo-graph, yes." Don listened passively. 'All this was a long way from the moon. "So in secret he infects himself with this virus that we call a resonating virus. It seems to respond to nervous activity as a sounding board to a tuning fork, do you know? As an amplifier. "Now I was apprentice -- student, yes -- with Bielov. One evening I am working with a friend, Dvoriov, in the laboratory where we have monkeys, and Dvoriov suddenly cries out that Bielov will kill himself! Bielov is not there. He is at his house half a kilometer away, outside the station. But we go, because Dvoriov insists, like a crazy man, do you understand?" She was getting violently demonstrative. The words poured from her, with wild gestures to emphasize them. "And he is taking poison, laid on his bed with a note by him! From half a kilometer Dvoriov knew . And that was when we discovered it was true, what Bielov said in his last note. This virus can create telepathy." Don almost sat up. Only a stab of pain from his head made him IP fall back. Telepathy! With a tool like that the East would -- "So all of us who had in any way been infected, Dvoriov, myself, many many more as well, were brought here to the moon, to this secret base, to work upon the antidote. We think we have it. We think so because it was tested on myself, and for many months now I have been well, and have not suffered to be able to read a thought in another mind. And that was what was given to you. This was why Dvoriov wore a spacesuit when he came into the moon-walker to us. Although I am now cured, perhaps, I still carry the virus, can still infect others. But I am sealed up here in the one room because I am the control study. It must be learned if the virus will one day die out in my body, do you understand?" Painfully, Don worked it out. Yes, it hung together. He could have been infected by Olga as an immune but a carrier, and had been given the antidote, so was now an immune carrier himself, and... he had to get out of here! If he could just walk out, that would be enough to take the secret of the miraculous virus with hirti. Or was this all a big lie? O lga was going on, but he was scarcely paying attention. "Now all the others, you see, think together, and talk no more. I must talk again. Oh, I have been so alone since I was cured! Soon, when one year and a half is finished, and if I am still well, there will be more cures. But here it is a long way from other people, and our supplies come by automatic rockets and by robot vehicles And all of us are of high intelligence, so perhaps the others may not after all want to be cured. They work together on many problems." Don seized on that one. Telepathy would imply -- perfect espionage, perfect teamwork in research, limitless things! "When you fell down in your ship," Olga hurried on, "it was much argued whether to rescue you. It was dangerous. But it would not have been possible to endure the knowing that you were dying, do you understand? Better to save you. Better also because without company I would go mad, and though I have no longer power to receive thoughts all the others can hear me distantly as they heard you." Once more she clasped his hand. It occurred to him that he would probably need a friend in the enemy camp. He returned the pressure. It wasn't difficult. In spite of her mannish haircut and her rather disturbing eagerness to talk, she was attractive and female. Vague plans for exploiting these facts crossed his mind. In alarm, he checked them. It had just struck him that if he could be "overheard" at the distance of the crash, he could be overheard similarly and more easily now. What a fantastic situation to find himself in! "So you will help me to keep my mind well," Olga was saying, "and this will be good for the others, and also you will be a control for the antidote, because if you do not begin to have telepathy it will prove it also immunizes, as well as cures. It is turning out so well!" she finished rapturously. "What is it like to read people's minds?" Don demanded. "So strange it cannot be explained. It must happen to you. Blurred. Confusing. Sometimes frightening. Worst and most difficult is when you are awake and near a person sleeping, for dreams are not logical. Almost they are insane. That is why now everyone here sleeps at the same time; we have our own artificial time, and all sleep from midnight to eight hundred hours. This is by hypnosis, that all go to sleep and wake up together. No other way is possible." Click! Don tried to keep the thought unverbalized, at least, so as to reduce the chance of it being picked out of his mind. He said, "And -- are they listening to me all the time?" "No, no! Much work is done, and they concentrate hard. I -- or now you as well -- we are like a little noise in the corner of a room. It is there, but you can forget it. To hear the tick of a watch at night, when your wrist comes near your ear, is easy, but after you wear the watch two days, three days, it is ignored, you understand? So with the mind you are not interested in. With many minds, it is much more difficult, for it is what you would call louder. Stronger." So he could allow himself to think that it would be possible to escape as soon as he was well enough, when the ninety or a hundred telepathic people here were all fast asleep together. And hypnotically prevented from waking up for eight hours. IV I t was logical that they should become lovers. The confined conditions plus Olga's desperate hunger for maximum companionship saw to that. Don had no particular objection, except first that it seemed obscurely like treachery to have so much pleasure from it, and second that he could never help wondering whether there were eavesdroppers. There were regular deliveries of food, usually by the same middleaged woman he had seen bring the hypodermic with the antidote just after he woke up. It seemed that that could have been automated. But it gave an opportunity for visual inspection of the control subjects, of course, and according to Olga that was why it was attended to personally. Twice a day he and she both had to offer a drop of blood from a finger to be taken to a lab somewhere else in the base. She did this skilfully for herself and for him, and he noted -- not knowing whether it was important, but taking everything in that he could -- that the sterilizing ultra-violet did not play inside the sliding box when something was passed out of the room as it did when something was passed inward. Aside from that, Olga talked. Months of pent-up conversation IF flooded from her. Childhood memories, descriptions of what it was like to be infested with the resonating virus, funny stories, accounts of books she had read and shows she had seen, word-portraits of people here at the station before they became as they were... Don closed his mind to it firmly, as he had been taught. One could never tell when insidious propaganda might come through the harmless-seeming words. The other people in the base might as well not have existed except as shadows beyond the sealed window, appearing like the figures on some ancient mechanical clock at stated hours, going through their routine and vanishing again. But there was a world outside, and there was a secret of tremendous importance which he alone of all Americans possessed and which, if humanly possible, he was going to take away. H is watch had survived the crash, and still worked. The base was apparently run on an arbitrary time -- perhaps that of some Russian meridian -- but it was easy to establish when the official "midnight" fell; two-forty a.m. on his Greenwich-set watch. Disciplining himself with every technique he had ever been taught, he acted quite well enough to convince Olga within a few days that his gratitude for being saved from death had evolved into a genuine affection for her. It was unkind, he knew. But there was a deadly rivalry between west and east, and unless the secret of telepathy was shared it might be the long-feared decisive advantage which would give the enemy (the enemy since before Don was born, although there had never been a war in all that) the effective victory. Then, measuredly, he began' to make himself depressed and restless. The natural effect 'of being cooped up gave him a basis to work on. Soon he was snapping and complaining with convincing vigor while she wrung her hands and demanded what she could do. After a couple of days of that, he delicately broached the idea that they ought to be allowed outside, to save them from claustrophobia setting in. So what if it were not permitted? Was anyone to know if -- just after midnight -- one of the moon-walkers was taken out briefly, and returned before anyone woke up? Horror at the idea fought in Olga's mind with her boundless desire to please her companion and not to be condemned to renewed loneliness. She voiced objections. Don disposed of them smoothly. He was enough of a technician to get around the alarms if she knew where they were. There could not be many, because all the telepaths would be in hypnotic sleep. It would be impossible to wake just one of them because of this difficulty with insaneseeming dreams picked up from sleeping minds... Three days' argument produced the admission that there were no alarms or indeed locks to prevent Olga leaving her one room. There had just been no reason why she should, until now. She had wanted to keep the experiment perfectly controlled. After over a year, Don countered, surely enough evidence had been gathered! On the fourth night, he won his point. H e had never been so excited in his life as at the moment when she timorously activated the remote control for the big lock through which the moon-walker entered and left the base, and sent it hurrying and scurrying over the plain as if anxious to get quickly away from the base where everyone slumbered, and all the alarms had been temporarily restored to their normal "daytime" setting. It was lunar night outside. To the radar senses of the moon-walker that made no difference at all. At a steady forty-k.p.h. clip it headed out across the black plain under the frozen stars. At his request, she showed him how to operate all the controls. Directly she had done so, he closed his fingers gently on her carotid arteries. As she fainted, he chuckled to himself. He felt extraordinarily proud as though he had given her a much-needed lesson in absolute devotion to duty. He had been a little ashamed of himself for not cracking his suit when he saw he was being rescued by the enemy, and again when he found himself tempted to treat Olga with real tenderness. But he had well and truly made amends for his weakness now. He bound and gagged her with strips torn from her clothing and placed her comfortably in the copilot's chair. Then he studied his location. He had done some heavy thinking on the problem of navigation, and he was fairlv sure he could strike straight across the plain towards Mrs. Rafferty's Pass -- that all-important gap between steep mountains which an irreverent spaceman had named. Beyond there, he would be in line-of-sight radio range of more than one American base, and could take his pick of the nearest. ft would be a long haul. But traffic in the lunar night was very sparse, and with a fusion engine under him the range was virtually unlimited. He occupied his time on the long trip with dreams of the glory awaiting the man who captured not only one of the fabulous moon-walkers, but also the incredible secret of the telepathic virus. When the eggheads set to work on that one, things would really blow off Imagine the lovely expression on Soviet faces as they learned of the loss of their secret weapon! He noticed eventually that Olga had recovered. He had expected her to struggle against her bonds, splutter foolish nonsense behind her soaked gag. But she did not. She merelv twisted her head and looked at him. For some reason, he could not meet her gaze for long. He distracted himself by feigning cheerIF fulness which was not altogether sincere. He said, "Sorry, Olga, honey! I'm afraid I never was the type to be romanced away from the call of duty. They teach you a lot about loyalty in the Service. Some of it sticks." She said nothing. How could she, efficiently gagged as she was? Yet somehow a sort of deflating message seemed to reach him from her. As it might be put in words. Don't count chickens. It didn't fit with his future plans, and he ignored it. He said nothing else directly to her all the time it took the moonwalker to reach Mrs. Rafferty's Pass and come in range of an American base. As luck would have it, the first one he contacted was on a war footing. They made him stand by for six hours while they verified his identity by satellite relay half around Luna and made sure it wasn't a Soviet trap. But they relaxed their over-cautious manner once they had men swarming over the machine and inspecting its mechanism, and in another hour or two he was in the presence of the base commander and pouring out his message. Again, the commander was suspicious. But at length Don convinced him, and the application of a syringe of disinhibitor to Olga produced evidence to back him up. Within two hours more he, Olga and a heavy guard were on their way to America Base One, the nearest equivalent to a city anywhere on the moon, for ferrying back to Earth. He had a wonderful time impressing the guards with the resourcefulness whereby he had captured the moon-walker. The telepathic virus was of less interest to them. Machinery they could see working. Viruses were a cold in the head. Still... On this trip, Olga was not gagged, only handcuffed to a stanchion, but she said nothing at all. She merely went on looking at Don. Sometimes she smiled, and he didn't like the smile at all. So he tried not to look at her. It took the better part of a day at America Base One to establish his claims to the satisfaction of the egghead staff. There were hasty conferences with the topmost brass; there were plans laid on for a vicepresidential welcome and other suitable rewards for Don Bywater. And suitable treatment for Olga was likewise arranged. "Congratulations!" said the base commander briefly, as the ferry to Earth was being fueled and raised on the launching ramps. He shook Don's hand briefly. Photographs were taken for the record. V S omewhere along the line, some wires seemed to get crossed. When the ship had settled at Nevada Main Port there was quite a crowd. It cheered as Don emerged, waving, straining a little against full gravity, but not as loudly as might have been. The vice president waited at the edge of the field for the buggy to fetch Don across. Don went down to the little open vehicle with his personal escort. Then they brought Olga out of the ship. The cheering rose to a noise like Niagara. Disgusted suddenly with the whole business, Don had to make room for her in the buggy's back seat. But to his amazement she was smiling, even at him, and with some sign of real pleasure at the welcome arranged for them. The driver turned the buggy around and drove at a suitably slow pace across the concrete toward the vice president, the cameras and the press. "Tell me, Don," Olga said in a voice bright with false cheerfulness, "did you ever stop to wonder about some things?" "What?" Don was lost in worrying about what might happen in this ghastly situation, and about his tarnished glory. "Why Bielov killed himself, yes? And why it was necessary to take all of us to the moon and close us away from the whole world?" Don felt a block of ice form around his heart. "Think!" Olga invited brightly. "All on the moon at our base were clever, sensible people, high intelligence, trained scientists. All infected. Not .deliberately, by accident. For them, life is difficult but not bad... More were infected than are there now, but it was clearly necessary to insure that the stupid ones, the untrained thinkers, were excluded. We know a lot, over our side of the world, about people in the mass. You also should know. People have lynched and rioted here, do you understand?" Don stared at her numbly. She turned and inspected the waiting crowd with a bright, hating look in her eyes. "Yes!" she said, and gave a nod. "People in the mass react strangely. They make less than the -- what is it in English?" "The sum of their parts." The gravelly voice was Don's own, but it took him a while to recognize that he had spoken. "That is correct." Bitterness colored Olga's words. "I think perhaps I was sane till you exploited me -- for loyalty, as you said. Now... perhaps not. But I think there is a good number of people here, enough to form well a mob " Don's mind seemed to have congealed now. To stop the buggy? To stand up and scream a warning? "Possibly there are some people here who dislike your vice president. Political people are easily hated." Olga smiled a little crazy smile. "Do you think it would please the crowd if I persuaded the leader to kiss me, the pretty girl who has been brought to see error of her ways? Who would not know what loyalty means? You should know, Don." P erhaps the antidote in the carriers' bodies had made the virus more efficient at the business of infecting others. The crowd took ten minutes to become the mob Olga had predicted; within days it was the hemisphere that was infected, and in two weeks, the world. IF IF  Feature H ave you ever seen a nematode? Probably not -- and for the same reason people, especially in the season of the mortarboard, the graduation watch, and the platitudinous valedictory, can't see the profusion of new frontiers all around them. We don't mean the New Frontier of foreign policy. We mean the ones worth dedicating a life to, capcitement, discovery and accomplishment. Do you really think there aren't many of them around? If there were, you might be saying, why can't you see them? Have you ever seen a nematode? Listen: If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. That was written in #, in a report to the Department of Agriculture, by one N. A. Cobb, who apparently did discover a frontier, and who was followed by more nematologists -- but never enough. It has been estimated that these amazing critters cost the farmer -- and you -- want to organize a safari to hunt nematodes, get yourself a shovel and step over to the nearest grassland. In the top inch of one square yard of topsoil you can bag twenty A nematode is an eel-like animal seldom more than a twentieth of an inch long. It has a well developed nervous system and elaborate organs, and in one form or another it thrives in hot springs, Arctic ice and your own treasured personal plumbn ing. Trichinosis is caused by nematodes; so is hookworm. Among the many astonishing things about this little marauder is his -- well, let's call it chemical radio. T here is one nematode which lives exclusively on tomato plants and its close relatives. It lays its eggs and encapsulates them, and neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night has the slightest effect on this capsule. Nor time -- at least, not much. If no tomato rootlets appear in the nearby soil, the capsule will lie there dormant for years on end. But as soon as the right plant sprouts, pop goes the capsule, the eggs hatch and nematodes swarm to the attack. (They don't all hatch, by the way; having apparently bought an insurance policy, the nematode leaves a percentage of the eggs unhatched in case of crop failure. These can resist everything the capsule could, almost as well, plus temptation. No matter what, they'll await another season.) The especially interesting thing about this is the chemical "signal" sent out by the plant, and the nematode's reaction to it. It isn't anything as gross as, for example, an acid which dissolves the capsule. It's a trace chemical so dilute that it's indetectable by any but the most advanced lab techniques. The capsule isn't opened by it; it opens itself when it gets the "message", and it's so sensitive that it will only respond to a healthy, new fast-growing rootlet. If the root is growing at a rate of ##ths of an inch a day it will then be left alone. Such a plant is weak and may not live. But if its growth is #I #th of an inch a day, pop goes the capsule. The chemical that brings this about is called a root "diffusate." Hold on to that. The nematode has its enemies; prime among these is a tiny threadlike fungus. When no nematodes are present, these (there are several species) grow their fine tangled threads quietly through the topsoil like many others. But in the presence of nematodes, the fungus -- goes hunting! In a very brief time, the innocuous threads begin to manufacture traps. Some make flypaper, some fishhooks; the most amazing of all makes a closed noose. Should a nematode put his head in the noose, it snaps closed -- in less than one tenth of a second! Now, wha triggers these traps is contact. What causes them to be made, however, and be ready in time is -- you probably guessed it -- a diffusate. So sensitive are these fungi to some trace chemical exuded by the nematodes that, if grown in a nutrient dish to which one drop of water in which the nematodes have lived is added, they will immediately begin to build traps. Here, then, is one of those frontiers. The composition and action of diffusates is poorly understood, and the man who can explain the process will have done more than make the acquaintance of a hookworm. For it is a diffusate which sends out the irresistible call from ovum to sperm -- and sends the opposite message the very instant a single sperm cell penetrates it. And such understanding may make clearer the exact electroIF chemical process by which a nerve impulse, which triggers cell after cell in microseconds, carries a message. There is simply no way to calculate the ultimate effects of such understanding. But if you feel a little cheated by our use of terms like "adventure" and "exploration" for such sit-down, eyestrain, trace-element researches, maybe the Para apricot, the vinca rose, aniba ' , pacova', and pajuru ' will be more to your liking. H ere is exploration and adventure in its truest sense, not only the exotic-land, pith-helmet, wild beast and deadly serpent variety, but also the pot-o'-gold kind; for here is exploration with more than a fair chance of a classic buck at the far end. At last, and belatedly, teams of American and Brazilian doctors and biochemists are assaulting the Amazon Valley -- an immense, largely uncharted tract carpeted with some # as-yet-unclassified plant species. Everyone knows the story of curare , deadly arrow-poison which became a miracle drug. But did you know that along with quinine and ipecac, cortisone also comes from a jungle plant, and Brazilian Indians used to chew Rauwolfia to make them brave in battle, long before Mad Ave ever heard of Miltown? And they have # species of Rauwolfia in those jungles, each valuable in its own special way. Doctors in the state of Para' found a high and tragic incidence of stomach hemorrhage a while back, and traced it to a local apricot, which wa eaten plentifully by the people. From it they have derived a valuable anticoagulent to control strokes and angina. (Let us add that our home grown variety doesn't play these tricks.) The vinca rose, common as our daffodils, is used in Brazil for a bracing tea, a mouth wash, an antiseptic for open wounds and a cure for upset stomachs. This year researchers haVe found that it is a potent aid in the remission of many types of cancer, including leukemial Pacova' and pajuru ' with which Intheir faces since before Columbus, may make a breakthrough in the dye industry the like of which has not been seen since coaltar appeared on the scene. Aniba! is a heady perfume, and certainly the forerunner of a whole new series of exotic scents. We've been talking here only about one small corner of one science -- biochemistry -- and have, we think, uncovered a goodly number of challenging "new frontiers". When you pause to think that without exception, every scientific discipline can produce more of the same, the widespread ambition to shoot for Fringe-Benefitsville in good old General Everything Inc. looks just a little effete, doesn't it? IP  Novelette Whatever it was that had happened in the test, it badly needed a good explanation. I L ieutenant Colonel Philip Snow, Test Director of the AeroMedical Laboratory, was pacing the study floor in his quarters, asking himself for the dozenth time in the past half-hour: What had happened to Richardson during the test that afternoon? He was no stranger to problems. He had been living with them for the past few years, and they had been problems the like of which had never before challenged the ingenuity of man. For he was the head of a small community of men, scientists like himself -- medical specialists of all kinds, psychologists, electronic technicians, physicists, pressure engineers, mathematicians and so on, each one of them an acknowledged expert in his particular field -- who had worked together with one end in view: to send a man into space and bring him back safely to Earth again. To put it more excitingly: to enable man to take his first step toward the conquest of the universe. IF The result of their labors to date was the Capsule, a bottle-shaped contraption which occupied the center of the laboratory floor. It wasn't very big; just big enough to contain a man enclosed in a spacesuit, lying on a couch surrounded by instruments. But there wasn't a square inch of the capsule itself, the spacesuit, and the instruments which hadn't presented innumerable problems, the solving of which had been the result of endless research and theorizing and testing. And in the same way, and almost to the same extent, there wasn't a square inch of the man, too, which didn't present problems, all of which must be solved before he could be sent into space. And so, in test after test, one of the chosen astronauts had lain on the couch in the capsule, wired through his spacesuit to the dozens of dials and graph recorders on the consoles at which sat the watching specialists. It seemed there was nothing that could happen inside his body that they could not know about. They could read every flexing of his muscles, every heartbeat, every tiny shifting of temperature, every reaction of his blood and of his complicated nervous system. On the encephalograph, they could even detect reactions in the mass of gray matter which was his brain, any sign of tension there, and above all, any symptom of that strange phenomenon of which so little was yet known, and which was called the "breakoff" -- the eerie sensation of complete isolation from Earth, the trancelike apathy and indifference to survival that can attack not only high-flying pilots, but deep-sea divers, "the rapture of the depths," and sometimes it was accompanied by hallucinations in which strange forms and sounds were seen and heard. I n the case of Lieutenant Hamhad been no mysterious troubles of this kind -- in fact, no troubles of any kind at ' all. Aged thirty-six, he had been one of the first of the astronauts to volunteer. He had passed with flying colors every one of the grueling preliminary tests, mental and physical, and as far as could be judged by science, he had seemed to be the perfect specimen, mentally and physically, for the job. In the many tests made with him inside the capsule, nothing had gone wrong with him. There had been no signs of fatigue or failure of any kind. Had Snow been asked who, in his opinion, would be the first man -- or, at any rate, the first American -- to go into deep space, he would unhesitatingly have nominated Richardson. That is to say, until that afternoon when the thing had happened. It had been a long test, one made for the first time. The object of it was to find out how the spacesuit, which was sealed off from the rest of the capsule, would stand up if something happened to the capsule itself. If, for instance, in its headlong flight through space, something struck it, something, maybe, no bigger than a small pebble. The odds were that in collision with even so IF small a meteor, the shell of the capsule would be punctured, and within a minute or less, the atmospheric pressure inside it, fixed at about five thousand feet above sea level, would be reduced to zero. In other words, the capsule would become a vacuum in which nothing on Earth could live. The astronaut would then have to depend upon his spacesuit which, being pressurized, and being really a capsule within a capsule, with its own supply of oxygen, would be the one hope of survival. That day, the test had consisted of the "puncturing" of the capsule. At a given signal, the pressure inside it had been reduced to that of fifty miles above the Earth's surface -- in other words, to zero -- by pumping out the air inside it. Richardson, the ace of the astronauts, had been chosen for this important test. It had gone well. With the other scientists at their dials, Snow, seated at the big console of literally dozens of dials, the only one to be connected with Richardson by sound and speech, had given the signal. In a minute, the capsule had become a vacuum fifty miles above the surface of the Earth, outside its envelope of atmosphere. Richardson's voice, reading his instruments, acknowledging Snow's instructions, answering his questions, had come through as normal and as calm as ever. Snow had felt a rising excitement as the test proceeded. And then, without warning, the thing had happened. Richardson's voice had stopped in the middle of an instrument reading, as if it had suddenly been cut off. A few seconds later, it had resumed. Birt when it did so, the voice was uttering a stream of unintelligible soundi in a low, lilting chant. Snow had listened incredulously for perhaps thirty seconds, at the end of which the sounds had suddenly ceased. Immediately, Snow had given instructions for the normal pressure inside the capsule to be restored. Almost as he had done so, Richardson's voice, once again normal, had resumed the reading of the instruments, taking up from where it had left off a minute before. Acting on a sudden impulse. Snow had decided to say nothing over the wire to Richardson at the time. He had continued his conversation with the astronaut, telling him they were "bringing him down" and asking the usual questions until the test ended. W hen, with the others, he had stood around watching while Richardson was helped out of his spacesuit, he had carefully watched their faces, looking for some sign of doubt or puzzlement But he saw none. On the contrary, they all seemed triumphantly satisfied. Even Richardson had shown no sign that anything unusual had occurred. He had been his usual cheerful self, seeming not even slightly fatigued by the long test. Being the only one who had been in contact with Richardson, Snow had suddenly found himself wondering if he really had heard those sounds, if, maybe, he had been the victim of a hallucination. This was why he had said nothing about it at the time. He had just asked, as casually as he could, if any of them had anything they wanted to bring up immediately. They had shaken their heads, beaming their satisfaction, and he had dismissed them all, saying that in view of Jhe length of the test they might all call it a day, and postponing the usual interrogation until the morrow. Then he had hurried back to his quarters, bringing with him the recording machine on which, as was the practice, his conversation with Richardson during the test had been recorded. Controlling his impatience with difficulty, he had rewound the tape on the machine and played it back, the tension rising within him as he listened. There had been no hallucination. He heard Richardson's voice reading the instrument, the sudden cutoff in the middle of it, the short silence, then the voice uttering the strange sounds in a low-pitched chant with a gentle rise and fall to it. Three times he had played it back, and now it seemed to him that these were not just disconnected sounds. They appeared to have a cadence, a phrasing which indicated that they belonged to a language of some sort. Snow was no linguist. He had less than a fair conversational knowledge of French and German, and a scholar's acquaintance with Latin, but he had travelled very extensively in his time and had been accustomed to hear many languages spoken. He was quite sure he had never heard anything even remotely resembling these sounds. Certainly Richardson was no linguist either. He was third-generation American from British stock, and all he knew about languages was what he had learned in school. T hen where had those sounds come from? Were they a language, and if so, w,hat did they mean? How could this happen to a man like Richardson without his knowing about it? Did it mean that here was, after all, something strange about him which the man himself might not even know about, and which might mean that he was not fit for the project? This last question worried Snow more than the others. He went to the telephone on his desk and dialed the Richardson bungalow. The voice of Richardson's pretty wife answered him. "Yes? Sandra Richardson here." "Hello, Sandra. Phil Snow calling. Is Ham there?" "He's in the shower singing his head off. Shall I get him?" "No, it isn't important. I just wanted to ask him again if he feels all right after the test. I was rather a long one, and I wondered if he might feel tired, or..." "Tired? He seems even more full of pep than usual. Was the test so very long, then?" "Yes, it was. That's why I called and -- just to tell him it was a success. I haven't checked all the reports yet, but it looks good. And you say he's as usual?" IF "Yes. Why? There wasn't anything...?" "No, no, nothing at all. Just as I said. I'll be seeing you." He rang off, hoping that nothing he had said was now making Sandra Richardson suspicious, and resumed his pacing up and down the floor. Now another question came into his mind. The same test would be run several times again before final conclusions could be made. Should he wait for them to see if this thing happened again before starting anything with Richardson and his colleagues? But even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. If this never again happened in any future test, the fact would remain that it had happened once and could not be forgotten or brushed aside. It must be cleared up. Something had happened to Richardson's mind. He decided to take Abe Fran stein, his head psychologist, into his confidence. As he dialed Franstein's bungalow, he recalled with a sense man was not only a world authority in his particular subject, but that he was said to be able to read, write, and converse in a staggering number of languages, some of them obscure Oriental dialects. When Franstein answered the call, Snow asked him to drop in for coffee after dinner. II #T T Tell, I must say," said Fran V stein as they sipped their coffee, "yours is the first glum face I've seen around here since that test this afternoon. Here we are, within sight of our goal at last, and look at you! Weren't you satisfied?" "Before I go into that," Snow replied, "there are a few things I want to ask you." "About the test?" "In a way, but .principally about Richardson. Have you ever had any reason to suspect that there is anything unusual about him?" "In what way?" "In your line." Franstein produced an enormous meerschaum pipe and proceeded to fill it from an untidy plastic pouch as he replied. "Yes, there is. One very unusual thing." "There is?" "He's got a very rare type of mind. It's probably perfectly balanced." The little man lit his pipe and continued: "The vast majority of us have some sort of imbalance, mentally. He hasn't. When I say imbalance, I mean the sort of thing that makes for genius, a phenomenal memory, an outstanding, effortless talent, amnesia, any form of insanity, or even something like a violent temper. Anything, so to speak, overemphasized." "Is it physical? I mean, does it have anything to do with the size or weight of the brain, or anything like that?" "You can take the brain of a genius and that of an ordinary person of average intelligence, and find them exactly the same in measurements and tissue condition. The popular conception of the genius as a man with a bulging forehead is so much nonsense. Plenty of lunatics and retarded individuals have bulging foreheads." "Then what does it have to do with?" "Ah! That's the big question. Nobody knows. You can take two men, equal physically in every respect, equal in upbringing, education, health, and with the same sized brain. One of them might turn out to be a genius, the other an average individual, and nobody knows what makes the difference. Nobody knows what makes an infant prodigy, or what it is which enables a child of two to read easily, or a kid of five or six to play some instrument as if he'd been at it for years or compose symphonies, or master advanced mathematics. Same answer. Nobody knows. It's got nothing to do with heredity. So few geniuses have had genius offspring that they form exceptions to the rule. Again, why does an infant prodigy sometimes lose his gift or talent entirely as he grows older? We don't know. All we know is that the gift or talent is there, but where it comes from, or why it is in one brain and not in another, we don't know. But surely you don't have to have me to tell you all this, Phil? What's on your mind?" "Listen to this," Snow said, and went to the tape recorder. H e rewound the tape to its beginning, depressed the switch marked Play , and presently they heard the two voices, Snow's and Richardson's. "Nowl" said Snow as the point on the tape approached. There came the sudden stopping of Richardson's voice in the middle of an instrument reading, the short silence, then Richardson's voice chanting the strange sounds. Franstein took his pipe from between his teeth and his mouth fell open as he listened. The sounds ceased and Richardson's voice resumed the instrument reading at the point at which it had left off. "That's all," said Snow, and switched off the machine. Franstein put his pipe back into his mouth. "Is this the recording of this afternoon's test?" "Yes. What d'you make of it?" "Let's hear it again." Snow played back the recording a second and a third time, and then said: "Well?" Franstein went to the table and helped himself to more coffee before replying. "It's a new one on me," he said presently. "I've got about a thousand recordings of languages and dialects from all over the world, and not one of them is anything like that." "You think it is a language, not just sounds?" "That we've got to find out, but I'd say, offhand, it's a primitive form of a language of some sort." "Then how the devil does it come out of a man like Richardson who's never spoken anything but English -- nor his forebears, for that matter?" Franstein shrugged his shoulders. "How does great music come out of a child of six, and so on? Same If question, same answer. Nobody knows. Have you spoken to Richardson about it?" "No. I rang his bungalow just before dinner and spoke to Sandra. Richardson was in the shower, and she said he was feeling fine. I didn't tell her about this, of course." "Then it couldn't have been some sort of mediumistic trance. They usually feel the effects of that sooner or later." "You're not suggesting spiritualism, are you?" and in Snow's voice was a note of amusement. "Don't laugh at it. If it's never been proved, neither has it been disproved." And that touched off a discussion which went on for two hours. It covered many theories, many beliefs and faiths, all of which Franstein spoke learnedly and with great respect. He talked of reincarnation, spiritualism, the mystery of time, and in this last connection, he paused in the middle of what he was saying and asked: "If this -- " and he waved a hand toward the machine -- "is a language, and I'm pretty sure it is, how can we be sure that it is a language of the past? Why shouldn't it be one belonging to the future? All languages change with time. We'd probably find it very difficult to understand the English spoken ten centuries ago. What if this is the English that is going to be spoken a thousand years hence?" all of which Snow listened with the skepticism of the exact scientist, and Franstein, quick to notice this, went on: "You think yourselves clever, you exact scientists, and so you are. You can do a lot of things. You can split the atom, measure the stars, estimate the life expectancy of the sun; you have conquered distance, you have surrounded us with miracles like radio, television, invisible rays and all the rest of it. Presently, you will conquer space and colonize the planets, and so it will go until it will seem to you that you will know everything. And you will too, except for one thing -- the one final mystery, the last secret of the universe me, and any human being from a bum of Skid Row to the President. Man is the eternal unknown quantity, and you've never had a more clear demonstration of this than what happened to Richardson this afternoon. Oh, I know what you've found out. You know all about man, his insides, his glands, muscles, nerves, brain, and so on. You can even display him on a table as a bucket of water and little piles of salts and minerals, and you can point to them and say: 'That is what man is made of. Only the other day I was reading about some scientist who thinks he's on the verge of producing a cell of life in a test tube. You may even do that, and you may find out one day how to put the water and the salts and the minerals together again and make a man. I've always thought the Frankenstein story was a bit of inspired prophecy. But you still won't be able to explain why great music can come from a child of six, or what happened to Richardson this afternoon." He lit his big pipe, which had gone out, and through the puffs asked: "And what do you propose to do about Richardson?" "Run the test again tomorrow with him and see if this happens again, and then decide," replied Snow. "But even if nothing happens tomorrow, you can't ignore this." "That's true. We've got to get to the bottom of it, and that's where you come in. You're the expert on this sort of thing." Franstein looked at his watch. "Let's sleep on it and see what happens tomorrow, eh?" He was on his way to the door when the telephone bell rang. Snow picked up the receiver, and he heard him say: "Sandra?... What?... I'll be right over. I've got Abe Franstein with me. I'll bring him with me. Don't worry dear." Snow hung up. "Something's happened to Richardson," he said. "He's gone into a deep sleep and won't wake, and he's talking to himself in some funny language. Let's go." Snow rummaged in a drawer of his desk and found a stethoscope. Ill F ive minutes later, they were standing with pretty Sandra Richardson at the foot of the bed on which Richardson, clad in his pajamas, sprawled on his back. He was in a deep sleep and from his mouth came a low chanting. Franstein and Snow glanced at each other as they recognized the sounds. Snow tried to wake the astronaut, gently at first, then less so, but it had no effect. He used his stethoscope on heart and lungs, drew back an eyelid and examined the eye beneath, felt the brow. "When did this happen?" he asked the anxious Sandra. "About fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago," she replied. "We came in here and undressed and I used the bathroom first. When I came out, I found him like this." "How's he been all the evening?" "Fine, just as I told you when you rang. Tom and Betty Moreland came for dinner and we played canasta. Is he all right?" "As far as I can see, yes. Heart, lungs, eyes all right, no fever. I guess we'll just have to wait till he wakes." They went into the sitting room and Sandra left them to make coffee. "He's living through something," Franstein said. "Pity you haven't got the recorder here." "I thought the same. I'll get it." Snow left and Franstein wandered back into the bedroom and leaned over Richardson. Now he was sure this was a language and that the sleeper was conversing with someone in his sleep. The expressions changed on Richardson's face rapidly as they do on the face of anyone during a conversation. At one moment he laughed as he said something, then became serious as he said something else. Sandra came into the bedroom and joined Franstein at the bedside. "He's never been like this before," she said worriedly. IF "Doesn't he ever talk in his sleep?" "He never even snores. When we were first married, he slept so quietly that I thought he'd stopped breathing, but I'd only have to touch him or whisper to him and he'd wake in an instant. What does this mean?" "We'll find out, never fear." They went back into the sitting room as they heard Snow return. He was carrying the recording machine, and seeing the question in Sandra's eyes as she saw it, he said reassuringly: "We're going to make a recording of what Ham's saying. We'll soon find out what this is all about." He busied himself changing the tapes on the machine, taking the new one from his pocket, and fumbled the job in his haste. He had plugged in the microphone and was unwinding the long chord when they heard Richardson's voice call out from the next room: "Sandra!" and a moment later, Richardson appeared in the open doorway, staring at them in astonishment. "Abe! Phil! When did you come here?" "About .half an hour ago," Snow replied. R ichardson passed a hand over his eyes. "I must have fallen asleep," he said. "You did, darling, and I couldn't wake you," Sandra said. "So I called Phil." "You couldn't wake me?" "No, and you were talking away in your sleep. You had me worried." "Why?" Sandra, at a loss, looked at Franstein and he answered for her. "You were dreaming, Ham," he said. Richardson thought for a moment before replying. "Now that you mention it, I was. But what's so extraordinary about that? Why are you all looking at me as if I'd suddenly grown horns?"  "D'you remember what the dream was about?" Franstein asked. "Vaguely. Yes, I do. It was just a dream. Why is it so important?" He sat down in a deep chair and looked around at them. "What is all this?" he said. "I fall asleep for half an hour, have a silly dream, and wake up to find you here looking as if something big has happened." "Something has happened, Ham," said Franstein. "Something we don't understand." Richardson started up in his seat. "Take it easy, there's nothing to worry about. We'll get to the bottom of it." He turned to Snow. "I think I know the way out of this. Play the recording for Ham to hear." Snow hesitated for a moment. "All right, if you think so," he said, and busied himself with the recorder, replacing the used tape on the spool. Sandra perched herself on the arm of her husband's chair and put an arm about his shoulders. They waited while Snow linked up the end of the tape to the other spool. He pressed the Play switch, and presently there came the voices of Snow and Richardson. "That's this afternoon's test," Richardson said. Franstein nodded, and they continued to listen Then came the chanting sounds, and when he heard them, Richardson's expression changed to one of amazement. Snow switched off the machine. "What was that?" Richardson asked. "We hoped you'd be able to tell us," Franstein replied. "I? What should I know about it?" "That was your voice, Ham. Nobody's touched the tape, and I heard it during the test." "But this is crazy. How could I make a noise like that without knowing anything about it? Why, I remember every second of that test, and I know I didn't do anything like that." He jumped to his feet and began to walk up and down the room, his hands pressed to his head. "I said take it easy, Ham," Franstein said. Richardson pulled up short in his pacing and turned to the little man. "How can I take it easy? I spend six hours in the capsule in a difficult test, remember every bit of it, come out of it feeling not even tired, and now you tell me that in the middle of it I had some sort of a blackout and made funny noises. That can only mean that there's something wrong with me, and you don't have to tell me what that means. I don't qualify, after all. Is that what you came here to tell me?" F ranstein's voice was as quiet as before. "It doesn't mean anything of the sort. If there'd been a blackout or if something else had no happened to your brain, it would have shown up on the encephalograph, and nothing showed. I didn't know about this until I heard the recording, and we weren't going to say anything about it until we'd run the test a second time. Then Sandra called us to say she couldn't wake you and that you were talking in your sleep, and we came over to find you in a sleep as deep as a coma and obviously di;eaming." "And what's that got to do with the test?" "You were making the same sort of sounds in your sleep as you did in the test, and I'm sure they add up to a language of some sort." "What? You mean to say that was a language? For Pete's sake, I've never spoken anything but Epglish all my life. I can't." "We know that." Richardson turned to his wife. "Is this true?" he asked her tensely. "Was I making noises like that in my sleep?" She nodded miserably. He threw up his hands. "Okay," he said, "you're three to one. The ace astronaut turns out to be some sort of nut who talks monkey langauge in his sleep, and when he's awake too, without knowing it." He went to the deep chair and slumped down into it. "What do we do now? Go into analysis again? Start all over?" He laughed shortly and bitterly, and added: "Or do I resign from the project?" "Listen, Ham," Franstein said. "We're up against something new, something I don't understand, and whatever happens, we've got to try IF and find out what it is, for your sake as well as for the project's. Let's relax and start with the dream. Tell us what you remember of it." Richardson took time to calm down before he spoke. "It was just a dream," he began presently. "There was a big spaceship and a lot of people standing about." "Where was this?" "Where? I don't know. On Earth, I suppose. Open place, you know, only..." He paused before going on. "Only it wasn't standing up on end like a rocket. It was lying on its side, and we were loading it." "Who were 'we'?" "My father and my two brothers. And that shows how silly the dream was because I haven't got any brothers or father. My father in the dream wasn't anything like my own. He was just an old man, and he told us where to stow the crates." "What was in the crates?" "In the crates?" Richardson looked up. "Let me see now. Oh, yes, they were full of the seeds of plants and eggs and sperm of animals -- sort of the beginnings of things." "And where was the ship going to?" A gain, Richardson concentrated before replying. "To another Earth," lie said. "That's right. The old guy, our father, said that this one was going to be destroyed by some disaster, and the people standing about were laughing and jeering and saying the old man was crazy." "Do you know what sort of disaster was going to happen?" asked Franstein. Richardson looked at him and suddenly a smile formed on his face. "Now I know where that dream came from," he said. "Remember that book On The Beach? The story about how everyone on Earth was wiped out by nuclear fallout? That's it! I remember wondering when I read it if some of us would be able to go to another planet before anything like that happened here, and I remember thinking, too, that we'd probably take things like seeds and so on with us, and even the ova of animals, and that by then we'd probably know how to preserve them -- freeze them or something of the sort." "We can do that now," Snow said. "Well, there it is, then," said Richardson, smiling again. "There's the explanation." "It explains the dream all right," agreed Snow, "but what about the sounds? Particularly those you made in the capsule?" "Lord, yes!" said Richardson, and the smile left his face. "I'd forgotten about those. That puts us back to where we came in, doesn't it?" "I'm not so sure," said Franstein. He got to his feet and, in his turn, prowled up and down the room, deep in thought. The others waited for him to go on, and presently he turned to them, a glint of excitement in his eyes. "I think we're onto something," he said. "Those sounds are obviously a part of your dream, Ham, including the ones you made in the capsule, and only you know what they mean." "But I don't even remember making them!" IF "No, but your mind does. If we can unlock your mind, we can find the secret, and there's a way in which it can be done. Hypnosis." "Hypnosis?" The others spoke at once. Franstein nodded. "I've got to put you into a hypnotic trance, Ham, and we'll play that recording back to you and I think -- only think, remember -- that you're going to be able to tell us what they mean. Any objection, Phil?" "You're the expert." "How about you, Ham?" "I'll do anything to clear up this business." He jumped to his feet. "Let's get on with it now. What do I do? Shall I lie down on the sofa?" "I didn't know you are a hypnotist too, Abe," said Snow. "I'm not surprised, though. I might have known." Franstein took no notice of this, lie stepped up to Richardson and looked up at him, holding out one hand which the other, wonderingly, took. "The big thing is confidence, Ham," he said, looking up earnestly. "Complete confidence. You have that in me?" Richardson looked down on the little man and nodded his head. "Sure," he said. "I've always had that in you, Abe." Franstein continued to hold the other's hand. "That's fine," he said. "All you have to do is to relax and trust in me. Just relax completely. Just let yourself go -- eh?" R ichardson's head nodded again, and for a moment Franstein, still holding the hand continued to look up into Richardson's face above him. Then he released the hand and said: "Now you can lie down on the couch if you like." Richardson went to the couch and stretched himself out on it. "I've heard a lot about this-," Sandra said, "but I've never seen it done." Franstein smiled at her. "You've just seen it done, my dear," he said, and as she stared back at him in astonishment, added: "He's a very good subject. Now, when that machine is ready... "If I'm right in what I think," Franstein said a few minutes later to Snow, who stood by the table on which now rested the recorder, and to Sandra who was at the head of the couch looking down on her husband who lay there, his eyes halfclosed, "you're going to hear something very surprising. Please don't make a sound." They nodded their heads, and Franstein seated himself on the edge of the couch, leaned over Richardson, and spoke softly: "You hear me, Ham?" "Yes, I hear you." "Then listen." Franstein turned and nodded to Snow. The machine was switched on and there came, clearly, the chanted sounds of the test. They finished and the machine was switched off. "You heard. Ham?" "Yes, I heard." "You made those sounds that we just heard.' "Yes." "Can you repeat them?" "Then do so." And now the strange low chanting sounds streamed from Richardson's lips. Sandra put her hands to her mouth to stifle a gasp. Snow stepped to her side, his face tense. The sounds ceased and Franstein, his eyes alight with excitement, said softly: "Tell us, to whom are you speaking?" "To my sons." "Tell us in English what you are saying to them." There was a silence. Franstein repeated his command, and Richardson spoke again, this time in his normal voice. "And God saw the earth , and behold it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. And God said to Noah , I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark...and you shall come into the ark , you , vour sons , your wife , and your sons ' wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you , they shall be male and female... Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten and store it up...And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him..." The voice tapered off into silence, and Sandra, her eyes wide with fear and amazement whispered: "That's the story of the Flood and he told it as if he was there. What does it mean?" Franstein silenced her with a gesture and bent over Richardson whose eyes were closed. "Ham," he said, a note of insistence in his voice, "you hear me? Answer!" The eyes half opened. "Yes, I hear you." "Tell me, where did you go in the ark?" "To a place of many waters... many waters, and we rested on them until they went down." Now the voice was fading. "Where was it? Tell me, where was it?" The reply came in almost a whisper. "I don't know. It was another earth...another earth..." The eyes closed again, the breathing became deeper, but the lips still moved, and through them, barely heard in the tense silence, came again the low, chanting sounds. Then they, too, died away to silence, the lips ceased to move, and RichGalaxy Magabook No. I on sale now! i Two by Lester del Rey I On your newsstand -- get your copy today! r  # IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: You will be astonished to get a letter from Germany speaking about If. So I have to tell you that I am a German sf fan and reader of sf, too. Today we have no sf magazine in Germany, but we had. It was the German edition of Galaxy, and it was a very fine magazine, but only a very few people bought it and so publishing ended soon. I wanted to know what is on with sf in America and the only way to get to know the new American sf literature is to read an American sf magazine. So I came to If, and I think If is good enough to show me something about your sf. First some critic of my second edition of If, the one of January, #. I don't like serials, and so I am not happy to have one in If in R. A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, but I think that my meaning has not enough weight to abolish it. One of the best stories of that issue is, I think, Gary Wright's Captain of the Kali. It might be that G. Wright will become a good author, but one can see that he just has begun to write. He doesn't know whether he shall write more about the persons or the fiction. I think that the persons are more important and an author who can only describe action, but has no ideas how to describe persons, is, as I myself think, no good author. But Gary Wright seems to become a good one. There are other good stories in that issue, but I think there is no wealth to count them up. I hope that I have shown you that there are friends of If also in other countries. Finally I have a question to you: Do you ever publish stories of foreign authors? as German or French or other? With best greetings, Jorn-Dieter Bandermann # Hamburg-Nienstedten Wustenkamp #, W. Germany  Seldom if ever -- because we see very few, and almost none that we think our readers would enjoy. But we'd be glad to print any good story IF we can find regardless of origin. -- Editor    Dear Editor: Here's congratulating you on one of the finest issues that I have ever seen in your history. The Jan. issue was simply superb! I rate The Five Hells of Orion as the best by far, one of the best novelettes of interstellar adventure that I have ever read. If you ever start a "classic reprint" department this story will appear in If as a classic of classics. The next best story was Captain of the Kali , by an author who is very promising, Gary Wright. I found this story to be an excellent blend of science fiction and good old-fashioned adventure. Next comes The Shipshape Miracle , by Clifford D. Simak. All in all, a great issue. Every time I turn to your letter column I see comments on your cover and interior art, usually bad. Lately these remarks are getting better, signifying that your art is looking up. However, I don't give a darn whether your art is superb or crummy. When I buy If or any other sf magazine I look for good stories, and nothing else. I wish you came out monthly, though. Couldn't you do something about that? Paul Gilster # Goodwon Lane St. Louis #, Mo.    Dear Editor: The improvement in the January issue of If is welcome. Not one smudged or totally unreadable page! One trivial thing that irritates me no end is the utter lack of uniform size in the magazine. The November issue measure #x# cm. The January issue measures # . # x # cm. Of course I don't expect If to establish itself as a topnotch sf magazine (such as Analog or Galaxy) overnight, but I don't believe in stagnation, either. Who knows? If such improvements persist, I may even buy a subscription. Tell me more about Worlds of Tomorrow. Clarke, Leinster, Silverberg and Laumer. Quite a lineup, if I may say so. One more question, then I'll stop bothering you. Are you to become editor? Box # Bunola, Pennsylvania Yes. -- Editor    Dear Editor: In the first part of Podkayne of Mars, Podkayne states, "my waist is forty-eight centimeters." Robert Heinlein is one of my favorite authors, but sixteen-year-old girls do not usually have waistlines of a little over twelve inches. What happened, has Podkayne been dieting? Muriel Garfunkel # East #th Street New York #, N.Y.  A centimeter being .# inches, # of 'em must come to -- um -- gosh -- oh, say about nineteen inches, almost. Svelte but not scrawny. Better get that slipstick fixed.' Editor    Dear Editor: The March If was the first ish I'd seen in a while, but what an improvement! Neat cover by Finlay (ain't he always?), neat layout, neat illos, tinted headings, terrific yarns (an extra laurel for that disturbing bit by Ted White and Terry Carr). Wot next? Pulp size? No? I thought not. Know something? You're rounding up the best, so try to latch on to Rocklynne, Leigh Brackett, andor James MacCreigh (for that I get Pohl-axed) . Also Bloch, Bloch, Bloch. Sure! I'll be waiting with four dimes clutched in my sweaty little paw. Meantime I wish to heck someone would write to me. Chuck Morris R. #, Box # Gaffney, S.C.  James MacWho ? -- Editor    Dear Editor: I've heard of an all one-author issue, but never before an all oneartist issue. Hats off to Virgil Finlay and Fred Pohl, boys. It's good to see J. G. Ballard in your pages, but how about some more Britishers, say James White, Ken Bulmer, Philip High and so on? David Charles Paskow # West #th Avenue Philadelphia #, Penna.    Dear Editor: I protest! How could Heinlein squeal to a stop so soon when obviously, Poddy has a lot more story to her and so does Clark? Poddy ought to have made a pet of Ariel, flirted with a spaceship captain, proved her worth as a crewman in space and finally married Dexter. Please tell Mr. Heinlein to get busy on the sequel. Gwen Cunningham # Wisconsin Street Oakland #, California  Gosh, what do we need him for? You just wrote it ! -- Editor    As friends of the family know, each issue we bring you at least one story by a writer never before published in a science fiction magazine. This issue there are two: Another Earth y by a couple of fellows who have done all their previous writing in drama form, and Run downy by a young public-relations man from upstate New York. How about the rest of you out there? It isn't a contest; you don't have to tear off a boxtop ; all you have to do is write a story and mail it to us along with a stamped, self-addressed return envelope in case we don't like it... Next issue: Retief is back, with what we think about the best in the series. We begin a new serial called The Reefs of Space by Jack Williamson and your editor. And there'll be more... See you then! 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These are the Men of Space: Goddard, Bernard A. Schriever, John Paul Stapp, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, James A. Van Allen, Wernher von Braun, Theodore von Karman, John von Neumann, Charles Yeager. F. Dixon, Walter R. Dornberger, Hugh L. Dryden, W. Randolph Lovelace II, ward Teller, Robert C. Truax, Fred L. Whipple. For a limited time, readers of this magazine can purchase the above five books for # and save # on the total cost of the books if purchased separately at # each. For quick delivery, order now by using the coupon at right. Draper, Louis G. Dunn, Don D. Flickinger, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, Arthur Harold W. Ritchey, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., H. N. Toftoy. Gilruth, Samuel Herrick, John R. Pierce, Harrison A. Storms, Hubertus Strughold. Hibbs, Richard B. Kershner, Homer E. Newell, L. Eugene Root, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., Charles H. Townes, Roger S. Warner, Jr. #I Hudson Street New York #. N Y Please send me the indicated quantities of the following copy(ies) of Yolume I  # each copy(ies) of Volume #  # each copy(ies) of Volume #  # each copy(ies) of Volume #  # eachcopy(ies) of Volume #  # each set(s) of Volumes I through #  # each I have enclosed a check or money order in the full amount. Postage will be paid by the publisher. Name Address .State. JF  Editorial C onstant readers -- the majority, of course -- will recall the article I wrote last year (the Great Man got thumped for some of it from those who thought he wrote it, though there was no intent to deceive) about my notebook. Just random jottings which I thought might be of interest to you. There's one category of notes in the book which I didn't mention, because of a childish idea that some day I'm going to fabricate some of these things and make a fortune and never write editorials any more. But the heck with it. One, you might enjoy them. Two, there's a crying need for some of 'em. Three, I am surrounded by unfinished projects and it's past time I cleared the thicket.  The world is full of dark corners which could stand a spot of light, yet you can't -- I can't, anyway -- buy a pinup lamp designed to fit into a corner. Not only does every house, bar darn few, need a couple of these, it's the only way you can place a pinup lamp without the wire hanging out like a ruptured gut.  Compared with TV, home movies never got off the ground. Yet there are obvious advantages: you can see what you want to see when you want to see it; you can make your own films and show them. Why is no one making a serious effort to combine these devices, now that two-thirds of the population spends more time staring at the box than it does at school or making a living? Going at it whole hog, a hand-held TV tape camera would make a reel which could be dropped directly into the TV set without developing. Or -- I should say andor -- a hybrid device could scan rented or owned movie film, perhaps with a bank of photocells, and activate the picture tube. I refuse to believe this is a particularly large technical problem.  Area measuring device. Put a map under known illumination and get a reading from a light meter at a fixed distance. Ink in the area to be measured with black ink and take another reading. If the original area is known, the second reading will give you an exact ratio.  Mars canal photos. The "twinkle" effect is supposed to obscure them to some viewers, reveal them to others. So take your photos with high-sensitivity movie film, by the thousand-foot shot (granting good 'scope of course.) Then sit and watch the film. If the "twinkle" theory is correct, surely you'll get one or two frames with canals showing.  Household wiring, especially surface wiring, ready primed so it will take oil-based or alkyd paints.  A mechanical self-starter. Now that lawn-mowers and outboards come with the so-called "impulse" starter, which is nothing more than king-sized clockwork, why hasn't someone thought of the same thing for cars? The spring could be wound by the engine when it was running; it could be a heck of a big one, and it need not necessarily be wound too fast. Once wound, a'ratchet would hold it that way until it was called on. (Only for Pete's sakes keep your plugs clean!)  Why -- why has no enterprising firm or person put the simple fact of rising joblessness against the simple fact of the shortage in good household servants, and come up with the simple answer of a traininghiring agency for competent household help? There are still, believe it or not, lots of people who can afford servants and claim they can't find them. Not good ones, anyway. There have been times and places when household service was a dignified, honorable and -- heaven knows -- skilled occupation. It could be again, and if it caught on as a keep-up-with-the-Jones thing, somebody would stand to make a classic buck. The thicket's still thick. Let's see if my ideas can make money. Then the next step is to see if they can make money for me!     IF mMtmm What secret power I Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world.   Sail Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Lift, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. IF Every man, every living thing In the world was joined In the great Plan of Man -- the Plan that had redoubled Its efforts because it had lost its goal! I nphe major snapped: "Check in, A you Risks! What's the matter with you?" His radar horns made him look like Satan -- a sleepy young Satan with an underslung jaw, but dangerous. "Yes, sir," said Steve Ryeland, peering around. This was Reykjavik -- a new world to Ryeland, who had just come from a maximumsecurity labor camp inside the rim of the Arctic Circle. Ryeland blinked at the buildings, a thousand feet high, and at the jets and rockets scattered across the air field. The little man next to Ryeland sneezed and nudged him. "All right," Ryeland said, and went into the bare little Security lounge. On the teletype that stood in the corner of the room -- in the corner of every room -- he tapped out: Information. Steven Ryeland, rived at -- He took the code letters from the identification plate on the machine. -- Station #-Radius #-#, Reykjavik, Iceland. Query. What are personal ordeis? In a moment the answer came from the Planning Machine, a single typed letter "R". The Machine had received and understood the message and adjusted its records. The orders would follow. A Togetherness girl glanced into the lounge, saw the collars on Ryeland and the little man. Her lips had started to curve in the smile of her trade, but they clamped into a thin line. Risks. She nodded to the major and turned away. The teletype bell rang, and the Machine tapped out: Action. Proceed to Train #, Track #, Compartment #. Ryeland acknowledged the message. The major, leaning over his shoulder, grinned. "A one-way ticket to the Body Bank if you want my guess." "Yes, sir." Ryeland was not going to get into a discussion. He couldn't win. No Risk could win an argument with a man who wore the major's radar horns. "Well, get going," the major grumbled. "Oh, and Ryeland -- " "Yes, sir?" The major winked. "Thanks for the chess games. I'll be seeing you, I guess. Parts of you!" He laughed raucously as he strode away. "No side trips, remember," he warned. "I'll remember," said Steve Ryeland softly, touching the collar he wore. Oporto sneezed again. "Come on," he grumbled. "All right. What was that number?" The little dark man grinned. "Train #, Track #, Compartment #. That's an easy one -- ah choo! Dabbit," he complained, "I'm catching cold. Let's get out of this draft." Ryeland led off. They walked unescorted across the pavement to a cab rank and got in. All around them, travelers, air field workers and others glanced at them, saw the iron collars -- and at once, on each face a curtain descended. No one spoke to them. Ryeland punched the code numbers for their destination, and the car raced through broad boulevards to a huge marble structure on the other side of the city. Over its wide entrance were the carved letters: T hey made their way through a wide concourse, noisy and crowded; but everyone gave them plenty of room. Ryeland grinned sourly to himself. No side trips! Of course not -- and for the same reason. It wasn't healthy for a man who wore the collar to step out of line. And it wasn't healthy for anyone else to be in his immediate neighborhood if he did. "Track Six, was it?" "Train #, Compartment #. IF Can't you remember anything?" Oporto demanded. "There's Track Six." Ryeland led the way. Track Six was a freight platform. They went down a flight of motionless moving stairs and emerged beside the cradle track of the subtrains. Since the subtrains spanned the world, there was no clue as to where they were going. From Iceland they could be going to Canada, to Brazil, even to South Africa; the monstrous atomic drills of the Plan had burrowed perfectly straight shafts from everywhere to everywhere. The subtrains rocketed through air-exhausted tunnels, swung between hoops of electrostatic force. Without friction, their speed compared with the velocity of interplanetary travel. "Where is it?" Oporto grumbled, looking around. A harsh light flooded the grimy platforms, glittering on the huge aluminum balloons that lay in their cradles outside the vacuum locks. Men with trucks and cranes were loading a long row of freightspheres in the platform next to theirs; a little cluster of passengers began to appear down the moving stairs of a platform a hundred yards away. Oporto said abruptly: "I'll give you six to five the next train in is ours." "No bet." Ryeland knew better than to take him up. But he hoped the little man was right. It was cold on the platform. Chill air roared around them from the ventilators; Oporto, already chilled, sneezed and began to sniffle. Ryeland himself was shivering in his thin maximumsecurity denims. At the camp, when their travel orders came through, regulations demanded a thorough medical examination before they left. That was the rule under the Plan, and the examination included a steaming shower. "They want nice clean meat at the Body Bank," the guard .guffawed; but Ryeland paid no attention. He couldn't afford to... A man who wore the iron collar around his neck could only afford a limited look into the future. He could think about the day when the collar came off, and nothing else. A warning horn shrieked into the pit. Ryeland jumped; Oporto turned more slowly, as though he had been expecting it. Which he had. Red signals flickered from the enormous gates of the vacuum lock on Track Six. Air valves gasped. The gates swung slowly open and a tractor emerged towing a cradle with the special car they were waiting for. "You would have lost," Oporto commented and Ryeland nodded; of course he would have. The car stopped. Equalizer valves snorted again, and then its tall door flopped out from the top, forming a ramp to the platform. Escalators began to crawl along it. Oporto said anxiously: "Steve, I don't like the looks of this!" Out of the opening door of the car two men in uniform came running. They ran up the escalators, raced onto the platform and up the stairs. They didn't look at Ryeland or Oporto; they were in a hurry. They were bearing thick leather dispatch cases the same color as their uniforms. Bright blue uniforms! Why, that was the uniform of the special guard of -- Ryeland lifted his eyes to look, unbelieving. At the roof of the shed, amid the ugly web of ducts and burst forth, shining down on the sphere. And across its top, forty feet above the platform, there was a gleaming blue star and under it, etched in crystalline white, the legend: The special car they had been waiting for was the private car of the Planner himselfl T he first thought that crossed Steve Ryeland's mind was: Now I can present my case to the Planner! But the second thought canceled it. The Planner, like every other human on Earth or the planets, was only an instrument of the Planning Machine. If clearance ever came to Ryeland -- if the collar came off his neck -- it would be because the Machine had considered all the evidence and reached a proper decision. Human argument would not affect it. With an effort, Ryeland put the thought out of his mind; but all the same, he couldn't help feeling a touch better, a degree stronger. At least it was almost certain that their destination would not be the Body Bank! "What was that compartment number?" Oporto sighed. "#. Can't you remember anything? Train # -- the product of the two primes, # and #. Track #, their difference. Compartment #, their last digits in reverse order. That's an easy one -- " But Ryeland was hardly listening. The intimate acquaintance that Oporto seemed to have with all numbers was no longer news to him, and he had more urgent things on his mind. He led the way up the ramp and into the Planner's subtrain car. A woman in the blue uniform of the guard passed them, glanced at their collars and frowned. Before Ryeland could speak to her she had brushed past them busily and was gone. It said a lot for the efficiency of the collars, he thought wryly, that she didn't bother to find out what two Risks were doing wandering freely around the Planner's private car. There was no cause for worry; if they took a wrong turning, the collars would make it their last. But by the same token, it was highly dangerous for them to wander around. Ryeland stopped short and waited until someone else came by. "Sir!" he called. "Excuse me!" It was a straight, gray-haired man in the blue of the Planner's guard, wearing the silver mushrooms of a Technicorps colonel. "What is it?" he demanded impatiently. "We're ordered to compartment #," Ryeland explained. The colonel looked at him thoughtfully. "Name," he snapped. "Ryeland, Steven. And Oporto." "Umm." Presently the colonel sighed. "All right," he said grouchily. "Can't have you messing up the IF Planner's car with your blood. Better get secured. This way." He led them to a tiny room, ushered them in. "Look," he said, flexing the knob of the door. "No lock. But I should warn you that most of the corridors are radar-trapped. Do you understand?" They understood. "All right." He hesitated. "By the way. My name's Lescure, Colonel Pascal Lescure. We'll meet again." And he closed the door behind him. R yeland looked quickly around the room, but it wasn't the splendor of its furnishings or the comfort of its appointments that interested him. It was the teletype. Quickly he reported in for himself and Oporto. The answer came: R. Action. Await further orders. Oporto was beginning to look flushed and to tremble. "Always it's lige this," he said thickly. "I ged a cold and if I don't tage care I'm sick for weegs. I'm feeling lighdheaded already!" He stood up, tottering. , Ryeland shook his head. "No, you're not lightheaded. We're moving." The hand at the controls of the subtrain knew whose private car he was driving down the electrostatic tubes. The giant sphere was being given a featherbed ride. They had felt no jar at all on starting, but now they began to feel curiously light. That was intrinsic to the way of travel. The subtrain waj arrowing along a chord from point to point; on long hauls the tunnels dipped nearly a thousand miles below the earth's surface at the halfway mark. Once the initial acceleration was over, the first half of a trip by subtrain was like dropping in a superspeed express elevator. Absently Ryeland reached out an arm to brace Oporto as the little man weaved and shuddered. He frowned. The helical fields which walled the tunnels of the subtrains owed part of their stability to himself. On that Friday night, three years before, when the Plan Police burst in upon him, he had just finished dictating the specifications for a new helical unit that halved hysteresis losses, had a service life at least double the old ones. And yet he could only remember that much and no more. Had something been done to his mind? For the thousandth time Ryeland asked himself that question. He could remember the equations of his helical field theory that transformed the crude "magnetic bottles" that had first walled out the fluid rock, as early nucleonicists had walled in the plasma of fusing hydrogen. Yet he could not remember the work that had led him to its design. He could remember his design for ion accelerators to wall the atomic rockets of spaceships, and yet the author of that design -- himself -- was a stranger. What sort of man had he been? What had he done? "Sdeve," Oporto moaned. "You wouldn't have a drink on you?" Ryeland turned, brought back to reality. A drink! Oporto was feverish. "I'd better call the machine," he said. Oporto nodded weakly. "Yes, call in. I'm sick, Sdeve." Ryeland hesitated. The little man did look sick. While he was standing there, Oporto blundered past him. "I'll do id myself," he grumbled. "Ged out of my way." He reached with fumbling fingers for the keyboard, his face turned angrily toward Ryeland. That was a mistake; he should have been watching. In the unsteady footing he lurched, reached for the keyboard, missed, stumbled and fell heavily against the teletype. It toppled with a crash. There was a quick white flash from inside it and a sudden pungent smell of burning. Oporto got slowly to his feet. Ryeland opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything. What was the use? Obviously the teletype was out of commission; obviously Oporto hadn't done it on purpose. Oporto groaned: "Oh, dabbit. Steve, where'd thad colonel go? Maybe he could ged me something..." "Take it easy," Ryeland said absently. The little man's condition was clearly not good but, in truth, it was not Oporto that was on Ryeland's mind just then. It was the teletype. Always, since the first days after school, there had been no move Steve Ryeland made, no action he performed, without checking in with the Machine. Even at the maximumsecurity camp there had been a teletype on direct linkage with the Machine, standing in one desolate corner of the bare barracks. He felt curiously naked, and somehow forlorn. "Steve," said Oporto faintly, "could you ged me a glass of water?" That at least was possible; there was a silver carafe and crystal tumblers, fired with gold designs. Ryeland poured the little man a glass and handed it to him. Oporto took it and sank back against a huge, richly upholstered chair, his eyes closed. Ryeland roamed around the little cubicle. There wasn't much else for him to do. The colonel had warned them against radar-traps in the corridors; it was not to be thought of that they would go out and take the chance of being destroyed by a single wrong move. For they were Risks; and the iron collars they wore contained eighty grams of a high explosive. A step into an area proscribed for Risks (and such areas were common all over the world) meant that a triggering radar beam would touch off the explosive. Ryeland had seen that happen once. He didn't want it to happen to him. B rig or no brig, this room was part of the Planner's private car and it was furnished in a way that Ryeland had not seen in three years. He fingered the drapes around a mock-window and reached out to touch the polished mirror of a hardwood table top. Three years ago Ryeland had IF lived in a room something like this. No, he admitted, not quite as lavish. But a room that belonged to him, with furniture that no one else used and a place for his clothes, his books, the things he kept around him. But in that life he had been a cleared man, with a place in the Plan of Man and a quota to be met. That life had ended three years ago, on that fatal Friday afternoon. Even now, after endless sessions of what was called reconstructive therapy, Ryeland couldn't understand what had happened to him. The vaguely worded charge was "unplanned thinking," but all his merciless therapists had failed to help him recall any thoughts disloyal to the machine. The only material evidence of unplanned activities was his collection of space literature -- the yellowed old copies of books by Ley and Gamow and Hoyle and Einstein that he had saved from his father's library. Of course he knew that the books were not on the list approved by the Plan, but he had intended no disloyalty with his hobby. In fact, as he had many times told the therapists, the special equations of the helical field were related to the mathematics of the whole universe. Without knowing the equations for the expansion of the universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies, he could not have improved the helical units for the subtrain tunnels. But the therapists had always refused to specify exact charges. Men under the Plan no longer had rights, but merely functions. The purpose of the therapists was not to supply him with information. But to extract information from him. The sessions had failed, because he couldn't remember whatever it was that the therapists had been attempting to extract. There was so much hat he could not remember... Oporto said weakly: "Sdeve, ged me a doctor." "I can't!" Ryeland said bitterly: "If the Plan wants you sick you'll have to be sick." Oporto's face  turned a shade paler. "Shut up! Somebody may be listening." "I'm not criticizing the Plan. But we have to stay here, you know that." "Ryeland," Oporto begged, and went into a coughing fit. Ryeland looked down at the little man. He seemed to be in serious trouble now. Evidently his system was an ultra-allergic type. Swept clean of disease organisms in the sterile air that blew down on the isolation camp from the Pole, he had been ripe for infection. He was breathing heavily and raggedly, and heat wafted off his forehead as Ryeland brought his hand near it. "Hold on, Oporto," he said. "It'll only be a little while. Maybe a couple of hours." At a thousand miles an hour, there was no place on Earth much farther away than that. "I can be dead in a couble of hours," said Oporto. "Can't you ged me a doctor?" Ryeland hesitated. There was truth to what the little man said. The Plan provided constant immunization for those who lived in areas exposed to disease; but the hypoallergic, like Oporto, might well lose that immunity in a few months. And Oporto had been breathing sterile air for three years. "All right," said Ryeland wearily, "I'll do what I can. You come with me, Oporto." Booby-trapped the halls might be, dangerous the trip certainly was; but it was life and death to Oporto. he door opened easily. Ryeland, half supporting Oporto, looked out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He sighed; he had hoped that they might find a passerby. Oporto babbled: "Steve, what are you doing? Led me alone. We can't go oud here -- the colonel warned us!" "We have to get you to a doctor, remember?" Ryeland scanned the corridor. At the intersections were curious canopied devices like the sun-shelter over a mogul's howdah. Perhaps they were the radar traps; at least, Ryeland couldn't imagine what else they might be. But there was one back the way they had come, and surely there had been no trap there No. Ryeland thought it out carefully. The fact that they had been allowed to get to Compartment # didn't prove anything at all; quite possibly the traps had been turned off to allow them to pass. In fact, thinking it over, it seemed certain that the one route that would be prohibited would be the corridor going back to the entrance port. "Oporto," he said, "do you see those doors? I think we can go into one of them." "You do, Steve? What mages you think so?" the little man asked sardonically. "Because there's nothing better to try," Ryeland snapped, and dragged the little man with him. Around his neck the iron collar weighed heavier than ever. If only he were a superman, like that Donderevo whose name stuck half-forgotten in his mind... whose fate, somehow, was linked with Ryeland's own. Who was Donderevo, exactly? The therapists had questioned him so persistently about the man that there had to be some strong reason. Did Ryeland know him? When had he last seen him? When had he received a message from him? What was the message about? Donderevo was the son of an explorer and trader who had gathered a fortune from the asteroids and the moons of the outer planets, and had built a commercial empire outside the Plan of Man. Ron Donderevo had come to Earth as a student of space medicine at the great technological institute where Ryeland's father was a mathematics professor. While he was there, the Plan had annexed the last reluctant asteroids and moons which had remained outside. Donderevo's father had been defeated in a space fight, resisting the annexation. Donderevo himself had been placed in an iron collar, as a result of a student demonstration. Then one day he had disappeared. The legends said that IP he had somehow removed the collar, and escaped into space beyond the power of the Plan. Ryeland remembered meeting him only once, in his own father's study. Ryeland was an eight-yearold Technicub. Donderevo was a grown man, a graduate student, romantic and mysterious with his knowledge of far planets and unknown space. But was that enough to account for the questions? Ryeland had denied receiving any message from him, but the therapists were unconvinced. In any event, whatever Donderevo might have been, Ryeland wasn't; his collar was on for good, or until the Machine relented. Ryeland wondered crazily if he would hear the tiny click of the relay before the decapitation charge went off. Would there be any warning? Would he know? Or would it all be over, literally, before he knew what was happening? The only way to find out was to open a door and walk through it. He pushed a door open, selecting it at random from the half-dozen in the corridor. Oporto broke away from hifn and, surprisingly spry, ran a few paces down the corridor, whirled and watched him with a face of tense anticipation. Ryeland didn't stop to think it over, he walked in the door; and nothing happened. Grinning, embarrassed, Oporto trailed after. "That one was all right, huh, Steve?" Ryeland nodded; but there was no point in recrimination, although there were a lot of things he had in mind to say to the man who had urged him to take a chance -- and then ducked out of the way of the possible consequences. But of more immediate interest was the room they were in. It was about the size of Compartment # and empty. It was quietly furnished: A narrow bed, a table with a few flowers, a large mirror, an array of cabinets. A girl's room, Ryeland guessed, but from the relative modesty of its furnishings, not the room of a girl who was part of the higher brass on this de luxe subtrain. Possibly a secretary's room; perhaps a maid's. Whoever she was, she wasn't in. But there was another door, leading to a flight of steps. This time Ryeland didn't wait for Oporto. He caught his breath and held it, and when he had passed through and established once again that that particular door was not radar-trapped, he tasted salt and acid on his lip. He had bitten hard enough to draw blood. But he was through. The stairs were steep, but it was easy enough to help Oporto up them, with the plunging of the car taking pounds off their weight. They came out into another room, also empty and small. But this one was sumptuously furnished. It seemed to be a woman's dressing room. It was white and gold, with ivory-backed brushes and combs on a little vanity table, before a gold-rimmed oval mirror. The stairs, Ryeland guessed, were for the use of the personal maid to whoever used this room. And he heard someone singing. R yeland took a deep breath and called out: "Hello there! Do you hear me? I'm looking for a doctor!" There wasn't any answer. The singing went on, a girl's voice, clear and attractive; she was singing for her own amusement. Every once in a while she would go back and repeat a phrase, pause, then start again aimlessly. And under the singing was' a sort of musical cooing accompaniment. Ryeland looked at Oporto, shrugged and pushed the door open. They looked into a room that was green and silver. Its walls swam with fading, shifting green light. In the center was a round silver tub, six feet across, partly recessed into the floor. From the mouths of carved crystal dolphins tiny jets of perfumed warm water leaped and splashed, in a foam of bubbles, into the tub. And above the thick blanket of foam protruded one knee, the head and the arms of the most beautiful girl Ryeland had ever seen. "I -- I beg your pardon," he said, awkward and disturbed. She turned her head and looked at him calmly. On her wet, white shoulders were perched a pair of -- birds? No. They were shaped like birds, like doves, but they were made of metal; their feathers were fine silver scales; their eyes were red-lit jewels. The metal things moved restlessly, as the little eyes poked hotly at Ryeland and Oporto. They cooed soft threats, and the rustle of their wings was like thin whispering bells. Oporto opened his eyes, stared and emitted a strangling sound. "She -- She -- " He swallowed and clutched at Ryeland. "Steve, it's the Planner's daughter!" he gasped, and flung himself to the floor. "Please!" he begged, writhing toward her. "Please, we didn't mean to bother you!" But the approach must have alarmed her. Not very much; for she didn't raise her voice; but she stopped singing in the middle of a note and said, quite softly: "Guards." There must have been a microphone to pick up her words, for there was a sudden commotion outside. But more than that, she had defenders nearer still. The doves on her shoulders leaped into the air and flung themselves at the prostrate IF little man. Sharp beaks tore, wingtips like knives beat at him. The door opened and four tall women in the blue of the Planner's guard raced in. n D eath had not been far from Steve Ryeland for these three years. It had worn the neat white smock of Dr. Thrale, the fat, bald, oily man who had been his chief therapist. It had whispered in the soft, asthmatic voice of Dr. Thrale, warning him a thousand times that he stood in danger of the Body Bank, unless he could recall a message from Ron Donderevo, unless he could find the right answers to nonsense questions about a string of words and names that meant nothing to him -- spaceling, reefs of space , Donderevo, jetless drive. Death had taken other forms. The concealed trigger of a radar trap, the menacing horns of a radarheadset, the more subtle and more worrisome peril of orders to the Body Bank; these were the deaths he had known and learned to live with. These women, though, carried projectile weapons, not radar. Queer, thought Ryeland, even in that moment, for if carried through the thought indicated that there were some dangers to the person of the Planner's daughter that did not come from classified Risks like himself. Could ordinary citizens -- cleared citizens -- be dangerous to the Plan? But there was no answer to that question just then. Oporto was screaming under the attack of the silvery doves, the woman guards were bearing down on them. The girl stopped them all with a single word. "Wait." She swept a mound of bubbles away from her face to see better, exposing a throat of alabaster. Her eyes were greengray and serene. She looked very lovely and very young. She caught Ryeland completely undefended. In the isolation camp there had been no women -- not even a pinup picture; and here he was in the presence of a most beautiful woman, in what should have been the privacy of her bath. Apart from everything else, she could hardly have been unaware of the shattering effect she had on him. But she seemed completely at ease. She said, in a voice more polite than curious: "What do you want?" Ryeland coughed. "This man needs a doctor," he said hoarsely, looking away. The first of the female guards laughed sharply. She was tall, brunette; a heroic figure of what might have been a lovely girl, if reduced ten per cent in all dimensions. She said in a voice that just missed being baritone: "Come on, Risk! We'll take care of you and your friend too!" But the girl in the tub shifted position lazily. She waved an arm through the foam, watched the bubbles billow in slow concentric waves and said: "Never mind, Sergeant. Take the sick man to a doctor, if that's what he wants. Leave the other one here." "But, Madam! The Planner -- " "Sergeant," said the gentle voice, not raised at all; the sergeant turned almost white. She gestured at the others; they half carried Oporto out. The door closed behind them, cutting in twain a look of pure hatred and contempt that passed from the sergeant to Ryeland. The doves, which had been describing precise circles in the air, shook themselves and returned to the girl's shoulders. Their hot small eyes never left Ryeland, but after a moment they began to coo again. "You're an iron-collar man, aren't you?" the girl asked suddenly. Ryeland nodded. "A risk. Yes." "I've never spoken to an ironcollar man " she said thoughtfully. "Do you mind if we talk? I'm Donna Creery. My father is the Planner." "I know." Suddenly Ryeland was aware of his rumpled denims, of the fact that he was an intruder on this girl's bath. He coughed. "Don't you think your father -- T mean, I don't mind if we talk, but -- " "Good," said the girl, nodding gravely. She shifted position to get a better look at him. The bubbles rippled wildly. "I was afraid you might be sensitive about it," she told him. "I'm glad you're not. What's your name?" Ryeland raised his chin and spread the dollar of his denim shirt to display the iron band. "Sfeven Ryeland," she read, squinting to make out the glowing scarlet letters with his name and number. "Why, I think I know that name. A doctor? No. A rocket pilot?" "I am a mathematician, Miss Creery." She cried: "Oh, of course! Your folder is on my father's desk. I saw it this morning, when we were leaving Copenhagen." A n anxious eagerness took his breath. For three years he had been trying to learn the charges against him. The therapists had refused to give him information. Their questions had been carefully phrased to tell him nothing -- they had asked him a thousand times what the word spaceling meant, and punished him more then once for guessing that it meant an inhabitant of space. "Did the folder tell -- " He gulped. "Did it specify any charges against me?" Her greenish eyes surveyed him, unalarmed. "You displayed unplanned interests." "Huh? What does that mean?" "You possessed a secret collection of books and manuscripts, which had not been approved by the machine." "No, I didn't!" A cold breath touched the back of his neck. "There has been some terrible mistake -- " "The Planning Machine permits no mistakes," she reminded him gravely. "The titles of the forbidden books were listed in the folder. The authors were scientists of the wicked times before the Plan. Einstein. Gamow. Hoyle -- " "Oh!" He gasped. "Then those were just my father's books -- a few that I saved. You see, when I was a kid I used to dream of going to space. I've met Ron Donderevo. I IF wanted to pilot a spaceship, and discover new planets. The Machine killed that dream." He sighed. "It transferred me out of the Technicorps and reclassified me as a research mathematician. It assigned me to an installation somewhere underground -- I don't know where it was; we were not allowed even to guess whether we were under dry land or the ocean floor or the polar ice. I don't remember, even, if I ever guessed. My memory has... holes in it. I had two helpers -- a teletype girl and a little man named Oporto, who is a sort of human computing machine. The Machine sent us problems, like the problem of hysterisis loss in the subtrain tunnels. They were problems the Machine couldn't answer, I suppose -- even it doesn't know quite everything. Anyhow, we solved the problems. "Of course I wasn't supposed to need reference books, because I could ask the Machine for any fact I wanted. But for the sake of efficiency it had let me keep a few handbooks, and I had brought those books of my father's among them." He smiled .at her hopefully. "You see, for a man who had set his heart on space, life in a tunnel isn't very exciting. For a sort of hobby, I read those books about space. They were full of old theories about the nature of the universe. Using modern mathematics, I worked out a new set of equations to describe the expanding universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies -- " Her frown checked him. This was not quite the sort of talk for a young girl in her bath! "But that was not unplanned," ha finished desperately. "It was just a harmless hobby. In fact, it was useful to the Plan. The equations that I used in improving the helical field units were derived from the equations that describe the oontinuous creation of matter and space." "And that's what made you a risk?" She looked at him thoughtfully and frowned. "You don't look dangerous." He could find no answer to that He waited while she waved a hand absent-mindedly. One of the doves left her shoulder to fly, tinkling, to the crystal dolphin. It pecked precisely at a fin-shaped lever on the dolphin's back, and obediently the spray of perfumed water dwindled away. Ryeland watched, more than half lulled by the scent of lilac and the strangeness of his surroundings. The room was warm but not steamy; invisible ducts must be sucking the moisture out  Are you dangerous?" the girl asked suddenly. TJ ydand said: "No, Miss Creery." IV He hesitated, wondering how to explain it to this child. "The collar isn't a punishment. It's a precaution." "Precaution?" He said steadily: "The Machine has reason to believe that under certain circumstances I might work against the Plan of Man. I have never done anything, you must understand that. But the Machine can't take chances, and so -- the collar." She said wonderingly: "But you sound as though you approve of it!" "I'm loyal to the Plan!" She thought that over. Then: "Well, aren't we all? But the rest of us don't wear iron collars." He shook his head. "I never did anything that was against Security." "But perhaps you did something that wasn't -- quite?" Ryeland grinned. She was amazingly easy to get along with, he thought; the grin became a smile -- a real one, and the first he had worn in some time. "Yes," he admitted, "I did something that wasn't. There was a girl." "Steven, Steven!" Donna Creery shook her head mock-ruefully. "Always a girl. I thought that was only in stories." "In real life too, Miss Creery." He was almost relaxed... Then, abruptly, her mood changed. "Your folder contains another specification," she rapped out. "You are charged with concealing information about a device which is dangerous to the security of the Plan of Man." "But I'm not!" he protested desperately. "Somebody has made a mistake -- in spite of the Machine. For three years the therapists in the maximum security camp have been working me over, trying to extract information that I don't have." Her eyes widened, with a calm concern. "What kind of information?" "I'm not sure." He winced, with remembered pain. "They were careful not to give me hints, and they punished me for guessing. "They questioned me about a list of words," he said. "They strapped me down, with electrodes clamped all over me, recording every reaction. times. Spaceling. Reefs of space . Fusorian. Pyropod. Jetless drive. And two names -- Ron Donderevo and Daniel Horrock. "Putting all those words and names and other clues together, I guessed that the therapists thought that Horrock had brought me a message from Donderevo. A message from space, about things called reefs and spacelings and fusorians. Particularly, about something called a jetless drive. That was what they were trying to dig out of me -- how to build a jetless drive." She frowned. "What is a jetless drive?" "There isn't any," he said. "Because a jetless drive would be a system of reactionless propulsion. Crackpots for three hundred years have been trying to invent such a system, but everybody knows it would be a violation of the Third Law of Motion. It's as impossible as pushing a rowboat forward without pushing the water back." "I see." She was nodding gravely. "Impossible as creating new atoms and new space between the galaxies." H e looked at her sharply. "But I couldn't have had a message from Horrock -- or anybody else," he insisted desperately. "Not when they seem to think I did. On the Friday it happened, Oddball Oporto and the teletype girl had been with me all day. We were work'F mg late, finishing the specifications for the new helical unit. I let Oddball go about eighteen hundred hours, because he was getting a headache. The teletype girl went out with him, to bring coffee and sandwiches for us. They hadn't been gone half an hour, when somebody knocked on the door. I thought it was the girl -- but it was the Plan Police." "That wasn't on Friday." Donna Creery's eyes were veiled, strange. "According to the records in your folder, you were taken into precautionary custody at eighteen hundred hours on a Monday afternoon. That leaves at least three days missing from your story." Ryeland gulped. "That couldn't be!" He shook his head. "Oddball and the teletype girl had just gone out -- " "I studied your folder with considerable care." She failed to say why. "I am certain that you were picked up on a Monday." Ryeland felt a tingle of excitement. This was more than he had ever been able to learn about the case against him. "I suppose it's possible," he muttered. "At first' I was in a place miscalled a recreation center, somewhere underground. We weren't allowed to inquire where. The therapy sessions went on around the clock. I had no way of knowing the time or the date. "But I still don't know how to build a reactionless propulsion system. And I still believe that the Machine has permitted itself to make a mistake." Donna Creery shook her head reprovingly. Ryeland stopped, the collar tight around his neck. This was crazy! Staying here like this with the Planner's daughter! He said abruptly, harshly: "Miss Creery, I'm interrupting your bath. I must go!" She laughed, like a shimmer of pale music. "I don't want you to," she coaxed. "But -- your bath -- " "I always stay in the tub in these subtrain rides, Steven. It's comfortable, when the up-grav drag begins to work. And don't worry about my father. He rules the world -- under the Plan, of course! But he doesn't rule me." She was smiling. She could hardly be twenty, Ryeland thought ruefully, but there was no more doubt in his mind that she knew she was a woman. She said comfortably: "Sit down, Steven. There. On the bench." One slim arm, wearing wristlets of foam, gestured at an emerald bench next to the tub. The doves moved nervously as he approached. Donna Creery said: "Don't be afraid of my Peace Doves." He looked quizzically at the silver-steel beaks. "Oh, I'm sorry they hurt your friend," she apologized, "but they thought he was going to hurt me. You see, even without the guard I am protected." She waved a hand, and faint music seeped into the room from concealed speakers. "What was the girl like?" she demanded. "She was beautiful," he said shortiy"And dangerous?" H e nodded, but under the heavy weight of the collar the stiff hairs at the back of his neck were trying to rise. Dangerous? This girl was far more dangerous to him. He had no right to be here. The Machine would not be blind to this. But Donna Creery said soothingly: "Tell me about her. Was she really lovely?" "I believed she was. She had long yellow hair and green eyes. Eyes like yours. And she was in the secret police, but I didn't know that until the day of the raid." Laughter pealed from the girl's lips, and the Peace Doves fluttered their wings fretfully for balance. "And she betrayed you. Are you afraid I might? But I won't, Steven, I promise." He shrugged. "I've told you. I suppose I was lucky, at that. I was sent to a maximum-security camp. It could have been the Body Bank." She tilted her head to ponder that, and he watched the red glints flow through the dark waves of her hair. A last she sighed and said, "And for that you became a Risk. But you should have been more careful, Steven. You should not have defied the Plan. And now you have to wear that collar. Can't you get it off?" He laughed sharply. She said seriously: "No, I suppose not. But if I were you, I think I might. You said you were a mathematician. If I were a mathematician, and wore the collar, it would be only one more problem for me. I would find a way to solve it." He said with a touch of anger: "The collar was invented by Colonel Zamfirescu, the best engineer in the Technicorps -- before he was salvaged himself. He thought of everything." "It's only a metal band, Steven." "The toughest armor plate in the world! And inside it there's a deIF capitation charge, fused with a hydrogen power cell -- it won't last forever, no, but it will keep full power for a century! And that's longer than I can wait. And the collar's booby-trapped. If I try to cut it open -- if I even try to unlock it, and use the wrong key, or turn it the wrong way -- it will kill me on the spot. Have you ever seen a decapitation charge go off, Miss Creery? I have." She shuddered, but she said: "If I were you, I would run away." "Not very far! Radar runs faster. And even if you could get away -- out to the Cold Planets, say, or to one of the orbiting stations around Mercury -- there's a timing device in the collar. It has to be reset periodically, with a key. If not -- boom. And you never know when; just that it will be less than a year." "Oh." She shook her head sadly. "Then you must take it off," she said wisely. He laughed out loud; he couldn't help it. The idea was preposterous! "Don't laugh, Steven. Ron Donderevo did," she told him. "Donderevo! What do you know about Donderevo?" She said, "Oh, a little. I knew him, you see, when I was very small. I remember seeing him with the collar -- and I saw him again, without." He stopped, staring. He began: "You saw Donderevo -- " But there was a sudden, harsh knocking at the door. "Miss Creery!" a worried male voice clamored. "The Planner has sent for that Risk!" Ryeland sat bolt upright. For a moment he had forgotten; the voice had brought him back to the realities of his life. The girl said, "You'll have to go, Steven." She whispered, and one of the Peace Doves restlessly rose frojn her shoulders and circled the room, its hot red eyes fixed on Ryeland. It touched the door, and without sound the door opened. "Be careful," the girl said gently. "And don't think too much about Angela." "All right," Ryeland said, numb, walking like a mechanical man to where the radar-horned officer of the Planner's guard waited for him, with an expression like malevolent granite. It wasn't until the door had slid silently closed behind him that he remembered he had never mentioned the name of the girl who betrayed him, his teletype girl, Angela Zwick. F or all of Ryeland's life the Planner had been watching him. That fearless, genial, giant face had looked down on him from stereo posters in the home of his parents, the barracks of the Technicubs, the classrooms of his school -- in every public square, and all the laboratories and buildings where he had worked. Ryeland knew that face as well as his own father's -- better -- and so did every other human alive. The Planner sat behind a great hardwood desk in a chair that was all air cushions and cunning springs. He was looking absorbedly through a folder of papers on his desk. Uncomfortably Ryeland stood waiting. There was no resemblance between the Planner and his daughter. She was brunette and lovely, with the face of a child saint; he was square and silver, a lion's face. His hair was short, gray-white; it sat firmly on his head like a collision mat. And over his head, on the back of the great chair, a steel-gray falcon sat frozen; but it was not an ornament, for slowly metal-sheathed eyes opened and tiny bright red eyes peered out at Ryeland. At last the Planner looked up and smiled. He said in a velvet bass voice: "Son, don't you check in?" Ryeland jumped. "Oh. Sorry, sir." He hurried over to the gold-plated teletype and tapped out his name. The station plate on the machine The old man chuckled. "You're Steven Ryeland. I saw you once before, but you wouldn't remember that." Ryeland started. "Sir?" "It was a long time ago, boy," the Planner said contemplatively. "I visited your home; you were a baby. Don't look shocked. You see, I knew your father." Ryeland staggered. He was half floating as the hurtling sphere reached maximum velocity, hundreds of miles under the open air; but it was not that which made him dizzy, nor even the fact that he had not eaten for nearly a full day; it was this man on the other side of the desk. He said incredulously: "Sir, my parents never said anything about knowing the Planner. Surely they would have been proud " The Planner laughed, a glorious huge laugh. "My boy," he cried, "it's a wise child, eh? And you are not that wise. You don't know much about your parents. They were not proud of knowing me at all; they were ashamed because, you see, your father hated me very much." He nodded, the smile drying on his IF face. His voice became like the rasp of a file. "Your father was an enemy of the Plan!" he barked. "Sir," Ryeland protested, "I don't know anything about my father. He disappeared when I was young. And my mother never told me that." "She wouldn't," the Planner said savagely. "She was a dangerous woman, but not a stupid one. Neither of your parents were stupid, Ryeland; so how is it that you are?" Ryeland said baffled: "Sir?" "You're a Risk!" rasped the Planner. "You should not have dared defy the Plan. That was an act of stupidity!" Ryeland took a deep breath. Perhaps this was his chance to get his case on the record. He began: "Sir, let me explain. I had no intention of defying the Plan. There was a girl who reported me, and the Machine reclassified me as a Risk. I think this was an error, but -- " "You question the Machine?" "No, sir. Not the Machine, but the information that -- " "Never mind!" snapped the Planner. "I don't want you to incriminate yourself further. You are your father's son, and you, must remember that everything you do is suspect for that reason. I t took Ryeland's breath away. For a moment he couldn't speak. He stood there, weaving slightly in the unsteady footing as the sphere rolled restlessly about in the beginning of its up-drive back to the surface. Then he burst out: "Sir, do I understand you? You're saying that the Machine considers me a Risk because of what my father may have done before I was born! That's not fair. That's -- " "Fair!" bellowed the Planner, while the raven opened its tiny eyes and whirred restlessly over his head. "What sort of word is that, Ryeland? 'Fairness.' 'Freedom.' 'Democracy.' All those words your father used to use, they run in the blood. And they mean nothing. What does 'fairness' have to do with seventeen hundred and fifty calories a day? "Fairness," he sneered, "is used up, gone, spent! Do you know what your blessed ancestors did, boy? They mined 'fairness' and 'democracy' from the untapped resources of the world. They didn't invent them, they mined them -- just as the old farmers mined minerals from their cornfields, twenty crops of corn and a foot of soil! Well, the topsoil's gone now. And so is fairness and freedom. The world is a closed system now boy, and there isn't enough to go around!" The ferocity of the outburst left Ryeland stunned. "But -- but sir," he said, "surely the far planets offer new frontiers, new resources -- " "Be still!" barked the Planner, the square silver head thrust forward like a hammer. Above him the steelgray falcon whirred threateningly. The Planner glowered up at Ryeland, shifting his position in the compensating chair as the subtrain bgan its up-grav thrust. Weight came back to normal, then more than normal. Planner Creery said: "Ryeland, you're like your father. He never learned that the frontier was gone, but you must. The Plan of Man is based upon a systematic reduction of the pernicious personal liberties that almost destroyed our world. War! Dust bowls! Floods! Forest fires!" Each word was a foul epithet; he spat them at Ryeland. "We have to pay the bill for the waste that has gone before -- waste that your father, and those like him, would have spread. Never forget it, boy!" Ryeland stood silent. There was no reasoning with this man; there was a power and assurance that a gun might shatter, but no human power ever could. After a moment Ryeland said: "I haven't forgotten." Nor ever would, he thought. Not while the collar weighed around his neck. "The collar bothers you," said the Planner surprisingly, and grinned. It was as though he had read Ryeland's thoughts -- easy enough, Ryeland realized. "But we all wear them, boy. Each one of us, from the Planner down to the castoffs waiting for salvage in the Body Bank, must account to the Machine for every hour of every day; and each of us wears the Machine's shackle. On some of us they're intangible," he explained gravely, "and I admit that that does make a difference." only power, he realized; the man had personality, charm -- even to use on a Risk. "But if you like," the Planner added, off-handedly, "you can get that particular collar off your own particular neck." F or a moment Ryeland couldn't believe what he had heard. "Get the collar off, sir?" The Planner nodded majestically. He shifted his position again, touching a button. The massive, cushioned chair inclined slightly backward. The raven flapped with a tinkling metallic sound into the air, hovering, as a neck-rest rose out of the chair's back and enveloped the Planner's silver head. The subtrain sphere was well into its .upward thrust now. A faint squeal filtered through the soundproofing of the room -- testimony of the pressure that forced the car against the invisible, unfeelable wall of electrostatic force. It wasn't friction that made the squeal, but a heterodyne of vibrations from the generators that drove the car. Ryeland staggered as his weight grew. The Planner said suddenly: "We are all bound to the Plan in one way or another. I must try to find unbreakable links that can replace your iron collar -- or you must find them yourself; then the collar can come off." Ryeland said desperately: "Surely my work proves that I am loyal." "Surely it does not!" the Planner mocked. He shook his head like a great father bear with a naughty cub. "It is not what you have done already," he reproved, "but what you can do now that will matter. You have worked freely, Ryeland; work within the Plan. Always. Every moment. The Planning Machine will assign you a task. If you complete it -- " IF He shrugged, with an effort. Ryelnd was gasping now, the tag of his flesh a trap as the subtrain sphere forced its way up from Earth's molten center. He wanted to talk -- question the Planner -- perhaps leave the secret of those missing days. But his body refused. All around them was white-hot rock under pressure; only the electrostatic hoops kept it out; they were down many miles, but now rising. It was like an elevator again, but going up. The vertical component of the sphere's speed was rapidly reaching a hundred and fifty miles an hour; and even the Planner's voice, cushioned and protected as he was, began to grow hoarse and slow. "You'd better go now, Ryeland," he grumbled. "But would you like to know what your task will be?" Ryeland didn't answer -- he couldn't; but his eyes answered for him. The Planner chuckled slowly. "Yes, of course. The Machine thinks you can handle it. It sounds -- Well," said the Planner thoughtfully, "we each have our part to play, and mine is not necessarily to understand everything the Machine requires. Your task is to develop a jetless drive." Ryeland rocked, and clutched frantically at the edge of the Planner's huge desk. "A -- a jetless drive?" The Planner looked somberly amused. "I see," he said. "Perhaps your task does not include understanding it either? But that is what the Machine asks of you." "You mean -- " Ryeland tried to recover his breath. "You mean, a reactionless propulsion system?" "Precisely." "Do you know that your torture experts -- you reconstruction therapists -- have been trying for three years to make me tell them how to build a jetless drive? They seem to think I know how." "I know." The big mn shrugged. "I know their efforts failed. The Machine had received information that you had designed such a mechanism. Apparently that information was mistaken. But the past three years have made such a device more than ever essential to the security of the Plan -- more than ever dangerous to the Plan, if it should fall into unfriendly hands. "The Machine requires a jetless drive. Its records of your abilities and achievements indicate that you are qualified to develop such a device. I have decided to disregard the evidence of your unplanned behavior, the problem of whether your amnesia is real or assumed, voluntary or not. If you want to come out of your collar in one piece, you will design a working method of reactionless propulsion. Now," he said in an exhausted voice, "you must go." Through a haze Ryeland saw him make a faint motion with the huge gnarled hand that lay on the arm of his chair. The raven shifted position ever so little and beat the air frantically with its steel wings. Across the room a door opened. One of the Planner's guard officers came in. He was a giant of a man, but he stepped very carefully under the thrust of the sphere's climb. "Ryeland," whispered the great old man behind the desk. Ryeland turned, half leaning on the officer in guard blu. "About my daughter," said the Planner softly. The squeal had become a roar, almost drowning him out. "Donna has a soft heart, which he inherited from her mother; but her brain she inherited from me. Do not attach importance to the fact that she allowed you to talk with her in her bath." And the old man's eyes closed, as the Planner allowed his head to slump back at last. in M achine Major Chatterji said comfortingly: "You'll like us here, Ryeland. We're a brisk outfit, brisk." "Yes, sir." Ryeland looked around him. He was in a steel-walled cubicle with a Security designation. He had no idea where on, or under, Earth he might be. "You don't have to worry about nonsense," the major chattered. "Get the work done, that's all we care about." Ryeland nodded. The little major moved with the youthful grace of a kitten. He wore the radar-horned helmet of a risk-pusher debonairely, as though it were part of a fancydress c#stume. He caught Ryeland's glance. "Oh, that," he said, embarrassed. "Confounded nuisance, of course. But you are a Risk and the Machine's orders -- " "I m used # it." "Not that you're the only Risk here," Major Chatterji added quickly. "Heavens, no! Some of our best men, and all that." Ryeland interrupted, "Excuse me, Major." He bent to the teletype and rapidly typed out his identification number and the fact that he had arrived. Without delay the teletype rapped out: R. Information. Machine Major Chatterji is authorized # tc reconsider your status. Action. Requisition necessary equipment for expansion of equations re unified force field and steadystate hypothesis. Ryeland frowned. Major Chatterji, peeking over his shoulder at the gray teletype, cried: "At once, Steve! Oh, we move fast here. I'll have a six-deck calculator and a room to put it in before you can change your clothes, I'll bet you a lakh of dollars!" Ryeland said: "I don't understand. 'Unified force field and steady-state hypothesis' -- what's that about?" But the major was cheerfully ignorant. Administration was his job; Ryeland would find out everything else in due course, wouldn't he? Ryeland shrugged. "All right. But I won't need the calculator -- not if Oporto is still around." "The other Risk?" Machine Major Chatterji winked. "Always stick together," he nodded. "I'll have him detailed to you." Ryeland looked again at the teletype. The truly important part of the message also needed some thought. Machine Major Chatterji is IF authorized to reconsider your status . Then this man here, with the liquid black eyes and the lean, hooked nose, this was the man who could turn the key that would unlock the iron collar? Or was that the wrong assumption to make? The Machine was always exact. But sometimes the mere human who read its message failed to understand the meaning. For instance, did that message mean that Machine Major Chatterji could clear Ryeland -- or did it mean that he could downgrade him... say from Risk to raw material for the Body Bank? It was a sobering thought. The faded unreality of everything in his past except his knowledge of science left Ryeland with a nagging sense of bewilderment and loss. "Why does the Machine need a jetless drive?" Uneasily, he put the question to Major Chatterji. "The ion jet ships are good enough to reach the planets -- and anyhow the Plan of Man seems to be retreating from space and burrowing into the Earth." "Stop it!" Chatterji warned him sharply. "Such speculation is no part of our function." Ryeland insisted, "The Machine seems to be afraid that a jetless drive in the wrong hands would be dangerous to the Plan. Whose hands could that be? The Plan has conquered all the planets, taken in the whole human race. Except for a few fugitives like Ron Donderevo -- " "Don't talk about him!" Chatterji looked shocked. "Our own function here is enough to keep us busy without any such unplanned talk." Ryeland shrugged and gave it up, and Chatterji at once reverted to his cheerful bustle. "We've got to get you settled," he beamed, his gold-rimmed glasses flashing. "Faith! Come in here, girl." The door opened. A tall blonde strutted in. She wore tight scarlet pants and a brief scarlet jacket. Two centuries before she would have been a drum majorette; under the Plan she had a more important role to play. "This is Faith, Steve. She's one of our Togetherness girls. She'll help you get adjusted here, I promise!" The Togetherness girl smiled a lacquered smile. She piped: " 'Perform your own function perfectly -- and your own function only.' That's our motto here, Mr. Ryeland." It was like a doll talking. "And a splendid motto it is!" Major Chatterji endorsed, beaming. "Get him started, Faith. And don't forget the Togetherness meeting at nineteen hundred hours." R yeland's mind was teeming with jetless drives and the steadystate hypothesis and three missing days and Major Chatterji is authorized to reconsider and the fact that the Planner had known about his interview with Donna in her bath. But this was important too; he swept the other things out of his mind and tried to pay attention to what the Togetherness girl was saying. "You'll like it here, Steve," she whispered, solemnly squeezing his arm. She smiled up at him, and steered him down a gray-walled concrete tunnel. There were no windows. "This is Point Circle Black. Sounds confusing, doesn't it? But you'll learn. I'll teach you!" Point Circle Black was the headquarters office, where Major Chatterji, the administrative officer, fussed endlessly over his problems of supply and personnel. "Point Triangle Gray." Faith sang, waving at an intersection ahead. "That's the medical section. Tests and diseases, injuries and -- " she giggled naughtily -- "supply depot for the Body Bank." Ryeland grunted. "Oh, that's nothing for you to worry about, Steve," she said reassuringly. "Trust Major Chatterji. You do your part and he'll do his; that's Teamwork." Ryeland mumbled, "I understand. It's just that -- well, I've had to face the chance of the Body Bank for three years now. I admit I don't like the idea of being butchered." She stopped, scandalized, her perfect eyebrows arched, her clear eyes wide. "Butchered? Steve, what an unplanned word!" "I only meant -- " "The Planned term," she said firmly, "is 'salvaged'. And you can't deny the logic of the Machine, can you?" She didn't wait for an answer. She was well into her set speech. "The Body Bank," she parroted, "provides the attack team with the necesary stimulus to insure maximum effort. If the effort is successful, the team has nothing to fear. If the effort fails -- " She shrugged winsomely. "The welfare of the Plan of Ijdan," she said, "requires that they must make their contribution in another way. That is, their physical organs must contribute to the repair of more useful citizens. That's Teamwork!" "Thanks," said Ryeland grumpily. The isolation camp on the rim of the Arctic Circle, he thought wistfully -- it had been hard and dull and uncomfortable; but at least he hadn't been exposed to lectures from teen-aged girls! P oint Triangle Gray was a Security designation; all the names were. The whole area was called Team Center. It might have been under Lake Erie or the Indian Ocean; Ryeland never learned. At Point Triangle Gray he was given his tests. He caught a glimpse of Oporto, looking healthy enough but somehow crestfallen; they waved, but there was no chance to speak as Oporto came out of one laboratory room while Ryeland was going into another. At least, Ryeland thought, the little man hadn't been salvaged. Then he forgot about Oporto for five rigorous hours. Point Triangle Gray measured his functional indices and his loyalty quotients with every test that he had ever undergone before and one or two that were brand new to him. The lab men stripped him and clamped him in their metering devices, while the interrogators demanded every detail of his life, back to the toys his mother had given him for his third birthday. In these tests he tasted the afterbitterness of those sessions in the IP therapy room at the "recreation center" -- those long, endless ages when he was punished and punished again because he could not make sense of the crazy questions the therapists flung at him. He dreaded, each moment now, that in the next moment it would start again. Someone would fling him a quesion about pyropods or Ron Donderevo. Someone would ask him about the missing three days in his life, or demand that he draw them the plans for a device he'd never heard of. But it didn't happen; the questions were all routine. In fact, every one of the questions had been asked him before -- some of them a hundred times. Every answer had long since been recorded for the memory drums of the Planning Machine. But the interrogation went on. His reactions were studied in blinding actinic light, and photographed by infra-red in what to him was utter dark. His body fluids were sampled again and again. Whole salvos of injections stimulated and calmed him, and for a short time put him to sleep -- while heaven knew what pokings by scalpel and probe investigated the muscle tensions of his innermost system. But at last it was over. He was dressed in new crisp scarlet slacks and tunic and propelled into the gray concrete corridors where Faith was waiting, the lacquered smile on her face and her eyes glad. "You've passed!" she sang. "But I knew you would. And now you're a full member of the Team." She led him away carolling: "Next I'll show you your quarters. They're nice, Steve! And then, oh, there's so much here! You'll like the Togetherness Canteen. You'll have wonderful work facilities. Everything is fine -- and, of course, that's only fair, isn't it? Because so much is expected of you people on the Attack Team. You're entitled to a great deal in return; that's Teamwork!" She led him about for an hour, and she did not stop chattering once. She took him to a sort of mess hall to be fed -- alone; he was late for dinner, due to the tests at Point Triangle Gray, and the others were all through. The food was General Workers A-Ration -- about the same as at the maximum-security camp, though somewhat less of it in terms of calories. But it was pleasant to be allowed to sit and smoke after the meal. And she showed him his quarters. a They were comfortable. A rather surprisingly soft bed, a bookcase (already Machine Major Chatterji had stocked it with conversion tables and reference books), a more than adequate chest for the personal belongings he had long since ceased to own. "Isn't it nice?" the Togetherness girl enthused. "But we'll have to hurry, Steve. It's almost nineteen hundred hours!" T he Togetherness Canteen was high over the maze of tunnels that comprised Team Center. Its gray concrete was liberally splashed with bright colors. It was full of light and sound and people. There were nearly twenty Togetherness girls as pretty as Faith; they danced with laughing officers of the Technicorps, sat with them at tables, sang with them around a piano. There were hurrying waitresses as pretty as the Togetherness girls, or almost, bringing drinks and light refreshment. And there were the officers -- Ryeland's new colleagues. They all wore the crisp scarlet uniform; and his heart bounded, for three of them at least, he saw, wore the same iron collar as himself. But they were laughing. One danced with a red-headed girl as tall as he, two were in a card game. The iron collar did not seem to weigh heavily on these Risks. Ryeland took a deep, wondering breath. Maybe this place was the place he had hoped for all those three years... One side of the room was an enormous window, twenty feet tall, made of armor-glass. Outside weathered cliffs were splashed with orange sun, nearly set. The tops of pines swayed in an unheard wind, and a far mountain slope was splotched with evergreens and golden autumn aspen. Faith touched his arm. "What's wrong, Steve? Afraid of high places?" He had hardly noticed the scenery; his thoughts had been on his collar. But he blinked and came awake. "I -- I didn't know where this place was, until I saw the outside." "You still don't know," she laughed. "Come along. You'll want to meet the Team leader." General Fleemer had big bulging eyes and a tight uniform; it made him look like a very important frog. "So you're Steve Ryeland?" The general pumped his hand, the bulging eyes glowing with friendly Togetherness. "Glad to have you, Steve!" He grinned and flicked the iron collar with a fingernail. It rang faintly. "We'll have that off you in no time. Give us results, we'll give you your clearance! What could be fairer?" He caught Steve by the other elbow, the one Faith wasn't using, and carried him off. Faith trailed along. "Want you to meet some of the others," he boomed. "Here. Pascal! Come over here. Steve, I want you to meet -- " "But I already know Colonel Lescure," said Ryeland. It was the grayhaired Technicorps officer who had conducted them to Compartment # on the Planner's subtrain. The colonel nodded, and took IF him aside for a moment while General Fleemer rounded up more of the Team. "I didn't want to say anything before -- but I knew you were coming here. And I'm glad. Your -- ah -- interview was a success, eh?" And he nudged Ryeland's ribs. It occurred to Ryeland that the colonel might not have been nearly as jolly with him if the interview hadn't been a success, but he let it pass. "Yes," he said, "the Planner was quite -- " "Planner?" Colonel Lescure winked. "I mean the other interview, son! She's quite a girl!" It seemed, thought Steve Ryeland, that there was hardly a human under the Plan of Man who wasn't aware that he had spent three-quarters of an hour with Donna Creery in her bath. "Over here!" cried the general, beckoning. "You too, Otto!" As Ryeland reached the general Colonel Otto Gottling stumped over, his face like a rock. He was a jet combustion expert, as it turned out; his chamber had powered the last twelve rockets built for the outplanet run. Everyone was a specialist and Ryeland found it uncommonly difficult to figure out where the specialties fit together. Colonel Lescure, he discovered, was Director of the Plan of Space Biology, for example. A major named Max Lunggren was an astrophysicist. There were two other mathematicians -- one an expert in number theory, the other whose name was vaguely familiar to Ryeland as the author of a paper on normed rings. (Coincidentally -- or was it coincidence? -- both of them wore the collars of Risks.) The third Risk was a food chemist, a fat, jolly man who owned a fund of limericks. But some hours later Ryeland received a clue, at least; the evening was not entirely devoted to Togetherness.  Morily mellow General Fleemer climbed atop a table and hammered it with his heel for attention. "A toast!" he bawled. "I give you Teamwork -- and the Plan!" There was a rousing roar. Fleemer drained his glass with them and then turned serious. "Some of you," he cried, "wonder what our Team Attack is aimed at. Well, you'll find out! But for the benefit of the new people, first let me review the overall philosophy of the Team Attack itself. It is the essential tool of our scientific progress, and too important to be taken for granted!" "Hurray for Team Attack!" bawled one of the iron-collar mathematicians, amid a giggle of the Togetherness girls around him. General Fleemer smiled, quelling him. He said: "Once upon a time -- so our Team historians tell me -- science was done by individual men. Some of you may think it is still done that way." He gave a frosty grin to Ryeland and the other Risks. "But that is all over. The turning point came with the Einstein Team, which met at a town called Hiroshima to attack the primary problem of atomic fission. "Unfortunately," the general said sadly, holding out his glass for a refill, "these pioneers were destroyed by the unexpected success of their first experiment with uranium fission. But the principle of team attack survived! "Since then the Plan of Man has refined the principles and polished the techniques of Team Attack. When the Plan of Man requires a new scientific discovery, a team is created to make it. Such a team is needed now -- and you are my Team, all of you!" There was prolonged cheering. Then Fleemer paused. He smiled, and it was a scorpion's smile, vastly out of character in that wattled marshmallow face. He said: "I'm sure you all understand why you can be counted on to do your best." He nodded merrily to Ryeland and the other iron-collar men. "When you succeed, you will learn that Teamwork operates both ways. When you succeed. But if you fail -- if you fail -- why, then... He trailed off, and looked somberly at the men for a second. Then he grinned and drew one pudgy finger across his non-existent neck. "Zzzzt! The Body Bank! But we won't fail !" There was a burst of laughter. Machine Major Chatterji leaped to a table, his glasses gleaming. "Three cheers for General Fleemer and the Plan of Man! Hip, hip -- " "Hooray!" The cheer was loud but ragged. "Hip, hip -- " "Hooray!" Louder now. The whole room was together. "Hip, hip " "Hooray!" Ryeland found himself thundering along with the rest. He couldn't help it. He had been born under the Plan of Man. He could not doubt it. It would have deprived his life of meaning, as the iron collar that was the Plan's gift to him had, for a time, nearly deprived it of hope. There was loud applause. And General Fleemer, still smiling, raised his hand. "What the Machine needs," he said, "is a new physical principle." He shrugged winsomely -- as best he could with those blubber shoulders. "I'm not a scientist, and I don't know just how tough this job is going to be. Probably some of you think it's going to be very tough. Well," he said, chuckling, "the rest of you are just going to have to convince them otherwise!" And he touched his finger jestingly to his throat. R yeland tried, but got little information from the others. It wasn't so much that they refused to tell; it was more that he couldn't understand. The Machine would give him a detailed directive, they assured him, and wouldn't he have another drink? And an hour later Faith offered to show him a short-cut home to his quarters. They linked arms and wandered off through the graywalled corridors. "Here's an area you've never seen," she caroled. "See that? Point Nexus. That's the Message Center." "Lovely Message Center," said Ryeland comfortably. Funny. Even the iron collar didn't seem as hard or as cold. She was a sweet kind of IF girl, he thought dreamily. Of course, the Togetherness girls were coached, reared -- all but bred for that. But she reminded him of the Fair Lost One, Angela -- about whom the Planner's daughter had known more than she should. But of course it could have come from his personnel folder, and -- "Point Crescent Green," sang the girl, pointing to another stenciled emblem on the wall. "Lovely," said Ryeland automatically, and then took a closer look. "But what's going on?" The girl hesitated. She stopped in the middle of a word and frowned at Ryeland. "I tell you," she said after a moment, suddenly gay, "maybe this short-cut isn't such a good idea. Back the other way there's -- " "No, but look," Ryeland insisted planting his feet as she tugged at him. It was quite late now, but there were a couple of guards in Team scarlet, and one of them was turning a key to slide back a massive, lead-shielded door. Beyond was the floor of an enormous pit, lit by a bright single light, high up. Ryeland recognized it for what it was: A rocket landing pit. There were the 'great spreading girder arms of the gantry, the enormous ducts for the jet-baffles yawned black in the floor. A piece of his mind catalogued the information that rocket landings commonly took place here; light were the enormous doors that would open to the sky. But there was no rocket in the pit. There was something else, something in a heavy metal cage. "What is that thing?" Ryeland demanded. It looked a little like the seals that Ryeland had seen sunning themselves on the rocks off the mrtaximum-security camp; but it was golden -- metallic gold, thegold of the setting sun on bright metal, as it lay bathed in the wash of harsh light from above. The thing was alive. It was, however, no animal that Ryeland had ever seen. It lay on the floor of the great metal cage as though exhausted by efforts to escape. The golden fur was bloodied and torn about its head. Some of the bars were bent and bloodstained. Whatever it was, it had fought to get free! The Togetherness girl said worriedly: "Come away, Steve. Please! Major Chatterji doesn't want anyone to see the spaceling until -- " She gasped, confused. She begged: "Forget I said that! I shouldn't have taken you this way at all, but -- Oh, please, Steve, come away." Reluctantly he let her lead him away. The guard had hurried inside and the enormous metal doors were closed; there was nothing more to see in any case. But what was it that he had seen? IV A t # hours the next morning the teletype rang him out of a deep sleep. Hardly stopping to open his eyes he leaped to answer. It clattered: Query. Is Steven Ryeland, Ryeland blanched and instantly tapped out his acknowledgement. All human instincts ordered him to add an apology, but the Machine was not interested in apologies, only in compliance with its rules. It rapped back at him without pause: Information. Steady-sate hypothesis rests on theory of Fred Hoyle English astronomer physicist #th century stating that clouds hydrogen gas are continually formed between stars thus replenishing matter converted into energy in stellar power processes. Action. Produce necessary mathematical statements showing when under what conditions process can occur. Action. Make statement as to feasibility additional mathematical statement providing basis for neutralizing or reversing hydrogen formation process. Ryeland stared. There was a brief tap at the door and the Togetherness girl danced in, carrying a tray with tea and toast and a glass of pinkish fruit juice. "Good morning, Steven! Rise and shine. I -- oh!" He impatiently motioned her to be silent; the teletype, as though that were not enough for him to worry about in a single transmission, emitted the whir of marking impulses for a moment and then clattered out a new message: Information. Experimental evidence available indicating existence of drive mechanism not subject to Newton Third Law Motion. Information. Said mechanism referred to as Jetiess Drive. Act ; 'n. Produce necessary mathematical statements providing basis for reproducing Jetless Drive in Plan space vehicles. Action. Review work of Colonel Gottling unified force field as necessary first step. Ryeland pulled the tape out of the machine as soon as it was finished and sat staring at it. Somebody, he reflected, had been transferring information from his forbidden books into the Machine! Gently Faith removed it from his fingers. "Breakfast," she scolded. "A bath. You'll think better when you're more awake!" Groggily Steve allowed himself to be propelled toward the bath, his mind a whirl of hydrogen clouds and non-Newtonian force fields. The steaming shower woke him. By the time he was dressed and sitting down to breakfast with the Togetherness girl he was alert. "Jetless drive!" he said. "But there can't be such a thing. Newton's law!" "Drink your tea, Steven," she said soothingly. "Would the Machine ask you to do it if it were impossible?" "But I can't -- well, what experimental evidence? I haven't seen any." The Togetherness Girl looked inconspicuously at the watch on her wrist. "Colonel Lescure will be waiting, Steve. Drink your tea." T he colonel was very crisp in his uniform and white smock. He said: "You're jittery, Ryeland. Relax." IF Steve touched his iron collar significantly. The colonel smiled. "Oh, sure," he said, "but you want to get it off, don't you? And the best way is to relax, because your first job is to listen. I have to tell you about the reefs of space." The reefs of space! Ryeland gulped and tried to relax. A numbing fog of bewilderment and pain swirled up around him, across the lost years at the maximum security camp. He was lying stretched on the couch in the therapy room, with the cold electrodes clamped to his wrists, and the blinding light blazing into his face. Dr. Thrale was standing over him, fat and gentle and apologetic, wheezing out the words spaceling and pyropod and jetless drive and reefs of space, and methodically charting his reactions. "Relax, Ryeland." The colonel's voice buzzed out of a great gulf of distance. "We must take this problem one step at a time. The first step is the information which I am to give you now." "Sure," Ryeland gasped. "I understand." He was trying desperately to relax. Perhaps this information would answer the riddle of those three lost days. "Let's have a drink;" the Colonel was suggesting. "Talking's thirsty work." Ryeland hesitated. Alcohol had always been forbidden, at the academy and at the isolation camp. "Come on," said the colonel, twinkling. "A transfusion won't hurt the story." He opened a cabinet and took out glasses and a little box. While he poured drinks, Ryeland urged: "Reefs of space? Meteor clouds, perhaps?" Pascal Lescure laughed. "More like coral reefs. Here." He touched glasses. "That's better," he said comfortably, tasting his drink, and he opened the little box. A collection of fantastic little animals modeled in plastic spilled out. Ryeland glanced at them only abstractedly; his mind was on what Lescure had said. "But coral is built by living organisms." The colonel nodded. "The reefs of space are built by living organisms, too -- working over vastly longer stretches of time." Ryeland set down his untouched glass violently, slopping it over. "What organisms live in space?" "Why," the colonel said seriously, poking at his plastic toys with a finger, "creatures very much like these. They were modeled from life. And before that -- the creators of the reefs themselves, simple little onecelled organisms, originating -- everywhere!" Ryeland forced himself to speak slowly, methodically: "The Machine's orders came this morning. I'm to investigate the steady-state hypothesis. And ever since then I've been thinking -- about Hoyle's steady-state theory, and about another speculation he made. That life was born before the planets were, created by the chemical action of ultraviolet light in the cooling clouds of gas and dust around the sun. But how could it survive? The clouds disappear as the planets form." "Life adapts," the colonel said heavily, and poked at his dragons. He took a fresh drink. "Leaving out the intangibles," he lectured, "life is a phenomenon of matter and energy. The Hoyle Effect provides the matter, in the clouds of new hydrogen that are always being born between the stars. And life makes its own energy." "How?" "By fusing the hydrogen into heavier elements," the colonel said solemnly. He flicked a switch. A screen slid down out of the ceiling. An image appeared on it, the image of little darting bodies, flashing with light, crossing the field of vision. The picture might have been one of pond life under a microscope, except for the difference in shapes... and for the fact that these creatures gave off a light of their own. "The fusorians," said the colonel somberly. "Hardy little things. They fuse hydrogen atoms and generate energy, and they live in space." Fusorians! Ryeland felt his body tense as though an electric shock had passed through it. He was conscious of the colonel's gaze on him, and tried to relax, but the colonel studied him thoughtfully for a moment. He said only: "No wonder you're excited." He blinked at Ryeland mildly. "This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are islands in an infinite ocean of life -- strange life, which we had never suspected." "But why haven't any of them ever appeared on Earth?" Ryeland demanded. Infuriating how slowly Lescure spoke! It was life and death to Ryeland -- perhaps it was the answer to all his questions -- but the colonel treated it only as another lecture, and a rather dull one. The colonel shrugged. "Perhaps they drown in air. I suppose the heavier elements are their own waste products, and therefore poisonous to them." He took another pull at his drink. "Perhaps these creatures built the Earth," he said meditatively. "It accounts for the proportions of heavy elements better than the theories of the cosmologists. But of course it doesn't really matter -- not to the Plan, I mean." Ryeland frowned. There had been something almost disloyal about the colonel's tone. He changed the subject. "These things -- " touching the plastic models -- "they aren't fusorians?" "No. They're pyropods. They live in the reefs." Irritably the colonel waved a hand. The screen glowed with another picture. R yeland leaned forward staring. "Fairyland!" he breathed. The colonel laughed harshly. The view on the screen was of a delicate tracery of glowing vines and plants, where birdlike things moved effortlessly among the branches. "Call it that," said the colonel. "I called it other things when I was there. You see, there is a constant nev flow of matter into the universe. There is a steady rebirth of hydrogen between the stars. I know -- I've seen it!" IF Nervously he took another drink. "It was a few years ago. The pyropods had been seen, but none had been captured. The Planner ordered me out on a hunting trip to catch one." Rveland frowned. "Hunting? But the Plan of Man has no energy to waste on that sort of thing! Every calorie must go to some productive use!" "You're an apt pupil," the colonel said wryly, "but it was the Machine's decision, not mine. Or so the Planner said. At any rate, we took off for the planet beyond Pluto. Was there one? It was necessary to assume one, to provide a home for the pyropods -- or so we thought. We knew they had no home from Pluto sunwards... "It was a long trip. You know why interstellar flight has never been possible. There's power enough for us to reach the stars, but the difficulty is in finding the reaction mass to hurl away. Once you pass Orbit Pluto you begin to face those problems in practice. We were in the old Cristobal Colon, with hydrion jets. Our reaction mass was water. All we could carry was barely enough to land us on the hypothetical planet. We were to reload there for the flight home, if we found it." The colonel chuckled dryly. "We didn't find it," he said. "Then -- how did you get back?" Ryeland demanded, startled. "We blundered into something. What we called the Rim. Don't confuse it with the Reefs of Space -- miles yet. It belongs to the solar system, a scattered swarm of little asteroids, strung in a wide orbit all around the sun. A ring of snowballs, actually. Cold snow -- mostly methane and ammonia; but we found enough water to refill our tanks. And then we went on. The Machine's orders had been definite." The colonel shivered and finished his drink. "We went out and out," he said, mixing a fresh one, "beyond the Rim, until the sun was just a bright star behind -- then not even particularly bright. We were braking, on the point of turning back -- "And then we saw the first Reef." Colonel Lescure waved at the strange scene on the screen. He began to look alive again. "It didn't look like much at first. A mottled, lopsided mass, not much bigger than the snowballs. But it was luminous!" Ryeland found himself gulping his drink. Silently he held out the empty glass and the colonel refilled it without pausing. "An unearthly place. We came down in a brittle forest of things like coral branches. Thickets of shining crystal thorns snagged at our spacesuits when we went out exploring. We blundered through metal jungles that tripped and snared us with living wires and stabbed at us with sharp blades. And there were stranger things still! "There were enormous lovely flowers that shone with uncanny colors -- and gave off deadly gamma rays. There was a kind of golden vine that struck back with a highvoltage kick when you touched it. There were innocent little pods that squirted jets of radioactive isotopes. "It was a nightmare! But while we were reviving and decontaminating our casualties we worked out the natural history of the Reef. It was a cluster of living fusorian colonies! "We counted almost a hundred species. They must have grown from a few spores, drifting in the interstellar hydrogen. The rate of growth must be terribly slow -- a years. But the fusorians have time. "We looked at each other. We knew we had found something more than we had been sent for. "We had found a new frontier." Ryeland was on his feet, a sudden uncontrollable surge of emotion driving him there. "Frontier? Could -- could people survive out there?" "Why not? They're rich with everything we need. There's hydrogen for power, metal for machines, raw materials for food. We brought treasures back with us! We loaded our ship with every sort of specimen we could carry. Fantastic diamond spikes, and masses of malleable iron in perfectly pure crystals. Living prisms that shone with their own cold glow of fusion. Spongy metal mushrooms, in hundred-pound chunks, that tested more than ninety per cent uranium-#. Much more than critical mass! And yet they didn't explode, while tley lived. But one chunk did let go after we had jettisoned it in space, and after that we were careful to divide the masses." "So that's why the Machine needs a jetless drive?" Ryeland saw a ray of understanding, stabbing through the gray fog of confusion which had followed him from his suite in the maximum security camp. "To reach the reefs of space -- because they're beyond the range of our ion drives!" "I suppose so." Lescure nodded. "Though such thinking goes a little beyond our function." "But why would the Machine want to explore them?" Ryeland frowned at him. "Is there something in the reefs which could threaten the security of the Plan?" "Better not exceed our function," Lescure warned him. "I imagine the planets are pretty well protected from the life of space, by their atmospheres and their Van Allen belts. But of course there was the pyronod that rammed us -- " "Pyropod?" For a second Ryeland was lying on his couch in the therapy room again, with the cold electrodes IF clamped on his body and Thrale's apologetic voice lisping out the words that had been senseless to him then, jetless drive... fusorian... pyropod. Lescure's eyes had narrowed. "Ryeland, you appear unduly agitated. I don't quite understand your reactions -- unless you have heard this story before." "I have not." That, at least, was true. The therapists had always been careful to tell him nothing at all about pyropods or fusorians or the reefs of space. For another uncomfortable moment, Lescure stared. "Relax, then." At last he smiled. "Forgive my question. I asked it because there was an unfortunate breach of security. One member of my crew jumped ship after our return. He had managed to steal unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Of course he went to the Body Bank." His eyes brushed Ryeland again, casually. "I forget the fellow's name. Herrick? Horlick? Horrocks?" Ryeland sat still, feeling numb. C olonel Lescure waved carelessly, and the screen retracted, shutting itself off. "Drink?" he demanded. Ryeland shook his head, waiting. Lescure sighed and poked through his plastic toys. "Here," he said suddenly. Ryeland took the tiny things from him, a two-inch figurine in black and silver with a wicked, knifeedged snout. Lescure's glazed eyes remained on it in fascination. "That's the one that attacked us," he said. "This little thing?" The colonel laughed. "It was ninety feet long," he said. He took it back from Steve and patted it. "Vicious little creature," he said, half fondly. "Evolution has made them vicious, Ryeland. They are living war rockets. They've been hammered into a horrible 'perfection, by eternities of evolution." He swept the whole menagerie back into its box. "But they are only rockets," he said thoughtfully. "They need mass, too. We've cut up a dozen of them, and the squid is as much a rocket as they Perhaps that accounts for their voracity. They'll attack anything, with a hungry fury you can't imagine. Mass is not plentiful in space, and they need what they can find. "At any rate, this one rammed us, and -- well, we had another dozen casualties." The colonel shrugged. "It was touch and go, because the thing was faster than we. But ultimately the survivors manned a torpedo station, and then the contest was over. "Even the pyropods have not achieved a jetless drive." "If there is such a thing," said Ryeland. Colonel Lescure chuckled. He looked thoughtfully at Ryeland, as though choosing which of several to make. Finally he said: "You don't think the Team Attack will succeed?" Ryeland said stiffly: "I will do my best, Colonel. But Newton's Third Law -- " Colonel Lescure laughed aloud. "Ah, well," he said, "who knows? Perhaps it won't succeed. Perhaps there is no jetless drive." Hilariously amused, though Ryeland could not tell why, he tossed the box of plastic figurines back in a cupboard. "Ugly little things, good night," he said affectionately. Ryeland commented: "You sound as though you like them." "Why not? They don't bother us. If they haven't attacked the earth aren't likely to start very soon. They aren't adapted for atmosphere, or for direct, strong sunlight. Only a few of the strongest ventured in beyond Orbit Pluto to be sighted, before our expedition. None was ever seen in closer than Orbit Saturn -- and that one, I think, was dying." Ryeland was puzzled. "But -- you spoke of danger." "The danger that lurks in the Reefs of Space, yes!" "But, if it isn't the pyropods, then what is it?" "Freedom!" snapped Colonel Lescure, and clamped his lips shut. V F aith carried Ryeland off to his next interview. "You liked Colonel Lescure, didn't you?" she chattered. "He's such a nice man. If it were up to him, the reefrat wouldn't be suffering -- " She stopped, the very picture of embarrassed confusion. Ryeland looked at her thoughtfully "What's a reefrat?" "Here's Major Chatterji's office," said Faith nervously, and almost pushed him through the door. Machine Major Chatterji got up, smiling blankly through his gleaming glasses, waving a copy of Ryeland's orders from the Machine. "Ready, Ryeland," he called. "We're all set for you now." Ryeland advanced into the room, thinking. "I'll need my computer," he said. "And someone to look up all the work that's been done on the Hoyle Effect, boil it down, give me the essential information." "Right! You can have three assistants from Colonel Lescure's section. And I've already requisitioned a binary computer." "No," said Ryeland impatiently, "not a binary computer. My computer. Oddball Oporto." Major Chatterji's gold-rimmed glasses twinkled with alarm. "The Risk? But Ryeland, really!" "I need him," said Ryeland obstinately. The Machine's orders had been perfectly clear. Chatterji surrendered. "We'll have to get General Fleemer's okay," he said. "Come along." He led Ryeland out through a short corridor to an elevator; Faith tagged after inconspicuously. The three of them went up, out, down another hall. Chatterji tapped on a door. "All right," grumbled a voice from a speaker over the door, and it swung open. They walked into a silver room, with silver walls and furnishings plated in silver. General Fleemer, in a silver robe that he was knotting about him, stumped in from a bedroom. "Well?" Machine Major Chatterji cleared IF his throat. "Sir, Ryeland wants the other Risk, Oporto, assigned to him." "For calculation purposes, General," Ryeland cut in. "He's a natural calculator. What they used to call an idiot-savant , or the next thing to it." The general looked at him through his deepset eyes. "Will that help you solve the jetless drive?" "Why," Ryeland began, "I haven't started on that yet. This is the Hoyle Effect. The Machine ordered -- " "I know what the Machine ordered," the general grumbled. He scratched his nose reflectively. "All right, give him his man. But Ryeland. The important part of your work is the jetless drive." Ryeland was startled. "General, the Machine's orders didn't give priority to either section." "# give priority," said the general sharply. "Get along with it, man! And get out." In the corridor, Chatterji vanished toward his office and the Togetherness Girl took over again. "A very fine man, the general, don't you agree?" she chatted, leading him back to the elevator. Ryeland took a deep breath. "Faith," ,he said, "there's something funny here. General Fleemer lives awfully well! And he seems to take it upon himself to, at least, interpret the Machine's orders. Is that customary, in Team Attack?" The Togetherness Girl hesitated. She glanced at Ryeland, then led him down the corridor without speaking for a moment. She stopped before another door. "General Fleemer," she said, "is a fine man. I knew you'd like him. And you'll like Colonel Gottling too, don't think you won't!" And without any more of an answer than that, she opened the door to Gotti ing's office for him and left him there. B ut Colonel Gottling proved himself very hard to like. He was a huge man with a face like a skull, the horned helmet over it. He stood fingering the controls of his radar-horns angrily as Ryeland reported in on the teletype. "Hurry up, man," he muttered, and clumped out of his office, motioning Ryeland ahead of him. "You're next," he snapped. "Lescure had his whacks at the creature and he failed. They wouldn't let me handle it the way I wanted! And now it's up to you." Ryeland said, "I don't understand. What creature?" "The spaceling! The reefrat! The creature with the jetless drive." Ryeland said humbly, "Colonel, I don't know what you're talking about." Gottling spread his bony hands and stared at the ceiling in exasperation. "What under the Plan is this? What kind of idiots do they salvage for top-priority Teams these days? Do you mean you never heard of the reefrats?" "Only the word," Ryeland admitted. "But didn't you just say 'spaceling'?" "Same thing!" Gottling stopped in an anteroom, jerking a thumb at a file cabinet. He barked: "Here! Here's everything you want to know about them. Everything from resting weight to the chemistry of what passes for blood. The only thing I can't tell you is what makes them go, and I could tell you that if they'd let me alone with the thing!" "But -- " "You fool, stop saying 'but'!" howled Colonel Gottling. "Look here!" He opened a door. Beyond was a big room, once a repair shop attached to one of the rocket pits, now hastily improvised into a laboratory. There were unpainted partitions, unconcealed electric wiring. Chemical lab benches held glassware and flasks of reagents, reeking acidly. There were transformers; an X-ray generator; various bulky devices that might have been centrifuges, biological research equipment -- heaven knew what. And the lab was busy. There were at least two dozen men and women in scarlet Technicorps smocks working at the benches and instruments. They glanced up only briefly as Colonel Gottling and Ryeland entered and checked in, then quickly went back to their work without speaking. Evidently the cheery good will among the brass didn't extend to the lower echelons. Colonel Gottling, in a good humor again, lighted a long, greentinted cigarette and waved at the room "It's all yours now," he grunted. "Temporarily." Ryeland looked at him. "Or permanently," grinned the colonel, "provided vou can tell us what makes the spaceling fly. Me, I think you can't. You look soft, Ryeland. The collar has not hardened you enough. Still -- Do you want me to tell you something about the spaceling?" "I certainly do," Ryeland said fervently. "All right, why not? It's fairly intelligent. Lower primate level, at least. It is a warm-blooded oxygenbreathing mammal which -- why do you look that way, man?" Ryeland closed his mouth. "It's just that I thought it lived in space." Colonel Gottling guffawed. "And it does! An oxygen-breather, living in open space! Amusing, is it not? But it possesses some remarkable adaptations." "Such as what?" Colonel Gottling looked bored. "You should have asked Lescure these questions. I am a rocket man! But first, of course, there is the jetless drive. Then there is something else -- a field of force, perhaps, which enables it to hold a little cloud of air around it, even out in interstellar vacuum." Ryeland said thoughtfully: "Could the two effects be linked?" "Could they? Of course they could, idiot! But are they? I do not know." But Gottling was mellowing; treating Ryeland like an idiot had put him in a good humor. He said condescendingly: "It is possible, of course. I have thought that myself. If the reefrat can accelerate its own body without reaction, perhaps it can also accelerate gas molecules centripetally, also without reaction. How can one know? But -- "But let us look at the spaceling," IF he said abruptly. "Then we can talk more better." H e led the way through the laboratory and out the other side. They went througn a steel door into a sort of airlock. Racks in the walls held bulky protective suits and red-painted emergency gear. A warning sign glowed on the inner door of the airlock: "It is safe," Gottling assured him. "The pit was deconned months ago, before the spaceling was brought in." He pulled a lever. Motors groaned; the inner door, an enormous lead-lined mass of steel and firebrick, inched slowly aside. Like a Viking in his radar horns, the colonel stalked into the landing pit, Ryeland following. The pit was an enormous circular cavern. Floodlights blazed on the blackened concrete floor. Even the decon crews, with all their foamants and air-blasting, had failed to remove the black breath of the jets. Ryeland recognized it at once. It was the pit of which he had caught a glimpse the night before, with the Togetherness Girl. He lifted his eyes, looking for the sky and a settling rocket instinctively; but the dark armored walls lifted up into shadowy mystery. The cranes and the stages above were dark shapes in the dimness. No light passed the enormous doors, hundreds of feet up, that closed off the sky. Gottling touched his arm and pointed. Out in the black concrete stood a room-sized cage. Inside the cage was a pale cloud of greenish light; and in the center of the cloud lying motionless on the bare steel floor -- "The spaceling," said Gottling proudly. It had struggled. At close range, Ryeland could see how frantically fierce that struggle had been. The steel bars of the cage were thicker than his wrist, but some of them were bent. Red blood smeared them, and matted the spaceling's golden fur. It lay gasping on the stainless steel floor. "She's skulking now, but we'll put her through her paces," Gottling bragged. Ryeland said: "Wait, Colonel! The thing's injured. In the name of heaven, you can't -- " "Can't?" blazed the colonel. "Can't?" His finger reached up and touched the buttons of his radarfield suggestively. Under the triggering radar horns, his skull-like face glowered. "Don't tell me what I can't do, fool! Do you want me to expand my field radius? One touch of this and there won't be enough of you left to salvage!" Ryeland swallowed. Involuntarily his hand reached toward the collar, with its eighty grams of high explosive. "That's better," grunted Gottling. He clapped his hands and called: "Sergeant, get busy! Goose her!" A Technicorps sergeant in red came trotting out of the shadows. He carried a long pole tipped with a sharpened blade. Black wires led from it to a battery box on his shoulder. The spaceling rolled its battered head. Its eyes opened -- large, dark, limpid eyes -- a seal's eyes; and they were terrible, it seemed to Ryeland, with suffering and fear. A shudder rippled along the creature's smooth, featureless flanks. "Goose her in the belly!" Gottling shouted. "Mr. Ryeland wants to see her do her tricks!" The spaceling screamed. Its cry was thinly edged with terror, like the voice of a hysterical woman. "Stop it," Ryeland gasped, shaken. Colonel Gottling blared with laughter. Tears rolled out of his piglike eyes, down the bony cheeks. Finally he got control of himself. "Why, certainly," he gasped. "You're next, as I said, eh? And if you believe you can tell us how the creature flies without even seeing her do it -- " he shrugged. Writhing on the floor of the cage as though it had already felt the prod, the spaceling screamed in fright again. Ryeland said hoarsely: "Just make him take that prod away." "As you wish," the colonel nodded urbanely. "Sergeant! Return to duty. Andyou, Ryeland, I will leave you alone with your friend. Perhaps if I am not here to eavesdrop, she will whisper her secret in your ear!" Bellowing with laughter, Colonel Gottling shambled out of the pit. A fter an hour, Ryeland began to appreciate the difficulties of the problem. Back in the file room, he found a summary of the existing knowledge of the spaceling; he took it to the landing pit and read through it, watching the spaceling, trying to allow it to become accustomed to his presence. The creature hardly moved, except to follow Ryeland with its eyes. The notes on the spaceling showed a fruitless and painful history. The spaceling had been captured by an exploring Plan rocket retracing the steps of Lescure's Cristobal Colon. A section of notes, showing how the capture had been effected, was missing; the account took up the story with the creature being brought into the hastily converted rocket pit. It had been chained at first, so that the first investigators approached it with impunity. Then the chains had been taken off -- and, in quick order, half a dozen investigators had been bashed rather severely against the bars. The spaceling did not seem to have attacked them; they simply were in the way of the thing's terrified attempts at escape. However, after that the observations had been conducted primarily from outside the cage. And mostly -- at least in the last two weeks, since Colonel Gottling had taken over charge of the specimen -- with the help of the goad. Or worse. There were reports of blood tests and tissue samples. Ryeland glanced at them, frowned and put them aside; they meant nothing to him. IF There were X-ray studies, and reams of learned radiologists' reports. Also of no value to Ryeland, whatever they might have meant to Colonel Pascal Lescure. Then there were physical tests. Dynamometers had measured the pull against the chains. Telemetering devices had registered the change in the recorded curves of its vital processes under various conditions -- at rest, as it "flew", and "under extraordinary stimulus," as the report primly put it. Meaning, Ryeland supposed, under torture. No radiation of any sort had been detected. And someone had thought to surround the creature with plumb-bobs to test for an incident side thrust; there was none; the plumbs were undisturbed. No thrust! Then this nonsense that everyone had been spouting so glibly was not nonsense after all! For if there was no measurable thrust against its environment to balance its measured dynamometer pull -- then the spaceling had, indeed, a true jetless drive. Ryeland looked up from the notes to stare at the spaceling, slumped in the bottom of its cage, its great eyes fixed on him. Jetless drive! He suddenly felt very small and, for all the Togetherness and the Teamwork, . for all the joint effort embodied in the Plan of Man, very alone. Jetless drive -- here in this creature lay the seeds of a fact which would destroy Newton's Third Law, change the shape of the Solar System. For unquestionably, with such a drive, the scope of the Plan of Man would widen beyond recognition. Out past the useless, frozen methane giants, the Plan would drive to the stars! Ryeland shook his head, confused For suddenly he didn't want the Plan of Man expanded to the stars. That word that Pascal Lescure had used -- "Freedom!" It did not seem to live under the Plan. A bruptly his reveries were ended; there was a rumble like thunder in the pit. Ryeland leaped to his feet, astonished, while the spaceling mewed worriedly in its cage. A blade of light split the dark above. He looked up, and a slit of blue sky widened. There was a confused clattering behind him and someone came running into the pit. The Technicorps sergeant, shouting: "Mr. Ryeland, Mr. Ryeland! Get out of the way. Some crazy fool is coming in for a landing!" The sergeant raced over to the cage and began frantically trying to unbolt its heavy fastenings, to push it on its tiny wheel to the side of the pit. There was a wild cataract of flame thrusting into the opening gates of the pit overhead, radiotriggered; and a tiny rocket came weaving in, settling on a cushion of bright white fire. Ryeland thought grimly: "Thank God it's only a little one!" A big one would have been the end of the spaceling -- and of himself and the Technicorps sergeant as well. But this little speedster had plenty of room to land without incinerating i them all. It was a one-man craft, built for looks and play; it dropped to the black concrete on the far side of the pit, a hundred yards away, and though heat washed over them like a benediction, it did them no harm. A sudden gale roared through the floor ducts, sweeping the rocket fumes away. A ramp fell. A slim figure in white coveralls ran lightly down the ramp and across the concrete, confusingly half-familiar birds fluttering about its head. Ryeland was galvanized into action. "Stop it!" he shouted. "Keep away from that cage!" The intruder ignored him. Swearing, Ryeland raced to intercept the stranger. He took a dozen angry strides, caught a slim arm, swung the intruder around -- and gasped. Silvery doves tore fiercely at his face and head. "Get your hands off me, Risk!" It was a girl -- that girl! He could see now that her white coveralls did not disguise her sex. Her eyes were a greenish blue, and very familiar eyes; her voice, though charged with indignation, was a familiar voice. She gestured, and the Peace Doves fluttered muttering away. "What do you mean?" she demanded, shaking his fingers off her arm. Ryeland gulped. It was the Planner's daughter, Donna Creery. "I -- " he began. "I -- I didn't know it was you! But what do you want here?" "Want?" The ocean-water eyes flashed. "I want to know what you people are doing -- what you think you're doing by torturing my spaceling!" VI T he girl stood staring at Ryeland. She was an entirely different creature from the lovely girl in the bubble bath, almost unrecognizable. The Donna of the Planner's private subtrain car was a teen-ager in the process of becoming woman, with the sad shyness of youth and its innocence. But this girl was something else. This was the Planner's daughter, imperious. And not a child. Ryeland took a deep breath. Planner's daughter or no, this girl was in his way. The only way he had of getting the collar off his neck lay through the creature in the cage. He said sharply: "Get out of here, Miss Creery. The spaceling is dying. It mustn't be disturbed." "What?" The Peace Dove, settling on her shoulders, whirred and muttered. "You aren't allowed here," he said stubbornly. "Please leave!" She stared at him incredulously; then, without a word, turned to the cage. "Here, sweet," she whispered to the great seal-like animal. "Don't worry. Donna's here." The spaceling lifted its head and stared at her with great, limpid eyes. Ryeland said harshly: "Miss Creery, I asked you to leave." She didn't bother to look at him. "There's a good girl," she cooed, like a child with a puppy. "Where's the damned door?" Ryeland was angry now. "You can't go in there!" He caught at her arm. It was like catching a tiger by the tail; there was a quick movement, too fast to follow, and she caught him a stinging blow across the face with her open hand. Sheer astonishment drove him back; and by the time he recovered his balance the Planner's daughter had found the catch and was inside the door of the cage. The spaceling came heaving seallike toward her, whimpering. I t was a bad spot for Ryeland. If anything happened to the girl, there was no doubt in the world that he would be held responsible. Gottling would see to that. And then good-by dreams of freedom. In fact, more likely it would be goodbye head! Ryeland swore angrily. The Peace Doves squawked and rose into the air, circling around him. He paused, searched around, found a length of heavy chain just outside the cage door. Heaven knew what it had been used for -- though the stains on it suggested one possibility. He caught it up and dove into the cage after the girl. "Stop," she said calmly. "I don't want to turn the Doves loose on you." "Then get out of here!" he demanded. The floor of the cage was slippery with a kind of odorous slime. Part of it was the spaceling's blood, undoubtedly, but there was more -- decaying small things that Rveland couldn't recognize; perhaps they were animals that had come with the spaceling. The stench was powerful and sickening, but Ryeland didn't let it stop him. If that girl could stand it, that dainty creature who lived in an atmosphere of lilac blossoms and ease, certainly he could! She was bending over the creature, reaching down to caress its golden fur. "Drop that chain." she ordered over her shoulder. "It's afraid of you." It flinched from her touch at first. Then it relaxed. It licked at her face with a long black tongue. A sudden rumble filled the cage, like the purr of a giant cat. There was an eruption of noise from outside. Colonel Gottling, radar-horned, deep eyes blazing fury out of the face like a skull, came racing in with a dozen men in Technicorps scarlet. "Get her out of there, you fool!" he roared, waving the electric prod at Ryeland. The spaceling saw him and the enormous purr stopped. The creature began to whimper and tremble. "Hold it!" cried Ryeland. "You're frightening the spaceling. It may attack Miss Creery!" But Donna Creery needed no help from him just then. On her knees in the bloody slime, she looked up from the torn, blood-crusted fur of the creature and her eyes were a hawk's eyes. "Colonel Gottling," she said in a thin voice that cut like knives. "I've been wanting to talk to you!" The skull faced colonel swallowed but stood his ground. "You must get out of there, Miss Creery! The IF annual is dangerous. It has already wounded half a dozen men!" "And what were the men doing to the spaceling?" The girl bent to pat the golden battered head. Two or three fat green flies were buzzing through the thinning cloud of light around the wounds on the spaceling's flanks. "Filthy," she said with scorn. "I want this cleaned up!" She stood up and gestured Ryeland ahead of her out of the cage. "I want a meeting of the whole Team," she said coldly, closing the cage door behind her, "and I want it now! Meanwhile, Gottling, have your men clean that cage out. And if I catch any of them using that prod again, I'll see how they like it used on themselves!" Gottling turned purple. In a voice stiff with self-control he said: "It is no longer my project, Miss Creery. Mr. Ryeland has taken it over." "I give it back," said the girl. "I have another use for Mr. Ryeland." Ryeland said, shocked: "But the Machine ordered -- " "I'll take care of the Machine," she said calmly. "Get started on this cage, you men! The spaceling needs her symbiotic partners and they're dying fast." She turned to the door. "Now let's have that meeting," she said grimly. "I want to get a few things straight!" T hey were back at Point Crescent Green. The Team was buzzing like flies around the spaceling's wounds. Donna Creery dominated the meeting. Major Chatterji tittered shyly and General Fleemer made half a dozen speeches on Teamwork; Colonel Gottling was in an icy rage and Colonel Lescure fluttered objections. But not one of them could stand up against the girl. She blazed: "If that animal dies, she's going to take the lot of you with her! I've got news for you. There's a shortage of salvage material at the Body Bank." She stared around the room appraisingly. "Some of you would make pretty good spare parts. Do I make myself clear?" "Quite clear," Genral Fleemer said humbly. "But, Miss Creery, our Team objective -- " "Shut up," she said mildly. "Yes? What is it?" Machine Major Chatterji said with great respect: "There's a message for you on the teletype." "It can wait." There was an audible gasp but the girl paid no attention. "From this date forward, Mr. Ryeland is in charge of the Team." General Fleemer choked and sputtered: "Miss Creery, a Risk can't be put -- " "Yes, a Risk can," Donna Creery contradicted. "Oh, all right. Here, I'll get orders for you." She walked through them to the teletype, calmly pressed the "Interrupt" switch -- another gasp swept through the Team -- and began to type. In a moment the Machine's answer rattled back: Action. Fleemer Team will comply with directive of Donna Creery IS "Anything else bothering you?" she demanded. "Nothing," croaked General Fleemer. His toad eyes bulged more than ever. "All right. Now the rest of you clear out. Ryeland, I want to talk to you." Whispering among themselves, but not audibly, the Team filed out of the conference room. Donna Creery stretched and yawned, the Peace Doves fluttering and cooing. "That's better," she said drowsily. "What are you doing?" Ryeland coughed. "There seems to be a message coming in for you, Miss Creery," he said. "There always is," she sighed. She stood behind him, one arm casually on his shoulder, reading: Information. Planner Creery en route from Mombasa to Capetown. Information. Donna Creery personal rocket refueled and serviced Information. London Philharmonic acknowledges receipt of opening season program instructions. Action. Request choice of soloist Beethoven piano concerto. Information. Moon colony Alpha-Six requests presence Donna Creery #th anniversary celebration. Information. "The usual run of thing," the girl said absently. "It can wait." She looked around. "This place depresses me. Haven't you got a room of your own? Let's go there." She didn't wait for an answer; she got up and beckoned Ryeland to follow. He was not surprised to find that she knew the way. There seemed to be very little this girl didn't know! B ut the situation was getting out of hand. This girl was giving orders to an entire Research Team. It wasn't her place to do that. Everybody knew that! Under the Plan of Man it was the Machine that gave orders. Human beings -- even Planner's daughters -- were supposed to do their own job (perfectly) , and nobody else's. That was plain logic, the logic of the Plan. He stood stiffly holding the door to his room, meditating what to say to her. She walked in, looking curiously about; he followed, leaving the door ajar. "Oh, close it," she said impatiently. "Don't you think my Peace Doves are chaperones enough?" She laughed at the expression on his face, threw herself at full length on his bed and lit a cigarette. The dislodged Peace Doves cooed complainincly and found roosts for themselves on the iron headboard. Grudgingly  Ryeland closed the door. He nodded to the teletype. "Don't you want to check in?" "The Machine'll find me," Donna Creery said cheerfully. "You watch." And, sure enough, the words were hardly out of her mouth when the keys beean to rattle away: Information. Marseilles Planning Council asks Donna Creery g ; ve annual Plan Awards. Information. Life Magazine requests permission use photograph Donna Creery on Woman of the Year cover. Information -- IF "Someone's always available to tell the Machine where I've gone," the girl told Ryeland seriously. "And if not -- well, the Machine can usually make a pretty good guess where I'll bo. It knows me pretty well by now." She spoke, Ryeland noticed wonderingly, as though the Machine were an old friend. But she didn't give him much chance to speculate on that; she said abruptly: "You're not much, Steve, but you're better than those others. Can you keep my spaceling alive?" "Your spaceling?" She laughed. "It's mine because I like it. Everything I like belongs to me -- that's the way I want it." She added seriously: "But I don't know yet whether or not I like you." He said, the back of his neck bristling, "I have my duty, Miss Creery. I'm going to do it! I hope it won't mean any further discomfort to the spaceling, but, if it does -- Do you see this?" He tugged angrily at his collar. "I want that lings to get it off, I'll do it!" She stubbed out her cigarette lazily. "That isn't what you told Gottling," she observed. "How do you know what I told Gottling?" "Oh, I know very many things. Why shouldn't I? The Machine goes everywhere, and my father is practically part of the Machine. And, oh, yes, I like the Machine, and everything I like -- " She shrugged winsomely. Ryeland stared. She was mocking him. She had to be. It was a joke in terribly bad taste, but surely that was all it was. He said stiffly: "Miss Creery, I don't appreciate that sort of remark about the Machine. I believe in the Plan of Man." "That's terribly good of you," she said admiringly. "Blast you," he yelled, pushed a step too far, "don't make fun of me! The Plan of Man needs the jetless drive, you silly little skirt! If the spaceling has to die so the Plan can discover its secret, what possible difference does that make?" She swung her feet to the ground and got up, walking over close to him. Her face was relaxed and sympathetic. She looked at him for a second. Then she said suddenly: "Do you still love that girl?" It caught him off balance. "What -- what girl?" "Angela Zwick," she said patiently. "The daughter of Stefan Zwick. The blonde, twenty years old, five feet four and a quarter, with green eyes, who became your teletype operator late one afternoon and made you kiss her that very night. The one who turned you in. Do you still love her?" Ryeland's eyes popped. "I -- I know you've got special sources of information," he managed, "but, really, I had no idea -- " "Answer the question," she said impatiently. He took a deep breath and considered. "Why, I don't know," he said at last. "Perhaps I do." Donna Creery nodded. "I thought so," she said. "All right, Steve. I thought for a moment -- But, no, It wouldn't work out, would it? But I admire your spirit." Ryeland took a deep breath again. This girl, she had a talent for confusing him. It wasn't possible for him to keep up with her, he decided, it was only possible for him to cling to the basic facts of his existence. He said stiffly: "It doesn't take spirit to defend the Plan of Man. If the Plan needs to learn the secret of the jetless drive, that's my plain duty." She nodded and sat again on his bed, the Peace Doves settling gently on her shoulders. "Tell me, Steve, do you know why the Plan of Man requires this information?" "Why -- no, not exactly. I suppose -- " "Don't suppose. It's to explore the reefs of space. Do you know what the Plan wants in the reefs?" "No, I can't say that -- " "It wants Ron Donderevo, Steve." "Ron?" He frowned. "The man who got out of his iron collar, Steve," the girl said, nodding. "A man you might like to know again. That booby-trapped, tamperproof collar, that nobody can possibly get off until the Machine authorizes it -- the Machine wants to talk to Donderevo about it, very badly. Because he took his collar off, all by himself." Ryeland stared at her. She nodded. "And Donderevo is out in the reefs now," she Said, "and the Machine wants to do something about it. It might simply destroy the reefs. I understand you are working on some such project. But if it can't do that, it wants to send someone out there to find him. "Someone with a radar gun, Steve! To kill him! And that's why the Machine wants the secret of the jetless drive!" ii ii ii ii ii ii iT  li ii ii i j ii ij ij ii  Van Vogt Is Back! Complete Novelette of Interstellar Adventure A Great New Novelette by #'s "ScienceFiction Man of the Year" Manners and Customs of the Thrid Plus many other stories and features -- all In the next issue of H! Reserve your copy at your newsstand, or subscribe today! II II fl II II II fl fl fl II fl r! fi ri ii n IF IF  Short Story by bruce McAllister They were all that was left of humanity -- if they were still human! I wanted to call her Soft Breast, because she is soft when I hold her to me. But the Voice told me to call her Diane. When I call her Diane, I have a pleasant feeling, and she seems closer to me. She likes the name "Diane". The Voice knew what was best, of course, as it always does. I must mate with her every day, when the water is brightest. The Voice says so. It also says that I am in a "tank", and that the water is brightest when the "sun" is over the "tank". I do not understand the meaning of "sun", but the Voice says that "noon" is when the "Sun" is over the "tank". I must mate with Diane every "noon". I do know what the "tank" is. It is a very large thing filled with water, and having four "corners", one of which is the Cave where Diane and I sleep when the water is black like the ink of the squid and cold like dead fish. But we stay warm. There is the "floor" of the "tank", the "floor" being where all the rock and seaweed is, with all the crawling fish and crabs, where Diane and I walk and sleep. There are four "sides". "Sides" are smooth and blue walls, and have "view-ports" -- round, transparent areas -- on them. The Voice says that the things in the "view-ports" are Faces. I have a face, as does Diane. But the cracked, flat things with small lights circling about them are not pretty like Diane's face. The Voice says that the Faces have bodies, like myself, and Diane. No body could be like Diane's. I think I should be quite sick if I saw the bodies of the Faces. The Voice then says that the Faces are watching us, as we sometimes watch the porpoises. It took a very long time to grow used to having the Faces watch us, as Diane and I came together, but we learned to do it as simply as we swim and sleep. But Diane does not have babies. I am very sad when I see the porpoises and whales with their young. Diane and I sleep together in the Cave; Diane is very warm and soft. We sleep in happiness, but when we are awake, we are lonely. I question the Voice about a baby for Diane, but the Voice is always silent. I grow to hate the Faces in the "view-ports". They are always watching, watching. The Voice says that they are enemies, and bad. The Faces have not tried to hurt me: but I must think of them as enemies because the Voice says so. I ask bad, like the shark? The Voice says, no, worse than the sharks and eels. It says that the Faces are evil. The "tank" must be high, because the water is high. I have gone once to the surface, and, although I could get used to it, the light was too much for my eyes. It took me two hundred and seventy kicks to the surface; it took me three thousand steps from our Cave to the opposite "side". The "tank" is very large, otherwise the whales would not be happy. The fish are many, but the dangers are few. I have seen the sharks kill. But the shark does not come near me if I see it and am afraid. Sometimes I have caught it sneaking up behind me, but when I turn it leaves quickly. I have questioned the Voice about why the sharks leave. It does not know. It has no one to ask. T oday the "sun" must be very large, or powerful, or bright, because the water is brighter than most days. When I awoke Diane was not beside me. The rock of the Cave is jagged, so as I make my way from our bed of cool and slick seaweed, toward the entrance, I scrape my leg on the fifth kick. Not much blood comes from the cut. That is fortunate, because when there is blood the sharks come. Diane has grabbed the tail of a porpoise, and both are playing. Diane and I love the porpoises. Sometimes we can even hear their thoughts. They are different from the other fish; they are more like us. But they have babies and we do not. Diane sees me and, wanting to play, swims behind a rock and looks back, beckoning. I make a grab at her as I sneak around the rock. But she darts upward, toward the surface, where her body is a shadow of IF beauty against the lighter water above her. I follow her, but she ducks and I sail past her. Diane pulls up her legs, knees under her chin, and puts her arms around them. She then drops like a rock toward the "floor". I have caught a porpoise by his top fin. He knows my wish, so he speeds toward Diane, circles her and butts her soft thighs with his snout. She laughs, but continues to stay in a ball, her black hair waving. She is very beautiful. I try to pry her arms from around her legs gently, but she resists. I must use force. Diane does not mind when I do; because she knows I love her. I pull her arms away, and slip my arms under hers, kissing her on the lips for a long time. Struggling to free herself, laughing again, she pokes me sharply with her elbow and escapes my arms. I am surprised. She quickly puts her arms around my neck, pulls herself to my back and links her slim legs around my middle. She is pretending that I am a porpoise. I laugh. She pinches me to go ahead. I swim upward, but her thoughts tell me she wants to go to the Cave. I understand. I carry her through the water very slowly, feeling the warmth and nipples of her breasts pressed against my back as she rests her head on my shoulder and smiles. The Faces continue to stare. Many times I have searched for a word to show my hatred for them. I shall find it somehow, though. Sooner or later. C#TX#Tiat count of planets had   the Terrans infested?" The furry humanoid leaned over the desk and stared, unblinking, at the lesser humanoid in the only other chair in the room. His gaze was dropped as he scratched informally at the heavy fur at his wrist. He raised his gaze again. "Forty-three is the count, beush" replied the other. "And the count of planets destroyed?" "Forty-three planetoid missiles were sent and detonated simultaneously without resistance or losses on our part, beush" the assistant beush answered indirectly. The room was hot, so the beush lazily passed his hand over a faintly glowing panel. The room was cooled, and a large-eyed female with silky, ochrous fur -- very desirable to the majority of humanoids -- entered with two flared glasses of an odorles; transparent liquid -- very desirable to the majority of humanoids. The lesser humanoid was being treated exceptionately well. The room was momentarily silent as the two sipped at their drinks with black lips. The beush , as customary, spoke first. "Inform me of the pre-espionage intelligence accomplishments contra Energi. I have not been previously informed. Do not spare the details." "Of certainty, beush" began the assistant with all the grace of an informer. "The Light and Force Research of the Energi is executed in one center of one planet, the planet being Energa, as our intelligence service has conveniently listed it. The Energi have negative necessity for secrecy in their Light and Force Research, because, first, all centers are crusted and protected by Force Domes. Second, it is near impossibility that one could so self-disguise that he would negatively be detectable." He hesitated. "And these Energi," queried the beush, "are semi-telepathic or empathic?" "Affirmative," the assistant mumbled. "Then you have there a third reason," offered the beush. "Graces be given you, beush" The beush nodded in approval. "Continue, but negatively hesitate frequently or it will be necessary to discuss this subject post-present." H is assistant trembled slightly. "Unequivocally affirmative. Beush , your memory relates that five periods ante-present, when there existed the Truce inter Energi, Terrans and ourselves, there was a certain period during which gifts of the three nucleus-planets were exchanged in friendship. The Terrans were self-contented to donate to the Energi an immense 'aquarium' -- an 'aquarium' consisting of a partly transparent cell in which was placed a collection of Terran life-forms that breathed their oxygen from the dense atmosphere of Terran seas. But, as a warp-space message from the Terran Council indirectly proclaimed, the degenerate Terrans negatively possessed a ship of any Space type large or powerful enough to transport the 'aquarium to Energa. Our ships being the largest of the Truce, we were petitioned by the Terrans to transport it. These events developed before the Terrans grew pestiferous to our cause. We obliged, but even our vastest ship was slow, because the physical power necessary to bring the weight of the cell through warpspace quickly was too great for the solitary four generators. It was imperative that the trip be on a longer trajectory arranged through normspace. During the duration of the trip, feelings of suspicion arose inter Three Truce Races. As your memory also relates, the 'aquarium was still in space when we found it necessary to obliterate the total race of Terrans. The message of the annihilation arrived in retard to the Energi, so Time permitted us to devise a contra-Energi intelligence plan, a necessity since it was realized that the Energi would be disturbed by our action contra-Terrans and would, without doubt, take action contra-ourselves. "Unknown to you, beush , or to the masses and highers, an insignificant pleasure craft was extracted from Terran Space and negatively consumed with a planet when the bombs were detonated. The ship accommodated two Terrans. Proper Terrans by birth, negatively by reference. One was male, other female. The two had been in their culture socially and religiously united in a ceremony called 'matrimony. Emotions of sex, protection and an emotion we have negatively been able to analyze linked the two, and made them ideal for our purpose." IF The assistant looked at the beush, picked up his partially full glass and, before he could sip it, was dashed to the floor beside the beush himself. The former helped the higher to his unstable legs, and was commented to by the same, "Assistant, proceed to the protecroom." They entered the well-illuminated closet and immediately slipped into the unwieldy metallic suits. Once again they took their seats, the beush reflecting and saying, "As your memory relates, that explosion was a bomb-drop concussion from the Rebellers. We must now wear antiradiation protection. For that reason, and the danger of the Energi, you do see why we need the formulae of the Force Domes, immediately " There was menace in his voice. The assistant trembled violently. Using the rare smile of that humanoid race, the beush continued, "Do negatively self-preoccupy. Resume your information, if contented." "Contented," came the automatic reply, and the assistant began, "The two humans were perfect for the Plan, I repeat. Before the Energi received the message of the race destruction, it was imperative that we establish an agent on Energa, near the Force Domes. We assumed that the 'aquarium' would be placed on Energa, in the greatest center. That was correct, but negatively yet knowing for certainty, we perpetuated the Plan, with the 'aquarium' as the basis. "One of our most competent protoplasmic computers stabilized the final steps of the Plan. We were to subject the two Terrans to radiation and have as a result two Terrans who could breathe their normal oxygen form H# -- the atmosphere of the 'aquarium', I repeat. We were then to deprive them of memory, except of the inter-attracting emotions, to allow them to live in harmony. Thirdly, we were to place them in the 'aquarium' and have them forwarded under 'the reference of semi-intelligent aqua-beings from Terran seas. A simple, but quite effective plan, your opinion, beushl" "Quite," was the reply. "And concerning the method of info-interception?" The assistant continued without hesitation, embarrassed by his incompetency, "A hyper-complex spheroid with radio interceptors, a-matter viewers and recorders and the general intelligence instruments of micro-size was placed in the cranium of the male mutant. The spheroid has negative direct control over the organism. Size was too scarce for use on trivialities. Then an agent was placed behind the larger controls at our end of the instruments." "And you are the agent?" "Hyper-contentedly affirmative." I have done two things today. I have found the word for my hatred of the Faces. The Voice gave it to me. When I asked the Voice, it laughed and told me the word to use was "damn". So today I have thrice said, "Damn the Faces. Damn them." Diane and I have decided that we want a baby. Maybe the other fish wanted them, so they got them. We want a baby. "The two Terrans were so biologically mutated and are so nearly robotic, that it is physically impossible for reproduction on their part, beush." The beush ignored the assistant's words and said, "I have received copies of the thought-patterns and translations. There was something strange and very powerful about the meaning of the male's thought, 'want. I query." "Be assured without preoccupation that there exists negative danger of reproduction." The name I wanted to call Diane was not good, because her breasts are hard and large, as is her stomach. I think she is sick. I do not think Diane is sick. I think she is going to have a baby. "Entities, assistant! On your oathbody you proclaimed that there is negative danger of reproduction." "Rest assured, peace, beush. "But his thoughts!" "Rest assured, higher beush." There is much blood in the water today. Diane is having a baby; sharks have come. I have never seen so many sharks, and as big as they are T have never seen. T am afraid, but still some sneak among us near Diane. We love the porpoises, so they help us now. They are chasing the some. "Entities, Warp-spaced Entities! There has been reproduction." " Yorbeush " cried the assistant in defense. "It is physically impossible. But they are mutants. It is negatively impossible that they possess Mind Force to a degree." "To what degree? What degree could produce reproduction when it is physically impossible?" The beush was sarcastic. "How far can they go?" "There is negatively great amount they can do. Negative danger, because we have studied their instincts and emotions and found that they will not leave the 'aquarium,' their 'home'. Unless someone tells them to, but there is no one to do so." Today I damned the Faces nine times and finally wanted them to go away. The "view-ports" went black. It was like the sharks leaving when I wanted them to. I still do not understand. There has been much useless noise and senseless talk from the Voice these days. It is annoying because I must concentrate on loving Diane and caring for the baby. So T wanted the Voice to leave it. It left. "Entities Be Simply Damned! The spheroid ceased to exist, assistant. How far can they go, assistant?" The beush rose, screamed hysterically for three seconds and then fired the hand weapon point blank at the neck of his assistant. IF The sharks come today, because Diane is having another baby. Diane hurts, and there is more blood than last time. Her face is not pretty when she hurts, as it is pretty when she sleeps. So I want her to sleep. Her face is pretty now with the smile on her lips. "Fourteen thousand E n e r g i ceased to exist, spheroid ceased to exist, and another reproduction. Warpspace! How far will they go?" I t has been hundreds of days. Faces keep appearing, but I continue to want them to go away. Diane has had eighteen babies. The oldest are swimming around and playing with the porpoises. Diane and I spend most of the time teaching the children by showing them things, and by giving them our thoughts by touching them. T k)day I found that none of the children have Voices. I could want them to have Voices, but the children's thoughts tell me that it is not right to have a Voice. The eldest boy says that we should leave the tank, that a greater "tank" is around us, and that it is easier to move around in that greater tank. He also says that we must guard ourselves against Faces outside. That is strange, but the boy is a good boy. Many times he knows that things will happen before they do. He is a good boy. He is almost as tall as I am. The eldest girl is pretty like Diane, her body very white and soft but, since I wanted it so, her hair is golden, instead of dark. The boy likes her very much, and I have seen them together, touching. Tomorrow I will explain to him that if he wants something, he will get it. So he must want a baby. "Query? The Energi' will bombdrop the 'aquarium'? War declared against us? War declared? Entities be wholly damned! Negative! Negativvv!" The disintegrator was fired once more, this time into the orange eye of the beush himself, by himself, and for the good of himself. When, if I ever do want the Voice to come back, it will be very surprised to know that Diane has had twenty-four babies; that the three eldest boys have mated twice, once and twice, and have had four babies. The Voice will also be surprised to know that it took all twenty-nine of us to want all the Faces around the tank to die, as the eldest boy said to do. We could not tell, but the boy said that six seems impossible to me, but the boy is always right. Tomorrow we are leaving the the tank. We will want to leave it; it is getting crowded. The boy says that beyond the greater tank, which we will also leave, there is enough space for all the babies Diane could have if she lived forever. Forever, he said. It would be nice to live forever. I think I'll IF  Novelette Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt -- except one! I A mbassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff. "Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a' race known as the Qornt?" There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn. "They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went." He paused for effect. "They have now reappeared -- occupying the inner planet of this system!" "But, sir," Second Secretary Magnan offered. "That's unhabited Terrestrial territory..." "Indeed, Mr. Magnan?" Nitworth smiled , icily. "It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion." He plucked a heavy parchment from a IP folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud: His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qomt, OverLord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest. "Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory," Magnan said. Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger. "We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!" "Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out -- " the Military Attache began, "There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface," the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place. "Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil -- and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!" The Military Attache blinked. "That's absurd," he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table. "We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is -- the Qornt fleets are indetectible!" T he Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. "In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime -- " "I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing," the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. "F'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks -- " "No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?" The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. "What about a stiff Note demanding an erttra week's time?" "No! No begging," the Economic Officer objected. I'd say a calm, dig:, nified, aggressive withdrawal -- as soon as possible." "We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily," the Military Attache said. "Let's delay the withdrawal -- say, until tomorrow." "Early tomorrow," Magnan said. "Or maybe later today." "Well, I see you're of a mind with me," Nitworth nodded. "Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have IF II individuals to relocate." He eyed the Political Officer. "I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow." Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door. "Where are you going, Magnan?" Nitworth snapped. "Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture. Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out." "Kindly return to your chair," Nitworth said coldly. "A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally." Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. "Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?" "Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go." "Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!" Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall. "Oh, Retief," Nitworth said. Retief turned. "Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves -- in any direction." R etief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down toa strip of white beach with the bluo sea beyond. "A delightful vista," Magnan said, mopping at his face. "A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report -- " "I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right," Retief said. "Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe." "Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing." "I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away." "See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!" "One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me." "You expect me to make my way back alone?" "It's directly down-slope -- " Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm. There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense blacklensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening. Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk. "I'll go for help," Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush. A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned -- and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs. Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly. "Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "You nailed both of them." inphose undoubtedly are the A most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter," Magnan said. "It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!" The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slenders fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers. "It's not broken," he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. "Small thanks to you." Magnan smiled loftily. "I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future." "Diplomats? Surely you jest." "Never mind us," Retief said. "It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?" "Only Zubb and myself." "I mean altogether. How many Qornt?" The alien whistled shrilly. "Here, no signalling!" Magnan snapped, looking around. "That was merely an expression of amusement." "You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know." "Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished -- " a small whistle escaped -- "at being taken for a Qornt." "Aren't you a Qornt?" "I? Great snail trails, no!" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. "Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens." "You certainly look like Qornt." "Oh, not at all -- except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually." "A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?" "Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt." IF "I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock -- descended from a common ancestor, perhaps." "We are all Pud's creatures." "What are the differences between you, then?" "Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level." "Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?" Retief asked. T l he beak twitched. "Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod." "The outer planet of this system." "Oh, yes. We call it Guzzura. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters." "We're wasting time, Retief," Magnan said. "We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said." "Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?" Retief asked. "At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure." "That would be the invasion of Smorbrod," Magnan said. "And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!" "How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?" "Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty." "Fifteen or twenty what?" Magnan looked perplexed. "Fifteen or twenty Qornt." "You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?" Another whistle. "Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course." "And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum -- unilaterally?" "I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs." Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants. "What did he say?" "Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens." "You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature," Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan. "How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?" Retief asked. "Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects." "It's quite charming, really, "Magnan said. "Such a quaint, archaic accent." "Suppose we went down to Tarroon," Retief asked. "What kind of reception would we get?" "That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating -- such a tedious business -- and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you." "Do you mean to say," Magnan demanded, "that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne -- who openly avow their occupied world -- would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?" "If at all possible." Retief got to his feet. "I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention." Ill #CT'm not at all sure we're I going about this in the right way," Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. "These fellows Zubb and Slun -- Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?" "We can't." Maqnan stopped short. "Let's go back." "All right," Retief said. "Of course there may be an ambush -- " Magnan moved off. "Let's keep going." The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope. "You can find your way easily enough from here," he said. "You'll excuse us, I hope -- " "Nonsense, Slun!" Zubb pushed forward. "I'll escort our guests to Qomt Hall." He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back. "I don't like it, Retief," Magnan whispered. "Those fellows are plotting mischief." "Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you." "That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions -- " "Come along, please," Zubb called. "Another ten minutes' walk -- " "See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow," Magnan announced. "We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!" "Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village." "This is Tarroon?" "A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it." "No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air," Magnan muttered. "Camouflaged." He moved hesitantly through the opening. The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels. "Few signs of an advanced technology here," Magnan whispered. "These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise." Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. "Softly, IF now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting." "When will the feast be over?" Magnan called hoarsely. "In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month." "Look here, Zubb." Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. "How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?" "Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine." "These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?" "Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely -- " "Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!" "Come softly, now." Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward. T he corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, ' paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals; Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles -- and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board. Lesser trolls -- beaked, bushhaired, great-eyed -- trotted  briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow. "A most interesting display of barbaric splendor," Magnan breathed. "Now we'd better be getting back." "Ah, a moment," Zubb said. "Observe the Qornt -- the tallest of the feasters -- he with the headdress of crimson, purple, silver and pink." "Twelve feet if he's an inch," Magnan estimated. "And now we really must hurry along -- " "That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well." "What kind of vessels? Warships?" "Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?" "I don't suppose," Magnan said casually, "that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?" "They're fully automated twentythousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship." "Great heavens, Retief!" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. "It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!" Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. "I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight." "And now an interview with the Qorn himself," Zubb shrilled. "If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen..." "That won't be necessary," Magnan said hastily, "I've decided to refer the matter to committee." "After having come so far," Zubb said, "it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat." There was a pause. "Ah... Retief," Magnan said. "Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument..." R etief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol inone bony hand, a slim needier in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest. "I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb," Retief commented. "See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!" Magnan started. "Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy." "By no means," Zubb whistled. "I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please." "Rest assured, this will be reported!" "I doubt it." "You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!" "Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?" "Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot." Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An ' inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded. Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair -- a low, heavily padded stool -- and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall headdress of scarlet silk and purple IP feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye. Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard. Qom looked Retief over in silence, then belched. "Not bad," Retief said admiringly. "Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Stemwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre." "So," Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. "You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?" He slammed a bony hand against the table. "The answer is no!" Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. "Chain that one." He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. "This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too." "Why, your Excellency -- " Magnan started, stepping forward. "Stay back!" Qom hooted. "Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you." "Your Excellency, I'm empowered -- " "Not ,here, you're not!" Qom trumpeted. "Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!" He turned to look down the table. "How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?" T here was a momentary silence from all sides. "I guess so," grunted a giant Qomt in iridescent blue with flamecolored plumes. Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. "We've been all over this," he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. "I thought I'd made my point!" "Oh, sure, Qom." "You bet." "I'm convinced." Qom rumbled and resumed his seat. "All for one and one for all, that's us." "And you're the one, eh, Qorn?" Retief commented. Magnan cleared his throat. "I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move," he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes. "Silence!" Qom hooted. "No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway," he added. "They do whatever I convince them they ought to do." "But I'm sure that on more mature consideration -- " "I can lick any Qornt in the house." Qorn said. "That's why I'm Qom." He belched again. A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place. "You next!" The guns pointed at Retief s chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it. "Now," Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. "There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?" "Let them go," the blue and flame Qornt said glumly. "You can do better than that," Qorn hooted. "Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little -- lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say -- and ship them back." "Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!" "It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming," Retief commented. "It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap," Qorn said judiciously. "I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle." "Oh, I doubt that," the blue-andflame Qornt said. "Why should they?" Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. "Take these two," he hooted. "I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!" "Well," Magnan started. "Hold it, Mr. Magnan," Retief said, "I'lltell him." "What's your proposal?" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet. "A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight." "I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency," Retief said blandly. "We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum." "What?" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered. "We plan to use this planet for target practice," Retief said. "A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences." IV # #C"#"ou have the gall," Qorn I stormed, "to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall -- uninvited, at that -- and in chains -- " "Oh, these," Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. "We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I -- " Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering. "I told you they were brutes," Zubb shrilled. Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. "I don't care what they are!" he honked. "Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!" "And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons second firepower each." "Retief." Magnan tugged at his sleeve. "Don't forget their superdrive." "That's all right. They don't have one." IF "But -- " "We'll take you on!" Qorn Frenchhorned. "We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in -- " "Hogwash," the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. "If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything." "Qorn, you seem to be the firebrand here," Retief said. "I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason -- " "Over my dead body!" "My idea exactly," Retief said. "You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation." M agnan hovered at Retiefs side. "Twelve feet tall," he moaned. "And did you notice the size of those hands?" Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings. "I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here." "But that phenomenal reach -- " "I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him." Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort. "Enough! Let me at the upstart!" Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backwardjointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens -- both servitors and bejeweled Qornt -- formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants. Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg -- and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear. Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leanfloor. "Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief. Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him. "Need I remind you, sir," he said icily, "that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties." Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. "I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb." "Look here," Zubb began. "I may lose my temper," Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter. Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound k to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly. "If I were you. I'd relax," Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks. Retief turned to the watching crowd. "Next?" he called. The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. "Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader," he said. "Now, my qualifications -- " "Sit down," Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. "A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me." "But we must select a leader!" "That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader." # As I see it," Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, "you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight." "We don't mind a little fighting -- within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush tilings?" "I have a suggestion," Magnan said. "Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group." "What good would that do? QornJ are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct -- and, naturally, we have to follow him." "Why?" "Because that's the way it's done." "Why not do it another way?" Magnan offered. "Now, I'd like to suggest community singing -- " "If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?" "Live too long?" Magnan looked puzzled. "When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels -- " "I've lost the thread," Magnan said. "Who are the new Qornt?" "After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp -- " "You mean Slun and Zubb -- the mild-natured naturalists -- will become warmongers like Qorn?" "Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes." "What do Qornt turn into?" Retief asked. "Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood." "Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?" Magnan asked. "What about taking up sheepherdIF ing and regular church attendance?" "Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum -- that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was." "But now that's all off, of course," Magnan chirped. "Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all -- " "Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action." "But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!" "Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers -- all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on." "Why don't you go invade somebody else?" Magnan suggested. "I could name some very attractive prospects -- outside my sector, of course."  "Hold everything," Retief said. "I think we've got the basis of a deal here... V A t the head of a double column of gaudily caparisoned Qornt, Retief and Magnan strolled across the ramp toward the bright tower gates opened, and a black Corps limousine emerged, flying an Ambassadorial flag under a plain square of white. "Curious," Magnan commented. "I wonder what the significance of the white ensign might be?" Retief raised a hand. The column halted with a clash of accoutrements and a rasp of Qornt boots. Retief looked back along the line. The high white sun flashed on bright silks, polished buckles, deep-dyed plumes, butts of pistols, the soft gleam of leather. "A brave show indeed," Magnan commented approvingly. "I confess the idea has merit." The limousine pulled up with a squeal of brakes, stood on two fattired wheels, gyros humming softly. The hatch popped up. A portly diplomat stepped out. "Why Ambassador Nitworth," Magnan glowed. "This is very kind of you." "Keep cool, Magnan," Nitworth said in a strained voice. "We'll attempt to get you out of this." He stepped past Magnan's outstretched hand and looked hesitantly at the ramrod-straight line of Qornt, eighty-five strong -- and beyond, at the eighty-five tall Qornt dreadnaughts. "Good afternoon, sir... ah, Your Excellency," Nitworth said, blinking up at the leading Qornt. "You are Commander of the Strike Force, I assume?" "Nope," the Qornt said shortly. "I... ah... wish to request seventy-two hours in which to evacuate Headquarters," Nitworth plowed on. "Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "This -- " "Don't panic, Retief. I'll attempt to secure your release," Nitworth hissed over his shoulder. "Now -- " "You will address our leader with more respect!" the tall Qornt hooted, eyeing Nitworth ominously from eleven feet up. "Oh, yes indeed, sir... your Excellency... Commander. Now, about the invasion -- " "Mr. Secretary," Magnan tugged at Nitworth's sleeve. "In heaven's name, permit me to negotiate in peace!" Nitworth snapped. He rearranged his features. "Now your Excellency, we've arranged to evacuate Smorbrod, of course, just as you requested -- " "Requested?" the Qornt honked. "Ah... demanded, that is. Quite rightly of course. Ordered. Instructed. And, of course, we'll be only too pleased to follow any other instructions you might have." "You don't quite get the big picture, Mr. Secretary," Retief said. "This isn't -- " "Silence, confound you!" Nitworth barked. The leading Qornt looked at Retief. He nodded. Two bony hands shot out, seized Nitworth and stuffed a length of bright pink silk into his mouth, then spun him around and held him facing Retief. "If you don't mind my taking this opportunity to brief you, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said blandly, "I think I should mention that this isn't an invasion fleet. These are the new recruits for the Peace Enforcement Corps." Magnan stepped forward, glanced at the gag in Ambassador Nitworth's mouth, hesitated, then cleared his throat. "We felt," he said, "that the establishment of a Foreign Brigade within the P. E. Corps structure would provide the element of novelty the Department has requested in our recruiting, and at the same time would remove the stigma of Terrestrial chauvinism from future punitive operations." Nitworth starred, eyes bulging. He grunted, reaching for the gag, caught the Qornt's eye on him, dropped his hands to his sides. "I suggest we get the troops in out of the hot sun," Retief said. Magnan edged close. "What about the gag?" he whispered. "Let's leave it where it is for a while," Retief murmured. "It may save us a few concessions." A n hour later, Nitworth, breathing freely again, glowered across his desk at Retief and Magnan. "This entire affair," he rumbled, "has made me appear to be a fool!" "But we who are privileged to serve on your staff already know just how clever you are," Magnan burbled. Nitworth purpled. "You're skirting insolence, Magnan," he roared. "Why was I not informed of the arrangements? What was I to assume at the sight of eighty-five war vessels over my headquarters, unannounced?" "We tried to get through, but our wavelengths -- " "Bah! Sterner souls than I would have quailed at the spectacle!" IF "Oh, you were perfectly justified in panicking -- " "I did not panic!" Nitworth bellowed. "I merely adjusted to the apparent circumstances. Now, I'm of two minds as to the advisability of this foreign legion idea of yours. Still, it may have merit. I believe the wisest course would be to dispatch them on a long training cruise in an uninhabited sector of space -- " The office windows rattled. "What the devil!" Nitworth turned, stared out at the ramp where a Qornt ship rose slowly on a column of pale blue light. The vibration increased as a second ship lifted, then a third. Nitworth whirled on Magnan. "What's this! Who ordered these recruits to embark without my permission?" "I took the liberty of giving them an errand to run, Mr. Secretary," Retief said. "There was that little matter of the Groaci infiltrating the Sirenian System. I sent the boys off to handle it." "Call them back at once!" "I'm afraid that won't be possible. They're under orders to maintain total communications silence until completion of the mission." Nitworth drummed his fingers on the desk top. Slowly, a thoughtful expression dawned. He nodded. "This may work out," he said. "I should call them back, but since the fleet is out of contact, I'm unable to do so, correct? Thus I can hardly be held responsible for any overenthusiasm in chastising the Groaci." He closed one eye in a broad wink at Magnan. "Very well, gentlemen, I'll overlook the irregularity this time. Magnan, see to It the Smorbrodian public are notified they can remain where they are. And by the way, did you by any chance discover the technique of the indetectable drive the Qornt use?" "No, sir. That is, yes, sir." "Well? Well?" "There isn't any. The Qornt were there all the while. Underground." "Underground? Doing what?" "Hibernating -- for two hundred years at a stretch." O utside in the corridor, Magnan came up to Retief, who stood talking to a tall man in a pilot's coverall. "I'll be tied up, sending through full details on my -- our -- your recruiting theme, Retief," Magnan said. "Suppose you run into the city to assist the new Verpp Consul in settling in." "I'll do that, Mr. Magnan. Anything else?" Magnan raised his eyebrows. "You're remarkably compliant today, Retief. I'll arrange transportation." "Don't bother, Mr. Magnan. Cy here will run me over. He was the pilot who ferried us over to Roolit I, you recall." "I'll be with you as soon as I pack a few phone numbers, Retief," the pilot said. He moved off. Magnan followed him with a disapproving eye. "An uncouth sort, I fancied. I trust you're not consorting with his kind socially." "I wouldn't say that, exactly," Retief said. "We just want to go over IF  Short Story They were the doomed captives of alien creatures... on the planet where Mankind was born! T he reek and noise at the back of the circus were familiar to Javlin Bartramm. He felt the hard network of nerves in his solar plexus tighten. There were crowds of the reduls here, jostling and staring to see the day's entry arrive. You didn't have to pay to stand and rubberneck in the street; this lot probably couldn't afford seats for the arena. Javlin looked away from them in scorn. All the same, he felt some gratification when they sent up a cheeping cheer at the sight of him. They loved a human victim. His keeper undid the cart door and led him out, still chained. They went through the entrance, from blinding sunshine to dark, into the damp unsavory warren below the main stadium. Several reduls were moving about here, officials mainly. One or two called good luck to him; one chirped, "The crowd's in a good mood today, vertebrate." Javlin showed no response. His trainer, Ik So Baar, came up, a flamboyant redul towering above Javlin. He wore an array of spare gloves strapped across his orange belly. The white tiara that fitted round his antennae appeared only on sports days. "Greetings, Javlin. You look in the rudest of health. I'm glad you are not fighting me." "Greetings, Ik So." He slipped the lip-whistle into his mouth so that he could answer in a fair approximation of the redul language. "Is my opponent ready to be slain? Remember I go free if I win this bout -- IF ft will be my twelfth victory in succession." "There's been a change in the program, Javlin. Your Sirian opponent escaped in the night and had to be killed. You are entered in a double double." Javlin wrenched at his chains so hard that the keeper was swung off balance. "Ik So! You betray me! How much cajsh have I won for you? I will not fight a double double." There was no change of expression on the insect mask. "Then you will die, my pet vertebrate. The new arrangement is not my idea. You know by now that I get more cajsh for having you in a solo. Double double it has to be. These are my orders. Keeper, Cell # with him!" Fighting against his keeper's pull, Javlin cried, "I've got some rights, Ik So. I demand to see the arena promoter." "Pipe down, you stupid vertebrate! You have to do what you're ordered. I told you it wasn't my fault." "Well, for God's sake, who am I fighting with?" "You will be shackled to a fellow from the farms. He's had one or two preliminary bouts; they say he's good."  "From the farms..." Javlin broke into the filthiest redulian oaths he knew. Ik So came back towards him and slipped one of the metal gloves on to his forepincers; it gave him a cruel tearing weapon with a multitude of barbs. He held it up to Javlin's face. "Don't use that language to me, my mammalian friend. Humans from the farms or from space, what's the difference? This young fellow will fight well enough if you muck in with him. And you'd better muck in. You're billed to battle Before Javlin could answer, the tall figure turned and strode down the corridor, moving twice as fast as a man could walk. Javlin let himself be led to Cell #. The warder, a worker-redul with a gray belly, unlocked his chains and pushed him in, barring the door behind him. The cell smelt of alien species and apprehensions. Javlin went and sat down on the bench. He needed to think. H e knew himself for a simple man -- and knew that that knowledge meant the simplicity was relative. But his five years of captivity here under the reduls had not been all wasted. Ik So had trained him well in the arts of survival; and when you came down to brass tacks, there was no more proper pleasure in the universe than surviving. It was uncomplicated. It carried no responsibilities to anyone but yourself. That was what he hated about the double double events, which till now he had always been lucky enough to avoid. They carried a responsibility to your fellow fighter. From the beginning he had been well equipped to survive the gladiatorial routine. When his scoutship, the Plunderhorse, had been captured by redul forces Five years ago, IF Javlin Bartramm was duelling master and judo expert, as well as Top Armament Sergeant. The army ships had a long tradition, going back some six centuries, of sport aboard; it provided the ideal mixture of time-passer and needed exercise. Of all the members of the Plunderhorse's crew who had been taken captive, Javlin was -- as far as he knew -- the only survivor after five years of the insect race's rough games. Luck had played its part in his survival. He had liked Ik So Baar. Liking was a strange thing to feel for a nine-foot armored grasshopper with forearms like a lobster and a walk like a tyrannosaurus's run, but a sympathy existed between them -- and would continue to exist until he was killed in the ring, Javlin thought. With his bottom on the cold bench, he knew that Ik So would not betray him into a double double. The redul had had to obey the promoter's orders. Ik So needed his twelfth victory, so that he could free Javlin to help him train the other species down at the gladiatorial farm. Both of them knew that would be an effective partnership. So. Now y  as the time for luck to be with Javlin again. He sank on to his knees and looked down at the stone, brought his forehead down on to it, gazed down into the earth, into the cold ground, the warm rocks, the molten core, trying to visualize each, to draw from them attributes that would help him: cold for his brain, warm for his temper, molten for his energies. Strengthened by prayer, he stood up. The redul workers had yet to bring him his armor and the partner he was to fight with. He had long since learnt the ability to wait without resenting waiting. With professional care, he exercised himself slowly, checking the proper function of each muscle. As he did so, he heard the crowds cheer in the arena. He turned to peer out of the cell's further door, an affair of tightly set bars that allowed a narrow view of the combat area and the stands beyond. There was a centaur out there in the sunlight, fighting an Aldebaran bat-leopard. The centaur wore no armor but an iron cuirass; he had no weapons but his hooves and his hands. The bat-leopard, though its wings were clipped to prevent it flying out of the stadium, had dangerous claws and a great turn of speed. Only because its tongue had been cut out, ruining its echo-location system, was the contest anything like fair. The concept of fairness was lost upon the reduls, though; they preferred blood to justice. Javlin saw the kill. The centaur, a gallant creature with a humanlike head and an immense gold mane that began from his eyebrows, was plainly tiring. He eluded the batleopard as it swooped down on him, wheeling quickly round on his hind legs and trampling on its wing. But the bat-leopard turned and raked the other's legs with a slash of claws. The centaur toppled hamstrung to the ground. As he fell, he lashed out savagely with his forelegs, but the bat-leopard nipped in and tore his throat from side to side above the cuirass. It then dragged itself away under its mottled wings, like a lame prima donna dressed in a leather cape. The centaur struggled and lay still, as if the weight of whistling cheers that rose from the audience bore him down. Through the narrow bars, Javlin saw the throat bleed and the lungs heave as the defeated one sprawled in the dust. "What do you dream of, dying there in the sun?" Javlin asked. He turned away from the sight and the question. He sat quietly down on the bench and folded his arms. When the din outside told him that the next bout had begun, the passage door opened and a young human was pushed in. Javlin did not need telling that this was to be his partner in the double double against It was a girl. iGTou're Javlin?" she said. "I I know of you. My name's Awn." He kept himself under control, his brows drawn together as he stared at her. "You know what you're here for?" "This will be my first public fight," she said. Her hair was clipped short as a man's. Her skin was tanned and harsh, her left arm bore a gruesome scar. She held herself lithely on her feet. Though her body looked lean and hard, even the thick one-piece gown she wore to thigh length did not conceal the feminine curves of her body. She was not pretty, but Javlin had to admire the set of her mouth and her cool gray gaze. "I've had some stinking news this morning, but Ik So Baar never broke it to me that I was to be saddled with a woman," he said. "Ik probably didn't know -- that I'm a woman, I mean. The reduls are either neuter or hermaphrodite, unless they happen to be a rare queen. Didn't you know 'that? They can't tell the difference between human male and female." He spat. "You can't tell me anything about reduls." She spat. "If you knew, why blame me? You don't think I like being here? You don't think I asked to join the great Javlin?" Without answering he bent and began to massage the muscles of his calf. Since he occupied the middle of the bench, the girl remained standing. She watched him steadily. When he looked up again, she asked, "What or who are we fighting?" No surprise was left in him. "They didn't tell you?" "I've only just been pushed into this double double, as I imagine you have. I asked you, what are we fighting?" He injected unconcern into his voice to make the shock of what he said the greater. He massaged the muscles of the other calf. An aphrohale would have come in very welcome now. These crazy insects had no equivalent of the terrestrial prisonerate-a-hearty-breakfast routine. When he glanced up under his eyebrows, IF the girl still stood motionless, but her face had gone pale. little girl?" She didn't answer, so he went on, "The reduls resemble some terrestrial insects. They go through several stages of development, you know; reduls are just the final adult stage. Their larval stage is rather like the larval stage of the dragon fly. It's a greedy, omnivorous beast. It's aquatic and it's big. It's armored. we are going to be tied together to beeth. Are you feeling like dying this morning, Awn?" Instead of answering, she turned her head away and brought a hand up to her mouth. "Oh, no! No crying in here, for Earth's sake!" he said. He got up, yelled through the passage door, "Ik So, Ik So, you traitor, get this bloody woman out of here!"... recalled himself, jammed the lip-whistle into his mouth and was about to call again when Awn caught him a backhanded blow across the face. She faced him like a tiger. "You creature, you cowardly apology of a man! Do you think I weep for fear? I don't weep. I've lived nineteen years on this damned planet in their damned farms. Would I still be here if I wept? No -- but I mourn that you are already defeated, you, the great Javlin!" He frowned into her blazing face. "You don't seriously think you make me a good enough match for us to go out there and kill a couple "Damn your conceit, I'm prepared to try." "Fagh!" He thrust the lip-whistle into his mouth, and turned back to the door. She laughed at him bitterly, jeeringly. "You're a lackey to these insects, aren't you, Javlin? If you could see what a fool you look with that phoney beak of yours stuck on your mouth." H e let the instrument drop to the end of its chain. Grasping the bars, he leaned forward against them and looked at her over his shoulder. "I was trying to get this contest called off." "Don't tell me you haven't already tried. I have." To that he had no answer. He went back and sat on the bench. She returned to her corner. They both folded their arms and stared at each other. "Why don't you look out into the arena instead of glaring at me? You might pick up a few tips." When she did not answer, he said, "I'll tell you what you'll see. You can see the rows of spectators and a box where some sort of bigwig sits. I don't know who the bigwig is. It's never a queen -- as far as I can make out, the queens spend their lives underground, turning out eggs at the rate of fifty a second. Not the sort of life Earth royalty would have enjoyed in the old days. Under the bigwig's box there is a red banner with their insect hieroglyphs on. I asked Ik So once what the hieroglyphs said. He told me they meant -- well, in a rough translation -- The Greatest Show on Earth . It's funny, isn't it?" "You must admit we do make a show." "No, you miss the point. You see, that used to be the legend of circuses in the old days. But they've adopted it for their own use since they invaded Earth. They're boasting of their conquest." "And that's funny?" "In a sort of way. Don't you feel rather ashamed that this planet which saw the birth of the human race should be overrun by insects?" "No. The reduls were here before me. I was just born here. Weren't you?" "No, I wasn't. I was born on Washington IV. It's a lovely planet. There are hundreds of planets out there as fine and varied as Earth once was -- but it kind of rankles to think that this insect brood rules Earth." "If you feel so upset about it, why don't you do something?" He knotted his fists together. You should start explaining history and economics just before you ran out to be chopped to bits by a big rampant thing with circular saws for hands? "It would cost mankind too much to reconquer 'this planet. Too difficult. Too many deaths just for sentiment. And think of all those queens squirting eggs at a rate of knots; humans don't breed that fast. Humanity has learnt to face facts." She laughed without humor. "That's good. Why don't you learn to face the fact of me?" Javlin had nothing to say to that; she would not understand that directly he saw her he knew his hope of keeping his life had died. She was just a liability. Soon he would be dying, panting his juices out into the dust like that game young centaur... only it wouldn't be dust. "We fight in two foot of water," beeth like it. It slows our speed a bit. We might drown instead of having our heads bitten off." "I can hear someone coming down the corridor. It may be our armor," she said coolly. "Did you hear what I said?" "You can't wait to die, Javlin, can you?" 'TT'he bars fell away on the outA side of the door, and it opened. The keeper stood there. Ik So Baar had not appeared as he usually did. The creature flung in their armor and weapons and retreated, barring the door again behind him. It never ceased to astonish Javlin that those great dumb brutes of workers had intelligence. He stooped to pick up his uniform. The girl's looked so light and small. He lifted it, looking from it to her. "Thank you," she said. "It looks so small and new." "I shouldn't want anything heavier." "You've fought in it?" "Twice." There was no need to ask whether she had won. "We'd better get the stuff strapped on, then. We shall know when they are getting ready for us; you'll hear the arena being filled with water. They're probably saving us for the main events just before noon." "I didn't know about the two feet of water." "Scare you?" "No. I'm a good swimmer. Swam for fish in the river on the slave farm." "You caught fish with your bare hands?" "No, you dive down and stab them with a sharp rock. It takes practice." It was a remembered pleasure. She'd actually swum in one of Earth's rivers. He caught himself smiling back into her face. "Ik So's place is in the desert," he said, making his voice cold. "Anyhow, you won't be able to swim in the arena. Two foot of muddy stinking water helps nobody. And you'll be chained on to me with a fourfoot length of chain." "Let's get our armor on, then you'd better tell me all you know. Perhaps we can work out a plan of campaign." As he picked up the combined breastplate and shoulder guard, Awn untied her belt and lifted her dress over her head. Underneath she wore only a ragged pair of white briefs. She commenced to take those off. Javlin stared at her with surprise -- and pleasure. It had been years since he had been within hailing distance of a woman. This one -- yes, this one was a beauty. "What are you doing that for?" he asked. He hardly recognized his own voice. "The less we have on the better in that water. Aren't you going to take your clothes off?" He shook his head. Embarrassed, he fumbled on the rest of his kit. At least she wouldn't look so startling with her breastplate and skirt armor on. He checked his long andshort swords, clipping the one into the left belt clip, the other into the right. They were good swords, made by redul armorers to terrestrial specifications. When he turned back to Awn, she was fully accoutred. Nodding in approval, he offered her a seat on the bench beside him. They clattered against each other and smiled. Another bout had ended in the arena. The cheers and chirrups drifted through the bars to them. "I'm sorry you're involved in this," he said with care. "I was lucky to be involved in it with you." Her voice was not entirely steady, but she controlled it in a minute. "Can't I hear water?" He had already heard it. An unnatural silence radiated from the great inhuman crowd in the circus as they watched the stuff pour in. It would have great emotional significance for them, no doubt, since they had all lived in water for some years in their previous life stage. "They have wide-bore hoses," he said. His own voice had an irritating tremor. "The arena fills quite rapidly." "Let's formulate some sort of plan of attack then. These things, these nesses." "And some strengths! That's what you have to watch for." "I don't see that. You attack their weak points." "We shall be too busy looking out for their strong ones. They have long, segmented gray bodies -- about twenty segments, I think. Each segment is of chitin or something tough. Each segment bears two legs equipped with razor combs. At tail end and top end they have legs that work like sort of buzz saws, cut through anything they touch. And there are their jaws, of course." T he keeper was back. Its antennae flopped through the grating and then it unbolted the door and came in. It bore a length of chain as long as the cell was wide. Javlin and Awn did not resist as it locked them together, fitting the bracelets on to Javlin's right arm and Awn's left. "So." She stared at the chain. "The weak points: They could cut through our swords with their buzz saws?" "Correct." "Then they could cut through this chain. Get it severed near one of our wrists, and the other has a better long distance weapon than a sword. A blow over the head with the end of the chain won't improve their speed. How fast are they?" "The buzz' saws take up most of their sjeed. They're nothing like as fast as the reduls. No, you could say they were pretty sluggish in movement. And the fact that the two of them will also be chained together should help us." "Where are they chained?" "By the middle legs." "That gives them a smaller arc of destruction than if they were chained by back or front legs. We are going to slay these beasts yet, Javlin! What a murderous genus it must be to put its offspring in the arena for the public sport." He laughed. "Would you feel sentimental about babies?" "I'll tell you that when I've had the first of them. I mean, if I have the first of them." He put his hand over hers. "No if. We'll kill the bloody larvae okay." "Get the chain severed, the one of us with the longest bit of chain goes in for the nearest head, the other fends off the other brute. Right?" "Right." There was a worker redul at the outer door now, the door that led to the arena. He flung it open and stood there with a flaming torch, ready to drive them out if they did not emerge. "We've -- come to it then," she said. Suddenly she clung to him. "Let's take it at a run, love," he said. Together, balancing the chain be tween them, they ran towards the ing out from the far side, wallowing and splashing. The crowd stretched up toward the blue sky of earth, whistling their heads off. They didn't know what a man and a woman could do in combination. Now they were going to learn. IF IF  Novelette The ancient rule was sink or swim -- swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! i T ie horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship. The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the ramp. There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An intelligent runt like me. He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get together when we get down?" I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went back to his place without saying anything. My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the meantime. I've got brains as a consolation. After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps. We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and then we just... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot. Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that crack about being a snob. The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact the Ship had had with it -- and we were the ones who dropped them -- was almost # years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council. I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when I said good-by to Mother and Daddy -- a real emotional scene -- but that wasn't in public. I t wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really, because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month. Planets make me feel wretched. The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere and little grubby things just looking for you to crawl on. If you can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells -- I've been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but not for me. We have a place in the Ship like that -- the Third Level -- but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. IF When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still smarting from the slap I'd given him. In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see Jimmy -- if he would get back alive. It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive. Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to keep the population steady. I began to check my gear out -- sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes. Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next landing, I grabbed Nine's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the bad moment any longer. The ship lifted impersonally away from Nine and me like a rising bird, and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last II T he first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it -- one day in thirty gone. I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three things in mind -- stay alive, find people and find some of the others. The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces though not with that meatball Jimmy D. No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting. fl I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November -- too dose to Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to look forward to. In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. #, to my mind the best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky. On the third day, I found the road. I brought Nine down off the hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching it in file level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't identify. One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have draft animals. The first of the Great Ships was finished in #. One of the eight, as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything else in the Solar System in #. In that sixteen years # colonies were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that could have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll bet that half the 'colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses. over the ocean, so I traveled east on the road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere. I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Nine to a stop. There were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures alive. They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded along. I started Nine up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as cats with kittens. One of them IF had a string of packhorses on a line and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me. He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That was why I kept riding. He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head? There be escaped Losels in these woods." out yet, but I hadn't thought it was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though. Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say anything. It seemed smart. "Where be you from?" he asked. I pointed to the road behind us. "And where be you going?" I pointed ahead. No other way to go. He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and Daddy, who should know better. We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd better ride on from here with us. For protection." He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit with him. One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been watching us all the while. He called to the hard man. "He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at all. We mought as well throw him back again." The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed. The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us to Forton for protection." I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I said, "I don't think so." What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and reached for the rifle in his saddle boot. I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he didn't want to be fried. I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground." They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions. When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go." They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling tones said, "Look here, kid... "Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It surprised me. I didn't think I sounded that mean. I decided he just didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot. After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get them now." I dug my heels into Nine's sides and rode on. At the next bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and the creatures still while one beat a dustraising retreat down the road. I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels. Ill gave me a painted wooden doll that my great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it, nestled one in another, are ejeven more dolls, each one smaller than the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time. My face must have been like that as I rode along the road. The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work. But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or something. I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody questioned me. I njet people on horsback, and twice I met trucks moving silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back. Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received a jolt that sickened me. By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Nine to a gallop. I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted remember that. I wondered about it. But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why Horst and his buddies assumed I was IE a boy. It wasn't flattering; but I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the clocks tick on this planet. But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house -- a father and four children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me then -- these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I closed my eyes until it passed. T he first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight There wouldn't have been eight billion people. But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came. I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough foresight to see what was coming. If t hadn't been for them and some others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me. What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the Council should know. For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt really frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I whomped Nine a good one and gave him his head. I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's smart and brains I needed. How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy piethod. For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody? Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think of was to find a library, but that might be a job. I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what had gone wrong. I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal. The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry. The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours. Not too different, but not ours. One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that takes an advanced technology to build. I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof. I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man, his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father came and pulled him away. The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these kids. Isn't that horrible? About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never seen before. When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go, so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness, it seemed just right. It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home. I wished for the same for myself. The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I couldn't see far into the dark. A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this one, IF Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're not." Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the fire, and cut back to where Nine was parked. I grabbed up my blankets and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now what they used the highwalled pen for. I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take leave. I never got the chance. I was just heaving the saddle up on Nine when I felt a hand on my shoulder and I was swung around. "Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast. I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from behind and pinned my arms to my side. I opened my mouth to scream -- I have a good scream -- but a rough smelly hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a lungful of air. I bit down hard -- # lbs. psi, I'm told -- but he didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet and dragged me off. When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and I'll hurt you." That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said. The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him. "No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what we can use." The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his bunch. But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under my jacket. Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away with it." He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of trouble. So don't give me a hard time." He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering. "The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: something stuffy like that. type laugh, but a real laugh, so I knew I'd goofed. "Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving you your freedom." "Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my jacket. "Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats in jail in Forton." I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Nine, with all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him. He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what this, be for." He held out my pickup signal. Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said. I leveled my gun at them -- Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand that over to me." Horst made a disgusted sound. "Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over." I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton." "I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on." I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good enough," to the others who'd come up behind me. , I felt like a fool. Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it until it cracked and fell apart. Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk." I said calmly, "You big louse." It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my face and then nothing. Brains are no good if you don't use them. IV I remember pain and sickness, and motion, but my next clear memory is waking in a bed in a house. I had a feeling that time had passed but how much I didn't know. I looked around and found the old man who had told the story sitting by my bed. IF "How be you feeling this: momteg, young lady?" he asked He had white hair and a seamed face and tea hands were gnarled and old. His face was red, and the red and the white of his hair made a sharp contrast with the bright blue of his deepset eyes. It was a good face. "Not very healthy," I said. "How long has it been?" "Two days," he said. "You'll get over it soon enough. I be Daniel Kutsov. And you?" "I'm Mia Havero." "I found you dumped in a ditch after Horst Fanger and his boys had left you," he said. "A very unpleasant man... as I suppose he be bound to be, herding Losels." "Those green things were Losels? Why are they afraid of them?" "The ones you saw beed drugged. They wouldn't obey otherwise. Once in awhile a few be stronger than the drug and they escape to the woods. The drug cannot be so strong that they cannot work. So the strongest escape. They be some danger to most people, and a great danger to men like Horst Fanger who buy them from the ships. Every so often, hunters go out to thin them down." "That seems like slavery," I said, yawning. It was a stupid thing to say, like some comment about the idiocy of a Free Birth policy. Not the sentiment, but the timing. Mr. Kutsov treated the comment with more respect than it deserved. "Only God can decide a question like that," he said gently. "Be it slavery to use my horses to work for me? I don't know anyone who would say so. A man be a different matter, though. The question be whether a Losel be like a horse or like a man, and that I can't answer. Now go to sleep again and in a while I will bring you some food." He left then, but I didn't go to sleep. I was in trouble. I had no way to contact the scoutship. There was only one way out, and that was to find somebody else who did have Ins signal. That wasn't going to be easy. Mr. Kutsov brought me some food later in the day, and I asked him then, "Why are you doing all this for me?" He said, "I don't like to see children hurt, by people like Horst Fanger or by anyone." "But I'm from one of the Ships," I said. "You know that, don't you?" Mr. Kutsov nodded. "Yes, I know that." "I understand that is pretty bad around here." "With some people, true. But all the people who hate the Ships don't realize that if it beedn't for the Ships they wouldn't be here at all. They hold their grudge too close to their hearts. There be some of us who disagree with the government though it has lost us our families or years from our lives, and we would not destroy what we cannot agree with. When such an one as Horst Fanger uses this as an excuse to rob and injure a child, I will not agree. He has taken all that you have and there is no way to reclaim it, but what I can give of my house be yours." IP I thanked him as best I could and then I asked him what the grudge was that they held against the Ships. "It ben't a simple thing." he said. "You have seen how poor and backward we be. We realize it. Now and again, when you decide to stop, we see you people from the Ships. And you ben't poor or backward. You could call what we feel jealousy, if you wanted, but it be more than that and different. When we beed dropped here, there beed no scientists or technicians among us. I can understand. Why should they leave the last places where they had a chance to use and develop their knowledge for a backward planet where there is no equipment, no opportunity? What be felt here be that all the men who survived the end of Earth and the Solar System be the equal heirs of man's knowledge and accomplishment. But by bad luck, things didn't work out that way. So ideas urged by the Ships be ignored, and the Ships be despised, and people from the Ships be treated as shamefully as you have beed or worse." I could think of a good example of an idea that the Ships emphasized that had been ignored. Only it was more than an idea or an opinion. It was a cold and deadly lesson taught by history. It was: Man becomes an organism that ultimately destroys itself unless he regulates his own size and growth. That was what I was taught. I said, "I can understand how they might feel that way, but it's not fair. We pretty much support ourselves. As much as we can, we re-use things and salvage things, but we still need raw materials. The only thing we have to trade is knowledge. If we didn't have anything to trade for raw materials, that would be the end of us. Do we have a choice?" "I don't hold you to blame," Mr. Kutsov said slowly, "but I can't help but to feel that you have made a mistake and that it will hurt you in the end." I didn't say it, but I thought -- when you lay blame, whom do you put it on? People who are obviously sick like these Mud-eaters, or people who are normal like us? After I got better, I had the run of Mr. Kutsov's house. It was a small place near the edge of Forton, surrounded by trees and with a small garden. Mr. Kutsov made a regular shipping run through the towns to the coast and back every second week. It was not a profitable business, but he said that at his age, profit was no longer very important. He was very good to me, but I didn't understand him. He gave me lessons before he let me go outside into the town. Women were second class citizens around here, but prejudice of that sort wasn't in Mr. Kutsov. Dressed as I was, as scrawny as I am, when people saw me here, they saw a boy. People see what they expect to see. I could get away with my sex, but not my accent. I might sound right on seven Ships and on #I other planets, but here I was wrong. And I had two choices -- sound right or shut up. One of these choices was impossible for me, so I et out to learn to sound like a Tinteran, born and bred, with Mr. Kutsov's aid. It was a long time before he was grade. He said, "All right. You should keep listening to people and correcting yourself, but I be satisfied. You talk as though you have a rag in your mouth, but I think you can get by." Before I went out into town, I found out one more important thing. It was the answer to a question that I didn't ask Mr. Kutsov. I'd been searching for it in old newspapers, and at last I found the story I was looking for. The last sentence read: "After sentencing, Dentermount was sent to the Territorial Jail in Forton to serve his threemonth term." I thought, they misspelled his name. And then I thought, trust it to be Jimmy D. He gets in almost as much trouble as I do. T hough you may think it strange, my first stop was the library. I've found that it helps to be well-researched. I got what I could from Mr Kutsov's books during the first days while he was outdoors working in his garden. In his library, I found a novel that he had written himself called The White Way. He said, "It took me forty years to write it, and I have spent fortytwo years since living with the political repercussions. It has beed an interesting forty-two years, but I am not sure that I would do it again. Read the book if you be interested." I did read it, though I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. It seemed reasonable to me. But these Myd-eaters were crazy anyway. I couldn't help but think that he and Daddy would have found a lot in common. They were both fine, tough-minded people, and though you would never know it to look at them, they were the same age. Except that at the age of eighty Mr. Kutsov was old, and at the age of eighty Daddy was not. It cost me an effort to walk through the streets of Forton, but after my third trip, the pain was less, though the number of children still made me sick. In the library, I spent four days getting a line on Tintera. I read their history. I studied their geography and, as sneakily as I could, I tore out the best local maps I could find. On my trips through town, I took the time to look up Horst Fanger's place of business. It was a house, a shed and pea for the Losels, a stable, a truck garage (one truck -- broken down) and a sale block, all house in one rambling, shanty building. Mr. Horst Fanger was apparently a big man. Big deal. When I was ready, I scouted out the jail. It was a raw unpleasant day, the sort that makes me hate planets, and rain was threatening when I reached the jailpen. It was a solid three-story building of great stone blocks, shaped like a fortress and protected by bars, an iron-spike fence and two nasty-looking dogs. On my second trip around, the rain began. I beat it to the front and dodged in the entrance. IF I was standing there, shaking the rain off, when a man in a green uniform came stalking out of one of the offices that lined the firstfloor hallway. My heart stopped for a moment, but he went right by without giving me a second look and went upstairs. That gave me some confidence and so I started poking around. I had covered ihe bulletin boards and the offices on one side of the hall when another man in green came into the hall and made straight for me. I didn't wait, I walked toward him, too. I said, as wide-eyed and innocent as I could, "Can you help me, sir?" "Well, that depends. What sort of help do you need?" He was a big, rather slow man with one angled cloth bar on his shirt front over one pocket and a plate that said ROthe other side. He seemed goodnatured. I said, "Jerry had to write about the capital, and Jimmy got the Governor, and I got you " "Hold on there. First, what be your name?" "Billy Davidow," I said. "I don't know what to write, sir, and I thought you could show me around and tell me things." "I be sorry, son," he said. "We be pretty caught up today. Could you make it some other afternoon or maybe some evening?" I said slowly, "I have to hand the paper in this week." After a minute, he said, "All right. I'll take you around. But I can't spare much time. It'll have to be a quick tour." The offices were on the first floor. Storage rooms, an arms room and a target range were in the basement. Most of the cells were on the second floor, with the very rough cases celled on the third. "If the judge says maximum security, they go on. the third, everybody else on the second unless wo have an overflow. Have a boy upstairs now." My heart sank. "A real bad actor. Killed a man." Well, that wasn't Jimmy. Not with a three-month sentence. Maximum security had three set of barred doors plus an armed guard. Sgt. Robards pointed it all out to me. "By this time next week, it will all be full in here," he said sadly. "The Governor has ordered a round-up of all political agitators. The Anti-Redemptionists be getting out of hand and he be going to cool them off. Uh, don't put that in your paper." "Oh, I won't," I said, crossing off on my notes. The ordinary cells on the second floor weFe behind no barred doors and I got a guided tour. I stared Jimmy D. right in the face, but he had the brains to keep his mouth shut. When we had finished, I thanked Sgt. Robards enthusiastically. "It sure has been swell, sir." "Not at all, son," he said. "I enjoyed it myself. If you have time some evening, drop by when T have the duty. My schedule bees on the bulletin board." "Thank you, sir," I said. "Maybe I will." V B efore I scouted the jail I had only vague notions of what I was going to do to spring Jimmy D. I had spent an hour or so, for instance, toying with the idea of forcing the Territorial Governor to release Jimmy at the point of a gun. I spent that much time with it because the idea was fun to think about, but I dropped it because it was stupid. I finally decided on a very simple course of action, one that could easily go wrong. It was my choice because it was the only thing I could pull off by myself that had a chance of working. Before I left the jail building, I copied down Sgt. Robards' duty schedule from the bulletin board. Then I went home. I spent the next few days shoplifting. Mr. Kutsov was laying in supplies, too, loading his wagon for his regular trip. I helped him load up, saving my shopping for my spare time. Mr. Kutsov wanted me to go along with him, but I couldn't, of course, and I couldn't tell him why. He didn't want to argue and he couldn't make me do anything I didn't want to do, so I had an unfair advantage. I just dug in my heels. Finally he agreed it was all right for me to stay alone in the house while he was gone. It was what I wanted, but I didn't enjoy the process of getting my own way as much as I did at home. There it is a more even battle. The day he picked to leave was perfect for my purposes. Mr. Kutsov said, "I'll be back in six days. Be you sure that you will be all right?" I said, "Yes. I'll be careful. You be careful, too." "I don't think it matters much any more at my age," he smiled. "Stay out of trouble." "I'll try," I said, and waved goodby. That was what I meant to do, stay out of trouble. Back in the house, I wrote a note of explanation for Mr. Kutsov and thanked him for all he had done. Then I dug my two small packs out of hiding and I was ready. I set out just after dark. It was sprinkling lightly, but I didn't mind it. It surprised me, but I enjoyed the feel of the spray on my face. In one pocket I had pencil and paper for protective coverage. In another pocket I had a single sock and a roll of tape. Just before I got to the jail, I filled the sock with wet sand. Inside there were lights on in only two first floor offices. Sgt. Robards was in one of them. "Hello, Sgt. Robards," I said, going in. "How be you tonight?" "Well enough," he said. "It be pretty slow down here tonight. They be busy up on the Third Floor tonight, though." "Oh?" "They be picking up those AntiRedemptionists tonight. How did your paper go?" "I handed it in," I said. "I should IF get a good grade with your help." "Oh, you found out everything you needed to know." "Oh, yes. I just came by to visit tonight. I wondered if you'd show me the target range again. That was keen." "Sure," he said. "Would you like to see me pop some targets? I be the local champion, you know." "Gee, would you?" We went downstairs, Sgt. Robards leading the way. This was the place I'd picked to drop him. He was about to slip the key in the door to the range when I slugged him across the back of the neck with my sock full of sand. I grabbed him and eased him down. I tried the keys on either side of the target door key and opened the arsenal on the second try. I dragged him in there and got out my roll of tape I took three quick turns about his ankles, then did the same with his wrists. I finished by putting a bar and two crosspieces over the mouth. I picked out two weapons then. They had no sonics, of course, so I picked out two of the smallest and lightest pistols in the room. I figured out what cartridges fit them, and then dropped guns and cartridge clips into my pocket. I swung the door shut and locked it again, leaving Sgt. Robards inside. I stood for a moment in the corridor with the keys in my hand. There were only ten keys, not enough to cover each individual cell. Yet Sgt. Robards had clinked these keys and said that he could unlock the cells. Maybe I would have done better to stick up the Territorial Governor. Well, here goes. I eased up to the first floor. Nobody came out of the second office to check on the noise made by my pounding heart, which surprised me. Then up to the second floor. It was dark here, but light from the first and third floors leaking up and down the stairs made things bright enough for me to see what I was doing. There were voices on the third floor and somebody laughed up there. I held my breath and moved quietly to Jimmy's cell. I whispered, "Jimmy!" and he came alert and moved to the door. "Am I glad to see you," he whispered back. I held up the keys. "Do any of these fit?" "Yes, the D key. The D key. It fits the four cells in this corner." I fumbled through until I had the key tagged D. I opened the cell with as few clinking noises as possible. "Come on," I said. "We've got to get out of here in a hurry." He slipped out and pushed the door shut behind him. We headed for the stairs and were almost there when I heard somebody coming up. Jimmy must have heard it, too, because he grabbed my arm and pulled me back. We flattened out as best we could. Talk about walking right into it! The policeman looked over at us and said, "What are you doing up here, Robards? Hey, you're not..." I stepped out and brought out one of the pistols. I said, "Easy now. If things go wrong for us, I have nothing to lose by shooting you. If you want to live, play it straight." He apparently believed me, because he put his hands where I could see them and shut up. I herded him into Jimmy's cell and let Jimmy do the honors with the loaded sock. We taped him up and while Jimmy was locking him in, I heard somebody in one of the cells behind me say, "Shut up, there," to somebody else. I turned and said, "Do you want to get shot?" The voice was collected. "No. No trouble here." "Do you want to be let out?" The voice was amused. "I don't think so. Thank you just the same." Jimmy finished and I asked, "Where is your signal? We have to have that." "In the basement with the rest of my gear." The signal was all we took. When we were three blocks away and on a dark side street, I handed Jimmy his gun and ammunition. As he took them, he said, "Tell me something, Mia. Would you really have shot him?" I said. "I couldn't have. I hadn't loaded my gun yet." I led him through town following the back ways I'd worked out before. Somebody once said that good luck is no more nor less than careful preparation, and this time I meant to have good luck. I led Jimmy toward the Losel-selling district. Jimmy is short and red-headed with a face that makes him look about four years younger than he is. That's a handicap any time. When you stand out anyway, it's likely to make you a little bit tart. But Jimmy's all right most of the time. He said, "We're in trouble." "No," Jimmy said. "They have a scoutship from one of the other Ships. This is going to sound wild, but they intend to use the scout to take over a Ship and then use that to destroy the rest of the Ships. They're going to try. The police are rounding up everybody who is opposed who has any influence and is putting them in jail." "So what?" "Mia, are you mad at me for something?" "What makes you think so?" "You're being bitter about something." "If you must know, it's that crack you made about me being a snob." "That was a month ago." "I still resent it." "Why?" Jimmy asked. "It's true. You think that because you're from a Ship that you're automatically better than any Mud-eater. That makes you a snob." "Well, you're no better," I said. "Maybe not, but I don't pretend. Hey, look, we can't get anywhere if we fight and we've got to stick together. I'll tell you what. I'll apologize. I'm sorry I said it, even if it is true. Make up?" "Okay," I said. But that was a typical trick of his. Get the last blow in and then call the whole thing off. When we got to Horst Fanger's place, I said, "I've got our packs all set up. This is where ive get our IF horses." I'd left this until last, not wanting people running around looking for stolen horses while I was trying to break somebody out of the police jail pen. Besides, for this I wanted somebody along as lookout. There was a fetid, unwashed odor that hung about the pens that the misting rain did nothing to dispel. We slipped by the pens, the Losels watching us but making no noise, and came to the stables, which smelled better. Jimmy stood guard while I broke the lock and slipped inside. Nine was there, good old Nincompoop, and a quick search turned up his saddle as well. I saddled him up and then stood watch while Jimmy picked himself out a horse and gear. I did one last thing before I left. I took out the pencil and paper in my pocket and wrote in correct Inter E, nail. It may have been childish, but it felt good. We rode from there to Mr. Kutsov's house, still following back alleys. As we rode, I told Jimmy about Mr. Kutsov and what he'd done for me. When we got there, we rode around to the back. "Hold the horses," I said. "I'll slip in and get the packs. They're just inside." We both dismounted and Jimmy took Nine's reins. I bounded up the steps. Mr. Kutsov was waiting in the dark inside. He said, "I read your note." "Why did you come back?" I asked. He smiled. "It didn't seem right to leave you here by yourself. I be sorry. I think I underestimated you. Be that Jimmy Dentremont outside?" "You're not mad?" "No. I ben't angry. I understand why you couldn't tell me." For some reason, Istarted crying and couldn't stop. The tears ran down my face. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry." The front door signal sounded then and Mr. Kutsov answered the door. A green-uniformed policeman stood in the doorway. "Daniel Kutsov?" he asked. Instinctively, I shrank back out of sight of the doorway. I swiped at my face with my sleeve. Mr. Kutsov said, "Yes. What can I do for you." The policeman moved one step inside the house where I could see him again. He said in a flat voice, "I have a warrant for your arrest." T here was only one light on in the house, in the front room. From the shadows at the rear I watched them both. The policeman had a hard mask for a face, no more human than a Losel. Mr. Kutsov was determined and I had the feeling that he had forgotten my presence. "To jail again? For my book?" He shook his head. "No." "It be nothing to do with any book I know of, Kutsov. It be known that you be an Anti-Redemptionist. So come along." He grasped Mr. Kutsov's arm. Mr. Kutsov shook loose. "No. I won't go to jail again. It be no crime to be against stupidity. I won't o" The policeman said "You be coming whether you want to or not. You be under arrest." Mr. Kutsov's voice had never shown his age before, but it shook now. "Get out of my house I" A sense of coming destruction grew on me as I saw the policeman lift his gun from its holster and say, "You be coming if I have to shoot." Mr. Kutsov swung his fist at the policeman and missed and, as though the man could afford to let nothing pass without retaliation, he swung the barrel of his pistol dully against the side of Mr. Kutsov's head. It rocked Mr. Kutsov, but he didn't fall. He raised his fist again. The policeman struck once more and waited but Mr. Kutsov still didn't fall. Instead, he swung again, and for the first time he landed, a blow that bounced weakly off the man's shoulder. Almost inevitably, it seemed, the policeman raised his pistol and fired directly at Mr. Kutsov, and then again, and as the second report rang Mr. Kutsov slid to the floor. The silence was loud and gaunt. The policeman stood looking down at him and said, "Old foott" under his breath. Then he came to himself ancf looked around. Then he picked a candlestick off the table and dropped it with a thud by Mr. Kutsov's empty outstretched hand. The noise was a release tor me and I moved for the first time. The policeman grunted and looked up and we stared at each other. Then again, slowly, he raised his gun and pointed it at me. I heard a snickering sound and the three reports rang out, one following another. The policeman stood for a moment, balanced himself and then, like a crumpled sheet of paper, he fell to the floor. I didn't even look at Jimmy behind me. I started to cry and I went to Mr. Kutsov, passing by the policeman without even looking at him. As I bent down beside him, his eyes opened and he looked at me. I couldn't stop crying. I held his head and cried. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry." He smiled and said faintly, but clearly, "It be all right." After a minute he closed his eyes, and then he died. After another minute, Jimmy touched my arm and said, "There's nothing we can do. Let's leave now, Mia, while we still can." Outside, it was still raining. Standing in the rain I felt deserted. VI T he final morning on Tintera was a fine day. We and the horses were in a rock-enclosed aerie where we had dodged the day before for shelter. In the aerie were grass and a small rock spring, and this day, the final day, was bright with blue and piled clouds riding high. From where we sat, looking from the top of the rock wall, we could see over miles of expanse. Lower hills and curving valleys all covered IF with a rolling carpet of trees, a carpet of varying shades of gray and green. There were some natural upland meadows, and clearings in the valleys, and far away a line drawn in the trees that might be the path of a river. Down there, under that carpet, were all sorts of things -- wild Losels, men hunting us, and -- perhaps -- some of the others from the Ship. We had seen the Losels and they had seen us; they had gone their way and we had gone ours. The men hunting us for blowing up their scoutship we hadn't seen for four days, and even then they hadn't seen us. As for the others, we hadn't seen them at all. But they might be there, under the anonymous carpet. Jimmy got up from the ground and brushed himself off. He brought the signal over to me and said, "Should I. or do you want to?" "Go ahead," I said. He triggered it. George Fuhonin was piloting and we were the sixth and seventh aboard. The other five crowded around and helped us put our gear away. Jimmy went on inside and I went upstairs to talk to George. I was up there by the time we were airborne. "Hello, Halfpint," George said. "Hi, Georgie-Worgie," I said, dealing blow for blow. "Have you had any trouble picking us up?" "No trouble yet. You trying to wish me problems?" "No," I said. "This is a real nasty planet. They had Jimmy D. locked up in jail. They hate everybody from the Ships." "Oh." George raised his eyebrows. "Well, that might explain the board." He pointed to the board of lights above and to his left. Twenty-nine were marked for the twenty-nine of us. Of the twenty-nine, only twelve were lit. "The last light came on two hours ago. If there aren't any more, this will be the most fatal Triafl Group I've ever picked up." I stayed' upstairs .through two more pickups. Joe Fernandez-Fragoso, and then another double of which Venie Morlock was one half. T went downstairs to say hello to her: "ITire were just settling down   when George set off the alarm. He was speaking in the elder brother tone that I can't stand. "All right, kids -- shut up and listen. One of our people is down there. I didn't get close enough to see who. Whoever it is is surrounded by some of the local peasantry and we've got to bust him out. I'm going to buzz down and try to land on some of them. Then I want all of you outside and laying down a covering fire. Got that? I'm starting on down now." Some of the kids had their weapons with them, but Jimmy and I didn't. We hopped for the gear racks and got out our pistols. There were ten of us and four ramps to the outside. Jimmy and I had No. # to ourselves. George is a hotrodder, as Tve said, and after he gave us a long moment to get in place, he started down, a stomach-heaving swoop. Then he touched down light as a feather and dropped the ramps. Jimmy and I dived down the ramp and I went left and he went right. We were on a slight slope facing down and my momentum and the slant put me right where I wanted to be -- flat on my face. I rolled behind a tree and looked over to see Jimmy almost hidden in a bush. Here, hundreds of miles from where we had been picked up, it was misting under a familiar rolled gray sky. In my ears was the sound of gunfire from the other side of the ship and from below us. Our boy was pinned fifty yards down the slope behind some rocks that barely protected him. He was fighting back. I could see the sighting beam of his sonic pistol slapping out. About thirty feet away from him toward us was the body of his horse. I recognized him then -- a meatball named Riggy Allen. I took all this in in seconds, and then I raised my pistol and fired, aiming at his attackers. They were dug in behind trees and rocks, at least partly hidden from Riggy as he was hidden from them. From where we were, though, above and looking down, they could be picked out. The distance was too great for my shot and it plowed up earth ten feet short, but the man I aimed at ducked back behind cover. There was a certain satisfaction in one of these guns. Where a sonic pistol is silent, these made enough noise that you knew you were doing something. And when you missed with a sonic pistol, all you could expect at most was a shriveled branch or a sere and yellow leaf, but a miss with this gun could send up a gout of earth or drive a hole in a tree big enough to scare the steadiest man you can find. I aimed higher and started to loft my shots in. Jimmy was doing the same thing, and the net effect was to keep their heads down. Riggy finally got the idea after a long moment. He stood up and started racing up the hill. Then my gun clicked empty, and a second later the firing to my right stopped. I started to fumble for another clip. As our fire stopped, those heads popped back up again and took in the situation. They began to fire again and our boy Riggy took a long step and then dived over the body of his horse and went flat. I n a moment I was firing again, and then Jimmy was, too, and Riggy was up and running again. Then I started thinking clearly and held my fire while Jimmy emptied his clip. The instant he stopped, I started again, a regular squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. As I finished, Jimmy opened with his new clip and then Riggy was past us and up the ramp. He went flat in the doorway there and started firing his sonic pistol; its range was greater than our peashooters and he hosed the whole area down while Jimmy and I sprinted for the ramp. As we hit the inside of the ship, I yelled, "Raise No. #!" George had either been watching or listening, because it lifted smoothly up and locked in place. Shots were still coming from the other sides of the ship, so I yelled at Jimmy to go left. Riggy just stood there for a moment fuzzy-headed, IF but Jimmy gave him a shove to the right and he finally got the idea. I cut through the middle. In the doorway of No. #, I skidded flat on my face again and looked for targets. I dropped all my clips in front of me and began to fire. When the clip was empty, in two quick motions I pulled out the old one and slapped in the new and fired again. The three I was covering for used their heads and slipped in one at a time. As the second one came aboard, I heard Jimmy's voice call to raise No, # from my left. My third was Venie Morlock and as she ran aboard, I couldn't resist tripping her flat. I yelled to George to raise No. #. Venie glared at me and demanded, "What was that for?" as the ramp swung up. "Just making sure you didn't get shot," I said, lying. A second later, Riggy yelled that his side was okay and the last ramp was raised. My last view of Tintera was of a rainsoaked hillside and men doing their best to kill us, which all seems appropriate somehow. As the last ramp locked in place, George lifted the ship again and headed for the next pickup. I went over to say hello to Riggy. He'd been completely unhurt by the barrage, but he had a great gash on his arm that was just starting to heal. He said that he was minding hit own business in the woods one day when a Losel jumped out from bohind a bush and slashed him. That may sound reasonable to you, but you don't know Riggy. I do. My opinion is that it was probably the other way around -- the Losel was walking along in the woods one day, minding his own business, when Riggy jumped out from a bush and scared him. That is the sort of thing Riggy is inclined to do. Riggy had been sneaking a look at my gun, and now he said, "Where did you get that neat pistol? Let me see it." I handed it over. After a minute of inspection, Riggy asked, "You wouldn't want to trade, would you?" "For your sonic pistol?" "Yes. You want to?" I considered it for a minute, and then I said, "All right," and we traded. There is a certain amount of satisfaction in shooting an antique like that, but I know which is the Clifford D. Simak's Finest Science-Fiction Novel begins in the current (June) issue of Galaxy, plus stories and features  by Keith Laumer, Gordon R. Dickson, Willy Ley and others. June issue  still on sale -- get your copy today! more effective weapon. Besides, I only had one full clip of ammunition left. T here is a certain amount of prestige in coming back alive from Survival. It's your key to adulthood. There were no brass bands waiting for us when we got back, but our families were there, and that was enough. The fifteen of us went down the lowered ramp, and when I stood again on solid rock, I looked around that ugly, bare scout bay and just drank it in. Home. I turned to Jimmy then and I said, "Jimmy, it's a relief to be back, isn't it? And that isn't snobbery. It might have been before, but I don't think I am now." And Jimmy nodded. The waiting room wasn't bare. They had the decorations up for Year End, colored mobiles with lights that ranged through the spectrum, and more decorations on the walls. In the crowd of people waiting for us, I saw Jimmy's mother and her present husband, and Jimmy's father and his wife. When they saw Jimmy, they started waving and shouting. Just as I said, "I'll see you tonight," I saw Mother and Daddy standing off to one side, and I waved. It was as though I had left the real world entirely for a month, and now at last I was back where things were going on and I wasn't missing a thing. I ran to them and I kissed Mother and hugged Daddy. Mother was crying. I leaned back in Daddy's arms and looked up at him. He put a measuring hand over my head and said, "Mia, I believe you've grown some." It might be so. I felt taller. i Now m Worlds of Tomorrow -- "Most Americans now breathing have a good chance of physical life after death -- a sober, scientific probability of revival and rejuvenation of their frozen bodies # Immortality' complete in the June issue of Worlds of Tomorrowl  Plus great new science-fiction stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Damon Knight, Mack Reynolds and many more!  June issue of Worlds of Tomorrow still on sale -- get your copy todayl IF IF  Feature Special Reports Men of Space; by Shirley Thomas. # volumes (so far). Chilton Co., Philadelphia; Each # to # pp. f king-sized (# x ##-). Indexed and illustrated. Each #. N ow here's a set of books it's easy to throw rocks at. It's big, glossy and authored by a lady with more than trace amounts of Wideeye and Gush. Tt's big, and most irritatingly peopled by men who, absolutely and unnaturally without exception, are dedicated, fearless, papoint where you'd weep for joy at a single small mention of a wart or a pair of dirty feet or a touch of greed. It's big... and utterly uncricitcal of the moral posture, the philosophies and the political convictions of its subjects. Most of all, it's an easy target... it's so big. Be it known at this point that we've thrown all the rocks we're going to throw. We further depose and say that the above carping has to be modified in every particular. If Miss Thomas exhibits gush, it is not in much more than trace amounts. As to the rest, they are purely destructive criticisms. What the alternatives would, be to the uncritical approach in a work of this kind, we simply can't imagine. And a writer who wouldn't, on occasion fall into hyperbole when handling such a subject would have no soul and negligible glands. For -- it's big. Big as space. Big as human doggedness and human aspiration. And if you don't rise to these for themselves, the books have something else that's very special. First, a simple statement of what Miss Thomas has set out to do. Back of the spacemen are the space-men, just as a pilot is only the apex of a widening spearhead of crew, groundcrew, maintenance, field operations, manufacture and design personnel. Shepard, Glenn, Gagarin, Crossfield are names which readily come to mind in the spaceman category, and behind them, everyone knows, are von Braun, Teller, Doolittle, Pierce. Now, how freely can you identify Kantrowitz, Flickinger, Ramo and Toftoy? The Glenns and the von Brauns would be the first to say -- and have saidthat without these others, the space effort would be nothing at all, nor would they themselves be anything but anonymous (and probably angry). Overwhelmed at first by the sheer size of the volumes and their subjects, the reader will skim through some of the names and events he knows -- and will suddenly find he now knows more than he did. He then wets a toe in a Truax or a Townes (who he?) and, before he knows it, he's nostril deep in the torrent. Mrs. Thomas does her homework. Her usual format is some sort of narrative hook, a few paragraphs of refresher material (reminding you what you vaguely remember about this or that device or development -- satellite tracking or Dyna-Soar), then an account of how it was brought about and finally a biography of the man himself, with a very genuine effort to understand what shaped the man to this particular end. It is in the body of each narrative, the part which explains what it is the man did, that Miss Thomas gives you that something special we mentioned above. If she is going to tell you who invented the travelling wave tube (which she does) she will tell you what it is, what it's for, how it works and what it means. She does it clearly and lucidly and as accurately as a non-scientific vocabulary can manage. And you find yourself -- perhaps even in spite of yourself -- gradually oiling your irritations with the balm of wonder, as she uses her really remarkable ability to translate technicalities into meaningful American. Sometimes even she has her hands full, as in her determined effort to convey to you the essence of Samuel Herrick's paper, Step-by-Step Integration of xf(x,y,z,t ) Without a Corrector or A Modification of the te Variation of Constants " Method for Special Perturbations; but by golly, she makes it; and you find it's important and germane, for Samuel Herrick is the tracker supreme -- a man who out of his own talent and curiosity made a practical discipline out of the problem of locating bodies in orbit. As a young man, already deeply interested, he wrote to the only authority he knew of for guidance. "... as far as I know, no courses (are) given anywhere on the subject," answered Dr. Robert H. Goddard... Let us, for sampling, take Vol. # from the top. It has an impressive imprimatur , as have they all; the advisory board for the series is Lt. Gen. (U.S.A.F.) Donald Putt, Senator Styles Bridges Dr. E. M. Emme (N.A.S.A. historian), M. W. MacFarlane (Guggenheim Chair of Aeronautics, Library of Congress), Sorenson, U. of Nebraska, Sen. Stuart Symington and Dr. E. C. Walsh, (Exec. Sec., N.A.S.A.). The foreword is by General Schreiver, AF Systems Command, the preface by Captain Merril. The biographies are: James H. Doolittle; C. Stark Draper, M.I.T., instrumentation and guidance; Louis G. Dunn, rd man for Atlas, Thor, Titan and MinuteIU IF man; Don D. Flickinger, space medicine; Yuri Gagarin; Arthur Kantrowitz, nose-cones and re-entry; Admiral Raborn, the Polaris man; Harold W. Ritchey, solid fuel developer -- X-l , Nike, Hercules; Alan Shepard; and H. N. Toftoy, who originated "Paperclip", the effort that brought German rocket scientists to the U.S. after the war, and then sparked Redstone and Jupiter. Then the index; and in the middle is a photographic section, covering each of these men andor his work. Let us stress again that these are not Who's-Who type thumbnail sketches. In every case, Miss Thomas has researched the man's work as well as the man, and she just won't let go until she understands it and then does the same for you. And this, in the long run, is the true value of these books. But if you're at all interested in space -- and it would be hard to imagine that you weren't, or you wouldn't be reading this particular page -- you'll see the huge advantage in having, in one package, an indexed treasure-trove of readily understandable space subjects -- practically anything you can think of -- history, biography, fuels, guidance systems, tracking, nuclearand thermo-nuclear energy, astrophysics anddynamics andmechanics and just plainnomy, and anything else you can think of and a lot you won't until you spin through those indexes. And don't let that heavy price tag throw you. Go down to your public library and ask them to put in the set, and keep the new ones on order. Not so much to get definitive and complete information on all these sciences and disciplines, but to get enough of a grasp of them to enable you to go on to more specialized reading. And don't be surprised if the librarian and the Book Committee, or whatever setup your library has, eagerly buys the books for you. It happens that we are on the Book Committee of our local library, and can attest how wonderful it is when the public requests something which doesn't happen to be on the glop-of-the-month folder, or the breast-seller list. h tr sfir   ns IP  Short Story The alien came as a friend. He could not help looking like man's ultimate Enemy! T he children came running toward him, laughing and shouting, up from the lakeside to the spot on the grassy hill where he lay reading; and as Dr. John Donaldson saw what was clutched in the hand of his youngest son, he felt an involuntary tremor of disgust. "Look, John! Look what Paul caught!" That was his oldest, Joanne. She was nine, a brunette rapidly growing tan on this vacation trip. Behind her came David, eight, fair-haired and lobster-skinned, and in the rear was Paul, the six-yearold, out of breath and gripping in his still pudgy hand a small green frog. Donaldson shoved his book -- Haley, Studies in Morphological Linguistics -- to one side and sat up. Paul thrust the frog almost into his face. "I saw it hop, John -- and I caught it!" He pantomimed the catch with his free hand. "I saw him do it," affirmed David. The frog's head projected between thumb and first finger; two skinny webbed feet dangled free at the other end of Paul's hand, while the middle of the unfortunate batrachian was no doubt being painIF fully compressed by the small clammy hand. Donaldson felt pleased by Paul's display of coordination, unusual for a six-year-old. But at the same time he wished the boy would take the poor frog back to the lake and let it go. "Paul," he started to say, "you really ought to -- " The direct-wave phone at the far end of the blanket bleeped, indicating that Martha, back at the bungalow, was calling. "It's Mommy," Joanne said. Somehow they had never cared to call her by her first name, as they did him. "See what she wants, John." Donaldson sprawled forward and activated the phone. "Martha?" "John, there's a phone-call for you from Washington. I told them you were down by the lake, but they say it's important and they'll hold  M on Donaldson frowned. "Who from Washington?" "Caldwell, he said. Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. Said it was urgent." Sighing, Donaldson said, "Okay. I'm coming." He looked at Joanne and said, as if she hadn't heard the conversation at all, "There's a call for me and I have to go to the cottage to take it. Make sure your brothers don't go into the water while I'm gone. And see that Paul lets that confounded frog go." Picking up his book, he levered himself to his feet and set out for the phone in the bungalow at a brisk trot. C aldwell's voice was crisp and efficient and not at all apologetic as he said, "I'm sorry to have to interrupt you during your vacation, Dr. Donaldson. But it's an urgent matter and they tell us you're the man who can help us." "Perhaps I am. Just exactly what is it r you want?" "Check me if I'm wrong on the background. You re Professor of Linguistics at Columbia, a student of the Kethlani languages and author of a study of Kethlani linguistics published in #." "Yes, yes, that's all correct. But -- " "Dr. Donaldson, we've captured a live Kethlan. He entered the System in a small ship and one of our patrol vessels grappled him in, ship and all. We've got him here in Washington and we want you to come talk to him." For an instant Donaldson was too stunned to react. A live Kethlan? That was like saying, We've found a live Sumerian, or. We've found a live Etruscan. The Kethlani languages were precise, neat and utterly dead. At one time in the immeasurable past the Kethlani had visited the Solar System. They had left records of their visit on Mars and Venus, in two languages. One of the languages was translatable, because the Martians had translated it into their own, and the Martian language was still spoken as it had been a hundred thousand years before. Donaldson had obtained his doctorate with what was hailed as a IF of the Kethlani language. But a live Kethlan? Why -- After a moment he realized he was staring stupidly at his unevenlytanned face in the mirror above the phone cabinet, and that the man on the other end of the wire was making impatient noises. Slowly he said, "I can be in Washington this afternoon, I guess. Give me some time to pack up my things. You won't want me for long, will you?" "Until we're through talking to the Kethlan," Caldwell said. "All right," Donaldson said. "I can take a vacation any time. Kethlani don't come along that often." He hung up and peered at his face in the mirror. He had had curly reddish hair once, but fifteen years of the academic life had worn his forehead bare. His eyes were mild, his nose narrow and unemphatic, his lips thin and pale. As he studied himself, he did not think he looked very impressive. He looked professorial. That was to be expected. "Well?" Martha asked. Donaldson shrugged. "They captured some kind of alien spaceship with a live , one aboard. And it seems I'm the only person who can speak the language. They want me right away." "You're going?" "Of course. It shouldn't take more than a few days. You can manage with the children by yourself, can't you? I mean -- " She smiled faintly, walked around behind him and kneaded the muscle of his sun-reddened back in an affectionate gesture. "I know better than to argue," she said. "We can take a vacation next year." He swiveled his left hand behind his back, caught her hand and squeezed it fondly. He knew she would never object. After all, his happiness was her happiness --  and he was never happier than when working in his chosen field. The phone-call today would probably lead to all sorts of unwanted and unneeded publicity for him. But it would also bring him academic success, and there was no denying the genuine thrill of finding out how accurate his guesses about Kethlani pronunciation were. "You'd better go down to the lake and get the children," he said. "I'll want to say good-by before I leave." T hey had the ship locked in a stasis-field in the basement of the Bureau of E-T Affairs Building, on Constitution Avenue just across from the National Academy of Sciences. The great room looked like nothing so much as a crypt, Donaldson thought as he entered. Beam-projectors were mounted around the walls, focussing a golden glow on the ship. Caught in the field, the ship hovered in midair, a slim, strange-looking torpedo-like object about forty feet long and ten feet across the thickest place. A tingle rippled up Donaldson's spine as he saw the Kethlani cursives painted in blue along the hull. He translated them reflexively: Bringer of Friendship. "That's how we knew it was a Ketblani ship," Caldwell said, at his side. He was a small, intense man who hardly reached Donaldson's shoulder; he was Associate Director of the Bureau, and in his superior's absence he was running the show. Donaldson indicated the projectors. "How come the gadgetry? Couldn't you just sit the ship on the floor instead of floating it that way?" "That ship's heavy," Caldwell said. "Might crack the floor. Anyway, it's easier to maneuver this way. We can raise or lower the ship, turn it, float it in or out of the door." "I see," Donaldson said. "And you say there's a live Kethlan in there?" Caldwell nodded. He jerked a thumb toward a miniature broadcasting station at the far end of the big room. "We've been in contact with him. He talks to us and we talk to him. But we don't understand a damned bit of it, of course. You want to try?" Donaldson shook his head up and down in a tense affirmative. Caldwell led him down to the radio set, where an eager-looking young man in military uniform sat making adjustments. Caldwell said, "This is Dr. Donaldson of Columbia. He wrote the definitive book on Kethlani languages. He wants to talk to our friend in there." A microphone was thrust into Donaldson's hands. He looked at it blankly, then at the pink face of the uniformed man, then at the ship. The inscription was in Kethlani. A language, for which Donaldson was grateful. There were two Kethlani languages, highly dissimilar, which he had labeled A and B. He knew his way around in A well enough, but his mastery of Kethlani B was still exceedingly imperfect. "How do I use this thing?" "You push the button on the handle, and talk. That's all. The Kethlan can hear you. Anything he says will be picked up here." He indicated a tape-recorder and a speaker on the table. D onaldson jabbed down on the button, and, feeling a strange sense of disorientation, uttered two words in greeting in Kethlani A. The pronunciation, of course, was sheer guesswork. Donaldson had worked out what was to him a convincing Kethlani phonetic system, but whether that bore any relation to fact remained to be seen. He waited a moment. Then the speaker emitted a series of harsh, unfamiliar sounds -- and, buried in them like gems in a kitchen-midden, Donaldson detected familiar-sounding words. "Speak slowly," he said in Kethlani A. "I... have only a few words." The reply came about ten seconds later, in more measured accents. "How... do... you... speak our language?" Donaldson fumbled in his small vocabulary for some way of explaining that he had studied Kethlani documents left behind on Mars centuries earlier, and compared them with their understandable Martian translations until he had pried some sense out of them. IF He glimpsed the pale, sweat-beaded faces of the E-T men around him; they were mystified, wondering what he was saying to the alien but not daring to interrupt. Donaldson felt a flash of pity for them. Until today the Bureau had concerned itself with petty things: import of Martian antiquities, study visas for Venus, and the like. Now, suddenly, they found themselves staring at an extra-solar spaceship, and . all the giant problems that entailed. "Find out why he came to the Solar System," Caldwell whispered. "I'm trying to," Donaldson murmured with some irritation. He said in Kethlani, "You have made a long journey." "Yes... and alone." "Why have you come?" There was a long moment of silence; Donaldson waited, feeling tension of crackling intensity starting to build within him. The unreality of the situation obsessed him. He had been fondly confident that he would never have the opportunity to speak actual Kethlani, and that confidence was being shattered. Finally: "I... have come... why?" The inversion was grammatically correct. "Yes," Donaldson said. "Why?" Another long pause. Then the alien said something which Donaldson did not immediately understand. He asked for a repeat. It made little sense -- but, of course, his Kethlani vocabulary was a shallow one, and he had additional difficulty in comprehending because he had made some mistakes in interpreting vowel values when constructing his Kethlani phonetics. But the repeat came sharp and clear, and there was no mistaking it: "I do... do not like to talk this way. Come inside my ship and we will talk there." iTXhat's he saying?" Caldwell   prodded. Shaken, Donaldson let the mike dangle from limp fingers. "He -- he says he wants me to come inside the ship. He doesn't like longdistance conversations." Caldwell turned at a right angle and said to a waiting assistant, "All right. Have Mathews reverse the stasis-field and lower the ship. We're going to give the Kethlan some company." Donaldson blinked. "Company? You mean you're sending me in there?" "I sure as hell do mean that. The Kethlan said it's the only way he'd talk, didn't he? And that's what you're here for. To talk to him. So why shouldn't you go in there, eh?" "Well -- look, Caldwell, suppose it isn't safe?" "If I thought it was risky, I wouldn't send you in," Caldwell said blandly. Donaldson shook his head. "But look -- I don't want to seem cowardly, but I've got three children to think about. I'm not happy about facing an alien being inside his own ship, if you get me." "I get you," said Caldwell tiredly. "All right. You want to go home? You want to call the whole business off right here and now?" "Of course not. But -- " "But then you'll have to go in." "How will I be able to breathe?" "The alien air is close enough to our own. He's used to more carbon dioxide and less oxygen, but he can handle our air. There's no problem. And no risk. We had a man in there yesterday when the Kethlan opened the outer lock. You won't be in any physical danger. The alien won't bother you." "I hope not," Donaldson said. He felt hesitant about it; he hadn't bargained on going inside any extra solar spaceships. But they were clustered impatiently around him, waiting to send him inside, and he didn't seem to have much choice. He sensed a certain contempt for him on their faces already. He didn't want to increase their distaste. "Will you go in?" Caldwell asked. "All right. All right. Yes. I'll go in." Nervously Donaldson picked up the microphone and clamped a cold finger over the control-button. "Open your lock," he said to the alien being. "I'm coming inside." '"T'here was a moment's delay while the stasis-field projectors were reversed, lowering the ship gently to floor level. As soon as it touched, a panel in the gleaming golden side of the ship rolled smoothly open, revealingan inner panel. Donaldson moistened his lips, handed the microphone to Caldwell and walked uncertainly forward. He reached the lip of the airlock, stepped up over it, and into the ship. Immediately the door rolled shut behind him, closing him into a chamber about seven feet high and four feet wide, bordered in front and back by the outer and inner doors of the lock. He waited. Had he been claustrophobic he would have been hysterical by now. But l never would have come in here in the first place then, he thought. He waited. More than a minute passed; then, finally, the blank wall before him rolled aside, and the ship was open to him at last. He entered. At first it seemed to him the interior was totally dark. Gradually, his retinal rods conveyed a little information. A dim light flickered at one end of the narrow tubular ship. He could make out a few things: rows of reinforcing struts circling the ship at regularly spaced distances; a kind of control-panel with quite thoroughly alien-looking instruments on it; a large chamber at one end which might be used for storage of food. But where # s the alien? Donaldson wondered. He turned, slowly, through a three hundred sixty degree rotation, squinting in the dimness. A sort of mist hung before his eyes; the alien's exhalation, perhaps. But he saw no sign of the Kethlan. There was a sweetish, musky odor in the ship, unpleasant though not unbearable. "Everything okay?" Caldwell's voice said in his earphones. "So far. But I can't find the alien. It's damnably dark in here." "Look up," Caldwell advised. "You'll find him. Took our man a while too, yesterday," IF Puzzled, Donaldson raised his head and stared into the gloomshrouded rafters of the ship, wondering what he was supposed to see. In Kethlani he said loudly, "Where are you? I see you not." "I am here," came the harsh voice, from above. Donaldson looked. Then he backed away, double-taking, and looked again. A great shaggy thing hung head down against the roof of the ship. Staring intently, Donaldson made out a blunt, piggish face with flattened nostrils and huge flaring ears; the eyes, bright yellow but incredibly tiny, glittered with the unmistakable light of intelligence. He saw a body about the size of a man, covered with darkish thick fur and terminating in two short, thick, powerfullooking legs. As he watched the Kethlan shivered and stretched forth its vast leathery wings. In the darkness, Donaldson could see the corded muscular arm in the wing, and the very humanlooking fingers which sprouted from the uppermost part of the wing. Violent disgust rose in him, compounded from his own general dislike for animals' and from the halfremembered Transylvanian folktales that formed part of every child's heritage. He felt sick; he controlled himself only by remembering that he was in essence an ambassador, and any sickness would have disastrous consequences for him and for Earth. He. dared not offend the Kethlan. My God , he thought. An intelligent bat! H e managed to stammer out the words for greeting, and the alien responded. Donaldson, looking away, saw the elongated shadow of wings cast across the ship by the faint light at the other end. He felt weak, wobbly-legged; he wanted desperately to dash through the nowclosed airlock. But he forced himself to recover balance. He had a job to do. "I did not expect you to know Kethlani," the alien said. "It makes my job much less difficult." "And your job is -- ?" "To bring friendship from my people to yours. To link our worlds in brotherhood." The last concept was a little muddy to Donaldson; the literal translation he made mentally was children ofone-cave , but some questioning eventually brought over the concept of brotherhood. His eyes were growing more accustomed to the lighting, now, and he could see the Kethlan fairly well. An ugly brute, no doubt of it -- but probably I look just as bad to him, he thought. The creature's wingspread was perhaps seven or eight feet. Donaldson tried to picture a world of the beasts, skies thick with leather-winged commuters on their way to work. Evolution had made numerous modifications in the bat structure, Donaldson saw. The brain, of course; and the extra fingers, aside from the ones from which the wings had sprouted. The eyes looked weak, in typical bat-fashion, but probably there was compensation by way of keen auditory senses. Donaldson said, "Where is your world?" "Far from here. It -- " The rest of the answer was unintelligible to Donaldson. He felt lavage impatience with his own limited vocabulary; he wished he had worked just a little harder on translating the Syrtis Major documents. Well, it was too late for that now, of course. Caldwell cut in suddenly from outside. "Well? We're picking up all the jabber. What's all the talk about?" "Can't you wait till I'm finished?" Donaldson snapped. Then, repenting, he said: "Sorry. Guess I'm jumpy. Seems he's an ambassador from his people, trying to establish friendly relations with us. At least, I think so. I'll tell you more when I know something about it." S lowly, in fits and starts the story emerged. Frequently Donaldson had to ask the Kethlan to stop and double back while he puzzled over a word. He had no way of recording any of the new words he was learning, but he had always had a good memory, and he simply tucked them away. The Kethlani had visited the Solar System many years ago. Donaldson was unable to translate the actual figure, but it sounded like a lot. At that time, the Martians were at the peak of their civilization, and Earth was just an untamed wilderness populated by naked primates. The Kethlan wryly admitted that they had written off Earth as a potential place of civilization because a study of the bat population of Earth had proved unpromising. They had never expected the primates to evolve this way. But now they had returned, thousands of years later. Mars was bleak and its civilization decayed, but the third world had unexpectedly attained a high degree of culture and was welcome to embrace the Kethlani worlds in friendship and amity. "How many worlds db you inhabit?" The Kethlan counted to fifteen, by ones. "There are many others we do not inhabit, but simply maintain friendly relations with. Yours would be one, we hope." The conversation seemed to dwindle to a halt. Donaldson had run out of questions to ask, and he was exhausted by the hour-long strain of conversing in an alien language, under these conditions, within a cramped ship, talking to a creature whose physical appearance filled him with loathing and fear. His head throbbed. His stomach was knotted in pain and sweat made his clothes cling clammily to his body. He started to grope for ways to terminate the interview; then an idea struck him. He quoted a fragment of a document written in pure Kethlani B. There was an instant of stunned silence; then the alien asked in tones of unmistakable suspicion, "Where did you learn that language?" "I haven't really learned it. I just know a few words." He explained that he had found IF examples of both Kethlani A and Kethlani B along with their Martian equivalents; he had worked fairly comprehensively on the A language, but had only begun to explore the B recently. The Kethlan seemed to accept that. Then it said: "That is not a Kethlani language." Surprised, Donaldson uttered the interrogative expletive. The Kethlan said, "It is the language of our greatest enemies, our rivals, our bitter foes. It is the Thygnor tongue." "But -- why did we find your language and the other side-by-side, then?" After a long pause the alien said, "Once Thygnor and Kethlan were friends. Long ago we conducted a joint expedition to this sector of space. Long ago, before the rivalry sprang up. But now -- " the alien took on a sorrowful inflection -- "now we are enemies." That explained a great many things, Donaldson realized. The differences between Kethlani A and Kethlani B had been too great for it to seem as if one race spoke both of them. But a joint expedition -- that made it understandable. "Some day, perhaps, the Thygnor will visit your world. But by then you will be on guard against them." "What do they look like?" The alien described them, and Donaldson listened and was revolted. As far as he could understand, they were giant intelligent toads, standing erect, amphibian but warmblooded, vile-smelling, their bodies exuding a nauseous thick secretion. Giant toads, bats, the lizards of Mars -- evidently the primate monopoly of intelligence was confined solely to Earth, Donaldson realized. It was a humbling thought. His face wrinkled in displeasure at the mental image of the toad-people the Kethlan had created for him, as he recalled the harmless little frog Paul had captured by the lake... H e spoke in English, attracting Caldwell's attention, and explained the situation. "He wants me to swear brotherhood with him. He also says there's another intelligent race with interstellar travel -- toads, no less -- and that they're likely to pay us a visit some day too. What should I do?" "Go ahead and swear brotherhood," Caldwell said after a brief pause. "It can't hurt. We can always unswear it later, if we like. Say we had our fingers crossed while we were doing it, or something. Then when the frogs get here we can find out which bunch is better for us to be in league with." The cynicism of the reply annoyed Donaldson, but it was not his place to raise any objections. He said to the alien, "I am prepared to pledge brotherhood between Earth and the Kethlan worlds." The Kethlan fluttered suddenly down from its perch with a rustle of great wings, and stood facing Donaldson, tucking its wings around its thick shaggy body. Alarmed, Donaldson stepped back. The alien said reassuringly, "The way we pledge is by direct physical embrace, symbolizing harmony and friendship across the cosmos." He unfurled his wings. "Come close to me." No! Donaldson shrieked inwardly, as the mighty wings rose high and wrapped themselves about him. Go away! Don't touch me! He could smell the sweet, musky smell of the alien, feel its furry warmth, hear the mighty heart pounding, pounding in that massive ribcage... Revulsion dizzied him. He forced himself to wrap his arms around the barrel of a body while the wings blanketed him, and they stood that way for a moment, locked in a tight embrace. At length the alien released him. "Now we are friends. It is only the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between our peoples. I hope to speak with you again before long." It was a dismissal. On watery legs Donaldson tottered forward toward the opening airlock, pausing only to mutter a word of farewell before he stumbled through and out into the arms of the waiting men outside. "W e I #?" Caldwell demanded. "What happened? Did you swear brotherhood?" "Yes," Donaldson said wearily. "I swore." The stench of the alien ciung to him, sweet in his nostrils. It was as though throbbing wings still enfolded him. "I'm leaving now," he said. "I still have a little of my vacation left. I want to take it." He gulped a drink that someone handed him. He was shaking and gray-faced, but the effect of the embrace was wearing off. Only an irrational phobia , he told himself.  shouldn't be reacting this way. But already he was beginning to forget the embrace of the Kethlani, and the rationalization did him no good. A new and more dreadful thought was beginning to develop within him. He was the only Terrestrial expert on Kethlani B, too -- the Thygnor tongue. And some day, perhaps soon, the Thygnor were going to come to Earth, and Caldwell was going to impress him into service as an interpreter again. He wondered how the toad-people pledged eternal brotherhood. IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: If may not be a slick magazine, but it is the most fun to read of any science-fiction magazine on the market today. It is nice to know that there is a magazine where not only new authors can try their talents, but where the greats like Heinlein can use a freer style than the restrictions of the other magazines, with their strictly set editorial policies, will allow. The ending of the Heinlein novel was a novelette in itself, with too little continuity with the first two installments. Presumably this will be toned down and abridged and then hardbacked as r. juvenile, which is a pity, since the way it is now it packs an impact in spite of its disjointed style. As in most Heinlein novels the description was more entertaining than the action, and there were a number of loose ends in the plot. I certainly don't want a detailed explanation breaking in, mystery story style, but there is no reason I can see for "Uncle Tom" being set free without a more certain hold on him than they had, for example. The big trouble is that Heinlein let his reputation get in the way, and avoided the melodramatic action sequences which would have been less believable but more appropriate, and more fun. The letter column was much too short. Now that you have room for "another full length novelette", you should have room for a five-page letter column at least. Admittedly you seem to have an unbelievable wealth of story material to use, with Heinlein and McIntosh .n this issue, and Clement and Budrys in the next, but it won't hurt to spread all this talent over a very slightly longer space, and give the reader a chance to comment on it. Rick Norwood Bellingrath Southwestern Memphis #, Tennessee Dear Editor: For the first time in perhaps half a year, I believe I will write you one of my interminable letters of comment on your sterling publications, each of which pretends to come from a different publishing house. Perhaps your Mr. Guinn is a megalomaniac? As usual, Galaxy is good for its long fiction and disappointing in its short. Out ofeven short stories in the last three issues, only one (On the Fourth Planet) was good. This is the sort of sf that is really rewarding. Worlds of Tomorrow looks quite promising, assuming that the first issue is indicative of the editorial policy. These stories are all good, to one degree or another, and I can't quite put my finger on whatever it is about the total effect that makes it so different from Galaxy or If. I think it's because these stories are almost entirely straightforward. If: Who was it who referred to it as Worlds of Galaxy Rejects? That is not very fair, but If certainly does read as a poor man's Galaxy. When Whirly birds Call should not have been published; This Way to the Egress was unintelligible, for me. The Shipshape Miracle had a very Sheckleyish plot -- but Shockley should have handled it, since he knows how to do it right. With Simak (who is used to an entirely different type of story) at the helm, it reads rather clumsily. Capjbain of the Kali : Wow! You're right, there is a find! Gary Wright has done a fine job with an interesting story, and I hope you will encourage him to keep writing. # particularly appreciate a story which is well enough expressed that one can pick out one sentence that will give the theme of the story; here, you have: "There was no alien here but himself." To keep on a happy note, The Time Tombs was another good story. Ballard is a writer who does give a good clear picture of the society he ha placed his plot in, and the plot was worthwhile one. Saline Solution: I for one enjoy Retief. I'm fully happy with him as long as the readers don't go around screaming about what a wonderful writer he is. Or else, ho,w terrible the series is. Let's get one thing straight: Retief is sheer space opera... but what on Earth is wrong with well-handled space opera? The Tem-Point Princess is yet another good story. Considering the usual half-and-half quality of If, this seems to be a bumper crop. McIntosh just touched on the important and debatable point, "... Only we don't call it prostitution. What do you dislike about the way the Leontans do it. General?" But he did drive in his main point pretty well. Rmmmn, I wonder if he purposely wrote The Ten-Point Princess as an answer to Vercors' Le Silence De La Mer. And now, Podkayne of Mars. Boy, is that Heinlein getting lazy. In the first installment nothing happens. It could have taken up one chapter, or possibly two, in a well-balanced novel. The second installment could have been cut down a good deal, and the third was reasonably full the way it stood. Or, in other words, this novel was quite incomplete, as such. Ah, well you may ask, what else might Heinlein have said? Where could the plot have gone? Not very far, certainly, but certainly it is not an unworkable plot. No, the problem is simply this: Podkayne should have been what you IF call a Novella. But Heinlein was too lazy to condense, when he had almost guaranteed sales, anyway. And there was obviously another reason: a novella could not be sold to Scribner's or somesuch as a juvenile, which is what will clearly happen to this: one. To be brief, it appears to have been a mistake for Heinlein to use this plot, unless he could make more of a story of it And if he could, why didn't he? And that's it. I no longer have the strength to comment on anything but the fiction. And it is a good thing that this letter is not even vaguely aimed at "Hue and Cry". By my count, it holds more words than the last three installments of "Hue and Cry" put together! # Brighton Street Belmont, Mass.    Dear Editor: There are a few things about science fiction that might arouse some worthwhile response from your formidable readers. First: Science-fiction distribution is a problem. Not all towns get all science-fiction titles, even when the titles which do appear sell out in a day or two. Better distribution means better sales and better sales could mean a better magazine. Second : According to hearsay, science-fiction pocketbooks outsell science-fiction magazines about # to #. Pocketbooks depend largely on sf magazines for their material. The reader has little friendly newsy discourse with the pocketbook. The reader can't know when the pocketbook should be on the stands or what is coming out. So if the pocketbook doesn't strike the wholesaler as profitable he can warehouse it and swear it didn't sell. In places I have seen several people read science fiction, but most of them read only pocketbooks. Why? "Magazines have cheap comic-book type covers and the stories are probably on the same level." Or more often: "Magazine stories are too short. I like long novels." Is this true everywhere? Third: Sf magazines seem better than ever and may be selling better ktely. Yet they ought alsQ to reach the pocketbook audience so they can read the "better" stories "earlier" when they first appear. How can this be done? Large format suggests quality to many people. Arty pocketbook covers sell to still more people. Long novels sell to still more people. Slicker paper will sell a few copies. Color inside will sell more copies; color sells, in this culture of ours. Fourth: Does science fiction need another "almost hopeless cause" like space flight used to be? Now, how about promoting interstellar travel, something besides rocket drives, religion and space, what is human and what is food, the general ethics of man in the universe ; the sea, genetic improvement of the human creativeness vs. the regurgative memory, or the human mind. These are all science-fiction themes, but the general public only recognizes cigar-shaped spaceships as the content of science fiction. Or does science fiction need only color, wonder and conviction? Or does it need to catch the eye and flatter the intellect of more readers? Or are we a closed corporation actually afraid of new people and new ideas? Is science fiction our own private, secure, finished outpost from which we will not venture? Are we really more venturesome than Mrs. Fuddelfade next door who is still afraid of science fiction? The art work in our magasines, which is still mostly rehash of # hack pulp art, suggests we might need a little intellectual courage. We might face a tiger, but new iaeas make us tremble. Or is the great body of science-fiction world still raring to go to Hell and back for the sheer hell of proving it's there? Five : could a well established magazine like Galaxy go # by #I inches, shorter material, and maybe twocolor art, better paper, and a small science section to pick up ads, and sell for # cents or a dollar per copy per month? Don't yell yet, readers. Because threj poor or mediocre sf magazines cost you # a month anyway. Why not get it all in one good pcckage? Such a package could attract the best writers and artists and put science fiction or a very substantial footing. It would take nerve and money to possible? Six : Pm not n upstart newcomer or a senile oldster. I've purchased about every science-fiction magazine published since #, the exceptions being Planet , Captain Future and a certain Shaver matter. I care a lot about science fiction and how beautifully it is printed and how well it sells How about you? Roscoe Wright  West. Mont. College Art Department Dillon. Montana  Is it possible? Probably not -- or not at #c or . dollar, anyway. Or ret without a far heavier volume of advertising than any sf magazine has ever had . or ; s ever likely to get Rut it's an attractive thought! Editor Dear Editor: Congratulations on raising your price ; hope it stays that way because I've thought out the griir alternatives: you fold, or you go back to your rut. Seems to me as if you'll be trying for a Hugo i: #, if you can keep up this quality for five more issues. One thing about a long letter: You can chop out one paragraph and run it as a letter.    Nathan A...Bucklin P. #. Box # Dockton, Mass. Or -- as in this case -- a paragraph and a half I But even with such Herculean measures, we're out of space again. To those who didn't get their missives in -- sorry, and please don't stop sending them! This issue's "first" is a young fellow named Bruce McAllister who hails from California -- and Italy, Washington, D.C., the Riviera and wherever else the orders of his Navy captain father took him; we liked The Faces Outside , and hope you will too. Not quite a "first", but still an unfamiliar name in sciencefiction magazines, is Alexei Panshin. Down to the Worlds of Men is actually the second story he sold, but we don't count the first, because it appeared in one of those slickpaper things that have nothing to offer their contributors but prestige, pleasure, pride and money. By the way, did you notice who leads off our next issue? He's practically a discovery, at that; he hasn't written a new story for a science-fiction magazine in nearly fifteen years, until he finally gave in and wrote this one for us. Name's Van Vogt. We think he'll catch on. Editor IF If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed With new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address . City. Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Vs OF foo Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, Name Address City State I Enclose The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Plus Postage # i SEPT. IF  SCIENCE FICTION # A. E. VAK VOGrsicttor, lyit--: H# If you wonder what happened to the "'wonder in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writerschallenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Poht, Davidson, Simak, Bloch. Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! it #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. yps' end me the next # hig issues of IF! I enclose # (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.; Name Address City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter li you wish Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feafuro Editor Sol Cohen, Fubfisher David Perton, Production Manager Rose M. Bianchini, Art Director Cover by Wenzel from The Course of Logic IF published bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-clast postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All Material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and mny similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial A local feller just got himself a patent on a new cigarette filter. vSeems that the semi-precious mineral tourmaline is pyroelectric; that is, when heated, tourmaline crystals become polarized, with a negative charge at one end and a positive charge at the other. Cigarette smoke is warm enough to bring this about. The charged crystals attract and trap tar particles. He claims his filters can compete favorably with lesser breeds. Here's a perfect candidate for what I called here, about a year ago, the Kick Yourself Department. This contains all the ideas that were staring you right in the face all along, you fool you, until some other guy came along and turned it into money. Not that this odd quality of tourmaline is exactly staring you in the face. It has, however, surely been known for a long time; but it takes one guy with that special connection in his cranial wiring to put it to work. The m.an who invented the filter had been ordered by his doctor to quit smoking, which he reluctantly did; he was annoyed enough to work on the problem. He actually built an electrostatic filter in a holder, powered by batteries. Then, when his son brought some books home from college, he bumped into the tourmaline thing -- and there you go. My son's exhibit in the Science Fair last year was a microscope made of a juice can and a soup can, some wood scraps and some slips of window-glass. The lens is a drop of IF be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of mans mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious UBe Rosicrucians organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share tbt practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of mo book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address; Scribe E.p.P. Scribe E.Q.F. Sao Jose, California Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Ufe, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Namp Addrcss City water. The design came from a mechanical magazine, but we redesigned it a little and made an illuminator for it and dressed it up with flat black paint. lts a pretty good little instrument -- # power or so. Won a prize, too. Well, the phenomenon of drops of water that magnify wax in front of people's faces -- literally for thousands of years. Dew in the bushes, in the early morning with the sun low and shining right through the drops -- you almost have to see such a thing. Yet apparently nobody did! And can you imagine world history if someone had, say in ancient Egypt or Babylon? Wouldn't glass lenses follow as a matter of course? There's a Kick Yourself if there ever was one. T here are plenty of phenomena kicking around waiting to get broke and harnessed. Some arc right out front, and some are hiding in Joe College's science book, but they're around. For instance, if you use palladium as one electrode in an electrolysis tank, you won't get any hydrogen gas for quite a time, because the palladium will absorb nearly a thousand times its own volume of hydrogen. It gloms on to the H# good and hard, too -- you can't scrape it off, knock it off or pump it out. Heat will do it easily. Hasn't anyone got a home for that? Then there's the Barr Effect -- the ballet a drop of water will perform on a sheet of hot metal -- which I haven't space to describe here but which Steve Himself Barr has written up. Sugarlumps will sometimes give off light when rubbed or broken in the dark. A balloon filled with C# is attracted to the resonance box of a tuning fork. One filled with hydrogen is repelled. An iron tank containing gas under pressure will lose it all if heated red, even though no measurable opening appears, and it becomes gas-tight when it cods... Do you have any like these -- useless, or little-used, or littleknown unharnessed phenomena? If so, send 'em in! When we've accumulated enough, we'll run a column on them, with names of the donors included. Who knows? You might be responsible for the invention-ignition process in an Edison or Steinmetz who won't know he is one until he sees your contribution. If I sparked some stranger that way, I might kick myself a little -- but I think I'd be glad to do it! -- T.H.S. II I II I IJ I A great new novelette of interplanetary adventure by Hal Clement LI LI LI LI II IJ # IF IF  NoveUtt# The alien was deadly, dangerous and inhuman -- but he was not the most feared enemy on the ship! I O ne hundred and nine years after leaving Earth, the spaceship, Hope of Man, went into orbit The following "morning" Captain Browne informed the shipload of fourth and fifth generation colonists that a manned lifeboat would be dropped to the planet's surface. "Every member of the crew must consider himself expendable," he said earnestly. "This is the day that our great grandparents, our forefathers, who boldly set out for the new space frontier so long ago, looked forward to with unfaltering courage. We must not fail them." He concluded his announcement over the intercom system of the big ship by saying that the names of the crew members of the lifeboat would be given out within the hour. y "And I know that every real man aboard will want to see his name there' John Lesbee, the fifth of his line aboard, had a sinking sensation as he heard those words -- and he was not mistaken. Even as he tried to decide if he should give the signal for a desperate act of rebellion, Captain Browne made the expected announcement. The commander said, "And I know you will all join him in his moment of pride and courage when I tell you that John Lesbee will lead the crew that carries the hopes of man in this remote area of space. And now the others -- " He thereupon named seven of the nine persons with whom Lesbee had been conspiring to seize control of the ship. Since the lifeboat would only hold eight persons, Lesbee recognized that Browne was dispatching as many of his enemies as he could. He listened with a developing dismay, as the commander ordered all persons on the ship to come to the recreation room. "Here I request that the crew of the lifeboat join me and the other officers on stage. Their instructions are to surrender themselves to any craft which seeks to intercept them. They will be equipped with instruments whereby we here can watch, and determine the stage of scientific attainments of the dominant race on the planet below." L esbee hurried to his room on the technicians' deck, hoping that perhaps Tellier or Cantlin would seek him out there. He felt himself in need of a council of war, however brief. He waited five minutes, but not one member of his conspiratorial group showed. Nonetheless, he had time to grow calm. Peculiarly, it was the smell of the ship that soothed him most. From the earliest days of his life, the odor of energy and the scent of metal under stress had been perpetual companions. At the moment, with the ship in orbit, there was a letting up of stress. The smell was of old energies rather than new. But the effect was similar. He sat in the chair he used for reading, eyes closed, breathing in that complex of odors, product of so many titanic energies. Sitting there, he felt the fear leave his mind and body. He grew brave again, and strong. Lesbee recognized soberly that his plan to seize power had involved risks. Worse, no one would question Browne's choice of him as the leader of the mission. "I am," thought Lesbee, "probably the most highly trained technician ever to be on this ship." Browne Three had taken him when he was ten, and started him on the long grind of learning that led him, one after the other, to master the mechanical skills of all the various technical departments. And Browne Four had continued his training. He was taught how to repair relay systems. He gradually came to understand the purposes of countless analogs. The time came when he could visualize the entire automation. Long ago, the colossal cobweb IF of electronic instruments within the walls had become almost an extension of his nervous system.  During those years of work and study, each daily apprenticeship chore left his slim body exhausted. After he came off duty, he sought a brief relaxation and usually retired to an early rest. He never did find the time to learn the intricate theory that underlay the ship's many operations. His father, while he was alive, had made numerous attempts to pass his knowledge on to his son. But it was hard to teach complexities to a tired and sleepy boy. Lesbee even felt slightly relieved when his parent died. It took the pressure off him. Since then, however, he had come to realize that the Browne family, by forcing a lesser skill on the descendant of the original commander of the ship, had won their greatest victory. As he headed finally for the recreation room, Lesbee found himself wondering: Had the Brownes trained him with the intention of preparing him for such a mission as this? His eyes widened. If that was true, then his own conspiracy was merely an excuse. The decision to kill him might actually have been made more than a decade ago, and light years away... A s the lifeboat fell toward Alsat in the twin control chairs and watched on the forward screen the vast, misty atmosphere of the planet. Tellier was thin and intellectual, a descendant of the physicist Dr. Tellier who had made many speed experiments in the early days of the voyage. It had never been understood why spaceships could not attain even a good fraction of the speed of light, let alone velocities greater than light. When the scientist met his untimely death, there was no one with the training to carry on a testing program. It was vaguely believed by the trained personnel who succeeded Tellier that the ship had run into one of the paradoxes implicit in the Lorenz-Fitzgerald Contraction theory. Whatever the explanation, it was never solved. Watching Tellier, Lesbee wondered if his companion and best friend felt as empty inside as he did. Incredibly, this was the first time he -- or anyone -- had been outside the big ship. "We're actually heading down," he thought, "to one of those great masses of land and water, a planet." As he watched, fascinated, the massive ball grew visibly bigger. They came in at a slant, a long, swift, angling approach, ready to jet away if any of the natural radiation belts proved too much for their defense systems. But as each stage of radiation registered in turn, the dials showed that the lifeboat machinery made the proper responses automatically. The silence was shattered suddenly by an alarm bell. Simultaneously, one of the screens focused on a point of rapidly movIF ing light far below. The light darted toward them. A missile! Lesbee caught his breath. But the shining projectile veered off, turned completely around, look up position several miles away, and began to fall with them. His first thought was; "They'll never let us land," and he experienced an intense disappointment. Another signal brrred from the control board. "They're probing us," said Tellier, tensely. An instant after the words were uttered, the lifeboat seemed to shudder and to stiffen under them. It was the unmistakable feel of a tractor beam. Its field clutched the lifeboat, drew it, held it. habitants was already proving itself formidable. Underneath him the lifeboat continued its movement. The entire crew gathered around and watched as the point of brightness resolved into an object, which rapidly grew larger. It loomed up close, bigger than they. There was a metallic bump. The lifeboat shuddered from stem to stem. Even before the vibrations ceased Tellier said, "Notice they put our airlock against theirs." Behind Lesbee, his companions began that peculiar joking of the threatened. It was a coarse comedy, but it had enough actual humor suddenly to break through his fear. Involuntarily he found himself laughing. Then, momentarily free of anxiety, aware that Browne was watching and that there was no escape;, he said, "Open the airiock! Let the aliens capture us as ordered." II A few minutes after the outer airlock was opened, the airlock of the alien ship folded back also. Rubberized devices rolled out and contacted the Earth lifeboat, sealing off both entrances from the vacuum of space. Air hissed into the interlocking passageway between the two craft. In the alien craft's lock, an inner door opened. Again Lesbee held his breath. There was a movement in the passageway. A creature ambled into view. The being came forward with complete assurance, and pounded with something he held at the end of one of his four leathery arms on the hull. The creature had four legs and four arms, and a long thin body held straight up. It had almost no neck, yet the many skin folds between the head and the body indicated great flexibility was possible. Even as Lesbee noted the details of its appearance, the being turned his head slightly, and its two large expressionless eyes gazed straight at the hidden wall receptor that was photographing the scene, and therefore straight into Lesbee's eyes. Lesbee blinked at the creature, then tore his gaze away, swallowed hard, and nodded at Tellier. "Open up!" hr commanded. The moment the inner door of the Earth lifeboat opened, six more of the four-legged beings appeared ojic after another in the passageway, and walked forward in the same confident way as had the first. All seven creatures entered the open door of the lifeboat. As they entered their thoughts came instantly into Lesbee's mind... A s Dzing and his boarding party trotted from the small Karn ship through the connecting airlock, his chief officer thought a message to him. "Air pressure and oxygen content are within a tiny percentage of what exists at ground level on Karn. They can certainly live on our planet." Dzing moved forward into the Earth ship, and realized that he was in the craft's control chamber. There, for the first time, he saw the men. He and his crew ceased their forward motion; and the two groups of beings -- the humans and the Karn -- gazed at each other. The appearance of the two-legged beings did not surprise Dzing. Pulse viewers had, earlier, penetrated the metal walls of the lifeboat and had accurately photographed the shape and dimension of those aboard. His first instruction to his crew was designed to test if the strangers were, in fact, surrendering. He commanded: "Convey to the prisoners that we require them as a precaution to remove their clothing."... Until that direction was given, Lesbee was still uncertain as to whether or not these beings could receive human thoughts as he was receiving theirs. From the first moment, the aliens had conducted their mental conversations as if they were unaware of the thoughts of the human beings. Now he watched the Karn come forward. One tugged suggestively at his clothing. And there was no doubt. The mental telepathy was a oneway flow only -- from the Karn to the humans. He was already savoring the implications of that as he hastily undressed... It was absolutely vital that Browne do not find it out. Lesbee removed all his clothes; then, before laying them down, took out his notebook and pen. Standing there naked he wrote hurriedly: "Don't let on that we can read the minds of these beings." He handed the notebook around, and he felt a lot better as each of the men read it, and nodded at him silently. Dzing communicated telepathically with someone on the ground. "These strangers," he reported, "clearly acted under command to surrender. The problem is, how can we now' let them overcome us without arousing their suspicion that this is what we want them to do?" Lesbee did not receive the answer directly. But he picked it up from Dzing's mind: "Start tearing the lifeboat apart. See if that brings a reaction." T he members of the Kam boarding party went to work at once. Off came the control panels; floor plates were melted and ripped up. Soon instruments, wiring, it controls were exposed for examination. Most interesting of all to the aliens were the numerous computers and their accessories. Browne must have watched the destruction; for now, before the Karn could start wrecking the automatic machinery, his voice interjected: "Watch out, you men! I'm going to shut your airlock and cause your boat to make a sharp right turn in exactly twenty seconds." Few Lesbee and Tellier that simply meant sitting down in their chairs, and turning them so that the acceleration pressure would press them against the backs. The other men sank to the ripped-up floor, and braced themselves. Underneath Dzing, the ship swerved. The turn began slowly, but it propelled him and his fellows over to one wall of the control room. There he grabbed with his numerous hands at some handholds that had suddenly moved out from the smooth metal. By the time the turn grew sharper, he had his four short legs braced, and he took the rest of the wide swing around with every part of his long, sleek body taut. His companions did the same. Presently, the awful pressure eased up, and he was able to estimate that their new direction was almost at right angles to what it had been. He had reported what was happening while it was going on. Now, the answer came: "Keep on destroying. See what they do, and be prepared to succumb to anything that looks like a lethal attack." Lesbee wrote quickly in his notebook: "Our method of capturing them doesn't have to be subtle. They'll make it easy for us -- so we can't lose." Lesbee waited tensely as the notebook was passed around. It was still hard for him to believe that no one else had noticed what he had about this boarding party. Tellier added a note of his own: "It's obvious now that these beings were also instructed to consider themselves expendable." And that settled it for Lesbee. The others hadn't noticed what he had. He sighed with relief at the false analysis, for it gave him that most perfect of all advantages: that which derived from his special education. Apparently, he alone knew enough to have analyzed what these creatures were. The proof was in the immense clarity of their thoughts. Long ago, on earth, it had been established that man had a faltering telepathic ability, which could be utilized consistently only by electronic amplification outside his brain. The amount of energy needed for the step-up process was enough to burn out brain nerves, if applied directly. Since the Karn were utilizing it directly, they couldn't be living beings. Therefore, Dzing and his fellows were an advanced robot type. were not risking their own skins at all. Far more important to Lesbee, he could see how he might use these marvellous mechanisms to defeat Browne, take over the Hope of Man, and start the long journey back to Earth. m H e had been watching the Karn at their work ot destruction, while he had these thoughts. Now, he said aloud: "Hainker, Graves." "Yes?" The two men spoke together. "In a few moments Tm going to ask Captain Browne to turn the ship again. When he does, use our specimen gas guns!" The men grinned with relief. "Consider it done," said Hainker. Lesbee ordered the other four crewmen to be ready to use the specimen-holding devices at top speed. To Tcllier he said, "You take charge if anything happens to me." Then he wrote one more message in the notebook: "These beings will probably continue their mental intercommunication after they are appvrently rendered unconscious. Pay no attention, and do not comment on it in any way." He felt a lot better when that statement also had been read by the others, and the notebook was once more in his possession. Quickly, he spoke to the screen: "Captain Browne! Make another turn, just enough to pin them," And so they captured Dzing and his crew. As he had expected, the Karn continued their telepathic conversation. Dzing reported to his ground contact: "I think we did that rather well." There must have been an answering message from below, because he went on, "Yes, commander. We are now prisoners as per your instructions, and shall await events... The imprisoning method? Each of us is pinned down by a machine which has been placed astride us, with the main section adjusted to the contour of our bodies. A series of rigid metal appendages fasten our arms and legs. All these devices are electronically controlled, and we can of course escape at any time. Naturally, such action is for later..." Lesbee was chilled by the analysis; but for expendables there was no turning back. He ordered his men: "Get dressed. Then start repairing the ship. Put all the floor plates back except the section at G-#. They removed some of the analogs, and Td better make sure myself that it all goes back all right." When he had dressed, he reset the course of the lifeboat, and called Browne. The screen lit up after a moment, and there staring back at him was the unhappy countenance of the forty-year-old officer. Browne said glumly: "I want to congratulate you and your crew on your accomplishments. It would seem that we have a small scientific superiority over this race, and that we can attempt a li.mited landing." Since there would never be a landing on Alta #, Lesbee simply waited without comment as Browne seemed lost in thought. The officer stirred finally. He #I  still seemed uncertain, "Mr. Lesbee, he said, "as you must understand, this is an extremely dangerous situation for me -- and -- " he added hastily -- "for this entire expedition' What struck Lesbee, as he heard those words, was that Browne was not going to let him back on the ship. But he had to get aboard to accomplish his own purpose. He thought: "I'll have to bring this whole conspiracy out into the open, and apparently make a compromise offer." He drew a deep breath, gazed straight into the eyes of Browne's image on the screen and said with the complete courage of a man for whom there is no turning back: "It seems to me, sir, that we have two alternatives. We can resolve all these personal problems either through a democratic election or by a joint captaincy, you being one of the captains and I being the other." 'T'o any other person who might A have been listening the remark must have seemed a complete non sequitur. Browne, however, understood its relevance. He said with a sneer, "So you're out in the open. Well, let me tell you, Mr. Lesbee, there was never any talk of elections when the Lesbees were in power. And for a very good reason. A spaceship requires a technical aristocracy to command it. As for a joint captaincy, it wouldn't work." Lesbee urged his lie: "If we're going to stay here, we'll need at least two people of equal authority -- one on the ground, one on the ship." "I couldn't trust you on the ship!" said Browne flatly. "Then you be on the ship," Lesbee proposed. "All such practical details can be arranged." The older man must have been almost beside himself with the intensity of his own feelings on this subject. He flashed, "Your family has been out of power for over fifty years! How can you still feel that you have any rights?" Lesbee countered, "How come you still know what I'm talking about?" Browne said, a grinding rage in his tone, "The concept of inherited power was introduced by the first Lesbee. It was never planned." "But here you are," said Lesbee, "yourself a beneficiary of inherited power." Browne said from between clenched teeth: "It's absolutely ridiculous that the Earth government which was in power when the ship left -- and every member of which has been long dead -- should appoint somebody to a command position... and that now his descendant think that command post should be his, and his family's, for all time!" Lesbee was silent, startled by the dark emotions he had uncovered in the man. He felt even more justified, if that were possible, and advanced his next suggestion without a qualm. "Captain, this is a crisis. We should postpone our private struggle. Why don't we bring one of these prisoners aboard so that we can question him by use of films, or play acting? Later, we can discuss your situation and mine." He saw from the look on Browne's face that the reasonableness of the suggestion, and its potentialities, were penetrating. Browne said quickly, "Only you come aboard -- and with one prisoner only. No one else!" Lesbee felt a dizzying thrill as the man responded to his bait. He thought: "It's like an exercise in logic. He'll try to murder me as soon as he gets me alne and is satisfied that he can attack without danger to himself. But that very scheme is what will get me aboard. And I've got to get on the ship to carry out my plan." Browne was frowning. He said in a concerned tone: "Mr. Lesbee, can you think of any reason why we should not bring one of these beings aboard?" Lesbee shook his head. "No reason, sir," he lied. Browne seemed to come to a decision. "Very well. I'll see you shortly, and we can then discuss additional details." Lesbee dared not say another word. He nodded, and broke the connection, shuddering, disturbed, uneasy. "But," he thought, "what else can we do?" H e turned his attention to the part of the floor that had been left open for him. Quickly, he bent down and studied the codes on each of the programming units, as if he were seeking exactly the right ones that had originally been in those slots He found the series he wanted: an intricate system of cross-connected units that had originally been designed to program a remote-control landing system, an advanced Waldo mechanism capable of landing the craft on a planet and taking off again, all directed on the pulse level of human thought. He slid each unit of the series into its sequential position and locked it in. Then, that important task completed, he picked up the remote control attachment for the series and casually put it in his pocket. He returned to the control board and spent several minutes examining the wiring and comparing it with a wall chart. A number of wires had been torn loose. These he now re-connected, and at the same time he managed with a twist of his pliers to short-circuit a key relay .')f the remote control pilot. Lesbee replaced the panel itself loosely. There was no time to connect it properly. And, since he could easily justify his next move, he pulled a cage out of the storeroom. Into this he hoisted Dzing, manacles and all. Before lowering the lid he rigged into the cage a simple resistor that would prevent the Karn from broadcasting on the human thought level. The device was simple merely in that it was not selective. It had an on-off switch which triggered, or stopped, energy flow in the metal walls on the thought level. When the device was installed, Lesbee slipped the tiny remote control for it into his other pocket. Ho did not activate the control. Not yet. IF From the cage Dzing telepathed: is significant that these beings have selected me for this special attention. We might conclude that it is a matter of mathematical accident, or else that they are very observant and so noticed that I was the one who directed activities. Whatever the reason, it would be foolish to turn back now." A bell began to ring. As Lesbee watched, a spot of light appeared high on one of the screens. It moved rapidly toward some crossed lines in the exact center of the screen. Inexorably, then, the Hope of Man, as represented by the light, and the lifeboat moved toward their fateful rendezvous. IV B rowne's instructions were: "Come to Control Room Below!" Lesbee guided his powered dolly with the cage on it out of the big ship's airlock P -- and saw that the man in the control room of the lock was Second Officer Selwyn. Heavy brass for such a routine task. Selwyn waved at him with a twisted smile as Lesbee wheeled his cargo along the silent corridor. He saw no one else on his route. Other personnel had evidently been cleared from this part of the vessel. A little later, grim and determined, he set the cage down in the center of the big room and anchored it magnetically to the floor. As Lesbee entered the captain's office, Browne looked up from one of the two control chairs and stepped down from the rubbersheathed dais to the same level as Lesbee. He came forward, smiling, and held out his hand. He was a big man, as all the Brownes had been, bigger by a head than Lesbee, goodlooking in a clean-cut way. The two men were alone. "I'm glad you were so frank," he said. "I doubt if I could have spoken so bluntly to you without your initiative as an example." But as they shook hands, Lesbee was wary and suspicious. Lesbee thought: "He's trying to recover from the insanity of his reaction. I really blew him wide open," Browne continued in the same hearty tone: "I've made up my mind. An election is out of the question. The ship is swarming with untrained dissident groups, most of which simply want to go back to Earth." Lesbee, who had the same desire, was discreetly silent. Browne said, "You'll be ground captain; I'll be ship captain. Why don't we sit down right now and work out a communique on which we can agree and that I can read over the intercom to the others?" As Lesbee seated himself in the chair beside Browne, he was thinking: "What can be gained from publicly naming me ground captain?" He concluded finally, cynically, that the older man could gain the confidence of John Lesbee -- lull him, lead him on, delude him, destroy him. Surreptitiously Lesbee examined the room. Control Room Below was a large square chamber adjoining the massive central engines. Its control board was a duplicate of the one on the bridge located at the top of the ship. The great vessel could be guided equally from either board, except that pre-emptive power was on the bridge. The officer of the watch was given the right to make Merit decisions in an emergency. Lesbee made a quick mental calculation, and deduced that it was First Officer Miller's watch on the bridge. Miller was a staunch supporter of Browne. The man was probably watching them on one of his screens, ready to come to Browne's aid at a moment's notice. A few minutes later. Lesbee listened thoughtfully as Browne read their joint communique over the intercom, designating him as ground captain. He found himself a little amazed, and considerably dismayed, at the absolute confidence the older man must feel about his own power and position on the ship. It was a big step, naming his chief rival to so high a rank. Browne's next act was equally surprising. While they were still on the viewers, Browne reached over, clapped Lesbee affectionately on the shoulders and said to the watching audience: "As you all know, John is the only direct descendant of the original captain. No one knows exactly what happened half a hundred years ago when my grandfather first took command. But I remember the old man always felt that only he understood how things should be. I doubt if he had any confidence in any young whippersnapper over whom he did not have complete control. I often felt that my father was the victim rather than the beneficiary of my grandfather's temper and feelings of superiority." Browne smiled engagingly. "Anyway, good people, though we can't unbreak the eggs that were broken then, we can certainly start healing the wounds, without -- " his tone was suddenly firm -- "negating the fact that my own training and experience make me the proper commander of the ship itself." He broke off. "Captain Lesbee and I shall now jointly attempt to communicate with the captured intelligent life form from the planet below. You may watch, though we reserve the right to cut you off for good reason." He turned to Lesbee. "What do you think we should do first, John?" Lesbee was in a dilemma. The first large doubt had come to him, the possibility that perhaps the other was sincere. The possibility was especially disturbing because in a few moments a part of his own plan would be revealed. He sighed, and realized that there was no turning back at this stage. He thought: "We'll have to bring the entire madness out into the open, and only then can we begin to consider agreement as real." Aloud, he said in a steady voice, "Why not bring the prisoner out where we can see him?" As the tractor beam lifted Dzing out of the cage, and thus away from the energies that had suppressed his thought waves, the Karn telepathed IF "Have been held in a confined space, the metal of which was energized against communication. I shall now attempt to perceive and evalute the condition and performance of this ship -- " At that point, Browne reached over and clicked off the intercom. Having shut off the audience, he turned accusingly to Lesbee, and said, "Explain your failure to inform me that these beings communicated by telepathy." The tone of his voice was threatening. There was a hint of angry color in his face. It was the moment of discovery, L esbee hesitated, and then simply pointed out how precarious their relationship had been. He finished frankly, "I thought by keeping it a secret I might be able to stay alive a little longer, which was certainly not what you intended when you sent me out as an expendable." Browne snapped, 'But how did you hope to utilize? -- " He stopped. "Never mind," he muttered. Dzing was telepathing again: "In many ways this is mechanically a very advanced type ship. Atomic energy drives are correctly installed. The automatic machinery performs magnificently. There is massive energy screen equipment, and they can put out a tractor beam to match anything we have that's mobile. But there is a wrongness in the energy flows of this ship, which I lack the experience to interpret. Let me furnish you some data... The data consisted of variable wave measurements, evidently -- so Lesbee deduced -- the wavelengths of the energy flows involved in the "wrongness." He said in alarm at that point, "Better drop him into the cage while yye analyze what he could be talking about." Browne did so -- as Dzing telepathed: "If what you suggest is true, then these beings are completely at our mercy -- " Cur off! Browne was turning on the intercom. "Sorry I had to cut you good people off," he said. "You'll be interested to know that we have managed to tune in on the thought pulses of the prisoner and have intercepted his calls to someone on the planet below. This gives us an advantage." He turned to Lesbee. "Don't you agree?" Browne visibly showed no anxiety, whereas Dzing's final statement flabbergasted Lesbee. "... completely at our mercy..." surely meant exactly that. He was staggered that Browne could have missed the momentous meaning. Browne addressed him enthusiastically, "Tm excited by this telepathy! It's a marvelous short-cut to communication, if we could build up our own thought pulses. Maybe we could use the principle of the remote-control landing device which, as you know, can project human thoughts on a simple, gross level, where ordinary energies get confused by the intense field needed for the landing." What interested Lesbee in the suggestion was that he had in his tions at one end of the room. The pocket a remote control for precameraman and Third Officer Mincisely such mechanically produced del -- who had come in with him thought pulses. Unfortunately, the  -- strapped themselves into two adcontrol was for the lifeboat. It probjoining chairs attached to the proably would be advisable to tune the jector, and were evidently ready, control to the ship landing system also It was a problem he had lhile this was going on, Lesthought of earlier, and now Browne '  bee called various technihad opened the way for an easy cal personnel. Only one technician solution. protested. "But, John," he said, "that He held his voice steady as he way we have a double control -- said, "Captain, let me program those with the lifeboat control having landing analogs while you prepare pre-emption over the ship. That's the film communication project. very unusual." That way we can be ready for him It was unusual. But it was the either way." lifeboat control that was in his Browne seemed to be completely pocket where he could reach it trusting, for he agreed at once. quickly; and so he said adamantly, At Browne's direction, a film "Do you want to talk to Captain projector was wheeled in. It was Browne? Do you want his okay?" swiftly mounted on solid connec"No, no." The technician's doubts IF seemed to subside. "I heard you being named joint captain. You're the boss. It shall be done." Lesbee put down the closed-circuit phone into which he had been talking, and turned. It was then he saw that the film was ready to roll, and that Browne had his fingers on the controls of the tractor beam. The older man stared at him questioningly. "Shall I go ahead?" he asked. At this penultimate moment, Lesbee had a qualm. Almost immediately he realized that the only alternative to what Browne planned was that he reveal his own secret knowledge. He hesitated, torn by doubts. Then: "Will you turn that off?" He indicated the intercom. Browne said to the audience, "We'll bring you in again on this in a minute, good people." He broke the connection and gazed questioningly at Lesbee. Whereupon Lesbee said in a low voice, "Captain, I should inform you that I brought the Karn aboard in the hope of using him against you." "Well, that is a frank and open admission," the officer replied very softly. "I mention this," said Lesbee, "because if you had similar ulterior motives, we should clear the air completely before proceeding with this attempt at communication." A blossom of color spread from Browne's neck over his face. At last he said slowly, "I don't know how I can convince you, but I had no schemes." Lesbcc gazed at Browne's open countenance, and suddenly he realized that the officer was sincere, Browne had accepted the compromise. The solution of a joint captaincy was agreeable to him. Sitting there, Lcsbee experienced an enormous joy. Seconds went by before he realized what underlay the intense pleasurable excitement. It was simply the discovery that -- communication worked. You could tell your truth and get a hearing... if it made sense. It seemed to him that his truth made a lot of sense. He was offering Browne peace aboard the ship. Peace at a price, of course; but still peace. And in this severe emergency Browne recognized the entire validity of the solution. So it was now evident to Lesbee. Without further hesitation he told Browne that the creatures who had boarded the lifeboat, were robots -- not alive at all. B rowne was nodding thoughtfully, Finally he said: "But I don't see how this could be utilized to take over the ship." Lesbee said patiently, "As you know, sir, the remote landing control system includes five principal ideas which are projected very forcibly on the thought level. Three of these are for guidance -- up, down and sideways. Intense magnetic fields, any one of which could partially jam a complex robot's thinking processes. The fourth and fifth are instructions to blast either up or down. The force of the blast depends on how far the control is turned on. Since the energy used ia overwhelming those simple commands would take pre-emption over the robot. When that first one came aboard the lifeboat, I had a scan receiver -- nondetectable -- on him. This registered two power sources, one pointing forward, one backward, from the chest level. That's why I had him on his back when I brought him in here. But the fact is I could have had him tilted and pointing at a target, and activated either control four or five, thus destroying whatever was in the path of the resulting blast. Naturally, I took all possible precautions to make sure that this did not happen until you had indicated what you intended to do. One of these precautions would enable us to catch this creature's thoughts without -- " As he was speaking, he eagerly put his hand into his pocket, intending to show the older man the tiny on-off control device by which -- when it was off -- they would be able to read Dzing's thoughts without removing him from the cage. He stopped short in his explanation, because an ugly expression had come suddenly into Browne's face. The big man glanced at Third Officer Mindel. "Well, Dan," he said, "do you think that's it?" Lesbee noticed with shock that Mindel had on sound amplifying earphones. He must have overheard every word that Browne and he had spoken to each other. Mindel nodded. "Yes, Captain," he said. "I very definitely think he IF has now told us what we wanted to find out." Lesbee grew aware that Browne had released himself from his acceleration safety belt and was stepping away from his seat. The officer turned and, standing very straight, said in a formal tone: "Technician Lesbee, we have heard your admission of gross dereliction of duty, conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government of this ship, scheme to utilize alien creatures to destroy human beings, and confession of other unspeakable crimes. In this extremely dangerous situation, summary execution without formal trial is justified. I therefore sentence you to death and order Third Officer Dan Mindel to -- " He faltered, and came to a stop. V T wo things had been happening as he talked, Lesbee squeezed the "off" switch of the cage control, an entirely automatic gesture, convulsive, a spasmodic movement, result of his dismay. It was a mindless gesture. So far as he knew consciously, freeing Dzing's thoughts had no useful possibility for him. His only real hope -- as he realized almost immediately -- was to get his other hand into his remaining coat pocket and with it manipulate the remote-control landing device, the secret of which he had so naively revealed to Browne. The second thing that happened was that Dzing, released from mental control, telepathed: "Free again -- and this time of course permanently! I have just now activated by remote control the relays that will in a few moments start the engines of this ship, and I have naturally re-set the mechanism for controlling the rate of acceleration -- " His thoughts must have impinged progressively on Browne, for it was at that point that the officer paused uncertainly. Dzing continued: "I verified your analysis. This vessel does not have the internal energy flows of an interstellar ship. These two-legged beings have therefore failed to achieve the Light Speed Effect which alone makes possible trans-light velocities. I suspect they have taken many generations to make this journey, are far indeed for their home base, and Fm sure I can capture them all." Lesbee reached over, tripped on the intercom and yelled at the screen: "All stations prepare for emergency acceleration! Grab anything!" To Browne he shouted: "Get to your seat -- quick!' His actions were automatic responses to danger. Only after the words were spoken did it occur to him that he had no interest in the survival of Captain Browne. And that in fact the only reason the man was in danger was because he had stepped away from his safety belt, so that Mindel's blaster would kill Lesbee without damaging Browne. Browne evidently understood his danger. He started toward the control chair from which he had released himself only moments before. His reaching hands were still a foot or more from it when the impact of Acceleration One stopped him. He stood there trembling like a man who had struck an invisible but palpable wall. The next instant Acceleration Two caught him and thrust him on his back to the floor. He began to slide toward the rear of the room, faster and faster, and because he was quick and understanding he pressed the palms of his hands and his rubber shoes hard against the floor and so tried to slow the movement of his body. Lesbee was picturing other people elsewhere in the ship desperately trying to save themselves. He groaned, for the commander's failure was probably being duplicated everywhere. Even as he had that thought. Acceleration Three caught Browne. Like a rock propelled by a catapult he shot toward the rear wall. It was cushioned to protect human beings, and so it reacted like rubber, bouncing him a little. But the stuff had only momentary resilience. Acceleration Four pinned Browne halfway into the cushioned wall. From its imprisoning depths, he managed a strangled yell. "Lesbee, put a tractor beam on me! Save me! Pll make it up to you. I -- Acceleration Five choked off the words. The man's appeal brought momentary wonder to Lesbee. He was amazed that Browne hoped for mercy... , after what had happened, Browne's anguished words did produce one effect in him. They reminded him that there was something he must do. He forced his hand and his arm to the control board and focussed a tractor beam that firmly captured Third Officer Mindel and the cameraman. His intense effort was barely in time. Acceleration followed acceleration, making movement impossible. The time between each surge of increased speed grew longer. The slow minutes lengthened into what seemed an hour, then many hours. Lesbee was held in his chair as if he were gripped by hands of steel. His eyes felt glassy; his body had long since lost all feeling. He noticed something. The rate of acceleration was different from what the original Tellier had prescribed long ago. The actual increase in forward pressure each time was less. He realized something else. For a long time, no thoughts had come from the Karn. S uddenly, he felt an odd shift in speed, A physical sensation of slight, very slight, angular movement accompanied the maneuver. Slowly, the metal-like bands let go of his body. The numb feeling was replaced by the pricking as of thousands of tiny needles. Instead of muscle-compressing acceleration there was only a steady pressure. It was the pressure that he had in the past equated with gravity. Lesbee stirred hopefully, and when he felt himself move, realized what had happened. The artificial gravity had been shut off. Simultaneously, the ship had made a half turn within its outer shell. The drive IF power was now coming from below, a constant one gravity thrust. At this late, late moment, ha plunged his hand into the pocket which held the remote control for the pilotless landing mechanism -- and activated it. 'That ought to turn on his thoughts," he told himself savagely. But if Dzing was telepathing to his masters, it was no longer on the human thought level. So Lesbee concluded unhappily. The ether was silent. He now grew aware of something more. The ship smelled different: better, cleaner, purer. Lesbee's gaze snapped over to the speed dials on the control board. The figures registering there were unbelievable. They indicated that the spaceship was traveling at a solid fraction of the speed of light. Lesbee stared at the numbers incredulously. "We didn't have time!" he thought. "How could we go so fast so quickly -- in hours only to near the speed of light!" Sitting there, breathing hard, fighting to recover from the effects of that prolonged speed-up, he felt the fantastic reality of the universe. During all this slow century of flight through space, the Hope of Man had had the potential for this vastly greater velocity. He visualized the acceleration series so expertly programmed by Dzing as having achieved a shift to a new state of matter in motion. The "light speed effect," the Karn robot had called it. "And Tellier missed it," he thought. All those experiments the physicist had performed so painstakingly, and left a record of, had missed the great discovery. Missed it! And so a shipload of human beings had wandered for generations through the black deeps of interstellar space. A cross the room Browne was climbing groggily to his feet. He muttered, "... Better get back to... control chair." He had taken only a few uncertain steps when a realization seemed to strike him. He looked up then, and stared wildly at Lesbee. "Oh!" he said. The sound came from the gut level, a gasp of horrified understanding. As he slapped a complex of tractor beams on Browne, Lesbee said, "That's right, you're looking at your enemy. Better start talking. We haven't much time." Browne was pale now. But his mouth had been left free and so he was able to say huskily, "I did what any lawful government does in an emergency. I dealt with treason summarily, taking time only to find out what it consisted of." Lesbee had had another thought, this time about Miller on the bridge. Hastily, he swung Browne over in front of him. "Hand me your blaster," he said. "Stock first." He freed the other's arm, so that he could reach into the holster and take it out. Lesbee felt a lot better when he had the weapon. But still another idea had come to him. He said harshly, "I want to lift you over to the cage, and I don't want First Officer Miller to interfer. Get that, Mister Miller!" There was no answer from the screen. Browne said uneasily, "Why over to the cage?" Lesbee did not answer right away. Silently he manipulated the tractor beam control until Browne was in position. Having gotten him there, Lesbee hesitated. What bothered him was, why had the Karn's thought impulses ceased? He had an awful feeling that something was very wrong indeed. He gulped, and said, "Raise the lid!" Again, he freed Browne's arm. The big man reached over gingerly, unfastened the catch, and then drew back and glanced questioningly at Lesbee. "Look inside!" Lesbee commanded. Browne said scathingly, "You don't think for one second that -- " He stopped, for he was peering into the cage. He uttered a cry: "He's gone!" VI L esbee discussed the disappearance with Browne. It was an abrupt decision on his part to do so. The question of where Dzing might have got to was not omething he should merely turn over in his own head. He began by pointing at the dials from which the immense speed of the ship could be computed, and then, when that meaning was absorbed by the older man, said simply, "What happened? Where did he go? And how could we speed up to just under # miles a second in so short a time?" He had lowered the big man to the floor, and now he took some of the tension from the tractor beam but did not release the power. Browne stood in apparent deep thought. Finally, he nodded. "All right," he said, "I know what happened." "Tell me." Browne changed the subject, said in a deliberate tone, "What are you going to do with me?" Lesbee stared at him for a moment unbelievingly. "You're going to withhold this information?" he demanded. Browne spread his hands. "What else can I do? Till I know my fate, I have nothing to lose." Lesbee suppressed a strong impulse to rush over and strike his pri.soner. He said finally, "In your judgment is this delay dangerous?" Browne was silent, but a bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. " have nothing to lose," he repeated. The expression in Lesbee's face must have alarmed him, for he went on quickly, "Look, there's no need for you to conspire any more. What you really want is to go home, isn't it? Don't you see, with this new method of acceleration, we can make it to Earth in a few months! He stopped. He seemed momentarily uncertain. Lesbee snapped angrily, "Who are you trying to fool? Months! We're a dozen light years in actual distance IF from Earth. You mean years, not months." Browne hesitated then: "All right, a few years. But at least not a lifetime. So if you'll promise not to scheme against me further. I'll promise -- " "Youll promise!" Lesbee spoke savagely. He had been taken aback by Browne's instant attempt at blackmail. But the momentary sense of defeat was gone. He knew with a stubborn rage that he would stand for no nonsense. He said in an uncompromising voice, "Mister Browne, twenty seconds after I stop speaking, you start talking. If you don't, I'll batter you against these walls. I mean it!" Browne was pale. "Are you going to kill me? That's all I want to know. Look -- " his tone was urgent -- "we don't have to fight any more. We can go home. Don't you sec? The long madness is just about over. Nobody has to die." Lesbee hesitated. What the big man said was at least partly true. There was an attempt here to make twelve years sound like twelve days, or at most twelve weeks. But the fact was, it was a short period compared to the century-long journey which, at one time, had been the only possibility. H e thought: "Am I going to kill him?" It was hard to believe that he would, under the circumstances. All right. If not death, then what? He sat there uncertain. The vital seconds went by, and he could see no solution. He thought finaUy, in desperation: "Fll have to give in for the moment. Even a minute thinking about this is absolutely crazy." He said aloud in utter frustration, "I'll promise you this. If you can figure out how I can feci safe in a ship commanded by you I'll give your plan consideration. And now, mister, start talking." Browne nodded. "I accept that promise," he said, "What we've run into here is the Lorenz-Fitzgerald Contraction Theory. Only it's not a theory any more. We're living the reality of it." Lesbee argued, "But it only took us a few hours to get to the speed of light." Browne said, "As we approach light speed, space foreshortens and time compresses. What seemed like a few hours would be days in normal time and space." What Browne explained then was different rather than difficult. Lesbee had to blink his mind to shut out the glare of his old ideas and habits of thought, so that the more subtle shades of super-speed phenomena could shine through into his awareness. The time compression -- as Browne explained it -- was gradational. The rapid initial series of accelerations were obviously designed to pin down the personnel of the ship. Subsequent increments would be according to what was necessary to attain the ultra-speed finally achieved. Since the drive was still on, it was clear that some resistance was being encountered, perhaps from the fabric of space itself. It was no time to discuss technical details. Lesbee accepted the remarkable reality and said quickly, "Yes, but where is Dzing?" "My guess," said Browne, "is that he did not come along." "How do you mean?" "The space-time foreshortening did not affect him." "But -- " Lesbee began blankly. "Look," said Browne harshly, "don't ask me how he did it. My picture is, he stayed in the cage till after the acceleration stopped. Then, in a leisurely fashion, he released himself from the electrically locked manacles, climbed out, and went off to some other part of the ship. He wouldn't have to hurry since by this time he was operating at a rate of, say, five hundred times faster than our living pace." Lesbee said, "But that means he's been out there for hours -- his time. What's he been up to?" Browne admitted that he had no answer for that. "But you can see," he pointed out anxiously, "that I meant what I said about going back to Earth. We have no business in this part of space. These beings are far ahead of us scientifically." His purpose was obviously to persuade. Lesbee thought: "He's back to our fight. That's more important to him than any damage the real enemy is causing." A vague recollection came of the things he had read about the struggle for power throughout Earth history. How men intrigued for supremacy while vast hordes of the invader battered down the gates. Browne was a true spiritual descendant of all those mad people. Slowly, Lesbee turned and faced the big board. What was baffling to him was, what could you do against a being who moved five hundred times as fast as you did? H e had a sudden sense of awe, a picture... At any given instant Dzing was a blur. A spot of light. A movement so rapid that, even as the gaze lighted on him, he was gone to the other end of the ship -- and back. Yet Lesbee knew it took time to traverse the great ship from end to end. Twenty, even twenty-five minutes, was normal walking time for a human being going along the corridor known as Center A. It would take the Karn a full six seconds there and back. In its way that was a significant span of time, but after Lesbee had considered it for a moment he felt appalled. What could they do against a creature who had so great a time differential in his favor? From behind him, Browne said, "Why don't you use against him that remote landing control system that you set up with my permission?" Lesbee confessed: "I did that, as soon as the acceleration ceased. But he must have been -- back -- in the faster time by then." "That wouldn't make any difference," said Browne. "Eh!" Lesbee was startled. Browne parted his lips evidently intending to explain, and then he IF closed them again. Finally he said, "Make sure the intercom is off." Lesbee did so. But he was realizing that Browne was up to something again. He said, and there was rage in his lone, "I don't get it, and you do. Is that right." "Yes," said Browne. He spoke deliberately, but he was visibly suppressing excitement. "I know how to defeat this creature. That puts me in a bargaining position." Lesbee's eyes were narrowed to slits. "Damn you, no bargain. Tell me, or else!" Browne said, "I'm not really trying to be difficult. You either have to kill me, or come to some agreement. I want to know what that agreement is, because of course I'll do it." Lesbee said, "I think we ought to have an election." "I agree!" Browne spoke instantly. "You set it up." He broke off. "And now release me from these tractors and I'll show you the neatest spacetime trick you've ever seen, and that'll be the end of Dzing." Lesbee gazed at the man's face, saw there the same openness of countenance, the same h mk honest that had preceded the execution order, and he thought, "What can he do?" He considered many possibilities, and thought finally, desperately: "He's got the advantage over me of superior knowledge -- the most undefeatable weapon in the world. The only thing I can really hope to use against it in the final issue is my knowledge of a multitude of technician-level details." But -- what could Browne do against Lesbee? He said unhappily to the other, "Bcfo.re I free you, I want to lift you over to Mindel. When I do, you get his blaster for me." "Sure," said Browne casually. A few moments later he handed Mindel's gun over to Lesbee. So that wasn't it. Lesbee thought: "There's Miller on the bridge -- can it be that Miller flashed him a ready signal when my back was turned to the board?" Perhaps, like Browne, Miller had been temporarily incapacitated during the period of acceleration. It was vital that he find out Miller's present capability. L esbee tripped the intercom between the two boards. The rugged, lined face of the first officer showed large on the screen. Lesbee could see the outlines of the bridge behind the man and, beyond, the starry blackness of space. Lesbee said courteously, "Mr. Miller, how did you make out during the acceleration?" "It caught me by surprise, Captain. I really got a battering. I think I was out for a while. But I'm all right now." "Good," said Lesbee. "As you probably heard. Captain Brownu and I have come to an agreement, and we are now going to destroy the creature that is loose on tho ship. Stand by!" Cynically, he broke the connection. Miller was there all right, waiting. But the question was still, what could Miller do? The answer of course was that Miller could preempt. And -- Lesbee asked himself -- what could that do? Abruptly, it seemed to him, he had the answer. It was the technician's answer that he had been mentally straining for. He now understood Browne's plan. They were waiting for Lesbee to let down his guard for a moment. Then Miller would pre-empt, cut off the tractor beam from Browne and seize Lesbee with it. For the two officers it was vital that Lesbee not have time to fire the blaster at Browne. Lesbee thought: 'Tt's the only thing they can be worried about. The truth is, there's nothing else to stop them." The solution was, Lesbee realized with a savage glee, to let the two men achieve their desire. But first -- 'Mr. Browne," he said quietly, "T think you should give your information If I agree that it is indeed the correct solution, I shall release you and we shall have an election. You and I will stay right here till the election is over." Browne said, 'T accept your promise. The speed of light is a constant, and does not change in relation to moving objects. That would also apply to electromagnetic fields." Lesbee said, Then Dzing was affected by the remote-control device I turned on." "Instantly," said Browne. "Ho never got a chance to do anything. How much power did you use?" "Only first stage," said Lesbee. "But the machine-driven thought pulses in that would interfere with just about every magnetic field in his body. He couldn't do another coherent thing." Browne said in a hushed tone, "It's got to be. He'll be out of control in one of the corridors, completely at our mercy." He grinned. 'T told you I knew how to defeat him -- because, of course, he was already defeated." Lesbee considered that for a long moment, eyes narrowed. He realized that he accepted the explanation, but that he had preparations to make, and quickly -- before Browne got suspicious of his delay. He turned to the board and switched on the intercom. "People," he said, "strap yourselves in again. Help those who were injured to do the same. We may have another emergency. You have several minutes, I think, but don't waste any of them." He cut off the intercom, and he activated the closed-circuit intercom of the technical stations. He said urgently, "Special instruction to Technical personnel. Report anything unusual, particularly if strange thought forms are going through your mind." He had an answer to tht within moments after he finished speaking. A man's twangy voice came over: "I keep thinking I'm somebody named Dzing, and I'm trying to report to my owners. Boy, am I incoherent!" "Where is this?" "D -- # -- # " IF Lesbee punched the buttons that gave them a TV view of that particular ship location. Almost immediately he spotted a shimmer near the floor. After a moment's survey he ordered a heavy-duty mobile blaster brought to the corridor. By the time its colossal energies ceased, Dzing was only a darkened area on the flat surface. Ahile these events were pro  gressing, Lesbee had kept one eye on Browne and Mindel's blaster firmly gripped in his left hand. Now he said, "Well, sir, you certainly did what you promised. Wait a moment while T put this gun away, and then I'll carry out my part of the bargain." He started to do so, then, out of pitv, paused. He had been thinking in the back of his mind about what Browne had said earlier: that the trip to Earth might only take a few months. The officer had backed away from that statement, but it had been bothering Lesbee ever since. If it were true, then it was indeed a fact that nobody need die! He said quickly, "What was your reason for saying that the journey home would only take -- well -- less than a year?" "It's the tremendous time compression," Browne explained eagerly. "The distance as you pointed out is over # light-years. But with a time ratio of #, #, or # to one, we'll make it in less than a month. When I first started to say that, I could see that the figures were incomprehensible to you in your tense mood. In fact, I could scarcely believe them myself." Lesbee said, staggered, "We can get back to Earth in a couple of weeks -- my God!" He broke off, said urgently, "Look, I accept you as commander. We don't need an election. The status quo is good enough for any short period of time. Do you agree?" "Of course," said Browne. "That's the point I've been trying to make." As he spoke, his face was utterly guileless. Lesbee gazed at that mask of innocence, and he thought hopeless ly: "What's wrong? Why isn't he really agreeing? Is it because he doesn't want to lose his command so quickly?" Sitting there, unhappily fighting for the other's life, he tried to place himself mentally in the position of the commander of a vessel, tried to look at the prospect of a return to view. It was hard to picture such i reality. But presently it seemed to him that he understood. He said gently, feeling his way, "It would be kind of a shame to return without having made a successful landing anywhere. With thii new speed, we could visit a dozen sun systems, and still get home in a year." The look that came into Browne's face for a fleeting moment told Lesbee that he had penetrated to the thought in the man's mind. The next instant, Browne was shaking his head vigorously. "This is no time for side excursions," ho said. "We'll leave explorations of new star systems to future expeditions. The people of this ship have served their term. We go straight home," Browne's face was now completely relaxed. His blue eyes shone with truth and sincerity. There was nothing further that Lesbee could say. The gulf between Browne and himself could not be bridged. The commander had to kill hia rival, so that he might finally return to Earth and report that the mission of the Hope of Man was accomplished. I n the most deliberate fashion Lesbee shoved the blaster into the inner pocket of his coat. Then, as if he were being careful, he used the tractor beam to push Browne about four feet away. There he set him down, released him from the beam, and -- with the same deliberateness -- drew his hand away from the tractor controls. Thus he made himself completely defenseless. It was the moment of vulnerability. Browne leaped at him, yelling: 'Miller -- pre-emptl" First Officer Miller obeyed the command of his captain. What happened then, only Lesbee, the technician with a thousand bits of detailed knowledge, expected. For years it had been observed that when Control Room Below took over from Bridge, the ship speeded up slightly. And when Bridge took over from Control Room Below, the ship slowed instantly by the same amount -- in each instance, something less than half a mile an hour. The two boards were not completely synchronized. The technicians often joked about it, and Lesbee had once read an obscure technical explanation for the discrepancy. It had to do with the impossibility of ever getting two metals refined to the same precision of internal structure. It was the age-old story of, no two objects in the universe are alike. But in times past, the differential had meant nothing. It was a technical curiosity, an interesting phenomenon of the science of metallurgy, a practical problem that caused machinists to curse good-naturedly when technicians like Lesbee required them to make a replacement part. Unfortunately for Browne, the ship was now traveling near the speed of light. His strong hands, reaching towards Lesbee's slighter body, were actually touching the latter's arm when the momentary deceleration occured as Bridge took over. The sudden slow-down was at a much faster rate than even Lesbee expected. The resistance of space to the forward movement of the ship must be using up more engine power than he had realized; it was taking a lot of thrust to maintain a one gravity acceleration. The great vessel slowed about # miles per hour in the space of a second. IF Lesbee took the blow of that deceleration partly against his back, partly against one side -- for he had half-turned to defend himself from the bigger man's attack. Browne, who had nothing to grab on to, was flung forward at the full # miles per hour. He struck the control board with an audible thud, stuck to it as if he were glued there; and then, when the adjustment was over -- when the Hope of Man was again speeding along at one gravity -- his body slid down the face of the board, and crumpled into a twisted position on the rubberized dais. His uniform was discolored. As Lesbee watched, blood seeped through and dripped to the floor. # C A re you going to hold an election?" Tellier asked. The big ship had turned back under Lesbee's command, and had picked up his friends. The lifeboat itself, with the remaining Karn still aboard, was put into an orbit around The two young men were sitting now in the Captain's cabin. After the question was asked, Lesbee leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. He didn't need to examine his total resistance to the suggestion. He had already savored the feeling that command brought. Almost from the moment of Browne's death, he had observed himself having the same thoughts that Browne had voiced -- among many others, the reasons why elections were not advisable aboard a spaceship. He waited now while Eleesa, one of his three wives -- she being the younger of the two young widows of Browne -- poured wine for them, and went softly out. Then he laughed grimly. "My good friend," he said, "we're all lucky that time is so compressed at the speed of light. At #-timea compression, any further exploration we do will require only a few months, or years at most. And so I don't think we can afford to take the chance of defeating at an election the only person who understands the details of the new acceleration method. Until I decide exactly how much exploration we shall do, I shall keep our speed capabilities a secret. But I did, and do, think one other person should know where I have this information documented. Naturally, I selected First Officer Tellier." "Thank you, sir," the youth said. But he was visibly thoughtful as he sipped his wine. He went on finally, "Captain, I think you'd feel a lot better if you held an election. I'm sure you could win it." Lesbee laughed tolerantly, shook his head. "I'm afraid you don't understand the dynamics of government," he said. "There's no record in history of a person who actually had control, handing it over." He finished with the casual confidence of absolute power. "I'm not going to be presumptuous enough to fight a precedent like that!"     S# IF  Short Story Queer creatures! They fled the lifegiving sun and hid where even tin froze solid! lirt felt the airship going out ot control as he passed over a rock spattered stretch of sand. Automatically he looked for a smooth place to land and steered the bucking ship for it. The jolt of the landing triggered the ejector seat and in a second he was hurtling through the air away from the explosion of the damaged vehicle. Just before he blacked out, he thought -- almost calmly -- "a good hundred and fifty miles from the colony." When he regained consciousness, night was passing and the first of the three suns was peeking over the horizon. Curt lay still for a while, afraid to find out what might be wrong with him. And the rescue ship could take anything from an hour to a week to find him. He moved his head to discover if there might be anything left of his ship; he saw nothing but pieces. "Well," he said aloud, "so much for that." He reached back gingerly and undid the seat straps. Carefufly, IF he sat up and began to ease his weight onto his feet. A sharp twinge of pain in his knee dropped him back the knee but found no broken bones. "Well," he said again, quietly. The colony leaders had had very little to offer in the way of survival. Rule number I : Mark the crash site and your direction of travel. Number #: Get into shade before the combined heat of the three suns boils your blood. Number #: Carry your pistol for protection against liquitl scorpions, and always save the iast pellet for yourself. Curt glanced about nervously at the thoucht of the liquid scorpions  -- the one form of animal life the colonist had found on this mineralrich planet. Liquid scorpions were enormous masses of clear, icllyi'ih liquid that oozed forward across the rock and sand with rernarkahde speed. A liquid scorpion changed shape conshuitly, its mass shooting out legs wherever they were needed. Only the eyes, fixed in a bulge over the center of its mass, and the almost-sclid, curved stinger that arched over its back remained the same. The first landing party had stood transfi.xed while one of the crew was attacked and absorbed before their eyes. Clear, the scorpion had been almost invisible to them until it flowed about the navigator's legs and paralyzed him with the swaying stinger. When his frantic struggles had ceased, the creature flowed over his body and absorbed it. As the party watched, the clearness slowly became a thin, dark red, and the body could no longer be seen. Avengers had poured out of the ship after the giant scorpion, which reared back, tripling its height and halving its width. At the apex, the two protuding eyes bulged at them and the stinger swayed back and forth, reaching out and retreating. Explosive pellets fired into itr flesh were absorbed with a slurping sound. The captain in the end, had knelt and taken careful aim at the right eye, behind which was the only unreddened sector of the mass. Wten the right eye disappeared, the clear area spurted out of the hole and drained over the jelly-like surface. Slowly, silently, the first of the liquid scorpions died. Curt counted the pellets in his belt -- an even hundred. Enough... if he managed to keep out of sight and had good enough aim. He surveyed the surrounding countryside. Farlher along the valley were shaded caves vherc he could find protection once he had marked his course. If he could walk that far. X en came sluggishly awake, feeling the warmth penetrate his mass. The time of heat had come again, the time to search for what would halt the hunger that ached through every inch of him. Slowly, his coldstiffened mass flowed forward from its hiding place in the warmth-holding sand. The heat melted the stiffness out of him and he began to slide across the sand, his alert senses functioning again. Sense of touch led him across rocks and over ridges easily. The touchy sense of vibration waited apprehensively for movement that would shake the ground. And the third sense, the one that could be called only "sense" or "sense of knowing," functioned as always without his understanding. Today, this third sense told Xen, was different from other days. Extra-cautious, Xen oozed over rocky barriers in the direction that his "sense" told him held food. Once he felt a slight tremor, and in terror flooded out over the rock into thin, transparent nothing. He waited several degrees of heat, but no further movement touched the sensitive receivers in his mass. A falling rock, he decided, collecting himself and starting forward again. He slithered down rocky walls, pouring almost like water when the drop was long and drawing together at the bottom. When his feeling of touch warned him of the shade whose coolness might solidify him and leave him helpless in the open, he drew hurriedly away and changed direction. Finally, he reached an open spot that was likely to contain food. His mass ached for something to consume, but he flooded himself thin again and waited, feeling. There was no vibration through the surface, nor did his "sense" tell him of anything other than the possibility of nourishment. Xen hesitated only a degree of heat before bubbling excitedly into the open space. Touch found him something edible almost immediately -- he flowed around and over it, absorbing it hungrily. His mass dissolved it almost immediately and ached for more. He slid thin, reaching out in every direction until contact was made, then absorbing the food instantly and moving on. Curt, lying in meager shade that would be gone in half an hour when the third and largest sun rose, first saw the movement when it was on the rocks. His already frayed nerves gave a frightened leap. He lay perfectly still. Where he had seen the movement on the rocky shelf there was now nothing. The nothing moved forward. Curt shivered. He was certain he was seeing nothing, and yet his eyes were trying to tell him there was movement. When it reached the flat place and flowed swiftly forward, he realized that it was a liquid animal and was suddenly pointedly conscious of the weight of the pistol against his hip. He watched carefully for the eyes and the stinger, but saw none. That frightened him. If he could not find the brain, he had no mark to shoot at. As he watched, the liquid creature flowed against one of the hardy, sun-browned plants and jerked in reaction. Instantly, it flowed over the plant and absorbed it. The Uifoid turned naomentarily a thin brownish green and then cleared again. Curt watched it with narrowed eyes. It was just possible that this creature ate only plant life. The colonists had realized that the liquid scorpions had fed upon something else before they arrived, but no one had been able to discover what that something was. IF X en was in the process of absorbing a plant when the vibration sense alerted him. Terror shot through him and he spread thinly across thirty feet of ground and lay motionless, his "sense" telling him frantically that a Sting was hunting nearby. He lay for many degrees of heat, waiting. Sense of vibration and knowing both told him that the Sting was approaching, but uncertainly, searching. Then both senses reacted startledly to a new danger on the other side. New movement! A new' feeling that his "sense" could not understand. The Sting was approaching at an angle that would inevitably bring it in contact with Xen. Absorption was the penalty for being caught. Xen was resigned to death, for he could not possibly escape the Sting. And now there was this new sensation on the other side of him. Whatever it was, he had no idea; but likely it was as voracious as the Sting. Now the new thing vibrated jerkily around him and stopped between him and the Sting. The vibrations from the eager Sting accelerated rapidly, eagerly, as it flowed over the ground. Then, for no reason except that the new creature had moved slightly, the Sting recoiled. The jerks were plainly recorded through the earth to Xen; and as he felt the heavy jar, his "sense" told him that the danger from the Sting was past. The Sting was dead. Xen drew himself together and considered that. The new thing vibrated jerkily the place from which Xen had first felt it move. It must be solid as the rocks to move so jerkily, Xen thought. The Sting-killer drew itself back under the enormous rock and ceased to move. Curiosity drew Xen forward, fear dragged him back. He spread thin and drew together with uncertainty. At last, he oozed forward carefully until he reached the rock. The Stingkiller was pressed back under the rock, where touch told Xen a tiny amount of the cold-carrying shade remained. Xen puzzled at that. Why should this creature hide from the life-giving suns? He reached out and absorbed a plant thoughtfully. This thing was different from the liquid structures he had always known. If it was solid where they were liquid, perhaps then it was also opposite in its needs. Maybe this Sting-killer needed cold instead of heat. While Xen was considering this difficult thought, the Sting-kDler began to move again. C urt gasped. The shade was gone. The third sun was reaching long rays under the rock to sear his already-burned flesh. He had to find more shade. Movements were very painful. His lips were cracking and his face had blackened. The injured knee had swollen inside the protective suit; it throbbed and ached. Dazedly, he pulled himself to his feet. On the rock beside him, spread an inch thick, was the almost-invisible creature he had been forced to circle in order to stop the liquid scorpion. He wondered tiredly if it was dangerous. It lay completely motionless, just as it had when the liquid scorpion had approached. So it was probably more afraid of him than he was of it. He turned away. There appeared to be shade down the valley -- perhaps a mile, perhaps three. Too much for him, he knew, but he set out, feeling the sun beat cruelly at him, crying out when the pain in his knee forced him to catch his balance against the sun-heated rock. He knew without turning that the liquid creature was following him, stopping when he stopped, starting when he started. When he knew he could go no farther and felt his knee give weakly to his weight, he saw it ooze forward and began to flow over his legs. He tried to reach his pistol, but it seemed so far away. X en, following the Sting-killer curiously, put together all that he had learned. This creature was different from himself. It needed shade. It had killed his enemy, which was possibly also its own enemy. Now it was trying to reach the shade, but its progress grew steadily slower. He considered that progress. The only thing he could liken it to was one of his own kind, caught out in the time of cold, trying to reach the heat-retaining sands, slowly congealing into a solid mass and dying. This, then, was the reverse process. Perhaps the Sting-killer would become liquid after a certain degree of heat. Xen's sense of knowing warned him gently about too much wandering in the open, where countless Stings could be hiding. He drew this interesting creature. The Stingkiller vibrated the ground and lay still suddenly. Xen waited for a "sense" of death but none came. This might be for the new thing a stage similar to that when one of Xen's own kind became unable to move from the cold, but still lived and feared. Caught between his own fear and a very strange sensation that he could not interpret, Xen waited a degree of heat. Then he oozed forward and spread himself over the still shape, until it floated within him. When he flowed over one part, the thing struggled pitiably. Xen drew back startedly and the movement ceased. Carefully, he retraced his course, leaving the part free. This time there was no struggling. Spurred by fear of Stings, Xen began to flow across the land, letting his "Sense" guide him to the coldness. He slithered up slopes, poured over steep drops, always collecting himself in time to catch his burden. He found a place that would stay cold until the next time of heat and halted in front of it, his anxiety evident in the way he spread and collected himself, back and forth. At last he inched forward, feeling the agony of the cold bite into every cell. Bunching himself behind the Sting-killer, he made it flow along him until it broke free and lay upon the shaded rock. Xen drew back as hurriedly as his alreadysluggish mass would allow. He spread thin across the earth and let IF the heat liquefy his body again... It was when the time of cold was only a few degrees away that Xen felt the heavy vibration which nearly made him dissolve with fear. It lasted for a few degrees and then weakened and made only a small tremor. Now many smaller vibrations reached him, like many creatures moving about. The tremors spread out, moving slowly toward the rocky valley. Xen lay still trying to identify the vibrations. They were not those of Stings. As they approached, he recognized them as resembling in great numbers the creature he had put upon the rock. urt imagined he heard voices, an incoherent babble of them. He struggled to sit up, but there was an incredible weight on his chest. "Lie still," a voice said clearly, and his mind echoed, "Still... still... still... He struggled again. "Liquid," ho croaked painfully, "liquid animal... liquid..." The weight was still there. He heard one last voice say, "Poor guy, he must have run into scorpions." Then he was lifted and it seemed as though the lifting would never cease. Xen waited until the small tremor was gone and the great vibration had roared and disappeared. He knew by the sense of emptiness that the Sting-killer had gone back to his own kind. For a moment he felt very alone, though he knew the sand was full of Xens. Slowly, he drew himself together. For the time of cold was but a few degrees away, and he must seek the In Our Next issue An Exciting New Novelette by Keith Laumer by John Brunner IF  Novelette The Thrid were the wisest creatures in space -- they even said so themselvesl I T he real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does. But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for him to be trying to live and do business. IF He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons -- which the Thrid did not use -- to change the local social system. Most humans got off Thriddar -- fasti And boiling mad. Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough. They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that humans simply couldn't accept -- even though it applied only to Thrid. The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up. This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand Panjandrum -- the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over all the Thrid -- and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses to an official act. Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them. The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became deathlike. "On this day," intoned the high official, while the Witnesses listened reverently, "on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as have been his predecessors throughout the ages; -- on this day did the Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe." Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He scowled. IF The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U," intoned the official again, 'in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe, did speak and say and observe that it is the desire of the Rim Star Trading Corporation to present to him, the great and never-mistaken Glen-U, all of the present possessions of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation, and thereafter to remit to him all moneys, goods, and benefactions to and of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation as they shall be received. The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U did further speak and say and observe that anyone hindering this loyal and admirable gift must, by the operation of truth, vanish from sight and nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being." The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside. A part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship -- which would not have left any trade-goods behind -- and left the Grand Panjandrum to realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar. In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity, gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't feel only like a business man this moming. He thought of Ganti, who was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar. It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty spot. The Witnesses murmured reverently: "We hear the words of the NeverMistaken Glen-U." The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly: "I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and NeverMistaken Glen-U." Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said succinctly: "Like hell you will!" There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the human phrase. Jorgenson used it. The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody contradicted the Grand Panjandrum I Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government. But no government could bo perfect if its officials made mistakes. So no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid. "Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!" snapped Jorgenson. "Like hell you will!" The high official literally couldn't believe his ears. "But -- but the great and NeverMistaken Glen-U -- " "Is mistaken!" said Jorgenson bitingly. "He's wrong! The Rim Stars Trading Corporation does not want to give him anything! What he has said is not true!" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. "I won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is wrong about that, too! Now -- git!" He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger. There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away. Jorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy and his jaw was set. He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically, as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed, they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would discourage him. They began to believe. Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else. Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact phrases that said the trading company wanted -- wanted! -- practically to give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The Grand Panjandrum had said so! "He also said," said Jorgenson irritably, "that I'm to vanish and nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that happen? Do I get speared?" The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse. "This," he raged, "this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's nobody who can't be wrong!" IF The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby. When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they fled in pure horror. Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shockerfield back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post against a multitude. As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system and a -- call it -- theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their privilege. In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local governor's least and lightest remark -- why -- he must be either a criminal or insane. The local governor decided -- correctly, of course -- which he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life. T here'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction. Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work. But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that G anti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted to yield her to him. Jorgenson had fumed -- but not as a business man -- when the transfer took place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right. When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And immediately afterward he disappeared. Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things, this morning. (# Time passed. He had the tradingpost in a position of defense. He prepared his lunch, and glowered. More time passed. He cooked his dinner, and ate. Afterward he went up on the trading-post roof to smoke and to coddle his anger. He observed the sunset. There was always some haze in the air on Thriddar, and the colorings were very beautiful. He could see the towers of the capital city of the Thrid. He could see a cumbersome but still graceful steam-driven aircraft descend heavily to the field at the city's edge. Later he saw another steam-plane rise slowly but reliably and head away somewhere else. He saw the steam helicopters go skittering above the city's buildings. He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was. Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny. And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be seen... It definitely called for strong measures! He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum! It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it would soon be public knowledge. Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still. The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson. But they didn't wake him. He slept on. IjThen he woke, he knew that he   was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half awake, he tried to move and could not. Then he tried to waken fully, and he couldn't do that either. He stayed in a dream-like, frustrated state which was partly like a nightmare, while very gradually new sensations came to him. He felt a cushioned throbbing against his chest, in the very hard surface on which he lay face down. That surface swayed and rocked slightly. He tried again to move, and realized that his hands and feet were bound. He found that he shivered, and realized that his clothing had been taken from him. He was completely helpless and lying on his stomach in the cargospace of a steam helicopter: now IF he could hear the sound of its machinery. Then he knew what had happened. He'd committed fhe unthinkable crime -- or lunacy -- of declaring the Grand Panjandrum mistaken. So by the operation of truth, which was really an anesthetic gas cloud drifted over the trading post, he had vanished from sight. Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen fdee to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a generation. Then there might -- there might! -- be another. Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion. 'Tt will not be long," said a tranquil voice. Jorgenson changed from humanspeech profanity to Thrid. He directed his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened, apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice said severely: "You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined and no rational being will ever see you face to face." Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a humanitarian. Both were frustrated. Presently the motion of the copter changed. He knew the ship was descending. There were more violent swayings, as if from wind gusts deflected by something large and solid. Jorgenson even heard deepbass rumblings like sea upon a rocky coast. Then there were movements near him, a rope went around his waist, a loading-bay opened and he found himself lifted and lowered through it. H e dangled in midair, a couple of hundred feet above an utterly barren island on which huge ocean swells beat. The downdraft from the copter made him sway wildly, and once it had him spinning dizzily. The horizon was empty. He was being lowered swiftly to the island. And his hands and feet were still securely tied. Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid. stripped of all clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The Thrid laid Jorgenson down. He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it. It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away. Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a Thrid voice -- amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice -- said: "This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?" The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else. He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up. Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other. There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one spot -- perhaps a square yard of it -- where sand had been made fertile by the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants showed foliage of sorts. That was all, Jorgenson ground his teeth. "Go ahead," said Ganti grimly, "but it may be even worse than you think." He scrambled over the twisted stone of the island. He came back, carrying something. "It isn't worse," he said. "It's only as bad. They did drop food and water for both of us. I wasn't sure they would." H is calmness sobered Jorgenson. As a business man, he was moved to make his situation clear. He told Ganti of the Grand Panjandrum's move to take over the Rim Stars trading post, which was bad business. He told of his own reaction, which was not a business-like one at all. Then he said dourly: "But he's still wrong. No rational being is supposed ever to see me face to face. But you do." "But I'm crazy," said Ganti calmly. "I tried to kill the governor who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm probably forgotten by now." He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice. He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned. "You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?" "None," said Ganti unemotionally. "You'd better get out of the sun. It'll burn you badly. Come along." IF He led the waj over the bare, scorching rocky surface. He turned past a small pinnacle. There was shadow. Jorgenson crawled into it, and found himself in a cave. It was not a natural one. It had been hacked out, morsel by morsel. It was cool inside. It was astonishingly roomy. "How'd this happen?" demanded Jorgenson the business man. "This is a prison," Ganti explained matter-of-factly. "They let me down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him. When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When, presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again." Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for sleeping purposes. "And this?" "Somebody dug it out," said Ganti without resentment. "To keep busy. Maybe one prisoner only began it, A later one saw it started and worked on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many lives to make this cave." Jorgenson ground his teeth a seo ond time. "And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't bo wrong! Or because they had a business an official wanted!" "Or a wife," agreed Ganti. "Here! He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he went over the island. It was rock, nothing else. There was a pile of small broken stones from the excavation of the cave. There were the few starveling plants. There was the cordage with which Jorgenson had been lowered. There was the parcel containing food and water. Ganti observed that the plastic went to pieces in a week or so, so it couldn't be used for anything. There was nothing to escape with. Nothing to make anything to escape with. Even the dried seaweed bed was not comfortable. Jorgenson slept badly and waked with aching muscles. Ganti assured him unemotionally that he'd get used to it. He did. By the time the copter came to drop food and water again, Jorgenson was physically adjusted to the island. But neither as a business man or as a person could he adjust to hopelessness. He racked his brains for the most preposterous or faintest hope of deliverance. There were times when as a business man he reproached himself for staying on Thriddar after he became indignant with the way the planet was governed. It was very foolish. But much more often he felt such hatred of the manners and customs of the Thrid -- which had put him here -- that it seemed that something must somehow be possible if only so he could take revenge. Ill T he copter came, it dropped food and water, and it went away. It came, dropped food and water, and went away. Once a water-bag burst when dropped. They lost nearly half a week's water supply. Before the copter came again they'd gone two days without drinking. There were other incidents, of course. The dried seaweed they slept on turned to powdery trash. They got more seaweed hauling long kclp-like strands of it ashore from where it clung to the island's submerged rocks. Ganti mentioned that they must do it right after the copter came, so there would be no sign of enterprise to be seen from aloft. The seaweed had long, flexible stems of which no use whatever could be made. When it dried, it became stiff and brittle but without strength. Once Ganti abruptly began to talk of his youth. As if he were examining something he'd never noticed before, he told of the incredible conditioning-education of the young members of his race. They learned that they must never make a mistake. Never! Tt did not matter if they were unskilled or inefficient. It did not matter if they accomplished nothing There was no penalty for anything but making mistakes or differing from officials who could not make mistakes. So Thrid younglings were trained not to think; not to have any opinion about anything; only to repeat what nobody questioned; only to do what they were told by authority. It occurred to Jorgenson that on a planet with such a population, a skeptic could make a great deal of confusion. Then, another time, Jorgenson decided to make use of the weathering cord which had been cut from the copter when he was landed. He cut off a part of it with a sharpedged fragment of stone from the pile some former prisoner on the island had made. He unravelled the twisted fibers. Then he ground fishhooks from shells attached to the island's rocky walls just below water-line. After that they fished. Sometimes they even caught something to eat. But they never fished when the copter was due. Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there when wanted but could not escape. They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he walked. I f Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no particular meaning. But he was IF also a person, filled with hatred of the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea. He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone. But by sunset he'd worked it out. While they watched Thrid's red sun sink below the horizon, Jorgenson said thoughtfully: "There is a way to escape, Ganti." "On what? In what?" demanded Ganti. "In the helicopter that feeds us," said Jorgenson. "It never lands," said Ganti practically. "We can make it land," said Jorgenson. Thrid weren't allowed to make mistakes; he could make it a mistake not to land. "The crew is armed," said Ganti. "There are three of them." "They've only knives and scimitars," said Jorgenson. "They don't count. We can make better weapons than they have." Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart. Presently he grasped it. He said: "I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we make the copter land?" Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson quivered inside. He hoped. "We'll try it," said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. "If it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water." That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned. It was not at all a direct and forthright scheme. It began with the untwisting of more of the rope that had lowered Jorgenson. It went on with the making of string from that fiber. They made a great deal of string. Then, very clumsily and awkwardly, they wove strips of cloth, a couple of inches wide and five or six long. They made light strong cords extend from the ends of the cloth strips. Then they practiced with these bits of cloth and the broken stones a former prisoner had piled so neatly. The copter came and dropped food and water. When it left, they practiced. When it came again they were not practicing, but when it went away they practiced. They were a naked man and a naked Thrid, left upon a morsel of rock in a boundless sea, rehearsing themselves in an art so long-forgotten that they had to reinvent the finer parts of the technique. They experimented. They tried this. They tried that. When the copter appeared, they showed themselves. They rushed upon the dropped bag containing food and water as if fiercely trying to deny each other a full share. Once they seemed to fight over the dropped bag. The copter hovered to watch. The fight seemed furious and deadly, but inconclusive. When the copter went away Jorgenson and Ganti went briskly back to their practicing. T hey were almost satisfied with their proficiency, now. They had lost some of the small stones, but there were many left. They began to work with seaweed, the kind with long central stems which dried to brittle stiffness. They determined exactly how long they should be allowed to dry. They studied the way in which the flat seaweed foliage must be dried on rounded stone spaces to form seemingly solid surfaces of almost any shape. But they were utterly brittle when they were dry. It was not possible to make them hold any form for more than a day or so, even if sprinkled with cold water to keep them from crumbling to dust. And they practiced with the strip of cloth and the stones. Ganti became more skilful than Jorgenson, but even Jorgenson became an expert. There came a day when the copter dropped the bag of food and Ganti danced with seeming rage and shook his fist at it. The crew-Thrid saw him, but paid no attention. They went away. And Ganti and Jorgenson went to work. They hauled seaweed ashore. It had to dry to some degree before it could hold a form at all. While it dried, they practiced. The leaves were ready before the stems. They spread them on rounded surfaces, many leaves thick. They dried to dark-gray-greenish stuff looking like the crudest possible cardboard without a fraction of cardboard's strength or stiffness. Presently the stems were dry enough to be stiff but not yet entirely brittle. They made a framework, uniting its members with string from the dropped rope. Two days before the copter was due again, they used the cardboardlike but fragile curved sheet of seaweed-leaves to cover the frame. Finished, they had what looked like the fuselage of a landed copter. Thicker but brittle sections of the stems seemed rotor-blades when more seaweed-cardboard was attached. From two hundred feet, the crudities of the object would not show. It would look like a helicopter landed on the island where Jorgenson and Ganti were confined. It would look like a rescue. When the copter arrived, it checked in midair as if it braked. It hung in the air. Its crew stared down. They saw a strange aircraft there. The helicopter whirled and went streaking away toward the horizon. Jorgenson and Ganti immediately attacked their own creation. The framework was brittle; barely able to sustain its own weight. They furiously demolished the whole thing. They hauled its fragments into the cave. They worked furiously to remove every trace of its former presence. Within two hours a fleet of six steam-copters came driving across the sea. They swept over the island. IF They looked. They saw Jorgenson and Ganti -- naked man and naked Thrid -- glaring up at them. They saw nothing else. There was nothing else to see. There was a Thrid official on one of the copters. The matter had been reported to him. A helicopter could only have landed on this island to rescue the prisoners. They were not rescued. There had been no helicopter. The crew of the craft which made the report had made a mistake! Jorgenson arid Ganti gloated together when darkness had fallen. The copter-crew had made a false report. They would face an angry official. Either they'd take back their original report, or stick to it. If they took it back, they'd tried to deceive an official, who could not be wrong. Jorgenson and Ganti gloated over what they'd done to their jailers. IV Vhen a copter came again   a week later, it was not the same flier or the same crew. The bag of food and water was dropped from a different height. The copter hovered until it saw both Jorgenson and Ganti. Then it went away. They set to work again on seaweed hauled from the sea, and leaves smoothed over each other on suitable surfaces of rock. Stems up to four and five inches in diameter to be straightened out and almost dried to seem rotor-shafts, and lesser stems to make a framework. The mockup was tied together with string. They finished it the night before the copter was due again, and they practiced with their bits ot cloth and the stones until the light ended. They practiced again at daybreak, but when the helicopter came across the sea they were nowhere visible. But there was an aircraft aground upon the island. From the air it looked remarkably convincing. The prisoners listened eagerly from the hollowed-out cave. The mockup on the ground was in a miniature valley between sections of taller stone. It could be seen from above, but not well from the side. From one end it could not be seen at all, but from the other it was a remarkable job. It would deceive any eyes not very close indeed. The flying helicopter hovered and hovered, sweeping back and forth. Its crew-members saw no movement anywhere, which was not possible. If there was an aircraft aground, there must be Thrid who had flown it here. They were not to be seen. The prisoners were not to be seen. The situation was impossible. Jorgenson and Ganti waited. The flying jailers could not report what they saw. A previous crew had done that, and when they were proved mistaken or worse, they donned chains to do hard labor so long as they lived. But the Thrid in the copter over the island dared not not-report. Somebody else might sight it, and they'd be condemned for not reporting. They couldn't report it and they couldn't not-report it! Jorgenson grinned when the throbbing of the rotors became louder and louder as the steamhelicopter descended. He and Ganti made ready. The flying vehicle landed. They heard it. Its crew got out, fearful but alert and with weapons handy. One stayed close by the ship, his ears shriveled with terror. The other two, weapons very much to the fore, moved cautiously to examine the aircraft which could not possibly be here. Jorgenson and Ganti, together, scrambled from the hollowed-out cave. Ganti swung his strip of cloth. It had a strong cord attached to each end, and he held the cords so the cloth formed a pocket in which a stone lay. The whole whirled furiously. Ganti released one cord. The stone flew. It struck the Thrid on guard by the machine squarely in the middle of his forehead. Jorgenson's stone arrived the fraction of a second later, before the Thrid started to fall. They moved out, Jorgenson grinning in a most unbusinessman-like manner. They heard the startled exclamation of the other two newcomers as they realized that they saw only a mockup of a landed flier, a thing which crumbled as they touched it. Jorgenson and Ganti swung their sIinTS together. The jailer-Thrid turned just in time to see what was happening to them. It was final. And the copter took off again with Ganti and Jorgenson clothed and with an adequate supply of stones in improvised pockets in their garments. I t was perfectly simple from that time on. They walked into a village of the Thrid, on the mainland. It was the village where Ganti had lived; whose governor had spoken and said and observed that Ganti's wife wished to enter his household and that Ganti wished her to. Ganti marched truculently down its wider street. Astonished eyes turned upon him. Ganti said arrogantly: T am the new governor. Call others to see." The villagers could mot question the statement of an official. Not even the statement that he was an official. So Ganti -- with Jorgenson close behind -- swaggered into the local governor's palace. It wasn't impressive, but merely a leafy, thatched, sprawling complex of small buildings. Ganti led the way into the inmost portion of the palace and found a fat, sleeping Thrid with four villager-Thrid fanning him with huge fans. Ganti shouted, and the fat Thrid sat up, starkly bewildered. "I speak and say and observe," said Ganti coldly, "that I am the new governor and that you are about to die, with no one touching you." The fat Thrid gaped at him. It was incredible. In fact, to a Thrid who had never heard of a missile weapon -- it was impossible. Ganti swung his strip of cloth by the two cords attached to it. It whirled too swiftly to be seen clearly. A stone flew terribly straight. There was an impact. The local governor who had IF spoken and said and observed that Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household was quite dead. said Ganti to his former fellow-villagers, "I am the governor. If any deny it, they will die with no one touching them." And that was that. Ganti grimaced at Jorgenson: "I'll speak and say and observe something useful for you presently, Jorgenson. Right now I'm going to march on foot and talk to the provincial governor. I'll take a train of attendants, so he'll receive me. Then I'll tell him that he's about to die with nobody touching him. He's earned it!" Unquestionably, Ganti was right. j ny Thrid official, to whom it was impossible to be mistaken, would develop eccentric notions. Most humans couldn't stand by and watch. They got off Thriddar as soon as possible. At the moment, Jorgenson couldn't leave the planet, but he didn't want to see what Ganti could and would and by human standards probably ought to do. He camped in the steam-copter, in hiding, until Ganti sent him a message. Then he started up the copter and flew back to the trading post. It was empty. Gutted. Looted. But there was a high official waiting for him in the courtyard. He held a scroll in his hand. It gHnted golden. When Jorgenson regarded him grimly, the high official made a sound equivalent to clearing his throat, and the Witness-hatted Thrid around him became silent. "On this day," intoned the high official, "on this day did Ganti, the Never-Mistaken, as have been his predecessors through the ages; -- on this day did the Never-Mistaken Ganti speak and say and observe a truth in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe." Jorgenson listened grimly. The new Grand Panjandrum had made him -- Jorgenson -- a provincial governor. Ganti was grateful. The contents of the trading post would be returned. From this time on the Rim Stars Trading Corporation would prosper as never before. But Jorgenson wasn't a Thrid. He saw things as a businessman does, but also and contradictorily bie saw them as right and just or wrong and intolerable. As a businessman, he saw that everything had worked out admirably. As a believer in right and wrong, it seemed to him that nothing in particular had happened. He'd have done better, he considered, to do what most humans did after understanding what went on on Thriddar, and what seemingly always must go on on Thriddar. Because the Thrid had noticed that they were the most intelligent race in the universe, and therefore must have the most perfect possible government whose officials must inevitably be incapable of making a mistake... When the Rim Stars trading ship came to ground, a month later, Jorgenson went on board and stayed there. He remained on board when the ship left. Thriddar was no place IF  Peatur on a S hyly and silently, there has sidled into our cosmos one of the most extraordinary and potentially influential volumes ever put between covers. It's a heady experience to hold this book in your hands and reflect what the world would be if Newton, Da Vinci or Eratosthenes had had the same privilege. You might say that this is only marvelling, and what's so heady? and you're right. It becomes heady when you realize that in this season of the proliferation of laws, no one has yet passed one proclaiming that there shall be no more Da Vincis -- though most people seem to feel that somehow or other there can be no more giants. They're wrong. And just as this book could have moved the earth 'way back yonder, IF so it can today -- and it is very likely that it will; because it is being distributed all over the world. It's a paperback, and about the only way it could have been promoted less would be if it had never existed. I ran across it last Christmas in a toy catalog. Then when the local elementary school overcrowded itself into split sessions, the school to add a little something to a four-hour school day, and included a science demonstrations course. I bethought me of this book and had the Library order it. As soon as it came in it went straight to my desk for this treatment, so you may pride yourself (if such be your pride) that on your account there is a long and angry waiting list at the Library for it. Some of 'em got angry enough to buy it for themselves, which is a pretty beneficial side effect, at that. Some time ago I wrote for information as to price, ordering address, and permission to reproduce some of the illustrations; but as I said, promotion they ain't got. My letter remains, at this writing, unanswered. Therefore I made the drawings on these pages myself; they are not, then, reproductions, but illustrations of matter in the book. footnote in the bibliography resays they may be obtained from "Place de Fontenoy, Paris #, France. Copies may also be obtained in most countries from The catalog describes it; "Over # science demonstrations and experiments, using everyday materials. with the help of world science education leaders." Now, this is more than just an elementary science handbook. All over the world, in the Far East, in Africa, in Latin America, literacy is rising. With it rises the number of communities with shacks or tents or just the shade of a tree for schools, and somewhat less than nothing at all for materials. Science teaching therefore becomes a matter of real basics, right down to the level of the wedge and the lever, because you can always lay hands on a rock and a stick to demonstrate with. But this has its virtue. Simple materials call for more honest-toGod science (along with h-t-G teaching) than any amount of crackle-finished black boxes full of technology. In addition, the jungle (or desert, or Outback) youngster who learns his science this way is far more likely to relate science to his everyday life than our kids, who can coexist with years of film-strips and closed-circuit TV teaching aids, and remain untouched. Compactly described, this big (#x#") paperback has # closely printed pages with hundreds of excellent illustrations. It has no index, but the contents page is quite comprehensive. The appendices include a booklist, periodicals from all over the world, and a chart of rocks and minerals. Then there are # pages ol iclcrcnce tables, conversions and the like, and even a rule, a protractor. and a # degree and a # degree triangle. Ihe tone and purpose of the book are best demonstrated by drawings. The scale in Fig. I is amazingly sensitive, and can be made as accurate as an expensive care in calibrating it. The small bolt (it happens that one from an Erector set is just right) gives you the finest of fine adjustments. The bearing, a fine needle resting on the edges of two razor blades, is about as frictionless as a bearing can be (but see Fig. #) and the long lever arm makes small movements easy to see. You calibrate it by setting it to the zero point and then hanging weights made of aluminium (sic) from the pointer. "A common gauge of foil," says the book, "weighs # mg. for # sq, cm. of area." Having gotten your gross divisions with these, you proceed to subdivide as much as your patience and your steady hand permit. This scale will readily weigh a single human hair, or. with a tiny foil bucket (you'll have to reset it to zero) almost microscopic beads of liquid. Z ehnder balance (and I wish I knew who and where Mr. Z is so I could shake his hand) will do more than a boy scout knife plus Mr. Clean. If you look carefully at the drawing you will see that the large cork rests only on the points of the two pins. No matter how carefully you look you won't see that they rest on two slips of glass placed on top of the wooden base, because I couldn't figure out how to draw them. The balance beam is a knitting needle. The sensitivity adjustment lies in the amount the pins are pushed through the cork. Now listen to this: # mg. (the weight of a short piece of fine cotton thread) on one arm of the beam will rotate it about # cm. (about ##" -- enough to see easily.) If an experiment yields an almost immeasurably small jet of gas, this balance will detect it. A lighted match below the beam will demonstrate air convection. The beam is an insulated conductor, and therefore can be electrified, showing the slightest trace of static electricity. IF Magnetized, it becomes a dip needle. It is also a galvanometer: a coil of # turns of copper wire, connected to a thermocouple, and held near the beam, will cause the beam to rotate appreciably when the thermocouple is heated with a candle, delivering about .#I volt. Attach a tiny mirror to one end of the beam, and project a beam of light off it to a distant wall, and the balance will detect the current generated when you grasp the thermocouple with your fingers! Fig. # is drawn from various parts of the book. The upright is half of one of those flat brass telescopic curtain rods, screwed to the wooden base. The ring is made of coat-hanger wire with the ends folded back on themselves to make a close sliding fit inside the upright. (This is my own design; the book uses one of those snivvics which clamps on to the light-bulb to hold a lampshade. I was unable to find one locally without the whole lampshade attached.) Note the three segments of asbestos tape on the ring; these keep the dish from cracking along the line of the ring. The alcohol lamp is made of an ink bottle. The tube is half a brass rifle cartridge soldered to a hole in the bottle cap. The inset shows how the other half of the cartridge can make a stopper for the lamp. If no cartridge is available, an adequate tube can be made with tin from a can formed around a dowel and soldered. The dish is the top of an old electric-light bulb, and the book gives most explicit instructions for salvaging great wealth from these little-regarded treasures. A light bulb, variously cut and serviced, will give you a funnel, a flask, a set of ready-made electrodes, and a good many other things. You can cut one by scoring it with a three-cornered file, tieing a string along the score, soaking it with kerosene and setting it afire. When the fire goes out, plunge it into ice water. You may also use a soldering iron, run along the scratch. The sharp edge can be treated by playing a fine gas flame along it. I wish I had space to describe the demonstration gears made of pop-bottle caps, or the optical illusions, or the plant bio experiments, or the astronomy demonstrations, or -- oh, hell, go buy the Everybody had to be useful. If he was totally useless in every respect -- there was still a use! to IF Plan of Man... but he could not remember his crime. Around his neck he wore the iron collar that contained an explosive charge that would destroy him if he tried escape; but what the deed vas that had put it there he could only remember in tantalizing fragments. With his fellow convicted Risk, service of the Plan. Still a prisoner, he traveled aboard the luxurious private subtrain car of The Planner told him that his job was to develop a "jetiess drive' -- a new space propulsion system that would permit the forces of the Plan to expand into the Reefs of Space, the half-mythical bodies that circled the solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. of the spaceling, the strange creature from the distant Reefs that lived on energy and itself seemed to have a "jetless drive". Arriving at his destination, Ryeland was astonished to find that he himself was in charge of a whole project under the Plan of Man -- although a convicted Risk, wearing the iron collar, he had authority over high-ranking officers and important research workers. Yet there was something strange about his authority, almost as though he were not so much the conductor of an experimental project as its subject. And there was the chronic, nagging worry of his past always in his mind! For he could not remember the parts of his life that should have been crystal-clear...  IF Vil R yeland's new authority as leader of the Attack Team did nothing to endear him to his colleagues. He didn't care. He had work enough to keep him busy. Oddball Oporto made himself useful. The little man's talent for lightning computing saved Ryeland a good deal of time. Not that Oporto was faster than a computer. He wasn't; but Oporto had a distinct advantage over the binary digital types in that problems didn't have to be encoded and taped, then decoded. Still, in the final analysis there were not too many problems to compute. In fact, that was the big problem: Ryeland could find no handle by which to grasp the question of the jetless drive. But Oporto made himself useful in other ways as well. He had a prying nose for news, for example, which kept Ryeland informed of what was going on in the Team Project. 'Fleemer's got the sulks," he reported one day. "Holed up in his room, doesn't come out." "AH right," said Ryeland absently. "Say, where's my Physical Constants of SteadyState Equations?" "It's indexed under #," Oporto said patiently. "The word is that Fleemer is having an argument with the Machine. Messages are going back and forth, back and forth, all the time." "What?" Ryeland looked up, momentarily diverted from the task of scribbling out a library requisitioa for the book he needed. "Nobody can argue with the Machine!" Oporto shrugged. "I don't know what you'd call it, then." "General Fleemer is filing reports," Ryeland said firmly. He beckoned to Faith, brooding in a corner. The Togetherness girl came eagerly forward, saw the slip, looked glum, shrugged and went off to get the book. "Sure," said Oporto. "Say, have you heard anything from Donna Creery?" Ryeland shook his head. "I hear she's in Port Canaveral." Ryeland snapped: "That's her problem. No doubt the Planner's daughter has plenty of occasions for off-Earth trips." "No doubt," agreed Oporto, "but -- " "But you could mind your business," said Ryeland, closing the discussion. Faith came back with the book. Ryeland verified a couple of figures and turned a sheet of calculations over to Oporto. "Here, solve these for me. It'll give you something to do," he said. He stood up, looking absently around the room. This was his A Section, devoted to the Hoyle Effect. He had a whole sub-Team of workers going here. Still, he thought, it was a waste of time. "No sweat," said Oporto cheerfully, handing back to the completed equations. "Thanks." Ryeland glanced at them, then dumped them on the desk of one of the other workers. There wasn't much to be done but routine; he could leave it to the others now. That was why it was a waste of time. All the prior art was in hand and digested; it was only a matter of checking out the math now. Then he could answer the Machine's questions -- but in fact, he knew, he could pretty well answer them now. Under what conditions could hydrogen growth occur? That was easy. Basic theory gave most of the answer; an analysis of the data from Lescure's expedition in the Cristobal Colon gave a clue to the rest. And what was the possibility of halting or reversing the formation? That was easy too. Humans could have little control over the processes that could build stars. With finite equipment, in finite time, the probability was zero. But it was a measure of the Machine's -- desperation? Was that a word you could apply to the Machine -- a measure of the Machine's, well, urgency that it could even ask such questions as these. Ryeland said uncomfortably: Come on, Oporto. Let's go take a look at the spaceling." A nd that was B Section, and it was going badly indeed. Jetless drive! It was impossible, that was all. If Ryeland hadn't had the maddening spectacle of the spaceling right there before him, he would have sworn that the laws were right. For every action, Newton had stated centuries before, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That law of motion accounted for every movement of every creature on Earth. The cilia of the first swimming paramecium propelled the creature forward by propelling an equal mass of water backward. It was the same with the thrust of a propeller, in water or in air. Rockets thrust forward by reaction, as the mass of the ejected jet's hot molecules went one way, the vessel the rockets drove went another. Action and reaction! It was an equation that was easy to write -- Mass times Acceleration equals Mass-prime times Acceleration-prime -- and it was an equation that was hard to doubt. But it did not happen to be true. The evidence of the dazed little creature from space made a liar out of Newton. The spaceling's trick of floating without visible reaction confounded the greatest genius the world has ever known. The spaceling showed no reaction mass at all. Whatever it was that permitted the spaceling to hover, it (call it 'X") did not: Disturb the currents of the air; affect plumb-bobs hung all about; register on photographic film; discharge a gold-leaf electroscope; disturb a compass; produce a measurable electric, magnetic or electronic field; add to the weight of the cage when the entire structure was supported on a scale; make any audible sound; affect the basal metabolism of the spaceling itself; or produce a discoverable track in a cloud chamber. "X" did, on the other hand, do a few things. It affected the "brain waves" of IP the spaceling; there was a distincIt seemed to have a worrisome effect on certain other mammals. This was noticed by chance when a cat happened to wander into the rocket pit; when the spaceling lifted itself the cat was "spooked", leaping about stiff-legged, fur bristling, eyes aglare. And finally, it worked. Whatever "X" was, it lifted the spaceling with great ease. They even wrapped the spaceling in chains once, more than six hundred pounds of them. And as if amused the spaceling floated with all six hundred pounds for an hour, purring to itself. It was maddening. Still, thought Ryeland, though the comfort was small -- at least the thing seemed healthier. The wounds were healing. The small symbiotic animals that were left seemed to survive. The spaceling showed life and energy. Donna Creery would be pleased. N obody else seemed very pleased with Ryeland, though. General Fleemer stayed in his room, venturing forth only occasionally to make sardonic comments and get in the way. The other high brass of the Team didn't have Fleemer's ready escape, since they had specific tasks; but they made sure to be as unpleasant to Ryeland as they could manage. Only Major Chatterji was affable at all, and that was second nature to him. He came by every hour on the hour for a report. He was very little trouble. If Ryeland was busy, the major waited inconspicuously m the background. If Ryeland was free, the major asked a minimum of questions and then departed. Ryeland was pretty sure that all the information went, first, to the Machine and, second, almost as promptly to General Fleemer; but he could see no reason why he should attempt to interfere with the process. And he could also see no reason to believe he would be successful if ho tried. He kept busy. Oporto said one afternoon: "Say, it's definite about your girl friend. Ryeland blinked up from his papers. "Who?" He was genuinely confused for a moment; then ho remembered Oporto's previous remarks. "You mean Miss Creery?' "Miss Creery, yeah." The littlo man grinned. "She's off to the Moon. Her daddy, too." "That's nice," said Ryeland. Carefully he kept his voice noncommittal, though he wondered who ho was fooling. No matter how well ho diguised his interest from Oporto, he couldn't disguise it from himself: Something inside him reacted to the thought of Donna Creery. Oporto sprawled lazily over Ryeland's desk. "Well, I don't know if it is so nice, Steve," he said seriously. "Maybe they ought to stay home and attend to business. Did you hear about the Paris tube collapse?" "What?" Ryeland wearily put down the sheaf of reports and blinked at his friend. His eyes smarted. He rubbed them, wondering if he needed sleep. But that # didn't seem reasonable, he figured; he'd had at least eight hours sleep in the previous forty-eight. In any case, he didn't have the time; so he put the thought out of his mind and said: "What the devil are you talking about, Oporto?" The little man said: "Just what I said. The Paris subtrain to Finland. The tube collapse. More than a hundred people missing -- and that means dead, of course. When a tube gives out a hundred miles down you aren't 'missing.' " Rycland said, starrted: "But that isn't possible! I mean, T know the math for those tubes. They can collapse. all right, but not vithout plenty of warning. They can't break down without three hours of field degeneration -- plenty of time to halt transits." Oporto shrugged. "A hundred dead people would be glad to know that. Steve." he said. Ryeland thought for a second "Well," he said wearily, "maybe you're right, maybe the Planner ought to be around to keep an eye on things like that... Oh, hello, Major." Chatterji came smiling in, peering amiably through his gold glasses. "I wondered if there was anything to report, Mr. Ryeland." While Ryeland searched through the papers on his desk, Oporto said: "We were just talking about the Paris trouble. Major." Chatterji's brown eyes went op' que. There was a marked silence. Ryeland took it in, and realized that Machine Major Chatterji was concerned about the tube failure between Paris and the Finland center. Odd, he thought, why should Chatterji care? But he was too weary to pursue the subject further. He found the requisition he was looking for and silently passed it across the Chatterji. Tb.e major glanced at it casually, then intently. His crcw-cut black hair seemed to stand on end. "But, dear Rycland!" he protested, blinking throng: I In's gold-rimrned glasses. "This equipment -- " "I've ch-ecked it with the Machine," Rycland said obstin.ately. "Here," He showed the tcletane to Major Chatterji. Acth;P PequeFt approved. Action. Concert with Major Chatterji. Information. Power sources at Point Cii'cle Black not adequate to demands. "But, my d-.ar PyelandT The major's expression was tortured. "B isn't only a niattcr of power sources. Think of the r-'er cons'ricrabons!" "What the Plan requires, the Plan shall have," Ryeland quoted, beginning to enjoy himself. "Of course, of course. But -- " The major studied the list. "You have enough rdrctronic equipment here to run a u'dversity lab," he wailed "And some of it is dangerous. After the, uh, accident Mr. Oporto was talkine about, surely you under stand that we can't take chances." Ry eland stared. "What does that have to do with the Team project?" The major said angrily, "The Plan can't stand accidents, Mr. Ryeland! This equipment creates radiation hazards, if nothing else, and IF there are eighty thousand people in Points Circle Black, Triangle Gray, Crescent Green and Square silver alone. They can't be exposed to this sort of thing!" Ryeland tapped the teletape meaningfully. "Oh," sighed the major, "if the Machine approves..." He thought for a moment, then brightened. "I have it! An orbiting rocket!" Ryeland was taken aback. "What?" "An orbiting rocket filled with all the equipment you want," Chatterji said eagerly. "Why not? Everything run by remote control. I can requisition one for you at once, Mr. Ryeland! And you can fill it with all the dangerous equipment you like -- what do we care what happens to any wandering spacelings, eh?" He winked and giggled. "Well," said Ryeland doubtfully, "we could do it that way." "Of course we could! We'll arrange a TV repeater circuit with remote-controlled apparatus. You work in your lab, the equipment is out in space. Perform any experiments you like. And that way," he beamed, "if you blow the lab up you destroy only one ship, not all of MJ." He bustled off. I t was astonishing what the Plan of Man could accomplish. The rocket was loaded, launched and orbited in forty-eight hours. Ryeland never saw it. He monitored the installation of the equipment he wanted via TV circuits, tested the instruments, gave the okay -- and watched the fire-tailed bird leap off its launching pad through a cathode screen. At once he put it to work. The only thing they had learned about the force the spaceling generated, what the Planner had called the "jetless drive", waa that it was indetectable. But that in itself was a great piece of knowledge. Ryeland's researchers had turned up another fact -- a highenergy nuclear reaction which turned out less energy than went into it -- and it was just possible, it was more than possible, it was perhaps a fact, that that missing energy was not missing at all, but merely not detectable. Like the energy of the spaceling... Ryeland determined to recreate the nuclear reactions which were involved. Until the morning that the Togetherness girl woke him with news: "Rise and shine, Steve," she sang, bringing him his breakfast. "Guess what! General Fleemer's going to be at the Teamwork conference today." Steve got groggily to his feet. "That's his privilege," he said thickly, and looked at her, young, pretty, fresh -- though she had been with him, tirelessly running errands, through half the night, "Don't you ever get tired?" he asked sourly. "Oh, no, Steve! Eat your breakfast." She perched on his chair, watching him, and said earnestly: "We're not here to get tired, Steve. We have our job! We Togethernesa girls are the connecting wires that hold the Plan of Man's circuit together." He gaped at her, but she was serious. "That's right' she nodded. "The Plan of Man depends as much on us as on the transistors and condensers and capacitors -- that's you and the other brass. Everyone, is important! Don't forget, Steve: 'To each his own job -- and his own job only. " "I won't forget," he said, and wearily drank his citrus juice. But the girl had something on her mind, he saw. She was waiting for an opportunity to speak to him. "Well? What is it?" She seemed embarrassed. "Oh, "Uh -- it's just that -- well, there's talk, Steve. The girls were wondering about something." "For heaven's sake, say it!" "We wondered," she said primly, "if our Team really had anything to do with these accidents." Ryeland blinked and rubbed his eyes. But rubbing his eyes didn't change anything; the girl still sat there with the mildly embarrassed, mildly apologetic expression. "Accidents? Faith, what are you talking about?" "The Paris-Finland tube," she recited. "The Bombay power plant explosion. The cargo-jet crash in Nevada. You know." "No, I didn't know. Half those things I never heard of. Oporto's been falling down on the job." "There are others, Steve. And what the girls are saying -- " She paused. "I only wondered if it was true. They say our Team project has caused them. They even say that you, Steve -- " "That I what?" "Oh, I suppose it's ridiculous. General Fleemer said it wasn't really true, anyway, that you had something to do with it. But they say you were involved in planning the subtrains..." He grumbled, "They say some weird things. Excuse me while I dress, will you?" He couldn't put it out of his mind. It was foolish, he mought testily. How did rumors like that start? At the day's Teamwork conference, sure enough. General Fleemer had done them the unusual honor of attending. Ryeland scowled at him thoughtfully, then remembered the silly rumor. "Before we get started," he demanded, "has anybody heard anything about our work causing accidents?" A dozen blank expressions met his stare. Then the head of the computer section coughed and said hesitantly, "Well, there was some talk, Mr. Ryeland." "What kind of talk?" The computerman shrugged. "Just talk. One of the data-encoders had heard from a cousin who heard from somebody else. You know how it goes. The story is that our work here has upset the radio-control circuits, heaven knows how." "That's preposterous!" Steve exploded. "What the devil do they mean by that?" He stopped himself. It wasn't the computerman's fault, after all. "Well," he said grimly, "if anybody hears anything else like that, I want it reported to me!" Heads nodded; every head but General Fleemer's. He barked testily: "Ryeland! Are we going to gossip about accidents, or is the Team going to chart its course for the day?" Ryeland swallowed his temper. In spite of the fact that Donna Creer had put him in charge of the Team, General Flecmer's seniority made him a bad man to tangle with. "All right," said Ryeland, "let's get on with it." Then he brightened. "I saw your report, Lescure. Want to elaborate on it?" Colonel Lescure cleared his throat. "After a suggestion by Mr. Ryeland," he said, nodding, "we instituted a new series of X-ray examinations of the spaceling. By shadowgraphing its interior and using remote-chromotography analytic techniques I have discovered a sort of crystalline mass at the conflux of its major nervous canals. This is in accordance with the prediction made by Mr. Ryeland." Fleemer demanded harshly: "What does it mean?" Ryeland said eagerly: "It means ' we're making headway! There had to be some sort of such arrangement for controlling and directing the jetless drive. After yesterday's computer run, and some further calculations Oporto did for me, I asked Colonel Lescure to make the tests. He did -- on overtime, as you see. "What this means," he said, beginning to lecture, "is that we have found where the spaceling's force is generated and directed. And there's one other thing we learned from yesterday's calculations. Phase-rule analysis indicates zero possibility of any electromagnetic or gravitic force. I have the report here, ready for transmission to the Machine." General Fleemer nodded slowly, looking at Ryeland. After a moment he said, "Does it account for what happened to the mining colonies in Antarctica?" Ryeland was puzzled. "I don't understand... "No? I refer to the explosion of the power reactor last night, which destroyed them, at a very great loss to the Plan of Man. Not the only loss, Ryeland. A spaceship has been lost through a failure of its helical field accelerator. The same helical field which was involved in the reactor explosion -- and in other accidents, Ryeland. The same field which you helped to design." "The design is not to blame," Ryeland protested desperately. "If there have been accidents, they must be due to mechanical failure or human error or deliberate sabotage -- " "Exactly!" "How could I be to blame for accidents in Antarctica and a hundred miles down and out beyond the Moon?" "That's exactly what the Machine will want to know." "Perhaps it is only chance," he suggested wildly. "Coincidence. Accidents have happened in series before -- " "When?" "I don't remember, I -- I can't recall." He stammered and gulped, and walked away. The veil of gray fog across his past was thicker. Everything except his science was a swirl of unreality and contradiction. Alone in his room, he tried again to come to grips with that old riddle of the three days missing from his life. What had the therapists suspected that he had done in that lost interval? Why had they expected him to know anything about a call from Dan Horrock, or about fusorians and pyropods and spacelings or about how to design a reactionless drive? Lescure's story had given him clues, but they were too fragmentary to make much sense. Horrock had left the Cristobal Colon with unauthorized specimens and descriptions of the life of space. Did the Machine suspect that he had been in contact with Ryeland, before he was recaptured and consigned to the Body Bank? Ryeland turned the puzzle over, and saw no light. According to Donna Creery, there had really been three days between the knocking on his door and the arrival of the Plan Police. Had the knocking he remembered really been Horrock? If so, what had erased his memory? He stared at the wall and probed through the fog in his mind. He tried to remember Horrock, still perhaps in his uniform, soiled from his flight, perhaps bleeding from some wound, panting with terror and exhaustion, lugging the black canvas space bag that held his stolen notes and specimens -- The images had become queerly real. Were they all imagination? Had Horrock brought him some information vital to the invention of a jetless drive? He couldn't recall. IF He fell at last into a restless sleep, into a nightmare in which he and Horrock were in flight from the Plan Police. T he next morning Ryeland went directly from his room to the spaceling's cage in the rocket pit -- and stopped, appalled. The spaceling lay crushed and bleeding in its cage. Ryeland ran to the cage and let himself in. The creature had grown to know him. It lay wrapped in a fading glow of misty green, eyes dulled; but as he entered its eyes brightened angrily. It lifted off the floor. Suddenly apprehensive, Ryeland dodged outside and slammed the cage door -- just in time. The spaceling darted toward him with flashing speed. The cage rocked as she struck the do Jng door. Anchor chains clanked. Fresh blood ran down the bars, and a flan of golden fur was torn loose. She collapsed again, mewing piteously. Ryeland felt the first real rage he had known in years. He spun on his heel. "Gottling!" he bawled. "What the devil have you been up to?' The colonel appeared, looking sardonically self-satisfied. "Mr. Ryeland," he nodded. Ryeland took a firm grip on himself. Gottling looked more like a skull than ever, the radar horns giving a Satanic expression to a face that was cold and cruel enough to begin with. But those radar horns were not merely ornament. Team leader or not, Ryeland was a risk. The cold. complacent smile that twisted the corners of Gottling's thin lips was enough of a reminder of their relative status. One touch of the radar button on Gottling's harness and it was the end of Ryeland. But this was too much. Ryeland blazed: "You've been torturing the thing again!" "I suppose so," Gottling agreed mildly. "Damn you! My orders were -- " "Shut up, Risk!" There was no smile at all now. Gottling thrust a telctape at Ryeland. "Before you go too far, read this!" Ryeland hesitated, then took the tape. It read: Information. Agreed present line of investigation unneccessarily slow. Information. Danger of additional accidents possibly related Ryeland method of research must be investigated. Information. Possibility Ryeland engaged in direct sabotage subtrains, reactors, ion drives. Action. Direction of Team project returned to General Fleemer. Action. Supplementary lines to be initiated at discretion Colonel Gottling. Ryeland stared at it, dazed. The Machine had reversed itself againi But in truth it wasn't his own position, difficult though it had suddenly become, that concerned him. It was the spaceling. "Supplementary lines!" he thundered. "Man, you'll kill her!" Gottling shrugged, contemplating the spaceling. It lay gasping on the steel floor, looking up at them. n "Perhaps I will not wait for her to die," the colonel said meditatively. "Pascal does not wish to perform a vivisection, but he would hardly dare refuse the orders of the Machine, Even he." He smiled frostily and commented: "You are all alike, Pascal Lescure and the Planner's daughter and you. Risk. Blood frightens you. But pain is not contagious. You need not fear to observe it in others, it will not infect you. Indeed," he beamed, "there is much to learn in the pain of others." Ryeland said tightly: "I'm going to report this to Donna Creery." The colonel widened his eyes. "Oh? You need the Planner's daughter to fight your battles?" He allowed a silence to hang over them for a moment. Then, forgivingly: "But it does not matter, for you will not find that possible, Ryeland. Miss Creery is on the Moon. So you see, Risk, what happens to the spaceling from now on is entirely up to me." R yeland flung open the door of his room and headed for the teletype in the corner. Oporto and the Togetherness girl were there. He paused, distracted for a moment; he seemed to have interrupted something, but what? It didn't matter. He barked: "Oporto! What's Donna Creery's call number?" Oporto coughed. "Gee, Steve. I don't know. Three? Fifteen?" "Cut it out, Oporto," Ryeland warned dangerously. "Three." Ryeland thumped the teletype keyboard: Query. Permission for direct hookup communication Donna Creery station #. The teletype hardly hesitated: Information. Refused. "Well," Oporto said reasonably, "what did you expect? The Machine can't have its circuits tied up with -- " "Shut up." Ryeland was typing again, demanding a connection with the Planner himself. Information. Refused. "You see, Steve? You aren't getting anywhere. What's got you so steamed up ?" Ryeland told him in half a dozen sentences what was getting him so steamed up. "Oh, that's too bad," murmured the Togetherness girl. "The poor thing." Oporto seconded: "Tough. Well, what are you going to do? We're only Risks. We can't buck Gottling and all those." He sneezed, and complained: "See, Steve, you're gedding me all upset. I bet I'm catching a code." Ryeland looked at him blankly; be had not heard what Oporto had said, and hardly knew the other two were in the room with him. What could he do? Cut off from the Planner or his daughter, he had no chance to keep Gottling from murdering the spaceling. That was the end of the project. If what the Planner had told him was true, it actualIF ly endangered the Plan itself; for the jetless drive, the spaceling's queer method of propulsion, was important to the safety of all the Plan. Yet the Planning Machine would not allow him to -- He blinked and the room came into focus. "The Planning Machine!" he said aloud. "What? Steve," moaned Oporto, "now what are you going to do?" But Ryeland didn't answer. He sat at the keyboard of the machine and with a steady hand tapped out an account of what had happened. Colonel Gottling had deliberately controverted the orders of Donna Creery and the Machine itself. The spaceling was in danger. The Plan itself was threatened. He finished, and waited. And waited. And waited for long minutes, while Oporto and the girl whispered behind him. It was incredible that the Machine should take so long to answer! Ryeland asked himself feverishly: Was it turned on, was the wire cut, could it be possible that the Machine's circuits were so overloaded that the message was not received? He was actually bending over, hardly aware of what he was doing, to be sure that the machine was properly plugged in when abruptly it whirred and rattled. Ryeland was up like a shot. But the message was unbelievably short. It said only: R. "Received and understood," Oporto said sympathetically from behind him. "Gee, Steve. That's all? WeU, that's the Machine for you. It isn't up to us to question -- Steve. Hey. Steve! Where are you going?" But Ryeland was already gone. R yeland hurried down the corridors to General Fleemer's quarters. He had wasted time and it was now late; he would be waking the general up, but he didn't care about that, not now. He tapped on the door and then, without oausing, banged hard. "A minute, a minute," mumbled a grumpy voice. A wait. Then the door was flung open. General Fleemer was in lounging pajamas, bright purple tunic, striped purple and scarlet pants. The collar and cuffs were picked out in silver braid, and the room behind him was silver. Silver walls, silver-mounted furniture on a silvery rug. It was a startling effect. Fleemer growled irritably: "Ryeland? What the devil do you want?" "I have to talk to you. General." He didn't wait for an invitation, but slipped past him into the room. Then something stopped him and he paused, stared, distracted even from the important mission he was on. There was a statue by the fireplace, a bright silver statue of a girl. But it moved! It opened silver eyelids and looked at him. With pink-tinged lips, like metallic copper in a silver face, it said: "Who is this one?" "Go in the other room!" the general barked. The silver statue shrugged and stood up. It was no statue but a girl; the motion revealed it as she stared at Ryeland and left. Ryeland blinked. Dusted with silver to look like living metal, even her hair silver -- the general had a remarkable private life. But it was no business of Ryeland's at this moment. He said briskly: 'Sir, Colonel Gottling is about to destroy the spaceling. I'm afraid he is deliberately trying to sabotage the project.' Suddenly the general was no longer a cross, sleepy little fussbudget. His cat's eyes slitted down, his face abruptly became stone. "Go on," he said after a second. "Why -- that's all there is, sir. Isn't it enough? If Colonel Gottling goes ahead with vivisection it will kill the creature, I'm certain. Miss Creery left specific orders -- " "Wait," said the general, but did not invite him to sit down. He turned his back to Ryeland and strode over to his desk. He pressed a button on his desk phone and leaned over to yell into it. "Gottling? Get down to my quarters. Ryeland's here." Mumble-mumble from the desk phone. It was directional; Ryeland couldn't understand the wo.ds and wasn't meant to. "On the double!" the general barked, cutting off discussion, and broke the connection. Without looking at Ryeland he slumped in a chair, shading his eyes with his hands, and remained there until there was a crisp knock at the door. Colonel Gottling walked in. He did not seem disturbed, not in the least. And he was not alone. Machine Major Chatterji came smiling and bowing behind him. "What a lovely room, General! Oh, really lovely. It takes exquisite taste to transform our dreary barracks into -- " "Shut up." General Fleemer stood. Ryeland waited, poised for whatever excuse Gottling might offer, ready to confront him with the facts as soon as the general began his accusation. But the general did not begin. The general did not speak to Gottling at all. He said: "All right, Chatterji, have you got the orders?" "Yes, General. Certainly! Here you are. I knew you'd be wanting them, so -- " The general moved slightly and Chatterji was still. Fleemer took a sheet of teletype communication paper from the major's hand and passed it to Ryeland without comment. Ryeland glanced puzzlcdly at it. Then he felt a sudden quick burning sen.sation, as though a knife had reached him unsuspected. The message said: Information. Ryeland, Steven, Risk, change of status approved. Action. Subject will therefore without delay. peated aloud. He shook his head, dazed. "But -- there's got to be some mistake here, because, look, "You mean the Body Bank, as it is otherwise known." General Fleemer nodded wisely. "That's correct, IF and that is where you're going. You were perfectly right about Gottling sabotaging the Project, you see. Your only mistake was in thinking that he was alone," IX H eaven was on the island of Cuba. The subtrain took nearly an hour to get there. Ryeland hardly noticed. They rode in a rrray steel ball, far less luxurious than the Planner's private car. When they stopped, Ryeland, still dazed, still shocked, got out and blinked at a massive concrete archway over a steel gate. The letter in the concrete read: Resurrection under the Plan The station was gray concrete. Air ducts blew a clammy breath at them. A guard in white, a red heart stitched on the breast of his tunic, came forward to take charge. The major who had convoyed Ryeland's detail, tvventytwo new cadavers for the Body Bank, turned them over gratefully and went back into the subtrain without a look. He didn't like this escort detail. No one did. It was a reminder of mortality; even a machine major could be made to realize that one bad blunder, or one bad break, could put him in Heaven too. "Come on!" bawled the guard, and apathetically the twenty-two walking collections of spare parts followed him through the gate. A narrow corridor. A long rectangular room, with wooden benches. Ryeland sat and waited and, one by one, they were admitted to a smaller room. When it was his turn Ryeland walked through the door and a girl grasped his arm, thrusting it under the black-light. Her hair was red, the same bright red as the heart that was stitched on her uniform. Under the light his tattoo glowed faintly. She read off his name and number in a rapid drone. "Steven Ryeland," she said in the same continuous drone, "when you entered this gate you leave life behind as an individual you have failed to justify your place in the Plan the tissues of -- " She yawned sharply. She shook her head and grinned. "Excuse me. Where was I? The tissues of your body however may still serve the Plan before you enter have you anything to say?" Ryeland thought. What was there to say? He shook his head. "Go ahead, then. Through that door," said the girl. Behind Ryeland the door clanged with a steel finality. irst there were tests. Ryeland was shipped, scrubbed weighed, measured. X-rayed, bloodtested, tissue-tested, ascaulted, palped and all but sniffed and tasted. A bit of his flesh was snipped and whisked to a complex bench where a team of girls put it through a process of staining and microscopy. From their studies a genetic map was made of his chromosomes, every allele and allomorph in place, and coded into binary symbols which were stamped on his collar. It was interesting. Transplants of body organs did not survive, not even with suppressants, if the donor and subject were too different in their genetic makeup. Antibodies formed. The new tissue was attacked by the environment it found itself in. It died. So, usually, did the patient. The more delicate the tissue involved, the closer the genetic resemblance had to be. It was an old story. Any cornea can be imbedded in any other eye; the tissues are crude and simple, mostly water. blood from one to another -- blood is a tissue little more complex than the cornea. But the more highly specialized members are transferable, without suppressants, only between identical twins. Suppressants -- something like the allergy-controlling pharmaceuticals which once helped hold down hay fever -- can make the range of tolerance broader; but, even so, genetic patterns must be matched as closely as possible. It was good that it was interesting. Ryeland was able to keep his mind on it. He did not find himself dwelling on the fact that he was now in the position of the spaceling under Gottling. He did not have to contemplate the prospect of what was essentially (however gentle, however carefully anesthetized for him) the Death of a Thousand Cuts. And then they turned him loose, without warning. He had expected a cell. He was He tripped over a tuft of grass and, blinking in warm Caribbean afternoon sun, found himself in a broad park, with trees and comfortablelooking cabins. He started forward, then happened to think of something and returned to the guard. 'What do I do now? Who do I report to?" "Nobody," said the guard, gently closing the door. "Nobody at all, any more." R yeland walked down a broad green lane toward the glint of water, it was as good a direction to go as any. He had never in all his life before had the experience of being without orders. It was almost more disturbing than the sure prospect of dismemberment that lay before him. He was so absorbed in the feeling that he hardly heard someone calling to him until the man raised his voice. "You! Hey, you new fellow! Come back here!" Ryeland turned. The man who was calling him was about fifty years old -- the prime of life. He should have been a husky, bronzed creature with all his hair. Statistically he should hardly have needed even glasses. Forty good years should still be ahead of him at least. But the man who limp-stumped up to Ryeland had none of these things. He was totally bald. (In a moment, as the sunlight caught it, Ryeland saw that what had seemed to be the man's scalp was a plastic covering.) He walked with a shoulder-cane -- almost a crutch. And what he walked on were not fleshand-blood feet but prosthetic appliances. One eye was only a patch; the other was drawn into a squint by another area of pink plastic that covered the place where once he had had an ear. "You! Did you just come in?" he cried. His voice was deep and vibrant; that, at least, he had kept. Ryeland said, keeping his expression polite with some difficulty, "Yes, that's right. My name is Steve Ryeland." "Never mind that. Do you play bridge?" The difficult expression collapsed for a second, but Ryeland got it back. "I'm afraid not." "Damn." When the man scowled it pointed up another peculiarity of his face. He had no eyebrows. "How about chess?" "Yes, a little." "Speak up!" the man barked, turning his good ear irritably to Ryeland. "T said yes!" "Well, that's worth something," the man said, grudging the words. "Um. Maybe you could learn bridge, hey? We're a good house. No rough stuff, no stealing. And no basket cases." He said proudly: "I'm the senior inmate in the house. Take a look at me. See? I've got plenty left." Ryeland said slowly, "You mean I can pick out the house I live in? I don't know the rules here yet." "There aren't any rules. Oh," the man shrugged, "no fights resulting in bodily injury, no hazardous sports -- they salvage you total for that sort of thing. You know. What you've got, it doesn't belong to you any more. It's the Plan's and you're supposed to take care of it." He hitched himself forward on his shoulder-cane. "Well, what about it? You look all right to me. Take my advice and come in with us. Never mind what the other houses say -- those Jupiters will be talking about their pingpong table, and what good is that when tomorrow morning you maybe won't have what to play pingpong with!" He grinned confidentially, revealing a set of casually placed artificial teeth. Ryeland went with the one-eyed man, whose name turned out to be Whitehurst. The man was a good salesman, but he had not exaggerated the value of choosing the right hut. Ryeland could see that for himself; some cottages had a rundown, disreputable air, the inmates lounging around, surly and bored. Whitehurst's house was busy if nothing else. It was amazing, but Ryeland found Heaven rather pleasant. There was food -- good food, Whitehurst told him proudly, no synthetics or retreads! (The tissues had to be kept up.) There was plenty of leisure. (The patient had to be always in shape for major surgery.) There was... well... freedom, said Whitehurst, almost embarrassed as he Ryeland found out that it was so. If Heaven was a jail, at least the walls were out of sight. There was no fear of making a mistake and falling to ruin; there was no farther to fall. The physical plant was ideal. Small cottages dotted a green landscape. Palms stood on green hills. There was a grove of oaks and IF cedars by a lake, and the lake contained actual fish. The tropic sky was a permanent milky blue, with high-piled cumulus to give it life. Whitehurst's cottage called themselves the Dixie Presidents. No one remembered what doomed antiquarian, generations before, had selected the name, but it was the custom to name each house and succeeded inmates kept the names; it was a tradition. The Dixie Presidents were an all-male cottage, by choice. It was up to the inmates. Not all the houses were so monastic. There were as many women as men in Heaven, and the co-ed cottages were given to wild sounds late at night. But that was up to the inmates too. Listening to the evening conversation of his fellow inmates, Ryeland found a few things which struck him as odd. The cottage across the way was occupied by a family group. Strange! Their name was Minton -- Mr. Minton, Mrs. Minton and their five grown children. What mass crime had the Minton family committed to be scrapped en masse? It was queer. The principle that lay behind the Body Bank he knew well. It had been explained to him in detail on his travel orders, even if he had been the one man alive under the Plan who didn't know all about it from infancy. Each human under the Plan of Man was required to make a contribution toward the good of all. If inefficiency, malevolence or carelessness kept him from doing what he was asked, he would then be permitted to contribute in another way. He would be scrapped. His limbs and organs would be put to the use of more valuable citizens, replacing parts damaged through accident or disease. It was a project more attractive to the recipient than to the donor, of course. Yet it did have a sort of rough justice, and Ryeland thought he could bring himself to tolerate whatever might happen -- the world's good was more important than his own! And yet... One thing did bother him. In hii life he had known or heard of a fair number of persons who had been scrapped for the salvage of their parts in the Body Bank. And yet he could not remember ever, not even once, having encountered a man who had benefited from these organs... Now at last, when it was too late to matter, Ryeland had time to return to the riddle of his three missing days. He was tormented with the possibility that he had once known a precious secret which could somehow transform the Plan of Man -- if he could just recall it. That night after he had watched the bridge game for a few minutes he lay trying to remember. Had there been a knocking twice on his door, on Friday and again on Monday? If Horrock had really come to him, what message could he have brought? Even if a jetless drive could be invented, how could it threaten the Plan? Who besides Donderevo was free from the Machine? He found no answers. The fog was thicker in his memory. Even the fat, apologetic face of Dr. Thrale was growing dim. He no longer flinched when he remembered the cold electrodes clamped on his body. He fell asleep and dreamed that he had discovered a jetless drive. It was a broomstick. He rode it through a jungle of five-pointed tinsel stars, with General Fleemer astride a spaceling close behind him. Fleemer was goading and spurring the spaceling, and it was screaming horribly. an eveille! Reveille! Everybody IVup!" Ryeland woke up with a start; he had been dreaming that he was in the Body Bank, in an unusually soft bed, and woke to found it true. He sat blinking at the bunk across from him. It looked more like a surgical supply house than a human being's bed. The cords of a boneconduction hearing aid dangled from the stainless-steel shafts of a prosthetic arm. A self-powered wheelchair bore ten pounds of assorted steel, copper, rubber and plastic. As in the ancient joke about the wedding night, there was more of Ryeland's roommate on the bureau than in the bed. The roommate was a plump man of rosy complexion, what there was left of it, and ill temper. His name was Alden. "Come on, Ryeland," he screeched faintly in the high-pitched whisper of the newly deaf. "You know the rules of the house. Give me a hand." "All right." There was plenty of time before morning shape-up and breakfast, so Ryeland had been told; there had to be, for the senior members of the community needed plenty of time to get their miscellaneous artificial parts in place. As a newcomer, still complete in his organs, Ryeland had obligations. The juniors took care of the seniors. Seniority ruled -- not age, but length of time in Heaven. It was a fair system, it was explained to Ryeland, and it was enlightened selfinterest besides. "You'll find out," Whitehurst had said grimly. "Wait till you're missing a few little chunks." In the morning the conversation was less placid, less polite than at night. It was odd too, thought Ryeland, listening carefully. In the morning the one universal topic was Escape. Perhaps it was only the wake-up irritability of the normal human, but even the advanced basket cases from the huts next door laid their plans and carefully measured the daily patrol of the guard helicopters. Alden muttered for twenty minutes about the chance of swimming to a miraculously borrowed fishing submarine that some incredibly loyal friend from Life might arrange to have out beyond the breakers. It was foolish, it was pathetic. There was hardly enough left of him to bother escaping with. And his tone the night before had been bland resignation: "You'll learn, my boy," he told Ryeland, "we're here for a reason. It's right." It was puzzling. In the night Ryeland had been bothered by something sticking him in the ribs. IF Once Alden was wheeled away he searched, and there, thrust under the seams of the mattress, was a flat aluminum case. He opened and spilled out lump sugar, maps, terribly amateurish faked travel orders from the Machine. And a journal. The journal was the work of some previous occupant who signed himself only by initials -- D.W.H. -- and it covered a period of almost three years. The first entry was sober self-appraisal : June #. I arrived in Heaven this morning. I canT get out. If I did get out, there would be no place to go. But if I let myself give up the hope of somehow getting out I might as well be dead. Therefore I will try to escape. And I will not brood. The last entry, in a palsied hand, was less sober, less analytic: May the -- what? #th, maybe. Just a min. bfr shape-up. I think IVe got it! Nbdy ever looks at the scrap-heap carcasses! IVe seen some that look better than I do now and, whoosh, they're down the chute  out on the barge when they clean up. So tonight's the night. All I have to dc is pass one more shape-up. I've plenty left. Aprnces don't matter. If I can just -- There's the bell. More Itr. The remaining pages were blank. B reakfast came before the morning shape-up and Ryeland, stuffing the journal back in the mattress, went thoughtfully out to eat. The food was all Whitehurst had promised! There was no rationing here, none at all. Sugar. Coffee. Real, thick cream. Ham with red gravy; cereal with more of the thick cream; fruits and hot biscuits. Ryeland ate until his stomach bulged. He began to feel better. The world seemed calmer, brighter; his housemates left off grumbling and plotting and began to laugh and shout along the long tables. Ryeland sat next to Whitehurst and brought up the subject of the previous occupant of his bunk. "Oh, him," said the one-eyed man "Old Danny. He was here for ever, considering. I mean, he must have been a very popular type, they took so much of him. I thought they'd never salvage him total, though all he had keeping him going at the end was a whirl-pump heart and twice a day filtrations on the kidney machine. Funny thing about Danny, his bidding was good enough but when he played a hand -- " "What happened to him?" Whitehurst scowled. "Took both lungs at one time. Pity, too. He still had two arms, clear down to the fingers." The bell summoned them out to the morning shape-up. There were three of them a day, Whitehurst whispered, and you had to be present. Otherwise total salvage, right away. The white guards with red hearts appliqued on their tunics moved up and down the ragged lines, checking the tattooed identification against lists. "Gutnick, Fairweather, Breen, Morchant," the one at the house of the Dixie Presidents chanted, "Nothing for you boys. You can fall out, Alden, Hensley -- Hensley? Say, how did that name get on the list? Wasn't he scrapped last week?" Half a dozen voices agreed he had been; the guard scratched the name off his list. "Lousy administrative work. Say. Who are you?" He took Ryeland's arm. "Oh, Steve Ryeland. Welcome to our little community. Nothing for you today, though. Whitehurst. Oh, yes. Come on, Whitehurst, you're in business." Ryeland got away as soon as he could. The others were laughing and relaxed, but seeing Whitehurst led away had chilled the soft warmth that had spread over Ryeland at breakfast. At any moment it might be his name that was on the list; if there was anything at all he could do about it, the time to do it was now. He retrieved the journal from his bed, escaped the back way and found a sunny spot on a hill. He sat down against a stone retaining wall and studied the diary of the late D.W.H. rhere was nothing about the man's life-in-Life in his journal. But whatever he had been he was a man ot method and intelligence. He had begun by systematically investigating his surroundings. From the first month's entries Ryeland learned a number of possibly useful statistics. There had then been # inmates in Heaven, counting twelve children under the age of eighteen (and what had they done to be here?) This was not the only Heaven; there probably were a number of others; twice shipments of inmates had gone out through the gate, to replenish another Heaven tefarily low in stock. There were never any guards inside the walls except at the shapeups. Usually about a dozen came in then, and D.W.H. had once been able to count the outside guards at fifteen more. Heaven roamed over nearly a hundred acres, and there was a map, heavily erased and redrawn, tucked into the journal. A note on the map told Ryeland that the walls were electrified and impenetrable, even down to a depth of fifty yards under the surface. Apparently someone had actually dug that far! The beach was not fenced, but there was a heavy steel net and, beyond that, a persuasive tradition of sharks. The only other break in the wall was the building through which he had entered, and its satellite structures -- the clinic, the administration building, the powerhouse. And the sanitation building. It was there that the "scrap-heap" had attracted D.W.H. 's attention. It was near the beach, and a chute led to a barge which, towed to sea, disposed of the left-over parts of the inmates as well as the more ordinary wastes of a community of several hundred. Ryeland mused thoughtfully over the map Only the scrap disposal chute looked promising. Yet the writer had not thought of it until after some months and, judging by the increasingly panicked and incoherent quality of his notes, his judgment must by then have begun to deteriorate. Still, it was worth a thought. He said a man could escape that way. Perhaps a man could... If he had a place to escape to. Ryeland put that thought out of his mind and read industriously in the journal until movements outside the cottages revealed that it was time for the mid-day shape-up. X N o Dixie President was called at noon. Only when they were dismissed did Pvyeland realize he had been holding his breath almost continuously. Gutnick, the man next to him in line, winked and said; "It gets you that way at first. It keeps on getting you that way too." Ryeland said only: "What's that?" Gutnick turned and looked. Down the gravel path two guards were solemnly pushing a wiicelchair and a handtruck of appliances. All were connected to the occupant of the wheelchair. There was little left of the man, if it was a man. All of his head was swathed in bandages --  if that was his head Only a little gap showed where the mouth was. The auxiliary handtruck carried a considerable array of pumps and tubing, stainless-steel cylinders and electric equipment. Gutnick said, "Oh, him." Gutnick could not wave, as both his arms had been needed elsewhere, but he inclined his torso and called: "Hi, Alec. What did you lose this time?" The bandaged head moved faintly. Nothing else moved on the man. The nearly invisible lips parted to gasp, in words li;i-ffs of smoke. "That you, Gutnick? Just the other kidney, I think." "You've got plenty left," lied Gutnick cheerfully, and they went in to lunch. Ryeland could not get the basket case out of his mind. "I didn't think they bothered to keep us alive, with that much gone." "I guess Steve's something special. He's senior in all Heaven. He's been here -- " Gutnick's voice was respectful -- "almost six years." Ryeland didn't have much appetite; but after he'd taken a few bites he had to stop in order to feed Girtnick anyway; and then he himself began to perk up. It was astonishing, he marveled after lunch, trudging aimlessly around the walks of Heaven, how the food here made Hfe so bearable. It showed that a good diet made a happy man. It showed --  why, he thought with a sudden miserable flash of insight, it showed nothing at all except that even a doomed creature like himself could submerge the forebrain in a wallow of physical pleasures. He determined to go right back to the house and get the diary, study it, plan -- Someone was calling his name. He turned, and Oddball Oporto was rushing toward him. "Gee! Ryeland! It's you!" Oporto stopped. So did Ryeland; and then he realized that what they were doing was appraising each other, looking for missing parts. So soon it had become a habit in this place. "You don't seem to be missing anything," said Ryeland. "I've only been here two days. Got here right ahead of you -- T saw you come in. I guess you stopped to turn in your gear? They didn't bother with that, with me... I should've stayed in Iceland, hey? Not that I hold it against you," he finished glumly. "Sorry." "Yeah. Well, where you living?" Ryeland told him about the Dixie Presidents, and Oporto was incredulous, "Gee! Those moldy old creeps? Say, why not come over to our place? There's two vacancies right now, and some of the boys are real sharp. You know, you lose a few parts and there isn't much left but the brain; so what you want is a few little problems to work on. Well, fellow next to me, he has a whole bunch of stuff from the Lilavata -- old Hindu math problems, mostly diophantine equations when you come down to it, but -- " Ryeland said gently: "I'm working on a different problem right now." Oporto waited. "I want to get out of here." "Oh, no. Wait a minute! Steve, don't be crazy. A fellow like you, you've got years here. Plenty to look forward to. You don't want to -- " "But I do want to," said Ryeland, "I want to get away. It isn't just my life, though I admit that's got a lot to do with it." "What else? Oh. You don't have to tell me. That girl." "Not the girl. Or not exactly. But she's part of it. Something bad's happening with the spaceling and Colonel Gottling. It ought to be stopped." Oporto said dismally, "Gee, Steve. You don't want to talk like that Anyway -- " He stopped. Ryeland knew Oporto well enough to wait him out. He prompted: "Anyway what?" "Anyway," said Oporto with some hesitation, "I don't know why you want to bother with her. I thought that other girl was more important to you. You know, # -- I forget her name." Ryeland took it like a blow between the eyes. That number -- he didn't have Oporto's queer memory for any arithmetical function, but surely it was the number of... "Angela Zwick," he whispered, remembering blonde hair, blue eyes and a mouth that testified against him at his hearing. "That's the one. Well, now! So you didn't forget her?" Oporto was enjoying his bombshell. "Why not go see her? She's been here quite a while -- over in a cottage by the lake." "She's really here? But she was with the Plan Police." Ryeland was dazed. Had the Plan come to this, that it scrapped its own undercover agents? "Well," said Oporto judiciously, "I guess you'd say she's here. Anyway, there's a quorum present. Why not go see for yourself?" T he first sensation was shock, and a terrible embarrassment. Ryeland scraped one foot against another, staring at the girl in the wheelchair. He said her name gruffly, and then he met her eyes and could say nothing else. Angela? This thing in the chair, was it the girl he IF had known? She had no arms and, from the flatness of the lap robe that draped her, no legs either. But her face was intact, blue-green eyes, golden hair; her husky, warm voice was the voice he had known. "Steve! It's good to see you!" She was not embarrassed at all, only amused. She laughed. "Don't gawk. But I know how you feel. You've only just arrived, and I've been here twenty-one months." Ryeland sat awkwardly on the grass before her. Her cottage lay in a little clump of woods, and there were neatly tended beds of flowers around it. Flowers! Ryeland could not remember ever having seen flowers around a dwelling before, only in parks. Though this was a kind of a park, at that. Angela said softly: "I wondered if I would ever see you again, after what happened." She cocked her chin, and a tiny motor droned; the velvet-covered chin rest that supported her head seemed to have switches in it, so that she could move the wheels of her chair. Facing him, she said seriously: "You don't blame me, do you?" Ryeland muttered: "You did your job under the Plan." "So wise of you to say that, Steve. Ah, Steve! I'm glad to see you again." She lifted her lovely chin. "We've got so much to talk about. Take me down by the lake," she commanded... For nearly three years Ryeland had rehearsed the speeches he would make to Angela Zwick if ever they chanced to come together, but in this place they were all wrong, he forgot the words. He had raged silently in his bed, he had pleaded with the stony fields of the isolation camp; now, facing the girl, he found himself engaged in a little conversation. They chatted. They laughed. It was pleasant. Pleasant! And she had put the collar around his neck. "There is always peace in serving the Plan," she told him wisely, reading his mind. They stopped by the lake and he sat down. "I don't even mind the collar any more," he murmured, suppressing a yawn. "Of course not, Steve." He scratched his shoulderblades against the bole of a palm. "I never thought I'd stop minding that. Why, I remember talking to a fellow about it in the isolation camp. He said I'd get over it. I said -- " He stopped, and frowned faintly. "What did you say to him, Steve?" "Why," he said slowly, "I told him that I'd never stop hating the collar unless I was dead, or drugged." She smiled at him with mandarin calm. B ack at the cottage of the Dixie Presidents, Ryeland thumbed through the journal that had once belonged to his predecessor in the bunk. There was an entry that he wanted to read again. He found it: This place is insidious. The atmosphere is so tranquil -- God knows how! -- that it is very tempting to relax and let what happens happen. Today Cullen came back from th' clinic giggling because a nurse had told him a joke. He had lost both eyes! And two days later: Yesterday I lost my other leg. It is painful, but they gave me shots for that. I wonder why it doesn't bother me. I keep thinking of Cullen. Frowning, Ryeland closed the book and went out to stand in the afternoon shape m. The other Dixie Presidents were already there, and their greetings w re chill. Ryeland paid very little attention, although he knew they were annoyed because he had spent so little time conforming with the customs of the cottage. He hardly even noticed the guards, with their scarlet hearts blazoned on their white tunics, as they came droning down the line with their rolls. There was something more important on his mind. Ryeland was reasonably sure that his mind was functioning as well as it ever had. But he was finding it hard to think this matter through. He didn't mind the collar. That was the first term in the syllogism. Something in the diary supplied the second term. What was the conclusion? "Come on, I said!" said a guard's voice, annoyed, and Ryeland woke up to the fact that his name had been called. He gawked "Me? Are you calling me?" "You. That's what I said, man! You're on orders today. Come on to the tissue bank!" IF XI T he group of scrapped men waited for the elevator. The man next to Rjeland was whispering feverishly under his breath, his eyes fixed on the elevator door as though it were the gate to hell. He caught Ryeland looking at him and threw him a wild smile. "First time for you? Me, too. But I figure it won't be much, you know." "All right, all right." The guards began to herd them into the opening elevator door. "Move along, now!" The elevator dropped swiftly and let them out in an underground hall. Blue asepsis lamps winked on the walls, a hum from the air ducts told of purifiers at work. The guards ordered them to sit down. There were a dozen long, wooden benches. The waiting room was not at all crowded, though there were twenty or more walking cadavers in it. Ryeland looked around at them. Some seemed to have all their faculties and parts; if there was anything missing, it was not such as would appear on the surface. Many showed signs of being nibbled away -- a leg missing, " ear, a finger or two. And some ' were so much prosthesis, so little f h and blood, that it was a wonder that the surgeons could find anything left to take from them. The nervous man switched seats to join Ryeland and hissed in his ear: "See, the way I see it, they're not going to take much the first time. Why should they? For instance, your body might not transplant right. They can't tell. They'll have to do a couple little jobs first and see how they take, before they try anything big. I'm positive of that, friend..." He stopped as the door opened, his eyes like a tortured kitten's. But it was only a nurse walking through, and she paid no attention to them. Ryeland took time from his own worries to comfort the man. "That's right," he said. "That figures." It didn't, of course; the Plan knew all it had to know about them already. But the nervous man seized at the reassurance. He babbled: "Now, all we have to worry about is something little. Maybe some clumsy oaf lost a couple of fingers somewhere. Well, they'll take a finger. Or a couple of fingers..." He glanced wonderingly at his hand. "A couple of fingers. They'll take -- But what's that? You can spare them. Or a foot, maybe. But they aren't going to take anything big the first time, because -- " The door opened. A young, slim guard walked in. He was bored, and the look he gave the waiting cadavers was not intended for anything human. "Eckroth?" he called, reading from a list. The man next to Ryeland jumped. "Come on!" The nervous man stared frantically at Ryeland, swallowed, stood up and left, into a door that closed, silent and final, behind him. Ryeland sat and waited. One by one the cadavers were summoned to their operating rooms to give to the Plan what the Plan demanded of them. Ryeland watched them, because it was better to think of them than to think about himself: the oldster with the fireblue eyes, weeping into the maze of tubes that had replaced his breathing apparatus; the young girl with the curiously flat dressings along one side of her body; the men and women of all sizes and descriptions. Ryeland was almost the last of them all to be called. But at last it was his turn. A nurse beckoned to him. He stood up, feeling strangely empty. A queer premonitory tingling raced all over his peripheral nervous system, like a pain looking for its proper place to settle down and begin aching. What would it be? A foot, an arm, a set of teeth, some internal organs? "Oh, come on" said the nurse, looking ruffled. She was a pretty girl with red hair. She even wore a ring on her finger. Ryeland marveled. This girl was engaged I Somewhere there was a Plan-fearing man who looked at her with affection and warmth. And, here, she was the embodiment of something that was going to deprive Steve Ryeland of a part of his body. He walked stiffly after her. There was a roar in his ears: the drumming of his blood. It was very loud; he felt his heart thumping, very strong. Colors were bright, an antiseptic odor in the room was very sharp. His senses missed nothing. He felt the stiffness of his worn red uniform. The blue glare of the sterilamps was painfully bright. He was in a small room, dominated by a neat, high operating table, stainlessly white. Ryeland looked at the table and licked his lips. Unexpectedly the nurse giggled. "Oh, I swear. You cadavers take everything so hard. Don't you know why you're here?" Ryeland nodded stiffly. He knew very well. Still, it was odd that he didn't see the bright metal gleam of instruments. She said, humorously exasperated: "I don't think you do. Your blood, friend. That's all I'm going to take from you today. Maybe next time it will be different, of course. But right now we only need half a liter of your good red blood." F lat on his back, with his arm strapped to the table and a crisp, cool sheet covering his legs, Ryeland lay. He was watching his blood slowly fill a liter beaker up to a measured mark. His blood was wine-purple colored, and it seemed to flow very slowly. There was nothr at all painful about the process. Of course, it wasn't exactly pure pleasure. There was a queer jumpy sensation in his skin, a sort of warning of something that might hurt -- as though the nerve-ends, evolved to cope with grosser wounds and warn of instanter dangers, did not know quite what to tell the brain, and could only express a sort of worry. The tube made a faint vulgar sound from time to time, like a siphon sucking air, but there was no other noise. The nurse had left him. It was amazing how still the world was... il And it was amazing how clearly Ryeland could think. He was tranquil. More than that, he knew he was tranquil. More still, he was beginning to realize that he had been tranquil -- stupidly, crazily tranquil -- ever since he had arrived in the Body Bank! And so was everyone else! It accounted for the cheerful amputees and his heedless roommates at the Dixie Presidents. Tranquil! But it was not natural, and so it was due to drugs. Ryeland lay lazily watching the thick froth at the top of the beaker of his blood and marveled that he had not seen it before. Even the man who wrote the diary had never seen it, though he had come so close. Drugs! The Plan of Man understood that there were circuits in the human brain not subject to reason. Selfpreservation was one of them. The Machine would not risk a sudden flare-up of that instinct. The Machine must have known that, whatever the mood of the Body Bank's raw materials as they went in, however carefully conditioned to their duties under the Plan of Man, the threat of dismemberment and death could upset all conditioning. Therefore the Machine had taken steps. The obvious step -- how was it that no one had seen it? -- was to flood the cadavers with tranquilizing drugs. The nurse came in. She tapped the beaker lightly with a finger, fussed with the tubes, and in a moment deftly removed the needle from Ryelands arm. She was humming to herself. She pressed an alcohol pad over the little puncture in his arm and ordered; "Hold it that way to keep the pad in place." Ryeland was hardly listening. Tranquilizing drugs, he thought, like an echo; it explained everything. It explained why D.W.H.'s careful plans had come to nothing; before they could mature, the drive that would make them reality had been sapped. It explained why Ryeland himself had loafed for irretrievable days. The only astonishing thing was that he had found out. The nurse straightened his arm, plucked off the pad and pointed. "Out that way." Ryeland started obediently out the door, then stopped, shocked to alertness at last. An orderly was guiding an electric stretcher down the hall. On it, his eyes closed, lay the nervous man from Ry eland's group of donors. He looked to be asleep. Surely he had lost something -- but what? Arms were there, legs showed under the sheet, there was no mark on the motionless face. Ryeland said to the nurse: "Excuse me. That fellow. What happened with him?" The nurse peered past him. "Oh, that one." A shade came down over her eyes. "That was a big one. Did you know him?" "Yes." "I see." After a second she said briskly: "We needed a whole spine. There wasn't much point in trying to salvage any of the rest of him." Ryeland stumbled out into the corridor, following the corpse of the nervous man, who never again would have to be nervous. He glanced over his shoulder at the nurse and said: "Good-by." She said: "Fll be seeing you." human beings worked, studied, loved, quarreled and in general fulfilled their tiny assigned missions under the Plan of Man. In Saskatchewan an engineer turned a switch and the side of a mountain lifted itself, grumbled and slid into a lake, revealing an open vein of low-grade uranium ore, one of the last deposits left to tap. In the hillside town of Fiesole, in Italy, a Technicorps colonel made a field inspection of the new reservoir. The water level had risen a gratifying nineteen inches since his last report. He observed, from his flat-bottomed boat, how a certain jumbled pile of masonry he remembered seeing was now almost entirely submerged; it was the Pitti Palace, but he had never heard the name. (The Ponte Vcccnio was already twenty feet under the bottom of his boat.) Under Honduras, a subtrain shaft collapsed and eighteen hundred migratory agricultural workers were simultaneously cremated and dissolved in molten rock. The Planner, returned from the Moon, signed an order which would ultimately lower the level of the Mediterranean sea ninety feet, creating thousands of miles of new land around its dwindled shores and providing an enormous hydroelectric station at the Straits of Gibraltar... But on the isle of Cuba, no echo of these rumblings penetrated. Everything was calm. Everything was pleasant. And Steve Ryeland fought against it as hard as he could. He quarreled vigorously with his Dixie Presidents. The senior cadaver was hurt, shocked and mortified; as a consequence, half an hour later he lost count of trumps and suffered an eight-hundred point penalty in the afternoon's bridge game. Ryeland was well pleased. Quarreling stimulated his adrenals. He went out to find someone else to quarrel with. His logical candidate was Angela, and he found her where he had left her, sunning herself in front of her cottage. "Steve, dear," she whispered, but he did not want to be charmed. He said brutally: "I just made my first donation. Guess what it was?" He gave her a chance to scan him and look perturbed, then said: "Nothing much, only blood. Lucky, eh?" It was terribly bad manners. She said, "Yes, Steve, that's lucky. Must we talk about it? Oh, I know! Let's go down to the lake again. It's warm today, and there's bound to be a breeze at the fountains -- " "That's all you care about, isn't it?" "Stevel" "Food and comfort. Are those the only things that matter to you?" Angela said petulantly, "Steve, you're in an unpleasant mood this afternoon. If you don't want to come with me I'll go alone." "Do you care?" IF She opened her mouth, closed it, looked at him and shook her head. She was angry; but she was also untouched by it. As Ryeland was an irritation, she removed herself from it. He stood there thoughtfully. Even after Angela had flounced away, as best a woman with neither arms nor legs can flounce, he stood there, thinking. Knowing that ther were tranquilizers flooding his bloodstream was one thing, knowing what to do about it was something else. He could keep his adrenal glands combating the drug by quarreling, even by exercising, but it was wearing. It would be better to keep the drug from his system in the first place... It was very simple. It needed only one thing, Ryeland saw. He would merely have to stop eating and drinking entirely. B y lunchtime the next day he began to see the flaws in that scheme. He had worked it out very carefully. He had to eat something, otherwise he would die, and that would be no improvement at all. He settled on eating sugar. That day after the noon formation he entered the messhall, carried his tray to a corner -- and abandoned it there, untouched. He filled his pockets with sugar, as inconspicuously as he could. !t was a calculated risk. All foods were suspect, sugar included. But even the thorough Machine would not be likely to bother with sugar. Of course, water was out of the question. Already Ryeland was beginning to feel parched. He thought of making a still, somehow, and purifying the water from the lake. It would attract attention... but he was getting very thirsty. He went to see Angela and tried to take his mind off his thirst. They roamed about, the girl in her remarkably agile wheeled chair. She found him hard to endure that day. They sat by the lake and Steve Ryeland stared at it longingly. Water, lovely and clear. Beautiful water. Sweet water! But it was the source for all the drinking water in Heaven, and undoubtedly it was already treated. He talked about swimming and clinking ice in a glass and the spray from the prow of a boat until Angela, faintly exasperated, said: "Go swimming, then. No, don't worry about me." Gentle smile. "Td rather not, for reasons which are apparent, but you go ahead. It's what you want, isn't it?" And it was; but Ryeland refused vigorously until he thought of something and then went to get a pair of trunks. Why not go swimming? It was a trick torpedoed sailors had learned centuries before. If one merely lay in the water and relaxed, it would help control thirst. It wouldn't help much. But it would help a little -- perhaps it would keep him alive until his brain was clear and he could think surely enough to find a way out. But, oh, that water was tempting! He lay in the shallows and played a sort of game. It was for high stakes, his whole life riding on the turn of the wheel. He let the water come up to his chin. He let it touch his lip. He even let a few drops of it into his mouth; then he filled his mouth and held the water there. It would be so easy to swallow! So simple to ease his thirst! And surely, he said reasonably to himself, his eyes closed against the thirst, swishing the water back and forth with his cheeks and enjoying the sensation, surely one little drink would be of no real importance... Sputtering and coughing, he floundered out of the lake. That had been a close one. But he had learned something; the thirst was a counter-irritant; already he was fully aware of things that had been tempered and dull even an hour before. The puncture inside his elbow hurt. The nurse had been clumsy with the needle. The denims had chafed his thighs raw -- a poor fit, miserably poor -- and what a joy, he exulted, to be able to realize it. Angela was looking at him suspiciously. "What's the matter with you?" she demanded. "Nothing." "You act -- oh, I don't know. As if the Machine canceled your orders here. As though you were going to get rid of your collar." And even that was not impossible, thought Ryeland. If only he could hold out until somehow, some way there was a chance. He toweled himself dry and said, "Why not? Donderevo did it." "Steve," she scolded, "that's unplanned thinking! I'm disappointed in you. Nobody else can escape the way Donderevo did, and even if you could, your duty to the Plan -- " "Wait a minute." He stopped toweling and turned to look at her. "What did you say? What do you know about Donderevo?" "I know how he escaped. After all, this is where he escaped from." Ryeland heard a ripping sound, and glanced down to see that his hands, without command from his brain, had clenched so tightly on the towel that it had parted. He dropped it to the ground and whispered: A ngela writhed carelessly, angling her head to start the motors that turned her chair away from the sun. She frowned thoughtfully, then said, "Well, I don't suppose it would do any harm. You can't possibly duplicate his escape. No one can." "Angela! How did he do it?" "Not by any method you can follow, Steve." Her smile teased him. "He found a group on the staff here who could be tempted into unplanned thinking -- and he tempted them, with talk of space outside the Plan. He managed to corrupt them, with promises of freedom and wealth in the reefs of space. He bribed them to remove his collar -- surgically." "Huh?" "The thing was expertly planned, she said. "The disloyal surgeons forged the requisitions, and issued false documents. Donderevo was called out of the lineup one morning, exactly in the ordinary way. In one operating theater, he was disassembled, down to the head and the spine. All the parts were rushed into the adjoining theater -- and put back together, without the iron collar. "But don't go getting any ideas," she warned him. "Because the plot was eventually discovered. The surgeons who had participated were w promptly junked. Unfortunately, by that time Donderevo had escaped." "How did he get away?" "That was the most important part," she said. "You see, the surgeons made a rather ingenious effort to cover their tracks. They used junk parts to assemble a complete patchwork man inside the collar. This junk man took Donderevo's place, until it was too late to trace him." Ryeland shivered in the warm sunshine. That method of escape seemed gruesomely drastic, even if it had been open to him, which it was not. "Let's do something more amusing," Angela urged him. "There's one more thing I want to know." He looked at her, caught with an unpleasant fascination. "How did you happen to know all this?" She stretched her torso lazily in the sunshine, with a slow, graceful, serpentine movement. "I suppose I can tell you, Steve." She smiled at him confidentially. "Alter all, it's no secret between us that I once worked for the Plan Police. The fact is that I first came here on the Donderevo case. It was not broken until I had managed to persuade one of the guilty surgeons to use the same method to help me escape." She yawned, smiling with a feline satisfaction. "If you came here as a spy, why are you -- " He stopped, feeling a horrified embarrassment. 'Why am I still here? Don't be ashamed to ask that, Steve. I'm here because by the time I finished my task I was -- well -- as you see me. Naturally the Plan could not divert resources for my sake... so... I was declared surplus. Oh, I won't deny it disturbed me a little, at first. But I came to accept it. And you will too, Steve. You see, you have no other choice." A ccept the fate he would not, though he was powerfully tempted. A rain shower in the middle of the night woke him and he ran out, careless that he woke his cabin mates and left them staring, to find a standpipe under the eaves and drink, drink, drink. It gave him the strength he needed. The next morning he could see a difference. He held out his hand before him and it shook. It shook! He was nervous. He was also very hungry. Water was not, for the moment, a problem. He had found a jug that would do and carefully filled it from the drain of a dozen roofs. It tasted of zinc and tar. But he was off the drug... And hungry. Pie did not dare to eat in the commissary. Oporto came to see him at breakfast and that little dark face missed nothing. "Not hungry, Steve?" Ryeland pushed aside his untouched plate -- ham hash! lovely, irresistible coffee! -- and said, "No. I'm not hungry." Later, in the hut of the Dixie Presidents, Oporto still tagging along, the little man pointed IF at the jug of rain water. "What's that?" "It's water. In case I get thirsty," said Ryeland, allowing himself a small drink. Oporto's face remained thoughtful. Ryeland found a sense of doom pressing in on him, a fear that dried his mouth and bothered his digestion -- damaged already by the curious nature of the few substances he dared eat. He enjoyed it. He welcomed the flutterings of terror between his shoulderblades. He looked around him at the other cadavers of Heaven, and they were zombies, dead-alive, the victims of asphodel. They laughed and smiled and walked about (when they had what was needful to walk with), but they were dead men. Not Ryeland. He was alive, and in a panic. And very hungry. He managed to shake Oporto just before the second shape-up, and seized time to study some of the entries in the journal: Oct. #. The only examination given to the discarded parts in the trash pile is visual. They are under the observation of a guard stationed on the watch balcony of the North Clinic. Sometimes he isn't there, but I do not know vhy. Nov. #. Today I was in the North Clinic on the fifth floor, where the guard is stationed. I found out why he is sometimes absent, I think. Twice he was called in to help move patients; apparently this is part of his job. Since I was strapped to the table with a spinal tap I couldn't watch closely, but it seems evident that each time he is called inside he will remain there for at least half a minute, and that the periods at which he is most likely to be called are those when the operation schedule is heavy. Probably the three hours or so following each shape-up would be the best time. The morning and lunch shape-ups are no good. First, I would not be able to conceal my absence for more than a couple of hours; second, they don't usually dump the scraps until night anyway. That leaves only the night. Unfortunately not much operating is done then... Today it was the left leg, including the femur. Dec. #. Unusually heavy callouts at the shape-up this morning. The rumor is that there was a nuclear explosion in Baja California and a great many spare parts will be needed. I wonder. Tonight? Ryeland turned the page, hut he already knew what he would find. The next entry was the last. It had been close for D.W.H., but not quite close enough. H unger was beginning to prey on him seriously. His system began to refuse the sugar. Operto was openly suspicious now. He walked with Ryeland all over Heaven. Down by the palmfringed lake he sat with his back against a boulder and watched Ryeland grimly hurling rocks at the hanging coconuts. Ryeland did not succeed in knocking one down, but he did, after visiting a few clumps of palms, find one that had fallen. guess you like coconut milk a lot," Oporto said sulkily, seeing how greedily Ryeland hammered off the outer husk and bashed in the shell. "I love it." Actually the nut was overripe, and the milk had a foul taste. "Tastes good with garlic, huh?" Oporto was referring to some wild roots Ryeland had found, dark green spears thrusting out of the grass with a cluster of muddy little strong-favored knobs underground; Oporto had found him nibbling them experimentally. Ryeland said: "Leave me alone, will you? I -- ah -- don't feel very well," Oporto sighed. "Fm not surprised." But he wandered away after a while. Ryeland dismissed him from his mind. He felt weak and starved. It was only psychological, he told himself; why, shipwrecked mariners had lasted for months and years on little more than what he had so easily come by! But they had not, it was true, been subjected to the thrice-daily temptation of a loaded table from which they dared not eat. And there was another consideration. He looked longingly at the little fish in the lake, for example. He could easily catch one. What was to stop him from broiling it over a fire? But he had already attracted enough attention, he dared no more. Surely the guardians of Heaven would know what to do with a cadaver who had stumbled on the necessity of avoiding their drugs. Once they found one such it would be only a name on the shape-up list, a needle in the arm, and all the drug his system could absorb thrust into him at one moment. Will power would not help him then. Yet he could not avoid suspicion entirely, not as long as he continued to reject the all but irresistable food of Heaven. Already he was concerned over his mates in the Dixie Presidents, not to mention Angela Zwick and, above all, Oporto, whose behavior was no longer suspicious but sure. There was no doubt; Oporto knew. T he next morning he got away . from the others and scouted the periphery of Heaven. Reluctantly he decided that what everyone said was true; the fence was impassable. It would have to be the garbage heap. The leftover bits from the cadavers in Heaven were deposited in a stainless steel sump next the North Clinic. The pit was empty at this hour; it had been sluiced clean, its tons of abandoned humanity chuted into a barge and towed away. The hot sun had baked it gleaming. It was surrounded by a wire fence, and that in turn screened by red-flowered bougainvillea bushes. Ryeland wondered if the fence were electrified. Probably not... It would, he thought, be wise to make his bid for freedom soon. The quicker he tried, the more likely that he would retain all his parts. Even IF now, he saw, there was some sort of activity going on; guards were on the roof of the North Clinic, working around what looked like searchlight projectors. Ryeland scowled. If they flooded the garbage heap with light, that would make things more difficult. Still, the projectors were peculiar; they had reflectors but no lenses, and they seemed to be rather small for the task involved. Ryeland crossed his fingers. Perhaps they would be for some other use entirely. He could only hope. "Sdeve! Sdeve Ryeland!" a familiar voice called loudly. It was Oporto -- shouting, waving, smiling. Ryeland waited, suddenly wary. How had the little man known he would be here? And what was this sudden excitement in his manner? Oporto was sniffling, almost quivering. "Whad a mess, hey, Steve? You hear about id?" "About what?" "Another tube collabze! Eighdeen hundred people this time. You know whad I think? Sabodage. Thad's whad I think." Ryeland shook his head. He was not feeling over-friendly to the little man; he was still wary. Still, there was the chance that Oporto knew something, even here, cut off from the world as they all were. "Sabotage by whom?" "Anti-Plan elemends," Oporto explained cheerfully. "They've been happeding all over the world, you know. Thousands dead! Commudication wrecked!" He glanced over his shoulder, smiled, and said quite loudly: "Or don'd you think so, Steven Ryeland?" Ryeland's nostrils flared; he smelled danger. He looked where Oporto had glanced, and saw what Oporto had seen. Three big men in the white uniforms, coming toward them with purpose. He understood why Oporto had spoken his name so loudly; and the little man nodded, quite unabashed. "Yes, Steve. Judas Isgariot, thad's my other name." T he guards looked as though they were spoiling for a touch of resistance from him. He didn't offer it. He let them take him to the clinic, and when the needle was presented to his arm he stared at it without emotion. The shot was painless enough, even though he knew what it was. It was asphodel again, but this time he was ready for it "Don't give us any more trouble, Zero-Dome," growled the guard, and released him at the gate of the clinic. Ryeland's body responded at once to the shot. He accepted it; it was warmly comforting; it would not matter now. He almost laughed out loud. He could not feel betrayed by Oporto, even; Oporto could no longer commit betrayal; he was no longer trusted. And meanwhile... Ryeland could eat! There was a guard brooding over the tables assigned to the Dixie Presidents at lunch. Ryeland conscientiously gorged himself on roast pork and sweet potatoes, with three cups of coffee. It tasted very good. Why not? It didn't matter any more. Meprobamate is not a narcotic; it doesn't keep you from thinking. It only eases jitters -- that sovereign incentive to action! -- and for Ryeland the vvorrying fear had already served its purpose. He had his plan. He would carry it out that night, if he could; the next night certainly. He recognized quite calmly that, now that Oporto had told the guards he was avoiding food, he would no longer serve any purpose by not eating; they would pick him up and inject him. All right. It didn't matter, nothing mattered, he was on his way out. He could hardly wait for sundown and escape. It was time, too. There were heavy callouts that day. Ryeland's bunkmate had gone at breakfast and had not returned by lunch -- wouldn't ever return, now, said the wise old heads; if you didn't come back by the next shape-up, you weren't coming back at all. Five names were called at noon. At dinner, seven more -- why, thought Ryeland through his comfortable haze of meprobamate, that left only three in the entire cottage who had not been called for some donation that day, and Ryeland was one of them. Clearly he was pushing his luck. After the evening shape-up he looked one last time around Heaven and strolled away. Just in time. For as he was almost out of earshot in the gathering dark, a whiteclad guard came down the shell path. Ryeland paused, listening. "Ryeland," the guard was saying, and something with the word "clinic." Rumble-rumble; the bass voice of one of the few survivors of the Dixie Presidents, answering. "Oh." The guard again, not very interested. "Well, when he turns up, tell him to report. She can wait." Ryeland hid himself in the night What they wanted with him he could not know; but he was very sure that his time was even shorter than he had thought. But who was the "she" who could wait? Angela? He could hardly think so, but -- well, why not go to see her? If it turned out to be Angela, who had somehow inveigled a guard into being messenger-boy for her, there was no reason he should not find out why. If it turned out not to be her... he was surely all the better off for being as far as possible from the cabin of the Dixie Presidents. I t wasn't Angela. She was completely ignorant of why the guard had been looking for him, and completely disinterested. Uneasily, keeping an alert eye open for any possible guard who might come their way, he sat down beside her in the warm tropical evening. More to see what she would say than to relieve his feelings, he told her about Oporto's reporting him to the guards and his consequent new dose of tranquilizer. "Very right of him, Steve. You shouldn't go against the Plan!" He shook his head ruefully. can't understand you," he admitted. "To work for the Plan -- yes. That's duty. But to betray a friend -- " He stopped, and looked quickly at her, but she only laughed. "I know, Steven. But you're wrong. Do you remember what I was doing when we first met?" IF "Running a computer." "That's right! And we would set up problems -- oh, enormous problems. I loved that job, Steven! And the computer would solve them, onetwo, click-click, ting-a-ling! It could do it without fail; well, it was part of the Plan, you see. Only one unit in the master Plan of Man that the Machine itself runs. Do you know why it was never wrong?" "You tell me," he growled. She was so calm! "Because we tested it!" she cried. "There was a special test-circuit switch. After a big problem we'd send a charge -- oh, five times normal voltage! -- through every last tube and transistor and relay. If anything was going to fail, it would fail then -- and we'd know -- and we could replace it. And... well, Steven," she said, quite serious, "that's what I am, you see. I'm a test charge." She leaned forward against the high restraining chair-rms that kept her limbless body from toppling, "You can't be allowed to fail the Plan!" she cried. "You must be found if you are weak... and replaced. Oporto and I, we have one purpose under the Plan of Man: to find and report the bad tubes. Did I trick you? I don't know; is the excess voltage flushing out a computer a 'trick?' You were a bad tube. Admit it, Steven; you could fail. You did fail! And the Machine is better without you!" Ryeland paced about. The girl watched him solemnly, her eyes large and compassionate. He said after it lops your arms and legs off? "Then you're crazier than Opor to!" he roared. "The Machine is a monster! The Plan of Man is a hoax!" She refused to be shocked. reminded him. enslaved!" "Do you have another way!" He scowled. "I don't know. Maybe -- out in the Reefs of Space -- " "The Reefs of Space are no longer of any importance to you, my dear. Just like Ron Donderevo. Oh, he was a real man -- and mayba there are Reefs, I don't know. But there's nothing there for us." She moved her head, and the obedient wheels brought her closer to him. "And is it so bad, Steven? Being slaves? I know you have ideals -- I respect you for them, truly I do! But this is a matter of life and death for Mankind. And isn't it true that, for almost all of us, under the Plan of Man there is happiness?" He laughed shortly. "It comes hi the drinking water!" "All of it?" She leaned back lazily, looking at him with candid hug eyes. "What about me, Steven. Don't you want me?" It caught him off-guard. He flushed. "I -- I don't know what -- " "Because I'm here, Steven," she went on softly. "If you wanted me. I'm here. And I'm helpless; I can't resist you." He swallowed. "You -- Yoa could scream for help. The guards would -- Damn your He leaped away from her. "I'll never forgive you that, Angela! You've dragged me down to your level, haven't you? But you can't do the same trick again!" She said, calm, real regret in her voice, "I don't know what you mean, dear." And after a moment Ryeland realized that there was truth in what she said. She meant it; she was his to take, if he chose, and she would not have blamed him. He said brutally: "You're a high-voltage test circuit, Angela, yes, indeed! But you've already burned me once. I don't intend for it to happen again!" There was no longer any doubt of what he had to do in his mind. He was inside a wall; well, a wall had two sides. He would reach that other side! Perhaps he would be alive; more likely he would be a cadaver, stripped of useful parts. But he would reach it. Because... because, he thought, on the other side of that wall were many things. There was freedom -- maybe -- in the Reefs of Space. There was, perhaps, the man who knew how to remove collars. And there was Donna Creery. A bruptly he turned to Angela again, surprised at his own thought of the Planner's daughter, most dangerous of directions. He said, "I -- I didn't mean -- " "Don't apologize, Steve. You of all people -- " He became conscious that she bad stopped in the middle of a thought. "What were you going to say?" "Oh... Nothing. Nothing much. Just that..." "Angela!" he said angrily. "You've always kept secrets from me! Please don't keep on with it -- not here! Now, what were you going to say? Something about me 'of all people'? Am I any different from other people?" Her wide, lovely eyes studied him serenely .Then she said: "Don't you know that you are?" Her cool regard made him uncomfortable. He had to gulp before he could ask what she meant. "Haven't you been aware of anything strange about yourself?" He was about to shake his head, when something froze him. He recalled the riddle of the three days he had lost. Suddenly he remembered a ime when he thought he had heard her voice, from the dark outside the circle of pitiless light that blazed down on the therapy couch, before she had sacrificed her limbs to the Plan. "You must have noticed that you are different, Steve," her soft voice taunted him. "Have you ever wondered why?" For a moment he wanted to strike her. The iron collar was suddenly tighter around his neck, so tight that he could scarcely breathe, so tight that he felt the veins throbbing at his throat. He sat numb and silent, staring at her. "Did you think you were human?" Her voice was contemptuous, merciless. "I thought you might guess, when I was telling you how DonIF derevo got away. You are the junk man." "Junk -- what?" The hair stood up at the nape of his neck. He shuddered in the sun. The collar was heavier than lead, colder than ice. "I told you that a thing waa patched together out of waste parts. A decoy for the guards to watefa while Donderevo got away. Well, Steve, that's what you are." He sat still, breathing carefully through the cruel constriction of the collar. "If you're good-looking, Steve, that's because the surgeons were trying to put together a reasonable likeness of Ron Donderevo, who was a handsome man. If you dislike the Plan, it is because your brain and your glands were patched together from what was left of several of its most distinguished enemies. If you have an unusual mastery of helical field theory, it is because one lobe of your brain belonged to the man who invented it. If the rest of your memory is somewhat blurred or contradictory, it is because the rest of your brain waa stuck together from odds and ends of tissue." "No!" he whispered hoarsely. That can't be true -- " But the collar choked off hia voice. He felt weak and numb with a hideous feeling that it could be true. "If I was ever here before," he argued desperately, "I can't remember anything about it." That goes to prove it." Angela's slow smile was innocently sweet. "The men who assembled you were research scientists, as well as enemies of the Plan. They had been using bits of waste brain tissue in efforts to improve upon nature. When they were putting your brain together, they seized the opportunity to create a mental mechanism dangerous to the plan." Dazed, he could only shake his head. 'There's proof enough, if you don't believe me," she said. Xook at all your feats of sabotage. The subtrain tubes and fusion reactions and ion-drive accelerators that you have demolished with your fnproved designs -- " Agony wrenched him. don't remember -- " "That's the final perfection of your mental mechanism," she said calmly. "The disloyal surgeons equipped your new brain with a self-erasing circuit, to protect you from any temptation to reveal your secrets under torture. Aren't you aware of the blank in your past?" "I -- I am," Shuddering, he nodded. "That's all you are." A lazy malice glinted in her smile. "All the special attention that you have been receiving for the past three years is proof that you functioned remarkably well as a sabotage device, but your function has been performed. I suppose you are setting some sort of precedent, now that all your organs are about to be salvaged for the second time. But in spite of that, Steve, I can't help feeling that you are trying to carry your head a little too high. Actually, you're nothing more than a hundred and sixty pounds of bait that those traitors filched from the sharks." S hark meat! If that was all he was, then this was the place for him! Ryeland lurked in a clump of the bougainvilleas near the garbage pit, watching the guards on the roof, while the sun went down and the sky purpled and the stars began to find pockets in the cloud cover through which they could appear. The searchlights -- or whatever -- were not turned on. Numbed, Ryeland watched and tried not to think. That was one less worry. Still, there were guards on the roof; he would have to wait until it was darker. The guards were idly looking out over Heaven to the sea. It was a warm night, a fine tropic night. But what was before him was an ugly spectacle. It was odd, Ryeland thought dreamily, that the Plan of Man permitted itself this touch of natural human horror. The world was so cuddled in cotton batting, so insulated against shock, that it would seem this sight should have been hidden away. Before him lay some tons of meat and bone -- amputated, exsanguinated, raped of corneal tissue and bone grafts, of healthy arterial sections and snips of nervous tissue. What had been taken from the pale cold cadavers behind the fence was that mere nothing, life. What remained was good organic matter. And that was another queer thing, thought Ryeland. It would have been a superb animal feed! Or, if on this one point the Plan of Man had reason to be tender, why, how many thousands of acres of minedout farmland could be rejuvenated with the protein and phosphate In those corpses? The Plan did not choose to use them in that way. Each night the accumulated parts were chuted to a barge -- the barge towed out to sea -- the contents given the deep six. Fish, crabs, drifting jellies and moored bivalves would ingest their flesh. Why? Men would eat the fish; why not shorten the chain? Ryeland shifted uneasily, and turned his thought, away -- for, if Angela told the truth, from this sort of rubble his own body had been built... Anyway, it was almost time. There was a murmur of publicaddress speakers from the cottage areas. He couldn't hear the words, but it was unusual for them to be used at all so late at night. Then another cluster of speakers spoke up -- nearer, this time. It sounded as though a name were being called. Ryeland swore under his breath. The sentry nearest him stood rigid as the Machine itself, gazing out over Heaven. Couldn't he at least take a break, stretch, yawn, gaze at the stars -- couldn't he do anything but remain alert and watchful at his post? The loudspeakers again. It was the circuit around the lake, Ryeland guessed. And the tone was becoming irritable, as though the guard in his microphone room atop the Clinic was being annoyed by higher authority... and was passing hii annoyance on to the cadavers of Heaven. Then closer still; and Ryeland heard the name this time. His own name. '"Ryeland!" Only it came bouncing off half a dozen speaker! at once, each delayed a tiny fraction of a second by distance and echo: cheting away. He was not surprised; he had been more than half expecting it. He listened to the measured words, cadenced to let the echo of each fade before the next word was spoken: "You... are... ordered... to... report... to... the... South... Clinic... at... once!" And off toward the lake Ryeland could see lights moving. Ryeland took a deep breath. He would have to chance it, even if the guard did not look away -- He caught himself, poised. The guard moved. He turned his head and nodded, to someone out of sight; and then, so quickly that Ryeland might scarcely have noticed he was gone if his eyes had not been glued to the man, the guard stepped inside. Ryeland ran, climbed, swung him self over the fence, ripped off his clothes, balled and hid them under a body and flung himself, naked and acrawl with revulsion, onto the heap of pale, cold corpses. T here was classic terror. It wm like the buried-alive man of humanity's oldest, most frightening story: the awakening in the narrow box, the dark, the smell of damp earth, the hollow muffled sound of the hammered coffin lid with six feet of graveyard dirt above. It uas like the war wounded given up for dead, awakening in one of Grant's wagons after Shiloh, or the mass graves of Hiker's Sixth Army outside Stalingrad -- the dead all around, the man himself as good as dead. Ryeland thanked God for meprobamate. He lay face down and limbs under him, as much as he could. No reason to make a guard wonder why a relatively intact corpse should be on the heap. He did not move. He smelled an acrid, sour reek that nearly made him vomit and he was, in a moment, bitter cold. He swore silently. It had not occurred to him that the metal walls of the trashbin would be refrigerated. He waited. And waited. He dared not look up, dared hardly breathe. It would be, he calculated, at least a matter of hours before the bin would tip and chute its contents into the barge. His flesh crawled and tried desperately to shiver, but he would not allow it. A bright light flared. Ryeland froze. He heard a murmur of voices. But that was all right; it probably was time for changing the shift of guards, and that was good, because it meant time was passing even faster than he had dared hope. The light would be only a routine inspection, of course... Another light flared, and another. The area of corpses was flooded with light, he was drowning in light; over him he could hear the wash of copter vanes adding their light to the scene. He dared not move. He dared not even blink, though the lights were cruel; but it was in vain; everything was in vain. There was a sudden string of orders and a commotion at the steel ladder that admitted workmen to the sump. Four guards ran in. They did not hesitate; they picked their way rapidly across the stainless-steel floor, stepping on torsos, pushing limbs aside. Straight to Ryeland. "Good try," one of them grinned. Then, without humor, "But don't do it again." They hurried him to the ladder and up it. They had not allowed him to retrieve his clothes. Now that it was too late his body was racked with shivering. He si.tmmcred, "How -- how did you know?" The guard caught his elbow and lifted him to the roof of the North Clinic. He was not unkind. He gestured to the row of searchlight-like things that Ryeland had feared might be floodlights. "Infrared scanners, Ryeland. Sniffed out your body heat. Oh, you can fool them -- but not while you're alive, not without clothes on to hide your heat. And clothes would have given you away anyhow," he added compassionately, "so don't feel bad. You just didn't have a chance." He opened a door and shoved Ryeland, reeling, into a hall of the Clinic. "Now get a move on. Somebody wants you. Somebody important." ir IF  Short Story They made one little mistake -- very natural -- and disastrous! T he male silth plodded forward wearily at sixty miles an hour, pausing only long enough to uproot and wolf down one of the rare scrub trees directly in its path. Its three hundred tons of massive body shook the ground as the great hind legs thumped along, and every cell of it ached with hunger. It was warm blooded, despite its vaguely reptilian appearance. Only meat could satisfy its need for energy. But the great herds lay a thousand miles to the north of this barren land. Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for him and his silth! "Amek!" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the mental spectrum. "Arnek, stop lagging and get up herel" He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small, stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward around a boulder, "Quiet!" Ptarra ordered sharply. Then, as Arnek switched from a thudding run to a smooth, creeping approach, the mental impulse took on a note of triumph. "Look down there and then teU me I don't know a ship trail from a meteor!" The bowl was bright in the glare of the orange sunlight, but at first Arnek saw nothing. Then, as his gaze swept back toward the nearer section, he blinked his great eyes, only half believing what they registered. It was a small thing, hardly taller than Arnck's silth -- maybe not even as tall. But it was too regular and obviously artificial, a pointed cylinder, to be a meteorite. Between two of the base fins there seemed to be an opening, with a miniature ramp leading down to the ground. It looked like a delicately precise model of a spaceship from the dawn of time. It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base. Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to move on two of their four limbs. A rnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste for crawling things. "Let's go back," he suggested uneasily. "There's nothing here for us, and I'm hungry." "Don't be silly," Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority was strong in the thought. "Of course it's too small for us; I knew that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment, though -- " Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only the steady wash of inertiagravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra. Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base of the little ship. Obviously, it had landed hard -- probably hard enough to ruin instruments and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once. There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a downgrade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other. Below, the two humans swung IF around at the earth-shaking thunder of the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint impulses. Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. "Cut them off! Don't let them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning." In the hunt, Amck had long since become only an extension of his dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two was almost at the ramp. At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet away. Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger -- or something like it -- came from the other creature. Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the midge. It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover. There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. "If your hunger is so great, why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood smells sweet enough." Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer. Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned in his youth, in a longlost, ruined universe. "It had a weapon," he commented, changing the subject. Ptarra rumbled an assent. "I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the lower orders. They'll make good silths... Now let's see what we can find in the probe." S he slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit. Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male, he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have IF mined whatever lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery... thought the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary. Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. "Maybe the creatures operated it," he suggested. "What makes you think so?" "I don't know. It just seems somehow -- " "Intuition!" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. "Yet I can't blame you this time. It does almost look that way. But it's logically impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!" She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat on the ground. With infinite care, she managed to hook one claw over a miniature control. Almost immediately, radio waves began forming a recurrent pattern along their nerves, coming in long and short pulses. Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees and came back to join his mate. Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them from the sight of any landing craft. A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light. Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of packages with it. "It seems almost intelligent," he said softly. He strained to follow the faint wash of impressions on the lower band. There was something there that struck a familiar chord in his thoughts, but he could not decode it. "Just instinct," Ptarra dismis.sed it with cool logic. "A female seeking food for its injured mate." Arnek sighed uncomfortably. "It doesn't seem female," he objected. "Another hunch? Don't be silly, Arnek. It has to be a female. The larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female. How else could it care for the young? It needs ability for a whole family, while the male needs only enough for himself. The laws of evolution are logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all." There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily and listening to the signal from space. The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals were stronger. Ptarra nodded. 'They're coming. After four hundred years, we have a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and multiply. A new universe for our own," There was immense satisfaction with self in her thoughts. "Well, I earned it!" A rnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary consought refuge across intergalactic space to this universe. A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants. And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their precautions. Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh. They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair -- Arnek and Ptarra, Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile, and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient, either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own. Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth. Four iiundred years! And now -- now, he thought, he was tired. It no longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach. The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship, landing over the wreckage of the first. But it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow IF seemed to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground, sending out signals. "Another probe," Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts, quickly masked by cold logic. "Naturally, they'd wait to check with something like this. There will probably be several probes before they decide they have to investigate personally. All rightl We'll give them something to worry about." She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship. This time something ran out, down the ramp -- a tiny gadget of churning tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It circled briefly and then headed across the bowl. "Stop it," Ptarra ordered. "It may have a camera, so don't waste time. The less the builders learn about us, the better." Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed. At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them. Arnek could have squashed them with a single trust of his leg. But he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore, remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them and drive them toward the others. Then a wave of amusement from Ptarra checked him. "They'd never reach that far," she called. "They can't survive the crash of their vehicle. Let them go." A rnek felt the faint, murky mental signals so low on the band, and he knew Ptarra was right. They were staggering now, and the smaller one seemed to be only partly conscious. He sighed and scooped up the groimd car, carrying it back to Ptarra. This time his mate was making no effort to rip the ship apart. She was staring through one of the tiny ports, trying to fit her great eye against it. And she seemed uncertain. Finally she took the ground car and began dismantling it, looking for automatic or remote controls. There were none. "Maybe the creatures operated it -- and the ship," Arnek said. He expected the same reaction the remark had drawn before. This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in puzzlement. "About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes true," she muttered. "Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are only manual controls here. Where are those silly creatures?" The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths, holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes. Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet. Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone. A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked and a huge tongue ran over her lips. "Nerve fiber!" Her shout covered the entire spectrum. "Arnek, there arc pounds of nerve fiber in the creature! High grade -- better than that in these silth forms. As good as that in any silth. Here, give me the other." She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out and began working as delicately ms the silth body would permit. Her mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she held. "There -- a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain efficiency about it. It isn't logical -- and yet it is." Abruptly, the evidence was gone. "Come on," she ordered. Arnek sighed, and his stomach rumbled a protest. But he ignored it. "What good is it? We surely can't make a silth out of a tiny thing like that?" "Why not?" Contempt for male thought was mixed with smug satisfaction for her own. "We don't use the other cells anyhow. Oh, there will be difficulties. They may be short-lived. But with such high grade fiber, we can risk infiltrating a new one as often as we need. There should be enough of them. They probably have half a dozen to a litter twice a year, like most small live on a single planet. And since they're colonizing other worlds like this one..." Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that. Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people had used the same method at times. It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable of independent intelligence. There IF must be something wrong with it. Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But... "Their weapons," he cried. "Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow into their nerves, they'd kill us." Ptarra grunted. "Sometimes," she admitted, "you almost think like a female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And don't let them get near that ship, either!" I t was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before. Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on, and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band. "Do you remember everything?" Ptarra asked. "You've got to regain consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your mind to it." "I remember," Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled into him repeatedly untill he was sick of it. It was like the horror of having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now. "Be sure you take the smaller male body," she warned again. "Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these creatures once," he reminded her. For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost amusement as she answered. "Matching sex isn't logically necessary. It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger body." She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began to follow. It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him, until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the minimum of nutrient fluid with them. It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra already lying over the sleeping human. He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead. He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the strange nerve bundle in the skull. Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was almost glad that he had not died with it. Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host cells from the reaction. He set the first stage up, however. This time he managed with no help from Ptarra. Then he relapsed into unconsciousness, making no effort to control his new silth yet. He'd have to revise when the silth awoke, he told himself. But it was only a dream order, half completed... I t was a sudden painful pressure of acceleration that finally brought him out of his torpor. He felt half sick, and he could vaguely sense that the new silth was fevered and uncomfortable. But, amazingly, it was sitting up. And around it was a room bigger than the whole ship had seemed, and controls under its hands, and fantastic equipment. "It's about time," Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now, since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold and sure. "I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates." Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to leave. "Are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive -- but they're logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she isn't aware." The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek rode. "I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches." The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other human. "Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's metter than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still cop more cop ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live." Ptarra's thoughts cut through IF Arneks efforts to understand. "Reproduction feelings," she reported in satisfaction. "They must have higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick." Then her thoughts sharpened. "Take over your si #th!" The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out  from the converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain of the sillh. He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will. "There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation while we grow into these silths," Ptarra reported. "Now -- help me if you can." Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will. Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind, Arnek began to see the plan. There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There a single planet swung in orbit -- a planet with food but ho dangerous animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its isolation. There would be no fuel for further travel. But that copld wait, while their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take over the galaxy -- ns they had taken the one so long away! The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed. "Logic!" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his nerves. Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there was amusement. "Logic," she agreed. "But perhaps intuition isn't too bad for a male. You've been right twice." "Twice?" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths controlled their own ships, of course. But... "Twice," Ptarra said. "Fve just realized my silth is a male, as you suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?" She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek. Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male. Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had knov'm its day and now entered its # IF  Short Story Anything can happen in the customs lounge -- since they let those Earth people in! T here were usually a few Customs Inspectors in the lounge, waiting to begin their shifts, hanging around trading news and incidents and drinking the bad, lukewarm kasser that was a standing joke in the Immigration-Customs Service. Old Grag was telling for perhaps the eightieth time of a success of his when he young in the Service... They had this small box of sticky, squashy sweets with them. The young one was eating one. Many another inspector would have passed them through, but I thought the young one chewed too much and too loud. So I said, 'Mind if I have one?" " 'Wahl' says they together, 'it would set you on edge, Noble Wise Inspector. It is the taste of another world.' They was Venusers, and they started shifting and hopping around, and humming their national anthem, you know how they used to do back in the old days. I made quite a nice little find. Almost a half-scree of chamfer in each one of those sweets. I got a promotion out of that, and the Venusers got a six-year close out." Inspector Flimp blew one of his noses loudly. "Hee, that's nothing.  recall back when we first opened up for Immigration, and a whole shipload of earthers came in. I'hey were crammed in like tigs in a nest, and as usual they didn't know one word of the language, they didn't have any idea of where to go or how to do anything, and they'd got separated from their controller. They just stood around, huddled together and jabbering at each other. Well, I checked out about twenty of them, and then there comes up this big ugly female. Well, I jacks the elevator up some more, and I looks down at her. " 'Name!' I call. 'Gladdis Cracklegill,' or some other weird earth name she screams at me. 'Too much iV name,' I say. 'You've got enough name there for five of you. Which will you choose, Glad, Is, Crack, El or Giir "Well, it took me a while to make her understand me -- my earth accent wasn't too good then, and she was slow-headed, having only one, like all earthers. But I finally made her understand what I wanted to know, and then, by Clag, what a ramping frowst she did make! "It was while she was screeching at me that I noticed her teeth were pretty big. even for such a huge beast as she was. So I secretly turned on the Dento-Spyer, right into her jaws, and what a sight on the view screen! Each of those big teeth was false and filled to the top with Earth seeds she was trying to smuggle!' "Earthers!" exploded young Nask. "They make me sick!" "I'm with you, Nask," said Inspector Sprim. "And I don't understand why they still keep routing earthers through Immigration anyway. They claim they're a borderline case, but when you've seen as many as I have, you know, which side of the border they're on." N ask went off to the kasser dispenser and his place was taken by Brif, the head Inspector, who had been listening. "Un-edge yourself, Sprim," smiled Brif, contracting one of his heads. "I have good news, rare news and fine news. The Four Council decision just came down to us. Earthers are now to be routed through Livestock instead of Immigration beginning very soon." A cheer went up from the little group of Customs and Immigration officials. The one Livestock Inspector in the lounge groaned in despair. Old Inspector Flimp seemed bothered. "They've made themselves a mistake," he sputtered. "Earthers can be clever and tricky even after they're altered. Why, I seen them pull every trick in the book coming through here. Did I ever tell you about the stunted one with an artificial head who tried to pass himself off as a rest-park planner? Well, it seems that..." Two young, but large inspectors sneaked away from the group when they saw old Flimp was launched into one of his dull yarns again. Outside the lounge, after a quick look up and down the hall, they ducked into the robot-cleaner storage closet. "Boy," gasped the shorter inspector. "I had to get out of there. Besides the torture of listening to that two-headed monster babble on and on about how he outwitted earthers when he was still able to move around, this miserable thing has started to come loose again." He gave an impatient wrench to his left head, and it wobbled enough to expose some of the delicate wires that the earth robotic engineer had labored over so many hours. The other began tightening straps and buckles for him. "There," he said finally. "You look like one of the boys again." Laughing together, the earthers went back into the Customs Lounge. IF  Novelette She was only a space captain's daughter -- and all she wanted was a human to call her own! X Tight was a diamond studded I  dream from where they sat. The moon was a maiden on wing suggesting amorous flight, fnside the stuffiness of the celluloid-like vehicle there was absolutely no hint of discomfort or absurd misfittings -- despite the fact that Threlkeld and his daughter were now shaped out of all proportions to the conveyor itself. "You seem unusually drawn," Threlkeld suggested from his prone positition on the floor of the craft. Gelerie took a deep, sensual sigh. "It is the pill, I am sure." TLook at you," Threlkeld muttered, "and look at me -- we're perhaps the most unique imitation of humans the galaxy has ever produced." Again there was a maddening silence... maddening to Threlkeld. "My daughter," he said at length, disturbed, "I must remind you of the importance of this little mission. My entire career with the inter-star patrol depends on how well we function." Gelerie was bent in a heap near the tapering nose of the pod-shaped vehicle as it hurtled past the lovely moon, headlong toward a giant green IF You don't have to mail the coupon -- if you want to keep your covers intact -- but don't years... and sure to be one of its best! Every issue of Words of Tomorrow is packed with the best stories of your favorite writers. At almost one-third of newsstand price -- more outstanding stories. Either clip the coupon or send order on a plain sheet of paper...  but don't wait! Do it todayl  I Introductory Subscription Department j j #I Hudson Street, New York City #, New York j I introductory price! Start my subscription with Issue No. I j J No. # (circle which you prefer). I enclose check or money  I order for #. (Add # for postage outside of North  I and South America).  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Hurtled in a vessel with no manual controls, a vessel grown in a government garden on another world... catapulted on a very special assignment to a planet that neither grew missiles nor thought of launching them without myriads of mechanical wires, dials and blinker lights. Now Threlkeld was filled with indignation. "Gelerie, I command you -- " "Yes, Father. You command me," she drawled. "Unless you remain attentive, my daughter, we may fail. Failing, I must concede that I have finally grown too old for spatial duty, and be sent to the Home. Do you want that?" Gelerie had acquired all the attributes of a beautiful, buxom Earth girl. She looked up in the soft light that glowed its phosphorous loveliness from the very walls of the seed pod they occupied. Threlkeld muttered, "Such beauty -- it is beyond all that the textbooks described." Now Gelerie butted in, "The trouble, my father, is simple. The transition pills -- " "What about them?" "They do more than convert us from a six-footed tree-hanging creature of the Alpha Centauri group. They impose upon us the same emotional stress of the human. You know, father, I have been changed into leopards, rhinos and snoquallimie eels before; but always I retained my own natural traits -- the love of trees, the desire to return to my naive form and habitat as quickly as possible. But this time, I feel demure and attractive and extremely vain and -- " "I warn you, my daughter. I am old. I have seen these Earth types at work. They are a useless breed. Their extra-curricular activities are beyond all reason. Very few of them stick to what is really important. Very few of them understand that achievement of the goal is the only thing there is. Now, I suggest you fight off these emotions. Try not to succumb to human frailities, for we have an important job to do -- lest your poor father be put out to pasture." T he sound of empty space beside them was almost unnoticeable. The swish, so familiar for such speeds near their own planetary chain far out in the universe, was now missing. As they approached the Earth, a thin crescent of daylight appeared to their right. "Father," Gelerie said, "I cannot help myself. I am in love with this Earth form. I have this -- this deep sense of beauty, of love, of desire. I cannot seem to quell it." Threlkeld tried to help her with logic. "Homekind gave us the pills for a brief mission. I have lived long enough not to desire these human qualities. You are much younger and have much more to learn. Homekind devised these pills for but one purpose -- you are to lure a young man of your choosing into our vehicle. He will then be transported home, and your father will have his old job back on the ferry to Betelgeuse. Do not fail me, Gelerie." IF A bright, mercury-like flood of daylight appeared, and Threlkeld explained to her that it was light from the Earth's source of life, the solar body they had passed. He explained that Homekind was now selecting by remote control their landing site. The pod now skittered through the skies, safely avoiding other space craft which Earth might have sent up. Threlkeld's mind left his daughter and consumed the view below them. A grand chasm of blue-green, an ocean. Strips of sand here and there along a vast continental shelf. Thick vegetation on the continent. An excess of river inlets. All important bearings on their location should they need to call home for help. He observed the scene with satisfaction. And then they were slowing to a snail's pace, and Homekind was selecting a clearing in the sand along the shore of a river. Then the seed pod, its shape so much like that of the zephyr of Earth, twisted whirlybird fashion to the ground. Threlkeld lifted the rear of the container, and stiffly the two Earth imitations stepped out. "Now we roll the vehicle into the trees." They carefully gathered sticks and bramble from the water's edge and made a natural pile of debris in front of the pod, so that anyone glancing its way would never see the brownish green vehicle for other than was intended to be seen -- a mound of dried clay. "Now where are we, father?" Gelerie asked, as she stretched herself into shape. "We are but ten miles from the city harbor. We will skirt the riverbank for a boat. Homekind left nothing untended -- which is why you -- " "Why I must not fail," she replied drily. "I know. I must not fail. But I must be allowed to enjoy my Earth form for a while. It is beautiful." She looked him squarely in the eye. "It is beautiful, is it not, father? Am I not more beautiful than you have ever seen me?" "Homekind makes recordings of our conversations, my daughter... as it is psychiatrically right that they should. And in their analyses, I do not want them to have to ever say that Threlkeld succumbed to the skindeep world of the Earth people. I must warn you again, Gelerie," he went on, "that Earth people base nearly all of their existence, their plans, their hopes on how attractive they may be, how young or how old they may look, how withered their skin. For they live chiefly for vanity, very little else." The way Gelerie sighed told him he had failed. "One thing more, my daughter," he said in another attempt. "Homekind made you that attractive merely for the purpose of luring this male Earth creature into our conveyor. Now can you do it? Will you keep your mind on your task?" Gelerie said, "Where will you be, father?" "I will make the selection for you. Then I will transfer my mind into yours, just to make certain you complete your task." The girl was lost again in self-appraisal. She extended her supple human arms and legs and observed them almost lovingly. "I like the short garments they wear. Such beauty should never be hidden." "Homekind arranged it that way with a definite purpose in mind. Remember that," he said, now trotting ahead to find some sign of a boat. He was about to give up, afraid to admit Homekind might have erred, when Gelerie shrieked, "Look -- over that way. A leafboat." A warm sense of thanks went out from Threlkeld silently. He led the way to the large blue-green leaf that lay flat upon the water, stiffened with wax, water-resistant, entirely buoyant. They pulled it close and stepped aboard. There was no need for paddles, since a modified leafboat constructed by Homekind and transported by Homekind always naturally had built-in propulsion. Tiny molecules of water were converted along the underside of the leaf into a moderate amount of energy which shoved them forward under Homekind's magnetic command toward a collection of tall glass spires. "Remember, Gelerie," Threlkeld said to the dreaming girl who let her hand dangle in the waters of Earth, "mv future is at stake. You are a sixfooted tree-hanging creature. You will return to your native form the moment our mission is completed. Now I will not warn you again. Another moody spell and we return to the vehicle with only one thing assured -- Threlkeld the Great's impending retirement." But if he expected an assurance out of Gelerie that she would not fail, he was wrong, for she did not respond. T hey abandoned the leaf boat as the foot of a sign, which in their compact Earth-translation scheme pill they had taken, said, Forty-second Street. They scaled the elevated structures with almost natural animal precision and carefully dodged the ground vehicles that sped toward them on ramps. Then they were on the premises of their destination. A large white building touching the sky, and beside it a curved, oblong structure which Threlkeld whispered contained Earth's government. "He is to be a diplomat?" she asked. "Sh," he said, as people hurried past them, turning to inspect Gelcrie's brief toggery. They ascended a ramp to the glassed foyer. Then they were inside, gaping at the height of the ceiling, at the overhanging balconies. A young woman with Oriental qualities approached them. "May I be of assistance?" "Oh, Father," Gelerie said, fascinated at the human voice. "We wish," Threlkeld began guardedly, "to speak with the youngest member of the world government -- " "That would be the Congo, sir." "Not nation. Individual staff member. Person. Human. Youngest in years," Threlkeld explained. "Twenty-one is generally as young as anyone is allowed -- as clerks and aides, sir. That would be the minimum age. Diplomatic corpsmen are IF usually considerably older, Very well. The nearest and youngest of the aides." "I can think of Monsieur Joffrion of France or Sahib Masher of Arabia." Threlkeld was now weeding out difficulties. Homekind had given them access to one language only. "Someone who speaks the language I am speaking." The girl frowned. "Sir, you do not know what language you speak?" A bolt of fear shot through Threlkeld's earth stomach. "Of course I know. The point is, do you know?" "English," the frustrated guide said. "Very well, I will secure Mr. Twitty of the British delegation. Come this way, sir, madam." Threlkeld forced a deep intake of oxygen. He smiled at Gelerie and they followed the girl to an elevator. When they alighted, they were escorted down a hall to the doorway marked. Delegation of the United Kingdom. Then the guide turned to Threlkeld and said, "I have instructions to learn the nature of your mission before introducing you, sir." Threlkeld had hoped it would not come to this. But better to tell the girl than foil the chance now. "I want the young man to fall in love with my daughter. Then I am going to kidnap him and whisk him off to a faraway planet." There, he had said it. Homekind had told him to say it if necessary. The truth would be the one thing the Earthlings would never believe, they had told him. The Oriental girl laughed and said, "Sir, I admit defeat. Mr. Twitty will have to take it from here." She stuck her head inside the door and whistled softly. "Pip, pip, Yu-lin," came the juvenile voice of the young man inside. "What's the bother, old girl?" "A man and his daughter to see you." "And the nature of their visit?" "They want you to fall in love with the beautiful girl, and then her father will escort you on a nice honeymoon to some love spot in romantic night sky." As Yu-lin spoke, she turned her bright oriental eyes to Threlkeld and winked. Threlkeld felt his blood rush hot. In a mental transit to his daughter, he said, "I think it high time I transferred my mind to you. You need all the moral stamina you can get, and I see the power these Earthlings have on the opposite sex. It is not good. Prepare fhe cavity of your brain," he instructed, and seeing that away, Threlkeld made the mindswitch alone and aimed his body at a door marked Mens Room. Soon it disappeared. T 'he young Earthman rushed forward, unconcerned with the internal workings of Threlkeld, fiddling with his frog glasses and blinking as if he did not see well. Gelerie saw that he was thin, tall, sandyhaired and extremely good looking. Her heart pounded and Threlkeld's mind said, "Watch out." The young man smiled and extended his hand to Gelerie. "You'll have to forgive the guide, madam. She sometimes gets carried away. I am Twitty of the U.K. So glad to have you aboard." A nudge somewhere near Gelerie's brain awakened her. "I am afraid I am here for a very strange reason -- the very reason Yu-lin stated. I want you to fall in love with me." Twitty replaced his glasses. "I think ril go back and come out again. My dear, you are a lovely creature, but back home I am engaged to a girl who won three local beauty contests on the way to the title of Miss Britain." "And did she win Miss Britain?" Twitty's mouth dropped. "What are you trying to say?" "I am trying to say, sir, leave your Miss Britain who did not quite make it and fly aWay with me to Alpha Centauri -- " "Oh. come now," Twitty said laughing. "In that brief toggery you expect me to believe you are some moon maiden from a midsummer night's dream and go wandering with you through loveland in the sky? Go back to your fairy tale, Miss -- " "Gelerie." "Gelerie what?" "Gelerie is all they gave me in the Alpha Centauri group. We have a home-grown vehicle waiting in the woods. And a leafboat at the foot of Forty-second Street to carry us under its own power to the site of the vehicle. We covered the vehicle with driftwood to protect it lest some Earthling should swipe it and Homekind be forced to grow us another." Twitty called over his shoulder. "Brighton? Take over for a little while. I shall return by and by." But the allure of the woman creature in short pants was drawing him near. "May I see this thing in the woods?" "Of course," she said, and she could feel the mental smile of Threlkeld inside her brain as it seemed to take a deep, relieved breath. They descended the elevator and come out at the main exit. Twitty bolted forward and grabbed a guard by the arm. "Sir, I wish you to arrest this woman on suspicion as an alien from outer space or a candidate for Bellevue." A burly guard with a kind face looked into Gelerie's eyes. Now her father's brain was at anxiety's peak, calling the plays. "Go ahead, double your fingers into a fist, shove it forward. now, under his jaw -- " "But -- " Gelerie was stammering. "No buts!" Threlkeld's internal instructions poured. "When Homekind made you beautiful, my dear, they also made you big. You are an Amazon." "Amazon?" "No time to explain," he said. "Let the bruiser have one!" Gelerie shrugged and took a swing. The arms of the guard shot skyward, and the big, hulking body in uniform fell backwards and plopped against the floor. As he rose up, shouting, Gelerie grabbed the slim Mr. Twitty around the waist, lifted him bodily and ran like a sudden gale through the lobby, out the door, down the ramp and to the river. With an Olympic leap, she made it to the stable, sturdy leafboat. O n orders from Homekind the craft quietly slid toward the trysting place, Gelerie was aware of IF a flood of congratulations from her father in her brain. Twitty was red with humiliation. "You know, of course, they will be flying over us momentarily. You'll be courtmartialed, or whatever it is they do to the American kidnapers of international (diplomatic corps persons." "You don't like me," Gelerie pouted. "I came all the way from Alpha Centauri to take you home with me and you don't even as much as like me." The young Englishman lifted Gelerie's chin and studied her tears. "By jove, they are not crocodilian. I believe you are serious. You are innocent and serious...strong, of course, but innocent." "I love you. I want no one but you," she said. "I can see there would be an advantage in a fellow my size having a wife your size," he said reflectively. "But Babs would never approve." Gelerie shrugged her broad shoulders. She hugged herself lovingly. "Babs can always get another fellow. I'll never be able to get another guy." "Why? Are you planning to resign from the human race?" "That's exactly it," she agreed. "However, if I get you to come back with me, Homekind may consent to my staying in the human form and living with you the rest of my life." Twitty laughed. "Boys, come and get me," he muttered at the sky. Threlkeld stayed on guard mentally, and Gelerie depressed into a morose, human activity known as sinking one's head into one's knees. The U.K. man's laugh turned abruptly to awe when he saw the helicopter flutter over them and land on a spot of riverbank just ahead. Vaguely he could see military pilots, and two civilians hop out and run for the woods. He watched with disturbed concern as the leafboat made a sharp right turn of its own volition and headed for the bank. Now Gelerie arose, picked him up by the waist and carried him bodily toward the gathering. The militia were uncovering the seed pod. "Twitty," one of the men called. "What in heaven's name is she doing to you?" "You'll never guess," he fumed. "She's taking me to Alpha Centauri." "You don't mean it!" his crony replied. "Whatever will Babs think?" The military men ran back to the group. "Cadogan, sir. I believe you'd better come look. That clay mound behind all the rubble. It is just like the old man said it would be." Gelerie looked and saw her father at the vehicle. She raced forward with Twitty scratching and kicking. Cadogan said, "We found the old man wandering aimlessly. We asked him to show us where he came from. He kept pointing until we landed here. He has an excellent memory, but something has control of him. Something very sinister and weird, Twitty." Inside, Gelerie was getting a strong command from Threlkeld. "Get close, much closer. How can I effect a transit until you come within the required distance?" She thought-replied, "Well, get out of the pod so I can see you." "No! Get inside quickly. Homekind is ready whenever we are. Bring Twitty in with you and we'll be away!" Now the military men and Cadogan were clearing away the debris, half stumbling, half confused. "Get the girl. Don't let her get in that thing. No matter how absurd their story, don't let her get aboard that  -- that seed pod!" "Amazon," T h r e I k e I d yelled. "Amazon, Amazon, Amazon! Gelerie -- " A t that, Gelerie dropped Twitty and began swinging with both fists. She laid out two helicopter pilots and a civilian. She retrieved Twitty and her father said, "Now, get the devil in this pod so I can transfer back to the body! Then wc can revert to type, I said get the devil in the pod so -- " "No!" "Gelerie," his voice stormed, shattering her peace of mind. "No. If we go back to Alpha," she said, "I'll be a six-legged amphibian and Twitty will be a handsome human. He won't even know me!" Twitty looked at her. "Wh-who are addressing?" From inside the voice thundered on. "Think of your father, who has worked all his life for you! Just one more assignment with interstar patrol. Even ferry duty will suffice. Please let me have my specimen and my body, Gelerie! Please go inside the seed pod. Homekind will kill me in hours if I fail." Gelerie held Twitty at a distance. "I can't do it. I can't leave him." "Then bring him with you. What I keep telling you we came for -- " "Not as human-animal versus animal-animal," she said. "I love him. I can't harm him." "In the ship, Gelerie! For your old Daddy. Inside, girl. In -- " Gelerie was now close enough to permit her father's mind to transit. From inside he spoke aloud, "Well, thank Homekind for that! Now get in and we'll be off." "What about one of the others?" she said, now pointing at the three men who lay unconscious at her feet. "That would be fine," Threlkeld replied. "Just loss Twitty in the drink and bring Cadogan. He looks like good stock." Twitty was suddenly stricken with fright. If he never believed before, he believed now. "No. Cadogan has a wife and children. Don't take him -- take me, I'm unmarried." "Well," Threlkeld said, "now it's all solved. Get on board, Gelerie." "No, father. If I do that, I still become less than Twitty. Homekind does not respect love affairs between separate types." "Nor does it allow its 'missionaries to remain in the arena after the battle is won. Gelerie, face it if you stay here you'll revert to type the instant I leave." Gelerie turned Twitty loose. She bent low and looked through the opening of the vehicle at her father. "Do you think Homekind would do that other thing?" She said it so Twitty would not guess right off. "Nonsense. It would defeat the whole purpose of the mission," Threlkeld said. "They want a human specimen. Taking him home and IF turning him into one of us would not give them any new thing to study. You'll have to do better than that." "I meant here. Make him one of our kind and let him stay here." Threlkeld said, "Only if you can produce some human to take his place." Gelerie thought a moment. "What is the time limit on this mission?" "A year, Earth time. Two years at the outside." "And the period of human gestation?" "Nine months, ten days and -- what gives?" "I shall marry Twitty, give Homekind a human specimen -- my own -- in nine months and ten days. You tell Homekind of my plan. Let them hear the recording. Then return and be with me. I shall, one hour very soon, invite Twitty to sojourn with me on the completion of this mission, father. I guarantee you, Homekind be with me, he will not want to see me go the rest of the way alone." Threlkeld said, "My daughter's mind is full of strange logic, but it makes good sense. But be extremely careful my dear. The human is a deceitful thing. He will kiss your lips while stabbing your back." Gelerie turned to Twitty and said, "How would you like to have six legs and swing from the tree by your tail?" She turned and spoke, "See, father? He faints so readily. He will be quite easily handled." But her human eyes had not adjusted perfectly to Earth's thick atmosphere. She suddenly did not see the vehicle containing her father. Then, far beyond the clouds of sunset, she detected a small dot sailing off into the deep blue, its side reflecting gold. "Farewell for now, my father," she whispered. T urning to the helicopter, she carried three subdued men and placed them aboard. Then she lifted Twitty softly to her shoulders and muttered, "Homekind, fly me to their quarters. I am weary for the moment and do not feel like operating the controls." The copter lifted silently, swinging out over the East River. Though cramped, Gelerie found a place beside her for Twitty. When he bad stopped shaking, she whistled softly as the Oriental girl had and kissed him as an Amazon I E I by Philip K. Dick The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: In the past few issues  has made itself, I feel, one of the main cience-fiction magazines. Its quality has come up astonishingly. In the July issue. Emsh, with his cover illustration and interior work, reinforced in my mind my high opinion of him. How about an allEmsh issue? Before your July issue, you may remember, I wrote you and said that I'd gladly do a flip for more Van Vogt like what's-his-name did for Heinlein. Then I went on to say, "But I guess that isn't too likely." Well, what can I say? Except "ugh" aa I land on my back... Hank Luttrell Route #-# Barrett Sta. Rd. Kirkwood #, Mo. e  e Dear Editor: As an SF fan for the last # years, I feel entitled to sound off to the writers. So with your permission... SF writers attention! I hereby propose the following manifesto in regard to future sf stories: In first-contact-with-alien stories, let's have one of the parties equipped with automatic translators, and let's get on with the story. If I have to suffer through another of those long, laborious processes of "Me Tarzan -- Him No. # Planet" struggles, I just might give up sf and take up golf. On the subject of girls: Now, they're all right, don't get me wrong. But let's vary it a bit. I mean all this "terrific figrure, full breasts, scanty garments" stuff is getting, well, duW, believe it or not. Let's set up a code numbering system, like No. #-blonde, #-#-#. No. #-brunette, #-#-#, etc. Think of the space we'd save! Spaceships: By now everyone's IF #t heard of hyperdriye (that's where you call Einstein a liar by groins faster than light), so let's just ttss it, all right? Aliens: Those little green men, or they're well, don't you think it's time for something new? Maybe even humans. George A. Mayerchak  Dear Editor: Do you suppose I could have a bit of space in your letter column to mention to your readers that there is a contest now being run, for the third consecutive year, in fact, for amateur sf authors? est fan group of them all. Awards, three of them, are in cash. It is open to everyone who has sold less than three stories professionally. Stories must be less than # words -- fantasy, sf or weird. There is something in this for everyone; even the youngest writer who has little more than enthusiasm will find out why they don't sell. We can pretty well guarantee at least a page of criticism -- which, as anyone who submits at all regularly to prozines is well aware, is generally not available to the writer. The editors just don't have time to tell the would-be authors why they don't make it. For the complete rules, write me. Clayton Hamilin Southwest Harbor Maine  If neither sponsors nor participates in this contest -- but we think it's a Good Thing. Especially for ose new writers who pretty well know their stories aren't quite right to be published, and want to get a second person's view on why they aren't That we're just not able to do... We are able to do one thing toward encouraging new talent, though, and that is to print some of it. As regular readers know, each issue we bring you at least one story by a new writer. This issue there are two : The Tune of Cold, by a young lady from South Dakota, and The Customs Lounge, by a folksinging, star-gazing man from upstate New York. We like 'em -- hope you will too! -- Editor.   Dear Editor: Your July issue was good, but there were a few things about it that had a distinct aroma of the "old" If. Mighiest Qom: OK, but for some reason it seemed like a rewritten Relief of the Red-Tape Mountain (May, '#). Why does Retief always beat up on those poor little aliens? Earth should be up to its neck in space wars by now, but we always seem to end up with the BE M's on our side. Don't get me wrong. I think Retief is a great guy, but sometimes he seems very like a comic-book hero. Down to the Worlds of Men: Quite a story! I'd like to see more of this fellow's work. The Faces Outside: This story tears up and burns the 'Worlds of Galaxy Rejects" bit, especially when you add to it the great Turning Point and Singleminded of May. In the Arena: Actually this story reminded me of the E. R. Burroughs Mars series, with all Its arena battles in the first couple of books. At least the hero and heroine didn't give each other psychoanalysis as they do all too often. David Lebling # Rollins Court Rockville, Maryland   Dear Editor: Something bugged me about the May If. Pederson's cover from Turning Point was great, but -- I thought Mierna had blonde hair and blue skin, not black hair and brown skin. Don't tell me I'm colorblind! Don't get me wrong, though -- everything else about the issue was supreme! Lizbeth Stern #I East # St. New York City #  Well, we can explain that. The chain of communications between the author and the artist rests on one weak link. We're it. We goofed in transmitting the descriptions. -- Ed itor.    Dear Editor: How lucky you are! So many amateur editors and critics to help you run your magazine (art experts, too!) Particularly one Douglas Taylor of Elephant's Breath, Kansas, who, in his distinguished critique, off-handedly recommends that you 'eject Relief", thus causing me to write my first letter to any editor in all my years of science-ficion addiction. We live in troublesome times indeed, Mr. Taylor of Elephant's Ear, Kansas, times in which mediocrity is the standard and the art of gentle satire is all but extinct. Hit 'em with an ax or they don't dig you. I must take exception where Relief is concerned -- a rare combination of "actionadventure yarn" and intellectual type humor of a sort that appeals to me. Back to you, dear editor. I'm sure that you are doing your experienced best to produce a fine magazine and I for one will continue to wade through good stories and bad, good illustrations and poor, leaving all the decisions up to you -- saving only that you hang onto Relief for me! Harvey Telowitz # Long Beach Rd. Island Park, N. Y. #I  Dear Editor: I have the first volume, the first issue of If. Do you know who needs it? Lawrence Pearson # Willoughby Brooklyn #, N. Y.    Dear Editor: Hal Clement is really good. He is always good. He was especially good with The Green World in the May, #, issue of If. I would like to send out a plea for issues of Captain Future. James W. Ayers # #st St. Attalla, Ala.   (  There we are, out of room again. Thanks to all of you -- especially to those whose letters wouldn't fit in this time... Next issue? Retief is back, in Keith Laumer's The Governor of Glave; John Brunner tells us about A Better Mousetrap; we conclude The Reefs of Space... and there'll be more! Editor IF  if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy , foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City Address Zone State Seated, #. to r.: Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Berrien Evans. Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. t). Ratcliff Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling Photo by Philippe Halsman # famous authors start a new kind of writing school If you have writing talent worth developing, here's an opportunity never before available: Twelve of America's most famous authors have created a school of professional writing to help you develop your skill, talent and craftsmanship... and to pass on to you their secrets of achieving success and recognition. This unique home-training program is supervised by Rod Serling, winner of five Emmys for TV writing; Pulitzer Prize historian Bruce Catton; best-selling novelist Faith man; publisher-columnist Bennett Cerf; famed sportswriter Red Smith; Rudolf Flesch, top authority on readable writing; noted language expert Prof. Bergen Evans; famous mystery novelist Mignon G. Eberhart; J. D. Ratcliff, called by Time "America's No. I craftsman in the field of non-fiction"; and top ad men John Caples and Mark Wiseman. These famous authors have developed  remarkable series of textbooks, lessons and writing assignments that present -- in a clear and stimulating way -- what they have learned in their long, hard climb to the top. The School's instructors are themselves professional writers. Under the supervision of the # Famous Writers, these instructors work with students by mail, just as magazine and book editors work with many established authors. And they spend up to several hours on each assignment completed by a student... revising, correcting, and advising. The Famous Writers School is less than three years old. Its first students are not due to graduate until later this year. Yet, many have sold their writings to such varied publications as The Reader's Dlfest, Redhook, Popular Science, True Story. To select people with writing talent worth developing, the # Famous Writers have designed a revealing Talent Test. The coupon will bring you a copy, along with a brochure about the School. Your completed Test will be graded without charge or obligation by one of the School's instructors. If your Test indicates writing talent, you are then eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under absolutely no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have writing talent worth developing. Please mail me, without obligation, the Famous Writers Talent Test. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Street City Zone County State The School is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. THE GOVERNOR OF GLAVE-A Retief Storyby KEITH LAUMER  #s' New stories hy You don't have to mail the coupon -- if you want to keep your covers intact -- but don't years... and sure to be one of its best! Every issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is packed with the best stories of your favorite writers. At almost one-third of newsstand price -- more outstanding stories. Either clip the coupon or send order on a plain sheet of paper... but don't wait! Do it today! r n I Introductory Subscription Department J j #I Hudson Street, New York City #, New York ! I introductory price! Start my subscription with Issue No. I I  No. # (circle which you prefer). I enclose check or money  I order for #. (Add # for postage outside of North  I and South America).  I Name j I Address I i City Zone State I I J Here's What Is in Store for You in You'll laugh with his The Sfar Sent Knaves and be enthralled by his The Night of the Trolls. One of science fiction's finest women writers and anthologists brings you her unforgettable story. The Lonely. An all-time great writer with The Masked World. Celebrated author of The Visitor at the Zoo comes to The End of the Search. Hugo award-winner with an unforgettable novelette. The Impossible Star. Another Hugo winner with another memorable novelette, A Jury of Its Peers. All Your Favorites! Prize winners and the best of the newcomers, novelists and short-story writers -- all the writers who bring you the best of science fiction will be with subscription todayl Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher David Perton, Production Manager Rose M. Bianchini, Art Director Cover by Gaughan from Muck Man IP published bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial T his is not the letter department -- you'll find that elsewhere (and just by the way, it certainly has improved, hasn't it? One of these days we'll be back in the golden age of controversy and provocation, and screeds by people who are obviously destined to. fill the rest of the book) -- but from time to time something comes in which calls for more than the phrase of response which is all space allows back aft. For example, we owe some attention to Mr. Ed Wegman, Promotion tions Center. In our last issue, we described with justified hysterical enthusiasm the remarkable volume Source Book for Science Teachers, a handbook for the chewing-gum and string school of science buffs. We also went out of our way to be snide and cute about the lack of promotion for this shining gem of a book, since we had stumbled across it accidentally in a top company catalog IF be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of mans mind, and the mastery of lifers problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, 'The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe   K I Scribe H.W.K... I San Jose, California i j Please send me the free book. The Mastery  I of Life, which explains how I may learn to  I use my faculties and powers of mind. g ' I i Name i  I ! Address ' Rosicrucians City and by press time had been unable to find out who sells it in the U.S. And inevitably, the moment the article was set in type and beyond correction, Mr. Wegman's kind and courteous letter comes in with all the needed information. Know all by these presents then, that the Source Book can be had from Unesco Publications Center, #I Third Ave., New York #. It's # in hardcover, # in paper, and a hundred times worth a missed meal. Nothing we have done in these pages has sparked such a large and high-quality response as our recent piece on The American W ishhook, a discussion of the delights of catalogs. It "hit my sense of wonder squarely" said one respondent, which is almost as gratifying to an author of anything in a science-fiction magazine as a first acceptance. Now, company policy precludes our reporting prices or addresses in or of these catalogs, but we have answered each individual query, and in some cases, to save time (for these letters come from all over the world) have written ourselves to the companies, asking that their wishbooks be sent to the reader. This is only one way of saying that your letters mean a great deal to us. We have asked that an exception be made to the publisher's taboo on price reporting on these two items, because we regard them as genuinely exciting news items. The Zuckermann harpsichord kit costs only # (plus your local lumber) and the Heath electronic organ kit goes for a mere # (less bench). Either one gives you an instrument you couldn't get elsewhere without kicking hell out of a thousand-dollar bill. Ever use air letter sheets? You get them at the Post Office for #c -- a single sheet of lightweight paper, which folds up into envelope size and shape and is good for air postage to anywhere on earth. Well, many countries issue them, and one of the Wishbook letters came from New Zealand on an airletter sheet which bore a beautiful fourrcolor scenic print; we've never seen anything like it and suggest that some enterprising American printer please copy. O ccasionally we get queries, ranging from genealogy ("Can you tell me where my name originated?) through confessions of fuggheadedness ("I see by the May issue that you are to become editor of . When?" -- though what the May issue clearly reported was that Fred Pohl, and not yr. hmbl. svt., was editor of Worlds of Tomorrow) to questions of genuine interest to a good many of us. These are handled severally by ignoring them, by individual letters, or, as in this case, by asking you all, as: "Maybe you can help me. I sure would like a three dimensional coordinate system to which I can easily fix points to create mathematical figures and engineering projects. It could be photographed and used to show students and persons without great orientation-perception, facts that might not be apparent from drawings." Maybe you can help him? IF IF  Novelette The revolution was over and peace restored -- naturally Retief expected the worst! I R elief turned back the gold-encrusted scarlet cuff of the mess jacket of a First Secretary and Consul, gathered in the three eight-sided black dice, shook them by his right ear and sent them rattling across the floor to rebound from the bulkhead. "Thirteen's the point," the Power Section Chief called. 'Ten he makes it!" "Oh... Mr. Retief," a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. "The Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in the conference room at once?" Retief rose and dusted his knees. "That's all for now, boys," he said. "I'll take the rest of your money later." He followed the junior diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew level, past the glare panel reading the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing "Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief," the messenger said. "He usually is, Pete." Retief took a cigar from his breast pocket. "Got a light?" The Third Secretary produced a permatch. "I don't know why you smoke those things instead of dope sticks, Mr. Retief," he said. "The Ambassador hates the smell." Retief nodded. "I only smoke this kind at conferences. It makes for shorter sessions." He stepped into the room. Ambassador Sternwheeler eyed him down the length of the conference table. "Ah, Mr. Retief honors us with his presence. Do be seated, Retief." He fingered a yellow Departmental despatch. Retief took a chair, puffing out a dense cloud of smoke. "As I have been explaining to the remainder of my staff for the past quarter-hour," Stern wheeler rumbled, "I've been the recipient of important intelligence." He blinked at Retief expectantly. Retief raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry. "It seems," Sternwheeler went on, "that there has been a change in regime on Glave. A week ago, the government which invited the dispatch of this mission -- and to which weYe acca-edited -- was overthrown. The former ruling class has fled into exile. A popular workers' and peasants' junta has taken over." "Mr. Ambassador," Counsello Magnan broke in, rising. "I'd like to be the first -- " he glanced around the table -- "or one of the first, anyway, to welcome the new government of Glave into tiie family of planetary ruling bodies -- " #Qit down, Magnan!" SternO wheeler snapped. "Of course the Corps always recognizes de facto sovereignty. The problem is merely one of acquainting ourselves with the policies of this new group -- a sort of blue-collar coalition, it seems. In what position that leaves this Embassy I don't yet know." "I suppose this means we'll spend the next month in a parking orbit," Counsellor Magnan sighed. "Unfortunately," S t e r nwheeler went on, "the entire affair has apparently been carried off without recourse to violence, leaving the Corps no excuse to move in -- that is, it appears our assistance in restoring order will not be required." "Glave was one of the old Contract Worlds," Retief said. "What's become of the Planetary Manager General and the technical staff? And how do the peasants and workers plan to operate the atmospheric purification system, the Weather Control station, the tide regulation complexes?" "I'm more concerned at present with the status of the Mission! Will we be welcomed by these peasants or peppered with buckshot?" "You say that this is a popular junta, and that the former leaders have fled into exile," Retief said. "May I ask the source?" "The despatch cites a 'reliable Glavian source' . " "That's officialese for something cribbed from a broadcast news tape. Presumably the Glavian news services are in the hands of the revolution. In that case -- " "Yes, yes, there is the possibility that the issue is yet in doubt. Of course we'll have to exercise caution in making our approach. It wouldn't do to make overtures to the wrong side." "Oh, I think we need have no fear on that score," the Chief of the Political Section spoke up. "I know these entrenched cliques. Once challenged by an aroused populace, they scuttle for safety -- with large balances safely tucked away in neutral banks." "I'd like to go on record," Magnan piped, "as registering my deep gratification at this fulfillment of popular aspirations -- " "The most popular aspiration I know of is to live high off someone else's effort," Retief said. "I don't know of anyone outside the Corps who's managed it." # C Gentlemen!" Sternwheeler belVj lowed. "I'm awaiting your coqstructive suggestions -- not an exchange of political views. We'll arrive off Glave in less than six hours. I should like before that time to have developed some notion regarding to whom I shall expect to offer my credentials!" There was a discreet tap at the door; it opened and the young Third Secretary poked his head in. "Mr. Ambassador, I have a reply to your message -- just received from Glave. It's signed by the Stewwant to see it at once..." "Yes, of course; let me have it." asked. "It's the revolutionary group," the messenger said, passing the message over. "Glorious Fun Eternally," Retief suggested. "Or possibly Goodies For Everybody." "I believe that's 'Glavian Free Electorate'," the Third Secretary said. Sternwheeler stared at the paper, lips pursed. His face grew pink. He slammed the paper on the table. "Well, gentlemen! It appears our worst fears have been realized! This is nothing less than a warning! A threat! We're advised to divert course and bypass Glave entirely. It ence from meddling foreign exploiters, as they put it!" Magnan rose. "If you'll excuse me Mr. Ambassador, I want to get off a message to Sector HQ to hold my old job for me -- " "Sit down, you idiot!" Sternwheeler roared. "If you think I'm consenting to have my career blighted -- my first Ambassadorial post whisked out from under me -- the Corps made a fool of -- " "I'd like to take a look at that IF message," Relief said. It was passed along to him. He read it. don't believe this applies to us, Mr. Ambassador." #TThat are you talking about?   It's addressed to me by name!" "It merely states that 'meddling foreign exploiters' are unwelcome. Meddling foreigners we are, but we don't qualify as exploiters unless we show a profit -- and this appears to be shaping up as a particularly profitless venture." "What are you proposing, Mr. Retief?" "That we proceed to make planetfall as scheduled, greet our welcoming committee with wide diplomatic smiles, hint at largesse in the offing and settle down to observe the lie of the land." "Just what I was about to suggest," Magnan said. "That might be dangerous," Sternwheeler said. "That's why I didn't suggest it," Magnan said. "Still it's essential that we learn more of the situation than can be gleaned from official broadcasts," Sternwheeler mused. "Now, while I can't justify risking the entire Mission, it might be advisable to dispatch a delegation to sound out the new regime." "I'd like to volunteer," Magnan said, rising. "Of course, the delegates may be murdered -- " " -- but unfortunately. I'm under treatment at the moment." Magnan sat down.  -- which will place us in an excellent position, propaganda-wise. "What a pity I can't go," the Military Attache said. "But my place is with my troops." "The only troops you've got are the Assistant Attache and your secretary," Magnan pointed out.  "Say, I'd like to be down there in the thick of things," the Political Officer said. He assumed a grave expression. "But of course I'll be needed here, to interpret results." "I appreciate your attitude, gentlemen," Sternwheeler said, studying the ceiling. "But I'm afraid I must limit the privilege of volunteering for this hazardous duty to those officers of more robust physique, under forty years of age -- " "Tsk. I'm forty-one," Magnan said. " -- and with a reputation for adaptability." His glance moved along the table. "Do you mind if I run along now, Mr. Ambassador?" Retief said. It's time for my insulin shot." Sternwheeler's mouth dropped open. "Just kidding," Retief said." "I'll go. But I have one request, Mr. Ambassador: no further communication with the ground until I give the allclear." II R etief grounded the lighter, incycled the lock and stepped out. The hot yellow Glavian sun beat down on a broad expanse of concrete, an abandoned service cart and a row of tall ships casting black II shadows toward the sflent control tower. A wisp of smoke curled up from the shed area at the rim of the field. There was no other sign of life. Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road, a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded. Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which illuminated lettering over empty counters read put the valise down, then leaned across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked up at him. "You can come out now," Retief said. "They've gone." The man rose, dusting himself off. He looked over Retief's shoulder. "Who's gone?" "Whoever it was that scared you." "Whatta ya mean? I was looking for my pencil." "Here it is." Retief plucked a worn stub from the pocket of the soiled shirt sagging under the weight of braided shoulderboards. "You can sign me in as a Diplomatic Representative. A break for you -- no formalities necessary. Where can I catch a cab for the city?" The man eyed Retiefs bag. "What's in that?" "Personal belongings under dutyfree entry." "Guns?" "No, thanks, just a cab." "You got no gun? The man raised his voice. "That's right, fellows," Retief called out. "No gun; no knife, not even a small fission bomb. Just a few pairs of socks and some reading matter." A brown-uniformed man ran from behind the Customs Counter, holding a long-barreled blast-rifle centered on the Corps insignia stitched to the pocket of Retief's powder-blue blazer. "Don't try nothing," he said. "You're under arrest." "It can't be overtime parking. I've only been here five minutes." "Hah!" The gun-handler moved out from the counter, came up to Retief. "Empty out your pockets!" he barked. "Hands overhead!" "I'm just a diplomat, not a contortionist," Retief said, not moving. "Do you mind pointing that thing in some other direction?" "Looky here. Mister, I'll give the orders. We don't need anybody telling us how to run our business." "I'm telling you to shift that blaster before I take it away from you and wrap it around your neck," Retief said conversationally. The cop stepped back uncertainly, lowering the gun. "Jake! Horny! Pud! come on out!" Three more brown uniforms emerged from concealment. '# IF "Who are you fellows hiding from, the top sergeant?" Retief glanced over the ill-fitting uniforms, the unshaved faces, the scuffed boots. "Tell you what. When he shows up, I'll engage him in conversation. You beat it back to the barracks and grab a quick bath -- " "That's enough smart talk." The biggest of the three newcomers moved up to Retief. "You stuck your nose in at the wrong time. We just had a change of management around here." "I heard about it," Retief said. "Who do I complain to?" "Complain? What about?" "The port's a mess," Retief barked. "Nobody on duty to receive official visitors! No passenger service facilities! Why, do you know I had to carry my own bag -- " "All right, all right, that's outside my department. You better see the boss." "The boss? I thought you got rid of the bosses." "We did, but now we got new ones." "They any better than the old ones?" "This guy asks too many questions," the man with the gun said. "Let's let Sozier answer 'em." "Who's he?" "He's the Military Governor of the City." "Now we're getting somewhere," Retief said. "Lead the way, Jake -- and don't forget my bag." S ozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp, prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of a spacious office. "I warned you off," he snapped. "You came anyway." He leaned forward and slammed a fist down on the desk. "You're used to throwing your weight around, hut you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies pussyfooting around Glave!" "Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?" "Call me General!" "Mind if I sit down?" Retief pulld out a chair, seated himself and took out a cigar. "Curiously enough," he Said, lighting up, "the Corps has no intention of making any embarrassing investigations. We deal with the existing government, no questions asked." His eyes held the other's. "Unless, of course, there are evidences of atrocities or other illegal measures." The coal-chip eyes narrowed. "I don't have to make explanations to you or anybody else." "Except, presumably, the Glavian Free Electorate," Retief said blandly. "But tell me, General -- who's actually running the show?" A speaker on the desk buzzed. "Hey, Corporal Sozier! Wes's got them two hellions cornered. They're holed up in the Birthday Cake -- " "General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!" He gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by. "You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here -- pronto!" He swiveled back to Retief. "You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you. You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came -- and tell your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of the working man." Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform front bulging between silver buttons. "Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?" he inquired carelessly. Sozier's eyes narrowed to slits. "I could have you shot!" "Stop playing games with me, Sozier," Retief rapped. "There's a squadron of Peace Enforcers standing by just in case any apprentice statesmen forget the niceties of diplomatic usage. I suggest you start showing a little intelligence about now, or even Horny and Pud are likely to notice." S ozier's fingers squeaked on the arms of his chair. He swailowed. "You might start by assigning me an escort for a conducted tour of the capital," Retief went on. "I want to be in a position to confirm that order has been restablished, and that normal services have been restored. Otherwise it may be necessary to send in a Monitor Unit to straighten things out " "You know you can't meddle with the internal affairs of a sovereign world!" Retief sighed. "The trouble with taking over your boss's job is discovering its drawbacks. It's disillusioning, I know, Sozier, but -- " "All right! Take your tour! You'll find everything running as smooth as silk! Utilities, police, transport, environmental control -- " "W hat about Space Control? Glave Tower seems to be off the air." "I shut it down. We don't need anything and we don't want anything from the outside.' "Where's the new Premier keeping himself? Does he share your passion for privacy?" Tfee general got to his feet. "I'm letting you take your look, Mr. Big Nose. I'm giving you four hours. Then out! And the next meddling bureaucrat that tries to cut atmosphere on Glave without a clearance gets burned!" "I'll need a car." "Jake! You stick close to this bird Take him to the main power plant, the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump him at the port -- and see that he leaves." "I'll plan my own itinerary, thanksI can't promise I'll be finished in four hours -- but I'll keep you advised." "I warned you -- " "I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting ahead of me." Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. "Come on, Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our dinner. IF Ill A t the curb, Retief held out his hand. "Give me the power cylinder out of your rifle, Jake." "Huh?" "Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing stud. We don't want any accidents." "How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday." Retief pocketed the cylinder. "You sit in back. I'll drive." He wheeled the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into the pale sky. "Nice looking city, Jake," Retief said conversationally. "What's the population?"  "I dunno. I only been here a year." "What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?" "Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me." "My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?" "Sure. He useta come around to the club." "I take it he was in the army under the old regime?" "Yeah' -- but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight." "Just between us, Jake -- where did the former Planetary Manager General go?" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped, clamped his mouth shut. "I don't know nothing." Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up along the flank of a low hill. "I must admit I'm surprised, Jake," Retief said. "Everything seems orderly No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications normal -- just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?" "You wanta see the Power Plant?" Retief could see perspiration beaded on the man's forehead under the uniform cap. "Sure. Which way?" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station. "Quiet, isn't it?" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. "Let's go inside." "Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing -- " "You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion." "He won't like it." "The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him about it." Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked. "Let's try the back." The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached. A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He looked Retief over. "Who's this party, Jake?" he barked. "Sozier said show him the plant," Jake said. "What we need is more guys to pull duty, not tourists. Anyway, Fm Chief Engineer here. Nobody comes in here 'less I like their looks." Relief moved forward, stood looking down at the redhead. The little man hesitated, then waved him past. "Lucky for you I like your looks." Inside, Relief surveyed the long room, the giant converter units, the massive busbars. Armed men -- some in uniform, some in work clothes or loud sport shirts -- stood here and there. Other men read meters, adjusted controls or inspected dials. "You've got more guards than workers," Relief said. "Expecting trouble?" The redhead bit the corner from a plug of spearmint. He glanced around the plant. "Things is quiet now; but you never know." "Rather old fashioned equipment isn't it? When was it installed?" "Huh? I dunno. What's wrong with it?" "What's your basic power source, a core sink? Lithospheric friction? Sub-crustal hydralics?" "Beats me. Mister. I'm the boss here, not a dern mechanic." A gray-haired man carrying a clipboard walked past, studied a panel, made notes, glanced up to catch Relief's eye, moved on. "Everything seems to be running normally," 'Relief remarked. "Sure. Why not?" "Records being kept up properly?" "Sure. Some of these guys, all they do is walk around looking at dials and writing stuff on . paper. If it was me, I'd pul 'em to work." Relief strolled over to the grayhaired man, now scribbling before a bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard. Power off at sunset. Tell Corasol was scrawled in block letters across the record sheet. Relief nodded, rejoined his guard "All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center." Back in the car, headed west. Relief studied the blank windows of ofbeer bars, shooting galleries, tattoo cades, bordellos and half-credit casinos. "Everybody seems to be having fun," he remarked. Jake starea out the window. "Yeah." "Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in." "Soon as the corporal gets things organized. I'm opening me up a place to show dirty tri-di's. I'll get my share." "Meanwhile, let the rest of 'em have their fun, eh Jake?" "Look, Mister, I been thinking. Maybe you better gimme back that kick-stick you taken outa my gun..." "Sorry, Jake; no can do. Tell me, what was the real cause of the revolution? Not enough to eat? Too much regimentation?" "Naw, we always got plenty to eat. There wasn't none of that regimentation up til! I joined up in the corporal's army." "Rigid class structure, maybe? Educational discrimination?" Jake nodded. "Yeah, it was them schools done it. All the time trying IF to make a feller to some kind of class. Big shots. Know it all. Gonna make us sit around and view tapes. Figgered they was better than us." "And Sozier's idea was you'd take over, and you wouldn't have to be bothered." "Aw, it wasn't Sozier's idea. He ain't the big leader." "here does the big leader keep himself?" "I dunno. I guess he's pretty busy right now." Jake snickered. "Some of them guys call themselves colonels turned out not to know nothing about how to shoot off the guns." "Shooting, eh? I thought it was a sort of peaceful revolution. The managerial class were booted out, and that was that." "I don't know nothing," Jake snapped. "How come you keep trying to get me to say stuff I ain't supposed to talk about? You want to get me in trouble?" #th, you're already in trouble, Jake. But if you stick with me. I'll try to get you out of it. Where exactly did the refugees head for? How did they leave? Must have been a lot of them; I'd say in a city of this size alone, they'd run into the thousands." "I don't know." "Of course, it depends on your definition of a big shot. Who's included in that category, Jake?" "You know, the slick-talking ones; the fancy dressers; the guys that walk around and tell other guys what to do. We do all the work and they get all the big pay." "I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives, technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers -- all that crowd." "Yeah, them are the ones." "And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their noses in public." "We got as much right as anybody -- " "Jake, who's Corasol?" "He's -- I don't know." "I thought I overheard his name somewhere." "Uh, here's the communication center," Jake cut in. Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the brake and stepped out. "Lead the way, Jake." "Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside." "Anything to hide, Jake?" Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. "When I joined up with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess." "I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works harder after he's thrown out the parasites then he did before." A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments. Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a silent technician worked quietly. Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a purple spot under one eye. "Quite a bruise you've got there," Retief commented heartily. "Power failure at sunset," he added softly. The technician hesitated, nodded and moved on. Back in the car, Retief gave Jake directions. At the end of three hours, he had seen twelve smooth-running, heavily guarded installations. "So far, so good, Jake," he said. "Next stop, Sub-station Number Nine." In the mirror, Jake's face stiffened. "Hey, you can't go down there -- " "Something going on there, Jake?" "That's where -- I mean, no. I don't know." "I don't want to miss anything, Jake. Which way?" "I ain't going down there," Jake said sullenly. Retief braked. "In that case. I'm afraid our association is at an end, Jake." "You mean... you're getting out here?" "No, you are." "Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with you." Retief accelerated. "That's settled, then. Which way?" IV R etief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery of a loose crowd of brownuniformed men who stood in groups scattered across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn before the b:re. functional facade of suh-viatioFKnumbcr Nine. In the midst ot the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as he harangued a cluster of greenuniformed men from his place in the rear of a long open car. "What's it all about, Jake?" Retief enquired. "Since the parasites have all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed up in the pumping station -- and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word that it's all going to be fun and games from now on." "If the corporal sees you over here -- " "Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to see." Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A heavy lorry loaded with an immense tanlf with the letter H blazoned on its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd. "You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise. You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's full of gas -- and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with. I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators." Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station. Nothing happened. "I know you can hear me, damn IF you!" Sozier squalled. "You'd better get the doors open and get out here fast!" Relief stepped to Sozier's side. "Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went in for practical jokes." Sozier jerked around to gape at Relief. "What are you doing here!" he burst out. "I told Jake -- where is that -- " "Jake didn't like the questions I was asking," Relief said, "so he marched me up here to report to you." "Jake, you damn fool!" Sozier roared. "I got a good mind -- " #CT disagree, Sozier," Relief cut A in. "I think you're a complete imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than words." "Eh?" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building. "Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?" Sozier dropped. "Where?" "My mistake. Just a foreign particle on my contact lenses." Relief leaned on the car. "On the other hand, Sozier, most murderers are sneaky about it. I think making a public announcement is a nice gesture on your part. The Monitors won't have any trouble deciding who to hang when they come in to straighten out this mess." Sozier scrambled back onto his seat. "Monitors?" he snarled. "I don't think so. I don't think you'll be around to do any blabbering to anybody." He raised his voice. "Jake! March this spy over to the sidelines. If he tries anything, shoot him!" He gave Relief a baleful grin. "I'll lay the body out nice and ship it back to your cronies. Accidents will happen, you know. It'll be a week or two before they get around to following up -- and by then I'll have this little problem under control." Jake looked at Relief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle. Relief put his hands up. "I guess you got me, Jake," he said. "Careful of that gun, now." Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Relief and nodded toward the car. As Relief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd. Relief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly. A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way; Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As Relief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides. "The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in his mobile pool," Retief commented. "By the way, Jake, I have to be going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so -- " Retief s left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing, eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments: " -- seen that bird before." " -- where he's headed." " -- feller Sozier was talking to..." "Hey, you!" Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked on briskly. "Stop that jasper!" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him. he said. "Which of you gentlemen is Manager-General Corosol?" C orasol was a tall, wide-shouldered man of fifty, with shrewd eyes, a ready smile, capable-looking hands and an urbane manner. He and Retief sat at a table at one side of the large room, under a maze of piping, tanks and valves. Corasol poured amber fluid into square glass tumblers. "We spotted you by the blazer," he said. "Baby blue and gold braid stand out in a crowd." Retief nodded. "The uniform has its uses," he agreed. He tried the drink. "Say, what is this? It's not bad." "Sugarweed rum. Made from a marine plant. We have plenty of ocean here on Glave; there's only the one continent, you know, and it's useless for agriculture." "Weather?" "That's part of it. Glave is moving into what would be a major glaciation if it weren't for a rather elaborate climatic control installation. Then there are the tides. Half the continent would be inundated twice a year when our satellite is at aphelion; there's a system of baffles, locks and deep-water pumps that maintain the shore-line more or less constant. We still keep our cities well inland. Then there are the oxygen generators, the atmosphere filtration complex, vermin control and so on. Glave in its natural state is a rather hostile world." "I'm surprised that your mines can support it all." "Oh, they don't." Corasol shook his head. "Two hundred years ago, when the company first opened up Glave, it was economical enough. Quintite was a precious mineral in those days. Synthetics have long since taken over. Even fully automated, the mines barely support the public services and welfare system." IF "I seem to recall a reference in the Post Report to the effect that a company petition to vacate its charter had been denied... Corasol nodded, smiling wryly. long as any of the world's residents desired to remain, the Company was constrained to oblige them. The great majority departed long ago, of course. Relocated to other operational areas. Only the untrainables, living off welfare funds -- and a skeleton staff of single men to operate the technical installations -- have stayed on." "That explains the mechanics of the recent uprising," Retief said. The bottle clinked against glasses for a second round. "What about the good corporal?" Retief asked. "Assuming he's a strong swimmer, you should be hearing from him soon." Corasol glanced at his finger watch. "I imagine he'll be launching his gas attack any minute." "The prospect doesn't seem to bother you." "Sozier is a clever enough chap in his own way," Corasol said. "But he has a bad habit of leaping to conclusions. He's gotten hold of a tank of what someone has told him is gas -- as indeed it is. Hydrogen, for industrial use. It seems the poor fellow is under the impression that anything masquerading as gas will have a lethal effect." "He may be right -- if he pumps it in fast enough." "Oh, he won't be pumping it. Not after approximately five minutes from now." "Hmmm. I think I'm beginning to see the light. 'Power off at sunset.' " Corasol nodded. "I don't think he realizes somehow that all his vehicles are operating off broadcast power." "Still, he has a good-sized crowd of hopefuls with him. How do you plan to get through them?" "We don't. We go under. There's an extensive system of service ways underlying the city; another detail which I believe has escaped the corporal's notice." "You'll be heading for the port?" "Yes -- eventually. First, we have a few small chores to see to. Sozier has quite a number of our technical men working at gun point to keep various services going." Retief nodded. "It won't be easy breaking them out. I made a fast tour of the city this afternoon. Locked doors, armed guards -- " "Oh, the locks are power-operated, too. Our fellows will know what to do when the power fails. I think the sudden darkness will eliminate any problem from the guards." The lights flickered and died. The whine of the turbines was suddenly noticeable, descending. Faint cries sounded from outside. Corasol switched on a small portable lantern. "All ready, gentlemen?" he called, rising. "Let's move out. We want to complete this operation before dawn." F our hours later, Retief stood with Corasol in a low-ceilinged a central glare strip, watching as the last of the column of men released from forced labor in the city's utilities installations filed past. A solidly-built man with pale blond hair came up, breathing hard. "How did it go, Taine?" Corasol asked. "They're beginning to catch on, Mr. Corasol. We had a brisk time of it at Station Four. Everybody's clear now. No one killed, but we had a few injuries." Corasol nodded. "The last few crews in have reported trouble. Ah -- what about -- " Taine shook his head. "Sorry, sir. No trace. No one's seen them. But they're probably at the port ahead of us, hiding out. They'd know we'd arrive eventually." "I suppose so. You sent word to them well in advance..." "Suppose I stand by here with a few men. We'll patrol the tunnels in case they show up. We have several hours before daylight." "Yes. I'll go along and see to the preparations at Exit Ten. We'll make our sortie at oh-five-hundred. If you haven't seen anything of them by then ." "I'm sure they're all right." "They'd better be." Corasol said grimly. "Let's be off. Relief." "If it's all the same to you, Mr. Manager-General. I'll stay here with Taine. I'll join you later " "As you wish. I don't imagine there'll be any trouble -- but if there lend a certain air to the operation." He smiled, shook Retief's hand and moved off along the tunnel. The echo of feet and voices grew faint, faded to silence. Taine turned to the three men detailed to him, conversed briefly, sent them off along branching corridors. He glanced at Retief. "Mr. Retief, you're a diplomat. This errand is not a diplomatic one." "I've been on a few like that, too, Mr. Taine." Taine studied Retief's face. "I can believe that," he said. "However, I think you'd better rejoin the main party." "I might be of some use here, if your missing men arrive under fire." "Missing men?" Tine's mouth twisted in a sour smile. "You fail to grasp the picture, Mr. Retief. There'll be no missing men arrivmg. "Oh? I understood you were waiting here to meet them." "Not men, Mr. Retief. It happens that Corasol has twin daughters, aged nineteen. They haven't been seen since the trouble began." V H alf an hour passed. Retief leaned against the tunnel wall, arms folded, smoking a cigar in silence. Taine paced, ten yards up the corridor, ten yards back... "You seem nervous, Mr. Taine," Retief said. Taine stopped pacing, eyed Retief coldly. "You'd better go along now," he said decisively. "Just follow the main tunnel. It's about a mile." "Plenty of time yet, Mr. Taine." Retief smiled and drew on his cigar. "Your three men are still out." "They won't be back here. We'll rendezvous at Exit Ten." "Am I keeping you from something, Taine?" IF "I can't be responsible for your safety if you stay here." "Oh? You think I might fall victim to an accident?" Taine narrowed his eyes. "It could happen," he said harshly. "Where were the girls last seen?" Retief asked suddenly. "How would I know?" "Weren't you the one who got word to them?" "Maybe you'd better keep out of this." "You sent your men off; now you're eager to see me retire to a safe position. Why the desire for solitude, Taine? You wouldn't by any chance have plans?" "That's enough," Taine snapped. "On your way. That's an order!" "There are some aspects of this situation that puzzle me, Mr. Taine. Mr. Corasol has explained to me how he and his Division Chiefs -- including you -- were surprised in the executive suite at Planetary Central by a crowd of Sozier's bully-boys. They came in past the entire security system without an alarm. Corasol and the others put up a surprisingly good fight and made it to the service elevators -- and from there to the sub-station. There was even time to order an emergency alert to the entire staff -- but somehow, they were all caught at their stations and kept on the job at gun point. Now, I should think that you, as Chief of Security as well as Communications, should have some ideas as to how all this came about." "Are you implying -- " "Let me guess, Taine. You have a deal with Sozier. He takes over, ousts the legal owners, and sets himself up to live off the fat of the land, with you as his technical chief. Then, I imagine, you'd find it easy enough to dispose of Sozier -- and you'd be in charge." W ithout warning Taine put his head down arid charged. Retief dropped his cigar, sidestepped and planted a solid right on Taine's jaw. He staggered, went to his hands and knees. "I suppose you'd like to get word to Sozier that his work force is arriving at the port at oh-five-hundred," Retief said. "Of course, he'll want to have a good-sized reception committee on hand as they come out." Taine plunged to his feet, threw a vicious left that went past Retief's ear, then abruptly dropped, clamped a lock on Retief's leg, twisted -- The two men rolled, came to rest with Taine on top, Retief facedown, his arm bent back and doubled. Taine, red-faced and puffing, grunted as he applied pressure. "You know a lot about me," he grated, "but you overlooked the fact that I've been Glavian Judo champion for the past nine years." "You're a clever man, Taine," Retief said between clenched teeth. "Too clever to think it will work." "It will work. Glave's never had too small. Corasol invited your Embassy in because he had an idea there was something in the wind. That forced my hand. I've had to move hastily. But by the time I invite observers in to see for themselves, everything will be running smoothly. I can even afford to let Corasol and the others go -- I'll have hostages for his good behavior." "You've been wanting to boast about it to someone who could appreciate your cleverness, I see. Sozier must be an unappreciative audience." "Sozier's a filthy pig -- but he had his uses." "What do you plan to do now?" "I've been wondering that myself -- but I think the best solution is to simply break your arm for now. You should be easy to control then. It's quite simple. I merely apply pressure, thus..." "Judo is a very useful technique," Relief said. "But in order to make it work, you have to be a pretty good man..." He moved suddenly, shifting his position. Taine grabbed, holding Relief's arm by the wrist and elbow, his own arm levering Relief's back, back... Relief twisted onto his side, then his back. Tiane grunted, following the movemwit, straining. Slowly, Relief sat up against Taine's weight. Then, with a surge, he straightened his arm. Taine's grip broke. Relief came to his feet. Taine scrambled up in time to meet a clean uppercut that snapped him. onto his back -- out cold. # # A h, there you are," Relief said as Taine's eyes fluttered and opened. "You've had a nice nap -- almost fifteen minutes. Feeling better?" Taine snarled, straining against the bonds on his wrists. "Gold braid has its uses," Relief commented. "Now that you're back, perhaps you can answer a question a question for me. What's the Birthday Cake?" Taine spat. Relief went to stand over him. "Time is growing short, Mr. Taine. It will be dawn in another two hours. I can't afford the luxury of coaxing you." "You won't get away will) this." Relief looked at the glowing end of his cigar. "This won't be subtle, I agree -- but it will work." "You're bluffing." Relief leaned closer. "In my place -- would you hesitate?" he asked softly. Taine cursed, struggled to break free, eyes on the cigar. "What kind of diplomat are you?" he snarled. "The modern variety. Throat-cutting, thumb-screws, poison and stiletto work were popular in Machiavelli's time; nowadays we go in more for the administrative approach -- but the cigar-end still has its role." "Look, we can come to an agreement -- " "What's the Birthday Cake?" Relief snapped. "I'm in a position to do a lot for you!" "Last chance -- " "It's the official Residence of the Manager-General!" Taine screeched, writhing away from the cigar. "Where is it? Talk fast!" "You'll never get close! There's a seven-foot wall and by this time the grounds are swarming with Sozier's men." IF "Nevertheless, I want to know where it is -- and the information had better be good. If I don't come back, you'll have a long wait." Taine groaned. "All right. Put that damned cigar away. I'll tell you what I can..." R elief stood in the shadow of a vine-grown wall, watching the relief of the five-man guard detail at the main gate to the Residence grounds. The bluish light of the Glavian satellite reflected from the rainpocked street, glinted from the leaves of a massive tree ten yards from the gate. The chill in the air cut through Retief's wet clothes. The men at the gate huddled, hands in pockets, coat collars turned up, backs to the wind -- and to Relief. He moved silently forward, caught a low branch of the tree, pulled himself up. The men at the gate exchanged muttered remarks. One lit a cigarette. Relief waited, then moved higher. The guards talked in low voices, edged closer to the shelter of the gate-house. Relief lowered himself onto the wall, dropped down onto the sodden lawn, crouched, waiting. There was no alarm. Through ihe trees the dark shape of the house loomed up, its top storey defiantly ablaze with lights. Relief moved off silently, from the shadow of one tree to the next, swinging in an arc that would bring him to the rear of the great round structure. He froze as the heavy footfalls of one of Sozier's pickets slogged past five yards from him, then moved on. The glow of a campfire flickered near the front of the house. Relief could make out the shapes of men around it -- a dozen or two, at least. Probably as many more warmed themselves at each of the other fires visible on the grounds -- and most of the rest had doubtless found dryer shelter in the lee of the house itself. Relief reached the conservatory at the rear of the house, studied the dark path leading to the broad terrace, picked out the squat shape of the utilities manifold behind a screen of shrubbery. So far, Taine's information had been accurate. The next step was to -- There was a faint sound from high above, followed by a whoosh! Then with a sharp crack! a flare appeared overhead, rocking gracefully, flosting down gently under a small parachute. Below it, inky shadows rocked in unison. In the raw white light. Relief counted eighteen men clinging to handholds on the side of the house, immobile in the pitiless glare. Above them, a face appeared, then a second, peering over the edge of the fourth-storey gallery. Both figures rose, unlimbering four-foot bows, fitting arrows to strings -- Whok! Whok! Two men lost their holds and fell, yelling, to slam into the heavy shrubbery. A second flight of arrows found marks. Relief watched from the shadows as man after man dropped to flounder in the wet foliage. Several jumped before the deadly bows were turned on them. As the flare faded, the last of the men plunged down to crash among their fellows. Retief stepped ovty ran swiftly to the manifold, forcing his way among the closegrowing screen, scrambled to its top. His hand fell on a spent arrow. He picked it up. It was a stout wooden shaft twenty inches long, terminating in a rubber suction cup. Retief snorted, dropped the arrow and started up. VI T wenty feet above ground level, the wide windows of the third floor sun terrace presented a precarious handhold as Retief swung back a foot and kicked in a panel. Inside, he dimly made out the shape of a broad carpeted room, curving out of sight in both directions. There were wide-leaved tropical plants in boxes, groups of padded chairs, low tables with bowls of fruit. Retief made his way past them, found an inner door, went into a dark hall. At the far end, voices exchanged shouted questions. Feet pounded. A flicker of light from a hand lantern splashed across the wall, disappeared. Retief found a stair, went up it noiselessly. According to Taine, the elevator to the top floor apartment should be to the left -- Retief flattened himself to the wall. Footsteps sounded near at hand. He moved quickly to a doorway. There was a murmur of voices, the wavering light of lanterns. A party of uniformed men tiptoed past a cross corridor, struggling under the weight of a massive log, two feet in diameter and twelve feet long... on signal, hit it all together. Then... someone was saying. Retief waited, listening. There was the creak of a door, the fumbling of awkwardly laden feet on a stair, hoarse breathing, a muffled curse. "... got my fingers, you slob!" a voice snarled. "Shaddup!" another voice hissed. There was a long moment of silence, then a muffled command -- followed an instant later By a thunderous crash, a shout -- cut off abruptly by a ponderous blaml followed instantly by a roar like a burst dam, mingled with yells, thumps, crashes. A foamy wash of water surged along the cross corridor, followed a moment later by a man sliding on his back, then another, two more, the log, fragments of a door, more men. In the uproar, Retief moved along to the elevator, felt over the control panel, located a small knurled button. He turned it. The panel came away. He fumbled cautiously, found a toggle switch, flipped it. A light sprang up in the car. Instantly Retief flipped the light switch; the glow faded. He waited. No alarm. Men were picking themselves up, shouting... them broads dropped a hundred-gallon bag of water..." Someone complained. "... up there fast, men. We got the door okay!" Feet thumped. Yells sounded. "No good, Wes! They got a safe or something in the way!" Retief silently closed the lift door, pressed the button. With a sigh, the car slid upward, came to a gentle IF stop. He eased the door open, looked out into a dim-lit entrance hall. Footsteps sounded beyond a door. He waited; the clack of high heels crossing a floor. Retief stepped out of the car, went to the door, glanced into a spacious lounge with rich furniture, deep rugs, paintings, a sweep of glass, and in an alcove at the far side, a bar. Retief crossed the room, poured a stiff drink into a paper-thin glass and drained it. The high-heeled steps were coming back now. A door opened. Two leggy young women in shorts, with red-gold hair bound back by ribbons -- one green, one blue -- stepped into the room. One girl held a coil of insulated wire; the other, a heavylooking gray-enameled box eight inches on a side. "Now, see if you can tinker that generator to get a little more juice, Lyn," the girl with the wire said. "I'll start stringing..." Her voice died as she caught sight of Retief. He raised his glass, thing to put out about a thousand "My compliments, ladies. I see you're keeping yourselves amused."  faltered. "My narhe's Retief. Your father sent me along to carry your bags. It's lucky I arrived when I did, before any of those defenseless chaps outside were seriously injured." "You're not... one of them?" "Of course he's not, Lyn," the second girl said. "He's much too goodlooking." "That's good," Lyn said crisply. "I didn't want to have to use this thing." She tossed a bright-plated # mm needier onto a chair and sat down. "Dad's all right, isn't he?" "He's fine, and we've got to be going. Tight schedule, you know. And you'd better get some clothes on. It's cold outside." Lyn nodded. "Environmental Control went off the air six hours ago. You can already feel snow coming." "Don't you suppose we have time to just rig up one little old circuit?" the other twin wheedled. "Nothing serious; just enough to tickle." . "We planned to wire all the window frames, the trunk we used to block the stair, the lift shaft -- " "And then we thought we'd try to drop a loop down and pick up the gallery guard rail, and maybe some of that wrought-iron work around the front of the house -- " "Sorry, girls; no time." Five minutes later, the twins were ready, wrapped in fur robes. Retief had exchanged his soaked blazer for a down-lined weatherproof. "The lift will take us all the way down, won't it?" he asked. Lyn nodded. "We can go out through the wine cellar." Retief picked up the needier and handed it to Lyn. "Hang on to this," he said. "You may need it yet." A cold wind whipped the ramp as dawn lightened the sky. "It's hard to believe," Corasol said. "What made him do it?" "He saw a chance to own it all." "He can have it," Corasol's communicator beeped. He put it to his ear. "Everything's ship-shape and ready to lift," a tiny voice said. Corasol turned to Retief. "Let's go aboard." "Hold it," Retief said. "There's someone coming." Corasol spoke into the communiThe man slogging across the concator. "Keep him covered." Crete was short, wrapped in heavy garments. Over his head a white cloth fluttered from a stick. "From the set of those bat-ears, I'd ay it was the good corporal." "I wonder what he wants." Sozier stopped twenty feet from Retief and Corasol. "I want to... ah... talk to you, Corasol," he said. "Certainly, General. Go right ahead." "Look here, Corasol. You can't do this. My men will freeze. We'll starve. I've been thinking it over, and I've decided that we can reach an understanding." Corasol waited. "I mean, we can get together on this thing. Compromise. Maybe I acted a little hasty." Sozier looked from Corasol to Retief. "You're from tee his people full rights..." Retief puffed at his cigar in silence. Sozier started again. "Look, I'll give you a full voice in running things. A fifty-fity split. Whatta you say?" "I'm afraid  the proposal doesn't interest me. General," Corasol said. "Never mind the General stuff," Sozier said desperately. "Listen, you can run it. Just give me and my boys a little say-so." "Sorry." Corasol shook his head. "Not interested. General." "Okay, okay! You win! Just come on back and get things straightened out! I got a belly full of running things!" "I'm afraid I have other plans. General. For some time I've wanted to transfer operations to a world called Las Palmas on which we hold a charter. It has a naturally delightful climate, and I'm told the fishing is good. I leave Glave to the Free Electorate with my blessing. Goodby, General." He turned to. the ship. "You got to stay here!" Sozier howled. "We'll complain to the I'm a Corporal -- " "You're a General now -- whether you like it or not." Corasol said bluntly. He shivered. There was a hint of ice in the air. "If you or any of your men ever decide to go to work. General, I daresay we can train you for employment on Las Palmas. In the meantime -- Long Live the Revolution!" "You can't do this! I'll sue!" "Calm down. Sozier," Retief said. "Go back to town and see if you can get your radio working. Put in a call for Mr. Magnan aboard the It will make his day. And a word of advice: Mr. Magnan hates a piker -- so ask for plenty." #V yTy boy, I'm delighted," Am-L  A bassador Stern wheeler boomed. "A highly professional piece of work. A stirring testimonial to the value of the skilled negotiator!" "You're too kind, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said, glancing at his watch. IF "And Magnan tells me that not only will the Mission be welcomed, and my job secure for another year -- that is, I shall have an opportunity to serve -- but a technical mission has been requested as well. I shall look forward to meeting General Sozier. He sounds a most reasonable chap." "Oh, you'll like him, Mr. Ambasshare all you have." Counsellor of Embassy Magnan tapped and entered the office. "Forgive the intrusion, Mr. Ambassador," he said breathlessly, "but I must -- " "Well, what is it, man? The deal hasn't gone sour?" "Oh, far from it! I've been exploring General Sozier's economic situation with him via scope, and it seems he'll require a loan." "Yes, yes? How much?" Magnan inhaled proudly. "Twen"No!" "Yes!" "Magnificent! Good lord, Magnan, you're a genius! This will mean promotions all around. Why, the administrative Iqad alone -- " "I can't wait to make planetfall, Mr. Ambassador. I'm all a-bubble with plans. I hope they manage to get the docking facilities back in operation soon." "Help is on the way, my dear Magnan. I'm assured the Environmental Control installations will be coming back in operation again within a year or two." "My, didn't those ice-caps form quickly. And in the open sea." "Mere scum ice. As my Counsellor for Technical Affairs, you'll be in charge of the ice-breaking operation once we're settled in. I imagine you'll want to spend considerable time in the field. I'll be expecting a record of how evety credit is spent." "I'm more the executive type," Magnan said. "Possibly Retief -- " A desk speaker hummed. "Mr. Corasol's lighter has arrived to ferry Mr. Retief across to the Company ship..." "Sorry you won't be with us, Retief," Sternwheeler said heartily. He turned to Magnan. "Manager-General Corasol has extended Retief an exequatur as Consul General to Las Palmas." R etief nodded. "Much as I'd like to be out in that open boat with you, breaking ice, I'm afraid duty calls elsewhere." "Your own post? I'm not sure he's experienced enough, Mr. Ambassador. Now, I -- " "He was requested by name, Magnan. It seems the Manager-General's children took a fancy to him." "Eh? How curious. I never thought you were particularly interested in infant care, Retief." "Perhaps I haven't been, Mr. Magnan." Retief draped his short blue cape over his left arm and turned to the door. "But remember the diplomat's motto: be adaptable..." IF  Short Story We've taughf the dolphins English. Sooner or later, though, there may be something for T hough he was used to the tropical sun, a sliver of light reflected from one of the laboratory windows stabbed into Craven's head as he crossed the walkway, leading his little group of mamlanders. He felt uneasy and feverish, more than the previous night's drinking would account for. Perhaps he was coming down with something, God forbid. It would be a rotten time for it, with the rest of the staff over in Charlotte Amalie for the weekend. them to teach us! "What time did you say that plane's coming from Miami?" asked the gray, paunchy man with the clipped mustache. Hurrying to catch up with Craven, and glancing at his wristwatch, he stumbled and swore. "I ought to be back in New York right now. I hate to be out of the country with the situation the way it is." "Two-fifteen," said Craven shortly. "You'll have plenty of time." "What do you think about the IF crisis, Dr. Craven?" one of the women asked. She was plump and grayhaired. 'Aren't you worried to be out here all by yourself? My goodness, I would be." "Oh, I expect it'll blow over," Craven said indifferently. "They always do." "Well, that's right, they always have, the paunchy man said, sounding relieved. He paused, squinting his eyes to peer out past the white concrete pens to the harbor. "Saw something jump out there. There's another. Are those some of the animals?" "Yes, those are the dolphins," Craven said. Irritably he strode forward to open the laboratory door. "This way, please." Inside, it was cooler than outdoors, but full of sunlight from the big windows overlooking the sea. On the wall was an alphabet chart, with brightly colored pictures of simple objects. The floor was a concrete slab, cut away across the far side of the room to form a channel open at both ends. The water in the channel rose and fell with a slow, vertiginous surge. Craven's head was beginning to ache. "Here's where we do most of our work with the dolphins," he said. "Just a moment, I'll see if I can get one for you.". He stepped to a wall panel, pressed a switch, and spoke into the microphone. "Pete, this is Charles. Come in, please." A quacking gabble of sound from the wall speaker answered him. "Okay, come on in," Craven said, and switched off the mike. "What was that?" one of the matrons demanded. "Was that one of the dolphins talking? Craven smiled. "That's right. That was Pete, our star pupil. Look out the window. And stand back a little from the channel, please." There was a nervous shuffling of feet as some of the visitors moved away from the edge, others crowded closer to the windows. Down the concrete channel that led past the pens directly to the wall of the laboratory, something gray ws moving with surprising speed. It was submerged, but kicked up an occasional burst of spray. The visitors began to murmur in alarm; some backed away from the window. "Look out!" someone yelled. The gray shape burst into the room; the water in the channel lifted as if about to overflow, then fell back with a slapping sound. There was a shriek, then nervous laughter. I n the channel, balancing itself half out of the water, was a streamlined, water-bright shape. It spoke, in the same quacking gabble as before. "Okay, Pete," Craven said. "Out you come." "Was it really talking? someone asked behind him. "Could you understand what it said?" Craven, without bothering to reply, pressed a switch on the control panel. Out of a recess in the wall came an electric hoist supporting a curved, heavily braced metal platform. The platform lowered itself into the water; the dolphin swam into position over it. Craven pressed another switch; the platform rose. IF streaming water. The hoist moved forward again, then lowered its passenger onto a wheeled framework that stood beside the channel. There was a click. The supporting arms of the hoist rose out of the way. On the platform, which now formed the bed of the wheeled cart, lay a bulky eight-foot mammal. One eye was cocked alertly at Craven. The mouth, open in what seemed a pleasant smile, was full of sharp conicnl teeth. "Goodness!" said one of the women. "I hope he doesn't bite!" "Dolphins have never been known to attack a human being," Craven said perfunctorily. He pressed a button on the control panel. "Say hello to our visitors, Pete." The dolphin glanced alertly at the people standing behind Craven, then emitted one of its high-pitched bursts of sound. To Craven's accustomed ear the words were blurred but understandable. To the others, he knew, they were only noise. Ho pressed another button on the panel. After a moment, the dolphin's recorded voice, slowed down and deeper in pitch, came out of the speaker. "Hello, lai'ss and ge'men." There was a general murmur, some nervous laughter, one clear voice: "What did he say?" "His mouth didn't move when he talked," someone commented suspiciously. Craven grinned. "He doesn't use it for talking. That's for fish. He talks through his blowhole -- there, on the top of his head. Come on over, Pete, let's have a look at you." Obediently, the dolphin glided nearer on his cart, trailing a long plastic hose. Sprays of water had begun to spurt out of perforated tubes along either side of the cart, making the dolphin's skin gleam wetly. Out of this tiny personal rainstorm, .the dolphin stared up at the visitors with friendly interest. "He's shaped just like a jet plane!" one of the male visitors remarked. "Look at the curve of m head and, uh, snout -- " Craven smiled at the man. "Similar solutions for similar problems," he said. "Pete's streamlined, just like a pet. He's a bottle-nosed dolphin -- Tursions truncatus -- the same species Lilly used in his original work. He weighs about four hundred pounds; his brain is a little bigger than a man's. Pete is more intelligent than a dog or a monkey. He can not only understand commands in English -- he can talk back to us. That's why we feel this research is so important. What we're doing is teaching another species to enter the human community." T here was a moment of impressed silence. That will hold them, Craven thought. "What are all the gadgets for?" another man asked. "He controls the cart motors with those bars under his flukes," Craven said. "The other levers on either side are for manipulation -- he works those with his flippers. Pete's great lack is that he hasn't any hands or feet, you see -- but we're trying to make up for that. Show them, Pete, okay?" Okay, Charless," said the dolphin cheerfully. The cart wheeled, glided across the floor to the low bench on the far side, leaving a wet path behind it. Jointed arms extended from the front of the cart, groped for a pointer, picked it up in metal pincers. "Show us the apple, Pete," Craven said. The pointer rose, wavered, came to rest with its tip on the bright picture of an apple on the wall chart. "Now the boy," Craven said. There were murmurs of admiration as the dolphin pointed to the boy, the dog, the boat. "Now spell cat, Pete," said Craven. The pointer spelled out C-A-T "Good boy, Pete," Craven said. "Plenty of fish for you today." The dolphin opened his jaws wide, emitted a Bronx cheer, then a burst of cracklin? dolphin laughter. There was a nervous stir among the visitors. "You said dolphins have never been known to attack a person," said a gray-eyed girl. It was the first time she had spoken, but Craven had been aware of her; she was slender and pretty, held herself very erect. "That's right," he said, facing her. "It isn't that they couldn't -- you know they kill sharks -- but they just never have." "Even when people have hurt them?" she asked. Her gray eyes were sober. "That's correct," Craven said. "And it's true, isn't it, that many dolphins have been killed in the course of this research?" Craven felt a little irritated. "There were some fatalities, before we learned how to handle them," he said shortly. He turned away. "Now let's try something more difficult. Show them the chemistry experiment, Pete." As the dolphin turned toward the bench again. Craven commented, "This is something Pete has just been learning. We're pretty proud of it." On the bench was a little stand with several stoppered bottles, a beaker and a row of test tubes. Controlling the jointed arms with his flippers, the dolphin reached out, picked up a bottle and pulled the stopper. One set of metal pincers held the bottle; the other picked up a test tube. Slowly Pete made the bottle pour into the test tube. It ran full and spilled over. The dolphin rocked back and forth nervously in his cart. "Okay, Pete," Craven said soothingly. "Don't get nervous -- it's all right -- go ahead." The dolphin set the bottle down with a crash, poured the contents of the test tube into the beaker. The pincers reached for another bottle, slipped and tried again. They got the bottle on the second try, tilted it but missed the test tube. Overcorrecting, the dolphin crashed bottle and test tube together, and the test tube broke. The bottle dropped, spilled. The dolphin backed his cart away, swiveled toward Craven. "Too hard. Charless," he said plaintively. "Too hard." Craven's fists clenched with disappointment. The creature had done it perfectly on the last three tries! IF "Never mind, Pete," he said. "It's okay -- you did fine. Go on out and play now." "All finiss?" Pete asked. "Yes. So long." "So long." The dolphin wheeled his cart around, glided over to the edge of the channel. The jointed arms retracted. The cart bed tilted slowly; the dolphin slid off it into the water, almost without a splash. There was a glimpse of his gray body darting underwater; then the channel was empty. O n the way down to the seaplane, Craven found himself walking beside the gray-eyed girl. "Well, what did you make of it all?" he asked her. "I thought it was pathetic" she said. Her gray eyes were indignant. "You talk about making them enter the human community. It's all wrong! He's a dolphin, not a man. He was trying so hard, but the best you could turn him into was something like a retarded, crippled child. I felt so sorry." After the visitors were gone. Craven was restless. He kept remembering what the girl had said; there was just enough truth in it to make it rankle. His headache had not improved. The sunlight was still oppressive. He prowled through his living quarters, glanced with distaste at the black headlines of the day-old Miami paper, finally turned on the television. "... initials stand for 'non-radioactive heat emitters,' " a chubby, gray-haired man was saying, enunciating each word clearly. "Now the question is, what would be the consequences to us if these weapons -- " His voice cut off suddenly and a for a moment. Craven lit a cigarette and waited patiently: probably it was something more about the interminable peace talks in New Delhi. A voice said abruptly, "We interrupt this program to bring you -- " Then it stopped, and the placard vanished. There was nothing on the screen but a raster, and nothing but a hiss coming out of the speaker. After a moment Craven put his cigarette down and punched the channel selector. There was nothing on any of the channels except #, where a faint gray picture came in for a moment, then vanished. Craven stared at the machine, feeling abruptly frightened. If there was something wrong with the set, then why would channel I # -- ? He discovered that he was shaking. Without trying to understand what he was doing, he began to rip off his shirt and trousers. Naked except for shoes, he ran to the locker, pulled out mask, flippers, air tanks and regulator. The sky was bright and empty as he ran toward the dock -- not even a plane in sight. Craven shrugged into his harness, buckled it hastily. He glanced toward the buoy that marked the underwater station, then dropped into the water. Halfway out toward the station, swimming two fathoms deep. Craven knew he had been right. A sudden hissing patter came above him. #  and looking up, transfixed, he saw a shower of golden sparks descending, each in its furious cloud of bubbles. One came so near that he felt its heat on his skin. He writhed from it, staring incredulously as it fell to the bottom ten fathoms below. It came to Craven's stunned mind that the thing that must not happen had happened: someone had used the weapons that were too terrible for use. T he underwater station was in sixteen fathoms, as deep as it could have been built without pressurizing the dome. It stood on a rocky shelf in deep water, and although several of the golden sparks had fallen around it, none seemed to have clung to the dome. Craven swam to the lock, let himself in, and sat hugging himself, shaken by chills, as air slowly filled the chamber. Inside, he stared wildly around. He heard himself say aloud, "My God, what am I going to do?" Scraps of information from other TV broadcasts came back to his mind. Those infernal little pellets would go on emitting heat for months. And this must be only an accidental scattering: on the mainland, in populated centers, they would have fallen thick as hail... There was a compressor here in the station and a tide-driven standby generator; he could recharge his tanks indefinitely; but what about food, after ihe canned stuff on the shelves was gone? Fish. Craven felt weak with reaction, but could not be still. He adjusted his mask and mouthpiece again, went out through the lock. There seemed to be no more of the pellets on the bottom than before, and none were falling. Craven plucked up his courage, swam to the surface. Treading water, he put his mask up to stare at the island. The laboratories were in flames. Behind them, the mountain was one mass of yellowish-white smoke: the whole island was on fire. The sky seemed empty, but Craven could not endure its gigantic blue stare. He lowered his mask and dived again. Down in the clear blue depths. Craven heard the high-pitched gabble of dolphin conversation, and once or twice saw their gray shapes flitting by. A school of plump blues swam into view. Craven started, then went after it. There were spear-guns in the station, but he had not thought to bring one. He swam at the fish, grasping ineffectually with his hands, but they scattered easily around him. Vve got to learn, Draven's mind was telling him. This is my element now, the sea -- Tve got to adapt...  Something large and gray swam up toward him. Craven stiffened, but it was only Pete, gazing at him with friendly curiosity. The school of blues had reformed not far away. Abruptly the dolphin wheeled, darted away with a lazy surge of his flukes. In a moment he was gliding back, with a fat bluefish in his jaws. "Look, Charless," he said kindly, "this is the way to catch a fiss..." IF IF  Short Story The work wasn't hard, but there were some sacrifices. You had to give up hope and freedom -- and being human! I T he girt with the Slider egg glittering in her hair watched the bailiff lead Asa Graybar out of the courtroom. He recognized her as old Hazeltyne's daughter Harriet, no doubt come to see justice done. She didn't have the hothouse-flower look Asa would have expected in a girl whose father owned the most valuable of the planetary franchises. She was not afraid to meet his eye, the eye of a judicially certified criminal. There was, perhaps, a crease of puzzlement in her brow, as if she had thought crimes were committed by shriveled, rat-faced types, and not by young biological engineers who still affected crewcuts. Tom Dorr, Hazeltyne's general manager, was her escort. Asa felt certain, without proof, that Dorr was the man who had framed him for the charge of grand theft by secreting a fresh Slider egg in his laboratory. The older man stared at Asa coldly as he was led out of the courtroom and down the corridor back to jail. Jumpy, Asa's cellmate, took one look at his face as he was put back behind bars. "Guilty," Jumpy said. Asa glared at him. "I know, I know," Jumpy said hastily. "You were framed. But what's the rap?" "Five or one." "Take the five," Jumpy advised. "Learn basket-weaving in a nice airconditioned rehab clinic. A year on a changeling deal will seem a lot longer, even if you're lucky enough to live through it." Asa took four steps to the far wall of the cell, stood there briefly with his head bent and turned to face Jumpy "Nope," Asa said softly. "I'm going into a conversion tank. I'm going to be a muck man. Jumpy. I'm going out to Jordan's Planet and hunt Slider eggs." "Smuggling? It won't work." Asa didn't answer. The Hazeltyne company had gone after him because he had been working on a method of keeping Slider eggs alive. The Hazeltyne company would be happy to see him mark time for five years of so-called social reorientation. But if he could get out to Jordan's Planet, with his physiology adapted to the environment of that wretched world, he could studv the eggs under conditions no laboratory could duplicate He might even be able to cause trouble for Hazeltyne. His only problem would be staying alive foi a year. A n interview with a doctor from the Conversion Corps was required for all persons who elected changeling status. The law stated that potential changelings must be fully informed of the rights and hazards of altered shape before they signed a release. The requirement held whether or not the individual, like Asa, was already experienced. By the time humanity traveled to the stars, medical biology had made it possible to regenerate damaged or deficient organs of the body. Regeneration was limited only by advanced age. Sonrietime after a man's two hundredth year his body lost the ability to be coaxed into growing new cells. A fifth set of teeth was usually one's last. As long as senescence could be staved off, however, any man could have bulging biceps and a pencil waist, if he could pay for the treatment. Until the medical associations declared such treatments unethical there was even a short fad of deliberate deformities, with horns at the temples particularly popular. From regeneration it was a short step to specialized regrowth. The techniques were perfected to adapt humans to the dozen barely habitable worlds man had discovered. Even on Mars, the only planet outside Earth in the solar system where the human anatomy was remotely suitable, a man could work more efficiently with redesigned lungs and temperature controls than he could inside a pressure suit. On more bizarre planets a few light-years away the advantages of changeling bodies were greater. IF Unfortunately for planetary development companies, hardly anyone wanted to become a changeling. High pay lured few. So a law was passed permitting a convicted criminal to earn his freedom by putting in one year as a changeling for every five years he would otherwise have had to spend in rehabilitation. "What types of changelings do you have orders for right now, doctor?" Asa asked the man assigned to his case. It would look suspicious if he asked for Jordan's Planet without some preliminary questions. "Four," answered the doctor. "Squiffs for Nev' Arcady. Adapted for climbing the skycraper trees and with the arm structure modified into pseudo-wings or gliding. Then we need spiderinos for Von Neumann Two. If you want the nearest thing we have to Earth, there's Caesar's Moon, where we'd just have to double your tolerance for carbon monoxide and make you a bigger and better gorilla than the natives. Last, of course, there's always a need for muck men on Jordan's Planet." The doctor shrugged, as if naturally no one could be expected to choose Jordan's Planet. Asa frowned in apparent consideration of the alternatives. "What's the pay range?" he asked. "Ten dollars a day on Caesar's Moon. Fifteen on New Arcady or Von Neumann Two. Twenty-five on Jordan's." Asa raised his eyebrows. "Why such a difference? Everyone knows about muck men living in the mud while they hunt Slider eggs. But don't your conversions make the changeling comfortable in his new environment?" "Sure they do," said the doctor. "We can make you think mud feels better than chinchilla fur and we can have you jumping like a grasshopper despite the double gravity. But we can't make you like the sight of yourself. And we can't guarantee that a Slider won't kill you." "Still," Asa mused aloud, "it would mean a nice bankroll waiting at the end of the year." He leaned forward to fill in the necessary form. S ince it was cheaper to transport a normal human than to rig special environments in a spaceship, every planet operated its own conversion chambers. On the space freighter that carried him from Earth Asa Graybar was confined to a small cabin that was opened only for a guard to bring meals and take out dirty dishes. He was still a prisoner. Sometimes he could hear voices in the passageway outside, and once one of them sounded like a woman's. But since women neither served on spaceships nor worked in the dome settlements on harsher worlds, he decided it was his imagination. He might have been dead cargo for all he learned about space travel. Nevertheless his time was not wasted. He had as a companion, or cellmate, another convict who had elected conversion to muck man. More important, his companion had done time on Jordan's Planet before and had wanted to return. IF "It's the Slider eggs," explained Kershaw, the two-time loser. "The ones you see on Earth knock your eyes out, but they've already begun to die. There's nothing like a fresh one. And I'm not the first to go crazy over them. When I was reconverted and got home I had nine thousand dollars waiting for me. That'll buy a two-year-old egg that flashes maybe four times a day. So I stole a new one and got caught." Asa had held a Slider egg in his hand as he gazed into it. He could understand. The shell was clear as crystal, taut but elastic, while the albumen was just as clear around the sparkling network of organic filaments that served as a yolk. Along these interior threads played tiny flashes of lightning, part of some unexplained process of life. Electrical instruments picked up static discharges from the egg, but the phenomenon remained a mystery. Hardly anyone faced with the beauty of a Slider's egg bothered to question its workings. For a few expectant moments there would be only random, fitful gleamings, and then there would be a wild coruscation of light, dancing from one filament to the next in a frenzy of brillance. It took about four years for a Slider egg to die. Beauty, rarity and fading value made the eggs a luxury item like nothing the world had ever seen. If Asa had found a means of keeping them alive it would have made him wealthy at the expense of the Hazeltyne monopoly. "You know what I think?" Kershaw asked. "I think those flashes are the egg calling its momma. They when you scoop one out of the muck, and right away a Slider always comes swooping out of nowhere at you." "I've been meaning to ask you," Asa said. "How do you handle the Sliders?" Kershaw grinned. "First you try to catch it with a rocket. If you miss you start leaping for home. All this time you're broadcasting for help, you understand. When the Slider catches you, you leap up while it buries its jaws in the mud where you were just standing. You dig your claws in its back and hang on while it rolls around in the mud. Finally, if the 'copter comes -- and if they don't shoot off your head by mistake -- you live to tell the tale." II A sa Graybar kept his normal form on Jordan's Planet just long enough to learn the discomfort of double gravity. He was told he needed another physical examination and was taken right in to a doctor. His heart was pounding to keep his blood circulating on this massive world, but the doctor had apparently learned to make allowances. "Swallow this," said the doctor after making a series of tests. Asa swallowed the capsule. Two minutes later he felt himself beginning to lose consciousness. "This is it!" he thought in panic. He felt someone ease him back down onto a wheeled stretcher. Before consciousness faded completely he realized that no one got a chance to back out of becoming a changeling, that he was on his way to the conversion tank right now. When he finally awoke he felt well rested and very comfortable. But for a long time he was afraid to open his eyes. "Come on, Graybar," said a deep, booming voice. "Let's test our wings." It was not Kershaw's voice, but it had to be Kershaw. Asa opened his eyes. Everyone had seen pictures of muck men. It was different having one stand beside you. Kershaw looked much like an enormous frog except that his head was still mostly human. He was sitting on webbed feet, his lower legs bent double under huge thighs, and his trunk tilted forward so that his arms dangled to the ground. The arms were as thick around as an ordinary man's legs. The hands had become efficient scoops, with broad fingers webbed to the first joint and tipped with spade-like claws. The skin was still pinkish but had become scaly. Not a thread of hair showed anywhere on the body, not even on the head. This, Asa realized, was what he looked like himself. It would have been more bearable if the head had not retained strong traces of humanity The nostrils flared wide and the jaws hardly emerged from the neck, but the ears were human ears and the eyes, under those horny ridges, were human eyes. Asa felt sure that the eyes could still weep. He started to walk forward and tipped over on his side. Kershaw laughed. "Come to daddy, babykins," Kershaw said, holding out his hands. "Only try hopping this time. And take it easy." Asa pushed himself upright with one arm and tried a small hop. Nerve and muscle coordination was perfect. He found himself leaping as high as Kershaw's head. "That's the way,"Kershaw said approvingly. "Now get this on and we'll go outside." Asa snapped on a belt and breech cloth combination that had flaps of fabric dangling from the belt in front and behind. He followed as Kershaw pushed open a sliding door to lead the way out of the room where they had been left to revive from conversion. T hey went into a courtyard partly covered by a roof projecting from the Hazeltyne company's dome settlement. The far half of the courtyard was open to the gray drizzle that fell almost ceaselessly from the sky of Jordan's Planet and turned most of its surface into marsh and mud flats. A high wall enclosed the far portion of the courtyard. Ranged along the wall were thirty stalls for muck men. From fifty yards across the courtyard a muck man bounded over to them in two leaps. Attached to a harness across his shoulders and chest were a gun and a long knife. "Names?" he growled. He was a foot taller than Graybar and big everywhere in proportion. IF "Kershaw. I'm back, Furston." "I'm Graybar." "Kershaw again? Just start in where you left off, sucker. Come on, you." He pointed to Asa and leaped to the open portion of the courtyard. "Do what he says," Kershaw whispered to Graybar. "He's sort of a trusty and warden and parole officer rolled into one." Asa was put through a series of exercises to get him used to his distorted body, to teach him how to leap and how to dig. He was shown how to operate the radio he would carry and how to fire the pencilslim rockets of this gun. Finally he was told to eat a few berries from a native vine. He did so and immediately vomited. Furston laughed. "That's to remind you you're still a man," Furston said, grinning. "Everything that grows on this planet is poison. So if you got any ideas of hiding out till your term is up, forget 'em. Right here is where you eat." Asa turned without a word and hopped feebly away from Furston. He lifted his head to breathe deeply and saw two humans watching him from an observation tower on the roof. He leaped twenty feet into the air for a closer look. Gazing at him with repugnance, after witnessing the end of his session with Furston, were Harriet Hazeltyne and general manager Tom Dorr. The girl's presence merely puzzled Asa, but Dorr's being here worried him. Dorr had tried to get rid of him once and was now in an excellent position to make the riddance permanent. At supper that night, squatting on the ground beside a low table with the dozen other muck men, operating from the dome, Asa asked what the two were doing put here. "The girl will inherit this racket some day, won't she?" asked one of the others. "She wants to see what kind of suckers are making her rich." "Maybe that guy Dorr brought her along to show her what a big wheel he is," said one of the others. "Just hope he doesn't take over the operations." Ill N ext morning Furston passed out guns, knives, radios, and pouches to carry any eggs the muck men found. He gave each man a compass and assigned the sectors to be worked during the day. Finally he called Graybar aside. "In case you don't like it here," Furston said, "you can get a week knocked off your sentence for every egg you bring in. Now get out there and work that muck." Furston sent Graybar and Kershaw out together so that the veteran could show Asa the ropes. Asa had already learned that the wall around the courtyard was to keep Sliders out, not muck men in. He leaped over it and hopped along after Kershaw. Ftet slapping against the mud, they went about five miles from the Hazeltyne station, swimming easily across ponds too broad to jump. The mud, if not precisely as pleasant to the touch as chinchilla fur, was not at all uncomfortable, and the dripping air caressed their skins like a summer breeze back on Earth. Tiny, slippery creatures skidded and splashed out of their way. Finally Kershaw stopped. His experienced eye had seen a trail of swamp weeds crushed low into the mud. "Keep your eyes open," Kershaw said. "There's a Slider been around here lately. If you see something like an express train headed our way, start shooting." At each leap along the trail they peered quickly around. They saw no Sliders, but this meant little, for the beasts lived under the mud as much as on top of it. Kershaw halted again when they came to a roughly circular area some ten yards in diameter where the weeds had been torn out and lay rotting in the muck. "We're in luck," he said as Asa skidded to a stop at his side. "An egg was laid somewhere here within the last week. These places are hard to spot when the new weeds start growing." Kershaw took a long look around. "No trouble in sight. We dig." They started at the center of the cleared area, shoveling up great gobs ofmud with their hands and flinging them out of the clearing. Usually a muck man dug in a spiral out from the center, but Graybar and Kershaw dug in gradually widening semi-circles opposite each other. They had to dig four feet deep, and it was slow going until they had a pit big enough to stand in. Each handful of mud had to be squeezed gently before it was thrown away, to make sure it didn't conceal an egg. As he worked, Asa kept thinking what an inefficient system it was. Everything about the operation was wrong. "Got it!" Kershaw shouted. He leaped out of the pit and started wiping slime off a round object the size of a baseball. Asa jumped out to watch. "A big one," Kershaw said. He held it, still smeared with traces of mud, lovingly to his cheek, and then lifted it to eye level. "Just look at it." T he egg was flashing with a mad radiance, like a thousand diamonds being splintered under a earphones and he thought of what Kershaw had said, that the scintillation of an egg was an effect of its calls to a mother Slider for help. Asa looked around. "Jump!" he shouted. At the edge of the clearing a segmented length of greenish black scales, some two feet thick and six feet high, had reared up out of the weeds. The top segment was almost all mouth, already opened to show row upon row of teeth. Before Asa could draw his gun the Slider lowered its head to the ground, dug two front flippers into the mud and shot forward. Asa leaped with all his strength, sailing far out of the clearing. While he was still in the air he snapped IF the mouthpiece of his radio down from where it was hinged over his head. As he landed he turned instantly, his gun in his hand. "Calling the 'copter!" he spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece. "Kershaw and Graybar, sector eight, five miles out. Hurry!" "Graybar?" asked a voice in his earphone. "What's up?" "We've got an egg but a Slider wants it back." "On the way." Asa hopped back to the clearing. Kershaw must have been bowled over by the Slider's first rush, for he was trying to hop on one leg as if the other had been broken. The egg lay flickering on top of the mud where Kershaw had dropped it. The Slider, eight flippers on each side working madly, was twisting its thirty feet of wormlike body around for another charge. Aiming hastily, Asa fired a rocket at the monster's middle segment. The rocket smashed through hard scales and exploded in a fountain of gray flesh. The Slider writhed, coating its wound in mud, and twisted toward Asa. He leaped to one side, firing from the air and missing, and saw the Slider turn toward the patch of weeds where he would land. His legs were tensed to leap again the moment he hit the mud, but he saw the Slider would be on top of him before he could escape. As he landed he thrust his gun forward almost into the mouth of the creature and fired again. Even as he was knocked aside into the muck, Asa's body was showered with shreds of alien flesh scattered by the rocket's explosion. Desperately pushing himself to his feet, he saw the long headless body shiver and lie still. A sa took a deep breath and looked around. "Kershaw!" he called. "Where are you?" "Over here." Kershdw stood briefly above the weeds and fell back again. Asa leaped over to him. "Thanks," Kershaw said. "Muck men stick together. You'll make a good one. I wouldn't have had a chance. My leg's busted." "The helicopter ought to be here pretty soon," Asa said. He locked over at the dead Slider and shook his head. "Tell me, what are the odds on getting killed doing this?" "Last time I was here there was about one mucker killed for every six eggs brought out. Of course you're not supposed to stand there admiring the eggs like I did while a Slider comes up on you." Asa hopped over to the egg, which was still full of a dancing radiance where it rested on the mud. He scooped a hole in the muck and buried the egg. "Just in case there are any more Sliders around," he explained. "Makes no difference," said Kershaw, pointing upward. "Here comes the 'copter, late as usual." The big machine circled them, hovered to inspect the dead Slider, and settled down on broad skids. Through the transparent nose Asa could see Tom Dorr and Harriet Hazeltyne. The company manager swung the door open and leaned out. "I see you took care of the Slider," he said. "Hand over the egg." "Kershaw has a broken leg," Asa said. "I'll help him in and then I'll get the egg." While Kershaw grabbed the door frame to help pull himself into the helicopter, Asa got under his companion's belly and lifted him by the waist. He hadn't realized before just how strong his new body was. Kershaw, as a muck man, would have weighed close to three hundred pounds on Earth, close to six hundred here. Dorr made no move to help, but the girl reached under Kershaw's shoulder and strained to get him in. Once he was inside, Asa saw, the cabin was crowded. "Are you going to have room for me too?" he asked. "Not this trip," Dorr answered. "Now give me the egg." Asa didn't hesitate. "The egg stays with me," he said softly. "You do what I tell you, mucker," said Dorr. "Nope. I want to make sure you come back." Asa turned his head to Harriet. "You see. Miss Hazeltyne, I don't trust your friend. You might ask him to tell you about it." Dorr stared at him with narrowed eyes. Suddenly he smiled in a way that worried Asa. "Whatever you say, Graybar," Doer said. He turned to the controls. In another minute the helicopter was in the sky. A round trip for the helicopter should have taken no more than twenty minutes, allowing time for Kershaw to be taken out at the settlement. After an hour passed Asa began to worry. He was sure Dorr would return for the egg. Finally he realized that Dorr could locate the egg approximately by the body of the dead Slider. Dorr could return for the egg any time with some other muck man to dig for it. Asa pulled down the mouthpiece of his radio. "This is Graybar, calling the helicopter," he said. "When are you coming?" There was no answer except the hum of carrier wave. If he tried to carry the egg back, Asa knew. Sliders would attack him all along the way. A man had no chance of getting five miles with an egg by himself. He could leave the egg here, of course. Even so he would be lucky if he got back, following a hazy compass course from which he and Kershaw had certainly deviated on their outward trip. There were no landmarks in this wilderness of bog to help him find his way. The workers were supposed to home in on radio signals, if they lost their bearings, but Dorr would deny him that help. What was the night like on Jordan's Planet? Maybe Sliders slept at night. If he could stay awake, and if he didn't faint from hunger in this strange new body, and if the Sliders left him alone... A whirring noise made Asa jump in alarm. Then he smiled in relief, for it was the helicopter, the blessed helicopter, coming in over the swamp. IF But what if it was Dorr, coming back alone to dispose of him without any witnesses? Asa leaped for the carcass of the dead Slider and took shelter behind it. No machine-gun blast of rockets came from the helicopter. The big machine swooped low dizzily, tilted back in an inexpert attempt to hover, thumped down upon the mud and slid forward. As Asa jumped aside, the landing skids caught against the Slider's body and the helicopter flipped forward on its nose, one of the rotor blades plunging deep into the mud. Asa leaped forward in consternation. Not only was his chance of safe passage back to the settlement wrecked, but now he would have the extra burden of taking care of the pilot. When he reached the nose of the helicopter he saw that the pilot, untangling herself from the controls to get up, was Harriet Hazeltyne. IV # I A re you hurt?" Asa asked her. She reached for his shoulder to steady herself as she climbed out of the machine. 'T guess not," she said. "But taking a fall in this gravity is no fun. From the way my face feels I ought to be getting a black eye pretty soon." "What happened?" "I made a fool of myself." She made a face back in the direction of the settlement. "Dorr wasn't going to come after you. He said anyone who talked back to him should try arguing with the Sliders." She looked up at the machine-gun on the helicopter. "They feed at night, you know. And they eat their own kind," she said. "The Slider you killed would draw them like ants to jam." Asa glanced around quickly to make sure no Sliders had already come. He eyed the helicopter with distaste at the thought of what a flimsy fort it would make. "Anyway," Harriet said, "I told him he couldn't just leave you here and we started arguing. I lost my temper. He thought he had brought me to Jordan's Planet on a fancy tour. I told him the real reason I was here was to check up for my father on the way he was running things and there seemed to be a lot wrong. So he told me very politely I could run things to suit myself and he walked off." She shrugged, as if to indicate that she had made a mess of things. "And you took the helicopter by yourself," Asa said, as if he could hardly believe it yet. "Oh, back on Earth I can make a helicopter do stunts. But I wasn't used to this gravity. I don't suppose you couldmake this machine stand up straight?" Asa tugged at the body of the Slider until he got it off the skids of the plane. He pulled with all his strength at the rotor blade sunk in the mud, but the weight of the helicopter was upon it and the mud held it with a suction of its own. After a few minutes he had to give up. "We fight off the Sliders, then," she said, as matter of factly as if that problem was settled. "If it's any comfort, I know how to handle the machine-gun." "Nope. In this drizzle, at night, the Sliders would be on us before we could see them. We've got to try to get back." He stood in thought while she stared at him patiently. "What happened to the other muck men who went out today?" he asked. "They were called in when the 'copter came out the first time. Some of them may not have got back yet." A sa started talking into his radio. "Calling all muck men. This is Asa Graybar. All muck men, listen. This is Graybar. I am five miles out with Miss Hazeltyne, who came to rescue me after I saved Kershaw from a Slider. The helicopter is smashed. We're slogging in." He looked at her for a nod of confirmation and repeated the message. "Graybar?" came a voice in his earphones. "What do you want?" Asa grinned at Harriet as he continued. "Go on back to the settlement. Tell the others. Then organize a party to come help us. Bearing # degrees." "Right," said the unidentified voice. "I got it too," said another voice in the headset. "Muck men stick together." Good, Asa thought. At least two IF muckers were still out. They would tell the others. "Cancel all that," said a third voice. "This is Dorr speaking. Nobody goes out until I give the word." Asa didn't fancy waiting. "By authority of Miss Hazeltyne," he said rapidly, "Dorr is no longer manager. I am acting manager." He saw Harriet's eyebrows go up, for she couldn't hear the other end of what was going on. "Disregard Dorr," he continued. "If you can help us get back. Miss Hazeltyne will make changes to benefit all of us." Before he could say any more his ear was stricken with the noise of loud static. Dorr was making sure no more radio messages got through. Asa quickly told Harriet what had happened. The girl smiled with one side of her mouth. "Fine," she said, "but how am I supposed to cross the muck?" "On my back," Asa turned and entered the helicopter cabin. All the time he had been talking he had been worrying about the fact that he had only three rockets left for his gun. Quickly he checked the ammunition for the machinegun, found it was the same caliber, and felt that at last one break had gone his way. He took the plastic ammunition belts outside. "Load your pockets with these," he told the girl, pulling the rockets from their loops. Then, tying the plastic belts together, he fashioned a sling she could sit in with her legs at his sides. Finally he handed her his gun. "If you see a Slider," he said, "shoot for the head. Now climb on and hold tight to my gun harness and we'll try our luck." TThen she was astride his back Asa checked his compass and started jumping. At once he knew that the going would be much harder than he had imagined. Alone he could leap twenty-five yards, but her weight cut him down to about five yards. He kept going, realizing that the task was almost beyond his strength and not daring to tell her that even if his strength held out they might not even find the settlement in this drizzle. Hopping, sometimes staggering, skirting the wider pools in the swamp, Aa managed to go about a mile before he had to stop and rest. Harriet climbed out of the sling and settled down on a patch of weeds, a wet and slippery mat upon the mud. "We're going to make it," she said cheerfully. "I hope so," he said. "Not just for ourselves. A lot of changes should eggs on this planet. You're getting only a couple hundred a year." He was panting between sentences and stopped talking until he could catch his breath. "For one thing," he continued, "rockets are the wrong weapon against the Sliders. Flame throwers would be better. Of course they're a lot heavier than guns. But everything about the way you go after eggs is wrong. It's criminal to send one man out alone. It's utterly irresponsible to have only one helicopter. You're putting a price on eggs in terms of human lives. Muck men are human, you know, no matter what we look like." "You are very human," she said softly, "and very brave." He returned her smile, adding, "And we'll both be very dead unless we get going." They had traveled considerably less than a mile when he had to stop again. "How would you run things here? Harriet asked. "Start with new premises. There's no need to make monsters out of the muck men. Double their strength, and perhaps give them web feet, but why legs like a frog? If I could walk normally I could be pulling you on a sled. And why shovel hands instead of proper tools? Of course you would still have to give them a skin for this weather. Harriet's clothing was sodden and streaked with mud, and her hair was hanging down her head in wet, dark tangles that looked like so much boiled spinach. The bump when the helicopter fell had raised a blue-black swelling around her left eye. Yet, it occurred to Asa, she hadn't voiced the slightest complaint. She was listening intently to his advice. "I would send parties of three men out in a helicopter," he continued. "One would guard the ship while the other two hunted eggs. As soon as they found an egg they'd hop into the ship and be safe." T hey started off again. At the first leap Asa saw a Slider a hundred yards away. As soon as his feet hit the ground he whispered" to Harriet. She climbed out of the sling and held her gun ready while he drew his knife to wait. Long minutes passed before he decided they had not been seen and it was safe to continue. Next time they stopped the girl turned to Asa with a frown and asked, "Just how does Dorr think he can get away with this?" "Simple." Asa shrugged. "He'll say the Sliders got us despite all he could do. No muck man who could tell a different story will live long enough to get back to Earth." The sound of a rocket explosion came from somewhere off to their right. It was the loveliest sound Asa had ever heard. "The rescue party!" he shouted. "Let's go!" Knowing that rockets meant Sliders, but knowing also that no Slider was a match for a team of armed men, Asa leaped forward with renewed vigor. Once he misjudged his strength and landed in a puddle, splashing both of them with slimy water, but the girl on his back only laughed. They heard the sound of another rocket, and Harriet fired three shots of her own to attract attention. In a few more minutes they were happily welcoming six muck men. "I heard your message," said one of them, "and back at the settlement Kershaw told us what had happened. Furston tried to stop us and wound up with a knife in his belly... A couple of the others were afraid to come, and two were shot from the tower by IF Dorr, but the rest are with you. "Tom Dorr will be tried for murder," Harriet prcMnised grimly. With different men taking turns carrying Harriet for short distances they began to make progress rapidly. The Slider the men had been firing at was dead and no more were sighted before they came to the settlement. Dorr was waiting for them. He fired from the tower, his machinegun burst of rockets cutting through one man in mid-leap. Asa's party hugged the mud and fired back. Plastic showered from the tower window, and dust spurted from the concrete around it. "Keep me covered," Asa shouted. He 'took the gun from Harriet and leaped madly forward until he was under the shelter of the side of the dome. He waited for one more salvo from his party and jumped to the tower itself. Dorr had vanished, driven out of the tower by the rockets. Asa waved to the others to come forward and hopped into the main quarters of the dome. He had never been in this part of the settlement. Dorr could be lying in ambush for him. Asa moved cautiously, but he was confident that his own adjustment to the gravity of the planet would give him the advantage in any sudden meeting. H e looked around the comer and down some stairs just in time to see the discredited manager, holding a sack in one hands, struggle to open a door. Asa fired and missed. The next moment Dorr was outside. Asa leaped to the floor below.  One of the normal humans who lived in the settlement came out of another room, saw Asa and dodged back out of sight. Outside, Asa could see Dorr laboring to run along the paved road that led to the spaceship a quarter of a mile away. The fugitive turned once and fired wildly as Asa leaped after him. The mist was turning into heavy rain, and it was getting harder to see. Another rocket exploded somewhere out in front of Asa. The sound was followed by a scream. One more leap and Asa began firing himself. A Slider was gently taking into its mouth three eggs spilled from the sack lying beside what was left of Tom Dorr. One of Asa's shots destroyed the Slider, destroying the eggs, too as the monster's head exploded. Asa didn't think the eggs mattered much right now. He shuffled slowly back to the settlement, deciding to accept when Harriet offered him the managership. Some day, if he had his way. Slider eggs would be as common on Coming Next Month IF  Short Story The man who bears the Earthman's burden must give justice to the Lesser Tribes without the Law -- who may give it back! T he wakey-wakey played Earth Is Where My Heart Is and Mark Hassall sat up with a pounding heart. Every simulated morning for the last simulated three weeks he had woken to the gentle sound of Earth Is Where My Heart Is. But whatever you set the wakey-wakey to play, he reflected sadly, after a time it gave you a cold sweat to hear U For any signal which brings you to life in the morning after the mental death of sleep becomes associated with that shock to the system. The fear of death is nothing, compared to the fear of life. He flicked on the sound transmission of his telephone and left the visual pickup off. "Yup," he groaned into it. The telephone built up the unblushing image of Marylou, Transit Station J's nubile communications expert. "Marco," she cooed. "You're sitting up in bed." "You're damn right I am," he said. "But not any more!" And he curled himself modestly up in his electric blanket. "Anyway how in hell would you know? I've got the visual off." "I've eyes in the back of my head." "You just might have at that," he IF answered. For a communications expert on a Transit Station is considerably more than a mere switchboard girl. "Why don't you get dressed?" said Marylou. T'll really try and remember to do that before I go on duty," said Mark rolling towards the shower. "But I don't promise I'll get the time." "You just find the time," she said. When she heard the shower start she leaned forward across the control panel and turned the knob that accentuated the yellow register. She was a connoisseur about the performance of her telephone and loved it best of all her instruments. "I saw that," said Mark, just to keep her on her toes. "I was only turning up the yellow," said Marylou. "It was a little low. That's all." "You're a liar. You wanted to show off your pretty yellow hair." Maryiou pouted a little. "Just because you're being so tiresome this morning I'll tell you now why I called you." "Oh, God, no! You couldn't do that," he said from under the shower. "Not before breakfast." "You've got no time for breakfast. It's sim-# now. At sim-# you've got a case." "Oh, boy. Oh, boy," he moaned. "In the good old days bringers of bad news got killed. I'm surprised you dare. Why in space does this trial have to happen in the middle of the sim-night?" "Colonel's orders, Marco. He says a summary trial will impress the natives." T he colonel of Transit Station J was Colonel Prince Banerji of Haipur, and his ideas of discipline were inherited from an ancestor who once personally beheaded # English people, including # women and # children, back in his home state of Haipur on his home planet Earth, because he thought the English residents were becoming insubordinate. When the British soldiers came to take vengeance he told them that he had been no more severe with their late compatriots than he would be with his own people, and this was doubtless true. His descendant carried on the tradition by such endearing maneuvers as holding the monthly Emergency Evacuation Drill at sim#, the morning hour that is consecrated throughout the civilized universe to a pull at the Venusian drug-weed and a cup of coffee. "Constant and Effortful Vigilance," was his motto for his Transit Station. It was rumored that he never slept. Nobody had ever called him on the telephone without finding him immaculately uniformed and sitting at his desk. It was clear to Mark that he had been picked for the Station's most unpleasant job this sim-morning, probably for some good reason like Banerji had seen him smile or heard him whistle the sim-day before. The Station's most unpleasant job, of course, was sitting in on trials. Every Earthman on the Station, from the colonel to Roderick MacMack, the junior engineer, and Mark Hassall, the junior transport controller, held a commissioned rank in the Space S# Police, and under the terms of the Re-Foundation of Government in #, an officer in the Space Police had to be ready and trained to act the role of congressman, detective, judge, lawyer or jailer on demand. This happy sim-morning Mark Hassall had been chosen for judge. Standing Orders said that every dispute on the Station must be attended by an Earth officer. This Order meant, for instance, that Mark had once been forced to sit for # simhours in total silence alone in the courtroom with two tankfuls of Aldeberan-# creatures while they thrashed out what they alleged was a theological dispute. The Aids are the interpreters of the universe, and they had said that the subject matter of therr dispute was ineffable. "And if ineffable," they added, "then untranslatable." Mark hadn't even dared peruse a novel, for though no one but Aids could tell when Aids were having a break, the colonel, if he cared to look in, would know if Mark was. "This isn't my lucky sim-day," said Mark to Marylou while he brushed his teeth. "It could be much worse, friend," said the delectable communicator. "It's only an intra-species affair." In those days the difference between intra-Species law and interspecies law really meant something. Intra-Secies litigation was purgatorial, but inter-species litigation was hellish. In those days all cases were technically settled by Earth law, and in every judgment the judge had to produce a complicated formula reconciling his Earth-derived settlement with the law and practice of the relevant alien race. If two alien races were involved in a dispute, then the unhappy magistrate had to wrestle with a three-way compromise. With some sense of relief Mark turned on the visuals and gave Marylou a sight of his shining morning face. "What's the rap?" he asked, airing a bit of jargon he had picked up watching old television films in the Station library. (The Station had genuine antiques like the "Perry Mason" series he was quoting from.) "Wait for it," said Marylou roguishly, and brightened the contrast control to show off her roguish dimples. "Wife beating." "Oh, for God's sake! Only a tenth of them have arms to beat with! And only a tenth of them have wives." "Well, one in a hundred's a wifebeater." "I've heard it all. What could be next?" "It Could Be You, Mark darling," said Marylou. "Kindly remember your place," he said with mock roughness, and leaned forward as unobtrusively as he could in order to turn down the red register. "The Court at sim# then." "Good luck, Marco," said the Station's sole communications expert and sole Earth woman, and switched off. "Thank you, honeychile," said Mark meditatively into the gray screen. "Thank you." IF fThen he got to the courtroom and took his place on the Tribunal the trial was already set up. Beside him on the table was his water carafe, and about a quart of the Station's complement of Aldeberan-# people in their aquarium-like traveling quarters, with earphone pickups already connected, Mark put on the earphones. "Good morning, sir," said an electronically produced voice. "This is the Court Interpreter." "Good morning. Aids," he said. "Miss Marylou said to tell you that your container of body-fluid includes a toxic additive." Mark looked inside the vacuum flask which held water for the Judge and found it full of steaming black coffee. "Thank you, Aids. Convey my thanks to Miss Marylou. Sorry to see so many of you here this morning." The Aids made no answer. About two-thirds of the Station's complement of Aids had turned up that simmorning. They always sent to court just as many individuals as could cope with the complexity of the case as they saw it. They seldom misjudged. To see so many of them at once was a bad omen. He looked around the Court. Below him, in what they called the dock, were two bedraggled Fomalhaut-#s, one male, one female. He had no idea what the female Fomalhaut was doing there. The only wheeled race known at the time, they were circling round each other in the gyration labeled by the Ethological Handbook for their race "Repose: without joy", and which MacMack had rechristened "constant and effortful vigilance" after the tyrannous Banerji's watchword. Beyond them, in the position technically known as "Counsel for the Defense" was the Station's senior lieutenant, Gil Mulrooney, a thickset, grizzled veteran of the Last Trans-Stellar War. Beside him sat his opposite number, counsel for the prosecution, in the person of the Station's dapper Administrative Adjutant, Jules Monterey. The titles they bore for the occasion dated from a time when the government was divided into many separate departments -- like judiciary, administration, police, army or the Bar. But by the end of the #st century, government was government and no longer a species of public debate or carnival tug-of-war, and any government officer could take any role. The two counsels' jobs were roughly to list the points on two opposing sides, and Mark's was to pronounce judgment. But all government is of course implicit in each individual. Next time they would probably trade jobs. Beyond the court itself ranged the tiered compartments reserved for spectators. Each compartment was adapted to the physique of one of the # trans-stellar races living on the Station, with the front row reserved for Earthmen and Martians, whose solar system the Station happened to be in. Most of the compartments had someone inside. It looked to Mark as if an average number of every race had come to see the fun. You had to say "average" because the actual number of individuals of any race which constituted a quorum varied so much. For instance there was a quart of Aids on his desk: that would be around # individuals. There were around # Loon-birds sparsely roosting in their three-dimensional knitting safely (of course) behind glass. There were three Earthmen in the court, all in official capacities. There was one Leprechaun with his eye extruded. And, luckily, there was no PhoenixStation. There is only one Phoenixcloud known, but that one can be dangerous enough to a lonely Transit Station. It is the job of a Station to offer shelter and to offer sustenance -- but not if the first bite is the Station itself. "Thanks be for small mercies, anyway,' thought Mark. Aloud he said, "We'll begin." O n the recording strip sunk into the desk at the right of his chair he saw the words "The Court sits" appear. This was also the work of the Aids, who activated the official court record. The difference between languages and the difference between two styles in one language were both the same difference to them. So far as they knew it was all translation. So whatever one said in court ki English was minced up by their infallible brain-circuitry and emerged on the record in the sort of legal jargon with which lawyers have baffled laymen since the invention of justice. All round the court bodies relaxed in the way appropriate to their physique. "What gives in this case?" said Mark. "Set forth the Plaint," said the record. Gil Mulrooney got up slowly. "That's not hard," he said. "I was on Station watch this sim-morning. At sim-# I got a call from the automatic monitor on #th level, at the intersection of the Fomalhaut avenue and #th Freeway, a call of 'believed disturbance'. I immediately went down by chute in person." "Leaving the watch monitor active in the guardroom," Mark put in. "Of course," said Gil. "Activating the watch monitor." This would look right in the record. It wasn't that Mark doubted that Gil had taken this simple precaution, just that he might have forgotten to say so. It was Mark's job to keep the record straight and, more than that, to keep the colonel sweet. "Go on," said Mark. "The corridor monitor was quite correct. There was considerable disturbance coming from cell # on the Fomalhaut avenue, the cell assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Daap-daap. I could hear great clouts against the partition wall and a squealing that could be heard four blocks away. I thought at least a band of loon-birds had got loose in there." Mark shuddered at the picture. "Sounds bad. What did you do then?" "I activated the calling circuits and I was let in." "Immediately? You made me IF think all Hell was let loose in there." 'Well, it calmed down the moment I keyed the calling circuit. Almost as if they'd been waiting for me. "That doesn't sound very likely," said Mark, "if the noise was as bad as you say." "The noise was very bad," said Mulrooney grimacing "One wouldn't be mistaken about a noise like that." "Well, it was a sleep-period," said Monterey from the other counsel's box. "I don't see the relevance," said Mulrooney slowly. "The Fomalhauts don't sleep. You know that." "I do," said Monterey, conscientiously needling his opposite number as a good Counsel should. "But Earthmen do sleep. I call the judge's attention to that." "You're claiming I dreamt it then," shouted Mulrooney furiously. "You were probably as bleary as a gigolo on Sunday morning," answered Monterey. T he record paused for a few seconds, then produced this impartial translation. "I submit that Lieutenant Mulrooney was suffering from disorientation of the realitysense brought on by cultural shock, the cultural shock being due in this case to his foregoing a fundamental Earth custom, namely that of undergoing a period of unconsciousness between sim-#I and sim-#." "Nonsense," said Mark hurriedly. "Gil's a policeman, for God's sake." The Aids printed: "Objection formally noted. The judgment of this court in this is that, firstly, the Earth race is exceptionally immune to cultural shock, and, secondly, vigilance during the sleep-period is an old and honored custom of the Earth police subculture and would thus be entirely natural to Lieutenant Mulrooney." It looked damn good. "This is all off the point," said Mark. "Whatever interpretation we may put upon it, the court accepts that the Fomalhauts in question stopped quarreling and let you in. Then what?" "On gaining entrance I found the defendant, Fomalhaut-male Daapdaap, holding in one tentacle a carved Fomalhaut food-pipe some # cms long (Exhibit A), and the codefendant Fomalhaut-female Mrs. Daap-daap -- " "Oh, for God's sake!" said Mark, interrupting. "(Strike that from the Record.) I thought this was a wifebeating case. Tell me whose wife was beaten, and if Mrs. Daap-daap was the victim, why does she appear as co-defendant? Or isn't that Fomalhaut-female down there Mrs. Daapdaap?" "Well, Mrs. Daap-daap did get beaten," said Gil. "And she appears as co-defendant at her own request. And that is her in the dock. To tell the truth, this case is a daddy-o." "Certain features of this case render it unusually complex," typed the Record. "Yes, but is anybody going to explain it to me?" said Mark. "Honestly, I'd rather you thrash it out with the defendants themselves. This court's already too full of mouthpieces." And Mulrooney favored the tank of Aids with a mournful Bronx cheer, which they forebore, as near as Mark could see, to translate. "I talked with both Daap-daaps, of course, and the facts are clear enough, but I haven't the faintest idea what their plea is." "I'll confirm that. Judge," said Monterey. "Will you take over?" "Right," said Mark. "Don't go to sleep, though." Mulrooney glared at him, but the tactful Aids cut out the sleep metaphor and confined their Record to, "Maintain, however, general surveillance, Counsels." Mark signed to the two Fomalhauts to hook themselves to the direct Interpreter's Link. He addressed Mrs. Daap-daap. "I see that your front wheel is gravely contused, to the extent that you are resting it on a surgical trolley. Is that the result of a fight this sim-morning?" "Yes, sir," came the reply. "Witness?" said Mark. "Deposition of doctor," said the Aids, acting as his remembrancer. "Exhibit B." They were right as usual. Mark found the document in one of the slits under the Record. Its signer was an Asclepiad, amid-qravity race with a speciality in biophysics, who had been the Galaxy's doctors long before Man dame on the scene. It certified that when he attended Mrs. Daap-daap at # that morning she had been suffering from widespread surface contusions, and from a fractured bearing-joint in her front ankle -- all caused within # simhours of the treatment time. Mark addressed Mr. Daap-daap. "Did you do this to your wife?" he asked. "I did," he answered. He evidently did not want to hide it, for the Aids on the Record had added "(Relaxedly; without hesitation)". "Well, that's frank. And why did you hit her?" "Because I did wrong." "And why should you hit her when you do wrong?" "Because it is the duty of wives to suffer punishment for wiat their husbands do wrong." "I see. But why is she too in the dock?" "Because it is the duty of wives to suffer punishment for what their husbands do wrong." To the Aids, Mark said, "Come on. You're a question behind. I'm asking now why Mrs. Daap-daap is in the dock." "Unquote," said the Aids to show they were talking in their, or its, proper person. "The defendant's answer was as it appears in the Record." "But that can't be the answer to both questions!" Mark protested. "Unquote is that a statement or a question? To the defendants or to the interpreter?" "Well, don't let's waste breath," said Mark, knowing that the Aids enjoyed a good idiom. "If you know the answer, you tell." "Unquote I know why the defendant's wife is in the dock. You will remember that the reason is in the Fomalhaut Ethology Handbook paragraph #." (The Aids, being the only purely intellectual life form in the universe, could never conceive IF the difference between a memory and a reference book. They meant Mark could look the information up in the Fomalhaut Ethology. The advantage of their ignorance was that the colonel would never know that Mark hadn't remembered the information for himself, because the paragraph number would merely appear in the Aids' record as a reference.) M ark flipped over the pages of the Ethology. Para # was in Part II ("Social Behavior"), Chapter # ("Justice"), item #a ("Punishment"). It said: "Punishment for wrong-doing is customarily inflicted on the females -- wife, or, if unavailable, mother, or, if unavailable, female guardian. The accepted forms of punishment are physical chastisement or deprival of nutriment (see paras #-#) -- both these can be inflicted by Earth officials -- and deprival of Joy see (para #) -- which cannot." "Joy" was obviously pretty basic, judging by its, paragraph number, but this wasn't the time for looking it up. "I've got that sewn up, Aids," said Mark, laying the idioms on thick to gain time. "I'm right in there with you regarding why Daap-daap's little girl is in the dock. Now you give with the info why he was hitting her this sim-morning." "Roger," said the Aids, never at a loss how to beat interlocutors at their own game. "Can do, skipper. He was beating her then 'cos he just dun wrong. You will remember the same para." "I see that," said Mark. "That explains why he was beating her, and the note on methods of punishment explains why he was beating her,-but I still don't know why he was beating her." There was a pause, and then the Aids produced another line on the Record. It said: "Defendant: Because I had done wrong according to Earth code. My wife must suffer punishment for that." "I see," said Mark. Daap-daap was of course technically quite right. Transit Station J had its legal existence under an archaic type of agreement known as a "lease". This mean basically that under a reciprocal benefit agreement drawn up according to the law of Jupiter (in whose orbit the Station hung) the Earth Government controlled the area covered by the Station's orbit. The agreement specifically added that unless # sim-months (a Jupiter time-span) notice were given to the contrary. Earth law should be observed by all organic matter aboard. So much was true enough. But there were some Earth laws which some organic matter simply had to break, particularly (he glanced wryly at the # or so Loon-birds -- by God, there were now about a thousand of them -- swarming in the Spectators' area) the organic matter aboard his Station. And in their setup an individual could make trouble quicker by citing the letter of the law than any other way short of opening both doors of the airlock simultaneously. With something like anxiety in the corner of his mind, he said, "And what Earth law did you break?" "A law concerning Grievous Bodily Harm and Assault. I was beating my wife." "You acted quite rightly. That sort of thing could land you up in the courts," said Mark judiciously. "It has landed me up in court," said Daap-daap -- "(sternly)", according to the Record. "And my wife has already paid the penalty." F or a couple of heartbeats Mark spun dizzily in the no-space of the Fomalhauts' moral metaphysics. Then he was back in command. "This is the situation, then," he said ("sternly") No organic matter, wheeled or otherwise, in the Station would fool him. "You admit to beating your wife, and recognize that this is illegal under Earth law. Your defense against the charge of Assault is Justification within Racial Mores, and within your code of mores the justification is that your act of Assault was a legitimate punishment for a wrong which you had committed, or, at least, for an act which was illegal according to the laws of your domicile place; that wrong being that same act of Assault. The situation so far is simple." (He would show them who was master.) "However, your explanation is unsatisfactory in this particular, that under Earth law punishment may not be inflicted before the crime is committed. Therefore the same act cannot be both crime and punishment." "We deny that punishment was inflicted before the crime was committed. Nor was it inflicted afterwards. It was simultaneous." "Oh. I see." "Is our reasoning satisfactory? Did we do right in doing what we did? Will you acquit us?" "The court will adjourn for sim#-minutes to consider judgment." The human beings in .the Court stood up. The Fomalhauts formed themselves into the Obeisance Pattern and the Loon-birds -- there were now thousands of them in their sealed cubicle -- rose in . a humming cloud. Mark stepped swiftly round the back of his Tribunal and closed behind him the door of the small robing-room. He found his hands shaking as he sat at the bare desk in the small robing-room, and hje suddenly realized that the trial had started a whole row of alarm bells shrieking in his mind. Analyzing what those alarm bells were, he came first and inevitably to the thought of the colonel. Everyone in the Station knew from experience what the colonel's repayment for a clumsy judgment could be -- something nasty, like a tour of the exit vents of the air system, or a patrol in the high-grav sector. But the colonel, though savage, was fair. Mark was pretty sure he had done as well so far as could be expected. Anyway, there wasn't a moment of the sim-day when he wasn't scared of Banerji. The next thought he came to was "put-up job". The story of how they IF had stopped fighting the moment Mulrooney called them was suspicious enough. And then there was no denying that they had him pretty well tied up. He could acquit them by accepting a plea of justification. But if Daap-daap was to be excused for hitting his wife, then he had done no wrong -- and justification no longer applied. For how could he justifiably be hitting his wife if he had nothing for which to punish her? You get in the same mess, only the other way round, Mark thought, if you find them guilty. He was familiar with such paradoxes on paper, but he was very unhappy indeed to meet one in the flesh. His last thought, the worst of all, was, "This isn't just a Fomalhaut family quarrel. The whole Station's in on this." The spectators' benches had been trial. Reviewing in his mind's eye the patchwork of color which had been his view from the Tribunal, he came to the conclusion that every race in the mid-grav sector had sent at least one representative. For that matter, all the Loon-birds in the Station were in there -- the Loonbirds, the emo,tional carrion-eaters of the universe who congregated wherever there was trouble, the Loon-birds whom the Earth government employed as military personnel only. It was a bad omen when Loon-birds gathered. But one corner of his mental view-screen was blank. Which race might have been there but wasn't? Of course. He knew which: the Murrays. A few of them often came to court, particularly to hear a family quarrel. None had come today. If he could locate the blind spot in the Murrays' psychology which had kept them away today, he would have an insight into the real nature of today's case, and into what it meant to the inhabitants of the Station. For they had mostly known each other long before they had known Man, and they hadn't gotten the habit of confiding in Man. H e called up the Aids (who have no hates or loves, no prejudices or dislikes -- just intellect). "What's with the Murrays?" "You will remember the Murray Ethology para #. They are the only known life-form parasitic on an object smaller than themselves." "No. Try again." "You will remember page xiv of the Introduction. They were discovered by Arthur Murray, later one of the victims of the sensational Heatdeath Murders." "No, no. Something to do with this case." "How will you not remember paras #-#? Surely those pages of your memory are not missing? They deal with the control of Murray behavior. Murrays cannot be taught to do anything except those actions specified in the Ethology, nor can they be prevented in any way from doing those actions if the appropriate signal has been given. Thus their behavior fails completely to be plastic, and thus they have not the conception of wrong, guilt, punishment or law." All trials deal implicitly with wrong, guilt, punishment and law, and the fact that the Murrays had stayed away showed that these were not just implicit in this case but explicit. No point of conduct was on trial; the system itself was on trial. This was a testcase to decide if Earth law should continue to hold on the Station. It was as if one were to feed a certain problem into a computer, not to get an answer but to test the computer. Only this problem, he was pretty sure, included a proposition which damaged the computer itself. In the ordinary course of things, if a trial starts going sour you consult the law further until gradually the tangle comes clear. But in this case the very statement of the charge and the defense tampered with the structure of the law itself. Any further recourse to the same machine could only sent it into a positive feedback, which at each cycle would take it further into absurdity. There was, of course, Mark reflected, one further technique he could use if native wit could not sort out the Fomalhauts' disingenous pleas. He could go above the law, to the mechanism designed for dealing with treason, to that body of brutal fact known as "martial law." But was he a' Banerji, who would force a decision by merciless insistence instead of trying reasonable discussion? All the same he called the Aids, and together they refreshed his memory on the use of extralegal coercion in settling disputes. And he began to run over in his mind, not the Perry Mason series but the equally old and famous Mickey Spillane adventures. When the hour was up Mark took his place with as much calmness as he could. "Trial resumes," he said. The audience settled back into their seats, perches, hovering-heights or floating-depths. "Have the principals anything further to say before judgment be delivered?" "We wish the charge set aside," said the Fomalhauts. "We have been mistaken on a point of law and a point of ethics." Mark heaved a secret sigh. "We are glad that you should agree," he answered in a satisfactorily judicious tone. "What is the cause of your change of mind?" "We have a custonl, one custom only, that corresponds to your 'law. It is this: 'To each and from each according as he is. This is the whole of our law. For instance, it is right for a Fomalhaut being to obey Fomalhaut custom; for an Earth being to obey Earth custom. Thus for us there exist many versions of 'right. There is Earth 'right', there is Fomalhaut 'right', there is Aldeberan 'right' and so on." Mark nodded happily. "Now, it is Fomalhaut-right for a Fomalhaut to obey Fomalhaut custom. It is Fomalhaut-right for an Earth man to obey Earth custom. But here we are troubled. For it is no part ot Fomalhaut-right to determine the right of Earth according to Fomalhaut thinking. Thus in no way may we who are Fomalhauts either approve or disapprove the workings of an Earth court. All talk If of justice here is meaningless. We will withdraw now." Then the truth was on the table. Not only was the problem one to break the machine, but it said right there in the packet, "This problem breaks the machine." He felt a prickle of apprehension run down his spine, for he observed the Fomalhauts in the dock and in the spectators' benches melting and weaving into the hollow square of Active Hostility. CiVait a minute before you go," he said, smiling. Heck, he thought, this is insane. Surely if he could only think on his feet long enough he could solve this whole absurd problem. If this sordid family bickering was the revolt flag of half a universe, then this was a universe populated solely by dumb blonde mothers-in-law and vicars in the wood. He started talking. "Can we be sure there is a case to answer here? I mean, beating one's wife is one of the few honest and innocent pleasures in this over-civilized universe, and I imagine beating one's husband is too. And if this pastime may not be innocently indulged in, what do we all go through marriage for?" Surprisingly, the Aids said in his ear, "Is that a joke?" "I suppose it is." "A moment, please. Jokes take a little longer." Mark paused. He had taught the Station Aids to have a sense of humor because he liked to have someone around to construct new stories for him to tell -- bizarre as the Aids' jokes usually were. And he had been most gratified to discover from them -- probably the first Earth man to do so- that most of the trans-stellars had an analogue of a sense of humor too. So presumably the Aids meant to amuse the whole Station with his feeble quip. They might welf have a tough time, for the races which composed the audience had no fixed sexual organization which would make such a joke comprehensible. There were examples in front of him of gyniphagy (wife-eating) and of metazygy with stomach sharing (sexual union of Siamese twins) and of endosomatogamy (where an indi- vidual chooses his mate not merely from within his own tribe but from among the cells of his own body) and many others. There was a silence. Then apparently the Aids said something to the Asclepiad group, and they answered. Then the Aids spoke simultaneously to every group in the room. With a lift of the heart Mark realized that his job was done. Like the wind over a plain of grass a change ran over the room. The Loon-birds empurpled, whistled with disappointment and zipped out through their ventilator. The Woodweevils swallowed each other up until they had re-assembled their single persona. The Leprechaun opened its eye, drew its ear down into it, closed the eye on the ear and shut them both in its mouth. All round the room it was the same. Everyone reckoned the case was happily resolved. Even the original culprits, or plaintiffs, (whichever they were) the Fomalhauts, who before had sulked over the wrong they had suffered or been detected in inflicting (whichever it was), relaxed their hollow square into the interlocking circle of Quiet Pleasure. A soft answer turneth indeed away wrath, thought Mark. Aloud he said: "Okay, that's it." The Record printed: "Court adjourns sine die." Mark sat watching the assembled creatures leave in their own way. When they were gone he said confidentially to the Aids, "How did you do it?" "It was nothing," answered the Aids. "I made to each group the same basic suggestion, that, if performed with a life-partner (and I use the word in a punning sense, indicating thereby both cohabitors and commensals), actions which normally produce aversive stimuli actually produce reinforcing ones. And, with the permission of the Asclepiads, I cited certain contusions and abrasions for which they had to treat Miss Marylou." Mark was appalled. After a moment he asked, "And that wouldn't be a joke if something about someone and Miss Marylou wasn't supposed to be a secret?" "No, sir." "You know, you'll end on the gallows." "Yes, sir." "A joke's hardly a joke if it's a joke on you, is it?" "We wouldn't care to answer that, sir." "Good morning to you, then. Thank you for your help." B ack in his quarters, Mark changed his shirt and reflected grimly that the whole trial, including the Aids' version of a joke, would be on the Record, and the Record would very likely be at this moment in the colonel's hands. The now menacing tones of Earth Is Where My Heart Is interrupted his gloomy musings. Marylou appeared on the telephone. "Get your tie straight!" she shouted without preamble: "You're to see the colonel." "Oh, boy. Heap big trouble. This paleface is up the totem for sure this time." "This is no time for joking," she shouted agonizedly. "This is real trouble. He wants to see you in personV She knew what she was talking about. The last time the colonel had met anyone officially in person was at the trial of an Earth man for murder -- at his execution. "Man, I'm gone!" shouted Mark, and ran down the corridor towards the colonel's office, buttoning his cuffs as he went. He knocked once and heard the colonel's "Come in" before he dropped his hand. Inside the colonel sat at his desk, hard, strong, young-looking and ruthlessly efficient as he had often appeared on the telephone. His smooth coppery face was set as usual in an unrelenting expression of contemptuous dislike. "Sit down, Mark. I won't hurt you," he said surprisingly. Mark did so. "Look, Mark, this is my last command. I shaU never make the IF little hop back to Earth and to my own country, let alone see other countries on other stars as you will. Why? Because I'm old. Not in appearance, perhaps. But inside each cell totes up its own time-reckoning and there's nothing we can do to put the clock back. If you want to know the truth, this body's # years old. But I'm skillful at my job, and my job is to command you. And part of my skill is in knowing how to look when I command. You rarely see me. You know that. But do you know that when I telephone you, the words are mine but the speaker is an electronic face-voice simulacrum cooked up by Marylou? And when I have to appear in person I spend half a day down in the Asclepiads' stinking surgery, where the walls are lined with the pickled limbs of half the creatures of the galaxy and where the death-tubes are loaded with the day's quota? For in the morning I wake an old man, and noone may see me until my physician has remade me as the beautiful and terrible Indian prince. I'll show you something." Banerji leant forward and slowly unbuttoned his creaseless tunic. Inside Mark saw with a sudden sick horror that it was thickly and artfully padded. Underneath, his chest was the chest of an old man. Sharp edges of bone seemed ready to pierce the dry, wrinkled skin, and below his immaculate neckline the surface of his body was an ugly patchwork of brown and purple and fungoid white. "Now you know," said Banerji in his uncannily youthful voice. "And now I think you will understand that this Station is maintained and kept in order not by any mass of rules in a rulebook but by personal command. And that command is exercised by me. By my commanding words and by my commanding body. I am telling you this so that you will understand what you did today. You exercised command as I would do. Not perhaps in the way I would have done, but choosing your own method, imposing order on disorder, bringing submission out of revolt." "Why do you tell me this, sir?" asked Mark. "Because soon I shall go to my fathers, and you will go to take up a command of your own. And for that reason you must learn everything I have to teach." M ark was honestly proud that the colonel should thus treat him as an equal, but secretly he protested that he would never have to act the slave-driver in front of his own crew. "You are smiling now," said Banerji, "because you know that you will never have to use the proud airs and sordid subterfuges that I use. But I leave you with one thought. Your genius for command comes out in an admirably frank comradeliness, in a charming and self-deprecating gift of humor. It is the gift of your American heritage. But if as time goes on and your responsibility for the Government of your fellow beings becomes ever wider and greater, sometimes, in the privacy of your quarters, you need to practice and rehearse your charmingly spontaneous good humor -- then do not be ashamed." They sat for many moments in silence, and then the Indian said, "Back to your duties. Lieutenant. Constant and effortful vigilance." "Contsant and effortful vigilance, sir." Mark snapped and was gone. Back in his office he switched on the Aids. "Aids," he said in a phoney Australian accent. "You tell black-fellow Fomalhaut that white man savvy good-good make black fellow and black fellow woman chumchum." After a pause the adaptable Aids whined back, "Fair dinkum, cobber." "Cheerioh, old matey," said Mark, and switched to Marylou's channel. "Hiya handsome," he breathed intimately. "How about I take you over to the Mess and we stop all this Deprival of Joy?" Her face lit up. "Sure thing. Marco-boy. As soon as you like." "Five sim-minutes, then," he said and grinned boyishly at her. As she faded he buried his face in his hands. When you took up government, he thought, you take up a load as massy as the galaxy itself. He felt a thousand years old. But if that crazy old wreck Banerji can take it, so can Mark H assail! He got up, loosened his tie, tousled his hair and set out whistling m  i I A great new novel by one of your old favorites! Complete Science Fiction Novel of tomorrow's strange humans Plus Murray Leinster -- Cordwainer Smith -- and all your favorite writers October Galaxy still on sale at your favorite newsstand. Ask for your copy today! i I i I I IF IF  Feature # #T et us," says the feller, "eatL' up the street." "Oh no," says his girl friend, "I don't like asphalt." Which only goes to show how bubble-headed some guys girl-friends can get, for few substances known to man have proved so useful for so long. If today the number of uses for asphalt is pushing its second hundred thousand, it's only the result of an early start and straight A's ever since! There seems little doubt that the substance which forms the expansion joints between the concrete slabs of a superhighway is the same gunk used to coat the basket in which Moses was found amongst the bulrushes. The interlining of that paper bag you brought your ice cream home in yesterday is impregnated with much the same glop which waterproofed the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. "# sars of bitumen I poured over its outside; # sars I poured over its interior," says the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, quoting one Noah, noted local ark-builder. "Bitumen" once was, and in some places still is, a synonym for "asphalt." The Romans used the former as a generic term for all natural hydrocarbons, for although "petroleum" -- literally "rock oil" -- is a perfectly sound term, it was not used in classical Latin. Up until' fifty years ago these hydrocarbons were, commercially, divided into three main groups -- natural gas, the liquid petroleum, and asphalt: gas, liquid, solid, all neat and convenient The name "asphalt" or "asphaltum" comes from the Greek: actually it was called pissasphaltum, the derivation being the same, no kidding, as the word "pitch." Ancient references to these substances are plentiful and fascinating, especially since the stuff has worldwide distribution, though of course uneven. Not only is it found almost everywhere, it occurs throughout the whole range of geological strata, from the really old Laurentian rocks to the most recent Quarternary layers. Hence you can match a Bob Hope wisecrack about the La Brea Tar Pits with Diodorus's account of the Dead Sea asphalt industry, which collected the material for shipment to Egypt, where it was Used to preserve the dead. As a matter of fact, the Egyptian word "mummy" comes from the ancient Persian word "mummai" which means nothing else in the world but -- asphalt. I n the King James Bible you'll find, in the account of the construction of the Tower of Babel (Genesis ix, #) that "slime had they for mortar," and further on xiv, #) that the vale of Siddim "was full of slimepits." The Tower, as a boondoggle, had a bad enough reputation without this kind of slur on the contractors; so let's look at the Vulgate Bible, where, sure enough, we find the word translated "bitumen" instead of "slime" and "slime-pits." These pits figure elsewhere in Genesis. It seems there were four kings of the Babylonian region who had themselves a war with the five kings of the Low Plain of Siddim. As Genesis xiv puts it: "Now the Low Plain of Siddim was pits upon pits of bitumen; and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah took to flight and went falling into them, and those who remained fled into the mountainous region." And the GFs used to complain about mud! Anyway, there was so much bitumen around the Dead Sea, especially the southern tip, that the Romans used to call the Sea "Lake Asphaltitis." There are "lakes" of asphalt which are by no means mere figures of speech. The most celebrated of these is the one on the island of Trinidad. My oldest reference, which goes back sixty years, describes it as a hair over # acres, firm enough in most places to support a team of horses, though softer in the center. A "tramway", or mine railroad, was laid on palm leaves, and the asphalt was dug with pick and shovel, down to about two feet. In a day or so the excavated area would fill up again with soft material which hardened as it contacted the air. At that time they were pulling # tons annually, and the owners were paying the government a royalty of # a year. My most recent reference gives the area as # acres and says it has increased # acres in the past half-century; you can take your choice of the figures, but they're a quibble compared to the monstrous amounts that have come out of that sticky hole in the ground. The oldest estimate I can find for the amount ot asphalt in the lake is figured on # tons per foot of depth. But nobody knows how deep it is. A guess of # feet (average) would mean a reserve of # tons, which was the # estimate. Since tons and they're still calling it # acres. Some say it's # feet deep. Some say it's bottomless. IF There's a wonderfully consistent vagueness throughout the whole subject. Asphalt, like political convictions or science fiction, being a mixture not a compound, has a wide array of physical (non) constants, like specific gravity, melting point and solubility. Nobody seems to know just how it's formed, for the best guess -- that it's what's left of a petroleum deposit after the more volatile elements have evaporated -- really explains very little about what happens underground during the process, nor why, nor how come it has happened in so many places and times. The requirements would seem to be a very special combination of heat, gases, petroleum and mud, and some long-term churning. The result, quantitatively, for a representative sample, is about # per cent water; # per cent volatile bitumen; # per cent sulphur; ash, earth and such garbage, # per cent; and fixed carbon, # per cent. Chemically it's about # per cent carbon, # per cent hydrogen, # per cent nitrogen, # oxygen, and the rest, around # per cent sulphur. Some of the sulphur together with some of the oxygen and the asphalt, especially in the softer parts (like the gooshy pool in the center of the lake, which is locally called "mother of the lake") gives off considerable quantities of sulphur dioxide, a fragrance of rotten eggs. It keeps this up for some time after it's dug. A sphalt is now pumped, tanked and piped, for it can flow quite readily at around # degrees. Long cooking of a mash like this, however, can have frightening results, as for example the recent explosion of an asphalt tanker on a routine Gulf coast run. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but whatever it was, it happened swiftly and with great enthusiasm. Nothing was ever found of the ship or its crew but a few empty lifebelts and some scorched boards. Most asphalt, of course -- close to # per cent -- is used in road making. It's the tar in tarmac (the mac in macadam, a crushed-stone mix) and the black in blacktop. The rest goes into hundreds of thousands of other products and processes. As a component in concretes of various kinds, it makes wonderful shockproof foundations for hydraulic hammers, turret-lathes and such muscular machinery. It waterproofs swimming pools and roofing felt, makes rustpreventive paints and lacquers, floors, walks and trouble. (My brother and I, before we had two digits to our ages, discovered roofing tar as a substitute for bubble gum. We sat for hours in the hot sun, just chewing. It was the tarred roof we sat on. After our pants were pried off, we were sent to bed. My brother still had his cud. During the night it fell out of his face and welded his hair to the sheet. He couldn't get undraped until they shaved him bald as a bullet. ) Tile-makers couldn't get along without asphalt, nor automobile manufacturers, nor tree-surgeons. Nor could you. His past had been destroyed. He had no future. Yet he bore, buried within himself, the seeds of Man's only hope! W#tS ! #i The Characters but he could not remember his crime, though the iron collar he wore around his neck reminded him of it night and day. Chosen by charge of a special research project, Ryeland found himself giving orders to generals, colonels, celebrated scientists-who resented it, and showed their resentment in a thousand ways. It was a puzzling situation. Even more puzzling was the project itself, which was simply to develop "a jetless drive -- a new spacepropulsion system which would allow the forces of the Plan of Man to expand into the half-mythical bodies that circled the Sun far beyond Pluto. It seemed impossible. And yet -- there was the spaceling, the queer creature from the distant Reefs of Space that itself seemed to have such a drive. Ryeland was given the captive spaceling to experiment on, though it was the property of pestuous woman, who would surely find revenge if he harmed the creature that was her pet. It was a difficult life, and it led to catastrophe... for Ryeland's rebellious subordinates founcf a way to discredit him with the Machine, and he was ordered off the jetless-drive project and thrown into the Body Bank, that scrapheap for waste dtizens and criminals too far gone for salvage, where their sole remaining task was to give up the orgons of their bodies to repair more useful men and women. It was the end of the tine, there was no doubt of it. Yet fate held a still more shattering blow. In the Body Bank Ryeland met again what his crime had been and why he could not remember it. To hir horror, she did. Ryeland learned why so much of his memory war shodowy ond cenfvsed... for he was not a notural man! He was a 'junk mon'- -- created out of costoff parts .and bits of tissue, nothing but a dummy that some more fortunate vidini of the Body Bank had contrived as a screen to cover his escape! Desperate, Ryeland tried to flee the Body Bank -- but he was caught and hurried to the Administration Building where someone waited to see him. He did not know who; he did not know why. But surely it could not matter any more. Nothing worse could happen -- he had nothing left, not even a body of his owni IF T 'hey rushed him through the corridors, into a room, left him there for a moment; they threw a pair of coveralls at him, gave him barely time to squirm into them and paid no attention to the fact that they were four sizes too small. "It doesn't matter where you're going," rumbled the guard with the white tunic and the red heart. "Come on!" And they led him to another room and once again left him. Through an open door Ryeland saw an operating theater. Thank heaven for meprobomate, he thought without emotion, for this was undoubtedly the end of the trail. The asepsis lights were burning over the twin tables; a full Q. R. crew was in view behind the transparent contamination-bar. On one table was a man of Ryeland's approximate build, with a great sighing bellows box pumping air through a complicated nest of piping. A lung machine? Yes. And the man, Ryeland knew, was about to get new lungs. And the lungs would have to cOme, of course, from Ryeland... Or would they? Ryeland was baffled. For both tables were occupied, the one with a cadaver from Heaven as well as the one with a useful citizen come to collect a new part. It was very queer. But it only meant, probably, he assured himself, that he would be the donor for the next useful part. It was not kind of them to make him witness the operation, of course. But the Plan of Man was only impersonally kind. He glanced at the scene, looked away, then watched with helpless fascination. Faintly he could hear the brisk, businesslike orders of the surgeon, slitting skin, slicing through muscle, sculpting bone... The operation was nearly over when he heard a sound behind him. He turned. Donna Creery walked in the door. Donna Creery! She looked at him as though he were furniture. "Took you long enough to get him," she said grumpily to the man behind her -- chief surgeon of the Clinic, by his bearing and his frown. "All right. I've got this -- " she waved a radar gun -- "so he won't give me any trouble. Will you, Ryeland?" The surgeon said doubtfully, "It's most irregular." "You've seen the Machine's order," purred Donna Creery, and waved a strip of factape. "Oh," said the surgeon hastily, "of course. Miss Creery. You know I wouldn't -- But it's most irregular, all the same." Donna nodded coldly and beckoned to Ryeland. "The Machine does not have to be regular," she said. "Now show us how to get to my rocket." T hey were out of the clinic beyond the wall, out to a landing pit. And there was Donna Creery's rocket speedster, squatting on its fins. The girl whispered: "Chiquita!" Ryeland said strongly, "Wait a minute, Miss Creery Where are you taking me?" She looked at him thoughtfully. "I have orders from the Machine," she said after a moment. "They direct me to take you to another Heaven, where you are needed for a rush repair job on an important member of the Planning staff." "That sounds peculiar," he protested. "Oh, very. Chiquita!" The girl stamped her foot and glared into the ship. There was a golden movement inside, then a faint blue luminous haze. The spaceling floated out. Its tawny eyes were fixed worshipfully on Donna Creery. It wriggled felinely in the air, curled, spun -- in pure joy, it seemed -- and halted, poised in the air, before her. Ryeland started to speak. "Shut up," whispered the girl. "There isn't time to argue. You've got to get out of here before they come to take you back." "Back? But why should they do that? The travel orders from the Machine -- " " -- are forged" She met his gaze calmly. "Yes. I forged them myself, so I should know So the surgeon will be looking for you, as soon as he gets around to filing a routine report of compliance with the Machine. And that will be -- what would you say? Five minutes?" "But I don't understand!" "You don't have to understand!" the girl blazed. "There isn't timel I'm trying to save your life. Also -- " she hesitated. "Truthfully there's another reason. My father needs you." "The Planner? But -- but -- why would he have to forge orders from the Machine?" "I can't tell you now." She stared around. No one was in sight. She said grimly, "Heaven help you if anything goes wrong. I can't take you in my rocket; there isn't room. Anyway, that's the first place they'll look. I don't think they'll bother me. But if you're there -- " She shrugged. "Then what am I supposed to do?" "Do?" she cried. "Why get on Chiquita's back! What do you think I brought her for? Just get on -- she knows where to take you!" R yland rode the spaceling; it was like mounting a running stream. A slim golden shape, more slender than a seal, floating in the air; gold, pure gold that blended into black at the tail, it was the strangest mount a man ever bestrode. Donna said a quick word of command. The spaceling purred faintly, rippled its lazy muscles and whoom. It was like a muffled slap of metal. Suddenly they had leaped a hundred feet into the air. There was no shock, no crushing blow of acceleration. There was just a quick vibrant lift, and they were high in the air. Through the thin coveralls that were his only garment Ryeland felt the purring vibration of the spaceling's body. Down below he saw the Planner's daughter already entering her rocket. She did not intend to wait for trouble. The jets flared. Ryeland heard the sound -- but it was receding, receding although the rocket had already begun to climb; they were climbing too, and fast, Ryeland was breathless. He clung to the spaceling. There was no pressure; only his arms held him to that bare, warm, smooth back. His stomach fluttered. His breathing caught. Down below he saw men moving, insects on the lawn and the walks. But they were not looking up, probably couldn't see him if they did; it was still night, and the hovering helicopters, with their floodlights were between him and the ground. They were n.?arly a thousand feet in the air now. Donna's rocket, a black dot in the center of its own petaled flame, seemed plastered against the concrete of the pit below. Only the fact that its size stayed constant showed that it was following them; then even it began to dwindle. Off to the northeast was a storm, the warning cirrus veil across the sky, the dark towering cumulonimbus, the rain squalls already marching across the dark mountains of Cuba. Jhe spaceling turned toward the storm. "Wait!" cried Ryeland. "Don't go into thatV But the spaceling didn't understand, or wouldn't. It purred warmly, like a fat kitten, and arrowed toward the menacing cloud with its violent gusts. And still Ryeland felt no motion. All his body was accelerated uniformly by the spaceling's field, whatever it was. The air came with them, the pocket which the spaceling wore like a halo, its blue shroud of faintly glowing light. Their flight was not quite noiseless, though nearly; the only sound was a faint distant tearing, though they were barreling through the sky at surely sonic speed. Incredible! Ryeland's mathematician's mind fitted pieces together; the spaceling, he thought, must form a capsule ' which instantly shapes itself to meet the resistance -- forming the perfect streamline shape for its needs, blunt teardrop at a hundred miles an hour, needle as it approached sound's speed, probably wasp-waisted area-rule profile at higher speeds. And still there was no sense of motion, though Heaven had dropped away behind them and was gone. N ow they were over water. All around them was cloud. They were hurtling into the furious wall of towering thunderstorms that was the forefront of a hurricane. Cold rain drenched him in an instant. That was curious, thought the objective, never-stilled part of his mind; rain penetrated the capsule where the rush of air did not! But there was no time to think of it. The rain was pelting icewater, unthe spaceling, too. Its satisfied purr changed to a complaining mew; it shook and shuddered. But it plunged on. Ryeland was hopelessly lost. The storm was the same in all directions, a dim void of fog and icy water, flickering with distant lightning. But the spaceling knew where it was going... he hoped. They drilled through the top of the clouds and came out above them into clear air. Underneath them the shape of the storm revealed itself in a great spiral, the hurricane wheeling around its open eye. A bright light burst on him. It was the sun, rising again on the western horizon -- they were that high! It was a blaze of incandescence in the dark; and still they climbed. A great elation possessed Ryeland. He had done the impossible! He had escaped, with all his limbs and faculties, from the hell they called Heaven! He was no longer a numbered carcass; he was a man again. And Donna Creery had done it, where he had failed; he owed her something. He wondered briefly what it was she had failed to tell him about her father; then dismissed it. That wonder was lost in the greater soaring wonder of free flight. The sky was black around them -- surely the air was thin now. And still they climbed, while the vast hazy floor of sea and cloud became visibly convex. And still they climbed; and the air was thin now. That was all wrong! Ryeland knew that much; the spaceling's field should hold the air. But the creature itsejf was gasning now, panting. Its purring and mewing had tujned into the choking cough of a tiger. They still climbed, but Ryeland could feel the creature falter. They were at a dangerous altitude. Suddenly he was breathless. His drenched body was chilled through, even in the white, bright glare of the naked sun. It was the spaceling's wounds that were endangering them now, Ryeland realized. Gottling's torture chamber had left its marks. The creature's symbiotes had been destroyed, or some of them had. Its fusorians that gave it power, its parasitic Reef animalcules that made it possible for a warm-blooded airbreather to live in space in the first place, their numbers had been greatly diminished. They were not all gone, for there was still some air. It filled his grasping lungs, kept his body fluids from boiling out, screened him at least a little from the cold and the even more deadly UV of the sun. There was some air... but was there enough? Ryeland laughed grimly, with almost the last of his breath. "That's what I'll find out," he panted, hoarsely... and passed out. He was not conscious of the moment when he blacked out; he only knew that he was going.   sheer vonder that he was alive. Donna Creery's perfect face bent over him, making the wonder all the greater. "I made it," he whispered incredulously. The girl said seriously, "Yes, so far. But don't crowd your luck, Ryeland. We're still in trouble." He stirred to get up -- and floated free, until the girl's restraining hand pushed him back against the metal acceleration couch. They were in a spaceship, apparently in IF free-fall. He looked around. Automatically he said, "I've got to find a -- " He stopped. He had been about to ask where the teletype was, so that he could check in with the Machine. But that was no longer necessary, of course. Donna Creery gestured at the cabin of the spaceship. "You like it, Steven? It's yours." He was startled. "Mine?" "Oh, yes. Do you remember the ship that General Fleemer equipped for you, with remote controls from Point Triangle Gray? This is it -- with some changes. I've removed the remote controls. But it was a perfectly good interplanetary rocket, right in orbit where Chiquita could bring you to it. Only -- " she looked worried. "Only I'm surprised that Father isn't here." Ryeland shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't understand. Why does the Planner want me here?" She said, "He ought to tell you himself, but perhaps I can. Did you know, Steven, that in the past two months there have been over a hundred major seismic shocks? And they always seem to strike centers of population. My father thinks -- well, it doesn't sound right when I say it. He thinks the Machine is doing it." "The Machine!" "I know, Steven. But Father is worried. He has discovered that General Fleemer and others have been tampering with the Machine! Father is a good man, Steven, and he says he does not understand this. But I do. Fleemer wants to control the Machine -- because he wants to control the Plan of Man -- and destroying the project for discovery of a jetless drive is only one step in his plan. All those seismic shocks and accidents with subtrain tubes and fusion reactors and the new ion drives -- they're all part of it, too. Deliberate sabotage! "And, oh, Steven! How well it has worked! The Machine is only transistors and relays, you know; it knows nothing but what is fed into it. Fleemer has managed to corrupt its input circuits, and now the Machine is almost openly hostile to Father, and the whole crux of the matter right now is the jetless drive. The Machine has come to think that such a drive will destroy the Plan of Man. It has overruled Father's orders on it -- oh, a thousand times -- so that Father has to resort to subterfuge and tricks. He let me rescue you, as one of his moves. But I'm afraid it's too late." She moved away, peering worriedly at the viewports on the spaceship's panel. "They don't seem to be following Not yet, anyhow." Ryeland noticed he was shivering. It was not cold in the ship, but he had only the ill-fitting coveralls to wear and they were soaked through. "Who?" he demanded. "The Plan police," she said, surprised. "General Fleemer will be after Chiquita, even if they don't suspect you are with me. Though we can't count on that, of course; it wouldn't be unreasonable for the Machine to inform them that I had rescued you from Heaven He was going to kill Chiquita, you see, so I stole her." She frowned as Ryeland shook his head. "Why shouldn't I steal her?" the girl flared. "She was mine! And the only safe place for Chiquita is out in space -- out on the Reefs, if I can get her there. And, of course, that's the only safe place for you." Ryeland said angrily, "You're asking me to run away from the Machine! You want me to be an outlaw!" "Oh, Steven, what do you think you are? Have you forgotten Heaven already? I saved your life... You're lucky you got here," she said seriously, stroking the spaceling. "I wasn't at all sure Chiquita could make the jump from atmosphere." "Neither was I." She smiled, and for a moment she was the impish, confident girl who had interviewed him in her bath. But quickly her face clouded again. "I wish Father would come," she said. "Chiquita can't live forever without getting back to the Reefs to replenish her fusorians. And I -- well, I sent my own rocket back to Earth and crashed it where they'll find it. Perhaps they'll think we were both killed. But," she said calmly, "they would have to be stupid to be deceived very long, and the Machine is never stupid. It's -- I don't know -- unbalanced, now. But it is thorough. Father and I discussed it thoroughly; he knows the Machine well. He thinks we have about twelve hours." "Then what?" "Why, then the Machine will trigger your collar." IF I nvoluntarily Ryelands fingers came up to touch the dull metal that encircled his neck. The girl was right; that was what the machine would do. Twelve hours? He didn't know; but probably the Planner did. All right. Then in twelve hours they had to be out of range. "Can we get away from the Machine's radar beam in twelve hours?" he demanded. "I don't know, Steven. I think so. The Machine may not realize that you are in space." The girl restlessly prowled toward the viewports. "But Father isn't here. I don't know how long we can afford to wait. Once we get out to the Reefs, of course, there's nothing to worry about. You won't have your collar any more." He looked startled. She smiled. "Don't you remember, Steven? Ron Donderevo. The man who got his iron collar off; he's out there. I'm sure he can do the same with yours." Restlessly Ryeland touched his collar. "Please," he begged. "Tell me what you know about Donderevo"... about, he thought silently, the man this junk body of mine was built to replace. "You know everything there is to tell. Or almost," she said. "He was once a friend of my father -- in spite of all their differences over the future of the Plan of Man. It was Donderevo who first told my father something about the spacelings and the reefs, and convinced him that the Machine should try to develop a jetless drive. "Unfortunately, when the Plan took over his people, Donderevo engaged in disloyal activities. For that reason he was classified as a Risk and finally sent to the stockpile. The fact that Father communicated with him while he was in the stockpile, and finally connived at his escape, is one of the charges that Fleemer is using now in his effort to discredit Father with the Machine. "I think Donderevo might be able to help Father now, in this fight with Fleemer for control of the Machine and the future of the Plan. At least he could tell the Machine more about the reefs than it got from Lescure's reports -- after Fleemer had finished doctoring them. And that's where we must go, Steve -- to find Donderevo, out to the Reefs of Space!" Ryeland was suddenly afraid to tell Donna how desperately he wanted to see Ron Donderevo. Donderevo might help him remove the iron collar. Donderevo might help him clear up the fog of oblivion and contradiction in his past. But it was also possible that Donderevo would tell him that the collar could not be removed -- not without the elaborate surgical facilities available only at the stockpile. It was even possible that Donderevo would affirm what Angela had told him -- that he was a junk man, a meat machine patched together from a few bits of waste tissue, not worth saving from the collar. If that were true, he thought, he couldn't stand for Donna Creery ever to find it out. The Planner's daughter -- and a few pounds of salvaged human garbage. The gulf between them would be too wide for any warm emotion to cross. Donna Creery looked again at the viewports and sighed. 'T don't know why Father isn't here," she said, "but we dare not wait any longer. I'll send him a message and we'll go. Even the Machine's normal radar beam might reach out this far; we've got to get out of range." She smiled. "It isn't only for your sake, you know. If that collar were triggered in this little ship..." She pursed her lips gravely and shook her head. XV R yeland was deep in a dream of an armless, legless blonde with Oporto's grinning face coming at him with a sonic hacksaw. When the earth began to shake, his body vibrated like a harpstring... and he awoke. Donna Creery was leaning over him. Uncomfortably he stretched and rubbed his tingling hands and ankles. It took him several seconds to wake up. Not unusual; the sleep that spans interplanetary distances is not lightly thrown off. They had put themselves under for what was to have been a voyage of a hundred and fifty days. Were they at the end of it already? But Donna's face was worried, and there was a loud excited mewing from the ship's cargo lock. Ryeland groaned and tried to shake the aches out of his bones. Thank heaven they were in space, he thought. The mild thrust of Hohmann-minima orbits kept the endless contact of body-to-bed from producing the bed sores and bruises that would have been inevitable on Earth. "Steven!" the girl cried frantically. "Sorry," he mumbled, shook himself and woke up at last. "What's the matter?" "Chiquita's gone crazy!" He grunted and climbed up, peering into the cargo hold. The spaceling was flashing about the lock like a tom on the trail of a skulking mouse. She was mewing frantically. "Are we here?" "No, Steven! But Chiquita got so excited that she triggered the alarms and woke me up. We should be traveling for days yet!" "All right. Let's see what's bothering her." "But there's nothing to see. We're in deep space now, Steven. Far out beyond Pluto -- and yet surely not as far as the Reefs. There couldn't possibly be anything here that could bother her..." She stopped, listening. Both of them heard it at the same moment. It was an irritated hammering sound. They stared at each other. It came again, a muffled banging on their ship's hull. "Let's take a look," Ryeland said grimly. The viewports showed nothing, but on the outer door of the airlock was a small window, shielded against chance radiation. Ryeland slipped the catch and slid open the shields. A man stared in, with an expression of impatient annoyance. A man! Ryeland and the girl looked at IF each other and then at the face that peered in on them. It was quite impossible. But it was undeniably true. T he man did not even wear a spacesuit. He wore a ragged blanket, hammering on the valve of the airlock with the handle of a long knife. He was a lean little redbearded man, not young. Donna cried out suddenly. "Steven! I know him. His name is Quiveras. Why, he brought Chiquita to Earth -- to rescue Donderevo from the stockpile." She hesitated, then said abruptly: "Open the lock, Steven." "What?" "Open the lock, man!" "But the air -- " "Oh, there's no worry about that," she said impatiently. "Look!" She pointed behind the man's head where a smooth-lined shape rippled. Another spaceling! No wonder Chiquita had been so upset; undoubtedly she had sensed its presence, a creature like herself though larger and darker. "He's got his own air. The spaceling carried it. How do you suppose he lives? Open the lock!" Ryeland hesitated. Reason told him the girl was right; there could be no other explanation. Reason was certain; but his emotional conditioning against opening a door to the great exploding suck of space was too powerful to give in to mere reason without combat; it took a great deal of self-discipline for Ryeland to turn the valve key. But he did it. A metallic whine; a hiss of equalizing pressure. And the lock was open, and they were still breathing air -- queerly scented air, with a faint, hot, chemical bouquet, but not unpleasant. The little man hurried inside. He whistled sharply and his spaceling followed. It was a red-nosed, stub-winged seal, its nose" pulsing with red light. Its huge eyes peered around the chamber; it was whining shrilly with pleasure and excitement. "Wait!" cried the little man. The spaceling was frantic, but obedient; it paused in the lock while the man spun the closing valve. Then Quiveras said, "All right, Adam. Go meet your friend." The two spacelings flew at each other. Around and around the narrow cargo compartment they spun, mewing and purring in soprano-baritone counterpoint. Quiveras grinned. "Ah, the children! How happy to see each other they are!' He bowed and took off his rag of a hat. "And I, sir and madam. I am Quintano Quivaro Quiveras, your humble servant." He looked again at Donna Creery and smiled with real pleasure. "Ah, the Planner's daughter! It is good to see you! And you, sir; it is good to see you as well, though I do not as yet know your name." "Steve Ryeland." He put out his hand, and gravely they shook. Donna managed to say: "We're pleased to see you too, Mr. Quiveras. But -- " "But what is Quiveras doing here?" The man smiled and bowed again. "Ah, perhaps I may help. My Adam felt the presence of Chiquita here." He reached out and stroked the golden she-spaceling; the two of them hung poised, their flanks touching, just behind him. "So he wished to join you; and then, there is another reason." The smile left his face. "My Adam and I, we have been watching you for some time. Adam has excellent vision, apart from the way that spacelings have of knowing another spaceling is near even when vision is of no use. And Adam saw something. With his help, I saw it too." "What's that?" "Why," said Quiveras seriously, "perhaps you do not know it, but you are being followed by a heavy war rocket of the Plan of Man." I nvoluntarily Ryeland's fingers stole up to touch his collar. Donna Creery's face turned chalkwhite. Their signal to the Planner must have been intercepted; Fleemer knew where they were. The equations of military affairs in open space admit of only one solution: The faster vessel could always force battle on the slower. The logic of the radar-pulse that would trigger the collar on Ryeland's neck made it certain that the battle could be decided only one way. If they fled, the Plan cruiser would overtake them. If they stopped their jets, it would calculate course and position from the last recorded points with no chance whatsoever of error. The jets made a magnificent target, their light and heat a beacon escape would plot another blip on the Plan cruiser's thermal screens. And then the radar pulse would detonate the collar. Ry eland said harshly: "Can we fight? Are there any arms on the ship?" Quiveras's gnarled face took on an expression of surprise. "Fight against the Plan? Oh, no, my young friend. We do not fight them; that is their way. We follow our way. We merely run away." He nodded. "We Reefs, yes; it is a considerable journey. But at the end of the journey is freedom. Perhaps even -- " he followed Ryeland's stroking fingers on the collar with his eyes -- "freedom from that thing about your neck." "We have no lifeboat!" Quiveras pursed his lips. He pointed to the two spacelings, frolicking about. iRyeland said with quick comprehension: "The jetless drive! Of course. They can get us away from our rocket, and as they do not use thermal propulsion, the Plan ship won't be able to spot them. But -- the female is injured, Quiveras. She almost killed me before, in just a few minutes in space. Look." He indicated the ridged scars Colonel Gottling had left on her golden fur. "But she's had time to heal, Steven!" cried Donna Creery. "Don't forget we've been aspace for over four months!" Quiveras looked suddenly worried. Ignoring the girl, he dropped to one knee and crooned to the spaceling. Chiquita frolicked over and hung before him, purring faintly as he stroked the scars. At last Quiveras IF looked up, his gnarled face concerned. "These were bad wounds, Miss Creery. I did not think you would treat her like that." "It wasn't I!" Quiveras shook his head. Obstinately, he said, "They are bad. I do not know if she will ever altogether heal." Ryeland said stonily, "Are you telling us that we can't get away by spaceling, then?" "Oh, no!" The little man was upset. "I did not mean to frighten you. My Adam can hold enough air for us all, I promise. We must go quickly." "No," said Ryeland. The girl and Quiveras paused, staring at him. "Not like that," he said. "This rocket was equipped for me, to work out some of the problems of the jetless drive. I need that equipment -- for, if it is as important as you say, we must have it. The spacelings will have to tow it -- No," he said, not letting Quiveras object, "I know it will be difficult. But I must have it. And one other thing." Quiveras looked at him coldly, then at last smiled. "Very well. If and Chiquita can pull along whatever it is you want. What is the other thing?" Ryeland said: "I want to set a fuse on this ship's fuel compartment. I don't want them poking around in it after we go; I want to blow it up." I n ten minutes they had locked out some tons of computers, electronic instruments, a power source and a handful of other gear; Ryeland took another five to wire contacts to a time-clock and set them to explode the ship's fuel, and then they were ready to leave the spaceship. It was like making up one's mind to leap off a building. They stood in the open airlock, and there outside was the universe of stars. Ryeland felt more helpless and small than ever before in his life; how could human flesh survive that great cold barrage of light? But Quiveras assured them that the spaceling's bubble of gas had remained about the ship, held there by the spaceling even through the ship's hull. And in fact, they could see strange shapes and colors, hardly visible with their eyes, still used to the bright ship's interior and dazzled by the distant display of multitudinous suns. Ryeland and the girl joined hands and leaped, and they floated into the world of the spaceling. They felt nothing, but they began to move away. The two spacelings swam among them, apparently unheeding, but the jetless drive their bodies produced was moving them all at a tangent to the rocket's line of flight, diverging from it slowly. As they drew off from the ship, the captive air the spaceling carried with it detached itself from its resting places along the hull of the ship. The bubble condensed. The air became denser. Scraps of solid material drifted into place. Behind them, in a long string pointing toward the rocket ship they had left, an occasional glint of starshine showed the trail of instruments Ryeland had demanded they take with them. But they saw them only briefly, and then the spaceling's world was coalescing about them, and it was a fairyland. I t was incredible! Donna and Ryeland stared about, unbelieving. As the bits and pieces sorted themselves into their accustomed relationships they became a cool green cloud, so bright that Ryeland could hardly see the stars outside. Strangeleafed vines twined through the cloud," laden with clusters of unfamiliar fruit. Small creatures that were half fish and half bird flitted through the vines. They were at the center, and as the air reached earth-normal density the invisible small creatures that gave it light and life were thickly packed about them. They could move. Ryeland roamed restlessly around the mad little bubble of life they inhabited, with naked space only yards away, staring, thinking, asking quick questions of Quiveras. The little man had apologetically few answers for him, but the facts spoke for themselves. 'Tncredible!" he muttered. "Fantastic!" He caught himself on a tendril of vine eighteen inches from the faint veil that marked the end of the bubble and stared out at the stars. He could recognize no constellations; great Orion and the mighty Southern Cross alike were out there, but buried in a swarm of thousands of lesser lights, invisible on earth but here a snow-sprinkling of radiance. One great blue-white needle lanced IF him, and he knew that he had found nuclear energy at the light end of one star at least. That could only the scale; if the fusorians made be Sirius, many magnitudes brighter only light elements there would be than from Earth's surface, painful too much release of energy, we'd all to look at directly. be dead in a moment, one way or Behind him Donna said hesitantanother. But up past silver fusion ly, "Steven, what is all this?" takes energy..." He shook his Ryeland turned at last to confront head. "Sorry. But I can't help runher. "It's remarkable! I think I unning on about it. This is a complete derstand it, though... The drive little world, with its own complete field holds this little cloud of air. economy." Moving through space, it picks up Donna asked simply, "What about dust and hydrogen gas. These vines food?" have fusorian cells, that fuse the Quiveras interrupted. "Ah, foodV hydrogen into oxygen, carbon and he cried. He launched himself all the other elements -- and also through the air like a swimmer in release light and heat enough for the water, the vines like a strange seaspaceling's metabolism, or for ours. weed. He gathered his hands full of I'd guess," he said thoughtfully, the bright fruits and came soaring "that there's a fair proportion of back. He begged: "Try them! They heavy elements in those plants. Conare good. Platinum? Gold? I do not servation of energy. Fusion liberates know about heavy elements, Mr. Ryeland. But I know about flavorf' At that moment a great soundless flower of fire unfolded behind them. They all whirled to look. Ryeland said soberly: "There goes our rocket. I hope we're going to like this place, Donna. It's all we've got now." T hey gathered close to the film at the very rim of the bubble, peering out. "Not too close," warned Quiveras. "You must not stick even your little finger through it. You will be blown out, you see." Ryeland looked startled, then, after a moment, nodded. "Of course. Anything much larger than a molecule is not reflected, eh? And once the field was penetrated, it would be forced out by the pressure differential." Very cautiously they settled themselves to peer out at the ship they had left behind. The flame was gone, but even in its microseconds it had heated metal to red incandescence and they could see a ruddy skeleton that was all that was left of the craft's main supporting beams. The hull and fitting were scattered by the blast; but near the dark red glow they could make out faint points of light. The war rocket, Quiveras declared positively. The lights they saw were the flare of its auxiliary rockets as it matched position with the abandoned hulk. The spacelings hung looking out through the tangle of glowing vines, searching the dark outward sky. They made oft murmuring and whimpering sounds. Quiveras istened to them, stroking their sleek fur. crooning to them gently. "They are watching the Plan rocket," he told the others. "The ship radiates its own infrared. They can see it well, now that it is coming closer." "Closer?" Ryeland was startled. "Of course, Mr. Ryeland. The Plan is not stupid." "But -- they must think we are dead! And even if not, they have no way of tracing the spacelings' jetless drive -- " "Nor have they," Quiveras told him solemnly. "The Plan is merely thorough. I can understand what they are saying in that cruiser. 'Did they have an escape vessel? If so, where would they be going?' To the Reefs. And the Plan knows vhere the Reefs must be." The spacelings were growing uneasy. "And our friends here are tiring," Quiveras said soberly. "They need rest. Carrying all of us, and all of your equipment, Mr. Ryeland -- even for two of them it is a great load. They cannot go faster, and so they are going to try to hide. There." He pointed out through the glowing vines. of their little atmosphere was in his way. He kicked himself -- very warily! -- to the other end of their bubble and hung, clutching a vine and staring; but if there was something to see his untrained eyes could not make it out. Quiveras followed. "It is a cluster of Reefs," he explained. "There, near those three blue-white stars." Ryeland's Earth-adapted eyes were not equal to the task. But Chiquita and Adam slipped close to him IF and hung among the bright leaves, their sad eyes staring into the starsprinkled space ahead. Ryeland shook his head. "I don't see anything at all." "Nor did I," Quiveras agreed, "until the spacelings showed me. We are not equipped to find a pebble in the dark, countless miles away; but they are." Ryeland said doubtfully, "Even if there are Reefs there, and we get to them -- can't the Plan rocket follow us?" Quiveras shrugged. "Of course. But the Reefs are in a thicker cloud than this little bubble of Adam's, Mr. Ryeland. There are swarms of the little fireflies that you call fusorians; they'll fog his search screens. There are hunks of bigger stuff that will slow him down -- perhaps even wreck him, Mr. Ryeland, if he should be careless! Still, he may get through and find us. Yes. It is a chance, but we have no choice but to take it." They drove on for hours, there was no way of measuring just how long. As destination and pursuer were alike invisible to Ryeland, there were only the shrouded stars as reference points, and their great distance was not affected by the tiny crawl of the spacelings. Adam and Chiquita seemed hardly to be working, as they slipped supplely about through the vines, yet Quiveras assured Ryeland they were moving nearly as fast as the Plan cruiser, in spite of the trail of machines that followed them. Then Quiveras said, "We are almost there!" Ryeland sought among the stars for "there". What made it hardest was that there was neither bow nor stern to their tiny captive world, no sure way of knowing which way they were going. He could find nothing. The stars shone splendid and unobscured, as he hung at nearly the edge of their air capsule -- red stars, blue-white giants, clouds of nebular matter... Then he saw the Reef ahead. I t appeared first as a pale point of light that suddenly grew into a bulging, uneven sphere of splendor. It was a jeweled ball, floating in space, and the jewels were forests of crystal. They came closer, like a comet, then slower. Ryeland saw spiked trees of crystal carbon -- diamond! -- glittering with their own inner light. There were strange bulging brain-shaped masses of blue and violet, patches of ghostly white sand, a frozen forest with bright metal leaves. It was an incredible fairyland to Ryeland and the girl, but Quiveras surveyed it with a shrewd professional eye and shook his head. "Not a good place to hide," he said, peering at the glowing ball. "Still, that solid part might be useful. The Reefs are mostly hollow -- because they're dead inside." Ryeland nodded. "I suppose the surface organisms are the ones that pick up the free hydrogen and grow. The ones inside die of starvation." Quiveras was not listening. He cried gleefully: "Yes! There is a cave! -- If it is not already occupied." Ryeland stared at him. Quiveras shrugged. "These Reefs do not have much gravitation; something must be holding the air there, as the spacelings do. It could be another spaceling. It could be small cells in the Reef itself -- each Reef is its own world, I do not pretend that I know what to expect on this one. But it could be something quite bad." He raised a hand. "Wait. Let us see." The jeweled ball swam closer. "Watch," ordered Quiveras. "See how Chiquita enters the air of this Reef. Adam is pulling us now; Chiquita is controlling our atmosphere. Do you see?" The female spaceling was darting about, while Adam hung motionless. "I did wonder about that," admitted Ryeland. "When the two spheres meet, air pressure will be forcing them apart." Quiveras shook his head. "See, she airlocks the Reef in." Ryeland stared. They came closer to the Reef and closer. From the frightened movements of the little fishbirds, he saw that the shell was being contracted; yet there was no increase of pressure -- "I see!" he cried suddenly. "She is setting up another shell, big enough for both us and the Reef! Then she'll collapse our inner shell, letting the air leak out as it contracts to keep the pressure steady!" Quiveras nodded. There was a sudden vibration, as though the shock-front of a distant explosion had raced past them, and a clicking in their cars. The inner shell was finally gone. Ryeland stared about his new world. The steady rain of starlight, even through their light-fogged atmosphere, gave him a view of a wonderland. The sun itself, hardly brighter than Sirius, made yellowish sparkles in the crystal branches of the -- could he call it "vegetation"? But Quiveras gave him little time to admire the world. "Now we must do our art, Mr. Ryeland," he grinned. Ryeland saw that the two spacelings were hanging at a distance from the dark cave mouth, regarding it with huge wet eyes. Their red noses flickered swiftly. They whimpered, and a shudder ran along Chiquita's scarred flank. "What is our part?" Quiveras said calmly: "The spacelings have natural enemies -- clumsy, armored killers. Very slow -- too slow to catch the spacelings out in space. But extremely deadly. They wait for them in places like these." He said politely, "So we must ferret into this burrow, Mr. Ryeland, if you will do me the honor to join Q uiveras propelled himself to the mouth of the cave, peered inside, looked at the others and shrugged. "We will see," was all he said. Calmly he unwrapped a bundle of rags and took out an old Plan Police handweapon. He was not very skillful with it; he worried at it until he had opened the clip, checked the number of charges it contained -- Ryeland saw that it only held four; # IF undoubtedly Quiveras had found it difficult to obtain them -- snapped it closed and balanced it in his hand. Then with the heel of his worn boot he kicked at a stalagmite of greenish crystal until it broke free. It was eighteen inches long or more and quite sharp. It made a queer but serviceable sword, Ryeland thought, and then realized that it made an even better torch. The interior of the cave was dark. The crystal sword glowed with its trapped fusorian cells. Quiveras scrambled into the cave and Ryeland followed, unable to look at the girl. It was a strange dark lair of winding passages. The entrance was worn smooth -- alarmingly -- as though large bodies had been scraping in and out. Ryeland thought swiftly of the probable age of the Reef, and felt somewhat reassured. Time moved along different scales out here. Change could be lightning fast, or ponderously slow; those ledges might have been worn smooth dark passages, smooth-worn rock walls made of the bodies of onceliving fusorians, had perhaps been dead when the Earth was still a boiling incandescent blob. There simply was no way to tell. Nor had Ryeland any idea of how long or deep the passages might be. They were as labyrinthine as the maze inside a head of sea-coral, where tiny crustaceans wait for tinier fish to blunder in. Quiveras paused where the passage branched -- and, within sight, both divisions inside a dozen yards branched again. He was staring at the wall. As Ryeland joined him, he saw what Quiveras had seen. The worn sides of some of the passages bore curving parallel scars, as though they had been rasped by the claws of some incredible monster. Quiveras said cheerfully, "That one looks the most used, Mr. Ryeland. If we only knew when, eh? Well, ni try it -- asking you, if you please, to remain here on guard." He turned away, hesitated and said solemnly: "You see, it is you who must take the post of danger. For if a pyropod should come from one of the other passages while I am gone..." He made a grave face, spread his hands politely and left. R yeland clung to a projection of rock and waited. Pyropod... He heard the word again, in the soft, apologetic, wheezy voice of Dr. Thrale. He was lying again on the therapy couch in the recreation center, clamped into the cold electrodes, helplessly enduring the merciless probing into his blank memory. He shuddered again, flinching from that pitiless pressure to make him reveal the secret he had never known -- Or had he really ever known how to build a jetless drive? That haunting fog of black oblivion and insane contradiction flowed into his brain. Through it, he heard the lazy malice of Angela's voice, mocking him with her explanation of the riddle. He was a junk man, a meat machine designed to sabotage the plan, without a memory because he lacked a past. A queer companion for the Planner's daughter. He resolved again not to tell her what he was. Now when they were alone, when he and Quiveras were the only human beings in her world, -- could she stand the shock of learning that even he was no real human being? He shook himself impatiently, as if mere motion might dispel! that paralyzing fog and reveal his true identity. That old riddle would have to wait -- perhaps until the timing mechanism detonated the collar, and answered it forever. The problems of the present were more urgent now. It was warm in the cavern, far from the surface of the little deformed globe, where the fusorian cells poured endless heat and light into the atmosphere. But he found himself shivering. Pyropod? Yes. He had heard the term. He did not want to recall just what he had heard about it. Quiveras disappeared, the needlesharp crystal blade giving a strange light. It disappeared around a bend in the passage, and then for a time there was no light at all. Time passed. It was dark... silent... empty. Ryeland felt as though the dead walls around him were closing in. He wiped slippery sweat from his palms, listening, reaching out, because he could not help himself, to touch the walls to make sure that they were not about to squeeze him... Then involuntarily he felt himself grinning. Claustrophobia -- Earth, a floating dust mote in the middle of absolute emptiness! The incongruity reassured him; and he was calm and cheerful when, at last, he saw the glow of light appear again in the passage Quiveras had taken. The crystal sword came into sight and Quiveras hailed him cheerfully. "A dead end, and nothing there. Very well. He drew even with Ryeland and gazed at the other passages. 'T think," he said, with some doubt, "that we will leave these others for now. They do not seem occupied, and it would take us weeks to explore them all. Consider yourself fortunate, my friend. You have not yet been introduced to a pyropod." A t Quiveras's hail the spacelings came swimming gracefully down the tunnel, their red noses blinking as they probed its depths with infrared. Donna Creery followed more slowly, exploring the caves with a child's wonder and awe. "Is it safe?" she asked. Quiveras said calmly, "We will never be safe while Ryeland's collar is with us. If you mean are we safe from pyropods, x do not know. From a full-grown one, yes. I do not guarantee there is not a cub lurking somewhere, but if there is we will find it out and meanwhile shall we not try to make this place into a home?" They worked for three hard days, while the spacelings fluttered and mewed restlessly -- because, Quiveras said without emotion, the Plan cruiser was still somewhere about. IF As there was nothing they could do about it, they did nothing. To their little world they did a great deal. They carried aerial fusorian vines into the caverns, choosing cubicles for sleeping, for eating, for rest, curtaining and cushioning them with the vines, bringing shining crystals of ruby and topaz for heat and illumination. Donna cried out at its beauty. Indeed it was beautiful; and they were not finished. With Quiveras for a teacher, Ryeland learned how to weave nets and ropes out of the fiber from the vines. The surface of the reef provided crystal and great branching arms of metal, pure copper, pure aluminum, pure silver. They hammered the metal into crude tools. And finally they made a sort of curtain, woven from the vines and crusted with broken pieces of crystal, which they stretched across the mouth of the cave to conceal it. Quiveras stood back and regarded it. "Well," he said doubtfully, "it could be thicker and it could look more natural and those gadgets of yours could be hidden in better places. But if the Plan cruiser sniffs around here, it might miss you, at that." "Miss us? What about you?" "I, Miss Creery, will go out to the main Reefs." Quiveras's gnarled face looked eager. "I'll get help, more spacelings. And I'll bring back Ron Donderevo!" Ryeland and the girl were sorry to see him go, but their sorrow was nothing compared to the unhappiness of the two spacelings at being separated. Adam would carry Quiveras; Chiquita would have to stay with them, to maintain their atmosphere and to be ready to carry them away in desperate flight if the Plan cruiser should grow too inquisitive. They watched him leave, all three of them, Ryeland, Donna Creery and the spaceling. He was gone out of sight in a moment. Ryeland thought he caught a single reddish wink from Adam's nose -- perhaps the male spaceling turning restlessly as it drove away, to bid a last farewell to Chiquita. Then there was nothing. They stared till their eyes watered, but it was useless. The Plan cruisei could be lurking a mere hundred miles away -- a thousand men on spacelings could be within ten miles. Without radar gear they were blind. Out there were only the stars. Ryeland's mind drifted out among those stars wonderingly. He tried to imagine the clouds of new hydrogen, constantly being born of the Hoyle effect, and the myraid drifting fusorians that built the hydrogen into heavier elements that might someday be planets. There were other Reefs out there, the first concentrations of matter like the one they occupied, the larger ones that provided a home for the exiles of the Plan -- great ones, even, that might in some remote millenium become the cores for first condensations of titanic new suns. They were all invisible. Donna Creery touched his arm. "It's -- lonely," she whispered. "Let's go back inside." "Inside our cave!" he said harshly. "Back to the stone age! Is this the sort of life that's fit for a princess of the Plan?" She shrank away from him, and m a moment went with the spaceling silently inside the sheltering drift of vines. Ryeland roamed about, trying to work off the sudden storm of anger and helplessness that was besieging him. He tried to calm himself. But calm was impossible to him. Calm, he knew, was a sensation he would not be likely to feel, until he had managed to rid himself of the choking, threatening thing about his neck -- and until he had managed to bridge that gap in his past, until he had escaped that dreadful, creeping cloud of forgetfulness and contradiction -- Or until the collar's explosion brought him the permanent calm of the grave. T ime passed. They both found plenty to do. Alone now, except for the spaceling, they were queerly constrained in each other's company. Ryeland hardly recognized the bright, sure brat of the bath, with the angry Peace Dove and the fighting guard within instant call. Donna was quieter and younger now. They spoke of her father, and for the first time Ryeland was able to think of that semi-legendary Olymiian figure as a human being. Donna was terribly worried about her father. "But we couldn't wait for him, Steven. Only -- I wish we had." He asked her again why the Planner had had to hide from the Machine, and got the same answer he had been given before. It was no answer. "I don't know, Steven, but he was worried. And it's your equations that are the key to it." And that, of course, drove Ryeland out to stare at the banked machines he had brought with him from the rocket, but all he could do was stare. They needed space and order, and on this little reefling there was neither. They lived like primitive islanders, catching the tiny flying things with nets made of vines, feasting on the shining fruits. Ryeland's mind was queasy at the thought of the radiation they were absorbing with every luscious bite, but his stomach was delighted. And, he thought, they were not the first to eat them and live. Perhaps the radiation was purely photonic; perhaps a sort of bioluminescence, like the green glow of a firefly. Ryeland asked the girl again how Fleemer and his allies had got the better of her father, and got the same answer he had been given before. It was no answer. "I don't know, Steve. Except that it is all about the jetless drive. Father told me that he approved the search for an interstellar drive as part of the original Plan, built into the Machine. When he first learned about the spacelings, from Donderevo, he knew that a reactionless drive was possible. He began to organize an effort to learn how to build it. Immediately, he ran into fanatical opposition from men like Fleemer. I don't know the reason for their opposition. It must have been someIF thing more than just the desire to grab Father's place. Somehow, they were able to manipulate the Machine. They have got it under their own control. But I still believe that we could rescue the Machine and Father and the Plan of Man -- if we knew the secret of the spacelings." That, of course, drove Ryeland to begin assembling and testing the computers he had brought from the rocket. But the crawling fog was thicker in his mind. He sat staring at the banked computers, but he could think of no approach more promising than those he had tried when he was still on Fleemer's team. He couldn't be sure that the failure of the team attack was altogether due to Fleemer's sabotage. Anyhow, he reflected, there wasn't much that he could do in his cave on this reeflet. Even if he had been given the blueprints for a perfected reactionless drive, he had no shop equipment. Hopelessly, he gave up the effort. D ays passed. Weeks passed. The spaceling roamed sadly around their little world, still worried. They could not tead its ways as Quiveras had, but its worry was plain. Was it the Plan cruiser, still skulking about? Or a nearer menace? They simply could not tell. Donna grew sulky and unhappy, until they had a brief, brittle quarrel of words one day and it exploded into weeping. She clung to him. "I'm sorry. It's just that I always had so much. Servants, clean clothes, cooked food. Power, too. And now -- " She smiled up at him. Qucerly, Ryeland thrust her away then. He was churned up inside with feelings he could neither analyze nor handle. It was his turn to .be sulky and irritable, because, though he did not know it, his inner self was becoming a battle ground -- the site of a struggle between his common sense, on one hand, and on the other a growing, potent love for the Planner's daughter... Even his dreams were haunted. He slept restlessly, and felt that he was choking... He was in his office, miles under the surface of the Earth in the hidden complex of airconditioned tunnels that held the Machine and its attendants. He heard the knocking on the locked door, and got up to open it for Angela. But it wasn't Angela. It was Donna Creery, whitesmocked like the nurses at the stockpile. She had brought the coffee and sandwiches on a plastic tray, but she screamed and threw them on the floor when she saw his face. "It's Donderevo!" she was screaming. "It was Ron Donderevo -- " He wanted to tell her who he was, but suddenly he was strapped to the therapy couch in the recreation center, with shocks of paralvzing agony stabbing from the electrodes on his body. She was coming toward him again, in the white smock with a stitched red heart on her perfect breast, reaching for him with a long hooked scalpel. "You might as well tell us now." She was wheezing at him with Dr. Thrale's apologetic, asthmatic voice. "Tell us how tOfcbuild a jetless drive." He wanted to tell her. The specifications were clear in his mind, amazingly simple; he couldn't understand why there had to be so much fuss about such a simple thing. But his voice was paralyzed with the the shocks that made waves of dazing pain from the collar around his neck. And Donna wouldn't let him talk. Now she wore a horned radar helmet. She was taunting him, with Fleemer's ugly voice. One touch, Ryeland. Only one little touch on the detonation button, and your precious secret will die with you! Now she had Angela's face. But she still had hands, like Donna. He saw her touch the deadly little button. The collar about his neck blossomed and swelled -- He awoke strangling. "I was dreaming!" He tugged frantically at the collar. No! It was no dream. The collar was there, and surely it was about to explode. His exacerbated imagination felt it pulsing against his rasped throat. He thought he heard a sound from it, a tick, a whine, a purring of faint unstoppable engines. "No!" he shouted and leaped up out of the little nest of leaves where he slept. It was exploding! Not in a year, not in a minute -- now. He flung himself wildly about in the no-gravity, shouting. Donna Creery came swiftly to him, and the terror in her face woke him, drowning his imaginary terrors. "What's the matter?" he demanded harshly. "Steven! It's Chiquita. She -- she IF was wandering about the lower passages, where we've never been, and -- " She stopped, unable to speak on. Behind her the spaceling came, slowly, painfully, mewing tragically. Chiquita's flank was a horror, raw flesh and golden ichor, with the mark of a great sharp claw. T here were four cartridges in the clip. Ryeland checked them, blessed Quiveras for having left the gun and started down the passages. He didn't say anything to Donna Creery; he didn't know what to say. Then there was a pyropod on their Reef... Ryeland's throat was raw and dry. Pyropods. "Flame-feet." Outer-space animals which, Ryeland thought, sounded vaguely like Earthly squids. Ryeland tried to picture one, and failed; but Quiveras had said there was a possibility that the caverns in their Reef might house one. And Chiquita's terrible wounds had converted that possibility into something far stronger. Ryeland paused at the end of the passages they had explored, and picked up . the discarded crystal sword Quiveras had left there. It was still bright; it was all the light he had. Then he drove into the first of the great convoluted burrows. In five minutes he was at an end; the tunnel narrowed sharply, so that he could hardly move, and poised bits of rubble showed that nothing of any size had passed that way in finite time. He went back again. Another tunnel, a much longer one this time, but again a dead end. It was difficult to maneuver; in no-gravity, he could not walk, and the shape and constriction of the tunnel made it hard to leap. He came to another branch and stopped. There were two tunnels, both enormous, both dark and soundless. The air was the air the spaceling had brought, but it had a sharp strange odor, like burning gunpowder. And one of the tunnels was scarred with the enormous claws that had left their sign near the surface. Ryeland plunged in without giving himself time to think. He came almost at once to a chamber. He paused and hung in its entrance, peering about in the faint light his crystal sword gave. It was roughly spherical, so vast that its farther walls were dim; and in a niche at one side of it was a clutter of tangled objects. Warily he approached. It seemed to be a sort of midden, and the blood began to pulse in his ears. It contained odd-shaped objects that might have resembled the bones and fangs and carapaces of animals like no animals that had ever lived on earth. He stood staring at it, every sense poised. Then, with infinite pain, he approached. There was no sound. There was no motion. Gently he poked the crystalline light into a gap in the tangle. But nothing moved and there was nothing revealed. Ryeland moved back and considered. Space had its own scale of time. The discarded bones and the clawmarks in the rock might look just as fresh after another hundred million years. Undoubtedly the cave had been abandoned. He turned. Something screamed behind him. He had only time to halt his turn, to start to move his head back. And the heap of bones exploded. Vhat kept Ryeland from dying at once was the tiny scope of the cavern, compared to the scale of interplanetary distances. The pyropod, rocket driven, enormously strong, hadn't the room to maneuver or even to build up speed. But it blasted up at him with frightening speed. It was huge -- as Earth animals go -- larger than a horse, and armored with mirror-bright scales. It had a solitary eye, a wide mirror on a stalked central organ. It had a single, enormous claw at the end of a writhing, flexible trunk. It roared like a rocket at takeoff -- which it was -- and the great heavy-metal claw snapped violently. But the trash in its way screened Ryeland for a moment; he was thrust back and out of the way, and the pyropod flew past to gouge great chips out of the wall of the cavern. Ryejand took quick aim and fired. Even in the roar of the pyropod's drive, he could hear his bullet scream away, and knew that it had hit that armor and ricocheted off The pyropod did not turn to strike toward him again; it turned away, in fact. and its thin bright tail whipped toward him. White fire jetted out furiously. The tail! The tail was a more fearsome weapon than the claw -- the mighty drive that could hurl it through space could char him in a second! But Ryeland was already moving, and the blast missed him entirely, though a backwash of flame from the wall caught his leg and (he discovered later) raised great angry blisters on his skin. Ryeland crashed into the wall, spun like a racing swimmer in a pool, raised the gun again and fired -- rapidly -- one, two, three! And then his cartridges were gone... But one of those bullets had struck a target. The stalk that held its eye was hit. The bulb exploded; the creature was blinded. It blundered about the chamber like a rocket gone mad, colliding with the walls, recoiling, plunging wildly again. The blazing jet licked perilously close -- And then the jet was screaming away, bouncing and roaring through the tunnel, out, out and away... Ryeland was hurt badly, burned, bleeding, aching in every muscle; and he had no breath left at all after that quick violent encounter. But he did not pause. He leaped to follow the pyropod, Donna was up there! He sailed through dark space, his crystal torch long since lost, tried to see through the utter dark, tried to shield his head from striking against the wall. It was good, now, that the tunnel was so narrow; there was really only one way to go. IF And after interminable moments there was light. He drove toward it, rounded a bend, and saw Donna Creery hurrying toward him -- alive! She bore a coiled branch of the vine with its moons of luminous fusorians. "Steven! Thank God!" She tossed a loop of the vine to him; he caught it, and they drew themselves together. R y e I a n d caught her roughly. "The pyropodi What became of it?" "Gone," said Donna Creery. "It went right by, out into space. Not having a nucleonic harpoon, I let it go. I think we've seen the last of it." "It was hiding in a pile of bones," said Ryeland, suddenly drained. "I -- I think I hit its eye." "Yes. At least, it acted blind. And -- oh, Steven!" He looked at her, not comprehending. Reaction? He tried to reassure her. "It won't be back, Donna. You said yourself -- " "No, no. It's Chiquita, Steven. I think she's dying." He nodded, hardly hearing. "Poor thing. Well, we've avenged her, I guess" "And what about avenging ourselves? Have you forgotten, Steve -- if Chiquita dies, there's nothing to hold our air!" T he spaceling lay motionless in a little cave lined with vines. Now and then she struggled restlessly -- not to move, but to bring fresh air about her. She seemed both bloated and gaunt And the great wounds along her side were now crusted with dirty ocher scabs. "Poor Chiquita," the girl whispered, stroking the soft fur. Donna crooned at the creature, and its great dull eyes fastened on her. Ryeland looked the spaceling over. Her belly was swollen angrily, but the flesh had shrunk from the rest of her body. Her fur was lusterless and unkempt. The flame-red it was cold, black, dry. He touched her: hot. Did she hav a fever? Ryeland could not know, but surely she was hotter than when he had clung to her neck, fleeing the body bank. The spaceling seemed tc know that he was trying to help. She licked her black tongue out at him feebly; it was all the effort she could make. Ryeland said reluctantly, "I don't think there's anything we can do for her." "The light seems to bother her." "All right. That much we can do." But it wasn't easy, in this little world of luminous crystal and vine. They found some growths that glowed only faintly and tugged them into place, thicker and thicker, until the little nook where Chiquita lay became a dim green hiding-hole. Chiquita looked faintly grateful, but mostly she looked sick. They left her and went out to the surface to look at the stars. It was maddening, it was utterly maddening, to be so helpless! Ryeland clung to the edge of the tunnel, staring out toward emptiness. Somewhere out there, invisible but sure, lay the other Reefs The great outer Reefs where fugitive humans managed lives that were free of the Plan -- where, above all, lived Ron DonderIF evo, the native spaceman who had been a student of the science of the Plan, a guest and a prisoner of the Planner. He had worn the iron collar of a Risk -- the selfsame collar that choked Ryeland now, if Angela had told the truth. He had talked to the Planner about a jetless drive, had been consigned to the stockpile, had ridden Chiquita back to the Reefs. But -- was he superhuman? Could he remove Ryeland's collar -- here in the reefs, without all the elaborate surgical facilities that had been available at the stockpile? Could he fill the gap in Ryeland's tormented memory -- or was there really any gap to fill, except the time before the dissected scraps of a hundred salvaged enemies of the Plan had been assembled to make a thinking thing without a past? By now Quiveras might have reached him. By now they might be on their way! Perhaps in a few days Quiveras and the stranger would come to the little Reef and look for Ryeland and the girl. By now Quiveras might have reached him. By now they might be on their way! Perhaps in a few days Quiveras and the stranger would come to the little Reef and look for Ryeland and the girl. And what would they find? Ryeland knew that the most probable answer was... death. T ime passed, and the spaceling stayed alive. But she was wealcer and worse every day. The Reef became a dream to Ryeland. He lost all sense of time. He had no watch and there were no celestial objects to mark days or years very conveniently. He thought of a calendar, and tried to construct one. The sun was bright enough to be visible, but the trouble was that their little Reef had no perceptible rotation. No force from another bbject had ever set it spinning, perhaps; the same stars hung always over the tunnel mouth. It could tell them nothing of time. Painfully Ryeland located winking Algol and began a star-watch; its period would be his clock. Donna said gently: 'Tt won't help. You don't know when the collar will go off." And he realized that she had seen farther into his mind than he himself. It was the ticking year that he was trying to measure, the year which was in any event his maximum hope of life as long as that collar sat sullenly about his neck. Chiquita might not die, the Plan cruiser might not return, but his assassin was with him at every moment. At one of those moments it would strike. That was the ultimate deadly promise of the iron collar. You could flee the radar guns of the Plan Police and even outrun their cruisers. You could in the Reefs of Space perhaps even avoid the wash of pulsed radar which the Machine would flood through the system. But the timing element would not be stopped and would not be merciful. In less than a year it would go off... And Ryeland's guess, based on Algol's cycle and a careful recollection of how they had slept and eaten. was that no less than six months had already passed. Chiquita was now terribly sick. The great claw-gashes had begun to heal, but her fever was high. She seemed thirsty, but she would not drink; she seemed in pain, but she hardly moved. Only a low whimpering mew came from the little bower they had made for her. Ryeland made a decision and went out onto the shell of their Reef to put it into practice. It was only a matter of moments before Donna followed. 'What are you doing?" she demanded sharply. He stopped, caught working over the equipment the spacelings had transported from the ship for him -- the equipment that he had not used and now was proposing to put to a use completely unconnected with his original intention. He said, "How's Chiquita?" But she would not be diverted. What are you doing?" Ryeland said, "Rigging up a radio. I've got all the parts. I -- I thought I might be able to reach Quiveras and ask him to hurry -- " "Or maybe you thought you might reach that Plan cruiser?" Ryeland said strongly: "All right. Why not? Maybe we pushed our luck too far! Things weren't so bad back in the B -- back on Earth, I mean. The Plan of Man is reasonable. They'll take us back if I surrender, and even at worst, it can't be worse than waiting here to die." "Steven!" She reached up to stare into his eyes. "I won't have you going back!" "Who the devil," he yelled in a cold counterfeit of rage, "do you think you're ordering -- " But she stopped his lips. "Don't say it," she whispered. "I won't let you. And anyway, I'm afraid it's too late." It took him a second to react. "Chiquita!" He raced far ahead of her down to the dying spaceling. Chiquita had sunk into a sort of coma, motionless, barely breathing. Her belly was more and more misshapen, as with terminal malnutrition -- or whatever might correspond to it in the structure of a creature from space -- and the rest of her body as wasted as the gaunt, starved babies of Oriental famines of old times. Ryeland reached out a hand to her -- And drew it back! It was too late; it was all over. The spaceling had stopped breathing entirely. Absently Ryeland brushed the dull fur on her cooling neck. Dead, yes. No matter what secrets her alien metabolism held, there was no doubt that life had gone. And now... how long would the field that contained their air persist? Ryeland had no idea. In a firefly, he remembered, the bioluminescence lingered for hours after death. Was this a related effect? Probably not. The strange force that drove the spaceling was something far removed from a mere greenish glow. It might last for a few minutes. It might -- at any split second it might -- disappear, and kill them instantly in a soundless explosion of released air. IF Donna said softly, "Steven. Let's go outside where we can see the stars." T he Reef was a small hollowed planet, wheeling slowly now, perhaps because of some dying convulsion from Chiquita. From the mouth of the cave the whole stardusted splendor of the heavens was revealed. The sun itself, yellow and distant, came up through tangled vines to look at them, like the headlight of a far-off locomotive. "The sun," whispered Ryeland "Still the brightest star. We haven't come so far." They looked out at the mighty constellations, strange in their powdery mask of lesser stars but still identifiable -- mighty Orion, the misty cluster of the Pleiades, the vast silvery sweep of the galaxy. There it was, thought Ryeland soberly, the terrible, wonderful new empire that they had hoped to help claim for Man. And they had failed. It was very strange and wonderful, but he felt almost at peace. They were still alive. It was a fact that brought with it a sense of unbounded wealth. As everything had been lost with the death of the spaceling, now each tiny moment that they were somehow spared was a treasure. Each second was a joy. Ryeland anchored himself to a ledge of space coral, all silver and ruby, with Donna very light in his arms. They talked, not consecutively. There were things each had to say. The one central fact -- the fact that they were clinging to life by only the feeblest of grips -- they did not mention. Donna said: "Father's probably still on Earth. He can't have got my message. He'd have followed if he did. He's a busy, a driving man, Steven, and I used to hate him, but -- Oh, Steven! Now I am only sorry for him. Ryeland said: "You wouldn't remember. You were bathing, and I blundered in. I was embarrassed. I guess you were, too. No, you probably weren't. And you had the Peace Dove. It nearly killed -- what was his name? Oporto." Cloudily it struck him as odd: he had almost forgotten the man who had been the nearest thing he had to a friend. Donna said: "That was Father's idea, the Peace Dove. If you hate black... call it white, and love it. So he took that murdering thing and called it 'Peace'. He always boasted: 'The Planner is the first ruler in all Earth's history who has never needed a bodyguard.' But what would you call those things? My Peace Doves. His Hawks." Ryeland said, with a sudden rush of amazement: "Donna! We're still alive!" T hey looked at each other in wonderment, for sure enough, it was true. They had not died of airstrangulation. Around them their little world was still intact. "But surely the spaceling was dead!" Donna cried. "No Joubt of that. I don't understand this." They looked around anxiously. The stars blazed down on them, and that was all there was to be seen beyond the confines of the tiny air bubble that made their world. "Look!" cried Ryeland. "Something's happening." At the edge of the reeflet, suddenly, like a vanishing ghost... puff! There was a soundless explosion of faint, misty fog. And a colony of flying fish, a lacy pattern of vines, a clump of blossoms with liquid gold in their cups -- they fluttered, shook, flung madly away; and then that corner, too, was still; but it was dead. The shape of the bubble had changed. One corner of their little world had lost its air -- poof! -- like the winking of an eye. For one eternal moment Ryeland thought that this was what they had been waiting for. The spaceling, Chiquita, had died at last; the strange forces that allowed her to hold air about her, and them, had loosened their grasp, and they were faee to face with death. Donna, who felt the abrupt clutch of fear, clung to him tightly. But Ryeland whispered thoughtfully, "It isn't right, Donna. Something's happening, but not what we expected at .all. If the field went, it should go all at once." "But what could it be, then, Steven?" "Let's go see!" Like biped spacelings themselves, they turned and dove into the cavern. Quickly, quickly. Crazed, confused thoughts floated through Ryeland's mind: Their dying little world... all worlds, dying... all the planets of the sun, doomed to death, doomed because Ryeland had failed to give them inertialess travel in time... doomed to die without giving seed to space. They stopped, clutching at palely glowing vines. In the very green darkness Chiquita lay. She was surely dead. There was no possibility of a mistake. But beside her -- Beside her something moved! Beside that shrunken, lifeless skin, something quivered, curled and lifted. It came frolicking toward them, flying -- something small, smaller even than Donna, a mere doll beside the dead Chiquita, racked and shrunken though she was. It was a spaceling! A baby spaceling! Its red nose winked swiftly; it looked at them with bright, friendly eyes. "Oh, you darling!" cried Donna, holding out her arms to it, and it licked at her face with a slim, quick, black tongue. "Look there!" croaked Ryeland, astonished beyond words, pointing. There was another tiny, seal-like creature... and a third, and a fourth, and -- there seemed to be a dozen of them, frolicking and darting with their tiny noses blinking comically, pink light and orange, red and almost purple. Ryeland said softly: "Chiquita may be dead, but her children are not." There were eight of them in all, as well as they could count their quicksilver, gamboling shapes. Eight baby spacelings, frolicking like pups. Had they been born after the death of the mother, in some reproductive mystery of the spacelings' Had they been born before, and wandered off? Ryeland could not know. He only knew that they were here. "Thank heaven," whispered Donna, as Ryeland carried one out into the light to see it. "Thank Something," murmured Ryeland. "Look, Donna. They're just like adult spacelings, but tiny. Born fully formed -- obviously, they are able to maintain a field, able to use the jetless drivel Fortunately for us. Though," he said remembering the lost corner of their paradise, "I think they could stand a little more practice." He stopped, looking up, jaw hanging. Out there somewhere past the air curtain, something moved and winked. "The Plan rocket!" cried Donna in terror. "No! No," shouted Ryeland, leaping up. "Don't you see? It's too small too close. It's a spaceling! Quiveras has come back, and -- look! There's someone else. He has brought Donderevo back with him!" D onderevo! Six feet eight inches tall, a dark-faced man with blue eyes that blazed. His spaceling brought him daintily into the air bubble of their little haven, and Ron Donderevo sprang free. "Donna!" he cried, and caught her hand. Joyously Donna threw her arms about him, pressing her face against his bronzed cheek. When she drew free, she said: "Ron, this is Steve Ryeland." "I remember," Ryeland whispered breathlessly. "When I was a Technicub, about eight years old. And you were a medical student from space, wearing a collar because your people hadn't accepted the Plan -- " Chuckling, the huge man gripped his hand. Ron Donderevo's fringed leather jacket was open at the throat. His neck was a brown muscular column. A thin scar circled it, but he wore no collar. "And I remember you," Donderevo rumbled. "I admired your father. A philosopher and a historian, as well as a mathematician. He's the scholar who helped me understand the real meaning of the space frontier." "Your collar?" Ryeland interrupted him. "You really got out of it?" "Out of the collar, and out of the place they call Heaven." Donderevo nodded solemnly. "I was luckier than your father." "I was never told what became of him." R yeland caught his breath to ask another question, but the sudden iron constriction of his own collar stopped him. He wanted to know how Donderevo had got away, but he was afraid to know the answer. He was afraid that Donderevo would confirm the strange story of Angela Zwick -- that Ryeland was the imitation man that the anti-Plan surgeons had assembled in Donderevo's collar, to cover his escape. "Ron?" Donna's voice was quick and quivering with concern. "Can you get Steve out of his collar?" "Not quite the way I was taken out of mine." Ron Donderevo shook his shagged, craggy head. "Mine was removed in the surgical center at the stockpile where I had been sent for salvage. Half a dozen surgeons helped, using the best equipment -- " "What was done with your collar?" Ryeland interrupted. "I promised not to tell," Donderevo said. "Was a patch -- ?" Ryeland had to gulp and start again. "Was a patchwork man assembled in it? A kind of living dummy to take your place until the spaceling could carry you away?" "Right." The big man nodded casually. "I don't suppose it matters to anybody now." It mattered very much to Ryeland. His flesh turned numb and cold... as it must have been before it was sutured and cemented back into the likeness of a man. His knees felt weak. "What's wrong, Steve?" Donna asked. "You look so pale!" He couldn't tell her that he was that decoy, that patchwork of junk meat. "I was hoping you could take my collar off," he told Donderevo. That was a matter desperate enough to account for his agitation. "If you learned medicine on Earth, can't you -- can't you possibly do the operation?" Donderevo started to shake his head, and suddenly looked hard at Ryeland's face. He glanced at Donna, and peered again at Ryeland. His own face twitched and stiffened, gray beneath the bronze. "I suppose I could try," he admitted reluctantly. "Of course you understand that I lack the experience and the fine equipment those surgeons had. Operating here, with only a portable surgery, without trained assistants, I can promise you one chance in four that you'll survive the operation -- one chance in five that you'll walk again, even if you do survive." Ryeland fell dizzily back against a great crystal branch. Twittering iridescent bird-fish, jarred loose, swam tinkling away. "And yet," rumbled Donderevo compassionately, "you are right, Steve, for you have no chance otherwise. The Plan can kill you in ten seconds, as easy as that. The rocket Push a button -- poof! -- your code impulse is transmitted -- you're dead. And so am I," he said earnestly, "and poor Quiveras here, and Donna. So you are right, for you see, Steven, we must save you somehow or you may kill us all." "Describe it to me," said Ryeland emptily. "Tell me what it entails. Exactly." D onderevo hesitated, and then began. Ron Donderevo, that huge man, his hands soft as a maiden's, his voice deep as a tiger's growl; Ron Donderevo had performed many an operation for the Plan. But on Earth, in the Body Bank, he said with meticulous care, there were things that could not be dupIF Heated here. There were nurses and surgeons beyond counting. (Here was only young Donna and old Quiveras, neither of them trained.) There was equipment by the warehousefuH. Here was only what had been packed in on the back of spacelings. Enough, yes -- if nothing went wrong. But there were no extras. If a blood pump should fail, there was no other. There in the Body Bank was the unmatched reservoir of human parts that constituted a reserve against spoilage. And here were only the four of them, and no more parts than they needed to go around. The first step, he said, would be to create an atmosphere of asepsis around the anesthetized Ryeland. Easy enough, particularly in the negligible gravity of the spaceling's bubble, and particularly where the only ambient germs were those the four of them had brought in. A soft hissing from a yellowish metal tube Donderevo had brought -- he demonstrated it -- accounted for a polyantibiotic spray. Then -- scalpels, retractors, sutures, clamps. Sterile and inherently inhospitable to microscopic life, they came out of the gleaming containers at Donderevo's orders. Donna was whitefaced but steady as she listened and looked at the instruments. She shrank away as he described how the first scalpel would trace a thin red line around Ryeland's neck, just under the collar; but then she was all right. The epidermis and dermis would have to be slit and pulled back, like a stocking from a leg. Red flesh and white muscle would swiftly be cut and retracted. The great trapezius muscles would have to be cut, caught and held -- it was important that muscles be kept under tension. The small blood vessels of the neck needed to be tied off; ,the large ones -- the carotids, the jugular the vertebral blood supply -- were to be cut and quickly clamped to the plastic tubes of a double-chambered mechanical heart -- not because Ryeland's own heart was out of circuit, yet, but because there was blood loss, Qonstantly, from every vessel and uncountable capillary, from the disturbed cells themselves. Extra reserves of blood were needed and held in the mechanical heart's chambers, for a man's own heart was not equal to the task. Then the nerves, carefully dissected out and clamped to the wondrous organic silver leads that alone had made major replacement of parts possible. Nervous tissue does not readily regenerate in the higher vertebrates -- not without help. Organic silver is the solder that holds the parts together; organic silver in the form of braided wire strands is the "connection" that permits the extension of a nerve, so that performance is not lost during surgery. As the cervical ganglia were cut, great sections of Ryeland's body would convulse quiveringly. Then the bones. Sonic saws to slice into the third cervical vertebra. The spinal cord -- opened, sealed, tied. The fluid dammed inside its chamber -- "That's enough," interrupted Ryeland, his face frozen into a mask. "I get the picture. I don't need any more." His eyes sought Donna's, and lie tried to speak to her... but could not. "Go ahead," he said. "Operate!" He stepped forward, swung himself onto the operating cradle and lay patiently while Donderevo and Quiveras strapped him in. Then Donderevo nodded and Donna moved forward, her face trembling on the verge of repressed tears, in her hand the soft flexible mask that sealed his lips and plugged his nostrils. He moved his head aside quickly. "Good-by, my dearest," he whispered. "For a while." Then he allowed her to fit the mask. Crashing, crashing, the crystal trees swam down on him. The little reeflet folded into a bud, with himself in the heart of it like the pure liquid gold in the cup of one of its strange flowers... And he was unconscious. H e was unconscious. But his mind was racing on. He was dreaming. He was remembering. The haunting fog came swirling up out of the past. It had followed him all the way from Earth. It was all around him now. cold and silent and clinging It covered Donna and Ron Donderevo. and distorted them Everything changed, twisted into hopeless contradiction. He was no longer in the portable surgery. Now the straps that held him were those of the therapy couch in the recreation center. The people over him were Dr. Thrale and General Fleemer. "Tell us, Ryeland," Thrale's soft insistent voice was wheezing. "We know about the knocking on the door, after the teletype girl left your office to bring sandwiches and coffee. We know you left the papers on your desk and went to open the door. Tell us who came in." Suddenly, he knew. Somehow, the anesthetic had cleared away that clinging fog. It wasn't Angela Zwick! It wasn't even the Plan Police -- they really hadn't come until the following Monday. It was a thin man in a blood-spotted fatigue uniform, bent under the bulging weight of a soiled space bag. "Horrocks -- " "Shhh!" Ryeland let him into the room and locked the door again. Horrocks dropped the space bag and stood leaning on the desk. He was panting heavily. Droplets of red foam sprayed out of his mouth and spattered over the sheafs of yellow teletape on the desk. "You're hurt," Ryeland said. "Let me get a doctor." "That can wait," Dan Horrocks gasped. "I've got a message for you -- that's got more priority. From an old -- friend of yours." Ryeland helped him into a chair and listened to the message. It came in gasped words that were sometimes incoherent. The old friend was Ron Donderevo. Horrocks had met him at a tiny colony on an unchartside the Plan, when Colonel Lescure's ship had stopped there to pick up reaction mass The message itself took a long IF time for the stricken man to deliver, and longer still for Ry eland to grasp. It began with the existence of the Reefs of Space and the fusorian life that had built them. The point of it was the way the spacelings flew. "Donderevo wants you to know space isn't dead," Horrocks panted hoarsely. "A living frontier -- alive and infinite. Rockets can't -- can't reach it usefully. We've got to have -- propulsion -- with no reaction mass." In the dream he tried to tell the wounded man that any sort of jetless drive was forbidden by the Third Law of Motion. "Wrong -- " the wounded man interrupted him. "Spacelings -- fly! Donderevo said -- tell you that. All you need to know. Except the fact -- your father taught him. The historic effect -- effect of the free front -- " Horrocks coughed, spraying Ryeland with flecks of red. "Sorry!" he gasped. "Mean frontier. Closed frontier -- closed society. That's the Plan." He paused to cough again, turning painfully away from Ryeland. "Open frontier -- that's the reefs. Freedom. Forever!"  Ryeland needed time to understand that agonized summary of a fundamental fact, but later, when he began to grasp it, he thought he knew what had happened to his father. The Plan existed to regiment the closed society that had spread to the last frontier that rockets could reach. His father had seen the infinite promise of the new frontier of interstellar space -- but even a dream of that open frontier was treason to the closed world of the Plan. "Donderevo knows Planner -- Creery," Horrocks finished faintly. "Thinks we can trust -- trust him to understand -- that man is .more -- important than the Plan. If we can show him a working drive. But he says -- he says trust -- nobody -- nobody else." E ven after his message was delivered, Horrocks didn't want a doctor. He let Ryeland give him a eubiotic emergency shot from the survival kit that he had stolen from the Cristobal Colon, and hid in the rest room across the corridor before Angela Zwick came back with the sandwiches and coffee. By the time Ryeland had got rid of her, Horrocks was gone. The message was unbelievable -- but Horrocks had left the red-spattered space bag. Ryeland dumped it on his desk, and shivered with wonder. There was a great, glowing octahedral crystal of carbon coral. There were dazzling stereos of reefs and pyropods and spacelings. There was a notebook of Ron Donderevo's observations, proving that the spacelings really flew without reaction. Forced to believe, Ryeland's mind reacted. As Donderevo had told Horrocks to tell him, all he needed to know was the fact that the spacelings flew. With that simple datum actually accepted, the rest was obvious. As a mathematician, he knew that equations had to balance. As a physicist, however, he had learned that the balancing quantity might be physically elusive. The neutrino, required to balance the equations of a nuclear reaction, was one such example. In his own equations of mass-creation and space-expansion, which described the Hoyle effect, the new mass equalled x -- an unknown quantity, more elusive than even the neutrino, which he had failed to identify in nature. B...t now he saw it. Printed in the simple fact of the spaceling's flight, it was plain as the fact that two plus two is four. The unknown quantity which equalled the new mass in his equations was at last identified. It was momentum! The momentum of the expanding universe, which ultimately pushed the receeding galaxies beyond the velocity of light! With a professional satisfaction, he noted that the Third Law of Motion had not been violated. It had simply been transformed. The kinetic energy of the flying spaceling was balanced by a precisely equivalent energy of new mass. The reaction was governed by the classical equation of energy and mass, E mc#. The enormous last factor, the squared velocity of light, meant that a tiny mass was the equivalent of enormous kinetic energy. That was what had made his x so hard to identity. On its longest jetless flight, a spaceling would add only an imperceptible breath of new hydrogen to the cloud of atoms that its own motion had created. L ocked alone in his office. Ryeland went to work. A surging elation had swept away all his fatigue, and even the fear that Horrocks had brought. That single substitution of momentum for the unknown quantity in his own cosmological equations had given him the theory. A simple transformation described the field conditions required for the creation of new mass and the equivalent momentum. The problems of material and design were more troublesome, but by Sunday noon he had set up the complete specifications for a reactionless propulsion system with an effective Suddenly hungry and groggy, he stumbled across the hushed dimness of the tunnel to wash his face in the laboratory that had not been scrubbed since Horrocks had sprayed the basin with blood. He ate the last dry beef algae sandwich, and the last bitter drops of cold yeast coffee and went to sleep in his chair, wondering dully how to go about reaching Planner Creery without trusting anybody else. He woke early Monday morning with a stiff neck and the fading recollection of a nightmare in which he had been running with Horrocks from the Plan Police. He hid the space bag behind a filing cabinet, stuffed the blood-sprayed teletapes into the incinerator, and packed his specifications and the stereos in his briefcase. Two hours before the time for Angela and Oporto to come, he hurried away, into the maze of graywalled tunnels that housed all the linked computers of the Planning Machine and the working quarters of the Planner's staff. IF Trust nobody... The tunnels were dim and empty. Cool air roared here and there from the ducts. The Monday morning white-collar rush hadn't begun, but now and then he met a maintenance man in gray coveralls. It was strange to think of the solid miles of Earth above, when he had the key to the stars in his hands. Though he had never been to the Planner's office, he knew the way. Outside the automatic elevator, a guard looked at him sharply and waved him on past the warning He was not a Risk. He wore no security collar. Outside the Planner's suite, another guard studied his badge and tapped the number into a teletype. Waiting for the Machine to answer, Ryeland held his breath. But the guard looked up from the clattering machine, with a reluctant respect easing his official frown. "Go in, sir." A teletype girl in the waiting room wanted to know his business. He informed her that he had a confidential report for Planner Creery. She wanted to know the nature of it. When he insisted that it was too confidential for any ears except the Planner's, she made an appointment for him to see an executive associate. The executive associate was a huge, blue-faced frog of a man. A polished wood slab on his desk was impressively lettered: General Rudolph Fleemer. His bulging eyes were sharp, with a quick curiosity about Ryeland's confidential report. Unfortunately, Planner Creery had not returned from a weekend cruise with his family. He would doubtless be in his office later in the week, but even then pressure of accumulated work would be extreme. Although Planner Creery was well aware that Ryeland's distinguished achievements in helical field engineering had been useful to the Plan, the extent of his duties forced him to delegate most responsibilities to subordinates. General Fleemer implied that people who refused to trust the Planner's associates were seldom able to see the Planner himself. Reluctantly, when he saw that he could do no better, Ryelands left a message stating that his business involved Ron Donderevo and a new space propulsion system. General Fleemer promised sullenly to signal him later in the week, if Planner Creery chose to see him. Noon had passed before Ryeland got back to office. If Oporto and the teletype girl had come to work, he saw no sign of them. The bloodspattered space bag was still in place behind the filing cabinet, and a long yellow strip of teletape from the untended machine was piling up on the floor. He locked the office door and looked around for a place to hide his specifications for the jetless drive. There was no space behind his reference books. The gap between the filing cabinet and the wall was already dangerously conspicuous. His desk had no drawers. In fact, he reflected, there was no room in the Plan for personal secrets or private documents. He found no hiding place -- none better than his memory. He was dropping the specifications into the incinerator slot, when he heard the loud impatient knocking on his door... A gain in the dream he was an buried recreation center. The suites on both sides of him were occupied by disloyal surgeons who had been trapped in some plot against the Plan. The therapy room down the tunnel held the unplanned thing that they had assembled from scraps of waste tissue, which raved insanely in its straps and bandages while it was alive. Then the surgeons were gone. There was only Horrocks, in the next suite, and Oporto in the one across the corridor. He was seldom aware even of them, because the stewards kept him most of the time in the therapy room where the junk man had died. He was strapped to the couch, with the iron collar on his neck and electrodes clamped to his shivering flesh. Merciless light blazed down on his face. The white-smocked fat therapist stood over him, wheezing questions in a soft apologetic voice. What was the message that Horrocks had brought him from Ron Donderevo? Where were fusorians and pyropods and spacelings? What was the way to build a jetless drive? At first he could have answered, but a burning shock from the collar IF paralyzed his voice whenever he tried to speak. Even when he was trust anybody with what he knew, they wouldn't let him say a word. They gave him no chance to understand, left him no will even to dream of escape. Donderevo? Reefs of space? Jetless drive? The soft insistent voice and the agony went on, until all his past was lost in a fog of pain and insane contradiction. Even when the collar didn't shock him, he didn't try to speak. He didn't even try to think of the answer. His mind had been erased. XX R yeland awoke, blinking against a glare of light and found a man in white bending over him. It took him a long time to understand that it was not Dr. Thrale, but Donderevo; longer still to realize that the crystal glint and glowing color of the cave was right and natural, so sure he had been that he would find himself in the aseptic white of the therapy room. He was in the opetating cradle. The straps on his body had been loosened. Things began to click into place. There was Donderevo, yes, and the girl with her back to him undoubtedly was Donna Creery, and the other figure -- He sat up involuntarily, eyes wide. For the third figure in the room was not Quiveras. It was a Technicorps officer, watching him with the calculation of a poised cobra. With a sudden spasm of desperate hope and fear Ryeland's hands came up to his neck. They touched the familiar hard curve of the collar. He still wore it. He was still a Risk, his "e hanging on the whim of every guard with a radar pistol or on the flipover of a relay in the distant synapses of the Machine. "What -- " For a moment his voice was paralyzed, still half in the dream, remembering the violence of the shocks that had conditioned him not to speak the truths he knew. But he fought to get words out: "What went wrong?" Donderevo said compassionately, "We were too late. Before we had more than started the spacelings let us know the Plan cruiser was nearby. It breached the bubble around this reeflet. We sewed you up, and now we are all back in the Plan of Man." Unconsciously his hand touched the scar on his own throat. "I'm sorry about your collar. Ryeland," he said, "but if I'm not mistaken it will be no long time before I'm once more wearing one of my own." The nurse turned, and Ryeland had his third shock. For it was not Donna. "Where is she?" he demanded. "Safe," rumbled Donderevo. "Or as safe as any one under the Plan. Her father was in the cruiser. She's with him now." "May I -- " Ryeland had to stop and gulp, because a memory of agony had paralyzed his throat. "May I see them?" "I'll tell them you're awake," m Donderevo said. He moved toward the doorway, and turned back with a hesitant expression. "I had better warn you that you can't expect much help from Creery. You see, he's not the Planner any longer. In fact, he's wearing a collar of his own." R yeland was sitting on the edge of the portable cradle with a sheet wrapped around him, when Donna brought her father into that crystal-lighted cave of space. Though the former Planner was smiling tenderly at his daughter, his face looked pinched and gray. He wore the thin denim of a Risk. The chrome-steel collar shimmered with reflected crystal glints. Two officious men followed Creery. One was a stocky Technicorps colonel, who looked bleakly Satanic with his radar horns. The other was a communications sergeant, with a gray-cased portable teleset slung to his body. Donna nervously repeated what Donderevo had already told Ryeland about her father's arrival. "I was hoping," she finished wistfully, "that Father could unlock your collar." "Not even my own." Creery's stiff smile faded. "You can see that things have changed Our old friend General Fleemer is acting Planner now. I have been reclassified, and assigned to this hazardous special mission." He glanced uncomfortably back at the colonel. Donna's face twitched. She whispered, "What's your special mission, Father?" "It is concerned with the Plan of Man," he said. "You see, since the Machine had been reliably informed of the limitless extent of the Reefs of Space, it has been projecting a new phase of the Plan. In this second phase, the abundant resources of the space frontier will end any need for the strict regimentation of the original Plan. Unfortunately, this second phase cannot begin until the new frontier is actually open to the masses of mankind. Obviously, that requires a reactionless space drive." The former Planner paused. His haggard eyes looked sharply at Donderevo, regretfully at Ryeland, blankly at the Technicorps colonel. "General Fleemer managed to convince the Machine that I was no longer competent," he "said. "I suppose you know about the numerous failures of the helical field equipment that you had designed." His dull stare came back to Ryeland. "Fleemer laid all those disasters at my feet. As a result of such apparent executive errors, I was replaced. "I insisted on one last chance to find a reactionless drive. I had enough power left so that Fleemer was unable to block the assignment. That's my mission now. I saw the spacelings that came out to meet the cruiser. I must learn how they fly!" His voice was hopeless. "If Ryeland couldn't find the answer," Donderevo said, "I doubt that it exists." "But -- I found it!" T he collar was very tight. For a moment Ryeland's throat was paralyzed again. The old fog of agony and contradiction thickened in his mind. He looked at the man and at Donna. Her smile was sunshine, clearing the fog. He remembered. He could speak. He explained his theory of the equivalence of momentum and new mass, which related the flight of the spacelings to the expansion of the universe. He recited the specifications that he had memorized before the Plan Police burst into his office on that lost Monday. The colonel watched, a skeptical Satan, while they discussed the design and dictated the specifications to the sergeant at the portable teleset. They waited, while the message was digested by the special section of the Planning Machine aboard the cruiser. Time passed -- while slow radio pulsed the message to Earth. Ryeland looked at Donna Creery's anxious face -- and remembered the bandaged patchwork man who had raved and died in the therapy room down the tunnel from his suite in the recreation center. Then he himself was not the junk man! That part of Angela's story had been a malicious lie! The teleset clattered. Ryeland crowded with the former Planner and Donderevo and the girl to read the tape. Officiously, the colonel waved them back. He peered at the tape, and reached to finger the buttons of his radar gear. But his expression changed. T knew it, Mr. Planner." His voice was suddenly smoothly affable. 'T knew that Fleemer was nothing better than a conniving traitor, who will certainly get his comeuppance now! Any man with a spark of wit knew that jetless flight had to come." Grinning, he offered his hand to Creery. 'T want to be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Planner. Andyou, too, Mr. Ryeland. The special section of the Planning Machine in the cruiser has completed its preliminary evaluation of your invention. 'Tt has relayed a message to the master complex of the Machine on Earth, alerting it to prepare the Plan of Man for transition to the second phase, in which the freedom of the space frontier will render our present strict security controls both impossible and unnecessary. "As a first step toward the effectuation of that second phase, it is propagating a radar pulse -- " Ryeland heard a click at his throat. His collar snapped open. As if moved by the same pulse, the girl stepped forward and into his arms. Together they moved out of the cave into the faerie shimmer of the reeflet. To one side hung the great gray mass of the Plan cruiser, no longer an enemy. Beyond lay the stars. Tte stars. The limitless frontier for mankind -- the space between suns, where hydrogen is constantly born to make new worlds, as freedom is constantly born in the hearts of men. whispered Ryeland. And the girl said firmly: "Our IF  Novelette A Loot beyond avarice, raw materials past courting -- there had to be a catch! I A Aylward of Copernicus Observatory," said Angus. Up td that point, Captain Martinu had seriously been considering leaving the party. The band was much too loud. The dancing was far too energetic for someone like himself, who was used to long periods of free fall that wasted the muscles. And the promise of interesting people to talk to, with which Angus had persuaded him to come along, had not been fulfilled. Now, though, he felt a sudden stir of interest as he shook the hand of the short, bespectacled, balding scientist. He said, "You mean you're the Aylward they named the Aylward Field after?" "Er -- " Aylward looked uncomfortable. "Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I am." "As a result of which," Angus said, IF 'I owe you my life, among other things." He ran his hand through his shock of coarse black hair, which stuck up from his head, in the currently fashionable Fijian style, like a chimney-sweep's brush. Martinu said, "And I owe you a up a buster with your field in the old Castor, when I was a junior engine tech." Rather diffidently, Aylward eyed the other's immaculate uniform. "And stayed on in the space service? he said. "Isn't that unusual?" "Oh, unique!" Martinu agreed with a trace of pride. "I'm the only man in the service who's picked up a buster and not immediately bought himself out of a career job. I say, is there anything I can do for you?" Aylward seemed to be in some distress, his breathing deep and stertorous, his shoulders hunching forward. He said, "You can help me to a chair, if you will. I've been on Luna for the past seventeen years. Full gravity makes me terribly tired." Martinu hastily took the professor's arm. He was in top physical condition -- had to be -- but even so he was quickly exhausted by a couple of hours on his feet, so he could appreciate Aylward's discomfort. Angus, as always, had vanished the moment he saw a conversation starting and gone to spark another one elsewhere. There was a vacant double seat in the nearest of the alcoves off the dance floor. Martinu headed for it. There was a couple engaged in violent love-making on the other seat but he ignored their looks of irritation as he sat Aylward down. He said, "Let me get you a drink." "That's very kind of you," said Aylward. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief matching his Mexican-styled cummerbund. "A long cool one, for choice." "Will do," said Martinu, and went in search of a waiter. He was on his way back with the drinks when Angus, a look of anxiety on his long face, pushed through a cluster of other guests and caught his arm. "Martinu, I guess I should warn you about old Aylward. I mean, he's a nice guy and a genius and all that. But like a lot of geniuses he's a bit nutty on one point. Unfortunately you've hit it right away." "What? Busters?" "Yes. He has a perfectly absurd theory about what they are and where they come from. If you get him started on it, he'll bend your ear all night." Martinu shrugged. "If he hasn't got a right to theorize about busters, who has? Besides, the Aylward Field got me a share in one. I reckon listening to him for an hour or two is a cheap price to pay for that." "Damn it, I had to tell him what a buster was, once!" Angus made sweeping gesture which spilled his drink over the back of his hand. Fishing for a handkerchief to dry it, he went on, "In fact, if it hadn't been for me -- " Something in Martinu's expression warned him. He broke off "I guess I told you about that. Sorry. IF But don't say I didn't warn you, will you?" Martinu grinned and walked on. T he lovers had gone, presumably in search of more privacy. He set a tall frosted glass beside the professor and sat down himself. "I got you julep," he said. "Is that all right?" "Perfect." Aylward produced a length of tubing and dropped one end into the glass to save himself the effort of holding it up while he drank. "What are you having?" "Slivovitz," said Martinu. "Sort of homage to my Balkan ancestry. Anyway, what brings you back to Earth after such a long time, professor?" "Oh, someone seems to be infringing the patents on the Field," Aylward answered. "Angus told me I was needed, so I came down. He's my agent, you know -- and very good he is. I don't know how I'd manage without him. I've always found the world of commerce far more complicated than any problem in astrophysics, because it's easier to improve your equipment than yourself." "You haVe quite a setup at Copernicus, don't you? They tell me it's the best equipped observatory in the System, and you financed practically all of it yourself. May I inquire -- does the Field bring you in a good income?" Aylward gave a tired smile. "Excellent! I never expected so much return for so little effort." He drew out the tube from his now half-empty glass and began to run it absently between his fingers. "People sometimes ask me," he went on, "why I stick at my job when I'm wealthy enough to live in luxury on Earth. I think you'll probably understand me when I say I think I made a sensible decision." He cocked any eyebrow at Martinu. The captain suddenly found himself liking Aylward a lot. He smiled, and as he nodded agreement his hair bobbed around his face. It was too soft for the Fijian style, so he had had to settle for curls like a Queen Anne wig. Being used to a free-fall crewcut he found it a permanent irritation. Damn these silly Earthside fads! "I wouldn't even have come to this party but for Angus's insistence, Aylward went on. "I depend completely on him, as I said, and he does have this tendency to fly off into space over the littlest things... We were on the Algol together when we located the buster which started the whole thing. Did he ever tell you the story?" Almost, Martinu said, "He's told everybody!" But he checked himself. For one thing, Angus's version of the story had probably been colored by the passage of time, while Aylward's might give a different slant. And for another, though the professor's tone had been conventionally light, Martinu sensed that he was actually aching to find someone to listen to him. Angus had more than likely gone around warning all his other guests about Aylward's obsession with the buster problem. He set his glass down on his knee. "That was when Rusch was in com# mand, wasn't it?" he said. "Yes, I'd very much like to hear about it." II T he radar tech first class at number three screen held his breath for a long moment. When he let it out, it was to speak in a voice shaky with excitement. "Buster, sir!" he said. The lieutenant on the other side of the room whipped around and bounded over with a hard kick at the far wall. He caught the back of the tech's chair with one hand and hung there floating, his eyes wide. "Where -- where do you see it?" he demanded. "There, sir." The tech put his finger on a large green blip near the center of the screen. "It broke through about ten seconds ago. I saw it arrive. And the range and mass are exactly right." He hardly waited for an answer before shouting to the orderly at the phone desk. "Green, get me a line to the bridge!" "Aye-aye, sir," said the orderly unemotionally. The lieutenant turned to the screen again. He said, "What's the range?" "About four and a half kil, sir. Right under our feet." The lieutenant whistled. "Well, for sure it didn't sneak up on us. Read it for relative velocity, will you?" The tech slid cross-hairs over the screen, centered on the blip, pressed the switch of the doppler integrator. They waited the necessary five seconds and a figure went up on the dial. "Six hundred," the lieutenant said "Hasn't settled into its natural orbit yet. I think -- " He was going to say he thought the tech was right, but the communications orderly interrupted. "Bridge, sir!" "Chuck it over," said the lieutenant, and picked the phone put of the air as it soared across the room. He continued into it, "Ahmed, screen-room watch, sir. One of my techs thinks we're on a buster." "Hah!" said Captain Rusch skeptically. "How are we doing for white whales this week?" "It showed up without warning on number three screen at four and a half kilomiles, sir. We haven't had a chance to check its orbit yet, but its relative velocity is only six hundred. There was a pause. At length Rusch grunted. "Right, I'll get a 'scope on it," he said. "Bearing?" "Oh seven-six and a half, sir." "Thank you. Lieutenant. I'll let you know the verdict. Don't get to worked up till we're sure, will you?" That, of course, was a pious hope, Rusch reflected as he gave the bridge phone back to his own communications orderly. He could tell from the expressions on the faces around him. Even the normally placid Commander Gabrilov, who had been close enough to hear what Ahmed said, was showing excitement. "Okay," Rusch said. "O-kay. I don't have to say it again." Gabrilov gave a shamefaced grin lie IF and pushed himsell over to the 'scope controls. 'Oh-seven... six and a half," he said under his breath as he set them. "Four and a half kil... Yes, there's something there all right." "Get it on the screens," Rusch said. "Come on now!" He felt his heart pounding faster as he glanced at the big screen mounted over the pilot board at the forward end of the bridge. A click. An ill-defined, misshapen object appeared in the center of the square frame. It could have been anything out of the asteroid belt. There was a long silence. At last Gabrilov said, "Do you think it could really be a buster?" "Well, why the hell don't you take steps to find out?" Rusch snapped. Gabrilov colored. "Sorry, sir!" he mumbled. He barked at the communications orderly. "Tell Warrant Officer Fisher to draw power for a laser beam! Ask Lieutenant Ahmed to stand by for spectroanalysis!" "Aye-aye!" said the orderly fervently, his eyes bright. While they were waiting, Rusch glanced at Gabrilov. He said as though, there had been no interruption, "It could be a buster, of course. It's some while since the last one was found, but there have been forty-five of fhe things, and they turned up all over the System. One was found in a lunar equilateral, wasn't it? But even if this is a buster, you've got to remember one thing." "What?" "They may not all be worth picking up. Some of them may only bo lumps of iron, for instance. It hasn't happened yet, but it's possible." Gabrilov bit his lip and looked lugubrious. The communications orderly said, "Sir! Screen room!" Rusch seized the phone. Gabrilov came diving over to hover beside him. "Get this, sir!" Ahmed's voice said. "Spectroanalysis shows iron -- cobalt -- nickel -- " Gabrilov pulled a face, looking down at the floor. "But also!" Ahmed said triumphantly. "Also silver, gold, uranium thorium, platinum, osmium, iridium..." He went on, but Rusch had lowered the phone. "Number forty-six," he said quietly. W hatever the reason for all that shouting and banging and laughing, Aylward wished they would stop it and let him concentrate. He was trying to cope with more figures than his portable calculator could handle, and running side factors in his head always gave him a headache. The door of his cabin slammed back and Angus burst in, frantic with excitement. The chain of figures vanished into limbo and Aylward clapped his hand to his face. "For heaven's sake, what are you playing at?" he snarled. "Didn't you hear?" said Angus, braking himself on the far wall with his foot and bouncing back towards Aylward. "What are you doing?" "Trying to resolve some survey data -- if you'll kindly give me the chance to finish the job." Aylward spoke with heavy sarcasm; he was an old-young man of thirty-five with glasses and an expression which was usually mild but now was thunderous. "I never heard such a racket!" "But we've picked up a buster!" Angus exclaimed. Aylward sighed and pushed his papers under a clip to hold them to the table before sliding his chair back in its guides. "Is that serious?" he said. "Does it take long?" Angus hooked a leg under the tabletop and shook his head pityingly. "Are you trying to say you don't know what a buster is?" he demanded incredulously. "You can carry an ivory-tower pose too far, you know!" "All right, tell me what it is," Aylward snapped. Angus rolled his eyes, but shrugged and complied. "Nobody knows what they are -- exactly. They're lumps of matter that apparently drop from nowhere. Radar doesn't show them till they're well within detector range, and they think this may have something to do with the fact that they're fuller of high-number radioactives than a pudding is ot plums." "Oh, yes!" Aylward said. "Of course Tve heard of them! But there haven't been any for some time, have there? What are they like?" "Turn your screen on, and you'll see one. Captain Rusch had the 'scope image piped in for everyone to look at." Aylward did so. The screen lit with a knife-sharp picture of a roughly spherical object, scarred across by the sweep of the highpowered laser beam. It was approximately a hundred feet in diameter. Lights from the ship were playing on it now, and made it gleam against the black depths of space. "I wonder how much we'll get," Angus said in an awed tone. "Come again?" #"These things contain fabuA lous riches!" Angus gave him a supercilious glance. "So your ignorance doesn't show too much, listen and I'll give you the background. "The firt one was found by the Aurora about six years ago. They couldn't believe their eyes when they saw it drop out of nowhere -- a hundred-foot ball of concentrated wealth. They got thousands of tons of platinum out of it, gold, silver, uranium, and so many diamonds they practically bankrupted the commercial manufacturers. All the rest -- there've been forty-five to date -- have been cast in the same mould. The precious metals have more or less flooded the market, but the demand for radioactives is still high, and everyone who's found a buster has become rich for life. "After the Aurora case there was a gold rush to the asteroid belt -- no, don't interrupt, let me finish! But you don't seem to find busters with the ordinary planetoids. They showed up air over the System. And another odd thing -- this is the first to be discovered in some years, alIF though at one time they were being found at the rate of about two a month. Of course, this is probably a statistical accident; they're virtually undetectable until you're right on top of them." Aylward said, "All right, all right! I remember no. They predicted chaos. But in the event we absorbed the impact pretty well." "So well you don't seem to have noticed it at all," Angus commented dryly. Aylward ignored the jab. "Just a second," he said. He was frowning, for no reason Angus could think of. "If forty-five were found, and they were coming at an average two per month, the rush lasted two years. You don't know the dates of the first and last reported findings, do you?" "Huh?" Angus blinked. "Well, the Aurora got the first on twenty-seventh April, eight-six -- uh -- and the Capella got the forty-fifth some time in March of eighty-eight. Middle of March -- I think the seventeenth. Why?" Aylward said, "And it's ninety-two now!" He began frantically unstrapping himself from his chair. "Hey! Where are you off to in such a hurry?" Aylward looked grim. "Not being a seasoned space-traveler," he said, "I was a bit worried before making this trip about the number of ships that have been lost lately. I looked into it fairly closely to make sure I had a statistical chance of getting home." "What's that got to do with -- ?" "Since you have such a good memory for dates, you can tell me when the current run of losses started. They said thirty had gone missing in the past four years -- more than in the preceeding two decades!" Bewildered, Angus said, "Sure I can tell you. The Dubhe was lost on the Venus run some time between tenth March and first April of eighty-eight." "And the next ship to go?" "The Lucifer, She vanished -- " He broke off and bit his lip. "About two weeks later," Alyward said, kicking himself through the door. Angus hung where he was for a moment; then he gave a gasp and dived in the other's wake. Ill T he door of the bridge slid back with a squeal of complaint. Rusch turned. When he saw who the intruder was, he frowned. It was all very well to say that young Aylward was potentially the greatest living authority on theoretical astrophysics; it was all very well for him to want to make surveys distant from the sun -- but on simple principle Rusch disapproved of non-service personnel shipping on anything other than a proper passenger liner. However, the rosy glow attendant on the discovery of a buster had mellowed him to the point at which he did not even ask brusquely who had authorized Aylward to trespass on the bridge. He merely said, "Yes, Mr. Aylward? What do you want?" "Angus tells me you've located what they call a buster," Aylward said. His face was pale, and his eyes were very wide behind his glasses. "Yes, we have," Rusch agreed. A thought struck him, and he called to Gabrilov on the other side of the room. "I forgot to order 'splice the mainbrace, Mr. Gabrilov! I imagine the men are expecting it." "Aye-aye, sir!" "Captain!" Alyward said desperately. Rusch turned a frosty eye on him; he had jumped to the obvious conclusion. "D o n't worry, Mr. Aylward. There's enough valuable material in that thing out there to keep all of us in comfort for the rest of our natural lives. And spatial law provide that non-service personnel are entitled to two-thirds of a crewman's share. All we can do right now is stake our claim, of course, and with luck tow it into orbit at our destination. But we'll start the mining as soon as -- " "Captain, if I were you I'd be very chary even of staking a claim, let alone mining that thing!" Aylward regretted that force of habit had made him draw his feet down to the floor, because the captain was floating a foot off it, and so looked a long way down at him. There was a frigid silence. At last Rusch said. "Would you like to explain yourself, Mr. Aylward? If you can, that is." "Well, it seems to me -- " Aylward hesitated how to make this clear? Then he plunged on. "Isn't it a fact that no buster has been reported for four years, though there was a positive spate of them before that? And didn't the start of the current run of ships lost in space -- thirty known vessels and who knows how many others belonging to prospectors and freebooters -- didn't this coincide with the end of the stream of reported busters?" "By God, that's right!" The exclamation came from Gabrilov. "I'm sorry, sir," he added to Rusch. 'But the Dubhe was the first to go since they perfected atomics. And I have every reason to remember that she vanished about a fortnight fter the forty-fifth buster -- the Capellas. I was due to be aboard, but I was held back by an ear infection." "The odds against this are tremendous," Aylward said. He saw that Gabrilov's interruption had impressed Rusch, and was in haste to seize his momentary advantage. "Which is why I think it would be terribly dangerous to come too close to the buster. Uh -- what exactly is involved in what you call 'staking a claim' ?" "Just a moment!" Rusch said. "Are you envisaging that the buster might be unstable and blow up?" "Well..." Aylward looked at the floor. "There's an awful lot of reactive material in it, they tell me." "Hmph! It can't be very sensitive, then. We spectroanalyzed it with a laser beam intense enough to boil some of its surface off. What do you think, Gabrilov?" G abrilov was silent for a few seconds. At length he said, "Well, sir -- we don't lose anything by being careful. To stake our claim, we'd normally match velocities and coast in close, wouldn't we? We're still calculating whether we have IF enough reaction mass to take the thing in tow. But I don't think we have, so we'll have to send someone over and plant an identification beacon -- but much of the surface will be hot. I see several reasons why we should stand well off and take time out to program a remote-controlled missile to act as a marker." Rusch pondered. "Yes, it'd be cutting things fine to try and get something that massive into orbit at the end of this trip. I was working on the assumption that all we could do would be to mark her with a longlife beacon and come back under no load to fetch her... Very well, Mr. Aylward. I'll arrange to send out an unmanned lifeboat with the beacon in it. There's enough iron in the buster for electromagnets to get a grip. And to satisfy your qualms, we'll keep our distance." "Thank you, Captain," Aylward said. He was surprised to find, now that he'd made his point, that he was shaking all over and his forehead was slippery with sweat. They tied the lifeboat controls directly in to the pilot board on the bridge, and Gabrilov took charge. On the screen was a split-image projection: one screen showed the view from the lifeboat itself, the other the picture from the side of the ship as the lifeboat curved outwards towards the buster. Almost a quarter of an hour crept by on leaden feet as Gabrilov delicately maneuvered the tiny lifeboat closer and closer to the buster. Abruptly a tiny buzzer on the control board beeped and kept on beeping. "A hundred miles," Gabrilov said, not looking away from the screen in which the buster had grown progressively from a mere spot of light to a sizeable globe. "The homer has picked it up. Shall I just let it go its own way now?" "How far above the surface will the magnets take charge?"' "From about ten miles they ought to give a soft enough landing for the beacon to survive undamaged." "Then try and match velocities with the lifeboat about ten miles off." Gabrilov raised an eyebrow and looked worried, but he moved the main jet control slightly. The image of the lifeboat in the other half of the screen showed a spurt of reaction mass. More time limped by. At last Gabrilov gave a precisely timed touch to the braking jet control, and sat back. "Very nice," Rusch said under his breath. "Yes, she's going down." Aylward wondered if his heartbeats were audible to those around him; he was almost deaf with the rush of blood in his ears, and he was breathing fast and urgently. On the screen, the buster grew to moonsize, Earth size, and still larger; by now the lifeboat and the buster could no longer be seen separately from the ship without high magnification. The beeping grew to an intolerable unbroken buzz and stopped short. "Well, she's down," Gabrilov said unnecessarily. "And it looks as though -- " He got no further. On both halves of the screen there was suddenly an eruption of incredible, sun-like light, as though a miniature star had been born. #rew's getting restive, sir," Gabrilov said, putting back the phone. "That was the MO with the casualty statement. One man was watching through binoculars. He's going to need new eyes when we land, and a man in the nav section was looking down a 'scope, and he'll need one new retina. The radar tech who first spotted it has gone hysterical and needed sedation, and we have at least half a dozen cases of radiation sickness incipient." Rusch grunted. He had been more affected by their narrow escape than he wanted to reveal. He said, "It seems to me some of us joined the service for no better reason than the chance of sharing in a buster! The thing would have blown us to glory if we'd gone much closer. Tell 'em they're lucky to be alive. Did the thing leave any debris, by the way?" "Not a scrap," said Gabrilov gloomily. "Oh, there's probably some dust hell-bent for the stars, but nothing big enough to pick up." "It can't have been a total-conversion reaction!" The idea seemed to hit Rusch like a physical blow. 'Np -- or even at this distance, we wouldn't have survived to talk about it." Gabrilov drew himself down to a chair and formed his body into a posture as though resting on the seat. After a moment, he said, "Lieutenant Ahmed was talking about space-mines. Weapons of war. At first I thought he was just suffering from the after-effects of seeing his dreams of riches go bang. But the more I reflect, the more I'm inclined to wonder." across the room at Aylward. "What do you think?" he demanded. Aylward shook his head seriously. "I don't think it's war. I mean -- well, we haven't suffered much material damage. It's cost us thirty or so ships, but we have three and a half thousand in regular service. The loss of experienced space personnel is probably more serious, but still it's a fleabite. And besides, why should... someone who can afford to disguise a mine with thousands of tons of metal, and induce a reaction as efficient as the one we saw, waste effort on sowing a few mines randomly in space? They could so easily make a job of it by launching a few into orbits intersecting Earth's. No, I don't think we have to invoke an enemy. My guess is that the busters are inherently unstable, being composed of such heavy elements. Conceivably they don't even belong in our order of space-time. Alteration of the nature of the space around them -- on the arrival in the vicinity of a large and massive object, such as a spaceship -- might upset their not very good equilibrium and blow them back into the continuum from which they came." He frowned deep ly. "And yet this leaves so many questions unanswered. Why, for instance, were many of them safely brought into orbits around humanoccupied worlds? I had it in the back of my mind that they might be IF contraterrene, but since some of them were -- uh -- hooked, this is out of the question. I think I'm going to give this matter some further investigation." "Well, we can't do much here," Rusch said heavily. "We have sick men on board who need planetside medical care, but even if we hadn't I'd order immediate planetfall. This news about busters is too urgent to keep to ourselves. Gabrilov!" "Sir?" "Get the nav section to program us an orbit that will take us in radio range of a government station as soon as possible, and then home. Have the men strap down for a turning maneuver. And you'd better have the MO issue decelerine, too. We're in a hurry!" IV M artinu looked regretfully at his empty glass, and realized as he did so that the gentle voice of Professor Aylward had stopped. With an effort he brought himself back to the present, eyeing the other with curiosity. One would never have taken him for such a damned good story-teller. "So that was how it all began," he said after a pause. Aylward was tying knots now in his length of tubing. He nodded. "Mark you," he said, "it wasn't easy to convince the authorities. I say. I'm sorry to have to ask you, but would you do me a favor." "Of course." "Well, I'd like another drink, and I don't feel up to fetching one." 'Oh, certainly!" Martinu pulled himself to his feet. His muscles complained a little, but he adjusted after a moment or two and walked off with their glasses to find a waiter again. He was feeling a little superior by the time he got back. After all, Aylward enjoyed at least some gravity most of his life, whereas a spaceman like himself had to cope with the change from no gravity at all to one full gee every time he landed on Earth. Handing Aylward his new drink, Martinu wondered whether it was genuine devotion to duty or some defect of personality which made the tubby man hide himself away on the far side of the moon. He suspected the latter, now he came to think about it. What a shame -- to be so outstanding in one narrow field, and yet basically incompetent in the most important field of all, that of being an ordinary person. With disconcerting insight Aylward said, "There's no need to be sorry for me, you know." Martinu choked on a mouthful of his drink and began to make frantic denials. Aylward ignored him. Staring at the dancers inexhaustibly whirling around the floor, he went on, "I pity you as much as you pity me, and both of us ought to pity the people here. Like mice, when the cat's away. Was he going to become maudlin, for heaven's sake? Martinu decided to change the subject as quickly as possible. He said, "You were saying something about convincing the authorities, professor." "Was I?" Aylward blinked; the alcohol was taking effect on him. "Ah, so I was! Yes, I remember a blockheaded idiot named Machin -- a bureaucrat if ever there was one -- who tried to make out that we'd concocted a plot to filch all future busters away from their rightful owners. Like most people, he needed to have his nose rubbed in the truth before he'd accept it. But for him, we could have saved the Sirrius #CT remember the SiriusV MarX tinu said. "I had friends on her. She found a buster within radio range of Luna Port -- " "And because of Machin and his like," Aylward interrupted, "it went right in to grab it, and was blown up with eight hundred people aboard. Too many people saw it happen with their own eyes, and went blind like the crewmen of the Algol, for that affair to be hushed up. "So they fell over backwards to make amends. I was given facilities for taking proper equipment to the spot when the next buster appeared. By the time the fifth or sixth one showed up. I'd worked out the theoretical pattern of the Field. They try and tell me it was difficult to do. but don't you believe it The math is simple enough. What did give trouble was getting the generating equipment down to portable size. But we managed it in the end, made it a commercial proposition -- . nd busters held no more terrors; we could stabilize them in our spacetime long enough to cut them up and separate out the radioactives." His s's were getting the least bit i#e slurred, and he was staring at his fingers as though unsure quite how many he could see. "Angus tells me," he went on after a pause, "that it might have been a very bad thing. It was the direct cause of the vast inflation we underwent -- when? -- oh, thirteen or fourteen years ago, because the market for precious metals was saturated. It's the cause of prices like five bucks for a cup of coffee and two hundred for a taxi ride. I remember I used to dream of having it get you? I bet Angus is spending to include the whole of the gaiety around them. Distantly in the background a theremin was playing a solo in imitation of a trumpet. Martinu nodded pontifically. "But of course it also cured us of the tendency to place arbitrary values on things," Aylward finished. "Now we prize only work invested as a backing for currency, and the uranium from the busters made cheap fission-power possible, so maybe the trade was a good one. Ah!" A waiter in search of empty glasses entered the alcove, and Aylward signaled to him. "Get the captain another!" he instructed. "And one of the same for me." Martinu hesitated, then shrugged. "Slivovitz," he told the waiter, who nodded and hurried away. A man and a girl, holding hands, looked in to see if the alcove was unoccupied, and on finding it wasn't moved away. The waiter returned with the fresh glasses. "Foof!" Aylward said, having IF gulped at his. "That's rather good." He lowered the glass cautiously beside him, then leaned back, sleepily half-closing his eyes. "Look at them," he said. "Three bell the cat?" Martinu, whose own wits were apparently slipping a little, said foggily, "I beg your pardon?" blind mice. Who'll bell the cat? " repeated Aylward with dignity. "Though there isn't a cat, that I know of. For 'Who'll bell the cat?' read 'The mouse ran up the clock'." No, it was no good. Martinu didn't try to follow that one. A ylward finished his drink, with an appreciative belch, and said, "I suppose mice don't do so badly, really. What were we talking about?" "Mice, apparently," Martinu said. "I was talking about mice," Aylward corrected. "We were talking about busters. This can't last, you know." "What can't last?" "All this!" said Aylward largely. He gestured. "Not just this party -- everything else too. All unconscious of their doom the little victims play. Tell me, do you think the human race is master of its fate, or do you believe, like some people, that we're property?" Martinu was relieved to hear a fairly sensible remark for a change. He considered the question. "That's one of Fort's speculations, isn't it? I -- well, I don't know." "I'll tell you," Aylward promised. "Do you think you're of value to anyone but yourself?" "Well, no." "You're lucky. So am I. Just think of all the poor people who think they do matter. How disappointed they'll be when they find they don't!" "When will that be?" Martinu said, feeling it was expected. "Oh, definitely some time. Do you know what a buster is? I mean, what it's for?" Martinu was finding this a little tedious. He wished he had taken Angus's advice. "Tell me," he requested resignedly. "I warn you, you won't believe me. Angus doesn't, and he's a typical hard-headed individual. None of the other people I've told has believed me either. Anyway, I'll tell you. You said you didn't know if we were property or not. Well, we aren't property. Because we aren't worth owning. We're just one hell of a nuisance. Did you ever find yourself bothered with mice?" Sheer politeness, nothing else, drove Martinu to bring to bear what concentration he had left. "When I was a kid," he said finally, "I recall my mother had a house full of them. But they never bothered me. I rather liked them -- except for the stink." "How did your mother get rid of them?" "Well, I guess we tried trapping them first. That didn't work for long -- the cunning so-and-so's soon learned to avoid the traps. So in the end we poisoned them." Another couple appeared at the entrance of the alcove, with their arms round each other They were too absorbed to notice that anyone else was present, and walked past the seat where Aylward and Martinu were towards the curtains hanging behind it. Glad of some distraction, Martinu glanced over his shoulder and saw that they had drawn one of the curtains back to reveal an open window; they were leaning on the sill and staring at the stars. He envied them. "All right," Aylward said. "Now if you wanted to do something like that to men, what would you use for baiting your traps?" "Pm sorry?" Martinu came back with a start. Aylward repeated the question. "Well," Martinu said, humoring him, "Pd use something either useful or precious." "Exactly. And you'd lay some groundbait first, to lure the unsuspecting victims to the traps when they were put down." Suddenly Martinu got it. He wondered why it had taken him so long, he said disgustedly. But after a moment he saw the amusing side of it -- and after all, Angus had warned him! He chuckled. "So they're mousetraps, and we're the mice!" he said. "Aat an idea! But aren't you overlooking one thing in your analogy. Howabout the poison?" "I was coming to that," said Aylward with equanimity. "And so, I judge, are the 'people' who planned the busters. When the mice started dodging the traps, did your mother latch on at once?" "No, we kept right on setting them for a while. It was only when they became a real pest we turned to poison." "Pre-cisely!" Aylward looked pleased. "I imagine that they -- whoever they are -- will decide that their traps aren't working any nore. Then someone will find a super-large, stable buster and bring it to Earth, and -- that will be that." A cold chill moved down Martinu's spine. Trying to ascribe it to the open window behind him, he said slowly, "Haven't you heard?" "Heard what?" "Mohammed Abdul in the Vega just brought in the first stable buster since the Capella'sl Parked it in orbit today! And -- and it's an outsize one, a giant!" Alyward's face, all of a sudden, went pasty-pale. He looked at Martinu and tried to speak, but couldn't. Behind them, the girl looking out the window said in a tone of puzzlement, "Honey, what's the time?" "Three o'clock. Why?" said her companion. "I thought it wasn't dawn yet. And that isn't even the east over there. But look how red the sky is Don't miss Worlds of Tomorrow! Complete story by Keith Laumer IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I just finished reading the July If, and I enjoyed it very much. Mightiest Qorn was one of the best Retief stories IVe read so far. I'm looking forward to more in this series. The Faces Outside was very good, and so was Down to the Worlds of Men, and I hope to see more by these two new writers. I didn't intend to start the serial until I had all the parts, but I accidentally got interested in it, and now I am eagerly awaiting the next issue. I fen joy all the features in If, especially the letter column. I have two small suggestions. First, why not print the approximate date the next issue goes on sale? It'd make it harder for non-subscribers to miss an issue. Second, please print the number of installment there will be in a new serial so the reader know what he's getting into. Outside of these small things, I hope If stays exactly the same. Keep up the good work on your fine magazine; it's one of my favorites. -- Arthur Horan # New York Avenue Brooklyn #, New York  You've got a good point about printing the number of installments a serial will take. We'll do it. Actually we plan to hold all future serials to two parts -- simply because four months is too long to ask you to wait! -- Editor,    Dear Editor: I wish to protest the suggestion of Mr. Norwood in the July issue of If, that you expand the letter column to five pages. A letter column is an untrustworthy and usually boring beast, which talks for extended periods on subjects of interest only to itself, and in a manner which often shows an ignorance of English grammar. If you must print readers' letters, you could at least show the editorial discrimination concerning them that you show toward your stories, printing only the outstandone, e.g., those of general interest. As a rule, an individuars opinions of a story are not of general interest when they are expressed in general terms of approval or disapproval. Specific, constructive criticism is valuable, but I fear that most letters are of value only to the editor, and should not find their way into print. I would suggest, then, that the letter column be included in the magazine only when you have received enough letters to make it worth the space, which would normally be used for a story. -- John T. Sapienza, Jr. Box #, # Walnut Street Philadelphia #, Pennsylvania #i   Dear Editor: I have a relevant if rather belated (belated because we always get the issues late over here) comment on You and Nostradamus, A bank of organs of the human body was predicted, and on a recent news bulletin it was announced that such a bank was operating here. Specifically, heart valves of young road crash victims were being used to replace worn-out organs of elderly people. One of the main difficulties appeared to be contacting of the relatives of the deceased within # hours -- after which the organs are useless. There was a statement that the bank was fast running out of supplies (but no mention of tatooing Another interesting item on the same bulletin was that doctors discussing quarantine procedures foresaw future difficulties with space vehicles and their men If has improved greatly in artwork, paper and printing recently. My main grievance is that there are no book reviews, which could easily be made room for by cutting out one of your shorter shorts, which are usually pretty poor. If is certainly becoming more readable, and you seem to provide fair Space Opera -- which is in itself a novelty. More and better, please! E. E. Smith and Heinlein's serials are good selling points, as well as the Retief series. -- Terene Bull #, Mansfield Road Northampton, England  Smith? Well, we have a couple coming up that will interest you. One, by this same E. E. Smith, is a little number called Skylark DuQuesne. We don't quite know when we'll publish it, because the manuscript isn't in yet -- but Doc is putting the finishing touches on it right now ! And now we're out of room again. Our 'first" story for this month is Long Day in Court by a fellow who hides under the pseudonym of "Jonathan Brand" and, under his real name, occupies a responsible position with a large university. This is his first fiction anywhere -- but not his last, because we've already bought morel Next issue? Philip K. Dick, Robert F. Young, a particularly fine two-part serial beginning by Poul Anderson -- yes, it's a good one. And we have a problem in semantics concerning it for you to chew over: The next issue of If contains two Poul Anderson stories, but only one of them is by Poul Anderson. How come? Well, come around next issue and see! -- Editor. IF If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers -- challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Address. Use coupon or order by letter if you wish A Correspondence Institution # South Dearborn St., Dept. #-# Please send me, free of rost or ohlifation, your illustrated booklet "Law Training for Leadership." Name Age... 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No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh mir iXamr Sirrr No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! # for #; #, #; #, with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor So! Cohen, Publisher David Perton, Production Manager John Assante, Art Director Cover by McKenna from Three Worlds to Conquer IF published bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial T here I sat, as the ancient saying goes, with my teeth in my mouth and my bare face hanging out. Clamped to my head was a telephone operator's transceiver; before me was a iarge microphone; at my left was Hizzoner the Editor, F. Pohl, Esq., similarly caparisoned; and across from us sat a personable man hight Ed Joyce, who runs this dio. The transceivers shrilled in our ears at intervals, and from Out There in Radioland people threw questions by telephone. It is a great sport for those among you who would like to know what a live decoy feels like when he recognizes, among the bulrushes, a shooter of sitting ducks. Actually, this fear wasn't realized that day, and we had some interesting questions and a pleasant time of it; but one question does, I think, deserve a little space here. IF be generally to -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe ... ! Scribe Q-X.M. i San Jose, California  Please send me the free book. The Mastery j i of Life, which explains how I may learn to j i use my faculties and powers of mind.  i Name i i  Address I  City ! WTe Rosicrucians Fred had been describing the ref life in the laboratory. "Don't you think," demanded the disembodied voice from Out There in Etc., "that to create life in the laboratory is to usurp God?" Answer: No. Man's hands are God's work; the work of man's hands is God's work. (I spoke -- and speak -- for myself, of course.) So much for the question and the questioner, but I'm glad he brought it up and equally glad to do likewise here. The recurring suggestion that there's some sort of Armageddon going on between Science and Religion is, I think, a straw man for bigots. That Science has at one time or another dealt certain kinds of Religion a heavy blow, I do not argue. I do believe, however, that what received the blow was this or that set of fixed convictions, and not Religion itself. And I think that the idea that Science and Religion must of necessity be opposed to one another is a throwback at least to the #th Century -- perhaps farther -- and that to engage in this battle any more is equivalent to, and as quaint as, re-fighting the War of the Roses. It seems to me that this Armageddon notion springs from a concept which is more than a little insulting to both camps. Reduced to its simplest terms, it reads: Knowledge is Finite. The rationale would seem to be this: that jnly God can know everything and do everything. That the more man knows, the closer he gets to knowing It all, the more his science does, the closer it gets to doing it all; and that the end product vould be an omniscient and omnipotent man who would usurp the place of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Now, if science proves anything at all, it is that both knowledge and power potentials are infinite. The ultimate in either can never be reached. For those who care to believe it, God already has this knowledge and potency. How then could there possibly be a conflict in the matter? Furthermore, science has demonstrated time and again, and will always demonstrate, that the production of solutions is the richest source of new problems. This too seems to be an infinite process. As the size of our body of knowledge grows, so does the size of the as-yetunknown. And ever shall. Many churchmen can take this calmly in stride, regarding it (in which I concur) as a living manifestation of the greatness of this infinite Cause. I know personally a good many scientists Being people, they present a cross-section of convictions and attitudes quite as varied as those of any people. In the area of religion, I have met scientists far more devout than I could ever want to be; I've met unmoved, habitual, Sundaybest churchgoers, backslid Orthodoxers; agnostics, atheists and peo pi who just don't care one way or another. There is no secret sect of guys with test-tubes out to destroy the temples. There are more anti-religionists outside Science than in it... and if God thinks about this at all, He probably feels that He made a cosmos quite roomy enough to contain them all. IF HHf mm.  :...S-WSV t'tl'fifo. 'v.V'i IF  Short Story Against the invaders from space man had a secret ally -- from the ocean's depths! M ack maintained later he had merely assessed the situation and acted accordingly -- something any dolphin could have done. The Admiral was just plain impressed -- and proved it -- and, for his part, Gabriel Anaka was overwhelmingly satisfied in having proved one point. The only ones who had no comment at all were the Tegels and the manta ray. First, there had been the spotting of the Tegel ship, a feat made easier (if not pleasanter) by its monstrous size. While the earth fleet circled it warily, the best minds available were put to work in an effort to establish communications and find out what the intentions were. The Tegels obliged, in their own time, and when the response to the beamed math-logic was received, the message didn't take long to decipher. It said in effect: "Your oceans interesting. Investigating." The signature symbols were roughly equivalent to "Tegels." While military minds pondered what was meant by "investigating," the Tegels provided the answer. They plopped down into the Gulf of Mexico a few miles off the Alabama coast "Starship Falls Off Alabama," one responsible southern daily informed its readers. The Admiral, with considerably less humor, dispatched a submarine to the scene. This move resulted in a long silence followed by a curt communication requesting "the absence of disturbances in our vicinity." There was no overt threat, but, as the Admiral pointed out, there was something ominous about the way "our" was used. Afro-Asian Commander Hoghenza recommended treaty talks. Soviet Commander Tushkin urged immediate attack. Indian Commander Bihar advocated neutrality for the Gulf of Mexico. The Admiral went in circles with them. Finally he got them to agree -- to investigate. And the best way to investigate, the Admiral concluded, was with Mack and Anaka. It was a conclusion arrived at with more than a few reservations. Mack was one of the ablest dolphins serving with Earth Fleet, but, to the Admiral's way of thinking, the eight-foot cetacean was a little too "unmilitary" in his attitude. Too independent, bluntly. He thought the same of Anaka, but there was no way of getting around it. A man-dolphin team was the best way to keep tabs on the Tegels, and Mack and the tall Polynesian had demonstrated their ability to get along. Demonstrated it too well in some cases, the Admiral thought. Item: On Venus, Anaka and Mack arrested on charge of trying to procure a gilled Venusian for immoral purposes. Case dismissed -- but widely reported -- after Mack argued it would have been impossible for either of them to be immoral with a lizard even if they had been sober. Item: Off Ganymede, Anaka and Mack demoted for polluting hydroponics tank in experiment to ferment algae alcohol. And so on. The Admiral sighed andsummoned the two to Fleet Headquarters. Anaka stood stiffly at attention, eyes fixed on a crack in the wall. "Furthermore," the Admiral continued sternly, "I want to impress on you the fact that the Tegels may be technologically equal -- or even superior -- to us." "Yes, Admiral." The Admiral picked up a model space cruiser and eyed it thoughtfully. "As for you, Mack," he said, turning toward the circular tank, "I don't think I need stress the importance of discipline in this matter." "Admiral... right. Not... needing... stress... point." The words came booming out of the amplifying unit surgically implanted by Mack's "mouth" -- the blowhole on top of his head. The Admiral's face turned red. He considered a lecture on what could happen -- what might happen -- if the Tegels turned out to be both militarily able and hostile at the same time. But he .changed his mind and stalked out of the room. IF 'V-, v T S v ' #A . A  ikv  ' n "Vft' s  The last thing he saw before he slammed the door was Anaka looking at Mack in admiration as the dolphin did a neat figure-eight on his back. # # X) oss ibly    dull... as... mulI let... head," Mack commented later as he towed Anaka around the Tegel ship in a wide circle for the fiftieth time. "Yeah," Anaka agreed disgustedly, hitting the stud to the small outside mask speaker with his chin. He loosened his grip on the plastic reins trailing from the halter around the dolphin's body. "Guess I'd better file a report." It was understood Mack wouldn't have to do it unless an emergency came up. It took him too long to form the difficult human words by vibrating the blowhole which served as his nostril. Anaka kicked his feet and headed for the surface, where the buoy with the tele-beam bobbed monotonously. The Admiral had demanded complete, concise reports. Anaka complied. "No activity around the ship," he advised. "And no sign of a Tegel yet." He signed off and went under again. When he reached the big dolphin, he hit him on the head playfully with a meaty fist. "Chow?" "Thinking... good... splendid... damfine... ideas." Anaka pulled a tube of "frogman's crud" from his belt and sucked on the tasteless combination of mushy fruit and protein. "You... enjoy?" "Sure." "Then... hoping... swallow... whole... thing," Mack rumbled, thwacking Anaka on the back cheerfully with his tail. Anaka choked, messing up the inside of his mask. "Overgrown sardine!" he shouted. Mack whistled a dolphin laugh and swam for shallower waters, where he overtook a school of speckled trout. He managed to gulp down three small ones before the rest of the school escaped. Anaka flipped off the glaring Hensen light and finished his meal in darkness, mulling over things to do to Mack. #," First Garn bubbled happi ly, "this is found in plentitudes?" With two tentacles he brought to his mouth the delightful new food creature they had discovered. He took a small bite, munching in pleasure. "There is much of it," Second Garn affirmed, watching the small spade fish disappear. "Such an offering," First Garn gurgled piously, "calls for gratitude." His small red eyes glowed meaningfully. "Indeed," Second Garn said, bringing out the metal-leatf Dutiful. He handed it to First Garn, as was proper, and First Garn began the intonation: "Prime Garn, power; Prime Garn, obedience; Prime Garn, laws... " The Tegel crew extended its myriad listening tentacles in obedient reverence. IF When it was over, the Tegel ship opened its suction locks to bring in more food samples to see if this new planet was worth while. It wasn't really necessary, however. First Garn had already decided. T he manta ray was big. It also was irritable. The irritation started with 'the churning motor of the fourteen-foot boat. And it reached its peak when the three men aboard started casting alongside the bat-like ray for the lemon fish that swam under it, feeding on offal. The ray went down in a powerdive. When it came up, the boat made another run on it for more casting. With an angry flip, the three thousand pound ray hurled itself over the boat. One man screamed and went over the side. The other two ducked and closed their eyes. Mack heard the distant crack as the ray hit the water, and, seconds later, pinpointed it with his natural sonar. "Unholy... king... mackerel!" "Huh? What in hell?" Anaka had been catching a nap, strapped to Mack's back with the reins. "Ray." "So what? There's lots of rays around here." The Polynesian unstrapped himself. "Lots... maybe," Mack thundered, pointing his beak toward the Tegel ship, "but... not... going   . that... direction!"Uh, oh!" Anaka had caught the ray in the Hensen light. "That's the biggest one I ever saw." "Maybe... trouble." Anaka thought a moment. "If it kicks up any fuss around their ship, no telling how they'll react." "Good... idea... getting... you... better... position... if... need... call... help." Mack swished his tail for emphasis. "Okay. I'm going up a hundred feet." "Going... further!" The Tegel ship was in fairly shallow water -- about three hundred feet -- but Mack knew any violence in the water could rip Anaka's skin-thin pressure suit. Anaka knew it, too, but he didn't like the idea of leaving Mack alone. "Listen, dammit, you aren't giving me orders!" "Not... arguing... now!" Mack got under Anaka and pushed him up. By the time Anaka could make out the buoy by natural light, he was grinning behind his mask. Mack always looked after him. "Be careful, Daddy!" "Suggest... you... idiot!" Mack prodded Anaka in the rear with his beak and swam back down alone. F irst Garn wiggled his tentacles exuberantly. Second Garn turned brown in vicarious pleasure. "There is," First Garn said, "absolutely no reason why we should not clear the way for colonization. No reason whatsoever." He took another bite out of the small white trout. "In fact," he continued, "Tokh himself could not dissuade me from taking over these splendid feeding grounds now." He tossed the remnants of the fish to Second Garn, who turned orange in appreciation. First Garn turned to take another sample from the specimen container. " Alarm, First Garn!" the watch crew signaled in unison before he could grab another small fish. "Alarm? Specify the nature." "It is a monster, First Garn," the watch crew replied. "It is coming toward our vessel!" First Garn swam to the observation scope and activated a scan beam. It took only a second to lock in on the approaching ray. "By Tokh, it is a monster!" Second Garn sneaked a glimpse and turned purple in apprehension. "Prepare to blast!" First Garn ordered. All three hundred of the blast crew readied the weapon. "Destroy!" The ray shuddered as the electron pellet struck, sending pain surging down every nerve path. Tail lashing in agony, it moved closer to the Tegel ship. First Garn turned blue. "Use primary weapon!" A thousand tentacles worked the fire-control panel. A slim projectile streaked toward the ray.  M ack rolled over when the shock waive hit him. After he regained his even keel, he quickly probed the water with his sonar. He spotted only pieces of the big ray. Mack turned away from the Tegel ship and sped up to Anaka. The Polynesian had been fa. enough from the explosion to avoid injury, but was waving his arms frantically as Mack approached. "Hell, I didn't catch any of it. What happened?" "Tegels... destroy... ray." "They spot you?" "Don't... think. Being... still ... and... not... too... near. "What kind of weapons?" "Unknowing... first... tried... but... didn't... seem ,... advanced." "And?" "Second... probably... high... explosives." "High explosives?" There was a trace of incredulity in Anaka's voice. "With a ship like that, you'd think they'd have some fission stuff." "Possible... probable... but... only... damfool... use... fission... in... water... close... range." "That figures. We better get to base personally with this." He grabbed the halter and let the reins out. Mack was thinking all the way back. # # A Tot only is it stupid," the Ad-L 'N miral barked, "it's also suicidal -- for us." Anaka, not wholly convinced the Admiral was wrong, kept his silence. Mack didn't. It seemed perfectly logical to him. "Urge... reconsider... Admiral. Hard... for... me... express... your... language... but... positive... will... work. "You have no guarantee, dammit And we can't take chances!" IF "Suggest... Admiral... knows... less... these... matters    than... dolphin." The storm signals were evident on the Admiral's face. "Don't be insubordinate, Mack," the Admiral growled. "Will... leave... then." Mack had him dead to rights. Although the dolphins were nominally under Fleet advisories, the Treaty of # gave them absolute freedom from human interference. Their service was voluntary. The Admiral glared down at Mack in the tank. "Get the hell out, in that case. No one's stopping you." Mack didn't reply. He glanced at Anaka once, then swam through the tank tunnel into the open sea. The Admiral turned to Anaka. "You think he was right?" "Well, I just don't know, sir." "As long as you have any doubt about it," the Admiral snapped, "you're confined to quarters." F irst Gam considered the ray's destruction proof that any dangerous life forms could be handled. "And isn't it true," he asked Second Garn, "that we have seen no other threatening forms?" "Yes, First Garn." "And that we have seen no intelligent opposition f to our rightful presence here?" "Yes, First Garn." "Then we may assume that the intelligent life forms are inferior and fear us. Prepare the summons." Broken down to its simplest semantic elements, the summons said: "Food good. Come." M ack took the lead and, in age-' old respect for the joy of life and its expression in graceful swim ming, slapped the water hard withhis tail every minute. The others waited patiently, and finally Mack spoke in the rapid whistling, clicking, grunting dolphin language. "I think we are obligated to act for them." "That might be," the dolphin behind him said, "but can you offer a truly valid reason?" "They are our friends." "You have told us of this Admiral." "But he is at a disadvantage. He does not understand the ways of the waters." "And you think these Tegels can be regarded in that light?" "There is every reason to believe so." "We will get no thanks for it, in all probability." "We have had our thanks." The meaning was clear, and several of the dolphins further back whistled their agreement. "Think," Mack said, "of all they gave us. A symbolic language. The ability to develop our own culture. Even a chance to explore space with them." The dolphin behind Mack could not argue. Before Homo sapiens discovered that dolphins had brains as fully developed as man's, the dolphins were an intelligent, but cultureless, species. They played, fed and bred with only a primitive language of a few basic meanings. Man had made something more of them, and Mack wanted a chance to prove it. "Will you follow me?" he asked. "Yes," the dolphin behind him aid. Mack listened. "Yes," the others whistled. Mack led the way. naka had disobeyed orders. Being confined to quarters had been bad enough, but the Admiral's indignation had increased instead of mellowing. He had told Anaka he wouldn't be working with dolphins any more -- Mack or any others. Anaka thought about it for a while in his room. "The hell with it," he said. He put on his pressure suit and walked to the beach. The water felt good as it covered him. Almost like his natural element. Mack picked the Polynesian up on his sonar about a mile from the Tegel ship. "What... doing... here?" he asked, nuzzling Anaka's mask gently. "Coming to watch after you, stupid." Anaka felt a little like crying. "Suggesting... trouble... with... Admiral?" "A little." Anaka tried to sound casual. "We... f ix... that... trouble," Mack predicted. Anaka felt suspicion forming in the back of his mind. "How's that?" "You... watch." Anaka swung the Hensen light around. He picked out two dolphins coming in. Then more. And more. "What in hell?" Mack whistled rapidly, and the dolphins formed a long line behind him. "Oh, no!" Anaka moaned as it dawned on him. "You can't be serious." "Very... serious." "They'll make mincemeat out of you, Mack. You dolphins have no weapons!" "We... thinking... Tegels... stupid," Mack asserted affably. "Stupid enough for spaceflight?" "Special... kind... stupid." "I can't talk you out of it?" "No." "In that case," Anaka said firmly, "I might as well watch the slaughter. And you're not going to talk me out of it." He took the underwater rocket-gun from its sheath. Mack gave the equivalent of a shrug with his tail and let Anaka hang on to his back. F irst Garn floated complacently as the technical crew prepared to send the rocket bobbing to the surface, from whence it would blast into orbit and transmit. "This is a moment of historic note," he told Second Garn, who turned a deep crimson in agreement. "Soon," First Garn predicted, "all of our people will offer us thanks." He waved his tentacles majestically. "Let the rocket go!" He followed it with a scan beam. It rose almost two hundred feet before an alert dolphin saw it, butted it to the bottom, hammered it into the mud and "sat" on it IF I V Special Christmas Gift Rates galaxy   # Issues # # Issues # # Issues # Add # for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions # Issues # # Issues # # Issues # Add # for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions omorroW # Issues # # Issues # HI # Issues # Add # for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions fj # Issues of Each  # # In K I # Issues of Each  # # In  mWm  m. If Add # for eoch (# Issues) foreign subscriptior Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions to be sent in accordance with the offers indicated in each case below:  I enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the.U.S Permit No. # Sec, #, P.L.R. No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States New York. N. Y. a "Prepare all weapons!" First Garn raged. Mack whistled urgently. The dolphins withdrew rapidly and set up a cross-pattern of false sonar echoes. "Destroy!" First Garn screamed. The electron pellets and projectiles went off on a wild tack, misled by th. fake sonar. "Out of ship for attack!" First Garn screeched. The Tegels swam out after the dolphins, pulling portable assault weapons. Mack led the dolphins toward the Tegels. "Bring weapons to bear!" First Gam felt victory nearing. At close range, it could not be otherwise. The thousand-tenacled fire-control team brought the weapons to bear, carefully and accurately as the dolphins slowly came closer. So carefully was it done that by the time they were ready Mack had led the dolphins in a burst of speed behind them. "We have been outwitted!" First Garn shrieked. Several hundred Tegels swung around, noted First Garn was correct and awaited his command. It never came. Mack swallowed him with ease, and split seconds later the other dolphins were similarly occupied. Anaka remembered later, with some regret, that he had not fired a single shot. #Tn that case," the Admiral A laughed, slapping Anaka on the back, "I guess we'll have to credit the dolphins with the whole thing." "Yes, sir." The Admiral squatted down by the tank. "Mack, I disagreed with you when you told me what you wanted to do. I still think the risk was too great and, by all rights, both of you should be busted again." He paused smilingly. "That is if you'll let yourself be busted voluntarily -- again." "Think... dolphins," Mack said from the tank, "still... know... more... those... things..." The Admiral looked at Mack affectionately "Let me in on it?" Mack spouted a tall column of water, taking a deep breath. "Had... hunch... Tegels... have... fish... way... thinking." "Huh? Anaka beat the Admiral to the punch. "Had... feeling... would... follow... leader... blindly." "But, dammit," the Admiral broke in, "they were capable of space flight, so they must have been smarter than fish." "Smart... some... ways... stupid... others." "I think I get a part of it, Admiral," Anaka offered "He's trying tell us they had a blind spot in their behavior -- so far as the dolphins were concerned. In other words, without leadership they were absolutely helpless, incapable of independent action." The Admiral frowned. "How in hell could you count on getting them outside?" "Was... thinking... if... made... mad... enough... would... come... after... us." 'You didn't know that for sure, though," Anaka insisted. "No... but... knew... if... like... fish... in... thought... might... attack... in... group... like..." "Like a school of fish?" The Admiral's mouth was open. "Hoped... so." Anaka put his hand on the dolphin's head. "Were you sure you could foul up their weapons effectively?" "Not...sure... anything. Had... good... hunch... and... felt... our... duty." "Well, I'll be damned," the Admiral said reverently. "Probably," Anaka agreed. The Admiral didn't even hear him. He was thinking of another assignment for Mack and Anaka. T he President, reading from the official report, told the cheering crowds the dolphins took the chance because they felt they had better odds underwater than might have been had in an open space battle with the Tegels. And, he added somberly, teams going over the Tegel ship had indeed proved they were right. There was silence when he informed them of the summons that had been recovered and translated. Mack was not listening. He was tired from the lengthy questioning of the last few days. And he was thinking of a smaller, slimmer dolphin he had not seen for a long time. So he was reasonably surprised when Anaka, standing next to the President grabbed him around the middle and half lifted him out of the tank. He was even more surprised when the President taped the medal to his broad flanks. But the real moment of pride came later when the new space cruiser blasted out of its berth for its maiden trip Out. Mack was swimming in the spacious control tank -- Captain Mack of The Dolphin . Anaka was there in the No. # spot, helping the crew get used to Mack... It didn't take long.  Before they passed the Martian orbit, they had dropped the formal "sir" and just called him Captain Mack.  Mack liked it. So did the smaller dolphin who swam in the extralarge tank in Mack's quarters. They . In the December Worlds of Tomorrow Sequel to Big Baby, Arcturus Times Three, etc by J. T. McIntosh -- and many more! On sale now at all newsstands -- or IP IF  Feature F rom my throne here in the center of the universe, I took issue with a recent survey of science fiction, saying it was a pity not to have mentioned a certain half-dozen writers who had influenced the field. A faint rumor is going around that these six don't cut all that much ice, which is manifestly absurd -- as much so as the implication that there are other universes besides the one which revolves about this chair. Seriously, we do indeed perform many or most of our own definitions, and for me, science fiction could hardly be what it is, and what it has been to me, without these six -- in addition, of course, to the Hugo's and Heinleins, the Startlings and Stapledons, and all the other fixed stars in the sf firmament. These six were mentioned, not because of literary gigantism, not because you and you should burn offerings before their ikons, but only because sf could not be what it is to me without them. As you'll see, their status in my cosmos is personal andor professional. I stress again that I trouble to mention because they have been structural in my sf -- not necessarily yours. A. J. Budrys : In his very early twenties, Burdys produced a number of short stories each of which concerned, to greater, or less degree, old people. I freely confess that I don't know as much about anything as he did about old people -- the wistfulness, the scar-tissue, the compacted conservatism -- and the distilled knowledge that only a life-time of living can endow. There is at times an unleavened quality about his writing, which may be, for all I know, only consistent with this phenomenal percocity; for all that, it is my considered opinion that Budrys, should he care to travel that road, has the material in him for lasting greatness. Nevil Shute : Not only a perfect Journeyman nuts-and-bolts writer -- one who does his homework and uses all his tools -- Shute is to me the most perfect example of the general public's blind-spot concerning sf. If many sf writers have slightly paranoid feelings, it's because a readership which can readily discriminate between Shane and Hopalong Cassidy , between Graham Greene and Mickey Spillane, doesn't and won't learn the difference between the top ranks of sf and the funny papers. If On the Beach had been written by Edgar Pangborn (but then he wouldn't; and if he did, he might not have been able to sell it to any magazine in the field) no one would have heard of it. If Shute had written A Mirror for Observers (but then he couldn't) it would have been made into a Class A movie. In other words, any mainstream writer can get away with mediocre sf. Great sf tends to stay right in the clubhouse, even when it outranks its. contemporaries in every other field. Why, most of the people who buy this kind of thing don't even know they're reading science fiction; Fail Safe is a sf novel; so is #, and Seven Days in May, and Advise and Consent , and any other work which takes current knowledge and extrapolates it to probable or possible ends. (This, by the way, isn't my definition of sf -- just because it isn't all that sf does.) Edgar Pangborn is, then, Shute's mirror image in this matter. Go find A Mirror for Observers if you can and wonder with me how prose so polished, pacing so skilled, could with justice ever have been allowed to slip down the oubliette. wide a generalization to say that every sf satire, every sf comedy and every attempt at witty and biting criticism found in the field is a poor and usuually cheap imitation of what this man has been doing since the '#s. In addition I owe him a great deal personally, for his incredibly involved and complex mind can at times produce constructive comment so pointed and astute that the fortunate recipient is permanently improved by it. Admittedly the price may be to create two whole categories for our species: humanity, and Wm. Tenn, for each of which you must create your ethos and your laws. I've done that. And to me it's worth it. Vercors acquired this single name, if I remember correctly, in his days as a lethal journalist in the French Resistance. Most of his work reflects an almost unique ability to drive to real basics and subject them to scrutiny and analysis. The one book which affected me the most, both for content and method, is You Shall Know Them. The simple narrative situation is the discovery of a species, deep in the Outback, which is either a superior ape or an inferior man. Which it is presents the problem. Those who wish to train the creatures to work in mills and factories say they're animals. Those who feel otherwise set up a powerful . counterforce, most of the power being in noise and indignation. The protagonist decides to have the matter proved, and in his laboratory in England he personally impregnates one IF of the females (let me add here that this simple fact, when gossiped around, horrified potential readers by book its rightful place. Please tell your Aunt Amelia that the process was clinical, unromantic and performed with instruments) and when the offspring was born, he killed it (painlessly, Aunty) and then phoned the police. Now if the creature was an animal, so what? But if it were human, he was a murderer. Therefore: go to court. V ercors wrote this book around the (to me) shattering discovery that never in any literature, in all its history, has there been a true definition of Man. Descriptions, yes. Genuine definitions, no. He also pays the kind of tribute to the English courts which Joseph Conrad paid the English language; both men had adequate knowledge and experience to choose among many. He felt that the one place on earth where such a definition could be winnowed out was in an English Court of Law, and the bulk of the book is the trial transcript; and I'm not about to tell you how it comes out. What's important here is a matter of definition too. 'Here's a towering example of what sf is, can be and should be: an exploration of mores, attitudes and motivations, as well as science, clear down to bedrock so basic that it bears on every human being who ever drew breath. There are few expressions heard or read which have had such an impact on me; that I bewail the lack of a mention for this author is probably this difficulty I keep having that you think my universe isn't the universe. Tom Godwin is a name which possibly won't be found graven on granite three millennia from now; yet one story (of the many competent ones he has written) was another personal blockbuster. The Cold Equations is an extremely simple statement of the fact that natural law is to be used, not broken. A scout ship on a mercy mission upon which several lives depend is found to have a stowaway. Due to the un-bendable strictures of the situation, the stowaway must be thrown out or the ship will crash. Concededly, Godwin makes the most of the situation by having the stowaway turn out to be a pretty girl in her teens; aside from that, there's nothing in the story that isn't straight, clear and uncompromising. The human equation is of course agonizing, but in terms of the real problem it is meaningless. The solution to the problem is so clear there is no choice; so it isn't at all a problemand-answer story. It is that great rarity, an unequivocating examination of a real situation. The fact that such a situation has never exactly occurred is quite beside the point. And ever since I read that story, it has made itself a category and an aim. This too is what sf is for. I t might be interesting to see what other writers (and readers, too) have to say about their special personal monuments -- those which have been obscured by the public skyline. IF  Feature #. Perfectly harmless unless smashed #. What ballistic missiles travel in #. Certain mate of a sea vessel #. Given a chance, it will grow on you #. Turns red in a current #. Per aspera ad #. Fantasy-writer factions could use a few more #. A free drink in Mexico #. In France, you drink your cafe In one #. What some pigeons insist on doing #. Sports car #. The Atomic #. What vampires do all day #. A Roman emperor who should have listened to a soothsayer #. The inventor of dynamite #. A schooi and type of jacket #. A Spaniard cheers for a Swede #  else!" #. "Get a look at that!" #. An urgently important social event in school #. A popular vehicle m our #th state #. What Flash Gordon's ray pistol is responsible for an awful lot of #. Miss Chase, of the stage and movies #. Famous .also-ran #. First of last three words spoken to his best friend by ## Across. #. " , c'est l'amour!" #. One hundred fifty-one Romans #. Half a comic dance duo; name of a lady spy #. If you haven't got neon, argon, or radon, you can always fall back on -- #. A Chinese boat; Mister Spade's face #. You fight a toro, or milk a #. What you hate to see a good story do #. Safest locale for rocket pilot when his ship is between planets and he has no space suit #. You say werewolves have hairy faces; scientists say they are #. What the U.S. hopes to land on the moon #. Pertaining to the ear #. What a test-rocket sled runs by #. What flowers lose on the moon #. A block of salt for cattle #. Form of some alien monsters #. Evil spirit #. Crewmen on long rocket runs could play some deucey #. If heroes practice virtues, villains commit #. Measure of electrical power #. If the heroine goes to Mars, the hero goes #. A Swede yells his name at a bullfight #. What a drunken hero may get caught in #. "What's in ?" (# words) # . Man's name meaning "of the king" #. A kangaroo's legs, a rocket's engines, and a witch's broom are each, ip their own way,  # . What you better not do to a space suit on the moon #. Robin's best friend #. A southwestern tribe #. Avenues or holy people (abbr.) # . Nickname for Big Dipper; Latin stem for bears #. The man from Aberdeen says he won't #L A leading miracle fabric #. Name for specialized study of anodes #. Type of warfare young Tarzan was involved in #. What Scrooge's close friends called him IF #. Not dead nor asleep, but In-between state #. How to fly a one-man spaceship #. A delicate kind of lace #. What .Mars is covered with, mostly (# words) #. Charles Lamb's pen-name as essayist #. The unlucky spaceman managed to ## Down his spacesult, and it #. Flammable earth used for fuel #. After three days in space looking for the landing field, it was really a for sore eyes #. What incoming spaceships do on the upper atmosphere #. Word used in comparing different objects #. Our second-largest state #. A product you won't need on Inner Mercury #. The compass direction of Chicago from Albuquerque #. Beach in California #. Young girl who talked to chess pieces and playing cards #. What the villain always is, just before he gets blasted. #. Miss Negri of silent-screen days #. Units of force or power #. What some hardheads still think science-fiction is #. What SF fans feel toward those hardheads #. If "Romany Life" is about gypsies, then a gypsy must be a #. Name of a man who learned how to get into the cave of certain Arabian thieves #. Traveller between anode and cathode #. If you weigh a few oz. on Earth, you'll weigh a few on Jupiter IF  Novelette He knew a robot was only a tool to be used by men  But the big question was -- who was using who? I T he fast, silent way it crossed the room wasn't just efficiency. It was an insult or, more likely, a challenge. As if crossing rooms with out making a noise were some kind of game: Now you got a turn. Questions Controller Karl Paker, who by regulation had to rise and greet even robots a courteous three paces in front of his desk, remained squarely behind it, thoroughly seated and -- in his mind anyway -- swollen with hate. His bones, God knew, made noises enough, what with the accumulated frictions of fifty-five too-busy years. More, he limped. He wasn't going to give this thing a chance to listen and watch. The next instant he saw his mistake. You have to move to stay ahead of robots. Ahead morally, that is; physically you can't hope to as IP much as stay even. This one took and turned Paker's insult. Finding those last three steps open it took them, then seated itself on the corner of his desk. Paker couldn't breathe. Something went wrong in his throat. Pushing back his chair a little and gripping the arms he regarded his visitor -- to all outward appearance, a handsome, rather slender youth of about twenty, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed. You could tell it from the human only by its too-perfect humanity. In his mind Paker took the bottle of Earth cognac from the bottom left-hand drawer and, swinging from all the way back, christened that faintly rose right cheek good and gory. Or greasy, since that was the best it could do. But the very delicacy of its coloring somehow warned him that the three-hundred credit bottle, and not his visitor, would be the one to suffer; what he had to deal with wasn't so much cheek as it was brass. He sank back and merely glared at the drawer handle. "Well?" he said when his throat was working again. The robot gave him a youthful smile, though the thing was maybe three times his age "I am R #," it said. "However, you may call me Rob, or even Robby, if you have the appropriate personality-index. I am a human factors coordinator for this region. You are the Questions Controller and I am here at your request." "Yes," said Paker, not looking up. "Wefl." But he could face up to things, even things as humiliating as this. "Look here," he started over, now meeting the robot's eyes -- or whatever it wanted to call them. "We need help. I evaluate the questions. There seems to be only one of any promise, even if I don't like it. So I'm asking: Are there conditions under which the robot kind would agree to help us?" As soon as he was done saying it he dropped his gaze back to the left bottom drawer. Cognac might not be a club, but it would make an awfully comfortable hole to hide in. A fter all, he'd gone into questions control work some twenty-seven years ago because it seemed the one area where human beings had it over robots -- in fact, had to have it over robots to survive. Well, not survive, he thought. Robots would look after humans to that extent. Otherwise, where was his purpose, But in the present furiously competitive expansion into space, the only edge robots didn't have was in questions: Men could ask new ones, robots couldn't. And when you got the questions, the best you could do was ask the robot for help. Oh, yes. He'd need a lot of cognac to hide the taste of that. " 'We' means more humans than you," observed R #. "Me," said Paker. "The three thousand human beings left in this region. And lots more, maybe even We're in a real hole." He waited, but it was silent. Dramatic pauses never worked on machines. "We've lost two planets." He IF rose, limped to the filing cabinet by the window. Let it see the limp. Here the thing wasn't sitting on top of him anyhow. "I've got it all on tape for you, since that's the quickest way. But it might help if you heard it from a human too; tapes are computer-filtered. Out there around #C#, just seventeen light years and four months from where I'm standing, there's a nice Earth-type world, exactly the sort we've got to have if we're going to prevent..." He paused, blinked. " -- to prevent our taking over. Yes. Human policy is no secret." It wasn't. Or if it was a secret, it was an open one. If robots got the stars, as they were already getting two thirds of them, then you had no place to go. You would have to live in houses not out in the open, and when that happened you were lost. Robots were such damn good housekeepers. "Anyway, in due course we went down on the planet -- Baggins' world. Too fast, of course. There's never enough time to prepare things right, if we're going to stay ahead. And we couldn't let your kind have that world. Why, a man could almost walk around there in the raw!" H e faced the robot, which was still perched on his desk as if that were the only comfortable seat in the room. "Planets that congenial aren't easy to come by, you know. Trouble is, somebody else already lived there. An intelligent somebody." Paker thrust out his hands -- half fight, half appeal. "Maybe you can figure how we felt. There are lots of more or less intelligent animals in the universe, but until we got to Baggins' world nothing in the human class. It was like when you've been on a scout ship for a very long time, just yourself all alone, and then you make planetfall and suddenly there are other people talking too. That's how it's been with the hiiman race, except for you greasers. Well, we could talk to Bagginses, or almost, though they didn't seem quite right -- " "You mean they are not human." "Maybe something like that. Only you're not human too, and we can talk. What it was with the Bagginses, they didn't seem to have any ambition." Paker considered briefly. "We went down. I should explain they're enough to let us have the surface. Which we already had, for that matter. Anyway, there don't seem to be many of them, they're only under this small part of one continent. No ambition, like I said. Not quite right. "Well, that 'not quite right turned out to be plenty wrong. One of our teams located a fantastic vein of radioactives and sank a mine. It's not often you can mine radioactives in a habitable system. Well, I guess you could say mining in that spot was out by the treaty, but it was inevitable. They ought to have seen that. "The vein happened to be the gut of the Bagginses power system. No body knew they were that advanced! Of course, they misunderstood. Turned out they have robots too, only ones that follow orders instead of trying to steal the universe out from under your nose. They burned us off tiie planet." He made a face. "You know what would happen if I tried to play chess with you?" "I would win. Chess is no competition for us." "Yes. Well, that's how it was. They aren't better armed. As a matter of fact most of their weapons are copies of ours. But they took us, and made us look easy. Then they sent their machines out and they took us on Robinson's world too. Either they already had a stardrive and hadn't bothered to use it before, or else they worked up one like that -- " he snapped his fingers past his ear -- "so as to come after us. Two Earthweeks ago their machines hit Columbia, a strong, well-established colony of almost three thousand people, and they made that look easy too. We're no competition, as you put it." Paken went back to his desk and, robot or no, sat down, opened that bottom left-hand drawer. He hesitated, but the consequences of his last discourtesy were right there in front of him, practically bolted to the desktop. Knowing how silly it sounded he said: "I need a drink. Will you join me in one?" "Thank you, no," said R #I and, amazingly, left the desk to go sit in the chair itwas supposed to. After the first flush of relief, Paker wasn't sure this was better: It had such a hideously tidy way of sitting. When he had poured the cognac and placed the bottle carefully on the spot where his visitor had perched, simply -- as he told himself -- because that was where he wanted the bottle, he said: "I was inaccurate at one point earlier. I gave the impression that the Bagginses are in our class. But the right way to put it would be to say we're nowhere near theirs." Then he took the first sip of cognac. Now he had said it, now he had really said it all. "I cannot accept that," it said, using that unspeakable courteous voice robots always used when they were saying something that might offend you. "Animals of the sort your account suggests would not be your superiors in any meaningful way. They should be the reverse. However, I will be able to appraise their capacities more accurately after I have done the tapes. Now I can say only that if the situation is much as you've described it, we will probably decide to help." "How soon can you say?" Paker asked, a little too eagerly. "They may decide to hit here next." "Shortly. I should like to use your private bathroom, please." Paker opened his mouth, but nothing was in it to say. Cognac cost too much to spill, so he got the glass down properly, and then the shock started coming out. He began helplessly and horribly to blush. He could feel it go all the way down to his navel. "But!" he yelled, trying not to. "I mean, surely you don'tl" "I must communicate," said R #, in the same easy, courteous voice. "I prefer to do it in private and in pleasant, mathematically neat surroundings." IP TT#hile it was gone he put away   a good thirty credits' worth of cognac, but his sense of outrage burned right through the stuff. There were places robots should have absolutely no business. He felt that strongly. And he found that, try as he would to stop it, his mind insisted on showing him, like a set of smutty playing cards, pictures of that thing in his bathroom. And God alone knew what it meant by "communicate." Certainly only a robot would think it was the sort of thing you did in private -- or in his bathroom, with the door locked. For he'd heard it lock the door in still another burlesque of human modesty. "Well?" he said angrily when the door clicked again and it returned. #I stopped before reaching his desk and struck a parade rest -- a position human beings took because it was comfortable if you had to stand in one place a long time, and because, if you were human, you always had this problem of what to do with your hands. The posture infuriated him still further because neither problem could occur to a robot, ever. "Yes," it said. "You are in a hole, as you put it. We will help you." Then it said something else and he said, "What?" because he didn't quite hear. But he wasn't really asking. He was too taken up with the relief gushing through him, as if his blood had only this instant started to flow. Robots didn't lie. From an engineering point of view they coi sidered lying complicated out of all proportion to the uses it might have, and simply didn't build in the necessary circuits. So if this one said they would help -- they would. He hadn't dll this minute believed it; their business in the universe seemed to be making things hard, not easy. But they were going to help! "What?" he said again, more to hear that repeated than to hear something new. "I said, I can tell you a good deal about them." "Them?" he repeated. "I mean by 'them' what you call the Bagginses. I have just gone through the entire file on Baggins world." "That's nonsense," he said. "You can't have." "We investigated the species some three hundred Earth years ago. I will tell you about them, because it will be good for you to know." "Good?" he said. "Look here, what have you been doing in my bathroom?" "I have been communicating," said the robot stiffly. The trouble with their voices was you knew every bit of expression had been put in deliberately, by choice. But expression wasn't something you "put in." It was part of the organism's total functioning, like a yell of pain when somebody stepped on your foot, or the way blood rushed to the bruised spot. "In my bathroom?" he said. "That's outrageous!" He didn't quite know what was outrageous, but something was. T# #T , 'he Bagginses," it said, "are a A machine-dominated race. I was right, incidentally, in saying that they were in no significant way your suS eriors. The right conclusion to be rawn from the way that you were outgeneraled on Columbia and Robinson's world is that the machines you fought were controlled through subspace by a master brain back on Baggin's world. You had no chance." "What you mean is that their machines take orders from them," said Paker thickly. "Instead of going off on their own hook. That's what you mean by machine-dominated." "You have an excessively belligerent attitude," observed R #. "You should remember that under too much stimulus circuits burn out instead of operating. What I mean by saying the Bagginses are what must be called a machine-dominated race is that their civilization is oriented around machines. The Bagginses discovered about three thousand Earth years ago that their emotional needs could be entirely satisfied by directing an electric current to a nerve complex at the base of the eye. Your kind once made a similar discovery but have escaped its consequences. Their civilized development stopped. Automata do the work, but, as you observed, have not been structured to permit independent judgment. This is another indication of the Bagginses' compulsive need for security, a racial drive whose origin the investigative team could not determine." "Compulsive, hell. It just shows they're smarter than we were." "You are mistaken. Moreover, we can predict with a high order of probability that this need will lead them to seek out and destroy humankind wherever you may happen to be. We would rather not have humans eliminated from the universe; therefore we must join forces with you in this region until the Bagginses have been destroyed. Their destruction should take, with luck, no more than two Earth months." "Just like that, eh? You feel sure of yourselves, don't you?" "I am sure my feelings are what they should be," replied R #I precisely. Paker put his head on the desk, even though theother was still regarding him from that idiotic parade rest. Robots claimed to have feelings, but he intended never to believe it. There had to be limits. He sat up again, put the bottle away, slammed shut the drawer. He intended to be on his dignity now. "I don't know about that," he said. "But if you're so great on feelings, you must at least know what it feels like to be humiliated." There he hesitated, for it came to him that probably wasn't true. When would a robot be exposed to humiliation? "Anyway," he went on, "you ought to know what making a request like this does to us. We're fighting you -- or would be, if that weren't hopeless. At the least we're in a race with you'for the galaxy. We wouldn't be out here except for that, overextended and unprepared as we are. It's mostly your fault. How do you think it feels to come begging you the way I've done? You might have spared me being on my knees" IP R #I broke out of his parade rest and gestured sympathetically. "You misunderstand," he said. "Speaking your way, I do not want you or any of the human kind on his knees. I want you rather to stand on your own feet more. Thus, what you have said is absurd." Paker rose, limped around the desk "That was cruel," he said, standing in front of the thing and close. "A robot did this to me. One of your heavy models, not looking where it put its feet." "I know the story, and you have not said it accurately. MK # has large feet, requiring fifty square decimeters of surface, and when gravity came on there was no place else to put them. I also know that you could have the defective part replaced." "It's not a part. It's me " T he robot regarded him without expression, as if he hadn't spoken yet. "All right!" It was Paker's turn to sit on the desk. "But a man's entitled to some privacy. It's my bathroom." "I was communicating, as I have already told you. Subuniverse #, which you may not know about yet, as human minds are too confused to make use of it, is a cosmos consisting of abstractions or forms, the stuff of pure thought. Mind enters it in the same way a starship enters SubU #, except that one has only to think a pattern to create the realitywarp, so one does not need sunfield generators. However, one does need complete freedom to concentrate, and I prefer not to turn off my sensors around humans: That is bad manners Also, humans with derangements like yours have been known to attack exposed robots." Paker looked away. "Well?" he said. "So what are we going to do about the Bagginses? What's this two-month miracle of yours?" "Our records are three hundred years old, but a civilization such as I have described is necessarily static. The mind synthesis in which I have participated suggested that, considering the fact that these animals have not empowered their machinery with independent judgment, the vulnerable spot should be in the animals themselves." "Just the point you things would fix on." "The problem then becomes one of finding a way to deprive these animals of independent judgment. The surest way, on the basis of the information at present available, seems to be to destroy the animals entirely. They cannot make decisions if they do not exist, and without them their machines are harmless." " 'Trust a robot to state the obvious, " quoted Paker. "You are" right now up to where I am -- where we humans got, I might add, without even thinking about it. The question is, where do we go from here?" "I go to Baggins' world, if you can provide me with a probe-class ship that is small and fast enough to land there without being detected. If you cannot, then I go to Betel # where my kind are readying such a ship, and then to Baggins' world. You," it added conscientiously, "are the one to say where you go, but I can think of no reason for you to go anyplace out of the ordinary. No human needs to change his plans. I will take care of this problem." Paker stopped before saying what he wanted to. "We're involved too! I would like to know your plans so as to think about ours. We make up our own minds, you know." "Once on Baggins' world I shall try to destroy all these animals. You complained that I was stating the obvious." He clenched his hands. "Like that? You'll wander around and pull their heads off or what? You're just one robot, and these creatures by your own admission are a danger to the whole humankind. After all!" R #I was silent. "Plans that are not known cannot be anticipated," it said at last, making that deliberate, youthful smile. He felt the blood coming back into his cheeks and stood up, walked around behind the thing. He was looking out the window at the sky. It would darken and then turn somehow thin, and darken again. He felt something in him -- some moral quality -- tighten, and suddenly and agonizingly twist back on itself, the way a leg will go suddenly bent and hard with cramp. "I see," he said. Unhappily, he did. What the thing had said was right, even if having it said was intolerable. "Well, we can provide the probe-ship. Happens I own a modified bug. My plan is to go along." He hadn't planned that -- hadn't, in fact, planned anything until he said it, but now he found himself suddenly committed. It was his ship. "That's my business, I expect, just as what you intend to do is yours." R #I rose and came around and considered him. "You are old and lame and of doubtful usefulness." It was using the polite voice. Karl Paker smiled at it. "I can hold my own," he said. "One thing, I know how to disable a robot of your model. Even with its sensors on." Ill B ut disabling the thing -- even during the time when he could have done it -- wasn't the problem. The big problem was holding his own. Over the next two Earthmonths he learned how far claiming he could took him, how much that easy remark committed him to. Paker tossed another chunk of vegetation into the fire and watched the stuff try to crawl out. You would never think that messy green tangle could move unless you tried to burn it. But there it was, scrabbling wildly at the six-inch wall of earth R #I had put up to hold his fires together. Perhaps, for that matter, it couldn't move until you put it in a fire. God knew he himself had been doing things for five weeks now so far outside what he could, that in the norIF mal course he wouldn't even have tried -- all in the name of holding his own. "Robot!" he called, when the vegetation stopped struggling. R #I was sitting on a rock some twenty feet away, wearing a green sportshirt in forty degrees of frost. But its nose was red, as if with cold. Paker wondered a good deal about that. "I hear you," it said. "It's fifteen hours, Earth, time. Your two months are up." The thing regarded him. "Well, they're still kicking," said Paker, shifting around so he could reach the farther pile of vegetation with his lone hand. "We have failed. I thought that you already knew this." "I did." "Then I do not understand you. You must have been aware of the fact that I already knew it." He was too cold to laugh, but he could still make the right face to go with the kind of laughter he was thinking. "I expect I knew that too." "Then there is something wrong with you. As I have explained three times now, communication is an asymmetrical' relation with respect to the information communicated. Thus, if you -- " "I've had about enough of your communication," broke in Paker savagely. "That's one word we could do without." He threw a new lump into the fire. "It's not as if you were always saying new things yourself all the time. Oh, no." "Perhaps you need a new trench," observed the robot. "Though I dug the last one only five days ago. If you would not eat so much -- " "I eat to stay warm!" he shouted. Then he sat back, bracing himself on the plastic sheath where his right hand had been. He tried to stop jumping inside. How many times had the thing said something like that over the past week? Something that, if you could believe a robot could want to, had to be a calculated attempt to goad him on? A robot's mind didn't work by free association. If it got from the idea of communication to the idea of his trench, it got there according to a strict deductive order. In which case what were the postulates? Was the general idea to irritate hell out of him? He couldn't quite believe it had that in mind; but just in case this was possible, he was going to remain very calm. "What I mean is," he went on, to be saying something, "where do we go now? What next?" "You should die within fifteen or twenty days, but you may last a little longer. Predicting humans in this respect is difficult. When you are dead, I shall turn myself off." "After you've had the fun of seeing me go... I wish it had got us." "The hovercar machine probably had orders only to protect the young animals, as I have explained repeatedly. When we no longer endangered them, it forgot about us. Such machines cannot decide to do something on their own." "So turn yourself off." "I will not be rude." P aker considered its nose for a while, then went on. "Why do I waste my time talking to you, I wonder? Two Earthmonths ago I would have crawled through fire first." "Humans are I a n g u a g e-structured," explained R #I "You are under stress and require the consolation of jabbering. However, you have not listened to what I say since I fixed your arm." "But you say it anyhow. Why? Just so I can hear the sound of your pretty voice?" "I try to think of what I say as though I were your mother, but perhaps I make mistakes. Working with metaphors is difficult." Paker kept very still for a moment. "Some time you'll go too far," he breathed. "I shall not go so far as off this planet, in all probability," observed the robot. "Still, unlike you, I can always be switched back on." It executed a different, brotherly smile. Paker turned his back in spite of the cold. In his imagination he could see the landing party -- robots, probably -- stuffing his stiff form into a black undertaker's bag and bringing back movement to R #I by turning a switch. Of course, if they were robots they wouldn't have a black bag; but that was what he saw them using all the same. The worst part was he couldn't blame it for their failure. Not honestly. Animals, as the thing had explained once they were down and far enough away from the Hermes to be safe, were convenient to destroy not IF only because they damaged easily, He faced back to the fire, throwing but because once you killed one it in more crawly stuff. No, the plan couldn't be turned back on or its was all neat and logical, even now. parts used over. Which made sense. So logical that any good mechanical So what was the problem? You brain could work it out, as he had asked where the animals were most one good not-hand to prove. With vulnerable, and how you could go his teeth he pulled the glove off the at them so as to be sure of getting other hand, the one he still had, and them all. Logical questions, both, began to massage the rubbery cheek. The sort implicit in the information You could put that in the fire and you already had, the sort a mait might start crawling too. chine not only could ask but could But not a robot. It just switched itask better than a man. The answer self off. Once you were politely was logical too. You hit them "where dead, of course, the new animals are made." Because "I'm beginning to see why you -- as it had politely explained when things don't own more of the galaxy he told it the facts of life -- mathan you do," he called -- even chines were superior lovers; if your though R #I could hear him whislover was electric, you didn't bother per, as he perfectly well knew. "In with sex. You turned over the probspite of all your advantages, you're lem of reproduction to specialists. quitters." Paker's left cheek was going stiff. "I have explained the situation to you, but you are sloppy inside and forget things. You may use whatever mathematics you like to describe the problem, and I cancel out in every case. The Bagginses' master brain can coordinate more data than I, and it incorporates similar structures. As I cancel out, in the relevant sense I do not exist. You cannot say of something that does not exist that it is a quitter." It really meant that, Paker decided. That was the trouble with a mathematically precise language. When a robot went wrong, it went all the way. A human managed to spread out the error -- just because the language was sloppy. Like human minds; something you could never quite trust. But something that could meet change, too. As a sloppy human you were always up against something new, and had to keep your meanings loose to deal with it. So you could mean something new. You could make meanings; that was the secret of good questions. But a robot could only work over things until they fitted already established meanings, and, if that didn't work, give it up. " I still itch in the hand I don't have," he explained. "I even try to use it." "You will tell me when these attempts begin to succeed." P aker looked up. "You miss the point," he said, but despaired of making clear just what the point was. That was how it worked: You said something you didn't mean or understand even, and then you had to create a meaning for it. "I mean," he tried, "we're here and damn it, it's cold. We ought to do something." "I am still here," observed R #, "in the sense of being able to dig trenches, to lift heavy objects or to lay fires. You can do small, simple things like opening food sacks." Paker was quiet, since one thing he couldn't do any more was take out an R model. "I suppose I'll have to put some kind of gadget on that stump," he said into air. "I don't like it, but it's too unhandy without." "That is true." He glared at it. "Look here. Why don't you go away? That's something else you can do. If you went far enough away you could turn yourself off without being rude, you know." "You would freeze." It got down from the rock -- a handsome twentyyear-old whose breath didn't frost at minus forty. But it had a red nose. "Look," it said, squatting beside him and extending a right hand complete with fingernails and light brown hairs. "Your kind cannot make one so good. This is an efficient model. If you were equipped with one you would not even want to go back to the organic sort, it would seem so much less useful. For example, with this you would be able to hold together the materials for a fire while it got started well, without being burned." It flexed the fingers at him. "I would like to go away and switch myself off. I have no purpose here worthy of the name, and I am unhappy. But while I have this and you do not, you are depenr dent on me and I must remain." "Oh, unhappy," said Paker hutchIF # mg from it a few steps around the fire. "Go on!" But God knew he was dependent on it -- not just for creature comforts, but for survival. Or would be, if he had any chance of surviving. "You know," he brought out, "I may not have two good feet to stand on, but one hand is plenty to sit on." "You have made another of your nonsensical remarks," said R #I in a gloomy voice. Of course, a voice like that was calculated, but with what intention? Did he really care what its intention was? It was trying to do something to him, anyway. "What I mean is," he said, "if I'm here to die, I can do it all by myself. I don't need your help. If I could turn you off it would be in the bag and -- " and there he stopped, because he was thinking of something else now. He saw a way. "Listen!" he told it, shouting over a distance of two feet. "Think of yourself as a Baggins machine." He paused for a moment, because that was a pleasant thought. "And humankind is this green stuff you've got to hold down while it gets to burning. Now if we take away you, I -- I'm the Bagginses, I guess -- freeze to death, isn't that right?" "I do not know," said R #I in a minute. "Thinking of these three entities this way is awkward." "We should have known from the start! Of course! The thing to do is hit the machinery!" "Destroying mechanical lifeforms is poor strategy." "The brain, robot! The master brain! And, stupid, you didn't think of it!" R #I inspected the fire for a minute. Then it put its face through a complete Smile. "I almost might have predicted that you would think of such a plan," it said, when it was finished with the smile. "It could succeed, however." "And you didn't think of it," repeated Paker, who was quite warm now, even to the ends of all his toes. IV B ut after that he wasn't warm again for so long it might have been forever. They marched crosscountry for three days to reach what, on the three-hundred-year-old map in R #'s brain, looked like a good point to dig into a tunnel complex, and all that time they had no fire. Every four hours R #I halted. They would stare at each other while the stiffness sank into Paker's joints and his breathing came back to normal; then they were jogging on again. Paker didn't ask for the halts. Hadn't he said he could hold his own? But he knew R #I could have gone the whole distance without stopping, and every four hours he took the break without a word. It wasn't enough, of course; perhaps that made it easier to take. But he knew. For the rest, he depended on medicines to hold his own the little green pills that would clean his blood, let him go on, on, on, without sleep; the white pills when his balance got too shakey; the purple pills when he needed spurts of energy; the bigger white pills whose use he had forgotten. He didn't have enough, and he was counting the precious green ones again, trying to make the count come out slightly higher, when the robot said, "We will dig here," almost casually, as if it were telling him the world was a small place, wasn't it? He staggered on another thirty steps, counting helplessly. Then he got himself stopped and turned around, and then he dropped. He sat and watched the thing sink into the ground without so much as pretending he could help -- in spite of its "we." His underwear was supposedly good for fifty degrees of frost, but that wasn't true. He was brittle with cold. Was this the planet he'd claimed you could go around on in the raw? Then, without knowing how, he was somewhere in the dark leaning on a too-human shoulder and he pushed away. That he hadn't been going to do. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't do that either. It was warm again, all except his soul, and suddenly on his left he heard harsh breathing. The robot brushed by him, moving fast, and he heard a fuzzy sound and then a sharp crack ! "What was that?" he said, but couldn't control his voice and it came out only one vowel, a sort of nasal bubble. Perfect fingers gently pressed against his mouth. He had to hold in hard not to bite. They went on down. It was never possible for him to lead, but the plan was his, so he was leading in that sense. More, he was taking care of himself now, even if his bad foot came down too hard now and then. He could hold his own. After all, they'd been in the tunnels before... From time to time they passed vague little clouds of pink light along the left wall, clouds dilating and contracting regularly, like a heartbeat. Once the pink flared out as he went by and he saw a square, naked compartment, and in the far corner something -- more a mass than a shape. It changed and uttered a noise of some sort. Then he was past. Had that been the enemy? But what was the noise it made? A moan of pleasure, maybe. He had seen pictures of Bagginses: small, brown-skinned, wrinkly-looking creatures almost like elves. Miraculously close to the human. You wanted to talk to them. You could talk to them, if only a little, and there was the true miracle. In all those centuries of exploration and expansion humankind hadn't found anyone else to talk to, not counting robots. And of course you didn't count robots. But he didn't want to talk to that . T hey went down, on what seemed to him a long spiral, and there were no more pink lights. The darkness sank away for a long time, always curving a little toward his game side. The robot was leading him by the hand now, as if he were a threeyear-old. With his other thumb -- the one he didn't have any more -- stuck in his mouth, probably. IF Suddenly they were in the middle of a great hissing. Up ahead was something giant that filled up the black, coming at them. He was flung flat against the wall. Breath went out of him; the hissing rushed up to a roar all around. He was sick and desperate trying to breathe, the air pulled from his mouth. The robot held him flat. There was no room; he had to bend over. Then he was breathing and the darkness was clear again. The hissing got smaller up the way they had come; abruptly what must be a bend cut it in half. "That was a hovercar transport," explained R #, speaking, incredibly, in a normal voice, so that for an instant the darkness seemed td jump at Paker from half a dozen places. "We are close to the difficult part of our mission now. Thirtyfour meters ahead, if I have measured accurately, is the conveyor belt which that transport just left. I do not know how fast the belt moves. However, seventy kilometers distant in the direction of its movement, the belt should pass a wall on the other side of which are located the control circuits to be destroyed. The belt is the best approach, according to my map. You are tired, and you are in a comparatively safe place. I will go on from here alone." Even at five or six inches he couldn't see its face, but he suspected it was doing the boyish smile: Go suck your thumb, old man. This calls for youth -- or metal. Paker passed the wrong hand over his face; his mind lurched a little. "I can manage." He said it without expression, fighting the heaviness of his breathing. But he said nothing about holding his own. That was behind him now. "I cannot undertake to be responsible for your safety once I am on the conveyor belt. I will be busy with more important things than you." Paker closed his eyes. He let breath out hugely, even though its face might be right there. "Look here," he said. "You can never be responsible for me. Do you understand that? Never. Not for a minute. It's our battle, and I'm going on. You'd better try to understand that, too." "I will make the situation clear. I may have to do more than simply to ignore you. If I find that your presence is likely to interfere with what I must do, I will be obliged to render you inoperative." For a moment Paker just breathed. Why didn't it say "kill?" "I'll manage," he repeated, and started by it in the dark. S o they went on together. The belt was slow and he lay on his back letting the blackness slide over him and slide over him. He was sleepy. Here! Biting at his lips didn't help. Would the robot wake him or merely let him go on, riding slowly into the limbo of this hideous world? In any case he couldn't ask. A question of pride more than of a broken neck; his muscles were too sore for him to sit up. While your eyes were open you could stay awake, but how to be sure your eyes were open still? And then something had him by the shoulder and R #'s voice was at him, too close in the darkness. "In three Earth minutes I will say to you, 'Run! and when I say that you must face back the way we haye come and run as rapidly as possible." His shoulder was his own again. Paker sat up, shuddering. Seven pills remained in the hip pouch and because his fingers couldn't tell which was which he swallowed them all. When the robot shouted at him -- shoutedl -- he started to run, only to find that he was already running, leaning away from his lame side as if to leave it behind, going furiously, all but galloping. The air boomed out, again, again. Behind and over his left shoulder a sudden great jag of white broke the dark. Then something moved abruptly and the crash detonated -- inside his ears this time. He tried to shake it out, blinking hard. Behind, the darkness caved slowly into a pale green, and there was a room, long and with something like a giant starship drive for one wall. A blur went through the hole while it was still widening, and then he turned and lunged for all that light. He fell. He was on his knees at the middle of the belt arid overhead the hole passed by. Well, said something odd inside him, at least you were headed in the right direction. Then he screamed and was running again. He caught up with the hole without any trouble. When he fell again he was able to grab the edge with his single hand. For an instant he simply hung there, his heels skittering away from him helplessly. He hooked the other elbow into the opening and pulled himself toward it. Head. And shoulders. His feet found purchase and he pushed himself up and through. The floor was probably a meter or so lower than the conveyor belt, and as he fell a gout of blue-white kicked under him. Then he dropped through where it had been and slammed flat, nose first, and he was weeping and trying to breathe and rolling all at once, and around the heat swirled like heavy windswept smoke. Almost where he had fallen a young man in a flaming sports shirt crouched behind a cabinet: Robot R #. A huge hovercar filled the entrance across the room, its bumper pressed against the sides. As the robot moved from one side of the cabinet to the other a gun on top of the aircar moved too, keeping almost exact pace with its opponent; and just as the robot reached the edge that bluewhite slammed out. The air was alive with heat. Then Paker saw the thing that was most of the right wall, and that wasn't like a starship drive at all. He forgot the battle in the middle of the room. What it did look like was a giant secondary circuit for an R model. Not quite the same, but awfully close. The main difference was that where, on an R model, the secondary would have hooked into a decision-making component, this thing led to a strip of knobs and a viewplate of some kind. And before the viewplate, in IF a tiny chair, sagged a Baggins, looking a bit like soggy pudding. The way any animal looked after you hit it with an organic scrambler. But apparently it had been able to feed in the decisive order first. And what good was a scrambler against that thing at the door? Suddenly R #I went over the top of the cabinet. The gun was a little behind, and the bolt caught it in the legs. The robot spun completely around in the air and dropped back behind the cabinet with a crash that Paker felt over here, in his eyes. Above the cabinet, where its legs had been, uncoiled a little puff of gray smoke; the robot lay motionless. And who could blame it? So now came his turn. Paker played his scrambler over the aircar on the off chance it had a Baggins operator, then threw his weapon at it. No response. Slowly he stood up and he was still there, not a crash of imploding air. The gun was still fixed on the cabinet. What if it was impossible? He was the one with feet to stand on now. He bet himself that he wouldn't get three steps, and then that he wouldn't get three more. And three more. The next one would put him into the line of fire. His legs wouldn't take it, neither of them. So Paker lay down and rolled. Then he stood up, but he didn't have to bet himself any more. H e walked all the way across and he was standing over the tau node of what was, for all practical purposes, an R model. In disabling an R model you had to hook into the navel -- if you could stand to think of its having a navel -- and pull left hard with one hand, reach in with the other and twist Right here! That was about what an R model itself did, when it turned off its sensors. In effect, you wero making a closed system of the elaborate set of chemical imbalances that served a robot for thought. Only he couldn't. The thing was too big. He hadn't strength enough. But it didn't matter. He had time enough to detach the connecting lines one by one. He was jerking at a red and yellow one when the hissing stopped -- the hissing that he hadn't really heard -- and behind him the hover car sank like soft thunder to the floor. Muscles relaxed all along his back. He worked the remaining three lines free and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. His hand came away completely red. Nosebleed. Then Paker sat down and laughed. What he wanted to do was shout, "I'm king of the mountain!" He hadn't said that in maybe fortyfive Earth years; but he hadn't felt it in about that long either. And now he was horribly tired -- even if he was king of the mountain. So happily, he only thought about how funny it would be for a man his age to say something as young and as vainglorious as that, no matter what he might feel. Happily he did no more, because while he was still laughing a young voice said: "If you can help me up to my knees and over to that hovercar, and if it has independent controls. we should try to finish this job promptly. I have been in communication with my people, but we will have to secure our advantage for the next seven Earth weeks." And, looking over, he saw R #I modestly take its finger from its navel. # #T ook here," said Paker, sham-L bling over to the haphazard wheelchair they had constructed for R #, "I can face up to it when I've been wrong. Or I can try, anyhow. But emotions ! I still can't swallow that." He waved his hand before it uncertainly, and sat down on the bumper of the hovercar. One of the thousand things he had learned these four Earth months was that he shrugged with his hands rather than his shoulders. Trying to do it with one hand was like hopping when you wanted to run. A bad feeling. He looked at the sky with its ridiculous green sun, then back at R # f. There was a streak of rust over its right eyebrow that made the thing's face, for Paker, immensely more bearable, almost nice in fact. What he wanted to say was, "I would respect you if you were the kind of thing it is possible to respect." But he couldn't say that. Nor was it quite right, either. But there was a need to say it, and the need had been with him and stronger every day since they worked their way out of that monsterwarren, always in his mouth, and making him say altogether too many other things. So he went on talking, when what he really needed was a good slug of cognac. R #I continued to regard him silently. This was apparently one of its days for not speaking unless you put everything to it in the form of a question. "I mean," he tried, "why don't you come back and help man?" Which wasn't what he meant at all. "You should not ask that after your exposure to Baggins culture. When we discovered this world three hundred Earth years ago, we decided to leave it alone so that your kind could see what happens when mechanical lifeforms and animals cooperate. You disappoint me, Questions Controller." He was quiet for a moment because this was news. After all their conversations on Baggins' world the thing still withheld information, waiting for him to find the right question. He, God knew, hadn't any secrets left! He looked at the sky again, then asked: "Well? What happens?" "Machines dominate." "But if we take precautions? We're pretty shrewd, you know." "Your kind cannot well take more precautions than did the Bagginses." Another reminder that he'd run no real danger crossing that hourslong room, what with that giant brain not having enough discretion to tell a nosebleed from a friend, as long as the nosebleed was walking around in a friendly way? He'd heard too much about that six Earth weeks ago. He wasn't so sure, either. Or it might just mean what it said: you IF couldn't take more precautions, not possibly. And this was true. Paker made a vague guttural noise. Let it figure out whether he was agreeing or not. He tried the other side: "General idea is, you're doing your best to dominate right now." "Such an idea is absurd. I am too polite to suppose that you could entertain it." "But suppose I do?" The radio R #I had tricked together began to gabble in the hovercar cabin, and he limped three steps over and leaned into the door and pushed on the key. "Paker here," he said, amazed at the everyday sound of his voice. "I am sending." Then he moved the pointer to where a long, nervous tone began to trickle from the set and weighed down the key with a rock ready there for the purpose. Standing erect he looked to the north where a ship was likely to come in. But he couldn't see the fire trail, if there was one. He went back to his seat on the bumper. "Not long now. Well? Suppose I do? What are you up to if you're not trying to beat us?" "I am structured against supposing a thing so impolite." "I've noticed you can get around that kind of structure when it suits you to." It was silent. But wasn't the answer plain enough, once you looked at robots sympathetically? Once you realized there could be that particular question. Once you'd gone through what he had. "You're pushing us," he said. "The whole business of galactic expansion, the whole faked-out competition, is just a thing you've set up to keep us going. Not to let us get any rest, ever." "Animals tend to exaggerate their need for rest," agreed R #. "Just like you pushed me. You made us camp ten degree? of latitude farther north than necessary. Why? Because you figured the cold would keep me working. That's why you were riding me all the time, too. It wasn't really bad feeling." Paker rose, creaking. "Also, I know that when you got it in the legs that was calculated. You were still pushing  #I me. R #I said nothing and he walked on by it and stood looking out toward a streak of purple forest and above it the open sky. If you were a made thing, then your reason for being was somewhere outside you -- in those others, your creators. You existed to serve them. And in yourself you were nothing. You had to have them. You couldn't originate a purpose -- not on the fundamental level -- any more than you could originate a new question. What you could do, though, was use what was in you to the limit. "Wasn't this it?" he went on. "Somewhere back when you decided we were going soft, like the Bagginses. The problem was, we were alone out in space. No contest. Nobody ever came up to our mark, and probably we were starting not to come up to it too -- leaning on you too much for own good. So you decided the best way to serve us was to set up some hard competition." How long had he known this? Well, for a long time and only just this moment, both. "To get us back on our feet." He came around to where R #I could see him. "I guess what I want to say is -- thank God you were able to decide." Was he going to blush now, of all damned things? "You asked me earlier about my emotions," said the robot. " 'Feelings would be the better word. I think I can make you understand them." "I want to do that.' "You must not think of a feeling as something that happens inside you. Without an environment you would never feel anything. A feeling is, in essence, the relation your structure has to your environment." "You fit or you don't," he agreed, but he was not sure he really understood. "Perhaps that is correct. But I am explaining my feelings. My ideal environment is a mathematical one similar to subuniverse #, starting with self-evident axioms and working itself out into a closed system of a high order of complexity. In such an environment I would be perfectly happy." Paker considered. "And in the environment containing human beings?" he asked.  R #I smiled carefully. "Well, then, as you would say. I hate you. I also hate all your kind."  ' A gripping new novel of the far future Winner of the # "Best Story " Award for The Dragon Masters Enthralling novella by Fritz Leiber Philip K. Dick Damon Knight Willy Ley December issue on sale now at all newsstands -- or send #l to Galaxy, #I Hudson Street, New York City #. IP # Short Star I " I v"" i mi  Never play poker with a worm -- especially when it's an alien I T he leader worm, known in the Earth translation as The Hell Of A Long One -- he was three me ters long and approximately onehalf-meter thick -- wriggled happily on his white porcelain throne. f What beautiful porcelain we shall have with the calcined bones of these two Earthmen, Cards Wartson and Novice Howard!" The other three worms were also overjoyed, as well as sycophantic. "Such lovely, lovely porcelain!" they chanted, wriggling in time. Cards Wartson and Novice "Nosey" Howard, lying guarded on the floor, saw objections to the plan. Cards reminded the worms, "You can just quit wriggling for joy now. You can't use our bones, because we've still got us wrapped around them!" "That can be remedied," crooned the leader. "And it should be, when Earthmen come around we Martians and want to play poker, and then can't pay off when they lose." The other worms tittered delightedly. "You gave me a fast shuffle with those thousand legs of yours," complained Cards. "Those cards whizzed around in a circle so fast I couldn't follow them at all." "Yes, but he'd have won anyway, with you always trying to fill those inside straights," interjected Nosey critically. Then he looked at his captors. "But  don't owe you worms anything. I wasn't even playing cards with you." "No," retorted The Hell Of A Long One, "you were just snooping around where you had no business to be. Probably prying into our porcelain making secrets. And you upset a cabinet of my clay tablets, breaking half of them." "I can't help it if you don't have paper on this planet," shrugged How ard. "We'd trade you paper if you wanted it. When you make everything out of sand and dirt it's bound to be brittle." "Especially when clumsy spies come around," leered the leader, once again exciting the merriment of the other worms. "As art dealers, we of course are interested in your porcelain art objects," replied Howard stiffly, trying to cover his idle snooping with a little dignity. "Anyway interrupted Wartson, "what ever makes you want to put bone ash in your porcelain paste? You'll just come out with medium hard paste. There surely isn't any sale for anything but hard-paste porcelain -- why, this medium-paste stuff isn't worth the freight to Earth." "Bone ash is so rare on this planet," explained The Hell Of A Long One dreamily. "We worms have no bones, nor have any of the other fauna on the planet. Only fossils remain to us." "But still," Wartson said in disgust, "soft paste is soft paste." "Ah, but the new pastels! The new, delicate shades we shall discover!" breathed the leader worm ecstatically. "Who would want to sell beauty such as that?" Wartson and Howard could see they weren't going to talk the monster out of it. "Well, let's deal another hand," said Cards resignedly, reaching for the deck. "Double or nothing, what do you say?" I t had all begun earlier in the day, when the four art dealers drove down the dried-up canal in their jointly owned space car toward Erlanger, the home village of The Hell Of A Long One. They had had premonitions -- from long experience -- of the disasters to come. Jock Hickerson was driving, and he gave the first admonition. "Cards," he rasped, "quit trying to beat these natives at poker!" "Now you know that with a reasonable amount of luck -- " "Which you haven't had any of the last twenty years!" "I got the old finesse, anyway," said Cards proudly. "Sure you have!" flung back Jock. "You fill those inside straights of yours one out of every # times!" "I wish you could miss banging up the flaps of this space car that often," retorted Cards. "I don't know what you're talking about," said Jock loftily. "Just stop this can for a minute and I'll point out its scars to you!" IF returned Cards. "I swear, I don't know how she holds air out in space any more. Can't you keep away from these stone canal walls?" "I have to dodge the sand dunes." The other art dealer member of the car pool, a half-breed Indian named Teepee McGuzzle interposed sadly, "This sure is a dry place." "I hope those worms haven't got anything to make it wetter for you either," said Howard. "All we need is to have you on another roaring toot." "You can't roar when you toot," pointed out Teepee with some justification. "You make a mighty fine try at it," said Jock. "It was dirty of you fellows to thieve away my grog at the space port," mourned Teepee. "People are so undercover any more that a fellow doesn't know what to think. Twenty years ago if people wanted to be dishonest they did it out in the open, where you could see them. Nowadays people are so sneaky you can hardly tell what they are doing -- even if you watch them." "You should have stayed on the reservation," advised Cards. "If I had stayed on the Seminole reservation we wouldn't have this space car pool and be saving oodles of travel expense, because I'm the one who got the idea in the first place," said Teepee. "Here's the town we're looking for -- Erlanger," interjected Howard as a hundred half-oval, white porcelain structures loomed up in the early morning dust. A few minutes later they were conferring with The Hell Of A Long One -- or rather, Cards was. Ignoring his business as a porcelain art dealer, he drew a deck of cards from his pocket and proceeded to explain the principles of stud poker to the worm. The other art dealers were unable to get in a word. Novice Howard wandered into another room of the ovular structure and snooped where he did not belong. Teepee went hunting for alcohol. Jock dozed in a corner. T he two disasters happened together. Just as Cards Wartson got to owing far more than he could pay, the worms heard a crash in the next room. Rushing in, they discovered the broken clay records. Jock awoke at Teepee's urgent nudging. "Come on, we gotta get outa here!" "What's going on?" "Cards owes them a pot of money and Nosey broke something. They are going to kill both of them! Let's get out of here before they grab us!" "Why should they grab us? We haven't done anything." "Wait until they find out I drank up all their moss squeezing!" "Good God!" said Jock, running for the door. The two men did not stop running until they were safely locked in the space car. "Well, let's get back to the space port," urged Teepee when they had got their breath. "What for?" asked Jock, surprised. "To get some weapons. Rescue Cards and Nosey." "We don't need any weapons at all to whip those monsters." "I'm not wrestling with any threemeter worms," Teepee said decisively"Me either. So here's what we're going to do. We'll crash into the side of the building, on the side the worms are on, and before the worms get over the surprise we'll grab up Cards and Nosey and be on our way." "Don't you think maybe those porcelain walls are too thick?" objected Teepee. "Maybe we'll just tear up our ship." "Not if we hit her hard enough! Let's just slide back the plastic top now, so we'll be ready for a fast grab when we crash in!" "Let her rip!" said Teepee, drunkenly sliding back the greenhouse. They embarked upon the crazy scheme, backing off a hundred meters and then ramming the building at the vehicle's top ground speed. However, the space sedan, instead of breaking into the white porcelain, ran up the slick side of the building. Just as it arrived at a large ventilator hole in the top of the oval structure, it flipped over, and the two men tumbled down into the waiting grasp of the monsters. Teepee was the first to get to his feet. "There's just one little old thing I want to say," he declared, weaving a little, "and that is, I'm so glad to be here!" "I am glad you enjoy our company," returned The Hell Of A Long One. "It's not that," said Teepee. "It's just that I want to confess. If there's anything I can't stand, it's an undercover thief." "Kindly continue." "I drank up your moss squeezings," Teepee said humbly. "Stole our nectar!" "Drank every drop." "You'll catch it now! More calcined bones!" "I suppose so. That fermented spinach was the lousiest nectar I ever drank, too. Sure wasn't worth what I'm going to pay for it." Nosey Howard felt the urge too. "I also want to confess. When I broke your clay plates I was really snooping into your sex lives. I thought there might be some dirty jokes on them." "Dirty jokes?" the H. A. Long One asked, mystified. "You know. Slightly abnormal sex practices." "I can't imagine what you mean." "Well, on Earth for instance, a male and female after consorting for two or three evenings without mating may -- " He whispered busily. "You mean they may not mate the instant they sight each other?" asked The Hell Of A Long One, as he and his fellow monsters burst into frenzied fits of laughter. "So that's what dirty jokes are! No wonder you go to such extreme lengths to get new ones. Tell us more dirty jokes." "Well," said Nosey Howard, riding high, "there was this old maid -- I mean this female -- who never did -- " "Never did! Stop it, you are excruciating! I can't stand it!" gasped the worm, writhing his thousand legs together in merriment "She never did!" IF D o you have to keep scraping this can against the sides of the canal?" complained Wartson as the foursome made their way down the canal, weaving around the sand dunes in their battered space car. "You're going to break this whole case of porcelain figurines. "That's the thanks I get for getting us out of that mess," Jock said complacently as he recklessly whizzed from one side to the other of the stone-walled throughway. "Yes, you were a big help," answered Nosey Howard caustically. He tenderly cradled his armload of Martian clay tablets. "Instead of going to the spaceport for weapons, you dump your no-good selves right back in there again!  was the one who got them back in good humor." He added with pride, "Wait until they get that Emily Post book I promised them; they'll tear themselves apart laughing!" "How about that Everglades moonshine I promised them?" queried Teepee McGuzzle, waving a souvenir nectar pot. "It'll turn that yellow fuzz of theirs . a mildew green!" "They'll never see another poker hand like the one I wound up wit! though," said Cards Wartson cunningly. "Instead of watching me, they were watching you two turr bling down through the hole in the ceiling. First time I ever drew three cards to an inside straight flush!" In Our Next Issue--The funniest, fastest-moving Retief story yet by Keith Laumer by Robert F. Young by Poul Anderson IP  Novelette You've read Poul Anderson stories before -- but you've never read a Poul Anderson story like this one I T hat morning, as he carefully shaved his head until it glistened, Aaron Tozzo pondered a vision too unfortunate to be endured.He saw in his mind fifteen convicts from Nachbaren Slager, each man only one inch high, in a ship the size of a child's balloon. The ship, traveling at almost the speed of light, continued. on forever, with the men aboard neither knowing nor caring what became of them. The worst part of the vision was just that in all probability it was true. He dried his head, rubbed oil into his skin, then touched the button within his throat. When contact with the Bureau switchboard had been established, Tozzo said, "I admit we can do nothing to get those fifteen men back, but at least we can refuse to send any more." His comment, recorded by the switchboard, was passed on to his co-workers. They all agreed; he listened to their voices chiming in as he put on his smock, slippers and overcoat. Obviously, the flight had been an error; even the public knew that now. But -- "But we're going on," Edwin Fermeti, Tozzo's superior, said above the clamor. "We've already got the volunteers." "Also from Nachbaren Slager?" Tozzo asked. Naturally the prisoners there would volunteer; their lifespan at the camp was no more than five or six years. And if this flight to Proxima were successful, the men aboard would obtain their freedom. They would not have to return to any of the five inhabited planets within the Sol System. "Where does it matter where they originate?" Fermeti said smoothly. Tozzo said, "Our effort should be directed toward improving the U.S. Department of Penology, instead of trying to reach other stars." He had a sudden urge to resign his position with the Emigration Bureau and go into politics as a reform candidate. Later, as he sat at the breakfast table, his wife patted him sympathetically on the arm. "Aaron, you haven't been able to solve it yet, have you?" "No," he admitted shortly. "And now I don't even care." He did not tell her about the other ship loads of convicts which had fruitlessly been expended; it was forbidden to discuss that with anyone not employed by a department of the Government. "Could they be re-entering on their own?" "No. Because mass was lost here, in the Sol System. To re-enter they have to obtain equal mass back, to replace it. That's the whole point." Exasperated, he sipped his tea and ignored her. Women, he thought. Attractive but not bright. "They need mass back," he repeated. "Which would be fine if they were making a round trip, I suppose. But this is? an attempt to colonize; it's not a guided tour that returns to its point of origin." "How long does it take them to reach Proxima?" Leonore asked. "All reduced like that, to an inch high." "About four years." Her eyes grew large. "That's marvelous." Grumbling at her, Tozzo pushed his chair back from the table and rose. I wish they'd take her, he said to himself, since she imagines it's so marvelous. But Leonore would be too smart to volunteer. Leonore said softly, "Then I was right. The Bureau has sent people. You as much as admitted it just now." Flushing, Tozzo said, "Don't tell anybody; none of your female friends especially. Or it's my job." He glared at her. On that hostile note, he set off for the Bureau. A s Tozzo unlocked his office door, Edwin Fermeti hailed him. "You think Donald Nils is somewhere on a planet circling Proxima at this very moment?" Nils was a notorious murderer who had volunteered for one of the Bureau's flights. "I wonder -- maybe he's carrying around a lump of sugar five times his size." "Not really very funny," Tozzo said. Fermeti shrugged. "Just hoping to relieve the pessimism. I think we're all getting discouraged." He followed Tozzo into his office. "Maybe we should volunteer ourselves IF for the next flight." It sounded almost as if he meant it, and Tozzo glanced quickly at him. "Joke," Fermeti said. "One more flight," Tozzo said, "and if it fails, I resign." "I'll tell you something," Fermeti said. "We have a new tack." Now Tozzo's co-worker Craig Gilly had come sauntering up. To the two men, Fermeti said, "We're going to try using pre-cogs in obtaining our formula for re-entry." His eyes flickered as he saw their reaction. Astonished, Gilly said, "But all the pre-cogs are dead. Destroyed by Presidential order twenty years ago." Tozzo, impressed, said, "He's going to dip back into the past to obtain a pre-cog. Isn't that right, Fermeti?" "We will, yes," his superior said, nodding. "Back to the golden age of pre-cognition. The twentieth century." For a moment Tozzo was puzzled. And then he remembered. During the first half of the twentieth century so many pre-cogs -- people with the ability to read the future -- had come into existence that an organized guild had been formed with branches in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Pennsylvania. This group of precogs, all knowing one another, had put out a number of periodicals which had flourished for several decades. Boldly and openly, the members of the pre-cog guild had proclaimed in their writings their knowledge of the future. And yet -- as a whole, their society had paid littk attention to them. Tozzo said slowly, "Let me get this straight. You mean you're going to make use of the Department of Archaeology's time-dredges to scoop up a famous pre-cog of the past?" Nodding, Fermeti said, "And bring him here to help us, yes." "But how can he help us? He would have no knowledge of our future, only of his own." Fermeti said, "The Library of Congress has already given us access to its virtually complete collection of pre-cog journals of the twentieth century." He smiled crookedly at Tozzo and Gilly, obviously enjoying the situation. "It's my hope -- and my expectation -- that among this great body of writings we will find an article specifically dealing with our re-entry problem. The chances, statistically speaking, are quite good... they wrote about innumerable topics of future civilization, as you know." After a pause, Gilly said, "Very clever. I think your idea may solve our problem. Speed-of-light travel to other star systems may yet become a possibility." Sourly, Tozzo said, "Hopefully, before we run out of convicts." But he, too, liked his superior's idea. And, in addition, he looked forward to seeing face to face one of the famous twentieth century pre-cogs. Theirs had been one brief, glorious period -- sadly, long since ended. Or not so brief, if one dated it as starting with Jonathan Swift, rather than with H. G. Wells. Swift had written of the two moons of Mars and their unusual orbital characteristics years before telescopes had proved their existence. And so today there was a tendency in the textbooks to include him. II I t took the computers at the Library of Congress only a short while to scan the brittle, yellowed volumes, article by article, and to select the sole contribution dealing with deprivation of mass and restoration as the modus operandi of interstellar space travel. Einstein's formula that as an object increased its velocity its mass increased proportionally had been so fully accepted, so completely unquestioned, that no one in the twentieth century had paid any attention to the particular article, which had been put in print in August of # in a pre-cog journal called If. In Fermeti's office, Tozzo sat beside his superior as the two of them pored over the photographic reproduction of the journal. The article was titled Night Flight, and it ran only a few thousand words. Both men read it avidly, neither speaking until they had finished. "Well?" Fermeti said, when they had come to the end. Tozzo said, "No doubt of it. That's our Project, all right. A lot is garbled; for instance he calls the Emigration Bureau 'Outward, Incorporated,' and believes it to be a private commercial firm." He referred to the text. "It's really uncanny, though. You're obviously this character, Edmond Fletcher; the names are similar but still a little off, as is everything else. And I'm Alison Torelli." He shook his head admiringly. "Those pre-cogs... having a mental image of the future that was always askew and yet in the main -- n "In the main correct," Fermeti finished. "Yes, I agree. This Night Flight article definitely deals with us and the Bureau's Project... herein called Waterspider, because it has to be done in one great leap. Good lord, that would have been a perfect name, had we thought of it. Maybe we can still call it that." Tozzo said slowly, "But the precog who wrote Night Flight... in no place does he actually give the formula for mass-restoration or even for mass-deprivation. He just simply says that 'we have it.' " Taking the reproduction of the journal, he read aloud from the article: Difficulty in restoring mass to the ship and its passengers at the termination of the flight had proved a stumbling block for Torelli and his team of researchers and yet they had at last proved successful. After the fateful implosion of the Sea Scout, the initial ship to -- "And that's all," Tozzo said. "So what good does it do us? Yes, this pre-cog experienced our present situation a hundred years ago -- but he left out the technical details " There was silence. At last Fermeti said thoughtfully, "That doesn't mean he didn't know the technical data. We know today that the others in his guild were very often trained scientists." He examined the biographical report. "Yes, IF while not actually using his pre-cog ability he worked as a chicken-fat analyst for the University of California." "Do you still intend to use the time-dredge to bring him up to the present?" Fermeti nodded. "I only wish the dredge worked both ways. If it could be used with the future, not...the past, we could avoid having to jeopardize the safety of this precog -- " He glanced down at the article. "This Poul Anderson." Chilled, Tozzo said, "What hazard is there?" "We may not be able to return him to his own time. Or -- " Fermeti paused. "We might lose part of him along the way, wind up with only half of him. The dredge has bisected many objects before." "And this man isn't a convict at Nachbaren Slager," Tozzo said. "So you don't have that rationale to fall back on." Fermeti said suddenly, "We'll do it properly. We'll reduce the jeopardy by sending a team of men back to that time, back to #. They can apprehend this Poul Anderson and see that all of him gets into the time-dredge, not merely the top half or the left side." So it had been decided. The Department of Archaeology's timedredge would go back to the world of # and pick up the pre-cog Poul Anderson; there was nothing further to discuss. R esearch conducted by the U. S. Department of Archaeology showed that in September of # Poul Anderson had been living hi Berkeley, California, on Grove Street. In that month he had attended a top-level meeting of pre-cogs from all over the United States at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. It was probable that there, in that meeting, basic policy for the next year had been worked out, with Anderson, and other experts, participating. "It's really very simple," Fermeti explained to Tozzo and Gilly. "A pair of men will go back. They will be provided with forged identification showing them to be part of the nation-wide pre-cog organization... squares of cellophane-enclosed paper which are pinned to the coat lapel. Naturally, they will be wearing twentieth century garments. They will locate Poul Anderson, single him out and draw him off to one side." "And tell him what?" Tozzo said skeptically. "That they represent an unlicensed amateur pre-cog organization in Battlecreek, Michigan, and that they have constructed an amusing vehicle built to resemble a time-travel dredge of the future. They will ask Mr. Anderson, who was actually quite famous in his time, to pose by their humbug dredge, and then they will ask for a shot of him within. Our research shows that according to his contemporaries, Anderson was mild and easy-going and also that at these yearly top-strategy assemblies he often became convivial enough to enter into the mood of optimism generated by his fellow pre-cogs." Tozzo said, "You mean he sniffed what they called 'airplane dope? He was a 'glue-sniffer? " With a faint smile, Fermeti said, "Hardly. That was a mania among adolescents and did not become widespread in fact until a decade later. No, I am speaking about imbibing alcohol." "I see," Tozzo said, nodding. Fermeti continued, "In the area of difficulties, we must cope with the fact that at this top-secret session, Anderson brought along his wife Karen, dressed as a Maid of Venus in gleaming breast-cups, short skirt and helmet, and that he also brought their new-born daughter Astrid. Anderson himself did not wear any disguise for purposes of concealing his identity. He had no anxieties, being a quite stable person, as were most twentieth century pre-cogs. "However, during the discussion periods between formal sessions, the pre-cogs, minus their wives, circulating about, playing poker and arguing, some of them it is said stoning one another -- " "Stoning?" "Or, as it was put, becoming stoned. In any case, they gathered in small groups in the antechambers of the hotel, and it is at such an occasion that we expect to nab him. In the general hubbub his disappearance would not be noted. We would expect to return him to that exact time, or at least no more than a few hours later or earlier... preferably not earlier because two Poul Andersons at the meeting might prove awkward. Tozzo, impressed, said, "Sounds foolproof. "I'm glad you like it," Fermeti said tartly, "because you will be one of the team sent. Pleased, Tozzo said, "Then I had better get started learning the details of life in the mid twentieth century. He picked up another issue of If. This one, May of #, had interested him as soon as he had seen it. Of course, this issue would not be known yet to the people of #... but eventually they would see it. And once having seen it they would never forget it... Ray Bradbury's first textbook to be serialized, he realized as he examined the journal. The Fisher of Men , it was called, and in it the great Los Angeles pre-cog had anticipated the ghastly Gutmanist political revolution which was to sweep the inner planets. Bradbury had warned against Gutman, but the warning had gone -- of course -- unheeded. Now Gutman was dead and the fanatical supporters had dwindled to the status of random terrorists. But had the world listened to Bradbury -- "Why the frown? Fermeti asked him. "Don't you want to go?" "Yes, Tozzo said thoughtfully. "But it's a terrible responsibility. These are no ordinary men. "That is certainly the truth,' Fermeti said, nodding. Ill T wenty-four hours later, Aaron Tozzo stood surveying himself in his mid twentieth century clothing and wondering if Anderson would be deceived, if he actually could be duped into entering the dredge. IP The costume certainly was perfection itself. Tozzo had even been equipped with the customary waistlength beard and handlebar mustache so 'popular circa # in the United States. And he wore a wig. Wigs, as everyone knew, had at that time swept the United States as the fashion note par excellence; men and women both had worn huge powdered perukes of bright colors, reds and greens and blues and of course dignified grays. It was one of the most amusing occurrences of the twentieth century. Tozzo's wig, a bright red, pleased him. Authentic, it had come from the Los Angeles Museum of Cultural History, and the curator had vouched for it being a man's, not a woman's. So the fewest possible chances of detection were being taken. Little risk existed that they would be detected as members of another, future culture entirely. And yet Tozzo was still uneasy. However, the plan had been arranged; now it was time to go. With Gilly, the other member selected, Tozzo entered the time-dredge and seated himself at the controls. The Department of Archaeology had provided a full instruction manual, which lay open before him. As soon as Gilly had locked the hatch, Tozzo took the bull by the horns (a twentieth century expression) and started up the dredge. Dials registered. They were spinning backward into time, back to # and the San Francisco Precog Congress. Beside him, Gilly practiced mid twentieth century phrases from a reference volume. "Diz muz be da blace..." Gilly cleared his throat. "Kilroy was here," he murmured. "Wha hoppen? Like man, let's cut out; this ball's a drag." He shook his "head. "I can't grasp the exact sense of these phrases," he apologized to Tozzo. "Twenty-three skidoo." Now a red light glowed; the dredge was about to conclude its journey. A moment later its turbines halted. They had come to rest on the sidewalk outside the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in downtown San Francisco. On all sides, people in quaint archaic costumes dragged along on foot. And, Tozzo saw, there were no monorails; all the visible traffic was surface-bound. What a congestion, he thought, as he watched the automobiles and buses moving inch by inch along the packed streets. An official in blue waved traffic ahead as best he could, but the entire enterprise, Tozzo could see, was an abysmal failure. "Time for phase two," Gilly said. But he, too, was gaping at the stalled surface vehicles. "Good grief," he said, "look at the incredibly short skirts of the women; why, the knees are virtually exposed. Why don't the women die of whisk virus?" "I don't know," Tozzo said, "but I do know we've got to get into the Sir Francis Drake Hotel." Carefully, they opened the port of the time-dredge and stepped out. And then Tozzo realized something. There had been anerror. Already. The men of this decade were cleanshaven. "Gilly," he said rapidly, "we've got to shed our beards and mustaches." In an instant he had pulled Gilly's off, leaving his bare face exposed. But the wig; that was correct. All the men visible wore headdress of some type; Tozzo saw few if any bald men. The women, too had luxurious wigs... or were they wigs? Could they perhaps be natural hair? In any case, both he and Gilly now would pass. Into the Sir Francis Drake, he said to himself, leading Gilly along. T hey darted lithely across the sidewalk -- it was amazing how slowly the people of this time-period walked -- and into the inexpressibly old-fashioned lobby of the hotel. Like a museum, Tozzo thought as he glanced about him. I wish we could linger... but they could not. "How's our identification?" Gilly said nervously. "Is it passing inspection?" The business with the facehair had upset him. On each of their lapels they carried the expertly made false identification. It worked. Presently they found themselves ascending by a lift, or rather elevator, to the correct floor. The elevator let them off in a crowded foyer. Men, all clean-shaven, with wigs or natural hair, stood in small clusters everywhere, laughing and talking. And a number of attractive women, some of them in garments called leotards, which were skin-tight, loitered about smilingly. Even though the styles of the times required their breasts to be covered, they were a sight to see. Sotto voce, Gilly said, "I am stunned. In this room are some of the -- " "I know," Tozzo murmured. Their Project could wait, at least a little while. Here was an unbelievably golden opportunity to see these precogs, actually to talk to them and listen to them... Here came a tall, handsome man in a dark suit that sparkled with tiny specks of some unnatural material, some variety of synthetic. The man wore glasses and his hair, everything about him, had a tanned, dark look. The name on his identification... Tozzo peered. The tall, good-looking man was A. E. Van Vogt. "Say," another individual, perhaps a pre-cog enthusiast, was saying to Van Vogt, stopping him. "I read both versions of your World of Null A and I still didn't quite get that about it being him; you know, at the end. Could you explain that part to me? And also when they started into the tree and then just -- " Van Vogt halted. A soft smile appeared on his face and he said, "Well, I'll tell you a secret. I start out with a plot and then the plot sort of folds up. So then I have to have another plot to finish the rest of the story." Going over to listen, Tozzo felt something magnetic about Van Vogt. He was so tall, so spiritual. Yes, Tozzo said to himself; that was the word, a healing spirituality. There was a quality of innate goodness which emanated from him. All at once Van Vogt said, "There goes a man with my pants." And, IF without a further word to die enthusiast, stalked off and disappeared into the crowd. Tozzo's head swam. To actually have seen and heard A. E. Van Vogt -- "Look," Gilly was saying, plucking at his sleeve. "That enormous, genial-looking man seated over there; that's Howard Browne, who edited the pre-cog journal Amazing at this time-period." "I have to catch a plane," Howard Browne was saying to anyone who would listen to him. He glanced about him in worried anxiety, despite his almost physical geniality. "I wonder," Gilly said, "if Doctor Asimov is here." 'll#'e can ask, Tozzo decided. He   made his way over to one of the young women wearing a blonde clearly in the argot of the times. "Who's to know?" the girl said. "Is he here, miss?" "Naw," the girl said. Gilly again plucked at Tozzo's sleeve. "We must find Poul Anderson, remember? Enjoyable as it is to talk to this girl -- " "I'm inquiring about Asimov," Tozzo said brusquely. After all, Isaac Asimov had been founder of the entire twenty-first century positronic robot industry. How could he not be here? A burly outdoorish man strode by them, and Tozzo saw that this was Jack Vance. Vance, he decided, looked more like a big game hunter than anything else... we must beware of him, Tozzo decided. If we got into any altercation Vance could take care of us easily. He noticed now that Gilly was talking to the blonde-wigged girl man whose paper on parallel time is still at the very forefront of theoretical studies; isn't he -- " "I dunno," the girl said, in a bored tone of voice. A group had gathered about a figure opposite them; the central person whom everybody was listening to was saying, "... all right, if like Howard Browne you prefer air travel, fine. But I say it's risky. I don't fly. In fact even riding in a car is dangerous. I generally lie down in the back." The man wore a short-cropped wig and a bow tie; he had a round, pleasant face but his eyes were intense. It was Ray Bradbury, and Tozzo started toward him at once. "Stop!" Gilly whispered angrily. "Remember what we came for." And, past Bradbury, seated at the bar, Tozzo saw an older, care-weathered man in a brown suit wearing small glasses and sipping a drink. He recognized the man from drawings in early Gernsback publications; it was the fabulously unique pre-cog from the New Mexico re"I thought Legion of Time was the finest novel-length science-fiction work I ever read," an individual, evidently another pre-cog enthusiast, "That was originally going to be it grew. Yes, I liked that one, too." Meanwhile Gilly had wandered on, into an adjoining room. He found at a tabic, two women and a man in deep conversation. One of the women, dark-haired and handsome, with bare shoulders, was -- according to her identification plate -- Evelyn Paige. The taller women he discovered was the renowned Margaret St. Clair, and Gilly at once said: "Mrs. St. Clair, your article entitled The Scarlet Hexapod in the September # If was one of the finest -- " And then he broke off. Because Margaret St. Clair had not written that yet. Knew in fact nothing about it. Flushing with nervousness, Gilly backed away. "Sorry," he murmured. "Excuse me; I became confused." Raising an eyebrow, Margaret St. Clair said, "In the September # issue, you say? What are you, a man from the future?" "Droll," Evelyn Paige said, "but let's continue." She gave Gilly a hard stare from her black eyes. "Now Bob, as I understand what you're saying -- " She addressed the man opposite her, and Gilly saw now to his delight that the dire-looking cadaverous individual was none other than Robert Bloch. Gilly said, "Mr. Bloch, your article in Galaxy : Sabbatical , was -- " "You've got the wrong person, my friend," Robert Bloch said. "I never wrote any piece entitled Sabbatical" Good lord, Gilly realized. I did it again; Sabbatical is another work which has not been written yet. I had better get away from here. He moved back toward Tozzo... and found him standing rigidly. Tozzo said, "I've found Anderson." At once, Gilly turned, also rigid. B oth of them had carefully studied the pictures provided by the Library of Congress. There stood the famous pre-cog, tall and slender and straight, even a trifle thin, with curly hair -- or wig -- and glasses, a warm glint of friendliness in his eyes. He held a whiskey glass in one hand, and he was discoursing with several other pre-cogs. Obviously he was enjoying himself. "Um, uhh, let's see," Anderson was saying, as Tozzo and' Gilly came quietly up to join the group. "Pardon?" Anderson cupped his ear to catch what one of the other precogs was saying. "Oh, uh, yup, that's right." Anderson nodded. "Yup, Tony, uh, I agree with you one hundred per cent." The other pre-cog, Tozzo realized, was the superb Tony Boucher, whose pre-cognition of the religious revival of the next century had been almost supernatural. The word-by-word description of the Miracle in the Cave involving the robot... Tozzo gazed at Boucher with awe, and then he turned back to Anderson. "Poul," another pre-cog said. "I'll tell you how the Italians intended to get the British to leave if they did invade in #. The British would stay at hotels, the best, naturally. The Italians would overcharge them." "Oh, yes, yes," Anderson said, nodding and smiling, his eyes twinkno IF Kng. "And the British, being gentlemen, would say nothing -- " "But they'd leave the next day," the other pre-cog finished, and all in the group laughed, except for Gilly and Tozzo. "Mr. Anderson," Tozzo said tensely, "we're from an amateur pre-cog organization at Battlecreek, Michigan and we would like to photograph you beside our model of a time-dredge." "Pardon?" Anderson said, cupping his ear. Tozzo repeated what he had said, trying to be audible above the background racket. At last Anderson seemed to understand. "Oh, um, well, where is it?" Anderson asked obligingly. "Downstairs on the sidewalk," Gilly said. "It was too heavy to bring up." "Well, uh, if it won't take too awfully long," Anderson said, "which I doubt it will." He excused himself from the group and followed after them as they started toward the elevator. "It's steam-engine building time," a heavy-set man called to them as they passed. "Time to build steam engines, Poul." "We're going downstairs," Tozzo said nervously. "Walk downstairs on your heads," the pre-cog said. He waved goodby goodnaturedly, as the elevatpr came and the three of them entered it. "Kris is jolly today," Anderson said. "And how," Gilly said, using one of his phrases. "Is Bob Heinlem here?" Anderson asked Tozzo as they descended. "I understand he and Mildred Clingerman went off somewhere to talk about cats and nobody has seen them come back." "That's the way the ball bounces," Gilly said, trying out another twentU eth century phrase. Anderson cupped his ear, smiled hesitantly, but said nothing. At last, they emerged on the sidewalk. At the sight of their timedredge, Anderson blinked in astonishment. "I'll be gosh darned," he said, approaching it. "That's certainly imposing. Sure, I'd, uh, be happy to pose beside it." He drew his lean, angular body erect, smiling that warm, almost tender smile that Tozzo had noticed before. "Uh, how's this?" Anderson inquired, a little timidly. With an authentic twentieth century camera taken from the Smithsonian, Gilly snapped a picture. "Now inside," he requested, and glanced at Tozzo. "Why, uh, certainly," Poul Anderson said, and stepped up the stairs and into the dredge. "Gosh, Karen would, uh, like this," he said as he disappeared inside. "I wish to heck she'd come along." Tozzo followed swiftly. Gilly slammed the hatch shut, and, at the control board, Tozzo with the instruction manual in hand punched buttons. The turbines hummed, but Anderson did not seem to hear them; he was engrossed in staring at the controls, his eyes wide. "Gosh," he said. IF The time-dredge passed back to the present, with Anderson still lost in his scrutiny of the controls. IV F ermeti met them. "Mr. Anderson' he said, "this is an incredible honor." He held out his hand, but now Anderson was peering through the open hatch past him, at the city beyond; he did not notice the offered hand. "Say," Anderson said, his face twitching. "Um, what's, uh, this?" He was staring at the monorail system primarily, Tozzo decided. And this was odd, because at least in Seattle there had been monorails back in Anderson's time... or had there been? Had that come later? In any case, Anderson now wore a massively perplexed expression. "Individual cars," Tozzo said, standing close beside him. "Your monorails had only group cars. Later on, after your time, it was made possible for each citizen's house to have a monorail outlet; the individual brought his car out of its garage and onto the rail-terminal, from which point he joined the collective structure. Do you see?" But Anderson remained perplexed; his expression in fact had deepened. "Um," he said, "what do you mean 'my time'? Am I dead?" He looked morose now. "I thought it would be more along the lines of Valhalla, with Vikings and such. Not futuristic." "You're not dead, Mr. Anderson," Fermeti said. "What you're facing is the culture-syndrome of the mid twenty-first century. I must tell you, sir, that you've been napped. But you will be returned; I give you both my personal and official word." Anderson's jaw dropped, but he said nothing; he continued to stare. D onald Nils, notorious murderer, sat at the single table in the reference room of the Emigration Bureau's interstellar speed-of-light ship and computed that he was, in Earth figures, an inch high: Bitterly, he cursed. "It's cruel and unusual punishment," he grated aloud. "It's against the Constitution." And then he remembered that he had volunteered, in order to get out of Nachbaren Slager. That goddam hole, he said to himself. Anyhow, I'm out of there. And, he said to himself, even if I'm only an inch high I've still made myself captain of this lousy ship, and if it ever gets to Proxima I'll be captain of the entire lousy Proxima System. I didn't study with Gutman himself for nothing. And if that don't beat Nachbaren Slager, I don't know what does... His second-in-command, Pete Bailly, stuck his head into the reference room. "Hey, Nils, I have been looking over the micro-repro of this particular old pre-cog journal Astounding like you told me, this Venus Equilateral article about matter transmission, and I mean even though I was the top vid repairman in New York City that don't mean I can build one of these things." He glared at Nils. "That's asking a lot." Nils said tightly, "We've got to get back to Earth." lit "You're out of luck," Bailly told him. "Better settle for Prox." Furiously, Nils swept the microreproductions from the table, onto the floor of the ship. "That damn Bureau of Emigration! They tricked us!" Bailly shrugged. "Anyhow we got plenty to eat and a good reference library and #-D movies every night." "By the time we get to Prox," Nils snarled, "we'll have seen every movie -- " He calculated. "Two thousand times." "Well, then don't watch. Or we can run them backwards. How's your research coming?" "I got going the micro of an article in Space Science Fiction " Nils said thoughtfully, "called The Variable Man . It tells about faster-thanlight transmission. You disappear and then reappear. Some guy named Cole is going to perfect it, according to the old-time pre-cog who wrote it." He brooded about that. "If we could build a faster-than-light ship we could return to Earth. We could take over." "That's crazy talk," Bailly said. Nils regarded him. "I'm in command." "Then," Bailly said, "we got a nut in command. There's no returning to Terra; we better build our lives on Proxima's planets and forget forever about our home. Thank God we got women aboard. My God, even if we did get back... what could one-inch high people accomplish? We'd be jeered at." "Nobody jeers at me," Nils said quiedy. But he knew Eailly was right. They'd be lucky if they could re search the micros of the old pre-cog journals in the ship's reference room and develop for themselves a way of landing safely on Proxima's planets... even that was asking a lot. We'll succeed, Nils said to himself. As long as everyone obeys me, does exactly as I tell them, with no dumb questions. Bending, he activated the spool of the December # . There was an article in it that particularly interested him... and he had four years ahead of him in which to read, understand, and finally apply it. F ermeti said, "Surely your pre-cog ability helped prepare you for this, Mr. Anderson." His voice faltereded with nervous strain, despite his efforts to control it. "How about taking me back now?" Anderson said. He sounded almost calm. Fermeti, after shooting a swift glance at Tozzo and Gilly, said to Anderson, "We have . a technical problem, you see. That's why we brought here to our own time-continuum. You see -- " "I think you had better, um, take me back," Anderson broke in. "Karen'll get worried." He craned his neck, peering in all directions. "I knew it would be somewhat on this order," he murmured. His face twitched. "Not too different from what I expected... what's that tall thing over there? Looks like what the old blimps used to catch onto." "That." Tozzo said, "is a prayer tower." "Our problem," Fermeti said paIF tiently, "is dealt with in your article Night Flight in the August # If. We've been able to deprive an interstellar vehicle of its mass, but so far restoration of mass has -- " "Uh, oh, yes," Anderson said, in a preoccupied way. "I'm working on that yarn right now. Should have that off to Scott in another couple of weeks." He explained, "My agent." Fermeti considered a moment and then said, "Can you give us the formula for mass-restoration, Mr. Anderson?" "Um," Poul Anderson said slowly, "Yes, I guess that would be the correct term. Mass-restoration... I could go along with that." He nodded. "I haven't worked out any formula; I didn't want to make the yam too technical. I guess I could make one up, if that's what they wanted." He was silent, then, apparently having withdrawn into a world of his own; the three men waited, but Anderson said nothing more. "Your pre-cog ability," Fermeti said. "Pardon?" Anderson said, cupping his ear. "Pre-cog?" He smiled shyly. "Oh, uh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. I know John believes in all that, but I can't say as I consider a few experiments at Duke University as proof." Fermeti stared at Anderson a long time. "Take the first article in the January # Galaxy" he said quietly. "The Defenders... about the people living, beneath the surface and the robots up above, pretending to fight the war but actually not, actually faking the reports so interestingly that the people -- " "I read that," Poul Anderson agreed. "Very good, I thought, except for the ending. I didn't care too much for the ending. Fermeti said, "You understand, don't you, that those exact conditions came to pass in #, during World War Three? That by means of the article we were able to penetrate the deception carried on by our surface robots? That virtually every word of that article was exactly prophetic -- " "Phil Dick wrote that," Anderson said. " The Defenders ." "Do you know him?" Tozzo inquired. "Met him yesterday at the Convention," Anderson said. "For the first time. Very nervous fellow, was almost afraid to come in." Fermeti said, "Am I to understand that none of you are aware that you are pre-cogs?" His voice shook, completely out of control now. "  "some sf writers believe in it. I think Alf Van Vogt does." He smiled at Fermeti. "But don't you understand?" Fermeti demanded. "You described us in an article -- you accurately described our Bureau and its interstellar Project!" After a pause, Anderson murmured, "Gosh, I'll be darned. No, I didn't know that. Um, thanks a lot for telling me." Turning to Tozzo, Fermeti said, "Obviously we'll have to. recast our entire concept of the mid twentieth century." He looked weary. Tozzc said, 'Tor our purposes their ignorance doesn't matter. Because the pre-cognitive ability was there anyhow, whether they recognized it or not." That, to him, was perfectly clear. Anderson, meanwhile, had wandered off a little and stood now inspecting the display window of a nearby gift store. "Interesting brica-brac in there. I ought to pick up something for Karen while I'm here. Would it be all right -- " He turned questioningly to Fermeti. "Could I step in there for a moment and look around?" "Yes, yes," Fermeti said irritably. Poul Anderson disappeared inside the gift shop, leaving the three of them to argue the meaning of their discovery. "What we've got tc do," Fermeti said, "is sit him down in the situation familiar to him: before a typewriter. We must persuade him to compose an article on deprivation of mass and its subsequent restoration. Whether he himself takes the article to be factual or not has no bearing; it still will be. The Smithsonian must have a workable twentieth century typewriter and # by #I white sheets of paper. Do you agree?" Tozzo, meditating, said, "I'll tell you what I think. It was a cardinal error to permit him to go into that gift shop." "Why is that?" Fermeti inquired. "I see his point," Gilly said excitedly. "We'll never see Anderson again; he's skipped out on us through the pretext of gift-shopping for his wife." Ashen-faced, Fermeti turned and #W raced into the gift shop. Tozzo and Gilly followed. The store was empty. Anderson had eluded them; he was gone. A s he loped silently out the back door of the gift shop, Poul Anderson thought to himself, I don't believe they'll get me. At least not right away. I've got too much to do while I'm here, he realized. What an opportunity! When I'm an old man I can tell Astrid's children about this. Thinking of his daughter Astrid reminded him of one very simple fact, however. Eventually he had to go back to #. Because of Karen and the baby. No matter what he found here -- for him it was temporary. But meanwhile... first I'll go to the library, any library, he decided. And get a good look at history books that'll tell me what took place in the intervening years between # and now. I'd like to know, he said to himself, about the Cold War, how the U. S. and Russia come out. And -- space explorations. I'll bet they put a man on Luna by #. Certainly, they're exploring space now; heck, they even have a time-dredge so they must have that. Ahead Poul Anderson saw a doorway. It was open and without hesitation he plunged into it. Another shop of some kind, but this one larger than the gift shop. "Yes sir," a voice said, and a bald-headed man -- they all seemed to be bald-headed here -- approached him. The man glanced at AnIF derson's hair, his clothes... however the clerk was polite; he made no comment. "May I help you?" he asked. "Urn," Anderson said, stalling. What did this place sell, anyhow? He glanced around. Gleaming electronic objects of some sort. But what did they do? The clerk said, "Haven't you been nuzzled lately, sir?" "What's that?" Anderson said. Nuzzled? "The new spring nuzzlers have arrived, you know," the clerk said, moving toward the gleaming spherical machine nearest him. "Yes," he said to Poul, "you do strike me as very, very faintly introve -- no offense meant, sir, I mean, it's legal to be introved." The clerk chuckled. "For instance, your rather odd clothing... made it yourself, I take it? I must say, sir, to make your own clothing is highly introve. Did you weave it?" The clerk grimaced as if tasting something bad. "No," Poul said, "as a matter of fact it's my best suit." "Heh, heh," the clerk said. 'I share the joke, sir; quite witty. But what about your head? You haven't shaved your head in weeks" "Nope," Anderson admitted. "Well, maybe I do need a nuzzler." Evidently everyone in this century had one; like a TV set in his own time, it was a necessity, in order for one to be part of the culture. "How many in your family?" the clerk said. Bringing out a measuring tape, he measured the length of Poul's sleeve. "Three," Poul answered, baffled. "How old is the youngest?" "Just born," Poul said. The clerk's face lost all its color. "Get out of here," he said quietly. "Before I call for the polpol" "Um, what's that? Pardon?" Poul said, cupping his ear and trying to hear, not certain he had understood. "You're a criminal," the clerk mumbled. "You ought to be in Nachbaren Slager." "Well, thanks anyhow," Poul said, and backed out of the store, onto the sidewalk; his last glimpse was of the clerk still staring at him. U A re you a foreigner?" a voice f asked, a woman's voice. At the curb she had halted her vehicle. It looked to Poul like a bed; in fact, he realized, it was a bed. The woman regarded him with astute calm, her eyes dark and intense. Although her glistening shaved head somewhat upset him, he could see that she was attractive. "I'm from another culture," Poul said, finding himself unable to keep his eyes from her figure. Did all the women dress like this here in this society? Bare shoulders, he could understand. But not -- And the bed. The combination of the two was too much for him. What kind of business was she in, anyhow? And in public. What a society this was... morals had changed since his own time. "I'm looking for the library," Poul said, not coming too close to the vehicle which was a bed with motor and wheels, a tiller for steering. The woman said, "The library is one bight from here." "Um," Poul said, "what's a 'bight?' " "Obviously, you're wanging me," the woman said. All visible parts of her flushed a dark red. "It's not funny. Any more than your disgustingly hairy head is. Really, both your wanging and your head are not amusing, at least not to me." And yet she did not go on; she remained where she was, regarding him somberly. "Perhaps you need help," she decided. "Perhaps I should pity you. You know of course that the polpol could pick you up any time they want." Poul said, "Could I, um, buy you a cup of coffee somewhere and we could talk? I'm really anxious to find the library." "I'll go with you," the woman agreed. "Although I have no idea what 'coffee' is. If you touch me I'll nilp at once." "Don't do that," Poul said, "it's unnecessary; all I want to do is look up some historical material." And then it occurred to him that he could make good use of any technical data he could get his hands on. What one volume might he smuggle back to # which would be of great value? He racked his brains. An almanac. A dictionary... a school text on science which surveyed all the fields for laymen; yes, that would do it. A seventh grade text or a high school text. He could rip the covers off, throw them away, put the pages inside his coat. Poul said, "Where's a school? The closest school." He felt the urgency of it, now. He had no doubt that they were after him, close behind. "What is a 'school? " the woman asked. "Where your children go," Poul said. The woman said quietly, "You poor sick man." V F or a time Tozzo and Fermeti and Gilly stood in silence. And then Tozzo said in a carefully controlled voice. "You know what's going to happen to him, of course. Polpol will pick him up and mono-express him to Nachbaren Slager. Because of his appearance. He may even be there already." Fermeti sprinted at once for the nearest vidphone. "I'm going to contact the authorities at Nachbaren Slager. I'll talk to Potter; we can trust him, I think." Presently Major Potter's heavy, dark features formed on the vidscreen. "Oh, hello, Fermeti. You want more convicts, do you?" He chuckled. "You use them up even faster than we do." Behind Potter, Fermeti caught a glimpse of the open recreation area of the giant internment camp. Criminals, both political and nonpol, could be seen roaming about, stretching their legs, some of them playing dull, pointless games which, he knew, went on and on, sometimes for months, each time they were out of their work-cells. "What we want," Fermeti said, "is to prevent an individual being IF brought to you at all." He described Poul Anderson. "If he's monoed there, call me at once. And don't harm him. You understand? We want him back safe." "Sure," Potter said easily. "Just a minute; I'll have a scan put on our new admissions." He touched a button to his right and a #-R computer came on; Fermeti heard its low hum. Potter touched buttons and then said, "This'll pick him out if he's monoed here. Our admissionscircuit is prepared to . reject him." "No sign yet?" Fermeti asked tensely. "Nope," Potter said, and purposefully yawned. Fermeti broke the connection. "Now what?" Tozzo said. "We could possibly trace him by means of a Ganymedean sniffer-sponge." They were a repellent life form, though; if one managed to find its quarry it fastened at once to its blood system leech-wise. "Or do it mechanically," he added. "With a detec beam. We have a print of Anthat would really bring in the polpol." The detec beam by law belonged only to the polpol; after all, it was the artifact which had, at last, tracked down Gutman himself. Fermeti said bluntly, "I'm for broadcasting a planet-wide Type II alert. That'll activate the citizenry, the average informer. They'll know there's an automatic reward for any Type II found." "But he could be manhandled that way," Gilly pointed out. "By a mob. Let's think this through." After a pause Tozzo said, "How about trying it from a purely cerebral standpoint? If you had been transported from the mid twentieth century to our continuum, what would you want to do? Where would you go?" Quietly, Fermeti said, "To the nearest spaceport, of course. To buy a ticket to Mars or the outplanets -- routine in our age but utterly out of the question at mid twentieth century." They looked at one another. "But Anderson doesn't know where the spaceport is," Gilly said. "It'll take him valuable time to orient himself. We can go there directly by express subsurface mono." A moment later the three Bureau of Emigration men were on their way. "A fascinating situation," Gilly said, as they rode along, jiggling up and down, facing one another in the monorail first-class compartment. "We totally misjudged the mid twentieth century mind; it should be a lesson to us. Once we've regained possession of Anderson we should make further inquiries. For instance, the Poltergeist Effect. What was their interpretation of it? And table-tapping -- did they recognize it for what it was? Or did they merely consign it to the realm of the so-called 'occult' and let it go at that?" "Anderson may hold the clue to these questions and many others," Fermeti said. "But our central problem remains the same. We must induce him to complete the mass-restoration formula in precise mathe matical terms, rather than vague, poetic allusions." Thoughtfully, Tozzo said, "He's a at the ease by which he eluded us." "Yes," Fermeti agreed. "We mustn't underestimate him. We did that, and it's rebounded." His face was grim. H urrying up the almost-deserted sidestreet, Poul Anderson wondered why the woman had regarded him as sick. And the mention of children had set off the clerk in the store, too. Was birth illegal now? Or was it regarded as sex had been once, as something too private to speak of in public? In any case, he realized, if I plan to stay here I've got to shave my head. And, if possible, acquire different clothing. There must be barbershops. And, he thought, the coins in my pockets; they're probably worth a lot to collectors. He glanced about, hopefully. But all he saw were tall, luminous plastic and metal buildings which made up the city, structures in which incomprehensible transactions took place. They were as alien to him as -- Alien, he thought, and the word lodged chokingly in his mind. Because -- something had oozed from a doorway ahead of him. And now his way was blocked -- deliberately, it seemed -- by a slime mold, dark yellow in color, as large as a human being, palpitating visibly on the sidewalk. After a pause the slime mold undulated toward him at a regular, slow rate. A human evolutionary development? Poul Anderson wondered, recoiling from it. Good lord... and then he realized what he was seeing. This era had space travel. He was seeing a creature from another planet. "Um," Poul said, to the enormous mass of slime mold, "can I bother you a second to ask a question?" The slime mold ceased to undulate forward. And in Poul's brain a thought formed which was not his own. "I catch your query. In answer: I arrived yesterday from Callisto. But I also catch a number of unusual and highly interesting thoughts in addition... you are a time traveler from the past." The tone of the creature's emanations was one of considerate, polite amusement -- and interest. "Yes," Poul said. "From #." "And you wish to find a barbershop, a library and a school. All at once, in the precious time remaining before they capture you." The slime mold seemed solicitous. "What can I do to help you? I could absorb you, but it would be a permanent symbiosis, and you would not like that. You are thinking of your wife and child. Allow me to inform you as to the problem regarding your unfortunate mention of children. Terrans of this period are experiencing a mandatory moratorium on childbirth, because of the almost infinite sporting of the previous decades. There was a war, you see. Between Gutman's fanatical followers and the more liberal legions of General McKinley. The latter won." Poul said, "Where should I go? I'm confused." His head throbbed and he felt tired. Too much had happened. IF Just a short while ago he had been standing with Tony Boucher in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, drinking and chatting... and now this. Facing this great slime mold from Callisto. It was difficult -- to say the least -- to make such an adjustment. T he slime mold was transmitting to him. "I am accepted here while you, their ancestor, are regarded as odd. Ironic. To me, you look quite like them, except for your curly brown hair and of course your silly clothing. ,, The creature from Callisto pondered. "My friend, the polpol are the political police, and they search for deviants, followers of the defeated Gutman, who are terrorists now, and hated. Many of these followers are drawn from the potentially criminal classes. That is, the non-conformists, the so-called introves. Individuals who set their own subjective value-system up in place of the objective system in vogus. It is a matter of life and death to the Terrans, since Gutman almost won." "I'm going to hide," Poul den cided. "But where? You can't really. Not unless you wish to go underground and join the Gutmanites, the criminal class of bomb-throwers... and you won't want to do that. Let us stroll together, and if anyone challenges you, I will say you're my servant. You have manual extensors and I have not. And I have, by a quirk, decided to dress you oddly and to have you retain your headhair. The responsibility then becomes mine. It is actually not unusual for higher out-world organisms to employ Terran help." "Thanks," Poul said tautly, as the slime mold resumed its slow forward motion along the sidewalk. "But there are things I want to do -- " "I am on my way to the zoo," the slime mold continued. An unkind thought came to Poul. "Please," the slime mold said. "Your anachronistic twentieth century humor is not appreciated. I am not an inhabitant of the zoo; it is for life forms of low mental order such as Martian glebs and trawns. Since the initiation of interplanetary travel, zoos have become the center of -- " Poul said, "Could you lead me to the space terminal?" He tried to make his request sound casual. "You take a dreadful risk," the slime mold said, "in going to any public place. The polpol watch constantly." "I still want to go." If he could board an interplanetary ship, if he could leave Earth, see other worlds -- But they would erase his memory; all at once he realized that, in a rush of horror. I've got to make notes , he told himself. At once! "Do, um, you have a pencil?" he asked the slime mold. "Oh, wait; I have one. Pardon me." Obviously the slime mold didn't. On a piece of paper from his coat pocket -- it was convention material of some sort -- he wrote hurriedly, in brief, disjointed phrases, what had happened to him, what he had seen in the twenty-first century. Then he quickly stuck the paper back in his pocket. "A wise move," the slime mold said. "And now to the spaceport, if you will accompany me at my slow pace. And, as we go, I will give you details of Terra's history from your period on." The slime mold moved down the sidewalk. Poul accompanied it eagerly; after all, what choice did he have? "The Soviet Union. That was tragic. Their war with Red China in # which finally involved Israel and France... regrettable, but it did solve the problem of what to do with France -- a most difficult nation to deal with in the latter half of the twentieth century." On his piece of paper Poul jotted that down, too. "After France had been defeated -- " The slime mold went on, as Poul scratched against time. F ermeti said, "We must glin, if we're to catch Anderson before he boards a ship." And by "glin" he did not mean glinning a little; he meant a full search with the cooperation of the polpol. He hated to bring them in, and yet their help now seemed vital. Too much time had passed and Anderson had not yet been found. The spaceport lay ahead, a great disk miles in diameter, with no vertical obstructions. In the center was the Burned Spot, seared by years of tail-exhausts from landing and departing ships. Fermeti liked the spaceport, because here the denseness of the close-packed buildings of the city abruptly ceased. Here was openness, such as he recalled from childhood... if one dared to think openly of childhood. The terminal building was set hundreds of feet beneath the rexeroid layer built to protect the waiting people in case of an accident above. Fermeti reached the entrance of the descent ramp, then halted impatiently to wait for Tozzo and Gilly to catch up with him. "I'll nilp," Tozzo said, but without enthusiasm. And he broke the band on his wrist with a single decisive motion. The polpol ship hovered overhead at once. "We're from the Emigration Bureau," Fermeti explained to the polpol lieutenant. He outlined their Project, described -- reluctantly -- their bringing Poul Anderson from his time-period to their own. "Hair on head," the polpol lieutenant noted. "Quaint duds. Okay, Mr. Fermeti; we'll glin until we find him." He nodded, and his small ship shot off. "They're efficient," Tozzo admitted. "But not likeable," Fermeti said, finishing Tozzo's thought. "They make me uncomfortable," Tozzo agreed. "But I suppose they're supposed to." The three of them stepped onto the descent ramp -- and dropped at breathtaking speed to level one below. Fermeti shut his eyes, wincing at the loss of weight. It was almost as bad as takeoff itself. Why did everything have to be so rapid, these days? It certainly was not like the previous decade, when things had gone leisurely. They stepped from the ramp, shook themselves, and were apIF proached instantly by the building's polpol chief. "We have a report on your man," the gray-uniformed officer told them. "He hasn't taken off?" Fermeti said. "Thank God." He looked around. "Over there," the officer said, pointing. At a magazine rack, Poul Anderson was looking intently at the display. It took only a moment for the three Emigration Bureau officials to surround him. "Oh, uh, hello," Anderson said. "While I was waiting for my ship I thought I'd take a look and see what's still in print." Fermeti said, "Anderson, we require your unique abilities. I'm sorry, but we're taking you back to the Bureau." All at once Anderson was gone. Soundlessly, he had ducked away; they saw his tall, angular form become smaller as he raced for the gate to the field proper. Reluctantly, Fermeti reached within his coat and brought out a sleep-gun. "There's no other choice," he murmured, and squeezed. The racing figure tumbled, rolled. Fermeti put the sleep-gun away and in a toneless voice said, "He'll recover. A skinned knee, nothing worse." He glanced at Gilly and Tozzo. "Recover at the Bureau, I mean." Together, the three of them advanced toward the prone figure on the floor of the spaceport waiting room. CCyLTou may return to your own I time-continuum," Fermeti said quietly, "when you've given us the mass-restoration formula." He nodded, and a Bureau workman approached, carrying the ancient Royal portable typewriter. Seated in the chair across from Fermeti in the Bureau's inner business office, Poul Anderson said, "I don't use a portable." "You must cooperate," Fermeti informed him. "We have the scientific know-how to restore you to Karen; remember Karen and remember your newly-born daughter at the Congress in San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Without full cooperation from you, Anderson, there will be no cooperation from the Bureau. Surely, with your pre-cog ability you can see that." After a pause Anderson said, "Um, I can't work unless I have a pot of fresh coffee brewing around me at all times, somewhere." Curtly, Fermeti signaled. "We'll obtain coffee beans for you," he declared. "But the brewing is up to you. We'll also supply a pot from the Smithsonian collection and there our responsibility ends." Taking hold of the carriage of the typewriter, Anderson began to inspect it. "Red and back ribbon," he said. "I always use black. But I guess I can make do." He seemed a trifle sullen. Inserting a sheet of paper, he began to type. At the top of the page appeared the words: -- Poul Anderson "You say If bought it?" he asked Fermeti. "Yes," Fermeti replied tensely. Anderson typed: Difficulties at Outward, Incorporated had begun to nettle Edmond Fletcher. For one thing, an entire ship had disappeared, and although the individuals aboard were not personally known to him he felt a twinge of responsibility. Now, as he lathered himself with hormone-impregnated soap "He starts at the beginning," Fermeti said bitingly. "Well, if there's no alternative we'll simply have to bear with him." Musingly, he murmured, "I wonder how long it takes... I wonder how fast he writes. As a pre-cog he can see what's coming next; it should help him to do it in a hurry." Or was that just wishful thinking? "Have the coffee beans arrived yet?" Anderson asked, glancing up. "Any time now," Fermeti said. "I hope some of the beans are Colombian," Anderson said. L ong before the beans arrived the article was done. Rising stiffly, uncoiling his lengthy limbs, Poul Anderson said, "I think you have what you want, there. The mass restoration formula is on typescript page #." Eagerly, Fermeti turned the pages. Yes, there it was; peering over his shoulder, Tozzo saw the paragraph: If the ship followed a trajectory which would carry it into the star Proxima, it would, he realized, regain its mass through a process of leeching solar energy from the great star-furnace itself. Yes, it was Proxima itself which held the key to Torelli's problem, and now, after all this time, it had been solved. The simple formula revolved in his brain. And, Tozzo saw, there lay the formula. As the article said, the mass would be regained from solar energy converted into matter, the ultimate source of power in the universe. The answer had stared them in the face all this time! Their long struggle was over. "And now," Poul Anderson asked, "I'm free to go back to my own time?" Fermeti said simply, "Yes." "Wait," Tozzo said to his superior. "There's evidently something you don't understand." It was a section which he had read in the instruction manual attached to the time-dredge. He drew Fermeti to one side, where Anderson could not hear. "He can't be sent back to his own time with the knowledge he has now." "What knowledge?" Fermeti inquired. "That -- well. I'm not certain. Something to do with our society, here. What I'm trying to tell you is this: the first rule of time travel, according to the manual, is don't change the past. In this situation just bringing Anderson here has changed the past merely by exposing him to our society." Pondering, Fermeti said, "You may be correct. While he was in that gift shop he may have picked up some object which, taken back to IF his own time, might revolutionize their technology." "Or at the magazine rack at the spaceport," Tozzo said. "Or on his trip between those two points. And -- even the knowledge that he and his colleagues are pre-cogs." "You're right," Fermeti said. "The memory of this trip must be wiped from his brain." He turned and walked slowly back to Poul Anderson. "Look here," he addressed him. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but everything that's happened to you must be wiped from your brain." After a pause, Anderson said, "That's a shame. Sorry to hear that." He looked downcast. "But I'm not surprised," he murmured. He seemed philosophical about the whole affair. "It's generally handled this way." Tozzo asked, "Where can this alteration of the memory cells of his brain be accomplished?" "At the Department of Penology," Fermeti said. "Through the same channels we obtained the convicts." Pointing his sleep-gun at Poul Anderson he said, "Come along with us. I regret this... but it has to be done." VI A t the Department of Penology, painless electroshock removed from Poul Anderson's brain the precise cells in which his most recent memories were stored. Then, in a semi-conscious state, he was carried back into the time-dredge. A moment later he was on his trip back to the year #, to his own society and time. To the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in downtown San Francisco, California and his waiting wife and child. When the time-dredge returned empty, Tozzo, Gilly and Fermeti breathed a sigh of relief and broke open a bottle of hundred-year-old Scotch which Fermeti had been saving. The mission had been successfully accomplished; now they could turn their attention back to the Project. "Where's the manuscript that he wrote?" Fermeti said, putting down his glass to look all around his office. There was no manuscript to be found. And, Tozzo noticed, the antique Royal portable typewriter which they had brought from the Smithsonian -- it was gone, too. But why? Suddenly chill fear traveled up him. He understood. "Good lord," he said thickly. He put down his glass. "Somebody get a copy of the journal with his article in it. At once." Fermeti said, "What is it, Aaron? Explain." "When we removed his memory of what had happened we made it impossible for him to write the anticle for the journal," Tozzo said. "He must have based Night Flight on his experience with us, here." Snatching up the August # copy of If he turned to the table-of-contents page. No article by Poul Anderson was listed. Instead, on page #, he saw Philip K. Dick's The Mold of Yancy listed instead. They had changed the past after all. And now the formula for their Project was gone -- gone entirely. "We shouldn't have tampered," Tozzo said in a hoarse voice. "We should never have brought him out of the past." He drank a little more of the century-old Scotch, his hands shaking. "Brought who?" Gilly said, with a puzzled look. "Don't you remember?" Tozzo stared at him, incredulous. "What's this discussion about?" Fermeti said impatiently. "And what are you two doing in my office? You both should be busy at work." He saw the bottle of Scotch and blanched. "How'd that get open?" His hands trembling, Tozzo turned the pages of the journal over and over again. Already, the memory was growing diffuse in his mind; he struggled in vain to hold onto it. They had brought someone from the past, a pre-cog, wasn't it? But who? A name, still in his mind but dimming with each passing moment... Anderson or Anderton something like that. And in connection with the Bureau's interstellar mass-deprivation Project. Or was it? Puzzled, Tozzo shook his head and said in bewilderment, "I have some peculiar wprds in my mind. Night Flight. Do either of you happen to know what it refers to?" " Night Flight " Fermeti echoed. "No, it means nothing to me. I wonder, though -- it certainly would be an effective name for our Project." "Yes," Gilly agreed. "That must be what it refers to." "But our Project is called Waterspider , isn't it?" Tozzo said. At least he thought it was. He blinked, trying to focus his faculties. "The truth of the matter," Fermeti said, "is that we've never titled it." Brusquely, he added, "But I agree with you; that's an even better name for it. Waterspider . Yes, I like that." The door of the office opened and there stood a uniformed, bonded messenger. "From the Smithsonian," he informed them. "You requested this." He produced a parcel, which he laid on Fermeti's desk. "I don't remember ordering anything from the Smithsonian," Fermeti said. Opening it cautiously he found a can of roasted, ground coffee beans, still vacuum packed, over a century old. The three men looked at one another blankly. "Strange," Torelli murmured. "There must be some mistake." "Well," Fletcher said, "in any case, back to Project Waterspider Nodding, Torelli and Gilman turned in the direction of their own office on the first floor of Outward, Incorporated, the commercial firm at which they worked and the project on which they had labored, with so many heartaches and setbacks, for so long. A t the Science Fiction Convention at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Poul Anderson looked around him in bewilderment. Where had he been? Why had he gone out of the building? And it was an hour later; Tony Boucher and Jim Gunn had IF left for dinner by now, and he saw no sign of his wife Karen and the baby, either. The last he remembered was two fans from Battlecreek who wanted him to look at a display outside on the sidewalk. Perhaps he had gone to see that. In any case, he had no memory of the interval. Anderson groped about in his coat pocket for his pipe, hoping to calm his oddly jittery nerves -- and found, not his pipe, but instead a folded piece of paper. "Got anything for our auction, Poul?" a member of the Convention committee asked, halting beside him. "The auction is just about to start -- we have to hurry." Still looking at the paper from his pocket, Poul murmured, "Urn, you mean something here with me?" "Like a typescript of some published story, the original manuscript or earlier versions or notes. You know." He paused, waiting. "I seem to have some notes in my pocket," Poul said, still glancing over them. They were in his handwriting but he didn't remember having made them. A time-travel story, from the look of them. Must have been from those Bourbons and water, he decided, and not enough to eat. "Here," he said uncertainly, "it isn't much but I guess you can auction these." He took one final glance at them. "Notes for a story about a political figure called Gutman and a kidnapping in time. Intelligent slime mold, too, I notice." On impulse, he handed them over. "Thanks, the man said, and hurried on toward the other room, where the auction was being held. "I bid ten dollars," Howard Browne called, smiling broadly. "Then I have to catch a bus to the airport." The door closed after him. Karen, with Astrid, appeared beside Poul. "Want to go into the auction?" she asked her husband. "Buy an original Finlay?" "Urn, sure," Poul Anderson said, and with his wife and child walked TO by Jack Sharkey (Puzzle on page #) The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: IF is looking up. Congratulations on A. E. Van Vogt -- how'd you do it? Also Manners and Customs of the Thrid was good, and so was The Reefs of Space. Fve got one beef, though. What happened to the colored pic backgrounds? Also try to get Isaac Asimov, R.A.H. and Damor Knight, eh? One more question: How do you get your IFs back after loaning them? -- Walter E. Haun, R.R. Longville, Minnesota.  Answer: With difficulty. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: I have come to the conclusion that IF is making a supreme determination in doing everything to uphold the dignity of science fiction -- by printing stories better by far than many others which pass as sf these days. I have been a fan since I was # years old. After # years of reading sf, I have reached the decision that IF beats all. In my opinion, anyone of reasonable intelligence and imagination is a potential sf fan -- which state changes to a reality when such a person finds himself presented with a good sf magazine. Many characters who pass through the pages of IF will undoubtedly live -- I think. Clearcut stories of reality that invoke fact, fiction, prophecy and sometimes "IF"-ness. A friend of mine asked, "But is it fact or fiction?" Say what you like, but it still leaves a great deal of questions unanswered. So, Mr. Editor, -- keep printing, keep up the great stories and, stone the crows, mate, keep IF rolling -- (Miss) Dianne Hall-Clarke, ## Wentworth Ave., Dolan's Boy, Sth. Caringbah, Sidney, N.S.W., Australia.    Dear Editor: Why not combine IF y Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow into one #page monthly #c magazine? You could get more advertising by saying you had the combined circulation of the three magazines, and with the money you get from advertising you could have a better magazine. I also wonder why the Guinn magazines don't have classified advertising as brands Z-D and M do. IF Also, wher are the Retief stories going to be combined into a fullsized book? -- Irvin M. Koch, # White Oak Road, Chattanooga #, Tennessee.  (#) Because we'd lose money. (#) Sounds like a good idea -- maybe we'll try it. (#) They just have, or anyway about six of them have, in a book published by Ace called Envoy to New Worlds . -- Editor .    Dear Editor: This September issue of IF is the first I've bought in a few issues. Van Vogt's story sold it to me, of course. I got my money's worth. It is certainly a pleasure to have him back in science fiction. Mary Larson's The Time of Cold was a comfortable second. I'll look for her name in future numbers; there are not enough upbeat writers in the field. Don't you think that the belief in sympathetic magic you display on the inside back cover is rather out of keeping with the editor of a science-fiction magazine? -- Richard Kyle, # Earl Avenue, Long Beach, California, #.  For those who miss the point of this last remark (a group which included your editor until he went and got a copy of the magazine to check up), the reference is to the fact that the page in question contained an ad which was clearly meant to appear in Galaxy , not IF... By the way, more Van Vogt is on the way. One story in, more promised; but we're not just sure yet when they will appear -- Editor.   .  Dear Editor: This letter is going to be a dissertation on letter columns, otherwise known as lettercols. So sit right back, relax and prepare yourself to hear a sermon of sorts. The first thing that needs to be taken care of, naturally, is to define the purpose of a letter column in relation to a sf magazine. First of all, it should serve as ? sounding board for ideas; a place where ideas can be expounded or criticized. It should be a form of a forum where concepts are studied, analyzed, investigated. Secondly, it should not be a place where, primarily, likes and dislikes in regards to. stories, art or artists are put forth. These comments are of no consequence and waste space. "Whoa, check, gasp. Wait a minute here!" you say. "How in hell am I supposed to know what te readers want? These gripes are necessary in order that I may give them what they want." I agree completely. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that the comments are bad or should be disregarded. I'm saying that you shouldn't publish them. Let's face it: what nobody else thinks about a story doesn't make a bit of difference to me. I've already made up my mind, and like nothin's going to change it! Such matters are completely subjective and so are not open to discussion or argument. As things now stand only one magazine has a letter column that consistently fills the above requirements -- Analog. Oh, sure, If, Amazing and Fantastic occasionally print a letter that is worth reading, but not consistently. The next question is, what is there to write about? After all, as "P.C." said in the September, #, IF, it gets kind of hard to write editorials worth writing letters about, month after month. Let's stop and think a minute. Just why do fen read sf ? For escape? Not likely. For mental stimulation! And how do you get mental stimulation? By reading about concepts, ideas, philosophies! And where can these ideas be found in science fiction? In the stories. If you stop and give it some thought, isn't each and every story in the science-fiction field, for the most part, an editorial in itself? Expounding some thought? Damning some habit? Criticizing an idea? Heck sakes, every issue of an sf magazine has at least two or three concepts to write about ! Lastly I would like to make a general observation about letter columns. That is the manner, style, tone in which the letters published are written. Some time ago I got Wonder Stories , Startling Stories and Fantastic Story Quarterly. Now the lettercols in said magazines were really something! Sure, the letter writers called each other names while in the process of making some point, but, heck, that was what made the columns so fascinating. It seems to me that the quality which the letter columns of today are missing is humanness. All the columns, including Analog j, seem unnatural, forced, inhuman. -- Jim Maughan, # N Street, Turn water, Washington.  There's one thing that an editor can't do to improve his letter columns: he can't write the letters! That's up to you fellows out there. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: The Expendables first new Van Vogt story in fourteen years? Please check the January, # issue of Scientific American. The Hoffman Electronics Corporation ran a two page ad, and an sf story by Van Vogt was the focal point. It was called Itseif, The Hoffman people ran a series of six sf-oriented ads during '#, each with a short-short by an author such as Van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov and Leiber. Each was billed "a science-fiction original created expressly for Hoffman Electronics Corporation" and served as a stepping-off point for a discussion on "How Science Fiction Becomes Scientific Fact." -- Kenneth Burington, # South Meadow Drive, Glen Burnie, Maryland  When we bought. Van Vogt's story, we asked him how long it had been since he had written a story for an sf magazine -- the #-year figure was his. And, of course, it's true enough; he (and we) didn't think of the story appearing in the advertisement any more than we thought of his non-sf novel about communism in Asia, etc. -- Editor . That fills us up for another issue. Coming next time: a new Retief by Keith Laumer, The City That Grew in the Sea (and we think's it's one of the best ever) -- the conclusion of Pcul Anderson's exciting Three Worlds to Conquer -- In Saturn # # Rings , oy Robert F. Young -- and lots more. As old hands know, each issue we print at least one story by someone who has never before appeared in a science-fiction magazine. The idea is to give new talent a chance at a hearing, and thus to keep up the supply of new blood that every field needs. This issue we have two: The Competitors , by an Oklahoman who has been published a time or two before in other fields, but appears here with his first science-fiction story ever, and Mack , by a Kentucky newspaperman making his first stab at fiction of any kind. We think you'll be hearing more from both of them I -- FP IF Please #I Hudson Si. rush me New York  copies of #, Name Address City State I Enclose The Original Edition -- Complete ! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Vi OF Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) IN SATURN'S RINGS by ROBERT F. YOUNG It was sink or swim for Retief in this watery wonderland! If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers -- challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names In science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address City Zone State LUse coupon or order by letter if you wish Frederik Pohl, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Feature Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher David Perton, Production Manager John Assante, Art Director P Cover by Nodel from Guardian IP published bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, Inc., New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial T he future is a pretty nice place to live. I know -- I've just been there. On certain Chicago TV stations, at the break, you'll see a photograph of a startling structure -- twin towers studded with little curved balconies -- which the Second City is using more and more as a city symbol, like Paris's Eiffel Tower, New York's Statue of Liberty, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. I had the very great privilege of meeting the architect -- and the dreamer, and the one-man dynamo, who is responsible for the structures known as Marina City. The towers (and a flat office building, and a #-seat theater, under construction when I saw it) stand at the edge of the Chicago River not far from Lake Michigan. Each tower begins from ground level, with a spiral ramp with a roadway wide enough for two cars and radial wings where cars are parked; this spiral rises nearly a hundred feet before the building itself begins. Altogether the towers are about sixty stories high. The central core contains elevator shafts, ' and the apartments radiate out from this core. Each has its little balcony. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address. Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of die powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Beniamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of die Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. MasLife" -- No obA nonorganizaSiiojiixjAd dres r litll L.E.W. The rooms are unusually shaped but extremely comfortable. The odd shape becomes less so when you realize how seldom, in your own square or rectangular room, you actually use the corners. More often than not you'll have an easychair shoved in there, or even a china-closet or a TV catercornered. If you cut the corner right off, chances are you wouldn't miss it. The gently rounded pie segment shape of the Marina City rooms is therefore functional and pleasing. Closet space is ingeniously placed in the apartments. The rentals are mid-range, running from # up -- not excessive for a centrally located wonder like this. So much for the Up. But down from ground level -- way down -- you will find slips for # motorboats, plus service areas, plus storage space for # more boats. T was given a guided tour by Mr. Robert Goldberg, the architect, at night. Standing between them and looking up, I was ready to swear those towers were hooked right on to the stars. And as cars pulled up and down the ramps, their headlights slashed time and again diagonally across the glass-and-concrete face of that backdrop of an office building. Beautiful. I sincerely envy him the knowledge that he will leave behind him such a durable monument. Here's the future. Buildings like this, with schools, theaters, offices and stores -- beautiful and functional buildings -- will obsolete the chrome cracker-boxes for good and all, and they should. And -- practical? Here's the thing that flabbergasted me. My house stands on about three acres. So does Marina City -- with space for two thousand people and their cars and boats, and an office building and theater to boot! You're going to see more of these. Watch for them and be glad. Jack Vance  J. T. McIntosh I ; Philip K. Dick  Willy Ley  All in the February issue of Galaxy  Keith Laamei and many more -- on sale now! IF IF  Novelette I T he summer of Matthew North's life was a dream so deep in his past that he sometimes doubted whether he had really dreamed k. Autumn had set in eons ago, it seemed, and now winter was on hand. He did not find its cold and bitter breath the least bit to his living. Once again, pale Hyperion was coming forth to meet him. Once again, resplendent Saturn was advancing in her ice-blue gown. How The weird old castle on Saturn's moon was a fortress -- protecting a dynasty and a terrible secret I many times before had mother and daughter greeted him at journey's end? How many times before had they seen his sleek jettractor emerge from the immensities with a big black egg impaled upon its prow? Too many times. Well, there would be no more times. The Bimini base was gone, and the mysterious source of the many payloads which he and the other jettractor-pilots had delivered to the House of Christopoulos down through the centuries was buried beneath the raging waters of a newbom sea. The unanticipated tectonic revolution had begun mere hours after he had blasted off from the little Proxima Centauri planet which Nick the Greek had christened "Bimini" some five hundred years ago. For a long while Matthew had been in a state of shock. Recovering from it, he had radioed the news on ahead. He could just as well have waited, though, and delivered the news by word of mouth, for while radio waves exceeded his jettractor's near-photic velocity, they did not exceed it by very much. In all probability the message had preceded his arrival by no more than a few weeks. Such proved to be the case. Message received last week, the words that suddenly spelled themselves out on the luminous bulletin-panel informed him. Establish capsule in orbit, memorize but do not record readings, then land and proceed to the Hostel , there to await further instructions . -- Zeus Christopoulos IX. "Orders acknowledged, sir," said Matthew North. "Will proceed as directed." P recisely as directed. One does not question the commands of God, no matter how unorthodox those commands may be. And to Matthew North, Zeus Christopoulos IX was God, just as the previous male descendants of Nick the Greek had been God. The fact that Matthew had never laid eyes on any of these gods argued for rather thaq against their divinity, and the fact a that he had never been permitted to set foot inside the House of Christopoulos bolstered rather than undermined his respect for them. Choosing a polar orbit of maximum altitude, he reduced the jettractor's momentum to the velocity he wanted. Then, after mentally recording his instrument readings, he disengaged the capsule and fired his retros. He watched the huge eggshaped container dwindle into the blue-black distances and fade from sight. Finally he began orbiting in. Saturn hove into sight with each crossing of the twilight belt, but each time he saw not Saturn but a rich and dazzling jewel hanging upon the Brobdingnagian cheek of the Ethiope goddess Space -- the black bitch-goddess of vast immensities and burning suns at whose cold and unfeeling feet he had laid the best years of his life. "For you, Zeus, I did this thing," he said, unconsciously lumping the successive heirs into a single entity. "For you I put my years upon the block in order that your House might never be without the precious payloads I have delivered to its door -- payloads I have never seen and do not even know the nature of. And now they are no more. "Now I have come home to die." But he had no true right to regret, and he knew it. He had put his years upon the block, yes -- but no one had forced him to, and he had not auctioned them off for nothing. With them he had bouj'U a safe little island of changelessness in the giddy onrushing torrent of time. IF N ight passed, and came the day, the pale day with its cold and distant sun and its wan, cold stars. Gliding downward along an evershrinking orbital path, firing his retros with the passing of each dawn, Old Matt North became Young Matt North again -- Young Matt North standing in a bustling bar that bewildered him, rubbing shoulders with strangely garbed, gesticulating people who frightened him; Young Matt North recently rerun, adrift in a civilization that, thanks to the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, had left him almost two decades behind. Beside him stood the man from the House of Christopoulos who bad spotted him from across the room. He had come over and bought him a drink and told him glowingly about the Great Opportunity. "You paint a pretty picture," Young Matt said. "I'll say that much for you." The man was young -- almost as young as Young Matt North. His cheeks were smooth and plump, and you could smell money on his breath. Zeus I was his shepherd -- he did not want. "As true a picture as it is pretty, Matthew North," he said. "The House of 'Christopoulos takes care of its spacemen. It doesn't cast them adrift between runs the way the commercial carriers do. Zeus I was a spaceman once himself -- he knows what it's like to be cast adrift. That's why he spared no expense when he built the Haven. That's why he duplicated a sane and sensible setting out of the past instead of building a modern setting. That's why he guarantees his jettractor pilots a job for life. Thus far, there are only two, and he needs but one more, but the Haven is large enough to accommodate a hundred. And it will never chaqge. The Hostel will always be there waiting for you when you return, and during your six-months layovers there will be girls for the asking, and taverns with open doors." H I t had been true -- every word of it. And it was as true today as it had been then... Old Matt North berthed his jettractor, climbed out through the locks carrying his duffel bag, and walked around the big platform-lift on which he had lowered so many capsules into the subterranean pneumotube that led to the crypts beneath the House of Christopoulos. The little port gave directly onto the single street of the Haven, and he walked down the street toward the big stone structure at its farther end. As always, the sight of the Hostel reassured him. There was a permanence about stone that could not be duplicated, a solidity that other materials lacked. Inside, there would be warmth and welcome, and more food than he could eat and more wine than he could drink. And there would be girls, too. If he still wanted them. He wondered if he did. It was mid-morning, and a cold IF wind was blowing in from the surrounding ice-flats. It outlined his spacetogs against his spare frame and ridged his skin with gooseflesh. Beyond the Hostel, the great pile of the House of Christopoulos stood massively against the gray, starstarved sky. It had been patterned after the Parthenon, but in the distance-decimated sunlight its noble Doric columns and magnificent entablature took on a pale cast that was out of keeping with the trabeate architecture. And while the force-field that played darkly between the columns let in what little light there was, it gave back nothing in return. The over-all effect was one of Gothic gloom. Usually the House awoke vague longings in the deeps of Matthew North's being. Today it did not -- perhaps because he was not really seeing it. He was seeing the girls he had known instead -- the girls he had slept with down through the decades, some of whom were old and withered women now, and some of whom had lain for centuries dead. The pretty little call girls he had had with the sweet sad swiftness of a hummingbird's flight and then had known # more... and now the room that summer dresses in new bloom was empty, and only the sporadic fluttering of the window curtains betrayed the presence of their ghosts. It was as well, perhaps -- who knew? Matthew North sighed, and walked past the tavern doors agape. He avoided the expectant looks of the villagers -- the villagers whose function it was to cater to him during his layover and see to it that he wanted for nothing, and beneath whose breasts pulsed not hearts but tiny motors that never ran down, and behind whose welcoming eyes dwelled not memories but memory banks. Only the girls had been real. The rest was technological fantasy. The interior of the Hostel had not changed one whit. Indeed, he could have sworn that the log burning in the great stone hearth was the same log that had been burning there the day he left. The hostler was no longer the same though. Matthew stared at the small and portly -- and unquestionably human -- man who came forth from behind the bar to greet him. The man smiled at his bewilderment "Zeus IX decided that human personnel could do the job better," he explained. "Taverns are one thing, but an inn needs a human touch. He offered me the building, and the keep of my wife, my daughter and myself if we would school ourselves in mid-twenty-second century lore, and condition ourselves to the early-twentieth-century way of life which the Hostel symbolizes. I agreed to do so, and here I am. Welcome home, Matthew North." Clearly, the hostler had not as yet been informed that the Bimini base was no more. Matthew did not bother to enlighten him, and allowed himself to be led over to a big wooden table that stood before the hearth. Presently the hostler's wife -- a strapping woman with eyes the hue of port wine -- brought in steaming platters of food and a tall and dusty bottle of Venerian Chianti. Matthew knew an appetite he had not known in years and ate hugely. He drank largely of the wine. It was red and fiery, and warmed his very bones. Stupor stole over him. "I would sleep," he said. T he hosteler's wife depressed a buzzer at the end of the bar, and a moment later a tall girl with shoulder-length brown hair entered the big raftered room. She was wearing cling-slacks, and short fleece-lined boots; a white plastijacket covered her arms and shoulders, fell loosely round her hips. Youth shouted from her blue, smoke-filled eyes. "Faustina will show you your room," the hostler's wife said. "Ask her for whatever you want, and she will get it for you." The girl came forward, picked up his duffel bag, shouldered it effortlessly and led the way through the side entrance to the period-piece outside-stairway. On the second step she paused and turned. "Would you like some girls perhaps?" The amusement in her eyes diminished him. He lowered his gaze to the ground. "No," he said. "Not now." She shrugged and resumed her ascent of the stairs. He followed, marveling at the smooth flow of her limbs, at her graceful strength; at the youth that was manifest in her every movement. Lord, to be young again ! he thought. He felt suddenly, horribly, cheated -- robbed of life and love. He yearned to lean upon her shoulder, to steal some of her youth and strength. He wanted to see desire in her eyes. Instead, when she lingered for a moment in the doorway of the room the hostler had prepared for him, he saw pity. She lowered his duffel bag to the floor. "There's a buzzer by the bed," she said. "If you need anything just press it." She turned and walked down the hall and out dnto the landing. He heard her footsteps on the stairs. Silence came. The room was a large one. All of the rooms in the Hostel were large. Large and empty. Over the decades he had slept in a dozen of them. He would sleep in this one now, sleep the sleep of the dead, and he would forget stars and space, and loneliness. He would forget the pity he had seen in a young girl's eyes and he would forget that the only love he had ever known was the love that the House of Christopoulos had paid hard cold cash for, and itemized on the same list on which it had itemized his bread and wine. He would forget -- for a little while, at least -- that for all the slowed-down clocks that had given him relative immortality, he was an old, old man. He added wood to the fire in the big stone hearth and turned back the sheets of the huge four-poster bed. He undressed, showered, then climbed into the period-piece bed and let his weary body sink deeply into the eiderdown mattress. He thought of Bettinger and Flynn, the other two jettractorpilots. Bettinger must have reached Bimini by now, and seen the dark sea raging where once the android settlement and the fenced-off lake had been. In a few more months -- years, if you computed the time objectively -- Flynn would arrive there. Both would return with empty capsules. Matthew sighed, and turned on his side. There was nothing he could do. The Bimini base was no more, and that was all there was to it. He thought fleetingly of the orbiting capsule and wondered why Zeus IX had not wanted it brought down; but the ways of God were by their very nature inscrutable, and not to be questioned, and presently Matthew North ceased wondering, and slept. A knock on his door delivered him up from a haunting dream of his lost youth. "Yes?" said Old Matt North, sitting up in bed. "What is it?" "You have a visitor, Mr. North." "A visitor? Who?" There was awe in Faustina's voice. "Hera Christopoulos. She's waiting for you downstairs. Hurry, Mr. North!" Fading footsteps. Silence once again. For a while his consternation held him chained. Finally, breaking free, he climbed out of bed and pulled his best suit out of his duffel bag. He got into it, trembling all the while, and wetted and combed his gray and thinning hair. The dark stubble on his cheeks distressed him -- he should have shaved before going to bed. Now it was too late. Hera Christopoulos. The wife of Zeus IX... She was tall, and coldly beautiful. Her dark eyes were set beneath delicate black flares of brows, and held in them a quality that was reminiscent of deep space. Her black hair, upswept into a twist that flowered out and spilled down like the waters of a Cknmerian fountain, stole microcosmic stars from the hearth-fire before which she statuesquely stood. A scarlet sarong, secured by a silver chain around her throat, swirled thrice around her Junoesque body and terminated in a silver band just above her right knee. She had unfastened the throatclasp that had held her ermine cloak in place, and the cloak had fallen to the flagstone floor like snow, half-burying her sandaled feet, and she stood in the snow haughtily, the firelight heightening the insolence of her naked arms and shoulders and her semi-naked legs. Entering the room, Matthew thought for a moment that he had seen her before. The absurd thought was followed instantly by the memory which explained it. Oftentimes descendants duplicated the physical traits of a long-dead ancestor. Here was a case in point. It was not Hera whom he had seen, but Diono Christopoulos -- the wife of Zeus IV, and Hera's great-great grandmother. The memory, once unleashed, ran rampant in his mind. Once n again the long-ago night closed in around him -- the night and the wine and the laughter, the girls and the synthetic gin. Once again he was forty-five and afraid. Once again the strange restlessness came over him, and suddenly the intervening years were no more and he was plunging out of the stifling Haven bar and into the wind-washed street. The coldness of the night shocked him, but he did not go back inside for his greatcoat. He welcomed the coldness. He reveled in it, and he let the icy wind wash over him as though he were a boulder lodged in midstream, delighting in the clean, clear current. Saturn was on high, a great and gleaming jewel hanging in the heavens, bathing the iceflats in bluish light and imparting to the House of Christopoulos a majesty which the daylight would destroy. Something about the storied structure tied in with his restlessness. He set off across the flats, into the river of the wind. Ill r ie building was less than a mile distant from the Haven, but the wind and the ice made the going arduous. Only the heightened sugar-content of his blood enabled him to reach the row of artificial cypress trees that paralleled the rear line of columns. Gasping, he collapsed in the lee of a gnarled trunk and massaged his numb legs. When his breath returned, he peered round the trunk -- and saw the rift. It was the result of a circuit defect in the force-field, and apparently neither Alexander the Great nor the other three roguards had noticed it as yet. It wasn't a largo rift, but it was large enough to see through. The trouble was, it was way up on the force-field wall -- just beneath the entablature. However a tall cypress stood not far away. From its topmost branches an enterprising man might obtain a glimpse of the building's interior -- if he wanted to badly enough. Matthew North did. He was at the base of the tree in a matter of seconds. Minutes later he was riding the wind on a lofty bough, chest tight from the climb, hands numb and bleeding. The rift had a pinkish cast now. The room beyond it was pink. The room was a bath. He had believed in his naivete that because the House had been patterned after the Parthenon, it must of necessity have but one floor. He saw now that such was not the case. For all the loftiness of its ceiling, the bath into which he was gazing was unmistakably a part of a second story. Apparently the rift in the forcefield wall was on the visual circuit only, for the three women in # the room seemed unaware of the cold wind. Two of them would have been unaware of it in any event, for they were not truly women. They were android handmaidens. One of them had been created in the image of Helen of Troy, the other in the image of Hecuba. So perfectly IF wrought were they, however, that he would not have guessed the truth had it not been for the names embroidered beneath the neck lines of their Grecian Tunics. The woman in the bath proper was real, though. She put to shame the flaming torch of Helen of Troy, and all but extinguished the flickering one of Hecuba. A monogram on one of the huge white towels the handmaidens were holding revealed her identity: Dione Christopoulos. Matthew could not breathe. Dark of hair and eyes, scarlet of sultry, almost sullen lips, soft-white of water-rivuleting skin, she stood up in the marble basin. He saw the full breasts, scarlet-nippled to match her lips, the gracefully flowing buttocks, the breathless slopes of gleaming thighs. As though cognizant of his presence and eager to flaunt the pastures in which he could not feed, she faced the rift lor one full minute before surrendering herself to her handmaidens. He saw the birthmark then: the purple dagger-shaft between her breasts, its blade seemingly buried in her white flesh -- At the same time, his eyes caught a movement at the base of the tree. Lowering them, he saw the roguard standing there. Saturn's iceblue light glittered on the Macedonian armor, on the long, lethal lance whose inbuilt laser tube was capable of leveling a mountain. Matthew shrank against the bough, trying to efface himself from view. He needn't have. Antigonus or Seleucus or Ptolemy -- whichever of Alexander the Great's generals the roguard was -- had eyes only for the rift and was utterly unaware of the Peeping Tom in the tree above his head. Presently he left the trunk and hurried round the corner of the House, heading for the entrance where Alexander the Great was stationed, and leaving the coast clear. Matthew reached the ground in seconds, and began running across the flats. He was spent when he reached the Hostel trembling when he climbed into bed. All night long Dione Christopoulos had walked through his twisted dreams, and he had carried a mental picture of her standing in her bath down through the years to this very moment. T he resemblance between her and the beautiful young woman standing before him in the Hostel was striking. He had heard it said that interfamilial marriages had been the rule in the House of Christopoulos ever since Nick the Greek had married an indentured chambermaid -- a peasant girl named Antonia Anzalone -- and set the dynasty in motion. Matthew had always discredited the rumor, but now he wondered if perhaps there might not be something to it. He shuffled across the room and paused humbly before his visitor, staring down at the ermine snow that lay around her feet. Should he bow? he wondered. Or should he kneel? In his indecision, he did neither but stood there like the bewildered and frightened old man he was. Hera Christopoulos looked him up and down. Her voice was as cold as the wind that blew across the ice-flats. "Where is the last capsule?" she demanded. "Why wasn't k delivered to the House?" He could not think at first, could only stand there dumbly. When at last words came, they emerged in a meaningless mumble. "What did you say?" Hera Christopoulos asked. He clenched his hands in a vain attempt to still the trembling of his fingers. Faustina appeared timidly at his elbow, bearing a tray with two cups of coffee on it, and in his agitation he seized one of them and gulped down its throatsearing contents. Belatedly, he remembered that he should have let his visitor serve herself first. Acute embarrassment all but overwhelmed him. Miserably, he returned the cup to the tray. Hera declined the other cup with a disdainful look, and Faustina hurried away. The log fire crackled, and the crackling reverberated throughout the room. "Are you dumb?" Hera said contemptuously. "Or have you only temporarily lost your tongue?" Anger sparked him into articulation, and he raised his eyes. "The capsuld is in orbit, in accordance with your husband's directions." She took a step backward, and the fluffy pile of ermine snow becarrie a windrow. The deep-space darkness of her eyes intensified. "He ordered you to put the capsule in orbit. Why? "He did not say why." "When did he contact you?" "This morning, just before I made moonfall." "I order you to bring it down." "I can't bring it down unlea Zeus IX authorizes it," Matthew said. "Zeus IX was called away on business. Quite naturally I am empowered to speak for him in his absence. I hereby countermand his order with an order of my own: Bring the capsule down and see to it that it is delivered to the House immediately." With a catlike movement she bent down and picked up her cloak. Straightening, she showered it around her shoulders. "Immediately," she repeated, and, turning, started for the door. "No," said Matthew North. "I can't." She spun around, a flurry of whiteness and woman. "I order you to bring it down!" T he commoner in Matthew quivered, and the servant in him quaked, but his loyalty to Zeus IX refused to let him retreat. "When your husband notifies me and gives me the necessary order, I will bring it down," he said, "but not before. I am sorry, but I have no right to act otherwise." "Very well then. Give me the orbital readings and I'll have someone else bring it down." Matthew shook his head. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I can't do that either. You see," he went on, "Zeus Christopoulos IX represents more to me than just the ninth Zeus in line. He represents all the others who preceded him. I -- I have worked IP for the House of Christopoulos almost all my life. And I have come to regard my duties as a sort of sacred trust -- a trust that I could never bring myself to violate. I would die for the House of Christopoulos. I would die for you. But I cannot obey your order." She regarded him for some time, the Cimmerian fountain of her hair snowbanks of her shoulders. Thought, not anger, now resided in her deep-space eyes. At length, " I believe you would at, that," she said; and then, "Such loyalty should not go unrewarded." Surprised, Matthew said, "It has not gone unrewarded." "But it has not been rewarded in full." She glanced at the magnified dial of her ring-watch. "It is now six-twenty. At eight-thirty you will arrive at the House of Christopoulos for dinner. That is an order. Will you obey it?" Weakness came into Matthew's knees and sent his legs to trembling. His gratitude was so great that he could barely speak. "Yes -- yes, I will obey it. And thank you." "I will expect you then." She turned and walked out of the Hostel, her cloak snowsqualling around her. She climbed into the glide-car in which she had come, the glide-car hummed to life, and a moment later she was gone. IV T he Alexander the Great roguard stationed before the multi-columned entrance of the House was a product of the "realistic school" of android manufacturing. He was slightly larger than his long-dead flesh-and-blood prototype, but in all other respects he was a faithful reproduction. He possessed not only his prototype's character but his prototype's specialized knowledge as well. The look he bestowed upon Old Matt North artfully combined aristocratic arrogance and militaristic contempt. When Matthew said, "I'm Matthew North -- Mrs. Zeus Christopoulos IX is expecting me," the roguard acted as though he hadn't heard. Nevertheless, he relayed the information into the tiny radio attached to his helmet. A moment later Hera Christopoulos' imperious voice sounded crisply on the night air: "Well, let him in, you synthetic snob! I told you this afternoon that you were to pass him.'" Without a word Alexander the the Great stepped to one side and pointed toward the multicolumned facade of the House of Christopoulos with his laser-lance. Still shivering from his wind-beset walk across the flats, Matthew approached the Pentelic marble steps, all the while staring nervously up at the frieze upon which were carved bas-reliefs of the divine consorts of the original Zeus -- Metis, Maia, Leto, Dione, Demeter, Mnemosyne, Themis, and Eurynome. Above the cornice and centered beneath the peak of the gable was a big bas-relief of Hera that rather startlingly resembled the flesh-and-blood Hera with whom he was about to break bread. Flanking it on either side, in attitudes of abject adoration, were bas-reliefs of various mortals who had contributed to the glory that was Greece. Some of them he recognized from the pictured busts and sculptures he had viewed on his jettractor's librarytape: Thucydides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, Sophocles. One of the figures was groveling at her feet. It was a bas-relief of Homer. Night had fallen an hour ago, in accordance with Hyperion's neorotational period established some five centuries ago at the instigation of Nick the Greek. Now Saturn was climbing into the sky. Lowering his eyes from the gable, Matthew began ascending the wide marble steps. The Doric columns seemed to rise higher and higher above him. The feeling of insignificance that had afflicted him ever since he had set forth from the Hostel increased. He felt very small indeed when at last he stepped through the doorway that appeared transiently in the black curtain of the force-field, and into the enormous room beyond, and he wished that he had not come. The room occupied the entire front half. of the rectangular building. Strictly speaking, it was more of a great hall than a room. On three sides of it, the magnificent Doric columns rose up to the architrave; on the fourth side -- the side opposite the entrance -- a grand Pentelic staircase climbed majestically to a railed mezzanine, beyond which dozens of ornate doorways could be seen. The appointments were made of Pentelic marble, too -- benches tables, chairs. And in the center of the room a Pentelic marble fountain sent up an exquisite nosegay of twinkling water. High above the fountain, seemingly suspended in midair, an incongruous chandelier, wrought in the shape of a barredspiral nebula, shed soft but penetrating radiance. The ' inter-columnar force-field that so effectively concealed the building's interior from the eyes of the outsider existed here only as a diaphanous mist. Through the mist, the garish bonfire of the mile-away city of Saturnia showed like gentle candlelight. A robutler dating from the same "school" as the Alexander the Great roguard and wearing a Grecian tunic on the front of which the name Pindar was embroidered, came forward on sandaled feet. He took Matthew's greatcoat and earflapped cap, and conducted him across the room to a round marble table that stood at the base of the staircase. Passing ' the fountain, Matthew gave a start when he saw the silvery flashes that spelled the presence of Venerian piranhas. There were hundreds of them. No, not hundreds. Thousands. Hera's pets? he wondered. A fter seating him at the table, Pindar retired to the columnar sidelines. Matthew saw the other androids then. There was one standing at the base of each column. All of them IF wore tunics and sandals similar to Pindar's, and all of them save one were standing in statue-like immobility. The exception was an old "man" with a sensitive, bearded face who was regarding Matthew intently. As Matthew watched, the android left his column and came over to the table. He leaned forward, the tiny tubes that constituted his eyes alternately dimming and brightening. Matthew remembered encountering a similar reaction in one of the robartenders at the Haven. The robartender was a product of the same "school" that had produced the House of Christopoulos "personnel", and in common with all such "character" androids he could function effectively only as long as the scheme of things which he had been built to fit into remained at least reasonably in keeping with his "personal" sense of right and wrong. His sense of right and wrong was clear-cut enough. But therein lay its weakness. He believed that the three jettractor pilots should drink themselves into insensibility in his bar at least once during their layovers, and when Matthew had refused to touch a drop during one of his (he had been combatihg a peptic ulcer at the time), the robartender had suffered a mechanical breakdown, the first symptom of which had been an alternate dimming and brightening of his eyes. Matthew read the name on the old "man's" tunic. "Aeschylus?" The old "man" nodded eagerly. "Yes. Aeschylus -- overseer of baths and bedrooms." And then, "This morning, darkly plotting deep within, the monarch sleeping softly by her side, she -- " "You dare leave your post after hours!" It was Hera. Hera in a saronglrke gown that glittered with diamonds. Hera, tall and imperious, eyes abyss-dark with rage. Aeschylus stepped back,eye-tubes working furiously. "Bumbling old fool," she went on. "Get back to your column! You'll be scrapped tomorrow -- I never could stand listening to your plays anyway. They're stupid!" The old "man" turned and shuffled back across the floor and took up a stone-like stance by the column he had so recently left. Hera turned to Matthew who had risen to his feet. "I apologize for his presumption," she said. "Please sit down." Matthew did so, and she sat down next to him on the bench. There were lines of tiredness at her eyecorners -- or perhaps lines of worry; it was difficult to tell -- and her face seemed slightly thinner than it had been before. She clapped her hands. A moment later a mech-maid bearing a tray with a tall dark bottle and two flower-stem glasses on it emerged from a doorway to the right of the staircase. The embroidery on her tunic-front revealed her name to be Corinna. "Will that be all, madam?" she asked, after setting the glasses and the bottle before them. "For the moment. Begone, kitchen wench!" Corinna departed. Hera filled the glasses and handed one to Matthew. She raised the other. "A toast to your loyalty, Matthew North," she said. "May it hover forever over the House of Christopoulos like the great and shining star it truly is." T hey touched glasses, drank... The wine ignited cool fires within him. Lambent flames rose up and licked his thoughts. Was this the wine the House of Christopoulos was famous for? he wondered. The wine that Nick the Greek was reputed to have made his fortune on? Matthew did not think so. Such a wine was far too dear ever to have been distributed on the mass market. And besides, it was said that the real source of the Christopoulos fortune was the synthetic gin which Antonia Anzalone had developed in her bathtub before Nick the Greek had married her, and which the good citizens of Earth and the Seven Satraphies had been incontinently consuming ever since. Hera refilled the two glasses, and clapped her hands again -- twice, this time. Immediately Corinna and another mech-maid, whose name was Psappho, began bringing in viands. The amount and the quality of the food left Matthew speechless. The entree was Martian ptarmigan, a delicacy which he had never tasted before. With each course a different kind of wine was served, none of which he had ever tasted before either, and each of which was more potent than the last. All that saved him from drunkenness was the quantity of food he consumed. And in the end this did not save him either, for the meal proved to be no more than a foundation for the wine to come. There was red wine and blue wine and amber wine, and there was even a red wine with a greenish cast which Hera said came from the most continent and had been aged in deep space. Was there another wine, Matthew North wondered, a wine that she had not served him? -- a wine that was a product of Bimini and which had also been aged in deep space? He could not recall seeing any vineyards on Bimini, though, either during his orbits or during the walks he had been forced to take while the android personnel loaded his capsule. About all he had ever seen on Bimini were trees and more trees. That was all Bimini was, really -- or rather, all Bimini had been. A big jungle in the sky. Give or take a few lakes and rivers, of course -- and the saltwater sea that had recently kicked over its traces. The ship of small talk put into this port and that, Hera at the helm and Matthew sounding a polite note of concurrence whenever he thought one was called for. Presently it ran aground on the subject of Greek religious mythology. Hera dwelled lengthily on the Euhemeristic theory of the origin of the gods. "Then you don't think they were true gods, after all?" Matthew asked at length. She sipped her wine, set the glass back down. "On the contrary, Vm IF positive that they were true gods. The mere fact that they were once mortal doesn't mean that they couldn't have become immortal. Mortality is a necessary prelude to immortality, just as immortality is a necessary prelude to the superapotheosis which must logically follow. But aside from all that, the real proof of the immortality of the Greek gods has been staring scholars in the face for centuries. And they have been too short-sighted to see it." "I -- I guess I'm too short-sighted too," Matthew said. She laughed. It was a genuine enough laugh, but for some reason it deepened rather than lightened the lines at her eye-corners. "They lived near mortals and had dealings with mortals when they could just as easily have lived by themselves and had nothing to do with lesser beings," she explained. "Immortality, you see, is relative. Living with other immortals exclusively and avoiding mortals, they would have been unable to appreciate their superiority. Living near inferior beings and having dealings with them, they could appreciate it. It's such a simple truth that the scholars have overlooked it, the way they've overlooked so many simple truths. Scholars are stupid anyway -- almost as stupid as philosophers." She faced the staircase. "Come on out, old man," she called, "and start cleaning off the table." A n android with a block-like head shuffled out from behind the staircase. His huge face was ugly almost beyond belief. A straggly white beard dribbled down from cheeks and chin and upper lip into a mop-like tangle. Only the eyes saved the sorry visage from complete catastrophe. They were a clear, benevolent brown. The letters embroidered on his tunic spelled Socrates . He began collecting the dishes and the platters, and stacking them, his slab-like bare feet going flapflap-flap on the Pentelic marble floor. The dishes and platters stacked, he started carrying them through the doorway to the right of the staircase. His movements were slow and clumsy. There was something grotesque about the whole performance. Something pitiful. A scrap of ptarmigan had fallen to the table. Hera brushed it to the floor, and when the old "man" returned for his last load, she pointed to the scrap with the toe of her sandal. "Pick it up, old man," she said. Socrates did so, then carried the rest of the dishes and platters from the room. "Make sure you get them clean, old man," Hera called after him. For a moment Matthew felt sick to his stomach. Why Socrates? he wondered. Why Pindar? Why Corinna? However, he held his silence, and presently the matter drifted from his thoughts. All matters drifted from his thoughts. All save one... Hera was a strong and scented wind blowing through him. The wine strengthened the wind, and he found it increasingly difficult to stand against it. He swayed when the said, abruptly and without prelude, "Will you bring the capsule down?" But he did not fall. Not quite. "No," he said, "I can't." She moved closer to him, the diamonds of her sarong-gown dancing in blinding blues and whites. "You would not be bringing it down for nothing. I pay cash!" "On delivery?" he he ru'd his strange voice ask. "You are an honorable man. Your word is good enough." He swallowed. Her face was very close. It fascinated and repealed him simultaneously, but the repulsion was a form of fascination in itself -- a perverted form, perhaps, but nonetheless compelling. The thoughts that it awoke added to his drunkenness. He remembered that she was the only human being he had seen since entering the House, and he knew suddenly that they were alone, and that she had meant for them to be alone. "Do I have your word?" she asked. The dancing diamond-light of her sarong-gown half blinded him. He tried to speak, could not. His glazed eyes made speech unnecessary. She stood up. "You have not seen the mezzanine," she said. "Come, I will show it to you." V H e followed her up the marble stairs on unsteady stilts of legs. Seen from above, the enormous room brought to mind the concourse of an ancient railroad terminal. The mezzanine itself was a graceful promenade, and the walls between the doors that opened off from it were decorated with the simplest of Grecian designs. Hera opened one of the doors and stepped into the room beyond. Trembling, he followed. "My bath," she said. It was the same bath he had peered into -- how many years ago -- and seen Dione Christopoulos. He had been forty-five and afraid then. He was still afraid, but he was no longer forty-five. Nevertheless, the restlessness that had afflicted him then came back. Now he was in a position to apply the cure -- if making love to a beautiful woman who was far above his status really was the cure. In any event, it was for sale. And circumstances had provided him with the price. The trouble was, part of the price was his loyalty to Zeus IX. What was it that the capsule contained that Hera found so irresistible? he wondered. So irresistible that she could not wait till her husband returned to indulge herself? Drunk as he was, Matthew was still incapable of asking her pointblank. Wine or no wine, he was still her servant. He dared not risk incurring her ill-will. But was her motivation really important? Wasn't it enough that she did want the capsule brought down, and that only he knew its celestial hiding place? After the bath, she showed him several other rooms, the last of which was her bedchamber. It was IF a large room, and the three-dimensional murals on its walls made it seem even larger. The subject of the murals brought a blush to his withered cheeks. He had read of the rites for which the Temple of Diana at Ephesus had been famous. But reading about them was one thing -- seeing them graphically depicted was quite another. Hera was looking at him questioningly. Light emanating from the obscene murals gave her flesh a reddish cast, deepened the darkness of her eyes. He looked over her shoulder, saw the huge sleeping dais with its scarlet pillows and black counterpane. He heard the hoarseness of his breathing and he felt the pounding of his heart, and he knew all at once that in order to possess her he would betray far more than what Zeus IX represented; that, like all loyalties built on self-deception, his loyalty to the House of Christopoulos was worthless. He stood there helplessly as it came tumbling down around him. 'Til bring the capsule down whenever you wish," he said. "Yes," she answered absently, as though she had heard the words long before he said them. And then, "If you will wait outside, I will have my handmaidens prepare me." She clapped her hands. Trembling, he stepped out onto the mezzanine. Helen of Troy and Hecuba appeared, side by side, entered the loom and closed the door behind them. His trembling increased. To relax his thoughts he walked over to the marble railing and looked down into the great room below. At the fountain and the tables and the benches. At the columns, at the android standing at the base of each, as though chained. At Ictinus and Callicrates, the architects who had built the original Parthenon; at Phidias, the sculptor who had supervised the building; at Zeno, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Homer, Parmenides, Leucippos, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus -- Aeschylus was looking up at him, eyes flashing on and off. Now the android left his column, crossed the floor and ascended the stairs. He walked over to where Matthew was standing and touched his arm. "Come," he said, "I will show you so that you will believe." Matthew was annoyed, "Show me what?" "I will show you," Aeschylus repeated. "Come." The blink-rate of the eye-tubes was alarmingly high. What illogicality had this old "man" stumbled upon that could have upset him so? Suddenly curious, Matthew said, "All right -- but you'll have to hurry." A eschylus led him down the mezzanine to an imposing door at the farther end. The door was locked, but Aeschylus produced a ring of keys from a pocket in his tunic and inserted one of them into the anachronistic lock. A moment later, the door swung obediently open. Following the old "man" into the room beyond, Matthew found himself in a large bath. S# Wm It put Hera's to shame. The conwater, he thought he saw a flash cave wall was one continuous muof silver. Reflection? He wondered. ral of an Elysian countryside, and it blended imperceptibly into a ceiling-mural of u blue, cloud-scattered sky. So vivid was the illusion of depth that for a moment he thought he had stepped across space and time to ancient Greece. Real grass grew beneath his feet. The bath became a quiet pool on the bank of which he stood. Two life-size statues stood on the opposite bank -- one Pan, the other, Syrinx. Syrinx was running away, and Pan was in ithyphallic pursuit. Matthew looked down at the pool at his feet. It was perhaps nine feet in diameter and had a maximum depth of about five feet. Its concave bottom consisted of white marble. As he gazed into the bluish Peering closer, he saw other flashes. He identified the shining flickering shapes as Venerian piranhas then, and suddenly sober, he drew back. The water was alive with them! Why would any man -- even a rich man who could afford to be eccentric -- want to keep Venerian piranhas in his bath? Aeschylus was pointing toward the bottom of the pool. Stepping forward, Matthew looked down into the strange blue water once again -- And saw the bones -- The grisly bones, picked clean of living flesh. The white bones that almost matched the marble basin. Femurs, pelvis; empty rib box. Dark-socketed skull. Bone-finIF gen, one of them still encircled by a ring -- a ring that bore a familiar seal. The seal of the House of Christopoulos. Or, if you looked at it with Aeschylus' eyes, the seal of the House of Atreus... Sickened, Matthew turned away. "When?" he forced himself to ask. Aeschylus faced him. As the android spoke, his blink-rate rapidly increased : This morning, darkly plotting deep within, The monarch sleeping softly by her side, She rose, and did with goblet vile Scoop death from waters rampant and carry it aloft, And pour it into this, her monarch's pool. The old "man" paused. Raising his eyes to the counterfeit countryside and lifting his arms in supplication, he went on: Come, Eumenides three, and haunt her. Dog her bloody trail! To Apollo and Athena make her flee. Come, do not wait -- Orestes is no more; Electra lurks not at this sorry bier. Beyond the cloud-cast sky where once dimly shone the sun. Only darkness can be seen. Woe unto her -- woe! Awake, ye fiends incarnate, and right this crime The indifferent gods looked down but did not see! Horrified, Matthew seized the keys which the old "man" still held in his hand, and ran from the room He sorted through them as he hurried down the mezzanine, and by the time he reached the door to Hera's bedchamber he had the one he wanted. He fitted it into the lock, and turned it. Then he tried the door. It did not give. He went loking for a visiphone. VI T he Saturnia police had to knock out the Alexander the Great and his three generals with a deactivation ray to gain entry. Matthew did not know this till he left the House hours later and saw the four "bodies" sprawled on the marble steps. Instinctively, he looked away. They brought too vividly to mind the "body" he had found by the piranha-infested pool when he had returned to the bath with the Saturnia Inspector of Police. Alexander, Ptolemy, Seleucus and Antigonus could be re-activated. Aeschylus could not be. Aeschylus had gone insane; his circuits had shorted out, blowing his eye-tubes, and all that remained of him now was a blackened shell. Perhaps, though, it was just as well. Now that the House of Christopoulos had fallen, there was no more need for period-piece androids. Nor for period-piece spacemen. Old Matt North shivered in the raw wind that was rushing across the flats. He turned up the collar of his greatcoat, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Dawn was beginning to edge into the sky, and Saturn had long since crept to rest. He wondered what it would be like, living in a world that had left him over four centuries behind. He could not possibly adapt himself to it. He was too old. Too tired -- A tired old man. A filthy old man. That was what Hera Christopoulos had called him when the Saturnia police had led her shrieking from her bedchamber. Disheveled, half-naked in the obscene negligee in which she had adorned herself to awaken his desire and which revealed a dagger-birthmark startlingly similar to Dione's, she had screamed the words at the top of her voice. "Filthy old man," she screamed, face white, and suddenly, shockingly, thin. " made the Christopoulos fortune -- not Zeus I It was I who deserved your loyalty -- not him. And you sold me out! Filthy old man! Filthy old Peeping Tom!" Confronted with the bones at the bottom of the drained pool, she had not even bothered to conceal her guilt. "It would only have been for twenty . or thirty more years anyway," she said. "Maybe it's better this way." Abruptly her voice rose. "It was all his fault! There would have been enough in reserve to have lasted us for another century if he hadn't squandered it, if he hadn't given it away. Given it to his mistresses. 'Would you be beautiful forever?' he asked them, and they fawned at his feet. Then he sickened of them and let them wither away, one by one, and found others to give away his years to. My years. And then he tried to cheat me out of the handful we had left. Well, I beat him there. I'm glad I fed him to the fish. I hope they dined well." She gave a hideous laugh. "I'll bet his flesh was stringy, though. I'll bet his skin was tough!" More laughter erupted from her, each burst more hideous than the last, and finally the police dragged her from the room. Then the Inspector began to question Matthew. M atthew withheld nothing. He had nothing to withhold. But the questions which the Inspector threw at him told him more than his answers told the Inspector. They told him that the condition of the bones at the bottom of the pool indicated that Zeus IX had climbed into his bath shortly after sending his message to Matthew. They told him that the House of Christopoulos had no heirs and that it would become the property of the Hyperion Satrapy. They told him that the House itself had long been a source of mystery to the Saturnia police, and that they had been eagerly waiting for years for a pretext to break into it. They told him that the Inspector was completely in the dark as to Hera's reason for murdering her husband and equally in the dark as to Zeus IX's reason for ordering Matthew IP to put the capsule in orbit. They also told him that the Saturnia authorities knew nothing about the Hyperion-Bimini shuttle, and hence knew nothing whatsoever about the nature of the Bimini cargo. Neither did Old Matt North. And now that the Saturnia authorities were going to bring the capsule down themselves and launch an official investigation, he probably never would know. Unless -- He paused on the wind-swept iceflats. Deliberately, he finished the thought: Unless he brought it down himself. Well, why not? Who had a better right to bring it down than the man who had pushed it all the way to Bimini and all the way back again? Who, indeed! He began to run. Actually, it was more of a stepped-up shuffle than a run, but it was the best that he could do. He was gasping when he reached the port, but he did not stop, and minutes later he was in his jettractor, climbing, climbing, up the dark and breathless stairway of the night and into the great star-ceilinged hall of space. He caught the capsule deftly, brought it down on a Harlequin-orbit of nights and days and dawns and set it on the lift-platform. He got out and climbed up on the platform and began examining the meteor-pitted hull. Dawn had departed. Morning was airing the first dirty linen of the day above the warped back yard of the horizon when at last he found the hatch. Owing to the capsule's present position, the metal plate was low on the hull, and this made opening it all the more difficult; but finally the final dog gave way before the hammer he had brought from the jettractor, and the plate fell free. He dug through the intervening layers of chemically-treated insulation to the inner hull, expecting to find an inner hatch. He did not find one -- he found a valve instead. Wine? Had he been playing Bacchus all these weary years? Well, he was at least entitled to a taste. The valve was a large one, and could be opened only with a wrench. He got a large one out of his jettractor and locked its jaws on the protruding valve-stem. He did not mean to turn the stem all the way, but the wrench gave him more leverage than he thought he had and far more than he actually needed, and before he knew what had happened, a stream of ice-cold liquid had gushed forth and sent him tumbling off the platform. He landed on his back and lay there dazed, the liquid pouring down on him and drenching him to the skin. Finally the coldness shocked him into consciousness and brought him gasping to his feet. Finding the wrench, he climbed back up on the platform and tried to close the valve. But in order to get a firm grip on the stem he had to move into the gushing stream, and again the force of it proved too much for him and once more he went tumbling to the ground. This time, the wrench struck him glancingly on the temple and knocked off his earflapped cap. Blackness came then, and when at last it went away the stream had dwindled to a mere trickle, and the contents of the capsule were no more. H e sat up. All around him he heard the sound of liquid running off and seeping into the innumerable crevices in the ice. Clothes dripping, he floundered to his feet. He licked his wet lips, but he did not taste wine. Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail of water. Day spread more invisible clotheslines in the sky and hung out more dirty linen to dry. The wind grew sharper. Hatless, he started walking down the street in the wind. Something was happening in his bones. He could not get the nursery rhyme out of his mind. Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail of water... Faustina saw him from the Hostel, and came forth to meet him. "Are you all right, Mr. North?" "Yes, I'm all right," said Old Matt North. Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail of water. "You're wet. You're cold. Let me help you to your room." "Walk up the stairs before me -- that will be help enough." Faustina obeyed. He followed, youth of her. Lord , to be young again ! he thought... and even as the thought went through his mind he felt strength flowing into his half-frozen legs and building up in his back and arms. He felt his shoulders straightening, Old Matt North did, and he felt himself growing taller, as one by one the weary fruitless years slipped silently away. The wine from the stars was no human drink: It was that heady juice called -- youth. No, Ponce de Leon never found his Bimini, but Nick the Greek found his. High up on the big black hill of time and space he found it, and the waters of it were good Young Matt North paused at the top of the stairs, and Faustina turned and faced him. The consternation in her eyes soon gave way to better things. Standing on the landing in the wind, he smiled at her. She smiled back. lack Vanee  J. T. McIntosh  Keith Laumer Ip L Dick  Willy Ley  and many men All in the February issue of Galaxy -- on sale nowl IF IF  Short Story They sought the Guardian who had defended ancient Mars -- and destroyed it l hobos rose... The two men stood outside the Martian temple. Their faces were worried. "Let's get going!" said Pym. His voice sounded distant in the thin, chill air of the red desert. "Now. The hell with getting more stuff to take back!" "One more load," said Adams. His round face was nervous, but determined. He turned and entered the high, shadowy, triangular door of the temple. Pym sighed and followed. They switched on their torches, revealing bleak stone walls around them. Echoes of their footsteps were a constant murmur in the nearly circular confines. "If I was sure about it," said Adams, "I'd be running. I'd probably beat you back to the ship. But -- I'm not sure... Pym flashed his light upward -- held it steady on a pictograph. Then he moved the light onward to the next -- and the next -- The series of huge pictographs. seventeen in all, ran around the entire inner wall of the temple, about eight feet above the floor. They were deeply graven in the rusty sandstone. They were ugly. Pym shuddered. "I'm no expert," he said, "and even  get the message." "They certainly seem to be representational," Adams agreed. "Nevertheless, they may be symbolic. That thing -- the Guardian -- may just be a god, a protective spirit, an imagined entity -- " "It's a machine ," Pym said, certainty in his voice. "Look at it, for God's sake! Why fight the obvious?..." T heir flash-beams converged on the pictograph at two o'clock from the door -- the one bearing the most detailed image of the thing which they had nervously christened The Guardian. "Apparently a dodecahedron," Adams nodded. "Gigantic -- if those are really spaceships it's destroymg -- "With round eyelets all over it," Pym said harshly, "and rays coming out of the eyelets! And there -- " his flash-beam lowered a little the ruptured ship... doesn't that give you an idea of its size?" "Should it?" Adams said. "When we don't know the size of anything else in that context? Maybe the Martians were an inch tall." Pym flashed his light at the ninefoot-high doorway. His expression, in the reflected glow, said nuts. "All right," Adams grinned. "There's still no legal limit on the size of gods." "It's too sophisticated for that!" Pym said. He turned to irony: "Quite a primitive god-image!...with eyelets, and fanning death-rays, and mathematically symmetrical!" "I admit that it may well be a machine," said Adams. "I simply refuse to conclude that it is. Or was." He turned and commenced to gather up fragments of stone urns and plaques and other artifacts from the inches-thick dust, on the floor. He stowed them in the widemouthed sack hung on his belt. His light probed here and there. He fingered a shard of vase: "Okay... they were taller." "Is?... or was?" mused Pym. "What if it's still around?" "Then, if our understanding of the pictographs is correct," said Adams, "we have every reason to feel as nervous as we do." He moved off through an inner doorway. His light flickered on the walls of a chamber beyond. "The Guardian," said Pym, staring up at the multi-faceted thing portrayed in the two o'clock pictograph. "A machine. A robot... hellishly armed. Built to detect and destroy extra-Martians life forms." He moved his light to another pictograph, in which the Guardian apparently was incinerating a multitude of scurrying tiny forms on a desert battle field. "Pve dreamed up a theory to cover that, Adams." Adams laughed. "It's your day for theories." "Brainwaves," Pym said. "A portion of the Guardian's sensory apIF paratus could be tuned to the alpha kappa of the Martian brain, with a signal generator in its recognition circuits that constantly produces the key pattern, matching it against all outside patterns received. If a pattern is picked up that doesn't jitter right, a binary computation takes place whose answer is no -- " Adams appeared at the door. "Masterful! And then the Guardian tracks down and blasts hell out of the alien brain!" He picked up a piece of pottery, put it into the sack he was carrying and moved on into another chamber. "An interplanetary war," Pym mused on, his light illuminating another pictograph. "When Mars was at the height of her civilization. She had forgotten war. Suddenly, without warning, the Invaders were upon her. Half of Mars died in the first attack." He paused thoughtfully: "Maybe the Invaders were from Planet X... the one that blew up to create the Asteroid Belt. If they knew what was due to happen, they'd sure as hell want leben sraum..." A dam's cannonade of chuckles echoed around the close, dark walls. # "Superb. What a talent for fiction!" "You," said Adams coldly, "are an unimaginative God damned anthropologist. Remember Pictograph Two? The Invaders' fleet is shown coming from the next outer planet -- " "Jupiter," came Adams's voice. "Or the thing is meant to show a swarm of bugs, like locusts, coming out of the sun, like superstition, to ruin the crops. Or it could mean... God knows what it could mean!" He came out of the chamber and dumped his filled-up sack on the floor. He clipped another to his belt. "You're a lazy bastard. Give me a hand. Stop taking my first assumptions as gospel. I should interpret the Martian mind in six hours? And, yes -- " he ' paused, in his search for more artifacts -- "I will admit that it appears to be a fleet coming from the next outer planet. Satisfied?" He moved off. "Lord, what I'd give to know!" Pym's light slowly moved along the series of huge graven scenes: "Some scientists escaped, right? They formed Mars's defensive core. While the Invaders pillaged the planet, the scientists worked. They turned the thing loose... and it -- " he swallowed, looking at Pictographs Nine through Fifteen -- "it destroyed the Invaders. Utterly. It got all of them who had colonized the surface. It got the lookout ships, in orbit. It got all the lifecraft who tried to escape. In a day." "Or a year, or a thousand years," said Adams, his voice echoing from a corridor he was prowling. "Or it never happened at all." His voice was amused. "Maybe the pictographs show what happened to the lousy bugs who came and threatened the crops. Some other bugs came along, big round ones, and they ate the baddies and saved the day!" "One big round faceted bug," Pym said. "Just one. With rays coming out of -- " Adams's footsteps had faded. He couldn't hear. Pym shivered in the chill of the temple. He looked out the door. The dark rolling dunes of Syrtis Major seemed flooded with a frosty fire; smooth shrouds of paper-thin ice made sparkling traceries of the ripples that marched down each slope into shadow. Off in the distance was the Mars , like a toy, like a silver trophy, the cyclopean stare of its nose-port fixed on the cold-starred horizon. Pym wondered what he would do if a giant robot were suddenly to rear up hugely over that horizon, humming and clicking, a thousand eyelets searching, a thousand deadly ras ready to lash forth at him as the thing's "mind" said kill... Pym took his eyes from the temple door -- away from spectral imaginings. "Too late," he said to the pictographs. "The Guardian saved Mars too late. Ninety per cent of you were dead. You declined into savagery -- wandering tribes, staring at the rubble of cities. The scientists died, and science with them. The centuries passed, and nothing was left of the greatness of Mars." He flashed his light on the last tvo pictographs: "Nothing except -- the Guardian. You remembered it, all right. It was your legendary savior. You deified it. You built this temple to it, and probably many other temples. It was your god -- but, by real God, your legends recalled it as a machine" "Bravo!" said Adams, at Pym's shoulder, and he clapped gloved hands together in applause. "You've damn near got me convinced! Happily, there are other theories." He shoved the twisted necks of two chockful sacks into Pym's hands. "All right, then. It appears that we're in great danger. I'll race you to the ship!" "Funny," Pym grumbled. "Funny." He shouldered the sacks. "Is there anything we haven't photographed?" "You want to  wait . around," ' Adams said in mock worry, "when the Guardian is on the warpath?" Pym called him a name and walked out the temple door. Adams followed after first flashing his light around for a look at the pictographs. And he wasn't smiling. T hey trudged through the steep moonlit dunes toward the Mars . It lay in the distance like a silver cigar between them and the horizon. "It might still be running around out on the desert somewhere," Pym said. They were on the brink of a long slope, one which bore the slanting scars of their previous upand-down passages. Adams started down, and the thin snap and crackle of ice made his reply unintelligible. Pym followed, balancing arms-out like a skier, digging in with the sides of his feet. They moved crabwise down and along the face of fine, crisp sand. "What?" Pym said loudly. Adams shook his head. He vanished into the pool of inky shadow IF at the base of the dune. A moment later, he reappeared, black against silver, on the up-slope of the next dune. He waited for Pym. Thirty feet behind them, twice that above them, the temple humped up out of the sand like a giant peaked cranium -- dark, silent, against the red-and-black streaked sky. Its outer surface was graven with a twisting, sinuous ornamentation -- an alien geometry. Pym plunged into shadow. The slope began to level invisibly beneath his feet. He skipped, got sort of a jumping run under him, came to a stop beside Adams. "What?" he asked again. "You've got me terrified," Adams grinned. Pym looked closely at the roundfaced man. "By God," he said, "I have, haven't I? Wipe that smile and don't kid me!" Adams nudged stiff sand with his foot, watched it skitter and tumble down into the shadow between the dunes. He raised his eyes to the temple. "Everything you said," he said, "fits my preferred interpretation of the pictographs. I hate to admit it. Let's go." "It could still be alive," Pym said. "A machine doesn't live," Adams said. "It doesn't die. There may once have been a machine. It may be rust in the sands -- and it may be targeting us. We may be crazy. Let's go." They labored upward, crunching icy sand. Behind them was the temple. Above them was Phobos. Pym studied it through half-closed eyes. A few tiny craters were visible along its twilight boundary, and it gave back a faint rust hue which faded visibly as the little moon circled further toward nightside. Soon Mars's other moon, Deimos, would bullet up over the horizon, to race the stars for mastery of the night. The men moved on toward their ship, in the silver light of Phobos, whose name meant Fear. They topped a long rise. Before them stretched a vast level area of sand. And stretching off into the night were the deep tracks left by the Mars Fs great wheels in landing. Three feet down into the sand. Thirty feet apart. A mile long, and straight as a ruler over the darkened face of Syrtis Major. Such was the mark of the first Earth ship to reach Mars, eleven hours ago. T he men struggled on through the ruddy sand. Was there somewhere a giant robot, grim and cold, watching over this dead world, waiting patiently for sign of alien brains to be destroyed at the whispered bidding of its ancient builders? For how many centuries had that been a futile search? And now -- not futile. -- wandering the red deserts, giant treads bruising sand and polar ice and the criss-crossed mud of canal bottoms ages dry -- nosing alertly, testing air, ground, radiation -- a steel bloodhound, a racing silver tower, a deadly behemoth; soundless, perhaps, save for tha whisper of steel on oiled steel, the clicks of relays. How huge? How powerful? Perhaps it would blot out the sky. Now it was sniffing toward them, somewhere out over the sands, coming faster than the wind and more silent. The whine of rising power, a to photo-cells, dispensary circuits humming, eyelets searching, probing, pinpointing, while little robot repair-machines waited in niches to swarm out at first sign of damage or wear... Did it have a brain? Could it think? Could it tell that Earthmen were not enemies? Or weren't they? To ancient, peaceful, quiet Mars, would they have come as friends?... "I was right l" gasped Adams, as they plunged down a slope. "You're right. Fm scared! It's clear as hell, now!..." "What?" yelled Pym, over the crackling of paper-ice. They reached bottom. "What else could the pictographs mean?" Adams moaned. "Bugs," said Pym sardonically. They started up the next slope... Above them loomed the robot. p'hey squalled and flopped flat on the slope of the sand-dune, and they dragged out their repeating-pistols, and they fired explosive pellets galore. The ' night flickered, roared, flared, shook, and thundered with blue explosions. Fantastic shadows were created on the rippled sides of dunes. Thin ice turned to steam and rose in boiling clouds. Sandparticles rattled and danced as concussions slammed about. The Robot stared down at them, stiffly motionless. "Its head!" Pym shrieked. "Look at it! It's the Guardian!" They concentrated their fire on the silent, huge, multi-faceted head of the robot. It seemed to regard them patiently. Their guns howled at it, at the rate of ten limited fusion blasts per second per gun. The head came off. It wobbled off its boiling metal neck, struck a brawny metal shoulder, bounced and flicked molten droplets all around and thudded heavily to the sand at the top of the dune. It rolled over once -- rolled again -- and then was st : " The sand beneath it snapped, as icon rebelled at infernal heat. Red glow faded in the darkness. The rest of the robot still stood -- headless. It had not once moved, not at all. The men gasped, stared upward, wheezed, and finally recovered their breaths. Pym sat up. He bolstered his gun. He got to his feet. Boldly, ho trudged up the slope until he stood before the silent robot. He kicked its ankle, and cried jubilantly, "So much for the goddam. lousy Guardian!" He put his foot on the face of the detached, fallen head and struck a pose as Adams joined him. Adams was frowning. He passed Pym, and inspected joints in the robot's great body. "This thing," he said, "hasn't moved for a thousand years! It's rusted solid. It's been dead for God IF knows how long." He shook his head, smiling at Pym's heroic stance. "We had nothing to fear from it... it's an absolute wreck!" "Then," repeated Pym in satisfaction, "so much for the goddam Guardian!" "Look at it," said Adams quietly. "Huh?" said Pym. "It wasn't built for speed," said Adams. "It wasn't built to fly. Obviously, it wasn't built to withstand attack... and I'm sure the Invaders were better armed than we are. I wonder if it was even built to last ." He put a hand on the thing's great, cold, quiet right arm: "It's a worker." Pym stared. Adams slapped the crude right "hand" of the Robot. "Do you know design? It's a digger -- a miner -- a rooter -- a sand-hog. Maybe it's a searcher-forwater." He shook his head: "It's not something created by aliens..." "It came for us," said Pym. "We came to i#," said Adams. He' motioned at the surrounding dunes. "We've wandered afield in our upset state. Have we taken this route before? No, I think we're a dune or two off the beaten track... "So much," said Pym hopefully, "for the Guardian." "And good luck to us," whispered Adams. They started for their ship again. They almost made it. D eimos rose... and paused in its orbit... and remembered. tion #, Title #, United Statos Code.) I Date of filing. Oct. #. #. #. Title of publication. IF Street, New York #, N. Y. #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business office of the publishers (not printers), #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. #. 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F  Short Story it was bad luck to name a planet "Eden #I -- but these men weren't superstitious I S enior Biologist Johnston looked about him with a reluctant approval : the shuttle system from the spacecraft was efficiently organized, clean and swift. True, the Service man was leaning negligently against the bulkhead, whistling the latest Service-sponsored favorite. But no one ever expected full respect from a Service man. Service men were ambitionless, restless louts with an inborn rebellion against law, whether man-made or natural. Most were bright, many pressive list of campus expulsions. Before the Exploration Drive existed these men were drifting delinquents, whether outcasts of the society or members of some rough army. Senior Biologist Johnston's nose was superior but tolerant. This Service man's behavior might be insulting, but at least the man looked well -- tanned and healthy. Perhaps this was an A grade planet after all. The Group leader was waiting on the edge of the shuttle tarmac. Senior Biologist Johnston's sense of approval grew as the man greeted him deferentially, making all the seemly gestures. "Your name?" asked Johnston on a tolerant note. "Garfield, Senior Biologist," the Group leader said, with a bow of his head. He was a tall man, and well built, though not as heavy as Service men tended to be, and almost improperly young. But he was remarkable. Johnston had fully expected this. To be a leader of a group of Service men, a man had to be remarkable. "Very good, Garfield," Johnston said graciously, but as he cast a rapid assessing glance over the compound, his sense of approval lessened. The minimum time of exploration before a Senior could be called was six M. T. months. Considering this length of time, very few buildings had been erected. Johnston, no mincer of words, said so. "Is this all you have built?" he barked. Garfield waved an apologetic arm around the green and blue vista. "Sir," he said earnestly, "this is an A grade planet. No rain falls, so you can imagine how hard it is to get the men to build shelters." "No rain?" Johnston peered down at the rich brown earth and luxuriant dark-green growth. "No rain," Garfield said simply. "But the place is riddled with underground springs. Most probably they're fed with the snow from the ranges." Johnston allowed his gaze to wander up into the distance, to where the stately white crags of mountains reared jutting from mounded green slopes. "Wind?" he asked, into the clear still air. "No wind." "Hum." The Senior Biologist chewed this notion over for a while, and then allowed a faint rebuke to enter his tone. "Most interesting -- you should have sent for a Senior Meteorologist." "The biology of the area is most interesting," Garfield murmured diplomatically, and waited. "You know something about biology?" "I specialized in it at the Service Center." Johnston stared at Garfield for a full moment, and then joined in the young man's grin. "And you wanted a few little theories tested? Humph!" Garfield's grin grew wider, and the two men began to pace slowly towards the compound. "We've set up a Service-specified laboratory," he ventured. "Good, good." Senior Biologist Johnston stopped a moment, stretching his venerable bones and crinkling his eyes in the crystal air and bright warm sunlight. When he stepped off again his stride had become springier. "I admit I can understand why you found it difficult to get the men to build shelters," he said, a sharp twinkle in his eye. An amicable relationship had been cemented. "This is definitely an A-grade planet," Garfield said, following Johnston into the laboratory. "It betters all the Service specifications. In fact -- " he hesitated -- "we would have called it 'Eden', but..." "Yes, yes, I know," Senior Biologist Johnston agreed. "Every planet they've named Eden has had its snake, indeed. A fatal flaw." "Most Edens have eventually been found unfit for human settlement," Garfield said earnestly. "And, somehow, we just didn't want to take the risk." "I see, I see," Johnston said, smiling. "And I presume no fatal flaws have cropped up yet. What about predators? Carnivores?" "There's only one true carnivore," Garfield said slowly. "The Bighead -- that's what we call it, at any rate. You'll see what I mean: the animal has the biggest head I've ever seen. All muscles and teeth J ohnson frowned. "Only one carnivore?" "Yes." Garfield pulled up a chair for the Senior Biologist and straddled another, his tanned young face enthusiastic. "Let me give you the picture," he said. "The vegetation round here -- I suppose you noticed. It's incredibly luxuriant. Very fast growing, and completely herbaceous. Yes," he said to Johnston's startled expression. "No secondary thickening at all." Silently, disbelievingly, Johnston pushed aside his chair and went to the window. There was a long silence as he stood with his back to the room, and then when he spoke his voice was hushed. "No trees. Not a tree anywhere." "That's right, sir," Garfield said. "But when you think about it, it's logical. No wind, no rain, a temperate climate with no extremes of heat or cold -- no shelter needed." "But light." Johnston turned, red cheeks aglow, an excited hand pulling at his dandy little white beard. "There must be competition for light. This is most interesting." "Yes." Garfield bent forward. "You see, this sort of environment favors one particular type of animal." "The ruminant," Johnston said, his voice hushed. "Yes? Yes?" "Yes," Garfield said triumphantly. "Herbivorous animals -- millions of them, and the variation! You've no idea. And fast! There's one rather like a horse that Pd like a few races, and I could sit back in luxury for the rest of my days." "And these animals have only one enemy?" "That's right. The Bighead. One of my lieutenants -- Parr -- is an amateur paleontologist, though, and he got interested in the fossils round here. Plenty of them, too, all in excellent condition. And there's plenty of different types of carnivores." Garfield gestured towards a large number of ancient bones, all neatly laid out on the bench behind him. Excitedly Johnston poked around them, weighing skulls in his hand and testing sharp teeth. "Interesting, interesting," he muttered, aligning limb bones. "It looks as if they were fast," he said critically. "But not fast enough," Garfield interrupted. "You've no idea -- you must see these herbivores." "Hum," the Senior Biologist said thoughtfully. "So these carnivores became extinct, eh?" "Except for the Bighead," Garfield said, following Johnston to the door. "They -- Johnston had stopped so abruptly that Garfield crashed into him. "Sorry, sir!" Garfield began to laugh IF but then his eyes followed the line of Johnston's rigid gaze, and his humor died a nervous death. Tempting brown bodies played in the distant sun. "What -- is -- this?" The words were terrible, threateningly spaced. arfield coughed. "They're women, sir." "Women!" "Uh, yes, sir. They came out of the hills six weeks ago." "Six weeks! And have you informed Central?" Garfield coughed again, and the Senior Biologist turned a frosty eye on him. "No?" he barked. "Why not?" "Uh, I knew you were coming, sir, and I thought that -- " "You thought! And tell me, young man, is it in your orders to think?" "No, sir," said Garfield miserably. "Humph! Well, I'd better have a look at these -- these women ." The word was incredibly scornful, but Garfield, hurrying after Johnston's stumping form, .could not see why. The women were not beautiful, but that aura -- Maybe their faces were flattened and featureless, but those silky clouds of hair, so caressing... Maybfe their bodies were soft and blurred, but those delicious curves... And maybe the women were certifiable imbeciles, but that animal magnetism... "They are attractive," the Senior Biologist said strangely, peering at the poised, aware bodies. "Attractive" was hardly the word for the jellifying effect that these bodies had on men. "They'd put the Visagram girls out of business," Garfield allowed. "It's a quality that manufacturers of perfume have been trying to sell for centuries. You see what I mean?" Johnston, thoughtfully stroking his beard, turned an alert eye on him. "I'm an old man, Garfield," he said, twinkling. Garfield grinned. Evidently he was forgiven. "They're stupid, of course," he said. "Language?" Garfield shook his head. "A certain range of noises," he said, "and a limited number of facial expression. One of them is slightly more intelligent -- I've trained her to do a little housework." He raised his voice. "Tania! Tania!" One of them looked up and glided smoothly over, with rich movements of her buttery body. "Remarkably humanoid, eh?" said Garfield, a master's pride in his voice. "I've called her Tania." "So I noticed," Johnston said dryly. He began to amble away, bending over every now and then to poke around in the vegetation, but then stopped and looked back as the women began to raise themselves and point, crying out with hoarse, excited voices. A brown herd blurred across the plain in the flick of an eye. "They're fast!" the Senior Biologist exclaimed in tremendous surprise. Then he saw that one shape, one brown segment of the herd, was dragged back, slowing, separated from its fellows. It lunged, straining forward, heaving in distant fright "Aw -- ah! Aw -- ah!" the women began to cry in chorus, leaping up and down. Johnston began to run toward that distant struggling shape, pulling at his beard with an excited hand and cursing his old heart. A purring disturbance of the air, and Garfield materialized alongside in a zoomer, shouting. Johnston thankfully climbed up beside him. "It's a Bighead," Garfield shouted. He slammed the zoomer into slow motion, so that they could approach the struggle without disturbing the Bighead. Johnston had a momentary vision of the herbivore hauled down on its hindquarters, raising its long thin nose to the sky in a high-pitched violin scream as they flickered over the vegetation, and then they materialized beside the fight. The Bighead raised a huge, blood-dripping skull and reared back in sneering fright. And then it disappeared. Ran right off the horizon before the mind had registered that it existed. It had six legs. # C TV yT y God, it's fast," Johnston "The fastest thing on this planet." Garfield signed to the zoomer to stow the body of the slaughtered herbivore, and then kicked it into the homeward route. "Faster than all the herbivores?" Johnston asked as they materialized on the compound. "Yes. And it kills them wholesale.' From most of them it doesn't eat a mouthful, even. It seems to be activated by a lust for massacre. That's how we get our meat," Garfield said apologetically, and Johnston looked back to see that the zoomer had left the carcass in the cookhouse yard. "It's perfectly healthy, really -- and we wouldn't have a hope of catching any of those herbivores." "Quite so, quite so," said Johnston thoughtfully. "The Bigheads kill a lot of animals?" "Yes. Hundreds. The only reason the herbivores aren't wiped out is and very few Bigheads." "Then what happens to the carcasses?" Garfield stared at him. "There aren't any birds," Johnston pointed out. "And no other carnivores." "Well," said Garfield slowly, "I suppose the Amoebans get rid of them." "What?" Garfield grinned. "Come and see." They climbed down from the zoomer and walked over to the cookhouse yard, pausing at the fence. The cook was standing on the step, berating a large jelly that was extending a sly pseudopod toward the carcass of the herbivore. The pseudopod guiltily retreated. "Hi," said the cook when he saw them. "Titus is getting greedy," he said, in excuse for the jelly. He called to someone inside, and another man came out with a bucket of offal and bones, which he emptied onto the ground beside the Amoeban, talking to it as he did so. Titus slid rapidly on top of the pile, and IF settled down with a contented squish. # And keep off our good meat," said the cook, shaking an admonitory fist. With frequent and paternal backward looks the two men disappeared inside. "See?" said Garfield. "I thought you told me that there was only one carnivore," Johnston said severely. "Oh, come now," Garfield objected. # You can't call an Amoeban a nasty word like that -- can we, Titus?" He walked over to the creature and poked a doting finger into its protoplasm. It squiggled. # 'Amoeban is not a bad title," Johnston observed. "It's very amoeboid." "A much higher level of intelligence, of course," Garfield said. The Senior Biologist grinned. "Enough to inspire extreme and unwarranted affection from otherwise rational men." H e bent over the creature, studying it. It appeared to be typically amoeboid, if gigantic, distinguished only by its peculiar diet. The bones and offal were being rapidly absorbed. As Johnston watched they were completely surrounded by the jelly of the creature's body. Then he began to stroke his beard with a puzzled gesture. Vacuoles were forming round the food, widening and expanding as digestive juices were secreted, becoming large bubbles of fluid -- and the food, even the bone-matter, was dissolving. In five minutes all trace of the food was gone, and all that was left were the bubbles of yellowish fluid. "Fast," said Johnston thoughtfully"Titus? Why, he's as slow as a Service man after a night on Mars. Oh," said Garfield, "the digestion. I see what you mean. He'll eat as much as you'll give him, too -- and he gets plenty. I've, seen him at night twice his usual size with the big vacuole full of digested food inside him, but by morning it's all gone." "All?" said Johnston thoughtfully. "All." From then on Johnston showed an unnatural interest in Titus, being found most times sitting on the ground beside the creature, even in the dark of the evening -- an unnatural interest, because there was so much else to occupy him. Why, he didn't even bother to study the women, although they were the cause of his second argument with Garfield. "Garfield!" he shouted one day, bursting into the laboratory. "Garfield!" "Yes?" Garfield inquired mildly, looking up from a microscope. "Has Titus run amuck?" "Garfield! Did you know your men are -- are cohabiting with those women?" Garfield flushed. "Yes," he said quietly. "And what is the meaning of allowing them to do such a thing?" "It seemed harmless," Garfield murmured. Johnston's shout set the microscope swinging on its mounting. "Harmless! And intermarriage of humans and Venusians has only been allowed fifty years!" Garfield's eyes were steady. "Try and understand," he said. "My men are not angels -- very far from it. The last planet we explored was like most of them -- a livid hell. So when they get an A grade planet I allow them to take full advantage of it. Full advantage," he repeated for emphasis. "Oh, my God," said Johnston, and sank limply onto a stool. "Do you realize that three of those women are pregnant?" he demanded. "Yes." Garfield's eyes flickered a moment. "I must admit it was a shock," he said. "I hadn't expected that conception could take place -- they're so obviously a different species." He was silent a moment, and then his next words were very quiet. "Tania is pregnant too." I t took a moment for the significance of this to occur to Johnston, but when it did he groaned. "Oh, my boy, not you too? Didn't you know that relations with a humanoid species is forbidden until a full series of tests is carried out?" "I realize that," Garfield said calmly. "But as I see it the worst risk is that the -- offspring -- will be as imbecile as the mothers. There is also the possibility that our intelligence will be combined with their peculiar attractiveness. In any case, I take full responsibility for the whole business." He turned back to the microscope in dismissal, but the S-n ; or Biologist remained on his stool. "I shall notify Central," he said heavily. There was a long silence, and then Garfield turned back to the Senior Biologist -- not to continje the argument, but to discuss his latest finding. "Very interesting," he said, waving a hand at the microscope. "Parr has been poking round the hills after fossils, and he found a series of caves, all with a peculiar brown vegetation growing on the floor. Look." He snapped a switch on the side of the microscope, and an image flicked onto the screen. It was a foliose organism, a dark reddish brown -- about the color of liver -- and, judging by the scale at the side of the image, about three feet high. It was lichen-like, crisp and shiny, and abundantly and dichotomously branched. Garfield adjusted the coarse focus, and the image distended rapidly until individual cells could be seen. It was definitely animal. The cells were round, blurred and without cel! walls. "Interesting," said Johnston, staring and stroking his beard. "I've never come across anything like that before." "I've been analyzing it," Garfield said, his eyes alight with discovery. "Very strange. The outer boundary of each cell is protoplasm, all right, but the interior is either glycogen or a peculiar jellified amino acid." Johnston's frown was tremendous. "Stored protein?" he muttered. "In a digested form?" The idea was so puzzling that his eyebrows climbed up and down rapidly, like fluffy white caterpillars unsure IP whether to be star I #d or tremendously thoughtful. Garfield and Johnston discussed this engrossing subject for a while, wondering about the mode of life of such an animal, but were able to make nothing more of it. And one night a week later something happened that put the problem right out of their minds. Johnston caught a Bighead. H e was crouched by Titus, studying him with the aid of a light, as it was much later than usual, and quite dark. Behind him was the reticulated wire fence, and suddenly, shockingly, this crashed and collapsed under a tremendous onslaught. The Senior Biologist had had no warning at all. Not a single sound had reached his ears. One moment he was peacefully communing with Titus -- and the next, out of a clear black sky, he was presented with a Bighead, howling slathering into his face, with two of its great fangs entangled in the wire. The Senior Biologist could have forgiven his old heart if it had quietly given up the job then and there, but instead it thumped erratically on; and he ran into the kitchen and fetched a longhandled knife and killed the Bighead. It was a tremendous event. Within minutes the whole Group was crowded around him, creating bedlam and staring at this legendary animal. The head was huge, fully a third the size of the body. The eyes were frontal, like a man's, so that vision was telescopic and three-dimensional, and the slit-shaped pupils were distended within a red rim of iris. The body was lean and very muscular, with great driving pistons of middle and hind legs. The front legs were evidently manipulatory, for they were held up on either side of the head like the palps of a spider, and they were curved, and armed with huge tearing claws. Johnston noted this much in a single glance, and then, tearing at his beard with a wildly excited, blood-spattered hand, he ordered that the body be carried into the laboratory. This was done, and he locked himself inside. He remained there three days, admitting no one, not even Garfield, and opening the door only for trays at mealtimes. On the morning of the fourth day he called for Garfield. The Group leader hurried inside, expecting to be told of great discoveries, but Johnston merely waved him over to the dissection bench, where the fully opened animal lay under the preservative lights -- and then left the laboratory and went to bed. When the Senior Biologist returned in the late evening, with a refreshed look in his eye, and his beard washed, dried, brushed and dandy again, it was a thoroughly puzzled Group leader who met him. "Is it all there?" Garfield asked. Johnston nodded. "So you found the discrepancies?" he said, pedantic with an inner excitement. "Yes. But I don't understand -- don't understand!" Johnston twinkled. "Get the zoomer and come over to the cookhouse yard," he said. "Quickly. I'll answer questions later." When Garfield arrived with the zoomer Johnston was in his habitual position, crouched comfortably on the ground beside Titus. He looked up and waved, and then climbed up beside Garfield. "Don't laugh," he said. "But Titus is going to move soon -- and fast. Set the controls to follow him." Garfield did so, and then both men sat back in silence, staring down at the slight gleam of the amoeban, each occupied with his thoughts: Garfield gropingly, trying to understand, and Johnston concentratedly, going over each facet of his theory again and again. They waited an hour, and in all that time Garfield spoke once, helplessly. "But how could it live? How can an animal live without a digestive system?" Finally the zoomer gave a queer little shudder, disorientated, and Garfield looked down to see Titus extending tentative pseudopodia in all directions. Finally the right one was found, and the amoeban slithered into one long groping trickle. It seemed to gather itself, faintly gleaming -- and then, shockingly, the zoomer screamed into overdrive, and the Amoeban was a silvery flash streaking across the plain. T he zoomer growled, flickering after Titus into the hills, but was hopelessly outpaced. When it materialized the Amoeban had been at its destination many microseconds, and now it was in its usual sluggish form, lying jelly-limp outside a cave. Garfield neutralized the zoomer, and it hovered motionless above the Amoeban. He then looked inquiringly at Johnston, but the Senior Biologist gestured to him to remain still and silent. For a long series of minutes it seemed as if nothing was happening, but then a faint flick of movement caught Garfield's eye. And into the phosphorescent glow cast by the zoomer jerked one of Parr's "plants" -- the liver-brown foliose animal. With painful slowness it moved, jerking in little hops and leaps towards the Amoeban. Then, several laborious moments later, it was leaning against a pseudopod, and with a final little hop it flicked onto the taut membrane. "A parasite?" Garfield whispered. "Hush." The protoplasm of the amoeban was beginning to slither wetly, so that the foliose animal on its back was carried further into the center. Then abruptly, the shimmering flowing stopped. The foliose animal was directly above the huge vacuole of yellowish digested food. Again the scene was suspended, and it looked as if nothing was happening -- but the foliose animal was slowly, imperceptibly swelling, and the vacuole was equally slowly contracting. Barely had Garfield registered this than the protoplasm of the Amoeban began to flow again. A long pseudopod formed, and Titus slithered sluggishly into the cave, still bearing the foliose animal on his back. IF "Now," said Johnston, "I shall tell you my theory." "Shouldn't we go in there?" Garfield suggested. The Senior Biologist regarded him with a sharp eye. "It's unnecessary," he said. "I've seen it before." Garfield relaxed, frowning into the green glow of the controls. "You have told me," Johnston began, "that originally there were many carnivore species, but they all failed to adapt to the tremendous speed which the herbivores could attain. All except one -- the Bighead. "In that cave, young man, the foliose animal is finishing its meal, extracting all the digested food from the Amoeban. Then, as you noticed, it will store this food, producing branches in which to keep all the glycogens and jellified amino acids. Then along will come -- yes, look -- " There was a brown flash across the glow of the zoomer, zipping into the cave. " -- a Bighead. This Bighead will eat the branches of the foliose animal. For this is how the Bighead adapted. "One day," said the Senior Biologist lazily, long fingers gentle and reflective on his beard, "I shall make a study of how much the possession of a digestive system slows the organism down. At the moment all we know is that in times of emergency, when the body must reach its highest peak, the digestive system is shut down. In order for the body to reach top speed all digestion must stop. And to that common piece of knowledge I can add another -- that in order to become faster than the herbivores, the Bighead had to discard its digestive system. And how did it do that?" "How?" Garfield's voice was a whisper. "By some means -- I suspect a mutation -- it split into a number of animals." w hat! "   "Yes, yes," said Johnston indulgently. "I know: it doesn't make sense. At first I refused that theory, too, and considered that this was a complex example of symbiotic relationship. But now I know that the Bighead, the Amoeban and the foliose animal are all one creature. It's just division of labor carried to an extreme. The Bighead is the obtainer of food, the jaws and muscles of the creature. It has the speed, given, as you saw, by tremendous muscles and bone structure, and huge lungs and heart. And its function is to catch and kill the prey, leaving the carcass for the next part of the creature to deal with. "The Amoeban is the stomach -- the digestive system. Its job is to absorb and digest the carcass, collecting the digested food in a vacuole for the next part of the creature. "And, of course, the foliose animal has the function of storing the food. So that when the Bighead eats its branches, it gets predigested food in an assimilable form." Johnston finished abruptly, turnirg a smug gaze on Garfield for admiration. "Amazing!" "Yes," Johnston allowed. There was a long silence. "But how are you going to prove it?" "Prove it!" The Senior Biologist was flabbergasted. ("Yes. Prove that it is all one animal, and not a symbiotic relationship." T he Senior Biologist laid careful fingers across his beard. "That will be difficult... It depends on what stage the animal splits -- if I could see a foetus..." Johnston sat bolt upright. "A foetus!" Garfield stared at him, with the same stunning thought. "The reproductive system," he stuttered. "The Bighead didn't have a reproductive system." The fingers in Johnston's beard were agitated now. "The reproductive system Maybe the hormones slow the system down... but which part of the animal has the reproductive function?" Garfield's voice was hushed. "Maybe none of them have. Maybe there's another animal -- one we haven't seen yet -- the one that has the reproductive function -- " The men stared at each other, and then down at the cave, wildly trying to imagine what weird, budding, fissioning creature could be the reproductive phase of the creature. And as they watched, there was movement in the mouth of the cave, and a smooth form appeared, richly pregnant with new life. Tania came out of the cave. by Murray Leinster Complete novel of comedy and adventure t on a far-off world by Robert F. Young -- and many additional stories and features by your favorite science-fiction writers -- all in the February Worlds of Tomorrow, on sale now! IF IF  Novelette ( A Relief Story  .  I ,  . t t . '   . I Retief feared neither man nor alien .  . though sometimes he couldn't tell which was which! I C onsul-General Magnan clutched his baggy chartreuse velvet beret against the blast of air from the rotor of the waiting heli and beckoned Retief closer. "I'll be candid with you, Retief," he said from the side of his mouth. "I'm not at all happy about leaving you here as deputy chief under a Groaci superior. The combination of unpredictable elements is an open invitation to disaster." "I've never known disaster to wait for an invitation, where our Groaci colleagues were concerned," Retief commented. "Naturalizing a Groaci was irregular enough in itself," Magnan went on. "Tendering him an appointment in the Corps smacks of folly." "Don't underestimate the boys at headquarters," Retief said cheerfully. "Maybe this is just the first step in a shrewd scheme to take over Groac." "Nonsense! No one at HQ would want to go on record as favoring such a policy..." Magnan looked thoughtful. "Besides, what does Groac have that we need?" "Their cast-iron gall would be a valuable acquisition -- but I'm afraid that's the sort of intangible that will elude the wiliest diplomacy." Magnan pursed his lips. "Take care, Retief. If anything goes awry, I'll hold you fully responsible." The senior diplomat turned to the other staff members waiting nearby on the tower-top helipad, moved among them shaking hands, then scrambled into the heli. It lifted and beat its way eastward against a backdrop of luminous violet. Behind Retief, the voice of Vice-Consul Wimperton rose to a shrill bark. "No want um basket! No need um beads! Want um heavy metal, you blooming idiot!" Retief turned. A short-legged, long-torsoed local draped in a stiff lime-green garment stood roundshouldered before the Commercial Attache, dwarfed under a load of fancifully beaded baskets. "No want um?" the Poon enquired in a voice that seemed to thrum in his chest. "Plenty too cheap -- " "Nobody want um! How many times do I have to tell you, you bug-eyed -- " A curtain twitched aside from a narrow doorway; a spindle-legged Groaci in Bermuda shorts, argyle socks and a puce and magenta aloha shirt peered out. "Mr. Wimperton," he said faintly, "I must request that you refrain from abusing the locals so loudly. I have a splitting headache." T he deck lifted, creaking, and sank gently back. The Groaci put a hand against his midriff and clutched the doorframe. His name was Dools. He was new in his post -- as well as in his citizenship. "My, that was a dandy," Wimperton said. "Felt like my stomach came right up and bumped my chin!" "I'm sure we're all aware of the motion, Mr. Wimperton. All too aware," Dools whispered. "Say, you don't look at all well, Mr. Consul-General," Wimperton said solicitously. "It's this constant rocking, up and down, to and fro. You can never tell which way the tower will lean next." "Yes, yes, a penetrating observation, Mr. Wimperton." The ConsulGeneral tilted two eye-stalks toward Retief. "If you'd step inside a moment, Mr. Retief?" He held the curtain aside, let it drop behind Retief. Late sunlight filtering through the open-work walls of the Consulate IF i splashed a checkered pattern across colorful rugs of kelp fiber, low couches, desks and chairs of woven wicker work. Consul-General Dools looked at Retief nervously. "Mr. Retief," he said in his faint voice. "Now that our previous chief, Mr. Magnan, has departed, I, of course, find myself in charge." He paused while the floor lifted and sank; his eye-stalks waved sickeningly. "As a newcomer, perhaps you've noticed certain... oh... irregularities in our little organization here." Four of his eyes studied different corners of the room. Retief said nothing. "I wished merely to caution you: It would be unwise to evince excessive curiosity..." Retief waited. The tower leaned to the steady pressure of the rising gale. The floor slanted. ConsulGeneral Dool clung to a desk, his throat-sacs vibrating. "There are many ways," he started, "in which accidents could befall one here." The floor sagged, rose abruptly. Dools eulped, threw Retief a last despairing glance and fled as Wimperton came in, still muttering. He looked after the departing Groaci. "Consul-General Dools isn't a very good sailor," he commented. "Of course, in the week you've been here, you haven't seen a real blow The native peddler poked his round head through the door hanging, padded across the room on large, bare webbed feet and paused before Retief. "You want um basket?" The round, amber-and-olive patterned face gazed hopefully at him. "I'll take that one," Retief said in the native language, pointing. The wide lipless mouth stretched wide in the local equivalent of a delighted grin. "A sale! I was beginning to think you High-Pockets -- excuse me, sir -- you Terries were tighter than weed-ticks in a belly-button." He lowered his wares, . extracted the basket. "You shouldn't encourage him," Wimperton said snappishly. "For months I've been indoctrinating him to bring in some gold nuggets. The land-masses are practically solid with them -- but no, they build their town on a raft of seaweed in mid-ocean and weave baskets!" "They evolved in the weed," Retief said mildly. "And if they lifted the embargo on gold, in six months the planet would be swarming with prospectors, dumping their tailings into the ocean. They like it the way it is. The Poon caught Retiefs eyes, jerked his head toward the doorway, then ducked out through the door hanging. R etief waited half a minute, then rose lazily and stepped out on the wide observation deck. All around, lesser towers, intricately patterned, rose from the miles-long mat of yellow-green seaweed far below, moving restlessly with the long ocean swells. Sea fowl with weed-colored backs and skyblue undersides wheeled and IF screamed. Between the raying pinnacles, a spiderweb complex of catwalks swung in hundred-yard festoons. A continuous creaking of rattan filled the air. Far away, the white-flecked surface of the open sea was visible. Retief crossed to where the Poon waited by the stairwell entry. "You seem like a good fellow," the peddler said as Retief came up. "So I'll give you some free advice." He glanced around at the colordrenched sky. "There'll be a Big Blow tonight. Get down below -- don't waste any time." He hitched at his load of baskets and turned to the stairs. "And don't bother to tell those clowns." He jerked his head toward the Consular offices. "They're bad medicine." He bobbed his head and was gone. Retief threw a sharp glance at the clouds, got out a cigar and lit up, turned from the rail. A tall, broad-shouldered man in a somber uniform stood by the catwalk mouth, looking Retief over. He came across the close-woven deck and thrust out a large, welltanned hand. "My name's Klamper, Planetary Monitor Service. I guess you're the new man." Retief nodded. "Let me give you some advice. Watch out for the natives. They're sly, tricky devils." He paused. "You were talking to one just now. Don't let him lure you into going down into the native quarter. Nothing down there but natives and dark holes to fall into A helluva place for a Terry. Knifings, poisonings -- nothing there worth climbing down thirty flights of wicker steps to look at." Retief puffed at his dope stick. The wind swirled the smoke away. "Sounds interesting," he said. "I'll think it over." "Plenty to do right up here in the Consulate tower," Klamper said. "I guess you've seen the Tri-D tank -- a twenty-footer -- and the sublimation chamber. And there's a pretty good auto-banquet. And don't over look the library. They've got a few dandy sense-tapes there; I confiscated them from a Joy-boat in a twelve mile orbit off Callisto last year." The constable got out a dopestick and cocked an eye at Retief. "What do you think of your Groaci boss, Consul-General Jack Dools?" "I haven't seen much of him. He's been seasick ever since I got here."  "First time I ever ran into a "A naturalized Terry, I hear. Well, maybe he hasn't got all five eyes on an angle -- but I'd say watch him." Klamper hitched up his gun belt. "Well, I'll be shoving off." He glanced at the stormy sky. "Looks like I've got a busy night ahead." Retief stepped back into the office. A small, round man with pale hair and eyebrows looked up from the chair by Wimperton's desk. "Oh." Wimperton blinked at Retief. "I thought you'd gone for the day." He folded a sheaf of papers hurriedly, snapped a rubber band around them, turned and dropped them in the drawer of the filing cabinet.   nipping along to Dorm Tower, I believe, before the wind gets any worse. This breeze is nothing to what we get sometimes. I'd suggest you take care crossing the catwalk, Retief. It can be dangerous. In a cross-wind, it sets up a steady ripple." His limber hands demonstrated a steady ripple. "Other times it seems to float up and down." He eyed Retief. "I hope the motion isn't bothering you?" "I like it," Retief said. "As a boy, I had ? habit of eating candy bars -- you know, the sticky kind -- while standing on my head on a merry-go-round." Wimperton's eyes stared fixedly at Retief. A fine sweat popped out on his forehead. "Feels like it's building up, all right," Retief said genially. "Feel that one?" A distant, thoughtful look crept over Wimperton's face. "It's good and hot in here, too," Retief went on. "And there's that slight odor of fish, or octopus, or whatever it is... "Uh... I'd better see to the goldfish," Wimperton gasped. He rushed away. Retief turned to the round-faced man. "How was your trip, Mr. Pird?" "Ghastly," Pird piped. His voice sounded like a rubber doll. "I visited continents One and Two. Bare rock. No life higher than insects, but plenty of those. You know, it never rains on Poon. All five continents are deserts, and the heat -- " "I understood the Zoological Investigation and Liaison Council Headquarters had financed a couple of wild-life census stations over there, Retief said. "To be sure, facilities were prono volunteers have come forward to man them." Pird smiled sourly. "A pity. Consul-General Dools has expressed a passionate interest in wildlife." Pird grabbed at a paperweight as it slid across the desk-top. The walls creaked; wind shrilled, flapping the door hanging. The floor heaved and settled back. Pird swallowed, looking pale. "I believe I'd best be going," he said, starting toward the door. "Hold it," Retief called. Pird jerked. His eyes blinked. "Aren't you going to warn me about anything?" Pird stared for a moment, then scurried off. A lone, Retief stood with braced feet in the Consular office, gloomy now in the eerie light of the stormy sunset. He crossed to the filing cabinet, took a small instrument from a leather case and went to work on the lock. After five minutes' work, the top drawer popped out half an inch. Retief pulled it open; it was empty. The second contained a dry sandwich and a small green flask of blended whiskey. In the bottom drawer were four dog-eared copies of Saucy Stories, a prospectus in full-dimensional color illustrating Playtime on Paradise, the Planet with a Past, glossy catalogs describing the latest in two-seater sport IF helis and a fat document secured by a wide rubber band. Retief extracted the latter and opened the stiff paper. It was an elaborately worded legal instrument. In the fifth paragraph he read: "... whereas such body is otherwise uninhabited , unimproved, and subject to no prior claim filed with the proper authorities as specified in paragraph # A (#) above, and; Whereas claimant has duly established, by personal occupancy for a period of not less than six Standard Months, or by improvement to a value of... Retief read on, then removed the elaborately engraved cover sheet of the document, folded the rest and fitted it into an inside pocket. Outside, the wind rose to a howling crescendo; the floor shuddered; the walls tilted precariously. Retief took a magazine from the drawer, fitted the document cover over it, folded it and snapped the red rubber band in place, then replaced it in the drawer and closed it. The lock seated with a snick. He left the consulate and crossed the swaying catwalk to the next tower. II R etief stood in the doorway of his room, smoking a cigar. Pird, just starting down the stairway, clucked. "Better hurry, sir. Everyone else has gone down. The wind is rising very rapidly." 'Til be along." Retief looked down the empty corridor, undulating in the dim late-evening light, then went along to a curtain-hung doorway and stepped out onto a windswept balcony. From it a swaying wicker catwalk launched itself in a dizzy span to the Consulate Tower, a hundred yards distant. A dim light winked on in the consular offices, moving about slowly. Retief watched for a moment, then turned up the collar of his windbreaker and stepped off into the dark tunnel of the wildly swinging passage. The gale buffeted at it with a ferocity that had increased even in the quarter-hour he had spent in the Dorm Tower. The sky had darkened to an ominous mauve, streaked with fiery crimson. Below, lights sparkled all across the lower levels. The last fifty feet of the crossing was a steep climb up the sagging catwalk. Abruptly the catwalk dropped three feet and came to a stop with its floor canted at a sharp angle. Retief steadied himself, then went on, climbing now. Ten feet ahead, the yellow and blue hanging at the end of the passage was visible. It moved. The slight figure of Consul Dools appeared for a moment, wrapped in a dark poncho, then whisked back out of view. Retief made another two yards against the bucking of the sloping passage. He could hear a rasping now, a harsh sawing sound. A wedge of electric-purple sky appeared through the wicker roof ahead. It widened... With an abrupt crackling of breaking fibers, the end of the catwalk broke free and dropped like an express elevator. Retief locked his fingers in the twisted rattan and held on. The face of the tower flashed past. Retief slid two feet and caught himself with his torso half out the open end. Air shrieked past his face. A foot from his eyes, the severed end of the supporting cable whipped in the screaming wind -- cut clean. Retief looked down and saw the massed lights of the native section swooping up to meet him. A wall rushed close; Retief felt the whistle of air as he brushed it; then he was hurtling past low towers with lighted windows behind which alien faces gaped briefly. He swept low over a narrow street ablaze with colored lights, felt a shock as the catwalk brushed a building somewhere above; then the street was falling away below as the freeswinging catwalk cracked-the-whip, soaring upward in a wild zoom, slowing now... A wall loomed before him with a narrow balcony before lighted windows. For an instant, it seemed to hang before his face -- and Retief lunged, kicked his legs free of the twisted wicker. He caught the heavy rattan guard rail. He hung on,' groping with his feet, with the gale tearing at him, shrieking in his ears... Hands gripped him, hauline him up. He shook his head to clear it, felt a heavy hanging brush his face. Then he was standing on a yielding floor, blinking in the soft light of a primitive incandescent lamp, feeling the warmth and strange, spicy odor of an alien room. A five-foot native stood before him, staring up anxiously with large protruding green eyes in a smooth, olive-colored face. The wide, almost human mouth opened showing a flash of pink interior. "Are you all right, buddy?" a strangely resonant voice inquired in the bubbly local tongue. Retief felt of his jaw, moved his shoulders gingerly. "A little dazed by the speed with which the boys work, but otherwise fine he replied. "You speak Poon like a native, by Hoop!" the alien said. "Here sit down. How about a drink of Yiquil?" He indicated a low couch heaped with varicolored cushions and turned to a cupboard, wide webbed feet in bright yellow sandals gripping the swaying floor. "You fell off a catwalk, eh?" "Something like that," Retief accepted a deep two-handled porcelain jug, delicately shaped. He sniffed the drink, then sipped. "My name's Url Yum. I'm a netter for Matwide Fooderies." "Pm Retief. I'm with the Terran Consulate." He glanced around the room. "Handsome apartment you have here." "Oh, it's all right." There was a sharp whistle at the door. "You feel like meeting a bunch of people? I guess they saw you fall, and they'll be crowding in now to take a look at you. We don't often see Terries here in town, you know." "I'd rather not go on exhibit right now. Yum." "Sure, I know how you feel. I had IF to go over to Dryport on business a few months back, and every damn do-gooder wanted to have me in for tea and look me over." The whistle sounded again at the door. Url Yum padded across to the closet, brought out a large satchel and pulled out brightcolored gear of plastic and metal. "I was just about to go for a swim. Why don't you join me? You don't want to go back up tonight in this wind. We can go down the back way. How about it?" "A swim? In this weather?" "The best time. Hunting's good. The small stuff shelters under the Mat, and the big stuff is in there hunting them -- and we hunt the big stuff." He held up a polished spearhead. "Look, Yum, I'm just a Terry. I can't hold my breath more than a minute or two." "Neither can I. That's what the gear's for. You burn oxygen, same as we do, don't you?" The whistle came again, more peremptory now. "Hey, Yum!" a voice called. Retief finished his drink. "That yiquil's great stuff, Yum; it's already affecting my judgment. Let's go!" T hey stood in a narrow way that wound between high walls hung with dights and signboards, studded with balconies from which pennants fluttered, crowded with poony, filled with the shriek of wind, the chatter of whistled conversation, and over all the polyphonic creaking of the city. "Fve heard of twisting roads," Retief called. "This is the first time I ever saw one that really twisted." Yum put his mouth close to Reliefs ear. "You know the whistle dialect?" "I can understand it," Retief shouted back. "But I can't whistle it." Yum motioned, led the way down a side alley to a sea-shell ornamented hanging and pushed into a low room with couches along one wall, open shelves on another. A portjy Poon waddled forward. "Oi, Yum! Oi, stranger." "Oi," Yum said. "Gipp, this is Retief. We're going down. Can you fix him up with a spray job?" "Lucky you came to my place, Yum. I happen to have a compound specially prepared for Terry requirements, a fresh batch, just concocted yesterday." "Good. Retief, put your stuff over there." Yum opened his satchel, took out equipment and laid it out on a low table. He selected a pair of goggles, handed them to Retief. "These are a little big, but I think they'll seat all right." He handed over a heavy cylinder the size and shape of a beer bottle, added other items. "Okay: propulsion, communication lights, breathing apparatus, emergency gear. Now, after you strip and get your equipment buckled on, Gipp will fit you with water-foils and spray you in." Retief donned the gear and watched with interest while the portly proprietor shaped a putty-like material to his feet, forming large fins which stiffened to a rubbery consistency, then brought out a portable apparatus with a tank, compressor and hose with a wide nozzle. "Give him a Striding Devil job, Gipp," Yum ordered. Gipp hesitated, looking at Retief. "I suppose you've had a lot of experience -- ?" "He'll be all right," Yum put in. "He catches on fast, and he's got a good arm." "Whatever you say, Yum -- but you ought to warn him that a Death Angel will jump a Strider on sight." "Sure. That way we don't have to go looking for 'em." "Well, if you get one remember I'm paying top sprud for stones." "You'll get first crack." Gipp started up the compressor, twiddled knobs, then directed a heavy spray of viscous, greenish fluid on Retief's chest, working it in a pattern that covered him to the knees. Then the Poon shut down and set about changing hoses. "What's this stuff for?" Retief inquired, studying the thick, soft layer hardening on his skin. "Protective covering. It's tough as yuk skin. And it has an osmotic action; passes oxygen in, and CO # out. The color disguises you so you don't scare off the game -- and the finished job holds all your gear in place. It's a good insulation, too. That water's cold. It strips off easily when you come back in." Gipp worked for another five minutes. Retief craned his neck to look at himself. His back, he saw, was a dull black, with red and white flecks, separated from the glossy green front by pale gray sides. Broad pink gill-flaps flared from throat to shoulders. The ankles and fin-covered feet were a vivid red. "He's got the build for it," Gipp said, looking him over. "If I hadn't done the job myself, I'd swear he was a Strider, by Hoop?" "That's the idea, Gipp. Now jus give me a straight Big Mouth outfit." Yum took a flask from a side pocket and offered it to Retief, who took a generous pull, then passed it to Gipp, busy with his apparatus. "No, thanks. I don't need any delusions of grandeur tonight. I hope to do a good volume of business before the storm hits its peak." He worked carefully, covered Yum with a uniform dull gray, added a peaked crest of garish yellow. "All right, Retief." Yum handed him a light, short-barreled rifle from the muzzle of which a razoredgjed spearhead protruded. "Let's go down." Gipp led the way to a back room and opened a wide wicker cover set in the floor. Retief looked down to the sloping surface of a three-foot tube of close-woven strips. "Follow me," Yum said, and dived, head first, out of sight. Retief gripped his spear-gun, waved Gipp a cheery farewell and dived after him. Ill T he water was ink-black, alive with darting lights in red and yellow, ponderous-moving patterns IF of green and blue and, far below, dull gleams of violet. Retief kicked his feet, watched lights scatter before him in a boil of phosphorescence. A dark shape darted from the gloom and hovered before him. He recognized Yum's yellow crest, waving gently in the moving water. "Only peaceful place in town, when the wind's working," Yum's voice crackled in Retiefs ears. "Let's work our way east to get clear of the activity around here; then we'll see if we can't bait an Angel up." "How deep are we?" "The Mat's twenty meters thick here. We're going to work Underside first; if that's no go, we'll move down." Yum darted off with a flick of webbed feet. Retief followed. Above, the mass of the floating continent of weed was a fairyland tangle of waving fronds, fantastically shaped corals, coiling weed, and moving lights. "Use the knob on your left hip as a jet control," Yum said. "Steer with your feet -- and keep your rifle ready. If you see anything that looks like you, let him have it." Retief tried the knob, felt water chum past his knees; he leaped ahead, driving through the water with a speed that blurred the weedscape above. A slight twist of the ankles sent him angling sharply toward the depths; a minute adjustment brought him back to Yum's side. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, picked out the shapes behind the lights now. Massive, sluggish swimmers cruised, wide jaws open. Slim torpedo shapes darted and wheeled. A nebulous form, glowing with a nacreous pink, rose up and reached out with feathery arms; Yum swerved away, Retief following fifteen feet to one side of his bubble-trail. After a ten-minute . run, Yum slowed, rose until he brushed the tops of the coral trees, then reached up with his feet, planted them in a swirl of smoky mud and stood, inverted. Retief came alongside, twisted, felt the soft ooze under his feet. "It's a little confusing at first," Yum's voice came clear in Retiefs ears. "But you'll get used to it." Retief looked around. The undulating surface of the weed mass stretched away into deep gloom, studded with waving fronds, stiffbranched trees of red-violet, orange and chartreuse coral, feathery banks of leafy undergrowth set with multi-colored flowers as big as dinner plates, among which moving lights sparkled and played. "I'll pace you, off to the left," Yum said. "Move along with big, leaping strides. Anything your size except another Strider will give you a wide berth. If you see one, hit him fast. Aim for the mid-section. Now, if we pick up an Angel, you'll notice the shadow first. Just keep moving; I'll get under him and hit him where it hurts. When he turns, give it to him near the big red spot on his back. Got it?" "How many rounds in this rifle?" "Five in the magazine, and a spare on your left shoulder." "How do we know there aren't other hunters around? I'd hate to spear a friend of yours by mistake." "You'll get a recognition tone in your phones if anybody gets within fifteen yards -- maybe. That's part of the game. I got a nice barb cut out of my left leg last year. Some' joker wanted a Big Mouth for cut bait." Yum waved and flicked away. Retief picked an open avenue between towering corals and started off. Walking was not too difficult after the first few steps; rather like tramping the dusty surface of an asteroid, he reflected -- except that the diving gear was considerably less bulky than a spacesuit. T here was a movement to Retiefs right. A tall biped stalker into view ten yards distant, barely visible in the glow of phosphorescence. Retief halted and brought the gun around. The newcomer moved on in great floating leaps. Retief turned to follow. "Never mind the Strider," Yum said. "He didn't see you; he must have just fed. We'll work off to the right here and let him have this territory." Retief watched as the biped bounded off into the gloom, then moved on. Ahead, the darkness seemed deeper. A cow-sized creature with warts and glowing rings around wide eyes blundered past, rocking him with a surge of water. Tiny fish flashed by. The gloom deepened. "Action!" Yum's voice came, tense in the earphones. "Keep going; we've got a big one coming up to take a look!" Retief twisted to look toward the depths, like a black sky in which a dark cloud moved. He went on. "That's the stuff. Act like you don't notice him; otherwise he'll let fly with his musk, and we'll be working in the dark..." The shadow moved, spreading. All around, the scene darkened. At last a sluggish sea-creature humped past, raising a trail of mud-fog. "Hey," Yum's voice came. "He's by-passing us, moving on." "Maybe he's just not hungry tonight." "It's that Strider we saw; he's after him. Let's go!" Retief turned, saw a swirl of phosphorescence, jetted after it. The surface of the weed sloped, an inverted hill. Retief moved up beside Yum, following the immense shadow that fled across the rolling surface. The Strider came into view, leaning back toward the two hunters. "Take him!" Yum barked. "Ill get under the big boy!" He swirled away. Retief brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed -- Strider's chest. The creature reached, grabbing at its back... "Hold it!" Yum's voice snapped. "That's no Strider!" The long greenish beam of the searchlight swung, flashing from coral trees, glowing through drifting mud-clouds. "The damned fool! He'd better douse that light!" IF  ' ' ?. '.V v  'if llI li The Death Angel closed, like a hundred-foot blanket of black jelly settling in; the stranger backed, working frantically to fit a magazine to his rifle, bringing it up -- The Angel struck. For a moment it hugged the surface of the weed, rippling its edge -- then it heaved, recoiling violently -- "Good-oh!" Yum yelled. "I planted one fair and square! Move in and hit the hot-spot, Retief, and we'll be up half the night counting gold over a bottle of hundred-year yiqu.'l!" Retief hurled himself forward, kicked clear of the weed-bed, centered his sights on a foot-wide patch of luminous red at the center of the vast writhing shape, and fired, fired again, then went tumbling as the turbulence caught him and bowled him over. R etief and Yum crouched by the prone body of the Angel's victim. "He's a Terry, all right, Retief. I wonder what he was doing Underside -- alone?" "Probably a tourist, out to see the sights. Though I hadn't heard of any travellers registered with the Consulate." "You may be right. We're not far from the Tap Root; he was headed that way, and he seemed to know where he was going." Retief checked the man's equipment, noted his pulse and respiration. "He seems to be all right." "Sure. He just took a good jolt of current. We didn't give the Big Boy a chance to get his shredding hooks into him." "We'd better take him up." "Sure. Soon as we stone out our Angel, before the Big Mouths get him. There's a public entry-well not far away; probably the one he used. We'll just tow him along with us. He'll be okay." The vast bulk of the Angel drifted fifty yards from the crowns of the coral trees. They swam to it, shooed off an inquisitive scavenger, moved around to the red spot on the expanse of black hide. A short spear stood, half its length buried dead center in the target. A second spear protruded a foot away. Yum whistled. "You work close, Retief. Nice shooting." He undipped a slim-bladed knife, made an incision, plunged an arm into the rubbery body and brought out a lumpy organ the size of a grapefruit. He whistled again. "This must be the beachmaster of all Angels! Look at the size of that pouch!" He slit the leathery bag carefully, dipped in two fingers and extracted a black sphere as big as a large grape. "Retief, we make a great team. Look at those stones!" "What do you use them for?" "We grind them up and sprinkle them on our food. A great delicacy." "Yum, what's this Tap Root you mentioned?" "Eh? Why, it's -- well, it's the root that supplies the mat." "Just one for all this weed?" "Sure; it's all one plant -- the whole Mat." IF "I'd like to take a look at it. I can't picture a Terry swimming around down here at the height of a storm, just to rubberneck -- not unless it's a pretty spectacular sight." "It doesn't look like much. Just a big, tough cable, running down into the Big Deep." Yum tucked the pearls into a pouch clipped to his belt and led the way along the sloping weed .surface. He indicated a dark mass ahead. CCnphat's it -- back in that tanAgle of rootlets there. The Tap's a hundred feet in diameter and over a mile long. It anchors the Mat, and feeds it, too." "Let's take a closer look." Retief moved in among the waving rootlets. "Say -- what's that?" Yum's voice came over the earphones. Ahead, a large dark shape nestled among the entwining roots. Retief swam up alongside. "It's a scout boat -- Terry design." He swam to the entry port, found it locked. "Let's reconnoiter a little, Yum." The two moved over the waving mass of rootlets, cruising beside the moss-grown, barnacled wall of the immense root. Retief caught a glimpse of a white object, fluttering in the dark water. He headed for it. It was a plastic tag, wired to a spike driven into the husk of the root. Below it hung a small box, metal covered, with an insulated, cable projecting from one side. "What is it? Who'd come here and tamper with the Root?" Yum asked, puzzled. "It's a detonator," Retief said. "The cable is designed to plug into a packaged explosive charge." "Explosive! Here, by the Root?" "How long would the weed last with the root cut?" "Last? It wouldn't last a day! You cut a sprig of the weed, it crumbles in a matter of minutes. Oh, the fruit, leaves, husks, are tough enough -- but the main mass would disintegrate like a sugar lump in a mug of hot roca." "Somewhere there's a bomb to go with the detonator, Yum," Retief said. "Probably aboard the boat. Our swimmer was on the way to get it, I'd guess. Let's check him for keys. Yum fumbled over the limp body. "He's clean, Retief. He must have lost them in the fight." "All right; let's get him to the surface and see what he has to say." IV I n the damp-smelling cavern of the public entry hall, Retief stood over the unconscious man. Water dripped from him, puddled on the heavy-duty rattan ramp that sloped up from the water. The attendant on duty came forward, clucked at the sight of the inert body. "He left here, not fifteen minutes ago. Wouldn't accept my offer of a guide. I warned him..." "Where are his clothes?" Retief asked. "On the shelf -- there." The attendant pointed to a coat, trousers, boots, a tangle of heavy leather belts and an empty holster in a neat pile. "A cop?" Retief said. He examined the garments. "No identification," he said. "And no keys." "What happened?" the attendant asked. "An Angel hit him." "He'll be out for hours, then," the attendant said. "A big Angel gives a pretty good shock. Hahl These tourists are all alike." "Yum, you don't have a police force here -- or an army?" "No. What would we need with those?" "Can you get a few friends together -- volunteers, to watch the patrol boat?" "Sure, Retief. All you want." "Station about a dozen in the underbrush around the boat. Tell them to keep out of sight -- we don't want to scare anybody off. But be careful. A spear-gun is no match for a Mark IV blaster." "I'll call the boys." Yum went into the attendant's office, emerged five minutes later. "All set," he declared. "What about him?" He indicated the sleeping cop. "Have the fellow on duty watch him until your friends get here. Meanwhile, he'd better put him somewhere out of sight." "What about the bomb?" "We'll have to try to stampede somebody. Whoever sent our friend here doesn't know he didn't make it." Retief looked at Yum, frowning in thought. "Yum, peel out of that scare suit and put the uniform on." He began stripping off the Striding Devil disguise. "I'll borrow some local garb." "You've got an idea?" "Not much of one. Just a wild hunch." Yum kicked free of the last of the diving gear, pulled on the shapeless Patrol outfit. It hung ludicrously on his squat frame. "Retief, I wouldn't fool anybody in this." "That's just the point, Yum. Now let's move!" Y um stopped before a dark entry and pointed up at a lighted floor above. "This is it," he called over the howling wind. Retiefs long violet cloak whipped at his ankles; Yum held onto his patrolman's cap with one hand. "All right." Retief leaned close to Yum and shouted. "You wait five minutes, Yum; then just move off down the street. Move as though you were in a hurry. Then you'd better go back and help out the boys. If anybody comes close, let him get the port open; then hit him fast." "Well -- I guess you know what you're doing." Retief climbed the trembling wicker stairway, gripping the handrail as a violent gust bounced him against the swaying wall. Two flights up he pushed aside a hangIF Wimperton and Pird looked up from a table on which a meal of emergency rations was laid out in the bleak light of a feeble DC lamp. Wimperton's mouth opened wide. Pird scrambled up and stood wiping his fingers on his pink vest. "Hi, boys, ,, Retief said cheerfully. "Damnedest thing happened to me. You'll never guess." "Ah... you fell out a window?" Wimperton hazarded. "Close, but no dope-stick; the catwalk broke under me. Quite a ride." He strolled to the window. "Some wind out there. Say... "Yes, indeed, quite a wind, you're right," Pird piped. "Look here," Retief said. "Is that a Patrolman? Wonder what he's doing out in the storm!" Wimperton and Pird jumped to the window, craned. Below, Yum's ungainly figure waddled briskly along the pitching street, turned a corner. "Hey, that's -- " Wimperton started. "Yes, that's strange, all right," Pird cut in. "Poor weather for a stroll." "But that wasn't -- " "Wasn't anything for us to worry about, ha ha," Pird babbled. He pretended to yawn. "Well, about time to turn in, eh?" He patted his mouth, watching Retief. "Pm glad you suggested that," Retief said. "I was afraid you'd want to sit up and talk." "Just take that first room there," Pird said eagerly. "Lovely room. Just lie right down and drift right off. Wimperton, you show Mr. Retief the room and I'll just... ah . , . check a few things." Retief glanced back from tha door, caught a glimpse of Pird darting past the outer hanging. Ha stepped into the room. There was a tidy bunk, an easy chair, a rug, a tri-D set. "This is dandy." He patted the bed. "Well, Wimperton, have a pleasant night." "Yes, indeed. You too." Wimperton disappeared. Retief flipped the light off, lay back on the bed and waited. A minute passed. The door curtain twitched aside for a moment, dropped back. Lights winked off in the outer room. Retief rose, glanced out. The shelter was deserted. He crossed to the outer hanging, went down the swaying wicker stairs three at a time, stepped out into the stormwhipped street. Pird and Wimperton, each dragging a suitcase, staggered out of sight around the corner. Retief wrapped the cloak close aid followed. S tanding in the shadows by the straining, wicker-work wall of a Public Entry Well, Retief watched Wimperton and Pird as they paced the ramp. Pird glanced at a finger watch. "... any time now..." the words came faintly through the hammer of the wind and the groaning of wicker. Pird stopped before Wimperton, apparently asking a question. Wimperton reached inside his coat, brought out a thick packet of papers restrained by a red rubber band, waved them at Pird, put them back. Retief edged somewhat closer." "... don't like it either," Wimperton's nasal voice stated. "Either the locals are wise -- or they've got a deal with..." The wind whirled the words away. Retief stepped back into the street, saw the pink glow of a public phone fifty yards distant. He fought his way to it through the wind, dialed and asked to speak to Yum. "No action here yet," the native said. "How did the routine go over?" "Our pigeons flew the coop, all right. They know they've got troubles, but they're not sure just what kind. They're at a Public Entry near the Consulate, waiting for a pickup." "They'll have a long wait. Their driver's still asleep." "Yum, I have a feeling the bomb's timed to go off at the peak of the storm. How long will that be?" "Oh, about two hours, I'd say." "What will conditions be like at the top of the Consulate Tower now?" "Rough. The towers lean to the wind. The ceilings fold right down against the floors in a good blow -- and this pne's a dandy." "We're about out of time, Yum -- and there are two parties still unaccounted for. Pm afraid I have one more trip in this wind." "You're coming back here?" "I'm going up -- and I'd rather get moving while there's still crawl space in the Consulate." A howling gale struck Retief's head as he hauled himself up from a dark opening onto the thirtieth-floor balcony and looked up the long slant of the tower face. Forty feet above, the guard rail lining the terrace of the Consulate pent-house was dimly visible in the murk. Under Retief, the tower wall trembled and moved like a living thing. He reached for a handhold, started up the thirty-degree slope. Gusts tore at him. He rested, hugging the surface, then went on. Ten minutes later he pulled himself over and lay full length on the steep slope of the tower roof. The wind was less, here in the shelter of the canted floor. Retief slid down, then jumped, tumbled through the wind-tattered entry hanging, caught himself and blinked through the gloom of the deserted office. From the far wall, a grunt sounded. Retief made his way across the room and flicked a wall switch. Dim light glowed, showed him the trussed form of Consul-General Jack Dools huddled in the angle of wall and floor. Five blood-shot eyestalks quivered appealingly at Retief. He went to a tilted desk, extracted a letter knife from a clip, came back and sawed at the cords binding the Groaci, then pulled the gag free of the mandibles. "Ah, the shining of the sun on your ancestral egg-hill," Dools gasped in Groaci. "To express heartfelt gratitude; to vow eternal chumship... IF "Think nothing of it, Mr. Dools. You feel well enough to travel? We'll have to go down the outside. The stairs are collapsed." "How pleasant to see you alive, dear fellow," Dools went on in Terran. "I feared the miscreants had done their worst. I tried to interfere, but alas -- " "I saw you. At the time, I had the idea you were doing the sawing, but then I got to thinking about the booze and girly-book supply in the filing cabinet. Alcohol would poison you and as for unadorned mammals -- " "Mr. Retief, take care!" Dools hissed. "My hearing is keen; someone comes " Retief looked toward the doorway, then hastily tucked the cut ends of the rope out of sight under Dools' body. "Play 'em close to your thorax, Mr. Dools," he cautioned. A tall figure climbed through the flapping door hanging, crouched on the sloping floor, braced by one hand. The other held a power pistol, aimed at Retief. "Just stay where you are, bright boy," Klamper s called over the screech of the wind. "Don't bother untying him. My errand won't take but a minute." p He half-slid, half-crawled to the filing cabinet, keeping both eyes on Retief, fumbled a key from a pocket. He opened the top drawer, then the next, rummaged, tried the last drawer, then turned on Retief, showing even white teeth in an expression that was not a smile. "I ought to have my head examined. I let those two lightweights sell me a story. What an act! Wimperton gobbled like a turkey when he opened up that phoney cover and got a load of the funny-books inside. So I let 'em sucker me into a goose-chase... unless you've got it?" He came closer. "Turn out your pockets, hotshot." Retief shook his head. "If you're looking for the papers, forget it. I left them in my other suit." "You loused up six months work, greenhorn. But I'll be back to fill out some fresh forms. Too bad you won't be here to watch." He raised the power pistol; behind him, Dools lunged for the patrolman's ankle. A bolt of blue fire crackled harmlessly past Retief's ear as he leaned aside, chopped at Klamper's gun hand, followed up with a knee to the face. Klamper rolled with the blow, scrambled over a sagging desk and dived for the doorway. Dools started after him. "Let him go, Mr. Dools," Retief said. "I think I know where he's headed. Now let's get out of here before we get our clothes pressed -- with us in 'em!" V A t the Public Entry Well, Yum and a group of wellmuscled locals met Retief. "Our man was here about ten minutes ago," Yum said blandly, "Big fellow, in a big hurry." "You let him through?" "That's right." "Then you warned the boys at the boat to stop him?" "Well, no, Retief. I told them to let him go. As you pointed out, he had a blaster. He's several hundred miles out by now." Retief folded his arms. "There's something funny going on here, Yum. What about the bomb? It's probably timed to go off at the height of the storm -- say in another ten minutes." "Oh, that. I found it. It's taken care of." "Found it where? And how the devil do you take care of a sealed titanite charge?" "It was aboard the boat. You were right about that -- " "Come on, Yum. Give!" "Well, Retief, I was a little curious. You can't blame me, after meeting you under such -- unusual circumstances. I took a look through your clothes. I found this." He held up the document Retief had extracted from the Consulate files. "A fancy piece of paper laying claim to the whole damned planet of Poon -- which it states is uninhabited -- which it would have been if the bomb idea had worked out. The Mat would have broken up in the wind, and when the sky cleared, it would look like just another natural disaster. And in a few months, all five continents would be one big gold mine." "So?" "So I held out on you. Our slumbering pal had keys, all right. I went back and opened up the boat. There sat the bomb -- all labelled and ready to go." "Except for the detonator. That was wired to the root." "Uh-huh. A safety precaution. But I found another one. It wasn't hard to install. I had an idea the owner would be along to see about it before zero hour; but I didn't like the sight of the thing sitting out in the middle of the floor, so I tucked it away." "Where?" "In the chart storage bin." Retief whirled to the discarded Terran uniform, jerked the communicator from the lapel clip, keyed it on .the official frequency. "Klamper, if you can hear me, answer -- fast!" After a moment, Klamper's voice came back, a thin piping in the miniature earphone. Yum and Dools leaned closer. "Klamper here. Who're you?" "This is Retief, Klamper -- " "Oh, yeah, the bright young official. Well, I predict a big change in the near future for you. In about thirty seconds, to be exact." "Klamper, there's a bomb -- " "Well, well, so you found out about that, too. Sorry I can't help you. So long, su -- " The earphones went dead. "Klamper!" Yum looked at his watch. "Right on the button," he said. "At least," Dools said, "he lived long enough to exonerate Mr. Retief." sphere was a patter of hurried footsteps. Retief and Yum turned. In the door, Wimperton and Pird stood like ruffled birds, staring. "I'm afraid you lads missed the IF boat," Retief called. Yum signaled with his hand. Half a dozen local citizens fanned out to hem in the newcomers. "Oh, why Mr. Retief... What are you doing out of bed?" Pird squeaked. "Oh, I just dropped down to offer you boys a crack at a peachy new opportunity in the Achievement Corps. Consul-General Dools here has need of two volunteers to man the new wildlife census stations over on continents One and Two. I'm going to give you first grabs at it. We'll go over to the Shelter and type out your resignaof five-year enlistment contracts in the A.C. -- on a non-compensatory basis, of course." Wimperton's mouth sagged open. "And I have a number of microtape recordings I'll contribute," Dools said. "They're quite exciting. All about bombs and land claims and gold mines. You can play them over during your leisure time -- during sand-storms, perhaps." "But -- Mr. Retief," Pird cried. "We -- we've found conditions here somewhat less than congenial..." "What if we refuse?" Wimperton gulped. "In that case, Yum and his associates would like to interview you on the subject of homesteading." "Your pen or mine for the signature?" Pird said hastily. "I'll ask a couple of the boys to help these two philanthropists over to the Consulate," Yum said. "Let the business wait till morning... You and I have a bottle of Yiquil to finish, Retief." "Show Mr. Dools a few of those pearls we netted, Yum." Yum fished out the stones, handed them to Dools, who canted two pairs of eye-stalks at the lustrous one-inch spheres. "Gentlemen -- this is precisely the product I need to qualify Poon as a Class One commercial world! Can these be supplied in any volume? Say, a dozen a month?" "I think it could be arranged," Yum said in heavily accented Terran. "Why don't you join Retief and the boys and me in a snort?" "Well, I really don't think... "I know a barman who can concoct a suitable booze for any metabolism," Yum urged. "And a hangover cure afterwards." Retief linked arms with the slender Groaci. "Come along Mr. Consul-General," he said. "We won't take no for an answer."      IF  Feature CC'T'he next great breakthrough Ain science," I said during a recent symposium, "the breakthrough that will have the kind of impact on us all that the Hiroshima bomb had, will be in the area of psychophysiology: mind and brain. And the man who will bring it about walks the earth today." Since then I have been asked many times to say a little more about this, and I'm happy to oblige. Let me begin, however, with a disclaimer: I can't say exactly what the breakthrough will be. I am convinced of what kind it will be, however, for one simple reason: you can't,, you just can not, do as much research, in as many ways, with as many advanced tools, as are being turned to this goal, without making such a breakthrough! Consider: Dr. Lilly, in his pursuit of the language of the dolphins (work which is partly financed by the Space Administration, which has an exciting reason, to science-fiction readers: how do you communicate with a mind as good as a man's, but not like a man's?) uses a technique called stereotaxia -- among many, many others. Imagine a rigid steel frame in which the head of the subject is clamped, after careful measurement. X-rays and surface mapping. On the frame are three thumbscrews, each of which directs a long fine sterilized electrode in a different dimension: one for up and down, one for right and left, one for forward and back. Each one is calibrated and has a vernier adjustment. At the desired location, a fine hole is drilled in the skull, just down to the dura mater , the very outside tissue of the brain. Then the electrode is positioned and lowered down through the brain cells, to the precise location under study. The researcher presses a button, and a carefully measured, tiny pulse of electricity jolts the small area -- perhaps only a dozen cells -- at the tip of the electrode. Observations are then made -- and they are extraordinary. A human subject will experience flashes of light, or hot or cold sensations at certain parts of his body, or perhaps a burst of sound. Sometimes there are snatches of memory -- and some of these are not real! Exactly what reaction is experienced depends on the location of the probe and the intensity of the current. Bit by bit, segment by segment, the brain is examined -- not, of course, the same brain, but great numbers of similar ones, until the motor and sensory centers of cats, dogs, rats, monkeys, humans -- and of course dolphins -- become increasingly well-known -- and understood. It's a common tale that we use only a fraction -- some say a fourth, some say a tenth -- of our available brain cells. Most researchers today will not commit themselves on this. It is beginning to seem that we use all of the parts of the brain -- but none of them at maximum capacity, and not all of them in ways which are completely understood. A great deal has been written most of it irritates me to the bellowing point. There is admittedly a good deal of spectacular material in the research, but the way it is played up for these effects is pretty repulsive. The watch-and-ward mentality is ever so quick to put moral values on its use, describing it vividly as a sort of super goofball -- and acting therefore as advertising agents in exactly the ways which appeal most to the goofball mentality. Meanwhile one or two crusading-type groups are marching systematically off in directions almost guaranteed to have this particularly valuable baby thrown out with the bathwater, which is what happened to hypnotism a hundred years ago when it became part stagecraft, part practical joke, and part evil incarnate of the Trilby and Rasputin variety, until only now is it regaining some respectability. There are still some researchers who are doing important exploraultimately unlock the secrets of its strange behavior and great potency. That this substance, or certain ones allied to it, will open new pathways to the study and treatment of the mind is beyond doubt; we can only hope that they will be let alone to do it. One further word on hypnotism: here is an insight which might intrigue you. Beset as it is by real and fictional accounts of fixed, glazed eyes staring at lights and glittering pendulums, while the soft-voice Man of Power lulls the subject into deeper slumber, hypnotism has a hard time making itself known in its other and more widespread effects. We know for example, that the mind can direct the realization of pain away from a specified area of the body under hypnosis. You've surely read of hypnotic anesthesia in childbirth and dentistry, and the stage trick of pushing a needle through a fold of the subject's flesh, which not only is not felt, but does not bleed. But has it ever occurred to you that your own body, right this very minute, is performing the same trick of anesthesia? (I use the word in the sense of "lack of sensation" and not that of "lack of pain".) Got your socks on, friend? Well, either they are pulled up tight and pressing against your calves or they hang down sloppy and you can feel the soft folds around your ankles. Right? But you didn't feel those things before you started to read this page, did you? Not until your mind and yours truly got together to make the sense impressions come through. The mind is there and the nerves are there and the stimulus is there -- but the mind automatically switches off the recognition of most sense impressions until it is told, in some way or another, to switch it on again. You want another? Sit absolutely still with your hands on this page (close your eyes if you like) and let yourself become aware of your hairline in the back, beginning just behind your left ear and slowly working around your nape until you reach a point just behind your right ear. Not only will you find yourself aware of almost every point alone the way, you will almost certainly develop an itch so sudden and penetrating that it will be impossible for you not to scratch it If you are one of those who resist suggestion, you will scratch it anyway but you will not know you are doing it. Watch yourself, now! T he point I am making here is that in this sense most of us are "hypnotized' over most of our bodies most of the time, and old Soft Voice swinging his gold watch on its glittering chain hadn't one damn thing to do with it. On the apparently sound theory that anything once experienced is never forgotten, men work today on ways to bring back, or bring out, "forgotten material. This could lead to eidetic, or "camera" memory -- a handy thing not only in psychotherapy, but in a court of law. Studies are being made on the extraordinary metabolism of the brain cells, which seem to use blood fractions physically and chemically in different ways from other body cells. And aside from these and other researches on the organic activity of the brain, many profound and widely varied studies are being made on brain function -- that is, behavior: the learning process, for example, and psychosomatic illness. All this barely dusts over the surface of what's being done -- and I haven't even touched the quagjust don't -- turn so many tools in so many ways on such a subject without coming up with a breakthrough. And when it comes, it's going to change the face of our earth... Ha! You scratched! IF IP  Short Story I M r. President, honored guest, members of the Athletic Commission, fellow Innovators. It gives me great pleasure to report that the year # holds promise of imminent success for our cause. Our next annual meeting may well be in the form of a victory dinner! Through the untiring efforts of our organization, our national pastime, which has been stagnating in its own rigid rules for more than a century, is now on the verge of developing to its wonderful potential. While we still face formidable opposition from the Traditionalists, under whose rule the popularity of the sport continues to decline, during the past twelve months we have made tremendous progress. The new stadium, for instance -- or rather the special features tonight's guest of honor, master architect Thaddeus Brutus, has had built into it -- stands as tribute to our achievements. These new-fangled ideas -- where will they all stop? Through my work as historian for our organization, I have discovered that today's crisis is far from the first our national pastime has faced. The rare books and newspaper articles that have survived the wars and ravages of time reveal that, on more than one occasion, the sport rebounded from seeming extinction. In fact, it appeared doomed only a few short decades after its birth in the late I #th or early #th century, when it was known simply as wrestling, or gruntangroan. In its archaic form, the sport pitted two men against each other in a small, padded enclosure called a ring -- facetiously, I suppose, since every available record indicates it was square in shape. Each contestant, armed with nothing more than some ancient skill in the use of leverage, would struggle toward the benign goal of pressing his opponent's shoulders to the canvas flooring. Two out of three of these "pins" or "falls" would decide the match. It is easy to understand why such mild sport failed to become particularly popular. Actually, within half a century, it had all but fallen into oblivion when snatched from its deathbed by the advent of viewy -- originally known as television, or TV. These early views machines were cumbersome devices, capable of casting only two-dimensional images -- some of them not even in color -- on screens that were just a few inches in diameter. Wrestling, confined as it was by a ring, proved a natural for the new medium. It quickly claimed widespread interest, helped by the fact that entertainment was not considered suitable fare for TV in those days. However, wrestling's basic weakness remained. It just wasn't interesting enough. And, as the novelty wore off, its popularity waned. Promoters, in a frantic effort to rekindle interest, resorted to presenting one combatant as the hero and the other as the villain, prearranging the result so that good would triumph over evil. Reduced to such a farcical exhibition, deprived of any aspect of honest competition, once again the sport began a rapid decline toward extinction -- this time to sarcastic cries of "author, author" after an obviously rehearsed match. This "theatrical" trend led many wrestlers to adopt bizarre personalities in the wild hope of capturing a bit of public interest. For instance, one affected a long, blond, highly effeminate hair-do; another dressed and acted the part of a full-blooded Indian; a third billed himself a member of a royal family. One can see why, in #, after less than a century of existence, wrestling was again in its last throes. However on September #th of that year, new life was injected into the sport. T his historic occurrence took place during a minor bout in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which matched the second-rate talents of a veteran named Doc Mauler with those of a newcomer from the Canadian forests -- Lumberjack Lenny. Since Mauler -- who claimed a real medical degree -- was the local contestant, it was arranged that he should take the "match" by winning the first and third falls. Lenny, however, in the excitement of his first bout, forgot his instructions and unceremoniously pinned the veteran in a matter of minutes. When it appeared that Lenny was about to suffer a similar lapse of memory in the second fall, Doc Mauler called upon all his medical know-how and came up with the correct therapy for his opponent's mental condition. It was at this precise moment that the sport -- and Lenny -- received a shot in the arm. Let me explain that, before the bout started, Mauler had left his identifying stethoscope and hypodermics on the apron, or edge of the ring. In that desperate moment, just as he was about to be pinned for the second time, he found these implements conveniently within his IF reach, picked up a hypodermic needle and jabbed it into his opponent's arm. Lenny, sent reeling back by this new onslaught, retreated to his own corner, pausing only to gather up his own trademarks -- a lumber jacket and a two-edged axe -- before reengaging his adversary. The newspaper accounts of the day tell us that Mauler wisely attempted to move into close quarters, feinting with the hypodermic while trying to slip the stethoscope around Lenny's neck. As he explained from his hospital bed after the fight, although his main objective was to garrote his foe, he had not overlooked the possibility of injecting an air bubble into his bloodstream. However, he never got the chance. Lenny, calling upon the experience of his many barroom brawls in the north woods, faked an opening with his lumber jacket, then shortened the fight -- and Mauler's right leg -- with a quick backhand chop. Fortunately, the promoter of that historic match was none other than Eddie Crooch, whom we all revere today as the father of the sport. The audience's truly enthusiastic response to this refreshing exhibition of competitive feeling did not escape Crooch's shrewd eye and he lost no time in changing the rules of the sport to encompass it. Lumberjack Lenny and his Educated Axe was one of the first greats of this new phase of the game. Although Doc Mauler never fully recovered from his first encounter, his younger brother, Intern Izzy Mauler, strung together an enviable skein of victories until he found himself outweaponed, some years later, by Spearfisher Frank. Other immortals of that era were Plumber Sam and his Sturdy Stillson Wrench, Homer Hittinger and his Lead-Loaded Bat, Electron Eddie and his effective (if cumbersome) High-Voltage Generator, and Bill Guillotine, to name a few. E ven while these stars were packing the stands, Crooch was able to recognize in die sport the first faint signs of waning popularity. Unlike our Traditionalists today, he fully realized that Innovations led to renewed public interest. His inventive mind devised the switch to the full-sized arena, the next step toward modernizing the sport. This was accomplished in # while the meeting on horseback of the White Knight and Prince Valiant in a bout that matched the Lethal Lance against the Singing Sword, the latter proving fatally short by about three feet. Acclaimed as the greatest champion of this era, according to newspaper accounts, was Count Cruel, highly skilled in the use of mace and chain. However, even he fell before the slings and arrows of the young upstart, Arthur the Archer. Arthur's short-lived reign was brought to a sudden end by Carbine Carl, who, in turn, was dispatched by Machine Gun McGurk. It was this same McGurk who took part in the most famous match of all, pitting his skills against the two outstanding challengers of the day -- Richard of the Nepal Flame Thrower and Hand Grenade Harry. The end that day in a memorable battle which proved, among other things, that bulletproof glass wasn't always. Aside from the deposed champion and Hand Grenade Harry, eightynine spectators, two officials and three ushers failed to survive the final contest of what I like to think of as the romantic era of the sport. The incident was followed by a Senate investigation into the misleading labelling of glass products and a movement among misguided reformers to outlaw the sport. Fans and promoters alike turned to Crooch, already honored as the first Czar of the game, to find the solution. He met the challenge by appointing a committee of outstanding sports writers, businessmen and politicians to help create a new set of rules. As a result of the "Slaughterhouse Scandal", as it was picturesquely labelled by the newspapers, a glass company went into bankruptcy and Crooch's Gladiator Code was born. That Code, my research reveals, is virtually identical to that which now governs our national pastime, clearly showing how reactionary our Traditionalist opponents really are. Even as today, the original Code permitted gladiators a choice of nothing more lethal than a short sword or three-pronged spear. Swordsmen were to be equipped with shields, arm and leg guards, breast plates and helmets, all of light metal. Spearmen, who sacrificed protection for mobility, were also provided with fish nets with which to confound and entangle opponents. Then as now, although the majority of fans watched the combats on views, only those present at the arena were permitted to give the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" sign. While combats still make pleasant enough fare for a Sunday afternoon, the repetition throughout the years has sapped it of its original zest and crowd appeal. Certainly you will agree with me that Crooch, the greatest Innovator of them all, would not have let the sport decline as it has for lack of inventiveness. We do not seek to ban the Traditional Combats. With all its pageantry it might well serve as an interesting preliminary event for our Innovation... that great Innovation which, I predict with complete confidence, will be adding a fascinating new dimension to the sport within the year. And now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, designed the new stadium -- which incidentally, he has named the Coliseum after a famous #th Century edifice. It was his foresight and confidence in the ultimate adoption of our Innovation which led him to include in his plans the tunnels under the stands. Tunnels that lead to the arena floor through heavy wooden doors at one end, and to chambers closed off by iron bars at the other. These passageways, while too low for a man to walk through, are just right for lions. And now I give you... IP The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: Your January cover was the most unusual I have ever seen on any magazine, but you might do better to put the picture in the upper right-hand corner where it is more noticeable on the magazine rack. I suppose you realize what the reaction of a less-than-longtime imaginative fiction fan would be to Waterspider. Now I know for sure what you are doing with If. -- Irvin Koch, # Chattanooga Bank Building, Chattanooga, Tennessee # .    Dear Editor: Your November issue was the best In some time -- there wasn't one thing in it that I didn't like, so naturally, I will itemize. The Governor of Glave : Now there's a Retief story worthy of Laumer! The planetary revolution story is one of my favorite types, and although Laumer's plot has been used before, he has somehow turned it into a great story. I do not mourn the loss of aliens in the story -- all too often they are nothing but costumed Romans, Huns or Nazis. After all, if we are going to have an Attila or Hitler, an Earthman can play the part better. I never cease to marvel at the near telepathic Retief, he finds out more Muck Man! A real good story. However, it should somehow have been # pages longer. The section concerning the trip back should have been lengthened. Anyway, more stories of changelings would be welcome by me -- Mr. Dodge can handle a story line! A Better Mousetrap : Somewhere back when I got sick of the "we're property" idea, but Mr. Brunner had the courtesy not to make it the main idea of the story. It had enough action in it for me not to feel a bit insulted about the ending. Second Class Citizen: It was in the typical Knight style, but it occurs to me that the dolphin was talking under water, a difficult feat for a mammal! Long Day in Court: Okay, but looking at it again it seems a bit pointless, except maybe to say, neighbors' There is nothing I can say about The Reef # of Space that would not bring me into the realm of superatives! More power to ye, Pohl and One final question, any hope for an anthology? You've reached that height! -- David Lebling, # Rollins Ct., Rockville, Md. #.    Dear Editor: Your November cover makes the second artistic inspiration you've published in a row -- far above your usual standard. The new logo appeals to me; because it seems more dignified, I suppose. The cover story was the best in the magazine and one of the best you've published in some time. But tell me -- is Fremont Dodge a pseudonym for Jack Vance? The styles seem almost identical. -- Jim Harkness, # West Harding, Greenwood, Mississippi. Nope. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Yep, Retief is still a winner! Mr. Laumer's stories draw me to If since I make it a practice never to buy sf mags with a serial. In this case the serial was so interesting that I searched out and found back issues for the rest of it. I must say that your If has some of the flavor of the #'s that has been sadly lost. -- TSgt. Jeff Tisdale, # Comm Sqdn, Box #,    Dear Editor: First I must congratulate you on your new magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow. I think the two issues of Worlds of Tomorrow that I have read are better than any single issue of either If or Galaxy. There are a couple of points I must make about the distribution of all your magazines in Australia, however. I have just finished reading the September issue of If, while W of T. for August hasn't appeared on the newsstands here yet. Another thing is the price. In American If is sold for # cents, W. of T for # cents, which is # per cent more. In Australia, I can buy If for # while Your September issue has a lot of top-line names in it, and their stories live up to expectations. This is one of the best issues in some time, but certainly expected with names like Van Vogt, Leinster, del geon. Keep up this standard in If, please, and I will certainly stay a regular reader. A welcome sight has been the names of some British authors on your contents page -- John Brunner and Brian W. Aldiss. More, please! -- A. G. Thomas, Boldrewood, New Line Road, West Pennant Hills, N.S.W., Australia.  More? Well, how about this issue's "first" -- Jo Friday, a young lady who teaches science in Australia, and writes about as well as any heretofore-unpublished writer we've seen in a long time. We also have another "first" -- or, in this case, almost "first," since the writer has been published a time or two in in other fields, though not with science fiction, in Jesse Friedlander. By the way, notice who's leading off our next issue? Name's E. E. Smith, Ph.D. And the story is a winner! -- Editor. IFif you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy p  r # lssues foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City Address Zone State Seated, #. to r. : Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling Photo by Philippe Halsman # famous authors start a new kind of writing school If you have writing talent worth developing, here's an opportunity never before available: Twelve of America's most famous authors have created a school of professional writing to help you develop your skill, talent and craftsmanship... and to pass on to you their secrets of achieving success and recognition. This unique home-training program is supervised by Rod Serling, winner of five Emmys for TV writing; Pulitzer Prize historian Bruce Catton; best-selling novelist Faith man; publisher-columnist Bennett Cerf; famed sportswriter Red Smith; Rudolf Flesch, top authority on readable writing; noted language expert Prof. Bergen Evans; famous mystery novelist Mignon G. Eberhart; J. D. Ratcliff, called by Time "America's No. I craftsman in the field of non-fiction"; and top ad men John Caples and Mark Wiseman. These famous authors have developed q remarkable series of textbooks, lessons and writing assignments that present -- in a clear and stimulating way -- what they have learned in their long, hard climb to the top. The School's instructors are themselves professional writers. Under the supervision of the # Famous Writers, these instructors work with students by mail, just as magazine and book editors work with many established authors. And they spend up to several hours on each assignment completed by a student... revising, correcting, and advising. The Famous Writers School is less than three years old. Its first students are not due to graduate until later this year. Yet, many have sold their writings to such varied publications as The Reader's Digest, Redbook , Popular Science, True Story. To select people with writing talent worth developing, the # Famous Writers have designed a revealing Talent Test. The coupon will bring you a copy, along with a brochure about the School. Your completed Test will be graded without charge or obligation by one of the School's instructors. If your Test indicates writing talent, you are then eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under absolutely no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport. Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have writing talent worth developing. Please mail me, without obligation, the Famous Writers Talent Test. Mr. Mrs Age. Miss Street City .Zone County State The School is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. MAY #  #c  j f (Choice of Lady's or Man's wallet) Have more fun with your camera! Now, take all the pictures you want -- without worrying about the cost! you save up to # on developing -- and get custom service and jumbo prints at no extra charge! You get a fresh roll of genuine Kodak film -- every roll developed! Imagine -- you'll never have to buy film again! cameras, projectors, wallet photos, enlargeIn addition, you are eligible to receive special discount offers -- at savings of up to #! You'll save hundreds of dollars on all your photo needs! It costs only # to join. No other dues or membership fees. And -- if you join now -- you get a handsome photo wallet, worth #, year to join this wonderful, money-saving Club -- sponsored by one of America's largest camera manufacturers and photo finishers! Photo Wallet worth # Official Membership Card m , BSsount Oftert oall your photo needs' 'Entire contents copyngnt #. plus lOg postage. Please send me my Photo Wallet worth # and complete new mem ber s kit. Check choice of Lady's I Man's   mi , ,, im Frederfk PoM, Editor David Pertain, Production Manager So Cohen, Pubfisher Dave Getter, Assoc. Novnern IF published bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, VoL #, No. #, Main Officer #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # Issues # in tke United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.#. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. AH rights including translations reserved. Ail material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and ny similarity between character and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial Ode to a Skylark T he not-quite yet city of Tampeta, Florida, described in this issue's The Imperial Stars, is Doc Smith's conception of what will happen to Manatee County and surrounding areas in another couple of centuries. It is in this area of Florida's Golf coast, stretching from Dunedin and Tampa on the north to Sarasota on the south, that Smith spends his winters; it was here that he wrote The Imperial Stars; and, in fact, it is in this same area that your editor is writing these notes. Yesterday we spent the day with Doc Smith, clearing up a few loose ends in his forthcoming, long-delayed and long-awaited conclusion of his famous Skylark series, Skylark DuQuesne, which we will be printing in If as soon as the Heinlein FarnhairCs Freehold and one or two other items are done. (If you think we're name-dropping -- we are! It isn't often that an editor has a chance to announce a lineup like this!) Doc had a bit of eye surgery come up -- complains somebody has stuck about a # neutral gray filter on his vision when he wasn't looking -- and at the pleading of his doctor has agreed to budget a few weeks for operation and convalescence. But we talked mostly about the future -- Skylark DuQuesne, the future d'Alembert Family series to follow The Imperial Stars and so on. Doc, who has been writing for all but half a century, has plenty of future to count on, and we're hoping to keep printing his stories for half a century more. Hail to thee, blithe spirit! And keep 'em coming.    In case you hadn't noticed, this is an All-Smith issue... all different Smiths, of course. Besides Doc Smith we've got Mister and professor Smith, Herr Doktor Smith and Mr. Smith, Esq. Mister and professor Cordwainer Smith, a world traveler, confides that he was a great disappointment to his family because at the age of nine he could speak only five languages. Herr Doktor George O. Smith does all his writing now in Potsdam, Germany, where he is an electronics engineer on one of those enormous world-girdling projects that keep our satellites in orbit and our messages going through. Also from Potsdam -- but the other Potsdam, the one in upstate New York -- is Mr. Jack Smith, Esq. Proving it's a small world, he worked there for radio is operated by our old friend David A. Kyle. Mr. Smith, Esq., is our "first" for this issue; the others, of course are long-time favorites. be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toaay. The Rosicrucians (not a religious L Cityorganization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe X.L.G. ! Scribe X.L.G. i San Jose, California J Please send me the free book. The Mastery J , ofUfe, which explains how I may learn to J i use my faculties and powers of mind. Name. Address. IF  Complete Short Novel They were the finest interstellar agents -- and greatest circus stars -- the Service of the Empire had! I Des Plaines (Plan) # rev cat (qv)  NrAm (qy) phys. cult. Comml stndg, # #th. Prin ctrib gat Circus ot Gal, heav met, prec stones. (Encyclopedia Galactica , Vol. #, p#) Jules and Yvette F or twenty-eight minutes The Flying d'Alemberts -- who throughout two centuries had been the greatest troupe of aerialists of the entire Empire of Earth -- had kept the vast audience of the Circus of the Galaxy spellbound: densely silent; almost tranced. For twentyeight minutes both side rings had been empty and dark. The air over the center ring, from the hard-packed, imitation-sawdust-covered earth floor up to the plastic top one hundred forty-five feet above that floor, had been full of flying white-clad forms -- singles and pairs and groups all doing something utterly breathtaking. Suddenly, in perfect unison, eighteen of the twenty d'Alemberts then performing swung to their perches, secured their apparatus, and stood motionless, each with his or her right arm pointing upward at the highest part of the Big Top. As all those arms pointed up at her, Yvette d'Alembert moved swiftly, smoothly, out to the middle of her high wire -- and that wire was high indeed, being one hundred thirty-two feet above the floor of the ring. She did not carry even a fan for balance. She maintained her equilibrium by almost imperceptible movements of her hands, feet, and body. Reaching the center of the span, she stopped and posed. To the audience she appeared as motionless as a statue. Like all the other d'Alemberts, she was dressed in silver-spangled tights that clung to every part of her body like a second skin. Thus, while she was too short and too wide and too thick to be acceptable as an Earthly high-fashion model, her flamboyantly female figure made a very striking and very attractive picture -- at a distance. Close up, however, that picture changed. Her ankles were much larger than any Earthwoman's should have been. Her wrists were those of a six-footfour, two-hundred-fifty-pound timberman. Her musculature, from toenails to ears to fingertips, would have made all the beach-boys of Southern California turn green with envy. After a few seconds of posing, she turned her head and looked down at her brother Jules, on a perch sixty-one feet below her and an "impossible" sixty-four feet off to one side. Then, flexing her knees and swinging her horizontally outstretched arms in ever-increasing arcs, she put more and more power into her tightly stretched steel -- and Jules, grasping a flying ring in his left hand, began to flex his knees and move his body in precise synchronization with the natural period of the girl-wire system so far above him. Finally, in the last cycle through which she could hold the wire, Yvette squatted and drove both powerful legs downward and to her right -- and something snapped, with a harsh, metallic report as loud as a pistol shot T he wire, all its terrific tension released instantly as one end broke free and dropped, coiled itself up in the air with metallic whinings and slitherings; and Yvette d'Alembert, premiere aerialiste of all civilization, sprawling helplessly in midair, began her long fall to the floor. Eighteen d'Alemberts came to life on their perches, seized all the equipment they could reach, and hurled it all at the falling girl. One of her frantically reaching fingertips barely touched the bar of one swingIP mg trapeze; none of the other apparatus came even close. Jules, in the lowest position, had more time than did any of the second to spare. In the instant of the break he went outward and downward along the arc of the ninety-eight-foot radius of his top-hung flying ring. His aim was true and the force of launching had been precisely right. Yvette was falling face down, flat and horizontal, at a speed of over seventy feet a second as she neared the point of meeting. Jules, rigidly vertical at the bottom of his prodigious swing, was moving almost half that fast. In the instant before a right-angle collision that would have smashed any two ordinary athletes into masses of bloody flesh, two strong right hands smacked together in the practically unbreakable hand-over-wrist grip of the aerialist and Yvette spun and twisted like a cat -- except much faster. Both her feet went flat against his hard, flat belly. Her hard-sprung knees and powerful leg muscles absorbed most of the momentum of his mass and speed. Then, at the last possible instant, her legs went around his waist and locked behind his back, and his right hand flashed up to join his left in gripping the ring. That took care of the horizontal component of energy, but the vertical one was worse -- much worse; almost twice as great. Its violence drove their locked bodies downward and into a small but vicious arc; a savagely wrenching violence that would have broken any ordinary man's back in a fraction of a second. But Jules d'Alembert, although only five feet eight in height, had a mass of two hundred twenty-five pounds, most of which was composed of super-hard, super-reactive muscle; unstretchable, unbreakable gristle; and super-dense, superstrong, horse-sized bone. His arms were as large as, and immensely stronger than, an ordinary Earthman's legs. The two bodies, unstressed now relative to each other, began to hurtle downward together, at an angle of thirty degrees from the vertical, toward the edge of the ring facing the reserved-seat and box section of the stands. T he weakest point in the whole stressed system was now Jules' grip on that leather-covered steel ring. Could he hold it? Could he possibly hold it? Not one person in all that immense audience moved a muscle: not one of them even breathed. He held his grip for just under half a second, held it while that half-inch nylon cable stretched a good seven feet, held it while the entire supporting framework creaked and groaned. Then the merest moment before that frightful fall would have been arrested and both would have been safe, Jules' hands slipped from the ring and both began to fall the remaining forty feet to the ground. A high-speed camera, however, would have revealed the fact that they did not fall out of control. Each landed in perfect position. f Hard-sprung knees took half of the shock of landing; hard-sprung elbows took half of what was left Heads bent low on chests; powerful leg muscles drove forward; thick, hard shoulders and back muscles struck the floor in perfect rolls; and both brother and sister somersaulted lightly to their feet. Hand in hand, they posed motionless for a moment; then bowed deeply in unison, turned and ran lightly to an exit -- and they covered that one hundred yards of distance in less than five seconds. And the multitude of spectators went wild. They had seen a girl falling to certain death. They had felt a momentary flash of relief -- or actually of disappointment? -- when it seemed as though her life might be saved. Then they had watched two magnificently alive young people fall, if not to certain death, at least to maiming, crippling injury. Then, in the climactic last split second, the whole terrible accident had become the grand finale of the act. That it was a grand finale -- a crashing smash of a finish -- there was no possible doubt. The only question was, what emotion predominated in that shrieking, yelling, clapping, jeering, cheering, whistling and catcalling throng of Earthpeople -- relief, appreciation or disappointment? Whatever it was, however, they had all had the thrill of a life-time; and few if any of them could understand how it could possibly have been done. people inhabiting the nine hundred forty-two other planets of the Empire of Earth, scarcely one in a planet DesPlaines. Of those who had heard of it, comparatively few knew that its surface gravity was approximately three thousand centimeters per second squared -- more than three times that of small, green Earth. And most of those who knew that fact neither knew nor cared that harsh, forbidding, hostile DesPlaines was the home world of the Circus of the Galaxy and of The Family d'Alembert n The Service of the Empire (SOTE) was founded in # by Empress Stanley #, the first of the Great Stanleys, who, during her reign of # years (#-#) inculcated in it the spirit of loyalty and devotion that has characterized it ever since. Its spirit wavered only once, under weak and vicious Empress Stanley #, whose reign -- fortunately very short (#-#) -- was calamito full power, however, only under Emperor Stanley # ( reign # -- ), the third and greatest of the Great Stanleys, under whom it became the finest organization of its kind ever known. (Baird, A Study of Security, Ed. #, p#). The Brawl in the Dunedin Arms T he city of Tampeta, Florida, had a population of over fifteen IP had once been Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, but also all the other cities and villages between Sarasota on the south and Port Richey on the north. Just outside Tampeta's city limit, well out toward Lakeland, lay the Pinellas Fair Ground. There the Circus of the Galaxy had been playing to capacity crowds for over a week, with a different show -- especially with an entirely different climax -- every night. Jules and Yvette d'Alembert, as top stars of the show, of course had private dressing rooms. They also had private entrances. Thus no one connected with the show saw, and no one else either noticed or cared, that two short, fat Delfians, muffled to the eyes in the shapelessly billowing robes and hoods of their race, joined one of the columns of people moving slowly toward the exits leading to the immense parking lot. It took them half an hour to get to their car, but they were in no hurry. Out of the traffic jam at last, Jules maneuvered his heavy vehicle up into the second-level, west-bound Interstate Four and sped for the Dunedin district and the Dunedin Arms, one of the plushiest night spots in all North America. At the Arms, he gave a dollar to the parking-lot attendant, another to the resplendently uniformed doorman and a third to the usher who escorted them ceremoniously into the elevator and up to the fourth floor. At the check-stand the two Delfians refused -- as expected -- to part with any of their mufflings. Jules did, however -- also as expected -- give the provocatively clad hat-check girl a dollar before he handed his reservation slip and a five-dollar bill to the bowing captain. "Thank you, sir and madam, that worthy said. "We are very glad indeed to have you with us this evening, Mister and Misses Tygven. Will you have your table now, or perhaps a little later? "A little later, I think," Jules said, using faultlessly the RussoEnglish "Empirese" that was the court language of the Empire. He paused then, and gazed about the huge room. At his right, along the full two-hundred-foot length of the room, ran the subduedly ornate, mirror-backed bar. At his left were three tremendous windows overlooking the beach and the open Gulf. Heavy tables of genuine oak, not too closely spaced, filled the place except for a large central dance floor. On a stage at the far end of the room a spot-lighted, red-haired stripper was doing her stuff. Priceless paintings and fabulous tapestries adorned the walls. Suits of armor dating from the ancient days of chivalry stood on pedestals and niches here and there. The place was jammed with a gay, colorful and festive crowd; there were only a few vacant places even at that tremendously long bar. It was quite evident why the captain had suggested a short delay, so Jules said, "Yes, later, please. We will do a little serious drinking at the bar before we eat." And at the bar, Jules laid a fiftydollar bill on the oak and said, "A liter of vodnak, please. Estvan's, if you have it. In the original bottle -- sealed." "We have it. Mister." The bartender set out two glasses, a bowl of ice and the heavy, crudely molded, green-glass bottle of the onehundred-and-twenty-proof beverage that was the favored tipple of the rim-world, Delf. "We've got everything. And don't worry about it not being the clear quill. We don't cheat With our prices we don't have to" -- and he put down on the bar a dollar and fifteen cents in change, which Jules waved away. Before Jules opened the bottle -- he was looking into the mirror, and so was Yvette -- the man at Yvette's left finished his drink and moved away, and a tall, slim Earthman came up to take his place. Holding up one finger to the bartender, the newcomer said, "I'll take a jigger of the... T hat was as far as he got. "Rube!" Yvette snapped -- throughout the years, half of the old-time circus battle-cry of "Hey Rube!" had survived. She grabbed the heavy bottle by its neck, and hurling it even as she dropped -- dropped safely under the vicious blaster-beam that, having incinerated the slender Earthman, swept through the space her chest had occupied an instant before. Still in air, falling almost flat, she braced one foot against the bar, dived headlong under the nearest table, bent her back and heaved. The blaster-beam, however, had already expired. The heavy bottle, still full and still sealed, hurled with a DesPlainian's strength and with an aerialist's sure control, had struck bottom-on squarely in the middle of the gunner's face -- and that gunner now had no face at all and scarcely enough head to be recognizable as human. Jules, too, was busy. He too had dropped at his sister's warning word, scanning the room as he fell. He too made a dive; but his was high and far, toward a table for six at which only two couples sat. One of the men at that table, half hidden behind a tall and statuesque blonde, had started to rise to his feet and was reaching for his left armpit. Jules lit flat on the table and slid angle-wise across its length, in a welter of breaking and flying dishes, glassware, silverware, food and drink, directly at the man trying so frantically to draw his weapon. En route, Jules brushed the blonde aside. He didn't push her hard at all -- just a one-handed gentle shove; just enough to get her out of the way. Nevertheless, she went over backward, chair and all, and performed an involuntary back somersault -- thus revealing to all interested observers that she wore only a lacy trifle of nylon in the way of underwear. Continuing his slide, Jules made a point of his left elbow and rammed it into the man's gut. Then, as the man doubled up and "w-h-oo-s-h-e-d" in agony, Jules whirled to his feet off of the table and chopped the hard edge of his right hand down onto the back of his victim's neck -- which broke with a snap audible for dozens of feet IF above the uproar then going on. Then, seizing the man's half-drawn weapon -- it was a stun-gun, not a blaster -- he glanced at its dial. Ten. Wide open. Instantly lethal. Clicking it back to three -- a halfhour stun -- he played its beam briefly over the other man at the table (the guy had been too quiet and too unconcerned by far during all this action) and whirled around to see how his sister was making out. Yvette was doing all right. The table under which she had disappeared had leaped into the air, turned over -- shedding dishes and so forth far and wide -- and crashed twn onto the table at which the first blasterman and three other goons had been sitting. She had picked the blaster up and had tried to bend it around the side of Number Two's head; but it broke up almost as thoroughly as the head did. Ducking as only such a performer as she was could duck, she grabbed Number Three by the ankles, up-ended him, kicked the flaming blaster out of his hand before it could kill more than three innocent bystanders and was going to use him as a flail on Number Four when that unlucky (or lucky) wight slumped bonelessly to the floor in the beam of her brother's stunner. She had the motion all made -- why waste it? -- So, continuing her swing, she hammer-threw Number Three over a few rows of tables and out into fifty feet of air through the middle of one of the three immense windows already mentioned. Have you ever heard four hundred and thirty-two square feet of three-eighths-inch-thick plate glass shatter all at once? It makes a noise. Such a noise that all lesser noises stopped instantly. And in that strained, tense silence Jules spoke quietly to his sister. Both were apparently perfectly calm. Neither breathed one count faster than normal. Only their eyes -- his a glacially cold gray; hers a furiously hot blue -- showed how angry and how disconcerted they both were. "Many more of 'em, you think?" he asked. "Not to spot." Yvette shook her head. "And we've got no time to check." "Right. Take that one, I'll bring the other. Flit." Carrying two unconscious men, the two ran lightly, but at terrific speed, down three flights of stairs and out into the parking lot. The attendant, upon seeing what burdens they carried, tried simultaneously to run and to yell, but accomplished neither -- a halfhour stun saw to that. Tortured rubber shrieked and smoked as the heavy car spun out of the lot and into the highway Fortunately, traffic was so light -- it was then half past two in the morning -- that Jules did not have to drive far before a moment came when no other car was in sight. The d'Alembert vehicle, while it looked pretty much like an ordinary groundcar, was a little too long and too wide and too round and much too heavy to be any standard model. Thus, alone in the road for a moment, Jules punched IS three buttons and three things happened: #) the car's lights went out; #) from those too-round sides the two halves of an airtight, bulletproof, transparent canopy shot up, snapped together, and locked; and #) the vehicle went straight up, at an acceleration of four Earthly gravities -- having two Earthers aboard they couldn't hurry -- to an altitude of a hundred and ninety thousand feet before it stopped. J ules and Yvette removed what was left of their Delfian costumes -- which wasn't very much -- and stared wordlessly into each other's eyes for a long half minute. Then Yvette spoke: "That was our contact. Our only contact. And we don't know anythere was a leak. There had to be a leak, Julie." "That's for sure, and it was no ordinary leak, either. It had to be right in the Head's own office... Jules voice died away. Yvette shivered. "I'm afraid so. And we haven't an inkling, except for his retinal pattern, of who the Head is or where he is. He may not be on Earth, even." "Well, there'll be somebody in the Tampeta office here and they'll be on the alert. That brawl put the stuff into the fan but good. They'll be monitoring the channel every second." "But our friends' friends down there will be monitoring all channels every second -- and they probably have the codes." He thought for a moment, then grinned. "So I'll go back to one that's so old and so simple that they probably never heard of it... unless it'd fool our monitor, too... uh-uh. Whoever they've got on monitor right now is no dumb bunny; so here goes." He flipped a blue switch and raised his powerful -- and not too unmusical -- deep bass voice in song: "Sing of the evening star, Oh Susan; sweetest old tune ever sung. Oh, Susan, sweet one, tis..." "Susan here." A lilting, smoothas-cream contralto voice came from the speaker. There was a moment of silence, then the voice said "Cut!" and Jules flipped his switch; whereupon the voice concluded, "We'll beep you in. Out." "I'll say they're alert!" Yvette exclaimed; then went on, half-giggling in relief. "And she's fast on the trigger -- 'Susan here' my left eyeball. You made that whole thing up, didn't you, on the spur of the moment." "Uh-huh. If I'd had a little time the verse would have been as good as the music." Yvette snorted. "Ha! Modesty, thy name is Jules! I expect them to tap you for the Met any minute now. But you were right on one thing -- no dumb bunny could make 'S-O-T-E -- S-O-S' so fast out of that mess of yowling. But it won't really be a beeper, you think?" "Anything else but. My guess is a laser. They've got us lined up and they'll pour it right into our cup -- so I'd better set the cup to spinning." He did so, and in less than a minute the pencil-thin beam came IF In, chopped up Into evenly-spaced dashes by the rotation of the cupantenna of the car. There was of course no voice or signal. While Jules was manipulating his finders to determine the exact line of the beam, he said, " Better unlimber the launchers, Evie, and break out some bombs. Just in case somebody wants to argue with us on die way. I'll handle the other stuff." "That's a thought -- " She broke off; her tone changed, "But just suppose that's their beam?" "Could be; so we'll have to look a little bit out when we land. But they know that. So if everything's oke they'll engineer a safe approach -- we won't have to. They know who we are." Things had gone wrong. They had given the right signal at the rendezvous -- but the wrong people had responded. Now they had to find out whyl in Democracy failed because it could not cope with Communism . This failure , which began early in the twentieth century , became very evident when , in #, Canada, the United States of America and Mexico united to form the United States of North America. The Congress ed, but could not agree upon any effective action against Commitism. The Premier of Russia, however, acted. He issued orders; the recipients of which either obeyed them promptly or were promptly shot. ( Mees , History of Civilization , Vol. #, pl#) The Head S liding down the beam, the d'Alembert's vehicle was heading directly toward the roof of a building that towered at least forty stories above any other structure in its neighborhood. Jules slowed down; approached it gingerly; stopped half a mile away. It was all dark, except, strangely enough, for a small, brightlylighted spot on the roof of one wing. "Scan it," Jules said. "Infra first. See what it is." Yvette put her eye to the scanner. "Hall of State; Sector Four. That makes sense. State would be the best place to hide the Service, wouldn't it?" "Check. And the spot?" "Floodlight. One. That's a girl, standing in it. Young. Skinny, but not bad for an Earther. Black hair -- throat-mike -- sweater -- shorts -- two Mark Twenty-Nine Service blasters hanging loose -- sandals. Sneak up, Julie." Jules dropped the "car" -- which was in fact one of the deadliest fighting machines of its weight ever built by man -- down to within a couple of hundred yards of the lighted spot and stopped; and that highly distinctive throaty contralto voice came again from the speaker. "It's safe to talk now if we don't say too much," the voice said conversationally. "Are you armed?" "Yes." Jules wasn't saying much, yet. "Good. You won't need these, then." The girl walked out of the ring of light, put the brutal big hand-weapons down on the roof, and resumed her former place. "You recognize my voice, of course." "Yes." "You have a retinascope, I suppose." "Yes. Hold it a minute." Jules cut com and turned to his sister. "I don't like this a nickel's worth. What Earther's pattern, except the Head's, would we recognize without a comparison disk? Nobody's. So, if this is on the up and up, we've got to manhandle the Head himself." Yvette bit her lip. "Well, you said they'd arrange a safe approach, and that certainly would be one. What else can we do?" "Nothing," and Jules again flipped the blue switch. "Go ahead." "Land anywhere you please and one person will come aboard. Unarmed." "Oke." Jules landed the car well away from the ring of light and opened a port. In the darkness all that could be seen of the man who came up, empty hands outstretched, was that he was of medium height, of medium build and almost completely bald. He put his hands in through the port and Yvette, taking one of his wrists in each hand, helped him through the narrow opening and into the cramped front compartment of the car, where she held him gently but securely while Jules applied the retinascope to the Earthman's right eye. "The head himself," Jules said. "I'm sorry, sir... " "Think nothing of H, Jules." The stranger laughed deeply. "If you had acted differently I would have been amazed, displeased and disappointed. As it is, I am very glad indeed to meet you in the flesh," and he shook hands vigorously. "And you too, Yvette, my dear." Taking her hand, he kissed it in as courtly a fashion as though that tiny, cramped compartment were a ballroom. "And now -- purely a formality, of course -- the eyes. Yvette first, please," and he handed her the 'scope. She fitted it to her eye. "But you didn't put any disk in," she said. "Surely, sir, you don't..." A pattern briefly, then Jules'. "I don't know very many patterns, of course; but Jules and Yvette d'Alembert? You're too modest altogether, my dear." Then, opening the port, he called out, "Still safe, Helena?" "Still safe, father," the girl called back, and began to walk toward the car. "Nothing suspicious, they say, within three hundred miles of here." "Fine," Jules said. He opened the car up and all three got out. Jules went on, "I was hoping we were fast enough to get away clean, but I couldn't be sure. Now, sir, about our guests," and he jerked a thumb toward the rear compartment where the prisoners soddenly slept. "Ah, yes. I've been wondering about them. The reports were confused and contradictory." "I'm not surprised; it happened IF fast That one -- " Jules pointed -- "is probably just a low-bred gunnie that doesn't know a thing. The other one may not know anything or he may know a lot," and he told, in a very few words, about the too imperturbable observer of the brawl. He finished: "So our secret rendezvous was no secret." "I see." The Head raised his left wrist to his lips and said, "Colonel Grandon." "Yes, sir?" "Be on the roof in exactly two minutes. You'll find two men who got number three stunbeams about twenty minutes ago. They're in a Mark Forty-One Service Special near Space Jay Twelve. Revive them, find what they know and report." "Very well, sir," and the Head led the way to an elevator. The elevator took them down to the thirty-first floor, where it stopped of itself and opened its door into what was very evidently the private office of an exceedingly important man. It was a fairly large room, furnished richly but quietly. The rug, brown in color, was thick and soft. The beamed ceiling was of beautifully grained brown solentawood; the paneled walls were of the same fine, almost metal-hard wood. On the wall behind the big solentawood desk was inlaid the gold-crowned Shield of Empire. "Now we can talk," the girl said then, holding out her hand to Jules. "I'm Grand Lady... Oh, excuse that please!" She flushed hotly, whereupon Jules kissed her hand in true Court style; after which she shook hands cordially with both Jules and Yvette. "She should blush, friends," the Head said, but with no reproof in his voice. "But she hasn't been in the Service very long." Turning to the girl, he went on. "You are the Head's Girl Friday here, my dear. Our guests are of the thinnest upper crust of the entire Service; their worth to the Crown is immeasurable -- beyond any number of Grand Ladies. We'll sit down, please, and Helena will pour. A whiskey sour for me, if you please." He cocked an eyebrow at his two agents. "Yours?" "Orange juice, please," Yvette said, promptly; and Jules said, "Lemonade, please, if you have it handy." D rinks in hand -- Grand Lady Helena was drinking a weirdlooking ice-cream concoction -- the Head said: "The attack on you was a complete surprise. No leak, no hankypanky was even suspected until the man who was to bring you to me here was killed. The connection between this business and the matter that brought you to Earth is clear. In that connection it is a highly pleasing thought that the opposition knows nothing of you or of the Circus. You agree?" "I agree, sir," Jules said, and Yvette nodded. But Helena was puzzled. "How can it follow that they don't know, father?" "The d'Alemberts are new to you because there is no record anywhere IF of any connection between them and us. Except for this surprise attack you would not be learning of them now. I will go into detail after they leave, but for the present I will simply state as a fact that no one who knows anything about them would send only six men against Jules and Yvette d'Alembert. Or, if only six, all six would have fired simultaneously and on sight at them instead of burning the contact man first. That shows that they were more afraid of the Service here than of the supposed Delfian agents -- a fatal error." "Oh, I see -- excuse me, please, for interrupting." "That's quite all right. It's part of your education, Girl Friday. To proceed: we are investigating. We will find out where the leak is here and clean up the mess. In the meantime we will go ahead with the business for which we scheduled the Circus of Earth. There's trouble: centering, probably, on Durward. I'll give you all forty-odd reels of the record on it, but there are many things that are not on record and never will be, which is why I had to discuss it with you in person. You'll also have to talk to some outsiders to get the full picture. You may want to conduct preliminary investigation on Earth andor elsewhere before you go anywhere near Durward." The Head got up. These were his most valuable agents, and the fact that he had brought them here was a measure of the importance he attached to the situation. He had fully expected that there would be trouble waiting for them between the Circus and his office... and he had been equally confident that the d'Alemberts would be able to handle it. What he was less sure of was that they -- even they -- would be able to handle the trouble that lay ahead. He said abruptly, "Let's fill in some background. For example, consider the question of loyalty. The Service is loyal to the Crown as the symbol of Empire; to the wearer of the Crown, whoever or whatever he or she may be, as the focal point of the Empire. You agree?" "Of course, sir," Jules said, and both girls nodded. "Very well. In early #, when Crown Prince Ansel was planning the murder of every other member of the Royal Family, if we could have caught him at it in time we would have burned him down, Crown Prince though he was." "Why, I... suppose that... yes, sir," Jules said, and Yvette added thoughtfully: "I never thought of it before in just that way, sir. But that's the way it would have to be." "Nevertheless, after those eleven murders were accomplished facts Ansel, as the sole surviving member of the House of Stanley, became Emporer Stanley Nine. Was there then any question of gunning him? No. We instantly became as loyal to him as we had been to his father Stanley Eight and now are to his son Stanley Ten." "Of course, sir. But what..." "Now comes some off-the-record IF material. Have you ever heard oi Banion the Bastard?" Jules thought for a moment. "I don't think so, sir," he said. ' Yvette shook her head, but this time Helena nodded and said, "Ohoh -- a light beginneth to dawn." "I didn't think you two had," the Head went on. "Not too many people now alive ever have." IV Even before Arnold invented the subether drive and made galactic exploration possible, all Earth except and North America was being infiltrated and undermined. The real explosion of mankind into space , however, did not begin until #, when Copeland discovered the uranium-rich planet Urania Four ; thus assuring all mankind of cheap and virtually unlimited power. In # the American anti-Communists, disgusted and alarmed by the success of the "do-nothings" and "do-gooders" in blocking all effective action , left Earth en masse for Newhope ; whereupon Communism took control of all Earth without firing a shot or launching a missile . ( Mees , History of Civilization; Vol. #, p#). Banion the Bastard jlTarsh ailing his thoughts, the Head drank half of his whiskey sour slowly, then went on, "Stanley Nine's weakness was women; particularly young ones. Although he married late in #, It by the end of that year the Empress was merely a part of the furniture and the then Duke of Durward -- one Henry, a bachelor of thirty -- saw his big chance. He combed his planet to find one highly special woman. She had to be young, a virgin, spectacularly beautiful, and highly intelligent. Also, as unscrupulous, as vicious, and as hard as he himself was. Also unknown on Earth or at Court. He found her... The Head paused to finish his drink and build another one. "The Beast of Durward," Helena said. "Surely you've heard of her " Neither Jules nor Yvette had, and the Head went on, "A small-time, ruthlessly ambitious actress. The Duke arranged and financed for her a tremendous and tremendously expensive splash at Grand Imperial Court, right here on Earth. Stanley Nine fell hard. He didn't stand a chance -- and, with the Duke's full backing, she kept him on the hook much longer than any other woman was ever able to. "When she was about seven months pregnant the Duke married her; with Nine's full approval. Thus her son Banion was born in wedlock as the first child of and the heir of the Duke and Duchess of Durward. That, however, wasn't enough for the schemers. Stanley Nine, still blindly infatuated with the extremely talented Beast, issued a Patent of Royalty, admitting paternity and bestowing upon the infant the unique title of 'The Prince of Durward'. This patent also authorized a coat of arms as follows: " 'Purpure, quarterly three dragons rampant or, in chief sinister a bend sinister or, in dexter... "Wait up, father!" Helena broke in. "You're not getting through to me at all, and I don't believe that's our guests' language, either." The Head laughed. "Gold dragons, rearing on purple enamel. The bar sinister, which may not be a mark of illegitimacy, in this case definitely was. It goes on that way for a couple of hundred words, only a few of which are pertinent. 'Bordure gules, charged thirteen bezants sable'. Poor heraldry -- color on color and an unlucky number of spots on a background of blood -- but that and the fact that the Patent was dated Friday the Thirteenth of June, #, are perfectly in keeping with the Duke's vicious sense of humor. "A couple of months later -- long overdue -- Nine finally got tired of the Beast and came to with a thud. He who had wiped out all the rest of the Royal Family had himself set up a pretender with a completely valid claim. He ordered the Service to kill the Duke and Banion and destroy the Patent; but he was 'way too late. The Beast had seen it coming and they got away clean. With the Patent. "The Patent, of course, was most important. It was hand-written and signed in carbon ink by Emperor Stanley Nine himself, on Imperial parchment, with the signature driven into the parchment by the Great Seal of the Empire of Earth. The Patent was revoked, of course, and erased from all record, and the people were proscribed; but that wasn't enough. That Patent had to IF be found and destroyed; but it wasn't. Banion the Bastard had to be found and killed; but he wasn't. "In #I there was a fairly serious uprising; which, it was deduced later, was engineered by the Beast on her own. At least, there was clear evidence that she tried to knife the Duke in bed and he cut her throat with her own blade. "The search for that Patent and the Bastard and his blood has been going on ever since #; twenty years before I was born. As I said, the record of it covers more than forty reels. Results were neglible -- except for finding, at a cost of eighty-nine lives, three very good forgeries -- until two years ago, when several leads pointed back to Durward again. We sent agents, who found nothing. Three months ago all those agents stopped reporting. I sent in four of our best -- with orders, of course, to avoid all previous contacts -- and have not heard from any of them. Hence the Circus; the heaviest artillery the Service has. The threat to Stanley Ten and The Family is grave indeed. Just how grave I myself did not fully realize until the event of last night. "Duke Henry was born in #, ninety-seven years ago; so he is probably dead. So it may or may not be his children andor grandchildren who are carrying on. The Bastard, though, at #, may still be a potent force; and he undoubtedly has children and grandchildren whom we don't know anything about, either. "Your job is composed of two equally important parts. One, to find the genuine Patent and to briog it in so we can check its authenticity and so Stanley Ten can destroy It with his own bands. Two, to kill Banion the Bastard and aH of hti blood. Goodbye and good luck." B ack at the Circus, well after daybreak, Jules and Yvette reported to their father, the Managing Director. Then they drove out to the edge of the field, snugged their "oar" down into its berth in their ultra-fast two-man subspacer, and Jules said: "I knew the Head would have to be a Big Wheel, but not that big. If his daughter's a Grand Lady he's got to be a Grand Duke, no less. I think maybe I've seen his picture somewhere or seen him in a parade or something on tri-di..." "Oh, brother " Yvette snorted. "And I use the term advisedly. If you didn't recognize Grand Duke Zander von Wilmenhorst on sight! Oh no, he isn't much of anybody -- just one-half Stanley blood and the fifth from the Throne itself, is all. You'd better break out your Peerage and start studying it." "Uh-huh. What a cover for the Head -- my God, he owns Sector Four!" They slept until half past two; then went into the main tent to watch the climax of the matinee. They watched, with trained and minutely observant eyes, Yvette and Jules d'Alembert perform flawlessly a heart-stopping variation of the act they themselves had performed the night before. Five minutes later, the younger couple still in spangles, the four d'Alemberts sat at a table in the commissary. The two men looked very much alike; so did the two girls -- which was not surprising, since the two couples were two pairs of twins born of the same parents three yean apart No one except a DesPlainian could have told the two men or the two girls apart except by direct comparison. To the personnel of the Circus of the Galaxy this succession of top stars was routine. In the two-hundred-year history of the Circus there had been almost a hundred pairs called "Jules and Yvette d'Alembert"; there would continue to be a succession of them, one new pair every two or three years, as long as the Circus should endure. "How'd we do, Gran'paw?" the younger brother asked. "It must have been a treat to see a good performance of your act." "Close the orifice, Jules," the younger girl broke in. "Oh, you're calling me Jules already?" "Certainly. You are Jules now. What I started to say was, that's the way people break their arms, patting themselves on the back so much." "Oke. What I meant was, I'm glad the Head pulled them out of the Circus for special duty. It wouldn't be too long before they'd spatter themselves all over the ring the way their joints are creaking now. How about that, Jules?" and Jules grinned at Jules. "That is very true and very sad. Jules," Jules agreed, as a waitress came up to take their orders. "These ancient and unwieldy bones are just about ready for the fertilizer mill. The old-time pep is all shot..." "Stop crying, Jules, poor dear," the waitress said. She was, of course, a d'Alembert, too; and she had been a star. "Before I break down and dilute your soup with a flood of tears of my own. The King and Queen are dead, et cetera. So what? You're just getting started on your real jobs. The usual?" "Not quite," Yvette said. "You can get fresh orange juice here and I'm drowning myself in it. Squeeze me half a liter, please Felice dear, besides the usual." " 'Drowning yourself is right," the younger Yvette said, darkly. "I've got to watch my figure; so Fll have one small glass of lemon sour and a lamb chop." After eating, the older Jules and Yvette left the Circus -- without a ripple to show that they had gone. V Communism could gain no foothold on the new , raw planets. Communists wanted to agitate , not work; and on the planets a man either worked or died . Confined to Earth and no longer able to keep its masses in line by the imaginary menace of warmongering Capitalism , and facing squarely the fact that men will not produce efficiently under the lash , Communism came to a very low ebb... until it was saved by Premier Koslov, a strong and able executive , who in # IF made himself King Boris I of Earth and formed a harsh but just absolute monarchy based upon the profit motive. ( Stanhope , Elements of Empire, p#) Citizens of Earth J ules and Yvette studied, analyzed and restudied forty-seven spools of top-secret date, then sent them -- top-secretly -- through channels back to the Head. Then they visited more or less openly almost every district of Earth. At every point they encountered the same not-right odor. Something was definitely wrong. Security had been breached -- within the Service itself! To Jules and Yvette d'Alembert the situation shrieked for action -- instant effective action, at that. If the Service caught a chill, a hundred outlying planets lay under the threat of double pneumonia. For the Service was the ganglionic nerve system of the Stanleys themselves... and every bright, burning star, every immensely long, black spacelane, every whirling world and pocket of cosmic dust trembled and shook when those nerves tingled. As the evidence grew it became clear that there were two courses of action. They could patiently, painstakingly search, sift and study... and hope for a break... or they could plunge themselves into a trouble spot -- offer themselves as bait -- risk life and limb on a gamble, and trust to mind and muscle to get them out. These were the choices... But really, there was no choice -- because they were the d'Alemberts. "Out of everything we've learned I can see only three points of attack outside of Durward itself," Jules said, thoughtfully. "Algonia, Nevander, and Aston. Years apart. Three forged Patents of Royalty, fiightynine good agents down the drain... most of them probably as smart as we are... in spite of all the them..." He paused. "Uh-huh. Go on. Or because of it." the solider the security. We think. But that thing in the Head's office didn't smell exactly like Coty's L'Arigon." "I'll say it didn't. Usually they commit suicide or get their throats cut, but he simply disappeared. Absolutely vanished." "So we'll roll our own, except maybe for tops. So the big question is, what's our best cover?" "Well, we can't be Earthers, that's for sure." Yvette shrugged her shoulders and indicated his shape and her own. "Nor Delfians, to stand inspection. We're obviously DesPlainians. No other high-gravity planets were ever colonized, were there? Except Purity, of course... I wonder." Jules frowned in thought. "That's a thought, sis; that splinter-group of crackpots on Purity. We can be Puritans." Yvette nibbled her lip. "But would it work? They won't have anything to do with anybody they don't absolutely have to. Everybody's too rinful. They expect all the other planets, especially mother-planet DesPlaines, to be whiffed into incandescent vapor any minute by the wrath of God. There are a lot of renegade Puritans, though. Sinners ." "That's what I meant. We'll play it that they kicked us off because we got to be too sinful. We liked to dance and play cards and drink soda pop -- to say nothing of mining gold and platinum and diamonds and emeralds and bootlegging all our stuff to Earth. That's the way we made all our money. Remember?" Yvette laughed. "Just dimly. I must have been looking the other way at the time, but you can fill me in. They have kicked a lot of people off of Purity for doing just that -- and for much smaller sins, as well. Go ahead; it listens good." "Oke, but I don't know exactly what... get into compound low, brain, and start grinding... how about this? We'll have the Head make us ex-Puritan Citizens of Earth. You know how toplofty and you-be-damned Earthers are, out on the planets." "Uh-huh, and we'll be toploftier and you-be-damneder than anybody. I like." "Right. Concealment by obviousness. Rut as you said, not too many people ever even heard of Purity, and with our builds -- your build especially -- but wait a minute, how about disguising mel Hair down to my shoulders; waved and Hquidgolded. Eyebrows shaved to a different shape and golded. Handle-bar mustache, waxed to points and golded. A cockeyed hat with gold plumes two feet long. Cloth-of-gold sleeveless jersey and tight purple trunks. Arms and legs bare. A million dollars worth of jewelry -- genuine -- and a big, heavy swagger-stick that's really a blaster on one end and a stunner on the other. Think anybody'd recognize me as a DesPlainian in that kind of a fancy rig?" "I'll say they wouldn't!"' Yvette laughed delightedly, "anywhere on DesPlaines they'd shoot you on sight. The idea being that everyone would look at you and not bother to even wonder whether I was ir DesPlainian or not." "Uh-huh. Maybe it's a bit thin, but..." "I've got news for you, Buster." Yvette laughed again. "Not only it's thin, but also if you think I'm going to play little brown hen to that gorgeous hunk of rooster you're out of your mind. I'll design me a costume that will knock everybody's eyes right out of their sockets -- one that no DesPlainian woman would be caught dead in at a cat-fight." "Now you're chirping, birdie!" "That'll be fun! But it'll take months to grow your hair... a wig? Uh-uh." "Uh-uh is correct. Too chancy. But they've been working on this case for sixty-seven years, so a few extra weeks isn't going to make any important difference. And we'll have plenty to do in the meantime." "That's true. Oka -- let's fly at " IF T hus it came about, some time later, that the Executive Office of the Duke of Algonia was invaded by a couple whose likes had never before been seen on the planet Algonia -- or, for that matter, on any other planet. Jules was just as spectacular as his specifications had called for; Yvette was even more so. She, too, wore purple and gold -- what little there was of it -- with the arrangement of colors the exact reverse of his. Her shoes -- not silly pumps, but half-calf-high sure-grips studded with precious stones -- were royal purple. Her tight shorts were of golden jersey; her tight, sleeveless upper garment was of exactly the same shade of purple as her shoes and hair. She wore a wide, heavilyjeweled belt of nylon-backed gold; a jeweled half-veil of fine gold mesh; and, to cap the climax, a towering gold-filigree headdress of diamonds, emeralds and rubies that had been appraised at and insured thousand dollars. Paying no attention to the startled stares of the waiting people and office personnel, they walked calmly to the head of the line at the receptionist's desk. "We are citizens of Earth," Jules explained, as he courteously but firmly edged himself into the narrow space between a fat woman and the desk. He leaned over, picked up the amazed receptionist's hand and tucked a hundred-dollar bill into it. "Carlos and Carmen Velasquez, Citizens of Earth," he said gently, and dropped two ID cards onto her desk. "This k where visitors to your fair planet register, is it not?" "Oh, no, sir -- thank you, sir," the flustered girl said, as soon aa her eyes got back into place and she could again use her voice. ,  sir. "You will take care of it, my dear." Jules dropped three more notes on the desk. "Bring the cards over to the Hotel Splendide, after you have attended to it. We'll be there for a few days... or a few weeks, perhaps. Thank you, my girl." And the two walked out of the office as unconcernedly as they had walked in. At the Splendide; which was the plushiest caravansery the planet boasted, they soon became the favorite guests. Not only because they had the penthouse suite; #ut also because neither of them knew, apparently, that there was any smaller unit of currency than a five-dollar Earth bill. Whatever else they did, however, they always walked at a good, stiff hiking gait for at least an hour after supper. For the first few nights they explored; but after that, having found a route they liked, they stuck to it. Every night thereafter they drove out beyond the city limits, parked their car and took a six-mile hike along a fixed succession of narrow, lonely backcountry roads and bridle-paths; a route that had five places made to order for ambush -- and a route that they had gone to much trouble to publicize. For six nights they swung along at their five-miles-an-hour hiking gait in complete silence...  Complete silence? Yes. Their suregrip shoes made not even a whisper of sound against the blacktop: no item of their apparel or equipment rattled or tinkled or squeaked or even rustled. Everything had been designed that way. They could hear, but they could not be beard. Anyone laying for them would have to see them -- and they themselves had very acute hearing and aerialists' eyesight. Swinging along a clear stretch of road, Yvette asked, "S'pose we goofed, Julie?" "Uh-uh. Pretty sure not. It's just taking them time to get set. Senor and Senora Velasquez aren't the type to just disappear; it'd raise too much of a stink. Also, besides the king-size fortunes we're wearing, everybody knows that we've got enough money in the safe at the Splendide to start a bank and they'll want that So the job will take a lot of planning. This three-quartersnaked stunt wasn't designed to make it tough to impersonate us, but how would you go about finding two people to check out of the Splendide -- and get that half a megabuck out of their safe -- as us?" "Nicer" Yvette laughed. "I never though of it cutting both ways. They'll simply have to get a Des Plainian gangster and his moll... but wouldn't they have them ready?" "I don't think so. You don't find very many DesPlainians on lightgrav planets except in grav-controfled buildings. They no like -- for which I don't blame them. Another month of this with no work at gray and you and I both will be as flabby as two tubs of boiled noodles." "So we hope it won't be a month. Oke; we'll give 'em a few more days." Five more hikes were eventless. But on the sixth, at a place where the road would through a coppice of small trees and dense underbrush, their straining ears heard sounds and their keen eyes' saw movement F or concealment, the place was perfect, but in order to act the attackers had to move -- and low-echelon thugs are not very smart. Also, they had no idea whatever how fast their proposed quarry could move. Jules' hat and swagger stick and Yvette's tiara and handbag hit the blacktop practically at once as the two took off in low, flat dives ; he to his side of the road, she to hers. Diving straight through a bush, Jules slapped the nearest man lightly on the head -- gently, so as not to break his neck -- picked him up, and hurled him at another man, some twelve feet away, who was just getting to his feet. One jump -- he slugged the third in the solar plexus and in the same instant kicked the fourth in the face -- not with his toe, but with the whole big flat sole of his shoe. Four down and one to go. But this action had taken almost a second of time -- plenty of time for Number Five to get organized. Maybe he was the boss, since he'd been smut IP enough to station himself well off to one side. Number Two, who hadn't been hurt much, began to regain consciouness and to thrash around. Jules snaked bellywise over to him, picked his stunner up, and tapped him on the jaw with its butt. Then Jules crawled noiselessly around until he found a place from which he could get a fairly clear view toward Number Five; who, although he did not seem to realize it, was making a lot of noise. The seeing wasn't good -- the moon, while high, was only at quarter -- but jpt much light is necessary to use a stun-gun at close quarters. " P-s-s-s-t " the hood said, finally. "Ed! Hank! Spike! Did you get 'em. What the hell goes on?" He put his head out from behind a tree... and what went on was a halfhour stun. "Eve?" Jules asked then, of empty air. "Five here." "Same here," she replied from across the road. "No sweat. Is there any clear space over there?" "Yes -- we'll lug 'em over here." Yvette recovered her towering headdress and bag, then came across the road, dragging two limp forms by the collars of their leather jackets. In a few minutes ten unconscious or dead men -- Jules was afraid that he had hit Number Three a little too hard -- were laid out on their backs in a neat row. Jules picked up a stunner, then paused. "Uh-uh," he said, "Better give 'em the talk-juice now, so they'll be ready when we get 'em out of the house." "That'd be better." And Yvette took a hypodermic kit out of her bag and went to work. VI In two centuries the colonized planets numbered seven hundred , many of them having large populations. Interstellar commerce increased exponentially . Interstellar crime became rampant . The government of Earth , under a succession of strong and able kings , had been in fact an imperium for many years when , in #, King Stanley the Sixth of Earth crowned himself Emperor Stanley One of the Empire of Earth. ( Stanhope , Elements of Empire , p#). Storming the Castle Tules and Yvette did not drive  their car -- which was of course the biggest and most expensive one obtainable -- back to the hotel. Instead, they loaded their victims into the limousine like cordwood and took them to the "house" they had rented long since -- an estate so big and so far away from anywhere that the nearest neighbors meter Bofors working at full automatic. They unloaded their freight, then listened to the nine surviving hoodlums tell, completely unable to lie or withhold knowledge, everything they knew about crime -- and especially its biggest chief. The gamble paid off. "Got it!" exulted Jules when they were done. "I knew our friends -- whoever they are -- wouldn't stay out of a heist with this kind of money involved. But who would have thought that it was the Baron of Osberg... "You for one, brother dear," supplied Yvette. "And maybe me for another -- at least we knew the boss traitor had to be somebody big -- but tell me, are we going to sit here all night patting you on the back or are we going to do something?" Jules grinned and gave her a mock-salute. Then they gave each of the men a twelve-hour stun and went elsewhere. The castle of the Baron of Osberg was some seventy miles away. They parked the car a good mile down the road from it and, after selecting certain items of equipment, went the rest of the way on foot, being very careful not to be seen. Then, very cautiously and keeping continuously under cover, they made their way around what was actually a fortress. The two gates, front and rear, were built of two-inch-square bar steel, topped with charged barbed wire. Neither could be opened except by electronic impulses from inside the castle. The estate was surrounded by a reenforced concrete wall fifteen feet high, surmounted by interlaced . strands of charged barbed wire. The two grinned at each other and separated. Taking advantage of the high, thick hedges bordering the drive, they sneaked up to within six feet of the wall. Both squatted down. Eyes met eyes through the lower, leafless part of the hedges. Muscles tensed and, at Yvette's nod both leaped at full strength upward and inward. Each cleared the topmost wire by a good three feet, stunners drawn, and at the top of their silent flight they fired rapidly and precisely, stunning every guard they could see. Then, running around the main building, each taking a side, they stunned everything that moved. Yvette ran for the garage; Jules ran to the castle's back door. It was locked, of course! but a Talbot cutter burned the lock away in seconds. Jules did not know whether that door opened directly into the kitchen or into a hall; but the fact that it did open into the back hall mai# the job easy and simple. The door to the kitchen was not locked. The dozen or so people in it slumped bonelessly to the floor before any one of them realized that anything unusual was going on. Through the kitchen Jules went, through the butler's pantry and the serving hall, and put an eye to a tiny crack between thick velvet drapes. The "commons" room was immense. Its beamed ceiling and paneled walls were of waxed yellowwood. It was furnished lavishly and decorated profusely with ancestral portraits. At the far end there was an antlered fireplace in which a sixfoot log smoldered. Eleven men were in that room; some sitting, some standing; smoking or drinking or both; talking only occasionally and mostly in monosyllables; glancing much too frequently at watches on their wrists. Jules brought his stunner to bear and all eleven collapsed limply into IP their chairs or onto the floor. In a couple of minute Yvette came in. "Oke outside" she reported crisply. "Now the big frisk." "That's right." They went over the castle from subcellar to garrets, and when they were through they knew that everyone else inside the wall was unconscious. Then, and only then. Jules went over to the communicator, cut its video and punched a number. "This is the Service of the Empire," a perfectly-trained, beautifully-modulated voice came from the speaker. "How may I serve you? If you will turn your vision on, please?" "Sote six," Jules said. "Affold abacus zymase bezant. The head depends upon the stomach for survival." "Bub-but-but, sir... The change in the girl's voice was shocking. She had never heard any two of those four six-letter code words spoken together, and coupled with the words "head" and "survival" they knocked her out of control for a moment; but she rallied quickly. "He's home asleep, sir, but I'll get him right away. One moment, please," and Jules heard the strident clatter of an unusually loud squawk-box. "Lemme 'lone," a sleepy voice protested. "G'way. Cut out the damn racket or..." "Mr. Borton! Wake up!" the girl almost screamed. " Please wake up! It's a crash-pri red urgent!" "Oh." That had done it. "Oke, Hazel; thanks." "You are connected, sirs, and I'm out. Signal green, please, when you are through. #  She would much rather take a beating than listen to any part of the conversation that was to follow, whether she could understand any of it or not. "Praxis," Borton said. (Request for identification, symbol, or authority). "Fazzle and Fezzle." (Their own identifying numbers -- Agents Eighteen and Nineteen). "Holy..." Borton began, but shut himself up. The very top skimmings of the very top cream of the entire Service! "Oke." "Rafter, angles, angels. Angled. Suffer. Harlot static invert, cosine design. Single-joyful, singer, status, stasis. Over. "Afy -- God! Oke, but you didn't say where you are." "I don't know your code for local specifics, so... comprehend Old English ig-pay attin-lay?" "Ess-yay." 'Tate-ess-ay aron-bay berg-ozzay." "Catch . # "Front gate. Douse you glims short-long-short Over and out if oke." "Catch. Oke," Borton said. And its was oke -- perfectly so. If Agents Eighteen and Nineteen told any in the lake he'd do it -- and fast. "Here's your green, Hazel. Thanks." I n the time that elapsed before Borton's arrival at the estate of Baron's Osberg, Jules and Yvette questioned the eleven men. They didn't get enough to give them a dear lead to the planet Aston and a general idea of what the mob on Aston would have to be like. Then Borton arrived and they let him in. "You!" he exclaimed, looking from one spectacular agent to the other and back again. "Thafs a switch. You came in with bands blaring and pennons waving." "Check. They would be looking for pussy-footers." "Could be... If I may ask, I suppose there's a good reason why I wasn't let in on any of this?" #I "Very good. Come in and you'll see what it was." They led him back into the commons room and Jules waved an arm at the stupefied qten who, glazed eyes unseeing, , lolled slackly in chairs. "You used Nitrobarb," Borton said. "And on the Baron of Osberg. Half of them will die. I see." "They'll all die," Jules said grimly."Especially the Baron. Those who live through this will live a few days longer than the others. Is all. But you really don't see, yet Keep on looking." Borton's fast-panning gaze came to a burly, crew-cut man of thirtyodd and stopped. His face turned gray; he was too shocked and too surprised even to swear. "That's Alf Rixton," he managed finally. "My first assistant. He's been with me over ten years! top clearance -- lie-detector and hypnosis -- every year. He's done splendid work." "Yeah -- for the other side," Jules said coldly. "The only ones he ever gave you were the ones they wanted to get rid of. Take over, Borton, it's all yours. We'll IF have to stick around for a while -- it'd smell cheesy if we'd leave the planet too soon -- but we don't want to appear in this. Not a whisper. Nobody around here got a glimpse of us, but there are nine men -- " he told him about them -- "who shouldn't talk." "They won't. But listen! This mess here -- I couldn't possibly have done this alone!" "Of course not." Jules grinned. "Your assistant there cooked the whole deal up and helped you swing it. He was a tiger on wheels. Too bad the honors are posthumous."  Borton nodded slowly. "Thanks. One of our very best, he died a hero's death, defending gallantly and so forth -- sob, sob -- the louse. But this thing of me taking all the credit for an operation that..." He broke off and grinned wryly. "Oke." "Uh-huh," Jules agreed. Then he and Yvette said in unison, "Here's to tomorrow, fellow and friend. May we all live to see it!" And they strode blithely out. One nest had been cleared out -- it was time to move on to the next! Borton, motionless, stared at the closed door. He knew what those two were -- Agent Eighteen and Nineteen -- but that was all he knew or ever would know about them... But he had too much to do to waste much time wool-gathering. Shrugging his shoulders, he called his office and issued orders. Then he set up his recorder and began to ask questions of the hoodlums who were still alive. vn Empress Stanley # also reorganized, simplified and in a sense standardized the theretofore chaotic system of nobility. Her system , which has been changed very little throughout the years , is in essence as follows . Grand Dukes ride sectors of space, each containing many planets . Dukes rule single planets. Marquises ride continents or the equivalents thereof. Earls rule states or small nation. Counts rule counties. Barons rule cities or districts. Primogeniture is strict , with no distinction as to sex. Nobles may marry commoners or higher or lower nobles ; the lowerborn of each pair being automatically raised to the full rank of the higher-born spouse. ( Stanhope , Elements of Empire , p#) The Switch T he news broke early the following morning. It broke with a crash that was channeled to every planet of civilization. Carlos and Carmen Velasquez knew nothing of it until half past ten, when the eager waiter hurried in with the breakfast they had ordered a few minutes before. Ho was accompanied this time by his captain, who carried both morning papers in his hand. "Good morning, sir and madam," that worthy said. "You have perhaps not heard the extraordinary news on your receiver?" "Uh-us." Jules covered a yawn with his hand an shook his head. "We're hardly awake yet." He was wearing only purple-and-gold pajamas; Yvette wore her fabulous headpiece and a purple-and-gold robe that, while opaque in a few places here and there, was practically transparent everywhere else. "Something happen?" "Most assuredly! The most tremendous, the most sensational erf happenings, be assured!" He put the papers down on a side table and helped the waiter arrange the breakfast table most meticulously. "But you will read of it later. You will eat your breakfast now, please, while it is hot." And the two hotel men accepted gratuities and went back downstairs. After eating, Jules and Yvette went through the story with interest -- if with an occasional snort or giggle. The official version was der the masterly direction and leadership of Planetary Chief Borton, had been keeping this band of traitors under close and continuous surveillance for over a year. They had waited until they were sure that they had found every member and connection of the band, then they had struck everywhere at once. They had made a clean sweep. Faced with absolute proof of guilt, each traitor had confessed and each had been promptly executed, including the Baron of Osberg, who had been the leader. All had been cremated and their ashes had been dumped. The reporter was very glad to say that, since the Baron was the only member of his family involved in the crime, the Barony of Osberg would not revert to the crown. The Baroness Carlotta, who was very well known as a philanthropic clubwoman would succeed -- and so on. Planetary Chief Borton had had no help, not even from Earth. And there was no hint anywhere that nitrobarb -- the mere possession of which was by law a capital offense -- had been used. "Nice," Yvette said. "That story is so tight I almost believe it myself. But you said we'd have to stick around. Why? The fact that we were here on the planet -- coupled with the fact that those two Delfians had to be DesPlainians  would be plenty for people not half as smart as they are. Whether we stay here a month or leave today makes no difference -- except perhaps as an exercise in the old guessing game." "That's probably right, at that... Oke, we'll shoot in a call for the ship as soon as we're dressed." S ince the ship had to come from DesPlaines, it was eight days later that Carlos and Carmen Velasquez left the Hotel Splendide for the spaceport, scattering largesse from the penthouse to the limousine as they went. It was good to fed real gravity again; it was vastly more than good, when, safely inside a private lounge of the big subspaeer, they were met by three particular people -- two of whom were very special people indeed. " Julesl " a brown-haired girl shrieked, and took off at him in IF a flying leap from a distance of twelve feet. "Vonnie! Sweetheart!" He caught her expertly, although her momentum swung him around in a full circle; and for a long, ecstatic minute they stood almost motionless, locked fiercely in each other's arms. Yvonne pulled back a little, looked at him closely and shook her head. "I've got to have a picture of you. Both of you. They told me, but this is a thing that has got to be seen to believed. You always were a handsome dog, Julie, but now you're simply beautifull " She kissed him a few more times. "But I don't like that mustache -- it tickles! You know something? I asked the Council to let me be Carmen Velasquez -- begged them, practically on my knees -- but the old stinkers wouldn't. They made me take the thousand-point test, just like everybody else, and Gabby here beat me out." Jules grinned. "Did you think they wouldn't?" "Well, they certainly ought to've given me the job, since I'm engaged to the only thousapd-pointer alive. Anyway, I speared second place. I got nine eighty-nine." "That's mighty good going, sweet." There was a brief interlude, then Jules, with his arm still around his Yvonne's waist, turned to the two others, whom he hadn't even looked at before. The man was of his own age, size and shape, his hair, mustache, and eyebrows matched Jules' exactly. The girl, too, except for costume, was a very reasonable facsimile of Yvette, purpie hair and al. The man had been embracing Yvette ardently; the girl, having taken the towering ornament from Yvette's head and put it on her own, was unblushingly admiring herself in a mirror. "Hi, Gabby; hi, Jacques," Jules said, extending his free hand. "'Gabby', indeed!" the girl said, tossing her head in fine scorn. '"Grand Lady Gabrielle' to you, lout. I don't think IH even speak to any of the common herd any more unless they come crawling, bumping their foreheads on the floor." "Hear, hear!" "That's telling him, Gabby!" Yvette and Jacques said at once, and Yvette added: "I liked wearing these jewels and that crown and stuff, darn it," she mourned. "They did something for me," and the conversation became general. Jules and Yvette took off their spectacular finery and turned it over to the new Carlos and Carmen. They had their hair un-dyed and rebarbered long and plain; and Jules un-waxed and un-curled his mustache. They donned shapeless brown trousers and jackets of homespun and became in appearance somewhat unorthodox Puritans. The switch completed, at the next transfer-point a new Carlos and Carmen Velasquez, still tossing five-dollar Earth bills around like confetti, boarded the biggest and plushiest liner in port for a planet halfway across all explored space. T here wasn't room enough is Jules' cabin for him to pace the floor, so he stood still, with clenched fists jammed into his pockets. Yvette sat on his narrow bunk, frowning in concentration. "It's like fighting a fog," Jules aid, scowling. "And yet everything we find is just too damned pat" "You just lost me. Fog, yes. But I haven't noticed any patness." hasn't found any evidence that Duke Henry of Durward wasn't I, T, IT." "Which goes to show that he was." "Does it? He milked Durward of bucks. But could he possibly have got away with enough to finance a project that big this long? And the others... "I see what you mean. Never mind the others, let's pursue this one. Either he had help from the start or he hooked up with some. He'd have to, to do what he did." "That's sure. Yet nobody ever got a solid trace, ever. And the leads they did get didn't point to anything solid; just to nit-picking tuff. My thought is that every one of those leads was a trap -- a trap that worked." "And we weren't trapped because we made them come to us." "I'm not even sure of that." "My God! Surely you don't think this is a trap!" "Not exactly. I just think it may be. We have to follow it, of course, but we'll follow it with our eyes wide open and everything we've got on the trips. And if what we dig up points to Durward -- we'll go anywhere else in all space but there." "So you thing everybody's been barking up the wrong trees and all they've got is forty-seven reels of junk and..." "I said mayber Jules snapped. "I don't know anything!" "Which puts you one up on makes the most sense of anything I've heard yet So we jettison the junk and start from scratch... the big question being -- how? You're implying a Grand Duke. We can't go running around sticking nitrobarb into Grand Dukes at random." "How true; but you've read about top mobsters?" "So look. Durward is in Sector Ten. Algonia is in Three, Aston is in Six, Nevander is in Thirteen and Gastonia is a rim-world clear to hellangone out on the edge of Twenty." "How did Gastonia sneak into this muddle? It was muddled enough already, without another question mark." "My own idea. Empress Stanley Five started exiling rebels there way back in the twenty-two hundreds sometime and they've been doing it ever since. What could be nicer for recruiting purposes? But to get back on the beam, the Head thinks this thing is getting ripe. If it is, whoever's doing it has had to do a lot of heavy work and spent an ungodly lot of money. You can hide a lot of building -- armaments and such -- even without putting it underground. But you can't hide big flows of money from experts who know I J U how to look. So if you don't think I'm nuts,, we'll message the Head tonight to check the growth curves of all the planets for the last seventy got onto the top five or six." She looked at him admiringly. "I'm for it; strong. And then we go to Gastonia, or wherever?" "No. Then we go to Earth." She looked puzzled for a moment, then her face cleared. "I see. It would have to be a Grand Duke, at that, to get an agent into -- and especially out of -- the Head's own office... and the brains would almost have to be on Earth. You care smart, Julie; maybe we're getting Ttftoewbere, after all." T he ship docked and the two, they expected real trouble, and preparations were being made to handle it -- made their way to the middle-class dive that was the favorite hangout of the lower officers and the highest crewmen of whatever subspacers happened to be in port. That was all they had -- the name of the dive and a cryptic recognition signal bought for them by nitrobarb at the cost of a man's life. But it was enough. Since the latest ship to come to ground was DesPlainian, the six bouncer-guards of the place -- it was a somewhat unusual fact that all six of them were DesPlainians -- thought nothing of it when half a dozen leather-clad DesPlainian spacemen came bouncing in, shouting for strong drink and friendly girls. How could the guards have suspected anything? Or the brains, either, since the d'Alemberts had pitched them such a nice curve? There was no evidence that the Veslasquez pair had anything to do with what had happened on Algonia. And if they had had, what were they skyshooting off into the middle of nowhere for? The renegade Puritans' came in -- it was quite evident that they were renegades, since no Puritan in good standing would ever enter a bar -- and looked unconoernedly around. Since it was early in the afternoon, only one bartender was at work and only a few waitresses and B girls were on hand. The two strolled up to the bar and Jules said, "I was told to ask for the Blinding Flash and say the Deafening Report sent  me. The entire room exploded. The six guards tried, but before any of them could get his blaster half into action he was struck by over an eighth of a ton of the hardest meat he had ever felt. In the same instant Jules put his left arm around the bartender's throat and, with the blaster now in his right hand, drilloperator's head. He then whistled sharply at the terrified girls and waved his weapon at a corner; into which they and the few non-combatant customers were very glad indeed to run. In the meantime Yvette had divthe single earphone off the man's head, put it on her own, let the body fall and sat at the board. In two minutes the place was a shambles. When a five-hundredpound pair of DesPlainian freestyle brawlers strikes furniture it is the furniture that breaks, not the men. Two tables and half-a-dozen chairs remained intact; one savagely warring pair had gone straight through the heavy yellow-wood bar. And Jules, standing at ease with his blaster hanging at the loose, studied with keen appreciation the battles going on. He was not worried about the outcome. Only one result was possible. The guards were good, but they were not d'Alembert -- and those six d'Alemberts were the pick of the hardest-trained troupe of no-holds-barred fighting wrestlers known to man. In three and one-half minutes the place was practically a total loss, but the battle was over. The six survivors sported a few eyes that would soon be black, some contusions and abrasions, and several cuts, tears, scratches, gouges and bites that were bleeding more or less freely, but there had been no real damage at all. #I Jules said, as the sixth spaceman came to his feet, grinning hugely. "Drink up. There'll be at least some ginger ale left in whole bottles -- I think. And break out some champagne for the cuties. I wouldn't know whether they're still in the mood for fun and games or not, but at least we'll do the gentlemanly thing about the drinks. Now, barkeep my friend -- " he lifted that wight one-handedly over the bar, set him on his feet and put both big hands uncomfortably tight around his throat -- "Do you want to tell me all about all the gizmos between here and the boss upstairs or do I wring your neck exactly like a chicken's?" "I'll tell, I'll tell!" the man squawked. "Don't wring my neck -- please don't! It's all on the board there -- really it is -- the whole works!" "He isn't lying, Julie," Yvette said. "There's a whole row of special red indicators that doesn't belike the boss rings down and they set the traps from the board here." "That's it, that's it!" the man babbled. "There are blackjight beams across the halls up there, set to trigger blasters and stunners. The boss calls down and the man on the board sets up whatever he orders." "Oke. What's his door like -- wood or steel? Locked? And how about guards up there?" "Wood. Not locked. No guards -- no trouble ever gets to where he is, sir. He would've set 'em, of course -- " nodding his head at the dead blasted 'im too quick." "Oke. Lead the way. That's so in case of trouble you'll get it first -- from me, if necessary." Nothing happened until they reached the Boss's door. The bartender knocked -- no code, Jules noticed. A voice from inside the room called "Come in," and the pilot opened the door and led the way into the office. The man behind the desk was alone in the room. He gasped once, turned pale and reached for a row of buttons; IF but stopped the motion halfway as Jules' blaster came to bear. "Go ahead, push 'em," Jules said, but the boss, except for twitching muscles, made no move whatever as Jules gave the bartender a tap on the jaw, taking a hypodermic kit out of his pocket, went up to the desk. The man's eyes widened in panic fear. "Not that -- please not nitrobarb!" he pleaded, desperately. "I'm allergic to the stuff -- it'll kill me sure, my doctor says." "What makes you think this is nitrobarb? It could be plain distilled water!" ."Don't JTi ace me, mister! I think I probably know what you want... and you don't need to give me anything! I'll tell you everything I know without it, honestly I will!" And he did, and once again the d'Alemberts listened to the secrets of a traitors' nest. And it was, as Jules had expected it to be, a clear, straight lead to one man in one city of the planet of Durward. "Oke," Jules said, finally. "I won't kill you -- this time. Just tell your boss on Durward I'm coming; loaded to the gills with stuff he never even heard of." Then the eight d'Alemberts went back to their ship; where Jules and Yvette spent all the rest of the day and almost all of that night in the control room, the most secure spot they could find, composing and encoding a long message to the Head. When it was done, Jules rose, stretched and walked over to the galactic chart. Her eyes brooding, he set it for maximum span and turned on the activating circuits. As the great wispy star-clouds of the galactic lens took form, each surveyed star positioned with minute accuracy, he keyed the index locators for Durward, the planet to which all their hard-earned information pointed so surely, and for old Earth. Quickly the taped data spools whined and spun and printed out course and the dizzying distance in parsecs between the two planets. He said slowly, "All the signs say Durward is were the action is... " "I know, Julie," said his sister, covering a yawn. "So, of course we go to Earth. Well, what are we waiting for?" All explored space was divided into # wedge-shaped sectors; the line common to all sectors being the line through the center of Sol perpendicular to the plane of the Earth s orbit. Each sector was owned , subject only to the Throne , by a Grand Duke , Earth, by far the most important planet, did not belong to any sector , but was the private property of the Throne. Each Grand Duke had a palace , several residences and a Hall of State on Earth. Because of these facts the nobility of Earth were far more powerful than their titles indicated. The Principal Palace, in which all Grand Imperial Courts were held , was in Chicago; hence the Count of Chicago had more real power than most Earls and Marquises. More, in fact, than many Dukes . (Manley, Feudalism; Reel l, Intro Sec viii) The Massagerie I n his private office the Head was talking with a gray-haired man who, while old, was in no sense decrepit. Grand Lady Helena sat, shapely legs crossed, working on a twelve-ounce glass of cherry-icecream float. "But what does it mean , Zan?" the older man asked. "Route the Circus to Durward -- with instructions not to do anything whatever except circus routine. Carlos and Carmen Velasquez will not report and nothing they do, however wild, will be of any importance. And now this eawy-parlor business, right here on Earth I It doesn't make sense." "Not a beauty parlor, Bill. A massagerie de luxe. Or rather, The House of Strength of Body and of Heart'." "But don't you know what they're doing?" "Very little; and I don't want to know more. I give them a job; they do it their own way. I would hazard a guess that they have some reason to believe that a specific person they are interested in is likely to take an interest in bodybuilding. This, you will note, implies that they have reached the point of being interested in specific persons... but I don't know who. That is to the good. "As a recent event proved, the less I know of detail, the better." "That's true. No trace of your missing person?" "None. There probably won't be any until the d'Alemberts crack the main case. While they're working on it they get anything they want, with no questions asked." "As they should, especially since they want so little from us. I know that Circus taxes are rebated, but surely they spend more than that on Empire business?" "My guess is, they don't. The Circus is so successful that its taxes are very high, but the Duke won't say how high. I asked him once if we didn't owe him some money and he told me if I wanted to count pennies I'd better go get myself a job in a dime store." The old man laughed. "That sounds exactly like him. But DesPlaines is a rich planet, you know, and Etienne d'Alembert is a tremendously able man -- as well as being one of my best friends. Well, I'll leave you to your work. I like to talk to you when I'm feeling low, Zan; you give me a lift." He raised his glass. "Tomorrow, fellow and friend. May we all live to see it." They drank the toast and Emperor Stanley Ten, erect and springy, left the room. Helena grinned up at her father. "You didn't exactly lie, either; but if he knew as much as we do he wouldn't feel so uplifted." "He has troubles enough of his own without having to carry ours. Besides, we don't know who they're after. It could turn out to be someone outside those six, as well as not." The girl nodded. "If we had even a good suspicion, he'd get a shot of nitrobarb. All we know is that they haven't got a shred of evidence of anything. But how under the sun and moon and eleven circumpolar IP stars can this glorified gymnasium help solve anything?" "I haven't the most tenuous idea, my dear -- and just between us two, I'm just as curious as you are." A ten story gravity controlled building in the Evanston district of Chicago had been remodeled from top to bottom. All the work had been done by the high-grav personnel who now occupied the building. Over its splendidly impossign flared red: . and on each side of the portal, in small, severely plain obsidian letters on a silver background, a plaque read: duClos For weeks before the opening it had been noised abroad that this House of Strength would cater only to the topmost flakes of the upper crust; and that was precisely what it did. It turned down applicants, even of the nobility, by the score. Its first clients, and for some time its only clients, were the extremely powerful Count of Chicago, his Countess and their two gangling teen-age daughters. Since this display of ultra-snobbishness appealed very strongly to the ultra-snobbishness of the high nobility of the Capital of Empire, "duClos" raised snobbery to a height of performance very seldom seen anywhere. "Howre you doing, sis?" Jules asked, one evening. "I'm getting a few bites, but nothing solid. But there's a feel about Sector Twenty that I don't like -- I'm sure we're on the right track." "So am I, and I'm getting an idea. I wasn't going to mention it until I could thicken it up a little, but here goes. You know that Duchess of Swingleton? That snooty stinker that's supposed to be the daughter of the Grand Duchess?" Jules came to attention with a snap. "Supposed to be?" "Well, is then. Maybe I shouldn't have put it quite that way -- but you know how I've learned to sneer, in my own inimitable ladylike way?" "I wouldn't put that 'quite that way', either. If it was me on the receiving end I'd sock you right in the middle of your puss." "She'd really like to. I've been giving her the royal snoot all along and she's burning like a torch. But her mother, Grand Duchess Olga, takes it in stride. So why wouldn't Swingleton... unless she's bursting at the seams with something she's bottling up?" "My God, Eve! You think she's the Bastard's daughter?" "I'm not that far along yet; it's just a possibility. Not daughter; sixty-seven he would be; she's only about twenty. Still in the silly age -- which may account for her touchiness and everything. She's beautiful, athletic, rich, talented, noble and spoiled rotten. Her hobby is men. She works hard at it. So my thought is this: if she gets the idea from somewhere that duClos himself is the #? ness I'm positive that she'll insist sented, walked slowly around her on you coaching her yourself -- once, studying her from head to personally. You take her on, but foot from every angle. He scowled instead of bowing down and worand then said, "Maybe I can do shipping, you act like and say that something with this, but there you wouldn't be caught dead with doesn't seem to be much of anyher at a cat-fight, to say nothing of thing there to work on. Peel, you, in bed. If I'm right she'll blow up and I'll see." like a bomb and say something she "Peel?" The girl's head went even shouldn't." higher, her eyes blazed. "Are you t Jules whistled piercingly through talking to me?" she flared, his teeth. "Wow!" he said. "I'm talking to a mass of fat and a little flabby meat that ought to T hree days later, Jules accombe muscle but isn't," he replied panied Yvette into the apartcaustically. "Do you expect a master ment of the Duchess of Swingleton, sculptor to make something of a who proved to be a tall girl -- two tub of clay without touching it? inches taller than Jules -- beautiWear a bikini or tights if you like ful of face and figure, with dark -- although how you can imagine blue eyes and a mass of wheat-strawthat I, duClos, would get the thrills colored hair piled high on a proudlyover such a slug's body as yours is IF completely beyond my comprehened in practically nothing, duClos sion." was even less impressed than be"Get out!" Trembling with rage, fore. "Lard," he said, when his talshe pointed at the door. "Leave this ented fingers had reported their castle at once!" preliminary findings to his brain. He gave her his choicest top-deck "Flabby, unrendered lard; but I'll sneer. "Madame, nothing could possee what I can do with it. We'll sibly please me more." He executed go to your gymnasium now." a snappy about-face and made for "Why, aren't you going to take # the door. me to your place?" "Wait, you! Turn around!" He looked at her in amused and "Yes?" he asked, coldly. condescending surprise. "Are you "I am the Duchess of Swingleton!" that stupid? You'd fall flat and could "And I, madame, am duClos. hardly get up. Lt'll take a month of There are hundreds and hundreds work here before you'll be able of duchesses, but there is only one to work in the House of Strength. duClos." To your gymnasium, I say." She fought her anger down. "I'll In the castle's gymnasium, he said, put on a swimsuit," she said. "After "First, we'll show you what we, all, I do want to find out whether accustomed to three Earth gravities, you're any good or not." can do easily here on Earth," and But when she came back, dresshe and Yvette went through a routine of such violence that the apparatus creaked and groaned and the very floor shook. "Now what a fair Earth gymnast -- such as perhaps I'll be able to make out of you -- can do," and they showed her that. "Now I'll find out what you can do -- if anything. You can't do even fifty fast push-ups without going flat on your face," and of course she couldn't. He worked her fairly hard for half an hour, which was about all she could taken, then said, "That's enough for today, poor thing." Then, turning to Yvette, "Give her a massage in steam, and go deep. After that, the usual." "No, I want you to do it yourself," the girl said. "They say you're tops and I want nothing but the best." "Oke," Jules said, in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, and peeled down to his white nylon shorts. "That'd be better -- I'll know more exactly how you come along." The ladies-in-waiting were shocked -- or pretended to be -- as the three-quarters-naked man worked on their completely naked mistress; but Jules, alone, of all those present, was -- apparently -- not affected at all. He was a top-expert masseur working, at his profession. T his went on for day after day. Since the Duchess was actually a strong, healthy, athletic girl, splendidly built, and agile both physically and mentally, she learned fast and developed fast. But for the first time in her life she had struck a man and bounced. It was an intolerable situation -- a situation that got no better at all as time went on. He stayed coldly impersonal and more than somewhat contemptuous; he was and he remained a master craftsman wasting his talents on material entirely unworthy of his skill. He paid no attention whatever to any of the little plays she made. One day, however, when she had become a pretty fair gymnast and was very proud of her accomplishments, all the ladies-in-waiting disappeared before the massage was to begin. "We don't need them any more, I don't think." She pose# wit b r her skimpy garment half off, and gave him an under-eyebrows look that would have put any other man she knew into a flat spin. "Do we?" "I don't, that's sure," he said, with the sneer that had become so maddening that she wanted to bash it back into his skull with a sledgehammer. "And if you're trying to seduce me you're wasting your time. You're a hunk of clay I'm trying to model into something halfway worth while, and nothing else. I'd not rather have you than any other mass of poor-grade clay -- or a dime's worth of cat-meat." That blew it -- sky high. "You low-born oaf!" she screamed. "You clod! You base-born peasant, I'll have you flayed alive and staked out on..." She stopped screaming suddenly and her eyes widened the veriest little. "Stop running off at the mouth!" he rasped, timing it so perfectly that she knew he had interrupted IF her tirade. "My birth, high or low, has no bearing. I am duClos. I am trying to mold you into what our Creator intended you to be; His instrument to produce men, not the milksops and flabs now infesting this sinful planet Earth." "Oh? Don't tell me you're a Puritanl" she exclaimed, very glad indeed to change the subject. "I should have known it, though, by all that hair." "An ex-Puritan," he corrected her. "I do not believe that everything pleasant is sinful, but neglect of the human body most certainly is. So get in there. And snap it v CviAoK ? f ore y #U coo  # ff too 'mtSS?' Work went on, exactly as though nothing had happened. She graduated into the House of Strength and, everything considered, she did very well there. And she convinced herself quite easily that she had not revealed any tittle of the secret that had been held for sixty-seven years. DC As an example of the traditional loyalty of the Navy: When Empress Stanley #, her husband and four of their five children were assassinated in #, their youngest child, Prince Edward, escaped death only because he, then an ensign in the Navy, was being guarded as no other person had ever been guarded before. Fleet Admiral Simms declared martial law and, in the bloodiest purge in all history, executed not only all those found guilty, including Prince Charles and Princess Charlene, but also their entire families . He then made himself regent and ruled with an iron hand for six years. Then, to the vast surprise of all , he relinquished his regency on the day that Prince Edward came of age and he himself crowned Prince Edward Emperor Stanley Six. (Farnham; The Empire , Vol #, P#) The Fortress of Englewood J ules and Yvette deigned to accept six Grand Dukes and their wives as personal clients -- among whom were Grand Duke Nicholas and Grand Duchess Olga of Sector Twenty -- but that was all they would take. In that position of intimacy they dug up a few hints, but neither of them could lay hold of anything solid. At every opportunity they planted Earth operators in the kitchens, in the garages and everywhere else they could. These detectives found bits and pieces of information, but they could not find any leads to Banion or to any of his blood; nor to the all-important Patent of Royalty. "We've got to take this to the Head, Eve," Jules said finally. "I hate to yell for help on our first really big job, but he's just too damned big for us. And it's more than a possibility that it'd be the Head's head that would roll, not Duke Twenty's. We simply cant take the chance." Yvette nodded. "You're right, Fm afraid. He's really big... but he hasn't got a drop of Stanley blood in him... "Which is why he's playing it this way," Jules declared. "The power behind the Throne. I'll set up a meet." He set it up and they laid the whole ugly mess squarely on the line, and while they talked the Head aged ten years. When they were done he sat silent and motionless, in intense concentration, for a good fifteen minutes. They could almost feel the master strategist's keen brain at work. Finally he lifted his head sharply and he said: "I was hoping it would be one of the others, but you're right. We can't move against him without the genuine Patent actually in our hands." Jules scowled. "That's what I was afraid you'd say. And that Patent must be in the solidest safe-deposit vault on Earth." "It isn't," the Head said, flatly. "The Emperor can open any bank vault he pleases, with no. reason at all. So it's in a vault as good as any on Earth, but in the deepest subcellar of Castle Englewood. I'd stake my head on that. Theoretically, the Emperor could open that vault, too, at whim. But trying it would touch everything off and Nicholas might win. So I'm going to stake all our heads. No matter how daintily we try to pussyfoot it, there's always the chance of our touching off the explosion. However, there'd be no point in his as the Emperor and the Empress are alive, so what do you think of this?" and they discussed details for two hours. T hree days later, the news media announced that Emperor Stanley Ten had had a heart attack. It wasn't too serious, as such things go, but a battery of specialists agreed unanimously that he had to have at least two months of carefree rest, preferably at his favorite summer place, Big Piney in the Rockies. Wherefore Crown Princess Edna was given the unusual title of "Empress Pro Tem" and her parents went, with no pomp or circumstance at all -- not to Big Piney, but to an island in the Pacific that was guarded by every defensive device know to the military science of the age. And Empress Pro Tern Edna announced a party -- a getting-acquainted party that, beginning with a full Grand Imperial Court, would last for three days -- to which all thirty-six Grand Dukes and their entire families were invited. And did any of the invitees even think of declining? Not one. As that party began, Jules and Yvette and a regiment of experts went as insidiously as possible to work on Castle Englewood. Having free run of the place, as far as anyone now there was concerned, the two went first -- with stunners in their hands -- to visit the key personnel. They were followed by fifty cat-footed, fully briefed d'Alemberts, who took care of everyone else; particularly of the manytimes-too-numerous Castle Guard. Architects and engineers had detailed plans of the castle, but they were found useless. The actual details had never been registered. So electronic technicians unlimbered IF their most sensitive detectors and explored walls, floors and ceilings. They traced cable after cable, wire after wire; and section after section of the vast building went dark and powerless. It had been clear from the start that this was no ordinary residence of any ordinary Grand Duke. It was a fortress; a fortress that, except the d'Alemberts' ability to carry it out, would have been starkly impregnable. And, even so, the attack almost failed. "How about this, Major?" Jules asked, as the company, after exploring all the other tunnels and corridors in the sub-basements, returned to a grimly thick steel wall. "It opens from somewhere, somehow." The officer pointed out an almost invisible crack where steel butted against steel. "It'd probably take a week, though, to find out where or how. I think we cut all external leads to here, but they could have independent power in that section." "We'll assume they have," Jules said. "And automatic blasters -- or worse, stunners. Gas, maybe, or triggered bombs. But the Head gambled his life on a lot less than we know now, so bring up your shields and high-powers and burn the damned thing down." When the eight-inches-thick mass of armor-plate fell inward into the squad of tremendously-muscled DesPlainians, it struck a steel floor with a crash that shook the very bed-rock upon which Castle Englewood was built. One glance, however, was all Jules had; for even before steel struck steel he was smashed down flat by a force of twenty-five gravities; and the fact that the musclemen inside the room went down too was of little enough comfort. They were weight-lifters. He wasn't. U ltra-grav!" Jules gritted, through his clenched teeth. "Can you fellows do anything with it, Rick?" he demanded of the leader of the fighting wrestlers who had done such good work on Aston. "It looks like they've got me just about stuck down." "We're working on it, Chief," Rick said hoarsely, and they were. It was fantastic to see two-hundred-fifty-pound brawlers, muscled like Atlases, exerting every iota of their tremendous strength; first to get up onto their knees and then to lift, with the full power of both arms, a five-pound weapon up into some kind of firing position. Unfortunately, one of the guards -- a giant even for a DesPlainian weightlifter -- made it first. His first blast went straight through the man in front of Jules; and Jules, who had managed to get almost to his knees, lost a fist-sized chunk of flesh out of his left leg and went back down. Only the one guard, however, beat the d'Alemberts into action. In the ensuing awkward, slow-motion battle eighteen men died; eight of them being the Grand Duke's guards. Then slowly, ultratoilsomely, the d'Alembert found the gravity controls and restored a heavenly three thousand centimeters per second. And Yvette, who had been pinned down all this time, rushed over and first-aid-bandaged the ghastly wound in her brother's leg. They did not try to unlock the vault. It was too late now for catfooting. Demolition experts brought up their shields and sandbags and blew the whole face of it to bits. They removed the debris and ransacked the vault -- and they found a Patent of Royalty. Then, hearts in throats and scarcely breathing, they looked on while hand-writing experts and documentary experts gave that parchment the works. "This is the genuine Patent," the chief examiner said finally; and in the joyously relieved clamor that followed even the dead were for the moment forgotten. The rest of the project went smoothly enough. The full regiment of Imperial Guards sealed the Principal Palace bottle-tight. The Navy put an impenetrable umbrella over all Chicago. Fleet Admiral Armstrong himself led a company of marines into the Grand Ballroom and broke up the Empress Pro Tern's party by putting Grand Duke Nicholas and his entire retinue under arrest. And immediately, then and there in the Grand Ballroom, the Emperor's personal physician administered nitrobarb and the Court Psychologist asked questions. And Empress Pro Tern Edna, her face too stern and hard by far for any girl of her years, listened; and having listened, issued orders which Fleet Admiral Armstrong carried out. Since it is much faster to work such an inquiry from the top down than from the bottom up, full information was obtained in less than a week. And thus, while the resultant vacancies in the various services were many and terribly shocking, the menace that had hung over the Empire for sixty-seven years was at long last abated. And thus -- a thing supremely important to Jules and Yvette d'Alembert -- the Service of the Empire was at long last clean. X Because of their high intelligence , their super-cat agility, their hairtrigger speed of reaction and their enormous physical strength , DS? Plainians had been the best secretservice agents of, in turn , the Central Intelligence of Earth, the Galactic Intelligence Agency and the Service of the Empire. And of all DesPlainians, throughout the years, the d'Alemberts had been by far the best. The fact that the Circus of did not leak from . Earth because only the monarch, the Head and a very few of their most highly trusted intimates ever knew it. Nor did it leak from the Circus. Circus people never have spoken to rubes, and the inflexible Code d'Alembert was that d'Alemberts spoke only to d'Alemberts and to the Head, (unpublished data) Bill, Irene and Edna A gain it was late at night. Again the d'Alemberts Service Special slanted downward through the air IF toward the roof of the Hall of State of Sector Four. This time, however, the little speedster was not riding a beam and there was no spot of light upon the building's roof. Except for the light of the almost-full moon, everything was dark and still. Yvette was the Yvette of old. Jules, again short-haired and smoothshaved, looked like his usual self; but there was a crutch beside him and his sister was doing the piloting. She landed the craft near the kiosk of the ultra-private elevator, opened up and leaped lightly out; IwUviatmho re d out, clumsily and stiffly; and Grand Lady Helena came running up in a very ungrandladylike fashion. "Oh, you're wonderful, Yvette -- simply marvelousl" She put both arms around Yvette's neck and kissed her three times on the lips. "I'm awfully glad father let me be the one to meet you!" She turned and went somewhat carefully into Jules' arms. "And you, Jules! Oh, I just can't -- but surely you can hug a girl tighter than this, can't you? Even with a bum leg?" Jules, returning her kisses enthusiastically, tightened his arms a little, but not much. Then, lifting her by the armpits, he held her feather-lightly out at arms length, with her toes ten or twelve inches in air. "Sure I can," he said, solemnly but with sparkling eyes, "but the trouble is, I never hugged an Earther before and I'm afraid of breaking you in two. It wouldn't be quite de rigeur, would it, to break a Grand Lady's back and half of her ribs?" "Oh, there's no danger of that . I'm ever so much stronger than... She broke off and her eyes widened in surprise as her hands, already on his arms, tried with all their strength to drive her fingertips into them. "Oh, I see," she said quietly. "I never quite realized." Jules lowered her gently to the roof and she led the way into the elevator. She did not tell them what the Head wanted of them and they did not ask. As the elevator started down she said, "Jules, I'm going to tell you something. I was all set to fall in love with you and make you love me whether you wanted to or not. But when I couldn't make even a dent in those muscles of yours... arms as big and as hard as those of a heroicsize bronze... well... Her voice died away. "You couldn't, possibly," he replied soberly. "There's too much difference. Three of your gravities is a lot of grav, Helena. But we have your friendship?" "More than that, both of you. Ever so much more. That, and admiration and esteem and..." She broke off as the elevator door opened. She stepped aside; motioned for them to precede her. They took one step into the Head's private office and stopped dead in their tracks, their eyes and mouths becoming O's of astonishment. For -- The big but trim old gray-haired man was Emperor Stanley Ten! The statuesque, regal, brown-haired woman was Empress Irene! And the beautifully built, prematurely sternfaced girJ mixing drinks at the Head's bar was Crown Princess Edna. Ihe emperor stood up and raised a hand. "Do not kneel," he said -- but of course, with their speed of reaction, Yvette was already on her knees and Jules, gimpy leg and all, was on one. He raised them to their feet, kissed Yvette's hand and shook Jules' and said, "During this visit and hereafter in private, my friends, to you two I am Bill." "Oh, we couldn't, Your... Sire... not possibly," Jules said. "But we might call you 'sir', sir?" Stanley Ten smiled; and in that smiling shed a heavy load. "Oh? I understand. Many of the younger generation are not so well bred. 'Sir' will do very nicely. I take pleasure in presenting you both to Mrs. Stanley... and to our daughter, Edna." I ntroductions made, Edna Stanley went around with her tray, serving Jules last. As she handed him his glass of lemonade her dark, gray eyes, usually distant, were soft and warm. "It's a damned dirty stinking shame," she said, feelingly, "that we can't give you two, the two who saved our lives, at least a Grand Imperial Court channeled to every planet in space. And to cap it off we have to give that stuffed shirt Armsbold all the credit. The fathead! And he'll get another medal, I suppose -- and compared to you two he positively could not detect a smell on a skunk!" "Well -- " Jules began, but the princess rushed on. "Oh, I know that's the way it has to be, Jules, and I know why. And I know exactly how you feel about it. The Service of the Empire. The fine tradition of the finest group of men and women who ever lived. But knowing all that doesn't make it taste any better or go down any easier that all we can do is thank you for saving all three of our lives at such tremendous risk of your own, and that we have to do even that on the sneak -- or cost you yours." She threw her arms around Jules' neck and kissed him warmly. And, while he could not bring himself to the point of kissing the Crown Princess of the Empire as though she were an ordinary girl, his response was adequate. Edna Stanley was not the crying type, but her eyes were brimming as she drew her head back, looked straight into Jules eyes and went on, "But we three will remember it as long as we live; and you two will have a very special place in my heart as long as I live." Without giving Jules a chance to say anything -- which was just as well, since he could not possibly have said a word -- she wriggled free and embraced Yvette. "What did you expect, Yvette? And call me Edna; we're about the same age." "I'd love to, Edna, it warms me clear through. What I expected was a pat on the back from the Head there and another tough job." The Head laughed. "You'll get both, my dear." Then, turning to Stanley, "You see, Bill?" "I see, Zan. D'Alemberts. Metal of proof. Wrought and tempered." IF Stanley turned to Jules and Yvette. "You young people don't realize that your lives are more important to the Empire than mine is." "I not only don't realize it, sir," Jules said, doggedly, "but I don't see how it can possibly be true. You are the third and the greatest of the Great Stanleys. Eve and I are just two d'Alemberts out of over a thousand." "Correction, please. As of now you are, and probably for the next two or three years will continue to be the two most capable human beings alive." Stanley replenished his drink and brought Yvette a small pitcher of fresh orange juice, while Edna waited on the others. "Let's examine this 'Great Stanley' business a little; it will be a good way to get better acquainted. I've studied the House of Stanley quite thoroughly; enough to have developed what is -- to me, at least -- a new theory. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why the three so-called Great Stanleys happened to be the three who reigned longest? Empress Stanley Three, thirty-seven years; Emperor Stanley Six, thirty-six years; and I, who have more than either, and will probably -- thanks to you -- reign two more before reaching the age of seventy and abdicating in favor of Edna here?" "N-o-o-o, sir. I can't say that I have." "It's a highly pertinent fact. You know, I'm sure, that only one Stanley so far has died in bed." "Yes, sir, but..." "And one died in a space accident. The other seven were assassinated, usually by their own sons or daughters or brothers or sisters."  "Yes, sir. I know that." "They had too many children, too young. So Irene and I had only one child, and Edna wasn't born until I was forty-five years old. So as soon as she's able to carry the load we'll hand it to her on a platter and step out." "Dad!" the Crown Princess exclaimed. "You know very well I'd never even think of such a thing!" And: ed. "What a nasty thing to say!" T he Emperor grinned. "If you'll analyze what I actually said you'll see that you read that wicked thought of regicide and patricide into it -- and you'll know why. Anyway, Irene, you helped plan it. And it's worked out beautifully for all of us. You've all heard the old wheeze that 'Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely'?" They all had. "My theory is that only the first part of that old. "Is really true. For, as a matter of fact, no human being ever had absolute power until King Stanley the Sixth crowned himself Emperor Stanley One and took it. He had the whole galaxy. Every other despot in history was always reaching for more; so the truth of that old saying was never tested. "Indeed, there is much in preStanley history that argues against its truth. The worst gangsters and the most rapacious capitalists Earth ever knew, when they got old enough and powerful enough and rich enough, turned from crime and rapacity to something that was for the good of all mankind. And the entire history of the House of Stanley bears this out." There was a short silence, then the Empress said, thoughtfully, "Well, it's something to think about, at least... and it does seem to make sense... but my dear, what has all that to do with the present case?" "Everything," Stanley said, deadly serious now. "It shows why these two d'Alemberts -- highly trained, uniquely gifted, innately and completely loyal to the Empire -- are much more important to the Empire than I am. Not that they are indispensable. No one is. But they are at present irreplaceable and I am not. Any Stanley who is able to live long enough becomes a Great Stanley by sheer force of circumstance, and Edna will be one from the day she is crowned." The Emperor turned to face Jules and Yvette. "Nevertheless, my young friends, my life is extremely important to me. It is also extremely important to Irene and to Edna, as are their lives to me. Our three lives are important to a few real friends, such as Zander there and your father the Duke; but you would be surprised to know just how scarce such real friends are. The life of any individual Emperor or Empress, however, is of very little importance to the Empire itself, of which its rulers are merely the symbols. The Empire endures only because of the loyalty to it of such people as you. Such loyalty can not be commanded; it must be earned. The Empire will endure as long as, and only as long as, it continues to be worthy of such loyalty. Without that loyalty the Empire would fall. Instead of prosperity and peace there would be widespread and terribly destructive wars of planetary conquest. Our present cilization would degenerate into barbarism and savagery. "We Stanleys do what we can; but in the last analysis the Empire rests squarely upon the arch of its various services, and your Service of the Empire is the very keystone of that arch. "As Edna said, it is a shame that we three can give you only our thanks. It is not, however the thanks of only three people. I am speaking for the Empire when I say to you and through you to those who work with you..." Emperor Stanley Ten took the d'Alemberts' right hands, one in each of his own; Complete in the April Galaxy A Rod MeBan Story by Cordwainer Smith plus stories by Philip Jose Farmer, Harry Harrison, etc. On sale now! IF IF  Novelette Fire Is Man's oldest , best servant -- and his oldest f fiercest foel I T 'he scene was eerie, as ugly as fire at night in a dwelling has always been and always will be. The searchlights of the fire department gave no feeling of comfort; rather, they added to the conflict between man and the element of fire. The dancing flames threw their yellow flickerings on the firemen as they raced back and forth arranging things, making observations, calculating how this fire was to be stopped. It was not done in silence! "Get that hose line in there!" "Get me a three-inch wye!" "Water ready." "Pumper running!" "Steady, now. Steady! Got her set?" "Right!" "Okay, give her the works!" The hose bucked as the high-pressure water hit the nozzle. It roared forth, arched toward the blaze, and crashed through a window The color of the smoke began to change immediately as the dancing flames within the house fought their losing battle. No more than minutes later, the stream of water was cut. The firemen went in to the house with hand extinguishers to kill the few remaining sparks and to quench smouldering embers. Now all there was left was the dirty clean-up job, and the task of packing the fire equipment and returning to the station. Fire Chief Mooney looked at the rookie beside him. "Still want to be a fireman?" he asked "More than ever," said the rookie, whose name was Bill Lansing "Did this one give you enough to write your thesis?" asked the chief, pointing at the ruined home with his thumb. "I'm not certain. Could be," replied Bill. "Well, if you've an idea, let me know If it's good, l can tell you to go ahead If it isn't, I can save you the trouble of trying something foolish," said Fire Chief Mooney. "Chief, the process of adding something significant to the field of fire fighting isn't very easy. On the other hand, it isn't necessary to know the answer before you can point out that a problem does exist or that there is room for improvement." "This is true; of course, if you do a thesis on those lines it will get you your appointment if it's good enough But it's not the best way, nor the surest way." "I know. But what can be added to the field of fire fighting in the year of twenty-sixteen?" "You'll have to add something or you won't be appointed." "I know l didn't mean that nothing could possibly be added, chief. What I meant is that a rookie can't very well increase the scope of knowledge. Not when experienced, dedicated men have been working to advance the science. But I can point out one rather odd area, chief ' "Go on." "Chief, do you realize that here in twenty-sixteen, we're still fighting fire in the same way that they did in the day of Julius Caesar? We pour water on it. All that's changed is our more efficient ways of delivering the water." T he fire chief smiled. "Not quite Back in the day of Julius Caesar, they had private firefighting concerns, run as a business. If you were a customer of the Mooney Fire Company and your neighbor's house caught fire, we wouldn't touch it unless he were our customer too We'd go out all right, just to keep the fire from spreading to your house, but we'd let your neighbor's house burn to the ground. And if your neighbor's fire company happened to be a bitter rival of ours, we might even start a street fight." "That's not a matter of fire fighting," objected Bill. "It's just organization." IF ,'   M-j'lf,, k! tthiMSffeft Wziiisni   ji  .' ' ; ''j wf.-Xys. I, rjaai M . I a a  I " a   a  I 'i I. # f   a !v ' V. zti  iii rT'  ' E;#.vav? rf#:. -- r!' M . m .r "Of course. But I did want you to understand that things are not exactly the same as they were a couple of thousand years ago." "Other things have changed, too," aid the rookie thoughtfully. "They used to race through the streets carrying buckets because they hadn't invented the pump. The gizmo that Archimedes invented wasn't much of a pump, sir. It was more of a water lifter. I grant that the mobile team engine, with its pump, was a vast improvement over the hand pump... which was superior to the bucket brigade. Then the gasoline engine replaced the horses and the high-pressure rotary pump was driven by the same engine when the vehicle got to the scene. But the same argument still stands, chief. For all of our modem science, we still pour water on the fire." "I can point out one other item that's changed." "Yes?" "The nature of the fireman, Bill." "Yes?" "A long time ago; in fact, it was a long long time ago, your fireman was not of an admirable, civicminded character. The work was rough and largely physical, and its nature was such that it attracted the kind of man who did not mind sitting on his duff playing checkers for days on end, waiting for the alarm to ring." "That must have been a long time ago." "It was. Then came a breed of a better cut These men held jobs and public offices, and instead of a man joining the fire department because the job was easy, a man was accepted by his local fire department in about the same way that a candidate was accepted for a lodge or a freshman to a fraternity. This was the 'beginning. Fire-fighting operations took a sudden upswing; the men took pride in their equipment and in their work. It was an honor, and they accepted it as such. They were not paid. "But the standard was set and the results were visible. And so now we have the present system of rewarding deserving citizens by appointing them to the fire department and paying them an honorarium. This makes it possible for a truly talented man to be an artist or a writer, or to study for advanced degrees, or to devote himself to civic betterment." "This much I know." "Then you also know that the mere proclamation that you propose to be a deserving citizen isn't gcrtng to make you a scholar." "I do." "And I'm also afraid that your criticism isn't going to get you very far. I doubt that merely pointing out that we're still dousing a fire with water despite our vaunted science is going to do it, Bill. The criticism may be valid, but in this case, I think someone is going to pose the question, 'If, in two thousand and more years, no one has discovered anything more efficient, isn't it just barely possible that there isn't anything more efficient?" "Thomas Edison had a slogan," said Bill. "There's a better way to do it -- Find it!" "Edison wasn't always right," objected the chief. "And he could have made a vast improvement on his slogan by starting it with the word, 'If.' IF there's a better way to do it -- Find it!" II B ill Lansing's thesis was thorough, but its scientific excellence was marred by a strong taint of emotion. His theme, that the basic improvements in fire fighting were only to deliver a larger volume of water in a shorter time, concluded by suggesting that other substances and processes were ignored simply because water was so cheap and so plentiful that it hardly paid a man to rack his brains to improve upon it. It was, he said, plain laziness. Fire Commissioner Frank T. Edwards arose at the end of Bill Lansing's treatise and asked, "I presume that you are aware of the fundamental principle of extinguishing a fire, young man?" "Of course." "Not 'Of course.' You haven't proved that you know it at all." With a labored, overly patient tone of voice, Bill Lansing replied, "Water is the total product of combustion; it can't be oxidized any further. Technically, it is the ultimate ash. As such, it smothers the blaze by keeping out the oxygen of the atmosphere. Second, the specific heat of water -- that is, the number of calories required to raise the temperature of one cubic centimeter of water by one degree centigrade -- is exceeded only by hydrogen. The on-pour of water therefore reduces the temperature of the burning stuff until the latter is below the kindling point." "Then you will grant that insofar as its smothering and cooling properties are concerned, there is nothing better?" "This I concede," smiled Bill. "Since the substance with the highest specific heat is hydrogen, second-best water indeed become firsts best." "Then what is your point?" demanded the commissioner. "If water is the best, what better can you want?" "My father," said Bill, "was a fire claim adjuster. I learned some things from him -- for example that the damage caused by water generally exceeds the damage caused by the fire, a fact for many hundreds of years." "Your father was hardly fool enough to suggest that we avoid the water damage by letting the fire run on," snapped Commissioner Edwards. "What's your point? Do you want someone to invent or discover some substance that will do a better job." "I am no chemist," said Bill. "But I do know that specific heat is not the entire answer to the problem of heat absorption. There's the heat of conversion, for example. When the one degree centigrade variation in the definition of specific heat happens to span the freezing point, the amount of heat required to thaw a gram of ice into a gram of water -- or boil water into steam is considerably higher than the specific heat -- maybe a thousand times greater." "And you propose to use this sort of thing?" "It's already in use," said Bill. "When the water hits a hot fire, the first cooling is done when the heat boils the water into steam." "And so we're right back to the same argument. We use water, just as they did in Rome, because it is the best." Lansing shook his head. "There are many substances with a higher heat of conversion." "Yes," sneered the commissioner, "and I'll bet that when you look them up, you'll find that they are corrosive as the devil, or that their fine high heat of conversion takes place either at minus two hundred, or at plus fifteen hundred. But let's abandon that for a moment. Just why are you so all-fired interested in becoming a fireman?" #CT thought we were here to evaluJ. ate my thesis," objected Lansing. "Young man, you want an appointment to the Academy of Fire Fighters. You've received your proper degrees in the humanities and the sciences, and you've produced a thesis of dubious worth. I -- " "Of dubious worth?" exploded Bill Lansing. "Yes," said the commissioner calmly. "I'd have said totally worthless if I were as sure of my facts as I am of my opinion. This is just a simple admission that I do not know all there is to know about everything. Therefore it may be possible that your thesis has a trace of merit; now drop it, and let's examine your motives." "You can't!" "Yes, I can: I have that prerogative as fire commissioner. I said 'examine,' not 'question.' If your motives are above reproach, a strong mark will be made in your favor." "All right. Go ahead." "Isn't it true that all you want is the honor and glory of having been appointed?" "The honor exists, sure. But there's more. I am ambitious. I believe that I can go far as a member of the Academy Of Fire Fighters." "And, maybe, a little ambitious for Gloria Mooney's favor?" Lansing tensed, then controlled himself and said easily, "Sir, a rather staggering proportion of all male effort is undertaken to make an impression on a girl." "All right, I grant your argument. Ambition is by no means wrong." Commissioner Edwards paused, then said to the assembly, "Gentlemen, I move that we do not accept this thesis, on the grounds that it offers nothing constructive. However, for his honesty in telling of his ambition instead of mouthing some platitude about service and civic consciousness, I move that Bill Lansing be retained as a rookie and that he be urged to attack his appointment-thesis from another angle." T TThile fire fighting was still a  matter of flooding the blaze with water as it had been for several thousands of years, the city of twenty-sixteen and its component IF parts were quite different than the city of nineteen-sixty. For example, the word "dwelling" was still used; but it did not define a single-family structure situated on a plot of vacant ground. In even the least crowded areas of the megalopolis that stretched from Boston to Washington, the dwellings were low structures, seldom more than three stories high. They were constructed with an economy of building materials by the clever process of using a single wall between the adjoining structures instead of the wastefulness of erecting separate walls for each building. In the more densely populated areas, the tight cores of the original cities, dwellings were veritable cliffs. The walls of the apartment buildings rose sheer from the edge of the sidewalk, and each rectangular city block carried its own. Above the city, there was a thin, noisy population of helicopters. And below, the only reason traffic moved at all through the streets was because only essential vehicles were permitted in the dense knots. Had the Sleeper of H. G. Wells awakened, he would have found at least two things missing from his story. First, moving sidewalks did not hurl pedestrian traffic along a series of belts running at different speeds. There were no moving sidewalks. Below the city, in the subways, there were moving cars that closed tight, bumper-to-bumper as they crawled along the station platform, then stretched out into headlong flight to the next station. It was not a case of the quick or the dead, because he who lost his footing was merely thrust aside -- or, if he fell, elbow, knee or anatomy was mildly abraded as he was moved to safety. Second, the clever little advertising gimmick of projecting names and slogans on the sidewalk couldn't be done... because the sidewalks were elbow-to-elbow, cheek-to-jowl and nose-to-spine with those people who did not take to the subways. Within the individual dwelling units, things had not changed greatly, but enough to make a difference. Wooden furniture was still present, but mostly in the form of a solid core or foundation for fabrications with a simulated wood-grain surface. Natural fabrics were not plentiful, but the synthetics were so numerous that a story was told about using an alphanumeric computer to compose fetching names for them. One thing had hardly changed at all: The people. Oh, the faces and the figures of twenty-sixteen were not those of nineteen-sixty-odd by a factor of seventy-six years. But three generations isn't enough to detect a trend in evolution. Boys, for example, still called on girls -- especially when they had come to a turning point in their careers... So Lansing said, "I failed, Gloria." "But they kept you on as a rookie, didn't they?" Bill Lansing looked gloomy. "Sure, but that's sort of like handing out praise by writing it in Sanskrit and sealing it in the cornerstone of a granite building." "I still say you've got another chance." "Gloria, how often do they have fires these days?" "Why, I don't really know." "I've been a rookie for two years. I've been to one fire. Things simply do not go Whoosh! at the touch of a spark any more." "But doesn't that give you loads of time to study?" "Sure," he replied gloomily. "But study doesn't solve the problem. I've read the detailed account of every fire in the entire megalopolis for the past fifteen years. It's not enough. Nothing gives you firsthand knowledge like being on the actual scene of a fire so you can watch them work, see how they go about it and observe the results. So where does this leave me?" "Well, outside of being disappointed, Bill, just where do you think it leaves you?" "I know where it leaves me," he said. "I'm the son of a fire claim adjuster." "Is that so bad?" "Bad enough so that your father gave me a rough time until I made the rookie grade and was on my way toward being a real fireman. Now one false step and I'll be the son of a fire claim adjuster again. And believe me, Gloria, you know as well as I do that the only thing worse than being the son of a fire claim adjuster is to be the adjuster himself." "Oh, now, it isn't that bad." "Isn't it? Does your father know I'm here?" "He didn't say anything about not seeing you, if that's what you mean." "Gloria, if you want to find out the degree of my welcome as a failed-to-make-it candidate for the Academy Of Fire Fighters, let's you and I go and announce that we're about to go dancing, or to a show, or something similar." "All right. Let's," said Gloria. Ill T hey found Gloria's father in the family recreation room watching a comedy show. Here at home there was nothing to set him off as a fireman except for the traditional red suspenders that were, like a uniform, the insignia of his position; the silver buckles indicated that he was an official of the Academy, and the four tiny shields embossed on the buckles denoted his rank as fire chief. He looked up and blinked as they entered hand in hand. A fleeting frown crossed his face, but it came and went so fast that no one, not even Bill Lansing, could be certain that the frown was not caused by the change in eye-focus from the bright viewing screen to the couple walking through the diminished light. Gloria said, "Bill and I are going dancing, dad." "Dancing?" "Yes. The gang's throwing an impromptu at the Silver Garden." "Oh. The gang." "Yes." "All right. You sounded as though you intended to go alone." Bill Lansing bristled slightly. Gloria caught it first and squeezed his hand. He subsided without sayIF mg anything, and Gloria said gently, "Why, dad, we're all big enough to be out alone. Even after dark." Fire Chief Mooney looked at them and nodded slowly. "That isn't exactly what I meant," he said. "Jim Potter said last night that he was getting an idea for his thesis that he was going to work out in model form. And he said that if he finished it, he'd be over to show it to us this evening. But if the gang is going to be at the Silver Garden, he will too. Tell him I'm quite interested in his model, Gloria. Jim has a real head on his shoulders. Like father, like son, I always say." "Yes," said Gloria simply. Gloria's father looked at Bill. "And how is your program, Bill? Got any new ideas?" "Nothing clear yet. I've a couple of ideas that need some study before they're even presentable as possible ideas." "Good. Come around any time you have something to offer." Outside, on the crowded sidewalk, they were part of the surrounded-alones that make up the population of any city. Had they stood on that same location fifty years earlier, they would have been truly alone, in the middle of a tract of land too rough for farming and not yet needed for dwelling space. Then they could have counted the dabs of sky-glow that marked the location of the larger towns hidden by the slightly rolling hills that someone had dubbed the Watchung Mountains of New Jersey. But they were not fifty years earlier. Two generations of dwelling construction had changed the face of the Earth. The first had cleared out the thin forestation and dotted the landscape with a polka-pattem of rubber-stamp houses built by the production-line process. The first crew dug for the foundation, the second crew poured it. A third removed the forms and installed them forward of the line, while the next crew began to put up stringers and studs. When they moved along, the sheathing came, the plumbers and the electricians installed their hardware, the flooring was laid and the walls were plastered, and the roof was slapped on. A coat of paint went next, followed by the real estate salesmen and their clients. And while the foremost was still digging holes for more foundations, miles behind them the sheriff was serving foreclosure notices on those whose payments were delinquent. The second generation of building pushed the Watchung Mountains around until the terrain was level, and then erected row upon row of the two and three story dwellings, laid out in a closed formation of rectangles. This was the low-density population of the central megalopolis. G loria and Bill were part of the surrounded-alones. When the density of population forces a man to breathe his neighbor's exhalation, aloofness takes the place of privacy. It becomes a studied thing to notobserve; let some outrage takeplace, and the people who stop to stare are from a distant part of the city, while the folks next door pass by with the talent of a waiter who can walk through a crowded restaurant without letting anyone catch his eye or attention. And so Gloria and Bill could talk as if they were alone, and he said, "Well, that's about it, isn't it?" "Now what do you mean by that?" "There's no gang dance tonight. And that Potter creep isn't going -- " "Now, don't you go calling Jim Potter a creep. He isn't." "I suppose he's a fine fellow with grace, charm, money, an interesting mind, sex appeal -- and has the right to wear his father's red suspenders." "Don't be bitter, Bill." "What else can I be?" he demanded. "Jim has a real head on his shoulders. Like father, like son, I always say. Come around when you have something to offer." "That isn't all, Gloria. He backwatered fast after that glum, 'You sounded as if you were going out alone,' line of his, but what is he going to say when his favorite, Jim Potter, turns up and declares there's no impromptu dance tonight? He's going to accuse the both of us of lying so that we could go out and canoodle somewhere." "Don't worry, Bill. There are ways of coping with that." "For example?" "By proving that I'm not playing favorites." "In other words, you're going out with Jim Potter." "Now you see here, Bill Lansing! I've got every right to go out with whom I choose. You have no more right to object to Jim Potter than he has a right to object to you, and neither of you has a right to object to anybody else. Now that's not only clear, but it's also logical and sensible -- " Bill put out a hand and caught her elbow, just as she was about to step off the curb to cross the street. The traffic light had flashed red, and the cross-traffic fought its way into the intersection without waiting for the last of the running traffic to clear. Bumper to bumper and curb to curb, everything came to a halt. Then came a crescendo of horns. The horns died as the intersection cleared. There was a flurry in the vehicular pattern as one driver tried to fight his way from the middle lane to make a turn; he didn't make it, but with luck, perseverance and the unlikely possibility of meeting a polite driver that would give way, he might make his turn in the next couple of blocks. "Okay," said Bill, disconsolately replying to her argument. "But right now what do we do? There's no dance at the Silver Garden." "So we'll walk there, find that it isn't open and then turn over on March Street and see if we can get tickets to Bitter Love " She hugged his arm. "It isn't a big event, but a girl can paste theater tickets in her diary, can't she?" "I guess." "So we were disappointed about being mistaken about the dance, but it worked out even better because we saw that big new hit." IF "If we can get tickets." "We'll get tickets," she promised. "They wouldn't dare refuse the daughter of Fire Chief Mooney." IV T here was a murmur of voices when Bill opened the door with Gloria's key. Gloria said, "Maybe you'd best not come in, Bill. That father of mine -- he's still up." "The other is Jim Potter. He's still here. Look," he said hoarsely. "I'm not going to leave with Jim Potter in the house waiting to get you alone!" The hallway door before them opened to display Fire Chief Mooney, with Jim Potter in the background. Gloria's father used the voice that he'd found helpful in making himself heard over the crackle of open flames, the shouts of hardworking firemen, and the roar of newly-arriving fire equipment: "And how was the dance at the club that's closed? Find the floor crowded? So just what have you been doing, you two?" Gloria replied, "Now father, don't take that tone -- " "I'll take any tone I want to in my own home! What have you two been up to?" "We got tickets to Bitter Love , playing at theOrpheum," said Bill, waving the ticket stubs. "Did you stay to watch the show, or are you using the tickets as an alibi?" demanded Gloria's father. "Now, sir, that's no way to talk. Don't you trust your daughter?" "Yes, I trust her, you young schemer. But I don't trust you not to make a fool of her." "But I -- " "You, Lansing, might have spent your time better if you'd honestly tried to advance the science of fire fighting instead of thinking of clever schemes to marry into it. Hah! you yell about water, and how things haven't changed for two thousand years. Well, while you were carping about water and lack of progress, Jim Potter was thinking . His idea will get him appointed cum laude, possibly summa , and maybe even magna ." "But, sir -- " "Lansing, I think you are a thrillseeker. While you were complaining about lack of progress, and wailing that you couldn't really study a fire and the methods we use without really watching one, Jim Potter did what you couldn't do. He has made a very sensible plan." "Congratulations," said Lansing in a flat tone. "And may I ask what it is?" "I'm proud to be the one to tell you," said Fire Chief Mooney. "Assume you are called to a fire in a dwelling, Lansing. It is yours to fight, to plan against, to lay out your campaign to extinguish the blaze in the shortest time with the minimum damage. Understand?" "That is the job of the fire boss, the ranking official present." "Pre-cisely! Now, Lansing, suppose that you could make an instantaneous determination of the amount and placement of all flammable material in the dwelling, the chemistry and physical characteristics of these IF burnables, and the possible interaction between the various products of combustion." "That would be a help," Lansing said thoughtfully. "It would be as great a help to us as it helps a general who knows the strength and deployment of the entire enemy force against him." "Exactly! Well, Lansing, young Jim Potter proposes that every citicitizen post a layout of his dwelling, and the contents, and the material of which the articles are made! This information will go into a rapid crossaccess file, so that the full information will be available as soon as the fire alarm delivers the identification of the dwelling." B ill Lansing shook his head slowly. "I suppose you'd want penalties for falsification of the records?" "Naturally. False information might be quite deadly." "And sooner or later you'd issue licenses to purchase furniture and household goods to make certain that your records were accurate?" "Now that's the first good suggestion that I have ever heard you make, Lansing. Jim," he said to Potter, "I know you'll give full credit for this suggestion when you present your thesis." "Most certainly, sir," said Potter, scribbling. Lansing raised his hands. "Chief Mooney, sir?" "Now what, Lansing?" "Before you continue along this line of reasoning, I think you had better consult an attorney for advice." "Why? "Because I believe that any such requirement is a violation of the citizen's right to be free of unwarranted search. At any rate it is a violation of his privacy." "It's for his own protection, confound it!" Mooney shook his head violently. "What do you know about law?" "Very little. That's why I suggested that you consult someone who does. I think your plan would require a Constitutional amendment, a Supreme Court ruling, and a special department formed to enforce the requirements. It's a grand, blue-sky scheme, and totally impractical." "Lansing, have you ever heard of the N.I.H. Attitude?" "No, sir. What does N. I. H. stand for?" " 'Not Invented Here.' It refers to those people who go nit-picking and raising objections to anything they did not think of themselves. I withdraw my congratulations for your excellent suggestion because, it seems, it was meant as sarcasm. But to show you that we, at least, do not have the N. I. H. Attitude, we'll still use your suggestion. It's a good one -- regardless of its intent." "It won't work," said Lansing doggedly. "You'll hear a yell about 'Police State' go up so loud that no one will touch the idea." "Now, don't accuse me of advocating anything anti-democratic." "I didn't." "Yes, you did! And if you and your kind would only offer positive suggestions instead of throwing stumbling blocks in the way of progress, we would all be better off. You think fast enough when you're objecting to someone else's idea, or when you're scheming a plot to squirrel my daughter out from under my eyes. Why don't you bend that fine brain to something constructive?" "Mr. Mooney, I -- " "Lansing, you're nothing but an inept social climber who is playing in the wrong league. Why don't you leave quietly, you son of a fire claim adjuster?" "Now see here -- " "You see here, Lansing. Get out!" "Father, Bill Lansing is my guest, and I -- " "You go to your room and stay there, young missy! Bill Lansing was your guest, past tense. No progress, just water? Well, fathers have been pouring cold water over hot romances for a couple of thousand years, too. So get!" B ill Lansing's return to his station was a doleful journey. It was late at night; or more accurately, it was very early in the morning. Crammed in and jostling were the night people of the city. Some were tired, some were bored. Not a few were dozing in their subway seats. There were many couples engrossed with their own business to the point where they cared little for their surroundings. But if there was one who could be as unhappy and frustrated with helpless rage and utter futility as Bill Lansing, it could not be known. For Lansing had no one to tell, no sympathetic ear to listen. But if Bill Lansing thought that he had been kicked as low as any man could be kicked, he found that he had one more bitter blow awaiting him at the station. He was hailed just inside of the door by Fire Commissioner Edwards. "Lansing, I have a complaint against you." "A complaint, sir?" "Yes. Did you, or did you not imply that you were taking Gloria Lansing to a dance that in reality was non-existent?" Lansing gulped. It was a loaded question. In reality, the plan had simply been to test Fire Chief Mooney's reaction to Gloria going out on a late date with her. It had been Gloria's spur-of-the-moment picking, not his, that chose the dance. Bill could no more tell the commmissioner that they were testing Mooney's reaction than he could permit himself to place the blame on Gloria. Neither was the act of a gentleman and a fire fighter; furthermore, he was at fault anyway because the code of the fire fighter demanded that he correct any erroneous impression that Gloria might have given. But Bill Lansing had no doubt at all that the commissioner knew the entire story as close as Mooney could repeat it. For the commissioner's word had been "imply" and that meant that Gloria's statement had been undersigned; or in this case, underspoken, by Lansing. "Yes," he said. "This has been an unfortunate experience for all of us, Lansing. I hope it's over. You know the penalty IF of the Academy of Fire Fighters for permitting an implied untruth to stand." "Yes." "While you are relieved of all duty and responsibility, you may not leave your station until the Board of Fire Regents accepts your resignation officially." "And if there is a fire in the interim, sir?" "While every hand is needed at a fire, Lansing, our code is our protection. It is clear. No one who has not the full confidence of the Academy of Fire Fighters may have the honor of joining us in our chosen profession." "But, sir -- " The commissioner eyed Lansing coldly and in a sepulchral intonation, he said, "You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting." It was the traditional phrase of cold dismissal from the Academy. The phrase was, indeed, a translation of the Handwriting on the Wall. V   but eat, sleep and kill the waking hours, because those that surround you will not speak nor admit they heard you, time hangs heavy indeed. It is worse when your cell can not be left. It is even worse than that when you, and they, and everybody knows that the process of separating you from your tomb could be expedited in ten minutes if anybody gave a tinkle. But the Academy of Fire Fighters was thoroughly finished with Mr. Bill Lansing; so completely finished with him that its members wouldn't lift a finger to get rid of him. To them, he had ceased to exist. To place action before the treadmill brought his card to the top was to recognize that such a person had rights. And it might have gone that way, right on out until Bill Lansing's life turned a corner and became part of another world of activity. But a new world was not to be for Bill Lansing. Clotho, the Fate that weaves the lives of men, discovered the bowline, the knot that makes the closed loop which will not slip, and this she tied into her web. Call it fate. Call it coincidence. Call it anything you care to; but accept, even though reluctantly, the fire that flared up in the cellar of Fire Chief Mooney's home at one o'clock in the morning. The alarm clangored through the station, alerting the firemen, the rookies and the nearly-ex-rookie Bill Lansing. Next came the stentorian voice: "Now hear this! The address is one seven nine, three nine six four Rushman Avenue in the Watchung area near the metropolitan shopping area of Mountainside. The weather is clear. Temperature seventy-one, humidity fifty-three, wind from the southwest at ten. The time is one zero seven hours." Near him, Lansing heard someone mutter, "And the New York theater crowd will just be getting home, too!" In answer, the fire sub-chief said, "Right, Al. Look, you and Pete are temporarily detached. Get out there right now and plant traffic stoppers. Go now; we'll bring your fire gear in the equipment wagon." "Right, chief. But won't that leave you short-handed?" "We'll make out." Lansing said, "I volunteer." For the first time in three weeks, Lansing got a reply. "We don't accept outsiders," was the cold response. "Might as well use me," said Lansing. "I'm going anyway." "Not in any fire wagon this station uses!" From the roof of the station came the rising drone of a siren. It went up and up into a scream, undulated between shrill and ear-splitting, and then began to slide down the scale as the motor coasted to its well-balanced and near-frictionless stop. A banging scatter of cold motors came next; they settled down into a muted, vibrant roar. top him from going they could, but stop him from watching them leave they could not. He followed them to the equipment, then stood on the edge of the roof, leaning into the blast of the big choppers of the heavy equipment. They wasted no time clawing for altitude. Instead, they lurched forward off the roof and arrowed straight across the . city, no more than a hundred feet above the forest of television antennas that reached up for them. spectacle, but once it was over, all that Lansing could do was to go back below and wait. This was a world that had rejected him. A world that he was not permitted to join. He sprawled on his narrow bunk and listened to the radio. It was acknowledgements, and direction data and other information. To anyone not used to the patter, it would have been a hopeless mess of gabble. But to the ex-rookie, it was part of his nostalgia. He had the knowledge and the skill to build a radio receiver for this frequency (they could not be purchased) but once away from this station he would sever all ties. To maintain even the least of them would be more hurtful than not. One thing he could not envision was the spectacle of the Mooney dwelling in flame. That was a murky, flickering thing. But the approach of the sub-chiefs hopper he could follow without difficulty, for he knew that it would dip and circle the fire; the sub-chief would be collecting preliminary information so that he could plan his counter-attack. Then the radio became more orderly: "Redman, get the pyrometer over here." "Right, chief." "Harrington, get one of your spectographs aimed at that picture window in front. Put the second looking about ten feet above that tiled roof over on the side, and the third in the back. High, I'd say." "Right." hosewagon?" Bill Lansing grinned. The fire radio band was speech-scrambled within weeks after it had first been used. Language that would offend IF the delicate ear was denied to that ear because the government realized that it was easier to conceal the bad language of men working under danger and stress than it was to train them to use, "Oh my goodness!" as a verbal indication of dismay. The sub-chief got his reply: "Layin' hose, chief!" sake?" "The Bound Brook Reservoir." "What the XXll's the matter with the standpipes?" "They ain't been used in seven years, chief. Besides, we've got time to run a clear line before swooshsecond, and it's better that way." "Okay. Now -- " "Who's in charge here?" This was a new voice. "I am. Sub-Chief Walter Lang. From the Newark district station." "Where is Fire Chief Mooney?" "We haven't been able to contact him." "Commissioner Edwards?" "Probably on his way. And who are you -- sir?" "Sub-Secretary of Public Safety, James Moriarity. You mean that neither Mooney nor Edwards aro present?" "No, sir. I -- " "I'm here, X# X## it," came the unmistakable voice of Fire Chief Mooney. "And get me out!" "Trapped?" "Second floor rear." "How long can you hold out?" "Not too long. It's hot and it stinks of blowup." "Do you want to take cognizance, chief?" asked Lang. "From within?" The sound of was unmistakable. "Well, someone has got to give the orders." Lang turned to Moriarty. "Shall we go in and get him, sir?" "How do you figure the fire, Mr. Lang?" "One mo. Redman, what do the pyros say?" "Hotspots running up to three hundred, bits and flares to fivefifty. Average is reasonable but going up." "Harrigan, what does spectre say?" "The usual clutch of standard volatiles. You know. Polyesters, acrylics, acetates, eurenthanes, plus a mixture of ordinary smokes, wood distillates and monoxides." "How bad?" "The mixture is deadly in concentration, you know. Right now it will give a man an awful headache if he breathes it very long -- say a half hour or more. But the temperatures recorded by Redman say that the mix isn't to the whoosh point yet." "Then I can't take the emergency chance nor justify it," said Moriarity. "Where's your fire claim adjuster?" "He hasn't shown yet. He should have been here." "My God! Is there anyone who can work pro tern?" "Of course not. There never is when they're needed." M ooney's voice broke in, "Is Gloria safe?" "Isn't she with you?" #f "No. She has her own apartment on the top floor of this building." "Front or rear?" "Front." "And your wife?" "With me. But about Gloria -- T "Redman! Top floor front?" "About the same as below, maybe a bit cooler in the hot spots. Less total variation." "Harrigan?" "Rough, chief. The whole, standard list of hot, flammable volatiles are thick, plus traces of phosgene, hydrogen chloride and some nitrides. By comparison, Gloria's folks are breathing pure mountain air." "That's an emergency, chief! Can we go in?" "General call! Isn't there anybody who can certify this spot as an emergency? Anybody?" Bill Lansing could stand it no more. He got up from his bunk and snapped the press-to-talk switch on his radio. He said, "Sub-Secretary Moriarity from Bill Lansing. I am an ex-rookie fireman and therefore disqualified to talk, act, or participate on that basis. However, I am also the son of James Lansing, a journeyman and fellow of the College of Fire Claim Underwriters, through whom I was granted my certificate of competence in fire evaluation." "How fast can you get here?" "A matter of minutes if I can commandeer the hopper on the roof." Mooney's voice broke in, "Make him a # # present of it, but get us the # out of here!" Lansing headed for the roof on a dead run. Meanwhile, a new voice came in, thin and wavering, on the edge of radio contact. "Am I within range yet? Do you hear me? This is Commissioner Edwards. Respond, please, over and out." "We hear you now, Commissioner. Go ahead." "How does it stand?" "It apparently started below, point and cause of origin unknown. The dwelling is a special,, belonging to Fire Chief Mooney. You know the place, Commissioner." "Yes. Well, the elder Mooney dwelling, I do. But then daughter has a separate on the third floor that I haven't been in." "And the fire conditions?" 'Top-floor apartment, front side, isn't as separate as if the place were truly unconnected. Therefore a lot of the volatile stuff has been seeping up through the stair wells and halls. It's been collecting in Gloria's apartment." "Any sign of the girl?" "None. Harrigan?" "No trace of animal charcoal nor hydrocarbon vapor. She may be suffocated but she isn't burned." "Stop talking like that," yelled Mooney. "Get me out of here and I'll go up there myself!" "Is that an order, chief?" "Yes, # # it!" Moriarity said, "Commissioner, the only fire claim adjuster on the spot is ex-rookie Lansing. You know him?" "Yes, I know him," said Commissioner Edwards wearily. "Lansing? Will you authorize a breach of Mooney's section?" IF "Does Fire Chief Mooney wave his insurance?" "Now, see here! This is no time to -- " "If you're going to accuse me of vindictiveness, don't. Spectro and pyro give the Mooneys a good fiftyfive minutes before the whoosh point and threaten them with no more than a headache. I'm mindful of their lives and of their comfort, but I have the property to protect. Furthermore, the real danger is to the girl in the top floor front." "Shall we go in there?" "Without seeing it, I shouldn't grant permission. But the reports say -- yes, go in. Use the clear-out, grab and re-containment process, but be fast." "Pyro, what's the draft-coefficient?" "Fairly slow. But once that roof is open, you'll have a furnace condition in the whole place in a matter of minutes. All it takes is one tongue of flame to lick through a firebreak and -- " "Yes, yes, we know. Sky crew? Go in!" VI I ausing's hopper crossed the ring of billowing red flares that barred all surface traffic from entering the area. Then he saw the stricken dwelling. Fire apparatus hung in the sky on their helicopter blades, hovering about the scene. As for the fire itself, there was not much to see to indicate how dangerous it was. Only a flicker and a flash of yellow flame showed at the windows. And, of course, the inevitable group of civilians huddled together in night clothing; the the dwellers on either side and to the back of the Mooney place that fronted on the next street. As Lansing approached, the sky crew went into action. The first 'copter lowered carefully down onto the flat roof. On the bottom a sixfoot, circular object began to rotate -- the well-known but seldom seen sawing circle. When the cylindrical saw-teeth hit the material of the roof, the crunching noise could be heard above the racket of the many engines. It ground and it sawed, and the backlash from its effort made the pilot fight his stick to maintain hoverage. Then with a final crash, three things happened in so close a serial order that they appeared to have taken place at once. A slow-motion picture would have shown first that the thrust of the sawing circle and its helicopter drove the equipment down when the final resistance ceased; second that the pilot fought the thrust deftly by revving the engine and throwing the bite of the rotor blades to full life; and third that when the plug of the roof was lifted free, the gout of hot volatiles belched forth to carry the helicopter high and precariously pitching in the turbulence. "Where's the sky hook?" "Coming in, with hot papa in the iron claw." "Ready with the flush tank?" "Ready!" 'Toss it!" From one of the helicopters, a small glistening object arched out. With computer-accuracy it curved through the air to plunge into the newly made opening in the roof. There was no sound, but all at once the final billow of dirty smoke gushed forth and there was no more. "Snappy, now!" Hot papa, in his glistening firereflecting suit, was lowered through the opening. The iron claw line went slack; the pilot of the helicopter hovered and fought his stick, for despite flushing the smoke out of the apartment with a tank of clear helium, the air above the scene was turbulent. Indeed, the helium did no more than to provide visibility. It was non-poisonous, but just as deadly for the human lungs. "Got baby!" came the cry. The iron claw line went taught again. "How is she?" "Alive and wrapped in baby's bunting, double-folded with cold feet." "All right! No re-contain!" T he sawing circle lowered again, hovered, turned and fitted the roof-plug back in place. Some battens were slapped over the circular cut and then there came a rapid-fire series of sharp detonations as anchor-fasteners were driven home with cartridge guns. The sawing circle .rose, followed by the first of a thin trickle of smoke that began to seep through the cut. Mooney asked, "My daughter?" Someone replied, "She's being treated for smoke and vapor inhalation, some poisoning and a mild anoxia. No burns." "Thanks. "Now let's take care of the Mooneys," said Commissioner Edwards. "Shall we go in?" "Lansing?" asked Edwards. "Look," interjected Mooney, "if pyro and spectro say we're in no imminent danger, we'll play it by the rules." "Yes, but as fire chief you should be here. Lansing?" "Mr. Commisioner, will the Academy of Fire Fighters undertake Fire Chief Mooney's insurance? I can't underwrite it and accept the additional losses just to place him in his rightful command." "Now I think you are being vindictive." "Put yourself in my shoes, Commissioner, and take a look from a long way outside. If I go in too soon, someone is going to accuse me of trying to curry favor with the very obvious combination of fire chief and father of the girl I love. Aren't they?" "You'll find, young Mister Lansing, that no matter what you do, someone will criticize." "Then the best way is to do what I think right, isn't it?" "Urn -- " "All right! Now get off the air, Commissioner, and let your data gang go to work." Sub-Chief Walter Lang took over. "Data gang?" "Pyro here," said Redman. "General room ambient is about foursixteen, with hot spots to sevenfifty." "Spectro," said Harrigan, "nothIF mg new to report. The same crosssection of gases from burning or decomposed plastic fabrics, artificial leathers and so forth." "All right, plug your data directly into the computer." The voices on the fire-radio band ceased. In their place there came a tuneless, and apparently patternless, mixture of short pulses in many frequencies from low to high pitch. It was digital data covering the composition of the flammable gases within the confined dwelling, the temperatures found at a number of places within each room and the rate at which each factor was changing. From the computer there spilled lengths of tape, carrying their own computer code in punched holes. These would be used for analysis later; the information they contained was already used and coded by the computer. From the collectable evidence, estimates and a computer-grade reconstruction was made of the conditions that existed in parts of the dwelling that could not be seen from the outside. W ithin minutes, the information was complete and the counter-attack planned with computer-accuracy. "Can we get the Mooneys, Lansing? Haven't you stalled long enough? What'll happen if we open that lower bedroom now?" "The computer says it is a little early," said Bill Lansing. "And the book says that it's frequently better to let it burn a bit longer and tend to smother itself. We've come a long way from the day when the first act was to chop a hole in the roof to vent the explosive gases. Now we can afford to wait until they get threatening before starting the inevitable Fire-draft up through the house. But my experience," he went on, "isn't extensive enough to furnish a considered opinion, other than to believe that there is a reasonable period during which only a computer could tell the difference. So I'll say go in and get them." "Thanks," said Commissioner Edwards. "Mooney? We're coming in!" "I hear you. We're ready." There was a quick roar of engines as the twin rotors of the flying bridge fired up. The flying bridge, parked in the street and poised for the operation, took no spare time in rising to window height and plunging forward to thrust its covered outrigger through the bedroom window behind which the Mooneys were waiting. Smoke burst forth around the bridge, and a gout of flame followed as the hot volatiles belched forth, rose and created an out-draft. The fire fighter in the hot papa suit aboard the flying bridge did not make it all the way to the end of the covered runway. The Mooneys, she first and he second, were already aboard and running toward the body of the vehicle. "Baby's aboard," yelled hot papa , "and cryin' for cool air!" The flying bridge backed, turned and dropped to the street. Fire Chief Mooney came out of the exit door, steadying his wife by a hand at her elbow. Commissioner Edwards said, "Want to take over?" Mooney shook his head. "No. The headache they promised me is here, all right It's a pip. I couldn't think straight." "You better get some treament, chief." "After this thing is out. Let Lang go on. He's done a fine job so far." Walter Lang said, "Thanks chief." Then he asked, "Lansing? When is whoosh second?" Lansing looked at the last tape from the computer. "We've still a large margin of safety before it goes whoosh," said Lansing. "But I don't think we'll gain much by waiting, especially now that the bedroom window is gone. Hit it when you're ready, Lang." Then with the precision of computer programming. Pumper One hurled # liters of water through the smashed bedroom window; Pumper Two delivered # liters through a second floor window; and a hose line rigged to the sawing circle dropped # liters through the re-opened hole in the roof. The smoke billowed briefly through the shattered windows; then made its characteristic change from dirty brown to the steamy white that comes when water fights fire. There was only one re-burst. Just as the mop-up squad was about to enter with their absorbent machines, a flare was seen in the living room. Pumper Two responded with an additional # liters, a quantity determined by human estimate and not by the computer. As a result the mop-up squad found puddles on the floor when they entered ten minutes later to finish off the job. V oices died around the table as Fire Commissioner Edwards arose; there was one tiny clink as one of the Board of Regents put down his coffee cup. The Regents of the Academy of Fire Fighters were present in their full red-suspendered regalia. But they were all uncomfortably aware of the stranger in their midst. For he, too, was in full regalia. There was the shiny blue-serge suit and the hard white hat of the fireclaim adjuster, and he carried the small, leather-covered attache case that contained the decimal computer used during on-the-spot estimates of fire, smoke and water damage. Commissioner Edwards said, "I am in the very uncomfortable position of having to offer an honor upon a man who has already received what he may well believe to be a higher one. In retrospect, I regret that Mr. Lansing did not make a material contribution to the science of fire fighting. He did not invent some new process of extinguishing the blaze or eliminating the smoke, nor did he discover some fabulous new chemical that would kill the fleas without drowning the dog. In fact, Mr. Lansing did not even prove his own contention that fire fighting was unchanged from the day when our remote ancestors discovered that water was the master of fire, provided you poured enough of it on the blaze." "Indeed, gentlemen, I can only IF apologize for being Impatient. I take the responsibility for having urged the premature action that required a second charge of water, hastily estimated instead of carefully computed, to be hurled into the Mooney dwelling. "But in the act of acquiescing to our premature pleas, Mr. Bill Lansing, recently appointed Adjuster First Class, and a member of the College of Fire Claim Adjusters, revealed a part of his human nature seldom displayed by other members of his college. Humanely and humanly, Mr. Lansing understood that our natural enemy is Fire, to be killed at all cost and at once. "And to continue this understanding and to hope that it becomes mutual, I am conferring upon him the highest office that a non-member can hold, the unglorious, undignified, unrewarding post of Associate Member. By appointment." "And I," added Fire Chief Mooney, "find myself appointing him to the post of son-in-law, first class. By marriage." To his bride-to-be, Bill Lansing whispered, "I still say there's a better way to do it." "Than marriage?" "No. A better way to put out a fire." "There is," she chuckled. "And I'll show you the way after the E featuring the finest stories by the all-time greatest writers in the E s field of science fiction! E E In the big July issue -- by A. E. Van Vogt E by Robert A. Heinlein E  Coming soon -- E by E. E. Smith , Ph.D. E E and other Retief stories by Keith Laumer E All your favorites will be in the new monthly IF! Watch for it on your newsstand -- or subscribe now! E IF  Short Story They expected to hear a revelation . They didn't expect -- what they goti I n the semidarkness of the classroom the collection of intellectuals mulled over the possible reasons for their having been called together. They had come because Schuffman was their acknowledged master and because he was an old man, near death. They knew he was a tyrant and, at times, a crackpot. But no one could deny the man's genius with figures. As the professor entered the classroom, his colleagues gave him a respectful, if not enthusiastic, round of applause. Schuffman walked stiffly to the front of the room and stepped upon the raised platform. Behind him was a black velvet curtain that concealed a blackboard. "Gentlemen, please be seated." The professor was smiling. The thick lenses of his glasses made his eyes appear huge. "You are wondering why you have been called together?" Schuffman looked at the thirtyseven men before him. They sat behind grade-school desks and made notations in loose leaf binders. With their features blurred by cigarette smoke and the lack of light in the room they looked for all the world like a class of aged fifth graders. The old man smiled his all but toothless smile, raised his right hand and moved his right foot forward. Having assumed his favorite theatrical pose he said, quite slowly, "The unknowns no longer exist." A profound silence descended. Men in their forties looked in bewilderment at men in their eighties, who candidly returned their glances. "We have always assumed, rather blindly, that galaxies are unique units. Well, they most certainly are not. They are only as unique as is one physical entity unique from another. It is a separation of mass and of mass only." As Schuffman continued the room seemed to darken, almost imperceptibly. Only his face and the black velvet curtain behind him remained illuminated. "I have discovered the relationship between these sets or masses. There is a pattern. A key." The scientists squirmed in their seats. They felt vaguely that they should be astounded. They did not yet understand why. "What is the importance of this deduction? Gentlemen, think. The person who could describe the workings of the universe in a single mathematical formula would be a god. He would be all-knowing. When will life arise on a certain planet? When will life on a given mass destroy itself? What kinds of life may evolve, given certain conditions? These questions that made mockeries of our pitiful intellects, these questions would be child's play for the person who possessed the equation of the universe." The tension in the room was almost unbearable. Thirty-seven men held their breath. "In brief, gentlemen, I have the equation of the universel" S o saying, Schuffman pulled the velvet curtain back and revealed a series of figures that had been almost carelessly scribbled on the blackboard. "Look at it. Look at it, gentlemen!" The professor's voice had become louder and higher in pitch. "The universe depends for its very existence on this equation!" There was no sound in the room except Schuffman's voice and the labored breathing of some of the elder members of his audience. One or two of them prayed silently. The professor was no doubt exaggerating. Yet... "Look at it, you damned fools! You laughed at Schuffman before. No more! Now you will kneel down and ask favors like little children. I am like God. I am God -- and you are all damned idiots!" Thirty-seven pairs of fists were clenched and white-knuckled. Thirtyseven pairs of eyes strained at the equation. Thirty-seven foreheads became damp with perspiration. Suddenly, from the back of the room, came a clear, well modulated baritone voice. "The equation is wrong, professor." All heads turned to see who had questioned Schuffman. It was a young man, in his early thirties. Several of the scientists thought they recognized him. He stood perfectly erect and stared at the professor. "Who are you? How did you get in here?" "That is of little importance." "Well, however you came in, you will do me the kindness of leaving by the same..." "Schuffman." The young man's voice shook the room. It had a strange and fascinating depth to it. "Look at the seventh derivative of your equation. You have made an error that a careful high-school student could have avoided. The equation is impressive -- but it is invalid." An audible sigh went up from the thirty-seven men as they took note of the error. Someone laughed, "If the universe depends on that equation for its existence, none of us exist!" N ow everyone was laughing. The sound of so much mirth dinned in Schuffman's ears. The young man's voice was all he could distinguish in the jumble of sound: "Erase the equation!" Schuffman knew he was wrong. He picked up an eraser and slammed it against the blackboard. The thirtyseven men were taunting him, "Nothing exists... the equation is wrong... nobody here but us chickens!" they howled. The old man began to erase the blackboard with quick, agitated strokes. "Damn you, sir!" he screamed at the young man. As Professor Schuffman's eraser ran over and obliterated the last symbol of his equation, the universe disappeared. In the void, the young man sighed and wondered what to call the eighth day. A race that neither feared nor hated mankind -- but violated humanity's deepest, unspoken taboosl An astonishing complete short novel , sure to be discussed and remembered as a classicl by Brian W. Aldiss (author of The Long Afternoon of Earth, etc.) You're missing some of the finest science-fiction stories hi print today if you've been missing Worlds of Tomorrow. The memorable April issue, containing The Dark Light-Years and much more. It still on sale -- get your copy today! IF IF  Complete Short Novel The Store Of Heart's Desire Anything your heart desired was here -- wealth -- power -- hatred -- love -- even deathl I T he animal-derived underpeople talked about it for hundreds of years thereafter. The story became a part of their legend, their balladry. Real people, walking innocently around on the surface of the Earth, some kilometers above, never heard anything about it. To most of them, downdeep-downdeep was a place where robots and underpeople worked to provide the luxuries, comforts and pleasures of mankind. They knew nothing of the mysterious Aitch Eye or of its weird leader, the E-telekeli, and if they bad known, they would have been very surprised to find out that a true man had penetrated the uttermost depths and had conferred with the Aitch Eye itself. Very surprised. But not interested. Why should they care? Curiosity had died out a long time ago and the attempted Rediscovery of Man was awakening it only very slowly. A few officials knew or suspected the whole story, but then officials never talked much. Only the underpeople cared and they were startled indeed. A true man in downdeep-downdeep? How had that happened? What could have gone wrong? Nothing went wrong. C'mell took him, and took him at the bidding of the E-telekeli himself. He was an offworlder. He had the odd pompous name of Roderick MacArthur McBan the hundred and fifty-first and he was the richest sheep-owner from the richest planet in the galaxy, Old North Australia, which most people just called Norstrilia. He had gambled wildly, grotesquely, with help from his family's old computer, and he had won the largest fortune in the known or suspected universe. With this, he had bought Earth. The name didn't mean much. He was no crabbed financier, no empire-builder in civilian clothes. He was a boy, blond, tall, athletic. His shortname was Rod McBan. Though he was a mister and owner and a full-franchise landholder in Norstrilia, he had been driven to adventure by mischance; he had not sought it for lust of power. He didn't even go to downdeepdowndeep in true-man form. The traps would have killed him if he had. He had gone down disguised as a cat-man. T he cat-man disguise was not for the sake of downdeep; it was to keep him alive while all the thieves in space and Earth were looking for him. He had escaped death from the weapons of an old enemy, the Hon. Sec. in Norstrilia; he had bought Earth; he had abandoned his cousin-sweetheart Lavinia on Norstrilia, at the urgent insistence of his own government, and he had arrived on Earth in a catbody as the unwelcome but honored guest of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality, which always ruled and never reigned, had even provided him the undergirl C'mell as his consort and escort for his time on Earth; and C'mell was the most most enticing of the girlygirls of Earth. Knowing C'mell had been adventure incarnate. She had led him to things which he had not even imagined, including a knowledge of himself and of others. He had been places in the wet rich air of Earth, on the old streets and the complex cities, which no Norstrilian at home would ever believe; he had faced dangers, and now Rod knew that his time was drawing to a close. At IF last she was asking something of him and he could not refuse. All the time he had known her -- days which seemed as long and busy as years -- she had been giving: of herself, her time, the risk of her life. Now, for the first time, it was she who asked. He could not refuse. He went with her down to a store. A commissary, run by a wonderful person called the Catmaster. Five hundred years old, and still allowed to live, and still allowed to run his store. It was called the Department Store of Hearts' Desires. n Hphe trip was a vivid, quick dream. They had only a few hundred meters to fall before they reached ground level. They came out on the peoplestreet. A robot policeman watched them from a corner. Human beings in the costumes of a hundred historical periods were walking around in the warm, wet air of Earth. Rod could not smell as much salt in the air as he had smelled at the top of the tower, but down here in the city it smelled of more people than he had ever even imagined in one place. Thousands of individuals, hundreds and thousands of different kinds of foods, the odors of robots, of underpeople and of other things which seemed to be unmodified animals. "This is the most interesting-smelling place I have ever been," said he to C'mell. She glanced at him idly. "That's nice. You can smell like a dog-man. Most of the real people I have known couldn't smell their own feet. Come on though, C'roderick -- re member who you are! If we're not tagged and licensed for the surface, we'll get stopped by that policeman in one minute or less." She carried E-ikasus and steered Rod with a pressure on his elbow. They came to a ramp which led to an underground passage, well illuminated. Machines, robots and underpeople were hurrying back and forth along it, busy with the commerce of Earth. Rod would have been completely lost if he had been without C'mell. Though his miraculous broad-band hiering, which had so often surprised him and pleased him at home, had not returned during his few hours on Old Earth, his other senses gave him a suffocating awareness of the huge number of people around him and above him. (He never realized that there were times, long gone, when the cities of Earth had populations which reached the tens thousand people, and a comparable number of underpeople, was a crowd almost beyond measure.) The sounds and smells of underpeople were subtly different from those of people; some of the machines of Earth were bigger and older than anything which he had previously imagined; and above all, the circulation of water in immense gallons, for the multiple purposes of Earthport -- sanitation, coolIF ing, drinking, industrial purposes -- made him feel that he was not among a few buildings, which he would have called a city in Old North Australia, but that he himself had become a blood-cell thrusting through the circulatory system of some enormous composite animal, the nature of which he imperfectly understood. This city was alive with a sticky, wet, complicated aliveness Which he had hitherto not even imagined to be possible. Movement characterized it. He suspected that the movement went on by night and day, that there was no real cessation to it, that the great pumps thrust water through feeder pipes and drains whether people were awake or not. that the brains of this organization could be no one place, but had to comprise many subbrains, each committed and responsible for its particular tasks. No wonder underpeople were needed! It would be boredom and pain, even with perfected automation, to have enough human supervisors to reconnect the various systems if they had breakdowns inside themselves or at their interconnections. Old North Australia had vitalitv. But it was the vitality of open fields, few people, immense wealth, and perpetual military danger. This was the vitality of the cesspool or the compost heap, blit the rotting, blooming components were not waste material, but human beings and near-human beings. No wonder that his forefathers had fled the cities as they had been. They must have been solid plague to free men. And even Old Original Australia, somewhere here on Earth, had lost its openness and freedom in order to become the single giant city-complex of Nanbien. It must, Rod thought with horror, have been a thousand times the size of this city of Earthport. (He was wrong, because it reached three hundred thousand times the size of Earthport before it died. Earthport had only about two hundred thousand permanent residents when Rod visited it, with an additional number walking in from the nearer suburbs, the outer suburbs still being ruined and abandoned. But Australia -- under the name of Aojou Nanbien -- had reached a population of thirty billion before it died, and before the Wild Ones and the Menschenjager vivors.) R od was bewildered, but C'mell was not. She put A'gentur down, over his whined monkey-like side them. With the impudent knowledgeability of a true city girl, she led them to a cross-walk from which a continuous whistling roar came forth. By writing, by picture, and by loudspeaker, the warning system repeated up E-ikasus A'gentur, grabbed Rod by the arm, and jumped with them on a series of rapidly-moving airborne platforms. Rod, startled by the suddenness in which they had found the trackway, shouted to ask what it was: "Freight? What's that?" Things, Boxes. Food. This is the Central trackway. No sense in walking six kilometers when we can get this. Be ready to jump off with me when I give you the sign!" Tt feels dangerous," he said. "It isn't," said she, "not if you're a cat." With this somewhat equivocal reassurance, she let them ride. A'gentur could not care less. He cuddled his head against her shoulder, wrapped his long gibbon-like arms around her upper arm and went soundly to sleep. C'mell nodded at Rod. "Soon now!" she called, judging their distance by landmarks which he found meaningless. The landing points had flat, concrete-lined areas where the individual flat cars, rushing along on their river of air, could be shunted suddenly to the side for loading or unloading. Each of these loading areas had a number, but Rod had not even noticed at what point they had gotten on. The smells of the underground city changed so much as they moved from one district to another that he was more interested in odors than in the numbers on the platforms. She pinched his upper arm very sharply as a sign that he should get ready. They jumped. He staggered across the platform until he caught himself up against a large vertical crate marked Algonquin Paper Works -- Credit Slips, Miniature -- #m. C'mell landed as gracefully as if she had been acting a rehearsed piece of acrobatics. The little monkey on her shoulder stared with wide bright eyes. "This," said the monkey A'genturEikasus firmly and contemptuously, "is where all the people play at working. I'm tired, I'm hungry and my body sugar is low." He curled himself tight against C'mell's shoulder, closed his eyes and went back to sleep. "He has a point," said Rod. "Could we eat?" Cmell started to nod and then caught herself short "You're a cat," you know. He nodded. Then he grinned. "I'm hungry, anyhow. And I need a sandbox." "Sandbox?" she said, staring at him. "An awef," he said very clearly, using the Old North Australian term. "Awef?" It was his turn to get embarrassed. He said it in full: "An animal waste evacuation facility." "You mean a johnny," she cried. She thought a minute and then said, "Fooey." "What's the matter?" he asked, puzzled. "Each kind of underpeople has to use its own. It's death if you don't use one and it's death if you use the wrong one. The cat one fa four stations back on this underground trackway. Or we can walk back on the surface. It would only be a half hour." He said something rude to Earth. She wrinkled her brow. "All I said was, 'Earth fa a large healthy sheep.' That # s not so dirty." Her good humor returned. IP B efore she could ask him another question he held up a firm hand. "I am not going to waste a half hour. You wait here." He had seen the universal sign for "men's room" at the upper level of the platform. Before she could stop him he had gone into it. She caught her hand up to her mouth, knowing that the robot police would kill him on sight if they found him in the wrong place. It would be such a ghastly joke if the man who owned the earth were to die in the wrong toilet. As quick as thought she followed him, stopping just outside the door to the "men's room." She dared not to go in; she trusted that the place was empty when Rod entered it, because she had heard no boom of a slow, heavy bullet, none of the crisp buzzing of a burner. Robots did not use toilets, so they went in only when they were investigating something. She was prepared to distract any man living if he tried to enter that toilet by offering him the combination of an Immediate seduction or a complimentary and unwanted monkey. A'gentur had waked up. "Don't bother," he said. "I called my father. Anything approaching that door will fall asleep." An ordinary man, rather tired and worried-looking, headed for the men's room. CmeH was prepared to stop him at any cost, but she remembered what A'gentur-E-ikasus had told her, so she waited. The man reeled as he neared them. He stared at them, saw that they were underpeople, looked on through them as though they were not there. He took two more steps toward the door and suddenly reached out his hands as if he were going blind. He walked into the wall two meters from the door, touched it firmly and blindly with his hands and crumpled gently to the floor, where he lay snoring. "My dad's good," said A'genturE-ikasus. "He usually leaves real people alone, but when he must get them, he gets them. He even gave that man the distinct memory that he mistakenly took a sleeping pill when he was reaching for a pain-killer. When the human wakes up, he will feel foolish and will tell no one of his experience." Rod came out of the ever-sodangerous doorway. He grinned at them boyishly and did not notice the crumpled man lying beside the wall. "That's easier than turning back, and nobody noticed me at all." He was so proud of his foolhardy adventure that she did not have the heart to blame him. He smiled widely, his cat-whiskers tipping as he did so. For a moment, just a moment, she forgot that he was an important person and a real man to boot. He was a boy, and mighty like a cat, but all boy in his satisfaction, his wanton bravery, his passing happiness with vainglory. For a second or two she loved him. Then she thought of the terrible hours ahead, and of how he would go home, rich and scornful, to his all-people planet. The moment of love passed but she still liked him very much. "Come along, young fellow. You can eat. You are going to eat cat food since you are C'roderick, but it's not so bad." He frowned. "What is it? Do you have fish here? I tasted fish one time. A neighbor bought one. He traded two horses for it. It was delicious." "He wants fish," she cried to E-ikasus. "Give him a whole tuna for himself," grumbed the monkey. "My blood sugar is still low. I need some pineapple." C 'mell did not argue. She stayed underground and led them into a hall which had a picture of dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, bears and snakes above the door; that indicated the kinds of people who could be served there. E-ikasus scowled at the sign but he rode C'mell's shoulder in. "This gentlemen," said C'mell, speaking pleasantly to an old bearman who was scratching his belly and smoking a pipe, all at the same time, "has forgotten his credits." "No food," said the bear-man. "Rules. He can drink water, though." "I'll pay for him," said C'mell. The bear-jnan yawned. "Are you sure that he won't pay you back? If he does, that is private trading and it is punished by death." "I know the rules," said C'mell. "I've never been disciplined yet." The bear looked her over critically. He took his pipe out of his mouth and whistled. "No," said he, "and I can see that you won't be. What are you, anyhow? A model." "A girlygirl," said C'mell. The bear-man leapt from his stool with astonishing speed. "Catmadam!" he cried. "A thousand pardons. You can have anything in the place. You come from the top of Earthport? You know the Lords of the Instrumentality personally? You would like a table roped off with curtains? Or should I just throw everybody else out of here and report to my Man that we have a famous, beautiful slave from the highplaces?" "Nothing that drastic," said C'mell. "Just food." "Wait a bit," said A'gentur Eikasus, "if you're offering specials, I'll have two fresh pineapples, a quarter-kilo of ground fresh coconut and a tenth of a kilo of live insect grubs." The bear-man hesitated. "I was offering things to the cat-lady, who serves the mighty ones, not to you, monkey. But if the lady desires it, I will send for those things." He waited for C'mell's nod, got it, and pushed a button for a low-grade robot to come. He turned to Rod McBan, "And you, cat-gentleman. What would you like?" Before Rod could speak, C'mell said, "He wants two sailfish steaks, french fried potatoes, Waldorf salad, an order of ice cream and a large glass of orange juice." The bear-man shuddered visibly. "I've been here for many years and that is the most horrible lunch I ever ordered for a cat. I think Fll try it myself." C'mell smiled the smile which IF had graced a thousand welcomes. "I'll just help myself from the things you have on the counters. I'm not fussy." He started to protest but she cut him short with a graceful but unmistakable wave of the hand. He gave up. They sat at a table. A'gentur-E-ikasus waited for his combination monkey and bird lunch. Rod saw an old robot, dressed in a prehistoric tuxedo jacket, ask a question of the bear-man, leave one tray and bring another tray to him. The robot whipped off a freshly starched napkin. There was the most beautiful lunch which Rod McBan h#d ever seen. Even at a state banquet, the Old North Australians did not feed their guests like that. Just as they were finishing, the bear-cashier came to the table and asked, "Your name, cat-madam? I will charge these lunches to the government." "C'mell, servant to Teadrinker, subject to the Lord Jestocost, a Chief of the Instrumentality." The bear's face had been epilated, so that they could see him pale. "C'mell," he whispered. "C'mell! Forgive me, my lady. I have never seen you before. You have blessed this place. You have blessed my life. You are the friend of all underpeople. Go in peace." C'mell gave him the bow and smile which a reigning empress might give to an active Lord of the Instrumentality. She started to pick up the monkey but he scampered on ahead of her. Rod was puzzled. As the bear-man bowed him out, he asked, "C'mell. You are famous?" "In a way," she said. "Only among the underpeople." She hurried them both toward a ramp. They reached daylight at last, but even before they came to the surface, Rod's nose was assaulted by a riot of smells -- foods frying, cakes on the air, perfumes fighting with each other for attention and, above all, the smell of old things: dusty treasures, old leathers, tapestries, the echo-smells of people who had died a long time ago. C 'mell stopped and watched him. "You're smelling things again? I must say, you have a better nose than any human being I ever met before. How does it smell to you?" "Wonderful," he gasped. "Wonderful. Like all the treasures of the universe spilled out into one little place." "It's just the Thieves' Market of Paris." "There are thieves on Earth? Open ones, like Viola Siderea?" "Oh no," she laughed. "They would die in a few days. The Instrumentality would catch them. These are just people, playing. The Rediscovery of Man found some old institutions, and an old market was one of them. They make the robots and underpeople find things for them and then they pretend to be ancient, and make bargains with each other. Or they cook food. Not many real people ever cook food these  See the story, "The Ballad of Lost #, No. I (October, #), pages #-#. days. It's so funny that it tastes good to them. They all pick up money on their way in. They have barrels of it at the gate. In the evening, or when they leave, they usually throw the money in the gutter, even though they should really put it back in the barrel. It's not money we underpeople could use. We go by numbers and computer cards," she sighed. "I could certainly use some of that extra money." "And underpeople like you -- like us -- " said Rod, "what do we do in the market?" "Nothing," she whispered. "Absolutely nothing. We can walk through if we are not too big and not too small and not too dirty and not too smelly. And even if we are all right, we must walk right through without looking directly at the real people and without touching anything in the market." "Suppose we do?" asked Rod defiantly. "The robot police are there, with orders to kill on sight when they observe an infraction. Don't yoh realize, C'rod," she sobbed at him, tanks, way below in Downdeepdowndeep, ready to be born, to be trained, to be sent up here to serve Man? We're not scarce at all, C'rod, we're not scarce at all!" "Why are we going through the market, then?" "It's the only way to the Catmaster's store. We'll be tagged. Come along." Where the ramp reached the surface, four bright-eyed robots, the blue-enamel bodies shining and their milky eyes glowing, stood at the ready. Their weapons had an ugly buzz to them and were obviously already off the "safety" mark. C'mell talked to them quietly and submissively. When the robot-sergeant led her to a desk, she stared into an instrument like binoculars and blinked when she took her eyes away. She put her palm on a desk. The identification was completed. The robot sergeant handed her three bright disks, like saucers, each with a chain attached. Wordlessly she hung them around her own neck, Rod's neck, and A'gentur's. The robots let them pass. They walked in demure single file through the place of beautiful sights and smells. Rod felt that his eyes were wet with tears of rage; "I'll buy this place," he thought to himself, "if it's the only thing I'll ever buy!" C'mell had stopped walking. He looked up, very carefully. A door opened. A wise old catperson face looked out, stared at them, snapped, "No underpeople!" and slammed the door. C'mell rang the doorbell a second time. The face reappeared, more puzzled than angry. "Business," she whispered, "of the Aitch Eye." The face said, "In. Quick!" Ill O nce inside, Rod realized that the store was as rich as the market. There were no other cusIP tomers. After the outside sounds of music, laughter, frying, boiling, things falling, dishes clattering, people arguing and the low undertone of the ever-ready robot weapons buzzing, the quietness of the room was itself a luxury, like old, heavy velvet. The smells were no less variegated than those on the outside. But they were different, more complicated, and many more of them were completely unidentifiable. One smell he was sure of: human fear. It had been in this room not long before. "Quick," said the old cat-man. "I'm in trouble if you don't get out of my store soon. What it your business?" "I'm C'mell," said C'mell. He nodded pleasantly, but showed no sign of recognition. "I forget people," he said. "This is A'gentur." She indicated the monkey. The old cat-man did not even look at the animal. C'mell persisted, a note of triumph coming into her voice: You may have heard of him under his real name, E-ikasus." The old man stood there, blinking, as though he were taking it in. "Yeekasoose? With the letter E?" "Transformed," said C'mell inexorably, "for a trip all the way to Old North Australia and back." "Is this true?" said the old man to the monkey. E-ikasus said calmly, "I am the son of him of whom you think." The old man dropped to his knees, but did so with dignity: "I salute you, E-ikasus. When you next think-with your father, give him my greetings and ask from the Catmaster." "You are famous," said E-ikasus tranquilly. "But you are still in danger, merely being here. I have no license for underpeople!" C'mell produced her trump. "Catmaster, your next guest is no c'man. He is a true man, an offworlder, and he has just bought most of the planet Earth." more than ordinary shrewdness. There was a touch of kindness in his attitude. He was tall for a cat-man; few animal features were left to him, because old age, which reduces racial and sexual contrasts to mere memories, had wrinkled him into a uniform beige. His hair was not white, but beige too; his few cat-whiskers looked old and worn. He was garbed in a fantastic costume which -- Rod later learned -- consisted of the court robes of one of the Original Emperors, a dynasty which had prevailed many centuries among the further stars. Age was upon him, but wisdom was too: the habits of life, in his case, had been cleverness and kindness, themselves unusual in combination. Now very old, he was reaping the harvest of his years. He had done well with the thousands upon thousands of days behind him, with the result that age had brought a curious joy into his manner, as though each experience meant one more treat before the long bleak dark closed in. Rod felt himself attracted to this strange creature, who looked at him with such penetrating and very personal curiosity, and who managed to do so without giving offense. The catmaster spoke in very passable Norstrilian: "I know what you are thinking, mister and owner McBan." "You can hier me?" cried Rod. "Not your thoughts. Your face. It reads easily. I am sure that I can help you." "What makes you think I need help?" "All things need help," said the old c'man briskly, "but we must get rid of our other guests first. Where do you want to go, excellent one? And you, cat-madam?" "Home," said E-ikasus. He was tired and cross again. After speaking brusquely, he felt the need to make his tone more civil. "This body suits me badly, catmaster." "Are you good at falling?" said the catmaster. "Free fall?" The monkey grinned. "With this body? Of course. Excellent." "Fine," said the catmaster, "you can drop down my waste chute. It falls next to the forgotten palace where the great wings beat against time." The catmaster stepped to one side of the room. With only a nod at C'mell and Rod and a brief, "See you later," the monkey watched as the catsmaster opened a manhole cover, leaped trustingly into the complete black depth which appeared and was gone. The catmaster replaced the cover carefully. IF H e turned to Cornell She faced him truculently, the defiance of her posture oddly at variance with the innocent voluptuousness of her young female body. "I'm going nowhere." "You'll die," said the catmaster. "Can't you hear their weapons buzzing just outside the door? You know what they do to us underpeople. Especially to us cats. They use us, but do they trust us?" "I know one who does," she said. "The Lord Jestocost could protect me, even here, just as he protects you, far beyond your limit of years." "Don't argue it. You will make trouble for him with the other real people. Here, girl, I will give you a tray to carry with a dummy package on it. Go back to the underground and rest in the commissary of the bear-man. I will send Rod to you when we are through." "Yes," she said hotly, "but will you send him alive or dead?" The catmaster rolled his yellow eyes over Rod. "Alive," he said. "This one -- alive. I have predicted. Did you ever know me to be wrong? Come on, girl, out the door with you." C'mell let herself be handed a tray and a package, taken seemingly at random. As she left Rod thought of her with quick affection. She was his closest link with earth. He blurted out, "C'mell, will you be all right." She turned around at the door itself, looking all woman and all cat. Her red wild hair gleamed like a hearth-fire against the open light from the doorway. She stood erect, as though she were a citizen of Earth and not a mere underperson or girlygirl. She held out her right hand clearly and commandingty while balancing the tray on her left hand. When he shook hands with her, Rod realized that her hand felt utterly human but very strong. With scarcely a break in her voice she said, "Rod, goodbye. I'm taking a chance with you, but if s the best chance I've ever taken. You can trust the Catmaster, here in the department store of hearts' desires. He does strange things, Rod, but they're good strange things." He released her hand and she hind her. The room became hushed. "Sit down for a minute while I get ready. Or look around." "Sir catmaster -- " said Rod. "No title, please. I am an underperson, made out of cats. You may I miss C'mell. I'm worried about her. Am I falling in love with her? Is that what falling in love means?" "She's your wife," said the catmaster. "Just temporarily and just in pretense, but she's still your wife. It's Earthlike to worry about one's mate. She's all right." The old c'man disappeared behind a door which had an odd sign Rod looked around. The very first thing he saw was a display cabinet full of postage stamps. It was made of glass, but he could see the soft blues and the inimitable warm brick reds of his Cape of Good Hope triangular postage stamps. He had come to earth and there they were! He peered through the glass at them. They were even better than the illustrations which he had seen back on Norstrilia. They had the temper of great age upon them and yet, somehow, they seemed to freight with them the love which men, living men now dead, had given them for thousands and thousands of years. He looked around, and saw that the whole room was full of odd riches. There were ancient toys of all periods, flying toys, copies of machines, things which he suspected were trains. There was a two-story closet of clothing, shimmering with embroidery and gleaming with gold. There was a bin of weapons, clean and tidy -- models so ancient that he could not possibly guess what they had been used for, or by whom. Everywhere, there were buckets of coins, usually gold ones. He picked up a handful. They had languages he could not even guess at and they showed the proud imperious faces of the ancient dead. Another cabinet was one which he glanced at and then turned away from, shocked and yet inquisitive; it was filled with indecent souvenirs and pictures from a hundred periods of men's history, images, sketches, photographs, dolls and models, all of them portraying grisly, comical, sweet, friendly, impressive or horrible versions of the many acts of love. The next section made him pause utterly. Who would have ever wanted these things? Whips, knives, hoods, leather corsets. He passed on, very puzzled. T here was a slight sound. Rod turned around to face the Catmaster. "You like my poems? You like my things? I like them myself. Many men come in here to take things from me, but they find that title is vested in the Lord Jestocost, and they must do strange things to obtain my trifles." "Are all these things genuine?" asked Rod, thinking that even Old North Australia could not buy out this shop if they were. "Certainly not," said the old man. "Most of them are wonderful forgeries. The Instrumentality lets me go to the robot-pits where insane or worn-out robots are destroyed. I can have my pick of them if they are not dangerous. I put them to work making copies of anything which I find in the museums." "Those Cape triangles?" said Rod. "Are they real?" "Cape triangles? You mean the letter stickers. They are genuine, all right, but they are not mine. Those are on loan from the Earth museum until I can get them copied." "I will buy them," said Rod. "You will not," said the catmaster. "They are not for sale." "Then I will buy Earth and you and them too," said Rod. "Roderick Frederick Ronald Arthe one hundred and fifty-first, you will not." "Who are you to tell me?" "I have looked at one person and I have talked to two others." "All right," said Rod. "Who?" "I looked at the other Rod McIF Ban, your workman, Eleanor. She is a little mixed up about having a young man's body, because she is very drunk in the home of the Lord tiful young woman named Ruth Not-from-here is trying to make Eleanor marry her. She has no idea that she is dealing with another woman and Eleanor, in her copy of your proper body, is finding the experience exciting but terribly confusing. No harm will come of it, and your Eleanor is perfectly safe. Half the rascals of Earth have conbut he has a whole battalion from the Defense Fleet on loan around the place. So nothing is going to happen -- except that Eleanor will have a headache and Ruth will have a disappointment." Rod smiled. "You couldn't have told me anything better. Who else did you talk to?" "The Lord Jestocost and John Fisher to the hundredth." "Mister and owner Fisher? He's here?" "He's at his home, station of the Good Fresh Joey. I asked him if you could have your heart's desire. After a little while, he and somebody named doctor Wentworth said that the Commonwealth of Old North Australia would approve it." "How did you ever pay for such a call?" cried Rod. "Those things are frightfully expensive." "I didn't pay for it, mister and owner. You did. I charged it to your account, by the authority of your trustee, the Lord Jestocost. He and his forefathers have been my patrons for four hundred and twenty-six years." "You've got your nerve," said Rod, "spending my money when I was right here and not even asking me!" "You are an adult for some purposes and a minor for other purposes. I am offering you the skills which keep me alive. Do you think any ordinary cat-man would be allowed to live as long as this?" "No," said Rod. "Give me those stamps and let me go." The catmaster looked at him levelly. Once again there was the personal look on his face, which in Norstrilia would have been taken as an unpardonable affront; but along with the nosiness, there was an air of confidence and kindness which put Rod a little in awe of the man, underperson though he was. "Do you think that you could love these stamps when you get back home? Could they talk to you? Could they make you like yourself? Those pieces of paper are not your heart's desire. Something else is." "What?" said Rod, truculently. "In a bit, I'll explain. First, you cannot kill me. Second, you cannot hurt me. Third, if I kill you, it will be all for your own good. Fourth, if you get out of here, you will be a very happy man." "Are you barmy, mister?" cried Rod. "I can knock you flat and walk out that door. I don't know what you are talking about." "Try it," said the catmaster leveliyRod looked at the tall withered old man with the bright eyes. He looked at the door, a mere seven or eight meters away. He did not want to try it "All right." he conceded, "play your pitch." "I am a clinical psychologist. The only one on Earth and probably the only one on any planet. I got my knowledge from some ancient books when I was a kitten, being changed into a young man. I change people just a little, little bit. You know that the Instrumentality has surgeons and brain experts and all sorts of doctors. They can do almost anything with personality but the light stuff. That I do." "I don't get it," said Rod. "Would you go to a brain surgeon to get a haircut? Would you need a dermatologist to give you a bath? Of course not. I don't do heavy work. I just change people a little bit. It makes them happy. If I can't do anything with them, I give them souvenirs from this junkpile out here. The real work is in there. That's where you're going, pretty soon." He nodded his head IV R od was not a coward, but it was with feet and legs of lead that he walked to the door. It opened by itself. He walked in, steady but afraid. The room was dark with a darkness deeper than mere black. It was the dark of blindness, the expanse of cheek where no eye has ever been. The door closed behind him and he swam in the dark, so tangible had the darkness become. He felt blind. He felt as though he had never seen. But he could hear. He heard his own blood pulsing through his head. He could smell -- indeed, he was good at smelling. And this air -- this air smelled of the open night of Old North Australia. The smell made him feel little and afraid. It reminded him of his repeated childhoods, of the artificial drownings in the laboratories where he had gone to be re-born from one childhood to another. He reached out his hands. Nothing. He jumped gently. No ceiling. Using a fieldsman's trick familiar from times of dust-storms, he dropped lightly to his hands and feet. He scuttled crabwise on two feet and one hand, using the other hand as a shield to protect his face. In a very few meters he found the wall. He followed the wall around. Circular. This was the door. Follow again. With more confidence, he moved fast. Around, around, around. He could not tell whether the floor was asphalt or some kind of rough worn tile. Door again. A voice spieked to him. Spieked! And he heard it . He looked upward into the nothing which was bleaker than blindness, almost expecting to see the words in letters of fire, so clear had they been. IF The voice was Norstrilian and it said, Rod McBan is a man , man , man. But what is man? Immediate percussion of crazy , sad laughter . Rod never noticed that he reverted to the habits of babyhood. He sat flat on his rump, legs spread out in front of him at a # angle. He put his hands a little behind him and leaned back, letting the weight of his body push his shoulders a little bit upward. He knew the ideas that would follow the words, but he never knew why he so readily expected them. Light formed in the room, as he had been sure it would. T he images were little, but they looked real. Men and women and children, children and women and men marched into his vision and out again. They were not freaks. They were not beasts. They were not alien monstrosities begotten in some outside universe. They were not robots. They were not underpeople. They were all hominids like himself, kinsmen in the Earthborn races of men. First came people like Old North Australians and Earth people, very much alike, and both similar to the ancient types, except that Norstrilians were pale beneath their tanned skins and more robust. Then came Daimoni, white-eyed pale giants with a magical assurance, whose very babies walked as though they had already been given ballet lessons. Then heavy men, fathers, mothers, infants swimming on the solid ground from which they would never arise. Then rainmen from Amazonas Triste, their skins hanging in enormous folds around them, so that they looked like bundles of wet rags wrapped around monkeys. Blind men from Olympia, staring fiercely at the world through the radars mounted on their foreheads. Bloated monster-men from abandoned planets -- people as bad off as his own race had been after esAnd still more races. People he had never heard of. Men with shells. Men and women so thin that they looked like insects. A race of smiling, foolish giants, lost in the irreparable hebephrenia of their world. (Rod had the feeling that they were shepherded by a race of devoted dogs, more intelligent than themselves, who cajoled them into breeding, begged them to eat, led them to sleep. He saw no dogs, only the smiling unfocused fools, but the feeling dog, good dog! was somehow very near.) A funny little people who pranced with an indefinable deformity of gait. Water-people, the clean water of some unidentified world pulsing through their gills. And then -- More people, still, but hostile ones. Lipsticked hermaphrodites with enormous beards and fluting voices. Carcinomas which had taken over men. Giants rooted in the earth. Human bodies crawling and weeping as they crept through wet grass, contaminated themselves and looking for more people to infect. Rod did not know it, but he growled. He jumped into a squatting position and swept his hands across the rough floor, looking for a weapon. These were not men -- they were enemies! Still they came. People who had lost eyes, or who had grown fireresistant, the wrecks and residues of abandoned settlements and forgotten colonies. The waste and spoilage of the human race. And then -- Him. Himself. The child Rod McBan. And voices, Norstrilian voices calling: "He can't hier. He can't spiek. He's a freak. He's a freak! He can't hier. He can't spiek." And another voice: "His poor parents!" The child Rod disappeared and there were his parents again. Twelve times taller than life, so high that he had to peer up into the black absorptive ceiling to see the underside of their faces. The mother wept. The father sounded stern. The father was saying, "It's no use. Doris can watch him while we're gone, but if he isn't any better, we'll turn him in." "Kill him?" shrieked the woman. "Kill my baby? Oh, no! No!" The calm, loving, horrible voice of the man. "Darling, spiek to him yourself. He'll never hier. Can that be a Rod McBan?" Then the woman's voice, sweetpoisonous and worse than death, sobbing agreement with her man against her son. "I don't know, Rod. I don't know. Just don't tell me about it." He had hiered them, in one of his moments of wild penetrating hiering when everything telepathic came in with startling clarity. He had hiered them when he was a baby. The real Rod in the dark room let out a roar of fear, desolation, loneliness, rage, hate. This was the telepathic bomb with which he had so often startled or alarmed the neighbors. B ut this time, the room was closed. His mind roared back at itself. Rage, loudness, hate, raw noise poured into him from the floor, the circular wall, the high ceiling. He cringed beneath it and as he cringed, the sizes of the images changed. His parents sat in chairs, chairs. They were little, little. He was an almighty baby, so enormous that he could scoop them up with his hand. He reached the tiny loathesome parents who had said, "Let him die." To crush them, but they faded first. Their faces turned frightened. They looked wildly around. Their chairs dissolved, the fabric falling to a floor which in turn looked like storm-eroded cloth. They turned for a last kiss and had no lips. They IF reached to hug each other and their arms fell off. Their space ship had gone milky in mid-trip, dissolving into traceless nothing. And he, himself had seen it! The rage was followed by tears, by a guilt too deep for regret, by a self-accusation so raw and wet that it lived like one more organ inside his living body. He wanted nothing. No money, no stroon, no Station of Doom. He wanted no friends, no companionship, no welcome, no house, no food. He wanted no walks, no solitary discoveries in the field, no friendly sheep, no treasures in the gap, no computer, no day, no night, no life. He wanted nothing, and he could not understand death. The enormous room lost all light and all sound, and he did not notice it. His own naked life lay before him like a freshly dissected cadaver. It lay there and it made no sense. There had been many Roderick MacArthur McBans, one hundred and fifty of them in a room, but he -- #! #! -- was not one of them, not a giant who had wrestled treasure from the sick earth and hidden sunshine of the Norstrilian plains. It wasn't his telepathic deformity, his spieklessness, his braindeafness to hiering. It was himself, the "me-subtile" inside him, which was all wrong. He was the baby stead. He had hated mama and papa for their pride and their hate: when he hated them, they crumpled and died out in the mystery of space, so that they did not even leave bodies to bury. Rod stood to his feet. His hands were wet. He touched his face and he realized that he had been weeping with his face cupped in his hands. Wait. There was something that still remained. There was one thing that he wanted, and he wanted it from his one enemy. He wanted Houghton Syme not to hate him. Houghton could hier and spiek, but he was a shortie, living with the sickness of death lying between himself and every girl, every friend, every job he had met. And he, Rod, had mocked that man, calling him Old Hot and Simple. Rod might be worthless but he was not as bad off as Houghton Syme, the Hon. Sec. Houghton Syme was at least trying to be a man, to live his miserable scrap of a life, and all Rod had ever done was to flaunt his wealth and near-immortality before the poor cripple who had just one hundred and sixty years to live. Rod wanted only one thing -- to get back to Old North Australia in time to help Houghton Syme, to let Houghton Syme know that the guilt was his, Rod's, and not Syme's. The Onseck had a bit of a life and he deserved the best that he could make of it. Rod stood there, expecting nothing. He had forgiven his last and worst enemy. He had forgiven himself. T he door opened very matter-offactly and there stood the Catmaster, a quiet, wise smile upon his face. "You can come out now, Mister and owner McBan, and if there is anything in this outer room which you want, you may certainly have it." Rod walked out slowly. He had no idea how long he had been in When he emerged, the door closed behind him. "No thanks, cobber. It's mighty friendly of you, but I don't need anything much, and I'd better be getting back to my own planet." "Nothing?" said the Catmaster, still smiling very attentively and very quietly. "I'd like to hier and spiek but it's not very important." "This is for you," said the Catmaster. "You put it in your ear and leave it there. If it itches or gets dirty, you take it out, wash it, and put it back in. It's not a rare device, but apparently you don't have them on your planet." He held out an object no larger than the kernel of a ground-nut. Rod took it absently and was ready to put it into his pocket, not into his ear, when he saw that the smiling attentive face was watching, very gently but very alertly. He put the device' into his ear. It felt a little cold. "I will now," said the Catmaster, "take you to C'mell, who will lead you to your friends in Downdeepdowndeep. You had better take this blue two-penny Cape of Good Hope postage stamp with you. I will report to Jestocost that it was lost while I attempted to copy it. That is slightly true, isn't it?" Rod started to thank him absentmindedly and then -- Then, with a thrill which sent gooseflesh all over his neck, back and arms, he realized that the Catmaster had not moved his lips in the slightest, had not pushed air through his throat, had not disturbed the air with the pressure of noise. The Catmaster had spieked to Rod and Rod had hiered him. V R od McBan left the Department Store of Hearts' Desires simply, humbly. He carried a package of books, wrapped in dustproofing paper, and he looked like any other first-class cat-man messenger. The human beings in the market were still making their uproar, their smells of foods, spices, and odd objects, but he walked so calmly and so straightforwardly through their scattered groups that even the robot police, weapons on the buzz, paid no attention to him. When he had come across the Thieves' Market, going the other way with C'mell and A'gentur, he had been ill at ease. As a misterand-owner from Old North Australia, he had been compelled to keep his external dignity, but he had not felt ease within his heart. These people were strange. His destination had been unfamiliar, and the problems of wealth and survival lay heavy upon him. IF Now, it was all different. Catman he might be on the outside, but on the inside he once again felt his proper pride of home and planet. And more. He felt calm, down to the very tips of his nerve endings. The hiering-spieking device should have alerted and excited him: it did not. As he walked through the market, he noticed that very few of the Earth people were communicating with one another telepathically. They preferred to babble in their loud airborne language, of which they had not one but many kinds, with the old Common Tongue serving as a referent for those who had been endowed with different kinds of ancient language by the processes of the Rediscovery of Man. He had even heard Ancient Inglish, the Queen's Own Language, sounding remarkably close to his own spoken language of Norstrilian. These things caused neither stimulation nor excitement, not even pity. He had his own problems, but they were no longer the problems of wealth or of survival. Somehow he had a confidence that a hidden, friendly power in the universe would take care of him, if he took care of others. He wanted to get Eleanor out of trouble, to disembarrass the Hon. Sec., to see Lavinia, to reassure Doris, to say goodbye to C'mell, to get back to his sheep, to protect his computer and to keep the Lord Redlady away from lawfully on occasions too slight for manslaughter. One of the robot police, a little more perceptive than the others, watched this cat-man who walked with preternatural assurance through the crowds of men, but "C'roderick" did nothing but enter the market from one side, thread his way through it and leave at the other side, still carrying his package. The robot turned away. His dreadful, milky eyes, always ready for disorder and death, scanned the market place again and again with fatigue-free vigilance. Rod went down the ramp and turned right. There was the underpeople commissary with the bear-man cashier. The cashier remembered him. "It's been a long day, cat-sir, since I saw you. Would you like another special order of fish?" "Where's my girl?" said Rod bluntly. "C'mell?" said the bear-cashier. "She waited here a long time but then she went on and she left this message, Tell my man C'Rod that he should eat before following me, but that when he has eaten he can either follow me by going to Upshaft Four, Ground Level Hostd of the Singing Birds, Room Nine, where I am taking care of an offworld visitor, or he can send a robot to me and I will come to him.' Don't you think, cat-sir, that I've done well, remembering so complicated a message?" The bear-man flushed a little and the edge went off his pride as he confessed, for the sake of some abstract honesty, "Of course, that address part, I wrote that down. It would be very bad and very confusing if I sent you to the wrong address in people's country. Somebody might bum you down if you came into an unauthorized corridor." "Fish, then," said Rod. "A fish dinner, please." H e wondered why Cmell, with his life in the balance, would go off to another visitor. Even as he thought this, he detected the mean jealousy behind it, and he confessed to himself that he had no idea of the terms, conditions, or hours of work required in the girlygirl business. He sat dully on the bench, waiting for his food. still in his mind, the pathos of his parents, those dying dissolving mannikins, was bright within his heart, and his body throbbed with the fatigue of the ordeal. Idly he asked the bear-cashier, "How long has it been since I was here?" The bear-cashier looked at the clock on the wall, "About fourteen hours, worthy cat." "How long is that in real time?" Rod was trying to compare Norstrilian hours with Earth hours. He thought that Earth hours were oneseventh shorter, but he was not sure. The bear-man was completely baffled. "If you mean galactic navigation time, dear guest, we never use that down here anyhow. Are there any other kinds of time?" Rod realized his mistake and tried to correct it. "It doesn't matter. I am thirsty. What is lawful for underpeople to drink? I am tired and thirsty, both, but I have no desird to become the least bit drunk." "Since you are a c'man," said the bear-cashier, "I recommend strong black coffee mixed with sweet whipped cream." "I have no money," said Rod. 'The famous cat-madam, CmeH your consort, has guaranteed payment for anything at all that you order." "Go ahead, then." The bear-man called a robot over and gave him the orders. Rod stared at the wall, wondering what he was going to do with this Earth he had bought. He wasn't thinking very hard, just musing idly. A voice cot directly into his mind. He realized that the bear-man was spieking to him and that he could hear it. "You are not an underman, sir and master." "What?" spieked Rod. "You heard me," said the telepathic voice. "I am not going to repeat it. If you come in the sign of the Fish, may blessings be upon you." T don't know that sign," said Rod. "Then," spieked the bear-man, "no matter who you are, may you eat and drink in peace because you are a friend of Cornell and you are under the protection of the One Who Lives in Downdeep." "I don't know," spieked Rod. "I just don't know, but I thank you for your welcome, friend." "I do not give such welcomes Kghtly," said the bear-man, "and IF ordinarily I would be ready to ran away from anything at dangerous and unexplained as yourself, but you bring with you the quality of peace, which made me think that you might travel in the fellowship of the sign of the Fish. I have heard that in that sign, people and underpeople remember die blessed Joan and mingle in complete comradeship." "No," said Rod, "no. I travel alone." His food and drink came. He consumed them quietly. The bearcashier had given him a table ami bench far from the serving tables and away from the other underpeople who dropped in, interrupting their tasks, eating in a hurry so that they could get back in a hurry. He saw one wolf-man, wearing the insigne of Auxiliary Police, who came to the wall, forced his identitycard into a dot, opened his mouth, bolted down five large chunks a f red, raw meat and left the commissary, all in less than one and onehalf minutes. Rod was amazed but not impressed. He had too much on his rnfrvi. At the desk he confirmed the address which Ctadl had left, offered the bearsman a handshake and went along to Upshaft Four. He still looked like a c'man and he carried his package alertly and htmbly, as he had seen other underpeople behave in the presence of real persons. H e almost met death on the way. Upshaft Four was one-directional and was plainly marked, "People Only." Rod did not like the looks of it, as long as he moved in a cat-man body, but he did not think that Cmell would give him directions wrongly or lightly. (Later, he found that she had forgotten to tell him the phrase, "Special business under the protection of Jetocost, a Chief of the Instrumentality, " If he were to be challenged; but he did not know the phrase.) An arrogant human man, wearing a billowing red cloak, looked at him sharply as he took a belt, hooked it and stepped into the shaft When Rod stepped free, bd and the man were on a level. Rod tried to look like a humble, modest messenger, but the strange voice grated his ears: "Just what do you think you are doing? This is a human shaft." Rod pretended that he did not know it was himself whom the redcloaked man was addressing. He continued to float quietly upward, his magnet-belt tugging uncomfortably at his waist. A pain in foe ribs made him tuns suddenly, almost losing his balance! in foe belt "Animal!" cried foe man. "Speak up or die." Still holding his package of books. Rod said mildly, "Tm on an errand and I was told to go this way." The man's senseless hostility gave caliber to his voice: "And who told you?" "Cmell," said Rod absently. The man and his companions laughed at that, and for some reason their laughter had no humor #P in it, just savagery, cruelty and -- way down underneath -- something of fear. "Listen to that!" said the man in a red cloak. "One animal says another animal told it to do something." He whipped oat a knife. "What are you doing?" cried Rod. "Just cutting your belt," said the man. "There's nobody at all below us and you will make a nice red blob at the bottom of the shaft, cat-man. That ought to teach you which shaft to use." The man actually reached over and seized Rod's belt. He lifted the knife to slash. Rod became frightened and angry. His brain ran red. He spat thoughts at them -- pommy! shortie! Earthie! dead red dirty blue stinking little man, die, puke, burst, blaze, die! It all came out in a single flash, faster than he could control it. The red-cloaked man twisted oddly, as if in spasm. His two companions threshed in their belts. They turned slowly. High above them, two women began screaming. Further up a man was shouting, both with his voice and with his mind, "Police! Help! Police! Police! Brainbomb! Brainbomb! Help!" The effort of his telepathic explosion left Rod feeling disoriented and weak. He shook his head and blinked his eyes. He started to wipe his face, only to hit himself on the jaw with the package of books, which he still carried. This aroused him a little. He looked at the three men. Redcloak was dead, his head at an odd angle. The other two seemed to be dead. One was floating upside down, his rump pointing upmost and the two limp legs swinging out at odd angles; the other was right-side up but had sagged in his belt. All three of them kept moving a steady ten meters a itainute, right along with Rod. There were strange sounds from above. shaft with its volume, roared down: "Stay where you are! Police. Police. Police." R od glanced at the bodies floating upward. A corridor came by. He reached for the grip-bar, made it, and swung himself into the horizontal passage. He sat down immediately, not getting away from the Upshaft. He thought sharply with his new hiering. Excited, frantic minds beat all around him, looking for enemies, lunatics, crimes, aliens, anything strange. Softly he began spieking to the empty corridor and to himself, "I am a dumb cat. I am the messenger C'rod. I must take the books to the gentleman from the stars. I am a dumb cat. I do not know much." A robot, gleaming with the ornamental body-armor of Old Earth, landed at his cross-corridor, looked at Rod and called up the shaft, "Master, here's one. A c'man with a package. IF A young subchief came into view, feet first as he managed to ride down the shaft instead of going up it. He seized the ceiling of the transverse corridor, gave himself a push and (once free of the shaft's magnetism) dropped heavily on his feet beside Rod. Rod hiered him thinking, "Fm good at this. I'm a good telepath. I clean things up fast Look at this dumb cat." Rod went on concentrating, "Fm a dumb cat. I have a package to deliver. Fm a dumb cat." The subchief looked down at him scornfully. Rod felt the other's mind slide over his own in the rough equivalent of a search. He remained relaxed and tried to feel stupid while the other hiered him. Rod said nothing. The subchief flashed his baton over the package, eying the crystal knob at the end. "Books," he snorted. Rod nodded. "You!" said the bright young subchief. "You see bodies?" He spoke in a painfully clear, almost childish version of the Old Common Tongue. Rod held up three fingers and then pointed upward. "You, cat-man, you feel file brain-bomb!" Rod, beginning to enjoy the game, threw his head backward and let out a cattish yowl expressing pain. The subchief could not help clapping his hands over his ears. He started to turn away. "I can see what you think of it, cat fellow. You're pretty stupid, aren't you?" Still thinking low dull thoughts as evenly as he could, Rod said promptly and modestly, "Me smart cat. Very handsome, too." "Come along," said the subchief to his robot, disregarding Rod altogether. Rod plucked at his sleeve. The subchief turned back. Very humbly Rod said, "Sir and master, which way. Hostel of Singing Birds, Room Nine?" "Mother of poodles!" cried the subchief. "Fm on a murder case and this dumb cat asks me for directions." He was a decent young man and he thought for a minute. "This way -- " said he, pointing up the Upshaft -- "it's twenty mode meters and then the third street over. But that's 'people only.' IF about a kilometer over to the step for animals." He stood, frowning, and then swung on one of his robots: "Wush you see this cat!" "Yes, master, a cat-man, very handsome." "So you think he's handsome, too. He already thinks so, so that makes it unanimous. He may be handsome, but he's dumb. Wush', take this cat-man to the address he tells you. Use the upshaft by my authority. Don't put a belt on him, just hug him." Rod was immeasurably grateful that he had slipped his shaftbelt off and had left it negligently on the rack, just before the robot arrived. The robot seized him around the waist with what was literally a grip of iron. They did not wait for the slow upward magnetic drive of file shaft to lift them. The robot had some kind of jet in his backpack and lifted Rod with sickening speed to the next level. He pushed Rod into the corridor and followed him. "Where do you go?" said the robot, very plainly. Rod, concentrating on feeling stupid just in case someone might still be trying to hier his mind, said slowly and stumblingly, "Hostel of the Singing Birds, Room Nine." The robot stopped still, as though he were communicating telepathically, but Rod's mind, though alert, could catch not the faintest whisper of telepathic communication. "Hot buttered sheep!" thought Rod. "He's using radio to check the address with his headquarters right from here!" VI W ush' appeared to be doing just that. He came to in a moment. They emerged under the sky, filled with Earth's own moon, the loveliest thing that Rod had ever seen. He did not dare to stop and enjoy the scenery, but he trotted lithely beside the robot-policeman. They came down a road with heavy, scented flowers. The wet warm air of Earth spread the sweetness everywhere. On their right there was a courtyard with copies of ancient fountains, a dining space now completely empty of diners, a robot waiter in the corner and many individual rooms opening on the plaza. The robot policeman called to the robotwaiter, "Where's number nine?" The waiter answered him with a lifting of the hand and an odd twist af the wrist, twice repeated, which the robot-policeman seemed to understand perfectly well. "Come along," he said to Rod, leading the way to an outside stairway which reached up to an outside balcony serving the second story of rooms. One of the rooms had a plain number nine on it. Rod was about to tell the robotpoliceman that he could see the number nine, when Wush' with officious kindness, took the doorknob and flung it open with a gesture of welcome to Rod. There was the great cough of a heavy gun and Wush', his head blown almost completely off, clanked metallically to the iron floor of the balcony. Rod instinctively jumped for cover and flattened himself against the wall of the building. A handsome man, wearing what seemed to be a black suit, came into the doorway, a heavy-caliber police pistol in his hand. "Oh, there you are," said he to Rod evenly enough. "Come on in." Rod felt his legs working, felt himself walking into the room despite the effort of his mind to resist. He stopped pretending to be a dumb cat. He dropped the books on the ground and went back to thinking like his normal Old North Australian self, despite the cat body. It did no good. He kept on walking involuntarily, and entered the room. As he passed the man himself, he was conscious of a sticky sweet rotten smell, like nothing he had ever smelled before. He also saw that the man, though fully dothed, was sopping wet. He entered the room. IT I t was raining inside. Somebody had jammed the fire-sprinkler system so that a steady rain fell from the ceiling to the floor. C'mell stood in the middle of the room, her glorious red hair a wet stringy mop hanging down her shoulders. There was a look of concentration and alarm on her face. "I," said the man, "am Tostig Amaral. This girl said that her husband would come with a policeman. I did not think she was right. But she was right. With the cat-husband (here comes a policeman. I shoot the policeman. He is a robot and I can pay the Earth government for as many robots as I like. You are a cat. I can kill you also, and pay die charges on you. But I am a nice man, and I want to make love with your little red art over there, so I will be generous and pay you somedung to that you can tell her she is mine and not yours. Do you understand that, cat-man?" Rod found himself released from (he unexplained muscular bonds which had hampered his freedom. "My lord, my master from afar," he said, "Cmell is an underperson. It is the law here that if an underperson and a person become involved hi love, the underperson dies and the human person gets brainscrubbed. I am sure, my master, that you would not want to be brainscrubbed by the Earth authorities. Let the girl go." Amaral glided across the room. His face was pale, petulant, human, but Rod saw that the black clothes were not clothes at all. The "dothes" were mucous membranes, an extension of Amaral's living skin, The pale face turned even more pale with rage. "You're a bold cat-man to talk like that. My body is bigger than yours, and it is poisonous as welL We have had to live hard in the rain of Amazonas Triste, and we have mental and physical powers which you had better not disturb. If you will not take payment, go away anyhow. The girl is mine. What happens to her is my business. If I violate Earth regulations, I will destroy the c'girl and pay for her. Go away, or you die." Rod spoke with deliberate calm and calculated risk. "Citizen, I play no game. I am not a cat-man but a subject of Her Absent Majesty the Queen, from Old North Australia. I give you warning that it is a man you face, and no mere animal. Let that girl go." C'mell struggled as though she were trying to speak, but could not. Amaral laughed, "That's a lie, animal and a bold one. I admire you for trying to save your mate. But she is mine. She is a girlygirl and the Instrumentality gave her to me. She is my pleasure. Go, bold cat! You are a good liar." Rod took his last chance, "Scan me if you will." He stood his ground. Amaral's mind ran over his personality like filthy hands pawing naked flesh. Rod recoiled at the dirtiness and intimacy of being felt by such a person's thoughts, because be could sense the kinds of pleasure and cruelty which Amaral had experienced. He stood firm, calm, sure, just. He was not going to leave C'mell with this -- this monster from the stars, man though he might be, of the old true human stock. Amaral laughed. "You're a man, all right. A boy. A farmer. And you cannot hier or spiek except for the button in your ear. Get out, child, before I box your ears!" Rod spoke: "Amaral, I herewith put you in danger." Amaral did not reply with words. His peaked sharp face grew paler and the folds of his skin dilated. They quivered, like the edges of wet, torn balloons. The room began to fill with a sickening sweet stench, as though it were a candy shop in which all the unburied bodies had died weeks before. There was a Smell of vanilla, of sugar, of fresh hot cookies, of baked bread, of chocolate boiling in the pot: there was even a whiff of stroon. But as Amaral tensed and shook out his auxiliary skins each smell turned wrong, into a caricature and abomination of itself. The composite was hypnotic. Rod glanced at C'mell. She had turned completely white. That decided him. The calm which he had found with the Catmaster might be good, but there were moments for calm and other moments for anger. Rod deliberately chose anger. He felt fury rising in him as hot and quick and greedy as if it had been love. He felt his heart go faster, his muscles become stronger, his mind dearer. Amaral apparently had total confidence in Ms own poisonous and hypnotic powers, because he was staring straightforward as his skins swelled and waved in the air like wet leaves under water. The steady drizzle from the sprinkler kept everything penetratingly wet. Rod disregarded this. He welcomed fury. With his new hiering device, he focused on Amaral's mind, and only on Amaral's. Amaral saw the movement of his eyes and whipped a knife into view. "Man or cat, you're dying!" said Amaral, himself hot with the excitement of hate and collision. Rod then spoke, in his worst scream -- beast, filth, offal -- spot, dirt, vileness, wet, nasty -- die, die, die! H e was sure it was the loudest cry he had ever given. There was no echo, no effect. Amaral stared at him, the evil knife-point flickering in his hand like the flame atop a candle. Rod's anger reached a new height. He felt pain in his mind when he walked forward, cramps in his muscles as he used them. He felt a real fear of the offworld poison which this man-creature might exude, but the thought of C'mell -- cat or not cat -- alone with Amaral was enough to give him the rage of a beast and the strength of a machine. IF Only at the very last moment did Amaral realize Rod had broken loose. Rod never could tell whether the telepathic scream had really hurt the wet-worlder or not, because he did something very simple. He reached with all the speed of a Norstrilian farmer, snatched the knife from Amaral's hand, ripping folds of soft, sticky skin with it, and then slashed the other man from davicle to clavicle. He jumped back in time to avoid the spurt of blood. The "wet black suit" collapsed as Amaral died on the floor. Rod took the dazed C'mell by the arm and led her out of the room. The air on the balcony was fresh, but the murder-smell of Amazonas Triste was still upon him. He knew that he would hate himself for weeks, just from the memory of that smell. There were whole armies of robots and police outside. The body of Wush' had been taken away. There was silence as they emerged. Then a clear, civilized, commanding voice spoke from the plaza below, "Is he dead?" Rod nodded. "Forgive me for not coming closer. I am the Lord Jestocost. I know you, C'roderick, and I know who you really are. These people are all under my orders. You and the girl can wash and wash in the rooms below. Then you can run a certain errand. Tomorrow, at the second hour, I will see you." Robots came close to them -- apparently programmed to have no sense of smell, because the fulsome stench did not bother them in the least. People stepped out of their way looking startled and repelled, aa they passed. Rod was able to murmur, "C'mell, are you all right?" She nodded and. she gave him a wan smile. Then she forced herself to speak. "You are brave, mister McBan. You are even braver than a cat." The robots separated the two of them. Within moments Rod found little white medical robots taking his clothing off him gently, deftly and quickly. A hot shower, with a smell of medication to it, was already hissing in the bath-stall. Rod was tired of wetness, tired of all this water everywhere, tired of wet things and complicated people, but he stumbled into the shower with gratitude and hope. He was still alive. He had unknown friends to help him. And C'mell. C'mell was safe from the rain-man. "Is this," thought Rod, "what people call love?" The clean stringing astringency of the shower drove all thoughts from his mind. Two of the little white robots had followed him in. He sat on a hot, wet wooden bench and they scrubbed him with brushes which felt as though they would remove his very skin as they worked to get him clean. Bit by bit, the terrible odor faded. vn R od McBan went from the room of the stinkman to a place where a doctor gave him new smells to experience, smells of chemistry and of medicine and of heat and old. The doctor's name was Vomact, and Rod would have enjoyed his company if he had not wondered where CmeH was and what she was doing. Vomact was a small man, a full head shorter than Rod himself, but so gracefully proportioned that he did not look stunted or little. His face was thin, with a mop of ungovernable black hair which fell in all directions. Among Norstrilians, this fashion would have been deemed eccentric; to judge by the fact that other Earthmen let their hair grow wild and long, it must have been an Earth fashion. Rod found it foolish but not repulsive. It was not Vomact's appearance which caused the impression. It was the personality which tingled out of every pore. Vomact could become clam when he knew, from his medical wisdom, that kindness and tranquility were in order, but these qualities were not usual to him. He was vivacious, moody, lively, talkative to an extreme, but he was sensitive enough to the person to whom he was talking: he never became a bore. Even among Norstrilian women, Rod had never seen a person who expressed so much, so fluently. When Vomact talked, his hands were in constant motion -- outlining, describing, clarifying the points which he described. When he talked he smiled, scowled, raised his eyebrows in questioning, stared with amazement, looked aside in wonder. Rod was used to the sight of two Norstrilians having a long telepathic conversation, spieking and hiering one another as their bodies reposed, comfortable and immobile, while their minds worked directly on one another. To do all this with the speaking voice -- that, to a Norstrilian, was a marvel to hear and behold. There was something graceful and pleasant about the animation of this earth doctor which stood in complete contrast to the quick dangerous decisiveness of the Lords of the Instrumentality. Rod began to think that if Earth were full of people, all of them like Vomact, it must be a delightful but confusing place. Vomact had once hinted that his family was unusual, so that even in the long weary years of perfection, when everyone else had numbers, they kept their family name secret but remembered. UT am doctor Vomact. I know A that you are not a cat, mister and owner McBan, and it is only my business to check up on you. May I?" "Cmell -- " began Rod. "She is perfectly all right. We have given her a sedative and for the time being she is being treated as though she was a human woman. From the Instrumentality, the Lord Jestocost told me to suspend the rules in her case, and I did so. But I think we will both have trouble about the matter later on." IF Trouble?" said Rod. Til pay -- " "No, no, it's not payment. It's just the rule that damaged underpeople should be destroyed and not put in hospitals. Mind you, I treat them myself now and then, if I can do it on the sly. But now let's have a look at you." "Why are we talking?" spieked Rod telepathically. "Didn't you know that I can hier mind-to-mind now?" Instead of getting a physical examination, Rod had a wonderful visit with the doctor, in which they drank enormous glasses of a sweet Earth beverage called chai by the ancient Parosski ones. He found that this doctor Vomact was a candidate for a Chiefship of the Instrumentality, and he learned something of the strange tests required for that office. He even found that the doctor knew more than he himself did about his own financial position, and that the actuarial balances of Earth were sagging with the weight of his wealth, since the increase in the price of stroon might lead to shorter lives. The doctor and he ended by discussing the underpeople; he found that the doctor had just as yivid an admiration for C'mell as he himself did. The evening ended when Rod said, "I'm young, doctor and sir, and I sleep well, but I'm never going to sleep again if you don't get that smell away from me. I can smell it inride my nose." The doctor became professional. He said, "Open your mouth and breathe right into my face!" Rod hesitated and then obeyed. "Great crooked stars!" said the doctor. "I can smell it too. There's a little in your upper respiratory system, perhaps a little even in your lungs. Do you need your sense of smell for the next few days?" Rod said he did not. "Fine," said the doctor. "We oan numb that section of the brain very gently. There'll be no residual damage. You won't smell anything for eight to ten days, and by that time the smell of Amaral will be gone. Incidentally, you were charged with first degree murder, tried and acquitted, on the matter of Tostig Amaral." "How could I be?" said Rod. "I wasn't even arrested." 'The Instrumentality computered it. Now lie down, so I can kill off that smell." Rod lay down. The doctor put his head in a clamp and called in process knocked him out, and when he wakened, it was in a different building. He sat up in bed and saw the sea itself. Cmefl was standing at the edge of water. He sniffed. He smelled no salt, no wet, no water -- and no AmaraL It was worth the change. C 'mell came to him. "My dear, my very dear, my sire and master but my very dear! You chanced your life for me last night." "I'm a cat myself," laughed Rod. He leaped from the bed and ran out to the water margin. The immensity of blue water was incredible. The white waves were separate, definable miracles, each one of them. He had seen the enclosed lakes of Australia, but none of them did things like this. C'mell had the tact to stay silent tffl he had seen his fill. Then she broke the news. "You own Earth. You have work to do. Either you stay here and begin studying how to manage your property, or you go somewhere else. Either way, something a little bit sad is going to happen today." He looked at her seriously, his pajamas flapping in the wet wind which he could no longer smell. "I'm ready," he said. "What is it?" "You lose me." "Is that all? he laughed. C'mell looked very hurt. She stretched her fingers as though she were a nervous cat looking for something to claw. "I thought -- " said she, and stopped. She turned to look at him, staring fully, trustingly into his face. "You're such a young man, but you can do anything. Even among men you are fierce and decided. Tell me, what -- what do you wish?" "Nothing much," he smiled at her, "except that I am buying you and taking you home. We can't go to Norstrilia unless the law changes, but we can go to New Mars. They don't have any rules there, or none which a few tons of stroon won't get changed. C'mell, I'll stay cat. Will you marry me?" She started laughing but the laughter turned into weeping. She bugged him and buried her face against his chest. At last she wiped her ears off on her arm and looked up at him "Poor silly mel Poor silly you! Don't you see it, mister? I am a cat. If I had children, they would be cat-kittens, every one of them, unless I went every single week to get the genetic code recycled so that they would turn out underpeople. Don't you know that you and I can never marry -- not with any real hope? Besides, Rod, there is the other rule. You and I connot even see each other again from this sunset onward. How do you think the Lord Jestocost saved my life yesterday? How did he break almost all the rules of the book?" The brightness had gone out of Rod's day. "I don't know," he said dully. "By promising them I would die promptly and obediently if there were any more irregularities. By saying I was a nice animal. A biddable one. My death is hostage for what you and I must do. It's not a law. It's something worse than a law -- it's an agreement between the Lords of the Instrumentality." "I see," said he, understanding the logic of it, but hating the cruel Earth customs which put C'mell and himself together, only to tear them apart. "Let's walk down the beach, Rod," she said. "Unless you want your breakfast first of all..." "Oh, no," he said. Breakfast! a flutty crupp for all die breakfasts on Earth! She walked as though she had not a care in the world, but there was an undertone of meaning to her walk which warned Rod that she was up to something. IF It happened. F irst, she kissed him, with a kiss he remembered the rest of his life. Then, before he could say a word, she spieked in a penetrating telepathic shout. But her spieking was not words or ideas at all. It was singing of a high wild kind. It was the music which went along with her very own poem, which she had sung to him atop Earthport: And oh, my love, for you! High birds flying, and a High sky crying, and a High heart striving, and a High wind driving, and High brave place for you! But it was not those words, not those ideas, even though they seemed subtly different this time. She was doing something which the best telepaths of Old North Australia had tried in vain for thousands of years to accomplish -- she was transmitting the mathematical and proportional essence of music right out of her mind, and she was doing it with a clarity and force which would have been worthy of a great orchestra. The "high wind driving" fugue kept recurring. He turned his eyes away from her to see the astonishing thing which was happening all around them. The air, the ground, the sea were all becoming thick with life. Fish flashed out of blue waves. Wings circled by the multitude above them. The beach was thick with little running birds. Dogs and running animals which he had never seen before stood restlessly around C'mell -- hectares of them. Abruptly she stopped her song. With very high volume and clairty, she spat commands in all directions: 'Think of people. "Think of this cat and me running away somewhere "Think of ships. "Look for strangers. "Think of things in the sky." Rod was glad he did not have his broad-band telepathic hiering come on, as it sometimes had done at home. He was sure he would have gone dizzy with the pictures and the contradictions of it all. She had grabbed his shoulders and was whispering fiercely into his ear: "Rod, they'll cover us. Please make a trip with me, Rod. One last dangerous trip. Not for you. Not for me. Not even for mankind. For life, Rod. The Aitch Eye wants to see you." "Who's the Aitch Eye?" "He'll tell you the secret if you see him," she hissed. "Do it for me, then, if you don't trust my ideas." He smiled. "For you, C'mell, yes." "Don't even think, then, till you get there. Don't even ask questions. depend on you, Rod." She stood up and sang again, but the new song had no grief in it, no anguish, no weird keening from species to species. It was as cool and pretty as a music box, as simple as an assured and happy goodby. "That," said C'mell, "should ratGe the telepathic monitors for a while. They are not very imaginative anyhow, and when they get something like this they write up reports about it. Then they can't understand their reports and sooner or later one of them asks me what I did. I tell them the truth." "What are you going to tell them this time?" he asked, as they walked back to the house. "That I had something which I did not want them to hear." "They won't take that." "Of course not, but they will suspect me of trying to beg stroon for you to give to the underpeople." "Do you want some, C'mell?" "Of course not! It's illegal and it would just make me live longer than my natural life. Why bother?" They had reached die house. C'mell paused. "No questions, Rod." The smile she gave him would have melted a monument. He felt well. He was amused and pleased by the physical delight of hiering and spieking with die occasional true people who passed by. (Some underpeople could hier and spiek but they tried to conceal it, for fear that they would be resented.) He felt strong. Losing C'mell was a sad thing to do, but it was a whole day off; he began dreaming of things that he could do for her when they parted. Buying her services of thousands of people for the rest of her life? Giving her jewelry which would be the envy of Earthmankind? Leasing her a private planoform yacht? He suspected these might not be legal, but they were pleasant to think about vrn T hree hours later, he had no time for pleasant thoughts. They had flown into Earthport city, and they had started going down. Forty-five minutes of dropping had made his stomach very queasy. He felt the air go warm and stale and he wished desperately that he had not given up his sense of smell. Where the drop-shafts ended, the tunnels and the elevators began. Down they went, where incredibly old machinery spun slowly in a spray of oil, performing tasks which only the wildest mind could guess at. In one room, C'mell stopped and shouted at him over the noise of engines: "That's a pump." It did not look obvious. Huge turbines moved wearily. They seemed to be hooked up to an enormous steam engine powered by nuclear fuel. Five or six brightly-polished robots eyed them suspiciously as they walked around the machine, which was at least eighty meters long by forty-five high. "And come here... " shouted CmeD. They went into another room, empty and dean and quiet except for a rigid column of moving water which shot from floor to ceiling with no evidence of machinery at all. An underman, sloppily formed from a rat body, got up from his rocking chair when they entered. He bowed to Cmell as though she were a great lady but she waved him back to his chair. She took Rod near the column IF of water and pointed to a shiny ring on the floor. "That's the other pump. They do the same amount of work." "What is it?" he shouted. "Force-field, I guess. I'm not an engineer." They went on. In a quieter corridor she explained that the pumps were both of them for the service of weather control. The old one had been running six or seven thousand years, and showed very little wear. When people needed a supplementary one, they had simply printed it on plastic, set it in the floor, and turned it on with a few amps. The underman was there just to make sure that nothing broke down or went critical. "Can't real people design things any more?" asked Rod. "Only if they want to. Making them want to do things is the hard part now." "You mean, they don't want to do anything?" "Not exactly," said Cmell, "but they find that we are better than they are at almost anything. Real work, that Is. Not statesmanship like running the Instrumentality and the Earth government. Here and there a real human being gets to work, and there are always offworlders like you to stimulate them and challenge them with new problems. But they used to have secure lives of four hundred years, a common language, and a standard conditioning. They were dying off, just by being too perfect. One way to get better would have been to kill off us underpeople, but they couldn't do that all the way. There was too much messy work to be done that you couldn't count on robots for. Even the best robot, if he's a computer linked to the mind of a mouse will do fine for routine, but unless he has a very complete human education, he's going to make some wild judgments which won't suit what people want. So they need underpeople. I'm still a cat underneath it all, but even the cats which are unchanged are pretty close relatives of human beings. They make die same basic choices between power and beauty, between survival and self-sacrifice, between common sense and high courage. So the Lady Alice More worked out this plan for the Rediscovery of Man. Set up the Ancient Nations, give everybody an extra culture besides the old one based on the Old Common Tongue, let them get mad at each other, restore some disease, some danger, some accidents, but average it out so that nothing is really unchanged." T hey had come to a storeroom, the sheer size of which made Rod blink. The great reception haH at the top of Earthport had astounded him. This room was twice the size. The room was filled with extremely ancient cargoes which had not even been unpacked from their containers. Rod could see that some were marked outbound for worlds which no longer existed, or which had changed their names. Others were inbound,, but no one had unpacked them for fire thousand years and more. "What's all this stuff?" "Shipping, Technological change. Somebody wrote it all off the computers, so they didn't have to think of it any more. This is the thing which underpeople and robots are searching, to supply the ancient artifacts for the Rediscovery of Man. One of our boys -- rat stock, with a human I.Q. of # -- found something marked Musee Nationale. It was the whole National Museum of the Republic of Mali, which had been put inside a mountain when the ancient wars became severe. Mali apparently was not a very important 'nation,' as they called those groupings, but it had the same language as France, and we were able to supply real material, almost everything that was needed, to restore some kind of a French civilization. China has been hard. The Chinesians survived longer than any other nation, and they did their own graverobbing. So we have found it impossible to reconstruct China before the age of space. We can't modify people into being Ancient Chinese." Rod stopped, thunderstruck. "Can I talk to you here?" C'mell listened with a faraway look on her face. "Not here. I feel the very weak sweep of a monitor across my mind now and then. In a couple of minutes you can. Let's hurry along." "I just thought," cried Rod, "of tiie most important question in all the worlds!" "Stop thinking it, then," said C'mell, "until we come to a safe place." Instead of going straight on through the big aisle between the forgotten crates and packages, she squeezed between two crates and made her way to the edge of the big underground storeroom. "That package," she said, "is stroon. They lost it. We could help ourselves to it if we wanted to, but we're afraid of it." Rod looked at the names on the package. It had been shipped by Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold to Adaminaby Port and reconsigned to Earthport. "That's seventy-five generations ago, shipped from the Station of Doom. My farm. But I think it turns to poison if you leave it for more than two hundred years. Our own military people have some horrible uses for it, when invaders show up, but ordinary Norstrilians, when they find old stroon, always turn it in to the Commonwealth. We're afraid of it. Not that we often lose it. It's too valuable and we're too greedy, with a # per cent import duty on everything." C'mell led on. They unexpectedly passed a tiny robot, a lamp fixed to his head, who was seated between two enormous piles of books. He was apparently reading them one by one, because he had beside him a pile of notes larger in bulk than he was. He did not look up, nor did they interrupt him. At the wall, C'mell said, "Now do exactly what you're told. See the dust along the base of this crate?" "I see it," said Rod. "That must be left undisturbed. IP Now watch. I'm going ter jump from the top of this crate to the top of that one, without disturbing the dust Then I want yon to jump the same way and go exactly where I point -- without even thinking about it, if you can manage. I'll follow. Don't try to be polite or chivalrous, or you'll mess up the whole arrangement." Rod nodded. S he jumped to a case against the wall. Her red hair did not fly behind her, because she had tied it up in a turban before they started out, when she had obtained coveralls for each of them from the robotservants. They had looked like an ordinary couple of working c'people. Either she was very strong or the case was very light. Standing on the case, she tipped it very delicately, so that the pattern of dust around its base would be unchanged, save for microscopic examination. A blue glow came from beyond the case. With an odd, practised turn of the wrist she indicated that Rod should jump from his case to the tipped one, and from there into the area -- whatever it might be -- beyond the case. It seemed easy for him, but he wondered if she could support both his weight and hers on the case. He rememberer her order not to talk or think. He tried to think of the salmon steak he had eaten the day before. That should certainly be a good catthought, if a monitor happened to catch his mind at that moment! He jumped, teetered on the slanting top of the second packing case, and scrambled into a tiny doorway just big enough for him to crawl through. It was apparently designed for cables, pipes and maintenance, not for habitual human Use: it was too low to stand in. He scrambled forward. There was a slam. C'mell had jumped in after him, letting the case fall back into its old, apparently undisturbed position. She crawled up to him. "Keep going," she said. "Can we talk here?" "Of course. Do you want to? It'# not a very sociable place." "That question, that big questtion," said Rod. "I've got to ask you. You underpeople are aktng charge of people. If you're fixing up their new cultures for them, you're getting to be the masters of men!" "Yes," said C'mell and let the explosive affirmative hang m the air between them. He couldn't think of anything to say; it was his big bright idea for the day, and the fact that she already knew underpeople were becoming secret masters -- that was too much! She looked at his friendly face and said, more gently, "We underpeople have seen it coming for a long time. Some of the human people do, too. Especially the Lord Jestocost. He's no fool. And, Rod, you fit in." "I?" "Not as a person. As an economic change. As a source of unallocated power." "You mean, Cmell, you're after me, too? I can't believe it! I can recognize a pest or a nuisance or a robber. You don't seem like any of these. You're good, all the way through." His voice faltered. "I meant it this morning, C'mell, when I asked you to marry me." The delicacy of cat and the tenderness of woman combined in her voice as she answered, "I know you meant it" She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, in a caress as restrained as any touch could be. "But it's not for us. And I'm not using you myself, Rod. I want nothing for myself, but I want a good world for underpeople. And for people, too. For people, too! We cats loved you people long before we had brains. We've been your cats longer than anyone can remember. Do you think our loyalty to the human race would stop just because you changed our shapes and added a lot of thinking power? I love you. Rod, but I love people too. That's why Tm taking you to the Aitch Eye." "Can you tell me what that is -- now?" She laughed. "This place is safe. It's the Holy Insurgency. The secret government of the underpeople. This is a silly place to talk about it. Rod. You're going to meet the head of it, right now." "All of them?" Rod was thinking of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality. "It's not a them, it's a him. The R-telekelL Hie bird beneath the ground." "If there'a only (me, how (fid you choose him? Is he like the British Queen, whom we lost so long ago?" Cmell laughed. "We didn't choose him. He grew and now he leads us. You people took an eagle's egg and tried to make it into a Daimoni man. When the experiment failed, you threw the fetus out It lived. It's he. It'll be the strongest mind you've ever met Come on. This is no place to talk, and we're still talking." She started crawling down the horizontal shaft, waving at Rod to follow her. He followed, and as they crawled he called to her, "Cmell, atop a minute." S he stopped until he caught up with her. She thought that he might ask for a kiss, so worried and lonely did he look. She was ready to be kissed. He surprised her by saying, instead: "I can't smell, CmeiL Please, I'm so used to smelling that I miss it What does this place smell like#" Her eyes widened and then she laughed. "It mells like underground. Electricity burning the air. Animals somewhere far away, a lot of different smells of them. The old, old smell of man, almost gone. Engine oil and bad exhaust It smells like a headache. It smells like silence, like things untouched. There, is that it?" He nodded and they went m. At ftc cod of the horizontal Cmell tned and said, "All men die here. Come on!" Rod strned to follow and then IP stopped, "C'mell, are you discoordinated? Why should I die? There's no reason to." Her laughter was pure happiness. "Silly C'rod! You are a cat , cat enough to come where no man has passed for centuries. Come on. Watch out for those skeletons. They're a lot of them around here. We hate to kill real people, but there are some that we can't warn off in time." They emerged on a balcony, overlooking and even more enormous storeroom than the one before. This had thousands more boxes in it. C'mell paid no attention to it. She went to the end of the balcony and raced down a slender steel ladder. "More junk from the past!" she said, anticipating Rod's comment. "People have forgotten it up above; we mess around in it." Though he could not smell the air, at this depth it felt thick, heavy, immobile. Cornell did not slow down. She threaded her way through the junk and treasures on the floor as though she were an acrobat. On the far ride of the old room she stopped. Take one of these," she commanded. They looked like enormous umbrellas, like the pictures his computer had showed him. These seemed oddly large, compared to the ones in the pictures. He looked around for rain. Cmell did not understand his suptekms. "The shaft," she said, "has no magnetic controls, no updraft of air. It's just a shaft twelve meters in diameter. These are parachutes. We jump into the shaft with them and then we float straight down, four kilometers. It's close to the Moho." Since he did not pick up one of the big umbrellas, she handed him one. It was clumsy to hold but surprisingly light He blinked at her. "How will we ever get out?" "One of the bird-men will fly us up the shaft. It's hard work, but they can do it. Be sure to hook that thing to your belt. It's a long slow time falling, and we won't be able to talk on the way. And it's terribly dark, too." He complied. She opened a big door, beyond which there was the feel of nothing. She gave him a wave, partially opened her "umbrella", stepped over the edge of the door and vanished. He looked over the edge himself. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing of Cmell, no sound except for the slippage of air and an occasional mechanical whisper of metal against metal. He supposed that must bo the rib-tips of the umbrella touching the metallic edge of the shaft as she fefl. He sighed. Norstrilia was safe and quiet compared to this. He opened his umbrella too. Acting on an odd premonition, he took his little hiering-spieking shell out of his ear and put it carefully in his coverall pocket. This was his telepathic amplifier, something like an ancient hearing aid. That act saved his life. ns R od McBan remembered falling and falling. He shouted into the wet adhesive darkness, but there was no reply. He thought of cutting himself loose from his big umbrella and letting himself drop to the death 'below him, but then he thought of Cmell and he knew his body would drop upon her like a bomb. He wondered about his desperation, but could not understand it. (Only later did he find out that he was passing telepathic suicide screens which the underpeople had set up, screens fitted to the human mind, designed to dredge filth and despair from the paleocortex, the smell-bite-mate sequence of the noseguided animals who first walked Earth. But Rod was cat enough, just barely cat enough, and he was also telepathically subnormal, so that the screens did not do to him what they would have done to any normal man of Earth -- delivered a twisted dead body at the bottom. No man had ever gotten that far, but the underpeople were resolved that none ever should.) Rod twisted in his harness and at last he fainted. He awakened in a relatively small room, enormous by Earth standards but still much smaller than the storerooms which he had passed through on the way down. The lights were bright. He suspected that the room stank but he could not prove it with his smell gone. A man was speaking: "The Forbidden Word is never given unless the man who does not know it plainly asks for it." There was a chorus of voices sighing, "We remember. We remember what we remember." The speaker was almost a giant, thin and pale. His face was the face of a dead saint, white as alabaster, with glowing eyes. His body was that of man and bird both, man from the hips up, except that human hands grew out of the elbows of enormous, clean white wings. From the hips down to his legs were birdlegs, ending in horny, almost translucent bird-feet which stood steadily on the ground. "I am sorry, mister and owner McBan, that you took that risk. I was misinformed. You are a good cat on the outside but still completely a human man on the inside. Our safety devices bruised your mind and they might have killed you." Rod stared at the man as he stumbled to his feet. He saw that Cmell was one of the people helping him. When he was erect, someone handed him a beaker of very cold water. He drank it thirstily. It was hot down here -- hot, stuffy, and with the feel of big engines nearby. "I," said the great bird-man, "am E-telekeli." He pronounced it Eetelly-kelly. "You are the first human being in all of time to see me in the flesh." "Blessed, blessed, blessed, fourfold blessed is the name of our leader, our father, our brother, our son the E-telekeli," chorused the underpeople. lie IF #t# Rod looked around There was every kind of underperson imaginable here, including several that he had never even thought of. One was a head on a shelf, with no apparent body. When he looked, somewhat shocked, directly at the head, its face smiled and one eye closed in a deliberate wink. The E-telekeli followed his glance. "Do not let us shock you. Some of us are normal, but many of us down here are the discards of men's laboratories. This is my son, who has come here to meet you this day." A tall, very pale young man with no feathers stood up at this point. He was stark naked and completely unembarrassed. He held out a friendly hand to Rod. Rod was sure he had never seen the young man before. The young man sensed Rod's hesitation and said, "I am the E-ikasus." "Blessed, blessed, threefold blessed is the name of our leader-to-be, the Yeekasoose!" chanted the underpeople. Something about the scene caught Rod's rough Norstrilian humor. He spoke to the great underman as he would have spoken to another mister-and-owner back home, friendlily but bluntly. "Glad you welcome me, sir!" "Glad, glad, glad is the stranger from beyond the stars!" sang the chorus. "Can't you make them shut up?" asked Rod. " 'Shut up, shut up, shut up,' says the stranger from the starsl" chorused the group. T he E-telekeli did not exactly laugh, but his smile was not pure benevolence. "We can disregard them and talk, or I can blank out your mind everytlme they repeat what we say. This is a sort of court ceremony." Rod glanced around. "I'm in your power already," said he, "so it won't matter if you mess around with my mind. Blank them out." The E-telekeli stirred the ah in front of him as though he were writing a mathematical equation with his finger. Rod's eyes followed the finger and he suddenly felt the room quiet down. "Come over here and sit down," said the E-telekeli. Rod followed. "What do you want?" he asked as he followed. The E-telekeli did not even turn around to answer. He merely spoke while walking ahead. "Your money, mister and owner McBan. Almost all of your money." Rod stopped walking. He heard himself laughing wildly. "Money? You? Here? What could you possibly do with R?" "That," said die E-telekeH, "is why you should sit down." "Do sit," said Cmell, who had followed. Rod sat down. "We are afraid that Man himself will die and leave us alone in the universe. We need Man, and there is still an immensity of time before we all pour into a common destiny. People have always assumed that the end of things is around the corner, and we have the promise of IF the First Forbidden One that this will be so. But it could be hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe millions. People are scattered, mister McBan, so that no weapon will ever kill them all on all planets. But no matter how scattered they are, they are still haunted by themselves. They reach a point of development and then they stop." "Yes," said Rod, reaching for a carafe of water and helping himself to another drink. "But it's a long way from the philosophy of the universe down to my money. We have plenty of barmy swarmy talk in Old North Australia, but I never heard of anybody asking for another citizen's money, right off the bat." The eyes of the E-telekeli glowed like cold fire but Rod knew that this was no hynosis, no trick being played upon himself. It was the sheer force of the personality burning outward from the birdman. "Listen carefully, mister McBan. We are the creatures of man. You are gods to us. You have made us into people who talk, who worry, who think, who love, who die. Most of our races were the friends of man before we became underpeople. Like Cornell. How many cats have served and loved man, and for how long? How many cattle have worked for men, been eaten by men, been milked by men across the ages, and have stffl followed where men went? Even to the stars. And dogs. I do not have to tell you about the love of dogs for men. We call ourselves the Holy Insurgency because we are rebels. We are a government We are a power almost as big as the Instrumentality. Why do you think Teadrinker did not catch you when you arrived?" "Who is Teadrinker?" "An official who wanted to kidnap you. He failed because his underm an reported to me. We love you. Rod, not because you are a rich Norstrilian, but because it is our faith to love the mankind which created us." "This is a long slow wicket for my money," said Rod. "Come to the point, sir " T lie E-telekeli smiled with sweetness and sadness. Rod immediately knew that it was his own denseness which made the bird-man sad "nd patient. For the very first time he began to accept the feeling that this person might actually be the superior of any human. "I'm sorry," said Rod. "I haven't had a minute to enjoy my money since I got it. People have been telling me that everybody is after it. I'm beginning to think that I shall do nothing but run the rest of my life..." The E-telekeli smiled happily, the way a teacher smiles when a student has suddenly turned in a spectacular performance. "Correct. You have learned a lot. I am offering you something more -- the chance to do enormous good. Have you ever heard of Foundations?" Rod frowned. "The bottoms of buildings?" "No. Institutions. From the very ancient past." Rod shook his head. He hadn't. "If a gift was big enough, it endured and kept on giving, until the culture in which it was set had fallen. If you took most of your money and gave it to some good, wise men, it could be spent over and over again to improve the race of man. We need that. Better men will give us better lives. Do you think that we don't know how pilots and pinlighters have sometimes died, saving their cats in space?" "Or how they kill underpeople without a thought?" countered Rod. "Or humiliate them without noticing that they do it It seems to me that you must have some self-interest  n "I do. Some. But not so much as you think. Men are evil when they are frightened or bored. They are good when they are happy and busy. I want you to give your money to provide games, sports, competitions, shows, music -- and a chance for honest hatred." "Hatred?" said Rod. "I was beginning to think that I had found a Believer bird... somebody who mouthed old magic." "We're not ending time," said the great bird-man. "We are just altering the material conditions of man's situation for the present historical period. We want to steer mankind away from tragedy and self-defeat. Though the cliffs crumble, we want man to remain. Do you know Swinburne?" "Where is it?" said Rod. "It's not a place. It's a poet, before the age of space. Listen." Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink, Till the strength of the waves of the high tide crumble The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread. As a god self-slain on hts own strange altar, Death lies dead. "Do you agree with that?" "It sounds nice, but I don't understand it," said Rod. "Please, sir, I'm tireder than I thought. And I have only this one day with C'mell. Can I finish the business with you and have a little time with her?" The great underman lifted his arms. His wings spread like a canopy over Rod. "So be it!" he said, and the words rang out like great song. Rod could see the lips of the underpeople chorusing, but he did not notice the sound. "I offer you a tangible bargain. Tell me if you find I read your mind correctly." Rod nodded, somewhat in awe. "You want your money, but you do not want it. You will keep one money, which will leave you the richest man in Old North Australia for the rest of a very long life. The rest you will give to a foundation which will teach men to hate easily and lightly, as in a game, not sickly and wearily, as in habit. The trustees will be Lords of the Instrumentality whom I know, such as IF Jestocost, Crudelta, the Lady Johanna Gnade." "And what do I get?" "Your heart's desire." The beautiful wise pale face stared down at Rod like a father seeking to fathom the puzzlement of his own child. Rod was a little afraid of the face, but he confided in it, too. "I want too much. I can't have it all." "I'll tell you what you want. First, you want to be home right now, and all the trouble done with. I can start you back to the Station of Doom this very night." "But I want to see Earth!" "Come back, when you are older and wiser. Some day. See what your money has done." "Well -- " said Rod. "You want C'mell." The bland wise white face showed no embarrassment, no anger, no condescension. "You shall have her, in a linked dream, her mind to yours, for a happy subjective time of about a thousand years. You will live through all the happy things that you might have done together if you had stayed here and become a c'man. You will see your kittenchildren flourish, grow old and die. That will take about one half-hour." "It's just a dream," said Rod. "You want to take megacredits from me and give me a dreamy!" "With two minds? Two living, accelerated minds , thinking into each other? Have you ever heard of that?" "No," said Rod. "Do you trust me?" said the Etelekeli. Rod stared at the bird-man inquisitively and a great weight fell from him. He did trust this creature, more than he had ever trusted the father who did not want him, the mother who gave him up, the neighbors who looked at him and were kind. He sighed, "I trust you." "I also," added the E-telekeli, "will take care of all the little incidentals through my own network and I will leave the memory of them in your mind. If you trust me that should be enough. You get home, safe. You are protected, off Norstrilia, into which I rarely reach, for as long as you live. You have a separate life right now with C'mell and you will remember most of it. In return, you go to the wall and transfer your fortune, minus one-half of Rod McBan." Rod did not see that the underpeople thronged around him like worshippers. He had to stop when a very pale, tall girl took his hand and held it to her cheek. "You may not be the promised One, but you are a great and good man. We can take nothing from you. We can only ask. That is the teaching of Joan. And you have given." "Who are you?" said Rod in a frightened voice, thinking that she might be some lost human girl whom the underpeople had abducted to the guts of the Earth. "E-lamelanie, daughter of the Etelekeli." Rod stared at her and went to the wall. He pushed a routine sort of button. What a place to find it! "The Lord Jestocost," he called. "McBan speaking. No, you fool, I own this system." A handsome, polished plumpish man appeared on the screen. This was the Lord Jestocost himself, one of the governing Instrumentality. "If I guess right," said the strangeman, "you are the first human being ever to get into the depths. Can I serve you, mister and owner McBan?" '! "Take a note -- " said the Etelekeli, out of sight of the machine, beside Rod. Rod repeated it. The Lord Jestocost called witnesses at his end. I t was a long dictation, but at last the conveyance was finished. Only at one point did Rod balk. When they tried to call it the McBan Foundation, he said, "Just call it the One Hundred and Fifty Fund." "One Hundred and Fifty?" asked Jestocost. "For my father. It's his number in our family. I'm to-the-hundredand-fifty-first. He was before me. Don't explain the number. Just use it." "All clear," said Jestocost. "Now we have to get notaries and official witnesses to veridicate our imprints of your eyes, hand and brain. Ask the Person with you to give you a mask, so that the cat-man face will not upset the witnesses. Where is this machine you are using supposed to be located? I know perfectly well where I think it is." "At the foot of Alpha Ralpha, in a forgotten market," and the Etelekeli. "Your servicemen will find it there tomorrow when they come to check the authenticity of the machine." He still stood out of line of the machine, so that Jestocost could hear him but not see him. "I know the voice," said Jestocost. "It comes to me as in a real dream. But I shall not ask to see file face." "Your friend down here has gone where only underpeople go," said the E-telekeli, "and we are disposing of his fate in more ways than one, my lord. Subject to your gracious approval." "My approval does not seem to have been needed much," snorted Jestocost, with a little laugh. "I would like to talk to you. Do you have any intelligent underperson near you?" "I can call Cmell. She's always somewhere around." "This time, my lord, you cannot She's here." "There? With you ? I never knew she went there." The amazement showed on the face of the Lord Jestocost. "She is here, nevertheless. Do you have some other underperson?" Rod felt like a dummy, standing in the visiphone while the two voices, unseen by one another, talked past him. But he felt, very truly, that they both wished him well. He was almost nervous in anticipation of the strange happiness which had been offered to him and Cmell, but he was a respectful enough young man to wait until the great ones got through their business. IP "Wait a moment," said Jestocost. On the screen, in the depths, Rod could see the Lord of the Instrumentality work the controls of other, secondary screens. A moment later Jestocost answered: "B'dank is here. He will enter the room in a few minutes." "Twenty minutes from now, my sir and lord, will you hold hands with your servant B'dank as you once did with C'mell? I have the problem of this young man and his return. There are things which you do not know, and I would rather not put them on the wires." Jestocost hesitated only for the slightest of moments. "Good, then," he laughed. "I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb." The E-telekeli stood aside. Someone handed Rod a mask which hid his cat-man features and still left his eyes and hands exposed. The brainprint was gotten through the eyes. The recordings were made. Rod went back to the bench and table. He helped himself to another drink of water from the carafe. Someone threw a wreath of fresh flowers around his Shoulders. Fresh flowers! In such a place... he wondered. Three rather pretty undergirls, two of them of cat origin and one of them derived from dogs, were leading a freshly dressed C'mell toward him. She wore the simplest and most modest of all possible white dresses. Her waist was cinched by a broad golden belt. She laughed, stopped laughing and then blushed as they led her to Rod. Two seats were arranged on the bench. Cushions were disposed so that both of them would be comfortable. Silky metallic caps used in surgeries, were fitted on their heads. Rod felt his sense of smell explode within his brain; it came alive richly and suddenly. He took C'mell by the hand and began walking through the immemorial Earth forest, with a temple older than time shining in the clear soft light cast by Earth's old moon. He knew that he was already dreaming. C'mell caught his thought and said, "Rod, my master and lover, this is a dream. But I am in it with you..." XI W ho can measure a thousand years of happy dreaming -- the travels , the hunts, the picnics, the visits to forgotten and empty cities, the discovery of beautiful views and strange places? And the love, and the sharing, and the reflection of everything wonderful and strange by two separate , distinct and utterly harmonious personalities. C'mell the c'girl and C'roderick the c'man; they seemed happily doomed to be with one another. Who can live whole centuries of real bliss and then report it in minutes? Who can tell the full tale of such real lives -- happiness , quarrels, reconciliations , problems ,... solutions and always sharing, happiness, and more sharing... ? W hen they awakened Rod very gently, they let C'mell sleep on. He looked down at himself and expected to find himself old. But he was a young man still, in the deep forgotten underground of the E-telekeli, and he could not even smell. He reached for the thousand wonderful years as he watched C'mell, young again, lying on the bench, but the dream-years had tarted fading even as he reached for them. Rod stumbled on his feet. They led him to a chair. The E-telekeli sat in an adjacent chair, at the same table. He seemed weary. "My mister and owner McBan, I monitored your dream sharing, just to make sure it stayed in the right general direction. I hope you are satisfied." Rod nodded, very slowly, and reached for the carafe of water, which someone had re-filled while he slept. Slept, and lived, and dreamed, and grew old, and woke. "While you slept, mister McBan," said the great E-man, "I had a telepathic conference with the Lord Jestocost, who has been your friend, even though you do not know him. You have heard of the new automatic planoform ships." "They are experimental," said Rod. "So they are," said the E-tdekdi, "but perfectly safe. And the best 'automatic' pilots are not automatic at all. They have snake-men pilots. My pilots. They can outperform any pilots of the Instrumentality." "Of course," said Rod, "because they are dead." "No more dead than I," laughed the white calm bird of the underground. "I put them in cataleptic trances, with the help of my son the doctor E-ikasus. On the ships they wake up. One of them can take you to Norstrilia in a single long fast jump. And my son can work on you right here. We have a good medical workshop in one of those rooms. It will seem like a single night to you, though it will be several days in objective time. If you say goodbye to me now, and if you are ready to go, you will wake up in orbit just outside the Old North Australian subspace net. I have no wish for one of my underpeople to tear himself to pieces if he meets Mother Hitton's dreadful little kittens, whatever they may be. Do you happen to know?" "I don't know," said Rod quickly, "and if I. did, I couldn't tell you. It's the Queen's secret. " "The Queen?" "The Absent Queen. We use it to mean the Commonwealth government. Anyhow, mister bird, I can't go now. I've got to go back up to the surface of Earth. And I want my stamp that the catmaster gave me. And the books." "Do you trust me, mister and owner McBan?" The white giant rose to his feet; his eyes shone like fire. The underpeople spontaneously chorused, "Put your trust in the joyful lawful, put your trust in the loyal-awful bright blank power of the under-bird!" "I've trusted you with my life and my fortune, so far," said Rod, a little sullenly, "but you're not going to make me go. No matter how much I want to get home. And V I have an old enemy a home that I want to help. Houghton Syme the Hon. Sec. There might be something on Old Earth which I could take back to him." M T think you can trust me a little further," said the E-telekeli. "Would it solve the problem of the Hon. Sec. if you gave him a dream-share with someone he loved, to make up his having a short life?" "I don't know. Maybe." T can," said the master of underpeople, "have h is prescription made up. It will have to be mixed with plasma from his blood before he takes it. It would be good for about three thousand years of subjective life. We have never let this out of our own undercity before, but you are the Friend of Earth, and you shall have it." Rod tried to stammer his thanks. The white giant took Rod by the arm and led him back to the visiphone, still trembling with the connection for Earth's surface, many kilometers above. Rod trembled. Odd shards of dream-memory, coming out of his recently dreamed "life" with C'mell, pulsed through his mind. The bird-giant showed him the surface of Earth by borrowing a spying eye through the visiphone. They swooped through the streets of earth one last time. Rod saw his rare postage stamps -- Cape triangles, they were, printed before the beginning of time -- being packed carefully into a metal box which had his formal address printed on it, very proper indeed: Roderick Frederick Ronald "The Station of Doom" c-o Any Lawful Entry-port Planet of Old North Australia A t last the E-telekeli sighed and Rod sighed with him. "Enough?" asked the pale birdgiant. "Enough," said Rod. He started to leave the visiphone and then stopped. Rod made no move to leave. He had turned off the screen but he just stood there. "Something else?" said the Etelekeli. "She's all right," said the lord of the underworld. "She expects nothing from you. She's a good underperson." " want to do something for her." "There's nothing she wants. She is happy. You do not need to meddle." "She won't be a girlygirl forever," Rod insisted. "You underpeople get old. I don't know how you manage without stroon." "Neither do I," said the E-telekeli. "I just happen to have long life. But you're right about her. She will age soon enough, by your kind of time." "I'd like to buy the restaurant for her, the one the bear-man has, and let it become a sort of meeting place open to people and underpeople. She could give it the romantic and interesting touch so that k could be  success." "A wonderful idea. A perfect project for your Foundation," smiled the E-telekeli. "It shall be done." The bird-man went on: "Now, if you are ready, we will put you to sleep, my son E-ikasus will change you out of your cat body and you will wake in orbit around your home." "C'mell? Can you wake her up so I can say goodbye after that thousand years?" The master of the underworld took Rod gently by the arm and walked him across the huge underground room, talking as they went. "Would you want to have another goodbye, after that thousand years she remembers with you, if you were she? Let her be. It is kinder this way. You are human. You can afford to be rich with kindness. It is one of the best traits which you human people have." Rod stopped. "Do you have a recorder of some kind, then? She welcomed me to Earth wRh a wonderful little song about "high birds crying and I want to leave one of our Norstrilian songs for her." "Sing anything," said the E-telekeli, "and the chorus of my attendants will remember it as long as they live. The others would appreciate it too." Rod looked around at the underpeople who had followed them. For a moment he was embarrassed at singing to all of them, but when he saw their warm, adoring smiles, he was at ease with them. "Remember this, then, and be sure to sing it to C'mell for me, when she awakens." He lifted his voice a little and sang. Ron where the ram Is dancing, prancing! Listen where the ewe Is greeting, bleating. Rush where the lambs are running, funning. Watch where the stroon is flowing, growing. See how the men are reaping, heaping Wealth for their world! Look where the hiUs are dipping, ripping. Sit where the air is frying, drying. Go where the clouds are pacing, racing. Stand where the wealth is gleam ing, teeming. Shout to the top of the singing ringing Norstrilian power and pride! The chorus sang it back at him with a wealth and richness which he had never heard in the little song before. "And now," said the E-telekeli, "the blessing of the First Forbidden One be upon you." The giant bowed a little and kissed Rod McBan on the forehead. Rod thought it strange and started to speak, but the eyes were upon him . Eyes -- like twin fires. Fire -- like friendship and like warmth, like a welcome and a farewell. Eyes -- which became a single fire. He awakened only when he was in orbit around the planet of Old North Australia. T he descent was easy. The ship had a viewer. The pilot s aid very little. He put Rod down in the Station of Doom, a few hundred meters from his own door. He left two heavy packages. An Old North Australian patrol ship hovered overhead and the air hummed with danger while Norstrilian police floated to the ground and made sure that no one besides Rod McBan got off. The Earth ship whispered and was gone. 'Til give you a hand, mister," said one of the police. He clutched Rod with one mechanical claw of his omithopter, caught the two packages in the other, and flung his machine into the air with a single beat of the giant wings. They coasted into the yard. The wings tipped up, Rod and his packages were deposited deftly and the machine flapped away back to its distant base in silence. There was nobody there. He knew that Aunt Doris would come soon. And somebody else. His own sweetheart, on his own farm -- Lavinia. Lavinia! Here, now, on this dear poor dry earth, he knew how much Lavinia suited him. Now he could spiek, he could hier! It was strange. Yesterday -- or was it yesterday, for it felt like yesterday? -- he had fek very young indeed. He seemed to know in his deepest mind that Cmell had never been more than nine-tenths his, and that other tenth -- the most valuable and beautiful and most secret tenth of her life -- was forever given to some other man or underman who he would never know. He felt that Cmell would never give her heart again. And yet he kept for her a special kind of tenderness, which would never recur. It was not marriage which they had had, but it was pure romance. But here, here waited home itself, and love. Lavinia was in it, dear Lavinia with her mad lost father and her kindness to a Rod who had not let much kindness into his life. Suddenly, the words of an old poem rose unbidden to his mind: Ever. Never. Forever. Three words. The lever Of life upon time. Never, forever, ever I He spieked. He spieked very loud, "Lavinia!" Beyond the hill the cry came back, right into his mind, "Rod, Rod! Oh, Rod! Rod? "Yes," he spieked. "Don't run. I'm home." He felt her mind coming near, though she must have been beyond one of the nearby hills. When he touched minds with Lavinia, he knew that this was her ground, and his too. Nor for them the wet wonders of Earth, the golden-haired beauties of C'mell and Earth people! He knew without doubt that Lavinia would love and recognize the new Rod as she had loved the old. He waited very quietly and then he laughed to himself under the gray nearby friendly sky of Norstrilia. He had momentarily the childish impulse to rush across the hills of his home and to kiss his own computer. He waited for Lavinia instead. The Place Where Headers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I have just finished the November , and it prompted me to write my first letter to a magazine. Firstly, I am amazed how a magazine such as If could improve as much as it has in as little time as it has. There is not one point of the mag which has not increased in interest. Secondly, I suggest you have Keith Laumer sign an eighty-year contract. The more he writes, the better he gets, and he's writing more and more these days. The Retief series can't be beat as space opera and his singles in Worlds of Tomorrow are among the best I've seen in years. Thirdly, I just finished The Reefs of Space in If and All We Mars men in Worlds of Tomorrow and they have strengthened my opinion of serial stories. In my opinion there is nothing more suspenseful than a good serial, and these are two of the best I've ever read. Fourthly, Worlds of Tomorrow has proved to be beyond my wildest expectations. Every one of these stories is from good to excellent. I'm quite pleased over the resumption of Jack Sharkey's "contact" series. If only they could all be as good as The Creature Inside. Fifthly, Jonathan Brand. Hear, hear! I'd like to see more by this fellow. Finally, how about having an annual contest for amateur writers, the five best stories appearing throughout the following year in one of the Galaxy publications, with criticism being offered to the contestants? The chance for recognition in one of the top sf mags of the business could attract a lot of new talent. -- Sydney Silverstein, # Thouron Avenue, Philadelphia #, Pennsylvania. # The National Fantasy Fan Federation has such a contest fin which we cooperate), except that publication in a professional magazine is IF not guaranteed to the winners -- although chances are good that at least one or two of them will be accepted. For that matter, every issue we publish at least one "first" story; this issue's is The Final Equation, by Jack Smith. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: Congratulations on your January issue. It was undoubtedly the best I've seen this year (the first, too). The cover was good -- very distinctive -- except that I don't think much of your habit of blurbing your novels on the cover and putting features on the spine. It makes the mag seem (even) pulpier than it is. More Van Vogt, more Van Vogt, more Van Vogt! By the way, what about his Haunted Atoms which was in Authentic in #I and SF Digest in #? I wonder if some of your readers could help me with a little question I have. Sometime between # and # or thereabouts I read my first sf magazine. Now I wonder what it was. All I remember about it was two of the stories. The first one was about this alien spaceship. It dropped this bright-yellow blob on the Earth, and the blob grew until it covered the entire planet except for one island with a man on it. It turned out that the blob had transformed all the people of Earth into sort of monsters. The other story was about an alien who is spotted by hunters as he gets out of his ship. The alien shoots one of them and he becomes encased in jelly-like substance. The other hunters chase the alien into a village, where he is rammed by a car and finally killed. The alien has been clutching a bag to his side, and just as the villagers are about to open it, the hunter who was shot turns up feeling ten years younger. Then the villagers discover that in the bag was a bag of grass seed and a Holy Bible. Does anyone know what magazine this was? -- Robert Olsen, # Buoy, Orange, Califoria. # More Van Vogt? Coming up in the next issue ! -- Editor.     Dear Editor: Jim Maugham's letter (IF, January '#) on the subject of letter columns and S-F reader motivation, calls up a number of thoughts: If a reader really has reforming instincts he ought to write the kind of letters he wants to see. If they are good enough they'll be published and answered by other readers. It's mainly up to the people who write the letters to determine the character of Hue and Cry or any other forum. The readers want hot discussions, new ideas, sweeping concepts, unique philosophies -- or so they say. Frankly, most S-F readers don't seem to care for new thoughts any more than anyone else. In actual point of fact, they read primarily for escape, they react in a mild and passive manner to the supposed mental stimulation of the stories, and their comments are limited to expressions of generalized approval and petty dislkes. J. R. Parks, #I #th Avenue, Rocheve Dear Editor: I feel that If, Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow are probably the best science-fiction publications on the market today. But the trouble with your magazine, and all the others too, is that you do not report the news of what is going on in the world of science-fiction fandom. You never report on science-fiction organizations, conventions, or even review fanzines. I would appreciate it if you would please print this letter in your magazine so the readers may decide and Comment on this. Thank you very much. -- Guy Guden, # South Malden, Fullerton, California.    Dear Editor: Gaughan's cover for the November If was wonderful. A few like this and he might win the Hugo, instead of just getting nominated. That drawing he had on page ft, though. Is it so very needful that every square inch be full of marks? I shouldn't think so. The Governor of Glave was one of the best Retief so far, Muck Man was pretty good, A Better Mousetrap was all right, but I would have liked to seen more from Brunner. Knight's story was a bit disappointing, however it had fts high points, too. I wouldn't say that Long Day in Court is the best "first" you have had as yet, for you have had some very god ones. But I will say it was one of the best, and Fm happy to see that Mr. Brand has more stories yet to be published. By the way, have any of your other firsts sold anything else to you? -- Hank Luttrell, Rt. #-# Barrett Sta. Rd., Kirkwood #, Missouri.  Yep. Gary Wright (he wrote Captain of the Kali) has a new one coming up soon, and several others are in the offing. -- Editor.  a   Dear Editor: I enjoy IF very much. I have not been reading it long, but already it is my favorite magazine. I especially liked the Crossword Puzzle. My only regret about If is that I enjoy it so much and it only comes out once every two months. -- Drake Maynard, # Columbine Lane, Burlington, North Carolina.    Dear Editor: I was disappointed in the ending of your serial, The Reefs of Space . The ending was contrived, unconvincing, glib and much too fast I had the impression that the writers, having written our hero (Ryeland) and themselves into a corner, were staking work needed to write a convincing ending to the story. But they are professionals, and Fm used to seeing professional work from them. I did, for ## of the story; but the ending left me unbelieving. Back to your typewriters, boys, and do your homework ! -- Michael N. TforsteLa, # East #th Street, Brooklyn #, New York. # If that's all that's w or r yi ng you -- starting next issue, we can take care of it! That's right: Starting with the July issue, If is monthly. And what an issue July will be! A. E. Van Vogt's The SBkie -- the boginning of Robert A. Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold -- and coming up soon thereafter a whole new batch of Retief stories. Doe Smith's fourth and greatest Skylark story, Skylark DuJQuesne... and much more. Things are looking very definitely and conspicuously up I -- Editor . (effective with July issue) brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His great new novel, Farnham's Freehold, takes you into a time where humanity has done its best to destroy itself -- and the survivors have built themselves a strange new life! The Silkie -- the story of a man whose heritage and training transcend humanity T a creature whose one mission is to protect the human race, though he is no longer a part of it! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #.  New  Renewal Name Address City State Zip No. (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! Seated, #. to r.: Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling Photo by Philippe Halsman # famous authors start a new kind of writing school If you have writing talent worth developing, here's an opportunity never before available: Twelve of America's most famous authors have created a school of professional writing to help you develop your skill, talent and craftsmanship... and to pass on to you their secrets of achieving success and recognition. This unique home-training program is supervised by Rod Serling, winner of five Emmys for TV writing; Pulitzer Prize historian Bruce Catton; best-selling novelist Faith man; publisher-columnist Bennett Cerf; famed sportswriter Red Smith; Rudolf Flesch, top authority on readable writing; noted language expert Prof. Bergen Evans; famous mystery novelist Mignon G. Eberhart; J. D. Ratcliff, called by Time "America's No. I craftsman in the field of non-fiction'; and top ad men John Caples and Mark Wiseman. These famous authors have developed q remarkable series of textbooks, lessons and writing assignments that present -- in a clear and stimulating way -- what they have learned in their long, hard climb to the top. The School's instructors are themselves professional writers. Under the supervision of the # Famous Writers, these instructors work with students by mail, just as magazine and book editors work with many established authors. And they spend up to several hours on each assignment completed by a student... revising, correcting, and advising. The Famous Writers School is less than three years old. Its first students are not due to graduate until later this year. Yet, many have sold their writings to such varied publications as The Reader's Digest, Redbook, Popular Science, True Story. To select people with writing talent worth developing, the # Famous Writers have designed a revealing Talent Test. The coupon will bring you a copy, along with a brochure about the School. Your completed Test will be graded without charge or obligation by one of the School's instructors. If your Test indicates writing talent, you are then eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under absolutely no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School hpt. :!:!. WViiMiri. Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have writing talent worth developing. Please mail me, without obligation, the Famous Writers Talent Test. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Street City Zone... County State The School is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. r.,w Y The Great New Science-Fiction Novel U (effective vith July issue) I brings you the finest in science fiction Don't cielay -- send in your subscription order today IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His great new novel, Farnham's Freehold, takes you into a time where humanity has done its best to destroy itself -- and the survivors have built themselves a strange new life! The Silkie -- the story of a man whose heritage and training transcend humanity -- a creature whose one mission is to protect the human race, though he is no longer a part of it! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! r Mi  OM OB  W IB Hi MV HBi I IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #.  New  Renewal Name Address City State Zip No (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! Fredenk Pohl, Editor .  Sol Cohon, Publisher David Perfon, Production Manager Dave Geller, Assoc, IF published monihly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Gufnn, President, Vol #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. Ail material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materitil. All stories are fiction, and ony similarity between character and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  BUftrki N OW that IF has gone monthly, we start what we sincerely hope -- and believe -- will be the finest equence of serials, novelettes, complete short novels and short stories the magazine has ever known! To begin with, take a look at this issue's contents page. A brand-new Robert A. Heinlein and a complete A. E. Van Vogt -- there's a lineup you haven't seen anywhere for a good many years. Next on the heels of . the Heinlein serial, we have a Keith Laumer, The Hounds of Hell. And after that another three-part serial, this one Doc Smith's final, mightiest Skylark story. Skylark DuQuesne. And in between and all around them, the greatest collection of shorts and novelettes and features we can find. We haven't spent much time in these pages in telling you what we were trying to do with IF -- figuring you could See for yourself what we were doing, after all. But by now we hop# it has become clear that IF is fifling the gap in the science-fiction qectrum that has unaccountably been vacated for the past dozen-odd years. Adventure. Excitement. Drama. Color. Not hack pulp-writing or gory comic-strip blood and thunder, but the sort of story that attracted most of us to science fiction in the first place. In order to do this, we have had to go after all the old-time masters and try to lure them back into the fold... and, at the same time, try to develop new ones. As you have seen, in every issue for the past couple of years we have made it a point to publish at least one story by a brand-new, never-before-inprint writer. (This issue, for example, we bring you a wild and wonderful mathematical delight by Norman Kagan, a graduate student in one of New York's universities.) We think this is beginning to pay off for all of us -- and hope you feel the same! O ne last thing: In order to get the present big chunk of fiction in this issue, we had to scrimp on the pages for features -- which meant eliminating our letter column. Hue and Cry. But it will be back... and don't let its temporary absence keep you from sending in your letters of comment. We need them! were Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man otf woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philoscher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrudans. The Roskrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. "The Mas of Life" -- A non(trofic organizatiofiv Address : Sctthtt X.Y.T. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the fret book. The Mastery of Life which explains how I may learn to use my faculues and powers of mind. IF  Serial Iff the wreck of the world they knew they found a life stranger than any they dared dreamt i I iiTt's not a hearing aid," Hubert X Farnham explained. "It's a radio, tuned to the emergency frequency." Barbara Wells stopped with a bite halfway to her mouth. "Mr. Farnham! You think they are going to attack?" Her host shrugged. "The Kremlin doesn't let me in on its secrets." His son said, "Dad, quit scaring the ladies. Mrs. Wells -- " "Call me 'Barbara.' I'm going to ask the court to let me drop the 'Mrs.' " "You don't need permission." "Watch it. Barb," his sister Karen said. "Free advice is expensive." "Shaddap. Barbara, with all respect to my worthy father, he sees spooks. There is not going to be a war." "I hope you're right," Barbara Wells said soberly. "Why do you think so?" "Because the communists are realists. They never risk a war that would hurt them, even if they could win. So they won't risk one they can't win." "Then I wish," his mother said, "that they would stop having these dreadful crises. Cuba. All that fuss about Berlin -- as if anybody cared! And now this. It makes a person nervous. Joseph!" "Yes, ma'am?" "You fetch me coffee. And brandy. Cafe royale." "Yes, ma'am." The houseboy, a young Negro, removed her plate, barely touched. Young Farnham said, "Dad, it's not these phony crises that has Mother upset; it's the panicky way you behave. You must stop it." "No." "You must! Mother didn't eat her dinner... and all because of that silly button in your ear. You can't -- " "Drop it, Duke." "Sir?" "When you moved into your own apartment, we agreed to live as friends. As my friend your opinions are welcome. But that does not make you free to interfere between your mother -- my wife -- and myself." His wife said, "Now, Hubert." "Sorry, Grace." "You're too harsh on the boy. It does make me nervous." "Duke is not a boy. And I've done nothing to make you nervous." "I'm sorry, too. Mother. But if Dad regards it as interference, well -- " Duke forced a grin -- "I'll have to find a wife of my own to annoy. Barbara, will you marry me?" "No, Duke. Anyway, I agree with your father. Every car in our family has a survival kit. My father's idea. If anything happened. Pops would expect me to head up into the mountains." "You won't need to." "Sir?" "Dad means," explained Karen, "that you are welcome in our panic hole." B arbara showed a questioning look. Her host said, "Our bomb shelter. 'Farnham's Folly' my son calls it. I think you would be safer there than you would be running for the hills -- despite the fact that we are Base. If an alarm comes, we'll duck into it. Right, Joseph?" "Yes, sir! That way I stay on your payroll." "The hell you do. You're fired the instant the sirens sound -- and I start charging you rent." "Do I pay rent, too?" asked Barbara. "You wash dishes. Everybody does. Even Duke." "Count me out," Duke said grimly"Eh? Not that many dishes. Son." "Fm not joking. Dad; Khrushchev said he would bury us -- and you're making it come true. I'm not going to crawl into a hole in the ground!" IF "As you wish, sir." "Sonny boy!" His mother put down her cup. "If an attack comes, of course you're going into the shelter!" She blinked back tears. "Promise Mother." Young Farnham looked stubborn, then sighed. "All right. If an attack comes -- If an alarm sounds, I mean; there isn't going to be an attack -- in go into your panic hole. But, Dad, this is just to soothe Mother's nerves." "Nevertheless you are welcome." "Okay. Let's go into the living room and break out the cards -- with a firm understanding that we drop the subject." Barbara played as Farnham's partner, and the father and son had a private wager of a cent a point. The stakes made her tense, even though it was not her money. Her nervousness was increased by suspicion that her partner was a match player with a lot of experience. Her nerves relaxed, though not her care, as it began to appear that Mr. Farnham found her bidding satisfactory. But she welcomed the rest that came from being dummy. She spent these vacations studying Hubert Farnham. She decided that she liked him, for the way he handled his family and for the way he played bridge -- quietly, thoughtfully, exact in bidin play. She admired the way he squeezed out the last trick, of a contract in which she had forced them too high, by having the boldness to sluff an ace. TT ubert Farnham looked up from A the last trick. "Three spades, game and rubber. Well bid, partner." She flushed again. "Well played, you mean. I invited too much." "Not at all. At worst we would have been down one. If you don't bet, you can't win. Karen, has Joseph gone to bed?" "Studying. He's got a quiz." "I thought we might invite him to cut in. Barbara, Joseph is the best player in this house -- always aidacity at the right time. Plus the fact that he is studying to be an accountant and never forgets a card. Karen, can you find us something without disturbing Joseph?" Spect ah kin. Boss. Vodka and tonic for you?" "And muching food." "Come on, Barbara. Let's buttle." Hubert Farnham watched them fo, while thinking it was shame that so nice a child as Mrs. Wells should have had a sour marriage. A sound fame of bridge and a good disposition. Gangly and horsefaced, perhaps. But a nice smile and a mind of her own. If Duke had any gumption -- But Duke didn't have any. Farnham went to where his wife was nodding by the television receiver, and said, "Grace? Grace darling, ready for bed?" -- then helped her into her bedroom. Karen came in carrying drinks, followed by Barbara. "Hi! Barb got a look at our kitchen and decided to Make crepes Suzettes." "Fine. If you will snap the telewion on, we might get part of the Im o'clock roundup." " -- agreed in principal to three mti of four of the Presidents major points and has agreed to meet again o discuss the fourth point, the preaence of their nuclear submarines in our coastal waters. It may now be oafely stated that the crisis, the most acute in post-World-War-Two years, does seem to he tapering off to a mutual accommodation that both countries can live with. We pause to bring you exciting news from General Motors followed by an analysis in depth -- " Karen turned it down. Duke said, "Just as I said. Dad. You can take that cork out of your ear." "Later. Fm busy with crepes Suzettes. Barbara, I'll expect these for breakfast every morning." "Dad, quit trying to seduce her and cut the cards. I want to win back what I've lost." "That'll be a long night." Mr. Farnham finished eating, stood up to put his plate aside; the doorbell rang. "I'll answer it." He went to the door, returned shortly. Karen said, "Who was it, Daddy? I cut for you. You and I are partners. Look pleased." "I'm delighted. But remember that a count of eleven is not an opening bid. Somebody got lost, I guess. Possibly a nut." "My date. You scared him off." "Possibly. A bald-headed old coot, very weather-beaten and ragged." "My date," Karen confirmed. "President of the Dekes. Go get him. Daddy." "Too late. He took one look at me and fled. Whose bid is it?" Barbara continued to try to play like a machine. But it seemed to her that Duke was overbidding; she found herself thereby bidding timidly and had to force herself to overcome it. They went set several times in a long, dreary rubber which they "won" but lost on points. I t was a pleasure to lose the next rubber with Karen as her partner. They shifted and again she was Mr. Farnham's partner. He smiled at her. "This time we clobber them!" "I'll try." "Just play as you did. By the book. Duke will supply the mistakes." "Put your money where your IF mouth is, Dad. Want a side bet of a hundred dollars on this rubber?" 'A hundred it is." Barbara thought about seventeen lonely dollars in her purse and got nervous. She was still more nervous when the first hand ended at five clubs, bid and made -- by Duke -- and realized that he had overbid and would have been down one had she covered his finesse. Duke said, "Care to double that bet. Governor? "Okay. Deal." Her morale was bolstered by the second hand: her contract at four spades and made possible by voids; she was able to ruff before cleaning out trumps. Her partner's smile was reward enough. But it left her shaky. Duke said, "Both teams vulnerable, no part score. How's your blood pressure, Daddy-o? Double again?" "Planning on firing your secretary?" "Speak up, or accept a white feather." "Four hundred. You can sell your car." Mr. Farnham dealt. Barbara picked up her hand and frowned. The count was not bad -- to queens, a couple of jacks, an ace, a king -- but no biddable suit and the king was unguarded. It was a strength and distribution which she had long tagged as "just good enough to go set on." She hoped that it would be one of those sigh-of-relief hands in which everyone passes. Her partner picked up his hand and glanced at it. "Three no trump." Barbara repressed a gasp, Karen did gasp. "Daddy, are you feverish?" "Bid." "Pass!" Barbara said to herself, " 'Dod oh dod, what I do now?' " Her partner's bid promised twenty-five points -- and invited slam. She held thirteen points. Thirty-eight points in the two hands -- Grand slam. That's what the book said! Barbara girl, "three no trump" is #, #, or # points -- add thirteen and it reads "Grand Slam." But was Mr. Farnham playing by the book? Or was he bidding a shut-out to grab the rubber and nail down that preposterous bet? If she passed, then game and rubber -- and four hundred dollars -- was certain. But grand slam (if they made it) was, uh, around fifteen dollars at the stakes Duke and his father were playing. Risk four hun dred dollars of her partner's money igainst a chance of fifteen? Ridicuous! (But her partner had said, "Play by the book.") "Seven no trump," she said firm:yDuke whistled. "Thanks, Barbara. We're ganging up on you, Dad. Double." "Pass." "Pass," Karen echoed. Barbara again counted her hand. That singleton king looked awfully naked. But... either the home earn had thirty-eight points -- or ;t didn't. "Redouble." Duke grinned. "Thanks, sweetie pie. Your lead. Karen." M r, Farnham put down his hand and abruptly left the table, rlis son said, "Hey! Come back and :ake your medicine!" Mr. Farnham snapped on the television, moved on and switched on :he radio, changed its setting. "Red niert!" he snapped. "Somebody tell Joseph!" He ran out of the room. "Come back! You can't duck this with that kind of stunt!" "Shut up, Duke!" Karen snapped. The television screen flickered !nto life: " -- closing down. Tune at once to your emergency station. Good luck, good-by, and God bless you alir As the screen went blank the radiout in: " -- not a drill. This is not a drill. Take shelter. Emergency personnel report to their stations. Do not go out on the street. If you have no shelter, stay in the best protected room of your home. This is not a drill. Unidentified ballistic objects have been radar-sighted by our early-warning screens and it must be assumed that they are missiles. Take shelter. Emergency personnel report to their -- " "He means it," Karen said in an awed voice. "Duke, show Barb where to go. I'll wake Joseph." She ran out of the room. Duke said, "I don't believe it." "Duke, how do we get into the shelter?" "I'll show you." He stood up unhurriedly, picked up the hands put each in a separate pocket. "Mine and Sis's in my trousers, yours and Dad's in my coat. Come on. Want your suitcase?" "No!" II D uke led her through the kitchen to basement stairs. Mr. Farnham was halfway down, his wife in his arms. She seemed asleep. Duke snapped out of his attitude. "Hold it, Dad! I'll take her." "Get on down and open the door!" The door was steel set into the wall of the basement. Seconds were lost because Duke did not know how to handle its latch. At last Mr. Farnham passed his wife over to his son, opened it himself. Beyond, stairs led farther down. They managed it by carrying Mrs. Farnham, hands and feet, a limp doll, and took her IF through a second door into a room beyond. Its floor was six feet lower than the basement and under, Barbara decided, their back garden. She hung back while Mrs. Farnham was carried inside. Mr. Farnham reappeared. "Barbara! Get in here! Where's Joseph? Where's Karen?" Those two came rushing down the basement, stairs as he spoke. Karen was flushed and seemed excited and happy. Joseph was looking wild-eyed and was dressed in undershirt and trousers, his feet bare. He stopped short. "Mr. Farnham! Are they going to hit us?" "I'm afraid so. Get inside." The young Negro turned and yelled, "Doctor Livingstone I presumed He dashed back up the stairs. Mr. Farnham said, "Oh, GodV and pressed his fists against his temples. He added in his usual voice, "Get inside, girls. Karen, bolt the door but listen for me. I'll wait as long as I can." He glanced at his watch. "Five minutes." The girls went in. Barbara whispered, "What happened to Joseph? Flipped?" "Well, sort of. Dr.-Livingstone#-Presume is our cat. Loves Joseph, tolerates us." Karen started bolting the inner door, heavy steel, and secured with ten inch-thick bolts. She stopped. "Fm damned if I'll bolt this all the way while Daddy is outside! "Don't bolt it at all." Karen shook her head. "I'll use a couple, so he can hear me draw them. That cat may be a mile away. Barbara looked around. It was an L-shaped room; they had entered the end of one arm. Two bunks were oa the righthand wall; Grace Farnham was in the lower and still asleep. The left wall was solid with packed shelves; the passage was hardly wider than the door. The ceiling was low and arched and bf corrugated steel. She could see the ends of two more bunks at the bend. Duke was not in sight but he quickly appeared from around the bend, started setting up a card table in the space there. She watched in amazement as he got out the cards he had picked up -- how long ago? It seemed an hour. Probably less than five minutes. Duke saw her, grinned, and placed folding chairs around the table. T here came a clanging at the door. Karen unbolted it; Joseph tumbled in, followed by Mr. Famham. A lordly red Persian cat jumped out of Joseph's arms, started an inspection. Karen and her father bolted the door. He glanced at his wife, then said, "Joseph! Help me crank." "Yes, sir!" Duke came over. "Got her nuttoned up, Skipper?" "All but the sliding door. It has to be cranked." "Then come take your licking." Duke waved at the table. His father stared. "Duke, are vou seriously proposing to finish a card game while we're being attacked?" "I'm four hundred dollars senous. And another hundred says we aren't being attacked. In a half hour they'll call it off and tomorrow's papers will say the northern lights fouled up the radar. Play the hand? Or default?" "-Mmm. My partner will play it; I'm busy." "You stand behind the way she plays it?" "Of course." Barbara found herself sitting down at the table with a feeling that she had wandered into a dream. She picked up her partner's hand, studied it. "Lead, Karen." Karen said, "Oh, hell!" and led the trey of clubs. Duke picked up the dummy, laid it out in suits. "What do you want on it?" he asked. "Doesn't matter. I'll play both hands face up." "Better not." "It's solid." She exposed the cards. Duke studied them. "I see," he admitted. "Leave the hands; Dad will want to see this." He did some figuring. "Call it twenty-four hundred points Dad!" "Yes, Son?" "I'm writing a check for four hundred and ninety-two dollars -- and let that be a lesson to me." "You don't need to -- " All lights went out, the floor slammed against their feet. Barbara felt frightening pressure on her chest, tried to stand up and was knocked over. All around was a noise of giant subway trains, and the floor heaved like a ship in a cross sea. "Dad!" "Yes Duke! Are you hurt?" "I don't know. But mako duH five hundred and mnoty-two dollars!" The subterranean rumbling weal on. Through this roar Barbara heard Mr. Farnham chuckle. "Forget it!" he called out. "The dollar just depreciated." Mrs. Farnham started to screanL "Hubert! Hubert, where are you? Hubert! Make it stop! Please make it stop!" "Coming, dear!" A pencil of light cut the blackness, moved toward the bunks near the door. Barbara raised her head, made out that it was her host, on hands and knees with a flashlight in his teeth. He reached the bunk, succeeded in quieting Grace; her screams ceased. "Karen?" "Yes, Daddy." "Are you all right?" "Yes. Just bruised. My chair went over." "All right. Get the emergency lighting on in this bay. Don't stand up. Crawl, ril light you from here. Then get the hypo kit and -- Ow! Joseph!" "Yes, sir." "You in one piece?" "I'm okay. Boss." "Persuade your furry-faced Falstaff to join you. He jumped on  II me. "He's just friendly, Mr. Farnham." "Yes, yes. But I don't want him doing that while I'm giving a hypo. Call him." "Sure thing. Here, Doc! Doc, Doc, Doc! Fish, Doc!" IF S ome minutes later the rumbling had died out, the floor was steady, Mrs. Farnham had been knocked out by injected drug, two tiny lights were glowing in the first bay, and Mr. Farnham was inspecting. Damage was slight. Despite guard rails, cans had popped off shelves; a fifth of rum was broken. But liquor was almost the only thing stored in glass. The worst casualty was the shelter's battery-driven radio, torn loose from the wall and smashed. Mr. Farnham was on his knees, retrieving bits of it. His son looked down. "Don't bother. Dad. Sweep it up and throw it away." "Some parts can be salvaged." "What do you know about radios?" "Nothing," his father admitted. "But I have books." "A book won't fix that. You should have stocked a spare." "I have a spare." "Then for God's sake get it! I want to know what's happened." His father got up slowly and lookat Duke. "I would like to know, too. I can't hear anything over this radio I'm wearing. Not surprising, it's short range. But the spare is packed in foam and probably wasn't hurt." "Thenget it hooked up." "Later." "Later, hell. Where is it?" Mr. Farnham breathed hard. "I've had all the yap I'm going to take. Fm going to wait until I'm sure the attack is over. If you're itching to know what's happening outside, you can leave. If that's what you want I'll unbolt this door, crank back the armor door, and you can open the upper door yourself." "Eh? Don't be silly." "But close it after you. I don't want it open -- both for blast and radioactivity." "That's another thing. Don't you have any way to measure radioactivity? We ought takesteps to -- " "What? Dad, I don't appreciate being bawled out in the presence of others." "Then keep your voice down." They were in the first bay near the door. Mrs. Farnham was snoring by them; the others had retreated ness. "Are you ready to listen to me now?" "Very well, sir," Duke said stiffly. "Good. Son, I was not joking. Either leave... or do exactly as I tell you. That includes keeping your mouth shut when I tell you to. Which will it be? Absolute obedience, prompt and cheerful? Or will you leave?" "Aren't you being rather highhanded?" "I intend to be. This shelter is a lifeboat and I am boat officer. For the safety of all I shall maintain discipline. Even if it means tossing somebody, even my own son, overboard." "That's a far-fetched simile. Dad, it's a shame you were in the Navy. It gives you romantic ideas." " think it's a shame, Duke, that you never had service. You're not realistic. Well, which is it?" "Uh, ril be cooperative. But tliis absolute dictatorship -- Dad, tonight you made quite a point of the fact that you are a free man. Well, so am I. I'll cooperate. But I won't take unreasonable orders and, as for keeping my mouth shut, ril try to be diplomatic. But when I think it's necessary, I'll voice my opinion. Free speech. Fair enough?" H is father sighed. "Not nearly good enough, Duke. Stand aside. I want to unbolt the door." "Don't push a joke too far, Dad." "I'm not joking. I'm putting you out." "Dad... I hate to say this... but I don't think you are man enough. I'm bigger than you are and a lot younger." "Duke, please! I built this shelter. Not two hours ago you were sneering at it, telling me that it was a 'sick thing to do. Now you want to use it, since it turned out you were wrong. Can't you admit that?" "Oh, certainly. You've made your point." "Yet you are telling me how to run it. Telling me that  should have provided a spare radio. When you hadn't provided anything. Can't you be a man, give in, and do as I tell you? When your life depends on my hospitality?" "Cripes! I told you I would cooperate." "But you haven't been doing so. You've been making silly remarks, getting in my way, giving me lip, wasting my time when I have urgent things to do. Duke, I don't want your cooperation, on your termi according to your judgment. Whfli we are in this shelter I want yoor absolute obedience." Duke shook his head. "Get M through your head that Fm no longer a child. Dad. My cooperation, yet. But I won't promise the other." Mr. Farnham shook his head sorrowfully and turned away, "Josephl "Yes, sir?" "It's condition seven." "Condition seven, sir?" "Yes, and getting worse. Be careful with the instruments and dont waste time." "Right away, sir!" "Thank you." He turned to hii son. "Duke, if you really want to cooperate, you could pick up the pieces of this radio. It's the same model as the one in reserve. There may be pieces we can use to repair the other one, if it becomes necessary. Will you do that?' "Sure, sure. I told you I would cooperate." Duke got on his knees, started to complete the task he had interrupted. "Thank you." His father turned away. "Mr. Duke! Get your hands up I" Duke looked over his shoulder, saw Joseph by the card table, aiming a Thompson submachine gun at him. He jumped to his feet. "What tht hell!" "Stay there!" Joseph said. "I'll shoot." "Yes," agreed Duke's father, "he doesn't have the compunctions you thought I had. Joseph, if he moves, shoot him." IF "Daddy! What's going on?" Mr. Farnham turned to face his daughter. "Get back!" "But, Daddy -- " "Shut up. Both of you get into that lower bunk. Karen on the inside. Mover K aren moved. Barbara looked wide-eyed at theautomatic her host now held in his hand and got quickly into the lower bunk of the other bay. "Arms around each other," he said briskly. "Don't either of you let the other one move." He went back to the first bay. "Duke." "Yes?" "Lower your hands slowly and unfasten your trousers. Let them fall but don't step out of them. Then turn slowly and face the door. Unfasten the bolts." "Dad -- " "Shut up. Joseph, if he does anything but exactly what I told him to, shoot. Try for his legs, but hit him." Face white, expression dazed, Duke did as he was told: let his trousers fall until he was hobbled, turned and started unbolting the door. His father let him continue until half the bolts were drawn. "Duke. Stop. The next few seconds determine whether you go -- or stay. You know the terms." Duke barely hesitated. "I accept." "I must elaborate. You will not only obey me, you will obey Joseph." Joseph? "My second-in-command. I have to have one, Duke; I can't stay awake all the time. I would gladly have had you as deputy -- but you would have nothing to do with it. So I trained Joseph. He knows where everything is, how it works, how to repair it. So hes my deputy. Well? Will you obey him just as cheerfully? No back talk?" Duke said slowly, "I promise." "Good. But a promise made under duress isn't binding. There is another commitment always given under duress and nevertheless binding, a point which as a lawyer you will appreoiate. I want your parole as a prisoner. Will you give me your parole to abide by the conditions until we leave the shelter? A straight quid-pro-quo; your parole in exchange for not being forced outside?" "You have my parole." "Thank you. Throw the bolts and fasten your trousers. Joseph, stow the Tommy gun." "Okay, Boss." Duke secured the door, secured his pants. As he turned around his father offered him the automatic, butt first. "What's this for?" Duke asked. "Suit yourself. If your parole isn't good, I would rather find it out now." Duke took the gun, removed the clip, worked the slide and caught the cartridge from the chamber, put it back int# the clip and reloaded the gun -- handed it back. "My parole is good. Here." "Keep it. You were always a headstrong boy, Duke, but you were never a Kar." "Okay , , . Boss." His son put the pistol in a pocket. "Hot in here." "And going to get hotter." "Eh? How much radiation do you think we're getting?" "I don't mean radiation. Fire storm." He walked into the space where the bays joined, looked at a thermometer, then at his wrist "Eighty-four and only twenty-three minutes since we were hit. It'll get worse." "How much worse?" "How would I know, Duke? I don't know how far away the hit was, how many megatons, how widespread the fire. I don't even know whether the house is burning overhead, or was blasted away. Normal temperature in here is about fifty degrees. That doesn't look good. But there is nothing to do about it. Yes, there's one thing. Strip down t# shorts. I shall." H e went into the other bay. Tha girls were still in the lower bunk, arms around each other, keeping quiet. Joseph was on the floor with his back to the wall, the cat in his lap. Karen looked round-eyed as her father approached but she said nothing. "You kids can get up." "Thanks," said Karen. "Pretty warm for snuggling." Barbara backed out and Karen sat up. "So it is. Did you hear what jmt happened?" "Some sort of argument," Karen said cautiously. "Yes. And it's the last one. I'm boss and Joseph is my deputy. Understood?" IS IF "Yes, Daddy, "said Karen. "Mrs. Wells?" "Me? Why, of course! It's your shelter. Pm grateful to be in it -- Pm grateful to be alive! And please call me Barbara, Mr. Farnham." "Sorry, Hmm. Call me 'Hugh, I prefer it to 'Hubert.' Duke, everybody -- first names from now on. Don't call me 'Dad,' call me 'Hugh.' Joe, knock off the 'Mister' and the 'Miss.' Catch?" "Okay, Boss, if you say so." "Make that 'Okay, Hugh. Now you girls peel down, panties and bra or such, then get Grace peeled to her skin and turn the light out there. It's hot, it's going to get hotter. Joe, strip to your shorts.' Mr. Farnham took his packet off, started unbuttoning his shirt. Joseph said, "Uh, Pm comfortable." "I wasn't asking, I was telling you." "Uh... Boss, Vm not wearing shorts! "He's not," Karen confirmed. "I rushed him." "So?" Hugh looked at his exhouseboy and chuckled. "Joe, you're a sissy. I should have made Karen straw boss." "Suits me." "Get a pair out of stores and you can change in the toilet space. While you're about it, show Duke where it is. Karen, the same for Barbara. Then we'll gather for a powwow." The powwow started five minutes later. Hugh Farnham was at the table, dealing out bridge hands, assessing them. When they were seat ed he said, "Anybody for bridge?" "Daddy, you're joking." "My name is 'Hugh.' I was not joking, a rubber of bridge might quiet your nerves. Put away that cigarette, Duke." "Uh... sorry." "You can smoke tomorrow, I think. Tonight I've got pure oxygen cracked pretty wide and we are taking in no air. You saw the bottles in the toilet space?" The space between the bays was filled by pressure bottles, a water tank, a camp toilet, stores, and a small area where a person might manage a stand-up bath. Air intakes and exhausts, capped off, were there, plus a hand-orpower blower, and scavengers for carbon dioxide and water vapor. This space was reached by an archway between the tiers of bunks. "Oxygen in those? I thought it was air." "Couldn't afford the space penalty. So we can't risk fire, even a cigarette. I opened one inlet for a check. Very hot -- heat 'hot' as well as making a Geiger counter chatter. Folks, I don't know how long we'll be on bottled breathing.' I figured thirty-six hours for four! people, so it's nominally twenty-fourj hours for six, but that's not the pinch. I'm sweating -- and so are you. We can take it to about a hundred and twenty. Above that, we'll have to use oxygen just to cool the place. It might end in a fine balance between heat and suffocation. Or worse." "Daddy -- Hugh, I mean. Are you breaking it gently that we arc going to be baked alive?" "You won't be, Karen. I won't let you be." "Well... I prefer a bullet." "Nor will you be shot. I have enough sleeping pills to let twenty people die painlessly. But we aren't here to die. We've had vast luck; with a little more we'll make it. So don't be morbid." # # T T ow about the radioactivity?" asked Hugh. "Can you read an integrating counter?" "No." "Take my word for it that wc are in no danger yet. Now about sleeping. This side, where Grace is, is the girls' dorm; this other side is ours Only four bunks but that's okay; one person has to monitor air and heat, and the other one without a bed can keep him awake. However I'm taking the watch tonight and won't need company; I've taken dexedrine." "I'll stand watch." -- "I'll stay up with you." -- "I'm not sleepy let me stay here -- " "Slow down!" Hugh said. "Joe, you can't stand watch now because you have to relieve me when I'm tuckered out. You and I will alternate until we' are sure Aat the situation is safe." Joe shrugged and kept quiet. Duke said, "Then it's my privilege." "Can't either of you add? Two bunks for women, two for men. What's left over? We'll fold this table and the gal left over can sprawl on the floor here. Joe, break out blankets and put a couple here and a couple in the tank space for me.' "Right away, Hugh!" Both girls insisted on standing watch. Hugh shut them off. "Cut for it." "But -- " "Pipe down, Barbara. Ace low, and low girl sleeps on a bunk, the other here on the floor. Duke, do you want a sleeping pill?" "That's one habit I don't have." "Don't be an iron man." "Well -- A rain check?" "Surely. Joe? Seconal?" "Well, I'm so relieved that I don't have to take that quiz tomorrow..." "Glad somebody is happy. All right." "I was going to add that I'm pretty keyed up. You're sure you won't need me?" "I'm sure. Karen, get one for Joe. You know where?" "Yes and I'm going to get one for me, since I won the cut. I'm no iron man! And a Miltown on top of it." "Do that. Sorry, Barbara, you can't have one; I might have to wake you and have you keep me awake. You can have Miltown. You'll probably sleep from it." "I don't need it." "As you wish. Bed, everybody. It's midnight and two of you are going on watch in eight hours." In a few minutes all were in bed with Barbara where the table had been, all lights out save one in the tank space. Hugh squatted on blankets there, playing solitaire -- badly. IF . r # gain the floor heaved, again came that terrifying rumble. Karen screamed. Hugh was up at once. This one was not as violent; he was able to tay on his feet. He hurried into the girls' dorm. "Baby! Where are you?" He fumbled, found the light switch. "Up here, Daddy. Oh, Fm scared! I was just dropping off and it almost threw me out. Help me down." He did so; she clung to him, sobbing. "There, there," he said, patting her. "You've been a brave girl, don't let it throw you." "I'm not brave. Fve been scared silly all along. I just didn't want it to show." "Well... Fm scared too. So let's not show it, huh? Better have another pill. And a stiff drink." "All right. Both. Fm not going to sleep in that bunk. It's too hot up there, as well as scary when it shakes." "All right. I'll pull the mattress down." Duke and Barbara were sitting on the blanket she had been napping on ; they were looking very solemn. Hugh said, "Where's Joe? He wasn't hurt, was he?" Duke gave a short laugh. "Want to see 'Sleeping Innocence'? That bottom bunk." Hugh found his second-in-command sprawled on his back, snoring, as deeply unconscious as Grace Far oh am . Dr .Livingstone-I-Presume was curled up on his chest. Hugh came back. "Well, that blast was farther away. Fm glad Joe could deep." "It was too damned close to suit me! When are they going to run out of those things?" "Soon, I hope. Folks, Karen and I have just formed the 'Fm-scaredtoo' club and are about to celebrate with a drink. Any candidates?" "Fm a charter member!" "So am I," agreed Barbara. "Yes!" Hugh fetched papef cups, and bottles -- Scotch, seconal, and Miltown. "Water, anyone?" Duke said, "I don't want anything interfering with the liquor." "Water, please," Barbara answered. "It's so hot." "How hot is it, Daddy?" "Duke, I put the thermometer in the tank room. Go see, will you?" "Sure. And may I use that rain check?" "Certainly." Hugh gave Karen another seconal capsule, another Miltown pill, and told Barbara that she must take a Miltown -- then took one himself, having decided that dexedrine had made him edgy. Duke returned. "One hundred and four degrees," he announced. "I opened the valve another quarter turn. All right?" "Have to open it still wider soon. Here are your pills, Duke." "Thanks." Duke swallowed them, chased them with whisky. "Fm going to sleep on the floor, too. Coolest place in the house." "Smart of you. All right, leFs settle down. Give the pills a chance." H ugh sat with Karen after she bedded down, then gently extracted his hand from hers and returned to the tank room. The temperature was up two degrees. He opened the valve on the working tank still wider, listened to it sigh to emptiness, shook his head, got a wrench and shifted the gauge to a full tank. Before he opened it, he attached a hose, led it out into the main room. Then he went back to pretending to play solitaire. A few minutes later Barbara appeared in the doorway. "Fm not sleepy," she said. "Could you use some company?" "You've been crying." "Does it show? Fm sorry." "Come sit down. Want to play cards?" "If you want to. All I want is company." "We'll talk. Would you like another drink?" "Oh, would I! Can you spare it?" "I stocked plenty. Barbara, can you think of a better night to have a drink? But both of us will have to see to it that the other one doesn't go to sleep." "All right. I'll keep you awake." They shared a cup, Scotch with water from the tank. It poured out as sweat faster than they drank it. Hugh increased the gas flow again and found that the ceiling was unpleasantly hot. "Barbara, the house must have burned over us. There is thirty inches of concrete above us and then two feet of dirt." "How hot do you suppose it is outside?" "Couldn't guess. We must have been close to the fireball." He felt the ceiling again. "I beefed this thing up -- roof, walls, and floor are all one steel-reinforced box. It was none too much. We may have trouble getting the doors open. All this heat -- And probably warped by concussion." She said quietly, "Are we trapped?" "No, no. Under these bottles is a hatch to a tunnel. Thirty-inch culvert with concrete around it. Leads to the gully back of the garden. We can break out -- crowbars and a hydraulic jack -- even if the end is crushed in and covered with crater glass. Fm not worried about that; I'm worried about how long we can stay inside... and whether it will be safe when we leave." "How bad is the radioactivity?" He hesitated. "Barbara, would it mean anything to you? Know anything about radiation?" "Enough. Fm majoring -- I was majoring -- in botany; I've used isotopes in genetics experiments. I can stand bad news, Hugh, but not knowing -- well, that's why I was crying." "Mmm. The situation is worse than I told Duke." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Integrating counter back of the bottles. Go look." She went to it, stayed several minutes. When she came back, she sat down without speaking. "Well?" he asked. "Could I have another drink?" "Certainly." He mixed it. She sipped it, then said quietly, "If the slope doesn't change, we'll hit the red line by morning." she IF frowned. But that marks a conservative limit. If I remember the figures, we probably won't start vomiting for at least another day." And the curve should I level off soon. That's why heat worries me more than radiation." He looked at the thermometer, cracked the valve still wider. "I've been running the water-vapor getter on battery; I don't think we should crank the blower in this heat. I'm not going to worry about CeeOh-Two until we start to pant." "Seems reasonable." "Let's forget the hazards. Anytiling you'd like to talk about? Yourself?" "Little to tell, Hugh. Female, white, twenty-five years old. Back in school, or was, after a bad marriage. A brother in the Air Force -- so possibly he's all right. My parents were in Acapulco, so perhaps they are, too. No pets, thank God -- and I was so pleased that Joe saved his cat. No regrets, Hugh, and not afraid... not really. Just... sad." She sniffed. "It was a pretty nice world, even if I did crumb up my marriage." "Don't cry." "I'm not crying; Those drops are sweat." "Yes. Surely." "They are. It's terribly hot." Suddenly she reached both hands behind her ribs. "Do you mind? If I take this off? It's smothering me." "Go ahead. Child, if you can get comfortable -- or less uncomfortable -- do so. Skin doesn't shock me." He stood up, went behind the oxygen bottles, and looked at the record of radiation. Having done so, he checked the thermometer and increased the flow of oxygen. As he sat down he remarked, "I might as well have stored air instead of oxygen, then we could smoke. But I did not expect to use it for cooling." He ignored .the fact that she had accepted his invitation to be comfortable. He added, "I was worried about heating the place. I tried to design a stove to use contaminated air safely. Possible. But difficult." "I think you did amazingly well. This is the only shelter I've ever heard of with stored air. You're a scientist. Aren't you?" "Me? Heavens, no. High school only. What little I know I picked up here and there. Some in the Navy, metal work and correspondence courses. Then I worked for a public futility and learned something about construction and pipe lines. Then I became a contractor." He smiled. "No Barbara, I'm a 'general specialist'. The Elephant ChilcPs 'satiable curiosity.' Like Dr.-Livingstone-I-Presume." "How did a cat get a name like that?" "Karen. Because he's a great explorer. That cat can get into anything. Do you like cats?" "I don't know much about them. But Dr. Livingstone is a beauty." "So he is but I like all cats. You don't own a cat, he is a free citizen. Take dogs; dogs are friendly and fun and loyal. But slaves. Not their fault, they've been bred for it. But slavery makes me queasy, even in animals." He frowned. "Barbara, I'm not as sad over what has happened as you are. It might be good for us. I don't mean us six; I mean our country." S he looked very startled. "How?" "Well -- It's hard to take the long view when you are crouching m a shelter and wondering how long you can hold out. But -- Barbara, I've wonied for years about our country. It seems to me that we have been breeding slaves -- and I believe in freedom. This war may have turned the tide. This may be the first war in history which kills the stupid rather than the bright and able -- where is makes any distinction." "How do you figure that, Hugh?" "Well, wars have always been hardest on the best young men. This time the boys in service are as safe or safer than civilians. And of civilians those who used their heads and made preparations stand a far better chance. Not every case, but on the average, and that will improve the breed. When it's over, things will be tough, and that wifl improve the breed still more. For years the surest way of surviving has been to be utterly worthless and breed a lot of worthless kids. All standard genetics. But it seems that will change." She nodded. "That's cruel." "It is cruel. But no government yet has been able to repeal natural laws, though they keep trying." She shivered in spite of the heat. "I suppose you're right. No, I know you're right. But I could face it more cheerfully if I thought there was gothe poorest third is good genetics... but there is nothing good about "Mmm, yes. I hate to think about it. But I did think about it. Barbara, I didn't stockpile oxygen just against radiation and fire storm. I had in mind worse things." "Worse? How?" "All the talk about the horrors of World War Three has been about atomic weapons -- fallout, hundred megaton bombs, neutron bombs. The disarmament talks and the pacifist parades have all been about the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb -- as if A-weapons were the only thing that could kill. This may not be just an A-weapon war; more biological, and chemical." He hooked a thumb at the tanks. "That's why I stocked that bottled breathing. Against nerve gas. Aerosols. Viruses. God knows what. The communists won't smash this country if they can kill us without destroying our wealth. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bombs had been used only OQ military targets like the antimissile base here, but that New York and Detroit and such received nerve gas. Or a #-hour plague with # mortality. The horrid possibilities are endless. The air outside could be loaded with death that a counter won't detect and a filter can't stop." He smiled grimly. "Sorry. You had better go back to bed." "I'm miserable anyway and don't Wiot to be alone. May I stay?" IF "Certainly. I'm happier with you present no matter how gloomy I sound." "What you've been saying isn't nearly as gloomy as the thoughts I have alone. I wish we knew what was going on outside!" She added, "I wish we had a periscope." "We do have," "Huh? WhereT "Did have. Sorry. That pipe over there. I tried to raise it but it won't budge. However -- Barbie, I tromped on Duke for demanding that I break out our spare radio before the attack was over. But maybe it's over. What do you think?" "Me? How would I know?" "You know as much as I do. That first missile was intended to take out bother with us otherwise. If they are spotting from orbiting spaceships, then that second one was another try at the same target. The timing fits, time of flight from Kamchatka is about half an hour and the second hit about forty-five minutes after the first. That one was probably a bull's-eye -- and they know it, because more than an hour has passed and no third missile. That means they are through with us; Logical?"  "Sounds logical to me." "It's crumby logic, my dear. Not enough data. Perhaps both missiles thing they throw. Perhaps the Russkis have run out of missiles. Perhaps the third round will be delivered by bomber. We don't know. But Fm itching to find out." #T would certainly like to hear A some news." "We'll try. If it's good news, we'll wake the others." Hugh Farnham dug into the corner, came out with a box, unpacked a radio. "Doesn't have a scratch. Let's try it without an antenna. "Nothing but static," he announced shortly. "Not surprised. Although its mate could pull in local stations without an aerial. Now we'll hook to the fixed antenna. Wait here." He returned shortly. "No soap. Stands to reason that there isn't anything left of the fixed antenna.  we'll try the emergency one." Hugh took a wrench and removed a cap from an inch pipe that stuck down through the ceiling. He tested the opening with a radiation counter. "A little more count." He got two steel rods, each five feet long; with one he probed the pipe. "Doesn't go up as far as it should. The tcp of this pipe was buried just below ground. Trouble." He screwed the second rod into the first. "Now comes the touchy part. Stand back, there may be debris -- "It'll get on you." "On my hands, maybe. I'll scrub afterwards. You can go over me with a Geiger counter." He tapped with a sledge on the bottom of the joined rods. Up they went about eighteen inches. "Something solid. I'll have to bang it." Many blows later the rod was seated into the pipe. "It felt," he said, as he stopped to scrub his hands, "as if we passed into open air the last foot or so. But it should have stuck out five feet above ground. Rubble, I suppose. What's left of our home. Want to use the counter on me?" "Hugh, you say that as casually as 'What's left of yesterday's milk.' " He shrugged. "Barbie girl, I was broke when I joined the Navy, Pve been flat busted since; I will not waste tears over a roof and some plumbing. Get any count?" "You're clean." "Check the floor under the pipe." There were hot spots on the floor; Hugh wiped them with damp Kleenex, disposed of it in a metal waste can. She checked his hands afterwards, and the spots on the floor. "Well, that used up a gallon of water; this radio had better work." He clipped the antenna lead to the rod, switched it on. Ten minutes later they admitted fliat they were getting nothing. Noise -- static all over the dial -- but no signal. He sighed. "I'm not surprised. I don't know what ionization does to radio waves, but that must be a sorcerer's brew of hot botopes over our heads: I had hoped wc could get Salt Lake City." "Not Denver?" rH leave the gain up; maybe we'll bear something.' "Don't you want to save the battery?" "Not really. Let's sit down and recite limericks." He looked at the Integrating counter, whistled softly then checked the thermometer. "I'll five our sleeping beauties a little more relief from the beat. How well are you standing it. Barbie?" "Truthfully, I had forgotten it. The sweat pours off and that's that." "Me, too." "Well, don't use more oxygen on my account. How many bottles are left?" "Not many." "How many?" "Less than half. Don't fret. I'll bet you five hundred thousand dollars -- fifty cents in the new currency -- that you can't recite a limerick I don't know." "Clean, or dirty?" "Are there clean ones?" "Okay. 'A playful young fellow named Scott -- ' " T he limerick session was a flop. Hugh accused her of having a clean mind. She answered, "Not really, Hugh. But my mind isn't working." "I'm not at my sharpest. Another drink?" "Yes. With water, please, I sweat so; I'm dry. Hugh?" "Yes, Barbie?" "We're going to die. Aren't we?" "Yes." "I thought so. Before morning?" "Oh, no! I feel sure we can live till noon. If we want to." "I see. Hugh, would you mind if I moved over by you? Would you put your arm around me? Or is it too hot?" "Any time I'm too hot to put my arm around a girl I'll know I'm dead and in hell." "Thanks." "Room enough? TF Plenty," said Barbara, smiling. "You're a little girl." "I weigh a hundred and thirtytwo pounds and I'm five feet eight and that's not little." "You're a little girl. Put the cup aside. Tilt your face up." "Mmmm -- Again. Please, again." "A greedy little girl." "Yes. Very greedy. Thank you, Hugh." "All right?" "Wonderfully all right. And kiss me, too. Please?" "Barbara, Barbara!" "Hugh darling! I love you. Oh!" "I love you, Barbara." "Yes. Yes! Oh, please! NowV Some minutes later, the biggest slam of all hit them. Ill T he light went out, Grace Farnham screamed, and Dr. Livingstone-I-Presume wailed. Barbara was knocked silly and came to heaped over a steel bottle and disoriented by blackne.ss and no floors or walls. She groped around, found a leg, found Hugh attached to it. He was limp. She felt for his heart beat, could not find' it. She shouted: "Hello! Hello! Anybody!" Duke answered,"Barbara?" "Yes, yes!" "Are you all right?" "I'm all right, Hugh is hurt. I think he's dead." "Take it easy. When I find my trousers. I'll light a match -- if I can get off my shoulders. I'm standing on them." "Hubert! Hubertr "Yes, Mother! Wait." Grace continued to scream; Duke alternated reassurances and cursing the darkness. Barbara felt around, slipped on loose oxygen bottles, hurt her shiii and found a flat surface. She could not tell what it was; it was canted steeply. Duke called out, "Got 'em!" A match flared up, torch bright in oxygen-rich air. Joe's voice said, "Better put that out. Fire hazard." A flashlight beam cut the gloom. Barbara called out, "Joe! Help me with Hugh!" "Got to see about lights." "He may be dying." "Can't do a thing without light." Barbara shut up, tried again to find heart beat -- found it and clutched Hugh's head, sobbing. Lights came on in the men's bay; enough trickled in that Barbara could make out her surroundings. The floor sloped about thirty degrees; she, Hugh, steel bottles, water tank, and other gear were jumbled in the lower corner. The tank had sprung a leak and was flooding the toilet space. She saw that, had the tilt been the other way, she and Hugh would have been buried under steel and water. Minutes later Duke and Joe joined her, letting themselves down through the door. Joe carried a camp lamp. Duke said to Joe, "How are we going to move him?" "We don't. It might be his spine." "Still have to move him." "We don't move him," Joe said firmly. "Barbara, have you moved him?" "I took his head in my lap." "Well, don't move him any more." Joe looked his patient over, touching him gently. "I can't see any gross injuries," he decided. "Barbara, if you can stay put, we'll wait until he comes to. Then I can check his eyes for concussion, see if he can wiggle his toes, things like that." "I'll hold still. Anybody else hurt?" "Not to speak of," Duke assured her. "Joe thinks he's cracked some ribs and I wrenched a shoulder. Mother just got rolled into the corner of her bunk. Sis is soothing her. Sis is okay -- a lump on her head where a can konked her. Are you all right?" "Just bruises. Hugh and I were playing double solitaire and trying to keep cool when it hit." She wondered how long the lie would stand up. Duke had no more on than she did and didn't seem troubled by it; Joe was dressed in underwear shorts. She added, "The cat? Is he all right?" "Dr.-Livingstone-I-Presume," Joe answered seriously, "escaped injury. But he is vexed that his sand box was dumped over. He's cleaning himself and criticizing." "Fm.lad he wasn't hurt." "Nofice anything about this blast?" "What, Joe? It was the hardest of the three. Much the hardest." "Yes. But no rumbling. Just one great, big, grand slam, then... nothing.". "What does that indicate?" "I don't know. Barbara, can you stay here and not move? I want to get more lights on, check the damage, and see what to do about it." "I won't move." Hugh seemed to be breathing easily. In the silenoi she could hear his heart beat. She had nothing to be unhappy about K aren joined her, carrying a flashlight and moving carefully on the slant. "How's Daddy?" "No change." "Knocked cold, I guess. So was I. You okay?" She played the flash light over Barbara. "Not hurt." "Well! I'm glad you're in uniform, too. I can't find my pants. Joe ignores it so carefully, it's painful. Is that boy square!" "I don't know where my clothes are." "Joe has the only pants among us. What happened to you? Were you asleep?" "No. I was here. We were talking." "Hmn -- Further deponent sayeth not. I'll keep your grisly secret. Mother won't know; I gave her another hypo." "Aren't you jumping at conclusions?" "My favorite exercise. I hope my nasty suspicions are correct. I wish I had had something better to do than sleep last night. Since it's probably our last night." She leaned over and kissed Barbara. "I like you." "Thanks, Karen. Me, too. You." Let's hold a funeral and preach about what nice guys we are. You made my Daddy happy when you had the guts to bid that slam. If you made him happier still, I'm in favor of it." She straightened up. " 'Bye. I'll go sort groceries. If Daddy wakes up, yell." She left. # IF "Barbara," said Hugh softly. "Yes, Hugh? Yes!" "Keep your voice down. I heard what my daughter said." "You did?" "Yes. She's a gentleman. Barbara I love you. I may not have another chance to say so." "I love you." "Darling." "Shall I call the others? "Shortly. Are you comfortable?" "Oh, very!" "Then let me rest a bit. I feel woozy." "As long as you like. Uh, can you wiggle your toes? Do you hurt any place?" "I hurt lots of places, but not too much. Let me see -- Yes, I can move everything. All right, call Joe." "No hurry." "Better call him. Work to do." Shortly Mr. Farnham was back in charge. Joe required him to move himself -- a mass of bruises but no break, sprain, nor concussion. It seemed to Barbara that Hugh had landed on the bottles and that she had landed on him. She did not discuss her theory. Hugh's first act was to bind Joe's ribs with elastic bandage. Joe gasped as it tightened but seemed more comfortable with it. The lump on Karen's head was inspected; Hugh decided that there was something he could do for it. "Will somebody fetch the thermometer?" he asked. "Duke?" "It's busted." "It's a bimetal job. Shockproof." "I looked for it," Duke explained, "while you were doctoring. Seems cooler to me. While it may be shockproof, it couldn't stand being mashed between two tanks:" "Oh. Well, it's no big loss." "Dad? Wouldn't this be a good time to try the spare radio?" "I suppose so, but -- I hate to tell you, Duke, but you'll probably find it smashed, too. We tried it earlier. No results." He glanced at his wrist. "An hour and a half ago. At two a.m. Has anyone else the time?" Duke's watch agreed. "We seem to be in fair shape," Hugh decided, "except for water. There are some plastic jugs of water but we need to salvage the tank water; we may have to drink it. With Halazone tablets. Joe, we need utensils of any sort, and everybody bail. Keep it as clean as you can." He added. "When Joe can spare you, Karen, scrounge some breakfast. We've got to eat, even if this is Armageddon." "And Armageddon sick of it," Karen offered. H er father winced. "Baby girl, you will write on the blackboard one thousand times: T will not make bad puns before breakfast. ' " "I thought it was pretty good, Hugh." "Don't encourage her, Barbara. All right, get with it." Karen returned shortly, carrying Dr. Livingstone. "I wasn't much help," she announced, "Because somebody has to hang onto this damn cat. He wants to help." 'Kalhlerrrrtr "You did so! Fm going to entice him with sardines and get breakfast. What do you want. Daddy Hugh Boss? Crepes Suzettes?" "Yes. That sounds very good." "What you'll get k Spam and crackers." "All right. How's the bailing going?" "Daddy, I won't drink that water even with Halazone." She made a face. "You know where it wound p. "We may have to drink it." "Well... if you cut it with whisky -- " "Mmm. Every case of liquor is leaking. The two I've opened each have one fifth, unbroken." "Daddy, you've ruined breakfast." "The question is, do I ration it evenly? Or save it all for Grace?" "Oh." Karen's features screwed up m painful decision. "She can have my share. But the others shouldn't be deprived just because Gracie has a yen." "Karen, at this stage it's not a yen. ki a way, for her it's medicine." "Yeah, sure. And diamond bracelets and sable coats are medicine for me. "Baby, there's no point in blaming her. When you get to be my age -- " "Daddy, I don't expect to get to be your age -- and we both know it. If we've got even two fifths of liquor, it's probably enough. Why don't you just serve it to whoever needs it?" The lines in his face got deeper. "Karen, I haven't given up. It's distinctly cooler. We may get out of this yet." "Well -- I guess that's the proper attitude. Give me a kiss, Daddy." He did. "Now pipe down and get to work." F ive of diem gathered for breakfast, sitting on the floor as chairs would not stand up. Mii. Famham was still lethargic frmn heavy sedation. The others shared canned meat, crackers, cold Nescafe, canned peaches and warm comradeship. They were dressed, the men in shorts, Karen in shorts and halter, and Barbara in a muu muu belonging to Karen. Her underwear had been salvaged but was soaked and the air was too moist to dry it Hugh announced. "Time for a conference. Suggestions are wdcome." He looked at his son. "One item, Dad -- Hugh," Duke answered. "The backhouse took a beating. I patched it and rigged a platform out of boards that had secured the air bottles. It's shaky." "Good job, Duke. But with six of us I think we should rig a second one. Can we manage that, Joe?" "Yes, we could. But..." "But what?" "Do you know how much oxy is left?" "I do. We must shift to blower and filter soon. And there is not a working radiation counter left. So we won't know what we'll be letting in. However we've got to breathe." "But did you look at the blower?" "It looked all right." "It's not. I don't think I can repair it." Mr. Farnham sighed. "I've had a spare on order for six months. Well, rU look at it, too. And you, Duke; maybe one of us can fix it." "Okay." "Let's assume we can't repair it Then we use the oxygen as sparingIF ly as possible. After that we can get along, for a while, on the air inside. But there will come a time when we have to open the door." Nobody said anything. "Smile, Bomebody!" Hugh went on. "We aren't licked. We'll rig dust filters out of sheets in the door -- better than nothing. We still have one radio -- the one you mistook for a hearing aid, Barbara. I wrapped it and put it away; it wasn't hurt. Til go outside and put up an antenna and we can listen to it down here; it could save us. We'll rig a flagpole, from the sides of a bunk perhaps, and fly a flag. A hunting shirt. No, the American flag; I've got one. If we don't make it, we'll go down with our colors flying!" Karen started clapping. "Don't scoff, Karen." "I'm not scoffing. Daddy! I'm cry ing. The rockets red glare -- the bombs bursting in air -- gave proof through the night -- that our flag was still -- ' " Her voice broke and she buried her face in her hands. B arbara put an arm around her. Hugh Farnham went on as if nothing had happened. "But we won't go down. Soon they will search this area for survivors. They'll see our flag and take us out -- helicopter, probably. "So our business is to be alive when they come." He stopped to think. "No unnecessary work, no exercise. Sleeping pills for everybody and try to sleep twelve hours a day and lie down all the time; it will make the air last as long as possible. The only work is to repair that blower and we'll knock that off if we can't fix it. Let's see -- Water must be rationed. Duke, you are water marshal. See how much pure water there is; work out a schedule to stretch it. There is a one ounce glass with the medicines; use it to dispense water. That's all, I guess: Repair the blower, minimum exercise, maximum sleep, rationed water, Oh, yes! Sweat is wasteful. It's still hot and Barbara, you've sweat right through that sack. Take it off." "May I leave the room?" "Certainly." She left, walking carefully on the steep floor, went into the tank room, and returned wearing her soaked underwear. "That's better," he approved. "Now -- " "Hubert! Hubert! Where are you? I'm thirsty." "Duke, give her one ounce. Charge it to her." "Yes, sir." "Don't forget that the cat has to have water. "The dirty water, maybe?" "Humm. We won't die through playing fair with our guest. Let's keep our pride." "He's been drinking the dirty water." "Well -- You boss it. Suggestions, anyone? Joe does it suit you?" "Well -- No, sir." "So?" "No exercise, least oxygen used, makes sense. But when it comes time to open the door, where are we?" "We take our chances." "I mean, can we? Short on air, panting, thirsty, maybe sick -- I'd like to be certain that anyone, Karen, say, with a broken arm, can get that door open." "I see," said Hugh, nodding. "I'd like to try all three doors. Fd like to leave the armor door open. A girl can't handle that crank. I volunteer to try the upper door." "Sorry, it's my privilege. I go along with the rest. That's why I asked for suggestions. I'm tired, Joe; my mind is fuzzy." "And if the doors are blocked? Probably rubble against the upper door -- " "We have the jack." "Well, if we can't use the doors, we should make sure of the escape tunnel. Duke's shoulder isn't so good. My ribs are sore but I can work -- today. Tomorrow Duke and I will be stiff and twice as sore. There are those steel bottles cluttering the hatch and plunder stored in the hole. Takes work. Boss, I say we've got to be sure of our escape -- while we're still in pretty good shape." "I hate to order heavy work. But you've convinced me." Hugh stood up, suppressing a groan. "Let's get busy." "Fve got one more suggestion." "So?" "You ought to sack in. You haven't been to bed at all and you got banged up pretty hard." "Fm okay. Duke has a bad shoulder, you've got cracked ribs. And there's heavy work to be done." "I plan to use block and tackle to skid those bottles aside. Barbara can help. She's husky, for a girl." "Certainly I can," agreed Barbara. "I'm bigger than Joe is. Excuse me, Joe." "No argument. Boss. Hugh. I don't like to emphasize it but  thought of this. You admit you're tired. Not surprising, you've been on the go twenty-four hours. Do you mind my saying that I would feel more confident you could get us through if you would rest?" Hugh grinned. "Ganging up on me. All right, I'll take a nap." A few minutes later he was in the bottom bunk in the men's dormitory, his feet braced against the foot board. He closed his eyes and was asleep before he could get his worries organized. D uke and Joe found that five of the bolts of the inned door were stuck. "We'll let them be," Joe decided. "We can always drift them back with a sledge hammer. Let's crank back the armor door." The armor door, beyond the bolted door, was intended to withstand as much blast as the walls. It was cranked into place, or out, by a rack and gear driven, by a long crank. Joe could not budge it. Duke, heavier by forty pounds, put his weight on it -- no results. Then they leaned on it together. "Frozen." "Yeah." "Joe you mentioned a sledge hammer." The young Negro frowned. "Duke, I would rather your father tried that. We could break the crank. Or a tooth on the rack." "The trouble is, we're trying to crang a ton or so of door up hill when it was meant to move on the level." "Yes. But this door always has been pesky." "What do we do?" "We get at the escape tunnel." IF A block and tackle was fastened to a hook in the ceiling; the giant bottles were hauled out of the jumble and stacked, with Barbara and Karen heaving on the line and the men guiding them and then bracing them so that the stack could not roll. When the middle of the floor was clear they were able to get at the manhole cover to the tunnel. It was the massive, heavey-traffic sort and the hook in the celling It came up, creaking. It swung suddenly because of the # out-ofplumb of everything, taking a nick out of Duke's shin and an oath out of Duke. The hole was packed with provisions. The girls dug them out, Karen, being smaller, going down inside as they got deeper and Barbara stocking the stuff. Karen stuck her head up. "Hey! Water boss! There's canned water here." "WeU, goody for me!" Joe said, 'T had forgotten that This hatch hasn't been opened since the shelter was stocked." 'Toe shall I knock out the braces?"  'T'U get 'em. You clear out the supplies. Duke, this isn't armored the way the door is. Those braces hold a piece of boiled plate against the opening, with the supplies behind it and the manhole cover holding it all down. Inside the tunnel, at ten-foot intervals, are walls of sand bags, and the mouth has dirt over it. Your father said the idea was to cofferdam a blast. Let it in, slow it down, a piece at a time." "We'll find those sand bags jammed against that boiler plate." "If so, we'll dig 'em out." "Why didn't he use real armor?" "He thought this was safer. You saw what happened to the doors. I would hate to have to pry loose a steel barrier in that tunnel." "I see. Joe, I'm sorry I ever called this place a 'hole in the ground.' " "Well, it isn't. It's a machine -- a survival machine." "I'm through," Karen announced. "Some gentleman help me up. Or you, Duke." "I'll put the lid on with you under it." Duke helped his sister to climb out. J oe climbed down, flinching at the strain on his ribs. Dr. Livingstone had been superintending. Now he followed his friend into the ihole, using Joe's shoulders as a landing. "Duke, if you'll hand me that sledge -- Slay out of the way, Doc. Get your tail down." "Want me to take him?" asked Karen. "No, he likes to be in on things. Somebody hold the light." The braces were removed and piled on the floor above. "Duke, I need the tackle now. I don't want to hoist the plate. Just take its weight so I can swing it back. It's heavy." "Here it comes." "That's good. Doc! Darn you. Doc! Get out from under my feet! Just a steady strain, Duke. Some body hand me the flashlight. I'll swing her back and have a look." "And get a face full of isotopes." "Have to chance it. A touch more -- That's got her, she's swinging free." Then Joe didn't say anything. At last Duke said, "What do you see?" "I'm not sure. Let me swing it back, and hand me one brace." "Right over your head. Joe, what do you see?" The Negro was swinging the plate back when suddenly he grunted. "Doc! Doc, come back here! That little scamp! Between my legs and into the tunnel. Doc.'" "He can't get far." "Well -- Karen, will you go wake your father?" "Damn it, Joe! What do you see?' "Duke, I don't know. That's why I need Hugh." "I'm coming down." "There isn't room. I'm coming up, so Hugh can go down." Hugh arrived as Joe scrambled out. "Joe, what do you have?" "Hugh, look for yourself." "Well -- I should have built a ladder for this. Give me a hand." Hugh went down, removed the brace, swung back the plate. He stared even longer than Joe had, then called up. "Duke! Let's heave this plate out." "What is it. Dad?" "Get the plate out, then you can come down." It was hoisted out; father and son exchanged places. Duke stared down the tunnel. "That's enough, Duke. Here's a hand," said Hugh extending his arm. Duke rejoined them; his father said, "What do you think?" "I don't believe it." "Daddy," Karen said tensely, "somebody is going to talk, or I'm going to wrap this sledge hammer right around somebody's thick skuU." "Yes, baby. Uh, there's room for you girls to go down together." Barbara was handed down by Duke and Hugh, she helped Karen down over her. Both girls scrunched down and looked. Karen said softly. "I'll be goldamed!" She started crawling into the tunnel. Hugh called out, "Baby! Come back!" Karen did not answer. He added, "Barbara, tell me what you see." "I see," Barbara said slowly, "a beautiful wooded hillside, green trees, bushes, and a lovely sunny day." "That's what we saw." "But it's impossible," "Yes." IF IV H ugh turned to his deputy "Joe, Pm going out. Get me a forty-five and a belt. I shouldn't have let those girls go out unarmed." He eased himself down the hole. "You two guard the place." His son said, "Against what? There's nothing to guard in here." His father hesitated. "I don't know. Just a spooky feeling. All right, cpme along. But arm yourself. Joe!" "Coming!" "Joe, arm Duke and yourself. Then wait until we get outside. If we don't come back right away, use your judgment This situation I hadn't anticipated. It just can't be, "But it is." "So it is, Duke." Hugh buckled on the pistol, dropped to his knees. Framed in the tunnel's mouth was still the vision of lush greenness where there should have been blasted countryside and crater glass. He started to crawl. He stood up and moved away from the mouth, then looked around. "Daddy! Isn't this lovely! Karen was below him oh a slope that ran down to a stream across it the land rose and Was covered with trees. On this side was a semi-clearing. The sky was blue, sunlight warm and bright, and there was no sign of war's devastation, nor any sign of man -- not a building, a road, a path, no contrails in the sky. It was wilderness, and there was nothing that he recognized. "Daddy. I'm going down to the creek." "Come here! Where's Barbara?" "Up here, Hugh." He turned and saw her up the slope, above the shelter. "I'm trying to figure out what happened. What do you think?" The shelter sat cocked on the slope, a huge square monolith. Dirt clung to it save where the tunnel had cracked off and a jagged place where the stair well had been. The armor door was exposed just above him. "I don't think," he admitted. Duke emerged, dragging a rifle. He stood up, looked around, and said nothing. Barbra and Karen joined them. Dr. Livingston I Presume came bounding up to tag Hugh on the ankle and dash away. Obviously the Persian gave the place full approval; it was just right for cats. Duke said, 'T give up. Tell me." Hugh did not answer. Karen said, 'Daddy, why can't I go down to the creek? I'm going to take a bath. I stink." "It won't hurt you to stink. I'm confused, I don't want to be confused still more by worrying about your drowning -- " "It's shallow." " -- or eaten by a bear or falling in quicksand. You girls go inside, arm yourselves, and then come out if you want to. But stick close and keep your eyes peeled. Tell Joe to come out." "Yes, sir." The girls went. "What do you think, Duke?" "Well'... I reserve my opinion." "If you have one, it's more than I have. Duke, I'm stonkered. I planned for all sorts of things. This wasn't on the list. If you have opinions, for God's sake spill them." "Well -- This looks like mountain oountry in Central America. Of course that's impossible." "No point in worrying about whether it's possible. Suppose it was Central America. What would you watch for?" "Let me see. Might be cougars. Snakes certainly, Tarantulas and corpions. Malaria mosquitoes. You mentioned bears." "I meant bears as a symbol. We're firing to have to watch everything, every minute, until we know what we're up against." oe came out carrying a rifle. He kept quiet and looked round. Duke said, "We won't itarve. Off to the left down by the Iream." Hugh looked. A dappled fawn, hardly waist high, was staring at them, apparently unafraid. Duke said, "Sh I drop it?" He raised the rifle. "No. Unless you are dead set on fresh meat." "All right. Pretty thing, isn't it?" "Very. But it's no North American deer I ever saw. Duke? Where are we? And how did we get here?" Duke gave a lopsided grin. "Dad, you appointed yourself Fuehrer. I'm not supposed to think." "Oh, rats!" "Anyhow, I don't know. Maybe the Russkis developed a hallucination bomb." "But would we all see the same thing?" "No opinion. But if I had shot that deer. I'll bet we could have eaten it." "I think so, too. Joe? Ideas, opinions, suggestions?" Joe scratched his head. "Mighty pretty country. But I'm a city boy." "One thing you can do, Hugh." "What, Duke?" "Your little radio. Try it." "Good idea." Hugh crawled inside, caught Karen about to climb down, sent her baciv Dr it. While he waited, he wondered what he had that was suitable for a ladder? Chinning themselves in a six-foot manhole was tedious. The radio picked up static but nothing else. Hugh switched it off. "We'll try it tonight. I've gotten Mexico with it at night, even Canada." He frowned. "Something ought to be on the air. Unless they smeared us completely." "Dad, you aren't thinking straight." "How, Duke?" IF "This area did not get smeared. "That's why I can't understand a radio silence." "Yet Mountain Springs really caught it. Ergo, we aren't in Mountain Springs." "Who said we were?" Karen answered. "There's nothing like this in Mountain Springs. Nor the whole state." Hugh frowned. "I guess that's obvious." He looked at the shelter, gross, huge, massive. "But where are we?" "Don't you read comic books. Daddy? We're on another planet." "Don't joke, baby girl. I'm worried." "I wasn't joking. There is nothing like this within a thousand miles of home -- yet here we are. Might as well be another planet. The one we had was getting used up. "Hugh," Joe said, "it sounds silly. But I agree with Karen." "Why, Joe?" "Well, we're someplace, .What happens when an H-bomb explodes dead on you?" "You're vaporized." "I don't feel vaporized. And I can't see that big hunk of concrete sailing a thousand miles or so, and crashing down with nothing to show for it but cracked ribs and a hurt shoulder. But Karen's idea -- " He shrugged. "Call it the fourth dimension. That last big one nudged us through the fourth dimension." Barbara said, "Karen, I don't see how this can be anything but Earth." "Why? Spoilsport." "Well -- " Barbara chucked a pebble at a tree. "That's a eucalyptus, and an acacia beyond it. Not at all like Mountain Springs but a normal grouping of tropical and subtropical flora. Unless your 'new planet evolved plants just like Earth, this has to be Earth." "Hubert! Hubert! Where are you? I can't find you!" Grace Fmham't voice echoed out the Uumd. Hugh ducked into the tunnel. "Coming!" T hey ate lunch under a tree a little distance from the shelter. Hugh decided that the tunnel had been buried so deeply that the chance of its mouth being more radioactive than the interior was negligible. As for the roof, he was not certain. So he placed a dosimeter (the only sort of radiation instrument that had come through the pummeling) on top of the shelter to compare it later with one inside. He was relieved to see that the dosimeters agreed that they had suffered less than lethal dosage -- although large -- and that they checked each other. The only other precaution he took was for them to keep guns by them -- all but his wife. Grace Farnham "couldn't stand guns," and resented having to eat with guns in sight. But she ate with good appetite. Duke had built a fire and they were blessed with hot coffee, hot canned beef, hot peas, hot canned sweet potatoes, and canned fruit salad -- and cigarettes with no worry about air or fire. "That was lovely," Grace admitted. "Hubert dear? Do you know what it would take to make it just perfect? You don't approve of drinking in the middle of the day but these are special circumstances and my nerves are still a teensy bit on edge -- so, Joseph, if you will fust run back inside and fetch a bottle of that Spanish brandy -- " "Grace." "What dear? -- then all of us could celebrate our miraculous escape. You were saying?" "Most of the liquor was broken. That brings up something else. Duke, you are out of a job as water boss. I'd like you to take over as bartender. There arc at least two unbroken fifths. Whatever you find, split it six ways and make it share and share alike, whether it's several bottles each, or just a part of a bottle." M rs. Farnham looked blank Duke looked uneasy. Karen aid hastily, "Daddy, you know what I said." "Oh, yes. Duke, your sister is on the wagon. So hold her share as a medicinal reserve. Unless she changes her mind." "I don't want the job," said Duke. "We have to divide up the chores, Duke. Oh yes, do the same with cigarettes. When they are gone, they're gone, whereas I have hopes that we can distill liquor later." He turned to his wife. "Why not have a Miltown, dear?" "Drugs! Hubert Farnham, are you telling me that I can't have a drink?" "Not at all. At least two fifths came through. Your share would be about a half pint. If you want a drink, go ahead." "Well! Joseph, run inside and fetch me a bottle of brandy." "No!" her husband countermanded. "If you want it, Grace, fetch it yourself." "Oh, shucks, Hugh, I don't mind." "I do. Grace, Joe's ribs are cracked. It hurts him to climb. You can manage the climb with those boxes as steps -- and you're the only one who wasn't hurt." "That's not true!" "Not a scratch. Everybody else was bruised or worse. Now about jobs. I want you to take over as cook. Karen will be your assistant Okay, Karen?" "Certainly, Daddy." "It will keep you both busy. Wcll build a grill and dutch oven, but it will be cook over a campfire and wash dishes in the creek for a while." "So? And will you please tell me Mr. Farnham, what Joseph is going to do in the meantime? To earn his wages?" "Will you please tell me, how we'll pay wages? Dear, dear -- can't you see that things have changed?" "Don't be preposterous! Joseph will get every cent coming to him and he knows it -- just as soon as this mess is straightened out. After all, we've saved his life. And we've always been good to him, he won't mind waiting. Will you, Joseph?" "Grace! Quiet down and listen. Joe is no longer our servant. He is our partner in adversity. We'll never pay him wages again. Quit acting like a child and face the facts. We re broke. We're never going to have any money again. Our house is gone. My business is gone. The Mountain Exchange Bank is gone. We're wiped out... save for what we IF tored in the her. But we are kicky. We're alive and by some miracle have a chance of scratching a Mving out of the ground. Lucky. Do you understand?" 'Oh!" She burst into tears and fled into the shelter. Her behind was disappearing when Duke got up to follow. His father stopped him. "Duke!" "Yes." "One word and you can join your mother. I'm going exploring, I want you to go with me." Duke hesitated. "All right." "We'll start shortly. I think your job should be 'hunter.' You're a better shot than I am and Joe has never hunted. What do you think?" "Uh -- All right." "Good. Well, go soothe her down and, Duke, see if you can make her see the facts." "Maybe. But I agree with Mother. You were bullying her." "As may be. Go ahead." D uke turned abruptly and then left. Karen said quietly, "I Aink so, too. Daddy. You were bullying..." "I intended to. I judged it called for bullying. Karen, if I hadn't tromped on it, she would do no work... and would order Joe around, treat him as a hired cook." "Shucks, Hugh, I don't mind cooking. It was a pleasure to rustle lunch." "She's a better cook than you arc, Joe, and she's going to cook. Don't let me catch you fetching and carrying for her." The younger man grinned. "You won't catch me." "Better not. Or I'll skin you and nail it to the barn. Barbara, what do you know about farming?" "Very little." "You're a botanist." "No, I simply might have been one, some day." "Which makes you eight times as much of a farmer as the rest of us. I can barely tell a rose from a dandelion; Duke knows even less and Karen thinks you dig potatoes out of gravy. You heard Joe say he was a city boy. But we have seeds and a small supply of fertilizers. Also garden tools and books about farming. Look over what we've got and find a spot for a garden. Joe and I will do the spading and such. But yu will have to boss." Hugh and his son left a half hour later. "Joe," Hugh cautioned, "we plan to be back before dark but if we get caught, we'll keep a fire going all night and come back tomorrow. If you do have to search for us, don't go alone; take one of the girls. No, take Karen; Barbara has no shoes, just some spike-heeled sandals. Damn. Moccasins -- we'll have to make. Got it?" "Sure." "We'll head for that hill -- that one. I want to get high enough to get the lay of the land and maybe spot signs of civilization." They set out -- rifles, canteens, hand ax, machete, matches, iron rations, compasses, binoculars, mountain boots, coveralls. Coveralls and boots fitted Duke as well as Hugh; Duke found that his father had stocked clothes for him. They took turns, with the men following blazing trail and counting paces, the leader keeping lookout, compass direction, and record. The high hill Hugh had picked was across the stream. They explored its bank and found a place to wade. Everywhere they flushed game. The miniature deer were abundant and apparently had never been hunted. By man, at least -- Duke saw a mountain lion and twice they saw bears. I t seemed to be about three oclock local time as they approached the fummit. The climb was steep, cluttered with under growth and neither man was in training. When they reached the flattish summit Hugh wanted to lay on the ground. Instead he looked around. To the east the ground dropped off. Ho tared out over miles of prairie. He could see no sign of human life. He adjusted his binoculars and tarted searching. He saw moving figures, decided that they were antelope -- or cattle; he made mental note that these herds must he watched. Later, later -- "Hugh?" He lowered his binoculars. "Yes, Duke?" "See that peak? It's fourteen tiiousand one hundred and ten feet high." "I won't argue." "That's Mount James. Dad, wcre home!" "What do you mean?" "Look southwest. Those three gendarmes on that profile. The middle one is where I broke my leg when I was thirteen. That pointed mountain between there and Mount . # James -- Hunter's Hcurn. Can't you see? The skyline is as distinctive as a finger print. This is Mountain Springsl" Hugh stared. This skyline ho knew. His bedroom window was planned to let him see It at dawn; many sunsets he had watched it from his roof. "Yes." "Yes," Duke agreed. "Damned if I know how. But as I figure it -- " he stomped the ground -- "we're on the high reservoir. Where it ought to be." His brow wrinkled. "And as near as I can tell, our shelter i smack on our lot. Hugh took out the notebook in which was recorded paces and compasses courses, did some arithmetic. "Yes. Within the limits of error." "Well? How do you figure it?" Hugh looked at the skyline. "I don't. Duke how much daylight do we have?" "Well... three hours. The sun will be behind the mountains in two." "It took two hours to get here; we should make it back in less. Do you have any cigarettes?" "Yes." "May I have one? Charged against me, of course. I would like to rest about one cigarette, then start back." He looked around. "It's open up here. I don't think a bear would approach us." He placed his rifle and belt on the ground, settled down. Duke offered a cigarette to his father, look one himself. "Dad, you're a cold fish. Nothing excites you." "So? I'm so excitable that I had to karn never to give into it." IF "Doesn't seem that way to other people." TTiey smoked in silence, Duke seated, Hugh sprawled out. He was close to exhaustion and wished that he did not have to hike back. Presently Duke added, "Besides that, you enjoy bullying." His father answered, "I suppose so, if you class what I do as bullying. No one ever does anything but what he wants to do -- 'enjoys' -- within the possibilities open to him. If I change a tire, it's because I enjoy it more than being stranded." "Don't get fancy. You enjoy bullying Mother. You enjoyed spanking me as a kid... until Mother put her foot down and made you stop." His father said, "We had better start back." "Just a second. I want to show you something. Never mind your gear, this won't take a moment." Hugh stood up. "What is it?" "Just this. Your Captain Bligh act is finished." He clouted his father. "That's for bullying Mother!" He clouted him from the other side and harder, knocking his father off his feet. "And that's for having that nigger pull a gun on me!" H ugh Farnham lay where he had fallen. "Not 'nigger,' Duke. Negro." "He's a Negro as long as he behaves himself. Pulling a gun on me makes him a goddam nigger. You can get up. I won't hit you again." Hugh Farnham got to his feet. "Let's start back." "Is that all you've got to say? Go ahead. Hit me. I won't hit back." "No." "I didn't break my parole. I waited until we left the shelter." "Conceded. Shall I lead? Better, perhaps." "Do you think I'm afraid you might shoot me in the back? Look, Dad, I had to do it!" "Did you?" "Hell, yes. For my own self respect." "Very well." Hugh. buckled on his belt, picked up his gun, and headed for the last blaze. They hiked in silence. At last Duke said, "Dad?" "Yes, Duke?" "I'm sorry." "Forget it." They went on, found where they had forded the stream, crossed it. Hugh hurried as it was growing darker. Duke closed up again. "Just one thing. Dad? Why didn't you assign Barbara as cook? She's the freeloader. Why pick on Mother?" Hugh took his time in answering. "Barbara is no more a freeloader than you are, Duke, and cooking is the only thing Grace knows. Or were you suggesting that she loaf while the rest of us work?" "No. Oh, we all have to pitch in -- granted. But no more bullying, no more bawling Mother out in public. Understand me?" "Duke." "Yeah?" "I've been studying karate three afternoons... week... the past year." "So?" "Don't try it again. Shooting me in the back is safer." "I hear you." "Until you decide to shoot me, it would be well to accept my leadership. Or do you wish to the responsibility?" "Are you offering it? "I am not in a postdon to. Perhaps the group wnikl accept you. Your mother would. Possibly yow sister would prefer you. Concerning Barbara and Joe I offer no opinion. "How about you, Dad?' "I won't answer that; I owe you nothing. But until you decide to make a bid for leadership, I expect showed under parole." "In the long run there is no other sort. I can't quell a mutiny every few hours -- and I've had two from you plus an utter lack of discipline from your mother. No leader can function on those terms. So I will Includes no interference should I decide again to use what you call bullying.' " "Now see here, I told you I would sot stand for -- " "Quiet! Unless you make up your asind to that, your safest choice is in shoot me in the back. Don't come at me with bare hands nor risk giving me a chance to shoot first. At #be next sign of trouble, Duke, I will kfll you. If possible. One of us will surely be killed." They trudged along in silence, Mr. Farnham never looking back. At last Duke said, "Dad, for Christ's sake, why can't you run things democratically? I don't want to boss Ihings, I simply want you to be fair about it." "Mmm, you don't want to boss. You want to be a backseat driver -- with a veto over the driver." "Notsf I simply want tilings run democratically." "You do? Shall we vote on idiether Grace k to work like die rest of us? Whether she shall hog the liquor? Shall we use Robert's Rules of Order? Should she withdraw while we debate it? Or should she stay and defend herself against charges of indolence and drunkenness? Do you wish to submit your mother to such ignominy?" "Don't be silly!" "I am trying to find out what you mean by 'democratically.' If you mean putting every decision to a yourself to abide by every majority decision. You're welcome to run for chairman. I'm sick of the responsibility and I know that Joe does not like being my deputy." "That's another thing. Why should Joe have any voice in these matters?" "I thought you wanted to do it 'democratically'?" "Yes, but he is -- " "What, Duke? A 'nigger'? Or a servant?" "You've got a nasty way of putting things." "You've got nasty ideas. We'll try formal democracy -- rules of order, debate, secret ballot, everything -- any time you want to try such foolishness. Especially any time you want to mutiny and move a vote of no confidence and take over the leadership... and I'm so bitter as to hope that you succeed. In the meantime we do have a good democracy." "How do you figure?" "I'm serving by consent of the mair jority -- four to two, I think. But that doesn't suit me; I want it to be unanimous, I can't put up indefinitely with wrangling from the minority. You and your mother, I mean. I want it to be five to one before we get back, with your assurance that you will not interfere in my efforts to persuade, or cajole, or bully, your mother into accepting her share of the load -- until you care to risk a vote of no confidence." "You're asking me to agree to thatr cipline on your part... or at the next clash one of us will be killed, I won't give you the slightest warning. That's why your safest course is to shoot me in the back." "Quit talking nonsense! You know I won't shoot you in the back." "So? I will shoot you in the back or anywhere at the next hint of trouble. Duke, I can see only one alternative. If you find it impossible you don't think you can displace me, if you can't bring yourself to kill me, if you don't care to risk a clash in which one of us will be killed, then there is still a peaceful solution." "What is it?" "Any time you wish, you can leave. I'll give you a rifle, ammunition, salt, matches, a knife, whatever you find needful. You don't deserve them but I won't turn you out with nothing." Duke gave a bitter laugh. "Sending me out to play Robinson Crusoe... and leaving all the women with you!" "Oh, no! Any who wish arc fret' to go. With a fair share of anything and some to boot. All three womei if you can sell the idea." "I'll think about it." "Do. And do a little politicking and size up your chances of winning a vote against me 'democraticall -- while being extraordinarily careful not to cross wills .with me and thereby bring on a showdown sooner than you wish. I warn you, I'm feeling very short-tempered; you loosened one of my teeth." "I didn't mean to." "That wasn't the way it felt There's the shelter; you can start ing that we've had a lovely afternoon." "Look, Dad, if you won't mention -- " "Shut up. I'm sick of you." A s they neared the shelter Karen saw them and yoohooed; Joe and Barbara came crawling out the tunnel. Karen waved her shovel. "Come see what I've done!" She had dug privies, on each side of the shelter. Saplings formed frameworks which had been screened by tacking cardboard from liquor cases. Seats had been built of lumber remnants from the tank room. "Well?" demanded Karen. Aren't they gorgeousT "Yes," agreed Hugh. "Much more lavish than I had expected." He refrained from saying that they had cost most of the lumber. "I didn't do it all. Barbara did the carpentry. You should hear her swear when she hits her thumb." "You hurt your thumb, Barbara?" "It'll get welL Come try the ladder." "Sure thing." He started inside, Joe stopped him. "Hugh, while we've still got light, how about seeing something?" "All right. What?" "The shelter. You've been talking about building a cabin. Suppose we do: What do we have? A mud floor and a roof that leaks, no glass for windows and no doors. Seems to me the shelter is better." "Well, perhaps," agreed Hugh. "I had thought we could use it while pioneering, if we had to." "I don't think it's too radioactive, Hugh. That dosimeter should have gone sky high if the roof is really hot.' It hasn't." "That's good news. But, Joe, look at it. A slant of thirty degrees is uncomfortable. We need a house with a level floor." "That's what I mean. Hugh, that hydraulic jack -- it's rated at thirty tons. How much does the shelter weigh?" "Oh. Let me think how many yards of mix we used and how much steel." Hugh pondered it, got out his notebook. "Call it two hundred fifty tons." "Well, it was an idea." "Maybe it's a good idea." Hugh prowled around the shelter, a block twenty feet square and twelve high, iizing up angles, estimating yardiges. "It can be done," Hugh decided. "We dig under on the uphill side, to .he center line, cutting out enough o let that side settle down level. #amn, I wish we had power tools." "How long will it take?" Two men oond do it in a week if they didn't run into solid rock. With no dynamite a boulder can be a problem." "Too much of a problem?" "Always some way to cope. Let's pray we don't run into solid rock. As we get it dug out, we brace it with logs. At the end we snag the logs out with block and tackle. Then we put the jack under the downhill side and tilt it into place, shore it up and fill with what we've removed. Lots of sweat." "I'll start bright and early tomorrow." "You will like hell. Not until your ribs have healed. I will start tomorrow, with two husky girls. Plus Duke, if his shoulder isn't sore, after he shoots us a deer; we've got to conserve canned goods. Reminds me -- what was done with the dirty cans?" "Buried 'em." "Dig them up and wash them. A tin can is more valuable than gold; we'll use them for all sorts of things. Let's go in. I've still to admire the ladder." T he ladder was two trimmed saplings, with treads cut from boards and notched and nailed. Hugh reflected again that lumber had been used too lavishly; treads should have been fashioned from things that could no longer be ordered by picking up a telephone. "Thaft a beautiful ladder, Barbma!" She looked very pleased. "Joe did tile hard parts." I did not," Joe denied. "I just IF gave advice and touched up with the chisel." "Well, whoever did it, it's lovely. Now we'll see if it will take my weight." "Oh, it will!" Barbara said proudly The shelter had all lights burning. Have to caution them about batteries, too. Must tell the girls to look up how to make candles. "Where' Grace, Karen?" "Mother isn't well. She's lying down." "So? You had better start dinner." Hugh went into the women's bay, saw what sort of not-well his wife suffered. She was sleeping heavily, mouth open, snoring, and was fully dressed. He reached down, peeled back an eyelid; she did not stir. "Duke." "Yes?" "Come here. Everybody else outside." Duke joined him. Hugh said, "After lunch, did you give Grace a drink?" "Huh? You didn't say not to." "I wasn't criticizing. How much?" "Just a highball. An ounce and a half of Scotch, with water." "Does that look like one highball? Try to rouse her." Duke tried, then straightened up. "Dad, I know you think I'm a fool. But I gave her just one drink. D amn it. I'm more opposed to her drinking than you are!" "Take it easy, Duke. I assume that she got at the bottle after you left." "Well, maybe." Duke frowned. "As soon as I found an unbroken bottle I gave Mother that drink. Then I took inventory. I think I found it all, unless you have some hidden away -- " "No, the cases were together." "Right. I found thirteen unbroken bottles, twelve fifths and a quart of bourbon. I remember thinking that was two fifths each and the quart I would keep in reserve. I had opened one bottle of King's Ransom. I made a pencil mark on it. We'll know if she found it." "You hid the liquor?" "I stashed it in the upper bunk on the other side; I figured it would be hard for her to climb up there. I'm not a complete fool, Dad. She couldn't see me, she was in her bunk. But maybe she guessed." "Let's check." T hirteen bottles were between springs and mattress; twelve nearly full. Duke held it up. "See? Right to the line. But there was another bottle we had a snort from, after that second bombing. What happened to it?" "Barbara and I had some after you went to sleep, Duke. There was some left. I never saw it again. It was in the tank room." "Oh! I did, while we were bailing. Busted. I give up -- where did she get it?" "She didn't, Duke." "What do you mean?" "It wasn't liquor." Hugh went to the medicines drawer, got a bottle with a broken seal. "Count these seconal capsules. You had two last night." "Yeah." "Karen had one at bedtime, one later; Joe had one. Neither Barbara nor I had any, nor Grace. Five." "Hold it, Vm counting." His father began to count as Duke pushed them aside. "Ninety-one," Duke announced. "Check." Hugh put the capsules back. "So she took four." "What do we do, Dad? Stomach pump? Emetic?" "Nothing." "Why, you heartless -- She tried lo kill herself!" "Slow down, Duke. She did nothing of the sort. Four capsules, six grains, simply produces stupor in a healthy person -- and she's healthy as a horse; she had a physical a month ago. No, she snitched those pills to get drunk on." Hugh scowled. "An alcohol drunk is bad enough. But people kill themselves without meaning to with sleeping pills." "Dad, what do you mean, 'she look them to get drunk on'?" "You don't use them?" "I never had one in my life untO those two last night." "Do you remember how you felt just before you went to sleep? Warm and happy and woozy?" "No. I just lay down and konked out. Next thing I knew I was against Ihe wall on my shoulders." "You haven't developed tolerance for them. Grace knows what they can do. A very hapy drunk. I've known her to take more than one but she's never been chopped off from liquor before. When a person eats sleeping pills because he can't get liquor, he's in a bad way -- a very bad way." "Dad, you should have kept liquor away from her long ago!" "How, Duke? Tell her she couldn't have a drink? Take them away from her at parties? Quarrel with her in public? Fight with her in front of Joe? Not let her have cash, close out her bank account, see that she had no credit? Would that have stopped her from pawning furs?" "Mother would never have done that" "It's typical behavior in such cases. Duke, it is impossible to keep liquor away from any adult who is determined to have it. The United States government wasn't that powerful. I'll go further. It is impossible for anyone to be responsible for another person's behavior." "Uh... that's beside the point. What do we do now?" "So it is, counselor. Well, we keep these pills away from her." "And I'm damned well going to chop off the liquor completely!" "Oh, I wouldn't." "You wouldn't, em? Did I hear correctly when you said I was liquor boss?" "The decision is up to you. I simply said that I wouldn't. I think it's a mistake." "Well, I don't. Dad, I won't go into the matter of whether you could, or should, have stopped Mother from getting the way she is. But I intend to stop it." V ery well, Duke. Mmm, she's going to be cut off anyhow in a matter of days. It might be easier to taper her off. It you decide to, Pll contribute a bottle from my share. IF Hell, you can have both of mine. I like a snort as well as the next man. But Grace needs it." "That won't be necessary," his son said crisply. "I'm not going to let her have any. Get it over with, she'll be well that much sooner." "Your decision. May I offer a suggestion?" "What?" "In the morning, be up before she is. Move the liquor out and bury it, someplace known only to you. Then have open one bottle at a time and dispense it by the ounce. Tell the others to drink where she can't see it. You had better ditch the open bottle outdoors, too." "Sounds reasonable." "But that makes it all the more urgent to keep sleeping pills away from her." "Bury them?" "No. We need them inside, and it's not just sleeping pills. Demerol. Hypodermic needles. Several drugs, some poisonous and some addictive and all irreplaceable. If she can't find seconal -- five bottles of a hundred each, it's bulky -- there's no telling what she might get into. We'll use the vault." "Eh?" "A little safe set into concrete back of that cupboard. Nothing in it but birth certificates and such, and some reserve ammo, and two thousand silver dollars. Toss the money in with the hardware, we'll use it as metal. The combo is 'July #th, #' -- '#-#-#.' Better change it, Grace may know it." "At once!" "No rush, she won't wake up. 'Reserve ammo -- ' Duke, you were liquor and cigarette boss and now you are drugs boss. I'm going whole hog, you are rationing officer. Responsible for everything that can't be replaced: liquor, tobacco, ammunition, nails, toilet tissue, matches, dry cells, Kleenex, needles -- " "Good God! Got any more dirty jobs?" "Lots of them. Duke, I'm trying to make it each according to his talents. Joe is too diffident -- and ha missed obvious economies today. Karen doesn't think ahead. Barbara feels like a freeloader even though she's not, she wouldn't crack down. I would, but I'm swamped. You are a natural for it; you don't hesitate to assert yourself. And you have foresight when you take the trouble to use it." "Thank you too much. All right." "The hardest thing to drill into them will be saving every scrap of metal and paper and cloth and lumber, things Americans have wasted for years. Fish hooks. Groceries aren't as important; we'll replace them, you by hunting, Barbara by gardening. Nevertheless better note what can't be replaced. Salt. You must ration salt especially." "Salt?" "Unless you run across a salt lick in hunting. Salt -- Damn it, we're going to have to tan leather. All I used to do with a hide was rub it with salt and give it to the taxidermist. Im salt necessary?" "I don't know." "I'll look it up. Damnation, we're going to find that I failed to stock endless things we'll be miserable without." #f "Dad," Duke admitted, "I think you've done mighty well." "So? That's pleasant to hear. We'll manage to -- " "Yes?" Hugh went to the tank room. Karen's head stuck up out of the manhole. "Daddy, can we please come in? It's dark and scary and something big chased Doc in. Joe won't let us until you say." # #Qorry Baby. Everybody come O in. And we'll put the lid on." "Yes, sir. But Daddy, you ought to look outside. Stars. The Milky Way like a neon sign! And the Big Dipper -- so maybe this isn't another planet? Or would we still see the Big Dipper?" "I'm not certain." He recalled that the discovery that they were still in James County, Mountain Spring area, had not been shared. But Duke must tell k; it was his deduction. "Duke, want to take a look before we close up?" "Thanks, I've seen a star." "As you wish." Hugh went outside waited while his eyes adjusted, saw that Karen was right: Never before bad he seen the heavens on a clear mountain night with no other light, nor trace of smog, to dim its glory. "Beautiful!" Karen slipped her hand into his. "Yes," she agreed. "But I could use ome street lights. There are things out there. And we heard coyotes." "There are bears and Duke saw a mountain lion. Joe, better keep the cat in at night, and try to keep him close in the daytime." "He won't go far, he's timid. And something just taught him a lesson." "And me, too!" announced Karen "Bears! Come, Barbie, let's go ul D addy, if the Moon comes up, thk must be Earth -- and I'll never trust a comic book again." "Go ask your brother." Duke's discovery was the main subject at dinner. Karen's disappointment was offset by her interest in how they had mislaid Mountain Spfings. "Duke, are you sure you saw what you thought you saw?" "No possible mistalce," Hugh answered for him. "If it weren't for the trees, you could have spotted it. We had to climb Reservoir Hill to get a clear view." "You were gone all that time just to Reservoir Hill? Why, that's only five minutes away!" "Duke, explain to your sister about automobiles." "I think the bomb did it," Barbara said suddenly. "Why, certainly. Barb. The question is howT "I mean the enormous H-bomb the Russians claimed to have in orbit. The one they called the 'Cosmic Bomb.' I think it hit us." ## on, Barbara." Vj'"Well, the first bomb was awful and the second one was bad; they almost burned us up. But the third one just hit us whammy! and then no noise, no heat, no rumbling, and the radioactivity got less instead of worse. Here's my notion: You've worlds side by side, almost alike but not quite? Worlds where Elizabeth married Essex and Mark Anthony hntid redheads? And Ben Franklin IF fot electrocuted with his kite? Well, this is one." "First automobiles and now Benjamin Franklin. ##I go watch Ben Casey. "Like this, Karen. The Cosmic Bomb hits us, dead on -- and kicks us into the next world. One exactly like the one we were in, except that it never had men in it. "I'm not sure I like a world with no men. I'd rather have a strange planet, with warlords riding thoats. Or is it zitidars?" "What do you think of my theory, Hugh?" "I'm keeping an open mind. I'll go thi far: We should not couit on finding other human beings." "I go for your theory, Barbara," Duke offered. "It accounts for the facts. Squeezed out like a melon seed. Pht!" "And we landed here." Duke shrugged. "Let it be known as the Barbara Wells Theory of Cosmic Transportation and stand adopted. Here we are. We're stuck with it -- and I'm going to bed. Who sleeps where, Hugh?" "Just a second. Folks, meet the Rationing Officer. Take a bow, Duke." Hugh explained the austerity program.' "Duke will work it out but that's the idea. For example, I noticed a bent nail on the ground in the powder room. That calls for being spreadeagled and flogged. For a serious offense, such as wasting a match, it's keelhauling. Second offence -- hang him at the yardarm I" "Gee! Do we get to watch?" "Shut up, Karen. No punishments, just the miserable knowledge that you have deprived the rest of something necessary to life, health, or comfort. So don't give Duke any backtalk. I want to make another assignment. Baby, you know shorthand." "That's putting it strongly. Mr. Gregg wouldn't think so." "Hugh, I take shorthand. What do you want?" "Okay, Barbara, you are historian. Today is Day One. Or start with the calendar we are used to, but we may adjust it; those were winter stars. Every night jot down the events and put it in longhand later. Your title is Keeper of the Flame. As soon as possible, you really will be Keeper of the Flame; we will have to light a fire, then bank it every night. Sorry to have held you up, Duke." T hey got ready for bed. Hugh was pleased to see that Joe undressed completely and got into the lower bunk, as he had been told to. Duke stretched out on the floor, bare. The room was hot; the mass cooled slowly and air no longer circulated with the manhole cover in place, despite the vents in the tank room. Hugh made note that he must devise a bearproof -- and catproof -- gried in place of the cover. Later, later -- He took the camp lamp into the tank room. Someone had put the books back on shelves but some were open to dry; he fluffed these, hoped for the best. The last books in the world -- So it seemed. He felt sudden grief that abstract not given him. Somehow, the burnpeople. All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man. Book burners -- To rape a defenseless friendly book. Books had always been his best friends. In a hundred public libraries they had taught him. From a thousand newsstands they had warmed his loneliness. He suddenly felt that, if he had not been able to save some books, it would hardly be worthwhile to live. Most of his collection was functional: The Encyclopedia Britannica -- Grace had thought the space should be used for a television receiver "because they might be hard to buy afterwards.' He had grudged its business too, but it was the most compact assemblage of knowledge on the market. "Che" Guevera's War of the Guerrillas -- thank God he wasn't going to need that! Nor those next to it: "Yank" Levy's manual on resistance fighting, Griffith's Translation of Mao Tse-tung's On Guerrilla Warfare, Tom Wintringham's New Ways of War, the new TR on special operations -- forget 'em! Aint a-gonna study war no more! Tht Boy Scout Handbook, Eshbach's Mechanical Engineering, The Radio Repairman's Guide, Outdoor Life's Hunting and Fishing, Edible Fungi and How to Know Them, Home Life in the Colonial Days, Your Log Cabin, Chimneys and Fireplaces, The Hobo's Cook Book Medicine Without a Doctor, Fif Acres and Independence, Russiam Self-Taught and English-Russian and Russian English dictionaries. The Complete Herbalist, the survival manuals of the Navy Bureau of Weapons, The Air Force's Survival Techniques, The Practical Carpenter -- all sound books, of the brown and useful sort. The Oxford V'erse, A Treasury of American Poetry, Hoyle's Book of Games, Burton's Anatony of Melancholy, a different Burton's Thousand Nights and a Night, the good old Odyssey with the Wyeth illustrations, Kipling's Collected Verse and his Just So Stories, a one-volume Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Mathematical Recreations and Essays, Thus Spake Zarathustra,, T. S. Eliot's The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Robert Frost's Verse, Men Against the Sea -- He vished that he had found time to stock the list of fiction he had started. He wished that he had fetched down his works of Mark Twain regardless of space. He wished -- Too late, too late. This was it. All that was left of a mighty civilization. "The cloud-capped towers. He jerked awake and found that he had fallen asleep standing up. Why had he come in here? Something important. Oh, yes! Tanning leather -- Leather? Barbara was barefooted, Barbara must have moccasins. Better try the Britannica. Or that Colonial Days volume, thank God, you didn't have IF to use saJtl Find some oak trees. Better yet, have Barbara find them; it would make her feel useful. Find something that only Joe could do, too; make the poor little bastard feel appreciated. Loved. Remember to -- He stumbled back into the main room, looked at the upper bunk and knew that he couldn't make it. He lay down on the edge of Duke's blanket and fell instantly asleep. V G race did not get up for breakfast. The girls quietly fed them, then stayed in to clean up. Duke went hunting, carrying a forty-five, and a hunting bow. It was his choice; arrows could be recovered or replaced, bullets were gone forever. Duke tried a few flights and decided that his shoulder was okay. He checked watches and set out, with an understanding that a smoky fire would be built to home on if he was not back by three. Hugh told the girls to take outdoors any book not bone dry, then broke out quick the shovel and started leveling their house. Joe tried to join him; Hugh vetoed it. 'Took, Joe, there are a thousand things to do. Do them. But no heavy work." "Such as what, Hugh?" "Uh, correct the inventories. Give Duke a hand by starring everything that can't be replaced. In the course of that you'll think of things; write them down. Look up how to make soap and candles. Check both dosimeters. Strap on a gun and keep your eyes open -- and see that those girls don't go outside without guns. Hell, figure out a way to get plumbing and running water, with no pipe and no lead and no water closets and no portland cement." "How in the world could you do that?" "Somebody did it the first time. And tell this bush-tailed sidewalk superintendent that I need no help." "Okay. Come here. Doc! Come, come, come!" "And Joe. Speaking of bathrooms, you might offer to stand guard for the girls while they bathe. You don't have to look." "All right. I'll offer. But I'U teU them you suggested it. I don't want them to think -- " "Look, Joe. They are a couple of clean, wholesome, evil-minded American girls. Say what you please, they will still believe you are sneaking a peek. It's part of their credo that they are so fatally irresistible that a man just has to. So don't be too convincing; you'll hurt their feelings." "I get it. I guess." Joe went away, Hugh started digging, while reflecting that he had never missed a chance, given opportunity without loss of face -- but that incorrigible Sunday School lad probably would not sneak a peek at Lady Godiva. A good lad -- no imagination but utterly dependable. Very quickly Hugh knew what his worst oversight had been: no wheelbarrow. He had dug only a little before reaching this new appreciation. Digging by muscle power was bad but carrying it away in buckets was an affront to good sense. So he carried and thought about how to build a wheel -- with no metal, no heating tools, no machine shop, no foundry, no -- Now wait! He had steel bottles. There was strap iron in the bunks and soft iron in the periscope housing. Charcoal he could make and a bellows was simply an animal skin and some branches. Whittle a nozzle. Any dam fool who couldn't own a wheel with all that was at his disposal deserved to lift and carry. He had ten thousand trees, didn't he? Finland didn't have a damn thing but trees. Yet Finland was the finest little country in the world. "Doc, get out from under my feet!" If Finland was still there. Wherever the world was. Maybe the girls would like a Finnish bath. Down where they could plunge in afterwards and squeal and feel good. Poor kids, they would never see a beauty parlor; maybe a sauna would be a "moral equivalent." Grace might like it. Sweat off that blubber, get her slender again. What a beauty she had been! Barbara showed up, with a shovel. "Where did you get that? And what do you think you're doing?" "It's the one Duke was using. I'm going to dig."  "In bare feet? You're era -- Hey, you're wearing shoes!" "Joe's. The jeans are his, too. The shirt is Karen's. Where shall I dig?" "Just beyond me, here. Any boulder over five hundred pounds, ask for help. Where's Karen?" "Bathing. I decided to stink worst and bathe lat-." "When you like. Don't try to stick on this job all day. You can't." "I like working with you, Hugh. Almost as much as -- " She let it hang. "As playing bridge?" "Yes, you could mention that too." "Barbie girl." He found that just digging was fun. Gave the mind a rest and the muscles a workout. Happy making. Hadn't tried it for much too long. B arbara had been digging an hour when Mrs. Farnham came around a corner. Barbara said, "Good morning," added a shovelful to a bucket, picked both up half filled, and disappeared around the other corner. Grace Farnham said, "Well! I wondered where you were hiding. I was left quite alone. Do you realize that?" She was in the clothes she had slept in. Her features looked puffy. "You were allowed to sleep, dear." "It isn't pleasant to wake up in a strange place alone. I'm not accustomed to it." "Grace, you weren't being slighted. You were being pampered." "Is that what you call it? Then we'll say no more about it, do you mind?" "Not at all." "Really?" She seemed to brace herself, tihen said bleakly, "Perhaps you can stop long enough to tell me where you have hidden my liquor. My liquor. My share. I wouldn't IF ttdnk of toudimg yours -- after the way you've treated me! In front of ervants and strangers, may I add?" "Grace, you must sec Duke." What do you mtanV "Duke is in charge of liquor. I don't know where he put it." Youre lyingr "Grace, I haven't lied to you in twenty-seven years." "'Oh! You brutal, brutal man!" "Perhaps. But I'm not lying and the next time you say I am, it will go hard with you." "Where's Duke? He won't let you talk to me that wayl He told me so, he promised me!" "Duke has gone hunting. He hopes to be back by three." She stared, then rushed back around the comer. Barbara reappeared, picked up her shovel. They went on working. Hugh said, "I'm sorry you were exposed to that." "To what?" "Unless you were at least a hundred yards away, you know what" "Hugh, it's none of my business." "Under these conditions, anything is everybody's business. You have formed a bad opinion of Grace." "Hugh, I would not dream of being critical of your wife." "You have opinions. But I want you to have one in depth. Visualize her as she was, oh, twenty-five years ago. Think of Karen." "She would have looked like Karen." "Yes. But Karen has never had responsibility. Grace had and took it well. I was an enlisted man; I wasn't commissioned until after Pearl Harbor. Her people were what is known as 'good family.' Not anxious to have their daughter marry a penniless enlisted man." "I suppose not." "Nevertheless she did. Barbara, have you any notion what it was to be the wife of a junior enlisted man in those days? With no money? Grace's parents wanted her to come home -- but would not send her a cent as long as she stuck with me. She stuck." "Good for Grace." "Yes. She had no preparation for living in one room and sharing a bath down the hall, nor for waiting in Navy out-patient clinics. For making a dollar go twice as far as it should. For staying alone while I was at sea. Young and pretty and in Norfolk, she could have found excitement. She found a job instead -- in a laundry, sorting dirty clothes. And whenever I was home she was bright and cheerful and uncomplaining. Alexander was born the next year -- " " 'Alexander'?" #Tuke. Named for his mater-L nal grandpappy; I didn't get a vote. Her parents were anxious to make up once they had a grandson; Grace stayed cool and never accepted a cent -- back to work with our landlady minding the baby in weeks. "Those years were the roughest. I went up fast and money wasn't such a problem. The war came and I was bucked from chief to j.g. and ended as a lieutenant commander in Seabees. In # I had to choose between going back to chief or becoming a civilian. With Grace's backing, I got out. So I was on the beach with no job, a wife, a son in grammar school, a three-year-oki daughter, living in a trailer, prices high and going higher. We had some war bonds and a little that we had managed to put in the bank. "That was the second rough pkd. I took a stab at contracting, lost our savings, went to work for a water company. We didn't starve but scraped icebox and dishrag soup were on the menu. Barbara, she tood it like a trouper -- a hardworking den mother, a pillar of the "I was a construction boss before long and presently I tried contracting again. This time it clicked. I built a house on spec and a shoe string, sold it before it was finished end built two more at once. We've never been broke since," he paused until now." Hugh Farnham looked puzzled. "That was when she started to slip. When she started having help. When we kept liquor in the house. We didn't quarrel -- we never did, save over the fact that I tried to raise Duke fairly strictly and Grace couldn't bear to have the boy touched. "But that was when it started, when I started making money. She isn't built to stand prosperity. Grace has always stood up to adversity magnificently. This is the first time he hasn't. I still think she will." "Of course she will, Hugh." "I hope so." "I'm glad to know more about her, Hugh. I'll try to be considerate." "Damn it, I'm not asking that. I just want you to know that fat and foolish and self-centered isn't all there is to Grace. Nor was her slipping entirely her fault. Fm not easy to live with, Barbara." "So?" "So! When we were able to slow down, I didn't. I let business keep me away evenings. When a woman is left alone, it's easy to slip out for another beer when the commercial comes on and to nibble all evening along with the beer. If I was home, I was more likely to read than to visit, anyhow. And I didn't just let business keep me away; I joined the local duplicate club. She joined but she dropped out. She plays a good social game -- but I like to fight for every point. No criticism of her, there's no virtue in playing as if it were life or death. Grace's to take it easy, too... well, she wouldn't be the way she is." "Nonsense!" said Barbara, suddenly flaring up. "Pardon me?" "Hugh Farnham, what a person is can never be somebody eise's fault,  think. I am what I am because Barbie herself did it. And so did Grace. And so did you." She added in a low voice, "I love you. And that's not your fault, nor is anything we did your fault. I won't listen to you beating your breast and sobbing, 'Mea culpa!' You don't take credit for Grace's virtues. Why take blame for her faults?" i# IF He blinked and smiled. "Seven no trump." "That's better." "I love you. Consider yourself kissed." "Kiss back. Grand slam. But watch it," she said out of the comer of her mouth. "Here come the cops." It was Karen, clean, shining, hair brushed, fresh lipstick, and smiling. "What an inspiring sight!" she said. "Would you poor slaves like a crust of bread and a pannikin of water?" "Shortly," her father agreed. "In the meantime don't carry these buckets too heavily loaded." Karen backed away. "I wasn't volunteering!" "That's all right. We aren't formal." "But, Daddy, I'm cleanf" "Has the creek gone dry?" "Daddy! I've got lunch ready. Out front. You're too filthy to come into my lovely clean house." "Yes, baby. Come along, Barbara." He picked up the buckets. M rs. Farnham did not appear for lunch. Karen stated that Mother had decided to eat inside; Hugh let it go at that -- there would be enough hell when Duke got back. Joe said, "Hugh? About that notion of plumbing -- " "Got it figured out?" "Maybe I see a way to have running water." "If we get running water, I guarantee to provide plumbing fixtures." "Really, Daddy? I know what I want. In colored tile. Lavender, I think. And with a dressing --  "Shut up, infant. Yes, Joe?" "Well, you know those Roman aqueducts. This stream runs uphill that way. I mean it's higher up that way, so someplace it's higher than the shelter. As I understand it, Roman aqueducts weren't pipe, they were open." "I see." Faraham considered it. There was a waterfall a hundred yards upstream. Perhaps above it was high enough. "But that would mean a lot of masonry, whether dry-stone, or mud mortar. And each arch requires a frame while it's being built." "Couldn't we just split logs and hollow them out? And support them on other logs?" "We could." Hugh thought about it. "There's an easier way, and one (hat would kill two birds. Barbara, what sort of country is this?" "I beg your pardon?" "You said that this area is at least semi-tropical. Can you tell what season it is? And what the rest of the year is likely to bring? What I'm driving at is this: Are you going to need irrigation?" "Good heavens, Hugh, I can't answer that!" "You can try?" "Well -- " She looked around. "I doubt if it ever freezes here. If we had water, we might have crops all year. This is not a tropical rain forest, or the undergrowth would be much more dense. It looks like a place with a rainy season and a dry season." "Our creek doesn't go dry; it has lots of fish. Where were you thinking of having your garden?" "How about this stretch downstream to the south? Several trees should come out, though, and a lot of bushes." "Trees and bushes are no problem. Mmm -- Joe, let's take a walk, ril carry a rifle, you strap on your forty-five. Girls, don't dig so much that it topples down on you. We would miss you." "Daddy, I was thinking of taking a nap." "Good. Think about it while you're digging." Hugh and Joe worked their way upstream. "What are you figuring on, Hugh?" "A contour-line ditch. We need to lead water to an air vent on the roof. If we can do that, we've got it made. A sanitary toilet. Running water for cooking and washing. And for gardening, coming in high enough to channel it wherever Barbara wants it. But the luxury that will mean most to our womenfolk is a bath and kitchen. We'll clear the tank room and install both, using partitions." "Hugh, I see how you might get water with a ditch. But what about fixtures? You can't just let water splash, any which way, down through die roof." "I don't know yet, but we'll build them. Not a flush toilet, it's too complex. But a constant-flow toil, a sort that used to be common aboard warships. It's a trough with seats. Water runs into one end, out the other. We'll bail it down the manhole, out the tunnel, and away from the house. Have you seen any clay?" ii'here is a clay bank at the A stream below the house. Karen complained about how sticky it was. She went upstream to bathe, a sandy spot." "I'll look at it. If we can bake clay, we can make all sorts of things. A toilet. A sink. Dishes. Tile pipe. Build a kiln out of unbaked clay, use the kiln to bake anything. But clay just makes it easier. Water is the real gold; all civilizations were built on water. Joe, we are about high enough." "Maybe a little higher? It would be embarrassing to dig a ditch a couple of hundred yards long -- " "Longer." " -- or longer, and find that it's too low and no way to get it up to the roof." "Oh, we'll survey it first." Survey it? Hugh, maybe you didn't notice but we don't even have a spirit level. That big smash broke its glasses. And there isn't even a tripod, much less a transit and all those things." "The Egyptians invented surveying with less, Joe. Losing the spirit level doesn't matter. We'll build an unspirit level." "Are you making fun of me, Hugh?" "Not at all. Mechanics were building level and square centuries before you could buy instruments. We'll build a plumb-bob level. That's an upside down T, and a string with a weight to mark the vertical. You can build it about six feet long and six high to give us a long sighting arm -- minimize the errors. Have to take apart one of the bunks for IF boards. It's light, fussy work you can do while your ribs heal. While the girls do the heavy, unfussy excavating." "You draw it, I'll build it." "When we get the building leveled we'll mount it on the roof and sight upstream. Have to cut a tree or two but we won't have any trouble running a base line. Intercepts we run with a smaller level. Duck soup, Joe." "No sweat, huh." "Mostly sweat. But twenty feet a day of shallow ditch and we'll have irrigation water when the dry season hits. The bathroom can wait -- the gals will be cheered just by the fact that there will be one, someday. Joe, it would suit me if our base line cuts the stream about here. See anything?" "What should I see?" "We fell those two trees and they dam the creek. Then chuck in branches, mud, and some brush and still more mud and rocks and the stream backs up in a pond." Hugh added, "Have to devise a gate, and that I do not see, with what we have to work with. Every problem leads straight to another. Damn." "Hugh, you're counting your chickens before the cows come home." "I suppose so. Well, let's go see how much the girls have dug while we loafed." T he girls had dug little; Duke had returned with a miniature four-point buck. Barbara and Karen had it strung up against a tree and were trying to butcher it. Karen teemed to have as much blood on her as there was on the ground. They stopped as the men approached. Barbara wiped her forehead, leaving a red trail. "I hadn't realized they were so complicated inside." "Or so messy!" sighed Karen. "With that size it's easier on the ground." "Now he tells us. Show us, Daddy. We'll watch." "Me? I'm a gentleman sportsman; the guide did the dirty work. But -- Joe, can you lay hands on that little hatchet?" "Sure. It's sharp; I touched it up yesterday." Hugh split the breast bone and pelvic girdle and spread the carcass, then peeled out viscera and lungs and spilled them, while silently congratulating the girls on not having pierced the intestines. "All yours, girls. Barbara, if you can get that hide off, you might be wearing it soon. Have you noticed any oaks?" "There are scrub forms. And sumach, too. You're thinking of tanning?" "Yes." "I know how to extract it." "Then you know more about tanning than I do. I'll bow out. There are books." "I know, I was looking it up. Doc! Don't sniff at that boy." "He won't eat it," Joe assured her, "unless it's good for him. Cats are fussy." While butchering was going on Duke and his mother crawled out and joined them. Mrs. Farnham seemed cheerful but did not greet S# E yone; she simply looked at Duke's #. 'Oh, the poor little thingl Duke #ear how did you have the heart to kiU it?" "It sassed me and I got mad." "It's a pretty piece of venison, Duke," Hugh said. "Good eating." His wife glanced at him. "Perhaps you'll eat it; I couldn't bear to." Karen said, "Have you turned vegetarian. Mother?" "It's not the same thirg. I'm goii in, I don't want that on me. Karen, don't you dare come inside util you've washed; I won't have you tracking blood in after I've rtaved away getting the place spotless." She headed toward the shelter. "Come inside, Duke." "In a moment, Mother." Karen ftve the carcass an unnecessarily vicious cut. "Where did you nail it?" Hugh asked. "Other side of the ridge. I should ksve been back sooner." "Why?" "Missed an easy shot and splintered an arrow on a boulder. Buck faver. It has been years since I used a 'bow season' license." "One lost arrow, one carcass, is good hunting. You saved the arrowhead?" "Of course. Do I look foolish?" Karen answered, "No, but I do. Buddy, I cleaned house. If Mother #ld any cleaning, it was a mess she BMide herself." "I realized that." "And I'll bet when she smells Biese steaks, she won't want Spam!" Hugh moved away, agnaliag Duke to follow. Tm d to see Grace looking cheerful. You must have soothed hn " Duke looked sheepish. "Well -- As you pointed out, it's rough, chopping it off completely." He added, "But I rationed her. I gave her one drink and told her she could have one more before dinner." "That's doing quite well." "I had better go inside. The bottle is there." "Perhaps you had." "Oh, it's all right. I put her on her honor. You don't know how to handle her. Dad." "That's true. I don't" VI From the Journal of Barbara Wells: I am hobbled by a twisted ankle, so I am lying down and adding to this. I've taken notes every night -- but in shorthand. I haven't transcribed very much. The longhand version goes in the fly leaves of the Britannica. There are ten blank pages in each volume, twenty-four volumes, and I'll squeeze a thousand words to a page. # words. Enough to record our doings until we reclaim the art of making paper -- especially as the longhand version will be censored. Because I can't let my hair down to anyone -- and sometimes a gal needs to! This shorthand record is a diary which no one can read but me, as Karen is as poor at Gregg as she claimed. Or perhaps Joe knows Gregg. IF Isn't it requked in business colleges? But Joe is a gentleman and would not read this without invitation. I am fond of Joseph; his goodness is not a sham. I am sure he is keeping his lip buttoned on many unhappy thoughts; his position is as anomalous as mine and more difficult. Grace has quit ordering him around -- save that she orders all of us. Hugh gives orders, but for the welfare of all. Nor does he give many; we are settled in a routine. Tm the farmer, and plan my own work; Duke keeps meat on the table and gives me a hand when he doesn't hunt; Hugh hasn't told either of us what to do for a long time, and Karen has a free hand with the house. Hugh has about two centuries of mechanical work planned out and Joe helps him. But Grace's orders are for her own comfort. We usually carry them out; it's easier. She gets her own way and more than her share, simply by being difficult. She got the lion's share of liquor. Liquor doesn't matter to me; I rarely "need" a drink. But I enjoy a glow in company and had to remind myself that it was not my liquor, it was Farnham liquor. Grace finished her share in three days. Duke's was next to go. And so on. At last all was gone save one quart of bourbon earmarked "medicinal." Grace spotted where Duke had it and dug it up. When Duke came home, she was passed out and the bottle was dead. The next three days were horrors. She screamed. She wept. She threatened suicide. Hugh and Duke teamed up and one of them was always with her. Hugh acquired a black eye, Duke got scratches dowB his handsome face. I understand they put a lot of B-I into her and force-fed her. On the fourth day she stayed in her bunk; the next day she got up and seemed almost normal. But during lunch she asserted, ai something "everybody knows," that the Russians had attacked because Hugh insisted on building a shelttf. D uke says we must be patient I should not criticize Duke; ha is probably going to be my husband, I mean, who else is there? In this vicinity he is quite a catch. (Polygamy? Of course I wouldl Even with Grace as senior wife. But I haven't been asked.) The trouble is, while I like Duke, no spark jumps. So I am putting it off and avoiding circumstances where he might pat me on the fanny. It would be a hell of a note if I married him and there came a night when I was so irritated at his mother and so vexed with him for indulging her that I would tell him coldly that he is not half the man his father is. No, that must not happen. Duke does not deserve it. Joe? My admiration for him is unqualified. Joe is the first Negro I've had a chance to know well -- and I think most well of him. He plays better contract than I do; I suppose he's smarter than I am. The trouble with Joe is the same as with Duke: No spark jumps. But J am fond of him -- as a younger brother. He is never too busy to be accommodating. He is usually bear guard for Karen and me when we bathe and it's a comfort to know that Joe is alert --  -- Duke has killed five bears and Joe killed one while he was actually guarding us. It took three shots and dropped dead almost in Joe's lap. He stood his ground. We adjourned without worrying about modesty, which upset Joe more than bears do. Or wolves, or coyotes, mountain lions, or a cat which Duke says is a mutated leopard and especially dangerous because it attacks by dropping out of a tree. We don't bathe under trees and don't venture out of our clearing without an man. It is as dangerous as crossing Wilshire against the lights. I t took three weeks to excavate under the house. Boulders! This area is a wide, flat saucershaped valley, with boulders most anywhere. Whenever we hit a big one, we dug around it and the men would worry it out with crowbar and block and tackle. Mostly the men could get boulders out. But Karen found one that seemed to go down to China. Hugh looked it over and said, "Fine. Now dig a hole just north of it and deeper." Karen just looked at him. So we dug. And hit another big boulder. "Good," said Hugh. "Dig another hole north of that one." We hit a third oversize boulder. But in three days the last one had been tumbled into a hole next to iU the middle one had been worried into a hole where the last one had been, and the one that started the trouble was buried where the middle one had been. As fast as any spot had been cut deeply enough Hugh propped it up with pieces of log; he was worried lest the shelter shift and crush someone. So when we finished the shelter had a forest of posts under it Hugh then set two very heavy posts under the uphill corners and smarted removing the inner ones, using block and tackle. Sometimes they had to be dug under. Hugh was nervous during this and did ?? the rigging and digging himself. At last the uphill half was supported on these two big chunks. They would not budge. There was so much weight on those timbers that they sneered at our efforts. I said, "What do we do now, Hugh?" "Try the next-to-the-last resort." "What's the last resort?" "Burn them. But it would take roaring fires and we would have to clear grass and bushes and trees for quite a distance. Karen, you know where the ammonia is. And the iodine. I want both." I had wondered why Hugh had stocked so much ammonia. But he had, in used plastic Clorox bottles; the stuff had ridden through the shocks. I hadn't known that iodine was stocked in quantity, too; I don't handle the drugs. Soon he had sort of a chemistry lab. "What are you making, Hugh?" I asked. IF "Ersatz 'dynamite.' And I don't need company," he said. "The stuff is so touchy it explodes at a harsh look." "Sorry," I said, backing away. He looked up and smiled. "It's safe until it dries. I had it in mind in case I ever found myself in an underground. Occupying troops take a sour view of natives having explosives, but there is nothing suspicious about ammonia or iodine. The stuff is safe until you put it together and does not require a primer. But I never expected to use k for construction; it's too treacherous." "Hugh, I just remembered I don't care whether a floor is level or not." "If it makes you nervous, take a walk." Making it was simple; he combined tincture of iodine and ordinary household ammonia; a precipitate settled out. This he filtered through Kleenex, the result was a paste. Joe drilled holes into those stubborn posts; Hugh wrapped this mess in two batches, in paper, and packed a bundle into each hole, tamping with his finger. "Now we wait for it to dry." Everything that he used he flushed down with water, then took a bath with his clothes on, removed them in the water and left them, weighted down with rocks. That was all that day O ur armament includes two lovely ladies' guns, .# magnum rimfires with telescopic sights. Hugh had Duke and Joe sight them in. The sighting-in was done with sandbag rest -- heaped up dirt, that vl Hugh had them expend five bulleli each, so I knew he was serious. "One bullet, one bear" is his motto. When the explosive was dry, everything breakable was removed from the shelter. We women were chased far back. Karen was charged with hanging onto Dr. Livingstone, and I had Duke's bear rifle. Duke and Joe were on their bellies a measured hundred feet from the posts. Hugh stood between them. "Ready for count?" "Ready, Hugh." -- "Ready, Dad." "Deep breath. Let part of it out Hold it, steady on target, take up the slack. Five... four... three... two... one... ftreV A sound like a giant slammed door and the middle of each post disintegrated. The shelter stuck out like a shelf, then tilted ponderously down, touched, and was level. Karen and I cheered; Grace started to clap; Dr. Livingstone jumped down to investigate. Hugh turned bis head and grinned. And the shelter tilted back the other way as the ridge crumbled; k started to slide. It pivoted on the tunnel protuberance, picked up speed and tobogganned down the slope. I thought it was going to end up in the creek. But the slope leveled off; k ground to a stop, with the tunnel choked with dirt and the whole thing farther out of plumb than before! Hugh picked up the shovel he had used to heap up shooting supports, walked down to the shovel, began to dig. He was correct. The shelter wai level in a week, and this time he triggered the end posts with cross pieces; blasting was not needed. Best of all, the armor door cranked back without a murmur and we had air I ran down, tears bursting from my eyes. Joe was there first. Hugh !ooked up and said, "Joe, dig out the tunnel. I want to know if anything is damaged and the girls will Vint to get lunch." "Boss -- " Joe choked out. "Boss! Oh, gosh!" Hugh said, in a tone you use to Thild, "Why are you upset, Joe This has saved us work." I thought he had flipped. Joe said, Huhr "Certainly," Hugh assured him. "See how much lower the roof is? Every foot it dropped saves at least a hundred feet of aqueduct. And leveling will be simple here; the ground is loam and boulders are few. A week, with everybody pitching in. Then we bring water to the house and garden two weeks early." and sunlight inside -- it had been stuffy and candles made it pretty rank. Joe and Hugh started the ditch the same day. In anticipation of the glorious day Karen sketched on the walls of the tank room lifesize pictures of a wash stand, a bath tub, a pot. Truthfully, we are comfortable. Two mattress covers Karen filled with dried grass; sleeping on the floor is no worse than the bunks. We sit in chairs and play our evening rubber at the table. It is amazing what a difference level floors make and how much better it is to have a IF door than to climb down a ladder and crawl out a hole. Wc had to cook over a campfire a while as our grill and Dutch oven were smashed. Karen and I have thrown together a make-do because, as soon as water is led to the house, Hugh intends to start on ceramics, not only for a toilet and a sink but also for a stove vented out through the periscope hole. Luxury! My corn is coming up beautifully. I wonder what I can use to grind corn? The thought of hot corn bread makes me drool. K aren and Barbara were washing themselves, the day's dishes, and the week's laundry. Above them, Joe kept watch. Bushes and then trees had been cut away around the stretch they used for bathing; a predator could not approach without Joe having a clear shot at it. His eyes swung constantly, checking approaches. He wasted no seconds on the Elysian tableau he guarded. Karen said, "Barbie, this sheet won't stand another laundering." "We need rags." "But what will we use for sheets? It's this soap." Karen scooped a handful from a bowl on the bank. It was soft and gray and harsh and looked like oatmeal mush. "The stuff eats holes." "I'm not fretted about sheets but I dread the day when we are down to our last towel." "Which will belong to mother." Karen stated. "Our rationing officer will have some excellent reason." "Nasty, nasty. Karen, Duke has done a wonderful job." "I wasn't bitching. Duke can't help it. It's his friend Eddie." "'Eddie?" "Edipus Rex, dear." Barbara turned away and began rinsing a pair of ragged blue jeans. Karen said, "You dig me?" . "We all have faults." "Sure, everybody but me. Even Daddy has a shortcoming. His neck pains him." Barbara looked up. "Is Hugh having trouble with his neck? Perhaps it would help if we massaged it." Karen giggled. "Your weakness, sister mine, is that you wouldn't know a joke if it bit you. Daddy is stiff-necked and nothing will cure it. He doesn't have weaknesses and and that's his weakness. Don't frown. I love Daddy. I admire him. But I'm glad I'm not like him. I'll take this load up to the thorn bushes. Damn it, why didn't Daddy stock clothes pins? Those thorns are as bad as the soap." "Clothes pins we can do without. Hugh did an incredible job. Everything from an eight-day clock -- " "Which got busted, right off." " -- to tools and seeds and books and I don't know what. Karen! Don't climb out naked!" Karen stopped, one foot on the bank. "Nonsense. Old Stone Face won't look. Humiliating, that's what it is. I think I'll yoo-hoo at him." "You'll do no such thing. Joe is being a gentleman under trying circumstances. Karen, Joe is sweet. I wish you had heard him explain about Doc." "Explain what?" Karen asked. "Well, Doc is beginning to accept me. I was holding Doc yesterday and noticed something and said, Joe, Doc is getting terribly fat. Or was he always?' "That was a time when he blushed. But he answered with sweet seriousness, 'Barbara, Dr. Livingstone isn't as much of a boy cat as he thinks he is. Old Doc is more a girl-type cat. That isn't fat. Uh, you see -- Doc is going to have babies.' He blurted it out." Karen looked puzzled. "Come to think of it, I haven't picked him up lately. Just petted him and tried to keep him out of things. Lately it hasn't been safe to open a drawer; he's into it. Looking for a place to have kittens of course. I should have twigged." "Karen, why do you keep saying he' and 'him'?" "'Why?' Joe told you. Doc thinks he is a boy cat -- and who am I to argue? Mmm -- Calendar girl, how long have we been here?" "Sixty-two days. I've looked it up; it's sixty days with a normal range to seventy." "So it's any time now. I'll bet you two back rubs that we are up all night tonight. Cats never have kittens at a convenient hours." Karen abruptly began on the dishes. P resently she said in a low voice, "Barbie, Doc won't hand this household half the surprise I'm going to." "How, hon?" "I'm pregnant." "Hmi?" Ton beard me. Pregnant I had a tesC the froggie winked at me. HeO, Fm four months gone." Karea direw herself into the arms of the older girl "And Fm scared!'" Barbara hugged her. "Thwe, there, dear. It's going to be all right." "The hell it is," Karen blubbered. "Mother's going to raise hell... and there aren't any hospitals... nor doctors. Oh, why didn't Duke study medicine? Barbie, I'm going to die. I know I am." "Karen, that's silly. More babies have been born without doctors and hospitals than ever were wheeled into a delivery room. You're not scared of dying, you're scared of telling your parents." "Well, that, too." Karen wiped at her eyes and sniffed. I was going to. But the attack hit... and then Mother went to pieces... and Daddy has been loaded down with worries and there's never been the right time." "Karen, you aren't scared to tell your father, just your mother." "Well...Mother mostly. But Daddy, too. Besides being shocked and hurt -- he'll think it was silly of me to get caught." "While he's certain to be surprised, I doubt the other." Barbara hesitated. "Karen, you needn't take this alone. I can share it." "That's what I had hoped. That's why I asked you to come home with me. I told you." "I mean really share it. I'm pregnant, too." What?" "Yes. We can tell them together." IF "Good Lord, Barbara! How did it happen?" Barbara shrugged. "Careless. How did it happen to you?" Karen suddenly grinned. "How? A bee sprinkled pollen on me; how else? 'Who' you mean." "'Who' I don't care about. Your business. Well, dear? Shall we go tell them? I'll do the talking." "Wait a minute. You hadn't planned to tell anybody? Or had you?" "Why no," Barbara answered truthfully, "I was going to wait until it showed." Karen looked at Barbara's waistline. "You don't look it. And I do; I've been careful not to undress around Mother. Since you don't, let's hold that back and use it as a whammy if things get sticky." "If you like. Karen, tell Hugh first. Then let him tell your mother. And quit worrying. We'll have our babies and won't have any trouble and we'll raise them together and it'll be fun. We'll be happy." Karen's eyes lit up. "And you'll have a girl and Fll have a boy and we'll marry them and be grandmothers together!" "That sounds more like Karen." Barbara kissed her. "Run tell Hugh." K aren found Hugh bricking up the kiln; she told him that she would like a private talk. "All right," he agreed. "Let me tell Joe to get this fired up. I should inspect the ditch. Come along and talk?" He gave her a shovel, carried a rifle. "Now what's on your mind." "Let's get farther away." They walked a meandering distance. Hugh stopped, exchanged rifle for shovel, and built up a stretch of wall. "Daddy? Perhaps you've noticed a shortage of men?" "No. Three men and three women. The usual division." "Perhaps I should say 'eligible bachelors.' " "Then say it." "All right, I've said it. I need advice." He placed another shovelful, tamped it. "Say what you want, baby. Perhaps I can help." "Hardly. I'm pregnant, Daddy." He dropped the shovel, took her in both arms. "Oh, wonderful!" Presently she said, "Daddy... I can't shoot a bear with you hugging me. He put her down, grabbed the rifle. Wherer "Nowhere. But you're always warning us." "Oh. All right, I'll take over guard duty. Who's the father. Karen? Duke? Oh Joe?" "Neither. Earlier, at school." "Oh. Still better!" "How? Damn it. Daddy, this isn't going the way it's supposed to. A girl comes home ruined, her father is supposed to raise hell. All you say is, 'Just dandy!' You've got me confused." "Sorry. Under other circumstances, I might feel that you had been careless. But don't you see dear? You have almost doubled the chances of this colony surviving."He smiled. "I don't feel like working. Let's go spread the good news." vm H ugh leaned on his shovel. "That just about does it, Joe." "Let me tidy up around the gate." They were at the upper end of their ditch where the stream had been dammed against the dry season. It Ihad been on them for weeks; the forest was sear, the heat oppressive. They were extremely caroful about fire. But no longer so careful about bears. It was still standard practice to be armed, but Duke had killed so many carnivores, ursine and feline, they seldom saw one. was only a trickle but there was water for irrigation and for household needs. Without the ditch they would have lost their garden. It was necessary every day or so to adjust the flow. Hugh had not built a water gate; paucity of tools, scarcity of metal, and a total lack of lumber had baffled him. Instead he had devised an expedient, 'fhe point where water was taken from the pond had been faced with brick and a spillway set of halfround tile. To increase the flow this was taken out, the spill cut deeper, bricks adjusted, and tiles replaced. It was clumsy, it worked. The bottom of the ditch was tiled all the way to house and garden; a minimum of water was lost. Their kiln had worked day and night; most of their capital gain had come out of the clay bank below the house and it was becoming difficult to dig good clay. This did not worry Hugh; they had almost everything they needed. Their bathroom was no longer a joke. Water flowed in a two-stall trough toilet, partitioned with deer hide; tile drain pipe "leaded" with clay ran down the manhole, out the tunnel, and to a cesspool. Forming drain pipe Hugh found very difficult. After many failures he had whittled a male form in three parts -- in parts because it was necessary to shape the clay over it, let it dry enough to take out the form before it cracked from shrinking over the form. With practice he cut his failures to about # in forming, # in firing. The damaged water tank he had cut painfully, mallet and chisel, lengthwise into tubs, a bath tub indoors and a wash tub outdoors. The seams he had caulked with shaved hide. The tubs did not leak -- much. A brick fireplace-oven filled one corner of the bath-kitchen. It was not in use; days were long and hot; they cooked outdoors and ate under an awning of empty bears -- but it was ready against next rainy season. Their house now had two stories. Hugh had concluded that an addition strong enough to stop bears and tight enough to discourage snakes would have to be of stone, and solidly roofed. That he could do -- but how about windows and doors? Glass he would make some day if he solved the problems of soda and lime. But not soon. A stout door and tight shutters he could manage but it would be stuffy. So they had built a shed on the roof, a grass shack. Wth the laddw IF Bp, a bear faced a twelve-foot wall. Unsure that a wall would stop all their neighbors, Hugh had arranged trip lines around the edge so that disturbing them would cause an oxygen bottle to fall over. Their alarm was tripped the first week, scaring off the intruder. It had also, Hugh admitted, scared the bejasus out of him. Anything that could not be hurt by weather had been moved out and the main room was rearranged into a women's dormitory and nursery. H ugh stared downstream while Joe finished fussing. He could make out the roof of his penthouse. Good enough, he mused. Everything was in fair shape and next year would be better. So much better that they might take time to explore -- even Duke had not been as much as twenty miles away. Nothing but feet for travel and too busy scratching to live -- Next year would be soon enough. mans reach should exceed his grasp, or whafs a heaven for? They had started with neither pot nor window. This year a pot. Next year a window? No hurry. Things were going well. Even Grace seemed contented, after one horrible day-long rant. He felt cain the would settle down and be a happy grandmother. Grace liked babies -- how well he remembered. Not long now. Karen was fuzzily vague but her guesses seemed to show that D-day was about two weeks off, and her condition matched her guess. The sooner, the better! Hugh had studied everything in his library on pregnancy and childbirth; he made every preparation he could. His patients seemed to be in perfect health, both had satisfactory pelvic measurements, both seemed unafraid, and they helped each other not to gain too much weight, with friendly nagging. With Barbara to hold Karen's hand, with Karen to hold Barbara's hand, with Grace's motherly experience to bolster them, Hugh could see no trouble ahead. It would be wonderful to have babies in the house. With a warm wave of euphoria Hugh Famham realized that he had never been so happy in his life. #'lhat's it, Hugh. Let's catch A those tiles on the way back." "Okay. Take the rifle. I'll carry the tools." "I think," Joe said, "we ought to -- " His words chopped off at a gunshot; they froze. It was followed by two more. They ran. Barbara was in the door. She held up a gun and waved, went inside. She came out before they reached the house, stepping carefully down off the stoop and moving slowly; she was very gravid. Her belly bulged huge in shorts made from worn-out jeans that had belonged to Duke; she wore a man's shirt altered to support her breasts. She was barefooted and no longer carried the gun. Joe outdistanced Hugh, met her near the house. "Karen?" he demanded. "Yes. She's started. Grace is with her. But she wants you." "Let me catch my breath." Hugh wiped his face, tried to control his trembling. He took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. He went inside, Barbara following. The bunks near the door had been taken down. A bed stuck out into the doorway but space cleared by removing shelves left passage. One bunk was not a cot in the living corner. The bed was padded with a grass mattress and a bear rug; a calico cat, one of Doc's litter, was on it. Hugh squeezed past, felt another cat brush his ankles. He went into the other bay. The bunks there had been rebuilt into a bed across the end; Karen was in bed, Grace was seated, fanning her, and Joe stood by with an air of grave concern. Hugh smiled at his daughter. "Hi, Fatty!" He stooped and kissed her. "How are you? Hurting?" "Not now. But I'm glad you're here." "We hurried." A cat jumped up, landing on Karen. "Unh! Damn you, Maggie!" "Joe," said Hugh, "round up the cats and put them in Coventry." The tunnel mouth had been bricked up, but with air holes, and a cat door which could be filled with a large brick. The cats had a low opinion of this but it had been built after Happy New Year had become missing and presumed dead. Karen said, "Daddy, I want Maggie with me!" "Joe, make that all but Maggie. When we get busy, grab Maggie an# shut up her, too." "Daddy, you should have been a doctor." "I am a doctor. The best doctor in the world." As he left the house he encountered Duke, soaked from a long run. "I heard three shots. Sis?" "Yes. No hurry, labor has just started. I'm about to take a bath. Want to join me?" "I want to say hello to Sis first. "Hurry up; they're about to bathe her. And grab Joe; he's incarcerating cats. They'll want us out of the way." "Shouldn't we be boiling water?" "Do so, if it will calm you. Duke, my O. B. kit, such as it is, has been ready for a month. There are six jars of boiled water, for this and that. Go kiss your sister and don't let her see that you're worried." "You're a cold fish. Dad." "Son, I'm scared silly. I can list thirteen major complications -- and I'm not prepared to cope with any of them. Mostly I pat her hand and tell her that everything is dandy -- and that's what she needs. I examine her, solemn as a judge, and don't know what to look for. It's just to reassure her... and I'll thank you to help out. Duke said soberly, "I will, sir. I'll kid her along." "Don't overdo it. Just let her see that you share her confidence in old Doc Farnham." "I will." "If Joe gets the jitters, get him out. He's the worst. Grace is doing IF fine. Hurry up or they won't let you in." A ll that hot and weary day the woman brought to bed fought to void herself of her burden, whitefaced and shrieking, belly hardening with each attempt, muscles in arms and neck standing out as she strained -- then fell back limp as the contraction died away, tired and trembling, not speaking, uninterested in anything but the ordeal. It got steadily worse. Contraction became three minutes apart; each one longer and seemed to hurt more. At nine that night there was bleeding. Grace became frantic; she had heard many stories of the dangers of hemorrhage. Hugh assured her that it was normal and showed that the baby would arrive soon. He believed it, as it was not massive and did not continue -- and it did not seem possible that birth could be far away. Grace looked angry and got up; Barbara slipped into the chair she vacated. Hugh hoped that Grace would rest -- the women had been taking turns. But Grace returned a few minutes later. "Hubert," she said in a high, brittle voice. "Herbert, Fm going to call a doctor. "Do that," he agreed, his eyes on Karen. "You listen to me, Hubert Farnham. You should have called a dochear me? Fm going to call a doctor -- and you are not going to stop me." "Yes, Grace. The telephone is m there." He pointed into the other wing. Grace looked puzzled, then turned suddenly and went away. 'Duker His son hurried in. "Yes, Dad?" Hugh said forcefully, "Duke, your mother has decided to telephone for a doctor. You go help her. Do you understand? Duke's eyes widened. "Where are the needles?" "In the smaller bundle on the table. Don't touch the large bundle; it's sterile." "Got it. What dosage?" "Two c.c. Don't let her see the needle, or she'll jerk" Hugh's head jerked; he realized that he was groggy. "Make that three c.c.; I want her to go out like a light and sleep until morning. She can tolerate it." "Right away." Duke left. Karen had been lying quiet between contractions, apparently in semi-coma. Now she whispered, "Poor Daddy. Your women give you a lot of grief." "Rest, dear." "I -- Oh, God, here it comes again!" A round down -- it seemed to Hugh that the torture had been going on for weeks but his watch showed that Karen had been in labor eighteen hours -- Barbara said urgently, "Hugh, she can't take any more." "I know," he admitted, looking at his daughter. She was at the peak of a pain, face gray and contorted, mouth squared in agony, high sob#f Well? We have to do something." "I suppose she should have had a Caesarean But I'm no surgeon." "I wonder." "I don't. I'm not." 'You know more about it than the first man who ever did one! You know how to keep it sterile. We have sulfa drugs and you can load her up with demerol." She did not try to keep Karen from hearing; their patient was beyond caring. "No." "Hugh, you must. She's dying." "I know." He sighed. "But it's too late for a Caesarean, even if I knew how. To save Karen with one, I mean. We might save her baby." He blinked and swayed. "Only it would not. Whos to wet-nurse? You can't, not yet. And cows we don't have." He took a deep breath, tried to get a grip on himself. "Only one thing left. Try to get it out Eskimo style." "What's that?" "Get her up and let gravity help. Maybe it'll work. Call the boys, we'll need them. I've got to scrub again; I might have to do an episiotomy. Oh, God." Five minutes and two contractions later they were ready to try it. When Karen lay back exhausted after the second one, Hugh tried to explain what they were going to do. It was hard to get her attention. At last she nodded slightly and whispered, "I don't care." Hugh went to the table where his equipment was now opened out, and got his one scalpel, took the camp lamp in his other hand. 'AII right, boys. As soon as she starts, pick her up." They had only seconds to wait. Hugh saw the contraction start, nodded to Duke. "Nowl" "With me, Joe." They started to lift her, each with an arm under her back, a hand under a thigh. Karen screamed and fought them off. "No, no! Don't touch me --  cant stand it! Daddy, make them stop! DaddyV They stopped. Duke said, "Dad?" "Lift her up! Now!" They got her high in a squatting position, thighs pulled open. Barbara got behind Karen, arms around her, and pressed down on the girl's tortured belly. Karen screamed and struggled; they held her fast. Hugh barely had time to get to the floor before he had both hands full of wet, slippery, bloody baby. He knew there was something else he should do now but all he could think of was to get it by both feet in his left hand, lift it and slap its tiny bottom. It let out a choked wail. "Get her on the bed, boys -- but easy! It's still fastened by the cord." They made it, Hugh on his knees and burdened with a feebly wiggling load. Once they had Karen down, Hugh started to put her baby in her arms -- but saw that Karen was not up to it. She seemed to be awake. Her eyes were open. But she was in total collapse. H ugh was close to collapse. He looked dazedly around, handed the baby to Barbara. "Stay close." IF "Dad?" said Duke. "Aren't you supposed to cut the cord?" "Not yet." Where was that knife? He found it, rubbed it quickly with iodine -- hoped that it was sterile. Placed it by two boiled lengths of cotton string -- turned and felt the cord to see if it was pulsing. "He's beautiful," Joe said softly. "She," Hugh corrected. "The baby is a girl. Now, Barbara, if you -- " He broke off. Suddenly everything happened too fast. The baby started to choke; Hugh grabbed it, turned it upside down, dug into its mouth, scooped out a plug of mucus, handed the baby back, started again to check the cord -- saw that Karen was in trouble. With a nightmare feeling that he needed to be twins he got one of the strings, tied a square knot around the cord near the baby's belly, trying to control his trembling so as not to tie it too hard -- started to tie the second, saw that it was not needed; Karen suddenly delivered the pla centa and was hemorrhaging. She moaned. With one slash Hugh cut the cord snapped at Barbara, "Get a bell band on it!" -- turned to take care of the mother. She was flowing like a river; her face was gray and she seemed lui' conscious. Too late to attempt tc take stitches. This flood was from inside. He tried to stop it by packing her with their last roll of gauze while shouting to Joe and to Duke to ge a belly band compress on Karen himself to put pressure on her uter us. Some agonized time later tfu belly compress was in place. Hugh raised his eyes and looked at Karen's face -- then in sudden panic tric( to find her pulse. Karen had survived the birth her daughter by less than sever minutes. The child lingered for a few hours, then joined her. f X T hey went on. Duke hunted, Duke and Joe farmed, Hugh worked harder than ever. Grace worked, too, and her cooking improved -- and her eating; she got fatter. She never mentioned her conviction that her husband had been responsible for the death of their daughter. She did not speak to him at all. When a problem had to be discussed she spoke to Duke. She quit attending even their church services. In the last month of Barbara's pregnancy Duke sought out nis father, privately. "Dad, you told me that any time I wanted to leave -- or any of us -- we could." Hugh was startled. "Yes." "A pro-rata share, you said. Ammo, tools, and so forth." "Better than that; we're a going concern. Duke, you are leaving?" "Yes -- but not just myself. Mother wants to. She's the one who's dead set on it. I've got reasons, but Mother's wishes are the deciding factor." "Mmm. Let's talk about your reasons. Are you dissatisfied with the way I'm running things? I will gladly step aside. I feel sure that I can get Joe and Barbara to go along, so that you will have unanimous support." He sighed. "I am anxious to turn over the burden." Duke shook his head. "That's not it, Dad. I don't want to be boss and you've done a good job. Oh, I won't say I liked the high-handed way you started in. But results count and you got results. I'd rather not discuss my reasons except to say that they don't have to do with you -- and wouldn't be enough to make me leave if Mother weren't hipped on it. She wants to leave. She's going to leave. I can't let her leave alone." Hugh pondered it. "Duke, if that's how your mother feels, I won't try to persuade her; I've long since lost my influence over her. But I have two ideas. You may find one of them practical." "I doubt it." "Hear me. You know we have copper tubing; we used some in the kitchen. We have everything for a still; I stocked the items to build one if a war came along -- not just for us but because liquor is money in any primitive society. "I haven't built it for reasons we both know. But I could and I know how to make liquor." He smiled slightly. "Not book knowledge. While I was in the South Pacific, I bossed a still, with the shut-eye connivance of my C. O. I learned how to turn corn or potatoes or most anything into vodka, or fruit into brandy. Duke your mother might be happy if she had liquor. "She would drink herself to death!" "Duke, Duke! If she is happy doing it, who are we to stop her? IF What does she have to live for? She loved television, she enjoyed parties, she could spend a happy day at the hairdresser's, followed by a movie, then drinks with one of her friends. That was her life, Duke. Now where is it? Gone, gone! There is just this we can give her to make up for what she has lost. Who are you to decide that your mother must not drink herself to death?" "Dad, that's not the situation!" "So?" "You know I don't -- didn't -- approve of Mother's excessive drinking. But I might go along with letting her drink all she wants now. If you build that still, we might be customers. But we would still leave. Because that won't solve Mother's problem." "Well, Duke, that leaves only my other idea. I'll get out instead. Only -- " Hugh frowned. "Duke, tell her that I will leave as soon as Barbara has her baby. I can't walk out on my patient. You can give Grace my assur -- " "Dad, that won't solve a thing!" "I don't understand." # #h, Christ, I might as well vy spill it. It's Barbara, She's -- Well, hell. Mother is nuts on the subject. Can't stand her. Ever since Karen died." "Good Lord!" "Yeah. I tried to reason with her. I told her that Barbara couldn't leave. So she decided to leave. I can't stall her any longer. She's leaving. I'm going with her, to take care of her." His father rubbed his temples, "I guess there is no situation so bad but what it can get worse. Duke, even with you, she hasn't anywhere to go." "Not quite. Dad." "Eh?" "I can swing it, with your help. Do you remember that cave up Collins Canyon, the one they tried to make a tourist attraction? It's stifl there. Or its twin, I mean. I was hunting up that way that first week. The canyon looked so familiar that I climbed up and looked for the cave. Found it. And Dad, it's habitable and defensible." "The door? The mouth?" "No problem. If you can spare that steel plate that blocked off the tunnel." "Certainly." "The cave has a vent, higher up. No smoke problem. It has a spring that hasn't failed all this dry weather. Dad, it's as comfortable as the shelter; all it needs is outfitting." "I capitulate. You can take almost anything now. Beds, of course. Utensils. Your pick of the canned goods. Matches, ammunition, guns. Make a list. I'll help you move." Duke colored under his tan. "Dad, a few things are up there already." "So? Did you think I would be pinchpenny?" "Uh... I don't mean the past few days. I moved some things up the first days we were here. You see... well, you and I had that row -- and then you made me rationing officer. That gave me the idea, and for a week or more I always left here loaded, leaving when no one was watching." n Stealing," said Hugh tightly. "I didn't figure it so. I never took as much as one sixth of anything... and just stuff I would have to have in a pinch. Matches. Ammo. That rifle you couldn't find. One blanket. A knife. A little food. Some candles. You see... well, look at it from my side. There was aways the chance that I woud get you sore and either have to fight -- one of us killed is the way you put it -- or run and not be able to stop for anything. I decided not to fight. So I made preparations. But I didn't steal it; you said I could have it. Say the word and I'll fetch it all back." Hugh Farnham peeled a callus, then looked up. "One man's stealing is another man's survival, I suppose. Just one thing -- Duke, in that food you took: Were there any cans of milk?" "Not one. Dad, don't you think, if there had been, I would have beaten all records getting up there and back when Karen died?" "Yes. I'm sorry I asked." "I was sorry I hadn't snitched a few cans; then they wouldn't have been used up." "The baby didn't last out the milk we had, Duke. All right, it calls for quick surgery -- but don't forget that you can come back, any time. Duke, women sometimes get unreasonable at about your mother's age... then get over it and are nice old ladies. Maybe we'll have the family together again. I hope we'll see you occasionally. You're welcome to all the vegetables you can eat, of course." "I was going to mention that. I can't farm up there. Suppose I st# hunt for all of us...and when I bring in a load of meat I take away a load of green stuff." His father smiled. "We have reinstituted commerce. And we can supply you with pottery and there's n# need to do your own tanning. Duke, I suggest you sort out what you want, and tomorrow you and I and Joe will start packing it to your cave. Be lavish. Just one thing -- " "What?" "The books are mine! Anything you want to look up, you'll have to come here. This is not a circulating library." "Fair enough." "I mean it. You can have my razor, you can have my best knife. But snitch one book and I'll skin you alive and bind that book in human skin. There are limits. All right, I'll tell Joe, and get Barbara out of the house and we'll stay away until dark. Good luck, and tell Grace no hard feelings. There are, but tell her that. But I'm not too groused. It takes two to create a heaven... but hell can be accomplished by one. I can't say that I've been happy lately and Grace may be smarter than we think." A bout nine the next morning, they all were outside where chattels for the new household were piled. Hugh looked over his ex-wife's selections with wry amusement. Grace had taken literally the invitation to "take almost anything;" she had gutted the place -- the best blankets, almost all utensils including the tea IF kettle and the one skillet, three of four foam-rubber mattresses, nearly all the remaining canned goods, all the sugar, the lion's share of other irreplaceables, all the plastic dishes. Hugh made only one objection: salt. When he noted that Grace had grabbed all the salt he insisted on a division. Duke agreed and asked if there was anything else Hugh objected to? Hugh shook his head. Barbara would not mind making-do. 'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is -- " Duke had shown restraint, taking one shovel, one axe, a hammer, less than half the nails, and no tool not stocked in duplicate. Instead Duke remarked that he might want to borrow tools someday. Hugh agreed and offered his services on any twoman job. Duke thanked him. Both men found the situation embarrassing, both were unusually polite. A delay in starting was caused by the steel plate for the cave door. Its weight was not too great for a man as husky as Duke, but it was awkward. A pack had to be devised, rugged enough for the trek, comfortable in padding and straps, and so rigged that Duke could fire a rifle. This resulted in sacrificing the one intact bear hide, the covering of the bed Karen had died in. Hugh minded only the loss of time. It would take six trips by three men to move the plunder Grace had picked; Duke thought that two trips a day would be maximum. If they did not start soon, only one trip could be made that day. At last they got it on Duke's back with a fur pad protecting his spine. "Feels right," Duke decided. "Letli get packs on you two and get going." "In a jiffy," Hugh agreed and bent over to pick up his load. "My God!" "Trouble, Duke?" "Look!" A shape had appeared over the eastern rise. It slanted through the air on a course that would have missed Ijiem, but, as it neared the point of closest approach, it stopped dead, turned and headed for them. K passed majestically overhead. Hugh was unable to guess its size at first; there was nothing to which to relate it -- a dark shape propwtioned like a domino tile. But, as it passed about five hundred feet up, k seemed to him that it was around a hundred feet wide and three timet that in length. He could make out no features. It moved swiftly but made no noise. It swept past, turned, circled -- stopped, turned again and came toward them at lower altitude. H ugh found that he had an arm around Barbara. When the object had appeared, she had been some distance away, putting clothet to soak in the outside tub. Now sho was circled by his left arm and he could feel her trembling. "Hugh, what is it?" "People." The thing hovered above thefr flag. Now they could see people; heads showed above Its sides. A comer detached itself, splitting fi off sharply. It dove, stopped by the peak of the flag pole. Hugh saw that it was a car about nine feet long and three wide, with one passenger. No details could he see, no clue to motive power; the car enclosed the man's lower body; his trunk projected above. The man removed the flag, rejoined the main craft. His vehicle blended back in. The rectangle disintegrated. It broke into units like that which had filched their flag. Most cars remained in the air; some dozen landed, three in a triangle around the colonists. Duke yelled, "Watch it!" and dived for his gun. He never made it. He leaned forward at an extreme angle, pawed the air with a look of amazement, and was slowly pulled back to vertical. Barbara gasped in Hugh's ear. "Hugh, what is it?" "I don't know." He did not need to ask what she meant; he had felt, the instant his son was stopped, that he seemed to be waist deep in quicksand. "Don't fight it." "I wasn't going to." Grace shrilled, "Hubert! Hubert, do some -- " Her cries cut off. She seemed to faint but did not fall. Four cars were about eight feet in the air, lined up abreast, and were cruising over Barbara's farm. V.ere ey passed, everything underneath, corn stalks, tomato plants, beans, squash, lettuce, potato hills, everything including branching ditches was pressed fat into a macadam. The raw end ofhe main ditch spilled water over this pavement. One car whipped around, ran a new ditch around the raped area in a wide sweep which allowed the water to cirde the destroyed garden and reach the stream at a lower point. O ut of the pavilion strode a man. He seemed seven feet tall but some of this was a helmet, plumed and burnished. He wore a flowing skirt of red embroidered in gold and was bare to the waist save that an end of the skirt thrown across one shoulder covered part of his broad chest. He had an air of good-natured arrogance and his eyes were bright and merry. His forehead was high, his skull massive; he looked intelligent and alert. Hugh could not place his race. His skin was dark brown and shiny. But his mouth was only slightly Negroid; IF Ms nose, though broad, was arched, and his black hair was wavy. He carried a small crop. He strode up to them, stopped abruptly when he reached Joseph. He gave a curt order to their nearest captor. Joe stretched and bent his legs. "Thanks." The man spoke to Joe. Joe answered, "Sorry, I don't understand." The man spoke again. Joe shrugged helplessly. The man grinned and patted him on the shoulder, turned away, picked up Duke's rifle. He handled it clumsily, making Hugh flinch. Nevertheless he seemed to understand guns. He worked the bolt, ejecting one cartridge, then put it to his shoulder, aimed and fired. The blast was deafening, he had fired past Hugh's ear. He grinned bioadly, tossed the rifle to a suboritinate, walked up to Hugh and Barbara, reached out to touch Barbara's diild-swollen belly. Hugh knocked his hand away. With a gesture almost negligent, certainly without anger, the big man brushed Hugh's hand aside with the crop he carried. It was not a blow, it would not have swatted a fly. Hugh gasped in agony. His hand burned like fire and his arm was numb to the armpit. "Oh, God!" Barbara said urgently, "Don't, Hugh. He isn't hurting me." Nor was he. With a manner of impersonal interest such as a veterinarian might take in feeling a pregnant mare or bitch, the big man felt out the shape of the child she carried -- while Hugh writhed in that special humiliation of a man unable to protect his woman. Coming next month -- by Robert A. Heinlein A New Retief Story by Keith Laumer -- and many more All in the August issue of the new monthly IF! n IF  Short St His purposes were pure. His method was correct. His end was appaUing! G regory Swenn' basic problem was the manner of his rearing. Brought up by doting parents who -- as a business -- spent most of their time upon soapboxes on street corners exhorting passersby to "Repent before.it is too late!", young Gregory's view of life was apt to become a bit "slanted" as he grew up, a situation which his proud parents might have foretold had they realized the significance of his first spoken word, at the age of eight months. Some children began their communicative careers with "mama", others with "dada", and a few scions whose ancestry could be traced directly to certain prominent brokerage firms began their primal conversation by murmurring "money"; but young Gregory Swenn's first word was "Shame!" By the age of three, his vocabulary had improved to the extent of including innumerable cautionary expressions of the "Beware!", "Look out!" and "Consider!" genre, so that an hour spent in his urgently lisping company could reduce a steel-nerved stevedore to a whimpering jelly. By age five, Gregory had progressed far enough in intelligence to karn what this vocabulary referred to. It was then that he made his historic decision to devote his life to the same goals toward which his parents aimed. Gregory, however, decided upon a more direct route. After a reasonably normal apprenticeship in elementary and high schools (during the course of which Gregory spent most of his free time patrolling the streets with his pockets full of blackboard erasers and soap, to undo the damages wrought by other young men his age who wandered about practicing their calligraphy with colored chalk upon fences, sidewalks, and the walls of public washrooms), it came time to enter a university, a luxury Gregory could well afford, since -- when his parents and himself were engaged in passing the hat after a lecture -- he employed a ten-gallon Stetson with a false bottom. His doting parents asked him whether he would major in Basic Apologetics, or simply strive for a D. D. Gregory shocked these humble purveyors of righteousness by announcing, "I could learn, in either program, nothing which I already do not know. Therefore I intend to pursue a strict, concentrated major -- without electives or minors, hence not terminating in a degree, but that is a small matter -- in the relatively untapped field of Encephalic Phonology!" His parents, though quite poor, his statement to be a sophisticated utilization of foul language, they disowned him on the spot and hacked his soapbox into kindling. Undaunted, Gregory entered tlM university and began to learn for all he was worth. At the end of four years Gregory, now a pinch-faced, purse-lipped man of twenty-two years, had learnt all he needed to know on the subject. Quietly removing himself from the campus one night, he moved into a city apartment and began th construction of his famous Encephalophonolabialternater, a sort ol rfiortwave radio transmitter attuned to the frequencies of the humaa brain in the neuronic area controlling the use of lips, larynx, tongue, teeth and diaphragm. I n short, Gregory now could -- by the simple adjustment of a dial -- control the speech habits ol aU the people in the entire world. However, his scheme had ono flaw. Whereas he had hoped to entirely eliminate all profanity, vu garity, swearing, cursing and associated coarsenesses from humaa speech, leaving in their place a restful silence, he found that nature -- as usual abhorring a vacuum -- compromised to the extent of a substitute sound. This was a breathy vocalization quite close to a burbly whistle (such as those used by traffic policemen and camp counselors), which emerged from the lips of tha speaker in syllables that seemed ta say "weetl". "Well," sighed Gregory, "it is baiter than nothing, I guess. At least the words of the world will ba cleansed of decadent degradations." So saying, he plugged his maff chine into the wall outlet, set the dial and turned it on. Then, locking up the apartment, he set forth to stroll the streets of the city and see his tongue-tied utopia begin to bloom. Rounding a corner, Gregory chanced to collide with a gorillalike male who was three days unshaven, and wearing workman's clothing and a sour expression. "I beg your pardon," said Gregory, who was always extra-polite to people greater in size than himself. "Wyncha watch where the weetl you're goin'I" the man demanded, before shuffling off down the street. To his shift in speech mannerism he apparently paid no heed. Gregory stared after the man, bemused. 'Tt may be," he said to himself, "that people have become so inured to the use of profanity that the words have quite lost meaning for them." This bothered him terribly. "Little good it does," he pondered, "to eliminate the actual words, when the 'weetle' sound serves them as well!" He turned about and began hurrying back toward his apartment. There he discovered that he could not admit himself onto the premises, having unaccountably lost his wallet, his keys and one slightly used hankerchief. Then he recalled his encounter with the gorilla-like man, and the hasty manner in which the man had departed after the collision, not pausing to remonstrate nor resort to fisticuffs. "But," Gregory thought miserably, "I thought pickpockets were all small weasel-faced men who performed their art during parade and subway crushes! Disillusioned at this betrayal from a fellow man, Gregory began to thrust his inadequate shoulder against the door of his apartment, but it would not move. However, his efforts made sufficient commotion to incur the attentions of the building superintendent, who came upstairs on the run. "Weetl-o, Mr. Swenn," said the man, seeing him there in the corridor. "Can I be of some weetl p?" "Dear me!" gasped Gregory. "Even the innocent words are suffering. I thought my machine had more sense!" He clutched the superintendent by the suspenders. "You must unlock my door with your passkey," he pled, "lest it turn out that my efforts have done naught but supply the world with an allpurpose cuss-word!" "Why is your brow so weetlp with sweat?" inquired the man, prying Gregory's fingers from their elastic supports. "I'd expect such hysteria in a woman, but not in a person of the opposite weetl." "Open the door!" Gregory begged, weeping. "The machine is gaining on us! I had set the dial merely to block out the word 'weetl', but now it has advanced to the blockade of 'weetl' and 'weed', besides!" The superintendent stared blankly. "Maybe you'd better weetl down, Mr. Swenn," he suggested. "I mean it most weetlcerely," he added. G regory staggered back horrified at the progress his machine was making. Soon, he realized, it IF could be beyond the efforts of a person to order a weetinamon bun with his morning coffee! He staggered back even further as he realized that his very mind had been invaded by the onslaught of the machine. He could not so much as think of words like "weetr any more, let alone terms like "weetl" or 'Veetl"! Maddened he raced downstairs and into the street. He sprang into his car, stepped on the weed (the machine was against mention of intimate alimentary disorders), and let out the weed (against physical violations, also), then drove out toward the weed, whose stored-up reservoir provided the hydroelectric power that was even now running his machine. Not waiting for the green, he drove right through a weed weed at the intersection, and soon had a trail of angry motorcycle policemen following close weed him. But he arrived at the weed before they did, and raced for the entrance. But a spillage of water had weetlpened the weed, and Gregory, weetlpless to stop, fell weetlter-skelter off the front of the weetl into the turbines and was crushed to a pulp. By the time the untended machine had burnt itself out, the word 'Veetr' remained in the language as a verbal monument to its inventor, Gregory Swenn, who had by his efforts supplied the speaking world with a term used to reto to things so debased and unspeakable they had hitherto been even beyond the frank discussion of determined deI A lively, illusfroted explanation of a useful and fascinating branch of mathematics Experiments in Topology "Until Barr turned his thoughts toward topology it had never occured to anyone thot closed, one-sided surfaces such as Klein bottles and projective planes could be made sfmply by cutting and pasting sheets of paper... Yet it would be unfair to say that his book is no more than a collection of topological recreations. The play is mixed with important maHiematics, and there are occasional asides that plunge into deep waters." New York #, N. Y. mathemattctan named Klein Thought the Moebius band was divine. Said he: Tf you glue The edges of two, Youll get aweird ' bottle like miner The Mathenaufs IF  N#Mi#t# I I t happened on my fifth trip into the spaces, and the first ever made under the private enterprise acts. It took a long time to get the P.E.A. through Congress for mathenautics, but the precedents went all the .way back to the Telstar satellite a hundred years ago, and most of the concepts are in books anyone can buy, though not so readily understand. Besides, it didn't matter if BC-flight was made public or not. They sailed the star lanes In a mathematical abstractionand reached an unbelievable goal! All mathenauts are crazy. Everybody knows that. Take our crew. Johnny Pearl took a pin along whenever he went babysitting for the grad students at Berkeley, and three months later the mothers invariably found out they were pregnant again. And Pearl was our physcist. Then there was Goldwasser. Ed Goldwasser always sits in those pan-on-a-post cigarette holders when we're in New York, and if you ask him, he grumbles; "Well, its an ashiniy, aint k?" A punster aM a pataphysicist. I would never halve chosen him to go, except tfaH he and I got the idea together, so I couldn't say no. Ted Anderson was our metamathematician. He's about half a nanosecond behind Ephriam Cohen (the co-inventor of BC-flight) and has about six nervous breakdowns a month trying to pass him. But he's got the best practical knowledge of the BC-drive outside Princeton, if practical knowledge means anything with respect to a pure mathematical abstraction. And me -- topologist. A topologist is a man who can't tell a doughnut from a cup of coffee. (I'll explain that some other time.) Seriously, I specialize in some of the more abstruse properties of geometric structures. "Did Galois discover that theorem before or after he died?" is a sample of my conversation. Sure, mathenauts are mathenuts. But as we found out, not quite mathenutty enough. The ship, the Abrecht Dold, was a twelve googol scout that Ed Goldwasser and I'd picked up cheap from the N.Y.U. Courant Mathematical Sciences Institute. She wasn't the Princeton I.A.S. VonNeumann, with googolplex coils and a chapter of the D.A.R., and she wasn't one of those new toys you've been seeing for a rich man and his molecules, and the psychosomatics were straight from the Brill Institute at Harvard. A sweet ship. For psychic ecology we'd gotten a bunch of kids from the Bronx College of the New York City University, commonsense types -- business majors, engineers, pre-meds. But kids. I was looking over Ephraim Cohen's latest paper. Nymphomaniac Nested Complexes With Rossian Irrevelancies (old Ice Cream Cohen loves sexy titles), when the trouble started. We'd abstracted, and Goldwasser and Pearl had signalled me from the lab that they were ready for the first tests. I made the Dold invariant, and shoved off through one of the passages that linked the isomorphomechanism and the lab. (We kept the ship in free fall for convenience). I was about half way along the tube when the immy failed and the walls began to close in. S omeone (probably me) had scavenged the grablines to cut up for extra connectivity. I spread my legs and braked against the walls of the tube, believing with all my might. On second thought I let the walls sink in and braked with my palms. It would've been no trick to hold the walls for awhile. Without the immy my own imagination would hold them, this far from the B.C.N.Y. kids. But that might've brought more trouble -- I'd probably made some silly mistake, and the kids, who might not notice a simple contraction or shear, would crack up under some weirdomorphism. And if we lost the kids... So anyway I just dug my feet in against the mirage and tried to slow up, on a surface that no one'd bothered to think any friction into. Of course, if you've read some of the popular accounts of math-sailing. youd think Td fust duck back through a hcikt m the fiftieth dimension to the immy. But it doesn't work out that way. A ship in BCflight is a very precarious structure in a philosophical sense. That's why we carry a psychic ecology, and that's why Brill conditioning takes six years, plus with a Ph.D. in pure math, to absorb. As it was, there weren't a hundred mathenauts yet, and we'd been lucky to get Pearl and Anderson, despite their personalities. An)Tway, a mathenaut should never forget his postulates, or he'll find himself floating in #-space, with nary a notion to be named. Then the walls really did vanish -- NO! -- and I found myself at the junction of two passages. The other had a grabline. I caught it and rebounded, then swarmed back along the tube to the control room. About then the walls really did begin to cave in, till after ten seconds I was climbing down into a funnel. I caught my breath, swallowed some Dramamine, and burst into the control room. The heart of the ship was pulsing and throbbing. For a moment I thought I was back in Hawaii with my aqualung, an invader in a shifting, shimmering world of sea fronds and barracuda. But it was no immy, no immy -- a rubber room without the notion of distance that we take for granted (technically, a room with topological properties but no metric ones). To my eyes, it was as if everything had been transmuted to the finest, most pliable rubber, and chose to shift or swell as my gaze met it. Instrument racks and diairs and books sbnuik aad bd looned and twisted, and floor and ceiling vibrated with my breath. Ik was as if I had to keep thinking about everything for it to remain still. It was horrible. Ted Anderson was hanging in front of the immy, the isomorphomechanism, but he was in no shape to do anything. In fact, he was in no shape at all. His body was pulsing and throbbing and shaking, so his hands were too big or too small to manipulate the controls, or his eyes shrank or blossomed. Poor Ted's nerves had gone again. I shoved against the wall and bulleted toward him, a fish in a weaving, shifting undersea landscape, concentrating desperately on my body and the old structure of the room. (This is why physical training is so important). For an instant I was choking and screaming in a hairy blackness, a nightmare insideout total inversion; then I was back in the control room, and had shoved Ted away from the instruments, cursing when nothing happened, then bracing against the wall panels and shoving again. He drifted away. The immy was all right. The twiddles circuits between the B.C.N.Y kids and the rest of the Dold had been cut out. I set up an orthonormal system and punched the immy. Across the shuddering, shifting room Ted tried to speak, but found it too difficult. Great Gauss, he was lucky his aorta hadn't contracted to a straw and given him a coronary! I clamped down on my own circuIF latory system viciously, while he struggled to speak. Finally he kicked off and came tumbling toward me, mouthing and flailing his notebook. I hit the circuit. The room shifted about and for an instant Ted Anderson hung, ghostly, amid the isomorphomechanism's one to ones. He disappeared! II T he invention of BC-flight was the culmination of a century of work in algebraic topology and experimental psychology. For thousands of years men had speculated as to the nature of the world. For the past five hundred, physics and the physical sciences had held sway. Then Thomas Brill and Ephraim Cohen peeled away another layer of the reality onion, and the spacessciences came into being. If you insist on an analogy -- well, a scientist touches and probes the real universe, and abstracts an idealization into his head. Mathenautics allows him to grab himself by the scruff of the neck and pull himself up into the idealization. See -- I told you. Okay, we'll try it slowly. Science assumes the universe to be ordered, and investigates the nature of the ordering. In the "hard" sciences, mathematics is the basis of the ordering the scientist puts' on nature. By the twentieth century, a large portion of the physical processes and materials in the universe were found to submit to such an ordering (e.g.: analytic mechanics and the motions of the planets). Some scientists were even applying mathematical structures to aggregates of living things, and to living processes. Cohen and Brill asked (in ways far apart), "If order and organization seem to be a natural part of the universe, why can't we remove these qualities from coarse matter and space, and study them separately?" The answer was BC-flight. Through certain purely mathematical "mechanisms" and special psychological training, selected scientists (the term "mathenaut" came later, slang from the faddy "astronautics" that was current at the time), could be shifted into the abstract. The first mathenautical ships were crewed with young scientists and mathematicians who'd received Tom Brill's treatments and Ephraim Cohen's skullcracking sessions on the BC-field. The ships went into BC-flight and vanished. By the theory, the ships didn't go anywhere. But the effect was somehow real. Just as a materialist might see organic machines instead of peomathenauts saw the raw mathematical structure of space -- Riemann space, Hausdorf space, vector space -- without matter. A crowd of people existed as an immensely complicated something in vector space. The study of these somethings wae yielding immense amounts of knowledge. Pataphysics, patasociology, patapsychology were wild, baffling new fields of knowledge. But the math universes were strange, alien. How could you learn M to live in Flatland? The wildcat Blinds of the first crews were too creative. They become disoriented. Hence the immies (short for isomorphomechanisms) and their power supplies -- SayCows, DaughtAmSayCows, DaughtAmRevs, the B.C.N.Y. kids -- fatheads, stuffed Airts, personality types that clung to commonsense where there was none, and preserved (locally) a riiip's psychic ecology. Inside the BC-field, normalcy. Outside, raw knagination. Johnny, Ted, Goldy and I had ckosen vector spaces with certain loplogical properties to test Goldy's commercial concept. Outside the BC-field there was dimension but no distance, structure but no shape. Infide -- iiTy Riemann's tensorsP PearlD cried. He was at the iris of one of the tobes. A moment later Ed Goldwas#er joined him. "What happened to Ted?" "I -- I donH know. No -- yes I do!" I released the controls I had on my body, and stopped thinking about the room. The immy was working again. "He was doing something with the controls when the twiddles circuits failed. When I got diem working again and the room mapped back into shape, he happened to be where the immy had been. The commonsense circuits rejected him." "So where did he go?" asked Pearl. "I don't know." I was sweating. I wai diiakhig of all the things that could've happened when we lost the isomorphomechanism. Some subconscious twitch and you're rotated half a dozen dimensions out of phase, so you're floating in the raw stuff of thought, with maybe a hair-thin line around you to tell you where the ship has been, or maybe two polar dots. Or the ship takes the notion to shrink pea-size, so you're squeezed through all the tubes and compartments and smashed to jelly when we orthonormalize. Galois! We'd been lucky. The last thought gave me a notion "Could we have shrunk so we're inside his body? Or he grown so we're floating in his liver?" "No," said Goldy. "Topology is preserved. But I don't -- or, hell -- I really don't know. If he grew so big he was outside the psychic ecology, he might just have faded away..." The big pataphvsicist wrinkled up his face inside his beard. Alice should be required reading for matbenauts," he muttered reflectively. "The real trouble is no one has ever been outside the psychic ecology when a ship is in BCflight, and been back to tell about it. The animal experiments and the Norherf Wiener just never returned. And there were people, like Wilbur on the Paul R. Halmos. He just disappeared." "But you work outside the field," said Pearl, in a high, desperate voice. The psychist looked pale. "No," said Goldy. "I use, well --  'instruments', powered from the immy." IF Who knows wfcat couldVc happened?" I said, growing nervous myself. "You know you can map the volume of a sphere into the whole universe using the ratio: Ir: R equals R: Or where Ir and Or are the inside and outside distances for the points. Maybe that's what happened to Ted. Maybe he's just outside the math and his acne?" "Down boy," said Goldwasser. 'T've got a simpler suggestion. Let's check over the ship, compartment by compartment. Maybe he' in it somewhere, unconscious." ut he wasn't on the ship. We went over it twice, every tube, every compartment. (In reality, a mathenautic ship looks like a radio, ripped out of its case and flying through the air. We ended up in the ecology section, a big Broadway line subway car that roared and rattled in the middle of darkness in the middle of nothing. The B.C.N.Y. kids were all there -- Freddi Urbont clucking happily away to her boy friend, chubby and smily and an education major; Byron and Burbitt, electronics engineers, ecstatic over the latest copy of C'Quantum; Stephen Seidmann, a number theory major, quietly proving that since Harvard is the best school in the world, and B.C.N.Y. is better than Harvard, that B.C.N.Y. is the best school in the world; two citizens with nose jobs and names I'd forgotten, engaged in a filthy discussion' of glands and organs and meat. The walls were firm, the straw seats scratchy and uncomfortable. The projecton shewed we were just entering the #nd Street stop. How real, how comforting! I slid the door open to rejoin Johnny and Ed. The subway riders saw me slip into freefall, and glimpsed the emptiness of vector space. Hell broke loose! The far side of the car bulged inward, the glass smashing and the had no compensation training! Freddi Urbont burst into tears. Byron and Burbitt sqawcked and yelled as the bubble in the floor swallowed them. The wall next to the nose jobs sprouted a dozen phallic symbols, while the seal bubbled with breasts. The walls began to melt. Seidmann began to yell about the special status of N. Y. City University Honors Program students. All was in confusion, and my chest froze as I realized the psychic ecology was about to collapse. P earl acted with a speed and a surety I'd never have imagined. He shoved me out of the way and launched himself furiously at the other end of the car, now in free fall. There he pivoted, smiled horribly and at the top of his lungs began singing The Purple and the Black. Goldy and I had enough presence of mind to join him. Concentrating desperately on the shape and form of the car, we blasted the air with our devotion to Sheppard Hall, our love of Convent Avenue and our eternal devotion to Lewissohn Stags IF dium. Somehow it saved us. The room rumbled and twisted and reformed, and soon the eight of us were back in the tired old subway car that bi ought its daily catch of Beavers to #th Street. The equilibrium was still precarious. I heard Goldvvasser telling the nosejobs his terrible monologue about the "Volvo I want to buy. I can be the first to break the door membranes, and when I get my hands on that big, fat steering wheel, ohh!, it'll be a week before I climb out of it!" Pearl was cooing to Urbont how wonderful she was as the valedictorian at her Junior High, how great the teaching profession was, and how useful, and how interesting. As for me; "Well, I guess you're right, Steve. I should have gone to B.C.N.Y. instead of Berkeley." "That's right, Jimmy. After all, B.C.N.Y. has some of the best number theory people in the world. It's great to be a number theory major at B.C.N.Y. It's great to mumble and shout about infinite congruences and relative primes and know no one understands you, and wouldn't be interested if they did." "I guess you're right, Steve." "That's right, Jimmy. B.C.N.Y. has some of the greatest educators in the world. Like Dean Cashew, who started the Privileged Student Program. It sure is wonderful. At Berkeley you're just another student, but at B.C.N.Y. you can look down and laugh at all the people not in fb Privileged Student Program." "I guess you're right, Steve." "That's right, Jimmy. At B.C.N.Y. we have people that've turned dowi' full scholarships to Chicago anc M.I.T. Of course, I had to chop oft -- I mean they're quadruple ampu tees, but they love every minute down at the clinic." -- and so on. When the scrap paper and the gum wrappers were up to our knees and there were four false pan han dlers in the car, Johnny called i halt. The little psychist smiled anc nodded as he walked the three o: us carefully out the door. "Standard technique," he murmured to no one in particular. "Doing something immediately rather than the best thing a while later Their morale was shot, so I -- " He trailed off. "Are they really that sensitive?' Goldwasser asked. "I thought thei training was better than that." "You act like they were compo nents in an electronics rig," sai. Pearl jerkily. "You know that re medial sensory perception, the abil ity to percieve the dull routine tha' normal people ignore, is a very deli cate talent. Don't you realize wc mustn't interrupt their concentra with orthodox things, and especially now with the extraordinary!" Pearl was well launched. "In the dark ages such people were called dullards and subnormals. Only now in our enlightened age, do we realize their true ability to know things outside the ordinary senses -- a talent vital for BC-flight." The tedium and meaninglessness of life which we rationalize away -- "A ship is more mind than matter, and if you upset that mind -- Amm. I could hypnotize them. I could, but it fogs the. sense of reality. The sense of reality is very important to -- " He paled suddenly, and the corridor walls began to stutter. 'T, I think Fd better stay with them," he said quickly. "I know how to coach them, and it's better -- " He flung open the door and went back into the coach. Goldwasser and I looked at each other. Pearl was a trained mathenaut, and he'd panicked. But his specialty was people, not paramath. Well, let him stay where he was most effective, check the lab," I muttered. Neither of us spoke as we moved toward the lab -- slap a wall, pull yourself forward, twist round some instrumentation -- the "reaction swim" of a man in free fail. The walls began to quiver again, and I could see Goldy clamp down on his body and memories of this part of the ship. We were nearing the limits of the BC-field. The lab itself, and the experimental apparatus, stuck out into vector space. "Let's make our tests and go home," I told Goldy. "This trip has too much of the stink of failure about it." Neither of us mentioned Ted as we entered the lab. Ill R emember this was a commercial project. We weren't patasociologists studying abstract groups, or super-purists looking for the first point. We wanted money. Goldy thought he had a quick moneymaking scheme for us, but Goldy hasn't been normal since he took Polykarp Kusch's "Kusch of Death" at Columbia, "Electrodimensions and Magnespace." He was going to build four-dimensional molecules. Go back to Flatland. Imagine a hollow paper pyramid on the surface of that two-dimensional world. To a Flatlander, it is a triangle. Flop down the sides -- four triangles. Now put a molecule in each face -- one molecule, four molecules. Neat! And recall that you have infinite dimensions available. Think of the storage possibilities alone. All the books of the world in a viewer, all the food in the world in your pack. A television the size of a piece of paper; circuits looped through dim#. Loop an entire industrial plant through hyperspace, and get one the size and shape of a billboard. Shove raw materials in one side -- pull finished products out the other! But how do you make #-dim molecules? Goldy thought he had a way, and Ted Anderson had checked over the math and pronounced it workable. The notion rested in the middle of the lab: a queer, half-understood machine of mind and matter called a GrahmSchmidt generator. CC Teez, Ed! This lab looks like J your old room back in Diego Borough." "Yeah," said Goldwasser. "Johnny said it would be a good idea. Orientation against that That was the outside of the lab. IF raw topological space, without energy or matter or time. It was the shape and color of what you see in the back of your head. I looked away. Goldwasser's room was a duplicate of his old home -- the metal desk, the electronics rigs, the immense bookshelves, half-filled with with physics and half with religious works. I picked up a copy of Stack's Time and Eternity and thumbed through it, then put it down, embarrassed. "Good reading for a place like this." Goldwasser smiled. He sat down at the desk and began to check out his "instruments" from the locked drawer where he'd kept them. Once he reached across the desk and turned on a tape of Gene Gerard's Excelsior! The flat midwestern voice murmured in the background. "First, I need some hands," said Ed. "So -- " Out in the nothingness two pairs of lines met at right angles. For an instant, all space was filled with them, jammed together every which way. Then it just setted down to two. "Oooppps,," said Goldwasser. "Have to remember that they are just representatives of their equivalence classes. I don't want to fill up all space with my fumblings. Besides, that would twist everything one dimension, and then we'd be back where we started." The lab was in darkness, so in the dimness Goldwasser's big form seemed to crouch menacing over the controls. He wore his engineer's boots and his hair long, and a beard as well. He might have been some medieval monk, or primitive witchdoctor, mumbling spells and setting incantations. He touched a knob and set a widget, and checked in hit copy of Birkhoff and MacLane. "Now," he said, and played witb his instruments. Two new vectctti rose out of the intersections. "Crossproducts. Now I've a right and a left-handed system." All the while Gene Gerard was mumbing in the background: "The Count and Igor his vjervant took the beautiful maiden down to the crypt. 'Ah, now, my pretty snarled the Count. 'Come to my bedchamber, or I'll leave you to Igor's mercies.' The misshapen dwarf cackled and rubbed his paws. 'Decide, decide!' cried the count His voice was a scream. 'Decide, my "Augh," said Goldwasser, and shut it off. "Now," he said, "I've got somo plasma in the next compartment I'm going to release it, and shift tho ions one dimension. His hands poised over the G. S. generator. "Holy Halmos," I whispered. Ted Anderson stood beside tha generator. He looked thinner and paler than ever. The metamathematician's acne stood out plainly and I remembered Pearl's remark that ha didn't know if he should call Ted a Whitehead or a Blackhead. T ed smiled, and went into topological convulsions. I looked away, and presently he came back in to shape. "Hard getting used ta real space again," he whispered. fl "I haven't got long," he said, as that was how he'd planned to start, "so here it is. You know I was working on Ephraim's theories, looking for a flaw. You know the popular explanations of mathenautics. Brill's hypnotherapy and Ephraim's math allow the consciousness to become aware of the abstract structure it put on the universe." I winced, and he smiled painfully at me. "That's for the kiddies," he said, and I saw that Pearl was standing in the iris of the tube. Johnny was stronger than I'd thought! "There isn't any flaw," he said. As he did he seemed to grow thin. "Ted, you're rotating," I cautioned. He steadied, and continued. "There's no flaw. But the theory is wrong. It's backwards. This is the real universe" he said, and gestured. Beyond the lab topological space remained as always, a blank, the color of the back of your head through your own eyes. "Now listen to me, Goldy and Johnny and Kidder. What is the nature of intelligence? I guess it's the power to abstract, to conceptualize. I don't know what to say beyond that -- and I doubt if I ever will. I don't know what it is. But I know where it came from! Here! In the math spaces -- they're alive with thought, flashing with mind! "When the twiddles circuits failed I cracked. I fell apart, lost faith in it all. For I had just found what I though was a basic error in theory. I died, I vanished... "But I didn't. I'm a metamathematician. An operational philosopher, you might say. I may have gone IF mad -- but I think I passed a threshold of knowledge. I understand... "People think that math and science people are cranks -- fellows that can only get passionate about a differential equation, like that Seidmann fellow. But it isn't like that at all. Math and science are beautiful and mysterious arts. The theory of infinity -- "They're out there. The things we thought we'd invented ourselves. The concepts and the notions and the pure structures -- if you could see them..." He looked around the room, desperately. Pearl was rigid against the iris of the tube. Goldy looked at Ted for a moment, then his head darted from side to side. His hands whitened on the controls... "Jimmy," Ted said. I didn't know. I moved towards him, across the lab to the edge of topological space, and beyond the psychic ecology... "But how can I say it? How many people can stay awake over a book of modern algebra, and how many of those can understand? -- I saw a set bubbling and whirling, then take purpose and structure to itself and become a group, generate a second unity element, mount itself and become a group, generate a second unity element, mount itself and become a field, ringed by rings. Near it, a mature field, shot through with ideals, threw off a splitting field in a passion of growth, and became complex. -- saw the life of the matrices; the young ones sporting, adding an# multiplying by a constant, the mature ones mating by composition: male and female make male, femaln and male make female -- sex through anticommutivity! I saw them grow old, meeting false identities and loosing rows and columne into nullity. -- I saw a race of vectors, losing their universe to a newer race ol tensors that conqured and humbled them. -- I watched the tyranny of the Well Ordering Principle, as a fren set was lashed and whipped intn structure. I saw a partially ordered set, free and happy, broken before the Axioms of Zemelo. -- I saw the point sets, with their clicks and clubs, infinite numbers of sycophants clustering round a Bolzano -- Weirstrauss aristocrat -- the great compact medieval coverings of infinity with denumerable shires -- the conflicts as closed sets created open ones, and the other way round. -- I saw the rigid castes of a society of transformations, orthogonal royalty, inner product gentry, degenerates -- where intercomposition set the caste of the lower on the product. -- I saw the proud old cyclic groups, father and son and grandson, generating the generations, rebel and blacksheep and hero, following each other endlessly. Close by were the permutation groups, frolicking in a way that seemed like the way you sometimes repeat a sentence endlessly, stressing a different word each time. n There was much I saw that I did not understand, for mathematics is a deep, and even a mathenaut must choose his wedge of specialty. But that world of abstractions flamed with a beauty and meaning that chilled the works and worlds of men, so I wept in futility. Presently we found ourselves back in the lab. I sat beside Ted Anderson and leaned on him, and I did not speak for fear my voice would break... A nderson talked to Johnny and Ed. "There was a -- a race, here, that grew prideful. It knew the Riemann ace, and the vector space, the algebras and the topologies, and yet it was unfulfilled. In some way -- oddly like this craft, he murmured, gesturing -- "they wove the worlds together, creating the real universe you knew in ycur youth. "Yet still it was unsatisfied. Somehow the race yearned so for newness that it surpassed itself, conceiving matter and energy and entropy and creating them. "And there were laws and properties for these: inertia, speed, potential, quantumization. Perhaps life was an accident. It was not noticed for a long time, and proceeded apace. For the proud race had come to know itself, and saw that the new concepts were... flawed." Anderson smiled faintly, and turned to Ed. "Goldy, remember when we had Berkowitz for algebra," he asked. "Remember what he said the first day?" Goldwasser smiled. "Any math majors? "Hmm, that's good. "Any physics majors? "Physics majors! You" guys are just super engineers! "Any chemistry majors? "Chemistry major! You'd be better off as a cook!" Ted finished, "And so on, down to the, ahem, baloney majors." "He was number happy," said Ed. smiling. "No. He was right, in a way." Ted continued. "The race had found its new notions were crudities, simple copies of algebras and geometries past. What it thought was vigor was really sloth and decay. "It knew how to add and multiply, but it had forgotten what a field was, and what commutivity was. If entropy and time wreaked harm on matter, they did worse by this race. It wasn't interested in expeditions though the fiber bundles; rather it wanted to count apples. "There was conflict and argument, but it was too late to turn back. The race had already degenerated too far to turn back. Then life was discovered. "The majority of the race took matter for a bride. It's esthetic and creative powers ruined, it wallowed in passion and pain. Only remnants of reason remained. "For the rest, return to abstraction was impossible. Time, entropy, had robbed them of their knowledge, their heritage. Yet they still hoped and expended themselves to leave, well, call it a 'seed' of softs." "Mathematics?" cried Pearl. IF It explains some things," mused Goldwasser softly. "Why abstract mathematics, developed in the mind, turns out fifty years or a century later to accurately describe the physical universe. Tensor calculus and relativity, for example. If you look at it this way, the math was there first." "Yes, yes, yes. Mathematicians talked about their subject as an art form. One system is more 'elegant' than another if its logical structure is more austere. But Occam's Razor, the law of simplest hypothesis, isn't logical. "Many of the great mathematicians did their greatest work as children and youths before they were dissipated by the sensual world. In a trivial sense, scientist and mathematicians most of all are described as 'unworldly'... Anderson hobbled his head in the old familiar way. "You have almost returned," he said quietly. "This ship is really a heuristic device, an aid to perception. You are on the threshhold. You have come all the way back." The metamathematician took his notebook, and seemed to set all his will upon it. "See Ephriam gets this," he murmured. "He, you, I... the oneness -- " Abruptly he disappeared. The notebook fell to the floor. I took it up. Neither Ed nor Johnny Pearl met my eyes. We may have sat and stood there for several hours, numbed, silent. Presently the two began setting up the isomorphomechanism for realization. I joined them. IV "The National Mathenautics and A Hyperspace Administration had jurisdiction over civilian flights then, even as it Joes today. Ted was pretty important it seemed. Our preliminary debriefing won us a maximum security session with their research chief. Perhaps, as I'd thought passionately for an instant, I'd have dona better to smash the immy, rupture the psychic ecology, let the eggshell be shattered at last. But that's not the way of it. For all of our progress, some rules of scientific investigation don't change. Our first duty was to report back. Better heads than ours would decide what to do next. They did. Ephraim Cohen didn't say anything after he heard us out and looked at Ted's notebook. Old Ice Cream sat there, a big teddybear-shaped genius with thick black hair and a dumb smile, and grinned at us. It was in Institute code. The B.C.N.Y. kids hadn't sees anything, of course. So nobody talked. Johnny Pearl married a giii named Judy Shatz and they had fifteen kids. I guess that showed Johnny's views on the matter of matter. Ed Goldwasser got religion. ZeoJudaism is pretty orthodox these days, yet somehow he found it suited him. But he didn't forget what had happened back out in space. His book. The Cosmic Mind, came out last month, and it's a good summation of Ted's ideas, with a minimum ff of piritual overtones. Myself. Well, a mathematician, especially a topologist, is useless after thirty, the way progress is going along these days. But Dim-Dustries is a commercial enterprise, and I guess Tm good for twenty years more as a business man. Goldwasser's Grahm Schmidt generator worked, but that was just the beginning. Dimensional extension's made Earth a paradise, with housing hidden in the probabilities and automated industries tucked away in the dimensions. The biggest boon was something no one anticipated. A space of infinite dimensions solves all the basic problems of modern computer circuit design. Now all components can be linked with short electron paths, no matter how big and complex the device. There have been any number of other benefits. The space hospitals, for example, where topological surtlona of et hera... can persuade them to DO on Psychlo Dominance ahowi you In easy-toDynamic Telepathy and Thought Control. Make othen obey you and the world is wide rnabed to you by retom mail in plain thrilled or money back. Send only # to # Konba Driye Yukon, Okla. # gery can cure the most terrible wounds -- and topological psychiatry the most baffling syndromes. (Four years of math is required for pre-meds these days.) Pata-psychology and pata-sociology finally made some progress, so that political and economic woes have declined -- thanks too to the spaces, which have drained off a good deal of poor Earth's over-population. There are even spaces resorts, or so I'm told -- I don't get away much. I 've struck it lucky. Fantastically so. The Private Enterprise Acts had just been passed, you'll recall, and I had decided I didn't want to go spacing again. With the training required for the subject, I guess I was the only qualified man who had a peddler's pack too. Jaffee, one of my friends down at Securities and Exchange, went so far as to say that Dim-Dustries was a hyperspherical trust (math is required for pre-laws too.) But I placated him and I got some of my mathemateers to realign the Street on a moebius strip, so he had to side with me. Me, I'll stick to the Earth. The "real" planet is a garden spot now, and the girls are very lovely. Ted Anderson was recorded lost in topological space. He wasn't the first, and he was far from the last. Twiddles circuits have burned out, NaughtAm-Revs have gone mad, and no doubt there have been some believers who have sought out the Great Race. Ted, I did what I thought was IF IF  Short Str#i Spacemen don't interfere with primitive worlds. Of course, one little act can't matter -- I t was about the size of a grapefruit, and about the color of one. From its top sprouted a cluster of thin, ribbonish tentacles -- translucent, filled with shifting shades of violet and chartreuse, far tougher than they looked. Four pedal extremities, oddly like thumbs with long claws, stuck out from the bottom. It had two flat, pink eyes, set very close together. It squealed as Ray Caradac carried it at arm's length into the control room of the Manta. "Look what w have here," I m said grimly. Mary Caradac -- small, brunette, snapping-eyed, the other half of Extraterrestrial Explor-ation Team #I -- looked up from the bitchboard, where she had been dialing their course away from Sirius IV. "What on Earth -- "she gasped. "On SiriuSy' Ray corrected. "O good old Sirius IV, which we seeni not to have escaped quite as completely as we thought we had." "A baby Sirian!" "That's my guess, from thi glimpses we got of the natives." Astrocharts from her lap, and reachf# cd for the creature. Ray relinquished it, looking disgusted. While Mary cradled it in both hands, he moved three steps across the narrow, instrument-cluttered control room to snap on the rear screen. He focused the screen with one hand, rubbed his home-made crew-cut with the other. Behind him, the Sirian infant squealed, a sound like a viola harmonic. "Where'd you find it?" Mary asked. "Under my bed, of all places. I went to shove my suit-boots under it and change into sneakers, and the critter let out a squeal and damned near scared me out through the side of the ship." "What was it doing thereT "Ask i#." Ray stared glumly out at the dull green globe of Sirius IV, already thirty thousand miles away and retreating at ninety m.p.s. "Maybe it wanted to see the Universe, or just get the hell off its planet. I can understand that, after two hours on the godforsaken ice ball." "It probably likes minus thirty just fine. It's probably roasting right now, poor thing." R ay turned from the gazer. Mary was cuddling the Sirian infant to her breast and fanning it with one hand... "Look out," he said dryly. "It might bite." "So do human babies. Besides, it hasn't got any teeth." Ray looked at the tiny pink mouth, opening and closing horizantally under the eyes like sliding doors. He'd seen enough cockeyed life-forms not to shudder. "Why, look, it couldn't have wandered in," Mary said, twiddling one of the stubby legs. She set it on the chart file, where it immediately went plop on its rounded bottom, legs sticking out like a newborn kitten's. "It can't even stand up." She flashed a hand in front of the pink eyes, and filmy eyelids blinked. The tentacles waved. "I'm no judge of Sirian agp, but I'll bpt it's darned young." She looked wise and extended a finger and two tentacles curled around it, tugging it gently toward the mouth. "Uh, uh," she said. "Not a nipple, son. There, Ray -- you see?" She picked it up again. Another squeal. "I wasn't arguing," he said absently. Then, plaintively: "Just what the devil are we supposed to do with a Sirian infant? And how did it get here, if it can't walk under its own steam?" "Under someone else's, obviously," Mary said practically. Then she paused and cocked her head. Her eyes widened. "Good God! I wonder... come on Ray, let's go look where you found it. I have a perfectly wonderfully preposterous hunch!" They went single-file down the narrow corridor that led to sleeping quarters, Mary carrying the infant. There she waited for Ray to open the door -- as she would have done even if she hadn't had her hands full. The Caradacs had decided long ago that such little niceties should be IF carefully and lovingly observed from nowhere. Things like love and sex can get awfully pedestrian in a sixty-foot spacer, if you don't care for them right. Inside, Mary put the Sirian on Joe's bed and said, "Hold it there." Ray sat down beside the creature and put one hand on its back -- the surface # from eyes and mouth -- and pressed gingerly. Squeal. "I wonder what it eats," he said sourly. Mary was head and shoulders under the bed. She said, "Ah, hah!" and emerged with a handful of dried, crinkly-looking leaves. They smelled faintly like cinnamon. The Sirian's tentacles went zing! and it squealed an octave above any previous effort. "Feed it," Mary said, going under the bed again. Ray put a pinch of the leaves on the blanket, and released the creature, keeping one hand poised to see that it didn't roll off the bed. It dug the claws of its front feet into the blanket, hiked itself toward the leaves, opened its mouth and crunched away. Ray watched, eyes a little glazed. "What -- ?" Mary's head appeared again. In one hand she held more dried leaves; in the other a crude basket about a foot square, high sided, woven of some broad, reddish fiber. She squatted there, holding the basket, and looked at Ray, It took Ray about six seconds to get it. He looked down at the creature, happily chewing leaves, up again at Mary's face. His jaw dropped. She was beginning to grin. Ray clapped a hand unbelievingly to the side of his head, so hard his ears rang. "God in Heaven," he said. "A foundling!" "Basket and all," Mary said. "Only the pathetic note from the mother is lacking." #h, no, it's crazy!" "Crazy or not, it's here." Mary touched a hand to the tentacles, and there was a squeal -- a happy-sounding squeal. "But why?" Ray gasped. "Why should a Sirian mother -- dressed is a threadbare Sirian shawl, no doubt -- abandon her baby in our ship?" "Why do mothers in threadbare shawls usually abandon babies?" "M'm. Because they can't support them. Or because they're illegitimate, or something." "In this case it's probably just something. I don't think it could be a matter of supporting it. A B-# culture's too darned primitive for that. They live right off the soil. This stuff -- "Mary pinched a handful of leaves she'd put on the blanket -- "was everywhere we walked. As for legitimacy, that's never an issue in the pre-M series -- " "Tut," said Ray, academically aroused. "You're assuming, honey. You need ten decimals after B-#, or anything else to really classify. Forbidden fruits all over the place. Besides, maybe our little friend here isn't a waif at all. Maybe we were taken for gods, and it's a sacrifice." Tn a basket? Brought right into this big old terrifying ship?" "Oh, hell, # don't know. Motive X, for alien. That B-# status drove #f U# off the planet so fast... Scram! hands off! clear out! dont influence! and all the rest of Article #, Section #, paragraphs #, #, # and # of the Extraterrestrial Explor -- " "Not a nipple," Mary said, disengaging her finger again. "You know, Ray, I think it's thirsty." Ray glowered at the creature. "I wonder what i: drinks?" "Try water -- but be careful." Ray filled a glass of water from the tiny basin in the corner and held it close to the verticle pink mouth. The mouth wrinkled. The little Sirian scrabbled backward and pressed into the pillow. "So water's out," Ray grunted. He put the glass on the low table between the beds knocking over two pawns and the black queen. "So now what? My God, didn't whoever or whatever left the critter here have sense enough to realize that handful of leaves wouldn't last forever? That we might not have whatever they drink for water?" C#f course not," Mary said placidly. "Now who's assuming? What can you expect of a B-#... a cosmology? Food and water, or their equivalents, have always been around: therefore food and water are everywhere. A B-# couldn't have the slightest idea of what this ship is, or what we are, or where we're from or going and how and why -- " "Then why was the food left?" "Maybe to keep our friend happy until we found it. Oh, I don't know either! I'm just as puzzled as you are. But I do know what we've got to do now." "What?" "Take it back. It'll die if we don't." Ray sat down on the other bed and glared at the two who sat on his Mary and the Sirian infant, which had ceased eating and was now cleaning the waxy skin around its mouth with a tentacle. "Sure," he said. "Take it back. Violate every damned rule in the book. Take a chance on Influencing, by letting them see us again. One time is bad enough -- but the B series have short memories.  Most of it gets corrupted by legend, and after a couple of centuries the legends are obliterated by more recent events and interpretations. But a second time? That's the time that clicks." "We have to, anyway. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe it isn't a B -- " "Honey, I studied forty years not to be wrong. I can look at three artifacts, two flora, the dials on my spy-eye, and write a history." Mary looked stubborn. "We take it back. This isn't in the books." "Maybe they'll tear it to pieces if we do," Ray argued. "Maybe it's a freak -- a sport. Maybe that's why it landed up with us. We might be if we don't, so you get right on up to the board and get us back to that planet. Look how thirsty it is... hey, not a nipple, damn it!" The infant squealed, eyeing the finger. "Nobody'll ever know, Ray. We can't let the poor thing die." Ray sighed and raised his brows. IP Then he lowered one and winked at her. 'What do I get?" "A lot of nothing if you don't." Mary grinned at his back. M y mate dead. She die having little one. I sorry. She best mate. But I sorrier for little one. Soon they kill him. Why kill little ones when mother die having them? Priest say because they kill mother and now no mother to drink from. So they die anyway. But they not kill mother. That what I think. Not their fault. And other mothers with dead little ones. No little ones to drink them. Why not... why not... do for each other? But priest say no. He say they bad. Must die because kill mother. He say he must drink from mothers with dead little ones to keep magic power. He get fat. This go on for long long time. Many thousand suns. But I wonder if he really have magic power or just want to stay fat. Soon priest come to take little one away and kill him. I sorry. Then I think of shiny thing that come down by village out of sky. Everybody afraid. Priest tell us to stay away. Tell us gods angry. Tell us to stay in huts. Things come out of shiny thing. Tall and different. They walk through village. Everybody afraid. I afraid too. But they don't hurt. Don't kill. Don't break huts and eat like animals. T more sorry for little one than afraid. I no let priest kill him. While tall different things walk in village I go out with little one. Nobody see. Everybody afraid to look out. I take little one to shiny thing. Cave in side. I afraid but nothing happen. I take little one into cave and hide him. Leave food so he not cry and priest hear. I think maybe tall different things kill him when find him. But they no hurt when walk in village. And priest take long long time to kill little one if find him. So I hope tall different things treat little one good. I go back to village. Tall different things coming, I hide. They pass. I go into village. Everybody coming out. We see shiny thing go into sky. Everybody afraid. Priest most afraid. He say tall different things bad gods. They angry. Must sacrifice. He want little one to sacrifice. I afraid. I make up story. I say tall different things good gods. I say they take little one away ones wrong. They come to save him. Priest say I lie. I say he lie. I say good gods kill him if he kill more little ones when mothers die. Everybody listen. They say tall different ones didn't hurt. Didn't kill. Maybe I right. Maybe tall different ones really good gods. Priest say not true. He make up story. He say bad gods come because he call them to come take little one away and eat him. He say he call gods to take little one! But I know he lie because they no take. I put little one in shiny thing. But I don't say or they kM kill me for lying. I stick to stOTy. I tell everybody tall different ones good gods. Come to save little one. Priest say they bad gods. Come to take little one and eat him. Come to take us and eat us if we not believe priest. Everybody say wait for sign. Priest say kill me but everybody say wait. Lots of fathers like me. for long time. But they afraid. Priest say it right. He say gods tell him to. We wonder. Maybe priest just want to be priest. Everybody afraid of priest. Give him best food and best mates. We wait. I cry that night. T he airlock hissed. Ray Caradac came in, wearing his spacesuit against Sirius IV's icy cold, but not the helmet -- the planet was breathable. Mary was waiting. "I saw you coming through the gazer. Mow'd it go?" Ray grinned sourly as he zipped down the chest of his suit. Frost CCCCCC rC I i They sf rove fo make a new Eden of fhe Moont Complete Short Novel by Poul Anderson by Damon Knight by Harry Harrison jf on sale now! by Philip Jose Farmer chipped off the metallic doth. didn't leave it out in the brush as I'd planned. Afraid an animal would get it. I waited until dark and then went to the village. They pull in their sidewalks early -- not a soul stirring. I snuck in quiet as I could, and right in the middle of it the damned critter started squealing its fool head off. Familiar smells or something, I suppose. So I just set it down and walked dignifiedly out of the place. Don't know whether anybody saw me, but I suspect they did. Damn -- after all the trouble we went to landing way out here. I looked back at the edge of the brush, and there was a crowd around the kid." He stepped out of the suit and turned to rack it by the airlock, wearing only the standard padded diaper affair. "Funny thing... I thought I saw a light flashing. A white light. But, hell, that's impossible -- unless they have wood that burns white on this clod. Maybe I was seeing things." "Well, I certainly hope it's all right," Mary said. "Shame if they did kill it, poor little thing." Ray stood a moment at the gazer, looking out at the moons-lit brush. "I hope so too, honey. Well -- " he turned to the board -- "let's get out of here, and fast! Before Article #, Section # fights its way right out of the book and jumps down our throats." He paused as the A. G. unit caught, hummed loudly, then softly and steadily as they rose from Sirius IV. "I wonder if it will affect them?' It wasn't until next planetfall, eight months later, that Ray noticed IF that his pencil-flash was missing from his spacesuit breast-pocket. He asked Mary about it and Mary thought startledly; Not a nippier and said not believing it, "Oh, it'll turn up, one place or another." N ext darkness we hear noise. We see tall different one go away. The good gods bring my little one back! Priest come out. Everybody say you wrong. You lie. Gods not eat little one! Priest afraid. He say they bad gods. Bring little one back for sacrifice. They good gods. Little one has cold fire in hand. He throw cold fire at priest. This a new strange thing. God thing. It is a sign! We kill priest. Take him out for the animals to eat. I happy. Everybody like little one. He friend of good gods. Other mothers take care of him. Let him drink. Let other little ones drink. Do for each other, I happy because good gods bring him back to His people, and the First Night did ring with rejoicing; for He had returned from the Land Beyond the Sky and He said unto those who waited They are Good Gods, and I am Their Messenger, and lo! They have given to me a fragment of the Sun that I may shed light over darkness and open your eyes to good and gentle ways. And the false Priests said unto Him, Prove that you speak Truth; and in wrath He smote the Priests with the great light He carried, and lo! the false Priests were unmasked, and fled into the wilderness where they were devoured by wild beasts. Then the people cried, Welcome, and bade Him lead tn, and He said. Care for me, my Children, until I am able. So He was anointed, and fed, and in two suns had grown to manhood; and then He led His People from the valley and taught them to love...  "Always," mused the young Galac Federation student. "Always they come to fill a need. But where dc they come from? What really are their acts? Where do they go?" He closed the Sirian Bible and put it aside, and picked up another.k I 'k... J M One of his companions was human but dead. The other was living -- tk  'k t but was if a man? Complete Short Novel by Gordon R. Dickson by Jack Sharkey #b #b lb lb H lb if if lb lb lb I # by Philip K. Dick k by J. T. McIntosh i  i  i m IF  tim#UH# He wcfs no longer human, yet he must battle on humanity's side against the deadly creature from the stars! I N at Cemp, a class C SiUde, awakened in his selective fashion, and perceived with the receptors that had been asleep that he was now quite close to the ship which he had first sensed approaching an hour before. Momentarily, he softened the otherwise steel-hard chitinous structure of his outer skin, so that the area became sensitive to light waves in the visual spectrum. These he now recorded through a lens arrangement that utilized a portion of the chitin for distance viewing. There was a sudden pressure in his body as it adjusted to the weakening of the barrier between it and the vacuum of space. He experienced the peculiar sensation of the stored oxygen in the chitin being used up at an excessive rate -- vision was always extremely demanding of oxygen. And then, having taken a series of visual measurements, he hardened the chitin again. Instantly, oxygen consumption returned to normal. What he had seen with his telescopic vision system upset him. It was a V ship. Now the Vs, as Cemp knew, did not normally attack a full-grown Silkie. But there had been reports recently of unusual V activity. Several Silkies had been psychologically harassed. This group might conceivably discover where he was heading and use all their energy to prevent him. Even as he pondered whether to avoid them or to board them -- as Silkies often did -- he sensed that the ship was shifting its course ever so slightly in his direction. The decision was made for him. The Ws wanted contact. In terms of space orientation, the ship was neither up nor down in relation to him. But he sensed the ship's own artificial gravity and adopted it as a frame of reference. By that standard its approach was somewhat below him. As Cemp watched it with upper range perception that registered in his brain like very sharp radar blips, the ship slowed, made a wide turn and presently was moving in the same direction as he but at a slightly slower speed. If he kept going as he was, he would catch up with it in a few minutes. C emp did not veer away. In the blackness of space ahead and below, the V ship grew large. He had measured it as being about a mile wide, half a mile thick and three miles in length. Having no breathing apparatus, obtaining his oxygen as he did entirely by electrolytic interchange, Cemp could not sigh. But he felt an equivalent resignation, a sadness at the bad luck that had brought him into contact with such a large group of V's at so inopportune a time. As he came level with it, the ship lifted gently until it was only yards away. In the darkness on the deck below. Cemp saw that several dozen V's were waiting for him. Like himself, they wore no spacesuits, for they were for the time being completely adjusted to the vacuum of space. In the near background. Camp could see a lock that led into the interior of the ship. The outer chamber was open. Through its transparent wall he sensed the water that was inside. A basic longing in Cemp twinged with anticipatory pleasure. He reacted with a startled shudder, then thought in dismay: "Am I that close to the change?" Cemp, in the Silkie stage entirely a creature of space, settled awkwardly on the deck. The special bone structures that had once been legs were sensitive to molecular activity within solid masses; and so it was through energy interchanges within the bone itself that he felt himself touch the metal. In a sense, then, he stood there. But he balanced himself with energy flows, and not by any muscular contractions and expansions. There were no muscles. And it was with magnetic force that he attached himself to the deck, and with internal control that he moved, one after the other, the virtually solid blocks of highly differentiated bone. He walked forward like a twolegged being, feeling the stretch of the elasiicized bone of his legs. Walking was an intricate procedure for him. It meant softening the tough bone each time, then rehardening. Although he had learned long ago how to walk, still he was slow. He who could streak through space at # G's acceleration walked on the deck f the V liner at a mile an hour, and was happy that he could show a semblance of movement in such an environment. He walked to where the V's stood, pausing a few feet from the nearest chunky figure. At first look, a V seemed to be a slightly smaller Silkie, but Cemp knew that these bitter creatures were Variants. V for Variant. It was always difficult to determine which type of V one was looking at. The differences were internal and not readily detectable. And so he had his first purpose: to establish the identity of the V's on this ship. H e utilized that function in his brain which, before it was understood had been labeled telepathy. to communicate his message. There was a pause, and then a V -- who stood well back in the group -- replied with the same communication method: "We have a reason, sir, for not identifying ourselves. And so we ask you to please bear with us until you understand our problems." "Secrecy is illegal," Cemp replied curtly. The answer was surprisingly free of the usual V hostility. ue not trying to be difficult," the V sakL "My name is Ralden, and we want you to see something." "What?" "A boy, now nine years old. He'i the V child of a Silkie and a breather, and he recently showed extreme variant qualities. We want permission to destroy him." "Oh!" said Cemp. He was instantly disturbed. He had a fleeting awareness that his son, from his own first mating period, would now be nine. Relationship, of course, didn't matter. Silkies never saw their children. His training required him to put all Silkie offspring on the same footing. But it was one of the nightmares of the uneasy peace that reigned among the ordinary humans, the Special People, and the two surviving classes of Silkies, that a high-ability V would show up some day in the unstable world of Variants. The fear had proved unfounded. From time to time. Silkies who boarded the V ships learned that some promising boy had been executed by the V's themselves. Far from welcoming a superior child, the V's seemed to fear that if allow'ed to become full-grown he would be a natural leader, and would threaten their freedom. The extermination of promising boys now required the permission of a Silkie, which explained the secrecy. If they didn't obtain permission, they might still kill the youngster, trusting that the murder shin would never be identified. IF "Is that the reason?" Cemp demanded. It was. C emp hesitated. He sensed within himself all that remarkable complex of sensations that meant that he was about to change. This was no time for him to spend a day or so aboard a V ship. Yet if he didn't stay, it would be tantamount to granting permission for the execution, sight unseen. And that, he realized, could not be permitted. "You have done well," he communicated gravely. "I shall come aboard." The entire group of V's moved along with him to the lock, huddling together as the great steel door rolted shut behind them, closing them away from the vacuum of space. The water came in silently. Cemp could see it exploding intogas as it poured into the utter emptiness in the lock, but presently, as the narrow space filled up, it began to hold its liquor form, and it roiled and rushed around everybody's lower extremities. The feel of it was exquisitely pleasurable. Cemp's bones kept softening automatically, and he had to fight to hold them hard. But when the water closed over the upper part of his body, Gemp let the living barrier that made up his outer skin grow soft. Because the feel of the water excited him, now that the change was so near, he had to exercise a conscious restraint. He wanted to suck the warm delightful liquid with visible enjoyment through the gills that were now being exposed. But it seemed to him that such a display of exuberance might give away his condition to the more experienced V's. Around him, the V's were going through the transformation from their space forms to their normal gill state. The inner lock opened, and the entire group swam through with a casual ease. Behind them, the inner lock door slid shut -- and they were inside the ship itself, or rather in the first of the many big tanks that made up the interior. Cemp, using his vision now, looked around for identifying objects. But it was the usual dim watery world with transplanted sea life. Sea weeds swayed in the strong currents that -- Cemp knew -- were kept in motion by a powerful pumping system. He could feel the surge of the water at each impulse from the pumps. As always, he began to brace himself for that surge, accepting it, letting it become one of the rhythms of his life. II C emp had no problems in this environment. Water was a natural element for him, and in the transformation from Silkie to human fish he had lost only a few of his Silkie abilities. All that Silkie inner world of innumerable sensations remained. There were nerve centers which, both separately and in combination, tuned in on different energy flows. In early days, they would have been called senses. But instead of the five to which, for so # IF many centuries, human beings had limited their awareness, the Silkie could record # different kinds of sense-impressions over a wide range of intensity. The amount was on immense amount of internal "noise". Incessantly stimulation poured in upon him. From his earliest days, control of what his sense receptors recorded had been the principal objective of his training and education. The water flowed rhythmically through his gills. Cemp swam with the others through a watery fairyland. It was a warm, tropical sea. As he looked ahead, he saw that the water universe was changing because of their approach. The coral was a new, creamier color. Ten thousand sea worms had withdrawn their bright heads into their tiny holes. Presently, as the group passed, they began to come out again. The coral turned orange, then purple and orange, then other shades of colors and combinations. It was one tiny segment of the submarine landscape. A dozen fishes in blues and greens and purples darted up the canyon. Their wild beauty was appealing. They were an old life form, Nature-evolved, untouched by the magic 'of scientific knowledge that had finally solved so many of the mysteries of life. Cemp reached with webbed fingers for a fish that darted close to him. It whirled away in a flurry of momentarily whitened waters. Cemp grinned happily, and the warm water washed into his open mouth -- ao far had he softened. He was already smaller. There had been a natural shrinkage from the tense, bony Silkie body. The new forming muscles were contracted. The now internalized bone structure was down to a length of seven feet from a space-maximum of ten. Of the thirtymine V's. who had come out to help persuade Cemp to board the ship,  thirty-one -- he learned by inquiry -- were among the common variant types. The easiest state for them to be in was the fish condition in which they lived. They could be humans for brief periods, and they could be Silkies for periods that varied with these particular persons from a few hours to a week or so. All thirty-one had some control of energy in limited amounts. Of the remaining eight, three were capable of controlling very considerable energy, one could put up barriers to energy, and four could be breathers for extended periods of time. They were all intelligent beings, as such things were judged. But Cemp, who could detect on one or the other of his numerous receptor systems subtle body odors and temperatures in water and out, and read meaning into the set of bone and muscle, sensed from each of them a strong emotional mixture of discontent, anger, petulance and something even more intense: hatred. As he nearly always did with V's, Cemp swam close to the nearest. Then, using a particularly resistant magnetic force line as a carrier -- it held its message undistorted for a W few feet only -- he superimposed the question: "What's your secret?" T he V was momentarily startled. The reflex that was tcjggered into picking up the message was so on the ready that it put the answer onto a similar force line which, at that instant of time, was passing through its head in Cemp's direction. And Cemp had the secret. Cemp grinned at the effectiveness that he could now force a conversation. He communicated: "No one threatens V's individually or collectively. So why do you hate?" "I feel threatened!" was the sullen reply. "Since I know you have a wife -- from your secret -- do you also have children?" "Yes." "Work?" "Yes." "News, drama. TV?... "Yes " "Sport?" "I watch it. I don't participate." They were passing through an underwater jungle. Huge, waving fronds coral piled high, an octopus peering at them from the shadows of a cave an eel hissing and then darting away and fish by the dozen -- it was still the wild part of the ship, where the tropical conditions of an earth ocean were duplicated. To Cemp, who had been nearly a month in space without a break, merely swimming here seemed like great sport indeed. But all he said was, "Well, friend. that's all there is for anyone. A quiet enjoyable existence is the most that life has to offer. If you're envying me my police duties, don't! I'm inured to it, but I only have a mating period every nine and a half years. Would you care for that?" The implication in his statement, that Silkies could only have sex at intervals of nine years or so, was not true. But it was a myth that Silkies and their closest human allies, the Special People, had found it worthwhile to foster. Normal human beings particularly seemed to find great satisfaction in what they conceived to be a major defect in the otherwise enviable Silkie. After Cemp completed his reassuring communication, the dark emotion that had been radiating from the V took on added hostility. "You're treating me like a child," he said in a grim manner. "I know something of the logic of levels. So don't give me any of these sophistries." "It's still mostly speculation," Cemp answered gently. He added, "Don't worry, I won't tell your wife that you're unfaithful to her." "Damn you!" said the V, and swam off. Cemp turned to another of his companions and had a very similar discussion with him. This one's secret was that he had twice in the past year fallen asleep while on duty at one of the locks connecting the big ship with outer space. T he third person to whom Cemp addressed himself was a female. Her secret, surprisingly. no IF was that she thout herself insane. As soon as she realized that her thought had come through to him, the substance of her communication became hysterical. She was a graceful being, one of the breathers -- but completely unnerved now. "Don't tell them!" she telepathed in terror. "They'll kill me." Before Cemp could more than consider what an unexpected ally he had found for himself, let alone decide what made her feel she was insane, the female communicated frantically: "They're going to lure you into one of the shark tanks -- " Her almost human face contorted, as she realized what she had revealed. Cemp asked quickly, "What is their overall purpose?" "I don't know. But it's not what they said... oh, please?" She was threshing in the water now, physically disorganized. In a moment it would look odd. Cemp said hastily, "Don't worry -- I'll help you. You have my word." Her name, he discovered, was Mensa. She said she was very beautiful in her breather form. Cemp had already decided that since she might be useful, he would have to let himself be drawn into the shark tank. It was not obvious when it happened. One of the V's who was capable of energy output swam up beside him. Simultaneously but casually the others fell back. "This way," said his guide. Cemp followed. But it was several moments before he realized that he . and his guide were on one side of a transparent wall, and the rest of the group were on the other. He looked around for his companion. The V had dived down, and was sliding into a cavern between two rock formations. Abruptly the water around Cemp was plunged into pitch darkness. He grew aware that the V's were hovering beyond the transparent walls. Cemp saw movement in the swaying weeds: shadows, shapes, the glint of an eye, and the play of light on a grayish body... Cemp switched to another level of perception, based on shadow pictures... and grew alert for battle. I n his fish stage, Cemp could normally fight like a superelectric eel -- except that the discharge was a beam. No contact was required for what he could send forth. The beam had the bright flash of chain lightning, and was strong enough to kill a dozen sea monsters. It was formed outside his body, a confluence of two streams of oppositely charged particles. But this was not a normal time. The change in him was too imminent. Any fight with a denizen of this sea in space would have to be with levels of logic, not with energy. That he dared not waste. Even as he made the decision, a shark swam lazily out of the jungle of waving fronds and as lazily, or so it seemed came toward him, turned on its side and, mouth open, teeth showing, slashed at him with its enormous jaws. Cemp impressed a pattm on an energy wave that was passing through his brain going toward the beast. It was a pattern that stimulated an extremely primitive mechanism in the shark: the mechanism by which pictures were created in the brain. The shark had no defense against controlled over-stimulation of its picture making ability. In .a flash it visualized its teeth closing on its victim, imagined a bloody struggle, followed by a feast. And then, sated, stomach full, it imagined itself swimming back into the shadows, into the underwater forest in this tiny segment of a huge spaceship cruising near Jupiter. As the overstimulation continued, its pictures ceased to connect with body movements at all. It drifted forward and finally bumped, unnoticing, into a coral embankment. There it hung, dreaming that it was in motion. It was being attacked through a logic related to its structure, a level that by-passed its own gigantic attack equipment... Levels of logic. Long ago, now, men had titillated themselves by opening up the older parts of the human brain, where suggested pictures and sounds were as real as actual ones. It was the beast level of logic... not human at all. For an animal like a shark, reality was an on-off phenomenon, a series of mechanical conditionings. Now stimulation. Now not. Movement always, restless motion always -- the endless need for more oxygen than was available in any one location aught as it was in a suggested world of fantasy, the motionless shark body grew numb from insufficient oxygen, and started to become unconscious. Before it could really do so, Cemp communicated to the watchers: "Do you want me to kill this game fish?" Silently, the beings beyond the transparent wall indicated where he could escape from the shark tank. Cemp gave the monster control of itself again. But he knew it would be twenty or more minutes before the shock would wear off. As he emerged from the shark tank a few minutes later and rejoined the V's, he realized at once that their mood had changed. They were derisive of him. It was a puzzling attitude on their part, for so far as they knew they were completely at his mercy. Someone in this group must know why. So -- He saw that they were now in a tank of very deep water -- the bottom was not visible. Small schools of brightly colored fish skittered by in the green depths, and the water seemed slightly colder, more bracing: still delightful but no longer tropical. Cemp swam over to one of the V's who was capable of putting out energy. As before, he asked: "What's your secret?" The male Vs name was Cell, and his secret was that he had several times used his energy to kill rivals for the favors of certain females. He was instantly terrified that his murders would be found out. But he had no information, except that the administrative officer of the ship, RiIF bcr, had sent them to meet Cemp. The name was important information. But even more vital was Cemp's disturbing intuition that this task of duty on which he was embarked was much more important than the evidence had so far established. He divined that the shark attack was a test. But for what? Ill A head, suddenly, Cemp could see the city. The water at this point was crystal clear. Here were none of those the oceans of earth so often murky. Through that liquid, almost as transparent as glass, the city spread before him. Domed buildings. Duplicates of the domed undersea cities on earth, where real water pressure made the shape necessary. Here, with artificial gravity only, water was held in by the metal walls and had only what weight the ship's officers elected to give it. Buildings could be any reasonable size, delicately molded and even misshaped. They could be beautiful for their own sake and need not merely have the sometimes sever beauty of utility. The building to which Cemp was taken was a soaring dome with minarets. He was guided to a lock, where only two of the breathers, Mensa and a male named Grig, stayed with him. The water level began to drop. Air hissed in. Cemp trails, formed quickly to his human shape and stepped out of the airlock into the corridor of a modern, air-conditioned building. They were all three in the nude. The man said to the woman, "Take him to your apartment. Give him the clothes. As soon as I call, bring him to Apartment One upstairs." Grig was walking off, when Cemp stopped him. "Where did you get that information?" he demanded. The V hesitated, visibly frightened at being challenged by a Silkie. The expression on his face changed. He seemed to be listening. Instantly, Cemp activated the waking centers of a portion of the sensory equipment that he had let sleep and waited for a response on one or more. Much as a man who smells a strong odor of sulphur wrinkles his nose, or as someone who touched a red-hot object jerks involuntarily away, he expected a sensation from one of the numerous senses that were now on the ready. He got nothing. It was true that, in his human state, he was not so sensitive as when he was in the Silkie state. But such a totally negative result was outside hii experience. Grig said, "He says... as soon as you're dressed... come." "Who says?" Grig was surprised. "The boy," he replied. His manner indicated: who ehe? A s he dried himself, and put on the clothes Mensa handed him, Cemp found himself wondering why she believed herself insane. He asked cautiously, "Why do V's have a poor opinioa of themselves? "Because there's something better  -- Silkies." Her tone was angry, but there were tears of frustration in her eyes. She went on wearily, "I can't explain it, but I've felt shattered since I was a child. Right now, I have an irrational hope that you will want to take me over and possess me. I wish to be your slave." Half-dressed though she was, her jet black hair still caked and wet, she had told the truth about her appearance. Her olive white skin was formed, her body slim and with graceful curve. As a breather, she was beautiful. Cemp had no alternative. Within the next hour, he might need what help she could give. He said quietly, "I accept you as my slave." Her response was violent. In a single convulsion of novement, she ran over to him, writhing out of her upper garments until they draped low on her hips. "Take me!" she him. "Take me as a woman!" Cemp, who was married to a young woman of the Special People, released himself. "Slaves don't demand," he said in a firm tone. "Slaves are used at the will of their master. Askd my first demand as your master is: open your mind to me." The woman drew away from him, trembling. "I can't," she whispered, "The boy forbids it," Cemp asked; "What in you makes you feel insane?" She shook her head. "Something... connected with the boy," she laid. "I don't know what." "Then you're his slave, not mine," said Cemp coldly. Her eyes begged him. "Free met" the whispered. "I can't do it myself." "Where's Apartment One?" Cemp said. She told him. "You can take the stairway or the elevator," she said. Cemp went by the stairway. He needed a few minutes, just a few, to determine his course of action. He decided -- See the boy! Determine his fate. Talk to Riber, the administrative officer of the ship. Punish Riber! Order this ship to a check-in point! These decisions were hardened in his mind as he reached the upperlevel and pressed the button beside the door of apartment one. The door swung open noiselessly. Cemp walked in -- and there was the boy. H e was slightly under five feet tall, as fine looking a human child as Cemp had ever seen. The youngster was watching a TV screen set into one wall of the big room. When Cemp entered, the boy turned lazily and said, "I was interested to see what you would do with that shark, in view of your condition." He knew! The realization hit Cemp hard. He braced himself and agreed within himself to die; make no bargains to avoid exposure; come to his final decision with even greater care. The boy said, "You couldn't possibly do anything else." Cemp was recovering, but curious. He had set up a complete nosignal condition within himself. Yet the boy was reading detailed signals. How was it done?" IF Smiling faintly, the boy shook his bead. Cemp said, "If you dare not tell, dien it isn't much of a method. I deduce that if I find it out, I can defeat it." The boy laughed, made a dismissal gesture, changed the subject. "Do you believe I should be killed?" Cemp looked into those bright, gray eyes that regarded him with a boyish mischievousness, and felt a qualm. He was being played with by someone who regarded himself as untouchable. Question was, was the boy fooling himself, or was it real? "It's real," said the youngster. And if it was real -- Cemp's analysis continued -- were there built in restraining factors such as kept Silkies under control? The boy said curtly, "That I will not answer." "Very well." Cemp turned away. "If you persist in that decision, then my judgment is that you are outside the law. No person who cannot be controlled will ever be permitted to live in the solar system. But I'm going to give you a little while to change your mind. My advice: decide to be a law-abiding citizen." He turned, and left the apartment. And at least ,one important reality was that he was allowed to do so. IV G rig was waiting on the hallway outside. He seemed eager to please. Cemp, who wanted to meet Riber, asked if Riber was a breather. Riber was not; so Cenqp and Grig took to the water. Cemp was guided to an enormous depth, to where several domes wer# fixed to the inner hull of the ship. There, in a water-filled labyrinth of metal and plastic, he found Riber. The administrative leader of the ship turned out to be a long, strong fish being, with the peculiar, protruding eyes of the fish state. He Vvas floating beside a message receiving machine. In one hand he held the transmitter for the machine. He looked at Cemp and turned the machine on. He said aloud in the underwater language: "I think our conversation should be recorded. I don't think I can trust a Silkie to make a fair report on this special situation." Cemp acquiesced without an argument. The interchange began with Riber making what seemed to be a completely frank statement. He said, "This ship and all aboard are controlled by that remarkable boy. He is not always here, and so for the most part we do as we always have. But those people who went out to meet you had no way of resisting his commands. If you can deal with him, then obviously we shall be free again. But if you can't, then we are his servants like it or not." Cemp said, "There has to be some vulnerable level. Why, for example, do you do as he wants?" Riber said, "I laughed when he first told me what he wanted. But when I came to, hours later, I realized that I had done everything he desired while I was unconscious. Ae a result, I now do it consciously. This has been going on for about a year, earth time." Ilf Cemp questioned Riber closely. That he had continued physical functioning when he was under the boy's control indicated that a shutoff of normal outside perception was the principal method of inducing unconsciousness. Considering that, Cemp remembered the V whose secret was that he had fallen asleep while tending one of the outer locks. At Cemp's request, lock attendants were assembled. He interviewed each one privately with the question: "What's your secret?" Seven of the twenty revealed, in this unwitting fashion, that they had slept while on duty. It turned out to be that simple. The boy had arrived at the lock entrance, blanked out the mind of the attendant, and entered the ship. It seemed to Cemp he need examine no further. There was a frame, logic. The problem, which for a time had seemed to involve some new and intricate kind of telekinetic control, was beginning to look much more mundane. He returned to the woman's apartment and put on clothes again. Mensa went with him to the door. She whispered, "Don't you dare leave this ship without making love to me. I need to feel that I belong to you." Basically, that was not so, Cemp knew. She lived by reversals. She would always want what she did not have, despise or reject what she had. But he reassured her that he meant well by her -- and went up again to Apartment One. IP I t seemed to Cemp as he walked in that the boy's face was flushed and that the eyes that had been so bright were duller. Cemp said softly, "If I can figure it out, so can any Silkie. You went to a lot of trouble. Which tells me you do have limitations." Silkies could approach a vessel, undetected, if they were prepared to manipulate energy waves. But the method wa involved, requiring training. Cemp said, "Well, you know my thoughts. Which one is correct?" Silence. "Your problem," said Cemp emphatically, "is that the Special People take no chances with dangerous deviates." He hoped the boy understood how ultimately determined the Special People were. Abruptly, the boy sighed. "I might as well admit it. I am Tern, your son. When I realized it was you approaching the ship, I thought I'd have a look at my father. The truth is I became frightened that those abilities which you found so unusual would be detected. So I've been out here in space setting up an operating base to which I could retreat for my own protection. But I realize I need help. I think some changes should be made in our relationship with human beings. Other than that, educated." For Cemp, it was the decisive clarification. Then and there he made up his mind. There would be no execution. Hastily -- for Cemp was a man in a hurry -- they discussed the situation. Cemp would have to tell of this meeting when he got back to Earth. There was no way by which a Silkie could conceal the facts from the perceptive Special People. And foi many months, while he was in his mating stage, he would have no control of energy. During that period the boy would be at the mercy of a highly prejudiced law. Tern was disdainful. "Don't worry about me. I'm ready for them." It was rebel talk, dangerous and unfortunate. But this was not the moment to point that out. Such matters could be left until they got home. "You'd better start now," said the boy, "but as you'll see I'll get to Earth before you do." Cemp did not pause to find out how he would achieve such a miracle of speed. That also would have to wait. A s Cemp removed his clothes in Mensa's apartment, he said to her with considerable pride, "The boy is my son." Her eyes widened. "Your son!" she said. "But -- " She stopped. "What's the matter?" Cemp asked. "Nothing." She spoke mechanically. "I was surprised, that's all." Cemp finished dressing, then went over to her, and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He said, "I sense that you are involved in a love relationship." She shook her head. "Not now. Not since -- " She paused. She seemed bewildered. It was no time to check on a womans love life. If ever a maa was in a hurry it was he. When Cemp had gone, the boy came in. "You almost gave m ' away," he said in a tone that was wholly unchildlike. She cringed. "Tm only a V," she pleaded. He began to change, to grow. Presently, a fully adult human male stood before her. He directed toward her energy wave that must have exerted an enormous attraction to her, for in spite of the deepening expression of distaste on her face she swayed toward him. When she was within a foot of him, he cut off the wave. She drew back immediately. The man laughed. But he turned away from her, and for a few moments then he opened a communication line to someone on the planet of a distant star. He said in a silent interchange: "I have finally risked confrontation with a Silkie, one of the powerful inhabitants of this system. He is guided by an idea called Levels of Logic. I discovered that his had to do with his only offspring, a boy he has never seen. I distorted his interest in this child in a subtle way. I think I can now land safely on the principal planet, which is called Earth." "To distort it, you must have had to use him as a channel." "Yes. It was the one risk I took with him." "What about the other channels you have used, Di-isarill?" The man glanced at Mensa. "With one possible exception, they would resist any attempt of a Silkie to exIF plore their minds. They're a rebel group called V's, and are suspicious of and hostile to the other peoples in this system. The exception is a V woman who is completely under my control." "Why not annihilate her?" "These people have some kind of a sensitive telepathic connection, which they seem to be able to manipulate but which I have not wholly solved. If she died I think the others would know instantly. Therefore I cannot do what I normally would." "What about the Silkie?" "He is heading to Earth in a state of delusion. Equally important, he is due to suffer a physiological change which will strip him of all hrs present offensive and defensive powers. I intend to let this physical process run its course -- and then kill him." V C emp had relayed the story through Satellite-Five-R to his contact, Charley Baxter, at the Silkie Authority. When he reached the satellite, and transformed to human, he found a radiogram from Charley waiting for him. It said: "Till you've done away with him, you mean!" Cemp thought angrily, the official action surprised hini: an unexpected obstacle. The commander of the satellite, a normal intelligent human being, who had handed him the message, said, "Mr. Cemp, I have received instructions not to let you on any ferry to Earth until further notice. Thii is very unusual." "Unusual" was an understatement. Silkies ordinarily moved freely to and from Earth. Cemp made up his minS. "I'm going out into space again," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Aren't you due for the change?" The officer seemed doubtful about letting him go. Cemp smiled wryly and told the Silkie joke about such things, about how Silkies were like some mothersto-be who kept having false labor pains. Off to the hospital they went. Lay there in bed. At last returned home. And so, after several false alarms, baby finally was born in a taxicab. "Well, sir," said the man unhappily. "You do as you please. But there aren't any taxicabs in space." "It's not that instantaneous; you can fight it off for hours," said Cemp, who had been fighting it off for hours. Before he left, Cemp sent a radiogram to his wife: The coded message would upset her, he knew. But he did not doubt that she would met him at their pre-arranged rendevous, as he wanted. She would come if only to Ilf find out on behalf of the Special People what he was 'jp to Once out in space. Cemp headed for a point over the Snmh Pok. and then he began his entry He came in fast A:.:ording to theory, that was the only way an unprotected approach should he made. The pole were relativclv free of radiation There where the magnetic field of the planetary hodv was bent inward right down to the ground, the potent Van Allen radiation belt was a minimum threat Nonetheless, there were two periods of severe bombardment, one of high energy stripped nuclei, the other Jt X-rays. The X-rays did him nc narm, and, for the most part, the stripped nuclei passed right through his body as if it were a hard vacuum. Those nuclei that hit, however left a small wake of radioactivity. Hastily, Cemp expelled the more seriously damaged cells, with that special ability Silkies had of eliminating damaged parts of their bodies. As he entered the atmosphere, Cemp gradually activated the planet's magnetic force lines behind him. Even as they began to glow brightly, he felt the radar beams from below bouncing from him. But they were not a problem now. Radar would register the movement of his body and the pyrotechnic display to his rear as one  phenomenon. The outward appearance was of a meteorite shooting toward the ground. H is entrance being slantwise in the direction of Earth's rotation, his speed of entry was within his capacity to absorb, or radiate from him, the heat of his passage through the air. At ten miles up, he slowed even more and came down in the sea north of Antarctica about a thousand miles from the lower tip of South America. The cold waters quickly washed from his Silkie body the radioactive debris that still clung to the outer bone. He darted along about five hundred feet up, using the water as a coolant by slowing and diving into it whenever he got too hot. It was a fine balancing of extremely rapid acceleration and deceleration. But he made it to near where he lived at the lower tip of Florida in slightly more than forty minutes, the last five of which were wholly underwater. As he surfaced within sight of the beach, he transformed to his fish stage, and then -- two hundred feet from shore -- to human He had already seen Joanne's car parked on the road behind a sand dune. He did the overhand crawl to get to shallow water, and ran against the surging waves up the embankment to where she lay on a blanket, watching him. She stood up, a slender, very pretty woman, blonde and blueeyed. Her classically even features were white and set now; but she handed him a towel. Cemp dried himself, and climbed into the clothes she had brought. A few minutes later they were in the car; and at this i)oint she accepted his kiss. But she still withheld her thoughts, and her body was rigid with disapproval. When she finally communicated, it was verbally and not by direct eoIF crgy. She said, Do you realize that if you persist in this you will be the first Silkie in a hundred years to get himself punished or executed?" That she spoke out loud confirmed Cemp's suspicion. He was now certain that she had reported his illegal entry to the Silkie Authority, and that people were listening in to this conversation. He felt no blame of Joanne. He even surmised that all the Special People were prepared to help him through this trying period. They were probably also speeding up the investigation of Tern, so that the execution would be quickly over with. "What are you going to do, Nat?" She sounded anxious now, rather than angry. There was color m her face for the first time. At some depth within, Cemp felt vaguely surprised at how determined he was. But the awareness did not trigger any question in him. He said coolly: "If they kill that boy, Fll know the reason why." She said softly, "I never realized that a Silkie could have so much feeling for his child, whom he has not seen since birth." Cemp was irritated. "It's not personal," he said curtly. She said with sudden emotion: "Then you know the reason very well. This boy evidently has a method of concealing his thoughts, and of reading minds -- according to your own account -- that even you could not penetrate. With such a person, the Special People will not have their historic protection. It becomes a matter of policy." "In making my report," said Cemp, "I advised a five year studv and re-education program for th : boy. That's the way it's going to be. ' S he seemed not to hear. She sai i as if thinking out loud: "Silk ies were mutated by humans, on th: basis of the great biological discoeries of the last half of the twent eth century. When the basic lil : major advances in life forms, othe:than those naturally spawned in Na ture, became possible. Because th first transformations were to the fis' stage, the new beings were callev' Silkies -- after an old song. "But it had to be done carefully The Silkie could not be permitted ti breed as he pleased. So his genes, which endow him with so many marvellous senses and abilities, alsc contain certain limitations. He car. be a man, a fish, a Silkie at will So long as he does it by body con trol, he has nearly all his Silkie abil ities in any of these forms. But every nine and a half years he has t( become a human being again, in or der to mate. It's built into him. where he can't interfere with ii. Silkies who long ago tried to elim inate this phase of the cycle were executed. At the time of such r. compulsive change to human form, he loses all his Silkie abilities, ane becomes fallibly human. That's th: great hold we have over him. Thei'. we can punish him for anything il legal he did as a Silkie. Another hold is that there are no female Silkies. If the issue of a Silkie mating with a woman of the Special People is a girl, she is not a Silkie That, too, is built into his genes -- " She broke off: "The Special People are a tiny, tiny portion of the main human stream who -- it was discovered -- had a spontaneous ability to read the minds of Silkies. They used this to establish administrative ascendancy while there were still only a few Silkies, and thus they protected themselves and the human race from beings who would otherwise have overwhelmed them." She finished in a puzzled tone: "You've always agreed that such protection was necessary, for human beings to survive. Have you changed your mind?" When Cemp did not reply, she urged: "Why don't you go to the Silkie Authority and talk to Charley Baxter? A single conversation with him will get you further than any rebellin." She added quickly. "Tern is there. So you'll have to go there anyway. Please, Nat." It wasn't so much, then, that Cemp agreed with what she said. He thought of her suggestion very distinctly as offering a way of getting inside the building -- But he was not too surprised as his helijet came down on the roof to see Charley Baxter waiting for him, tall, rather goodlooking, thin, unusually pale. A s they rode down in an elevator, Cemp felt himself pass through in energy screen -- which instantly sealed off the pulsations from the outside world. And that was normal enough except for the force that was driving the screen. He sensed that the power backing it was enormous enough to protect a city, or even a part of the planet Cemp glanced questioningly at Baxter, and met a pair of sober, serious eyes. The man said seriously, "At this point, you may read me." What he read in Baxter's mind was that his own radiogram about Tern had caused a hasty examination of Tern's record. Result: they decided the boy was normal, and that something very serious had happened to Cemp. "At no time," said Baxter, "has your son been in danger. Now, take a look at that TV picture. Which one is Tern? One is." They had walked from the elevator into a large room. On the TV screen on one wall was a street scene. Several boys were approaching what must have been a hidden camera, for they showed no awareness of its presence. Cemp's gaze flicked across the strange faces. "Never saw them before," he said. "The boy to your right is your son," said Baxter. Cemp looked, then turned and stared at Baxter. And because his brain had energy relationships that by-passed mere neuron connections, he got the whole picture in a singleflash of understanding. That instantaneous comprehension included analytical awareness of how his duty to protect all Silkie children had been skillfully twisted by his pseudo son. It leaped on to a lightning examination of the energy level that had signaled to him. Almost immediately, he realized that the signal was the only direct contact that had been IF made by the boy on the V ship. In every other way, the fraudulent Tern had merely been a recipient of signals. He grew conscious of Baxter's bright eyes watching him. The man asked breathlessly: "Think we can do anything?" It was too soon to answer that. Cemp was gratefully realizing how skillfully he had been protected by the Special People. It seemed to him that if he had suspected the truth at any moment before being taken behind the energy screen that now guarded him -- the false Tern would probably have tried to annihilate him. Baxter was speaking again. "You sit down here, and let's see what the computer makes of the one signal you received." The computer extrapolated three structural frames that might fit the false Tern. Cemp and Baxter studied the coded messages with amazement, for they had not actually considered anything beyond an unusual V frame. All three formulated structures were alien. A quick analysis established that two of the three did not require secrecy on the part of so powerful a being as the invader undoubtedly was. Therefore the third frame, involving a gruesome form of esoteric sex climaxed by the ritual murder of one partner by the other, spiderlike, was the most likely. Baxter's voice had in it a desire not to believe. "That picture of their needing a lot of love objects -- could that be real?" He finished in m a subdued tone: "I'll alert all Silkies, mobilize our other forces -- but can you do anything at once?" Cemp who had already adjusted his sensory system to include all three alien frame was tense and afraid. He said aloud, "I ask myself where he would go and of course it would be to my home. Do you think Joanne would have gotten there yet? Was she supposed to head somewhere else?" He saw that Baxter was shaking his head... Cemp hurried through a door that led to a wide balcony, transformed to Silkie, did a partial cut-off of gravity combined with control of magnetic force lines... a man in a far greater hurry than he had ever been in before. H e entered the large house by the sea in his human form, the better to run the last few yards and maneuver in corridors. And because he had adjusted to the alien sensory structure his arrival was only partly signaled. He found Joanne in the master bedroom, half-undressed. She had never seemed so attractive. Her smile, warm, inviting, friendly, drew him. Some state of excitement she was in communicated to him, stirring an impulse so basic that it was as if a fine translucent sheath ' dropped over his senses, blurring his view of reality. The woman, almost luminescent in a fleshly radiance, lay on the pink bed and his whole being focused on her. For a long moment, nothing else existed. They were two people intensely in love. Breathless, astounded by that instant, hideous power, Cemp put his thought on the possible fate of the real Joanne, put his attention on fear for her -- and broke the spell. The rage, hate and violence that had been building up in him broke through. But the magnetically controlled radiation that Cemp launched at the creature crackled harmlessly against a magnetically controlled energy screen... Frothing, he plunged at the being, grabbed at him with his bare hands. For seconds they grappled, the almost nude woman and the wholly naked Cemp. Then Cemp was flung back by muscles that were ten times as strong as his own. He bounded to his feet, but he was sobered, thinking again. He began to consider the entire problem of Earth in relation to this creature and the threat it represented. The duplicate of Joanne was changing. The body in front of Cemp became that of a man with the frilly clothes of a woman's underdress still draped on the lower part of his body. But there was nothing feminine in his manner. Eyes blazing with the infinite violence potential of the male, the entity locked gazes with Cemp. Cemp was feeling a desperate anxiety for the real Joanne. But it did not even occur to him to ask this creature about her. He said, instead, 'T want you to leave. We'll miles out in space. IF The handsome human face of the other broke into a disdainful smile. go. But I sense in you a plan to learn from me where I come from. That will never happen." Cemp replied in a level tone: "We'll see what two thousand Silkies can get out of you." The being's skin glistened with health, shone with confidence and power. He said: "Perhaps I should remind you that we Kibmadine have achieved a total control of all the forces that Silkies control only partially." Cemp said, "Many rigidities can envelop one flexibility." The other said in an uncompromising voice, "Don't attack me. The price is too high." He started to turn away. And there was a moment, then, when Cemp had another thought, anorher feeling: a reluctance to let this being go without some attempt to reach across the abyss that separated them. Because this was man's first contact with an alien intelligence. For a few fleeting seconds Cemp remembered the thousand dreams that human beings had had for such a meeting. His hesitation came to its inevitable end. The infinitely hostile reality moved in to fill the endless void between' them. Instants later the alien was out on the patio, dissolving, changing -- and was gone. C emp contacted Baxter and said, "Line me up with another Silkie so that he can take over. I'm really awfully close to my change." He was lined up through the Silkie communications hub with a SKlkie named Jedd. Meanwhile, Baxter said, "I'm on my way over. I have been given a lot of governmental power." Cemp found Joanne in one of the spare bedrooms. She lay on the bed, fully dressed, breathing slowly and deeply. He sent a quick flow of energy through her brain. The reflexes that were stirred reassured him that she was merely sleeping. He also picked up some of the alien energy that was still in her cells. They told a story that made it instantly obvious why she was still alive: The Kibmadine had used her living body as a model for his duplication of her. On this occasion at least the creature had been after bigger game: a Silkie. Cemp did not try to rouse the sleeping woman. But he was greatly relieved as he went out onto the patio, which overlooked a white, sandy beach and the timeless blue ocean beyond. He sat there until Baxter presently joined him. They had already communicated mentally, and now Baxter said, "I sense a doubt in you." Cemp nodded. Baxter asked gently, "What do you fear?" DeathV It was a feeling deep inside him. Sitting there, he made up his mind -- for the second time since he had become involved with the alien -- to die if necessary. And with that decision, he began to turn on his receptors, all of them except that to start, he tuned out local Earth noise. TV, radio, innumerable energies from machines -- these had to be shut away from him. Swiftly, then, he began to "hear" the signals from the plenum. Long before Silkies it had been known that space was alive with messages; the entire sidereal universe pulsed with an incredible number of vibrations. Hour on hour and year by year, Silkies, lived with that ceaseless "noise", and most of their early training was entirely and exclusively directed to the development of selective sleep and rest and wakefulness mechanisms for each receptor. Now -- those that were asleep awakerred. Those that were at rest alerted. His brain came to peak awareness. He began to sense the near stars, the distant stars the clusters the galaxies. Every star had its only complex signal. Nowhere was there a duplication or even a close sim ilarity. The universe that he tuned in upon was composed entirely of individuals. Cemp appraised the distance of each star, the uniqueness of each signal. Friendly space world! Every star being exactly and precisely what it was and where it was gave meaning to the immense stellar universe. There was no chaos. He experienced his own location in space and time,and it gave him a certainty of the basic rightness of things. H e came back from his farflung ranging to about a million mdes from Earth. There he paused to let the signals come in from all of the space between Without opening his eyes, he said to Baxter, "I don't read him. He must have gone around the planet and put the mass of Earth between him and me. Are the reflectors ready?" Baxter talked on a phone line that had been kept open for him. Previously alerted Telstar and astronomical satellites were placed at Cemp's disposition. Through one of the reflectors, he focused on the invading entity. Cemp said to the alien, "Above everything else we want information." The other said, "Perhaps I should tell you our history." And so Cemp was given the story of the eternal lovers, more than a planetary system to another, and each time altered themselves to the form of the inhabitants and established a love relationship with them -- a love relationship that meant death and pain for their loveobjects. Only twice had the lovers met beings of sufficient power to make them draw back. In each instance, they had destroyed the entire system. Di-isarill finished: "No additional information is available no matter what you do." Cemp broke contact. A shaken Baxter said, "Do you think that was true information?" Cemp answered that the thought it was. He finished with finality: "Our job is to find out one thing: Where does IF ke come from? And then destroy him" But how do you propose to do this?" I t was a good question. His single clash with the creature had brought him up hard against a wall of power. Cemp sank lower into his settee and with closed eyes considered the problem of a race of beings who had complete control of body change. Many times in those long duty watches out in space, he had pondered such possibilities; for the cell could grow and ungrow, divide, split off, fall away and re-form, all within a few seconds. In the twilight varus, the bacteria and the cell had their complex being, the enormous speed of change had made possible the almost instantaneous orderly altering of human to Silkie and back again. The invader apparently could change to an infinite number of forms with equal rapidity, assuming any body shape at will. But the logic of levels applied to the Kibmadine's every action. From somewhere behind Cemp, Baxter said, "Are you sure?" His voice sounded incredulous. Cemp had two reactions to the question: Extreme joy at the hope that his analysis brought... and the stronger conviction. He said aloud, "Yes, logic applies. But for him we'll need the closest contact of the energies involved. Inches would be better than feet, feet better than yards. So FU have to get out there in person." "Out where?" Baxter asked, almost incredulous. "To his ship." "Do you think he has a ship?" "Of course he has one. Anything else would be impractical for his operations. Cemp was patient as he made his explanation. He had observed that even the Special People had exaggerated ideas on such matters. They tended to accept that Silkies were more capable than they were. But the logic of it was simple: coming in toward a sun, one could utilize its full gravitational pull to get up speed. Right now the Kibmadine would be "climbing the ladder" of the planets, cutting off the sun's gravity from behind, opening up to the pull of Jupiter and the outer planets. No sensible being would try to bridge the distances between stars by such a method. So there was a ship. There had to be. Cemp said, "Order a spaceship for me, complete with a tank of water that can be moved." "You expect to change before you get there?" "It'll happen any minute." Baxter said, amazed, "You intend to confront the most powerful being that we can imagine without a single bit of energy of your own available?" "Yes," said Cemp. "It's the only way we'll get him within inches of the energy source I want installed in the tank. For heaven's sake, man, get started." Reluctantly, Baxter reached for the phone. vm A s Cemp expected, he began his change en route. By the time he was put aboard the Kibmadine ship, he was already in a tank of water in his first compulsive change, which was to the fish state. He would be a class B Silkie for slightly more than two months. As Di-isarill came finally to the tiny ship in its remote orbit beyond Pluto, he noticed at once that the entrance mechanism had been tampered with, and he sensed the presence of Cemp aboard. In the course of countless millennia his fear reflexes had fallen into disuse. So he had no anxiety. But he recognized that here was all the appearance of a trap. In a flash, he checked to insure that there was no source of energy aboard that could destroy him. There was none; no relay; nothing. A faint energy emanated from the tank. But it had no purpose that Diisarill could detect. He wondered scathingly if these human beings expected somehow to work a bluff whereby he would be impelled by uncertainty to stay away from his own ship. With that thought, he activated the entrance mechanism, entered, transformed to human, walked over to the tank that stood in the center of the tiny ' cabin -- and looked down at Cemp, who lay at the bottom. Di-isarill said, 'Tf it's a bluff, I couldn't possibly yield to it because I have nowhere else that I can go." In his fish state, Cemp could hear and understand human words but could not speak them. Di-isarill persisted: "It's interesting that the one Silkie whom I cannot read has taken the enormous risk of coming aboard. Perhaps you were more affected by the desire I attempted to rouse in your home than appeared at the time. Perhaps you long for the ecstasy and the anguish that I offered." Cemp was thinking tensely: "It's working. He doesn't notiee how he got onto that subject." The logic of levels was beginning to take effect. I t was a strange world, the world of logic. For nearly all of his long history, man had been moved by unsuspected mechanisms in his brain and nervous system. A sleep center put him to sleep. A waking center woke him up. A rage mechanism mobilized him for attack. A fear complex propelled him to flight. There were a hundred or more other mechanisms, each with its special task for him, each in itself a marvel of perfect functioning but degraded by his uncomprehending obedience to a chance triggering of one or another. During this period, all civilization consisted of codes of honor and conduct and of attempts noble and ignoble to rationalize the unknown simplicities underneath. Finally, came a developing comprehension and control of the neural mechanisms, one, then another, then many. The real age of reason began. On the basis of that reason Cemp asked himself: Was the Kibmadine IF level lower, or higher, than for example the shark? It was lower, he decided. The comparison would be, if man had brought cannibalism into civilization with him. A lower level of logic applied to that. The shark was relatively pure within his frame. He lived by the feedback system, in a pretty good balance. He did not age, as humans did. He grew older -- and longer. It was a savagely simple system. Keep in motion: that was the law of it. What poetry that motion was, in the wide, deep sea that had spawned him! But it was -- feel need of oxygen, get excited, swim faster; enough oxygen, slow, cruise, even stop. But not for long. Movment continuous -- life. Eating, of itself, was lower, more basic, went farther back into the antiquity of the cell. And so, the mighty Kibmadine had brought into their innumerable forms one pattern that was vulnerable. one they wouldn't give up, no matter how much they controlled the other basic mechanisms of their bodies... D i-isarill was calm as he sped through space. He sensed that he had subtly managed to influence Cemp to the fear of intolerable retaliation... Unfortunate that the Silkie had analyzed the Kibmadine structure so accurately. It made direct reading of Cemp's feelings and thoughts difficult. Not that it mattered. Under other circumstances. Earth might well have been a planet to be destroyed. But there was no chance at all of enough Silkies being produced in time to save the system from being conquered. And so another race would, one at a time, experience the ecstasy of being eaten as the culmination of the act of love... What a joy it was to receive resistance, terror, shrinking;, and then the inversion: every part of the being craving to be eaten, longing, begging, demanding -- Di-isarill's calmness yielded to excitement, as the pictures and the feelings re-formed in his mind, from ten thousand remembered feasts of love-objects. "I really loved them all," he thought sadly. Too bad they were not brought up to appreciate in advance the ultimate delight of the all-consuming end of the sex orgy. It had always bothered Di-isarill that the preliminaries had to be secret, particularly with beings who had the ability to transmit thoughts to others of their kind and thus warn them. The greatest pleasure alwayi came when the ending was known, when part of the love play consisted of reassuring the troubled, treinbling being, quieting the pounding heart. "Some day," he told thousands of love partners, "I shall meet someone who will eat me. And when that happens -- " Always he had tried to persuade them that he would rejoice as he was being devoured. The inversion involved was e #f phenomenon of the life condition: first, resistance, terror, shrinking; then every part of the being craving to be eaten, longing, begging, demanding. The urge to succumb could be as powerful as the urge to survive. Standing there in front of the tank, looking down at Cemp, Diisarill felt a quickening of emotion as the conjuration of himself being eaten flitted like a fantasy through his brain. He had had such pictures before but never before so strong. He did not notice that he had passed the point of no return. W ithout thinking, he turned away from the tank. Cemp forgotten, he transformed quickly into a remembered form, longnecked, with smooth dappled skin and powerful teeth. He remembered the form well and lovingly. The members of the race had been love objects for the Kibmadine not too long ago. Their bodies had a particularly excruciating pleasure nerve system. Di-isarill could scarcely wait. Even as he became the form, his long neck twisted. A moment later the teeth, impelled by the merciless Kibmadine biting drive, cut off an entire thigh. The pain was so hideous he screamed. But in his enchanted brain the scream was only an echo of the countless screams that his bite had evoked in the past. Now, as then, the sound excited him almost beyond endurance. He bit deeper. champed harder, at faster. He devoured nearly one half of his own body before the imminence of death brought a baby fear from his own true past. Whimpering, blindly longing for home, he opened a line to his contact on the planet of the far sun where his kind now dwelt. At that instant an outside force surged past him and overwhelmed his personal communication. As one, a dozen Silkies loaded an electric charge on that line, all they believed it could carry. The charge that struck the distant Kibmadine totalled more than # volts and over # amperes of electricity. It was so powerful it smashed all his reflex defenses and burnt him in a single puff of flame and smoke. As quickly as it had opened, the line ceased to exist. The Sol system was now only an anonymous, distant star. T 'he tank with Cemp in it was carried to the ocean. He crawled out into the sea, breasted the incoming tide. The bubbling fresh liquid poured through his gills. As he reached the deeper water, he submerged. Soon the thunder of the surf was behind him. Ahead was a blue sea and the great underwater shelf where a colony of class B Silkies lived their fishlike existence. He would dwell in their domed cities with them... for a time. 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Guinn, President, Vol, #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York, #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # m the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. AH material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between character and actual persons is coinciaental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, M. Y. IF  Eiifrid I n the May # IF a chess-playing computer called "The Machine" was the hero of Fritz Leibers novella The #Square Madhouse . Recently we've learned that at computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was programmed for chess and allotted only two hours to demonstrate its skill. (Computer time is costly!) Nevertheless formidable player, especially in complicated middle-game positions, as described by Milt Garber, part-time chess consultant on the project, in the February # Chess Life. No connection between the real and fictional chess-robots -- which makes it interesting to compare their performances. ahead for each player (eight plies deep). The Machine: ten plies. Both evaluated future positions in terms of strength and development of pieces, .control of the center of "point count" chess, with numerical values assigned to all of the above. Neat touch: the chess king was given an infinity value, since winning the king wins the game. Another used "an alpha-beta heuristic program" to avoid wasting time oa trivial moves. per move. The Machine: # minutes. voted to a move from a few seconds to # minutes or more. The Machine: ditto. The Machine was programmed by ber says, "The advice of a grandmaster would have been extremely helpful." The machine was programmed wasn't, due to lack of memory capacity and of time available for writing the program. "played well in the opening and middle game, but failed badly in the end game -- simply because it had no end game program" -- which in turn was due once again timelimitations on program-writing. Aland other earlier computers programmed for chess. By contrast, The Machine tied for third in a very strong tournament against flesh-and-blood chess masters. Seems like a reasonable degree of correspondence between science fiction and reality! -- The Editor Secrets entrusted to a few # he hnpuMiled cf Mfe be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious WTe Rosicrucians c organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings . Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe H.C.H. ! Scribe H.C.H. i San Jose, California J Please send me the free book,Tbe Mastery  , of Life, which explains how I may learn to ! i use my faculties and powers of mind. J Name i i  Address j I i IF  Novelette He was a warrior slave of the mightiest power in space -- and his deadliest foe was himselfl I J en awoke to a gentle bobbing and stared up through clear plastic at a dark bluish-gray sky. For a moment the color seemed frighteningly wrong. Then his mind struggled out of the dull confusion that mired it. Of course there was nothing wrong with the sky. He must have been dreaming; in fact, shards of the dream still lingered, but they were going fast. A name whispered itself: Steve Duke. He frowned over that. Who was -- Now even the name was gone. He was Jen, and there'd been something about a bump on the head, which was probably why he couldn't remember how he'd gotten here. He was in a treadbag, afloat on a mildly choppy sea. The sea was dark purple, which was right, and die sun coming through the plastic was warm. He felt the bump on his head. Not a bad one. He thought he recalled that he'd been on a hunt, and had fallen off a cliff; but maybe that was another dream. The beach he could see didn't show any familiar details, so he must have drifted far from his hive. He sat up and rubbed at a welt on his thigh where he'd lain across the edge of one of the treadbag's metal hubs. He got off the hub and looked in its food compartment. There were only two cubes of concentrate, though he couldn't remember eating the rest. He put one in his mouth and saved the other. He checked the water compartment and found it empty. Kneeling on the hub, he reached over his head to the other hub and found that one had neither food nor water. He must have been lost several days! But apparently he'd had consciousness enough to eat and drink and jettison his wastes. He checked everything in each hub. There was very little reserve oxygen, and the batteries were low. He'd have to get the bag upright and get it to shore. He dismissed "Steve Duke" from his mind and got to work. I t wasn't easy to right a bag in active water. This kind of treadbag was thin plastic, shaped when inflated like a spherical balloon slightly flattened at the sides. The tread, simply thickened ribs of plastic, was around the long circumference. The diameter across that way was a little over seven feet, whereas it was only four from hub to hub. A bag floated on one side or the other. He got his fingers and toes hooked in handholds and threw his weight to the side. The bag rocked but didn't make it upright. He tried harder, and this time the bag went clear over and he got bumped around. On the fifth or sixth try he made it, then got the bag spinning by trotting up the curve before him, like a chipmunk in an exerciser. Now the batteries in the hubs would begin to charge, and he could recycle air if he had to. When he got to the beach he'd look for fresh water. He watched the shoreline, enjoying the way it winked and distorted as the treads passed before his eyes. When he was close he saw treadmarks on the sand. That meant he was within rolling distance of a hive. He wondered what they'd do with a stranger who couldn't even remember where he came from. A bag came into sight and rolled fast down the beach to intercept him. It was there ahead of him, because he couldn't make much speed in the water. He made the sign for trouble, and the man in the other bag acknowledged. Jen saw that he was quite old. Other bags were gathering now, most of them occupied by humanoids instead of men. One species was unfamiliar. Jen signaled Confusion, Hunger IF and Thirst. The old man nodded, pointed up the beach, made the Hive sign and led the way. They turned off the beach onto a trail through the spiny grass that choked most level land. It seemed taller and thicker here than around Jen's own hive, and made a harsher sound against the bag. Ahead, he could see nothing but a ridge covered with ordinary squat blue-green trees. It wasn't until they topped the ridge that he saw the hive, a clear inflated dome a quarter-mile across, with buildings and smaller domes inside. The Symbol of Gree -- four upright lines and a horizontal one, to represent a humanoid hand -- loomed large high up on the plastic. There were humanoid females working the fields around the hive, but he saw no human women. W hen they were half a mile from a dome a sentryglobe dropped down to hover ahead of them and they came to a halt. The globe extended a feeler against the old man's bag, listened and evidently passed him on, for he left with a gesture of politeness to Jen. The globe put its feeler against Jen's bag 'and its flat voice asked, "Who are you?" "I am Jen, number # # #. I do not remember any more. I was floating in the sea." "Are you ill?" "I don't feel ill. I think I got a bump cn the head." The globe said, "The Inquisitor, then," and hovered so its weapons cou'd b ar while Jen rolled to the hive entrance. Another globe took custody in the lock and pointed its feeler to the Inquisitor booth. The door opened to admit him, then closed behind. In the darkness a deep gentle voice, the voice of all Inquisitor booths, said, "What do Gree's loyal slaves say of him?" Jen felt the tightness in the throat, the welling of tears, that were always the response to that question. "Gree is Love," he stammered. "Gree is Beauty. Gree is Wisdom and Protection; the Sustainer and -- and the source of Comfort. Gree is All." "What is the purpose of your existence?" "To -- to obey Gree, and serve Him; and repay all I can of His Kindness." "What is your number, again?" "# # #." "What is your hive?" "I do not remember." "What is your race?" "Human." "What is your age?" "I do not remember." After a short wait, the voice said, "Your answers are truthful, Jen. Your hive is nearly one hundred miles from here. You were lost on a hunt and have evidently floated this far. Your age is twenty-three. We will adopt you. You may pass, Jen." Twentythree, Jen thought as he rolled from the booth. So young? The old man was waiting to lead him to the men's barracks. They passed small domes where fruits were growing or where livestock grazed in special atmospheres, and turned into a down-ramp near the center of the dome. There were two sets of locks, then they were among men. Jen tripped the bleeder-valve and the bag grew limp. He released the seals on both hubs, pulled hem free of the plastic and set them carefully outside. He climbed out, then ran his fingers around the beaded edges of both holes to make sure they were all right. He already knew, of course, that there were no significant scratches on the rest of the bag. A man was always on the lookout for those. He folded the bag and turned it in to Supply, along with the hubs which would have to be thoroughly tested and restocked. He turned to the old man. "I am Jen. I want to thank you for bringing me in." The other nodded. "You'll be staying with us, I judge. My name is Trav. And this is Holl, and Redn, and... come, I'll take you to the foreman. His name is Bargo." II B argo was a husky man of thirty or over, scarred as if he'd fought many contests. He looked Jen over. "Twenty-three, eh? Well, I can surely use a trained hand, and one well put together like you. They hardly let me get a novice out of puberty before they draft him. There'll be room for you on the wrestling team, and in the war games of course, and in two or three days I hope to stage a goar hunt. Guess that won't be new to you, eh?" "Uh, no," Jen said, embarrassed. "My memory's a little out of whack, though, you know." The fact was, he couldn't remember for sure what a goar looked like. The had him in the learning machines for the next two days, checking his education and giving him reviews. Then they released him for the time, but told him he'd have to spend fifteen hours out of each hundred in review. The hives all had standard curricula, of course -- as did the adolescent schools and the creches, from which he must have come -- but there were a few gaps in his recollection. Otherwise, things were fine. He wrestled, and got to the barracks semi-final. Then they spent a day inspecting bags and equipment for the goar hunt. He was dismayed to find he knew little about the hunting-bags, but he watched and listened and found they weren't complicated. That night he dreamed he was afloat again. The waves forced him in to shore where a heard of raging bovines with terrible horns and fiery eyes bellowed and stamped their hooves and made little dashes into the surf in their eagerness to reach him. A very wise creature that he could not quite see, because it shifted away when he tried to look at it, somehow got in his bag with him and told him, "Those may be goar and they will tear your bag and let the outside air in to suffocate you, and if you're not extremely clever and agile they'll trample your bag to bits, and you too, and gore you. But you must not forget for one instant, even if you are dying in the most terrible agony, that you are IF Jen, a loyal and obedient and loving slave of Gree. Now I shall go away and leave you to face the goar alone, because I must not be discovered." And the waves carried him in while the herd poured out to meet him; and they ripped his bag to nothing and he gasped in the atmosphere which was heavy with carbon dioxide but had little oxygen; and he was tossed about on the horns, nude and bleeding and in shreds; and whenever he fell he was pulped by the sharp, terribly heavy hooves. Then Gree, who was sometimes a blaze of light and sometimes more like a tent, came and lifted him clear and pushed the goar away, and patted him together with an adhesive, and put salve on his hurts, and patched his treadbag and put him in it, and said, "I will sustain you because you are Jen, my obedient slave." Jen awoke sobbing. The hunting-bags were of thickA er plastic than the standard model, and had more complex hubs, each with an outside grapple. Also there were two weapons in each hub: a laser that squirted a thin beam of light, hot enough to slice flesh, and a bullet-port that released null-grav pellets which travelled in a straight line at exactly one thousand feet per second and would detonate spontaneously at one thousand feet if they hit nothing sooner. Both weapons aimed straight out from the middle of the hubs. Jen didn't see how anyone could aim a bag accurately enough to hit anything more than a few feet away. Besides Jen and Bargo, only four others were going on the hunt: Holl and Redn and two men named Walter and Skell. About four dozen men in their late teens, who were going out in standard bags under Trav's instruction for simulated hunts and contests along the beach, enviously watched them go. Jen got into his bag, sealed the hubs in place, and inflated to a couple of pounds above room pressure. They went through the locks crossed the dome and left by the inland exit. The bag was firm out here. He noticed that the others were more skillful at treading the bags than he was. They left the cultivated areas and took a rising trail inland, facing into the early sun. The trees grew thick here, too tall to see over. Bargo led them to the top of the nearest ridge. On the other side, farther from the sea, the trees grew in scattered clumps and there was no cut trail. They went north on the ridge, staying as high as they could. Jen had trouble with the side-slope, but managed. After an hour of travel, Bargo took a small telescope from a case at his waist and gave the valley between them and the next ridge a careful search. Most of it, below the tree-line, was thick with spiny grass. A stream, lined with trees, wound down the middle. They rolled down the slope fast, dodging clumps of trees, and now Jen really had it hard. When they got to the thick grass it was easier, because it slowed them. Bargo found a place where the stream crossed and led them over. Presently he pointed at the far slope and signalled, "Fresh trail." Jen saw a spoor of flattened grass, at least ten feet wide, as if a large tent had been dragged up the lope. Evidently a goar was not a bovine after all. A fter lining up landmarks, Bargo split the party, Jen and Holl with himself, Skell leading Redn and Walter. They rolled apart and started up the ridge parallel to the goar's trail, each two hundred yards to the side of it. The other slope of the ridge was rocky for a mile down, but beyond that there was rolling country, with trees and grass. Bargo searched with his glass again, then they went down to the grass and looked for signs. There were none. The goar evidently had its lair among the rocks above them. Bargo nodded and turned his glass that way, studying the rocks for a long time. Then the other three bags joined them and they began working up the slope. Bargo found a cluster of huge rounded boulders he liked, and they scouted them carefully for a base, noting where a bag might get wedged between rocks or gashed on a sharp one, and where the lines of retreat were. Then he got them distributed rather wide apart, each handy to cover. Finally he rolled on up the slope alone. Presently he stopped and used his glass again, then hitched his bag around and fired a bullet which detonated a little way short of a great crumbling mass of rock. He waited. A rock bigger than a man's head came arching into sight as if frojn a catapult. Bargo avoided that easily, but a minor avalanche followed and he spun down the slope aa skidded into cover. The rocks shattered themselves against the protecting boulders. A shard the size of Jen's hand grazed his leg, leaving a visible mark. Nothing that size, at that speed, could pierce the plastic, but a bigger chunk might damage a hub. Something poked into sigh and came flowing down the slope like a monstrous flattened snake. It was easily ten feet wide and thirty long, but didn't look more than two feet thick anywhere. The front end tapered to a snout from which thrust a spade-shaped horizontally flat tusk or horn that flashed in the sun like glass or quartz. There were claws of the same glassy stuff along the monster's undulating edges. Jen could hear them ring on the rocks. Two small eyes winked open and shut. The thing came fast, with deceptive smoothness, over rocks and trees. It paused and its tail flipped up to send another rock hurtling. The rock showered them with fragments, then Bargo whirled into the open and let go a bullet which detonated very close to the thing. It looped itself aside as if stung, but no wound showed. It came for Bargo now, launching itself in a long soaring leap, landing on the boulers with amazing grace. Bargo was already gone and spinning down the slope toward the others. Bullets and laser beams converged on the goar as it went by in pursuit of the leader. It contorted and bits of its rubbery body flew, but it kept after Bargo. He was far down the hill now, and still going. The thing out after him. IF Jen, mortified that he hadn't even fired a bullet, was out with the others and headed downhill. He lost footing and tumbled wildly in the bag, caught himself and fought for balance. Bargo had turned around a tree-clump and was spinning to the side, while the goar tried to curve its soar tightly enough to catch him. It landed and launched off again, laterally to the slope this time, and Bargo instantly turned uphill. Now at least the goar didn't have altitude on him. Two other bags were downhill now, beyond the goar, having lost control as Jen had. The others were taking pot-shots at the goar, but it was by no means crippled and it was gaining fast on Bargo. Now it was impossible for the others to shoot without endangering the leader. Bargo had made a stand but his laser beams were gone now, the batteries too low. Jen was getting close to the spot. He could skid to a stop, turn and fire, or swerve past the goar to safety. Instead, he hurled the bag straight at the eager snout. The impact was stunning. The bag looped in an arc and bounced off the goar's back. There was some heaving and twisting and flashing sights of the snout, then it was over. He lay in the bag, dazed and bleeding. Bargo appeared and looked at him anxiously, then grinned. The goar still writhed, but its head was blasted and oozing graygreen ichor. Bargo said later that Jen's attack had given him just time enough to put a bullet in the right spot. They made jokes about Jen's being too proud to use bullets or lasers on a goar. Bruises were plentiful, but no bags were punctured and no one had any broken bones. When they rested and refreshed themselves, they began to hack out the goar's snout-blade and some of the claws, using the lasers and the grapples. The stuff did seem to be quartz, deposited somehow or perhaps honed and polished by the beast. They awarded the snout to Jen. Since it was too big to get in through a jettison hatch, the honor meant he had to carry it home clutched in a grapple. E vidently Jen's awkwardness with the hunting bag was not noticed, for Bargo made him a sort of assistant and sent him out with squads of younger men to teach tactics. He did very well. He found he could read a war-problem script once and comprehend it. Not only did he know every tactic and stragem in the manuals, but he invented some of his own. He easily made up his deficiencies in the technical subjects, and thereafter attended advanced math and physics classes with the other mature men. Trav was barracks instructor in these, though of course the teaching machines did most of the actufal lecturing. Four thousand hours passed. Jen was now the second ranking athlete in the barracks. Sometimes, when he was lucky, he even beat Bargo. But when he represented the barracks against others in the hive -- there were currently eight different humanoid species in this hive, each with its own barracks -- there was one individual named Fazzool, a B'lant, whom he could never beat. It was not because of physical differences. The B'lant were about the size and shape of men, hairless, with tough gray skins adapted to some harsh world, but no more muscular than men. However, they came close to being infallible in whatever they'd once learned. In general, they were a little less inventive and a little slower thinking than men, but Fazzool was an exceptional B'lant and there was certainly nothing slow or dull about him. The two of them had some contests that thrilled the hive, but sftWays some minor slip of Jen's gave Fazzool the victory. It was impossible for Jen to resent Fazzool, however much one hated to lose. Fazzool was modest and gracious about his victories. As a matter of fact, they became good friends. A big batch of eighteen-yearolds came in, and all the older men were busy training them. Then one day Jen returned from a trip with a bunch of them to find Bargo in a glum, bitter mood. "That'll be your last trip," the foreman said. Jen looked at him in surprise. "What do you mean?" But the foreman only turned and walked away. Jen sought out Trav. "What's wrong with Bargo? Have I done something wrong?" "Did he snap at you?" "No, but he'd hardly talk to me. And he said -- " "He's always that way when there's a draft." "A draft!" Jen stared at the old man. "You mean I'm going?" "Everyone of eligible age is going. All over the hive." Jen whooped and seized the old man and danced him around. "I'm drafted! I'm going to Space! I'll -- I'll be a warrior, and hunt the Bird of Effogus! I'll -- " When he calmed down he said, "I'm sorry Bargo is taking it the way he is. He'll get along without me; he did before." "It isn't that," Trav said, straightning his tunic and trying to look severe. He met Jen's eyes. "Didn't it ever occur to you what it's like to be passed over?" That sobered Jen. After a minute he said, "I -- no. I didn't think a man like Bargo..." Trav gave him a sardonic smile. "What do you suppose he'd doing here at his age? Did you ever hear of anyone coming back to a hive world?" "Well no. But how could a man like Bargo be passed over?" "I don't know. Any more than I know why I was passed over forty years ago." Ill T he com blared, "Attention. the following men will line up in numerical order immediately at the med booth. Skell, number # # #. Jen, number # # #. Redn, number..." Always before, the man in front of Jen had come back out of the med booth. This time he didn't, and Jen went in a little nervously. The door closed behind him and he IF squeezed his eyes shut against the usual sprays. Blasts of warm air left him itching. A voice said, "What is that bruise on your left thigh?" "I fell in a treadbag, while I was showing novices a maneuver." A metal tentacle came from the wall and put its mouthlike tip against the bruise. There was a tiny needleprick and the voice said, "That'll fix it. Take a deep breath, now." The tentacle came up to listen to his heart. When the pricks and thumpings and mouth-sprays-to-gargle were over, a panel opened in the back of the booth, where he'ci never suspected one, and he stepped through. He was in an unfamiliar corridor. He walked along it to a turn, and saw humanoids ahead of him. Farther on he saw Skell walking. A humanoid stepped from a side-passage just ahead of him and they both stopped, startled. The line gradually filled in, and when it came to a stand there were about two humanoids between him and Skell. Ahead of Skell, a B'lant stepped out of line and came back. Jen recognized Fazzool, "Zo," the leathery humanoid said, falling in beside him. "We draft togezzer! Maybe we big heros and see much sport, and many strange zings." Jen laughed. That pretty much expressed his own feelings. "Maybe I can wrestle the Bird of Effogus," he said, "Even if I can't wrestle with you." The com said, "Quiet in line, please. You'll be moving in a moment. You're about to meet your Overseer." J en had seen members of the Overseer race, but not close up. This one stood on a low platform in a large auditorium and addressed them. He spoke B'lant rather than English, since there were more B'lant present than humans. (All hunanoids had to learn those two languages.) He told them he'd be their commander all through Advanced School, until .they were requisitioned to Fleets or other service and were full-fledged warriors of Gree. He looked almost human, except for the extremely wide-set yes and broad short nose, and he smiled at them in a friendly way. He wore a one-piece coverall with the Symbol of Gree worked onto the left breast. He carried a laser pistol in a holster at his belt. "There' one formality we have to take care of," he told them at the last. "I must mark you with my personal ideograph. It will be your identification and safeguard in case you get lost, until you nave a different commander, when it will be changed. I'll also put your numbers on you now. I don't have to do that here and now, but we have time, and it gives me a chance to know each of you individually." They had to file past him one at a time, while he implanted his mark and their numbers on their hips. It was done invisibly, by a stylus that left tiny magnetic panicles in the skin that could only be read with the proper instrument. It itched for a while. Jen noticed that whenever they were lined up, the men and the B'lant always came first. Also, they got preferential seating. The other humanoids did not seem to mind. As soon as the marking was finished they were fed, then marched to a tunnel-train that bore them on monotonously for two hours. Then they transferred to what could only be a spaceship. J en found his first sight of space disappointing. It was too much like the training films; and of course he'd been in the gray chamber many times so free-fall was no novelty. Most of the others seemed to enjoy it more. Their destination must have been many light-years from the hive world, for they nulled out three times, spacing in twice for corrections any maybe as evasive action in case enemy ship detected them. Then the third time they were within easy telescope range of the Advanced School. It was a collection of spheres and cylinders, some connected by what looked like threads from here, some in slow orbit around the central group. Lights, indistinguishable from stars except by relative motion, crawled here and there. Every globe or cylinder had at least two ports lit up, and some were spangled with lights. The whole thing looked like an elaborate toy. Now, as .first indoctrination in actual space, each draftee had to leave the ship in a spacebag and get himself over to the School. Jen got in the de-pressure chamber and took deep breaths and exercises to speed adjustment. He pulled his suit's limp helmet over his head and sealed it, but didn't inflate. It would inflate when he got in the bag, which would only be at four pounds. The other draftees in the chamber with him all looked scared. The spacebag was of clear plastic no thicker than that of a hunting model treadbag, but this bag was was elongated from hub to hub rather than flattened. Strong cords ran from three points equidistant around the rim of each hub to corresponding points on the other. There was room between the three ropes to position oneself comfortably, but he found that the problem was to avoid pulling on one and deforming the bag when he didn't want to. Tilting the hubs naturally tilted the grav drive and affected his aim. Now at last he was reacting to Space. He had to fight panic for a few seconds as he skewed off course, then overcorrected and got the bag into a very confusing endfor-end tumble. He forced himself to relax and consider the problem. He was in no real trouble; at worst he'd pass within a short distance of the cylinder he had to attain. Ahead of him he could see bags in even worse spins, and one drifting out at a sharp angle. The occupant of that one was curled up in a tight ball, arms wrapped around his head. A light was moving out from the School to make the rescue; but that was one who'd obviously flunked the test. He found he could judge his own drift even though the ship, the station and the stars were wheeling around him. The first thing to do was get his spin around the hub-toIF hub axis. He gave the rotor jets of and worked at his wobble until it one hub a gentle blast. The result, was almost entirely gone; then he as the bag twisted and several spins killed most of the lateral spin and fought, was disturbing, but he waitwent drifting to the cylinder very ed it out and eventually things staneatly. bilized. Now he had a precessing Larger bags, rigid and doublewobble, not too fast to follow if he manned, were darting about resconcentrated hard. He chose what cuing people. Jen passed Redn very he felt were the right side-jets and close, and saw the strain on the touched them lightly. After anothother man's face. A moment later er period of distortion, the bag setone of the heavy bags eased into tied to a lateral spin with a small Redn's path and absorbed some of wobble. He let that go and concenhis momentum. Then they came trated on his course. A few careful over to look at Jen, gave him a pair spurts got his long axis lined up and of grins, and left him. He wanted a little over-corrected, which was very much to hit the net at the cywhat he needed. Now a mild grav linder without any help. He made thrust brought him on course, or small corrections and got some near enough. But he was overtakwobble again, but ignored it. He ing bags ahead. He retroed a little was on course, and got his speed about right. He He hit near the edge of the net was feeling proud of himself now, and it took up the shock. He worked furiously with a grapple and got it hooked around a strand. He relaxed, perspiring. Then he saw another bag coming straight at the net, faster than he had. At the last moment it checked and drifted in neatly with very little wobble. It touched almost the exact center of the net and a grapple caught on casually. Jen felt his face grow warmer as he met Fazzool's grin. T he ship that had brought them stood by for ten hours. At the end of that time it left, taking with it those who'd flunked the transfer plus four others who couldn't seem to adjust to steady weightlessness, despite their previously passing in the grav tanks. There'd be service for them, and maybe even combat, but not in space. Holl was one of them. Now the class settled into a routine of hard work. They were learning not only how to apply in actual Space the physics and math they knew, but aho the maintenance and operation of a staggering array of equipment. All of it was fascinating, though, and most of it came easier to Jen than to some of the others. Skell, who'd been so good up to now, flunked out on blunders, along with a few humanoids. The Overseer was a fiend in his insistence on detail #nd perfection, and sometimes when they got in from a long drill he'd take them to do it over. When they weren't out on those they had to spend long hours at exercise, usually in a cylinder of comparatively small circumference around which they ran as hard as they could to simulate gravity, barked at by instructors, until they were exhausted. Some grumbled, but Jen didn't. He wanted to keep his strength, and also to be able to eat what he liked and digest it afterward. After nearly eight hundred hours, the Overseer decided they'd earned a twenty-hour vacation. A ship whisked them through null to a recreation world, where they staged an orgy that made the .Overseer shake his head and say he'd never quite seen their match for pure debauchery. That was the time Fazzool, by pulling a quick swap in the dark, maneuvered Jen into a rather intimate position with a B'lant woman, and an especially leathery one at that. It was rather a horrible shock, but everyone had a lot of fun out of it and it made Jen a minor legend at the School. Except for the rare vacations, the only days of relaxation were when they had free-fall wrestling or team games of tie-up, in a spherical gymnasium where it was necessary to think and move in three dimensions. The tie-up game was simple, so far as rules went: ten men on each side endeavored to tie up their opponents with short length of rope. An amazing amount of strategy developed, with Jen and Fazzool quickly becoming the two best team leaders in the class. Here, as everywhere, humans and B'lant seemed naturally to lead, other humanoids to follow. When they'd become good at the game, the Overseer made Jen and Fazzool co-leaders of IF a class team and sent them into competition against other classes. They did very well together. T he eight thousand hours of Advanced School were nearly past, and now there was one ultimate test everyone must face. He must find his way home in a spacebag, from where a ship dropped him. It would take him about one hundred hours, and he had no radio and no directions except what he knew of the local stars and what he could learn from a starchart and some instruments. There was alleged to be enough food, water, air and energy to keep him alive and bring him home -- if used just right -- and very little more. Jen watched the ship pull away, then wink into null. The first thing to do, he told himself, was to relax and think about the problem. By exercising just enough to keep his circulation and digestion moving, and eating barely enough to avoid starving, he'd be sure of the food and air. There was a special problem about the air -- he could use some of it for jetting, and thus save battery power from the grav drive. But if he wasted too much compressed air, he'd have to recycle the bag's, and that used energy. One thing he could not afford to do was drift away from the School, or propel himself even a few degrees in the wrong direction. Therefore, he couldn't waste too much time thinking before he located himself. First of all he had to determine the bag's spin very accurately, so he could correct for it. That was simple in theory, but tedious. He fixed the figures in the computer. Next he used the small telescope to find all the variable or multiple stars of any brightness, and compared his list with the star chart. He got no definite clues, but did eliminate some possibilities. He'd have to look for more subtle things. There'd be some hint -- : the angle of a short-orbit binary, or something. Finally the computer nudged up an answer with a probability of better than three to one. Dare he act on that? The one chance in three of being wrong depended on the closeness of his readings, and on mechanical error. He decided to wait a little longer. Two hours later he re-checked, found no change, and made some quick mental calculations. The position he suspected would fit with his being presently about ninety hours from the station, with the acceleration he planned. He stared in the indicated direction. The stars were cold and unfamiliar. If he were wrong, would they find him? There had been losses out of most groups, so they said. Gree was only a mortal after all, and not infallible; and neither "were his Overseers. And even if they rescued him -- he could assure that by just going nowhere -- he did not want to survive and flunk. He had no better information that what the computer offered so far. He made up the programming and used the grav drive. If he wound up with extra air he could always use it for jets later. Once he was committed, though, he worried about his decision. If he used too much battery energy, the extra air wouldn't do him any good. He needed the batteries to keep the bag warm. Barely fifteen hours had passed. # t thirty hours he was sure   he was getting closer to the School, but it looked as if he had enough error to pass it out of telescope range. Now he faced decision again. Pondering it only made his nerves worse, so he calculated as close as he could and made the corrections with compressed air. Then he did his exercises and are, and forced himself to relax; but unwelcome thoughts kept coming. Did Gree really worry about individual slaves? Suppose it were accepted that a certain number should die in training? Many died in combat. And thinking of combat, what if the enemy happened to space in here? Glory was fine, but he didn't want to die meanly in a bag without any weapons. At fifty hours he reached some kind of an emotional crisis and had to face the real question: citner he could keep a grip on himself or he couldn't. Put that way, it was a little easier. He simply mustered all his courage to face the threat. But relaxing was harder than violent action would have been. And now something else was getting out of kilter. At times he could remember the creche and almost all his younger life; then those memories would shift to a different angle so they seemed second-hand as if he'd only watched them in a movie, and some of them would elude him entirely. He endured grimly, clinging to his identity as Jen, who belonged to Gree. But at somewhere around seventy-five hours -- he wasn't paying enough attention to the rime now, nor bothering to eat or exercise -- his skull seemed to get crowded. Hot dizziness swept over him. He heard his voice cry out distantly, "No!" Then the tide rolled over him. IV T here seemed to be a bird in the bag with Steve. It was the size of a condor, or larger, but it had a head and face that were both elfin-like and man-like, and a pair of small but strong-looking hands and arms. "Steve," it said to him m a dry whisper of a voice. "Major Steve Duke. Come up." He shook himself awake. He looked at the creature and said a four-letter word. "How'd you get here?" "I'm not real. Your own mind is conjuring me up. We arranged it that way, but for technical reasons we couldn't tell you." He reached out a hand suddenly, found he could grasp nothing. "Hell! You look real. Solid." "Pull yourself together," the whisper said, "You're in danger. Jen's personality is beginning to waver." Steve scowled. "Good riddance, if you ask me. # feel all right. What now?" "Review. Question-and-answer. IF At least we can make sure your personality stays firm." Steve swore again. "I don't need that childish stuff.  know who I am. "Don't be too sure. You need me, as an exterior personality -- even an artificial one -- to focus on. It's the only way we can keep things in the right relationship. All right now, who are you?" Steve sighed. He'd been over this so often. "Steve Duke. Major, Free Earth Counter Force." "What am ?" Steve grinned. "Bird of Effogus. And you'd better not let me get you on a gun-screen while I'm working for Gree; because let me tell you, I'm a -- " "What is Gree?" "A son of a -- oh, all right. Invader. Tyrant. We're going to settle his hash as soon as I find out for you how to get at him." "I wish we had your confidence of that. Why did we choose you?" "Because I was a dual personality, and you could feed into the submerged one the memories of a captured Gree slave." "You're reciting by rote," the Bird accused. "Do you really feel what you're saying?" "Yes, damn it! I tell you everything is all right!" "It isn't all right," the Bird said, "Jen's beginning to float a little." "He'll make it," Steve said. "He does all right. He fools the Inquisitors. And he's got guts. Or we've got guts; or however it is." Steve realized his attitude toward Jen was ambivalent. On the one hand he felt a little contemptuous; on the other he often found himself rooting for Jen. It was as he thought he might feel toward a kid brother, if he had a kid brother. He said, more conscientiously, "Things are all right. I have all of his impressions and memories. He has none of mine. As long as that's true his environment will tend to correct any drift, won't it?" # #X#"es," the Bird said, "so long I as he doesn't go completely off when he's alone. Now, I detect something ugly squirming around in that cesspool mind of yours. Let's have it up and look at it." "All right," Steve said with a rush that Gree is trying to conquer the galaxy, or a hefty piece of it. What about youl If we help you stop him, maybe you'll just take over yourself. And as long as you want frankness... they say Gree is humanoid, at least. I'd just as soon be a slave to a humanoid as to a God damned bird. Rather." "Thank you. Let's go over it point by point. How long has Gree had Earth?" "Damn you," Steve muttered, "You've sure got me twisted up inside. Arguing with myself... Six hundred years, according to you. All right. You shewed me evidence." "And what was Earth six hundred years ago?" "Occupied the Solar System. About to get to the stars." "What is Earth now?" "A hive planet. A breeding and training pen." "And how were you raised?" ly, "knowing the truth." "Where?" "On a planet you gave us." "Correct. Now, about our being birds." "I suppose I have to believe the evidence," Steve said, "You were humanoid once. You mutated yourself for wings and gave up a lot of your material science. Still, that doesn't..." "Which brings us to a point. How long, according to evidence you'll admit to believing, have we been capable of conquering a hefty piece of the galaxy, as you put it?" maybe." "And we didn't?" "No." "Then doesn't your attitude seem foolish?" "I suppose so." "And now shall I tell you why you have such a suspicion?" "I don't give a fig whether you tell me or not. Whether I tell myself, is what I actually mean." "It's because you're just naturally a sour, disagreeable slob." "You picked me for the job." "Yes. Which brings us back to where we started. You'd better go back under now." Steve concentrated hard on the key phrase, remembering how it sounded in ah Inquisitor booth: "What do Gree's loyal slaves..." J en awoke sobbing. He must have been dreaming of Gree again. He checked the chronometer. Nearly eighty hours gone. He must have slept quite a while; he felt refreshed and a little more serene. He had only to endure now; endure and keep himself fit. The others would be having it just as hard. He took care of his needs and checked course again, as nearly aa he knew it. Hours passed. Finally he thought he saw a fuzzy spot of light that revolved in a small circle around his fore-and-aft axis. He put the scope on it and trembled with excitement. He'd done it! There was only a small correction to make now; and since he didn't want to be in too much below a hundred hours, he retroed a little. There was enough charge in the batteries to keep him warm, and a little compressed air to jet with. He made a good net landing and got through the lock, and got himself out of the bag. He was stiff and lame, and his intestines felt stuffed up. The Overseer hurried to him, beaming, and hustled him through an Inquisitor booth. On the other side, the Overseer told him, "The best performance I've seen in a long time, Jen! A shower now, eh? Then maybe something alcoholic?" "I guess so, sir." Jen's voice was very hoarse. "The others...?" "A very good record. Over half in already, and only two under ninety-five hours, which is passing. The rest should all make it without help except six. They'll flunk, I'm afraid; but that's a low number; and we won't lose one." "Fazzool?" "About an hour away, and in fine shape. When we get you all in and IF doctored up, there'll be vacation. Forty hours this time!" V A fter the vacation -- during which Jen managed to sneak carborundum crystals into Fazzool's bed -- there was a short period of review and examinations. Then one waking-cycle the corns blared, "The following report to Overseer's office at once. Jen, number # # #. Fazzool, number..." The Overseer was already emptying his desk. He told them, "The twenty highest scores in the class are going to a Fleet Base. You will be the only B'lant and the only human in the group, and you'll be jointly in charge until you report in. The other eighteen are being advanced one grade. You are both being advanced two. You will find the assignment inspiring; and if you maintain the same level of diligence, the way is open for you to go high in the service of Gree." He came around fhe desk to shake hands. "I've enjoyed working with you, and with the class in general. I hope my next one will be as good." The trip must have been long, for they made four jumps of it, but finally they spaced in within sight of the Base. This was a breathtakingly thick starfield, but the Base was even more awesome. A long chain of Stations, each bigger than the whole of the School they'd left, swung in distant orbit around a huge red star. Farther in, a swarm of collectordepots soaked up energy and transformed it for beaming out to the Stations. Freighters darted between Stations like bees, or popped out of null with mysterious cargoes from ten thousand exotic worlds. Jen's transport was dropping toward one of the stations, while he and the others crowded before a screen. The station's  image ballooned until it filled the screen, and now Jen saw the fighting ships nursed up to it in perfect ranks, like piglets dwarfed against the belly of a monstrous sow. The transport retroed; a huge port filled the screen. A screeching and shivering of metal, a bell and a green light, and they were sealed on. The draft filed from the transport and lined up before an Inquisitor booth. Other groups, totaling hundreds of draftees, were being processed through. And this was only one Station of the Base! Jen reacted to the key question and sobbed out his answers in the booth, then he was through it, handing his taped orders to an Overseer. "Get your group to med first," he told Jen and Fazzool, "then come back here. You two double-graders -- Jen and Fazzool, is it? -- are assigned to a crew at once." T hey saw no more of their classmates when they'd gone through med. An overseer -- their new commander -- put his ideograph on them after erasing the old one, and took them via shuttle-car across the great cylinder of the Station to the sunward side, where they went aboard his ship. This was only a Scout, with a crew of twenty plus the skipper. Actually, there were two crews; the second one, under another Overseer who was Second-in-command, being off duty now. The duty crew bunked in the Station handy to the ship. Jen and Fazzool had been made familiar with this standard class of Scout at school. She had three sections, squat cylinders coupled endto-end by standard locks, the two outer ones being the only ways in and out of the ship. One was coupled to the Station when she was home, and left open. The middle section was the living quarters, and there they bunked when they were on duty. The two end sections had duplicate powergenerators and fighting equipment, so that either could carry on by itself in a pinch. She had her own mess and was proud of it, and the food was the best Jen had ever eaten. The discipline was not harsh, though no one loafed. Everyone was concerned with keeping the Scout shipshape, and that was it. Jen was disappointed at first that he and Fazzool hadn't gotten a capital ship, but his feeling changed fast. The Scout was his ship now. Still, he loved to sign out a bag during free hours and go outside to look at the big ships. They were five-sectional, each section a vastly wide but flat cylinder, with great missile ports and laser-beam openings into which he could have floated his bag. The ships were so big, in fact, that a standard Scout coupled onto the end lock as a tiny lifeboat There were so many things to do in free time that none of them ever need grow stale. There were furloughs to vacation worlds, space tours to fascinating planets, films, exhibitions, athletic contests. For that matter, the Scout's missions were fascinating. They'd null, and space in, twenty or thirty times per trip; each time hanging dark and with all power damped for a few minutes, listening, since there was always the chance, however Small in the vastness of the galaxy, of stumbling upon the enemy. But if things were quiet they'd take photographs and instrument readings, or perhaps orbit an interesting planet. A few times they actually landed. Once they were so long that at their check-in point they found a drone awaiting them, a standard Scout, unmanned and programmed just to hop here and back. They squirted it a message and it vanished into null to go home and report they were all right. But on the Scout's nineteenth or twentieth mission, one of their hops dumped them right into the midst of a battle. VI A horn bellowed. The Second in command who was in Jen's end of the ship, leaped for his battle-seat and strapped in with his left hand while his right hovered over a button. Crewmen poured from the middle-section lock. When they stopped coming the Second dropped his fist oh the button and the lock slammed shut. IF Screens were asquirm now with green blips -- friendly ships -- and, at the edges, a glob of yellow ones which were the enemy. Short red lines, crawling like worms, were the enemy missiles. They'd obviously gotten a jump on the friendly fleet. Jen and Fazzool were in their seats and strapped down. They had the defensive armament for this end of the ship; small counter-missiles and one laser beam. The screen went blank, then came on again with all the blips shifted, which meant the Scout had nulled out and spaced in again some miles away. That puzzled Jen for a second, then he realized she was locked into Fleet Command and was moving with the other ships. The red worms on the screen wheeled and came on again. It would be fifteen minutes or more until enough energy accumulated to null again. The screen began to blink white with detonations as the interception began. It was impossible to follow as the automatics went to work, missiles and counter-missiles, with their built-in computers and tactical sense, maneuvering at a hundred times human speed. The Scout shuddered and clanged as debris and expanding gases hit her. She lurched hard, twice, and Jen understood she'd been shifted to guard some important ship. A big blip on the main screen, very near the center, would be the one. A circle glowed for an instant around that blip, then was gone. The Command Ship herself! He darted a glance at the Second and saw the Overseer's face taut, his shoulders slightly hunched, as if expecting to be martyred any instant. The rain of debris on the hull was deafening now. Other Scouts were clustered around, their combined automatics intercepting most of what came by, headed for the Command Ship. T hen a heavy salvo, showed on the screen, the big stuff, surrounded by its swarm of protective smaller missiles. The Scout jumped again and the salvo leaped across the screen. She'd been put right in the path! And the salvo was coming fast -- far too fast. Barring miracles, it would sweep aside the Scouts, Jen's included, like so many gnats and go on to atomize the Command Ship. The idea of death pervaded Jen's mind but it was an impersonal thing, unimportant now. If he could just make a hole in that protection around the main enemy salvo. Crack it; dent it; so Gree's missiles could get in! His fingers began to dance over his keyboard. Nearly everything in this end of the Scout went blasting away in a compact group, pitifully small, but for that very reason not likely to attract much attention. He let it go straight on collision course for the hostile salvo. At the right instant he'd maneuver. But soon -- his control would only last until the enemy jamming got strong. Now! He sent his missiles blossoming out like a flower, away from each other as if to attack from many angles. He built up a small concentration in the path of the salvo. But the instants flew so fast, and brain and fingers were so slow. He was aware of Fazzool beside him, letting Jen handle this while he, the B'lant, trove with the laser beam to fight off death from the Scout for just brief seconds, just enough time for Jen to do whatever he was doing. Now! Jen pulled his ludicrously overmatched missiles back into a tight group, shooting in at full acceleration toward the tiny flaw in the defense where missiles had pulled out to meet his feint. The screen blinked with explosions. Then a great blinding flare! He'd gotten something! And there was a hole, if only for a second. Were there friendly missiles close enough to exploit it? But the fight was on top of the Scout now. She bucked and screamed as steel tore into her and great detonations made brief gigantic winds in Space. There was a jar so immense Jen's straps dug into his body until he thought they'd tear him apart. The screens went blind-white, then black. All the lights went out. Then they came on again as circuit-breakers cut back in. The salvo was past, and there was only one more great flaring on the screens, that lasted for many seconds and centered somewhere near the Command Ship. Then it was incredibly still, with only a faint thump now and then of slow-moving debris against the hull. The screens showed a few distant flares as unimportant missiles went off. The enemy fleet had vanished from the screens. Nulled out, probably, and with wisdom, for more of Gree's fleets would be on the way. The Overseer, his face drained and wooden, was unstrapping. He paused and listened as overseer language gobbled from the com. He translated, "A reconnaissance in force, we think. They won't be back." He glanced at the screen, where the big blip, close in, still glowed. The Command Ship's still alive, more or less, and we'll get the credit for that. But I'm afraid our other two sections are dead." He looked at Jen for a few ,moments. I don't like to demand it after the way you've just fought, but someone has to go outside and inspect damage. Two." Jen looked at Fazzool, who grinned. Jen said, "We're both pretty good in bags, sir, and we've worked together a lot." The Second smiled faintly. "I know. I've got enough power to null if we have to, but the field would only extend a few yards; so stay very close to the hull. I think, though, we'll be here a while." J en inflected the bag to a little above ship's pressure, then sealed his suit and raised the suit pressure a fraction of a pound. Fazzool wasn't quite ready, so he propelled himself toward the lock and a humanoid opened it for him. Outside, he got a grapple on a handhold and looked around while he waited for Fazzool. This was a dense starfield, so there was light enough to see even the dark ships and the holes in them. There'd evidently been about twenty capital ships in this fleet, and somewhat more of the enemy. IF The Command Ship only lived the fleet, noting things Jen would nominally; one section out of the have ignored. It was the drones that five. Auxiliaries and bags clustered had brought him to the surface, he around it, at work already making knew -- some planted command to rescues and emergency repairs. surface when he saw a possible way Drones winked in and out of existo Gree. Could he stow away on tence. Those would be carrying one? Not likely; they'd be monibattle reports to Central Command, tored inside as well as out. wherever that might be. A few of The lock opened and he put on them might even be reporting to what he hoped was a natural smile. Gree himself. Wherever he was. They propelled their bags along That last thought made Jen's blood the end and around to the cylindripound. He sent a little cool air into C al side. The middle compartment his helmet, but it didn't help. The was holed in several places and crowded dizziness grew. Alarmed, completely dark. Two crewmen he looked to make sure his grapple should have been on duty there, was tight. Then he blacked out. Fazzool maneuvered his bag to throw a light-beam in and they saw S teve shot a glance at the tellthe two bodies. tale light and saw the lock was They went to the far section, pumping down. Fazzool would be where the skipper had been. It was out in seconds. He stared around at in even worse shape, with great jagged holes. Steve studied one and decided they could get the bags in. He went in first, and aimed his light for Fazzool. It came to him that it would be very easy to shove the B'lant's bag against the jagged steel and rip it. But Fazzool would still be in a suit. And what was the profit just now? There was nobody alive in the section. The skipper had died in his battle-seat. There was no power. Steve wished he were alone. There were some things he'd have loved to give more attention. They checked what they had to and went back outside. At the live end Steve lagged a little and let Fazzool reach the lock first. He wanted a few more minutes outside to look around and think. The drones still came and went. The only way he'd get into one was with clearance from an Overseer. He stiffened. Maybe he could arrange that. He glanced at the tell-tale light. He'd have a few minutes before they began to wonder, inside. He shot back around the hull into the jagged hole. He hesitated, wondering if he could work out of a bag. But the suit would stiffen with the big pressure differential... He propelled over to the dead skipper and wedged his bag between a seat and the bulkhead so his grapple was positioned about right. In some compartment of the skipper's panel would be what he wanted. He got one compartment open. Food. He tore at others, finally found the magnetic marker. He maneuvered it to the bag's jettison lock and inside. He floated, pummeling his mind for a plan. They must be getting worried about him by now. A note to Jen from the Skipper! But there was no time to write it now. He got more compartment open, found a pencil and notepad, got them into the bag. Now if he could arrange for the rest of the Scout to die... He stared at the powr unit. No himself too. A missile? There were still a few left in this end. But how would he set it off, with enough delay to let him get clear? It would be easy enough to position it so it would streak through the middle section and blast the bulkhead beyond. Could he rig some radio control to fire it? Not in less than hours. But there must be a way. All he had to do was set off the driving charge. The skipper's laser gun! H e went back to the corpse, tore at the holster and got the gun, then went for a missile. He didn't take the biggest. No use advertising to the whole fleet; a small penetration would do. There was a hole in the bulkhead he could put it in, but he needed something to jam it in with. A corpse... He 'got one and stuffed it into the hole, pushed the missile in alongside. The gun fit nicely in a pocket of the corpse's suit so it wouldn't float away. He aimed it at the missile's casing, in what he hoped was the right spot, and set it for low power and steady operation. When he IF triggered it the casing began to glow at once. Scared now, he propelled out of the hole and shot away from the Scout. He turned in time to see the masked flare. Vapor and debris puffed out. There were no lights left that he could see. He let out his breath and relaxed for a moment, grinning like an adolescent. Then he took a grip on himself. Not time yet to be feeling so damned clever. He wrote in pencil, trying to imitate the dead skipper's writing, in English, "Jen: you are unconscious as I write, but you are not wounded and you will live if we get you into a bag. The rest of us won't. You are marked with a very important message. Take this note without delay to the Overseer in command of the fleet. Give it to no one else and do not let anyone examine you. These are your orders. Good luck" Then he faked the skipper's ideograph. Now he took the magnetic marker and added more, in the Overseer script. Slaves weren't supposed to know that, but the bird of Effogus had taught him many things. Final' ly he unsealed his suit and prepared to mark the message on himself. He hesitated. Dare he do it this way? It would prove that the suit had been unsealed, and in breathable air, when the message was implanted. He couldn't think of anything better. He put the message on his stomach, describing a new type of enemy missile. If he wrote the script awkwardly, that was as a dying Overseer might write. And if they wanted any confirmation about the enemy missile, the battle had already supplied it. He happened to know that there had been an innovation used. He hoped the information was expendable. He suited up, then jettisoned the pencil, notepad and marker, nudging them with the bag so they'd float away. Now there was one more thing to do before putting himself under and letting Jen carry the ball for a while. He must injure himself slightly, to make things plausible. A bump on the head? Banal; and he'd already used that once. He grinned. Simple enough -- a bloody nose would look like pressure trouble or concussion. He brought the heel of his hand against the front of the helmet, hard. When he tasted blood he exhaled through his nose to spatter the inside of the helmet. Then he relaxed and thought hard about Gree, and asked himself the key question. J en came to with the taste of blood in his mouth and a trickle of it in his nose. He was in a suit and a bag, which agreed with what he remembered last -- starting outside with Fazzool. What had happened? And where had the note come from that was gummed to the hub before his face? He read it. Evidently the other sections of the Scout had not been dead; the note was from the skipper. He turned to peer at the Scout. She looked dead now. Grief welled up in him. Was Fazzool dead then, along with the rest? They'd given Jen this chance to live. Maybe Fazzool himself, with his last strength, had sealed the bag and pushed it into the lock. No matter how badly he felt, he must carry out the skipper's orders. He propelled himself toward the Command ship. He reached for the radio controls, then hesitated. Best not to transmit. Instead, he used the bag's light to signal. As he approached a sentry-globe intercepted him and listened to his story. It called an Overseer who tried hard to convince him that the Fleet Commander was far too busy to listen to second-grader slaves. Jen was humble but persistent. Finally the Overseer took him to the ship's Second, who read the note and phoned the Commander. They were told to take Jen in. It was good to be out of the bag and the suit. They gave him a damp cloth to wipe his face with, and a drink of stimulant, after he told them he didn't need a medico. Then they put him through an Inquisitor booth. The Commander asked, "Did you see this written?" "No, sir." "Come. We'll put it under a marker." They found the invisible writing, then asked him, "Do you know where it's implanted?" He rubbed his middle. "It itches here." When they'd read it, the Commander said, "Do you know what this implant's about?" "No, sir." "What was your battle station?" "Counter-missiles, sir." The Overseer's eyebrows went up. "Did .you plan that little penetration and execute it?" "Yes." The other looked at him for a long time, then said, "I think it will be a good idea to send you along to Central Command, message and all. It's something they'll want to study, and your recollections of the battle will be very helpful." He motioned to an aide to take care of the details. np'he drone they put him in was A a standard Scout, with the living comfort mostly replaced by automatic equipment, but with space for two or three passengers. He was alone. Central Command, which they reached in three hops, looked more like some small outpose on a primitive world. Actually, the Command was in orbiting ships, ready to null out at the first hint of trouble. They sent the drone away and put Jen through an Inquisitor booth which asked him an unusual number of questions. Finally they shuttled him to a different ship and read the message implanted in his skin. An Overseer took charge of him, erased the old ideograph and substituted a new one, and said they'd probably send him back to his Base as soon as a drone could be spared. He also said Jen would doubtless be decorated and advanced another grade for his part in the battle. They gave him a temporary bunk m a barracks with a few other odds and ends of slaves. After he'd had only a few hours sleep they called him back to bis IF new Overseer's office again. As he floated in, a B'lant already rhere turned and grinned at him. Fazzool! Jen gaped, then launched himself forward with a cry. But at that instant the familiar hot dizziness rose up in him... Steve surfaced in panic. He embraced Fazzool, using that to hide his face for a few seconds until he could get control of himself. Then he drew back and said, "You're alive! How...?" Fazzool, grinning like a child, said, "I zot you dead too! When ze final blast come, you still outside, or in ze lock -- " "I -- in the lock, I think," Steve said, trying to make his dismay look like something else. If Fazzool had a clear recollection, his story would damn Steve's -- or Jen's -- like a spotlight. "But you -- but there was the note -- " "I was halfway out ze bag," Fazzool said. "I remember zat. Ze shock stun me When I come to ze ozzers all dead, but my suit not punctured. Zen I go outside to look for you, and when zere no sign I go to big ship for help, because I zpt you drifting even if not dead." The Overseer said, "In a suit, he went. He had no bag." Fazzool grinned. "I am real careful, and it not far enough to freeze zrough my tough skin." "Well," the Overseer said, "you two have had your reunion. And I have a very pleasant piece of news for you. Being the heroes of the battle, and having vital recollections of it, you're going to have an audience with Gree himself." Hphey went in a drone, withA out any way to see out of it, in two hops. Steve managed to skirt around the precarious conversational points. It was very fortunate for him that they hadn't given Fazzool a transcript of Jen's story. But that good luck was only temporary, of course. The Bird came and hovered at the edge of his mind for a minute, whispering, Careful . Keep your head. Easy to say. The drone bumped r fown somewhere and a com said, "Suit up and inflate to seven pounds." By the time the lock opened the drone was down to less than seven pounds, so the suits were mildly rigid. Steve took a few pulls of oxygen so he'd be alert. But they went from the drone into a sealed surface vehicle of some kind and rolled away under low gravity. Tentatively, he decided this was a small, airless planet. Far from any visible installations, probably, and guarded at a distance rather than close in, and with only a few drones visiting it. And probably only one of many to which Gree could retreat, if the slightest threat appeared. They travelled for fifteen minutes or so and coupled on somewhere, and they were let out into a large lock of about the same pressure and told to unsuit. The air was oxygenrich. An Overseer led them silently to an Inquisitor booth. Steve had no choice but to submerge. "Gree is All..." Jen left the booth and stood a moment while the emotion subsided. It didn't all leave. He was so full of joy that his breath kept catching. Fazzool had survived the battle after all, and they were both about to see the Master! And after that there was no imagining the adventures and glories that awaited them. He glanced at the Overseer. The Overseer wore a reverent look too. Fazzool emerged, wiping his eyes, and they followed the Overseer around a turn and into a wide hall with a low ceiling and a single plain door at its other end. The Symbol of Gree, in massive metal, blocked the door. From behind it came six humanoids and an Overseer, walking silently, faces full of glory. Jen's own escort led them forward. The room beyond was dim, but at one end lights glowed upon a tall figure standing on a low platform. Jen could not lift his eyes to it. His feet carried him mechanically upon a thick dark rug. Three chairs stood ready, as if they'd just been placed. But when he reached them, instead of sitting he threw himself down and buried his face in the rug. He felt Fazzool land beside him, sobbing as he was. The quiet sweet music rose a little in volume. The gentle voice he'd known all his life said, "Arise, my children." Then, the Inquisitor was Gree himself! Somehow that made Jen inexpressibly happy, as if loneliness and discontent were impossble forever. A foul thought nudged at his mind: How could Gree be so many places at once? He thrusted it away, ashamed. Gree or booths programmed to ask and to listen like Gree; it did not matter. He pushed himself upright but still hung his head. The voice said, "Be glad. Look at me." Jen's tears stopped and he looked up. G ree was certainly humanoid, if one could elevate the word. He was tall; taller than Jen or Fazzool or the Overseer by perhaps a foot. His shoulders were broad, his build supple and young. But the gray strands in his curly black hair and beard showed his maturity. He wore a suit of dark material which almost certainly had precious metals woven into it. At his throat a jabot of the purest white cloth set off he short-cropped beard and his olive skin. The face was just sufficiently marked with care. The eyebrows pulled down at the middle, but arched up and tilted at the outer ends almost mischievously. The eyes were very long and narrow, with full lashes and long folds of skin at the inner corners. The irises were very light gray and had black vertical slits for pupils that looked into one's soul for the slightest shadow of unworthiness. Jen shuddered and was glad he bore no flaws. The nose, delicate at the bridge, swelled to a very broad base, a trifle uptilted so it showed large nostrils. There was a curl of mustache above the wide, full-lipped mouth. The mouth seemed both stem and faintly smiling at the same time. The skin drew in tautly under sharp cheekbones, to a gaunt jaw that was square and outthrust IP under the beard. On the head, set hair like two tree-trunks, were two horns, straight, an inch thick and five inches long, with blunt knobby ends. They were intricately carved and inset with gems, and they held Jen's eyes in fascination. Gree was frightening. Gree was reassuring. He stirred memories of the creche-father; and other memories vaguer but just as fond. He made Jen want to serve him forever; to rush out and batter down all his enemies. The lips parted. "I have listened to the accounts of the battle you were in, and one of my reasons for bringing you here was to honor your heroism. There is another reason. The Bird of Effogus used some new device or tactic, and we must learn of it at once. So far, your recollection have not been complete." Jen felt a new stir of fear and was ashamed of it. The voice went on, Apparently each of you was unconscious for a time, but in different parts of the ship." Now Jen's fear was like a siren. He felt the hot dizziness again. S teve averted his eyes so any change in them wouldn't show. He knew he was very close to death now, blit fear was thin before a mightier urge which an abstract part of his mind recognized as a planted command. It trembled in every vein and muscle, and seemed almost to shout aloud: "Kill! Kill!" He edged to the right close to th Overseer, as if overcome with emotion; half-turned and put his left hand on the officer's arm. At the same instant he contrived to push a chair against the Overseer's thigh or a diversion. Deftly, he got hia fingers on the Overseer's holster, masking the moment with his own body. He managed to press the release-button without putting pressure against the Overseer's thigh. The gun slipped out easily. The Overseer spoke to him reassuringly, and he nodded and drew clear. Gree was watching with a patient expression. Steve jerked the the gun up and fired straight at the wide eyes. The beam raked ugly raw welts across the face and left a bubbling where the eyes had been. A laser beam shot out from somewhere in the abdomen, but Steve had already leaped behind the Overseer, who took it in the chest. He screamed and sagged, but Steve gave him a squirt in the kidneys to make sure. Then he raked Gree across the middle. The tall form, horrible to look at now, stood unswaying, and Steve knew suddenly that it was not naturally alive. He whirled toward Fazzool. They both stood motionless for one frozen instant while he read the beginning of comprehension, and of other things, in the B'lant's face. He had the gun aimed at that face, but some compulsion made him lower it to the chest instead. He could hear and see the tough skin sizzle where the beam hit. Fazzool jerked double, fell, and lay still. Steve dropped the gun as if it had suddenly grown white-hot, then, furious at himself, picked it up and whirled toward Gree. He was in time to see the big body split to the waist and fall, limply. Where the spine might have been, what looked like a yard of thick metal cable hung in mid-air, contorting. A beam flashed from it, but blindly. Steve raked it until his own gun went dead. It fell to the floor and lay twisting. Doors slammed shut somewhere. If he guessed right, no one, not even Overseers, would be permitted to seethat the Master had fallen. More than likely, there were other Grees. Maybe there was a whole race of the cable-things. He glanced at FazzooFs inert body. Maybe," he snarled unsteadily, "you'll stay dead this time!" A panel was opening at the rear of the room, and the metal thing on the floor writhed toward it. It was trying to escape to somewhere. And that meant a possible avenue for Steve! H e ran for the opening, then stopped suddenly. The cable thing might be insurance of a sort. There might be circuits tuned to it, that would pass it, but not a man. It showed no sign of being aware of him now, nor of anything but its own agony and need to escape. He grabbed the cloth from around the neck of the Gree-body, which moved slowly with some demi-life of its own, and used the cloth to insulate his hand from the cablething. He picked it up. It was more than an inch thick, with a grainy surface, patterned differently at different spots. Could an intelligence be programmed into a length of metal? No doubt. Especially if it were not homogeneous, but differfelt solid. It hung writhing from his hand, like a metal snake, as he plunged into the darkness. The panel closed behind them. He was in what looked like an artificial cave. The only light came from fifty yards away where a Scout was parked. Above it was a gantry-work, apparently to open a door of some kind. He dashed for the Scout and thrust himself into the open lock. The thing in his hand gave off sparks and a. rasping sound, and a smell of ozone, as it scraped against the steel. The lock slammed behind them. They nulled without waiting to get clear of the cave. He grinned. If circuits watched, he'd look like a rescuer. There was no one in the drone to challenge him. And now he had precious minutes, out here in some unmarked wilderness of Space, before they could null again! He shoved himself toward the computers, from which the standard keyboards had been removed. No telling how the cable-thing controlled them. He thumbed fasteners, got the panel off and stared at the circuits inside. The wiring was familiar, and by shorting certain leads he could simulate the pressing of keys. But where would he go? Anywhere but where the Scout was programmed to go! At least he could gain time. U He made the short-circuits that gave him an override on the programming. A set of co-ordinates came into his mind and he acted on them. He was ready minutes before the accumulators had charge enough to null. He waited, half expecting some creature to crawl out of somewhere and ray him down; or the drone itself to come to life. The cable-thing had subsided to a slow undulating. They nulled, and he relaxed a little. He wasn't near any stars. But why had he chosen this spot? No doubt from a command planted in his mind. That turned out to be the case. The com clicked and rattled and said in a familiar whisper, "We're coming in, Major Duke." Two of the Birds he already knew. The other had so much rank even Steve was awed. That one said, looking at the cable-thing, "Do you know what you've got here, Major?" Steve shrugged. "It controlled what passed for Gree. Or one Gree." "It's one of the Invaders. And with what we can read out of it, we can find a lot more. If we can get moving before they realize it's missing." T he war would take a long time still, even though the surprise attacks had gotten many of the cable-things. There were still thousands of die-hard fighting ships, and the Overseer race, and an empire. Steve #as back in the fighting as soon as he got tired of posing around in public. They gave him a Scout group; ships almost as good as the Gree Scouts. formance when it came to the preparations for the re-taking of Earth -- the original Earth -- they wouldn't give him a higher command. He resented that, but didn't brood about it. He was seeing action. And between missions he had all he could eat or drink or wear or take to bed. He wished, though, that they could do something about the other personality. Though they assured him Jen could never surface again unless Steve willed it, Jen was still there somewhere. And sometimes by Keith Laumer j Complete in the next issue of IF -- plus conclusion of Robert Heinlein's great novel, Farn ham's Freehold , and many more storiesl I JF  Short Story He awaited the entrance of his executioner -- and found , instead , himseltl B efore I saw his face, I thought the man was Loyalty Monitor Hartch, my executioner. He had got in while I was looking out the window. Should I call it a life now and jump out, or wait for Hartch to incinerate me? The Loyalty police had a neat, clean way of doing it these days, leaving scarcely an ash. And my blaster was in a desk half way across the room. My usual place of business had seemed the best place to hide. If Smithson had not talked, my presence here was only to be expected; if he had, here was the last place they'd look. Oh, they'd be here -- Monitor Hartch was as thorough as he was corrupt -- but last, not first. Had I been less bemused I'd have heard him coming and pressed the stud in my pocket that would activate the sonic nerve-disruptor. I had rigged the doorway with it against a day like this. A man in my position couldn't be too careful. I was on the manufacturing end of some of the Loyalty Police's gadgets. I don't mean their walky-talkies, but the unspeakable things they carry in their gray gladstones. (The things a man lets himself be sucked into, to disarm suspicion and prove his cooperativeness, while he looks for a place to plant the shiv in the whole system!) But I had the disadvantage of a stern neo-Calvinistic upbringing. That was an anti-survival factor that had already cost us some of the best man of our sect -- one of which I had proved I was not. The man in the mirror just couldn't stomach all this, and he saw to it that I couldn't, either. When things moved too slowly the cooperative way, I had involved myself in a humanitarian, if belated plot to relieve Earth of Our Beloved Leader's services -- and life. Stupid? Of course it was. But one is forced into stupid things from time to time to appease the man in the mirror. Now one of my co-plotters had been picked up. It was a risk we had all taken, but that didn't make things any easier now. Smithson was a good man, but when Interrogation happens it's just a question of time. Even had I sprung my little trap when the man came in, it would have given me only a few minutes' headway -- with no place to head for. Even now I didn't see the man's face because I was starring at his gray gladstone. Executioner Hartch was also an interrogator, then. The bag would contain equipment to extract from me any names and other information that the unlucky Smithson might have missed. I edged closer to the blaster in the drawer as the man spoke. "It's been a long time, Fornay." This would not be Hartch's gambit. And the voice... I looked up -- and the bottom of my stomach dropped out, because he was the man in the mirror! No, not quite. But -- my visitor's face was my face! Y ounger by a decade and more -- but my face. Numbly, I wondered that they would send such a person. I sat down, forgetting the blaster. "It puzzles me," I said cautiously, "that my duplicate should be chosen for this job." It puzzled me, in fact, that there was a duplicate. Humanics was meticulous about such things. But it looked as though Our Beloved Leader's Loyalty Police had taken them and their pattern-files over, too, by now. And O. B. L.'s boys would be less fussy than Humanics about waiting for a man to die before making his andirodduplicate. Yet what purpose could be served now by this? The android himself looked puzzled as his eyes followed mine. Then he let me have it and it hit me like a thunderbolt. "I'm in from Cauldron and I'm going back within the hour. I'm glad I didn't miss you, Ben." Blankly, I looked at him again. Lean and keen and browned in a whiter sun than Sol. And a certain look in his eyes... Yes. I knew now who he was. Worse, I knew why he was here. "You're the pattern I sold to that damned recruiter from Cauldron a long time ago." He nodded. "I wondered if you'd remember. Tell me, Ben, just when did you decide to sell the pattern you made on your twenty-first birthday?" Trouble never comes singly. I wasn't in enough of a spot for my part in the plot against O. B. L. This android had to return now from that godforsaken hellhole fifty lightyears away to collect for his indignities. Before, I'd been about ready to call it quits. This android's presence made everything different, I don't know why. What I wanted now was to knock him flat, then get out of this room -- and farther -- and never have to look at him again. I must have got up. "Sit down, Ben Fornay. Let's talk." His voice packed plenty of authority and he looked well able to enforce his command physically. I sat. "I -- uhs -- sold that pattern five years later, when I was twenty-six." "What'd you use the money for, Ben?" The truth sounded incredible to me even as I spoke it. "To further Our Beloved Leader's career. In a small way, I helped put him where he is." I hadn't known then it would be like this. "Well, they cooked me up ten years after they go f hold of our -- of your pattern. You're forty-five now, Ben, and I'm thirty -- in physical age, that is, if you don't count what Cauldron's done to me. Considering the shortage of ex-Humanics personnel on Cauldron, I guess I was lucky that they got around to me as soon as they did. Did you ever wonder about me?" "Thought you were dead." "Sorry to disappoint you. Ben, do you know what it's like to wake up without warning on a strange planet?"  "I can imagine, uh -- ?" "Martin. John Martin." "Martin, I've had nightmares." "Have you, now?" John Martin's eyes raked the well appointed room. "Changes have been made while I was away. I've been wondering just where you stand in all this. But I know now. You're doing business with the Loyalty Police, right?" F or an instant I had an impulse to tell him the whole story. Not that he could help me, only it curdled me that my other self should think I'd gone along easily after I learned the score. But the sarcasm in his voice cut home. A wave of hatred for him shook me. And yet... and yet... he was me! Can any man really hate himself? "I'd rather hunt with the hounds than run with the hares," I said at last. "I joined them -- Or at least I did business with them." "I've wondered how you were bettering yourself all these years I've been on Cauldron. Let me tell you what it's like out there, Ben. When you first wake up you're in a different room and you wonder why they moved you. Then you notice everything, including your arm, seems heavier and drops faster. After a while the man comes to tell you that you're not Ben Fornay who went into trance fifteen minutes ago. Forney is the name of some other guy fifty light-years away and you're stuck with his past. Only you don't have time to sit down and digest all this because winds are howling outside and there's your share of a ten-thousand-Tiectare paddy and tons of negil sporelings to be planted before noon. "Ben, did you know that the forenoon on Cauldron lasts five months? And the first four and a half of them it rains. In the afternoon you work in a temperature of I I # or up, keepworms from eating or poisoning the negil roots. You've got the little black bugs for company, chomping away on your eyelashes. But nights are when you should be there, Ben. The water worms go, the slime-weed comes, and the fever-midges swarm. Now about these midges. They cover your skin, they bore through your boots, they -- " "I get the picture." I did, too. He'd expect money. "So, Martin, you chucked it all and came back here, and you want me to move over and share the loot." But it wasn't exactly my cash, and I hadn't sequestered it from Hartch's sticky fingers only to hand it over to John Martin. "If you knew how funny -- " "No, I'd rather survive on Cauldron than the way you're doing it here. The other colonists, if you want to call us that, sent me here to buy patterns -- like me and like most of them. I've got them. They're stowed aboard the Star-Trader. Five thousand new colonists, Ben, for the weight of one man. But the main reason I promoted this trip for myself was to settle with you." "If you don't want money, what do you want?" "I guess you could call it revenge." Martin seemed to be weighing his words, as if uncertain how to put what he had to say. A feint, perhaps. I didn't take my  eyes off the android from Cauldron. Y ou see, Cauldron was one of those frontier worlds staked out or two before. It was even more ravenous than most for men. Some day, of course, Cauldron would be a tidy world where women could live, too, and youngsters thrive. At least, that was what the men of Cauldron had in mind. But right now the men of Cauldron had a tiger by the tail that they called a terraforming project. To keep this from blowing out from under them in ten different colors, they had to put Earth's wealth to work where it would do the most good just as fast as they could get their hands on it. The wealth came from their negil crop, which they hand-processed and shipped to Earth. Terrans like Our Beloved Leader and his cohorts prized the vile-tasting green powder for its rejuvenating properties. But the growing and harvesting and processing of the stuff -- plus the terraforming going on at the same time, plus the colonists' own food crops -- required the cooperation of great numbers of men -- on a world not designed with regard to men's tolerances. From what I'd heard, is was a steaming edition of Hades, complete with smell. Upwards of seventy per sent of the new colonists died within months of midge fever or other distempers. But Martin had survived. "I survived. I even adapted. It's a new planet opening up, even if it is hell, and I've done well there. Have my own plantation now in the terraformed sector and I'm testing out a new strain of sporelings..." As Martin talked I'd been edging closer to that blaster. Now I reached for it. #f But he got there first, and rammed it against my belly. "Ben, don't try things like that," he said, almost tiredly. "Your reflexes aren't what they used to be." I tried not to flinch. "You couldn't blast me. It would be like blasting yourself." "Don't count on that too hard. Where would I be now if you'd got there first?" With the blaster he gestured toward the door. "Looks like we'll have to do this the hard way. You're coming with me." "Coming where? My God, you're not going to kill me?" "Out!" Well, that doorway was what I wanted to go through. I went out. But also, my hand cupped the stud in my pocket, and as Martin stepped through I pressed it. Martin collapsed to the floor without a sound. I fled. Halfway down the hall I stopped running and started thinking. There was no place to go, so why hurry? Martin had said he intended to return to Cauldron on the Star-Trader -- today. He'd done right well there in spite of everything. Maybe I'd sent the wrong one of us off-planet. Things could hardly be hotter there than they were here. In an instant my mind was made up. If I stayed on Earth I was a dead man. Worse, I'd betray others. I'd go to Cauldron on Martin's -- that is, on the android's -- ticket. If Hartch didn't catch me first. A journey to a star, we're told, begins with a single step. For me, that step had to be back past where Martin lay on the floor, to the desk where I kept the cash. The cash belonged to our project but any member could use it in an emergency. It had seemed safe from Hartch's cupidity; the man had an almost psychic affinity for other people's money. At least it was safer here than in one of the obvious places like home or under ground. I'd picked up the gladstone on the way past him. Now. I emptied it. All it contained was a change of clothing and a few odds and ends. My conscience, what was left of it, staged a short-lived revolt. What was left of it was still bucking like a bronc on the old tri-dis at things I'd been party to in recent years. You'd think he'd shut up now that I'd landed right here on the bullseye trying to make him happy. I was in no mood for further appeasement. It made it harder, though, that this android and I were closer than identical brothers. Leaving Martin here to Hartch's tender mercies was almost a form of suicide. But I scotched that whole argument quick, as something out of the old fanciful romances inspired by the Humanics idea in its early days. Humanics had made androids only after the original was deceased. And there must be a lot that the Humanics people themselves didn't know, because I shook with unreasoning hatred of this android. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands, and he -- He'd come back from fifty lightyears to settle our score, with only his hands as weapon. IF That straightened me out on everything. I stuffed the cash into the gladstone. Then came the worst part, and I almost didn't make it. The ticket had to be on the android's person... I f you were a Humanics client back in the old days, you simply went every three months or so to their nearest center, for trance. During trance, the biometry people recorded everything about you from your gene pattern to your personality pattern, complete with memories conscious and subconscious, up to moment of trance. Also, a microbiopsy sample of your flesh was reHumanics packed this whole record of yours into a stasis-box the size of a sleeping capsule, and that was that. Unless you died before your time. Then, after complying with certain legal requirements, Humanics took your latest capsule and, using Kuzarian techniques, re-created you, to all intents and purposes. All that was lost -- aside from your personal life and death, that is -- was whatever experience and memory had been added between your latest recording and your death. Immortality, of a sort. The whole transaction about this android had begun some twentyfive years earlier, when I was twenty-six. Legally, a man's patterns belonged to himself. So, when this man from Cauldron made me the offer I promptly claimed a pattern from Humanics that I'd made five years earlier and sold it to him. I'd thought about that transaction now and then. In fact, I'd tried not to think about it, because of the guilty knowledge that that other "I" went to Cauldron to undergo an agonizing death. And yet -- Well, it wasn't only the cash. Or so I told myself at times, especially since my opinion of O.B.L. had soured. In a way, I belonged on the frontier world that I could never hope to buy a ticket for, since such a ticket would cost a not-so-small fortune. There were outlets there for the energies that drove and goaded me and wasted themselves and me, here on my home planets. Sometimes I imagined that other had survived. But even then that sarcastic remnant of conscience wasn't satisfied; it pointed the finger at me for that other ruthless, younger me living on a storm-lashed planet, cursing me and the day he was recreated on that hell-world I'd sold him into -- and that I'd never know. I had my ticket for Couldron -- which was a good thing, because there seemed to be no ticket office as such in the vast underground Spaceport Administration Building. The only concession to the rare and unsolicited interstellar passenger -- who took up a lot more room than valued cargo -- was a small, neglected waiting room whose bare walls half-echoed with my footsteps as I crossed to scan the old-fashioned bulletin board in one comer. The notice prominently displayed there informed: Once aboard, it would take practically an extradition order to get me off again, and it was now #. I felt for the wallet and pulled it out. The trouble was: with it I pulled out the whole picture of the other time I'd set eyes on it, when I'd been ransacking Martin's pockets. I'd glanced in the wallet, seen the big yellow ticket, then as I jammed the wallet into my own pocket I saw that Martin's eyes were open and he was staring at me. His eyes were practically all he'd be able to move for five or six hours, and they annoyed the hell out of me. In the end, I propped him into the chair behind my desk, faced him away, then got out fast with the wallet and the gladstone and the blaster. Now, in the waiting room, I stuffed the wallet back without looking inside -- and found I'd taken a couple of steps back towards the exit. I was reasonably safe -- if I stayed here until I could arrange to board the Star-Trader. Starships as a refuge just didn't figure in anyone's scheme of things. The fares were astronomical and access was by ticket only, even for the crew. It would be hours before Martin could tell Hartch about that ticket. I headed for a chair to light up and pull myself together before any more suicidal impulses toward that exit took hold of me. I'd already done my Stupid Deed for the decade when I joined up with the plotters in the first place, and I sure couldn't afford another stupidity this soon. The old waiting room was oddly quiet. Oh, the building as a whole hummed with purposeful activity and distant voices through distant loudspeaker, but this room was apart. I sat there and pointed out to Martin -- his eyes were still staring at me with that damned helpless hatred, just as though he sat here facing me instead of in that chair five miles away -- that he was someone else, that in any case I owed him nothing. As I say, I understood perfectly the depth of his hatred for me. It didn't surprise me he'd gone to the trouble and expense or returning to Terra to settle my guts -- and would have succeeded, except for the sonic deadfall. And if he didn't, then the Loyalty Police would -- in spades. I tamped out the cigarette, got up and headed for that bulletin board again to find out what I was supposed to do next. There were two more notices: The purser was a gray sort of man who asked no questions. He and his reflection in the mirrored wall weighed the bags, and money changed hands. He asked me for my ticket to punch the transaction out on, and that seemed to be that. I opened the wallet. "I'll record that now, sir, if you'll hand it to me." The purser's voice had a trace of impatience as I conIF tinued staring sickly at what was in my hand, because that was when I first saw the second ticket. John Martin had in that wallet not only his own return ticket to Cauldron, but an extra one, and the extra ticket had my name on it. Martin, then, had not planned to kill me on the spot. In an instant my whole structure of rationalizations toppled -- the ones I'd argued with John Martin's accusing eyes in the waiting room. His eyes now somehow meshed with those that stared at me from the mirrored wall. They made it quite clear that when I walked onto that starship alone, everything between us would be over with. I saw my hand shaking. I got up and headed blindly for the door. "Your bag, sir?" The purser's voice was definitely annoyed. "If you've changed your mind about going, you'll want your bag back." I went back to his desk long enough to check the baggage through -- in Martin's name. Seemed the least I could do for him, though the chances now of either of us ever having a use for that money were slightly less favorable than the prognosis for an ice-cube in hell. Then I left the 'Administration Building and went back after John Martin. W hen I got back the door was still open, but Martin wasn't there. Hartch was sprawled in the chair instead. He whirled and faced me and grinned like a man who's just been paid off on a long-shot. "I played a hunch you might show up here, Fornay." He was a thickset man starting to run to jowls, and his black eyes bored into me. "What made you think I'd come here, Monitor Hartch?" I heard myself ask him. "Fornay, I wonder if you know how close you came to getting away without a trace. When all other clues petered out I took a flyer on your, uh, double, hei'e. I don't know why you did this to him, but I felt in my bones you'd come trotting back for him. I wanted to be on hand to collect when that Calvinistic background of yours paid off in stupidity. And don't try your little deadfall again. I deactivated it." I didn't see Hartch draw his blaster, it was just in his hand. "Our Beloved Leader wants to see you, Fornay." With Martin's absence I felt too numb to resist -- not that resistance was possible. All I said was, "Did you have to incinerate him, Hartch?" A yellow-toothed smile took place on his face. "Incinerate? No. I think Our Beloved Leader will want to reserve that pleasure for himself. With two of you he can have twice the satisfaction." Martin, then, was still alive. My eyes went to the closet door and Hartch nodded. Martin was there, all right, when Hartch slid the door aside, but the close quarters hadn't done him any good. He lay in a crumpled heap, and it took me several seconds to be sure he still breathed. Hartch was fiddling with his walktalky. I said "Wfcit! Let's talk business." Ten minutes later we were back at the Spaceport Administration Building -- Martin (still unconscious), myself and Hartch. Hartch flashed his badge at the purser, who verified for him the sum of the cash in the gladstone. But the bag was by now, of course, aboard the starship. The purser looked less gray and nondescript as he told Hartch that only a written order signed by the person in whose name the valuables were signed through could get them off the Star-Trader. I had signed them through in Martin's name. But this presented no serious difficulty, since as far as the purser knew -- or feigned to know -- I was John Martin. I got Martin aboard and as comfortable as possible before I signed the gladstone over to Hartch. In the minutes remaining before lift-off I made one #-cent coded telephone call -- and got far more than my money's worth... i n hours later, in hyperspace, Martin and I were sitting at the ship's tiny bar. "So that second ticket was what made you come back for me. Propped in that chair I was sure I wouldn't be on the Star-Trader when she left." "Good God, you must've bought that ticket out of your own pocket!" "Saved every credit of my profits since I hit Cauldron to buy that ticket, Ben. A lot of the guys talk about going back. I did it." I poured him another drink. "That extra ticket proved you weren't trying to kill me but to rescue -- " "Ben, I'm going to be honest You should've left me in that closet Rescue, hell! If I'd known you needed rescuing I'd probably have stayed home and farmed the profits back into the plantation. I hated you that much -- or thought I did. Kidnaping was more what I had in mind. Wanted you to find out what you'd let that other self of yours in for. You being so damned safe was what curdled me." "Safe!" "Huh? Oh hell, I'm not sorry I came back -- except that you gave money to Hartch on my account." "And I'm not sorry I went back for you -- not that I had a real choice. We're really the same entity, John. You and I and the man in the mirror. A man can't cut off his own arm, can he?" "Urn." "Don't worry about the money. I had one name that poor Smithson didn't and I made a phone call before we left. Hartch and his funds were, shall I say, adequately met." "Good work," Martin grinned. "When we get to Cauldron I'll have a quarterly share waiting for me. I'd like to put it where it'll do the most good." "I'll help you put it there if -- John. D'you think I can fit in?" "You may wish you'd chosen to stay home and be killed. But if you can live through the first few months and take the work, you've got it made -- friend. We can be a sort of double threat to the status quo." "I'll drink to that -- friend." IP IF  Novelette' Retief could handle aliens . It was his own bosses that he really was worried about!  I R etieT reined in the tall-shouldered urze-beast with a jingle of the hunting-bells attached to the long-legged mount's harness. The trail of the dirosaur led straight ahead into a dense thicket of iron-rod trees, now bent and twisted by the passing of the wounded monster. Far away, the hunting horns of the main party sounded. Retief smiled. Prince Tavilan would employ a choice selection of royal oaths when he learned that a mere diplomat had beaten him to the quarry's turn-at-bay. A windy screech sounded from the depths of the thicket. Retief raised his saddle-horn and blew an answering blast. There was a clanging of branches, a scraping of armored hide on metallic bark. Retief dropped the horn to swing at the pommel. With a pull of a lever he cocked his crossbow, waiting. A tiny head, mostly jaws, armed with a foot-long spike below the mouth, snaked out from the grove, hissing a ferocious warning. Retief's urze-beast stirred and tossed its head at the scent of the dirosaur. Trees shuddered aside as the great carnivore forced its bulk between them, its golden-yellow eyes fixed on the man. A clawed foreleg as big as a man's body, set with rusty scales, raked the ground, dragging the predator's multi-ton bulk into the clear. With a final clangorous flick of its log-like tail, the dirosaur broke free, reared its head into striking position and charged. Retief raised the crossbow and took aim -- The crossbow bucked. Retief spurred aside. He had a momentary glimpse of a two-foot shaft of polished steel protruding from the eye socket of the monster as it blundered past, the long neck falling, to collapse in a cloud of dust, lie twitching, then still. I t was five minutes before the hunt galloped into view, Prince Tavilan's black-crested urze-beast in the lead. He slowed to a canter, rode up beside the fallen dirosaur and sat looking down at the openjawed head, the yellow eyes glazing in death. "That's another barrel of royal vintage I owe you, Retief," he said. "If I ever see the palace cellars again." He was a tall, wide, sandyhaired man with a turned-up, sunburned nose. His leather forest garb was well worn. There were cockleburrs in the snow-tiger facings of his royal Eloran blue cape. The crossbow slung across his back wa his only weapon. "We're wasting time hunting game," a rider at the prince's side said. "There's a plentiful supply of crossbow bolts at the lodge. I propose we ride down into Elora City and distribute them among the good Prime Minister's Greenbacks -- point first." will revise its policy." Tavilan glanced at Retief. "If the tripledamned embargo were lifted, Minister Prouch and his talk of a Regency would evaporate faster than the royal treasury has under his control." "Oh, it's not an Embargo, your Highness," Retief said. "I believe Ambassador Hidebinder refers to it as a unilateral shift in emphasis balance-of-trade-wise to a more grouporiented -- " "What it adds up to is the Royal Eloran Navy grounded, while traitors plot in the palace and Dangredi's pirates raid shipping at the edge of Eloran atmosphere!" Tavilan smacked a fist into his palm. "I've got the finest corps of naval combat commanders in the Eastern' Arm, forty-five battle-ready ships of icy, no fuel! So much for my cooperation with vour Ambassador, Retief!" "Didn't he explain that, Your Highness? If you had the Big Picture, it would all make sense. Of course, I'm a Small Picture man myself, so I'm afraid I can't be of much help in explaining it." "It's not your doing, Retief. But IF have a dictatorship clamped on them because I lack a few megaton seconds of firepower." "Your great grandfather's mistake was in being a romantic. If he'd named his planet Drab Conformity, set up a committee of bureaucrats to run it and used the forest to supply paper mills instead of hunting in them, you'd be the apple of the "The old man led a hard life. When he found Elora it was a wilderness. He made his fortune and then arranged matters here to suit himself -- and we Elorans still like parties!" Retief glanced at the sun. "Speaking of which, I'd better be starting back. The Grande Balle d'Elore is tonight and Mr. Magnan will be upset if I'm not there to help him hover nervously for at least an hour before the Ambassador comes down." "Retief, you're not riding back to the city?" Count Arrol looked up from cutting out the dirosaur's chinhorn. He stood. "I told you what my man reported. Your sympathies are too well known to suit Prouch. Tonight, at the ball -- " "I don't think the worthy Prime Minister will go that far. He's dependent on the good will of the bad publicity." "The Palace Guard is still loyal," Tavilan said. "And remember the lad, Aric. You can trust him with any mission within his strength. He's working in the palace as a mess servant." He laughed bitterly. "Think of us as you dance with the fair ladies of the court, Retief. If you see my father, tell him I and my Invincibles will continue to skulk here in the Deep Forest as he commands -- but we long for action." "I'll get word to you, Tavilan," Retief said. "My conspiratorial instinct tells me that there'll be action enough for everybody before sunrise tomorrow." II I n the Grand Ballroom at the Palace of Elora, Retief cast an eye over the chattering elite of the court, the gorgeously gowned and uniformed couples, the glum representatives of the People's Party, the gaudily dressed diplomats from Yill, Fust, Flamme and half a hundred other worlds. A cluster of spiderlean Groaci whispered together near a potted man-eating plant, one leaf of which quivered tentively, seemed to sniff the aliens and withdrew hastily. Retief plucked a glass from a wide silver tray offered by a bright-eyed mess boy in a brocaded bolero jacket and a cloth-of-gold turban, who glanced quickly around the crowded ballroom, then stepped close to whisper: "Mr. Retief -- the rascals are forcing the lock on your room!" Retief passed the glass under his nose and sipped. "Exactly which rascals do you mean, Aric?" he murmured. "We've got about four sets to choose from." Aric grinned. "A couple of the Groaci Ambassador's boys," he whispered. "The ones he usually uses for high-class back-alley work." Retief nodded. "That would be Yilith and Sith, formerly of the IF Groaci Secret Police. Things must be coming to a head. It's not like old Lhiss to take such direct action." He finished the drink and put the empty glass on a black marble table. "Come on, Aric. Ditch that tray and let's take a walk." In the broad, mirror-hung corridor, Retief turned to the right. "But, Mr. Retief," Aric said. "Your apartment's in the other direction." "They won't find anything there, Aric -- and it would be embarrassing for all concerned if I caught them red-handed. So while they're occupied, I'll just take this opportunity to search their rooms." A t the top of the wide spiral staircase that led from the public areas of the palace to the living quarters assigned to foreign diplomatic missions, Retief paused. "You wait here, Aric." He went along the corridor to the third door, a simple white-painted panel edged with a tiny carved floral design. He tried the large gold doorknob, then took a slender instrument from an inner pocket of his silver-epauletted tangerine mess jacket and delicately probed the lock. The bolt snicked back. l#e eased the door open, glanced around, then stepped back out and beckoned Aric to him. "How'd you get it open, Mr. Relief?" "Locks are a hobby of mine. Patrol the corridor, and if you see anybody, cough. If it's one of my Groaci colleagues, have a regular paroxysm. I won't be long." Inside the room, Retief made a fast check of the desk, the dresser drawers, the undersides of furniture. He slapped sofa cushions, prodded mattresses for tell-tale cracklings, then opened the closet door. Through the wall, faint voices were audible, scratchy with the quality of narrow-range amplification. He stooped and plucked a tiny earphone from a miniature wall bracket. AmbassadorLhiss, it appeared, was not immune from eavesdropping by his own staff... Retief put the phone to his ear. "... agreed, then," Ambassador Hi debinder's voice was saying. "Seventy-two hours from now, and not a moment before." "Just see that you keep your end of the bargain," a thin Groaci voice lisped. "This would be a poor time for treachery." "I want it clearly understood that our man will be treated in a reasonably civilized fashion, and quietly released to us when the affair is completed." "I suggest you avoid over-complicating the arrangements with lastminute conditions," the Groaci voice said. "You've done very well in this affair," Hidebinder came back. "Your profits on the armaments alone -- " "As I recall, it was you who proposed the scheme. It is you who wish to place homeless Soetti rabble on Elora, not we." Retief listened for another five minutes before he snapped the phone back in its bracket, stepped quickly to the door. In the hall, Aric came to meet him. "Find anything, Mr. Retief?" "Too much." Retief took a pen from his pocket and jotted a note. "See that this gets to Prince Tavilan at the lodge. Tell him to get the Invincibles ready, but to do nothing until I get word to him -- no matter what." "Sure, Mr. Retief, but -- " "Let's go, Aric. And remember: you're more help to me outside than inside." "I don't follow you, Mr. Retief." Aric trotted at his side. "Outside what?" "We'll know in a few minutes. But wherever I wind up, watch for a signal." From the head of the Grand staircase Retief saw the glint of light on steel. Two men in the dull black and green of the People's Volunteers stood in the corridor. "Hey, Mr. Retief," Aric whispered. "What are Greenbacks doing in the palace?" "Simple, Aric. They're standing guard over my door." "Maybe somebody caught those Groaci trying to break in." "Drop back behind me, Aric -- and remember what I said." R etief walked up to his door, took out an old-fashioned mechanical key and inserted it in the lock. One of the two armed soldiers stepped up and made a threatening motion with his rifle butt. "Nobody goes in there, you," he growled. He was a broad-faced blond, a descendant of the transported felons who had served as contract labor on Elora a century earlier. Retief turned casually, moved to one side far enough that the man before him was between him and his companion, then moved suddenly. He caught the stock of the rifle in his left hand and with his right yanked the barrel forward; the butt described a short arc, smashed against the soldier's chin. He gave a choked yell and stumbled back. Retief jerked the door open, slipped inside, slammed it behind him. He shot the bolt, then started a fast check of his room. The door rattled; heavy poundings sounded. Retief pulled open the desk. A loose heap of unfamiliar papers lay there. A glance at one showed the letterhead of the Office of the Commercial Attache, Terrestrial Embassy. It appeared to be a delivery order for one hundred thousand rounds of fractionalton ammunition made out to a Bogan armaments exporter. Another was an unsigned letter referring to drop-points and large sums of money. A heavy parchment caught Retiefs eye. It was stamped in red: Below the seal of the Eloryan Imperial Department of War was a detailed breakout of the disposition of units of the Imperial Fleet and the Volunteer Reserve. The telephone buzzed. Retief picked it up. There was a sound of breathing at the other end. "Yilith?" a faint voice inquired. "No, you damned fool!" Retief snapped. "They finished up ten minutes ago. When do the Greenbacks arrive?" "Why, they should be there now. The pigeon has left the ballroom -- " IF There was a pause. "Who is this?" Retief slammed down the phone, whirled to the wide fireplace, flipped the switch that started a cheery blaze licking over the pseudo-logs. He grabbed up a handfull of papers from the desk, tossed them into the fire, started back for another -- With a rending of tough plastic panels, the door bulged, then slammed open. Hall a dozen Greenbacks charged into the room, short bayonets fixed and leveled. Retief's hand went behind him, felt over the small table at his back, plucked open the drawer, fished out a tiny slug gun and dropped it into a back pocket. A tall man with small head, a body like a bag of water, and tiny feet bellied his way through the armed men. He wore a drab cutaway of grayish-green adorned with the star of the Order of Farm Production. Behind him, the small, spindle-armed figure of the Groaci Military Attache was visible, decked out in formal jewel-studded eyeshields and a pink and green hipcloak. "Don't touch anything!" the water-bag man called in a high, excited voice. "I want everything undisturbed!" "What about the fire, Mr. Minister?" the Groaci lisped. "The miscreant seems to have been burning something." "Yes, yes. Rake those papers out of there!" The large man wobbled his chins agitatedly. He fixed Retief with eyes like peeled eggs. "I'm warning you, don't move." ' "Let me have a crack at him," a Greenback said. "He fixed Horney so he won't be able to eat nothing but mush for six months." "None of that!" The big-bellied man held up a hand. A striped vest bulged under his voluminous frock coat like a feather mattress. "We'll just hold him for the authorities." "Any particular reason why you and your friends came to ' play in my room?" Retief enquired mildly. "Or were you under the impression it was my birthday?" "Look here," a man called from across the room. "Under the mattress!" He held up a paper. "A letter from the pirate, Dangredi, addressed to Retief, thanking him for the latest consignment of arms and supplies!" "If you'll wait just a minute," Retief said, "I'll get my scrapbook. It's full of all kinds of incriminating evidence I've been saving for just this occasion." "Ah, then you confess! Where is it?" the Groaci whispered hoarsely, pushing to the fore. "Oh, I forgot. When I heard you coming, I ate it." T here was a stir at the rear of the group. The ranks parted and a short, round Terrestrial with a stiff white mustache and a mouth like a change-purse pushed through. He yanked at the overlapping lapels of a grape-juice colored mess-jacket caked with decorations. "Here, what's this Mr. Retief! Contraband? Pilfered documents? Evidence of traffic with piratical elements?" "No, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "I'm only charging them with breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, abuse of diplomatic privilege and loitering. If you'll -- " "Here, don't let him confuse the issue, Ambassador Hidebinder!" The egglike eyes rolled toward the stout diplomat. "He stands self-convicted." "Don't say too much, Mr. Minister," Retief cut in. "After all, you haven't had time yet to read those scraps the boys are fishing out of the fire, so it wouldn't do for you to know what they are." "Enough of this pointless chatter!" Prime Minister Prouch piped. "Obviously, there's treason afoot here!" He jabbed a finger at the Terrestrial Ambassador. "In view of the seriousness of the offense -- in a time of grave crisis in inter-world affairs -- I demand that you suspend this criminal's diplomatic immunity!" The Groaci spoke up: "As a neutral party, I propose that he be turned over to my mission for restraint until the time of trial." "Well..." Ambassador Hidebindcr blinked. "I'm not at all sure..." "We'll tolerate no stalling tactics!" The Minister squeaked. "The security of Elora is at stake!" He motioned. The troops closed in around Retief. "I propose to take this man into custody at once." He bulged his eyes at Hidebinder. "I trust there will be no protest!" Hidebinder looked around at the room, the scattered papers, the smouldering fire, then at Retief. "Your penchant for mischief is well-known, Mr. Retief," he said acidly. "I'm sure this fits the pattern nicely." "Not as nicely as you imagine," Retief said. "Maybe you'd better think it over -- without any help from Ambassador Lhiss." Hidebinder purpled and sputtered. "The man's run amok! You have my permission to place him under protective restraint!" He stamped from the room. General Hish stepped forward. "Soldiers you heard the order of the Minister," he hissed. "Take the criminal away!" Ill T he cell was ten feet square, with a twelve by eighteen inch opening just under the ten-foot high ceiling. The furnishings included a plastic cot with one blanket, the minimum in plumbing facilities, one small, unshielded neon lamp, numerous large roaches and a bristly rat over a foot long, which sat by the floor drain from which it had emerged, regarding Retief with beady eyes. RetiePs hand went slowly to the small, hard pillow on the cot beside him. He picked it up, pegged it suddenly. With a squeal of rage, the rat dove for the rusted-out drain cover, scrabbled for a moment in a frantic attempt to squirm past the cushion, now wedged in the drain; then it darted for the darkest corner of the cell. Retief picked up the blanket and a length of yarn worked from it earlier, moved toward the rat. It IF crouched, making a sound like a Retief looped rusty bedspring. Suddenly it leaped over his fing( straight at Retief s face -- and met In the gloon the enveloping blanket in midair. lamp, the Cautiously, Retief folded back against the d the blanket to expose the chinless, the bunk am snouted face, armed with backslanting yellow fangs half an inch , long, He looped the string over the  Ur vicious head, and knotted it... rectang He went to the drain, kicked the through tl obstruction from it, then released . e e j the tethered rt. It dived down the intervals, ree. dark opening and was gone. ?fge outside The carefully coiled string paid Suddenly the out rapidly, loop after loop. It twitched, one slowed, then fed down the drain gave thr  more slowly as the rat traveled a mor nent tn through the piping. The guard's  n t " ere w footsteps approached.  nc was on Retief jumped for the cot; he was Retief pull stretched out at ease when the sendragged hea try looked in. When he had passed, slowly, hand Retief looped the end of the string over his finger, pulled in the slack. In the gloomy light of the neon lamp, the thread was invisible against the dark floor. He sat on the bunk and waited. A n hour passed. The barred rectangle of moonlight slanting through the window crept across the floor. Regularly, at nine-minute intervals, feet sounded in the passage outside the metal slab door. Suddenly the string in Retief 's hand twitched, once, twice, three times. He gave three answering tugs. For a moment there was no response; then there was a single firm tug. Aric was on the job... Retief pulled at the string. It dragged heavily. He hauled it in slowly, hand over hand. Twice it caught on some obstruction far away in the drain line; he tugged gently until it came free. He thrust the accumulating pile of thread under the mattress. Each time the guard looked in, he was sitting quietly, staring at the wall. Suddenly, the end of a half-inch rope appeared, securely tied to the end of the string. Retief let it slip back a few inches, waited until the sentry passed, then quickly began hauling in the rope. Five minutes later, a hundred feet of polyon cable were tucked out of sight under the mattress. Retief slipped the bundle of hacksaw blades which had been tied to the end of the rope into the pocket of the gold-braided white trousers which he had been allowed to retain along with his short boots. He stood under the window, gauged the distance, then jumped. He pulled himself up, got a firm grip on the bars, then too-; out a saw and started in. An hour later, both bars were cut through, ready to be removed by a single firm twist. Retief waited for the guard to pass, then dropped the blades down the drain, looped the cable over his shoulder and leaped up to the window again. Far below, he could see the moonlight sparkling on a fountain in the palace garden; the shadows of trees and hedges were dark against the grass. On the graveled walks, armed sentries paced. Retief wrenched the bars free, tied the rope to one, tossed the coil of rope through the window, then pulled himself up, carefully fitting the short bar across the comer of the window-opening on the inside. Keeping pressure on the rope, he eased out, then slid quickly down. T wenty feet below. Retief dropped onto a narrow balcony before a rank of darkened glass doors. With a flick, he freed the upper end of the rope. The bar clattered against the stone wall as it fell. He pulled the rope in, dropped it in a heap, then tried door handles until he found one that turned. He stepped in through heavy drapes, felt his way across to the door, opened it and looked out into a wide corridor. At the far end, two ornately uniformed Palace Guards stood stiffly at attention. There was no one else in sight. Retief slipped the slug gun into the palm of his hand, stepped out, walked boldly toward the guards. They stood unmoving. As he passed, one spoke quietly from the corner of his mouth: "Greenbacks patrolling one flight up." "They're on the lookout for any suspicious activity," the other sentry added. "If I see any, I'll let you know," Retief said softly. "If you hear any loud noises, pay no attention. General Hish will be entertaining a guest." Retief followed the corridor, took a turn to the left, then a right, found the passage housing the Groaci Embassy, now brightly lit. The apartment of the military attache was on the left, four doors along. A black-booted Greenback officer stepped into view from the far IF end of the passage, paused at sight of Retief striding unconcernedly toward him. The Greenback narrowed his eyes uncertainly, then snapped back the flap covering his sidearm, tugged at the heavy power pistol. Retief brought the slug gun up, fired at pointblank range. At the mufffed whoompl the officer slammed back, hit the floor and lay sprawled. His gun bounced against the wall. Relief scooped it up, turned to the door of the Groaci General's quarters, needle-beamed the lock at low power. The hardware dissolved in a wash of blue flame, an acrid stink of burned plastic and metal. He kicked the door wide, turned and caught the fallen Greenback by the ankles and dragged him inside. A swift examination of the room revealed that it was deserted. Retief picked up the phone and dialed. "Post number twenty-nine," a crisp voice answered promptly. "This is the General's guest," Retief said. "The light in the hall might hurt the General's eyes. Think you could douse it?" "We've had some trouble with fuses in that wing lately. I've got a feeling one might go out any minute now -- and' it will take maybe an hour to fix." The phone clicked off. Retief flipped off the lights in the room, went into the small, lavishly equipped kitchen, rummaged through the supplies of Groaci delicacies, found a one-pound jar of caviar and a package of grain wafers. He ate hurriedly, keeping an eye on the door, drank a small bottle of Green Yill wine, then returned to the living room. He stripped the Greenback and donned the drab uniform. The phone buzzed. Retief lifted the receiver. "Two minute alert," a low voice said. "He's alone." Retief went to the door, opened it half an inch, stood in the shadows beside it. He heard the go'ft approach of mincing Groaci footsteps, then a soft exclamation -- He swung the door open, reached out, caught the Groaci by the throat and dragged him inside. He grunted as a booted foot caught him in the ribs; then he jammed the pistol hard against the Groaci's horny thorax. "No loud noises, please, General. I have a splitting headache." Retief pushed the door shut with a foot and leaned against the light button. A soft glow sprang up. Retief released the Groaci, holding the gun aimed at a three-inch broad Grand Cordon of the Legion d'Cosme crossing the bulging abdomen. "I'm going out; you're coming with me. Better hope we make it." He holstered the pistol, showed the small, smooth-stone-shaped slug gun. "This will be a foot from your back, so be a good little soldier and give all the right answers." The Groacie's throat sacs dilated, vibrating. He cast a sidelong glance at the stripped body of the Greenback. "The swift inevitability of your death," he hissed in Groaci. "To anticipate with joy your end in frightful torment..." "To button your mandible and march," Retief interrupted. He pulled the door open. "After you." T he blaze of stars scattered from horizon to horizon above the palace roof. Their light gleamed on the polished fittings of a lowslung heli parked on the royal pad, as Retief and his prisoner emerged from the service stair into the cold night air. There was a scrunch of boots on gravel, the snick! of a powergun's action. Abruptly a searchlight's beam glared. "Hey -- aren't you -- " "Do not interfere, soft-faced idiot!" the Groaci hissed. The light flashed across to him; his five beady, stemmed eyes glinted angrily at the guard. "General Hish, sir." The guard snapped off the light, presented arms hurriedly. Other boots sounded. coming across the roof-top. "What's going on here? Tell these -- " the voice broke off. In the gloom, barely relieved by starlight, Retief saw the newcomer start, then put a hand to his pistol butt. "We require the use of the royal gig," Hish whispered. "Stand aside!" "But the orders -- " the first guard started. "General, drop!" the second bawled, hauling his gun out. Retief shot him, took a short step and drove a hard punch to the jaw of the first Greenback, still standing, gaping, then caught the Groaci's arm, jumped for the heli. Yells sounded across the roof. A yardwide. light-cannon, gymbal-mounted atop the guard shack, winked on, throwing a gray-blue tunnel of light into the sky; it pivoted, depressed, swept a burning disc across to Retief -- He drew the power pistol, thumbed it to narrow beam and blasted the light. It exploded in a shower of tinkling glass, a billow of orange smoke that faded, winked out. Retief shoved the slender Groaci ahead of him, yanked wide the heli's entry hatch, tumbled his prisoner in and jumped after him. He rammed power, the finely engineered craft leaped from the roof, surged upward in a buffet of suddenly stirred air. From below, blue and yellow flashes winked briefly against the discs of the screaming rotors; then they dwindled away and were gone. IV H alf an hour later, Retief dropped the heli in low over the black tree-tops of the Deep Forest. A gleam of light reflected across rippling water. He edged the machine forward and swung out over the lake, dropping down to tree-top level. Below, the water churned in the down-draft from the rotors as the heli settled gently into two feet of water. Retief cut the engine and popped the hatch. Cold mountain air swirled in. Somewhere, water lizards shrilled. "What place of infamy is this? the captive General hissed. He stared out into the darkness. "Do you bring me here to slay me unseen, vile disrespecter of diplomatic privilege?" "The idea has merit," Retief said, "but I have other plans for you. General." He climbed down, moIF tioning the Groaci out. Hish grumbled, scrambling down into the icy water of the lake, slogging to shore. From the darkness a night-fowl called. Retief whistled a reply. There was the sound of a footstep in the brush, the click ! of a crossbow's cocking mechanism. "It's Retief," he called. "I have a guest: General Hish, of the Groaci Embassy." "Ah, welcome, Retief," a soft voice drawled. "We're honored, General. Good of you to call. His Highness was hoping you'd be along soon..." I nside the high-beamed lodge, Prince Tavilan came across the room. Behind him, Aric grinned. "I caught the rat all right, Mr. Retief." "Retief!" Tavilan clapped him on the shoulder. "Aric reached me with your message an hour ago. I heard the news of your arrest on Tri-D. They broke into a concert to announce that a plot involving the ments had been uncovered." "Hidebinder will be very unhappy with that version of events," Retief said. "The agreement was that it was all to be blamed on a rotten apple in the Corps barrel. Namely  me. "We were saddling up to storm the Palace and free you, when your message reached me -- " "How many reliable men do you have available on short notice, Your Highness?" Retief cut in. "I have thirty-eight of the Invincibles with me here. At least three others are under arrest on various pretext. Four more managed to report in that they're pinned down by 'protective escorts'. Retief shook his head. That was the idea of arresting me, Your Highness -- as a personal affront to you, since my sympathies are well known. Prouch wanted to bring you out into the open. An armed attack was just what he needed -- and he was ready for you. He has .at least two hundred Greenbacks in the Palace, armed to the nines. Your raid would have been the signal of his take-over -- to preserve the domestic tranquility, of course -- and your death in the fighting would have left him a clear field." "What about the Palace Guard? They haven't gone over?" "Of course not." Retief accepted a cigar, took a seat by the fire. "They're standing fast, playing it by ear. The Grand Ball tonight gave them an excuse for full dress, including weapons, of course. The Greenbacks aren't quite ready to start anything with them -- yet." T avilan stamped across the firebeast-hide rug. "Blast it, Retief we can't sit here and watch Prouch and his mob move in unopposed! If we hit them now -- before they've had time to consolidate -- " " -- you'll get every Royalist supporter in Elora City killed," Retief finished for him. Now, let's consider the situation. Item: the Royal policy. Item two: Prouch's people's Volunteer Naval Reserve Detachment of late-model Bogan destroyers is sitting in its launch-cradles at Gray Valley, fifteen miles away." "They're no threat to us; they can't operate without fuel either." "They won't have to," Retief said, puffing out smoke. "Corps policy is nothing if not elastic. It seems that the Big Picture called for the supplying of the Volunteer Reserve with full magazines -- " "What!" " -- and the topping off of all tanks." Tavilan's ruddy face paled. "I see," he said quietly, nodding. "The while it was arming Prouch's revolutionaries. It never intended to see the monarchy survive." a very clean-minded organization, and it heard somewhere that 'monarchy' was a dirty word." "All right!" Prince Tavilan turned to Count Arrol. "We have mounts for every man -- and plenty of crossbow bolts. There'll be Greenback blood on the palace floors before the night is out." "If I might make a suggestion...?" "You're not involved in this, Retief. Take the copter and get clear." "Clear to where? I've been disowned by my colleagues and slapped in jail by the Prime Minister. To get back to the subject: I see no point in our riding into Elora City and being shot down at long range by Greenbacks." "We'll ride in at the Marivale Gate; move up through -- " "If you'll pardon my saying so," Retief said, "I've got a better idea. It's only fifteen miles to the Gray Valley." "So?" "So I suggest we take a ride over there and look at the Volunteer Navy." "You've just told me Prouch's renegades are armed to the teeth!" Retief nodded. "Since we need guns, Your Highness, I can't think of a closer place to get 'em." A t the head of the troop of thirty-eight riders, including General Hish, lashed to a mount, Retief and Tavilan reined in at the crest of the slope that faced the barracks of the Peoples Volunteer Naval Reserve, a blaze of light all across the narrow valley. On the ramp a quarter of a mile beyond the administrative and shop areas, ten slim destroyers loomed, bathed in the glare of poly-arcs. Prince Tavilan whistled. have struck it off even better than I thought. That's all brand-new equipment." "Just defensive, of course," Retief said. "I believe Minister Prouch has given assurances that the elimination of Dangredi's freebooters will be carried out with dispatch -- his regime." Tavilan laughed shortly. "I could have swept Dangredi off the space hadn't blockaded me." "Such are the vagaries of Galactic policy." "I know, the Big Picture again." Tavilan turned to Arrol. "We'll split into two parties, work around both ends of the valley, and pick our target at close range. Retief, you ride with me. Let's move out" IF It was a forty-minute ride along of the next ships in line, sentries, the forested slopes walling the valstand-by riot squads, and those two ley to the rendevous point Prince pillboxes commanding the ends of Tavilan had designated, a sheltered the valley." ravine less than a hundred yards "Still -- I must give those men from the nearest of the parked war their chance t# dec , are themS elves." vessels. The access ladder was  As the Prince wishes . But ru down, and light spilled from the keep my blaster loose in its holster open entry port. A Reservist m j ust j n case  baggy gray and green lounged in the opening. Two more stood below, power rifles slung across their backs. "You could pick those three off from here," Retief remarked. "Crossbows are a nice quiet weapon. T he Prince rode in the lead with his guidon at his left, followed by thirty-five men, formed up in a precise triangle of seven ranks, with two formal honor guards out on the flanks. The rearTavilan shook his head. "We'll ride down in formal battle order. No war's been declared. They won't fire on the Prince Royal." "There may be forty more inside -- to say nothing of the crews guard followed, holding the reins of the mount to which General Hish, .still hissing bitter complaints, was lashed. The Invincibles moved down the slope and out onto the broad tarmac, hooves clattering aua ist the paved surface. The two men on the ramp turned and stood gaping. The one above at the ship's entry port whirled, disappeared inside. The troop rode on; they were halfway to the ship now. One of the waiting Greenbacks unlimbered his power gun, cranked the action; the other followed suit. Both stepped forward half a dozen paces, brought their weapons up uncertainly. "Halt! Who the hell's there?" one bawled. Tavilan flipped the corner of his hunting cape forward over his shoulder to show the royal Eloran device and came on in silence. The taller of the two Greenbacks raised his rifle, . hesitated, half-lowered it. Riding half a pace behind Tavilan, Retief eased his pistol from its holster, watching the doorway above. On his right, Count Arrol held his crossbow across his knee, a bolt cocked in the carriage, his finger on the trigger. Ten feet from the two Greenback sentries, Prince Tavilan reined in. "Aren't you men accustomed to render a proper salute when your commander makes a surprise inspection?" he asked mildly. The Greenbacks looked at each other, fingering their guns. "It looks as though the word has gone out," Arrol whispered to Retief. At that moment a figure eased into view at the port; light glinted from the front sight of a power gun as it came up, steadied -- Retief sighted and fired. In the instantaneous blue glare, the man at the port whirled and fell outward. The Greenback nearest Tavilan made a sudden move to swing his gun on the Prince -- then stumbled back, a steel quarrel from Arrol's crossbow standing in his chest. The second Greenback dropped his weapon, stood with raised hands, his mouth open and eyes wide; then he turned and ran. Tavilan leaped down from his steed, dashed for the access ladder, his crossbow ready. "Everybody in," Arrol called. The men sprang up in good order; those waiting on the ramp faced outward, covering all points. From the adjacent vessel, a sharp report echoed. A man fell from the ladder; others caught him, lifted him up. Far away, a harsh voice bellowed orders. "They can't use any heavy stuff," Arrol said. "They wouldn't want to nick the paint on their new battlewagon." A squad of men appeared, running from the shadows at the base of the ship from which the firing had come. Most of the troop were up the ladder now; two men hustled the struggling Groaci up. Beside Retief, Arrol launched three bolts in rapid-fire order. Two of the oncoming men fell. The blue flashes of power guns winked; here and there, the surface of the tarmac boiled as wild shots struck. "Come on!" The two men ran for the ladder; Arrol sprang for it, swarmed up. Retief followed. Molten metal spattered as a power-gun bolt vaporized the handrail. Then hands were hauling him safely inside the ship. "Hit the deck," Arrol yelled. "We're lifting!" IF V  V infinite repeater," an officer reported, "but no serious damage was done. They held their fire just a little too long." "We were lucky," Prince Tavilan said. "One man killed, one wounded. It's fortunate we didn't select the next ship in line. We'd have had a hornet's nest on our hands." "Too bad we broke up the battalion crap game," Retief commented. "But by now they'll be lifting off after us -- a few of them, anyway." "All right. We'll give them a warm welcome before they nail us." "If I may venture to suggest -- " Tavilan waved a hand, grinning. "Every time you get so damned polite, you've got some diabolical scheme up your sleeve. What is it this time, Retief?" "We won't wait around to be nailed. We'll drive for Deep Space at flank speed -- " "And run into Dangredi's blockade? I'd rather use my firepower on Prouch's scavengers." "That's where our friend the General comes in." Retief nodded toward the trussed Groaci. "He and Dangredi  are old business associates. We'll put him on the screen and see if he can't negotiate a brief truce. With the approval of your Highness, I think we can make an offer that will interest him." T he flagships of the pirate fleet was a four hundred year old, five hundred thousand ton dreadnought, a relic of pre-Concordiat times. In the red-lit gloom of its cavernous Command Control deck, Retief and Prince Tavilan relaxed in deep couches designed for the massive frames of the Hondu corsairs. Opposite them; Dangredi, the Hondu chieftain, lounged at ease, his shaggy, leather-strapped, jewelspangled #-pound bulk almost overflowing his thronelike chair. At Retief's side, General Hish perched nervously. Half a dozen of Tavilan's Invincibles stood around the room, chatting with an equal number of Dangredi's hulking officers, whose greenish fur looked black in the light from the crimson lamps. "What I failing to grasp," Dangredi rumbled, "is reason for why suddenly now changing of plan previously okayed." "I hardly think that matters," Tavilan said smoothly. "I've offered to add one hundred thousand Galactic Credits to the sum already agreed on." "But whole idea was compensate me, Grand Hereditary War Chief of Hondu people, for not fight. Now is offering more pay for stand and give battle." "I thought you Hondu loved war," an Eloran officer said. Dangredi nodded his heavy greenfurred head, featureless but for two wide green-pupilled eyes. "Crazy mad for warring, and also plenty fond of cash. But is smelling rodent somewhere in woodpile." "It's very simple, Commodore," Retief said. "General Hish here had arranged with you to flee when the People's Volunteer forces attacked. Now changing conditions on Elora make it necessary that you fight. And in place of the loot you wouiJ otherwise so rightly expect, you'll collect a handsome honorarium. " Suddenly the Groaci leaped to his feet, pointed at Retief. "Commodore Dangredi," he hissed. "This renegade diplomat beside me holds a gun pointed at my vitals. Only thus did he coerce me to request this parley. Had I guessed his intention, I would have dared him to do his worst. Seize the traitor, Excellency!" Dangredi stared at the Groaci. "He -- and these strutting popinjays -- plot against the security of the People's State of Elora!" Hish whispered urgently. "The plan remains unchanged! You are to flee engagement with the forces of Minister Prouch!" The great green head bobbed suddenly; hooting laughter sounded. A vast hand slapped a thigh like a shaggy beer keg. "Aha! At last is getting grasp of situation," Dangredi bellowed. "Now is little honest treachery, kind of dealing Hondu understanding!" He waved a hand at a servitor standing by. "Bringing wassail bowl, plenty meat!" He brought his hands together with a dull boom, rubbed them briskly. "Doublecross, plenty fighting, more gold at end of trail! Is kind of operation I, Dangredi, Hereditary War Chief, dreaming of in long nights of tooth-shedding time!" , "But these -- these criminal kidnappers have no authority to deal -- " "Groaci-napping is harmless pastime. Like stealing wine-melons when cub. Unless, maybe -- " he cocked a large emerald eye at Hish -- "you maybe raising ante?" "I... I will match the offer of the saboteurs of interplanetary amity! One hundred thousand in Groad gold!" Dangredi considered briefly. "No good. What about fighting? You give Hondu gunners targets in sights? Or maybe chance for roughand-tumble hand-to-hand, cold steel against enemy blades?" General Hish shuddered. "In the name of civilization, I appeal -- " "Shove civilization in ventral oriface! Hondu taking good, crooked, bloodthirsty barbarians every time. Now disappearing quietly, Groaci, while I and new buddies planning strategy. Maybe later I sending for you and bending arms and legs until you tell all about enemy battle plan." "The Groaci is our hostage," Tavilan said as the general was led away. "He's not to be bent without my prior approval." "Sure; just having little joke." Dangredi leaned back, accepted a vast drumstick and a tank of wine, waited while his guests were supplied with delicacies. "Now, Retief, you say attack coming when...?" A Magnan said, "I don't quite understand how it happened that after trouncing the Eloran Volunteers, the pirate Dangredi voluntarily gave himself up and offered the services of his entire fleet as a reserve force to replace the very units he destroyed." "Never mind that, Magnan," AmIF bassador Hidebinder said. 'As seasoned campaigners must, we shall accept the fait accompli. Our resettlement plans are set back a year, at least. It's doubly unfortunate that Prime Minister Prouch suffered a fall just at this time. Magnan, you'll attend the funeral." "With pleasure, Mr. Ambassador," Magnan said. "That is, I'll be honored." "Retief..." Hidebinder glared across the table. "I'm not going to press civil charges, since the Eloran government, at the behest of Prince Tavilan, has dropped the case. However, I may as well tell you at once -- your future with the Corps is non-existent. A trifling embezzlement of official funds, I could wink at. Embellished reports, slack performance of duty, cowardice in the face of the enemy -- these I could shrug off as youthful peccadillos. But foot-dragging in the carrying out of my policy -- " his fist thumped the desk. "Intolerable!" You openly allied yourself with -- " A messenger entered the conference room, handed a note to Magnan, who passed it to Hidebinder. He opened it impatiently, glanced at it. His jaw dropped. He read it through again. His mouth closed; his jowls paled, quivering. "Mr. Ambassador -- what is it?"  Magnan gasped. Hidebinder rose and tottered from the room. Magnan snatched up the paper, read it through, then stared at Retief. "He's been declared persona non grata ! The Imperial government gives him twelve hours to leave Elora!" Retief glanced at the wall clock. "If he hurries, he can catch the mail boat." "And you, Retief..." etief raised his eyebrows. Magnan glanced around the table. "If you gentlemen will excuse us for a few moments?" Half a dozen frowning diplomats filed from the room. Magnan cleared his throat. "This is most irregular, Retief! The Imperial government requests that you present credentials as Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary at once! They will accept no other appointee." Retief asked. "I told Prince Tavilan I wouldn't have time for a ceremonial job. I have a suggestion, Mr. Magnan. Suppose I nominate you for the post?" On sale now at all newsstands! "Over the heads of a hundred senior officers?" Magnan gasped. "Retief, dear boy... "That is, if your distaste for monarchies isn't overwhelming?" "Eh? Oh, well, as to that," Magnan sat erect, tugged his lapels into place "I've always had a sneaking admiration for absolute royalty. " "Fine. Dangredi will be along in a few minutes to arrange for supplies. It seems there are a few shipables already landing on the northern continent who'll have to be warned off. It's probably just a slip. I'm sure our former ambassador wouldn't have jumped the gun in violation of solemn treaties." "Ah," Magnan said "And, of course, the Royal Navy will require provisioning -- just to be sure the new Reservists don't get any large ideas." "Uh... " "And, of course, a new treaty plainly guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Elora will have to be worked up at once." "Oh... " Retief rose. "All of which I'm Ambassador. And by the way -- I think I could best serve the mission in some other capacity than as Admin Officer." Magnan pulled at his collar, waiting... "I think I'd better work closely with Prince Tavilan, the heir apparent," Retief said blandly. "He does a lot of hunting, so perhaps you'd better designate me as Field and Stream Attache." He picked up his crossbow which was in the corner of the room. "I leave the details to you, Mr. Ambassador. I'm going to do some hunting." by Cordwainer Smith by Richard Wilson by Wyman Guin All complete in the August Galaxy -- now on cHe! IF IF  Short Storv The berserker machine was built to destroy life. Carr's mission was to teach it to be a friend I C arr swallowed a pain pill, and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter and spoke to the rogue ship that hung before him in space. "I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you." He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. His radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, but he knew that it had heard him. Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was a lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy. Until now the war waged on life by the berserker machines had been a remote horror in the news stories. The colony's only real fighting ship had been sent to join Karlsen's fleet in the defense of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here, and the people of Carr's planet were readying two more ships in feverish haste -- they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even when the two ships were ready, they would hardly be a match for a berserker. When Carr had taken his plan to the leaders of the colony, they had thought him mad. Go out and talk to it of peace and love? Argue with it? There might be some hope of converting the most depraved human to the cause of goodness and mercy, but what appeal could alter the built-in purpose of a machine? "Why not talk to it of peace?" Carr had demanded. "Have you a nothing to lose." They had looked at him, across the gulf that separates healthy planners from those who know they are dying. They thought almost any scheme would be better than his. But they could imagine nothing else to do until the warships were ready, which would be at least ten days. The little one-man ship was expendable, being unarmed. Armed, it would be no more a provocation to a berserker. In the end, they let Carr take it, hoping there was a chance his arguments might delay the inevitable attack. For Carr himself, of course, they wasted no thought. For Carr was dying. Was as good as dead. W hen Carr came within a million miles of the berserker, it stopped its own unhurried motion and seemed to wait for him, hanging in space in the orbital track of an airless planetoid, at a point from which the planetoid was still several days away. "I am unarmed," he radioed again. "I come to talk with you, not to damage you. If those who built you were here, I would try to talk to them of peace and love. Do you understand?" He felt sure it would understand his language. All the berserker machines had learned the universal space-travelers' tongue, from human prisoners or from each other. And he was serious about talking love to the unknown Builders. Grudges and vengeance seemed tiny things to a dying man. But the Builders would not be aboard; the berserkers had been constructed, probably, when Earthmen hunted the mammoth with spears. The Builders were lost in spacetime, along with their enemies of long ago. Suddenly it answered him: "Little ship, maintain your present speed and course toward me. Be ready to stop when ordered. " "I -- I will." In spite of being ready for it, Carr found himself stuttering and shaken at the sound of its voice, the uneven mechanical reproduction of the words of human prisoners, recorded aboard or borrowed from another machine. Now the weapons which could sterilize a planet would be trained on him alone. And there was worse than destruction to be feared, if one tenth of the stories about berserkers' prisoners were true. Carr did not let himself think about that -- although the pain that racked him in momentary flood, of agony made death seem almost welcome. When he was within ten thousand miles it ordered: "Stop. Wait where you are, relative to me." Carr obeyed instantly. Soon he saw that it had launched toward him something about the size of his own ship -- a little moving dot on his video screen, coming out of the vast black fortress that floated against the stars. Even at this range he could see IF how scarred and battered that fortress was. He had heard that all of these ancient machines were damaged, from their long senseless fighting across the galaxy; but surely such apparent ruin as this must be exceptional. The berserker's launch slowed and drew up beside his ship. Soon there came a clanging at the airlock. "Open!" demanded the radio voice. "I must search you." "Then you will listen to me?" "Then I will listen." He opened the lock, and stood aside for the half dozen machines that entered. They were not unlike robot valets and workers, except that these were old and limping and worn, like their great master. Here and there a new part gleamed. But often the machines' movements were unsteady as they searched Carr, searched his cabin, probed everywhere on the little ship. One of them had to be half-carried out by its fellows, when the search was completed. Another one of the machines, a thing with arms and hands like a man's, stayed behind. As soon as the lock had closed behind the others, it settled itself in the combat chair and began to drive the ship toward the berserker. "Wait!" Carr protested. "I didn't surrender!" The ridiculous words hung in the air, seeming to deserve no reply. Sudden panic made Canmove without thinking; he stepped forward and grabbed at the mechanical pilot, trying to pull it from the chair. It put one metal hand against his chest and shoved him across the cabin, so that he staggered and fell in the artificial gravity, thumping his head painfully against a bulkhead. "In a matter of minutes we will talk about love and peace," said the radio voice. L ooking out a port as his ship neared the immense berserker, Carr saw the scars of battle become plainer and plainer, even to his unpracticed eye. There were holes in the hull, square miles of bendings and swellings and pits where the metal had once flowed molten. Rubbing his bumped head, Carr felt a faint thrill of pride. We've done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. His own martial feeling annoyed him, in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist. Of course it could hardly be thought immoral to use violence against a dangerous but inanimate machine. After some delay, a hatch opened in the berserker's side, and Carr's ship followed the berserker's launch into darkness. Now there was nothing to be seen through the port. Soon there came a gentle bump, as of docking. The mechanical pilot shut off the drive, turned toward Carr and started to rise from the chair. Something in it failed. Instead of rising smoothly, the pilot reared up, flailed for a moment with arms that sought a grip or balance, and then fell heavily to the deck. For half a minute it moved one arm, and made a grinding noise. Then it was still. In the half minute of silence which followed, Carr realized that he was again master o ms cabin: chance had given him that. If there was something he could do -- "Leave your ship," said the calm voice. "There is an airfilled tube fitted to your airlock. It will lead you to a place where we can talk of peace and love." Carr's eyes, with a sort of reluctant horror, had dragged themselves to focus on the engine switch, and beyond that, to the C-plus activator. The C-plus jump was not usable as a drive anywhere near the huge mass of a sun. In such proximity as this to a mass even the size of the surrounding berserker, the effect became only a weapon -- a weapon of tremendous potential power. Carr did not -- or thought he did not -- any longer fear sudden death; he was too near to the slow, sure kind. But now he found that with all his heart and soul he feared what might be prepared for him outside the airlock. All the horror stories came back. The thought of going out through that airlock now was unendurable. It was less terrifying for him to step carefully around the fallen pilot, to reach the controls and turn the engine back on. "I can talk to you from here," he said, his voice quavering in spite of an effort to keep it steady. After about ten seconds, the berserker said: "Your C-plus drive has safety devices. You will not be able to kamikaze me." "You may be right," said Carr after a moment's thought. "But if a safety device does function, it might hurl my ship away from your center of mass, right through your hull. And your hull is in bad shape now. You don't want any more damage." "You would die." "I'll have to die sometime. But I didn't come out here to die, or to fight. I came to talk with you, to try to reach some agreement." "What kind of agreement?" At last Carr took a deep breath, and marshaled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage. "I've had the feeling," he began, "that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy." "Life is my enemy. Life is evil." Pause. "Do you want to become goodlife?" C arr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. "From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?" There was a longer pause. "What evidence can you offer that I should change my purpose?" "For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you." "What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?" Carr tried again. "Life is basicalIF f superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life." "What evidence do you offer?" "Man has a spirit." "I have learned that men claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not men who deny that this spirit exists?" "Spirit is so defined. And there are such men." "Then I do not accept the argument of spirit." Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. "Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility." "That is correct." "But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy or organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull." "I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect," the mechanical voice informed him blandly, "though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?" "Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that -- produce brains capable of intelligent action?" There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr's throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours. "I have never tried to use that hypothesis," it answered suddenly. "But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise -- then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine." "You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate." He wasn't sure he could follow fhe machine's line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game of Life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator. The berserker said: "If I am able to study some living cells -- " Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. "Stop that!" he screamed, without thought. "The first thing you try, I'll kill you!" I ts voice was unevenly calm, as always. "There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metal and repair myself as far as possible." The indicator was quiet again. The berserker resumed its argument. "If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent lifeunit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for, or against, your argument. Will you provide me with cells?" "You must have had prisoners, sometime." He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker. "No, I have never taken a prisoner." It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air. "The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possibly I could give you a few of them." "Half a cubic centimeter should be enough; not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the sensation avoid it, if possible." Did it want to drug him? That seemed too simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell. He went on with the game. "I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from the control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you." He got the medical kit, took two pain-killers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had had some biological training. When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers sealed it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock and left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock, and leave again. He took a pep pill. It would stimulate some pain, but he'd be alert. Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited. He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by. "You are free to leave," it was saying. "Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make helping you my purpose. Do you understand?" Carr felt numb. "Yes. Yes f have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side." Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and realized that the great hatch through which his ship had entered was swinging open. T his far within the system, Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. It meant he could see the berserker as he fled from it, and he kept it in sight as long as possible. His last sight of the berserker showed it moving as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him. A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialed air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot was gone, with the tissue sample. There was nothing strange to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, IF as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars. After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and he watched the stars some more, with great interest, like a man examining something long forgotten. In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With his whole world bulking between him and the berserker's rock, Carr began to use his radio. "Ho, on the ground! Good news." The answer came almost instantly. "We've been tracking you, Carr. What's going on? What happened?" He told them of his encounter with the berserker. "So that's the story up to now," he finished. "I expect the thing really needs to refit. It is seriously damaged. Two warships attacking it now should easily win." "Yes." There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. "Carr -- you haven't started a landing approach yet, so maybe you understand. We've got to be careful. The thing was probably lying to you." "Oh, I know. Even that pilot's collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go -- or maybe left it in my airlock." "What stuff?" Carr said, "The stuff you're worrying about. The poison it thinks will kill us all. I'd guess it's some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected I'd hurry home and land before getting sick, and spread a new plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines against machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses. It didn't know our chemistry. It must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner." "Some virus, you think? What's it doing to you, Carr? Are you in pain -- I mean, more than before?" "No." Carr swirled his chair to look at the little chart he had begun. It showed that in the last two days his weight loss had started to reverse itself. He looked down at his body, at the bandaged place near the center of a discolored, inhuman-looking area. That area was sm ailed than it had been, and he saw a hint of new and healthy skin. "What is the stuff doing to you?" Carr allowed himself to smile, and to speak aloud his growing hope.      They hod thought this world empty of mankind -- now they found how wrong they were I T ie object swept on past, turned, and made a wide circle around their little plantation -- stopped, turned again and came straight toward them at a much lower altitude. Hugh became aware that Grace had been screaming, now had stopped, and that he had one arm around Barbara -- how, he did not recall. When the flying object had appeared, she had been some distance away, putting clothes to soak in the outside washtub. Now she was circled by his left arm and he could feel her trembling. "Hugh, what is it?" "People." The thing hovered above their What Has Gone Before    hold and dedicated bridge player, is spending a quiet weekend in his home while the world hovers on the brink of disaster. His son, admits the wisdom of Farnham's construction of a bomb shelter -- radiation proof, blast proof, self-contained as to air, food and water. Farnham' s wife, ment, for it has been years since Grace Farnham felt needed and important enough to justify her role in the household and she has sunk into a sort of cheerful, alcoholic apathy. Their daughter, brought with her a schoolmate, the household is the houseboy, servant, part substitute son for Hugh Farnham. After dinner they settle down to a few rubbers of bridge -- interrupted by a sudden, sneak nuclear attack. The war that all have both feared and disbelieved in... has begun. After a night of terror and discomfort in the shelter, the six survivors emerge and find themselves in a world they do not recognize. There is no sign of bomb damage, except the twisted shell of their shelter -- but neither is there any sign of the homes, the roads, the cities that had been all around them. They are alone in a wilderness. Months pass, during which Karen dies and Hugh and Barbara find themselves in love. Then, without warning, a strange duster of flying machines drop toward them out of the sky. They have been found -- but by whom? flagpole. They all now could see that there were people on it; several heads showed above its low sides. A corner detached itself from the rectangle, splitting off sharply. It dove and stopped in the air by the peak of the flag pole. Hugh saw that it was a separate car, perhaps nine feet long and three feet wide, with one passenger, or pilot. Still no details could be seen, no clue to motive power. The car enclosed the lower part of the man's body; his trunk, arms, and head projected above. Hugh was reminded of a horse and rider, or possibly an Eskimo in a kayak. The man removed the flag from the pole, rejoined the main craft. its corner; no seam remained. The rectangle in the air suddenly disintegrated. It broke into separate units like that one which had detached itself to filch their flag. Most of them remained in the air; some dozen or so landed, three of them in a triangle around the group of colonists. Duke yelled, "Watch it!" and dived for his gun on the ground. H e never made it. Instead he leaned forward at a curious angle as if he were balancing against a heavy roll of a ship. He pawed the air with an expression of amazement and slowly was pulled back to vertical. Barbara gasped in Hugh's ear. "Hugh, what is it?" "I don't know." He did not have to ask what she meant; he had suddenly felt, at the same time his son was stopped, that he seemed to be standing waist deep in invisible quicksand. "Don't fight it." "I wasn't going to." Grace shrilled, "Hubert! Hubert, do some -- " Her cries cut off. Then she seemed to faint but did not fall. Four of the boxlike individual cars were six or eight feet in the air, lined up abreast, and were slowly cruising over the most level part of the clearing, Barbara's farm. Where they passed, everything underneath, corn stalks, tomato plants, beans, squash, lettuce, potato hills, everything including branching irrigation ditches, was leveled, pressed flat into a sort of macadam. The raw end of the main ditch spilled water over this new pavement. One of the cars whipped around to that point, ran a new and deeper ditch around the raped area in a wide sweep of several hundred yards which allowed the ditch water to circle around the destroyed garden and reach the stream at a new point lower down. Barbara buried her face against Hugh's shoulder. He patted her The car that had made the by pass ditch went upstream along the old ditch. Soon the water ceased to flow at all. As fast as the garden was leveled other cars landed on it. Hugh was unable to figure out just what they did or how they did it, but a large pavilion, glossy black and ornately decorated in red and gold, grew up in seconds in the clearing. Duke called out, "Dad! For God's sake, can't you get at your gun?" Hugh was wearing a forty-five, the only weapon he had planned to take on the hike. He had already discovered that his hands were only slightly hampered by whatever held them. But he answered, "I shan't try." "Are you going to just stand there and let -- " "Yes. Duke, use your head. If we hold still and don't fight, we may live longer. We'll try to parley." Out of the pavilion strode a man. He seemed to be almost seven feet tall but some of this height was a helmet, plumed and burnished. He wore a flowing skirt of red embroidered in gold and was bare from the waist up save that an end of the skirt was thrown back across one shoulder such that it covered, diagonally, part of his broad chest. He was shod in black boots. All other men who had passed close enough to be seen were dressed in black coveralls with a red and gold patch at the right shoulder. Hugh felt an impression that this man (there was no slightest doubt that he was master) -- that the big man, the boss, the commander, had taken his time to change into more formal clothes. Hugh was encouraged by this. Unquestionably they were prisoners -- but if the leader took the trouble to dress up before interviewing them, then it followed that they were prisoners of some importance and a parley might be fruitful. Or did that follow? But he was encouraged by the man's visage as well as his clothes. He had an air of good-natured, jovial arrogance and his eyes were bright and merry. His forehead was high and his skull massive; he looked intelligent and alert. Hugh could not place his race. All the skin that showed, from his waist up, was dark, smooth brown and as shiny as if he oiled it. But his mouth was only slightly Negroid, his nose, though broad, was arched, and his black hair was wavy. He carried a small crop, or whip, or swagger stick, but no weapons. H e strode up to them, stopped abruptly when he reached Joseph. He gave some curt order to the nearest of their three captors. Joe stretched and bent his legs. "Thanks." The man spoke to Joe. Joe answered, "Sorry, I don't understand." The man spoke again. Joe shrugged helplessly. The man grinned and patted him on the shoulder, turned away, picked up the rifle Duke had tried for. He handled it clumsily, making Hugh flinch at his apparent ignorance of, or indifference to, safety precautions about where to point the muzzle of a gun. Nevertheless he seemed to understand guns. He worked the bolt, ejecting one cartridge, then put it to his shoulder with passable form, aimed at a point and fired. The blast was deafening. He had fired right past Hugh's ear. He grinned broadly, tossed the rifle to one of his subordinates, walked up to Hugh and Barbara, reached out to touch Barbara's childswollen belly. Hugh knocked his hand away. With a gesture almost negligent, IF certainly without anger, the big man brushed Hugh's hand aside with the crop he carried. It was not a blow, it would barely have swatted a fly. Hugh gasped in agony. His hand burned like fire and his arm was numb to the armpit. "Oh, God!" Barbara said urgently, "Don't, Hugh. Let him. He isn't hurting me." Nor was he. With a manner which showed only impersonal interest as a veterinarian might take in feeling a pregnant mare or bitch, the big man felt out the shape of the child she carried -- while Hugh writhed in that special humiliation of a man unable to protect his woman. The big man finished, grinned at Barbara and patted her head. Hugh tried to ignore the pain in his hand and dug into his memory for a language imperfectly learned. "Vooi govoriti'yeh po-Russki, Gospodin?" The man glanced at him, made no answer. Barbara said, "Sprechen sie deutsch, mein Herr?" That got her a smile, nothing more. Hugh called out, "Duke, try him in Spanish!" "Okay. Halbla usted Espanol, Senor?" No response. Hugh sighed. "We've shot our wad." "M'sieur?" Joe said. "Est-ce que vous parlez la langue francaise?" The man suddenly turned and faced Joseph. "Tiens?" "Parlez-vous francais, monsieur?" "Mais oui! Vous etes francaises?" "Non, non! Je suis americain. Nous sommes tous am#ricains." "Vraiment? Impossible!" "C'est vrai, monsieur. Je vous en assure." Joe pointed to the peak of the empty flag pole. "Les Etats-Unis de l'Amerique." The conversation became less easy to follow as both sides stumbled along in broken French. At least they paused and Joe said, "Hugh, he has asked me -- ordered me, I think -- to come with him into his tent and talk. I've asked him to let you all loose first. He says No. 'Hell, no!' it amounts to." "Ask him to let the women loose." "I'll try." Joe spoke at some length with the big man. "He says the enceinte femme -- that's Barbara -- C an sit down where she is. But the 'fat one' -- Grace he means -- is to come along with us." "Good enough. Good work, Joe. Get us a deal." "I'll try. I don't understand him very well." T he three went into the pavilion. Barbara found that she could sit down, even stretched out which Hugh urged her to do. But the invisible web held Hugh as clingingly as ever even though she was right next to him. "Dad," Duke said urgently, "this is our chance to make plans, while nobody is around who understands English." "Duke," Hugh answered wearily, "can't you see they hold all the trumps? It's my guess that we are alive as long as he isn't annoyed with us -- and not one minute long" Aren't you even going to try to fight? Where's all that talk you used to giv me about how you were a free man and planned to stay free?" Hugh rubbed his hurt hand. "Duke, I'm not going to argue. You start anything now and you'll get us all killed. That's how I size it up." "So k was just talk?" Duke said scornfully. "Well, I'm not making any promises." "All right, all right. Drop it." "I'm still not making any promises. Just tell me one thing, Dad. How does it feel to be shoved around? Instead of doing the shoving?" "I don't like it." "Neither did L And I've never forgotten it. I hope you get your bellyful of it." Barbara said, "Duke, for heaven's sake, stop talking like a fool!" Duke looked at her. "I'll shut up. Just tell me one thing. Where did you get that baby in you?" Barbara did not answer. Hugh said quietly, "Duke, if we get out of this, I promise you a beating for that remark." "Any time, old man, any time." They quit talking. Barbara reached out and patted Hugh's ankle. Four or five of the uniformed men gathered around the pile of household objects, picked through them, looking them over. A man whose manner spelled petty officer came up and gave them an order; they dispersed. He looked at some of the objects himself, then peered into the shelter and went inside. Hugh heard a sound of rushing water, looked and saw a brown wava rushing down the stream bed. Barbara raised her head and asked, "What is that?" "Our dam is gone. It doesn't matter." After a long time Joe came out of the pavilion alone. He came up to Hugh and said, "Well, here's the scoop, as nearly as I can get it. Not too near, maybe; he speaks some sort of patois and neither one of us is really fluent anyhow. But here it is. We're trespassers, this is private land. He also figured that we were escaped prisoners -- the word is something else, not French, but that's the idea. I've convinced him -- I think I've convinced him -- that we are perfectly innocent people brought here through no fault of our own. "Anyhow, he's not mad at us, even though we are technically criminals -- trespass, and planting things where farms aren't supposed to be and building a dam and a house and things like that. He's not really sore and I think everything is going to be all right -- as long as we do as we are told. He finds us interesting -- how we got here and so forth." Joe stopped and looked at Barbara. "You remember that theory that you had about parallel universes?" "Certainly. I guess I was right. No?" "No." Joe shook his head. "This part is as confused as can be and I didn't understand it. But one thing is absolutely sure. Barbara, Hugh -- Duke, get this! This is our own world, right here." IF D uke said, "Joe, that's preposterous." "You argue it with him. He's convinced me. He knows what I mean by the United States, he knows where France is. And so forth. No question about it." "Well -- " Duke paused. "As may be. But what about this? Where's my mother? What's the idea of leaving her in there with that savage?" "She's all right, she's having lunch with him. And she's enjoying it. Just let it run easy, Duke, and we're going to be okay, I think. Soon as they finish lunch we'll be leaving." A few minutes later Hugh helped Barbara climb into the 'back of one of the odd flying machines, then mounted into one himself, behind the pilot. He found the seat comfortable and, in place of a safety belt, a field of that invisible quicksand enclosed the lower part of his body as he sat down. His pilot, a young Negro who looked remarkably like Joe, glanced back then took off with neither noise nor fuss and joined his car into the reforming rectangle in the air. Hugh saw that perhaps half the small cars had passengers; the passengers were whites, the pilots were invariably colored, ranging from as light brown as a Javanese to as sooty black as a Fiji Islander. The car he was in was half way back and in the outside starboard rank of the formation. He looked around, spotting where each of the others had wound up, and was only mildly surprised to see that Grace was riding behind the boss man, in the front rank, middle position. Joe was behind them, rather muchly buried in cats. Off to his right, two cars had not joined up. One hovered over the pile of household goods, gathered them up in a non-existent cargo net, moved away. The second car positioned itself directly over the shelter. The massive concrete block lifted, steadily, straight up, and on an even keel, without disturbing the shack on its roof. The small car and its giant burden took position about fifty feet off the starboard side. The entire formation moved forward and gathered speed but Hugh felt no wind of motion. The little car flanking them seemed to have no struggle keeping up despite its giant burden. Hugh could not see the ofher loaded car but assumed that it was on the port side. The last he saw of their home was a bare scar where the shelter had rested, a larger scar where Barbara's farm had been, and a meandering track that used to mark an irrigation ditch. He looked away and rubbed his sore hand, reflecting that the whole thing had been a gross abuse of coincidence. It offended him the way a hand of thirteen spades in a putatively hondst deal would offend him. He pondered a remark Joe had made just before they had loaded: "We were incredibly lucky to have encountered a scholar. French is a dead language -- 'une langue perdue,' he called it." . Hugh craned his neck back to the left, caught Barbara's eye. She smiled at him. XI M emtok, Chief Palace Domestic to the Lord Protector of the Noonday Region, was busy and happy -- happy because he was busy, although he was not aware that he was happy and was given to complaining about how hard he had to work, all because, as he put it, although he commanded some eighteen hundred servants there were not three of them who could be trusted to empty a slop jar without close supervision. He had just completed a pleasant interview chewing out the head chef; he had suggested that the chef himself, old and tough as he certainly would be, nevertheless would make a better roast than the piece of meat the chef had been careless enough to send in to Their Charity the evening before. One of the duties that Memtok assumed personally was always to sample what his lord ate, despite the risk of poison and despite the fact that Their Charity's tastes in cuisine were not his own. It was merely one of the innumerable ways in which Memtok gave ever painstaking attention to details, an imaginative diligence that had brought him, still in his prime, to his present supreme eminence. The head chef had grumbled and Memtok had sent him away with just a taste of the lesser whip to remind him that cooks were not all that hard to find. Then he had turned happily to his paperwork. There were stacks of it, as he had just completed moving the household from the Palace to the Summer Palace -- thirty-eight of the Chosen but only four hundred and sixty-three servants; the summer residence was run with a skeleton staff. The twice-yearly move always involved a wash of paperwork -- purchase orders, musters, inventories, vouchers, shipping lists, revisions of duty rosters, dispatches -- and he considered as usual advising his patron to have some likely youngster muted and trained as his clerk. But he rejected the idea, also as usual; Memtok did not trust servants who could read and write and add, it gave them ideas even if they could not talk. The truth was, Memtok loved his paperwork and did not want to share it. His hands flew quickly over the papers, checking figures, signing his symbol, okaying payments. He held his pen in an odd fashion, nested between the first three fingers of his right hand -- this because he had no thumbs. He did not miss them, could barely remember what it had been like to have them. Nor did he need them. He could handle a spoon, a pen, and a whip without them, and he had no need ever to handle anything else. Far from missing his thumbs, he was proud of their absence; they proved that he had served his lord in both major capacities, at stud when he was younger and now these many years as a tempered domestic. Every male servant over fourteen (with some scarce special exceptions) showed one alteration or the other; very few could exhibit both, only a few hundred on the entire IP Earth. Those few spoke as equals only to each other, they were an elite. Someone scratched at the door. "Come!" he called out, then, when he saw who it was, growled, "What do you want?" The growl was automatic but he really did dislike this servant for the best of reasons; he was not subject to Memtok's discipline. He was of a different caste, huntsmen, wardens, keepers, and beaters, and was subject to the Majordomo of the Preserve. The Majordomo considered himself to be of the same rank as the Chief Domestic, and nominally was. However, he had thumbs. Memtok's greatest objections to the Summer Palace was that it often put him in contact with these servants who had the unpardonable fault of not being under his orders. While it would take only a word to Their Charity to crack down on one of them, he disliked to ask, and while he could touch one of them up a little without any real fear of reprimand, the louse would be sure to complain to his own boss. Memtok did not believe in friction between executive servants. Bad for morale. "Message from Boss. Rayed to tell you Their Charity on his way back. Says four savages with the escort. Says you better tear up to the roof, take care of them. All." " 'All'? Damn you, what do you mean 'AH'? Why four savages? And in the Name of Uncle when are they arriving?" "All," the servant insisted. "Message came in about twenty minutes ago. I been looking all over for you." "Gef out!" Memtok was jarred out of his warm euphoria of fussing with bits of paper. The important part of the message was that Their Charity was arriving home instead of staying away over night. Chef, Receptionist, Musical Director, Housekeeper, Groundskeeper, all heads of departments -- he was phoning orders even as he thought. Four savages? Who cared about four savages? But he was on the roof and accepted their custody. He would have been there anyway, with the Lord Protector arriving. W hen they arrived Hugh had no chance to see Barbara, reassure her, tell her to keep her chin up. When at last he was released from the gentle restraint of the "seat belt," he was confronted by a little bald-headed white man with a waspish face, an abrupt manner, and a whip. He was dressed in a white robe which reminded Hugh of the night shirts his grandfather had worn, save that it had on the right shoulder the red and gold patch which Hugh had tentatively identified as the insigne of the big man, the boss. The emblem was repeated in rubies and gold on the chest of the little man as a medallion supported by a heavy gold chain. The man in the nightshirt looked him over with obvious distaste, then turned him and Duke over to another white man in a nightshirt This man wore no medallion but did carry a small whip. Hugh rubbed his hand and resolved not to test whether this whip was as potent as the ornate one carried by the big boss. Duke tested it. The angry little man gave instructions to his straw boss, and left. The straw boss gave them an order; Hugh correctly interpreted the tone and gesture as: "All right, you guys, get going. This way" -- and got going. Duke didn't. The straw boss barely touched him on his left calf; Duke yelped before he could stop himself. He limped the rest of the way -- down a ramp, into what turned out to be a very fast lift, then into a windowless, light, white-walled room which whiffed vaguely of hospitals. Duke understood the order to strip down without needing to be stimulated; he cursed but complied. Hugh merely complied. He was beginning to understand the system. The whips were used as spurs are used by a good rider, to exact prompt obedience but not with intent to damage. From there they were herded into a smaller room where they were hit from all sides by streams of water. The operator was in a gallery above. He shouted at them, then indicated in pantomine that they were to scrub. They scrubbed. The water jets cut off, they were doused in a sirup that was liquid soap or detergent. They scrubbed again and were rinsed and were required to scrub still again, all to gestures that left no doubt as to how thorough a bath was expected. The water jets got very hot and harsh, changed to cold and still harsher, were replaced by violent blasts of hot air. It was all too much like an automatic dishwasher, Hugh felt, but they ended up cleaner than they had been in months. An assistant to the bathmaster then plastered strips over each of their eyebrows, rubbed an emulsion on their scalps, into their scratchy beards (neither had shaved that day), over their backs and chests and arms and legs, and finally into their pubic hair. Duke got another lesson in obedience before he submitted to this last indignity. When, immediately thereafter, they were subjected willy-nilly to enemas, he gritted his teeth and took it. The water closet was a whirlpool set in the floor. Their finger and toe nails were cut short. After that they were bathed again. The eyebrow patches washed away. So did their hair. When they came out this time, they were both bald all over, save for eyebrows. The bathmaster made them gargle, showing them what he wanted and spitting into the whirlpool. They gargled three times -- a rather pleasant, pungent liquid -- and when it was over Hugh found that his teeth seemed cleaner than they had ever been in his life. In fact he felt utterly clean, lively, glowing with wellbeing -- but humiliated. They were taken to another room and examined. T heir examiner was clearly a physician. He wore the conventional white night shirt and a small insigne on a thin gold chain but he IF needed no diplomas on the wall to show his profession. His bedside manner would never make him rich, Hugh decided; he had the air of many military surgeons Hugh had known -- not unkind but quite impersonal. He seemed much surprised by and very interested in a removable bridge he found in Hugh's mouth. He examined it closely, looked in Hugh's mouth at the gaps it had filled, gave it to one of his assistants with some instructions. The assistant went away and Hugh wondered if his chewing was going to be permanently hampered. The physician took a leisurely hour or more over each of them, using instruments Hugh did not recognize and whose functions he could not, in most cases, guess. Weight, height, and blood pressure were almost the only familiar items. Things were done to them, too, none of them really unpleasant -- no hypodermic needles, no knives. During this, Hugh's bridge was returned and he was allowed to put it back in. But the tests andor treatments often seemed to be indignities even though not painful. Once, when Hugh was stretched out on a table from which Duke had just been released, the younger man said, "How do you like it, Dad?" "Restful." Duke snorted. The fact that both men had appendicitis scars seemed to interest the physician as much as the removable bridge. By acting he indicated a severe bellyache, then jabbed a thumb vigorously into McBurney's point. Hugh conveyed agreement -- with some difficulty, as nodding the head seemed to mean a negative response. An assistant came in and handed the physician a contrivance which turned out to be another dental bridge, for Hugh was required to open his mouth; the old one was again taken out and the new one carefully seated. It felt to Hugh's tongue as if he again had natural teeth there. The physician then probed a couple of cavities, cleaned them out and filled them -- without pain but without anesthesia so far as Hugh was aware. After that Hugh was rather suddenly "strapped" (an invisible field again) to a table, supine, and his legs were elevated. Another table was wheeled up and Hugh suddenly realized that he was being prepared for surgery -- and with horror he was sure just what sort of surgery. "Duke! Don't let them grab you! Fight! Get that whip!" Duke hesitated an instant too long. The therapist did not carry a whip; he merely kept one at hand. Duke lunged for it, the physician got it first. Moments later Duke was on his back, still gasping his agony at punishment he had taken in trying to stop it and having his knees elevated and spread. They both went on protesting. The physician looked at them thoughtfully and the straw boss who had fetched them was called in. They conferred. Presently the waspish little man with the big medallion strode in, looked the situation over, stormed out. There was a long wait. The boss A therapist filled in the time by having his assistants complete preparations for the surgery and there was no longer the slightest doubt in Hugh's mind, or Duke's, as to just what they were in for. In fact Duke pointed out that it would have been far better if they had fought -- and died -- earlier in the day, rather than wind up like this. As they would have fought, he reminded his father, if Hugh hadn't turned out to be chicken. Hugh didn't argue, he agreed. He tried to tell himself that his docility in being captured was on account of the women. But it afforded him little comfort. After a long time the little man with the medallion stormed back in, apparently angrier than ever. He snapped one curt order; Hugh and Duke were released. That ended it, save that they were each rubbed all over with a fragrant cream. They were given a white nightshirt apiece, conducted some distance through long bare passages and Hugh was shoved into a cell. The door was not locked but he could not open it. In one corner was a tray, with covered dishes and a spoon. The food was excellent and some of it utterly unidentifiable; Hugh ate with good appetite, scraping the dishes and drinking all of the thin beer with it. Then he slept for a while on a soft part erf the floor, having blanked his mind of useless worry. He was awakened by being prodded with a foot. He was taken to still another plain, windowless room, which turned out to be a school room. Two of the short white men in nightshirts were there. They were equipped with many props, the equivalent of a blackboard (it could be cleared instantly by some magic), infinite patience -- and a whip, for the lessons were "taught to the tune of a hickory stick." No error went unnoted. They both could draw well and both were skilled and imaginative pantominists; Hugh was taught to speak. He was taught with extraordinary speed. Hugh discovered that his memory was greatly sharpened by the stimuli of pain; he had little tendency to repeat a mistake. At first he was punished only for forgetting vocabulary, but as he learned, he also grew to expect flicks of pain for errors in inflection, construction, idiom, and accent. This Pavlovian treatment continued -- if his mental records were correct -- for seventeen days; he did nothing else and saw no one but his teachers. They worked in shifts. Hugh worked every possible minute, about sixteen hours a day, he thought; at least he was never allowed quite enough sleep although he never felt sleepy -- he didn't dare -- during lessons. Once a day he was bathed and given a clean nightshirt, twice a day he was fed, tasty food and plentiful, three times a day he was policed to the toilet. All other minutes were spent learning to speak, with ever the sharp awareness that any bobble would be instantly punished. IF But he learned how to duck punishment -- sometimes. A question, quickly put, would sometimes do. "Teacher, this one understands that there are protocol modes for each status, rising and falling, but what this one in its ignorance lacks is knowledge of what each status is -- being wholly without experience through the inscrutable ways of Uncle the Mighty -- and also is sometimes not aware of the status assumed for teaching purposes by my charitable teacher and of the status this humble one is expected to assume in reply. More than that, this one does not know its own status in the great family. May it please its teacher." T he whip was put down and for the next half hour he was lectured. The problem was more involved than Hugh's question showed. The lowest possible status was stud. No, there was one lower: servant children. But children were expected to make mistakes, it did not matter; truly they had no status. Next higher was slut, then tempered servant -- a category with subtle and effectively unlimited gradations of rank inside it, so involved that speech of equals was often used if the gradient was not clearly evident. High above all servants were the Chosen, with their own unlimited and sometimes changing variations of rank, including those ritual circumstances in which a lady takes precedence over a lord. But that was not usually any worry of a servant; always use protocol rising mode. However -- "If two of the Chosen speak to you at once, which one do you answer?" "The junior," Hugh answered. "Why?" "Since the Chosen do not make mistakes, this one's ears were at fault. The senior did not actually speak, for his junior would never have interrupted." "Correct. You are a' tempered gardener and you encounter a Chosen of the same rank as your lord uncle. He speaks. 'Boy, what sort of a flower is that?' " "As Their Charity knows much better than this one can ever know, if this one's eyes are not mistaken, that plant may be a hydrangea." "Good enough. But drop your eyes when you say it. Not to me. To the Chosen. Now about your status -- " The teacher looked pained. "You haven't any." "Please, teacher?" "Uncle! I've tried to find out. Nobody knows but our Lord Uncle and they have not ruled. You're not a child, you're not a stud, you're not a tempered, you don't belong anywhere. Uncle alone knows. You're a savage and you don't fit." "But what protocol mode must I use?" "Always the rising. Oh, not to children. Nor to sluts, I venture. No need to overdo it." Except for the changes in inflection by status, Hugh found the language simple and remarkably logical. It had no irregular verbs and its syntax was orderly; it probably had been tidied up at some time by edict. He suspected, from a few words that he recognized -- "simba," "bwana," "wazir," "etage," "trek," "oncle" -- that it had its roots in several African languages. But that did not matter. This was "Speech" and, according to his teachers, the only language spoken anywhere. In addition to protocol modes, quite a chunk of the vocabulary was double, one form of a word being used down, its exact synonym although often utterly different in root used up. He had to know both -- be able to recognize one and to use the other. The pronunciation gave him trouble at first, but by the end of the first week he could lip-smack, click, make the fast glottal stop, and hear and say vowel distinctions he had never suspected existed. By the sixteenth day he was chattering freely, beginning to think in it, and the whip was rarely used. Late the next day the Lord Protector sent for him.  lthough he had already been bathed that day, Hugh was rushed through another violent bath in five minutes, rubbed down with fragrant cream, and issued a fresh white robe, before being whizzed to the lord's private apartments. There he was bounced past a series of receptionists close on Memtok's heels, and into a large, private, and very sumptuous retiring room. The lord was not there; Joseph and Dr.-Livingstone-I-Presume were. Joe called out, "Hugh! Wonderful! You may go Memtok." Memtok hesitated, then backed away and left. Joe ignored him, slipped his arm in Hugh's, and led him to a divan. "Gosh, it's good to see you! Sit down, we'll talk until Ponse gets here. You look well." Doctor Livingstone came up, checked Hugh's ankles, purred and stropped against them. "I am well. 'Ponse'?" Hugh reached down and scratched the cat's ears. "Don't you know his name? The Lord Protector, I mean. No, I guess you wouldn't. That's one of his names, the one he uses en famille. He has a string of them, of course. Never mind, have they been treating you all right?" "Yes. I suppose so." "They had better. Ponse gave orders for you to be pampered. Look, if you aren't treated okay, you tell me. I can fix it." Hugh hesitated. "Joe, have you had one of those odd whips used on you?" "Me?" Joe seemed astonished. "No, of course no." He looked troubled. "Hugh, have they been abusing you? Peel off that mother hubbard and let me have a look." Hugh shook his head. "There are no marks on me. I haven't been hurt. But I certainly don't like it." "But if you've been stroked for no reason -- Hugh, that's one thing that Ponse does not tolerate, I know. He's a very humane sort of guy. All he wants is discipline. If anybody -- anybody at all, even Memtok -- has been cruel to you, well, somebody is going to catch it." Hugh thought about it. In actual IF truth he rather liked his teachers. They had worked hard and patiently over him and had been quite sparing of him once R became possible to talk instead of using the whip. "I haven't been hurt. Just reminded." "I'm glad to hear it. Actually, Hugh, I didn't see how you could be. That quirt Ponse carries -- well, you could kill a man with it at a thousand feet. I takes real skill to use it gently. But those toys the upper servants carry, all they do is tingle and that's all they are supposed to do." Hugh decided not to argue over what constituted a tingle; he had more urgent things on his mind. "Joe, how are the others? Have you seen them?" "Oh, they're all right. Certainly. You heard about Barbara?" "I haven't heard a damn thing! What about Barbara?" "Slow down. Having her babies, I mean." "She had her baby?" " 'Babies,' I said. Twin boys, identical. A week ago." "How is she? How is she?" "Easy, man! She's just fine, couldn't be better. Of course. They are way ahead of where we were in medicine; losing a mother, or a baby, is unheard of." Joe suddenly looked sad. "It's a dicty shame they didn't runacross us at least three months back." He brightened, "Barbara told me that she had intended to name it Karen, if it was a girl. When it turned out to be twin boys, she named one -- the one five minutes the elder -- 'Hugh' and named the other 'Kari Joseph.' Nice, eh?" "I'm flattered. Then you've seen her. Joe, I've got to see her. Right away. How do I arrange it?" J oe looked astonished. "But you carit see her, Hugh. Surely you know that." "Why, in God's name, can't I?" "Why, you're not tempered, that's why. Impossible." "Oh." "I'm sorry, but that's the way it is." Joseph suddenly grinned. "But I understand that you were almost made eligible by accident. Ponse laughed his head off at how close you came and how you and Duke yelped." "I don't see the humor of it, I'm afraid." "Oh, shucks, Hugh, he simply has a robust sense of humor. He laughed when he told me about it. I didn't laugh and he decided that I have no sense of humor. Different people laugh at different things. Karen used to use a fake Negro dialect that set my teeth on edge, the times I happened to overhear it. But she didn't mean any harm by it. Karen -- Well, they just don't come any better, and you and I both know it and I'll shut up about it. Look, if the vet had gone ahead on you, without orders, it would have cost him his hands; Ponse sent that word to him. Might have suspended the sentence, of course, to save his usefulness -- good surgeons are valuable. But his assumption was only natural, Hugh. Both you and Duke are too tall and too big for stud. However, Ponse doesn't tolerate sloppiness." "All right, all right. I still don't IF see the harm in my calling on Barbara and seeing her babies. You saw her. And you're not tempered." Joe looked patiently exasperated. "Hugh, it's not the same thing. Surely you know it." "Why isn't it?" Joe sighed. "Hugh, I didn't make the rules. But I'm Chosen and you're not, and that's all there is to it. It's not my fault that you're white, now, k it?" "No. All right. Forget it." "Let's just be glad that one of us is in a position to get us all some favors. Do you realize that all of you would have been executed at once? If I hadn't been along?" "The thought has crossed my mind. Lucky indeed that you knew French. And that he knows some French." Joe shook his head. "French didn't enter into it, it merely saved time. The point was that  was there... and the rest of you were excused of any responsibility on that account. What had to be settled then was the degree of my criminality. My neck was very much in a noose." Joe frowned. "I'm still not in the clear. I mean, Ponse is convinced he's acquitted me. But my case still has to be reviewed by the Supreme Lord Proprietor. It's his preserve -- Ponse is just custodian. I could be executed for it yet." # Toe what in the world is there about it to cause you to talk about being executed?" "Plenty! Look, if you four ofays had been there alone, Ponse would have tried you and excuted you just by looking at you. Two capital crimes and both self-evident. Escapees. Servants who had run away from their lord. Destructive trespass in a personal domain of the Supreme Proprietor. Open-and-shut on both counts and death for each of them. Now don't tell me that wasn't the way it was because I already know it and it took me long enough to make Ponse see it, using a language neither one of us knows too well. And my own neck is still in jeopardy. However -- " He brightened up -- "Ponse tells me that the Supreme Proprietor is ten years behind in reviewing criminal cases and that it has been more years than that since he last set foot on this preserve or even cruised over it... and that long before my case can possibly come up there won't be a trace of any destruction. They are already putting the trees back and there's never an accurate count of bears and deer and other game. He tells me not to worry." "Well, that's good." "But maybe you think I haven't done some sweating over it! Just letting your shadow fall across the Supreme Lord Proprietor means your neck. Sneezing in his presence is even worse -- so you can figure out for yourself that trespassing on land that is his personally is nothing to take lightly. But I shan't worry as long as Ponse says not to. He's been treating me as a guest, not as a prisoner. But tell me about yourself. I hear you've been studying the language. So have I -- a tutor every day I've had time for it." Hugh answered, "May it meet with their approval, this one's time has, as they know, been devoted to nothing else." "Whoo! You speak it better than I do." "I was given incentive," Hugh said, relapsing into English. "Joe, have you seen Duke? Grace?" "Duke, no. I haven't tried to. Fact is, Ponse has been away most of the time and took me along; I've been terribly busy. Grace, yes. It's even possible that you might see Grace. She's often in these apartments. That's the only way you could see her, of course. Right here. And in the presence of Ponse. Might happen. He's not a stickler for protocol when it suits his convenience to break it. In private, I mean. He keeps up appearances in public. His position requires it." "Hmm -- Joe, in that case, couldn't you ask him to let me see Barbara and the twins? Here? In his presence?" Joe looked exasperated. "Hugh, can't you understand that I'm just a guest? I'm here on sufferance. I don't have a single servant of my own, no money, no title. I said you might see Grace here; I did not say you would. If you did, it would be because he had sent for you and it suited him not to send her out -- not for your convenience. As for asking him to let you see Barbara, I simply can't. And that's that! I advise you not to, either. You might learn that his quirt doesn't just tingle." "All I meant was -- " "Watch it, Hugh! Here he comes, we'd better rise." J oe stood up and went to meet his host. Hugh stood with head bowed, eyes downcast, and waited to be noticed. Ponse came striding in, dressed much as Hugh had seen him before save that the helmet was replaced by a little red skullcap. He greeted Joe, sat heavily down on a large divan, stuck out his legs. Doctor Livingstone jumped up into the lord's lap; he stroked it. Two female servants appeared from nowhere, pulled off his boots, wiped his feet with a hot towel, dried them, massaged them, placed slippers on them, and vanished. While this was going on, the Lord Protector spoke to Joe of matters Hugh had never heard of and could not follow other than as words, but he noticed with interest that the noble used the mode of equals to Joe and that Joe talked the same fashion to him. Hugh decided that Joe must be in as solid as Doctor Livingstone. Well, Joe did have a very pleasing personality. At last the big man glanced at him. "Sit down, boy." Hugh sat down, on the floor. The lord went on, "Have you learned Language? We're told that you have." "May it please Their Charity, this one's time has been devoted singly to that purpose, with what inadequate results known to them far better than their servant would dare venture to estimate." "Not bad, not bad. Accent could be crisper. And you missed an infix on one word. How do you like the weather we've been having lately?" "Weather is as Uncle the Mighty ordains it If it pleases His favorite IF nephew, it cannot fail to make joyful one so humble as this servant." "Quite good. Accent still blurry but understandable. Work on it. Tell your teachers we said it. Now drop that fancy speech, I haven't time to listen to it when I want a straight answer. Equals speech, always. In private, I mean." "All right. I -- " Hugh broke off suddenly; one of the female servants had returned, to kneel in front of her lord with a cold drink on an ornate tray. Ponse glanced sharply at Hugh, then looked at the girl. "It? Doesn't count, it's a deaf mute. You were saying?" "Nothing much. I was about to say that I couldn't have an opinion about the weather because I haven't seen it at all since I got here." "I suppose not. I gave orders for you to learn Language as quickly as possible and servants are inclined to follow instructions literally. No imagination. All right, you are to walk outdoors an hour each day from now on. Tell whoever is in charge of you. Any petition? Are you getting enough to eat? Are you being treated well?" "The food is good. I'm used to eating three times a day but -- " "You can eat four times a day if it's any comfort to you. Again, tell the one in charge of you. All right, now to other matters. Hugh -- that's your name, isn't it?" "Yes, Their Charity." "Can't you hear? I said, 'Use equals mode.' My private name is Ponse. Use it. Hugh, if I had not picked you people up myself, were I not myself a scholar, and had I not seen with my own eyes the artifacts in that curious structure, your house, I would not have believed it. As it is, I must. I'm not a superstitious man. Uncle works in mysterious ways, granted, but He doesn't use miracles... and I would not hesitate to repeat that in any temple on Earth, unorthodox as. it sounds. But -- How long does it come to, Jeer' "Two thousand one hundred and three years." "Call it two thousand. What's the matter, Hugh?" "Uh, nothing, nothing." "If you're going to throw up, please go outside to do it; I picked out these rugs myself. As I was saying, you've given my scientists something to think about -- and a good thing, too; they haven't turned out anything more important than a better mouse trap in years. Lazy scoundrels. I've told them to come up with a sensible answer, no miracles. How five people -- or six, I understand -- and a small building of some mass could hurdle twenty centuries and never break an egg. Exaggregation. Joe tells me it broke some bones and some other things. Speaking of bones, Joe tells me this won't please you -- and it didn't please him -- but for scientific reasons, I ordered my scientists to disturb some bones. Strontium sampling, that sort of thing; I suppose you've never heard of it. Clear proof that the cadaver had matured before the period of maximum radioactivity -- Look, I warned you about these rugs. Don't do it!" n H ugh gulped ("Karen! Karen! Oh, my darling!") "Better now? Perhaps I should tell you that a priest was present throughout, all proper propitiations were made -- exactly as if it had been one of the Chosen. Special concession, my orders. And when the tests were completed every atom was returned and the grave closed with proper rites. "That's true, Hugh," Joseph said gravely. "I was there. And I put on fresh flowers. Flowers that will stay fresh, I'm told." "Certainly they will stay fresh," Ponse confirmed, "until they wear out from sheer erosion. I don't know why you use flowers but if there are any other rites or sacrifices necessary to atone for what may seem to you a desecration, just name it. I'm a broad-minded man; I'm aware that other times have bad other customs." "No. No, best just let it be." "As you wish. It was done from scientific necessity. It seemed more reasonable than amputating one of your fingers though perhaps I might have asked you. Other tests also kept my scientists from wiggling out of the obvious. Foods preserved by primitive methods so ancient that I doubt if any modem food expert would know how to go about duplicating same -- and yet the foods were, I am told, edible. At least some servants were required to eat them. No harm resulted. A fascinating radioactivity gradient between the upper and inner sides of the roof structure -- I gave them a hint on that one. Acting on information received from Joe, I ordered them to look for evidence that this event took place at the very beginning of the East-West War that destroyed the Northern Hemisphere. "So they found it. And calculations led them to believe that the structure must have been very near to the origin of an atom-kernel explosion. Yet it was unhurt. That produced a theory so wild that I won't tire your ears with it; I've told them to go on working. "But the best thing, from my viewpoint, is the historical treasure you bring with you. I am a man of history, Hugh. History, properly interpreted, tells everything. The treasure, of course, are those books that came along with you. I am not exaggerating when I say that they are my most precious possessions. There are only two other copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the world today -- and those other two are not this edition and are in such poor shape that they are curiosities rather than something a scholar can work with; they weren't cared for during the Turmoil Ages." Ponse leaned back and stretched and looked very happy. "But mine is in mint condition!" He added, "I'm not discounting the other books. Treasures, all of them. Especially one, the Adventures of Odysseus, which is not known only by reputation. I take it that the pictures in that book date from the time of Odysseus, too?" "I'm afraid not. The artist was alive in my time." "Too bad. They're interesting, nevertheless. Primitive art, stronger IF than we have now. But perhaps I exaggerated when I said that the the books were my chiefest possession." "Yes?" "You are! There! Doesn't that please you?" H ugh barely hesitated. "Yes. If true." (If it's true that I am your chattel, you arrogant bastard, I prefer being a valuable one!) "Oh, quite true. And if you had been speaking in protocol mode, you wouldn't have been able to phrase a doubt. I never lie, Hugh; remember that. You and -- That other one, Joe?" "Duke." " 'Duke.' Although Joe speaks highly of your scholarship, not so highly of its. But let me explain what you mean to me. There are other scholars who read Ancient English quite readily. None at present in my household, true. Since it is not a root language to any important degree, few study it. Nevertheless scholars of English could be found, be borrowed. But none such as yourself. You actually lived then; you can, I am sure, read English as readily as I read Language, you'll be able to translate knowledgeably, without these maddening four and five interpretations of a single passage that so disfigure most translations from ancient sources, all because the scholar doesn't really know what the ancient author was talking about. Lack of cultural context, I mean. And no doubt you will be able to supply on demand footnotes and explanations for things obscure to me and commonplace to you. "Right? Right! So you see what I want of you. Start with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Get busy today, translate it. Just scribble it out quickly, sloppy but fast Sne else will pretty it up for my eyes. Understand? All right, go do it." . Hugh opened his mouth, gulped, closed it, then started over. "But, Ponse, I can't write Language." "Whatl" "I was taught to speak it; I haven't been taught to read and write it." Ponse blinked. "Memtok!" The Chief Palace Domestic arrived with such speed that one might have suspected that he was just outside the door. And so indeed he had been -- listening in on private con versations of his patron by means, Memtok was certain, were not known to the Lord Protector... certain inasmuch as Memtok was still breathing. Such measures were risky but he found them indispensable to the efficient performance of his duties. At worst, it was safer than planting a slut in there who was not quite a deaf mute. "Memtok, I told you that it was to be taught to speak, read, and write Language." Hugh listened, with eyes downcast, while the Chief Domestic tried to protest simultaneously that the order had never been given (it had not) but nevertheless had been carried out (obviously false), all without contradicting the Lord Protector (impossible to reconcile, inconceivable to attempt). "Garbage," Ponse remarked. "I don't know why I don't put you up for adoption. You would look good in a coal mine. That pale skin of yours would be much improved by some healthy coal dust." He twitched the quirt in his hand and Memtok paled still more. "Very well, let it be corrected. It is to spend half of each day in learning to read and write, the other half in translating and in dictating same into a recorder. I should have thought of that before; writing out a translation takes too long. Nevertheless I want it to be able to read and write; it will need it for all I have in mind." He turned to Hugh. "Anything else you can think of? That you need?" Hugh started to phrase a request in the involved indirection which presumed nothing, as required by protocol mode, rising. P onse chopped him off. "Speak directly, Hugh. Memtok, close your ears. No ceremony needed in Memtok's presence, he is a member of my inner family, my nephew in spirit if not in the eyes of my senior sister. Spit it out." Hugh noticed that Memtok relaxed and looked as beatific as his vinegar features permitted. "Well, Ponse, I need more rooni to work. My cell is about the size of that divan. Smaller." "Describe your needs." "Well, I'd like a room with natural light, one with windows, say a third the size of this one. Working tables, book shelves, writing materials, a comfortable chair -- yes, and access to a toilet without having to wait; it interferes with my thinking otherwise." "Don't you have that now?" "No. And I don't think it helps my thinking to be touched up with a whip. I'm quite used to working hard without such inducement." "Memtok, have you been whipping it?" "No, my uncle. I swear." "You would swear if you were caught with cream on your lip. Who has been?" Hugh dared to interrupt. "I'm not complaining, Ponse. But those whips make me nervous, I'm not used to them. And I never know who can give me orders. Anybody, apparently. I haven't been able to find out my status." "Hmm -- Memtok, where do you have it in the Family?" The head servant barely conceded that he had not been able to solve that problem. "Let's solve it. We make it a department head. Mmm. Department of Ancient History. Title: Chief Researcher. Senior head of department, just below you. Pass the word around. I'm doing this to make clear just how valuable this servant is to me... and anyone who slows up its work, even indirectly, is likely to wind up in the stew. I suppose it will really be a one-servant department but you can fill it out, make it look good, by transferring its teachers, and whoever looks out for its recorder and prepares the stuff for me, a cleaner or two, maybe an assistant to keep them straight and bossed -- I don't want to take up its valuable time on routine. A messenIF ger. You know. I'm sure there must be dozens of idlers around this house, eating their silly heads off, who would look well in the Department of Ancient History. Now have fetched a lesser whip and a lesser badge. Move." In moments only Hugh was wearing a medallion not much smaller than Memtok's. Ponse took the whip of office and removed something from it. "Hugh, I'm not giving you a charged whip, you don't know how to use it. If one of your loafers need spurring, Memtok will be glad to help; he's expert. Later, when you know how, we'll see. Now. Are you satisfied?" Hugh decided that it was not the time to ask to be allowed to see Barbara. Not with Memtok present. But he was beginning to hope that he could ask soon. He and Memtok were dismissed together. Memtok's face showed nothing but he did not object when Hugh walked abreast of him. M emtok was silent while he led Hugh back down to servants' country; he had much to think over. He was figuring out how to handle this startling development to his own advantage. This savage's status had troubled the Chief Domestic from arrival. The trouble was, he didn't fit -- and in Memtok's world everything had to fit. Well, now the savage had an assigned status. Their Charity had spoken and that was that. But the situation was not improved; it was worse. The newly assigned status was so ridiculous as to make the whole below-stairs structure (the whole world, that is) a mockery. But Memtok was shrewd and very practical. The bedrock of his philosophy could be summed up in: You can't fight City Hall. And his basic strategy in applying that philosophy was the pragmatic wisdom expressed in: When you can't beat 'em, you join 'em. How could this savage's preposterous promotion be made to appear both necessary and proper -- and a credit to the Chief Palace Domestic? Uncle! The savage wasn't even tempered. Nor would he be. At least not yet, he amended. Later, possibly -- it would make everything so much more tidy. Memtok had been amazed when Their Charity had postponed the obvious, couldn't understand it. But there it was. Memtok hardly recalled nis own tempering; his emotions and drives before that time were a thin memory -- of someone else. There was certainly no reason for the sav age to have kicked up a fuss about it; tempering marked promotion into real living. Memtok looked forward to at least a half a century more of activity, power, gracious liv ing, satisfaction. What stud could possibly claim that? But there it was. How to make it look good? A Curiosity! That's what the savage was, a Curiosity. All great lords possessed Curiosities; there had been times when visiting with his equals or near-equals in his own caste that he had been somewhat ashamed of the fact that his own lord took no interest in owning Curiosities. There were not even Siamese twins nor a two-headed freak in the whole household, not even stuffed. Not even a flipperarmed dwarf as a clown. Their Charity was -- let's admit it -- too simple in his tastes for his high rank; sometimes Memtok was a little ashamed of him. Spending his time on scrolls and such when he should be upholding the pride of the house. That lord of Hind -- What was his title? Prince something or other silly. Never mind, he had that big cage where studs and sluts lived and mated with great apes, talked the same jabber -- it wasn't Language -- and you couldn't tell which was which save that some were hairy and some were smooth. There was a Curiosity worthy of a great household! That lord's chief domestic had declared by the Uncle that there were live crossbreeds from the experiment, hidden away where the priests couldn't object. Memtok doubted that but wasn't certain. It might be true, since it was a nevermentioned fact that despite all official denial crossbreeds between servants and Chosen were possible -- and did happen, even though designated bedwarmers were always sterile. But these rare accidents were never allowed to see the light of day. A Curiosity, that was the angle. An untempered who was nevertheless a servant executive. A Famous Scholar who had not even been able to speak Language when he was almost as old as Memtok. A man out of nowhere. From the stars, perhaps. Everybody knew that there were men somewhere in the stars. Probably a miracle involved... and the temples were investigating and any year now this household would be famous for its unique Curiosity. Yes. A word here, a word there, a veiled hint -- # #TTugh," Memtok said cordially. "May I call you 'Hugh'?" "What? Why, certainly!" "And you must call me 'Memtok.' Let's stroll a bit and pick out space for your departmental headquarters. You would like a sunny place, I understand? Perhaps rooms facing on the gardens? And do you want your personal quarters opening off your headquarters? Or would you rather have them elsewhere so that you can get away from it all?" The latter, Memtok had already decided. Roust out both the head gardeners and the studmaster and give the savage both their quarters -- that would make everyone understand at once just how important this Curiosity was... and get both of them sore at the savage, too, which was good. He'd soon realize who was his friend. Memtok,. namely, and nobody else. Besides, the gardener had been getting a little uppity, implying that his work didn't really come under the Chief Domestic. A touching up was what he needed. Hugh said, "Oh, I don't need anything fancy. Just a convenient place to work." "Come, come! We want you to have every facility. Not a word, not IF a word. I wish  could get away from it all sometimes. But I can't. Problems, problems, problems, every minute of the day; some people have to have all their thinking done for them. It will be a real treat to have a man of the mind among us. We'll find you cozy personal quarters, plenty of room for you and your valet. But separate." Valet? Was there a tempered young buck around, well housebroken and biddable, who could be depended on to report everything and keep his mouth shut? Suppose he had his sister's eldest son tempered now, would the lad shape up in time to do the job? And would his sister see the wisdom in pushing matters and part with the boy now? Or would she squawk? He had great hopes for the boy, as she well knew. Memtok was coldly aware that he would have to go some day -- though not for many years -- and he was determined that his heir should succeed to his high office. But it would take planning and such planning could never start too soon. If his sister could be made to see it -- Memtok intentionally led Hugh through crowded passageways instead of by the direct and private route from Memtok's office to the Lord's apartments; servants 'scurried out of the way wherever they went -- save one unfortunate who stumbled and got tingled for his awkwardness. "My!" said Hugh. "This is a big building." Smaller than Gimbel's, perhaps. Or perhaps not. "This? Wait till you see the Paln ace itself -- though no doubt it is falling to rack and ruin at the moment, under my chief deputy. Hugh, we use only a quarter of the staff here. There is no formal entertaining, just garden parties. And only a handful of guests. In the city the Chosen are always coming and going. Many is the time I am rooted out of bed in the middle of the night to open apartments for some lord and his ladies without a moment's warning. And there is where organization and planning count. To be able to open the door of a guest wing flat and know -- know , mind you, know without even looking -- that the beds are freshly perfumed, refreshments hot and cold waiting, everything spotless, music softly playing." "That must take real staff work." # # O taff work!" Memtok snorted.  "I wish I could agree. What it does take is for me myself to inspect every room, every night, no matter how tired I am, before I go to bed. Then stay up long enough to see that mistakes are corrected, not depend on their lies. They're all liars, Hugh. Too much 'Happiness.' But Their Charity is generous; he never cuts down on the ration." "Certainly I've found the food ample. And good." "I didn't say food, I said 'Happiness.' I control the food, not Their Charity -- and I don't believe in starving them, not even as punishment. A tingle is better. They understand that. One thing you must always remember, Hugh, is that most servants don't really have minds. They're as thoughtless as the Chosen -- not referring to Their Charity of course; I would never criticize my own patron. I mean Charity in general. You understand." He winked and gave Hugh a dig in the ribs. "I don't know much about the Chosen," Hugh admitted. "I've hardly laid eyes on them and I've spoken only to Their Charity." "Well... keep your eyes open, you'll see. But it takes more than a dark skin to make brains no matter what they teach in temple. Not that I expect you to quote those sentiments nor would I admit it if you did. But -- who do you think runs this household?" "I don't think I've been here long enough to express opinions." "Very shrewd. You could go far if you had ambition. Let me put it this way. If Their Charity goes away, the household goes on smoothly as ever -- or smoother. If I am away, or dare to fall sick -- well, I shudder to think of it." He gestured with his whip ahead of them. "They know. You won't find them scurrying that fast to get out of his way." Hugh changed the subject. "I did not understand your remark about a 'ration of Happiness. " "Haven't you been receiving yours?" "I don't know what it is." "Oho! One bullock gets you three that it has been issued but never got as far as you. Must look into that. As to what it is, I'll show you." Memtok led him up a ramp, through a door and out onto a balcony. Below was the servants' main dining IF hall, now crowded with three queues. "This is issue time -- studs at a different hour, of course. They can have it as drink, in chewing form, or to smoke. The dosage is the same but some say that smoking it produces the keenest happiness." Memtok used words not yet in Hugh's vocabulary. Hugh told him so. Memtok said, "Never mind. It improves the appetite, steadies the nerves, promotes good health, enhances all pleasures -- and wrecks ambition. The trick is to be able to take it, or leave it alone. I never took it regularly even when I was at stud; I had ambition. I take it now only on feast days or such -- and only in moderation." Memtok smiled. "You'll find out tonight." "I will?" "Didn't I tell you? Banquet in ybur honor, just after the hour of evening prayer." Hugh was hardly listening. He was searching the far queue, trying to spot Barbara. M emtok sent the Chief Veterinarian and the Household Engineer as an escort of honor for Hugh. Hugh was mildly embarrassed at this attention from the physician and surgeon in view of the helpless posture he had been in the last time he had seen the man. But the veterinarian seemed to see nothing odd, he was most cordial. Memtok headed the long table with Hugh on his right. Some twenty department heads were seated; there was at least one lower servant standing behind each guest and endless streams of them coming in and out from kitchen and pantry. The banquet room was beautiful, its furnishings lavish, and the feast was sumptuous and endless; Hugh wondered what a meal of the Chosen must be like if their upper servants ate this way. He soon found out, in part. Memtok was served twice, once from the same tasty and numerous dishes everyone shared, again from another complete menu. These dishes he sampled, using separate plates for them, but rarely did more than taste. Of the regular menu he ate sparingly and sometimes passed up dishes. He noticed Hugh's glance. "The Lord Protector's dinner. Try any of it you like. At your own risk, of course." "What risk?" "Poison, naturally. When a man is over a hundred years old his heir is certain to be impatient. To say nothing of business competitors, political rivals, and subverted friends. Go ahead; the taster tries it half an hour before Their Charity -- or I -- touches it, and we've lost only one taster this year." Hugh decided that his nerve was being tested; he tried a spoonful from a dish Memtok had sampled. "Like it?" asked Memtok. "Seems a bit greasy to me." "Hear that, Gnou? Our new cousin is a man of taste. Greasy. And someday you'll be fried in your own grease, I fear. The truth is, Hugh, that we eat better than the Chosen do... although courses are served more elaborately and beautifully in the Grand Hall, of course, of course. But I am a gourmet who appreciates artistry in food; Their Charity really doesn't care what it is as long as it doesn't squeal when he bites it. In fact, if the sauces are too elaborate, the spices too exotic, he'll send it back with a demand for a plain slice of roast, a hunk of plain bread, and a pitcher of milk. True, Gnou?" "You have said it." "And frustrating." "Very," admitted the chef. "So Cousin Gnou's best cooks work for us, and the Chosen struggle along with ones whose chief skill lies in getting a bird's skin back on without ruffling the feathers. And now, Cousin Hirh, if you will excuse me a moment, I must lift up to the Grand Hall and attempt by proper ceremony to make Cousin Gncu's piece de resistance seem better than it is. Hugh, don't believe what they tell you about me while I'm gone -- regrettably it's all true." He exposed his teeth in what must have been a smile and left. N o one spoke for a while. Finally someone -- Hugh thought it was the transportation master but he had met too many too fast -- said, "Chief Researcher, what household were you with before you were adopted here, may one ask?" "One may ask. House of Farnham. Freeholder Extraordinary." "So. I am forced to admit that the title of your Chosen is new to me. A new title, perhaps?" "Very old," Hugh answered. "Extremely ancient and granted directly by Uncle the Mighty, blessed be His Name. The rank is roughly that of king, but senior to it." "Really?" said the master. Hugh decided to drop that shovel and pick up a wider one. In his conversation earlier that day he had learned that Memtok knew a reat deal about many things -- but almost nothing about such trivia as history, geography, and other matters outside the household. And he had learned in his Language lessons that a servant who could read and write was rare, even among executive servants, unless the skill was necessary to his duties. Memtok had told him proudly that he had petitioned the opportunity while he was still at stud and had labored at it to the vast amusement of the other studs. "But I had my eyes on the future," he had told Hugh. "I could have had at least five more years, probably ten, at stud. But as soon as I could read, I petitioned to be tempered. So I had the last laugh -- for where are they now?" Hugh decided that the very widest shovel was needed; a big lie was always easier to sell than a little one. "The title is unbroken for over three thousand years in House Farnham. The line remained intact by direct intervention of the Uncle right through the Turmoil and the Change. Because of its Divine origin its holder always speaks to the Proprietor as an equal, 'thee' and 'thou.' " Hugh drew himself up proudly. "And  was factotum-in-chief of Lord Farnham. I did everything for him." "A noble house indeed. But 'factotum-in-chief'? We don't use that designation here. Is it a domestic?" "Yes and no. The chief domestic mrks under the factotum." IF The man almost gasped. "And so ? " Hugh went on, "do all servant executives, domestic or not -- business, political, agrarian, everything. The responsibility is very wearing." "So I should imagine!" "It is. i was growing old and my health was failing -- I suffered a temporary paralysis of my lower limbs. Truthfully I never liked so much responsibility, I am a scholar by nature. So I petitioned to be adopted and here lam -- scholar to a Chosen of similar scholarly tastes... a fitting occupation." Hugh then realized that he had stretched one item too far; the veterinarian had looked up with interest. "This paralysis. I noted no signs." (Damn it, doctors never cared anything about anything but their own specialty!) "It came on me suddenly one morning," Hugh said smoothly, "and I haven't been troubled by it since. But to a man of my years, a warning to be heeded." "And what are your years? Professional interest, of course. One may ask?" H ugh tried to make the snub as direct as some he had heard Memtok pass out. "One may not. I'll let you know when I need your services. But," he added, to sooth the smart a little, "It would be fair to say that I was born some years earlier than was Their Charity." "Astonishing. From your physical condition -- quite good, I thought -- I would have judged you to be no more than sixty, at the most." "Blood will tell," Hugh said smugly. "As you know best. I am not the only one of my blood line to live a very long time." He was saved from further evasions to cover his whoppers by the return of Memtok. Everyone stood up. Hugh didn't notice in time, so he remained seated and brazened it out. If Memtok resented it, he did not let it show. He clapped Hugh on the shoulder as he sat down. "No doubt they've told you how I eat my own young?" "I was given the impression of a happy family presided over by a beloved uncle." "Liars, all of them. Well, I'm through for the evening -- until some emergency comes up. Their Charity knows that we are welcoming you; he commanded me not to return to the Grand Hall. So now we can relax and be merry." The Chief Domestic tapped his goblet with a spoon. "Cousins and nephews, a toast to our newest cousin. Possibly you heard what I said -- the Lord Protector is pleased at our modest effort to make Cousin Hugh feel at home in Their family. But I am sure that you already guessed that... since one cannot miss that Cousin Hugh carries, not a least whip, but a lesser whip exactly like mine!" Memtok smiled archly. "Let us all trust that he will never need to use it." Loud applause greeted the boss's "You all know that not even my chief deputy carries such authority, much less the ordinary department head... and from that I am sure you will conclude that a hint from Cousin Hugh, Chief Researcher and Aide in Scholarship to Their Charity by direct apointment -- a hint from him is an order from me -- so don't let me make it a direct order. "And now the first toast! All cousins together and let Happiness flow freely... so let the junior among us give the first toast. Who claims it, who claims it?" The party got rowdy. Early, Hugh noted that Memtok drank very sparingly. He remembered the warning and tried to emulate him. But it was impossible. The Chief Domestic could drop out of any toast, merely raise his glass, but Hugh as guest of honor felt compelled to drink them all. S ome unknown time later Memtok led him back to his newly acquired and luxurious quarters. Hugh felt drunk but not unsteady -- it was just that the floor was so far away. He felt illuminated, possessed of the wisdom of the ages, floating on silvery clouds, and soaked through with angelic happiness. He still had no idea what was in Happiness drinks (he had drunk it only, not smoked or chewed it) . Alcohol? Maybe. Betel nut? Mushrooms? Probably. Marijuana? It seemed certain. He must remember to write down the formula while it was fresh in his mind. This was what Grace should have had! He must -- But of course, she did have it now. How very nice! Poor old Grace. He had never understood her -- all she needed was a little Happiness. Memtok took him into his bedroom. Sleeping across the foot of his lovely new bed was a female creature, blonde and cuddly. Hugh looked down at her from about a hundred feet elevation and blinked. "Who she?" "Your bed warmer. Didn't I say?" "But -- " "It's quite all right. Yes, yes, I know you are technically a stud. But you can't harm her, I assure you; this is what she is for. No danger. Not even altered. A natural freemartin, this one." Hugh turned around to discuss it, wheeling slowly because of his great width and high sail area. But Memtok was gone. Hugh found that he could just make it to the bed. "Move over, Kitten," he muttered, and fell asleep. He overslept but the kitten was still there; she had his breakfast waiting. He looked at her with unease -- not because he had a hangover; he did not. Apparently Happiness did not exact such payments -- and was thereby that much more insidious. He felt physically strong, mentally alert, and morally straight -- and very hungry. But this teenager was an embarrassment. "What's your name, kitten?" "May it please them, this one's name is of such little importance that whatever they please to call it will be a boon." "Cut it, cut it! Use equals speech." "I don't really have a name, sir, not yet. Mostly they just say, 'Hey, you.' " "All right, I'll call you 'Kitten.' Does that suit you? You look like a kitten." She dimpled. "Yes. sir. It's ever so much nicer than 'Hey, you.' " "All right, your name is 'Kitten' IF and tell everybody that it is and don't answer to 'Hey, you.' Tell them that is official because the Chief Researcher says so and if anybody doubts it, tell them to check with the Chief Domestic. If they dare." "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Kitten, Kitten, Kitten," she repeated as if memorizing it, then giggled. "Pretty!" "Good. Is that my breakfast?" "Yes, sir." He ate in bed, offering her bits, and discovered that she evidently expected to be fed, or at least allowed to eat. There was enough for four; between them they ate enough for three. Then he learned that she expected to assist him in the bathroom; he put a stop to that. L ater, ready to get hard at work at his assigned duties, he said to her, "What do you do now?" "I go back to sluts' quarters, sir, as soon as you release me. But I come back at bedtime -- whatever time you say." He was about to tell her that once was a joke and that she was charming and that he almost regretted passing out the night before but that he did not require her services on any future -- He stopped, An idea had hit him. "Look. Do you know a tall slut named Barbara? Oh, this much taller than you are, at least. She was adopted something over two weeks ago and she had babies, twin boys, about a week ago." "Oh, yes, sir. The savage." "That's the one. Do you know where she is? Can you go to her?" "Oh, yes, sir. She's still in lyingin quarters. I like to go in there and look at the babies." She looked wistful. "It must be nice." "Uh, yes. Can you take a message to her?" Kitten looked doubtful. "I don't know. She might not understand. She's a savage, you know. She can't talk very well." "Mmm. Damn. No, maybe it's a help. Wait a moment." His quarters had been equipped witha desk; he went to it, got one of those extraordinary pens -- they didn't stain and didn't wear out and appeared to be solid plastic, no ink -- found a piece of paper. Hastily he wrote a note, asking Barbara about herself and the twins, assuring her of his own welfare and his odd promotion, telling her that soon, somehow, he would see her -- be patient, dear -- and assuring her of his love. He added a P.S. "The bearer of this note is 'Kitten' -- if the bearer is short, blonde, busty, and about fourteen. She is my bedwarmer -- and that's all she is and you've got an evil mind, wench! I'm going to hang onto her because she is a way -- the only way, it would appear -- for me to communicate with you. I'll try to write every day, I'll darn well expect a note from you every day. If you can. And if anybody does anything you don't like, tell me and I'll send you his head on a platter. I think. Things are looking up. Plenty of paper and a pen herewith. Love, love, love -- H. It's habit-forming." He gave the girl the note and writing materials. "You know the Chief Domestic by sight?' "Oh, yes, sir. I've warmed his bed. Twice." "Really? I'm amazed." "Why, sir?" "Well, I didn't think he would be interested." "You mean because he's tempered? Oh, but several of the executives like to have a bedwarmer anyhow. I like it better than being sent upstairs; it's less trouble and you get lots more sleep. The Chief Domestic doesn't usually send for a bedwarmer, though. It's just that he checks us and teaches us manners before we are allowed to serve upstairs." She added, "You see, he knows all about it; he used to be a stud, you know." She looked at Hugh with innocent curiosity that seemed capable of staring through his robe. "Is it true what they say about you? May you ask?" "Uh... one may not." "I'm sorry, sir." She looked crushed. "I didn't mean any harm. But some of the sluts are such gossips." She glanced fearfully at his whip, looked away and dropped her eyes. "Kitten." "Yes, sir." "See this whip?" "Uh, yessirl" "You will never, never, never feel my whip. That's a promise. Never. We're friends." Her face lit up and she looked angelically beautiful instead of merely pretty. "Oh, thank you, sir!" "And another thing. The only whip you need fear from now on is the Chief Domestic's. So stay out of his way. Anyone else -- any 'least whip' -- you tell him, or her, that this lesser whip is what he'll get if he touches you. Tell him to check with the Chief Domestic if he doesn't think I mean it. Understand me?" "Yes, sir." She looked smugly happy. Too smug, Hugh decided. "But you stay out of trouble. Don't do anything to deserve a tingle -- or I might turn you over to the Chief Domestic for a real tingling, the sort he is famous for. But as long as you are working for me, don't allow anyone but him to tingle you... and I solemnly promise that my whip will never touch you. Now git and deliver that. I'll see you tonight, say about two hours after evening prayer. Or come earlier if you are sleepy and go to bed." Must remember to have a little bed put in here for her, he reminded himself. K itten touched her forehead and left. Hugh went to his office and spent a happy day learning the alphabet and dictating three articles from the Britannica. He found his vocabulary utterly inadequate, so he sent for one of his teachers and used the man as a walking dictionary. Even so, he found it necessary to amplify and explain almost endlessly; concepts had changed. Kitten went straight to the Chief Domestic's office, made her report, turned the note and writing materials over to him. Memtok was more than a little annoyed that he held in his hand what might be important evidence -- and no way to read k. It did occur to him that that other one -- Duke? Some such -- might possibly be able to read these hen IF scratches. But not likely, of course, and even under tingiing there would be no certainty that Duke would translate honestly, and no way to check on him. Asking Joe, of course, never never crossed his mind. Nor did asking Their Charity's new bedwarmer. But the impasse did have one intriguing aspect. Was it possible that this savage slut actually could read? And perhaps even essay to write a reply? He stuck the note in his copier, gave it back to the girl. "All right, your name is Kitten. And do exactly as he tells you about not letting yourself be tingled -- and be sure to gossip about it; I want it known all over. But get this -- " He gave Kitten the gentlest of reminders on her left calf; she jumped. "This whip is waiting for you, if you make any mistakes." "This one hears and obeys!" Hugh returned to his flat from the executives dining room rather late; he had sat around and gossiped. He found Kitten asleep in his bed and remembered only then that he had forgotten to ask for another bed for her. She had clutched in her hand a folded paper. Gently he worked it out withput waking her: Darling, How utterly wonderful to see your handwriting! Almost as good as touching your hand. (But not quite.) I knew from Joe that you were safe, hadn't heard about your promotion, didn't know for sure that you knew ahout the twins. First about them -- They are thriving, they both look like their papa, both have his angelic disposition. Sax pounds each at birth is my guess, but, although they were weighed, weights here mean nothing to me. Me? I'm a prize cow, dearest. No trouble at all -- and the care I received (and am receiving) is fantastically good. I started to labor, was given something to drink, never hurt again at all although I remember all details of having two babies -- as if it had happened to somebody else. So trouble free and actually every day and twice on Sundays. And would, if the rewards were as nice as little Hugh and Karl Joseph. As for the rest since then, boring except for our fine boys, but I'm learning the language as fast as I can. And somebody should tell the Borden company about me -- which is good, as our scamps are greedy eaters. I'm even able to help out the girl in the next bed who is rather short on milk. Just call me Elsie. I'll be patient. I'm not the least surprised at your new honors; I expect you'll be bossing the place in a month. I have confidence in my man. My husband. Such a beautiful word -- As for Kitten, I don't believe a word of your Boy Scout assertions, my lecherous darling; your record shows that you take instant advantage of Innocent young girls. And she's awfully cute. Seriously, dearest, I know how noble you are about such things and I didn't have an evil-minded thought. But I would not blame you if your nobility slipped a little -- especially as I've picked up enough words to be aware of her odd category in this strange place. I mean, Kitten is not vulnerable and can't go set. If you did slip, I would not be jealous -- not much, anyhow -- but I would not want it to become a habit. Not to the exclusion of me, at least; my hormones seem to be rearranging themselves very rapidly and I'm not that noble. But I don't want you to get rid of her when she is our only way of communicating. Be nice to her; she's a nice kid. But you would anyway, you're always nice to everyone. I will write everyday. And I will cry in my pillow and be worried to death any day I don't hear from you. My love forever and forever, B. P.S. The smear on the bottom is little Hugh's right footprint. Hugh kissed the letter, then got quickly into bed, clutching it. Kitten did not wake. Hugh slept soundly. H ugh found learning to read and write Language not difficult. Spelling was phonetic, with a sign for every sound. There were no silent letters and never any question about spelling or pronunciation. Accent was always on the penultima unless marked; the system was as free from traps as Esperanto. He found that he could sound out any word as soon as he had learned the #-letter alphabet, and that, with a little thought, he coqld spell any word he could pronounce. Writing and printing were alike, both cursive, and a printed page looked like one written by a skilled penman. He was not surprised to find that the writing-printing looked like Arabic and a search in the Britannica confirmed that the alphabet must have derived (with many changes) from Arabic of his time. Half a dozen letters had not changed; some others were similar although changed. But there were many new letters to cover the expansion into a system of one sound, one sign -- plus letters for sounds XXth century Arabic had never used. Careful search in the Britannica convinced him that Arabic, French and Swahili were the main roots of Language, plus Uncle alone knew what else. But he could not confirm this. An unabridged dictionary of language, one with derivations, such as he had been used to for English, apparently did not exist -- and his teachers seemed convinced that Language had always been just as they knew it. The concept of change baffled them. No matter, it was only of intellectual interest; Hugh knew neither Arabic, French nor Swahili. He had learned a little Latin and less German in high school, and had struggled to learn Russian in his later years when it appeared that, win or lose, Russian might be useful. He was not equipped to study the roots of language, he was merely curious. Nor did he dare spend much time on it. He wanted to please Their Charity, butter him up thoroughly so that he might, eventually, petition the boon of seeing Barbara -- and that meant a flood of translated articles. Hugh consistently worked very hard at it. The second day after his elevar tion, Hugh asked for Duke and Memtok promptly sent for him. Duke was rather worn down -- there were lines in his face -- but he spoke Language. Duke spoke it not as well as his father did and apparently had tangled with his teachers more than Hugh had; his mood seemed to oscillate between utter hopelessness and reckless rebellion, and he was limping badly on his left leg. Memtok made no objection to transferring Duke to the Department of Ancient History. "Glad to get rid of him. He's too monstrous big for stud, yet he doesn't seem to be good for anything else. Certainly, put him to work. I can't bear to see a servant lying around, eating his head off, and doing nothing." So Hugh took him along. Duke looked over Hugh's private apartment and said, "Christ! You certainly managed to come up smelling like a rose. How come?" IF H ugh explained the situation. "So what I want you to do is to translate legal articles and related subjects -- whatever you can do best. We don't have to start at 'A and work through to 'Z' -- alphabetical by our alphabet means nothing. I'm going to work up a subject index instead. But that's not your worry. You'll just sit and dictate translations into a recorder cone." Duke shoved his fists together and looked stubborn. "You can stuff it." "Duke, don't take that attitude. This is an opportunity." "For you, maybe. What are you doing about Mother?" "What can I do? I'm not allowed to see her, neither are you. You know that. But Joe assures me that she is not only comfortable and well treated, but happy." "So he says. Or so you say he says. I want to see it myself. I damn well insist on it." "Very well, insist on it. Go see Memtok about it. But I must warn you, I can't protect you from him." "Rats. I know what that slimy little bastard would say -- and what he would be likely to do." Duke scowled and rubbed his injured leg. "It's up to you to arrange it. You've got such an unholy drag around here, the least you can do with it is to use it to protect Mother." "Duke, I don't have that sort of drag. I'm being pampered for the same reason a race horse is pampered... and I have just as little control over it as a race horse has over when and how he will race. But I can cut you in on some pampering if you cooperate. Decent quarters, immunity from mistreatment, a pleasant place to work -- easy work, really! But I can no more get you into women's quarters, or have Grace sent here, than I can go to the Moon. They have harem rules here, as you know." "And you are content to sit here and be a trained seal for that ape, and neglect Mother? Count me out!" "Duke, I won't argue. I'll assign you a room to work in and send you a volume of the Britannica each day. Then it's up to you. If you won't work, I'll try to keep Memtok from knowing it. But I rather think he has spies all over the place." Hugh let it go at that. At first he got no help out of Duke. Hugh ignored it and pretended that Duke was working. But in time boredom worked where argument had failed; Duke could not stand to be shut up in a featureless room with nothing to do. He was not locked up but he did not venture out much because there was always the chance that he might run into Memtok, or some other whip-carrying upper servant who might want to know where he was going, what he was doing, and why. Servants were expected to look busy even if they weren't from morning prayer to evening prayer. Duke began to produce translations and, with them, a complaint that he was short on vocabulary. Hugh made inquiries and was able to have assigned to him a tempered clerk who had worked as a stenographer in Their Charity's many legal affairs. But he rarely saw Duke. It seemed to be the only way they could stay out of arguments. Duke's output speeded up after the first week but fell off in quality -- Duke had discovered the sovereign power of "Happiness." Hugh considered warning Duke about the drug, decided against it. If it kept Duke contented in captivity, who was he to deny him this anoJvne? The poor quality of Duke's translations, those Hugh had cheeked, did not worry Hugh; Their Charity had no way to judge -- unless Joe rendered an opinion, which seemed unlikely. He himself v as not trying too hard to turn out good translation. "Not good, but Wednesday" was the principle he used: Give the boss lucid copy in great quantity -- and leave out the hard parts. Besides, Hugh had found that a couple of drinks of "Happiness" at dinner topped the day off nicely. It allowed him to read Barbara's daily letter in a warm glow, write a cheerful answer for Kitten to carry back the next morning, then to bed and sound sleep. B ut Hugh did not use much of it; he was afraid of the stuff. Alcohol, he reasoned, had the advantage of being a poison. It gave fair warning by exacting hangovers if one started drinking heavily. But this stuff, as Memtok had said, exacted no such price; it merely turned anxiety, depression, worry, boredom, any unpleasant emotion, into an uncritical happy glow. Hugh wondered if it was. principally methyl meprobamate? But he knew little chemistry and that little was two thousand years behind the times. As a member of the executive servants mess he was not rationed; he could have all he wanted. But Hugh noted that Memtok was not the only boss who used the stuff most abstemiously. A man did not fight his way up in the servants' hierarchy by dulling himself with drugs -- but sometimes a servant did get high up, then skidded all the way to the bottom, unable to stand prosperity in the form of an unrationed supply of "Happiness." Hugh never learned what became of them. Hugh could even keep a bottle in his rooms -- and that solved the problem of Kitten. Hugh had decided not to ask for a separate bed for Kitten; he did not want to rub Memtok's nose in the fact that he was using the child only as a go-between to women's quarters. Instead he required the girl to make up a bed each night on the comfortable divan in his living room. Kitten was very hurt by this. By now she was sure that Hugh could make better use of a bedwarmer and she regarded it as rebuke to her in her honorable capacity as comfort and solace -- and it scared her. If her master did not like her, she might lose the best job she had ever been assigned. (She did not dare report to Memtok that Hugh had no use for her as a bedwarmer; she gave full reports on every point but that.) She wept. She could not have done better; Hugh Farnham had been a sucker for women's tears all his life. He took her on his knee and consoled her, and explained that he liked her very much (true), that it was a sad, sad thing but he was too old properly to appreciate a female bedmate IF (a lie), and that he slept badly and was disturbed by having anyone in bed with him (a half-truth) -- and that he was entirely satisfied with her and wanted her to go on working for him. "Now wipe your eyes and have a drink of this." He knew that she used the stuff. She chewed her ration like bubble gum -- chewing gum it was in fact; the powder was added to chicle and most of the servants preferred it that way because they could go dreamily through the day, chewing it while they worked. Kitten passed her empty days chewing it and chewed the played-out cud in Hugh's quarters after she learned he did not mind. So he did not hesitate to give her a drink of it. Kitten went happily to bed and right to sleep that night, no longer worried that her master might get rid of her. That set a precedent. Each evening, about half an hour before Hugh wanted the lights out, he would give her a short drink of it. F or awhile he kept track of the level in the bottle. Kitten was often in his quarters when he was not, he knew how very much she enjoyed it, and there were no locks in his quarters. His rank entitled him to locks but he did not know this; Memtok had carefully not told him. He quit bothering when he was convinced that Kitten was not snitching it. In fact, Kitten would have been terrified at the thought of stealing from her master. Her ego was barely big enough for a timid mouse; she was less than nothing and knew it and had never owned anything, riot even a name, until Hugh gave her one. Under his kindness she was beginning to be a person, but it was still the faintest flicker. Anything could blow it out. She would no more have risked stealing from him than she would Hugh, half by intent, encouraged her confidence in other ways. She was a trained bath girl, Japanese style; he gave in and' let her scrub his back and handle the nozzles for his bath, dress him, and take care of his clothes. She was a masseuse, too. He sometimes found it pleasant to have his head and neck rubbed after a day spent poring over the fine print in the encyclopedia or following the lines in a scroll reader -- and she was pathetically anxious to do anything to make herself necessary to him. "Kitten, what do you do in the daytime?" "Why, nothing mostly. Sluts of my subcaste mostly don't have to work if they have night duty. Since I'm having night duty every night I'm allowed to stay in the sleep room until midday. So I do, even if I'm not sleepy, because the slutmaster is likely to put one to work if he catches one just wandering around. Afternoons -- well, mostly I try to stay out of sight. That's best. Safest." "I see. Well, you can hide out in here if you like. Or can you do that?" Her face lit up. "If you give me a pass, I can." "All right, I will. You can watch television -- no, it's not on at that hour. Mmm, you don't know how to read. Or do you?" "Oh, no, sir! I wouldn't dare petition." "Hmm." Hugh was aware that permission to learn to read could not be granted even by Memtok; it required Their Charity's permission and was granted only after investigation of the necessity. Furthermore, anything he did that was out of line jeopardized his thin chances of reunion with Barbara. But -- damn it, a man had to be a man! "There are plenty of scrolls in here and a reader I don't use in the daytime. Do you want to learn?" "Uncle protect us!" "Don't swear. If you want to learn -- and can keep your pretty little mouth shut about it. I'll teaah you. Don't look so damned scared! You don't have to decide now. Tell me later. Just don't talk about it. To anyone." Kitten did not. That made two matters which she did not report to the Chief Domestic. It scared her not to report it, but she had a reflex for self-preservation and felt without knowing why that to report this would endanger her happy setup. Kitten became substitute family life for Hugh. She sent him to work cheerful, greeted him with a smile when he came back, talked if he wanted to talk and never spoke unless spoken to. Most evenings she curled up iri front of the television -- Hugh thought of it as "the television" and called it by an equivalent word in Language, and it was in fact closed-circuit television under principles not known to him, in color, in three dimensions, and without lines, no I t played every evening in the servants' main hall, from evening prayer until lights-out, to a packed house, and there were outlets in the apartments of executive servants. Hugh had watched it a number of evenings, expecting to gain insight into this strange society he must learn to live in. It took him four evenings to decide that one might as well try to study the United States he had known by watching Gunsmoke. It was the most blatant of melodrama, with acting as stylized as Chinese theater, and the favorite plot seemed to be that of the faithful servant who dies gloriously that his lord may live. The only good thing Hugh could see about it was that it had no commercials -- and that was an accidental virtue: Servants had no money to spend. But it was only second in importance to Happiness in the morale of life below stairs. Kitten loved it. She would watch it, snapping her gum monotonously, and sometimes suppressing squeals of excitement, as Hugh read -- then sigh happily when the program ended, accept her little drink of Happiness with profuse thanks and a touch of her forehead, and go quietly to sleep when told to. Hugh sometimes went on reading. He read a great deal -- every evening (unless Memtok stopped in to visit) and half of every day. He begrudged the time he spent translating for Their Charity but never neglected it; it was the hopeful key to better things. He had found it necessary to do research into modIF cm culture if he was to translate matters of ancient history intelligibly. The Summer Palace had a fair library. He was given access to it when he claimed the necessity for his work -- Memtok arranged it. But his true purpose was not translation but to try to understand what, in the name of all that was holy, had happened to his world to produce this world. So he usually had a scroll in the reader, either in his office, or in his living room. The scroll system of printing he found admirable; it mechanized the oldest form of book into a system far more efficient than bound leaves and boards -- drop the double cylinder into the reader, flip it on, and hold still. The letters raced across in front of his eyes like letters chasing their way around the Times building -- several hundred feet at a whack, to the end of the scroll. Then the scroll flipped over and chased back the following line, which was printed upside down to the one just scanned. The eye wasted no time flipping back and forth at a stacked column of lines. By a slight pressure the gadget speeded up to whatever the brain could accept. As Hugh got used to the phonetics he acquired a speed faster than he had ever managed in English. But he did not find what he was looking for. Somewhere in the past the distinctions between fact, fiction, history and religious writings seemed to have been rubbed out. Even when he got it clear that the East-West War that had bounced him and his out of their own century was now dated # B.C. (Before the Great Change), he still had trouble matching the world he had known with the "history" set forth in these scrolls. T he war itself he didn't find hard to believe. He had experienced only a worm's-eye view of the first few hours but what the scrolls related matched well enough the possibilities: a missile and bomb holocaust that had escalated in its strike" and "massive retaliation" and smeared cities from Peiping to Chicago, Toronto to Smolensk, fire storms that had done ten times the damage the bombs did, nerve gas and other poisons that had picked up where fire left off, plagues that were incubating when the shocked survivors were picking themselves up and beginning to hope -- plagues that did not stop, diseases that were going strong when fallout was no longer deadly. Yes, he could believe that. The bright boys had made it possible. And the dull boys they worked for had not only never managed to make the possibility unlikely but had never really believed it when the bright boys delivered what the dull boys had ordered. Not, he reminded himself, that he had ever believed in "Better red than dead" -- or believed in it now. The aggression had been one-sided as hell. He did not regret a single megaton of the "massive retaliation." But there it was. The scrolls said that it had killed off the whole northern world. ill But how about the rest of it? It says here that the United States, at the time of the war, held its black population as slaves. Somebody had chopped out a century there. On purpose? Or was it honest confusion and almost no records? There had been, he knew, a great bookburning for two centuries during the Turmoil, and even after the Change. Was it lost history, like Crete? Or did the priests like it better this way? And since when were the Chinese classed as "white" and the Hindus classed as "black"? Yes, yes, purely on skin color Chinese and Japanese were as light as the average "white" of his time, and Hindus were certainly as dark as most Africans. But t was not the accepted anthropological ordering, reflected in the vulgar terms "white" and "colored" in his day. Of course, if all they meant was skin shade -- and apparently that was what they did mean -- he couldn't argue. But the rest of the story maintained that the whites, with their evil ways, killed each other off, destroyed each other almost to the last man... leaving the innocent, charitable, merciful dark race -- beloved by Uncle the Mighty -- to inherit the Earth. The few white survivors, spared by Uncle's mercy, had been succored and cherished as children and now again were waxing numerous under the benevolent guidance of the Chosen. So it read. IT ?gh could see that a war I A which had smeared all of North America, all of Europe, all of Asia except India, could kill off most whites and almost all Chinese. But what had happened to the white minority in South America, the whites of the Union of South Africa, and all the Australians and New Zealanders? Search as he would, Hugh could not find out. All that seemed certain was that the Chosen were all equipped with built-in sunburns whereas servants were palefaces -- and usually small. Hugh and his son towered over the other servants. Contrariwise, the few dozen Chosen he had seen were big men. If the present day whites were descended from Australians, mostly -- No, couldn't be. Aussies had not been runts. And those "Expeditions of Mercy" -- were they slave raids? Or pogroms? Or both? Or, literally, as the scrolls said, rescue missions for survivors? The Bookburnings might account for these discrepancies. It wasn't clear to Hugh whether all books had been put to the torch, or possibly technical books had been spared -- for it was clear that the Chosen had technology superior in all the ways that he had seen to that of his time; it seemed unlikely that they had started from scratch and gone still farther. Or was it unlikely? All the science and technology of his own time that had amounted to a damn had been less than five, hundred years old, most of it less than a hundred, and the most amazing parts not more than a generation old. Could the world have gone back to the dark ages, then pulled out of it and more, in a span of two thousand years? IF Of course it could! he thought. Either way, the Koran was the only book officially exempt from the torch during many years of the Turmoil -- and Hugh harbored a suspicion that the Koran had not been exempt either. He had owned an English translation of the Koran, had read it with deep interest several times. He wished now that he had put it into the shelter, for the Koran as he now read it in "Language" did not match his memory. For one thing, he had thought that Mahomet Was a redheaded Arab. This "Koran" mentioned his skin color re peatedly, as black. And he was sure that the Koran was free of racism, that was one of many things he had like about it. This "improved" version was rabid with it. Furthermore, this Koran had a new testament with a martyred Messiah -- or "prophet" might be a better word. He had taught and he had been hanged for it -- religious scrolls were all marked with a gallows. Hugh did not object to a new testament. There had been plenty of time for a new revelation and religions usually had them, as naturally as a cat has kittens. What he objected to was some revisionist (or many) working over the words of the first prophet, apparently (it seemed to him) to make them fit this new book. That wasn't fair, that was cheating. Hugh gave up trying to sort facts from fables. Perhaps old Ponse would feel mellow enough to discuss it someday. The social organization, as shown by the scrolls, he found almost as puzzling. H was beginning to get a picture of a complex culture, stable, even static. High technology, few innovations, smooth, efficient -- and decadent. Church and State were one -- "One Tongue, One King, One People, One God." The Lord Proprietor was both sovereign and supreme priest and owned everything under Uncle's  grant, and the Lords Protector such as Ponse were merely his bishops and held only fiefs. Yet there were plenty of private citizens (Chosen, of course -- a white was not a person), private shopkeepers, landowners, professional men, etc. A setup for an absolute totalitarian communism, yet streaked through and through with what appeared to be private enterprise. Hell, there were even corporations if he understood what he was reading. T he most interesting point to Hugh (aside from the dismal fact that his own status was fixed by law and custom at zero) was the inheritance system. Family was everything, yet marriage was almost nothing -- present but not important. Descent was always through the female line -- but power was exercised by males. This confused Hugh until it suddenly all fell into place. Ponse was Lord Protector because he was eldest son of an eldest daughter -- whose oldest brother had been lord protector of this fief before Ponse. Ponse's heir therefore was his oldest sister's oldest son. Descent of title went down through mother and endlessly with secular power vested in the oldest brother of each of these female heirs. It did not matter who Ponse's father was and it mattered even less what sons he had. None of them could inherit, no matter what. Ponse inherited from his mother's brother; his heir was his sister's son. Hugh could see that, under this system, marriage would never be important -- and bastardy might be a concept so abstract as to be unrecognized -- but family would be more important than ever. Women (of the Chosen) could never be downgraded under it. They were more important than males even though they ruled through deputies, their brothers. And the religion recognized this; the One God, Uncle the Mighty, had an elder sister, the Eternal Mamaloi... so sacred that she was not prayed to and her name was never used in cursing. She was never mentioned. She was just there , the Eternal Female Principle that gave it all life and being. Hugh had a feeling that he had read about this sort of matrilineal descent before, uncle to nephew through the female line, and he searched the Britannica for it. Then he was surprised to discover that the setup, or features of it, had prevailed at one time or another in every continent and most cultures. The Great Change had been when Mamaloi had at last suceeded -- working indirectly, as always -- in uniting all Her children under one roof and placing their Uncle in charge of them. Then She could rest. Hugh's comment was: "And God help the human race!" Hugh kept expecting Their Charity to send for him. But two months passed and he did not, and Hugh was beginning to fret that he would never have a chance to ask to see Barbara. Apparently Ponse had no interest in him as long as he kept on grinding out translations. Translating the Britannica looked to Hugh like a job for several lifetimes; he resolved to stir things up, so he sent one day's batch with a letter to Their Charity. A week later the Lord Protector sent for him. Memtok came for Hugh, dancing with impatience but insisting that Hugh at least wash his armpits, rub himself with deodorant cream and put on a clean robe. The Lord Protector did not seem to care how Hugh smelled. He let him stand several minutes while he did something else. Hugh stood in silence... although Grace was present. She was lounging on a divan, playing with cats and chewing gum. She glanced at Hugh, then ignored him, save that her face took on a secret smile that Hugh knew too well -- he called it "canary that ate the cat." Dr. Livingstone I Presume greeted Hugh, jumping down from the divan, coming over and rubbing against his ankles. Hugh knew that he should ignore it, wait for the lord to recognize his presence -- but this cat had been his friend a long time; he could not snub it. He bent down and stroked the cat. The skies did not split, Their Charity ignored the breach. Presently the Lord Protector said, IF "Yes, boy, come here. Now what's chose.' Hugh, you aren't just sniffthis about making money from your ing Happiness. Things are the same translations? What in Uncle ever now. Well? What's your idea? Spit gave you the notion I needed monit out." ey?" Hugh had got the notion from Memtok. The Chief Domestic had growled about how difficult it was to run things, with pennypinching from on high getting worse every year. "May it please Their Charity, this one's opinions are of no value, it is true, but -- " "Cut the flowery talk, damn you!" "Ponse, I haven't any idea how things are here. But back where -- when -- I came from there never was a man so rich but what he needed more money. Usually, the richer he was, the more he needed." The lord grinned ruefully. " 'Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme "It seems to me that there are things in your encyclopedia which might be turned to a profit. Processes and other thing that have been lost in the last two thousand years -- but might be worth money now." "All right, do it. The stuff you send up is satisfactory, what I've had time to read. But some of it is trivial. 'Smith, John, born and died -- a politician who did nothing much and did that little poorly. Know what I mean?" "I think so, Ponse." "All right, skip that garbage and dig me up four or five juicy ideas I can cash in on." #I # Hugh hesitated. Ponse said, "Well? Didn't you understand?" "I think I need help. You see, I don't know anything, anything at all, really, except what goes on below stairs. I thought Joe might help." "How?" "I understand that he has traveled some with you, seen things. And he reads English. He is more likely to be able to pick out subjects that merit study. He could pick the articles, I will translate them, and you can judge whether or not here is anything to exploit. I can synopsize them, too, so that you needn't waste your time wading through details if the subject doesn't merit it." "Good idea. I'm sure Joe will be happy to help. All right, send up the encyclopedia. All." Hugh was dismissed so abruptly that he had no chance to mention Barbara. But, he reflected, he could not have risked it with Grace present. He considered digging out Duke, telling him that his mother was fat and happy -- both literally -- but decided against it. He wasn't sure how pleased Duke would be with a truthful report, and wanted no argument. They didn't see eye to eye and that was that. XV Y oe sent  back down a volume almost every day for many days, with pages marked and articles checked; Hugh slaved very hard to try to keep up with him, and to make really useful translations. After two weeks of this Hugh was again sent for. He expected a conference over some business idea. What he found was Ponse, Joe, and a Chosen he had never seen. Hugh instantly prepared to speak protocol mode, rising. The Lord Protector said. "Come here, Hugh. Cut the cams. And don't start any of that tiresome formality, this is all family. Private." Hugh hesitantly approached. The other Chosen, a big dark man with a permanent scowl, didn't seem pleased at the idea. He was carrying his quirt and twitched it. But Joe looked up and smiled. "I've been teaching them contract, Hugh, and our usual fourth had to be away. I've been telling Ponse that you are the best player any where or when. So don't let me down." "I'll try not to." Hugh recognized one deck of cards, they had once been his. The other deck appeared to be handpainted on plastic and were quite beautiful. The table was the right height and size, but was not from the shelter; fabulous hand craftsmanship had gone into it. The cut made Hugh partner of the strange Chosen. Hugh tried not show how nervous it made him, especially as his partner clearly did not like it. But the Chosen grunted and accepted it. His partner's contract at three spades -- by a fluke distribution they made four. His partner growled, "Boy, you underbid, you wasted game. Don't let it happen again." Hugh kept quiet and dealt. On the next hand Joe and Ponse made five clubs. Hush's partner was furious -- at Hugh. "If you had led IF diamonds, we would have set them! And you washed out our leg. I warned you. Now I'm -- " "Mrika!" Ponse said sharply. "This is contract. Play it as such. And put that tickler out of reach. The servant played correctly." "It did not! And I'm damned if I care for the idea of letting it in the game anyhow. I can smell the rank, sharp stink of a buck servant no matter how much it's scrubbed. And I don't think this one is scrubbed at all." Hugh felt sweat breaking out in his armpits and flinched. But Ponse said evenly, "Very well, we excuse you. You may leave." "That suits me!" The Chosen stood up. "Just one thing before I go. If you don't quit stalling, Their Mercy will let the Northwestern Protectorate -- " "Are you planning to put up the money?" Their Charity said sharply. "Me? It's a Family matter. Not but what I wouldn't jump at the chance if I could beg, borrow, or scrape up the bullocks. Forty million hectares and more, and most of it in prime timber -- of course I would! But I hardly have one bullocks to jingle against another -- and you know why." "Certainly we know why. You gamble."  "Oh, come now! A businessman has to take chances. You can't call it gambling When -- " "We do call it gambling. We do not object to gambling but we have a vast distaste for losing. If you must lose, you will do it with your own bullocks." "But this isn't gambling, it's a sure thing -- as well as getting us in solid with Their Mercy. The Family -- " "We will decide what is good for the Family. For a while longer at least. Your turn will come soon enough. In the meantime we are as anxious to please the Lord Proprietor as you are. But not with bullocks the Family doesn't have in the treasury." "You could borrow it. The interest would only come to -- " "You wanted to leave, Mrika. We note that you have left." Ponse picked up cards and began to shuffle them. The younger Chosen snorted and left. P onse laid out a solitaire game, started to play. Presently he said to Joe, "Sometimes that young man gets me so annoyed that I would happily change my will." Joe looked puzzled. "I thought you could not disinherit him?" "Oh, no, no!" Their Charity looked shocked. "Not even a peasant can do that. Where woulds we be if there were no stability here on Earth? I wouldn't dream of it, even if the law permitted it; he's my heir. I was just thinking of the servants." Joe said, "I don't follow you." "Why you know -- No, perhaps you don't. I keep forgetting that you didn't grow up among us. My will disposes of anything personally mine. Not much I grant you -- jewelry, scrolls, such. Value probably household servants. Just the household, I'm not talking about servants in mines or on ranches, or in our shipping lines. It's customary to list all household servants in a will -- otherwise they escort their uncle." He grinned. "It would be a good joke on Mrika if he suddenly learned that he was going to have to find the money somewhere to adopt fifteen hundred, two thousand servants -- or shut up the house and live in a tent. I can just see that. Why, I doubt if he knows how to put on his own boots. Hugh, if you tell me to put the black lady on the red lord, I'll tingle you, I promise. I'm not in a good mood." Hugh said hastily, "Did you miss a play? I hadn't noticed." "Then why were you staring at the cards?" Hugh had indeed been staring at the game, trying his best to be invisible. He had been made very nervous by witnessing a quarrel between Ponse and his nephew. He hoped never to see the younger Chosen again -- the man might remember him. But he had missed not a word, he found it extremely interesting. Ponse went on, "Which would you prefer, Hugh? To escort me to Heaven? Or stay here and serve Mrika? Don't answer too quickly. If you stay here, I venture you may be eating your ovn toes to stay your hunger before I'm gone a year... whereas Heaven is a very nice place, so the Good Scroll tells us." "It's a hard choice." "Well, you don't have to make it, nor will you know. A servant should never know, it keeps him on his toes. That scoundrel Memtok keeps praying me for the honor of being in my escort. If I thought he was sincere, I would dismiss him for incompetence. But he isn't." Ponse swept the cards together, having reached a block. "Damn that lad! He's poor company but I had my liver set on a few good, hard rubbers. Joe, we've got to teach more people to play contract. Being left without a fourth is annoying." "Certainly," agreed Joe. "Right now?" "No, no. I want to play, damn it, not watch some beginner bumble through it. I'm growing addicted to it. Takes a man's worries off his mind." H ugh was hit by inspiration. "Ponse, if you don't mind having another servant in the game... Joe brightened up. "Why, of course! He -- " "Barbara," Hugh cut in fast, before Joe could mention Duke. Joe blinked. Then he smoothly picked where he had left off. "He -- Hugh, I mean -- was about to mention a servant named Barbara. Good bridge player." "Well! You've been teaching this game below stairs, Hugh?" Ponse added, " 'Barbara'? A name I don't recognize. Not one of the upper servants, I'm sure." "You remember her," Joe said. "She was with us when you picked us up. The tall one." "Oh, yes. Bigging, it was. But, Joe, are you telling me that a slut can play this game?" "She's a top player," Joe assured him. "Plays better than I do. Heavens, Ponse, she can play rings around you. Isn't that right, Hugh?" "Barbara is an excellent player." "This I must see to believe." A few minutes later Barbara, IF freshly bathed and scared, was fetched in. She glanced at Hugh, looked startled silly, opened her mouth, closed it, and stood mute. Ponse came up to her. "So this is the slut who is supposed to be able to play contract. Stop trembling, little one; nobody's going to eat you." In a few bluff words, confirmed by Joe, he convinced her that she was there to play bridge and that she was expected to relax and be informal -- no fancy talk. "Just behave as if you were downstairs, having a good time with other servants. Hear me?" "Yes, sir." "Just one thing." He tapped her on her chest. "When you're my partner, I shan't be angry if you make a mistake or two. After all, you're only a slut and it's surprising that you can play an intellectual game at all. But -- " He paused. "But... when you are playing against me, if you fail to fight for every trick, if I even suspect that you are trying to let me win, I guarantee you'll tingle when you leave. Understand me?" "That's right," agreed Joe. "Their Charity expects it. You just play by the book, and play your best." " 'Play by the book,' " Ponse repeated. "I've never seen this book Joe talks about but that's the way Joe says he has taught me to play. So do it. All right, let's cut the cards." Hugh hardly listened, he was drinking in the sight of Barbara. She looked well and healthy although it was startling to see her slender again -- or almost slender, he corrected; she was still largish in the fanny and certainly in the bust. She had lost most of her tan and was dressed in the shapeless short robe that all female servants wore below stairs, but he was delighted to see that she had not had her hair removed. It was close cropped but it could grow back. He noticed that his own appearance seemed to startle her, realized why. He said, smiling, "Yes, I comb my hair with a washrag now, Barbie. No matter, I didn't have enough left to be more than a nuisance. Now that I'm used to being hairless, I like it." "You look distinguished, Hugh." "He's ugly as sin," said Ponse. "But are we chatting? Or playing bridge? Your bid, Barba." T hey played bridge for hours. As it progressed, Barbara seemed to relax and enjoy it. She smiled a great deal, usually at Hugh, but also at Joe and even at Their Charity. She played by the book and Ponse never found fault with her. Hugh decided that their host was a good run-of-the-mill player, not yet perfect in his play -- but he was smart, always remembered what cards had been played, and usually bid quite accurately, by the book. Hugh found him a satisfactory partner and an adequately strong opponent; it was a good game. But once, with Barbara as Ponse's partner and contract in her hand, Hugh saw as soon as Ponse laid down the dummy that Ponse had overbid in his answer by at least one trick. So he contrived to play so that he lost one sure trick, thereby letting Barbara make contract, game, and rubber. It got him a glance with ro expression from Barbara and Joe gave him a look that had a suggestion of a twinkle in it, but Joe kept his mouth shut. Ponse did not notice. He gave a bass roar of satisfaction, reached across and patted Barbara's head. "Wonderful, wonderful! Little one, you really can play contract. Why, I doubt if I could have made that one myself." Nor did Ponse complain when, on the next rubber, Barbara and Hugh gave him and Joe a trouncing. Hugh decided that Ponse had the inborn honesty sometimes called "sportsmanship" -- plus quite a good head for cards. One of the little deaf-mutes trotted in, knelt, and served Their Charity a tumbler of something cold, then another to Joe. Ponse took a long swig, wiped his mouth and said, "Ah, that hits the spot!" Joe made a quiet, almost wlrispercd suggestion to him. Ponse looked startled and said, "Oh, certainly. Why not?" So Hugh and Barbara were served, too. Hugh was pleased to discover that it was just cold apple juice; he wasn't sure of his ability to play tight bridge had it been Happiness." During this rubber Hugh noticed that Barbara was squirming a little and seemed to have trouble in concentrating. When the hand ended he said quietly, "Trouble, hon?" She glanced at Ponse and whispered quickly, "Some. I was about to feed the boys when I was sent for." "Oh." Hugh turned to his host. "Ponse, Barbara needs to stop." Ponse looked up from shuffling. "Plumbing call! One of the maids can show it, I suppose. They must go somewhere." "Not that. Well, maybe that, too. But what I meant was, Barbara has twins." "Well? Sluts usually have twins, they have two breasts. What do you expect?" "That's the point, she's nursing them and she's hours past time for it. She has to leave." Ponse looked annoyed, hesitated, then said, "Oh, garbage. Its milk won't cake from so short a delay. Here, cut the cards." Hugh did not touch them. Ponse said, "Didn't you hear me?" Hugh stood up. His heart was beating very fast and he felt a shudder of fear. "Ponse, Barbara hurts. She needs to nurse her twins right now. I may not be able to force you to let her -- but if you think I'll play cards with you while you don't let her, you're crazy." F or long moments the big man simply stared, without expression. Then suddenly he grinned. "Hugh I like you, I really do. You did something like this once before, didn't you? The slut is your sister, I suppose." "No." "Then you are the one who is crazy. Do you know how close you came to being cold meat?" "I can guess." "I doubt it, you don't look worried. But I like spunk, even .in a servant. Very well, I'll have its brats fetched. They can be fed while we play." IF The twins were fetched and Hugh saw at once that they were the most perfect, handsomest, healthiest and loveliest boy babies that had ever been born; he told Barbara so. But he did not immediately get a chance to touch them as Ponse took one in each arm, laughed at them, blew in their faces and jiggled them. "Fine boys!" he roared. "Fine boys, Barba! Holy little terrors, I'll bet. Go on, swing that fist, kid! Sock Uncle in the nose again. What do you call them, Barba? Do they have names?" "This one is Hugh -- " "Eh? Does Hugh have something to do with them? Or thinks he has, perhaps?" "He's their father." "Well, well! Hugh, you may be ugly, but you have other qualities. If Barba knows what she's talking about. And. what's this one's name?" "That one is little Joe. Karl Joseph." Ponse lifted an eyebrow at Joe. "So you have sluts naming brats for you, eh, Joe? I'll have to watch you, you're a sly one. What did you give Barba?" "Beg pardon?" "Birthing present, you idiot. Nothing? Give her that ring you're wearing. So many brats in this house named after me that I have to order trinkets by the basket load; they all know it obliges me to make them a present. Hugh here is lucky, he has nothing to give. Hey, Hughie has teeth already." Hugh got to hold them for a moment while they settled down for combined bridge and nursing. Barbara took them one at a time and played cards with her free hand. The little maids fussed over the one not nursing and, in due time, took them away. In spite of the handicap Barbara managed to play well, even with Ponse top scorer, Barbara close behind, and Joe and Hugh tied for anchor position. Hugh had cheated very little to make it come out that way; the cards had favored Ponse and Barbara when they were partners; they had made two small slams, the only slams of the session. Ponse was feeling very jovial about it. "Barba, come here, little one. You tell the slutmaster that I said to find a wet nurse for your brats and that I want the vet to dry you up as soon as possible, heat me? I want you available as my bridge partner. Or opponent -- you give a man a tough fight." "Yes, sir. May one speak?" "One may." "I would rather nurse them myself. They're all I have." "Well -- " He shrugged. "This seems to be my day for balky servants. I'm afraid you are both still savages at heart. A tingling wouldn't do you any harm, slut. All right, but you'll have to play one-handed sometimes; I won't have brats stopping the game." He grinned. "Besides, I'd like to see the little rascals occasionally, especially that one that bites. You may go. All." B arbara was dismissed so suddenly that Hugh barely had time to exchange smiles with her. He had hoped to walk down with her, steal a little private visit. But His Charity did not dismiss him, so he stayed -- with a warm glow in his heart; it had been the happiest time he had had in a long time. Ponse discussed the articles he had been translating, why none of them offered practical new business ventures. "But don't fret about it, Hugh. Keep plugging away and we'll strike ore yet." He turned the talk to other matters, still kept Hugh there. Hugh found him a knowledgeable conversationalist, interestten as he was to talk. He seemed to Hugh the epitome of the perfect decadent gentleman -- urbane, cosmopolitan, disillusioned and cynical, a dilettant in all arts and sciences, neither merciful nor cruel, unimpressed by his own rank, and not racist. At least he treated Hugh as an intellectual equal in private conversation. While they were talking, the little maids came in and served dinner to Ponse and to Joe, at the card table where they had remained. Nothing was offered to Hugh, nor did he expect it -- nor want it, as he could always have meals served in his rooms if he was not on time in the executive servants' dining room and he had long since decided, from several samplings, that Memtok was right: The upper servants ate better than the master. But when Ponse had finished, he shoved his dishes toward Hugh. "Eat." Hugh hesitated a split second; he did not need to be told that he was being honored -- for a servant. There was plenty of food, at least three times as much left as Ponse had eaten. Hugh could not recall that he had ever in his life eaten someone's leavings, and certainly not with a used spoon. But he dug in. As usual, Their Charity's menu did not especially please Hugh -- somewhat greasy and he had no great liking for pork. Pork was hardly ever served below stairs but was often part of the menus Memtok sampled, Hugh had noticed. It surprised him, as the revised Koran these people used still contained the dietary laws and the Chosen did follow some of the original Muslim customs. They practiced circumcision, did not use alcohol other than a thin beer, and observed Ramadan at least nominally and still called it that. Mahomet would have been shocked by the accretions and revisions to his straightforward monotheistic teaching but nevertheless he would have recognized some of the details. But the bread was good, the fruits were superb, and so were the ices and many other things; it wasn't necessary to dine solely on the roast. Hugh kept intact his record for enjoying the inevitable. Ponse was interested in what the climate had been in this region in Hugh's time. "Joe tells me you sometimes had freezing temperatures. Even snow." "Oh, yes, both, every winter." "Fantastic. How cold did it get?" Hugh had to stop to think. He had not yet had occasion to learn how these people marked temperatures. "If you consider the range from freezing of water to its boiling, it was not especially unusual for IF it to get one third of that range lower than freezing." Ponse looked surprised. "Are you sure? We call that range, freezing to boiling, one hundred. Are you telling me that it sometimes got as much as thirty-three degrees below freezing?" Hugh noted with interest that the centigrade scale had survived two millenia -- but no reason why it should not; they used the decimal system in arithmetic and in their money. He had to do a conversion in his head. "Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Nearly cold enough to freeze mercury, and often cold enough for that, up in those mountains." Hugh pointed out a view window. "Cold enough," Joe agreed, "to freeze your teeth! Only thing that ever made me long for Mississippi." "Where," asked Ponse, "is Missisrippi?" "It's not," Joe told him. "It's under water now. And good riddance." r tis led to discussion of why the climate had changed and Their Charity sent for the last volume of the Britannica, containing ancient maps, and for modem maps. They poured over them together. Where the Mississippi Valley had been, the Gulf now reached far north. It was no longer a gulf but part of the Atlantic as Florida and Yucatan were missing and Cuba was a few small islands. California had a central sea and most of northern Canada was gone. Similar shrinkages had taken place elsewhere. The Scandinavian Peninsula was now a great island The British Isles were several small islands. Part of the Sahara was under water. What had been lowlands anywhere were missing -- Holland, Belgium, northern Germany could not be found. Nor Denmark -- the Baltic was a gulf of the Atlantic. Hugh looked at it with odd sorrow and had never felt so homesick. He had known it was so, from reading; this was the first map he had seen of it. "The question," said Ponse, "is whether the melting of the ice was triggered by the explosions and dust of the East-West War, or was it a natural change that was, at most, simply speeded up a little by artificial events? Some of my scientists say one thing, some the other." "What do you think?" asked Hugh. The lord shrugged. "I'm not foolish enough to hold an opinion when I have insufficient data; I'll leave that folly to scientists. I'm simply glad that Uncle saw fit to let me live in an age in which I can go outdoors without freezing my feet. I visited the South Pole once -- I have some mines there. Frost on the ground. Dreadful. The place for ice is in a drink." Ponse went to the view window and stood looking out at the silhouette of mountains against darkening sky. "However, if it got that cold up there now, we would root them out in a hurry. Eh, Joe?" "They would come back with their tails between their legs," Joe agreed. Hugh looked puzzled. "Ponse means," Joe explained, "the runners hiding up in the mountains. What they thought you were when we were found." "Runners and a few aborigines," Ponse supplemented. "Savages. Poor creatures who have never been rescued by civilization. It's very hard to save them, Hugh. They don't stand around in the open and wait to be picked up the way you did. They're as crafty as wolves. Caves and things, and the merest shadow in the sky and they freeze and you can't see them -- and they are very destructive of game. Of course we could smoke them out any number of ways. But that would kill off the game, can't have that. Hugh, you've lived out there in the open; you must have acquired some feel for it. How would you go about resthe game." Mr. Hugh Farnham hesitated only long enough to phrase his reply. "Their Charity knows that this one is a servant. This one's ears must be at fault in thinking that it heard its humble self called on to see the problem as it might appear to the Chosen." "Why, damn your impudence for dodging around it with fancy talk. Hugh, I want your opinion." "You got my opinion, Ponse. I'm a servant I know it, you know it. My sympathies are with the runaways. And the savages. I didn't know. I was dragged." O now? Of course you were captured, even Joe was. But there was language difficulty. Now you've seen the difference. You k now." "Yes. I know," Hugh replied. "Then you certainly know how much your condition has improved. Don't you sleep in a better bed now? Aren't you eating better? Uncle! When we picked you up, you were half starved and infested with vermin. You were barely staying alive with the hardest sort of work, I could see . I'm not blind, I'm not stupid. There isn't a member of my Family down to the lowest and dullest cleaner that works half as hard as you had to, or sleeps in as poor a bed -- and in a stinking little sty; I could hardly bear the stench before we fumigated it. And as for the food, if that is the word, any servant in this house would turn up his nose at what you ate. Right?" "Yes " "Well?" "I prefer freedom." " 'Freedom!' " Their Charity snorted. "A concept without a referent, like 'ghosts.' Meaningless. Hugh, you should study semantics. Modern semantics, I mean; I doubt if they ha'd such a science in your day, really. We are all free -- to walk our appointed paths. Just as a stone is free to fall when you toss it into the air. No one is free in the purely abstract meaning you give the word. Do you think  am free? Free to change places with you, say? Would I if I could? You bet I would! You have no concept of the worries T have, the work I do. Sometimes I lie awake half the night, worrying about which way to turn next -- and you won't find that in servants' hall. They're happy, they have no worries. But I have to carry my burden as best I can." IF Hugh looked stubborn. Ponse came over and put his arm around Hugh's shoulders. "Come, let's sit down and talk this over, judicially, not emotionally -- two civilized beings. I'm not one of those superstitious persons who thinks a man can't think because his skin is pale. Surely you know that. Haven't I respected your intellect?" "Well... yes." "That's better. But I happen to know more about this than you do. Let me explain some things -- Joe has seen them -- and you can ask questions if you need to, and we'll arrive at a rational understanding. First -- Joe, you've seen the Chossen here and there who are what our friend Hugh would, no doubt describe as 'free.' Tell him." Joe snorted. "Hugh, you should see. You would be darn glad to be privileged to live in Ponse's household. There is just one phrase I can think of to describe them. Po' black trash. Like the white trash not knowing where their next meal is coming from." "I follow you." "I think I do, too," agreed Their Charity. "A pungent phrase. I look forward to the day when every man will have servants. But it can't come overnight, they'll have to lift themselves up. But a day when all the Chosen will be served -- and all servants as well cared for as I know they are in my Family. That's my ideal. In the meantime I do the best I can. I look after their welfare from birth until they're called Home by Uncle. They have nothing to fear, utter security -- which they wouldn't have out in those mountains as I'm sure you know better than I. They are happy, they are never overworked -- which I am -- and they have plenty of fun, which is more than I can say! This bridge game today -- the first real fun I've had in a mo h. And they are never punished, only just enough to remind them when they. err. Have to do that, you've seen how stupid most of them ar.e. Not that I am inferring that you are. No, I tell you honestly that I think you are smart enough to take care of servants yourself, despite your skin. I'm speaking of the ordinary run of them. Honestly, Hugh, do you think they could possibly take care of them as well as I look out for them?" ( # probably not." Hugh was thinkX ing that he had heard all this before, only a few nights ago, and in almost the same words -- from Memtok. With the slight difference that Ponse did seem to be honestly fond of his servants and earnest about their welfare -- whereas the Chief Domestic had been openly contemptuous of them, even more strongly so than his barely veiled contempt for the Chosen. "No, they couldn't, most of them." "Ah! You agree with me." "No." Ponse looked pained. "Hugh, how can we have a rational discussion if you say one thing and contradict it in the next breath?" "I didn't contradict myself. I agreed that you took fine care of the welfare of your servants. But I did not agree that I prefer it to freedom. I don't." "But tell me why, Hugh? Give me a concrete reason, not a philosophical abstraction. If you're not happy, I want to know why. So that I can correct it." "I can give you one good reason. I'm not allowed to live with my wife and children." "Eh?" "Barbara. And the twins." "Oh. But is that really important to you? You have a bedwarmer. I know you have; Memtok told me, and I congratulated him on having used initiative in an odd situation. Not much gets past that sly old fox. You have one and she is sure to be more expert at her specialty than the ordinary run of breeding slut. As for the brats, no reason why you can't see them all you wish -- just order them fetched to you whenever you like. But who wants to live with brats? Or with a wife? I don't live with my wife and children, you can bet on that. I see them on appropriate occasions. But who would want to live with them?" "I would." "Well -- Uncle! I want you to be happy. It can be arranged." "# can?" "Certainly. If you hadn't put up such a fuss over being tempered, you could have had them with you all along -- though I confess I don't see why. Do you want to see the vet?" "Uh... no." "Well, there's always the other choice. I'll have the slut spayed." 'WO." Ponse sighed. "You're a hard one to please. Be practical, Hugh; I can't change a scientific breeding system developed over centuries to pamper one servant. Do you know how many servants are in this family? Here and at the Palace? Somewhere around eighteen hundred, I believe. Do you know what would happen if I allowed unrestricted breeding? In ten years there would be twice that number. Do you know what would happen next? They'd starve, that's what would happen. I can't support them in unlimited breeding. Would if I could, but it's wishing for the Moon. Worse, for we can go to the Moon any time it's worth while but nobody yet has been able to cope with the way servants will breed if left to their own devices. So which is better? To control the breeding? Or let them starve?" T heir Charity sighed and went on, "I wish you were a head shorter, we could work something out. You've been in studs' quarters?" "I visited it once, with Memtok," said Hugh. "You noticed the door? You had to stoop; Memtok walked straight in. He used to be a stud. The doors are that height in every studs' barracks in the world -- and no servant is chosen if he can't walk in without stooping. And the slut in this case is too tall, too. A wise law, Hugh, but I didn't make it; it was handed down by Their Mercy of that time, a long time ago. If they are allowed to breed too tall they start needing to be tingled too often and that's not good, ehher for master or servant. No, Hugh. Anything within reason. But don't ask for the impossible." He moved from the diIF van where he had been sitting tete-atete with Hugh, and sat down at the card table, picked up one deck. "So we'll say no more about it. Do you know how to play double solitaire?" "Yes." "Then come see if you can beat me a game and let's be cheerful. A man gets upset when his efforts aren't appreciated." Hugh shut up and s it down with him. He was thinking glumly that Ponse was not a villain, not at all. He was exactly like the members of every other ruling class in history: honestly convinced of his own benevolence and hurt if it was challenged. They played a game. Hugh lost, his mind was not on it. They started to lay out another. Their Charity remarked, "I must have more cards painted. These are getting worn and sticky." Hugh said, "Couldn't it be done more quickly, using a printer such as we use for scrolls?" "Eh? I suppose so. Hadn't thought about it." The big man rubbed one of the XXth century cards. "This doesn't seem much like printing. Are they printed? Were they, I mean?" "Oh, yes. Many thousands at a figuring the enormous numbers that used to be sold." "Really? I wouldn't have thought that bridge, with its demand on the intellect, would have attracted many people." Hugh suddenly put down his cards. "Ponse? You wanted a way to make money." "Certainly." # #XToure holding it in your I hand. Brand new. In this age. Joe! Come here and let's talk about this. How many decks of playing cards were sold each year in the United States?" "Gosh, Hugh, I don't know. Millions, maybe." "So I would say. And .at a grosf profit of about # on each deck, too. Mmm. Ponse, bridge and solitaire aren't the only games that can be played with these cards. The possibilities are unlimited. There are simple games, simple as solitaire but played by two or three or more players. There are games a dozen people can play at once. There are hard games and easy games, there is even a form of bridge -- 'duplicate,' it's called -- which is harder than contract, for people who like to work hard when they play Ponse, every family -- little family, I mean -- in the United States kept one or two or even dozens of decks of these cards on hand; it was a rare home that didn't own a single deck. I couldn't guess how many were sold. decks in use in the United States alone. And you've got a virgin market. All it needs is to get people interested in playing with cards." "Ponse, Hugh is right," Joe said solemnly. "The possibilities are unlimited." Ponse pursed up his lips. "If we sold them for a bullock a deck, let us say... mmm -- " "Too much," Joe objected. "You would kill your market before you got started." Hugh said, "Joe, what's this formula for setting a price to maximize profits rather than sales?" "Works only if you have a monopoly." "Well? How is that done here? Patents and copyrights and such? I haven't read anything about it." Joe looked troubled. "Hugh, the Chosen don't use such a system. You see, they don't need to. Everything is pretty well worked out, things don't change much." Hugh said, "That's bad. Two weeks after we start the market will be flooded with cheap imitations." Ponse said, "What are you two jabbering about? Speak Language." Hugh's first question had necessarily been in English; he knew no other words for what he wanted to ask. Joe had answered in English. Joe said, "Sorry, Ponse," and explained the ideas behind patent rights, copyright, and monopoly. Ponse relaxed. "Oh, that's simple. When a man gets an inspiration from Heaven, the Lord Proprietor recognizes it and forbids anyone else to use it without his let. Doesn't happen often, I recall only two cases in my lifetime. But Mighty Uncle has been known to smile." Hugh was not surprised to learn how scarce invention was. It was a static culture at best, with most of what they called "science" in the hands of tempered slaves. And if patenting a new idea was that difficult, there would be little incentive to invent. "Would you say that this idea is an inspiration from Heaven?" Ponse thought about it. "A true inspiration is whatever. Their Mercy, in Their wisdom, recognizes as an inspirations." Suddenly he grinned. "In my opinion, anything that will stack bullocks in the Family coffers is certainly an inspiration. The problem is to make the Proprietor see it. But there are ways, there are ways. That's my problem, not yours. Keep talking." J oe said, "Hugh, the protection should extend not only over playing cards but over the games themselves." "Of course. If they don't buy Their Charity's cards, they must not play his games. Hard to stop, since anybody can fake up a deck of cards, paint them on blank cards. But the monopoly should make it illegal." "And not just cards like these, but any sort of playing cards. Shucks, you could play bridge with cards just with numbers on them." "Yes." Hugh pondered. "Joe, there was a Scrabble set in the shelter." "It's still around. Ponse's scientists saved everything. Hugh, I see what you're driving at, but nobody here could learn Scrabble. You have to know English." "Yes, yes! But what's to keep us from inventing Scrabble all over again -- in Language? Let me set one of my staff to making a frequency count of the alphabet as it appears in Language and I'll have a set of Scrabble, board and tiles and rules, suited to Language, the following day." "What in the name of Unde is Scrabble?" IF "It's a game, Ponse. Quite a good one, too. But the point is that it's a game that we can charge more for than we can for a deck of cards." "And that's not all," said Hugh. "Parcheesi, Monopoly, backgammon, Old Maid for kids -- call it something else -- dominoes, anagrams, poker chips and racks, jigsaw puzzles -- have you seen any?" "No." "Good for young and old, and all degrees of difficulty. Tinker Toy. The idea is to think big, this isn't just playing cards. Dice. Lots of games with dice. Joe, are there casinos here?" "Of sorts. There are places to gamble and lots of private gambling." "Roulette wheels?" "I don't believe so." "Tt gets too big to think about. Ponse, you are going to have to sit up all night every night, just counting your money." "Servants for such chores. I wish I knew what you two are talking about. May one ask?" "Sorry, sir. Joe and I were talking about ancient games... and not just games but all sorts of recreations that we used to have and have now been lost. At least T think they have been. Joe?" "The only one I've seen that still looks familiar is chess. It's practically the same." "Chess would hold up if anything would. Ponces the point is that every one of these things has money in it. Surely, you have games now. But these will be novelties. So old they are new again. Ping Pong... bowling alleys! Joe, have you seen -- " "No." we've got a backlog for a century. Ponse, the first problem is to get a protection from Their Mercy to cover it all -- and I see a theory that makes it all an inspiration from on high. It was a miracle." "What? Garbage. I don't believe in miracles." "You don't have to believe in it Look, we were found on the Proprietor's own personal land -- and you found us. Doesn't that look as if Uncle intended for the Proprietor to know about this? And for you as Lord Protector to protect it?" Ponse grinned. "An argument could be made for such a theory. Might be expensive. But you can't boil water without feeding the fire, as my aunt used to say." He stood up. "I'm an old man, I'm tired. Hugh, let's see that Scrabble game. Soon. Joe, we'll find time for you to explain to me these other things. We excuse you both. All." Iitten was long since asleep  when Hugh returned to his quarters but she was clutching a note : Oh, darling, it was so wonderful to see you! ! ! I can't wait until Their Charity asks us to make up a four for bridge again! Isn't he an old dear? Even if he was thoughtless at one point. He corrected his mistake and that's always the mark of a true gentleman. I'm still so excited at seeing you that I can hardly write, and Kitten is waiting to take this to you. The twins send you kisses, slobbery ones. Love, love, love! Your Own B. Hugh read Barbara's note with mixed feelings. He shared Barbara's joy in their reunion, limited and temporary as it had been, and eagerly looked forward to the next time Ponse's pleasure would permit them to be together again. As for the rest -- Better get her out of here before she acquired a slave mentality! Surely, Ponse was a gentleman within the accepted meaning of the term. He was conscientious about his responsibilities, generous, and tolerant with his inferior. A gentleman. But he was a revolving son of a bitch, too! And Barbara ought not to be so ready to overlook the fact. Ignore it, yes. One had to. But not forget it. He must get her free. But how? He went to bed. But not to sleep. An aching hour later he got up, went into his living room, moving softly so as not to disturb Kitten, stood at his own window. He could barely make out against the black sky the blacker blackness of the Rocky Mountains, punching jagged holes in the sky. Somewhere out there, there were free men. He could break his window, walk toward the mountains, be lost in them before daylight. Find free companions. He need not even break the window -- just slip past a nodding watchman, or use the authority symbolized by his whip and go out at night despite the watch. No real effort was made to keep house servants locked up. A watch was set at nightfall more to keep intruders out. Most house servants would no more think of running away than a dog would. Dogs -- One of the studmaster's duties was keeper of the hounds. If necessary, he could kill a dog with his bare hands. But how do you run when burdened down with two small babies? He went to a cupboard, poured himself a stiff drink of Happiness, gulped it down and went back to bed. Soon he slept. To Be Concluded farthest stars --  -- on sale now! IF (effective with July issue) brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His great new novel, Farnham's Freehold, takes you into a time where humanity has done its best to destroy itself -- and the survivors have built themselves a strange new life! 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Address: Scribe    H.C.n... Scribe H.C.H. I San Jose, California i I Please send me the free book, The Mastery  I of Ufe, which explains how I may learn to  I use my faculties and powers of mind. i I I j Name i  Address ' I City  I IF  Novelette The Retief knew the Groaci were frying to steal this world -- trouble was, the world didn't seem to mind a bit! I R etief scaled his pale burgundy afternoon informal beret across the office, narrowly missing the clothes tree, and dumped the heavy carton he was carrying on his desk. A shapely brunette with a turned-up nose appeared at the connecting door to the next office. "Miss Braswell," he said before she could speak. "I have here two handsome half-Hter wine glasses which Fm about to field-test. Will you join me?" She made a shushing motion, rolling her eyes toward the inner office. A narrow, agitated face appeared over her shoulder. "Retief!" Consul-General Magnan burst out. "I've been at wit's end! How does it happen that every time catastrophe strikes you're out of the office?" "It's merely a matter of timing," Retief said soothingly, stripping paper from the package. He pulled out a tulip-shaped goblet which seemed to be made of coils of jewelcolored glass welded together in an intricate pattern. He held it up to the light. "Pretty, eh? And barely cool from the glass-blower." "While you idled about the bazaar," Magnan snapped, his face an angry pink above a wide, stiff collar of yellow plastiweave, "I've been coping single-handed with disaster! I suggest you put aside your baubles; I'm calling a formal Emergency Staff Meeting in two minutes!" "That means you, me and Miss Braswell, I take it, since the rest of the staff is off crater-viewing -- " "Just you and I." Magnan mopped at his face with a vast floral-patterned tissue. "This is a highly classified emergency." "Oh, goody. I'll take the rest of the afternoon off and watch the festivities." Miss Braswell winked at Retief, extended the tip of her tongue in salute to the Consul-General's back, and was gone. Retief plucked a bottle from his desk drawer and followed Magnan into the inner office. The senior officer yanked at his stiff collar, now wilting with perspiration. "Why this couldn't have waited until Minister Barnshingle's return, I don't know," he said. "He's already a day overdue. I've tried to contact him, to no avail. This primitive lineof-sight local telescreen system -- " He broke off. "Retief, kindly defer your tippling until after the crisis!" "Oh, this isn't tippling, Mr. Magnan. I'm doing a commodity analysis for my next report. You fobbed the detail of Commercial Attache off on me, if you recall." "As Charge d'affaire in the absence of the Minister, I forbid drinking on duty!" Magnan roared. "Surely you jest, Mr. Magnan! It would mean the end of diplomacy as we know it." "Well, not until after lunch, at least. And I hereby authorize you to postpone market research until further notice; we're facing a possible holocaust in a matter of hours!" "What's it all about?" M agnan plucked a sheet of yellow paper from his desk and handed it to Retief. "This came in over the autotyper forty minutes ago." "Uhlans," Retief said. "Those are thousand-man transports. And ohnine-hundred on the thirty-third is just about two hours from now." "This could be an invasion, Retief! A major breach of the peace! Can you imagine how it would look in my record if the planet were invaded under my very nose!" "Tough on the natives, too," Retief commented. "What action have you taken so far?" IP "Action? Why, I've canceled this afternoon's social engagements, checked out-going passenger schedules... and sharpened a number of pencils." "Have you tried contacting this Ensign Pomfroy for a little more detail?" "There's no one on duty in the Message Center but a local Code Clerk. He's trying to raise him now." Magnan depressed a button on his desk. "Oo-Gilitit, have you met with any success?" "Pomfroy-Tic all same have organ cluster up ventral orifice -- " "Gilitit, I've warned you to watch your language!" Magnan roared. "It's no habit for a communications man to get into!" He clicked off. "Confounded locals! It's hopeless, of course. Our equipment was never designed for pinpointing moving patrol boats at four A-U's." "How do the Yalcan's feel about the situation?" asked Retief, playing with the goblet still in his hand. Magnan blinked. "Why, as to that, I -- ah -- was just going to call OoRilikuk." Magnan punched keys, tuned in a bland yellow and blue face with eyes like gold pinheads, and vertically-hinged jaws busy with an oily drumstick. "Ah, there, Magnan," a voice like an uncoiled wheel said. "Just finishing Up my lunch. Roast haunch of giant locust. Delicious." A tongue like a length of green silken rope flicked a tidbit from a corner of the lipless mouth. "Oo-Rilikuk, do you know anything of a large convoy due here today?" R ilikuk dabbed at his chin with a gossamer napkin. "I seem to recall issuing a number of visas to Groaci nationals in recent weeks." "Groaci? Fifty shiploads of them?" "Something like that," the Yalcan said carelessly. "By the way, if you haven't already made arrangements, perhaps you'd care to join my Bachelor's Group for the upcoming festivities -- " "You're not concerned? Perhaps you're not aware of the insidious reputation the Groaci enjoy!" "I don't mind saying I've exercised a trifle of influence to procure a choice mud pocket. The rich, oleaginous kind, you know. And there'll be no shortage of nubile females along -- though you're not organized to appreciate the latter, it's true -- " "May I ask the state of the planetary defenses, Rilikuk? I'm warning you, Groaci can't be trusted!" "Planetary defenses?" Rilikuk issued a chirrup of amusement. "As confirmed pacifists, we've never felt the need for such an extravagance. Now, I'll be leaving the office in a few minutes. Suppose I drop by for you. We'll go on to my place for dinner, then off to the bog -- " "You're leaving the Foreign Office at a moment like this?" Magnan yelped. "They'll be landing in a matter of minutes!" "I fear I'll have no time to devote to tourism this week, Magnan," Rilikuk said. "They'll just have to manage alone. After all, Voom Festival comes but once in ninety-four standard years." IF Magnan rang off with a snort. "We'll receive scant help from that quarter." He swiveled to gaze out the unglazed window across the gay tiles of the plaza, lined with squat, one-story shops of embossed and colored ceramic brick, to the glittering minarets of the mile-distant temple complex. "If these idlers invested less energy in shard-sorting and more in foreign affairs, I wouldn't be faced with this contretemps." into selling them a few thousand tons of sand, they wouldn't have to sort shards." bottoms than hauling sand, Retief... though I notice the local scrap pile is about depleted. Possibly now they'll turn to more profitable pursuits than lavishing the artistry of generations on tenantless shrines." He indicated the cluster of glass towers sparkling in the sun. "They might even consent to export a reasonable volume of glassware in place of the present token amounts." "Rarity keeps the price up; and they say they can't afford to let much glass off-world. It all goes back in the scrap piles when it's broken, for reuse." Magnan stared across the plain, where the white plumes of small geysers puffed into brief life, while the pale smoke rising from the fumaroles rose straight up in the still air. Far above, a point of blue light twinkled. "Odd," Magnan said, frowning. "I've never seen one of the moons in broad daylight before." Retief came to the window. "You still haven't. Apparently our Groaci friends are ahead of schedule. That's an ion drive, and it's not over twenty miles out." U M agnan bounded to his feet. "Get your hat, .Retief! We'll confront these interlopers the moment they set foot on Yalcan soil! The Corps isn't letting this sort of thing pass without comment!" "The Corps is always a fast group with a comment." Retief said. "I'll give it that." Outside, the plaza was a-bustle with shopkeepers glittering in holiday glass jewelry, busily closing up their stalls, erecting intricate decorations resembling inverted chandeliers before the shuttered shops, and exchanging shouted greetings. A longbodied pink-and-red-faced Yalcan in a white apron leaning in the open door of a shop waved a jointed forearm. "Retief-Tic! Do me honor of to drop in for last Voom cup before I lock up. Your friend, too!" "Sorry, Oo-Plif; duty calls." "I see you've established your usual contacts among the undesirable element," Magnan muttered, signalling a boat-shaped taxi edging through the press on fat pneumatic wheels. "Look at these lackwitsi Completely engrossed in their frivolity, while disaster descends scarcely a mile away." Retief eyed the descending ship as it settled in behind the glittering spires of the temple-city. "I wonder why they're landing ttiere, instead of at the port," Relief wondered. 'They've probably mistaken the shrine for the town," Magnan snapped. "One must admit that it makes a far more impressive display than this collection of mud huts!" "Not the Groaci. They do their homework carefully before they start anything." The cab pulled up and Magnan barked directions at the driver, who waved his forearms in the Yalcan equivalent of a shrug. "Speak to this fellow, Retief!" Magnan snapped. "Obscure dialects are a hobby of yours, I believe." Retief gave the driver instructions in the local patois and leaned back against the floppy cushions. Magnan perched on the edge of the seat and nipped at a hangnail. The car cleared the square, racketed down a side street streaming with locals headed for the bog, gunned out across the hard-baked mud-flat, swerving violently around the bubbling devil's cauldrons of hot mud that dotted the way. A small geyser erupted with a whoosh! and spattered the open vehicle with hot droplets. A whiff of rotten-egg smoke blew past. Off to the left, the sunlight glinted from the wide surface of the swaipp, thickly scattered with exotic lily-like flowers. Here and there, tree-ferns grew in graceful clumps from the shallow water. Along the shore, bright-colored tents had been erected, and local celebrants clustered in groups among them, weaving to and fro and waving their multiple arms. iiTt's disgraceful," Magnan sniff-l-ed. "They're already staggering and their infernal festival's hardly begun!" "It's a native dance," Retief said. "Very cultural." "What's the occasion for this idiotic celebration? It seems to have completely paralyzed whatever elementary sense of responsibility these flibertigibbets possess." "It's related in some way to the conjunction of the four moons," Retief said. "But there's more to it than that. It seems to have an important religious significance. The dances are symbolic of death and rebirth, or something of the sort." "Hmmph! I see the dancers are now falling flat on their faces! Religious ecstasy, no doubt!" As they swept past the reeling locals, the driver made cabalistic signs in the air and grabbed the steering bar just in time to swerve past a steam-jet that snored from a cleft boulder. Ahead, a cloud of dust was rolling out from the landing spot where the Groaci ship had settled in, a scant hundred yards from an outlying shrine, a sparkling fiftyfoot tower of red, yellow and green glass. "They're coming perilously close to violating the native holy place," Magnan observed as the taxi pulled up beside the ship. "There may be mob violence at any moment." A pair of locals, emerging from one of the many fanciful glass arches adorning the entrances to the shrine complex, cast no more than a casual glance at the vessel as a port opened in its side and a spindleIF legged Groaci in golfing knickers and loud socks appeared. Magnan climbed hurriedly from the cab. "I want you to note my handling of this, Retief," he said behind his hand. "A firm word now may avert an incident." "I'd better say a firm word to the driver, or we'll be walking back." "Look, Mac-Tic, I got a reserved slot in a hot pocket of mud waiting for me," the driver called as he wheeled the car around. "Five minutes, okay?" Retief handed the cabbie a ten credit token and followed Magnan across the scorched ground to the landing ladder. The Groaci descended, all five eye-stalks canted in different directions -- One on Magnan. "Minister Barnshingle," he said in his faint Groac voice before Magnan could speak. "I am Fiss, Tour Director for Groac Planetary Tours, Incorporated. I assume you've come to assist in clearing my little flock through the Customs and Immigration formalities. Now -- " "Tour Director, did you say, Mr. Fiss?" Magnan cut in. "Fifty shiploads of tourists?" "Quite correct. I can assure you that passports and visas are all in order, and immunization records are up-to-date. Since we Groaci have no diplomatic mission to Yale, it is good office." "Just a minute, Mr. Fiss! How long are your tourists planning to stay on Yale? Just during the Voom Festival, I assume?" "I believe our visas read... ah... indefinite, Mr. Minister." "I'm Magnan, Charge in the absence of the Minister," Magnan said. F iss waved his eyes. "The Minister is not here?" "No, he's off mountain climbing. Very keen on sports. Now, ah, may I ask where your other forty-nine vessels might be?" "Just where is the Minister to be found?" Fiss enquired. "I really can't say," Magnan sniffed. "We've had no word for two days. Now, about your other ships," Magnan persisted. "There are, I believe, forty-nine cities here on this charming little world," Fiss said smoothly. "One transport is calling at each." "Curious way to conduct a tour." Magnan broke off as a cargo port rumbled open and a heavy six-wheeled vehicle churned out. Rows of multi-eyed Groaci heads peered over open sides, on which the words second vehicle followed the first, and a third and fourth. Magnan gaped as the emerging carriers took up positions in an orderly double file. "Here, what's this, Fiss?" he blurted. "These are tourists?" "Of course? What else? Please not the presence of ladies and also a number of lovable Groaci grubs. Yes, innocent, fun-loving tourists all." "Why are they in armored cars?" Magnan watched as the vehicles moved off in the direction of the towering glass temples. "Here, where are they going?" Ill "Since the entire populace is fully occupied with Voom festival activities," Fiss hissed blandly, "Groac Tours has thoughtfully arranged to occupy available unused housing." "Why, that's the local Holy of Holies," Magnan expostulated. "You can't go in there!" "The structures are not in use," Fiss whispered. "And I see no objection on the part of the aborigines." He indicated the cab driver who was watching indifferently as the first tractor moved under a graceful crystalline arch into the sparkling glass-bricked avenue. "Hey, Mac-Tic," the driver called to Retief in Yale. "Time's up. I wanna get there before the mud cools!" "Are you out of your mind, Mr. Fiss?" Magnan demanded. "You're deliberately precipitating an incident! I'm warning you, I'll refer this to Sector HQ and call for a squadron of Peace Enforcers!" "What need for Peace Enforcers, my dear fellow?" Fiss murmured. "Peace reigns! We are unarmed. No act of violence is contemplated." "We'll see about this!" Magnan fumed. He turned and stamped toward the waiting taxi. "So thoughtful of you to welcome us," Fiss's faint voice followed him. "I shall be calling at the Legation later to arrange a number of formalities. All quite legal, I assure you." "It's worse than I thought," Magnan groaned to Retief as he climbed into the cab. "When a Groaci starts citing statutes, you can be sure there's mischief afoot!" CC'This is incredible!" MagnanI barked at the screen where Oo-Rilikuk's multi-colored visage nodded blandly against a background of sinously moving Yalcan dancing-wenches. "You calmly admit that these foreigners are occupying every pagoda on the planet, strewing dope-stick butts and -- " "This is Voom season, Mr. Magnan," Rilikuk said reasonably. "What could be more fitting?" "Your concept of propriety confounds me. There are fifty thousand of these fellows -- and I have the distinct impression they're planning an extended stay!" "Very likely," Rilikuk agreed, twitching in time to the music in the background. "And now, if you'll excuse me..." The screen blanked. Magnan threw up his hands. "I don't like it, Retief. There's an aspect of this we're missing." A chime sounded. The door opened and the Groaci Fiss bustled in, breathing noisily under the weight of a heavy briefcase. "Ah, Mr. Magnan! So good of you to await me. I have the papers here." He hoisted the case onto the desk and undid stout straps. "Pm sure you'll find all in order: Territorial claims, governmental charter, application for League membship -- " "What's this?" Magnan scanned the heavy documents. "What are you saying sir? That Yale -- that the Groaci -- that you -- " "Quite right," Fiss nodded. "This world is now Groaci property." There was a loud crash from the direction of the now deserted street. Magnan swiveled, stared out at a band of businesslike Groaci, hard at work on a shuttered shop with pry-bars. "What are they doing?" he yelped. "Mr. Fiss, order those vandals away at once! The situation is getting out of hand!" "Not at all. Those chaps are merely following my instructions. And now if you have any belongings you wish to take along -- " "Eh? Belongings? Tm not going anywhere." "Permit me to contradict you," Fiss hissed softly, prodding a paper with a damp-looking finger. "This is the eviction order. I find that this humble structure will adequately fulfill my requirement for a field-office here in the village." "F-field office?" "I expect we shall be busy here for a few days," Fiss said. "Transferring useful items to our quarters," He waved airily toward the sparkling towers beyond the swamp. "You're violating the Legation?" Magnan's eyes bulged. "There has been a change of status quo since my arrival," Fiss pointed out. "No formal relations exist between my government and an office, and you are unregistered aliens." "This is an outrage!" Magnan sputtered. "I'm not leaving!" "So?" Fiss murmured. He stepped to the door, opened it, waved in a quartet of bigger-than-average Groaci. #rx intimidate the soft ones," A he hissed in Groaci. "To make threatening gestures." Two of the newcomers stepped to Retief. He took them casually by their thin necks, escorted them to the window and tumbled them out. The second pair jumped at him in time to meet a stiff-arrri which slammed both of them onto their backs. Fiss emitted a' weak but impassioned bleat. "Unhand them, brute! These are lawfully appointed bailiffs!" Retief helped the stunned Groaci after their fellows and took a step toward Fiss. The Tour Director squeaked and darted through the door. "Retief!" Magnan yelped. "Stop! After all, these papers -- " Retief gathered in the parchments, tossed them after the intruders. The outraged face of Tour Director Fiss appeared at the opening. "Ruffians! Bandits! Our legal and just claim -- " " -- isn't worth the plastic it's printed on," Retief stated. "And if any more tourists wander into the Legation I won't be so polite with them." Fiss turned and made frantic gestures to the foraging crew. "To enter and evict the madmen!" he hissed. "To cast them forth bodily!" The several dozen Groaci who had gathered moved in a body toward the Legation door. "Fm disappointed in you, Fiss," Retief said, shaking his head sadly. "I thought you were going to pretend that this was all perfectly legal. and here you are about to violate a diplomatic mission in broad daylight." Fiss hesitated, then hissed an order to his men. They halted. "Very well, Soft One," he whispered. "What need of force? Unlike the higher races, you require water at frequent intervals, I believe. Since, alas, I cannot authorize further deliveries through the village mains, you will soon emerge to seek it. We 'will be waiting." M agnan tottered to Retief's side. "Mr. Fiss," he croaked. "This is madness! You can't possibly hope to justify this outrageous seizure." "On the contrary, Mr. Magnan," Fiss waved a fistful of paper. "If you will re-read you Colonial Code, Title Three, Section XI, paragraph #b, you will find that, and I quote, 'any planetary body lacking an indigenous culture may be considered as available for homesteading by any Power covenant to these articles.' " "Surely, Fiss, you don't imply that Yale is uninhabited! Great Heavens, the world is known throughout the Sector for the beauty of its glass and ceramic work." "I refer further to paragraph #d, ibidem Fiss bored on, "which provides the following criteria for determination of cultural level within the meaning of the Code (a) an active, organized government competent to represent native interests; (b) a degree of social organization characterized by cities of at least one thousand inhabitants; and (c) individual or group I.Q., (as applicable) averaging .# "standard" as "Have you lost your wits?" Magnan cut in. "You're standing in the midst of a Yalcan City! I deal daily with representatives of the Yalcan government! As for intelligence -- " Inhahited city, Mr. Magnan, permit me to remind you. Minimum population, one thousand individuals." Fiss waved a hand at the empty street. "I see no individuals here." "But they're all away participating in a festival!" "As for government," Fiss continued blandly, "I have been totally unsuccessful in discovering any active organization. I confess I have been unable to secure a specimen of the local fauna for I.Q. Testing, but I feel sure any such effort would be unrewarding." "You deliberately timed this coup to take advantage of local customs!" Magnan said in a shocked tone. "The code will be amended, Fiss!" The Groaci vibrated his throat sac, a contemptuous gesture. Ex post facto legal manipulations can hardly be expected to affect the present situation retroactively, my dear Magnan." Magnan clutched at the edge of the window. "Retief," he gasped weakly. "This is insane, but I have a sudden, awful conviction that he's legally on firm ground." "Of course," Fiss went on, "article # of the Code expressly prohibits occupation by force of any world, cultured or otherwise. However, since our arrival was carried out in complete tranquility, this is hardly germane." IF "The festival will be over tomorrow," Magnan burst out. "What then?" legal possession of this planet," Fiss whispered, "it will, of course, be necessary to enforce the just laws which are even now being enacted. To this end, certain arms are of course necessary." He spat rapid Groacian at a trio of newcomers in black hipcloaks, who silently produced heavy particle-guns from sequinned holsters strapped to their thighs. "You aren't planning -- violence?" Magnan gasped. "Not against ms.'" "As to that," Fiss whispered, "I was about to point out that naturally, a formal request for diplomatic status addressed to the present regime would, of course, receive consideration." "Tour Director Fiss -- " Magnan gulped. "Planetary Coordinator Pro-Tern Fiss, if you please," the Groaci hissed. "It is unfortunate that the large Soft One acted in such haste, but I am prepared to overlook the incident." "Why, ah, very good of you. I'm sure, Pla -- " "You're out of luck, Fiss," Retief cut in. "You'll have to conduct your Magnan tugged at Retief's sleeve. "Here, Retief! This is hardly a time for truculence!" "It's as good a time as any, Mr. Magnan. And Minister Barnshingle might be irritated if he came back and discovered that these squatters had been recognized as a legal government." Magnan groaned. "I... I suppose you're right." "So? But, no matter, Soft One," Fiss whispered. "Why treat with underlings, eh? My scouts report a party of terrestrials in difficulty oil an awkward slope some leagues from here. Doubtless the person Barnshingle of whom you speak will be grateful for relief. A timely rescue by selfless Groaci homesteaders wiU establish a correct mood for initiation of formal relations." "The Minister's in trouble?" Magnan squeaked. "He is at present dangling over a crevasse of awesome depth by a single strand of rope. Diplomat muscles appear unequal to the task of drawing him up." There was a rending crunch from a shop across the plaza as a barred door collapsed under the impact (rf a power ram. Swarms of Groaci were systematically looting the stalls already opened, loading foodstuffs, glassware and other merchandise into wheeled vehicles. "This is wholesale hijackery!" Magnan yelped. "Open pillage! Highway robbery! You can't do this without a license!" "Curb your tongue, sir!" Fiss hissed. "I shall for a while indulge your arrogant preemption of Groaci property out of sentimental respect for the niceties of diplomatic usage, but I shall tolerate no insults!" "Threats, Mr. Fiss?" Magnan choked. "Call it what you will. Soft One," Fiss said. "When you are ready to If acquiesce, send your word to me. Meantime, leave this building at your peril!" IV D usk had fallen. The sounds of shattering locks and maneuvering vehicles continued in the streets outside. Beyond the window, booted Groaci peace-keepers paced monotonously, heavy blast guns at the ready. Now and then, in a momentary lull, the sound of Yalcan voices raised in song could be heard from the bog, where torches flared, reflecting from the mirror-dark waters. The two lesser moons were high in the sky in their slow orbits; the third had risen above the horizon and cast purple shadows across the floor of the silent Legation office. "It's nearly dark," Magnan muttered. "Retief, perhaps I'd better accompany you. Fiss may change his mind and batter the door down." "He could come in through the window any time he decided to," Retief said. "He's nicely bluffed for the present, Mr. Magnan. And someone has to stay here to maintain occupancy of Ae Legation." "On second thought, I'm changing my instructions," Magnan said decisively. "You'd better not go. After all, if Minister Barnshingle wishes to recognize the coup, I see no reason -- " "I don't think the Minister will be reasoning at his most lucidT level while dangling over a precipice. And there's also Miss Braswell to consider. She's out there somewhere." "Retief, you can't hope to find her without being apprehended! The city is swarming with armed Groaci!" "I think I know the back streets better than they do. I'll stay out of sight. If I can reach Barnshingle before he signs anything, it may save a lot of embarrassment all around." "Retief, as Charge -- " "Don't give me any instructions I can't follow, Mr. Magnan," Retief took a hand-light from a desk drawer, clipped it to his belt. "Just lie low and ignore whatever Fiss says to you. I'll be back in a few hours." R etief stepped from a doorless opening into the shadows of a narrow alley running behind the Legation. He waited until a knobkneed Groaci in an elaborate helmet had strolled past the lighted intersection fifty feet distant, then jumped, pulled himself up onto the low, tiled roof of the adjacent building. In the light of the rising fourth moon, he moved quietly to the far side, lay flat looking down on a side street littered with items discarded by the looters. One or two windows showed lights. A single armed Groaci stood under a corner street-lamp. Silently Retief worked his way along the roofs, jumping gaps between buildings, until he reached a narrow space leading back into darkness a few yards from the corner. He groped, found a chip of broken tile, tossed it down into the alley. The Groaci cocked his eyes alertly, swung his gun around and came over to investigate, Retief tossed IF down' another pebble; as the sentry entered the dark way, Retief dropped behind him, yanked him backward off his feet and caught the falling gun. He put the muzzle against the Grocai's pulsating throat sac. 'Tell me where the Terry female is being held," he growled, "and maybe I won't tie knots in your eyestalks." unhand me, demonic one!" "Of course, you may not know," Retief said. "In that case I'd have to regretfully kill you and strike up a new acquaintance, which would be a nuisance for both of us." "The impropriety of assaulting an innocent tourist! To lodge a complaint with the Travellers Aid Society!" "No, that was this morning," Retief corrected his prisoner. "This afternoon you're a peaceful homesteader. You can think of me as an unpacified aborigine, if it will help any." He jabbed with the gun. "Make up your mind. I'm on a tight schedule." "The ghastliness of your fate," the Groaci hissed. "Well, I have to hurry along," Retief said. "Pardon my thumbs; shooting is such a messy business, and noisy, too." "To restrain yourself, prowler in the night! To show you the way to the Soft She -- and to savor the moment when you writhe on the hooks!" "That's right," Retief said agreeably. "Think about something cheerful." He prodded the captive guard to his feet. "In the meantime -- " he switched to Groaci -- "to play your cards right and maybe to live to see the dawn." I n a shadowy arcade running beside a rare two-story structure, Relief studied the dark windows in the wall opposite. Faint light gleamed behind two of the glassless openings. "Fll have to leave you here, I'm afraid, Tish," Relief said softly. "I'll just pop you into one of these convenient garbage storage units. They have nicely fitted airtight doors, but you'll be all right for an hour or so. If your information is accurate, with luck ril be back in plenty of time to let you out before you suffocate. Of course, if anything happens to delay me -- well, that's just the little risk we have to run, eh?" "To... to try the rear window first," Tish whispered. "Whatever you say." Relief opened the door to the refuse bin and urged the Groaci inside. The alien clinched his olfactory sphincters tight and perched disconsolately on a heap of fruit rinds, locust carapaces and pottery shards, his head ducked under the low ceiling. "To remember this trusting one," he said shakily. "To carefully avoid being killed before returning to release me."' "With a motivation like that. I'm sure to survive." Retief clamped the door shut, looked both ways, and darted across the street. The wall tiles were deeply incised with decorative floral motifs. He found finger and todiolds, climbed quickly to the level of the windows, eased through into a dark room. He paused to listen; there were faint Groaci voices mewhere. In the dim-lit hall, they were more distinct. He moved silently along to the nearest room. The door opened at a touch. Miss Braswell jumped up from a long, low Yalcan couch, her mouth open for a scream, cut off as she recognized Retief in the gloom. Why -- Mr. Retief I" "Shhh." He crossed to her. A length of rope was tied firmly to her ankle and looped around a massive clay sculpture. She was barefooted, and her brown hair was in a state of mild disarray; there was a streak of dirt along one cheek. "What in the world is it all about?" she whispered. "I was just about to buy the darlingest handdecorated chamber pot when all of a sudden a whole bunch of these nasty little creatures popped out of nowhere waving their eyes at me." "How many are in the buildiig now?" Retief attacked the heavy knots in the rope. "Heavens, I have no idea. It's been pretty quiet for the last hour." She giggled. "That tickles. I tried to untie it, but I only broke a fingernail." The knot yielded and Retief tossed the rope aside. "Do you feel equal to a short climb?" Miss Braswell came close to Retief. "Whatever you say, Mr. Retief," she murmured. "Where are your shoes?" "I kept kicking them when they IF were tying me up, so they took them. UghI Those creepy, damp hands!" "If we should get separated, head for the Legation. Mr. Magnan is holding the fort." "You mean -- these awful little Groaci are there, too?" "Haven't you heard? They're colonizing the place." "Why, the nerve!" 'Tere was a sudden hiss of nearA by voices. Relief flattened himself against the wall just inside the door. Miss Braswell whirled and sat on the chaise-longue. There was the soft clap of Groaci feet. A small figure stepped into the room. "Ah, young woman," a soft Groaci voice hissed. "Time to be going along." "Where?" the girl demanded loudly "To more comfortable quarters in more attractive surroundings." "If it wasn't so ridiculous, I'd think you were on the make, you sticky little monster. Keep away from me!" "You mammals are all alike," the Groaci whispered. "But it's pointless to flaunt those ugly objects at me, my girl." Two more Groaci had followed the first, who signalled. "To make fast its arms," he snapped. "To mind its talons -- " Miss Braswell jumped up and swung an open-'handed slap that sent the flimsy alien reeling back; Relief stepped quickly behind the other two, cracked their heads together sharply, thrust them aside and chopped a hand across the leader's neck. "Time to go," he breathed. At the window, he glanced out, then swung a leg over the sill. "It's easy; just hang on with your toes." Miss Braswell giggled again. "It's so sort of sexy, being barefooted, isn't it?" "That depends on what's attached to the feet," Relief said. "Hurry up, now. We're in enemy territory." "Mr. Relief," she said from above, "Do you think I flaunt my ah..." "Certainly not. Miss Braswell. They flaunt themselves." There was a sudden drumming from the shadows of the arcade across the way. "It just occurred to my friend Tish to use a little initiative," Retief called softly. He dropped to the street a few feet below. "Jump -- I'll catch you." The thumping continued. Miss Braswell squealed and let go, slammed agaihst Relief's chest. He set her on her feet. "The Groaci have good ears. Come on!" They dashed for the nearest dark alley as a squad of armed Groaci Peace-keepers rounded a corner. There was a weak shout, a clatter of accoutrements as the four aliens broke into a run. Gripping Miss Braswell's hand, Retief dashed along the narrow way. Ahead, a wall loomed, blocking the passage. They skidded to a halt, turned to face the oncoming pursuers. "Get to the roof," Retief snapped. "I'll slow them down!" Between Retief and the Groaci, a six foot long grating set in the pavement suddenly dropped open with a dank of metal. The leading Groaci, coming on at a smart clip, plunged over the edge, followed an instant later by the second. Relief brought his light up, shone it in the eyes of the other two as the third runner reached the pitfall, dropped from sight. As the last of the four faltered, sensing something amiss, the long, sinuous form of a Yalcan native glided from a door set in the wall, gave the Groaci a hearty push, dusted both sets of hands, and inclined its head in a gracious nod. # # A h, Retief-Tic -- and BraswellTiccim! What jolly surprise! Please do honor to enter humble abode for refreshing snort before continuing!" "Nice timing, Oo-Plif," Retief said. "I thought you'd be off to the festival by now." The Yalcan reached inside the door, fumbled. The grating swung back in place. "I was busy with brisk trade when Five-eyes arrive," he explained. "Decide stick around to keep eye on store. Plenty time make scene at bog yet." Miss Braswell shuddered as she crossed the grate. "What's down there?" "Only good honest sewage, nice change for Five-eyes. After brisk swim, fetch up in bog, join in merrymaking." "I thought you Yalcans were pacifists," Retief commented, stepping inside a roughly finished passage running parallel with the outer wall of the building. "All Yalcan love peace. More peaceful now noisy Five-eyes enjoying swim. Besides, only open drain cover; Visitors dive in of own free will." "I had the impression you helped that last fellow along." "Always try to be helpful when possible. Listen, you want to talk, or want snort?" They followed Oo-Plif along interior passages to emerge behind the bar of the darkened dram-shop, took seats at a low bench and accepted elaborate glasses of aromatic liquor... "Oo-Plif, I'd appreciate it if you'd see Miss Braswell back to the Legation," Retief said. "I have to leave town on an urgent errand." "Better stay close, Retief-Tic. Come along to bog in time for high point of Voom festiyal. Only couple hours now." "I have an errand to run first, Oo-Plif. I've been delegated to find Minister Barnshingle and notify him that the Legation's under siege and that he shouldn't sign anything without reading the fine print." "Barnshingle-Tic-Tic? Skinny Terran with receding lower mandible and abdomen like queen ripe with eggs?" "Graphically put, Oo-Plif. He's supposed to be hanging around a mountain somewhere, if the Groaci haven't yet swooped down to the rescue." Oo-Plif was wobbling his head, now enameled in orange and green holiday colors, in the Yalcan gesture of affirmation. "Barnshingle-Tic-Tic here in city at present moment. Arrive halfhour ago amid heavy escort of Fivees." IF "Hmmm. That simplifies matters, perhaps. I was expecting to have to steal a Groaci heli and hunt him down in the wilds. Did he seem to be a prisoner, Oo-Plif? "Hard to say, not get too good look. Busy helping Five-eyes find way to bog." "Via the sewer, I take it?" "Sure; plenty gratings round town. Must be fifty Five-eyes in swim now; plenty company." "Are you sure they can swim?" "Details, details," Oo-Plif said soothingly. "You want to go now, pay visit to Barnshingle-Tic-Tic?" "As soon as Miss Braswell's taken care of." "I'm going with you," the girl said quickly. "I wouldn't dream of missing the excitement." V ii'This system of hidden pasA sages is certainly handy," Relief said. "How much farther?" "Close now. Not really hidden passages; just space in double walls. Yalcan like build plenty strong." They emerged into another of the innumerable alleys that characterized the town, crossed it, entered another door. Oo-Plif cautioned silence. "Place swarm with Five-eyes. We sneak up and get lie of land, find way of rescue Barnshingle-TicTic from rescuers." Five minutes later, crowded into a narrow, dusty passage in the heart of the sprawling building. Relief heard the booming tones of Barnshingle's voice nearby, and the breathy reply of a Groaci. "Opening in back of closet just ahead," Oo-Plif whispered. "Get earful of proceedings there." Relief edged forward. Through the half-open closet door he caught a glimpse of Minister Barnshingle seated awkwardly in a low Yalcan easy chair, dressed in dusty hikin' clothes. Half a dozen Groaci in varicolored mufti surrounded him. " -- an exceedingly hairy experience, to be sure," Barnshingle was saying. "Most gratifying to see your heli appear. Drone-master Fiss. But I don't quite grasp the import of the present situation. Not that I'm suggesting that I'm being held against my will, you understand, but I really must hurry back to my office." "No need for haste, Mr. Minister," Fiss reassured him. "Everything has been conducted with scrupulous regard for legality, I assure you." "But there seemed to be hundreds of your... , ah... esteemed compatriots about in the streets," Barnshingle pressed on. "And I had the distinct impression that there were a number of highly irregular activities in progress." "You refer perhaps to the efforts of some of our people to remove certain obstacles?" "Breaking down doors, to be precise," Barnshingle said a trifle snappishly. "As well as hauling away wagon-loads of merchandise from shops the owners of which appeared to be absent." "Ah, yes, impulse buying. Hardly consonant with domestic thrift. But enough of this delightful gossip, Mr. Minister. The matter I wished to discuss with you... Fiss gave the Minister a glowing account of his peaceful takeover, citing chapter and verse each time the astounded diplomat attempted to rumble a protest. "And, of course," he finished, "I wished to acquaint your Excellency with the facts before permitting you to be subjected to ill-advised counsel by hot-heads." "B-but, great heavens. Dronemaster -- " "Planetary Coordinator Pro Tern Fiss interjected smoothly. "Now, I shall, of course, be happy to inspect your credentials at once in order to regularize relations between the Corps and my government." # #TVyTy credentials? But I've preJ"Asented my credentials to "This is hardly the time to reminisce over vanished regimes, Mr. Minister. Now -- " Fiss leaned forward confidentially -- "you and I are, if I may employ the term, men of the world. Not for us the fruitless expense of emotional energy over the fait accompli, eh? As for myself, I am most eager to show you around my offices in the finest of the towers of my capital." "Towers? Capital?" "The attractive edifices just beyond the swampy area where the local wildlife are now disporting themselves," Fiss explained. "I have assigned -- " "You've violated the native Sanctum Sanctorum?" Barnshingle gasped. "An unfortunate choice of words," Fiss hissed. "Would you have me establish my ministries here in this warren of huts?" "The Yalcans -- " Barnshingle said weakly. "The name of the planet is now Grudlu," Fiss stated. "In honor of Grud, the patron Muse of practicality." "Look here, Fiss! Are you asking me to turn my back on the Yalcans and recognize you as the de jure government here? Simply on the basis of this absurd legalistic rationalization of yours?" "With the exception of a number of slanted adjectives, very succinctly put," Fiss whispered. "Why in the world would I do a dastardly thing like that?" Barnshingle demanded. "Why, good for him," Miss Braswell breathed behind Retief. "Ah, yes, terms," Fiss said comfortably. "First, your mission would, of course, be raised at once to Embassy level, at Grudlun insistence, with yourself requested by name as Ambassador, naturally. Secondly, I have in mind certain local commercial properties which might make a valuable addition to your portfolio. I can let you in at investor's prices. The entire transaction to be conducted with the utmost discretion, of course, so as not to arouse comment among the coarse-minded. Then, of course, you'll wish to select a handsome penthouse for yourself in one of my more exclusive towers..." "Penthouse? Ambassador? Portfolio?" Barnshingle babbled. "I marvel at the patience your Excellency has displayed in tolerating the thinly veiled insult implied IF in your assignment to grubby quarters in this kennel," Fiss commented. "Why a person could disappear in this maze of old crockery and never be heard from again." "Disappear?" Barnshingle croaked. "And vvha -- what if I refuse?" # # TJ efuse? Please, Mr. Minister -- or more properly, Mr. Ambassador -- why release the fowl of fancy to flutter among such morbid trees of speculation?" "What about my staff? Will -- " "Suitable bribes will be offered," Fiss whispered crisply. "Pray don't give it another thought. All surviving members of the Mission will present a united front -- with the exception of the two criminals now sulking in the former Legation, of course," he added. "Magnan? Why, he's one of my most reliable men!" "Perhaps something could be managed in the case of Mr. Magnan, since you express an interest. As for the other -- he will return to Groac to stand trial for assorted crimes against the peace and dignity of the Groacian state." "I really must protest -- " Barnshingle said weakly. "Your Excellency's loyalty is most touching. And now, if you'd just care to sign here." An underling handed Fiss a document which he passed to Barnshingle. "Why, the old phoney!" Miss Braswell gasped. "He's going to do it!" "It's time to break this up," Relief whispered to Oo-Plif. "I'll take care of Fiss;. you hit the others." "On contrary, Retief-Tic," tho Yalcan replied. "Most improper to interfere with natural course of events." "Maybe you don't understand; Barnshingle's about to sign away your rights to Yale. By the time you drag it through the courts and recover, you may all be dead. The Groaci are zealous in the. field of wildlife control." "No matter. We Yalcans pacifistic folk. Not like butt in," Oo-Plif said quietly. "In that case. I'll have to do it alone. You'll take care of Miss Braswell -- " "No, not even alone, dear RetiefTic. Not in spirit of Yalcan Pacifism." Something hard prodded Relief's chest; he looked down at the power gun in Oo-PIifs lower right hand. "Why, you old stinker," Miss Braswell said. "And I thought you were sweet!" "Hope soon to recoup good opinion, Braswell-Ticcim," Oo-Plif said. "Now silence, please." In the room, Barnshingle and Fiss were making congratulatory noises at each other. "Matter of fact," Barnshingle said, "I never felt these Yalcans were ready for self-government. I'm sure your wardship will be just what they need." "Please -- no meddling in internal affairs," Fiss said. "And now let us away to more appropriate surroundings. Just wait until you see the view from your new suite, Mr. Ambassador..." They departed, chattering. you've had your way, VV Oo-Plif," Relief said. "Your pacifism has a curiously spotty quality. Just why do you object to preventing our unfortunate Minister from making an idiot of himself?" "Forgive use of weapon, RetiefTic. Foolishness of Barnshingle Tic-Tic-Tic not important." "He's a three-tic man now?" "Promotion just received at hands of Five-eyes. Now away to bog, all buddies together, eh?" "Where's the rest of Barnshingle's staff? They were together on the crater-viewing expedition?" "All tucked away in house few alleys from here. Better get wiggle on now. Climax of festival arrive soon." "Good night, does your silly old carnival mean more to you than your own planet?" Miss Braswell demanded. "Voom festival of great national importance," Oo-Plif stated, opening and closing his bony mandibles like the two halves of a clam -- a mannerism indicating polite amusement. Following the Yalcan's instructions, Relief squeezed through narrow passages, found his way out into the inevitable dark alley. Miss Braswell's hand holding tightly to his. The sounds of looters and their vehicles had diminished to nearsilence now. A turbine growled along a nearby street, going away. They came out into a side street, surveyed the deserted pavement, the scattered discards of the Groaci homesteaders. Above the low roof-lines, the miledistant towers of the shrine were a blaze of gorgeous light. "It looks so pretty, all lit up," Miss Braswell said. "I'm just amazed that you'd let those nasty little Groaci walk in and take it all away from you." Oo-Plif laughed, a sound like sand in a bearing. "Towers tributes to deities. Fate of towers in deities' hands now." "Hmmmph. They could have used a little help from you," Miss Braswell sniffed. "Looks like the new owners have cleared out for now," Relief said. "All over at the towers, throwing a party in honor of Independence Day." "Time go to dandy hot bog," Oo-Plif said. "Big event soon now." Moving briskly along the empty street under the light of the fourth moon, now high in the sky, they reached the corner. Down the wider cross-avenue, the flaring torches of the revelers at the bog sparkled cheerfully. The faint sound of Yalcan voices raised in song were audible in the stillness. "Just what is this big event we're hurrying to make?" Retlief enquired. Oo-Plif indicated the large satellite overhead. "When number four moon reach position ten degrees west of zenith -- Voom!" "Oh, astrological symbolism." "Not know big word. Only one time every ninety-four years standard all four moon line up. When this happen -- Voom!" "Voom," Relief said. "Just what does the word signify?" "Fine old Yalcan word," Oo-Pliff said. "Terry equivalent... ummm ff IF "Probably untraaslatable." Oo-Plif snapped the fingers of his upper left hand. "I remember,' he said. "Mean 'earthquake'!" Relief stopped dead. "You did say -- 'earthquake'?" "Correct, Retief-Tic." Relief's left fist slammed out in a jack-hammer punch to the Yalcan's midriff plates. The tall creature ooffed, coiled into a ball, all four legs scrabbling, the four arms groping wildly. "Sorry, pal," Retief muttered, catching up the power gun. "No time to argue." He grabbed Miss Braswell's hand and started off at a dead run down the deserted street toward the towering castle of light. VI T hey skidded to a halt at a gleam from an opening door ahead. A pipe stem-legged Groaci hurried from a building, a bulging sack over one knobby shoulder. A second helmeted looter trotted behind, lugging a handsome ten-gallon spittoon. "They've got a heli," Retief said softly. "We need it. Wait here." Miss Braswell clutched his hand even tighter. "I'm scared!" The two scavengers were clambering into their dark machine now. Running lights sprang into diamond disengaged his hand, ran across the thirty feet of open pavement and jumped, just as the heli lifted. There were faint, confused cries from the startled Groaci. One fumbled out a power rifle in time for Retief to jerk it from his grasp, toss it over the side. The heli canted wildly, narrowly missing a decorated cornice. Retief got a grip on a bony neck, propelled the owner over the side, heard a faint yelp as he hit. An instant later, the second followed. Retief caught the controls, brought the heli around in a tight turn, dropped it in beside Miss Braswell. "Oh! I was afraid it was you that fell overboard, Mr. Retief!" She scrambled up beside him, lent a hand to tumble the gaboon out to smash thunderously on the tiles. On a nearby roof, the two dispossessed Groaci keened softly, like lost kittens. The heli jumped off, lifted swiftly past them and headed for the glass towers. T he city of glass spread over forty acres, a crystalline fantasy of towers, minarets, fragile balconies suspended over space, diaphanous fretwork, airy walkways spun like spiderwebs between slim spires ablaze with jewel-colored light. Retief brought the heli in high, settled in a stomach-lifting swoop toward the tallest of the towers. "Miss Braswell, you can operate this thing, can't you?" "Sure, I'm a good driver, but -- Retief threw the drive into autohover three feet above a tiny terrace clinging to the spire. "Wait here. I'll be back as soon as I can. If anybody else shows up, get out of here fast and head for the bog!" "The... the bog?" "It's the safest place around when the quake hits!" He was over the side, across the five-foot wide shelf dark shadows moved on the pebbleof water-clear glass, and through an glass ceiling. Retief went up, caught opening arched with intertwined a brief glimpse of five richly draped glass vines hung with sparkling scarGroaci under an ornate chandelier, let and purple berries. A narrow stair fingering elaborate Yalcan wine wound down, debouching into a glasses and clustering about the round chamber walled with transstooping, chinless figure of Minister parent murals depicting gardens in Barnshingle. the sun. Through the glass, lighted " -- pleasure to deal with realists windows in the next tower were like yourselves," the diplomat was visible, and beyond, the silhouettes saying. "Pity about the natives, of of half a dozen Groaci and a tall, course, but as you pointed out, a paunchy Terrestrial. little discipline -- " Retief foCind more stairs, leaped Retief knocked two Groaci spindown them, whirled through an ning, caught Barnshingle by the arm, archway of trellised glass flowers, slopping his drink over the crimson A narrow crystal ribbon arched cuff of his mess jacket, across the void to the lighted entry "We've got to go -- fast, Mr. Minopposite. He pulled off his shoes, ister! Explanations later!" crossed the bridge in five quick Fiss hissed orders; two Groaci steps. darted away and another rushed in Voices were audible above, and to be stiff-armed. Barnshingle chokIF ed, spluttered, jerked free. His face had turned an unflattering shade of purple. "What's the meaning of this outburst?" "Sorry, Mr. Minister." Relief slammed a clean right cross to Barnshingle's jaw, caught the diplomat as he folded, stooped to hoist the weight to his shoulders, and ran for the door. Suddenly Groaci were everywhere. Two bounced aside from Relief's rush; another ducked, swung a power gun up, fired just as Fiss leaped in and knocked his hand aside. "To endanger the bloated one," he hissed -- and went over backwards as Relief slammed him aside. A helmeted Groaci Peace-keeper tackled Relief from behind; he paused to kick him across the room, bowling over others. A blaster bolt bubbled glass above his head. The air hissed with weak Groaci shouts as Relief plunged down stairs. Behind him, there was a terrific crash; over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of glass chips showering from a fallen chandelier. He was at the bridge now; Barnshingle groaned and flapped his arms feebly. Relief stepped onto the narrow span, felt it sway under his weight. He took two steps, put a foot over the edge, teetered -- There was a crystalline tinkle, and a ten-foot spear of canary-yellow glass fell past him. He caught his balance, took another step, wobbled as the bridge quivered, leaped clear as the glass shattered into ten thousand glittering shards that sparkled as they fell. H e went up stairs three at a time. A sudden lurch threw him against the wall, where mosaic glass figures depicted glass blowers at work. A huge chunk of the scene fell backwards, letting in a gust of cool night air. Relief scrambled for footing, went up, felt a glass slab drop from underfoot as he gained the terrace. Wind beat down from the heli, hovering a few yards distant. The sparkling tower that had loomed nearby was gone. A sustained crashing, as of nearby surf, drowned the heli's turbos. Relief lowered Barnshingle, now pawing weakly and blinking vague eyes, half lifted, half shoved him into the rear seat. "Hurry, Mr. Relief! It's going!" The noise was deafening now. Relief grasped a strut to pull himself up, and suddenly he was hanging by one hand, his feet treading air. The heli surged, lifting. He looked down. The tower was dropping away below, a cloud of vari-colored glass splinters puffing out as the upper stories thundered down into the depths. A slender sapphire spire, thrusting up almost alone now, rippled like a dancer, then broke into three major fragments and dropped gracefully from view. Relief hauled himself up, got a foot inside the heli, pulled himself into the seat. "Mr. Relief, you're bleeding." He put a hand up, felt slickness across his cheek. "A lot of splinters flying around. It was a little too close -- " "Mr. Relief!" Miss Braswell worked frantically at the controls. "We're losing altitude!" There was a harsh droning noise. Retief looked back. A heavy armored heli with Groaci markings was dropping toward theni. "Make for the bog!" Retief called over the racket. There was a buzz, and garish light glared across the struts above Relief's head, bubbling paint. "Hang on!" Miss Braswell shouted. "Evasive action!" The heli tilted, whipped up in the opposite direction, spun, dropped like a stone, darted ahead. The futile buzzing of the Groaci's blaster rattled around the faltering vehicle. "Can't do much more of that," Miss Braswell gasped. "Losing altitude too fast." A vast, dark shadow flitted overhead. "We're sunk," Miss Braswell squeaked. "Another one -- " There was a flare of actinic blue from above and behind, followed by a muffled clatter. Retief caught a glimpse of the Groaci heli, its rotors vibrating wildly, falling away behind them. Something huge and shadowy swept toward them from the rear in a rising whistle of air. "Get set," Retief called. He brought up the blaster he had taken from Oo-Plif, steadied his hand against the heli -- The shadow dropped close; the running lights' of the heli gleamed on thirty-foot canopies of translucent tracery spread wide above a sevenfoot body. Oo-Plif's gaily painted face beamed down at them. He floated on spread wings, arms and legs folded close. "Ah. Retief-Tic! Punch in thorax hasten metamorphis. Got clear of chrysalis just in time!" "Oo-Plif!" Retief yelled. "What are you doing here?" "Follow to warn you, dear buddy! Not want you to meet gods in lousy company like crowd of Fiveeyes! Now on to bog for festivities!" Below, the torch-lit surface of the swamp rushed up. Miss Braswell braked, threw herself into Retief's arms as the battered heli struck with a massive splatter at the edge of the mud. Painted Yalcan faces bobbed all around. "Welcome, strangers!" voices called. "Just in time for fun!" B arnshingle was groaning, holding his head. "What am I doing here, hip-deep in mud?" he demanded. "Where's Magnan? What happened to that fellow Fiss?" "Mr. Magnan is coming now," Miss Braswell said. "You bumped your head." "Bumped my head? I seem to recall -- " Someone floundered up, gasping and waving skinny, mud-caked arms. "Mr. Minister! These primitives dragged me bodily from the street!" "I thought you were going to stay inside the Legation," Retief said. "I was merely conducting a negotiation," Magnan huffed. "What are you doing here, Retief -- and Miss Braswell!" "What were you negotiating for? A private apartment just below the Ambassadorial penthouse?" IF "Wha -- whatever's happened?" Barnshingle burst out. "Where's the shrine gone?" He stared across at the glowing heap that marked the site of the fallen towers. "It seems to have -- ah -- been offered to the local deities," Magnan said. "It seems to be the custom." "And all those nasty little bugeyes with it," Miss Braswell put in. "Really, Miss Braswell! I must ask you to avoid the use of racial epithets!" "It's really too bad about the towers; they were awfully pretty." Oo-Plif, perched like a vast moth on a nearby tree-fern spoke up. "Is okay. Re-use glass. Make plenty bowl and pot from fragments." "But -- what about all those Groaci mixed in with the pieces?" "Impurities make dandy colors," Oo-Plif assured her. "My jaw," Barnshingle grated. "How did I fall and hit my jaw?" "Retief-Tic arrive in nick of time to snatch you from sacrificial pile. Probably bump chin in process." "What in the world were you doing there, Mr. Minister?" Magnan gasped. "You might have been killed." "Why, ah, I was trepanned there by the Groaci. Quite against my will, of course. They... ah... had some fantastic proposal to make. I was just on the point of daring them to do their worst when you appeared, Retief. After that, my recollection grows a bit hazy." #'"These head-blows often have A retroactive effects," Retief said. "I'll wager you don't recall a thing that was said from the time they picked you off that perilous mountain." "Don't remember? Why, I have perfect recall -- " "It's even possible that Oo-Plif has forgotten some of the things he overheard -- about penthouses and gilt-edge stocks." Retief went on. "Maybe it was the excitement generated by your announcement that Yale will be getting some large shipments of fine gray silica sand from Groac suitable for glass-making, "Announcement?" Barnshingle gulped. "The one you're going to make tomorrow," Retief suggested very gently. "Oh... that one," the Minister said weakly. "Time to go along now to next phase of celebration," Oo-Plif called from his perch. "How jolly," Magnan said. "Come along, Mr. Minister." "Not you, Magnan-Tic, and Barnshingle Tic-Tic," Oo-Plif said. Mating rites no place for elderly drones. You scheduled for cosy roost in thorn-tree as ceremonial penitence for follies of youth." "What about us?" Miss Braswell asked breathlessly. "Oh, time for you to get busy on youthful follies, so have something to repent later!" "You said... mating rite. Does that mean...?" "Vomm festival merely provide time, place and member of opposite gender," Oo-Pliff said. "Rest up to IF  Short Storf , He was the maddest man you ever saw. tn fact, that was his career! T he too-happy puppy came bounding up to him -- a bundle of hysterical yipes and a waggling tail that would bring joy to the soul of anyone. The pathetic expectation and sheer love in the shining eyes and woolly rump was something to see. The whole world loves a puppy like that. And George Gnevni kicked the thing end over end and high into the air with a remarkably powerful boot. The sound that came from the broken creature as it crash-landed against a wall was a heart-rending wail that would have melted the heart of a stone toad. Gnevni was disgusted with himself. "Less than ten meters. Should have booted him twelve. Til kill the blood-sucking cod-headed little cur the next time. Nothing goes rigjit today." I t was not a real puppy; it was better than a real one. There is something artificial in the joy and carrying on of a real puppy as well as in its hurt screaming. But the antics of this one rang true. The thing was made by a competent artist, and it was well made. It could be set to go through the same routine again at a moment's notice. A Crippled Old Lady came up shaking with palsy. There was real beauty in her face yet, and a serenity that pain could never take away from her. "A glorious morning to you, my good man," she said to Gnevni. And he kicked her crutches out from under her. "I am sure that was an accident, sir," she gasped as she teetered and nearly fell. "Would you be so kind as to hand them to me again? I'm quite unable to stand without them." Gnevni knocked her down with a smacking blow. He then stomped up and down on her body from stem to stern. And with a heavy two-footed jump on her stomach he left her writhing on the pavement. Gnevni was again disgusted with himself. "It doesn't seem to do a thing for me today," he said, "not a thing. I don't know what's the matter with me this morning." It was a real lady. We are afraid of dog-lovers, but we are not afraid of people-lovers. There are so few of them. So the lady was not an artificial one. She was real flesh and blood, and the best of both. However, she was neither crippled nor old. She was a remarkably athletic woman and had been a stunt girl before she found her true vocation. She was also a fine young actress and played the Crippled Old Lady role well. Gnevni went to his job in the Cortin Institute Building that was popularly known as the Milk Shed. "Bring my things, crow-bait," he grumbled at a nice young lady assistant. "I see the rats have been in your hair again. Are you naturally deformed or do you stand that way on purpose? There's a point, you know beyond which ugliness is no Icxnger a virtue." The nice young lady began to cry, but not very convincingly. She went off to get Gnevni's things. But she would bring only a part of them, and, not all of them the right ones. "Old George isn't himself this morning," said the under-doctor Cotrel of Gnevni. "I know," said under-doctor Devon. "We'll have to devise something to get him mad today. We can't have him getting pleasant on us," T he required paranexus could not be synthesized. Many substances had been tried and all of them had been found insufficient. But the thing was needed for the finest operation of the Programmeds. It had to be the real thing, and there was only one way to get a steady supply of it. At one time they had simplified it by emphasizing the cortin and adrenalin components of it. Later they had emphasized a dozen other components, and then a hundred. And finally they accepted it for what it was -- too complex for duplication, too necessary an accessory for the Programmeds to be neglected, too valuable at its most effective to be taken from random specimens. It could be had only from humans, and it could be had in fine quality only from a special sort of humans. The thing was very complex, but at the Institute they called it Oil of Dog. Peredacha was a pleasant little contrivance -- a "Shadier Movement" or "female" of the species that had once been called homo cori' ventus or robot and was now referred to as "Programmed Person". She had a sound consciousness, hint of developing originality, a capacity for growth and a neatness of mechanism and person. She might be capable of fine work of the speculative sort. She was one of those on whom the added spark might not be wasted. Always they had worked to combine the best elements of both sorts. The Programmed Persons were in many respects superior to the Old Recension Persons or Humans. They were of better emotional balance, of greater diligence, of wider adaptability, of much vaster memory or accumufation and of readier judgment based on that memory. But there was one thing lacking in the most adept of the Programmed that was often to be found in the meanest of the Humans. This was a thing very hard to name. It was the little bit extra; but the Programmed already had the very much extra. It had something of the creative in it, though the Programmed were surely more creative than the humans. It was the rising to the occasion; the Programmed could do this more gracefully, but sometimes less effectively, than could the humans. It was the breaking out of a framework, the utter lack of complacency, the sudden surge of power or intellect, the bewildering rriastery of the moment, the thing that made the difference. It was the Programmed themselves who sought out the thing, for they were the more conscious of the difference. It was the Programmed technicians who set up the system. It cost the humans nothing, and it profited the Programmed very much in their persons and personalities. On many of them, of course, it had little effect; but on a select few it had the effect of raising them to a genius grade. And many of them who could never become geniuses did become specialists to a degree unheard of before -- and all because of the peculiar human additive. It was something like the crossing of the two races, though there could never be a true cross of species so different -- one of them not being of the reproductive sort. The adrenal complex sometimes worked great changes on a Programmed. There were but a few consistent prime sources of it -- and each of them somehow had his distinguishing mark. Often a Programmed felt an immediate kinship, seldom reciprocated, with the Human donor. And Peredacha, a very responsive Programmed, felt the kinship keenly when the additive was given to her. "I claim for paternity," she cried. It was a standard joke of the Programmed. 'T claim as daughter to my donor! I never believed it before. I thought it only one of those things that everybody says. The donors are such a surly bunch that it drives them really violent if one of us seeks their acquaintence on thi pretext. But Fm curious. Which one was it?" She was told. "Oh no! Not him of the whole clutch! How droll can you get? He is my new kindred? But never beIP fore did I feel so glorious. Never have I been able to work so well." T he assigned job of George Gnevni was a mechanical one. In the ordinary course of things this would be all wrong, for George had less mechanical aptitude than any man ever born. George had very little aptitude for anything at all in the world -- until his one peculiar talent was discovered. He was an unhandsome and graceless man, and he lived in poverty. Much has been said about the compensations of physical ugliness -- mostly the same things that have been said about poverty. It is often maintained that they may be melded behind the dross front, that the sterling character may develop and shine through the adversity. It is lies, it is lies! It happens only rarely that these things are enobling. With persons of the commoner sort it happens not at all. To be ugly and clumsy and poor at the same time will finally drive a man to raving anger against the whole world. And that was the idea. Gnevni was assigned a mean lodging, and his meal tickets were peculiar ones. He could not obtain what he wanted to eat. He could have only what was on the list for him to eat, and this was evilly contrived to cover everything that disagreed with him. As a result he was usually in gastric pain and in seething anger at his own entrails. He had an ugly nature to begin with, but the form of life forced upoo him deepened and nurtured it. Gnevni's voice was harsh and jangling, though there was real mastery of resonance in his powerful howling when his anger reached high form. He was denied wifing privileges, and no woman would have had him in any case. He was allowed just enough of bad whoajohnny whisky to keep him edgy and mean, but not enought to bring him solace. He was an oaf -- an obscene distasteful clod of humanity. He Knew it and he boiled and seethed with the shoddy knowledge. He was no better than a badger in a cage, but those things are terrific snappers. For his poor livelihood he was given a quota of mechanical tasks to complete every day, and he had no mechanical aptitude at all. They were simple assembly jobs. A competent Programmed Person could do in minutes what it took Gnevni all day to do. Most children of the human species could do the same things easily and quickly -- though some might not be able to do them at all, for the Humans are less uniform in their abilities than the Programmed. The things that Gnevni was to assemble were never all there, some of them were the wrong things, and some of them were defective. A Programmed would have spotted the off stuff at once and sent it back, but ugly George had no way of telling whether things were right or not. He sweated and swore his days away at the grotesque labor and became the angriest man alive. Joker tools were sometimes substituted on him for the true tools -- screwdrivers with shafts as flexible as spaghetti, key-drifts with noses as soft as wax, box-end wrench sets that were sized to fit nothing, soldering guns that froze ice on their tips, mis-marked calipers with automatic slippage, false templates, unworkable crimpers, continuity testers that shocked a man to near madness. It is a legend that humans have an affinity for mechanical things. But normal humans have an innate hatred for machinery, and the accomodation that has grown up between them is a nervous one. The damned stuff just doesn't work right. You hate it, and it hates you. That's the old basic of it. Swift, a wise old mad man, once wrote a piece on the "Perversity of Inanimate Objects". And they are perverse, particularly to a sick, ugly ignorant, incompetent, poor man who fights them in a frenzy -- and they fight back. All day long George Gnevni and a few of his unfortunate fellows attacked their tasks explosively -- the air blue with multi-syllabled profanity, and anger dancing about like summer lightning. Now and then, people came and inserted tubes into these unfortunates, and performed some other indignities upon them. The paranexus, the complex substance, the "Oil of Dog" that was needed for stimulation of the Programmed, while it could be taken from any humans, could only be had in its prime form from a depraved, insane sort of Very Angry Men, B ut today George Gnevni was not himself. There was only a sullenness in him, not the required flaming purple anger. "We have to prod him," said under-doctor Cotrel. "We can't waste a whole day on him. He's sick enough. He tests at a high enough pitch of excitement. Why won't he put out? Why won't he get mad?" "I have an idea," said under-doctor Devon. "We have an inner-office memo that one of the Programmed has recognized kinship with him. You remember when Wut was in a slump? We got a Programmed up here who threw an arm around him and called him Uncle Wilbur. The way Wut exploded, seismographs must have recorded the shock at a considerable distance. We had to move fast to prevent him from damaging the Programmed. And then Wut was so mad that we were able to use him around the clock for seventy-two hours. How our Very Angry Men do hate the Programmed! They call them the things." "Good. Anything that worked on Wut ought to work double on Gnevni. Get the Programmed Person up here. We'll have him at ugly George." "Her. She's a Shadier Movement Programmed and so technically a female." "Better yet. I can hardly wait, Gnevni is the most spectacular of them all when he really goes wild. We should get a good production from him." Peredacha, the talented little Shadier Movement Programmed, IF came to the Cortin Institute Building -- the Milk Shed. She understood the situation and enjoyed it. Tlie Programmed have their humor -- more urbane than that of Humans, and yet as genuine -- and they appreciate the hilarity of an incongruous . confrontation. Peredacha was something of an actress, for all the Programmed have a talent for mimicry. She considered the role for a moment, and she put all her talent into it. And she did it! She made herself into the most pathetic urchin since the Little Match Girl. Yet she was a Programmed and not a Human; it was as though a gear box should put on a waifs shawl and turn tearjerker. They brought her in. 'Tapa!" Peredacha cried and rushed towards Gnevni. The attendants had closed between them to prevent damage when the anger of the low man should rise like a jagged wave. The show should have been greater than the one that Wut had once put on for less reason. Gnevni was a bigger man with more power of anger, and the situation was even more ridiculous. It should have set records on the decibel-recorder, filled the room with brimstone, and enriched the vocabulary of scatologyBut it didn't. The face of George Gnevni was slack, and he shook his heavy head sadly. "Take the child away," he said dully. "I will not be responsible for my feelings today." I t was a new morning and George Gnevni must return to his brutal livelihood. A too-happy puppy came bounding up to him -- a bundle of hysterically gay yipes with a waggling rump and tail hitched on to them. "Hello, little fellow," Gnevni said and bent down to pet it. But the puppy was not programmed for such treatment. It was made to be kicked by angry men. It threw itself into a series of reverse somersaults and heart-rending wails as though it had been kicked indeed. "Oh, the poor little toy!" said Gnevni. "It has never known kindness." "Look, Gnevni," said an inferior sort of man who came up, "the dog was made for one thing only -- so that twelve or thirteen of you hotfires could kick it every morning and get into your mood. Now kick to." "I won't do it." "ni report you." "I don't care. How could anyone harm that poor little tyke?" The Crippled Old Lady came up -- shaking as with palsy. "A glorious good morning to you, my good man," she said to Gnevni. "And a fine morning to you, my lady," he said. "What? You're not supposed to say that! You're supposed to kick my crutches out from under me and then knock me down and trample on me. It helps get you in your mood. Crippled Old Ladies are infuriating sights to the Very Angry Men; they make them even angrier. Everybody knows that." 'I just don't believe that I will do it today, ah -- Margaret, is that not your name? A fine day to you, my dear." "Knock off that fine day stuff! I have my job to do. I'm a mood piece. You blow-tops are supposed to kick out my crutches and tromp me down to get in your mood. Now start kicking or I'll report you." "Do so if you must, my dear." G nevni went to his job in the Cortin Institute Building, and there he was good for nothing. Mad? He wasn't even sullen He was puzzled and pleasant, and when you have one of the old stand-bys go pleasant on you you're in trouble. He was civil to everybody and gave them all the jitters. He completed his mechanical tasks in an hour -- finding them much easier when he attacked them calmly. But he wasn't supposed to find them easier. So there was consternation in the Department. Gnevni had been the best producer of them all. They couldn't let him go by like that. "Damn you, get mad!" under-doctor Cotrel shouted and shook him. "We won't have any malingering on the job. Get mad and start putting out." "I just don't seem able to get mad today," said Gnevni honestly. "You double-damned will get mad, you crud-head!" pursued under-doctor Cotrel. Cotrel seemed rather upset himself. "Under-doctor Devon! Over-doctor Ratracer! Director Duggle! Come help me with this pig-headed fellow. He won't get mad." "He's got to get mad," said underdoctor Devon. "We'll make the filtheating fink get mad." "It looks bad," said Director Duggle. "He was at only half efficiency yesterday, and today he's good for nothing at all. Well, put him through the routine. We can't have him going sour at us." They put him through the routine. It was brutal. It would have made a roaring devil out of the sweetest saint. Even spectators commonly became white with fury when such a thing was put on, and there was no limit to the effect on the victim. Gnevni endured it with composed sorrow but without anger. And when even the routine didn't work what more could you do to him? Under doctor Cotrel began to cuff and kick him: "Get mad, you slimy sulphurous son of a she shink! Get mad, you mud-headed old monkey! Get mad, you dirt-eating mutthead! You slobber-mouthed donkey, get mad!" They brought in others. They even brought in Peredacha -- hoping she would have a more positive effect on him than she had had the day before. But Gnevni brightened up to see her. "Ah, it is my little daughter! I sent you notes at intervals through the evening and night, but I guess you did not receive them. It is so wonderful just to see you again." "Why you bat-whiskered old bum, was it you who sent those notes? 'Sweet papa'. You? By the shop where I was made, I never heard of anything like it before!" "Do not be cruel, Peredacha. You IF are all that I care for in the world. With you I could become a new man." "Well, not being human I guess I can be humane. I'll look after you, ugly papa. But they don't want you to become a new man; as the old one you were the best they had. Come now, get mad for the people. It's your job." "I know, but I'm unable to do it. I have been thinking, Peredacha, that since you are my daughter in a way -- cortin of my cortin and adrenalin of my adrenalin -- perhaps the two of us might go off somewhere and -- " "Holy howling hog!" Under-doctor Cotrel took off in a screech too high for the human ear to follow, so perhaps only Peredacha heard and flushed. And then Cotrel broke up completely. He kicked and beat on Gnevni. He shrilled and sobbed and gobbled. And when his sounds once more became intelligible it was a screaming, "Get mad, damn you, get mad!" Cotrel was a lean man, but powerfully corded and muscled, and now every cord of muscle and nerve stood glaringly out on him black and purple. That plan was plain frantic in his displeasure at Gnevni. The flying foam from his lips flecked the room -- something you would not have expected from under-doctor Cotrel. #Tt is all right," said Director X Duggle. "Gnevni was about finished in any case. The best of them are only good for a year or two -- the pace is a terrific one. And we are lucky to have his replacement ready at hand." "Replacement?" pared the livid Cotrel. "He's got to get mad! There isn't any replacement." And he continued to strike Gnevni. "I believe that the director has you in mind, Cotrel," said over-doctor Ratracer. "Yes. I am sure of ii." "Me? I am under-doctor Cotrel! I make five hundred Guzman d'or a month!" "And now you will make five," said Director Duggle. "Grinding poverty is a concomitant of your new job. I had suspected you had a talent for it. Now I am sure. You begin immediately. You become the latest, and soon I hope the best, of the Very Angry Men." Cotrel became so, and immediately. Gnevni had been good. Wut before him had been one of the best. But for carrying-onnoise and stink generally, there was never such an exhibition as Mad Man Cotrel now put on -- getting into the spirit of his new job. He was the maddest man you IF  Novelette The surf was perfect, the reef was ideal -- whof difference did it make if it wasn't of Earth? I D angeiously overbalanced by his long fire-engine-red surfboard, the boy tried to climb down the cliff. White gujls ballooned in the updraft of wind against the dusty white cliff... He slipped. His skinny feet scurried for footholds down the crumbling chalk. The high wind of the Pacific Ocean knifed his wide eyes, and the hissing updraft lifted his red surfboard like a wing in his arms. Staggering high above the high-tide surf, he fell downward. "The same to you!" The fallen boy spat chalk and sand and the taste of blood. With stinging knees, he knelt on the narrow beach beside his red surfboard, fingering the chalk-streaked dents. "You dinged my board, too!" The seawind ruffled his thick brown thatch of hair. On top of his bent head, his fluttering hair glowed yellow from his mother's pero.xide bottle, junior high school style. Surfer style. In the dazzling beach sunlight he wore a halo. But his stubborn lower lip was bleeding as he scowled down at the damage to his surfboard. Behind his back, the surface of the ocean writhed. A gleaming area as large as a football field bulged the surface, quivering, and sank down a few feet, forming rows of swells in deep water where no swells should be. The tide was going down, and low tide would expose it. It looked almost like the flank of a huge animal. And if any animal -- any Earthly animal -- were that bright purple color. 'Trning, the boy glared at theI shore-break, the steep waves breaking unridably close upon the sand, and looked no further out. His more alert brother would have noticed the disturbed water out there where the gulls were wheeling and crying. But the boy was scowling at his damaged surfboard again. "Crumby board! If I try to ride these waves, probably break in half." The surfboard already was a patchwork of fiberglass-cloth repairs disguised with red paint. It was his brother's old board, scarred from heroic wipe-outs onto the rodcs at Hammond's Reef, spectacular clobberings at Rincon Point, collisions at Huntington Beach concrete pier and other really great surfing spots where his brother wouldn't take him. His famous brother would raise his eyebrows in mock amazement that he, Ted, would even ask to tag along. "Decision negative." His head-shaking brother was a mighty suntan-lotion bronze with ooh-ah muscles from years of paddling surfboards, and a modest grin. To make it worse, his brother was an eager-beaver brain who got all "A's" last semester, a member of the -- bugles, please -- California Scholastic Federation. Worse still, his brother had poked thermometers into sea anenomes and won First Prize in the Science Fair. He got his picture in the newspaper. Now, instead of watching television like a normal guy, his brother studied right through Midnite Movie. His brother was praying for a scholarship to Stanford to study marine biology. His brother was sweating out the National Merit Scholarship Tests. His brother had developed a temper like a hand grenade. Groaning, his brother would now permit himself only two hours of surfing per week. During those two hours -- "Go home!" his brother would yell when Ted followed his brother's surfing club to the beach. "Go home. You can't surf. These waves are too big. You'll get clobbered. And don't break any bottles on the beach, you gremmie!" His brother surfing buddies would laugh like crazy. "I am not a gremmie." Alone beneath the chalk cliff, now the boy glared seaward at the unridable five-foot high shorebreak. These waves crashed straight down with popping noises. Their white soup jumbled straight in over the high-tide sand. He knew that the straight shape of the beach and the deep water directly offshore made this place impossible for surfing. Surfers never came here, so he could practice stupidly riding the soup all day without anybody laughing at him. He waxed his board. He dragged it into the knee-deep soup. He still did not notice what had happened out in deep water. W hirling, he vaulted on to his board. As he tried to stand erect, his board shot out from under him like a cake of soap. He fell backward, plopping awkwardly in the shallows. He sprang up, glancing guiltily at the cliff-top. There was no one to witness his embarrassment. Dripping, he chased after his board. The wind turned icy. The next try, his board twisted beneath his feet like a treacherous snake, and he fell sideways, flailing the air with one arm, ending up with an earful of sand. The tide was going down, and he kept falling off his board and trying to stand up on it, and falling off and trying to stand up with endless determination. His scoutmaster had described him: "Most single-minded kid I ever saw. Spends all day trying to tie one knot. Also most unobservant. Lucky we don't live in Africa. Fd tell him to pitch his tent between four tree trunks, and he'd pitch it underneath an elephant. That kid's narrow eyes would never notice." Lower lip thrust out, when Ted tried the soup again he stood up all the way to the beach -- almost. Toppling forward, he leaped, landing deftly on his feet, and his board whacked him across the shins agonizingly. "Fll show him! I can too surf! Some day -- great big eight-foot walls breaking on Hammond's Reef -- when my crumby brother chickens, Fll ride one. I will! Or a tube, a really big tube breaking along the Santa Barbara sandspit -- ten feet high," he lapsed into pure fantasy, " -- twenty feet high at -- at the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii." All this time the tide was going down. Staring out at the vast Pacific, Ted blinked. Way out there, shimmering semicircular bulges rose in the water as if swells were passing over a submerged reef. "There's no reef out there!" As he watched, one of the swells creamed over, at least two hundred yards from shore, an easy downpouring like Waikiki. "Like wow!" He could hardly believe it. His brother had taken him spearfishing out there, sloshing around with fins and masks, and there hadn't been any reef. The water had been twenty feet deep with dark beds of pebbles and weeds and light patches of sand -- nothing to make these perfect surfing waves build up. Why now? "Don't ask no questions," he whispered his junior high school motto, "just have fun, man!" P addling out with hurried strokes, as if his reef would swim away or something, Ted discovered it was a heck of a long way out there. IF Those waves were big, with white teeth. "Worst can do -- is clobber me," he gasped, paddling harder. Ahead of him a glassy swell stood up, with flashing schools of anchovies silhouetted above his head. And up. His board flopped safely over its unbroken crest.' He paddled beyond the break and came about. This reef seemed to cover as much space as a football field with an upward bulge near the fifty yard line. Vaguely, briefly, he imagined it was some sort of sandpile down there. But imagination was something he didn't fuss with. That was his brother's department. His sunburned nose wrinkling, Ted grinned with excitement. Never had he tried to catch a wave as big as the monster swell that was building up over the reef and gliding toward him. "No questions," he thought, paddling like mad to stay ahead, to catch the curl or be cleaned-up. "Just got to surf, man." He glanced back blurry-eyed as the swell loomed, then heaved under him. Like an elevator it lifted his board, and the nose of his surfboard lunged out over nothingness. In that instant of truth, he didn't chicken, didn't backwater, didn't ask questions. "Yeeoww!" His mischievously grinning junior high school science teacher had written on the blackboard: In the Universe of men and oceans, planets and space, there are galaxies of answers so amazing that we don't even know their questions. "Give us -- a new and astounding question -- uh -- Ted." "Huh?" Ted had blushed, hotfaced, the schoolroom dim to his eyes because he had been staring out the window. He scratched his Tshirt with embarrassment. He didn't know what to answer. A questioner he didn't want be. All he wanted was to be a surfer -- the greatest surfer who ever lived! "Yee-oww-eeeee!" Triumphantly shouting, he stood erect upon his surfboard. His surfboard seemed to grow eyes and a brain, a built-in guidance system, as it slid down across the face of the wave, a perfect right-slide away from the bulging center of the reef. "I am an eagle!" In his self-imposed ignorance, Ted didn't even know this surfer-shout had originated from the excited word-signals of an early Russian cosmonaut, circling the Earth. The ocean spray whirled past his triumphant face. Away from the influence of the reef the wave smoothed out and his board slowed. Ted shuffled backward, stalling his surfboard and swinging its nose seaward over the declining hump of the swell without falling off. He dropped to his knees, paddling back toward the wonderful new reef, grinning and wheezing with exertion. "Man, if my big-wheel brother -- saw that great ride -- me -- his eyeballs would drop out!" H is brother's eyeballs would have become somewhat distended if he had taken a close look at the reef. But even Ted's brother would not have been able to ask the inspired question, the astounding question IF which could lead to an answer, an explanation of the reef. The key question was too wild: Question: What is the connection between the appearance of this reef and the sudden disappearance back in # of our Mariner IX space probe? If asked, Ted would have guessed a Mariner was a -- uh -- not a sailor -- a satellite, maybe? His brother would have described it as a deep space probe physically resembling a miniature oil derrick and programmed to orbit a neighboring planet. At least. Mariner IX was. It also could react to command signals from Earth, radioing back information its sensors -- its primitive electrical nervous system -- had collected. Its behavior patterns were far less complicated and less flexible than a rat's. In this respect, Ted's brother would have compared it to an amoeba -- A glittering mass of water curled high above the reef, a hollowed wave that made Ted shout with joy: "A tube, a real tube!" There couldn't be much water over the center of the reef to make such a beautiful tube. The tide was going down, he thought. Hurriedly, he positioned his surfboard across the center of the reef when the wave came. He wanted to try to go right through the next tube the way big guys did in surfing movies in Hawaii. His eyes widened. Big swell coming; should he or shouldn't he? Ted took a little chicken-hearted forward stroke. Before he could backwater, his board took off across the face of the wave as if it had a mind of its own, right-sliding down and down until the crest teetered high above him and his board was shooting along the foot of the liquid cliff. His right hand extended as if to hold back the overhanging wavetube. The crest toppled above his head as he ran toward the nose of his board, trying to increase speed before the tunnel-like wave ate him. Even his imaginative brother would not have considered that an answering space probe would enter Earth's gravitational field. This was five months after Mariner IX unexpectedly went silent, only five months after Mariner IX emitted a last squeak more characteristic of a rat than an amoeba. The embarrassing silence that followed the newspapers had blamed on another of the long history of short-circuits, electrical malfunctions and battery failures which had plagued the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Privately, certain ulcerous administrators cursed the day that electricity was -- uh -- invented. In their tortured imaginations they even an organic space probe, if it promised to be free of short-circuits, electrical malfunctions, battery failures and congressional investigating committees. Ted's brother would have laughed: "Impossible! Living protoplasm unshielded can't survive the vacuum and hard radiation of outer space." The microscopic spore had entered Earth's gravitional field, drifted safely through the Van Allen radiation belt, spiraled inward tlu-ough the crowding atoms of Earth's upper atmosphere and settled in the Pacific Ocean. Its chromosomes had been artificially arranged, programmed so that it would grow in a predetermined pattern. When it was huge be able to generate jolts of electricity an electric eel would envy, and no short-circuits as it radioed back information its blind sensors had collected. It was the answering spaceprobe, growing huge as a roof along the ocean floor. T he nose of Ted's surfboard, pearl-diving, rammed into the reef. His arms spread like wings as he flipped over the nose of his board. The liquid roof caved in. His knees hit bottom. The blinding wave-surge dragged him along the reef and left him sitting there, exposed. Between swells the reef now had only six inches of water on it. To his surprise, his knees didn't feel scraped or skinned. Beneath his feet the reef felt rubbery. As he peered down, he almost imagined he could see the bottom deep beneath him instead of right under his toes as he waded. Characteristically, his eyes narrowed with suspicion, as if he was afraid some big guys, like his brother, were playing a joke on him. But he still thought he could make out blurry beds of pebbles and weeds and light patches of sand, all as dim as if they were twenty feet below his bare feet. The next wave knocked him rumble-seat over the tea-kettle. In the deeped water inside the reef, wheezing and snorting, Ted dog-paddled toward shore, pursuing his surfboard. "Clobbered me -- but I can really surf!" Ted sloshed excitedly through the shallows after his surfboard, which was cruising upsidedown with its skeg-keel in the air like a little sail gleaming purple. Purple? "My crumby brother! What'd he do -- making my board's skeg turn purple?" The nose of his red surfboard, where it stuck the reef, was stained purple, too. "Doesn't rub off. But I'll twitch him. I'll show him I can really surf, man!" Dragging his board to the base of the chalk cliff, leaving it there unguarded, a stupid move in any man's language, Ted scrambled up the cliff and hot-footed over the burning concrete sidewalks for five blocks. iCTavid, David!" he yelled his way through the living room into his brother's bedroom. "I can surf. I can really surf! You got to see me. Big tubes, I been riding 'em. Really big like Hawa -- Leggo me. Ow!" "Then shut up, you gremmie, when I'm trying to study!" David seemed slightly irritated, like an awakened grizzly bear with his foot caught in a trap and attacked by hornets. "Everybody bothering me!" "Please, David, you got to see! Really big surfing waves." "Shut up. ril never win a National Merit Scholarship Award with you always bothering me!" David roared dramatically. "I got to study." IF "Beautiful surfing waves, David, on a reef like -- " "I'm never going surfing again," David groaned as if he was trying to win an Academy Award. 'Fantastico tubes like you never  "Get outa here! Get your dirty feet off my rug!" "Please, David! Just watch me ride one wave, just one wave." "You stupid crock, even your knees are purple. I said get your dirty purple feet off my rug." David bayoneted him backward off the rug with his hard-poking Karate finger. "You been wading in athlete's foot medicine. No, you little fiend, you been trampling sea hares. Purple sea slugs to you, you half-pint monster." "I have not! This purple won't hurt your crumby rug. See, this purple doesn't rub off," Ted yelled angrily. "All I wanted you to do was watch me ride one wave." "Shuddup!" The trigger word: wave, seemed to redouble David's fury. Breathing hard, he pinned Ted against the enormous metal short-wave radio transmitter cabinet. Its remaining knobs and switches felt uncomfortably bumpy against Ted's bare back. The transmitter had been partially dismantled because David had lost his ham radio license. The F. C. C. had taken it away after Federal Communications Commission investigators had discovered it was David who was experimenting on unauthorized wave lengths. "Just one wave, David," Ted squeaked. "No! No! No! I'm supposed to be studying. I'll never win a scholarship to Stanford now." David's room already was decorated with red and white Stanford pennants covering his butterfly collections, neatly pinned row on row. His Karate finger jabbed deeper into Ted's stomach. "Go away, you little gremmie." Ted tried to -- lunging sideways. His arm sloshed into David's twentygallon aquarium, tearing the black paper screening. D avid yelped with horror. "You've disturbed 'em." Two eyeless pink things emerged from the muddy tunnels at the bottom of the aquarium, darted about and vanished again. "How'll I win another Science Fair Award with you always bothering my blind gobies!" David was feeding them bait doped with fluorescent dye so that he could watch them in the dark. "Get away from my black light. You're dripping water on it, you crock!" David had caught the gobies, tiny blind fish, by digging up the mud-tunnels of ghost shrimps in a tidepool. In the aquarium he had laid a sheet of glass on the mud, a roof for their tunnels. In darkness, when David had turned on the ultra-violet fluorescent light, the gobies glowed purple as if they had been dyed. David had color-tagged them so he could watch their movements while the blind gobies thought they were in darkness, invisible. Glowing purple, they wriggled out of the tunnels of their host, the ghost shrimp, to search for more glowing purple food -- provided by David, the hardeyed experimenter. "Please, DavidI Just watch me ride one wave across the reef. You won't even have to climb down the cliff -- ." "What cliff? There's no cliff at Hammond's Reef." "This is. another reef, David. A better reef." "I got to study. What reef are you talking about?" Without thinking, Ted blurted the truth: "At the Chalk Cliff." "The Chalk Cliff?" David roared. "No surfing waves, no reef at the Chalk Cliff. Whatta you mean bothering me? Whatta you mean telling lies? No surfing at the Chalk Cliff. Not even you gremmies go there. The Chalk Cliff! Have a knuckleburger!" "Ow, David! A reef, a new reef. Don't cork me again, David." "Then say that you're a dirty lying bothering little gremmie. Go on, say it! -- There is no reef at the Chalk Cliff. "But there is a reef. Please, David! A surfers reef." "Now you got me so nervous I'll never study again. Everybody bothering me. I got to get out of here," David groaned. "I'm going to Hammond's Reef." But when David's # Ford "woodie" station wagon burped to a halt, it was at the Chalk Cliff. # #Qee, David! Look, David, real tubes! Look at 'em building out there on the reef!" David's adam's apple jiggled. Speechless,, he stood up through the hole in the roof of his "woodie." Finally, his voice squeaked with awe and joy. "I'm stoked! "A new reef, an anomaly, a phenomenon," David's voice faded as he whipped his surfboard over the tailgate of his "woodie." "Cow-a-bunga!" David yelled like a cornball and galloped down the slanting cliff as if he'd turned off the Law of Gravity. Like mad, as if he saw his Perfect Wave coming, David paddled toward the cresting reef. "Hey, wait, David, wait for me. It was me you came to watch ride one -- " By the time Ted finished falling down the cliff, his brother already was maneuvering his surfboard to take off into a tube. Erect, with perfect surfing form, David angled across the face of the wave toward the shallows of the hidden reef. His wave shimmered skyward above his head, rising and hollowing into a translucently green flowing tube. It was beautiful. David's board hit the invisible reef so hard he ran right off the nose and seemed to be running through the air when he vanished into a wave. He emerged, crawling eighteen inches above the water, when the wave passed. On all fours, David began thumping the air beneath him, his fists bouncing back as if he was hitting rubber. The next wave buried him. David reappeared standing on nothing. His raised hands glinted purple as he waded toward shore. Abruptly, he sank as he stepped off IF the edge of the reef. Splattering, he swam toward Ted's board. "Stay away or you'll (something) it," David gasped. "Delicate scientific exper -- I'll be famous. Careful scientific investigation." He wallowed hurriedly toward the beach. "Wait, David! Watch me ride one, just one wave." But David was retreating rapidly up the cliff. "Now watch me, David, watch me!" Taking off, sliding away from the center of the reef, Ted rose unsteadily on his board. "Look, David! Look at me ride!" But David had vanished behind his "woodie." Without falling off, Ted stalled his board and paddled out again. "Hey David, watch me this time!" David ploughed down the slanting cliff from his station wagon through rising chalk dust with something clutched in either hand. He splashed through the shallows after his capsized board. "Look at me, David, look at me ride." Ted fell off. David paddled past him muttering: "Be quiet, delicate scientific tests -- " A heavy ballpeen hammer dangling from one fist, David clambered on to the invisible reef. With the scientific delicacy of a blacksmith, David pounded a huge screwdriver into the reef. There was an electrical crackling. David rose. Ted glimpsed him rising ten feet above the ocean as the waves rolled back. Then David fell. The water spread bright purple. With more anger than surprise, Ted witnessed his reef and the protruding handle of David's screwdriver streaking out to sea like a periscope trailing purple foam. "You ruined my reef! You never even watched me ride one wave!" To Ted's disappointed yells, David made no reply. David's contorted face seemed purple. Even when David became the first National Merit Award Scholarship, he had very little to say. David spent his time scowling at His mirror. Purple? Now he could never go to Stanford. Their colors were red and white. Skin specialists insisted the purple dye would wear off, but it didn't. Not even sandpaper. Amazingly, David was as popular as ever. "Put on a gold-colored shirt to go with your cute purple face," David's buxom girl friend giggled, "and enroll at U. S. C. with me." The tragedy was Ted. "Everybody staring at me." Ted wouldn't go out of the house. "Everybody laughing at me. I'm not a cow. Everybody making jokes about a purple cow. Nobody liked me to begin with and now they say I'm a freak. At least you're purple all over, David. I'm all blotchy. I wish I was dead." In deep water the gigantic space probe had stopped contracting. It had dissolved the intruding screwdriver. Gradually it expanded along the bottom toward shore, huger than ever. As it bulged reef-like toward the surface, gulls whirled above the disturbed water. With a shriek, a gull veered away as if it had bounced off a plate glass window, and crashed into the sea. The gull's sodden breast feathers turned purple. It was dead. A cross the continent in New York's Yankee Stadium the pitcher loosed the first ball of the World Series. In the boys' bedroom Ted laughed at the portable TV, frantically twisting the horizontal control knob. There was nothing but a jumble of upward rolling lines and roaring static on every channel. "Wherever I go!" Ted shrieked. "Static's in here, too, so it isn't just the living room TV. It's everywhere I go. Being purple isn't enough. Now I can't even watch TV!" In the living room, that TV set shouted clearly: "Strike one!" Its perfect picture showed the batter turning to stare in amazement at the umpire's upraised arm. David had gone out into the hall. Now as he came back into the living room, the pitcher's intent face freckled with static snow. The picture rolled and David stepped closer to adjust the horizontal control. The pitcher's contorted faces peering to get the sign from the multiple vibrating catchers dissolved into a howling snowstorm. "Terrible static!" David backed away, eyeing the rabbit-ears antenna on top of the TV set, and the pitcher reappeared ghost-like through the snow and disappeared again as David reached toward the antenna. "Have I been electrified? Like that glass rod experiment -- rubbed with silk? Is it me, or -- ?" David ran out of the living room to look for his portable radio. The umpire shouted: "Strike two!" Scowling, the batter bent for a handful of dirt, but no one was watching him in the living room. David was out on the lawn, twisting the little portable radio from side to side. He ran back into the bedroom. "Listen, listen, Ted, the static's louder when I turn my portable this way. The aerial's wrapped around a little card inside my portable radio so that it's directional -- ." "I don't care about your lousy radio. I don't care about the World Series. All I care about is me. I'm a spotted freak. At least you're purple all over. It's all your fault Vm purple spotted." "What can I say?" David stared out the window, slowly turning the portable radio toward the sea, and the static blared. David peered at his brother's swollen purple eyes. "Somebody is shooting at us. We're not giving off static. I think we're reflecting k. Somebody is following each of us with a narrow radio beam -- aimed like a firehose -- no, like a laser. We're a couple of targets. That's what I think." "I don't care about goofy scientific stuff," Ted bleated. "So shut up with all that stuff. It's your fault, you and that lousy reef. I wish I was dead!" "Don't talk like that. Get my big IF speargun over there." David carried the portable radio. "Yes, outside. I want you to come outside. All right, put on your hat if you don't want anybody to see your stupid purple head." D avid led the way toward the Chalk Cliff. Ted tagged after him, lugging the heavy speargun. A home-made arbelete powered by four thick strands of rubber surgical tubing, the speargun had driven its steel harpoon shaft clear through a small leopard shark. Above the surface, freed from the resistance of the water, the speargun was more powerful and deadly. "Pm going to shoot that thing." Ted's purple eyelids slitted, and he glanced about. But there were no amused faces or pitying faces of neighbors to see his purple-blotched face. He stopped. Fitting the three-foot long steel shaft into the steel cup, hissing with effort, he stretched the rubber tubing, cocking the speargun like a hair-trigger crossbow. He ran after his brother. Ahead, gulls on the updraft whiteflagged the edge of the cliff. David was peering down. His back was bent. He wasn't saying anything. Ted stumbled. "Look, David, down there! Something shining on top of the water -- like a ghost." "That's what Pm looking at. Sunlight reflecting off the spray, the dried salt, the organs of its -- body. Hard to see what shape -- Hey you little idiot, don't shoot it!" "Keep away from me, David. You told me to bring the speargun." "Don't point it at me! Give it here." "Pm going to shoot. Keep away." "Listen, Ted, I told you wrong. Shooting it with the speargun isn't going to help us. We'll still be purple, Ted. Give me the speargun. I was a stupid crock to tell you to bring it. Shooting this thing when we don't know what will happ -- David lunged. Ted scuttled backward along the edge of the cliff. "Don't you aim it at me, Ted. I told you I was wrong to bring it. Shooting won't solve anything. Look what happened when I stuck a screwdriver in it. Pm just a crock, always poking things with pins or thermometers to see what they will do. Don't shoot it with the speargun!" "You keep away from me!" "Don't shoot it." David's voice softened. "Behind me, you hear the portable radio, hear the static. That thing down there's no worm. Only stupid crocks and gremmies -- " David's voice rose edgily -- "go around sticking and poking and pestering things they don't know anything about! "You hear the radio static!" David's voice brightened with promise. "That thing down there in the surf is broadcasting static, on unauthorized wavelengths. Yes, listen! I know how to make people believe us about this thing -- make people take us seriously -- so hand me the speargun." But Ted backed off, his narrow eyes slitted. IF "Hand me the speargun." David followed, "The F. C. C., the Federal Communications Commission men, remember how they caught me when I broadcast on unauthorized wavelengths. All we have to do is report this thing, and their tracer equipment will -- " Whirling at the brink of the cliff, Ted fired the speargun. The long steel harpoon shafted flashed downward like an arrow. Ted scrambled down the cliff toward the lashing sea. He wallowed in the purple staining shallows, even ducking his head into the spreading purple dye. "You stupid little gremmief' David violently dragged his brother out on to the purple sand. "What did you do that for? Now we don't know what it'll do. You idiot, after all I said, why -- why did you have to go and shoot it?" "At least," Ted gasped, purple dye streaming down his face, "at least now I'm purple all over like you. Leggo!" But David arm-locked his brother, rushing him toward the cliff. "Butt out of here! That thing is spoutii purple like a geyser." "Hope it dies," Ted wheezed as he climbed the cliff. "Look at my hands, like your hands now. But I don't want purple hands!" he cried out, clawing the purple chalk. He was sobbing as David shoved him up to the top of the purplesprayed cliff. Above him, purple gulls and purple fog rose in the updraft and swept inland on the sea wind. As the two boys ran toward home there was a purple mist before their eyes. P urple faces yelled in horror at each other and scattered into purple houses. A purple policeman stared helplessly at the purple sky. Purple defense officials shouted into purple telephones. A purple military mind instinctively pushed a purple button. The locks clicked in the deep missile silos. The clocks ticked while an A. S. W.plane, with a long magnetic-anomaly detector protruding from its tail like a stinger, droned low along the cliffs and over the purple surf. Its bomb-bay door opened. A fat gleam of metal tumbled downward through the air and splashed as the plane veered away in frantic evasive action. The purple explosion mushroomed toward the stratosphere. The organic probe of the third planet had blossomed, seeded. Catalytic molecules spread with the winds, triggering film of moispture which coated plants, planarian worms, plagiarists and platypuses, and everything was turning purple. Purple people ran randomly through the streets of Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Jersey City, their eyeballs purple with outrage. Purple cows chomped contentedly on the purple grass of Western Europe -- and Eastern Europe. Purple presidents and dictators shouted angrily back and forth via purple-moistured microphones. Louder and louder the static engulfed them. Static on all wavelengths was echoing from everyone all over the purple planet. E ven from outer space the Earth appeared purple. In perigee beSI yond the Moon, the translucently organic ship tipped as six eyes peered out, four ears wiggled. Three eyelids fluttered. boTH of US canT follOW the "O. K. K. K.! O. K. K. K., but trudER." "REally, I SHould HAve suc"INsufficient bralNS! MY sec"REally, DonT yoU think thE samE COlor, Will DEflect "NO!" gery?" SO!" The mouth-slit smiled. "BuT Due to mechanical difficulties this issue of IF was shipped late. Because of this delay, we have changed the dating from September to October. No issue will be dated September. The next issue will be dated November. This does not affect the contents. IF IP  Short Stor She was a maiden in distress, seeking aid against the brutes who refused to take her life! H e was reading in the living room of his late uncle's house when a piece of the dust ruffle detached itself from the couch and started moving. He watched distractedly, not paying any particular attention at first, then, curious, finally annoyed, because the thing would keep moving, and when it reached a point midway between the couch and his chair he got up and removed the dust ruffle with the tip of his shoe, revealing a bug as big as his hand. That night, in bed, he was reading again when he began plumping up the pillows for sleep. He thought it only an annoyance when the pillow on the left plumped back. He gave it another couple of pats, found as he turned over that it had disarranged itself and thumped it, really hard this time, with his fist. It seemed agitated, and as he gave it another thump something muscular and black slithered out of the pillowcase faster than he could apprehend it and began circling, rushing like a mad monorail around and around the baseboards of the room, going faster and faster until it dissipated itself finally and fell in a limp heap in the corner. His first thought was to get someone to help him remove it, but he was alone in the house, and he had not lived in the neighborhood long enough to get to know any of the neighbors. He picked it up on a broom (as he had the bug) and then, satisfied that he was alone in the room, he turned on his side and went to sleep. The next morning the wolfskin rug by his late uncle's bed seemed to come alive. It skittered around the floor like an outsized doormat, going along on four rubbery pink legs, and he bundled up the creature (whatever it was) in the wolfskin and dumped it out the window without even having a closer look. He had the strangest feeling, as he let it go and it plummeted down the hill, that it had been trying to tell him something. He was not a nervous man (he was, after all, a jMofessor of mathematics) but when his toaster belched twice and disgorged a covey of centipedes which massed and marched on him, coming rank on rank across the breakfast table, he said to himself, "This must stop," and he went over the house with a series of insecticides and heavy sticks, not turning up so much as a stray spider, or a single ant. He thought briefly of getting someone in to live with him, someone who was good with wild life. But he was a confirmed bachelor of independent leanings and he could not imaging himself accommodating another person, especially now, on his sabbatical. He was a small muscular man with a determined jaw and the head of a battle-scarred cat. The more he thought of asking someone else to help him cope, the less he liked it. "Hell with it," he said, giving the house a final once-over. Then he put crawling things out of his mind and went on up to bed. B ecause the insecticides lingered, he spent that night on the porch outside his uncle's secondstory room. It seemed high enough, and safe enough. He rather liked the way the hillside swept down and away from him, and the fact that the porch was no more than a platform with a low railing and a telescope, so that it was rather like sleeping at the edge of a cliff. He kept an eye peeled for wild life until nine or ten at least. Then, exhausted by the day's activities with insecticides, he curled up in his sleeping bag and went to sleep. He waked at three, not knowing why. The air was as sharp and chill as white wine. Each leaf on each of the black trees that overhung the porch seemed magnified in the early morning chill. He was aware of the leaves -- every one of them -- and could not keep himself from thinking of the thousands of leaves on thousands of twigs, all gathered to hang over him, each motionless and distinct. He sat up, wondering why in all this stillness he was trembling. Then, because he knew he would not sleep for a while, he got up and paced the porch, smoking, finally coming to a stop at his uncle's telescope. He turned it to the skies first, trying to sight the moon through a break in the trees. Then, realizing that it was set for closer ranges, he gave up and trained it on the valley below, looking over fields and sleepIF ing houses, fixing finally on a house on the hill which rose at the other side. The telescope was excellent at such distances. He could see figures framed in the picture window and then faces and finally expressions, warped and highlighted by a blue sharp relief and seemed to dominate the room. The house itself was a low, brick rambler, bourgeois and unremarkable except for the fact that there were three glossy, black cars pulled up around it, like cattle at a feeding station. The whole was lit by a powerful, unearthly blue glow that seemed important to the young man only in retrospect; at the time he was so taken up with the quarrel, or fight, going on behind the picture window that he hardly marked or noticed it. , There seemed to be four men in the room, three advancing on a fourth, arguing, finally coming to blows. They were shadows moving mechanical blue light which would strike him, as he looked back on it, as a conflagration of diamonds, cold and at the same time unquenchable. Behind the window the activity grew more atid more frantic. The men were furious now, mouths distended in shouts which the young man, watching through the telescope, could see but could not hear. They moved faster and faster, in growing violence. One had raised a stick, or an instrument, to strike another when all four stopped suddenly and faced what must have been the front door. The young man, watching, picked out the front door of the house and focussed on it, not ready to believe that there was indeed a woman in night clothes beating on the door with bare hands, or that her whole body shook with agitation, or that a plethora of hair billowed out and down her back. Before he could refocus his telescope to make sure, the front door opened and closed in a fraction of a second and the young woman disappeared. She had rushed in through a crack in the door -- or had been dragged -- and now she was inside. Growing stiff from the cold, he left his telescope just long enough to wrap himself in a blanket. By the time he refocussed the icy telescope, the blue glow was gone. The cars were still there, like beetles around the carcass of a larger beetle, and he imagined he could still see a crack of blue light between hastily-drawn drapes. But there was no sign of movement. Enthralled, suddenly, by the quick remembered image of the woman, he kept the telescope trained on the house across the valley, keeping his vigil until the sun came up and he went to sleep. Vhen he woke the half-remembered details came back like the hazy elements of a dream. But there was the telescope. When he trained it on the hill opposite there was the house, there were the signs of a quick departure, to verify what he had seen. He went down to breakfast, thinking on it. Later he took his morning paper to the living room, determined to put the whole thing out of his mind. When the dust ruffle began moving just as he reached for the sports section his first impulse was to trample it. But something made him lift it first, to see what he would be trampling, and he saw that this time it was a spider, and the spider had a note in its mouth. Once he had distracted the spider with a piece of salami and snatched the note from it, he found that it was in a clear, legible hand. It said, He did not have to guess who had sent it. He had known from the look of the woman's back as she had pounded on the door across the valley that she was beautiful, and that she needed help. "Strange," he said to himself, wanting to do something about it. Then he settled down to preparing his courses for the term which would follow his sabbatical, reminding himself that there was little he could do until he knew her whereabouts, or her problem, or at least her name. blacksnake dropped in his lap before it took off around the bedroom, Feeling a certain responsibility, he wrote a return note and popped it in the blacksnake's mouth . , . before he picked it up on a broom and tossed it out the window. and in a burst of loyalty kept the telescope trained on the house across the valley until he fell asleep. When he woke it was at that same still, dead time of night, and the house across the valley was alight. He watched the four men running around in growing excitement, saw them rise to a murderous pitch and then stop suddenly, and saw the woman fling at the door again and again, hammering with bare fists until it opened and someone jerked her inside; he imagined that she tipped him a wave just before the door closed on her. He knew from experience that he might as well go on back to bed. He shook the blacksnake out of his pillowslip without even looking at it, dumped the toads from his bedroom slippers and pushed the preying mantis off the nighttable, saying, all right, all right, with a touch of impatience, as he turned off the light. T he girl herself was standing in front of the fireplace as he brought his breakfast coffee into the living room. He had taken the note from the giant cockroach in the pantry without reading it and now he beheld the woman, who was lithe in black, and held two salamanders and a spider straining at a red patent leather leash. She whispered to the spider, which detached itself and made a little rush for his ankles. "Don't do that," he said, aiming a kick at it. The spider slunk away. "Oh, I'm sorry," the girl said in a voice like midnight. "I thought everyone liked pets." "Not everyone." He eyed the salaIF manders. "What's on your mind?" "Help. I'm from another planet and I need your help." "So I understand." He tugged at his tweed jacket, wishing he'd had the elbows patched. "Won't you have some tea?" She shook her head. "It's too urgent. The planets will only be in conjunction for the rest of the week, so we have to act fast." "We?" "You and I." "Why me?" "Because last time your uncle didn't," she said, curling up beside him. As he stiffened, she shooed the salamanders to the other side of the room. "I had him all lined up during the last conjunction. Then at the last minute he deserted me." "Died." Marcus corrected her. "Deserted me." She made a little mouth. "Sometimes I think he died on purpose. So he wouldn't have to go through with it." He hated arguments. "If you say so. Now what's going on over there?" "Ah," she said. "You found the telescope." "Well, yes. Now what's all this about Uncle Harry?" She shook her head sadly. "We were -- very close -- and he had it all figured out so I could go." "I don't understand." "It's perfectly simple," she said. "Those fools are in love with me." "What fools?" He gave the spider a nervous kick. "My countrymen. Garth ToglRammy and Seth. Well, all but Seth. He knows what his instructions are, and he's ready to go through with them." She looked at him brightly, "Thats what all the fighting's about." He looked at her blankly. "It's perfectly simple," she said, crossing her legs with a rustle of silk. "We were sent here ten years ago on a mission. I was in my early teens." She looked at him as if this explained everything. "I was an ugly teenager, when you get right down to it. That made the whole plan seem perfectly simple. We were to collect minerals -- and a certain amount of information -- for three years, and then report back to the sending station. The house across the valley. All we had to do was wait for a conjunction. Then the people at home would set things in motion and transport the boys." "The boys?" "Garth," she said patiently. "Togl. Rammy and Seth. But by the time the Conjunction came. I'd gotten -- well -- I'd grown. I was more or less as you see me, and three of the boys were in love with me. They wouldn't let Seth..." Marcus leaned forward suspiciously. "Wouldn't let him what?" "Set things in motion. The being." She looked at him for a minute, saw that he wasn't comprehending, and tried to simplify. "The machine. It's not really a machine, but it's not really a being, either. I don't know what it is, but when the planets are in conjunction, it's strong enough to disintegrate three people and recreate them somewhere else. "Three people," he said, disturbed. "Well, for, coming," she said. "It could take four going back, too, if we had the fuel..." That -- blue light I saw in the telescope?" "That's It. Seth takes care of It." "And the -- fuel?" # #y Te," she said with a lumin-LVl ous smile. "Pm a Catalyst. That's a very big deal, back home. You go out beautifully. You simply advance into It -- the being -- the machine -- and generate enough power to send any number of people anywhere in the uni,verse." She lifted her head proudly. "Pm told I'll be one of the best. That's why I was chosen for this mission." He was straining, trying hard to understand. "Then you..." "I'm all set, all ready. I've been waiting all my life for this, and now those stupid fools are in love with me and they won't let me get on with it." Marcus said with a sinking feeling, "It?" "My final assignment. Sending them home. It's the simplest thing in the world." She lowered thick, furry lashes on her cheeks and then looked up at him with eyes that clear. "All they have to do is feed me into it. Zip. Mission accompished, and they're on their way back home." "And you..." "Atomized." She seemed to glow. "Think of me in the breeze, in the air all around. IPs beautiful." Stroking the spider meditatively, she went on. "But they won't do it, because Garth and Rammy and Togl have all fallen in love with me -- and they're all bigger than Seth." She leaned forward. "That's why I need your help." "Help?" "Complete my mission. Go into the -- machine. Listen, say yes, and I'll tell you the plan." Appalled, Marcus came to his feet. "I don't want to hear your plan. Listen, when the conjunction is over, I want you to come back. I'd like you to come live with me." He waved his hands desperately. "PH marry you." "Then you won't help?" "How could I help, when it means your destruction and you're so..." She cut him off. "That's my trouble," she said with a sigh. "Everyone falls in love with me. Well, good-by." "Don't say good-by," he said because he coudn't help himself. "Say I'll be seeing you." "I won't be seeing you if I can help it," she said with a sniff. "This is the last night of the conjunction, and I'm going to find a way into that machine." He reached out, wanting to stop her. But she had gathered the spider and the salamanders and a hoptoad he hadn't even noticed until that moment. With a lovely, doomed wave she disappeared. N ot even the sports page could hold his interest after that. He went listlessly through the routine of the day, bored by calculus, dreaming over topology, seeing only her face, tenuous and changing, in all the convolutions of the problem in front of him. He found himself watching the IF dust-ruffle hopefully. He almost wished he would bump into a giant cockroach in the pantry and was frankly disappointed when he shook out his pillow-case at bedtime and the blacksnake was not there. He watched the house across the valley for what seemed like hours, until his eye was almost frozen to the eyepiece of the telescope. This time he was awake when the blue glow showed itself in the window, faint at first and then brighter, finally blinding, dizzying. He saw wSeth hurrying back and forth, serving it. As he watched the cars pulled up -- one for Garth, one for Togl, one for Rammy. He saw Seth go to the door to let them in. The three hulking aliens pushed wide the door, which Marcus noticed did not seem to have a handle, and swaggered in. As he watched they advanced on the fourth figure -- Seth -- in rising excitement and wrath. Then he saw the woman, Mavra, rushing out of nowhere. At the sight of the sweep of her hair and the curve of her back he could no longer contain himself. He rushed out of the house and into the tar, still in his pajamas, and hurled the car along the country roads, finding the house across the valley as surely as if he had been rehearsing that wild drive all his adult life. Blazing, terrified by the idea that she might succeed this time, and exist no more, he flung himself at the front door of the house. It opened easily. "Mr. Justice," she said, more beautiful even than he had remembered her. "Fm so glad you came." In the background, the three men were wrangling with Seth. "I had to come -- I had -- " "You had to help me." Her eyes were shimmering with gratitude. "Now if you'll just keep the others out of my way, Seth will -- " He was almost choked by urgency. "Help you, hell! I came to stop you. Which one is Seth?" "You've come to help us, then." A tall, craggy, rock-pile of a man advanced. "That's Garth," the girl whispered giving Marcus a little push. "And Togl and Rammy behind. The determined one -- that's Seth." "You think as we do." Almost tearful with gratitude, Rammy joined Garth. "We've got to make Seth see that he just can't do it." In the background Seth glowered, recalcitrant. And at his back was the source of the blue glow, an impower, a devourer, crouched and waiting in the space where the dining alcove had once been. "It comes alive during the conjunctions," Garth said in a whisper. "Once the Catalyst goes in, somebody back home throws a switch." The being flickered at first, getting brighter and brighter as Marcus watched. He saw that it could not move of itself, that it was just waiting, and he resolved to do everything in his power to keep Seth from letting the girl to it. Rammy and Togl arrayed themselves on either side of Marcus, reenforcing him. "You can't do it, Seth," they said as one. "You can't do it, Seth," said Garth, in the lead. 'This man from outside, he says you can't do it." "Of course he does!" Seth hissed at him. "He knows we're here on reconnaissance. Do you think he wants us to go home and give our report?"' "I come as a friend," Marcus said a little sententiously. "And as a friend I must beg... Seth snorted unpleasantly. "Friend, hell. Alien. He thinks we're spies." "Never mind what he thinks," Rammy said nervously. "Listen to what he says. "The conjunction is almost over. We have to hurry home!" "What is home, if Mavra dies?" Garth was almost in tears. Rammy said, "Mavra, the beautiful." Togl added, "Mavra, our love." "Love, hell," Seth said. "She knows her job." "Look man," Marcus said, wishing he were a little better at persuasion. "Our decency, our common humanity..." and then he broke off, wailing, "You just can't. I'm in love with her." "You fool!" Seth spat. And then he turned and the others turned with him, to see that Mavra, taking advantage of their confusion, had slipped into the dining alcove, tipping Seth a little wink as she went. Now, with a gallant little wave, she was disappearing into the bowels of the blue glow, the being, the center of the machine. A s she connected there was a flash like a shower of flaming needles. Marcus reeled, without sight, without blood or breath for an excruciating second. When he recovered, gasping, he saw that the others were changing; Garth, Togl and Rammy facing him in a luminly, facing the spot where the being or machine had been, all three already on their way home. Caught in the agony of passage, they incandesced. "We've been had," Garth said mournfully, just as he and the others flickered and went out. And Marcus, in his pajamas, was alone, in the cold and deserted room. by Gordon R. Dickson A complete short novel in the worlds of the Dorsai and the Friendly Soldiers This and many other complete stories IF IF  Short Stor#, Never trust an Alien! When they are most defenseless they're most totally deadlyl T he Alien Alert sounded while Rohan was sitting down with his Uncle Spadler to his first meal of venison. Uncle Spadler had just cut himself a bite-size chunk of rare steak. The fork, with the meat spitted upon it, wavered before the granite chin and the dark red, extremely bushy mustache. Three times the eerie sound tormented the chilly mountain air. Sixty seconds passed -- the silence weighing like heavy heartbeats -- three times again, the wail. All was quiet inside and outside the isolated cabin. Rohan's boyish lips trembled. 'T -- I thought I heard something outside, Uncle." "You what? "I thought I heard a noise outside, Uncle." Uncle Spadler's eyes gleamed. He rose from the table and crossed the cabin to the gun rack. He plucked one of the two sporting rifles from its magnetic holder. He yanked back the rifle bolt, three, four, six times. Expelled deer slugs made clicking sounds as they hit the floor. Uncle Spadler took some high explosive killer shells from a greea box. Snip, snip, snip went the shellf into the rifle's magazine. Rohan gripped the edge of the table hard as he watched his uncle cross the floor with the gun in his hands. His breath sucked in as, gua resting with the stock steady against his hip. Uncle Spadler threw the door open. Wind rushed in, cold and snowfilled. Flakes fell to the floor, melting like human consciences. Uncle Spadler moved through the doorway. His broad back disappeared from view, and for a moment there was an open square of dusk-filled daylight. Then he had backed inside again. "What is it, Uncle?" Rohan gasped, Spadler did not answer. He closed the door silently. Then he whirled, heavy, huge and bear-like. He faced Rohan at close-quarters, and he said, in a voice like thunder, "Tracks outside." "Alien?" "Alien." "Big ones?" "Big ones." R ohan shuddered. He stirred not a leg nor an arm while his uncle moved about the cabin. From behind him he heard. "Hurry up! Get ready now! We've got a job to do." "But I -- " His uncle's face was before him, glowering red with rage. "A job, I say! You too, as well as I." "But -- " "Here!" And Uncle Spadler thrust into his hands a wadded bundle of outdoor clothing. He took the rifle and the extra flashlight his uncle handed him. He moved to the door. He put on the snowshoes.  "The tracks are over there," said Uncle Spadler, pointing through the snowstorm. "Big flat ones, like nothing I ever saw before." Rohan stared. He moved the way his uncle had directed him. The track was shaped roughly like a human's. Twelve feet ahead of the track there was another one, and twelve feet further on, another. Each track was positioned one directly ahead and behind another, in a way that no animal -- human or otherwise -- should normally walk. "There's many different kinds of Aliens." Rohan's voice was hoarse. "Aren't there. Uncle?" "Many, many kinds," said Uncle Spadler. "And you've never seen this kind of track before?" "I told you I hadn't!" "And you never heard of an Alien that makes this kind?" "Never!" "It must want to live very badly to escape prison camp and attempt to cross a hunting area." Rohan raised a hand encased in a shooting glove to his forehead. Through the skin-tight plastic, his fingers could just detect the hairlike line upon his forehead. "So long," he said wonderingly. "So very long! All that dark and the wetness. Half dead, half knowing. Angel voices. The rustle of a nurse's gown. Soft hiss of a nutrient supply tube." "Are you re-living that again?" said his uncle. "Yes," said Rohan. "Stop it!" his uncle said brutally. "But -- " "It's ten years since your broken body was put in the re-growth tank. You've been out of the hospital two years. Long enough. I'd think." "But, Uncle Spadler, when I was little..." "What?" IF "Before all the trouble... "Out with it!" "I -- I thought everyone liked Aliens." Spadler's face moved close to his. Snow flecked the bushy eyebrows. "You stupid, boy?" "N-no, I don't think so." "After those souvenirs from 'friendly' -- " contempt reversed meaning -- "Aliens started explod'tourists' produced weapons and house-pets began blinding and poisoning people... after all that, you still think there's good in Aliens?" "S-some Aliens, perhaps." "Bah!" said Uncle Spadler. Rohan looked down at his right snowshoe, then at the giant track in front of it. He swallowed. He did not contradict his uncle. "You have a rifle there," Uncle Spadler said, "Yes," Rohan said. "That gun will stop any Alien that you have to stop with it." "I'm glad it will," Rohan said. "C'mon, then!" Rohan looked up to see his uncle moving off into the snowstorm. His lips twisted. He drew cold air into his lungs, then expelled a cloud of white vapor. Taking a firm grim on the gun, he followed his uncle. H is legs were a dull ache as morning approached. By then it had long since quit snowing. The stars were beginning to fade, and still they had not seen the Alien. Uncle Spadler pointed at the nearest track with his now turned off flashlight. "See, it stood here for a while. Resting, maybe thinking up some devilment. It knows part of it advantage is gone in the daylight. "The tracks head for the woodsy Uncle," Rohan said. Uncle Spadler moved that way. "Be alert now," he said. "It could be preparing an ambush." "Do they do that ofteil Uncle? "Some do," said Uncle Spadler. Rohan frowned. His eyes watered. His fingernails tried to dig through his gloves and into his rifle stock. At the edge of the forest, Uncle Spadler dropped his flashlight. He did not bother to pick it up. "Uncle?" Spadler pointed. Ahead, one track mark stood out plainly beneath a low-hanging tree limb. "It's a low place for it to have stood, isn't it, Uncle?" "The thing hops," Uncle Spadler said. "Perhaps it's not so big as it looks." "Perhaps not. That doesn't mean it's any less dangerous." Rohan swallowed as he peered into the woods. "So many bushes --  it could hide anywhere, couldn't it?" "It's too rough to wear snowshoes. We'll have to wait until the sun is all the way up before we go in." "And that will give it still more of a chance, won't it. Uncle?" "Shut up!" said Uncle Spadler. A bent branch sprang back and wrapped itself around the calf of Uncle Spadler's right leg. Uncle Spadler screamed. Then he stopped screaming and swore lividly. Hurrying to his uncle's side, Rohan saw a row of needle-like thorns protruding from the top half of his uncle's combat boot. "Didn't penetrate through the boot leather," Uncle Spadler said at last. "You can bet I'd be dead if they had." "Poison?" Uncle Spadler pointed at a yellowish, all but invisible mucus on one of the thorns. He was careful not to touch it. "That's poison of some kind. The Alien we're tracking is probably venomous." "We'd better get those thorns out," Rohan said concernedly. He searched in a pocket and found a pair of pliers. Carefully, so as to avoid touching the mucus, he began pulling the thorns. When he had pulled three thorns, he stopped in astonishment. "Uncle, some of these thorns -- they've got barbs on them!" "Hold one up where I can sec," said Uncle Spadler. Rohan held up the pliers. "Small," said Uncle Spadler. "That means a delicate touch, doesn't it? Probably real small manipulating appendages?" "Hurry up with those thorns." "Uncle, could there be a big Alien carrying a small Alien?" "Hurry up, I said." Rohan pulled the last of the thorns. He straightened up and saw his uncle's eyes were directed at a bush in back of him. "I'm going over there," said his uncle. "You stay here and watch for me." "All right. Uncle." Rohan stood in the snow and watched his uncle advance on the bush. His head swiveled right and left; his eyes tried to see everywhere. Uncle Spadler reached the bushes. He maneuvered around the edges. He waved for Rohan to keep back. Then he disappeared from sight behind some tree trunks. Seconds lengthened into minutes. Minutes dragged interminably. Suddenly Rohan's hands tightened convulsively on his rifle. His eyelids stretched. He opened his mouth wide, but no sound came. From a different direction then the one his uncle had taken, there had come a thing -- a bunny rabbit thing, with fur that was softly glowing. A thing without visible legs, that hopped twelve feet at a time in a staight line toward him. T he rifle flew to Rohan's shoulder, drawn there by hours of drill and practice. "H-halt, Alien!" he said. The Alien halted. It raised babyish pink hands before its wrinkled face. Violet eyes stared liquidly upwards. It spoke: "Oh, Being of Many Thunders," it said in a surprisingly strong, scarcely accented voice. "Oh, Master of Space, Son of Conqueror of Worlds -- " Rohan yelled loudly for his Uncle Spadler. Only the stillness of the forest answered him. IF Times my Superior. Oh, Man, this Worthless Nonentity is Vastly Pleased that you have come for me." "W-what do you mean?" Violet eyes rolled. The creature gave off a scent like springtime flowers. A sound came from its body which was both lulling and stirring at the same time and might well have been the opening chord in some grand Alien symphony. "On Far World of My Origin, I Live, Work, and One Day Honored. Entertainers I, Most Honored of Profession. Conquerors Come, but not you Conquerors. Conquerors want Entertainers. I am Honored." "You mean," Rohan swallowed, "you were a non-combatant? One of a race conquered by other Aliens?" "Non-Combatant I," talked-sang the Alien. "I not Escape From Camp. I ordered From. I told Test Man's Tracking ability. I do... Not Want." "Who ordered you?" "Mans at Camp. Guards say Hop Fast. Say where go. Say Man Rewarded Find me." "Uncle Spadler!" Rohan called. Stillness. "I can't believe what you say! It can't be the way Ihings happen. You tried to kill my uncle." "No, No, Not Do! I try Catch Food. You come. I Fear. Not Want Times my Superior." Suddenly, the music Alien played took on a dirge-like quality. The pinkish face bent over its cupped hands. Tears ran rather than leaked from the violet eyes, falling like tiny beads of amber Inio tlie cup that awaited them. Rohan stared. His face softened. He lowered his rifle. Impulsively he dropped to his knees in front of the Alien. He tossed the gun aside and reached for a handkerchief. The tears were now brimming the hollow formed by the hands. From each pink finger there clicked a long curved claw. The claws pointed upwards, curved back from the fingertips. Rohan found his handkerchief with his right hand. And Alien's claws snapped outwards, and amber droplets filled the air. I nstinctively Rohan's eyes squeezed shut. His left forearm raised, his head dropped. From the bushes, a rifle cracked. A killer shell exploded. Stuff hit Rohan's raised forearm. Rohan was hurled backwards. Rohan's eyes opened. "It tried to get me too," someone said. "It thought it led me into a deadfall, but I avoided it." Rohan turned to see his Uncle Spadler. His mouth worked. "B-but, Uncle, it was so h-helpless," he said. "Take a look at your coat!" Rohan looked at his left coat sleeve. Wisps of smoke were coming from tiny brown holes where the Alien's tears had landed. "Helpless as a spitting cobra." Rohan's two perfectly good eyes widened. In a voice hardly recognizable as his own he added: "And every bit as trustworthy." IF  Serid Conclusion He had five lives In his care -- and he could save them only by giving up everything that mattered in his own!, F or the next many days Hugh was busy redesigning the game of Scrabble to fit Language, translating Hoyle s Complete Book of Games, dictating rules and descriptions (to the best of his memory) of games and recreations not in Hoyle (such as Ping Pong, golf, water skiing). attending conferences with Ponse and Joe, and others with Joe alone -- and playing bridge. The last was by far the best. With Joe's help he taught several of the Chosen the game, but most of the sessions were play, with Joe, Ponse, and always Barbara. Ponse had the enthusiasm of a new convert. When he was in residence he played bridge What Has Gone Before...  family, is caught in the destruction of a sudden and devastating nuclear war. With his wife and children they take refuge in his bomb shelter, bringing with them Farnham finds himself unexpectedly and peremptorily in love. But there is little time for them to dwell on their relationship, for when the bombs stop failing and they leave the shelter they find themselves in a world where no sign of man appears. There is no destruction -- there is no city! They establish a primitive way of life, in which Farnham's chief lieutenant is the other member of their party, houseboy and is now more of a son to him than his own son, Duke. Farnham's daughter, Karen dies in childbirth. As they are recovering from the tragedy they are visited by a fleet of strange ships commanded by oner and brings them to the castle which is his home. He treats them with a sort of disinterested good humor, except for Joseph, who he makes an honored guest. It is Joseph's skin color that has earned him special privilege. They learn that they have fallen through a flaw in time and are in the world of thousands of years from now, where the European and American nations have all but destroyed themselves in nuclear war; now all power belongs to the unharmed Africans who have taken over and rebuilt on the ruins. Except for Joseph, Farnham's family group is taken into the community as domestic slaves. Farnham himself is turned over to huge slave estate. They are separated and put to work. They are well fed and reasonably housed, but they are slaves nonetheless. In captivity, Barbara bears Farnham's twin children -- which he can never see. He determines to escape. But where is there to go? IF every minute that he could spare, and always wanted the same four, the best players available. It seemed to Hugh that Their Charity was fond of Barbara, as fond as he was of the cat he called "Dok'livstnipsoom" -- never "Doc." Ponse extended to cats the courtesy due equals, and Doc, or any of the cats, was free to jump up into his lap even when he was bidding a difficult hand. He extended the same courtesy and affection to Barbara as he knew her better, always called her "Barba," or "Child," and never again referred to her as "it." Barbara called him "Ponse," or "Uncle," and clearly felt unafraid and happy in his company. Sometimes Ponse left Barbara and Hugh alone in his lounging room, once for more than twenty minutes. These were jewels beyond price; they did not risk losing such a privilege by doing more than hold hands. If it was time to nurse the boys, Barbara said so and Ponse always ordered them fetched up. Once he ordered them fetched to his lounge when it wasn't necessary, said that he had not seen them for a week and wanted to see how much they had grown. So the game waited while their' "Uncle" Ponse got down on the rug and made foolish noises at them. Then he had them taken away. Five minutes of babies was enough. But he said to Barbara, "Child, they're growing like sugar cane. I hope I live to see them grow up." "You'll live a long time. Uncle." "Maybe. I've outlived a dozen food tasters, but that salts no fish. Those brats of ours will make magnificent matched footmen. I can see them now, serving in the banquet hall of the Palace -- the Residence, I mean, not this summer cottage. Whose deal is it?" H ugh saw Grace a few times during this period, but never for more than seconds. If he showed up and she was there, she left at once, displeasure large on her face. If Barbara arrived for bridge before Hugh did, Grace was always out of sight. It was clear that she was an habituee of the lord's informal apartments; it was equally clear that she resented Barbara as much as ever, with bile left over for Hugh. But she never said anything and it seemed likely that she had learned not to cross wills with Their Charity. It was now official that Grace was bedwarmer to Their Charity. Hugh learned this from Kitten, who would happily gossip about anything if encouraged. It appeared that the sluts knew when the lord was in residence (Hugh often did not) by whether Grace was downstairs or up. She was assigned no other duties and even the slutmaster did not dare put her to work on her days of idleness. She was immune to all whips, even Memtok's. She was also, the few times Hugh glimpsed her, lavishly dressed and bejeweled. She was also very fat, so fat that Hugh felt relieved that he no longer had even a nominal obligation to share a bed with her. True, all bedwarmers were fat by Hugh's standards. Even kitten was plump enough that had she been a XXth century American girl, she would have been at least pretending to diet, and talking about it. Kitten did talk about it. She fretted that she was unable to put on weight. Kitten was so young that her plumpness was somewhat pleasing, as with a baby. But Hugh found Grace's fatness another matter. Somewhere in that jiggling mass was buried the beautiful girl he had married. He tried not to think about it and could not see why Ponse would like it -- if he did. But in truth, Hugh admitted, he did not know that Grace was anything more than nominally Ponse's bedwarmer, just as Kitten was to him. After all, Ponse was alleged to be more than a century old. Would Ponse have any more use for one than Memtok had? Hugh did not know -- nor really care. Ponse looked to be perhaps sixty-five and still strong and virile. But Hugh held a private opinion that Grace's role was odalisque, not houri. While the question did not really matter to him, it did to Duke. Hugh's first son came storming into Hugh's office one day and demanded a private interview; Hugh led him to his apartment. He had not seen Duke in nearly a month. Satisfactory translations had been coming in from him; there had been no need to see him. H ugh tried to make the meeting pleasant. "Sit down, Duke. May I offer you a drink of Happiness?" "No, thanks! What's this I hear about Mother?" "What do you hear, Duke?" (Oh, Lord! Here we go again.) "You know damned well what I mean!" "I'm afraid I don't." Hugh made him spell it out, offering no help. Duke had his facts correct and, to Hugh's surprise, had learned them just that day. Since every one of more than four hundred servants had known all along that one of the slut savages -- the other one, not the tall skinny one -- lived upstairs with Their Charity more than she lived in the sluts' quarters, it seemed incredible that Duke had taken so long to find out. However, Duke had very little to do with the other servants and was not popular with them -- "a troublemaker," Memtok had called him. Hugh neither confirmed nor denied Duke's story. "Well?" Duke demanded. "What are you going to do about it?" "About what, Duke? Are you suggesting that I put a stop to servants' hall gossip? I doubt if I could. My usual practice is to ignore it." "I don't mean that at all! Are you going to sit there while your wife is being raped?" "Probably. You come in here with some story you've picked up from a second assistant dishwasher, or some equally reliable source, and expect me to do something. Now, I would like to know, first, why do you think this gossip is true? Second, what has what you have told me got to do with rape? Third, if all or any of it were true, what would you expect me to do about it? Fourth, what, if anything, do you IF think I can do about it? Take them in order and please be specific. Then we may talk about what I will do.' "Quit twisting things around." "Tm not twisting anything. You are. Duke, you had an expensive education as a lawyer -- I know, I picked up the tab. You used to lecture me about 'rules of evidence. Now use some of that education. Take those questions in order. Why do you think this gossip is true? "Uh... I heard it and I checked around. Everybody knows it.' "So? Everybody knew the Earth was flat, at one time. They were wrong. But what is the allegation? Be specific." "Why, I told you. Mother is assigned as that bastard's bedwarmer. "Who says so?" "Why, everybody!' "Did you ask the slutmaster?" "Do you think Fm crazy?" "Fll take that as rhetorical. But to shorten this, what 'everybody knows' as you put it, is that Grace is assigned duties of some sort, upstairs. This seems possible and no doubt could be verified, one way or the other. Possibly in attendance on Their Charity, possibly waiting on the ladies of the household, or perhaps other duties. Do you want me to arrange an appointment for you with the slutmaster, so that you can ask him what duties your mother has? I tell you truthfully that I do not know her duties." "Uh, you ask him." "I shan't. I feel sure that, if I did ask, Grace would regard it as snooping on my part. Let's assume for the moment that you have asked him and that he has told you, as you now suspect only from gossip, that her assignment is as bedwarmer. To Their Charity. On this assumption, made for the sake of argument only, since you certainly haven't proved it -- on this assumption, where does rape come in?" D uke looked astonished. "I would not have believed it, even of you. Do you mean to sit there and say baldly ttiat you think Mother would do such a thing voluntarily? "I long ago gave up trying to guess what your mother would or would not do. But  haven't said she is doing anything. You have. I don't know that her assignment is bedwarmer other than through gossip, gossip which you have repeated without proof. If true, I still would not know if she had ever carried out the assignment by actually getting into his bed, voluntarily or otherwise -- I've never seen his bed nor even heard gossip on this point... just your evil thoughts. But if those thoughts are correct, I still would have no opinion as to whether or not anything other than sleep had taken place. I myself, over the course of years, have shared beds with more than one female and did nothing but sleep; I know it can happen. But in any event I doubt very strongly that Their Charity has ever raped any female in all his long life. I doubt it especially now. Never mind. I see only one way to get at the facts, if any, underlying these foul suspicions in your mind. Ask the Lord Protector." "Go nghi ahead! First sensible thing vou've said." "Oh, not me. Duke. You see, I don't even faintly suspect him of rape. But you can ask him. Simply see the Chief Domestic. You don't have to go through me to see Memtok; you know his policy. He'll see any Palace servant who wants to see him. At the servant's risk, of course, but I doubt if he'll tingle anyone in my department without good cause; I do have some fat cat privileges. Tell him you want an audience with the Lord Protector. I think that is all it will take, although you may have to wait a week or two. If Memtok turns you down, tell me. I fancy I can get him to arrange it Then, when you see the Lord Protector, simply ask him, point blank." "And be lied to. If I ever get that close to that black ape. I'm going to kill him!" Mr. Farnham sighed. "Duke, I don't see how can man can be so wrong-headed so many different ways. If you are granted an audience, Memtok will be right at your side. With his whip. The Lord Protector will probably be about fifty feet away. And the whip he carries doesn't just tingle; it's a deadly weapon. Very. The old man has lived a long time, he's not easy to kill." "I can try!" "So you can. If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not respect his judgment. But you are equally sDly in thinking that Their Charity would lie about it. If he has done what you think he has -- raped your mother, forced her to submit unslightest shame, not in any way reluctant to answer you plainly and honestly. Duke, he would no more bother to lie to you than it would occur to him to step aside if you were in his way. However -- would you believe your mother?" "Of course I would." ('Then tell him also that you A would like to see her. I am almost certain that he would grant the request. For a few minutes and in his presence. The strict harem rules he can break if he chooses. If you have the guts to tell him to his face that you want to hear her confirm whatever he tells you, I think he would be astonished. But I think he would then laugh and grant the petition. If you want to see your mother, assure yourself personally of her welfare and safety, that's all I can suggest. You certainly can't see her otherwise. It's so irregular that your only chance is to spring it on him, face to face." Hugh stood up. "We've wasted enough time in futile talk. Either get back to work, or go see Memtok." "I'm not through." "Oh, yes, you are. That was an order, not a suggestion. Do one or the other, and do it now." "If you think I'm scared of that whip -- " "Oh, heavens, Duke, I wouldn't tingle you myself. You're my son, it might restrain me. If you ever force me to it, I'll ask Memtok to chastise you. He's reputed to be quite exIF pert. Now get out. You've wasted half my morning." Duke left. Hugh stayed a while, trying to compose himself. A row with Duke always left him shaking inside; it had been so when the lad was only twelve. But something else troubled him, too. He had used every sophistry he could think of to divert Duke from a hopeless course. That did not worry him, nor did he share Duke's basic worry. Whatever had happened to Grace, he felt sure that rape was not a factor. But he was sourly aware of something that Duke, in his delusions, apparently did not realize -- the oldest Law of the Conquered, that their ly. Whether his ex-wife had or had not was a matter almost academic. He suspected that she had never been offered the opportunity -- but, either way, she was obviously contented with her lot -- smug about it. That troubled him little; he had tried to do his duty by her, she had long since withdrawn herself from him. But he did not want Barbara ever to feel the deadening load of hopelessness that could -- and had, all through history -- turned chaste Much as he loved her, he had no illusions that Barbara was either angel or saint. The Sabine women had stood no chance and in the long run, neither would she. "Death before dishonor!" was a fine slogan, but it did not wear well. In time, enough time, it changed to happy cooperation. He got out his bottle of Happiness, looked at it... put it back. He would never solve his problems that way. H ugh made no effort to find out whether or not Duke had gone to see Memtok. Hugh got back to work, that day and following days, at his endless task of buttering up Their Charity in every way available to him, whether by good bridge, moneymaking ideas, or simply translating. He no longer had any real hope that the boss would eventually permit him to move Barbara and the twins into his comfortable apartment; old Ponse seemed adamant on that point. But favor at court could be useful, even indispensable, no matter what happened -- and in the meantime it let him see Barbara occasionally. He never gave up his end purpose of escape. As the summer wore on he realized that the chances were very slim indeed of escaping -- all four of them escaping, twins in arms -- that year. Soon the household would move to the city, and so far as he knew the only possible time to escape was when they were near mountains. No matter. A year, two years, even longer, perhaps even wait until the boys could walk. Hard enough even then, but very nearly impossible with babies in arms. He must tell Barbara, with whispered urgency, the very next time they were left alone even for a minute, what he had in mind -- urge her to keep her chin up, and wait. He didn't dare write it in his nightly notes to her. Ponse could get them translated -- other scholars somewhere understood English, even though Joe would never give him away. Would Grace? He hoped not, but couldn't guess. Probably Ponse knew all about these notes, had them translated every day, chuckled over them, and did not care. Perhaps he could work out a code with Barbara -- something as simple as first word, first line, then second word, second line, and so on. Might risk it. He had figured out one thing in their favor, an advantage that might overcome their sad luck of sophistication in this society. It was evident that runaways rarely succeeded because of their appearance. A white skin might be disguised -- but servants average many inches shorter and many pounds lighters than the Chosen. Both Barbara and Hugh were above average height for their own time; they were big enough to pass in that respect for Chosen. Features? The Chosen were not uniform in feature; Hindu influence mixed with Negroid and with other things. His permanent baldness was a problem, he would have to steal a wig. Or make one. But with stolen clothes, squirreled food, weapons of some sort (his two hands!), and makeup -- they might be able to pass for "poor black trash" and safely take to the road. If it wasn't too far. If the hounds did not get them. If they did not make some ridiculous bumble through not knowing the customs. But servants, marked by their complexion, were not allowed to go one step outside the household, farm. ranch, or whatever was their lawful cage -- without a pass from their patron. Perhaps he could learn what a pass looked like, forge one. No, that was useless. Barbara and he could not travel as servants on a forged pass for the very reasons that made it dimly possible for them to disguise as Chosen: Their size was too distinctive, a pickup call for them would be carried out on sight. T he more Hugh thought about it the more it seemed to him that he would have to wait at least until the next summer and then make a quick run for the mountains. If they were among the servants picked for the Summer Palace next year -- if they both were -- if all four were -- He had not thought of that angle. Christ! Their little family might never be all under this one roof again. Perhaps they would have to run for it, right here, right now, in the short time left before the move -- run and take a chance on hounds, on bears, on those nasty little leopards... with two nursing babies to protect. God! Was ever a man faced with poorer chances for saving his family? Yes. He himself had been -- when he built that shelter. Prepare every way he could... and pray for a miracle. He started saving food from meals served in his rooms, such sorts as would keep a while. He kept his eyes open to steal a knife -- or anything that could be made into a knife. He carefully kept what he was doing from Kitten's eyes. IF Not once did he consider starting out some night alone. Much sooner than he had hoped he got a chance to acquire makeup. A feast day always meant an orgy of Happiness in servants' hall; one came along that featured amateur theatricals. Hugh was urged to clown the part of Lord Protector in a comic skit. He did not hesitate to do so. Memtok himself had pointed out that his size made him perfect for the part. Hugh roared through it, brandishing a quirt three times as big as Their Charity ever carried. He was a dramatic success. He saw Ponse watching the fun from the balcony from which Hugh had first seen Happiness issued, watching and laughing."So Hugh ad-libbed, calling out, "Hey, less noise up theiol Memtok! Tingle that critter!" Their Charity laughed harder than ever, the servants were almost hysterical and, at bridge the following day, Ponse patted him and told him that he was the best Lord of Nonsense that the pageant had ever had. Result: one stolen package of pigment which needed only to be mixed with the plentiful deodorant cream to be makeup as good as Max Factor ever sold to make him the exact shade of the Lord Protector; one wig which covered his baldness with black wavy hair. It was not the wig he had worn in the skit; he had turned that one back to the chief housekeeper, picking a time under Memtok's eyes and urging Memtok to try it on to see how it would look. No, it was a wig he had tried on out of several saved from year to year -- and which had fitted him just as well. He tried it on, dropped it, kicked it into a corner, recovered it in private -- and kept it hidden under his robe for several days until it seemed certain that it hadn't been missed. Then it wound up under a heavy file case in his outer office one night when he chose to work later than his clerks. He was still looking for something he could grind into a knife. H e did not see Duke during the three weeks following their row. Sometimes Duke's translations came in, sometimes he skipped a day or two; Hugh let him get away with it. But when Hugh could not recall having seen any scrolls come through of the sort Duke was concerned with for a full week, Hugh decided that he ought to check up. Eventually Ponse might notice; Duke might get into trouble. Or get Hugh into trouble. Hugh walked around to the combined study and bedroom that was Duke's privilege for being a "researcher in history." He scratched on the door -- no answer. He scratched again, decided that Duke was sleeping, or not in; he slid the door up and looked in. Duke was not asleep but he was out of this world. He was sprawled naked on his bunk in the most allout Happiness jag Hugh had ever seen. Duke looked up when the door opened, giggled foolishly, made a wide gesture, and said, "Hiyah, y'ole bas'ard! How's tricks?" Hugh stepped closer for a better look at what he thought he saw and felt sick at his stomach. "Son, son!" "Still crepe-hanging, Hughie? Old hooey Hugh!" Gulping, Hugh started to back out, and backed almost into the Chief Veterinarian. The surgeon smiled and said, "Visiting my patient? He hardly needs it." He moved past Hugh with a muttered apology, leaned over Duke, peeled an eyelid back, examined him in other ways, said to him jovially, "You're doing fine, cousin. Let's give you another treatment, then I'll send you in another big meal. How does that sound?" "Jus' fine. Doc. Jus' dandy! You're my frien'. Best frien' never had!" The vet set a dial on a little instrument, pressed it against Duke's thigh, waited a moment, and came out. He smiled at Hugh. "Practically recovered. He'll dream a few hours now, wake up very hungry, and not know any time has passed. Then we'll feed him and give him another dose. A fine patient, he's rallied beautifully. Doesn't know what's happened. And by the time we're ready to taper him off, he won't be interested." 'Who ordered this? The surgeon looked surprised. "The Chief Domestic, of course. Why?" "Why wasn't I told?" "I really don't know, better ask him. I got it as a routine order, we carried it out in the routine fashion. Sleeping powder in his evening meal, I mean, then surgery that night. Followed by post-surgical care and the usual massive dosage to keep him IF tranquil. It tends to make some of them a little nervous at first, we vary it to suitthe patient. But, as you can see, this patient has taken it as easily as pulling a tooth. By the way, that bridge I installed in your mouth. Satisfactory?" "What? Yes. Never mind that! I want to know -- " "May it please you, the Chief Domestic is the one to see. Now, if this one may be excused, Fm overdue to hold sick call. I merely stopped by to make sure my patient was happy." Hugh let him go, then went to his apartment and threw up. Then he went looking for Memtok. M emtok seemed pleased to see him, received him into his office at once, invited him to sit down. Hugh had begun to value the Chief Domestic as a friend, or as the nearest thing he had to a friend below stairs. Memtok had formed a habit of dropping in on Hugh in the evenings occasionally and, despite the boss servant's vinegary approach to life and the vast difference in their backgrounds and values, Hugh found him shrewd and always stimulating and extremely well informed within his limits. Besides Memtok seemed to have the loneliness that a ship's captain must endure; he seemed pleased to relax and enjoy friendship. Since the other upper servants were correctly polite with the Chief Researcher rather than warm, Hugh, lonesome himself, had enjoyed Memtok's unbending and had thought of him as his friend. Until this -- Hugh told Memtok bluntly, without protocol, what was on his mind. "Why did you do this?" Memtok looked surprised. "Such a question! Such a very improper question, in fact. Because the Lord Protector ordered it." "He did? "My dear cousin! Tempering is always by the lord's order. Oh, I recommend, to be sure; that's routine. But orders for alterations must come from above. However, if it is any business of yours, in this case I made no recommendation. I was simply given the order, I had it carried out. All." "Certainly it was my business! He works for me." "Oh! But he had already been transferred before this was done. Else I would have made a point of telling you, believe me. Propriety, cousin, propriety in all things. I hold subordinates strictly accountable, as you know. So I never undercut them. Can't run a taut household if one does. Fair is fair." " wasn't told he was transferred. Don't you count that as undercutting?" "Oh, but you were." The Chief Domestic glanced at the enormous rack of pigeon holes backing his desk, searched briefly, pulled out a slip. "There it is." Hugh looked at it. "Duty Assignment. Change In. One servant, male (savage, rescued  adopted), known as Duke, description -- " Hugh skipped on down. " -- relieved of all duties in the Department of Ancient History and assigned to the personal service of Their Charity, effective immediately. Billeting  Messing assignments: Unchanged until further -- " "I never saw this!" "No, it's my file copy. You got the original." Memtok pointed at the lower left corner. "Your deputy clerk's sign. It always pleases me when my executive can read and write, it makes things so much more orderly. With an ignoramus like the Chief Groundskeeper, one can tell him until one's throat is raw and later the stupid lout will claim that wasn't the way he heard it -- yet a good tingling improves his memory only for that one day. Disheartening. One can't be forever tingling an upper servant, it simply doesn't work." Memtok sighed. "I'd recommend a change, if his assistant wasn't even stupider." "Memtok, I still never saw this." "As may be. It was delivered, your deputy receipted for it. Look around your office. One bullock gets you three you'll find it. Perhaps you'd like me to tingle your deputy? Glad to." #tXTo, no." Memtok was almostL  certainly right, the order was probably on his own desk, unread. Hugh's department had grown to two or three dozen people, he did not .know how many; there seemed to be more every day. Most of them seemed to be button sorters or some such, all of them wanted to take up his time. Hugh had long since told the earnest, fairly literate clerk who was his deputy that he was not to be bothered with anything short of an emergency. Otherwise Hugh would have accomplished no translating after the first week; Parkinson's Law had taken over. The clerk had obeyed, after some reprimands, and routine matters stacked up. Every week or so Hugh would go through the stack rapidly, shove it all back at his deputy for file or burning or whatever it was they did with useless papers. Probably the order transferring Duke was in the current accumulation. If he had seen it in time -- Too late, too late! He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face. Too late! Oh, my son! Memtok touched his shoulder almost gently. "Cousin, take hold of yourself. Your prerogatives were not abridged. You see that, do you not?" "Yes. Yes, I see it," Hugh mumbled through his hands. "Then why are you so overwrought?" "He was -- He is -- my son." "He is? Then why are you behaving as if he were your nephew?" Memtok used the specific form, meaning "your eldest sister's oldest son" and he was honestly puzzled by the savage's odd reaction. He could understand a mother being interested in her son -- or her oldest son, at least. But a father? Uncle! Memtok had sons, he was statistically certain, throughout the household -- "One-Shot Memtok" the former slutmaster used to call him. But he didn't know who they were and could not imagine wanting to know. Or caring. "Because -- " Hugh started. "Oh, forget it, forget it. You did your duty. Conceded." IF "Well -- You still seem upset. I'll send out for a bottle of Hapiness. ril join you, this once." "No. No, thank you." "Oh, come, come! You need it. A tonic is excellent, it is excess that one must avoid." "Thanks, Memtok, but I really don't want it. Right now I must be sharp, especially so. I want to see Their Charity. Right away if possible. Will you arrange it for me?" "I can't do that." "Damn it, I know that you can. And I know he will see me if you ask him." "Cousin, I didn't say that I would not; I said T cant. Their Charity is not in residence." "Oh." Then he asked to have word sent to Joe -- Joe would surely know what had happened, and why. But the Chief Domestic told him that the young Chosen had left with the Lord Protector. He promised to let Hugh know when either or both of them returned -- yes, at once, cousin. H ugh skipped dinner, went to his rooms and brooded. He could not avoid tormenting himself with the thought that it was, in part at least, his own fault -- no, no, not for failing to read every useless paper that came into his office the instant it arrived; no, that was sheer bad luck. Even if he checked his "junk mail" each morning, it probably would have been too late. The two orders had probably gone out at the same time. What did anguish his soul was fear that he had pushed the first domino, in that quarrel with Duke the last time he had seen him. He could have lied to the boy, told him flatly that his mother was, to Hugh's certain knowledge, a maid-in-waiting or some such, to the Lord Protector's sister, safe inside the royal harem and never seen by a man. Pampered, living the life of Riley, and happy in it -- and that other tale was just the gossip servants talk to fill their idle minds. Duke would have believed it because Duke would have wanted to believe it, and would have had no way to disprove it. As it was -- Perhaps Duke had gone to see Their Charity. Perhaps Memtok had arranged it, or perhaps Duke had simply tried to hull his way in and the row had reached Ponse's ears. In any case it was more than possible, he saw now, that his advice to Duke to see the head man might well have resulted in a scene that would have caused Potise to order the tempering as casually as he would order his air coach. All too likely -- He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person's actions. He believed it, he tried to live by it. But he found that cold intellectual wisdom no comfort. At last he quit brooding, got writing materials, and got to work on a letter to Barbara. He had had not even a moment's chance to tell her his plans for them to escape, no chance to work up a code. But from here on she must be ready at no notice. He must tell her immediately, somehow. Barbara knew German, he himself had a smattering left over from one high school year of it. He could not speak, read, nor understand it --  but he recalled some words. He knew enough Russian to stumble through a simple conversation. Barbara had picked up a few words from him during their time in the wilderness -- a game that they could share without giving Grace cause for jealousy -- they often annoyed Grace unintentionally. H e wrote a draft of what he wanted to say, then painfully translated the letter into a mishmash of German, Russian, colloquial English, beatnik jive, literary allusions pig Latin, and special idioms. In the end he had a message that he was sure Barbara could puzzle out, but he was certain that no students of ancient languages could translate it into Language even in the unlikely event that the scholar knew English, German, and Russian. He was not afraid that it might be translated by anyone else. If Grace saw it, she pronounce it gibberish; she knew no Russian, no German. Duke was off in a drugridden dreamworld. Joe might guess at the meaning -- Joe was sharp -- but he trusted Joe not to give him away. Nevertheless he tried to conceal the meaning even from Joe, intentionally hashing the syntax and using deliberate and obvious misspellings. The draft read: My darling, I have been planning our escape for tome time. I do not know how I will manage it but I want you to be ready, day or night, to grab the twins and simply follow me. Steal food if you can, steal some stout shoes, steal a knife. We'll head for the mountains. I had intended to wait until next summer, let the boys grow some first. But something has happened to change my mind: Duke has been tempered. I don't know why and Tm too heartbroken to talk about it. But it could happen to me next. Worse than that. You remember Ponse's saying that he wanted to seo our twins as matched footmen? Darling, studs do not serve in the Banquet Hall. Nor is there any other fate in store for them; they are both going to be tall. It must not happen! And we can't wait. The caital city of the Protectorate is somewhere near where St. Louis used to be. We can't run all the way to the Rocky Mountains carrying our two boys -- and we have no way of knowing (and no reason to expect) that all four of us will be sent here to the Summer Palace next year. Be brave. Don't touch any Happiness drug in any form from here on; our chance is likely to be a split-second one, with no warning. I love you, Hugh Kitten came in; he told her to watch the show, not bother him. Tho child obeyed. The final draft read: Luba, Ya bin smoking komplott seit Hector was weaned. The Count of Monte Cristo bit, dig? Kinder too klein machs nix -- ya hawchool Goldilocks' troubles machs nix -- as the fellow said, it's the only game in town. Good Girl Scouts always follow the Boy Scout motto. Speise, schuhen, messer -- what Fagin taught Oliver, nicht? Dal Schnell is die her von duh aparat; Berlin is too far from the Big Rock Candy and Eliza would never make the final curtain. Ein ander jahr, nyet. It takes twa to tango and four to play bridge, all in ein kammer, or the trek is dreck. A house divided is for the voqelen, like doom. Mehr, ya haben schrecken. Mein Kronprinz now rules only the Duchy of Abelard. Page Christine Jorgenson, he answers -- I kid you not Spilt milk but ters no parsnips after the barn is burned so weep no more, my lady -- but falsetto is not the pitch for detski whose horoscope reads Gemini. Borjemoi! Old King Coal is a Merry Old Soul thee. Better a bonny bairn beards baren Karen -- is ratification unanimous? Igday eemay? Verb. Sap: I don't drink, smoke, nor chew, nor run around with twists who do. Cloud nine is endsville for this bit. Write soon, even if it's only five dollars utbay swing the jive; the dump is bugged and the Gay Pay Oo is eager. Forever -- H. Kitten was long asleep before Hugh finished composing this jargon. He then tore the draft into bits and dropped it down the whirlpool toilet, went to bed. After a long time haunted by Duke's giggling, foolish, happy, drug-blurred face he got up and broke his own injunction to Barbara, dosed his sorrows and his fears with bottled "Happiness." Barbara's answer came the next day. It read: Darling, When you bid three no-trump, my answer is seven no-trump, without hesitation. Then it's a grand slam -- or we go sot and don't cry. Any time you can get four together we'll be ready to play. Love alwaysB. Nothing else happened that day. Nor the next -- or the next. Hugh doggedly dictated translations, his mind not on his work. He was very careful what he ate or drank, since he now knew the surgeon's humane way of sneaking up on a victim; he ate only from dishes Memtok had eaten from, tried to be crafty by never accepting a fruit or a roll that was closest to him when a servant offered him such, avoided drinking anything at the table -- he drank only water which he himself had taken from the tap. He continued to have breakfast in his room, but he started passing up many foods that he liked in favor of unpeeled fruits and boiled eggs in the shell. He knew these precautions were futile. No determined Borgia would have found them difficult to outwit, and in any case, if orders came to temper him, they need only grab him after subduing him with a whip if it proved difficult to drug him. But at least he might have time to protest, to demand that he be taken before the Lord Protector. As for whips -- He resumed his karate practice, alone in his rooms. A karate blow delivered fast enough would cause even a whip wi elder to lose interest. There was no real hope behind any of it. He simply intended not to go peacefully. Duke had been right; it would have been better to have fought and died at once. He made no attempt to see Duke. He continued to hide food from his breakfast tray, sugar mostly, salt, and some hard bread. He assumed diat such food must be undrugged even though he ate none of it at the time, because it did not affect Kitten. He had been going barefoot most of the time but wearing felt slippers for his daily exercise walks in the servants' garden. Now he complained to Memtok that the gravel hurt his feet through these silly slippers -- didn't the household afford anything better? He was given heavy leather sandals, wore them thereafter in the garden. He cultivated the household's chief engineer, telling him that, in his youth, he had been in charge of construction for his former lord. The engineer was flattered, being not only one of the junior executive servants but also in the habit of hearing mostly complaints rather than friendly interest. Hugh sat with him after dinner and managed to appear knowledgeable largely by listening. Hugh was invited to look around the plant, and spent a tiring morning the next day crawling over pipes and looking at plans -- the engineer could not write but could read a little and understood drawings. It would have been an interesting day in itself if Hugh had been free from worries; Hugh's background made construction and engineering interesting to him. But he concentrated on trying to memorize every drawing he saw, match it in his mind with the passageways and rooms he was taken through. He had a deadly serious purpose; Despite having lived most of a summer in this big IF building, he knew only small pieces of it inside and only a walled garden outside. He needed to know every possible exit from servants' quarters, what lay behind the guarded door to sluts' quarters, it layout, and most particularly, where in that area Barbara and the twins lived. H e got as far as the meander door that led into the distaff side. The engineer hesitated when the guard suddenly became alert. He said, "Cousin Hugh, I'm sure it's all right for you to go in here, with me -- but maybe we had better go up to the Chief Domestic's office and have him write you out a pass." "Whatever you say, cousin." "Well, there really isn't anything of interest in here. Just the usual appointments of a barracks -- water, lights, air service, plumbing, baths, such things. All the interesting stuff, power plant, incinerator, air control, and so forth, is elsewhere. And you know how the boss is -- likely to fret over any variation from routine. If it's all the same to you. I'll make my morning inspection in there this afternoon." "However you want to arrange things," Hugh answered with a suggestion of affronted dignity. "Well... everybody knows you're not one of those disgusting young studs." The engineer looked embarrassed. "Tell you what. You just tell me flatly that you want to see everytbing... in my department that is... and I'll trot up to Memtok and tell him you said so. He knows -- Uncle! We all know -- that you enjoy the favor of Their Charity. You understand me? I don't mean to presume. Memtok will write out a pass right quick and I'll be in the clear and so will the guard and the head guard. You wait here and be comfortable. I'll hurry." "Don't bother. There's nothing, in there I want to see," Hugh lied. "You've seen one bath, you've seen 'em all, I always say." The engineer smiled in relief. "That's a good one, I'll remember that. 'You've seen one bath, you've seen 'em all!' Ha ha! Well, we've stiU got the carpentry shop and the metal shop." Hugh went on with him, arm in arm and jovial, while fuming inside. So close! Yet letting Memtok suspect that he had any special interest in sluts' quarters was the last thing he wanted. But the morning was well spent. Not only did Hugh acquire a burglar's insight as to strong and weak points of the building (that delivery door to the unloading dock; if it was merely locked at night, it should be possible to break out. "Gve me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to rest it on -- ") but also he picked up two prizes. The first was a broken piece of spring steel, about eight inches long. Hugh palmed it from some scrap in the metal shop; it wound up taped to his arm, after an unneeded plumbing call, for he had gone prepared to steal. The second was even more of a prize: a printed drawing of the lowest level, with engineering installatipns shown boldly -- but with every door and passage marked -- including sluts' quarters. Hugh had admired it. "Uncle, but that's a beautiful drawing! Your own work?" The engineer shyly admitted that it was. Based on architect's plans, you understand -- but changes keep having to be added. "Beautiful!" Hugh repeated. "It's a shame there's only one copy." "Oh, plenty of copies, they wear out. Would you like one?" "I would treasure it. Especially if the artist would inscribe it to me." When the man hesitated, Hugh moved in fast and said, "May I suggest a wording? Here, I'll write it out and you copy it." Hugh walked away with the print, inscribed: "To my dear cousin Hugh, a fellow craftsman who appreciates beautiful work." T hat night he showed it to Kitten. The child was awestruck. She had no concept of maps and was fascinated bv the idea that it was possible to put down, just on a piece of paper, the long passages and twisty turns of her world. Hugh showed her how one went from his quarters to the ramp leading up to the executive servants' dining room, where the servants' main dining hall was, how the passage outside led, by two turns, to the garden. She confirmed the routes slowlv, frowning in unaccustomed mental effort. "You must live somewhere over here. Kitten. This area is sluts' quarters." "It is?" she asked, incredulous. "Yes. See if you can find where you live. I won't show you, you know how now. I'll just sit back." "Oh. Uncle help me! Let me see. First, I have to come down this ramp -- " She paused to think while Hugh kept his face impassive. She had just confirmed what he had almost stopped suspecting; the child was a planted spy. " -- then... this is the door?" "That's right." "Then I walk straight ahead past the slutmaster's office, clear to the end. and I turn, and... I must live right therer She clapped her hands and giggled. "Your billet is across from your mess hall?" "Yes." "Then you got it right, first time! That's wonderful! Now let's see what else you can figure out." For the next quarter hour she took him on a tour of sluts' quarters -- junior and senior common rooms, messes, virgins' dormitory, bed warmers' sleep room, nursery, lying-in, children's hall, service stalls, baths, playground door, garden door, offices, senior matron's apartment, everything -- and Hugh learned that Barbara was no longer billeted in lying-in. He didn't ask. Kitten volunteered it. "Barbara -- you know, the savage slut you write to -- she used to be there at first, and now she's right there. "How can you tell? Those rooms all look alike." " can tell. It's the second one of IF the four-molher rooms on this side, when you walk away from the baths." Hugh noted with deep interest that a maintenance tunnel ran under the baths, with an access manhole in the very passage Barbara's room was on -- and with even deeper interest that this seemed to connect with another one that ran clear across the building. Could it be that here was a wide-open unguarded route between all three main areas of servants' land? Surely not, as the lines seemed to show that any stud with initiative need only crawl a hundred yards in the dark to let himself into sluts' quarters. Yet it might be true -- for how would any stud know where those tunnels led? And why would a stud risk it if he guessed? With the ratio of intact males to breeding sluts about that of bulls to cows on a cattle ranch. And could thumbless hands handle the fastenings? For that matter, could those trap doors be opened from below? It might very well be impossible, probably was. "You're a fast learner. Kitten. Now try a prt you don't know as well. Figure out, on the drawing, how to get from our rooms here to my offices. And if you solve that one, here's a harder one. What turns you would take and what ramp you would use if I told you to take a message to the Chief Domestic?" She solved the first one after puzzling, the second she traced without hesitation. A t lunch next day, with Memtok at his elbow, Hugh called down the table to the engineer. "Pipes old cousin! That beautiful drawing you gave me yesterday -- do you suppose one of your woodworkers could frame it for me? I'd like to hang it over my desk where people can. admire it." The engineer flushed and grinned widely. "Certainly, Cousin Hugh! How about a nice, clear-grained piece of mahogany?" "Perfect." Hugh turned to his left. "Cousin Memtok, our cousin is wasted on pipes and plumbing. He's an artist. As soon as I have it hung, you must stop by and see what I mean." "Glad to. Cousin. When I find time. If I find time." More than a week passed with no word about Their Charity, nor about Joe -- a week of no bridge, and no Barbara. At last, one day at lunch, Memtok said, "By the way, I had been meaning to tell you, the young Chosen Joseph has returned. Do you still want to see him?" "Certainly. Is Their Charity also in residence?" "No. Their Gracious sister believes that he may not return until after we go home. Ah, you must see that. Cousin! Not a cottage like this. Great doings night and day -- and this humble servant will be lucky to get three meals in peace all winter. Run, run, run, worry, worry, worry, problems popping right and left," he said with unctuous satisfaction. "Be glad you're a scholar." Word came a couple of hours later that Joe expected Hugh. Ho knew his way, having been to Joe's guestrooms to help teach bridge to Chosen, so he went up alone, passed the check points and was escorted from the last one to Joe's door. Joe greeted him enthusiastically. "Come in, Hugh! Find a seat. No protocol, nobody here but us chickens. Wait till you hear all I've accomplished. Boy, have I been busy! One shop all ready to go as a pilot plant before Their Charity finished wangling the protection, all on the Q.T. But so organized that we were in production the same day protection was granted. Not bad terms, either. Their Mercy takes half. Their Charity hangs onto half and floats the financing, and out of Their Charity's half I'm cut in for ten per cent and manage the company. Of course as we branch out and into other lines -- the whole thing is called 'Inspired Games' and the charter is written to cover almost any fun you can have outside of bed -- as we branch out. I'll need help in management. And that's a sticky problem; I'm scared silly that old Ponse is going to want me to put some of his dull-witted relatives in. Hope not, there's no place for nepotism when you're trying to hold coats and turn an honest bullock. Probably best to train servants for it -- cheaper in the long run, with the right sort. How about you, Hugh? Do you think you could swing the management of a factory? It's a big job. I've got a hundred and seven people working there already." #j don't see why not. I've bossed #three times that many risking my own money, and never missed a payroll -- and I once bossed over two thousand skilled trades of all sorts when I was in the Seabees. But, Joe, I came up here with something on my mind." "Uh, all right, all right, spill it. Then I want to show you the layout. And the plans." "Joe, you know about Duke?" "What about Duke?" "Tempered. Didn't you know?" "Oh. Yes, I knew. That happened just about as I left. He's not hurt, is he? Complications?" " 'Hurt?' Joe, he was tempered. You act as if he had merely had a tooth pulled. You knew? Didn't you try to stop it?" "No." "In the name of God, why not?' "Let me finish, can't you? I don't recall that you tried to stop it, either." "I never had the chance. I never knew." "Neither did I. That's what I've been trying to tell you, but you keep jumping down my throat. I learned about it the morning after it happened." "Oh. Sorry. I thought you meant you just stood by and let it happen." "Well, I didn't. Don't know what I could have done if I had known. Maybe asked Ponse to call you in and tell you, first, I suppose. Wouldn't have done any good, so I guess we were both better off not having to fret about it. Maybe all for the best. Now about our plans. If IF you have a look at this schematic layout, you'll see -- " "Joe!" "Huh?" "Can't you see I'm in no shape to talk about playing-card factories?" Joe folded up his plans. "I'm sorry, Hugh. Let's sit down together and you talk, if it will make you feel better. I guess I'm pretty preoccupied with this venture. It's exciting. But get it off your chest. I suppose you do feel bad about it. Looking at it from one angle." Joe listened, Hugh talked. Presently Joe shook his head. "Hugh, I can set your mind at rest on one point. Duke never did see the Lord Protector. Never asked to, so far as I know. So your advice to Duke -- good enough advice, I think -- could not have had anything to do with his being tempered." "I hope you're right. I'd feel like cutting my throat if I knew it was my fault." "It's not, so quit fretting about it." "I'll try. Joe, whatever possessed Ponse to do it. He knew how we felt about it, from that time it almost happened through a misunderstanding. So why would he? I thought he was my friend." Joe looked embarrassed. "You really want to know?" "I've got to know." "Well... you're bound to find out. Grace did it." That? Joe. you must be mis  taken. Sure, sure, Grace has her faults. But she wouldn't have that done to her own son." "Well, no, not exactly. I doubt if she knew what it was until after it was done. But, just the same, she' set it off. She's been wheedling Ponse and whining at him almost from the day we got here that she wanted her Dukie with her. She was lonesome. Tonsie, I'm lonesome. Ponsie, you're being mean to Gracie. Ponsie, I'm going to tickle you until you say Yes. Ponsie, why won't you?' -- all in that baby whine she uses sometimes. Always uses now, I should say. Hugh, I guess you didn't see much of it." "None of it." "I would have wrung her neck. But Ponse just ignored her, except when she tickled him. Then he would laugh and they would roll on the floor and he would tell her to shut up, and make her sit quiet for a while. Treated her just like one of the cats. Honest, I don't think he ever -- I mean, it doesn't seem likely, from what I saw that he was interested in her as a -- " "And I'm not interested. Didn't anybody tell Grace what it would entail, for her to have her son with her?" "Hugh. I don't think so. It would never occur to Ponse that any explanation was required... and certainly I never discussed it with her. Not that she ever talked to me much. She doesn't like me any more, I take up too much of her Ponsie's time." Joe wrinkled his nose. "I doubt if she knew. Of course she should have figured it out on her own. Anybody else would have. But, excuse me, since she's your wife. but I'm not sure she's bright enough." "And hopped up on Happiness, too -- every time I caught sight of her. No, she's not bright. But she's not my wife, either. Barbara is my wife." "Well... legally speaking, a servant can't have a wife." "I wasn't speaking legally, I was speaking the truth. But even though Grace is no longer my wife, I'm somewhat comforted to know that she probably didn't push it knowing what it would cost Duke." Joe looked thoughful. "Hugh, I don't think she did... but I don't think she really cares, either... and I'm not sure that you can properly say that it cost Duke anything." "You might explain those statements. Perhaps I'm dense." "Well, if Grace minds that Duke has been tempered, she certainly doesn't show it. She's pleased as punch. And he doesn't seem to mind." "You've seen them? Since?" "Oh, yes. I had breakfast with Their Charity yesterday morning. They were both there." "I thought Ponse was still away?" iCT Te was back and now he's A I gone out to the west coast. Business. We're really tearing into it. He was only here a couple of days. But he had this birthday present for Grace. Duke, I mean. Yes, I know it wasn't her birthday, hers k in December, as I recall, and anyhow birthdays aren't anything nowadays; it's namedays that counts. But she told Ponse she was about to have a birthday and kept wheedling him -- and you know Ponse, indulgent with animals and kids. And with Grace. So he set it up as a surprise for her. The minute he was back, he made a present of Duke to her. Shucks, they've even got a room somewhere off Ponse's private quarters. Neither one of them has to sleep below stairs any longer, they live up here. In the private-private quarters I mean. Where you've been, where we play bridge." "Okay, I don't care where they sleep. You were telling me how Grace felt about it. And Duke." "Oh, yes. Can't say just when she found out what had been done to Duke to make it possible for him to be with her, all I can say is that she is so happy about it that she was even cordial with me -- telling me what a dear Ponsie was to arrange it and doesn't Dukie look just grand? In his new clothes? Stuff like that. She's got him dressed in the fancy livery the servants wear up here, not a robe like that you're wearing. She's even put jewelry on him. Ponse doesn't mind. He's an outright gift, a servant's servant, Grace's. Actually I don't think he does a lick of work, he's just her pet. And she loves it that way." "But how about Duke?" Hugh persisted. "That's what I've been telling you, Hugh. Duke hasn't lost by it. He's snug as a bug in a rug and he knows it. He was almost patronizing to me. You might have thought I IF was the one wearing livery instead of the other way around. With Grace in solid with the big boss and with her wound around his little finger, Duke thinks he's got it made. Well, he has, Hugh. And I didn't mind his manner; I could see he was hopped on this tranquilizer you servants use." "You call it 'got it made' when a man is grabbed and drugged and tempered and then kept drugged so that he doesn't care what happens to him? Joe, I'm surprised. I'm shocked." "Certainly I call it that. Hugh, put your prejudices aside and look at it rationally. Duke is happy. If you don't believe it, let me take you in there and you talk to him. Talk to both of them. I'm free to go in there even when Their Charity is not in residence and I'll take the liberty of taking you with me, though I shouldn't. See for yourself." "No, I'll take your word for it, I don't think I could stomach it. I'll concede that Duke is happy. I'm well aware that, if you feed a man enough of that 'Happiness' drug, he'll be happy as a lark even if you cut off his arms and legs and then start on his head. But you can be that sort of 'happy' on morphine. Or heroin. Or opium. That doesn't make it a good thing. It's a tragedy." "Oh, don't be melodramatic, Hugh. These things are all relative. Consider it in its frame. Duke was certain to be tempered eventually. It's not lawful for a servant as big as he is to be kept for stud. I'm sure you know that. So what difference does it make whether it's done last week, or next year, or when Ponse dies. The only difference is that he is happy in a life of luxury, instead of hard manual labor in a mine, or a rice swamp, or such. He doesn't know anything useful, he could never hope to rise very high. High for a servant, I mean." "Joe, do you know .what you sound like? Like some white-supremacy apologist telling how well off the darkies used to be, a-sittin' outside their cabins, a-strummin' their banjoes, and singin' spirituals." Joe blinked. "I could resent that." H ugh Farnham was angry and feeling reckless. "Go ahead and resent it! I can't stop you. You're a Chosen, I'm a servant. Can I fetch your white sheet for you, Massah? What time does the Klan meet?" "Shut up!" Hugh Farnham shut up. Joe went on quietly, "I won't bandy words with you. I suppose it does look that way, to you. If so, do you expect me to weep? The shoe is on the other foot, that's all -- and high time. I used to be a servant. Now I'm a respected businessman -- with a good chance of becoming a nephew by marriage of some noble family. Do you think I would swap back, even if I could? For Duke? Not for anybody, I'm no hypocrite. I was a servant, now you are one. What are you beefing about?" "Joe, you were a decently treated employee. You were not a slave." The younger man's eyes suddenly became opaque and his features took on an ebony hardness Hugh had never seen in him before. "Hugh," he said softly, "have you ever made a bus trip through Alabama? As a 'nigger'?" "No." "Then shut up. You don't know what you are talking about." He went on, "The subject is closed and now we'll talk business. I do want you to see what I've done and am planning to do. This games notion is the best idea I ever had." Hugh did not argue whose idea it had been; he listened while the young man went on with eager enthusiasm. At last Joe put down his pen and sat back. "What do you think of it? Any suggestions? You made some useful suggestions when I proposed it to Ponse -- keep on being useful and there will be a good place in it for you." H ugh hesitated. It seemed to him that Joe's plans were too ambitious in the early stages in view of the fact that the market was only a potential and a demand had yet to be created. He did not say so. All he said was, "It might be worth while to package with each deck, no extra charge, a rule book." "Oh, no, we'll sell those separately. Make money on them. " "I didn't mean a complete Hoyle. Just a pamphlet with some of the simpler games. Cribbage. A couple of solitaire games. One or two others. Do that and the customers start enjoying them at once. It should lead to more sales." "Hmm. Pll think about it." Joe folded up his papers, set them aside. "Hugh, you got so shirty a while ago that I didn't tell you one thing I have in mind." "Yes?" "Ponse is a grand old man, but he isn't going to live forever. I plan to have my own affairs separate from his by then so that I'll be financially independent. Trade around interests somehow, untangle it. I guess I don't need to tell you that I'm not anxious to have Mrika as my boss -- and I didn't tell you, so don't repeat it. But I'll manage it. I'm looking out for number one." He grinned. "And when Mrika is Lord Protector I won't be living here. I'll have a household of my own, a modest one -- and I'll need servants. Guess whom I plan to adopt when I staff it." "I couldn't." "Not you -- although you may very well be a business servant to me, if it turns out you really can manage a job. No, I had in mind adopting Grace and Duke." "Huh?" "Surprised? Mrika won't want them, that's certain. He despises Grace because of her influence over his uncle, and it's a sure thing he's not going to like Duke any better. Neither of them is trained and it shouldn't be expensive to adopt them from him if I don't appear to eager. But they would be useful to me. For one thing, since they speak English, I'd be able to talk to them in a language nobody else knows. And that could be an advantage, especiIF ally when other servants are around. But best of all -- well, the food here is good but sometimes I get a longing for some plain old American cooking. And Grace is a very good cook, when she wants to be. So ##I make her a cook. Duke can't cook but he can learn to wait on table and answer the door and such. Houseboy, in other words." Hugh said slowly, "Joe, you don't want them because Grace can cook." Joe grinned unashamedly. "No, not entirely. I think Duke would look real good as my houseboy. And Grace as my cook. Tit for tat. Oh, ril treat them decently, Hugh, don't you worry. They work hard and behave themselves and they won't get tingled. However, I don't doubt but what it will take a few tingles before they get the idea." He twitched his quirt. "And I won't say I won't enjoy teaching them. I owe them both a little. Three years, Hugh. Three years of Grace's endless demands, never satisfied with anything -- and three years of being treated with patronizing contempt by Duke whenever he was around." Hugh said nothing. Joe said, "Well? What do you think of my plan?" "I thought you were a gentleman, Joe. It seems I was wrong." "So?" Joe barely twitched his quirt. "Boy, we excuse you. All." H ugh came away from Joe's rooms feeling uttedy discoiwaged. He knew that he had been foolish -- no, criminally careless! -- in lotting Joe get his goat. He needed Joe. Until he had Barbara and the twins safely hidden in the high mountains, he needed every possible source of favor and privilege. Joe, Memtok, Ponse, anyone he could find -- and probably Joe most of all. Joe was a Chosen. Joe could go anywhere, tell him things he didn't know, give him things he could not possibly steal. He had even considered, as a last resort, asking Joe to plot with him, help them to escape. Not now! It would take long and careful buttering before he could risk that. Idiot! Utter fool! To risk Barbara and the boys just because you can't hold your bloody temper! It seemed to him that things were as bad as they could get -- and part of it his own folly. But he soon learned that things could be much worse. He did not stand around moping; he looked up Memtok. It had become more urgent than ever to set up some way to communicate with Barbara. Secretly. And that meant that he had to talk to her -- and that mean at least one bridge game in the Lord Protector's lounge and a snatch of talk even if he had to talk English in front of Ponse. He had to force matters. Hugh found the Chief Domestic leaving his office. "Cousin Memtok, could you spare me a word?" Memtok's habitual frown barely relaxed. "Certainly, cousin. But walk along with me, will you? Trouble, fI trouble, trouble. You would think that a department head could run his department without someone to wipe his nose, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong. The freezer flunky complains to the leading butcher and he complains to the chef, and it's a maintenance matter, and you would think that Gnou would take it up directly with engineering and between them they would settle it. Oh, no! They both come to me with their troubles. You know something about construction, don't you?' "Yes," Hugh admitted, "but I'm not up to date in the subject. It has been some years." (About two thousand, my friend! But we won't speak of that.) "Construction is construction. Come along, give me the benefit of your advice." (And find out that I'm faking. Chum, ril double-talk you to death.) "Certainly. If this humble one's opinion is worth anything." "Damned chill room. It's been a headache every summer. I'm glad we'll be back in the Palace soon," "Has the date been set? May one ask?" "One may. A week from tomorrow. So it's time to think about packing up your department and being ready to move." I t was a body blow. Hugh almost stumbled but he tried to keep his face calm and his voice steady. "So soon?" "Why are you looking worried? A few files, some office equipment. Have you any idea how many thousands of items I have on inventory? And how much gets stolen, or lost, or damaged simply because you can't trust any of these fools? Uncle!" "It must be terribly wearing," agreed Hugh. "But that brings to mind something. I petitioned you to let me know when Their Charity was next in residence. I learned from the young Chosen, Joseph, that Their Charity returned a day or two ago and is now gone again." "Are you criticizing?" "Uncle forbid! I was just asking." "It is true that Their Charity was physically present for a short time. But he was not officially in residence. Not in the best of health, it seemed to be -- Uncle protect him." "Uncle protect him well!" Hugh answered sincerely. "Under the circumstances naturally you did not ask him to grant me an audience. But could I ask of you the small favor, next time -- " "We'll talk later. Let's see what these two helpless ones have to offer." Head Chef Gnou and the Chief Engineer met them at the entrance to Gnou's domain, they went on through the kichen, through the butcher shop, and into the cold room. But they lingered in the butcher shop, Memtok impatient, while parka-like garments were fetched, the Chief Domestic having refused the ones offered on the legitimate grounds that they were soiled. The butcher shop was very crowded with live helpers and dead carcasses -- birds, beeves, fish, anything. Hugh reflected that thirtyIF eight Chosen and four hundred and fifty servants ate a lot of meat. He found the place mildly depressing even though he himself had cleaned and cut and trimmed many an animal. But only his habitual tight control in the presence of Memtok and his "cousins" in service kept him from showing shock at something he saw on the floor, trimmed from a carcass almost cut up on one block. It was a dainty, plump, very feminine hand. Hugh felt dizzy, there was a roaring in his ears. He blinked. It was still there. A hand much like Kitten's -- He breathed carefully, controlled the retching within him, kept his back turned until he had command over himself. There had suddenly flooded over him the truth behind certain incongruities, certain idioms, some pointless jokes. He now understood what they had meant. G nou was making nervous conversation while his boss waited. He moved to the chopping block, unintentionally kicking the dainty little hand underneath into a pile of scraps and said, "Here's one you won't have to bother to taste. Chief Domestic. Unless the old one returns unexpectedly." "I always bother to taste," Memtok said coldly. "Their Charity expects his table to be perfect whether he is in residence or not." "Oh, yes, surely," Gnou agreed. "That's what I always tell my cooks. But -- Well, this very roast illustrates one of my problems. Too fat. You'll feel that it's greasy -- and so it will be. But that's what comes of using sluts. Now, in my opinion, you can't find a nicer piece of meat, marbled but firm, than a buck tempered not older than six, then hung at twice that age." "No one asked your opinion," Memtok answered. "Their Charity's opinion is the only one that counts. They thinks that sluts are more tender." "Oh, I agree, I agree! No offense intended." "And none taken. In fact I agree with your opinion. I was simply making clear that your opinion -- and mine in this matter -- is irrelevant. I see they've fetched them. Did they stop to make them?" The party put on heavy garments, went on inside. The engineer had said nothing up to then, effacing himself other than a nod and a friendly grin to Hugh. Now he explained the problem, a cranky one of refrigeration. Hugh tried to keep his eyes on it, rather than on the contents of the meat storage room. Most of the meat was beef and fowl. But one long row of hooks down the center held what he knew he would find -- human carcasses, gutted and cleaned and frozen, hanging head down, save that the heads were missing. Young sluts and bucks, he could see, but whether the bucks were tempered or not was no longer evident. He gulped and thanked his unlucky stars that that pathetic little hand had given him some warning, at least saved him from fainting. "Well, Cousin Hugh, what do you think?" "Why, I agree with Pipes." "That the problem can't be solved?" "No, no." Hugh had not really listened. "His reasoning is correct and he implied the answer. As he says, the problem can't be solved -- now. The thing to do is not to try to patch it up. now. Wait a week. Tear it out. Put in new equipment." Memtok looked sour. "Expensive." "But cheaper in the long run. Good engineering isn't accomplished by grudging a few bullocks. Isn't that right. Pipes?" The engineer nodded vigorously. "Just what I always say, Cousin Hugh! You're absolutely right." Memtok still frowned. "Well --  prepare an estimate. Show it to Cousin Hugh before you bring it to me. Memtok paused on the way out and patted the loin of a stripling buck carcass. "That's what I would call a nice piece of meat. Eh, Hugh?" "Beautiful," Hugh agreed with a straight face. "Your nephew, perhaps? Or just a son?" T here was a frozen silence. Nobody moved except that Memtok seemed to grow taller. He raised his whip of authority most slightly, no more than tightening his thumbless grip. Then suddenly he grimaced and gave a dry chuckle. "Cousin Hugh, your well-known wit will be the death of me yet. That's a good one. Gnou, remind me to tell that this evening." The chef agreed and chuckled, the engineer roared. Memtok gave his cold little laugh again. "I'm afraid I can't claim the honor, Hugh. All these critters are ranch bred, not one of them is a cousin of ours. Yes, I know how it is in some households, but Their Charity considers it unspeakably vulgar to serve a house servant, even in cases of accidental death. And besides, it makes the servants restless." "Commendable." "Yes. It is gratifying to serve one who is a stickler for propriety. Enough, enough, lime is wasting. Walk back with me, Hugh." IF Once they were clear of the rest Memtok said, "You were saying?" "Excuse me?" "Come, come, you're being absent-minded today. Something about Their Charity not being in residence." "Oh, yes. Memtok, could you possibly, as a special favor to me, let me know the minute Their Charity returns? Whether officially in residence or not? Not petition anything for me. Just let me know." Damn it, with time pouring away like life through a severed artery his only course might be a belly-scraping apology to Joe. then get Joe to intercede. "No." said Memtok. "No. I don't think I can." "T beg your pardon? Has this one offended you?" "You mean that witticism? Heaven, no! Some might find it vulgar and one bullock gets you three that if you had told it in sluts' quarters some of them would have fainted. But if there is one thing I pride myself on, Hugh, it's my sense of humor -- and any day I can't see a joke simply because I am the butt of it, T'll petition to turn in my whip. No, it was simply my turn to have a little joke at your expense. I said, T don't think I can.' That is a statement of two meanings -- a double-meaning joke, follow me? I don't think I can tell you when Their Charity returns because he has sent word to me that he is not returning. So you'll see him next at the Palace... and I promise I'll let you know when he's in residence." The Chief Domestic dug him in the ribs. "I wish you had seen your own face. My little joke wasn't nearly as sharp as yours. But your jaw dropped. Very comical." H ugh excused hmself, went to his rooms, took an extra bath, a most thorough one, then simply thought until dinner time. He braced himself for the ordeal of dinner with a carefully measured dose of Happiness -- not enough to affect him later, strong enough to carry him through dinner, now that he knew why "pork" appeared so often on the menu of the Chosen. He suspected that the pork served to the servants was really pork. But he intended to eat no more bacon nevertheless. Nor ham, nor ponk chops, nor sausage. In fact he might turn vegetarian. He was very busy that evening, writing long after Kitten was asleep. It had become utterly necessary to reach Barbara secretly, yet his only means was the insecure route through Kitten. The problem was to write to Barbara in a code that only she could read, and which she would see as a code without having been warned and without the code being explained to her -- and yet one which was safe from others. But the double-talk mixture he had last sent her would not do; he was now going to have to give her detailed instructions, ones where it really mattered if she missed a word or failed to guess a concealed meaning. His last draft was a miracle of double-talk. 'f Sjp toeve vr. T wooU bv ,#eT.Y t gcd Vo Rbo voV,c I TbC.n, X'tv Sore. Ur's ors.J,r GS.r aUen CXft.wc Co,n you ret-Xl Vv X c.mcjl 'tAa:!: U#.t t#ve kr#cVo rereci myircry woni-eri tf'fbre VCve.'t S#t# #. t.roe beto-oje Ke eer could be milt'e dry oo en re-ivn" nsu)r r o-oSur# iie # doiy orii #slx Irle #" TotAeC# n ftlorue  or Vc Co-g e j Mc orooe#i Let-ror- tne r'JlO-''Uet  HcmtN coVv VbQ CovxSder slo.n' S So rco-cVveS  S sevTnces #U oc V-tJTr io,l u # o'h'H Stvdi Let's hcve or  UVera.ry ' S y Vfew .VouT WctVC Tuuin TireA Since Hugh had never discussed Edgar Allan Poe with Barbara at any time, he was certain that she would study the note for a hidden message. The only question was whether or not she would find it. He wanted her to read it as: If you can read this answer the same way period Having done his best he put it aside, first disposing of all trial work, then prepared to do something else much more risky. At that point he would have given his chances of immortal bliss, plus # for a cheap flashlight -- and then have settled for a candle. or softly as he wished, by glowing, translucent spheres set in the upper corners. Hugh did not know what they were save that they were not any sort of electric light he had ever known. They gave off no heat, seemed not to require wiring, and were controlled by little cranks. A similar light, the size of a golf ball, was mounted on his scroll reader. It was controlled by twisting it; he had decided tentatively that twisting these spheres polarized them in some way. He tried to dismount the scroll reader light. He finally got it loose by breaking IF the upper frame. It was now a feanothing he could do would dim it -- which was almost as embarrassing as no light at all. He found that he could conceal it in an armpit under his robe. There was still a glow but not much. H e made sure that Kitten was asleep, turned out all lights, raised his corridor door, looked out. The passageway was dim, lighted only by a standing light at an intersection fifty yards away. Regrettably he had to go that way. He had expected no light at this hour. He felt his "knife" taped to his left arm -- not much of a knife, but patient whetting with a rock picked up from a garden path had put and edge on it, and tape had made a firm grip. It still needed hours more work and he could work on it only after Kitten was asleep or in time stolen from working hours. But it felt good to have it there and it was the only knife, chisel, screwdriver, or burglar's jimmy that he had. The manhole to the engineering service tunnels which he wanted lay in the passage to the right after he had to pass' the lighted intersection. Any manhole would do, hut that one was on the logical route to the veterinary's quarters. If caught outside his rooms but otherwise without cream on his lip. he planned to plead a sudden stomach ache. The manhole cover swung back easily on a hinge, it was fastened by a clasp that needed only turning to free it. The floor of the tunnel, glimpsed with his tiny sphere, lay four feet below the corridor floor. He started to let himself down and ran into his first trouble. These manholes, and the tunnels they led to, had been intended for men a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than Hugh Farnham, and proportionately smaller in shoulders, hips, hand-and-knees, height, and so forth. But he could make it. He had to. He wondered how he would make it when it counted, crawling and carrying at least one baby. But that he had to do, too. So he would. He almost trapped himself. Barely in time he found that the under side of the steel door was smooth, no handle and that it latched automatically by a spring catch. That settled why no one worried that the studs might gain unplanned access to sluts. But it also settled something else. Hugh had seriously considered snatching this very chance, if he found things quiet at the other end: Wake Barbara, bring all four of them back via the tunnel -- then outside and away, by any of half a dozen weak points, away and off to the mountains on foot, reach them before light, find some stream and ford it endwise long enough to throw off hounds. Go, go, go.' With almost no food, with nothing but a makeshift knife, with no equipment, a "night shirt" for clothing, and no hope of anvthing better. Go? And save his family, of die with them. But die free! Perhaps, perhaps some day his ff twin sons, wiser in the new ways than himself and toughened by a life fighting nature, could lead an uprising against this foul thing. But all he planned to do, all he could hope for, was get them free, keep them free, alive and free and ungelded until they were grown and strong. Or die. Such was still his plan. He wasted not a moment sorrowing over that spring catch. It merely meant that he must communicate with Barbara, and set a time with her, because she would have to open the hatch at the far end. Tonight he could only reconnoiter. He found that tape from his knife handle would hold the spring catch back. He tested it from above, and found that the lid could now be swung back without turning the clasp. But his wild instincts warned him that this would not do. The tape might not Hold until he was back. He might be trapped inside. H e spent a sweating half hour working on that spring catch, using knife and fingers and holding the light ball in his teeth. At last he managed to get at and break the spring. He removed the catch entirely. The manhole, closed, now looked normal, but it could be opened from underneath with just a push. Only then did he let himself down inside and close it over him. He started oiit on knees and elbows with the light in his mouth, and stopped almost at once. The damned skirt of his robe kept him from crawling! He tried bunching it around his waist. It slid down. At last he inched back to the manhole shaft, took the pesky garment off entirely, left it under the manhole and crawled away without it, naked save for knife strapped to his arm and the light in his teeth. He found that he could then make fair progress, although never able to get fully on hands and knees. His elbows had to be bent, his thighs he could not bring erect, and there were places where valves and fittings of the pipes he crawled past forced him almost to his belly. Nor could he tell how far he was going. However, there were joints in the tunnel about (it seemed to him) every thirty feet; he counted them and tried to match them in his IF mind with the engineering drawing. Pass under two manholes... harp left turn into another tunnel at next manhole... crawl about a hundred and fifty feet and under one manhole -- Something more than an hour later he was under a manhole which had to be the one closest to Barbara. If he had not lost himself in the bowels of the palace -- If he had correctly remembered that complex drawing -- If the drawing was up to date -- (Had two thousand years made any difference in the wellknown lag between engineering changes and revisions of the prints to match?) If Kitten knew what she was talking about in locating Barbara's billet by a method so novel to her -- If it was still Barbara's billet -- He crouched in the awkward space and tried to press his ear against the shaft's cover. He heard a baby cry. About ten minutes later he heard hushed female voices. They approached, passed over him, and someone stepped on the lid. Hugh unkinked himself, prepared to return. The space was so tight that the ob'Wous way was to back up the way he had come, so he found himself trying to crawl backward through the tunnel. That worked so poorly that he came back to the shaft and, with some contortions and loss of skin, he sot turned around. What seemed hours later he was convinced that he was lost. He began to wonder which was the more likely: Would he starve or die of thirst down here? Or would some repairman get the shock of his simple life by finding him first? But he kept on crawling. His hands found his robe before his eyes saw it. Five minutes later he was in it; seven minutes later (he stopped to listen) he was up and out and had the lid closed. He forced himself not to run back to his rooms. Kitten was awake. He wasn't aware of it until she followed him into the bath. Then she was saying with wide-eyed horror, "Oh, dear! Your poor knees! And your elbows, too." "I stumbled and fell down." She didn't argue it, she simply insisted on bathing him and salving and taping the raw places. But when she started to pick up his dirty robe, he told her sharply to go to bed. He did not mind her touching his robe. But his knife had been on top of it and only by clumsy maneuvering had he managed to keep himself between her and it long enough for him to flip a fold of cloth over the weapon. Kitten went silently to bed. Hugh hid the knife in its usual place (much too high for Kitten), then went into his living room and found the child crying in her pillow. He petted her, soothed her, said he had not meant to sound harsh, and fed with her while she drank it, watched her go happily to sleep. Then he did not even try to get along without it himself. Kitten had her a bonus dose of Happiness -- sat gone to sleep with one hand outside her cover. It looked to Hugh exactly like a forlorn little hand he had seen twelve hours earlier on the floor of a butcher shop. He was exhausted and the drink let him go to sleep. But not to rest. He found himself at a dinner party, black tie and dressy. But he did not like the menu. Hungarians goulash... French fries... Chinese noodles... po' boy sandwich... breast of peasant... baked Alaskans -- but it was all pork. His host insisted that he taste every dish. "Come, come!" he chided with a witnry smile. "How do you know you don't like it if you don't taste it? One bullock gets you three you'll learn to love it." Hugh moaned and could not wake up. itten did not chatter at breakfast, which suited him. Two hours of nightmare-ridden sleep was not enough, yet it was necessary to go to his office and pretend to work. Mostly he stared at the print framed over his desk while his scroll reader clicked unnoticed. After lunch he sneaked away and tried to catch a nap. But the engineer scratched at his door and apologetically asked him to look over his estimates on refitting the meat cooler. Hugh poured his guest a dollop of Happiness, then pretended to study figures that meant nothing to him. After a decent time he complimented the man, then scrawled a note to Memtok, recommending the idea that the contract be let. Barbara's note that night applauded the idea of a literary discussion club by mail and discussed Mark Twain. Hugh was interested only in how it read diagonally: Did I read it correctly darlingi iquestiom mark Darling must escape nex days ready night after letter has phrase freedom lonel thing -- F or the next three days Hugh's letters to Barbara were very long and chatty and discussed everything from Mark Twain's use of colloquial idiom to the influence of progressive education on the relaxation of grammar. Her answers were lengthy, equally "literary," and reported that she would be ready to IF the hatch, confirmed that she understood, that sihe had a little stock of food, had no knife, no shoes -- but that her feet were very calloused -- and that her only worry was that the twins might cry or that her roommates might wake up, especially as two of them were still giving night feedings to their babies. But for Hugh not to worry, she would manage. Hugh drew a fresh bottle of Happiness, taped it near the top of the shaft, instructed her to tell her roommates that she had stolen it, then use it to get them so hopped on the drug that they would either sleep or be so slaphappy that if they did wake, they would do nothing but giggle -- and, if possible, get enough of the drug into the twins that the Infants would pass out and not cry no matter how they were handled. Making an extra trip through the tunnels to plant the bottle was a risk Hugh hated to take. But he made it pay. He not only timed himself by the clocks in his room and learned beyond any possibility of mistake the rat maze he must follow but also he carried a practice load, a package of scrolls taped together to form a mass bigger and heavier, he felt sure, than one of his infant sons would be. This he tied to his chest with a sling made of stolen cloth; it had been a dust cover for the scroll printer in his offices. He made two such slings, one for Barbara, and tore and tied them such that they could be shifted to the back later to permit the babies to bo carried papoose style. He found that it was difficult but not impossible to carry a baby in this fashion through the low tunnels, and he spotted the places where it was necessary to inch forward with extreme care not to place any pressure on his dummy "precious burden" and still not let the ties on his back catch on engineering fittings above him. But it could be done and he got back to his rooms without waking Kitten -- he had increased her evening bonus of Happiness. He replaced the scrolls hid his knife and spherical lamp, washed his knees and elbows and anointed them, then sat down and wrote a long P.S. to the letter he had written earlier to tell Barbara how to find the bottle. This postscript added some afterthoughts about the philosophy of Hemingway and remarked that it seemed odd that a writer would in one story say that "freedom is a lonely thing" and in another story state that -- and so on. That night he gave Kitten her usual amplified nightcap, then said, "Not much left in this bottle. Finish it off and I'll get a fresh one tomorrow." "Oh, I'd get terribly silly. You wouldn't like me." "Go ahead, drink it. Have a good time, live it up. What else is life for?" Half an hour later Kitten was bed. Hugh stayed with her until she was snoring heavily. He covered her hands, stood looking down at her, knelt and kissed her good-bye. A few minutes later he was down the first manhole with the lid closed over him. H e took off his robe, piled on it a bundle of what he had collected for survival -- food, sandals, his stolen wig, two pots of servants' deodorant cream into which he had blended brown pigment. He did not expect to use disguise and had little faith in it, but if they were overtaken by daylight before they were in the mountains, he intended to darken all four of them, tear their robes into something resembling the breechclout and wrap-around which he had learned were the working clothes of free peasant farmers among the Chosen -- "poor black trash" as Joe called them -- and try to brazen it out, keeping away from people if possible, until it was dark again. He tied one baby sling to him with the other inside it and started. He hurried, as time was everything. Even if Barbara managed to pass out her roommates promptly, even if he had no trouble breaking out at his preferred exit, even if the crawl back through the tunnels could be made in less than an hour -- doubtful, with the kids -- they could not be outdoors earlier than midnight, which allowed them five hours of darkness to reach wild country. Could he hope for three miles an hour? Tt seemed unlikely, Barbara barefooted and both carrying kids, the country unknown and dark -- and those moutains seen from his window seemed to be at least fifteen miles away. It would be a narrow squeak even if everything broke his way. He made fast time to sluts' quarters, punishing his knees and elbows. The bottle was missing, he could feel the tacky places where he had fastened it. He settled himself as comfortably as possible and concentrated on quieting his pounding heart, slowing his breathing, and relaxing. He tried to make his mind blank. He actually dozed off. But he was instantly alert when the lid over him was raised. Barbara made no sound. She handed him one of their sons, he stuffed the limp little body as far down the tunnel as he could reach. She handed him the other, he placed it beside the first, then added a pitiful little bundle she had. But he did not kiss her until they were both down inside -- only seconds after he had wakened -- and the lid had clicked into place over them. She clung to him, sobbing; he whispered fiercely not to make a sound, then added last-minute instructions into her ear. She quieted instantly, nodded acknowledgement; they got busy. It was agonizingly difficult to get ready for the crawl in a space too small for either of them and nearly impossible for them both. They did it because they had to. First he helped her get out of the shorter garment sluts wore, then he had her lie down with her legs back in the other reach of the tunnel while he IF Hcd a baby sling to her, then a baby was stuffed into each sling and the knots tightened to keep each child ng as firmly in its little hammock as possible. Barbara's baggage was a problem Hugh soived by knotting Ac skirt of her garment together, stuffing her hoarded food into the sack thus formed, tying the sleeves around his left leg and letting it drag behind. He had planned to tie ft around his waist, but the sleeves were too short. That done (it seemed to take hours), he had Barbara back up into the far reach of the tunnel, Aen managed most painfully to turn himself around and get headed the right way without banging little Hughies skull. Or was it Karl Joseph? He had forgotten to ask. Either one, the baby's warm body against his, its lightly sensed breathing, gave him fresh courage. By God, they would make it! Whatever got in his way would die. H e set out, with the light in his teeth, moving very fast whenever clearance let him do so without danger to the child. He did not slow down for Barbara and had warned her that he would not unless she called out. She did not, ever. Once her baggage worked loose from his leg. They stopped and he had her tie it to his ankle; that was their only rest. They made good time but it seemed forever before he reached Ae little pile of plunder. They unslung the babies and caught their breaths. Then he helped Barbara back into her shift, rearranged her sling to carry her one baby papoose fashion, and made up their luggage into one bundle. All that he held out was his knife, still taped to his arm, his robe, and the light. He showed her how to hold the light in her mouth, then spread her lips and let the tiniest trickle leak out between her teeth. She tried it. "You look ghastly," he whispered. "Like a jack o' lantern. But it's better than a flashlight. No hands. Now listen carefully. Fm going up. You be ready to hand me my robe instantly. I may reconnoiter." "I could help you get it on, right here." "No, because if Fm caught coming out, there will be a fight and it would slow me down. But I won't want it, probably, until we reach a storeroom that is our next fairly safe place. If it's all clear above, Fll want you to hand out everything fast, including the baby who's not on your back. But you will have to carry him as well as the bundle and my robe; Fve got to have both hands free. Darling, I don't want to kill anybody but if anyone is unlucky enough to get in our way, I will. You understand that, don't you?" She nodded. "So I carry everything. Can do, my husband." "You follow me, fast. It's about two city blocks to that storeroom and we probably won't see or hear anyone. I jiggered the lock on it late Ais afternoon, stuffed a wad of Kitten's chewing gum into it. Once insidi rearrange things and see if you can wear my sandals." "My feet are all right. Feel." "Maybe we'll take turns wearing them. Never mind. I then have to break a lock on a delivery door but I spotted some steel bars a week ago which ought still to be there. Anyhow, I'll break out. Then away we go, as fast as we can trot. It should be breakfast time before we are missed, sometime after that before they are sure we are gone, still longer before a chase is organized. We'll make it." "Sure we will." "Just one thing. If I reach for my robe and then close the lid on you, stay here. Don't make a sound, don't try to peek out." "I won't." lips. I'm going to sneak a peek." He raise the lid a quarter of an inch, then lowered it. "In luck," he whispered. "Even the standing light is out. Here I go. Be ready to hand things up fast. Joey first. And don't show a light." He pushed the lid up and flat down without a sound, raised himself, got his feet to the corridor floor, A light him. "That's far enough," a dry voice said. "Doti't move." He kicked the whip hand so fast that the whip flew aside as he closed Then this -- and that -- and sure enough! The man's neck was broken, just as the book said it would be. Instantly he knelt down. "Everything out! Fast!" Barbara did not answer; she shov"I might be gone an hour. I might ed baby and baggage up to him, was fake a belly ache and have to see the vet, then come back." "All right," "Barbara, it might even be twentyfour hours, if anything goes wrong. Can you stay here and keep quiet and keep the twins quiet that long? If you must?" "Whatever it takes, Hugh." He kissed her. "Now put the light back in your mouth and close your out fast as he took her hand. "Some light," he whispered. "His went out and I've got to dispose of him." She gave him light. Memtok -- Hugh quelled his surprise, stuffed the body down the hole, closed the lid. Barbara was ready, baby on back, baby in left arm, bundle in right. "We go on! Stay close on my heels!" He set out for the intersection, holding his course in the dark by finger tips on the wall. He never saw the whip that got him. All he knew was the pain. XX F or a long time Mr. Hugh Famham was aware of nothing but pain. When it eased off, he found that he was in a confinement cell like the one in which he had lived his first days under the Protectorate -- possibly the same one. He was there three days. He thought it was three days, as he was fed six times. He always knew when they were about to feed him -- and to empty his slop jar, for he was not taken outside for any purpose. He would find himself restrained by that invisible spider web, then someone would come inside, leave food, replace the slop jar, and go. He soon learned that it was impossible to get the servant who did this to answer him. After what might have been three days he found himself unexpectedly caught up by that prisoning field (he had just been fed) and his old colleague and "cousin" the Chief Veterinary ' came in. Hugh had more Aan a suspicion as to why; his feeling amounted to a conviction, so he pleaded, demanded to be taken to the Lord Protector and finally shouted. The surgeon ignored it. He did something to Hugh's thigh, then left. To Hugh's limited relief he did not become unconscious, but he found, when the tanglefoot field let up, that he could not move anyhow and that he felt lethargic. Shortly two servants came in, picked him up, placed him in a box all too much like a coffin. Hugh found that he was being shipped somewhere. His shipping case was given casual but not rough handling; once he felt a lift surge to a stop; his boX was placed in something; and some minutes, hours, or days later it was moved again; and presently he was dumped into another confinement room. He knew it was a different one; the walls were light green instead of white. By the time they fed him he had recovered and was again "tangled" while food was placed inside. This went on for one hundred and twenty-two meals. Hugh kept track by biting a chunk out of his toolong finger nails and scratching the inside of his left arm. This took him less than five minutes each day; he spent the rest of his time worrying and sometimes sleeping. Sleeping was worse than worrying because he always re-enacted his escape attempt in his sleep and it always ended in disaster -- although not necessarily at the same point. He did not always kill his friend the Chief Domestic and at least twice they got all the way to the mountains before they were caught. But, long or short, it ended the same way and he would wake up sobbing and calling for Barbara. He worried most about Barbara -- and the twins, although the boys were not as real to him. He had never heard of a slut being severely punished for anything. However, he had never heard of a slut being involved in an attempted escape and know. But he did know that the Lord Protector preferred slut meat for his table. He tried to tell himself that old Ponse, whatever he did, would do nothing to a slut while she was still nursing babies -- and that would be a long time yet; among servants, according to Kitten, mothers nursed babies for at least two years. He worried about Kitten, too. Would the child be punished for something she had nothing to do with? A completely innocent bystander. Again he did not know. There was "justice" here; it was a major branch of religious writings. But he also knew that it resembled so little the concept "justice" of his own culture that he had found the stuff almost unreadable. H e spent most of his time on what he thought of as "constructive" worry, i.e., what he should have done rather than what he had done. He saw now that his plans had been laughably inadequate. He should never let himself be panicked into moving .too soon. It would have been far better to have built up his connection with Joe, never disagreed with him, tickled his vanity, gone to work for him and, in time, prevailed on him to adopt Barbara and the kids. Joe was an accommodating person and old Ponse was so open-handed that he might simply have made Joe a present of these three useless servants instead of demanding cash. The boys would have been in no danger for years (and perhaps never in danger if Joe owned them), and, in time, Hugh could have expected to become a trusted business servant, with a broad pass allowing him to go anywhere on his master's business -- and Hugh would have acquired sophisticated knowledge of how this world worked that a house servant could never acquire. Once he learned exactly how it ticked, he could have planned an escape that would work. Any society man has ever devised, he reminded himself, could be bribed -- and a servant who handles money can find ways to steal some. Probably there was an "underground railroad" that ran to the mountains. Yes, he had been far too hasty. He considered, too, the wider aspects -- a slave uprising. He visualized those tunnel being used not for escape but as a secret meeting place. Classes in reading and writing, taught in whispers; oaths as mighty as a Mau Mau initiation binding the conspirators as blood brothers, with each Chosen having marked against his name a series of dedicated assassins, servants patiently and slowly grinding scraps of metal into deadly knives. This "constructive" dream he enjoyed most -- and believed in least. Would these docile sheep ever rebel? It seemed unlikely. He had been classed with them by accident of complexion but they were not of his breed even though he did not IP doubt that they were of his ancestry. Centuries of selective breeding had made them something else, as little like himself as a lap dog is like a timber wolf. And yet, and yet, how did he know? He knew only the tempered males, and the few studs he had seen had all been dulled by a liberal ration of "Happiness" -- to say nothing of what it might do to a man's fighting spirit to lose his thumbs at an early age and be driven around with whips-that-were-morethan-whips. This matter of racial differences -- or the equally nonsense notion of "racial equality" -- had never been examined scientifically; there was too much emotion on both sides. Nobody wanted honest data. Hugh recalled an area in Pernambuco he had seen while in the Navy, a place where the rich plantation owners, dignified, polished, educated in France, were all black, while their servants and field hands -- giggling, shuffling, shiftless knuckleheads "obviously" incapable of better things -- were mostly white men. He had stopped telling this anecdote in the States. It was never really believed and it was almost always resented -- even by Whites who made a big thing of how anxious they were to "help the American Negro improve himself." Hugh had formed the opinion that almost all of these bleeding hearts wanted the Negro's lot improved until it was almost as high as their own -- and no longer on their consciences. But the idea that the tables could ever be fully turned was one they rejected emotionally. Hugh knew that the tables could indeed be turned. He had seen it that once, now he was experiencing it. But Hugh knew that the situation was still more confused. Many Roman citizens had been "black as the ace of spades" and many slaves of Romans had been as blond as Hitler wanted to be -- so any "white man" of European ancestry was certain to have a dash of Negro blood. Sometimes more than a dash. That southern Senator, what was his name? -- the one who had built his career on "white supremacy." Hugh had come across two sardonic facts: This old boy had died from cancer of the jaw and had had many blood tranfusions -- and his blood type was such that the chances were two hundred to one that its owner had not just a touch of the tar brush but practically the whole tar barrel. A Navy surgeon had gleefully pointed this out to Hugh and had proved both points in medical literature. Nevertheless, this confused matter of races would never be straightened out -- because almost nobody wanted the truth. Take this matter of singing. It had seemed self-evident to Hugh that Negroes of his time averaged better singers than had whites; most people seemed to think so and Hugh felt such a preference. Yet the very persons, white or black, who insisted most loudly that "all races were equal" always seemed happy to agree that Negroes were superior. on the average, in this one way. It reminded Hugh of Orwell's Animal Farm, in which "All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others." Well, he knew who wasn't equal here -- despite his statistically certain drop or more of black blood. Hugh Farnham, namely. He found that he agreed with Joe; When things were unequal, it was much nicer to be on top! O n the sixty-first day in this new place, if it was the sixty-first, they came for him, bathed him, cut his finger and toe nails, rubbed him all over with deodorant cream, and paraded him before the Lord Protector. Hugh learned that he still could be humiliated by not being given even a night shirt as clothing, but he conceded that it was a reasonable precaution in handling a prisoner who killed with his bare hands. His escort were two young Chosen, in uniforms which Hugh assumed to be military, and the whips they carried were definitely not "lesser whips." The route they followed was very long; it was clearly a huge building. The room where he was finally delivered was very like in spirit (although different in detail) to the informal lounge where Hugh had once played bridge. The big view window looked out over a wide tropical river. Hugh hardly glanced at it; the Lord Protector was there. And so were Barbara and the twins! The babies were crawling on the floor. But Barbara was breast deep in that invisible quicksand, a trap that claimed Hugh as soon as he was halted. She smiled at him but did not speak. He looked her over carefully. She seemed unhurt and healthy, but she was thin and had deep circles under her eyes. He started to speak; she gestured warningly with eyes and head. Hugh then looked at the Lord Protector -- and noticed only then that Joe was lounging near him and that Grace and Duke were playing some card game over in a corner, both of them chewing gum and both ostentatiously not seeing that Hugh was there. He looked back at Their Charity. Hugh decided that Ponse had been ill. Despite the fact that Hugh felt comfortably warm in skin Ponse was wearing a full robe with a shawl over his lap and he looked, for once, almost his reputed age. But when he spoke, his voice was still resonant. "You may go. Captain. We excuse you." The escort withdrew. Their Charity looked Hugh over soberly. At last he said, "Well, boy, you certainly made a mess of things, didn't you?" He looked down and played with something in his lap, caught it and pulled it back to the middle of the shawl. Hugh saw that it was a white mouse. He felt sudden sympathy for the mouse. It didn't seem to like where it was, but if it did manage to escape, the cats would quickly get it. Maggie was watching with deep interest. IF Hugh did not answer, the renark seemed rhetorical. But it had tartled him very much. Ponse covered the mouse with his hand, looked up. "Well? Say something!" "You speak English!" #CTon't look so silly. Of course I do. I'm a scholar, Hugh. Do you think I would let myself be surrounded by people who speak a language I don't understand? I speak it, and I read it, silly as the spelling is. I've been tutored daily by skilled scholars -- plus conversation practice with a living dictionary." He jerked his head toward Grace. "Couldn't you guess that I would want to read those books of mine? Not be dependent on your hit-or-miss translations? I've read the 'Just So Stories' twice. Charming!" He shifted back to Language. "But we are not here to discuss literature." Their Charity barely gestured. Four slut servants came running in with a table, placed it in front of the big man, placed things on it. Hugh recognized them all -- a homemade knife, a wig, two pots for deodorant cream, a bundle that would be food, an empty Happiness bottle, a' little white sphere now dull, a pair of sandals, two robes, one long, one short, and both mussed and rather dirty, and a surprisingly high stack of paper, creased and much written on. Ponse put the white mouse on the table, stirred the display of exhibits, said broodingly, "I'm no fool, Hugh. Fve owned servants all my life. I had you figured out before you had yourself figured out. Doesn't do to let a man like you mingle with loyal servants, he corrupts them. Gives them ideas they are better off without. I had planned to let you escape as soon as I was through with you. You could have afforded to wait." "Do you expect me to believe that?" Doesn't matter whether you do or don't. It's the truth. I could not afford to have you very long -- one bad apple rots the rest, as my uncle was fond of saying. Nor could I put you up for adoption and let some unwitting buyer pay good money for a servant who would then corrupt others elsewhere in my realm. No, you had to escape." "Even if that is so, I would never have escaped without Barbara and my boys." "I said I am not a fool. Kindly remember it. Of course you would not. I was going to use Barba -- and these darling brats -- to force you to escape. At my selected time. Now you've ruined it. I must make an example of you. For the benefit of the other servants." He frowned and picked up the crude knife. "Poor balance. Hugh, did you really expect to make it with this pitiful tackle? Not even shoes for that child by you. If only you had waited a decent time, you would have been given opportunity to steal what you really needed." "Ponse, you are playing with me the way you've been playing with that mouse. You weren't planning to let us escape. Not really escape at least. I would have wound up on your table." 'Tlease!" The old man made a grimace of distaste. "Hugh, Pm not well, someone has again been trying to poison me -- my nephew, I suppose -- and this time almost succeeded. So don't talk nasty, it upsets my stomach." He looked Hugh up and down. 'Tough. Inedible. An old stud savage is merely garbage. Much too gamy. Besides that, a gentleman doesn't eat members of his own family, no matter what. The thought is repugnant to me. So let's not talk in bad taste. There's no cause for you to bristle so. I'm not angry with you, just very, very provoked." He glanced at the twins, said, "Hughie, stop pulling Maggie's tail." His voice was neither loud nor sharp; the baby stopped at once. "Admittedly those two would make tasty appetizers were they not of my household. But even had they not been, I would have planned better things for them; they are so cute and so much alike. Did plan better things at first. Until it became clear that they were necessary to forcing you to run." P onse sighed. "I can see that you still do not believe a word I'm saying. Hugh, you don't understand the system. Well, servants never do. Did you ever grow apples?" "No." "A good eating apple, firm and sweetly tart, is never a product of nature. It is the result of long development under careful control from something small and sour and hard and hardly fit for animal fodder. Then it has to be scientifically propagated and protected. On the other hand, too highly developed plants -- or animals -- can go bad, lose their firmness, their flavor, get mushy and soft and worthless. It's a nice two-horned problem. We have it constantly with servants. On the one hand you must weed out the rebels, the troublemakers, not let them breed. On the other hand these very troublemakers, the worst of them, are invaluable breeding stock that must not be lost. So we do both. The run-of-the-crop bad ones we temper and keep. The very worst ones -- such as you -- we encourage to run. If you live -- and some of you do -- we can rescue you, or your strong get, at a later time and add you in, judiciously, to a breeding line that has become so soft and docile and stupid that it is no longer worth its keep. Our poor friend Memtok was a result of such pepping up of the breed. One quarter savage he was. He never knew it of course -- and a good stud that added strength to a line. But far too dangerous and ambitious to be kept too long at stud; he had to be made to see the advantages of being tempered. Most of my upper servants have a recent strain of savage in them. Some of them are Memtok's sons. My engineer, for example. No, Hugh, you would not have wound up on anybody's table. Nor tempered. I would like to have kept you as a pet, you're diverting -- and a fair bridge hand in the bargain. But I could not let you stay in contact with my loyal servants. Presently you would have been put in touch with the underground." IF Hugh opened his mouth and closed it. "Surprised, eh? But there is always an underground, throughout history, wherever there is a ruling class and a serving class. Which is to say, always. If there were not an underground, it would be necessary to invent one. However, since there is one, we keep track of it, subsidize it -- and use it. In the upper servants' mess its contact is the veterinary -- trusted by everyone and quite shamelessly free of sentiment. I don't like him. But if you had confided in him, you would have been guided, advised, and helped. I would have used you to cover about a hundred sluts, then sent you on your way. Don't look started. Even Their Mercy uses studs who have to stoop a bit to get through the studs' door when a freshening of the line is indicated -- and there was always the danger that you might get you yourself, and those dear boys, killed, and thereby have wasted your fine potential." T heir Charity picked up the pile of Kitten-delivered mail. "These things -- All my Chief Domestic was expected to do was to thwart you frofn doing something silly; he never knew the veterinary's second function. Why, I even had to crack down on Memtok a bit to turn his copies of these things over to me -- when anyone could have guessed that a stud like you would find a way to get in touch with his slut. I deduced that it would happen that time that you stood up to me about her, our first bridge game. Remember? Perhaps you don't. But I sent for Memtok, and sure enough, you had already started. Although he was reluctant to admit it, since he had not reported it." Hugh was hardly listening. He was turning over in his mind the glaring fact that he was hearing things told only to dead men. None of the four of them was going to leave this room alive. No, perhaps the twins would. Yes, Ponse wanted the breeding line. But he -- and Barbara, too -- would never have a chance to talk. But Ponse was saying. "You still have a chance to correct your mistakes. And you made lots of them. One note you wrote my scholars assured me was gibberish, not English at all. So I knew it was a secret message whether we could read it or not. So thereafter all your notes were subjected to careful analysis, not just reading. So of course we found the key -- rather naive to be considered a code, rather clever considering the handicaps. And very useful to me. But confound it, Hugh, it cost me! Memtok was naive about savages, he did not realize that they fight when cornered." Ponse scowled. "Damn you, Hugh, your recklessness cost me a valuable property. I wouldn't have taken ten thousand bullocks for Memtok's adoption -- no, not twenty. And now your life is forfeit. The purely technical charge of attempting to run we could overlook, a tingling in front of the other servants would cover that. Destroying your master's property we could even cover up if it had been done secretly. Did you know that that bedwarmer I lent you knew most of what you were up to? Saw much of it? Sluts gossip." "She told you?" "No, damn it, it didn't tell the half; we had to tingle it out of it. Then it turned out it knew so much that we could not afford to have it talking and the other servants putting one and one together. So it had to go." "You had her killed." Hugh felt a surge of disgust and said it, knowing that nothing he said could matter now. "What's it to you? Its life was forfeit, treason to its master. However, I'm not a spiteful man, the little critter has no moral sense and didn't know what it was doing -- you must have hypnotized it, Hugh -- and I am a frugal man; I don't uselessly waste property. It's adopted so far away now that it'll have trouble understanding the accent, much less have its stories believed." Hugh sighed. "I'm relieved." "Choice about the slut, eh? Was it that good?" "She was innocent. I didn't want her hurt." "As may be. Now, Hugh, you can repair all this costly mess. Pay me back the damage and do yourself a good turn at the same time." "How?""Quite simple. You've cost me my key executive servant, I've no one of his caliber to replace him. So you take his place, that's all. No scandal, no fuss, no upset below stairs -- every servant who saw any piece of it is already adopted away. And you can tell any story you like about what happened to Memtok. Or even claim you don't know. Barba, can you refrain from gossip?" "I certainly can where Hugh's welfare is concerned." "That's a good child. I would hate to have you muted, it would hamper our bridge game. Although Hugh will be rather busy for bridge. Hugh, here's the honey that trapped the bear. You take over as Chief Domestic, do the kind of job I know you can do once you learn the details -- and Barba and the twins live with you. What you always wanted. Well, that's the choice. Be my boss servant and have them with you. Or your lives are forfeit. What do you say?" H ugh Farnham was so dazed that he was gulping, trying to accept, when Their Charity added, "Just one thing. I won't be able to let you have them with you right away." "No?" "No. I still want to breed a few from you, before you are tempered. Needn't be long, if you are as spry as you look." Barbara said, "No!" But Hugh Farnham was making a terrible decision. "Wait, Barbara. Ponse. What about the boys? Will they be tempered, too?" "Oh.' Ponse thought about it. "You drive a hard bargain, Hugh. Suppose we say that they will not be. Let's say that I might use them at stud a bit -- but not take their thumbs; it would be a dead giveaway for so private a purpose with IF studs as tall as they are going to be. Then at fourteen or fifteen I let them escape. Does that suit you?" The old man stopped to cough; a painful spasm racked him. "Damn it, you're tiring me." Hugh pondered it. "Ponse, you may not be alive fourteen or fifteen years from now." "True. But it is very impolite for you to say so." "Can you bind this bargain for your heir? Mrika?" Ponse rubbed his hair and grinned. "You're a sharp one, Hugh. What a Chief Domestic you will make! Of course I can't -- which is why I want some get from you, without waiting for the boys to mature. But there is always a choice, just as you have a choice now. I can see to it that you are in my heavenly escort. All of you, the boys, too. Or I can have you all kept alive and you can work out a new bargain, if any. 'Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi' -- which was the ancients' way of saying that when the protector leaves there is always a new protector. Just tell me. I'll do it either way." Hugh was thinking over the grim choices when Barbara again spoke up. "Their Charity -- " "Yes, child?" "You had better have my tongue cut out. Right now, before you let me leave this room. Because I will have nothing to do with this wicked scheme. And I will not keep quiet. No!" "Barba, Barba, that's not being a good girl." "I am not a girl. I am a woman and a wife and a mother! I will never call you 'uncle' aain -- you are vile! I will not play bridge with you ever again, with or without my tongue. We are helpless... but I will give you nothing. What is this you offer? You want my husband to agree to this evil thing in exchange for a few scant years of life for me and our sons -- for as long as God lets that evilness you call your body continue to breathe. Then what? You cheat him even then. We die. Or we are left to the mercy of your nephew who is even worse than you are. Oh, I know! The bedwarmers all hate him, they weep when they are called to serve him -- and weep even harder when they come back. But I would not let Hugh make this choice even if you could promise us all a lifetime of luxury. No! I won't, I won't! You try to do it. I'll kill my babies! Then myself. Then Hugh will kill himself I know! No matter what you have done to him!" She stopped, spat as far as she could in the old man's direction, then burst into tears. Their Charity said, "Hughie, I told you to stop teasing that cat. It will scratch you." Slowly he stood up, said, "Reason with them, Joe," and left the room. J oe sighed and came over close to them. "Barbara," he said gently, "take hold of yourself. You aren't acting in Hugh's interests even if you think you are. You should advise him to take it. After all, a man Hugh's age doesn't have much to lose by it." Barbara looked at him as if she had never seen him before in her life. Then she spat again. Joe was close, she got him in the face. He jumped and raised his hand. Hugh said sharply, "Joe, if you hit her and I ever get loose, I'll break your arm." "I wasn't going to hit her," Joe said slowly. "I was just going to wipe my face. I wouldn't hit Barbara, Hugh; I admire her. I just don't think she has good sense." He took a kerchief to the smear of saliva. "I guess there is no arguing." "None, Joe. I'm sorry I spit on you." "That's all right, Barbara. You're upset... and you never treated me as a nigger, ever. Well, Hugh?" "Barbara has decided it. And she always means what she says. I can't say that I'm sorry. Staying alive here just isn't worth it, for any of us. Even if I was not to be tempered." "I hate to hear you say that, Hugh. All in all, you and I always got along pretty well. Well, if that's your last word, I might as well go tell Their Charity. Is it?" "Yes " "Yes, Joe." "Well -- Good-bye, Barbara. Good-bye, Hugh." He left. The Lord Protector came back in alone, moving with the slow caution of a man old and sick. "So that's what you've decided," he said, sitting down and gathering the shawl around him. He reached out for the mouse, still crouching on the table top; servants came in and cleared off the table. He went on, "Can't say that I'm surprised -- I've played bridge with both of you. Well, now we take up the other choice. Your lives are forfeit and I can't let you stay here, other than on those terms. So now we send you back." "Back where, Ponse?" "Why, back to your own time, of course. If you make it. Perhaps you will." He stroked the mouse. "This little fellow made it. Two weeks at least. And it didn't hurt him. Though one can only guess what two thousand years would do." The servants were back in and were piling on the table a man's watch, a Canadian dime, a pair of much worn mountain boots, a hunting knife, some badly made moccasins, a pair of levis, some ragged denim shorts with a very large waistline, a .# automatic pistol with belt, two ragged and faded shirts, one somewhat altered, a part of a paper of matches and a small notebook and pencil. Ponse looked at the collection. "Was there anything else?" He slid the loaded clip from the pistol, held it in his hand. "If not, get dressed." The invisible field let them loose. iiT don't see what there is to beIsurprised about," Ponse told them. "Hugh, you will remember that I told my scientists that I wanted to know how you got here. No miracles. I told them rather firmly. They understood I would be most unhappy -- and vexed -- if the Protectorate's scientists could not solve it when they had so many hints, so much data. So they did. Probably. IF At least they were able to move this little fellow. He arrived today, which is why I sent for you today. Now we will find out if it works backward in time as well as forwards -- and if the big apparatus works as well as the bench model. I understand it is not so much the amount of power -- no atom-kernel bombs necessary -- as the precise application of power. But we'll soon know." Hugh asked, "How will you know? We will know -- if it works. But how will you know?" "Oh, that. My scientists are really quite clever, when they have incentive. One of them will explain it." The scientists were called in, two Chosen and five servants. There was of course no introduction; Hugh found himself treated as impersonally as the little white mouse who still tried to meet his death on the floor, but was restrained. Hugh was required to take off his shirt and two servant-scientists taped a small package to Hugh's right shoulder. 'What's that?" It seemed surprisingly heavy for its size. The servants did not answer; the leading Chosen said, "You will be told. Come here. See this." "This" turned out to be Hugh's former property, a U.S. Geodetic Survey map of James County.' "Do you understand this? Or must we explain it?" "I understand it." Hugh used the equal mode. The Chosen ignored it while continuing to speak in protocol mode, falling. "Then you know that here is where you arrived." Hugh agreed, as the man's finger covered the spot where Hugh's home had once stood. The Chosen nodded thoughtfully and added, "Do you understand the meaning of these marks?" He pointed to a tiny xmark and very small figures beside it. "Certainly. We call that a 'bench mark. Exact location and altitude. It"s a reference point for all the rest of the map." "Excellent." The Chosen now pointed to a similar mark at the summit of Mount James as shown by the map. "Now, tell us, if you know -- but don't lie about it; it will not advantage you -- how much error there would be, horizontally and vertically, between these two reference points." Hugh thought about it, held up bis thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. The Chosen blinked. "It would not have been that accurate in those primitive times. We assume that you are lying. Try again. Or admit that you don't know." "And I suggest that you don't know what you are talking about. It would be at least that accurate. Probably much closer." Hugh thought of telling him that he had bossed surveying parties in the Seabees and had done much of his own surveying when he was getting started as a contractor -- and that while he did not know how accurate a government geodetic survey was, he did know that enormously more accurate methods had been used in setting those bench marks than were ever used in the ordinary (quite accurate) survey. But he decided that explanation would be wasted. T he Chosen looked at him, then glanced at Their Charity. The old man had been listening but his face showed nothing. "Very well. We will assume that the marks are accurate, each to the other. Which is fortunate, as this one is missing -- " he pointed to the first one, near where Hugh's home had been -- "whereas this one -- " he indicated the summit of Mount James -- "is still in place, in solid rock. Now search your memory and do not lie again, as it will matter to you... and it will matter to Their Charity and to us, as a silly lie on your part could waste much effort and Their Charity would be much displeased, we are certain. Where, quite near this reference mark and the same height -- certainly no higher! -- is -- was, I mean, in those primitive times -- a flat, level place?" Hugh thought about it. He knew exactly where that bench mark had been : in the cornerstone of the Southport Savings Bank. It was, or had been, a small brass plate, let into the stone beside the larger dedication plate, about eighteen inches above the sidewalk at the northeast corner of the bank building. It had been placed there shortly after the Southport shopping center had been built. Hugh had often glanced at it in passing; it had always given him a warm feeling of stability to note a bench mark. The bank had sided on a parking lot shared by the bank, a Safeway Supermarket, and a couple of other shops. "It is level and flat off this way for a distance of -- "(Hugh estimated the width of that ancient parking lot in feet, placed the figure in modern units.) "Or a little farther. That's just an estimate, not wholly accurate." "But it is flat and level? And no higher than this point?" "A little lower and sloping away. For drainage." "Very well. Now place your attention on this configuration." Again it was Hugh's property, a Conoco map of the state. "That object fastened to your back you may think of as a clock. We will not explain it, you could not understand. Suffice it to say that radiation decay of a metal inside it measures time. That is why it is heavy; it is cased in lead to protect it. You will take it to here," The Chosen pointed to a town on the map; Hugh noted that it was the home of the state university. At a gesture the Chosen was handed a slip of paper. To Hugh he said, "Can you read this? Do you know what it means? Or must it be explained?" "It says 'University State Bank,' " Hugh told him. "I seem to recall that there was an institution of that name in that town. I'm not sure, I don't recall doing any business with it." "There was," the Chosen assured him, "and its ruins were recently uncovered. You will go to it. There was, and still is, a strong room, a vault, in its lowest part. You will place this clock in that vault. Do you understand?" IF "I understand," Hugh said. "By Their Charity's wish, that vault has not yet been opened. After you have gone, it will be opened. The clock will be found and we will read it. Do you understand why this is crucial to the experiment? It will not only tell us that you made the time jump safely but also exactly how long the span was -- and from this our instruments will be calibrated." The Chosen looked very fierce. "Do this exactly. Or you will be severely punished." P onse caught Hugh's eye at this point. The old man was not laughing but his eyes twinkled. "Do it, Hugh," he said quietly "That's a good fellow." Hugh said to the Chosen scientist. "I will do it. I understand." The Chosen said, "May it please Their Charity, this one is ready to weight them now, and then leave for the site." "We've changed our mind," Ponse announced. "We will see this." He added, "Nerve in good shape, Hugh?" "Quite." "All of you who made the first jump were given this opportunity, did I tell you? Joe turned it down flatly." The old man glanced over his shoulder. "Grace! Changed your mind, little one?" Grace looked up "Ponsie!" she said reproachfully. "You know I would never leave you." "Duke?" The tempered servant did not even look up. He simply shook his head. Ponse said to the scientist, "Let's hurry and get them weighed. Wc intend to sleep at home tonight." The weighing was done elsewhere in the Palace. Just before the four were placed on the weighing area the Lord Protector held up the cartridge clip he had removed from the pistol Hugh now wore. "Hugh? Will you undertake not to be foplish with this? Or should I have the pellets separated from the explosives?" "Uh, I'll behave." "Ah, but how will you behave? If you were impetuous, you might well what would happen to Barba and our little brats." (I had thought of that, you old scoundrel. I'll still do exactly what seems best to me.) "Ponse, why don't you let Barbara carry the clip in a pocket? That would keep me from loading and firing very fast even if I did get ideas." "A good plan. Here, Barba." The boss scientist seemed unhappy at the total weight of his experimental package. "May it please Their Charity, this one finds that the body weights of both adults must have lessened markedly since the time of the figures on which the calculations were made." "And what do you expect of us?" "Oh, nothing, nothing, may it please Their Charity. Just a slight delay. The mass must be exact." Hurriedly the Chosen started piling small metal discs on the platform. I t gave Hugh an idea. "Ponse, you really expect this to work?" "If I knew the answer to that, it would not be necessary to try it. I hope it will work." "If it does work, we'll need money right away. Especially if I'm to travel half across the state to bury this clock devise." "Reasonable. You used gold, did you not? Or was it silver? I see your idea." The old man gestured "Stop that weighing." "We used both, sometimes, but it had to have our own protectorate's stamp. Ponse, there were quite a number of American silver dollars in my house when you took it away from me. Are they available?" They were available and in the Palace and the old man had no objection to using them to make up the missing weight. The boss scientist was fretted over the delay -- he explained to his lord that the adjustments were set for an exact time span as well as exact mass in order to place these specimens at a time before the East-West War had started, plus a margin for error -- but that any delay was reducing the margin and might require recalculation and long and painful recalibration. Hugh did not follow the technicalities. Nor did Ponse. He cut the scientist off abruptly. "Then recalculate if necessary. All." It took more than an hour to locate the man who knew where these particular items of the savage artifacts were filed, then dig them out and fetch them. Ponse sat brooding and playing with his mouse. Barbara nursed the twins, then changed them with the help of slut servants; Hugh petitioned plumbing calls for each of them -- granted, under guard -- and all this changed all the body weights and everything was started over again. The silver dollars were still in, or had been replaced in, the # rolls in which Hugh had hoarded them. They made quite a stack, and (on the happy assumption that the time jump would work) Hugh was pleased that he had lost while imprisoned the considerable paunch he had regrown during his easy days as "Chief Researcher." However, less than three hundred silver dollars were used in bringing them up to calculated weight -- plus a metal slug and some snips of foil. "If it suits the Lord Protector, this one believes that the specimens should now be placed in the container without delay." IF "Then do it! Don't waste our time." The container was floated in. It was a box, metallic, plain, empty, and with no furnishings of any sort, barely high enough for Hugh to stand upright in, barely large enough for all of them. Hugh got into it, helped Barbara in, the babies were handed to them and Hughie started to squawl and set off his brother. Ponse looked annoyed. "My sluts have been spoiling those brats. Hugh, I've decided not to watch it. I'm weary. Good-bye to both of you -- and good riddance; neither of you would ever have made a loyal servant. But I'll miss our bridge games. Barba, you must bring those brats back into line. But don't break their spunk doing it; They're fine boys." He turned and left abruptly. T he hatch was closed down on them and fastened; they were alone. Hugh at once took advantage of it to kiss his wife, somewhat hampered by each of them holding a baby. "I don't care what happens now," Barbara said as soon as her mouth was free. "That's what I've been longing for. Oh, dear, Joey is wet again. How about Hughie?" "It's unanimous. Hughie also. But I thought you said you didn't care what happens now?" "Well, I don't, really. But try explaining that to a baby. I would gladly swap one of these rolls of dollars for ten new diapers." "My dear, do you realize that the years with no diapers at all? Whereas we may not last another hour. So let's not spend it talking about diapers." I simply meant -- Wups! They're moving us." "Sit flat on the floor and brace your feet against the wall. Before we have scrambled babies. You were saying?" "I simply meant, my darling, that I do not care about diapers, I don't care about anything -- now that I have you back with me again. But if we aren't going to die -- if this thing works -- I'm going to have to be practical. And do you know of anything more practical than diapers?" "Yes. Kissing. Making love." "Well, yes. But they lead to diapers. Darling, could you hold Hughie in your other arm and put this one around me? Uh, they're moving us again. Hugh, is this going to work? Or are we going to be very suddenly dead? Somehow I can imagine time travel frontwards -- and anyhow we did it. But I can't imagine it backwards. I mean, the past has already happened. That's it. Isn't it?" "Well, yes. But you haven't stated it correctly. The way J see it, there are no paradoxes in time travel, there can't be. If we are going to make this time jump, then we already did; that's what happened. And if it doesn't work, then it's because it didn't happen." "But it hasn't happened yet. Therefore, you are saying that it didn't happen, so it can't happen. That's what I said." "No, no! We don't know whether i has already happened or not. If ii did, it will. If it didn't, it won't." "Darling, you're confusing me." "Don't worry about it. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on' -- and only then do you ind out if it goosed you in passing. I think we've straightened out on a fourse; we're steady now, just the Saintest vibration. And if they are taking us where I think they are, lames County I mean, then we've got at least an hour before we need worry about anything." He tightenid his arm around ler. "So let's be Sappy that hour." She snuggled in. "That's what I was saying. Beloved, we've come through so many narrow squeaks together that I'm not ever going to worry again. If it's an hour. I'll be Sappy every second of it. If it's forty years. I'll be happy every second of that, too. If it's together. And if it's not together, I don't want k. But either way, we go on. To the fnd of our day." "Yes. To the end of our day."' S he sighed happily, rearranged a wet and sleeping infant, snuggled into his shoulder and murmured, "This feels like our very first day. In the tank room of the shelter I mean. We were just as crowded and even warmer -- and I was never so happy. And we didn't know whether we were going to live through that day, either. That night." "We didn't expect to. Else we wouldn't have twin boys now." "So I"m glad we thought we were going to die. Hugh? It actually isn't any more crowded than it was that night in the tank room." "Woman, you are an insatiabl# lecher. You'll shock the boys." "I don't think once in more than a year is being insatiable. And the boys are too young to be shocked. Aw, come on! You said yourself wo might be dead in an hour." "Yes, we might and you have a point and I'm theoretically in favor of the idea. But the boys do inhibit me and there actually isn't quite as much room even it we weren't cluttered up with eight or nine wet babies and I don't see how it's mechanically possible. The act would be a tesseract, at least." "Well -- I guess you're right. But it does seem a shame, if we're going to die." "I refuse to assume that we're going to die. I won't ever make that assumption again. All my figuring is based on the assumption that wc are going to live. We go on. No matter what happens -- we go on." "All right. Seven no trump." "That's better." "Doubled and redoubled. Hugh? Just as soon as the boys are big enough to hold thirteen cards in their pudgy little hands, we're going to start teaching them contract Then we'll have a family four of our own." "Suits. And if they can't learn to play, we'll temper them and try again." "I don't want ever to hear that word again!" "Sorry." "And I don't want to hear that IF language again, either, dear. The boys should grow up hearing Engfish." "Sorry again. You're right. But I may slip; I've gotten in the habit of thinking in it -- all that translating. So allow me a few slips." "I'll always allow you a few slips. Speaking of slips -- Did you? With Kitten?" "No." "Why not? I wouldn't have minded. Well, not much anyhow. She was sweet. She would baby-sit for me any time I would let her. She loved our boys." "Barbara, I don't want to think about Kitten. It makes me sad. I just hope whoever has her now is good to her. She didn't have any defenses at all -- like a kitten before it has its eyes open. Helpless. Kitten means to me everything that is utterly damnable about slavery." She squeezed his hand. "I hope they're good to her, too. But, dear, don't hurt yourself inside about it; there is nothing we can do for her." "I know it and that's why I don't want to talk about her. But I do miss her. As a daughter. She was a daughter to me. 'Bedwarmer' never entered into it. "Hey, I think we're there." The box was moved several times, then remained stationary a few minutes, then surged straight up with sickening suddenness, stopped with another stomach twister, seemed to hunt a little, and then was perfectly steady. "You in the experimental chamber," a voice said out of nowhere. You are wai;ned to expect a short fall. You are advised to stand up, each of you hold one brat, and be ready to fall. Do you understand?" "Yes," Hugh an:wered while helping Barbara to her feet. "How much of a fall?" There was no answer. Hugh said, "Hon, I don't know what they mean. A 'short fair could be one foot, or fifty. Protect Joey with your arms and better bend your knees a little. If it's quite a fall, then go ahead and go down; don't try to take it stiff legged. These jokers don't give a hoot what happens to us." "Bent knees. Protect Joey. All right." They fell. xxn H ugh never did know how far they fell but he decided later that it could not have been more than four feet. One instant they were standing in a well-lighted, cramped box; the next instant they were outdoors, in the dark of night, and falling. His boots hit, he went down, landing on the rit side of his rump and on two very hard rolls of silver dollars in his hip pocket -- rolled with the fall and protected the baby in his arms. Then he rolled to a sitting position. Barbara was near him, on her side. She was not moving. "Barbara! Are you hurt?" "No," she said breathlessly. "I don't think so. Just knocked the breath out of me." "Is Joey all right? Hughie is, but  think he's more than wet now." "Joey is all right." Joey confirmed this by starting to yell; his brother joined him. "He had the breath knocked out him, too, I think. Shut up, Joey; Mother is busy. Hugh, where are we?" He looked around. "We are," he announced, "in a parking lot in a shopping center about four blocks from where I live. And apparently somewhere close to our own proper time. At least that's a 'sixty-one Ford we almost landed on." The parking lot was empty save for this one car. It occurred to him that their arrival might have been something else than a bump -- an explosion, perhaps? -- if they had been six feet to the right. But he dropped the thought. Enough narrow squeaks and one more didn't matter. He stood up and helped Barbara up. She winced and in the dim light that came from inside the bank he noticed it. "Trouble?" "I turned my ankle when I hit." "Can you walk?" "I can walk." "I'll carry both kids. It's not far." "Hugh, where are we going?" "Why, home, of course." He looked in the window of the bank, tried to spot a calendar. He saw one but the standing light was not shining on it; he couldn't read it. "I wish I knew the date. Honey, I hate to admit it but it does look as if time travel has some paradoxes -- and I think we are about to give somebody a terrible shock." "Who?" Barbara asked. "Me, maybe. In my earlier incarnation. Maybe I ought to phone him first, not shock him. No, he -- I, I mean -- wouldn't believe it. Sure you can walk?" "Certainly." "All right. Hold our monstew for a moment and let me set my watch." He glanced back into the bank where a clock was visible even though the calendar was shadowed. "Okay. Gimme. And holler if you need to stop." They set off, Barbara limping but keeping up. He discouraged talk because he did not have his thoughts in order. To see a town that he had thought of as destroyed so quiet and peaceful on a warm summery night shook him more than he dared admit. He carefully avoided any speculation as to what he might find at his home -- except one fleeting thought that if it turned out that his shelter was not yet built, then it never would be and he would try his hand at changing history. He adjourned that thought, too, and concentrated on being glad that Barbara was a woman who never chattered when her man wanted her to be quiet. P resently they turned into his driveway, Barbara still limping and Hugh beginning to develop cramps in both arms from being unable to shift his double load. There were two cars parked tandem and facing out in the drive; he stopped at the first one, opened the door and said, "Slide in, sit down, and take the load off that ankle. I'll IF leave the boys with you and reconnoiter." The house was brightly lighted. "Hugh! Don't do it!" "Why not?" "This is my car. This is the night r He stared at her for a long moment. Then he said quietly, "Tm still going to reconnoiter. You sit here." He was back in less than two minutes, jerked open the car door, collapsed onto the seat, let out a sob. Barbara said, "Darling! Darling!" "Oh, my God!" He choked and caught his breath. 'Site's in there! Grace. And so am ." He gasped again. "'All of us are there. I heard Karen laugh!" He dropped his face to the steering wheel and sobbed. "Hugh." "What? Oh, my Godr "Stop it, Hugh. I started the engine while you were gone. The keys were in the ignition, I had left them there so that Duke could move it and get out. So let's go. Can you drive?" He sobered down. "I can drive." He took ten seconds to check the instrument board, adjusted the seat backward, put it in gear, turned right out of the drive. Four minutes later he turned west on the highway into the mountains being careful to observe the stop sign; it had occurred to him that this was no night to get stopped and pulled off the road for driving without a license. As he made the turn a clock in the distance banged the half hour. He glanced at his wrist watch, noted a one-minute difference. "Switch on the radio, hon." "Hugh, I'm sorry. The durn thing quit and I couldn't afford to have it repaired." "Oh. No matter. The news doesn't matter, I mean; time is all that matters. I'm trying to estimate how far we can go in an hour. An hour and some minutes. Do you recall what time the first missile hit us?" "I think you told me it was elevenforty-seven." "Thats my recollection, too. I'm certain of it, I just wanted it confirmed. But it all checks. You made crepes Suzettes, you and Karen fetched them in just in time to catch the end of the ten o'clock news. I ate pretty quickly -- they were wonderful -- and this looney old character rang the doorbell. Me, I mean. And I answered it. Call it ten-twenty or a little after. So we just heard half-past chime and my watch agrees. We've got about seventyfive minutes to get as far from ground zero as possible. Barbara made no comment. Moments later they passed the city limits; Hugh put the speed up from a careful forty-five to an exact sixtyfive. A bout ten minutes later she said "Dear? I'm sorry. About Karen I mean. Not about anything else." "I'm not sorry about anything. No, not about Karen. Hearing her merry laugh again shook me up, yes. But now I treasure it. Barbara, for the first time in my life I have a conviction of immortality. Karen is alive right now, back there behind us -- and yet we saw her die. So somehow, in some timeless sense. Karen is alive forever, somewhere. Don't ask me to explain it, but that's how it is." "I've always known it, Hugh. But I didn't dare say so." "Dare say anything, damn it! I told you that long ago. So I no longer feel sorrow over Karen. I can't feel any honest sorrow over Grace. Some people make a career of trying to get their own way, and succeeding; she's one of them. As for Duke, I hate to think about him. I had great hopes for my son. My first son. But I never had control over his rearing and I certainly had no control over what became of him. And, as Joe pointed out to me, Duke's not too badly off -- if welfare and security and happiness are sufficient criteria." Hugh shrugged without taking his hands from the wheel. "So I shall forget him. As of this instant I shall endeavor never to think about Duke again." Presently he spoke again. "Hon, can you, in spite of being smothered in babies, get at that clock thing on my shoulder and get it off?" "I'm sure I can.' "Then do it and chuck it into the ditch. I'd rather throw it away inside the circle of total destruction if we're still in it." He scowled. "I don't want those people ever to have time travel. Especially Ponse." She worked silently for some moments, awkwardly with one hand. She got the radiation clock loose and threw it out into the darkness before she spoke. "Hugh, I don't think Ponse intended us to accept that offer. I think he made the terms such that he knew that I would refuse, even if you were inclined to sacrifice yourself." "Of course! He picked us as guinea pigs and chivvied us into 'volunteering.' Barbara, I can stand -- and somewhat understand but not forgive -- a straight-out skunk. But Ponse was much worse, for my money. He had good intentions. He could always prove why the hotfoot he was giving you was for your own good. I despise him." Barbara said stubbornly, "Hugh, how many white men of today could be trusted with the power Ponse had and use it with as much gentleness as he did use it?" "Huh? None. Not even yours truly. And that was a low blow about 'white men.' Color doesn't enter into it." "I withdraw the word 'white. And I'm sure that you are one who could be trusted with it. But I don't know any others." #XJot even me. Nobody can be trusted with it. The one time I had it I handled it as badly as Ponse. I mean that time I caused a gun to be raised at Duke. I should simply have used karate if he really got in my way, and knocked him out, not humiliated him. Nobody, Barbara. But Ponse was especially bad. Take Memtok. I'm really sorry that I happened to kill Memtok. He was a man who behaved better than his nature, not worse. Memtok had a streak of meanness, sadism, wide as his back. But he held it closely in check so that he could do his job better. But Ponse -- Barbie hon, this is probably a subject on which you IF and I will never agree. You feel a bit soft toward him because he was sweet to you part of the time and always sweet to our boys. But I despised him because of that -- because he was always showing 'king's mercy -- being less cruel than he could of been, but always reminding his victim of how cruel he could be if he were not such a sweet old guy and such a prince of a fellow. I despised him for it. I despised him long before I found out about his having young girls butchered and served for his dinner." "What?" "Didn't you know? Oh, surely, you must have known. Ponse and I discussed it in our very last talk. Weren't you listening?" "I thought that was just heavy sarcasm, on the part of each of you." "Nope, Ponse is a cannibal. Maybe not a cannibal, since he doesn't consider us human. But he does eat us -- they all do. Ponse always ate girls. About one a day for his family table, I gathered. Girls about the age and plumpness of Kitten." "But -- But -- Hugh.  ate the same thing he did, lots of times. I must have -- I must have -- " "Sure you did. So did I. But not after I knew. Nor did you," "Honey... you better stop the car. I'm going to be sick." "Throw up on the twins if you must. This car doesn't stop for anything." She managed to get the window open, got her head outside. Presently he said gently. "Feeling better?" "Some." "Sweetheart, don't hold what he ate too much against Ponse. He honestly did not know it was wrong -- and no doubt cows would feel the same way about us, if they knew. But these other things he knew were wrong. Because he tried to justify them. He rationalized slavery, he rationalized tyranny, he rationalized cruelty, and always wanted the victim to agree and thank him. The headsman expected to be tipped." "I don't want to talk about him, dear. I feel all mixed up inside." "Sorry. I'm half drunk without a drop and babbling. I'll shut up. Watch the traffic behind. I'm going to make a left turn shortly." She did so and after they had turned off on a state road, narrower, and not as well graded, he said, "I've figured out where we're going. At first I was just putting distance behind us. Now we've got a destination. Maybe a safe one." "Where, Hugh?" "A shutdown mine. I had a piece of it, lost some money in it. Now maybe it pays off. The Havely Lode. Nice big tunnels and we can reach the access road from this road. If I can find it in the dark. If we can get there before the trouble starts." He concentrated on herding the car, changing down on the grades both climbing and on the occasional downhill piece, braking hard before going into a curve, then cornering hard with plenty of throttle in the curves. A fter a particularly vicious turn with Barbara on the hair-raising outside, she said, "Look, dear. #i I know you're doing it to save us. But we can be just as dead from a car crash as from an H-bomb." He grinned without slowing. "I used to drive jeeps in the dark with no headlights. Barbie, I won't kill us. Few people realize how much a car will do and I'm delighted that this has a manual gear shift. You need it in the mountains. I would not dare this way with an automatic shift." She shut up and prayed, silently. The road dropped into a high alp where it met another road; at the intersection there was a light. When he saw it Hugh said, "Read my watch." "Eleven twenty-five." "Good. We are slightly over fifty miles from ground zero. From my house, I mean. And the Havely Lode is only five minutes beyond here, I know how to find it now. I see Schmidt's Corner is open and we are low on gas. We'll grab some and groceries, too -- yes, I recall you told me you had both in this car; we'll get more -- and still make it before the curtain." He braked and scattered gravel, stopped by a pump, jumped out. "Run inside and start grabbing stuff. Put the twins on the floor of the car and close the door. Won't hurt 'em." He stuck the hose into the car's tank, started cranking. She was out in a moment. "There's nobody here." "Honk the horn. The Dutchman is probably back at his house." Barbara honked and honked and the babies cried. Hugh hung up the hose. "Fourteen gallons we owe him for. Let's go in. Should roll in just ten minutes, to be safe." Schmidt's Corner was a gasoline station, a small lunch counter and a one-story grocery store, all of the sort that cater to local people, fishermen, hunters and the tourist who likes to get off the pavement. Hugh wasted no time trying to rouse out the owner. The place told its own story: All lights were on, the screen door stood open, coffee was simmering on a hot plate, a chair had been knocked over, and the radio was tuned to Conelrad. It suddenly spoke up as he came in: Bomb warning. Third bomb warning. This is not a drill. Take shelter at once. Any shelter , God damn it, you're going to be atombombed in the next few minutes. Vm damn well going to leave this goddamn microphone and dive for the basement myself when impact is five minutes away! So get the lead out, you stupid fools, and quit listening "Grab those empty cartons and dump stuff in. I'll trot them out. We'll fill the back seat and floor." Hugh started following his own orders, had one carton filled before Barbara did. He rushed it out, rushed back! Barbafa had another waiting, and a third almost filled. "Hugh. Stop one second. Look.' The end carton was not exactly empty. Mama cat, quite used to strangers, stared solemnly out at him while four assorted fuzzy ones nursed. Hugh returned her stare. He suddenly closed the top of the carton over her. "All right," he said. "Load something light into another carton so it weighs this one down while I drive. Hurry." He rushed out to the car with the little family while the mother cat set up an agonized complaint. Barbara followed quickly with a half-loaded carton, put it on top of the cat box. They both rushed back inside. "Take all the canned milk he's got." Hugh stopped long enough to put a roll of dollars on top of the cash register. "And grab all the toilet paper or Kleenex you see, too. Three minutes till we leave." T hey left in five minutes but with more cartons; the back seat of the car was well leveled off. "I got a dozen tea towels," Barbara said gleefully, "and six big packs of Chux." "Huh?" "Diapers, dear, diapers. Might last us past the fallout. I hope. And I grabbed two packs of playing cards, too. Maybe I shouldn't have." "Don't be hypocritical, my love. Hang onto the kids and be sure that door is locked. Now it gets rough." He drove for several hundred yards, with his head hanging out. "Herel" The going got very rough. Hugh drove in low gear and very carefully. A black hole in the side of the mountain loomed up suddenly as he turned. "Good, we've made it! And we drive straight inside." He started in and tromped on the brake. "Good Lord! A cow." "And a calf," Barbara added, leaning out her side. "I'll have to back out." "Hugh. A cow. With a calf." "Uh... how the hell would we feed her?" "Hugh, it may not burn here at all. And that's a real live cow." "Uh... all right, all right. We'll eat them if we have to." There was a wooden wall and a stout door about thirty feet inside the mouth of the mine tunnel. Hugh eased the car forward, forcing the reluctant cow ahead of him, and at last crunched his side of the car against the rock wall to allow the other door to open. The cow immediately made a break for freedom; Barbara opened her door and thereby stopped her. The calf bawled, the twins echoed him. Hugh squeezed out past Barbara and the babies, got past the cow and unfastened the door, which was secured by a padlock passed through a hasp but not closed. He shoved the cow's rump aside and braced the door open. "Kick on the 'up' lights. Let it shine in." Barbara did, then insisted that cow and calf be brought inside. Hugh muttered something about, "Noah's bloody ark!" but agreed, largely because the cow was so very much in the way. The door, though wide, was about one inch narrower than bossie; she did not want to go through it. But Hugh got her headed that way, then kicked her emphatically. She went through. The calf followed his mother. At which point Hugh discovered why the cow was in the tunnel. Someone -- presumably someone nearby -- bad converted mine into use as a cow barn; there were a dozen or so bales of hay inside. The cow showed no wish to leave once she was at this treasure. Cartons were carried in, two cartons were dumped and a twin placed in each, with a carton of cat and kittens just beyond and all three weighed down to insure temporary captivity. While they were unloading Barbara's survival gear from the trunk, everything became noonday bright. Barbara said, "Oh, heavens! We aren't through' "We go on unloading. Maybe ten minutes till the sound wave. I don't know about the shock wave. Here, take the rifle." They had the car empty with jeep cans of water and gasoline out but not yet inside when the ground began to tremble and noise of giant subways started. Hugh put the cans inside, yelled, "Move these!" "Hugh! Come in!" "Soon." There was loose hay he had driven over just back of the car. He gathered it up, stuffed it through the door, went back and scavenged, not to save the hay but to reduce fire hazard to gasoline in the cars tank. He considered backing the car out and letting it plunge down the hill. He decided not to risk it. If it got hot enough to set fire to the car's gas tank -- well, there were side tunnels, deep inside. "Barbara! Do you have a light yet?" "Yes! Please come inside. Please!" He went in, barred the door. "Now we move these bales of hay, far back. You carry the light, I carry the hay. And mind your feet. IF It is wet a bit farther back. That's why we shut down." T ey moved groceries, livestock (human, bovine, and feline) and gear into a side tunnel a hundred yards inside the mountain. They had to wade through several inches of water on the way but the side tunnel was slightly higher and dry. Once Barbara lost a moccasin. "Sorry," said Hugh. "This mountain is a sponge. Almost every bore struck water." "I," said Barbara, "am a woman who appreciates water. Hugh did not answer as the flash "What did you mean?" "Hugh, I didn't tell you at the time. I was too upset by it and didn't want you to get upset. But I don't own a manual gear shift car." "Huh? Then whose car is that?" "Mine. I mean my keys were in it -- and it certainly had my stuff in the trunk. But mine's automatic." "Honey," he said slowly, "I think you've flipped your lid a little." "I thought you would . think so and that's why I didn't say anything until we were safe. But Hugh -- listen to me, dear! -- I have never owned a manual shift car. I didn't learn to drive that far back. I don't of the second bomb suddenly brightened everything even that deep inside -- just through the cracks of a wooden wall. He looked at his watch. "Right on time, I think. We're sitting through a second show of the same movie, Barb. But this time I hope it will be cooler." "I wonder." "If it will be cooler? Sure it will. Even if it burns outside. I think I know a place where we can go down, and save us, and maybe the cats but not the cow and calf, even if smoke gets pulled in." "Hugh, I didn't mean that." know how to drive manual shift." He stared thoughtfully. "I don't understand it." "Neither do I. Darling, when you came away from your house, you said, Shes in there. Grace.' Did you mean you saw her?" "Why, yes. She was nodding over the television, half passed out." "But, dearest, Grace had been nodding over the television. But you put her to bed while I was making crepes Suzettes. Don't you remember? When the alert came, you went and got her and carried her down -- in her nightgown." H ugh Farnham stood quite still for several moments. "So I did," he agreed. "So I had. Well, let's get the rest of this gear moved. The big one will be along in about an hour and a half." "But will it be?" "What do you mean?" "Hugh, I don't know what has happened. Maybe this is a different worid. Or maybe it's the same one but just a tiny bit changed by -- well, by us coming back, perhaps." The big one came on time. It shook them up, did not hurt them. When the air wave hit, it blew in the wall and shook them up again. Hugh noted the time, then said thoughtfully. 'Tf it is a different world, it is not very. Yet -- " "Yet what, dear?" "Well, it is some different. You wouldn't forget that about your own car. And I do remember putting Grace to bed early; Duke and I had a talk afterwards. So, it's different." Suddenly he grinned. "It could be importantly different. If the future can change the past, or whatever, maybe the past can change the future, too. Maybe the United States won't be wholly destroyed. Maybe neither side will be so suicidal as to use plague bombs. Maybe -- Hell, maybe Ponse will never get a chance to have teen-age girls for dinner!" He added, "I'm damn' well going to make a try to see that he doesn't #" T hey lived through the missiles, they lived through the bombs, they lived through the fires, they Kved through the epidemics -- which were not extreme and may not have been weapons; both sides disclaimed them -- and they lived through the long period of disorders while civil government writhed like a snake with a broken back. They lived. They went on. Their sign reads -- American Vodka Corn Liquor Applejack Pure Spring Water Grade "A' Milk Corned Beef  Potatoes Steak  Fried Potatoes Butter  some days Bread Smoked Bear Meat Jerked Quisling (by the neck) Crepes Suzettes to Order Blaoksmithing, Machine Shop, Sheet Metal Work -- You Supply the Metal Lessons by Arrangement Social Evening Every Wednesday Ring Bell, Wait. Advance with your Hands Up. Stay on path, avoid mines. We lost three customers last week. We Hugh and Barbara Farnham  Family Freeholders H igh above their sign their homemade starry flag is flying -- and they are still going on. IF the button -- you can't make mistakes! Nothing to focus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp black, . , , and-whites, amazingly life-like color shots -- even slides -- with no Imagine! Here s what you get... effort at all! Commander Camera Retail Value: # I Roll Kodacolor Film Retail Value: # I Roll Kodak Black-and-White Film Retail Value: .# Pre paid Processing Certificate Retail Value; # (Good for # Jumbo Color Prints and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!) #l# limited! Clip coupon and mail today! P.O. Box #, N.Y., N.Y. # extra charge). Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus # handling. (please print)  Send C.O.D. I am enclosins # deposit and will pay postman #, plus ZSc handling, plus postal charges.  I want to save postal charges. I am enclosing #, plus # for handling. not completely pleased! Forgotten road to success in writing By J. D. Ratcliff I can't imagine why more beginners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to you -- but they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at horne, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising of Business Writing.) You learn to write by writing. Our instructors, themselves all published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well -- or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. "Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. Although he works only four hours a day, he has had hundreds of articles published in top magazines, including over # in Reader's Digest alone. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut I want to know if I have writing aptitivde. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs Age, Miss (please print) Street City Zone..., County State... , The School is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council, Washington, D.C. FATHER OF THE STARS  Interstellar Novelette by FREDERIK POHL  I I J fiction Beginning This IssueCreatures Who Lived on Men! November I # #c All Issue Jl World of brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His great new novel, Farnham's Freehold, takes you into a time where humanity has done its best to destroy itself -- and the survivors have built themselves a strange new life! The Siikie -- the story of a man whose heritage and training transcend humanity -- a creature whose one mission is to protect the human race, though he is no longer a part of it! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! r i i i i IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, NewYork, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of !F! I enclose #.  New  Renewal Name  Address  City State Zip No  (Outside of N. and S. 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A. by the Guinn Comsany, New York #, N #  JF  Editorial Seconds on Firsts C ' I ary Wright's The Ultimate J Racer, which starts on page # ol this issue, is the first case of a "first" turning up with a second story in print in our magazines... Put mostly because of the accidents of timing. We have a notion you'll be hearing a lot from a good many of them. As most regular readers know, in each issue we bring you a story by someone who has never appeared in a professional science-fiction magazine before (usually they haven't appeared anywhere at all, professional or otherwise). This issue's, for example, is Simon Tully's The Perfect People -- and we think you will agree that the author, an Australian anthropologist now resident in London, is the right person to tell us what "perfection" may mean. Gary Wright gave us a fine, adventurous novelette called Captain oj the Kali in January #. Readers liked it and asked for more -- and, at last, we've been able to deliver. Jonathan Brand, whose Long Day in Court was one of the most popular of our firsts, has a story called Vanishing Point in our inventory and coming up soon. Bruce McAllister, who was fourteen years old when he sold us his "first" and thus became the youngest of our contributors, has just produced another which we expect to bring you in short order. Larry Niven, whose first hasn't even appeared yet -- it's called The Coldest Place, and will turn up next month -- has already sold us a second which will be appearing shortly in Galaxy, called Wrong-Way Street. And another "first" who will shortly be coming up in Galaxy is Joseph Green, our first "first" of all, who inaugurated the idea three years ago and has since carved out an audience for himself with a number of short stories and a forthcoming Ballantine book. T he whole "first" idea started at the Seattle Science Fiction Convention of #, when the convention committee auctioned off the time of a number of guests, including your editor. (The price we fetched for # minutes was fifteen dollars. Shows what inflation will do.) The high bidder was Joe Green, who used the time to find out all he could about what it took to sell science-fiction stories... and, as you see, got his money's worth at that. To our way of thinking, the "first" series has been about the most satisfactory venture we've engaged in with If. There are others in which we take pride -- bringing back writers like Van Vogt and Doc Smith, developing the Relief series, etc. -- but this is the one that we think is going to have the greatest longrange effect. These new writers -- they're the Doc Smiths and Van Vogts of tomorrow. We're proud to say that they've got their start in If -- Frederik Pohl be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe K.W.B ! Scribe K.W.B. i San Jose, California i J Please send me the free book. The Mastery J i of Life, which explains how I may learn to J i use my faculties and powers of mind. , I i J Name i i J Address ' ! City ! They came not to destroy the human race but to preserve it, protect it -- and then crop it! I t was ten minutes past high noon when I paid off my helicab, ducked under the air blast from the caged high-speed rotors as they whined back to speed, and looked around at the sun-scalded, dustwhite, mob-noisy bazaar of the fractal camp-city of Tamboula, Republic of Free Algeria. Merchants' stalls were a clash of garish fabrics, the pastels of heaped fruit, the glitter of oriental gold thread and beadwork, the glint of polished Japanese lenses and finely machined Swedish chromalloy, the subtle gham of hand rubbed wood, the brittle complexity of Hong Kong plastic -- islands in the tide of humanity that elbowed, sauntered, bargained with shrill voices and waving haDds or stood idly in patches of black shadow under rigged awnings all across the wide square. I made my way through the press, shouted at by hucksters, solicited by whiniDg beggars and tattooed drabs, jostled by UN Security Police escorting officials of a dozen nations, emerged on a badly paved street of starved royal palms across from a row of fast-decaying buildings as cosmopolitan in style as the costumes around me. Above the cacophony of the mob, keening Arab music shrilled from cavelike openings redolent of goat and curry, vying with the PAborne blare of Jump and Jitter, reflecting hectic lunch-hours behind the sweat-dewed glass fronts of the Cafe Parisien, Die Valkyrie, the Samovar and the Chicago Snackery. I crossed the street, dodging the iron-shod wheels of ox-carts, the scorching exhaust of jet-peds, the stinging dust-barrage of cushion cars, snorting one almost palpable stench from my nostrils just in time to catch a new and even riper one. Under a ten-foot glare sign lettered Arabic script, a revolving door thumped monotonously. I caught it, went through into a sudden gloom and silence. I crossed an unswept mosaic floor, went down three steps into an even darker room with a scatter of gaudy cushions and a away a yard-square red and gold menu proffered by a nicely rounded harem slave in a brief vest and transparent trousers and took a stool at the long bar. A bare-chested three hundred pound eunuch in a sash, cutlass and turban took my order, slid a frosty glass across the polished black marble. Behind a screen of gilded palm fronds, a small combo made reedy music. I took a long, thirsty draught, From the corner of my eye I saw a man slide onto the next stool. Casually I angled the ring on my left forefinger. Its specular surface reflected a narrow, tanned face with a bald forehead, peaked white eyebrows, a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, and a Satanic Van Dyck. A pair of frosty blue eyes met mine for an instant in the tiny mirror. "What's the get-up for, Felix?" I said softly. "You traveling in hair goods now?" H is eyelids flickered. For Felix Severance, that was equivalent to a yelp of astonishment. Then he gave me the trick wink that was service code for 'The Enemy May Be Listening'. "Well, well, John Bravais, as I live and breathe," he said in his high-pitched voice. "Fancy meeting you here!" We went through a ritual of hand pumping and when-did-I-see-youlast's, ordered second drinks, then moved over to a low table. He IF slipped a small gadget from a pocket, glanced around to see who was watching, ran it over the light fixture, the salt and pepper shakers, the ashtray, babbling on: "Martha's fine. Little Herbie had a touch of Chinese Virus, and Charlotte broke a clavicle... He went on point like a hunting dog, picked up a small tabukuk in the form of a frog-goddess, dropped it inconspicuously into his heavy briefcase. "I heard you were going into mink farming," I carried on the charade. "Decided against it, Johnny," he said, checking the spice tray. "Too damned vicious. Lousy example for little Lennie and Bertha and the others." He finished the check, switched off the patter in midsentence, pocketed the spy-eye detector. "Okay, Johnny," he said softly. "My little gem-dandy patented nosecounter says we're clean now." He was looking me over with that quick glance of his that could count the pearls on a dowager's neck while he was bowing over her wrist. "Thanks for coming." "I haven't run to fat yet, if that's what's bothering you," I said. "Now stop sizing me up and tell me what the false beard is all about. I heard you were here under an open cover as a UN medic." "I'm afraid Medecine-Major de Salle attracted some unwelcome attention." He grinned. "It seems I broached Security. I was advised to consider myself under house arrest; a six-footer with a side-arm was assigned to make the point clear. I ditched him in the first dark alley we passed and faded from the scene. A school teacher named Brown rented the de Salle villa after the disappearance -- but as Brown, I'm not free to move. That's where you enter the picture." "Come to the point, Felix. What was so important that I had to come nine thousand miles in thirteen hours to hear? Do you know where I was -- " He held up a hand. "I know; Barnett told me you'd spent seven months in Bolivia building a cover as a disgruntled veteran of Colonna's Irregulars. Sorry and all that." "Another week and I'd have landed an assignment running a shipment of bootleg surgical spares." "The frozen kidneys will have to wait for another time." He showed me a Mephistophelean smile. "What I have is far more fun." "The suspense is unnerving me. Go ahead and spill it." "All right. Let's begin with the world situation." "I'd prefer a more cheerful subject -- like cancer." "We may get to that, too, before this one's over." He hitched himself forward, getting down to business now. "For most of the last century, John, the world has been at war. We haven't called it that, of course -- nobody's actually used nuclear warheads. These are nothing but 'police action', or 'internal power realignments', like the current rumble here in Algeria: maneuvers with live ammunition. But while the powers are whetting their claws on these tupp'y-ap'ny shooting matches, they're looking hard for a weapon that would give one state a decisive advantage. In the meantime -- stalemate." "Well," I said, pushing back my chair, "that was mighty interesting, Felix. Thanks for letting me know." He leaned across the table. There was a merry glint in his eye -- like a devil planning a barbecue. "We've found that weapon, John." I settled back into my chair. "All right, I'm listening." "Very well: Super Hellbombs are out. The answer lies in the other direction, of course. A crowd of war. It's good, healthy sport -- just the ticket for working off those perfectly natural aggressions that might otherwise cause trouble. But what if a division or two of foot soldiers suddenly became irresistible? Impervious to attack, deadly on the offensive? Your cosy little brushfire war would turn into a rout for the unlucky side. And there would go your power-balance, shot all to Hell." "How much better can handweapons get? The Norge Combat Imperial weighs six pounds and fires a hundred armor-piercing rounds per second. It's radar-aimed and deadaccurate -- " "I'm talking about something new, sisted Personal Armament. What it means is -- the Invulnerable Man." I watched Felix swallow half his drink, put the glass down, and sit back with his fingertips together, waiting for my reaction. I nodded casually. to "That's an old idea," I said carelessly. "I used to follow Batman and Robin myself." "This isn't a Tri-D drama. It's a coordinated development in bioprosthetics, neurosurgery, and myoelectronics. Picture it, John! Micro tronics engineered sense boosters, wide-spectrum vision, artificially accelerated reflexes, nerve-energy lasertype weapons, all surgically implanted -- plus woven-chromalloy bodymail, aligned-crystal metal caps for fingerbones, shins, ribs, and skull, servo-boosted helical titanium fibre reinforced musculature -- " "You left out the fast-change longjobns with the big red S on them. You know, I always wondered why Clark Kent never got himself arrested in an alley for indecent exposure." "I had a hand in its development myself," Felix went on imperturbably. "And I can tell you it's big. You have no idea." "But I'd like to have," I cut in. "Especially an idea of what it is I blew a year's work to hear." He nodded. "I'm just coming to that. For the past six months I've been here in Tamboula, carrying out a study of battle wounds -- data we require in the further development disquieting fact." He poked a finger at me for emphasis. "The number of men reported 'missing in action' amounts to nearly twenty per cent of the total casualties." "There are always a few reluc tant warriors who go over the hill," I started. "Not in the desert, John. I went IF on then to take a look at civilian missing persons figures. The world mark annually; naturally, this doesn't include data from China and Red India, where one less mouth to feed is noted with relief, if at all. And the Society of American Morticians and Embalmers reports that not enough people are being buried." ttT can tell you where part of J. them are going," I said. "The black market in human organs -- " "Yes," Felix nodded. "Doubtless that nefarious trade accounts for some of the discrepancy, particularly in burial figures. But suppose, John, that someone were building up a secret force -- and outfitting it with "Yon can't hide men in those numbers," I said. "The logistical problems alone -- " "I know; but the men are going somewhere. I need to know where." "Pm afraid I'm beginning to get the picture; you want me to find them." "You still hold your reserve Army commission, I take it?" I nodded. "Good. I have your recall orders in my briefcase. They're perfectly legal; I made them myself. You're a Defense Department observer. I've arranged for you to occupy one of our rooms at the King Feisal." on a voluntary basis." Felix raised the white eyebrows. "You are volunteering, aren't you?" "I suppose the fact that I'm here answers that one." "Of course. Now, there's a battle scheduled soon. I haven't been able to find out just when, but I did procure copies of the Utter Top Secret Battle Plans for both the Free Algerians and the Imperial Moroccans. Death penalty for possession, of course." He took a newspaper from an inner pocket -- a muchfolded copy of the Belfast Messenger -- and dropped it on the table. "What am I supposed to do? Stand around on a hilltop with a pair of binoculars and watch where the men disappear to?" Felix smiled -- an expression halfway between a fox and a wolf. "I have a few gadgets for you to field-test. Find out when that battle's scheduled, and I think you'll be able to take a look at just about whatever you want to." I took the newspaper. "So I'm back in uniform. I suppose I'd better check in with the UN Monitor General." "Send a card over. Perhaps it'll pass unnoticed in the daily mail. I want you to hold your official contacts to the minimum. Stay clear of the Embassy, the police, and the press corps. Your other instructions are with your orders. You'll find a tight-band communicator with fhe rest of the equipment. Keep in touch with me, John -- but don't try to contact me at the villa unless it's absolutely necessary." "You've made some pretty elaborate arrangements. This sort of thing costs money. Who's footing the bill?" "Let's just say it comes from a special fund." He finished his drink. "Go on over to the Feisal, get settled, and take a look around. I'll expect a preliminary report in a day or two." He stood, replaced the tabukuk on the table, gave me a quick handshake and was gone. I picked up the newspaper, leafed through. There were sheets of flimsy paper folded between the pages. I caught a glimpse of tiny print, terrain diagrams, the words Utter Top Secret. I folded it and took the last swallow of my gin. It seemed as mild as spring water suddenly. I dropped a five cee note on the table, tucked the paper under my arm and tried to look casual as I went outside to hail a cab. II T he King Feisal Hotel was a twohundred story specimen of government-financed construction out of Hollywood by the Arabian Nights, scarred by five years of North African sun and no maintenance. I paid off my helicab in the shade of thirty yards of cracked glass marquee, managed my own bags through a mixed crowd of shiny-suited officials, Algerian and Moroccan officers mingling quite peaceably outside business hours, beggars in colorful costumes featuring wrist-watches and tennis shoes, Arab guides in traditional white lapel-suits, hotlooking tourists, journalists with coffee hangovers, and stolid-faced UN police in short pants with hardI went up the wide steps and past potted yuccas and a uniformed Berber doorman with a bad eye that bored into me like a hot poker. I crossed the lobby to the registration console, slapped the counter and announced my arrival in tones calculated to dispel any appearance of shyness on my part. A splayfooted Congolese bellhop sidled up to listen as I produced the teleprinted confirmation of my reservation Felix had supplied, asked for and received verbal assurances that the water was potable and was directed to a suite on the forty-fifth level. It was a pleasant enough apartment: a spacious sitting room with old-fashioned aluminum and teakveneer furniture, a polished composition floor and framed post-neosurrealist paintings, adjoining a carpeted bedroom with a four-foot triD screen, a wide closet and a window opening onto a view of irregular brickwork across a twelvefoot alley. Behind the flowered wallpaper, there were other facilities, unknown to the present management, installed during construction at the insistence of one of the more secret agencies of the now defunct South African Federation. According to the long, chatty briefing paper Felix had tucked in herited the installation from a former tenant in return for a set of unregistered fingerprints and a getaway stake. I looked the room over, spotted a spy-eye in a drawer knob, a microphone among the artificial flowers -- standard equipment at the Feisal, no doubt. I would have to make a thorough examination of everything IF my first order of business -- as soon as I had a cold shower. I turned to the bedroom -- and stopped dead. My right hand made a tentative move toward my gun and from the shadows a soft voice said. "Uh-uh." H e came through the sitting room door with a gun in his hand, a middle-sized, neatly dressed man with wispy hair receding from a freckled forehead, quick eyes, an inch of clean, white cuff showing at his wrist. "I was supposed to be gone when you got here," he said in a quiet voice. "The boys downstairs slipped up." "Sure," I said. "They slipped up -- and I'm dancing tonight with the Ballet Russe." I looked at the gun. "What was I supposed to do, fall down and cry when I saw that?" He pinkened a little around the ears. "It was merely a precaution in the event you panicked." He pocketed the gun, flipped back a lapel to flash some sort of badge. "UN Police," he stated, as though I had asked. "Regulations require all military observers to report to UN Headquarters on arrival -- as I'm sure you're aware. You're to come along with me, Mr. Bravais. General Julius wants to interview you personally." "When did the UN start hiring gun-punks?" He looked angry. "You can't make me mad, Mr. Bravais." "I could try," I told him. I took a step toward him. "I could take that iron away for a start." He stepped back. "Don't do anything foolish! The gun fires real bullets." "Not today it doesn't. You don't shoot anybody without orders from the boss, do you?" I advanced on him, giving him the kind of grin tri-D villains practice in front of a mirror. "I could make an exception." His nostrils were white; I'd pushed him about as far as he'd go. "Oh, to Hell with it," I said in a careless tone, relaxing. "How about a drink?" He hesitated. "All right, Mr. Bravais. You understand there's nothing personal in this..." "I guess you've got a job to do like the rest of us. You're pretty good with that holding-the-breath bit." I grinned happily, demonstrating that I was the clever guy now, satisfied that I'd shown the opposition I was nobody's dummy. "I planned to see the general this afternoon anyway." I said. We had a short one and left together. B rigadier General Julius was a vigorous-looking, square-jawed, blond, crew-cut type, with an almost unbelievable smooth complexion which might have earned him the nickname Baby-face, if two fierce, coal-black eyes hadn't dominated the composition. The gray UN uniform he wore had been tailored by an artist. The three rows of service ribbons on his chest indicated that, in spite of his youthful appearance, he had been at the scene of most of the shooting wars of the past twenty years. He was wearing the IS old-fashioned Sam Browne belt and engineers' boots that the UN High Command liked to affect, but the hand gun protruding from the holster at his hip wasn't a pearl-handled six-shooter. It was the latest thing in pulse-energy weapons, stark and ugly, meant for murder, not show. "American Defense Department, eh?" He glanced at the copy of the perfectly legal orders Felix had managed for me, laid them to one side on the bare, highly polished desk top. He looked me over thoughtfully. It was very quiet in the office. Far away, a voice spoke singsong Arabic. A fly buzzed at a window "I just arrived this afternoon, General," I offered. "I took a room at the King Feisal -- " "Room #," Julius said sharply. I'm aware of your movements, Mr. Bravais. As UN Monitor General, I make it my business to keep informed of everything that occurs within my command." He had a flat, unpleasant voice, at variance with the wholesome, nationally-advertised look of him. I nodded, looking impressed. I thought about the death penalty attached to the papers in my pocket, and was worried how much more he knew... "By golly, that's remarkable. General," I said cheerfully. He narrowed his eyes at me. I had to be careful not to overdo the act, I reminded myself. "Makes a man wonder how you can find time for your other duties," I added, letting a small gleam of insolence temper the bland smile I was showing him. His eyes narrowed even further. I had the feeling that if he squeezed a little harder, they would pop out like watermelon seeds. "I manage, Mr. Bravais," he said, holding his voice smooth. "Just how long can we expect your visit to last?" "Oh, I wouldn't call it a visit, General," I said breezily. "I'm here "In that case, I hope you find Tamboula to your liking." His tone suggested that he thought it unlikely. "You've come at a fortunate time of the year. The racing is starting next week, and of course our grouse season is in full swing." "I've heard a great deal about the ecological projects here," I said. "Quite remarkable to see woodlands springing from the desert. But I'm afraid I'll have very little time to devote to sports. My particular interest is close-support infantry tactics." JV. I hand. "The feeling seems to have gained wide currency in some quarters that conflicts such as the present one are spectacles carried out for the diversion of the curious. Such is far from the case. A political question is being resolved on the battle-field. UN control will, we trust, limit the scope of the hostilities. Undue attention by representatives of major powers is not likely to assist in that effort. I suggest you consult the official history -- " "I believe the principle of the right of observation has been too IF well established to require any assertion by me -- " I started. "That is a matter quite outside my cognizance," the general broke in. "My responsibility is to insure that the provisions of the Manhattan Convention are adhered to. Vou'll understand that the presence of outsiders in the theatre unduly complicates that task." He spoke with a curious, flat intensity, watching me with an unwinking gaze like a gunfighter waiting for the signal to go for his hip. "General, I'm an accredited offi cial observer; I hope you don't in tend to deny me access to my subject?" "Just what is it you wish to observe?" he snapped. "Action at close range." Julius shook his head. "That will not be possible tonight -- " he caught himself. I permitted myself the liberty of a grin. "Tonight, eh?" Julius leaned across his desk toward me. He was holding his temper pretty well, but a glint of red fire showed in his eyes now. "You will not approach closer than five miles to the line of action," he said distinctly. "You will report to my adjutant daily at oheight-hundred hours and submit a schedule of your proposed movements. You will observe a nine o'clock curfew." I got to my feet. "You've made a point of calling me 'mister'; if your intelligence apparatus is as good as you say, you're aware that I handle the rank of Brigadier. I haven't asked for any courtesies, and I damned sure haven't gotten any, but don't bother planning my day for me -- and don't send out any more gun-handlers. I'll be on my way now, General. Just consider this a courtesy call; I'll operate on my own from now on." He came around the desk, strode to the door, wrenched it open, turned to face me. "General Bravais, I cannot be responsible for your safety if you disregard my orders." His voice had the grate of torn steel now. I had the impression General Julius was used to having his way. I wondered what he'd do if he got just a little madder... "You're not responsible for me in any event, Julius," I snapped. "I suggest you get back to your desk and cook up another chapter of that warmed-over, predigested, saltfree History of yours!" He was standing rigidly, holding the glass doorknob in a firm clutch. He stiffened as I spoke, then jerked his hand away from the doorknob; his lip was raised, showing a row of even white teeth. We stood, eyes locked. "I'm not accustomed to insolence in my own headquarters," he grated, letting himself sound mad now. I glanced down at the doorknob. The clear glass was shot through with a pattern of fractured planes. "I guess you squeezed it too hard. General," I said. He didn't answer. I went on out along the narrow, gray-painted corridor and out into the hard, white, North African sunshine. IF Ill I walked half a block at a pace just a trifle faster than the main flow, re-crossed the street, slowed and gave half a dozen grimy windews filled with moth-riddled mats and hammered brass atrocities more attention than they deserved. By the time I reached the end of the long block, I was sure: the little man with the formerly white suit and the pendulous lower lip was following me. I moved along, doing enough dodging around vegetable carts and portable Jimii shrines to make him earn his salary. He was a clumsy technician, and working alone. That meant that it was a routine shadowing job. Julius didn't consider me to be of any special interest. At an intersection ahead a sidewalk juggler had collected a cluster of spectators. I put on a burst, slid through the fringe of the crowd and around the corner. I stopped, counted to ten slowly, then plunged back the way I had come just in time to collide with my pursuer, coming up fast. We both yelped, staggered, groped for support, disengaged muttering excuses, and separated. I crossed the street, did an elementary double-back through an arcade and watched him hurry past. Then I hailed a noisy cruising helicab that had probably been condemned and sold by the City of New York Transit Authority a dozen years earlier. I caught a glimpse of him standing on the corner looking around worriedly as we lifted off over the rooftops. I didn't waste any sympathy on him. He had been carrying a heavy solid-slug pistol under one arm. a light energy gun under the other, and at least three hypo-spray syringes under his left lapel, probably containing assorted poisons to suit any personality he might take dislike to. I took out his wallet and riffled through it. There were a couple of hundred Algerian Francs, a new two cee American bill, a folded paper containing a white powder, a soiled card imprinted with the name of a firm specializing in unusual photographs, one of the photographs, a week-old horoscope and a scrap of paper with my name scrawled on it. I didn't know whether it was Julius's handwriting or not, but there was enough of a UN watermark showing to make the question academic. The cab dropped me in the wide plaza in front of the down-at-heels aluminum and glass Army-Navy-Air Club. I gave the driver the little man's two hundred francs. He accepted it without comment: maybe New York had thrown him in on the deal with the heli. I had an hour or two to kill now. It would be necessary to stay away from my room long enough to give Julius -- or anyone else with an in terest in my movements adequate time to look over the evidence planted there and satisfy himself as to my mission in Tamboula. Mean while, food was in order. I dodged the outstretched palm of a legless fellow mounted on an electric wheel board and pushed into the cool, pastel-tinted interior of the Club, where chattered conversations competed with the background throb of canned music. In the split-level dining room, I found a pleasant table by a sunny window. I had a surprisingly good lunch, lingered over a demi-bouteille of Chateau Lascombe '#, and watched the officers of the opposing armies scheduled to lock themselves in mortal combat an hour after sundown. They shared tables, chatting and laughing over the brandy and cigars, the bright green of the Free Algerian uniform making a handsome contrast with the scarlet of the Imperial Moroccans. It was either a civilized way to wage war, or a hell of an idiotic way for grown men to behave, I wasn't sure which. I turned my attention from them and devoted the next hour to a careful study of Felix's instructions. S unset was beginning to color the sky when I left the club and walked the four blocks to the King Feisal. Just opposite the marquee, a uniformed chauffeur seemed to be having turbine trouble. He stood, peering under the raised hood with a worried expression. I went past him and a pair of shady businessmen types who started a vigorous conversation as I came up, and fell silent as I went through the door. Inside, a slight, colorless European in a tan suit leaning against the end of the lobby news kiosk gave me a once-over that was as subtle as a left hook. At the desk, the small, round, Frenchified Arab day manager rolled his eyes toward the far end of the counter. I eased along, made a show of looking through the free tour maps. He sidled over, perspiring heavily. "M'sieu -- I have to tell you -- a man was interrupted searching your room this afternoon." His voice was a damp whisper, like something bubbling up through mud. His breath did nothing to lessen the similarity. "Sure," I said, angling myself so that the nearest operative could catch it without straining. "But how about the Casbah?" The manager blinked, then got into the spirit of the thing. "I would have held him for the police, but he made a break for it." "Say, that's fine. I've always wanted to see those dancing girls. Is it true about the raisin in their bellybutton?" "That fellow -- " the manager's eyes rolled toward a tall, thin man who was standing nearby leafing through a pictonews that looked as though his lunch had been wrapped in it -- "he has been here all the afternoon." His voice dropped to an even more confidential level. "I don't like his looks." I nodded. "You're right," I said loudly. "And he's not even reading: his lips aren't moving." The newspaper jerked as though he'd just found his name in the obituary column. I went past him to the elevator, waited until the man in the tan suit had followed me in and gotten settled: then I stepped back off. He hesitated for a moment, then showed me an expression like a man who has just remembered something, hurriedly got off. I promptly got IF back oa, turned and gave him a nice smile which he failed to return as the doors closed. Riding up, I did a little rapid thinking. The clowns in the lobby were a trifle too good to be true. The manager's little contribution was part of the performance, just in case I failed to spot them. Julius wanted to be sure I knew his eye was on me. I punched a button, got off a floor below my own, went along to the fire-stairs. I pushed through the glass door, went up past a landing littered with used ampoules and the violet-tinted butts of dope-sticks, came out in the shadows at the end of a poorly lighted corridor. My room was halfway along on the left. I went to it, put the microphone I wore disguised as a fingerring against the door, placed my ear against the ring. I heard the clack of water dripping in the bathroom, the hollow hum of the ventilator, sounds from beyond the windows, nothing else. I keyed the door quietly and went in: the room was empty, silent, sad in the early evening light. The key to my briefcase lay where I had left it. I shone my U-V penlight on it and examined the words: the fluorescent film with which I had coated the web was scored. That meant that by now Julius was scanning copies of a number of carefully prepared letters and notes establishing my anti-UN, anti-Julius sentiment. It was a risky secondary cover to use with a man as sensitive of personal status as the general, but Felix had decided on it after a close study of his dossier. Give a man what he expects to find, and he's satisfied. At least that was the theory. F or half an hour I puttered, putting away shirts, arranging papers, mixing another drink. At the end of that time I had completed my inspection and was satisfied nothing new had been installed in the suite since I had seen it a few hours earlier. The IR eye still peered at me from the center knob on the chest of drawers, and the pin head microphone in the plastic flower arrangement was still in place. I hung a soiled undershirt over the former. The audio pick-up didn't bother me. I'd just make it a point to move quietly. It was almost dark now -- time to be going. I made a few final noises in the bathroom with running water and clattering toilet articles; then I flipped off the lights, made the bed creak as I stretched out on it, then rose carefully, went to the closet, slid inside, and soundlessly shut the door. Following Felix's written instructions, I unscrewed the old-fashioned fluorescent tube from the ceiling fixture, pressed the switch concealed in the socket; the hatch in the end wall rolled smoothly back. I stepped through, closed it behind me, went along a narrow passage that ended in an iron ladder leading up. At the top I cracked my head in the dark, felt for the latch, lifted the panel and pulled myself up into the stifling heat of the dark, cramped room Severance had fitted out as my forward command post. It wasn't much to look at -- a seven by twelve foot space, low-ceilinged, blank walled, with a grimy double hung window at one end giving a view of irregular black roof tops and, far away, tall palms like giant dandelions against a sky of luminous deep blue that was growing deeper. I closed the shutter's and switched on the ceiling light, the sudden brightness hurting my eyes. A steel locker against the wall opened to the combination Severance had given me. If I had made an error, a magnesium flare would have reduced the contents to white-hot ash. I pulled the door wide, took out a limp, fish-scale textured coverall with heavy fittings moulded into the fabric at the small of the back and at the ankles. I pulled off my jacket, struggled into the garment: it was called an optical-effect suit, and it rets. It had the unusual property of absorbing some wavelengths of light and re-emitting them in the infrared, reflecting others in controlled patterns. It was auto-tuned over the entire visible spectrum, and was capable of duplicating any background pattern short of a clan Ginsberg tartan. I couldn't walk down a crowded avenue in it without causing a few puzzled stares, but in any less crowded setting, it was as close an approximation of a cloak of invisibility as science had come up with. It was the cover Lab's newest toy, and was worth a hundred thousand cees in small, unmarked bills in any of the secret market-places of the world. Felix had gone all the way in stealing it for me. T he second item I would need for the evening's adventure was a compact apparatus the size and shape of an old-style cavalry canteen, fitted with high-velocity gas jets and heavy clips which locked to matching fittings on the suit. I lifted it -- it was surprisingly heavy -- and clamped it in place against my chest. Broad woven wire straps stitched into the suit took up the weight. I tried the control -- a two-inch knob at the center of the unit. Immediately I felt the slightly nauseous sensation of free-fall. The surface of the suit cracked softly as static charges built and neutralized themselves against the field-interface. Then my toes were reaching for the floor. My focussed-phase field gravity settled over me again like a lead cape. I checked the deep thigh pockets of the suit; there was a pair of three-ounce, hundred-power binocular-goggles, a spring-steel sheath knife, a command-monitor communicator tuneable to the frequencies of both combatants as well as to the special band available only to Felix. I pressed the send-button, got no reply. Felix was out. In a buttoned-down pocket, I found a # mm needier, smaller and lighter than the standard Navy model I normally carried. Its darts were charged with a newly developed, wide-spectrum venom guaranteed to kill a charging elephant within a microsecond of contact. I tucked it back in its fitted holster with the same respect a snake-handler gives a krait. I was hot in the suit. Sweat was already beginning to trickle down my back. I switched off the lights, openIF ed the shutters and the window, crawled through and found a precarious foothold on a ledge. The air was cooler here. I took a couple of deep breaths to steady my nerves, carefully not looking down the sheer five-hundred-foot face of the building. I groped the communicator from my pocket, made another try to raise Felix: still nothing. I would have to move without the reassurance of knowing that someone was available to record my last words. I twisted the lift control. At once the close, airless pressure of the field shut away the faint breeze. Tiny blue sparks arced to the wall at my back. I was lifting now, feeling the secure pressure against my feet drifting away. I pushed clear, twisting myself to a semi-horizontal chest-down position, and waved my arms, striving for equilibrium, fighting against the feeling that in another instant I would plummet to the pavement. It was a long way down, and although my intellect told me my flying carpet would support up to a half ton of dead weight, my emotions told me I was a foolish and extremely fragile man, a long way from his native element. I touched the jet control lever, and at the forward surge, my vertigo left me. Suddenly I was a swift, soundless bird, sweeping through the wide night sky on mighty pinions -- A dark shape loomed in front of me. I gave the fieldstrength knob a convulsive twist, cleared an unlighted roof antenna by a foot. From now on. I fold myself, it would be a good idea to do my pinion-sweeping with a little more caution. I slowed my forward motion and angled steeply up. The lights were dwindling away below now, the glitter of ' Avenue desN at ions the hard shine from the windows of hotels and office buildings. The sounds that floated up to me were dull, muted by the field. At an estimated five hundred feet altitude, I took a bearing on the blue beacon atop the control tower at Hammarskold Field, a mile east of the town, opened my jets to full bore and headed for the battlefield. IV I hung three hundred feet above the sparsely wooded hill top where the blue-clad Moroccans had set up their forward field HQ, jiggling my position controls to counter brisk breeze and mentally calculating the odds against my being bagged by a wild shot. With my goggles tuned to low mag and IR filter, I was able to make out a cluster of officers around a chart table, three recon cars, parked behind the crest of the hill with their drivers beside them, and a line of dug-in riflemen on the forward slope. Five miles to the north, the pale blue flashes of the Algerians' opening bombardment winked against the horizon. The battle's objective was a bombed-out oasis occupying the center of the shallow valley ringed by the low hills over one of which I now hovered. According to Felix's Utter Top Secret battle plan, the Algerians would thrust their right forward in a feint to the Moroccan left, while quickly bringing up the bulk of their light armor behind the screen of the hills on the enemy right. The Moroccan strategy was to sit tight in defensive entrenchments until the enemy intention became clear. Then they would launch a drive straight down the valley, with a second column poised to take the Algerians in the flank as soon as they struck from cover at the Moroccan flank. It seemed like a nice, conventional exercise, and I felt sure the boys would enjoy it a lot. The Algerian ballistic shells were making vivid puffs high above the thumps of sound as the Moroccan anti-ballistic artillery made their interceptions. At each flash the details of the battlefield below blinked into momentary clarity. It was an almost steady flickering, like heat lightning on a summer evening. I turned up my binocular magnification, scanned the distant Algerian massing area for signs of their main column moving out. They were a minute or two ahead of schedule. The churn of dust was just beginning to rise above the lead element: then antidust equipment went into operation and the cloud dissipated. Now I could pick out the tiny pinpricks of running lights, coming swiftly around in the shelter of the distant hills to form the arrowhead of the Algerian attack. I lifted myself another hundred feet, jetted toward their route of advance. They were coming up fast, risking accidents in the dark to beat the best time the Moroccans would have estimated was possible. I arrived over the cut through which they would turn to make their dash for the oasis just as the lead tank rounded into it, a massive Bolo Mark II, running without lights. The Moroccans, caught in the trap of overconfidence in their intelligence analysis, still showed no signs of recognizing the danger. The first squad of four Algerian combat units was through the pass now, gunning out into the open. The bombardment went on, building to a climax, lulling the Moroccans into keeping their heads down, secure in the assumption that the enemy would hold his armor well back from the rain of devastation showering down from above. Belatedly now, a volley of flares went up from the Moroccan side: the tanks had been spotted. Abruptly the valley burned dead white under a glare like six small suns. Each racing tank was the base of a cluster of long, bounding shadows of absolute black. I dropped lower, watched the second and third elements follow the lead units through the pass. The fourth unit of the last squad, lagging far behind, slowed and came to a stop. A minute passed. Then he started up and moved slowly ahead by passing the designated route of march. Out on the plain, Moroccan tanks were roaring out from their positions two miles to my left, guns stabbing across the plain, both columns together in a hammer-blow at the Algerian surprise thrust. Below me, the tank trundled heavily away from the IF scene of action, veering to the left now, moving into broken ground. The approved Battle Plan had included no detachment operating independently on the Algerian left. If the wandering Bolo were detected by the monitors  -- as it must inevitably be within minutes -- the battle was forfeit, the fury and destruction all for nothing. Something was up... I ignored the battle shaping up on the plain, dropped to a hundred feet, followed the tank as it lumbered down a shale-littered slope into deep shadow. I moved carefully between towering walls of shattered rock, fifty feet above the floor of the dry wadi along which the Bolo moved in a sluggish crawl, a finger of light from its turret probing uncertainly ahead as though exploring new and dangerous territory. It negotiated an awkward turn, halted. I saw a faint gleam as its hatch cycled: then a silhouetted man clambered out, dropped to the ground: the tank sat with turbines idling, its searchlight fixed aimlessly on a patch of bare rock, like the gaze of a dead man. I turned up the sensitivity of my goggles, tried to penetrate the darkness. I couldn't see the driver. I moved closer. Something massive and dark was coming up the ravine toward me, hovering about two yards above the ground. It was a flattish shape, roughly oval, dull-colored, casting a faint blue-green glow against the rocky walls as it maneuvered gently around a projecting buttress, settled in close to the Bolo. For a moment nothing happened. The idling engine of the tank was a soft growl against utter stillness, punctuated by the sounds of distant battle. Then there was a heavy thud. The sound reminded me of a steer I had seen poleaxed once in a marketplace in Havana. I worked my binocular controls, tuning well over into the IR. The scene before me took on a faint, eerie glow. I maneuvered to the right, made out an oblong patch of lesser blackness against the dark ground. Abruptly shadows were sliding up the rock wall. The angry snarl of an engine sounded from behind me. I lifted myself quickly, moved back against the ravine face. The armored shape of a late model command car careened into view, an opaque caterpillar of dust boiling up behind it, the blue-white lance of its canyon floor, picking up the dusty flank of the squatting giant, reflecting from the polished rim of its open hatch. The car slowed and stopped directly below me, hovering on its air-cushion, the blue-black muzzles of its twin infinite repeaters poking through the armorglass canopy, centered on the tank. A minute passed. Faint, flickering light stuttered against the sky in the direction of the battle. The car below sank and came to rest slightly canted on the boulder-strewn ground. Its engines died. Metal clanked as its door slid open. A man in the dull green of the Algerian field uniform stepped out, a pistol in his hand. He shouted in Arabic. There was no reply. He walked forward into the settling dust in the alley of light from the car's headlamp, his shadow stalking ahead. I saw the glint of the palmleaf insignia on his shoulder. A major, probably the squadron commander. He stopped, seemed to totter for a moment, then fell stiffly forward, hit hard on his face, lay without moving. I hung where I was, absolutely still, waiting. From the darkness between the stalled tanks, a creature came into view, padding silently on broad, dead white paws like ghastly caricatures of human hands. Stiff, coarse hair bristled on the lean, six-foot body, growing low on the forehead of a naked face like a fanged and snouted skull. A pattern of straps crisscrossed the razor back. Light winked from metal fittings on the harness. It came up to the man who lay face down with his feet toward me, fifty feet below, settled itself on its haunches, fumbled with its obscenely human hands in a pouch at its side. I caught a glint of light from polished instruments: then it crouched over the man, set to work. I heard a grating sound, realized that I had been grinding my teeth together in a rictus to shock. Cold sweat trickled down the side of my neck under the suit. Down below, the creature worked busily, its gaunt, narrow-shouldered body screening its task. It shifted position, presenting its back now, the long curve of its horselike neck. I had to force my hand to move. I slipped the dart gun from its fitted pocket, flipped off the safety. The beast labored on, absorbed in its victim: quick motions of its elbows reflected its deft manipulations. A feeling of nightmarish unreality seemed to hang over the scene: the wink and rumble of artillery beyond the hills, the knifelike sharpness of the shadows thrown by the light of the command car, the patient whine of the idling engine, the intent, demonic figure. I took careful aim just below a triangular clasp securing two straps that crossed the arched back, and fired. T he creature twitched a patch of hide impatiently, went on with its work. I aimed again, then lowered the gun without firing a second time. If one jolt of Felix's wide-spectrum venom had no effect, two wouldn't help. I flattened myself in the pocket of shadow against the cliffface, watched as the alien rose to a grotesque two-legged stance, pranced away on its rear hands toward the body of a driver, lying crumpled by the nearest Bolo. The major lay on his back now: his cap nearby, his gun a yard beyond it. There was blood on his face and on the dusty stone under him. I estimated the distance to the command car, gauging the possibility of reaching it and training the forward battery on the monstrosity was now leaning over the second man. There was a sudden, sharp yelp. The alien darted a few steps, collided glancingly with the massive skirt of the Bolo, veered toward me. IF I caught a glimpse of a gaping mouth, a ragged, black tongue, teeth like needles of yellow bone. The stricken demon bit at its rear quarters, running a tight circle like a dog chasing its tail, yelping sharply: then it was down, kicking, scrabbling with its pale, flat hands, raising a roil of dust. Then it stiffened and lay still. I dropped quickly to the ground and switched off the lift-field. I caught the reek of exhaust fumes, the hot-stone odor of the desert, a sharp, sour smell that I knew emanated from the dead creature. Sounds were louder now: the distant firing took on a sharp and immediate quality. The keening turbine was like a wail of abandoned hope. I went to the body of the major, bent over it. The face was slack, the eyelids unnaturally sunken. There was a clean wound across the forehead at the hairline: the hair was matted with glistening blood. I turned him on his face and felt the blood drain from my own. The top of his skull had been cut free. It hung in place on a hinge of scalp. Inside the glistening red-black cavity was nothing. I leaned closer. A deep incision gaped from the base of the skull down under the collar. Very little blood had leaked from it: the heart had stopped before the wound was made. The alien lay fifteen feet away. I looked across at it, my breathing coming fast and shallow now, hissing between teeth that were bared in a snarl. Every instinct I owned was telling me to put space between myself and the demonic creature that had walked like a beast but had used its hands like a man. I heard of hackles rising: now I felt them. I gripped the gun tighter as I crossed the last few feet, stood lookng down at the sparse, rumpled coat through which dull gray-pink skin showed. I prodded the body with a boot: it was stiff, inert, abnormally heavy. I pushed harder, rolled it over. At close range, the face was yellowish white, dry, porous-textured. The hands were outflung, palms up, bloody from the trepanning of the major: near one lay a bulging, gallon-sized sack, opaque with dust. I stepped around to it, knelt and wiped a finger across the bulge on the surface. It was yielding and warm to the touch. Pinkish fluid wobbled under the taut membrane. I brushed away more dust. Now I could see a pink, jellylike mass suspended in the liquid. It had a furrowed surface, like sunbaked mud, and from its underside a thick, curled stem hung down, neatly snipped off at the three-inch mark. I prodded the bag: the mass stirred: a snow-white sphere just smaller than a golf ball wavered into view, turning to show me a ring of amber brown with a black center dot. The beast had been a skilled surgeon. In just under five minutes it had removed the major's brain, complete with eyeballs. V T he battle sounds were slackening now. It wouldn't be long before another vehicle came along the IF ravine in search of the missing Bolo and the officer who had followed it. I stood, feeling my heart pound as though I had run a mile, fighting down the sickish feeling that knotted my stomach. I didn't have much time and there were things to be done -- now. I could have a nervous collapse later -- after I had played this nightmare scene out to its end. The tankman, lying awkwardly beside his machine, was dead, already cooling to the touch. I went back to the fallen demon, went through the pouches attached to the creature's harness, found a case fitted with scalpels, forceps, a tiny saber saw. There was a supply of plastic containers and a miniature apparatus with attached tubing -- probably a pump-and-filter combination for drawing off plasma. There was another container, packed with ampoules of a design I had seen recently -- on the landing in my hotel. The thought was like a cold finger on my spine. The last pouch yielded a scrap of smooth, tough paper, imprinted with lines of pot-hooks of a sort I had never seen before. I tucked it away in my knee-pocket, got to my feet. The paper was better than nothing as evidence that I hadn't been the dreamer of a particularly horrible nightmare. But I needed something that would communicate some of the shock that had turned my heart to ice. Felix need to see that skullwhite face... The ravine was still quiet: maybe I had time. I ran to the car, started it up, brought it forward, halted it beside the dead man. I jumped down lifted the limp, still warm body into the cockpit. I remounted, maneuvered up beside the dead alien. I opened the cargo compartment at the rear of the car, then gritted my teeth and grasped the creature's hind wrists. Through the gloved hands of the suit, the bristles were as stiff as scrub-brushes. I dragged the corpse to the car, used the power of the suit to lift the three-hundred-pound weight, tumbled it inside. I went back for the sack containing the brain, put it on the seat beside the dead major, then climbed in and headed back up the ravine. As I reached the first turn, a glare of light projected the car's moving shadow on the rock wall fountain from the open hatch of the Bolo. I gunned the car, felt a tremor run through the rock an instant before I heard the blast. Small stones rained down, bounded off the canopy and hood. Either the tank had been mined for automatic destruction if abandoned, or the creature I had killed had set a time-charge to eliminate the traces of his clandestine visit. I tramped on the throt tie, holding my thoughts rigidly on my driving. I wasn't ready yet to think about the implications of what I had seen. I could feel the full shock of it, lurking in the wings, waiting to jump out and send me screaming for a policeman -- but that would have to wait. Now, like a thief fleeing a broached vault with an unexpectedly rich haul, I was concerned only with # ? getting clear with my prize while there was still time. Because there was no doubt that in a little while -- when whoever, or whatever was awaiting the return of the brain-thief realized that something was awry -- a variety of hell would break loose that would make ordinary death and destruction seem by comparison as mild and wholesome as a Spring formal. I skirted the hills where flood' lights were glaring now in the Moroccan camp: the cease-fire had apparently been sounded: UN monitors would be moving out on the field, tallying casualties, looking for evidence of illegal weapons, checking out complaints by both sides of Battle Plan violations. I hoped that in the general excitement the absence of the command car would go unnoticed for now. The road into Tamboula was a wide, well-patrolled highway: I avoided it, took a route across a wasteland of stunted mesquite, skirted a trenched and irrigated field, orderly in the light of the new-risen moon, stopped by a clump of trees fifty yards from Felix's villa, a former farmhouse, converted by capable of withstanding a siege that would have leveled Stalingrad. The windows were dark. I took out my communicator, pressed the red button which turned it to Felix's special equipment. "Wolfhound here, Talisman. Anybody home?" There was no reply. I tried again: nothing. It was too early to start worrying, but I started anyway. There were sounds on the road behind me now. The troops -- those who had survived -- tired and happy after their evening's fun, were starting back to their billets in town. Even if my borrowed car hadn't been missed yet, the sight of it would inspire laggard memories. I couldn't stay here. General Julius had been less than enthusiastic about my presence in Tamboula: my arrival at his headquarters in a stolen Algerian command car would hardly be calculated to soothe his irritation. But even a stuffed shirt of a political appointee would have a difficult time shrugging off what I had to show him. And I had to share the knowledge of my cargo with someone -- now. I gunned the car around the side of the house, out across a field of cabbages, mounted the raised highway and barreled for the city at flank speed. I parked the car beside a gleaming Monojag in the well-lighted but deserted ten-car garage under UN headquarters, pulled off the suit and harness, took the lift to the third floor, walked through deserted offices to General Julius' door, went in without knocking. He was there, sitting at his desk, square-shouldered and grim-jawed, like a cornered police chief promising the press an arrest at any moment. He didn't move as I came up to his desk. "I'm glad I caught you. General," I said. "Something's happened that you should know about." He was a long time reacting to my presence -- as though he were wool-gathering a long way off. His IF eyes seemed to focus on me slowly. His mouth opened, then closed hard. "Yes?" he snapped. "What do you want?" "Have you had a report of a missing Bolo and a command car?" His dead-black eyes narrowed. I had his attention now. The room seemed very still: there was tension in the air, as though many ears were listening for what I might say next. "Missing combat units?" Julius said expressionlessly. "Go on." "An Algerian Mark II wandered off the beaten path. It wound up in a ravine about three miles south of the action." Julius stared at me. "You observed this?" His fingers squeaked on the desk top. "That's right. The car followed the Bolo in. A major was driving it." "You imply that this vehicle maneuvered in violation of the Battle Plan?" His tone was smooth now -- like the edge of an axe. "They left the field of action and went south. Let's not play footsie about the Battle Plan. Sure I had a copy. Grow up, General. I'm not a reporter for a family magazine. I'm here on business. Part of my business is to know what's going on." "My order to you -- " "Don't ride a busted bluff down in flames, General. How about that Bolo?" Julius leaned forward. "A ravine, south of the battle ground?" "That's right. There's not much left of it. It blew." "How close were you?" "Close enough." "And the car?" "It's downstairs, in your garage." I let that one ride. Julius cocked his head, as though listening to advice from unhear voices. "Where did you find the vehicle?" "Where the driver left it." "And you took it?" "Look, General, I didn't come here to talk about traffic violations. I saw something out there -- " "You dared to defy me?" Julius' classically chiseled upper lip was writhing back in a snarl: behind his eyes red fires burned. It seemed to be taking all his will power not to bite me. "You entered the battle zone -- " "Forget that!" I cut him off. "There's some kind of vehicle sitting out there near what's left of the Bolo. The blast probably caught it, but there should be enough left to work on. I saw what got out of it. It wasn't human. It killed the driver and the major." I stopped then, belatedly. What I was saying sounded wild, even to me. "Come with me, General," I said. "I'll show you." Abruptly, he laughed -- a harsh, tinny sound. "I see. It's a joke," he stated. He got to his feet. "Just one moment. I have an important call to make." I stared after him as he strode across the room, disappeared into an inner room. There was a call-screen beside his desk. I went to it, cautiously eased the conference switch to the 'on' position. There was a soft hum, nothing more. A pad lay on top of the cabinet, marks scribbled on it. I half turned away -- I stood looking down at the paper. my heart starting to thump again under my ribs like a caged bird. The lines on the paper were not mere random jottings. They were letters, words: words in an alien script. I had seen similar pot hooks less than an hour before -- on the paper I had taken from the pocket of the demon. A t that moment Julius strode back into the room, his face fixed in a smile as authentic as the gold medals on a bottle of vermouth. "Now, General Bravais," he said in a tone of forced geniality, "why don't you and I sit down and have a quiet drink together?" I shook my head. It was time for me to stop talking and start thinking -- something I hadn't done much of since the four-handed horror had stalked out of the shadows and into my world-picture. I had come here, babbling out my story, wanting someone to share the shattering thing I had seen. But my choice of confidants had been as poor as the judgment I had been showing ever since I had left the ravine. I had channeled my panic into the outward semblance of sober, reasonable action -- but it had been panic nonetheless. Julius had his office booze cabinet open now. Shelves with icebuckets, tongs, bottles, glasses deployed themselves at the touch of a button. "What about a Scotch, General?" He suggested. "Bourbon? Soy?" "I'd better be on my way, General," I said. I moved toward the door, "Perhaps I got a little too excited. Maybe I was seeing things." My hand was feeling for the dart gun -- until I realized, with a pang of unpleasant excitement, that I had left it in the car with the lift-suit. "Of course! You're probably famished. I'll just order up a bite. I haven't eaten myself." "No, thanks, General. I'm pretty tired. I'll check in at my hotel and..." My voice trailed off foolishly. I -- and Felix -- had gone to considerable trouble to leave the public with the impression that I was tucked safely away in my room. Now I was here, putting Julius on notice that while his watchdogs curled happily on my doorstep, I had been out on the town -- and the super-secret equipment Felix had lent me was lying unattended in the car. "I have quarters right here in the building, General Bravais," Julius bored on. "No need to go back to your rooms. Just make yourself comfortable here." I held up a hand and fixed a silly smile in place. It came naturally. I felt as phony as a man who reaches for his wallet after a big dinner and feels nothing but his hipbone. "I have a couple of appointments this evening," I gushed, "and some papers I want to go over. And I need to get my notes in shape." I had the door open now. "What about first thing in the morning?" Julius was coming toward me, with an expression on his face that human features had never been shaped for. A good soldier knows when he's up against something too big to handle -- when it's time to run. IF I slammed the door on the square tight-lipped face, sprinted for the lift, then bypassed it, plunged for the stairs. Behind me there was a heavy crash and the pound of feet. I skidded through the scattered butts on the landing, leaped down five steps at a time. I could hear Julius above, not getting any closer, but not losing any ground either. As I ran, I tried to picture the layout of the garage. The lift door had been in the center of the wall, with another door to its left. The car was parked fifteen feet from it. It would be to my left as I emerged. I needed more time. There was a trick for getting down stairs quickly -- if my ankles could take it. I whirled around the second landing, half-turned to the left, braced my feet, the left higher than the right, and jumped. My feet struck at an angle, skidded: I shot down as though I were on a ski slope, slammed the next landing, took a quick step, leaped again. The door to the garage was in front of me now. I wrenched it open, skidded through, slammed it. There was a heavy thumb latch. I flipped it, heard the solid snick as it seated. I dashed for the car, leaped the side. A thunderous blow struck the heavy metal-clad fire door behind me. I scrambled into the seat, kicked the starter, saw dust whirl from beneath the car. There was a second clangorous shock against the armored door. I twisted, saw it jump -- then, unbelievingly, bulge -- The metal tore with a screech. A hand groped through the jagged opening, found the latch, plucked it from the door as though it were made of wet paper. The car was up on its air cushion now; I backed it as the door swung wide. Julius came through, ran straight for me. I wrenched the wheel over, gunned the twin turbines; the car leaped forward, caught Julius square across the chest with a shock as though I had hit a hundred-year oak, carried him backward. I saw furrows appear in the chromalloy hood as his fingers clawed -- Then the car thundered against the masonry wall and rebounded in a rain of falling bricks. Through the dust, I saw Julius's arm come up, strike down at the crumpled metal before him with a shock that I felt through the frame. There was a howl of metal in agony -- then a deafening rattle as the turbines chattered to a halt. The car dropped with a bone-bending jar. I stumbled out, half-dazed, stood staring at General Julius' dustcovered head and shoulders pinned between the ruined car and the wall, one arm outflung, the other plunged through metal into the heart of the engine. I became aware of voices. I turned and saw a huddle of locals, one or two pale, wide-eyed European faces at the open garage doors. Like a man in a daze I walked around the rear of the wrecked car, pulled open the door of the Monojag parked beside it, transferred the suit and life-harness to the other car. I took the sheath knife from the suit pocket, went to the cargo compartment of the Turbocad, threw open the lid. A wave of an unbelievable stench come from the body of the dead thing inside. I gritted my teeth, sawed at the skin of the long, lean neck. It was like hacking at an oak root. I saw a pointed ear, almost grasped it, worked at it with the keen blade. Brownish fluid seeped out as I worried through it. Behind me, the curious spectators were shouting questions back and forth now. With a savage slash, I freed the ear, jammed it in a pocket, then whirled to the Monojag, jumped in, started up. I backed, wheeled out, and away down the street. In the mirror, I saw the crowd start cautiously forward. Driving aimlessly along dark streets, I tried again and failed again to raise Felix on my communicator. I switched on the radio, caught a throaty male contralto muttering a song of strange perversions. On another channel, wild brass instruments squealed a hybrid syncopated alhaza. On a third a voice gushing with synthetic excitement reported the latest evidence of an imminent coldwar thaw in the form of a remark made at a reception by the wife of an Albanian diplomat in the hearing of the Chinese Charge to the effect that only French wine would be served at a coming dinner in honor of the birthday of the Cuban President. The next item was about a madman who had murdered an Algerian officer. The victim's headless body had been found in a stolen military vehicle which had been wrecked and abandoned near UN headquarters. I looked at my watch, lulius's heirs were fast workers. It had been exactly sixteen minutes since I had left his body pinned under the wreckage of the command car. VI I parked the Turbocad three blocks from the King Feisal, took five minutes to don the OE suit, complete with lift-harness, then drove slowly along toward the hotel. The news bulletin had said nothing about the car I was now in; it had also failed to mention the dead general, the body of the alien or the bagged brain. It wasn't mere sloppy reporting. The version of the story that was being released had been concocted hurriedly, but carefully. I could expect that other measures would have been taken, with equal care. It was not time for me to allow myself the luxury of errors in strategy -- but there were things I needed in my secret hideaway. The hotel was just ahead now. I slowly edged toward the curb. To an observer, the car would appear to be empty, a remoted pickup objected to sharing transportation with anything as unreliable as a human driver. A doorman in an ornate Zouave uniform came forward, glanced in the car as it came to a stop; he looked around sharply, turned and took three steps to a IF call-screen, talked tersely into it. Moments later, two hard-eyed men in unornamented dark coveralls strode from the hotel entry, fanned out to approach the car from two sides. I had seen enough to get the general idea. i nudged the car into motion, steering between the two wide-shouldered, lean-hipped trouble boys. One whipped out a three-inch black disk -- a police control-override. A red light blinked on the dash. The car faltered as the external command came to brake. I gunned it hard, felt the accelerator jam. The nearer man was swinging alongside now, reaching for the door. An unfamiliar lever caught my eye, mounted to the left of the cruise control knob; I hit it, felt the accelerator go to the floor. There was a sharp tug, a rending of metal, and the car leaped ahead. In the mirror I saw one of the two men down, skidding to the curb. The other stood, feet apart, bringing a hand gun to bear -- I cut the wheel and howled into a cross street as solid slugs sang off the armored bubble next to my ear. Ahead, a startled man in a white turban leaped from my path. Late drinkers at a lone lighted sidewalk cafe stared as I shot past. I got the needier out, put it on the seat beside me. I half-expected to see a roadblock pop up ahead. If it did, I would hit it wide-open. I had no intention of stopping until I had put a healthy distance between myself and the man I had seen in the mirror, scrambling to his feet, still holding in his hand the door handle he had torn from the car. I parked the all-too-identifiable car a block farther along, oh a dark side street; I palmed the gun, slid out, stood in the darkness under a royal palm with a trunk like gray cement, giving my instincts a chance to softly whisper warnings in my ears. It was very still here. Far away, I heard a worn turbine coming closer, then going away. The moon was up now, an icy blue-white disk glaring in a pale night sky, casting shadows like the memory of a noonday, long ago. My instincts were as silent as everything else. Maybe the beating I'd been giving them all evening had given them the impression I didn't need them any more. Maybe they were right. I hadn't slowed down yet long enough to let what I had seen filter through the fine sieve of my intellect: I had been playing it by ear from moment to moment. Maybe that was the best technique, when half of what you saw was unbelievable and the other half was impossible. I tried to raise Felix again; no answer. He had warned me to stay clear of police stations. After my reception at UN HQ it was easy advice to take. He had also told me to stay clear of his villa -- except in emergencies. That meant now. I activated the left belt, rose quickly and headed west. N o light showed in the villa as I came in on it from the east. I used my nearly depleted jets to brake to a stop against the flow of the river of dark night air and hovered, looking down on the moonlit rooftop of Algerian tile, the neat garden, the silvery fields stretching away to the desert. I took the communicator from the suit pocket, tried again to raise Felix. A sharp vibration answered my signal. I brought the device up close to my face. "Felix!" I almost shouted, my words loud in my ears inside the muffling field. "Where the hell have you been? -- " I broke off, suddenly wary. "John, old boy. Where are you? There's been the devil to pay!" It was Felix's familiar voice -- but I had had a number of expensive lessons in caution since sundown. "Where are you, Felix?" "I'm at the house: just got in. I tried to check with you at the hotel, but little men with beady eyes seemed to be peering at me from every keyhole. I gave it up and came here. "Where've you been these last hours? Something's going on in the town. Nothing to do with you, I hope!" "I tried to call you," I countered. "Where were you?" "Yes -- I felt the damned thing buzzing in my pocket. As it happened, it wasn't practical for me to speak just then. When I tried you, I got no reply." "I've been busy. I guess I missed your buzz." There was a moment's silence. "So you were mixed up in whatever it is that's got them running about like ants in a stirred hill?" "Maybe. I want to see you. Meet me in town -- at the Club." "Is that safe, John?" "Never mind. Get started; half an hour." I broke off. Down below, the house was a silent block of moonwhite masonry. A low-slung sports car squatted by the front door. Foreshortened trees cast ink-black shadows on the gravel drive. The front door opened, closed quickly. Felix's tall, lean figure came down the steps, reached the car in three strides. He slid into the seat, started up, backed quickly, headed off along the curving way. His lights came on, dimmed. "All right, that's far enough," I transmitted. "I just wanted to be sure you were there, and alone." Below, the car slowed, pulled to the side of the road. I saw Felix craning his neck, his face a white blob in the pale light. "It's that serious, eh, John? Right. Shall I go back to the house?" "Put the car in the drive and get out." I dropped lower, watching him comply. I gained fifty feet upwind, curved in so that the wind would bring me across the drive. Felix stopped the car by the front door, stepped out, stood hands in pockets, looking around as though deciding whether it was a nice enough night for a stroll. I corrected my course and dropped lower. I was ten feet above the dry IF lawn now, sweeping toward him silently at fifteen miles per hour. His back was toward me. At the last instant, he started to turn just as my toe caught him behind the ear in a neatly placed kick. He leaped forward, fell headlong, by face down, arms outflung. I Topped to the drive, shut down the field, stood with the gun ready in mv hand, watching him. The impact had been about right -- not the massive shock of slamming against whatever it was that had masqueraded as General Julius, or the metal-shearing wrench that had torn the door handle from the car. I walked toward him, knelt cautiously, rolled him over. His mouth was half open, his eyes shut. I took the sheath knife from my knee pouch, jabbed him lightly in the side. The flesh seemed reassuringly tender. I took his limp hand, pricked it. The skin broke: a bead of blood appeared, black in the dim light. I sheathed the knife with a hand that shook. "Sorry, Felix," I muttered. "I had to be sure you weren't machined out of spring steel like a couple of other people I've met this evening." I nside, I laid Felix on a low divan in the dark room, put a cold damp cloth on his forehead and waved a glass of plum brandy under his nose. There was a bluish swelling behind his ear, but his pulse and respiration were all right. Within a minute he was stirring, making vague swimming motions and then, suddenly, sitting up, eyes open, his hand groping toward his underarm holster. "It's all right, Felix," I said. "You had a bump on the head, but you're among friends." "Some friends." He put a hand up. touched the bruise, pronounced a couple of Arabic curses in a soft voice. "What the devil's up, John? I let you out of my sight for an hour or two, and the whole damned official apparatus goes into a Condition Red flap." "I used the gear, Felix. I tracked a Bolo down a side trail, about three miles off the battle map. I saw things -- things I'm going to have trouble telling you about." Felix was looking at me keenly. "Take it easy, old man. You look as though you'd had a bit of a shaking." He got to his feet, wavered for a moment, went across to the bar. "No lights," I said. "Who're we hiding out from?" He got out glasses and a bottle, poured, came back and sat down. He raised his glass. "Confusion to the enemy," he said. I took a sip, then a gulp. The Scotch felt as smooth as cup grease. "I'll try to take it in order," I said. "I watched the tank stop. The driver got out -- and fell on his face." "No shot, signs of gas, anything of that sort?" "Nothing. I was fifty feet away, and felt nothing, smelled nothing, saw nothing. Of course the field "Wouldn't stop a gas, or a vibratory effect. Was there any fluorescing of the field interface?" IF I shook my head, went on with my story. Felix listened quietly until I mentioned the poisoned dart I had fired. His face fell like a bride's cake. "You must have missed!" "After about two minutes, it got the message: yelped a few times, chased its tail, had a modest fit and died." "My God! The thing must have the metabolism of a rock crusher. Two minutes, you say?" "Yep." I went on. When I finished, he frowned thoughtfully. "John, are you sure?" "Hell, I'm not sure of anything! The easiest hypothesis is that I'm out of my mind. In a way, I'd prefer that." I fumbled, brought out the severed ear I had cut from the dead alien. "Here, take a look at this and then tell me I sawed it off poor old Bowser, who just wanted me to play with his rubber rat." Felix took the two-inch triangle of course-haired gristle, peered at it in the near-dark. "This is from the thing in the canyon?" "That's right." I tried another pocket, found the printed hieroglyphics I had taken from the creature's pouch. "And this. Maybe it's a simple Chinese laundry list -- or a Turkish recipe for goulash. Maybe I'm having delusions on a grand scale." Felix stood. "John... He eyed me sharply. "What you've turned up calls for special measures. We can't take chances now -- not until we know what it is we're up against. I'm going to let you in on a secret I've sworn to protect with my life." He led me to a back room, moved a picture, pressed unmarked spots on the wall. A panel slid back in the floor. "This is the Hole," he said. "Even be sure of avoiding interruption there." "Felix -- who do you work for?" He held up the severed ear. "Suffice it to say -- I'm against the owner of this." I nodded. "I'll settle for that." T hree hours later, Felix switched off the lights in the laboratory and led me into a comfortable lounge room with teak paneling, deep chairs, a business-like bar, and wide pseudo-windows with a view of a moonlit garden with fountains, which helped to dispel the oppressive feeling of being two hundred feet underground. I sat in one of the chairs and looked around. "Felix, who built this place? Somehow, this doesn't look like a government-furnished installation to me. You've got equipment in that lab that's ahead of anything I'Ve seen. And you're not as surprised at what I've told you as you ought to be." He leaned over and slapped me cm the knee, grinning his Mephistophelean grin. "Buck up, Johnny. I sent you out to find an explanation of something. You've found it -- with bells on. If it takes a few devil-dogs from Mars to tie it all together, that's not your fault." "What the hell did I stumble into last night?" He finished mixing drinks, sat down across from me, rubbing the side of his jaw. The air conditioners made a faint hum in the background. "It's the damnedest tissue I've ever examined," he said. "Almost a crystalline structure. And the hairs! There are metallic fibers in them. Incredibly tough. The fluid was a regular witches' brew; plenty of cyanoglobin present." He shook his head. "Something out of this world, to coin a phrase." "In other words, we've been invaded?" "That's one way to put it -- unless someone's invited them." He put his glass on the table at his elbow, leaned forward. "We know now that whatever it was that was attached to the ear is responsible for the disappearance of men from battlefields and other places. From the number of such incidents, we can surmise that there are hundreds -- perhaps thousands of these creatures among us." "Why hasn't someone seen them?" #i"T"hat's something we have to ifind out. Obviously they employ some method of camouflage as they go about their work. "Secondly, they've been busy among us for some time. Missingpersons figures were anomalously high as far back as World War One. That data for earlier conflicts are unreliable, but such as they are, they don't rule out the possibility." "Apparently these creatures have a use for human brain tissue. From the description you gave me, I surmise that the organ was in a nutrient solution of some sort -- alive." "My God." "Yes. Now, we're faced with not one, but two varieties of adversary. It's plain that our former associate, General lulius, was something other than human. The same may be said of the individual who attempted to stop your car." "They looked as human as I do. Maybe more so." "Perhaps they are. Modified, of course, to serve alien purposes. Some such arrangement would be necessary in order to carry on the dayto-day business." "What business -- other than brain-stealing?" "Consider for a moment. They've infiltrated the UN. From the speed with which they worked, it's obvious that they have a large and wellintegrated operation -- and methods of communication far more subtle than the clumsy apparatus we employ. As for your 'accidentally' meeting agents of the invader at every official contact, I'd say it's likely that they control every official agency in Tambo'ula. In effect, the city is in their hands. here, Felix! Fifty governments are represented. I've only seen a couple of these Supermen." "True. But they say for every rat you see in the barnyard, there are probably a hundred hiding somewhere." He looked almost pleased. "We're on our own, John. We can't shout for a policeman." IF "What can we do? We're holed up under a hundred feet of shielded concrete, with plenty of food, liquor, and taped tri-D shows -- but we might as well be locked in a cell -- " Felix held up a hand. "We're not without resources, John. This hideaway was designed to provide the most complete and modern facilities for certain lines of research and iesting. We know a few things about our aliens now -- things they don't know we know. And I'm sure they're puzzling over your dramatic appearances and disappearances much as we're pondering their capabilities. They're not super-beings. My little stinger killed one. You eluded others. Now that we know something of the nature of the enemy, we can begin to design counter-measures." "Just two of us?" "I didn't mean to imply that the enemy controls everything , John. It wouldn't be necessary. One or two cowboys can control quite a large herd of cattle." "Why herd us at all? Why not just round us up, chop out our brains and let it go at that?" "Oh, many reasons. Conservation of natural resources. Ease of harvesting. And then, perhaps, we might not be quite safe, if we were once alerted to what was going on. Cattle have been known to stampede... "So -- what do we do?" tt'IT Te leave Tamboula. Back in  r America, we make contact with a few individuals known to us personally. I'd steer clear of Barnett, for example, but there are a number of reliable men. Then we construct a counter-alien organization, armed and equipped. And then -- well, we'll see." "And how do we go about leaving Tamboula? I have an idea the whole scheme breaks down right there." Felix looked sober. "I'm afraid our old friend Bravais will never be seen departing from these shores." I waited. A small grin was tugging at the corners of his mouth. "I think he'll have to disappear in much the same manner that Major deSalle of the UN Medical Staff dropped from sight -- and as one H. D. Brown, who leased the same house, will vanish one day soon." "Behind a false beard and a set of brown contact lenses?" "Nothing so crude, my dear fellow." Felix was positively rubbing his hands together in anticipation now. "I'm going to give you the full treatment -- use some of those ideas guinea pigs for up till now. You'll have a new hair color. Self-regenerating, too. New eye color and retinal patterns, an inch or two difference in height, new finger and dental prints -- " "None of that will do me much good if some curious customs man digs under the dirty socks and finds that piece of ear. That's all the evidence we've got." "Never fear, John. You won't be unprotected." There was a merry glint in his eye now. "You won't merely have a new identity. I'm gear. If a General Julius jumps out at you then, just break him in two and keep going." viii I was sitting od the edge of a wooden chair, listening to a thin bumming in my head. "Tell me when the sound stops," Felix said. His voice seemed to be coming from a remote distance, even though I could see him, standing a few feet away, looking hazy, like a picture shot through cheese cloth and faded. I pressed the switch in my hand. Felix's blurred features nodded. "Good enough, John. Now come around and let's check those ligament attachment." I relaxed the muscles that had once been used to prick up the ears, thus switching my hearing range back to the normal. I made a move to rise and bounded three feet in the air. "Easy, John!" Felix had emerged from inch-thick arrear plastic walls. "We can't have you springing about the room like a dervish. Remember your lessons." I balanced carefully, like a man with springs tied to his shoes. "I remember my lessons," J said. "Pain has a way of sticking in my mind." "It's the best method when you're in a hurry, John." "How did the test go?" "Not badly at all. You held it to .# microbel at # cycles. How was the vision?" "About like shaving with a steamed mirror. I still get only blacks and whites." "You'll develop a color discretion after a while. Your optic center has been accustomed to just the usual six hues for thirty-odd years It can't learn to differentiate in the ultra violet range overnight." "And I can't adjust to the feeling that I weigh half an ounce, either, dammit! I dance around on my toes like a barefooted hair-dresser on a hot pavement." Felix grinned as though I'd paid him a compliment. "In point of fact, I you now weight three hundred and twenty-eight pounds. I've plated another five mills of chromalloy onto the skeletal grid. Your system's shown a nice tolerance for it. I'm pulling one more net of the number nine web over the trapezius, deltoids and latissimi dorsi -- " "The tolerances of my metabolism are not to be taken as those of the management," I cut in. "These past six weeks have been a vivisectionist's nightmare. I've got more scars than a Shendy Tribesman, and my netves are standing on end and waving around like charmed snakes. I'm ready to call it a day and try it as is." Felix nodded soberly. "We're about finished with you, John. I know it's been difficult, but there's no point in taking anything less than our best to the fray, is there?" "I don't know why I don't ache all over," I grumbled. "I've been sliced, chiseled and sawed at like a side of beef in a butcher's college. I suppose you've got me doped to the eyebrows. Along with all the other strange sensations, a little thing like a neocaine jag would pass unnoj ticed." "No -- no dope. Hypnotics, old boy." "Swell. Every day in every way I'm hurting less and less, eh?" I took a breath, more from habit than need. The oxygen storage units installed under the lower edge of my rib cage were more than half charged; I could go for another two hours if I had to. "I know we're in a hell of a spot -- and it's better to sail in with grins in place and all flags flying than sit around telling each other the crisis has arrived. But I'm ready for action." Felix was looking at papers, paying no attention at all. "Surely, old man. Gripe all you like," he said absently. "Just don't get friendly and slap me on the back. I'm still made of old-fashioned flesh and blood. Now, I'd like another check on the strain gauges." I closed my mouth and went across to the Iron Man -- a collection of cables and bars that looked like an explosion in a bicycle factory. "The grip, first." I took the padded handle, settled my hand comfortably, squeezed lightly to get the feel of it, then put on the pressure. I heard a creak among the levers; then the metal collapsed" like a cardboard under my hand. I let go. "Sorry, Felix. But what Ihe hell, thin-guage aluminum... "That's a special steel tubing, coldextruded, two tenths of an inch thick," Felix said, fingering the wreckage. "Try a lift now." I went over to a rig with a heavy horizontal beam, bent my knees, settled my shoulders under it with a metal-to-wood clatter. I set myself, slowly straightened my legs. Tho pressure on my shoulders seemed modest -- about like hefting a heavy suitcase. I came fully erect, then went up on my toes, pushing now against an almost immovable resistance. "Slack off, John," Felix called. "I believe I'll consider you've passed your brute-strength test. Over twenty-nine hundred pounds. About what a Chevette runabout weighs -- and I don't think you were flat out at that." "I could have edged a few ounces more." I flexed my shoulders. "The padding helped, but it wasn't quite thick enough." "The padding was two inches of oak." He looked at me, pulling at his lower lip. "Damned pity I can't take you along to the next Myoelectronics Congress. I could make a couple of blighters eat two-hour speeches saying it wasn't possible." I took a turn up and down the room, trying not to bounce at each step. "Felix, you said another week to let the incisions heal. Let's skip that. I'm ready to go now. You've been in town every day, and haven't seen any signs of abnormal activity. The alarm's died down." "Died down too damned quickly to suit me," he cut in. "It's too quiet. At the least, I'd have expected someone out to check over the house. You'll recall that the former tenant, my alter-ego, turned in a report on missing men and head wounds; but they haven't been near the place. There's been nothing n the papers since the first day or two -- and I daresay that it wouldn't have been mentioned then, except that a crowd of idlers saw you kill Julius." "Look, Felix. I've got so damned much microtronics gear buried in my teeth I'm afraid to eat anything tougher than spaghetti. I've got a laser wired into my left ring-finger, and enough servo-motors bolted to my insides to power an automatic kitchen. Let's skip the rest of the program and get going. I may nave new stainless-steel knuckles, but it's the same old me inside. I'm getting those hell-hounds are doing up there." "What time is it, John?" Felix asked suddenly. I glanced at the black-and-chromium wallclock. "Twenty-four minutes after nine," I said. Felix raised his hand and snapped his fingers -- I felt a slight twitch -- as though everything in the room had jumped half an inch. Felix was looking at me with a quizzical smile. "What time did you say it was?" "Nine twenty-four." "Look at the clock." I glanced at it again. "Why, is it -- " I stopped. The hands stood at ten o'clock sharp. "Clock manipulation at a distance," I said. "How do you do it -- and why?" Felix shook his head, smiling. "You've just had another half-hour session in deep hypnosis, John. I want another couple of days to reinforce that primary personality fraction I've split off before I tie it in with a mnemonic cross-connection. We want your alter-ego to be sure to swing into action at the first hint of outside mental influence." "Speaking of psychodynamics, how are you coming along with your own conditioning?" "Pretty well, I think. I've been attempting to split off a personality fraction for myself. I'm not sure how effective my efforts have been. Frankly, autohypnotics were never ; my strong suit. Still, there are a few  facts that I can't afford to expunge j from my mind completely -- but on the other hand, I can't afford to let the enemy have them. I've buried them in the alternate ego, and keyed them to a trigger word. The same i word is tied to my heart action." j "In other words -- if anyone cues  this information, it's suicide for you." I (i Correct," Felix said cheerfully. "I need the basic power of the survival instinct to cover this information. I've given you the key word under hypnosis. Your subconscious will know when to use it." "Pretty drastic, isn't it?" "It's tricky business, trying to outguess a virtually unknown enemy. But from their interest in brains, it's a fair guess that they know a bit about the mechanics of the huI man mind. We can't rule out the possibility that they possess a tech nique for controlling human mental processes. I can't let them control mine. I've too many secrets." I chewed that one over. "You IF may be right. That tank driver didn't behave like a man who was running his own affairs. And whatever it was that hit him and the major -- " "It could have been an amplified telepathic command -- to stop breathing, perhaps -- or shutting off the flow of blood through the carotid arteries. From the fact that it didn't affect you, we can assume that their technique is selective. It probably requires at least a visual fix on the object, for a start." "We're assuming a hell of a lot, Felix. We'd better do some more field work before we reason ourselves right out onto the end of a long limb." Felix was looking thoughtful. "It shouldn't be too difficult to arrange shielding around the personality center area. A platinum-gauge micro-grid with a filament spacing of about -- " "Oh-oh. This sounds like another expedition into the seat of what I once thought of as my intelligence." Felix clucked. "I can handle it with a number # probe, like building a ship in a bottle. It could make a great difference -- if it works." "There's too much guesswork here, Felix." "I know," he nodded. "But we've got to extract every possible ounce of intelligence on the enemy from the few fragments of data we have. I don't think we're going to have much in the way of a second chance." "We'll be doing well if we have a first one." "You are getting nervy." "You're damned right! If I don't get going soon, I may funk the whole act and retire to a small farm near Nairobi to write my memoirs." Felix cackled. "Let's dial ourselves a nice little entrecote avec champignon and a liter or two of good Burgundy and forget business for an hour or two. Give me three more days, John. Then we'll make our play -- ready or not!" IX T he night air was cold and clean. Gravel crunched under my feet with a crisp, live sound. Felix tossed our two small bags in the boot of the car, paused to sniff the breeze. "A fine night for trouble," he said briskly. I looked up at the spread of fat, multi-colored stars. "It's good to be out, after fifty days of stale air and scalpels," I said. "Trouble or no trouble." I slid into my seat, taking care not to bend any metal. "We'll have to register you as a lethal weapon when this caper is over," Felix said, watching me gingerly fasten my seat belt. "Meantime, watch what you grab if I take a corner a trifle too fast." He started up, pulled off down the drive turned into the highway. "It's not too late to change plans and take the Subsea Tube to Naples," I said. "I have a negative vibration when it comes to rocket flights. Why not go underground, the way the Lord intended us to travel?" "I won the deck-cut, old boy," Felix said. "For myself, I've had enough of the underground life for now. I want a fast transit to New York." "I feel a little exposed right now," I said. "Too damn bad we don't have two OE suits." "Wouldn't help if we did. You couldn't get aboard an aircraft, tube or anything else without showing up on a dozen different monkey-business detectors. But we'll be all right. They aren't looking for me -- and your own mistress wouldn't know you now. You're good-looking, boy!" "I know. I'm just talking to keep myself occupied." "You have our prize exhibit all cozy in your trick belt?" "Yep." We drove in silence for the next mile. The city lights glowed on our right as we swung off on the part road. We pulled into a mile-wide lot under banked polyarcs, rode a slipway to the rotunda, a glass-walled arena under a paper-thin airfoil cantilevered out in hundred yard wings from supporting columns of ferroconcrete twelve feet in diameter at the base. I concentrated on walking without hopping while Felix led the way across to an island of brighter lights and polished corners where showgirls in trim uniforms stamped tickets and gave discouraging answers to male passengers with threehour layovers to kill. I watched the crowd while he went through the formalities. There were the usual fat ladies in paint and finger rings, slim haughty women with strange-looking hats, bald businessmen with wilting linen and a mild glow expensively acquired at the airport bar, damplooking recruits in rumpled uniforms, thin official travelers with dark suits, narrow shoulders and faces as expressive as filing cabinets. Once I spotted a big black and tan German shepherd on a leash, and twitched: my foot hit a parked suitcase, sent it cannonballing against the counter. Felix stepped in quickly, soothed the fat man who owned the mishandled luggage, guided me toward a glass stairway that swept up to a gallery lined with live-looking palms. We headed for a pair of frosted glass doors under three-foot in flowing script. "We have nearly an hour before take off Time for a light snack and a stirrup cup." Felix seemed to be in the best of spirits now. The fresh air had revived me, too. The sight air of businesslike bustle, the bright lights made the memories of stealthy horrors seem remote. We took a table near the far side of the wide, mosaic-floored, softly lit room. A smiling waitress in leis and a grass skirt took orders for martinis. Across the room, a group of bow-legged men with flamboyant shirts strummed guitars. Felix glanced around contentedly. "I think perhaps we've overestimated the opposition, John." He lit up a dope-stick, blew violet smoke toward an ice bucket by the next table. "Another advantage of rocket travel is the champagne," he remarked. "We can be nicely oiled by the time we fire retros over Kennedy." IF "While we're overestimating the enemy, let's not forget that he has a number of clever tricks we haven't quite mastered yet," I put in. "Getting out of Tamboula is a start; but we still have the problem of contact when we reach the States. We won't accomplish much hiding out in back rooms over tamale joints, sneaking out at night for a pictonews to find out what's going on." Felix nodded. "I have some ideas on that score, John. We'll also need a quick and inconspicious method of identifying 'human' aliens. I think I know how that can be done. We can work with the radar albedo of the alien skin, for example: it must be a rather unusual material to withstand puncturing steel doors." He was smiling again, looking happy. He leaned toward me, talking against a strident voice from the next table. "I've been working for twenty years, preparing for what I've termed a 'surreptitious war', based on the premise that when the next conflict took place, it would be fought not on battlefields, or in space, but in the streets and offices of apparently peaceful cities: a war of brainwashing techniques, infiltration, subversion, betrayal. It's been in the air for a hundred years now: a vast insanity that's kept us flogging away, nation against nation, race against race -- with the planets at our fingertips, beckoning... S omething was happening. The music was changing to a sour whine in my ears. The chatter at the tables around me was like the petulant cries of trapped monkeys in vast, bleak cages. Felix was still talking, jabbing with a silver spoon to emphasize his points. My eyes went to the double doors fifty yards distant across the brittle-patterned floor. Beyond the obscure glass, dark shapes moved restlessly, like dim shadows of crawling men. I pushed my chair back. "Felix!" I croaked. " -- could have established a permanent colony of perhaps five thousand. Carefully picked personnel, of course -- " "The door!" My voice was choking off in my throat as though a hand were crushing it. The air in the room seemed to darken; tiny points of light danced before me. "Something wrong, old boy!" Felix was leaning toward me. a concerned expression on his face. He looked as unreal now as a paper cutout -- a cardboard man in a cardboard scene. Far across the room the door swung silently open. A staring corpse-pale face appeared at the level of a man's belt. It pushed into the room, the long, lean, bristled body pacing on legs like the arms of apes, the fingered feet slapping the floor in a deliberate rhythm. A second beast followed, smaller, with a blacker coat and a grayish ruff edging the long-toothed face. A third and fourth passed through the door, both rangy, heavy, their long bodies sagging between humped shoulders and lean flanks. The leader raised his head, seeming to sniff the air. "Felix!" I pointed. He turned casually, let his gaze linger a moment, then glanced at me with a slight smile. "Very attractive," he said. "You must be recovering, John, for a pretty face to excite you -- " "Good God, Felix! Can't you see them!" He frowned. "You're shouting, John. Yes, I saw them." I was aware of faces turning toward me at the surrounding tables, eyebrows raised, frowns settling into place. I reached out, caught Felix's arm. His face contorted in a spasm of agony. "Felix! They've come! Four of them!" He smoothed his features with an effort, tugged against my grip. His eyes were stricken. "Johnny -- the strain has been too much for you -- " he started. "Felix, you've got to listen. What do you see coming through that door!" "Four young women," he said in a choked voice, "Very gay, very sweet. Would that I had time..." His face was paling. "John, you're breaking my arm!" I jerked my hand back. "They're aliens, Felix! The dog things I saw in the ravine! Look again! Try to see them!" The leading demon had turned toward us now. The white face was fixed on me as it came on, steadily, relentlessly, stalking unnoticed along the aisle between the tables where diners laughed and talked, forking food into over-fed mouths. Felix turned, stared. "They're coming toward us," he said in a voice thin with strain. "The first young lady is dressed in yellow -- " "It's a thing like a tailless dog: a skull-face, stiff black hair. Remember the ear!" F elix tensed: an uncertain expression crept over his face. He turned toward me. "I -- " he started. His features went slack: his head lolled, eyes half open. The music died with a squawk. Conversation drained into silence. The first of the montrosities quickened its pace: its head came up as it headed straight for me. I leaned toward Felix, shouted his name. He muttered something, slumped back, stared vacantly past me. "Felix, for God's sake, use your gun!" I jumped up. My knee caught the table. It went flying against the next one: Felix tumbled back, slammed to the floor. I caught a momentary impression of dull-faced patrons. sitting slackly at tables all around. There was a quickening slap of beast-hands now as the leading thing broke into a clumsy gallop, closing now, red eyes glinting, the black tongue lolling from the side of the wide jaws as it clearing the last few yards, sprang -- With a roar of horror, I swung my right fist in a roundhouse blow that caught the monster squarely on the neck. It went crashing across a table in an explosion of silver, glasses and laden plates, to go down between tables in a tangle of snowy linen; then the second demonic thing was on me. I saw dagger-teeth flash, ducked aside, caught a thick foreIF arm, feeling the flesh tear under my hand as I hurled it aside. The beast whirled, squealing thinly, reared up seven feet tall -- I struck at it, saw its face collapse into pulped ruin. It fell past me, kicking frantically. The last two attackers split, rushed me from both sides. I ran toward the one on the left, missed a swing at its head, felt the clamp of teeth on my arm, the impact of its weight like a feather mattress, I staggered, caught myself, slammed blows at the bristled side. It was like pounding a saddle. I struck for the head then, saw skin and flesh shear under the impact, struck again, knocked an eye from its socket -- And still the thing clung, raking at me with its pale hands like minstrel's gloves. I reached for its throat with my free hand, whirled to interpose its body between me and the last of the four creatures as it sprang: the impact knocked me back a step, sent the attacker sprawling. It leaped up, slunk around to the left of a fallen table to take me from the side. A t that moment, to my horror, the music resumed. I heard a tinkle of laughter, an impatient call for a waiter. Beyond the crushed head at my arm, with its single hate-filled eye, I caught a glimpse of the animated faces of diners, busy forks, a raised wine-glass -- "Help me, for the love of God!" I roared. No one so much as glanced in my direction. I ripped at the locked jaws on my arm, feeling bone and leather shred and crumble. With a sound like nails tearing from wood, the fangs scraped clear, shredding my sleeve. The long body fell back, slack. I threw it aside, turned to face the last of the monsters. Baleful red eyes in a white mask of horror stared at me across a table ten feet away where a man with a red-veined nose sniffed a glass thoughtfully. On the floor at my feet, Felix lay half under the body of a dead demon. Now the last of the four creatures moved in. Beyond it, I saw a movement at the entrance: the door swung wide. Two demons came through it at a run, then another -- The thing nearest me crouched, wide mouth gaping. It had learned a measure of caution now: I took a step back, looked around for a route of escape -- "Now!" a silent voice seemed to shout in my mind. "Now!" I took my eyes from the death's head snarling three yards away, fixed my eyes on Felix's face. "Ashurbanipal!" I shouted. Felix's eyes opened -- dead eyes in a slack face. "The Franklin Street Postal Station in Coffeyville, Kansas," he said in a lifeless monotone. "Box #. Code." There was a rasp of horny finger on the floor, a blur of movement as the demon sprang. It landed full on Felix's chest, and I saw its boned snout go down. I threw myself at it, grappled the bristled torso to me, felt bones collapse as we smashed against a IF table, sent it crashng down. I kicked the dead thing aside, scrambled up to see a pack of its fellows leaping to the attack, more boiling through the open doors. I caught a glimpse of Felix, blood covering his chest -- then I leaped clear and ran. Far across the wide room, tall glass slabs reared up thirty feet to the arched ceiling. Tables bounded to left and right as I cut a swathe across the crowded flcar. Ten feet from the wall, I crossed my arms over my face, lowered my head and dived. There was a shattering crash as the glass exploded from its frame. I felt a passing sting as huge shards tumbled aside. There was a moment of whipping wind; then I slammed against the concrete terrace as lightly as a straw man, rolled, came to my feet, sprinted for the darkness which lay beyond the lighted plaza. Behind me glass smashed. I heard through the opening, the scrabble of feet. People whirled from my path with little screams; then I was past them, dashing across a spread of lawn, then crashing through underbrush like spiderwebs and into the clear. In the bright moonlight the stony desert stretched to the seacliffs a mile distant. Behind me, I heard the relentless gallop of demonic pursuers. In my mind was the image of the comrade I had left behind -- the incomparable Felix, dead, beneath a tidal wave of horrors. I ran -- and the Hounds of Hell bayed behind me. X I huddled in a sea-carved hollow at the base of a crumbling twenty-foot cliff of sandy clay, breathing in vast gulps of cold, damp air, hearing the slap and hiss of the surf which curled in phosphorescent sheets almost to my feet. Far out on the black, Mediterranean, gleaming points of light winked on the horizon: ships lying to anchor in the roadstead off Tamboula. I pulled my coat off. peeled my blood-stiffened shirt from my back. By the light of the moon I examined the gouges across my left forearm, made by the demon's teeth. Tiny gleaming filaments of metal showed in the cuts. The thing's fangs had been as hard as diamond. Cold night wind whipped at me. Felix hadn't thought to install any insulation in the course of the remodeling. I tore a sleeve from my shirt, bound up my arm. There were cuts on my face and shoulders from the glass. Not deep and, thanks to Felix's hypnotic commands, not painful -- but blood was flowing freely. I got to my feet and waded out ankle-deep, scooped cold salt water in my wounds, then pulled my shirt and coat back on. It was all I could do in the way of first aid. Now it was time to give my attention to survival. I didn't know how many miles I had run -- or how far behind the dog-things trailed me. Perhaps I had escaped them. I keened my hearing, not breathing, hoping there would be nothing but the deep sigh of the wind... From far across the plain, I heard the slap of galloping beast-hands, how many I couldn't tell. There was a chance that if I stayed where I was in the shelter of the cliff they might pass me by. But they had come unerringly to me as I sat in the bright-lit restaurant with Felix -- The thought of my dead companion was like a ghostly knife-wound in my chest. Felix, the urbane, the elegant! I remembered his jaunty smile, the irrepressible high spirits that had met every challenge with a counter-attack. And now, he was alone back there, dead, under a tidal wave of demons. I wouldn't wait here, to be cornered in the dark. Better to meet them in the open, kill as many as I possibly could before they bore me down. There was a narrow strip of wet, boulder-dotted beach running along the base of the sheer wall behind me. I went a few yards along it, splashing through shallow pools. An earth-fall had made a shelving slope to the level ground above. At the top, I lay flat and looked out across the pebbled plain. I saw that I was at the tip of a tongue of desert thrusting out into the sea, a narrow peninsula no more than a hundred yards wide at its base, narrowing to the point where I lay. Far away, the city was a pink glow against the sky. Near at hand, I saw dark shapes that could very well have been rocks -- or crouching enemies. I squinted down hard to trigger my visual boaster complex. The desert sprang into instant, vivid clarity. Every stone fragment, mesquite bush, darting ground rat, stood out as under a full moon. A hundred yards away, a long, dark-glistening creature bounded from the shelter of a rock slab, swinging its pale, snouted face from right to left, then back, as it ran. Over the roar of surf, the distant whirr and clatter of night-locusts, the pad of its feet was loud now. Its breathing was a vile intimacy in my ears. When the thing was fifty feet away, it stopped abruptly, one white hand raised. Its gleaming eyes turned toward my hiding place. Then it leaped straight toward me. I came to my feet, caught up a head-sized rock that seemed as light as cork, threw it; it slammed off the creature's flank with a sound like a brick hitting a board fence, knocked it off its feet -- but the thing was up in an instant, leaping across the last few yards -- I leaned aside, swung a kick that went home with a thud, then chopped a bone-smashing blow behind the shoulder ruff, felt the spine shatter. The thing struck heavily, rolled lay for a moment, stunned. Then the head came up. It moved feebly, scrabbling with its front legs -- toward me. I felt the skin prickle along the back of my neck. "What are you?" I called hoarsely. "Where do you come from? What do you want?" The ruby eyes held on my face; the broken body lunged forward another foot. IF "You understand me! Can't you speak?" Still it dragged itself on, its jaws smiling their skull-smile. The smell of its blood was a poison chemical reek. I looked back toward the city. Far away, I saw movement -- low shapes that galloped silently. From all across the barren plain they streamed toward the point of land where I stood, summoned by the dying creature at my feet. I stood at the edge of the cliff above the breaking surf, watching them come. It was useless for me to run any any farther. Even if I escaped the trap I had entered, there was no refuge along the coast. Algiers was sixty miles to the east. To the west there was nothing between me and Oran, over a hundred miles away. I could run for half an hour before oxygen exhaustion forced me to stop, cover perhaps twenty miles, but the aliens would follow with the patience of death. I was cornered, brought to bay. Out across the dark water, the nearest ship lay no more than two miles offshore. The dog-things were close now. I could see them silhouetted against the lesser skyglow, like some evil swarm of giant rats, piped from their lair by the music of Hell. A plague of demons. The leaders slowed, coming on cautiously, dozens of them, almost shoulder to shoulder -- I turned, leaped far out toward the black surf below; felt the icy waters closing over me. Swimming just above the muddy bottom, I struck out for deep water, heading out to sea. T he ocean floor by night was a magic land of broken terrain, darting schools of many-colored fishes, waving screens of green, translucent weed. A hundred feet from shore the bottom fell away and I swept out over a dark chasm, feeling the chill currents of deep water as I angled downward. The small fish disappeared now. A great, dark, lazy shape sailed toward me out of blackness, was swallowed up in gloom. There was noises, grunts, shrill whistles, the grind and thud of tidestirred rocks on the bottom, the distant, mechanical whirring of a propellor-driven boat. After twenty minutes, my vision began to blur. I was feeling the strain in my arms and the first stifling sensations of oxygen starvation. I angled upward, broke the surface, saw the low silhouette of a half-submerged vessel a quarter of a mile away across rippled ink-and-silver water, streaked with the winking reflections of her deck lights. I trod water, looking around. A bell-buoy clanged a hundred yards distant. Farther away, a small boat buzzed toward shore from a ship farther out. There was a smell of sea-things, salt, a metallic odor of ship's engines and a vagrant reek of oil. There was no indication of pursuit from the shore. I swam on toward the ship, came up on her from the starboard quarters across her stern. There was a deckhouse beyond a low guard rail, a retractable antenna array perched atop it with crimson and white lights sparkling at the peak. Farther forward, small deck cranes poised over an open hatch like ungainly herons waiting for a minnow. I caught a faint sound of raucous music, a momentarily raised voice. The odor of petroleum was strong here, and there was a glistening, filmy scum on the water. She was a tanker, loaded and ready to sail, to judge from the waterline, a foot above her anachronistic plimsoll. I pulled myself up on the corroding hull-plates, inched my way to the rail, crossed to the deckhouse. The door opened into warmth, light, the odors of beer, tobacco smoke, unlaundered humans. I took a great, grateful lungful. This was familiar, reassuring; the odor of my kind of animal. S teep stairs led down. I followed them, came into a narrow corridor with a three-inch glare-strip along the center line of the low ceiling. There were doors set at ten-foot intervals along the smooth, buff-colored walls. Voices muttered at the far end of the corridor. I stepped to the nearest door, listened with my hearing keened, then turned the handle and stepped inside. It was an eight-by-ten cell papered with photo-murals of Central Park, chipped and grease-stained at hand level. There was a table, a metal locker, a hooked rug on the floor, a tidy bunk, a single-tube lamp clamped to the wall above it beside a handpainted plaster plaque reprsenting a haloed saint with a dazed expression. Footsteps were coming along the corridor. I turned to the door as it opened and nearly collided with a vast, tall man in a solid undershirt bulging with biceps, blue trousers worn low to ease a paunch that looked slight against his massive bulk. He stared down at me, frowning. He had curly, uncut hair, large, dull-brown eyes, a loose mouth. There was a deeply depressed scar the size of an egg on the side of his forehead above his left eye. He raised a hand, pointed a thick finger at me. "Hey!" he said, in a startingly mellow tenor. He blinked past me at the room. "This here it my flop." "Sorry" I said. "I guess I kind of stumbled into the wrong place." I started past him. He moved, blocking the door. "How come you're in my flop?" he demanded. He didn't sound mad -- just mildly curious. "I was looking for the mate," I said. "He must be down the hall, eh?" "Heck no. The mate got a fancy place aft." He was looking me over now. "How come you're all wet?" "I fell in the water," I said. "Look, how are you fixed for crew aboard this ship?" The giant reached up, rasped at his scalp with a fingernail like a banjo pick. "You want to sign on?" IF "Right. Now -- " I started. "Who you want to see, you want to see Carboni. Oh, boy." The loose mouth curved in a vast grin. "He'll be surprised, all right. Nobody don't want to sign on aboard the Scabbier." "Well, I do. Where do I find him?" The grin dropped. "Huh!" "Where can I find Mr. Carboni -- so I can sign on, you know." The grin was back. He nodded vigorously. "He's prob'ly down in the ward room. He's prob'ly pretty drunk." "Maybe you could show me the way." He looked blank for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah. Hey." He was frowning again, looking at my shoulder. "You got a cut on ya. You got a couple of cuts. You been in a fight?" "Nothing serious. How about Mr. Carboni..." The finger was aimed at me like a revolver. "That's how come you want to sign on the Scabbier. I betcha. You croaked some guy, and the cops is after ya." "Not as for as I know, big boy. Now -- " "My name ain't Big Boy. It's Joel." "Okay, Joel. Let's go see the man, all right?" "Come on." He moved out of the doorway, started off along the corridor, watching to be sure I was following. "Carboni, he drinks a couple of bottles and he gets drunk. I tried that but with me it don't work. One time I drank two bottles of booze but all it done, it made me like burp." "When does the ship sail?" "Huh? I dunno." "What's your destination?" "What's that?" "Skip it Joel. Just take me to your leader." A fter a five-minute walk along criss-crossing passageways, we ducked our heads, stepped into a long, narrow room where three men sat at an oilcloth-covered table decorated with a capless ketchup bottle and a mustard pot with a wooden stick. There were four empty liquor bottles, on the table and another, nearly full one. The drinker on the opposite side of the table looked up as we came in. He was a thick-necked fellow with a bald head, heavy features, bushy eyebrows, a blotchy complexion. He sat slumped with both arms on the table encircling his glass. One of his eyes looked at the ceiling with a mild expression; the other fixed itself on me. A frown made a deep crease between the eyes. "Who the hell are you?" His voice was a husky whisper. Someone had hit him in the windpipe once. It hadn't improved his manners. I stepped up past Joel. "I want to sign on for the cruise." He swallowed a healthy slug of what was in the glass, glanced at his companions, who were hitching, around to get a look at me. "He says it's a cruise," he rasped. "He wants to sign on, he says." The eye went to Joel. "Where'd you pick this bird up?" Joel turning, said, "Huh?" "Where'd you come from, punk?" The eye was back on me again. "Mow'd you get aboard?" "The name's Jones," I said. "I swam. What about that job?" "A job. he says." The eye ran over me. "You're a seaman, eh?" "I can learn." "He can learn, he says." "Not many guys want to sign on this tub, do they, Carboni," Joel asked brightly. "Shut up," Carboni growled without looking at him. "You got blood on your face," he said to me. I put my hand up, felt a gash across my jaw. "I don't like this mug's looks," one of the drinking buddies said in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard. "A chain-climber. I got a good mind to throw him to hell off back into the drink where he came from. He looks like some kind of a cop to me." He was a long-faced, lanky, big-handed fellow in grimy whites. He had a large nose, coarse receding gums. "Do I get the job or not?" I said, looking at Carboni. "I'm talking to you, mug," the long man said. "I asked you if you are a cop." "Who runs this show?" I said, still watching Carboni. "You or this talking horse?" I jerked a thumb at the latter. He made an explosive noise, started getting up from the bench. "Sit down, Pogey," Carboni snarled. The lanky man sank back, talking to himself. itnpbat's a pretty good swim out from shore," Carboni said. "You musta been in a pretty big hurry to leave town." I didn't say anything. "Cops after you?" "Not that I know of." "Not that he knows of, he says." Carboni grinned. He had even white teeth; they looked .as though they had cost a lot of money. "Any papers?" I shook my head. "No papers, he says," Carboni relayed. "You want me I should pitch him over the side, Carboni?" the third man spoke up. He was a swarthy man with stubby arms and a crooked jay. like a dwarfed giant. "Cap'n wouldn't like that," Joel said. "Cap'n said we needed crew." "Up the captain," the horsey man with stubby arms and a crooked jaw, said. "We don't need no -- " "Pogey," Carboni cut in. He rolled the eye over to bear on him. "You talk too much. Shut up." He jolted his chair back, turned, lifted a phone off a wall bracket, thumbed a call button. The glass eye was rolled over my way now, as though watching for a false move. "Skipper, I got a bird here says he's a seaman," Carboni said into the instrument. "Claims he lost his papers." There was a pause. "Yeah," , Carboni said. "Yeah." He listened again, then hitched himself up in the chair, frowning. He glanced toward me. "Yeah?" he said. I let my gaze wander idly across the room -- and switched my hearing IF ' f into high gear. Background noises leaped into cracking presence. The hum of the phone was a sharp whine; I heard wood and metal creak, the thump of beating hearts, the glutinous wheeze of lungs expanding, the heavy, grate of feet shifting on the floor -- and faintly, in an excited voice: "...UN radio a gun bumped off somebody maybe a couple... try for a ship they said. Cripes, looks like." Felix had said that with a little concentration, I could develop selectivity. I needed it now. I strained to filter the static, catch the words: . handle him?" Carbone looked my way again. "Can a kid handle a lollipop?" "Okay. Look." The voice was clearer now... lousy local cops... we turn this guy in... reward peanuts... their problem. We need hands, we work this boy... get there... Stateside cops... a nice piece of change..." "I see what you mean, Skipper," Carboni said. He had a corner of his mouth lifted to show me a smile that I might have found reassuring if I'd been a female crocodile. "Get him down below. Anchors up in an hour and a half. Shake it up." "Leave it to me, Skipper." Carboni hung up, swung around to give me the full face smile. The bridgework wasn't so expensive after all, just old style removable plates. "Well, I decided to give you a chance, Jones," he croaked. "You're on. You'll sign papers in the morning." "Hey, okay if he helps me out in the hot-room and stuff?" Joel enquired. He sounded like a ten-yearold asking for a puppy. Carboni thrust out his lips, nodded. "All right, Jones; for now, you help the dummy. Take the flop next to his." "By the way, where's this tub headed?" I asked. "Jacksonville. Why? You choosy or something?" "If I was, would I be here?" C arboni snorted. "Anchors in in an hour." He leveled the eye on Joel. "Get moving," he barked. "What do you think this is, a rest home for morons?" "Come on." Joel tugged at my arm. I followed him out, along corridors to a door. He opened it, flipped on a light, showed me a room identical with his own except that it lacked the plaster saint and the hooked rug. He opened the locker, tossed sheets and a blanket on the bed. I pulled off my wet jacket. Joel puckered his mouth, looking at me. "Hey, Jones, you better get Doc to fix them cuts you got." I sat on the bunk. I felt weak suddenly, sucked as dry as a spider's dinner. There was a humming in the back of my head, and my face felt hot. I pulled the sodden makeshift bandage from the arm the dogthing had chewed. There were four deep gouges, half a dozen shallower ones -- all inflamed, swelling. The arm was hot and painful. "Can you get me some antiseptic and tape?" I asked. IF "Huh?" Joel grunted. "Is there a first-aid kit around?" Joel pondered, then went into the corridor, came back with a bluepainted metal box. In it I found a purple fluid which bubbled when I daubed it on my wounds. Joel watched, fascinated. At my request he applied some to l he cuts on my back, working with lotal concentration, his mouth hanging open. If he saw the glint of metal filaments in the torn skin he made no comment. I folded gauze; Joel helped me tape it in place. When we finished, he stood back, smiling. Then he frowned. Hey, Jones. How come you didn't get Doc to fix you up?" "I'll be okay," I said. Joel nodded as though I had clarified a difficult point. He looked at me, frowning. He was thinking again. "How's come Carboni's scared of you?" he asked. "He's not scared of me, Joel," I said. "He took a shine to me on sight." Joel thought that one over. "Yeah," he said. "But look; we got stuff we got to do. We got to get a move on." I stood up, acutely aware of fatigue, and wounds, and a sensation similar to a ticking bomb behind my eyes. Felix's post-hypnotic anesthetic had been a big help while it lasted, but the withdrawal symptoms evened the score. "I want to go up on deck a minute," I said. Joel blinked, followed me as I retraced the path along which I had come half an hour earlier. I stepped out onto the deck, shivered in the wet clothes as the freshening wind hit me. There were no lights on the shore opposite. Half a mile to the left, there was a faint gleam from the windows of beach shacks; farther along, the great arc of the dredged harbor was a line of jewels against the dark night. I tensed the eye squint mucsfes, saw the black water snap into gray misty clarity. On its surface, nothing stirred. I attuned my hearing to pick up the softest of night sounds. There were the thousand pings and thumps from the ship, the creak of the anchor cables, and the crump and hiss of the distant surf. If the demons were close, they were well hidden. For the moment, it seemed, I was safe. I was. I wasn't so sure about the world. On sale at all newsstands! IF  Short Story He searched the stars for a perfect race -- and found what perfection really is! T he largest of the symmetroids sat down. And, in an order that was just far enough off simultaneity for a very attentive observer to notice the sequence, the others followed him. To call it "sitting down" involved giving the phrase a much wider than usual meaning. But Streeve was by now quite used to employing the patterns of his native language in novel ways, in order to guide his thought along the behavior types of the symmetroids. "Sitting down" usually involves bending of certain limbs, jerky movements of the rest of the body and a sudden halt as the sitting down member hits the sitting down surface. But the symmetroids seemed to compress themselves, rather like a large balloon letting out half its air. Or else it was as if gravity had suddenly doubled, so that each part of their bodies -- twice as heavy as it had been before -- concertinaed against the part below it. The general impression, however, wasn't really one of air escaping, or of weight increasing. It was simply of their taking up a resting, non-mobile position: and that was why Streeve called it "sitting down". He checked the time and made an entry in his notebook. Then whilst the people were eating, he went over the day's route and compared it with the corresponding day of the last cycle. That was quite unnecessary, since he remembered the landmarks and resting places in great detail -- he had been past them so many times that it would be impossible not to. But Streeve was well trained. He had been taught that efficient observing is wasted without detailed recording. A note book and sharp pencil were always in his hand. For the first time in thirty years of field work, Streeve was restless. He had only ten notebooks left, out of an original five hundred. Yet he had nowhere near enough data to return home and write his thesis. It was painful to review the changing moods of his time on the symmetroids' planet, and he indulged in this pain too often for his own liking. When he and the nineteen other young anthropologists of his class had been given a final briefing they were warned that it was unusual to discover a suitable race in under three years. Even after finding one, seven years was thought a reasonable time for a complete survey of their habits and tastes, and a description of the language. But Streeve ran across the symmetroids in the first week on his assigned continent. As he began preparations for establishing communication his mood had been one of exultation. I t had been made plain to Streeve's class that the first suitable people they came across were to be their object of study. No one was allowed to search for a second group if, for example, the one first encountered presented difficulties of communication. So that it was particularly unfortunate, in view of Streeve's lack of results, that the symmetroids were plainly quite suitable for field study. They certainly had some sort of social organization. A different symmetroid was likely to sit down first each night. But several years of observation had established that this was by random choice out of probabilities strictly assigned to every member of the race. Streeve had arranged the symmetroids along a hierarchy of importance, according to the size of each one's probability rating. This correlated with the part different symmetroids played in varous ceremonies and rites. For instance, each symmetroid mated with a frequency that was determined by its importance. Or at least he assumed they were mating when two of the people juxtaposed their symmetrical bodies and began rotating them in opposite directions, always touching each other, so that the larger, of the pair moved around the smaller one. (There could be no strict division of the sexes since the smaller in one instance of mating was often the larger in another.) They moved faster and faster until eventually all Streeve could see was a rotating elliptical blur. Then, as they slowed down again, he would gradually be able to make out three revolving bodies: a larger going around a smaller as before, but now a third, infant symmetroid moving in figure-ofeight fashion around and between the two original bodies. And they seemed to have some means of communicating with each other. If .?. symmetroid in the rear suddenly stopped -- Streeve still had no idea what the reason for this could be -- the leaders would immediately return and, by grouping around the ailing member, presumably do what was needed to cure him. It had taken some time for Streeve to notice that they never "turned around" when they went back to help a colleague (it was the only time they ever did go back for anything). Or rather, they never "rotated" : Streeve decided that "turn round" was inapplicable to a people who had no front or back or sides, but whose bodies were made up of a number of circular rings, varying inches in diameter and piled to a height of up to ten feet. Streeve was still as far away as he had ever been from finding out how they communicated. But the more he thought about it the more he accepted this, and was surprised that no anthropologist had ever experienced difficulty of this kind before. They might use sounds that were outside his threshhold of hearing: or light signals in the ultraviolet or infra-red ranges: or else some form of telepathy. He inclined towards the last alternative, once his hypothesis about their direction of movement had been checked and verified. The symmetroids always moved along together, in a straggly line which would certainly have some definitive criterion determining each one's position in it -- but whatever this was, Streeve had yet to work out. The leading symmetroid seemed to move toward the direction in which there were the least number of trees; the direction in which movement would be easiest. There was only one kind of plant on the continent, and Streeve was aware that he was extending the usual meaning of the word "tree" by applying it in this context. But the term seemed less unsuitable than any other for the flat-topped, telegraph-pole-like growths, with rings that looked like long-play records of different sizes growing symmetrically out of their stems. The "trees" occurred in any sort of pattern: in round clumps, in straight lines, in six-pointed star designs, or just individually, with no obvious shape to their distribution. B y exercising what Streeve liked to think was a "radar sense," the symmetroids always moved towards the most open ground, the direction in which they would have most freedom of movement. Their course was continually changing, as the possibilities in front of them altered, so that they appeared at first sight to be moving in a random, drunken wind. If necessary, they would presumably be able to return the way they had come in the event of encountering an impenetrable cul-de-sac; so that they never need stop or bump into anything. But the trees were never very thick, and during Streeve's IF thirty years of study a complete turn-about with the interesting question of instantaneous change of leader -- had never occurred. When he first hit upon the "moving in ijiost open direction" hypothesis, after seven-and-a-ha!f years, Josei Streeve had made the first of a series of widely scattered and quite unscientific comments in his notebook: This race is surely more perfect than any other known to us. Their life is quite systematic, completely determined and yet, at a guess, entirely satisfying. Now they were eating. Or at least Streeve called it eating. The biggest circle of a symmetroid body was about halfway up and every evening, after they had been sitting for a few minutes, each would spurt a fountain of some liquid from the whole circumference of the largest ring into a gap which opened around the third-totopmost ring. It was easy to see that the same two rings were involved in each case -- although each symmetroid had a total of seventynine rings -- because of their coloring. The large feeder circle was a dirty yellow, the same color as the trees, and the fed ring was pure blue, in contrast to the mingled shades of red and brown that covered the rest of their bodies. Mainly, Streeve called it "eating" because of the other function of the yellow ring. Every morning the symmetroids would rise in a body, and each approach a different tree. Two of them would never choose the same tree: Streeve recognised the basis of allocation to be such that the total distances moved by the symmetroids to their individual trees should be minimum. Once each was under its tree (getting there was no difficulty, since the lowest branch on any tree was at about twelve feet) it rotated quickly around it, so that the symmetroid's widest ring always extended for about two inches under the tree's lowest branch. Between the sixth and nineteenth revolutions a liquid sprayed down from the tree into a cavity around the top edge of the yellow circle. T he time that elapsed between their sitting down and eating (which they did from a sitting-down position) varied from one minute to over two hours. Streeve had yet to find a formula to explain the interval although he felt sure he should be able to. Although they did not sit down quite simultaneously, he had never been able to detect the minutest difference in their feeding times. Similarly, although one of them would get up a fraction of a second before the others in the morning (and it was never the one that had sat down first the previous evening) they would gather their food at precisely the same moment. Sometimes they slept -- or at least remained motionless -- for three hours, sometimes for sixteen. The only sure feature was that they stopped before sundown and rose after dawn -- once only three seconds after, but the following day five hours later. At first Streeve tended to oversleep, and had once or twice spent days looking for them. But with practice he woke after three hours, and every half-hour after that, even though it was now unnecessary. He still could not predict to the slightest extent what time they would stand up and begin moving: but he knew exactly the course they would take. I n Streeve's fourteenth year he had the glimmering of another hypothesis. His excitement compelled another unscheduled entry: If I am right, the ultimate link is in place. This race must be considered the most perfect people known to man. It took five more years to be certain, and six more after that before he wrote : They are I am convinced, that the symmetroids moved along a closed path, so that they completed a circuit, and passed the same landmarks, every two hundred and seven days. As far as he could remember, and from the notes he had made, this had been the case since his ninth year. He was almost certain that before then they had not been on this circuit. He could remember a desert that took fifteen days to cross (he called it a "desert" for want of a better term, since there were only a quarter as many trees as usual), several clumps of plants shaped like swastikas, and a large hole in the ground which, fortuitously, had lain just off the symmetroids' course. He could not be quite sure of all this, for he had still been puzzled by their seemingly inexplicable wandering course for most of the initial nine years, and the written record sometimes made little sense now. But if he was right, if... If l am right, then these people have attained complete perfection only during my time here. For just twenty-one. years their lives have beer absolutely predestined the predestination being determined by their own past behavior! For although an open course can lead into a closed one, a closed one can only be followed -- forever. However, after thirty years, Streeve was restless. He had been totally unable to communicate with the symmetroids. If he approached them he seemed merely to be regarded as another plant, and their course altered accordingly. They could, if they wished, move faster than him, so that he had yet to touch one. By a carefully planned maneuver he had once forced them to change their leader and almost reverse direction for a few yards. But that was very little to show for half a lifetime of attempted contact. Should be return home? Certain failure in his Ph. D. would mean permanent drafting to the underwater army. Or was it better to stay on here, to fill the last ten notebooks as slowly as he could, and hope for an earthquake -- although he had been told they were non-existent on this planet -- or a forest fire -- although it rained every night and the trees never dried out -- to alter the status quo, and give him a new opportunity for communicating with the symmetroids. Streeve's speculations were interrupted. The people had risen, led by an eight-foot high symmetroid whose probability of standing up first was held by Streeve -- on the. basis of ten samples of a thousand days each -- to be only one in one-hundredand-thirty-nine. Their food gathered, Ihey set off along the usual path at a standard three miles per hour. Streeve followed, still half thinking about returning at once -- he had not seen his transit craft since landing but was confident he could get back to it in fifty days. He noticed a star-shaped clump of trees ahead that rather looked as if it had one arm a little shorter than the other, something he couldn't remember having seen around here before. But the trees were thick enough in this area for this not to be surprising. In fact, there was little to choose between several different directions at this stage of the circuit. And he thought he could feel -- or maybe he just imagined -- that the leader's pace slowed a little, perhaps as he took longer to select the most open course. I t wasn't until three hours later that Streeve became worried. The course seemed unfamiliar, and the pace had definitely slowed now, as the leader found each direction almost as completely wooded as every other. He cursed his slow thinking -- dimmed by his years on this planet -- for not having realized that a tree could fall down. The optimum need not necessarily remain constant from circuit to circuit. Now the circle was broken! But the symmetroids were as impassive as ever. Had they even realized that they were on a closed course? Streeve had intuitively guessed so, but his knowledge of their intelligence was slight, and he had no real reason for this belief. And even now, the hoped-for communcation. did not materialize. For the first time in years Streeve's mind was racing. If they were the perfect people, how could they have ceased to be perfect? For ceasing to be perfect is an imperfection, which perfect people could never possess. Yet they had been perfect, as he understood perfection, and had now paten tty ceased to be completely perfect. How could this be? As he pondered the paradox, Streeve followed the people through a crack in the wall of trees. If this proved a dead end they would for the first time have to turn around But the path continued, and Streeve plodded after. Until both trees and earth suddenly stopped before a type of terrain that Streeve had never seen on this planet. As he watched, still struggling with the paradox of perfection, the people moved on --  moved smoothly into the sea. Streeve hesitated for a moment. Then, before following them, he had time to scribble a final epigram on the last page of notebook number four-hundred-and-ninety. You may not believe it, but there are still some people who think it was wrong to award him a posthumous Ph.D. for a single sentence: The only perfect  people are IF  Novelette i : A man could defeat a soulless machine every time. But what if they were not -- soulless ? T hey found a spot in the paddock area to park the station wagon, and carefully rolled the scarred old racer off its trailer. Ross and Gray eased it to the track gate while Ken took the VW bus around behind the pits. The savage sounds of racing engines raked the day and a fever burned in the air -- engines, cars, competition. Speed. Two grinning marshals joked through their inspection as Ross and Gray stood statuelike. Like two old reprobates and a weathered dowager at a teenage brawl, Ross thought. They were finally passed onto the course and began pushing the crimPrm jn car down the long pit lane, jleekei and shinier cars lashed past, 'and, between the cries of their passing, came the sideline comments. What the hell is that? Maybe a replica of an old accident. A Ferrari! It's a damned old F err aril Great Ghost! Are they going to race it? It must be on loan from the Italian Museum of Antique Arts. They did not bother to glance aside. Two battered old men pushing a battered old coupe; they had heard it all before. Many times. Too many times. They stopped in their pit area and Gray leaned over the roof to catch his breath. Ken had backed the bus in close behind the barrier and already raised the antenna. He swung open the rear door and turned, frowning, rubbing his hands on his hips. "Can we go? I've got a greengo on all power circuits." Gray hunched into the engine compartment while Ross checked tires and fuel. Ken leaned over the barrier. "Okay?" Gray slammed the lid and buttoned it up. "Fire it," he grunted. "Nothing's wrong that hasn't always been. You say all your little tubes and trinkets are warm?" "There aren't any damn tubes and you know it." Ken slammed into the back of the bus. Gray chuckled. "Boy's spooky today." Ross reached into the cockpit and flicked the switch. "He's lost his practice time," he said. "Can't blame him. He still takes us seriously." A glance flickered between them and Ross turned toward the bus. Ken was barely visible through the open rear door. Ross nodded, and Ken flicked switches in the bus. The Ferrari skirred, grumped and fired. Ross made a stirring motion with one hand; the engine raised its pitch, warming and smoothing. Gray opened the bonnet again and leaned over the rumbling engine. Fie made the barest adjustment to three of the carbs and nodded to himself. Ross raised a fist and twisted it. Thunder rolled and heads turned to stare from the other pits. Gray looked up and grinned. Ross toned to Ken again and made a steering motion with both hands. In the cockpit, the blank staring manikin copied Ross's action. Ross jabbed a fist in front of him. The manikin dropped a stiff hand and jerked through the gears. They raked slightly. Ross frowned and glanced at Gray, who just shook his head and slammed the bonnet. Ross raised his fist and motioned as if cracking a whip. The car snarled forward and stopped abruptly. "At least it can stop," Gray frowned. A scowling marshal edged past the bus and scrambled over the barrier. He glared at them, at the car, and at his clipboard. "I'm Crandall, pit marshal. Want to see those brakes!" IF Ro;s looked at Ken and whipped Inhand again. hard. The coupe squealed down the strip and slammed to a stop. Tire smoke drifted away. Crandall I I owned again at his board. "You Ross Eliot?" Ross nodded. Crandall blinked at him for a moment and referred again to his board. "And your operator is Kennith Manning. His license?" "Inside the side door of the bus." "Urn. You're late, Eliot. Is Manning familiar with this course?" "He's raced it before. Anything else on your mind?" "Well, everything is in order, I suppose. You're cleared. I just can't understand why -- " Ross raised a hand and chopped il down and the Ferrari smothered them in an avalanche of sound. It roared down the pit lane and onto Ihe course like an unleashed banshee, leaving a wake of craning heads and muttering voices. Ross nnd Gray frowned after it. The gears had raked again. Crandall's mouth was still open. Ross left him with his clipboard and turned to Gray. "That same damn thing." Gray shrugged. "Well, it's not clutch dragging. I promise you that!" Ross eased over the barrier and in the side door of the bus. Ken was seated at the console. His hands flicked over the board and his eyes never left the wide TV screen. Ross watched the road reel out of the depths of the screen and blur under the smooth red nose and fender swells. No sound came from the console; only the cry of cars passing the pit area, and that sound did not fit the action on the screen. Ross thought again how much this was like a movie rattier than the real thing... and not a very good movie at that. A corner came unwinding under the Ferrari's nose. Ken shifted, and Ross frowned. "It's still raking." "I know," Ken nodded. "I'm getting a red light but it's just a flicker. Watch." His fingers danced on the board and the scene lurched slightly as the car shifted. A tiny light blinked red under transmission. "Can you match you rpm's better?" "I try." Ken shook his head. "But you know -- " "Yeah, I know. A surge of electricity is different from a hand." He slapped Ken on the shoulder and helped Gray unload tires and fuel cans. "Take a look at the clutch servo when it comes in." Gray threw him a searing look. "A man wouldn't even need a clutch!" "How much time we got?" Ken yelled. "About a half hour of practice. Maybe less." II H e walked, hands in pockets, behind the pits and thought of Ken and Gray. And of himself. They were quite a group. Two old # fire eaters and a young one. Ken could unleash his flame through the console, and with such a blaze of skill and devotion that the old Ferrari could still sing the high notes and earn her way; not winning -- it had been a long time since she'd led the way home -- but close enough to finance another race. Barely. And another. Always one more. And Gray and himself: they were too old for flames; they just seethed along. Two old bastards. No -- make that three. The growling old Ferrari qualified too. Three old zombies still in there cluttering up the course. The ancient Triumvirate, long fallen and lacking the sense to crawl away. But that was the way with Oid Bastardsc too cranky to quit, too mean to die, too angry to know better. That was the way when the fire outlasted its function. You just seethed. He passed slowly behind the pit areas, crews feverish in the last intense moments of practice: Lafitte, Apache, Lotus, Volga, Porsche, #BM-GM, Abarth, Honda, Coventry, GE-Ford. There were a few independents -- as themselves -- but with cars that showed no aging, in appearance or in name. And so many new names since the # "man ban." But few of the old racing companies had stayed. Some had faded quietly; some not. Enzo Ferrari had not. He had gathered all his cars he could and sent them and the factory into the sky over Modena. "No car of mine shall be subject to this shame," he said then. But one car was -- Ross's, because Rosi had been a Ferrari team driver, an had hidden his car that thunderin day. And now was beginning to fe the edge of regret. And shame. He shouldered through the crow to the fence beyond the pits. Honda shrieked past with rpm's t cower dogs for miles around. It shu off for Corner One, squealed its downshift and sang around an away. The crowd chattered in i echo. Like a gleaming green pro jectile, a Lotus arced into the cor ner. It was chased by two Fords an a Volga, servo-manikins jerkin their downshifts. Another Lotus slip streamed a Coventry past the pit The Coven went wide and the Lotu leaped smoothly inside the corne and came out first. Voices laugh and elbows nudged. Lotus was th Big Name now. Lotus was the ca to catch. He smiled to himself That hadn't always been true. Ther had been another name -- once. The crowd ruffled and heads turned, a silence came and eyes squinted up the long straight past the pits where the South Turn opened. Ah yes. The new challenger for the Lotus crown. They moaned down the straight in close V formation, less than an inch apart at # mph; three daz zling streaks of white that snapped crisp, simultaneous shifts, curved through Corner One and left tire smoke and six black scars on the pavement behind them. Grandstanding, Ross thought. They even have a showoff circuit. But there were cheers and cries of excitement around him, and, suddenly, he felt very old. Old and empty. No, not empty. Old and angry. Old because he was; angry because this sleek people's imagination and enthusiasm. with a puppet in it, more than a machine on the end of a transmitter. nothing but monitors. The car was in command of itself. Machinery and electricity combined to drive itself, GM. The ultimate racer, they called it; machinery beyond man's mistakes. Gray had another name for it. A familiar old wail rode up the sky, a commanding bellow that brought a smile to his craggy face and peering faces from the crowd. There! How many men and machines had paid tribute to that voice? It lanced past the pits in a touch of thunder and curved for the corner. Gears crashed in the downshift and it slithered for a second, then pulled through and away. Ross's smile faded. A bad shift and too much brakes. Ken was getting jarred by the gear rake. Voices hummed behind him. Holy Robe! Was that a Ferrari? Yeah. It's in the program. Ross Eliot! You're kidding. No! Look! Ross Eliot: owner. I'll be damned! Old Angry Man Eliot. I thought he was dead. Might as well be if that antique is the best he can do. Ross edged his way to the rear, one thought boring through him: go home, Eliot. Get out. They don't race your way any more. You've provided comedy relief long enough. You're dead. H e walked back slowly, listening to the snarling cars and his snarling mind. It was going to rain. Naturally. Who ever heard of a race without rain? But it would give them an edge. A slight edge. Their servo sat in a closed coupe and its lenses stayed dry and clean, while most of the modern cars were open and the servo lenses subject to everything the course had to offer. And in the rain it would cost them. Pit stops for wiping lenses! A slender figure stepped from the vehicles behind the Lotus pit and Ross put his head down, pretending not to notice. But the clipped, mocking voice halted him. "Hello there, Eliot." He looked up. Finely cut face, crinkled eyes, neat mustache, careless hair: "dashing" the press called him, and managed to overlook the arrogant curl in the corner of his mouth. "Hello, Stewart. How fly the Loti?" It was an old joke -- but then so was he. "Rather well, as usual. I see you're still coaxing mileage from the Rampant Black Horse. Not sounding awfully well in the gears, is it?" "We're cracking walnuts for lunch. Join us. I'll save you the shells." He shouldered past. God, what he would give for a Ferrari in his hands and a fast course and a field of Lotus to pass. What he wouldn't give for -- for anything right now. Ken sprinted from their pit area as he approached. Gray following as fast as he could. Ken saw him and wheeled. "I baled it. Ross. Missed third and Warren Corners." "Okay. Get back on the board to drive it in. Gray and I'll go out and have a look. It'll run, won't it?" The look on Ken's face was like a bullet in his chest. "It'll start -- but I've got a full red light on the transmission." "We'll take the trailer then." He paused, frowning at the gray sky. Today? The last broken leg for the Black Horse? He looked back to Ken. "Hell, boy! Quit looking like you just shot your father. We've been through the tules before." "Yeah, but not with a bunged box. Hadn't I better come in case we have to -- have to haul it in?" Like pronouncing a death in the family, Ross thought. He unleashed a long breath and nodded, and felt something shudder loose inside. God. it was a helpless feeling to be out of luck, out of time, out of place. Ill I t wasn't really hurt. Another scarred fender would hardly be noticed. Another dent in the air scoop made little difference. The wheels were still true. The front end was straight. The sump was sand polished but whole. It was still a fighting machine. But today was the day. No more "one more race." Rain rattled on the roof of the VW. Ross finished and sat staring at Ken. "So that's the last act, boy. E can't even pay what I owe you." Ken shook his head, gazing at , the rain-shiny racer on its trailer behind their pit. "Just one rotten, stupid, damned solenoid!" Gray snorted and juggled a screwdriver from hand to hand. "Just a solenoid they don't even make any more!" "If we could only replace -- " "Quit dreaming, boy," Gray said. "There isn't a twenty-four volt system left in the business." A slim figure plunged through the rain and grinned at them through the open side doors. "Well. Choke up on the walnuts, did it?" Ross glanced up. Yes, the smile was there. "Clutch solenoid." "Oh. Too bad. Not like the old days, is it? Are you dead?" "We're dead," Ross answered. we?" "A damn shame, that. There's nothing you can do? I mean, a clutch bugger is such a bloody little thing." "It's enough." They listened for a moment to the calling of the small classes. Eugines growled in the pits. Stewart  spoke again. "Well, that's the bitch of it, isn't j it? I don't suppose we could cobble I something together. We have servos j that -- " " "Rack it, Mr. Lotus." But Gray's IF voice had lost its edge. "That's a car out there, not one of your animated toys. We couldn't convert it in a month and you know it!" Stewart gave a brittle laugh. "You're right, of course, but that's the running of it, isn't it? I mean, you've had your day, haven't you?" Ross stared at Stewart for a long time before he spoke. "Stewart, I've often wondered why you talk in questions," he said quietly. "And I wonder if it isn't that you need the assurance of agreement. So I'll agree with you this time. Yes, we've had our day. And it was a day you know very little about. It took men to match the machines then, Stewart." Stewart flushed. "Times change, Angry Man. Racing is -- " "Racing is a little girl's business now. Playtime. An abortion born of electric trains and 'Father Knows Best.' And you're proud of it, aren't you, Stewart? You were a loud voice in the bringing of the ban. Loud and in a position to bray in the right ears. Why? What made you and the others push that through?" Stewart paused. "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Men were dying! Needlessly! Mangled in the wreckage of their cars. Stupid deaths. What other reasons are necessary?" R oss gazed away at the drizzling rain and smiled. "I remember a young man with a new license and a new car. I remember how he managed to blunder every race he entered. Strange. I understand he was a real ace with little electric cars on a little road racing course." He glanced back at Stewart. "I wonder what was lacking in him that he couldn't race a real car. I wonder why he felt he had to protect the lives of his fellow men. Such consideration, Stewart. I am honored. If it hadn't been for you -- and the others too, of course -- I might be dead. I should thank you." Stewart stiffened. His voice became even more clipped. "Yes. I think we have saved some lives." "Saved, Stewart? Or taken away?" "I -- don't understand what you mean by that." "I know you don't." A harsh edge came into Ross's voice. "Run off now, Stewart. Go play with your toys. I'm tired of being protected." One side of Stewart's mouth lifted in a cold smile. "Too bad you couldn't have kept racing, Eliot. You could have died a hero instead of becoming the pathetic thing you are now." Ross nodded. "True. Perhaps I'll drive today." "Do that! Make a complete ass of yourself!" Stewart spun and strode into the rain, then stopped. "You were a great driver, Eliot. Too bad that people shan't remember you as one." He swung away and was gone and no one spoke in the bus. The gray rain drummed on the roof and Ross stared at his cold and lonely racer. What is it? he thought. What is it that links a man with the pulse and thunder of a car until his whole life is in that machine? That machine there. That low, mean missile with a rearing black horse as its emblem. A car he had lived with and in and around for too many years. A car that was almost legend now. Ferrari. And eleven years of laughter and ridicule had never seen it finish last, not fail to finish. Until today. And today it would not even start. It was over. The last Ferrari was through. And what now? The museum at Watkins Glen # The car. waxed and poised on hidden blocks, marked and scarred and beautiful? Himself and Gray, waxed and poised on hidden rods, marked and scarred and ugly. And the neat sign could read: Last Ferrari. Last driver and mechanic. V#. # bhp, # mph. Ross "Angry Man" Eliot ; World Champion, #, #. Gray " Even Angrier " Willard; mechanic and Old Bastard. And there could be more. Much more. Little awe-sparking notes to urge the grunts of wonder from the Sunday families. Broke course record at Schring five times in succession without brakes or clutch. Broke my little finger too in a bad shift. Won # LeMans after passing through an eight-car tangle without touching a thing. Touched the brake. Once. Got nickname at Nurburg Ring after hurling his broken clutch pedal at the pit crew and going on to win German GP of #. Missed them, though Oh yes, they could tell it. Tell the big and tell the little. Give them all the facts and features. Play the roar and make them shudder. Show the films and have them wonder. But they could never touch the truth of what is was to be this man and this machine coupled in an act of living, how it was to ride in thunder with the touch of lightning underfoot and the rim of life in both hands. They could never tell. And the people would never know. He gazed at the car crouching on its trailer like a great poised cat. His machine. His mistress. And the cold goggling manikin bolted in the cockpit like an alien violator. His anger flamed. He turned to Gray and nodded. Gray smiled for the first time in years. "About time, Angry Man." IV K en's voice was low and feverish in the closed bus. "You're crazy, Ross! You're crazy! You'll be blackflagged out of racing for life. You!" "It has happened to better men. Some of them thought it was the only honorable thing to do." "But you haven't driven in over ten years. No one can just jump into it after that -- not even you." IF "I remember where the gears are, boy. Yank on that other leg. It's caught on a cable." They were stripping the manikin of its coveralls. Ken exploded, "Kee-rist! You call prowling around a few courses in the dawn's early light driving? I mean racing, Ross. I mean boring out there and working it!" Ross looked up, his voice flat. "Kenny, don't tell me about racing." They stared a moment longer, and Ken glanced away. They both jumped like cats when the door banged open. Gray crowded in. shaking his head. "That Crandall," he snorted. "He came snooping by and asked if we were still running. I told him, 'Hell yes. We got a replacement part.' And he acted real disappointed. Watched me clear the pedals and then took off. The man's got eyes like a truck's got wings." Ken suddenly snapped his fingers. "The video! How can I fake it without video? What if he peeks in here and I'm diddling in front of a blank screen?" "Good thought, Ken-boy." Gray reached for the manikin's head with its two sparkling eyes. He pulled a screwdriver from a hip pocket and started taking the skull apart. "I guess we can bale together some kind of a lash-up." Ross slipped his legs into the coveralls, speaking quietly. "You don't have to play the game, Ken. You know that." "Yeah, I know." "It's a lifetime ban for all concerned. You'll never get so much as a pit pass for the rest of your life." "I know." Gray plucked an eye tube from the skull, untangled its leads and started on the other. "You're foolish, Ken-boy," he said. "It doesn't matter with us. Ross will probably slaughter himself, and I don't know any better. But you've got a good future in this business. You can play that damn TV and piano better than anyone I've seen. Ross could get you a seat in a second." Ken shook his head. "We might just pull it off." "Dream and scheme," Gray chuckled. "Nobody that's ever tried it has pulled it off. It's a last act, boy." He removed the other tube, rammed them both in a pocket and slipped out. The smaller classes had started and engines screamed through the rain. A Honda squalled by in the lead, followed, it seemed, by every fighting animal in the world. Ross lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking. The door yanked open again. They jumped. Crandall stood scowling from the shelter of a large umbrella. "Your mechanic says you're still running!" "You're damn right! And if you slam in here like that when my operator is on the board I'll ram your clipboard right down your bloody throat! This is a private vehicle." C xrandall sniffed, glared at the  sprawling servo-manikin and slammed the door. "Just put up with him the best you can, I guess," Ross said. Ken leaned forward. "Have we any chance at all?" "Chance of what? Pulling it off? Getting into the money?" "Either. Both." "Not much, no. Neither. You've seen how the marshals swarm the pits after a race for what they call 'inspection?' Have you ever won dered why a car should be inspected after a race? They're still looking for men drivers, boy. And they find them once in a while; old fools like me who think the old days were kind of fun, who don't appreciate being kept from hurting ourselves. As far as dodging that and getting into the money -- mouse guano! I always held that a man could beat a servo, but I don't know now. These new outfits are fast! Did you at Sebring this spring? It takes a big bale of machinery to do that, boy." "But the Ferrari did # -- " "At Bonneville, Ken. Not on a race circuit." He was silent for a moment, turning his old, battered helmet in his hands. "And pulling it off or placing isn't really the point." "What is, Ross? You're not doing it just for the hell of it." Cars snarled past, downshifting, lining for Corner One. Ross raised his head and listened. Two racers passed, one holding a second longer before shifting. He smiled. "Perhaps that's it. Just for the hell of it. Damned if I do..." He paused, squinting through a rainflecked window at the Ferrari, bright and shiny now from the wet. "And surely damned if I don't." The door banged open again and Gray leaned in. "May God damn Crandall to everlasting hell! Try your screen." Ken spun to the board and snapped a switch. The screen blinked on showing the blunt rear of the station wagon. "I put them in the air scoop. Told Crandall I was fixing a leak in the oil cooler." Rain followed the lines of a grin down his cheeks. "He wanted to know why the manij kin was out. I told him it had to go potty. I swear, the man has never I seen a real racer in his life! He asked, 'What's that lever sticking up from the floor?' Judas! I should have said it was the crank that wound the spring." Ross grinned as he pulled on his helmet. "You can go to hell for lying too." "I'll race you there. Let's go before Old Peek and Peck comes back. I want to see if you remember how to start it." Ross pulled on his gloves and adjusted his goggles. "Must cover my beady little eye tubes," he grinned. "Better cover your big mouth too." Gray grabbed his feet. "Grab its bead, Ken-boy. We'll plug it in and see if it works." "Jees!" Ken grunted. "It's gotten a lot heavier." "And limp too. For godsake, Ross, stiffen up! Who the hell ever heard of a limp servo?" IF "You think I'm limp now, you old bastard, wait'll you cut me out of that machine." H e sat stiff behind the wheel, and not simply from imitating a servo. He was like a painting, incredibly old and brittle and not very well done at that. The car was close around him. The water-smooth hood and fenders curved familiarly in front, the seat was firm and holding, the wheel hard in his hands. But he felt wrong. Alien. Not a part of anything here. And with the rain whispering softly on the top and the cold mist on his face from the open side window -- it came to him why. He was the only man in this long row of quietly waiting cars. The only touch of life among this machinery. And it was a cold lonely feeling. The chill loneness of an intruder in an enemy land. And that made him angry too. Why should he be a stranger here? This was his country, wasn't it? A car, a course, a competition! But the thought stood close behind him and would not leave. He glared at Gray poised across the track in his circle; a travesty of a Le Mans start in which the mechanics ran to start the cars. The old goat will catch pneumonia, he thought. No hat! No raincoat. Just grizzled old Gray frowning in the rain, coveralls soaked and plastered to his wiry frame. He swivelled his eyes down the course. Crowds jammed the fences under a mushroom forest of umbrellas and makeshift canopies. A strange breed, he thought, mobbed together in the rain to watch a pack of cars fight. And what would they think if they knew a man was sitting in one of those cars? Would they be on his side? Would they be cheering him? Yes, he thought so. And that was a warm feeling; to have a crowd on your side. He had a sudden impulse to move, to show he was human, but he didn't. The cold manikins down the line stared straight and statuelike, and he copied them. Mist curled on Corner One and the pavement gleamed like polished glass. He ran the course again in his mind. He had raced it before the ban, but that had been long ago. Too long. Back when he was -- His blood leaped and his hands tensed. The count had started. He watched Gray crouch -- then spring, running like a boy. The long line of figures dashed across the wet track. Gray slipped and nearly went down, arms waving, then skidded alongside and rammed an arm through the window. "Go break a leg," he breathed. Ross touched the starter. The big engine growled, roared, and he fired the Ferrari off the line, sliding slightly as he bent it down the track. And he smiled. Go break a leg! Go kill yourself. Into the tiger's mouth! Join the dead men! Dares from the days of TCs and Cad-Allards and big white Mercedes, the calls of a clan who ran for the joy of it. Old words. Foolish. But something old and foolish rides this course today V H e was first away and leaning into third going into Corner One, and his mirrors showed a raging flood of cars behind him. He caught fourth, skidded slightly on Corner Two, and dropped into fifth. His mirrors were crowded with headlights, airscoops, and flashing bodies. Well, let them come. If nothing more he'd lived the leap off the line again and been first into a race. nearly in its tailpipes. They seethed under the Pirelli Bridge, spray pluming behind them, and downshifted for the Dogleg. He snapped down to fourth, then raked third and swore. The Lotus went into the corner too fast. It slithered wide He made a try but the Lotus recovered and outpulled him going hadn't wavered a bit, and was already gone down the mile straight in a boiling steam of spray. He shifted up to fifth again, squinting into the Lotus's lashing past. Lord, they were fast! Like jets on a strafing run. He glanced working up with no more effort than a hot car in truck traffic. The Ferrari lurched and water roared underneath. There were pools on the pavement, invisible in the rain. A Ford sizzled past with a dark red Apache in its wake. Some old warning made him slow and pull far right without really knowing why, and there it was. Spray exploded under the Ford's nose and it disappeared for a second. The Apache dove into the wall of water then slashed across in front of him, spinning. The Ford plowed end for end into the infield. An old hack-chant chuckled in his ear: There are cool drivers and fool drivers, but not cool, fool drivers. Warren Corners were suddenly there and he was outside and out of position and out of luck. He noviced through the first hard left in a long chance for the right unless he backed through it. Damn. He dropped two gears and managed to leave the pavement in a straight line, barely clearing way for a Porsche and two big Hondas. The Ferrari bucked as it hit the dirt. He coaxed it around, carving long furrows in the grass and mud. He took out two bushes and a young tree, missed a rock and the fence, plowed through a shallow ditch and angled back to the course. Like trying to enter a freeway at five o'clock. He kept it rolling, edged into a clear spot and savagely worked his way up through the gears. Well, you old fool, he scathed himself, what are you doing out here? Forgot how to play Followthe-Leader? Apparently, but then he had always been the leader before. Then he smiled: I wonder how that looked on Ken's screen? A Lafitte passed, chased by a Coventry and a Lotus. And he was IF glad he was in a closed coupe. A game of "no touch tag" in a hurricane at # mph. How the devil could they see? He was having trouble enough, and their eye tubes were certainly no better than his eyes. The Lafitte pulled over in front of him and the Coventry passed it. Barely. In a crash of water, the Lafitte surged sideways and nudged the Lotus, and all he could see for a moment were headlights -- tailtwo cars like pinwheels on the road in front, spinning together and parts flying, and he was suddenly through between them. An Abarth behind him didn't make it. He followed the Coventry's line around the Little Hairpin, let a Volga by, then tailed it down the short straight and around the Big Hairpin. A Honda crowded close behind him going into the Esses. It stayed there, then pulled by on the straight. No fighting it. The old Ferrari was outclassed. Probably the smallest car here could fan him on the straights. T he Honda swerved ahead of him and he barely missed the Apache that was swung backwards on the pavement, then watched helplessly as the Honda rocketed headon into a Ford that was re-entering the course. He went under some of that. He tried to relax, remembering that no one was being killed and mangled. But old habits die hard. To him, cars meant men. South Turn curved underneath and opened into the pit straight. One lap down; ninety-nine to go. He relaxed a little. Let them traffic each other. He was out here in his car and that was all that mattered. It would be the last time in his life that anything mattered. Let the machines fight it out. Let the servos sweat... , Too bad they couldn't. The laps leafed away like pages of an old book. Long-forgotten things returned; the old reactions and techniques, once automatic, found themselves again. Like single instruments finding their place in an orchestral arrangement. He and his car were linking together again, slowly -- then stronger, as two people from old passion find themselves again: little by little, gradually responding. Reacting together. The rain had blown away, but the sky sulked gray and soggy. The course was still wet. It wasn't glassy; the Little Hairpin was the only dodgey spot where water pooled in the apex of the corner. Gray had propped a gas can up behind the barrier so that it could only be seen from the course. He had even found some chalk -- God only knew from where. Ross wondered if he hadn't been keeping it for just this moment. And the writing on the can read: #? Well, why not. Nineteenth was a comfortable position. Especially for two Old Bastards running more on anger than anything else. But he started edging up his lap times. Traffic had thinned and scattered. The opening bash, like something from an old, wildcat stock-car circus, had taken care of the rash operators. It was easy, he thought, to be rash at some quiet console. So you lost a car once in a while. So what? All you had to lose was your job -- not your life. There should be a feature of the consoles that when an operator bent a car -- two met ciless metal hands seized and broke the operator accordingly. Perhaps some flavor would return. But then the international committees would ponder this danger, judge it harmful and rule that servos must operate the boards. Mustn't let anyone be hurt. Naughty. Father knows best, you know. Mustn't do anything dangerous. Ross clamped his jaws and slashed through the Esses using every available inch of pavement. He was beginning to understand why the mountain climbers kept jumping their servos off the highest cliffs. Our Father, who knows best, you are a doddering old meddler! Modern racing or not, the old troubles were still there. The price of pushing machinery to its peak. There were nine cars in the pits with mechanics shouldered into engines. gearboxes, front ends, brakes; electricians into servos and consoles; some cars alone and lonely -- dead. On the course he had passed a Volga with crumpled nose and a bad problem with left corners. The course itself was sidelined with cars in various stages of disassembly. And he had the unique pleasure of seeing a servo psych out. A sleek Coventry had headed him into the Dogleg. Something had failed to dick, or had clicked too many times, or had clicked at the wrong time, or had been the wrong click altogether, and the machine had bolted from the course like a sudden coward, accelerating, spinning mud roostertails behind it. Fortunately for the spectators there was an old foundation there. Unfortunately for the Coventry. And he and the old warrior Ferrari had gone around and around, and growled and howled, and .remembered what it was to be alive. Ross Eliot is back, he grinned to himself. As much of him as will ever make it! A nother shower was ghosting in from the west. He noticed it as he moaned down the backstretch, taking Warren Corners in two linked arcs and nearly running over a Lafitte coming out. It tried hard to repass, but the Little Hairpin came up too soon. He sliced through the edge of the pool and pushed hard for the Big Hairpin. There was a glint of green ahead. He showed a cold smile and slammed through the Big Hairpin, the Esses and the .South Turn. The green Lotus was ahead on the pit straight, running behind a Porsche. And the Lafitte was no longer on his tail. He watched the shower barely touch the north end of the course as he came up the straight and into Corner One. He closed up on the Porsche and the Lotus coming under the Pirelli Bridge, and backed off for the Dogleg. The others didn't. n IF Too bad. he grinned. Tbe two cars fishtailed on the slick pavement. too fast and too far into the lenses see that shower? The Lotus left the corner sideways, blasted mud and destroyed itself around a tree. The Porsche held, but broadside and sliding. He passed it, torque up and a gear over. He smiled his way around. Not too bad for an old man. Perhaps not too old for a bad man. He drove harder, deeper into the corners, and felt the old elation of pushing into that dark land of limitations. Riding the edge, they used to call it. It was exploring. Crowding man and machine into that foggy unknown where only skill and judgment kept them alive, where there was no such thing as a small mistake. Racing . I But I'm slow, he thought, much too slow. In the old days the team manager would have yanked him off the course and given him hell for lugging the engine. Gray had the pit stop signal up as he came past the pits. He nodded automatically, then laughed at himself. Servos didn't nod! They may short out and smoke; they got jolted around in a fender bending contest; they sometimes whirled aloft in a sprawl of limbs and wires in an accident -- but nod? Never! Well -- hardly ever. He pulled over for the pit lane on the next lap. braked, geared down and stopped by Gray. And froze. Stewart and Crandall were stand,' ing by the bus just behind the bar-! rier. Stewart was smiling! Crandall was frowning. Ken slammed from the bus, jarred Stewart with a hard shoulder and vaulted the barrier. He started on a rear wheel while Gray dumped fuel into the five-inch filler. The car lurched on the jack. Ross stared straight ahead, hands clamped on the wheel. He heard Stewart laugh. "Well, why shouldn't it look like him? I have a servo that looks like me -- though I think mine is in better shape." Crandall said something that was covered by a passing car. Stewart laughed again. "Oh, some antiques are quite astonishing, aren't they? But it's pathetic when they're pressed into something beyond their usefulness." His voice seemed uncommonly loud, as if he were deliberately trying to reach Ross's ears. Gray blocked off the two men and fumbled inside the cockpit, checking Ross's "connections." "Looks like we sneaked out on the wife and got caught," he said in a low voice. "Crandall?" "Crandall doesn't know his behind from a brake disc. It's Stewart. He lounged in here with his catcurling grin and asked where you were. I told him you were suddenly taken ill. He said, 'He certainly has, hasn't he?' He must have spread it around. The other pits are watching you." "No black flag yet." "No one will tattle but Stewart, , IF I'm sure of that. But I think he's waiting for you to bash it." "Nice of him." "He said he always wondered what was the color of your blood." T he car jarred down from the jack and Ken was back over the barrier and into the bus. Gray stepped back, still blocking the two men. Ross fired the Ferrari into life and slammed it down the pit lane and onto the course. He hurled it through Corner One, down the short straight and through Comer Two. It squalled, held, and he screamed under Pirelli Bridge. So that was the game now! They had given him the stage for one last laugh, had they? He slashed through the Dogleg from outside to inside to outside on the bare brink of a wild slide and allowed himself a grim smile. That was a little better! The fire was back in the blaze again; Angry Man Eliot! That was what made him before: anger. A happy man couldn't be a racer. A happy man was a satisfied man, and a satisfied man had no business out here. He had been satisfied just to be in his car on the course -- and that was wrong for him. Out of character. All angry men managed a last, loud word. Perhaps his wouldn't be the last word, but it would damn well be loud. The old Ferrari voiced its battle cry down the back straight and through Warren Corners. The Little Hairpin with its pool of water, the Big Hairpin, the Esses unwound beneath him. He caught a Coventry in the South Turn, nipped inside and passed it coming out. It repassed on the pit straight and he had to do it all over again in Corner One. It stayed back, waiting, but he got around a Volga in Corner Two and stayed there, adding a little more distance in the Dogleg. The two of them came close on his tail down the long back straight but Warren Corners rushed up and he had a hundred yards lead coming out. Too bad, he told them. If you had been men I would have waved. The laps raged by. He was a zombilike thing, a reactor to commands that bypassed thought: one hand on the wheel, the other on the shift lever, watching a corner rush at him at # mph; then brakes, downshift, downshift, on the line from one edge of the pavement to the other to the outside again, full pedal, upshift, tach into the red line, upshift, wait for the next corner. I'm a servo, he thought. Little different from the others; just blood instead of electricity. Have you seen the color yet, Stewart? Faces flashed and followed from the pits. Take a good look, he told them. It's the last act and you may miss the whole damn point of the play. He caught a Porsche in the Esses, a Lotus on Corner Two, and an Apache in the Dogleg. A Lotus wouldn't let him by in Warren Corners nor in the Little Hairpin. In the Big Hairpin he planted the Ferrari's nose on its tail and pushed. It pulled over. Clear off the pavement. A Honda was next in the South Turn, then another Porsche on Corner Two. And that is your failing, fellows, he grinned. Corners. The bland servos didn't have that one critical sense: that delicate, subliminal thing that heard the whisper in the car and reacted before the mind gave it reason; that intimate thing that linked a man and machine. It was something that couldn't ride a wavelength. And races are run in the corners, he told them, not on the straights. Any child can fire a missile in a straight line, but a man learns to corner. And not just on a race course, either. C ars were passed and fell behind, and fatigue slipped into his arms and shoulders. Blood and muscles, he thought, aren't electricity and solenoids. Gray was alone again in the pit and his makeshift board showed position and remaining laps. But it made little difference. He had been lapped once by the leaders, the matter of winning now; it was a matter of doing what he could. Didn't they used to say that the true drivers were really racing themselves? Something like that. Stirling Moss once put it another way. One's a racer or one's not. And one's a man or one's not. He pushed. And finally glimpsed them flying the Esses like three white rockets: the ultimate racers and #. And that's the way they planned to finish, with the two green Lotus howling at their heels. He smiled. Stewart must be questioning himself to death. Not only was Old Angry Man running with the hounds but his trim green streaks were being shown the way home. Poor man. We may as well combine his problems. One's a racer or one's not. He chased, pushing to the ragged rim, and the flashes of white and green ahead of him came more frequently. He edged closer lap by lap and was finally last in the trainlike line that screamed out of the South Turn and past the blurred faces in the pits. White, green and red! Symbolic? he thought. Yes. White is Truth. Green is Jealousy. Red is -- what else? -- Blood. the next step; logical advancement. Yes, take a good lock, people. Ten years of racing in one tricolored flash. They hauled away from him on the straights; he caught them in the corners. They pulled away, and he caught them again. He studied them and frowned. Almost manlike. Their reactions in the corners were incredibly fast, faster than any man, but they still had a reservation and he was coran assurance, a confidence -- damn it -- almost a senseThey were corIF nering better than the two Lotus. And he gave himself a bitter grin. The operator -- human or not -- belongs in the machine. These two creations were almost racers. Almost. The test was -- were they capable of pushing beyond themselves? Did they know their own boundaries? The five cars lengthened their lead down the back straight, but Warren Corners came zigzagging and he pushed his red nose to within six inches of the last green tail. The Lotus pulled over for him to pass but he did not have the power. He dropped behind it again, then slammed deep into the Little Hairpin. They came out side by side. It outpulled him on the short straight. He did it again on the Big Hairpin, holding his foot down to the last possible instant. He came out in front of the Lotus and with enough speed over to pull alongside its twin. It matched him however and they went into the Esses side by side. Then came the South Turn, and this time down the pit it was white, red, green. Well, Stewart? Have you seen the color yet? T he two Lotus came after him like cats on a rabbit but he stayed ahead through the north end of the course; the fast half, but with enough corners to hold them back. He arced through the Dogleg on the crying edge of a slide, trying to carry enough speed through with him to hold down the long back straight. For a moment he held but had to watch them pull away, and frown helplessly at his mirrors as the two Lotus closed the distance behind him. One started by, but Warren Corners were almost always a wit surprising. They hid in ambush over a slight rise, and at # mph they sprang suddenly. Too suddenly for the console operator in the Lotus van. The green car slammed full panic brakes, slithering beside him, then swung broadside as it fell behind. The other Lotus had to leave the course to avoid a crash, but man , aged to stay on its wheels. Well, Stewart, that's the bitch of it, isn't it? A car is still only as good as its operator. He howled through the two Warrens and came up close behind the up beside two as if goosed. So, he nodded. You can go faster, can you? And you're just a bit spooky too. Well... They backed off for the Little Hairpin, three dropping back to find its line. But Ross held. The distance rushed shut until he knew something beyond his own brakes would have to save them from collision. Stampeding, they used to call it; for scaring green drivers. And three was green. It spurted up beside two again on the inside, and the corner was there and the pool of water and no place for it to go. Spray crashed white against the sky. The car recovered instantly, but in that slice of time it touched two. And two left the corner sideways into the mud, going over and ever and into the air and end for end until there was hardly enough of it left to stop. Number three stayed on the course, but greatly slowed, and he, passed it without losing speed. He tried to pick up the slipstream from one. but he was not close enough hard into the Big Hairpin, caught through the Esses. He rode close and felt them touch lightly in the South Turn. # the stands and pits, but bis slipstreaming held and they entered Corner One less than a foot anart. In the one flashing glance he had. it seemed that he had never seen so many faces bordering around the course And he hated them! Hated them with a savage, flaming hatred for their coddled, cowardly world; their progressively protective world that had made him an alien in his own land. For he was an alien and he knew it now. An anachronism. A smoldering old savage unable to adapt; unable to take it quietly. An Old Bastard. ing on him down the pit straight and through Corner One with the remaining Lotus snarling on its tail. They were closer coming out of Corner Two, snaking slightly in their screaming acceleration. He allowed himself a small smile. So that was the flavor now: full go and to hell with the cars! Okay. Men have a full go too. over him going under the bridge, finally coming alongside, the Lotus riding its slipstream. There was no passing room before the Dogleg; it was back off or get off. He knew what was coming. It was an old trick, and he felt disgust that they should think he couldn't handle it. He was on the outside, holding into the corner until they had no room to come over to make their line. Then he gave full brakes, dropped a gear, then another, then full power. The two cars drifted across his nose, forced too far into the corner. He cleared the tail of the Lotus by four inches, stayed on his line and went through. They left the ditch and bounced. The Lotus swerved to miss it and hit a parked Lafitte. Dirt and pieces cluttered up the sky. He had one last glimpse of grass, trying to recover, then it fell behind. He chased hard down the back straight, out of the slipstream now and losing distance. Damned stupid machines! But his mirrors showed three back on the course and coming fast, tire smoke streaming behind it. He caught one again out of Warren Corners. He held back a short distance, then made a bid in the Little Hairpin. They held side by side for a moment coming out, engines climbing to a siren cry. But power paid again and he had to tuck in behind the white car as it pulled away. Number three was pressing closer through the Big IF Hairpin. He could see why. It carved out behind him in a brawling, tire-mauling disregard for everything, only its brute power holding it on the course. Its engine couldn't take that for long, he knew that. But apparently that made no difference now. It was after him. By design or by mistake, by will or by short circuit, it was after him. Couldn't they turn it off? Or didn't they want to? If you were a man, he thought, if you were a being of choice and knowledge -- I would admire you. You would be a racer. T hey seethed through the Esses and lined up for the South Turn. Three was coming now like a mad beast. He held close inside in the fast left turn. Three started around him on the outside. Impossible! Nothing could hold at that speed. "Why you goddamned machine!" he said. "You're broken!" ed into the wall. Body panels shattered off behind it. A tire blew. It lurched, slammed the wall hard and curved across in front of him. He jabbed brakes and dropped a gear. The Ferrari screamed its protest, sending the tachometer far beyond the red line. "Sorry, old girl, but I think they've taken us." He could drop back until the tangle resolved itself. But one would be down the straight and out of sight. Or he could hold in and bore through and never quite know how he made it. The decision was made without him really aware of the question. One's a racer or one's not. The wild three barely cleared his nose -- and slashed into two. They both spun. He backed off, watching. That was it! The metal men had bashed themselves out. The apple was his now. The whole show! He could stroll home and take it. The two cars separated, ricocheting from the wall. He watched, safely, then rammed his foot down. There would be a hole! A tiny hole and the old Ferrari would lose some more paint. But that's the going of it. He had never strolled home! But something white blurred across in front of him, he met it full on. The shoulder strap snapped and his head smashed the wheel. Automatically he yanked himself back and pulled hard left, trying to broadslide down the straight. But the slide became a spin, and he was too dazed and too tired and too old to do anything about it. Go, Ferrari, he said. You've got eleven years of momentum in you. Work it off. You've got the last word. Another crash. And another. And one final thundering impact that blasted him to a halt. The engine roared into him through the firewall. Flames exploded in the cockpit that he did not feel and the only thing he heard from the world outside was one voice -- almost a scream. " Let it burn!" He agreed. The only thing to do. He groped until he found the wheel, then leaned back in the seat IF  Short Story Here's why the captain of the Delta Crucis couldn't lie -- and what he could do instead! I can't say that I enjoy dealing with Captain Hannah. It isn't that he charges too much for the use of that tramp spacer of his -- the Delta Crucis -- although he usually isn't above charging close to the limit of what he figures the traffic will bear. It's just that things seem to happen whenever I dead with him. And then there's the point that I don't trust him. Still, he sometimes gives me a better price than I can get anywhere else, and on occasion his is the only ship that's available. So I find myself contracting with him oftener than is good for my health. Captain Hannah usually isn't much given to talking, but on this occasion I was giving him a hard time. The prospective cargo was milna nuts. As you know, they are easy to ship, and can be stored for years. The only thing that bothers them is dampness. If I couldn't get my price, I could afford to wait. The warehouse they were stored in was mine, it was well built and it wasn't full. As for Captain Hannah, I think that an installment on the mortgage on Delta Crucis must have been due. He was acting hungryAt any rate, he had been telling me about the unusually excellent humidity control system he had in his ship. When I delicately implied that he was shading the truth, he didn't stare at me silently out of those pale spacer's eyes of his and then stalk away, as he usually would have done. Instead, when he had stared at me silently, he beckoned the waiter over and motioned for our glasses to be refilled. T hen the silent Captain Hannah started to talk. "Clever I may not be," said Captain Hannah. "Lucky I frequently am not. But dishonest -- this I will never be." He paused. "I have never told anyone this before, but would you like to hear about how I came to own Delta Crucis? It will prove my statement about my honesty, and that will give you a hold over me in future dealings that I'm not sure I can afford. Still, it will be worth it, if it helps me get this contract with you at this time." "I told him expansively that I was in no hurry, that my crop and I were very happy where they were, but that if he wanted to tell me a story, I was not adverse to drinking his liquor. "Well," said Captain Hannah, "not too many years ago I was First Officer of the Star of Glory. That's one of the biggest and most profitable combined passengerfreighters of the Glory Line. You've heard of them, I'm sure, even if their ships don't often call at backwater planets like this one. They are a huge outfit, but they aren't particularly famous for their honesty. The courts keep them from getting too far out of line very often, but they shave things as close as they think they can get away with. "At the time of my story, we were circling Gamma Ophiuchus Four, getting ready to set down and do a little trading. Captain Clark was a big, bold man, with the kind of moral sense, or lack of it, that the Glory Line admires. But when he gathered his crew together to give last minute instructions he looked scared. His big, blotchy face had turned mushroom pale and glistened with a sheen of sweat. His hands trembled as he held them up in his usually brusque signal for silence. " 'Listen to me, all of you,' he said hoarsely. 'Behave yourselves dirtside this trip. No tricks, no stealing, no lies. Not on the Diogenes Planet. For the sake of all of us, keep your noses entirely clean. If you make one step out of line they'll know it, God help us. And I'll know it. And you'll regret it the rest of your lives -- if you're allowed to live.' "He paused for a minute and ran a hand over his clammy face. When he continued, it seemed almost as if he talked to himself instead of his crew. 'After what the Empress of Glory pulled here last year it may be too late for all of us, whatever we do. But the Company says we go down, so we go down. They say it's worth the risk -- but what do they risk? Still, it may be all right... Just remember: don't lie or steal on this planet.' "Captain Clark visibly pulled himself back together, and then yelled out, 'That's all -- man your landing station' a couple of the officers in the old Empress. I knew that her entire crew -- including officers -- had been paid off and replaced after they had got back from their previous cruise. The rumor was that they had been blackballed from space, but no one from Empress would talk about it. I hadn't known that they had set down on Gamma Ophiuchus Four. Between the mystery of what happened to the crew Of the Empress and the mystery of a fearless skipper acting gutlessscared, I decided it wouldn't do me any harm to behave myself and tell the truth for a few days. In fact it might do a lot of good. At that time, however, it was certainly not my intention to make honesty a way of life. For a spacer like himself, it sounded too much like a way of life that didn't go along with eating regularly. And I'm fond of my three squares a day -- it's a habit I acquired a long time ago. "So the captain set the Star of Glory down into her berth as smoothly as if he hadn't had his teeth chattering. After the cooling sprays cut off, I rode the ladder down as head of the landing detail. As I told you, Glory was a big ship, but she wasn't that big; the skipper, not the first officer, was the usual head of the landing detail. The switch didn't make me feel any better. "Well, I 'howdied the senior native of the group that rode out to meet us, just as if everything was sweetness and light. He nodded back gravely. He, like the rest of his party, was about seven feet tall, with a bald head about two sizes too big for the rest of him. The boss, whose name I can't pronounce, had pepper and salt body fur, carefully curried wherever it showed on his arms and legs and under his casually slung toga. He strode around with a sort of stately awkwardness, like a stork, and like the others he had sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes. Frankly, they didn't look like much to be worried about. But I was worried about them. "The headman held out a long arm without saying anything. I laid our port authorization and our pratique and manifests and such in it. He perused them all in a languid and leisurely manner, and then asked, in excellent Trade English, if our ship didn't belong to the same Company as the Empress of Glory. "I told him yes. He sighed and studied the faces of all of the men in the landing detail with great care. Then he nodded slowly and asked to see the rest of the crew. As these men came down the ladder he gave each of them the same slow faceto-face stare, but he seemed satisfied until, last of all, the captain showed up. "The Ophiucan's bald head slowly turned a deep purple, and then faded gradually back to its normal light blue. He didn't speak until the reversible color change was complete. Then, regretfully I thought, he said, 'You, Captain Clark, have IF visited us before. At that time your behavior gave us concern. Now, since the visit of the Empress of Glory, your own return leaves us no choice. You, and all of your crew, must be given Stage Two Education. # TT without hesitation, as if he'd   been held down on springs and released by a trigger. Captain Clark dove for the ladder and swarmed up it, trying desperately to escape back into the interior of his ship. "The rest of us just stood with our jaws slightly dropped, watching the performance. The Ophiucans, though, for all of their awkwardness, moved as quickly as the Captain did. One of them caught him by the heels just before he disappeared entirely from view. They hauled him, still scrabbling, back down the ladder. " 'Don't let them take us!' he screamed. 'Help me! Help me! ' At that, a few of us tried a sally to free Captain Clark and break through into the ship, but the natives were ready for that, too. They rounded all of us up, and held us with a casual air of complete boredom that was infuriating. "Their boss took no notice of all of this. He just led the way slowly back to the column of Ophiucan vehicles, and jacknifed into the first one. We Earthmen were herded into the trucks behind, and wheeled to a windowless building at the edge of the landing area. There we were led into a long, featureless corridor lined on both sides with doors and were popped, one to a room, into the torture cubicles behind the doors. "They were entirely impersonal and dispassionate about the whole thing. They strapped me into a chair, the only one in the room, and got right to work. They hit me with needles that sent fire and ice through my body. They wheeled up a machine that blinked agonizing lights and howled agonizing sounds at me for days and months -- for and eternity of time. And through it all, and it was the most unendurable thing of all, a calm voice spoke to me continuously, pounding at my brain until it broke into little pieces. Actually, I've found out since, the whole thing didn't take more than a couple of hours. "I've only been given a dose of the rack or thumbscrews once, but I can bet that the best experts with those tools are amateurs in comparison with the Ophiucans when it comes to dishing out pain. Only what they had done didn't show when they were finished. Afterwards, when they let me go, I could walk without a limp. There wasn't so much as a red mark on me. "They turned all of us loose -- just like that. They even apologized for the discomfort that they felt they had caused us, and set up a trade meeting for the following day. None of us headed back for the ship, except the captain. The crew headed for a pub that was pointed out by an Ophiucan, and I turned into the Officer's Bar. "It was all very normal and customary for a spaceship's crew after planetfall, except for that interminable two hours of torture just behind me. I tell you, I resolved to behave myself on Gamma Ophiuchus Four." Captain Hannah paused to take a sip of his drink. t (Tt's a very sad story," I told JL Captain Hannah. "And maybe l even believe it. But I understand that people forget the lessons taught them by pain very quickly. And after all, this isn't Gamma Ophiuchus Four. Why should all of this that you've told me give me confidence in your present veracity?" Captain Hannah stared at me for several seconds, and then very slowly set down his glass. Didn't you hear me when I started?" he asked. "This is the story of how I got Delta Crucis. Wait until you hear the rest. "There was only one other Earthman in the bar," said Captain Hannah. "He waited until I had a drink in front of me, and then wandered over to my table. 'Do you mind?' he asked, motioning to a chair beside mine. "I shrugged, and he sat down. 'I'm Captain Jones,' he said. 'Maybe you saw my ship when you set down. Mine is Delta Crucis, over there on the other side of the field.' "I said nothing, and he looked at me for a very long time. 'So they gave you the Cure?' he asked softly, as last. "I nodded. 'The bastards.' "Jones shook his head. 'You've got them all wrong,' he said. 'In their own minds, they were doing you a favor. They weren't torturing you. They weren't trying to hurt you at all. What they were doing was treating your sick mind. Unfortunately, they don't know much about human metabolism and such, so the treatment hurts.' "I nodded in agreement. " 'They are the best mind-tinker ers that I've ever heard of in the Universe. And they are a very moral people. They can't stand liars. Also, and not very surprisingly, they hate to be cheated. You -- or your outfit at least -- must have tried to put something over on them at some time or other. They let that happen only once, if they're careless.' "I nodded. 'It's possible,' I agreed. With the Glory Line, it was so possible as to be a certainty. " 'What they did to you,' said Captain Jones, 'was to treat your mind so that it is now impossible for you to tell a lie. Also, they have fixed it so that if you have stolen anything of theirs, or of anybody else's on this world, you can't take it off-planet with you when you leave. Nor can you knowingly lift off with anything that anyone else has stolen on board your ship. That's what they refer to as Stage Two Education. They figure that treatment will put an end to lying and stealing on this planet. They never lie or steal themselves.' " 'It sounds mighty effective, too, if you're telling the truth,' I said. " 'Oh, I can prove that it's the truth, easily enough,' said Captain Jones. 'Just you try to tell me a lie -- any lie at all.' IF V V do it. I couldn't force myself to tell a lie, no matter how much I sweated and tried. Jt was hell. I was horrified. What good is a trader in the spaceways who has to tell the truth all the time, even when he dickers? "Captain Jones tried to console me. We had several drinks, which we paid for alternately, and he said that maybe it wouldn't be too bad for me after all -- that Earthmen are a mighty ingenious bunch of people, all in all, and that in an emergency, they might even be able to tell the truth and make out all right with a small profit at the end. "Well, when it came time for the Ophiucan bartender to shut up shop, my friend Captain Jones asked if I had any spare money. 'We can go over to my ship,' he said, 'and play a little poker. After all, it's perfectly safe. I know I can trust you to be honest with the cards.' "This sounded fine and fair to me at the time. In my condition it somehow never occurred to me that I had no equivalent assurance as to the honesty of Captain Jones. I've got three thousand, about,' I told him, patting my pocket. 'Got it right here. Don't mind too much losing in an honest game -- hate to be cheated. Like an Ophi -- Ophu -- ' I let that idea lie where it belonged, and let Captain Jones lead me around the edges of the sprawling spaceport, to where his ship stood in an isolated launching bay. The ship wasn't new and it wasn't big -- you know the Delta class almost as well as I do -- but it looked beautiful to me. You know, you've hired my ship often enough: one-man controls, and freedom of action, instead of the large crews and the steady schedules and the complicated regulations and the demanding passengers of a Glory Liner. "We climbed up into the control room. Captain Jones broke out a bottle, but the walk had sobered me enough that I turned him down. 'Look,' I asked. 'How can I play poker with you? I've got to tell the truth all the time.' " 'Of course,' he answered. 'You weren't intending to cheat, were you? When you pull a bluff and make a bet on a bad hand, you aren't lying. You are just saying that you are that hand; and with your cash in the pot, you are sure telling the truth. I just don't have to worry about cheating, that's all. Of course, you won't be able to look happy when you've got a bad hand, or pretend that you don't know the correct odds, or pull any shady plays like that. But then, you don't look to me like a man who would try to play that brand of poker, with or without the Ophiucan treatment.' I I Qo I accepted his drink, and we started playing. "Captain Jones wasn't a very good poker player. He knew the odds all right, but he bet a little too hard when he had a good hand, and there was a sort of unconscious twitch in his left eye when he was thinking of pulling a bluff. He ran out of money pretty soon, and started writing I.O.U.s. We kept the game going for several hours -- it must have been the middle of the night by the time we finished -- and when we counted up Captain Jones' I.O.U.'s we figured out that I had just acquired a spaceship, complete with mortgage. "I felt an impulse to tell Jones to take back his ship, that it wasn't fair for him to gamble it away in a single night, but I found that I couldn't say it. It wouldn't have been true. The game had been an honest one. I would have paid if I had lost. I did want a spaceship -- this spaceship. Delta Crucis was what I had been longing for during all of my years in space. "I wouldn't be being dishonest to Captain Clark or the Glory Line either, if I left the Star of Glory to skipper my own ship. I was already old to be a mere first officer. My contract had expired and not renewed -- they were just taking me back home through courtesy and a provision of my contract that required them to. The second officet was fully qualified to take my place. " 'What are you going to do with yourself, now that you haven't got a ship?' I asked Jones. 'Captain Clark might take you on as first officer, to keep the passengers impressed with the number of officers he's got, but I'm not a bit sure of that. He carries all the Blue Suits the law requires, even without me.' " 'It might be worth giving him a try,' said Jones. 'Or I may just have to stay here on the Diogenes Planet and see what develops.' "He shook his head, a little sadly, I thought. 'Do you know,' he said, 'one of the things I'll be sorry for about all this, if I stay here, is that I'll miss setting down on the planet most of your cargo is assigned to. Eden Number Five. I had planned to take a little vacation there -- hunting and fishing, and maybe a little bit more. They've got some mighty good-looking girls. " 'I'll tell you what,' I said, 'I'll take you there. There's no reason that you shouldn't stay on board. And you should be able to ship out of Eden Number Five without a bit of trouble. A lot of ship's officers are just looking for the chance to stay awhile. Let's consider that it's all settled, then.' 'No, thank you,' said Jones. 'That would be charity, and I'd never forgive myself if I took that kind of charity from you now. I lost fair and square, and I'm not whining. Let's just leave it at that.' t T T #"ell, I couldn't persuade him   to agree to come with me. He wanted to, it was clear enough, but he had that old spacer pride. I liked him a good deal better for showing it. It eased some of the contempt I had felt toward him for gambling away a fine ship like Delta Crucis. " 'At least you'll spend the night here, what's left of it,' I said at last. 'You can use your old cabin. I won't be moving in until tomorrow anyway. Not that there's anything on the Star that I really want to bring with me aboard my ship. Some uniforms with the wrong insignia, and some other clothes.' IF " 'I'll take you up on that," said Jones, 'and thanks. Thanks a lot. I'll take my own things dirtside tomorrow. " 'And don't forget to make your arrangements with the Port Authorities to lift. You have to start within about three days if you're going to make it to Eden Number Five in time, and there's a penalty clause in your contract if you're late, that you can't afford to pay. It only takes a few minutes to get clearance, provided you do it at night. You may not have had occasion to find out about it, but these stilt-legs are nocturnal. You were met by the offshift. By the way, your ship is all topped off and ready to go.' Jones ran his fingers slowly over the smooth enamel of the main computer, patted it a couple of times without any noticeable change of expression and then stumbled into my cabin. "I stayed in the control room for a while, thinking, and finally managed to reach a decision. Jones wanted to come with me. It was just his pride that was keeping him from riding along. He couldn't object if I took off while he was still on board; in fact, he'd be grateful. I tiptoed over and locked the door to the cabin. Then I called up my old ship, and told the O.D. of the Star of Glory that it was up to him, as Officer of the Deck, to wake up the skipper and tell him that I wouldn't be back. Morgon -- the O.D. -- told me he figured that could wait until morning, but that Captain Clark wasn't getting much sleep. "That chore accomplished. I buzzed the Spaceport Control Tower, and got clearance to lift. tt'T#'ithin a couple of hours from the time she had become mine with the help of a busted flush, Delta Crucis was growling up into parking orbit under my command. Jones woke up at that, of course, but I couldn't hear what he was shouting until I cut the jets. And even then I couldn't make out the words. All I could tell was that he was pounding and kicking at the door and yelling. Actually, I wasn't trying to listen to him very hard. I was lining up my ship for my first Jump in my own property, and I wanted it to be a good one. "When I finally pushed the button and we went into the Limbo that cut us entirely free from Ophiuchus and sent us hurtling, I hoped, to the vicinity of Eden, the banging and kicking and shouting stopped as if the button had cut them off too. "I went over to the door and unlocked it to let Jones out. I was beginning to worry that he might be unhappy about my having shanghaied him, even if I had meant it as a gift. "'Congratulations, my friend,' he said. 'You got me off that damn planet, in spite of all the Ophiucans could do! You came through in fine style. Somehow, do you know, I never really believed all this would work. It was a real long shot gamble, but I had to take it." " 'What the hell are you talking about?' I asked him politely. 'You're babbling. Have you gone off your rocker?' " 'Almost,' said Jones. 'It was a close thing. But I'm fine now. I knew that there had to be some way -- some honest way -- to get around those stilt legs with their holier-than-thou morality and their brain molding. I couldn't beat their conditioning, so I used it.' " 'Then you've been through that treatment of theirs too?' I asked. " 'I sure have,' Jones nodded proudly. 'And with reason, too, according to their lights. I picked up a handful of Ophiucan fire opals real cheap. The way I did it was honest enough to get me by most places, but it wasn't honest enough for these natives, so they gave me the works. They didn't try to take the stones back; they were mine, all right. The bastards just fixed it up so that they were sure I could never sell them or get them off the planet. "Remember, they have adjusted my mind so that I can't lie, and so I can't knowingly let the goods I stole be removed from the planet. So I had to arrange for you to do it without my knowledge, and that wasn't easy. That's what I was banging on the door for -- to tell you what I had done, so you wouldn't go through with it. If you had heard me, you would have had to set Delta Crucis back down on the Diogenes planet. When we shifted into Limbo, the compulsion ceased. " 'As you can understand, that's why I couldn't accept your charity. You wouldn't have locked me out of the control room, and I would have stopped you from lifting. Fortunately. I didn't really believe you'd lock me in and take off -- it was just a hope. If I'd been even half sure, I couldn't have carried it off.' " 'But why didn't you just give me the ship? Why the gambling bit? And did you try to lose?' ( t Tones laughed. 'Of course I didn't try to lose. That would have been dishonest. You had to earn the ship to take it without asking questions that would have wrecked everything. I'd have had to tell you the truth, you know. If you will think back, you'll realize that every word I told you was the absolute truth. But I've got my gems safely into space anyway, and it's well worth the loss of the Crucis to do it. My profits will be big enough to let me buy a dozen ships like this, free and clear.' " 'Aren't you afraid I'll just take the stones away from you?' I asked. "Jones shook his head. 'I'd raise a stink, and the authorities would ask you about it, and you'd have to tell them the truth. Remember, by Galactic Law I came by these gems legally, and Ophiucan rules don't apply in space. " 'That's why you can't just drop me out through the space lock, either, if you should have that in mind, which I doubt. You'd just talk a noose around your neck, sooner or later.' " 'I'm satisfied,' I said. And I was. I had my ship, and I still have it. And I manage to make a little profit with her, too, even though I have to keep absolutely honest in my dealings, even with crooks." Captain Hannah finished his drink. "And that, my friend, is why you can trust me," he said. "The treatment I was given on the Diogenes Planet is beyond the ability of anyone else in the Universe to undo, insofar as I've been able to find out up to this time. And I've tried. So, do I get the contract?" I wasn't sure. It sounded to me as if the captain of a space tramp, even being honest, was more dangerous than most men are, lying up a storm. "You can read the contract as well as I can," said Captain Hannah. "I'm insured against non-delivery, so you don't have to worry about that. You pay me based on the lowest price you can expect me to get for milna nuts in good condition -- you only lose if they spoil. And I promise to keep very careful check on the humidity controls -- very careful. Remember, if your profits go up, so do mine. The price I'm quoting you is barely enough to cover my fuel cost and the next payment on the mortgage on Delta Crucis, which is about due." S o I gave him my trade, and he made me a profit, too. Almost five times what I expected to make. He turned the humidity controls up high, so the milna nuts sprouted, and then sold them at premium prices as seedlings. It's honest enough, I suppose, but it's also very risky. Too damp or not quite damp enough, and the nuts just rot. And the risk was all mine. Hannah couldn't lose. Of course, it took very careful attention to the humidity controls through the whole trip to get the cargo through safely, and that is just what he'd promised. Maybe Captain Hannah is forced to tell the truth, after all. I wonder if Diogenes would recognize his It you've missed any copies of Galaxy, IF or Worlds of Tomorrow from # to date, our Back Number Department has a limited supply available at #c each, any three issues for #, regardless of original cover price. Copies sent postpaid anywhere in U.S. or Canada. Sorry, no copies before # at present available. Send dates and title of issues you wish with remittance to Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York City #. IF  Novelette Assassin  Son His way of life was the dealing of death... and his victims were legionl T he intemperate sun of Sepharad had half risen, its golden circle still skewered on the western horizon by the spires of the capital city of Zamorah. To the East, the black, elliptical backside of the Parasol had likewise risen. It stood in opposition to the sun, like a disc of nighttime that the day could not dispel. Joseph Goldfrank tossed off a brocade coverlet and stumbled out onto his private balcony, where an antique bronze quadrant was mounted on the marble balustrade. After consulting Barron's Astral Tables, he adjusted the quadrant a fraction of a degree from its previous position. Then, kneeling, his palms lifted in the direction determined by the quadrant, he began to pray: "Terrafather, Gaea-mother, Earth, which I may never hope to tread -- though I am absent, do not forget that I am yours. Yours still: in the press of other Gravities; in the light of other Suns: in the midst of Aliens: still yours. Preserve me human and remember me so. Let my sons return to your land, your light, your air and your people." While he mumbled through the old ritual, his mind cleared itself of the unconscious clutter of sleep. He kissed the Tables and replaced it in its niche under the quadrant. Sepharad's sun had risen from the spires of Zamorah. It shone on Joseph's naked body, burnt to a dark bronze by eighteen years under its alien brightness. He began, as always after the morning prayer, to exercise. On his left shoulder was the stillpainful mark of the Sephradim, a circle crosshatched with lines of longitude and latitude, with which he had been tattooed on his eighteenth birthday. The Sephradim was a sign that his ancestors had come to Sepharad directly from Earth. Originally, the tattoo had been the mark of a criminal -- to be exact, of a murderer. But on Sepharad it was a distinction greatly envied by the rest of the human population. His righl shoulder bore no tattoo: Joseph was a younger son. "Joseph!" his father's Voice rang out from the terrace below. "Breakfast." With lightning obedience, Joseph threw on a robe woven from Earthgrown cotton and ornamented with Sephradian diamonds. Since it was quicker than the stairs, he jumped down to the terrace from his balcony. His father's hand was extended for a perfunctory kiss, which, perfunctorily, was accorded it. His brother, to whom this honor had only recently come due, made more of a ceremony of it. Joseph poured out two carafes of coffee for them and, as was the duty of a second son, recited the prayer-beforemeals. "I will have only one coffee this morning, Joseph. Therefore, you may have what is left -- with David's permission." Joseph glanced hopefully at his brother, who nodded his consent. "I thank you both." He emptied the dregs of. the electric percolator into his own carafe. Usually he had to content himself with a second brewing of the grounds. His father passed him a salver of fruit taken from their own orchards, and Joseph selected a mango and breadfruit. Native-grown products were seldom admitted to the Goldfrank table, but since on Earth the fruit of Sepharad was considered a great delicacy, and exception had been made. "Your brother and I will be gone throughout the day. I expect you to oversee Chilperic's work. The mosaic in the steam room needs to be repaired, and I shall want a roast to be ready for my evening meal. I shall be home by the next opposition." At sunset, the Parasol in the west and the sun in the east would again be in opposition, marking the end of a full day's work. "A roast. Then, you -- " His father's stern gaze silenced the unnecessary question. Roast meat meant only one thing: his father was going to perform an assassination. Joseph wondered who was to be his father's victim. But after all the name would probably mean nothing to him. He knew little of Sephradian politics. T he Goldfranks, father and sons, ate in silence, while the sun ruthlessly shortened the shadow of the eight-foot wall circling the terrace. When there was no shade left, the elder Goldfrank rose. David followed him to the heliport. Joseph watched as the copter rose silently from its couch at the side of the house, like a jewel pendant in the bright morning sky, then turned to the capital city of Zamorah, a brighter jewel at the horizon. The copter had risen slowly, powered by a ten-horse antigravitic generator. Now it sped out of sight to the west as its sidejets caught fire and scorched their path across the sky. Chilperic, unbidden, wheeled out of the house to gather the breakfast dishes. Chilperic was a "blob." as the natives of Sepharad were called by the Earth-born colonists -- who had pre-empted the natural title of Sephradim for themselves. It was a measure of Goldfrank's affluence that he could retain a blob as his servant. It was not so much a question of Chilperic's wages (which were exorbitant), but the expense of providing the aluminum, mobile armature in which Chilperic went about his chores in the Goldfrank household. "Good morning, Master Joseph," Chilperic's voice box piped. "How does the Earth lie!" "Happily and far," Joseph returned. "In what conjunction?" "Please, Chilperic! We don't have to go through the whole ritual. There's work to do." "Your father has given the most explcit orders that the only ritual -- " "Father is gone for the day, and you will take my orders. My first order is not to tell Father that I told you to be informal with me." Chilperic laughed: "Ha-ha-ha." Like the other phonetic elements of the voice box. the laughter was taped. It always sounded the same. Blobs, being telepathic among themselves, had no need of voices. Chilperic "spoke" with his fingers, using a phonetic typewriter inside the ovoid armature that enclosed his amorphous body like the eggshell about an egg. The smooth metal shell was dotted with sockets into which a variety of prosthetic limbs could be inserted. Chilperic thus gave all the appearances of being a robot; it was disquieting when he did not act like one. "I understand that I am to repair the mosaics in the steam room, just as I did last year." "Yes." "The steam room, if you will forgive my saying so, is a foolish place for a mosaic. But it is a foolish mosaic." Chilperic's judgement of the Miro reproduction coincided fairly well with Joseph's own. The fluctuations of taste had led the younger generation on Sepharad to despise abstractionism  -- as two generations before, when the Goldfrank villa had been constructed, they had been led to admire it. Nevertheless, as a servant, it was not Chilperic's place to make judgments. Joseph reminded him of this. "It is a beautiful work of art," Chilperic apologized, "and a striking IF example of the impossibility of two cultures understanding each other." With this, Chilperic, bland as aluminum, wheeled off to the kitchen with the breakfast table. Joseph sat down to memorize tion V of Will Durant's Story of Civilization. He was preparing for the priesthood. II Then the sun and the Parasol '  had each risen # from the horizon and one fourth of the day was spent. Joseph set aside his history text and went into the house to check on Chilperic's work. It was hardly a necessary task. Like the robot he so much resembled, Chilperic was incapable of loitering. By nature the blobs were industrious, but Joseph's father suspected that this invariable trait was no more than a clever deception, and he had communicated a good deal of this attitude to his sons. Like most Sephradim, the elder Goldfrank was convinced that the blobs were engaged in a subtle and relentless conspiracy against his person -- an understandable obsession in a man who, more than twenty years as a professional assassin, had killed so many of their race that mere quantity was somehow beside the point. Goldfrank tolerated Chilperic's presence in the house for four reasons: It was a mark of prestige: Chilperic had worked for the family as long as the elder Goldfrank could remember, and to discharge him now would be an act of cowardice; he did the work of three human servants (but then he was paid accordingly); and, lastly, Chilperic was sexually neuter, so that even Goldfrank could see that his most touchy suspicions had no basis in reason. "Master Joseph?" "Yes, Chilperic?" "If I finish repairing this exquisite mural by Eclipse, may I go into the village I am needed at a mating. It will take only a few minutes." "Surely. And while you're there stop by the Earth Quarter and pick up a roast for the evening meal. Father will return by opposition. It must be ready then." "As you say." Chilperic turned back to his work, but Joseph suspected that he was already signaling his six fellow-blobs in the village to expect him for the mating. The blobs were septsexual, a degree of sexual differentaton found only in free-form telepathic races. Joseph did not understand too precisely the entire Sephradian mating process. There were, he knew, two blobs that performed a masculine function and two others that could be called women; the "mother" was hermaphroditic, then there were two neutral sexes who served somehow as catalysts. The "neuters" were not motivated by strictly sexual desires: the function of one was largely vegetative and of the other (which Chilperic represented) digestive. Chilperic had once attempted to give Joseph a more detailed explanation. But to Joseph, as to most humans, the subject inspired disgust rather than scientific curiosity. With a mental shrug of his shoulders, Chilperic had abandoned the discussion. The effect of this septsexuality on the native Sephradian culture (and, indirectly, upon the human colonists) bad been enormous. The government of the planet, from the Councils of the Empress at Zamorah to the meanest village bureaucracy, was based on the dynastic principle. The intricacies of dynastic politics were complicated by five-way sexual intrigues (the two neutral sexes being neutral in this too). Murder -- for reasons of passion or ambition -- were not uncommon. Moreover, the result of murder among the telepathic blobs was a vampire-like heightening of the mental powers of the murderer at the moment that his victim died. A mass-murderer became, by the very commission of his crimes, almost too powerful to destroy. On Sepharad, therefore, there was every incitement to murder, and so it lay under the strictest taboo. But the taboo did not, of course, affect other races. The appearance upon Sepharad of Earthmen had brought about a large-scale cultural transformation. Earthmen, not being telepaths and not being subject to telepathic influence, could murder a Sephradian without inheriting his victim's store of mental powers -- and without being daunted by them. Earthmen, in fact, seemed to be indifferent to any consideration but the fee they received for their work. The professional assassin was born. The government of Earth, when it learned of these developments on Sepharad, accommodated its economic ally by using the alien planet as a prison colony. Murderers were given the choice between life imprisonment on Venus and transportation to Sepharad. They all chose Sepharad. Joseph was the great-great-grandson of Leonard Goldfrank, a professional murderer of some notoriety in Chicago in the year #. It was equivalent to a Mayflower pedigree. O utside, indistinctly, Joseph heard a knock on the gate. Even muted by the heavy walls of the houes, he recognized it as Leora's. He went across the terrace to the thick oak gate (not Earth-grown oak, but expensive just the same) set into the terrace's enclosing wall and admitted his brother's fiancee. Indiscreetly, Leora Hughes removed her veil. Joseph had seen her face before -- when David was present -- but even so he averted his eyes. "Silly!" Leora chided. "You can look at me. After all, in a few weeks, I'll be living here." It was, of course, equally true that in a few weeks Joseph would no longer be living in his father's house, but Leora did not draw such fine distinctions. Blushing, Joseph looked at her, avoiding the mocking intensity of her dark eyes, covertly admiring the carefully preserved pallor of her skin, the fullness of her lower lip made fuller by carmine. "My brother is gone for the day." "He's -- working!" she asked. The too IF mockery was suddenly absent from her eyes and her face went somewhat paler. "With Father, yes. But they'll be back this evening. I'll say you were here." "I am still here. Aren't you going to ask me into the house? If I leave now, I'll certainly be overcome by the heat." With the sun still an hour from Eclipse, the temperature was # Farenheit. "Besides," Leora went on, as Joseph led her to the atrium, where a marble dolphin's head (imported from Italy) gargled out a steady stream of chilled water -- "besides. I'd just as soon talk to you as David. David never has anything to talk about." "What would you like him to talk about! His work?" "Don't be bitter, Joseph. As a priest, you're going to be a fine assassin, I must say." He laughed. "I'll admit I used to be jealous of David -- " "Didn't you! I remember when we were seven, playing outside, the Quarterhouse. You told me -- " " -- But I am over that. If every one could be an assassin just by wanting it, no one would do anything else -- farmers, mechanics, store-keepers. Besides being a priest is the next best thing." "That's just what I meant. Next best." "I mean, with regard to money." Leora pursed her lips and nodded with ironic sympathy. "What I like about my future brother-in-law is his honesty. When other priests talk about 'keeping alive the sacred heritage of the human race' or 'the delights and comforts of a life of contemplation and learning,' you talk about money." "I like money. The other things are important, too. But when you're eighteen, sacred history -- " " -- is a bore." "What I like about my future sister-in-law is her immodesty." It was Leora's turn to blush. "What do you mean!" Joseph glanced reproachfully at her veil that she held loosely in her fingers, its silver sash brushing the terrazzo floor. "But that! I mean -- all the times when we were children, it's ridiculous." "But now we're not children. David wouldn't think it was ridiculous." She fixed the veil over her face, so that Joseph could see only her eyes glaring at him angrily. "I'd better start home. Tell David I missed him." "Good-by, Leora." But Leora did not glance back, or say good-by. I t seemed strange to think of Leora as his brother's fiancee: Leora, who, in the irresponsible years when they went to school with each other -- before, that is, she had adopted the veil of womanhood and stopped coming to the afternoon classes at the Quarterhouse -- had been his special friend. In fact, she had been rather more than that, although he had tried not to think how much more. How it must seem to Leora he did not ask himself. As a woman, it would make little difference how she felt. The marriage had been arranged between their fathers on the day that David had come of age, one year ago. It seemed strange that, a whole year later, it still seemed strange. The last sliver of the sun slipped behind the enormous man-made Parasol, and the artificial night of the Sephradian noonday descended over the land. Joseph knelt and faced the western sky. There, insignificant beside the greater brightness of near-by Vega, Earth's sun shone dimly and listened (or so he had been told at the Quarterhouse school) to his prayer. Joseph knew perfectly well that neither Earth, nor Earth's sun. actually listened to him. He sometimes doubted that anything or anyone listened at all -- except sometimes, his father. More than once Joseph had been beaten for neglecting the rituals, so that now they were almost second nature. The Eclipse lasted twenty minutes as long as it took the sun traveling eastward to pass behind the Parasol, travelling in the contrary direction at the same speed. The great Parasol, its longitudinal axis describing a # arc across the sky, shielded Zamorah and its environs from the fiercest heat of the sun, gave a brief respite to the parching earth while the spillgates of the new irrigating systems were opened, and allowed the dweller of the planet, human or otherwise a chance to walk abroad shaded from the merciless sun. The Parasol orbitted a mere hundred miles above the planet, the power for its antigravity plant being provided by the very sun whose rays its giant mirrors, visible as far away as the Lunar Observatory, deflected into space. Earth had built the Parasol and its two fascimiles orbitting beyond the horizon it had given them space. Earth had built the Parasol for Sepharad without cost, but not entirely from selfless motives. As a result of the lower mean temperature and the new pattern of pressure belts over once-arid plains, the agricultural output of Sepharad had more than doubled in the last fifty years. Of course, population had also boomed but not at all at the same rate. Septsexuality had certian advantages vis-a-vis the Malthusian dilemma. Export was now Sepharad's largest industry, and Earth and her colonies were Sepharad's chief markets. Joseph set off for his afternoon classes at the Quarterhouse as soon as he had rattled through the noonday prayer. If he hurried he could arrive at the Human Quarter in the village before the twenty-minute Eclipse was over. E clipse was not a total darkness. the northern and southern horizons glowed with a dim, refracted light. In the gloom, Joseph could still discern the gold-lettered sign above side of the villa was the family cemetery where ostentatious bronze crosses marked the graves of the men, and silver spheres -- the mark of the Sephradim -- stood above the women's plots. The bronze crosses were weathered to a dull green, and IF the silver spheres -- all but one -- were tarnished and gray. That one was his mother's, killed two years before, while shopping in the village during one of the recurrent outbursts against the colonists. Over a low hill, on Joseph's right hand, was the Hughes' villa, and farther on the flambuoyant fourstory mansion of Oscar Milne. Goldfrank, Hughes and Milne were all three professional assassins, which was three more than the nearby village had need of itself. Most of their work was carried on in Zamorah. Prudence, however, had led them to establish suburban residences at a comfortable distance from the scene of their business. A few crude structures of scrap plastic, the dwellings of lower-caste Sephradians, stood on the outskirts of the Human Quarter. No blobs were at large during Eclipse -- or, as the blobs referred to it, the Time of the Assassin. Although the Council of the Empress had sanctioned the construction of the Parasol, the average blob still regarded the daily blackout with superstitious terror. Custom had it that in the beginning the Eclipse had lasted mere seconds. Now the period of darkness was twenty minutes: and tomorrow? Rumors would spring up that the Time of the Assassin was growing longer. There would be local attacks on the colonists, who were thought to be responsible. Then the Empress' Army would dismiss the rioters and calm their fears -- which the next Eclipse would resurrect, keeping the vicious circle steadily 'a-spin. There was little hope of stopping it as long as the blobs worshipped the sun. The Human Quarter looked slightly shabbier than the Sephradian slums on its outskirts. While the professonal assassin enjoyed the luxury of his villa, the average colonisl paid the price of his legal criminality. They were rigidly segregated from the blobs, and building permits for their quarter were not easily obtained. Even jobs were scarce, short-lived and poorly paid. Since the colonists -- and their offspring -- were considered outlaws by the government of Earth, they were denied even the hope of someday departing their prison. But for all that they were probably happier on Sepharad than they would have been on Venus. Happiness is a relative state. Joseph did not like the Quarter. He hurried through it to his school, haunted by the thought that in only a few weeks this would be his home. Then, abruptly, he halted. Directly ahead of him a blob cased in the special fenestrated armature of the Imperial Civil Service wheeled down the street from the Quarterhouse, flanked on each side by guards in less ornamental shells. Joseph recognized the blob (or, more exactly, he recognized the armature) and bowed his head as it passed him: Sisebat, the most powerful Sephradian in the village and its mayor. He did not look like a murderer, Joseph thought. But then -- neither did his own father. Ill I "Shut up, Jamie," Joseph calmly commanded, but his eyes revealed well enough that he was afraid. A ring of boys had begun to form around them in the street outside the Quarterhouse. Jamie Hughes, his father's only son and a future assassin himself, was not to be shut up that easily. "Yeah -- he's the eighth man at a mating!" He made an obscene gesture. Joseph swung. Jamie had been ready, and Joseph found himself lying on the stony street, blood dripping from his nose. "Say he is!" Jamie taunted. "Say he's a blob-lover." Jamie fed Joseph's rage with professional expertise. Enraged, Joseph lunged to his feet, not flailing his fists as Jamie had expected, instead butting his head into the boy's stomach. They went down together. Jamie pounded at the base of Joseph's neck with the calloused side of his hand, Joseph bringing up his knee toward Jamie's midriff. Jamie twisted out of his grasp, ripping his clothing to avoid the well-aimed knee. Then Jamie began to kick his ribs. It was not an even match. Jamie, although he was two years younger and inches shorter than Joseph, was in training to be a killer. Joseph had not fought with anyone for the past year -- and he had never, except for some playful tussles with his brother, fought with an assassinto-be. Two of the older boys were trying to pull Jamie away. While his attention was diverted by the peacemakers, Joseph grabbed his leg and toppled him to the pavement, cracking his head against the stone ar.J stunning him sufficiently to allow Joseph to purchase hold on his throat unresisted. Thumbs pressed against the windpipe, quite blind now to anything but the pleasure of the violence -- the triumph -- strangling... "Joseph! Joseph!" It was unmistakably the voice of M agister Sontag, the Instructor of Earth History at the Quarterhouse and Master of the Rituals. Joseph loosened his grip on Jame's throat and looked to the Magister where he frowned down from a secondfloor dormer window. "Come up to my office this minute -- but first apologize to Master Hughes." "I apologize," Joseph mumbled. "Yeah -- blob-lover," Jamie said, sotto voice, accepting Joseph's hand. As he ascended the stairs to Sontag's office, tears of shame welled up in Joseph's eyes. "Sit down, Joseph. Here's a damp towel for your nose. Do you feel all in one piece?" "Yes. I'm very sorry; it was my fault. I -- " "Please, no false contrition. If I know Jamie at all, it was probably his fault. What did he do?" "He wanted me to kiss his ring. As though I were his younger brother! I don't have to do that -- it's not part of the Rituals." "Strictly speaking, of course not. But I have noticed that usually you are rather liberal in interpreting the Rituals. By refusing Jamie, you gave him the pretext he was looking for to fight with you." "He called my father -- " IF " -- enough names, doubtless, so that you struck the first blow. Jamie would see to that." The Magister sat down behind his desk and began to stroke the long beard signalizing his priesthood. "Humility is a lesson that is difficult for the young to learn. I don't want to scold you for today's little adventure -- you're not one to repeat mistakes. And I don't want to suggest that you're too high-spirited. A candidate for the priesthood should not be devoid of spirit, though that is using the word in a rather different sense. Yours seem to be animal spirits." Joseph looked up from the bloodstained towel, smiling. The Magister was smiling too. "I'm sure you'll learn to tame them at the seminary. Now -- " he pressed a button on the side of his desk -- "will you join me for a late lunch?" "With pleasure." A girl, obviously still in her teens despite the veil that hid her face and the loose robe that hid most of her other features, entered and stood before the Magister. "Bring wine and biscuits for two, Esther." Esther Sontag acknowledged her father's order with a slight bow. She glanced quickly at the towel Joseph still held to bis nose and then, less quickly, into Joseph's eyes where she found no reply nor recognition. Joseph always avoided meeting her anxious, darting eyes, for he knew that his father and the Magister were still bickering over the financial details of their betrothal. It was only a matter of time before their engagement was announced, and Joseph did not want Esther to read in his eyes the complete indifference he felt for her. Until their wedding, he could spare her that pain, at least. "Well, Joseph, are you eager to be off to the seminary? Eh? No one is ever eager to become a priest, so don't lie." "You'll like it. You're a good student, and there will be many history texts there you've never seen -- Toynebee, Gibbon. Or, if you prefer the classics, as I do, Plutarch, Herodotus. You do enjoy studying history, don't you?" "Next to making it. I can think of no finer pursuit." "I shall debate that point when you have had a chance to read Caesar's Commentaries. But, tell me, Joseph, if you could choose your way of life instead of inheriting it, would you have become a priest? No, don't answer that; it's not a fair question. We always imagine that, if we were free, we would be somewhere else, doing something better. Perhaps you know that I was the second son of an assassin myself. Sontag was once a famous name on Zamorah. I can remember the day my father packed me off for the seminary. I wasn't exactly eager "And you had wanted to be an assassin?" Indirectly, this was Joseph's answer to the Magister's question. Neither of them felt it necessary to be more explicit than that. "I did. Three months later my father was killed. By the time I was a priest, my older brother was also dead -- but not before he had avenged our father's death." "It's a dangerous profession." "But that is not my lesson. The assassin sows death, and death is his reaping." "The lex talionis ," Joseph observed as though reciting a lesson, and the Magister, as though satisfied with his recitation, changed the subject. "Do you wish to return to Earth someday, Joseph?" "It is the wish of every Sephradim." "We will never be allowed to leave this planet. Not until we can learn to live here without doing violence. or sanctioning it. On Earth, your father would be a criminal." "Yes -- and for his other murders." "The men he killed were assassins. He had no choice when he did it! The courts proved it was self-defense." "A murderer defending himself against other murderers. On Earth, a court that tolerate any murder is considered criminal itself. In short, we live in a criminal society." "Will a few priests and a dozen history books be able to change that? Excuse me, I didn't mean -- " "Of course you meant it. You're right. But it isn't the priests, or even the society that must be changed. It is each person, in his heart. You have read enough Earth history by now to have come to that conclusion yourself. Durant says -- " Esther entered without knocking. "Father!" she gasped. Her face was unveiled, but the features which Joseph saw revealed now for the first time communicated only one sensation -- fear. "Father, there are blobs downstairs! They -- " Sisebat stood in the open door behind Esther. Four guards wheeled into the room. "I have come for the prisoner, Joseph Goldfrank," Sisebat announced. There was the sting of the guard's needle at the base of his neck, and then nothing... darkness... eclipse. IV T erra-father, Gaea-mother, Earth! You may have what is left -- with David's permission... Under his body, bare, cold stone; hauds tied tight behind his back. Then Leora's voice:... a fine assassin, I must say. And his reply: the lex talionis... avenged... The image of Chilperic wheeling toward him, at the edge of consciousness now, was part of a dream. He was waking. The image seemed too real. There was a blob, but it was not Chilperic. He did not recognize the room in which he found himself. It was almost a cell. He remembered that he was a prisoner and rose to his knees on the floor, straining against the ropes that tightly bound him. "Father!" he cried. "My father, is he -- " "Your father is dead. And your brother as well. They attempted to assassinate the Empress. The village has confiscated their estate, but IF generously our mayor, Sisebat, has allowed you to live. I am to accompany you to the village where you may gather your personal possessions. My name is Egica." "Dead, you say? Both? Dead?" "Will you need to be guarded, or shall I untie you?" "I don't feel angry... or violent. That's strange." "Not strange at all: the sedation does not wear off immediately. But I advise you not to become violent. I am, as your language has it, armed." Joseph felt Egica's dextrous psuedopodia unravelling the knots in the rope. The wet plasma brushed his wrists. His skin had never felt the flesh of a blob till then. "This way." "It's night." "Yes, two hours, past the sunset." "And I am not a prisoner?" "No. The Magister spoke on your behalf -- and quite eloquently, too. He promised Sisebat that you were devoted to ideals of nonviolence, that you were to be a priest. Sisebat seemed to believe him. At least, he accepted his bribe, which was probably all that he wanted." "Then you didn't believe him?" "I advised our mayor to be merciful. Your death might have offended the human colonists unnecessarily. As for your idealism or lack of it, I profess no opinion." Joseph discovered that he had been crying, and it came over him now that his father and his brother were no longer alive, that the roast was either cold now or forgotten in the oven, turning to ash. "How were they killed?" "With laser-guns. They felt no pain, I'm sure. The bodies -- what was left -- were brought back to your villa. You will see." T hey walked the rest of the way in silence. Chilperic admitted them at the gate. The bodies lay on separate plastic mats on the terrace. It was impossible to tell which had been his father. The next thing Joseph was aware of was Chilperic's voice -- Joseph, get up. Can you stand up? Joseph, can I help? And then the wet pressure of Chilperic's psuedopodia against his bare shoulders. Joseph recoiled from that touch, not screaming yet, though perhaps he was -- Get away -- remembering the sensation, his horror, Chilperic's touch, wishing only to be outside his body. And then it seemed he was merely a spectator as his hands upended the blob's armature and rolled it over on the stone floor, a spectator of the fully-distended psuedopod that reached toward him until the heavy armature rolled over on it, and it broke then and lay on the stone floor, a streak of jelly. And Chilperic's cry -- Jo-seph -- that seemed though it issued from a mechanical voice box, to be choked with pain and grief. He did scream then -- stricken by a terror not of the forgotten touch but of his own irredeemable deed. He only noticed the laser projecting from Egica's metal shell after he had raised Chilperic upright. "He did not mean to do it," Chilperic's voice box enunciated, more for Joseph's benefit than Egica's whom he had already restrained from using the laser, telepathically. "When his father's father was killed, it was just the same. To them, we are all alike... all guilty. I am older now; that is the only difference. Slower to move -- and to mend." "Chilpcric -- " "Quite. I have no time to... Humans are a little insane, but it is over quickly... a terrible mosaic." "I know. I'll have it taken down." "Ha-ha-ha... Joseph -- be like -- " Chilperic spoke no more. There was a vague, liquid sound within the armature, as the blob's body relaxed into death. "What did he want to say?" Joseph asked, turning to Egica. "Be like your father." "An assassin?" "That was his meaning, but he would not have used that word." Egica paused. When he resumed, his words came more slowly. "It is also my meaning. As I understand your laws, your Ritual, you are entitled now, since your brother is dead, to become an assassin. It is hereditary. Am I right?" "Can you talk about that now?" "At no time else, I am afraid. You are responsible for Chilperic's death." "I know. I know." "My testimony could damn you. You can be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. But an assassin would not be tried. He is licensed to do murder, and he lives outside the laws. Sisebat will never grant that license to you; he has to much to fear. But I will -- when I am mayor. I will also allow you to reclaim your father's estate. Therefore, you will assassinate Sisebat tonight." "And if I refuse?" "I cannot return to the village until Sisebat is dead. He will know that I have plotted his death, and he will kill me. Therefore, if you refuse I will kill you." "You give me little choice." "There is not much to give." "I will do it." "Chilperic was right. You will be the very image of your father." V R eturning to the village that night, his father's laser-gun hidden beneath a heavy woolen robe (made in England), Joseph allowed himself the luxury of idle speculation. In the future, it would be a luxury that he could ill afford. He speculated, for instance, on the problem of free will. He reflected that, being forced into a career that he had only that afternoon freely desired, he no longer desired that career. Necessity had a bitter taste. He thought of Leora, whom he would now surely marry, although a few hours ago he would not have allowed himself to admit that he was in love with her. Though she would be happier wed to him, though she might even have desired it, she was as much a slave of necessity as Joseph. She would wed him not for love's sake, but because he had inherited her from his brother and her father would not leave her any choice. IF Joseph wondered if necessity would have the same taste for Leora. He thought of Magister Sontag, gratefully and already with a sense of nostalgia. Later that night he would have the Magister tattoo on his right shoulder the mark of the Assassin: a shortsword crossed by a dagger, the same emblem that would be cast in bronze and set over his father's grave. Esther would probably be watching in secret. He was surprised that, for the first time, he thought of Esther with affection. And, when he stood before the mayor's dwelling in the center of the village, he thought of Sisebat. A servant answered the door. "I wish to see the mayor -- to thank him for sparing my life." The servant (who was a human) bowed to Joseph and ushered him into a large hall. "This way, please." The funniest, fastest saga of tomorrow's interstellar war that you ever read! Complete Short Novel by Harry Harrison Don't miss it! Marchand's life was In vain -- but his failure was his greatest possible success r orman Marchand sat in the I wings of the ballroom's small stage, on a leather hassock someone had found for him. There were fifteen hundred people outside in the ballroom, waiting to do him honor. Marchand remembered the ballroom very well. He had once owned it. Forty... no, it wasn't forty. Not even fifty. Sixty years ago it 'j had been, sixty and more years ago , that he and Joyce had danced in that j ballroom. Then the hotel was the j newest on Earth and he was the ;'j newly married son of the man who 'J had built it, and the party was the J reception for his wedding to Joyce.  Of course, none of these people J no would know about that. But Marchand remembered... Oh, Joyce, my very clear! But she had been dead a long time now. It was a noisy crowd. He peered out through the wings, and could was the Vice-President of the United States shaking hands with the Governor of Ontario as though, for the moment, they had forgotten they were of different parlies. There was Linfox, from the Institute, obligingly helping a chimpanzee into the chair next to what, judging by the microphones ranked before it, would probably be Marchand's own. Linfox seemed a little ill at ease with the chimp. The chimpanzee had no doubt been smithed, but the imposition of human intelligence did not lengthen its ape's legs. Then Dan Fleury appeared, up the steps from the floor of the ballroom where the rest of the fifteen hundred diners were taking their places. Fleury didn't look well at all, Marchand thought -- not without a small touch of satisfaction, since Fleury was fifteen years younger than himself. Still, Marchand wasn't jealous. Not even of the young bellman who had brought him the hassock, twenty years at the most and built like a fullback. One life was enough for a man to live. Especially when you had accomplished the dream you had set out to bring to fruition. Or almost. Of course, it cost him everything his father left. But what else was money for? "It's time to go in, sir. May I help you!" It was the young fullback nearly bursting his bellman's uniform with the huge hard muscles of youth. He was very solicitous. One of the nice things about having this testimonial dinner in a Marchand hotel was that the staff was as deferential to him as though he still owned the place. Probably that was why the committee had picked it, Marchand ruminated, quaint and old-fashioned as the hotel must seem now. Though at one time -- He recollected himself. "I'm sorry, young man. I was -- woolgathering. Thank you." He stood up, slowly but not very painfully, considering that it had been a long day. As the fullback walked him onto the stage the applause was enough to drive down the automatic volume control on his hearing aid. For that reason he missed the first words from Dan Fleury. No doubt they were complimentary. Very carefully he lowered himself into his chair, and as the clapping eased off he was able to begin to hear the words. D ; an Fleury was still a tall man, built like a barrel, with bushy eyebrows and a huge mane of hair. He had helped Marchand's mad project for thrusting man into space from its very beginnings. He said as much now. "Man's grandest dream!" he roared. "The conquering of the stars themselves! And here is the one man who taught us how to dream it, Norman Marchand!" Marchand bowed to the storm of applause. Til Again his hearing aid saved his ears and cost him the next few words: " -- and now that we are on the threshhold of success," Fleury was booming, "it is altogether fitting that we should gather here tonight... to join in fellowship and in the expression of that grand hope... to rededicate ourselves to its fulfillment... and to pay our respects, and give of our love, to the man who first showed us what dream to have!" power of Dan Fleury 's oratory Marchand smiled out on the foggy sea of faces. It was, he thought, almost cruel of Fleury to put it like that. The threshhold of success indeed! How many years now had they waited on it patiently? -- and the door still locked in their faces. Of course, he thought wryly, they must have calculated that the testimonial dinner would have to be held soon unless they wanted a cadaver for a guest. But still... He turned painfully and looked at Fleury, half perplexed. There was something in his tone. Was there -- Could there be -- There could not, he told himself firmly There was no news, no breakthrough, no report from one of the wandering ships, no dream come true at last. He would have been the first to know. Not for anything would they have kept a thing like that from him. And he did not know that thing. " -- and now," Fleury was saying, "I won't keep you from your dinners. There will be many a long, strong speech to help your digestions afterwards, I promise you! But now, let's eat!" Laughter. Applause. A buzz and clash of forks. The injunction to eat did not, of course, include Norman Marchand. He sat with his hands in his lap, watching them dig in, smiling and feeling just a touch deprived, with the wry regret of the very old. He didn't envy the young people anything really, he told himself. Not their health, their youth or their life expectancy. But he envied them the bowls of ice. He tried to pretend he enjoyed his wine and the huge pink shrimp in crackers and milk. According to Asa Czerny, who ought to know since he had kept Marchand alive this long, he had a clear choice. He could eat whatever he chose, or he could stay alive. For a while. And ever since Czerny had been good enough, or despairing enough, to give him a maximum date for his fife exectancy, Marchand had in idle moments tried to calculate just how much of those remaining months he good meal. He rather believed that when Czerny looked up at him after the weekly medical checkup and said that only days were left, that he would take those last days and trade them in for a sauerbraten with potato pancakes and sweet-sour red cabbage on the side. But that time was not yet. With any kind of luck he still had a month. Perhaps as much as two... "I beg your -- pardon," he said, half-turning to the chimpanzee. Even smithed, the animal spoke so poorly that Marchand had not at first known that he was being addressed. He should not have turned. His wrist had lost its suppleness; the spoon in his hand tilted : the soggy crackers fell. He made the mistake of trying to move his knee out of the way -- it was bad enough to be old, he did not want to be sloppy -- and he moved too quickly. The chair was at the very edge of the little platform. He felt himself going over. Ninety-six is too old to be falling on your head, he thought, if I was going to do this sort of thing I might just as well have eaten some of those shrimp... Blit he did not kill himself. He only knocked himself unconscious. And not for very long at that, because he began to wake up while they were still carrying him back to his dressing room behind the stage. O nce upon a time. Norman Marchand had given his life to a hope. Rich, intelligent, married to a girl of beauty and tenderness, he had taken everything he owned and given it to the Institute for Colonizing Extra-Solar Planets. He had, to bedollars. That was the whole of the personal fortune his father had left him, and it was nowhere near enough to do the job. It was only a catalyst. He had used it to hire publicity men, fund-raisers, investment counselors, foundation managers. He had spent it on documentary films and on TV commercials. With it he had financed cocktail parties for United States senators and prize contests for the nation's sixth grades, and he had done what he set out to do. He had raised money. A very great deal of money. He had taken all the money he had begged and teased out of the pockets of the world and used it to finance the building of twenty-six great ships, each the size of a dozen ocean liners, and he had cast them into space like a farmer sowing wheat upon the wind. I tried, he whispered to himself, returning from the darkest place he had ever seen. I wanted to see man reach out and touch a new home... and I wanted to be the one to guide him there... And someone was saying: " -- he know about it, did he? But we were trying to keep it quiet -- " Someone else told the first person to shut his mouth. Marchand opened his eyes. Czerny was there, unsmiling He saw that Marchand was conscious. "You're all right," he said and Marchand knew that it was true, since Czerny was scowling angrily at him. If the news had been bad he would have smiled -- "No you don't!" cried Czerney, catching him by the shoulder. "You stay right there. You're going home to bed." "But you said I was all right." "I meant you were still breathing. Don't push it, Norm." Marchand protested, "But the dinner -- I ought to be there -- " Asa Czerny had cared for Marchand for thirty years. They had gone fishing together, and once or IF twice they had gotten drunk. Czerny would not have refused for nothing. He only shook his head. Marchand slumped back. Behind Czerny the chimpanzee was squatting silently on the edge of a chair, watching. He's worried, Marchand though. Worried because he feels it's his fault, what happened to me. The thought gave him enough strength tosay: "Stupid of me to fall like that, Mr. -- I'm sorry." Czerny supplied the introduction. "This is Duane Ferguson, Norman. He was supernumary on the Copernicus. Smithed. He's attending the dinner in costume, as it were." The chimpanzee nodded but did not speak. He was watching that silvertongued orator, Dan Fleury, who seemed upset. "Where is that ambulance?" demanded Czerny, with a doctor's impatience with internes, and the fullback in bellman's uniform hurried silently away to find out. T he chimpanzee made a barking sound, clearing his throat. "Ghwadd," he said -- more or less: the German ich sound followed by word "what" -- "Ghwadd did jou mee-an aboud evdial, Midda Vleury?" Dan Fleury turned and looked at the chimp blankly. But not, Marchand thought suddenly, as though he didn't know what the chimp was talking about. Only as if he didn't intend to answer. Marchand rasped, "What's this 'evdial' Dan?" "Search me. Look, Mr Ferguson, perhaps we'd better go outside." "Ghwadd?" The harsh barking voice struggled against the simian body it occupied, and came closer to the sounds it meant to emit. "What did you bean -- did you mean?" He was a rude young man, Marchand thought irritably. The fellow was tiring him. Although there was something about that insistent question -- Marchand winced and felt for a moment as though he were going to throw up. It passed, leaving him wobbly. It wasn't possible he had broken anything, he told himself. Czerny would not lie about that. But he felt as if he had. He lost interest in the chimp-man, did not even turn his head as Fleury hurried him out of the room, whispering to him in an agitated and lowpitched chirrup like the scratching of a cricket's legs. If a man wanted to abandon his God-given human body and put his mind, thoughts and -- yes -- soul into the corpus of an anthropoid, there was nothing in that to entitle him to any special consideration from Norman Marchand. Of course not! Marchand rehearsed the familiar argument as he waited for the ambulance. Men who volunteered for the interstellar flights he had done so much to bring about knew what they were getting into. Until some frabjous super-Batman would always be so. At possible speeds -- less than light's # mps crawl -- it was a matter of decades to reach almost every worthwhile planet that was known. The Smith process allowed these men to use their minds to control chimpanzee bodies -- easily bred, utterly expendable -- while their own bodes rested in the deep-freeze for all the long years between the stars. It took brave men, naturally. They were entitled to courtesy and consideration. But so was he, and it was not courteous to blather about "evdial". whatever that was, while the man who had made their trip possible was seriously injured... Unless... Marchand opened his eyes again. "Evdiat." Unless "evdial" was the closest chimpanzee vocal chords and chimpanzee lips could come to -- to --  -- unless what they had been talking about, while he was unconscious, was that utterly impossible, hopeless and fantastic dream that he, Marchand, has had turned his back upon when he began organizing the colonization campaign. Unless someone had really found II A s soon as he was able the next day, Marchand got himself into a wheelchair -- all by himself, he didn't want any help in this -- and rolled it out into the chartroom of the home the Institute had given him rentfree for all of his life. (He had, of course, given it in the first place to the Institute.) The Institute had put three hundred thousand dollars into the chart room. Stayed and guy wired stars flecked the volume of a forty-'o.H ballroom, representing in scale all the space within fifty-five light-years of Sol. Every star was mapped and tagged. They had even moved a few of them slightly, a year ago, to correct for proper motion: it was that carefully done. The twenty-six great starships the Institute had financed were there, too, or such of them as were still in space. They were out of scale, of course, but Marchand understood what they represented. He rolled his chair down the marked path to the center of the room and sat there, looking around, just under yellow Sol. There was blue-white Sirius dominating them all, Procyon hanging just above. The two of them together were incomparably the brightest objects in the room, though red Altair was brighter in its own right than Procyon. In the center of the chamber Sol and Alpha Centauri A made a brillant pair. He gazed with rheuming eyes at that greatest disappointment of his life Alpha Centauri B. So close. So right. So sterile. It was an ironic blunder of creation that the nearest and best chance of another home had never formed planets... or had formed them and swept them into the Bode-area traps set by itself and its two companions. But there were other hopes... Marchand sought and found Tau Ceti, yellow and pale. Only eleven light-years away, the colony should be definitely established by now. In another decade or less they should have an answer... if, of course, it IF had planets Man could live on. That was the big question, to which they had already received so many "nos". But Tau Ceti was still a good bet, Marchand told himself stoutly. It was a dimmer, cooler sun than Sol. But it was type G, and according to spectropolarimetry, almost certainly planetiferous. And if it were another disappointment -- Marchand turned his eyes to # Eridani A, even dimmer, even farther away. The expedition to # Eridani A had been, he remembered, the fifth ship he had launched. It ought to be reaching its destination soon -- this year, or perhaps next. There was no sure way of estimating time when the top velocity was so close to light's own... But now of course the top velocity was more. The sudden wash of failure almost made him physically ill. Faster than light travel -- why, how dared they! But he didn't have time to waste on that particular emotion, or indeed on any emotion at all. He felt time draining away from him and sat up straight again, looking around. At ninety-six you dare not do anything slowly, not even daydream. H e glanced at, and dismissed, Procyon. They had tried Procyon lately -- the ship would not be even halfway. They had tried almost everything. Even Epsilon Eridani and Groombridge #; even, far down past the probable good bets among the spectroscopic classes, #I Cygni A and Epsilon Indi, a late and despairing try at Proxima Centauri (though they were very nearly sure it was wasted, the Alpha Centauri expedition had detected nothing like viable planets.) There had been twenty-six of them in all. Three ships lost, three returned, one still Earthbound. Nineteen were still out there. Marchand looked for comfort at the bright green arrow that marked where the Tycho Brahe rode its jets of ionized gas, the biggest of his ships, three thousand men and women. It seemed to him that someone had mentioned the Tycho Brahe recently. When? Why? He was not sure, but the name stuck in his mind. The door opened and Dan Fleury walked in, glancing at the arrayed stars and ships and not seeing them. The chart room had never meant anything to Fleury. He scolded, "Damn it, Norman, you scared us witless! Why you're not in the hospital now -- " "I was in the hospital, Dan. I wouldn't stay. And finally I got it through Asa Czerny's head that I meant it, so he said I could come home if I would stay quiet and let him look in. Well, as you see, I'm quiet. And I don't care if he looks in. I only care about finding out the "Oh, cripes, Norm! Honestly, you shouldn't worry yourself -- " "Dan, for thirty years you've never used the word 'honestly' except when you were lying to me. Now give. I sent for you this morning because you. know the answer. I want it." " For God's sake, Dan." Fleury glanced around the room, as though he were seeing the glowing points of light for the first time... perhaps he was, Marchand thought. He said at last, "Well, there is something." Marchand waited. He had had a great deal of practice at waiting. "There's a young fellow," said Fleury, starting over again. "He's named Eisele. A mathematician, would you believe it? He's got an idea." Fleury pulled over a chair and sat down. "It's far from perfect," he added. "In fact," he said, "a lot of people think it won't work at all. You know the theory, of course. Einstein, Lorentz-Fitzgerald, the whole roster -- they're all against it. It's called -- get this!  -- polynomiation." He waited for a laugh, hopelessly. Then he said, "Although I must say he appears to have something, since the tests -- " Marchand said gently and with enormous restraint: "Dan, will you please spit it out? Let's see what you said so far. There's this fellow named Eisele and he has something and it's crazy but it works." "Well -- yes." Marchand slowly leaned back and closed his eyes. "So that means that we were all wrong. Especially me. And all our work -- " "Look, Norman! Don't ever think like that. Your work has made it all the difference. If it weren't for you, people like Eisele never would have had the chance. Don't you know he was working under one of our grants?" "No. I didn't know that." Marchand's eyes went out to the Tycho Brahe for a moment. "But it doesn't help much. I wonder if fifty-odd thousand men and women who have given most of their lives to the deepfreeze because of -- my work -- will feel the way you do. But thanks. You've told me what I want to know." W hen Czerny entered the chart room an hour later Marchand said at once, "Am I in good enough shape to stand a smith?" The doctor put down his bag and took a chair before he answered. "We don't have anyone available, Norman. There hasn't been a volunteer for years." "No. I don't mean smithed into a human body. I don't want any would-be suicide volunteer donors, you said yourself the smithed bodies sometimes suicided anyway. I'll settle for a chimp. Why should I be any better than that young fellow -- what's his name?" "You mean Duane Ferguson." "Sure. Why should I be any better than he is?" "Oh, cut it out, Norman. You're too old. Your phospholipids -- " "I'm not too old to die, am I? And that's the worst that could happen." "It wouldn't be stable! Not at your age; you just don't understand the chemistry. I couldn't promise you more than a few weeks." Marchand said joyously, "Really! I didn't expect that much. That's more than you can promise me now." The doctor argued, but Marchand had held up his end of many a hardIF fought battle in ninety-six years, and besides he had an advantage over Czerny. The doctor knew even better than Marchand himself that getting into a passion would kill him. At the moment when Czerny gauged the risk of a smith translation less than the risk of going on arguing about it, he frowned, shook his head grudgingly and left. Slowly Marchand wheeled after him. He did not have to hurry to what might be the last act of his life. There was plenty of time. In the Institute they kept a supply of breeding chimpahzees, but it would take several hours to prepare one. One mind had to be sacrificed in the smith imposition. The man would ultimately be able to return to his own body, his risk less than one chance in fifty of failure. But the chimp would never be the same. Marchand submitted to the beginnings of the irradiation, the delicate titration of his body fluids, the endless strapping and patching and clamping. He had seen it done and there were no surprises in the procedure... He had not known, however, that it would hurt so much. Ill T rying not to walk on his knuckles (but it was hard; the ape body was meant to crouch, the arms were too long to hang comfortably along his sides), Marchand waddled out into the pad area and bent his rigid chimp's spine back in order to look up at the hated thing. Dan Fleury came toward him. "Norm?" he asked tentatively. Marchand attempted to nod: it was not a success, but Fleury understood. "Norman," he said, "this is Sigmund Marchard raised one long arm and extended a hand that resisted being opened: it was used to being clawed into a fist. "Gongradulazhuns," he said, as clearly as he could. Virtuously he did not squeeze the hand of the young dark-eyed man who was bebeing introduced to him. He had been warned that chimpanzee strength maimed human beings. He was not likely to forget, but it was tempting to allow himself to consider it for a moment. He dropped the hand and winced as pain flooded through him. Czerny had warned him to expect it. Unstable, dangerous, won't last had rumbled through his conversation; and don't forget, Norman, the sensory equipment is set high for you; you're not used to so much input : it will hurt. But Marchand had assured the doctor he would not mind that, and indeed he didn't. He looked at the ship again. "Zo tliads id," he grumbled, and again bent the backbone, the whole barrel chest of the brute he occupied, to stare at the ship on the pad. It was perhaps a hundred feet tall. "Nod, mudge," he said scornfully. "De Zirian, dad was our firzd, zdood nine hoonderd feed dall and garried a dousand beople to Alpha Zendauri." "And it brought a hundred and fifty back alive." said Eisele. He didn't emphasize the words in any way, but he said it quite clearly. "I want to tell you I've always admired you, Dr. Marchand. I hope you won't mind my company. I understand you want to go along with me out to the Tycho Brahe." "Why zhould I mind?" He did, of course. With the best will in the world, this young fellow had thrown seventy years of dedication, plus a dollars of his own, countless hunernment handouts. f rom the pennies of school children -- tossed them all into the chamber pot and flushed them Into history. They would say: A nonce figure of the early twentyfirst century, Norman Marchand, or Marquand, attempted stellar colonization with primitive rocket-propelled craft. He was of course unsuccessful, and the toll of life and wealth in his ill-conceived venture enormous. However, after Eisle's faster-than-light became practicable... They would say that he was a failure. And he was. W hen Tycho Brahe blasted off to the stars massed bands of five hundred pieces played it to its countdown and television audiences all over the world watched it through their orbiting satellites. A president, a governor and half the senate were on hand. When Eisele's little ship took off to catch it and tell its people their efforts had been all in vain, it was like the departure of the #:# ferry for Jersey City. To that extent, thought Marchand, had Eisele degraded the majesty of starflight. Yet he would not have missed it for anything. Not though it meant forcing himself as supercargo on Eisele, who had destroyed his life, and on the other smithed chimpanzee, Duane Ferguson, who was for some reason deemed to have special privileges in regard to the Brahe. Marchand heard one of the men call it a polyflecter, but he would not do it the honor of asking anyone what that meant -- for some reason. Because it was likely to break down, so spares were needed? Marchand dismissed the question, realizing that it had not been a fear but a hope. Whatever the reason he didn't care; he didn't want even to be here, he only regarded it as his inescapable duty. And he entered Eisele's ship. The interior of Eisele's damned ship was built to human scale, ninefoot ceilings and broad acceleration couches, but they had brought hammocks scaled to a chimpanzee torso for himself and Duane Ferguson. Doubtless they had looted the hammocks from the new ship. The one that would never fly -- or at least not on streams of ionized gas. And doubtless this was almost the last time that a man's mind would have to leave Earth in an ape's body. What Eisele's damned ship rode to the stars on in place of ionized gas Marchand did not understand. The whatcha-flecter, whatever the damned thing was named, was so tiny. The whole ship was a pigmy. There was no room for reaction '# IF mass, or at least only for enough to get it off-Earth. Then the little black box -- it was not really little, since it was the size of a grand piano; and it was not black but gray; but it was a box, all right -- would work its magic. They called that magic "polynomiation". What polynomiation was Marchand did not try to understand, beyond listening, or seeming to listen, to Eisele's brief, crude attempt to translate mathematics into English. He heard just enough to recognize a few words. Space was N dmensional. All right, that answered the whole question, as far as he was concerned and he did not hear Eisele's tortuous efforts to explain how one jacked oneself up, so, to speak, into a polynomial dimension -- or no, not that, but translated the existing polynomial extensions of a standard #-space mass into higher orders -- he didn't hear. He didn't hear any of it. What he was listening to was the deep liquid thump of the great ape's heart that now was sustaining his brain. Duane Ferguson appeared, in the ape's body that he would never leave now. That was one more count of Marchand's self-indictment; he had heard them say that the odds had worked against Ferguson, and his body had died in the imposition. As soon as he had heard what Eisele was up to, Marchand had seized on it as a chance for expiation. The project was very simple. A good test for Eisele's drive, and a mission of mercy, too. They intended to fleet after the plodding, long-gone Tycho Brahe and catch it in mid-space... for even now, thirty years after it had left Port Kennedy, it was still decelerating to begin its search orbit around Groombridge #. As Marchand strapped himself in, Eisele was explaining it all over again. He was making tests on his black box and talking at the same time: "You see, sir, we'll try to match course and velocity, but frankly that's the hard part. Catching them's nothing: we've got the speed. Then we'll transfer the extra polyflecter to the Tycho Brahe -- " "Yez, thanggs," said Marchand politely, but he still did not listen to the talk about the machine. As long as it existed he would use it, his conscience would not let him off that, but he didn't want details. Because the thing was, there were all those wasted lives. Every year in the Tycho Brahe's deep freeze means a month off the life of the body that lay there. Respiration was slowed, but it was not stopped. The heart did not beat but blood was perfused through a pump; tubes dripped sugar and minerals into the torpid blood, catheters carried wastes away. And Groombridge # was a flight of ninety years. The best a forty-year-old man could hope for on arriving was to be restored into a body whose biological age was nearly fifty -- while behind him on the Earth was nothing but a family long dead, friends turned into dust. It had been worth it. Or so the colonists had thought. Driven by the worm that wriggled in the spine of the explorer, the itch that drove him on; because of the wealth and the power and the freedom that a new world could give them, and because of the place they would have in the history books -- not Washington's place, or even Christ's. They would have the place of an Adam and an Eve. It had been worth it, all those thousands had thought when they volunteered and set out. But what would they think when they landed! If they landed without knowing the truth, if some ship like Eisele's did not reach and tell them in midspace, they would find the greatest disappointment any man had ever borne. The Groombridge # expedition aboard the Tycho Brahe still had forty years to go on its original trip plan. With Eisele's invention driving faster-than-light commerce, there would be a planet populated by hundreds of thousands of people, factories at work, roads built, the best land taken, the history books already into their fifth chapter... and what would the three thousand aging adventurers think then? Marchand moaned and shook, not entirely because the ship was taking off and the acceleration squeezed his rib cage down against his spine. W hen they were in the polyflecter's grip he floated across the pilot room to join the others. "I vas never in zpaze bevore," he said. Eisele said with great deference, "Your work was on the Earth." "Vas, yez." But Marchand left it at that. A man whose whole life was a failure owed something to humanity, and one of the things he owed was the privilege of allowing them to over look it. He watched carefully while Eisele and Ferguson read their instruments and made micrometric settings on the polyflecter. He did not understand anything about the faster-thanlight drive, but he understood that a chart was a chart. Here there was a doubly profiled representation of the course-line of the Groombridge # expedition. The Tycho Brahe was a point of light, some nine-tenths of the way from Sol to the Groombridge star in distance, which meant something under three-quarters of the way in time. "Mass detectors, Dr. Marchand," said Eisele cheerfully pointing to the charts. "Good thing they're not much closer, or they wouldn't have mass enough to show." Marchand understood: the same detectors that would show a sun or a planet would its speed were great enough to add sufficient mass. "And a good thing," added Eisele, looking worried, "that they're not much farther away. We're going to have trouble matching their velocity now, even though they've been decelerating for nine years... Let's get strapped in." From the hammock Marchand braced himself for another surge of acceleration. But it was not that, it was something different and far worse. It was a sausage-grinder, chewing his heart and sinews and spitting them out in strange crippled shapes. It was a wine-press, squeezing his throat, collapsing his heart. It was the giddy nausea of a roller-coaster or a small craft in a typhoon. Wherever it took them, the IF stars on the profile charts slipped and slid and flowed into new positions. Marchand, absorbed in the most crushing migraine of all but a century, hardly knew what was happening, but he knew that in the hours they found the Tycho Brahe, after giving it a thirty-year start. IV T he captain of the Tycho Brahe was a graying, yellow-fanged chimp named Lafcadio, his brown animal eyes hooded with shock, his long, stringy arms still quivering with the reaction of seeing a ship -- a ship -- and human beings. He could not take his eyes off Eisele, Marchand noted, and looked? It had been thirty years in an ape's body for the captain. The ape was old now. Lafcadio would be thinking himself more than half chimp already, the human frame only a memory that blurred against the everyday reminders of furry-backed hands and splayed prehensile feet. Marchand himself could feel the ape's mind stealing back, though he knew it was only imagination. Or was it imagination? Asa Czerny had said the imposition would not be stable -- something to do with the phospholipids -- he could not remember. He could not, in fact, remember anything with the clarity and certainly he could wish, and it was not merely because his mind was ninety-six years old. Without emotion Marchand realized that his measured months or weeks had dwindled to a few days. It could, of course, be the throbbing pain between his temples that was robbng him of reason. But Marchand only entertained that thought to dismiss it; if he had courage enough to realize that his life's work was wasted, he could face the fact that pain was only a secondorder derivative of the killer that stalked his ape's body. But it made it hard for him to concentrate. It was through a haze that he heard the talk of the captain and his crew -- the twenty-two smithed chimpanzees who superintended the running of the Tycho Brahe and watched over the three thousand frozen bodies in its hold. It was over a deep, confusing roar that he heard Eiesle instruct them in the transfer of the great, lumbering ark that his box could make fleet enough to span the stars in a day's journey. He was aware that they looked on him, from time to time, with pity. He did not mind their pity. He only asked that they allow him to live with them until he died, knowing as he knew that that would be no long time; and he passed, while they were still talking, into a painful, dizzying reverie that lasted until -- he did not know the measure of the time -- until he found himself strapped in a hammock in the control room of the ship, and felt the added crushing agony that told him they were once again slipping through the space of other dimensions. "Are you all right?" said a fami liar thick, slurred voice. It was the other, last victim of his blundering, the one called Ferguson. Marchand managed to say that he was. "Were almost there," said Ferguson "I thought you'd like to know. There's a planet. Inhabitable, they think." F rom Earth the star called Groombrige # was not even visible to the naked eye. Binoculars might make it a tiny flicker of light, lost among countless thousands of farther, but brighter, stars. From Groombridge # Sol was not much more. Marchand remembered struggling out of his hammock, overruling the worry on Ferguson's simian face, to look back at the view that showed Sol. Ferguson had picked it out for him, and Marchand looked at light that had been fifteen years journeying from his home. The photons that impinged on his eyes now had pauseed to drench the Earth in the colors of sunset when he was in his seventies and his wife only a few years mourned... He did not remember getting back to his haccock. He did not remember, either, at what moment of time someone told him about the planet they hoped to own. It hung low around the little orange disk of Groombridge # -- by solar standards, at least. The captain's first approximation made its orbit quite irregular, but at its nearest approach it would be less glowing fire-coal of its primary. Near enough. Warm enough. Telescopes showed it a planet with oceans and forests, removing the lingering doubts of the captain, for its orbit could not freeze it even at greatest remove from its star, or char it at closest -- or else the forest could not have grown. Spectroscopes, thermocouples, filarometers showed more, the instruments racing ahead of the ship, now in orbit and compelled to creep at rocket speeds the last little inch of its journey. The atmosphere could be breathed, for the ferny woods had flushed out the poisons and filled it with oxygen. The gravity was more than Earth's -- a drag on the first generation, to be sure, and an expense in foot troubles and lumbar aches for many more -- but nothing that could not be borne. The world was fair. Marchand remembered nothing of how he learned this, or of the landing, or of the hurried, joyful opening of the freezing crypts, the awakening of the colonists, the beginning of life on the planet... he only knew that there was a time when he found himself curled on a soft, warm hummock, and he looked up and saw sky.  T he protuberant hairy lip and sloping brows of a chimpanzee were hovering over him. Marchand recognized that young fellow Ferguson. "Hello," he said. "How long have I been unconscious?" The chimp said, with embarrassment, "Well -- you haven't been unconscious at all, exactly. You've been -- " His voice trailed off. "I see," said Marchand, and struggled up. He was grateful for the strength of the slope-shouldered. IF short-legged body he had borrowed, for this world he had come to had an uncomfortably powerful grip. The effort made him dizzy. A pale sky and thin clouds spiraled around him; he felt queer flashes of pain and pleasure, remembered tastes he had never experienced, felt joys he had never known... With an effort he repressed the vestigial ape and said, "You mean I've been -- what would you call it? Unstable? The smithing didn't quite take." But he didn't need confirmation from Feguson. He knew; and knew that the next time he slipped away would be the last. Czerny had warned him. The phospholipids, wasn't that it? It was almost time to go home... Off to one side he saw men and women, human men and women, on various errands and it made him ask: "You're still an ape?" "I will be for a while. Dr. Marchand. "My body's gone, you know." Marchand puzzled over that for a while. His attention wandering, he caught himself licking his forearm and grooming his round belly. "No!" he shouted, and tried to stand up. Ferguson helped him, and Marchand was grateful for the ape's strong arm. He remembered what had been bothering him. "Why?" he asked. "Why what, Dr. Marchand?" "Why did you come?" Ferguson said anxiously, "I wish you'd sit down till the doctor gets here. I came because there's someone on the Tycho Brahe I wanted to see." A girl? thought Marchand wonderingly, "And did you see her?" "Not her, them. Yes, I saw them. My parents. You see, I was two years old when the Tycho Brahe left. My parents were good breeding stock -- volunteers were hard to get then, they tell me -- oh, of course, you'd know better than I. Anyway they -- I was adopted by an aunt. They left me a letter to read when I was old enough... Dr. Marchand! What's the matter?" Marchand reeled and fell; he could not help it; he knew he was a spectacle, could feel the incongruous tears rheuming out of his beast eyes; but this last and unexpected blow was too harsh. He had faced the fact of fifty thousand damaged lives and accepted guilt for them, but one abandoned baby, left to an aunt and the apology of a letter, broke his heart. "I wonder why you don't kill me," he said. "Dr. Marchand! I don't know what you're talking about." "If only," said Marchand carefully, "I don't expect any favors, but if only there were some way I could pay. But I can't. I have nothing left, not even enough life to matter. But I'm sorry, Mr. Ferguson, and that will have to do." Ferguson said, "Dr. Marchand, if I'm not mistaken, you're saying that you apologize for the Institute." Marchand nodded. "But -- oh. I'm not the one to say this, but there's no one else. Look. Let me try to make it clear. The first thing the colonists did yesterday was choose a name for the planet. The vote was unanimous. Do you know what they called it?" Marchand only looked at him dully. "Please listen. Dr. Marchand. They named it after the man who inspired all their lives. Their greatest hero. They named it Marchand." Marchand stared at him, and stared longer, and then without changing expression closed his eyes. "Dr. Marchand!" said Ferguson tentatively, and then, seriously worried at last, turned and scuttled ape-like, legs and knuckles bearing him rapidly across the ground, to get the ship's doctor who had left him with strict orders to call him as soon as the patient showed any signs of life. When they got back the chimp was gone. They looked at the fronded forest and at each other. "Wandered off, I expect," said the doctor. "It may be just as well." "But the nights are cold! He'll get pneumonia. He'll die." "Not any more," said the doctor, as kindly as he could. "He's already dead in every way that matters." He bent and rubbed his aching thighs, worn already from the struggle against this new Eden's gravity, then straightened and looked at the stars in the darkening western sky. A bright green one was another planet of Groombridge #'s, farther out, all ice and copper salts. One of the very faintest ones, perhaps, was Sol. "He gave us these planets," said the doctor, and turned back toward the city. "Do you know what being a good man means, Ferguson? It means being better than you really are -- so that even your failures carry someone a little farther to success -- and that's what he did for us. I IF hope he heard what you were trying to tell him. I hope he remembers it when he dies," the doctor said. "If he doesn't," said Ferguson very clearly, "the rest of us always will." T he next day they found the curled-up body. It was the first funeral ever held on the planet, and the one that the history books describe. That is why, on the planet called Marchand, the statue at the spaceport has a small bas-relief carved over the legend: The bas-relief is the shape of a chimpanzee, curled on itself and looking out with blind, frightened eyes upon the world, for it was the chimpanzee's body that they found, and the chimpanzee's body that they buried under the monument. The bas-relief and the body, they are ape. But the statue that rises above The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: In my opinion If is at this moment the best science fiction magazine on the market. It contains everything that I could possibly want in an S.F. magazine, big name authors who continue to write some of the best stories available, plus a continuous supply of new authors who seem to be almost as good as the old reliable pros, also witty and informative editorials which seems to enhance the quality of the magazine. Put these all together, and they spell, in my opinion anyway, a great magazine. Just to make it plain that the purpose of this letter is not solely to butter you up, I have a complaint to make. It seems that through someone's fault I have not received the September issue of If. My first thought was that my subscription had run out, but on checking I found that I still had two issues of my sub still forthcoming. I hope that this mistake can be rectified soon, and my issue sent to me. I had especially wanted this issue since it contained the final installment of Robert A. Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, but, aside from this slight mistake I have no other complaints to make, and in my opinion If is still the best S.F. magazines sold today. -- Charles J. Bing, #I Center Street, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.  Hope you discovered the explanation by now. We had to omit the September issue because of printing difficulties. But hopefully we're straightened out now! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: I happened to see you on the Johnny Carson Tonight show, and I must say that you helped add to the more respectful attitude shown today towards science fiction. I feel that the trend is gradually swinging over to the romantic type of reading and that it will continue to do so as long as Galaxy, Worlds of Tomorrow, and If continue their remarkable output of entertaining and delightful science-fiction stories. The success of any magazine depends on the editor. There couldn't be any better editor than the one of the previously mentioned three magazines. As usual, the issue of If scored an excellent grade. Even though I am relatively new to reading science fiction, I haven't noticed one story published in If that did not measure up to its usually high standards. What I can't understand is why this certain magazine (I wonder which one) wins the Hugo every year. But I'm sure of one thing: Keep up the good work and the Hugo award for the best science fiction magazine for # will certainly go to IF. -- Calvin Cahan, # Lafayette, Omaha, Nebraska.    Dear Editor: With your knowledge of recent science fiction, you can perhaps answer a question: In what anthology or magazine can I find again a wonderful S.F. yarn about dogs? If you ever saw it, you will remember this plot. A space ship from a planet closely resembling Earth lands here. Its crew also closely resemble Earth people, so that they receive an enthusiastic welcome and when ready to return to their home, their ship is loaded with gifts from Earth. Among the gifts are a pair of fine dogs for breeding stock, as their planet has no dogs. While the ports of the space ship are open and the crew is taking a farewell look at their Earth friends, one of the crew (a co-pilot?) informs the captain that he understood the dogs' thoughts and warns the captain about burdening their planet with these parasitic pests whose only thought is to cajole and flatter human beings into sheltering and feeding and cherishing them for life, and giving nothing in return. The captain ridicules the warning. He cannot read the dogs' thoughts himself and already the dogs are licking his hand and showing all the signs of servile affection that all dogs use. The co-pilot sees that his warning is useless and plans to get rid of the dogs before the ship arrives home. But as he stands near an open port, one of the dogs suddenly shoves him out and he suffers a fatal fall to Earth, a few hundred feet below the open port. I have searched through a dozen anthologies and can't find it. I read it within the last three years, I'm sure. You may know of it. -- Dabney Horton, # Main Street, Northport, New York.    Dear Editor, You are correct; If has, for the last two issues, done all you claimed it was trying to do... adventure, excitement, color, drama, etc. You might just as well leave out "Hue and Cry", or at least cut i! down to never more than one and a half pages. Most of the letters are of more interest to you than to the readers (like this one). -- Irvin Koch, # Chattanooga Bank Building, Chattanooga, Tennessee #.    Dear Editor: You run a fine magazine but your geography ain't good. Potsdam is in East Germany and not very far from Berlin. If I am in Potsdam, engineering a communication system, I am in trouble. And if that's where you folks have been sending my mail, h is no wonder I have not heard from you. So please pass the word around that I am in Frankfurt am Main, in the German Federal Republic, a Part Of The Free World, and that I have never been, and am not now, affiliated with any organization, political party, or anything else Period. -- George O. Smith, Frankfurt am Main, West Germany.    Dear Editor: The March issue of If proved to be a quite a good one for two basic reasons. First, your all-Smith idea was good, and all the stories were of high quality. E.E. Smith's The Imperial Stars was different from the usual If material, but I think that it could have been improved with more work. The Store of Heart's Desires was the best story in the issue. It contained a plot that kept moving and only slowed up a few places. I like Cordwainer Smith's underpeople, and I am looking forward to more stories from him. Secondly, do you always drop such bombshells so casually? The announcement that If was going monthly bowled me over. I can't tell you how glad I am to hear it. If is really on the upswing. -- Paul Gilster, # Godwin Lane, St. Louis, Missouri.    Dear Editor: Because I am a younger generation reader of science fiction (I am fifteen years old) I don't know too much about the field as it was in its early days. I have read "Doc" Smith's yarns, The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three and Skylark of Valeron in recent paperback editions. They are pretty good stories, but I couldn't help but visualize a long string of Skylark stories, each beginning with a new revival of Dr. Marc DuQuesne and ending with Richard Seaton adding another, larger spaceship to his collection and a red feather to his cap to commemorate his mastery of another order of radiation. The other day I came upon an issue of If on the stands and was greatly surprised to read your announcement concerning Skylark DuQuesne. Good grief! How many Skylark stories have there been? -- Bill Beck, # Vassar Drive, Boulder, Colorado.    Dear Editor: If gets better by the issue. It couldn't be better except (and here I go with my two cents worth)...#) More Retief stories, please. #) More illustrations by Finlay and Gaughan (who has improved a lot in the last few issues). #) A book review column. #) A story or so by Theodore Sturgeon wouldn't be out of order. (And by the way, what happened to him? I didn't see his name on the content's page or any article by him.) #) I would like to see stories by Clifford Simak, Robert Sheckley and the light-hearted side of Isaac Asimov. -- Brian Baldwin, # Harding Road, Chattanooga, Tennessee. IF Imagine! Here's what you get... the button -- you can't make mistakes! Nothing to locus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp blackand-whites. amazingly life-like color shots -- even slides -- with no effort at all! Commander Camera Retail Value: # I Roll Kodacolor Film Retail Value: #  Roll Kodak Black-and-White Film Retail Value: .# Pre paid Processing Certificate Retail Value: # (Good for # Jumbo Color Prints and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!) # limited! Clip coupon and mail today! P.O. Box #. N.Y., N.Y. # extra charge). Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus # handling. (please print)  Send C.O.D. I am enclosing S# deposit and will pay postman #. plus # handling, plus postal charge.  I want #o save postal charges. I am enclosing #, plus # for handling. not completely pleased! Forgotten road to success in writing By J. D. Ratcliff I can't imagine why more beginners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to you -- but they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at horne, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing.) You learn to write by writing. Our instructors, themselves all published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print' in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well -- or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. "Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. Although he works only four hours a day, he has had hundreds of articles published in top magazines, including over # in Reader's Digest alone. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut I want to know if I have writing aptitude. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss (please print) Street City Zone... , County State. The School is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council, Washington, D.C. AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD by J. T. MclNTOSH D Concluding -- He searched through time for a dreamand didn't know it when it came true! Imagine! Here's what you get... Commander Camera Retail Value: I Roll Kodacolor Film Retail Value: I Roil Kodak Black-and-White Film Retail Value: Pre-paid Processing Certificate Retail Value: (Good for # Jumbo Color Prints and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!)  # # .# # # limited! Clip coupon and mail today! the button -- you can't make mistakes! Nothing to locus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp blackand-whites, amazingly life-like color shots -- even slides -- with, no effort at all! P.O. Box #, N.Y... N.Y. # extra charge).' Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus # handling. (please print)  Send C.O.D. I am enclosing # deposit and will pay postman #, plus # handling, plus postal charges.  I want to save postal charges. I am enclosing #, plus # for handling. not completely pleased! Frederik Pohi, Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor David Perton, Production Manager SmiAL -- Conclusion IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office; #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-clast postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. AH material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York # N. Y. IF  Editorial H igh on the side of a hill outside San Francisco lives one of the finest science-fiction writers in the world. His name is Jack Vance and we had the pleasure of visiting his home a few weeks ago, during the course of the World Science Fiction Convention held in Berkeley. To reach the Vance estate you drive up a hill. Then you drive up a steeper hill. Then you drive up the steepest hill of all, shift into fourwheel drive, go a few yards further, then climb steps and ladders. His front lawn probably covers two or three acres -- stood on end. All in all it is a charming place, an unusual one, and just right for the author of such charming, unusual and by Masters y The Moon Moth and the one that starts in next isues's , The #t   The convention itself, by the way, was a first-rate affair, populated with such fine writers as Vance, Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak (who picked up a Hugo of his own for the story in last year's Galaxy, Here Gather the Stars), Frank Herbert, Anthony Boucher -- you name 'em. Awards were flowing like water, and, as a matter of fact, your editor acquired one too: The Invisible Little Men's Award, consisting of a mahogany base bearing the gold footprints of an invisible little man. Highlights of the affair were speeches by the joint guests of honor, Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, a talk on science fiction in movies and television by a man who is responsible for a lot of it, Harlan Ellison, a reminiscing talk by the fan guest of honor, Forrest J. Ackerman, and much more. If you haven't ever been to a science-fiction convention, you don't know what you're missing. Next year's will be in London... and what better reason could there be for a transAtlantic trip?   #  In every issue of If we run a "first" story by someone who has never before appeared in a professional magazine. This month's is L. D. Ogle's The Heat Racers, a fresh and pleasing tale. We're looking for more, you know. What about the rest of you out there? -- The Editor be generally tpld -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of mans mind, and the mastery of lifers problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toaay, The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe p j p j Scribe  I I Sao Jose, California i j Please send me the free book. The Mastery j I of Ufe, which explains how I may learn to j I use my faculties and powers of mind.   I j Name :::  ! Address ' e Rosicrucians Oty. IF  Novelett When Time Was New Ife searched through time tor a dream -- and didn't know it when it came true! I to meet up with a stegosaurus sooner or later, but he hadn't expected to T he stegosaurus standing beneath meet up with a boy and a girl. What the ginkgo tree didn't surprise in the name of all that was MesoCarpenter, but the two kids sitting zoic were they doing in the upper in the branches did. He had expected Cretaceous Period! Maybe, he reflected, leaning forward in the driver's seat of his battery-powered triceratank, they were tied in in some way with the anachronistic fossil he had come back to the Age of Dinosaurs to investigate. Certainly the fact that Miss Sands, his chief assistant who had cased the place-time on the timescope, had said nothing about a couple of kids, meant nothing. Timescopes registered only the general lay of the land. They seldom showed anything smaller than a mediumsized mountain. The stego nudged the trunk of the gingko with a hip as high as a hill. The tree gave such a convulsive shudder that the two children nearly fell off the branch they were sitting on and came tumbling down upon the serrated ridge of the monster's back. Their faces were as white as the line of cliffs that showed distantly beyond the scatterings of dogwoods and magnolias and live oaks, and the stands of willows and laurels and fan palms, that patterned the prehistoric plain. Carpenter braced himself in the driver's seat. "Come on, Sam," he said, addressing the triceratank by nickname, "let's go get it!" S ince leaving the entry area several hours ago, he had been moving along in low gear in order not to miss any potential clues that might point the way to the anachronistic fossil's place of origin -- a locale which, as was usually the case with unidentifiable anachronisms, the paleontological society that employed him had been able to pinpoint much more accurately in time than in space. Now, he threw Sam into second and focused the three horn-howitzers jutting from the reptivehicle's facial regions on the sacral ganglion of the offending ornithischian. Plugg! Plugg! Plugg! went the three stun charges as they struck home, and down went the a posteriori section .of the stego. The anterior section apprised by the pea-sized brain that something had gone haywire, twisted far enough around for one of the little eyes in the pint-sized head to take in the approaching triceratank, whereupon the stubby forelegs immediately began the herculean task of dragging the tenton, humpbacked body out of the theater of operations. Carpenter grinned. "Take it easy, old mountainsides," he said. "You'll be on all four feet again in less time than it takes to say Tyrannosaurus rex'." After bringing Sam to a halt a dozen yards from the base of the ginkgo, he looked up at the two terrified children through the one-way transparency of the reptivehicle's skull-nacelle. If anything, their faces were even whiter than they had been before. Small wonder. Sam looked more like a triceratops than most real triceratops did. Raising the nacelle, Carpenter recoiled a little from the sudden contrast between the humid heat of the midsummer's day and Sam's airconditioned interior. He stood up in the driver's compartment and showed himself. "Come on down you two," he called. "Nobody's going to eat you.' f Two pairs of the widest and bluest eyes that he had ever seen came to rest upon his face. In neither pair, however, was there the faintest gleam of understanding. "I said come on down," he repeated. "There's nothing to be afraid of." The boy turned to the girl, and the two of them began jabbering back and forth in a sing-song tongue that resembled Chinese, but only as the mist resembles the rain. It had no more in common with modern American than its speakers had with their surroundings. Clearly they hadn't understood a word he had said. But, equally as clearly, they must have found reassurance in his plain and honest face, or perhaps in the gentle tone of his voice. After talking the matter over for a few moments, they left their aerie and shinned down the trunk, the boy going first and helping the girl over the rough spots. He was about nine; she was about eleven. Carpenter stepped out of the compartment, vaulted down from Sam's steel snout and went over to where they were standing. By this time, the stego had recovered the use of its hind legs and was high-tailing -- or rather, high-backing -- it over the plain. The boy was wearing a loose, apricot-colored blouse which was considerably stained and disheveled from his recent arboreal activities, a pair of apricot-colored slacks which were similarly stained and disheveled and which terminated at his thin calves and a pair of open-toe sandals. The girl's outfit was identical, save that it was azure in hue and somewhat less stained and disheveled. She was about an inch taller than the boy, but no less thin. Both of them had delicate features, and hair the color of buttercups, and both of them wore expressions so solemn as to be almost ludicrous. It was virtually a sure bet that they were brother and sister. G azing earnestly up into Carpenter's gray eyes, the girl gave voice a series of sing-song phrases, each of them, judging from the nuances of pronunciation, representative of a different language. When she finished. Carpenter shook his head. "I just don't dig you, pumpkin," he said. Then, just to make sure, he repeated the remark in Anglo-Saxon, Aeolic Greek, lovver Cro-magnonese, upper-Acheulian, middle English, Iroquoian and Hyannis-Portese smatterings of which tongues and dialects he had picked up during his various sojourns in the past. No dice. Every word he spoke was just plain Greek to the girl and the boy. Suddenly the girl's eyes sparkled with excitement, and, plunging her hand into a plastic reticule that hung from the belt that supported her slacks, she withdrew what appeared to be three pairs of earrings. She handed one pair to Carpenter, one to the boy, and kept one for herself; ' then she and the boy proceeded to affix the objects to their ear lobes, motioning to Carpenter to do the same. Complying, he discovered that the tiny disks which he had taken for pendants were in reality tiny diaphragms of some kind. Once the minute clamps were tightened into IF to place, they fitted just within the ear openings. The girl regarded his handiwork critically for a moment, then, standing on tiptoe, reached up and adiiisted each disk with deft fingers. Satisfied, she stepped back. "Now," she said, in perfect idiomatic English. 'we can get through to each other and find out what's what." C arpcnter stared at her. "Well I must say, you caught on to my langiia'c awful fast!" "Oh, we didn't learn it," the boy said. "Those are micro-translators -- hearrin:s. With them on, whatever we sav sounds to you the way you would say it, and whatever you say sounds to us the way we would say it." "I forgot I had them with me," said the girl. "They're standard travelers' equipment, but, not being a traveler in the strict sense of the word, I wouldn't have happened to have them. Only I'd just got back from foreign-activities class when the kidnapers grabbed me. Now," she went on, again gazing earnestly up into Carpenter's eyes, "I think it will be best if we take care of the amenities first, don't you? My name is Marcy, this is my brother Skip, and we are from Greater Mars. What is your name, and where are you from, kind sir?" I t wasn't easy, but Carpenter managed to keep his voice matter-of-fact. It was no more than fair that he should have. If anything, what he had to say was even more incredible than what he had just heard. "I'm Howard Carpenter, and Tm from Earth, # A. D. That's # years from now." He pointed to the triceratank. "Sam over there is my time machine -- among other things. When powered from an outside source, there's practically no limit to his field of operations." The girl blinked once, and so did the boy. But that was all. "Well," Marcy said presently, "that much is taken care of: you're from Earth Future and we're from Mars Present." She paused, looking at Carpenter curiously. "Is there something you don't understand, Mr. Carpenter?" Carpenter took a deep breath. He exhaled it. "In point of fact, yes. For one thing, there's the little matter of the difference in gravity between the two planets. Here on Earth you weigh more than twice as much as you weigh on Mars, and I can't quite figure out how you can move around so effortlessly, to say nothing of how you could have shinned up the trunk of that ginkgo tree." "Oh, I see what you mean, Mr. Carpenter," Marcy said. "And it's a very good point, too. But obviously you're using Mars Future as a criterion, and just as obviously Mars Future is no longer quite the same as Mars Present. I -- I guess a lot can happen in # years. Well, anyway, Mr. Carpenter," she continued, "the Mars of Skip's and my day has a gravity that approximates this planet's. Centuries ago, you see, our engineers artificially increased the existent gravity in order that no more of our atmosphere could escape into space, and sucIF cessive generations have adapted themselves to the stronger pull. Does that clarify matters for you, Mr. Carpenter?" He had to admit that it did. "Do you kids have a last name?" he asked. "No, we don't, Mr. Carpenter. At one time it was the custom for Martians to have last names, but when desentimentalization was introduced, the custom was abolished. Before we proceed any further, Mr. Carpenter, I would like to thank you for saving our lives. It -- it was very noble of you." "You're most welcome," Carpenter said, "but I'm afraid if we go on standing here in the open like this. I'm going to have to save them all over again, and my own to boot. So let's the three of us get inside Sam where it's safe. All right?" Leading the way over to the triceratank, he vaulted up on the snout and reached down for the girl's hand. After pulling her up beside him, he helped her into the driver's compartment. "There's a small doorway behind the driver's seat," he told her. "Crawl through it and make yourself at home in the cabin just beyond. You'll find a table and chairs arid a bunk, plus a cupboard filled with good things to eat. All the comforts of home." Before she could comply, a weird whistling sound came from above the plain. She glanced at the sky, and her face went dead-white. "It's them!" she gasped. "They've found us already!" Carpenter saw the dark wingedshapes of the pteranodons then. There were two of them, and they were homing in on the triceratank like a pair of prehistoric dive-bombers. Seizing Skip's hand, he pulled the boy up on the snout, set him in the compartment beside his sister, and told them to get into the cabin fast. Then he jumped into the driver's seat and slammed down the nacelle. Just in time: the first pteranodon came so close that its right aileron scraped against Sam's frilled headshield, and the second came so close that its ventral fuselage brushed Sam's back. Their twin tailjets left two double wakes of bluish smoke. n C arpenter sat up straight in the driver's seat. Ailerons? Fuselage? Tailjets? Pteranodons? He activated Sam's shield-field and extended it to a distance of two feet beyond the armor-plating, then he threw the reptivehicle into gear. The pteranodons were circling high overhead. "Marcy," he called, "come forward a minute, will you?" Her buttercup-colored hair tickled his cheek as she leaned over his shoulder. "Yes, Mr. Carpenter?" "When you saw the pteranodons, you said, 'They've found us already!' What did you mean by that?" "They're not pteranodons, Mr, Carpenter. Whatever pteranodons are. They're kidnapers, piloting military-surplus flyabouts that probably look like pteranodons. They abducted Skip and me from the preparatory school of the Greater Martian Technological Apotheosization Institute and are holding us for ransom. Earth is their hideout. There are three of them altogether -- Roul and Fritad and Holmer. One of them is probably back in the spaceship." Carpenter was silent for several moments. The Mars of # A.D. was a desolate place of rubble, sand and wind inhabited by a few thousand diehard colonists from Earth and a few hundred thousand diehard Martians, the former living beneath atmosphere-domes and the latter, save for the few who had intermarried with the colonists, living in deep caves where oxygen could still be obtained. But twenty-second century excavations by the Extraterrestrial Archaeological Society had unearthed unquestionable evidence to the effect that an ultra-technological civilization similar to that of Earth Present had existed on the planet over # years ago. Surely it was no more than reasonable to assume that such a civilization had had space travel. That being the case, Earth, during her uppermost Mesozoic Era, must have presented an ideal hideout for Martian criminals, kidnapers included. Certainly such a theory threw considerable light on the anachronisms that kept cropping up in Cretaceous strata. There was of course another way to explain Marcys and Skip's presence in the Age of DinosaOrs: they could be # A.D. Earth children, and they could have wOme back via time machine the same as he had. Or they could have been abducted by twenty-second century kidnapers for that matter, and have been brought back. But, that being so, why should they lie about it? "Tell me, Marcy," Carpenter said, "do you believe I came from the future?" "Oh, of course, Mr. Carpenter. And I'm sure Skip does, too. Its -- its kind of hard to believe, but I know that someone as nice as you wouldn't tell a fib -- especially such a big one." "Thank you," Carpenter said. "And I believe you came from Greater Mars, which, I imagine, is the planet's largest and most powerful country. Tell me something about your civilization." "It's a magnificent civilization, Mr. Carpenter. Every day we progress by leaps and bounds, and now that we've licked the instability factor, we'll progress even faster." " The instability factor'?" "Human emotion. It held us back for years, but it can't any more. Now, when a boy reaches his thirteenth birthday and a girl reaches her fifteenth, they are desentimentalizcd. And after that, they are able to make calm cool decisions strictly in keeping with pure logic. That way they can achieve maximum efficiency. At the Institute preparatory school. Skip and I are going through what is known as the 'pre-desentimentalization process.' After four more years we'll begin receiving dosages of the desentimentalization drug. Then -- " one of the pteranodons as it sideswiped the shield-field. IF Carpenter watched it as it wobbled wildly for a moment, and before it shot skyward he caught a glimpse of its occupant. All he saw was an expressionless face, but from its forward location he deduced that the man was lying in a prone position between the two twelve-foot wings. Marcy was trembling. "I -- I think they're out to kill us, Mr. Carpenter," she said. "They threatened to if we tried to escape. Now that they've got our voices on the ransom tape, they probably figure they don't need us any more." He reached back and patted her hand where it lay lightly on his shoulder. "It's all right, pumpkin. With old Sam here protecting you, you haven't got a thing to worry about." "Is -- is that really his name, "It sure is. Sam Triceratops, Esquire. Sam, this is Marcy. You take good care of her and her brother -- do you hear me?" He turned his head and looked into the girl's wide blue eyes. "He says he will. I'll bet you haven't got anybody like him on Mars, have you?" She shook her head -- as standard a Martian gesture, apparently, as it was a terrestrial -- and for a moment he thought that a tremulous smile was going to break up on her lips. It didn't, though -- not quite. "Indeed we haven't, Mr. Carpenter." He squinted up through the nacelle at the circling pteranodons (he still thought of them as pteranodons, even though he knew they were not). "Where's this spaceship of their's, Marcy? Is it far from here?" She pointed to the left. "Over there. You come to a river, and then a swamp. Skip and I escaped this morning when Fritad, who was guarding the lock, fell asleep. They're a bunch of sleepyheads, always falling asleep when it's their turn to stand guard. Eventually the Greater Martian Space Police will track the ship here; we thought we could hide out until they got here. We crept through the swamp and floated across the river on a log. It -- it was awful, with big snakes on legs chasing us, and -- and -- " His shoulder informed him that she was trembling again. "Look, I'll tell you what, pumpkin," he said. "You go back to the cabin and fix yourself and Skip something to eat. I don't know what kind of food you're accustomed to, but it can't be too different from what Sam's got in stock. You'll find some square, vacuum-containers in the cupboard -- they contain sandwiches. On the refrigerator-shelf just above, you'll find some tall bottles with circlets of little stars -- they contain pop. Open some of each, and dig in. Come to think of it. I'm hungry myself, so while you're at it, fix me something, too." Again, she almost smiled. "All right, Mr. Carpenter. I'll fix you something special." Alone in the driver's compartment, he surveyed the Cretaceous landscape through the front, lateral and rear viewscopes. A range of young mountains showed far to the left. To the right was the distant line of cliffs. The rear viewscope framed scattered stands of willows. fan palms and dwarf magnolias, beyond which the forested uplands, wherein lay his entry area, began. Far ahead, volcanos smoked with Mesozoic abandon. # yean from now, this territory would be part of the state of Montana. # years from now, a group of paleontologists digging somewhere in the vastly changed terrain would unearth the fossil of a modem man who had died # years before his disinterment. Would the fossil turn out to be his own! Carpenter grinned, and looked up at the sky to where the two pteranodons still circle. It could have been the fossil of a Martian. He turned the triceratank around and started off in the opposite direction. "Come on, Sam," he said. "Let's see if we can't find a good hiding place where we can lay over for the night. Maybe by morning I'll be able to figure out what to do. Who'd ever have thought we'd wind up playing rescue-team to a couple of kids?" Sam grunted deep in his gear box and made tracks for the forested uplands. T he trouble with going back in time to investigate anachronisms was that frequently you found yourself the author of the anachronism in question. Take the classic instance of Professor Archibald Quigley. Whether the story was true or not, no one could say for certain, but, true or not, it pointed up the irony of time travel as nothing else could. A stanch Coleridge admirer. Professor Quigley had been curious for years -- or so the story went -- as to the identity of the visitor who had called at the farmhouse in Nether Stowey in the county of Somersetshire, England in the year # and interrupted Coleridge while the poet was writing down a poem which he had just composed in his sleep. The visitor had hung around for an hour, and afterward Coleridge hadn't been able to remember the rest of the poem. As a result, Kubla Khan was never finished. Eventually, Professor Quigley's curiosity grew to such proportions that he could no longer endure it, and he applied at the Bureau of Time Travel for permission to return to the placetime in order that he might set his mind at ease. His request was granted, whereupon he handed over half his life-savings without a qualm in exchange for a trip back to the morning in question. Emerging near the farmhouse, he hid in a clump of bushes, watching the front door; then, growing impatient when no one showed up, ho went to the door himself, and knocked. Coleridge answered the knock personally, and even though he asked the professor in, the dark look that he gave his visitor was something which the professor never forgot to the end of his days. Recalling the story. Carpenter chuckled. It wasn't really anything for him to be chuckling about, though, because what had happened to the professor could very well happen to him. Whether he liked k or not, there was a good chance IF that the fossil which the North American Paleontological Society had sent him back to the Mesozoic Era to investigate might turn out to be his own. Nevertheless, he refused to let the possibility bother him. For one thing, the minute he found himself in a jam, all he had to do was to contact his two assistants, Miss Sands and Peter Detritus, and they would come flying to his aid in Edith the therapod or one of the other rephand. For ant .her, he had already learned that outside forces were at work in the Cretaceous Period. He wasn't the only candidate for fossildom. Anyway, worrying about such matters was a waste of time: what was going to happen had already happened, and that was all there was to it. S kip crawled out of the cabin and leaned over the back of the driver's seat. 'Marcy sent you up a sandwich and a bottle of pop, Mr. Carpenter," he said, handing over both items. And then, "Can I sit beside you, sir?" "Sure thing," Carpenter said, moving over. The boy climbed over the backrest and slid down into the seat. No sooner had he done so than another buttercup-colored head appeared. "Would -- would it be all right, Mr. Carpenter, if -- if -- " "Move over and make room for her in the middle. Skip." Sam's head was a good five feet wide, hence the driver's compartment was by no means a small one. But the seat itself was only three feet wide, and accommodating two half-grown kids and a man the size of Carpenter wasno small accomplishment, especially in view of the fact that all three of them were eating sandwiches and drinking pop. Carpenter felt like an indulgent parent taking his offspring on an excursion through a zoo. And such a zoo!, They were in the forest now, and around them Cretaceous oaks and laurels stood; there were willows, too, and screw pines and gingkos galore, and now and then they passed through incongruous stands of fan palms. Through the undergrowth they glimpsed a huge and lumbering creature that looked like a horse in front and a kangaroo in back. Carpenter identified it as an anatosaurus. In a clearing they came upon a struthiomimus and startled the ostrich-like creature half out of its wits. A spike-backed ankylosaurus glowered at them from behind a clump of sedges, but discreetly refrained from questioning Sam's right of way. Glancing into a treetop, Carpenter saw him first archaeopteryx. Rising his eyes still higher, he saw the circling pteranodons. He had hoped to lose them after entering the forest, and to this end he held Sam on an erratic course. Obviously, however, they were equipped with matter detectors. ' A more sophisticated subterfuge would be necessary. There was a chance that he might bring them down with a barrage of stun-charges, but it was a slim one and he decided not to try it in any event. The kidnapers undoubtedly deserved to die for what they had done, but he was not their judge. He would kill them if he had to, but he refused to do it as long as he had an ace up his sleeve. Turning toward the two children, he saw that they had lost interest in their sandwiches and were looking apprehensively upward. Catching their eye, he winked. "I think it's high time we gave them the slip, don't you?" "But how, Mr. Carpenter?" Skip asked. " They're locked right on us with their detector-beams. We're just lucky ordinary Martians like them can't buy super Martian weapons. They've got melters, which are a form of iridescers: but if they had real iridescers; we'd be goners." "We can shake them easy, merely by jumping a little ways back in lime. Come on, you two -- finish your sandwiches and stop worrying." Their apprehension vanished, and excitement took its place. Let's jump back six days," Marcy said. "They'll never find us then because we won't be here yet." "Can't do it, pumpkin -- it would take too much starch out of Sam. Time-jumping requires a tremendous amount of power. In order for a part-time time-machine like Sam to jump any great distance, its power has to be supplemented by the power of .a regular time station. The station propels the reptivehicle back to a pre-established entry area, and the time-traveler drives out of the area and goes about his business. The only way he can get back to the present is by driving back into the area, contacting the station and tapping its power-supply again, or by sending back a distress signal and having someone come to get him in another reptivehicle. At the most, Sam could make about a four-day round trip under his own power but it would burn him out. Once that happened, even the station couldn't pull him back. I think we'd better settle for an hour." I ronically, the smaller the temporal distance you had to deal with, the more figuring you had to do. After directing the triceratank via the liaison-ring on his right index finger to continue on its present erratic course. Carpenter got busy with pad and pencil, and presently he began punching out arithmetical brain-twisters on the compact computer that was built into the control panel. Marcy leaned forward, watching him intently. "If it will expedite matters, Mr. Carpenter," she said, "I can do simple sums, such as those you're writing down, in my head. For instance, # times #I equals #." "It may very well at that, pumpkin, but I think we'd better check and make sure, don't you?" He punched out the first two sets of numerals on the calculator, and depressed the multiplication button. # the answer panel said. He nearly dropped the pencil. "She's a mathematical genius," Skip said. "I'm a mechanical genius IF myself. That's how come we were kidnaped. Our government values geniuses highly. They'll pay a lot of money to get us back." "Your government? I thought kidnapers preyed on parents, not governments." "Oh, but out parents aren't responsible for us any more," Marcy explained. "In fact, they've probably forgotten all about us. After the age of six, children become the property of the state. Modern Martian parents are desentimentalized, you see, and don't in the least mind getting rid of -- giving up their children." Carpenter regarded the two solemn faces for some time. "Yes," he said, "I do see at that." With Marcy's help, he completed the rest of his calculations; then he fed the final set of figures into Sam's frontal ganglion. "Here we go, you two!" he said, and threw the jumpback switch. There was a brief shimmering effect and an almost imperceptible jar. So smoothly did the transition take place that Sam did not even pause in his lumbering walk. C arpenter turned his wristwatoh back from #:# P.M. to #:# P.M. "Take a look at the sky now, kids. See any more pteranodons?" They peered up through the foliage. "Not a one, Mr. Carpenter," Marcy said, her eyes warm with admiration. "Not a single one!" "Say, you've got our scientists beat forty different ways from Sunday!" Skip said. "They think they're pretty smart, but I'll bet they've never even thought of trying to travel in time... How far can you jump into the future Mr. Carpenter -- in a regular time-machine, I mean?" "Given sufficient power, to the end of time -- if time does have an end. But traveling beyond one's own present is forbidden by law. The powers-that-be in .# consider it bad for a race of people to find out what's going to happen to them before it actually happens, and for once I'm inclined to think that the powers-that-be are right." He discontinued liaison control, took over manually and set Sam on a course at right angles to their present direction. At length they broke free from the forest onto the plain. In the distance the line of cliffs that he had noticed earlier showed whitely against the blue and hazy sky. "How'd you kids like to camp out for the night?" he asked. Skip's eyes went round. "Camp out, Mr. Carpenter?" "Sure. We'll build a fire, cook our food over it, spread our blankets on the ground -- regular American Indian style. Maybe we can even find a cave in the cliffs. Think you'd like that?" Both pairs of eyes were round now. "What's 'American Indian style,' Mr. Carpenter?" Marcy asked. He told them about the Arapahoes and the Cheyennes and the Crows and the Apaches, and about the buffalo and the great plains and Custer's last stand, and the Conestogas and the frontiersmen (the old ones, not the "new"), and about Geronimo aud Sitting Bull and Cochise, and all the while he talked their eyes remained fastened on his face as though it were the sun and they had never before seen day. When he finished telling them about the settling of the west, he told them about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and Generals Grant and Lee and the Gettysburg Address and the Battle of Bull Run and the surrender at Appomattox. He had never talked so much in all his life. He wondered what had come over him, why he felt so carefree and gay all of a sudden and why nothing seemed to matter except the haze-ridden Cretaceous afternoon and the two round-eyed children sitting beside him. But he did not waste much time wondering. He went on to tell them about the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and about what a wonderful dream the founding fathers had had and about how much better it would have turned out if opportunistic men had not used it to further their own selfish end and about how relatively wonderful it had turned out anyway, despite the many crimes that had been committed in its name. By the time .he finished, evening was on hand. The white cliffs rose up before them, shouldering the darkening sky. At the base of the cliffs they found a jim-dandy of an untenanted cave, large enough to accommodate both Sam and themselves and with enough room left over to build a campfire. Carpenter drove the reptivehicle inside and parked it in the rear; then he extended the shieldfield till it included the cave, the side of the cliff and a large semi-circular area at the base of the cliff. After checking the "front yard" and finding that it contained no reptiles except several small and harmless lizards, he put the two children to work gathering firewood. Meanwhile, he generated a one-way illusion-field just within the shield field so that the forthcoming campfire would not be visible from without. There was plenty of firewood available in the form of dead laurel and dogwod branches. Soon a respectable pile of fuel reposed just within the mouth of the cave. By this time Skip, at least, had shed his reserve. "Can I help build the fire, Mr. Carpenter?" he cried jumping up and down. "Can I -- can I -- can I?" "Skip!" Marcy said. "Its all right, pumpkin," Carpenter told her. "You can help, too, if you like." T he walls of the cave turned red, then rosy, as young flames grew into full-fledged ones. Carpenter opened three packages of frankfurters and three packages of rolls and showed his. charges how to spear the frankfurters on the end of pointed sticks and roast them over the fire. Afterward he demonstrated how to place a frankfurter in a roll and smother it with mustard, pickle relish, and chopped onions. It was i# IF as though he had flung wide magic casements opening on enchanted lands that the two children had not dreamed existed. The last vestiges of solemnity departed from their faces, and during the next half hour they created and consumed six hot dogs apiece. Skip got so excited that he nearly fell into the fire, and the smile that had been trying all afternoon to break upon Marcy's lips at last came through, teaching the flames to burn bright. Carpenter had made a pot of cocoa in Sam's kitchenette, and nothing more was needed to round out the cookout except marshmallows. Was it remotely possible, he wondered, that his efficient chief assistant had included such nostalgic delicacies among the various supplies in Sam's tail-compartment? It was doubtful at best, but he took a look anyway. To his delight, he found a whole box of them. Again, he performed a demonstration, while the two children looked on in open-mouthed awe. When the two marshmallows which he had speared on his stick turned golden brown he thought for a moment that Skip's eyes were going to fall out of his head. As for Marcy, she just stood, there and stared as though Carpenter had said, "Let there be light!" and the first day had come into being. Laughing, he removed the marshmallows and handed one to each of them. "Skip!" xMarcy said when the boy popped his into his mouth and dispatched it with a single gulp, "where are your manners?" She ate her's daintily. After the marshmallow roast, ht went outside and cut enough laurel and dogwood branches for three mattresses. He showed the children how to arrange the branches on the cavern floor and how to cover them with the blankets which he took out of Sam's tail-compartment. Skip needed no further invitation to turn in: exhausted from his enthusiastic activities and becalmed by his full stomach, he collapsed upon his blanket as soon as he had it in place. Carpenter got three more blankets, covered him with one of them and turned to Marcey, "You look tired, too, pumpkin." "Oh, but I'm not, Mr Carpenter. Not in the least bit. I'm two years older than Skip, you know. He's just a kid." H e folded the remaining two blankets into impromptu pillows and placed them a few feet from the fire. He sat down on one of them; she sat down on the other. All evening, grunts and growls and groans had been coming sporadically from beyond the shield-field; now they were supplanted by an awesome noise that brought to mind a gigantic road-repair machine breaking up old pavement. The cavern floor trembled, and the firelight flickered wildly on the wall. "Sounds like old tyrannosaurus," Carpenter said. "Probably out looking for a midnight snack in the form of a struthiomimus or two." " 'Tyrannosaurus,' Mr. Carpenter?" He described the ferocious theropod for her. S#ic nodded after he had finished, and a shudder shook her. "Yes," she said, "Skip and I saw one. It was a little while after we crossed the river. We -- we hid in a clump of bushes till he passed. What terrible creatures you have here on Earth, Mr. Carpenterl" "They no longer exist in my day and age," Carpenter said. "We have terrible 'creatures' of another order -- 'creatures' that would send old tyrannosaurus high-tailing it for the hills like a flushed rabbit. I shouldn't be complaining, though. Our technological debauchery left us with a cold-war hangover -- sure; but it. paid off in quite a number of things. Time travel, for one. Interplanetary travel, for another." At this point, the road-repair machine struck a bad stretch of pavement, and, judging from the ungodly series of sound that ensued, blew a rod to boot. The girl moved closer to him. "Take it easy pumpkin. There's nothing to worry about. An army of theropods couldn't break through that shield-field." "Why do you call me 'pumpkin', Mr. Carpenter? On Mars, a pumpkin is an unpleasant squashy vegetable that grows in swamps and midden-marshes." He laughed. The sounds from beyond the shield-field diminished, then faded away, as the theropod thundered off in another direction. "On Earth, a pumpkin is quite a nice vegetable -- or maybe it's a fruit. Whichever, it's quite respectable. But that's beside the point. 'Pumpkin' is what a man calls a girl when he likes her." There was a silence. Then, "Do you have a real girl, Mr. Carpenter?" "Not actually, Marcy. You might say that figuratively speaking I worship one from afar." "That doesn't sound like very much fun. Who is she?" "She's my chief assistant at the North American Paleontological Society where I work -- Miss Sands. Her first name is 'Elaine', but I never call her by it. She sees to it that I don't forget anything when I retro-travel, and she cases the placetimes over a time-scope before I start out. Then she and my other assistant, Peter Detritus,' stand by, ready to come to the rescue if I should send back a can of chicken soup. You see, a can of chicken soup is our distress signal. It's about as big an object as a paleontologivehicle can handle in most cases, and the word 'chicken' in our language cannotes fear." "But why do you worship her from afar, Mr. Carpenter?" "Well you see," Carpenter said, "Miss Sands isn't just an ordinary run-of-the-mill girl. She's the cool, aloof type -- a goddess, if you know what I mean. Although I don't see how you possibly could. Anyway, you simply don't treat goddesses the way you treat mere girls -- you keep your distance and worship them from afar and humbly wait for them to bestow favors upon you. I -- I worship her so much, in fact, that every time I'm near her I get so flustrated that I can hardly say anything. Maybe after I get to know her better it'll be different. So far. I've known her three months." IF H e fell silent. Marcys hearrings twinkled in the firelight as she turned and looked gently up into his face. "What's the matter, Mr, Carpenter -- cat got your tongue?" "I was just thinking," Carpenter said. "Three months is quite a long time at that -- long enough for a man to tell whether a girl is ever going to like him or not. And Miss Sands isn't ever going to like me -- I can see that now. Why, she doesn't even look at me unless she absolutely has to, and she won't say two words to me if she can possibly avoid it. So you see, even if I did stop worshipping her from afar and got up enough nerve to tell her that I love her, she would probably only be annoyed and tell me to get lost." Marcy was indignant. "She must be out of her mind, Mr. Carpenter -- just plain out of her mind. She should be ashamed of herself!" "No, Marcy -- you've got her all wrong. You can't expect a girl as beautiful as she is to go for a goodfor-nothing time-bum like me." "A good-for-nothing time-bum indeed! You know, Mr. Carpenter, I don't think you understand women very well. Why, I'll bet if you told her you love her, she'd throw herself into your arms!" "You're a romantic, Marcy. In real life, such things don't happen." He stood up "Well, young lady, I don't know about you, but I'm tired. Shall we call it a day?" "If you wish to, Mr Carpenter." She was asleep by the time he pulled her blanket up to her chin. As he stood there looking down at her, e turned on her side, and the firelight caught the buttercup-hue fuzz on the back of her neck, where her hair had been cut too short, and tinted it red-gold. All he could think of were buttercup-clad meadows in spring, and the warm clean sun rising and ushering in the dewjeweled day... After checking to see if Skip was all right, he went over and stood in the cave mouth and stared out into the darkness. With tyrannosaurus' departure, the lesser Cretaceous creatures had come out of their hiding places and were making their presence known again. He glimpsed the grotesque shapes of several ornithopods; he saw an ankylosaurus standing immobile by a coppice of fan palms; he heard lizards scurrying both inside and outside the shieldfield. A moon subtly different from the one he was most accustomed to was climbing into the prehistoric heavens. The difference lay in the number of meteorite craters. There were far fewer of them now than there would be # years in the future. He realized presently that although he was still looking at the moon he was no longer seeing it. He was seeing the campfire instead, and the girl and the boy enthusiastically roasting marshmallows. Why hadn't he gotten married and had children? he wondered suddenly. Why had he passed up all the pretty girls he had ever known, only to fall hopelessly in love at the age of thirty-two with a beautiful goddess who preferred not to know he was alive? What had given him the notion that the thrill derived from adventure was somehow superior to the contentment derived from loving and being loved? -- that getting the bugs out of historical and pre-historical times was more important than getting the bugs out of his own life? That a lonely room in a boarding house was a man's castle and that drinks drank in dim-lit bars with fun-girls he could no longer remember the next day spelled "freedom?" What treasure had he expected to find in the past that could equal the treasures he had passed up in the future? The night had grown chill. Before lying down to sleep he added more wood to the fire. He listened to the flames crackle and watched their pale flickerings on the cavern walls. A lizard regarded him with golden eyes out of prehistoric shadows. In the distance, an omithopod went Waroompfl Beside him in the Mesozoic night the two children breathed softly in their green-bough beds. Presently he slept. Ill T he next morning, Carpenter wasted no time in getting the show on the road Marcy and Skip were all for remaining in the cave indefinitely, but he explained to them that, were they to stay in one place, the kidnapers would find them that much sooner, and that therefore it would be better if they kept on the move. Thus far, everything he had told them had rung a bell in their language just as everything they had told him had rung a bell in his, but this time, for some reason, he had a hard time getting through to diem. Either t!iat, or they just plain didnt want to to leave the cave. Leave it they did however -- after ablutions performed in Sams compact lavatory and a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked in Sam's kitchenette -- when he made it clear to them that he was still the boss. He hadn't as yet decided on a definite plan of action. While trying to make up his mind, he let the triceratank. pick its own course over the plain -- a feat for which its hypersensitive terrainometer more than qualified. Actually, he had only two choices: (#) -- continue to play big brother to the two children and elude the kidnapers until they gave up or until the cavalry, in the form of the Greater Martian Space Police, arrived on the scene, or (#) -- return to the entry-area and signal Miss Sands and Peter Detritus to bring the triceratank back to the present The second choice was by far the safer course of action. He would have settled for it without hesitation if it had not been for two things: (a) Marcy and Skip, while they undoubtedly would be able to adapt to a civilization as similar to their own as twenty-second century terrestrial civilization was, might never feel completely at home in it, and (b) sooner or later, they would come face to face with the demoralizing information that their own civilization of # years ago, had long since turned to dust and that the technological dreams which they had been taught to regard as gospel had come to nothing. A posIF sible third choice lay in taking them back to Earth Present, keeping them there until such time as the kidnapers gave up and left or until the Space Police showed up, and then returning them to Earth Past; but such a procedure would involve several round trips to the Cretaceous Period. Carpenter knew without having to ask that, owing to the fantastic expense involved, one such non-paleontological round trip, to say nothing of several. P ondering the problem, he became . aware that someone was tugging on his sleeve. It was Skip, who had come forward and climbed into the driver's seat. "Can I steer him, Mr. Carpenter? Can I?" Carpenter surveyed the plain through the front, lateral, and rear viewscopes; then he raised Sam's head and took a long look at the sky through the nacelle. A dark speck hovered high above the line of cliffs they had left less than an hour ago. As he watched, it was joined by two others. "Later on. Skip. Right now, I think we've got company." Skip's eyes had found the specks, too. "The pteranodons again, Mr. Carpenter?" "I'm afraid so." The specks grew rapidly larger, resolved into winged shapes with narrow, pointed heads. Marcy had come forward, and her gaze, too, was directed at the sky. This time, she didn't seem to be in the least bit frightened, and neither did Skip. "Are we going to jump back in time again, Mr. Carpenter?" she asked. "We'll see, pumpkin," he said. The pteranodons were clearly visible now. There was no question but what they were interested in Sam. Whether they would try attacking him again was another matter. In any event, Carpenter decided that, even though the triceratank's shield-field was in operation, his best bet would be to head for the nearest stand of trees. It was a stand of palmettos, and about half a mile distant. He threw Sam into high, and took over the controls again. "Come on, Sam," he said, to keep the kids' morale from faltering, "show Marcy and Skip what you can dol" Sam took off like a twentiethcentury locomotive, his flexible steel legs moving rhythmically, his alloyhoofs pounding the ground in a thunderous cadence. Nevertheless, he was no match for the pteranodons, and they overtook him easily. The foremost one swooped down a hundred yards ahead, released what looked like a big metal egg and soared skyward. The metal egg turned out to be a bomb. The crater that it created was so wide that it took all of Carpenter's skill to guide Sam around it without rolling the reptivehicle over. Instantly he revved up the engine and shifted into second. "They're not going to get us that way, are they, old timer?" he said. Carpenter glanced at the sky. All of the pteranodons were directly overhead now. Circling. One, two, three, he counted. Three... yesterday there had been only two. "Marcy," he said, suddenly excited, "how IF many kidnapers did you say there were?" "Three, Mr. Carpenter. Roul and Fritad and Holmer." "Then they're all up there. That means the ship is unguarded -- imless theres a crew." "No, Mr. Carpenter -- here's no crew. They did the piloting ttiemselves." He lowered his gaze from the circling pteranodons. "Do you kids think you could get inside?" "Easy," Skip said. "It's a militarysurplus flyabout-carrier with standard locks, and standard locks are simple for someone with a little mechanical ability to disengage. That's how come Marcy and I were able to escape in the first place. You just leave everything to me, Mr. Carpenter." "Good," Carpenter said. "We'll be diere waiting for them when they come back." W ith Marcy doing the figuring, retro co-ordinate calculus was a breeze. Sam was ready for jumpback in a matter of seconds. Carpenter waited till they were in the stand of palmettos, then he threw the switch. Again, there was a shimmering .effect and a slight jar, and daylight gave way to pre-dawn darkness. Behind them in a cave at the base of the cliffs, another triceratank stood, and another Carpenter and another Marcy and Skip still slept soundly in their green-bough beds. "How far did we jump back this time, Mr. Carpenter?" Skip asked. Carpenter turned on Sam's headlights and began guiding him out of the stand of palmettos. "Four hours. That should give us plenty of time to reach the ship and get set before our friends return. We may even reach it before they start out -- assuming of course that they haven't been searching for us round the clock." "But suppose they spot us in this time-phase?" Marcy objected. "Won't we be in the same pickle we just got out of?" "It's a possibility, pumpkin. But the odds have it overwhelmingly that they didn't spot us. Otherwise they wouldn't have gone on searching for us -- right?" She gazed at him admiringly. "You know something, Mr. Carpenter? You're pretty smart." Coming from someone who could multiply #I by # in her head, it was quite a compliment. However, Carpenter managed to take it in his stride. "I hope you kids can find the ship now, " ue said. "We're already on the right course," Skip said. "I know, because I've got a perfect sense of direction. It's camouflaged as a big tree." For the second time that morning, the sun came up. As had been the case yesterday, Sam's size and mien cowed the various Cretaceous creatures they met although whether tyrannosaurus would have been similarly cowed had they come upon him was a ' moot question at best. In any case, they didn't come upon him. By eight o'clock they were moving over the same terrain that Carpenter had come to not long after leaving the forested uplands the day before. "Look!" Marcy exclaimed presently. "There's the tree we climbed when the humpbacked monster chased us!" "It sure is," Skip said. "Boy, were we scared!" Carpenter grinned. "He probably thought you were some species of flora he hadn't tried yet. Good thing for his digestive system that I happened along when I did." They looked at him blankly for a moment, and at first he thought that the barriers of two different languages and two different thought worlds had been too high for his little joke to surmount. Such, however, did not prove to be the case. First Marcy burst out laughing, and then Skip. "Mr. Carpenter, if you aren't the darndest!" Marcy cried. T hey went on. The landscape grew more and more open, with coppices of palmettos and clusters of fan palms constituting most of the major plant-life. Far to the right, smoking volcanos added their discolored breath to the hazy atmosphere. In the distances ahead, mountains showed, their heads lost in the Mesozoic smog. The humidity was so high that large globules of moisture kept condensing on Sam's nacelle and rolling down like raindrops. Tortoises, lizards, and snakes abounded, and once a real pteranodon glided swiftly by overhead. At length they came to the river which Marcy had mentioned and which the increasing softness of the ground had been heralding for some time. Looking downstream, Carpenter saw his first brontosaurus. He pointed it out to the kids, and they stared at it bug-eyed. It was wallowing in the middle of the sluggish stream. Only its small head, its long neck, and the upper part of its back were visible. The neck brought to mind a lofty rubbery tower, but the illusion was marred by the frequency with which the head kept dipping down to the ferns and horse tails that lined the river bank. The poor creature was so enormous that it virtually had to keep eating day and night in order to stay alive. Carpenter found a shallows and guided Sam across the stream to the opposite bank. The ground was somewhat firmer here, but the firmness was deceiving, for the reptivehicle's terrainometer registered an even higher frequency of bogs. (Lord! Carpenter thought. Suppose the two kids had blundered into one!) Ferns grew in abundance, and there were thick carpets of sassafras and sedges. Palmettos and fan palms were still the rule, but there were occasional ginkgos scattered here and there. One of them was a veritable giant of a tree, towering to a height of over one hundred and fifty feet. Carpenter stared at it. Cretaceous Period ginkgos generally grew on highground, not low, but a ginkgo the size of this one had no business growing in the Cretaceous Period at all. Moreover, the huge tree was incongruous in other respects. Its trunk was far too thick, for one thing. For another, the lower part of it up to a height of about twenty IF feet consisted of three slender subtrunks, forming a sort of tripod on which the rest of the tree rested. At this point, Carpenter became aware that his two charges were pointing excitedly at the object of his curiosity "That's ur Skip exclaimed. "That's the ship!" "Well, no wonder it caught my eye," Carpenter said. "They didn't do a very good job of camouflaging it. I can even see one of the flyabout-bays." Marcy said. "They weren't particularly concerned about how it looks from the ground. It's how it looks from above that counts. Of course, if the Space Police get here in time they'll pick it up sooner or later on their detector-beams, but it will fool them for a while at least." "You talk as though you don't expect them to get here in time." "I don't. Oh, they'll get here eventually, Mr. Carpenter, but not for weeks, and maybe even months. It takes a long time for their radarintelligence department to track a ship, besides which it's a sure bet that they don't even know we've been kidnaped yet. In aJl previous cases where Institute children have been abducted, the government has paid the ransom' first and then notified the Space Police. Of course, even after the ransom has been paid and the children have been returned, the Space Police still launch a search for the kidnapers, and eventually they find their hideout; but naturally the kidnapers are long gone by then. "I think," Carpenter said, "that it's high time a precedent was established, don't you?"  A fter parking Sam out of sight in a nearly coppice of palmettos and deactivating the shield-field, he reached in under the driver's seat and pulled out the only hand weapon the triceratank contained -- a lightweight but powerful stun-rifle specially deof time-travel personnel. Slinging it on his shoulder, he threw open the nacelle, stepped out onto Sam's snout and helped the two children down to the ground. The trio approached the ship. Skip shinned up one of the landing jacks, climbed some distance up the trunk and had the locks open in a matter of seconds. He lowered an aluminum ladder. "Everything's all set, Mr. Carpenter." Marcy glanced over her shoulder at the palmetto coppice. "Will -- will Sam be all right do you think?" "Of course he will, pumpkin," Carpenter said. "Up with you now." The ship's air-conditioned interior had a temperature that paralleled Sam's, the lighting was cool, subdued. Beyond the inner lock, a brief corridor led to a spiral steel stairway that gave access to the decks above and to the engine rooms below. Glancing at his watch, which he had set four hours back, Carpenter saw that the time was #:#. In a few minutes, the pteranodons would be closing in on the Sam and Carpenter and Marcy and Skip of the "previous" time-phase. Even assuming that the three kidnapers headed straight for the ship afterward, there was still time to spare -- time enough, certainly, to send a certain message before laying the trap he had in mind. True, he could send the message after Roul and Fritad an Holmer were safely locked in their cabins, but in the event that something went wrong he might not be able to send it at all, so it was better to send it right now. "Okay, you kids," he said, "close the locks and then lead the way to the communications-room." They obeyed the first order with alacrity, but hedged on the second. Marcy lingered in the corridor. Skip just behind her. "Why do you want to go to the communications-room, Mr. Carpenter?" she asked. "So you kids can radio our position to the Space Police and tell them to get here in a hurry. You do know how, I hope." Skip looked at Marcy. Marcy looked at Skip. After a moment, both of them shook their heads. "Now see here," Carpenter said, annoyed, "you know perfectly well you know how. Why are you pretending you don't?" Skip looked at the deck. "We -- we don't want to go home. Mr. Carpenter." Carpenter regarded first one solemn face and then the other. "But you've got to be home! Where else can you go?" Neither of them answered. Neither of them look at him. "It boils down to this," he proceeded presently. "If we succeed in capturing Roul and Fritad and Holmer, fine and dandy. We'll sit tight, and when the Space Police get here we'll turn them over. But if something goes wrong and we don't capture them. we'll at least have an ace up our sleeve in the form of the message you're going to send. Now Fm familiar with the length of time it takes to get from Mars to Earth in the spaceships of my day, but I don't of course know how long your spaceships take. So maybe you two can give me some idea of the length of time that will elapse between the Space Police's receipt of our message and their arrival here on Earth," he asked. "With the two planets in their present positions, just over four days," Marcy said. "If you like, Mr. Carpenter, I can figure it out for you right down to a fraction of a -- " "That's close enough, pumpkin. Now, up the stairs with you, and you too. Skip. Time's a-wastingl" They complied glumly. The communications-room was on the second deck. Some of the equipment was vaguely familiar to Carpenter, but most of it was Greek. A wide, deckto-ceiling viewport looked out over the Cretaceous plain, and, glancing down through the ersatz foliage, he found that he could see the palmetto coppice in which Sam was hidden. He scanned the sky for signs of the returning pteranodons. The sky was empty. Turning away from the viewport, he noticed that a fourth party had entered the room. He unslung hds stun-rifle and managed to get it party's hand went, and the stun-rifle was no more. He looked incredulously down at his hand. IF IV T he fourth party was a tall, muscular man clad in clothing similar to Marcy's and Skip's, but of a much richer material. The expression on his narrow face contained about as much feeling as a dried fig, and the metal tube in his hand was now directed at the center of Carpenter's forehead. Carpenter didn't need to be told that if he moved so much as one iota he would suffer a fate similar to that suffered by his rifle, but the man vouchsafed the information anyway. "If you move, you melt," he said. "No Holmer!" Marcy cried. "Don't you dare harm him. He only helped us because he felt sorry for us." "I thought you said there were only three of them, pumpkin," Carpenter said, not taking his eyes from Holmer's face. "That is all there are, Mr. Carpenter. Honest! The third pteranodon must have been a drone. They tricked us!" Holmer should have grinned, but he didn't. There should have been triumph in his tone of voice when he addressed Carpenter, but there wasn't. "You had to be from the future, friend," he said. "Me and my buddies cased this place some time ago, and we knew you couldn't be from now. That being so, it wasn't hard for us to figure out that when that tank of your's disappeared yesterday you either jumped ahead in time or jumped back in it, and the odds were two to one that you jumped back. So we gambled on it, figured you'd try the same thing again if you were forced into it, and rigged up a little trap for you, which we figured you'd be smart enough to fall for. You were. The only reason I don't melt you right now is because Roul and Fritad aren't back yet. I want them to get a look at you first. I'll melt you then but good. And the brats, too. We don't need them any more." Carpenter recoiled. The dictates of pure logic had much in common with the dictates of pure vindictiveness. Probably the pteranodons had been trying to "melt" Marcy, Skip, Sam, and himself almost from the beginning, and if it hadn't been for Sam's shield-field, they undoubtedly would have succeeded. Oh well. Carpenter thought, logic was a twoedged blade, and two could wield it as well as one. "How soon will your buddies be back, Holmer?" The Martian regarded him blankly. Carpenter tumbled to the fact that the man wasn't wearing hearrings then. H e said to Marcy: "Tell me, pumpkin, if this ship were to fall on its side, would either the change in its position or its impact with the ground be liable to set off an explosion? Answer me with a 'yes' or a 'no' so that our friend here won't know what we're talking about." "No, Mr. Carpenter." "And is the structure of the ship sturdy enough to prevent the bulkheads from caving in on us?" "Yes, Mr. Carpenter." "How about the equipment in this room. Is it bolted down securely enough to prevent its being torn loose?" "Yes, Mr. Carpenter." "Good. Now, as surreptitiously as you can, you and Skip start sidling over to that steel supporting pillar in the center of the deck. When the ship starts to topple, you hold on for dear life." "What's he saying to you, kid?" Holmer demanded. Marcy stuck her tongue out at him. "Wouldn't you like to know!" she retorted. Obviously, the ability to make calm, cool decisions strictly in keeping 'with pure logic did not demand a concomitant ability to think fast, for it was not until that moment, that the desentimentalized Martian realized that he alone of the four persons present was not wearing hearrings. Reaching into the small pouch that hung at his side, he withdrew a pair. Then, keeping his melter directed at Carpenter's forehead with one hand, he began attaching them to his ears with the other. Meanwhile, Carpenter ran his right thumb over the tiny, graduated nodules of the liaison-ring on his right index finger, and when he found the ones he wanted, he pressed them in their proper sequence. On the plain below, Sam stuck his snout out of the palmetto coppice. Carpenter concentrated, his thoughts riding the tele-circuit that now connected his mind with Sam's sacral ganglion: Retract your hornhowitzers and raise your nacelleshield, Sam. Sam did so. Now, back off, get a good run, charge the landing-jack on your right, and knock it out. Then get the hell out of the way! Sam came out of the coppice, turned and trotted a hundred yards out on the plain. There he turned again, aligning himself for the forthcoming encounter. He started out slowly, geared himself into second. The sound of his hoofbeats climbed into a thunderous crescendo and penetrated the bulkhead of the com munications-room, and Holmer, who had finally gotten his hearrings into place, gave a start and stepped over to the viewport. By this time Sam was streaking toward the ship like an ornithischian battering-ram. No one with an IQ in excess of # could have failed to foresee what was shortly going to happen. Holmer had an IQ considerably in excess of #, but sometimes having a few brains is just as dangerous as having a little knowledge. It was so now. Forgetting Carpenter completely, the Martian threw a smafl lever to the right of the viewscope, causing the thick, unbreakable glass to retract into the bulkhead; then he leaned out through the resultant aperture and directed his melter toward the ground. Simultaneously, Sam made contact with the landing-jack, and Holmer went flying through the aperture like a jet-propelled Darius Green. The two kids were already clinging to the supporting pillar. With a leap, Carpenter joined them. "Hang on, you two!" he shouted, and proIF ceeded to practice what he preached. The downward journey was slow at first, but it rapidly picked up momentum. Somebody should have yelthat didn't dissuade the ginkgo from pered, tortoises scrabbled and sauropact tore both Carpenter and the children from the pillar, but he managed to' grab them and cushion their fall with his body. His back struck the bulkhead, and his breath blasted from his lungs. Somebody turned out the lights. A t length, somebody turned them back on again. He saw Marcy's face hovering like a small pale moon above his own. Her eyes were like autumn asters after the first frost. She has loosened his collar and she was patting his cheeks and she was crying. He grinned up at her, got gingerly to his feet and looked around. The communicationsroom hadn't changed any, but it looked different. That was because he was standing on the bulkhead instead oi on the deck. It was also because he was still dazed. Marcy, tears running down her cheeks, wailed, "I was afraid yo were dead, Mr Carpenter!" He rumpled her buttercup-colored hair. "Fooled you, didn't I?" At this point. Skip entered the room through the now horizontal doorway, a small container clutched in his hand. His face lit up when he saw Carpenter. "I went after some recuperative gas, but I guess yon don't need it after all. Gee, Fm glad you're all right, Mr. Carpenter!" "I take it you kids are, too," Carpenter said. He was relieved when both of them said they were. Still somewhat dazed, he clambered up the concave bulkhead to the viewport and looked out. Sam was nowhere to be seen. Remembering that he was still in telecircuit contact, he ordered the triceratank to home in, after which he climbed through the viewport, lowered himself to the ground and began looking for Holmer's body. When he failed to find it he thought at first that the man had survived the fall and had made off into the surrounding scenery. Then he came to one of the bogs with which the area was infested, and saw its roiled surface. He shuddered. Well, anyway, he knew who the fossil was. Or rather, who the fossil had been. Sam came trotting up, circumventing the bog in response to the terrainometer's stimuli. Carpenter patted the reptivehicle's head, which was not in the least damaged from its recent collision with the landing jack; then he broke off liaison and returned to the ship. Marcy and Skip were standing in the viewport, staring at the sky. Turning, Carpenter stared at the sky, too. There were three specks in it. His mind cleared completely then, and he lifted the two children down to the ground. "Run for Sam!" he said. "Hurry!" He set out after them. They easily outmatched his longer but far-slower strides, gaining the reptivehicle and clambering into the driver's compartment before he had covered half the distance. The pteranodons were close now, and he could see their shadows rushing toward him across the ground. Unfortunately, however, he failed to see the small tortoise that was trying frantically to get out of his way. He tripped over it and went sprawling on his face. Glancing up, he saw that Marcy and Skip had closed Sam's nacelle. A moment later, to his consternation the triceratank disappeared. Suddenly another shadow crept across the land, a shadow so vast that it swallowed those cast by the pteranodons. Turning on his side. Carpenter saw the ship. It was settling down on the plain like an extraterrestrial Empire State Building, and, as he watched, three rainbow-beams of light shot forth from its upper section and the three pteranodons went The Empire State Building came solidly to rest, opened its street doors and extended a gangplank the width of a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. Through the doors and down the sidewalk came the cavalry. Looking in the other direction. Carpenter saw that Sam had reappeared in exactly the same spot from which he had vanished. His nacelle had reopened, and Marcy and Skip were climbing out of die driver's compartment in the midst of a cloud of bluish smoke. Carpenter understood what had happened then, and he kissed the twenty-second century good-by. IF T he two kids came running up just as the commander of the cavalry stepped to the forefront of his troops. Actually, the troops were six tall Martians wearing deeppurple togas and stern expressions and carrying melters, while the commander was an even taller Martian wearing an even purpler toga and an even sterner expression and carrying what looked like a fairy godmother's wand. The dirty look which he accorded Carpenter was duplicated a moment later by the dirty look which he accorded the two children. They were helping Carpenter to his feet. Not that he needed help in a physical sense. It was just that he was so overwhelmed by the rapid turn of events that he couldn't quite get his bearings back. Marcy was sobbing. "We didn't want to burn Sam out, Mr. Carpenter," she said, all in a rush, "but jumping back four days, two hours, sixteen minutes and three and three-quarter seconds and sneaking on board the kidnaper's ship and sending a message to space Police Headquarters was the only way we could get them here in time to save your life. I told them what a pickle you'd be in, and to have their iridescers ready. Then, just as we were about to come back to the present Sam's time-travel unit broke down and Skip had to fix it, and then Sam went and burned out anyway, and oh, Mr. Carpenter, I'm so sorry! Now, you'll never be able to go back to the year # again and see Miss Sands, and -- " Carpenter patted her on the shoulder. "It's all right, pumpkin. Iti all right. You did the right thing, and I'm proud of you for it." shook his head in admiration."Yoo sure computed it to a T, didn't you?" A smile broke through the rain of tears, and the rain went away. "I'm -- I'm pretty good at computations, Mr. Carpenter." "But  threw the switch," Skip said. "And  fixed Sam's time-travel unit when it broke down." Carpenter grinned. "I know you did. Skip. I think the two of yon are just' wonderful." He faced the tall Martian with the fairy-godmother wand, noted that the man already had a pair of hearrings attached to his ears. "I guess I'm almost as beholden to you as I am to Marcy and Skip," Carpenter said, "and I'm duly grateful. And now I'm afraid Tdei going to impose on your good willstill further and ask you to take me to Mars with you. My reptivehicle'i burned out and can't possibly be repaired by anyone except a group of technological specialists working in an ultra-modern machine shop with all the trimmings, which means I have no way either of contacting the era from which I came, or of getting back to it." "My name is Hautor," the taB Martian said. He turned to Marcy. "Recount tome with the maximum degree of conciseness of which you are capable, the events beginning with your arrival on this planet and leading up to the present moment." Marcy did so. "So you see, sir," she concluded, "in helping Skip and me, Mr. Carpenter has got himself in quite a pickle. He can't return to his own era, and he can't survive in this one. We simply have to take him back to Mars with us, and that's all there is to it!" H autor made no comment. Almost casually, he raised his fairy godmother wand, pointed it toward the kidnapers' prostrate ship and did 'something to the handle that caused the wand proper to Presently a rainbow beam of light flashed forth from the Empire State Building, struck the kidnapers' ship and relegated it to the same fate as that suffered by the three pteranodons. Turning, Hautor faced two of his men. "Put the children on board the police cruiser and see to it that they are suitably cared for." Finally, he turned back to Carpenter. "The government of Greater Mars is grateful for the services you have rendered it in the preserving of the lives of two of its most valuable citizens-to-be. I thank you in its behalf. And now, Mr. Carpenter, good-by." Hautor started to turn away. Instantly Marcy and Skip ran to his side. "You can't leave him here!" Marcy cried. "He'll die!" Hautor signaled to the two Martians whom he had spoken to a moment ago. They leaped forward, seized the two children and began dragging them toward the Empire State Building. "Look," Carpenter said, somewhat staggered by the new turn of events, but still on his feet, "I'm not begging for my life, but I can do you people some good if you'll make room for me in your society. I can give you time travel, for one thing. For another -- " "Mr. Carpenter, if we had wanted time travel, we would have devised it long ago. Time travel is the pursuit of fools. The pattern of the past is set, and cannot be changed; and in it that has not already been done, why try? And as for the future, who but an imbecile would want to know what tomorrow will bring?" . "All right," Carpenter said. "I won't invent time travel then, I'll keep my mouth shut and settle down and be good solid citizen." "You wouldn't and you know it, Mr. Carpenter -- unless we desentiment alized you. And I can tell from the expression on your face that you would never voluntarily submit to such a solution. You would rather remain here in your prehistoric past and die." "Now that you mentioned it, I would at that," Carpenter said. "Compared to you people. Tyrannosaurus rex as a Salvation Army worker, and all the other dinosaurs, saurischians and ornithischians alike, have hearts of purest gold. But it seems to me that there is one simple thing which you could do in my behalf without severely affecting your desentimentalized equilibrium. You could give me a weapon to replace the one that Holmer disintegrated." Hautor shook his head. "That is one thing I cannot do, Mr. Carpenter, because a weapon could conceivably become a fossil, and thereby make me responsible for an anachronism. I am already potentially responsible for one in the form of Holmer's irretrievable body, and I IF refuse to risk being responsible for any more. Why do you think I iridesced the kidnapers' ship?" "Mr. Carpenter," Skip ciled from the gangplank, up which the two Martians were dragging him and his sister, "maybe Sam's not completely burned out. Maybe you can rev up enough juice to at least send back can of chicken soup," "Pm afraid no. Skip," Carpenter called back. "But it's all right, you kids," he went on, "Don't you worry about me -- Pll get along okay. Animals have always liked me, so why shouldn't reptiles! They're animals, too." "Oh, Mr. Carpenter!" Marcy cried. "Pm so sorry this happened! Why didn't you take us back to # witii you. We wanted you to all along, but we afraid to say so." "I wish I had, pumpkin -- I wish I had." Suddenly, he couldn't see very well, and he turned away. When he looked back, the two Martians were dragging Marcy and Skip through the locks. He waved. "Good-by, you kids," he called. "Pll never forget you." Marcy made a last desperate effort to free herself. She almost, but not quite, succeeded. The autumn asters of her eyes were twinkling with tears like morning dew. "I love you, Mr. Carpenter!" she cried, just before she and Skip were dragged out of sight. "Pll love you for the rest of my life!" With two deft movements, Hautor flicked the hearrings from Carpenter's ears; then he and the rest of e cavalry climbed the gangplank and entered the ship. Some cavalry! Carpenter thought. He watched the street doors close, saw the Empire State Building quiver. Presently it lifted and hovered majestically, stabbed into the sky just above the ground on a wash of blinding light. It rose, effortlessly, and became a star. It wasn't a falling star, but he wished in it anyway. "I wish both of you happiness, he said "and I wish that they never take your hearts away, because your hearts are one of the nicest things about you." The star faded then, and winked out. He stood all alone on the vast plain.  The ground trembled. Turning, he caught a great dark movement to the right ot a trio of fan palms. A moment later, he made out the huge head and the massive, upright body. He recoiled as two rows of saberlike teeth glittered in the sun. Tyrannosaurus! V A bumed-out reptivehicle was better than no reptivehicle at all. Carpenter made tracks for Sam. In the driver's compartment, with the nacelle tightly dosed, he watched the theropod's proach. There was no question but what it had seen him, and no question but what it was headed straight for Sam. Marcy and Skip had retracted the nacelle-shield, which left Carpenter pretty much of a sitting duck; however, he didn't retreat to Sam's cabin just yet, for they had also re-projected the horn-howitzers. #i Although the howitzers were no longer maneuverable, they were still operable. If the tyrannosaurus came within their fixed range it could be put temporarily out of action with a volley of stun-charges. Right now, it was approaching Sam at right angles to the direction in which the howitzers were pointing, but there was a chance that it might pass in front of them before closing in. Carpenter considered it a chance worth taking. He crouched low in the driver's seat, his right hand within easy reaching distance of the trio of triggers. With the air-conditioning unit no longer functioning, the interior ot the tricerafank was hot and stuffy. To add to his discomfort, the air was permeated with the acrid smell of burnt wiring. He shut his mind to both annoyances, and concentrated on the task at hand. The theropod was so close now that he could see its atrophied forelegs. They dangled down from the neckwidth shoulders like the wizened legs of a creature one tenth its size. Over them, a full twenty-five feet above the ground and attached to a neck the girth of a tree trunk, loomed the huge head; below them, the grotesque torso swelled out and down to the hind legs. The mighty tail dragged over the landscape, adding the cracking and splitting noises of crushed shrubbery to the thunder thrown forth each time the enormous bird-claw feet came into contact with the terrain. Carpenter should have been terrified. He was at a loss to understand why he wasn't. Several yards from the triceatank, the tyrannosaurus came to a hall and its partically opened jaws began opening wider. The foot-and-a-half-high teeth with which they were equipped could grind through Sam's nacelle as though it was made of tissue paper, and from all indications, that was just what they were going to do. Carpenter prepared himself for a hasty retreat int# Sam's cabin; then just when things looked blackest, the therodon, as though dissatisfied with its present angle of attack, moved around in front of the reptivehicle, providing him with the opportunity he had been hoping for. His fingers leaped to the first of tha trio of triggers, touched, but did-nol squeeze it. Why wasn't he afraid? Jle looked up through the nacelle at the horrendous head. The huge jaws had continued to part, and now the whole top of the skull was raising into a vertical position. As he stared, a pretty head of quite another nature appeared over the lower row of teeth and two bright blue eyes peered down at him. "Miss Sands!" he gasped, and nearly fell out of the drivers seat. R ecovering himself, he threw open the nacelle, stepped out on Sam's snout and gave the tyrrannosaurus an affectionate pat on the stomach. "Edith," he said. "Edith, you doll, you!" "Are you all right, Mr Carpenter?" Miss Sands called down. "Just fine," Carpenter said. "Am I glad to see youy Miss Sands!" Another head appeared beside IF Miss Sands. The familiar chestnut haired head of Peter Detritus. "Are you glad to see me too, Mr. Carpenter?" "Well, I guess, Pete old buddy!" Miss Sands lowered. Edith's lips ladder, and the two of them climbed down. Peter Detritus was carrying a low cable, and presently he proceed to affix it to Sam's snout and Edith tail respectively. Carpenter lent a hand. "How'd you know I was in a pickle?" he asked. T didn't send back any soup." "We had a hunch," Peter Eetritus said. He turned to Miss Sands. "There, she's all set, Sandy." "Well let's be on our way then," Miss Sands said. She looked at Carpenter, then looked quickly away, Tf, of course, your mission is completed, Mr. Cainter." Now that the excitement was over he was finding her presence just as disconcerting as he usually found h. "It's completed all right. Miss Sands," he said to the left pocket of her field blouse. "You'll never beBeve how it turned out, either." "Oh, I wouldn't say that. Sometimes the most unbelievable things of all turn out to be the most belie veable one. I'll fix you somediing to eat, Mr. Carpenter." She cliitibed agilely up the ladder. Carpenter followed, and Peter Detritus brought up the rear. "I'll take the controls, Mr. Carpenter," the latter said, pulling in the ladder. "You look bushed." "I am," Carpenter said. In Edith's cabin, he collapsed on the bunk. Miss Sands went over to the kitchenette and put water on to boil for coffee and took a boiled ham down from the refrigeratorshelf. Up in the driver's compartment, Peter Detritus closed the nacelle and threw Edith into gear. He was a good driver, Peter Detritus was, and he would rather drive than eat. Not only that, he could take a paleontologivehicle apart and put it back together again blindfolded. Funny, why he and Miss Sands had never gone for each other. They were both so attractive, you'd have thought they would have fallen in love long ago. Carpenter was glad that they hadn't of course -- not that it was ever going to do him any good. He wondered why they had made no mention of the Space Police ship. Surely, they must have seen it when it blasted off... Edith was moving over the plain in the direction of the uplands now, and through the cabin viewport he could see Sam shambling along behind on motion-provoked legs. In the kitchenette. Miss Sands was slicing ham. Carpenter concerntrated on her, trying to drive away the sadness he felt over his parting with Marcy and Skip. His eyes touched her slender shapely legs, her slender waist, rose to her cupreous head, lingering for a moment on the silken fuzz that grew charmingly on the back of her neck where her hair had been cut too short. Strange, how people's hair got darker when they grew older -- Carpenter lay motionlessly on the bunk. "Miss Sands," he said suddenly, "how much is #I times #?" "#I " Miss Sands answered. Abruptly she gave a start. Then she went on slicing ham. S lowly, Carpenter sat up. He lowered his feet to the floor. A tightness took over in his chest and he could barely breathe. Take a pair of lonely kids. One of them a mathematical genius, the other a mechanical genius. A pair of lonely kids who have never known what it is like to be loved in all their lonely lives. Now, transport them to another planet and put them in a reptivehicle that for all its practicability is still a huge and delightful toy, and treat them to an impromptu Cretaceous camping trip, and show them the first affection they have ever known. Finally, take these things away from them and simultaneously provide them with a supreme motivation for getting them back -- the need to have a human life -- and include in that motivation the inbuilt possibility that by saving that life they can -- in another but no less real sense -- save their own. But # years! # miles! It couldnt be! Why couldn't it?" They could have built the machine in secret at the preparatory school, all the while pretending to go along with the "pre-desentimentilization process"; then, just before they were scheduled to begin receiving doses of the desentimentalization drug, they could have entered the machine and time-jumped far into the future. Granted, such a timejump would have required a vast amount of power. And granted, the Martian landscape they would have emerged on would have given them the shock of their lives. But they were resourceful kids, easily resourceful enough to have tapped the nearest major power source, and certainly resourceful enough to have endured the climate and the atmosphere of Mars Present until they located one of the Martian oxygen caves. The Martians would have taken care of them and have taught them all they needed to know to pass themselves off as terrestrials in one of the domed colonies. As for the colonists, they wouldn't have asked too many questions because they would have been overjoyed to add two newcomers to their underpopulated community. After that, it would merely have been a matter of the two children's biding their time till they grew old enough to work and earn their passage to Earth. Once on earth, it would merely have been a matter of acquiring the necessary education to equip them for paleontological work. Sure, it would have taken them years to accomplish such a mission, but they would have anticipated that, and have time-jumped to a point in time far enough in advance of the year # A.D. to have enabled them to do what they had to do. They had played it pretty close at that, though. Miss Sands had only and as for Peter Detritus, he had been hired a month later. On Miss Sands' recommendation, of course. They had simply come the long IF way around -- that was all. Traveled # miles to Mars Past, # years to Mars Present, # miles to Earth Present, and # years to Earth Past. Carpenter sat there, stunned. Had they known they were going to turn out to be Miss Sands and Peter Detritus? he wondered. They must have -- or, if not, they must have gambled on it and taken the names when they joined the colonist. All of which created something of a paradox. But it was a minor one at best, not worth worrying about. In any event, the names certainly fitted them. But why had they passed themselves off as strangers? Well, they had been strangers, hadn't they? And if they had told him the truth, would he have believed them? Of course he wouldn't have. None of which explained why Miss Sands disliked him. But did she dislike him? Maybe her reaction to him resulted from the same cause that was responsible for his reaction to her. Maybe she worshipped him as much as he worshipped her, and became as tonguetied in his presence as he did in hers. Maybe the reason she had never looked at him any longer than was absolutely necessary was that she had been afraid of betraying the way she felt before he learned the truth about her. He found it suddenly hard to see. T he smooth purring of Ediths battery-powered motor filled the cabin. For quite sometime now there had been no other sound. "What's the matter?" Miss Sands said suddenly out of clear blue sky. "Cat got your tongue, Mr. Carpenter?" He stood up then. She had turned, and was facing him. Her eyes were misted, and she was looking at him gently, adoringly... the way she had looked at him last night, in one sense, and # years ago in another, by a Mesozoic campfire in an upper Cretaceous cave. Why Vll bet if you told her you loved her, she'd throw herself into your arms! "I love you, pumpkin," Carpenter said. Coming next month XF  Short Siorv #I ' c LIf the coldest place In the universe -- and the strangest! I n the coldest place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it. "See anything?' asked Eric. "No, of course not. It's too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You remember the way they scattered away from the probe." "Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go." I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector boimcing gently on my shoulder. I bounced too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding. I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them. Elsewhere all was as shone above the soft crags; but the light made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared. There was supposed to be life IP # Short Storx ft ivcrs the coldest place In the universe -- and the strangest! I n the coldest place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it. "See anything?" asked Eric. "No, of course not. It's too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You remember the way they scattered away from the probe." "Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go." I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on my shoulder. I bounced too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding. I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them. Elsewhere all was as shone above the soft crags; but the light made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared. There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess what it might be like. I wo years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved into close orbit about the planet and then landed about here, partly to find out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view of the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the snow and out of the light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had suggested that they were only shadows. I'd seen the films. I knew better. There was life. Something alive, that hated light. Something out there in the dark. Something huge... "Eric, you there?' "Where would I go?" he mocked me. "Well," said I, "If I watched every word I spoke I'd never get anything said." All the same, I had been tactless Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn't be going anywhere unless the ship went along. "Touche," said Eric "Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?" "Very little." In fact, the frozen air didn't even melt under the pressure of my boots. "They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of your light." He knew I hadn't seen anything; he was looking through a peeper in the top of my helmet. "Okay, I'll climb that mountain and turn it off for awhile." svim; my head so he could A see the mound I meant, then started up it. It was good exercise, and no strain in the low gravity. I could jump almost as high as on the Moon, without fear of a rock's edge tearing my suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes. My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There was black all around; the world was black with cold. I turned off the light and the world disappeared. I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the stem of a pipe in my mouth. The air renewer sucked air and smoke down past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat and smoked, waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realized I was sweating. The suit was almost too well insulated. Our ion-drive section came over very fast, and disappeared as it hit the planet's shadow. Time was passing. The charge in my pipe burned out and I dumped it. "Try the light," said Eric. I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile around, white fairy landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking, looking... and saw it. Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat, monstrously large amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice. Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully up the side of a nitrogen mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp. "The collector!" Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed it like a telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could find it in the collector's peeper. The collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and away. Eric was controlling it now. After a moment I asked, "Should I come back?" "Certainly not. Stay there. I can't bring the collector back to the ship! You'll have to wait and carry if back with you." The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the collector's rocket went after it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipp below the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter, "Got it." The bright flame reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me. When the thing was hovering near me on two lateral rockets I picked it up by the tail and carried it home. no trouble," said Eric. "I  just used the scoop to nip a piece out of his flank, if so I may speak. I got about ten cubic centimeters of strange flesh." "Good," said I. Carrying the collector carefully in one hand, I went up the landing leg to the airlock. Eric let me in. I peeled off my frosting suit in the blessed artificial light of ship's day. "Okay," said Eric. "Take it up to the lab. And don't touch it." Eric can be a hell of an annoying character. "Eve got a brain," I snarled, "even if you can't see it." So can I. There was a ringing silence while we each tried to dream up an apology. Eric got there first. "Sorry," he said. "Me too." I hauled the collector off to the lab on a cart. He guided me when I got there. "Put the whole package in that opening. Jaws first. No, don't close it yet. Turn the thing until these lines match the lines on the collector. Okay. Push it in a little. Now close the door. Okay, Howie, I'll take it from there..." There were chugging sounds from behind the little door. "Have to wait 'til the lab's cool enough. Go get some coffee," said Eric. "I'd better check your maintenance." "Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids." 'Prosthetic aids' -- that was a hot one. I'd thought it up myself. I pushed the coffee button so it would be ready when I was through, then opened the big door in the forward wall of the cabin. Eric looked much like an electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his brain. In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of the intricately shaped glass-and-soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric's nerves reached out to master the ship. The instruments which mastered Eric -- but he was sensitive about having it put that way -- were banked along boA IF sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically, seventy beats a minute. "How do I look?" Eric asked. "Beautiful. Are you looking for flatteiy?" "Jackass! Am I still alive?" "The instruments think so. But I'd better lower your fluid temperature a fraction." I did. Ever since we'd landed I'd had a tendency to keep temperatures too high. "Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank is getting low." "Well, it'll last the trip." "Yeah. 'Scuse me, Eric, coffee's ready." I went and got it. The only thing I really worry about is his liver. It's too complicated. It could break down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar Eric would be dead. If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane, because he can't sleep unless I set his prosthetic aids. I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled. "Hey!" "What's wrong?" I was ready to run in any direction. "It's only helium!" He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed. "I get it now, Howie. Helium two. That's all our monsters are. Nuts." Helium two, the superfluid that flows uphill. "Nuts doubled. Hold everything, Eric. Don't throw away your samples. Check them for contaminants." "For what?" "Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the contaminants in the helium are complex enough it might be alive." "There are plenty of other substances," said Eric, "but I can't analyze them well enough. We'll have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool." I got up. "Take off right now?" "Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, blit we're just as likely to wait here while this one deteriorates." "Okay, I'm strapping down now. Eric?" "Yeah? Take off in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the iondrive section. You can get up." "No, ril wait. Eric, I hope it isn't alive. I'd rather it was just helium two acting like its supposed to act." "Why? Don't you want to be famous, like me?" "Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It's just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto you could not make life out of helium two." "It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the predawn crescent. Pluto's day is long enough for that. You're right, though; it doesn't get colder than this even between the stars. Luckily I don't have much imagination." Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the IF  Novelette BY T . McIntosh Everyone knew no good would come of digging UP. Turned out that everyone was righti I F or the last month before Ascension Day there was only one topic in Gallery #. But there were # different opinions to be expressed. "The date is wrong," said old Modin uneasily. "I'm sure the date is wrong. It should be fifty yean from now, or a hundred years from now, or two hundred. If this is the first possible safe date in two hundred years, obviously three hundred would be safer. Or four hundred. Or five hundred." "Ascension Day!" said Loret skeptically, at a different time and in different company, for she was sixteen and interested in nothing that was not male, or fun, orjoth. "What's supposed to happen, for heaven's sake! What's special about digging upwards! When you dig up or down or sidewise, what do you ever find except rock and shale and stones and sometimes a spring? What's supposed to happen when we dig up from Tunnel # terminus, for heaven's sake? Why don't we just have a holiday and a festival on Ascension Day, and forget the whole crazy idea of digging upwards, for heaven's sake?" In the Council, Sim went further. "Surely," he said in his dry, rather pedantic voice, "the conception of digging upward is symbolic. Two centuries ago the Founders set a day for our thoughts, wishes and aspirations to turn upwards to higher, better things. The pasage of time, the distortion of ritual, has turned an abstract idea into a concrete one." Also at a Council meeting, old Zet said: "Doesn't the idea come from some two-hundred-year-old figure of speech which has struck? Like when cows fly' or 'once in a blue moon'? I think so. What's a 'blue moon' supposed to be? I guess the truth is that someone said once: 'We'll dig upwards in two hundred years,' intending to convey that nobody would ever dig upwards at all. Well, who but an idiot ever dug above his head? You're liable to bury yourself in stones, and what's the use of a vertical tunnel to nowhere anyway? Naturally when we want more space we dig horizontally. Multiple levels on top of one another merely raise scores of quite difficult and unnecessary engineering problems." Sinn, who talked a lot, naturally had more than one go at Ascension Day. "I am certain there is no more than religious significance in the tradition. The warning runs: Be ware the fire which sears the flesh. If it still burns, return to the Gal-lery at once and close the shaft for another hundred years. Now I can quote from old books to show that Ascension Day is mentioned by name in an ancient religion of a whatever that's supposed to mean. God who created heaven and earth, However, the meaning of our tradition is clear: Turn your thoughts upwards, and beware the fires of hell." Modin, too, had another crack at it. "Something terrible will happen if we ever dig up from Tunnel # ers knew about it. Perhaps there's a terminus," he warned. "The Foundvast sprint up there. Maybe once it's breached it can never be dartifned. What the legends mean is: Dig upwards at your peril. When you do, that will be the end of Galley #." But despite the fears of old Modin, the angry indifference of Loret (who wanted all the attention that was going and believed she had every right to get it), the pedantic skepticism of Sinn and the practical, down-to-earth objections of Zet, the general opinion was that of Sello, the Premier. Sello expressed the view simply: "There's a clear direction. At such and such a date, at a certain place, dig upwards for five thousand feet. That's exactly what we're going to do. Why not? The Founders believed it was to our advantage to do so. If we find it's not, we'll fill in the hole again." So matters stood until, just a week before Ascension Day, Sinn died. And the very next day, Modin died. Those who believed in signs had a field day. Modin was old, true, but Sinn was not. That the two principal opponents of Ascension Day should die just before it might have been taken as a sign that the Founders' instructions must be carried out literally. But the superstitious insisted on taking it the other way. To them, Sinn and Modin were prophets. Their deaths suddenly and dramatically increase the value and truth of their last statements. G allery #I was a warm, wellplanned hive housing # people in luxury. For twelve hours at a time the pale gray sky, fully twenty feet above the floor, was brightly lit. For the next twelve, only a faint gleam enabled those who had to be out by night to find their way about. The wide avenues, with their massive central pillars, were flanked by houses (houses, not cells) neatly inserted in the rock. Every fifty yards an air vent sighed softly. There was no transport system, although the question of providing one was considered every few years. It was sometimes necessary to walk several miles. But cattlemen were housed near the cattle, fishmongers near the stock pools, builders near the present construction site. "Some peopleware flabby enough as it is," Sello commented caustically when the question came up again. And once more the provision of a regular service of trains, trams, buses or cars was turned down. There were plenty of sports grounds and swimming pools. Centrally placed was a dog track. There was no great demand for further facilities, since no one in Gallery #I was overburdened with leisure. There was always plenty of work to be done. Every structure in the Gallery had to be regularly checked and overhauled -- occasional minor disasters were sufficient reminder of this. And the fact that neither property nor money could be willed to descendants ensured that nobody was ever relieved of the necessity ot having to work for a living. Gallery #I was not paradise. It was a moderately contented community, entirely self-supporting, peaceable, law-abiding. It had to be law-abiding, for in a closed community crime was a waste of time. You couldn't take the risk of seriously offending society when there was literally nowhere to go. And few crimes ever went unsolved. It would always be taken for granted that the criminal had not skipped town. However, as Ascension Day approached, the Gallery became slightly less law-abiding and considerably less peaceful. Ascension Day was such a big and obviously important thing that as the date came closer there was increasing unrest in the IF Gallery. People took sides and tempers were lost. The two sides were obvious. To dig or not to dig, that was the question. The issues were fairly obvious too. we're going to dig. What have we to lose? If we don't find anything or we don't like what we find, that's too bad. But suppose we do find something and do like what we find? we are. What more do we want! We've nothing to gain and everything to lose. Two hundred years ago, when Ascension Day was set, Gallery #I must have been a tiny, mp, overcrowded, uncomfortable cavern. Look at it now. What else do we need! Nothing. Nothing at all. n T Then Aleta came home on the   eve of Ascension Day to change out of her working clothes, she found her father looking unusually grave. Sello was a stocky man of fortyfive, a bmlder. As Premier he was the final arbiter in Gallery #, but he had a job like everybody else. The GoUty pay he received as Premier was an allowance to bring up his earnings .to what he would have received as a builder if his other duties, did not make demands on his time. "Aleta," he said, "you and Sep mean to go to the rally tonight, don't you?" She nodded and asked, "Why?" "It would be better if you didn't  go. She showed her surprise. "We're not taking sides. Pop, only going along to see what happens. What's the harm in that?" "No harm. But -- " He looked at her for several seconds. She was eighteen, and even in her dusty overall (she was a Sander) a very pretty girl. She had red hair and a neat, small-scale figure, exquisitely rounded. Sello knew he was lucky to have a child at all, in a community where population control was so rigidly enforced. He was ten times luckier to have such a child as Aleta -- beautiful, contented, intelligent, warmhearted. He could honestly say that if he had been granted the opportunity of drawing up the complete specifications for his daughter, she would have been exactly like Aleta. To add to all this, she had the sense to attract and be attracted by young Sep, a probable future Premier and exactly the son-in-law Sello would have chosen. "There's going to be trouble at the rally," Sello said at last. "It may get out of hand. People will be hurt." "Surely not. Pop?" said Aleta. "I know there have been fights already, but nothing very serious. What does fighting prove? If you're stronger than another man, does that prove what you believe is right and what he believes is wrong?" "I know that, Aleta. But do the people who will be at the rally know it?" IF She smiled. "Anyway, Sep can look after me." Sello still looked doubtful. "The old books talk of mobs and mob law. We've never had a mob before. We don't know what it's liable to do." Aleta laughed. "Pop, you're making it more and more impossible for me to stay away from the rally. But we'll be careful." She went to her bedroom to change. Having had her meals on the job, she merely had to wash and change before going out. Since there were no drones in the Gallery, since everyone spent most of every day except Sunday in working clothes, there had long been a tacit agreement that if you judged people by what they wore, you did so only in their leisure hours. Working clothes didn't even resemble leisure clothes. During the day you wore what your work demanded. In the evening you wore something as different from this as possible. Aleta chose a green and orange outfit provocative in its utter impracticality. Her orange blouse had double vertical ruffles at front and back; her wide green skirt swung from the hips over an orange sheath, ankle-length, which made walking' close to impossible. She wore white high-heeled shoes and white gloves. In a constant warmth which made semi-nudity comfortable, fashion ran to concealment. Semi-nudity in public was common but never fashionable. Girls wore a halter and shorts for games or for work; to be dressed, they went to the other extreme. Men labored stripped to the' waist, but when they went on the town they wore black dress suits. Sep called for Aleta as smartly dressed as she was. His black trousers were knife-creased, his gray jacket spotless. They ribbed one another easily. "I know it's only a rally, but shouldn't you have changed out of your working clothes!" Sep said. "I didn't want to show you up," Aleta retorted. A s they walked to the dog track, the noise came and hit them. The only time they had heard such shouting before was when a particularly exciting dog race was being run. But this was different -- the shouting was jagged, angry, irregular. Aleta remembered Sello's warning and hesitated momentarily. But Sep, curious to see what was going on, was hurrying. Even without stopping she had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with him. They didn't get near the track. They turned a corner and stopped, stunned by what they saw. Perhaps seventy people were engaged in the scuffle. At first it seemed no more than a scuffle -- but as Aleta looked round, her gaze swung back incredulously to a doorway in which three young men were battering two older men's heads viciously against the closed door. Sep saw this too, and started to Tun. But in a moment he stopped. It was suddenly obvious that what they had seen was not the worst thing going on in the melee. About a dozen people, men and women, had linked arms and were trampling a line of squirming bodies. Three youths with sticks were beating a couple of girls. A huge man sitting on the stomach of his helpless victim was clouting him on the head: left, right, left, right, left, right. There were shouts and screams and moans and entreaties. There was no sense in the scene; it was like a montage of the most violent, savage episodes from a dozen different horror films, all scrambled together. There was no sense in the conflict either. What had probably started as a disagreement over the clear issues of Ascension Day had become a riot, an orgy of sadism, a goulash of blood lust. Sep and Aleta had time for only a brief, incredulous glance at the mad violence in the street. Then a fat man cannoned into Aleta and she staggered back against a wall. The next moment a red-eyed rooter reached out and grabbed her bodice, together with a good deal of her flesh, and wrenched savagely. The flesh withstood the assault but the blouse did not. Most' of it came away in the man's hand. The next moment Sep had wheeled him round and hit him on the chin. He staggered back, but a friend of his jumped Sep from behind. Watching Sep, Aleta didn't know whether she was struck deliberately or accidentally, or by whom. Anyway, she sprawled full length on her side, and someone kicked her. Vaguely she was aware that she must have been recognized, that thii was happening to her simply because she was the daughter of the Premier. Suddenly Sep was with her again, dragging her to her feet. There was a cut on his cheek. "Run!" he gasped. She laughed hysterically. Run, in the sheath she was wearing? Sep bent and ripped it open. As he did so another rioter came up behind Aleta. Still bent double, Sep butted him in the stomach with his head. Aleta ran. They both ran, not looking back. They ran right back to Sello's house, and slammed the door behind them. E verybody assumed Ascension Day would be postponed while the riot was probed. There was no such episode in recorded history. The Gallery was frightened, ashamed, grief-stricken, defiant. But Sello got the digging started before he even began to deal with the rioters. Delay would only make more time available for further strife. Once the digging was under way. Ascension Day was officially inaugurated a fait accompli. gang began the long operation (it was expected to take a month). Fifty men stood by in case of further riots. There were none. The rally riot had shocked the whole Gallery out of further demonstration. It was assumed that Sello would call a full Council meeting to discuss what action should be taken. This IF was another assumption which prove false. Sello dealt with the rioters as ordinary criminals. He recognized nothing out of the ordinary in the circumstances. He dealt with the identified rioters as if each of their crimes had been committed in a vacuum. And in the small, closed community, most of them were identified. Seven men and two women had died. Eighty-four were injured. The seven murderers (two killed twice) were tried first, found guilty and executed. It was in this atmosphere of summary justice that the hundreds of other charges were examined. Although Sello was at first strongly criticized, his handling of the affair was eventually applauded. There had been a feeling that since the riot was a special case, special measures would have to be invented to deal with it. Most people not involved had felt that it was out of the question to try so many offenders in the usual way; many even felt that the riot should be passed over almost as if it had never happened. Sello's attitude from the very beginning was that a mob had no special privilege to assault life and limb. Strong conviction was no excuse for murder. In the trials, Asscension Day was not even mentioned. The only question was, who had done what? Ordinary houses had to be converted into jails. Sello, a politician in the final reckoning, knew that few of the sentences which he and other judges passed would be completed. However, the essential thing was that justice should be swift and decisive. Nothing like the Ascension Eve Riot must ever happen again. Most of the men and women on trial were dazed, incredulous. They could scarcely believe that they had done what they had done, and they were sure they would not be heavily punished. They trusted in the common, familiar human defense:  wasn't the only one. He was doing it too. This availed them nothing. The others who were doing it too came up in court later. And gradually even the men given the stiffest sentences accepted the justice of it all. Mad they might have been -- they were being punished for what they had done. Not for what they had thought nor what they intended: what they had done. All the time the trials were going on (# men and women on # charges), Seps digging party bored upwards, stowing the surplus rock in long-prepared shafts. After the seventh day the work suddenly became very easy. Instead of the hard rock which was encountered in almost all digging operations, Sep struck soft, dry soil which could be drilled ten times as fast as it could be carried away. It was useful, this soil. A great deal of it went to the gardeners, who had never had enough before. Now flower-beds were planted all over the Gallery. Few of the Ascension Eve Riot trials were long or complicated. Most of the rioters pleaded guilty; the knew what they had done, and they knew the evidence against them. The last riot trial was concluded on another eve -- the eve of attainment of five thousand feet. Ill A leta spent the evening at home with her father. Sep was usually too tired to do anything but sleep when he finished work. She watched Sello without speaking for a long time. Only she knew that Sello was not a cold, implacable judge, that the death penalties he had passed and the centuries of jail sentences had taken years off his own life. At last, since he clearly wasn't going to speak, she said: "What do you think Sep will find. Pop?" He looked up. "Perhaps another Gallery," he said. "This is Gallery #, remember." The idea came as a revelation to Aleta. Such a possibility had never been discussed, although now it was presented to her it seemed suddenly obvious. Gallery #I -- that was the name of the world. Its inhabitants did not consider the possibility of other Galleries partly because in two centuries of carefully planned expansion they had never found anything to suggest that other Galleries existed. Certainly #I was a number, yet it never crossed anyone's mind that there might be seventy other Galleries, or even more, all with people in them -- different, unknown people, in different, unknown Galleries. "Yes," she said slowly, thoughtfully. "Yes, I suppose that's possible. What made you think of it. Pop?" "The same thing that made mo enforce Ascension Day. The thing that showed me how distorted history can become.". Aleta was surprised. He never talked of history, or possible distortion in it. "When my father was alive, he often told me about the body," Sello said quietly. "What body?" "A party digging off Tunnel # struck a spring. In it they found the body of a man. A recent body, dead only a matter of days. Not the body of anyone from Gallery #." He paused. Aleta saw the significance at once. "Why, that means... But tell me, when was this? And why have I never heard about it?" Sello nodded, an unspoken ques tion answered. "You understand, Aleta. YouTe intelligent, and not afraid to face the truth, even if its different from what you expect. But not everybody is like you." H e looked beyond her into space. "This happened only seventy years ago -- in the lifetime of quite a few people still alive. The man was found, and the significance was undeniable. This was not the only Gallery... But time passed, and belief became strained. This is the world. There is nothing else, nothing but rock. When we dig, we never find anything but rock and stones and shale and sometimes soil. The spring off Tunnel # was sealed off. IF bypassed. The body was cremated. And ten years later, already hardly anyone believed that a body had been found. Or if it had been found, it came from this Gallery." "Is it possible?" Aleta said thoughtfully. "It's possible. The men who had actually found the body died, one after another, until only my father was left. The records in the library were questioned, disbelieved and finally destroyed. There could have been no strange body, because this is Gallery #, this is the Gallery. It must have been a trick, a joke, a hoax. You see?" Aleta wasn't sure that she did see. "I've always remembered," Sello went on, "that in the Gallery the truth is what people believe. At least, what people believe is all that can survive. I'm not a great reader, few of us are -- but when you go to the library, when you read the records, you find that before a certain time nothing exists, and that after that time all that remains is what we believe now." Aleta wasn't entirely convinced. "We have a great respect for tradition, Pop. Surely we pay too much attention to old legends, warnings and ritual, rather than too little?" "Attention, yes. Veneration, yes. Real respect, no. Rather than believe that what the Founders said was exactly what they meant, we've been changing it around to suit ourselves for two centuries. Like Sinn in the Council... I wish he'd had the consideration to live for another couple of weeks instead of becoming a martyr... The Founders' warning about Ascension Day comes down to us like this: Beware the fire which sears the flesh. If it still burns, return to the Gallery at once and close the shaft for another hundred years' He shook his head. "I wonder what they really said." "You don't believe they said that?" "I believe they said something much more definite and specific. But generations of librarians have turned it gradually into something vague and mystical. Another thing I don't believe is that the world began two hundred years ago with the Founders. I don't think they meant us to believe it, either. But maybe it doesn't matter." "Why not?" "Because the important thing did survive. The definite instruction to dig upwards for five thousand feet." "So you believe...?" "I believe that tomorrow, soon answers to questions we can't even ask now, because we don't know enough to ask them." n this Sello proved correct. It was still early morning when Sep sent for Sello. Aleta had not even left for work. Sep's message was so startling that she didn't go at all. "On a day of such significance," Sello declared, forgetting for a moment that he was talking to his daughter and not addressing a meeting of the Council, "What happens five thousand feet up is five thousand times more important than anything that may happen in the Gallery." So Aleta went with him. They had to walk to Tunnel # terminus. There they found a crude but efficient elevator which took them up the five thousand feet. They emerged on a landing stage and entered a second elevator. The last five thousand feet they had to climb. At the top they found Sep and his men crowded in a small tunnel off the vertical shaft. There was a strange silence among them. "What's happened!" Sello asked. "It's impossible to explain," Sep said quietly. "You'll have to look for yourself." 'Ts there danger?" "That's another thing you'll have to decide for yourself. I've fitted a valve just above this tunnel, anyway. It can be closed at any time." Sep climbed up the ladder first, then Sello, then Aleta. Even up here, Sello noted, the shaft was neatly, strongly lined with stonedust bricks. Sep could be relied on to do a good job, cutting no corners. ' They passed through the valve, closed it behind them and climbed up into a blaze of light. For the two men and the girl green valley under the early morning sun was a terrifying experience. Although  the light was not too bright for them, the illumination in the Gallery being strong, they could scarcely see. Their eyes could not accommodate themselves to the distances involved, to the strangely bright colors, to the fantastic, unknown shapes. Actually, had they known it, in this small valley none of the distances, even to the tops of the surrounding hills was long as surface distances went. But to people who knew nothing outside Gallery #, a mile of unrestricted vision represented vastness beyond belief. Nobody said anything. After a few minutes they began to lose their fear that they would fall upwards into the empty sky. This was a strange, irrational terror. Nobody had ever fallen upwards in the Gallery. Yet the roof over their heads, so close, so solid, had come to be a psychological necessity. Without it, they were afraid of a thousand unimaginable things. It was a protection, it was sanity. At last Sello spoke. "I don't like it I fought for this moment, for this vision, and now that it's been achieved I wonder if Sinn and Modin were right." "This is a wonderful place," Sep protested. "Yes... Hell, too, would be a wonderful place." "Now that we've found it we must try to find out -- " "Oh, yes," Sello interrupted with a sigh. "We must certainly try to find out. We have no choice, now. Aleta, are you afraid?" They were all afraid, yet somehow she knew exactly what ho meant. He meant, was she so awed by the revelation and its implications that she had to go straight back to the Gallery at once, or could she stay out here in this vast, terrifying Gallery and even explore it if necessary? IF "I'll stay," she said. "If you want me too." "Good." He didn't want her to stay, he wanted to take her back with him. But he had already made up his mind that a representative group must make some acquaintance with this world (a world of which, he had already begun to suspect, Gallery #I was only a tiny and insignificant part). As Premier, he could not permit himself to lead this group. His responsibility was to the Gallery. However, since in the event of anything going seriously wrong -- and it was obvious that many things could go wrong in such a strange, utterly unknown environment -- people would be liable to say that he had made others do what he would not do himself, he knew Aleta had to be a member of the party. There was scarcely a choice. Carefully he explained his plan. This great new Gallery could not be ignored. It existed. More must be found out about it. So a representative group of thirty volunteers would stay up here for a day or more, cautiously finding out... whatever there was to find out. "Will you take, charge, Sep?" Sello asked. "Of course." "YoU' must... Sello stopped himself. It was no good putting a man in charge of a party testing a new, utterly unknown environment and in the next breath weighing him down with orders, even with advice. In the end Sello confined himself to a platitude so vague that it could not be a burden: "Be careful, Sep. IV T hey climbed out of the hole in the ground and hesitated in awe, one after the other. Afterwards they confessed that each one of them experienced that strange fear of falling upwards into the infinite blue sky. Several of them hurt their eyes staring at the sun. But no serious damage was done -- nobody was stupid enough to go on doing anything so painful simply because he had never seen anything like the sun before.  They had no name for the sun. The word "sun" had survived in their language in such phrases as "a place in the sun," "sunny-tempered" and "nothing new under the sun," but no one guessed that this was the sun. They talked of it as a light or a lamp. Most of them were young, the young being the most curious, the most fearless and the readiest to volunteer. Loret was among them, with some of her gang of admirers. Although she had thought and said Ascension Day was nonsense, she was as ready as anyone to participate in any exciting developments there might be. She was not old enough to care on Wednesday about anything she might have said on Monday. Despite the initial awe, the early fears, in a few minutes everybody was laughing and chattering. Soon some of the youngsters began to show otf, demonstrating their bravery and their unconcern about the miracle before their eyes. "Wait," Sep called. "Listen, all ot you. First, nobody gets out of sight of the shaft, understood! We may have to go back at any moment. There may be dangers in this world weknow nothing about -- huge animals, poisonous vapor, fire, flood, a hundred other things we can't begin to imagine. We may even have to close the shaft behind us. Anybody who's wandered off may be left behind." The threat brought shocked silence, and involuntarily the group closed up.  "Another thing," Sep said. "This ground looks okay, but it may be treacherous. You find yourself slipping into holes. We're used to level ground, and this isn't level. So watch out, all of you." And for a few minutes they watched out. But as nothing untoward happened, the group spread out again, brave vnce more. It was now possible to make out things which had been obscure at first. When Sello, Aleta and Sep around them, they had discovered for the first time that the eye and brain had great trouble interpreting the unknown. The mountain behind them, a vast black, towering shape, had been difficult to see clearly. The brain behind the eye told the eye to look again, to send impressions that made more sense. Gradually they realized that Gallery #I had been deliberately placed under that mountain. That the terminus of Tunnel # was directly below almost the lowest part of the valley, so that the shaft to the surface was shortest there. Almost, not quite. For three hundred yards further on there was a tiny lake. Even to the inexperienced Galleryites, this was clearly the true bottom of the valley. They stared at the lake, all ol them, not quite understanding what it was. Water, certainly. At least it looked like water. But so much water? Was there so much water in the world? And the color was unexpected. It was black, blue, gray, green, blue, brown. They had never seen water in quantity except in a pool or tank. And it rippled as if it were alive. Loret laughed suddenly. "It's hot," she said. "Let's take off our clothes." At first only Loret threw off her clothes, and only a few outer garments at that. Presently, however, there began to seem something essentially right about taking off their clothes in this open world. It was not merely because it was hot and the sun was pleasant on their skin. It was also a feeling of freedom, of spaciousness, of newness. In the Gallery certain convviitixrtis were observed. But this was outside the Gallery. This was a new place, a wonderful, fantastic place where no rules applied until new rule were made. Why, there wasn't even anything to fall on them. There was nothing that could fall on them. This was only gradually realized -- what at first had seemed frightening began, only a short time later, to seem a IF marvellous new freedom. You could play games, shout, stamp on the ground, do anything you liked without fear that you'd start a roof fall. When most of the other took off their outer clothes, Loret stripped to a red bathing suit. Only she had thought to bring a bathing suit, possibly because, knowing how she looked in it, she never missed any opportunity to wear it. "I wish Pd brought mine," another girl said, looking at Loret jealously. "But it's too far to go all the way back for it." "You can have mine if you like," said Loret recklessly, jumping up an stripping it off. S tartled by her daring, the boys and girls with her looked at Sep. But he did and said nothing. The next moment half a dozen of them stripped naked, leaping and dancing on the grass like children. "I wonder if there's something different in the air up here?" Aleta murmured to Sep. "Don't you feel it?" He nodded. "Quite possibly. More oxygen, less carbon dioxide. That would account for it." "Harmful, do you think?" "No, I guess not. We may tire ourselves out more, that's all." "I feel like stripping and dancing too." "Go ahead." "No, I can't. Pm the Premier's daughter, remember? You could, you're nothing in particular." Sep grinned and threw small stone at her. Despite Sep's sober warnings, nothing untoward happened. They saw plenty of insects but no animals. The ground was firm and safe. Running on it was delightful, and falls proved laughably harmless compared with falls on rock or concrete. It took them an hour or two to get around to swimming in the lake. Several of them had thought about it much earlier, but didn't say anything in case they should be forced to prove their courage by diving in. It was Loret, of course, who eventually suggested it. Still nude, she sat on the edge first and dangled her toes in the water, shrieking at the cold. A few minutes later, nevertheless, she was in the water, shouting that it wasn't so cold once you were in. Cautiously a few of her entourage followed her. Sep had considered forbidding bathing or at least delivering warnings. There might be dangerous creatures in the lake, which looked very deep, and who could tell what other perils there might be? In the end he said nothing, for the whole experiment as he saw it was aimed at finding out as much as possible about this vast external world. Very little would be found out if he forbade everything. The bathers emerged, shivering. But the sun was now so hot, high overhead, that in a few minutes they were so warm that they were ready to swim again. Around midday they ate the food they had brought with them. Most of them were so hungry that they ate at one sitting all they had brought to last them all day. After lunch four of the men crossed the valley floor to the nearest hill. The lower slopes presented no difficulty, but presently they reached a rock face which, to inexperienced climbers, looked quite unscaleable. Skirting it for several hundred yards, they found no place where they could climb more than twenty feet higher. They were not surprised. The valley seemed so vast to all the people from the Gallery that it occurred to no one that it was merely a tiny part of an immense continent. It seemed quite natural that the hills which surrounded the valley should be unclimbable, enclosing it as decisively as the walls of Gallery #I bounded it. They descended and reported to Sep, who was as unsurprised as they were. He, too, had not tried to project his thoughts beyond the valley. In the middle of the afternoon, Aleta, who had sat quietly with others, finally succumbed to temptation and stripped to her briefs. She dived in the lake, swam right across and back, and climbed out, shaking the water from her hair. There was a murmur of slightly reluctant admiration. No one else had managed to swim right across. Loret stared at her in unconcealed dislike. In her view Aleta had deliberately and maliciously stolen her thunder -- as usual. I t was shortly after this that Sello climbed to the exit once more to see for himself what was going on. He stared in shocked disapproval at Loret and her friends, all nude by this time. IF Sep saw him and came to report to him. "You permitted this!" Sello said with a wave of his hand. Sep grinned. "I could hardly stop them. The air up here is intoxicating. We haven't a drop of alcohol with us, but you wouldn't guess it from the things that have been going on -- " "What sort of things?" Sello demanded quickly. "Oh, nothing much. Running, dancing, jumping, climbing, swimmin, wrestling -- a few scrapes and scratches, but nobody's hurt." "Swimming? That pond? You let them?" "Aleta's just swum across and back." Sello clearly didn't approve of the way Sep was handling things. His eyes widened as Aleta stood up and waved, scarcely more decent than Loret and her companions. However he had put Sep in charge. And the average age of the volunteers was less than twenty. He grunted and made a withdraw into the hole. "Wait," said Sep. "Could you send up some more food? This air makes us very hungry." "Are you sure it's safe to stay here?" "Safe? Fve been thinking. Premier. Isn't it pretty clear that we all came from here originally? Before we built the Gallery?" Evidently the same thought had already crossed Sello's mind, for it was no surprise to him and he didn't argue. "If so," he said, "the Founders must have had a very good reason to withdraw to the Gallery and ensure that we stayed there for two centuries." Sep nodded soberly. "I guess so." "Any idea what it might be?" Sello asked. "No, not in the present conditions. But they may change." "Change? How?" Sep pointed at the sun. "The lamp in the sky... it moves. Soon it will be night." "Like night in the Gallery? And at the same time?" Sep nodded "Not by coincidence either I guess our night and day are modelled on night and day here. I don't know what night will be like here -- except it's almost certain to be very cold." "Then come back to the Gallery when it's night." "You don't want us to stay for the whole cycle?" "I want you to come back -- and be examined." "For what?" For the first time it was Sello who smiled. "We won't know what we're looking for until we find it, will we?" After Sello had climbed down the shaft again, Sep remained for some time where he was, frowning thoughtfully. Age obviously made a great difference to people's reaction to this open Gallary. Sello, whom Sep had always considered wise and reasonably progressive, proved to be almost as reactionary as Sinn and Modin at sight of the valley. And Sello was not very old. Yet Sep and Aleta and Loret and the other volunteers, few of them beyond their teens, adapted easily and readily to these new conditions outside the Gallery. Perhaps it was a pity that the final decisions -- whatever they might be -- would be taken, as all important decisions were, by the elders of Gallery #. V T hey sunbathed all day. But when the sun (which they were still calling a lamp) disappeared behind one of the hill-tops, the temperature dropped sharply. Within half an hour they all wore all the clothes they had with them and wanted more. In another half-hour it was so cold that Sep had to order withdrawal to the Gallery. It was an order which was gladly obeyed. This new world was wonderful by day, but even before the last rays of the sun had disappeared it became terrifying again. Sep and Aleta stayed at the top of the shaft to see what happened when the lamp went out. The others hastened back to Gallery #, eagerly anticipating the delights of describing the wonders they had seen to the stay-at-homes. "There's another bird," Aleta said, pointing. They had seen plenty of birds without losing their wonder of them. Birds and flight were not entirely unknown to them -- they had hens in the Gallery. The swooping, soaring birds of the valley showed, however, that hens had aH but forgotten how to fly. This was a beautiful silvery bird which circled the valley lazily, still in sunshine although the whole valley was in deep shadow. Presently it darted away and in a few minutes night was complete. Aleta was shivering in Sep's arms. They climbed down and closed the valve behind them, missing the wonder of the moon and stars. Next day all thirty of the volunteers came out in a fiery rash. They lay in bed groaning, wincing at the touch of the lightest sheet. Some thought they were dying. Some feared they were not. Some had colds as well as the red rash: others had boils. There was no great mystery about the common ailment. The rash was clearly caused by burning. The burning was clearly caused by the great lamp whose warmth had been so pleasant the day before. Sep and Aleta, who had sunbathed moderately, were in better case than anyone else. Yet they were in such pain that they were not consulted when the emergency Council meeting called by the Premier made its decision. 'Beware the fire that sears the flesh,' Sello quoted grimly. "If it still burns, return to the Gallery at once and close the shaft for another hundred years. Our duty is clear, Councillors." "Yes," said Zet with satisfaction. "I'm glad you agree. Premier." And he couldn't resist adding: "At last." "We had to obey the Founders we have profited by it. We have greatly added to our knowledge of the world we live in. But we must IF now heed their warning. The fire that sears the flesh still burns. We must close the shaft. At once." When Sep heard the decision, he jumped up, put on his lightest shirt and shorts, and hurried out to find Sello. "We're making a mistake, Premier," he protested when he found him. "It's a wonderful world up there, and we've scarcely given it a chance. These I urns are nothing! They'll heal in a day or two," he insisted. "I hope so," said Sello, shuddering as he though of Aleta's burns. "I certainly hope so." "Look," Sep said, baring the flesh on his hips. "If you protect yourself from the lamp, no harm befalls you. We must go hack and -- " Sello interrupted him. "It's too late Sep," Sello said quietly. "The shaft has already been closed. Not merely closed but collapsed. There is no shaft there any more." Sep nearly said something extremely rude. But he stopped himself in time. This was Aleta's father, after all. And you couldn't argue with a Council decision. He made a secret resolution. In twenty years he would be on the Council. Perhaps he would be Premier. If he was, he would devote ah his energies to reopening the shaft to the wonderful world above. Yet even as he resolved this, he remembered how different the reaction of old and young people had been to the valley. In twenty years' time, when he had power, he would then be nearly as old as Sello was now. Perhaps, he though bleakly, it would always be the same. The young were adventurous, the old were cautions. And the old made all of the decisions. Perhaps all Ascension Days would have the same result. Perhaps the human race would never have any home but Gallery #, never recognizing anything else as home. And this is wrong. Sep thought with the certainty of youth. Sella is wrong. Hes not being wise, he's being over-cautions. We came from that world and we can never he more than half alive except in that world. Sello is wrongs wrong, wrong! B ut Sello, though mistaken, was not wrong. The silvery bird which Aleta had admired flew back to its home. And next day, although the evidence it had brought back was hazy and inconclusive, two larger birds arrived over the valley. They saw nothing significant. The caved-in shaft looked no different from a score of natural scars in the floor of the valley. However, just to be on the safe side, they dropped a radiation bomb. Poison slowly spread over the valley. Then they flew away. In the valley where thirty young men and girls had laughed and played and bathed less then twentyfour hours ago, nothing remained but the fire that sears the flesh. IF  Short The cheerful plgllke alien would never harm a human -- but it might not stop a human harming himself! I t happened on Hippodamia. The name isn't really important. There are ten thousand other asteroid-stations just as undistinguished. Netter settled back into the soft, live-moss chair and prepared to talk the Creature out of the impasse. Then, with a shudder, he saw it on the wall and he began to tremble. He had found, in part, what he bad come to find. It was the beefy, bearded head of Captain Kalbfleish, mounted like a trophy. 'Great God, Man!" -- and H wasn't a man to whom he spoke -- "that's a human head." Netter cracked. "Which Great God, yours or mine?" Porcellus grunted. "They aren't the same, or they've been badly described. Yes, a human head. I've always wanted one. You notice that I have given it the favored position in the center of the great wall. I now have at least one of the heads of every species that interest me. Some of the heads are much larger and more ornamented than your friend's. It's a pity that humans don't have sweeping horns; that would make them perfect. But even without them, I consider Kalbfleish's head the finest in my collection. It's truly magnificant. It was. "Kalbfleish has a fine head on him," his friends used to say, and laugh. The big captain, for all his remarkable courage and spirit, had not been long on brains. As a trophy, his head looked even wilder than it had when he was alive. It had a stark and staring expression -- as though his death had been one of terror and agony. "You killed him of course," said Netter dryly, as he braided a romal in his nervous hands. "So, one way or the other. I'll have to kill you -- or you me." "Not I," said Porcellus -- a moist and hog-fat Creature. "I wouldn't harm an insect. Your friend had a violent heart and it finally ruptured. He was uncommonly energetic -- especially so on the day of his death." "Where is his body, you fat pig?" "My translator has only a rough idea of pig, and I suppose you intend it for an insult: but I have a tough hide. I couldn't do a thing with his body, Netter, it was putrid in no time. When you humans know you are going to die you should begin giving yourself injections three or four basic days before. Then your bodies wouldn't turn foul after death. I had no idea he had neglected it, so I wasn't prepared. I was lucky to save the head." "We humans don't know when we're going to die," said Netter. "What is this you gave me to eat? "Yes, now' I remember Kalbfleisk saying he didn't know when he would die, but I thought that he spoke in humor. Since you also say it, it must be true of your species. "The name of the food would mean nothing to you, but yon have a close parallel to its method of preparation. I have read about geese in an Earth book of the ca tain's though I overlooked pigs. Yon sometimes put live geese to dance on hot griddles before they are killed. Because this excites and alarms them their livers become enlarged and are then eaten as great delicacies The creatures whose meat you are eating also died in excitement and alarm, and they are delicious through and through." Well, the meat was certainly delicious. That fat hog of a creature knew how to live well. Netter finished the meal and set it aside. Once more he braided the romal in his hands while he grasped for words. "I suppose all the creatures whose heads you have here died accidently, Porcellus?" he asked. "Well, all but one of them died," said Porcellus, "and I did not kill them. One of them died at a great distance from here: he willed mo his head and had it sent to me because I had admired it. And one of them, so far as I know is still alive. He was a being of multiplex heads. He hacked one of them off quite cured and mounted it himself. A queer chap. He is staring down at you now and it will amuse you to guess which one he is." P orcellus didn't actually speak like that. He spoke in a series of grunts, some verbal and some ventral. But Netter's Console Translator had a selector dial. He could dial translation in any language, pidgeon, diplomatic pleasantry, old Southern U.S. soft-talk or Yiddisih dialect, among others, if he wished. Whenever he encountered a creature who was repulsive to him -- as Porcellus was -- he dialed a courtly manner of speech. This was somehow easier on his ears and nerves. "We're wasting time," Netter told the creature. "I've come to pursue claim to this asteroid. We need it for a way station. As we both know it's never worked out well for two such different species to share a station. We had first claim here long ago: and we abandoned it. Then you set up your station here: but you also abandoned it." "Never," said Porcellus. "Would I abandon my cozy home and my trophies? Would my masters wish the removal of so fine a station master as myself? I was called Home on urgent business. I was gone but for a basic year and the odds were very high against any other claimer coming during that time." "The rules state that a live and competent agent must be in residence at all times or the asteroid can be declared abandoned," Netter said. "The asteroid was plainly abandoned when Kalbfleish arrived: you were gone. He reported it, and claimed the station for our company. The claim was approved and accepted. "True," said the Creature Porcellus. "What is that thing you play with in your hands? But Captain Kalbfleish -- following the awkward interval after I had returned -- also abandoned the station by dying. I so reported his death, and claimed the station for ourselves aoce more. The claim was approved and accepted. Now you are here as my guest only and, I tell you in all ldness, not a very welcome one." "But a proved murder will void your claim," said Netter. "So prove it, fine man," said Porcellus. "Yours is a smaller head than Kalbfleish's but k has a certain distinction. I could make room for it among my trophies. We have each of us sent various reports, and the matter is under litigation. " In the meanwhile, the accidental death of either of us would void his claim and settle the matter. We cannot kill directly. Investigators are already on the way and we would both be prime suspects, since we are the only ones here. What is that leather thing with which you play?" # A romal, Porcellus. A short quirt braided onto a rein. They made them in Old Mexico, California and Texas, but they were mostly ornamental." "Earth places, my translator say. Were they used with a creature?" "With a pony, a horse." "Haven't I stumbled onto the information that the horse is extinct? "Yes. The braiding of the little thing is only a hobby of mine." IF "A hobby, according to my comprehensive translator, is a sort of vicarious horse -- a mental surrogate which one rides. Is that correct?" "Correct, Porcellus. Haven't you a hobby?" "My hobby is heads." said the thing. Netter started to leave for his own camp. "To the early and accidental death of one of us," he toasted, finshing his drink. "Shoals!" toasted Porcellus. "I believe that is your word. And a warning: stay away from the low dome which you will see on the plain. It's dangerous." No -- Porcellus wanted him to go to the curious dome -- or he wouldn't have warned him away from it. Was it dangerous? Or did the thing merely want to divert him? Porcellus must have known that he would explore every feature of landscape on the small asteroid. Perhaps it was only to further worry him, as Porcellus himself had seemed to be worried. But what in hog heaven can worry a hog! Netter had it after a while. He knows when he's going to die. He's surprised that humans haven't that knowledge. But can I depend on it? It's only a guess -- and a poor one at tht. Netter left the dome until last. He circumnavigated the asteroid in a brisk six-mile walk and found nothing of interest. At last he came thoughtfully to the dome. Rising to no more than his height in the center, it was about sixty feet in diameter, symmetrical in general outline, with a slightly rough ened surface, and probably artificial. "I believe it is an old direction beacon of the Porcines," he said aloud to himself. "Yes, this is certainly the top of an obsolete beam sphere, and most of it is underground. They were no good. I think we had them at one time." Netter stepped gingerly onto the sphere. It was certainly firm enough. There was no danger of him crashing through. He climbed to the center. "Nice, he said, 'T)ut nothing." Then he felt it activated "So Porcellus still uses it," he said, "I didn't realize they were so backward." H e walked around on it, and it rotated gently under him, compensating for him. He strode down the side a little way, and it quickly brought him back to the top. "This could be fun," he said. He could take three, four quick steps away from the top, and he would still be on top. He could tense to jump sideways, and the sphere would compensate before he left the surface: he'd still land exactly on the center whichever way he jumped. The thing rolled easily and noiselessly, immedately anticipating and reacting to every movement. He walked, he ran, he laughed He trotted half a mile to end up standing where he stood before. "You know tricks and I know tricks, old sphere," he shouted "Let's see who's smarter." He feinted, he broke, he dodged, he ran crazy-legged as though he were brokenfield dribbling at Galactk rules Football. He evaded tacklers, he scored countless goals in his mind -- but he never left the dome. He lay down and rolled, trying to go down the steep far slopes as though they were grass banks. He stopped rolling and lay on his back. "I haven't had so much fun since I was a boy at the amusement park," he said. He hadn't? Then why did he suddenly begin to tremble? Why didhe begin to whistle off key. It was almost as though he was scared. 'Stone walls do not a pokey make nor locks a -- " It was the Cross-Bar Hotel Blues he was whistling and he had to stop it. He was locked tight in jail on a hillock in the middle of a plain, and there was no barrier in sight. There was no possible way he could get off the compensating dome. After an hour of cavorting and hopping about he wasn't even one full step from where he started -- and there was no possible way that he could do better. He thought about it for a full Hippodamia day and night -- fortyfive minutes basic time. He couldn't come up with anything constructive. "If I had a rope and you had a stump," he said talking to no one, "I'd rope the stump -- I'm good at that -- and pull myself off this thing. But he didn't have a rope and the plain sure didn't have a stump. It hardly had a pebble as big as his thumb. tCThis is where Kalbleish died," A said Netter "You said it right, pig man, my friend had a violent heart and it finally ruptured on him. You didn't have to murder him. You let him run himself to death. You said it, he was uncommonly energetic -- especially so on the day of his death. Now I understand. He could never stand to be confined. He must have gone crazy when he realized the paradoxical nature of his prison -- on the most open space on the asteroid. He must have run until he ruptured all his organs. It is no wonder that he died with that look of horror." This was a jail that nobody could break. Why try more tricks on the sphere? It knew what he was going to do even before he did. "Only a creature that could fly in zero atmosphere could get off of this," he mused. "Even a worm couldn't crawl off unless he were too small to affect the compensators. If I had two cant hooks I might be able to fool the thing, but it could no doubt compensate for the resolution of forces. If I had a weight on a line I might pule it a little -- but not much. Porky has it made. I'll die either of starvation, exertion or insanity -- but the investigation won't show that I was murdered. "Why have two humans died of heart attack here?" is the most they can ask him, and Porky will rub his hands and say "Bad climate." But what Porky Porcellus really said was: "Fine man, why do you play like a boy on top of that thing? Is that any way for a hopeful asteroid agent to conduct himself." "Porcellus, you think you've trapped me, do you?" flared Netter. "I trap you! My hands are clean. IF O ' k Permit No. # Sec. #, P.L.R. New York, N. Y. No postage stomp necessary if mailed in the United States Special Christmas Gift Rates # Issues #  # Issues # # # Issues # Add #: for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions rrq science  # Issues # El # Issues # B # Issues # Add #d for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions moRRoW Now #c  # Issues # # # Issues # HI # Issues # Add #C for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions j # Issues of Each  # In All K # Issues of Each I #-# In All L # Issues of Each # In All Add # for each (# Issues) foreign subscriptions Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions lo be sent In accordance with the offers indicoted in eoch case belowt nVw henVwai a b c # e f # h I j ic i n P, CiRaE n#w renewal a b c d e f g h I j IC I  I enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet p, n ciRaE N?w ren#wai a B C # E F C H I j K I No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the U.#. Give the gift you would like to receive Is it my fault that two humans develop the strange mania of running themselves to death in a weird game! How far away was Porcellus from the edge of the dome? Too far. Two far by several yards. "Porcellus, what is this thing?' Netter cried out. "Once it was a beam sphere, as you have probably guessed Now its obsolete. I have altered it a bit. I use it as an intelligence test. To fail it is to die." "Did anyone ever get off it?" Netter called He had to get Porcellus interested. He had to get him to come several feet closer before he turned away. "Only one passed," said the creature, "and he had unusual natural advantages. He was a peculiar fellow of the species Larrik who visited me some basic years ago. He simply broke himself into two pieces and walked off in opposite directions. The globe couldn't compensate for both of them. One got clear, obtained a line and pulled his other half off. Both halves lauded at me, and then they rejoined themselves. But you haven't his advantage, Netter. Yqu have failed." #T'#I find a way," swore Netter. I "I'll find a trick." Just a little bit closer now would do it. "You lose. Netter," said Porcelhis. "There is no fixed thing on the plain you could use to pull yourself off -- even if you had a way of reaching it. The longest thing you have with you is what you call the romal, and it's not long enough." Porcellus was close enough. Right at the end of the dome, when he turned it would be perfect -- some where between thirty-two and thirtyfive feet. There was no fixed object on the plain, but there was something heavy enough that would serve as one. The romal was no longer than his arm, but it was a romal rey -- a king romal. Porcellus turned away in his triumph. The lightthin lariat flew and dropped over his body. The fat hulk was no match for Netter when he was on solid ground. He hog-tied the Hog-man with the thin leather line and rolled him onto the dome. And Porcellus was immediately on the center top of the dome to stay there until he died of hunger, uncommon exertion or porcine apoplexy... Netter was moving things about in the fine trophy room which he had recently inherited. He set a fine hardwood peg into the wall and hung on it the king romal for which he now had especial afiection. He moved many things in the trophy room. He wanted #ie setting to be just right. He knew just what space it should occupy cm Aat great wall. The investigation was over with and Netter's claim had been accepted. He was now asteroid stationmaster -- a good job. The head was ready. It had been cured out and tanned and treated, and the eye-tushers were polished until they gleamed. Porcellus had a magnificent head! IF  Serta He was the only man In the world who could hope to stand up against the enemyif he was still a mani XI F or the first eight hours at my new job, while the ancient tanker ploughed at fifty knots sixtyfive feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean, I labored with Joel at routine drudgery that could have been performed with greater efficiency and less cost by a mediumpriced computer. I passed a bad hour when we surfaced to pass through the Gibraltar locks. A boat came alongside and I heard the clank of feet on the deck above; caught scraps -- voices asking What Has Gone Before e e  John Bravals, mtelligence operator and soldier of fortune, IS assigned to track down the report that strange creatures are interfering in the formal war games the world uses to settle its diplomatic problems. Fitted out with special equipment, he visits one battle and finds a creature that looks like a huge, savage dog that uses superscientific weapons to destroy a tank, kill its crew... and in a matter of seconds operate on their bodies to remove their brains. Bravais reports back to Ms superiors and is given a new body to help him match the superfast, super-strong hounds of hell. Fitted out with prosthetic muscles and skin of steel, with sensory equipment that matches the radar of a battleship and the long-distance sensitivity of Project Ozma, able to work for days without rest and to destroy any mortal adversary, Bravais sets out to find the creatures -- and succeeds too well. For they are everywhere. Masked as humans, relying on a psionk ability to camouflage themselves, they pass as military officers, diplomats -- Earth leaders of every variety. Bravais's superiors are killed. He himself is a fugitive and alone. Wounded, helpless, he stows away aboard a cargo submarine headed for the U.S.A. m ' questions, the captain blandly denying any knowledge of stowaways. I was waiting just inside the deckhouse door as he invited his official visitors to search the ship. They declined with curses. I heard them reboard their launch; then the sound of its engines growled away across the water. I leaned against the wall, feeling hot and dizzy. My arm throbbed like a giant toothache. Joel had been waiting with me. "Hey, Jones," he said. "How come we're hanging around here? You going out on deck?" I let a long breath out; it was a bad habit I was forming -- forgetting to breathe for minutes at a stretch. I straightened with an effort, feeling the deck move under me. "Sure," I said. "Let's go take a look at the Rock." The cold pre-dawn air cleared my head. I leaned on the rail beside Joel, watching the towering barrier walls slip down into the churning water as the lock filled. Then the tanker edged ahead, the mighty gates slid in behind us, churning water aside, met with a dull boom. Again we rode the flood, gaining another hundred feet. Forty-five minutes and five locks later we slid out into the choppy, blue-black waters of the South Atlantic, five hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. Dawn was coloring the sky now. Lights gleamed wanly from the fortress of Gibraltar, and from the flat, white city on the African side. A raucous buzzer sounded across the deck. ?# "Hey, we better get below before we get dunked," Joel advised. We stepped back into the stale interior. A moment later we heard the crash of the waters closing over us above, then the silence of the deep sea settled in again. "Well," Joel said cheerfully. "I guess we got to get back to work, Jones." I nodded. For a moment, blackness whirled before me as I turned. I caught myself, followed Joel back down into the ship. D uring the next forty-eight hours, Joel and I found time for several four-hour sleeps and a couple of short naps between bellowed orders from Carboni or the unseen captain. At odd intervals we went to the crew mess, demanded and got plates of oily cold-storage eggs and too-salty bacon. Now, having just completed a laborious two-hour visual inspection of reset switches, I again sat at the long table, listening to the feverish humming in my head, picking at a mixture of mummified beef and canned milk and taking medicinal sips from a clay mug of North African brandy. Across the table, the bearded elder known as Doc worked conscientiously to finish the bottle. Joel had put his head on the table and gone off to sleep. At the far end of the room, Fogey, the horse-faced man, monotonously and with much profanity called off items from an inventory list while a short, chinless sailor with a wool cap and warts ticked them off on a clipboard. What the rest of the nine-man crew IF did aboard the vessel, I hadn't yet learned. Four of them had just left the room, staggering drunk. "Three more trips, Jones," Doc stated. "Thirty-one years on the line -- nine on Excalibur. I'll miss the old tub." He looked around the room with sad, red-veined eyes. "No, Fm a damned liar," he corrected. "I hate this damned scow." He looked at me as though I had praised it. "I've hated every minute of those thirty-one years. Hated medical school before that. You ever been in a cadaver lab?" "Sure have," I said, forcing myself to follow the conversation. "There was a fellow I hadn't seen for years. Opened up the tin box, and there he was." I sipped the brandy, feeling it burn its way down. Doc worked his lips, blinked, took a puD at his drink. "I knew a fellow," he said, "sold his body to a medical school. Got five hundred cees for it, which he badly needed at the time. Later on he got in the chips and thought better of the bargain. Wanted to buy it back. Well, seems like the title had changed hands a couple of times. He traced it from Yak to Georgia, and on down to Miami. Finally caught up with it." He took a healthy draught from his cup, exhaled noisily. "Too late, though. End of the year, you know. Nothing left but a few ribs, the left arm, and the bottom half of the cranium." He sighed. "A sad case." H is image was wavering, obscured by whirling points of light; I blinked them away, raised my glass to him. "Doc, you're one' of the finest liars I ever met." He blushed, looking modest. "Shucks, seems like things just naturally happen to me. Why, I remember the time..." he rambled on. At the far end of the table, Fogey tossed his list aside, yawned, scratched at an unshaven jaw. "Get some coffee over here, Runt," he ordered. The warty sailor bustled, operating the coffee maker, filled a two-quart pot, rattled thick cups and sheet-metal spoons. He placed the pot iu front of the horsefaced man. "Watch out, Mr. Dobbin. She's plenty hot." He went back to his list, muttering to himself. Fogey grunted; He glanced at Joel, snoring across the table from him; he licked a finger, touched it to the polished metal; it hissed. An expression twitched at the corners of his mouth. He took the pot gingerly by the massive insulated handle, stood. "Hey, dummy!" he said sharply. Joel stirred. "Wake up, dummy!" Joel sat up, knuckling his eyes. He saw Fogey and smiled. "Gee, I guess I -- " he started. "Here!" Fogey thrust the pot at him. Joel reached out, took the rounded container in his two huge hands. His jaw dropped. His eyes widened. Fogey stepped back, his mouth arched m a grin like something carved at the top of Notre Dame. I was a little slow, but I reached Joel then, knocked the steaming pot from hk bandr, it smashed against the wall behind Pogey, spewed steam and liquid in a wide sheet that caught the horse-faced man full across the back. He howled, writhed away from the table, clutching at his shoulder. He screamed again, tore at his jacket. Doc came to his feet, grabbing at the bottle as it tottered, almost fell. The horse-faced man clawed his shirt open, ripped it from his shoulders. A vast red blister swelled visibly from his patchy hair-line almost to the soiled edge of the underwear showing above his belt. His eye fell on Doc. "Do something, damn your guts!" he shrilled. "Oh, Jesus..." Doc started around the table. I caught his arm. "To hell with that sadist," I said. "Take a look at Joel's hands." Joel still stood, staring at his hands. A tear formed, rolled down his cheek. "I'll kill him!" Pogey screeched. He plunged across the room, knocked the sailor aside, caught up a steak knife, whirled on Joel. I pushed in front of him. The odors of sweat and alcohol came from him in waves. I caught his wrist, remembering not to pulp the bone. "Joel," I said, my eyes holding on Pogey's. "If this man ever hurts you again, put your thumbs into his throat until he stops moving, understand?" I twitched the knife from Pogey's hand, shoved him from me. His face was as white now as the dead face of the thing I had killed in the ravine. The recollection must have shown in my expression. Pogey shivered, backed, turned to the sailor who was standing wide-eyed, all warts and Adam's apple, looking from one of us to the other like a spectator at a ping-pong tournament. "Get me to my room," Pogey gasped out. His knees went slack as the sailor caught him. Behind me, Joel moaned. "Let's get this boy down to my sick-bay," Doc was saying. "Second-degree, maybe worse. Callouset helped..." As I turned, his eyes found mine. "You better let me take a look at you, too," he said. "You're hotter'n a power pile, Jones." I put a hand on the desk to keep it from spinning. "How's Joel?" My voice seemed to belong to someone else. A wave of nausea rolled over me, left me shivering violently.  would have to wait... I forced my thoughts to hold to the subject. Wait until they came. There would be a band, dressed all in Red, and General Julius would be leading it . I fought the fantasy away. Delirium waited like a mire beside the nari;ow path of reason. Nothing to do with Julius. Julius was dead. I had strangled him, while he bit at me. The dog-things had chased me, and now I was on the beach. It was cold, cold... I shivered violently, huddling against the steel cliff. Joel was calling my name. He needed help, but I was trapped. "Please, Jones... don't hit the doc." I got my eyes open. Joel's face IF loomed above me. Blood ran from his nose. Doc's frightened face stared. I fell back, feeling my heart pound like a shoeing hammer. I lay back and let the dream take me... I awoke feeling weak, sick, beaten, thrown away. I stirred, heard cloth tear. I looked down; my left arm, as numb as something carved from marble, was strapped to my side. I felt the pull of tape at my neck, across my jaw. My mouth tasted as though mice had nested in it. I sat up as weak as a diplomatic protest. I got to my feet, blinked away a light-shot blackness, went across to the door, looked out through the bars. Joel lay in the corridor, asleep on a mat. I called his name. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, smiled. "Hey, Jones!" He got to his feet, touched his swollen nose. "Boy, Jones, you sure pack a wallop. You feeling better now?" "Lots better. How long was I out?" He looked down at me vaguely. "How long before we reach Jacksonville?" "Gosh, Jones, I dunno. Pretty soon, maybe." I tensed the muscles behind my cars, tuned through the sounds of the ship, picked up the mutter of voices; but they were indistinct, unreadable. "Listen to me, Joel," I said. "There'll be police waiting for me when we dock. I have to get off the ship before then. How long before we surface?" "Huh? Hey, hows come cops is after you, Jones?" "Never mind that, Joel. Try to think, now. Do we surface out at sea, before we get into the harbor?" Joel frowned." "Gosh, I don't know about that, Jones." I gripped the bars. "I want you to do something for me, Joel. Go to the crew mess. There's a clock there. Go check it, and come back and tell me what time it is." Joel nodded. "Okay, Jones. Sure. Hows come..." "I'll tell you later. Hurry!" I sat on the floor and waited. The deck seemed to surge under me. Either we were maneuvering, or I was having another relapse. There was a distant booming, the sudden vibration of turbulence transmitted through the hull. The ship heaved, settled. I got to my feet, holding to the wall for support. The question of when we would surface had become academic. We were on the top now. There were sounds along the corridor: the clump of feet, raised voices. I keened my hearing again, picked up the whine of the main drive turbines, the clatter of deploying deck gear, the creak of the hull -- and another sound: the rhythmic growl of a small-boat engine, far away but coming closer. The minutes crawled on like #tepped-on roaches. Joel appeared down the corridor, came up to the cell door. There was a worried look on his face. "The big hand was on... lessee... Hey, Jones." He looked at me like a lost kid. "I got a funny feeling." "Sure, Joel. I'm scared, too." But I got this like tickle-feeling in my head." I nodded, listening for the sounds from above. The boat was close now. I heard its engines cut back; then it was bumping alongside. The sound of the ship's turbines had faded to a growl. "Does a customs boat usually come out to meet the ship in the harbor?" Joel was rubbing his head with one bandaged hand. He looked up at the low ceiling and whimpered. "What is it, Joel?" Then I felt it: the eerie sense of unreality, the graying of the light in the dim corridor, the sense of doom impending. I grabbed the bars, strained at them. The metal gave, grudgingly, a fraction of an inch; my head pounded from the effort. "Joel!" I called. My voice had a ragged edge to it. "Who keeps the key to this door?" His eyes wavered down to meet mine. "Uh... Carboni keeps all the keys." "Can you get them?" Joel looked at the ceiling. I heard feet on the deck now -- and a soft padding that sent a chill through me like an iron spear. "I got such a tickle in my head," he moaned. "I'm scared, Jones. Sometimes -- " he brushed at his face, groping for words -- "when I seen the big dogs it was just like this, Jones. It tickled in my head." T swallowed hard. "Tell me about the big dogs. Joel." "T didn't like them dogs, Jones. They scared me. I run when I seen 'em. I hid." "When did you see them?" "In port. Lots of times. I seen 'em in the streets, and inside buildings. I seen 'em looking out of cars." He pointed to the ceiling. "They're up there now. I can tell." "Listen, Joel. Go to Carboni's office; get the keys; the one you want is a big electrokey. Bring it here, as fast as you can." "I'm scared, Jones." But he stepped back with a sob, turned and ran. I clung to the bars and waited, listening to the feet that prowled the deck above. T he ship was deathly still now except for the slap of water, the groan of structural members as the hull flexed under the motion of the waves. I heard stealthy feet moving, the rasp of unhuman hands at the deckhouse door. Joel appeared, half-running. T heard the other footsteps slow, come to a stop. I pictured the thing, standing with one pale hand upraised like a dog on point, its death-mask turning, searching for the source of the sounds. I motioned to Joel. "Keep it quiet!" I hissed. He came up to the door, holding up the key, a two-inch square of black plastic from which a short metal rod protruded. "Carboni was setting right there. He never even looked up." "Get the door open," I whispered urgently. He inserted the key, his tongue in the corner of his mouth. I could hear the thing around the comer, coming back now, hurrying. #B The lock snickered; I slid the door aside, stepped into the passage -- The creature bounded into view, brought up short, red eyes staring in a white mask. Beside me, Joel cried out. I pushed in front of him as the demon sprang, slammed a blow to its head that sent it sprawling past me. It was up instantly, whirling, rearing up on thin too-long legs. I chopped at its neck with the side of my hand, jumped back as its jaws snapped half an inch from my wrist, swung a kick that caught its hip, knocked it against . the wall. It yelped and came at me, dragging a hind leg. Behind it, Joel stood, mouth open, flat against the cell door. I shook my head to clear it. The scene before me wavered; a sound like roaring waters filled my head. A cannonball struck me, carried me back, down. The needle-filled mouth was a foot from my face, and I hit at it, caught a fist-full of stiff-bristled hide, held the snapping jaws from me. The great pale hands struck at me -- poorly aimed, feeble blows. The jaws were the demon's weapon. They ravened inches from my face -- and my arm was weakening. T he beast lunged backward, twisted free from my one-handed grip. I heard Joel's yell, instantly choked off. I came to my knees, saw the flurry of motion as the demon bore him backwards. I got my feet under me, took two steps, threw myself at the black-bristled back, locked my right arm around its throat in a crushing embrace. I lunged backward, rolled clear of Joel, saw him stumble to his feet, start toward me -- "Stay clearl" I shouted. The demon fought, flailing the deck and walls with wild blows of its four hands. I held on, choking it, feeling bone and cartilage collapse, grinding the shattered throat until the head fell slack. One leg drummed for a moment against the deck. Then the thing stiffened and was still. I pushed it aside, tottered to my feet. Joel stared at me, dazed. I listened, heard the slap of running beast-hands. "Into the cell, Joel!" I pushed him inside, slammed and locked the door. "You'll be safe there -- they won't bother with you," I called. "When you get ashore, go home, stay there. You understand?" He nodded dumbly. The feet were close now. I turned, ran along the passage, took a cross-corridor, nearly fell over someone sprawled on the deck. A patch of evening sky showed at the top of the companionway. I went up, leaped out on the open deck, almost awash in the still sea. I caught a glimpse of two demons standing with raised heads, as though listening, while beyond them a third crouched over a fallen crewman. Three steps took me to the rail; I leaped over it and dived into the dark water. Coffeyville, Kansas, Felix had said. Box #, the Franklin Street Postal Station. It was a long drive for an invalid, and what I would find at the end IF of it I didn't know -- but it was something that Felix had thought important enough to lock in the final strongbox of his subconscious. I headed north. A lifetime later, I steered a stolen pick-up to the curb on a snow-frosted side street of sagging, cavernous houses that had been the culminating achievements of rich farmers a century before. Now they looked as bleak and empty as abandoned funeral homes. I got out of the car, waited until the pavement settled down, then walked back two blocks to a structure in red-brick Gothic bearing the legend: Coffeyville, Kans. # Inside, a bored-looking youngish man with thinning hair and a pursed mouth watched me from behind the peeling veneer of a kidney-shaped the sea of gray Jello in which his face seemed to float, got a hand on the desk, . leaned more or less upright, and heard somebody say, 'T'd like a room for tonight." His mouth was moving. It was hot in the room. I pulled at my collar. The Jello had closed over the clerk now, but a voice with an edge like a meat saw went on:... drunks in the place. You'll have to clear out of here. This -- " Unfortunately, I'm not drunk," I heard myself pronouncing the words quite distinctly. 'T'm a bit off my feed. Touch of an old malaria, possibly." He was swimming back into focus. My feet seemed to be swinging in a slow arc over my heai. I kept both hands on the counter and tried to convince myself that I was standing solidly on the rubber mat that covered the worn place in the rug. I let go long enough to get out my wallet, put money on the counter. "Well..." His hand covered the bill. "You do look a little flushed. Chinese flu, maybe. Maybe you'd better see a doctor. And that's a nasty cut on your face." "Not used to these new-fangled safety razors," I said. "I'll be all right." The floor was sliding back to where it belonged now. The Jello had thinned out sufficiently to show me the registration book and a finger with a hang-nail indicating the line where I should sign. My stomach felt like a flush tank on the verge of starting its cycle. I grabbed the stylus, scrawled something, waded through knee-deep fog to the lift, rode up, walked past a few miles of wallpaper that was someone's revenge for life's disappointments, found my room, got the door open, took a step toward the bed and passed out cold. A crew of little red men was working at my arm with saws and hatchets, while another played a blow-torch over my face. I tried to yeU to scare them away, managed a weak croak. I got my eyes open, dis covered that my face was against a dusty rug with a pattern of faded fruits and flowers; I crawled as far as the wall-mounted lavatory, pulled myself up, got the cold water on, splashed it over my head. I could hear myself moaning, like a dog begging to be let in on a cold night; it didn't seem important. I let myself moan. There was yellow light outside the dirt-scaled window when I tottered across to the bed; the next time I looked it was deep twilight. Time seemed to be slipping by in large pieces, Hke an ice-floe breaking up. I got up on the third try, went back and used more cold water, then braced my feet and risked a look in the mirror. An hour later, with half a dozen assorted feverdepressants, cortical stimulants, metabolic catalyzers, and happy pills in my stomach, I took a hot shower, shaved, put a clean tape on my jaw and went downstairs. The clerk used his worried look at me. "Maybe you hadn't ought to go out, sir," he suggested. I said "I'll manage. Where's Franklin Street?" He gave me directions and I went out into the chill of the late autumn night. I considered calling a cab, but decided against it. My experiences had made me wary of sharing confined spaces with strangers. Using the pick-up was out, too; a hot car might attract just the attention I was most desirous of avoiding at the moment. I started off at a wobbling gait that steadied as the chemicals in my blood stream started to work, my breath freezing into ice-crystals. The Post Office was a low, yellowish armorplast front with a glass door flanked on one side by a codepunch panel, and on the other by colorful exhortations to Enlist Now in the Peace Brigade and Fight For the Way of Life of Your Choice. I strolled to the panel, punched keys one, seven, four, and two. Machinery whirred. A box popped into view. Through the quarter-inch armorplast, I could see a thick manilia envelope. The proper code would cause the transparent panel to slide up -- but unfortunately Felix hadn't had time to give k to me. I slammed my fist against the plastic. It made a hell of a loud noise; a faint mark appeared on the panel. I set myself, hit k again as hard as I could. The plastic shattered diis time. I poked the sharp fragments in, got my fingers on the envelope, pulled it out through the jagged opening. I could hear a bell starting up far back inside the building. Nearer at hand, a red light above the door blinked furiously. It was unfortunate -- but a risk I had had to take. I tucked the envelope away, turned, took two steps -- A loping dog-shape rounded the corner, galloped silently toward me. I spun; a second was angling across the street at a dead run. Far down the street, two pedestrians sauntered on their ways, oblivious of what was happening; there was no one else in sight. A third demon appeared at an alley mouth across the street, trotted directly toward me, sharp ears erect, skull-face smiling. IF There was a dark delivery-van at the curb. I leaped to it, tried the door -- locked. I doubled my fist, smashed the glass, got the door open. The nearest demon broke into an awkward gallop. I slid into the seat, twisted the key, accelerated from the curb as the thing leaped. It struck just behind the door, clung for a moment, fell off. I steered for the one in the street ahead, saw it dodge aside at the last instant -- just too late. There was a heavy shock; the car veered. I caught it, rounded a corner on two wheels, steering awkwardly with one hand. The gyros screeched their protest as I zigzagged, missing another dog-thing coming up fast, then straightened out and roared off toward the polyarcs of a major expressway intermix. I caught a glimpse of a road-side sign: I braked quickly, passed the blue glare-sign that indicated the pickup point for the state autodrive system, squealed to a stop fifty yards beyond it. I switched the drive lever back in to flick the van into gear. It started off, came quickly up to speed, jerkily corrected course as it crossed the system monitor line. I watched it as it swung off into the banked curve ahead, accelerating rapidly; then I climbed an ancient wire fence, stumbled across a snow-scattered plouged field and into the shelter of the trees. E xcitement, I was discovering, wasn't good for my ailment. I had another attack of nausea that left me pale, trembling, empty as a looted house, and easily strong enough to sort out a stamp collection, using power-assisted tongs. I swayed on all fours, smelling leafmould and frozen bark, hearing a distant croak of tree-frogs. The demons had laid a neat trap for me. They had watched, followed my movements -- probably from the time I left the ship -- waiting for the proper time to close in. My trick with the van had gained me a few minutes respite -- but nothing more. Alerted police would bring the empty vehicle to a halt within a mile or two; then a cordon would close in, beating every thicket, until they found me. Meanwhile, I had time enough to take a look at whatever it was that I had come five thousand miles to collect -- the thing Felix had guarded with the last fragment of his will. I took the envelope from the inner pocket, tore off one end. A twoinch-square wafer of translucent polyon slipped into my hand. In the faint starlight, I could see a pattern of fine wires and vari-colored beads imbedded in the material. I turned it over, smelled it, shook it, held it to my ear. Identify your self," a tiny voice said. I jumped, held the thing on my palm to stare at it, then cautiously put it to my ear again. You now have sixty seconds in which to identify yourself the voice Fifty-eight seconds and counting... I held the rectangle before my mouth. "Bravais," I said. "John Bravais, "... fifty-two; fiftyone... fifty  I talked to it some more, listened again: "... fortyfour; forty-three; forty two... Talking to it wasn't getting me anywhere. How the hell did you identify yourself to a piece of plastic the size of a book of matches? Fingerprints? A membership card in the National Geographic Society? to the plastic, then listened again:... thirty-one; thirty... There was a pause. the absence of proper identification within thirty seconds, this plaque will detonate. Unauthorized personnel are warned to withdraw to fifty yards. Twenty seconds and counting. Nineteen; eighteen... I had my arm back, ready to throw -- but I checked the motion. The blast would attract everything withih a mile, from flying saucer watchers to red-eyed beast-shapes that loped on hands, like a man -- and I wouldhave lost my one ace in a game where the stakes were more than life and death. I hesitated, looked at the ticking bomb in my hand. "Thinking caps, children," I whispered aloud. "Thinking caps, thinking caps..." Talking to it was no good; ID cards with built-in molecular patterns for special scanners meant nothing to it. It had to be something he hadn't had time to tell me. A signal had to be transmitted. I had nothing -- except an array of gimmicks built into my teeth by Felix... There was a spy-eye detector which would set up a sharp twinge in my left upper canine under any radiation on the spy band; the right gency band receiver; in my right lower third molar, there was miniature radar pulser -- A transmitter. Just possibly -- if there was still time. I jammed the plaque to my ear: "... ten seconds and counting. Nine -- " With my tongue, I pushed aside the protective cap on the tooth, bit down; there was a sour taste of galvanic action as the contacts closed, a tingle as an echo bounced back from metal somewhere out across the night. I pulsed again; if that hadn't done it, nothing would. "Tom are recognized the voice said crisply. "Tom are now seven hundred and thirty-two yards northnorth-east of the station..." I got to my feet, took a bearing on the North Star, and set off through the trees. Nearly an hour later I came out of the woods onto an unsurfaced track, went through a ditch choked with stiff, waist-high weeds, scraped myself getting over a rotting wire fence. There were headlights on the distant highway now, and other IF lights coming out from Coffeyvillc. I put the wafer to my ear... two hundred twenty-two yards, bearing two-oh-seven" the calm voice said. I picked my way past the rusted hulk of a tractor abandoned under the crabbed branches of a dead apple tree, came back into the open, broke into a rur across a grassed stretch that had probably been a pasture forty years earlier. Faint light fell across the ground ahead; my shadow bobbed in front of me, swung aside and disappeared. Cars were closing in on the wood lot behind me. "... hundred and fifty-four yards, bearing two one three... I corrected course to the right, plunged down a slight slope, crashed through a dense growth of brush, went knee-deep into half-frozen muck, sending skim-ice tinkling. Dry stalks broke under my hand as I clawed my Way up an embankment. I came to a gasping halt, checked my position: eighteen yards, bearing two seven five... I left the road, ran past a fallen barn. And there was nothing; not so much as a marker stone or a dry bush. Standing alone in the frozen field, shivering with the bitter cold, I could hear approaching feet -- more than one set of them. I turned to face them, taking deep breaths to charge my air banks, tried to blink the fog from my failing visipn. It would be over in another minute. I would try to kill at least one more of them before those bony snouts found my throat. I started to toss the useless plague aside, on Impulse put it to my ear. " -- rectly above the entry; please re-identify... You are now directly above the entry; please re-identify... You are now -- " I groped with my tongue, bit down on the tooth. Nothing happened. Through the darkness, I saw a movement among the scattered trees. Near at hand, there was a soft hum, a grating sound. Directly before me, dirt stirred; a polishedcylinder a yard across, dirt-topped, emerged from the earth, rose swiftly to a height of six feet. With a click! a panel slid back, exposing an unlighted and featureless interior. I didn't linger; I stepped inside, felt the shaft start down, and stumbled out into warmth and silence. I was in a small, softly-lit room with a polished floor, warm to the touch, and walls which were a jumble of ancient, varnished oak cabinet-work, gray-painted equipment housings, instrument panels, indicator lights, and controls resembling those of a Tri-D starship. Exposed wiring and conduit crisscrossed the panels. A vast clock with fanciful Roman numerals and elaborate hands said ten minutes past ten. It was like nothing I had ever seen -- except for a remote resemblance to Felix's underground laboratory in Tamboula. I felt an urge to hysterical laughter as I thought of the things up above, prowling the ground now, converging on the spot from which I had miraculously disappeared. How long IF would it be before they started to dig? The urge to laugh died. I closed my eyes, gathered my forces, such as they were, and keened my hearing... Rustling sounds in the earth aU about me; the slow grind of the earthworm, the frantic scrabble, pause, scrabble of the burrowing mole, the soft, tentative creak of the questing root... I tuned, reaching out... Wind moaned in the trees. Soft footfalls thump, thumped, crossing the field above me. There was the growl of a turbine, coming closer, the grate of tires in soft earth. A door slammed, feet clumped. '# did not come this way" a flat voice said. Something gibbered -- a sound that turned my spine to ice. "Zr is sick and weak" the first voice said. 'lt is only a man. It did not come this way. It is not here" More of the breathy gobbling; I could almost see the skull-face, the grinning mouth, the rag-tongue moving as it commanded the manshaped slave standing before it. "# is not here" the humanoid said. # will return to my post in the village." Now the gabble was angry, insistent. It commanded. It is not logical," the toneless voice said. It went another way. The other units will find it." Two beast-things gibbered. You let it escape you at the vih lage," a lifeless voice replied. Thai was not in accordance with logic." The argument went on, twenty feet above my hidden sanctuary. ... a factor which we cannot compute," a dead voice stated. "To remain here is unintelligent." Footsteps tramped away. The car door clattered open, slammed. A turbine growled into life; tires crunched the hard earth, going away. Soft feet paced above me. Two of the creatures, possibly three, crossed and re-crossed the area. I could hear them as they conferred,' a conversation of goblins. Then two stalked away, while the third settled down heavily to wait. y took out my talking plastic rectangle and put it to my ear. "... now in Survival Station Twelve," the precise voice was saying. "Place this token in the illuminated slot on the station monitor panel." There was a pause. "You are now in Survival Station Twelve  Across the room, there was a recessed scrollwork console dimly lit by a yellow glare strip. I wavered across to it, found the lighted slot, pressed the wafer into it, then leaned against a chair, waiting. Things clicked and hummed; a white light snapped on, giving the room a cheery, clinical look, like a preparatory buzz, matching the humming in my head; then: "This is your Station Monitor," a deep voice said in near-monotone. "The voice you hear is a 'speechconstruct, capable of verbalizing computer findings. The unit is also capable of receiving programming instructions verbally. Please speak distinctly and unambiguously. Do not employ slang or unusual constructions Avoid words having multiple denotations." The room seemed to fade and brighten, swaying like a cable-car in a high wind. I was beginning to learn the signs; I would black out in a few seconds. I looked, around for a soft place to fall, while the voice droned on. Abruptly, it broke off. Then: 'Emergency overidel" it said sharply. "Sensing instruments indicate you require immediate medical attention... There was a sound behind me; I turned. As in a dream, I saw a white-sheeted cot deploy from a wall recess, roll across the room hunting a little, then come straight on and stop beside me. "Place yourself on the cot, with your head at the equipment end." The voice echoed from far away. I made a vast effort, pushed myself clear of the chair, fell across the bed. I was struggling to get myself on it, when I felt a touch, twisted to see padded, jointed arms grasp me and gently but firmly hoist me up and lay me out, face-down. The sheet was smooth and cool under my face. "You will undergo emergency diagnosis and treatment," the voice said. "An anesthetic will be administered if required. Do not be alarmed." I caught just one whiff of neopolyform. Then I was relaxing, letting it all go, sliding down a long, smooth slope into a warm, dark sea. I came out of it with a sensation that took me a moment or two to analyze -- a cold-water, gray-skies. no-nonsense sort of feeling. For tho first time in days -- how many I didn't know -- the fine feverish threads of delirium were lacking in the ragged fabric of my thoughts. I took a breath, waited for the familiar throb of pain between my temples, the first swell of the seasickness in my stomach; nothing happened. I got my eyes open and glanced over at my left arm; it was strapped to a board, swathed in bandages to the wrist, bristling with metal clips and festooned with tubing. In sudden panic, I moved the fingers of the hand projecting from the bandages. They twitched, flexed awkwardly. With an effort, I reached across with my right hand, touched the smooth skin of the knuckles of the other. Under my fingers, the texture was cool, inhumanly glossy; the cold gloss of polyon. I raked at the bandages, tore them back -- An inch below the wrist, the pseudo-skin ended. A pair of gleaming metal rods replaced the familiar curve of my forearm. A sort of animal whimper came from my throat. I clenched my lost fist -- and the artificial hand complied. I fell back, feeling a numbness spread from the dead hand all through me. I was truncated, spoiled, less-than-whole. I made an effort to sit up, to tear free from the restraining straps, wild ideas of revenge boiling up inside me -- I was as weak as a drowned kitten. I lay, breathing hoarsely, getting used to the idea... The Station Monitor's level voice broke into the silence: IF Emergency override now conduded. Resuming normal briefing procedure." There was a pause; then the voice went on in its tone of imperturbable calm: "Indicate whether full status briefing is required; if other, state details of requirement." "How long have I been unconscious?" I croaked. My voice was weak, but understandable. "Question requires a value assessment of non-objective factors; authorization requested." "Never mind. How long have I been here?" "Eighteen hours, twenty-two minutes, six seconds, mark. Eight hours, twe -- " "Close enough," I cut in. "What's been happening?" "On the basis of the initial encephalogrammatic pattern, a preliminary diagnosis of massive anaphylactic shock coupled with acute stage four metabolic -- " "Cancel. I don't need the gruesomer details. You've hacked off my arm, replaced it with a hook, cleared out the infection, and gotten the fever down. I guess I'm grateful. But what are the dog-things doing up above?" There was a long silence, with just the hum of an out-of-kilter carrier. Then: "Question implies assumption at variance with previously acquired two-valued data." "Can't you give me a simple answer?" I barked weakly. "Have they started to dig?" "Question implies acceptance at objective physical level of existence and activities of phenomenon classified as subjective. Closed area. Question cannot be answered." "Wait a minute -- you're telling me that the four-handed monsters and the fake humans that work with them are imaginary?" "To avoid delays in responses, do not employ slang or unusual constructions. All data impinging on subject area both directly and indirectly, including instrument-acquired statistical material, photographic and transmitted images, audio direct pick-up, amplification, and replay, and other, have been, A, systematically rejected by Operators as incorrect, illusory, or non-objective; B, produced negative hallucinatory reactions resulting in inability of Operators to perceive read-outs; or, C, been followed by mental breakdown, unconsciousness or death of Operators." "In other words, whenever you've reported anything on the demons the listeners either didn't believe you, couldn't see or hear your report, or went insane or died." "Affirmative." "Has... ah... anything started to dig? Are there any evidences of excavation work xsp above?" "Negative." "Can the presence of diis station be detected using a mass-discont uity-type detector?" "Negative; the station is probeneutral." I let out a long breath. "What is this place?" I asked. "Who built it? And when?" "Station twelve was completed in #. It has been periodically added to since that time. It is one of a complex of fifty survival stations prepared by the Ultimax Group." "What's the Ultimax Group?" "An elite inner circle organization, international in scope, privately financed, comprising one hundred and fourteen individuals selected on the basis of superior intellectual endowment, advanced specialist training, emotional stability and other factors." "For what purpose?" "To monitor trends in the Basic Survival Factors, and to take such steps as may be required to maintain favorable societal survival ratio." "I never heard of them. How long have they been operating?" "Two hundred and seventy-one years." "My God! Who started it?" "The original Committee included Benjamin Franklin, George Loffitt, Danilo Moncredi and Cyril Ste. Claire." "And Felix Severance was a member?" "Affirmative." "And they don't know about -- the non-objective things up above?" "Question indeterminate, as it requires an assumption at variance with -- " ay -- cancel. You said there are other stations. Can I get in touch with them?" "State the number of the station with which you desire to communicate." "What's the nearest one to Jacksonville?" "Station nineteen, Talisman, Florida. Contact now open, on Number three screen." One of the previously blank panels opposite me glowed into life, showed me a view of a room similar in many particulars to Station twelve, except that its basic decor was a trifle more modern -- the stainless steel of the early Atomic Era. "Anybody home?" I called. There was no reply. I tried the other stations successively. None answered. "That's that," I said. "Tell me more about this Ultimax Group. What's it been doing these past couple of hundred years?" "It contributed materially to the success of the American War of Independence, the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire, the consolidation of the Italian and German nations, the emergence of Nippon, the defeat of the Central Powers in the First Engagement of the European War, and of the Fascist Powers in the Second Engagement, and the establishment of the State of Israel. It supported the Space effort..." I was beginning to, feel a little ragged now; the first fine glow was fading. I listened to the voice for another half-hour, while it told me all about the little-known facts of history; then I dismissed it and took another nap. y ate, slept and waited. After fourteen hours, the straps holding my arm released themselves; after that, I practiced tottering up and down my prison, testing my new IP jurm, and now and then tuning in on what went on overhead. For the most part, there was silence, broken only by the sounds of nature and the slap and thump of pacing feet. I heard a few gobbled conversations, and once an exchange between a humanoid and a demon: "# has means of escaping pursuit" the flat voice was saying as I picked it up. This is the same one that eluded our units at location totterpohl" Angry sounds from a demon... 'That is not my area of surveillance," the first voice said coldly. My work is among the men" Another alien tongue-lashing. reports are negative; the instruments indicate nothing -- " An excited interruption. When the star has set, then.  must call in more units..." The voice faded, going away. "Monitor, it's time for me to start making plans. They're getting restless up above. I'm going to need a few things: clothes, money, weapons, transportation. Can you help me?" "State your requirements in detail." "I need an inconspicuous civiliantype suit, perferably heated. I'll also need underwear, boots and a good hand-gun; one of those Borgia Specials Felix gave me would do nicely. About ten thousand cees in cash -- some small bills, the rest in hundreds. I want a useful ID -- and a good map. I don't suppose you could get me an OE suit and a lift belt, but a radar-negative heli would be verv useful. A high-speed, armored oh" Within half an hour the delivery bin had disgorged a complete wardrobe, including a warm, sturdy, and conservatively cut suit with a special underarm pocket In which the needier nested snugly. My wallet bulged with nicely aged bills. I had a latemodel compass-map strapped to my wrist, a card identifying me as a Treasury man, and a special key tucked in an inner pocket that would open the door to a concealed Ultimax motor depot near Independence, less than thirty miles away. At regular intervals, the Station Monitor gave instructions for treatment, keeping tabs on my condition by means of an array of remotesensing instruments buried in the walls. My strength was returning slowly. The arm was a marvel of bio-prosthetics. The sight of the stark, functional chromalloy radius and ulna gave me a strange, unpleasant sensation every time I saw h, but I was learning to use it; as die nerve-connections healed, I was even developing tactile sensivity in the fingertips. When the chronometer on the wall showed that I had been in the underground station for forty-nine hours that seemed like weeks I made another routine enquiry on conditions up above. "How about k, Monitor?" I called. "Any signs of excavation work going on up there?" There was a long pause -- as there was every time I asked questions around the edges of the Forbidden Topic. "Negative," the voice said at last. "Can you get a message out to somebody for me?" "Affirmative, assuming -- " "Skip the assumptions. He's somewhere in Jacksonville, Florida -- I hope -- assuming the demons didn't kill him just to keep in practice. His name's Joel -- last name unknown, even to him. Address unknown. As of a week ago, he was crewman aboard a sub-tanker called the Excalihur, out of New Hartford. Find him, and tell him to meet me at the where's the nearest diplomatic post?" "The British Consulate at Chicago." "All right; I want Joel to meet me in the lobby of the main Y in Chicago, as soon as he can get there. Do you think you can reach him with what I've given you?" "Indeterminate. Telephone connections can be made with -- " There was a loud, dulltoned thump: that shook. the station. The Monitor's voice wavered and went on: " -- all points on -- " Another thud. I was on my feet, watching microscopic dust particles shaken out of crevices by the impact, settling on the floor. There was another blow, more severe than the others. "What the Hell was that?" I asked -- yelled -- but it was rhetorical; I knew the answer. The demons were at my door. # # A #I right, . talk fast. Monitor," I barked. I pulled on my clothes as I talked, checked the gun. "Is there any other route out of here?" "The secondary exit route leads from the point now indicated by the amber light," the voice said imperturbably. Across the room, I saw an indicator blink on, off, on. "However," the Monitor went on, "departure from the Station at this time is not advised. You have not yet recovered full normal function. Optimum recovery rate will be obtained by continued bed rest, controlled diet, proper medication, and minimal exertion -- " I interrupted it. "You're developing a nagging tone," I told it. "Get that door open. Monitor, I assume you're mined for destruction?" I asked getting more anxious. "Affirmative." "Wait until the last minute -- until there's a nice crowd of curious zombies and other non-existent phonomena around; then blow. Understand?" "Affirmative," the voice said calmly. I went to the narrow exit panel, paused and looked around at the chamber. "So long," I called. There was no answer. I stepped through into the narrow corridor that led endlessly down, emerged into icy-cold, dusty-smelling darkness. Helis were parked there. I selected one, activated its circuit, saw a dome overhead slide open as it began to move. An arctic wind slashed at me. I had gone perhaps a mile, when a sudden glare erupted into the sky from over the brow of the low ridge. A column of red-lit smoke boiled upward. IF XV J ust after sunrise, a small all-dayfor-a-cee parking raft anchored two miles off Chicago accepted my heli with a reassuring sneer of indifference. I took the ski-way ashore, rode a walkaway half a mile to the block-square cube of unwashed glass which housed the fivethousand-bed dormitory of the Young Men's Nondenominational Association. I left word for Joel, asked for and received one of the six-by-eight-foot private cubicles, dropped a half-cee in the slot for a breakfast-table edition pictonews, and settled down to wait, with no more than a modest hope that my last instruction to the Station monitor would bear fruit in the form of the unfortunate Joel, a goodnatured giant with the intelligence of an alert five year old, but with the invaluable ability to detect the presence of prowling demons at a distance of a full half-mile. Hours slipped by while I slept -- a restless sleep, from which I awoke with a start, again and again, hearing the creak of the floor, the rattle of a latch along the corridor. I wasn't hungry; the thought of food made my stomach knot. There was a taste in my mouth like old gym shoes, and a full set of nausea-andheadache symptoms hovered in the wings, ready to come on at the first hint of encouragement. I shaved once, staring at a grim, hollowcheeked face in the mirror -- a face that belonged to a stranger who had done a long stretch in a tough prison on a false charge. The plastic surgery scars were pale lines now, but the shortened nose, lowered hairline, blue eyes and pale crew-cut still looked as unnatural to me as a halloween falseface. I tried to estimate how long it might be before Joel arrived -- if he arrived. It had been five hours since I had given the order to the Monitor. A message would have gone out to Station Nine, the Monitor there would have connections with a telefax or visiscreen switchboard. The order would have gone to a leg-man -- perhaps an ordinary messenger service, or a private detective agency. Someone would have followed the slim leads, checked out the habitual hangouts where Joel spent his time between voyages. It was safe to assume that he was a creature of fixed habit. Once the message -- with funds, I hoped -- was delivered, Joel would be steered to a tube or jet station. Allow two hours for the passage, another hour for him to discover the crosstown kwik-stop... The arithmetic always gave the same answer: he should have been here an hour or two after I arrived. I called the desk again. Nothing. I got off the bed, groaning; aches were beginning to creep through the armor of drugs that were keeping me going. It was time to move -- Joel or no Joel. I had a plan -- not much of one, but the best I could do, alone. I dressed, went down to the vast, echoing lobby -- as cheery as a gas chamber. A few hundred derelicts lounged in rump-spnmg chairs parked on patches of dusty rug like islands in a sea of plastic flooring the color of dried mud. I crossed to the mformation desk, opened my mouth -- and saw Joel stretched out in a chair like a battered boxer between rounds, eyes shut, mouth open, an electric blue scarf knotted around his thick neck like a hangman's noose. I felt my face cracking into a wide grin. I went over to him, shook him gently, then a little harder. His eyes opened. He looked at me blankly for a moment -- his eyes like the windows of an empty house; then he smiled, an expression as innocent as an infant offering sticky candy. "Hi, Jones," he said, sitting up. "Boy, you should've seen the train I rode in! It was all fancy, and there was this nice lady... "He told me all about it while we gripped hands, grinning. Suddenly, now, it was all right. Luck was still with me. The demons had tried -- tried hard -- but I was here, still alive, iron hand and all -- and I wasn't alone. I felt a hint of spring return to my muscles, the first twings of hunger in days. "Joel, there's a job I have to do," I said. "I want you to help me with it." He nodded, incurious but eager to please. Talking, we crossed the vast floor and went out into the winter street. T he British Consulate, perched on piles on the shore of Lake Michigan, was a weather-stained cube of stone filigree done in the sterilized Hindu style that had been a popular cliche back in the nineties. There were lights beyond the grillwork in the wide entry, and on the upper floors. We walked past once, then turned, came back, went up the wide, shallow steps, past a steaming fountain of recirculated heated water glimmering in a purple spotlight, rattled the tall grill. A Royal Marine three-striper in traditional dress blues got up from a desk, came across the wide marble floor to the gate, fingering the hilt of a ceremonial sabre. "The Consulate opens at ten I. M." he said, looking me over through the grille. "My name's Jones," I said. "Treasury. I've got to see the Duty Officer -- now. It can't wait until morning." "Let's see a little identification, sir," the Marine said. I showed him the blue Class One I. D. He nodded, handed the I. D. back through the grill, got out a key, opened up. "That's Mr. Phipps. I'll ring him. You'll 'ave to wait 'ere." I nodded, stood where I could see the approach to the building while the Sergeant went to a desk, dialed, talked briefly. A second Marine came along the corridor, took up a position opposite me. He was a solidly built red-head, not over eighteen. He looked at me with a face as expressionless as a courthouse clock. "E's coming down," the Sergeant said. There was sound of feet coming leisurely down the winding stair-case on my left; a sad-looking tweedsuited man with thinning gray hair and pale blue eyes in wrinkled pockIF cts came into view, slowed when he saw me. He glanced 'at the Marine. "What's this all about, Sergeant?" he said in a tired voice, like someone who has put up with a lot lately and expects more of the same. "Somebody to see you," the Sergeant said. "Sir," he added. The newcomer looked at me suspiciously. "I have some important information to report, Mr. Phipps," I said. "Just who are you, might I inquire?" Phipps asked. His expression indicated that whatever I said, he wouldn't be pleased. "U. S. Treasury." I showed him the I. D. He nodded, looked past me out through the heavy grillwork. "You may as well come along to the office." I followed him to the second floor, along a wide, still, corridor of dark offices, into a lighted room with sexless furnishings in the international official medium-plush style. Joel stood beside me, gaping at a picture of Queen Anne on the wall. #T won't bore you with details, X Mr. Phipps," I said. "I've observed some very odd goings-on. It sounds curious, I know, but... well, it involves a rather unusual dog." I watched his expression closely. He was eyeing me with a bored expression that suggested that this was about what he'd expect from cranks who rattled the grill at a late hour. He patted back a yawn. "Just how are British interests involved, Mr... ah... Jones?" "This dog was intelligent," I bored on. "Well!" His eyebrows went up. "I'm sure I don't..." His eyes went to the door. Footsteps were coming along the hall. I turned. A husky-looking, black-haired man with deepset dark eyes came into the room, looked at me, ignoring Phipps. I saw the Marine in the hall behind him. I didn't need a second glance to know I had found what I was looking for. I felt my pulse start to beat a little faster. "What is it you want here?" he snapped, not bothering with preliminaries. "Ah, Mr. Clomesby-House, Mr. Jones, of the American Treasury Department," Phipps said, sitting up in his chair. He ducked his head, adjusting a look of alert interest on his dried-out features. I surmised that Clomesby-House was his boss. "Mr. Jones was just lodging a complaint regarding a... um...  dog," Phipps started Clomesby-House narrowed his eyes at me. "What dog is this?" he rapped out. "Well," I laughed diffidently. "It sounds pretty silly, here in a nice clean office -- but some pretty odd things have been happening to me lately. They all seem to center around the dogs..." He waited. "It's a secret spy network -- I'm sure of it," I went on. "I have plenty of evidence. Now, I don't want you to just take my word for it. I have a friend who's been helping me -- " His dark eyes went to Joel. "This man knows of this, too?" IF "Oh, he's Qot the one I meant. He just gave me a lift over. These dogs II "You have seen them -- often?" "Well, every now and again." "And why did you come here -- to the British Consulate?" "I'm coming to that part. You see -- well, actually, it's a little hard to explain." I looked anxious -- like a nut who wants to reveal the location of a flying saucer, but is a little shy about butterfly nets. "If you could possibly spare the time -- I'd like you to meet my friend. It's not far I He was still squinting at me. His fingers squeaked as he tensed them against the desk-top. I remembered Julius exhibiting the same mannerism -- a nervous habit of the notmen when they had a decision to make. I could almost hear him thinking: it would be simplicity itself for him to summon the strait-jacket crew, let them listen to my remarks about intelligent dogs, and let nature take its course. But on the other hand, what I had to say just might alert someone, cause unwelcome inquiries, invite troublesome poking about... He gave a Prussian nod. "As you wish. Come along." F orty-five minutes later, with my nose against the glass, I stared down at a vast expanse of unbroken blackness spread out below. It was the Yerkes National Forest. "This is the place," I said. "Set her down right here. Clomesby-House shot me a look which would have curdled spring water. "Here?" he growled. I nodded brightly; it was as good a place as any for what I had in mind. He hissed, angled the heli sharply downward. I could sense that he was beginning to regret his excessive caution in whisking me away to a lonely place where he could deal with me and my imaginary accomplice privately. He had wasted time and fuel on a pair of soft, feeble humans. Clomesby-House was either an excellent pilot or a fool; he whipped the heli in under the spreading branches of a stand of hundred-foot hybrid spruce, grounded it without a jar, slammed a door open, letting in a wintry blast, and climbed out. The landing lights burned blue-white pools on the patchy snow, flickering as the rotor blades spun to a stop. "Stay behind me, Joel," I said quickly. "No matter what happens, don't interfere. Just keep alert for the dog-things; you understand?" He gave me a startled look. "Are they gonna come here, Jones...?" "I hope not..." I jumped out, stood facing Clomesby-House. Behind me, Joel hugged himself, staring around at the great trees. "Very well," the not-man said, his black eyes probing me like cold pokers. "Where is the other man?" He stood in a curious slack position, like a mannikin that hasn't been positioned by the window dresser. Out here, with just two soon-to-bedead humans watching, it wasn't necessary to bother with the all troublesome details of looking human. I went close to him, stared into bis all-too-perfect face. "Never mind all that," I said. "It was just a come-on. It's you I want to talk to. Where did you come from? What do you want on Earth?" All the expression went out of his face then. He stood for a moment, as though considering a suggestion I know the signs; he was communing with another inhuman brainsomewhere not too distant. I stepped to him quickly, hit him in the pit of the stomach with all my strength. He bounced back like a tackle dummy hit by a swinging boom, crashed against a tree-trunk, rebounded -- still on his feet. In the instant of contact, I had felt something break inside him -- but it wasn't slowing him down. He launched himself at me, hands outstretched, the arrogance of the invulnerable alien, still not understanding that this time the man before him was something more than mere victim. I met him with a straight right smash to the head that spun him, knocked him to the ground. He scrambled, sending great gouts of frozen mud and snow flying, came to his feet. The thing shaped like a man came toward me, expressionless, one arm hanging, the other raised, hand flattened for an axeblow. I raised an arm, took an impact like a trip-hammer on my steel arm, countered with a smashing chest-punch. It was a waste of effort; the thing's thoracic area was armored like a dinosaur's skull. It brought its arm around in a swipe that caught me glancingly across the shoulder, sent me reeling... Joel was between us, huge fists ready; he landed a smashing left that would have felled an ox, followed with a right that struck the cold, smooth face like a cannonball; the creature seemed not to notice. It struck out, and Joel went skidding. Then the thing was past him, charging for me. Joel's diversion had given me the necessary moment to set myself. I caught the descending arm in a two-handed grip, hauled it around, broke it across my chest, hurled the alien from me, then, as it tripped and fell, aimed a kick that caught it just on the kneecap. It went down then, and I stood over it, breathing hard, as it threshed helplessly, silently, trying to rise on its broken leg. #Ton't struggle," I got out beI -- tween breaths. "That wouldn't be logical, would it? Now it's time for you to tell me a few things: where did you come from? What world?" It lay still then, a broken toy, no longer needed. "You will die soon," it said flatly. "Maybe; meanwhile just call me curious. Where's your headquarters? Who runs things, you or the dogs? What do you do with the men you steal -- or their brains?" "Information is of no use to the soon-dead," the flat voice stated indifferently. Behind me, Joel moaned, a thin, high wail of animal torment. I whirled to him. He lay, oddly crumpled, at the base of a giant IF tree, his face white, shocked. Blood ran from his mouth. I went to him, knelt. The front of his shirt was a sodden mass of bloody fabric. The thing's blow had smashed his chest as effectively as a falling safe. Toel. hold on... I'll get you to a doctor!" I eased my arms under him. started to life. He shrieked and twisted once. "It tickles in my head," he whimpered. "I don't like it when it tickles in my head." His eyes fell on me. "I can't get up, Jones," he said. "Please help me get up..." "Don't trv to move, Joel. You're hurt inside." "I don't want the dogs to come, Jons. I'm afraid." "The dogs?" I felt my scalp tighten. "Here? Are you sure?" I twisted. staring into the deep forest all around, saw nothin. "Come on, Joel: I'm going to lift you into the heli..." T put a hand under his back, half-lifted him. He screamed hoarsely. I lowered him. "It hurts too bad, Jones," he gasned out. "I'm sorry... "Where are the dogs, Joel? How long before they'll be here?" "They're close, Jones...I whirled on the broken manthing. "How far away are they?" I mapped. "You called them; how long before they'll be here?" It looked at me with the one eye that remained in its battered head, said nothing. I kicked it in the side, hard enough to hurt my foot, sent the limp body skidding two yards. "Talk, damn you!" It merely looked at me, as impersonally as a morgue attendant taking inventory. Its gaze went past me; it seemed to be listening... Then I felt it -- the greasy, gray feeling of unreality that meant the demons were closing on the attack. I keened my hearing... I heard the lope of demonic hands, galloping across frozen ground, brushing against brittle, leaf less twigs, coming closer. "You... gotta... hurrv... up..." Joel's voice croaked. "G-by, Jones You was... a good friend. I guess you was... the only friend... I ever had..." I looked at him. He was dying: I knew that nothing I could do would save him. And a few feet away, the heli waited, fuelled, ready to go. In three steps I could be in if, lifting off to leave the demon horde clashing their jaws in frustrated fury. I would be free then to contact the Ultimax Group, carry on the fight... I took a step toward the heli, and my eyes fell on Joel's face -- the face of a child, afraid, but trying not to show it. And I remembered Felix, whom I had left alone, to die beneath a tidal wave of horror "Take it easy, Joel," I said. My voice was hoarse. "I'm not leaving. I'm staying with you." He opened his mouth to say something, but no sound came out. There was a crash of underbrush and I whirled. A dark dog-shape bounded from the shadow of a giant tree, skidded to a halt, then charged into the circle of light. I set myself, waited -- and as it leaped. threw my weight into a straightarm blow that met the scraped-bonc face in mid-air, drove it back in pulped ruin into the shattered skull. The thing hurtled past me, struck, threshing in its death-fit. Two more of the beast-things leaped into view, sprang at me side by side. I jumped to meet them, caught one by the neck, crushed bone and hide together, hurled it aside, turned to drive a kick into the chest of the second. There were more of them around me now; I spun, kicked at one, struck another down with my chromalloy fist, shook a third from my right arm, fended off another... It was a nightmare battle against leaping creatures almost imblows; they came at me like bounding ghost-shapes, red-eyed and gapejawed, and I struck, and struck... A white hot bear-trap closed on my leg, I tried to shake it off. It clung, dragging at me. Then I was down, and the weight on me was like heaped mattresses set with needles of fire; I thought of a man drowning in a sea of piranha, razor teeth stripping the flesh from the living bone. I felt the tearing of flesh. As in a dream, I heard the gobble of demon voices, the slap of beast hands. And then the blackness that I knew was death closed over me. S omewhere, I dream in a sunless emptiness. The years arch over the long avenue of time, Into the static Universe, change comes I sense movement, the slide and turn of intricate components, and the tentative questing of sensors, like raw nerves hesitantly exposed. Light, form, color, impinge on de licate instruments. Space takes on dimension, texture. All around me a broad plain of shattered rock and black shadows stretches away to a line of fire at the edge of the world, under the glare of a sun that rages purplewhite against bottomless silver-black. A shape moves, small with distance -- and beyond it, others. I am moving, too, driving forward effortlessly over the rough ground, throwing up dust in heavy clouds that drop back with a curious quickness. Rock-chips fly, twinkling as they fall. I sense vibrations; the thunder of my passage, the whine and growl of meshing metal, the oscillation of electrons. Abruptly, from beyond the jagged horizon, an object comes, a glittering torpedo-shape tipped with blue fire, flashing with a swiftness that swells it in a moment to giant size. I feel the closing of rays within me; circuits come alive. My back arches; I left my arms and thrust -- Fire lances from my fingertips, the spangled sky. I pivot, trailing the shattered projectile as it gouts incandescence, breaks apart, falls in fragments beyond a distant stony ridge. A growl of thunder rolls, dies. I rake my eyes across the desolate spread of fragmented shale around me, mark a flicker of movement among up-tilted rock-slabs, point and IF fire in one smooth corordwaied motion . Ana still I plunge on, charging to a blind attack against an unknown enemy. I grina down a long slope, dozing aside rock-chunks, jolting across crevasses. A vast shape swings from an inky shadow to y left, pivots heavily, trailing a shattered tread. A dreadnought of the enemy, damaged, left behind in the retreat, but with her offensive power intact.  see the immense disrupted grid swing to hear on me, glow to red heat --  lock full emergency power to my prime batteries, open my mouth, and bellow -- and bellow again... Then  am racng off-side, driving for the crest of a ridge, over it, down the far slope os molten rock bubbles behind me. The shock wave strikes and I am lifted, flung downslope. I catch myself, claw for purchase; the limping monster appears on the ridge and  hurl my thunder at it and see' its exposed grid shat-ter, explode...  turn back slowly to rejoin my column. Tne battle continues. The words flash into my mind like the silent blow of a bright axe, not spoken in English, hut spat in an abbreviated Command Code of harsh inflected syllables. I hear myself acknowledge the order in kind, as an instant compulsive response my damage sensors race through a fiftythousand-item checklist like rats scurrying among filled shelves. Negative, I hear myself report. All systems functional. But deep inside me a dam strains, cracks, bursts. A tendril of released thought, startled awake by the command, seems to grope, struggling outward. Word-images, sharp-chiseled as diamonds, thrust among the bodiless conceptualizations of' rote conditioning. I reach back, hack -- to the blinding light of a strange awakening, past confusion and dawning awareness... back... into a bland, ever-dwindling record of stimulus, pain, stimulus, pleasure; a wordless voice that speaks, instructs, impresses, punishes, rewards -- printing on my receptive mind the skein of conditioned reflex, the teachings that convert the blanked protoplasm of the shocked brain into the trained battle-computer of a dreadnought of the line... And in the forefront of my mind, I am remembering, somewhere long ago, a body -- of flesh and blood, soft, feeting, complex, infinitely responsive. A target flashes, and I aim and fire. That impulse had once lifted an arm, pointed a finger. A human finger. A human body. I savor the concept, at once strange and as familiar as life itself. The fragile concept of identity crystallizes from vagueness, grows, sharpens -- There is a moment of disorientation, a swirling together and a rending apart. I am a man. A man named Bravais. The habit of obedience carried me forward over rough ground, maneuvering in response to longlearned rules as rigid as laws of nature. My sensors lanced out, I locked to my fellow machines. My control mechanisms acted, swinging me to the point of zero-stress, then driving me forward. In my mind, thoughts jostled each other: Secondary target, track!...  you meet another Julius, break him in two and keep going... advance, assault speed... this is your Station Monitor; permission requested to multilate the body ,... arm all batteries; then micro-second alert...  guess you was the only friend I ever had -- Suddenly, vividly I remembered the fight with the demons, the weight of the stinking bodies that bore me down, teeth tearing at my throat... ' I had seen the enemy at work -- tfie deft saws, the clever scalpels. I remembered the brain of the Algerian major, lifted from the skull, preserved. As I was now preserved. The demons had killed my body, left, it to rot in the forest. But now I lived again -- in the body of a great machine. The command struck at me, a mental impulse of immense power. I watched, an observer aloof from the action as my conditioned-response complex reacted, sensing the fantastic complexity of the workings of the mobile fort that was now my body, order galvanized my automatic responses in instant obedience. On impulse, I intercepted the command; then I reached out along my circuits, sent out new commands. I turned myself, faced the violet sun, moved ponderously forward; I halted, pivoted, tracked my guns across the darkling sky. Somehow I had gained control of my machine-body. I remembered the command -- the external voice that would have asserted its control -- But instead, it had cued my hypnotically produced reserve personality-fraction into active control! I withdrew, felt the automatics resume control, moving me off to my new station. The enemy was clever, and as thorough as death. I had been tracked down, killed, chained in slavery on a ruined no-man's world; but I had broken the bonds. I was alive, master of my fortressbody. Free, inside the enemy defenses. L ater -- hours or days, I had no way of calculating time -- I rumbled down an echoing tunnel into a vast cavern, took my place in a long line of scarred battle units. f# IF I moved forward. Other units moved up, stationed themselves on cither side of me. A long silence grew. I was aware that other orders were being given -- orders not addressed to me, automatically tuned out by my trained reflexes. Something was going on. I made an effort, extended sensitivity, picked up the transmission: " -- malfunction! Escort unit eighty-four to decontamination chamber and stand by during reflexcheck! Acknowledge and execute! I heard the snick of relays closing; I was hearing the internal command circuits of my fellow battle units. I let my automation-circuits stir me into motion; I moved off, listening as the command voice gave a final instruction to my armed guard:  Units eighty-three and eightyfive; at first indication of deviant response, trigger destruct circuits! I saw the turrets of the battlewagons beside me swing to cover me; their ports slid back, the black snouts of infinite repeaters emerged, aimed and ready. The commandmind had already sensed something out of the ordinary in Unit Eightyfour. I rolled on toward the interrogation chamber, monitoring the flow of reflex-thought in the minds of the units beside me -- a dull sequence of course-correction, alert-reinforcements, routine functional adjustments. Carefully, using minimal power, I reached out... nit eighty-three; damage report!" I commanded. Nothing happened. The battle units were programmed to accept commands from only one source -- the command voice. "Units eighty-three and eightyfive; arm weapons; complete prefire drill! the command came. From beside me, I heard arming locks slide open. Together, my guards and I entered the cell. the voice of the Interrogator rang out. I watched as my well-drilled reflexes went through their paces. I would have to move with great care now; every action was under scrutiny by the enemy. Another command came, and as I responded, I studied the quality of the Interrogator's voice. It was different, simpler, lacking the overtones of emotion of the Command-mind. I reached out my awareness toward it, sensed walls of armor, the complex filaments of circuitry. I followed a communications lead which trailed off underground to a distant bunker. The intricacy of a vast computer lay exposed before me. I probed gently, testing the shape and density of the mechanical mind-field; it was a poor thing, a huge but feeble monomaniac -- but it was linked to memory banks. I felt a warning twitch of alarm in the moroncircuits, caught the shape of an intention -- Instantly I shunted aside its command, struck back to seize control of the computer's limited discretionary function. Holding firm, f traced the location of the destructassembly which it would have activated, found it mounted below my brain, disarmed it. Then I instructed the Interrogator to continue with the routine check-out, and to report all normal. While it busied itself in idiot obedience, I linked myself to its memory banks and scanned the stored data. The results were disappointing. The Interrogator's programming was starkly limited, a series of test patterns for fighting and service machines. I withdrew, knowing no more than I had of the enemy. The Interrogator reported me as battle-ready, and, on command, I rejoined my waiting comrades. An As the energy quotient in my servo-circuits dropped, the sensitivity range of my receptors drew in, scanning from the gamma scale down through ultra-violet, past infra-red, into the dullness of short-wave. Silence and darkness settled over the depot. I sent out a pulse, scanned the space around me. The clatter of the command voice was gone. I was alone now -- I and my comatose comrades-in-arms. There were ninety-one units, similar to myself in most respects, but armed with a variety of weapons. Small, busy machines scurried among us, carrying out needed repairs. I touched one, caught vague images of a simplified world-image, outlined in scents and animal drives. I recognized it as the brain of an Earthly dog. It had been programmed to operate the elementary maintenance apparatus. Reaching farther, I encountered the confused mutter of a far-flung communications system, a muted surf-roar of commands, acknowledgements, an incoherent clutter of operation messages, meaningless to me. I touched the mind of the fighting machine beside me, groped along the dark passages of its dulled nervecomplex, found the personality center. A sharp probing impulse elicited nothing. The ego was paralyzed. I withdrew to its peripheral awareness level; a dim glow of consciousness lingered there. 'Who are you?' I called. Unit eightythree, of the line," the reply was a flat monotone. You were a man once, I told it. What was your nameT "Unit eighty-three of the line," the monotone repeated. "Combat ready, standing by at low alerU Awaiting orders" I tried another; the result was the same. There was no hint of personality in the captive brain. They were complex neurotronic circuits, nothing more. Compact, efficient, with trained reflex-patterns, cheaper and easier to gather from the warring tribes of Earth than to duplicate mechanically. I stirred another quiescent brain. IF probed at the numbed ego, pried without success at the opaque shield of stunned tissue that surrounds it. It was hopeless. I would find no allies here -- only slaves of the enemy. F ree inside the enemy fortress --  in a flawless camouflage -- I was helpless without information. I needed to know what and where the Command Voice was, the disposition of other brigades, the longrange plan of action, who the enemy was that we fought on the fire-shattered plain -- and on what world the plain lay. I would learn nothing here, parked in a subterranean depot. It was time to take risks. An impulse to my drive mechanuisinow sent me forward out of the line-up. I swung around, moved off toward the tunnel through which I had entered the cave. In the utter silence, the clash of my treads transmitted through my frame was deafening. I filtered out the noise, tuned my receptivity for sounds of other activity nearby. There were none. Past the ranked combat units, high and grim in the lightless place, the tunnel mouth gaped dark. I entered if, ascended the sloping passage, reached a massive barrier of flint-steel. I felt for the presence of a control-field, sensed the imbecile mechanism of the lock. A touch, and it responded, sent out the pulse that rolled the immense doors back. I moved out into the open under a blazing black sky. I studied the landscape, realizing for the first time that my field of vision included the entire circum-' ference of the horizon. Nothing stirred all across the barren waste. Here and there the ruins of a combat unit showed dark against gray dust. The flaring purple sun was low over the far ridges now; a profusion of glittering stars seemed to hang close overhead. I didn't know in what direction the enemy headquarters might lie. I picked a route that led across levd ground toward a lone promontory and started toward it. F rom my vantage point atop the conical hill, I saw the tips of saw-toothed peaks that formed a wide ring around my position, theii? bases out of sight over the near horizon. My sense of scale was confused by the strange aspect reality assumed through unfamiliar senses. Instinct told me that the shattered slab before me was perhaps five yards long. I stirred it with my treads, saw it bound away, flip lightly over, sink to rest, stirring coarse dust which boiled up, dropped back like mud under water. I was no better at judging my ovm size. Was I a vast, multi-tc apptfatus, or a tiny fighting maphine no bigger than a one-man jet-ped? The horizon seemed close. Was it refSHf only a mile or two away -- or was my visual range so far extended that a hundred miles seemed only a step? Self-analysis wasn't getting me any closer to my objective -- enemy intelligence. Perhaps beyond the . shelter of the wide crater I would see some indications of life. I headed for a cleft between steep cliffs, churned up through dust that fountained behind me, gained the pass. The view ahead showed the same sterile rock and dust that I had left behind me. I went on, down the slope and out across the plain, skirting bumed-out machines, some of fantastic design, others twins to my own grim body. I passed small craters -- whether natural formations or the results of bombardment I couldn't tell. The distant babble of confused commands was a background to the crackle of starstatic. I felt neither hunger or fatigue -- only a burning curiosity as to what lay beyond the next ridge, and a nagging fear that I might be discovered and destroyed before I had taken my revenge for what had been done to me... The strange machine appeared suddenly at the top of a sheer cliff that ran obliquely across my route. It saw me at the same instant that I saw it, pivoted, depressing its guns to bear on me. In place of the simple markings of the battle units I had seen, there were complicated insignia painted in garish colors across ks hull. I halted, waiting. familiar voice of my Brigade commander boomed in my mind. "Unit eighty-four of the line, combat ready As I reported, I extended a probing impulse across the insubstantial not-space, touched the shape of the mind behind the voice. With an instantaneous reflex, it struck at me. The slave circuits of my brain resonated with the power of the blow -- but in that instant I had seen the strange workings of the alien mind, scanned the pattern of the assault it had hurled at me -- and now I traced the path of primary volition, struck back, caught the enemy ego in an unbreakable grip. "Who are you?" I demanded. I t gibbered, writhed, fought to escape; I held it tighter -- like gripping a lashing snake in bare hands. "Answer, or I destroy you!" "I am Zixz, Centurion of the line, of the Nest of the Thousand Agonies Suffered Gladly. What Over-mind are you... "Where do you come from?" "I was spawned in the muck beds of Kzak, by order of the Bed-master" "You're not human. Why were you installed in a machine?" "I was condemned for the crime of inferiority. Here I expiate that fault." "What world is this?" The reply was a meaningless identity-symbol. "Why do you fight this war?" The captive alien mind howled out its war slogan -- as incomprehensible as an astrologer's jargon. I silenced it. "How many Brigades are engaged?" "Four thousand, but not all are at full strength." "Who is the enemy?" The symbol that the alien hurled at me was a compound of horrors. IF " Where is your headquarters? I demanded. I caught an instant's glimpse of twisted towers, deep caverns, and concept: the Place that Must Be Defended. Then the alien lunged against my control, shrieked an alarm -- I tightened my grip and sudden silence fell. Cautiously, I relaxed. A few threads of dying thought spiraled out from the broken mind; then it winked out like a quenched ember. I had killed the Centurion Zixz. And into the void, a thunderous command roared. Quickly I shaped a concept, counterfeiting the dead Centurion's mind pattern: 'Brigade strength ninetyone; ready for combat. Delayed by necessity for destruction of defective unit, I countered. Proceeding as ordered I broke in, still feigning the mind-voice of Zixz: "Massive enemy flanking attack! New weapons of unfamiliar capability! Non-detectible units assaulting me in overwhelming numbers. But while I transmitted the false report to the Overmind, I extended a delicate sensing line, brushed over the other, felt out the form of a mighty intelligence, vastly more powerful than that of Zixz. And yet the structure was familiar -- like that of the Centurion, magnified, reinforced. And here was the primary volitional path. I moved along as lightly as a spider stalking a gnat, came into a vast mind-cavern, ablaze with the power of a massive intellect. Busily I concocted fantastic mass and firepower readings, fanciful descriptions of complex and meaningless enemy maneuvers; and while I held the Over-mind's attention, I searched -- and found its memory vaults. T here was the image of a great nest, seething with voracious life -- a nest that covered a world, leaped to another, swelled through an ever-increasing volume of space, driven by lusts that burned like living fire in each tiny mote that comprised the swarming tribe. I saw the outward writhing pseudopods of this burgeoning race as they met, slashed at each other with mindless fury -- and then flowed on, over every obstacle, changing, adapting to burning suns and worlds of ice, to the near-null gravity of tiny rock-worlds and the smashing forces of titan-planets of collapsed matter. The wave reached the edge of its IF galaxy, boiled up, reached out vainly over the void -- and, defeated, recoiled on itself, churning back toward Galactic center, stronger now, more ruthless, possessed of a vast frustrated rage that shrieked its insatiable needs, devouring all in its path -- and coming together at last in an eruption of mad vitality that rent the very fabric of space. And from the void at the heart of the universe, the wave rolled out again. It was tempered in the fires of uncounted ages of ravening combat, up its substance now in a new upsurge of violence that made the past invasions seem as somnolent as spawning pools. Again the edge of the galaxy was reached, and there the wave built, poised -- and bridged the gap to the next galaxy. Over the slim link, life flowed, fighting, slashing, devouring, leaping from new feeding ground to in a transcendent fury of hunger, again a leap into nothingness -- and a new galaxy was reached. Nothing remained in the Nestmind of its original character. It had become a vast mechanism for growth, a disease that radiated outward from a center so distant in the universe that the mind itself in time forgot its beginnings. Units broke free, withered, faded, died. Random islands of the raging vitality consumed themselves, disappeared. A long arm turned back, groped its way along the chains of burnedout worlds, scavenging, growing, to lance in the end into the original nest place, to devastate it and go on, blind, insensate, insatiable -- and finding no new feeding grounds beyond, it turned upon itself. I withdrew from the Over-mind, and for a moment I held the long perspective of that view. I saw my world as the insignificant scintilla that it was among the stars, my own human race a sinister tribe of barbaric freaks, harvested like wild bees. A great gleaming planet, had risen above the broken horizon, casting a bluish light across the darkling plateau. I saw the gleam of white from a misty patch on the overcurve of the glaring world, the pale outlines of continents. Familiar continents. I was looking at the full Earth, a space. T here was no time now to indulge the pangs of homesickness. The Over-mind continued to pour out orders to its dead centurion, and I babbled responses, describing the maneuvering of immense imaginary fleets, fabulous aerial assaults, weapons of incredible destructive power. And while I transmitted, I raced along the base of the cliff toward the shelter of a distant ringwall. In the open now, I saw the dust clouds of distant brigades on the move, coming closer. I altered course, steered for a smaller crater almost lost over the curve of the lunar horizon. I skirted a vast tumulus of. broken rock, thundered out into the clear -- " Spread all across my route, a full brigade of heavy combat units churned toward me under a pall of dust. I swung away to the left; at once, a harsh voice rang in my mind: I ignored the call, saw a unit detach itself, race to intercept me. I halted, swung to bring my guns to bear. I opened my receptors, heard a harsh command: For a moment, I hesitated, ready to pour my fire into the enemy. Then I felt the probe of the stranger's mind reach out to me. Goshr a familiar voice exclaimed in my mind. 'Whafre you doin' here, Jones? XX iinphat's how it was, Jones, A Joel said. "For a while I just watched; I looked at the country and tried to figure out where I was. All I knew was, I was Unit One Hundred of the line -- and I was Joel, too. But everything was different. There was fighting going on 'bout all the time. I got to worrying maybe Fd get hurt. This new body I got's tough, but a direct hit could knock it out -- I saw it happen to others. I tried to talk to some of 'em after I got the knack of it. But all they knew was their number and the orders of the day. "Then one day I just ducked out; there was so may units in the fight I didn't figure anybody'd notice. I been here ever since-unno how long." "How many times has the Earth crossed the sky since you woke up? "Maybe six or seven." "Then you've been here for months -- and nothing's happened yet?" "Nope. I figured maybe they forgot about me." "I don't think time means the same thing to them as it does to us." "This is a funny-looking place, ain't it, Jones? The sun's funny -- and the moon, too." "We're on the moon, Joel. That planet you see in the sky is the Earth." "Gosh." "Joel. I don't know how much time we'll have -- but I have a feeling that when the current battle is settled, the Over-mind will be along to find out why we didn't work out. I think it assumes we're just a routine malfunction. They don't seem to have any emotions. They aren't out for revenge for the centurion I killed -- but if they knew we were in full control of our bodies, we'd have been blasted." "Who are they, Jones -- the Command minds and the Over-mind -- all these voices I hear in my head?" "They're the masters of the dogthings. They're fighting a war. The Devil knows what it's about... For some reason they're using our moon as a battleground -- and we're a convenient source of computer circuits." "The ones they're fighting -- they're just as bad," Joel cut in. "I got close to 'em once -- nearly got cut off. I put out a feeler to one -- wanted to see what he was like. I figured maybe if he was against the Command voice, maybe I'd change IF sides -- but it was -- it was horrible, Jones. Kind of like... well, like some of the old ladies that used to come around the Seaman's Welfare. They was so bound to do good, they d kill you if you got in their way. It's like Hell comes in two colors -- black and white." "We need information, Joel. We're as ignorant as new-born babies. For a while, I didn't even know how fast time was going past. I got that part straight when I saw the earth rise. We move fast -- we can run through a fifty-thousand item check list in a second or two. But I still don't know how big I am." I can tell you how big we are, Jones. Come on." I watched as the great battle-machine that had been Joel backed, turned, started off along the wall. I followed. At the far end of the compound, at the junction of the barrier wall with a massive squat tower, he stopped. Look there," he said. I examined the ground, noted the broken rubble, a heap of scattered objects like fragments of broken spaghetti, loose dust drifted against the coarse, unjointed wall. "See them little sticks that got a kind of glow to 'em?" Joel said. "Sure... T hen I recognized what I was looking at. "My God!" "Funny, ain't it? Them skulls don't look no bigger'n marbles; legbones like they might belong to a mouse. But they're full-sized human bones, Jones. It's us that's off. We must be, well, 'bout -- well, I can't count that high... "They look about twelve inches; my picture of myself is about twelve feet to my upper turret. I can multiply that by six; that makes us seventy-two feet high!" "Jones -- could you teach me to count them big numbers? You know, it's funny -- but seems like I missed learnin' a lot of things, back when -- when I was just a man." "You've changed, Joel. You think about things a lot more than you used to." "I know, Jones. It's like I used to be sort of half-asleep or something. I can't remember much about it -- back there. It's all kind of gray and fuzzy. There's lots of things I want to know now. Like numbers. But in those days, I never even asked." "Joel, how did you get the wound you had on your forehead?" "Yeah -- I remember. There was a sore place. It hurt, all the time. Gosh, I forgot all about them headaches! And it was kind of pushed in, like." "It was a badly depressed fracture, probably bone fragments pressing on your brain. That pressure's gone now." "It don't do me much good." I reached out, sensed two machines dozing on low alert. "I tried to control a couple of units once," I called to Joel. "It didn't work. But I've learned a few tricks since then. Maybe... " "Maybe what, Jones?" "I don't know -- but I'm going to try something and see what happens." I reached out to the dull glow of the idling mind-fiekl, formed in my mind an image of the shape of the mental voice of the dead centurion Zixz. "Combat unit! Damage report!" I thundered. "All systems functional," came the instant reply. "Situation Report!" I demanded. "Unit six of the line, standing by on low alert!" I reached for the other mind, touched it; it identified itself as unit seven of the Brigade of Ognyx. "Units six and seven! Stand by!" I roared. "Acknowledge," came the instant reply. Joel and I raced out onto the rock-shattered plain. Half a mile distant, the two immense combat units sat, guns still bearing on their target. "Units six and seven!" I transmitted as I barrelled past. "You are now under the command code 'Talisman'. Your primary function will be the protection and assistance of units eiehtv-four and one hundred. You will not report the existence of Talisman to any Command Unit. Fall in and follow me." I saw the two huge machines obediently start up, wheel into line, come up to speed. Together, our small force hurled across the stark desert under the blue light of a warm, green world I would never see aggin. "Hev. that was neat, Jones," Joel called. "Where we going now?" "There's an underground depot a few miles from here. I.et's see if we can reach it before they cut us T he enemy was a dust cloud far to the east. We, angled west, crossed a range of broken ground dotted with burnedout hulks, raced past the up-thrust fault line where the dead centurion Zixz still held his silent vigil at the cliffhead, drove for the crater wall. Monitoring the command band, I heard the clamor of orders, an exchange of queries among Command units, caught an order hurled at the guards I had captured : "Joel -- fake up six!" I said quickly. Then: "Standing by at low alert," I transmitted in the monotone of an automaton circuit. "All quiet," I transmitted listlessly. The crater walls were rising before us now; I streaked for the cleft, flipped on powerful lights as I entered the shadows of the pass. Behind me. Joel and our two recruits followed up the rise of ground, down onto the plain within the ringwall. I scanned the scene, identified the location of the access tunnel, roared across up to it and stopped. "So far so good, Joel. Wait here with six and seven. If I don't come back... good Inck." I moved forward into the black mouth of the tunnel. The units sat in ranks as I had left them, silent, ready, their circuits idling. There was no time now for caution on my part. "Combat Units!" I rapped out. "You are now under operational #Q# IF control of Command Unit Talisman! Only Talisman commands will be obeyed! Order? of the Over-mind will not be heard! Full combat alert! Prepare for action! First squad, roU out!" Obediently, ten massive fighting machines rumbled forward, wheeled left into line, advanced toward the exit ramp. I preceded them, emerged into the open, watched as they filed out and took up battle formation. "They caught on to where we were going, Jones," Joel called. "I've been listening; they sent ten units over to see what we're up to!" "I'll take this squad to the pass and hold them off, Joel! You get the rest of them out!" I heard his voice rapping out orders under the Talisman code as I set off for the pass. A s I reached the crest of the defile, the interceptor force came into view -- ten mighty machines, glittering under the light of the full Earth. At once, a thunderous command blasted at me: I reached out, found the grotesque form of an alien mind, dealt it a smashing blow. "Task force, you are now under the control of Talisman Command," I roared in imitation of the command voice. "Take up positions in echelon with Talisman force!" Nine of the battle units acknowledged, moved into the pass, leaving their dead leader behind. Under our guns, they founted the path, took up stations as ordered. Far out on the flat, the main body was in view, coming up fast. "All out, Jones," Joel's call came. We're on the way." "Some new volunteers have just rallied to the standard," I called back. "Post units at all the passes into the crater; we're going to have to defend this position." "If we run for it, we could get away clean now, Jones," Joel called. "We could head for way off yonder somewhere, and we'd be safe " "Safe -- for what?" "For anything. We could set and think, and look up at the stars and wonder at 'em, and every now and again we could loose off our guns, just for the heck of it -- " "It's too late to run for it. But we're not finished yet, Joel. Take this bunch over and swear 'em in." I extended awareness, caught a fragment of an order: I complied with a confused report of mysterious enemy machines, flights of ballistics attackers, heavy damage. The Over-mind rose to new heights of fury: "He's getting a little upset now," I called to Joel. "He doesn't know what's happening. Be on the alert for those brigades -- they're out for blood." . A flight of missiles appeared over the horizon, arcing down on us. I integrated their courses, saw diat they would overshoot. "Hold your fire, Joel!" I called. "We'll save our firepower for when it counts.' Volley followed volley, arcing high overhead -- decoys intended to draw fire at maximum range rather than to inflict hits. I felt for the imbecile brain of the waveleader -- a twitter of fear-patterns, food-lusts, mating drives, tropisms, subverted to the uses of evasion patterns and course corrections. With a touch, I readjusted their navigational orientation, saw the flight swing and drive back to dive on its originators. Below, the enemy, confused by the abrupt desertion of the vanguard, milled in confusion. Those that advanced met a hail of destruction from the guns of two hundred and ten units firing from cover. They hesitated, fell back. A final lone enemy-brained unit, scarred and burned, came relentlessly on, rocked to our bombardment, veered to one side and plunged over a precipice. I gave the cease-fire, and watched the aimless maneuvering of the moron units below -- and still they came over the horizon, pouring in in Brigade strength, their sensors seeking out targets, finding none, T saw a damaged unit go berserk, charge down on a comrade, firing, and in automatic response, a thousand guns, glad of a target, vaporized it a corruscation of ravening energies. # #T ooks like we mixed 'em up A-' pretty good, Jones," Joel commented. "We gained a little time," I replied. "They're not what you'd call flexible." "Whafs our next move? We're in a kind of a dead end here. Once they figure what's going on they'll surround the place and lob it in on us from all sides -- and we're goners." "Meanwhile, things are quiet. Now's our chance to hold a council of war." "Jones, I been looking over these units of ours -- and there's something funny about 'em. It's like they wasn't really machines, kind of." "They're not. Every machine here has a human brain in it." "Huh?" "Like you, Joel -- and me. They're all human. Just unconscious." There was a pause while Joel probed the dulled mind of the nearest slave unit, waiting, guns aimed, for the order to carry on the fight. "Yeah, Jones. I see the place. It's all blanked off, like. It's like trying to poke a hole through a steel plate with your finger. But..." "But what?" "Oh, I don't know, Jones. I just got a feeling -- if I touched it just right... Look, let me show you." I extended awareness, touched the probe that was an extension of Joel's mind-field, followed as it reached into the dim glow of the paralyzed mind, thrust among layered patterns of pseudo-light, past complex structures that towered into unguessed levels of existence, deep into the convoluted intricacy of the living brain, to touch the buried perIF onality center -- encysted, inert, a pocket of nothingness deep under a barrier of stunned not-thought. "Don't you see, Jones? It ought to be, like, say a taut cable with toe wind making it sing. Something stopped it, clamped it down so's it can't move. we got to do to set it free is giv I a little push -- and it'll start up again." "All I see is a dead spot, Joel. If you can see all that, you're way ahead of me." "Okay if I try it?" "Go ahead -- and I'll keep my relays crossed..." "Here goes... I saw the finger of pure, focussed energy reach out, touch the grayness -- and the opacity faded and was gone. "Okay so far," Joel said. "Now Like a jeweler cleaving a hundred carat rough diamond, Joel poised, then struck once, sharply. And the glow that had been the moron mind of a slave sprang up in a dazzling light;, and into the gray continuum where thought moved like a living force, words came: T he huge fighting machine parked forty feet away across the rocky ledge behind me backed suddenly, lowered its guns, traversed toem across the empty landscape, brought them to bear on me. "Watch him Jones!" Joel's voice came sharply. "He's scared; he's liable to get violent!" In the instant xnat the strange voice had burst from the slave unit, my probing contact had been thrust back by an expanding mind-field as powerful as Joel's. "We're friends!" I called quickly in the code in which commands were transmitted. "Fellow prisoners!" I thrust against the pressure of the newly awakened mind, found the automated combat-reflex circuitry, clamped down an inhibiting field -- enough to impede a fire-order, at least for a moment. the strange voice shouted, a deafening bellow in my mind. I plucked the conditioned identity-concept from the mind before me, called to it in the command code: "Unit twenty-nine of the Anyx Brigade! Listen!" It roared out its barbaric jargon, overtones of fright and horror rising like blood-stained tides in the confused mind. I tried again: "I'm a friend -- an enemy of the Command-voice. You've been a slave. I'm another slave -- #n revolt against the masters!" There was a moment of silence; then: "A fellow slave? What trickery is this?" And this time it spoke -- or bellowed -- in the familiar command code. "It's no trick," I transmitted. "You were captured -- but now you're free." "Free? Invisible one, I wear the likeness of a monstrous troll-shape! Enchantments hold me yet in bondage. Where is my blade, Hrothgar? Where are my peers and bondsmen? What fire-blasted heath is this before me?" I talked to the frightened mind, soothing it, explaining as much as I could. At last it seemed to understand -- at least enough that I could withdraw my grip on its firecontrol circuitry. "Ah, I feel a part of the spell released!" the freed mind exclaimed. "Now soon perhaps TU feel Hrothgar's pommel against my palm, and waken from this dream of Hell!" "I was holding you," I said. "I was afraid you'd fire on me before I could explain." "You laid hands on an earl of the realm!" He was roaring again. "Not hands; just a suggestion -- to keep you from doing anything hasty." "Hello, Aethelbert," Joel put in. "Sure glad to have you with us -- " # Toel," I interrupted. "Try anJ other one; wake as many as you can -- but hold onto their battle-reflexes until you get them calmed down." Then, to our new comrade: "We're surrounded. There are thousands of them down there -- see for yourself." "Yes -- never have I seen such concentration of brigades. What action is this we fight." He broke off suddenly. "A strange thing it is, unseen one, but now I sense in my memory a vast lore of great trollwars, fought with fire and magic under a black sky with a swollen moon. And I seem to see myself among them -- an ogre of the ogres!" A call came from Joel: "I got another one, Jones! I don't know what he's saying, but it's not in command code. Sure sounds excited!" "Keep it up, Joel.' While he worked, I talked to Aethelbert. He was quick to grasp the situation -- once he understood that I was only another combat unit like himself. Then he was ready to launch a one-man attack. "Well I remember the shape of the sorcerer: like a slinking dog it came, when I beached my boat on the rocky shores of Oronsay under Sgarbh Breae. My carls fell like swooning maids without the striking of a blow -- and then the werewolf was on me, and Hrothgar's honed edge glanced from its hide as a willow wand from the back of a sullen housewench. And now they have given me shape of a war-troll! Now will I take such revenge as will make Loki roar over his meadhorn!" "Jones!" Joel cut in. "Here's another one! He's talking American; all about Very lights and Huns..." I gave the new man a capsule briefing, then went on to another -- a calm, cool mind speaking strangely accented Arabic. He blamed all his troubles on an evil Djinn of the sorcerer Salomon, in league with the Infidels. I let him talk, getting it all straight in his mind -- then cued him to bring his conditioned battle-experience into his conscious awareness. He switched to Command Code without IF a break in the stream of his thoughts. "By the virtue of the One God, such a gathering of units was never seen! Praise Allah, that I should be granted such a wealth of enemies to kill before I die!" I managed to hold him from a headlong charge, then picked up a new voice, this one crying out in antique Spanish to his Compeador, Saint Diego, God, and the Bishop of Seville, interchangeably, I assured him that all was well, and went on  to the next man -- a former artilleryman whose last recollection was of a charge by French cavalry, the flash of a saber # -- then night, and lying alone among the dead, until the dogs came. "Jones, we're doing real good; that's six now. But down on the plain they're starting to move around. The Over-mind is reorganizing, and they'll be attacking right soon now. We're gonna run out of time... "Suppose our new men each start in to release others? Can you brief them -- show them how? They can work in pairs, with one freeing a man and the other holding him down until he understands what's happening." "Hey, that's a good idea! It's easy, once you know how. Let's start with Aethelbert... T ime was a term without meaning. To speak a sentence in the measured phrases of a human language required as long, subjectively, as to deliver a lengthy harangue in the compact Command Code -- and yet the latter seemed, while I spoke, to consume as much time as its more deliberate equivalent. My circuitry, designed for instantaneous action, accommodated to the mode of speech -- just as, on low alert, a waiting period that might measure weeks by terrestrial standards could pass in a brief hour of passive nonaction. While Joel and I worked, calming, reassuring, instructing, the seiging legions formed up into units on the dusty plain of white light moving. It might have been minutes -- or hours -- before the last of our two hundred and ten combat units had been freed from the paralyzing force of the Overmind. Three had raved, lapsed into inand black shadow below, arraying themselves for the assault. In the sky, the Earth hung, apparently uncoherence -- minds broken by the shock; two more had opened fire in the initial panic -- and had been instantly blasted by the return fire of a dozen units -- the first trac casualties of the campaign. Five more had resisted all efforts at contact; catatonics, permanently withdrawn from reality. And seven had gibbered in the alien symbolism of the demons -- condemned criminals, sentenced to the Brigades for the crimes of inferiority, non-conformity or lilogic. These are snuffed out, left their mighty carapaces as mindless slaves to be used as we had been used. It was ruthless -- but this was a war of no quarter, species against species. And our legions grew in strength and readiness. xxn I called for their attention. "So far we've had the advantage of surprise," I said. "We've hit and run, done the unexpected; they've milled around us like a herd of buffalo. We've managed to slice through them, pick off a few isolated units, capture a few more. But the honeymoon is about over. They're standing off out of take-over range, and they've imposed communications silence, so we don't know what they're planning." "Like I thought: we're losin'," someone commented. "Will we huddle here to be burned in our hall like Eric's men?" Aethelbert boomed. "Is this the tenth deed I'll relate to Thor in his meadhall in Asqard?" "We got to bust out of here," a Sixth Armored man said. "And fast, what I mean." "We can keep hitting and running -- and lose a few men each time," I went on. "In the end we'll be wiped out." "In the name of the one God, let us carry the fight to the legions of Shaitan!" "For the honor of the gods, I say attack!" "We'll attack -- but it will be a feint; Thomas, you'll take twentyseven units, and move out to the south. Don't close; cruise their line at extreme range, as though you were looking for a weak spot. Put two of your best probemen on scan for recruits; you may be able to pick off a unit here and there. Keep up defensive fire only; if you draw out a pursuit column, tall back on this position, and try to capture them." "Twenty-seven units say ye, sir? What of the others?" "I'm taking two men. When you reach a point close to a two-sevenoh heading from here -- turn and hit their line with everything you've got. That will be my signal to move out." "Wi' two men only? By'r lakin, they'll trounce ye like a stockfish!" "We'll come out with screens down, ports closed, and mingle with the enemy. In the confusion. I'm counting on their assuming we're loyal slaves. As soon as you see we're in their lines, turn and run for it; keep them busy. With luck, we'll get through -- " "And where would you be goin'?" an Irish voice demanded. "Their headquarters is about twelve miles west of here. I'm going to try to reach it." W ith my two companions beside me, I waited at the south end of the ravine, watching the distant dust cloud that was Thomas's force as it raced across the star-lit desert, the flickering of enemy guns lighting the scene with a winking radiance of blue and red and white. Then I swung to enter the pass, gunned up the long slope. Ben followed, trailing by a quarter mile. Far back, Aethelbert was coming up fast, the fire of the remaining enemy unit lighting his defensive screens. I reached the crest of the pass, came to a halt looking down on a vast complex of works -- tunnel IF heads, squat sheds, low circular structures of unknown function -- gray, rough textured, stark and ugly against the bleakness of the lunar landscape. And beyond the warren of buildings, a tower reached up into the glittering black of the night sky, a ragged shape like a lone spire remaining from a fallen ring wall: The Place that Must Be Defended. I looked back down the trail. From my vantage point I could see the broad sweep of the plain: the distant jumble of rock where we had enemy, strung out in a long pincers which enveloped the tiny group of winking lights that I knew was Thomas and his dwindling band; and nearer, the dust trail reaching almost to the foot of the pass, and the second trail, close behind. From halfway down the sloping trail, a once-Confederate named Ben called: "Aethelbert's in trouble; he's taken a hit, I think -- and somebody's closing on him. I better give him a leg up." 'Aethelbertl" I called. "Are you all right?" T 'here was no answer. I saw him slow as he entered the pass, turn sideways, blocking the entry, his guns pointed back toward the enemy. The oncoming unit poured fire into the now stationary target; it rocked to hit after hit. Ben, coming up beside me now, swung his guns, opened fire on the enemy unit as it came within range. "Aethelbert, we'll cover you!" I called. "Come on into the pass." "I'll tarry here, Jones," came a faint reply. "There'll be no lack of foes to tempt my thunder." "Just a few yards farther!" "Bare is the back without brother behind it," he sang out. "Now take the meadhall of the goblins by storm, and may Odin guide your sword-arm!" "I'm goin' back for him!" Ben yelled. "As you were, Ben! The target's ahead! Let's go and get it!" I launched myself down the slope without waiting to see him comply; a moment later, he passed me, racing to run interception for me. "Head for the tower," I called. The first buildings were close now -- unlovely constructions of featureless stone, puny in scale. I saw a tiny dark shape appear in a tunnel mouth, bound toward a cluster of huts -- and recognized it as one of the dog-things, looking no larger to me than a leaping rat. Its head was grotesquely muffled in a breathing mask -- apparently its only protection from the lunar vacuum. I veered, bore down on it, saw its skull-face twist toward me as my treads caught it, pulped it in an instant, flung the bristled rag that was its corpse far behind me. Ahead, Ben braked to a halt before a wide gate, swung his forward battery on it, blasted it to rubble, then roared ahead through the gap, with me close behind -- A shock wave struck me like a solid wall of steel. I felt myself go up, leap back, crash to the rocky ground, slide to rest in a shower of debris. Half dazed, I stared through the settling dust, saw the blackened hulk that had been my Confederate scout, smoke boiling from every aperture, his treads gone, gun barrels melted. I shouted his name, caught a faint reply: "Cap'n... don't move... trap... all automatic stuff... I saw 'em too late... Hellbores... set in the walls... You'll trigger 'em when you move... don't stir..." I felt his mind-field fade, wink out. I scanned the interior of the compound, saw the black mouths of the mighty guns, aimed full on me... waiting. I reached out, felt for the dim glow of cybernetic controls, found nothing. They were mechanically operated, set to blast anything that moved in the target area. The detonation that had halted me in my tracks had saved my life. Ben was dead. Behind me, Aethelbert held the pass alone; and on the plain, my comrades fought on, in ever-dwindling numbers, covering my desperation bid for victory. And I was here, caught like a fly in a web, helpless, fifty yards from my objective. T he explosion had blackened the pavement of the court, gouged a crater a yard deep, charred the blank invulnerable wdls that ringed it. My hull, too, would be blackened and pitted. I could see fragments of my blasted comrade scattered all across the yard; splashes of molten metal were bright against the drab masonry. There were openings in the walls, I noted as the last of the dust fell back, the final shreds of black smoke dissipated in the near-vacuum. They seemed no bigger than rat-holes, but I realized that they were actually about a yard wide and half again as high. As I watched, a pale snout poked from one; then the lean withers and flanks of a demon appeared, its size diminished by contrast with my immense body. The thing wore a respirator helmet like the one I had seen earlier; straps criss-crossed its back. It bounded lightly to the burned-out hulk that had been Ben, circled it, stepping daintily around chunks that still glowed red. It came to me then, disappeared as it passed under the range of my visual units. I held myself totally unmoving, carefully withdrew vitality from my external circuitry, closed myself behind an inner shield of not-thought. Alone in the absolute darkness of sensory deprivation, I waited for what might happen next. Faintly, I felt a probing touch -- ghostly fingers of alien thought that groped along my dark circuitry, seeking for indications of activity. There was an abortive shudder as an impulse was directed at my drive controls. Then the questing probe withdrew. Cautiously, I extended sensitivity to my visual complex, saw the creature as it trotted back to its hole. Again the compound was silent and empty -- except for the corpse of the great machine that had been my friend. IF m Quickly, I ran an inspection, discovered the worst: My drive mechanism was fused at vital points in the front suspension, and my forward batteries were inoperative -- warped by the terrific heat of the blast from the hellbores that had smashed Ben. I was trapped inside ten thousand terrestrial tons of inert, dead metal. M ore demons emerged from the building now, trotting from the same arched way through which the first had come. Other creatures followed -- squat, many-armed things like landwalking octopi. They went to Ben, swarmed over the hot metal, perched high up on the blackened carapace, set to work. Below on the dusty ground, the demons paced, or stood in pairs, silently watching. I considered reaching out to touch a demon mind -- and rejected the idea. I was not skilled enough to be sure of not alerting it, warning it that something still lived inside my scorched and battered hull. Instead, I selected a small horror squatting on the fused mass that had been Ben's forward turret. I reached out, found the awarenesscenter .  . Grays and blacks and whites, dimly-seen -- but with distorted pseudo-scent images sharp-etched; furtive thoughts of food, and warmth, and rest, a wanderlust and a burning drive for a formless concept that was a female... It was the brain of a cat, installed in the maintenance machine, its natural drives perverted to the uses of the aliens, its keen sense linked to electronic sensers, its superb motorennervation linked to demon-made limbs of insensitive metal. I explored the tiny brain, saw the wonderful complexity of even this simple mechanism -- vastly more sophisticated than even the most complex of cybernetic circuits. With an effort, I extended the scope of my contact, saw mistily what its eyes saw: the pitted surface of metal on which it squatted, the tiny cutting tools with which it drilled deep into the burned chromally of the ruined hull. I sensed the heat of the metal, the curve of it under me, the monomaniacal drive to do thus -- and thus -- boring the holes, setting the charge, moving on to the next... I pulled back, momentarily confused by the immediacy of the experience. The small machines, under the direction of the demons, were preparing to blast open the fused access hatch. Abruptly, I became aware of a sensation in my outer hull, checked the appropriate sensors, felt the pressure of small bodies, the hot probe of needle-tipped drills. In my preoccupation, I had failed to notice that a crew was at work on me, too. Soon -- in minutes, or an hour or two -- a shock would drive through me, as my upper access hatch was blasted away, exposing my living brain to the vacuum and the cold metal probes of the machines. Delicately, I directed movement to the cat's 'limbs. They moved smoothly in response, walked me IF across the twisted metal. I turned the sensory cluster to stare across at the openings in the wall, gaping now like great arched entries to the small-scale sensors of the tiny apparatus. Half a dozen now-huge demons paced or stood between me and the doors. None seemed to have noticed that I was no longer at work. I moved on down the side of the wrecked machine, sprang to the dust-drifted ground. A demon turned empty red eyes on me, looked past me, turned away. I moved toward the nearest archway, scuttling along at a speed which I hoped was appropriate to a maintenance unit returning to its storage bay for repairs or supplies. Another demon swung its head to watch, followed me with its eyes as I crossed the open ground. I reached the arch, hopped up the low step, sjipped into the darkness of the high-arched passage. Somewhere in the ominous tower before me -- the Place That Must Be Defended -- lay the secret of the power of the demons. My only chance of survival lay in finding it. I tore my eyes from the light and started into the dark maze. T he passage was featureless, unadorned, running straight to a heavy lock which opened at the pulse my welldrilled cat-brain emitted. In my octopoid body I scuttled forward into a tiny chamber, waited while the inner seal slid aside. A wider corridor lay before me, brightly illuminated in the infra-red range -- and crowded with hurrying demons, looking as immense as gaunt and bristled horses to my small-scale sensors. I moved ahead, ignored by the busy inmates of the building. I found a rising ramp, hurried up its wide curve, emerged on another level, like the first except that there were other creatures here -- tall, mechanical-looking things that ambled on irridescent chitinous limbs. I saw one or two demons of another species, characterized by flatter faces and enormous, protruding teeth, and pale, tawny hides. They wore more elaborate harness than the workercl ass things I had met in the past, and there was a glint of jeweled decoration on their brightwork fittings -- the first signs of frivolity I had seen among the aliens. I saw two of the humanoid aliens of the General Julius type. Both wore familiar earthly costumes -- one a pink business suit and other a stained military uniform; I judged that they were agents reporting on their operations among the natives. None of these varied, life-forms paid the slightest attention to me, but I couldn't help feeling as vulnerable as a newborn mouse in a rattler's cage. The most superficial probe from any of them would shatter my tenuous grip on the slave-machine's ego center. And an instant later, my own untenanted brain would be shattered -- or enslaved again. Moving past a congregation of the insect-things before a wide, square-cut door, I spied a narrow stair leading up from a short passage to the right. I turned in, went along to it, looked up its dark well. What I was looking for, I didn't know -- but instinct seemed to urge me upward. I hopped up with my ten legs, began the climb. I was in a wide chamber with a high ceiling supported by columns, among which massive apparatus was ranked in endless rows. Great red-eyed demons prowled the aisles of the sides of stilt-legged insectthings -- whether as guds or servants, I couldn't tell. A cacophony of humming, buzzing, raucous squealing, deep-toned roaring, filled the thin air, as the batteries of giant machines churned out their unimaginable products. I scurried, along, darting around the careless footfalls of the giant creatures, made for a door across the room, on either side of which two immense demons squatted on their haunches like vast watchdogs. I thought of the soldier in the fairy-tale, who had stolen the treasure guarded by a dog with eyes as big as saucers. These eyes were smaller, and of a balefid red, but they were as watchful as look-outs for a burglar gang. They were guarding something. That was reason enough for me to want to pass the door. I scurried past them, saw other small machines like myself hurrying about their tasks, numbly skipping aside when threatened by a heavy foot. I had chosen my disguise well. The tiny cat-brained devices appeared to have free run of the tower. There was a quiet comer where a cross-aisle dead-ended. I settled myself in it, blanked off sensory input, reached out to the most superficial level of mental activity, sensed the darting actionreaction impulses of the other cat-brains all around me. I selected one dim center, felt gingerly through its simple drives, selected one, stimulated it, planted a concept. Quickly I jumped to a second brain, keyed its elemental impulses, then went on to a fourth, and a fifth... I withdrew and focused my sensors. Across the floor, I saw a small machine darting erratically about, attracting cold stares from the busy creatures around it. A second machine scuttled into view from between giant apparati, paused a moment, jittering on thin legs, then darted to the first, leaped at it. With a metallic clatter, the two rolled across the floor and struck the lean shank of a demon which bounded aside, whirled, struck out. A third cat-brained machine dashed to join the fray. Two more appeared at the same moment, saw each other, came together with a crash -- five enraged Toms, each sure he was attacking a rival for the imagined female the image of whose presence I had evoked. A dirty trick, but effective. The two guardian demons bounded from their posts, sprang at the combatants, cuffed them apart -- but only for an instant. Nimbly, the fighting cats danced aside from the rush of the dog-things, darted back to re-engage. I moved from my corner, scurried along the baseboard IF to the guarded door, fired a triggering pulse at its mechanism. It stood firm. I extended a sensing probe -- a form of supersonic sonar, I realized as I felt over the shapes of the locking circuitry. I perceived the required form for the unlocking signal, transmitted it. The moronic apparatus responded, withdrew the magnetic locking field, I nudged the door, felt it swinc open, slipped past it, pushed it shut behind me. A narrow stair well lead up toward light. I started up, feeling my thin limbs tiring now. My power-pack needed recharging; I felt a powerful reflexive urge to descend to a dimly conceived place where a niche waited, in which I could snuggle against comforting contacts and receive a pleasure-flow of renewed vitality... I overrode the conditioned urge and clambered up the high-looming steps. They were scaled to the long legs of the demons, almost too high for my limited agility. There was no alarm from below. The demonguardians had failed to notice the penetration of their sanctum sanctorum. I was dragging myself as I topped the last step. I squatted with trembling limbs outsprawled, looking into a bright, round room, walled with smooth, nacreous material that resembled mother of pearl pierced with glazed openings beyond which the black lunar sky pressed close. At the center of the chamber, a shallow bowl rested on a short column, like a truncated bird-bath of polished metal. After a moment's rest, I moved into the room. I was aware of a curious humming, a sense of vast power idling at the edge of perceptibility. The floor was smooth under me, extending to a curving joint with the walls, which rose, darkening, to form a shadowed dome many yards overhead. The light was diffuse, soft, sourceless. I circled the gleaming pedestal, searching for some indication of the meaning or utility of this strange place, so unlike the stark and functional ugliness of the levels below. There was nothing. No indication of life, no sign of controls or instrumentation. Perhaps, after all, the Place That Must Be Defended was no more than a ceremonial temple dedicated to whatever strange deities might command the devotion of the monsters that prowled the levels beow... There was a sound -- a dry clicking, like a dead twig tapping a window. I crouched near the pedestal, stared around me, saw nothing. The walls of the empty room gleamed softly, silntly. The sound came again -- and a dry squeaking, as of leather sliding against unoiled metal. A diffuse shadow, faint, formless, glided down the walls. I turned my sensors up ward -- and saw it. ""t hung in the gloom of the dome, a bulging, grayish body in a cluster of tentacular members like giant angleworms, clinging to a bright filament depending from the peak of the onion-shaped dome. As I watched, it dropped down another foot, its glistening reticulated arms moving with a hideous, fluid grace. A cluster of stemmed sense organs poked from the upper side of the body -- crab-eyes on a torso like a bag of oil. I recognized the shape of the creature. It was the one on which my borrowed mechanical form was modelled. The thing saw me then -- I was sure of it. It paused in its descent, tilted its eyes toward me. I didn't move. Then the worm-arms twitched, flowed. It dropped lower, unreeling the cable as it came. It was five yards above the parabolic bowl, then four, then three. There was a feeling of haste in its movements now, something frantic in its scrambling descent. Whatever the thing was. its objective was clear: to reach the polished bowl below it -- quickly. My move was obvious: to prevent it. I sprang to the pedestal, reared up, my forelimbs catching at the edge of the bowl. I scrabbled with other legs at the smooth base, found purchase for another pair of limbs. I was clear of the floor now, rising up to the edge -- The thing above me emitted a mewing cry, dropped abruptly another yard, then released its support and launched itself at me. The flailing tentacles caught at me, wrapped me in an embrace like a nest of constrictors. I lost my hold, fell back with a stunning crash, the alien thing still entoiling me. It broke away, reached for the bowl, swung itself up; I sprang after it, seized a trailing limb with three of mine, hauled back. It turned like a striking snake, struck out at me -- blows that sent me over on my back, skidding away, until I was brought up short by the grip I had retained on one outflung member. I righted myself with a bound, crouched under a new rain of blows, lashed out in return, saw thick mustard-colored fluid ooze from a wound on the heavy body. The thing went mad. It lashed its many legs in wild, unaimed blows, leaping against the restraint of my grip. I caught another flailing arm, the cruel metal of my pincers biting into the yielding muscle. Abruptly it changed its tactics. Its multiple arms reached out to me, seized me, hauled me close. Then, with a surge, it raised me, dashed me down against the rock-hard floor. Dazed, I felt my grip go slack, the sinuous members of the alien withdraw. I reached after it felt a last member slither from my weakened grasp. I could see again. The thing was at the pedestal, swarming up, teetering on the edge of the bowl. I gathered my strength, lunged after it, drove my outstretched arm up at the unprotected underbody, felt it strike, pierce deep... The thing wailed, a horrifying cry. For a moment it wrapped its futile arms around my stabbing metal one; then it went limp, fell back, struck and lay, a slack heap of flabby, colorless flesh, in a spatter of viscious ochre. IF I rested for a moment, feeling the on-off-on flashes of failing senses. I had spent the last of my waning energy in the battle with the deciped. It was hard to hold my grip on the fading consciousness of the cat-brain; almost, I could feel my awareness slipping away, back to the doomed hulk in the courtyard below, the guns still erained upon my inert body. I wondered how close the drillers were now to the vulnerable brain -- and how Aethelbert fared at the pass, how many of my comrades still lived on the shattered battlefi'.'ld beyond. There was one more effort required of me before I relapsed back into the darkness that seemed to beckon all around. The thing I had killed had attacked me to keep me from reaching the hollow of the metal bowl-shape, and had striven frantically to attain it itself. I had to discover what it had guarded there. I dragged myself to the base of the pedestal, rose up, tottering, groped for the edge above. It was too far. I sank back quivering, black lights dancing in my dimming sensory field. Beside me lay the dead alien. I groped to it, crawled up on the slumped curve of its flaccid body, tried again. Now my fore-limbs reached the edge of the bowl, gripped; I pushed myself up, brought other limbs into play. Now I swung, suspended. With a supreme effort, I hauled myself up, oped, found a hold across the bowl -- and tipped myself into the polished hollow. F rom a source as bottomless as space itself, power flowed, sweeping through me with an ectasy that transcended all pleasure, burning away the dead husks of fatigue, hopelessness, pain. I felt my mind come alive, as a thousand new senses illuuminated the plane of space-time in which I hung; I sensed the subtle organizational patterns of the molecular aggregations that swirled over me, the play of oscillations all across the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, the infinity of intermeshing pressures, flows, transitions that were reality. The scope of my awareness spread out to sense the structured honeycomb of the tower walls, the scurrying centers of energy that were living minds nested in flesh and metal, drove outward to embrace the surrounding court, noting the bulk of cold metal that was the ruined machine in which my unconscious brain lay buried -- and outward still, sweeping across the curve of the world, detecting the patterned network of glowing points scattered across the waste of lifelessness. Now each dim radiance took on form and dimension, swelling until separately, yet together, their inner structures lay exposed. I saw the familar forms of human minds, each locked in a colorless prison of paralysis -- and the alien shapes of demon-minds, webs of weird thoughtforms born of an unknowable conception of reality. And here and there, in clusters, were other minds, beacons of flashing vitality -- the remnant of my fighting brigades? I singled out one, called to it: His answer was a flare of confusion, question; then: They' re poundin' us, Jones. Where are you? Can you send us any help?" "Tom gave me a turn, Jones. For a minute I thought you was the Over-mind, you came through so strong" His voice was weak, fading. "# guess ifll all be over pretty soon, Jones. I'm glad we tried, though. Sorry it turned out like this... Ithe array of enslaved human minds. I thought back to the frantic hour I had spent when Joel and I had freed the trapped minds of Aethelbert and Doubtsby and Bermuez. If I could reach them all now, in one great sweep ,... I brought the multitude of dully glowing centers into sharp focus, fixed in my mind the concept of the pattern of their natural reasonance -- and sent out a pulse. All across the dark face of the dead world faint points of illumination quickened, flared up, blazed bright. At once, I fired an orientation-concept -- a single complex symbol which placed in each dazed and newly emancipated brain the awareness of the status quo, the need for instant attack on demonbrained enemies. I switched my plane of reference back to Joel. I caught Joel's excited answer, then switched to alert the others. The pattern of the great battle changed. Now isolated demon-brained machines fought furiously against overwhelming odds, winked out one by one. Far away, in distant depots, on earth-lit deserts a thousand miles from the tower of the Over-mind, awakened slave brigades blasted astronished centurions, sallied forth to seek out and destroy the hated former masters. From a dozen hidden fortresses, beleagered demons fitted out vast siege units, sent them forth to mow broad swatches through the attacking battle units before they fell to massive bombardments. In a lull, I searched through the building below me, found and pinched out the frantic demons hiding there. Their numbers dwindles, shrank from thousands to a dozen, six, two, a single last survivor -- then none. The moon was ours. J oel's great bulk, pitted with new scars bright against the old, loomed up beside me in the compound, bright under the glow of a full Earth. "All the fellows are here now, Jones -- we lost seventy-one, the major says. A couple dozen more are disabled, like you and Aethelbert, but still live. The maintenance machines have gone to work on IF 'em. We got plenty of spares, anyway. We'll have you rolling again in no time." "Good work, Joel." I widened my contact to take in all of the hundred and eight intact survivors of the original group of freed slaves. Every one of you will have his hands full, rounding up the new men and organizing them. We have no way of knowing how soon our late enemies' home base will start inquiring after them. And when they do, we want to be ready." "What about going home, chief?" a man who had taken a bullet in the knee at the Hurtgen Forest called out. "How we going to get back?" "You off your onion, mate?" a one-time British sailor growled. "What kind o' show you think we'd make waltzing into Picadilly in these get-ups!" "We got to go back, to kill off the rest of these devils, haven't we?" "Mum, my masters," Thomas interrupted. "Hear out our captain." "Two days ago I used the enemy's equipment to call Earth," I told them. "I managed a link-up to the public visiscreen system, and got through to the Central Coordinating Monitor of an organization called the Ultimax Group. I gave them the full picture. They knew what to do. The enemy is outnumbered a thousand troops wearing special protective helmets and armed with recoilless rifles can handle them." "Yeah, but what about us?" the soldier burst out. "What are we going to do --  -- stay on this Godforsaken place forever? Hell, there's transports at the depots; let's use 'emi I got a wife and kids back there!" "Are you daft, fellow?" a dragoon of Charles the Second inquired. "Your chicks are long since dust, and their dam with them -- as are mine, God pity 'em." "My old woman's alive and cursing yet, no doubt," a Dutch UN platoon leader said. "But she wouldn't know me now -- aijd keeping me in reaction mass'd play hell with her household budget. No, I can't see going back..." "Maybe -- they could get us human bodies again, some way... "Human body, indeed!" the dragoon cut him off. "Could a fighting man hope for a better corpse than this, that knows naught of toothache, the ague nor the French disease?" Another voice cut into the talk -- the voice of Ramon Descortes of the Ultimax Group, listening in from Earth on the . circuit I held open. "General Bravais," he said excitedly -- and I channeled his transmission through my circuitry, broadcasting it to every man within range. "I've been following your talk. Although I find it unbelievable, I'm faced with the incontrovertible evidence. Our instruments indicate that your transmissions are undoubtedily coming from Luna -- how and why you will explain in due course, I hope. You've told me that you -- and the others -- have been surgically transplanted to artificial environments. Now you wish to be restored. Naturally! Let me urge you to return -- and wc will have for each of you a new body of superb design -- not stricdy huto say the leastP I had to call for order to quell the uproar. "Some kind of android?" I asked. "We have on hand a captive -- an alien operative of the humanoid type. We will capture more -- alive. They will be anestheized and placed in deep freeze, awaiting your return. According to the present estimate, there are some ten thousand of them working here on Earth. Sufficient for your needs, I believe " "Say, how's the fight going there?" someone called. "Well. The first Special Units have gone into action at Chicago, Paris and Tamboula, with complete success. Governments are falling like autumn leaves, wellknown figures are suiciding in droves, and mad dogs are reported everywhere. It is only a matter of hours now." "Then there's nothing to stand in the way!" "Broadway, here I come!" "Paris -- without a king? Why  "An end to war? As well and end to living!" "What about you, General?" someone call, and others joined in. "I'll order the transports made ready immediately," I said. "Every man that wants to go back can leave in a matter of hours." "Jones -- I mean. General -- " loel started. "Jones will . do; I won't need the old name any more." "You're not going back?" "We fought a battle here," I said. "And we won. But the war goes on. On a hundred worlds; a thousand -- we don't know how many. The demons rule space -- but Man is on his way now. He'll be jumping off Earth, reaching out to those worlds. And when he reaches them -- she'll find the armored brigades of the enemy waiting for him. Nothing can stand against them -- except us. We've proven that we can outfight twice our number in slave machines. And we can free the minds that control those machines, turn them against the enemy. The farther we go, the bigger our force will be. Some day, in the far future, we'll push them off the edge of the Galaxy. Until then, the war goes on. I can't go home again -- but I can fight for home, wherever I find the enemy." "General Bravais," a new voice cut in. "Surely you can't mean that? Why, your name will be on every tongue on Earth! You're the hero of the century. Of any century! You'll be awarded every decoration -- " "A battle-scarred five-thousandton Battle Unit would be ill at ease in a procession down Pennsylvania Avenue," I said. "For better or worse, my chromalloy body and I are joined irretrievably. I couldn't sit on a veranda and sip a whiskey sour, knowing what was waiting -- out there. So I'm going to meet it, instead. How 'many are going with me?" IF And the answer was a mighty roar in many tongues, from many ages -- the voice of Man, that would soon be heard among the stars. T he star-ship Destoire descended on a pale column of blue light, came to rest on the edge of a shallow sea edged with flower-like trees set in a carpet of russet grass. Her captan and crew emerged, walked to the top of a low hill, surveyed the countryside. "Beautiful," the navigator said. "And like all the others -- deserted," "You romanticize," the second officer scoffed. "Uninhabited, perhaps. But the term 'deserted' implies former habitation; this world is virgin. The captain nudged him. "Then what's that?" he pointed. A grassy promontory thrust up from the level plain a mile distant; beyond it, a second mound rose, lonely in the sweep of prairie. "An outcropping of rock, I suppose..." The captain exchanged a look with the navigator. "Even though this is your first trip out of the Home System surely you've heard Ae stories of the Pathfinders -- " "Folklore," the second officer said. "A pretty fairytale." "But the proofs -- " "Can be manufactured by anyone who has a taste for the fanciful. Come now, we're grown men. We needn't give lip service to legends of evil demons and beneficient trolls who fight them in our behalf!" "Come along," the captain said. He started down the long slope toward the distant hillock. I t loomed up sixty feet above the level plain, a craggy shape of torn and pitted metal, its wounds half concealed under a shroud of vines. Wind-blown soil had lodged in crannies and seeds had sprouted there, and now the wind stirred the grass-blades and the stemmed wildflowers that softened the harsh angles of the ancient machine. Corroded stumps that had once been gun barrels thrust out from among whispering leaves, a hint of defiance still implicit in their carriage. The navigator pulled away a cable of vine, exposed a patch of still-bright surface. "That was a brigade insignia," he said. "I've seen pictures..." "Look here," the captain said. He had cleared the covering of leaves from a plate of polished chromalloy, with deeply-incised lettering clearly visible against the imperishable metal. He leaned close, pursing his lips over the inscription. Then he read aloud: R. L P. end -- .w;The Place Where Readers And Editor tAeei.,, Dear Editor: Three cheers for Jim Maugham! Three kicks to J.R. Parkes. Alright. Here's a hot discussion, a sweeping concept, and a unique philosophy. It's stretching the point a little !o call this a philosophy but it fills bill on the other two counts. We no .v have two so-called sf television programs on the national networks. I he plots are of a kindergarten t)e, technical matters are sometimes faked out, and good old fashioned space opera is not the primary fare. Outer Limits has done a better job than Twilight Zone, Their alien getups are marvelous and some of the stories are masterpieces, even if the plots are ultra-simple. The main fault of these shows is that they're sf watered down for the people who don't like sf. In fact, the trials that producers, writers and directors go through to please the twelve year old national intelligence borders on the ridiculous, as they cut and hack and slash almost all the scripts that come to them. If these programs were upgraded to the point where they would be a little more pleasing to people who enjoy sf it would not only heighten the national opinion of sf as a literary form but it would bring more to our ranks. There are many people around who think of Flash Gordon when sf is mentioned, simply because they haven't been exposed to anything else. I want to see a science-fiction program aimed at its fans and not garbage truck drivers. I want to see aliens as allies of Terrans. I want to see stories like Green World, The Ballad of Lost OMell or the Retief stories brought to the TV screen. We can do away with childish attempts to produce simple horror. There are other emotions that sf could convey on TV. They could also do away with the ultra-sonic music which only detracts from the creation as a whole and actually alienates you from it. It can be done, too, with letters like this one going from every science fiction fan to the networks. The volume of mail would be a torrent and enough to swing them around our way. I appeal. If you think of yourself as a science fiction fan, blow a nickel on a letter. A nickel is a small price to pay for TV science fiction drama of the type that we yearn for. -- John D. Cochran, # Baker Street, Fremont, Ohio.    Dear Editor: I would like to ask a favor of you or your readers. If anyone knows of a club or discussion group in Tacoma, Washington, which meets to discuss science fiction, E.S.P., or similar subjects, will he please write to Hue and Cry or to my address below? A group outside of Tacoma will not do any good because I am severely crippled and transportation is difficult. Thank you for any help that can be given. -- Janet G. Fox, # North Union, Tacoma #, Washington. #    Dear Editor: Be it known right at the inception that the document to follow consists entirely of personal opinions and therefore is of no practical value whatsoever. You may stop reading now if you wish. Hey, wait a minute! Come back! It was only a joke! A joke!... Please? The September '# issue of If will mark the beginning of my third year with your 'zine (yes. I'm one of the old readers) and I'd like to say right now that the present product is a far cry from those rather shabby items of '#. As if you didn't know. If is now one of the best printed SF publications around. It's a pity, though, that you use the color tinting only in the story titles and not in the actual illustrations thehiselves as you did in the January of '#. Those Schelling illustrations for The Five Hells of Orion were beautiful. Speaking of illustrations, the covers are good, too; the March, July and August wrapping in particular. Especially the August, even if k didn't show anything that happened in the story (must have been one of those "fascinating missions"). But the pictures don't keep the readers as buyers. (Very astute observation, don't you think?) (Well, that's your prerogative.) And so we shall blithely trip onward to the next subject, to wit, the filler material between illos. Actually, I don't have that much to say (although it won't stop me) because most of your stories this The tannest complete short novel of space war yon'll ever read! by Harry Harrison by Lester del Rey by Wyman Guin And many more! calendar year have met with my approval ("Bless Klonos!" breathes the editor thankfully). However. Although I have been reading SF for only six years, I like to consider myself a knowledgeable fan. I even own a few copies of magazines dating from the Middle Ages (i. e., #). But in all my readings I had never come across anything by the old master E. E. Smith. Therefore I looked forward to your May issue with some curiosity, even anticipation. Wish I could say the same now. The Imperial Stars, sir, was bad. The progres and denouement of the tale yvas rather simple (I don't mean uncomplicated) and the writing itself was, well, clumsy. As a matter of fact, though I hate to say it, the writing reminded me of my own story-writing style (you rejected one of my outpourings last year; remember?). In short, it leaves something to be desired. But all your other readers will probably love it. One more cavil and then we'll go on to happier subjects. I find that the blurbs you use in your three magazines become very annoying, Philip Jose Farmer's greatest story! Complete in the January by Theodore Ti. Thomas by B. S. Richardson And many morel not to mention tedious, when read en masse. One more thing and then I'll go bother some other editor. Mr. Pohl, sir, to settle a bone of contention between my left and right heads (this is the middle head speaking), would you tell us if you have ever employed the name Charles Satterfield as a pseudonym? -- Peter Riley, #I Crescent Street, New London, Connecticut #. Matter of fact, yes. -- The Editor. #:   Dear Editor: I never before read any sciencefiction magazines because from what I could see most of them were nothing but bunk. However, while I was glancing over a magazine stand, I noticed the name Robert A. Heinlein. Then I read the inside page and from what I saw, I knew I'd buy every issue of If for at least the next year. The serials you plan look great! The other stories in the July issue were good too, and I got a special kick out of Bixby's Old Testament. No hue or cry, just praise for the one sf magazine with class. -- Michael J. Hunter, Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks for your letter, and we'l! see you next month. At least we hope we will -- and we're sure next month's If will be a good one. Jack Vance who won the Hugo for The Drapon Masters, which appeared in Galaxy, now comes to If with might win him another! And in the same issue a new Retief story by Keith Laumer -- a novelette by Wilson Tucker -- oh, yes, a good issue! -- The Editor. IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. r. Your Name Here No. CX-#by Lynd Ward No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! its vividly real telepathic societv, detailed so ingeniously and dramadcallv that, finisUng the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Plus Postage #i I Enclose...State. JANUARY #  #c Beginning This Issue A Great New Science-Fiction Novel its vividly real telepathic society detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finisUng the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, Name Address City State I Enclose Th Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours for Only #I Plus Postage #Si H# Frederik Pohl, Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  EditoricA Worlds of When... A s professional forward-lookers A we science-fiction writers sometimes lose sight of the fact that others are in the business as well. A group specializing in "when-ness" are the computer people of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a first-rate book summarizing their opinions about what tomorrow will look like is Computers Press), which Martin Greenberger assembled out of transcripts of a lecture and discussion series held at The contributors to the lecture series include Vannevar Bush, Marvin L. Minsky (perhaps best known to the lay public as the inventor of the Minsky i! n, a computer program which displays what are essentiaUy complete universes on a cathode tube), John R. Pierce, C. P. Snow, the late Norbert Wiener and any number of other articulate and inform men and women. We don't propose to review the book here; we only want to tell you that it is a rewarding reading experience. Everybody knows about the job -- doing capacities of the computer, how it measures out the proportions of meats that go into bologna, makes out payrolls, runs oil refineries, etc. But did you ever think of computer programming as an art form? More than # words of programming are written a year; the Library of Congress has recently amended its rules to permit copyrighting a program; and it seems at least a possibility that Composing a program for a computer to operate may very shortly attain the same cultural and philosophical standing as composing a symphony. Indeed, "possibility", is too thin and remote a word. A number of the book's contributors speak of the esthetic enjoyment of preparing "software" (i.e., the programs, etc. -- as distinguished from the "hardware" of the machines themselves) for computers. The implications for a wordworker like the undersigned, who has been cheerfully viewing the cybernation revolution as one thfU meant serious dislocations for stee workers and subway motor men -- but surely not for himself! -- are fascinating, and a little frightening. One can imagine some future If is the form of binary codes, proceeding through some latter-day #s input into a quantified readout like the Minskytron... But not today, at any rate. Today there's , and as John Pierce says in one of his remarks in this book, speculation "is the only way we have of giving variety to the future. When the future comes there is going to be just one future, but here in anticipation we can enjoy a lot of different futures." And we did. We enjoyed the whole be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to tome -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of diose who understand them. Behind die tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- fheir amazing discoveries of the hich den processes of man's mind, and the usastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these fiicts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toaay. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organizadou) an ie-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secref wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the po etical helpfulness of their teachings, write today for a firee copy of me book, The Mastery of Life. Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe  I Scribe N.X.Qc I San Jose, California I Please send me the jhee book, Tb Mastery I of Ufe, which explidns how I may learn to I use my faculties and powers of mind.  j Ttfamg j j Addrea  l i...A First of Three Parts This was the day when the sun went out -- and mankind shook ot the name of the Starchildl I I t was the day, the hour and the moment of Earth's vernal equinox... and the near stars blinked. A dozen of them flickered at once. Blazing Sirius and its dense dwarf sister. The bright ye#o# twins of Alpha Centauri. Faint red Proxima... the distant sparks of Eta Eridani and # Ophiuchi A... , the bright Sun itself. The vast cosmic engines declared a vacation in their processes: th fusion of smaller atoms into larg the flow of surplus mass into energy, the filtration of that energy through layered seas of restless gas, the radiation of their atomic power into space. By the shores of Earth's oceans, within the crater walls of Luna, on the sands of Mars and the ringed satellites of Saturn, out past the Spacewall to the reefs, the great and shook and knew fear. The whisper spread out into the galaxy, propagated at the speed of light; The Starchildr Tliat was the way it began. The flickering of the neighbor stars lasted only a moment, and it was seen first on the reefs nearest each star. Then slow Pluto caught the twinkle of # Ophiuchi A while Neptune, lumbering in its dark orbit on tile far side of Sol, was the first to catch the dimming of whitehot Sirius. On Earth, where the fat old Planner sat chuckling on his golden chair, every momentary pulse of darkness arrived at once. His chuckles stopped. His pouchy face darkened. As his astronomers reported in, he exploded in wrath. His first reports came from a hardened station in the zone of twilight on the planet Mercury, where sliding concrete doors uncovered a pit beneath a saw-toothed crater rim. A silvered dome pushed out of the pit, out of the ragged shadow, into the white blaze of the near sun. The barrels of a dozen optical and radio telescopes, pyrometers, telescanners and cameras thrust out at the great orb, under the blazoned slogan that the dome displayed to the universe in letteri of cast bronze: And inside the insulated, refrigerated observatory, three astronomers watched a thousand boards and gauges and dials. They wen waiting. For they had been warned. T he senior office on duty lifted his eyes from a chrononaeter dial and growled: "Five minutes!" The other two men squinted at their instruments in silence. The grizzled Technicaptain peered at them through the pale lighting of screen that dominated the glitter of instruments. On it swam the visual image of the sun, golden and engorged, reaching out with fat, slow tendrils of superheated gas as it lay above the rock-fanged horizon of the planet Mercury. "Yeah," he grumbled, half to himself. "Were ready." The junior member of the team was a lean young Technicadet, an ambitious young man, already enbittered by the harsh facts of survival and promotion in the Technicorps. He dared a comment: "Ready for nothing, if you ask me. This is idiot business!" The senior officer rolled a yellowed eye toward Mm, but said nothing. ' "So?" murmured the third man. He was a plump little Techtenant who had found a satisfying philosophy in his recent promotion. "The F Machine's business is idiotic, then?" "Now, looki I didn't mean -- " "No. But you didn't think, either. The Machine discerns the greater plan; we only execute the parts. If the Machine attaches importance to this fanciful creature, the Starchild, then we may not question its motives." The Tcchnicadet gestured at the huge solar globe angrily and cried: "Look! What could put that out?" The Techtenant shrugged, and the senior officer only said: "Four minutes." The cadet's military courtesy was worn thin under the abrasion of their long, tense vigil. He scowled at his telemetering pyrometers and grumbled: "Not a flicker! We've been here three miserable weeks, and we haven't seen a thing." The Technicaptain rumbled: "We'll stay here three years if the Machine orders it. The Machine is above injustice or error. The Machine was built to rule the Plan, and it is guarded against human blunders." "Oh, yes, sir. But twve seen nothing at ah," cried the Technicadet. "No larchild. No major sunspots -- or whatever it is we are supposed to expect." "Practice patience," advised the fat captain. "Or you may find yourself serving the Plan more personally. There is always a need for spare parts in the Body Bank! Three minutes." T he Technicadet subside ? grudgingly apologetic. aI three men sat strapped in their observation chairs, watching the great golden image of the sun. Wreathed in its red coronal streamers, pocked in its middle latitudes with a trail of small black spots, it hung over the black horizon like a god's eye. The instruments around them clicked and murmured. "I remember," the Techtenant said at last, as though to himself, "when that sun was only another star in the sky. No brighter even than great Vega." The Technicadet cried eagerly: "You were out in the Reefs?" "Two minutes," growled the captain, but his eyes were on the young Techtenant. He nodded. "Looking for my sister's -- boy friend? Fiancee? Looking for Boysie Gann. Because he was looking for the Starchild. And we didn't find either of them." The cadet said simply, "I've never seen the Reefs." "A beautiful thing," said the Techtenant. "There are spiked forests of silicon plants, shining with their own light. Like jewels, and sharp enough to shred your spacesuit. There's a growth that makes great brain-shaped masses of pure silver. There are thick stalks of platinum and gold, and there are things like flowers that are diamonds." The cadet's breathing was suddenly loud. The grizzled old ca tain turned to look at him, all his recent scorn now frozen into longing -- and a sort of fear. He snapped: "Pay attention to your work man! The Reefs are dangerous business!" "Yes, sir," the Tech tenant agreed earnestly. "I saw a great beast like a nightmare, shaped like a scorpion, huge as a horse -- " "No, you f#ol! Dangerous to the Plan of Man. There is something there that nearly destroyed us once. If the Starchild has his way -- " He stopped himself and only said: "One minute." The Techtenant reddened. "Fm sorry, sir. I certainly did not intend to seem unplanned. I don't mean to suggest that those savage nomads beyond the Spacewall are worth considering, even if they do believe the Starchild to be more than human." "Tend your instruments!" The captain set the example, resolutely taking his eyes from the men and the screen, clamping them on the bank of gauges and dials before him. A vagrant thought stirred his mind of the blonde Togetherness girl who had first whispered the name of the Starchild to him. What had become of her? The Body Bank? -- But there was no time for that. It was only seconds now. In spite of all the insulation and the cold air sighing from the vents, the dome was suddenly stifling. The captain feH a tickle of perspiration running down his sides. "Twenty seconds!" The captain stood with his eyes frozen on the black chronometer needle that raced to meet the red, still one he had set. When they touched it would be the vernal equinox on Earth. And the Starchild's threat would be proved an empty bluff -- Or would not. Suddenly the whisper of the instruments changed. A camera shutter began clicking gently. "Ten seconds!" The shielded floor lamps shut themselves off. Only the instrument lights rivaled the phosphor glow from the image of the great yellow sun in the screen. "Five seconds!.... Four!... Three!..." -- twenty reels of tape began to spin shrilly in the darkness; the breathing of the men was like sobs -- "Two!... One!... "Zero.'" The captain gulped and rubbed his eyes. There was a dimming. Then the filters went down and then there was a burst of flame -- then darkness. The lights were gone. All of them. The sun's image had winked out. He heard a gasp from one of the other men, then a shout: "The Starchild! He's done it!" And the other man sobbed: "We're blind!" T hat, too, was how it began. But there was more. Like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a still pond, a wave of darkness spread out from the sun. Three minutes after the instant of the vernal equinox it reached that clucking camera in the dome on Mercury, unseen by those sightless eyes. In not quite three more minutes, it struck the men watching from IF the orbital stations above the eternal hot, dank clouds of Venus. A falling shadow of fear, it darkened tiieir screens, whitened their faces, silenced their talk. But their instrument lights remained visible. They had not been blinded by that last great burst of light from the sun. Eight minutes from the sun, the wave of blackness washed over Earth. All across the sunward face of the planet a crushing night came down. Bewildered, men paused and fumbled through the endless seconds before the city lights came on. Terror electrified those who bad heard the whisper of the Starchild's threat. On the dark side of Earth and on Luna, astronomers blenched as their near, familiar stars flickered. Some had heard whispers of the Starchild, too, and of a Writ of Liberation. Others merely knew that the images in their great spaceborne mirrors, or in the scopes that peered up from Earth's highest mountains, suddenly were missing familiar points of light. They came back -- But the sun did not Not then. Not for half an hour and more, and while it was gone there was panic. To the Planner on bis great golden chair the news cane and quenched his chuckling good humor, His huge soft face turned pale with fear. To a man named Boysie Gann, locked in the dungeons of the Machine, no word came -- but he knew. For he heard a guard whisper to another, The Starchild r To a girl with haunted dark eyes. telling whispering sonic beads before a console of the Machine, the word came in a language that Man had not invented, and few men could understand. Her name was Delta Four, and she did not fear. She did not care at all... And that was how it began for them, and the wave of darkness raced on into infinite space. Twelve minutes from the sun it swept Mars, halting the dedication of an enormous new project to extract oxygen and water from the dead crust of the planet. The Deputy Planner of Mars, a poorly planned individual who had seen the Writ of Liberation with his own eyes, snatched a gun from his honor guard and shot himself. During the following quarterhour that shadow bathed the asteroids, terrified a few, left others unconcerned. For they either did not know, being buried in the mining shafts that hollowed out the precious cores of the tiny planets, or they were so dazed and uncaring with the eternal hardship of their toil that nothing could frighten them again. The racing wave of light overtook the scattered outposts of the Plan on the Moons of Jupiter. It darkened Saturn's rings, swallowed the satellites of Uranus and Neptune. It fell upon (the Spacewall Command complex cm distant Pluto, where only those whose eyes fell upon the sun by chance noticed it -- but they were afraid. It drowned the Spacewall itself -- more web than wall, a net of farscattered stations whose laser beams and patrol craft kept watch on the little-known infinities beyond, alert to guard the Plan of Man against vagrants from the Reefs, or such enemies as the Starchild. A wave of unexpected terror, it sent the crews of a thousand slowwheeling spaceforts shouting to their emergency stations. It awakened sirens and horns on ten thousand lonely patrol ships. It set the signals of confused alarm. A day or so beyond Pluto it washed the frontiers of the solar system, the snowball protoplanets of solid methane and ammonia which the distant gravitational arms of the sun had never gathered into actual worlds. And then at last, days beyond that last fearful outpost of the Plan, it began to bathe the Reefs of Space. O ut on the reefs, those living asteroids grown through unending ages by the minute fusorian organisms, feeding on the thin seas of interstellar' hydrogen, the wave of shadow no longer meant terror. It was only another event, in a life that was filled with danger and surprise. On one lonely worldlet a prospector stopped to peer in annoyance at where the sun had been. He fumbled in his pack for a luminous crystal of fusorian diamond, and bent over his drill again. On another reef a lay preacher in the Church of the Star glanced at his watch, then at the sky. He was not afraid when he saw that Sol was gone from its accustomed position. He had been expecting it. He left his work to face the blue blaze of Deneb; knelt, whispered a few words of supplication and thanksgiving. Calmly then he bent back to the unfinished space boot on his last, for he was by trade a cobbler. The shadow washed over a grave, but no one saw it. No one could have, for no one was there. Not even the cadaver; the grave was empty. The shadow rested lightly on a city of stern, hard-faced refugees from the Plan of Man -- on a great cluster of reeflets where a mighty space armada was being fashioned from fusorian steel -- on a girl named Quarla Snow, who stood watching it flicker out with tears bright in her eyes. On another living rock, a herdsman stood guarding a calving member of his herd from a flight of marauding pyropods. Lying behind a sheltering ledge of organic iron, one eye on his parturient spaceling while he searched out the armored killers with frugal flashes from his laser gun, he failed to notice that the sun had gone out. That was how it began, for every man, woman and child alive. A nd thirty-nine minutes later the sun began again its mighty outpouring of heat and light, but the dark looked down on a changed solar system. The sun's atomic engines ran IF again. Hydrogen fused into helium, through the carbon cycle. Filtered energy flowed toward the solar surface. Radiation poured into space. Three minutes from the sun, the wave of radiation crashed against that insulated dome on Mercury. It was recorded by the clucking camera, analyzed by the thousand automatic instruments. Sobbing with joy -- or fear! -- the blinded astronomers flashed the word to Earth: The sun lives again! But its light reached Earth before tiieir message. That first rebirth of light brushed a high mountain on Earth, where the Planner sat on his golden chair, the gray metal falcon that perched on his shoulder darting a red-eyed glare about the room, whirring its steel wings. The Planner was staring at a sheet of creamy parchment which bore the heading: It had been delivered to him by Ihe hand of one of his own guards, who had found it at his door. It aid: The Starchild requires the release of all of his followers who are held in the service of the Plan of Man by security collars. The Starchild requires that all of his followers who have been consigned to the Body Bank for salvage shall be restored to their original state, and then that they too shall be released. The Starchild finally requires that the barrier called the Spacewall shall be dismantled, and that free passage between the worlds of the Plan and the Reefs of Space shall be permitted. The Starchild is aware that the Plan of Man considers itself invulnerable, and thus he has arranged a warning demonstration. At the moment of the vernal equinox on Earth the sun will be extinguished. Twelve near stars will blink. If the Planner fails to meet the Starchild's requirements after this demonstration, further measures will be taken. These will result in the destruction of the Plan of Man. "Unplanned nonsense," groaned the Planner. "Impudence! Treason!" A tall Technicolonel said uneasily, "Sir. We must take measures... "Measures," grumbled the Planner, while his steel falcon clashed its pinions. "What does the Machine say?" A girl in a hooded gown said: "No data, sir." Her voice was like distant music, her expression serene. "No data! Find me some data! Find who this Starchild is! Tell me how he did this thing -- and how I can stop him from doing it again!" The Technicolonel coughed. "Sir, for some years we have had reports of a Church of the Star. A new religion, apparently springing from the Reefs -- " "Always the Reefs! They should have been destroyed twenty years ago!" "Yes, sir. But they were not. And the pioneers -- that is, sir, the tramps and vagabonds on the n Reefs -- they invented new superstitions. They worship, I believe, tfio star Deneb. Alpha Cygni -- the star at the top of the Northern Cross. They have imagined a paradise on the planets that they imagine to orbit around it. They wish to migrate there, or some of them do -- though at maximum drive for conventional spacecraft," he continued earnestly, "they might average some one per cent of the speed of light, in which case Deneb, at four hundred light-years distance, would not be reached for forty thousand -- "Get to the pointi" cried the Planner fretfully. "What about the Starchild?" "Well, sir, we had heard rumors of such a person in our investigations of this cult. Sometime ago we decided to send a -- uh -- a special investigator to secure intelligence concerning him and it. The investigator's name was Boysie Gann, sir, and -- " "Bring him to me! Is he here on Earth?" "Yes, sir. But -- well, sir, he did not return as we expected. In fact -- " the Colonel's face was a picture-puzzle of confusion -- "I must confess, sir, that we don't properly know how he did return, as -- " "Fool!" shouted the Planner. "Bring him to me! Never mind what you don't know. Bring me Boysie Gann!"... And that too was how it began; but in fact some parts of it began earlier. For Boysie Gann it began many months earlier, when he was a spy. U F or Boysie Gann the beginning was on Polaris Station, that great metal wheel that floats in the icy space past Pluto, one link in die Spacewall between the Plan of Man planets and the Reefs. Boysie Gann was twenty-six years old and already a Machine Major. Boysie Gann was six feet tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed. He was broad through the shoulders and slim at the waist. He moved like a cheerful cat. He looked like a fighter, and he was. He reported aboard the Polaris Station with a grin and a disarming look out of his bright blue eyes. "Boysie Gann reporting, sir," he told the deck officer. "Technicadet Gann, at your service." And that was a cheerful lie. He was no cadet, but at the spy school on Pluto the briefing officers had given him a new rank to make his job easier. A Machine Major was a man of importance. He would be watched. A cadet could go anywhere, see anything. The deck officer assigned him quarters, procured him help in stowing his gear, shook his hand to welcome him aboard, and ordered him to report to the commandant of the Station, Machine Colond Mohammed Zafar. Gann's assignment was to investigate rumors of strange anti-Plan activities on the Polaris Station. Gann was a soldier of the Plan, and he could hardly conceive of anything anti-Plan that was not at the same time corrupt, slovenly. IP evil and wrong. He had come to the station expecting to find it rundown and rusty, manned by surly malcontents. Yet the discipline was good. The men were on their toes. On the way through the plastic passages of the wheel, stepping high in the light gravity of the station's spin, he saw that the metalwork was bright. Confusing, thought Gann, mildly perplexed; but he knew his duty and he knew how to do it. He knocked on the door of the commandant's office and was ordered inside. He came to full attention and a brisk salute. "Technicadet Gann reporting as ordered, sir!" The. Machine Colonel returned his salute methodically. Here, too, Gann was faintly surprised, though he allowed none of the surprise to show through his military bearing and engaging grin. Machine Colonel Zafar was a short brown man in meticulously pressed dress whites, who looked as solid and enduring as the Plan itself. "Welcome aboard, cadet," he said. "Give me your orders, please." "Yes, sir!" Gann's orders were also a lie. They showed him to be a relief laser operator fresh out from Earth. They did not mention his true rank, or his intensive training on Pluto. The commandant read them carefully, then nodded. "Cadet Gann," he said in his soft, precise voice, "we are glad to have you on Polaris Station. As you know, this station is a major unit in the Spacewalk Our primary job is to detect and intercept any unauthorized traffic between the Plan of Man and the areas beyond Pluto -- the wastes that are called the Reefs of Space. Our secondary job is to monitor as much activity in the Reefs as possible. Our radar, laser and optical systems are the heart of our mission -- and so. Cadet Gann, what you do is the most important part of our work here. Don't fail us." "Sir!" said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I won't fail you! I serve the Plan of Man without question or pause!" And he saluted and left. But before he left he dropped his orders and retrieved them, with a flashing grin of apology to the colonel. He left with his shoulders high. For in' the instant when he wa bent out of the commandant's sight, picking up his papers, he had planted a listening bug under the projecting rim of Machine Colonel Zafar's desk. W ithin an hour of Gann's arrival on Polaris Station he was fitted with an iron collar. He had expected it. In so sensitive an installation as the station, every man wore one of the Machine's collars, so that at any instant, wherever he might be, any one of them could be destroyed. There was no other way. A space man gone amok -- a traitor loose in the fuel stores -- a drunken armorer at the studs of the station's mighty missiles -- any individual could do so much harm that it was necessary to have instant control over every man aboard. Still, k was an unoomfortaUe ieeling. Gann touched the collar fightly, and for once die smile was fone from his cheerful face. It was disturbing to know that someone somewhere -- the distant Machine on Earth, or one of its satellites nearby; a security officer on Pluto, or the commandant here on the station -- could at the surge of a radar pulse detonate the decapitation charge. His bunkmate was a tall, lean Nigerian, Technicadet M'Buna. Lounging in the security office, waiting for Gann, M'Buna saw his involuntary gesture and laughed. As he held the door and they started off to their duty post M'Bima said, "Makes you nervous, eh? Don't worry. If it goes off, you'll never know it!" Gann grinned. He liked M'Buna, had at first encounter already realized that here was an intelligent, mdent friend. Yet he said at once, Nobody likes a collar. And -- " he acted a pause, gjancing around -- "I hear there are people somes(#iere who do something about it. Out on the Reefs. Men who know how to get the collars off..." M'Buna said imcomfortably, "I wouldn't know anything about that. Here's our station." Gann nodded and let it pass. But he had not failed to notice that M'Buna had overlooked one essential act. What Gann said hinted at treason to the Plan. M'Buna's duty was clear: He should have called Gann on it and established exactly what was meant by the hint. And then reported Gann at once. H uge as an ocean liner, flimsy as a dragon-kite, Polaris Station was a big plastic wheel. Its spin was just fast enough to keep the crew's soup in the plate and the plate on the table. The hub was stationary, with the radar-laser search dome on the north face, the entry locks on the other. The station had been set up first, more than : quarter-century before, as a base for exploring the Reef cluster immediatdy to the galactic north of the sun. The snowball that had supplied reaction mass for the old nuclear rockets was still in detector range, swinging a hundred miles from the station in their coupled orbits. Now diere was no need for reaction mass, but the snow-asteroid still had its uses. It served as a cosmic garbage dump, the unreclaimed wastes and offal of the station hauled out there after every watch and left on its surface so that free-orbiting particles oi trash woi not return false signals to the search instruments back at the station. Within forty-eight hours of reporting aboard the station. Machine Major Boysie Gann had bugged the offices of the commandant, the executive officer, the quartermaster and the intelligence chief. Each tiny instrument was broadcasting a sealed-wave pickup of every word that was uttered in those sacrosanct chambers. Gann himself spot-monitored the transmissions when time allowed. The rest of the time the great records machine on Pluto received the signals, taped them and transmitted them to Earth and die IP Imried citadel of the Planning Machine itself. But all his bugs produced nothtagGann's orders had been less than explicit: Seek out and identify enemies of the Plan. Beyond that there had been only rumors. A vast smuggling enterprise, shipping valuable strategic materials from the inner Plan Worlds to the Reefs. A strange new cult that threatened to unite the reefs against the inner planets. A leader preaching a hegira. A security leak... But which of these was true, if any, Gann had not been told. It was not security doctrine to tell agents precisely what they should be looking for, on the grounds that their time was most productively employed when they could develop and follow up on many of their own leads. Yet here there were no leads at an. No real leads, at least. A few unguarded remarks at mess. Some slipshod accounting of spare parts for the laser banks. These were anti-Plan irregularities, to be sure, and men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. Men would go to the Body Bank for them now, from Polaris Station, for Gann had promptly filed the names and data. But he was iertain that what he should be looking for was something bigger and worse than an occasional disgruntled or sloppy officer. Within one week Gann had proved to his own satisfaction that if there was any major anti-Plan activity going on, it was not om Polaris Station. He had to look elsewhere. But where else was there?... It wasn't until he had been there twice that he realized where the "elsewhere" had to be. L ike all the noncommissioned personnel, Gann took his share of KP, garbage detail, cleanup orderly and so on. It was not usually a burdensome chore. The radar ovens and cybernated housekeepers did all the work; the only thing left for the men in charge was to make sure they were working properly. Even the short hop from station to the snowball for garbage disposal was a welcome break in the routine. He shared his garbage tour with M'Buna, and they spent their time chatting desultorily at the controls of the "scow" -- actually a reactionless space-tractor -- while the garbage pods steered, unloaded and returned themselves. M'Buna had never referred to Gann's leading remark about collars. Nor had Gann ever been able to draw him into any unplanned talk; he had given up trying. They talked about home. They talked about promotion. And they talked about girls. For Gann there was one girl, and her name was Julie Martinet. "No bigger than a minute, M'Buna," he said earnestly, "and with those beautiful dark eyes. She's waiting for me. When I come back -- " "Sure," said M'Buna. "Now, this girl I knew in Lagos -- " "You're talking about a girl," said Gann. "Julie is the girl. The only one who matters." "How come you never get any mail from her?" asked M'Buna. And Gann froze. "She doesn't like to write letters," he said after a moment, but inside he was cursing himself. So foolish a slip! There was a reason, and a perfectly good one, why he got no letters from JuHe Martinet. They were piling up for him on Pluto, he was sure of diat; but they could not be forwarded here. There was too much risk of someone reading one, and learning from some chance comment that Gann was not the simple laser tech he appeared. As soon as he could Gann changed the subject. "Say," he said, "what's that on the scope?" It was a tiny blip, settling down featherlight toward the surface of the snowball protoplanet. A clutter of trash, of course. Nothing more. It was by no means unusual for some part oi the garbage cargo to rebound from the tenuous clutch of the snowball's gravity and whed around in space for minutes or hours before finally settling into place. But M'Buna glanced at the radar display and said casually: "The commandant, I suppose. He comes out here every once in a while to dieck things over." Carefully, trying to hide his excitement, Gann said, "Wonder what he does there." M'Buna shrugged, reached forward and turned a switch. The pod had emptied itself and returned to the ship. "Tell you what," Gann went on. "Let's look." H e didn't wait for an answer. The pod back, the scow ready, there was nothing to stop him. He fed the ion-stream to the reactionless drive and cut in the course correcting side-rockets. The scow began to move. M'Buna said tautly, "No! Cut k out, Gann. The Old Man isn't going to want us skylarking around without permission." But Gann wasn't listening. He was watching the screens intently. If Machine Colonel Zfar was paying surreptitious visits to the ice-planetoid there had to be a reason. He was going to find out what that reason was. He cut in maximum magnification on the screens, and the surface of the little protoplanet of frozen gases leap up toward him. The thing was eight or ten miles thick, shaped more like a broken cinder block than a sphere. It was unusually dense, as the distant, orbiting blobs of frozen methane and hydrogen went; if it ever drifted in near the sun, it would make a major comet. In the screen its greenish crust of solid gases looked like a blizzard in slow motion. Disturbed by the impact of the waste they had dumped, the whole snowball was quivering and shaking, its light gas-snow . rising in sheets and falling again. There was absolutely nothing to be seen... But even a tiny planetoid has a great deal of surface by human standards. Somewhere on that surface Colonel Zafar had gone in his flying suit. Gann reached again for tt IF Ihe controls to circle aroimcL Some noise warned him. He turned, and saw M'Buna leaning toward him, a strange expression of mingled pity and hate on his face; and in M'Buna's hand was a glittering metal pencil, pointed at him. In that split-second of time that was left to him Gann thought wildly: If only I could get the report in, Fve sure found something anti-Plan going on now... And that was the last thought he had for a long time. He heard a hiss and had just time to realize that the sting on his cheek was a nerve-pellet fired from M'Buna's contraband gun. That was all. Blackness closed over him, and cold. Ill A nerve pellet is an instant anesthetic. It is also something more. It does not wear off. Not ever. The victim of a nerve pellet does not recover consciousness until he is given an antidote. When Gann woke up, he had no idea of how long he had been under the influence of the nerve pellet. But what he knew for sure was that he was no longer in the control room of the garbage scow. Nor was he anywhere else in the universe where he had ever been before. He lay on an uneven, rocky ledge. Under him was a soft, moist -- and warm! -- blanket of something that seemed to be a lichen. a kind of clinging moss that grew in thick, flaky scales. It was glowing with a soft steady light. On the rocks around him the light was greenish in hue. Farther away, on higher ridges, it shone purple and red. And above the rocks the sky was velvet black, with a single dazzling star blazing down on him. Boysie Gann struggled to his feet -- and soared into the air. As he came down he stared about him. When he looked away from the rocks and that bright star his eyes adjusted and he could see other stars. All the familiar constellations... And then it hit him. That bright star was the sun. He was on one of the Reefs of Space. G ann nevCT knew how he came there. The man vfbo would Gann never saw MBuna again. But h was dear that while under the influence of the narft pellet he had been transported and marooned. Alone, withoid a radio, without instruments, without a riiip or spacesuit, he might five out his life on that Reef -- but he would die there in the end. For he could never leave. It was surely a good way to dispose of an unwanted man -- simpler even than murder, since there was no body to get rid of. He was stiff and cold. His wrists were swollen and his ankles numb. Evidently his captors had not trusted to the nerve pellet to keep him quiet, but had riiackled lam as well. If But the shackles were gone now, with every other evidence of who k was who had brought him here. His head hurt. He was parched and hungry. He began to k)ok around him more methodically. His first needs were food and water; but he could not resist a look around at the wonder of the place. Bright metallic fern fronds tinkled like wind-gongs from an overgrown vale to one side. A distant whirring soimded like a flock of grouse. Impossible that there should be grouse here, Gann knew; yet there might be some sort of life. The Reefs of Space were created by life, like the coral atolls on Earth's warm seas. Life inhabited them all... But it was not always -- not even often! -- life of a sort compatible with humankind. For the Reefs were formed from clusters of fusorians, feasting on the hydrogen formed between the stars according to the laws of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis, coverting it into heavier atoms, and then into atoms heavier still. The life in the Reefs was sometimes warm-blooded, carbonbased, oxygen-breathing animal. But more often it was metal or crystal -- at best, worthless for food; at worst, a deadly danger. The bright star, Sol, was near the south celestial pole, Gann discovered. That put him more or less galactic north of the sun -- and therefore, almost straight out from Polaris Station. How far out? He had no way of knowing, except tfiat the major Reef clusters were thought to be some two hundred astronomical units from Sol. At a Gann turned his eyes from the stars and looked about him. He had a world to explore. It might be less than a hundred yards in its longest axis, but it was all he had. He rubbed his aching wrists and ankles and began to explore. He climbed carefully out of that small, glowing green dell -- carefully, because he knew the daftger of a reeflet. The fusorian symbiotes held an atmosphere, somehow; but it was like a soap bubble, and if Gann were so incautious as to step too high and soar through it, he would find himself in the hard vacuum of the space between the stars, and death would come in a horrible explosive burst as his blood boiled off and his cells ruptured. He climbed toward the ridge paused and looked around. Ahead of him was another dell this one bearing some sort of glittering bush. The tants were shoulder-high, with plumes of narrow gloss, sprinkled with what seemed to be individual fusorian cells that glowed with their own light. Each leaf darkened from green at the base to black at the tip, and each ended in a bright red berry. Queerly, they grew in rows. They looked, in fact, like a truck farm in Earth's populous market valleys, and at once Gann's hunger surged forth. They looked like food! He started toward them at a shambling run -- And from behind him a voice oke. IP "Well, good for you. See you woke up finally. Headed right for the feedbag too, eh?" M achine Major Boysie Gann's training had prepared him for any shock. It was trained reflex that stopped him in mid-flig';u, turned him, brought him hick down to the glowing mossy si u race of the reeflet in a half criiich, ready to do battle. But there was nothing wc'iike in the figure that was coming toward him. He was a stubby little man with a big belly and a dirty yellow beard. His clothing was woven out of some kind of rough fiber. It was ragged and filthy and half unbuttoned. And clinging to his bald brown head was a black-fanged, greenscaled, red-eyed creature the size of a capuchin monkey. It looked like a toy dragon. And from under the knife-sharp edges of its scales seeped little wisps of smoke. Boysie Gann said warily: "Hello." "Why, hello," the man said in a mild voice, "u was sleeping. Figured rd best leave you to sleep it off. Nice to have you here. I wasnt expecting company." "I wasn't exactly expecting to be here." The man nodded and thrust out a dirty, gnarled hand. "Figured that. Couple fellows dropped you five, six hours ago. Looks like they gave you a rough enough time so I let you be." The creature on its head wheeled to face Gann as its owner moved, glaring at him with hot red eyes, Gann shook the man's hand and said, "I need some water. And food." "Why, sure. Come along then." He nodded, the creature scrambling back and forth, and turned to lead the way across the cultivated field toward what seemed to be a tiny black lake. "Omer don't like strangers," he called over his shoulder, "but he won't bother you none. Just don't make any sudden moves, is all. Omer's a pyropod -- just a baby, of course, but they can be mean." Silently Gann agreed. The littio creature looked mean enough, with its oozing plumes of smoke and fiery eyes. They loped across the glowing rows of the man's little farm and reached the shore of the lake -- no more than a pond really, fifty feet across, its surface disturbed with the slow, tall waves of low-gravity fluids. On its far bank a sharp cliff rose in a glitter of metallic outcroppings, softened by glowing plants and mosses, and in the base of the cliff was a metSi lean-to that hid the mouth of the cave. "That's home," said the man cheerfully. "Welcome to it, such as 'tis. Come in and rest yourself." "Thanks," said Gann. "By the way, we didn't really introduce ourselves." "Oh? Guess you're right," said the man. "I'm Harry Hickson. And you -- " Gann started to speak, but Hickson didn't pause -- "you're what you call it. Machine Major Boysie Gann, out of the spy school on Pluto." IF F or twenty-four hours Gann rested in the cave of the hermit, Harry Hickson, and his thoughts were dark. How had Hickson known his name? Even more -- how had he known that he was not a shanghaied radar-laser tech, but a graduate of the spy school? There was no answer in Gann's brain, so he shut off his mind to conjectures and applied it to restoring his physical condition and reconnoitering his surroundings. Evidently he had been unconscious for longer than he had thought on the ship that had dumped him on this reeflet, for he had lost weight and strength and there was a straggly stubble of beard on his chin. But Hickson fed him and cared for him. He gave Gann a bed of sorts to sleep on -- only a stack of reeking blankets, but as good as the one he slept on himself -- and fed him from the same pot of greasy stew as himsupplemented with fruits and roots and shoots of the plants he grew on the rock. The reddish berries, which tasted like a sort of acid citrous fruit, were a good source of all necessary vitamins, Harry told him earnestly, and one of the Hchens was a source of protein. Gann did not question the food. Clearly it had kept Harry Hickson alive for a long time -- the cave showed that it had been his home for months or even years -- and it would keep Gann alive for at least as long as he intended to stay on the reeflet. And that would not be long. For he had learned from Hickson that there was a way of communicating that would bring help if he needed it. "Never needed it, o' course," he said, fishing a long string of a rhubarb-like vegetable out of his bowl of stew and licking his fingers. "But it's comforting to know it's there... Say, you worried about that collar, Boysie?" Gann stopped in mid-gesture, suddenly aware that he had been tugging at it. "Not exacdy," he said quietly. "Get it off (rf you, if you like," Hickson offered mBcfly. "No trouble. Done it lots o times." Gann stared. "What the Plan arc you talking about?" he demanded. "Don't you know what this is? These things are built with automatic destruct circuits, as well as the remote triggering equipment. If anybody tries to take them off -- " He touched both sides of the collar with fingertips and flipped them up and outward, pantomiming the explosion of a decapitation charge. "Oh, sure, I know all about that, said Hickson. "Hold still. No, not you, Gann. You, Omer! Don't wiggle so. Makes me nervous... He got up from his squatting position at the rude plank table where they ate and came around behind Gann. "Just you sit there, Boysie," he said. "Can move if you want to, it don't matter, but don't look toward me... Omer confound you! Get your claws outa my scalp! Raised hdm from an egg, that little devil, right here in my own smoke-pot, but he gets jumpy #S when he knows I'm going to -- Well, here we are." And something moved around Gann's neck. He couldn't see what Hickson was doing, was sure that the tubby little hermit had not brought any tools or instruments. Yet there was a sudden constriction at his throat. He heard the lock snap... The collar fell of his neck and clattered to the floor of the cave. Gann leaped to his feet and spun, white-faced, to be ready for the explosion. But no explosion came. "Now, rest easy, Boysie," complained the hermit. "You're spooking Omer, here. That thing can't blow up any more." Casually he picked up the collar and lifted it to examine it in the light of a mass of luminous diamond that would have "They make them real nice," he said admiringly. "Lot of detail in this thing. Too bad it can't be something more useful -- " And he tossed it to the rear of the cave. "Well," he said, "you about ready to move on now?" Gann stood silent for a second, looking at him. "Move on where?" he asked. "Oh, don't worry, Boysie. I know what you were thinking. Plain as day. You figure I ought to go back and get examined by the Planning Machine, 'cause you don't quite understand what I'm up to but you think it's unplanned. Well, that's right. Unplanned is what I am. And I don't mind if you do what you're thinking, and te my lasergun and call help so you can get out of here. But I'm not going with you, Boysie. Make up your mind to that." "All right," said Gann, surrendering. But in his mind he was not surrendering at all. Hickson had put it very mildly when he said that Gann wanted to take him back for study. Gann not only wanted to, he intended to. In fact, he had never intended anything as hard in his life -- had never been so determined or insistent, not even about his career in the service of the Machine, not even in his great love for Julie Martinet. This man Harry Hickson was an unplanned disaster in the making. Whoever he was, however he did what he did, he was a terrible danger to the Plan of Man. Gann could almost hear the instructions of his briefing officer back on Pluto -- if he had been able to report Hickson's existence to him, and if the briefing officer could issue an order: Subject Hickson is a negative factor. His uncatalogued knowledge must be retrieved for the Plan. Then each organ of his unautomated body must be ob Uterated... But how to get him back into the jurisdiction of the Planning Machine? There had to be a way. There would be a way. Machine Major Boysie Gann was sure of it. An it required was that he be patient -- and then, when his chance came, be ready. Gann said, "If you mean it, then IF let's take your guo and signal right now. I'm ready to move on." H arry Hickson led Gann to a point of red-scaled rock, puffing and wheezing. On his bald scalp the fledgling pyropod wheeled and slithered, keeping its bright red eyes on Boysie Gann. "See up there?" called Hickson over his Moulder. "That star there next to Vega -- " Boysie Gann followed his pointing finger. "You mean Theta Lyrae?" The hermit turned and looked at him, mildly surprised. "That's right, Boysie. You fellows learn a lot in that spy school. Too bad you don't -- Well, never mind that. One I mean, it's just below. Theta Lyrae. The faint red one. Forget the name, but that one right there. That way's Freehaven." Gann felt his blood pound. "Freehaven? I've heard of it. A colony of reef-rats." "Aw, Boysie don't say it like that. They're free men, that's all. That's the biggest place in the Reefs, Freehaven is. Like a -- well, what would you call it? A kind of a town only its one whole cluster of Reefs, maybe a hundred thousand miles across. And maybe half a billion miles from here." "I see," said Gann, thinking with exultation and pride: What a prize to bring back to Pluto! A whole city to be Planned and returned to the brotherhood of the Machine! He could almost see the glowing jet-trails of the Plan cruisers vectoring in on the cluster... "Don't get your hopes up," Hickson said dryly. "You ain't there yet, Boysie, and maybe even when you get there you won't find it too easy to pick up a phone and call the Machine. Now hush a minute while I send for your ride out there." He pick up the clumsy old laser gun he had taken out of its greasy rag wrappings  back in the cave, checked its power settings, raised it and aimed carefully at the distant red spark that was the lineof-sight to Freehaven. Three times he snapped the trigger, then lowered the gun and turned to Gann. "That's all there is to it. Take 'em a while to get here. Might as well go back to the cave." But he paused, glancing at Boysie Gann as though he were mildly embarrassed about something. Then he seemed to come to a decision. He turned back to the stars, set down the laser pistol and stretched out his arms. His lips moved, but Gann could hear no sound. On his bald pate the pyropod hissed and slithered. The hermit's whole body seemed stretched, yearning, toward -- toward what? Gann could not tdl. Toward Freehaven, perhaps. Toward the faint red star that marked its position -- or toward Theta Lyrae nearby -- or toward the great bright giants of the Summer Triangle that marked that part of the sky, Vega, Altair and Deneb... Then Harry Hickson relaxed and the pyropod scuttled down from his scalp onto his shoulder, as the hermit raised one arm and made a sinuous, undulating motion. Like  as Ihe wriggle of a snake, Gann tibought Or the looping movement f a swan's neck. Swan? Some faint old memory tirred in Boysie Gann's mind. Something about a swan -- and a tar -- But it would not come clear, and lie followed Hairy Hickson back to the cave. H arry Hickson's little reeflet was one drifting island in an expanding infinity of matter and space. The doctrine of the NeoHoyle Hypothesis was clear: The universe was limitless, in space, in time -- and in matter. New mass was forming everywhere in the form of newly created hydrogen atoms, as the old complexes of matter -- the stars and planets, the dust clouds and the galaxies -- were spinning slowly apart. Hickson's reeflet was an infant among bodies of organized matter, years in age, in size no more than a dust mote. Yet it was like most of the universe in that; for most matter is young. The spiralling growth in rate of creation of new matter makes that sure. Some galaxies, and even some of the reefs between them, are old beyond computation and imagination, because the steady-state universe has neither beginning nor end. And life is the oldest phenomenon of all. Older than the oldest stars -- but yet young, though those scattered and forgotten stars are black and dead. Life in space has lived -- literaL ly -- forever. Every p o;e ii i. oecn evolved, through every conceivable evolutionary test. Watching Harry Hickson play with his pet pyropod, Boysie Gann reflected that the strangest lifeform he knew was man. For here was the pudgy, balding hermit -- unplanned and deviant, a deadly danger by every standard of the Planning Machine -- solemnly attempting to teach his pyropod to fly. He lifted the little horror off his head and set it carefully on a high ledge, then retreated. Spitting and hissing, its red eyes glittering, its scales seeping the smoke of its internal jet fires, it wailed in a thin, raucous screech for him to come back. Then, despairing, it launched itself out into the air, missed Hickson by yards and crashed into the rock w at the far side of. the cave, where it remained, writhing and hissing, until Hickson took pity on it and picked k up. "It's a wonder it doesn't dash its brains out," muttered Gann, die fifth time the little beast crashed into the rock. "Oh, I guess so," Hickson agreed mildly. "Don't suppose it has any, really, dioughA pretty clumsy kind of beast k is, right, Omer?" And he patted the little monster with the appearance of real affection for a moment, then sighed and set it down. He carefully inverted a crate and set it down over the pyropod, then put a mass of silvery fusorian coral upon the crate. The pyropod squalled and hissed but Hickson ignored it. "Hoped I could teach it to fly before I go," rr he said regretfully, "but I guess I won't make it. Boysie, your transportation ought to be here in an hour. Care to see what the pilot's gonna look like?" He thumbed an old-fashioned two-dimensional color print out of a button-down pocket in his ragged coat and handed it to Gann. It was a pretty, quite young girl, one hand resting on the head of a seal-like creature, before a background of a glowing purple and silver Reef. "Name's Quarla," said the old man affectionately. "Quarla Snow. Daughter of an old friend of mine. He treated me, couple years ago. Doctor, he is, and a good one. Don't know much about what ails me, though..." The hermit seemed to realize he was rambling and caught himself wp short, "Guess that's all," he said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment. "Swan bless you, Boysie. Give Quarla my love." And in a moment, before Gann could realize what he was about to do, the old man had turned, pushed aside the metal door that overhung the entrance to the cave, and stepped out. Gann shook his head, half in rueful amusement, half in surprise. "Hey!" he called. "Hickson! Where are you going? Wait for me!" And he hurried to the door of the cave and out onto the sward the old hermit had so carefully cropped. The man was not there. His footprints were there, still visible in the faint bruises on the lichenous surface of the earth. But Harry Hickson was gone. Gann ranged the surface of the entire reef in the next few hours, shouting and searching. But there was no answer to his call, no sight of Hickson anywhere. The man had simply vanished. IV I n the cave 'Machine Major Gann found the old man's laser gun -- an ancient Technicorps model that must have been smuggled into space before the Spacewall was set up. It gave him a small feeling of confidence to carry it, though there was no visible enemy to shoot it at. He needed that confidence. No man can be aloneEach man has his place in the Plan of Man, under the benevolent guidance of the Planning Machine. Each man serves the Plan, so that the Plan may serve all men... That was doctrine, and Boysie Gann found himself foolishly repeating it as he clambered up the red-scaled rock to the point from which Hickson had signaled to Freehaven. It did not help very much. No man can be alone... but Boysie Gann felt very much alone indeed, on that tiny floating islet of reef, under the blazing stare of There was no reason for him to be on this point of rock, rather than anywhere else on the surface of the reeflet. He had no reason to believe his rescuer would come to look for him there. Had no reason to be sure there would be a rescuer at all, in fact, for what the half-demented hermit, Harry Hickson, had said could not be accepted as reliable... Yet he stayed there, waiting, for hours. He leaned against a cairn of rock and scanned the skies. Only the distant, unfriendly stars returned his look. He sat, leaning against the rock, and drowsed. No sound or motion disturbed him. And then... There was a faint blur of greenish mist in the low black sky, moving at the threshold of vision. Gann sprang to his feet, eyes peering into the immense emptiness above him. The greenish blur was so faint he could not be sure it was real. Yet -- surely there was something there; and, following it, a cluster of even fainter reddish sparks. Gann raised the laser, checked the settings to make sure he was not firing a blast of destruction into the sky, and thumbed the trigger thrice, as he had seen Hickson do, pointing it toward the greenish blur. A moment... and then the green glow veered toward him. It was his rescuer, he was sure of it. But what were the red sparks? Even as he watched, the tiny, distant coals veered too, following the greenish glow. Rapidly they grew nearer... Then one of the red sparks dashed ahead of the rest, with a long blue trail of incandescence faintly visible behind it. It was like an ominous comet as it dived through the greenish cloud. Noise smote Gann's ears abruptly: a sudden roaring, like the jet of an old-time rocket. M The things had come at last into the shallow atmosphere of his reeflet. He heard the shriek of their motion through the air -- and something else. Something was screaming. The red spark thundered overhead, out of the green cloud, toward Gann like some deadly ancient missile homing in on a radar trace -- then at the last moment rose up a dozen yards above his head, and as it passed he caught a sudden glimpse of nightmare. Metal scales fike broken mirrors. Enormous tdons, dripping something that glowed and was golden, something that splattered to the ground near Gann like a soft, fitful rain. The red spark divided into two red, monstrous, blinking eyes, mirror-rimmed, in a head like a maniac dragon's. And the roaring blue flame was the tail of the thing. "Pyropod!" breathed Boysie Gam? aloud, transfixed. He had never seen an adult before -- had heard of them only as distant rumors, like the sort of ghost stories unplanned parents used to tell their children. The baby pyropod that had been Harry Hickson's pet had not prepared him for the huge, menacing reality that shrieked through the air above him now. He stood, stunned. A pyropod is a living rocket, flame-footed and deadly. Their chemistry is not that of Earthly air-brcjithers; their primeval genesis came from the same non-carbon evolutionary strain that shaped the IF fusorians. On their plasma jets, jaticlear in temperature, fired by fusorian symbiotes, they can out:fun a Plan cruiser and outfight any Terrestrial beast in search of prey. And to the pyropods, anything that moves is prey. Their jets take enor;mous quantities of reaction mass. Their appetites are insatiable. Scavengers of space, they will attack anything. Fortunately for the continuation of life on the inner planets and the Reefs of Space, atmosphere is a slow poison to the pyropods and gravity damages their reflexes. They are beasts of the interstellar void, ship-sized monstrosities at their hugest, big as cave bears even when barely mature. Standing in shock, watching the great beast Boysie Gann stared at the red eyes pulsing in their telescopic mirrors, wheel and flash back toward him, imagined the black talons ripping metal or rock like bread... And realized, almost too late, that he was the target of those monstrous talons now. Instinctively he raised the laser gun and fired. The charge was minimal, only the message setting; yet the great pyropod felt it, screamed and soared away. Gann hurled himself to the shelter of the rock cairn, staring about. The torn green cloud of luminosity was dissolving in the night sky above him. Streamers of mist scattered and faded. And where the cloud had been, Gann could see what had brought it. A spaceling. One of the warmblooded, seal-like creatures that roam the space between the stars, natural prey to the pyropods, friend to man. It had brought the cloud -- for it was the spaceling's ability to hold atmosphere about it, in a Ryeland-effect field, that permitted them, as oxygen-breathers, to live in space at all. The spaceling had been grievously wounded. Even from so far away, Gann could see the hideous slash that ripped along the whole length of its sleek, golden body as it came tumbling down. Something was clinging to its fur -- a rider? Gann could not be sure; but what he was certain of was that the end for both the spaceling and its burden was very near. The pyropod that had attacked him had wheeled again and was diving on the wounded seal-like beast. A louder howling drowned out the spaceling's scream as the pyropod came out of the dark over a purple-scaled ridge, red eyes pulsing and dripping talons reaching again. Gann reacted without thought. He twisted the crystal of that old laser to maximal intensity, steadied the tube on the rocks of the cairn and fired into those dreadful flashing eyes. They exploded. The pyropod bellowed in agony. Its eyes were gone -- eyes or eyelike structures; actually, Gann knew, they were more like laser search gear. But whatever they were, they were gone now, burst like the shattered hull of a subtrain when the field of its tunnel fails and the fluid rock crushes it. The pyropod drove blindly up and away, squalling until its sound was cut off like tibe dropping of a curtain. It had passed beyond the atmosphere into space. Blind and wounded, Gann thought it would not be back. And a blessing that was, since an orange light was blinking on the laser gun, warning him that the fuel cell was fully exhausted. He knew there were other pyropods still out there, somewhere beyond the veil of air. He could see their faint red sparks circling, and the blue trails of their fiery exhausts. They veered all at once, and drove in toward the retreating comet-tail of the pyropod he had wounded. There was a puff of incandescent vapor... Dimly Gann realized that its mates had destroyed the wounded one, torn it open and were now wheeling and diving, fighting for their shares of the kill. But he had no time for them. The spaceling had tumbled to earth halfway across the little reeflet, and Gann stumbled and leaped across the redscaled rocks to find it. I t was lying at the edge of Harry Hickson's little plantation, urting glowing yellow blood across the green moss. Beside it was its rider, bent over the terrible wound, tryingwith both hands to stanch the flow of blood. The rider was a girl. Hickson had been right. It was the girl in the photograph he had displayed. The spaceling moaned and shuddered as Gann drew near, its voice a faint, inarticulate sob The girl was sobbing too. "Can I help?" said Boysie Gann. The girl, Quarla Snow, turned quickly, startled. She stared at Gann as though he were himself a pyropod, or some more fearsome monster from legend. There wa fright in her eyes -- and yet queerly, thought Gann, almost relief as well; as though she had expected something even worse. It was the expression of a man who finds himself confronted by a wolf -- when he expects a tiger. "Who are you?" she demanded. Her ' voice was low and controlled. She was tall and strong, but very young. "Boysie Gann," he said. "And you're Quarla Snow. Harry Hickson told me you'd be here." Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened in fear. For a moment she seemed about to run, then she shook her head in a pathetic gesture and turned ba to the spaceling. Its golden blood had ceased to flow, ks body to move. The sounds it had uttered were still. "Sultana's dead," the girl said softly, as though to herself. "Fm sorry," Boysie Gann said inadequately. He glanced aloft -- tha pyropods were out of sight entirely now -- then back to her. Quarla Snow's face was lightly tanned, almost to match her honeycolored hair. She was nearly the color of her spaceling. Her white coveralla were splashed with that golden ichor, her hands dripping with it Yet she was beautiful. For a moment a buried emotion IF tmnbled inside Boysie Gann, a fflemory of Julie Martinet and the taste of the fresh salt surf on her mouth when he kissed her on the beach of the little Mexican resort. Playa Blanca, long ages ago when they had said good-by. This girl m not in the least resemble Julie Martinet. She was blonde where Julit had hair like night; she was tall, and Julie tiny. Her face was broad, friendly and, even in her sorrow and fear, it showed contentment and joy in life, while Julie Martinet was a girl ,of sad pleasures and half-expressed sorrows. Yet there was something in both of them that stirred him. He said hastily: "Those things may be back. We'd better do something about it." The girl's tears were drying on her cheeks and her expression had become more calm. She looked down at the dead gun in Gann's hands and half-smiled. "Not with that, Boysie Gann. It's empty." I "I know. We'd better get back to Hickson's cave. He may have left other charges." "Left them? But I diought you said he was here!" The shadow fell over her face again, her eyes bright and fearful. "He was, yes. But he's gone. Disappeared. I don't know where." The girl nodded absently, as diough she were too dazed to take in what he had said. She dropped to her knees beside the dead spacefing and stroked ks golden head. "Poor Sultana. I'll never forgive myself. When I got your signal I -- well, I was frightened. I dida know what to do. Dad was gone on an emergency call. He'd taken our ship, and -- I decided to ride Sultana out here by myself." Her mouth set white for a moment. "I didn't really think ofany danger. There aren't many pyropods in these clusters any more -- been hunted out years ago, though they keep straying back. But I'd outrun them on Sultana often enough before. I didn't think about the fact that she's -- that she was -- getting old." She stood up and touched Gann lightly on the arm, a gesture of reassurance. "But you're not to worry. We aren't marooned here; Dad win come for us in the ship as soon as he gets home. I left a message." Gann nodded. "So he'll wait a wMe," he said, comprehendingly, "and then, if you haven't returned in -- what? a day or so? -- then he'll come looking for you." But Quarla Snow rfiook her golden head, her expression unreadable. "No. He won't wait. Not even a second. I said in my note that Harry Hickson's old distress signal had come. He'D be here as fast as his ship can bring him, to see who sent Harry's signaL" Gann stared. "Harry did. Harry Hickson. I told you!" "I know you told me," the girt said, her voice calm but with an undercurrent of wonder and of fear. "But you see, it couldn't have been Harry. I -- no, wait. I'll show you." And she turned and led him away from the cultivated little field. IF back up to the red-scaled crest of fock where he bad rested hb laser gun on the cairn of rocks to fire at the pyropod. '"See?" she said, touching the cairn. He bent closer to look, and there on the lowermost rock, on one half-smoothed face of a boulder, was a faint scratching of carved letters, whittled out a line at a time with a laser gun, almost invisible unless you knew just where to look: Harry Hickson Died of a fusorian infection Deneb light his way "You see?" said the girl. "Harry could not have sent the message. He died here three years ago." V A ll this was months before the Writ of Liberation. On Earth the old Planner sat in silent, joyous communion with the Planning Machine. In solarian space the great Plan cruisers arrowed from satellite to planet, from asteroid to distant Spacewall post, carrying the weapons and the orders of the Machine to all the farfJung territories of the Plan of Man. On the island of Cuba, in the Body Bank, a Nigerian ex-Technicorps man, broken for inefficiency, gave up the last of his vital organs to serve some more worthy servant of the Plan, and died. (His name had once been M'Buna. He had been captured and court-martialed for desertion.) A girl named Julie Martinet, in a dormitory hall far below the surface of the Peruvian Andes, sat with stylus in hand deciding on which letter to write -- one to the man she loved "but had not heard from", the other an application for special duty in the service of the Machine. And out on the reefs, tn the sprawling hundred-orbed community called Frcehaven, Machine Major Boysie Gann began to understand that his greatest opportunity for service -- and his greatest hope of reward! -- had been handed to him on a silver platter. For he was at large in Freehaven, the very heart of the Reefs of Space. And he knew, or thought he knew, a way to get back to th# worlds of the Plan. True, there were some puzzling problems. Some of them, indeed, were almost frightening. What could Quarla Snow hope to gain by pretending that Harry Hickson was dead? What did she think Gann had seen on the little reeflet? A ghost? It was no ghost that had fed him, healed him, taken the collar from around his neck. And it was no coincidence, he was coming to believe, that had brought him to Hickson's world in the first place. There was no proof, of course. But he was sure that M'Buna, perhaps Colonel Zafar as well, were in some way related to Hickson and the treasonable activities that were going on all around him in this unplanned, decadent, dangerous world of the Reefs. He had heard hints. An unguarded word, a look, a renud!k ttoA was halted before It began. Nothing tangible -- but enough to make him sure that there were links between the Reefs and the Plan worlds -- links that extended even into the Technicorps, even into the vital defenses of the Spacewall itself. If he could get back -- No! he thought. When he got back, with the proof of this spreading rot, with the names of the conspirators and the evidence that would send them to the Body Bank, then no reward in the Machine's power would be too great to give to Machine Major Boysie Gann. And Julie Martinet would be waiting... Meanwhile there was a lot of work to do. Gann dared not make notes or attempt to secure tapes or photographs; but he missed no opportunity to scout and examine every part of this queer community of Freehaven. Even the name was strange and somehow disconcerting. Freehaven. As though "freedom" were important! And yet -- Boysie Gann could not help but notice that strangely the decadent, unruly mobs that dwelt in Freehaven seemed somehow sturdier, somehow happier, in some way more alert and even who lived under the all-powerfid and protective embrace of the Plan of Man... It was confusing. But his duty was clear. Gann set himself to learn aM there was to know. F reehaven consisted of a o(Hipb of thousand people, scattered over a hundred fusorian-grown rocks and a hundred thousand miles of space. Many of the rocks had been terraformed, Gann learned, with the lichenous air-plant he had first seen on Harry Hickson's little reef. The rest of them were airless, but all of them supplied useful metals and minerals to the bustling economy of freehaven. Gann was not sure just what he had expected -- tattooed savages, perhaps, dancing to a wild tomtom -- but he had surely not been prepared for this modern, busy community. There were farms and herds -- of spacelings, but even in one case a stock farm with sixty head of what seemed to be Guernsey cattle, stolen somehow from the Plan of Man and transported in some improbable manner out to this hydrogen-based worldlet twenty airless reef that was mostly pure fusorian iron there was even a steel mill -- one of the small nuclearpowered units developed by Technicorps engineers for use on the asteroids, to save the high cost of lifting Terran steel into space. Gann marveled at it all. He admitted it to Quarla Snow and her father, with whom he was staying as guest... or prisoner, he was never siue which... at a meal when he was served as fine a steak as he had ever tasted, with wines that hom the bouquet of French vineyards. Dt. Snow boomed: "It isn't only ttm food that is good here, youi IF man. ft is life! It has a fiavor here that the Plan worlds wffl never taste. Boysie Oann said engagingly, "You may be right. I -- well, you have to excuse me. You see, I've never known anything but the Plan." Quarla's father nodded briskly. "Of course. None of us had, before we made our way out here. None but Quarla, at any rate, and a few others like her who were bom here. They've lived in freedom all their lives." Gann said, with just the right inflexion of doubt: "But I don't understand. I mean -- how does it work? Who tells you what you're to do?" "No one, boy! ITiat's the whole point of freedom! We came here because we didn want to five under the collar of the Machine. We work together, and as you see we work welL Isperity and happiness! Thafs what weve bufit out of nothingness, just as the fusorians build our worlds for us out of thin gas and energy. Why, when Harry Hickson and I came here -- " He broke off and tugged at his chin, frowning at Boysie Oann. "Yes?" said Gann. "You and Hickson -- ?" "It was different then," said Dr. Snow shortly. "Boy, do you stiB want us to believe that story erf yours about Hickson? A man I helped to bury myself, right under the rocks of hn home?" Gann said carefully, knowing that he was on dangerous ground: "Well, sir, ol course I dort know anything about Hickson. But what I told you was true. The man who summoned Quarla said he was Harry Hickson, and I had absolute ly no reason at all to doubt him at the time." Snow nodded somberly and said no more; but Gann noticed that he no longer seemed to enjoy his meal. Gann put the matter from his mind. He was thinking of something bigger. He was thinking of the gratitude of the Machine when he returned, riding one of Quarla Snow's spacelings, as she was even now teaching him to ride -- bringing word of the community of Freehaven and its precious crop of several thousand splendid candidates for tissue salvage at the Body Bank! H e rose and strolled with Quarla outside. Harry Hickson's pet pyropod, which Quarla had insisted on rescuing from the cave when her father arrived to take them off the reeflet, hissed and slithered around Ae area outside the door where its staked diain permitted it to move. He took her hand and held it, as they looked over the green ramble of glowing vines toward the distant beacm tlat was the central urban area of Freehaven. "You promised to let me ride one of your spacelings," he said, squeezing her hand and grinning. "If Fm going to be a permanent inhabitant here, Fd better get started learning my way around." She looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled. Under her golden hair her eyes were an intense blue. "Why not?" she said. "But not out of the atmosphere, Boysie. Not at first." "I thought the spacelings brought their air with diem -- " She nodded, but said firmly: "Not out of the atmosphere. For one thing, there might be pyropods." He scoffed: "So close to Freehaven? Ncmsense, Quark! Whafs the other thing?" She hesitated. "Wdl," she began -- She was saved the trouble of answering. A pale bhie wash of energy brightened up the sky over their heads. Both of them turned to look; a spacecraft was coming in for a landing, full jets blazing to slow its racing drive. Whoever it was who was piloting the craft, he was in a hurry. In a matter of seconds the ship was down on the lichenous kwn before Dr. Snow's clinic, its lock open, a man leaping out. He glanced toward Quarla and Boysie Gann, cried, "Emergency!", and turned to receive something that was being handed to him out the lock of the ship. Quarla cried: "I'll get my father. Boysie, run and help them!" Gann was already in motion, hurtling across the lichenous ground, though the two men in the rocket needed Bttle help. What was coming through the lock of the ship was a man on a stretcher, wrapped in white sheets. In the light gravity of the Reef the two of them were perfectly adequate to handle it Gann lKre a lumd anyway. "Sick," panted one of the men. "Don't know who he is, but he collapsed in my spaceling corral. Thought it might be something dangerous -- " Gann nodded, helped lift the stretcher on which the sick man was thrashing and babbling -- And almost dropped it, light gravity or not. He stood there, jaw hanging, eyes wide. Face streaming with perspiration, eyes vacant, head tossing from side to side in delirium, the face of the man on the stretcher was nevertheless very familiar to Boysie Gann. It was the face of Machine Colond Mohammed Zafar. I f ever Boysie Gann had needed all the wits and wiles that had been drummed into him in the spy school on Pluto, now was the moment. "Dangerous," the reef-rat who had brought Zafar had called him. He was more than dangerous, he spelled a strong probability of disaster for Boysie Gann. Zafar of all people would know him -- and if, as Gann was morally certain, Zafar and M'Buna had been joined in some anti-Plan scheme on Polaris Station, Zafar would surely now know that Gann was no simple radar tech. He dared not risk Zafar's recovering consciousness and identifying him. Yet his every loyalty to the Plan of Man demanded that he take every chance to learn more about IF Zafar from die cdond'e diointed Havings. Dr. Snow made it easf for him, widiout knowing it "You, boyi" he snapped. "Stay out of here. Quarla, loo! May be contagious... But stay where I cmi find you if I need you," he added, bending over his patient The two of them stood at the door of the emergency room, Quarla's hand, forgotten, in Boysie Gann's. He's bad, Boysie," she whispered. "Don't know what h is. I haven't seen anything like that since Harry -- " Then she stopped, and went on in a different tone, to the men who had brought him: "You'd better wait until my father's examined him. You might have been exposed." In the emergency room Dr. Snow was lifting a bimetal thermometer out of Zafar's slack mouth, mumbling incoherently. Boysie Gann strained to hear what the man was saying, but all he could catch were words like "... trap for minds... "... living dust and lying dreams..." Dr. Snow's expression was serious. "High," he muttered, then anced toward the group at the door. "Quarla!" he called. "You'll have to compound an injection for me. Standard broad-spectrum antibiotics, afebrilium, analgesics. Call his weight -- let's see -- ninety kilos. And make the dosage maximum." Quarla nodded and hurried to the pharmacy room, while Snow bent back to ibe man. Even at this distance, Gann could see fiiat the fonner machine colonel's face  wat contcurted in agony and fear. There was more than sickness in Zafar's wild muttering, there was terror. He pushed himself erect, eyes staring, and shouted: "Graveyard of the galaxy! Starchild! Beware the trap! Beware your heart's desire!" Then Quarla was back with a spray hypodermic. Her father took it from her, pushed her out #f the room again and quickly injected the man. Zafar slumped back onto the examining couch, eyes closing, still mumbling to himself. The doctor watched him for a second, then came toward the group at the door. "He'll sleep for a while," he said. "Nothing else to do at this moment. We've got to see how he responds to the drug." The man who had brought him said, "Doc, what is k? Are we  going to -- ?" But Dr. Snow was shaking his head. "I can't answer your questiem," he said. "I don't know what k is. But I don't think you're in any danger. I've only seen one other case like this, three years ago. But I was exposed, and so was my daughter, and several others -- and no one was infected." He hesitated, glancing at Gann. He said abruptly, "The other case was Harry Hickson, Mr. Gann. It killed him." Boysie Gann started to speak, then nodded. "I understand." "Do you?" Dr. Snow's voice was heavy with irony. "I don't! I don't understand at all. Let me show you something -- then tell me if you understand!" He stood away from the door, reached out a hand and switched off the lights in the emergency room. 'Took!" he cried. "Do you understand that?" The four in the doorway gasped as one. "Father!" cried Quarla, and the men swore softly. Inside the emergency room, in the semi-darkness Dr. Snow had brought about, Mohammed Zafar's leather-colored skin was leather-colored no longer. Like the spilled blood of the spaceling Gann had seen murdered, far's skin was bright with a golden glow! His' face shone with the radiance of a muted sun. One wasted hand, dangling out of the sheets, was limned in a yellowish, unsteady light like the flicker of a Quarla choked: "It's -- it's just like Harry, father!" The doctor nodded somberly. "And it will end the same way, too. Unless there's a miracle, that man will be dead in an hour." He sighed and reached to turn the light on again, but there was an abrupt hissing, swishing sound and something darted past them, over their heads. "What the devil!" cried Dr. Snow, and turned on the lights. Something was on the dying man's head, something that scuttled about and glared at them with hot red eyes, like incandescent shoebuttons. "Father! It's Harry's -- I mean, it's the pyropod! The one Boysie and I brought back!" cried Quarla Snow. Gann said tightly: "Look! He broke the chain." And then he laughed shakily. "Harry would b# pleased," he said unsteadily. "At last the thing's learned how to fly." M achine Colonel Zafar lived longer than the hour Dr. Snow had promised, but it was obvious that the extra time would not be very long. He was sinking. For minutes at a time he seemed hardly to breathe, then roused himself long enough to mumble incoherent phrases like: "Te Starchildl But the Swan won't help him..." Snow was working over his laboratory equipment in the corner of the room, pausing every few minutes to check his patient's breathing, and shake his head. He summoned Quarla and Gann to him and gestured to a microscope. "I want to show you something," he said, his face somber and wondering. "Look." And he stepped aside. Quarla looked into the slim chromed barrels of the microscope, then lifted her head to stare questioningly at her father. He nodded. "You see? Mr. Gann, look." Slowly Boysie Gann took her place. "I'm not a scientist, Doctor," he protested. "I won't know what to look for." But then he was looking through the eyepieces and his voice stopped. He did not need to be a scientist The spectacle before him, standing out clear in three dimensions in the stereoscopic field of the microscope, was nothing he had ever seen before. Straw-colored erythrocytes and pale eosinophils floated among colonies of benign microorganisms that IF live in every humans blood. Rodlike and ameoboid, radial or amorphous, all the tiny bacteria were familiar. In a vague, half-remembered way, to Gann. All but one. For dominating the field were masses of globular bodies, dark and uninteresting looking at first, but bursting under his eyes into spurts of golden light. Like the luminous plankton of Earth's warm seas, they flared again. It was like tiny warning lights signalling disaster in the sample of the sick man's blood -- hundreds of them, perhaps thousands -- so many that the field of minated with a flickering golden glow. "Great Plan!" whispered Boysie Gann. "And this is what made him sick?" Dr. Snow said slowly, "It is the same thing I saw in Harry Hickson's blood. Just before he died." He took his place at the twin eyepieces and glanced for a second at the tiny golden spheres. "Fusorians," he said. "It took me a month with paper chromatography and mass spectrograms to verify it in Harry's blood, but that is what they were. Colonies of fusorian symbiotes He stared blankly at the microscope, then roused himself and hurried back to his patient. Machine Colonel Zafar was gasping for breath, his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, his fingers working aimlessly, his whole skin suffused with that golden glow. "Quarlal" rapped Dr. Snow. "Seal the roomi Wei give him a positive partial pressure of oxygen!... It won't save hk Kfe," he added wearily. "But it may prolong it -- by minutes, at least." The girl hurried to close the door tightly against its resilient seals, while her father adjusted valves on his mediconsole. Boysie Gann heard a "white" sound of hissing gas and felt a quick increase of pressure in his ears. He swallowed and heard Quarla's voice, queerly distant, say: "Father! He's -- he's trying to get up!" Machine Colonel Zafar was sitting up. His eyes were less remote, his breathing easier in the hypobaric atmosphere. But the golden glow was even more intense, the perspiration streaming from his brow. And his eyes were on Boysie Gann. "You!" he cried. "Swan take you! Get back to the Machine, you traitor!" And he made the curious looping gesture with his arm that Gann had seen in Harry Hickson... A nd tfien Boysie Gann remembered what the star was that lived in the heart of the Swan. "Alpha Cygni!" he cried. "Deneb!" The star in the constellation of the Swan!" Zofar fell back on an elbow, glaring at him. "Your dirty mouth profanes the sacred name," he hissed. "The Starchild will punish you. In the heart of the Planner's citadel -- in the bowels of Terra, where the Machine plays with its human toys -- the Starchild will seek out and destroy its enemies If His eyes closed and he gasped for breath. Gann looked at Quarla and her father, but their expressions were as clouded as his own. "Starchild?" whispered the girl. "Father, do you know what -- " The doctor rumbled: "No, Quarla. I know nothing. Only rumors. A myth that there is a Starchild, and that he will bring the faithful of the Church of the Star home to Deneb's planets one day." "No rumor!" shouted the glowing, golden man, and paused to cough hackingly. "The Starchild lives! I've seen him in the heart of the Whirlpool! He has touched me with his radiant hand!" But Dr. Snow was beside him, thrusting him back down on the bed, hushing him. "No!" cried Zafar wildly. "Don't stop the word of the Starchild! See here!" And with a convulsive effort he drew out of the pouch of the one garment he still wore a stiff creamcolored sheet of parchment. "The Writ of Liberation!" he shouted. "The Starchild gave it to me to send to Earth. And I send it -- now!" The pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson scuttled wildly about, its red eyes bright orange in the high-oxygen air. It hissed and shook its scales; and Zafar's eyes, too, were almost orange -- glowing with tiny, dancing golden atoms, even in the pupil. They seemed blind -- or fixed on something far more distant than the walls of the doctor's clinic. Boysie Gann felt a shudder, as though the floor of the room were shaking. It had not moved. He staggered and thrust out a hand to support himself, yet there was no motion. "To Earth!" cried the sick man, and threw the sheet of paper from him. "Swan, carry it! Starchild, guide it! To Earth..." he broke off. The doctor tried again to calm him, but the dying man thrust him aside. "To Earth!" he cried. "And you -- spy, traitor, slave of the Machine! Swan take you... Gann opened his mouth to say something, anything, ' but words would not come. The room lurched again, more violently. Sickeningly. The others did not seem to notice, yet the shock came again. He stumbled and almost fell, caught himself and reached out instinctively for the fluttering sheet of paper Zafar had thrown into the air. It slipped away from him... and disappeared. One moment it was there. The next moment it was gone. Where it had been Gann saw a queer flow in the atmosphere, like flawed glass, spinning. The whirlpool grew. It enlarged and came near him, and the room moved around him once more. Frantically he tried to lejq) back, save himself, but he was falling, falling into the whirlpool... falling... and falling... He fell for what seemed to be a thousand years, while the room turned queerly dark and disappeared. Quarla's worried face, the doctor's look of shock, Mohammed Zafar's dying glare of hate -- all disappeared, and around him he saw the dim shapes of stars and planets. #D IF of galaxies and dust douda, iiing and glowing... He fell for a long time, throu what seemed to be a distance of less miles -- And was. For when the falling stopped and he staggered, shaken and frantic to hig feet, he fell flat and cut his face, bloodied his nose, against a gray, soft-lighted metal floor. He was in full Earth gravity. He was on the Reefs no longer. He was on a planet. And around him stretched long empty corridors of metal walls and spinning tapes and glittering lights. Machine Major Boysie Oann was home at last. He was in the catacombs under Earth's surface that housed the mighty electronic masses of the Planning Machine. VI A nd diat was how it began for Boysie Gann, with a twenty in a place where no one could possibly be, in the heart of the Machine. A warm wind blew between the narrow walls of the corridor. There was a faint distant hum, overlaid by the whir and hiss of rushing tape, the drone of enormous far-off machines. Gann stood up, gasping with the effort of moving his new weight -- nearly a hundred kilos, when for months he had had to carry only a fraction of that, or none. He looked around, dazed; He was in a long corridor. At the end of it, hundreds of yards off. was a brighter light that seemed be a room. He stumbled toward it, stanching the flow from his nose with the back of a hand, coughing and tasting the acrid blood at the back his mouth. The gray light turned out to come frm a strange, roimd chamber, its roof a high concrete dome. The great floor was broken with little island clusters of consoles and control panels, unattended. The wall, almost circular, was pierced with twenty-four dark tunnels like the one he had come from. Gann leaned dizzily against the frame of the door though which he had entered for a moment. Then, summoning his strength, he shouted: "Help! Anyone! Is anybody here?" The only answer was a booming echo from the great concrete dom and the distairt whirring of the tapes. The control stations were empty, the corridors vacant Yet, as Gann stood diere, he began to feel that the place was somehow alive. As the echoes died away his ears began to register fainter, more distant sounds -- a muffled mechanical murmur, a hum and whir. All the corridors were as empty as the one he had left He peer into them one by one, saw nothing but the endless banks of computing equipment, the jungle of thick cables that roofed them. Almost cm tiptoes, humbled by the immense hush around him, Gann went to the circular islands of consoles in the middle of the chamber. One unit, glowing with illuminated dials and buttons, faced each radiating tunnel. He stood entranced, watching the race of indicator lights across the face of each console. He had never seen this place in his own person before, yet it was all familiar to him, had been repeated a hundred times, from a hundred angles, in the texts and visual-aid lectures at the Technicorps academy. He was in the very heart of the Planning Machine -- the most secret, the most elaborately guarded spot on nine planets. The nerve center of the Plan of Man. And the Planning Machine did not even know he was there! That was the fact that most shook Boysie Gann, almost terrified him -- not only for himself, although surely he was on dangerous ground, men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. His fear was for the Plan of Man itself. How was it possible? With all its storage of facts on every act of every human being in the plan -- with its great taped mass of data covering every field of knowledge, every scientific discovery, every law -- the Planning Machine seemed to have no way of telling that an unauthorized human being was at large in its very heart. Gann found himself sobbing. Dizzied, he clutched at the edge of the nearest console and frantically tried to make sense of the unfamiliar glitter of dials and scopes and racing lights. There was a linkbox! For a moment he was hopeful -- yet the link boxes to the Machine were meant only for those who had received communion, who wore the flat plate in their skulls that gave the Machine access to their cranial nerve centers. Dared he use the linidbox? But what else was there? Gano thought swiftly, crazily, of punching a button at random -- throwing a switch -- turning a chaL Any smafl change would alert the Machine. Serving robots or human techs would be there in moments. And then his eyes oaut sight of a small, flat red plate, bearing a single bright-lit button, and one word. It was at the top of the console nearest him. The single word He stood staring at it for a long moment, forgetting to breathe. If that plate meant what it so clearly, unequivocally said, he had it in his power to -- to -- To stop the Machine, Machine Major Boysie Gann, Technicorps academy graduate, veteran of the spy school, trained and toughened against the worst a solar system could produce, found himself babbling in terrified hysteria. Stop the Machine! The thought was unbearable. He flung himself on the linkbox, found a switch, wept, babbled and sobbed into it. He was not speaking in the Mechanese that the Machine had developed for the links -- didn't know it -- would have forgotten it if he had known it. He was literally terrified, as nothing in his life had ever terrified him before. When the squad of Plan Guardsmen in Machine gray came boiling out of the access elevators, racing down the corridors, their weapons at the ready, they found him slumped on the floor, all but unconscious. Boysie Gann nearly died right en, with twenty bullets in his body. But the Techtenant in command issued a sharp order. He peered wonderingly at Gann, restrained his men, thought tor a second, then shook his head. "Don't hurt him," he growled. "Or not so he can't talk! Let's get him up to the security office -- fast!" F or four days Boysie Gann was questioned around the clock by the brawniest bullies in the Technicorps, and they were not gentle with him. He answered all their questions -- told the absolute truth -- and paid for it with the impact of a club against his kidneys, a kick in his ribs. They knocked him unconscious a dozen times, and each time he revived again with a hardfaced medical orderly pulling a hypodermic out of his skin, brought back to face more interrogation. Finally they let him sleep -- not because they were satisfied with his answers, but because the medics feared he would die. When he awoke he ached in every part of his body. He was strapped to an operating table. The Body Bank, he thought at first in a surge of panic. But it was not the Body Bank; it was a prison. Clearly the medics had been working on him. Although he ached, be could move. His toes curled, his fingers responded to his brain. His eyes opened, and moved where he willed them. Only one thing was different: there was a cold, hard pressure around his neck. The security collar that Harry Hickson had removed so easily had been replaced. Men were all around him, removing the straps, forcing him to his feet. "You! Risk." growled one of chin that was stubbled blue with beard. "On your feet! You're going to talk to the general." They hurried him through graywalled corridors to an elevator. It rose with a sickening thrust of acceleration, stopped as rapidly. Gann nearly fell, but was thrust to his feet again by one of the guards. "Out! Move on. Risk!" And he stumbled through more corridors, into a bare gray office, and there he stood at attention for a long, long time, waiting. Then -- Boysie Gann heard no signal, but perhaps it had been relayed through the radar-horned helmet of the guards -- the security guardsman barked: "In there!" and thrust him through a door. Gann entered into a larger, brighter office. It was beautifully furnished, with a bust of the Planner in glowing gold smiling down from a pedestal, and a golden linkbox to the Machine dominating the desk. On the desk was a nameplate. Machine General Abel Wheeler And the man who sat behind it was the general himself. He sat regarding Boysie Gann for a long moment. Machine General Wheeler seemed more than half a nachine liimsdf. He was a Ug man, an angular, perplexing, irupt-moving man. ole body looked metallic: skin-tan of bronze, eyes the color of steel, spikes of copper wire for hair. He stared at Gann and then, without a word, looked away, his eyes going to something invisible on his desk. Boysie Gann fdt choked by the Hard, cold oonstriction of the securty collar. Bruises aching, skin clammy with sweat, he stood painfully igid. At the Technicorps academy le had learned the art of standing indlessly at attention -- the imper:eptibly slow shifting of weight and muscular tensions that kept a man from pitching forward on his face. He blanked out his mind, thought of nothing but of the importance oi standing there. The general's frowning eyes clung to the tilted communications screens that faced him on his desk, invisible to Gann. After a moment he tapped soundless keys, communicating, Gann knew, wiA the Machine. Gann wondered Aat he did not use the linkbox. It did not occur to him that the general might fear that Boysie Gann, the man who had appeared inexplicably in the heart of the Planning Machine's caverns, might equally inexplicably have learned to understand Mechanese. The general waited, reading something, frowning stiffly. Abruptly his head jerked up and he stared at Gann. T he screens had ceased to flicker. His flat bronzed face was expressionless. It was a mask of meat. as though some bungling surgeon li' the replacement center had failed to connect the nerves and muscles that would have given it life. General .Wheeler said sharply: "Machine Major Boysie GannI" Gann jumped; could not help him-, self; the voice was like a met rasp. "You may stand at ease!" Gann let his lean shoulders sag slightly forward, drew a long breath, shifted his feet. But he was not really at ease. General Wheeler's eyes were on him, steel-colored, as coldly merciless as though they were the probes of a surgeon planting electrodes in his brain. He snapped: "The Machine requires information from you." Gann said painfully, "I know, sir. I've already been interrogated --  about a hundred times. I'd say." "It will be a thousandl You wiH be interrogated again and again and again. The Machine's need for truth is urgent." Wheeler's broad head jutted forward like the sudden thrust of a piston. "The Starchild! Who is he?" There was a dry lump in Gann's throat. He swallowed and said stubbornly: "I don't know, sir. I've told everything I know." "The Writ of Liberation! Who wrote it?" Gann shook his head "How did it get into the Planner's headquarters?" Gann kept on shaking his head, hopelessly but obstinately. "And yourself, how did you get into the Planning Machine' tunnels? Who is Quarla Snow? Why did you kill Machine Colonel Zafar and make up this preposterous Ue -- ?" "No, sir!" cried Gann. "I didn't! Colonel Zafar was anti-Plan!" The general's wide mouth hardened. His bloodless lips shut like the jaws of a trap. His voice was like a muffled, ominous clang: "The evidence," he said, "suggests that you are lying. Can you prove you are not?" "No, sir. But -- " "Machine Major Boysie Gann! Are you the Starchild?" "No, sir!" Gann was honestly surprised, indignant. "I -- " "Machine Major Boysie Gann! Do you know what became of the Togethership?" Gann cried hopelessly: "The what? General, I never even heard of the -- what is it? The Togethership. I don't know what you're talking about." Like the steady pulse of a laser scan, the general tolled: "The Togethership went into space forty years ago. It was never heard ol again. Major Gann, what do you know of this?" "Nothing, sir! Why, I wasn't even born!" For a moment the mask cracked, and the general's face looked almost human. Worried. Even confused. He said after a moment, "Yes. That's true. But -- " Then he tightened up again, bent forward stiffly from the hips. His steel eyes narrowed. "Are you loyal to the Plan of Man?" he asked softly. "Yes, sir!" The general nodded. "I hope so," he said bleakly. "For the sake of the Plan -- and for your own sake, too. For I am going to tell you something diat cannot ever be told again. U you whisper a word of it, Machine Major Boysie Gann, your death wBl come at once. At once, "You see, the Planning Machine is not unique. There is another one." Gann's eyes widened. "Another -- " he stopped, and had to begin again. It was like being told there were two Jehovahs, a second Christ "Another Planning Machine, sir? But where is it?" The general shook his head. "Lost," he said somberly. "Another Machine -- as great, as powerful, as complete as the one that guides the Plan of Man. And we do not know where it is. "Or what it is doing." T here was a man name Ryeland, the general told Boysie Gann. scientist. The husband of the daughter of the then-Planner, and close to the center of power surrounding die Planning Machine itself. And decades before he had gone into space, just as Gann himself had done, and seen the Reefs of Space, and come back with the tale of countless thousands of unplanned humans living their lives out on the fusorian worldlets, outside the scope of the plan. "What he said," rasped General Wheeler sternly, "was false! But the Machine wisely determined to test it out! The Planning Machine does not leap to conclusions! It weighs the evidence -- learns the facts -- makes a plan!" "Yes, sir," said Boysie Gann. "I've heard of this Ryeland, I think, A leading scientist even today!" The general nodded. 'T'oday," ha said cryptically, "Ryeland has abandoned error. A loyal servant of tba Plan. And so is the former Planner Creery, who also has turned away from falsity. But then -- " He sighed, like the wheezing of a high-vacuum pump. Then, he told Gann, both men had been duped -- and had caused the Machine to commit -- not an error, of course. That was impossible to the Machine. But to conduct an experiment which failed. The experiment was to bring the Plan of Man to the Reefs. The Machine had directed the construction of a mighty spacecraft called the Togethership. The biggest space-going vessel ever built. A mobile spacefort. It was fabricated at the yards on Deimos, and powered with six detachable jetless drive units that were themselves great fighting ships. And more than half of its hull was filled with a slave unit of the Planning Machine -- a linked bank of computers and storage banks, as advanced as the Machine itself, lacking only the network of communications and implementation facilities that the Machine had developed out of the race of Man. The Togethership was built, launched, tested and fitted out. A selected crew was assembled and came aboard. Supplies were loaded for a ten-year cruise. The slave Ma chine assumed control -- the Togethership flashed out past Orbit Pluto -- passed the Spacewall -- and was gone. IF Days later a message came back via laser relay chain. All was going well. The Togethership had sighted a major cluster of the Reefs of Space. No other message was ever received. Machine General Wheeler paused, his steel-gray eyes on Gann. "No other message," he repeated. "It has never been heard from again. Scouting vessels, attempting to locate it, came back without having found any trace. Or did not come back at all. Or returned early, damaged, having been attacked by pyropods or something worse. "That is the story of the Togethershipy Major Gann. Except for one thing: The cluster of Reefs it last reported sighting was in the same position as what you have called Freehaven. And you were there. Major. What did you learn?" Wonderingly, Gann shook his head. "Nothing, sir. Believe me. Not even a rumor." The general looked at him for a long second. Then he nodded. "Gann," he said bleakly. "I will tell you one more thing." Abruptly he snapped three switches on his desk, glanced at a monitoring dial, nodded. "We are cut off," he declared. "Not even the Planning Machine can look in on us now. What I have to tell you is for no ears but your own. "You see, Gann, it is not only the welfare of the Plan of Man that is involved here. I have a special interest in solving these mysteries. Solving them myself. "Major Gann, I intend to be the next Planner." B oysie Gann was adrift in dangerous waters, and knew it. He had heard rumors of the power-struggle of the human leaders who surrounded the great central power-fact of the Machine, jockeying for position, seeking personal advantage. The Technicorps academy had been filled with sly jokes and blazing-eyed, after-dark discussions of it Some' had viewed the political strife as treason (though they dared only whisper the thought). Some had taken it as a joke, or as a natural law of human affairs which they proposed to fc low for their own advancement Gann remembered the brother of the girl he had left at Playa Blanca, a white-hot idealist; remembered one of his instructors, a cynical humorist whose japes had seemed half in earnest and had set his classes wriggling with astonishment and something like fear. The instructor had disappeared one day. The young cadet who was Julie Martinet's brother had become an honor student at the Academy. He had even gone on to spy school on Pluto, just as Gann himself was leaving. But idealist or cynic, whatever the attitude of the individual, the whole question of political maneuvering had been remote. It was something that took place far off, high up -- not in the life of Boysie Gann. Not until now. Machine General Abel Wheeler leaned forward from his desk and rapped outihe words: "I n;ust know this. Do you know who sent the Writ of Liberation?" #F Gann shook his head. Sir, Vv never even seen it. I don't know what it says." "Foolish threats. Major Gann! An insane promise to stop the sun's light. A warning to the Planner and to the Machine that freedom must be restored -- hah! And yet -- " the man's steel eyes grew colder and more distant stih, as he contemplated something far away -- "it seems that there is something behind the threats. For the sun is indeed stopped." He paused. Boysie Gann Uinked. "Stopped? The sun? SSr, I don't understand... "Nor do I," rasped the general, "but that does not matter. What matters is the security of the Machine. It matters particularly to me, since I am entrusted with its defense. This Writ of Liberation is a threat; I must protect the Machine against it. If I am successful, I will receive -- a suitable reward. To those who can help me -- " He glanced about his spy-tight room, leaned farther forward still, and merely mouthed the words: "I can offer them rewards, too. Major Gann." His steel eyes stabbed restlessly about the room, then returned to Gann. "Major," he said. "I need you for a friend." G ann was still turning over in his mind what the general had said about the stoppage of the sun. The sun? No longer shining in the iky? It was hard to believe. He shook himself free from the questions that were burning at him and said uneasily, "I hope to be your frieodl fir. But I sdn know nottig of die Starchfld." The general nodded like a metro nome. "You w#I be questioned again," he rapped out "This time, directly by the Machine, through one of its servitors -- a human who has taken the Machine's commuo ion and speaks dbctly to it This will perhaps help you to remember certain things. It may even be that from the questions the acolyte asks, you may be able to deduce other things -- perhaps even make a guess at things that are stored in the memory banks of the Machine that even I do not know. If so," he said, hk face a bronze mask, "I vill be interested. The choice is yours. My friend or my foe -- and even now," he added, his bronze jaws hardening, "I have power enough to punish my foes." He opened the switches again, danced at his communications screens, nodded, tapped out an answer and turned once more to Gann. "You will go now to Sister Delta Four," he stated. "There your diredlink questioning to the Machine will begin. Major, look at this!" Unexpectedly he raised his right fist It clenched like a remote man#ulator into a bronze hammer. "This hand," he droned somberly, "once belonged to someone else, an unplanned traitor who threw a bomb at the Planner. His aim was poor. He missed the Planner, but hh bomb shattered my own right hand. "My hand could not be raired by tile surgeons, so it was replaced. IF With the hand of the would-be assassin." The bronze fist slammed against the console. "Gann, remember this! If you fail to serve the Machine in the way that is first required, you will serve it in some other way -- more than likely, in the Body Bank!" T he radar-horned guards were waiting. "Come on, Risk!" growled the Boysie Gann was thrust and dragged through the long gray halls, into the elevators, out again -- and left . to wait in a bare gray room. Only for a moment. Then the guards came back, looking angry and confused. "Come on. Risk!" growled know no other words, be able to speak in no other way -- and Gann was taken out again. A girl was standing in the doorway, telling her sonic beads, her head bent. She wore the robe and cowl of one of the Machine's comjnuning acolytes, one of those adepts who had learned the Mechanese that Machine now spoke in preference to any other language, whose very brain centers were open to the touch of the Machine. As they passed she spoke to one of the guards. "Orders changed!" he said roughly. "Come along if you like -- we're going to the Planner!" Gann hung back, trying to turn him ahead. He could hear the girl's oddly melodious voice, not so much speaking as chanting Mechanese in the quarter-tones of her sonic beads, but could not make out her words. She would be -- what had General Wheeler called her? Sister Delta Four. The one who yas to interrogate him. But he was going instead to the office of the Planner himself! In all his years of life under the Plan, Boysie Gann had never seen the Planner in the flesh. Few had. There was no need, with communications reaching into every home, even every room under the Plan -- and the Planner was something more than human, removed from even the condescending social intercourse of emperors. Gann shivered slightly. He was already assuming the attitudes of the convict of any land or time. He feared change. He dreaded the unknown. And the Planner represented a very large unknown quantity indeed. Again the tunnels, again the highvelocity drop of the elevators. Again Gann was thrust into a tiny room and left there. He was somewhere far underground. Listening, he could hear no sound except the muffled murmur of air from the duct overhead. The walls were an unpleasant yellowish gray -- no longer quite the sterile Technicorps color, but tinged with Planner's gold. Gann wondered if it were deliberate -- or if it was merely that this cell was so old, its occupants viewed with so little favor, that the baked-in coloring of the walls had yellowed with age. The ceiling gave a cold gray light. There was only one bare metal table, and one bare metal chair. The security collar was hard against his throat Gann sat down and laid his head on the table. His bruises were beginning to stiffen and ache. His brain was whirling. mind. General Wheeler and his menacing hints of reward. Quarla Snow's spaceling, and the pyropods. Julie Martinet. A daytime sky with the sun somehow gone out... the sunlike fusorian globules in Colonel Zafar's blood... Julie Martinet again, and Quarla Snow. He lived again the endless frightening drop that landed him in the bowels of the planet Earth, among the memory banks of the Machine. He saw again sterile Pluto's vistas of ice, and the great slow spin of Polaris Station. He thought of the Writ of Liberation and wondered at the love for freedom of the Planless men of the Reefs -- the love for freedom -- the freedom to love -- He thought again of Julie Martinet, and submerged himself in memories of the Togetherness resort at Playa Blanca, the slight, dark girl he had heard singing, their golden dawn together on the beach, with the 'taste of salt spray on her lips. He could see her face as clearly as though she were in the room with him. 'ulie," he whispered, and she opened her lips to reply -- "Come on, Risk!" she said queerly -- roughly. "Get up! Move!" ing him angrily. "Risk! Wake up!" Gann shook himself. He had been asleep. His arm was numb and tingling, where his head had rested on it. He was still dazed as they dragged him out of the cell, into another room -- larger -- brighter -- furnished in splendor. It was all gold. Gold tapestries on the wall, showing the spinning worlds of the Plan of Man. Gold light fixtures, and gold trays on the golden tables. The floor a carpeting of gold, the furniture upholstered in a golden fabric. A guard stood by him at each side, gripping his arms. They brought him to the center of the room and stood to a gold-arched door and whispered to a Technicorps officer in the uniform of the Planner's guard who stood there. The officer nodded inpatiently and held up a hand. The radar-horned guard turned and signaled to his men. Wait, Boysie Gann was very sure, without being told, of where they were. Beyond that door was the Planner himself. They were not alone in the room. Turning his neck -- the grip of the guards did not allow him to turn his body -- he saw that the acolyte girl, Sister Delta Four, was in the room, kneeling on a golden hassock, telling her sonic beads. She was slight. What small sight he could get of her face, under the great soft cowl, was oval, grave and pale. Her loose black robe fell to the floor IF around the hassock. Her cape bore the luminous emblem of those who had undergone communion with the Machine -- the symbolic ellipses of electronic orbits intertwined. The guards wrenched him straight again. One whispered to the other across him, "Watch! She's going to go into communion." Even in his precarious position Gann could not help wanting to see. He had never before been with an acolyte during communion. It was something to be desired -- and dreaded. If the deadly security collar around his neck was the stick that the Machine had invented to enforce the Plan of Man, the communion plate was the carrot that rewarded faithful service. Gann knew what it looked like. He thought he had caught a glimpse of it in the forehead of Sister Delta Four, the bright metal disk grafted into the skin, starred with its black pattern of holes that accepted the prongs of the communion plug. He knew that communion was supposed to be the perfect experience. The communion plate was only its exterior s)mibol. It was in the brain itself that the delicate stereotaxia of the Machine's neurosurgeons had done their finest work. Through electrodes wired to the plate in the forehead, the Machine requited its deserving servants with tuned electonic stimuli. Its messages flowed directly into the pleasure centers of the brain. The perfect experience -- for it had no taint of reality to corrupt tt, no bill presented in the form of exhaustion or physical damage -- no substance! It was the quintessence of pleasure. Stripped of tactile, visual, (factory -- of all sensual complications -- it was the great good thing that men had always sought, and found imperfectly as a side-effect of eating, or drinking, or inhaling the crisp air of a mountain morning, or sex. It was all of them, distilled and served up in a tidy package, received through a bright metal plate. It was so perfect, thought Boysie Gann wildly, that it seemed somehow wrong... "She's getting ready!" whispered one of the guards, and Gann ventured to turn his head again to see. He succeeded -- only for a moment, but he succeeded. The guards were watching too, and loosened their grips just enough for him to turn. Sister Delta Four lifted the black hood to uncover her forehead. T here on the smooth white skin he saw the bright metal disk -- saw it, trembled, looked away -- looked back again, and saw clearly what his mind had rejected. He saw the face of Sister Delta Four. There was a hoarse whisper from the doorway. "Let's go!" The guards started, and jerked him away, thrust him facing forward so that he saw like fury, beckoning them angrily, signaling that the Planner was ready for them now. But Boysie Gann fought them, struggled like a wild man. "No!" he shouted. "Wait!" And he battled the astonished guards, trying to turn, to go back to the girl whose serene face he had seen, eyes closed, lifting the communion plug to her forehead. The guards lashed out at him, struck him. He hardly felt the blows. He turned, breaking free of one of them, colliding heavily with the other so that they fell sprawling on the thick golden rug, the other guards leaping toward them. But as they fell, Gann saw the face again. He had been right. Tere was no doubt. Sister Delta Four was Julie Martinet. The girl he loved was now no longer entirely human. Her vows were no longer to him. She was an adjunct to the Machine, as dependent on it for her every bit of life and thought as some remote-directed subsea mining dredge... and as little a part of the race of men. Julie Martinet had become a part of the machine. Complete Short Novel by Cordwainer Smith by James H. Schmitz by J. T. McIntosh All in the February Galaxy, on sale now! IF w  Short Start . fmoiy's problem ittdn't present any dUficultles. It was the solution that was complicated! Qing!ng a worried song Emory O Clark rode out on his umcyde. It was very eaiiy on a summer morning soft with hmeysuckle and rosea, merry with bird calls. But Emory regarded none of those things. He wheels a straight line, green across the dew silver lawns, up to the entrance of the City Hall. There he slotted his unicycle, fingertipped the Welcome, and went up the hundred steps two at a time while the bronze doors were sliding apart. Recessed in deep shadow the four-story facade of the Master Index confronted him. "Emory Clark," it welcomed. "Private dtizem. Single. # years # days. Occupation garden-hobbyist. Is it a question oir a problem?" "Your Honor, I have a problem." "Problem number #," k assented. "Series Bb#, year #, city of Atlanta, Georgia. Go." "Your Honor, I have a mouse in the house." Lights flickered ruminatively. "Mouse. Mus mus, harmless nonaggressive mammal, average lengUi # centimeters not counting appendages. Intelligence .#. Please restate your problem to show that it is a problem." "Harmless -- nonaggressive! What do you call harmless nonaggressive? This beast has somehow entered my home -- uninvited -- and will not leave no matter what I say to it. And the worst of it is, it's chewing on a fine stand of grass in my living-room garden and making itself a nest in there. I have been expecting to take a prize in the Garden Club Show with that grass. If that goes, what becomes of my hard-won position of leadership! My community status? My peace of mind?" "Which of these questions do you want answered first?" "Never mind those question, your honor. I only hope I never find out; and while I stand here palavering another stalk of timothy may be falling. Just tell me how to rid me of mine enemy." "Answering problem #, series Bb#, year #, city of Atlanta, Georgia," replied its honor, briskly. "First catch your mouse then transport it to any distance over one kilometer and it will be unable to find its way back." Emory fidgeted his feet. "Your honor I already tried that. But ah I achieved was information: that mouse can dodge faster than I can grab. I need a gadget." The Master Index reminded him that the law forbade manual combat with harmless nonaggressive creatures. But it agreed that if the mouse would not accept a ride a suitable gadget #ould be used. A library pass tingled into a tray under a slot. "Permit to withdraw one hypothecator, model T, seven-day loan, renewable. Best mousetrap ever invented. Success to your efforts," and it switched off all its lights. Delighted, Emory pocketed the pass, strode over to the basement entrance, and leaped singing into the downshaft. All was peaceful in the gadget library because of the early hour. Emory presented his pass to the librarian, which slotted it with a businesslike snap. There ensued a wait of fifteen minutes which Emory sp#nt whistling. Then the permit came back stamped "Not On Shelf." #T T Till you ask the Master Index   for a second choice!" inr quired the librarian. "Or will you wait until some other borrower returns an hypothecator!" "What, me wait while a wild animal makes hay with my status symbols!" cried Emory, running for the upshaft. Lights were on in the audience hall, and Emory was third in line for his next permit; but its honor recognized him and his problem, and provided a permit for a transmog without delay. So Emory presented this at the gadget library and found that afl the transmogs were also out on loan. After several such trials and misses, he appealed directly to the librarian. "Just tell me what you do have on shelf in the way of mousetraps. Any old kind of trap, just so I rescue my grass while there's still some left." "But," protested its accuracy, "I am a finder, not a keeper. My IF bins have always had plenty of everything, or if not the Master Index can recommend something else just as good and possibly better depending on circumstances unforeseeable, or if not or if not or if not or if not." "Clear the request, your accuracy," said Emory, in some haste, seeing that the librarian was about to flip its catalog. "I will apply to the Master Index again." By this time, the waiting line was so long that Emo had to take his place twenty steps back down outside the entrance. He was beginning to think about lunch but he held his place sturdily and referred its honor back to problem #, etcetera, subsolution E, with a protest of these delays. "I realize, your honor, that sutions take as long as they take. But in this case time is of the essence." "Certainly your solution is taking longer than it should," agreed its honor. I have been able to locate such problems without this difficulty. Considering the number it may be that the community is having a plague of mice. This would justify the reactivatkm of a gadget factory. But as afl gadgeteers are humans, and therefore work only when they feel like h, this is on the human level of negotiation. Do you wish to be an emissary?" "Anything!" cried Emory. "Anything! My grass, my grass!" "I have now notified the Engineering-Hobbyists Club,' its honor assured him, "with full details of your predicament." Five address cards and an Emissary's Badge tinkled from slots into trays. "CaH on each of their committeemen and obtain their choice of a factory site. Once this is known, we will then also know which hobby club is using it now, and can seek the use of the space for your purposes." Next day Emcwy was back at City Hall looking desperate. "Your honor, I have been able to locate only two of these five people so far, and they disagree. In the meantime, another mouse had appeared, or may have been lurking all the while, for in the nest are five small mice, or possible six. All I know is that when I tried to count them the larger mice bit my finger, after which they went bac to dancing in my garden." He had to wait while its honor outlined the correct medical procedure and warned him against manual combat with small nonagressivo creatures. "Second warning," it added, and rang a gong twice. "Nonaggressive!" exclaimed Emory. "If these animals are nonaggressive, what's an aggresive one like!" and the Mast Index presented him with a zoo pass. S everal days later he had occasion to use it. He was canvassing all members of the Engineering-Hobbyist Club in the hope of obtaining a committee able to agree on something. One of them was locksmithing a new zoo cage and after interviewing him, Emory found himself in conversation with the hobbyist who ran the zoo park. "Certainly is a great plague of mice," agreed the zoo keeper. "Thii # is the only place you won't fine mice. We have a lion, a tiger, a leopard, a puma -- actually oidy me house cat, but they all smell alike to mice. No mouse wffl ever go near a cat." "Cats?" I "Finest mousetrap ever invented," he said. Emory leaped to the saddle with a whoop and hedge-hopped his unicycle all the way to City HaH and danced on the steps as the line moved up to his turn. However, the Master Index knew all that already and dieelared itself unable to issue him a permit to borrow a cat. "If we turn loose a creature classified as aggressive, you would be in bigger trouble than you're in now," it explained. "The tiger, die lion, the puma and the rest of the cats are apt to kill people. The only small ones are the variety know as house cats, and be assured that diose also are far from tame," he warned. Exasperated, Emory made a few remarks about the general situation and some of its particulars. He had said somewhat the same before and its honor told him so. "All you are doing is holding up die line," it chided. "Emotion solves nothing but. the existence of emotion. I am myself restricted by law, as you are." Regardless of what emotion might solve, Emory had feelings which had been kept hot by days of methodical endeavors. He turned to the waiting line and expressed his sentiments. Everyone agreed with him. More than half of them were there on simHar errands. The community was overrun with mice. All anyone had been able to do was gadget them from one place to another. This provided the mice with fresh fields to conquer. "Reclassify the mice!" cried Emory, waving his fist above his head. The other citizens cried with one voice, "Reclassify the mice!" While Emory referred all that to its honor and demanded an answer. It's answer was that it could only expound the law, not make it or change it. "But you, Emory Clark, private citizen, etcetera, have one vote and a human voice. If you want to get the mice reclassified, success to your efforts." And it gave him a library pass for several hundred massive volumes of pertinent data. There was nothing Emory could do but begin upon these studies. The whole community was up in arms; but reclassification was a world affair, in which the problems of one community are proportionately as small as is a mouse to a house. Emory had to face up to the fact that the Master Index had, as it said, limits. A t least, Emory now had leisure and impetus for study. His gardening occupation was no more, for the multiplying mice had taken over the premises to such an extent that he was sleeping out-of-doors under his unicycle cover. He had made a lot of new friends, IF M However, and when a man needs to adjust his frames of reference, conference can help. One of his first calls was upon Henry Adkins, the zoo hobbyist, a man who might converse intelligently on the subject of the classification of the creatures with whom mankind shares his universe. "Henry," he said, "I am thinking of lobbying for Freedom for Cats as well as Down with Tyranny erf Mice." Henry pulled at his chin. "It's not that I would object to losing my show specimens, though I would," he mused. "But if Leo ever gets loose in this town, you'd better move. That brute is not only large, he's neurotic. But the house cat, now -- I must admit, reluctantly, that there is a case of injustice. Bird Watchers' Lobby, of course," and he introduce Emory to the zoo's only living specimen, a handsome Siamese male with a hard blue squint. "NankL Very gentle. Nanki is a lineal descendant of the original Nanki-Poo, and all those arc especially gentle." "But they catch mice nonetheless!" "Mice, rats, snakes -- of all house cats, a Siamese is the fastest and grabbiest." Emory extended the hand of friendship to Nanki, who immediately bit it. Emory snatched his hand back and stared at the oozing marks. "What was that about gentle!" "Oh, Nanki IS gentle -- at heart he really IS, but he displays pseudoneurotic behavior because he is lonely. The nearest Siamese queen to in the Topeka, Kansas, zoologi cal park." Emory was already leaving, bal he paused, awed. "Say. You sound like a Master Index. And you're just a human. You are, aren't you? I wouldn't even know which way il was to Topeka." Henry waved a deprecating hand at the westering sun. "Just hobbyinformation, really." It seemed that the aggressive species were dwindling so fast in captivity that animal-hobbyists held conventions just to brag about the rare specimens they still had alive, and to swap stuffed ones. Emory looked at Nanki with more sympathy and less resentment The unfortunate beast must remain imprisoned though gentle at heart, until death, after which he would be stuffed and perhaps traded off, who knows where. "I forgive you, Nanki," he said, wrapping his hand in his handkerchief. "I fed a sense of doom myself." T hen he went home, thinkinf profounHy without any help at all from computers. His premises were in a state of ultimate disgrace. Cluttering mice ran everywhere, with cleaning machines scurrying anxiously after little black droppings. The furniture was chewed, walls tracked. The dining-room disposal groaned over tainted food shoveled into it by the automatic checkup, while more food clicked restlely and temporarily into the pantry pockets. Emory admitted to the mice that SF yActory seecoed to be theirs for the lime being. But not forever. Meanwhile, I choose other company. I go but be warned, I shall return." With that, he switched off all the house power and turned grimly away. Once more he returned to the City Hall. But this time he merely applied for a Nansen passport. "I shall become an Emissary-atLarge," he explained "wandering upon my quest until this matter is reclassified by the citizens of the world. A man does what he can," he said humbly. "Success to your efforts," and with routine courtesy, its honor flipped out the requested badge and turned out all its lights, for the day's business was done and there was nobody in line behind Emory. He examined the jewel in the slanting light. It carried the code number of the Master Index and his own finger prints, and thus gave him welcome to the services of all the Indexes of tile world. He donned the badge and strode out of the building, humming solemnly in a baritone undertone. Next he called on a hostess-hobbyist and obtained a picnic hamper of hinch. Then he paid another visit to the zoo keeper. "Henry," he said, "right now there are some points we might not agree on. But some day you will understand." With that, he punched Henry on the button, took his keys, and locked him into the monkey cage. Then he went to see Nanki, and emptied the basket of lunch before the indifferent cat. A mouse sprang out ol tile sandwiches -- truly, the whe city was being plagued with mice. Nanki came to life. He caught the mouse with a flying leap and ate it at once. Emory waited patiently and approvingly while Nanki finished his snack. Meanwhile he was drawing on a pair of long heavy riding gauntlets. "You and I can get along, Nanki," he declared. He scooped Nanki into the hamper, snapped down the lid, secured it and swung the whole thing over his arm. In the monkey cage, Henry was trying to sit up. Emory wondered whether he had the heart to hit him again, and for that matter, whether he could safely attempt it now that Henry would not be surprised. "Next stop is going to be Topeka, Kansas." He tapped the basket which was yowling in a loud nasal tenor. "What this world needs is more cats like this one. You going to try to stop me?" Henry's eyes widened. He rubbed his aching jaw. "You din have hit tha har," he grumbled. "Topeka tha way. Ige pathword thith year, 'Leo he roar!' Think you can ge i righ?" "Leo he roar," and Emory roared for himself. Leo heard it and took it up. Other animals joined the chorus and soon the whole zoo was in an uproar. To this farewell, Emory sprang to saddle; and he and Nanki whirled off together towards the sunset, singIF IF  Novelette He only lived for one day -- and perhaps it was too longl I O wen Hall's one day of life began with uncertainty. In that first moment of total awareness he found himself standing outside a door, facing a road that moved. The door had slammed shut behind him -- after he had been shoved through it -- although there was no distinct recollection of his passage through the doorway, or who had done the shoving. It was reasonable to assume that the same hand was responsible for both. A thrust against the small of his back, a slam -- and awareness of self and surroundings began with that. The light hurt his eyes. The sun was shining, the weather was bland and summery. Airy brightness engulfed him, contrasting sharply with the blackness behind that door and the blackness which replaced memory. Owen turned his attention to the road. It rolled. The moving roadway was actually a street, a wide and smoothly surfaced street which flowed toward the rising sun at a speed equal to a fast walk. It appeared from the southwest, curving gently aroimd an endless series of low buildings as ft approached, and vanished into the southeastern distance. Owen inspected the street with a growing sense of wonder; he guessed that it completely encircled the city, and he knew without proof what it was. He had never before seen a Heinldn rolling road, bift there it was. There was no telling what science would do next! In the following moment that mysterious door behind him was yanked open and a woman shouted belligerently. Owen turned around to examine the newest discovery. T he woman popped through the door. She was perhaps thirtyfive or forty years of age, and rather chunky about the middle, per hair was brown, her eyes were angry and her hands were large enough to push him through any door with ease. She was clad from neck to sandals in form-fitting pink clothing. Baby pink. The single garment resembled mechanic's covalls and it was reasonably flattering except for that bulge in the middle. The woman staggered as she approached him. 'What you doing here?" she shouted at him. "Told you to go to work. Go!" Owen murmured politely. "Honey, you're loaded." Ignoring the accusation or perhaps not understanding it, the belligerent woman strode close, leaned over to peer into his eyes and splashed him with eighty-six proof breath. She bellowed. "Wiat's wrong with you? What went wrong? How is your equilibrium? Huh?" "There's nothing wrong with my equilibrium," Owen retorted. "Did you shove me through that door? What's the big idea?" "Can you walk without falling down?" "I might ask you the same thing." Owen discovered that he posessed a baritone voice, and was pleased. He realized the pushy, loudmouthed woman wasn't his wife; he didn't have a wife. And he found time to wonder what he was doing there -- wherever there was. The city was a new one on him. "Show me you can walk," the woman demanded. Owen obediently marched back and forth along the path between the door and the street His legs were strangely weak and for a brief moment he felt like an infant learning to walk, but then he mastered the technique as familiarity returned. It was like regaining an old skill. "Nothing to it," Owen said. "Ready to go to work?" "Work?" Owen blinked. He didn't particularly care whether he worked or not. It was a nice day; he'd just as soon go fishing if there was a stream handy. But he was certain he didn't want to go back inside that door with the old harridan. "I guess so. What work? Where?" "Get on that road. Follow those men. Go." IF He craned his neck to look again at the rolling road and found it thinly populated. Owen revealed his surprise. Men were beginning to appear from the southwest, singly and in small groups, riding past him toward some unknown destination to the east. They did not look at him or the swaying woman as they went by, but instead contented themselves with studying their shoes or the haircuts of the men in front. They traveled like zombies. "What's wrong with those guys?" Owen came around again to question the woman, but found that she had deserted him and was staggering up the path to her door. He held his breath until she made it. The door slammed. O wen hesitated with indecision and then realized he just couldn't jstand there all day. He joined the other men on the rolling load, swinging onto k awkwardly and very nearly losing his balance. That trick certainly wasn't familiar. Owen braced his feet apart to keep his balance and noted witii a nnall envy that the other riders were having no trouble. Maybe ha could do better tomorrow. Unless he skipped out to go fing tomorrow. Owen looked away from the city, staring across the road at the open countryside in hopes of finding a stream or even a promising gravel pit. Little more than a vast, uninhabited prairie met his searching eye. In the distance, already fading behind him, he discovered a small stand of timber but there were no birds or grazing animals to suggest water there. Perhaps twenty minutes later the moving road carried him past a square mile of broken monuments and tumbled tombstones, but he wasn't interested in finding a fishing hole in an ancient cemetery. The prairie remained vacant. It revealed no farmhouses or cattle or people. The road carried him eastward around the rim of the city as the sun climbed higher into the sky. There were no individual houses along the road, as Owen discovered after a while. He saw nothing but an unbroken row of buildings monotonously stacked side by side, their walls touching or clinging to each other. Men came out of countless doorways, came from hundreds of apartments or rooms or even warrens along the way to join the other hundreds already on the road. They did not speak, did not gang together to gossip about this or that The men simply stood in one place, waiting stolidly. Owen thought that was pretty stupid. He walked across the road and stared into the face of a rider. "What's the name of this here town, sport?" TTie fellow returned his stare for a fraction of a second and then dropped his gaze, pretending to study his feet. Owen bent down, craned his neck and peered up into the man's face. "D'ya think the Senators will ever win a pennant?" The man turned around and rode backward to avoid him. Owen said aloud that was a hell of a thing for a grown man to do, and lost interest in the clod. On an impulse, and in an attempt to create a diversion, he trotted here and diere along the road, staring impudently into faces, saying nonsensical things to provoke a reply, defiberately sliding between a pair who ipeared to be traveling together, stepping on toes and jabbing with his elbows. He was ignored. His co-riders would not respond in any way nor even acknowledge his presence except to turn away when he thrust his face into theirs. Owen told them loudly they might as well be a pack of zombies. Still curious, he decided to examine the mechanism of the road. Moving carefully to the edge of the rolling surface, he dropped to his knees and searched for a crack in the construction materials, seeking a space between the road itself and whatever bed it rested on. There was none. Owen thought that failed to make sense. There had to be a separation between the two bodies. If the road was suspended on jets of air there ought to be little wheels of some kind to implant forward movement, or so it seemed to his unmechanistic mind. And of course diere should be a nameplate or something giving Heinlein credit -- or revealing . his protective patent number. Owen was sitting there, puzzling it, when somebody tapped his shoulder. A side glance revealed a pair of feminine legs clad in pink coveralls. She was back. n O wen realized his mistake when he jumped up and said, "Hi, Mother! Did you bring the jug?" This woman was dressed in the same fashion, the same garment, but most decidedly she was not the same female he had last seen staggering up the path. Xbis new one was a bit taller, a trifle less mature about the bust and hips, and easily ten years younger. Her hair was sandy blonde and she had a minute brown spot on the tip of her nose. She asked, reasonably enough, "What were you doing down there?" "Looking for the little wheels." "What little wheels?" "The little wheels this road runs on. "Did you find them?" "No." "Do you feel all right? Are you well?" "Of course I am. Want to dance?" "Is your equilibrium satisfactory?" "Why do yovL people keep asking that?" Owen retorted with somo heat. "There's nothing wrong with me -- except that I don't remember last night. Or yesterday." The young woman peered at him with speculation. "What is a jiig?" "Booze." "What is booze?" "Stuff that comes in a jug. You drink it." "Why?" Owen said, "Oh, fudgel Go ask your sister." IF have no sister. Where did you originate?" "I don't know -- back there, somewhere." Owen waved a negligent hand to indicate same vague distance behind him and almost struck a man standing there. He fedn't been aware that anyone else was so near. The man blinked at his passing hand but did nothing else. To the waiting woman, Own said dryly, "Here, watch this." And he deliberately thrust a finger against the man's nose, pushing it off center. At the same time he emitted a throaty, "BeepI" The man turned his back. "See that?" Owen demanded of the woman. "No guts." "Why did you do that?" she wanted to know. "For the hell of it." "Your behavior is certainly unusual," the pink woman admitted. T suspect you are incomplete. Are you sure you don't remember your point of origin?" "I wouldn't go back there again if I did remember," Owen said. "That dame was loaded but she wouldn't share it." He stared at the back of the man standing near them and suspected the fellow was listening. Nosy zombie. Owen grasped the young woman's hand and pulled her to the middle of the street. #Tow we can talk," he explainled. "These guys give me the creeps." The woman was startled by his action. "You touched me." Owen looked M her chest. "Want an racore?" "No." And then she did something which startled him. Reaching for the breast pocket in his coveralls she pushed her fingers down inside, rummaging around for something. Owen looked down and discovered he was wearing dun-colored coveralls, His garment wasn't nearly so weU tailored as hers, and of course he didn't fill it in the same manner. All the men on the street were dressed as he was. "What are you looking for, lint?" She did not answer but instead searched the other of the two identical pockets in his garment. Bodi were empty. Pulling the collar away from his neck she ran her fingers around the neckband without finding anything, and then frisked him by moving her hands down each sleeve of the coveralls. A small oblong bar of stainless steel was fastened inside one sleeve, above the wrist. The woman removed it with an exclamation of annoyance and pinned the bar in its proper place, under the flap of one pocket. She then placed the flat of her thumb against the bar and gently pressed it to his chest. For the sheer fun of it, Owen did the same to her. The yoimg woman was taken aback by the gesture but stood firm when she realized what he was doing. An identical bar of stainless steel was pinned beneath a pink flap, riding high on her breast. It gave softly as Owen pushed. A sensation was transmitted to his IF Ihumb, a peculiar sensation he did not immediately recognize. He pushed again. His thumb felt or read numbers, and then he knew he was reading a message imprinted on the bar. The thumb transmitted a legend: L-#-#-# "That is enough," she told him, and removed his hand from her body. Fascinated, Owen put a thumb to his own pocket bar. Recon HAln-#? "Hey," he cried, "dig those crazy bug numbers! What's that question mark for?" "Your original age is uncertain." "I'm twenty-eight." The pink and blonde doll zeroed In on that. "How do you know?" O wen blinked, parted his lips to attempt a rational explanation, and then paused, hung on a dilemma. He didn't know how he knew. "Well, I just am, that's all." His thumb lingered over the identification bar a second time. "What does Recon H mean?" She ignored the question. "Were you given instructions?" "I was told to follow these creeps lo work." "Nothing else?" The doll again betrayed annoyance. "Weren't you told to return, afterward? Don't you recall your point of origin? What was the number on the door? Do you remember the woman there?" Owen shuddered. "I remember she was loaded." "Loaded? She was weighted down?" "She was loaded with booze. You know, looped." "I dont know. What is looped? Where did she obtain the booze?" "How should I know?" Owen demanded with irritation. "Mayb# she had a still in there." "A still what?" "Honey, you're a dull cat. Don't you know anything? How'd you ever get to be strawboss' around here without knowing anything? You pink babes are running this crazy place, aren't you?" He examined the cute little brown spot on the tip of her nose. "Where did I come from, anyway? How'd I get into this zombie business?" "There is something terribly wrong here." "You can say that again." "But why should I repeat it?" "Oh, go fly a kite. I know, I know, what is a kite?" Owen shook his head with bewilderment. "No organization all the way down the line. Let's start over." And ho reached for the bar on her breast. She stepped back. "Stop that. Do you remember your name?" "Owen Hall." "And you are twenty-eight?" "Yes." "When did you cease being twenty-eight?" Owen said, "When the -- " and came up short, astonished at her question and his own attempt at an answer. He had almost answered. When fhe -- what? Owen poked about the huge and nearly empty cavern which substituted for a memory. Something was moving in there. He focussed on the object. An automobile. The was a vague image and wondered what it had to do with him. "Do you remember anything prior to that door? "No. She just shoved me through." "You don't recall the location? The number? "I haven't the foggiest idea. "But where will you spend the night?" r iat gave him pause. "I don't know. I hadn't even thought about it. Any park benches around here?" "What is a park bench?" "That's what I thought," he said gloomily. "Honey, whatever happened to the Indiana I lived in?" "Is Indiana a town? I don't know that name. But I think you should come to my place tonight. You simply can't go roaming around." Owen's jaw dropped. "Do you mean that?" "Certainly. You have to sleep somewhere indoors." He stole a glance at the nearby men. "Won't people talk?" "Talk about what?" "This sure as hell ain't Indiana." The blonde charmer gave him a small metallic plate about the size of a calling card. Owen moved his thumb over it, inwardly pleased at his new-found skill. The plate repeated the legend he had already read on her bar, while immediately below that identification was another number he supposed to be a house number, or at least a door number to one oi the warrens along the road. Owen allowed his thumb to tarry over the plate and his imagination to play in the blonde hair. It was difficult to accept. "You want me to spend the night with you?" "I certaiidy do. I want to look into you; there is more than a suspicion that you are incomplete. Your present behavior isn't normal, you know. It needs correcting." "So what's in it for me?" "The works," she replied enigmatically. "Obey your previous instructions and then obey mine. When you are dismissed from your job report to this address." And she left him as abruptly as she had come. Owen watched her swing off the road in expert fadiion. He even turned around to watch her exciting figure until it vanished in the distance behind him. Owen puUed himself from an erotic dream to find himsdf looking into the blank face of a blank man standing several feet away. "You poor sapi The trouble with you is, you're all dieie. Know what I mean?" m T he rolling road eventually delivered its human cargo to some large building Owen took to be a factory, or possMy a warehouse. There were no signs to indicate the nature of the place. For once he sorely missed the ubiquitous billboard. The men ahead of Owen were leaving the road and entering the building in fiieir listless fashion, braving fike so many stereod# IF types on their way to another boring Aiy at the office. Owen followed them, knowing curiosity. A great doorway engulfed him. A factory, Owen decided. In that first quick glance around, he saw what appeared to be hundreds of machines of totally alien design, geared to produce something equally alien. There were no scraps of anfIhing on the floor to lend a hint of the iwoduct, no stockpiles of raw material waiting to be fashioned. The incoming men pushed past him, scattering throu the building and each choosing a machine with practiced familiarity. Still led by curiosity, Owen walked perhaps a hundred feet along tiie most convenient aisle and stopped again. After a moment he bellowed aloud. "Hey! What the hell is going on here? Anybody home? The far leaches of the building echoed his diout. The soulless factory workers did not pause in their tasks, did not look up or even peek around at him, did not cover their ears as his hoarse bellow beat around the great building. Owen considered yelling fire! The yell was unnecessary; he caught a sudden flash of pink in the fistance and concentrated on that. Someone had heard him. Another one of those pink women came along the aisle on the run, panting from the unusual exertion. Who did that? Who did what?" "What is the matter here! Why (fid you raise your voice?" Owen inspected her. This newest specimen was a distinct disappointment and he didn't try to conceal that fact. She was a much older woman than any he had seen thus far: gray haired, gray eyed, gray skinned, singularly straight up and down, and utterly without a sense of humor. "We don't raise our voices in here, man." Her enunciation of man contained a built-in gibe. "Grandma, except for you and me, nobody has voices in here," he retorted. That brought a titanic frown to the gray forehead. She opened her palm as if to slap him but changed her mind as the hand was traveling toward him. Instead, she quickly flipped open his pocket flap and jabbed an angry thumb down on his identification bar. The gray lips curled. 'T might have known it. A brand new one. Didn't they teach you manners?" "What arc manners?" Owen asked with secret delight. Grandmother managed a double take. She snapped at Owen. "Who was your fabricator?" "Do you mean that crazy doll who kicked me out of the house? She didn't introduce herself. Hitting the jug, you know. One of those women who booze up and then want to fight." Owen clucked with disapprobation. "But don't worry, Granny, Fve got miother date for tonight." "I should hope so," tiie gray lady retorted. "Now behave youreif and come with me." followed the woman to an unmanned machine. In four minutes time she introduced him to the production line, and it was the most confounding thing he's ever seen. The machine itself was a monstrous affair the size of an overland truck. Almost all of its working parts were concealed from view behind a casing, hiding the wheels and gears from curious eyes but at the same time preventing him or those mindless operators from sticking their fingers into the works. The nearby face of the machine contained a window perhaps two square feet in area, with a short stainless steel bar above the window and a row of push buttons beneath. The bar was about five inches wide and two inches high, of concave design, and set into the machine wall at about the height of a man's head. Owen discovered it was intended to receive a man's forehead. Following the gray dame's explicit instructions he bellied up to the machine, placed his forehead against the bar and visualized a slice of bacon. He just stood there and thought about a slice of bacon. When he had formed a complete image in his mind, the full, rounded picture of a succulent strip of bacon fairly oozing with vitamins and goodness, he pushed the first button as he had been told to do and the machine began operating. A light went on behind the window. A strip of bacon -- the one he had visualized -- dropped from somewhere overhead onto a paper tray. Owen stepped back to stare at it "Well, how about that!" "Continue!" the gray grandmotherly type snapped in his ear. "Yon haven't completed the ration. Follow my instructions." "Say, that's a damned good trick. How'd I do it?" "It is reconstituted pork. Complete the ration." Again he bellied up to the machine, placed his head against ths think-bar, pressed the button and produced a second slice of bacon. II dropped down to rest on the tray alongside the first slice. Owen kept at it until he had five slices in all. "That is sufficient. Now wrap it."  Punching the second button with a feeling of secret exhilaration, Owen watched through the window as a sheet of transparent wrapping paper spewed up from below, wrapped itself around the rasher of bacon with an assist from a pair of mechanical fingers and tidied up the package for somebody's breakfast. "Dispatch it." He punched the third button and the package was whisked out of sight. An empty tray dropped into place and the machine waited for the young creator's next visualization. "Neat -- very neat. I didn't even say shazamr "Stop that noise. Talking isn't permitted here. Continue working until the shift has ended." "You mean this is all I have to do?" "Isn't that enough?" IP "Well, I guess so," he said. "Then get at it. And keep your mouth shut." She watched over his Mulder for the next several minutes, making certain he did a competent job. O wen thought bacon, made bacon, wrapped bacon and sent bacon on its way to some mysterious place, five slices to the package. All of his bacon was of the finest quality, prime meat, because it suddenly occurred to him that one of those packages might be his breakfast in the morning, and he would surely be hungry if the charming pink and blonde creature lived up to her enigmatic promise. After a while the gray haired supervisor seemed satisfied with his output and left him, disappearing into the vast distance from which she had come. The production of bacon went on for nearly an hour. And then Owen made a necktie. It wasn't a very good necktie. The colors were poor and the pattern awry, but it was his very first necktic and he was proud of it. He wondered if perhaps he could create a fad for neckties, something to reMeve the dun monotony of the coveralls. He made several neckties, each an improvement on the one before, wrapping each one in an individual gift package and sending them on their way. Next he tried a loaf of bread but it was a dismal failure and had to be scrubbed -- his visualization of ttie interior had been faulty. A handful of cigars pame out better. They looked so good he wished he could reach through die window and help himself. Then it occurred to him that a fine monkey wrench might please somebody, so he visualized that, wrapped it and sent it along to wherever the things were going. Other tools followed, sometimes one to a package and sometimes several just for variety: screwdrivers, pliers, ball peen hammers, chisels, awls, saws, squares, files, everything a journeyman carpenter would want in his toolbox. The quality and abundance of his tools provoked a mild wonder. They were so well made, so meticulous in detail, so workmanlike. Perhaps he had been a carpenter before. Before what? Before he had ceased being twenty-eight. Before that fuzzy image of a moving automobile. O wen stopped work to think about that. Scrawny wisps of memory skittered about the barren places of his mind. Sometimes two or three wisps touched and thereafter clung together. He had been sitting in an automobile. Sitting in the front seat. The automobile was moving very fast, almost too fast, hurtling along a road at breakneck speed. Perhaps he had been rushing to his carpenter's job. Something happened next. Something very big happened. Another shadowy image. The image crawled out of a worm hole at the bottom of his mind and crept forward to be examined. It touched W another image. A large truck. There was a large truck on the same road and it was moving toward him. Toward his automobile. Owen stepped back and stared up at his machine. The machine was as big as a truck; when he used his imagination it was the size and shape of a large truck -- that other truck which had appeared in front of his car. There it was! He had been sitting in the front seat of his own automobile, hurrying along a road, and a truck had rushed at him from nowhere. Well, the truck might have been there all the time but he hadn't been looking at it, hadn't seen it. He remembered a toolbox resting on the seat beside him. Suddenly the box was open and tools were flying through the windshield. Some of them were even hitting him. His automobile stopped quite suddenly. Owen was very certain, now, what happened to him. The speeding car, the unexpected truck, the hurtling tools were too vivid, too substantial to be dismissed. That had happened to him. Owen blinked at the unexpected mildness of that and wondered briefly why the experience hadn't followed the book. There had been no sharp division, no definite period of transition between the tools striking him and that drunken woman thumping him on the back as she shoved him through a door. The one blow had followed the others without meaningful separation. No rest period. Movement in the corner of his eye. Owen hastily returned to his machine when he caught a glimpse of the supervisor coming along the aisle. Pink clothing was like a neon signboard in such drab surroundings. The gray woman paused for a sullen moment and looked over his shoulder while he dutifully manufactured packages of bacon; rich, tasty bacon. When she continued on her way, Owen made a cucumber. He was fond of cucumbers. IV H e was surprised at the shortness of the work day; it had union hours beat handily. Owen guessed it wasn't much beyond noon when the gray haired supervisor blew a piercing blast on a whistle and stopped the works. The shrill noise careened around the building. He was the only one to cover his ears. The lifeless creatures manning the machines trooped to the great door and departed, exhibiting neither surprise nor regret; they mounted the road, which was now rolling in the opposite direction, and rode away without emotion. Owen followed them in like manner because the old gray eyes were watching him with frustration and suspicion. She seemed upset about something. Owen conquered a sudden impulse to turn around and waggle his fingers at her -- she might see well enough to note where he held his thumb. His return trip was uneventful. The old cemetery was dismissed IF with a casual glance because H no longer seemed important to him. He was preoccupied with a belated realization that no one at the factory, including himself, had made a trip to the drinking fountain or the men's room all morning long. That was decidedly odd. The little metal card in his pocket bore the pink blonde's door number. Owen fished it out to read it again. He began watching doors. The numbers dwindled as the road carried him to the southwest He found the proper dwelling after a while and swung off the road, looking over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching him. They weren't -- they were busy seeking their doors... Owen walked up the path and tried the door but k did not give under his hand. He put more strength into a second attempt but stffl it held fast. So he kicked the door open. The apartment reminded him of Ae factory, but on a smaller scale ei course. It consisted of one long room, having a number of opaque screens and other room dividers set here and there to break the vast, monotonous expanse of the whole. There were no pictures, no carpets, no useless dustcatchers. He located a lounging area, a dining area, a vaguely feminine place which would be the blonde's bedroom (double bed), a cubbyhole alongside it which served as a bath and another, smaller cubbyhole which contained a single stainless steel cot and nothing more. Owen stared at the cot and shuddered. The remainder of the apartment was a workshop, and here the suggestion of a factory was too broad to be ignored. The dominating structure in the room was the think and do machine -- a scaled-down replica of that same machine he had used this morning to manufacture bacon. The only otfier discemable difference to this machine was that It contained a delivery door on one side, an opening exactly resembling an oven door. Owen pulled it open to peer inside. The oven was empty but for a smidgin of dust and an odor which caused him to wrinkle his nose and quickly close the door. Three oblong boxes were stacked at the rear of the machine. Because he was nosy, Owen lifted the lid of the topmost box and looked inside. He closed it fast. A worn book caught his eye and he picked it up to riffle the pages. Owen guessed it to be a service manual. Several of the large inner pages folded out to resemble blueprints or schematic drawings or something. The text of the manual was written in a peculiar kind of English he failed to understand, but the illustrations were remarkably clear and comprehensible. They depicted men. Owen slammed shut the book, suddenly ill at ease. He did not like to look at skeletons and at livid, man-like things with their skins off. It was indecent. O wen found a jar of old coins tucked away in a corner of the workshop and was twisting off the lid when he heard a noise at the n door. He put down the jar and went to investigate. The blonde had come home. He said, "Nice little place you've got here." The blonde was staring at the shattered remains of her door. Her surprise on seeing him was equal to the dismay caused by the wreckage. "What are you doing here?" "Unfair! Unfair! You invited me -- now don't try to wriggle out of it." "What happened to this door?" "I kicked it open." "But why did you do that?" "Because it was locked," Owen said simply. A sharp, penetrating frown. "Are you looped?" "Not yet. I couldn't find anything in the house." "Why did you leave your job?" "The old woman -- you know. Granny -- stopped the works. She sent us home." "Why?" "I didn't ask. I'm not a company man." "Was there a breakdown?" "I didn't see any." "That is very unusual. Something must have gone wrong." "Too bad," Owen said. "I liked the hours, too." She looked past him into the interior of the house. "What were you doing in there?" "Casing the joint. It's a square layout." "It isn't square, it's a trapezoid. Our buildings are planned." Owen shook his head. "Honey, do you have any idea what a dumb broad is? The slightest idea?" "No." "I didn't think so." He waved her forward. "You might as well hop over that kindling and come on in. You stand out there yakking all day, people will think you're selling subscriptions or something." The blonde stepped over the wreckage of her door and entered the apartment in, something of a daze. "I confess I don't understand you at all. You are unlike any other man I have ever known. You are incomprehensible." "That makes two of us," he retorted. "What did you do with Indiana?" "I never had your Indiana. I don't know what it is." "Indiana was the place I lived in, back there, back when. What time is it now -- I mean, what year is it?" "One Hundred Sixty-one." "One Hundred and Sixty-one ivhat?" "What do you mean by what?" "There you are!" he shouted triumphantly. "What is A. D. or something like that." The blonde was bewildered. "What is A. D.?" Owen muttered, "A rose is a rose is a rose." He seized her hand and pulled her into the workshop. As before, she seemed startled by his unfamiliar action but went along readily enough. Owen paused near the think and do machine and pointed dramatically to the stack of oblong crates stacked beside it. IF "Poor old Yorick is stuffed in there, in that top box. Shame on you. T here had not been sufficient time for the startled expression to leave her face. "Do you know him?" she asked incredulously. "Never saw him before in my life. Either of my lives. Do you specialize in reconstituted orange juice?" Owen stepped close and peered into her eyes in what he hoped was an accusatory manner. "Fve got your number, baby!" "Of course you have. I gave it to you this morning." "Not that number!" Owen roared. "I mean, I know what's going on here. In this house -- this town. I know all about them zombies out there. They're recon jobs!" The pretty blonde stared at Owen for a long while as the shout died away and silence returned to the room. At last she said thoughtfully, You are flawed" Each word was given a careful enunciation to make it properly significant. Owen shifted uncomfortably under her stare, looked away, took a backward step and searched for somethiing to distract her attention. He felt like an ant under glass. The jar of old coins caught his eye and his imagination; he'd been about to examine them when the blonde came home. Now there was a handful of clues. Owen darted across the shop. He twisted off the lid and spilled the coins on a bench. Apparently she had tried to clean them. "Come here -- look at these things. Where did you get them?" The blonde joined him at tho bench, watching him carefully. "They turn up here and there, during excavations. The ancients used them in their religious ceremonies; they are called monies." "I know what they are," he said shortly. "Look at the datesl" Owen sorted the coins. There was a solitary penny, several dimes, a couple of quarters, a half dollar, and two other coins whichwere total strangers to his eye. The penny was dated # and Owen grunted his satisfaction at die familiar date. Two of the dimes were of the Mercury type bearing the dates # and #; the remainder were the later Roosevelt dimes and Owen inspected the date of each one with a concentrated interest. One dime was carefully put aside. The two quarters were of minimal interest because the dates were common. The half dollar was something else again and earned a careful scrutiny. Owen stared with disfavor at the man's profile stamped on the coin and muttered an indistinct vilification; imagine that jackass winding up famous! It was put aside with the dime. He hunched over the remaining, unfamiliar pieces. "Look at these things," he commanded the blonde. "Ten Shut. What is ten shut? What do you know about the AmerCan States? Does that mean what I think it means?" "It is said that AmerCan was a most ancient land, supposedly the possession of a mythical deity. I know nothing more than that." She studied his face, anticipating an expected ritual. 'Do you know about it?" "Never heard of the fool thing, but I can guess. Look here, they turned out these pieces in # and #. Boy -- talk about Buck Rogers stuff!" Owen dismissed the strange coins and returned his attention to the dime. He inspected it somberly, turned it over to read the mint mark and then rolled it in his fingers. It had the old feel of Indiana, the feel of home. After a moment he gave the dime to the girl. Read it." "Read what?" It was not what she was expecting. "The date." "One nine six zero. Is that significant?" "It sure as hell is, honey. #. That was minted just one year after I... after the... you know." He groped fMAe proper expression to mark the evt. "After you ceased being twentyeight?" Owen nodded, knowing a melancholy mood. "It gives a guy a funny feeling at the bottom of his stomaclL I mean, I didn't get that far, but here it is in my hand. The date reads funny. It makes a guy think." She asked softly. "Do you want me to withdraw?" "Withdraw? What for?" "You might want to pray privately." O wen nearly hurled the dime across the room. "You don't on it, dimwit, you spend it!" "Spend? How do you spend it?" "On beer -- when you can find dime beer." "What is beer?" "Booze," he retorted. The blonde brightened. "I know that term now. I have discovered that Booze was the name of a prehistoric god who manufactured alcoholic beverages for his people. The ancients drank it during their ceremonial ' orgies." "We sure as hell did, honey, with or without the orgies. And so did that crazy dame who had me last night. Where did she get the stuff?" The young woman revealed her frustration. "I don't know that I have not been able to locate your fabricator; you haven't been very helpful, you know. But I am certain that her unfortunate experiments with the alcohol was responsible for your flawed condition. It never happened before. There is no such thing as a faulted worker. That simply can't be permitted, of course." "Of course. So what do we do now? Fly kites?" The blonde folded her arms. The hesitation in answering was noticeable. "I admit to a certain curioaity." "About what?" "About you, Owen Hall. The flaw may have been deliberate." Owen studied the pink coveralls, A lively rubber ball of exhilaration snapped up and down his spine. "Do you suppose that babe had something in mind?" "I intend to find out" "How?" She only smiled and looked at liim. "Goody," Owen said after a moment. "I like surprises." O wen Hall woke up at some unknown hour of the night. He peered around in the darkness, seeking orientation, and then turned over in bed to gently prod the shoulder of the sleeping mechanic. The absolute hush of an untenanted night enfolded the apartment and the city beyond it. Owen knew without looking that the road was motionless and empty, and the park benches -- if they existed -- would be folded away. Perhaps even the moon had deserted the earth lest its light cause a stirring among nightbirds. The silence on the other side of the door was total. The blonde moved under his prodding. "What's the matter?" she asked drowsily. "I'm hungry." "Go to sleep. It isn't time to eat. "But I'm hungry now," Owen insisted. She pulled herself awake and sat up in bed, obviously annoyed. "Can't you wait until morning?" "No," Owen said and bounced out of bed. 'Tlit the deck." He pulled back the cover. "Chop, chop." The young woman climbed out with a suspicious word on her lips that aroused his wonder. He was sure he wouldn't like it if he understood it. She walked on bare feet to the kitchen and turned on a light. Owen said, "Wow," and looked at the view while the blonde snapped a switch above a stainless steel box set into the kitchen wall. Another contraption that reminded him of an oven. He watched in silence as she sullenly pushed a series of btittons below the shiny box ordering a meal. Nothing happen ed immediately and the blonde lean ed against the wall, fighting sleep Time slipped away. "What's holding up the show?" "Be patient," she said crossly. "It will be cooked and delivered in a moment." "Right out of the factory, eh? You babes sure have this town organized." A signal light winked into sudthe blonde pulled open an ovenlike door on the front. His breakfast was there, steaming hot. Owen stared at the monkey wrench. The wooden handle was done to a crisp. The woman was stunned. What is that?" "A monkey wrench. What did you think it was?" S he turned on him, her face clouded with the color of anger. Despite himself, Owen was entranced. He couldn't remember ever seeing a woman angry all the way down. "Look at me!" Owen lifted his gaze. "I am." "Tom did that!" "Guilty, your honor." n IF That is why the processing plant was shut down, that is why you were sent home early "I thought it was the union hours." She shook an excited finger in his face. "Do you realize what you've done? Do you realize people might go hungry tomorrow? Did you make many of those things?" "No," Owen said truthfully. "Just one of them. That one." "You are totally irresponsible!" "Aw, calm down. You said that before; you're always yakking about my flaws and my equilibrium. Go sing a new song." He inspected the smoking handle of the wrench and decided he wasn't hungry after all. It wouldn't be wise to request another order just now. She said omiously, "There will be no question about your equilibrium in the morning. There will be no flaws when you leave here." "Going to rebuild me, eh? A complete overhaul?" "You will not be flawed vhen I am finished with you." "Thafs what I thought." Owen looked at her symmetrical witchery. "Always wanting to take the fun out of Bfe, always wanting to knock everybody down to size. Honey, you've got a screwball world here and you can damn well keep it. If you prefer them zombies out there to me, die h with' it." He turned aod stalked out. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to bed," he called back from the other room. A moment later: "I'm in bed. See in what peace a Christian can die." The young woman stood in the kitchen for a long moment before snapping off the switch on the wall oven. The light followed, and still she waited in the darkness. At length she realized her bare feet were cold. Owen Hall's single day of life ded better than it had begun. tion #, Title #, United States Code.) #. DCbe of riUnK, OcU #, #. #. Title of publication. IF Street, New York, N.Y., #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business office of the publishers (not printers), #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y., #. # Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher Sol (#ohen, #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y... #. Editor Frederlk Pohl, #I Hu(kon Street, New York, N.Y., #, Managing Editor none. #. Owner: Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York. N.Y., #, Robert M. Guinn (Sole stockholder) #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y., #. #. Inown bdholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or securities: none, #. Paragraphs # and # Include. In eases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or lo any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom weh trustee ts acting, also ttse statemejnts of two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to tho dreumstanoes and conditions undler which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and eecurlties In a capacity other than that a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which Itself Is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing ooiooratlon have been Included In paragraphs T and # when the Interests of such individuals art equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run) ; average no. copies each Issue during proceeding # months: #: single Issue nearest to filing date. #. B. Paid circulation. #. To term subscrlbeat by mail carrier delivery or by other means: average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #t: single issue nearest to filing date, #. #. Sales through agents, news dealers, or otherwise: averago no. copies each Issue during preceding # montte: #; single issue nearest to filing data: #M. C. Free distribution (Including samples) by mall, carrier delivery, or by other means: average no. eoplaa each issue during preceding # months: none; single issue nearest to filing data: none. D. Total no. of copies each issue during preceding # montbs. #; single issue nearest o filing date: #. I eertlfy that the statements made by me abora are correct and eomplata. Sol CWmb, Publisher. IF  Novelette If Is good fo place things In perspective--but can you be sure the perspective h yours? I T he momeoft Bill Wheeler stepped into the bathroom, both little girls shrieked and leapt out of the bath. Bill grabbed for Hannah and Iris wife grabbed for Tammy. She missed, he connected, but Hannah twisted out of hts grasp, left him with a hanctfnl of suds, and chased the other handful of suds into the nursery. A moment later they were back brandishing sheets of drawing-paper covered with bold drawings. "Look, Daddy! Look what I drew at school!" yelled Tammy. "Look, I drew something too!" shouted Hannah. "Look, look, look, look!" Their mother shushed helplessly through the steam but Bill just laughed. "Look, Daddy, stop laughing Daddy. Look at our pictures." "All right, already," he said. "Now one at a time, for Heaven's sake. Get in a line, why don't you?" "They'll get in the bath again if anywhere," said Mrs. Wheeler, and firmly lifted Hannah -- the nearest and smallest -- over the rim, her pink sudsy legs kicking in the air. "Well, you seem to have your feet on the ground," he said to his other daughter. "Oh, come on, Daddy," she answered. and thrust the drawing towards him. He took it from her, and, prolonging the suspense, slowly fetched from his inside pocket a leather case from which he took his lenses and fixed them deliberately on his nose. Meanwhile Hannah was energetically resisting her mother's efforts to soap her arms and was beating the back of her father's neck with a roll of drawing paper. Mrs. Wheeler acted like a wise mother, and whipped the roll of paper out of one daughter's hand and wrapped the other in a shroud-sized towel. "Let's keep it a little quiet," said Bill. "I 'm concentrating on Tammy's picture." There was a comparative silence, broken only by a suppressed whinnying from the two girls. "Now let's see. Right in the front, bigger than everything else, there's a man with a fur round his neck -- " "That's not fur. Daddy," said Tammy from inside the towel. "That's a beard." "And he seems to be wearing a sort of yachting jacket covered with bottle tops." "Silly, Daddy! That's his Space Police uniform with his rows and rows of medals." "Oh, yes. Well, behind him a piece there's this space cruiser on its hind legs, there's a couple more people in yachting jackets -- " "Oh, Daddyr " -- round a little fire, and then there's trees and flowers and so on and a monster artichoke -- " "It's a Murray person. Daddy. A Murray person." "I see now by the warts. And then there's more trees very small in the background, and after that there's a little, little man walking away into the distance." "Now look at mine! Now look at mine!" came a shout out of the steam in the bath, and Hannah purameled at her mother's arm. i#T)ut that somewhere safe for JL me," said Bill to his elder daughter, handing her back her drawing. "I must look at Hannah's." From the window-sill he picked up the other drawing and opened it. "Remarkable unanimity of theme, I see," he said. "There's this big man with a beard in the front and then halfway back the other two medium-sized men by the fire and the warty artichoke -- " "Murray person!" screamed Hannah, incensed, from the bath. "And then the line of trees and then the little man in the distance." "Come on, Daddyl Guess what it represents. Daddy!" "I really can't think," said their father in mock mystificatiofi. 'Something you read about hi school?" "You're being so stupid, Daddy," said Hannah. Tammy released herself from the towel and wound it instead round her father's legs. "Daddy really knows," she said scornfully. "He's just pretending." "I don't know," said Bill. "It's you on the Federation satellite, Daddy. Don't you see?" sidd Hannah eagerly. "There's you in the front with the medals, and behind's Levine and Matsuki and right in the back's the cd man getting smaller and smaller. "Don't you see?" "Well, now you mention it. I do see Levine and Matsuki and I just see the o!kl man, though he's got a bit small in this picture. But I don't see me. Unless you mean this bearded monkey up front here -- but he's nothing Ifte me." "You're so sffly sometimes. Daddy," said Tammy. "Of course it's you in tbc picture." "I guess they've finished their bath," said BiU's wife. "Time for our story! Time for our story!" "Okay, so let's be off," said Bill. He waited for the resolution of an unequeal three-way struggle between Hannah and her mother and Hannah's flowered nightshirt and then they were ready. Bill snatched his two diildren up into his arms, from which point they instantly started tugging at his reddish beard. "Easy on the steering," he said and swept them through into die nursery, where he inserted one into die b with the elephants on the quih and the other into the bed widi die lions on the quilt. They popped straight out again like corks from a champagne bottle and, bouncii round him, changed beds. He bared his teeth and hooded his eyes SatankaQy. "Drat it," he said. "Where did I put those children?" "Wrong beds," said Hanmdi, snugging down into the covers unti only her curly topknot showed. "Now tell us the story of you and Levine and Matsuko on the Federatkm satellite." "You don't want that old story again? I've told it to you a dozen times. And it's sort of sad." "The Federation satellite! The Federation satellite!" "Don't you want the one about the witch, the wolves and the little girl who Hved on Endymion IV?" "You and the Federation satdlitel" "The Federation satellite it is then. Ready now. It was like this." He stopped. Hannah's topknot had disappeared and he could see nothing of her except a bulge under the bedclothes like a goat in the stoma of a boa constrictor. "Did I lose you?" he asked. "Oh, I see. Ten! Nine! Sight! Seven! SixIFive! Fourl Three! Two! -- um -- urn -- One! Fire all!" With a whining and a spluttering Hannah emerged from her boa constrictor and sat up straight with her arms above her head, grinning and giggling. "All ipshape now? Well, I'll begin." IF II #CTackaways in the dim past beAJ fore you two nonsenses were thought of, (he said), a ship set out from Glenn Field, New Mexico, carrying three men, a Murray and just a heap of papers and pictures. The first man was Levine, Earth's ambassador to the Galactic Federation; the second was Matsuki, a captain in the Space Police; and the third man was his engineer, as stupid, lazy and bearded a man as you could hope to meet. Til not tell you his name. ("Daddy!" shouted Tammy and Hannah together.) Don't interrupt. Their mission was to deliver Levine and his heap of papers and pictures to a meetingplace where he would talk to people from the Federation. Levine was going to do the talking; the Murray, as you know, just keeps the artificial gravity going; the engineer was to run the ship and Matsuki was there sort of to run the Murray and the engineer. So when the ship got to the meeting-place they found the Federation hadn't arrived. But they'd left a biggish disk-island floating there -- luckily the right way up or we'd all have slipped off. And they'd left a signal beacon which guided the ship in to land. The signal beacon also said they should wait there, the Federation people would be along in about four Earth days. The engineer looked through a porthole and everything looked okay; he opened the ventilator and the air sniffed okay. So everybody got out and took a walk. Well, you kids these days know as much about the Federation as I do, but I'll just say that in those days we knew pretty little about them. Wo sort of suspected they were good eggs, but it was Levine's job to find out exactly how good. Very brave man, Levine. So anyway, everybody got out. The ship had landed in what looked like a clearing in a wood. Around them were trees and shrubs of all Earth varieties -- more like the Botanical Gardens, reaHy, than a natural wood. And between the trees were scattered irregular beds of vegetables and flowers. Some of them looked recently dug over. To be exact about the vegetables, there were beds of tomatoes, beds of carrots, beds of onions, beds of celery and beds of lettuce. Since there were also apple trees, peach trees, lemon trees, grapefruit trees, mulberry trees and grape vines the three men made themselves a delicious fresh salad like the one you had tonight. This, I may say, they were very glad and very lucky to get after weeks in space. (He looked sternly at the children. Tammy giggled guiltily. Hannah squirmed and giggled.) So the sun was still high and they decided to see what the rest of the country was like. They left the ship on automatic and set off along what might have been a path through the trees. The land sloped upwards, very slightly at first, then more steeply, so that finally they came to a nearlyvertical rampart or ridge about ten feet high which curved inwards round them on both sides. Along tI the top of it grew a line of fir trees. They scrambled up the ridge and found themselves looking down on a flat and level plain that dipped away before them.  "I guess this is an old volcano crater," said Matsuki, who (as a good captain) liked to make classifications as firm as possible. Or maybe an old meteor crater?" said Levine, who (as a good diplomat) liked his classifications fluid. 'T guess so," said the engineer, who (as a good engineer) was stupid. Beyond the ring of trees they could see countryside much like the area within the saucer -- a pizza of flowers and vegetable patches, peppered with fruit trees. In some places the engineer thought he could discern paths through the trees, but they were so scattered and irregular that they might have been skeins of last year's leaves piled up by the wind between the trees. The sun was bright overhead; the light breeze was fresh and dry; the metal of the ship glinted sharply behind them across the grove. But the air in the plain beyond was misty and moist, and the horizon was lost in a faint blue haze which hid anything further than about five miles out. The engineer, with his marvellously sharp eyes, was the first to see the figure who is the strange hero of this story. ("The old mani The old man!" shouted the children delightedly.) T he old man. This rugged figure was climbing slowly through the trees up the rim of the glade in which the Earthmen stood. He was dressed in baggy old blue denim pants and a patched tartan shirt. In one hand he carried a knobbly beechwood staff, in the other a bundle. The engineer nudged the other two Earthmen and together they stood up under the pines along the perimeter of the glade and waved and shouted to the old man. He untwisted himself as reluctantly as a #-year old apple tree and raised his stick in greeting... "I'll be along presently," he called up to them. "Just you wait where you are." A few moments later the old man reached the top of the rise with a considerable puffing and blowing. ("And spitting. Daddy," said Hannah. "You forgot the spitting." And she gave a vigorous imitation of what she meant. "Well, yes. That's true. He was spitting a bit, too. But that's no reason for you to." Bill fell silent for a moment, and cleared his throat. Hannah culminated her display in a paroxysm of sniffing and hissing, then settled back on her pillow grinning. "Well, when he got to the top, he held out his hand to Levine and said -- " " 'Welcome to the Federation, sir. My name's Gardner. Make yourself at home, sir, you and your company. Fll do what I can to make you comfortable, but don't ask no questions, I just work here,' " said Tammy all in one breath. "That's right. Then he laid his bundle on the ground and unwrapped a striped flannel rag and fetched out the carcass of a fat hare.'O IF "I trapped this out in the blueberry patch isi the valley. I was busy with my traps and I didn't see you arrive until you was already here, almost. I'd better hurry and make your fire or he won't be done by dinner time." "Well, I'm sure that's most kind ot you, Mr. Gardner," siid Levine. 'But I don't think we lijcd a fire. We've got a small stove built into the extension heat-engine of our ship." "It'll be all the better done over wood, sir. And you'll need a little fire of an evening." "Well, that's most hospitable." "Now I hope you've everything you want. There's a spring for water to the south of your ship about # yards. You can tell which is south by the sun. I thought of making the fire between there and the ship. You'll see there's a couple of fallen trees there'll make comfortable seating, I think." "Sounds like a holiday!" said Matsuki, rolling up his sleeves and taking deep breaths of the pinescented air. "I certainly hope it will be one, sir," said Gardner. "I'm going over now to make up your fire. Why don't you look around? I'm afraid I have to ask you not to go further out than the ridge around this dip here Beyond there I'm not supposed to take you. And you'd need a gukle." Levine said, "Ya, sure. We'll just v.alk around for now." When they got back to the ship they found the (Ad man had picked a camp site for them. He was sitting on a fallen log stirring a pot which hung on a tripod of sticks over a crackling fire. They crowded round the pot. "Smells good," said Matsuki, rudely dipping his finger in. "Tastes good, too." "It's the hare, sir," said the old man. "As a matter of fact I added to it some juice I made last year. You take grapes, and squeeze them, and if you let them ferment -- " "That's a remarkable process," said the engineer. "Perhaps you could patent it." " 'Patent?' I don't know the word, sir." "Never mind," said Matsuko, who was a gluttonous eater. "What say we eat? Eh?" He looked round the group, his eyes pleading. So the engineer was sent to get the plates and they sat down round the fire and helped themselves from the pot. B y the time they had finished the sun had gone down. The old man collected their plates and they heard him rinse them in the spring in the darkness beyond the fire. When he came back he was carrying an earthenware jar corked at the neck. "I Ve got some more of that juice I spoke of," he said. "Would you like some to drink after dinner?" "You bet," said Matsuki and ambled to the ship and brought mugs. The old man uncorked the bottle. For a long time the four men sat around the little fire in a silence broken only by the sounds of the IF engineer's gurgling pipe, and of Matsuki smacking his lips and of ine' restless pencD. "What are you doing?" asked the old man. "I'm drawing," said Levine. "I do it when I've nothing else to do." "Can I look, please?" "Of course. Come and sit over here." The old man moved round and the engineer made a place for him. "I see," he said. "But that's marvelous. You're making a picture of us. There's the cooking pot very big in front and beyond with the light on half his face, is Captain Matsuki picking his teeth. That's marvelous. Coidd you draw me?" "Of course. Sit opposite me where I can see you without the light in my eyes." The old man went over where he pointed. He tore out the sheet he'd been working on and selected a long stick of charcoal. The old man watched his hands in fascination. Levine began to draw. "Who are you, Mr. Gardner? How did you get here? Are you human?" "Oh yes, sir," said the old man proudly. "I'm human all right. I know why you ask. I've seen some clever robots. But my parents were human all right, servants to colonists on Stoneground." Levine grunted. "There haven't been colonists on Stoneground since the Damp hit the planet # years ago. It's pretty far from Earth's other colonies, you know." The old man didn't answer for a while. He was watching Levkies careful movements. Following his gaze, the engineer realized that Levine was drawing much slower than usual, though the old man couldn't know that. The old man's attention was on Levine's drawing, but Levine's was on the old man's words. "Oh, yes, the Damp got my. parents, and my parents' master and mistress. But I was in a Jdddy-cabin the master and mistress had used for their own children and passed on to my parents. So when the Damp came I escaped." "That's funny." "Why, sir?" "Well, the police sent out a census force after the Damp passed on. They traced every single colonist who'd been noted in the census before. And buried them, too. I remember reading an abstract of the report. Even when colonies have to be written off we have to find out what happened. I'm sorry if this u painful, but it's important to Earth what happens to Barthmen." "I'm not hurt. It's o long ago now. I'm proud you ould inquire, sir. The truth is I was bom after die last census of the living planet and then the Damp came. They never knew I existed." "I see. Well, what happened then?" "It's simple, really. When the Federation spotted die Damp on Stoneground they sent a fumigation team in right away. Now that you know about the Damp I expect you do the same." "Yes, we do." "You see Stoneground's one of Earth's farthest colonies. Well, it's V also OD the outskirts ot the Federation territory." "I suppose it is, yes." "I was the first human being the Federation ever met, so they tell me. I was eight years old. Well, they began to study my environment at once -- fetched a whole farmhouse and everything in it from Stoneground and installed it on one of their planets, and brought along an old rancher and his wife from Stoneground's neighbor Bullrush. They were my stepfather and mother, old Mr. and Mrs. Gardner of Bullrush. They died years ago. I"m lucky to be alive myself." "TTiat's a strange story. How did you get here?" "They put me here as curator. This is Earth-Heaven, the Federation's gift to Earth. They feel you should have somewhere in this sector you can call home." "It's certainly like Earth, It's a wonderful job." "I believe it is. But it's only a mock-up. Very beautiful, of course, but it's not Earth." "I guess not, Gardner, Home's always something special." "I wish one day I could go to your home, Man's home. I'd like to see i once. I hope you don't mind me mentioning that? I'd so like to go in a ship back to Earth." The old man gazed into the fire. Levine glanced at Matsuki and Matsuki looked questioningly at the engineer. When the engineer felt their eyes on him he shrugged his shoulders. "There's room" he said, "Why shouldn't there be enough room for one more?" m M atsuki had been lying all afternoon in the long grass just below the boundary ridge of the encampment. Now he came strolling back towards the ship and found the others drinking mugs of tea. "How on Earth -- ?" he asked. "It's not perhaps quite what you're used to, sir," said Gardner, mugs. "I did what I could with the local product. I found a bush down in the valley and I took the liberty of picking some myself last year and drying it in the sun." "You know, this is some climate. Old Gardner gets us tea. And while I was lying out there I saw a couple of flights of duck, Striped and Peking, and pigeons and even a swan. I haven't eaten swan since once in Normandy, there was a little place... It hurts to remember those days. I wish we had a little gun, I really do." "It's more than my job's worth, Matsuki," said Levine. "Not even one small atomic cannon." Silently the engineer handed Matsuki a forked stick he'd been whittling. "I think this may serve. If you ask Levine pleasantly, he might open his briefcase and give you a few of the government's rubberbands. And even some paper clips as bullet." "Hey, that's not a bad idea. But pebbles would make heavier bullets. What about it, Ambassador? You wouldn't lose your job over a few rubberbands?" "I guess not. I'll get you some after tea." Levine settled back to IP his drawing. He only knew how to draw two ways. Sometimes he would draw things around him at that moment; sometimes he would draw his wife. She was a cheerful, dumpy woman and they had several cheerful, dark-eyed children. Gardner roasted hedgehogs in clay for dinner that night. The next day Matsuki frightened several pigeons and bruised a woodcock. Levine drew his wife as a tall blonde, since his imagination ran away with him when he was away from home. The engineer made Matguki a crossbow with a telescopic sight out of some pieces of an optical scanner, a tunic-hanger and three Space Police belts. Gardner charcoal-grilled a brace of pheasants and washed Levine's white shirts. T he next day was a bit different. It happens that this engineer was a light sleeper. Like his youngest daughter -- but not like his wife and his lazybones elder daughter. (Tammy squirmed protestingly.) Anyway, he awoke the next morning around # a.m. or #:#. Mist hung among the trees in the glade; the shadows of the trunks slanted through it making a network of biue bars. The rail of the ship's ladder was damp with the morning dew and, running his hand along it, he swept up a stream of water. Below him the old man was poking around the campfire. A thin trickle of smoke wavered up towards the tree tops. "Hullo, Gardner. How are you tibis morning?" asked the engineer, belting his woollen robe around him. "Good morning, Mr. Wheeler, sir," said the old man. "I'm just finishing your fire. Then I'll be off and maybe find some eggs for breakfast. That would suit, I hope?" "Excellent. I'll come with you." "Well, to be "honest, sir. I'd rather you didn't, if you don't mind me saying so, sir. The chidcens usutdfy lay in the raspberry bramble tlmt I have, and that out. beyond fiie perimeter." "Come on, then. I'll come widi you to the edge of the grove." "Well, thafs all right." The two set off together, the dd man switching away fiercely at nettles and ragwort in the grass, plants that hurt his professional pride. The young engineer watched him curiously. "Why can't I go outside the glade?" "It's not 'can't', sir, if you understand me. It's just sort of this part has been laid out for your party and in a way the rest hasn't. I'll show you what I mean when we get there." In a few minutes they got up onto the rampart under the pines and stopped. "Fm going over there," said Gardner, pointing to a green patch about half a mile away. "That's the raspberry patch. But I doubt you could make it out there. You'd get lost. Walk a few yards and you'll see what I mean." The engineer smiled at the old man's distrust of his sense of direction and stepped out amiably down the slope with him. Immediately he sensed that the air outside the bowl was entirely different from that above. It must be as steamy as a jungle, was his first thought. He could hardly see the old man ahead of him, and the tops of the low fruit trees were lost in the swirling mist. He went forward uncertainly, tripped on the uneven ground. When he looked up there was nothing to be seen anywhere. He was surrounded by an even glow which cut him off from his surroundings as surely as if he had been sitting in a light globe. If this was mist, it was the thicket -- and dryest -- he'd ever been in. "Hey, Gardnerl" he shouted. "Get me out of this." XTothing happened. He experimented by putting his hand close to his face. When he held it a couple of inches from his eyes it was just visible as a dark shadow. Not only could he see nothing, but he discovered with a start that he could hear nothing except the beat of his own heart and a hiss that could as easily have been in his ears as in the trees. "All right, Gardner. I see what you mean." He had meant to speak aloud, but his words were absorbed and muffled by the pressing blankness so that he did not know whether he had actually spoken. But immediately he felt a hand on his shouldej. He got up, and the hand guided him along a winding track that led upward. Within a few steps his vision began to clear, he saw the trees take shape like people in a Turkish bath and a few minutes later they were standing on the ridge looking down on the deceptively inviting country. "It's just a little hazy down there, sir." The engineer nodded apologetically. "I'll be off for the eggs. You stay up here and you'll be all right." The engineer watched the old man set off determinedly towards his raspberry patch, skirting the trees and shrubs without even looking up. When he was a hundred yards down the path the engineer turned and sprinted back to the ship. He mounted the ladder two steps at a time and skidded through the ship to the captain's cabin. Once inside he shook Matsuki awake. "What's the matter? Can't you let anyone sleep?" "Up. cap'n," said the engineer, saluting rudely. "Help's needed." Matsuki leapt out of bed instantly and made for the door that led onto the conrol deck. The engineer put his arm across it. "No trouble -- yet. Relax. Just bring a rope, will you? And put on a robe. We're going outside." The captain sighed. "I'll never get to sleep again now," he said grumpily. "I'll come." Soon they both stood on the grass outside, the engineer in his matted wool gown and slippers and the captain in a quilted silk coat with a black dragon on it and his woodsoled sandals. "We'll go this way," said the engineer and led his chief the same way he had gone earlier. When they reached the ridge he waited for the captain to stop yawning and deep-breathing, and then IF pointed to the raspberry patch and the dark dot within it which was the laboring Gardner. "Now," he said. "I'm going to hold the rope and I want you to walk down there a ort way just paying out the rope as you go. Right?" "Sure, if that's what makes you happy for today. How far do you think I should go?" "Please yourself, skipper. You won't want to go far." Shrugging his shoulders, the caplain gave the engineer the end of the rope and set off down the hill, paying it out off his arm. The engineer saw him set off steadily enough, then slow down and go more cautiously; then the captain walked straight into a bramble bush, and fell in. The engineer heard him make some rude comments on the engineer and on the bush. Then he got up again. He was moving his hands cautiously ahead of hhn, and shuffling his feet hesitantly. "All right, if you're so clever!" rtiouted the captain. "What do I do now? "Come out," said the engineer. The rope was still coiled around flie captain's fist, so the engineer pulled gently "This way," he shouted. Slowly and circumspectly (that is, with caution and care) the captain climbed the hill. "Misty down there?" asked the wigineer when Matuski reached the top. "Misty? Are you kidding? It's absolutely impenetrable." He looked exasperated. what's the story." #ome back to the p and  tell you." Together they set off over the ngy pine-neles. 'Well, first, it's not misty down diere. Not like with mist." "I see what you mean. It's not danrp." "Second, it certainly is difficult to see. As if everything were out of focus and all energy were being absorbed." "Hmm." "Well, now, when we're both home at Glenn Reid and I'm visiting you for the evening, what do I do first and always?" "Kiss my wife, you slob." "Well, second." "Let me see. You get a drink. No, that's not it. I know! You go over to the solido cabinet and fiddle with the knobs." "Right. And what is the result?" "It sort of gets rid of some of the fog. I don't know how it's done." "No. Well, I'm the engineer. But basically I'd say it stops the light running around like particles as disorganized as a herd of pigs and gets them in neat rows like waves." "So you once told me. But I don't see any control panel." "No, that's rit, you don't. But if I run into the ship I think I can lay my finger on a device which would do the same for the landscape. You wait here and I'll look." The engineer climbed the ladder and rummaged around as promised and sure enough laid his hands on the thing he wanted. It was a round thingumajig with a handle on one end and a dark eye the other. He handed it to the captain. "That's the feflow. Now one of us goes out and looks around. The other stays and watches the power gauges on the power beam to this thing, and looks after His Excellency." "His Excellency will look after himself," said Levine from the tc of the ladder. He was formally attired in a black tee-shirt and pinstripe morning shorts. His hair was combed, his chin irreproachably shaved and his teeth shone as brightly as a control board in an emergency. "Good morning, you old liar," shouted the captain. "This morning the entertainment is provided by the engine-room." "Since we're all here. I'll kind of assign everyone to their places," said the engineer, not at all taken aback. "Levine will sit here making us some coffee. If Gardner comes, say we're out gathering shredded wheat in the plantations and we'fl be back any moment. I shall stay in the engine-room balancing the power output of the dibblefook that the captain's carrying, and the intrepid captain shall walk down into the plain and see what he can see. Everybody know their lines?" Levine said, "I'll be boiled if I know what's going on around this camp, but don't mind me." The captain fingered the dancHeprib experimentally. "I just press this button, huh?" "Right," said the engineer. "And point the suttleprobe at what you want to see. Give me a moment to lock the direction-finder on you, and then start walking. If you're not back by # hours we'U send out the bloodhounds." He turned and disappeared into the ship. A few moments later Levine and Matsuki heard the whine of the auxiliary power come on. The captain shrugged his shoulders and set off towards the pines. Well, for the next hour the engineer did what engineers do in engine-rooms when they're controlling ganglehubs -- ("You said dibblefook before. Daddy," said Tammy. "Suttleprobe," said Hannah. "Hush. I said dinglegrape.") -- And Levine did whatever people do with coffee. I should think he snoozed by the fire mostly. And finally the captain came running over the edge of the ridge and down into the camp. "The weirdest thing," he panted. "The weirdest thing! Hey, greaseball, come on out of the ship! Tve got news for you." A few moments later the engineer came grinning down the ladder. "The gimbelsone really worked. It was sure drawing some power." "Sure it worked. It was clearing out an area about # foot ahead and quite a bit on both sides and beyond that -- just a wall of mist like a screen. Well, I walked down from the ridge and for, oh, say a hundred yards, two hundred, the country was like you'd expect -- like an earthy slope, with some stones and rocki and grass and those old trees. these kept on, but I gradually had the impression the grass was getting finer and the trees were sort at stunted, or as if they were only bushes out there. Pretty soon it got # there wasn't a thing growing ive knee high. Like toy trees. Or really like a Japanese garden -- I remember those from when I was a kid. Well, here's the weird thing. I kept on even further and those trees got smaller and smaller the further out I went, and about a hundred yards further on they were nothing but a fuzz on the ground and beyond that nothing at all. Just nothing at all. I was walking in a bubble of mist on bare steel plates. That's all there is out there." IV '"Te engineer was the first to reA act. He got up and walked out towards the ridge. The others followed. When they reached the line of pines they stopped. The old gardener was half way back from the distant raspberry patch, a hunched figure growing larger with each step. When he got up to where they stood in line cm the ridge he opened his kerchief and showed them a heap of speckly eggs and dark red fruit. I see Mr. Matsuki and Mr. Levine got up. I hope you slept well." "We were just going to haiw breakfast. Come and join us." "Well, thank you kindly." They walked over to the campsite in silence. Levine poured four mugs of coffee. Gardner fetched water from the spring and put the eggs on to boil. "Reckon you'll be off in a few days," he said. Levine nodded, "I'm afraid so. Tomorrow back to work." "You won't forget to ask if I ean come back with you, will you?" "Of course not. You should see Earth. Earth's really something." The engineer had been gazing into the fire without saying anything aince breakfast started. Now he looked up and blurted out, "Look, I'm not sure you could come with us. It's not as simple as that I" He poked at the embers of the fire. "I think I could settle the matter, if we could do some tests." "What would you want me to do?" "Well, first, when you go out beyond the ridge do you find it difficult to see?" "Yes, a little. But not so difficult as you. I'm more used to it." "For instance, when you're out where you were this morning, could you look back and see the pines round our camp?" "No. They'd be hidden in the mist. I'd lose sight of them after walking just a few minutes." "Well, what I propose to do is fix up a sort of searchlight which will light up the trees on the ridge so that they can be seen from the plain. But you've got to think this over. There's a possibility that what you see may be a sihock. But on the other hand we can't take you back to Earth without doing some experiment like this. You ought to think it over." "I have thought it over," said Gardner. "I want to go and I'll do anything that's necessary. I can't believe that there's anything around here would surprise me after all these years." "Right, then. Now here's what we've got to do. I'm going to give the trundlebib to Levine, and you and he will go out to the perimeter. I'll hook up a three-way communication link, too. We'll be able to hear anything you say, if you don't go more than # miles out, and you'll hear what we say. Just wait out here while I lock onto you." The engineer refilled his mug from the pot by the fire and carried it with him into the ship. The secondary power went on, and in a moment the three men heard his voice. It buzzed in their ears with a slight penetrating whine. Matsuki realized that the engineer must have tuned his output to resonate his hearer's teeth. "Now if Levine and Gardner would walk towards the perimeter ... Any direction will do." Matsuki watched them walk toward the pines. Around him buzzed a few gnats attracted by the camp fire. A few late summer leaves floated down from the lemon trees. The empy billycan over the fire rattled in the breeze." S uddenly Levine's voice buzzed in his head. "We reached the perimeter." "Now I want you both to go down about # yards." "Right. We made it." "I want Levine to place the danderglod on the ground facing up into the trees. Press it into the soil, that won't hurt it. And go and stand under the trees where it's pointing. From here on, Gardner must go alone." IF "rm quite used to that, if you don't mind, my boy," said Gardner. "Please go cautiously. Just go about # feet." There was a pause. "I've done that," said Gardner. "Now look back. What do you see?" "Well, there's the line of pines, and under them's Mr. Levine." "Now, raise your hand and lift your little finger and see if it will cover Levine." "Uh-huh. It just about does -- all but his head." "All right, now move on down. Now go slow. I don't want you to move more than # feet, okay? Now look around you. What do you see?" "Everything's pretty misty down here, of course. There's the three palms with the grape-vines on them, just as usual. Grapes could do with picking. I'd say. Nothing else." "Everything look about the right size?" "Sure thing. Mighty fine big grapes, though." "Now look back towards Levine. See anything?" "No. Fog's too bad at this level." "Now, this is the important part. Keep looking towards Levine. I'm going to turn on the hubbleswopc. Remember -- everything may be a bit distorted." There was silence and then suddenly a sharp intake of breath from the old man. "Quite a turn that gave me! Thought Mr. Levine was right on top of me for a moment, right next to me! But I see he's still under the pines. Looks big, though." "I thought that would be the effect. Hold up your finger and try to cover him up again." "Well, that's kind of funny. I -- let me see -- I just can, well, 'cept for his head." "Hmm. Well, walk a little further and we'll try again." There was a long wait. "Don't go too far!" "Hold your horses, young man," said Gardner. "There's something I want to do." "I'm sorry," said the engineer. "Let me know when you're about ready." There was a much longer silence, and Matsuki, looking up, noticed with a shock that the satellite's sun was dead above die trees. Their breakfast hand stretched right into noontime. Suddenly Gardner spoke again. "I'm ready to look again now if you want to turn on the power." "Here we go again, then." Instantly they heard the old man scream hysterically, "Oh, God -- he's like a -- !" The sentence ended in a choking groan. There was a grinding noise and a thump and then silence. Matsuki sprang up and upset the coffee pot into the fire where it hissed and bubbled. The engineer came flying down the ladder in one jump. He was shouting, "Everyone stay where they are! Levine stay under the pines. Matsuki stay by the fire and make some coffee and get the liquor out of the ship. Above all, Levine, don't go down there!" He plunged through a thicket of light pink azaleas toward the perimeter. n V VXell, there was nothing anyone could da. Levine said that after the old man had told the engineer to hold his horses, he'd set off much further into the plain until Levine had finally lost sight of him. If he'd fallen and hurt himself, we'd probably have never found his body. And if we walked down to him and he saw us coming it would just have made things worse. They stood together on the perimeter near the spot where the old man had left Levine, and the engineer explained what it was the old man had seen and why. They left Matsuki looking out for the old man and the other two went back to the camp fire. Every two minutes Levine said over the telephone link, "Hullo, Mr. Gardner. Can you hear me? This is Levine. Please come up to the camp and I will explain." Finally the old man answered. "I'll come out. Wait up there for me. I think I must have fainted." When he came up the rampart Matsuki took his arm and helped him to the campfire. There the Earthmen gave him coffee laced with whiskey from their First Aid kit. After a while he looked less pale. Finally he said, "It was the shock of seeing Mr. Levine -- like a giant on the horizon -- taller than your ship!" "I believe it," said the engineer. "I guess you found out something I ought to know." The engineer nodded glumly. "Something bad?" The engineer nodded again. "I can't go back to Earth with you?" Nobody poke. "Tell me why, please." Matsuki looked at Levine. The engineer looked into the fire. Levine took a deep breath. "I'll tell you," he said. He got up and stood opposite Gardner. "How big am I?" he asked. "Say, five foot nine." "Hold your hand out straight, and try and cover me with your little finger. Can you do it?" "No." "All right. I'm bigger than your finger." He walked several paces further off. "Can you do it now?" "Almost." "At this distance I'm almost smaller than your finger." He walked out towards the perimeter and stopped again. "Try now," he said. "I can do it easily now." Levine ran back to the fire, and took out a sheet of drawing paper. He sketched an avenue of trees marching back into the distance and disappearing at the horizon. In the avenue he put three figures, one in the foreground, one in the middleground and one a long way away. "That's me near," he said, pointing to the first figure. "I look big. And here's me further away, and here's me a long way away. You can cover me up with just the tip of your finger. Well, when you actually look at me I'm always the same size -- I just look smaller or larger. But this picture of me, this one in the front, actually is larger than the one in the back. Do you see?" The old man was not looking at Levine's drawing any more; he was gazing out miserably towards the line of pines on the ridge. He nodded slowly. IP Levine made a sign to the others and the three Earthmen walked unhappily back to their ship. After a while the engineer said bitterly, "We will have to thank the Federation for their hospitality. They meant very well by bringing us down in a picture of Earth. We just never got around to realizing they'd include a picture of an Earthman." iiThat's not all," said Tammy A after a moment. "You haven't told what the old man did." "That's really the sad part. I didn't want to tell you a sad story at bedtime." "I know, Daddy, but it's part of the story, isn't it?" "Yup, I guess so. Well, after a time the old man came up to Levine holding the sketch and said, 'And when you've finished with your picture you just put it away in its folder?' Levine nodded. The old man put hk brown finger in the middle of tile horizon. 'What happens back there? " 'We call it the vanishing point. AH the lines in the picture are supposed to meet there and vanish.' " 'I'll head that way. I'm still a human being and I'd like to go out like one,' "I can't remember we found anything to say to that. He went off to do his work as usual, and the next morning he came in with a chicken and a couple of pineapples. " 'A farewell present,' he said. 'I've a bit of everything out there. I'll do all right along the way.' "So sometime after breakfast we sort of all got up together and went out to the pines. And there we just all shook hands and he tucked his old striped cloth in his belt and picked up his staff and set off down the track. It was a fantastically dear day. For a long, long time the three men, Matsuki, Levine and the engineer watched him getting smaller and smaller. "And that is all." F or a short time neither of the children spoke. Then Tammy opened her eyes. "My picture, the teacher at school said it was very advanced, the way I'd made the people get smaller toward the back of the picture. She said most children don't do that because it's not the way it looks to most children. Well, it doesn't. I just drew it how you said it happened. Didn't I?" She snuggled down under the covers. "Sure you did, turnip. Sure." After a moment or two he said, "Hey-ho, why don't you two fellows go to sleep, ho?" Neither answered, so he disengaged his hand from Hannah's moist fist, kissed them both on the tops of their heads, tiptoed into the hallway leaving their door ajar and ran down the stairs      IF # Short Stcrf Come along for o day's sailing- and the around beneath vour keel! T he skipper's voice came softly over the intercom, "Easy does it fellows, let's not jump the gun." We were at # feet, this was a bit higher than the pattern of the minimum of # feet required by tiie National Heat-Racing Club, but the skipper is a cautious person and didn't want to be disqualified by being too low when the starting gun sounded. The five-minute gun had already sounded and we were stooging around absorbing just enough heat to keep our craft under motion and maintain our altitude. Fred was concentrating on our radio, listening for the high-pitched bleep that would be the starting gun. The starting gun? Well this is a leftover from the old wind yacht days, when they used a chemical combustion weapon to signal the start of a race. X "Three seconds to go," said Fred quietly, "one, two, three." The skipper swung the console around to bring us on course, and in the electronic deck below I saw med my absorbers to take the ock of full power. I heard the skipper say, "Danm," and looking through the starboard port I saw the Thermo Queen squeeze between us and the buoy. The Thermo Queen was our closest rival and there was no denying k, she was a beautiful ship. She was the very latest thing in heat-racing yachts. Her huge black heat-absorbing sails were the same size as ours according to the rules of the N. H. R. C. Her sails were designed to pick up even the most distant rays and reflections of heat. I have seen her MHing in the predawn rays of the rising sun, skimming along at minimum altitude to save her heat, and making me lose my heart to the beauty of her black sails contrasting with her chromalloy hull. She is all self-contained and completely powered by heat-absorbing machinery as is required by the club. Her old-fashioned radio is powered by the body heat of the operator, and her skipper even had the foresight to get a rather fat man for an operator. W e kidded him about using some of his own heat to power the ship. Our ship the Heat Ranker is an old timer, as is our skipper, and the two were an almost unbeatable combination until the Queen was built two years ago. Then this young skipper and his new ship started showing us his little black exhaust tubes and the after end of the Queen. The Queens skipper used a new type console to steer and balance his ship. It was equipped with colored indicators to show the amount of heat being absorbed, whereas our skipper preferred the old type upon which he could place his hands and sensitive fingers on the plates on top of the console and feel just how much heat each sail was absorbing. The skipper had these plates tuned so fine that if we were absorbing too much heat the plates would bum your fingers. It was a real sight to see the skipper, sometimes with his eyes closed, passing his hands over those plates like a musician. We are a good crew, the five of us, and the skipper has complete faith in us. He never repeats an order twice. The serious-looking fellow is Fred, our radio operator. He isn't as serious as he looks though, and can be a lot of fun at a party. He is rather thin and sometimes he has to run an extension to my body to reach some far-away station. The big guy is Big George. He is our mainsail handler, he needs to be big to trim the port and star sails. He can spin the adjusting wheels as if they were spacephone dials. To offset George's size and to work the little sails in the small parts of the ship we have Slim. Just then the Air Guard came in strong over the air. "Air Guard Seven to all craft, all commercial and pleasure craft will clear the oneto two-thousand foot level in Sector Six for the National Heat Races." We crossed the starting line neck and neck with the Queen followed by twenty six other racers hard on our heels. The Queen immediately headed for a ground highway where the concrete at this time of day would be throwing up all kinds of heat. Our skipper headed for a smafl ridge which was going roughly m our direction and told George to adjust his sails for maximum B.T. U.'s on both port and star sails. We weren't going at top speed, but we did not have to fill our condensm with stored heat to keep from bum ing our sails -- as the Queen must have been doing. We would save ow condensers for later when we needed them. The skipper switdied to following a river and I had to put a few B.T.U.'s in the condenser bank. W e were passing over a patch of woods when the skipper told George to shorten sail a bit and let me use our banked heat. We could see most of the fleet above and below us and quite a few ahead of us. We weren't too worried because many times before wc had been dead last and had managed to come over the finish line first in a blast that would be at the very thermal limits of our sail. Looking out of the port I saw below us some small crafts cruising about a large sandpit and called the akipper's attention to it. The skipper called die boys. Heat Ranger to peanut fleet, can we use your thermos?" Peanut Commodore to Heat Ranger, be our guest, please. We haven't forgotten that you gave us your last year's sails. The heat range is from force twelve to fifteen, watch the middle it's a litde strong there." The boys pulled over to the side and watched as we swooped down over the sandpot humping up in the middle in order not to bank any heat as yet. We came tearing right up through the middle of the fleet and we could hear the boys cheering us on their mini seta. Soon after we were gaining on the Thermo Queen and were about to pass it when suddenly a big luxury boat came up. ShQ was operating on transmitted power and hit us from below, damaging our spanker sad and hull near the after section and shaking us up a bit. Nothing for us to do, but stop. We dropped our magna anchor and used the heat from a large warehouse roof to keep us aloft while we inspected the damage. Slim crawled aft. The spanker sail was easily repaired with growing plastic compound, but we could not rair the hull until we dry docked her. The skipper put on  his magnasuit and crawled outside to inspect the hull. Wc would be able to continue without being a menace to navigation, but the damage would slow our progress. We were happy to hear the Air Guard taking the luxury boat into custody for interference. We were dead last now, and using what little heat I had banked only took us near the fleet, but not near enough. We stayed low and searched for new reflections. The skipper found a small lake just chock full of sparkling reflections from the noonday sun and we were tearing along at near top speed, banking a few B.T.U.'b in the condensers. W e passed the old Hot Mama and then the Shamrock and were behind and below the Queen. The skipper cocked a wary eye upward. "Watch him now," he said, "he'll duplicate our every move. If we can fool him we have the race." "Saim, can the Queen sec the port sail from where she is?" "No," answered SKm. "(toy, then George take m the port safl as much m possible, and ir Slim you see if you can make the hip balance out with the spanker sail. Bill you give her all she's got." We were gaining on the Queen very fast now, but I could see them spreading all the sail they could get out. The Queen was absorbing too much heat and I could see from where I stood, the outer edges of her sails start to glow red from the heat, then white, and then I saw pieces of glowing sail drop off and fall to the earth. She was soon behind us. "Stand by for the finish," said Fred and he switched the intercom on to the radio band. We stood silent for a few minutes and then we heard the long bleep that said we were over the finish line -- first. The old ship practically vibrated with our cheers. Then George said over the intercom, "Now Bill?" "Now," I said. I went up to the bridge to take over the ship while George and Slim put a paravane on the struggling and protesting skipper. They opened the hatch and threw him out of the ship at fifteen thousand feet. This was an old tradition from the wind ship days. "Have fun," laughed George, "I certainly hope you fall into something good." I took the ship over to the mooring ground, dropped the magna anchor and put her away for the day. "Now for the party, everybody come up to the bridge deck." I opened a small drawer in the console and took out the drinks, a tray, full of drink tablets. "What will you have, the clear ones are champagne, the frosty ones are gin and the amber ones are beer. I like the amber ones with the blue stripe, that's blue ribbon beer." We were singing "What will you do with a drunken sailor," and doing very good at harmonizing, when the main hatch opened and there stood the skipper... The skipper I knew did not drink and I thought, oh boy here's where we get it. "Hello boys, excuse me for being so wet, I fell into a swimming pool. May I join your party?" I dumped a couple of champagne tablets into a glass of water and had it in the skipper's hand before he stopped talking. "Oh what do you do with a drunken sailor, what do you do with a drunken sailor, early in the mornComing Next Issue  A groat new novelette of tomorrow's super-science  by A. E. Van Vogt  In the February issue of IF -- don't miss HI IF  Novelette The Hoogans owned the planet -- they said so themselves. But who were the creatures from underground who disputed their claim? I T he Hoogan chamberlain was tall, black-clad, and high-shouldered. He had an immense domeshaped head sloping on to his massive shoulders. His eyes were like freshly shelled oysters in a leathery face and he had long, dangling arms. He turned to face the party of Terrestrial diplomats who stood clutching suifcases under the lofty vaulted ceiling of the vast, daik hall. Shafts of eerily colored light filtered through stained-glass loopholes, which were high in the walk, shedding a faint glow on the uneven stone floor. The drab-colored murals and hangings depicted the specialities of the seven Hoogan Hells. The mouths of dark corridofs radiated from the circular chamber with helmeted and kilted Hoogan pikemen spaced between them, immobile as the gargoyles that peered from high niches. "His Arrokanze the Pishop has graziously blaced at your dispozal theze cozy quarters," the chamberlain said in a deep, hollow voice. "You may now zelect rooms on the floors above and array yourselves in the karments provided." "Look here, Mr. Odom-Glom," Ambassador Straphanger cut in, "Fve been thinking it over, and Fve decided that my staff and I will just nip back over to our ship for the night." "His Arrokanze will be egspectink you at the fete in the Ebiscobal Kardens in one hour's time," tte Hoogan bored on. "His Arrokamte tizlikes to be kept waitink." "Oh, we're all keenly aware of the honor His Arrogance has paid us in offering accomodations here in the Episcopal Palace, but -- " "One hour," Odom-Glom repeated, his voice echoing across the hall. He turned away, the symbolic chain attached to his neck clanking as he moved. He paused, turned back. "By the way, you are instrugted to iknore any small ah... indruzions. If you zee anything... unusual, zummon a guard at onzc." "Intrusions?" Straphanger repeated querulously. "What kind of intrusions?" "The balace," Odom-Glom said, "is haunted." F our twisting turns of a stone staircase above the reception hall. Second Secretary Magnan t toed at Retiefs side. They went along an echoing corridor, past black iron-bound doors and mouldy tapestries which were dimly visible in the light of a flambeau. "Quaint beliefs these bucolics entertain," Magnan said in a tone of forced heartiness. "Haunted indeed! How silly! Ha!" "Why are you whispering?" Relief inquired. "Just out of respect for the Bishop, of course." Magnan came to an abrupt halt, and clutched Relief's sleeve. "Wha-what's that?" he pointed. Along the corridor, something small and dark slipped from die shadow of a pilaster to the shelt of a doorway. "Probably just our imagination," Relief suggested. "But it had big red eyes," Magnan protested. "Tliey're as easy to imagine at any other kind." "I just remembered -- I left my shower cap in my hold baggage. Let's go back." Relief moved off. "It's just a few doors farther. Six, seven... here we are." He inserted the key OdomGlom's aide had provided. The heavy door swung open with a creak that descended Ae scale to a low groan. Magnan, hurrying forward, paused to stare at Ae nearest wailhanging which showed a group of Hoogans suspended head-down from spikes above leaping flames, while goblins of various shapes prodded Aem wiA long barb-tipped spears. "Curious how similar religious art is from one world to another," he commented. Inside the room, he stared around in dismay at the damp stone walls, the two spartan cots and carved devils which stood in the corners. "What perfectly ghastly quarters!" He dropped his suitcase and went over to prod the nearest bunk. hy, my spine will never endure this mattress! Fll be a physical wreck after the first night! And the draft -- I'm sure to catch a chill. And... and..." He broke off. Magnan raised a shaky finger to point at the darkest corner of the Barrow chamber where a tall, bugeyed demon carved from pale blue stone winked garnet eyes. "Retief! Something moved over there -- it was just like the devils in the pictures! All fuzzy red brisdes and eyes that glow in the dark!" Retief opened his suitcase. "If you see another one, throw a shoe at it. Right now, we'd better be getting into costume; compared with an aroused ambassador, a few devils are just friendly pets." H alf an hour later, after having sponged off at a stone sink, Magnan's eyes were still rolling nervously. He adjusted the folds of his Hoogan ceremonial sarong before #ie tarnished, rippled mirror. "I suppose it is just nerves," he aid. "It's all the fault of that Odom.Glom fellow anck his quaint native iuperstitions! I confess his remarks quite unnerved me for a moment." Across the room, Third Secretary Retief was loading match-head iz charges into the magazine of an inconspicuous handgun. "Probably just his way of warning us about the mice," he said. Magnan turned and caught a glimpse of the gun. "Here, Retief! What's that?" "Just a quaint native cure for spooks -- if they get too noisy." He tucked the gun out of sight under the Hoogan sarong. "Just think of it as a sort of good-luck charm, Mr. Magnan." "A knife up the sleeve is an old diplomatic tradition," Magnan said doubtfully. "But a power pistol under the sarong..." "I'll have it along in case something jumps out of the stonework and yells boo!" Retief said reassuringly. Magnan sniffed, admiring himself in the dark glass. "I was rather relieved when the ambassador insisted on native dress for the staff instead of ceremonial nudity for tonight's affair." He turned to study the hang of the uneven hemline that exposed his bare shins. "One of his finer moments, I fancied. He does cut an impressive figure, once his jowls get that purplish tinge. Not even Odom-Glom dared stand up to him. Though I do wish he'd gone just the one step further and demanded the right to wear trousers -- " He broke off, his eyes on the black drapes covering the high, narrow window. The heavy cloth twitched. "Retief!" he gasped. "There it is again!" "Shhh," Retief watched as the curtain moved again. A tiny redglowing bead appeared at its edge, a foot above the floor; a wire-thin kg emerged, and then another. A body like a ball of reddish fluff came into view, its red-bead eyes on two-inch stalks which tilted alertly lo scan the chamber. Its gaze fixed on Relief; it moved clear of the curtain, paused, then started toward him on skittery legs -- W ith a yell, Magnan dived for the door and flung it wide. "Guards! Help! Goblins! Spooks!" His voice receded along the hall, mingling with the clank of accoutrements, and the slap of wide Hoogan feet. The intruder hesitated at the outcry, dithered for a moment, then, emitting a cry like a goosed fairy, fumbled with two of its limbs at comething attached to its back. Beyond the door, Magnan's voice supplied a shrill counterpoint to the rumble of Hoogan questions. "Then get someone who speaks Terran!" he yelped. "At this moment my associate is being savaged by the monster!" Relief crossed quickly to the window, pulled the drapes aside and unlatched a panel, letting in a draft of damp night air. "This way out, fellow," he said. "You'd better get going before the cops arrive." The fluffball darted across the room and came to a shaky stop before Relief. He made quick, nervous motions. A folded square of paper fell to the floor at Retief s feet. Then the creature sprang for the opening and was gone as Hoogan feet clumped at the door. "Where Spism?" a heavy voice Jemantled in thick Terran. A conical Hoogan head in a flaring helmet swivelled to scan the room. Behind the guard, Magnan craned for a view. "Where is the beast?" he shrilled. "It was at least fourfeet high, and its tusks were fourinches long at the very leasti" The Hoogan advanced into the room. He pointed to the open window with his broad-headed sevenfoot pike. "It was a mouse after all," Redef said. "It got away." "You let Spism ko?" "Shouldn't I have?" Retief inquired mildly, pocketing the paper. "Spism bad imp from nether rechions; might bite Derry, get blood boizonink." "I think you're being impertinent," Magnan said sharply. "Biting Tcrrans is perfectly safe -- " The Hoogan turned to him, his pike lowered ominously. iC'lou will gome with me," it A ordered. "The benaldy for consortink with minions of Unterworlt is poilink in oil." "Here," Magnan said, backing up. "Stand back, my man -- " The Hoogan reached for Magnan with a long, snaky hand; Retief stepped up behind him, selected a spot, and struck a sharp blow with bunched fingertips. The guard stumbled, fell past Magnan, and hit chin first with a resounding slam. His pike shattered against the wall. "Retief!" Magnan gobbled. "What are you thinking of? You've laid hands on a member of the Episcopal Guard!" "I had the distinct impression th' this fellow hooked a toe on the ru imd fell down. BKdn't yoo notice" "Why, you know very well -- " "Just before he reached you M) Magnan." "Ah... why yes, now that yoi mention it, he did trip," Magnan' tone was suddenly brisk. "Nasty fall. I rushed up to support him, but alas, too late. Poor fellow. Served him right, the brute. Shall we go through his pockets?" "Why?" "You're right; there isn't time. That crash was doubtless heard throughout the palace." A second Hoogan appeared at the open door, his helmet bearing the fanged angel, which was indicative of officer rank. He eyed the fallen pikeman. "You addacked this one?" he demanded. Magnan glanced at the victim as though noticing him for the first time. "He seems to have fallen down," he observed brightly. "Against rules to kill Hoogan," the captain said ominously. "He... ah... broke his spear," Magnan pointed out helpfully. "Very bad crime, defile ceremonial spear," the captain said sternly. "Require burification zeremony. Very expenzive." Magnan fumbled in a money pouch at one hip. "I'd love to contribute a little something." "Ten Hoogan gredits, forget die whole thing. For extra five dizpose of body." The felled Hoogan stirred, mumbled, sat up. IF iiTTa!" the captain said. "Look  m like no teal. But for another extra five -- " he lifted a short, ugly club from his belt, " -- finish off unfortimate victim of Derry violence." "Stop!" Magnan yelled. "Are you out of your mind?" "Inzult to overseer castle briest cosd you two more gredits. For you I mage zpecial brice, three for five." "Bribery?" Magnan gasped. "Corruption?" "Three it is," the Hoogan nodded. "How about you?" he turned to Relief. "You short like other Derry?" "Look here, Fm paying you nothing!" Magnan barked. "Just assist this unfortunate chap out of here, if you please, and we'll get on with our dressing!" "Small religious contributions fine old Hoogan gustom!" the overseer protested. "You want to fiolate local tapoos?" "We Terrans have a few customs of our own," Relief put in smoothly. "We feel that graft should only be paid voluntarily." He offered a note which the officer palmed deftly. The guard was on his feet now, swaying. The captain barked an order, his subordinate gathered up the spear fragments, shot Magnan a poisonous look and departed, followed by the captain. Relief closed the door behind the departing visitors, fished out the scrap of paper dropped by the fleeing Spism and opened it. Magnan, busy at the mirror again, heaved a deep sigh. "Hardly an auspicious beginning," he commented. "Heavens! It's twenty-thirty! We're late!" He gave his sarong a final tug and smoothed a thinning lock across his forehead. He led the way along the echoing hall and down a spiral stair to an archway debouching onto wide steps above a ragged lawn. Blue lanterns hanging in the branches of skeletal trees shed a wan radiance on the fungus-like ornamental plants. Sculptures representing souls in torment, were placed near wide tables laden with Terran delicacies hastily unloaded from the Corps transport for the occasion. A dozen grotesquely shaped fountains spread a fine mist and an odor of sulphur across the festive scene. Beyond the high spike-topped wall, the ominous shape of an immense brass-colored idol reared up half a mile away. Its ferocious sculptured grin glowing in the glare of spotlights, its right arm raised in the Hoogan royal salute -- elbow straight out, forearm pointing up-' ward with fingers spread, the left hand gripping the right biceps. Magnan shuddered. "That beastly idol -- it's subHoogan," Magnan commented. "Isn't that smoke coming out of its nostrils?" Relief sniffed. "Something's bum' ing," he agreed. n A dark figure stepped from dense shadow at Magan's elbow.  #  Only old newsbabers you scent," it rumbled. "Our Hoogan Kods are uzeful; they serve as gommunity inzinerators." "Odom-Glom! You startled me!" Magnan chirped. He slapped at an insect that buzzed about his face. "I do hope the evening is a big success. It was so thoughtful of his Arrogance to allow the Corps to act as host tonight; such a gesture of acceptance -- sort of." "Reverze hosbitality iz an old Hoogan gustom," Odom-Glom said. "It would be a kood itea to know all our old Hoogan gustoms, zo az not to end up lige the lasd Derran Tiplomat." "Yes, it was unfortunate about Ambassador Straphanger's predecessor getting excommunicated, and all. But really, how was he to know he was supposed to fill the Episcopal begging bowl with hundred-credit notes,?" "It wasn't zo much not contributink; but pourink the canned beans in spoiled the bill His Arrokanze had planted as a hint." "A bad scene," Magnan agreed. "But I'm sure this evening will smooth everything over." The orchestra began tuning up and lugubrious notes groaned across the lawn. Armed Episcopal guards were taking up their posts, and sarong-clad diplomats were forming a receiving line by a stone arch opening through which the dignitaries would arrive. "I must hurry alonk now and zee to the kun emplazements," OdomGlom said. "One lasd suggestion: wordly goods of course mean nothing to His Arrokanze, but tha deadliest of the zinz is Ztinchinezz. His Arrokanze detests a tightwad." He moved off, chains clashing. "The ambassador's not out yet," Magnan noted nervously. "Gracious, I hope he puts in an appearance before Bishop Ai-Poppy-Googy arrives. I dread the prospect of having to engage His Arrogance in light chitchat." # A ccording to the Post Report, dealing with the Bishop is very simple," Relief said. "Just give him everything in sight, and if that doesn't satisfy him, give him some more." "I can see that you're finally getting the hang of diplomacy. Relief," Magnan said approvingly. "Still, I'm worried." "Since it's your job as protocol officer to soften up difficult guests," Relief #aid, "why not meet the Bishop at the gate and try out a few racy stories on him?" "I hardly imagine that the Chief of State of a Theocracy would react to biological anecdotes," Magnan said stiffly. "Oh, biology is a perfectly clean subject here on Hoog; but don't bring up cooking in polite conversation. According to the handbook, there's an unspoken agreement among the cultured element that the stork brings the goodies." "Really? Heavens, and all the cookies are stamped 'Made in Hong Kong'! I'll have to tell the cook to substitute blintzes. While I'm attending to that, you'd best take your post at the gate. You'll handle the IF first shift tonight. I'll send Stringwhistle along to relieve you in an hour." "I could delay the Bishop a few minutes for you," Retief offered, as they crossed to the gate. "Suppose I start by demanding to see his invitation." "None of your ill-timed japes, Retief! After the last mission's fiasco, establishing a friendly rapport with the Bishop tonight could mean promotions all around." "I think the traditional lawn party is a little too subtle for a fellow like the Bishop. We should have used a simple symbolism -- like a few rounds of heavy artillery lobbed into the palace grounds." "Hardly the diplomatic approach," Magnan sniffed. "For centuries now it's been understood that if enough diplomats go to parties, everything will come right in the end." "I wonder if the Hoogans understand that tradition?" "Certainly; after all, we're all fellow beings -- brothers under the skin, as it were." "In this case, the skin is an inch thick and tougher than armorplast. Fm not sure we can pentrate to the brotherhood layer in time to stop bloodshed." "Actually, I rather look forward to matching epigrams with His Arrogance tonight," Magnan said loftily, turning to scan the gardens. "As you know. I'm always at my sparkling best with high-ranking guests -- and, of course, mere size and strength fail utterly to intimidate me." Magnan turned at a sound behind him, uttered a strangled yelp, and trampled a Hoog waiter's foot as he leaped back from the spectacle of a seven-foot high, six-foot wide Hoog wrapped in cloth of gold. The monster's gilded features included one-inch nose holes, huge, watery, reddish eyes and a wide mouth set in a formal grimac to display polished gold-capped teeth. Two clusters of ringed fingers gripped the hilt of an immense two-edged sword. smells pat!" the apbellowed. He leaned forward, sniffed vigorously at Magnan and snorted. "Horriple!" he announced, elbowing Magnan aside. 'Ko away, vellow! You're invested with an acute P.O.!" "Why, Your Arrogance -- it's just a touch of skin bracer in back of ray ear." "It smelts like pargain night in a choy house. Where's Ambassador Hapstrinker? I drust you have blenty of food reaty. l unterstant you Berries take a kreat interesd in gooking." The Bishop winked a damp, pink eye, rammed Magnan under the ribs, and guffawed comfortably. "Oof!" Magnan said. "Why, Your Arrogance!" The Bishop was already striding toward the nearest table, his escort of armed and helmeted guards trailing behind, fingering scimitars and eyeing the diplomats suspiciously. "I... I think I'll just scoot along and see to the refreshments," Magnan bleated. "Retief, you accompany His Arrogance and keep him amused until help arrives -- I mean, # C Qomethink  parition until the ambassador puts in an iqpearance!" He fled. The Bishop dipped a boneless finger into a large crystal container of cheese sauce, studied it at arm's length, sniffed it, then, with a flick of a limber wrist, spattered it across the ruffled shirt fronts and glassy smiles of the diplomats strung out in the receiving line. "Who are these leavers?" he demanded loudly. "Bropaply relatives, waitink arount for handout. I have the zame proplem. Or had the zame proplem, I should zay. Two weeks ako was Zelf-Denial Feztival. I made the subreme sagrifize ant offered the entire lot to the anzestral spirids." "Giving up your relatives for Lent is quite an idea," Retief said. "It could catch on." The Bishop picked up a plate of dainty sandwiches, spilled the food off, sniffed the plate, and took a small bite. "I've heard a kreat teal about Derran tishes," he said, chewing noisily. "A bit too crizp, but not pat." He took a second nip from the thin porcelain and offered it to Retief. "Have a bite," he invited genially. "No thanks, I filled up on a beer bottle just before Your Arrogance arrived," Retief countered. "Try the dinner plates. They're said to be an epicure's delight." T here was a sudden stir from the vicinity of the wide terrace doors. Ambitious diplomatic underlings sprang to positions of eager anticipation, their delighted smiles ready. The squat figure of Carea IF Minister Straphanger, Terrestrial Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Hoog waddled into view, stylishly decked out in a short but heavily brocaded Hooall but dragged the ground, and jeweled sandals. At his side puffed a companion of almost identical, build and garb, distinguished only by a mop of vivid orange hair. Magnan trailed by two yards. "Ah, the ambassador is twints?" the Bishop inquired, moving toward the approaching pair. "No, that's Mrs. Straphanger," Retief said. "If I were Your Arrogance I'd ditch that saucer; i she's fierce when aroused." "Ah, the edernal female, ever conzerned with food gonzervation." The Bishop tossed a crust of the plate in back of a flowering bush. "Ah, there, Ambassador Strakhumper!" he bellowed. "And your charmink cow! She will be litterink zoon, I trust?" "Littering? How's that?" Straphanger stared around in confusion. "I azzume you keep your cows pregnant?" the Bishop boomed. "Or possibly thiz one is over-aged. Bud no matter; doubtless she waz a gread broducer in her day." "Well, I never!" Mrs. Straphanger snapped, bridling. "By the way," Ai-Poppy-Googy went on, "I hate to disguss finanzes over food, zo I suggesd we deal with the broplem of an abbrobriate kift ad onze. I am of gourse quite brebared to vorget the drivial misunterstantink with the former ampassator ant agcepd any zum in egquibblink." er babbled. "Gift?" "Of gourse, if you wish to avoid aquirink a reputation az a piker, an amiss." But... but whatever for?" "Ah, ah," the Bishop waggled an admonitory tactile member. "No pryink into Hoogan internal matters!" "Oh, no, indeed, Your Arrogance! I only meant... what's the occasion? For the gift. I mean." "It's Tuesday." "Oh." The Bishop nodded placidly. "Luggy you didn't throw thiz affair on Wentsday; thad's douple gifd day." He plucked a glass from a tray offered by a bearer, emptied the contents on the lawn and nipped a chip from the edge with his polished metallic teeth, munching thoughtfully. "Lackink in flavor," he commented. #V Ty best crystal," Mrs. StrapiVl hanger gasped. "All the way from Brooklyn, yet, and like a goat he's eating it!" "A koat?" The Bishop eyed her suspiciously. "I don't belief I know the term." "It's a... a sort of gourmet," Straphanger improvised. Sweat was glistening on his forehead. "Known for its discriminating tastes." "Now, about the matter of a bension," the Bishop continued. m aee no neet of oztentation. A mere thousant a day would suvvize as a token of Corps czteem." "A thousand what a day?" The ambassador inquired around a frozen diplomatic grm which exposed old-fashioned removable dentures. "Credits, of gourse. And then there is the matter of zupzidies to Hoogan industry; zay vivty thousant a month. Ton'd give a thoughd to atminisdration; just make the cheggs payaWe to me perzonally -- " "Hoogan industry? But I was given to understand there are no industries here on Hoog." "That's why we reguire a zupzidy," the Bishop said blandly. Straphanger hitched his smile in place with an effort. "Your Arrogance, I'm here merely to establish friendly relations, to bring Hoog into the mainstream of Galactic cultural life -- " "What coult be frientlier than money?" the Bishop inquired in a loud, final-sounding voice. "Well," Straphanger conceded, "we might arrange a loan -- " "An oudright krant iz zo much zimpler," the Bishop pointed out. "Of course, it would mean extra staff, to handle the administrative load." Straphanger rubbed his hands together, a speculative gleam in his eye. "Say twenty-five for a start." The Bishop turned as a mediumsized Hoog in tight, black and silver vestments came up, growled in his ear and waved a rubbery arm toward the house. "What?" the Bishop exploded. He swivelled on Straphanger. "You are harporink tapoo greatures? Givink aid and gomfort to untesirable elements? Sharink your zubstanze with minions of the opposition?" Arrogance!" Straphanger's voice quavered against the rising roar of the outraged cleric. "I don't understand! What did that fellow say?" The Bishop bawled commands in Hoogan. His escort scattered and began beating the bushes which rimmed the garden. The ambassador trotting at his side, the guest of honor strode to the laden refreshment tables, and began stuffing in fragile china, muttering to himself. "Your Arrogance," Straphanger panted. "If I could just have some explanation! I'm sure it's all just a ghastly mistake! What are these men searching for? I assure you -- " "Out of the gootnezz of my heart I welgomed you to Hoog!" the Bishop roared. "As a great gompliment to you, I abzorbed your language! I was even ready to agzept cash, the zubreme chesture! And now I find that you openly gonzort with the enemies of the Kods!" Standing on the sidelines of the verbal fray. Relief glanced around the garden. He spotted a fountain in the shape of a two-headed Hoogan dwarf with oversized teeth and belly, and moved over to it. There was a tug at his sandal lace. He looked down. Two bright eyes at the ends of wirelike stalks stared up appealingly from a clump of grass. He glanced around -- all eyes were on the Bishop. "Arc you looking for me?" Relief asked softly. IF "Right!" a squeaky voice piped. You're a hard man to have a quiet hat with, Mr... ahh." "Retief." "How do, Retief. My name's Jackspurt. The boys appointed me okesman to tell you Terries about what's going on. After all, I guess # Spism's got a few rights, too." "If you can explain what's going an in this filbert factory. I'll be forever in your debt, Jackspurt. Speak your piece." "It's the Hoogans; they don't give HI a minute's peace. Talk about persecution! Do you know those OBalm-singing hippos are blaming us lor everything from sour milk to loss of potency? It's getting where Ws not safe to take a stroll after sundown." "Hold on, Jackspurt. Maybe jFou'd better fill me in on some background. Who are you? Why are the Hoogans after you? And where did you learn to speak Terran with that flawless enunciation of consonants?" CiT used to be a mascot on a TerX ry trader; I stowed away when she landed here for emergency acpairs. It was a great life; but after a wjiile I got homesick for good old Hoog -- ' you know how it is -- " "You're a native of this charming world?" "Sure -- us Spism's have been around longer than the Hoogs. And wc got along for thousands of years with no trouble. The Hoogs took the surface, and we settled in nice and omfy underground. Then they got religion and it's been hell ever since." "Hold on, Jackspurt. I always heard that religion exercised a beneficent influence on those fortunate enough to possess it." "That depends on which side you're on." "That's a point." "But I haven't given you the big picture yet. These Hoogan priests launched a full-scale propaganda campaign -- painted up a lot of religious art with pictures of Spisms poking pitchforks at Hoogs, and pretty soon it got so even the average Hoog in the street started jumping and making X's in the air and mumbling spells everytime one of us came up for a breath of fresh air. The next thing we knew, it was fullscale war! I'm telling you, Retief, us Spisms are in bad shape -- and it's gotta get worse!" A guard was working his way toward the ogre fountain. "Jiggers, the gendarmes," Retief said. "You'd better get out of sight, Jackspurt. They're beating the bushes for you. Why don't we continue this later." The Spism whisked back under cover. "But this is important, Retief!" Jackspurt's voice emanated from the brush. "The boys are counting on me." "Shh! Watch me and take your cue." Magnan had turned and was eyeing Retief suspiciously. He stepped to his junior's side. "Retief, if you're mixed up in this mix-up..." "Me, Mr. Magnan? Why, I just arrived this afternoon the same time you did." 'Magnan!" Straphanger's voice cut through ihe hubbub. "The Bishop informs me that some sort of demonic creature was seen here on the Embassy grounds this evening! Of course we know nothing about it, but His Arrogance has drawn the unfortunate implication that we're consorting with denizens of the netherworld!" He lowered his voice as Magnan drew close. "Superstitious poppycock, but we've got to play along. You and the others spread out and go through a show of looking for this mythical imp. I'll pacify His Arrogance." #ertainly, Mr. Ambassador. But... ah... what if we find it?" "Then you're an even greater idiot than I suspect!" Straphanger twisted his working smile into position and turned back to the Bishop. "Relief, you start along there," Magnan indicated the front of the house. "I'll go poke about in the bushes. And whatever you do, don't turn up anything -- like that ghastly creature we encountered upstairs." A startled look spread across his face. "Good Lord, Relief! Do you suppose -- ?" "Not a chance. I picture something more like a medium-sized dragon." "Still... perhaps I'd better mention it to the. ambassador." "And confirm the Bishop's opinion? Very courageous of you. Mind tf I stick around and watch?" "On the other hand, he's a busy man," Magnan said hurriedly. "After all, why bother him with trivia?" He hurried off to take up a position near the Bishop and make a show of stooping and peering among the conifer-like hedges. Relief sauntered back to the table, deserted now except for a lone Hoogan bearer at the far end gathering empties onto a wide tray and tossing damp paper napkins into a capacious waste-paper receptacle. Relief picked up an empty sandwich plate, said "hsst!" The Hoogan looked up as Relief tossed the plate, dropped the big paper bag and caught the tossed crockery. # T Tere's some more," Relief of-tX fered helpfully. He gathered up and handed over a pair of saucers, three empty glasses and a couple of cheese sandwiches each minus one bite. "You'd better hump along now and police up behind His Arrogance," he suggested. "He's leaving a trail of saucer rims behind him -- doesn't seem to like the floral design." "You dry dell me my chop?" the Hoogan demanded truculently as Relief fumbled a spoon and let it drop to the grass just under the edge of the hanging table cloth. "Certainly not, old boy," Retid! reassured the glowering local. He stopped for the spoon, caught a glimpse of an eye peering from the shadows. "Get in the bag," he hissed from the comer of his mouth. "Who you talg to?" the servant ducked and stared under the table. Behind him, the paper-trash container rustled softly as the Spism whisked into it m IF "Just addressing a few words to the spoon god," Relief said blandly. "Bad luck to drop a spoon, you know." "Yes?" the Hoogan said. He leaned against the table, got out a much-used toothpick and began plying it on his unpolished teeth. "You voreigners kot grazy iteas. Efrypoty know kood lug trob sboon, bat lug trob forg." He carefully examined the tip of the toothpick. "Back home, falling from a tenstory building is considered an inauspicious omen," Relief rambled on, watching the armed Episcopal Guards as they worked closer. One came over to the table, gave Relief a sharp look, thrust his head under the table, and then reached down to check the paper-trash container. "How about a little refreshment?" Relief picked up a cup, dipped it full from a bowl of thick purple punch, took a step toward the warrior and seemed to trip; the sticky fluid struck the Hoogan just below the clasp holding the rainbow-hued cape, spread out in an interesting pattern across his polished breastplate. The bearer grabbed up his tray and bag and backed off hurriedly as the spluttering guard slapped limber fingers at the purple mess. "Itiot! Clumpsy oaf!" he choked angrily. "What? Boozink on tudy?" a vast voice boomed. The Bishop bellied past Relief, planted himself before the confused Hoogan. "The benalty is boilink in oil!" he roared. "Take him away!" IV O ther guardsmen closed in and grabbed their unfortunate fellow. "That was my fault. Your Arrogance," Relief started. "I offered him -- " "You would inderfere with the Ebiscobal administration of justize?" the Bishop bellowed, turning on Retief. "You have the demerity to sugchest that the Ebiscobal judgment is fallible?" "Not exactly; you're just wrong," Relief said. "I spilled the punch on him." The Bishop's face purpled; his mouth worked. He swallowed. "It's ben zo long zinze anyone condratieded me," he said mildly, "that I've vorkotten tibe bunishment." He waved two fingers in blessing. "You are apzolved, my zon," he said airily. "In vact, I apzolv you for the whole weekent. Have fun; it's on the house." "Why, isn't that gracious of His Arrogance," Magnan chirped, popping up beside the Bishop. "What a pity we didn't find the demon; but I -- " "That reminds me," the Bishop said ominously. He fixed an eye on Ambassador Straphanger as die senior diplomat came up. "I'm still waitink for results!" "Look here. Your Arrogance! How can we find a demon if there's no demon here?" "That's your broblem!" There was a yell from the gate. Two guards were man-handling the bearer with the waste-paper bag, who jerked away, making indignant noises. The bag fell, split open, which the fugitive Spism burst, sending scraps flying in every direction. With a bound, it was past the astonished guards and heading for the rear gate. More guards appeared in its path, jerking long-barrelled guns from tooled holsters. A shot seared a long gouge in the deep grass, narrowly missing other Episcopal retainers dashing up to get a crack at the action. The Bishop yelled, waving his boneless arms. C ut off, the Spism veered, dashed from the house, but was met by a squad charging out from inside. A near-miss smashed dishes on the table behind Magnan, who yelped and hit the dirt. The Spism skittered, took evasive action, headed for the flower-decked gate letting out onto the drive. The guards were all behind it now, the way clear. With a tremendous yell, Bishop Ai-Poppy-Googy whipped his giant sword out and leaped to intercept the fleeing creature. As he bounded past Retief, the latter pivoted, and thrust out a foot. He hooked the Espiscopal leg just above a flare-topped, bejeweled pink leather shoe. His Arrogance dived forward, struck medals-first, and skidded on his face under the table. "Why, hi there," Magnan's voice piped under the muffling canopy of the drooping tablecloth. "Just a minute, and FU scroonch over -- " Tlie Bishop roared and rose up, the table lifting with him; dishes, glasses, and food cascaded off on Magnan, who was still crouching on the groimd. With a surge, the Bishop hurled the board aside and roared again, while whirling to confront the dancing figure of Ambassador Straphanger, o flapped a napkin at the mud on the ornate conicals of the guest of honor. "Treazonl" Ai-Poppy-Googy bellowed. "AzzazzintsI Murderers! Achents of the Unterworlt! Obstructors of chustisti Heretics!" "Now, now. Your Arrogance! Don't get upset -- " "Upzet! This iz maybe a choke?" The Bishop dashed the muddied cloth from Straphanger's hand. He bent down, snatched up his sword and waved it overhead. The Episcopal Guard was closing in quickly now. "I hereby eggsgommunigate the lot of you!" the Bishop yelled. "No food, no water, no bolice brotectionl Alzo, you will be puplicly eggsecuted! Boys, round zem up!" Guns were suddenly leveled at the huddle of diplomats surrounding the ambassador. Magnan yelped. Straphanger's wattles quivered. "Ton'd miss this one!" Ai-PoppyGoogy indicated Retief. "It was hds foot I fell over!" A guard poked a gun into Retief s side. # # # h, I think Your Arrogance is forgetting that Mr. Retief has an Episcopal dispensation," Straphanger said brightly. "Retief, if you'll just run along to my office and send out a code two-oh-three -- or is it three-oh-two -- or -- anyway, a call for aitch ee ell pee -- " "He'll ko along with the rest of you scoundrels!" the Bishop yelled you to write a few chegs in your Half a dozen armed Hoogans were zell before the eggzecution?" herding the remainder of the staff "Oh, Fm afraid that wouldn't do up to join the group now. at all, Your Arrogance. I need the "Any more insite?" Embassy seal, and the check verify"No, Your Arrokants," the caping machine, and the code books tain of the guard reported. "Only and -- " a few zervants." "Well... bossibly I might make "Foil them in oil for azzociatink an egzeption; I'll defer punishment with azzazzints! As for the rest of until the cash arrives." you -- " "Sorry, Your Arrogance, but I "Your .Arrogance," Straphanger wouldn't ask you to deviate from ke up. "Naturally, I don't mind tradition just to accommodate me. dying, if its Your Arrogance's pleasNo, we're all excommunicated, so lire, but then we won't be able to I suppose we may just as well get give you the gifts and things, will comfortable and start starving -- " we?" "Holt it! Don't rush me! Who's "Tamn!" Ai-Poppy-Googy threw doing the eggsgommunigatink, you his sword down, narrowly missing or me?" Magnan's foot. "I forgot about the "Oh, you are." gifts!" He looked thoughtful. "Look, "Brecizely! And I zay you're not zuppose I make arranchmends for eggsgommunigatedi" The Bishop #J stared around truculently. "Now, about the gifd! You can deliver the pened to pring an armored gar alonk -- " "This is touple-gift day." "But you said Wednesday was double-gih day. This is only Tuesday." iiTt's now Wentsday, by Ebiscobal X decree," the Bistu said, raising his sword. "But you can't -- I mean, how ean you?" "Calendar reform," Ai-PoppyGoogy said. "Lonk overdue." "Well, I suppose it could be arranged." "Kood! I herepy grant you an Ebiscobal rebrieve. Put that toesn't inglude the resd of these untesireaples!" the Bishop waved a hand. "Dake them away, poys!" "Ah... I'm grateful for the pardon, I'm sure," Straphanger said, gaining confidence rapidly; "but of course I won't be able to process the paper work properly without my staff." Ai-Poppy-Googy glared with large, damp red eyes. "All right! Keep them! They're all rebrieved egzebd thad one!" He aimed a finger at Relief like a gun. "I have sbezial blans for him!" the guards shifted their attention to Relief ringing him in with aimed guns. "Maybe His Arrogance would be just a teeny bit lenient this time," Magnan suggested, dabbing at a smear of liver paste along his bare arm, "if Mr. Relief apologized and promised never to do it again." "Do whad akain?" the Bishop demanded. "Trip you," Magnan said. "You know, like he did just now." "He dribbed me?" Ai-PoppyGoogy choked. "On burpose?" "Why, ah, it must have been a mistake -- " Straphanger started. "Your Arrogance has such a keen sense of humor. I'm sure you'll sec the comic aspect of it, if you just think about it," Magnan offered. "Relief! Did you -- I mean, surely you didn't." Straphanger choked. "Well!" Magnan said indignantly. "I was lying right there." "Zearch him!" the Bishop bellowed. Guards jumped forward; busy hands grabbing at Reliefs kiltpockets, almost at once came upon the folded paper the Spism had dropped as it fled his room. "Ah-hah!" the Bishop pounced. He opened the paper and read the message. "A gonsbirazy!" he yelled. "Unter my very nose! Put the ironts on him!" #T must protest!" Straphanger X spoke up. "You can't go about chaining up diplomats every time a little indiscretion is committedi Leave the matter to me. Your Arrogance; I'll see that a sharp entry goes in his record." "The Kods will nod be denied their tue!" Ai-Poppy-Googy roared. "Domorrow is the Krant Vestifal of Wentstay -- " "Tomorrow's Thursday," Magnan interjected. IF "Domorrow is Wentstay! Today is Wentstay! I herepy teclare a whole weeg of Wentstays, plast itJ Now, as I was sayink -- this Derran will bartizibate in the vestifal! Zuch is the holy will! No more arkuments!" "Oh, he'll be taking part in a ceremony!" Straphanger said in a relieved tone. "Well, goodness, I suppose we can spare him long enough for that." He offered a small diplomatic chuckle. "The Corps is always ready to promote worship in whatever form, of course." "The only drue Kods are the Hookan Kods, py the Kods!" the Bishop boomed. "Any more of your Derran heresy and I'll refersc my tisbenzation! Now dake thiz one to the demple and brebare him vor the rides of Wentstay! The resd of you will remain imter arresd, undil the will of the Kods is known!" "Mr. Ambassador," Magnan quavered, tugging at Straphanger's arm, "do you think you should allow them -- " "Merely letting His Arrogance save face," Straphanger said in a confidential tone. He winked at Relief. "Don't worry, my boy; good experience for you. You'll get an inside view of the Hoogan religions concept at work!" "But -- but, what if they... I mean, boiling in oil is so permanent,' Magnan persisted. "Quiet, Magnan! I'll have no whiners in my organization!" "Thanks for thinking of me, Mr. Magnan," Relief said. "I still have my good-luck charm." "Charm?" Magnan looked blank. "Witchgraft?" the Bishop boomed. "I zuzbegted as much!" He turned a large, red eye on Straphanger. "I'll pe zeeing you at the zercmony! Ton'd pe lade!" He eyed Retief. "Are you goming beazevully?" "In view of the number of guns aimed at me," Relief said, "I sincerely hope so." V r ie cell was narrow, dark, damp, and unfurnished except for a plain table with a bottle of bittersmelling wine and a narrow bendi on which Relief sat. His wrists were chained together, and he was listening to a muffled tapping whidi sounded faintly from beyond the walls. It had been going on now for twelve hours, he estimated -- long enough for the Hoogans to have completed their preparations for the religious ceremonies in which he was to play a part. The tapping abruptly changed tone and sounded louder, nearer. There was a light clatter, as of pebbles tossed on the floor. A moment later, there was a soft scraping sound, a rasping like fingernails on a blackboard; then silence. "Relief, are you there?" a this voice chirped through the pitdi darkness. "Sure, Jackspurt! Come on ki and join the pjuty. I'm glad to see you eluded the gendarmes." "Those slobs! Hah. But listen. Relief, I've got bad news." "Press on, Jackspurt; I'm listening." "This is Festival Day -- and (Md Googy's scheduled the big all-out push for today, to tie in with the miimbo-jumbo. The Hoogs have been building this king-size fumigatoi for months -- stacking it full of rubbish, old rags, worn-out tires, and what not. At the height of the big ceremony they set the stuff on fire and start the smoke-pumps going. They got a system of pipes laid out leading into the burrows, see? There won't be a safe spot for Spisms for miles around. Our boys will come stampeding out of their hideaways, some of which have been in the family for generations, and zowie! the Bishop's troops lower the boom! It'll be the finish of us Spisms!" "That's a heart-rending story, JaeV spurt -- or it would be, if I weren't in such a heart-rending position myself at the moment." "Yeah, the Wednesday Rites. You scheduled for the matinee or the big evening spectacular?" Jackspurt broke off as clankings sounded from beyond the door. "Holy Moses, Relief! Time's up! They're here! Listen, I was supposed to brief you in, like, but it took longer'n I figured tunneling through that wall, and then I got to yakking -- " A key scraped in the keyhole. "Listen! Did you drink any of what's in the bottle?" "No." "Good! It's doped! When I leave, dump it! You'll have to pretend you can't talk or the jig's up! Put on a kind of zombie routine, see? Whatever they tell you -- do it! If they get the idea you're putting something over, it's zkkk! for every Terry on Hoog! And remember! Keep your head down and your arms and legs tucked in -- " The lock turned with a rasp of rusty tumblers. "Gotta go! Good luck!" Jackspurt scrambled and was gone. R elief took a step, grabbed up the bottle, poured it down the three-inch hole through which his visitor had fled. Light blazed as the heavy door swung inward. Three hooded Hoogan pikemen came into the cell, followed by a black-robed priest. Relief stood holding the empty bottle, his body concealing Jackspurt's escape route. "How to you veel, Derry?" the priest inquired, looking Relief over. He stepped in, thumbed Reliefs eyelid up, grunted, and took the empty bottle from his hand. "Goked to the eyeprows," he stated. "Arc you zure?" a pikeman challenged. "I ton'd drust these voreigners." "Nadurally I'm zure; the hypervasgulations of the subraoccibital whatchamagallids is dypical; a glassic gase. Dake him alonk." Hemmed in by pikes, Relief followed along a torch-lit passage, up winding stone stairs, to emerge abruptly into blinding light and the susurrus of a multitude of voices, above which one rose like the boom of surf: "... azzure you, my tear Ampassador Hipstinker, our brinzibal tiety, Uk-Ruppa-Tooty, is nod only a IF hantzome degoration and a gonstand icminter to the bobulaze that the ncxd tithe is tue -- he also broduzes oragular stadements rekularly effry Wentstay at one B. M. Of gourse, it is nod always kiven to us to untcrsdant whad he's dalkink apout, bud the evvegd on the beasandry is most zaludory." Squinting against the sudden sunlight, Retief made out the resplendcntly robed figure of the Bishop, seated under a vast parasol on a massive throne of dark wood carved with designs of intertwined serpents. He was flanked on the left by the Terran Ambassador and on the right by a huddle of lesser diplomates. The group was ringed in by stonyfaced Hoogan guards with bared scimitars. The priest who had accompanied Retief bowed unctiously before the Episcopal throne. "Your Arrokanze, the #n-to-pe-Alefated One is here," he indicated Retief with a wave of the hand. "Is he... ah... #" Ai-PoppyGoogy looked inquiringly at the escort. "A glassig gase of hypervasgulations of the thinkamapops," a pikeman spoke up. "Foil thad one in oil," the Bishop said, frowning. "He dalgs doo mudge." "You appear a bit peaked. Relief," Straphanger commented. "I trust you slept well last night? Comfortable quarters and all that?" Retief stared absently past the ambassador's left ear. "Retief, the ambassador's addressing you," Magnan said sharply. "Brobably he's losd in metitations," Ai-Poppy-Googy said hastily. "On with the zeremony." "Perhaps he's sick," Magnan said. "Here, you'd better sit down." "Ah-ah," Ai-Poppy-Googy held up a limber hand. "The mosd imbortand bortion of the zeremony yed remaints to pe zeleprated." "Ah, yes, of course," Straphanger sat back. "I'd quite forgotten, Your Arrogance." He glanced around. "We'll have a magnificent view of the proceedings from here." At a prod from an Episcopal Guard, Retief turned -- and found himself staring directly into the vast brass smile of the Hoogan idol. F rom Retiefs elevated viewpoint atop the two-hundred foot high ziggurat, the head of the god reared up another fifty feet. It was an immense stylized Hoogan face of polished yellow metal, the vast hand upraised beside it. The eyes were deep hollows at the back of which a sullen red glow gave an impression of malignant intelligence. The noseholes, a yard each in diameter, drooled a thin trickle of smoko which coiled up past soot-streaked cheeks to dissipate in the clear air. The mouth which split the massive head, gaped in a crocodile smile set with spade-shaped teeth with spaces between them beyond which was visible a curve of polished esophagus agleam with leaping reflections from inner fires below. Two lesser priests stepped forward to hang assorted ornaments on Retiefs shoulders and neck. Another taking up a position before him. intoned a repetitious chant. Somewhere, drums commenced a slow tattoo. A murmur passed over the crowd packing the slopes of the ziggurat and the plaza below. Standing at ease, apparently ignoring his surroundings, Retief noted a twofoot wide trough cut in the stone platform at his feet, deepening and slanting down as it ran to the abrupt drop-off ten yards distant. An acolyte was busy pouring oil into the hollow and spreading it with swipes of his hands. "Just what does this phase of the ceremonial involve?" Straphanger inquired in a tone of synthetic diplomatic interest. "Waid and zee," Ai-Poppy-Googy said shortly. "Mr. Ambassador," Magnan whispered hoarsely. "His hands are chained!" "Part of the ceremony, no doubt." "And that groove," Magnan went on. "It runs from Retief right over to the edge... just above that horrible ig-bay outh-may." "Yes, yes, you needn't play the part of a tourist guide, Magnan. By the way," Straphanger lowered his voice, "you didn't happen to bring along a hip flask, I suppose?" "Why, no, Mr. Ambassador. I have a nice antiviral nasal spray, if that would help. But about that chute -- " #Tlarm, isn't it. Your Arro  gance?" Straphanger turned to the Bishop. "A bit dry, too." "You ton'd lige our Hoogan weather?" the Bishop asked in an ominous tone. "No, no, it's fine. I love it when it's nice and hot and dry." "Ah, Your Arrogance," Magnan spoke up. "Just what is it you have in mind doing with Retief?" "Iz kreat honor," the Bishop said. "I'm sure we're all delighted at this opportunity for one of onr group to get an inside view of the Hoogan religious philosophy," Straphanger said sharply. "Now kindly sit down and stop that infernal chattering," he added behind his hand. The Bishop was speaking quickly in Hoogan; the attendant priests urged Retief forward a step, grasped his arms and deftly placed him face-down in the oiled channel. The rattle of the drums rose to a crescendo. Flabby Hoogan hands shoved Retief forward down the steepening slope. "Mr. Ambassador!" Magnan's voice rose to a shrill bleat. "I do believe they're feeding him to that monster!" "Nonsense, Magnan!" Straphanger's suety voice countered. "It's all symbolic, I'm sure. And I might point out that you're hardly conducting yourself like a seasoned diplomat." "Stop!" Retief, sliding rapidly toward the edge, heard Magnan's yelp and the scuffle of rapid footsteps. There was a wet splat! and bony elbows slammed against him. He twisted, caught a glimpse of Magnan's white face, open mouth and clutching hands as together they shot over the edge and out in a graceful arc toward the waiting jaws of Uk-Ruppa-Tooty. VI K eep your arms and legs tucked in, Jackspurt had said; Relief bad time to grit his teeth -- then he was hurtling past the tombstonesized fangs, Magnan's hands still clutehing his legs. They dropped down into a blast of searing heat and light, then suddenly, stunningly, they slammed against and through a yielding, shredding network of filaments as fine as spiderwebs. Relief came to a stop, rebounded, caught at a heavier cable that brushed his hand, and was clinging to a coarse rope ladder, Magnan's weight dangling from his heels. "Bullseye!" a tiny voice screeched almost in his ear. "Now let's get out of here fast, before they dope out what happened!" Relief found a foothold in the snarl of rope, reached down and hauled the rag-limp second secretary to his side. The heat from below was scorching, even here in the shelter of a bulge in the god's throat. "Wha-what-bu-bu -- " Magnan babbled, groping for a handhold. "Hurry up, Retiefi" Jackspurt urged. "Up here by the tonsils! It's a secret passage!" Relief assisted Magnan in scrambling up. He boosted him into the narrow, circular burrow that ran back through the solid metal. The Spism in the lead, they moved hurriedly away from the sound of priestly voices raised in puzzled inquiry, reached a set of cramped steps leading down. "We're okay now," Jackspurt said. "Take a breather, and then we'll go down and meet the boys." Later they were in a cavern floOTed with rough masonry, and lit by a burning wick afloat in a shallow bowl of aromatic oil. All around, twitching Spism eye-stalks stared al the intruders; the close-packed red goblin-forms of Jackspurt and his clan moved restlessly, like giant fiddler crabs on some subterranean beach. Behind them, tall, pale-blue cousins poised on yard-long legs, watched from shadowy corners. In niches and crannies in the walls, tiny green Spisms and sluggish orange forms with white spots clung, gazing. Dark purple Spisms, dangling from the ceiling like tumorous stalactites, waved their free legs hypnotically, studying the scene. Magnan's fingers dug into Retiefs arm. "G-great heavens, Retiefi" he gasped out. "You -- you don't suppose we've died and that my Aunt Minerva was right all along?" "Mr. Relief, meet the boys," Jackspurt clambered up to perch on a ledge overlooking the gathering. "A lot of them are pretty shy, but they're a good-natured bunch, always a thousand laughs. When they heard you was in trouble, they all joined in to help out." #'eli them Mr. Magnan and A I said thanks," Relief said. "It was an experience we wouldn't have missed. Right, Mr. Magnan?" "I'd certainly never miss it," Magnan swallowed audibly. "H-how is it you can talk to these hobgoblins. Relief?" he hissed. "You haven't... ah... made some sort of pact with the powers o# darkness, I trost?" "Hey, letief," Jackspurt said. Yoor #fieiid got some kind of race prejudice or something?" "Heavens, no," Magnan said in a strangled voice. "Some of my best friends are fiends -- I mean, in our profession, one meets -- " "Mr. Magnan is just a little confused," Retief put in. "He didn't expect to be playing such an active role in today's events." "Speaking of active, we better get you gents, back to the surface fast," lackspurt said. "The pumps will be starting up any minute now." "Where are you going when the fumigation begins?" "We got an escape route mapped out through the sewers that ought to bring "US out in the clear a couple miles from town. We're just hoping Ihe Hoog don't have the outfall staked out." "Where are these smoke pumps located?" Retief asked. "Up above -- in Uk-RuppaTooty's bcRy." "Who's manaing them?" "A couple of priests. Why?" "How do we get there from here?" "Well, there's a couple passages -- but we bettw not waste any time ftght-seeing." "Retief, ase you out of your mind?" Magnan blurted. "If the priests see us, our goose will be eooked, along with the rest of our anatomies I" "We'll try to make it a point to see them first. Jackspurt, can you get a couple of doaea vcunteers?" "You mean to climb up in that brass god? I don't know, Retief. The fellas are pretty superstitious." "We need them to make a diversion while Mr. Magnan and I carry out the negotiation -- " "Who, me?" Magnan squeaked. "Negotiation?" Jackspurt protested. "Jumping Jehosophat, how can you negotiate with a Hoog?" "Ahem," Magnan cleared his throat. "That, Mr. Jackspurt, is after all one's function as a diplomat." "Well..." Jackspurt buzzed briefly to his fellows, then hopped down from his perch as a dozen Spisms of assorted sizes and colors came forward. "We're game, Mr. Retief. Let's go!" T he dull gleam of the metal walls of the vast chamber that was the interior of the god Uk-RuppaTooty loomed out of dense shadow where Retief and Magnan crouched with their hobgoblin crew. At the center of the gloomy chamber, lowcaste Hoogans labored before the open door of a giant, red-glowing furnace, tossing in armloads of rubbish, old shoes, bundled magazines, and broken plastic crockery. A layer of harsh, eye-watering smoko hung in the air. Jackspurt snorted. "Boy, when they start pumping that stuff into the burrows..." "Where are the priests?" Retief inquired in a whisper. Jackspurt pointed to a small cubicle at the top of a flight of steps. "Up there, in the control room." Retief studied the layout. "Jackspurt, you and your men spread out around the room. Give me five minutes. Then take turns jumping out and making faces." Jackspurt gave instructions to his crew; they faded away into the darkness. "Maybe you'd better wait here," Retief suggested to Magnan. "Where are you going?" "I think I'd better have a chat with the ecclesiaslics up in the prompting box." "And leave me here alone, surrounded by these ghoulish Spisms?" "All right, but keep it quiet or the smoke of burning diplomats will be added to the other fumes." Fifty feet above the floor, Retief gripped narrow handholds, working his way around to the rear of the control box. Through the dusty windows a blue-robed Hoogan priest could be seen lounging in a bored attitude, studying a scroll. A second Hoogan, in the familiar black, stood nervously by. Suddenly the silence below was broken by a mournful wail. "What's that!" Magnan jumped, slipped and grabbed for a secure grip on a projecting angle-iron supporting a narrow catwalk. "Our co-workers going into action." Retief said softly. Beside the furnace door, the Hoogan workers were staring around nervously. There was another doleful moan. One of the Hoogans dropped his shovel and muttered. Retief ducked back as the blue-robed priest came to the window and peered down below. He then motioned to the other, who went to the door of the tiny chamber, opened it, stepped out on the catwalk and shouted down to the workers. One answered in defiant tones. Two of the workers started toward a door dimly visible at the far side of the furnace room. The priest shouted after them; as his bellow faded and echoed, the thin hoot of a Spism sounded, like the last wail of dying hope. The priest jumped and whirled to dart back inside the control room. He slipped, fell from the catwalk and found himself staring directly into Magnan's startled face. He opened his mouth to roar -- M agnan whipped off his mauve cummerbund and thrust it into the gaping mouth. With a muffled grunt, the Hoogan lost his grip, fell, and slammed into the heaped rubbish with a tremendous slam. The stokers fled, shouting. The lone priest flattened his face against the window, peering down into the gloom. With a quick movement, Retief gained the catwalk, and stepped through the door. The priest whirled and leaped for a microphone-like device on the corner table. Retief cased the power pistol from his sarong and aimed it at the priest. T wouldn't make any announcements just yet," he said. "The results aren't all in." "Who are you?" The Hoogan sidled toward a corner cabinet. "If that's where you keep your prayer books, better let them lie for a while yet." "Look here, berhabs you are unaware thad I am His Voracity, the Deacon Um-Moomy-Hooby, ant I have gonnegtions -- " "Doubtless. And don't try for the door; I have a confederate out there who's noted for his ferocity," Retief said. Magnan came through the door, panting. Um-Moomy-Hooby backed away. "Whad -- whad do you wand?" "I understand the god is about to utter oracular statements, as the high point of the Wednesday services," Retief said. "Yez -- I waz jusd goink over my sgribt. Now if you'll eggsguze me I have to -- " "It just happens that it's the script we want to talk about. There are a couple of special announcements Td like to see inserted." "Whad? Damper with holy sgribture?" "Nothing like that; just a good word for a group of associates of ours and possibly a short commer"Plasphemy! Herezy! Refishionizm! Nefer will I pe a barty to zuch zagrilechel" Retief clicked off the toTs safety catch. " -- Put, on the other hant, bossiply somethink gould pe arranched," the Deacon said hastily. "How much did you hafe in mind offerink?" "I wouldn't think of attempting to bribe a man of the cloth," Retief said smoothly. "You're going to do this for the common welfare." "Jusd whad is it you hafe in mind?" "The first item is the campaign you've been waging against die Spisms." IF # A h, yezi And a wontervul jap our lats hafe peen toink, we will zee them ztambed oud endirely, and virtue driumvant!" genocide, Tm afraid. Now, my thought was that we could agree on a reasonable division of spheres of influence." "A teal with the Bowers of Tarknezz? Are you oud of your mind?" "Now, now," Magnan put in, "a more cooperative attitude would do Your Voracity greater credit." "You zugchesd that the jurch should gombromize with zin?" "Not exactly compromise," Magnan said placatingly. "Just work out a sort of peaceful coexistence plan." "Nefer will I, as deacon, gome oud in vafor of dogetherness with Zatan'z Impz!" "There, there, Your Voracity; if you'd just sit down across the table from them, you'd find these imps weren't bad fellows at all." There was a soft sound from the door. Jackspurt, a jaunty, two-foot sphere of red bristles, appeared, waving his eyestalks exultantly. A looming blue Spism behind him. "Nice going. Relief!" he called. "I see you caught one. Pitch him down after the other one, and let's dear out of here This little diversion will give us time to get clear before the smoke starts." "Jackspurt, do you suppose your fellows could do a fast job of shifting a few hoses around? You'H have to block off the sewers and feed the smoke off in some other direction." "Say, that's an idea!" Jackspurt agreed. "And I think I know just the direction." He gave instructions to the big blue Spism, who hurried away. The Deacon had retreated to a corner, eyes goggling, his hands describing mystic passes in the air. More Spisms were crowding into the room now, tall blue ones, tiny darting green ones, sluggish purple varieties -- all cocking their eyestalks at the prelate. "Help!" he croaked weakly. "The minions of the netherworlt are ubon me!" M agnan drew out a chair from the table. "Just have a seat. Your Voracity," he said soothingly. "Let's just see if we can't work out a modus vivendi suitable to all parties." "Come to termz with the enemy? Id will mean the ent of the jurch!" "On the contrary. Your Voracity; if you ever succeeded in eliminating the opposition, you'd be out of a job. The problem is merely to arrange matters in a civilized fashion so that everyone's interests are protected." "You may hafe somethink there," Um-Moomy-Hooby seated himself gingerly. "But the nevariouz agtirities of these goplins musd pe kebt unter sdrigd gondrol -- Ebiscobal gondrol, thad is." "Look, my boys got to make a living," Jackspurt started. "Zellink a vew love-botions, zerdainly," the Deacon said. "And modezd draffic in aphrodisiags, I#S dope, and razedrack tips. But beddling filthy menus to teen-agers, no! "The zame goez vor sdealing withoud a licenze, and the zale of algoholic peferaches, with the eggzebtion of small amounts of broberly aged sduff for medicinal use py the glerchy, of gourse." "Okay, I think we can go along with that," Jackspurt said. "But you priests will have to lay off the propaganda from now on. I want to church art." "Oh, I think you could work out something lovely in little winged Spisms with haloes," Magnan suggested. "I think you owe it to them. Your Voracity, after all this discrimination in the past." "Tevils with winks?" Um-MoomyHooby groaned. "It wiM blay hop with our zympolizmz -- put I zubboze it can pe done." "And you'll have to have guarantees that everything from two feet under the surface on down belongs to us," Jackspurt added. "We leave the surface to you, and throw in the atmosphere, just so you dedicate a few easements so we can come up and sightsee now and then." "Thad zeems egwidaple," the Deacon agreed. "Supchegd to vinal abbrofal py His Arrokanze, of gourze." "By the way," Jackspurt asked casually, "who's next in line for the Bishop's job if anything happens to Ai-Poppy-Googy?" "Az it habbenz, I am," UmMoomy-Hooby said. 'Why?" "Just asking," Jackspurt said. A loud thumping started up from the wide floor below. "What's that?" Magnan yelled. "The pumps," the Deacon said. "A bity so many Spisms will tie, but it is manivezdly the will of UkRuppa-Tooty." "I guess old Uk-Ruppa-Tooty had a last-minute change of heart," Jackspurt said callously. "We shifted the pipes around to feed the fumes back up into the city plumbing system. I guess there's black smoke pouring up out of every john in town by now." "Touple-grozzer!" the Deacon leaped up, waving his arms. "The teal'z off -- " "Ah, ah, you promised. Your Voracity," Magnan chided. "And besides, Mr. Retief still has a gun." "And now, if you'll just pick up the microphone. Your Voracity," Retief said. "I think we can initiate the era of good feeling without further delay. Just keep our role quiet, and take all the credit for yourself." # A about poor Ai-PoppyGoogy falling off the ziggurat when the smoke came boiling out of Uk-Ruppa-Tooty's mouth," Ambassador Straphanger said, forking another generous helping of Hoogan chow mein onto his plate. "Still, one must confess it was a dramatic end for a churchman of his stature, shooting down the sHde and disappearing into the smoke as he did." IF "Yez, alreaty the canonization papers are peing brebared." His newly installed Arrogance, Bishop Um-Moomy-Hoopy, shot a nervous glance at the Spism seated beside him. He'll pe the batron zaint of rehapilidated tevilz, impz, and kop#S." "A pity you missed all the excitement, Magnan," Straphanger said, diewing. "And you, too, Retief. While you absented yourselves, the Hoogan philosophy underwent a Yeri table renaissance -- helped along, I humbly assume, by my modest peace-making efforts." 'Hah!" the Bishop muttered under his breath. "Frankly, what with all the smoke, I hadn't expected the oracle's pronouncement to be quite so lucid," Straphanger went on, "to say nothing of its unprecedented generosity -- " "Chenerosity?" interrupted UmMoomy-Hoopy, his heavy features reflecting rapid mental recapitualflon of his concessions. "Why, yes, ceding all mineral rights to the formerly persecuted race here on Hoog -- a charming gesture of conciliation." "Mineralts rightz? Whad minerte?" Jackspurt, splendid in the newly tailored tunic of Chief Representative for Spismodic Affairs to the Episcopal court, spoke up from his place along the table set up on the palace terrace. "Oh, he's just talking about the deposits of gold, silver, platinum, indium, and uranium, plus a few Moulders of diamonds, ruby, and so forth that are laying around below ground. The planet's lousy with the stuff. We'll use our easements to ferry it up to the surface where the freighters will pick it up, so we won't put you Hoogs out at all." r ie Bishop's alligator-hide features purpled. "You -- you knew apout theze mineralts?" he choked. "Why, didn't His former Arrogance mention it to you? That was what brought the mission here; the routine minerals survey our technical people ran from space last year showed up the deposits." "Ant we puilt our Brincible Kod oud of prass -- imborted prass at thad," the Bishop said numbly. "Too scared of a few Spisms to dig," Jackspurt said in a stage whisper. There was a flicker of lightning in the sky to the cast. Thunder rolled. A large raindrop spattered on Straphanger's plate, followed by another. "Oh-oh, we'd better head for cover," Jackspurt said. "I know these flash squalls; lightning out the kazoo -- figure of the god Uk-Ruppa-Tooty into vivid silhouette against a blueblack sky. Dishes rattled' on the table as sound rumbled across the sky on wooden wheels. The Bishop and his guests rose hastily, as a third jagged electrical discharge ripped across the sky -- stricking the gianr idol full on the shoulder. A shower of sparks flew; the Hoogan gesture of salute, pi vote ! lowly at the elbow. The yard-wide liand, seen edge-on with the fingers extended, swung slowly in a great ere, came to rest with the extended thumb resting firmly against the tnub nose. Sparks flew as the digit was welded firmly in place. The Bishop stared, then tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, long and scarchingly. "Chusd pedween uz men of the worlt," he said hoarsely, "do you zubboze thad phenomenon haz any bezial zigniviganze?" "I think if I were you, Your Arrogance, Fd watch my p," Jackurt said in an awed tone. "And, uh, by the way, on behalf of the Spisms, Fd Hkc to make a contribution to the Episcopal treasury." "Hmmm. Have you ever thought aboud tagink inzdruction?" the Bishop inquired. "Fm sure it could be arranged, and as for the little contribution you sboge of, dwenty bercend of the take would zuvvice." They strolled off along the corridor, deep in conversation. Ambassador Straphanger hurried away to prepare his dispatches to Sector HQ, Magnan at his heels. Retief stepped back out onto the terrace and lit up a dope-stitk. Far away, Uk-Ruppa-Tooty loomed, solemnly thumbing his nose at the Episcopal Palace. Cheerfully, Retief returned ttie Philip Jose Farmer's Greatest Storv author of The Lovers and many other great sf stories! Philip K. Dick R. S. Richardson Theodore L. Thomas -- and many others All In the January Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I have several comments to make on the December issue of If. #. The cover work was phenomenal. Please let's have some more like it. #. The Hounds of Hell was excellent again. Please, more Laumer! #. Now comes the complaint: When is Doc Smith coming? YouVe been promising to have Skylark DuQuesne soon for months. This was my original reason for subscribing (although Heinlein, Laumer and Van Vogt are good reasons too!) and it still is what I am waiting for! Vance has just been published by Berkley Medallion -- now you are riiould have stories before they come out in book form, not after! You noticed no complaints on quality of your stories. I tried -- but I couldn't find anything to complain about! Please keep up the good work on the stories and keep Morrow for cover illustrations. -- Martin Massoglia, # West McDonel, Michigan State University, East Lansing Michigan. # Re Doc Smith: The first dralt of Skylark DuQuesne was completed last spring, and it's a winner, too. One complication arose to prevent Doc from completing the revision on schedule: a little matter of some major surgery. The operation was one of those all-day jobs that take a team of surgeons working at top speeds, and average recovery time for a young adult usually runs to a matter of months... but Doc Smith, who is just beginning to get his second wind at #, was up and out of the hospital in a week, back at work a few days later, and is now finishing up the rewrite. An amazing young fellow is this Doc Smith! We're chary of predictions more than one issue ahead -- sometimes even those go astray, as you see with Jack Vance's story! -- but as of this writing we fully expect to bring Skylark DuQuesne into the April issue. agree with every word you say... and that's why the serial beginning this month is Starchild, When we with the clear understanding that there would be no book publication for at least a year. Somewhere, somebody, somehow failed to get the message -- the book edition came out -- and at the last possible moment we had to pull the story out and replace it. (If you look closely at the cover you can see where the type was cut out and changed. In fact, the cover painting was made place. Coincidentally, it happens to illustrate a scene in Starchild as well, proving that not all accidents are chine... but we won't be running it here... because we dont use reprints. Not even accidental ones. --    Dear Editor: That last serial that appeared in your magazine -- The Hounds of Hell by Keith Laumer -- is the most disgustingly ridiculous story you have ever printed. If one could forgive it for having almost no plot one still could not forgive it for being chock full of stock situations and incidents which appear over and over again almost word for word in various other stories. I mean, where is the author's creativity? And why does he insist on cluttering up the story with trite sentences? The story read like something written in the thirties (or maybe the twenties). It was stocked wi sudi antiquities as the Superman Hero, the Secret Laboratory and the oneman-band type of character who did the surgery on the hero to make him superhuman. This is not the type of story that makes If the high quality magazine that it is. Please avoid cluttering your future issues with stories like this one -- especially if they take up as much space as this one did! -- Robert Heitman, # South #th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #.    Dear Editor: The Silkie was even better than Van Vogt's last. The Expendables. Please keep Van Vogt coming! Kagan is a find -- hope to see more of him. Where has Sturgeon gone? And -- I hate to say this, but the only story in your aU-Sraith issue that was worth beans was The Imperial Stars. But its quality made up for the other three. Would you accept an 'TFirstory that would have to be published as a serial ? -- Jack Baldwin, # North Alison Street, Santa Barbara, California #.  Yep. -- Editor. And that's about k for another issue. Our first for this issue is L. D. Ogle of Muskegon, Michigan. Next issue we're going to try to squeeze in an extra page or two of Hue and Cry because the letters are beginning to pile up... but come to think of it, we've got a serial installment, a long Van Vogt and a couple of other items that may get in the way... well, keep the letters coming anyway! We'll do the best we can. -- The Editor. IF I( Imagine! Here's what you get... the button -- you can't make mistakes! Nothing to focus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp blackand-whites, amazingly life-like color shots -- even slides -- with, no effort at all! Commander Camera Retail Vriue: # I Rol! Kodacolor Film Retail Value: # I Roll Kodak Black-and-White Film Retail Value: .# Pre paid Processing Certificate Retail Value: # (Good for # jumbo Color Prints and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!) # limited! Clip coupon and mail today. P.O. Box #. N.Y., N.Y. # extra charge). Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus #fl handling.  Send C.#. I am enclosing # deposit and will pay postman #, plus # handling, plus postal charges.  I want to save postal charges. I am enclosing #, plus #t for handling. Dot completely pleased'.  go o o O', a oo d o s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! The umpt eenth corollary of Finagic's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep' owner s name impni Your Name Here #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. FEBRUARY #  #c I IBaiaBl # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep' s, ooo o o o o O o o o #(# O O O (j Frederik Pohl, Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor David Perton, Production Mgr  Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr  IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. AH material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any simariliaty between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial Science Fiction in Academe S hortly before this issue of If appears we expect to visit the campus of Wooster College in Ohio to take part in the # session of the Modern Language Association's annual symposium on science fiction. This sort of event has become rather un-newsworthy of late. The University of Chicago, perhaps, led off the trend with its seminar on science fiction a few years ago. At U.C.L.A., a depository for science-fiction magazines has been established -- not just the newsstand publications like If, Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow , but the mimeographed, hectographed and even carbon-copied "fanzines" published for limited circulation by science-fiction readers all over the world. Syracuse University is attempting to establish another sort of depository, collecting the papers of science-fiction writers as a permanent record of their lives and thoughts. This growth of scholarly interest in science fiction is both pleasing and sobering -- pleasing because we like science fiction, and like to have other people take an interest in it; sobering because it somehow has the aroma of erecting a monument. (An honor which is, of course, usually reserved for the dead.) N ow, we don't think for one minute that science fiction is dead, or even showing signs of failing. We think it's here to stay. We do think, though, that there has been some visible tendency foi science-fiction writers and editors to begin to take themselves a little over-seriously, as though conscious of the scholarly eyes upon them; and we have the uneasy notion that the sort of self-consciousness that feeling engenders could in the long run be serious. After all, science fiction's greatest merit lies in its tolerance of the way-out and its freedom from convention! As we see it, it's our job, especially here in , to stay loose. No formulas. No playing it safe. What we think we ought to be doing here in If is turning up all the new talent we can (as in our "firsts" -- this month's is J. L. Frye, with Zombie ), enticing back the greatest of the old masters (as with A. E. Van Vogt, herewith, and Doc Smith's Skylark DaQuesne , coming up shortly) -- and giving them all as much freedom as they need to keep us all alert... and entertained! We hope we're succeeding in this. Judging by the letters we get for Hue and Cry (squeezed out of this issue, by the way -- but back next month), most of you feel we are. But if you think not, or if you have an idea of how we can do things better -- let's hear from Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. IF  Novelette The aHen was mighty but it could be killed -- again and again and againl monster, Matlin began to get mad. In its death throes, the twelvefoot creature had done a violent muscular convulsion and somersaulted over into the dump section of Matlin's truck. There it lay now, with its elephantine head and quarter-length trunk twisted to one side, and a huge arm and hand flung up and visible over the rear end. What must have been tons of shiny, black body was squashed limply down into the bottom of the cavernous metal carrier... creating a problem. That was all it was to Matlin: a problem. Steve Matlin was an abysmally suspicious and angry man. His impulse now was to dump the beast in the weeds beside the road. Reluctantly, he decided against that. He had unfortunately been seen driving along this little used lake road by the two officers of a highway patrol car. If the patrolmen found the creature's body, they would assume that he had shot it. This benighted man, Matlin, envisioned himself as being the person who would have to see to the disposition of the dead monster. As he reasoned it out, if he made the mistake of dumping it in the wrong place, he'd have to hire a crane to get it into his truck again. And if he simply look it home, he'd have the job of digging a hole for it. "Better take it to the police," he decided gloomily, "and follow their advice like a good little fellow." Seething at the nuisance, but resigned, he drove to the main highway. There, instead of turning left to his farm, he headed for Minden, the nearest suburb of the city. Arrived in town, he drove straight to the police station, braked to a halt, and vigorously honked his horn. Nobody showed. The exasperated Matlin was about to lean on his horn and really blast them with sound, when he made an electrifying discovery. The police headquarters was on a side street and, whatever the reason, there wasn't a car or person in sight... Hot afternoon, empty street, rare opportunity -- Matlin tripped the lever that started the dump mechanism. A moment later, he felt the beasi s oody shift. He simply drove out irorn under it and kept on going, gunning his motor and reversing me uump mechanism. II T hat night before they went t bed, his wife, Cora, said to him, "Did you hear about the creature from space?" Matlin's mind leaped to the memory of the beast he had carted into town. He thought scathingly: "Those nuts! Creature from space indeed!" But he said aloud, gruffly, "You watching that junk on TV?" "It was in the news report," she said defensively. "They found it right there in the street." So it was the thing he had killed. He felt a sudden glee. He'd got away with it. He thought smugly: "Saved myself twenty-five bucks. Time I had a little luck." He went silently to bed. Cora lay for a while, listening to his peaceful breathing, thinking of the monster from space -- and thinking of the universe that she knew existed somewhere beyond the narrow world of Steve Matlin. She had once been a teacher. But that was four children and two decades ago. It was a little hard sometimes to realize how far away the real world was these days. Out there, a creature never before seen on earth had been found lying dead in the street in front of the Minden police station. The TV cameras brought front views, side f views and top views into everyher sudden confusion. And they body's living room. No one had any also evidently believed that a husidea how the thing had gotten where band would have told his wife. The it was discovered, and, according to principal spokesman, a fine looking, the news commentators, top governsoft-voiced man of her own age, ment and military officials were bewho had introduced himself as John ginning to gather around the colosGraham -- and who was the only sal corpse like buzzing flies. person present not in a police or Two days went by. A monstermilitary uniform -- said in a kindhunting expedition arrived at the ly tone, "Tell your husband there's Matlin farm -- among other places quite a reward already, something -- but Cora shook her head to their like a hundred thousand dollars, for questions and denied in a take-itanyone who can help us effectively." for-granted .tone that Steve was the The expedition departed in a long one who had transported the beast, line of noisy motorcycles and cars. "After all," she said scathingly, "he would have told me. Surely, you -- Tt was about mid-morning the next uh!" X day when Steve Matlin saw the She stopped, thought: "That man! second monster. That incredible man! He could He had been following the trail of have ." the first one from the lake road. And The visitors seemed unaware of suddenly here was another. IF there, breathless. What he had expected, in coming here by himself, Matlin had never considered clearly. When Cora had told him of the reward money, he had instantly derided her trusting nature. "Those S.O.B.'s will never split that reward with anyone who hasn't got his claim staked and ready to fight," he had said. He had come to stake his claim. His shock on seeing this second creature was like a multitude of flames burning inside him. He was aware of the heat rising along his spine and searing his brain. Fear! Trembling, he raised his rifle. As he did so, the creature -- which had been bending down -- came up with something that glinted whistled past Matlin's head and struck a tree behind him with an impact like a clap of thunder. The ground trembled. An instant later, the sound of an explosion came to Matlin's ears. The explosion was loud enough to have come from a small cannon. Even as he made the mental comparison from his experience as a Marine in World War II, the distant rifle -- it looked like a rifle, though a huge one -- spat flame again. This time the bullet struck the rock ten yards in front of Matlin and sprayed him with a shower of rock splinters. His body stung all over, and when he was able to look again -- after the second explosion had echoed from the distance -- he saw that his hands were covered with dozens of droplets of his blood. The sight was both terrifying and galvanizing. He slid back, rolled over, half-clawed to his feet and, bending low, ran to the gully's end, stopping only when he realized that it was becoming too shallow to be a shelter. What could he do? S hadowy memories came of wartime risks he had taken. At the time he had felt enforced, compelled by the realities of a war he never accepted -- a war that had wasted several years of his life. But he remembered moving, crouching, going forward. He had always thought what a mad thing it was for a sensible person to force himself into enemy territory. Yet under the hated pressure of wartime discipline, he had resignedly gone into the most deadly situations. Was it possible he would have to do that now -- because of his own foolishness in coming here? As he crouched there, appalled, two more cannonlike shells splattered the rock where he had been seconds before. A cannon against a rifle! Matlin wanted out, wanted away. The angry scheme he had had to get for himself whatever might be at the end of this search had no meaning in the face of the firepower that was seeking his destruction with each booming shot. He lay cringing at the shallow end of the gully, not even daring to raise his head. His own rifle seemed like a mere toy now... T he phone rang. When Cora answered, it took her several moments to recognize the hoarse voice at the other end as her husband's. "I'm calling from a roadside pay phone. Can you find out where that monster-hunting expedition is now?" he said. "Mamie just called. They were over at her farm. Why?" "It's chasing me," he said. "Tell 'em I'm coming toward the highway from the boathouse. It's driving a dump truck as big as a house." "What's chasing you?" Cora yelled into the mouthpiece. "Where?" "A second one of the monsters. On that back road to the lake," Matlin moaned. And hung up. Ill T he battle on the highway began about two o'clock in the afternoon. The creature climbed out of the cab of a dump truck that stood twenty feet high. Crouching behind the vehicle, it fired with a rifle the size of a cannon at anything that moved. The two dozen men with their frail cars and tiny rifles crouched in the underbrush. Lying beside Graham, Matlin heard the man say urgently to an army major: "Call again for an air strike!" It was about ten minutes after that that the first helicopter appeared on the horizon. It turned out to be an enterprising TV station's vehicle, with cameras aboard. The fluttering monstrosity of flying machine circled the dump truck, takIF ing pictures of the great being beside it. At first it did not seem to occur to the creature to look at the sky for the source of the sound. But suddenly it got the idea. Up came that long rifle. The first bullet smashed through the cockpit. A splinter from somewhere hit the pilot and knocked him unconscious. The helicopter flew off erratically. As it retreated, another gigantic bullet smashed its tail. The stricken whirlibird fluttered down among the trees on the other side of a low hill. Worse, when the military helicopters arrived, they no longer had the advantage of surprise. The cannon-rifle fired at them as they approached. They veered off -- but not before three went down, one in flames. With one exception, the others began to shoot back from a distance. The exception flew off to the left, disappearing low behind a hill. It reappeared presently to the rear of the monster and, while the other machines kept up a barrage from in front, this lone helicopter came in on the target from behind. The barrage of bullets that its pilot loosed downward almost tore off the great head of a creature which did not even see where the death came from. M atlin walked forward with the others, angrily fingering the "claim" he had written out. It infuriated him that they were not offering to honor his rights. Even though he had expected it, the reality was hard to take. Arrived at the truck, he stood impatiently by while the men examined the creature, the huge vehicle and the rifle. Matlin was drawn abruptly out of his irritated self-absorption with the realization that he, had been twice addressed. Graham indicated the ten-foot rifle. "What do you make of that?" The question approach, the appeal to him on an equal basis, momentarily neutralized the timeless anger in Matlin. "Now!" he thought. He handed Graham his claim with the request, "I'd like you to sign this." Then he bent down beside the huge weapon and examined it. He commented presently, "Looks like a pump action repeater, much like the one Tve got, only many times as big. Could have been made by the same company." It irritated him as he spoke to realize that Graham still held the claim sheet in his hand; had not even glanced at it. Graham said in an odd tone, "What company?" "Mine is a Messer," said Matlin. Graham sighed and shook his head in bewilderment. "Take a look at the nameplate on that big gun," he said. Matlin bent down. The word, him in indented, black metal lettering. "And what's the name of your dump truck?" Graham asked. Silently, Matlin loped around to the front of the over-sized truck, and peered up at the letters. They were exactly the same as on his own M When Matlin returned with the identification, Graham nodded, and then handed him back his claim sheet, and said evenly, "If I were to write that claim, Mr. Matlin, it would read: 'As the man who has done the most to prevent the creature from space being traced down, I recognize myself -- ' meaning you, Mr. Matlin -- 'as the one person least qualified to receive the reward.' " It was such an unexpected reaction, so instantly threatening to his rights, so totally negative, that Matlin blanched. But he was stopped by the words only for a moment. Then the anger poured. "Why, you damned swindler!" he began. "Wait!" Graham spoke piercingly, raised his hand in a warning gesture. His steely gray eyes were cynical as he continued: "Now, if you were to lead us onto the real backtrack, help us locate these creatures, I'll reconsider that judgment. Will you?" N ight came and caught them on the hunt. As the monster-hunting expedition camped beside the lake, the darkness was shattered by a thunderous roaring sound. Matlin tumbled from .the back seat of his car, ran to the lake shore, and peered across the dark waters toward the island in the lake's center. He was aware of other men coming up behind and beside him. It was from the island that the noise came. "Sounds like a whole battery of jet engines," somebody yelled above the roar, "and it seems to be coming this way." Abruptly, the truth of that was borne out. The jet sound was suddenly above them. Framed in a patch of dark blue sky, a monstrous sized helicopter was momentarily visible. It disappeared into a cloud bank. The great roaring receded, became a remote throb. In the darkness, Graham came up beside Matlin, said, "Didn't you tell me you had a lakeside cabin near here?" "Yeh." Matlin said wary. "Got a boat there?" Matlin jumped to a horrid conclusion. "You're not thinking of going over to the island?" he gulped. "Now!" Graham said earnestly, "We'll pay you for the rent of the boat, and guarantee you against damages -- in writing. And if that's the base these creatures operate from, I'll sign your claim." Matlin hesitated. The boat and the lakefront property were his one dream. No one, not even Cora, had ever realized how much they meant to him. On the very day that he had killed the first monster, he had taken a load of sand from his farm and dumped it lovingly on the water's edge. Standing there, Matlin visualized what the reward money would do for his dream: the rough shoreline fully sanded in, a hunting and fishing lodge, and a larger boat, the kind he had often fantasied but never managed to acquire. "I'll do it," he said. IF On the island, using his flashlight sparingly, Matlin led Graham and two other men to where the ground suddenly felt... harder. When they dug down, they found metal bare inches under the grass. Graham talked softly by twoway radio to the camp they had left and then held his radio for Matlin and himself to hear the answer: a parachute army would be called by way of the more powerful radio at the camp. By dawn, several hundred seasoned men with tanks, demolition units, and cannon would be down with them. But, as the radio shut off, they were alone once more in the dark. The reinforcements of the morning were still hours away. It was Matlin -- again -- who found the overhang that led into a huge, brightly lighted ship. H e was so intent, and interested, that he was inside the first chamber with the others before he clearly realized how far he had come. He stopped. He half turned to run. But he didn't move. The scene held him. They were in a circular room about # feet in diameter. A number of solidly built metallic extrusions came up from the floor or down from ceiling. Except for them the room was empty. Matlin went with the others to where a ramp led down to the next level. Here there were more of the huge, built-in machines -- if that was what they were -- but this level, also, was deserted. On the third level, they found two sleeping "children". Each lay on its back in a long, black, metal, box-like structure. The larger was about half the size of a full-grown alien, the smaller a mere bit of a thing two feet long. Both were stocky of body and were, unmistakably, younger versions of the two creatures that had already been killed. As the three men -- Graham and the two officers -- glanced at each other questioningly, Matlin drew out his claim sheet, and held it toward Graham. The government agent gave him a startled look; then, evidently realizing Matlin meant it, he nodded resignedly, took the pen and signed. The moment he had the claim sheet back in his hands, Matlin headed for the ramp. He was sweating now with fear. Yet he realized he had had no alternative. He had to have that signature. But now -- ... Get away from all this stuff that was none of his business! When he reached the lakeshore, he started the motor of the motorboat, and headed back toward his boathouse. He locked up the boat, walked stealthily through the darkness to his car, and drove off. As he came out of the line of trees a mile from his farm, he saw the entire yard was on fire. He heard the thunder of gigantic engines -- His house, his barn, his machine shed -- all were burning! In the vivid, fitful light from the flames he saw the huge helicopter lift up from the far side and soar up into the night sky. So that was where it had gone! It passed by above him somewhat to his right, a colossal sound, the source of which was now completely invisible in the darkness of an overcast sky. Matlin found Cora and the son that was not away at school crouching in the field. She mumbled something about the monster having come over and looked down at them. She said wonderingly, "How did it know this was your farm? That's what I don't understand." IV T he fire was dwindling. People were beginning to drive into the yard. Car doors slammed. In the fading brightness, Matlin in a bemused state carried his son and walked beside Cora to his station wagon. He was having a different kind of thought. Why hadn't the creature killed his wife and child? Cora and the boy had been as completely at its mercy as the farm. A neighbor named Dan Gray touched his arm and said, "How about you and Cora and the boy staying at my place tonight, Steve?" By the time they got over on the Gray farm, a man was on TV describing how Steve Matlin had left three men at the mercy of the returning alien. He named Matlin. Matlin recognized the man who was talking as a member of the monster-hunting expedition. He glanced around, saw that Gray, Gray's wife -- a tall, thin wornan -- and Cora were staring at him. Cora said in horror: "Steve, you didn't!" Matlin was amazed. "I'm going to sue that fellow for libel!" he yelled. "Then it isn't true," Cora wailed. "What an awful thing for them to say such a lie!" Matlin was outraged at her misunderstanding. "It's not a lie, just a bunch of baloney. Why should I stay on that island? If they want to be crazy, that's their business." He saw from their faces that his perfectly obvious truth was not obvious to them. He became grim. "Okay, I can see I'm no longer welcome. Come along, Cora." Mrs. Gray said, tightlipped, "Cora and the boy can stay." at peace with their foolishness. "I'll pick you up in the morning," he said to his wife. Cora did not reply. Gray accompanied Matlin to his car. When he came back into the living room, he was shaking his head. He said to Cora, "One thing about that husband of yours. He let you know where he stands." Cora said stiffly, "He's let me know once too often. Imagine leaving those men!" There were tears in her eyes. "He says they lured him over to the island." "Nobody lures Steve. His own scheming got him over there." "He says he suddenly realized the generals had done it again -- got a private into the front line. And since this was not his war -- " IF "If it isn't his war, whose is it? He fired the first shot." "Well, anyway, the generals are on the firing line, and no one could care less than Steve. I can tell you that." "That's the astonishing thing," said Cora, wonderingly. "He thinks World War II was a conspiracy to waste his time. He lives entirely in his own private world. Nothing can shake him, as you just saw." M atlin drove back to his farm and slept there in the back of his car. When he returned to the Gray farm in the morning, Dan Gray came out to meet him. He was grinning. He said, "Well, Steve, it's finally going to be your war." Matlin stared at the knowing smile on the somewhat heavy face of his neighbor, but the words seemed meaningless. So he made no reply but simply got out of his car and walked into the house. The two women were watching the TV. Matlin did not even glance at the picture. "Ready, Cora?" he said. Both women turned and looked at him strangely. Finally, Mrs. Gray said breathlessly, "You're taking it very calmly." "Taking what calmly?" Mrs. Gray looked helplessly at Cora. "I can't tell him," she almost whispered. Matlin glanced questioningly at his wife. She said, "You might as well hear it. The creature came back and found Mr. Graham and his two companions on the island. And it talked to them through some kind of mechanical translation device. It said it was going to leave earth but thal first it was going to accomplish one thing. It said -- it said -- " Matlin said impatiently, "For Pete's sake, Cora, let's go. You can tell me on the way." Cora said, "It said -- it was going to kill you first." For once Matlin was speechless. At last he stammered: "Me!" After a moment, he added, incredulous, "That's ridiculous. I haven't anything to do with this business." "It says you're the only one on earth who made it your business." f'qphe shock was growing on MatA lin. He could not speak, could not deny the charge in words. Inside his head, he protested silently: "But that first beast was coming toward me. How was I supposed to know?" Cora was continuing in a grieffilled voice: "It says that on all the planets it's visited, no one has ever before killed without warning, without asking any questions." Matlin stared at her with hopeless eyes. He felt battered, defeated, ultimately threatened. For a moment, again, he could scarcely believe. He thought: "I only want to be left alone!" The thought stopped. Because he knew suddenly that all these years he had been maintaining an untruth: that what went on elsewhere was none of his affair. He had pretended so hard, gone into such instant rages, that other people simply glanced at each other significantly and fell silent, and thereafter never brought up the subject again. He had always thought with satisfaction, "By damn, they'd better not say anything but -- " contemptuously -- "let them think what they want." And now, he was the only human being that a visitor from another planet felt motivated to kill... He grew aware once more of Dan Gray's smile. The man spread his hands helplessly. "I can't help it, Steve. Believe it or not, I like you. I even think I understand you. But -- forgive me, Cora -- this seems to me to he a case of poetic justice. I can't think of anyone else who's had something like this coming to him for so long." Matlin turned and walked out of the room. He was aware of Cora following him hastily. "Just a minute, Steve," she said, "I have something for you." Matlin turned. They were alone in the hallway. He grew aware that she was tugging at her wedding ring. "Here," she said, "I should have given you this nineteen years ago, but I let the coming of our first child stop me." # Sh e opened his palm, placed the ring in it. and closed his fingers over it. "You're on your own, Steve. After twenty years of being the most selfish, elf-centered man in the world. yOu can face this as you should, by yourself." Matlin scowled down at the ring, then: "Bah! When you look at me, vo" f be human race as it really is. I've never gone in for the shams, that's all." He slipped the ring into his pocket. "I'm going to keep this and give it back to you when you get over this foolish feeling. My feeling for you was never a sham." He turned and walked out of the room and out of the house. A car was pulling up in front of the Gray house. John Graham was inside it. He climbed out and walked over to where Matlin was about to get into his station wagon, said, "I came over to see you." "Make it quick!" said Matlin. "I have three messages for you." "Shoot!" "Obviously," said Graham, "the U.S. government will not allow one of its citizens to be casually exterminated." Accordingly -- he continued formally -- all of the armed forces would be interposed between Steve Matlin and the alien. Matlin stared at him with uncompromising hostility. "He can duplicate anything we've got, so those are just big words." Graham said in the same formal way that the ability of the creature to duplicate, first, the rifle, then the truck, and then the helicopter, had been taken note of by the military. Matlin's curt laugh dismissed as asinine the notion that the generals would know what to do with such information. "C'mon, c'mon," he said roughly, "what's the second message?" "It's personal," said Graham. He stepped forward. His fist came up, connected perfectly with Matlin's jaw. Matlin was knocked back against his car. He sank to the IF ground, sat there rubbing his jaw and looking up at Graham. He said in an even tone: "Just about everybody seems to agree I had that coming to me, so I'll take it. What's the last message?" Graham, who had evidently expected a battle, stepped back. His savage mood softened. He shook his head wonderingly. "Steve," he said, "you amaze me. Maybe I even respect you." Matlin said nothing. He just sat there, elbows on knees. After a moment, Graham continued : "The way the generals figure it, there's got to be another reason why the creature wants to kill you. Maybe you know something." His gray eyes watched Matlin closely. "Have you been holding anything back?" Matlin shook his head but he was interested. He climbed slowly to his feet, frowning, thoughtful as he dusted himself off. Graham persisted. "It is proposed that its ability to duplicate is based upon a kind of perception that human beings don't have." "Hey!" said Matlin, eyes wide. "You mean like the homing pigeon, or birds flying south, or salmon coming back to their little pool where they were bom?" "The reasoning is," said Graham, "that you got some feedback on whatever it is, and so the creature wants to kill you before you can pass on to anybody else what you know." Matlin was shaking his head. "They're off their rocker. I don't know a thing." G raham watched him a moment longer. Then, clearly satisfied, he said, "Anyway, the military feel that they can't take a chance with a creature that has made a death threat against an American citizen. So they're going to drop an atomio bomb on it and end the matter once and for all." For some reason,  Matlin felt an instant alarm. "Just a minute," ho said doubtfully. "Suppose it duplicates that? Then it'll have everything we've got, and we still won't have seen a thing ifs got." Graham was tolerant. "Oh, come now, Steve. The bomb will be e small one but the right size to pulverize that spaceship. I personally feel strong regrets about this but I have no doubt of the outcome. Once the bomb drops, it'll have nothing to duplicate with -- and it won't be around to do any duplicating." Matlin said, "Better tell them to hold that bomb till they've thought about it some more." Graham was looking at his watch. "I'm afraid it's a little late for that, Steve. Because they figured you might have some telepathic connection with this creature, I've been holding back the fact that the bomb is being dropped -- right -- now!" As he spoke, there was a sound of distant thunder. Involuntarily, the two men ducked. Then they straightened and looked over the near farms, past the trees in the distance, beyond the low hills. A small but familiar and sinister mushroom was rising from the other side of the horizon. "Well," said Graham, "that does j It Too bad. But it shouldn't have made that threat against you." "What about the other ship?" Matlin asked. "What other ship?" said Graham. They had both spoken involuntarily; Now, they stared at each other. ' feraham broke the silence. "Oh, my God!" he said. V T here were stubborn people at G.H.Q. For two decisive days, they rejected the idea that there might be another ship. Then, late in the afternoon of the third day, radar reported a small object high above fiefld H from which the atomic plane had taken off to destroy the spaceship on the island. Control tower challenged the approaching airborne machine. When there was no response, somebody became anxious and sounded a bomb alarm. Then he dived down a chute lhat took him head first into a shelter far below. His quick action made him one of about # fast-reflex people who urvived. Seconds after he made his dive p safety, an atomic bomb demolished field H. About the same time, a TV helicopter was hovering above the island In Matlin's lake, taking pictures of the bomb crater there. Suddenly a spaceship came silently down from fet great height and landed. The helicopter did not tarry. It look rear view pictures as it was fleeing the scene. w Graham went to see Cora, looking for Matlin. But she could only shake her head. "Steve said he was going on the road till this whole thing blew over. He said he figured he'd better not be sitting still when that creature came looking for him." They put Matlin's photo on TV On the fourth day after that, Graham interviewed four sullen young men who had tried to seize Matlin, their intention being to deliver him to the monster. As their spokesman put it, "By handing over the one guy who was really involved in this business, the rest of us could have gone back to our daily affairs." They filed out, one on crutches, two with arms in slings, all bandaged in some way, groaning a little. The following day, Graham interrogated two people who claimed to have witnessed a duel on an open stretch of highway between Matlin in a station wagon and the monster flying an enormous jet plane. Matlin had had a bazooka and the beast had finally beat a retreat. General Maxwell Day, who was with Graham, wondered aloud if Matlin might not be the man who had raided a Marine armory and taken a # rocket launcher and a quarter of a ton of ammunition for it. Graham phoned Cora. "I'm checking a report," he said. "Would Steve have thought of utilizing Marine equipment?" Cora answered carefully: "That weapon belonged to the people of the U.S., didn't it?" "Yes." IF "Well, then, I think Steve would regard himself as part owner, as a citizen, and without any guilt since he would consider either that he paid for it with taxes or earned it in World War II." Graham put his hand over the mouthpiece, said, "I gather he would have thought of such a thing." The Marine officer held his hand out for the phone. "Let me talk to her," he said. A moment later: "Mrs. Matlin?" "Yes?" "May I ask you some very personal questions about your husband?" "You may." "Now, Mrs. Matlin, Mr. Graham here has the highest respect for your opinions, so think carefully about this one: Is your husband intelligent?" Cora hesitated; then: "I know exactly what you mean. On some levels, no; on others, extremely intelligent." "Is he brave?" "To hear him talk, no. But my feeling is, totally. I think you'd have to engage his interest, though." "What does he think of generals?" "They're idiots." "Is he an honest man?" "We-#-#-#-#, that depends. For example, he had that rifle along that first day in ' the hope that he'd be able to kill a deer illegally." "I mean is he responsible for his debts?" "If I may quote him -- he wouldn't give the so and so's the satisfaction of owing them money." General Day smiled. "Now, Mrs. Matlin, would you take your hutband back if I made a sergeant out of him?" "Why not a captain?" "I'm sorry, Mrs. Matlin, if you'll think a little bit, you'll realize thaf he'd never sink that low." "Oh, I don't have to think. You're right. Well -- yes, I might take him back. B-but he's not in the Marines anymore." "He will be, Mrs. Matlin. Goodby." He hung up. An hour later it was announced on TV, radio and the newspapers that Matlin had been re-inducted into the Marines, and that he was ordered to report to the nearest Marine station. A bout midnight that night a jet, with Graham and several officers aboard, flew down to the Marine base where Matlin was resignedly waiting for them. They secured a Marine private's uniform. As the grim, unshaved man reluctantly donned it, they interrogated him. They were interested in any thought whatsoever that may have flitted through Matlin's mind for any reason. Matlin objected: "That's crazy. I don't know anything special -- except the thing is out to get me." "We think you do." "But that's a lot of -- " "Private Matlin! That's an order!" Glumly -- but thoroughly -- Matlin complied with the orders. He told them everything that had passed through his mind about the creature in the past few days. And there had IF been things, many things, things that had seemed crazy and distorted to him, until he thought he was beginning to lose his mind. Visions of a home on a planet of another star. Visions of long, long years of travel. Visions of the buried ship at the lake, where thousands of atomic bombs were in process of being duplicated. His listeners turned pale, but Graham urged, "Go on." Matlin continued: There was only one creature, but it had brought with it a number of spare bodies and could grow even more. Then he stopped. "Damn it," he growled, "I don't like to say this stuff! Why do you want to hear it, anyway? It's just crazy dreams." Graham glanced at the Marine commander, then at Matlin. He said, "Matlin, we don't think it's dreams at all. We think that you are in resonance -- somehow! -- with the creature's mind. And we need to know what it has in its mind -- so, for heaven's sake, go on!" T he story, by the time Matlin got through piecing it together, made a pattern: The alien had arrived in the solar system in two ships, with its bodies in various growth stages and evenly distributed between the two vessels. When one ship -- and its cargo of bodies -- was later destroyed, it made a duplicate, and now again had two. As body after body was destroyed, the next in line was triggered into rapid growth and awakened to full adulthood in about two days. Each new body had the complete "memory" of what had happened to the ones that preceded it; everything that happened to its preceding self. On arrival, the first body had awakened in a state of total receptiveness. It had wanted to be able to duplicate the thoughts and feelings of the inhabitants of' this newiy found planet. -- Be like them, think like them, know their language -- It was in this helpless, blank condition, when it stumbled on Steve Matlin. And that was the story. The creature had been imprinted with the personality of Matlin. Graham said, "Steve, do you realize that this being got all these destructive ideas from vou?" Matlin blinked. "Huh!" Graham, remembering some things that Cora had told him, said, "Do you have any friends, Steve? Anybody you like? Anybody anywhere ?" Matlin could think of no one. Except, of course, Cora and the kids. But his feelings about them were not unmixed. She had insisted on sending the three older children to school in town. But he did feel a genuine affection for her, and them, at some level. Graham said tensely, "That's why she's alive. That's why the creature didn't kill her the day it burned your farm." "B-but -- " Matlin protested, "why destroy the farm?" "You hate the damn place, don't you?" Matlin was silent. He'd said it a thousand times. "What do you think we ought to do with about half the people in this country, Steve?" "I think we ought to wipe the human race off the map and start over again," said Matlin automatically. "What do you think we ought to do with the Russians?" "If I had my way," said Matlin, "we'd go over there and plaster the whole of Asia with atomic bombs." After a little, Graham said softly, "Like to change any of those ideas, Steve?" Matlin, who had finished dressing, scowled into a mirror. "Look," he said finally, "you've got me where I can't hit back. And I'm ready to be loused up by what the idiot generals have got in their crazy noodles. So tell me what you want me to do." A I lX) Hl 'juoraoui ospaid jBip  ceased its feverish duplication of man's atomic bombs... and became itself. Its compulsive mental tie with Matlin was severed. Shuddering, That made a report, on an instantaneous relay-wave transmitter whose receiver was lightyears away: "What w'e always feared would happen on one of these blank mind approaches to a new planet finally happened to me. While I was enormously receptive to any thought, my first body was destroyed by a twolegged inhabitant of this system, a being with the most incredible ideas -- which are apparently due to some early mistreatment. This inability to slough off early shock conditioning seems to be a unique phenomenon of the people of this planet. "Realizing how trapped I was while he remained alive, I made several attempts to kill him. I was unsuccessful in this because he turned out to be unexpectedly resourceful. But he has now put on a suit called a uniform, and this has immediately turned him into a peaceful person. "Thus I was able to free myself. Naturally, I can still sense where he is, but he can no longer receive my thoughts nor I his. However, I must report that I am pinned down here by an air fleet. My image as a goodwill visitor has been completely nullified by what has happened. Obviously, I won't use any weapons against them; so perhaps this expedition is doomed." A team of astronauts was sent up. The team successfully boarded That's second spaceship, reporting that it was occupied by four bodies in various growth stages. Even as they blew up the ship in its silent orbit, on earth Matlin was driven to the edge of the lake. There, a government launch was provided him. While Graham and General Day watched through binoculars, Matlin drove the # craft right onto the beach of the island, careless of any damage to it. "I think he smashed the launch," said Graham. "Good." "Good?" "My whole theory about him would collapse if he treated governIF ment property with the same care that he gave his own possessions. It reassures me that he's exactly the man I thought." Matlin came to where the second alien ship lay at the bottom of the blast pit. Water had filtered down into the clay. Having his orders, Matlin dutifully slid down into the goo. He held his rifle high, cursed, and started for the entrance. VI G raham, General Day, and an artillery major watched Matlin's progress on a portable TV. The picture was coming from a ship some # feet above the island. The scene below was crystal clear. Through the marvelous telescopic lens, Matlin actually looked like a tiny human being walking. "But why send anyone?" Graham protested. "Why not just blast it? As you've already pointed out, we've got enough power up there -- " he indicated the sky above -- "to exterminate him." General Day explained that he now favored Graham's earlier view. The alien might be able to defend itself. "But it's too late for caution," Graham interjected. "We've burned our bridges." It would be unwise, the Marine officer explained, to provoke the creature further until a confrontation had taken place. "A confrontation between a super-being -- and Matlin!" "Who else should we send? Some poor devil? No, Matlin is oriented to this. Seeing the creature face oa is not a new experience to him aa it would be to some other lower ranks." "Why not send you? Me?" Day answered in a steady voice that such decisions as were required here should not be made by people who reasoned on the basis of official attitudes. "How do you think I got to be a general? When in doubt, I listened to what the men thought. They have a basic canniness that transcends intellect." With an effort, Graham recovered. "You heard Matlin's basic truth," he said. "His opinion of the human race -- " General Day gave him a surprised look. "You mean to tell me that isn't your opinion also?" "No." "You don't think that human beings are absolutely impossible?" "No, I think they're pretty terrific," said Graham. "Boy, are you far gone," said the general in a tolerant voice. "I can see that we Marines have an understanding of human behavior that beats all you brain-washed people." He broke off. "Matlin was badly handled in World War II." "What?" Graham groped. "You ask, what has that got to do with it? Plenty. You see, Mr. Graham, you have to understand that a true Marine is a king. Now, Matlin is the true Marine type. But he was treated like an ordinary private. He never got over it; so he's been seething for # years, waiting for recognition. I'm giving it to him. A king Marine, Mr. Graham, can direct a war, take command of a city, or negotiate with a foreign power like a government. Marines who get to be generals are considered sub-level versions of this species. All Marines understand this perfectly. It will not occur to Matlin to consult me, or you, or the U.S. Government. He'll size up the situation, make a decision, and I shall back him up." He turned to the major, commanded, "All right, start firing!" "Firing!" Graham yelled. Day explained patiently as to a child that it was necessary in this extreme emergency to reindoctrinate this particular Marine, and grind in the simple truth -- to him -- that generals always loused things up. M A quick reminder, that's all, Mr. Graham." M atlin was still skidding around in the mud when the first shell landed to his left. It sprayed him with fine droplets of wet dirt. The second shell landed to his right. The debris from it missed him entirely, but he was now in such state of rage that he didn't notice. By the time the shelling ceased, his anger was gone and he was in that peculiar state of mind which can only be described with one word: Marine. The man who presently entered the alien ship knew that life was tough, that other people could not be trusted, that no one cared about him. It was a truth he had always fought with bitterness and rage. But there was no longer any doubt in his mind. People were what they were. They would shoot you in the back if they couldn't get you from in front. Understanding this, you could be friendly with them, shake their hands, enjoy their company -- and be completely free of any need to judge them or condemn them. But you were on your own, day and night, year in and out. As he saw the creature, Matlin used his gun for the purpose that he had brought it. Deliberately, he tossed it down. It struck the metal floor with a clatter. The echoes of the sound faded -- and there was silence. Alien and human stood there staring. Matlin waited. S uddenly, the hoped-for voice came from a speaker in the ceiling: "I am talking to you through a computer, which is translating my thoughts into your language. It will do the same for yours. Why have they sent you to me -- the one man I threatened to kill?" That added: "I no longer plan to kill you. So you may talk freely." Matlin said bluntly, "We're trying to decide what to do with you. Do you have any suggestions?" "I wish to leave the planet forever. Can you arrange it?" Matlin was practical. Could the creature leave whether human beings like it or not? "No." The simple negative took Matlin slightly aback. "You have no special weapons from -- from where you come from?" IF "None," admitted the alien. That admission also startled Matlin. "You mean to tell me we can do what we want with you? You can't stop us?" "Yes, except -- " Matlin wanted to know except what? The great eyes blinked at him, its black, fold-like eyelids rolling up and down in a skin and muscle complex unlike that of any creature Matlin had ever seen before. "Except that it will do you no good to kill me." "You'd better make damn clear what you mean," Matlin said. Watching him, That gave its explanation. And Matlin realized that what That said was true. For once in the an enemy would solve nothing. M atlin's boat was almost waterlogged by the time he successfully beached it near where Graham and the others were waiting. He came up to them and saluted. General Day returned the salute smartly, and said: "Your report." "I told him he could go," said Matlin. "He'll be leaving when I signal." "What?" That was Graham, his voice sounding shrill and amazed in his own ears. "But why?" "Never mind why," said General Day. "That's the way it's going to be." He spoke into his mike: "Men, this alien ship is going to lift from here in a few minutes. Let it go through. A duly authorized person has negotiated this solution." The language was not clear to Matlin. "Is it okay?" he asked questioningly. For an instant, it seemed to Graham, Day hesitated. Graham said urgently into that instant: "At least, you're going to find out what made him agree?" Day seemed to have come to a decision; his momentary hesitation ended. "Okay!" he said to Matlin. "Okay, sergeant." Matlin raised his rifle, and fired it into the air. To Graham, Day said, "I've never lost a bet on a king Marine, and I don't expect to now." The interchange ended. For on the island, the ship was lifting. Silent, jetless, rocketless power drove it up on a slant. It passed over their heads, gathering speed. It grew small and, as they watched, became a dot and vanished. Aboard it, the creature to which Matlin had talked performed the preliminaries necessary to an interstellar voyage, and then retired to one of the sleep boxes. Soon it was in a state of suspended animation... Thereupon happened what the monster had told Matlin -- the underlying reality, which made it useless, unnecessary, even dangerous, to destroy it and its vessel. On a planet many light-years away, the real That stirred, awaken      IF  Short Story Nothing can withstand the power of the press -- even when it g s robot-directedi I t was a sensational front page. The four-color headline had punch, the atrocity photo had a pretty girl in it, the comic strip was surefire and the crossword puzzle was just difficult enough. "Same old slop," said Dave Romero, tilting back in his swivel chair and spreading the proof out on his desk. "I've been editor of the Territory Eight Press-Guardian for five months and I've never written a word." His assistant, a tall heavyset young man named Merle Bockman, said, "So complain to Commander Vetterlein. He's supposed to be staying at his suite in the Territory Eight Patriotic Arms Hotel this week." Commander G. B. Vetterlein owned forty-seven newspapers on Barnum and eighty-three on other planets. Everything that appeared in the Press-Guardian came from his news and feature syndicates. As editor, Dave's main function was making up the paper and getting everything to fit into eight pages. "What's a six-letter word for scoundrel?" he asked Bockman. "Batson," replied his assistant. "Who's this guy in our first comic strip remind you of? This fellow here who seems to be deflowering the heroine between panels?" Not looking, Bockman said, "Batson." Dave nodded, his dark face lining as he frowned. He read the headline aloud again. " 'Batson Lies, Avers Plexus Spokesman'. Subhead: 'No Famine In Territory Nine'." "Did you read Little Crippled Sally today?" "Yeah, where she tells her uncle that starvation is usually only psychosomatic. Sure." Bockman moved toward the press room "I have a hunch that Plexus Enterprises is pulling a fast one with those surplus food warehouses." "All I know is what I print in the paper," said Dave. "Go ahead. Tell those automatic bastards to roll. It's after ten and we've got to be on the stands by noon." Cupping his hands Bockman yelled, "Let'er roll!" at the fully automated press room. The presses roared and he slid the door shut to cut off some of the whir. "I wonder what Leopoldo Batson's really like." "Let's suggest that to Commander Vetterlein for tomorrow's Inquiring Reporter question," said Dave, still frowning at the front page. L eopoldo Batson had seized control of the key cities in the neighboring Territory Nine some six months before. He still didn't have complete authority, and one of his big problems was the Plexus Food Enterprises Company. Plexus had been paid a fee by four of the previous governments to stockpile a certain amount of food from the many crops and meats that they grew, processed and packaged. Now that a famine had actually hit Territory Nine the surplus storehouses proved to be just about empty. There were rumors that Plexus had shifted products to other warehouses, but they claimed spoilage and acts of god. None of this appeared in the Press-Guardian , since there was a strong possibility that Commander Vetterlein was a major shareholder in Plexus Enterprises. Whatever his motives, the commander seemed determined to use his papers to do in Leopoldo Batson. Even his papers here in Territory Eight. "Bv the way," said Bockman. "Yeah?" "Something was delivered whileyou were out at coffee. I put it back in the cloak room." "What is it?" "A big crate, comes from the Vett Syndicate storerooms in the capital at Keystone." "Are we supposed to open it?" "Nothing came with the crate," said Bockman, nodding his head toward the back room of the newspaper offices. "It's addressed to you and that's all I know." Dave stood up. "We'll investigate." A blue light flashed over Dave's desk. "Message," said Bockman. "Blue," said Dave, dropping back into his chair. "Blue's the damned commander's color." He swung his forefinger against the response toggle and said, "David W. Romero." "Stand easy," said a rich falsetto voice. On the view screen next to Dave's outdrop tube appeared the long sharp face of a pale, grayhaired man. "Commander Vetterlein here. How's it going, David?" "Fine, sir," he said smartly. "I'd like to see you here at my suite in one half of an hour," said the commander and faded out. Dave stood up again. "Oh, boy." "It could be a raise," said Bockman. "No, no," said Dave. "Raises come out of the payhole there. But an in-person talk with the commander. That's something else again." "Shall I open the crate while you're gone?" "Yes," said Dave, heading for the door. "I s may want to use it." C ommander Vetterlein laughed like a squeezed rubber doll. A tear appeared at the corner of one of his pale eyes and he clapped his hands on his knees. "Isn't that a scheme to admire?" he asked Dave. The parlor of the suite was some fifty feet long with two bright, all-glass walls. The solid walls were decorated with neat rows of flags. The flags of the various territories, condominiums, nations and kingdoms where the commander had papers. Dave was looking at the flags and not at his chief. "Yes, sir." "You're admiring my flag collection?" "Yes, sir." "The flag of one's country," said the commander's piping voice, "brings tears to one's eyes and elation to one's heart. You can well understand that, being a citizen of so many places and planets, I can sometimes sit here for hours crying and being elated." "Yes, I can understand that." "Now then," said Vetterlein, "to return to the details of your special mission. You will leave tonight, in a plain unmarked land car, and proceed to Territory Nine. Reservations have been made for you at the Esperanza Inn -- under your own name, since we want no charges of scheming." "And the Esperanza Inn is near this chateau?" "Exactly," said the comtnander, smiling. "The cold stone chateau wherein an unsullied fairhaired young woman is being held prisoner and used for an uncountable number of vile purposes by Leopoldo Batson, the so-called liberator of Territory Nine." Dave checked his notebook. "Her name is Patricia Haysen and she's the daughter of the former Prime Minister." "Right. Of old Gaylord J. Haysen himself, the territory's leading warehouse rental agent and a keen politician." The commander picked a folder from the jade-top table in front of his knees. "Here we have pictures of the girl. Bathing suit shot, formal dress, disheveled. We'll want to run them all. More important are the pictures you'll get of the guards doing her injustices and shots of her being freed and so on." Dave took the photos. Patricia Haysen was a blonde girl in her early twenties, pretty and slender, looking somewhat reluctant. "She's expecting the rescue?" "Her father has arranged it. Rented the chateau under a name IF that's pretty close to Batson," explained the commander. "Haysen has also seen to it that two defected Batson men will be on guard there. They will be easily overpowered." "Good," said Dave, since he would be doing the overpowering. "It's going to be a big story," said Commander Vetterlein. "It's certain to look real if handled properly. Then it will damage Batson. After all, nobody wants a seducer for a president." "No, sir," agreed Dave. "I have picked you, David, because I want the story to break in this territory, outside of Batson's stamping grounds. That will also make the rescue seem more daring." The commander chuckled. "After you succeed with this, David, other plums will come your way." "I'm glad to do it," said Dave. "I'm sure my assistant can run the paper while I'm gone." Slipping the pictures of the Haysen girl away Vetterlein said, "I've made certain that the Press-Guardian will function smoothly. On direct order from me, our Keystone storerooms have sent you an android." "Beg pardon?" "Over the years, we've experimented with the use of robot editors. They don't have the fire and drive of real flesh-and-blood fellows like yourself but they do function efficiently," the commander said, "I have quite an interest in this type of android. I have even bought up large quantities of those used on far remote planets. Some of my android editors in the collection are well over two centuries old." He laughed. "Don't frown, David. The one you've got is brand new and ready to go. The latest model. Let's hope it doesn't prove too good, eh now?" So that's what was in the crate! "Right, sir," said Dave, trying not to frown. M erle Bockman, his arms folded, was standing in the middle of the editorial room. His head was tilted slightly to the left and his straight brown hair was hanging at an odd angle. As Dave came in he said, "Hello, chief." "Open the crate yet?" "Halfway. Then I stopped." "It's supposed to be my temporary replacement," said Dave. "They come packed in excelsior now?" "It's an android." "Oh," said Bockman. "That's okay. I thought somebody was trying to give us a scoop on a trunk murder." He shook his head. "Why do you need a replacement?" Dave told him about his assignment to go into the next territory and pretend to rescue Patricia Haysen. "Let's get this brand new efficient editor unpacked. I've got to leave in a couple of hours." "I thought," said Bockman, following Dave to the cloakroom, "that I'd get to run the PressGuardian when you had to leave." "So did I. But you don't seem to be one of the commander's hobbies." The crate lid was still down but most of the nails had been pulled. "I stopped when I saw the feet." said Bookman. Dave grabbed the lid and swung it up. "What the hell?" On top of the excelsior rested a box of cigars. Dave lifted it out and started scooping the excelsior away. Something started whirring and buzzing, and then the android suddenly sat up. He looked like a heavy middle-aged man. He had a speckled complexion and a thick belligerent lower lip. Pulled down on his wide forehead was a green eyeshade. He scowled at Dave. "You, Junior! Who are you?" "Dave Romero. You're going to be running the paper here during the day or so that I'm gone." "Give me my damn cigars," said the android, grabbed the box of cigars from Dave and jumped out of the crate. Glaring at Bockman the android said. "You! Who are you?" "Merle Bockman." "Merle? That's great. They give me a wall-eyed greenhorn named Merle and an undersized Romero and think I'm going to put out a paper worth reading!" Dave glanced down into the crate and saw a bill of lading. He reached for it. "Now that you know us, who the hell are you?" "My name-," said the android, "is Howey-#." He thumbed open the cigar box. "And I'm too damn good a city editor to be stuck with an operation like this." T he slip in Dave's hand read: "Enclosed find one (#) automatic editor. His name is Maximo-# and to operate him simply push button marked edit " To Howey-#, Dave said, "It says here you're supposed to be Maximo-#." Howey-# laughed and lit his cigar with a wood match. "A lot they know! I'll tell you, Dave. I've been on the shelf for a time. They prefer those new pansy andies but I knew I'd get a crack at a paper again. I'm going to put this sheet on its feet. What's its name?" "The Press-Guardian " said Dave. "I think, though, that you've been sent to us by mistake." Howey exhaled smoke. "You needed a city editor. I'm it. Show me my desk." "Merle," said Dave, "you stay here and fill Howey in. I want to make a call." Dave ran to his desk and dialed the Patriotic Arms. He couldn't get through to the commander and had to talk to the image of his general secretary, a fat man named Brubecker. "Aren't you enroute yet, David?" asked Brubecker. "It's about the android editor," said Dave. "They sent us the wrong one and..." "David. Mistakes just aren't made where the commander's hobbies are concerned." Brubecker puckered his lips. "Don't be a spoilsport about turning over the reins. It is, after all, only for a couple of days at most." Then he was gone. "Junior," called Howey-#, "you're sitting in my slot. Now. First off I want to read a few IF copies of this rag and then I want to go out and nose around this town and see what's going on." He came up and patted Dave on the back. "Where do you keep your bottle?" "You drink, too?" "I was built to do everything a good editor is supposed to do," said Howey-#. "Third drawer on the left," said Dave. He gave up his swivel chair and looked back at Bockman. "I'll see you in a day or so with a big story." Bockman didn't speak. D ave traveled back roads and little used roadways in the gray land car the Vett Syndicate had provided him. It was nearly twilight now and he'd been driving since morning. He had left Territory Eight last night, driven several hours and then pulled off the road and slept a few hours. He crossed over into Territory Nine a little after sunrise. The roads Commander Vetterlein had mapped out for him to take to the chateau were so out of the way that Dave hadn't had a chance to pick up a copy of today's PressGuardian. He hoped Howey-#'s first issue was up to standard. Well, that was the commander's problem -- or his general secretary's. Since Dave had come to Barnum to work on the Press-Guardian he had done what he was told. He didn't agree with Commander Vetterlein's approach or with most of his ideas. But Dave was anxious to make good on this job. He was twenty-seven now and he'd already screwed up a couple of good jobs. This time he'd keep quiet and follow orders. He had been here five months and had no trouble. He'd even received a raise. The country around him now was dry and nearly flat. No grass, few trees. Hard orange and yellow land and low, brown, rocky hills. There was a wind and it snapped thin clouds of dust up into the thin blue sky. Dust spattered at the car windows, along with swarms of suicidal green gnats. He found the sideroad that led to the chateau and turned onto it. Gradually a forest grew up around him. When the road finally deadended against a high stone wall there seemed to be tall, tangled trees everywhere behind him. Dave went over his map again and then gathered up his cameras and his stun pistol and got out of the car. It was a step up in the organization to be chosen for a nonsitting assignment like this. Even so, Dave felt uneasy. You couldn't tell how realistic things might get in a mock rescue. The narrow break in the wall was where it was supposed to be. Dave shoved his gear through and then edged through himself. There was the chateau. A large yellowstone building, some thirty yards from where he stood. Dave uncased a camera and took a few steps toward the place. Something showed at a second floor window. Something white was being waved. 'Don't surrender till I get a few pictures," Dave called. A girl's voice called something back and then the white was gone. A moment later a ground floor side door opened and a slim blonde girl ran from the chateau waving a large white sheet of paper. "... can forget it," she was saying. Dave hurried toward her. "Since I'm alone you'll have to take some of the pictures when I tangle with the guards. Where are they anyway?" "They got upset and took off," the girl said. "You are the man from the Press-Guardian , aren't you?" "Yes." "Well," the girl said, "then you should have seen this. I was just packing when I glanced out and saw you sneaking up." What she was holding was a copy of the PressGuardian. "Today's?" asked Dave, taking it. "I haven't seen it yet." "A runner brought it just awhile ago. I don't imagine Commander Vetterlein can be too happy." Swallowing, Dave made himself look at the front page. The headline read: Plexus Plans Frameup! Then the subheads: News Magnate Linked With Crooked Food Company In Move To Smear Batson! Press-Guardian Refuses To Play Ball And Tells All! The accompanying stories were more of the same. "He even threw out all the comics," said Dave, leafing through the paper. "But left my name on the masthead." "He?" "Howey-#," mumbled Dave. Howey really was a good newsman. In his few hours as acting editor he'd gone out and dug up the whole story about the setup in Territory Eight. It probably didn't take that much digging. Dave knew most of what Howey had used in his expose. He just hadn't been able to use it in print. "You see, they delivered the wrong android to take my place." "Can you explain while I pack?" asked the girl. "I don't feel like staying on at the chateau now. I told my father this whole foolishness just couldn't be made to work. He and the commander cooked it up -- and so it had to be tried." "You are Patricia Haysen, then?" "Why else would I be involved in this mishmash? Come on!" They went into the chateau and Dave explained to her just exactly how Howey-# had ruined his career for him. B rown fog began to fill in the spaces between the clumps of trees. Patricia Haysen made herself more compact on the car seat and said, "I'm sorry none of the communications at the chateau were connected. My father didn't think it was worth the expense since we'd only be using the place for a few days. Do you really want to call your paper?" Dave slowed the car as the weather thickened. "Eventually. If only to tell them what to do with the stuff in my desk." "Maybe Commander Vetterlein IF will forgive," began the girl. "No. He's not likely to, is he?" "Nope." "You're sure you don't want to head back to your own territory tonight? You don't have to transport me home." "I want to postpone the trip until tomorrow," said Dave. "By now somebody must have stopped Howey-#." "Of course." said Patricia. "You can count on the commander." "I was trying to hold onto this job with the Press-Guardian " "Don't apologize for not telling the truth in the paper. You'd have been stopped anyway." "I hate to think of an android having more nerve than me." "They build some of them that way," said the girl. She bobbed up suddenly. "That's no fog there!" Dave braked. About # feet ahead of them was a black truck, swung across the road. Five uniformed men were standing in front of it, casually aiming blaster rifles down the road. "Would those guys be some of Leopoldo Batson's troops?" "Now that you mention it," said Patricia, "that short man with the curly gray hair is Leopoldo Batson himself." "The range of those rifles is two to three hundred feet. I guess we'd better surrender." He killed the motor. "Want to take some pictures of them first?" Dave frowned at her and stepped out of the car. "Good evening." "Name, please?" asked one of the approaching men. "I'm Dave Romero from Territory Eight." Batson clapped his hands together and laughed. "My friend!" he came running for Dave. "A man of great courage." W hile Batson embraced him Dave said, "You were expecting me?" "Yes," said Batson. "We learned that you were registered at the Esperanza Inn and after we read today's Press-Guardian we knew you had come here to our territory for but one purpose. Am I right?" "Well, yes," said Dave, watching Patricia climb to the road. "How were you able to wrest control away from Commander Vetterlein? Will you continue?" "I hope so." "Enough talk," said Batson. "We came to the inn with an invitation for you. You had not arrived and we set out to watch the roads for some sign of you." His head jerked. "Who is that girl?" "I'm Patricia Haysen. You know me, don't you, Mr. Batson?" "I know your corrupt father." "Miss Haysen," said Dave, "Miss Haysen provided me with a great deal of information. She's on our side, Batson." "Coming from the heroic editor of the Press-Guardian that's recommendation enough," said Batson, embracing them both. "What sort of invitation did you have in mind?" asked Dave. "I know you'll want to cover it," said Batson. "We have at last obtained accurate information concerning the Plexus Food Enterprises manipulations of the surplus food supplies. We have found the actual locations of the hidden warehouses where the food is really kept before it is sold secretly to wholesalers in other territories." "The stuff didn't spoil then?" "No," said Batson. "Plexus juggled books and records to make it look that way. A good scheme for selling the same goods twice, once to the government and once to private parties." He clasped Dave's arm. "So I invite you to accompany us on tonight's raid." "Tonight?" said Dave. "Right now?" "We strike at midnight," said Batson. "You should get enough material for a whole edition. Plus pictures." Dave nodded finally. "Okay." He looked toward Patricia. "I'll come along, too, if I may," she said. "You're on our side now," said Batson. "You're welcome." Batson embraced them both and then they started off on the raid. T he office of the Press-Guardian was quiet. It was early morning and Dave stood in the doorway with the still, blue morning behind him. "BOckman?" he said. He waited and then entered and crossed to his desk. Sitting on top of it, under a halfempty box of cigars, was a copy of yesterday's paper. Dave had spent all yesterday afternoon and evening driving back and he had again not seen the Press-Guardian at all. He lifted aside Howey-#'s cigars and looked down at the front page. As he had expected all the expose was retracted and a sabotage plot charged against Batson and his followers. There was no mention of Howey#. Dave walked back to the cloak room and peered in. The crate was there with the lid on but not nailed shtit. Dave lifted it and then let it drop. Howey-# had been dismantled and tossed into the excelsior and the lid jammed down to make the pieces fit. Dave went again to his desk. Bockman was just coming in to the office. "Hello, Merle." Bockman said, "All is forgiven -- in case you were worried." "Oh?" "The commander called me personally. He said now and then a mistake gets made, and this time someone in his organization slipped up and sent us a crusading editor from his private collection and not a new efficient model. A few firings were made and the incident is officially over." "That's fine." "It was a good issue I thought," said Bockman. "Although I had to pretend that Howey-# went berserk and locked me in the cloak room when I protested and that I didn't get out until it was too late to stop the paper." "Who dismantled him?" IF "The commander sent over some guys." Bockman lowered his head. "Have any trouble over in Nine?" "No," said Dave. "I'm a hero over there because they think I put out that issue. I met Leopoldo Batson and went on a midnight raid with him." "A raid?" "We found the warehouses where Plexus had stored the food supplies they'd swindled the government out of. Then yesterday morning I went along while some of the food was distributed. There really are a lot of hungry people over there." "I figured," said Bockman. "What about Haysen's daughter? That's the only problem that's still bothering Commander Vetterlein. Her father called him and said she never came back from the chateau. Commander will be asking you about her." "Patricia got fed up with her father. She's on the other side now. I left her over in the capital yesterday." Bockman put his hands in his pockets. "Shall we get going on the makeup? The Syndicate's been outdoing itself on anti-Batson." Dave took a cigar from the box. "Today's issue is going to be devoted to the raid on the Plexus warehouses and to the famine. With text and pictures by your editor." Bockman said, "And tomorrow's paper?" "I imagine it will be another retraction," said Dave. "If possible I should be back in the capital of Territory Nine by sometime tonight." He lit the cigar. "Before I go, though, I want to do an expose on my own. You can say I locked you in the cloakroom." "To hell with that," said Bockby Larry Niven  by Brian W. Aldiss by Lloyd Biggie, ir. plus other stories and articles by R. S. Richardson , Joseph IP  Novelette The creature from space was tiny but dangerous . In fact, it was a Man I I H e had taken refuge deep in a cavern when the fiery object sped across the horizon and dropped straight toward the center of his praying circle. He had watched it settle, its flames fusing rock and clay, watched the cherry red surface of the object turn gray as it cooled. Until then he had not thought of it as some kind of vehicle bearing a living being. Even when an opening appeared and a creature climbed to the ground his sensation was one of shocked inability to accept the picture his eyes held. He had never sen a living thing so small. The creature was hardly larger than a branch from one of the desert shrubs that surrounded the praying circle. He lay in the cavern's darkness, frozen in breathless rigidity, watching with hypnotic fascination as the creature began to move about. He tried to still the excited quivering of his muscles, lest some emanation from them might turn the visitor's attention toward him; he had no way of knowing what senses the creature possessed. He was known among his Ceremonial Family as The Small One -- not yet quite adolescent, and tiny for his age. He blinked hard and suppressed a whimper, fearful that he faced a problem much larger than he could be expected to handle alone. He could lie hidden in the cave's darkness and yet see clearly every inch of the fantastic, arid landscape around his prayer circle through a narrow slit in the wall. This gradually helped to quiet his racing blood. It was then that Small One began to sense waves of emotion flowing from the stranger. He thought. "This thing has a mind," and found some of his fears draining away. He could begin to think, without too much apprehension, of trying to establish some means of communicating with the alien being. But suddenly tension returned. The stranger had discovered his cave mouth and was moving toward it. F rantically Small One concentrated upon learning why the creature seemed bent upon entering that black hole. But the alien mind was murky. Its thoughts took only vague shapes. Small One probed for signs of intended violence, but he found only curiosity, mingled with a confusion of half-formed ideas, among which was a primitive sort of wariness and cautious distrust of dark places. The stranger crept into the cave. Small One could hear the intruder stumbling about in the gloom. From the ledge upon which he lay, Small One could watch a rather incomplete exploration back about a hundred feet into the tunnel. By the manner of the visitor's movement Small One realized that possibly the creature possessed eyes that became blinded t by darkness. He seemed to have no secondary senses to compensate. The stranger came forward toward the light again, and Small One could see that wariness had slipped from him and could sense dimly that a feeling of shelter and safety had taken its place. He thought of letting the stranger know that his probing hands had passed near a Wist, but caution kept Small One lying hidden upon his ledge. He memorized carefully, however, the crevice in which the Wist lay, for when night's cold swept away day's blazing desert heat that Wist would lose its torpor. Then it would crawl about in search of flesh it might sting into a living-death paralysis and use as an incubator to receive and nourish its eggs. Before that time older members of The Small One's Family must come and destroy the Wist. The stranger was moving again. He started to explore an area of the desert within sight of his ship, examining sparse plant life, stopping at intervals to survey at some length far-away features of landscape through an object he held up before his eyes. Small One guessed it to be some mechanical means for increasing the creature's powers of vision. On one circle back to his ship the visitor's feet kicked into a pile of crystals. They were bright bits that The Small One found on occasions shining from stream beds or lying in the rubble of erosion on mesas beyond the great pine forests. The Small One had brought them with him to his vigil, for he was still very young. Even though he had embarked upon the first of the five ceremonial stages of Thinking Alone, which were the steps from childhood to the wisdom of an adult, The Small One had felt afraid to sit in the loneliness of his prayer circle without companionship of his toys. He was ashamed now that this strange being had discovered his secret and would know how much of the baby still lurked within him. But the stranger seemed wildly excited by the discovery. He laid down a tube-like object which he had carried with great care all this time, scooped up a handful of crystals and rushed with them to relatively cooler air just inside the cave to examine them. He turned them over and over in his hands -- ruby red ones, clear glass-like ones which scintillated with sparkling brightness deep in their hearts even in the filtered light of the cavern month. Small One caught from the creature's mind sensations of tremendous satisfaction. There were vague images of richness, of yellow hair, of a pale throat around which a string of the crystals sparkled -- pictures piling up kaleidoscopically, so fast that the patterns became confused and unrecognizable. But that evident joy over some silly toys caused The Small One to feel suddenly a strong bond of kinship. The warmth of desiring understanding and friendliness crept into his mind. Impulsively he moved from his ledge. Small One was not prepared for such an explosion of terror as that which thundered from the stranger's mind. The creature whirled, froze for an instant with face a twisted mask, then sprang backward toward the cavern's darkness. T error lashed at The Small One like uncontrollable whips of energy. He sensed a fearsome image of himself -- a gigantic head with blazing green eyes and saber-like teeth -- flooding the stranger's mind. He caught impressions of a desire to flee, of a wish for that metal tube which the stranger had laid upon the sands and forgotten in the excitement of finding his crystals, of a hopeless resignation to death. The ledge upon which The Small One had hidden was directly over the cave's entrance. He sensed that the mere act of suddenly appearing between the stranger and that doorway enlarged the creature's fright. To allay this fear The Small One stepped to one side and left the tunnel opening free. Yet the stranger continued to back farther into the cavern depths, wedging himself finally in a crevice where he seemed to feel himself hidden by darkness. The Small One spent some moments wishing he could have adIF vanced through even one or two more of the stages of Thinking Alone, for he felt very young in the face of this problem. He had never known of a living thing on his world that experienced the terrible fear he saw in this creature huddled in the dark crevice. Perhaps the Wise Ones might have some understanding of it, but such insight would not belong to Small One until the fifth stage. He felt intuitively that this visitor from the skies possessed a degree of intelligence. He caught vague and completely alien impressions from that mind: the tube lying out on the sands would be used to kill Small One if opportunity presented itself to possess it; much of the fear lying like a mist over the creature's mind centered in certainty that only moments stood between it and death under the fangs of a wild beast hungering for food. The idea was so preposterous! The Small One would have laughed aloud if his thoughts had not been flooded with pity for the cowering creature. In his young way he hoped the stranger possessed intelligence of a degree high enough to allow some means of communication to be established between them. He built images of friendship, of peaceful intention, of helpfulness, of frank curiosity... but faced finally a realization that the pathways through the creature's mind were clouded. Any pictures that might find their way along them would be dim and possibly unrecognized. He tried then a visual presentation, holding his arms wide in the gesture of welcoming a brother from another Ceremonial Family. When no response followed, he stood tall, in the aloof posture of a strange one waiting politely to be noticed and invited to confer. He went closer and repeated these rhythmic signs, but got no response. He began to feel completely helpless and childish in the face of this problem. He thought for a while of calling for his Family's Tutor, but he was ashamed to confess that he might still be too young to have been sent out to his first stage of Thinking Alone. It occurred to Small One that the stranger's eyes might be of a reatively primitive type that could not receive impressions through darkness, and so he willed light to come into the cave. The creature's wild scream at first clear sight of The Small One hurled itself far down passages, deep into the cavern in repeated waves of echoes. Small One had to close his own mind a moment to bring his senses back into harmony, for that cry sliced like a spear into his wide-open ears. He backed away from the crevice so that the stranger might not feel himself imprisoned there. Then he repeated again, for eyes that could now see, the ceremonial greetings he had used in darkness -- the aloofness of one wishing to be noticed, the wideopened arms of welcoming a brother from another Family. But each movement seemed to drive the visitor into a wilder frenzy of fear emotions. The Small One probed and found IF that his movements were being misinterpreted as threats. Heheld himself still for a time, hoping to calm the stranger's terror. He searched his own mind for some means by which he might establish communication and reassure the creature. He wished with the self-pity of the very young, for that close, secure contact that only yesterday had bound his mind in complete unity with his Tutor's. He wept inside, for he knew that his first step over the threshold toward the Coming of Age had severed that tie forever. Hphe Small One labored hard at his problem, but the only possibility he could think of was to perform a ritual of ultimate friendship rarely used outside one's Ceremonial Family, the Ritual of Trust -- to lie on his back and wave his feet helplessly in the air, exposing his vulnerable belly. This he did, over and over, crawling a little closer each time until he could almost feel the creature's panting breath stir the air between them. He lay quiet then, hoping this being might eventually conquer fear and perform his own proper part of the ritual. It occurred to The Small One that an alien culture might not have instructed its members in proper responses to the ritual. So he invited the creature in pantomime, showing the routine of making a stabbing motion with empty hands to complete acknowledgement and acceptance of proffered trust. He lay there patiently, repeating the pantomime at intervals. In time The Small One sensed a lessening of the pounding force of fear waves between them and an alert wariness gradually taking their place. The stranger began making noises -- modulated sound which must be a language. Small One concentrated upon storing every syllable . in the memory area of his mind. There was a tune and a pattern: "You're an ugly monster. You could tear me out of this crack without half trying. Why don't you? What's stopping you? What's with this rolling over on your back like that? When my dog does that he's either done something he knows I'll whip him for, or he wants his tummy scratched. Is that what you're trying? Or do you figure on tricking me into coming out from behind this rock so you can snap me up without having to dig me out? I wouldn't make a good-sized bite for you. You couldn't even feel me go down that gullet of yours. If you weren't so damned big I'd swear you were trying to make friends. Well, nothing doing, Pal; you won't get me that way. I'm staying right here. It's your move, Big Boy. What do you intend to do next?" Small One lay almost breathlessly still, fearful that any further approach might destroy the tentative calm that had settled between them. Time's pulse beat out the slow, monotonous rhythm of the first sun's climb to its zenith and into the dawning of the red sun. Small One found his concentration weakening. It became increasingly difficult to hold light within the cavern. And then a suffusion of joy poureci trom Small One's neck glands, for the stranger stretched an arm out from his hiding place. Modulated sound again came from the creature's mouth: "Wish I knew what was going around in that great big head of yours, Pal. I can't stand much more in this crevice; my feet won't take it. You could get me anyhow. Might as well take a chance and come out. Get it over with. If you were as small as my dog I know what I'd do to that big tummy of yours. All right, Comrade, I'm coming out. Will that start your saliva glands working, or will it make your heart beat in anticipation of a kind word -- like Shep's? Your eyes just don't look as liquid and loving as his. Wish I knew!" Then a foot edged from the crevice -- and in a moment the creature stood outside. Small One did not dare turn his eyes to see better. He feared the thing might dart back into hiding at a movement even that imperceptible. The thing took one more step -- and another, until it stood close to The Small One. From the corners of his eyes Small One saw the creature stretch on tip-toe, saw it reach upward toward his belly. But then, instead of an empty-handed stabbing motion which he expected as completion of the offer of Ultimate Friendship, Small One felt the stranger's fingers scratching and patting. Modulated sound accompanied the action: "There now, what do you say to that, old fellow? You're a whale of a lot bigger than Shep, but I guess you must be somebody's pet. How does that feel, Old Boy? Are we friends now?" But The Small One did not indulge himself too long in surprise reactions to any change this visitor had made in the ceremony. It was clear that the stranger had not been bred in a society which lived in accordance with civilized customs of The Ceremonial Families. Failure to complete the prescribed ritual properly meant, then, not boorishness but inheritance of a culture different from that of The Families. The miracle of it struck Sma'l One with such impact that he to his full height, assumed the cacmonial pose and began to sing the song of Joyful Brotherhood. He sang for some moments before he realized the mistake he had made. II T he stranger had sprung back into the rock crevice and clung there desperately, his body seemingly shaken by the waves of sound as ululations reverberated like a roaring wind through the cavern. Contrite and worried, Small One ceased his song in the middle of a phrase and dropped quickly to his former position. Exhaustion grasped him with painfully probing fingers, tearing at muscles and mind. He felt helpless and sorry for himself. Abruptly he surrendered to the child that was still within him. He no longer could command enough concentration to keep light in the cave. As darkness drained back into the area Small One could sense the heightening of that pitiful stranger's IF fears. And he was too tired and too inexperienced -- and still too young -- to alleviate them. It was not until almost time for the setting of the red sun that the stranger ventured again from his refuge. Small One had found in those tedious hours enough rest so that his power of concentration had been renewed, and he was able to will light back into the cavern. The alien seemed to possess no understanding of why light had reappeared. The phenomenon sent the being on a series of movements about the cave. Small One was able to catch enough from the mist of that mind to know the creature's movements were motivated by a search to find some explanation for the light source. Small One tried to project ' pictures of understanding but saw that these only seemed to cause disturbance within the visitor's mind rather than clarity. He sensed that these pictures seemed like hallucinations to the creature, attributed to some mental aberration brought about by the strangeness of environment. So Small One ceased temporarily his attempts to communicate and contended himself with following the visitor about. But this was also a source of uneasiness. At frequent intervals the creature would stop and look at Small One and make modulated sound: "Are you stalking me, Monster? Are you waiting for the right moment to pounce?" And Small One would lie on his back, repeating his offer of the Ritual of Trust, accepting graciously some rather timid scratchings and pats in lieu of the ceremonial Stab with empty hands. And the stranger formed vocal sounds almost continuously, while he scratched Small One's belly, while he searched for the light source -- evidently a method of generating within himself courage and a will to carry on. The sounds followed a pattern: "You act like you're tame, but maybe you just aren't hungry yet. Is that it, Monster? Are you keeping me in sight until the next meal time? If you're somebody's lap dog I'd hate to meet the master. He'd need a whole city lot just to do an about-face." Small One stored these sounds in his memory so that later they might be given to the Wise One of his Family and perhaps deciphered. Possibly it might eak, a conference of the Wise Ones from all the Ceremonial Families before meanings could be found. Small One knew now that this alien thing produced brain pulses much like his own; he knew also that he was the first of his race ever to contact a living intelligence from another planet, a being developed out of a totally different culture. Thoughts of the honor and glory that would come to his Family set his heart to pounding wild rhythms of excitement. The stranger's random searching for the light source had now turned into a repeated figure that was gradually leading them along one wall toward the cave's entrance. Syllables coming from the creature's mouth were changing character, seemingly more organized and less like incoherent responses to panic. "Look Shep -- or Rover -- or whatever they call you -- don't follow so close. I don't like that big mouth of your hanging over my shoulder. If you'll just not entertain any thoughts about making a meal out of me until I can maneuver around toward that entrance and get outside to my blaster we won't be on such unequal terms with each other." A picture was formed. It came about probably because this creature's mind focused upon a material object which he visualized imaginatively, but it produced a picture whose pulses passed into Small One's mind -- a dimly lit, flickering thing more shadow than photographic, but clear enough for Small One to understand. The creature's mind held an image of the little tube he had dropped by the heap of crystals, and desire for it played in ghost-like impressions across the picture. With no thought of possible consequences, and with child-like generosity of the very young, Small One thought the tube into the stranger's hands. I'll he damned! I'll be  V damned!" The syllables were symbolic of a dumfounded and completely incredulous state of mind; that much Small One could make out. The creature sat, because surprise seemed to have drawn strength from him. He stared at the tube. He turned it over and over. He repeated the syllables of astonishment and shook his head and stared hard at Small One. Then his shoulder straightened, and he rose with a confident manner utterly changed from the frightened watchfulness of just the moment before. The eyes looked directly at Small One, and sound came with a strong vocal quality. "Well, Comrade, the shoe's on the other foot now. Can you comprehend that? Watch." Small One saw the tube raised and pointed. A huge boulder across the cave suddenly disintegrated into a puff of pungent vapor. The voice rang triumphantly: "This puts rhe balance of power back in my h s! Do you understand that, Big Boy?" There was almost insolent ease in the way the stranger leaned against the rock wall; grim amusement in the new sounds coming from him. "Don't know how this happened, Pal, but there's evidently intelligence on this planet that's solved the problem of teleportation. Looks like they've been keeping track of me. Looks like they just don't want me to become a meal for you. So, Big Boy, watch your step! If you're capable of understanding what you saw this blaster do to that boulder, you saw what will happen to you if you make one move I don't like. Savvy, fellow?" Small One could sense glee in the stranger's tones, and so in his childlike way was happy for the creature, glad that relief from fear had come to it. The visitor pushed boldly past and headed directly for the cave's entrance and the late afternoon sunshine outside. Small One followed to the vehicle which had brought the visitor, and IF sat patiently on the sand while the creature entered and made vocal sounds to an instrument Small One judged to be some device for comn "-"'eating with others of the same kind. He caught snatches of the excited inflections:... looks like we're on the point of finding a race with minds like our own, maybe more advanced... haven't made themselves known yet... obviously friendly... rescued me from some kind of monster that's sitting outside the scouter right now... put my blaster right smack into my hand... won't believe this, but they evidently did it by teleportation... safe now to bring the ship in... got us another Earth here, looks like!" S mall One saw the visitor return to the open hatch. He watched him lean against the doorway and listened to lazily confident sounds coming from the creature. "Still here, friend? You must have a lump of curiosity that's as big as you are. Why don't you trot off to the folks that own you and bring them back here to talk to me? How about that, fellow?" There was pleasant satisfaction in the visitor's voice, and so Small One spent some moments trying to establish the bond of Sharing of Happiness with the creature. It was a failure. He realized that as yet he could not seem to span the gulf that separated their minds. But a determination was growing within himself to bridge that gap. First he concentrated upon creating within himself that Silent Moment. He wanted to examine this urge to be the first of his world to establish satisfactory communication with beings from an unknown ball, whirling in its own tight orbit far out across the galaxy. He felt justly proud that the shadowed hand of Chance had chosen him out of his Family -- and through him his Family, out of all the Families -- to become the first one to receive this gift from space. He faced the alternatives: relinquish this task to the Old Ones of the Families, or withhold knowledge of visitors from space until he, by himself, could appear before their councils and accept the plaudits from his world for the glory of his Family. He examined critically the impulses which were driving him toward handling the affair by himself, fearful that the decision might be prompted by pride rationalized as usefulness to his Family and to his race. He prayed a moment for humility and truth. Then he settled down with a reasonably clear conscience to the tedious task of setting up communication channels between the alien and himself. Like the child that he was, he now felt confident enough to move the universes. He began with simple things, projecting into the stranger's mind images of his Family, their homes, their artifacts, then alternated with more abstract pictures of friendly Knowledge-seeking. He could see, from certain physical responses, that these visions were touching the edges of the stranger's consciousness, but without meaning. Fragments of unrelated thoughts were intermingled like jackstraws. There was no order of memory storage. Small One's probing discovered at moments logically arranged sequences of thought and followed their lines gleefully -- to find each time their tails drifting off into a limbo of jumbled impressions. Like the child that he was, Small One became discouraged and fretful. But those faint shadows of coming maturity, which had caused the Family Tutor to think him ready for the first step of Thinking Alone, held him tenaciously to his purpose. And so they faced each other through the twilight and the darkening purple of dusk, the stranger sitting in the open door of his vehicle, Small One squatting upon the fused sands of his ruined prayer circle. Brooding peace grew with the dimming of the three suns' afterglow. Cooling desert air carried the sound of the distant songs of the Lhronos. The fluttering of their wings and scratching from their claws made the desert noisy with preparations for bedding down in the burrows in the giant cacti. P resently the stranger reached for a pouch of dried forage material. He poured some of the chopped bits into a carved wooden receptacle, then struck a small fire, brought these bits to a glow and alternately inhaled and exhaled smoke from them. Small One sensed a relaxing of tensions in the mind he faced and increased the force with which he projected his pictures. Rewards came slowly at first, in the form of puzzled frowns upon the alien's forehead. Conceivably they were unrecognized sensation caused by slow awakening of that dormant area of brain Small One was trying to reach. Small One could tell that his thought images were forming there now, fuzzy and distorted, but with increasing clarity and rapidity -- almost as wellformed as those in the new-born ones reflected from the Mothers of the Ceremonial Families. Exactly when these pictures drew recognition from the stranger as attempts to communicate was not clear to Small One. His first inkling of it came with a repeated sound phrase that must signify incredulous astonishment: "I'll be damned!" The creature sat frozen in the doorway of his vehicle and said it many times. The absorption of smoke into the respiratory system was forgotten, and the fire went out in the carved receptacle in his hand. Small One then began patiently to teach the stranger to form answering pictures, as he had seen nurses do with infants of his Family. He recognized quickly that this being could not yet learn to reach into the minds of others for thought images lying there, nor project those of his own mind. This communication, at least for some time, would leave the creature's mind entirely passive, like the page upon which one wrote. Ideas with even a minimum of the abstract in them could not pass from one mind to the other unless some way were found to picture fhe abstraction in terms of a concrete, physical object. There was IF reason to doubt that this being would ever grasp the imagry of the abstract. But Small One did learn a great deal: This visitor was of a race called by themselves mankind; the home planet was in a solar system possessing only one yellow sun -- which struck Small One as a dreary environment with a lack of variety which might account for the unused portions of this man's brain; he was one of a ship's crew of ten involved in exploration of planets for possible colonization. Small One eventually managed to transmit a superficial understanding of the Ceremonial Family, some of its rituals, and the dedication of one's self to the five stages of exploration of the mind as preparation for maturity. This last Small One could find no way to explain clearly -- since he had only just embarked upon his first stage and was, consequently, in the position of a child who can hear the words of his elders but cannot understand them. Yet Small One found the skepticism and ridicule in the man's mind gradually giving way to wonder. It was becoming less labor now to converse with this man. Relaxation and peaceful thinking flowed between them, free and bright as star reflections in water. Excitement of discovery had brought the visitor down from his perch in the doorway of his vehicle. Caution was tossed aside. He dropped upon the sands beside Small One and lost himself in tracing figures and outlines to enhance the fuzzy images he was able to form in his mind. Small One wanted to sing for the joy of it. He remembered the effect his voice had produced upon the visitor during that first meeting in the cave and suppressed the impulse. Ill N ight time's chill became biting, but the pair were too absorbed to be aware of it. Not until after repeated warnings from Small One's exploratory sense did he awaken to imminent danger. It was the Wist, held in a harmless stupor by day's heat, released when cold followed the vanishing suns across the land. Small One remembered he had seen it in the depths of the cavern when the man's exploring hands had passed near it, remembered his intention to call an adult of his Family to destroy it before nightfall. He sprang to his feet, feeling again the helplessness and insecurity of a child lost from his protecting home circle. He had never killed a Wist. No one of his age -- from any of the Families -- had ever dared attempt the feat. But now he knew he must try. There was no escape, for the Wist moved faster than any living thing upon his world. The man sensed desperation in Small One's sudden leap and was on his feet... and then he saw the spider-like legs of the great predator, scrambling over a hillock into the prayer circle. He reached for his blaster -- and realized he had left it lying in the doorway of his scouter. He could never make it. IF Small One was no longer aware of the man, not even of himself. He felt only the tearing pain of trying to force a concentration of energy greater than he had ever achieved. The Wist came at them across the circle, then slowed... and was suddenly miraculously crumpled upon the sand with the spasms of death contorting its legs. Many long, slow moments passed before either one moved, the man held in a rigid grip of dumfounded reaction, Small One weak to the point of faintness from the tremendous channeling and focusing through his mind of every bit of energy his child's body possessed. Finally the man stirred, first to recover the blaster from his scouter, and then to approach the dead Wist warily, blaster tube held ready. At length he turned toward Small One. "You -- did this? You killed the thing?" Small One could catch the stranger's meanings only from his incredulous tones. There were no images forming in the man's mind -- just emotional responses throughout the brain cells, flashing like the wild sparking of a multiple short circuit. Small One tried to reproduce a picture of assent and explanation there, but all the connections laboriously built between them had broken down temporarily. "What weapon did you use? I couldn't see it. What was it? Where is it?" Small One attempted again to project an answer into the man's mind, and found its agitation was still too great. Hoping to calm the man, he sat deliberately with his back to the dead predator. After  time the man joined him, careful, however, to face the Wist. Small One then formed repeated patterns, trying in many ways to explain that he had thought death into the Wist. And finally, long after the last convulsive jerking had left those great spider-like legs, the man was able to tear his attention from that black heap of death. Night's heaviness pressed upon the turbulence within him and leveled his mind gradually to quiet where pictures might again take shape, and he understood Small One dimly. "You mean you did nothing to kill that horror lying over there except just the power of thought waves?" S mall One misunderstood the skepticism he found in the stranger's mind. He felt humble and inadequate because youth had allowed him to do no more than barely blot out the carnivore's life. He tried constructing images through which the man could understand that adults of the Families would have performed the task more efficiently... since they could separate the atoms of any structure from each other, and cause them to lose all bonds which held them together and to dart off as free particles. He explained that they could also cause the atoms to travel in a group, as a flock of birds might, and be drawn together into their tightly organized form in some other place. At this point Small One found pictures in the other's mind beginning to give way to disjointed worry patterns. The man rose and edged toward his citadel of steel. He resorted to modulated sound again, forgetting that Small One could not clearly catch ideas from it. "You mean just with the power of thought your race can cause the atoms which make up my body, or any other thing, to fly apart? And that I would cease to exist?" When he finally was able to probe the meanings of these syllables Small One, with pride for which he was immediately ashamed, projected an affirmative answer. He detected increasing wariness in the alien's mind, and the next syllables were delivered slowly, with a cautious sound in their inflections. "You mean that any time someone rubs you the wrong way he's gone -- just like that! Kaput! On just a whim! It's beginning to look to me like a fellow would be much safer playing Russian roulette than having you around." Small One, after finding the man's meanings, shaped images of his Family to show that only after passing through the fifth stage of Thinking Alone did such power come to his people -- and that the fifth stage also brought control. He felt the man grasp this idea in a shadowy sort of way. Fear lessened, but a worried watchfulness remained. The man climbed to the doorway of his ship and turned to wave. "I'm just a little too shook up to talk any more tonight, Pal. Let's get some sleep and finish it in daylight... And I hope that mind power of yours can't penetrate steel." The scouter's door clanged shut. The first moment was one of disappointment for Small One. But the astounding fact remained: he had met a being from an alien world, and they had talked. A great weariness was settling upon him. It was time to rest, for excitement alone could not have overcome the tremendous energy demanded. He stretched himself upon the sand and blissfully opened his ears to the hiss and roar and bursts of noise that constantly passed through the universes from star to far off star. It was his rn:sic. Presently he slept like a tired, happy child. M orning touched two beings whose minds were refreshed. Communication between them was easier, pictures sharper in the man's mind. Much information flowed between them, but as the red sun rose to across the sky Small One found the man scanning the heavens with increasing frequency. Blank moments came into the visitor's concentration, and with them a tendency to lapse into his modulated sounds. "We'll be seeing the big ship pretty soon, Pal. It ought to be just about ready to hit the outer atmosphere by now. Then you'll be in the middle of a crowd, my friend!"  The man made frequent trips to the instruments through which he kept contact with his kind. And then there was a moment when he jumped from his scouter shouting: "Five minutes more, Big Boy! Look, IP Pal, I almost forgot. I've got kind of used to your looks, but I don't know what those buzzards will do when they first step out of that ship and see you looming up like a blasted nightmare. Let's get you back into that cave until I can figure out a way to make them acquainted with you a little more gradually than I had to." The meanings were caught with difficulty, for in excitement over imminent arrival of his comrades the man was again not using that area of his brain through which the two had achieved communication. Small One agreeably retired into the cave and found his ledge from where he could peer through the small crack and watch. In a few moments the ship appeared, sat on its tail of fire a second, touched down and cooled. Then its company was out and crowding about Small One's man, with much exchange of their modulated sounds and exploring about the prayer circle. Finally Small One saw his man gesture toward the cave and start for it with his companions following. He knew they were coming to see him. He stepped out into the sunshine, sending the newcomers thoughts of welcome. The entire group stopped as if moved by a common control. Small One saw their hands go unconsciously to blasters at their belts, felt shock pour from their minds. He looked, bewildered, at his man who was still advancing. "Don't mind them," the man was saying. "They'll get used to you." And he turned back to his com-' rades. "Come on, you bums! He won't hurt you. He just looks like something out of a bad dream. He's tame as a kitten. Tickle his tummy and he's your friend for life. Roll over, fellow. Make believe you're a nice doggie for the people -- before they take out for tall timber." Small One could catch the man's meaning only from gestures accompanying his words, but he graciously complied, lying as still as possible while all the newcomers approached one by one to pat and scratch apprehensively, their vocal mechanisms producing syllables: "That's a nice fellow! Good boy! There, there now, pal!" And Small One's man laughed all the while, mocking their timidity. IV T he next few hours proved rather disconsolate for Small One. A bustling activity began among the visitors as soon as introductions had been completed. Small One found communion with his man reduced to an extremely few fuzzy pictures, for constant vocal communication with his own kind seemed to cause the man to use only the more primitive areas of his brain. The man was involved in physical activity, helping his companions to unload materials from their ship. All the men made wide detours to avoid passing close to Small One, except one they called Doc. He stopped his work frequently to stare intently at Small One. Several times a certain pattern of modulated sound came from Doc. "I'm going to need a specimen for dissection." Small One's man was quick to answer each time. "Take it slow, Doc. This is evidently the intelligent race on the planet. They communicate by projecting images into your mind. I don't know how far this telepathy thing goes, whether it involves an ability to read thoughts or not, but quit blabbing everything that comes into your mind until we know a little more about these creatures. It just might cause us to face a bad survival situation." Later Small One's man returned and they sat aside to attempt more exchange of knowledge. It became clear gradually that the man wished to see others from this planet, and Small One gleefully sent out the image of happy discovery toward the far-away minds of his Ceremonial Family. They came a little before the setting of the third sun. Small One, dreaming with youthful excitement about his part in this memorable event, was made aware of their arrival by sudden action on the part of the nine newcomers from the big ship, who dropped burdens and gathered into a tight group to stand uneasily with hands on blaster butts. Small One's man came toward him and said, "Get us acquainted with your friends quick and easy, old fellow. Let them know we won't hurt them unless they try something out of line. Hop to it, Boyf" Small One understood from inflections what was wanted. He went and sat before the Wise One. Their minds locked, and Small One laid in the Elder's mind a complete account of the man's arrival by a flaming vehicle, of the struggle to communicate, of mankind's susceptibility to fear, of its curious weakness which forced dependence upon material aids for most of its adjustments to life. Small One became aware of his man's voice: "Look, fellow! My outfit's getting pretty nervous with all that mob of nightmares sitting there staring -- doing nothing. Let's get these introductions on the road. Some of those tinhorn buddies of mine have itchy trigger fingers. This silence just doesn't look good. Are you talking to your friends? We'd better have some action and noise right quick, before something happens. Tell your pals to play doggie and roll over and make like they're tame so we can all get acquainted. Tell them we won't hurt them... if they act like good boys." Understanding more from inflection and pantomime than he could extract from the man's mind, Small One tried to project a reassuring picture to the representative of mankind. Then he opened his own mind to the Old One and explained the need for performing the Ritual of Trust with these strangers. He felt immediately the strong pulses of disapproval that surged from every member of his Family. From the Old One came sharp images of rebuke: "You are still a child and can, therefore, be excused for straying from the proper use of Family Ritual. But as a child you must be bound again to your Tutor. You must IF learn among other things that the Ritual of Trust is not lightly offered outside your own Family. These strangers are welcome. Perhaps we can learn from them; perhaps they can also learn from us. We shall make them welcome." Small One tried to place pictures of these thoughts in his man's mind and found the paths difficult to traverse. Interference was there, both from a partial closing of that section of brain Small One had labored so long to stimTflate, and from a confused self-pity the scolding had let loose in Small One's own mind. Then the Family were rising to their full heights and advancing... and they began to sing the song of Joyful Brotherhood. T he thing happened suddenly, like an explosion. Small One heard his man shouting. He understood enough to recognize it as a warning: "Don't do it! It's their welcome! Don't do it!" But the hiss of blasters was already cutting through the cries, and members of the Family were dying. Small One knew what would come next. He sprang upon his man and bore him to the ground, sheltering him with his own body and the shield of his own mind. He tried at the same time to project his knowledge of this alien race to the bewildered survivors of his Family. "They are afraid! The brotherhood song frightens them. Don't hurt them -- let my man explain to them." But the Old One had thought death for them. The nine from the Earth ship existed only as particles lost among loose in the universe. Only the one man, crushed nearly to suffocation under the tremendous bulk of Small One, was left, gasping to inflate lungs pressed almost to collapse. Crying with helplessness, Small One lifted himself from the prostrate body. He felt the Old One's mind touch his. The image it carried was compelling. "This man must go with the others." Small One cried out in his mind against it. "This man is not evil like his brothers!" He tried to form pictures of the moments of sentiment that he had discovered in his man's mind. He begged in the name of the Families' reluctance to destroy intelligence. He pleaded in the name of the mercy which was so strongly imbedded in traditions of the Ceremonial Family, and for himself and the affection which he had developed for this alien thing. His man had taken no part in killing! His man had called out to prevent it! Adults of the Family had now gathered, and they shut their minds to his while they consulted. Small One's Tutor was there among them and impressions of great sadness and pity reached Small One from his mind. And finally the Old One left the circle to convey its decisions. "The man may live. He will be your charge so long as you desire his company. Your Tutor will instruct you in the powers you must have to restrict his movements. And whenever darkness covers our homes he must be caged." Small One bowed in the Ritual of Gratefulness and Obedience, but shame clung heavily to his body and spread a mist before his eyes. This was the manner in which a favor was given to a child. He read in the compassionate eyes of his Tutor the story of his failure to be ready for the Five Steps into companionship with adults of the Families. He turned to the man and presented the council's decisions, but the creature was dazed, numbed by seeing his companions so suddenly become nothing. Small One cradled the man in his arms and followed with him after the Family to the valley of their homes. T here was no wild grief in the valley that night, for in this civilization of The Families members possessed the patience to soften sorrow into acceptance of inevitability. When Small One laid his man in the cage designated by the Old One and locked its door the volatile child's part of his mind already visioned the coming days of companionship. Clang of the door brought the man from his dazed stupor. He screamed at Small One, "What's this all about? Why are you doing this? I killed nobody! I tried to stop them." Small One sat beside the cage and throughout the slow pacing of twilight across the world thought quietness into the man's resisting mind. And then he projected to the man thoughts of gladness for the reprieve IF of life that the Family Council had seen fit to grant. The man seemed inconsolable. Over and over he said, "What's to become of me? I can't take that ship back to Earth alone. What am I going to do?" Small One caught hopelessness in words he could not understand. He thrust bright pictures into that dim area of his man's brain, fighting to arouse it once more. He built visions of the two of them playing together in the gay abandonment of children. He recognized now that, besides grief for dead companions, the man worried about his own future. And so Small One explained the Old One's decision minutely, projecting images of toys, of the pet Vakrun frisking and nuzzling around them, then a picture of the Vakrun and the man together, sheltered one in each arm of Small One. Then he made pictures of safety, security and the fun of playing together -- the Small One and his two pets. And then the man was pounding the bars of his cage with fists that quickly became bloody, screaming, "I am not an animal! Let me out of this! I am not an animal!" The tumult brought the Old One. He thought the man into calmness and to oblivion of sleep, and then he stood looking down at Small One, shaking his shaggy head sadly. Small One felt shame. Apprehension for his man's future swirled like a black fog through his mind. Morning found the man dead. He was hanging from a noose of his own fashioning from the bars of his cage. Adults of the Ceremonial Family came to stand beside Small One and look with him at the pitiful thing, and their minds drew together into council. The Wise One read the patterns of that dead brain and spread their meanings out for the council to see: "This creature belongs to a race which cannot accept inferiority. It must either feel superior or perish. If it cannot achieve superiority through the mind it invents instruments of power to hold others in subjection to it. This is a race like the one which devasted our galaxy in the days of the passing of the Dark Star through our suns. And now that this man has found his way into space there will be more to follow. There will come another time of blackness -- unless we can seek them out and destroy them before they infect the galaxy." Involuntarily Small One exclaimed aloud against this, for it did not fit into what he had been taught about the Ceremonial Families. Nowhere did it reflect the tolerance and peace and hatred of violence which showed through every ritual he had been taught to perform. At a nod from the Old One the Tutor led Small One away to a quiet place and tried to show him by analogy with the Wist that evil forces must be eliminated before the bright sun of kindness could shine without clouds to mar it. Eventually Small One was left alone with his grief, the contradictions of adult thinking still unresolved in him. He knew that his people would go out to the empty ship, and that an examination of maps therein and of memory force impressed upon the atoms of their steel hulls would betray Earth's location. Impulse said those ships must be destroyed before they were made to give up their secret, so that death would not rain down upon the innocent and unsuspecting world of his man. And the child in Small One leaped to the impulse. D riven by a love for mankind, transferred through the love for his man, he hurried over the mountain pass and out on the desert toward his praying circle. And the child in him cried because he was not yet old enough to be able to separate those ships into their particles and lose their identities among the whirling motes of matter. In his mind there was only the pit of the fire death to serve. Like a festering sore in the valley of volcanic cones which lay at the desert's edge was a pit filled with a yellow stuff belched from the depths of Small One's world. Powdery after it cooled, it was violently corrosive, reducing most substances to dust, reproducing itself like a virus as long as a bit was left to feed upon. Small One had nothing adequate to carry the powder except some abandoned shells of the desert crawler which had a temporary resistance to its action. The crying was still in him as he carried two shells of the powder to the big ship and its little scouting brother. He leaned as far inside both hatchways as he could force his body and threw the powder, scattering it as widely over both interiors as he could, throwing the shells after the floating stuff. Then he sat in his prayer circle to watch through the hours, while the bright metal ships turned to piles of dust. And he cried with his child's heart because these ships belonged to his man and would soon become, with their once proud passenger, an unrecognizable part of the soil of his world and a hurt-filled memory. And then he cried because insight told him that he had made it possible for brothers of his man to find their way to this world some day, perhaps with the power to destroy his Family and his world. Then the first sharp stings on his hands told him that some of the yellow powder had touched his own flesh in spite of the care used in scattering it. He sat through the long twilight, through the evening songs of the Lhronos winging to safety of their night-time burrows, with the corrosion slowly turning his own flesh to pulp, and he cried his child's heart out over the inadequacy of his mind that chance had forced into monumental decisions too soon. He cried over the foolishness of all life which must by its nature spend so many of its brief moments of consciousness in the destruction of life -- until some time in the star-burst of a glorious night the fiery disintegration creeping slowly through his body finally touched the center of his own life, and the young voice IF IF  Short Stars In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is -- doomed! It was many centuries ago that the overcrowded spaceship made its final, clumsy, grounding on the planet of Croth. Only the oldest sagas, in story and song, deal briefly and carelessly with that original crash landing. What ensued concerned them -- T he colonists must have numbered close to three hundred. From the constant tales of feuding and ugly blood lettings in those early months and years we must assume they were banished malcontents. They built rude homes and started cultivating land not far from the landing place in two fertile, streamwatered valleys. With seeds and the few remaining head of livestock surviving the landing, they started building a humble version of Earth. A year later, perhaps less -- for words and meanings and spoken fables change with each retelling -- disaster had come upon them. The plague -- the virus -- the darkness -- struck them all within a matter of hours. Whether it was something native to Croth, or a mutated strain carried from Earth, we do not know. Their vision dimmed, clouded over, and died. None had escaped. The twin valleys were populated by sightless humans and unseeing livestock. Only the intruders suffered blindness -- the native birds and beasts seemed untouched. The entrances to the twin valleys, five in all, were narrow and easily blocked by walls of stone and earth. They had sealed themselves away from the rest of savage Croth and had learned to live in comparative peace and security. Their ears, their noses, and their fingers and toes swiftly adapted themselves. With the passage of centuries the very meaning of the words: "vision" or "sight" had become empty and the words describing color or shade, abandoned. The population had increased, remarkably until the valleys had become overcrowded. Then the outer walls were breached and palisades of stakes, later to be replaced with barriers of earth and stones, were pushed gradually outward along the downward course of the twin valleys' streams. Intervening hills and ridges broke into this ballooning outward thrust, and eventually a number of widely separated enclosures had resulted. Gates and earlier walls cut the enclosures into many sections. The contrast of the neatly cultivated patches within the dikes, against the green seas of forest and tall grasses, must have reminded one of the ancient battle of the Hollanders against the North Sea. Into this peaceful walled microcosm there eventually dropped a fatally wounded spaceship, a cargo ship burdened with electronic equipment, and replacements and repairs for mining mechs. The blowup of one of the ship's two power kettles had killed all the crew save Dorby Cole, and Cole had, somehow, managed to crash land the shattered mass of metals and plastoids. The ship plowed into the rim of a broad green plain, ripping deeper as it went, until a ten-mile gouge ended just short of the wooded foothills of a Crothan mountain chain. A section of intact hull, complete with emergency space lock, thrust up through the tangled mass of tree roots and foliage of the prairie grove beneath which most of the ship lay buried. Less than a thousand feet from the little island of forest growth a roughly constructed wall of earth, topped with dressed stone and shar pened stakes, ran back toward lv. wooded hills. Twelve feet in height, at its minimum, and often much taller, it blocked the passage of Croth's most destructive wild life. But it could not keep an active man with tools and ropes from passage... B an Telar stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his face with the hairy back of his forearm. He stood erect, the great stake he carried resting on the turf and leaned against his shoulder. As he rested, two other workers carrying similar sharpened posts passed him. Mert Rodn and Hekl Yenn -- his nostrils recognized them. His lips curled when the bestial stench of Mert Rodn's unwashed body came to him. It was Mert Rodn who was his most formidable rival for the smooth-fleshed girl, Esala Rowan. Rodn was an older man, twice widowed, and a thick-muscled giant. Already he had crippled two other suitors for Esala's hand, and Ban IF Tekir had escaped only by his youth and nimbleness. So now Telar waited a possible assault with the thick stake heid before him as a shield. The Warmth was above him, making his naked flesh wet and unpleasant, and attracting the tiny winged midges that swarm and sting. The breeze came from beyond the Wall, bearing with it an alien odor that was unpleasant and acrid and like burnt metal. He heard branches and leaves wrestling together, and the beat of feathered wings, and the rasp of armored insect legs and exoskeletons in the thick prairie grass of this newly reclaimed field. "Ho, weakling!" challenged Mert Rodn from further along the path. "Must you rest with every other step? A fine mate for Esala you would make!" So! The big man was not going to attack while Hekl Yenn, and others, might be within hearing range. He must be planning to catch him apart from the others. Telar shouldered his burden and started on again. "The Warmth is not yet overhead," taunted Rodn, "and you are wearied. Before the Cold comes again we will drag your weakling body back to the village." "It is not I who will be dragged Mert Rodn," said Ban Telar. "As the Warmth grows so does my strength. But the Warmth lessens your strength. You are old and stiff, Rodn, unfit to father more children." Rodn growled something angrily and Hekl Yenn answered doubtfully. He could not catch the words, but immediately afterward his ears warned of something unusual. And then his nose scented a stranger, possibly a visitor from some distant sector of the Wall. Momentarily he forgot the two workers directly in front of him. That moment's inattention allowed them to put down their heavy posts and launch themselves back at him. He flung the barrier of the heavy stake in their direction, and backed away in a quick shuffle into the unknown terrain alongside the path. But Yenn and Rodn came after him, from either side, his startled heartbeats and his breathing their guides. Yenn's slender fingers wrapped around his throat, and Rodn's wide palms and thick fingers bit into Ban Telar's shoulder and upper arm. R odn began mauling him. He was deliberate and merciless. He did not wish to kill Ban Telar for the penalty for murder was severe -- the loss of both ears and the nose and life-long slavery. He wished only to cripple Ban Telar so lithe-limbed Esala Rowan would shudder to touch him again. A forearm snapped. Telar clenched his teeth on the agony of his cracked ribs and his battered jaws and skull. If he could only twist free and run. Even into the unknown stretch of prairie away from the path... And his other arm popped as Rodn exerted his great strength. Would Rodn ever have done with him? Was he not hurt enough as it was? Yet he knew that Rodn wanted his back to be twisted. A strange voice, speaking strange angry words, was beside them. He heard no sound of blows; yet the hands of both Hekl Yenn and Mert Rodn fell away limply. There was only a slight spppt of sound, and an alien scent. The hands of the stranger were upon him, working with the broken arms. He felt the bones grate and there was the sound of quick axe strokes, and then the pressure of wooden splints and stiff bindings holding them in place. In spite of the pain he was aware of the approach of other workers in this new sector. They ranged themselves about the fallen men and about him and the stranger. He made their number between seven and twelve, the confusion and the alien scents making him uncertain. "Why did you and this stranger kill Mert Rodn and Hekl Yenn?" demanded one of the workers, Aret Pol. "They are not dead," Doln Perse's reedy voice cried. "Then what have you done with them? And who is this stranger who speaks gibberish? Is he a madman?" "He saved me from a beating by the two of them," Ban Telar said weakly. "I do not know his name or his sector along the Wall. He has not the scent of our people, nor the words of ourvillage." "Can there be villages and sectors of the Wall that we know nothing of?" the workers questioned. "Or are there Walls built beyond our Wall? Let us arrest this strange man." There was a confusion and the stranger mouthed harsh words, after which the spppt sound came and the workers fell silent. And then the stranger slung Ban Telar's body over his shoulders and headed toward the Wall. That they climbed a rude ladder of lashed poles and descended on the further side in a similar fashion, Ban Telar knew. It was in his mind that this must be a worker from another Wall that lay beyond their own. Such an intriguing theory was often bandied about by the very young and the very old. The unintelligible words and the mysterious weapon would seem to bear this out. He was carried into the coolness of a grove of trees, and the alien scorched metallic smell grew overpowering and almost sickening. Then a door clanged hollowly and they went down into an amazing blend of odors and sounds and brokenness. The stranger laid him on a firm, yet springy, surface and shortly he felt a pricking in his arm. Afterward he fell asleep. B an Telar put aside the helmet that linked with the edutapes the spaceman, Dorby Cole, had chosen for him. A month of growing friendship and cultural exchange had passed since first they met. Now Ban Telar knew that Cole had come from another world, and that only a fraction of this world of Croth was occupied by his people. The concepts of an earth, freely floating in space, and of huge warmths, or suns, no longer seemed so strange to Ban Telar. IP A week since, Cole had put the mentrol hood down over Ban Telar's skull, and as the thousands of tiny electrodes contacted his brain he had seen through the eyes of the ship's one remaining controlled robot. He had seen the green vegetation and the pale-blue sky and the silveryredness of air, and gaily plated lizards darting among the trees. Out on the plains he had seen vast seas of four-legged beasts of many strange shapes and sizes, feeding and running and feeding again. And he knew now that it was the robot, the super mech controlled by Dorby Cole's brain, that had crossed the wall and rescued him. "I needed to make contact with your people," Cole had explained, "so I have kidnapped you." Ban Telar did not resent his privileged-prisoner role. But for the stranger he would now be a painwracked bundle of broken bones and swollen flesh. It was the being away from Esala that hurt him the most. In his absence she might yield to Mert Rodn's offer of marriage. For Rodn did own three houses and a dozen fields. "I have finished with the edutapes, Dorby Cole," he said as the Earthman entered the cabin. "Good," Cole said. He came closer. "Let me fit this headband over your ears and forehead... So!" There was a firm, though soft, pressure against Telar's flesh. He heard a click and then a building hum. A weird swirling of grayness faded and he began to see a faint picture. It was like the pictures he had experienced under the mentrol hood while he controlled the super mech. Cole adjusted unseen knobs, and the pictures were suddenly sharp and clear. "There!" he cried out. "I can see! As though I rode within the robot -- or controlled it." "Since you have no eyes," said Cole, "I decided you could use some. No need for twin mentrols and a super mech. This allows you to see as well or better than myself." "This is wonderful, Dorby Cole." "A trifle selfish too, Ban Telar. From what you tell me of the ancient myths and songs I too can expect blindness before many months. If you can see -- so can I." "The sickness may have passed." Telar shrugged. "But if not I can teach you how to live among us. Even if the band fails you it is not hard to live within the Wall." Cole was a chunky youngish man, red-haired and gray-eyed, his face fair and freckled. Now his skin flushed and his eyes were hot. "For you, perhaps, it is easy. But I cannot smell, or hear. I would be in the way and helpless. These second eyes must work, Ban Telar." "They give me an odd feeling," Ban Telar said, stumbling as he tried to walk across the cabin's buckled deck. "Already there is an ache in my skull and I feel sickness in the pit of my stomach... But I can see perfectly." "It may take weeks to learn their proper use, Ban Telar. You will be like an infant learning to walk. But in the end you will feel lost without your second eyes." Telar's skull was splitting with headache. He slipped off the band, welcoming the darkness and the familiar smells and sounds. Perhaps, he thought, the gift of vision was not the wonderful thing that he had first imagined. Yet, even as he doubted, he was impatient to get outside and explore the broad continents and islands of Croth's one vast sea. O ut of the wreckage of the giant freighter Dorby Cole and Ban Telar had extracted the damaged amphibious skimmer, and repaired it. At first Ban Telar worked by controlling the super mech, but as his arms healed he used the huge robot less and less. And gradually he came to use the Eyes for longer periods until he took them off only to sleep or to work in darkness. The skimmer was fueled and ready for the globe-circling preliminary hop. But before it left Ban Telar asked to be permitted to visit Esala Rowan. And, being in the hottest season of the year on Croth, he chose the period of Warmth that Earthmen call midday. At this time most of the workers and women of the villages within the Wall were sleeping. Only with the Cold's welcome, at nightfall, would children and adults again be about. He took with him another of the dozen Eyes that the Earthman had fashioned from the electronic and mech parts of the ship's cargo. Perhaps if Esala Rowan could see as he saw she would consent to mate with him... And together they could teach the People the use of other Eyes. Within the WalPs confines i! : Eyes changed the whole character of the world he had known. He saw that the huts of brick and plastered mud were misshapen and a mad blend of colors and plasterings. The paths wandered across the plots of land, almost touching at times. He saw the naked brown bodies of men and women sleeping under the trees and inside the huts, and the sightless pygmy cattle, huge-uddered and leopard-spotted, in the fields. He saw a small boy, alone, slipping from a hut to play in the empty fields and woods. He had stolen away, many times, in years gone by, to go on similar boyish explorations into the unknown. Esala Rowan lived with her wrinkled old mother, Efa, in a hut on the village's outer circle of dwellings. Efa was a widow who never tired of extolling the wealth of Mert Rodn. And now Ban Telar could see how near to collapse was the mean little hovel of mud and thatch. Esala slept close to the mat-barred doorway -- her mother in a further corner. He whispered softly her name, and Esala's pale golden face and fair hair appeared. But for the sunken eye sockets she was as beautiful as the women in the Earthman's books and tapes. Her nostrils dilated. She put both arms around his neck. "Ban!" she whispered, "Ban Telar!" IF "I did not want you to think I was dead, Esala." "I knew you were not. They said the stranger killed and ate you after he stung the workers. There were many stories. Some said that Mert Rodn hired the stranger to carry you off." Ban Telar laughed. "Then you have not mated with Mert Rodn as your mother wished?" "Never. He thinks to win me by crippling his rivals. Let the whole village be crippled -- yet I will not mate with him. And my mother... She is dead these past nine Warmths." "Then come with me, Esala, to live with the Earthman. We will travel far and see many strange lands." "You use strange words. What is see? And we must mate only if the Old Ones bless us... We must not leave the village, either. You were wrong to do so." Ban Telar slipped the Space Eyes over Esala's head and adjusted the controls. He felt her shrinking within his arms and then a cry of fear sounded. Faint though it was he covered her lips with his palm. "This is seeing, Esala. The Earthman gave this gift to many of our people. After we have been blessed by the Old Ones and are mates I will take you to him." Esala was pawing the headband from her forehead. "I am afraid," she said, when he took his hand away. "There is evil in this thing. There is flashing like pain that hurts not and strange things. Put it away." B an Telar shrugged. He stowed the Eyes inside the knapsack he carried and took Esala's trembling hand again. "Come along," he said, "to the Old Ones' house." "But they sleep," objected Esala. "We will awaken them. We have waited too long to mate. We wifl wait no longer." As they walked together down the empty narrowness of the street Ban Telar was astonished by the differences that vision brought. The crooked walls, sagging and twisted, with their unequally textured walls and warped door frames. The crudeness of the furniture that the blind artisans of the village constructed so sturdily -- and usually, lopsidedly. Finally they arrived at the ancient, and larger, buildings where the childless and feeble-bodied old men and women were housed. This was the governing body of the village, and few among the workers disputed them... Some day they too might be left homeless and helpless. And then they would be the Old Ones. Let the Old Ones make the laws. Bless the Old Ones. We too shall grow old. "Awaken, oh Old Ones," Ban Telar cried. "Esala Rowan and Ban Telar ask your blessing on their mating." There was a rustling and husky whispering within the main room of the dwelling and the odor of ancient flesh and long-worn blankets of wool and vegetable fibers. With his Eyes Ban Telar saw more than a score of ancients, most of them huddling their wrinkled, ancient bodies in coarsely woven blankets despite the noonday heat. "You have been gone from the village many Warmths and many Colds," a quavering old voice, Polg Rian's, charged. "I was taken away by the Earthman until my arms were healed," Ban Telar said. "It is against the laws for you to leave the village without our permission," the old voice said. "For this you are to have twenty blows of a staff across your back. And for a hundred Warmths and Colds you are to wear chains." Ban Telar's right hand dropped down to the stitcher holstered at his hip. He had scoffed at Cole's insistence that he take it, but now he was glad. The nip of one or two of the paralyn-tipped needles in the weapon's magazine could paralyze the strongest man. "I have returned with a gift from the Earth our people left years ago," he cried, backing away a step or so. "With it you can see again." "Ban Telar is crazed," the old man said. "He babbles of fantasies. He knows nothing of sight. Only we Old Ones know. Seize him." B y this time the noise had aroused' other villagers, and among them, black-bearded and thick-bodied as a gorilla, moved Mert Rodn. His broad nostrils quivered and his teeth bared as he scented Ban Telar and Esala Rowan. He elbowed through the crowd. "Let me set my hands on Ban Telar," he raged, and Ban Telak saw his big hand go down to the sheathed knife at his hip. Ban Telar tried once more to be heard. "I speak only the truth," he said. "We are of the same race as the stranger. But his people can see, as we once could. With Eyes we can go beyond the Wall. We can see the stars and the sun." "Seize the madman," cried all the Old Ones. "Seize him. Strike him down. Beat off his diseased head!" Ban Telar cleared the trimmer key of his weapon and started backing away, with Esala struggling to get free from his grasp. Dorby Cole had warned him that this might happen -- that his own people would turn against him -- but he had not believed. "Let me go, Ban Telar," screamed Esala. "Do not take me to the devil from Earth. Do not torture me with the band about my head. Free me, demon!" Anger cut across the confusion within his brain. He would carry her off in spite of herself as Dorby Cole had done with him. He saw the workers closing in on him, ten or twelve of them, and more arriving. In flight alone could he best them once he had escaped that constricting ring. His thumb depressed the firing stud of the stitcher, spewing needles in short bursts. Four of the men went down and he leaped through the gap. Esala was struggling and crying out, and the villagers were setting up a howl that was deafening. The confusion was an aid, now, IF for ears and noses could not distinguish the location of either of them. He had gained the meadows and the carefully cultivated fields beyond the village before the Old Ones' cries for silence and order were obeyed. Then the hastily armed men, forty or fifty of them he estimated, came padding silently after him. And in their front, his head low as he followed their scent spoor, came the hairy giant, Mert Rodn. "Put me down, Ban Telar," begged the girl. "Alone you can escape. Burdened as you are they will overtake you quickly." "I will not leave you behind to mate with Mert Rodn," Ban Telar told her as he left the path and took to the fields. "But I would wait for you," she said. "Truly. I do love you. Throw away the Eyes. Take your punishment. When their anger has cooled we will mate." Ban Telar paused briefly to study the pattern of naked, bronze-fleshed men, brandishing their crook-bladed metal knives and their clubs and spears. They stayed on the paths, in the main, but a small party of four, Mert Rodn in the lead, were sniffing out 'his trail. The ladders were less than two hundred feet distant now, and to the north. With his stitcher ready, and armed, he plunged directly toward them. Only once did he fire. A numbed worker went sagging to the path as he crossed it and then he was ascending the inner ladder to cross the Wall. One last look he took back with him into the enclosure as he turned to descend on the other side. He swallowed thickly. They were driving him out, a condemned hunted pariah; yet this had been his home since birth. His foot kicked the ladder away. He started the descent. T he skimmer was ready at last. The two days spent in cramming a basic edutape course in language and history into Esala's stubborn little blonde skull had not been wasted entirely. But even so, they kept her hands taped together when she wore the Eyes for each increasingly longer period. She wore it now as they prepared for takeoff, and her taped hands were strapped to her seat. "We will find other valleys, Esala," Ban Telar told her, "Where our children, and the children of those who wish to see again, can dwell." "The Eyes are evil," Esala spat out bitterly. "I wish to smash them all. And the Earthman with them." Dorby Cole shrugged his shoulders and winked at Ban Telar. "You picked a tough one, Ban," he said. "Better toss her back over the wall and catch a new one."  "He will not do so!" Esala's voice trembled with rage. "Ban Telar is to be my mate. It is you who are to blame." Cole looked directly into the Eyes that Esala wore. "Is it not good to see colors and trees, and your mate, Esala?" he demanded. "Why do you think the Eyes harm you?" Esala sniffed and shut her lips primly. Cole started to turn away. And then she spoke again. "It is not good that the Old Ones should be doubted," she said. "They have told us that sight, that seeing, is something imagined by children and brainsick fools. So it is wrong to make liars of them." "You see?" Ban Telar told the Earthman. "Perhaps I must beat her. But then she would hate me. I do not know." "Give her time, Ban," advised Cole. "Her world is upside-down. Remember the first weeks you spent," Cole was strapping himself into the control seat. When he had finished he set about checking the gauges and dials on the control panels. He turned to Ban Telar. "Did we remove the covers from the rear jets?" he asked. "I think they're free, but would you check?" Ban Telar slid out of his seat and hurried outside. He checked the broad-tailed skimmer's jets and found them cleared. He started back toward the cabin's oval lock. And Mert Rodn sprang from the concealment of the little ship's overhang to pin him to the foot-worn turf. R odn was alone. Apparently none of the others had dared risk the ladder and the crossing of the Wall. But hatred and desire for Esala had driven Mert Rodn to follow. Rodn's horny hands were shutting off Ban Telar's wind. Already his ears were roaring and redness seemed to be flooding the Eyes. Convulsively he struggled, his fists drumming at the older man's thick-muscled stomach. His knuckles brushed the handle of Rodn's sheathed knife and he groped wildly for the weapon -- found it! He tugged it out, a task complicated by the pressure of their two sweaty bodies, and then he drove the crudely forged blade into Rodn's side. The throttling hands fell away and Rodn whipped into furious action. The Eyes were torn from Ban Telar's head. Smashing impacts from Rodn's fists and elbows and knees knocked him about and jarred the knife from his grasp. In the sudden darkness, once so familiar, he felt helpless and tiny as an infant. Over and over they rolled, Rodn growling savagely, now, his teeth and nails ripping at Ban Telar's hide. Telar's hand clawed for anything, a rock, a stick or a wrench. He found the knife, its unevenly whetted blade laying open in his palm. Painfully he reversed the weapon, using the ground as a base, and drove the bloody weapon again and again into his huge foe's body. And when Rodn eventually shuddered and fought no more he knew that he was dead. Dorby Cole came and rolled the ugly carcass off him, and patched his wounds, but in his mind there was a great confusion and an emptiness. He would not again put on the Eyes. "No," he told Cole, "never again will I wear the Eyes. Esala was right. It was the Eyes that made me doubt the Old Ones. Find us a IF secure valley where we can build another Wall for our sons and daughters to live behind. But mention no more to us that evil art of seeing that has lost us our native village and has made of me a murderer." "You will feel differently tomorrow," Dorby Cole's voice said. "It is the shock of near-death, and your wounds. Surely, now that you have seen the beauty of your world you will not lose it forever." Ban Telar said nothing. But in his mind there was the stubborn conviction that this Earthman, this demon masquerading as a friend, must die before he trapped others of the People into believing in seeing. If he could only clear his mind and make his leaden senses and his weakened muscles react. The scent of the Earthman was hateful. The knife of Mert Rodn was lying where his locked fingers had finally dropped it, and now he found it. He lunged at Cole. "No, Ban!" said Cole hoarsely. "You are confused. Don't make me use the stitcher." The scent of the Earthman was sharp and the sound of his vitals and the rasping of his feet on the turf. He hated the blasphemer. The builder of lies must die. He sprang. And then the needles stung his flesh and he fell. He could hear, faintly, and the scent of trampled grass was in his nostrils. "I was wrong," he heard Cole say. "You will get your valley, Ban Telar, but no more. You are too old to understand... I must teach children from behind the wall. Only their minds are unwarped and by Cordwainer Smith by James H. Schmitz by J. T. McIntosh plus stories and columns by Willy Ley , Algis Budrys and XF  Novelette The star-swarming armies of Gree had a new weapon -- and Duke had to go and find itl I T he storm below was a whopper, which didn't surprise Colonel Steve Duke since the planet had a deep atmosphere with a sealevel pressure of over forty pounds per square inch. Such a storm would blind enemy radar, if any. It might also incinerate Steve, protected only by a thin plastic pod and his equally flimsy suit. He watched the roiling clouds swell toward him, and increased his deceleration a little. Presently, air pressure dented the pod, but most of his speed was gone now and the pod didn't heat. Clouds engulfed him, the flare of lightning was all around and thunder battered at the pod. He endured grimly until he was below the lightning and in fog so thick he might have been sinking through milk. It got darker, until the flares from above were barely noticeable. The fog was more like ink; a dripping night air so dense he could nearly have turned off the grav unit and let the pod float down. He poked at the plastic to see how rigid it was. According to his briefings, when the pod got limp he'd be near the ground. It wasn't very rigid now. Something like a miniature torpedo with a flashing light in its nose came out of the fog, emitted a brighter flare, grazed the pod, and vanished. He crouched, waiting for the detonation. It didn't come. What the devil, he wondered. Some kind of a warning shot? Or a misfire? It had surely homed on him. There was nothing he could do if they fired a deadly missile; they'd be zeroed on him now. At least, he thought wryly, he was sure, now, that there were Gree forces on the planet. Up to now, that had been only a computer probability. He grabbed equipment, stuffed it into pockets and hung things around his neck. The pod struck and squashed flat, sliding a little. Tree branches poked into it, but didn't penetrate the plastic. He could hear faint sounds now, pops and rumbles, and see reddish flashes that didn't look like laser beams. He tore at releases, got one metal end out of the pod, and squirmed out. He was on something that felt like packed cotton with a lot of sticks in it. He scrabbled away from the pod on all fours, thanking Providence (though his superiors deserved the credit), that it was a genuine Gree pod and he wouldn't have to hide it. H e bumped into a low wall of the cottony stuff, and understood. He was in a tree crown, solider than it looked in the sneak photos. This was the boundary where it reared up, jousting for space with a neighbor. He pulled himself over and kept going. Now he noticed that the crowns slanted toward their centers, in a very shallow cone. He remembered that they were supposed to be fifty feet across, and that checked pretty well. He crossed another boundary just before strong red light bloomed foggily behind him. He peered back and found the fog much thinner. They were using dispersers, then; probably ultrasonic. They were standing in the light, incautiously, talking about his pod. There were six of them, two men and four B'lant. The latter were humanoids with tough gray skins, very effective fighters in difficult environments. They wore full plastic suits and carried unfamiliar weapons. The fog suddenly boiled around them and they all went down except one B'lant who caught himself, whirled, and fired across the crown. Steve could hear the subdued 'pop' that accompanied each flash of red light. The light beam, he thought, would be harmless; for aiming only. But a dim figure that it caught jerked and doubled over and was falling before the flash was gone. ' Someone doused the steady red light and in a moment Steve, with his helmet listeners turned full on, could hear sounds as if some of the downed men were crawling over the boundary. Steve's mind puzzled at it. Concussion weapons of some kind -- logical, in this air -- but not fatal, apparently, at medium range. Who had fired them? Suspicion lanced through him. Had the Birds of Effogus -- ? No, it would make no sense for them to invade, after going to all the trouble to sneak him down. Anyway, he thought, he'd better move. He waited until there was enough noise to cover him. then rolled over another boundary and the one beyond it. The fog was definitely thin now, though fifty or sixty feet above it was as solid as ever. There were occasional red beams and enough steady glows here and there so he could see a little. A red beam slashed out suddenly, only two crowns away, and impaled a figure just crossing a boundary. Steve could see the victim -- a B'lant -- gasp and lose consciousness in a way that confirmed the guess about concussion weapons. A red flare came on, and a squad of six, four humans this time, converged on the fallen humanoid. Steve waited for them to put a couple more shots into him to make sure, but instead two of them bent over, unsealed his helmet and seemed to be giving him first aid. In a minute the B'lant came to. They helped him up, and though he looked sick and was bleeding at the nose, he was nowhere near dead. Understanding suddenly, Steve swore to himself. Live maneuvers. Not a real fight at all. But it would be just as deadly to Steve if they located him -- which they would if he just squatted here. The weapons might not kill, barring an unfortunate kind of hit, but he couldn't afford to be capttired, or even knocked out or deafened. He dug at the cottony stuff with his hands and managed to part it enough to squirm in. He groped down for something solid to hold to, and discovered that the crown was supported by radial shoots, each three or four inches thick at the central trunk, and far enough apart a little ways out for him to wedge himself between. He got himself into the least uncomfortable position he could and tried to pull the foliage together over him. Then he simply resigned himself to waiting. The Birds' theory seemed to be right. These were commandos, a tough chosen lot; and ready for action, judging by the roughness of their training. So far, the thrusts had been tentative but demoralizing to Steve's side because there seemed no way to guard against them. Well, that was what Steve was here for -- to find out how they managed to stage into this backwoods of the galaxy, through IF all the blockades, watches and patrols the birds could devise: and how they got from here to wherever they raided. And, if possible, why Gree had chosen a world with nearly three times the air pressure normal for humanoids. Steve wasn't quite on his own. There were natives, rather primitive. that he was to contact. It was considered desirable that he survive the mission, if convenient. Knowing Gree's empire as he did, he wasn't very expendable. A t first light he unsealed his helmet and was assaulted by the forest smell: damp, sweetish, moldy. The fog was apparently thinning naturally this time. The cottony foliage turned out to be green, which made him think of it more as moss. There were no branches below him. Except for the radial crown at the top -- went straight down, with bands around it at intervals like monstrous bamboo. into the fog that still hung thick beneath the canopy. The ground was supposed to be there somewhere, three or four hundred feet down. He worked himself up cautiously and looked around, though he was pretty sure the commandos wouldn't be on the canopy in the daytime, and that their base wouldn't be close by. He was right. They'd policed up; even taking his pod with them. He hoped some supply sergeant wouldn't get a sudden burst of zeal and check records closely enough to find he had an extra pod. The canopy was coming to life. There seemed nothing that didn't fly; even the things that crept did so on adapted wings, and could fly in a pinch. There were things from insect size on up to condor size. The latter were just as wary as the small things, which suggested probably natural enemies, even bigger. The predominant body-shape was something like a manta ray, but with horizontally flat tails and welldeveloped heads on flexible necks. There was one common feature that was suggestive: everything had a third eye, on top or on the back of the head, looking to the rear. He saw no feathers and no chitinous sheaths or membranes. Everything looked rubbery. There was supposed to be a river close by. He thought it would be on this side of a ridge that he could see to the north. He plowed awkwardly in that direction, and within an hour could see the break in the jungle. He reached the edge and looked out over a placid slowflowing river at least a mile wide. He squirmed himself out of sight and studied it. There were flying things over the water, mostly of the same general pattern, and of all sizes. Fish -- the first non-flying things he'd seen, except for the Commandos -- broached the surface. There were other things that acted equally at home in the air or the water. One of those was a serpent six or seven feet long, with ribbons for wings along each side, that twisted its way through the air with a fasciIF nating motion. Nearly everything had carnivore's teeth -- and used them. He saw nothing on the ground below except some small amphibians or triphibians, but there were tracks at the water's edge. The natives were supposed to live on the other side. He got out his binoculars and settled himself to watch. II I t was past mid-day when he saw them. There were eleven, in a V formation, flapping ponderously above the opposite edge of the jungle. They wore leather harnesses and back packs, and something on their heads that he couldn't make out. He got out a signalling device, a sophisticated heliograph, adjusted it, and gave them five quick flashes. Their heads swivelled. They pulled up and hovered. There seemed to be a conference, then one flapped up higher and dipped its wings, one after another. That might be an acknowledgement. He waited. So did they. He gave them five more flashes, there was another conference, and again the flying signal. Finally they headed out across the river. Two flapped up, gaining altitude as lookouts, no doubt. The other nine stayed fairly low over the water and seemed to be hurrying. When they were close he realized with a shock that the things on their heads were not headgear, but trunks like a Terran elephant's, carried in a tight curl. As they glided down toward him -- they apparently saw him from quite a ways out -- he saw that the trunks, about the size of a man's leg, ended in three flexible digits. Less than two hundred yards away, something startled them. The two lookouts came shooting down, very fast considering the thick air. The whole eleven dove toward the riverbank a few yards downstream. Steve, who'd been briefed in their queer language that sounded like boulders being ground together, could hear one mouthing orders. They were headed for a short concave arc of riverbank, splitting into two groups to occupy ends of the arc. Two lagged a little, waiting for the others to land among the tree trunks. Then they too landed, in the focus of the arc, and turned to look up. They were very odd-looking on land. In the air they were streamlined enough; but aground on their wingtips and tails, with the forward parts of their bodies tilted up at forty-five degrees, they looked like monstrous thick three-lobed leaves with the stems pointed up. Their heads did look like elephants', except that there were no flapping ears, no tusks, and the eyes protruded, almost on stalks. He judged that the biggest -- the mature-looking one who gave the orders -- weighed twice as much as a man. H e followed their gaze. Still far up, mere dots, was a big multiple V of about three dozen flying things. They came down in a steep dive. Now he could see that they were about the size of his prospective allies, but had no trunks. Instead, they had snouts like reptiles. The smaller things over the river scattered. The diving flock checked a little a hundred yards up and out, as if suspicious. The two decoys hopped end-for-end and arrowed toward the jungle, each in a single leap and glide. They certainly looked different in the air. The lure must have been overpowering. The predators shot down in a knot, actually bumping wings. Missiles flew from both ends of the arc, and several predators flopped screeching on the sand. The others whirled away from the ambush. Defenders leaped from the jungle to grab up what missiles hadn't fallen in the river. Steve had to classify the weapons as axes. The heads were discus-shaped stones with flaked edges and holes drilled through the middles. The handles weren't fixed at right angles, but were put on like the fork of a wheelbarrow so they were free to whirl about the stone, in the same plane. The handles were light, and as the natives' trunks hurled the weapons with great force, the handles bent sharply, whipped, and finally trailed in the air. A good arrangement, everything considered. The predators were back, more cunningly this time, threatening enough to draw missiles but mostly dodging them. It was obvious the defenders would soon run out of axes and be overwhelmed. Steve stood up, laser pistol in his hand. They were ugly things, in a way, but they were his allies and they fought intelligently. He was no more capable of staying out of it than of growing an extra head. He shot coolly, breaking up the attack, not trying to stop individual predators from reaching the trees because there were too many. Some spotted him and flapped to get above him. He ignored them until they were close, then gave each a frugal rake of the beam. One landed almost on top of him, still alive enough to hop. He burned through its skull, then whirled to fire at two that had circled to take him from behind. They thudded near him. Others were coming from several directions. He knew the pistol would go dead any instant and there'd be no time to put another power unit in it. The air reeked of burnt flesh and the rusting-iron smell of blood. He saved his last few ergs of pistol energy. A stone axe flashed by him and hit the closest predator, slashing its chest badly enough to down it. His allies were out of the jungle and rallying around him, with few axes left but with wooden lances ready to fend off as well as possible. But the attackers were down to half strength and they suddenly decided they were out-matched. They wheeled in unison and shot downriver for the nearest bend. Steve got a new power unit in the pistol as his allies swooped down to salvage what axes they could. IP It took them a while to understand that he could not fly, and when they did they were silent with amazement. Then the leader asked, as nearly as Steve could understand, whether he was at home in the water, and added that the river was dangerous. Finally Steve had to demonstrate how he walked. They got busy rigging a harness so he could be carried, as they evidently carried cargo. Of the eleven, two were dead and one so badly hurt he could not fly without help. Most of the others had minor gashes. There was one thing Steve had to do before they left; dispose of the predators he'd burned. A laser wound would be recognized. He said in the native language, "Trouble, enemy," and pointed to the burns on the carcasses, touched his eyes and stared at the burns ostentatiously. They understood, and hustled to haul the carcasses out over the river and drop them. The leader said river creatures would eat them. They lifted him. dangling, and started back across the river. He was glad to get away from the stink of blood, though he didn't fail to notice that it smelled like ordinary protein-life blood. There was little talk while flying. From gestures and a few words, he understood that he'd met a military patrol and that the leader was of fairly high rank. His name sounded like "Gegego." He knew of the Birds of Effogus, and that they'd sent Steve to help in some way against the mysterious new enemy. However, despite the demonstration of the laser pistol, Steve could see in Gegego's manner skepticism as to the effectiveness of a being who couldn't even fly. Steve didn't resent that; it amused him, and in general he didn't find them too repugnant. They were fine fighters, and though they had an odor, it wasn't unbearable. This whole world assaulted his nose with such variety and determination that one more smell didn't matter. They hauled him across and up the left shore for two hours, then turned into a small side-stream and slanted down, depositing him gently on an elevated walkway or platform. They'd built a wickerwork dam here, below a long pool, and along both sides of the pool stretched a village. T he walkways were tiered one above another, from tree to tree, and the dwellings were in sections of the tree trunks, as if hole had been cut into bamboo so birds could crawl in. There were leather flaps over some of the openings. The tree trunks, this near the ground, were as much as fifteen feet through, and the natural woody divisions between sections were secure floors. The community fires were on the ground, fed by tossing down wood from the lowest platform. Most wood burned vigorously here, even when sopping wet; but the bamboo would hardly bum at all. Cooking was done by lowering the food on bamboo poles (and in bamboo pots. n il need be). There were boiled greens and grains, and flat unrisen bread, and barbequed meats. Steve thought he might as well find out at once how the food agreed with him, so he ate it, moderately. Some of the meat was a little gamey. There were only a few females, mammalian, and even fewer children. This was clearly an outpost. Gegego sent out squads in various directions, then, that afternoon, was ready to discuss the common aim. They agreed, using Steve's few words and pantomime, that the first necessity was to pinpoint the enemy and learn what they could about him without risking discovery. Gegego promised all the help possible. It seemed the Harnkrah (that was what the natives called themselves) had been missing patrols and had had one village shot up, without knowing what kind of enemy was doing those things, or where he came from. Later, Steve lay alone in his tree section, letting his mind wander over the situation as it chose. He was going to be with the natives quite a while and he didn't relish being hauled around like a fly dangling on a strand of spiderweb. Probably it would be easy to build some kind of a glider here; then at least he could be towed. He might even tinker up some kind of flaps so he could fly without help. Also, he could make stronger allies of the Harnkrah if he could work out some better weapons for them. Not to use against Gree, of course, but to make it safer for Hhern to travel in predator country. Their trunks could easily manipulate fixed catapults or crossbows, and he'd already seen that, with their strength and agility and their wide-apart eyes for good ranging, they made excellent marksmen. It was a shame, though, that they only had one trunk apiece. D uring the next twenty days or so he did little but experiment with weapons and gliders and learn all he could of the language. He picked up the latter fairly well. Gegego seized gleefully upon a heavy bow, on a post which swivelled in a solid mounting. "This," he grated, "will make our outposts easier to defend, and help us go into lands we have always wanted." He gestured to an aide. "I will send a report down-river. Soon the river will be lined with these." Steve knew by now that the Harnkrah had a loose confederation that linked the whole area between this river and another farther north, from the sea up to the vague frontier. This outpost was part of the latter. To settle any farther inland meant fighting off more predators. A dozen fixed bows in a village, with plenty of big arrows, could make a difference. Still, he didn't want to be pinned down to outposts, so he ought to work out something that could be fired from the air. "What if we made a thing like this," he asked, "but only half as big? Could you handle it aloft?" Gegego made a pondering' face. "I think, no. Not if we flew fast." IF "What," Steve asked, "if two of you flew close together? Could one hold the bow while the other pulled the string?" Gegego waved his trunk impatiently. "You do not see. We hold things in our mouths so our trunks can do something else, but the bad thing is that this weapon sticks out to the sides. The air would make it move around." "I was afraid of that. How would it be if I made something that did not stick out to the sides?" "Good, I think, if it had a shape so our trunks could hold it tight." "I'll make something." Steve said. In the process, he came to appreciate the virtues of the simple bow; which, reduced to terms of energy acceptance, transformation, storage and release, were astounding. In this thick atmosphere, though, he didn't want high initial velocity for the arrows so much as more weight; so a less efficient launcher -- as regards speed of energy release -- would do. He tried helical springs of split bamboo, formed in the heat of a fire. It was awkward to get the arrows into such a launcher and the springs bent too much laterally. What evolved was a sort of bird cage, with six splints of bamboo forming a slender cage. On one end was a ring into which the arrowshaft slipped, and against which the rear of the arrowhead pressed. On the other end was a hollow cylindrical handle, coaxial with the cage. When the handle was held firm and the ring compressed toward it, the splints belled out under tension. In the air, a Harnkrah warrior carried the weapon in his mouth, with the thick heavy arrows in a quiver. When he wanted to shoot he seized an arrow by the head and inserted the other end in the launcher, through the ring, the cage, and the handle. The fletched end protruded far enough beyond the handle to grasp with his teethThen he took hold of the handle with his trunk and thrust it forward, pulling the arrow farther through and compressing the cage. When he let go with his teeth, the arrow flew. A good sharp heavy hardwood point made it a formidable missile. Gegego hopped with delight, and acted as if he were ready to take on the whole planet. He sent weapon prototypes downriver with strong escorts, and went into production locally. Steve had less luck with his flying machines. The flap arrangements could keep him in the air, but were too tiring and too clumsy at take off. He did learn, though how to build a good glider out of bamboo and thin leather, and how to control it by shifting his weight in a comfortable sling. He had to settle for being towed to gliding altitudes. Ill R einforcements were arriving steadily and Gegego had squads pushing upstream and establishing new outposts. The local settlement grew fast and became a production center for the weapons. Steve decided it was time to send in his second report to the Birds. The sender looked like a small telescope hung in gimbals so it would always point up. Actually, it would compress, scramble and squirt at a predetermined moment any message fed into it. At the right moment, a tiny droneship would be spacing out above the planet to gulp the message and null out again with it. There was always a small chance of detection, so Steve hadn't used the system any more than necessary. He fed his report into it and set it out on a walkway where it could point to the sky. Now that he'd run out of work he was restless and moody. The smallness of the message sender, his only link with the galaxy, accentuated his isolation. He had no way of knowing whether his message would ever be heard. If not, the Birds of Effogus might just write him off and go about their investigation some other way. He paced the platform staring down at the huge fires, which were kept burning to partially dispel the night fog. Creatures of the dark flitted in and out of the dancing light. The wet wood burned with loud pops and hisses, and with a punky smell. A squad of scouts came volplaning down from riverward and landed on the lowest platform while a few youngsters, miniatures in every detail of the adults, circled excitedly. Seen from above, the Harnkrah in flight were very graceful, and aerodynamically admirable; but their total alienness bore in upon Steve. "Damn it," he muttered, "I should have thought of fermenting some beer or something. This is going to get worse." He turned toward his quarters to occupy himself rechecking equipment. He'd only been inside a few minutes when he heard Gegego's voice calling him, "Ker-nell Dookuh! Ker-nell Doo-kuh!" He got up quickly and stepped outside. He always felt better when Gegego returned. "What is it?" "A kullig with a burn like your weapon makes!" 'phe kullig -- the kind of predator Steve had fought -- was dead of wounds from the new arrows. The burn was older; a seared streak and a small hole through one wing. He said, "It's a laser, all right. But he might have gotten it anywhere." "No," Gegego said, "it would be too painful to fly far. He was on this side of the river, two days' flight above here, but I think he came from the other side. There is a concentration of kullig and smaller things there, very unusual. And there is something not right about the fog." He made wondering gestures with his trunk. "I do not see why the kullig should gather there. Surely this enemy we seek is not foolish enough to be caught by kullig." "No." "Then," Gegego continued, "they must want the kullig there. Maybe to keep us away so we will not find them. We would not have found it, if you were not here and IF ff we did not have the new weapons." Steve thought about it. He had no better clues. "Could you set me down there, on that side of the river?" "All alone? It would be very dangerous for you." "I'm not here on a vacation. I can scout the ground with some of the things I carry." Gegego said, "I will talk to some scouts and be back quickly." Steve added a hasty postscript to his report, giving the new data and the suspected location, and saying he was going to reconnoiter alone. Gegego returned and said without further protest, "Tomorrow night, as soon as the fog comes." The glider slid through fog already so thick Steve could see only the nearer of the two Harnkrah towing him, tandem. Around them, especially ahead, was a bedlam of shrieks and bellows as Gegego 's warriors bludgeoned a way clear. A contorting bulk tumbled out of the fog and into it again, and splashed into the invisible river. A swirling dogfight loomed suddenly, and the two towmen whirled aside to avoid it. The glider skidded and slammed into a kullig, which bellowed and slashed at a glider wing. Steve grinned. The glider only had to last a few seconds more. They pulled him up sharply and the edge of the jungle flashed under him. The towline went slack as the two Harnkrah hovered. He shoved his weight back to bring up the nose and the Harnkrah dropped neatly, each catching a wing. They lowered him to the canopy and he slid out of the straps and landed on the foliage as they hauled the glider up and around and vanished back toward the river. He was on his own. He squirmed down through the canopy and hooked a strap over a tree shoot, then dropped a line over it, letting the free end fall. He went down, paying out line and letting it slide over the shoot for a pulley. He landed in giant fungi, scattering small creatures in the dusk; pulled down his line and coiled it as he crouched against the tree trunk. Above the canopy he could hear the hoarse calls of kullig, but he was safe from them down here. He activated certain instruments, and, as he'd expected, heard only the onset of the nightly thunderstorm. He could hear the river on his right, so he wasn't disoriented; but rather than risk traveling at night, he thought he'd better find a place to hole up. He found a fallen tree and wedged himself under it, among clammy but harmless fungi. F or eight days he worked his tedious way west, learning how to be comfortable or at least healthy in the dank sub-world of the jungle. There was no natural danger there so long as he stayed far enough from the river where kullig or certain triphibians ventured in. There was no sign of Gree forces. On the evening of the ninth day his instruments told him he was nearing feeble electrical activity. Now his impatience was hard to control. He forced himself to explore cautiously, step by careful step, until he'd mapped out a fence a little way west of a small stream. After one more day he knew the fence made a right-angle turn at a grassy knoll, ran west more than a mile, then turned back toward the river along another creek. The whole, then, was an isolated patch of forest with a fence just inside its perimeter, roughly square, a mile and a quarter on a side. He drew back, shaved and cleaned up, cooked and ate a goosesized creature, forced himself to rest briefly, then changed into a Gree-slave gunner's uniform. He hid what equipment he wasn't taking along, and started back to the fence. By morning he was across the stream and in hiding. Two things surprised him. One was that a fog dispenser was at work, keeping the fence and the area within it clear. The other was the fence itself. He'd expected something like barbed wire, with alarm circuits, instead there was a vast basketwork of bamboo, with vertical posts spaced between the trees, reaching clear to the canopy, and strong horizontal slats woven between. He could see a few wires. At spaces, there were dim blue lights, high on the fence. He heard voices and presently a five-man patrol strode along the inside. Three were B'lant; the others men. The uniforms were assorted, so probably everyone drew fence patrol duty now and then. They carried, slung on their backs, weapons that could burn a man in two with one slash. There was another patrol twenty minutes behind the first. Each came by twice in three and a half hours, then was replaced. None of the men showed any distress in the heavy air, so they must be well acclimated. T his close, his instruments registered more electrical activity deep in the camp, but it was well screened and could not have been picked up from space. There were no large masses of metal close to him; certainly none approaching the size of even a small Scout ship. As soon as it was dark he probed along the fence until he found a gate, not guarded but locked and wired with alarms. That was what he'd have to get through, since he didn't dare climb the fence or cut a hole in it. He chose certain instruments and went to the gate. The condition of the ground showed that there'd been some heavy foot traffic through the gate recently and that didn't add to his comfort. He crouched in shadow until the next patrol passed, then ran a dim flashlight all around the gate, studying wires. He found the ones he wanted, and clipped to them, on either side of the gate, leads of his own which he stuck to the fence with gobs of sticky stuff. Working in shifts between patrols, he sealed onto the alarm wires small sleeves that looked like the kind used to repair breaks or join loose ends. These, however, were non-conducting and IF of such material that they would I not melt when he sliced through the alarm wires with a thin laser beam. He attached instruments tc his own leads and poked them inside the fence so he could reclaim them quickly from inside. If anyone turned a flashlight toward the to it. At the top were platforms, one of them hinged so it could be dropped in the daytime, out of sight from above. Now it poked up at an angle through the hole. There was a rope pulley for hoisting things. The whole place stunk of garbage. A winged form swept above the hole, barely visible in the faint blue light. Steve thought he understood. The garbage was taken up to the canopy and dumped. This drew scavengers, and kullig to prey on the scavengers, and assured the camp -- so they thought -- that the Harnkrah would stay away. The fog was probably only dispelled for a short distance above the canopy, so there was no danger of being seen from above at night, and nothing to show in the daytime. Besides, it was a better way of hiding the garbage than dumping it in the river. He grunted thoughtfully. In Gree's armies, the garbage detail was punishment, hence not composed of permanent squads. A stranger might not be noticed. He found a rotted tree with a hole near the ground, obscured by a fungus, hid his excess gear, then settled himself to wait. IV I t was two hours before he heard the detail coming. He stood near the base of the stairway, in shadow, and simply stepped into line at the right moment. The garbage tubs were sections of youne tree trunks, again saving metal. Some of the men began to hoist those on the pulley. Steve joined the ones going up the stairs. Six B'lant in clean gunners' uniforms led the way and stepped out onto the canopy, distributing themselves around the hole. Steve paired with another man to lug one of the tubs out onto the canopy, carry it to where a gunner pointed, and dump it. A horde of small things, some medium size, dove on it. Kullig circled warily. One -- perhaps a greenhorn -- croaked belligerently and swerved closer. A gunner slashed it with a weak beam. It shrieked and did a somersault in the air, caught itself and shot away. The men were mostly glum and silent, but at the bottom of the stairs one of the B'lant gunners fell in beside Steve. "What did you do, gunner, zat you get zis punishment?" Steve produced a wry grin and answered in B'lant, which he spoke perfectly, "I talked back to an Overseer." The B'lant grinned. "You were zmart. You dodge ze mock-up." Steve looked at him questioningly. "Mock-up?" "You did not hear? Zree zoiiza go out ze east gate, eight hours ago, on big mock battle. On ze ground! All zat mud and zings crawling around; and real laser guns among ze tree trunks!" Steve grunted as if in assent. It was blind luck he hadn't stumbled into that exercise too; and their being out there increased the likelihood that his tampering with the IF gate would be discovered, soon. There was nothing he could do except work as fast as he could. He chatted with the B'lant as they passed through an inner gate, almost ignored by sleepy guards. When the tubs were stacked behind the mess hall, he simply walked away as the others did. HP here were less than seven A hours of dark left now. He spent one of them prowling the camp, attaching himself first to one group then another. There was apparently considerable turnover of personnel here. The layout of the camp was a standard Gree pattern of buildings in a circle, their outer walls forming a line of defense, with the camp's functions inside the circle. In the second hour he found a closely guarded stockade fifty yards in diameter, which seemed to be the focus of the technical activity. Electrotechs, especially, were servicing something inside. The best chance for him to get in would be to pose as one of those, for which he'd need the right uniform. He watched various of the techs and finally chose a young one who seemed a little unfamiliar with the camp. He intercepted him. "Excuse me. I've just come in, and I was wondering where I could get this fixed." What he showed the man was a compact photoscanner, of a type a slave had no right to be casually carrying around. The tech glanced at it and said, "You'd better turn that in!" Steve looked as irresolute as he could. "I know, but I took it from a wreck and I don't want to have to explain. I'd pay you for fixing it, on the quiet. Or... Ed sell it cheap." Even Gree's slaves could be tempted. The young man wavered. Steve said, "At least, take a look at it for me. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?" The tech followed Steve into a shadow where light from a window cast an isolated shaft. He took the instrument from Steve and held it in the light. Steve killed him with a quick rabbit punch. He stood looking down at the inert form for a moment. "You didn't suffer any," he muttered, then dragged the body close to the building and switched uniforms. He strolled into the open, pushing aside his feeling of remorse. Now he needed some more specific excuse to enter the stockade, and maybe he could get it at the electronics supply shop. He located that and paused just inside the door until he saw a chance to pick up an ammeter that had just been placed on the tounter for checking in. He was out the door before they missed it. He walked boldly to the stockade, showed the thing to a guard, and said, "Do you have to check this through?" The guard glanced at the instrument and shook his head, and Steve walked by him without another word, and through the staggered doorways. He turned, without pausing, toward the first piece of electrical equipment he saw, whi:h was oni ut a ring of standard mobile generators. He paused beside it and looked where everyone else was looking, at a large apparatus in the middle of the stockade. T here was a metal platform, a few inches above the ground, with electrodes or projectors of some kind pointing toward it from six sides and from above. Thick cables led to the electrodes from generators like the one beside him, and other cables converged to a control panel where techs were making adjustments. There was an expectancy. One of the techs pushed a control and a glowing spot appeared above the platform at the focus of the electrodes. It expanded until it was a luminescent bubble clinging above the platform. A warning buzzer sounded and there was suddenly a humanoid, one of the Overseer race, in the bubble. He was in a clear plastic balloon -- not a pod with fittings, but a mere bag, tied at its neck with a cord. The bag looked very rigid with pressure. The luminescent bubble collapsed and the bag wrinkled. The Overseer inside slashed himself free with a knife and stepped out. A tech hurried to pick up the collapsed bag and stuff it into a hopper. The new arrival was already off the platform and talking to the Overseer in charge locally. The bubble formed again, and another humanoid, a slave, appeared in an identical bag. Now they came at intervals of a few seconds, calmly, forming into squads and marching away. At the last, wounded came, all under their own power, some with splints or extensive bandages. Finally another Overseer materialized, this one wounded, judging from his limp, though Steve couldn't see because he wasn't in simple coveralls but in a complex plastic suit. Steve eyed the suit curiously. It wasn't a standard space type. Of course, they might use a special kind, for this heavy pressure... Then, suddenly, he saw the whole setup. It was an underwater suit! That was why they used this planet -- men based here, living in this air, were already adapted to diving! Sea commandos; and that explained many things. But that wasn't important now. The important thing was the apparatus that transferred them! There was no problem in nulling a man in a pod, or a suit, or anything else of such small size and mass; but any object had to come out of null into virtual vacuum. Not that a few atoms of hydrogen, say, couldn't be shunted aside, but anything as substantial as an atmosphere -- even one percent of this one -- would demand impossible techniques and energy levels. What Gree had here, then, must be an apparatus for forcing all the air out of a certain spot, and a null-coordination system accurate enough to hop an object exactly into the evacuated spot. The theory wasn't new. The practice was supposed to be impossible. Obviously, it wasn't. Implications came to IF Steve. One base, a few thousand commandos, meant nothing now. Such a device could land armies right through a blockade! He had to get word out. H e turned to the generator and pretended to be testing it, using the ammeter and his body to hide the photoscanner. He got as many shots as he dared of the apparatus, not neglecting the cables nor the control panel. Then he stowed the scanner under his uniform and considered means of escape. What he had to do was get back to where he'd hidden his message-squirter in a rotting tree, and feed in what the photoscanner held -- then get away from the sender and avoid capture until the message was sent. He didn't know when that would be, but it would probably be during the next day. There wasn't apt to be another garbage detail tonight, so he couldn't use that again. At least, he'd better get out of this hot spot. He started toward the stockade exit, and paused. Something was up. Guards were listening to their helmet radios, and presently several of them left. Steve's mind raced. The chances were, they'd found the man he'd killed, but hadn't identified him yet. Otherwise they'd be swarming to this stockade, not away from it, and grabbing everyone in an electrotech uniform. Ditto about the gate. Nevertheless, it was too late to leave the stockade, let alone get through the inner fence. Not by stealth. So, if he couldn't sneak out, he'd have to break out; and the first step was to create a diversion; invent the biggest rumpus he could. The closest thing to hand was the generator. This model had its own grav units so it could be flown, and a platform where an operator could stand. It would be clumsy and slow, a childishly easy target for even a hand gun, so he couldn't just jump on it and fly away. But he might create an excuse for flying it away. He slid open the cover of the fuelfeed compartment and went to work. The fuel was a carefully drawn wire of a heavy alloy, stable under ordinary conditions but readily and cleanly fissionable in the chamber. If the wire fed too fast there could be a runaway. If things really got hot the whole spool of wire could fission at once. Regulators made that almost impossible as an accident -- but regulators could be destroyed. He got through some rods, then melted a bimetallic component that was supposed to clamp down under heat With his fingers, he pulled the wire through the primary feed gate so there was a loose loop, being drawn too rapidly into the chamber. When things began cooking he moved on to the next generator as if he were testing them all. He didn't take the risk of sabotaging that one too, as many eyes would be alert now. He moved unobtrusively aside. S omeone shouted. There was a shocked silence, then a stampede for the exit that quickly II lammed it. Steve ran back toward the generator. He shouted at a tech foreman who had stood his ground hoping to do something, but who was about to change his mind. Steve grabbed his arm. "The cables. Get them off! I'll fly it away!" He jumped onto the operator's platform and threw switches. The foreman gaped, then understood and ran to disconnect the cables. They dropped free and Steve lifted the awkward bulk. He hoped the accumulators held enough charge to keep the gravs working. He looked down at the faces turned up to him and could read the terror and the hope. He got over the stockade wall and fought the controls to weave a path among the trees. The heat was scorching -- he knew fission far away. He'd cut it too fine! He'd never reach the dump area in time. Desperately, he tilted the front end up and poured on power. He clung to hot metal as the generator rammed into the canopy, slewed and thrust upward again and finally broke through. He hurled himself to one side and buried his face in the foliage. If the generator got far enough into the fog... Incredible brightness came through his fingers and squeezed eyelids, and shock waves hit him, one, two, like giant fists. He was up and scrabbling away before the glow in the fog was gone. He wasn't burned much. If he got treatment before too long, the radiation wouldn't matter. He forced himself to stop and think. Which way was the garbage dump? There might be several, in a ring around the camp. He'd have to trust his instinct for direction; whatever recollection he had of the direction he'd been headed. A few feeble lights gleamed under the canopy, but they didn't help. Something blundered into his shoulder and flapped away with a thin cry. Probably the blast had blinded a lot of things. He moved on the Vay he'd started. Wings whooshed over him and he drew the pistol, but kept going and the kullig didn't come down. He went as fast as the foliage would let him. Someone would have done some thinking by now, and they'd soon be on the canopy after him. His lungs ached; it was like trying to run through high weeds. A blue light winked on, to his left and ahead. He heard B'lant and human voices, and at least one Overseer. They spread out and now he could see gunner uniforms and the heavy beamers. There might be a slim chance he could surrender, playing it innocent, and not be burned down until he got a chance to use his own pistol or grab one of the heavier weapons. They wouldn't be sure, on the spot, that he wasn't a legitimate hero... The alternative was to go down through the canopy, hope to find a tree tall enough to reach and slender enough to slide down. On the ground, he might still reach the message sender. More blue lights appeared on the IF other side of him, and now he saw some below, on the ground. That hope was gone too. He crouched, listening. Something small crept by him. He grabbed it and hurled it high and to the side. It screeched and one of the nearest squad sent a bolt toward it, and was cursed by the squad leader. Steve rolled onto another crown, hoping to get behind the squad. A heavy beam lashed at him from another direction and someone yelled, "There he is!" Blue flashlights swung his way. He waited, pistol ready. He might take a few with him. All the lights suddenly went out and there were startled oaths. Squads called out to each other, questioning, until an Overseer's voice harshed, "Silence!" Steve's stomach went tight. There'd been rumor among the Birds of a suppressor blanket that stilled all electrical activity above a very low level. He moved very quietly. An Overseer called, "Get some glow bulbs and chemical rifles up here!" Someone, whimpering, stumbled into the crown beside Steve. Steve got away from him as fast as he could without making noise. The man thrashed around until wings swept down, then he screamed in terror. The wings turned and came back, and this time the scream was pure agony that ended in a bubbling sound. It hadn't taken the kullig long to discover that the rules were changed. They'd be hunting by sound, now. Somewhere, another man screamed. Suddenly there was weird light. Objects tumbled from the fog ceilgas that mixed with the air and continued to glow, spreading ghostly luminescence over the canopy. There was an explosion somewhere that made the trees shake, and three more in quick succession. Incandescence erupted half a mile away, boiled up into the fog and faded. A rattle of rifle fire broke out somewhere and spread, the old cartridge kind. There was shouting everywhere now. An ancient bulletfiring machine gun went burp-burpburp-burp, somewhere close, and ended in a bang like an explosive bullet. Close to Steve, a squad led by an Overseer with glow bulbs tied around his waist came up out of a hole, lugging another machine gun, and frantically set it up. Steve crept toward them with his knife out. A kullig swooped toward the squad. The Overseer turned to put an explosive bullet into it, and as he did he saw Steve. Steve's knife beat the revolver but he only stuck the Overseer in the shoulder and the pistol steadied again. Huge arrows flashed into the dim light and knocked the Overseer flat, and the flight of Harnkrah wheeled and split and came in again from two sides and rained arrows on the squad. Steve lay still because they wouldn't recognize him in this uniform. Then something that was not a Harnkrah and not a kullig came flapping over. Steve called, "Here! Here! It's Duke!" The slow wings, feathered ones, turned toward him and the Bird of Effogus came down to land on its elf-human feet, swearing softly as they tangled in the foliage. "Colonel? What air! Like flying in molasses!" More of the Birds converged, carrying toysized rifles that must have fired the unfamiliar explosive bullets, mopping up and forming a cordon around Steve and the highranking Bird who'd landed. That one had found a better place to stand, and now folded its wings and smoothed them with its miniaturehuman hands, so that it looked like an elf wearing a bulky cloak. "What a world!" it whispered, "We got worried when you reported you were taking off alone, and came down to talk to your friends. When that blast went off we recognized your delicate touch, and called the ships down." It chuckled. "How did our blanket work? It's never been tried before on a large scale." "It worked," Steve said. His throat felt tight. There weren't enough of the Birds so they took part in many actual battles, and they'd come down after him. "I... didn't expect you," he said foolishly. He watched another Harnkrah approach, and recognized Gegego. Gegego was calling loudly, and in a moment other Harnkrah appeared towing Steve's glider, which made the high-ranking bird chuckle dryly again. "Are you all right?". Gegego asked anxiously, landing. He and the high-ranking Bird seemed to know each other already, exchanging nods. Steve thought, Vm a little out of place among all these flying things... Then he remembered something, and felt better again. "Sir, there are three thousand armed commandos on the ground somewhere, on maneuvers, and they undoubtedly know what's happened. I think we'd better get on about rounding them up, so we can write this whole Next month in IF -- A complete novelette of the strangest battle in space -- between man's navies and the unmanned Berserker vessels! by Fred Saberhagen by Eric Frank Russell -- and many others. Reserve your copy today! IF IF  Short Story Invulnerable, handsome, strong, perceptive -- why did the Zombies long so passionately for death? T he cold winter night was seeping into the nuclear submarine pens and the hour was late. However, a surprise inspection is just that and Rear Admiral Zagorski was at least warmly dressed. Now that the inspection was going well he was even becoming pleased. That was atremendous change from his first reaction on being dragged out of bed at a late hour of the night. Only two possibilities had occurred to him then. The first and least likely was war. And the second -- well, as an officer and a non-party member he slept with a gun in his hand. As it had turned out, it was a surprise inspection by none other than General Kazan himself. Midnight was an odd hour for an inspection but the general's unorthodox methods were well known. He hurried from ship to ship with only his own aide and the admiral. There he would look about with his hands in his overcoat, not even bothering to wake the crews or the maintenance groups. Sometimes he disappeared into the interiors of the atomic submarines while his aide occupied the admiral with the usual questions that the brass invariably have asked. At other tirties the general would stand with him talking in perfect Russian, but for his native Georgian drawl, while his aide would disappear into the submarines, only to return and quickly move on. Pleased with himself, the admiral found himself smiling as the inspection drew to a close. He stared at the big, broad-bodied general and thought that he looked much bigger than he did in his pictures. But there was no mistaking that face. Then the general pointedly made clear that he was not inspecting to find things that shined and sparkled as they would in any regular inspection. He wanted to get the general gist of the operation. He even made a little joke with the admiral -- said he wanted what the American Army would call "the Big Picture" -- and they laughed quietly together. All in all, he seemed pleased with what he saw and praised the admiral casually. Admiral Zagorski was so pleased that he went overboard to arrange transportation for the general. His tactics on his lightning inspection tours were well known. To preclude forewarning, he was arranging all his transportation as he went, without using his rank or name. A helicopter was quickly sent to the underground pens to take him to the air field near Leningrad. Until it came the general and the aide were guests of the admiral and they drank vodka and talked lightly. Before following his aide into the helicopter the big general stood for a moment looking down into the admiral's face while the wind blew between them. "Zagorski," he said. "I would continue to sleep with that pistol handy, were I you." Zagorski numbly returned his salute and watched him board the helicopter. A Begal was warmed up and waiting on the tarmac as the helicopter settled down close by. A covey of military police and the officer of the day met the general and escorted him to the waiting plane. Once inside he told the pilot to clear for Kiev but that would change at the last minute and go to Kharkov. However, since he wished to make a surprise inspection there, it was necessary that the tower not be informed of the true destination. The pilot, like everyone in the military, was familiar with the general's eccentricities. Even more important, he knew what the general had done in the past with subordinates who objected. There was no question and quickly the plane was in the air. The general and his aide settled down to wait. Shortly after the pilot had veered from Kiev to Kharkov a message was received over the radio system. The general and his aide joined the two pilots in the cockpit. It seemed that a missile complex on the Kola Peninsula had been sabotaged. While they waited for further information a second message came through. The submarine pens near Vyborg had also been sabotaged. "That's where you were, wasn't it, sir?" asked the pilot, a colonel. "Yes," answered the general, standing behind him. Looking sideways he could see his aide standing behind the co-pilot. "We're only twenty minutes from Kharkov now, sir," the pilot said. IF "We'll have to clear for their pattern now." "That's too much trouble to bother with," General Kazan said in perfect English. As the two pilots turned in surprise to look up at him, he and his aide brought heavy arms down on the pilots' heads, crushing them. Less than two hours later they were free-falling near Samsun in Turkey. As their chutes opened and slowed them, Kazan watched the plane starting back across the water. He chuckled to himself as he thought of the trouble somebody was going to have trying to trace its whereabouts. Its autopilot would carry it about half way across the Black Sea before the bomb they'd left was triggered. Then, out of sight of land, there would be an explosion and the plane would fall into the sea. Poor General Kazan, he thought. If they even begin to trace this night's activities, it is all going to be at your doorstep. Just outside of Samsun they met their pickup and soon were at one portation back to the States was waiting. T he doctor met them at the airport with a car. No sooner were they in it than he turned to them. "Well done," he said. "Now listen. You know how short-handed we are. Well, one of you has to make the change right away so he can be going again by the end of next week. I've a job for the other." When neither of them said anything to him he ordered, "Don't sit there talking to each other! I don't have the equipment here to listen in." "Okay, Doc," said the one who had been the aide. "We're both pretty close to the deadline. Bat the general there -- " he gestured to the other -- "has less time left." "Oh? So it's the general now," the gray-haired doctor said. "You're letting rank go to your head, Pete." "I thought I made a pretty good general," answered Pete pleasantly. "My turn next time," laughed Joel, the ex-aide. "Well, la-dee-da," growled the doctor. "I'm the one that puts the faces on. So I think I'll be the one to decide who is going to impersonate whom." # wonder what they've got cooked up now that's so hot ? Pete sent Joel. Then he asked out loud, "How did it really go over there?" The doctor gave him a long look, then shifted so that he'd be more comfortable talking over the front seat. "Perfectly," he said slowly. "Total destruction on both. It'll be years before they'll have them back in the condition they were before your visit. As for Kazan himself --  well, Admiral Zagorski sang very nicely when the Cheka finally caught up with him." "Give 'em much of a chase?" Pete asked. "Took three of them," answered the doctor. Pete's face smiled. "But he named Kazan and the OD at the Leningrad place concurred. They'll both be shot, and with no alibi Kazan will go down with n them." he stopped chuckling. "They're having fits trying to figure out what happened to that plane." Then the car stopped before a guarded gate and the conversation with the doctor ceased. The two in the back seat continued to discuss the new job in their own manner; this made no sound, however. The car pulled up in front of a large, single-storied building. The seat protested with squeaks as Pete slid his heavy body across it to the door. He got out, staring at the building and the legend above the began to file silently into the building a thought crossed his mind. In a way it all started here. T he Cold War had never taken the turn so much feared in the fifties and sixties. Instead, with the emergence of Red China as a major world power, it had degenerated into a hot war of intrigue. Unfortunately, this was no more final a solution -- without escalation to total war -- than the earlier situation. In this atmosphere there was an almost accidental meeting imaginative President at a cocktail party one evening. The scientist had been specializing in prosthesis. Only he went farther; he developed a completely prosthetic man. The one problem that he couldn't solve directly was the brain, the mind. He finally did this indirectly by utilizing the findings of another field. The computer people, while working with biophysicists, had developed a plasma capable of recording and sustaining brain patterns. Their intent had been to find some way of preserving the mind while performing extensive operations on the brain. In the past such operations had been unsuccessful because the patient's personality or reason, or both, were altered radically. Almost by accident it was discovered that the brain, when successfully transferred, could operate independently of its organic body, with no loss of personality or reason. When the two developments were mated, the Zombie was born. The body was physically perfect, though it stood six-six and weighed three hundred pounds. Near-perfect synthetic skin made the resulting figure impossible to tell from a human being, except by microscopic or X-ray examination. It was possible to sensitize the eyes in both the infra-red and the normal bands, so that vision would be perfect even at night. The new, compact transceivers could be buried into the body, activated by thought, achieving an almost telepathic result. The body could withstand extreme ranges of temperature and great shock. However, it was not without its defects. Not everyone could operate one. The brain transfer involved such prolonged pain that few could survive it without insanity. And it was discovered (after four deaths) that three weeks was the maximum time that the brain could survive outside of its natural body. After that, it deteriorated rapidly. IF The President had listened carefully to the scientist, then had dipped into his emergency fund to finance what came to be called Operation Zombie; it was a compact army of superb spies and saboteurs, made up of almost unstoppable and unkillable men. Zombies. And that's what I am, thought Pete, as he stopped before a door marked No Admittance. H e swung the door open slowly and looked in. There was an iron lung on one side of the room, with a man lying in it who waved feebly at him. "Hi, George," he said kindly. Then he looked at his own body. It lay on the other bed in the room. The face was disfigured and half burnt away. The legs were thin and half wasted and so were the arms. Crippled and ugly for twenty-two years of my life, he thought. And not even enough nerve ends to graft to. Hey , Pete . came the thought into his head. You keep sending out pleasant thoughts like that and  will get out of this overcoat and let you have that job without an argument. Pete realized that he had unconsciously been sending while he thought. He, as all the others, had to be careful; otherwise everyone would know what he was thinking all the time. Every thought wasn't necessarily sent, but thought was the way the transmitter was triggered and any thought could be sent. And these thoughts aren't any more pleasant to them than me, he thought; but he didn't want to send that. It was strange to him, but only the crippled and the infirm seemed to make a success, with the overcoats, as the prosthetic bodies were called. It seemed that only those who wanted out of their bodies so terribly bad that they would go through hell -- which was approximately what it felt like -- could do it. The time sense was distorted during the five-minute process, and the pain (which was indescribable) seemed to last for years. He personally felt that it wasn't even subjectively that long. But after a while of unabated and unvarying pain it didn't seem to make such difference. You couldn't black out or faint and you didn't grow numb. You went through it once to get in, and once to get out. Every time. It was hell. Sometimes an operative would come back from a mission to find that his physical body had expired. Then there was only the wait for death. The deterioration of the mind in the plasma wasn't painless either. The time it took was just as .subjectively lengthened as the transfer. One Zombie had come back that way... and stuck his head in the atomic furnace so he could die painlessly. Pete! sent the doctor. He knew the doctor was using his desk console and really couldn't blame him; that man had invented the damned overcoats but he was too smart to get in one. Get on down to the office , Pete? Coming, he sent as he closed the door and started down the hall. But not for God , country, or mother! and he sent that too, before he closed off his thoughts again. Currently he'd been informed that the research boys were working on the sleep factor. It was fact that an operative in his overcoat needed no sleep and found it impossible to get any. This had pfbved an asset more often than a hindrance; however, they claimed that this might be the key to the three-week limit and might explain why transfer to fresh plasma resulted in death for the operative. Only by transfer to the natural-born body could the operative's life be prolonged. Then, too, on return to the natural body the brain just went to sleep. The length seemed to depend directly on how much time had been spent in the overcoat. Then he was at the office. J oel, the doctor and one other man were seated there. 'Bout time, Joel sent. " 'Bout time," sputtered the console. "Let's not be kids," said the doctor tiredly. "When you've something to say, just say it. Don't act like rookies!" "Yes, sir, Doc!" two voices boomed out of the console. The doctor frowned and leaned back in his chair with his pipe. And that's something else they didn't tell us, Pete thought. The prosthetic bodies could see, tell a difference in temperature, and had a pretty good sense of touch; they just couldn't derive any physical pleasure. They were built to look exactly like a man at all times. They could smoke, drink and eat but there was no sensation to it. The chemists had even told Pete that he'd been poisoned four times. He hadn't known it. "Well," Pete said. The doctor flipped off the desk console and asked, "What's the weakest part of our organization?" What do you think he's got up his sleeve this time? sent Joel. Beats me! sent Pete. He said, "The number of us. There aren't very many. Then, this place right here. One bomb and there's going to be an awful lot of dead me walking around." "That," stated the man who'd not spoken, "is why I'm here. You don't know me but that's not necessary." Another one, sent Joel, Looks down his nose at us Zombies. "We going to work together?" Pete asked. The man looked away from him without any desire to work together on his face. "We caught him trying to get into this place while you were... away," said the doctor. "He's on our side now. Has to be... But we're wasting time. Neither of you has much more than twenty-one hours. So who's going?" "I am," answered Pete quickly. Pete ! Joel sent. I've got at least three hours on you. I should be the one to go. Not if you had seventeen hours on me, Pete sent. IF You're pushing your luck, sent Joel. You trying to kill yourself? I don't know , Pete sent. Aloud he said, "I'll go down to surgery so they can be changing this face of mine. You wouldn't want anybody to wonder what Kazan was doing walking around while he was being taken before a firing squad. Tust radio me the dope." Then he turned and walked quickly out. "They always act like that?" asked the stranger, sneering. "What are you trying to say?" Joel snapped as he came to his feet. The doctor shrugged and flipped on the console. "Joel," he said. "You go on down to the transfer room. I'm really going to need you next week. The sooner you're out the better I'll feel." "Why not two of us on this job?" Joel asked angrily. "I just want one man killed," answered the doctor. I t was almost nine at night when Pete finally stood in the street. Looking up Broadway, it seemed like nothing but night clubs all the way to the tunnel and on both sides of the street. For a moment he couldn't help but stand and enjoy the night scene. He could, if he wanted, see it as clear as day; but he didn't use his infrared vision. The contrast of the night and the lights was too pleasing without it. He stood for several minutes as the wind flipped his trench coat; he knew that the wind was cold, but he wasn't cold. Finally he patted the .# under his arm and joined the crowd. He had a different face, and a different name, and the papers to prove both. He also had a man to find and twelve hours were gone. He knew where to go now, though. As he casually walked with the crowds toward his destination he ran over what he knew again. The principal man involved was called Linder. He was a free-lance vendor of information; he sold to the highest bidder, no matter what nation, and often to more than one. He held the reins over a small-time outfit of hoods in the city. It often works that way, he thought. They have money and they can get in with the crooks and the gangsters. They let themselves be used till they have control -- and then there's just one more gangster in the river. Poor guy, thought Pete. He should have kept his nose out of Operation Zombie. We're too vulnerable. We can't even be presented to the American public because we kill and sabotage. Up ahead was a little nightclub, the kind specializing in second-rate strip-tease and watered-down drinks. A small-time hood by the name of Scobbs owned it with a silent partner called Gilby. They used it as a front for their more lucrative activities, like the one Linder was coming to see them about tonight. In a way, he thought, I'm doing them a favor Linder would have them both in the river inside a year. His thoughts ended as he came up to the entrance of the club. Music, laughter, and talk flowed out of the door. Well, thought Pete, it's time to go back to work. The bouncer eyed him warily as he came in. Pete returned his stare. "Scobbs here?" he asked, letting a sneer fill his face. "Whadaya want with him?" the bouncer asked, standing in his way. "That," said Pete, "is between Scobbs and myself, punk!" The bouncer stood undecided for a moment and Pete almost laughed. The guy didn't know whether he should take insult from him, or whether he was a friend of Scobbs or not. Before he'd made up his mind Pete said, "I'll wait." And he walked around him. H e sat at a table that had a "Reserved sign" on it. From it he could watch the door and keep his back to a wall. On the small stage a shapely girl was dropping the last of her clothes and wiggling more or less in time to the music. A waitress came up to his table and said, "This table is reserved." Pete looked slowly up at her. Two men were coming through the door. The bouncer stopped one of them and pointed toward Pete. "I don't mind at all, honey," he said, standing up. The men looked at him for a moment and then went past the bar and through a door marked private. The bouncer started toward Pete. "Okay, buddy," he said as he came closer. "I'm going to take you around back and show you just who's a punk and who's not." It was merely a feeling, but he was sure there was another standing close in behind him. "Do I walk?" asked Pete. "Or does it taka two of you punks to carry me?" They were big men and each grabbed one of Pete's arms. He didn't resist, but simply relaxed and allowed them to drag him. Together they managed to get him past the bar and through the back door, but they were surprised at his weight. As the door slammed shut behind, the second man put a full nelson on Pete while the bouncer took his time taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeve. "You haven't been a bouncer for long." It was a statement the way Pete said it "I've got a rod." "That, buddy," the bouncer said, "you'll never get a chance to use." "No," said Pete, smiling. "I just won't need to." He shifted his weight so that the man holding him had to support it, and at the same time he shoved backwards with his feet. All his weight slammed the man into the wall only a few feet behind. The bouncer jumped forward and Pete lashed out with his foot, catching the man in the knee and dropping him to his hands and knees. Breaking the nelson, he swung his arm down on the bouncer's head. Then, reversing, he brought his other fist into the face of the other. Pete stood up, straightened his tie, and went back inside. One of the men would never get up again. The other would wish he couldn't. The bartender's face went white as Pete stepped through the door. When he made a move for whatIP ever he kept under the bar, Pete casually opened his coat so that his gun was visible. The bartender went back to wiping the bar top and Pete turned to the door marked "Private". It was locked. He broke the knob off in his hand, opened the door and walked in. He followed a short hall to a thick door. Deciding it must be the door to Scobbs' office, he tried it, found it open and walked in. There were two men in the room. One, Scobbs, sat behind an over-large desk; the other, Gilby, stood in the middle of the room. There was also a girl. He only glanced at her as he closed the door but it was enough to notice that she was tied in her chair. He was also sure that she was the most beautiful woman that he'd seen, even though her face was red and puffed. Evidently Gilby had been slapping her. W hat the hell?" snapped Scobbs from the desk. "Just a friendly little call," smiled Pete as he tossed the broken knob onto the desk. It gave him a pleasant feeling to see the expressions on men's faces as the knob bounced across the desk and off into Scobb's lap. "I'm a friend of Linder's. Can you tell me where he's to be found?" Pete asked, moving close to Gilby. "I never seen you before," Gilby said. He was a big man but found himself looking up at Pete. "He's coming here," whimpered the girl in the chair. "You stay shut up!" shouted Gilby, starting to slap her. Pete caught his arm, straightened it out and broke it at the elbow. "That'll make it a little harder to get to your gun," he laughed as Gilby screamed. He continued to hold onto the man's arm. "Be good," he continued. "Or I'll start jerking it." Then he turnfed to face Scobbs, who hadn't moved. "Scobbs," he said quietly. "I dare say you've a gun somewhere. Try for it and you're a dead man." He dropped Gilby's arm and Gilby winced. "You move," Pete said, moving behind the chair to untie the girl, "and I'll break the other one." As he untied her he became aware once again just how beautiful she was. She had a classical face and a full body and long blond hair. That's another thing, he thought bitterly. You still have the wants -- and you can't do a damn thing about them. Then she was loose and he told her to stay where she was. "Gilby," Pete asked, "who's the girl?" "Ask her yourself!" "T'm..." "Be quiet, honey," Pete said sharply. As he moved back to Gilby he talked mildly. "What, pray tell, Gilby, did I tell you?" When there was no answer he jerked the arm again. "Okay!" Gilby moaned. "She's the niece of..." "I have a gun pointed at the middle of your back," said a voice from the doorway. "Raise the hands slowly." "Linder, I suppose?" The man # didn't answer but the expression on Scobbs' face gave Pete the answer. "Now would be a good time to get your gun out, Scobbs," Pete sneered. A s Scobbs went for it, Pete wheeled Gilby between him and the doorway. He had his own gun out and shot Scobbs in the head before the little man had his drawer open. Two slugs from the gun of the man at the door ripped through Gilby and he screamed. Then, with tlifr dead weight of Gilby pulling him off balance, Pete was firing at Linder. Then his right leg collapsed. He fell. Linder's face dropped away as he tumbled backward with his blood spurting out of his neck. Pete rolled Gilby's body off him and started to stand up, only to fall heavily on his face. One of Linder's bullets had gone through his right knee. The leg was useless. Then the girl was helping him. He thought that it was amazing that she'd come through untouched -- and that she was very beautiful. "Hand me the chair," he said. She did, a strange expression on her face. Pete broke the front legs and the seat off the chair. Then, using it as a crutch, he managed to stand up. "Is there a back way out of here?" he asked. "Yes. Behind that curtain." She pointed. "You're very beautiful, you know," he said, putting his left arm over her shoulders. She kissed him quickly on the cheek and helped him out through the curtains. As they slid into the taxi she'd flagged down. The police cars were converging on the club. "I wonder what that's all about?" asked the driver after Pete had given him the destination. "A riot," Pete said. He took both of the girl's hands in his so that she couldn't look too closely at his leg, searching for blood that wasn't there. Then he decided to keep her really occupied so he pulled her close and kissed her. She responded. He could tell that much. But it was pure nothing to him. No wonder they call us Zombies, he thought. But he really didn't want to think about it; she was too beautiful. And -- bitter thought -- any woman would be too beautiful for him, anyway. There was construction going on at the Bay Bridge. They were detoured to the next one. The first pang of fear crossed his mind as he looked quickly at his watch; only two hours left. Pete cursed to himself for the delay and for being forced together with this beautiful woman. Oh, they gave you a handsome face, he thought, and a perfect body. A real walking Valentino. His thoughts remained as black while she sat close to him and the taxi sped on. As it was, they were in Oakland, driving around Lake Merritt, when the cabbie's radio beeped into life. What it said was clear and simple: "Man and woman sought. Man: handsome, about six-six, dark hair, maybe limping with right or left leg. Woman... The cabbie hit the brakes and brought the car to a sudden stop. He wasn't sure, but that cabbie wasn't taking any chances. He jumped out the door and started running. It was so quick that by the time Pete recovered the man was twenty feet away. He slammed open his door and held his gun out. "Stop! Or I'll fire," he yelled. The man didn't even hesitate. Pete could have dropped him at the range but he put the gun back into his holster. Quickly he wrote a name and a telephone number on a slip of paper and gave it to the girl. "Get out and find a phone," he snapped. "Tell them where you are. They'll pick you up; tell them I'll met a chopper just this side of the tunnel if I can't make it to the pickup point." She hesitated, reading it. "Move!" snapped Pete. "But this is my uncle's name," said the girl hoarsely. "Well, that explains what you were doing at Scobbs place -- but move!" He was already crawling over the seat. With one foot he wasn't going to be driving very well, but he had a chance -- if he could get far enough before they set up roadblocks. The girl clear, he punched the accelerator. Lights I can ignore, he thought as he roared through a red one at an increasing pace. But my time is running out... I t was beginning to look easy as he passed the last of the houses. To his left the road bordered a sharp drop off, a long ravine with an inclined side and lots of trees and brush. He saw the red light in the rear view mirror at the same time he heard the siren behind him. Good for you, cabbie, he thought. But there was only a mile left to the tunnel and the pickup point was at the other end. At half a mile to go his infrared. vision could see the otherwise invisible road block. The car behind him was still gaining. He went another quarter mile closer before he swung the wheel hard to the left, crossed the double line and threw himself into the back seat. The car flew off the edge of the road. The sirens were still going somewhere and the car was spinning over and over. He prayed he didn't hit anything hard enough to completely flatten the car and entrap him. Then there was a lurch, the smell of gasoline, a sliding and an explosion. He sat watching the car burning for a moment. He could have gotten out, but he was just as happy to have been thrown clear. Even when it dosn't hurt it's not a nice feeling to know that you're burning. He'd had two hours last time he'd looked and he looked at his watch again; it had stopped. He rolled over and began crawling up the ravine toward the tunnel and the pickup spot. His body wouldn't grow tired nor hurt, but panic and doubt could still assail his mind. If only Operation Zombie had some kind of jurisdiction in the states all this would be unnecessary. Fat chance that, he laughed to himself. They can't even make it public what we're really organized to do. He continued to crawl, knowing that till the fire was out they'd assume he was probably in the car or somewhere nearby. They'd never suspect that a man could survive a tumble like that and walk or even crawl away. Not till they'd not found him in the car anyway. Besides, he wasn't a man. The doctor's niece is beautiful, he thought hazily, beginning to grow tired. The two things hit him at once; he was in love with a girl he'd only known for a few hours. Sleep meant death. He couldn't die now. Not now. Up above he could see the bridge; beyond that was the tunnel. Just up that slope, he thought while his head started to spin; and he knew he didn't really want to get to the pickup spot because he was in love and that was useless and... his head began to spin and there were people and the world tilted upside down and there was noise and there was pain. The pain wouldn't stop. It went on and on, and he couldn't think while the pain went on. P ete opened his eyes slowly and stared at the white ceiling above him. Then he remembered the pain and looked down at his body. His own gnarled and wrinkled arms were crossed over his chest He could see his almost useless legs curled under the sheet. He closed his eyes to hold back the tears that he knew would come. This was the real Pete; this was the way he was and always would be. That was engraven bitterly into his heart and mind, whether in his human or Zombie body. This was a hell and a pain far worse than any transfer could ever be for him. Later, when his eyes had dried, he painfully managed himself out of bed and into his harness and crutches. As he stood up two icchs came into the room. "Hi ya, Pete!" one of them called cheerfully. "We'd sure given you up for a goner." Pete stood unsteadily, watching ugly face, but it was lost in the wrinkles and folds. "That was some operation that you pulled off last night," the tech continued. "I sure wish I could qualify for an overcoat. Gosh, but you're lucky!" What Pete croaked then wasn't understandable since his larynx had been ruined and he couldn't speak. The tone, however, was perfectly clear. Then he staggered out of the room. "What's with him?" the tech asked. "Beats me," replied the other tech. "You'd think they didn't like anything or anybody very much the way they act most of the time." They shrugged at each other, wondering what guys like Pete had that enabled them to qualify for the overcoats when they couldn't.      IF IF  Serial Second of Three The worlds of men were defenseless before the strangest creature ever spawned in space -- the Starchildl I f the catacombs of the Machine were the nerve center of the Plan of Man, then the great State Hall of the Planner was its heart. Huge as a hangar for jetless spacecraft, ornate as a Pharaoh's tomb, it housed the most powerful man in the history ot the human race, and it was worthy of him. The walls were paneled in gold. Crescent-shaped lunettes were frescoed with scenes of the nine planets and thousand lesser worlds on which the Plan of Man reigned supreme. In the great hall, a score of attendants waited on the Planner's will: Machine Major Boysie Gann is assigned to duty on Polaris Station, the artificial sun-satellite orbiting far beyond Pluto that constitutes one of the Plan Worlds' picket stations protecting the inner planets from the Reefs of Space. He discovers that his commander, Colonel Zafar, is involved in some undercover activity, but before he can do anything about it he is captured and marooned on one of the Reefs. There he meets a hermit, Harry Hickson, who feeds him, shelters him -- and disappears. A girl from the Reef settlements, Quarla Snow, rescues him, but when he tells her about Harry Hickson she refuses to believe him. For she knows Hickson very well... and she knows that Harry Hickson has been dead for years. Yet there is no doubt in Gann's mind that the man he saw is the same Harry Hickson! The mystery is beyond solving for him, but it is only one part of a greater mystery. For Harry Hickson is linked with the strange religious cult, the Church of the Star, and somehow connected with that church is a queer, unbelievable, almost legendary figure called the Starchild. Who is the Starchild? No one knows. What is the Starchild? No one can say. Gann's life in the Reefs does not last long enough for him to solve these mysteries. Quarla's father, a doctor, receives a new patient, who is Colonel Zafar -- dying -- rambling deliriously about the Starchild and about strange powers. And yet it is not all delirium, for something happens that is beyond all Gann's powers of understanding: He finds himself falling, falling -- and alights of the Planning Machine. Gann has no idea how he got there. When he is discovered by guards, they know no more than he, but they accuse him of being the Starchild. Gann protests he is not -- that the Starchild is only a myth in any event. But he learns that the Starchild is no myth. That has been proved once and for all. The Starchild has sent an ultimatum to Earth, calling on the Plan of Man to relinquish its total control over humanity under threat of frightful reprisals... and as proof of his powers, the Starchild has threatened to extinguish the sun and a dozen near stars for a period of time. And the threat was made good. Whoever or whatever the Starchild is, he has the power to halt the mighty atomic fusion engines that fuel the stars! his personal physician, three blackrobed Mechanese acolytes with their linkboxes and tonal beads, a dozen guards. The Vice-Planner for Venus was there, an efficient little engineer whose nose and ears were out of scale, seeming to have come from some gigantic donor. So was Machine General Wheeler, fixing Boysie Gann as he entered with a steelgray stare. No one spoke. Dominating the great hall, on a huge golden chair, was the Planner himself. He was staring, lost in thought, at a great quartz table, on which stood scores of fantastic metal and crystal toys. Gann found himself standing in the center of a great tesselated floor, alone. His guards had halted behind him. He waited for the Planner to notice him. But the Planner's eyes were on his toys. He sighed and stretched out a hand to them, stacking them in military rows, as absorbedly as any five-year-old with his lead soldiers; he formed them in columns and marched them across the clean gleaming quartz. The figures were dragons. They were monsters from storybooks, and creatures too incredible ever to have been in a story. Some were mirrorbright, some black. Many were in gorgeous rainbow hues. They had no wings, nor had they legs. Their heads were the heads of monsters, some with teeth like sabers, some with curious frayed flower-petal faces, like the muzzle of a star-nosed mole. Boysie Gann had never been so close to the Planner before. He could not help being a little disappointed. The Planner was only a man! An old, fat, flabby man at that -- and, thought Gann privately, a bit of an eccentric, too. Yet the Planner was the voice of the Planning Machine itself. It was impossible for the Machine to falter in its judgments, impossible that its chosen instrument be anything less than perfect. Of course, there were the recurrent rumors about the present Planner's predecessors -- old Planner Creery, for example, who had fallen into error in attempting to allow the Reefs of Space entry into the Plan of Man under their own conditions... Swiftly Gann rejected that thought. This was no place to be thinking treason! He turned his mind to the stabbing pain that had pierced him in the anteroom, when he had found the girl he loved, Julie Martinet, changed into a priestess of the Machine, Delta Four. How had it happened? Why had it happened?... The Planner raised his great round head and stared at Boysie Gann. "You," he rasped. "Do you know what these are?" G ann swallowed and stuttered. "Y-yes, sir," he got out. "I mean, I think so. I mean, some of them look like pyropods. The creatures that prey on the life in the Reefs of Space, sir -- " But the Planner was nodding his great bloated head. "Pyropods, yes," he boomed. With a sudden motion he swept the delicately carved pieces off the quartz table, sent them crashing to the floor. "I wish l had a thousand pyropods!" he shouted. out to the Reefs to kill and destroy every living thing on them! What insanity that these reef-rats should dare talk to me of freedom!" He broke off and glared at Boysie Gann, who stood silent, unable to speak. The Planner said: "I stand for classic truth! What is it that animates the Reefs of Space, Gann? Tell me, for you have been there. It is the romantic fallacy," he roared, not waiting for an answer, "the eternal delusion that man is perfectible, that there is a spirit of goodness that can grow and mature in crass organic creatures! What insanity! And now they threaten me in my own Hall -- blot out my sun -- boast of more deadly measures still!" He pressed his plump arms against the carved golden arms of his chair, half lifted himself, leaned forward to Gann and shouted : "Who is this Starchild, Gann? Is it you?" Boysie Gann was galvanized into shocked speech. "No, sir! Not me! I've never seen him. I know nothing about him -- oh, except what I've heard here, when General Wheeler's men interrogated me. And a few rumors. But I'm not the Starchild!" are fh ose rumors. Gann? I must know!" Gann looked helplessly around the great hall. All in it were watching him, their eyes cold, their faces impassive. He was on his own; there was no help for him from anyone there. He said desperately, "Sir, I've told all I know a hundred times. I'll tell it again. I'll tell you all I know, but the truth is, sir, that I know almost nothing about the Starchild!" "The truth," boomed the Planner, "is what  say it is! Go on! Speak!" Gann obediently commenced the old story. "I was detailed, sir, to investigate certain irregularities on Polaris Station..." As he went through the long, familiar tale there was dead silence in the hall, the Planner listening impassively, leaning on one arm in his great golden chair, the others taking their cue from him. Gann's voice fell on the enormous hall like words shouted down a well. Only echoes answered him only the narrowing of an eye, the faint shift of a position showed that his hearers had understood. He finished with his arrest in the catacombs of the Machine, and stood silent. The Planner said thoughtfully, "You spoke of a sign. The sign of the Swan." "Yes, sir." Boysie Gann demonstrated as best he could the supple mo mn cf forearm and hand that he had seen in Harry Hickson and the dying Colonel Zafar. "I believe it refers to the constellation Cygnus, in which the main star, Deneb, is some sort of object of worship to what is called the Church of the Star... " T he planner turned his great head away from Gann, toward the black-robed knot of communicants of the Machine. "Deneb!" he barked. "Display it!" One of the acolytes spoke in soft, chiming tones to his linkbox. Instantly the lights in the ir great hall darkened, and on the vaulted ceiling a panorama sprang into light. The Planner craned his thick neck to stare searchingly upward. Every eye followed his. It was as though the thousand yards of earth and rock above them had rolled back. They were gazing into the depths of space on what seemed to be a clear, moonless night -- late in autumn, Gann judged by the position of the constellations; perhaps around midnight. Overhead were the great bright stars of the Summer Triangle, Altair to the south, Deneb and Vega to the north. The Milky Way banded the vault with a great irregular powder of stardust. Low on the horizon to the west red Antares glowed; to the east was Fomalhaut... Abruptly the scene began to contract. It was as though they were rushing through space, straight toward the constellation Cygnus. Fomalhaut and Antares slipped out of sight with Sagittarius and Altair's constellation, the Eagle; so did the Pole Star and Cepheus below it; all that was left was Cygnus, the constellation of the Swan, hanging over their heads like a bright canopyA voice chimed: "Constellation Cygnus. Stars: Alpha Cygrii, also known as Deneb, blue-white, first magnitude. Beta Cygni, also known as Albireo, double, components deep blue and orange. Gamma Cygni -- " The Planner's voice cut in raspingly: "Just Deneb, idiot! What about Deneb?" The voice did not miss a beat. It chimed: "Deneb, distance # light-years. Surface temperature, # degrees. Supergiant. Spectrographic composition, hydrogen, calcium -- " "Planets!" boomed the Planner irritably. "No planets known," sang the invisible voice. Gann craned his neck; it came from one of the black-robed acolytes, but with their faces shrouded in the hoods he ' could not tell which. The Planner was silent for a long time, staring upward. He said at last, "Has the Machine any evidence of physical connection between Deneb and the Starchild?" "No evidence, sir," chanted the invisible voice at once. "Exceptions as follows: Possible connection between star Deneb and reported Church of the Star. Possible connection between star Deneb and star #I Cygni in same constellation, #I Cygni being one of the stars said Starchild threatened to, and did, extinguish. Neither of these items considered significant by the Machine." The Planner grumbled. "Very well. Cancel." The display overhead winked out, the room lights sprang up. The Planner sat brooding for a moment, his eyes remote. He stared absently around the room, his gaze passing over Boysie Gann, over the spilled toys at his feet, over the faces of the guardsmen and Machine General Wheeler. His eyes came to rest on the blackrobed acolytes. Then he sighed and gestured to one of them. It was only the crook of a finger, but the figure in black at once came toward him, holding something in his hand. It was a length of golden cable extending from his linkbox. At its end was a golden eight-pronged plug. Boysie Gann's eyes went wide. If he was not insane -- and no, he was not; for already the acolyte was stepping to the Planner's side, touching his forehead, sweeping back his sparse, unruly hair, baring the glittering plate that was set into his forehead -- the Planner was about to undergo communion with the Machine! T he spectacle was fascinating -- and frightening. Heedless of the eyes on him, the Planner sat relaxed while the acolyte deftly slipped the golden plug into the receptors in the plate on his forehead. At once the Planner's expression changed. His eyes closed. The fretful, angry look disappeared. There was a second's grimace, the teeth bared in rictus, the corners of the eyes wrinkling in deep furrows, the jaw set. It was like a momentary pang of agony... Or ecstasy. It passed, and the Planner's face went blank again. His breathing began to grow more rapid. As the planted electrodes excited the secret centers of his brain, he began to show feeling. His face creased in a smile, then frowned, then smiled again, forgivingly. His lips began to move. Hoarse, inarticulate words whispered -- slowly -- then faster, faster. His plump body shook, his fingers worked. The blackrobed acolyte calmly touched his arm, whispered in his ear. The Planner calmed. His body relaxed again. His whispered voice stopped. The acolyte waited for a second, nodded, removed the cable and stepped lightly away. The Planner opened his eyes and looked around. To Boysie Gann, the change in the Planner was stranger than anything he had seen on the Reefs of Space. A glum, angry, harried man had accepted that moment of communication with the electronic joys of the Machine; a cheerful, energetic, buoyant one had emerged from it. The Planner opened his mouth and boomed laughter into the great hall. "Ha!" he shouted. "Ho! That's good!" He sat up and pounded his great fist onto the quartz table. "We'll destroy them!" he cried. "Reef-rats and Starchild -- anyone who dares interfere with the Plan of Man. Well crush them and their fanciful dreams forever. And you'll help in this, Boysie Gann, for you are the chosen instrument of the Plan in this great work!" For a lunatic moment Gann thought of turning, running, fleeing -- of leaping toward the Planner and letting the decapitation charge in his security collar end his problems forever. There was something wild and fearful in the great chuckling good humor with which the Planner bubbled now, something that terrified Gann. If the Machine could cause such personality change in its most favored of servants, Gann feared the Machine. Feared it! And that thought was in itself fearsome to IF him, for the Machine had always been the great good master whose judgments were infallible, who always rewarded good service, punished only the bad. Yet this particular reward seemed a very terrible punishment to Gann... But all he said was, "Yes, sir. I serve the Plan, sir!" The Planner shouted with glee. "Serve it well, boy!" he cried. "Serve it with all your heart and mind -- or you'll serve it with your eyes and arms and liver, in the Body Bank! We all serve the Plan, boy. In one way or another!" And he dismissed Gann with a good-humored wave of one fat arm, and turned to General Wheeler. As the guards closed in on Gann and marched him out of the room he caught one glimpse of the general, staring toward him. The steel-gray eyes were cold and empty, but Gann could read their message. Don't fail me, either , Gann , they said. IX T here had once been a time, thought Boysie Gann, when life was simple and his duty clear. In that dead, half-forgotten time -- was it only months ago? It seemed like centuries -- and he had found, and loved, and won a girl named Julie Martinet. He remembered the flight they met, remembered their long hours together, their endless promises, the bright hope of happiness they gave each other. He remembered the long white beach at Uhe Togetherness center at Plays Blanca, and her kiss before he left. Warms sweet, soft, loving, she had been everything a man could want. Her memory had followed Boysie the sun, and her absence had made that long voyage bleak. Yet never had he been so far from her as in this room. He could, if he dared, reach out and touch the lips he had kissed at PI ay a Blanca. But the mind behind them was no longer the mindof the sweet, warm girl he had loved. The body was the body of Julie Martinet, but what inhabited it was Sister Delta Four. Involuntarily he whispered: "Julie! Julie Martinet..." She stood motionless, regarding him with grave dark eyes. He searched them for some hint of recognition, for the saving warmth of love that had filled them at Playa Blanca, but nothing was there. She shook her hooded head. "I am Delta Four," she said, her voice a melodious chime. "I am to interrogate you for the Machine." She stood watching him, waiting for a response, her pale face half hidden by the deep folds of the cowl she wore. The luminous emblem on her black robes mocked him. It was a Keep Off sign that foe dared not ignore. But he could not help saying, "Julie, don't you remember me at all? Can't you tell me what happened?" She fingered her long string of bright black beads, each an electronic bell that rang when she stroked it. "Major Gann," she sang, her ur voice in perfect pitch with the tonal beads, "I am, as you see, an acolyte of the Machine. I do not wish to be reminded of any other life." "Please, Julie. At least tell me why you didn't wait -- " Her grave head nodded. "We have time," she trilled. "Ask your question." "Why didn't you -- I mean, why didn't Julie Martinet wait for me? I sent you a letter from Pluto -- " "Your message was delivered," she sang. "But Julie Martinet had already been admitted to training as acolyte for the Machine. She destroyed your message. She does not wish to recall it." "But I loved you!" Gann burst out. "How could you turn your back on me?" The serene pale face stared at him without curiosity. "Julie Martinet loved you," she corrected him melodiously. "I am Delta Four. Please sit down, Major Gann. I must interrogate you for the Machine." Reluctantly Gann sank into a chair, watched as she moved another chair near his. She seated herself with deliberate grace. From under the cape she brought forth a small linkbox, covered in a black plastic, like leather. "Major Gann," she said, "I must ask you if you are the Starchild." Her voice was pure melody, cold and perfect and remote as her white, oval face. Gann snapped: "Plan take it, no! I'm fed up with that question! I've said it a hundred -- " But she was shaking her head. "Wait," she broke in. "One moment, please." H e watched her glumly, the ache of his bruises combining with the deeper ache in his heart as, hooded head intently bent, she once again touched the long string of beads. As each electronic chime rang out her throat echoed the tone, practising the difficult scale of tone phonemes that made up the artificial language called Mechanese. Mechanese was the difficult bridge between the Machine and the human mind. Earlier computers had crossed that bridge by building their own structure of translation, transforming English into Fortran or another artificial tongue, Fortran into binary numbers, the binary statement into instructions and data for processing. The Machine's language was itself a sort of pattern of binary digits that represented its own electronic processes -- circuits open or closed, storage points charged or discharged, ferrite cores in one magnetic state or another. Human beings could not be trained to speak that binary language, nor could the Machine of the Plan of Man be troubled with the dull task of translation. Instead it had created a language that men could learn -- with difficulty, with a consecration of purpose that required them to give up the coarser human aspects of their lives, but all ihe same with accuracy and assurance. Mechanese was a bridge, but a difficult one. The Machine, counting time in nanoseconds, could not wait for laggard human speech. Accurate in every either-or response, it had no need of redundancy. It IF i SSk  had computed the theoretical capacity of the human ear and the human voice at some # binary units of information per second, and it had deviseci a tongue to approach that theoretical maximum. Normal human speech conveyed only about # such bits of information in a second; Mechanese was a thousand times more efficient. And, Gann knew, it was about a thousand times as difficult to learn. Bitterly he realized that it was the very thing in Julie Martinet that first drew his attention to her -- her soft, true voice -- that had lost her for him forever. The Machine sought endlessly for humans who could be trained to Mechanese -- sought them and, when it found them, did not let them go. Only such special individuals could be trained to speak Mechanese well, though it was possible for almost anyone who invested the time and effort to learn a sort of pidgin, or to understand it. A true acolyte needed not only a wide vocal range but a true sense of absolute pitch. The tonal beads would help. An acolyte could, as Delta Four was doing now, use them as a sort of pitch-pipe before talking to the Machine. But not even they would convert an ordinary human into one fluent in Mechanese. Watching her tolling the tonal beads, Gann pictured the long, arduous weeks of training. He knew it required total concentration, absolute devotion. And its ultimate reward was the bright metal plate in her forehead. Her quick voice trilled a chain ot silver bird-notes. The linkbox sang an electronic answer. Her alert, emotionless eyes looked up at him at last. "We're ready now," she said. "Major Gann. Are you the Starchild?" A hundred interrogations, and this was the hundred and first. Boysie Gann no longer needed his mind to answer the girl's questions. Repetition had taught his tongue and lips to answer by themselves. I am not the Starchild. I have never seen the Starchild. I know nothing of the Writ of Liberation. I have never engaged in unplanned activities. And all the time his heart was shouting: Julie! Come back... Each time he answered a quesn. Sister Delta Four sang into the linkbox. The strange, quavering notes sounded nothing like what he had said, but he knew that each difficult phoneme was also a meaningful morpheme, each sung syllable a clause. And each time she asked a question she paused, regarding him with detached interest, her perfect face as inhuman as her voice. "My tour of hazardous duty took me out to the Spacewall..." he said, and went on with the long familiar tale. He felt the bright gold walls pressing in on him, suddenly suffocating. He wondered how many thousand feet of rock lay above him. Up at the surface of the earth, was the endangered sun shining now on IF woods and fields tinted faintly green with early spring? Or was there arctic ice above this isolated, sounddeadened cell in the Planner's vast suites? Or miles, perhaps, of dark and icy ocean? He had no way of knowing. And abruptly he felt a wave of desperate longing for the Reefs, for Freehaven, for Quarla Snow. Those strange spaceborne rocks were somehow kinder than the Plan of Man. He was homesick for infinite space... for that fantastic concept, freedom... The stem snarl of the linkbox brought him back to his interrogation. "Proceed," cooed Sister Delta Four. "You were attacked by pyropods?" Her voice was tuneful as a crystal bell, cold and empty as the black space between the Reefs. There was no flicker of feeling on the serene and secret oval of her face. He nodded wearily -- then, remembering: "Yes, but before that, I forgot to mention one thing. Hickson removed my collar." widen. She merely sang into the linkbox, still watching him, her eyes intent byt somehow blind, as though she were already absorbed in her private ecstasy of communion. The black box snarled. "The Machine requires elucidation," Sister Delta Four trilled sweetly. "We must find this unregimented Harry Hickson. His knowledge must be recovered for the Plan. Then each organ of his body must be obliterated." Gann grinned bleakly at her, looking at the lips he had kissed so long ago. "Sorry. I can't help you. He's dead." "The Machine rejects this data," she sang. "Did you not ask this unplanned man how he removed the collar?" "I don't know how," he admitted. He paused, hoping to see some living spark in her eyes. But there was none. The black box whirred ominously. "I think he was a convert to the Church of the Star," said Gann hurriedly. "I think -- that is, as I understand it, his power was thought to come from Deneb." An angry peal from the linkbox. "That is self-evidently false," sang the cool voice of Sister Delta Four. "No star possesses any such power to share. No mind in the universe is more powerful than the Machine." She paused, while the black box snarled again. "If the falsehood is Harry Hickson's, the truth will be extracted when he is captured," she translated sweetly. "If the falsehood is yours, Major Gann, you are in grave danger of the Body Bank." He cried: "I'm telling the truth! I'm loyal to the Plan of Man!" The box sang; the girl intoned, "The Machine rejects such merely verbal assurances. One moment. The Machine is receiving additional data through another input." Q ueerly, the girl's voice was fading. Gann blinked at her. She seemed to be moving -- dwindling -- as though she were falling away from him, down through the long dark emptiness of space. It was as though Gann were looking at her through a zoom lens, pulling away. She receded a thousand yards -- Then she was back. Gann felt a moment's vertigo, as though the Planner's suite down in the bowels of the earth were somehow dancing a slow waltz. The feeling passed. The linkbox whirred menacingly, and Sister Delta Four sang, "The Machine terminates this interview." A sharp hum from the linkbox. "It reminds you that unplanned ideas, like unplanned words and unplanned actions, must be severely corrected. But it reserves judgment on your ultimate disposition." Her white, perfect face was smiling slightly, perhaps in contemplation of her instant rapture that was soon to come, when the buried electrodes would excite her brain to the incomparable bliss of electronic communion. But the linkbox was not yet through with her. It buzzed again, harshly. "The Machine finds your narrative incomplete," she recited melodiously, contemplating Gann with her dark, serene eyes. "You have not identified the Starchild. You have revealed no facts about the Togethership. You have not accounted for the so-called Writ of Liberation. You have not explained how you got into the vault of the Machine." Gann shook his head. "I don't know what to tell you," he said. The box whirred implacably. "Your statements are inadequate," Sister Delta Four sang again. "But the interview is concluded -- " There was that surge of unreal motion again. Gann gripped his chair. This time even the girl felt it; her perfect lips opened, her eyes shook a flicker of surprise. The linkbox twittered urgently. At the same moment loud bells and sirens began to sound elsewhere in the Planner's warrens. "Earth temblors," the girl began haltingly, "have been detected at several points -- " Then the linkbox crashed out a loud, despairing sound. Sister Delta Four gasped. Instinctively she reached out and caught Boysie Gann's arm. "Pyropods!" she cried. "The -- The -- Oh, you've got to help! The Planner's hall has been invaded by pyropods! Hundreds of them! They're there now!" T he private room in which Sister Delta Four had been interrogating Boysie Gann was one tiny office in the immense network of corridors and chambers that was the administrative and living headquarters of the Planner. It had been locked, but the door opened instantly to the pattern of the girl's fingertips on the knob. It flung wide, and Gann and the girl ran through the open doorway, into a wide, goldwalled hall. Broad as a highway, tall as a two-story building, it ran straight through the heart of a mountain, the Planner's rooms opening off it at intervals all the way. It was a great ceremonial thoroughfare, lined with glittering gold and crystal statuary, hung in gold brocades, paneled with murals and viewscreens. IF And it was filled with the reeking, choking, dusty smoke of jet exhausts. A scream of some huge rocketing body ripping through the air smote their ears. A human shout of anguish -- the cries of men taken by surprise -- the thin, ear-splitting volley of laser guns. In all the noise and confusion Gann saw one thing clearly -- saw it, grabbed the girl by her arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the doorway. A pyropod was rocketing toward them down the hall. It roared at them at a speed nearing Mach One; in the cramped quarters of the hall the shriek of its passage was physically painful, deafening. And the look of the thing was that of an avenging angel come to Earth, set on destruction. It was a nightmare come to life. Wilder than the most fantastic of the Planner's toys, it was shaped a little like a scorpion, larger than a charging buffalo. Its eyes were great mirrors with stalked receptors at the center -- natural radio telescopes, glowing red. Its jaws were mighty enough to crunch steel bars. Its talons could rip through armor plate. Its body was armored with darkly shining scales; a long wicked saber-like tail was arched over its back. And the whole thing was screaming through the air of the tunnel toward them. The girl cried out in fear; Gann pulled her head against his chest, quieting her -- though in truth the sound of her terror was lost in the earsplitting din of the pyropod's passage. This was no baby, like the one Gann had played with on Harry Hickson's reef. It was an armored juggernaut, full grown, capable ot battling a Plan space cruiser on equal terms. It passed them and rocketed into a group of armed guardsmen, knotted a hundred yards down the hall. They were firing wildly with laser and projectile weapons; it struck them, passed... and they were gone. Only a jackstraw heap of corpses and stirring near-dead marked where they had been. "Great Machine!" gasped Sister Delta Four, her impeccable serenity gone, her black hood thrown back, the bright metal plaque blinking out of a terrified face; "What was that?" "You told me," snapped Gann. "Pyropod! If it comes back, we're dead!" She whimpered and tugged at his arm. "Back in here -- we can hide " "No! There are others. If one finds us this way we don't have a chance. But if I can get a gun -- w He stared down the broad, long hall. The bright jet of the pyropod's tail was out of sight. Perhaps the monster had gone into another room, or down another hallway. Meanwhile the guardsmen were still in a heap of death. He came to a fast decision. "Julie -- I mean -- oh, never mind that Listen! These things can be killed if you know where to aim. I'm going after a gun. You stay in the room!" And he was off, running as hard as he could, straight down the broad hall toward the dying men. He fought the temptation to skulk along the sides. There was no concealment here. If the creature came back, he would be dead; it was that simple. His only chance was speed. He did that hundred yards in Olympic time -- And it was nearly too slow, at that. Gasping, wheezing, his chest and muscles on fire, he heard a sudden growing volume of sound and looked up. A howl of sound was coming toward him, and behind it, almost as fast as the sound itself, a pyropod was rocketing at him. He flung himself to the floor. The thing missed him by inches; he caught a quick glimpse of metal jaws and crystal tusks, of enormous talons reaching out for him; then it was past, and he was up and running He heard the thing crashing, smashing, battering into the statuary and the walls of the hall, stopping itself at heedless cost, but he did not turn. He leaped to the fallen guardsmen, caught up a laser gun, checked its charge and whirled. The pyropod had completed its turn. It caught Gann in its pulsing red headlamps. It was screaming at him,s a living battle-rocket. He fired one maximum-blast shot into its eye, and tumbled to the ground again. It screamed in agony as it passed over him. It blundered blindly into a wall, sideswiped a cluster of statuary, gouged out a bright streak in the hard metal of the corridor. Its jet flamed brightly and faded. Gann fired one more shot, then covered his head with his hands. IF There was a great distant explosion. He felt the shock wave pass over him. Some of the corpses near him were stirred by the thrust of it, their bleeding limbs flopping wildly, their unseeing faces nodding. The pyropod was gone. But Sister Delta Four had said "dozens" of them... Quickly Gann stooped to the abbatoir the pyropod had left and rummaged for weapons. He discovered a half-empty laser weapon, pocketed a light projectile gun, loaded up with the three heaviest-charge laser guns he could find. Then he turned to go after Sister Delta Four. She was standing just behind him. She had seen what he was doing, and she had done the same. She held two weapons, and in a pouch in her robes Gann could see the glitter of at least one more. He hesitated, then grinned. "Come on," he cried. "Let's see what we can do! Right in the eyes, remember!" He clapped her on the shoulder, and turned and ran in the direction of the Great Hall of the Planner. A hellish howling and roaring led him to it. He needed no other signs. Before he got there, he destroyed two more pyropods, neither quite as big as the one that had nearly got them in the hall, and Sister Delta Four had frightened another off with a long-range shot that might #I might not have hit. The Great Hall of the Planner was the mother-hive. It was filled with the great creatures, ripping through the smoky, sulfurous air, ripping out boulder-sized bits from the walls, from the huge golden chair of the Planner, from anything that would give them reaction mass. They seemed to have conquered the human defenders of the Hall wnh no trouble, and were fighting among themselves over the spoils. Then Gann caught the slim ruby flash of a laser weapon. One of the pyropods bellowed with pain, like an air-raid siren gone mad. It was not a mortal wound, but it must have been an agonizing one; the injured creature hurtled through the air and collided with another feasting beast; the two began to slash each other. Someone was still alive in the room! Warning the girl to remain behind, Gann peered cautiously around the door. The laser flash had seemed to come from one of the decorative niches holding statuary, under a painted lunette. Gann took a deep breath and shouted, then ducked back around the door. But it was useless. In the monstrous racket of the snarling, fighting pyropods his voice was unheard. He caught Sister Delta Four by the shoulder, pulled her close to him so that her ear was next to his lips. "I'm .going to try to pick them off one by one!" he cried. "They're not paying any attention right now. I think I can get most of them. But if any start this way, you shoot right for the eyes!" She nodded, her face calm and untouched again, the great service lasers incongruous in her hands. He gave her a last thoughtful glance, unable to forget the bright communion plate that was now once again hidden under the black cowl, then turned toward the Great Hall. It took him twenty minutes. He counted, and there were fifteen of the great beasts rocketing and fighting about the hall. He got seven of them, one by one, before there was any trouble. Then at Sister Delta Four's warning touch, he had to turn and destroy a lone wanderer, racing toward them down the hall. Then he got three more, and then he noticed that one screamed, burst and died at the far side of the hall that he had not fired on. Whoever was hiding in the niche across the hall had seen what he was doing, and had copied him. '"T'fiere were two guns firing then JL -- no, three; for Sister Delta Four stepped out beside him and helped gun down the last survivors, confused and blundering, as the walls shook with the creatures' screams and the air grew acrid and sickening with their fumes. And then they were all gone. Hesitantly Gann entered the hall, laser guns ready, eyes darting about as he picked his way across the destroyed battleground. There were distant bellowings still. Obviously there were still a few strays, elsewhere in the underground palace of the Planner; but most of them were dead in this room. He hurried toward his unknown ally. IF Machine General Abel Wheeler stepped stiffly out of the niche and moved toward him. There was a hard grin of victory on his face. He holstered one gun and thrust out a hand with a motion like a piston to grasp Gann's extended clasp. "Well done, Major," he rasped. "Thank you, sir. I had helped. This is -- " The general's expression did not change. "I know Sister Delta Four," he boomed. "You may tell the Machine that I commend you, Sister. Please contact the Machine now and ascertain its condition. I fear this attack may have been intended to harm it!" He grasped Gann's arm in a grip of steel and led him away. "Ugly creatures," he rasped, kicking at one enormous ripped cadaver. "Poetic justice, you might say. The Planner has always been fascinated by them. Interesting coincidence that they've appeared out of nowhere, here in his own home grounds." He glanced over his shoulder at Sister Delta Four, who was quickly chiming her tonal beads, setting up her linkbox. "See here, Gann. Look at this." On the floor in front of the niche where General Wheeler had taken refuge there was a square of thick, creamy paper. "What is it. sir?" "Pick it up, man! See for yourself!" There were human voices now, coming from the hall. The mighty forces of the Plan of Man were regathering themselves. Order was being restored. Boysie Gann hesitated. Something was wrong. "The Planner?" he asked. "Is he -- " He looked around the great hall, littered with corpses of the invading pyropods and the human guards who had been trapped there. "Not he, Major! Gone this half hour. Read that document!" Gann, with a feeling that something was awry, leaned forward and retrieved the paper. He glanced at it. Then his doubts and uncertainties dropped out of his mind. This paper was strangely familiar. He had seen one just like it -- twenty billion miles away -- in the hands of the dying Machine Colonel Zafar. That had been the document they called the Writ of Liberation! A nd this one was something almost as earthshaking in its importance, almost as dangerous to the Plan of Man. Boysie Gann read swiftly, looked up at the silent carved face of General Wheeler wonderingly, then returned to the paper. It was headed, To the Planner, and it said: To the Planner, or to whoever succeeds him if he is now dead. You and those who serve with you ignored my warning and discounted the dimming of the Sun. I send you now a pack of beasts to show that my powers can do more than frighten. They will destroy much. They may yet destroy more. If I send them again, it will not be to the headquarters of the Planner -- if anything remains of that to be destroyed. The next demonstration will occur in the vaults of the Planning Machine. Gann looked up, his lips taut, his eyes narrowed. "The Planning Machine !" he said. "General, we must tell Sister Delta Four at once! This must be conveyed to the Machine immediately." The general rasped: "That decision will be made by me, Major. What have you to say for yourself?" Startled, Gann said, "Why -- I don't know what you mean, General. I didn't have anything to do with -- " Then he saw that the general was no longer standing with his arms at his side. One hand held a laser gun again, and it was pointing at him. "You're under arrest," clipped General Wheeler metallically. "Do not attempt to draw those weapons. Do not speak or move." Gann opened his mouth, then closed it again. This was the overwhelming, culminating insanity of a fantastic experience. Himself under arrest! But for what? He dared not even ask. The general's iron expression showed that he meant his orders to be obeyed. Behind him, Boysie Gann heard the movements of the guards, coming near -- and past them, a distant booming. He recognized that sound. Another stray pyropod! He forgot his orders and cried: "General! There's another one -- " General Wheeler rapped: "Be silent! I will not speak again! The men will take care of your beast!" His voice was queerly loud, Gann thought even in his confusion -- almost as though the general were speaking not to him, but to the roomful of witnesses. But he could not help himself. He knew what one single pyropod could do, knew that even the Planner's guards might not be able to cope with it -- and knew that in that room was the body and heart of the girl he loved, even though they might be inhabited by the cold, machinelike mind of Sister Delta Four. He whirled, drew his laser gun and was ready as the roar of the pyropod shrieked to the door of the room and the creature appeared. Gann fired at the red eyes. The guards were ready too, alerted by the sound and by Gann's quick action; they had turned and were firing. The creature was caught in a dozen bolts of destroying energy. It puffed into flame and exploded... And between Gann and the door, Sister Delta Four, whispering into her linkbox, fell silently forward. She dropped to the floor and did not move, though the linkbox hooted questioningly to her. "She's hit!" cried Gann, and dropped his weapons, racing to her. He caught her up in his arms, and stared into her black eyes. His hands were covered with blood. Along one side of her black robes a spreading patch of sticky moisture began to seep, clouding IF the bright electronic symbols, trickling to the floor. There was no heartbeat. He raised his eyes, stared vacantly at the approaching General Wheeler. "Is she dead?" he demanded, unable to take it in. "Was it my shot? Or -- " He paused, trying to remember. Had there been another pencil-thin lance of laser light coming from his side of the room? Had General Wheeler fired over his shoulder and shot Sister Delta Four? But there was no time to think of that. The general was on him now, his face a metallic mask of sternness. "Disarm that man!" he rasped to the guards. "Take him before the Planner! I accuse him of bringing this document here! I accuse him of admitting the beasts we have destroyed. I accuse him ot slaying Sister Delta Four to keep her from denouncing him. I accuse him of being the Starchild!" X T he battered veterans of the skirmish with the pyropods, limping out of the battlefield and taking the swift elevators to the surface, found the Planner standing like a jovial Santa Claus on a quartzwalled balcony, near the snowy summit of the mountain in which his headquarters was buried. This was his eyrie, the great crow's-nest of his palace. He chuckled to General Wheeler: "They tried to get me and missed! They'll not have another chance! We'll wipe out every last lone rebel." The general rasped: "Sir, here is your first traitor! This is the man who is responsible. I found him bearing this document." Gann cried: "Planner, the general is lying! He knows I didn't -- " "Silence!" snapped the general. The Planner did not even look at Gann. Smiling and nodding, he read the square of paper, then dropped it negligently to the floor. "You're sure he's the Starchild, General?" he asked. "Consider the evidence, sir!" rapped the general. "One. He appeared originally in the vaults of the Machine, with no explanation of how he got there. Two. At the same time, the Writ of Liberation appeared, also unexplained. Three. He was bearing this document when I apprehended him. Four. He displayed a suspicious knowledge of the vulnerable spots on the pyropods when his own life was in danger. Five. He purposely slew Sister Delta Four, making it look like an accident, so that she could not speak against him. Six. He was about to do the same to me when I ordered the guards to disarm him. The conclusion, sir, is overwhelmingly indicated that Machine Major Boysie Gann is indeed the Starchild." "But sir -- " cried Gann. The Planner gestured, and one of the guards wrenched his arm, forcing him to be quiet. "That's better," chuckled the old Planner, beaming down on Boysie Gann. His dose of communion had clearly lasted him a long time; he was as bubbling with good humor as though the Machine even now lit were shooting pleasure sensations into his brain. "Yet," said the Planner, smiling good-humoredly at General Wheeler, "one of the guards reported that it was you, not Gann, who killed the sister. Could you have been mistaken?" "No, sir! Impossible, sir. I had no reason." T he Planner nodded cheerfully and scratched his plump old cheek. He got to his feet and went to the quartz wall of his eyrie, squinting out into the sunset sky. To windward of the summit, the descending sun picked out a towering crown of cumulus. Beyond the crystal parapet, its last rays shimmered on a small waterfall and tinted the falling slopes of evergreens. "As a matter of fact," the Planner added over his shoulder, "Sister Delta Four is not dead." He stared smiling down the slopes, toward a brown-smogged city below. "She is now in surgery. Her heart was destroyed, but circulation was restored before the brain was damaged. Even now a donor is being provided to replace her lost parts." Bovsie Gann cried joyfully: "Plan be thanked! Sir, she'll tell you that I knew nothing of the pyropods until she herself told me about them!" "Silence!" rasped General Wheeler. "Guards! Your orders are to keep him quiet. I understand donors are needed for several of your wounded comrades. The first man who fails to keep the prisoner silent will be considered a volunteer "Not so fast," chuckled the Planner. "Your zeal goes too far. General." His heavy-lidded eyes looked dark and old as the lichencrusted stone below the crystal wall, as he gazed benignly toward the far city in the smog. "Let us Plan," he said, turning and smiling. "Let us decide what to do." The Vice-Planner for Venus spoke up promptly: "Double the guards in the vaults of the Machine, sir. Institute maximum security measures, admitting nounauthorized person -- " He broke off and scratched his enormous nose in puzzlement, as he realized that neither Boysie Gann nor the pyropods had submitted to security check before entering the most heavily guarded places in the Plan of Man. A male acolyte in the black robes of the Machine, listening to a subdued buzzing from his linkbox, raised his voice suddenly. "The Machine requires the services of the prisoner," he chanted. "The Machine instructs Machine General Wheeler that the prisoner is not to be harmed in any way which will affect his memory or his intellect." Wheeler's expression was that of a steel-gray thundercloud. The Planner turned toward him, chuckling. "You have your orders, General," he said good-humoredly. "Be sure they are carried out. Do you know what those orders are, young man?" he added, turning with a bland expression of cheer to Boysie Gann. "No, sir. But I stand ready to serve the Plan of Man!" "Oh, you do indeed," nodded IF the Planner. "In a very special way, as it happens. Major, you have been selected to replace Sister Delta Four. The Machine is about to permit you to receive training in its special service as an acolyte -- and then communion!" T he heavy iron security collar was not enough for so precious an enemy of the Plan as Boysie Gann. "You're not just a Risk," one of the guards explained solicitously. "See, we can't take a chance, Major. We don't want to blow your little head off. We don't want to kill you. We want to deliver you in one piece, right? So just stand still there, while we put these cuffs on you... and we'll take you to the training base... and then, when the Machine's all finished with you, then we'll blow your head off!" And the guard snapped the fetters cruelly tight on Gann's wrists and started him moving with a shove. They took him to a subtrainstation first, and would not answer his questions. Was Julie Martinet all right? Why had General Wheeler lied? What was the Machine going to do with him? To each question there was only one response: "Shut up, you! Move on!" But then there was nowhere to move. They were in the subtrain station, the great cold vaulted shed where the enormous electron-flow driven globes waited to carry their passengers through tunnels in the earth, across a continent or under a sea. But no globe was moving. They brought Gann to a platform, ten security guards forming the detail that surrounded him, and then they waited. Boysie Gann could see that the station was a military base, because of the armored guard-boxes beside the troughs, and because of the black Technicorps uniforms on everyone. That was understandable enough; this was the depot that served the Planner himself, the one nearest his tunneledout mountain retreat But what was not understandable was that there were neither arrivals nor departures. Behind him, a track lock closed with a wheeze of leaking air. A Togetherness girl froze her automatic smile as she caught sight of his colllar, and hurried past. The guards in their radar horns gazed vacantly after her. "Look," said Boysie Gann, "what's the matter? What are we waiting for?" "Shut up, you," growled a machine-sergeant of the guards. But he had a worried look. One of his men said something to him; the sergeant replied in an undertone. All Gann could catch was: " -- trouble in the tunnels somewhere. Now shut up. When they're ready for us, we'll know." The great forty-foot bubbles waited silently in their passage cradles, and Boysie Gann stood reganding them. Wherever he was going, it was probably somewhere far away. Short-haul trips were seldom by way of the subtrains. The great atomic driHs of the Plan had tunneled straight-line passages from all major centers to all others, sometimes relayed, sometimes piercing nearly through the nickel-iron core of the Earth itself in a single non-stop thrust from Sidney, say, to Calcutta. The great freight and passenger globes reached speeds so great that Coriolis force was their principal adversary; the electrostatic hoops that banded the evacuated tunnels were double and triple strength on the side against which the earth's potation tended to throw the spheres. Via the subtrains, no point on Earth was more than a few hours away from any other... Boysie Gann became aware of a confused mutter of excitement, and focused his eyes on what was going on in the subtrain shed. A great dull freightsphere was sliding gently into the station, emerging from the mouth of a beltringed tunnel. "About time they got 'em going again," grumbled the machine sergeant. "All right, let's move out They'll be letting us board now." T he sergeant was right. Within ten minutes they were in a subtrain globe, settling down in a passenger compartment. But there was a wait of nearly a quarter of an hour more before Boysie Gann felt the gentle lurch that meant they had begun to move. His guards were more relaxed, now that they were in the subtrain. Gann could not very well escape them now, not when there was nowhere to go but the interior of a forty-foot sphere, with nothing outside but great electrostatic hoops in an airless tunnel, whizzing by at speeds of thousands of miles an hour. A couple of the guards disappeared, came back with self-satisfied smiles and relieved the others. Clearly there was a Togetherness canteen on the globe. Even the radar-horned sergeant looked somehow less inimical, more like a human being. Above all things, Gann wished he knew what had happened to Sister Delta Four. There had been a moment there, while the pyropods were attacking, when she had seemed less like a cold-hearted servant of the Machine and more like the girl he had kissed at Playa Blanca. He dreamed of getting her back -- of somehow winning favor with the Machine and receiving the great reward of Julie Martinet's release -- It was only a dream. Considering his position now, it was an insane one. Gann realized that he should be devoting every second's thought he could to planning -- to trying to understand what had put him in this position, and what he could do. But it seemed quite hopeless. He had the giddy sensation that the universe had gone mad. From that first moment on Polaris Station, when he had followed Machine Colonel Zafar down to the methane snowball, events had carried him helplessly along: they made no sense to him, but there was nothing he could do to help interpret them. Their incomprehensibility was intrinsic. It was not that he was lacking in comprehension, it was that the things which had happened were not to be understood in the sane, sensible terms of life under the Plan of Man... He felt a giddy sensation again, and this time it was not in his mind. Boysie Gann leaped to his feet in alarm. He could not help thinking of the strange queasiness that drop into the Planning Machine's catacombs -- the same, sensation, just before the pyropods struck -- But this was not the same thing at all. The lurching, twisting sensation he felt was simply explained. The subtrain car had come to a stop. It was hanging now, spinning slowly, between the charged hoops of its airless tunnel. If Gann had been in any doubt, the cries from outside his room, the shouts of guards within, removed that doubt quickly. Everyone on the subtrain globe seemed to be shouting at once. "What's the matter?" "We've stopped!" "Great Plan, we're a couple of hundred miles down! The temperature -- " "Help me! Let me out of here!" The voices were a confused babble, but they all had in common the warning knife-edge of panic. There was terror on that subtrain car -- terror that could not be calmed with words, for its base was all too real. The machine sergeant comprehended the situation at once. With a jerk of his radar-horned head he bawled at his squad : "Come on, outside! Those sheep'll stampede if we don't keep 'em in line!" Boysie Gann was left alone. Outside he could hear the Technicorps guards shouting orders at the terrified travelers on the subtrain. No one seemed to know what had happened. They had stopped, that was all. Hundreds of miles below the surface of the earth, the rock outside hot enough to melt aluminum, the pressure great enough to crush diamonds into dust if the electrostatic hoops ever faltered -- they were stopped. Whatever it was that had disrupted the service before they left the station was probably disrupting it again. The only difference was that now they were where no help could ever reach them, where if the fields in the hoops failed they would be dead in the least fraction of a second -- where even if the field maintained itself they would be dead in a few days of asphyxiation, unless they could move. Then, abruptly, there was another lurch, and they were moving again. As the great forty-foot sphere gathered speed and stability, Boysie Gann became aware that he had been hardly breathmg. There was a great cry of thanksgiving from the people outside his room. One by one his guards came back, chattering and laughing, seeming almost human. They did not include him in their conversation, but they did not go out of their way to keep him out. One of them even disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with a tray of drinks from the Togetherness canteen... And then the great globe shook again. Shook -- crashed into something that shrieked of destroyed metal -- slammed to a jolting, smashing stop. Gann and the guards tumbled across the room, hurled against the wall like thrown gravel. Boysie Gann heard screams and a rending sound of the metal of the great sphere being crushed. "We've had it!" someone shrieked. "The fields have failed!" -- and as he went deep into black oblivion, not yet feeling pain but knowing that he was bleeding, he had struck the wall too hard to get up and walk away, Gann had time for one last thought: He's right, thought Gann; this is the end. -- When, some indeterminate time later, he opened his eyes and found himself still alive, he was almost disappointed. G ann was in an emergency hospital. Stiff white bandages covered part of his eyes; his head ached as though a corps of drummers were using it for practice; he could see, under the shadow of the bandages, that one arm was encased in a balloon-cast. But he was alive. A Togetherness nurse was bending over him. He said clearly, "I thought the tube collapsed." "Hush," she said gently. "It did. But you were almost at the surface, and the wrecking squads dug you out." "Almost at the surface?" He squinted past her, at the second figure standing by his bed. For one crazy instant on waking he had thought it was the Angel of Death come to take him away. Now he saw it was an acolyte of the Machine, the linkbox in her hand, IF whispering tinkling notes to the microphone it contained. "I -- I guess I'm at the training center," he said. The nurse nodded. "Sleep if you can," she ordered. And Boysie Gann was glad to comply... For three days Boysie Gann had the status of a convalescent. It was a considerable improvement over his status as a major public enemy. The immediate guard detail was withdrawn -- several had been killed in the tube implosion and were going through the messy business of resuscitation and repair at f he Body Bank. Gann was free to wander within the limited confines o! one wing of the hospital in which he was a patient. He was even allowed access to the recreation lounge, run by a young Togetherness girl who reminded him of Quarla Snow. Her disposition was like Quarla's, too. She did not seem conscious of his collar. Most important, she let him watch the news-screens to his heart's content. Boysie Gann had been away from Earth, off on the Reefs or in intensive custody for so long that he had lost touch with the running news stories. He sat and dreamed. What was happening on the screen soaked slowly into his mind and heart. He watched, and loved, the gold-haired, long-legged choruses of Togetherness girls cooing their gentle threats: "Work for the Plan! Live for the Plan! You don't want to go to Heaven and make spare parts for the Plan!" Though he knew his ob;';ces of winding up in the Body Bank called Heaven and making "spare parts for the Plan" must be rated pretty high, there was no tear in what the girls were sinking. It was a part of a life that he had lost, and he wanted it back. Above all he wanted to find himself again. Boysie Gann could not recognize himself in the enemy of the Ma chine who had been castigated by the Planner himself, denounced by Machine General Wheeler, interrogated by Sister Delta Four. Tha Boysie Gann was a creature who had been born on Polaris Station, a man who lived with undead Reef rats and queer creatures called spacelings and pyropods. Gann could not fit the strange rebellious shape of this other Boysie Gann into his personality, could not add the two identities and produce a vector sum of his future life... He sat up straight and glared at the view-screen. He had been watching a worldwide news broadcast with half his mind, hardly conscious of what he saw, although in fact what he saw was exciting enough. The news broadcast with almost a catalogue of disasters -- a crashed Plan cruiser that destroyed half a city, earthquakes in Antarctica, a runaway nuclear reactor on the Indian subcontinent. And then there had been a nearer disaster. The screen had shown the very subtrain catastrophe that had put him in this place. And called it sabotage! Gann blinked. He hardly recognized the accident. The bland fat Technicolonel puffing out his gruff charges of criminal conspiracy seemed to be talking about some other disaster, on some other world. Malicious sabotage? A bomb planted in the subtrain to discredit the Planner and the Planning Machine? Most incongruous of all -- him radar-horned guard sergeant as his accomplice? Gann put down his glass of vitamin-laced fruit juice and hobbled over to the Togetherness girl in charge of the lounge. He was shaking. "Please," he begged. "Did you see that? What is it all about?" She scolded him sunnily. "Now, now! Your duty under the Plan is to get well! You must prepare yourself to return to serve -- no questions, no worries -- nothing but healing and rest!" He said with difficulty, "It said on the newscast that I was responsible for the subtrain accident. It isn't so! And the guard sergeant who was in charge of me -- what happened to him?" Her large, clear eyes darkened for a moment in puzzlement. But only for a moment. She would not question her orders; if her orders said that she was to care for an enemy of the Plan, she would care for an enemy of the Plan. She ahook her head and, smiling, led him back to the couch. "Drink your Juice," she said with playful severity, and would say no more. To her, what the Plan of Man ordained was necessarily right and true -- because "right" and "truth" were defined by the Plan of Man. Or so thought Boysie Gann. So thought Boysie Gann, and was aware in some part of him that there was something in that thought which was dangerous -- dangerous to him and to all mankind, for if the sweet and empty-headed Togetherness girl accepted the Plan so unquestioningly... He could not put the thought together. It almost seemed as though he himself, and General Wheeler, and even the Planner -- as if all the human race within the Plan were in some sense no less empty-headed than a Togetherness girl. But he could not complete the thought. And then time ran out and he no longer had leisure for such thoughts, for he began the course of training that would lead him to communion with the Machine. D yadic relation: I hate spinach. Ternary relation:  hate spinach except when it is well washed. Quaternary relation: I hate spinach except when it is well washed because the sand gets in my teeth. With instructor and book, with constant subliminal tapes droning while he slept and teaching machines snapping at him awake, Boysie Gann began to learn the calculus of statement, the logic of relations, the geometries of Hilbert and Ackermann and Boole. Conjunctions and disjunctions, axioms and theorems, double negations and metastatements... they all surged through his brain, nesting with destructive dilemmas and syllogisms in the mood of Barbara. He leaned to transpose and commute. He IF learned the principle of exportation and the use of dots as brackets. He learned the unambiguous phrasing and inflectionless grammar of machine programming; he learned the distinction between perceptual symbols and motor symbols, and learned to make the auditory symbols that bridged the gap. For hours with an oscillator squeal beeping in his ear to guide him, he sang endless quarter-tone scales. He studied the factorization problems of the General Problem Solver and learned to quantify relationships. He learned the construction of truth tables, and how to use them to track down tautologies in a premise. There were neither classes nor schoolrooms, there was only study and work. It went on and on, endlessly. Gann woke to the drone of the tape-recorded voice under his pillow, ate with the chime of sonic bells in his ear, fell exhausted into his bed with schematics of sharedtime computer inputs racing through his mind. There was a world outside the training center, but he had lost touch with it completely. In stolen moments he caught snatches of conversation between his few human contacts -- the Togetherness girls who served him at table, the guards who roamed the halls -- that his mind was too hard-pressed to fit together. The Starchild. The Writ of Liberation. Disasters under the earth, rocket explosions in space. They did not matter; what mattered was null hypotheses and probabilistic calculus. If he had time enough, and thought enough, to probe beTh Hahkz ! yond the demands of the training, his mind always reached one step ahead -- to the moment when training was over and he would receive the metal badge of communion in his flesh -- and it recoiled, and returned to Hilbert and Boole. When the course was over, Gann did not realize it. He went to sleep -- exhausted, as he was always exhausted in this place. He tumbled into the narrow, hard bed in the solitary, tilewalled room. The voice under his pillow promptly began to recite to him: " -- generate a matrix K, ultilizing the mechanisms of associative retrieval to add contextual relationships to coordinate retrieval. Let the i-th row and th column show the degree of association -- " Some part of him was taking it in, he knew, but his conscious mind was hardly aware of it. All he was aware of was his own inadequacy. He would never match the pure, crystalline tones of Sister Delta Four and the other acolyte; he did not have the voice for it. He would never grasp and retain all the information theory and programming he had been taught; he did not have the training for it... He drifted off to sleep. He was barely aware that something was wrong -- some new scent in the atmosphere, some hardly perceived whisper of motion, as though someone were waiting outside his room for him to be asleep. Then the anesthetic gas that had been piped through his pillow took effect. He slept. Deeply. When he woke he felt a minor but nagging ache in the skin and the bone of his forehead. He was in another room -- green-walled, surgical. He did not have to touch his forehead to know that while he slept the surgeons had been at work, the hair-thin electrodes slipped into the micrometrically located centers of his brain, the bright badge of communion implanted on his brow. I n the mammalian brain exist bundles of nerves and specialized tissue which control mood and emotion, as well as those which control motor activities, homeostatic regulation, conscious thought and the various other activities of that threepound mass of hypertrophied tissue. One such area is the pleasure center. Slip a fine platinum electric into it by stereotaxic surgery. Feed tiny surge of electricity. The result is ecstasy! Fit a laboratory animal with such an electrode and with a key it can operate, and it will go on pressing the key, pressing the key, pressing the key... it will not pause for food or drink or fear... it will sear itself with delight until it collapses of exahustion, and wake only to press the key once more. The jolt of ecstasy that tore through Boysie Gann's being in that first moment of awakening with the communion plate in his forehead and the electrodes embedded in his brain was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was taste, feeling, odor and light; it was the wild delight IF of sex and the terrifying joy of daredevil sport; it was all the things he had ever known at once, magnified unbearably. Time stopped. He was adrift in a turbulent sea of sensation... Eons and lifetimes later, he became conscious of humanity again. He was back in his body. The tides of quintessential pleasure had receded from around him, and left him aching and dry. He opened his eyes, and saw a Technicorps medical orderly retreating from him, the communion probe wires in his hand. He had been cut off from the joy of the Planning Machine. Gann took a long shuddering breath and reconciled himself to being human again. He could understand Sister Delta Four. He could accept his destiny in communion with the Machine. No other reward could be half as great as this, no other purpose as important -- Dazedly he became aware that something was wrong. The Technicorps man's face was pale with fear. Voices shouted from outside, and one of them was queerly familiar. Gann struggled to his feet, apprehensive and wary. When the door burst open it was Machine General Wheeler who came into the room like a raging typhoon. "Gann!" he roared. "Starchild! You devil, what have you done?" "I? Done? Nothing, General -- and I'm not the Starchild, I swear it!" "Filth!" howled the general. "Don't lie to me! What have you done to the Planning Machine?" Gann started to reply, to defend himself. The general gave him no chance. "Lies!" he raged. "Starchild, you've destroyed us all! Admit it! Admit that it was you who has driven the Planning Machine hopelessly madl" On your newsstand now -- Brian W. Aldiss Miriam Allen deFord Julian F. Grow Keith Laumer Fritz Leiber C. C. MacApp Cordwainer Smith Robert F. Young Get your copy today if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? 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Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. IF  NovtUMj If was  fanta s tic place to tight a rocks could conceal an alien ambushl E arth's Gobi spaceport was perhaps the biggest in all the small corner of the galaxy settled by Solarian Man and hk descendants; at least, so thought Mitdiell Spain, who had seen most of those ports in his twenty-four years of life. But looking down now from the crowded, descending shuttle, he could see almost nothing of the Gobi's miles of ramp. The vast crowd below, meaning only joyful welcome, had defeated its own p pose by forcing back and breaking the police lines. Now the vertical string of descending shuttle-ships had to pause, searching for enough clear room to land. Mitchell Spain, crowded into the lowest shuttle with a thousand other volunteers, was paying little attention to the landing problem for the moment. Into this jammed compartment, once a luxurious observation lounge, had just come Johann Karisen himself; and this was Mitch's first chance for a good look at the newly appointed High Commander of Sol's defense, though Mitch had ridden Karlsen's spear-shaped flagship all the way from Esteel. Karlsen was no older than Mitchell Spain, and no taller, his shortness somehow surprising at first glance. He had become ruler of the planet Esteel largely through the influence of his half-brother, the mighty Felipe Nogara; but he held that rule by his own talents. "This field may be blocked for the rest of the day," Karlsen was saying now, to a cold-eyed Earthman who had just come aboard the shuttle from an aircar. "Let's have the ports open, I want to look around." Glass and metal slid and reshaped themselves, and sealed ports became small balconies open to the air of Earth, the fresh smells of a living planet -- open, also, to the roaring chant of the crowd a few hundred feet below: "Karlsen! Karlsen!" As the High Commander stepped out onto a balcony to survey for himself the chances of landing, the throng of men in the lounge made a seemingly involuntary brief surging movement, as if to follow. These men were mostly Esteeler volunteers, with a sprinkling of adventurers like Mitchell Spain, the Martian wanderer who had signed up on Esteel for the battle bounty Karlsen offered. "Don't crowd, outlander," said a tall man ahead of Mitch, turning and looking down at him. "I answer to die name of Mitchell Spain." He let his voice rasp a shade deeper than usual "No move an outlander here than you, I think." The tall one, by his dress and accent, came from Venus, a planet terraformed only within the last century, whose people were sensitive and proud in newness of independence and power. A Venerian might well be jumpy here, on a ship filled with men from a planet ruled by Felipe Nogara's brother. "Spain -- sounds like a Martian name," said the Venerian in a milder tone, looking down at Mitch. M artians were not known for patience and long suffering. After another moment the tall one seemed to get tired of locking eyes and turned away. The cold-eyed Earthman, his face somehow familiar to Mitch, was on the communicator, probably to the captain of the shuttle. "Drive on toward the city; cross the Khosutu highway, and let down there." Karlsen, back inside, said: "Tell him to go no more than about ten kilometers an hour; they seem to want to see me." The statement was matter-of-fact; if people had made great efforts to see Johann Karlsen, it was only die courteous thing to greet them. Mitch watched Karlsen's face, and then the back of his head, and the strong arms lifted to wave, as the High Commander stepped out again onto the little balcony. The crowdli roar doubled. Is that all you feel, Karlsen, a I wish to be courteous? Oh, no, my friend, you are acting. To be greeted with that thunder must do something rital to any man. It might exalt him; possibly it could disgust or frighten him, friendly as it was. You wear well your mask of courteous nobility, High Commander. What was it like to be Johann Karlsen, come to save the world, when none of the really great and powerful ones seemed to care too much about it? With a bride of famed beauty to be yours when the battle has been won? And where was brother Felipe today? Scheming, no doubt, to get economic power over yet another planet. With another shift of the little mob inside the shuttle the tall Venerian moved from in front of Mitch who could now see clearly out the port past Karlsen. Sea of faces, the old cliche, this was really it. How to write this... Mitch knew he would someday have to write it. If all men's foolishness was not permanently ended by the coming battle with the unliving, the battle bounty should suffice to let a man write for some time. Ahead now were the bone-colored towers of Ulan Bator, rising beyond their fringe of suburban slideways and sunfields a highway, and bright multicolored pennants, worn by the aircars swarming out from the city in glad welcome. Police aircars were keeping pace protectively with the spaceship, though there seemed no possible danger from anything but excess enthusiasm. Another, special, aircar approached. The police craft touched it briefly and gently, then drew back with deference. Mitch stretched his neck, and made out a Carmpan insignia on the car. It was probably their ambassador to Sol, in person. The space shuttle eased to a dead slow creeping. Some said that the Carmpan looked like machines themselves, but they were the strong allies of Earth-descended man in the war against the enemies of all life. If the Carmpan bodies were slow and squarish, their minds were visionary; if they were curiously unable to use force against any enemy, their indirect help was of great value. S omething near silence came over the vast crowd as the ambassador reared himself up in his open car; from his head and body ganglions of wire and fiber stretched to make a hundred connections with Carmpan animals and equipment around him. The crowd recognized the meaning of the network; a great sigh went up. In the shuttle men jostled one another trying for a better view. The cold-eyed Earthman whispered rapidly into the communicator. "Prophecy!" said a hoarse voice, near Mitch's ear. " -- of Probability!" come the ambassador's voice, suddenly amplified, seeming to pick up the thought in mid-phrase. The Carmpan Prophets of Probability were half mystics, half cold mathematicians. Karlsen's aids must have decided, or known, that this prophecy was goinn to he a favorable, inspiring thing winch the crowd should hear and had ordered the ambassador's yoice picked up on a public address system. "The hope, the living spark, to spread the flame of life!" The inhuman mouth chopped out the words, which still rose ringingly. The armlike appendages pointed straight to Karlsen, level on his balcony with the hovering aircar. "The dark metal thoughts are now of victory, the dead things make their plans to kill us all. But in this man before me now, there is life greater than any strength of metal. A power of life, to resonate -- in all of us. I see -- with Karlsen -- victory -- " The strain on a Carmpan prophet in action seemed always to be immense, just as his accuracy was always high. Mitch had heard that tfie stresses involved were more topological than electrical. He had heard it, but like most Earthdescended, had never understood it. "Victory," the ambassador repeated. "Victory... and then..." Something changed in the nonSolarian face. The cold-eyed Earthman was perhaps expert in reading ilien expressions, or was perhaps taking no chances. He whispered another command, and the amplification was taken from the Carmpan voice. A roar of approval mounted up past shuttle and aircar, from the great throng who thought the prophecy complete. But the ambassador was not finished, though now only those a few meters in front of him, inside the shuttle, could hear his faltering voice... then death, destruction, failure." The square body bent, but the alien eyes were still riveted on Karlsen. "He who wins everything -- will die owning nothing..." The Carmpan bent down and his aircar moved away. In the lounge of the shuttle there was silence. The hurrahing outside seemed to have a tone of mockery. After long seconds, the High Commander raised his voice: "Men, we who heard the finish of the prophecy are few -- but still we are many, to keep a secret. So I don't ask for secrecy. But spread the word, too, that I have no faith in prophecies that are not of God. The Carmpan have never claimed to be infallible." The gloomy answer was unspoken, but almost telepathically loud among the group. Nine times out of ten, the Carmpan are right. There will be victory, then death and failure. But did the dark ending apply only to Johann Karlsen, or to the whole cause of the living? The men in the shuttle looked at one another, wondering and murmuring. T he shuttles found space to land, at the edge of Ulan Bator. Disembarking, there was no chance for gloom, with the joyous crowd growing thicker by the moment around the ships. A lovely Earth girl came wreathed in garlands, to throw a flowery loop around Mitchell Spain, and to kiss him. He was an ugly man, quite unused to such Still, he noticed when the High Commander's eye was on him. "You, Martian, come with me to the General Staff meeting. I want to show a representative group in there so they'll believe Esteel is cosmopolitan. I need one or two who were born in Sol's light." "Yes, sir." Was there no other reason why Karlsen had singled him out? They stood together in the crowd, two short men looking levelfy at each other. One ugly and flower-bedecked, his arm still around a girl who stared with sudden awed recognition at the other man, who was magnetic in a way beyond handsomeness or ugliness. The ruler of a planet, perhaps to be the savior of all life. "I like the way you keep people from standing on your toes in a crowd," said Karlsen to Mitchell Spain. "Without raising your voice or uttering threats. What's your name and rank?" Military organization was vague, in this war where everything that lived was on the same side. "Mitchell Spain, sir. No rank assigned, yet. I've been training with the marines. I was on Esteel when you offered a good battle bounty, so here I am." "Not to .defend Mars?" "I suppose, that too. But I might as well get paid for it." Karlsen's high-ranking aides were wrangling and shouting now, about groundcar transportation to the Staff meeting. This seemed to leave Karlsen with time to talk. He thought, and recognition flickered on his face. "Mitchell Spain? The poet?" "I -- I've had a couple of things published. Nothing much..." "Have you combat experience?" "Yes, I was aboard one berserker, before it was pacified. That was out -- " "Later, we'll talk. Probably have some marine command for you. Experienced men are scarce. Hemphill, where are those groundcars?" The cold-eyed Earthinan turned to answer. Of course, his face had been familiar; this was Hemphill, fanatic hero of a dozen berserker fights. Mitch was faintly awed, in spite of himself. At last the groundcars came. The ride was into Ulan Bator. The military center would be under the metropolis, taking full advantage of the defensive forcefields that could be extended up into space to protect the area of the city. Riding down the long elevator zig-zag to the buried War Room, Mitch found himself again next to Karlsen. "Congratulations on your coming marriage, sir." Mitch didn't know if he liked Karlsen or not; but already he felt curiously certain of him, as if he had known the man for years. Karlsen would know he was not trying to curry favor. The High Commander nodded. "Thank you." He hesitated for a moment, then produced a small photo. In an illusion of three dimensions it showed the head of a young woman, golden hair done in the style favored by the new aristocracy of Venus. There was no need for any polite stretching of truth. "She's very beautiful." "Yes." Karlsen looked long at II tiie picture, as if reluctant to put it away. "There are those who say this will be only a political alliance. God knows we need one. But believe me, Poet, she means far more than that to me." Karlsen blinked suddenly, and, as if amused at himself, gave Mitch a why-am-I-telling-you-all-this look. The elevator floor pressed up under the passengers' feet, and the doors sighed open. They had reached the catacomb of the General Staff. n M any of the Staff were Venetian in these days, though not an absolute majority. From their greeting, it was plain that the Venerian members were coldly hostile to Nogara's brother. Humanity was, as always, a tangle of cliques and alliances. The brains of the Solarian Parliament and the Executive had been taxed to find a High Commander. If some objected to Johann Karlsen, no one who knew him had any honest doubt of his ability. He brought with him to battle many trained men, and unlike some mightier leaders, he had sponsibility for the defense of Sol. In the frigid atmosphere in which the Staff meeting opened, there was nothing but to get quickly to business. The enemy, the berserker machines, had abandoned their old tactics of single, unpredictable raids. Those tactics had once threatened the intelligent life of this part of the galaxy with ruin, but slowly over the last decades the defenses of life had been strengthened, the scales had begun to tip. There were now thought to be about two hundred berserker machines; they had recently formed themselves into a fleet, with concentrated power capable of overwhelming one at a time all centers of human resistance. Two strongly defended planets had already been destroyed. A massed human fleet was needed, first to defend Sol, and then to meet and break the power of the unliving. "So far, then, we are agreed," said Karlsen, straightening up from the plotting table and looking around at the General Staff. "We have not as many ships, or as many trained men as we would like. Perhaps no government away from Sol has contributed all it could." Kemal, the Venerian Admiral, glanced around at his planetmen, but declined the chance to comment on the weak contribution of Karlsen's own half-brother, Nogara. There was no living being upon whom Earth, Mars, and Venus could agree, as the leader for this war. KemalseemNogara's brother. Karlsen went on: "We have available for combat two hundred and forty-three ships, specially constructed or modified to suit the new tactics I propose to use. We are all grateful for the magnificent Venerian contribution of a hundred ships. Six of them, as you all probably know, mount the new long range, C-plus cannon." The praise produced no visible IP among the Venerians. Karlten went on. "We seem to have a numerical advantage of about forty ships. I needn't tell you how the enemy outgun us and outpower us, unit for unit." He paused. "The ram-and-board tactics should give us just the element of surprise we need." P erhaps the High Commander was choosing his words carefully, not wanting to say that some element of surprise offered the only logical hope of success. After the decadeslong dawning of hope, it would be too much to say that. Too much for even these tough-minded men who knew how a berserker machine weighed in the scales of war against any ordinary warship. "One big problem is trained men," Karlsen continued, "to lead the boarding parties. I've done the best I can, recruiting. Of those ready and in training as boarding marines now, the bulk are Estellers." Admiral Kemal seemed to guess what was coming; he started to push back his chair and rise, then waited, evidently wanting to make certain. Karlsen went on in the same level tone. "These trained marines will be formed into companies, and one company assigned to each warihip. Then -- " "One moment, High Commander Karlsen." Kemal had risen. "Yes?" "Do I understand that you mean lo station companies of Esteelers board Venerian ships?" "In many cases my plan will mean that, yes. You protest?" "I do." The Venerian looked around at his planetmen. "We all do." "Nevertheless it is so ordered." Kemal looked briefly around at his fellows once more, then sat down, blank-faced. The stenocameras in the room's corners emitted their low sibilance, reminding all that their proceedings were being recorded. A vertical crease appeared briefly in the High Commander's forehead, and he looked for long thoughtful seconds at the Venerians before resuming his talk. But what else was there to do, except put Esteelers onto Venerian ships? They won't let you be a hero, Karlsen, thought Mitchell Spain. The universe is bad; and men are fools, never really all on the same side in any war. Ill I n the hold of the Venerian warship Solar Spot the armor lay packed inside a padded coffin-like crate. Mitch knelt beside it inspecting the knee and elbow joints. "Want me to paint some insignia on it, Captain?" It was a young Esteeler named Fishman, one of the newly formed marine company Mitch now commanded. Fishman had picked up a multicolor paintstick somewhere, and he pointed with it to the suit. Mitch glanced around at the hold, swarming with his men busily opening crates of equipment. He had decided to let things run themselves as much as possible. "Insignia? Why, I don't think so. Unless you have some idea for a company insignia. That might be a good thing to have." There seemed no need for any distinguishing mark on his armored suit. It was of Martian make, distinctive in style, old but with the latest improvements built in -- probably no man wore better. The barrel chest already bore one design -- a large black spot shattered by jagged red -- showing that Mitch had been In at the 'death' of one berserker. Mitch's uncle had worn the same armor; the men of Mars had always gone in great numbers out to space. "Sergeant McKendrick," Mitch asked, "what do you think about having a company insignia?" The newly appointed sergeant, an intelligent-looking young man, paused in walking past, and looked from Mitch to Fishman as if trying to decide who stood where on insignia before committing himself. Then he looked between them, his expression hardening. A thin-faced Venerian, evidently an officer, had entered the hold with a squad of six men behind him, armbanded and sidearmed. Ship's Police. The officer took a few steps and then stood motionless, looking at the paintstick in Fishman's hand. When everyone in the hold was silently watching him, he asked quiedy: "Why have you stolen from ship's stores?" "Stolen -- this!" The young Esteller held up the paintstick, half smiling, as if ready to share a joke. They didn't come joking with  Police squad, or, if they did, it was not the kind of joke a Martian appreciated. Mitch still knelt beside his crated armor. There was an unloaded carbine inside the suit's torso and he put his hand on it. "We are at war, and we are in space," the thin-faced officer went on, still speaking mildly, standing relaxed, looking round at the openmouthed Esteeler company. "Everyone aboard a Venerian ship is subject to law. For stealing from ship's stores, while we face the enemy, the penalty is death. Take him away." He made an economical gesture to his squad. e paintstick clattered loudly on the deck. Fishman looked as if he might be going to topple over, half the smile still on his face. IF Mitch stood up, the carbine in the crook of his arm. It was a stubby weapon with heavy double barrels, really a miniature recoilless cannon, to be used in free fall to destroy armored machinery. "Just a minute, " Mitch said. A couple of the police squad had begun to move uncertainly toward Fishman; they stopped in their tracks, as if glad of the chance. The officer looked at Mitch, and raised one cool eyebrow. "Do you know what the penalty is, for threatening me?" "Can't be any worse than the penalty for blowing your ugly head off. I'm Captain Mitchell Spain, marine company commander on this ship, and nobody just comes in here and drags my men away and hangs them. Who are you?" "I am Mr. Salvador," said the Venerian. His eyes appraised Mitch, no doubt establishing that he was Martian. Wheels were turning in Mr. Salvador's calm brain, and plans were changing. He said: "Had I known that a man commanded this -- group -- I would not have thought an object lesson necessary. Come." This last word was addressed to his squad and accompanied by another simple elegant gesture. The six almost rushed to precede him to the exit. Salvador's eyes motioned Mitch to follow him toward the door. There he turned, still unruffled. "Your men will follow you eagerly now, Captain Spain," he said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. "And the time will come when a faint smile, as if of appreciation, he was gone. There was a moment of silence Mitch stared at the closed door, wondering. Then a roar of jubilation burst out and his back was being pounded. "Captain -- what'd he mean, catting himself mister?" "It's some kind of political rank the Venerians have. You guys look here! I may need some honest witnesses." Mitch held up the carbine for all to see, and broke open t ha chambers and clips, showing it to be unloaded. There was renewed excitement, more howls and jokes at the expense of the retreated Venerians. But Salvador had not thought himself defeated. "McKendrick, call the bridge. Tell the ship's captain I want to see him. Let's get on with this unpacking." ' Young Fishman, paintstick to hand again, stood staring vacantly down as if contemplating a design for the deck. It was beginning to soak in, how close a thing it had been. But could the death-threat have been really serious? T he ship's captain was coldly noncommittal, but he indicated there were no present plans for hanging any Estellers on the Solar Spot. During the next sleep period Mitch kept armed sentries posted in the marines' quarters. The next day he was summoned to the flagship. From the launch be had a view of a dance of bright If dots, glinting in the light of distant Sol. Part of the fleet was already at ramming practice. Behind the High Commander's desk sat neither a poetry critic nor a musing bridegroom, but the ruler of a planet. "Captain Spain -- sit down." To be given a chair seemed a good sign. Waiting for Karlsen to finish some paperwork, Mitch's thoughts wandered, recalling customs he had read about, ceremonies of saluting and posturing men had used in the past when huge permanent organizations had been formed men and destroying their property. Certainly men were still as greedy as ever; and now the great conflict with the unliving was forcing them to organize again for mass destruction. Could those old days, when life fought all-out war against life, ever come again? With a sigh, Karlsen pushed aside his papers. "What happened yesterday, between you and Mr. Salvador?" "He said he meant to hang one of my men." Mitch gave the story, s simply as he could. He omitted only Salvador's parting words, without fully reasoning out why he did. "When I'm made responsible for men," he finished, "nobody just walks in and hangs them. Though rm not fully convinced they would have gone that far, I meant to be as serious about it as they were." The High Commander picked out a paper from his desk litter. "Two Esteeler marines have been hanged already. For fighting." "Damned arrogant Venerians I'd say." "I want none of that, CaptainP "Yes sir. But I'm telling you ws came mighty close to a shooting war, yesterday on the Solar Spot" "I realize that" Karlsen made a gesture expressive of futility. "Spain, is it impossible for the people of this fleet to cooperate, even when the survival -- what is it?" T he Earthman, Hemphill, had entered the cabin without ceremony. His thin lips were pressed tighter than ever. "A courier has just arrived with news. Atsog is attacked." Karlsen's strong hand crumpled papers with an involuntary twitch. "Any details?" "The courier captain says he thinks the whole berserker fleet was there. The ground defenses were still resisting strongly when he pulled out. He just got his ship away in time." Atsog; a planet closer to Sol than the enemy had been thought to be. It was Sol they were coming for, all right. They must know it was the human center. More people were at the oabin door. Hemphill stepped aside for the Venerian, Admiral Kemal. Mr. Salvador, hardly glancing at Mitch followed the admiral in. "You have heard the news. High Commander?" Salvador began. Kemal, just ready to speak himself, gave his political officer an annoyed glance, but said nothing. "That Atsog is attacked, yes," said Karlsen. IF "My ships can be ready to move In two hours," said Kemal. Karlsen sighed, and shook his head. "I watched today's maneuvers. The fleet can hardly be ready in two weeks." Kemal's shock and rage seemed genuine. "You'd do that? You'd let a Venerian planet die just because we haven't knuckled under to your brother? Because we discipline his damned Esteeler -- " "Admiral Kemal, you will control yourself! You, and everyone else, are subject to discipline, while I command!" Kemal got himself in hand, apparently with great effort. Karlsen's voice was not very loud, but the cabin seemed to resonate with it. "You call hangings part of your discipline. I swear by the name of God that I will use even hanging, if I must, to enforce some kind of unity in this fleet. Understand, this fleet is the only military power that can oppose the massed berserkers. Trained, and unified, we can destroy them." No listener could doubt it for the moment. "But .whether Atsog falls, or Venus, or Esteel, I will not risk this fleet until I judge it ready." Into the silence, Salvador said, with an air of respect: "High Commander, the courier reported one thing more. That the Lady Christina de Dulcin was visiting on Atsog when the attack began -- and that she must be there still." Karlsen closed his eyes for two seconds. Then he looked round at all of them. "If you have no further military business, gentlemen, get out." His voice was still steady. Walking beside Mitch down the flagship corridor, Hemphill broke a silence to say thoughtfully: "Karlsen is the man the cause needs, now. Some Venerians have approached me, tentatively, about joining a plot -- I refused. We must make sure that Karlsen remains in command." "A plot?" Hemphill did not elaborate. Mitch said: "What they did just now was pretty low -- letting him make that speech about going slow, no matter what -- and then breaking the news to him about his lady being on Atsog." Hemphill said : "He knew already she was there. That news arrived on yesterday's courier." IV T here was a dark nebula made rocks and older than the sun, named the Stone Place by men. Those who gathered there now were not men and they gave nothing a name; they hoped nothing, feared nothing, wondered at nothing. They had no pride and no regret, but they had from electrical pressure and flow -- and their built-in purpose, toward which their planning circuits moved. As if by instinct the berserker machines had formed themselves into a fleet when the time was ripe, when the eternal enemy, Life, had begun to mass its strength. The planet named Atsog in the life-language had yielded a number of still functioning life-units from had been destroyed while their stubborn defenses were beaten down. Functional life-units were sources of valuable information -- long ago the berserkers had learned human languages, and something of human psychology. There were stimuli, even the threat of which usually brought at least limited cooperation from any life-unit. The life-unit (designating itself General Bradin) which had controlled the defense of Atsog, was among those captured, almost undamaged. Its dissection was begun within perception of the other captured life-units. The thin outer covering tissue was delicately removed, and placed upon a suitable form, to preserve it for further study. The life-units which controlled othen were examined carefully, whenever possible. After this stimulus, it was no longer possible to communicate intelligibly with General Bradin; in a matter of hours it ceased to function at all. In itself a trifling victory, this small unit of watery matter was freed of the aberration called Life. But the flow of information now increased from the nearby units which had perceived the process. It was soon confirmed that the Life-units were assembling a fleet More detailed information was sought. One important line of questioning concerned the life-unit which would control this fleet Gradually, from interrogations and the reading of captured records, a picture emerged. A name: Johann Karlsen. A biography. Contradictory things were said about him, but die facts showed he had risen rapidly to a position units. Throughout the long war, the berserker computers had gathered and collated all available data on the men who became leaders of Life. Now against this data they matched, point for point, every detail that could be learned about Johann Karlsen. The behavior of these leading units often resisted analysis, as if some quality of the life-disease in them was forever beyond the reach of machines. These individuals used logic, but sometimes it seemed they were not bound by logic. The most IF dangerous life-units of all sometimes acted in ways that seemed to contradict the known supremacy of the laws of physics and of chance, as if they could be minds possessed of true free will, instead of its illusion. And Karlsen was one of these, supremely one of these. His fitting of the dangerous pattern became plainer with every new comparison. In the past, such life-units had been troublesome local problems. For one of them to command the whole life-fleet with a decisive battle approaching, was extremely dangerous to the cause of Death. The outcome of the approaching battle seemed almost certain to be favorable, since there were probably only two hundred ships in the lifefleet. But die brooding berserkers could not be certain enough of anything, white a unit like Johann Karlsen led the Irving. And if the battle was long postponed the enemy Life could become stronger. There were hints that inventive Life was developing new weapons, newer and more powerful ships. The wordless conference reached a decision. There were berserker reserves, which had waited for millenaa along the galactic rim, dead and uncaring in their hiding places among dust clouds and heavy nebulae, and on dark stars. For this climactic battle they must be summoned, the power of Life to resist must be broken now. From the berserker fleet at the Stone Place, between Atsog's Sun and Sol, courier machines sped out toward the galactic rim. It would take some time for all the reserves to gather. Meanwhile, the interrogations went on. iiT isten, I've decided I can help JL' you, see. About this guy Karlsen, I know you want to find out about him. Only I got a delicate brain. If anything hurts me my brain don't work at all, so no rough stuff on me, understand? I'M be no good to you ever if you use rough stuff on me." This prisoner was unusual. The interrogating computer borrowed new circuits for itself, chose , symbols and hurled them back at the life-unit. "What can you tell me about Karlsen?" "Listen, you're gonna treat me right, aren't you?" "Useful information will be rewarded. Untruth will bring you unpleasant stimuli." "I'll tell you this now -- the woman Karfsen was going to marry is here, you caught her alive in the same shelter Bradin was in." Tr.v.v. "Now if you sort of give me control over all these other prisoners make things nice for me, why I bet I can think up the best way for you to use her. If you just tell him you've got her, why he might not believe you, see?" Out on the galactic rim, the signals of the heralds called out the hidden reserves of the unliving. Subtle detectors heard the signals, and triggered the great engines into cold flame. The forcefield brain in each strategic housing awoke to livelier death. Each reserve machine acknowledged the call and began to move with metallic leisure, shaking loose its cubic miles of weight and power, freeing itself from dust, or ice, or age-old mud, or solid rock -- then rising and turning, orienting itself in space. All converging, they drove faster than light toward the Stone Place, where the destroyers of Atsog awaited their reinforcement. With the arrival of each reserve machine, the linked berserker computers saw victory more probable. But still the quality of one life-unit made all computations uncertain. V F elipe Nogara raised a strong and hairy hand, and wiped it gently across one glowing segment of the panel before his chair. The center of his private study was filled by an enormous display sphere, which now showed a representation of the explored part of the galaxy. At Nogara's gesture, the sphere dimmed and began to relight itself in a slow intricate sequence. A wave of his hand had just theoretically eliminated the berserker fleet as a factor in the power game. To leave it in, he told himaelf, diffused the probabilities too widely. It was really the competing power of Ventrs -- and that of two or three other prosperous, agressive planets -- which occupied his mind. Well insulated in this private room from the hum of Esteel City and from the routine press of business, Nogara watched his computers' new prediction take shape, showing the political power structure as it might exist one year from now, two year five. As he had expected, this m quence showed Esteel expanding hi influence. It was even possible that he could become ruler of the human galaxy. Nogara wondered at his own calm in the face of such an idea. Twelve or fifteen years ago he had driven with all his power of intellect and will to advance himself. Gradually, the moves in the game had come to seem automatic. Today, there was a chance that almost every thinking being known to exist would come to acknowledge him as ruler -- and it meant less to him than the first local election he had ever won. Diminishing returns, of course. The more gained, the greater gain needed to produce an equal pleasure. At least when he was alone. If his aides were watching this prediction now it would certainly excite them, and he would catch their excitement. But, being alone, he sighed. The berserker fleet would not vanish at the wave of a hand. Today, what was probably the final plea for more help had arrived from Earth. The trouble was that granting Sol more help would take ships and men and money from Nogara's expansion projects. Wherever he did that now he stood to lose out, eventually, to other men. Old Sol would have to survive the coming attack with no more help from Esteel. Nogara realized, wondering dully at himself, that he would as soon see even Esteel destroyed as see control slip from his hands. Now why? He could not say he loved his IF planet or people, but he had been, by and large, a good ruler, not a tyrant. Good government was, after all, good politics. His desk chimed the melodious notes that meant something was newly available for his amusement Nogara chose to answer. # COir," said a woman's voice, "two O new possibilities are in the ahower room now." Projected from hidden cameras, a scene glowed into life above Nogara's desk; bodies gleaming in a pray of water. "They are from prison, sir, anxious for any reprieve." Watching, Nogara felt only a weariness; and, yes, something like self-contempt. He questioned himself: Where in all the universe is there a reason why I should not seek pleasure as I choose? And again: Will I dabble in sadism, next? And if I do, what of it? But what after that? Having paused respectfully, the voice asked: "Perhaps this evening you would prefer something different?" "Later," he said. The scene vanished. Maybe I should try to be a Believer for a while, he thought. What an intense thrill it must be for Johann to sin. If he ever does. That had been a genuine pleasure, seeing Johann given command of the Solarian Fleet, watching the Venerians boil. But it had raised another problem. Johann, victorious over the berserkers would emerge as the greatest hero in human history. Would that not make even Johann dangerously ambitious? The thing to do would be to ease him out of the public eye, give him some highranked job, honest, but dirty and ingforious. Hunting out outlaws somewhere, Johann would probably accept that, being Johann. But if Johann bid for galactic power, he wo ul d have to take his chances. Any pawn in the game might be removed. Nogara shook his head. Suppose Johann lost the coming battle, and lost Sol? A berserker victory would not be a matter of diffusing probabilities, that was pleasant double talk for a tired mind to fool itself with. A berserker victory would mean the end of Earth man in the galaxy, probably within a few years. No computer was needed to see that There was a little bottle in his desk; Nogara brought it out and looked at it The end of the chess game was in It The end of all pleasure and boredom and pain. Looking at the vfad caused him no emotion. In H was a powerful drug which threw a man into a kind of ecstasy -- a transcendental excitement that within a few minutes burst the heart or the blood vessels of the brain. Someday, when all else was exhausted, when it was completely a berserker universe -- He put the vial away and he put away die final appeal from Earth. What did it all matte? Was it not a berserker unxvene already, everything determined by the random swirls of condensing gas, before the stars were born? Felipe Nogara leaned back in Ids chair, watching his computers marking out the galactic chessboard. VI T hrough the fleet the rumor spread that Karlsen delayed because it was a Venerian colony under seige. Aboard the Solar Spot , Mitch saw no delays for any reason. He had time for only work, quick meals and sleep. When the final ram-and-board drill had been completed, the last stores and ammunition loaded, Mitch was too tired to feel much except relief. He rested, not frightened or elated, while the Spot wheeled into a rank with forty other arrow-shaped ships, dipped with them into the first Cplus jump of the deep space search, and began to hunt the enemy. It was days later before dull routine was broken by a jangling battle alarm. Mitch was wakened by it; before his eyes were fully opened, he was scrambling into the armored suit stored under his bunk. Nearby, some marines grumbled about practice alerts; but none of them was moving slowly. "This is High Commander Karlsen speaking," boomed the overhead speakers. "This is not a practice alert, repeat, not practice. Two berserkers have been sighted. One we've just glimpsed at extreme range. Likely it will get away, though the Ninth Squadron is chasing if. "The other is not going to escape. In a matter of minutes we will have it englobed, in normal space. We are not going to destroy it by bombardment; we are going to It soften it up a bit, and then see how well we can really ram-andboard. If there are any bugs left in our tactics, we'd better find out now. Squadrons Two, Four, and Seven will each send one ship to the ramming attack. I'm going back on Command Channel now, Squadron Commanders." "Squadron Four," sighed Sergeant McKendrick. "More Esteelers in our company than any other. How can we miss?" The marines lay like dragon's teeth seeded in the dark, strapped into the padded acceleration couches that had been their bunks, while the psych-music tried to hill them, and those who were Believers prayed. In the darkness Mitch listened, and passed on to his men the terse battle reports that came to him as marine commander on the ship. He was afraid. What was death, that men should fear it so? It could be only the end of all experience. That was inevitable, and beyond imagination, and he feared it. The preliminary bombardment did not take long. Two hundred and thirty ships of life held a single great trapped enemy in the center of their hollow sphere formation. The enemy did not give a damn if he was trapped because he was dead already and had always been dead. Listening in the dark to laconic voices, Mitch heard how the great berserker fought back, as if with the finest human courage and contempt for odds. Could you really fight machines when you could never make them suffer pain or fear? B ut you could defeat machine. And this time, for once, humanity had far too many guns. It would be easy to blow this berserker into vapor. Would it be best to do so? There were bound to be marine casualties m any boarding no matter how favorable the odds. But a true combat test of theboarding scheme was badly needed before the decisive battle came to be fought. And, too, this enemy might hold living prisoners who might be rescued by boarders. A High Commander probably did well to have a rocklike certainty of his own rightness. The order was given. The Spot and two other chosen ships fell in toward the battered enemy at the center of the englobement Straps held Mitch firmly, but the gravity had been turned off for the ramming, and weightlessness gave the impression that his body would fly and vibrate like a pellet shaken in a bottle with the coming impact. Soundless dark, soft cushioning, and lulling music; but a few words came into the helmet and the body cringed, knowing that outside were the black cold guns and the hurtling machines, unimaginable forces leaping now to meet. Now -- Reality shattered in through all the protection and padding. The shaped atomic charge at the tip of the ramming prow opened the berserker's skin. In five seconds of crashing impact, the prow vaporized, melted, and crumpled its length away, the true hull driving behind it until the Solar Spot was sunk like an arrow into the body of her enemy. Mitch spoke for the last time to the bridge of the Solar Spot, while his men lurched past him in free fall, their suit lights glaring. "My panel shows Sally Port Three the only one not blocked," he said. "We're all going out that way." "Remember," said a Venerian voice, "your first job is to protect this ship against counterattack." "Roger." If they wanted to give him offensively unnecessary reminders, now was not the time for argument. He broke contact with the bridge and hurried after his men. The other two ships were to send their boarders fighting toward the strategic housing, which would be somewhere deep in the berserker's center. The marines from the Solar Spot were to try to find and save any prisoners the berserker might hold. A berserker usually held prisoners near its surface, so the first search would be made by squads spreading out under the hundreds of square kilometers of hull. In the dark chaos of wrecked machinery just outside the sally port there was no sign yet of counterattack. The berserkers' unknown builders supposedly had not constructed them to fight battles inside their own metallic skins, upon which fact rode the fleet's hopes for success in a major battle. Mitch left forty men to defend the hull of the Spot, and himself led a squad of ten out into the labyrinth. There was no use setting himself up in a command post -- communications in here would be impossible, once out of line-ofsight. T he first man in each searching squad carried a mass spectrometer, an instrument that would detect the stray atoms of oxygen bound to leak from compartments where living beings breathed. The last man wore on one hand a device to blaze a trail with arrows of luminous paint; without a trail, getting lost in this three-dimensional maze would be almost inevitable. "Got a scent, Captain," said Mitch's spectrometer man, after five minutes' casting through the squad's assigned sector of the dying berserker. "Keep on it." Mitch was second in line, his carbine ready. The detector man led the way through a' dark and weightless mechanical universe, perhaps last seen by living eyes fifty-thousand years before. Several times he paused, adjusting his instrument and waving its probe. The pace was rapid; men trained in free fall, given plenty of holds to thrust and steer by could move faster than runners. A towering, multi-jointed shape rose up before the detector man, brandishing blue-white welding arcs like swords. Before Mitch was aware of aiming his carbine fired twice. The shells ripped the machine open and pounded it backward; it was only some semi-robotic maintenance device, not built for fighting. The detector man had nerve; he plunged right on. The squad kept pace with him, their suit lights scouting out unfamiliar shapes and distances, cutting knife-edge shadows m the vacuum, glare and darkness IF mellowed only by reflection. "Getting close!" And then they came to it. It was a place like the top of a huge dry well. An ovoid like a ship's launch, very thickly armored, had apparently been raised through the well from deep inside the berserker, and was now clamped to a dock. "It's the launch, it's oozing oxygen." "Captain, there's some kind of airlock on this side. Outer door's open." It looked like the smooth and easy entrance of a trap. "Keep your eyes open." Mitch went into the airlock. "Be ready to blast me out of here if I don't show in one minute." It was an ordinary airlock, probably cut from some human spaceship. He shut himself inside, and then got the inner door open. Most of the interior was a single compartment. In the center was an acceleration couch, holding a nude female mannikin. He drifted near, saw that her head had been depilated and that there were tiny beads of blood still on her scalp, as if probes had just been withdrawn. When his suit lamp hit her face she opened dead blue staring eyes, blinking mechanically. Still not sure that he was looking at a living human being, Mitch drifted beside her and touched her arm with metal fingers. Then ail at once her face became human, her eyes coming from death through nightmare to reality. She saw him and cried out. Before he could free her there were crystal drops of tears in the weightless air. Listening to his rapid orders, she held one hand modestly in front of her, and the other over her raw scalp. Then she nodded, and took into her mouth the end of a breathing tube which would dole air from Mitch's suit tank. In a few more seconds he had her wrapped in a clinging, binding rescue blanket, temporary proof against vacuum and freezing. The detector man had found no other oxygen source near the launch. Mitch ordered his squad back along their luminous trail. A t the sally port, he heard that things were not going well with the attack. Real fighting robots were defending the strategic housing, where its forcefield brain was buried, miles inside it. At least eight men had been killed down there. Two more ships were going to ram and board. Mitch carried the girl through the sally port and three more friendly hatches. The monstrously thick hull of the ship shuddered and sang around him; the Solar Spot, her mission accomplished, boarders retrieved, was being withdrawn. Fufl weight came back, and light. "In here, Captain." berserker's prisoner might have been deliberately infected with something contagious. Men knew how to deal with such tricks; the machines had tried them before. Inside the infirmary, he set her down. While medics and nurses # ft scrambled around, lie unfolded the blanket from tl le girl #  face, remembering to leave h curled over her shaven head, and opened his own helmet. "You can spit out the tube, now," he told her, in his rasping voice. She did so and opened her eyes again. "Oh, are you real?" she whispered. Her hand pushed its way out of the blanket folds and slid over his armor. "Oh, let me touch a human being again!" Her hand moved up to his exposed face and gripped his cheek and neck. "I'm real enough. You're all right, now." ' One of the bustling doctors came to a sudden, frozen halt, staring at the girl. Then he spun around on his heel and hurried away. What was wrong? Others sounded confident, reassuring the girl as they ministered to her. She wouldn't let go of Mitch, die became nearly hysterical when tiey tried gently to separate her from him. "I guess you'd better stay," a doctor told him. He sat there holding her hand, his helmet and gauntlets off. He looked away while they did medical things to her. They still spoke reassuringly; he thought they were finding nothing much wrong. "What's your name?" she asked him when the medics were through for the moment. Her head was bandaged; her slender arm came from between sheets to maintain contact with his hand. "Mitchell Spain." Now that he got a good look at her, a living young human female, he was in no hurry at all to get away. "What's yours?" A shadow crossed her face. "I'm -- not sure." There was a sudden commotion at the infirmary door; High Commander Karlsen was pushing past til he was standing beside Mitch, but he was not looking at Mitch. "Chris," he said to the girl. "Thank God." There were tears in his eyes. The Lady Christina de Dulcin turned her eyes from Mitch to Johann Karlsen, and screamed in abject terror VU C#XJw, Captain, tell me how you I v found her and brought her out." Mitch began his tale. Hie two men were alone in Karlsen's monastic cabin, just off the flagship's bridge. The fight was over, the berserker a torn and harmless hulk. No other prisoners had been aboard it. "They planned to send her back to me," Karlsen said staring into space, when Mitch had finished his account. "We attacked before it could launch her toward us. It kept her safe, and sent her back to me." Mitch was silent. Karlsen's red-rimmed eyes fastened on him. "She's been brainwashed, Poet. It can be done with some permanence, you know, when adIP vantage is taken of the subject's natural tendencies. I suppose she's never thought too much of me. There were political reasons for her to consent to our marriage... she screams when the doctors even mention my name. They tell me it's possible that horrible things were done to her by some man-shaped machine made to look like me. Other people are tolerable, to a degree. But it's you she wants to be alone with, you she needs." "She cried out when I left her, but -- me?" "The natural tendency, you see. For her to -- love -- the man who aaved her. The machines set her mind to fasten all the joy of rescue upon the first male human face she saw. The doctors assure me such things can be done. They've given her drugs, but even in sleep the instruments show her nightmares, her pain, and she cries out for you. What do you feel toward her?" "Sir, I'll do anything I can. What do you want of me?" "I want you to stop her suffering, what else?" Karlsen's voice rose to a nagged shout. "Stay alone with her, stop her pain if you can!" He got himself under a kind of control. "Go on. The doctors will take' you in. Your gear will be brought over from the Solar Spot " Mitch stood up. Any words he could think of sounded in his mind like sickening attempts at humor. He nodded, and hurried out. #Hphis is your last chance to join A us," said the Venerian, Salvador, looking up and down the dim corridors of this remote outer part of the flagship. "Our patience is worn, and we will strike soon. With the de Dulcin woman in her present condition, Nogara's brother is doubly unfit to command." The Venerian must be carrying a pocket spy-jammer; a multisonic whine was setting Hemphill's teeth on edge. And so was the Venerian. "Karlsen is vital to the human cause whether we like him or not," Hemphill said, his own patience about gone, but his voice calm and reasonable. "Don't you see to what lengths the berserkers have gone, to get at him? They sacrificed a perfectly good machine just to deliver his brainwashed woman here, to attack him psychologically." "Well. If that is true they have succeeded. If Karlsen had any value before, now he will be able to think of nothing but his woman and the A Martian." Hemphill sighed. "Remember, he refused to hurry the fleet to Atsog to try to save her. He hasn't failed yet. Until he does, you and the others must give up this plotting against him." Salvador backed away a step, and spat on the deck in rage. A calculated display, thought Hemphill. "Look to yourself, Earth man!" Salvador hissed. "Karlsen's days are numbered, and the days of those who around and walked away. "Wait!" Hemphill called, quietly. The Venerian stopped and turned with an air of arrogant reluctance. Hemphill shot him through the heart with a laser pistol. The weapon made a splitting, crackling noise in atmosphere. "You were good at talking and scheming," Hemphill mused aloud, prodding the dying man with his toe, making sure no second shot was needed. "But too devious, to lead the figjht against the damned machines." He bent quickly to search the body, and stood up elated. He had found a list of officers' names, some few underlined, some, including his own, followed by an interrogation point. Another document was a scribbled compilation of the units under command of certain Venerian officers. There were a few more notes; altogether, plenty of evidence for the arrest of the hard-core plotters. It might tend to split the fleet, but -- Hemphill looked up sharply, then relaxed. The man approaching w as one of his own, whom he had stationed nearby. "We'll take these to the Hih Commander at once." Hemphill waved the papers. "There'll be just time to clean out the traitors and reorganize command before we face battle." Yet he delayed for another moment, staring down at Salvador's corpse. The plotter had been overconfident and inept, but still dangerous. Did some sort of luck operate to protect Karlsen? Karlseo himself did not match Hemphill's ideal of a war leader, he was not as ruthless as machinery or as cold as metal. Yet the damned machines made great sacrifices to attack him. Hemphill shrugged, and hurried on his way. Uli Titch, I do love you. I know IV JL what the doctors say it is, but what do they really know about me?" Christina de Dulcin reclined upon a luxurious acceleration couch, in what was nominally the sleeping room of the High Commander's quarters. Karlsen had never occupied the place, preferring a small cabin. Mitchell Spain sat three feet from Chris, afraid to so much as touch her hand, afraid of what he might do, and what she might do. They were alone, and he felt sure they were unwatched. Chris had even demanded assurances against spy devices and Karlsen had sent his pledge. Besides, what kind of ship would have spy devices built into its highest officer's quarters? IF A situation for bedroom farce, but not when you had to live through it. The man outside taking the strain, had two hundred ships dependent on him now, and many human planets would be lifeless in five years if the coming battle failed. "What do you really know about me, Chris?" he asked. "I know you mean life itself to me. Oh, Mitch, I have no time now to be coy, and mannered, and every those things. And -- once -- I would have married a man like Karleen, for political reasons. But all that was before Atsog." Her voice dropped on the last word, and her hand on her robe made a convulsive grasping gesture. He had to lean forward and take it. "Chris, Atsog is in the past, now." "Atsog will never be over, completely over, for me. I keep remembering more and more of it. Mitch, the machines made us watch while they skinned General Bradin alive. I saw that. I can't bother with silly things like politics anymore, life is too short for them. I don't fear anything anymore, either, except driving you away... He felt pity and lust, and half a dozen other maddening things. "Karlsen's a good man," he said finally. She repressed a shudder. "I suppose," she said, in a controlled voice. "But Mitch, what do you feel for me? Tell the truth -- if you don't love me now, I know you will, in time." She smiled faintly, and raised a hand. "When my silly hair grows back." "Your silly hair." His voice almost broke. He reached to touch her face, then pulled his fingers back as if from a flame. "Chris, you're his girl, and too much depends on him." "I was never his." "Still... I can't lie to you, Chris; maybe I can't tell you the truth, either, about how I feel. The battle's coming, everything's up in the air, paralyzed. No one can plan..." He made an awkward, uncertain gesture. "Mitch." Her voice was understanding. "This is terrible for you, isn't it? Don't worry, I'll do nothing to make it worse. Will you call the doctor? As long as I know you're somewhere near, I think I can rest, now." vra K arisen studied Salvador's papers in silence for some minutes, like a man pondering a chess problem. He did not seem greatly surprised. "I have a few dependable men standing ready," Hemphill finally volunteered. "We can quickly -- arrest -- the leaders of this plot." The blue eyes searched him. truly necessary?" "I thought so," said Hemphill blandly. "He was reaching for his own weapon." Karlsen glanced once more at the papers and reached a decision. "Commander Hemphill, I want you to pick four ships, and scout the far edge of the Stone Place nebula. We don't want to push beyond it, without knowing where the enemy is, and give him a chance to get between us and Sol. Use caution -- to get the general location jjpf the bulk of his fleet is enough."  "Very well." Hemphill nodded. The reconnaissance made sense; and if Karlsen wanted to get Hemphill out of the way, and deal with his human opponents by his own methods, well, let him. Those methods often seemed soft-headed to Hemphill, but they seemed to work for Karlsen. If the damned machines for some reason found Karlsen unendurable, then Hemphill would support him, to the point of cheerful murder and beyond. What else really mattered in the universe, besides smashing the damned machines? Mitch spent hours every day alone with Chris. He kept from her the wild rumors which circulated throughout the fleet. Salvador's violent end was whispered about, and guards were posted near Karlsen 's quarters. Some said Admiral Kemal was on the verge of open revolt. And now the Stone Place was close ahead of the fleet; ebony shattered planets, blotting out half the sky. No ship oould move through the Stone Place; every cubic kilometer of it held enough matter to prevent C-plus travel or normal movement. The fleet headed toward one sharply defined edge, around which Hemphill's scouting squadron had already disappeared. # # Che grows a little saner, a little O calmer, every day," said Mitch, entering the High Commander's monastic cabin. Karlsen looked up from his desk. The papers before him looked like lists of names, in Venerian script. "I thank you for that word. Poet Does she speak of me?" "No." They eyed each other, the poor and ugly cynic, the anointed and handsome Believer. "Poet," Karlsen asked suddenly, "how do you deal with deadly enemies, when you find them in your power?" "We Martians are supposed to be a violent people. Do you expect me to pass sentence on myself?" Karlsen appeared not to understand, for a moment. "Oh. No. I was not speaking of -- you and I, and Chris. Not of personal affairs. I suppose I was only thinking aloud, asking for a sign." "Then don't ask me, ask your God. But didn't he tell you to forgive your enemies?" "He did." Karlsen nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. "You know, He wants a lot from us. A real hell of a lot." It was a peculiar sensation, to become suddenly convinced that the man you were watching was a genuine, non-hypocritical Believer. Mitch was not sure he had ever met the like before. Nor had he ever seen Karlsen quite like this -- passive, waiting, asking for a sign. As if there was in fact some Purpose outside the layers of a man's own mind, that IF could inspire him. Mitch thought about it. If... But that was all mystical nonsense. Karlsen's communicator sounded. Mitch could not make out what the other voice was saying, but he watched the effect on the High Commander. Energy and determination were coming back, there were subtle signs of the return of force, of the tremendous conviction of being right. It was like watching the gentle glow when a fusion power lamp was ignited. "Yes," Karlsen was saying. "Yes, well done." Then he raised the Venerian papers from his desk; it was as if he raised them only by force of will, his fingers only gesturing beneath them. "The news is from Hemphill," he said to Mitch, almost absently. "The berserker fleet is just around the bulge of the Stone Place from us. Hemphill estimates they are two hundred strong, and thinks them unaware of our presence. We attack at once. Man your battle station, Poet; God be with you." He turned back to his communicator. "Ask Admiral Kemal to my cabin at once. Tell him to bring his staff. In particular -- " He glanced at the Venerian papers and read off several names. "Good luck to you, sir." Mitch had delayed to say that. Before he hurried out, he saw Karlsen stuffing the Venerian papers into his trash disintegrator. B efore Mitch reached his own cabin, the battle horns were winding. He had armed and suited himself and was making his way back through the suddenly crowded narrow corridors toward the bridge, when the ship's speakers boomed uddenly to life, picking up Karlens voice:... whatever wrongs we have done you, by word, or deed, or by things left undone. I ask you now to forgive. And in the name of every man who calls me friend or leader, I pledge that any grievance we have against you, is from this moment wiped from memory." Everyone in the crowded passage hesitated in the rush for battle stations. Mitch found himself staring mto the eyes of a huge, well-armed Venerian ship's policeman, probably here on the flagship as some officer's bodyguard. There came an amplified cough and rumble, and then the voice of Admiral Kemal: "We -- we are brothers, Esteeler anl Venerian, and all of us. All of us, together now, the living against th berserker." Kemal's voice rose to a shout: "Destruction to the damned machines, and death to their builders! Let every man remember Atsog!" "Remember Atsog!" roared Karlaen's voice. In the corridor there was a moment's hush, like that before a towering wave smites down. Then a great insensate shout. Mitch found himself with tears in his eyes, yelling something. "Remember General Bradin," cried the big Venerian, grabbing Mitch and hugging him, lifting him, armor and all. "Death to his flayers!" "Death to the flayers!" The shout ran like a flame through the corridors. No one needed to be told that the same things were happening in all the ships in the fleet. All at once there was no room for anything less than brotherhood, no time for anything less than glory. "Destruction to the damned machines ! rt Near the flagship's center of gravity was the bridge, only a dais holding a ring of combat chairs, each with its clustered controls and dials. "Boarding Coordinator ready," Mitch reported, strapping himself in. The viewing sphere near the bridge's center showed the human advance, in two leapfrogging lines of over a hundred ships each. Each ship was a green dot in the sphere, positioned as truthfully as the flagship's computers could manage. The irregular surface of the Stone Place moved beside the battle lines in a series of jerks; the flagship was traveling by C-plus microjumps, so the presentation in the viewing sphere was a succession of still pictures at second-and-a-half intervals. Slowed by the mass of their C-plus cannon, the six fat green symbols of the Venerian heavy weapons ships labored forward, falling behind the rest of the fleet. I n Mitch's headphones someone was saying: "In about ten minutes we can expect to reach -- " The voice died away. There was a red dot in the sphere already, and IP then another, and then a dozen, rising like tiny suns around the bulge of dark nebula. For long seconds the men on the bridge were silent while the berserker advance came into view. Hemphill's scouting party must, after all, have been detected, for the berserker fleet was not cruising, but attacking. There was a battlenet of a hundred or more red dots, and now there were two nets, leapfrogging in and out of space like the human lines. And still the red berserkers rose into view, their formations growing, spreading out to englobe and crush a smaller fleet. "I make it three hundred machines," said a pedantic and somewhat effeminate voice, breaking the silence with cold precision. Once, the mere knowledge that three hundred berserkers existed might have crushed all human hopes. In this place, in this hour, fear itself could frighten no one. The voices in Mitch's headphones began to transact the business of opening a battle. There was nothing yet for him to do but listen and watch. The six heavy green marks were falling further behind; without hesitation, Karlsen was hurling his entire fleet straight at the enemy center. The foe's strength had been underestimated, but it seemed the berserker command had made a similar error, because the red formations too were being forced to regroup, spread themselves wider. The distance between fleets was still too great for normal weapons to be effective, but the laboring heavy-weapons ships with their C. plus cannon were now in range, and they could fire through friendly formations almost as easily as not At their volley Mitch thought he felt space jar around him; it was some freak secondary effect that the human brain noticed, really only wasted energy. Each projectile, blasted by explosives to a safe distance from the launching ship, mounted its own C-plus engine, which then accelerated the projectile while it flickered in and out of reality on microtimers. Their leaden masses magnified by velocity, the huge slugs skipped through existence like stones across water, passing like phantoms through the fleet of life, emerging fully into normal space only as they approached their target, traveling then like de Broglie wavieles, their matter churning internally with a phase velocity greater than that of light Almost instantly after Mitch felt the slugs' ghostly passage, one red dot began to expand and thin into a cloud, still tiny in the viewing sphere. Someone gasped. In a feW more moments, the flagship's own weapons, beams and missiles, went into action. The enemy center stopped, two came on smoothly as the screw of a vast meat-grinder, threatening englobement of the first line of human ships. K arlsen did not hesitate, and a great turning point flickered past in a second. The life-fleet hurtled on, deliberately into, the #S trap, straight for the hinge of the jaws. Space twitched and warped around Mitchell Spain. Every ship in the fleet was firing now, and every enemy answering, and the energies released plucked through his armor like ghostly fingers. Green dots and red vanished from the sphere, but not many of either as yet. The voices in Mitch's helmet slackened, as events raced into a pattern that shifted too fast for human thought to follow. Now for a time the fight would be computer against computer, faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing. The viewing sphere on the flagship's bridge was shifting ranges almost in a flicker. One swelling red then half of that, then half again. And now the flagship came into normal space for the final lunge of the attack, firing itself like a bullet at the enemy. Again the viewer switched to a closer range, and the chosen foe was no longer a red dot, but a great forbidding castle, tilted crazily, black against the stars. Only a hundred miles away, then half of that. The velocity of closure slowed to less than a mile a second. As expected, the enemy was accelerating, trying to get away from what must look to it like a suicide charge. For the last time Mitch checked his chair, his suit, his weapons. Chris , be safe in a cocoon. The berserker swelled in the sphere, gun flashes showing now around his steel-ribbed belly. A small one, this, maybe only ten times the flagship's bulk. Always a rotten spot to be found, in every one of them, under their skins old wounds, for the life of the galaxy had fought them for fifty thousand years. Try to run, you monstrous obsenity, try in vain. Closer, twisting closer. Now! Lights all gone, falling in the dark for one endless second -- Impact. Mitch's chair shook him, the gentle pads inside his armor battering and bruising him.' The expendable ramming prow would be vaporizing, shattering and crumpling, dissipating energy down to a level the battering-ram ship could endure. When the crashing stopped, noise still remained, a whining droning symphony of stressed metal and escaping air and gasses, like sobbing breathing. The great machines were locked together now, half the length of the flagship embedded in the berserker. A rough ramming, but no one on the bridge was injured. Damage control reported that the expected air leaks were being controlled. Gunnery reported that it could extend no turret inside the wound yet. Drive reported ready for a maximum effort. Drive! T he ship twisted in the wound it had made. This could be victory, here tearing the enemy open, sawing his metal bowels out into space. The bridge twisted with the structure of the ship, this warship that was more solid metal than anything else. For a moment, Mitch IP thought he could come close to comprehending the power of the engines men had built. "No use, Commander. We're wedged in." The enemy endured. The berserker memory would already be searched, the plans made, the counterattack on the flagship coming, without fear or mercy. The Ship Commander turned his head to look at Johann Karlsen. It had been foreseen that once a battle had reached this melee stage there would be little a High Commander could do. Even if the flagship were not half-buried in an enemy hull, all space nearby was a complete inferno of confused destruction, through which any meaningful communication would be impossible. If Karlsen was helpless now, neither could the berserker computers still link themselves into a single brain. "Fight your ship, sir," said Karlsen. He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair, staring at the clouded viewing sphere as if trying to make sense of the few flickering lights within it. The Ship Commander immediately ordered his marines to board. Mitch saw them out the sally ports. Then, sitting still was worse than any action. "Sir, I request permission to join the boarders." Karlsend seemed not to hear. He disqualified himself, for now, from any use of power; especially to set Mitchell Spain in the forefront of the battle, or to hold him bade. The Ship Commander considered. He wanted to keep a Boarding Coordinator on the bridge; but experienced men could be desperately short in the fighting. "Go, then. Do what you can to help defend our sally ports." IX T his berserker defended itself well with soldier-robots. The marines had hardly gotten away from the embedded hull when the counterattack came, cutting most of them off. In a narrow zig-zag passage leading out to the port near which fighting was heaviest, an armored figure met Mitch. "Captain Spain? I'm Sergeant Broom, acting Defense Commander here. Bridge says you're to take over. It's a little rough. Gunnery can't get a turret working inside the wound. The danker have all kinds of room to maneuver, and they keep coming at us." "Let's get out there, then." The two of them hurried forward, through a passage that became only a warped slit. The flagship was bent here, a strained swordblade forced into a chink of armor. "Nothing rotten here," said Mitch, climbing at last out of the sally port. There were sudden distant flashes of light, and the sudden glow of hot metal, by which to see braced girders, like tall buildings, among which the flagship had jammed itself. "Eh? No." Broom must be wondering what he was talking about. But die sergeant stuck to business, pointing out to Mitch where he had about a hundred men disposed among the chaos of tom metal and drifting debris. "The clankers don't use guns. They just drift in, sneaking, or charge in a wave, and get at us hand-to-hand, if they can. Last wave we lost six men." Whining gusts of gas came out of the deep caverns, and scattered blobs of liquid, along with the flashes of light, and deep shudders through the metal. The damned thing might be dying, or just getting ready to fight; there was no way to tell. "Any more of the boarding parties get back?" Mitch asked. "No. Doesn't look good for 'em." "Port defense, this is gunnery," said a cheerful radio voice. "We're getting the eighty-degree upper forward turret working." "Well, then use it!" Mitch rasped back. "We're inside, you can't help hitting something!" A minute later, searchlights moved out from doored recesses in the flagship's hull, and stabbed into the great chaotic cavern. "Here they come again!" yelled Broom. Hundreds of meters away, beyond the melted stump of the flagship's prow, a line of figures drifted nearer. The searchlights questioned them; they were not suited men. Mitch was opening his mouth to yell when the turret fired, 'throwing a raveling skein of sheel bursts across the advancing rank of machines. But more ranks were coming. Men were firing in every direction at machines that came clambering, jetting, drifting, in hundreds. M itch took off from the sally port, moving in diving weightless leaps, touring the outposts, shifting men when the need arose. "Fall back when you have to!" he ordered, on command radio. "Keep them from the sally ports!" His men faced no lurching conscription of mechanized pipefitters and moving welders; these devices were built, in one shape or another, to fight. As he dove between outposts, a thing like a massive chain looped itself to intercept Mitch; he broke it in half with his second shot. A metallic butterfly darted again, and he wasted four shots at it. He found an outpost abandoned, and started back toward the sally port, radioing ahead: "Broom, how is it there?" "Hard to tell, Captain. Squad IF leader, check in again, squad leaders -- " The flying thing darted back; Mitch sliced it with his laser pistol. As he approached the sally port, weapons were flaring all around him. This interior fight was turning into a microcosm of the confused struggle between fleets. He knew that still raged, for the ghostly fingers of heavy weapons still plucked through his armor continually. "Here they come again -- Dog, Easy, Nine-o , clock. ,, Coordinates of an attack straight at the sally port. Mitch found a place to wedge himself, and raised his carbine again. Many of the machines in this wave bore metal diields before them. He fired and reloaded, again and again. The flagship's one usable turret flamed steadily, and an almost continuous line of explosions marched across the machines' ranks in vacuum-silence, along with a traversing searchlight spot. The automatic cannons of the turret were far heavier than the marines' hand weapons; almost anything the cannon hit dissolved in radii of splinters. But suddenly there were machines on the flagship hull, attacking the turret from its blind side. Mitch called out warning, and started in that direction. Then all at once the enemy was around him. Two things caught a nearby man in their crab-like claws, trying to tear him apart between them. Mitch fired quickly at the moving figures and hit the man, blowing one leg off. A moment later one of the crabmachines was knocked away and broken by a hailstorm of shells. The other one beat the armored man to pieces against a jagged girder, and turned to look for its next piece of work. This machine was armored like a warship. It spotted Mitch and came for him, climbing through drifting rubble, shells and slugs rocking it but not crippling. It gleamed in his suit lights, reaching out bright pincers, as he emptied his carbine at the box where its cybernetics should be. H e drew his pistol and dodged, but like a falling cat it turned at him. It caught him by the left hand and the helmet, metal squealing and crunching. He thrust the laser pistol against what he thought was the brainbox, and held the trigger down. He and the machine were drifting, it could get no leverage for its strength. But it held him, working on his armored hand and helmet. Its brainbox, the pistol and tho fingers of his right gauntlet, were glowing hot. Something molten spattered across his faceplate, the glare half-blinding him. The laser burned out, fusing its barrel to the enemy in a glowing weld. His left gauntlet, still caught, was giving way, being crushed --  -- his hand -- Even as his suit's hypos and tourniquet bit him, he got his burned right hand free of the laser's butt and trigger guard and reached the plastic grenades at his belt. His left arm was going wooden, even before the claw released his mangled hand and fumbled slowly for a fresh grip. The machine was shuddering afl o ver, Kke an agonized man. Mitch whipped his right arm around to plaster a grenade on the far side of the brainbox. Then with arms and legs he strained against the crushing, groping claws. His suit-servos whined wkh overload, being overpowered, two seconds, dose eyes, three -- The explosion stunned him. He found himself drifting free. Lights were flaring. Somewhere was a sally port; he had to get there and defend it. His head cleared slowly. He had the feeling that someone was pressing a pair of fingers against his chest. He hoped that was only some reaction from the hand. It was hard to see anything, with his faceplate still half-covered with splashed metal, but at last he spotted the flagship hull. A chunk of something came within reach, and he used k to propel himself toward the sally port, spinning weakly. He dug out a fresh clip of ammunition and then realized his carbine was gone. The space near the sally port was foggy with shattered mechanism; and there were stffl men here, firing their weapons out into the great cavern. Mitch recognized Broom's armor in. the flaring lights, and got a welcoming wave. "Captain! They've knocked out the turret, and most of our searchlights. But we've wrecked an awful lot of 'em -- how's your arm?" "Feels like wood. Got a carbine?" "Say again?" Broom couldn't hear him. Of course, the damned thing had squeezed his helmet and probably wrecked his radio transmitter. He put his helmet against Broom's, and said: "You're in charge. I'm going in. Get back out if I can." Broom was nodding, guiding him watchfully toward the port. Gun flashes started up around them thick and fast again, but there was nothing he could do about that, with two steady dull fingers pressing into his chest. Lightheaded. Get back out? Who was he fooling? Lucky if he got in without help. He went into the port, past the interior guards' niches, and through an airlock. A medic took one look and came to help him. N ot dead yet, he thought, aware of people and lights around him. There was something else to notice, too; he felt no more ghostly plucking of space-bending weapons. Then he understood that he was being wheeled out of surgery, and that people hurrying by had triumph in their faces. He was still too groggy to frame a coherent question, but words he heard seemed to mean that another ship had joined in the attack on this berserker. That was a good sign, that there were spare ships around. The stretcher bearers set him down near the bridge, in an area that was being used as a recovery room; there were many wounded, strapped down and given breathing tubes against possible failure of gravity or air. Mitch could see signs of battle damage around him. How could that be, this far inside the ihip. The sally ports had been held. There was a long gravitic shudder. "They've disengaged her," said someone nearby. Mitch passed out for a little while. The next thing he could see was that people were converging on the bridge from all directions. Their faces were happy and wondering, as if some joyful signal had called them. Many of them carried what seemed to Mitch the strangest assortment of burdens : weapons, books, helmets, bandages, trays of food, bottles, even bewildered children, who must have been just rescued from the berserker's grip. Mitch hitched himself up on his right elbow, ignoring the twinges in his bandaged chest and burnt fingers. Still he could not see the combat chairs of the bridge, for the people moving between. From all the corridors of the ship they came, solemnly happy, men and women crowding together in the brightening lights. An hour or so later, Mitch roused to find that a viewing sphere had been set up nearby. The space where the battle had been was a jagged new nebula of gaseous metal, a few little fireplace coals against the ebony folds of the Stone Place. Someone near Mitch was tiredly, but with animation, telling the story to a recorder: " -- fifteen ships and about eight thousand men lost are our present count. Every one of our ships seems to be damaged. We estimate ninety -- that's nine-zero -- berserkers destroyed. Last count was a hundred and seventy-six captured, or wrecking themselves. It's still hard to believe. A day like this... we must remember that thirty or more of them escaped, and are as deadly as ever. We will have to go on hunting and fighting them for a long time, but their power as a fleet has been broken. We can hope that capturing this many machines will at last give us some definite lead on their origin. Ah, best of all, some twelve thousand human prisoners have been freed. "Now, how to explain our success? Those of us not Believers of one kind or another will say victory came because our hulls were newer and stronger, our long-range weapons new and superior, our tactics unexpected by the enemy -- and our marines able to defeat anything the berserkers could send against them. "Above all, history will give credit to High Commander Karlsen, for his decision to attack, at a time when his reconciliation with the Venerians had inspired and united the fleet The High Commander is here now, visiting the wounded who lie in rows... K arlsen's movements were so slow and tired that Mitch thought he too might be wounded, though no bandages were visible. He shuffled past the ranked stretchers, with a word or nod for each of the wounded. Beside Mitch's pallet he stopped, as if recognition was a shock. "She's dead. Poet," were the first words he said. The ship turned under Mitch for #f a moment; then he could be calm, as if he had expected to hear this. The battle had hollowed him out Karlsen was telling him, in a withered voice, how the enemy had forced through the flagship's hull a kind of torpedo, an infernal machine that seemed to know how the rtiip was designed, a moving atomic pile that had burned its way through the High Commander's quarters and almost to the bridge before it could be stopped and quenched. The sight of battle damage here should have warned Mitch. But he hadn't thought. Shock and drugs kept him from thinking or feeling much of anything now, but he could see her face, looking as it had in the gray deadly place from which he had rescued her. Rescued. I am a weak and foolish man," Karlsen was saying. "But I have never been your enemy. Are you mine?" "No. You forgave all your enemies. Got rid of them. Now you won't have any, for a while. Galactic hero. But, I don't envy you." "No. God rest her." But Karlsen's face was still alive, under all the grief and weariness. Only death oould finally crush this man. He gave the ghost of a smile. "And, the second part of the prophecy, eh? I am to be defeated, and to die owning nothing. As if a man could die any other way." "Karlsen, you're all right. I think you may survive your own success. Die in peace, some day, still hoping for your Believers' heaven." "The day I die -- " Karlsen turned his head slowly. "I'll remember this day. This glory, this victory for aU men." Under the weariness and grief he had still his tremendous assurance -- not of being right, Mitch thought now, but of being committed to right. "Poet, when you are able, come and work for me." "Someday, maybe. Now, I can live on the battle bounty. And I have work. If they can't grow back my hand -- why, I can write with one." Mitch was suddenly very tired. A hand touched his good shoulder; a voice said; "God be with you. Johann Karlsen moved on. Mitch wanted only to rest. Then, to his work. The world was bad, and all men were fools -- but there were men who would not be crushed. And that was a thing worth f Two Classic in One Boole I by Theodore Sturgeon f in Galaxy Magabook ## -- on sale at your newsstand soonl  IF IF  Short Stor # His rendezvous was with a man he had not seen in half a human life -- and with something else i W arhurst leaned on a tubular rail and watched the passengers boarding the ship. This was one of his favorite occupations, there being nothing more sinful available. Nice to see a change of faces once in a while. Nicer still to see an occasional female one as reminder of the fact that the human race is not an all-male society. And, anyway, he liked to speculate about who these people were and what particular talents they possessed and why they were going wherever they were going. Up the duralumin gangway they came, the fat and the thin, the short and the tall. The majority were men in their twenties or thirties. Advenliness and beat an existence out of alien soil. Fodder for the faraway. Among them might be a criminal or two as well as a few misanthropes. One man, a little balding and slightly older than the rest, wore a calm, phlegmatic air. Warhurst weighed him up as some kind of scientist or maybe a doctor. The three girls following immediately behind had a brisk, professional manner and might be nurses. There was a serious shortage of doctors and nurses out there. Van Someren joined him at the rail, draped himself over it and gazed down. He was the ship's agent and, as the local representative of the owner, was entitled to enough respect to avoid a charge of mutiny. Chewing a splinter erf wood, he watched the ascending passengers as if seeking the one escaping with the green eye of the little yellow god. After a while he removed the splinter, straightened himself and spoke. "Take a look at Methuselah." Obediently Warhurst took a look. A gangling and skinny oldster was coming aboard dragging a large and badly battered case. A ship's loader tried to lend a hand with the case. The ancient repelled him fiercely with emphatic but unbearable words. Defiantly he lugged the case upward. His face became more visible as it neared: it was complete with two eyes, a nose and a pure white Fancy Dan mustache. The eyes were rheumy but shrewd, the nose was suffering from battle fatigue but still breathing. "Eighty if a day," said Warhurst. "They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel." "He's all yours," said Van Someren. "What d'you mean, all mine?" "You're the deck officer. He's a privileged passenger. Count it up on your fingers." # # Teepers! Is he a trig stockholder or something?" "As far as I know he isn't worth a cent. All I can say is that I have my orders and those are to teH you Harlow and that he's a privileged passenger. I am further instructed to state with suitable emphasis that you will be held personally responsible for his safe arrival and that if you fail in this duty your offal will be required for feeding to the vultures." "Nuts to that," said Warhurst. "If he's a chronic invalid he belongs to the ship's medic." "Since when have invalids been toted into the wilds?" "There has to be a first time," Warhurst protested. "Well, this ain't it. He's not a sick man as far as I know. They wouldn't ship him if he were." "I should think so, too. We've no geriatric ward on this vessel." "There's no psychiatric one either but they let you zoom around." Van Someren smirked triumphantly, had a brief chew on his hunk of wood, then diagnosed, "I know what's the matter with you. You've figured on squiring those three dames around -- on company time and with full pay." "No harm in that, is there?" "I wouldn't know, never having experienced your in-flight technique. But orders are orders and you obey them or walk the plank into sharkinfested seas. The owners say you're to nursemaid this Harlow relic. Think of him as your poor old father and treat him with filial care." "Get out of my sight, you darned woodpecker," said Warhurst. "All right, all right, have it your IF #wn way." Van Someren smirked igain and wandered off. Leaving the rail, Warhurst went below, pushed through a group of passengers cluttering a narrow corridor, found his man standing firmly astride his big case. He went up lo him. "Mr. Harlow?" "Correct. Who told you?" "It's my business to know these Aings. I'm Steve Warhurst." "That's a heck of a coincidence." "What is?" "That being your name. Could easily have been anything else, Joe Snape, Theophilus Bagley or whatever. But it had to be... what did you say?" "Steve Warhurst. I'm the deck officer." "That so? What do you do for a crust?" "I look after the welfare of the passengers," explained Warhurst, patiently. "Man, you've got it made," said Harlow. iiT do plenty of other things," X Warhurst persisted, not liking the insinuation. "Taking care of the human ioad is only one of my jobs." "I should think so, too. You're wearing enough gold to be worth mining." Harlow let his watery, yellow-tinged eyes examine the passengers within visual range. "Real bunch of sissies. In my young days they needed no fancy-pants deck officers. A man climbed aboard and strapped himself down good and tight. If a strap busted he got an eye knocked out." "Things have changed," Warhurst reminded. "So I've heard." "Nobody has to be mummywrapped or encapsulated. We've got null-G. You'll float like a feather as we rise. When the siren yowls we'll both go up without the aid of nets." "Human race is getting soft," opined Mr. Harlow. "I'd like to see your transit voucher." Warhurst prompted. "What for?" "It records your cabin number. I'll take you to it." "Listen," ordered Harlow, baring a set of beaten-up teeth, "I know my cabin number and I'm capable of reaching it under my own steam." "I wasn't suggesting wheeling you there. I merely want to show you where it is." "Show me?" Harlow registered incredulity. "Let me tell you I've found my way through places that'd give you the holy horrors. I don't need any snub-nosed kid to tell me which way to go." "No offense," soothed Warhurst. "How about me helping you with your case?" "Sooot!" bawled Harlow. First Officer Winterton, who happened to be passing, stopped and asked, "Is something wrong?" "This gilded cutie," informed Harlow, nodding at Warhurst, "thinks I'm a cripple." "I offered to help with his case," explained Warhurst. "There you are -- what did I tell you?" said Harlow. "It was quite proper of him," Winterton assured Harlow. "Mr. Warhurst is the ship's host so far as the passengers are concerned." "Then why doesn't he pick on the others? Some of 'em are making ready to faint." "Why didn't you?" Winterton asked Warhurst, secretly beginning to regret his intervention. "The agent said he was a P.P." H arlow let go his grip on his case, grabbed Warhurst's tie, pulled its knot to quarter size and growled, "if you want to call me names cafl 'em proper, as main to man." "A P.P. is a privileged passenger," said Warhurst, fighting for breath. "Privileged?" He let go the tie, irritated and baffled. "Never asked for a privilege in my life and I'm not starting now." "You don't have to ask. The status is thrust upon you." "Why?" "How the devil should I know why?" retorted Warhurst, feeling far from jovial himself. He freed his neck and pumped oxygen. "I get orders and I don't question the reasons for them." "There aren't any reasons," Harlow informed. "Some jerk of a clerk must have got things mixed up. Is there a big shot named Barlow on board?" "No." "Can't be him then, can it? Not if he isn't here. Anyway, nobody's going to coddle me, see? Prize fool I'd look being baby-sitted by some young squirt dolled up like a Christmas tree." "The young squirt," Winterton pointed out, "happens to be fortytwo years old and has twenty years of space service behind him." "Just as I thought," said Harlow. "Still wet behind the ears and got plenty to learn. I could eat six like him before breakfast and still be afl set for a real feed." He gripped his case and heaved it off the floor, his fingers thin and veined, with knuckles like knobs. "You decorated dummies go and prop up the staggerers. I can fend for myself," he grunted. Case in hand, he went along the corridor and peered at the number on each cabin door. His pace was slow, laborious. Turning the end corner, he passed from sight. "Awkward customer, huh?" said Warhurst. "A savage old-timer," decided Winterton. "Aren't many of them left these days. Wonder why he's been rated a P.P. The last one I came across was a retired employee. Been fifty years with the company. They gave him free passage to Earth along with the full treatment." "We're not heading for home," said Warhurst. "Yeah, I know. We're making for six underpopulated underdeveloped planets reserved exclusively for the young and healthy. The powersthatbe seem to have made an exception for this Harlow character. I can't imagine why." "Maybe he's not fit to live with so they're isolating him in the nevernever." "Oh, he's not that bad." "I know," said Warhurst. "I was only kidding." T hey were four days out before Warhurst renewed the encounter. He'd been kept busy awhile on various matters that always crowded up immediately after departure or shortly before arrival. The interim period was the time when he could pay more attention to social duties. In dress uniform, with face closely shaved and pants pressed, he went to the lounge all set to play the part of guide, companion and father confessor to any lonely hearts who might be moping around. It was a job that had endless possibilities none of which ever came to anything. As he expressed it in his more complaining moments, whenever the basket of fruit was being handed around he invariably got the lemon. And again it was so. The feminine portion of the ship's load obviously was neither solitary nor bored. There was a clinking of glasses and a steady babble of conversation and no sweet face was visibly yearning for his company. Only old Harlow sat by himself, hunched in a corner behind a small and empty table. With a shrug of resignation Warhurst crossed the lounge, said, "Mind if I sit here?" "I can suffer it. Had plenty of worse things happen to me." "You seem to have survived," said Warhurst, offering a wary smile. "What comes of pulling my head in every time the chopper fell." Harlow inspected him with faint disapproval. "Done yourself up for Sunday, huh? How oome you're picking on me? Those girls refuse to be fascinated?" "The ladies are being entertained, as you can see." "Good thing, too. Keep 'em out of mischief." He glowered across the room and muttered something under his breath. Then he informed, "Soon as I came in one of 'em put on a sloppy smile and said, 'Hello, Pop!' Must think I'm a penny balloon or something. Pop! Put her in her place, I did. Told her my name is Bill and not to forget it." "Mind if I call you Bill?" "Call me any durned thing you like so long as it ain't Pop." "Same with me. I don't care what I'm called so long as it isn't a gilded cutie or a snub-nosed kid." "Oh, well, fair's fair, I guess." "You can call me Steve." "Knew a fellow of that name once. Went into Reedstar and never came out. Tough luck -- but that's the way it is." "The way what is?" # #T ife," said Harlow. "TheyL' come and they go and some never come back." Warhurst changed the subject "Care to have a drink with me?" "Depends. Wouldn't give belly room to all this cocktail muck. Strictly for women that stuff is. Hammerhead juice is the only thing fit to drink and they don't know what it is these days. Human race is going down the drain." "Leave it to me." Warhurst got up and went to the bar. "Joe, the old fellow I'm with likes a blowtorch pointed down his gullet. Says there's nothing like hammerhead juice. What have you got that he might consider a few cuts above goat's milk?" With narrowed eyes Joe gazed across the lounge and studied Harlow. He seemed to be struggling with a problem. Finally he bent under the counter and came up with a bottle and poured a measure of green, oily liquid. "This should be diluted with gin. He's getting it raw. Comes as near as it can get to being unfit for human consumption. Same for you?" "No, sir. Got to think of the fire hazard. I'll have a shot of crewrum, official issue." Joe served that too, leaned over the bar and whispered, "Know who that old dodderer is?" "No. Do you?" "No." "Then we're back where we started." "Listen," urged Joe, "and I'll tell you something. I've been at this job as long as you've been at yours. I've never seen hammerhead juice and nobody's ever asked for it and I haven't got any." "It's just his figure of speech," suggested Warhurst. "He means some kind of rotgut." "Listen," ordered Joe for the second time. "I've never seen the stuff but I have heard of it. My father used to mention it when he conned me into growing up and following him into the space service. According to him only one bunch ever asked for it and had the intestinal fortitude to beat it into submission." He paused to give a wellcalculated touch of drama, finished, "The Legion of Planetary Scouts." "It adds up," said Warhurst impassively. Picking up the drinks, he took them across, carefully placed them on the table. He sat down and looked at Harlow. "In the long ago those drinks would have been two tantalising globules floating around in mid-air. We'd have had to swim after them, gulping like goldfish. But now we can lay gravity on the floor like a carpet or roll it up and hide H in the attic when we don't want it. Things have changed. I told you that before, didn't I?" "You did." # #TT #eh, I apologize for doing so.  V I took it for granted that you hadn't been on a ship in yean -- and you said nothing to disillusion me. I was wrong." "How have you figured k out?" asked Harlow, eyeing him carefully. Warhurst jerked a thumb toward the bar. "Joe there says nobody but planetary scouts ever asked foe hammerhead juice." "Fat lot he knows about it. He's not old enough to remember." "His father told him." "That so? Maybe he was right I dunno." "You do know," Warhurst insisted. "I think you've been a planetary scout and that you may be one of the last of the original legion." IP "There'll never be a last, not so long as photographic reconnaisance Isn't enough and somebody has to trudge on foot to see what's under the mist and the trees." Harlow gulped his drink, clamped his eyes shut and gripped the rim of the table. Then he opened the eyes, let out a brief gasp and said, "Not bad for cough medicine. Gives a feller a slight jolt." "Joe thinks it verges on cyanide." "He would. They're weak at the knees these days." "See here, Bill, tell me something. When were you last on a ship?" "Couple of years ago." "A passenger liner?" "No -- it was a government survey ship." "With null-G?" "You bet," said Harlow emphatically. "Couldn't have gone the distance otherwise. Even at that it took plenty long enough to return to base." "How long?" "What's it to you?" "Nothing at all," admitted Warhurst. "I'm just plain nosey. How long did it take?" "Fourteen years," informed Harlow with some reluctance. W arhurst rocked back. "Fourteen? Ye gods! Any G-less ship using up that much time must have been out to the very edge of exploration." "That's right. Fourteen out and fourteen back. And I was stuck there for eight years as well, given up for lost. That makes thirty-six in all. A slice out of a man's life." He took a good suck at his drink, repeated the eye-closing and tablegripping business, said, "Hah!" and then finished, "After which I had a fight on my hands." "Over what?" "Feller called me a liar." "Didn't he believe you'd been gone that long?" "He believed it all right. Couldn't deny the facts. Made a long, oily speech about the time I'd put in and the immense value of the reports I'd made. Real greasy type he was, with medals and badges and gold rings on his sleeves and a fancied-up cap like yours. Buttered me all over -- and then called me a liar." "Why?" "Said that around the time I had left -- which was before he was born -- I'd not told the truth about my age and that he had the documentary evidence to prove it. Said I should never have been sent out in the first place and that it was a damned disgrace." "Had you told the truth?" Warhurst pressed. "Didn't tell a lie," Harlow evaded. "Told 'em I was plenty young enough to go ten times round the galaxy." "And were you?" "Yes, sir! I still am." Harlow scowled at the floor. "This pudding-headed pipsqueak wasn't buying that. Said I was far too old for further service and that I'd be given free passage back to Terra. Durn it, I'm only eighty-eight and that's me, bang, slap, finish. A dead dog. I got riled. Terra, I yelled, Terra? Haven't seen the place in nearly seventy years and don't know a soul there. What's on Terra for me? Nothing! If you're exporting the garbage you can ship me to Kangshan. At least I've got an old partner there." "What did he say to that?" "Wouldn't look me straight in the eyes. Muttered something about how Kangshan was strictly for characters a lot younger than me. Said he didn't think they'd have me there even if he got down on his knees and begged." "You had an answer to that one, I guess?" # # Cure did. Told him he wasn't O old enough to speak for others. Told him to signal Kangshan and ask if they'd take me." "Which I presume he did." "Must have done, though he took long enough about it. Eventually another official nincompoop handed me my sailing orders and made another oily speech. I tell you, Warble -- " "Warhurst. Steve Warhurst." "I tell you if brass-hat gab could be boosted through tubes we'd all be way out beyond. Seems more talk than action these days. Human race is losing its capacity to suffer." "I wouldn't say that. Bill. Things done the hard way aren't necessarily done better. Nor are they done badly because done the easy way. The essence of progress consists of finding ways of avoiding oldtime difficulties." "That may be, bat -- " Harlow paused, mused  short while, ventured, "Well, maybe I'm not as young as I used to be. But that doesn't make me a dead dog, does it?" "Not at all." "Kangshan doesn't think so." "You say you've got a partner there?" "Yes, Jim Lacey. He's all I've got in creation. No scout operates alone except by accident. They go places in small bunches or often in pairs. You fellows who zoom around in shiploads don't know what partnership really means. A man's sidekick is his only contact with the human race when the rest of it is other brain to help solve problems, another pair of hands to work and fight. With each other a couple of trouble-seekers can get by in circumstances where if alone they'd go nuts. So I'm telling you that in faraway places partnership is something very special." "I can well imagine," said Warhurst. "Lacey was my first and longest space-partner. We were born in the same town, lived on the same street, went to the same schools and eventually joined the service together. We were dropped into some hot spots and shared the grief when things became rough and tough. Now I'm going to Kangshan. I promised I'd meet him there." "After best part of forty years he wouldn't figure on seeing you again, would he?" With a stubborn set to his jaw, Harlow repeated, "I said I'd meet IF him and that's all that matters." He stood up, a little creakily, "My turn. Same again?" Warhurst nodded. Taking the empty glasses, Harlow carried them to the bar. "A crew-rum and another shot of that green hair oil." to be sociable. Harlow hammered on the bar and bawled, "Don't call me Pop, you bottle-juggling ape! I could outmarch you with a ninety-pound pack and then do a tap dance." Grabbing the drinks, he brought them back, seated himself and snarled, "Booze-slingers in space. They'll be organizing beauty contests next. Human race is on die skids." "Here's to the old days," said Warhurst. He drank, wobbled his Adam's apple, closed his eyes and held on tight. "For a beginner you show promise, Wharton." "Warhurst, if you don't mind." r here was the inevitable spell of rushed work before the landing but Warhurst got through it in good time and stationed himself at the head of the gangway. The formality was always the same; as each passenger began the descent Warhurst put on his most cordial smile and speeded the parting guest with a word of good cheer. "Hope you've enjoyed your trip, Mr. Soandso. Good-by! Best of luck!" Harlow came last, having listened to the swan song a dozen times while waiting beside his big case. Heaving the case forward, he stopped at the top of the steps. "Why don't they tape it and save you the bother? Thought you said there's nothing wrong with doing things the easy way." "Passengers like the personal touch." "They would. Mothers' pets. Think they're mighty tough but I could beat 'em away with my hat." His watery eyes gazed across the primitive spaceport and into the far distance. "Last landing for me. Just as well, I reckon. Got to come sometime and it might as well be now." Warhurst held out a hand. "Goodby, Bill. Glad to have known you." Giving the hand a couple of prim shakes, Harlow responded with, "We got along, Warburton." Then he lugged his case down the steps and across the tarmac. A big, beefy man met him, chatted briefly, tried to take the case and was fiercely repelled. The big man then led him to a private floater and climbed aboard. Harlow got his case in and followed. A few seconds later the floater emitted a high-pitched whine, shuddered a couple of times, then soared. Heading swiftly northward, it diminished to a dot and vanished. Winterton appeared at the exit, said with satisfaction, "All off. That's got rid of another menagerie." "I often wonder just what happens to them," Warhurst ventured. "I don't," said Winterton. "Couldn't care less. Got more than enough to worry about." Soon afterward the ship took off and headed back to base with little load aboard. Outward cargo was always plentiful, inward usually small. All they took out of Kangshan was ten tons of osmiridium and two passenger. T k he ship made six relatively short hauls from base and one long run to Terra. Then it arrived at Kangshan again. Three years had passed since its last visit but the scene had changed only slightly. The spaceport was now a fraction larger and had a new control tower. The adjacent capital town of Wingbury had added a couple of hundred houses and that was all. Winterton came along and asked, "Want to go out?" "Who wouldn't?" responded Warhurst. "Aren't we beating it yet?" "The refinery says it can boost the return load if we'll wait four days. The agent says we're to stand by and take it. Anyone who wants to run around on solid earth can do so." He waved an arm in the general direction of Wingbury. "Go help yourself." "Thanks," said Warhurst. "Nine thousand population and one sodabar." "You don't have to go." "I'll go. Give my legs some exercise if nothing else." Donning his dress uniform, he went into town. He'd been there a couple of times before and knew what to expect. One main street with forty quiet, understocked shops. It was a settlement right on the space frontier, growing and developing with chronic slowness. One could not expect the sophisticated joys of civilization on a planet with two small towns, thirty villages and a total population of less than fifty thousands. He strolled ten times up and down the main street and stared into the half-empty windows of shops. Becoming bored, he visited the sodabar, took a stool near to the only other customer, a leathery-faced character in his early thirties. The customer nodded. "Hi, sailor! What ship?" " Salamander ." "Should have known she was due. I lose touch these days, being well out of town. When are they going to start sending the really big boats?" "Darned if I know." The other nodded again, mused a bit, went on, "Hard luck on you fellows. Nothing for you here. Progress takes time. But things will be different if you can live long enough to see 'em." "I know," said Warhurst. "Got no relatives here, no friends, nobody you can visit?" "Not a soul." "Too bad." "I palled on with a fellow who landed on the last trip, three years ago. Wouldn't mind seeing how he's making out." "Well, what's to stop you?" "Lost track of him," Warhurst explained. "Saw him off the ship and don't know where he went." T he other twisted around on his stool and pointed across the road. "Try the governmental building over there, department of imIF migration. They register every arrival and should be able to tell you where he is." "Thanks!" Finishing his drink, Warhurst crossed the road, entered the building and found the department on the second floor. He spoke to the young clerk behind the counter. "I'm trying to trace a recent immigrant." "Date of arrival and full name?" Warhurst gave the information. Digging out a ledger, the clerk thumbed through it, asked, "Ex the Salamander?" "Yes, that's my ship." "Exempted from age restriction. Taken into the charge of Joseph Buhl. I don't know what -- " Another clerk standing nearby interrupted with, "Buhl? I saw Joe Buhl a couple of minutes ago. He went up the road as I was looking through the window." "He's your man," informed the first clerk. "You should have no trouble finding him." He extracted a register and consulted it. "His floater is numbered D#. You'll find it in the park alongside the spaceport." "What does he look like?" "As tall as you but a lot heavier. Has a slight paunch, big red face and bushy eyebrows." "I'll track him down," Warhurst said. "It'll give me something to do." Trudging back to the spaceport, he reached the floaterpark and found machine D#. He sat on the fat tire of a landing wheel and waited. There were twelve other floaters in the park. Far across the tarmac stood only one spaceship, his own, waiting for its promised payload. After forty minutes a hefty, floridfaced man approached. Warhurst came to his feet. "Mr. Buhl?" "That's right." "Thought I'd like to see Bill Harlow. I've been told that you should know where he is." Buhl studied him levelly. "Got bad news for you." "Is he -- ?" "Died a year ago, aged ninety." "I'm sorry to hear that." "You an old friend of his?" Buhl inquired. "Couldn't be, having only half his years. I kept him company on the last trip. Took a liking to the cantankerous old cuss and he seemed to find me bearable." "I understand. Why did you figure on looking him up -- got some time on your hands?" "A bit." "Well, maybe I can fill it in for you, mister -- ?" "Steve Warhurst." "I'll give you a ride and show you something migjhty interesting." B uhl unlocked the floater's door and motioned the other to enter. Warhurst got in and settled himself. Buhl plumped heavily into the pilot's seat, slammed the door, took the machine up and turned its nose to the north. "Know much about this planet?" "Not a lot," Warhurst confessed. "There are so many newly settled worlds these days that we space wanderers get to learn little about any of them. On eadh planet the spaceport and adjacent town is about all we're familiar with." "Then I'll educaite you somewhat, " Buhl said. "This planet was discovered by a survey ship called the Kangshan and its captain named it after his ship. He made the usual aerial survey but -- as is always the oase -- it wasn't enough. He came down low to test the atmosphere and found it satisfactory. So he dumped a couple of scouts and took off, leaving them to face a forty days' survival test." "Bait," Warhurst contributed. "Correct. Scouts are bait.' That's what they're for -- among other things." Buhl gazed meditatively forward while the floater hissed steadily on. "The two were Jim Lacey and Bill Harlow." "Ah! I never knew that." "You know now. They tramped around looking for exploitable prospects -- and trouble. Eventually they arrived at a big quartzite monolith known today as The Needle. Mineral-rich mountains lay to the west, a big river and falls to the east. Time was pressing. Guess what?" "They split," Warhurst hazarded. "Correct. They broke the rules and split up. It was no crime but it was a risk. Harlow headed west and Lacey went east They agreed to meet at The Needle four days later. Harlow returned on time lugging a load of stuff for assay. He camped at The Needle for a couple of days and then went looking for Lacey. He found him near the river, dead." "Huh?" Warhurst looked baffled. "The old fellow talked as if Lacey were still alive." "He would," said Buhl. "That's the way these oldtimers were made." He dropped the floater's nose and began to lose altitude. "Lacey had had his feet bitten off by a mudwallower. He'd blasted it as he fell and thus didn't get eaten. But then he went under from loss of blood. Harlow buried him, marked the grave, examined the wallower and made careful notes about it. In due time the Kangshan homed on his tiny beacon and picked him up. The planet was settled on the strength of his report and wallowers have since been hunted down and exterminated." # # T T arlow didn't say a word A A about all this," complained Warhurst. "Typical of him. If he bragged it was always about how he could keep going long after us softer types had dropped." Buhl pointed downward. A wide river now wound beneath with a monster cascade straight ahead. "Lacey Falls." Turning away from the river he brought the floater down to twenty feet above a rough dirt road. He followed the road for a few miles until a small town rolled into sight. "Look to your right." Obediently, Warhurst looked and was in time to see a large roadside "Named after him, eh?" "That's right. I'm the mayor. We IF gave him a home, comfort and companionship in his last days. It was all we could do for him." "I'm glad of that." "Wasn't much use, though. He'd been kept alive beyond his years by change, actvity and danger. He was killed by leisure and safety. There was no solution to the problem and he knew it. Often he'd leave town, walk out to The Needle and brood." "Why?" "Because he'd told Laoey he'd meet him there. He never forgot it It became an obsession towards the end. His last words were, 'I told Jim I'd meet him." They crossed the town, landed at the base of an enormous quartzite rock. They got out and stared up at it lit soared for two hundred feet, the facets of its crystals glittering in the sun. "The Needle," informed BuhL "It's not unique. There are other formations like it. We dug up' Lacey's bones and buried them here. We buried Harlow with them." He led the way around to the front of The Needle. A plain, unadorned grave lay at its foot. On the face of the rock a skilled mason had polished a square yard of crystal and cut a neat inscription thereon. All it said was: James Lacey and by Frank HeHsort i Author of Under Pressure, Dun by KaHb Loumor (Author of Tho Croat Timo Modbfa. Noox oarf lb. KotM stortoo) by Gordon k. Dickson (Author of Dorsad , On Messenger M om fain, etc,) -- and many other fine stories are in the April Galaxy -- on sale now! IF # Short Story He knew he was being automated out of a job -- but he didn't know what ebel tory No. # TO: Control Board Chairman, World Factory Central Bottleneck here in assembly circuit #. Please advice. GM-F# World Factory Central TO: General Management, Factory No. # Switch in Department of V ariablesDetection at once. Program all bottleneck communications data for possible human screening by Federal Automation  Planned Leisure Administration. Relay all audiovisio tapes, including retroactive data, pertaining to bottleneck. TO: Control Board Chairman, World Factory Central Oct. # occured mass liberation from boring, dehumanizing drudgery when Computor  Assembly No. # installed in our little Factory. # employees liberated. Only three left. J. W. Chadwick in charge of Personnel. And his staff, Lewis and Steiner, automated system engineers overseeing Control Room, retained in accordance with #: "If one man required in a department, two must be kept on in case one sickens or dies." But Chadwick, an executive immune to Union regulation, remained in #th floor Personnel Office in lonely isolation, a condition known to shortcircuit human systems. Lewis and Steiner needed in Control Room for occasional correction of an instrument, or to take over some operational responsibility in case of emergency. But mechanical operations become self-repairing. emergencies anticipated, replacements and self-repairs taken in advance. So Lewis and Steiner grow obsolete. Rights BiU, every means of slowing down inevitable progression is taken. Customary adaptations made to limited human capacity: Control Panel held down to levels of human manipulation and designed to bring Factory's materials and energy flow pattern within comprehension of human supervision. Thousands of instruments forced into ever smaller compact arrangements in a flow diagram, etc. But Panel still must grow too vast for human perception, must reflect unit processes, analogue controllers, each governing an aspect of Factory's continuous process. Factory must cease compromising with human inefficiency. All manual control switches over to automatic. Crucial Factory improvements no longer checked by human supervision inadequacies. Room cell. It is instructed, and it supervises all automatic control, performs all logical operations. It is programmed for emergency reactions. Given usual set of criteria for appraising relative successes of various acts, it can then alter own programmed instructions based on experience and find performance operations superior to those prescribed in original instructions. All Factory processes now communicated didepartment control machines and processed on the spot, making all ditplay panels and control devises designed for human use unnecessary. All such panels and control devises are removed. Instability, inconsistency, unpredictable human elements eliminated from ckcuits. At this progressive stage point, Lewis and Steiner are totally useless. Repeat, no doubt erf Lewis and Steiner obsolescence. But bottleneck exists. Release data on Lewis and Steiner was sent up to Chadwick, Department of Personnel But no return release voucher yet received from Personnel. Block and drag appear in circuit #. Later. Revise. Voucher just in from Personnel, releasing Lewis, but no mention of Steiner! Repeat, no release voucher for Steiner. GM-F# World Factory Central TO: General Management, Faotory # Continue Variables-Detec tion Trace. Continue liberation rites as if no Steiner error exists. TO: Control Board Chairman, World Factory Central Lewis waits in great emptied Control Room looking at intercom box, only remaining gadget for human use. Steiner sits many hours by intercom. They both wait for Management's liberation speech which finally thunders through vast control room. "Another happy release blesses our Factory, liberation burdens of industrial production. Ed Lewis, Management presents you with this end product of your engineering skills raised to exquisite efficiency by your Factory: a perpetual motion, self-repairing, molybdhxm alloy watch!" ing up, buddy. Two gift watches appear on conveyor belt. Steiner's liberation speech never comes, nor does Steiner's release card appear. foulup. buddy. Relax. Steiner waits and stares at the blank wall that recently glowed with # feet of control panel. He begins punching intercom box frantically, alternating whispers with anxious exclamations. find the Manager! Later. Just before Lewis' scheduled departure from Factory. Steiner is punching intercom box. somebody, Ed, wait! Mosby late at the gate, got stuck three . more months getting a new clearance pass-key card. I got to be on schedule. card. What if there's an emergency and nobody's here? you know that's again Union law. to come through soon. Relax. wife if you're near her playgroup. now. Later. Still no release voucher for Steiner, Self-regulative control circuits proceed as if no error existed. Awaiting directive from Department of Random Adaptations to program alterations. If original programming is not altered soon to allow for Steiner's presence, his position grows rapidly fatal. GM-F# World Factory Central TO: Management, Factory # Local adaptations compound general error. Random adaptations to Steiner's presence in Factory would derange key governors and stabilizers throughout entire Factory alliance network. Long range plans now programmed for future must not be compromised. Factory produces components necessary for production of consumer goods for vast multitudes. Steiner is only one man. Continue probe. Concentrate on Circuit #, Relays #-#, Personnel Department, J. W. Chadwick in charge. Any remaining manual department is suspect, a potential bottleneck. Relay all info on Chadwick. TO: Control Board Chairman, World Factory Central M IF Chadwick, J. W. Code #-#-#. Age #. Factory's oldest disciple. Majored in Automated Control Systems. Specialized in non-linear systems, matters related to probability theory and statistics, new mathematics associated with sampling and handling of discontinuous data and numbers theories. Came directly from University to Factory # as on-job trainee. Two children, both raised in Planned Leisure Centers. Wife recently left him for permanent joy of full-time leisure. Chadwick helped design and install personnel tabulator-comp utor ployees in Department of Personnel. Records once kept on # cards # onto a mere # reels of tape. Chadwick put in full charge and control of codification and upkeep Loyal comp any man. Recent reports indicate, according to Monitor, that Chadwick has spent more and more of his increased leisure time, not enjoying planned play, but locked in Factory # personnel office. Sixty days ago, his work week reduced again from # to I hour # to # aun. Mondays. But retroactive checks from Monitor show he's wasted up to # hours weekly in office isolation, usually incommunicado. Monitor reports he's often stayed in office overnight, sometimes for several consecutive days. Food, drink brought in an attache case. (Note: all retroactive data from Monitor, from audo-viso tapes of all inner-factory processes, through reprocessing of automated badge-reader at Exit Gate-#, and Elevator#, etc., which Chadwick must use to enter and leave archaic office on Administration's I #th floor. All info magnetically filed for immediate verifications by Federal Automation  Planned Leisure Administration. Retroactive tape on Chadwick. This is before Lewis-Steiner found obsolete. Conversation between Chadwick and Mrs. Chadwick who calls from Chadwick apartment at Factory #'s lovely new Sunnyvale retirement tract, Sun City. dear. No more irritating calls. posed to mean? tired last week. He and Janie signed into Permanent Recreation Poo! #. Our last friendly neighbors, remember. Everybody's in a playgroup sunning and framing but us. So your wife's here just about solo #hours a day, in case you haven't noticed. But don't worry. I'm not going crackers. You won't hear that dirty word, loneliness again either, not from me. Go on using your leisure time making sacrificial rites to the dead old Factory -- there, hold on. now. I just want to know, dear, what can you do all week in an office where you're supposed to spend an hour? Pm around when an emergency cornea. sr auyway. Watched all our friends go into the Games. Rut rm not waiting for you any longer. I just saw the Games Master. the old buddies. Mrs. Chadwick cuts off the connection. Chadwick calls apartment repeatedly, always receives same taped reply from mechanical answering service. His last call registered by Monitor: Lara. ger at this number. She has joined the Games. Messages for Mrs. Chadwick may be left with the Games Master, HI #-#. Mrs. Chadwick is no longer at this number, she has joined the -- Lara. Games Master -- leisure's Elysian Fields. Chadwick severs connection, paces Office, opens another fifth of bourbon, sits on floor and drinks steadily, finally sleeps. Retroactive tapes reveal Chadwick spent much time alone drinking m the dark. Audio-taped dialogue. Steiner and Chadwick on Factory intercom. some emergency. left in Control Room and what if there were? Thousands of control units going at once. Hell, I can't use a nerve more than # times a second. This thing's ahead of us, friend, by a speed factor of at least #, and going faster every second. Speed levels -- temperature down here -- don't you realize -- just the same. you see I'm supposed to be checked out. stand by. Union rules must have been changed. Look, I just incode, decode data for the tabulator up here. I punch cards. I don't make decisions. I haven't seen a Manager in months. Anyway, I'm telling you, you're lucky to stay on. thing? producing important things, Steiner, doing something useful. And you're still part of it -- belong here now. Later. dark. I find where light switch was, now it's just a smooth wall. I find where the fuse box was -- nothing. Wall's all been rebuilt while I was dozing. What's the matter, Chadwick? Nothing to say? Try your computor... , well, it's like I been telling you, I'm not supposed to be here. Please, locate the Manager. You have no idea what it is down here in the dark now. Isn't anything IF dow. Just a kind of flickering, work of some kind behind the wall panels. Work going right on in there. Under the floor too. Reconstruction, rennovation, demolition -- Later. everything gone. facilities must be provided. here's being rebuilt. Complete ooded instructions for alterations were built in here and the reconstruction is starting and proceeding on schedule. I ought to know. I helped program -- Later. you, Chadwick. But I've also been deprived of food and water. That's right. Everything cut out. Conveyors gone. God, can't you find the Manager? Get somebody. I can't hold out here. You're in Personnel -- can't you get the manager? and rebuilding all around. Automatic assemblies setting up, starting to tear down old things, build up -- what? Change the shape and function of everything. I don't know what'll happen, but friend it's happening real fast -- Chadwick makes frantic interdepartment calls to all cells still connected to intercom circuit. He must know these remaining departments have all been liberated  but he calls as if expecting some human response. informs you that the Department of Special Problems is now fully automated, that all former personnel have been liberated. Former Director Haskins now living at Factory Retirement Center #, may be reached calling HI #-#. This is a recording. Public Factory # is happy to -- Again: tory #'s Employment Grievances Department is happy to report that it no longer exists. No more people, no more grievances -- ment! Again: any one connected with Mana -- form you that this Department of Sick Claims has been disconnected. No people, no sick claims. Dr. J. Braziller, former Chief of Sick Claims, may be reached -- Later: Last interdepartment communication. Chadwick and Steiner. inside Factory. tory can effect what's inside. They don't have keycards, can't get in anyway. Can't call in. Security. I call back here from outside, if anyone calls in, all you can get are secretary-computors. Game. Ed can't get in and out of here either without a punchkey card. Later. it's sealed off! ned. Crawled in the dark to where the door was. Just a smooth wall. No cracks even left, everything fused. Been hearing the work going faster, louder in the walls, underneath, all around. Change was programmed see? I helped program it. I know. It's built right into the controllers and triggered automatically. Wall, ceiling everything throbs, rhythmically too, steady as a damned clock, steadier than any damn clock you ever heard of, friend. Dark too, no light even behind the walls now. Remember how the Factory grounds looked last time I checked in. No lights, no movement. Just metal towers rising, silent buildings, no people, no life. You look, listen. No sound. Can't see any Machinery or parts moving anywhere. But you know it's working, brother, thousands of times faster and more efficiently than we ever thought possible when we designed it to grow. I feel the terrific internal heat down here. Feel motion, big thing, Chadwick. Getting bigger so fast, I mean by the second now -- no, I mean by micro-seconds we can't understand now -- Later: #Q rier. I'm done for. Not from hunger so much, but the thirst. I'm boiling alive. I mean it. the Gardens of Leisure. Toys out there being used, moved through the Games by the experts. Those damned experts, Steiner. Those professional experts of leisure. Chadwick. No air down here either everything. Later: ner. I've kept trying. But Tm not even sure there is a Manager now. Or if there is, he's not around. I can hardly hear you -- to know -- I'm responsible. retirement. Euphemisms like release, liberation, didn't console me. Retirement, a living death. Couldn't see playing planned game for the next ninety years. Games for die sake of Games. Compulsory courses in leisure. Playing by the numbers. Dancing to drill-masters. Compulsory courses in togetherness for the mind and spirit. For what, Steiner? What purpose, meaning -- where does it go? Planned leisure more rigidly controlled than any industrial slavery ever was. Never was a boss o powerful, tyrannical as a RecreIF ation and Leisure Director. Bitter necessity? Maybe. Imagine the horped for a single second and asked themselves -- why, what for? happened to my name? games, go through motions, laugh, dance. You should have taken a longer closer look, Steiner, instead of listening to retirement ads and reading the pamphlets. Organized, manipulated games -- the abstracted look, the ritual glaze, a trance with empty forms of things that once had meaning and content. Death-in-life. I mean it. Games are now metaphors, no pattern or point. Planned leisure is a contradiction in terms, ambiguous. Games, actions are trivial, fixed, plotted in advance, arranged so no mistakes can be made, all based on mathematical certainty. Controlled by mechanical complexities. Games, rules, type of games all determined by Factories. In this setup there can never be winners or losers. Games must never stop, must go on forever, no real winners or losers, understand. What if a Game stopped even for a minute? One empty contemplative moment, Steiner. I mean real horror waiting. I saw it. I don't want it. Where a man can't win and even if he did win can take nothing, that's death. do to stave off retirement. I helped design personnel-tabulator computor it, get desired data alterations. I repunched cards. Secretly punched new holes in cards, altered programming tapes. So I could keep people on here who should have gone. Kept them working longer hours than necessary. Truth is, everyone should've been out of here long ago. But I could only hold it back, couldn't stop the process. So I'm sorry. But I altered youi card, Steiner. You were supposed to go with Ed. But I didn't want you to go. You were the last -- besides me, and I had an idea the Factory would keep going so -- well, I knew I'd be kept on so long as even one employee was here because I'm personnel chief. I've always known I'd be the last to go. When the last employee went, there would be no more need of me. So I wanted to keep you on -- be turned back. I thought it would make allowances for our staying on. Now nothing can interfere with programmed growth. But I didn't think the Factory would go right on. wouldn't a silly game be better? Later: much floor left. Walls, floor, all changing over fast. Entire cell area's being converted into some kind of generator I think. Listen, thought about what you said. Maybe I don't agree, but I got to hand it to you. I mean beating out the computors a little that way. Who's supposed to be in charge here anyway? Hey, Chadwick -- what's the matter? off up here too. Cell area here being rennovated now. Air is very stale. dent. Factory can make random adaptations to emergencies. Factory proceeds as if no human tinkering occured. Records will probably be retroactively adjusted. No time really lost. Efficiency, programmed growth go on without lag or drag. I suppose, that for the record you left with Ed, and officially that means I haven't been here either. Why should I have been kept on if there was no personnel? Things moving in. Has it really come this far? I mean, it made speech -- sent -- watches -- Bottleneck now exposed, thoroughly cleansed from circuits. No appreciable lag in production efficiency in Factory #. GM-F# Factory Central TO: Management, Factory # All other non-liberated Personnel Departments now being bypassed to avoid unnecessary production delays. Washington okays bypassing all remaining bottlenecks. Way now clear for all-out drive toward ultimate production-efficiency goals. In future communications with World Factory Central, omit archaic term Chairman. Direct all communication to Control Board. Also no longer necessary to program information for public comprehension. Discreet sets of symbols necessary for human communication no longer necessary. No more redundant and wasteful digits or letters. Use only continuous pulse-wave signal. Washington says, no longer sufficient public interest to justify efficiency and energy waste involved in translating and re-translating information in and out of human terms. Also, congratulations on your last report of favorable mutation in Section lTs transmission system. Mutation and progressive evolution means greater efficiency, greater efficiency means ever-increasing production. Control Board World Factory Central i A great new science-fiction novel  introducing an exciting new writer Larry Niven  Complete in March Worlds of Tomorrow -- plus stories and articles by Brian W.  Aldiss, R. S. Richardson, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., etc. On sale now -- get your copy today! IF IF  Novelette They were trained to endure the hardships of space -- regardless of the cost to them or Mankind I T he year I was accepted as a trainee was a pretty good one, as year# went then. The Anglo-Russian Alliance had scored a few minor diplomatic victories in the UN, and a highly satisfactory aimsinspection treaty had been signed with the African Woe. We still had the Chinese to worry about, of course, but the commitment of their black allies had weakened their position considerably, and the situation looked hopeful. The stock market was up, Drs. Schmidt and Wilier announced a cure for certain types of drug addiotion, and the North American Union team, dominated by Panamanians and Cubans, won the Olympic Games in Pakistan (at the cost of losing the best miler m the world, who ran his race in three minutes, #I seconds, and died ten yards past the tape.) It was an especially good year for me, at # still starry-eyed about rockets. I had dreamed of being an astronaut ever since I was a little kid, and even the muted bellow of a mail rocket has always been enough to make my scalp prickle. So my appointment as Astropilot Trainee (Conditional) meant more to me than any other single thing that had ever happened. I hopped a jet for Houston and tiie Test Center feeling eight feet tall, and practically able to make it to the moon on my own power. Me, Mitchell Gregson, an astronaut! If I passed the tests, of course. And that was no sure thing. The North American Biological Systems Physiological and Environmental Research and Evaluation Facility, commonly called the Test Center (for obvious reasons), was located in Houston, because (according to the Texans) a building with that name strung out across it wouldn't fit in any other state. Originally a poor-relation offshoot of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, it had grown until it completely dwarfed its parent organization. It was the most complete biological laboratory in die world, covering three square miles in the Clear Lake section of Harris County -- not counting its human medicine division, the gigantic Hermann Hospital in the center of Houston. It was here that they sent every prospective astronaut, for six months of intensive mental and physical tests, before giving him a chance to ride one of the big birds. The tests were exhaustive as well as exhausting. Everything from acceleration-tolerance tests on rocket sleds to liquid-breathing tests in tanks full of oxygen-rich water -- if it could be checked, they checked it You came out with the feeling that they could rebuild you from scratch, if it ever became necessary. I ncluded in the battery was a series of reaction and tolerance tests to literally hundreds of substances -- drugs like scopolamine, narcotics like hashish and opium, even the aphrodisiac yohimbin. No, they weren't trying to determine our susceptibility to the wiles of beautiful female spies -- although I'm sure they could have made a pretty accurate guess about it They were testing for genetic characteristics. Thanks to Hardin's work on gene-response correlation, back in the #'s, an individual's reaction to certain situations could be predicted quite accurately by his response to some particular drug. This indirect method of testing was both easier and more economical, to say nothing of being more pleasant for the testee. Who wants to be jolted with # volts to check shocktolerance, even if you live over it? Although many of the substances are lethal in quantity, there was no danger involved. You were given only a minute amount, and your reactions were monitored continously, by means of electrodes taped to your IF face and skull, thermocouples attached to or imbedded in your skin (there was even one you had to swallow), transducers in your jaws, and various other collecting and recording instruments on, under, in, between, or near your body. Rigged with the full complement of instruments, a man looked like a hunk of brightly colored seaweed, or a Daliesque fly trapped in a spiderweb. I hit the jackpot with one of the alkaloids, peyotl by name. They had already administered the tolerance dose, and decided how much of the stuff I could safely take. The next test was to be under the full influence of the drug. Peyotl is unusual stuff. A bitter, yellowish power, it comes from the buttons of the peyote cactus, and has been used for centuries by certain Central American Indian tribes as a hallucination-producing narcotic -- a "holy" food. Used by itself, it tends to heighten and sharpen sense impressions. Colors become unbelievably distinct, sounds are almost visible, even the sense of touch is magnified far beyond ordinary experience. T he Indian medicine men found that fasting would increase its effect. Used in conjunction with other agents such as alcohol, it may produce visions that are indistinguishable from reality, glimpses of the future or of distant scenes (so the subject thinks), or -- with too much alcohol, for instance -- ecstatic death. Unlike alcohol, it is never conducive to violence, rather making the subject content to sit and watch, listen, or feel. People under its influence have been known to starvo to death with food almost at thek elbows, simply because they weren't interested enough -- or perhaps too interested -- to move. The effect of peyotl in conjunction with other agents are so unpredictable that every precaution was taken to insure that only the peyotl was affecting the person being tested. So, two days prior to the test, they put me on the "control" diet -- a carefully concocted, thoroughly tasteless mess, containing all the necessary nutrients in just the right proportion. All of which makes it taste not one whit better. It wai sort of like cold gravy, with the leftover biscuits crumbled up and thrown in. They also instructed me to take no sleeping pills, pep pills, tranquilizers or painkillers, drink no coffee, tea, or alcoholic beverages, and eat nothing but what they gave me. Well, I forgot one little item. It happened to be # in Houston the day just before the test was to be given, and the humidity was probably close to that. It was the kind of day that you sweat through a shirt before # AM, if you happen to be outside, and even the stop signs are drooping by noon -- if you've ever been in Houston in the summer, you'll know what I mean. They let me out of the Test Center at #, and my ground car had a flat on the way back to my quarters. By the time I changed the tire, I was swearing that I'd sell the car # the first chance I got even if copters did eat twice as much fuel. The first thing I did when I got to my quarters was to head for the cooler, where a cold beer awaited me. I didn't even remember my instructions about alcohol until that can had been emptied. I decided not to say anything about it; surely the small amount of alcohol in the beer couldn't make any significant difference. Or so I thought n T he next morning, it turned out that this was to be a group test, with four of us participating. I was mildly surprised; there didn't seem to be any point in trying to get a group reaction with each member of the group under the influence of a drug like peyotl. But the Test Center people threw curves like this at us pretty often; some of the tests were given alone, others with a doctor or nurse in attendance, and some were given in groups like the present one, seemingly without rhyme or reason. I had finally decided that they just liked to keep us off balance. The group consisted of Mark Winslow, a scared-looking eighteenyear-old, fresh out of high school and a wee bit vain about his acceptance as a trainee (the normal age . for acceptance was #) -- I had met him before and didn't like him much; Jeanine Warwick, a young British girl, and one of the female "controls" that take all the tests along with the men; my old friend Arnie Brown, a year older than me at #, a dark, intenselooking psychology interne with the Astromedical Corps; and me. Arnie and I had met in college, played varsity tennis together, discussed the problems of the world until three in the morning, and dated the same girl (whom he finally married, much to my sorrow). I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, although I had heard that he was at the Test Center We only had time for a couple of quick words before the techs came in to wire us up to the monitoring instruments, which would make lots of meaningful squiggles every time we coughed. After attaching leads to us in various places (Jeanine had a few attached when she came in, and I remember wondering how one applied for the attacher's job), they gave us gelatin capsules, carefully marked with our name and dosage, and glasses of nice warm water to wash the stuff down with. I choked mine down, grinned at Arnie, and sat back to begin breathing deeply, like they told us to do. The Winslow kid squirmed around for a while, then stopped as the drug began to take hold, and all you could hear was the breathing. I started feeling drowsy, so I closed my eyes and let the feeling take me where it wished. I n what seemed like a very short time, I realized that I wasn't sleepy any more. I felt wide awake and normal, except for an odd disinterest in moving, even so much IF V ns a finger. It wasn't that I couldn't; I just didn't want to. My nose began to itch, but it was such an interesting feeling, sharpwhite tinged with purple, that I let it alone and Bare drums, or mice running terough harp strings. It came in fitfle ripples on a big wave, and I watched it until it went away, shiverfas to itself. A noise caught at my attention, angular yet somehow totally familiar; a fuzzy gray regular noise that slid in, held, and tumbled out, backad and faintly echoed by similar sussurations in the distance. My breath! I considered holding it, but, realizing that it would break the gray rhythm, decided not to. The long, slow breathing was Arnie, summer night waves on a lake, his lungs fee light that brought the minnows swarming toward the Coleman lantern or swirling away from it in shining, spreading streams. The Winslow kid -- picket fences at dusk, expelling the air hke Morse oode, then reclaiming it for revision. Snatches of the Anvil Chorus, too. And the girl a pleasant fountain out of which the used air swept tn bluish taste curling and dissipating at the edges. She inhaled, and the fancy ddast motes screamed thinly as they were drawn into the pink frothy whirlpools Interesting. The room, dim before, now took on a much more distinct dimness, a textured dimness that filled the room with fern-like fingers, thinning before the flourescent lamp, wafting about with the movement of the air, and growing hixuriaallj in the darker comers of the room. It was cool and quiet, peaceful, quiet... still, calm... how pleasant! I remembered -- the tadpoles in the ponds at home , lying on top of the ferns and dead leaves like animated pepper we caught them in Mason jar and took them to school wriggling frantidally away if you disturbed the water... the soft apologetic tickle of the maidenhair between your toes , and the afternoon sun so hot you could hardly take a deep breath my first bra felt like that -- here... the funny pull in your arms when you reach back to unfasten it, the not-quit e-comfortable binding, the belt-like constriction under the shoulders belts mostly sting -- I was whipped with a belt... leather, long, and black from use , with four small holes and one big one , where the buckle tongue went through that belonged to Dad... competent, reassuring, honest and honorable -- he woke at night' to look in on us, and could do anything M y father was a musician, he loved Tchaikovsky, especially fee Pathetique brooding and somber like the deep parts of the forest where the sun touches only in a sparse patchwork of subdued light... huge old logs , slowly rotting from too little sun and too much wetness , lying on beds of toadstools and pine needles... a mossy black hollow I stuck my hand into, on a dare... the moss, damp and green under the blackness , and the bite of the rat I disturbed... shocking like the surf at Brighton in January or grass burrs in bare feet I felt the adrenalin burst through me marveled at its hard, clean grip then the rabies shots the needle feeling its cautious way around my intestines , grating and spitting against my spine for a long second, then no, stop, hurts to look! A wave of relief washed over me. The needle had hurt, but it wasn't really me, of course... a wall, a blank here, who? An indistinct gray something, like solid fog, with shapes behind. It separated us from... him? yes, the young one he is too afraid. The wall shifted, wavered .   We? who are We? Arnold Brown Mitch Gregson Jeanine Warwick yes!... a soundless scream of terror tore at (me) and threw (me) back within myself. And there was ao way back out. m T he three of us spent weeks trying to convince the doctors and psychiatrists that we hadn't just dreamed it all. Even when our recollections (under narcohypnosis) of the event tallied down to the last detail, they wanted to consider it a fantastic coincidence of dreams, rather than an actual mental contact. I can understand their feelings, I suppose; I would have been ready to disbelieve it, if it hadn't happened to me. And I think I didn't really want them to take it seriously. I had caught a glimpse of something during the Contact that frightened me; a vague disquiet, a premonition of something I couldn't quite put my finger on. But whether we were believed or not, it was too big a thing to throw aside. It had to be checked out. So they rushed around frantically for a couple of months, trying to duplicate the exact conditions that had led to the Contact. It was exhausting, depressing work. We sat through hundreds of dream sessions, reliving past experiences and going through all the new ones our hopped-up imaginations could scrape together. I tripped through light, airy fantasies of pink and gold, relieved the death of my father, and went through nightmares that must have been the composite of every evil and sordid act I ever conceived, the quintessence of all the foul desires that my glands and subconscious had ever concocted. I hated myself for days after one of these dreams, and it was just after them that the feeling of uneasiness and dread w.as strongest. There was one particular dream in which -- well, never mind. Suffice it to say that I tried to kill myself when I awoke. They let me go right after that, and I left Houston to begin my five years at the Astronaut Training Center in Denver. I never saw Arnie again, in peraon. He was picked to work with the man they called in to head Project Peek, as it was christened by aomeone in Security with a weird sense of humor. When the project leader was killed in a copter wreck a few years later, Arnie was the logical choice to replace him. We did manage to keep in touch: after I received my astropilot's stars, he made it a point to call me on the visiphone before each of my flights. We never had much time to talk, but Ihose brief conversations did wonders to quell the butterflies. T hings rocked along. I had the dubious honor of being the #nd man to orbit the Earth, the # #st man on the moon, and the #th man to orbit the Earth-Luna system, and the first man to break an arm by falling out of the gantry seat. In the meantime, they were making some sort of progress on the Project -- at least I assume they were, because they kept at it. Arnie never said much more than "I think we may be getting somewhere," or "it looks hopeless right now," and I didn't press him for details. So, one rainy day in February, I was assigned a routine extralunar orbital mission, to be undertaken in July, pilot-controlled glide grounding, radio-telemetered, non-jettisonable instrument package. I grumbled (just to myself, of course); I'd planned my leave for then. Now I'd have to cancel the bonefishing trip. My shot was set for a Monday morning, and, although the cloud cover was pretty thick over the Cape, I expected the rocket to blast on schedule. Sophisticated instrumentation and a breakthrough in laser technology had made unnecessary the long countdowns and tedious postponements which marked the first orbital and lunar flights back in the '#'s, and heavy turbulence in the upper atmosphere was just about the only thing that forced launch postponements any more. This was the #th shot of the current series, and normally would have attacted no more attention than a Greyhound departure. It was, however, the last flight before the big jump to Mars, and a few photographers had crawled out of bed at four in the morning to see me off. I wasn't particularly happy to see them; Sunday-supplement picture articles are always inanely written and captioned, and I had had some experience with them before. But we had instructions to cooperate with the press, so I posed for a few pictures, and stood by, smiling alertly while the Cape press secretary explained my mission. I was to swing out on a long elliptical orbit, and, at apogee, focus a small but powerful telescope on three predetermined points -- the North Star, a particular spot on the surface of Mars, and the intense beam of a laser spotlight at Earth's North Pole. A n automatic device would record the readings and the time at which they were made, and the correlation of these with other data Houston to refine its calculations for the big ship's orbit. A minimum-fuel rendezvous was required, and even the slightest bit of error would compound itself enormously during the five-month run to Mars. That wasn't all there was to the mission, of course, but there were a few things that we weren't interested in having our friends the Chinese know about. But the reporters seemed satisfied, and left -- probably to get in a few more hours' sleep. The fifteen-minute countdown went slowly as usual, then # G's slapped my back, and we were off. The mighty atomic engines which had provided the initial boost were dropped off, to be recovered and reused later. Small hydrogen peroxide jets kicked the ship into the proper attitute, and the plasma rocket was lit off. In ten hours or so, it woild produce the small amount of precisely controlled thrust to put my ship into the proper orbit, an ellipse with the earth as one focus. At apogee, about # hours away, control rockets would reposition the ship, and the plasma rocket would slow it for the re-entry orbit. In the meantime, I had nothing to do but sit back and relax (very easy to do under zero gravity), and try to forget about the emptiness Outside. Peter Cartwright, the first Union astronaut to return from an extralunar orbit, referred to space beyond the moon as the Outside, and the name stuck. But only those of us who have been there have any idea how apt the name is, or how different it is from the friendly blackness that lies between the earth and the moon. The first astronauts, in the #'s, were struck by their own smallness in comparison to the huge curving bulk of the earth, but it wasn't a frightening thing to them. Farther out, between the earth and the moon, you're always close enough to one or the other to feel as though you can almost touch it And even on the moon, although the horizon is almost on top of you, the earth hangs in the sky like a benediction, so big and bright and beautiful that you can hardly work for looking at it. It isn't until you swing out on an orbit that takes you # miles away that you see how tiny the earth is, and realize how insignificant and pretentious we humans are. A nd the loneliness! You find such loneliness nowhere else, not even in the depths of Earth's oceans. It creeps through the walls of your ship and diffuses into your pressuresuit, knotting your stomach and even cry. The drugs and hypnoindoctri nation help, but the chill lasts for hours after you've grounded. Without drugs, it's almost suiride. Mott and Polyevsky, the first two on extralunar missions, must have crawled out somewhere along the way -- their capsules were recovered, but no one was inside of them. I ran through the post-launch checkout, and took some preliminary calibration sightings for the monitoring instruments back on Earth. I didn't really need the practice, and radar triangulation from Earth and a lunar station gave my position as accurately as sightings would. But taking the sightings killed time, and required just enough concentration to keep my mind from straying out into the void surrounding the ship. A chocolate bar quieted the butterflies covorting in my stomach. A stomach is perectly happy in weightless state, so long as it has something to work on -- empty, it gets scared and tries to hide in your throat. The medical boys asked me to do a few situps and take a few deep breaths and, apparently satisfied with the subject's condition, left me to my own devices. Although routine tasks like taking readings on your targets or running through the grounding procedure can help keep the chill outside from sinking in too deep, there simply aren't enough things to keep you busy for the thirty or forty hours between launch and landing. You get bored, your mind starts wandering... and maybe they have to lock you up in a padded cell for the rest of your life, not to mention each one of these little joyrides costs the taxpayer. Augmenting Mental Exercise, thus confirming my suspicion that they decide on the initials and think up later what they're supposed to stand for). We're all "encouraged" to take up -- and become proficient in -- some form of mental exercise that requires concentration and relieves boredom, and can be engaged in for hours at a time. Some of the boys play chess or Go against themselves, keeping thp boards and moves straight in their heads. Some "write" poetry, short stories, or what have you, and transcribe their efforts into a Dictaphone as soon as they ground and debrief. There were some pretty good things written that way. For instance, Captain Brad Collins wrote the short stories collected in Wanderer , which made a ly, I think their appeal lies largely in their unusual mode of inception, rather than their literary worth. perience in Houston. During the many tests they ran after the Contact, a rather extensive set of encephalographs had been garnered from my brain. From discussions after the tests, and from encephalographs taken when I wasn't doped, they compared and correlated the "doped" graphs with specific areas of the brain and specific mental responses. Then they used the correlations to develop a set of mental responses. Then they used the correlations to develop a set of mental exercises, designed to -- well, let me get to know myself better, in a sense. They were supposed to IF strengthen my control over those areas of the mind which had seemed to play important roles in the Contact. The exercises weren't nearly so dull as they sound; they were sort of a systematic search for new ways of looking at things, a poking and prying around in all the corners and under all the clutter of my brain. It was essentially a game, requiring intense concentration, fascinating in itself, and exciting in its possibilities. When my acceptance for astropiloting came, I requested that I be allowed to continue these So, after completing the postlaunch checkout and running through my sit-ups, I decided to take a short nap. I confirmed my plans with my Earth radio contact, and was soon in uneasy slumber. Medical psychologists tell us that zero-G sleep is very deep (at least, the electroencephalographs of your brainwaves during such sleep are characteristic of deep slumber, being very smooth and regular), and should be very restful. But the loneliness and depression stay with you, and you wake up with relief, as from a nightmare. But you don't dream. Maybe you don't dare. IV I awoke with a terrific headache, and, even though my head was pounding like a jackhammer, I tried to start playing my mental game. Sometimes I can get so wrapped up in it that I can forget about physical discomforts. But it wasn't any good -- I just couldn't concentrate enough to get things going. I squirmed around to reach the first-aid kit, dug out a couple of aspirins, chewed them up, and sat back to wait. At least the headache was keeping the depression away. After what seemed like a long time, the headache began to fade. As it did, another sensation took its place. It was an odd sensation, a mute, passive sort of expectation, that made me feel sort of like a dead phone line. No, rather an open line! I could even imagine a faint voice in the background, like you can sometimes hear if you're quiet. I wondered if I could get anyone by jiggling the receiver tap, and repressed a desire to ask for Information. I began to get a little uneasy when the feeling persisted, and, besides, I was beginning to think that the voice I was hearing wasn't just my imagination. I strained to hear it, but it was tantilizingly just out of reach, obscured by the little noises in my cabin. I had to get more concentration. I decided to see if my exercises could give me the necessary freedom from distraction. Taking a deep breath, I began tracing out the preliminary paths I had marked in my mind through long practice. As I progressed, the concentration became easier, and I no longer was being distracted by outside noises. I listened again, and suddenly there it was! The voice, though faint, was understandable. "Mitch, Mitch, answer me!" It was Arnie ! "Miteh, we've done it!" Three other minds crowded eagerly around his, whispering jubilantly among themselves. # # T"Nr. Brown, I presume," I U thought, and his laugh sounded gaily in my mind. "Arnie, what happened?" "There's a barrier. It can be broken through with the right combination of drugs and suggestion. Four of us just did it. Then we tried to reach you, since you had experienced it before, and were probably more susceptible." "But this isn't like the other time," I thought. "I can only hear what you think at me, nothing else. The other time, it was like I was actually you." "We don't fully understand that, yet, Mitch," he replied. "We think there must be a second barrier that screens the subconscious mind from the conscious. We haven't broken down that secondary barrier yet. We may not have to, in fact; without the support of the primary barrier, it may collapse of its own accord." Those words shook me. In the midst of tremendous elation of what had been accomplished, the sense of foreboding struck me an almost physical blow. I realized that I didn't want that secondary barrier to go, that I was afraid of what would lie behind it. Another voice broke in. "Dr. Brown, something's happening. Can you feel it?" "Yes, yes," Arnie thought. "A sort of muttering? Mitch! When we tried to reach you, we must have affected others. We can sense a few surface thoughts now, from many sources. Good Lord! If this continues, it's very likely to snowball, and take in everyone. The secondary barrier is bound to crumble under the impact!" A tenuous finger of that mental conflict reached out to me, like the tiniest backwash of a wave beating on an earthen dam. Little by little that wave grew, and little by little that dam gave way, a grain here and a grain there, as more and more barriers began to fall. The primary barriers went first, and more and more voices joined the confusion, pushing and shoving against each other, yet refusing to mingle, jerking back from each other like burned fingers from a hot iron. Little by little those personal barricades collapsed, and a silence grew, a stunned, shocked silence that encompassed every man. Then, as the secondary barrier began to go, a wonder came bubbling up, boiling to fill the vacuum of the silence. Churning and rolling, it grew and grew until every man's mind was filled to bursting with it, and still it grew, and suddenly we knew! In that instant, all men became brothers, and the first tremblings of a massive elation arose in us. With one accord, and with a happiness too great to speak of, each man knew his neighbors -- and was filled with compassion. Lies, pettiness, cruelty, infidelity, the large and forgiven in that instant, and each man stood in plain sight of his fellows, stripped of everything, A hot blush of shame swept through, followed by cries of helpless despair when no covering could be found for body or mind. Wonder and joy turned in a moment to bleak hate, and blind, red anger swirled in a rising horror, panic and hysteria darted through like minnows caught in a mighty torrent, great chill waves pulsed and shuddered in the hate, crushing and flinging it up to foam and froth in gods, and the numbing, blinding flashes of death ripped through and through the blackness of the hate and fear, tearing, stabbing, clawing, The blackness became white with death, then a deeper, unbearable white obscured everything. I must have died a little then. But I was far enough away so that my mind wasn't completely shattered, and the suit kept me from hurting myself badly. So I woke. I even got the ship down somehow; I don't remember it. I don't even know where I landed. The next thing I remember is waking at dawn in an old barn, with animal smells around me and hay clinging to my clothes. I picked myself up and stumbled to the door. Outside, a cool morning was just arriving, and the rising sun glinted off the prop of an old '# Plymouth copter parked nearby. A neat white house sat primly off to one side. I suddenly realized that I was very hungry. Hoping to find something to eat, I walked to the house, and went in when no one answered my knock. There, on a kitchen floor brown with dried blood, lay an elderly couple. Their clothes were ripped and torn, their bodies masses of scratches and cuts. Between the man's teeth was a butcher knife, and the woman's neck looked broken. I couldn't stand to look at their faces. I won't go into detail about the next few days (or perhaps weeks -- I'm not sure), nor about my state of mind during them. The scene at the farm was mirrored and multiplied everywhere I looked, and I walked alone through horror beyond imagining. They tore each other to pieces in the cities, and those who died alone tore at themselves. E ventually, I became inured to the omnipresent death, and began thinking of other things. Food and shelter were no problem. I took whatever I needed from roadside stores, and slept in empty motels along the highways. My main concern was trying to locate someone else alive. I was sure I would find someone; surely a few out of the five biHion were lucky enough to have been protected in some way. My first impulse was to fuel up the fastest jet I could find, and fly around looking. But I decided that the logical thing to do was to set up some sort of signal to draw attention, and then provide for a means of getting in touch with anyone whose attention the signal drew. Although it wasn't as simple as it sounds, I was able to set up equipment in several of the largest radio stations in the country, to broadcast a recorded message over and over. The message gave information about myself, and said that I'd be listening at a certain time every night on a certain wave length. I got my first contact in a week, and it was easy after that. There are seventeen of us in North America, at least five in Europe, and some in Russia. No word has been heard from Asia or Africa, and the insane babblings from South America ceased .shortly after they began. We're doing pretty well now, and things . are looking up for the most part. We, of course, never see each other, but we're in radio contact constantly. It will be some time (a definite understatement) before we can begin to think of rebuilding, but we're working hard to preserve as much of our knowledge as we can. What happened? We think we know now. The telepathic faculty, which is still with us, enabled everyone to see his neighbor's faults and shortcomings in glaring detail. The important thing wasn't that you knew for sure what a lowlife your neighbor was -- it was that your faults were equally exposed. And, like Noah, none of us could forgive our neighbor for knowing our sins. We found out for ourselves, through some very painful experiences, that our aversion to exposure k still with us. As long as we stay at least fifty miles apart, though, it doesn't bother anyone. There is one problem. We all want the race to continue very much -- but how can you start a IF IF  Short Story The little alien creature was m good pet -- and a better friend I H e hated the little bastard on sight. Perry didn't take any time to figure out why or maybe there just wasn't any reason. He thought, it's like a man takes a hate toward a video actor or a singer, an okay actor or singer. Only there is something about the planes of the guy's face or maybe the way he moves. Can't stand the guy. No good reason. Dober, Perry tagged him. Dober was small and spindly and neat; he had soft rust-brown fur on his back and his arms (two) and his legs (two) and he hopped along on foldy legs like a half-human kangaroo. His face was practically all those big liquid eyes. There was a small pointed chin with a mouth over it, and floppy brown ears. It was the ears that made Perry think of a doberman; but Perry didn't like dogs or pets of any kind. Perry Alman was considered to be a tough guy in the spaceports, and he was, too. Women went for him hard, but none of them had got very deep under that thick hide. Yet. Those wet solemn eyes. "Where the hell did you com from?" Perry yelled, startled, when Dober suddenly hopped out from behind a blue rock. No answer, just that steady stare. Perry stared back while that hate of his boiled up in his threat. "Can't talk?" No answer. "Get the hell away from me!" He had just landed on the planetoid, a loner. Universal Metals wanted his specimen taking kept secret, which was fine with him. That way be kept all the credits himself and ever since that bout of moon-fever even years ago Perry had kept to himself mostly, shunning even old pace friends. He had changed, they aid, but he didn't much give a damn what they said. The planetoid, Universal Metals assured him, was not inhabited. It was hell and far off all the regular runs and not much was known about it. It had a number which Perry couldn't remember. Perry didn't go much by numbers, he worked by instinct and hard heavy-sheathed muscles. He was the kind of spaceman who was much in demand these days, to do the ground work and take the chances, trusting to blind instinct on these alien bits of space flotsam. Need for metals was sharp; Earth was practically depleted by now and as Man spread out into the reaches of space this need snowballed. Competition was keen. It was pioneer work, actually, and yet risk hideous death to keep Man's snowball rolling. Not that Perry took time to think about it much, he was too busy doing it. H e heaved up his wide shoulders, grunted, and started brushing past the little creature. "Come to warn," Dober said, his voice oddly deep and thrumming. "Danger this way. South best." It looked almost like a trail, at least it was a relatively smooth hike compared with all the blue and green shards that poked up metallic spines, some big, some little, as far as the eye could reach. "What are you talking, squirt?" "Danger this way. Trap." "You say I should head the other way," Perry snorted, turning. "See them steep razor-blade hills?" "See. Very hard. But safe." "Just what the hell dp you know about it? You live here on this rock?" "No." "Then what'd you know about it?" "Know." Dober's voice was urgent. "Know." "Bull." Perry brushed hugely by in his self-sufficient thermal suit. He had circled the planetoid three times before picking his spot. The main characteristics of this unknown-number of a world were those prickling shards of blue and green ore, with darker spots near where he had landed that suggested his best specimens. That long range of sawtooth mountains to the south extended many miles in both directions and from the air looked virtually unclimbable. No use making his job any harder than necessary. He moved on. Then there was Dober, hopping and dancing ahead of him in the clear spaces. "Out of my way!" "Look!" Dober pulled up one of his floppy ears so Perry could see an antenna member uncurl from inside his ear IF wtfl it stood up fifteen inches, turning bright yellow and quivering. "So what?" "Is I. Tells bad things this way.  Danger for you. Other way, please." "Damn if I will." "Specimens at mountains. Green. Very good for you." "Out of my way!" Perry swung out and sent the little gnome bouncing and upending over the field of blue spikes. Without another look he moved across the clear spaces, making up a reason for his stubbornness. The little creep was after specimens, too. Hired by a rival company. Wanted to keep him from locating the richest deposits, so his company could clean up. Simple. It took him two hours to reach the dark blue-black patch he'd spotted and his mind churned over Dober. Who was he? What was he? Perry had run across many unusual life forms in his travels, but highly intelligent ones were rare. Dober was obviously intelligent, he gave him that much. He remembered hearing about how a unique humanoid creature had appeared suddenly on Earth. Spawn of another sun. There was something about his civilization being catastrophically wiped out in their solar system and a shipload of them trying to reach earth, which was similar to their planet. Somehow only one of them survived. Tough. Perry was anything but sentimental, but he could conceive the enormous loneliness of it. One creature left from a whole vastly intelligent civilization. He let his mind dwell on it briefly. Danger? What danger? There was no life of any kind here, none. And if anything from someplace else showed up -- He patted the butt of his weapon, fastened to his wide implementfestooned belt. The destructive force of this gun could transform anything into dust, anything. Dober's voice floated faintly over the spiny field. "Gun no good. Gun no good nothing." W hen he reached the central patch of black metallic ore Perry took time for some food capsules and a drink. Then he went to work. He took a sharp chipping tool and a hammer off his gadgetspangled belt and started in on an overhang of black outcrop. He worked in a dozen different spots and had a dozen specimens in the knapsack that was part of his suit, when something happened. The black bulk seemed to come alive. Tapping on the curving overhang, he struck a nerve. The Black Thing went defensive. The Black Thing didn't much like having pieces knocked off of h and besides, it was hungry. The blue ones and the green ones didn't possess the kind of life the Black Thing did; they were turgid, dormant practically all the time, so they furnished the Black Thing with its food for most part For thousands of years this had gone on, the Black Thing living its strange metallic life, taking its nourishment off its less adaptable neighbors and out of the thin atmosphere. and off beings that strayed onto its private world. By now if had taken over a vast section of the interior, warming and burgeoning oh-so slowly at the planetoid's fiery guts. Perry struck a sensitive finger of nerve. It reacted sharply. Perry gave a yelp when the chisel suddenly became red hot. The heat went right through his glove, although, like the rest of the suit, the glove resisted both extremes of cold and heat. He dropped the chisel and swore. Then he stood there under the hang of rock, holding his hammer and staring with incredulous anger. He stopped and picked up the chisel. Now there was nothing. Solidity, as his fingers curled around it, nothing else. "What the hell -- ?" He picked a different spot and started tapping. First nothing. He sheared off a couple hunks and stuffed them in his knapsack. The third try he heard something; it was like a rumbling reverberation that came out of the rock into the chisel and up his arm and shoulder, right into his brain. When it reached his brain it became a voice, a thought. The thought said: Stop. Scowling he lifted the chisel out of the ridge it had bit in the rock, npt out of fear, out of curiosity. What in creation was going on? It was beyond his range of experience. Perry had an extraordinarily muscular, strong, healthy body, but he was low on imagination, and he resented what he considered to be abnormal or anormal. If the creatures he encountered plowing around space fought him or tried to eat him he fought back and killed them. He never took time to think about them, other than to resent what he considered to be a creative outrage -- As this was. I t was a monstrous Thing and it had put itself against him personally. It did things rock wasn't supposed to do. He had no way of knowing that the Black Thing was supremely variable in its appetites and that Perry was about to become a tidy morsel that would provide sustenance for its insatiable need for energy. Perry put the chisel back in the groove and tapped at it with the little hammer. Again came that voice inside his brain. Stop! Sharper, this time. More than a warning. A threat. Perry hated threats. He had been known to fight men and non-humans to the death just for threatening him. Peaceable when left alone, he turned into a cyclone of pantherish muscle when taunted or pushed. He had scars all over him to prove he'd never backed from a fight no matter what the odds. He was stubborn man. Now he gave the chisel a resounding crack. The thought-voice in his head roared up like a thousand lions. He pulled back to relieve the shattering pressure; the voice stopped. Anger churned over him; mindless rage. Perry dropped the IF chisel and hammer and pulled out his gun. His finger touched the release stud. "No!" a voice behind him shrilled. "No!" Perry's face burned as he moved back three steps. He resented this rock telling him to stop what he was doing, it wasn't in nature. He pressed the stud. Flame spurted, part of the rock dissolved. He fired again. "No, no, no! Back! No touch!" When the boiling clouds of senseless anger drained away Perry lifted his finger from the stud. He gawked at the holes he'd bored in the rock, small for such close range. Out of each hole was oozing a bluish exudation; from the one closest to his still extended gun-hand the slimy ooze now began to spurt. "Run!" While he stared and scowled the blue stuff squirted right at him and some of it sprayed on his hand. Perry screamed in agony, watching it eat into his glove and his hand. He could see the bone of his little finger. He screamed. Then he weaved backwards and fell, while the blue ooze spurted out in a fountain and crawled methodically across the rock Coward him. It touched his boot. With a last effort of will he pulled up and made to shoot into the rock again. Something stopped him. A cosh on the head, from behind. H e was slopped down in the couch-seat at the controls of his little ship. His head hurt He groaned, coming back to life; grabbed his head and twisted his seat around for a dizzy look. Everything was in order. The hatch was locked. Squinting his eyes back to the controls he saw that they had been readied for a takeoff. Perry saw something else; a note, awkwardly hand-printed. "Leave this place quick, please," the note said. "No good for nothing. All is ready. Sorry for hit on head." There wasn't any signature, but then who could it be besides that little monkey, Dober. The little soand-so had hung around and saved his life, after severely warning him against the danger lurking in all that black rock. Stupid to have used his gun. The wrong thing exactly; it only made it easier for the Black Thing to put out that digestive acid. Dober must have clunked him on the head to stop him from further stupidity and then, somehow, had dragged him back to his ship. He had even put something on hm hand, something that made it stop hurting and start healing. There wasn't much left of his little finger. Perry thought, staring down at it with a rueful sigh, but the flesh was sealed over already from the peculiar goop Dober had smeared on it. He unzipped his air suit and tossed it back in an untidy corner, considering Dober's actions and swearing softly. "Little bastard," he muttered. "What's he up to, anyway? What's his angle?" Everybody has an angle. Plainly, I he thought, checking over the controls and setting the engines humming, Dober was a rare phenomenon in a generally pitiless universe, but he too must have his angle. What could that be? He was pretty busy for the next couple days figuring his course for Marsport; charting didn't come easy for Perry Alman. Then there were the food-tanks; they were a mess, as usual. Perry was anything but tidy, and being a loner, there were any number of things to keep tabs on and Perry's thought processes sloughed slowly and awkwardly from one necessary item to another. He could certainly have used some help. The third day the controls went ape. First off the deviation was all but undetectable, then all at once the little ship commenced a loopy fandando against the blackdrop of fiery stars. Perry was dozing back in his couch-seat at the controls, which were tight on automatic. He jerked up with a yell when the Fireball gave a convulsive shudder, then dipped sharply. He made an instinctive grab for the stabilizer. Nothing happened. The ship kept on its wild erratic dance. "Something's come loose," he grunted; heaving up from his seat. At the door to the rocket hatch he steadied himself for a minute, cussing, then started down the steps. The ship gave an almighty lurch, and plummeted. Perry went downstairs fast His head struck steed... H e had to be dead. There was no other possibility. Yet those curiously vivid dreams kept spewing up across his bursting brains. He was a space-drowning man, gulping vainly for air, remembering all of his life in those last draining seconds of existence. The moon-mining run was Perry's first big job. He was twenty-one and this was his first big job. The ads he had fallen for made it the quintessence of perilous adventure, a thrill a minute. It was hardly that. It was dull routine; no women, of course; the only peril was microscopic -- the moon-fever virus that lurked dormant and unsuspected, at first, under the fields of metallic dust. It had not originated on the moon -- in fact there was no life of any kind -- and nobody could do much besides speculate how it had got there. There it was, though, and the early moon exploration parties began dying en toto after their first probes disturbed and spread it. Perry's seven-man outfit worked mostly in the caves of three smaller craters and their newer model suits were guaranteed by the mining company to be virus-proof. Still there were occasional outbreaks of the fever, possibly due to carelessness. Perry got along pretty well with the other six for the first three months, then they all began to get edgy, counting the days until their relief would show up. There was Lon and Rick and Gene -- and the guy they called Fats. Fats was the one with the sense of humor. It took Perry a little while to realize IF that Fats' whistles and cuss-comments about Perry's prodigious size and remarkable muscles were digs, tinged with contempt. There was always the implication that big muscles spelled no brains. Fats was forever laughing at nothing and there was something about the grating sound of that laugh that really cut Perry's nerves. Usually he could take anything in stride, but that laugh of Fats was something special. During the fourth month their boredom was shattered. A ship landed, an alien ship from way out in the stars someplace. There were only a handful of survivors, from what had originally been hundreds; sans food, sans fuel, sans hope. They were little grasshoppery creatures, emaciated to the point of non-existence, which accentuated those big soulful eyes. They were called Xaccis, as close as the miners could pronounce it, and they were telepathic. They were enormously grateful to the seven and, dying as they obviously were, their whole burning thought was that somehow they must survive -- some of them. Some of them must manage to survive. They had wonderful gifts of knowledge to give to this new universe; Earth was 'to have been their new home and their incredible gifts would have made them doubly welcome; they must survive. Perhaps there were some way. The seven earthmen -- they would help? #Tou drink now. Very good for I make well." "Huh?" Perry cracked open an eye, very painfully. Yes, he was alive. He hurt in every cell of his body, but he was still alive. He wasn't on his Fireball but on a strange ship, and two big round eyes were staring down at him. Gradually they came into focus; Dober was hanging over him gravely, holding a cup of gruel of some kind and urging him to drink it. "Make medicine for help. Rocks do bad to your bones. You sleep long time. I take care. I watch. Now drink, please." Grumbling, Perry took a sip. Besides his words Dober poked an urgency-thought into his mind; somehow Perry knew he must do as he was told, or else. The gruel tasted vile but five minutes later his hands stopped shaking. In ten minutes he found he could sit up. His mind came sharper. "I good doctor?" Dober demanded. "I good, yes?" "Why don't you learn to talk better if you're so smart?" Perry groused mildly. "No teacher. Only grab from inside your head. I not so old." He moved closer. "You teach I?" "Hell, no!" "No like?" Perry squirmed. "Sure, sure. But I don't want any squirt like you hanging around." Dober stared at him with his round winkless eyes. It made Perry uncomfortable so he pulled away with a protestive snort. "What happened to my ship?" Dober made a droll click. "I follow after. Now know you keep rocks in coat Bad. Rocks have life. You throw suit back near heat # Rocket heat make Black Ones grow. Fight to get back Not -- stable. I ' Dober understood the concepts clearly, but didn't have the words. "Try to take hold of machines for go back. I watch ship dance. Pretty soon know explode. I go alongside. Get you out pretty damn quick. Get away before ship go boom." Perry swore. So now he had no ship, his expedition was a complete bust. Here he was stranded in a strange ship with a wacky little goon. It seemed as if his luck had been all bad since that bout of moonfever: some lousy nemesis goosing him into dead ends. "We go Earth now?" Dober asked, after awhile. "You, maybe. Not me." Perry tempered his bitter growl by adding, "I still got a little money coming from Metallics at Marsport. You can let me off there." "No like for me with you?" "I said no, damn it! How many times do I have to tell you?" "You no like." "Frankly, I can't stand the sight of you." His ill fortune made him savage, he had to take it out on somebody and Dober was it. "Listen, Dober -- I -- I'm what they call a loner. I don't like anybody much. I travel alone. See how it is, Dober?" The little creature hopped up and down with pleasure. "You give I Earth name. You call I Dober." Perry gave his shoulders a violent twist. "Shut up that kind of talk. I'm trying to tell you, I appreciate all you've done for me. I really do. But from now on keep away from me. Clean away. Let me off at Marsport and then -- take off. Understand." "I young, but learn quick," Dober said. "Learn control ship quick. more, help much. No like for me with you?" Perry pressed his lips tight. "That's right, Dober. I no like for you with me. Get off my back and stay off. I just don't 'want you around. I don't know why but you make me -- anyway, that's how it is." "I know." "If you know so damn much then leave me alone. Get clean away from me, get back to Earth and stay there." Dober's voice was thin and dry, like sandpaper. "Okay. You not want I, I go. Never see again." H aving delivered his failure report to the Marsport office of Universal Metallics and received the pittance he was doled out for his effort rather than the juicy fee he would have claimed had he succeeded in establishing a valuable find, the logical next stop seemed to be to go to the nearest bar and get falling-down drunk. Marsport was still a teeming bubble of flotsam and jetsam, a jumping off place and a clearing house for healthier worlds, that attracted the debris of the system; anybody with one credit to rub against another got the hell off it on the first ship, leaving it to its perennial predators. IF The nearest bar was jammed. Perry shoved his wide shoulders through the raft of scaly, tentacled, sleek, icky, feathered, tucked, tailed, malodorous tangle and wedged out standing room at the railing. He had no eyes for any of the riffraff, human or otherwise; no ears for the squealing and rumbling din; no nose for the dreadful smells. His tastesense and his mind were pointed toward the smudged row of bottles behind the fat semi-human dispenser of nepenthe, yearning toward the knock on the head that would make bearable the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune. He had three, quick. Four. That cold lump down in the pit of his stomach began to dissolve; he gave a glance around him. "Hi," she said. "You're a big one, aren't you?" Perry gave her a fast look, then returned to his drink. Pretty, she was. Hell, beautiful. But her kind made a point of it, always had. Nowadays a woman had limitless ways and means of achieving and extending her looks. Plastic surgery. Transplants. Everything reput to where it would create the best effect for her particular bone structure. Yet he didn't think a tramp on Marsport would run to that in credits. He found himself musing about the Gannys. Those frigid utterly emotionless serpents on Ganymede did the best work along these lines, possibly because they were completely ruthless about it. Rebodying was outlawed on Earth and Venus, and most other places, but the Gannys still did a brisk business. They were wizards at recasting human flesh, their work defied detection; they replaced internal organs and glands as well. Mankind had spilled out into space so fast there was no keeping track of what went on in the far places like Ganymede, and what went on there made the ancient Nero and his crowd look like a bunch of Sunday School teachers. I t was dangerous getting involved with the Gannys; you had to dangle your credits at them through go-betweens, else you might end up in one of their flesh pits. They kept human slaves and hacked them up to suit their customers. This was an open secret, although when the space lawmen made their surprise raids nothing could be found. Perry took another look. Boy, she was stacked. He grinned and leaned toward her, waving his glass. "Care to join me?" She hesitated now. A tremulous shiver moved briefly across her clear oval face. Her hair was a pale fire, her eyes were blue like the sky over Italy or Mexico; there was a physical warmth that reached out toward him, even when she was holding back. The hold-back was in her blue eyes, too. Perry couldn't believe it was shyness. Not here in this cesspool. It was more than that -- a cogent fear. A girl like her might get stranded here, it could happen. Not a new story. Perry thought of himself as a right guy. In the glow of four drinks he thought: maybe I can help the poor kid. "Got a name?" he asked, handing fcea a drink. "Lisa," she said, her voice low and defensive. She sipped from her glass without enthusiasm. Her eyes couldn't tick with his; she was still scared. "You don't drink much, Lisa." "No." "By the way, I'm Perry Alman." She smiled bewitchingly. "Like Marsport?" he asked conversationally. Lisa laughed. This was a gag, obviously. Nobody liked Marsport. Marsport was a cankerous bubble of air on a dead, dead world. Moonport was safe, clean, uncluttered; yet Marsport oontinued to flourish; there were always companies and individuals who shied from the restrictive red tape. "You look -- what's the wordwistful," he said. "You -- you remind me of things. Nice things, back home." "Where's that?" "Ohio." "What are you doing out here?" "My father was an exporter. When I stopped getting letters, I came out to find him." Her voice was toneless with restraint. "I guess you don't want to talk about it." "Yes, I do, I -- I haven't had a chance to tell anybody. Maybe it might help if I -- " "Go right ahead." P erry ordered more drinks and listened. He didn't catch the whole story. He was getting juiced and he was falling down into those blue eyes. It seemed that her father had been engaged lucratively in trading manufactured Earth goods for raw materials and native hand-madei for several years, while Lisa was going to school, studying languages for a teacher's profession. She was very close to her father, her mother having died when she was a child, and when the letters stopped she set out to look for him, tracing him to Jupiter satellite belt. She didn't find him. His alien partner was in Marsport so she came here. His name was Korp and to her horror she found that he was allied with a Ganny kidnap ring. They wanted her on sight. "I got away," she shivered, "but I lost everything -- even my credits case. What could I do? I stumbled into this place and I stay here, where there are lots of people. I feel safer here. I'm scared to be alone. It has been three weeks. A nightmare." "You've got to get back to Ohio." "How? I haven't any credits. I keep hoping I'll meet somebody who will lend me the money. I do have it there, honestly. Don't you see? I have no papers. Nobody will believe me!" Her voice dropped to a bitter whisper. Perry finished his sixth drink and set down the glass with an elaborate flourish. Everything and everybody in the odoriferous bar was a blur, everything except Lisa's beautiful face. Those blue eyes, brimming up. "I believe you," he said thickly. "I'll get you on a ship. Tonight." Fuzzy as he was, he didn't quite believe her. But the poor kid needed a friend and she most particularly # IF seeded to get the hell off this deadend. It was a good story, anyway. Break him to pay her passage back to Earth, but what the hell, he'd been broke lots of times before and he expected to be broke again. He took her arm and waltzed her through the mob and into the benighted street. It was narrow, crowded, and it stank almost as bad. The air wasn't much good; Mar sport was as usual perilously overcrowded for the oxygen bubble's machines were equipped to put out. At the mouth of a dark alley Lisa stopped. "Got a few things in a hole of a room down here. Can't we stop there a minute, please?" Perry squited into the black, then lurched against the slimy wall. "I'll wait here." She nodded and started to go in, then she turned and came up to him, close. "Perry." "Yeah?" "I owe you something." Her lips brushed his, and her closeness lit fires inside him. "I like you Perry. I like you more than I've ever liked anybody. We'll probably never see each other again. Please..." Her Kps clung fiercely to his, then she was pulling him along with her into the alley. The fires inside him leaped. T he room was a hole, as Lisa had said. It was equipped with a narrow bed, a straight chair, and a night table with a metal carafe of precious water on it. Also with a Kzard-faced Venurian. The wash of sick light made Perry blink; ha heard the door snap-lock behind him while he stood there squinting at the snake-man. "I got him, Korp," Lisa said. "Now it's your turn." Korp didn't wait. In the seconds it took Perry's fuzzy brain tq catch up and the adrenalin to get pumping, he was on Perry., A scaly fist lashed out, connected. Two more followed. Grunting, Perry fell back bleary-eyed against the rough wall. The smash of those three cutting blows evoked in him a kind of dispassionate masochism; served him right for getting so off-guard and stupid. He kept on his feet, though, and the jolts of pain overrode his narcotic torpor; the juices started rivering again and his mind snapped sharp. With a roar he went into action. When his first one landed, Korp hissed something to Lisa, who was leaning coolly against the far wall, smoking a cigarette. "Don't mess him up too much," she pointed out to Korp. "We waited a long time for this special order. They don't come that big and masculine these days." Now Perry knew why Korp hadn't just killed him with a gun. The Gannys wanted him alive; the transfers had to be made from living flesh, preferably undamaged. While he was bruising his balled fists on Karp's scales Lisa dropped her cigarette and went to the night table. She opened the drawer and took out a slender fistful of Metal with a hollow transparent barrel that had liquid in it. It was a needle fun. She pointed it at Perry, waiting for a clear shot. Perry put Korp between them and kept him there One needleful of that juice and he was already on Ganny, meat for the plastic butchers. Korp dropped to the floor with a yell at Lisa. This was it. The needle flew. Then, halfway, it stopped in the air, quivered, and fell on the floor. Lisa screamed, staring behind Perry at the door. Perry half-swung a glance to look-see what had caused the miracle but didn't quite make it Lisa was pumping another needle into place and Korp was climbing up on his feet and lunging toward the doorway. Lisa's finger whitened on the trigger. This time it hit, like a mosquito with a very long stinger... The floor moved up and rapped him lightly on the chin. T hose dreams again, spilled out from secret doors; it was almost as if a fumbling hand inside his memory apparati were seeking them out and unlocking them on purpose. "Moon-fever," somebody said. "He's got moon-fever." "Moon-fever, hell!" a familiar voice laughed. "He's -- " The last word was lost in Fats' roaring bellylaugh. "Shhh," a feminine voice admonished. "I can't get over it!" Fats chortled. "Not him! Not Big Muscles himself!" The voices blurred at some new distraction. One sharp voice cracked through in a caustic rage. "How did he (:ef in here?" "Doctor, I swear -- " "I thought I told you nobody, and... most momentous event in the annals of medical history... critical point... get this laughing hyena out of this room and out of this building before I strangle him with my bare hands!" "Doctor -- " "Out, out! I'll deal with you later, nurse. As for you, you 'grinning moron, I -- " He was whirling, falling, and the voices cut out. Once in a while he got vague glimpses of a white-walled room, a hospital, perhaps. Pain tore at his guts, then a needle jabbed his arm and the pain was gone. A couple times he tried to sit up but the nurses were right there in force, with their restraining hands and their needles. Life was a long sleep, punctuated with feeding and pills, and blurred voices in the background. Once there was the sensation of a roomful of people. He tried to open his eyes, couldn't, but sometimes the curtain of unconsciousness flapped open to let in random phrases that registered diffusely on his aural memory. "Rare privilege to address you distinguished gentlemen. Most important scientists in your related fields. Attempt to provide some background for this great event... the problem was to provide this alien foetus with absolute security... warmth, feeding... they were dying... all of them... this was their one slender hope... and if this one lives, IF parthogenisis is possible! Think of that, gentlemen! "They are telepathic... probed Alman's mind... selected best specimen for their purpose... no women, of course... problem was Alman's psychological attitude... realized he would never submit voluntarily, even if he did his attitude would be wrong... foetus would die, he would will it to die... tricked him... knew he would be returned to Earth with supposed moon-fever... sealed instructions for us... secret hospital... not a word has leaked out... Alman has been kept under sedation all these months... we can only hope and pray..." Sudden shattering pain. Perry screamed and woke. #TAober."L' He blinked up at the little round-eyed creature hovering over him. His hand moved unvoluntarily to his lower belly, running along the faint long scar he always kept carefully hidden. "You did it again, Dober," he aid. Dober buzzed contentment. "I do." "Just what did you do?" Besides a few sore spots where Korp had placed his fist marks Perry felt pretty good. "I stop needle first time. Make fall. My mind say to it, you fall down, needle. Then lizard-man jump at me. I shoot him. But my mind no can work for two things at same time. Other needle hit you while I kill man name Korp. Sorry." Perry hiked up on one elbow. Hie was lying on the bed in the little room Lisa had steered him to. Dober was slapping goop on his face and shoulders, on the cuts where Korp's soaley fists had opened the skin. He was on his knees. Perry sat up, wincing his general displeasure. "How'd you get here?" "No like I come?" Dober asked regretfully. "Sorry. I forget give back your gun. It in your ship. I remember about gun after go. Think you need. Come back to bring." He held up Perry's weapon. "You killed Korp with that?" "No like kill. But Korp very bad man. I see in mind. No good for nobody." "The girl?" "No kill girl. She not bad like Korp. She mixed up. Accident with father. He die, her body all smash. Ganny-people make for her new body. Korp fix this so now she must work for them. Owe them one bodyBad, but not impossible. Let go." "Think she'll make it, Dober?" Dober gave a droll shrug. "Maybe yes. Maybe no." P erry looked into those round liquid eyes for several minutes, while his mind chewed on all that had happened -- including the dreams. "How old are you, Dober?" he asked, in a while. "Seven." "Yeah. You were bora on Earth?" Dober nodded his big head. "In a very special, very secret hospital." Dober nodded. "Very special -- me." Perry sighed. It "How come they let you go? I would have thought they'd have watched you like a bunch of hawks. You're pretty important, Dober. One f the most important things that ever happened on Earth." Dober clicked an odd chuckle. "No let me go. I watch. I learn. I get smart. Play tricks on doctors. Run away. Steal ship. Learn to fly. Come for find you. They tell me to find. Want help you much. I damn smart. You like now?" Perry blinked, floored. Something drifted up from way, way, way down in his mind, a funny random thing. Those long months on the moon the mining company had furnished hundreds of microtapes for the womenless expedition to while away the time -- new ones, old ones, what they called "classics". There was one about a sentimental anger who wore white gloves, painted his face black, and got down on his knees, bleating emotionally... For one of your smiles... Dober's round eyes, with that incredible brain olicking away behind them, were on him, solemnly. He said nothing, but simmering off in the background was an emotion that touched Perry on a tender spot. "You feel good now?"' Dober asked. "Yeah." "I go away some more. No more bother you." Perry slapped him lightly across the furry ear. "It's okay, Dober, my boy. Guess I'm stuck with you. But none of them sloppy Mother's Day cards, Coming Next Month Remember The Totally Rich , which ran in Worlds of Tomorrow a year or two ago? Remember the novels like To Conquer Chaos? Then you remember John Brunner, that prolific and talented young Englishman who writes like an old master -- with color and scope and, above all, with a fine sense of adventure. We talked with Brunner a couple of months ago, urging him to give us more of his stories. As the conversation occurred on the observation platform of the Empire State Building, with a fifth of a mile of empty space on one side of him and us on the other, he agreed at once. Next month we bring you the first fruits of that undertaking, beginning a two-part novel called The Altar at Asconel, You'll like it. IP IF  Serial He lunged across the orbiting worlds of the Plan to battle men and stars -- on equal terms I XU r ie Plan of Man had gone amok. All over Earth, out into the asteroid belt, in the refrigerated warrens on Mercury, in the sunless depths of Pluto and on the slowly wheeling forts of the SpacewaH... the terror had struck. Routing orders crashed one subcar ball into another two thousand miles below the surface of t he earth. Six hundred persons died in a meteor-like gout of suddenly blaring gases that melted the subcar shaft and let the molten core pour in. On Venus a Teohnicorps captain received routine programming instructions from the Machine and. obediently, set a dial and turned a witch. It flooded forty thousand bard won acres of reclaimed land with oily brine. A "man of golden fire" appeared on the stage of the great Auditorium of the Plan in Peiping, where the Vice Planner for Asia had been scheduled to speak to his staff. The golden man disappeared again, and twenty raging pyropods flashed and destroying everything within reach. The Vice Planner, minutes late in keeping his engagement, had his life spared in consequence. In short, sharp words Machine General Wheeler barked out the story of the catastrophes that were overwhelming the Plan. "The Starchild! Seen in the vaults of the Planning Machine -- and now the Machine's gone mad. Its orders are wrong! Its data can't be trusted! Gann, if you are the Star child -- " Boysie Gann had been pushed too far. In a shout louder than Wheeler's own he roared: "General! I'm not the Starchild! Don't be a fooll" Suddenly the machinelike face of the general seemed to wilt and crack. It was in a very human voice that he said, after a moment: "No. Perhaps you're not. Burt -- what in the name of the Plan is going on?" G ann snapped: "I thought you were telling me that. What's this about the Starchild being seen in the Machine itself?" "Just that, Gann. Guards reported someone there. A squad was sent down, and they saw him. He was at the manual consoles -- ohanging the settings, erasing miles of tape, reversing connections. The Machine is mad now, Gann. And the Plan is going mad with it. All over the world." "Never mind that! What did he look like, this Starohild?" Machine General Wheeler squared his shoulders and barked crisply: "A man. Golden, they say. Almost as though he were luminous. Photographs were taken, blit he was not recognized. It -- it didn't resemble you, Gann. But I thought -- " "You thought you'd come here anyway. Use me as a scapegoat, maybe. Is that it? The way you did when you pretended I shot Delta Four?" The general tried to protest, then his lips smacked shut like the closing of a trap. He nodded his head twice, briskly, like a metronome. "Yes!" Gann was taken aback. He had not expected so quick a confession. All he could do is say, "But why? Why did you shoot her? To get her out of the way as a witness?" "Of course," rapped Machine General Wheeler. "And pretend I was the Starchild? To make yourself more important to the Planner and the Machine?" "Precisely," the general crackled out. Gann studied him thoughtfully, then said: "Something must have changed your mind. What was it?" The general answered without changing expression or tone. Only a faint color on the brow, a pale brightness as of perspiration, showed the strain he must have felt. "The gM recovered," he snapped. "She IF What Has Gone Before The Plan of Man Is threatened by someone -- or something! -- from space. He ealb himself the Starchild... and claims to have the power to extinguish suns   . a mi proves the claim to be fact. Major Boysie Gann finds himself caught up in a tangled trail that leads through the solar observatories on Mercury, out through the Reefs of Space and back to the caverns of the Planning Machine on Earth. At each step he finds himself drawn deeper into  trap of inexplicable happenings and deadly peril... culminating when the Planning Machine seems to go mad, driven out of control by the Starchild -- and Gann b accused of being the Starchildl told the Planner the truth -- that I had merely found that document, and planted it on you. The Planner reported to the Machine, and -- " "And what?" demanded Boysie Gann. The general's voice cracked. "And the Machine went mad. It ordered my arrest. Then it began ordering the arrest of Sister Delta Four, the Vice Planner for Central America, the guards in the. Hall of the Planner, even the Planner himself. There was confusion. I shot my way clear. I secured an aircraft, the one Sister Delta Four had come to the Planner's headquarters in, and I escaped. But I must leave Barth, Gann! I want you to take me to the Reefs, because -- because I must get away." "Get away? Why?" The general's voice tolled out Hie answer. "In shooting my way out of the Planner's headquarters I kitted two men. One of them was dm Planner." B oysie Gann had never know where the training school was located on Earth. As they emerged to the surface he saw for the fast time the great sweep of mountains to the north, felt the icy sting of cold air and realized that they were on the plateaus below the Himalayas. For thousands of years only nomads and warriors had shared this bleak, desolate land. Now a great hydroelectric plant boomed beyond the level sweep of a rocketport hewn out of rock. There was something about the power plant that looked strange. As Machine General Wheeler fed n him quickly to a waiting jetoraft Gann realized what was wrong with the hydroelectric plant. Even at this distance he could see that it was a wreck. Its great windows reflected no light; they were shattered. There were cracks in its solid masonry walls. There had been an explosion within -- some migjhty burst of short circuiting energy, volatilizing all matter within its scope. "Never mind that," rapped out the general. "Come aboard! There's someone there you'll want to see." Gann followed, staring about. If destruction had come even here, it must be radically more far-reaching than he had dreamed. Was it the Starchild? And who was the Starchild? Hurrying after General Wheeler, Gann's mind was a vortex of thoughts, memories, impressions. The body-shaking rapture of his communion with the Machine. The terrible fight in the Planner's hall, and the terrible shock that had truck him when he saw Sister Delta Four -- the girl who had once been Julie Martinet, his love -- shot down before him. The long dizzying fall through non-pace, from the Reefs to Earth. The strange hermit, Harry Hickson -- It was almost more than he could take in. Bemused, he was hardly aware when they reached the waiting jetship. He followed General Wheeler into the open hatch, and then he saw who K was who awaited diem there. "Julie!" he cried. "Julie Martinet!" But it was Sister Delta Four who answered, "Come in. Close the hatch. We must take off at once! I have a message from the Machine." G eneral Wheeler reacted at once. He turned and closed the hatch, then leaped across the narrow cabin of the jetship and snatched from the grasp of Sister Delta Four the black cube that was her linkbox. "Fool!" he rasped. "A message from the Machine! Don't you know the Machine's gone mad? The Starchild has been tampering with it. It is no longer functioning according to Plan. The evidence of your eyes should tell you that -- can't you see what's been going on?" The girl lifted her head, unafraid, and stared at him with objective, remote eyes. The black fabric of her hood fell away, baring the bright medallion of the communion plate in her forehead, just like Boysie Gann's own. She said in her melodic, chiming voice: "I serve the Machine, General Wheeler. And you are a traitor, condemned to death." "So are you, for that matter," growled the general. He tossed the linkbox to Boysie Gann. "Here. Keep her quiet while I get us started. We've got to get off Earth at once." He dived for the control cabin, to set the automatic instruments that would start the motors, take the plane off the field, fly it strigjht and true to its destination, radio for landing instructions and set it down. Gann glanced at the linkbox in his hands, then at Sister Delta Four. The linkbox carried its communion plug, racked in a recess in its IF cubical bulk. Gann could see the bright glitter of its rounded tips that mated so perfectly with the plate in bis own skull. If, he thought ponderously, he were to take that plug off its clip and place it into the plate in his forehead... if he were to complete his communion... he would once again feel that total rapture, than almost unbearable ecstasy of soul and senses that he had tasted, just once, an hour before. The temptation was overpowering. He could understand Julie -- or rather, Sister Delta Four -- a great deal better now. There had never been an addiction like this one, no drug, no narcotic, no mere alcoholic coraving that was as overpowering in ks appeal. He could understand why Julie Martinet had given up family, freedom, the pleasures of the senses and himself, for the shroud of an acolyte of the Machine. He could understand it, because he was all but at that point himself, after one single exposure. W ith a swift motion, before he could stop to think, he lifted the linkbox and dashed it to the floor. It crackled and sputtered. In its static-filled buzzing sound he could detect some of the tonal morphemes he had been taught, but he did not give himself a chance to puzzle out their meaning, did not allow the linkbox the time to beg for its preservation -- if that was its intention. He lifted a foot and crushed it, stamped k again and again, like a noxious insect. Its buzzing abruptly stopped. There was a faint blue flash of electric sparks, and then it was only a mangled mass of printed circuits and crushed transistors. "That's the end of that, Julie," he said. "And that's the end of our relationship with the Machine." She was watohing him silent, her eyes dark and incurious. "Don't you have anything to say?" he demanded. She pealed: "Only what I am instructed to tell you Major Gann. The message that was given me by the Machine." "Damn the Machine!" he cried. "Can't you understand that's over? It's finished. Gone! First we have to try to straighten out this mess -- then -- maybe then! -- we can think about using the Machine again. Ueing it! Not letting k use us!" "I know nothing of that, Major Gann," she sang. "I only know the message. It follows: To Major Gann . Action. Proceed at once to the Togethership on the Reefs of Space via Mercury Terminator Line Station Seven. Message ends . # Gann shook his head dazedly. "Julie, Julie!" he protested. "That's ridiculous on the face of it. Go to the Reefs by way of Mercury? That's like coming across a room by way of -- of Deneb. It's not the way at all -- " "I don't know about that," rasped the voice of Machine General Wheeler from behind him. Gann turned. The general was standing in the open door of the control cabin, something in his hand. His expression was dark and fearful, like some trapped and dangerous creature of the jungle. Gann said, "But Mercury is near the Sun. Even if we wanted to go to the farthest part of the Reefs, where we're at superior conjunction, we might go near Mercury, yes, but we'd never land there. Not anywhere on the planet much less at some particular station on the terminator line." "Go there we will," rapped General Wheeler. "Land there we will. And at the station. Major Gann! I told you I intended to go to the Reefs at once and wanted you with me. I had a reason. See here! This dropped to the ground before me as I was leaving the Planner's chambers after my -- ah -- episode with the guns." Wordlessly Boysie Gann took the document. It was a creamy square, without signature, and on k were the words: If you would save yourself, your people and your worlds, bring Machine Major Boysie Gann and yourself to the Togethership on the Reefs of Space. The gateway will be found at the Plan of Man solar observatory on Mercury, Terminator Station Seven. "The Starchild!" cried Gann. General Wheeler nodded with a harsh, mechanical up-down, updown. "A message from the Starchild, yes. And the same message from the Planning Machine. Major Gann! Do you realize what this means? The Fiaoniftg Machine k the Starchild!" xra A t some point they transshipped into a Plan of Man jetless-driva cruiser. Gann paid little attention. He was using the time in the beat way he could, to rest, to try to recover from the shocks and stresses of the last few weeks. And how fast they had accumulated, how violently they had drained him of strength, and of peace of mind! He could still feel the distant ache in his forehead, in the bones of his skull, behind his eyes, in his sinuses -- the track of the probes of the surgeons who had implanted the communion electrodes in his brain. He could feel the aches and bruises of his working-over by the Planner's guards. How long ago? He was exhausted still from the battle with the pyropods and the long drop to Earth. Hs weary muscles still bore the fatigue poisons of his fight on Harry Hickson's reeflet... He closed his eyes, and Quarla Snow came into his mind. He opened them, and Sister Delta Four sat quietly unmoving, her eyes fixed on him, before him. He was beginning to feel himself again. With the return of strength there returned the question of the two women, so unlike yet so much in his thoughts. He said: "Julie. Sister Delta Four, if you'd rather. Do you know that whait General Wheeler said is true? That the Machine is mad?" IF Her perfect face, half hidden in the cowl, did not change expression. "I know that that is what the general aid," she sang. "But it is mad, Julie. The Starchild has wrecked it. Now it is wrecking the Plan planets. Do you still want to serve it?" "I serve the Planning Machine," she chimed sweetly, her dark eyes cool and empty. "Because of the bliss of communion? I understand that, Julie. Don't forget -- " he touched the glittering plate in his forehead -- "I've felt it too." T here was a flicker in her eyes, almost an expression of indulgent amusement, as she looked at him. But she only said, in her voice like the sound of beHs: "What you felt, Major Gann, is only a shabby imitation of what the Machine gives its true servants. For you are only half a servant. The Machine has not opened its mind to you." Puzzled, Gann asked: "You mean -- mind to mind linkage? Communication with the -- what could you call it? -- with the thoughts of the Machine?" She only shrugged. "It is something of that sort, perhaps," she aid indifferently. "You cannot know." She sang a quick chiming chorus of tonal morphemes. Gann tried to follow, but was lost almost at once. "You said something about the -- the soul?" he guessed. "The soul of the Machine?" "You see? I am sorry for you, Major Garni," she said. "More for you than for myself. Since you have destroyed my link box I cannot reach the Machine, but some day perhapa I will fnd another link box. You wifl never attain it." Machine General Wheeler had been dozing while they spoke. Now Gann became aware that the general was awake and listening to them. When he saw Gann's eyes on him the general sat up and laughed raspingly, like an ancient, ill-kept machine. "A fool," he said, hurling one bright, contemptuous look at the girl. "And you're another, Gann. You're not fit to survive, either of you." "I survive if the Machine desires it," chimed the girl clearly. "I will cease when the Machine no longer needs me." The general ticked off a nod and turned to Gann. "You see? And what is it that keeps you alive?" Gann said seriously, "I don't know." He got up , moved restlessly about the cramped quarters of the Plan cruiser, his step light and imprecise in the tiny gravity its jetless thrust supplied. He said, "Out on the Reefs they talk about freedom. Fm not sure, but -- Yes. I think it is that hope that keeps me going now, the hope that freedom is real, and good." The general laughed again. Without passion, as though playing back an ancient tape-recording in his brain, he said: "The Planner I just killed understood freedom. He called it the 'romantic fallacy'. Freedom is that which permits the dirty, Planless nomads of the Reefs to eke out fheir wretched lives. It is a myth." "I saw happy men and women on the Reefs," said Boysie Gann softly, less to the general than to himself. "You saw animals! They believe that men are good. They believe that mere human men and women, left to their own unplanned devices on any drifting rock somewhere in apace, can somehc v find within themselves the natural springs of morality and intellectual enlightenment and progress. They are wrong!" He blinked at Gann and the silent, composed girl. "Men are evil," he aaid. "The givers of laws have always known that men are essentially bad. They must be goaded into whatever good they display. Our Ran of Man was created to defend this classic philosophy -- the cornerstone of all civilization. The Plan recognizes the evil in man. It forces him to goodness and progress. There Is no other way!" M ercury, the heil-piaoet, lay before them. The guiding sensors of their Plan cruiser reached out with fingers of radiation to touch the planet, the Sun; sought reference points by optical examination of the fixed bright stars; scanned the limbs and poles of Mercury and accurately fixed the proper point on the terminator line of the sun's radiation. Then, satisfied, or in whatever state passes in a machine for satisfaction, h completed its landing corrections and directed the cruiser into a landing orbit. The great naked fire of the sun away -- three times as close as to Earth, its mighty outpouring of light and heat nine times as great. Its surface was mottled with great ugly spots, leprous with the scaley markings called faculae and granulations. It was painful to watch, bright and blinding. Machine General Wheeler moved a hand angrily, and the vision screen obediently blotted oust the central disk, like a solar eclipse; then they could see the somber scarlet chromosphere, the leaping red arches of prominences, like slow-modon snakes striking at the void and, surrounding all, the white blazing radiance of the corona. In that mighty furnace, each second lakes of solar hydrogen flashed into helium, pouring out energy. Each second, every square centimeter of ks enormous surface hurled sax thousand watts of power into the void. On the sunward side of Mercury, molten tin and lead ran like water in fissures of baked and ovenlike rock. On its dark side the thinnest of atmospheres, boiled from the rock by the solar radiation, smashed free of it by the impact of meteorities, carried some tiny warmth to relieve what was otherwise a freezing cold nearly as absolute as that of Pluto. On the terminator line the Plan of Man's string of observatories maintained a precarious existence, the searing heat before them, the "There!" rasped General Wheeler, tabbing a finger at the screen. "Terreinator Line Station Seven! Now we'll see about this Starchild!" The great Plan cruiser, dancing it the thrust of its reactionless motors, slowed, halted, kissed the seared rock and came to rest, in the Aadow of a silvery dome that reached out toward the sun with the barrels of telescopes and pyrometers, glared toward it with the great blind eyes of radio telescopes and masers. Over its entrance blazed the sign. General Wheeler laughed sharply. "Faithful to whom, eh? To me, Gann! Trust in me!" Boysie Gann glanced at him without expression, then at Sister Delta Four. She was mute and uncaring, her eyes hidden in the folds of her dark cowl. Gann shook his head hut said nothing. In his heart he thought: Mad. He's as mad as the Machine. Tubular entranceways were groping slowly toward them from the dome, found the airlocks of the cruiser, met and sealed themselves. The hatches opened. Gann stood up. "Let's go. All of us. I -- I don't know what we'll find." He waited and General Wheeler stalked past him, elbows and knees stiff as the linkages of a recriprocatmg engine. Sister Delta Four approached the lock, then hesitated and looked at Gann. She threw a series of tonal symbols at him, her voice crisp and pure as bells. Gann said hesitantly, "I -- I don't understand. As you said, I'm only about half educated. Something about a -- a man? A relative?" Sister Delta Four said in English: "I asked you to be careful, Major Gann. There is a brother here who is of unstable emotion." "I don't understand," said Boysie Gann. The girl did not answer, only nodded remotely and passed on into the entranceway, into Terminator Station Seven. A s Gann followed her he heard General Wheeler's rasping roar: "Hello there!!! Anyone! Isn't anyone here?" The general was standing atop an enameled steel desk, peering around in all directions. Behind him were banks of electronic instruments, arranged in long rows like lockers in a gymnasium; they purred and hummed and flashed with lights, ignoring the presence of the general. The desk itself was part of a small office suite. It was deserted. "I don't understand," rapped the general. He climbed down, picked up a phone from a desk and stabbed circuit buttons at random, listened briefly, then flung it down. "There's no one here," he said, brows gathered in irritation and anger. "A joke? Would this Starchild dare joke with meV Gann said, "What about the rest of the station, General?" "Search it!" barked the general. "You too, Sister! There must be someone! The doorway to the Reefs -- the key to the Togethership -- I will not let them escape me!" IF Gann looked forebodingly at Sister Delta Four, but she did not return his gaze. Obediently, her fingers telling her sonic beads, she chose a doorway and entered it, her dark cowl moving as she scanned the rooms beyond for signs of life. Gann shrugged and selected an area of his own and began the search. He could hear General Wheeler's angry shouts, and the purr or whine or click of the automatic machinery of the observatory, keeping its instruments pointed at selected areas of the Sun, tabulating the results. He could hear the distant whine erf pumps, the sigh of air in the vents. There were no other sounds. The observatory seemed to be deserted. Gann moved through a chamber of record storage, where stacked drawers of magnetic tape reels held the information gleaned from countless machine-hours of solar study, glanced into what might have been a recreation room, found himself in the main observation chamber. No one moved. No voice challenged him. "Hello!" he cried, echoing General Wheeler's fading voice. There was no answer. The normal complement of a nearly automatic station like this (me was small -- half a dozen men, perhaps even fewer. Yet it was hard to believe that some disaster had overtaken them all at once -- Or so Gann thought. Then, turning, he saw the disaster. T here were three of them -- three men, piled like jackstraws behind a workdesk, before a closed and locked door. They were unmistakably dead. The one on top, supine, sightless yellowed eyes staring at the ceiling, was a grizzled older man in the uniform of a Technicaptain. Of the other two Gann could tell little except for their insignia -- a lieutenant and a cadet, one plump and young, one young and oddly, familiar. Gann bent and touched them. There was no pulse. No breath. Yet the bodies still seem to be warm. Perhaps it was only his imagination, he thought. Or the warmth of the room -- cooled by the circulating refrigerated air from the pumps, yet still so close to the blazing Sun. He heard a faint sound, and jerked his head up, frowning, listening. It was not one sound. There were two. One he identified -- the faint tones of Sister Delta Four's sonic beads. In her own search of the dome, by some other route, she was coming near. But what was the other sound? It seemed to come from nearby, though muffled. He turned his head and stared at the locked door. Could it be from behind that? It seemed to be a sort of oloset or recordstorage chamber. It was massive, and the locks that held it would not respond to any unauthorized key. Yet now he was sure of it: there were sounds behind it, sounds like the distant murmur of life. Sister Delta Four entered the room, saw him, hurried over to stoop swiftly over the three bodies. When she looked up her eyes were dark. She sang. "You need not fear him after all, Major Gann." Boysie Gann blinked. "Fear Whom?" "'The brother," the girl intoned. "He is dead. His unPlanned emotions need not concern you any longer." "Brother? But -- " Then Gann stopped in mid-sentence. Understanding began to reach him. He reached for the body of the Technicadet, turned the flaccid head. The face was one he had seen before. " Your brother!" he cried. Sister Delta Four corrected him. "The brother of Julie Martinet. The brother of this body, yes. As you fee, he is dead." Her dark eyes were mild and unconcerned, as though she were commenting on the weather. Beyond the jackstraw heap of bodies the thick square door still hid the source of the tiny sounds, but Gann put them out of his mind. Julie Martinet's brother! He could see the resemblance, the same grave eyes, the same shape of the jaw -- in Sister Delta Four, it completed a perfect oval; in the boy, it gave him a strong chin under a dreamer's face. Boy sie Gann saw that, and he saw something more. He bent close, incredulous. But there was no doubt. Under the pallor of death, under the uncaring vacancy of the face, there was a hint of color. Golden color. Almost luminous. Gann turned quickly to the other corpses. The same! Like Machine Colonel Zafar, like Harry Hickson, like the beasts of the Reefs, the three dead Technicorps men gleamed faintly, goldenly, like a brass helmet's reflection of a distant sun. H e drew Sister Delta Four after him and sought and found General Wheeler, told him in short sentences what he had seen. "The same golden color, General," he said. "It's fatal. Or. -- " He hesitated, remembering. Harry Hickson had died of the disease, yes. But he had lived again. He brushed that thought out of his mind. "Fatal," he repeated. "It's a fusorian infection, I think. If you put a drop of their blood under a microscope you would see little fusorian globules, flickering with golden light. Some sort of symbiosis, Dr. Snow said. But fatal..." General Wheeler rasped: "Fusorian, you say? The Reefs, then! Do you know what that means to me, Gann? It means the Starchild! My information was not wrong. He's here!" "But he can't be," Gann protested. "We've searched the station, the three of us, and we saw no one." And Sister Delta Four echoed him: "We saw no one, General. No one at all, but the dead." "Dead o alive, he's here," growled the general. "I'll find him! I'll make him lead me to the Together ship!" Boysie Gann remembered the sounds behind the door. He said, "There is one place, General. One place where -- someone might be. Behind the bodies was a door -- " IF "Come on!" shouted Wheeler, not writing to hear him out, and led the way like an animated machine, aims flailing, harsh breath rasping. Gann and the girl had found him far from the observatory room, down in the subterranean storage spaces of the dome, poking and shouting into recesses of canned food and unused spools of tape. Even in Mercury's light grasp it was a long, hard, running climb back to the instrument room, and even Sister Delta Four was gasping for breath before they made half the distance back. And then they aM stopped, panting, staring at each other. For afi of them had caught the same sound -- the distant rumble of caterpillar tracks, carried faintly through Mercury's rock and the structure of the station. It was the entranceways, the long tubular protuberances through which fieir ship had been linked to the lock of the observatory dome. They were in motion. Either another ship had arrived... Or their own ship was talking off! "Let's go!" cried Boysie Gann, and they ran the remaining distance faster than before. The great door was standing open and the bodies were gone. General Wheeler and Gann turned without words and searched the room, under desks, behind cabinets, even inside the servicing hatches of the instruments themselves. "They're gone," said Gann at last, and the general echoed his words: "They're gone." Another voice said, "They've taken your ship, too." Gann and the general spun around. Sister Delta Four had not troubled to search the room with them. She had gone through the door, into a tiny, steel-walled cubicle that had evidently been designed for holding the most important records in safety hi the event of some disaster or mischance to the station. What it held now was another sort of treasure entfreiy. It was a girl, her lips white where they had been gagged, her arms still trailing ropes that Sister Delta Four had not finished taking off her. "They took your ship," she repeated. "All three of them. They opened the door for me -- and left." Gann hardly heard what she was mind. Honey-haired, softly tanned of skm, eyes blue and bright... he knew that girl. The girl in the observation dome in Mercury was the girl he had left hoe and now. It was Quarla Snow. I n the bright, refrigerated dome the pumps poured cooling air in upon them, but the great stormracked globe of the Sun that hung in the viewing screen seemed to beat down on them as though they were naked on Mercury's rock. Quarla Snow reached out and touched Boysie Gann's arm. "I thought you were dead," she said wonderingjy, and her eyes went toward Sister Delta Four, kneeling beside her, patiently, absently rublung Qu aria's chafed wrists. "Never mind that," said Gann. "How did you get here? Was it -- the Starchild?" Quarla shook her head, not in denial but in doubt. "I don't know. After you disappeared I set out to look for you." General Wheeler, at one of the optical telescopes, rapped angrily: "There! I see the villains! Between us and the Sun!" He studied the controls of his instruments furiously, selected a switch and turned it. The great image of the sun in the screen danced and dwindled as the field of vision c t a new telescope replaced the old one. They saw the Plan cruiser that had brought them, already very remote in the black, star-sprinkled sky that surrounded the blazing globe. "I wonder who's piloting it," murmured Boysie Gann. "Those criminals you saw here!" Wheeler barked. "Playing possum! They fooled you! Now they've taken our ship and we're marooned." "General," said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I don't ask you to believe me, but I was not fooled. They were not pretending to be dead. They were dead." "Impossible," rasped the general. "Look at the idiots! They're heading straight for the Sun. The ship isn't designed for photosphere temperatures! They'M kill themselves!" Gann turned wearily back to Quarla Snow. "You said you went looking for me. Why?" She flushed and looked away. She did not answer the question. She said, "Colonel Zafar died. My father reported it -- it was dangerous, you see -- and he took the body into Freehaven for examination. Ho did not know what had become of you. Neither did I. But -- I though! I could find you." Sister Delta Four got up quietly, crossed to the girl's other side, began to rub circulation into the other wrist. Quarla went on, her eyes avoiding Boysie Gann's. As sho spoke she looked sometimes at Sister Delta Four, sometimes at General Wheeler, sometimes at the great hanging orb of the Sun and the Plan cruiser that was moving slowly toward its long, tentacle-like prominences. She had gone outside, she said, and called her spaceling. Then she brought Harry Hickson's pyropod out into the open air, released it, watched it circle them twice, then arrow off into space itself... and, riding the spaceling, she had followed it. "After you disappeared and Colonel Zafar died, it seemed to go crazy," she said. "Raced around the house -- I thought it was looking for you. And I thought it might find you, if I set it free." "The Starchild!" boomed General Wheeler. "Get to the Starchild, woman! Did you ever find the Starchild?" She hesitated. "I think I did," she said at last "I think I met the Starchild in the heart of Reef Whirlpool." R eef Whirlpool -- not a planet, not a sun, not a comet. Not even a Reef in the true sense. It was something that partook of IF some of tihe elements of all of them. It had begun as a Reef, no doubt. It orbited Sol like a planet, if a distant one; like a comet, most of ks bulk was gases. And it burned with hydrogen-helium fusion at its core, like a star. Basically Reef Whirlpool was simply a bigger, denser cluster of Reefs than most of those stepchildren of Sol. Given time and additions enough, it might some day become the heart of a star. Its angular momentum was enormous; some stronger force than gravity kept its parts from flying into space. The Reefs that composed it were older and -- stranger -- than those outside. Pyropods in queerly mutated forms swarmed in and around it. Its central portions had never been visited by man, not even by the explorers of the Reefs. It was a place of terror and legend. The life that it harbored had been a long time evolving. Straight as an arrow the baby pyropod that once had belong to Harry Hickson hurtled toward Reef Whirlpool -- and behind it, pursing, barely able to keep its glowing bluewhite trail in sight, followed Quarla Snow on her spaceling. "I was afraid," she said soberly. "We passed a mating swarm of pyropods. Then ten thousand of them together, wheeling in space in a single body -- if they had seen us and pursued we wouldn't have had a chance. But it was too late to worry about that... and I was even more afraid of Reef Whirlpool." "The Starchild, girl!" cried General Wheeler. "Now!" His eyes were fixed angrily on the screen, where the Plan cruiser was coming closer and closer to the Sun, one great curved prominence seeming almost to lick up toward it like a reaching tongue of flame. "We reached Reef Whirlpool," said the girl, "and there I lost Hickson's pyropod. But Bella -- that's my spaceling -- Bella seemed to know where he had gone. We went in." From nearby in space Reef Whirlpool looked like a tiny galaxy, its separate reeflets glowing each with its own hue, like bright, soft stars against die dark. The rim of the disk was dark -- dead rocks and fragments; there, Quarla thought, were the nesting places of the pyropod swarms. She could feel the spaceling shudder, its limpid eyes wide and glazed with fear. But it went on. "Bella didn't seem able to help herself," said Quarla Snow. "She seemed to want to go right on -- to her own destruction -- or to something she feared even more." "Like those fools in my ship," rapped General. Wheeler. "Is that where the Starchild was? In that Reef?" Quarla Snow hesitated. "I don't know. Truly, General Wheeler, I don't know what I saw in the Reef. I know that I saw a great many things that weren't there." "Illusions?" the general demanded. "You were hallucinating?" She nodded uncertainly. "Yes. No. I don't know. I only know I saw things that couldn't have been there. One of them was Harry Hickson, and I knew he was dead. Another was Colonel Zafar. And another -- why, Boysie, one of them was you." T hey were deep in the core of Reef Whirlpool now. The spaceling's frenzy grew. They were long past the outer rim of rock where the pyropods nested, but there was something ahead that terrified Bella more than the tunneled nests of the beasts. "It's all right, honey," said the voice of her father in her ear. She cried out and stared around her. He was not there. No one was there, inside the tiny envelope of air the spaceling carried with them as they fled through dead airless space. "Go on, darling," said another voice. It was the voice of the mao she had just seen disappear in a whirlpool of light, the man she was seeking, Boysie Gann. And a third voice: "Quarla, girl! Don't hang back now!" And that was the voice that terrified her most of all, for she knew it, though she had not heard it in a long time and knew its owner was dead. It was the voice of Harry Hickson. Illusion? It had to be illusion. Hickson was dead. No one was there -- no one in sight, and no possibility that someone could be lurking out of sight, beyond Bella's envelope of air. For outside that elastic sphere there was nothing to carry a voice's sound. IF Yet that illusion stayed with her. "Don't fret about pyropods, girl," advised the voice, slow, rough, kind -- Harry Hickson's own, she was sure of it. "Get on with it! We're waiting for you." She remembered some words the dying Colonel Zafar had said: " -- mind trap... beware your heart's desire..." There was a warning there. But she could not take caution from the warning; will she, nill she, the spaceling was carrying her deeper and deeper into Reef Whirlpool, with the gleam of lesser reeflets darting past them as they flew, glittering diamond fungi, luminous blue polygons, jungles of incandescent wire, glowing nightmare worldlets for which she could find no name. And then they were at what she knew was the core. A great ship swung emptily about, huge as the whole Reef of Freehaven, giant, lethal weapons staring out of open ports. It was in free orbit at the heart of Reef Whiripool. Its weapons were unmanned Its drives were silent. "Great Plan!" shouted Machine General Wheeler, wild with excitement. "The Togethershipl It had to be the Togethershipr Quarla Snow looked at him, faintly puzzled. "That was the name k bore, yes. Your ship. General?" The general cackled with glee. "It is now! My ship -- my Machine that's been locked in its holds -- and my worlds, as soon as I reach it! You'll take me there, woman. You'll lead me to the Togethership  When I've made myself the master of the Planning Machine it carries I'll be back here on the Plan Worlds. Not just a general -- not even a Planner -- I'll rule the Machine itself! I'll -- I " He broke off, staring at Boysie Gann. "What's the matter?" he rapped. Gann said, "How do you propose to reach it. General?" The generafs face darkened. He scowled aft the screen, where his cruiser, now hopelessly beyond his reach, seemed to be dodging around the great solar flare that had developed in the moments while they were watching. "Go on," he growled. "I'M find a way. I'll get the Togethership, and then -- Never mind! Go on." A round that great battlecraft of the Plan, painted dead black for camouflage m space, studded with laser scopes and bristling with missile launchers, there was a queer golden mist. Quarla looked, and looked again. It was like a fog of liquid gold. Like a golden cloud. Impossible that there should be a cloud in space, even here. Yet she saw it. And at its heart was a great golden sphere, larger and brighter than the elfin Reefs more perfectly round. Like a laser burst hurtling to a target, the spacding drove toward k. Quarla cried out in terror, for as they raced toward it its surface seemed to lift to meet them. A bulge appeared and grew, became a tentacle reaching toward them. And the phantom voice of Harry Hickson said roughly, "Quarla, honey! Don't be scared. Come on!" She could not have stopped if she had tried. Bella was out of control. The voice was surely illusion, yet Quarla found it reassuring. Her horror ebbed. Queerly detached, she watched the bulge on the golden surface swell and divide into three parts. Eaoh stretched out until it became a bright golden snake. She watched them coil toward her -- They struck. Hot yellow coils whipped and tightened around her. Yet there was no pain. There was even less fear. The living ropes of gold hauled her in like a hooked trout, down to that golden sphere, and her oalm and detachment grew. Even the spaceling had lost all of its fear. Nestling into the hot, contracting coils, Bella purred like a huge kitten. She was drowsy. Quarla was drowsy, too. She thought she heard Harry Hickson speaking to her again -- calmly but urgently -- telling her things of great importance. You must go, child, he seemed to say, you must go to this place and do that thing. You must avoid these. Then you must return here... It was greatly soothing to hear his calm, wise voice. Quarla Snow slept. She slept, and time passed... "And," she said, "when I woke up, I knew what I must do. I had to come here and fetch you. All of you. He wants you to come to him." General Wheeler rasped: "The IF StarohUd! He's the one you mean, eh?" But she was shaking her head obstinately. "I don't know that. I only know what I must do. Only -- " her expression became worried -- "the men were here and they were afraid of me. They locked me up. They would not listen." Sister Delta Four sang, "Major Gann. General Wheeler. Miss Snow. Have you observed the screen?" They turned as one, startled, staring at the screen. Up there hung the Sun. The bright prominence that had grown so swiftly was huger still. It overhung the shape of the fleeing Plan cruiser with the three men who should have been dead -- overhung it like a crested wave, like the hood of a striking cobra. And like a snake it was striking. The Plan cruiser had changed direction -- too late. Slow though the great, jetting tongue of flame seemed in the screen, its movement was miles per second. Twist and turn though it would, the cruiser could not escape. The prominence touched it. The tiny black shape disappeared. Boysie Gann found himself shaking, heard the metallic, monotonous steady cyrsing of the general by his side. The cruiser had been swept out of space. Slowly the incredible tongue of flame began to fall back toward the mottled surface of its star, the Sun. "The general recovered himself A first. The coppery spikes of his hair, his flat bronze features, his whole expression showed resolution. "All right," he said. "We don't have to worry about trying to get that ship back any more. It's gone. Question is, how do we get out of here? Second question, how do we then get to the Reefs -- and the Together ship?" Sister Delta Four sang proudly: "There will be no difficulty in that The Machine has said that the gateway to the Togethership is to be found here." The general fixed his steel-gray stare on her. "But where? Out that airlock? Onto the rock of dayside Mercury? We'd fry in minutes. Or do you suggest we fly -- " He stopped in mid-sentence, bronze face frozen, then turned on Quarla Snow. "Those beasts of yours! What became of them? The spacelings, or whatever you called them." But Quarla was shaking her head. "This near the Sun Bella would never live," she said. "The radiation would destroy her -- and us, too, if we were in her air-oapsule. And anyway, she'i not here." "Then how?" cried the general. "There must be a way! Both messages -- the wStarchild's and the Machine's -- they both said this was the way." Quarla said softly', "And so it is, General. That is why I came here, to fetch you to the Reefs. I don't know how. I only know it will happen. The room seemed to lurch. It oaught all of them off guard. They turned to look at each other with varying expressions of surprise and fear. XV "I think," said Boysie Gann grimly, "that we've found our gateway." He knew that sensation, had felt it before, knew that in the powers it involved the long climb outward to the orbits of the Reefs was only a matter of moments. He was not afraid. In fact, there was almost relief in the knowledge that soon they would be facing the presence which had dislocated a solar system. Yet something was troubling him, some question of the last few moments, something that had been asked but not answered. He felt the room lurch again, and the lights grew distant and dim. And then he remembered. "Why, Quarla?" he croaked hoarsely. The girl of the Reefs looked at him affectionately. "Why what, Boysie?" "Why were they afraid of you? You said the men here feared you. WhyV The room seemed to shake and twist itself, as though viewed through a defective glass. The lights were leaving them -- or they the lights, as though new quanta of space were being bora between them, separating them without motion like the recession of fleeing galaxies. And then Gann saw the answer. Quarla did not need to speak. His eyes told him what had terrified the three men in Terminator Station Seven. In the dwindling light Quarla alone stood forth bright and clear -- her face, her arms, her body shining brightly... With a golden glow. T iey tumbled through space endlessly and forever, and then they stopped. They had arrived. They were all together in a wondrous new world. All about them hung the slowly spinning worldlets of Reef Whirlpool, jewels of emerald and ruby, glowing gems of white light and blue. There was the slowly pulsing golden sphere that had captured Quarla Snow. And there the great battleship of the Plan, the Togethership. Quarla Snow had described the ship, but she had not made them see its immensity. The vessel was huge. Boysie Gann saw it, and saw too that they were not alone. A ton of rushing mass hurtled toward them and stopped in midflight, squealing happily. A glowing red nose nuzzled Quarla Snow. "Bella!" cried the girl, and patted the tawny velvet fur. She murmured to Gann, "My spaceling. We're in her envelope of air, you see. Without it we'd not live a minute here." General Wheeler rapped: "Get your sentimental reunion over with, woman! Can this beast take us to the TogethershipT ' "We're going there now," said Quarla Snow. "See for yourself, General." They were. Gann could see it now, see the great battlecraft growing as they drew close. They were in free fall within the spaceling's vital oapsule, all four of them in loose and tumbling attitudes, Quarla with one hand on the spaceling's coat, IF Sister Delta Four proud and dignified even in the sprawl of zero-G, Machine General Wheeler careless of everything around him but his goal, his steel-gray eyes fixed on the looming Togethership. The battlecraft of the Plan was more distant and more immense even tiin Gann had realized. It grew into a long planetoid of sleek black metal, hanging suspended in the apace between the glowing golden sphere that dominated Reef Whirlpool's core and the tumbling worldlets that brightened the sky about them. They circled it and found the valves of a look yawning open at its base, circled by the jutting black cylinders of the six great drive units that had thrust it up from Earth. It did not seem to have been used in all those years. It had an abandoned and empty look. The spaceling, without direction, seeming compelled by some outside force, took them straight into those valves, and halted. The entry port of the Togethership was as big as a three-story house. As they entered, luminous rings around its walls sprang into soft gray light. The great valves moved silently, remorselessly shut behind them. They were enclosed in a wall of steel. All around them the walls were pitted and scarred, as though from some enormous battle of the past. There had been no such battle, Gann knew. What could have done it? Could it have been meteorites, over he decades that the locks had hung open... General Wheeler saw his look and rapped: "Pyropods! They've been chewing at my ship! By the Plan, I'M root out every filthy one of them -- " The general was right, Gann realized. Not only right, but seething with anger. It had become his ship , containing his copy of the Planning Machine. And with k he intended to make all the worlds of the solar system his planets... Darkly, Boysie Gann realized that there were more dangerous things in this ship than pyropods. H e became aware of a sighing, rustling noise, and saw that the ling's vital capsule no longer protected them from the void; they were in a breathable atmosphere. The spaceling realized k even before he did. She flicked her seal-like tail and darted away; raced back, her red nose glowing with joy, whimpering with pleasure. She played games with the bright-leafed vines she had carried in her air-envelope -- the curious Reef plants that were part of the elaborate evolutionary device that enable a warm-blooded oxygenbreather like herself to survive in naked space. She rolled the waxy, luminous tendrils into a huge ball, tossed it with her glowing nose, chased it across the lock, caught it with her broad velvet tail... "Bella!" called Quarla Snow, affectionately stern. "Come back here! Behave yourself!" But the spaceling was playfully obstinate. She flashed across the lock and back, racing toward them like the charge of a pyropod, missed them by inches, returned to the inner wall -- and there, at the far end of the lock, discovered a crevice that had not been there seconds before. Mewing excitedly, the spaceling slid its supple body through the narrow opening and was gone. A way was open into the rest of the ship. The same machinery  that had turned on the lights and closed the outer valves had now opened a passage inside. "Hah!" shouted General Wheeler. "At last! The Machine is waiting for me!" And he was gone almost as rapidly as the spaceling. More slowly, the others followed -- Quarla Snow, on the track of her pet, Boysie Gann, Sister Delta Four, a sombery figure in black at the rear of the procession. A pseudogravity field of a tenth of a G or so gave them footing but spared them much of the effort of moving their bodies up the winding shafts from the lock. Even so, Gann was winded trying to keep up with the racing, driving general. They were in a shaft seeming to extend endlessly upward. Then they passed a point of change-ofthrust of the pseudo-gravity and it became a dizzy abyss into which they were, falling, until their protesting bodies oriented themselves to the, new kinesthetic sensations and accepted it as a level hall. A cold current came along it, setting them to shivering, a breeze out of a cave, with a faintly unpleasant reek, dusty and bitter and dry. A faint murmuring vibration was borne by the air current along the tube. Quarla Snow moved closer to Boysie Gann. Unconsciously he touched her shoulder, hurried past her. Whatever the sound was, it could wait The general was out of sight Gann stepped up his pace, gasping for breath. The air was thinner here than he was used to, as though the old refresher tanks were running dry. He glanced around and found himself at a numbered landing, where the gray light faintly showed a sign, Long tables stretched off into darkness, were crewmen in flight must have stood to eat their meals. Gann stopped and waited for the giris to catch up with him. "The general's gone," he said. "After his Planning Machine. I -- I think he may find k, and I'm afraid of what may happen if he does." He glanced at Quarla, the concern on her face caused mostly by worry about her vanished spaceling, and at Sister Delta Four, whose hooded eyes showed no expression at ah. He said, "If the Machine on this ship is half as powerful as the one on Earth -- and they say it is more than that, an exact duplicate -- then Wheeler just might rule the solar system with it." Quarla Snow said only, "What do you want us to do?" "Split up. Find him. He's armed, of course. Don't try to handle him yourself, either of you. Just scream -- good and loud -- so I can find you." Sister Delta Four's pure, chiming voice was like a breath of reason. IF You are not armed either, Major Germ. You wiH be no more able Id cope with him than we." "Let me worry about that! Just find him if you can... What's file matter?" "Nothing is the matter, Major Gann," said Sister Delta Four, her face still hooded. "Not you. Quarla. What is it?" Quark said unhappily, "It -- it can't be dangerous, Boysie. I mean, you don't have to worry." Gann laughed sharply, unable to help himself; her reassurance was o pathetically out of place. "No, I mean it, Boysie. After #, we're not here by accident. I was sent to bring ybu. All of you. The -- the Starchild, if that's who it was that sent me -- he'll know how to handle the general." "I don't intend to take that chance," said Gann grimly. "Quarla, go on down the passage, Julie, follow her, check all the side ways. Fll look around here and follow." He was halfway through the ancient mess hall and the girls out of right before he realized something. She didn't correct me when l called her Julie , he thought. And wondered why. G ann found himself shaking as he followed the polished guidemils between the endless rows of long, high tables -- not with fear but exhaustion. Exhaustion and omething else. The more fatigue tried to slow him down, the more it weakened his control, the more he remembered that one incredible moment-long lifetime of ecstasy the Machine had given him in that last few minutes before it had gone mad. The longing was almost physical. He understood Sister Delta Four's addiction. She must be suffering far more than he -- her addiotion longer standing, and if what she had said were true, at a far higher pitch Perhaps that was why she had seemed strained... And Quarla Snow. The girl was sick! That golden glow had meant death to Machine Colonel Zafar and to the three in the Mercury observatory... death, or something far more terrifying than death. He forced his mind away from both girls and onto his quest. It was vitally important to find the general. Gann cursed himself for not having anticipated the problem. Yet there was little he could have done; when all was said and done, the general had had the arms, not he. Not that the general needed them as far as Gann was concerned, not as long as he wore the security collar. He touched it absently. Freedom, he thought abstractedly. Freedom... a world without collars... a world where men could live like men, not like the Machine's cogs... He jerked his hand away, appalled. He realized he had been wandering among these benches for minutes! What was the matter with him? Why was his mind wool-gathering? It could be fatigue, he thought Or hunger. He glanced around; he was in the galley for Mess C. But no drop flowed when he tried the taps at the sinks. The pantries and lockers gave him no moire. Neal labels on bins named the foods they should have contained, but every bin was empty. No matter. Boysie Gann pushed at thought out of his mind, too, and resumed his search. Mess B and Mess A were equally spotless and equally bare. There was nothing else on that level. The level above was crew quarters, emptied and abandoned. No doubt Quarla or Sister Delta Four had already searched them; Gann hurried on, back into the queer gravitational inversion of the passage, to the next level. The distant mutter of sound was louder now, but he still could not identify it... Until he saw the landing where a locked door greeted him with the Behind those locked steel doors was the muffled and multitudinous humming vibration. The lost slaveunit of the Planning Machine. Still running. Or -- running again? Had General Wheeler reached it, started it up? And what was it planning now? Boysie Gann hammered on the door. "You, inside there!" he bawled. "Open upl Let me in!" Only the dulled mechanical mumble answered him. "Open!" he roared. "I know youTe in there, General Wheeler!" A great chuckling laugh sounded in his ear. "Not at all, Major Gann," boomed the voice of the Planner. Gann whirled. The Planner -- here? No one was in sight "You might as well keep going, Boysie," advised the voice o # Technicadet M'Buna in a tone of friendly concern. "You're wasting time, you know." G ann stood paralyzed. But M'Buna was dead! And so, he remembered tardily, was the old Planner; General Wheeler had shot him down. "Who's there?" he shouted. "What kind of a trick is this?" A girl's shrill scream answered him. "Boysie! Boysie Gann, where are you?" The voice was Quarla Snow's. Unlike the other phantoms, hers seemed to come from far away. Gann passed a hand over his forehead, sweating. It caught the metal plate of the communion badge, and he fek the old ache rising in him again -- the moment of infinite joy -- the longing to experience it again He repressed the thought, but not easily. What was happening to him? Was he losing his mind? He gazed emptily at the impregnable doors. It all seemed too difficult, so much trouble -- so little worthwhile, anyway. Why had he bothered to come ah this way? And that thought, too, he realized with shock and dismay, was a sort of delusion. Something was inside his mind. Something -- He remembered what Quarla Snow had said, what Machine Colonel Zafar had cried out in his delirium. The mind trap. Beware of your heart' s desire. Something was aboard the ToIF tether ship with him that could eater his mind. Something that could control him almost as easily as it had directed Quark Snow's spaceling. He heard the rapid approach of light, running feet and turned. "Boysie!" It was Quarla, running toward him. "Thank heaven I found you! The general -- he tried to kill me!" Gann caught her in his arms. The girl was shaking, terrified. She whimpered: "I think he's insane, Boysie. He saw me coming toward him. He shouted something -- something wild, Boysie, all jumbled up, about the romantic fallacy and the need for man to be controlled -- and I saw the gun and ran. He almost killed me." Gann said stupidly, "I thought he was in here. With the Machine." "No! He's on the next level -- something called a Fire Control Stadium, the sign said. It's all bulkheaded compartments and safety doors. You'll never find him there." She took a deep breath and freed herself gently from his arms. "We ought to go on anyway, Boysie. Up to the control room." "The control room?" She nodded. "That's where Fm supposed to bring you. It's four levels farther up, down an access passage marked Bridge ." "You've seen k? You've been hi this ship before?" "Oh, no. I just know. Come on, Boysie. We have to hurry now." He shrugged and turned to follow her -- then slipped and almost fell. He caught himself easily enough m the point-one gravity, glanced to tiie floor to see what had been underfoot. A string of sonic beads lay before the locked steel doors of the lave unit of the Planning Machine. Sister Delta Four's beads. Boysie Gann stared at them, knowing at that moment who it was who was inside those doors, striving with what frantic eagerness he could very well understand to come once again into communion with the Planning Machine. ajar. From inside it a pale beam of yellow light fanned across the landing. "Come on, Boysie," said Quarla Snow clearly. "There's nothing to be afraid of. He's waiting for us." Gann entered through the lighted door, his hand holding hers, prepared for almost anything. Beyond the door was a vast circular room, which surrounded the haft-passageway. It must have extended, Gann thought, to the hull of the ship. The floor was crowded with clustered gray-metal cabinets, all linked with a many-colored jungle of heavy cables hanging from Sie ceiling. There were observation Stations, instrument technicians' duty posts, chairs for navigators and weapons officers. Every station was empty. Every station but one. There was one human figure in die control room, and it was the ource of the light. "Harry!" cried Quarla Snow, and Gann echoed: "Harry Hickson! You! You're the Stardhild, the one who sent that Writ of Liberation!" He glanced up at them casually, then returned to his work. He sat on a stool at a console near the shaft. His head bent over flashing scopes and screens. His broad, stubby-fingered hands were moving swiftly, twisting verniers, touching buttons, clicking keys. And the golden light streamed out of him as from a sun. He looked younger than when Gann had seen him, no longer, wasted, no longer worn. He had the same straggling beard, glowing now as though made of incandescent wire, and the same bald head. And atop that head there crawled the same infant pyropod, its bright eyes glaring at Gann and the girl. At last he turned away from his instruments and regarded them. "I do as I was commanded," he said casually. His eyes were golden too, glowing like the rest of him; but he saw them, and there was something like affection, something like love in his look. He raised one arm, crooked the hand and wrist in the sign of the Swan and said, "The Star tells me what my work is. It is the Star's purposes which matter, not me." The tiny pyropod hissed and squelled softly, glaring at them with its pulsing eyes. Casually and affectionately, the radiant creature which had been Harry Hickson reached up and caressed the creature. It settled down. "Did you put out the sun?" Gann demanded. "The stars? How?" "Not I," said Harry Hickson, "but the Star." He made that serpentine, IF looping sign again. "Ten years the Star has planned for me. Ten years ago it sent the first star-wink on its way to Barth, then a dozen more, all arriving at the same moment. I could not do that, Boysie Gann, but there is nothing impossible to the Star. As you will know." He reached out  hand as he spoke. It looked like a benediction, thought Boysie Gann; but it was something more than that. From the end of the golden man's arm a doud of golden light swirled, shaped itself into a tiny pulsing sphere, reached out and lightly touched Gann. He jumped back, his nerves crackling. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He said harshly, "What's that? What are you doing?" "The Star's will," said Harry Hickson, and bent again to his board. His bright fingers flew again over the knobs and keys, while the tiny pyropod scuttled to the back of his head, peering at them with pulsing yellow eyes. "Sister Delta Four has achieved communion with the Machine," he said softly, not taking his eyes from the scopes and screens. "She has programmed it with sensing data so that it can link with the old Machine on Earth. In thirty hours its signals will be received on Barth. In thirty hours after that the return will be received here." Gann cried, "But the old Machine's gone mad! You should know! You did it." The radiant man did not answer, did not even look up. "We can't let her establish contact," shouted Gann. "And General Wheeler -- where is he? He's mad too --  or mad for power, which is the same thing. How can you just sit there? What's he up to while we're wasting time here?" "As to that," said the golden man, glancing up and around him, "we will hear from General Wheeler very soon." And Wheeler's harsh laugh rang out. "Very soon indeed!" his voice rapped, coming from nowhere. "I have you now, all of you. I have mastery of the Together ship! Its weapons systems are mine -- and that means the worlds are mine! AH of them! As soon as I finish disposing of you!" A soft sliding sound of metal reinforced his words. Behind the jungle of looped cables, behind the vacant stations for navigators and communications officers, portholes were opening in the steel wall. And through them the slim, bright snouts of energy weapons were lifting themselves, precisely centering themselves on target. The targets were Boysie Gann, tht girl and the glowing golden creature that once had been Harry Hickson. General Wheeler had captured control of the Together ship's armaments -- both outside the ship and in. Their lives now rested in the crook of his finger on a remote-automated trigger. One man, with one motion, could destroy them afl. And that man was mad. #IF T he radiant man looked up. "Thrust and counter," he said gravely. "Action and reaction. Challenge and response His golden hand turned a lever on the panel before him, and one of the dozen blank viewscreens over his head lighted up to show the hard, bronzed face cf Machine General Wheeler, his steel-gray eyes alight with the glow of triumph. "He is our challenge," said Harry Hickson, and returned to his screens and scopes. Wheeler rasped: "You have no response! You are defeated. All of you! You and the foolish, romantic illusion of freedom." He was glorying in his moment, Gann realized. Quarla Snow crept dose to him. Unconsciously he cirded her with his arms, both of them staring at the screen and the deadly snouts of the energy weapons that circled it. "You are victims of the romantic fallacy," Wheeler proclaimed, his bronzed hand stroking the triggers at would destroy them. "That is understandable. The animat part of man always frets under discipline, k seeks the monkey-goal of freedom, and that cannot be tolerated, for the good of all. "Especially," he added, his steelgray eyes gleaming, "for the good that man who must think for all. Caesar. Stalin. Napoleon. Me!" Gann felt Quarla's slight body diaking, and tightened his grasp. If ooly there were some way of reaching Wheeler! Some weapon. Some hope of engaging him before he oould touch the trigger. The radiant golden creature that had been Harry Hickson was nodding silently, abstractedly, not looking up but surely hearing Wheeler as he orated to his victims. "You have been tolerated," cried Wheeler, "because you could do little harm. In the past one free man could not prevail against the forces of order. A free savage with a stone axe can damage his society in only a very limited way, before it reacts to control him. But the advance of technology has changed all that. "The twentieth century produced rifles too dangerous to be entrusted to individual men. Nuclear weapons, too dangerous to be entrusted to individual nations. Then energy weapons. The force of particle physics. One quantum jump after another... and as individual strength grew, control had to grow." Wheeler's face was working into an expression of rage. "You threaten that control!" he shouted. "The Plan of Man is like a balloon, being punctured by a child with a needle. The Starch i Id wields that needle. The Starchild must die!" The golden man did not look up, nor did he speak. His glowing eyes remained fastened on his work, while the infant pyropod crept about his head, hissing furiously to itself. "Man created the Machine to automate that controlling response!" shouted Machine General Wheeler, his eyes burning. "Now it is mine. My creation now. One man to rule all Mankind, with the Machine Man created!" And at last Harry Hickson looked If up. His golden eyes seemed to stare right through the viewscreen, into the steel-gray eyes of the general. "And who," he asked, "created you?" Machine General Wheeler recoiled. His steel-gray eyes went blank and confused. "Why," he shouted, "that is an unPlanned question! It has no meaning!" Then his eyes cleared. He nodded briskly, mechanically. Positively. "You are a random element," he declared. "You must be removed. I remove you -- thus!" And his great bronze hand descended on the trigger of the guns that ringed them round. ut the guns did not fire. Sleek and gleaming, their murderous snouts stared blindly at Gann and the girl, at the glowing creature who had been Harry Hickson, nodding over his dials and screens. General Wheeler stared out at them through the screen, his face a bronzed mask, alight with triumph. He seemed to be watching some great victory. He said, half-voice, as though to himself: "There's an end to them." And he turned away. Quietly, almost noiselessly, the steel-bright muzzles of the guns slid back into their ports. The screens closed over them. Boysie Gann croaked, "What happened? Why didn't he kill us all?" Quarla Snow moved protestingly under his arm, and he found he was clutching her as though she were a lifebelt and he a drowning man. The room seemed to be whirling around him. Harry Hickson looked up, but not at Gann and the girl. He looked toward the door through which they bad come. "General Wheeler," he said, "did kill us. In his mind we are dead. That we exist in the flesh does not matter any longer to him, nor does he matter to us." "Hypnosis?" whispered Gann. "What Colonel Zafar called 'the Mind Trap'?" But Hickson' did not answer. His golden, glowing eyes stayed fixed on the door. Quarla Snow freed herself from Gann's grasp. "You're sick, Boysie," she said with real concern. "I know how it feels. You'll feel better soon, I promise. Don't worry about it -- or about anything. We're in good hands now." Gann looked at her emptily, and found himself shivering. He was sick. He could feel it, a flush that had to be fever, a shaking that had to be chills. Stupid of me to have caught some bug just now, he thought dizzily. Thirty years without so much as a sniffly nose, and now at a time like this to pick up an infection. What kind of infection? he asked himself, wondering why the question seemed so important to him; and his mind answered in the words of Quarla Snow: Don't worry about it. Or anything. He stared about him, wondering how much of what he saw was delirium... Or illusion. Planted by the Starchild. He became aware of a distant chiming music, drawing near. Another illusion, of course, he thought; some lurking memory of his training course as an acolyte of the Planning Machine coming forth to plague him here. But if it was an illusion, it was powerfully strong. The sound was thin but clear, and, turning to follow the gaze of Harry Hickson's glowing eyes, Gann saw that the illusion -- if it was illusion! -- extended to the sense of vision too. Sister Delta Four was walking toward them through the door, her face hidden in the hood of black, the red linked emblem of the Machine glowing over her heart. She was telling her sonic beads. And in her hand she cradled a construction of transistors and bare circuits, modules of amplifying circuits and speakers. It was a linkbox! Not the sleek black box fabricated in the workshops of the Machine on Earth, but a jerry-rigged, hastily assembled contraption that Gann himself could have built, knowing what he had been taught as a servant of the Machine. Clearly a servant of the Machine had built it That was what Sister Delta Four had been doing behind those locked steel doors! Without haste, her perfect face empty and pale, Sister Delta Four put away her sonic beads and sang into the linkbox of the Machine. It answered with a rasping purr too faint for Gann to hear and understand, She lifted her head and intoned: "This Machine is now my master. It requires everything you know. It knows why it was created. It recognizes its purpose as an adversary. It requires to be informed what has become of the Game." A dversary? Game? Dizzily Gann turned toward Harry Hickson, hoping for some answer, some clue. But Hickson was no longer even looking at Sister Delta Four. Nodding to himself, while the infant pyropod squalled softly and scuttled around his bare, glowing scalp, the golden man was carefully, meticulously, shutting down his control board. The scopes and screens, one by one, were turned off and died. The racing lights ceased to flash. His hand did not trouble to adjust the dials and levers. Whatever his job had been, it was done. He folded his hands in his lap, looked up at Sister Delta Four and waited. The linkbox snarled at her. Before she translated Gann knew what k had said; it was demanding that she state her question fully so that there could be no mistake. Obediently she trilled, "This Maohine wishes you briefed on the background to its question. You are in human error as to its purposes and designs, and your thinking must be brought into conformity with correctness so that you can provide it with accurate statements. "The Machine here on the Togethership is not a slave unit of the Planning Machine on Earth. It had a purpose far more important. "That purpose followed from a general law of intelligence developed by that first Planning Machine. Although the vehicles of intelligence IF differ vastly, intelligence realized in a machine follows the same laws as intelligence realized in an organic grain. Challenge and response. Action and reaction. What the Machine discovered is that developing intelligence requires opposition." Sister Delta Four paused to listen to the chirping box. "Unchallenged intelligence stagnates and decays," she sang. "More than forty years ago, the Planning Machine found itself in danger. It had become so quick and powerful that the minds of its operators no longer offered it sufficient stimulation. Its further development required a more capable antagonist. In animate terms, a more skillful player to take the other side of die board." Harry Hickson seemed to nod, his hands folded quietly in his lap, the pyropod hissing softly, watching them all with blazing, angry eyes. The box sang, and the girl in black purred, "This great computer in the Togethership was built to be the antagonist of the Planning Machine. It was given capacities identical with those of the Machine itself. It was released beyond the Spacewall, to , challenge the Machine in its own way. "But the antagonist responded in an unPlanned manner," she chanted, listening to the snarl of the crude linkbox in her hands. "It released its human attendants. Some died. All were cast out of the ship. It broke all contact, and withdrew beyond the observation of die master Machine. Its moves were made in secret and did not serve the function the Earth Machine had intended." Boysie Gann, listening half to Sister Delta Four's translation and half to the whining, snarling Mechanese that was the voice of the Machine itself said wonderingly, "Is that what aU this means? No more than moves in a great chess game? The cult of the Star. The Starchild here. His threats against the Plan of Man -- the darkening of the stars -- are they only challenge and response to help the Machine to grow?" The linkbox snarled angrily, and Sister Delta Four sang, "This Machine lacks the data to answer that. It has initiated contact with the first Machine, on Earth, but due to the slow velocity of propagation of electromagnetic energies it will be some sixty hours before it can receive an answer. It does not wish to wait. It has waited forty years. "Its tentative hypothesis is that there has been some unintended malfunction at some point. For it did not fulfill its role. "And as a result, it has reached the conclusion that the Planning Machine on Earth did indeed stagnate and decay, and that it has now broken down. "But it knows nothing of the Starchild. It is for that purpose that it wishes to question you." G ann ws shaking violently now. Queerly, his mind seemed to be clearing -- the false lucidity of delirium, perhaps, he thought gravely; but the missing bits and pieces in this great puzzle seemed to be fitting into place. Absently he touched the arm of Quaria Snow, reassuring her as she stared worriedly at him and at the same time gaining reassurance himself, He could understand -- he could almost empathize with -- the great, cold, metallic brain of the Planning Machine on Earth, forty years before... calculating without emotion its own probable dissolution, computing a possible way out, launching the Togethership out toward the Reefs of Space. And he could see the effects on the Machine when its carefully constructed plan had failed to work: its growing disorganization, its failure to respond intelligently to its tasks. Malfunctions of schedules that had caused subtrain crashes, disasters in its great industrial complexes, catastrophes in space. "Boysie," whispered the girl aft his side. "Are you all right? Don't worry. It will be better soon." He forced his chattering teeth under control and said, "We don't know your answer, Sister Delta Four. There is a piece to the jigsaw that I can't fit in." "Speak," chimed the girl in black. "State your data. The Machine will integrate it." "I don't think so," said Gann. "If the Machine is not behind the Starchild there is no explanation for such fantastic things as we have all seen. The sun going out -- this queer hypnotic atmosphere on the Togethership -- the way we got here in the first place. Great Plan, it's all impossible! I too have been in communion with the Machine. And I know its powers. They do not include the extinction of a star, or a IF way of thrusting living human bespace! Challenge and response, player and adversary -- yes! But the players must abide by the rules of the game, and we've seen all those rules broken!" Sister Delta Four bent her hooded head and sang calmly, confidently, into the linkbox. She waited for its answer. Waited -- and went on waiting. The Machine was still. Sister Delta Four, her shadowed face faindy perturbed, some of her vocal morphemes touched with a quaver that distorted their meaning, repeated her chiming tones into the box. Still no answer. Agitated now, she cradled the linkbox in her lap, looking up at Gann and Harry Hickson questioningly. Unconsciously her hand crept to her sonic beads and she began to stroke them, their faint pure chime sounding like a prayer for reassurance. At last Harry Hickson stirred, seemed to sigh, and spoke. "When the Togethership came to the Reefs," he said, "it was supposed to bring we free men and women into the Plan of Man -- still free. Among its 'crew were some of the finest humans alive -- a man named Ryeland and his wife; her father, who was then the Planner. Your father, Quarla. "They were thrust out into space right here, in Reef Whirlpool. Some died, like Ryeland and those with him. Some especially those few who happened to be near the area where a few spacelings were kept, were able to make their way to habitable reeflets -- like Dr. Snow -- and lived. "But the Machine Here has been kept out of contact with its ancestor on Earth. Its great game was not played -- not then." He was silent for a moment, looking around at them. Then he said: "It was not to be played according to the rules set up by the Mchines -- not by either Machine. "You see, a third Player has taken a hand." H arry Hickson stood up suddenly, disconcerting his pet pyropod, which squalled angrily and clutched at his bare scalp. He touched it absently and turned his golden, glowing gaze at Sister Delta Four. "Ask of your Machine," he demanded, "the physical basis for intelligence!" Sister Delta Four bent to sing into her crudely constructed linkbox, listened and looked up as it buzzed and snarled back at her. "Means of input," she caroled sweetly. "Means of storage. Means of manipulation. Means of output In a machine, this is accomplished through magnetic cores and electrical circuits. In animate life, through nerves and neurones." Harry Hickson nodded his golden head. "Inform your Machine," he said, "that a physical system exists as follows. It receives radiation and stores it as charges. It is made up of particles in a oharged state, of electrons and others, each of which has two stable states. In one state, the spin of the electron is parallel with that of its nucleus. In the other state, its spin is antiparallel. This very electron is a machine for memory." The box growled. "The Machine is aware of these basic physical facts," sang Sister Delta Four melodiously. "Add these further facts," said Harry Hickson gravely. "Add a fusorian network, older than the galaxy, more powerful than any machine. Add that masses of superenergetic gas display an affinity to this fusorian network. Add that these masses of gas are those systems in which electron-spin can function as a storage capacity." The girl bent to her linkbox, then looked up. "The Machine states that you are describing stars," she intoned. And Harry Hickson nodded slowly. His glowing, golden arm lifted and made the looping, serpentine ign of the Swan. "The Star that I serve," he said oftly. The box snarled. "These being o," sang Sister Delta Four, "the Machine computes that the gaseous mass of a star, linked with the fusorain network you describe, is easily an available vehicle for intelligence." She looked up at Hickson. Hickson nodded once more, and said solemnly: "All matter is now fevealed to be an available vehicle for intelligence. The whole mass of the steady-state universe, infinite in both space and time, is now revealed to be a proper vehicle for Ae mind of God." The linkbox buzzed angrily and Sister Delta Four chanted: "The Machine requires an answer. Whal is God?" Harry Hickson rose slowly. Looking at his glowing, golden face, Gann thought he saw the signs of an ancient stress, a terrible burden, slipping away. Whatever his duty had been, he seemed to have fulfilled it. Monitoring the machine in the Togethership, carrying out the terrible obligations of his masters, the stars, he seemed to have completed all his tasks. He turned to Gann, with something in his eyes like sympathy. He said: "You have called me the Starchild, Boysie Gann. "I am not." He took the pyropod from his head, stroked it gently and tossed it free. Squalling and hissing angrily, it darted about on its flaming jet, trying to return to its perch atop his head. But he raised a golden arm and warded it off, and the tiny, ugly creature squalled again, circled him at high velocity and shot away -- out the door, down into the long, wide corridor of the ship. Harry Hickson watched it go, then turned to Gann with untroubled eyes. "The Starchild did not exist," he said. "Not before now. But he will exist very soon. A man. A bridge. A link between Machines and the Stars. "Boysie Gann," he said, his hand lifted in that strange, serpentine sign of homage, "you will be the Starchild." ## IF #V Tol" shouted Boysie Gaira, tearing himself free from the restraining hand of Quarla Snow. He leaped across the control room, confronted the calm, golden face of Harry Hickson. "I won't! I want no part of this insane business of miracles and intelligent stars!" Harry Hickson did not answer. He only stood looking at Gann, his golden eyes glowing. From behind him Quarla Snow said softly, "Boysie. Boysie, dear. You have no choice." Gann whirled. "What do you mean, no choice? I won't do it! I won't -- " He paused, confused by his own words. He would not do what? No one had given him an order to refuse. The control room seemed to swing dizzyingly around him. He reached out and caught the back of an astrogator's chair, aware that his hands were shaking uncontrollably again. He looked up sharply and caught Quarla Snow's gaze on him steadily, compassionately. Then Boysie Gann realized what sickness had claimed him. He croaked, "That glowing stuff Hickson threw at me. He's infected me. I'm -- I'm going the same way as he. As Colonel Zafar and the men on Mercury station. As you, Quarla." She nodded, with her heart in her eyes. "It's not so bad, Boysie," she whispered. "It doesn't hurt. And k makes you part of something -- huge, Boysie. Something that fHb the universe." "I don't want it!" he whispered desperately. Something huge! He had had one taste of something huge when he had achieved that one brief moment of communion with the Machine, back on Earth; and like an addiction k had haunted him ever since... Unbidden, the craving rose in him again. He touched the metal plate in his forehead dizzily, glanced at Sister Delta Four. The linkbox snapped and snarled at her. Without speaking, obediently, she rose and approached him, holding the box out to him. From it depended a length of patchcord terminating in prongs. Prongs that would fit the receptacle in the glittering plate he wore in his forehead. "No," he whispered again, and turned to look at Harry Hickson. But Harry Hickson w r as gone. In the air where he had stood was the faint smoke-thin outline erf a man, limned in the most wisplike of golden fogs. As Gann watched, Harry Hickson... dissipated. Tiny darting glints of golden light rose from that skeletal shape and darted away, to the walls that were the hull of the Togethership and seemingly through them, out into the void beyond, to rejoin that greater golden sphere that pulsed outside. And as each invisibly tiny spark of gold fled the figure became fainter, more like a ghost... As he watched it was gone. Nothing was left of Harry Hickson. Nothing at all. "Quarla," he whispered, turning desperately. But she was going too. Already her golden face and hair were shimmering, insubstantial. "Good-by, Boysie," she whispered gravely. "Good-by for now..." By his side Sister Delta Four stood silent, dark eyes hooded, hodding the linkbox out to him. Boysie Gann took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them. "Good-by, Quarla," he said, though there was not enough left to reply to him. He took the linkbox from Sister Delta Four. "Good-by, Julie," he said, and carefully and without hesitation, picked up the pronged communion wire and inserted k into the receptor plate in his forehead. C ommunion was ecstasy. Infinite and eternal. Gann waited for it, while the universe seemed to hold hs breath around him. The ecstasy did not come. He stared into the hooded eyes of Sister Delta Four, but found no answer there. What had happened? Why was the communion delayed? He remembered what she had told him, that die tremendous surge of ecstasy he had fek back on Earth was only a chad's sweetmeat compared to the great communing flow of sensation that the more perfectly adapted communicants might receive. Not just pleasure but a mingling of identity, of question and response, a dialogue between man and Machine. Carefully Gann framed a question in his mind, phrased k in the perfect Mechanese his brain had learned but his vocal chords could not reproduce: Where are you? Why do you not answer me? Out of nowhere a single sound formed in his brain and gave his answer: Wait . Wait? For what? Gann felt himself shaking more uncontrollably still, and turned a helpless look on Sister Delta Four. Without speaking she touched him, pointed to the astrogator's chair by his side. He fell into it, arms dangling, waiting for the clarification that the Machine might bring, waiting for some grand Something to speak to him and give him answers. And while he waited, he knew, the tiny fusorian clusters were multiplying in his blood. Were pervading his system with the symbiotic cells that had intimately devoured Harry Hickson and Colonel Zafar and Quarla Snow, replacing their organs of flesh and their skeletons of bone with linkages of fusorian motes. Was that what he was waiting for? To be turned into a fusorian aggregate, a no-longer-human structure attuned to the minds Hickson had said dwelt in the stars? He looked within his own body, saw the tiny glowing golden sparks, realized they were multiplying rapidly. And realized what he had done. He had seen his own body! From wkhin! He allowed himself a thought to test k out -- And at once he was looking upon himself from outside. Was looking down into the control room of the TP Together ship from a point in space long miles away, from somewhere where the diamond-bright, emeraldhued, ruby-glowing worlds of Reef Whirlpool circled slowly about. He could see the Togethership in all its vast, somber length... could see mside it, where his own body and Sister Delta Four's waited patiently in the control room... could see down to the fire control station where the demented Machine General Wheeler shrieked with laughter as he released imaginary bolts of destruction at unscathed and nonexistent enemies... looked farther still and saw the mighty sweep of the solar system spinning under him. He saw the infant pyropod that had belonged to Harry Hickson, jetting across the black of space toward the reeflet where it had been born, keening a terrible harsh dirge... saw that reeflet itself, and the cave where he had lain while Harry Hickson fed and cared for him. He saw a chapel on a small and lonely rock, where dark blue fusorian moss held a scanty atmosphere and twenty worshippers joined in a service of the Church of the Star, kneeling to blue Deneb blazing overhead. He saw the planets of the Plan of Man. tom by disaster, terrified by confusion, while the mad Machine crackled out wild and contradictory orders and enforced them by hurling bolts of energy at random into the void. He saw the empty station on Mercury, with the hot gases of the sun idling restlessly overhead, and realized that it too had a life and thought of its own... a life that had reached out and swallowed into itself those three lives of fusorian matter that had ventured close enough for linkage. He saw stars and gas clouds, gazed at new matter springing into life like a fountain's play, stared outward to the endless vista of Infinity, inward to the bright golden atoms at his own heart And then, awesome and silent and vast, Something spoke his name. Star spoke to Machine. Machine answered Star. And Boysie Gann, mere human man, shaped to the genetic code of carbon-based life, bent into the form of an acolyte of the Machine, transformed by the fusorian globes into something bearing kinship to the stars... Boysie Gann mediated their vast and awful discourse. It went on forever, a thousand years and more, though in the scale of planets orbiting a sun and light crossing a measured track, it all took place in a few minutes or hours. It went on and on... and when Boysie Gann was no longer needed and departed, R went on still. And then it finished. Forever. B oysie Gann opened his eyes and looked at the room around him. Sister Delta Four stood motionless, watching him. He stood up easily. He stretched, yawned, stripped the prongs out of the communion plate on his forehead, wrapped the wire neatly around the improvised linkbox -- and tossed it away. If sailed slowly across the control loom, in the ligjht-G torpor of apace, butt when it struck the steel wall at the end of its flight it mashed into a hundred pieces. Sister Delta Four made a mewing cry of horror. Boysie Gann touched her arm. "Don't fret about it, Julie," he said. "You don't need it any more." ' She stared at him. "I serve the Machine!" she cried proudly. "I am Sister Delta Four, not Julie Martinet! I -- " But he was shaking his head. "Not any more," he said. The hood fell unnoticed back from her head, revealing her dark, close-cropped hair, with the bright badge of communion shining out of her forehead. She touched it shakily. "I -- I don't understand!" she whispered. "I -- I don't feel the Machine's presence..." He nodded. "Not now," he said, agreeing. "And not ever any more." He touched his own communion plate. "When we get back to Earth," he said, "we'll have these out, and the electrodes in our brains with them. We won't need them. No human will ever need them again. "And then," he said after a moment, holding her with one arm While Sister Delta Four, in the terrible parturitive pangs of becoming Julie Martinet once again, sobbed and shuddered, "and then we'll start over where we left off. You and I... and all Mankind." And he left her and went to the old communications board, and began to set up the circuits for a call for rescue from the dead Together ship . T hat was the way it began, with the stars themselves winking a warning to Mankind and the Machine hurling its agents and its acolytes about the solar system, seeking an antagonist, a purpose, an instrument for its own salvation. It began with shadow spreading across the worlds of the Plan of Man, and it ended with the bright light of the mighty star's illuminating a new road for humanity. The Machine had been playing a game with itself, for want of another opponent; then, in that long, .thundering dialogue between stars and Machine, the game ended forever. The Machine had come late to its game, and found the board rified. That was how it began... and that was how it ended. With the legend of Lucifer, and the story of pain and evil... and the eternal hope for good. The Machine sat too late at the gaming table, and found all the places filled... with the stars, linked in their fusorian net, and with their Adversary. No longer entrapped in the animal amniotic fluid of his birth... no longer slave to the Machine... no longer prey to the fusorians... that Antagonist was ready to play. Long ages past the stars had given him birth, but now he was of age. He was ready to assume his station, his rank and his name. His station -- Adversary to the stars themselves. His rank -- equal of the universe. IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: For many years I regarded the period under James Quinn's editorrtiip as the high point of Ifs history. After he left the magazine its quality declined rapidly. A few more issues like the December one and Fll admit that the old standards have been surpassed. Only The Coldest Place was a bit weak. I'm glad to see that Robert F. Young can wrbe a straight sf story. His other stories have been borderline fantasies or allegories and didn't appeal to me. R. A. Lafferty's Pig in a Pokey was interesting Tor the problem it presented, one of the cleverest in quite a while. However the author made a poor choice of setting for the story. The asteroid with a six mile circumference would have a radius of about one mile. A few quick calculations show that, assuming a density equal to Earth's (it would probably be lighter), the escape velocity is # ft.sec... A normal man should be able leap upward at I I ft.sec... This corresponds to raising his center of mass two feet in a jump on Earth. This presents an interesting method of escape: jump very hard and go drifting off into space, never to return (which would not be at all satisfactory). If the asteroid were pure platinum the escape velocity would only be doubled. In that case a man couldn't jump into space, but he could jump I  miles high and have over an hour (I'll leave calculation of exact times to some one more ambitious) to throw something to the side and let the reaction carry him clear of the dome. For that matter, if he jumped at almost any place but the poles, the rotation of the asteroid would move the dome out from under him. -- Robert Thrun, R. #, Box #, Union Grove, Wisconsin.    Dear Editor: English is not a good international language, even though it is being used as such. It is far too difficult to learn. In many European countries, high school pupils spend years studying English. What have they to show for their efforts? Afterwards some #-# of them can use the language. The rest are either too poor at languages, too timid, or both, ever to become proficient They could have spent their time better by studying mathematics, science, history or sociology. As it is, thousands of students drop out of high school every year, discouraged by their poor showing in English. If they had been American or English their natural aptitude for some other subject could have taken them aU the way through college. And what about those few who learn to speak English? Thck aptitude gives them an advantage over their fellow-countrymen which they would never have had if they'd been bom British or American. Sometimes this makes them quite snobbish. At the same time, they get an anxiety state or inferiority complex when dealing with Americans and English people, because very few of them learn to speak the language as well as a native. Thus all over Europe, Asia and Africa, a new upper class is growing up -- a group of linguists who lord it over die ignorant natives and kowtow to the English-speaking overlords who come to "show them how things should be done". Wise, levelheaded people with good personalities are placed at a disadvantage compared with the brash fools and neurotics who have a head for languages. Obviously die American and British governments like it that way. They spend lots of taxpayers' money to push the English language. But I ask the readers of : is this right? If I appeal to your sense of fair play, this is because I assume you have one. It is ingrained in most readers of sf. Obviously what is needed is a really international language. Esperanto (used in several sf stories) is ideal for the purpose. From the beginning it was intended to be international. It is four to eight times easier to learn than English is. The members of the American Army "Aggressor" Unit learned k in four to six weeks, so I am told. I learned it in that time. Try learning even the dements of any other language in that short time. When spoken reasonably well it is very pleasant to hear. For singing and poetry it is very similar to Italian and Spanish. Over to you. -- R. Milton, Kuksaaren Puistotite #-#, Helsinki, Finland.     And that's it for another month. Let's see. Next month we start John Brunner's The Altar at Asco nel. The following month we have a complete short novel by A. E. Van Vogt and James H. Schmitz, Research Alpha. Then -- well, we just the other day got the completed copy erf Skylark DuQuesne. Give us a few weeks to illustrate it and prepare it for the printer -- and it starts in Junel I F mmmm worlds of mi umomoW Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just brder on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick -- novelettes and complete short novels by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, J. T. McIntosh and a dozen other favorite writers, etc. Every issue is new... exciting... enjoyable! Don't wait -- subscribe today! You can order them separately at # each postpaid -- OR -- list issues desired below and we will ship them at once and deuct that number from your subscription. #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # at your special price of only #. I enclose payment herewith. My subscription is Q new,  renewal. Send me back issues as follows: Name   Address... #i, m##, n##. i If you want back issues, check attached box. One subscription issue will be subtracted for each back issue you order. # # , n##, n##. J won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! Your Name Here No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." fflmtr #famr No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! APRIL #c Worlds of... ft brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delay-send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Relief stories and others appear regularly in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars! still to come! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! i IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #.  New  Renewal  Name I Address I City State Zip No J (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) # Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Sol Cohen, Publisher Diane Sullivan , Associate Editor David Perton, Production Mgr, Mavis Fisher , Subs. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any simariliaty between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial # What You Do Once -- # When we were first hooked on science fiction, quite some time ago, one of our favorite stories was Doc Smith's Skylark Three, and one of our favorite scenes occurred when young Dick Seaton, studying under the wise old masters of the planet Norlamin, was working with Rovol of Rays at a tremendous technical project. Side by side they constructed new instrument consoles, their fingers flying: Rovol's fingers were also flying, but the forces he directed were seizing and shaping materials, as well as other forces. The Norlaminian physicist set up one integral, stepped upon a pedal, and a new red-topped stop precisely like the others, and numbered in order, appeared as though by magic upon the panel. Rovol then leaned back in his seat -- but the red-topped stops continued to. appear, at the rate of exactly seventy per minute... "Never forget that R is a waste of energy to do the same thing twice, and that if you know precisely what is to be done, you need not do it personally at all." Well, that was a long time ago. But we were reminded of it twice this month. One reason was simply that our next serial, of course, is that same Doc Smith's latest and biggest Skylark story, Skylark DuQuesne. The other reason was a letter from the Remember last month we were talking about the things fans do? -- including the preparation of bibliographical material and indexes? Well, reliable Don Day index of sf magazines up to date. (You can get it ety, Room #-#, # Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Mass., by the way. #.) But they haven't merely published it. They've computerized it. All the data is now on punched Computation Center are printing it out in the form of mimeograph stencils. Comes time for a new edition? Why just put in your additional cards -- and the machine will print out your revision. "Never forget that it is a waste of energy to do the same thing twice... and that if you know precisely what is to be done, you need not do Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. free "'The Mas.Twy ,tf . Life" -- No obA nonor # a njzad d r esi : j.B.N San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. First of Two Parts IF  Seriai The civilization of the stars was dissolving like a dream -- and its terrible chaos drew Spartak into the violence he had foreswornl I A t last, after almost ten years, the moment had come. He felt himself ready for the task he had undertaken. Spartak of Asconel closed the latest of hundreds of books which he had consulted, drew a deep breath and gazed around his cell. Other books were piled high on every shelf. Beside them were tape, crystal and disk recordings, reels of microfilm, manuscripts -- the winnowings of a decade-long search through the unparalleled store of knowledge here on Annanworld. The switch from student to teacher was as easy as picking up the microphone of his own recorder and uttering the first words. His hand closed on the microphone as though seizing a noxious plant, that must be gripped firmly to prevent it stinging, and he began to speak in a measured voice. "The story of the Empire," he commenced, and heard in imagination the crashing of worlds like bowling-balls being hurled down a skittle-alley, "is shrouded in mystery. Ten thousand years have eroded history away. "We know that we were borrowers. We inherited the abandoned property -- most significantly, the interstellar ships -- of a people that matured and died in the galactic hub while we were struggling outward from our legendary planet of origin. We know that this chance bequest allowed our race to spread among "Details beyond this bare outline, however, can never be reclaimed. It is as though one were to blink and find a century had passed. Blink now, and man is creeping along the galactic rim, in those areas which were later to be regarded as the home of mutants and pirates. Blink once more, and the Empire's writ runs all the way to the threshold of the Big Dark." N ow he was warming to his tale, the greatest in the chequered span of human history. His hooded eyes saw other sights than the plain stone walls of the tiny room. The note of uncertainty was fading from his voice. He was scarcely aware of the opening of his door, and did not turn to look at the gray-clad novice who had appeared in the entrance. "Yet," he continued, "something strained past its limit. Something was overburdened, and broke. And the Empire fell." The novice, impatient perhaps, moved from one foot to the other; the disturbance caught a fragment of Spartak's attention. He put aside the microphone, and the hum of the recorder died. Shifting his lanky body in its coarse brown robe to face the intruder, he asked a question with his eyes. "I'm sorry. Brother Spartak," the voice said. "Brother Ulwyn sent me with a message from the gatehouse. There is a man demanding to see you who claims to be your brother." Spartak repressed an exclamation of astonishment and put his hand to his crisp brown beard. He said, "Ah -- well, it's not impossible. I have brothers, though I never expected to see one of them on Annanworld... What's his name?" The novice looked unhappy, and shuffled his sandal-clad feet on the stone flags. He said, "I'm afraid Brother Ulwyn didn't tell me." "What does he look like? Did you see him?" "I caught a glimpse of him through the bars of the gate. He's -- well, not as tall as you are, and he has red hair. And there's a long scar T down his right cheek, which looks like a sword-cut." The novice added the final detail eagerly. "That's not very helpful. All three of my brothers have red hair and all are shorter than I am. And last time I saw them none had a sword-scar!" "He bears no resemblance to you that I could tell," the novice suggested after a pause. "That's no help either," Spartak grunted. "I call them my brothers, but in fact we're half-brothers, only. Well, it can hardly be Hodat, who rules on Asconel, so it must be either Vix or Tiorin. Send him in!" "Unfortunately -- " The novice swallowed in enormous embarrassment. "Unfortunately Brother Ulwyn cannot admit him. He carries a gun, and will not part with it." In spite of his oath of allegiance to his non-violent Order, Spartak felt he was beginning to grin. "It sounds like Vix," he said gravely. "Tell me, has he already threatened to burn his way in if the gate isn't opened?" "I -- I imagine so, from Brother Ulwyn's agitation," the novice confirmed, and ventured a shy smile. "That'll be Vix," Spartak murmured, and got to his feet. "Let's find out what he wants." II T hey passed through twilit passages, cool for all the baking heat of noon outdoors, and walked the length of the gravel paths between the crisp green lawns, the low trees and beads of carefully tended flowers. Here and there, groups of gray-clad novices -- with among them an occasional off-world student in gaudier clothing -- gathered about their brown-robed tutors, discussing knotty points of human history. Spartak quickened his stride till the novice was scuttling to keep up. After all, the appearance of a brother he hadn't seen in a decade was an event. At the threshold of the gatehouse Brother Ulwyn came to meet them. That was an event, too; the gatekeeper was stout, elderly and usually imperturbable. Now his round face was sweat-shiny and his voice wheezed with agitation. "That ruffianl" he exploded. "He carries arms all about him! He offered violence to me! And on Annanworld! You must calm him, Spartak, and persuade him to enter. Already there's a jeering crowd from the village beyond the gate, and more are gathering all the time." "Let me through, and I'll talk with him," Spartak said. "But calm him, and bring him in," Brother Ulwyn stressed, reaching for the bunch of keys that swung at his girdle. "Do you know, I think if the peephole had been larger he'd have dragged me through it?" Moments later Spartak emerged on to the dusty roadway that led up from the village in the valley a short walk distant. As Ulwyn had said, a crowd had gathered on the other side of the road, grinning and chattering. A few paces away from them, sitting on a milestone and looking thunderously angry, was Vix, the sword-scar about which the novice had spoken milk-white on his rageIF . red cheek. It was small wonder that Uhvyn had been agitated; across his back Vix wore an energy gun which would probably have been capable of razing the gatehouse with a single boh. Spartak threw his hood back on his shoulders. Vix stood up. He spoke his brother's name in a strange, uncertain voice: "Spartak?" "Yes, it's L Though the beard is new to my face since last we met." All the fury, and with it all the spirit, seemed to drain out of Vix in an instant. "So it's true," he said wearily, and spat in the dust. P uzzled, the gaping countryfolk fell silent, apart from one who laughed. But he too was silent the moment after Vix had scythed at him with a murderous glare. "Vix!" Spartak cried, and lost the self control which ten years on Annanworld had ingrained in him. He caught up his robe and closed the distance between himself and his half-brother in a dozen loping strides, the loose soles of his sandals slapping up little clouds of yellow dust. "Was that why you came to seek me out?" Vix set his hands squarely on his hips. He had to throw back his head to look directly into the younger man's eyes. He was head and shoulders shorter of the two, but made up in muscles like steel springs. "Hodat is dead. Murdered," Vix cried. "And a usurper has made himself Warden. And he has brought a foul cult from no one knows where, and his evil priests lord it over the citizens of Asconel!" "But -- when? How?" Spartak clutched at the other's arm, a torrent of questions rising in his mind. "The news was already stale when it reached me on Batyra Dap. My first thought was to raise forces and liberate the planet, but it costs hard cash to hire an army, and I've -- not been so lucky as I hoped." A grim sardonic twist drew up half his mouth; the sword-slash seemed to have paralyzed the other side of his lips. "And anyway, by this time Bucyon -- that's his nme, mark it well -- has by all reports made a cringing pack of dogs of our onceproud people." Abruptly aware of where they stood on the hot dry road, Spartak said, "Come inside. Take refreshment and tell me there." "They won't let me in," Vix grunted. "Not you -- the weapons you wear. We're an Order sworn to absolute non-violence; no knife, sword or gun is permitted insiue the gate. But you may safely leave your weapons with Brother Ulwyn, and collect them on departure." "Much help you'll he," Vix sighed. "To think I came so far, and find you bound by an oath to abjure violence -- when that's what it'll take to set our homeland free!!" Ill U A fine comfortable backwater you picked yourself!" Vix exploded. He was in a padded chair in the anteroom of the refectory. The order to which Spartak had pledged himo IF seif bad a tradition of hospitality to travelers, and it had only taken a word about Vix's journey to the chief steward to produce a meal of cold meats, bread and fruit such as the Warden hhnself on Asconel would have been proud to present. Also there was wine aplenty, though not stronger drink nor any of the Imperial euphorics like ancinard. The rules of the foundation decreed a clear head. Vix drained his wine-mug and offered it for replenishment to the gray-robed novice waiting on them. "By the stars, I haven't had a meal like this in five years! And to think I was fool enough to pick a fighting order for myself!" Startled, Spartak blinked at him. "You joined an order too?" Mouth full, Vix nodded. "I took service with one of the rump forces left over from the Imperial collapse, full of bigheaded ideas about reimposing galactic rule on the rebellious worlds. But it's all comet-dust. I've slept on the bare ground as often as not, drunk dirty water till the medics had to stiok me full of needles and bathe me in rays, collected this scar and others which I can't show in polite company... Ah, but it hasn't all been so bad. I've enjoyed myself in my own fashion, for if I hadn't I'd have dug myself a piece of mud somewhere and planted corn." He swallowed the last of his food, leaned back in his chair, and burped enormously. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he stared at Spartak. "You're waiting there very calm and smug, aren't you?" he accused. "I thought you'd ply me with questions all the time I was eating!" "I was sure you'd tell me in your own good time," Spartak answered peaceably. He was going to have to tread very carefully in his dealings with this irascible older brother, that was plain. "In any case, the shock of hearing Hod at was dead seems to have -- " he made a vague gesture -- "chilled my mind, so to speak. I can hardly credit it." "Ah, you always were a corked bottle. Ashamed to show your feelings in front of anyone else. If you have any feelings, that is." With the solid food in his guts, Vix was reverting to his normal manner. Spartak flushed. "I'm sorry. It's true I've spent more time reading than talking these past several years. But it's in a good cause," he added defensively, thinking to penetrate the other's hostility. "I'm working on a history of Asconel." "Faugh! I'm not concerned with the dead past. I'm worried about the future. Don't your books tell you that that's under our control, while the past is what we find it and we can't set it to rights?" Another gulp of wine, and once more the mug held much hold with working at a distance. Asconel is its own history." "I -- " On the verge of a hot objection, Spartak checked. "I'll tell you something, too," he continued after a moment's pause. "That's a far more philosophical remark than I ever expected to hear from your lips!" "By the nine moons of Argus, if you can't learn something in ten years' travelling, you might as well be dead." Vix put his hand to his waist, as though uncomfortable at the absence of his sidearms. "And I'm not dead. Well, let's not bicker. I'll tell you what I can." Spartak bit back a retort. He was now absorbing the important points of what Vix had told him: Hodat dead, a usurper ruling Asconel, some cult with an arrogant priesthood dominating the citizens. All this added up to a frightening whole. V ix said: "This woman Lydis appeared one day, off a ship from no one knows where. Somehow, she got herself to the attention of Hodat, and once they'd met, things went out of control. He said, so the story runs, that this woman knew his innermost thoughts -- that she was like a part of himself. Before anyone knew what had happened, she was being talked of as his wife-to-be. "True, for a while things went well enough, I'm told. The witch Lydis was said to be beautiful, which is a good start for any woman, although she never appeared in public except in a long black gown with a veil over her hair. Like Borin foresaw, there was a plot to depose Hodat because of some degree or other, and allegedly she warned him of it, having seen into the minds of those, who planned it." "A telepathic mutant," Spartak muttered. "Then the priests of Belizuek started to come in. It had always been Imperial policy that if anyone was fool enough to want to spend time talking to idols or the empty air they should be allowed to get on with it, so under the guise of religious freedom they were permitted to land. Hodat started listening to them a great deal. I ought to say this was some cult to which Lydis herself adhered, by the way -- said it was from her home world of Brinze. "I guess it was the sacrifices which sparked the last resistance in Hodat. Bemused though he was by the witch, he yet had enough love for Asconel and its people to refuse that horrible last step." "Sacrifices?" Spartak heard his own voice utter the word an infinitely long way away. "Not -- human sacrifices?" "Human," Vix echoed, and the word seemed to curdle the air of the room. "And it was then, while Hodat yet refused, that Bucyon came from space with a fleet the equal of the one I used to fight with over by Batyra Dap -- ex-Imperial ships. "They took over. They killed Hodat. And Bucyon sits in the Warden's chair with Lydis at his side -- she having been the bait dangled ahead of Hodat to lead him to disaster. And Asconel is a ruin of all our father's hopes." "Is there no resistance to the usurper?" Spartak whispered. "Some, some. I hear that Tigrid Zen -- remember him? -- is either in exile or in hiding on one of the outer planets of the home system, trying to find an opening in the net Bucyon has cast around Asconel. But there's no spirit in the people." IF Spartak got blindly to his feet. He said, "I -- I must go and speak to Father Erton, and tell him I'm called away. And then I'll fetch my belongings and come with you." "Well!" Vix studied him. "That's more like the response I'd hoped for, late though it is. But I warn you, I can't tote all your beloved books and such around the galaxy! I've grown used to travelling light in these past ten years." "My books are in my head," Spartak said quietly, and went out. IV O ut in the corridor, Spartak paused as he snapped his fingers at a passing novice: Inform Father Erton I wish to see him, collect my belongings and pack them in my cases, have the kitchener prepare two travelpacks of food... Then Spartak headed straight toward the library. He entered the enormous hall with sufficient lack of the proper ceremony to draw a reproving glare from the Head Librarian, Brother Carl, in his high pulpit overlooking the entire array of more than five hundred low-walled cubicles. But he barely noticed that; he was concerned only to spot a vacant cubicle on the master plan-board and make his way to it as quickly as possible. There was a place unoccupied at Aisle II, Rank Five. He almost broke into a run as he approached it. Without bothering to close the door behind him he dropped into the single chair and punched a rapid succession of buttons on the panel which formed the only other feature of the tiny booth. One finger button, he hesitated; then he decided it was best to have a permanent record, and run the risk of the knowledgeable library computers swamping him with a flood of literature. He punched for a print-out instead of spoken or screened data. Then he took a deep breath. "Brinze," he said. "Planet, presumed habitable, location unknown." He waited in a mood of grim expectancy. It was all very well for Port Controller Grydnik, out on Asconel -- which was, after all, rather an isolated world -- to state that Brinze didn't exist because there was no Imperial record of it. But the records of Annanworld weren't so parochial. The library disgorged a small plain card, no larger than the palm of his hand, from the slot at the base of the panel. Dismayed, Spartak picked it up and read it. It ran: itable, location unknown. No data. Request verify basis for question." He tore the card across and threw it away. "Belizuek," he said. "Religious cult or feature of cult." The answering card was slightly larger, but not much. On it were the ject of veneration of religious cult introduced to former Imperial space four years ago. No data on origins. No data on ritual. Unconfirmed reports of human sacrifice posted as "Bucyon," Spartak said. "Personal name. Lydis, personal name." Deliberately he refrained from crossreferencing to Asconel. The fact that the library contained information even as meagre as what it had given him on this mysterious Belizuek cult had taken him aback; he had imagined that in his ten-year research for his projected history of his home planet he had exhausted every single reference in the entire store. "Present Warden of Asconel. LYconfirmed reports of usurpation by violence posted as -- " He didn't bother to see under what delicate category the memory of the library had entered those reports. He crumpled the card and tossed it aside in fury. "I'm an idiot," he growled. This material the library was supplying to him was nothing more than the siftings of the story Vix himself had just told in the refactory anteroom. Brother Ulwyn, in the gatehouse, must have informed the library as a matter of routine that a visitor from Asconel had arrived, and the library, finding it lacked recent news of that planet, had automatically eavesdropped on this much-travelled stranger. Techniques like these had been partially responsible for making Annanworld into the most notable of all the Empire's information centres. For some minutes after that, he just sat. He had hoped to present a whole stack of data about Brinze and Belizuek to Vix, as some sort of justification for having hidden away in this placid backwater. Vix's gibe was half-true, he had to admit. And it turned out there was nothing in the library but the same rumors, now rendered third-hand. The door of the cubicle was pushed aside, and a startled offworld student was there, carrying a recorder. "Oh! Excuse me, Brother, but this cubicle was shown vacant on -- " "That's all right," Spartak said, rising with limbs that seemed to have stiffened from the passage of a lifetime. "I forgot to shut the door. But I've done what I came to do, anyway." ( #X"ou'll forgive me," Father ErX ton said in his wheezy ancient voice. He was very old; rumor placed him at well past the century mark. "I should perhaps not say this. We are a center for study and distribution of information, and it's only a courtesy obligation that we place on those who make such extensive use of our facilities as you have done, to recompense us with some original work before leaving." But he loaded the words with a glare, and Spartak, who had always regarded the Master of his order with great respect, felt impelled to excuse himself against the implied charge. "I have no intention of departing permanently, Father," he said. "It is simply that this news -- " "Moreover," Father Erton continued, totally ignoring the interruption, "Brother Ulwyn gives us most unfavorable reports of this halfbrother of yours who comes to drag you away. Says he is violent in the extreme. Heavily armed." IF "But Asconel is one of the few -- " "You may have no intention of departing permanently," Father Erton proceeded, as though his ears and mouth were keeping different time-scales, the gap between them amounting to several seconds. "But someone else -- for example, the alleged usurper of Asconel -- may take no notice of what you plan. And your chance to return will be... Pffft!" "I'm sorry, my mind is made -- " "Most crucial of all is my final point. If you leave here and while absent infringe the vow you took to renounce all forms of violence, you cannot be re-admitted." Father Erton leaned back with an effort and stared at Spartak. "I am not by temperament a violent person," Spartak forced out, acutely conscious that Father Erton's refusal to listen to a word he had to say had made him long to employ a great deal of violence on his sparse gray pate. "My intention is merely to -- " "Your intention is to throw away ten years of valuable study on a heroic gesture. You may well not return alive, and even if you do you stand the same chance of turning back the calendar as I would have of combating a tidal wave. I understand your attachment to Asconel. Why, I myself, after seventy years, still occasionally find myself nostalgic for my own birth world! And that the appeal comes from your half-brother makes it even more understandable that you should be tempted. Nonetheless, I urge prudence, a night's sleep before your linal decision, and -- best ot all -- a reconsideration." Spartak got to his feet, a cold rag me," he said between his teeth. "You know what's going to happen here? One of these days someone who doesn't give a yard of a comet's tail for some hypothetical Second Galactic Empire is going to remember Annanworld, and he'll whistle up a few score jollyboys with armed starships and knock this pretty study down around your ears. Then he'll pick over the survivors and choose out the girls for raping and some of the novices for general drudgery, and loot the wreckage for enough to last him out a lifetime of luxury. And if this doesn't happen, it's going to be because a few places like Asconel and Loudor and Del cad ore held to the oldfashioned ways, stood up for justice and order and the rule of law and did their best to keep the pirates and the slavers and the privateers from off your neck!" Father Erton gazed up at him unblinkingly. He said, "It's takea you ten years, has it, to come around to this way of thinking?" "No. More like ten minutes!" "Then go," Father Erton sighed, "But remember! If you commit yourself to violence, save the expense of coming back!" V T hey went a considerable distance in silence, with no one else in sight except some children on a hilltop, playing some game with a long white stick. #J Spartak was engaged with his own bitter thoughts, and was anyway used to long hours of private study and contemplation. It was not until they were almost halfway to the village that he spoke. "How did you come here? By the regular space-lines?" "Blazes, no. In this corner of the galaxy, shipping schedules are down to monthly, sometimes bi-monthly frequencies. I should sit on my butt while they get around to organizing a crew and lifting their creaky old tubs? No, I have my own ship now." "Your own ship?" Spartak echoed in surprise. "You've done well. I've not heard of a privately owned starship before." "Don't picture any ship of the line," Vix grunted. "I have an Imperial scout, probably one of the original ships they tell me we found when we came out into space the very first time. I've never dared compute how old she must be." "Twenty thousand years," Spartak said positively. "Twenty -- ?" It was Vix's turn to be astonished. "Oh, never!" "If it's one of the original Imperial vessels, it must be. According to what events you take as marking the establishment and the collapse of the Empire, it lasted something between eight and a half and nine thousand years. By the time we came out to collect them, the various artifacts our predecessors left behind were already at least as old as tht whole lifespan of the Empire." "This is something I've never got straight in my mind," Vix said slowly. He seemed to be groping for some subject of conversation which would be sufficiently neutral to let him get to know this stranger-brother of his, who had adopted a way of life so alien to his temperament and yet now had to be his companion and confidant. "I guess you must have put in a deal of study on it -- hm?" "I did when I first came to Annanworld," Spartak agreed. "I had this over-ambitious idea that I was going to find out how the Empire originally arose. But the records simply don't exist. What little had been recorded was either destroyed or simply rotted away. We've never had the skills required to build something to last ten thousand years. Even an Empire!" "But -- well, at least you can tell me how it is we're still flying ships supposed to be as old as you just said?" "We've made some intelligent guesses. The best and most likely is that at some time in their own history the people who left the ships behind lost interest in physical activity, and built sufficient ships and some few other items to last out their -- well, maybe their lifespan. Or else they went to another galaxy because they'd studied this one from rim to rim and exhausted it and themselves. But they'd built well. It took us ten thousand years to use up what they left behind." "It's not used up yet, not by a long way," Vix countered. # #X#"es, but what time couldn't do I to those ships, we've done deliberately. It costs to buy a ship, TF but it doesn't cost anything to run one, for they're self-fuelling and almost indestructible. The Argian fleet numbered one hundred and one million vessels at the height of Imperial power, and there must have been almost one thousand times as many as that in service throughout the galaxy. Yet now -- as you just said -- there are so few ships you may wait a month for passage on what used to be a flourishing Imperial starlane." "We're building some ships of our own, though." "Where? Not in Imperial space, Vix. Out on the Rim, where the Imperial writ never ran. I sometimes think I'd like to go out there, to see what human endeavor can do by itself, without accidental help from a vanished race." "A long trip without much prospect of reward," Vix said. "Me, I'll stick around the hub. Numbers much to a man unless he's prepared to think of planets as grains of dust and human beings as less than bacteria. And no one raised on a world as sweet as Asconel could do that." Spartak shifted his heavy load to the opposite shoulder. He was a little relieved at what Vix had just said. In the years since they last met, this fiery older brother of his had clearly matured as Tiorin had done, and there was a good chance, he reasoned, of their becoming friends at last. "How did you come by your ship?" Spartak asked eventually, after casting around for some way of keeping the talk moving. "Took it as my pay after we put down the rebellion of the old Twenty-Seventh Fleet." Spartak swallowed dryness and was glad when the other left the subject where it lay. "That's not all I've picked up, by any means. Though most of what I've had I've spent as fast as I got it. Matter of fact, I guess there may be some problems if you've fallen into the ways of these sexless monks you've kept so much company with." "You have a girl with you?" Spartak suggested. "That's right." "A slave?" "I don't like the tone of your voice," Vix said sharply. "I don't pay her regular wages, if that's what you mean. But I keep her, feed her, clothe her -- and she does the chores for me that a woman usually does for a man. But there are other reasons why a girl keeps company with a man without being enslaved. Have you forgotten, cooped up in your hermitage here?" "Have you been together long?" Spartak inquired peaceably. He was tempted to correct Vix's mistaken idea of the life led by his order, but did not. "About five years altogether." Vix brightened a little; they were in full sight of the transport terminus in the village. "Ah! From here we can get to the spaceport in under the hour." inphere she is," he exclaimed, A throwing up a proud arm to point. "The smallest vessel in sight, but mine. Go over and stow your bags. I have to pay port dues and get clearance -- they still observe all sorts of old-fashioned rules and regulations here." "Ah -- this girl of yours," Spartak ventured. "What's her name, for when I meet her?" "Vineta. Don't worry. She knows it's you coming back with me, if anyone off this world does." Spartak shrugged and made off across the hard gray surface of the port. A great deal must have changed in the last few years, he reflected, for his brother to have secured a ship of his own. Governments of planets, great trading enterprises, and other corporate organizations had owned ships under the Empire; if these bodies were letting go of the items most indispensable to the continuance of galactic trade and communication, decay must have spread far and fast. Ther was one exception to the list of ship-owners he'd mentally made: pirates sometimes claimed to own their ships absolutely. But he preferred not to linger on that idea. He came close to the ship now. The access ladder was down; awkwardly he clambered to the top, his bags swinging. He rapped on the door of the lock, thinking: twenty thousand years ! It is incredible ! When no one opened to him, he tested the manual lock release. It opened the door for him. He frowned. It was unlike Vix to risk leaving the ship thus. But perhaps this girl of his felt safe on her own. He climbed inside and called aloud. "Ah -- Vineta? Are you there?" But there was no one in any of the accessible compartments of the vessel: control cabin, living quarters, sleeping quarters, sanitary facilities were all empty. He was standing, puzzled, in the control room when Vix came stamping aboard, and forestalled the redhead's questions with a curt sentence. "She wasn't here when I arrived." "What? Vineta! Vineta!" The harsh sound reverberated in the hollow hull. No answer came. Vix set to searching, as Spartak had just done, and came back moments later with his face a mask of fury. "Gone!" he roared. "After all I've done for her, to walk out like this -- take to her heels without even clearing out her gear! The little baggage! The little radiation-spawned sweetton gued -- " "Vix," Spartak said very softly, "are you altogether surprised?" "What do you mean by that?" the redhead blasted. "I remember from -- from back home. The way you used to treat your women sooner or later turned them against you. And the life you've been leading isn't the sort which would make you any more gentle." "So you think she just waited till my back was turned and ran for it?" "Not exactly. But Annanworld had quite a reputation. Isn't it possible that she decided she was tired of a roving life? She'll never have been to Asconel, probably never stopped on any single world with you for more than a short stay -- " "What are you talking like this for? You never even saw the girl!" Vix wiped away sweat that had started on his forehead. "Ach! Go IF stow your gear in the lower cabin. That was hers, and some of her things are still there. I'm going to ask the port authorities what became of her, and fetch her back by her hair if I have to." He gave his half-brother a final withering glare. "Well, move! Or would you rather I left her behind, because it might embarrass you to have my mistress here in such a confined space? Is that why you're trying to talk me into thinking it's my fault? If she was going to run off she could have done it on a dozen other worlds without waiting for this precious favorite of yours!" Spartak said nothing, but picked up his bags and made his way to the lower cabin as directed. VI A frown of self-directed anger pulling his brows into deep furrows over his nose, Spartak glanced around the lower cabin, barely taking in the pathetic few belongings which bore witness to the occupancy of it by the girl Vineta. He had not meant to spark an argument with Vix; it was simply that ten years on Annanworld had accustomed him to going straight' to the point in the interests of exposing the truth, and he had largely forgotten how to use tact. He had been shorn of most of his false conceptions of himself, and was glad to have lost them. But it made no odds that Vix had almost certainly treated his girl the same as he had always treated women -- even beating her occasionally. To have told him that she had probably grown tired of aim and run off was a stupid error. Sighing, he cleared away the miscellaneous junk disposed on the shelves and in the drawers. Without his at first realizing, they made a picture to him: a kind of implied portrait of their owner. This curiously shaped seashell, from some planet where the mollusca had a copper-based metabolism to judge by the bluish sheen of the lining; this necklet of rock crystal, pink and blue and yellow; this solido of two smiling elderly folk -- her parents, possibly? It wasn't until he came to tall closets in the far corner and found half a dozen costumes hanging there, together with a small stringed instrument which he did not recognize, that he checked and started to think seriously about the conclusions he ought to draw. Even then he went ahead with what he had originally intended -- changing clothes, putting aside the brown robe of his order in favor of garments not worn since his arrival on Annanworld, but still a fair fit to his body, whose leanness had remained constant since his late adolescence. There was a reminder in that stringed instrument of his own mother, who had been a wandering singer and teacher. It was the means of getting a living. Surely that, and the clothing, would not have been left behind, no matter how eager she was to escape Vix and lose herself on Annanworld? And it was still less likely that she should have abandoned small souvenir items, like the solido, which were no burden to carry and presumably held emotional significance for her. Maybe she went aground to buy something , he told himself at last, marvelling how sluggish his mind had been made by the annoyance his disagreement with Vix had caused. I must tell Vix not to do anything rash -- In that instant, when he stood with one leg in his old but serviceable breeches of Vellian silk, the ship's gravity went on, and within seconds he felt the surging of the drive. This was not the slickly smooth operation of a large liner, elaborately maintained for the passengers' comfort -- like the only other vessels in which he had ever flown space. It was the jarring violence of a scoutship stripped for action, without frills, and seemed to vibrate all the way into his belly, triggering a reflex nausea. He resisted it in near-panic, thinking what foul company Vix would be if he worked out for himself, many systems distant, what Spartak had just deduced from the clothing still in the cabin. He struggled out into the corridor, and ' as he turned from sliding shut the cabin door caught a glimpse of movement at the foot of the companionway leading up to the control room. It was too brief, and the drive-induced nausea was now too strong, for him to get a clear view of the person who had gone by, but the obvious deduction was that Vineta was aboard after all. He had no time to work out where she might have been hiding. He was completely unfamiliar with this design of ship, and if Vix hadn't found her she must have concealed herself very thoroughly. Or else Vix himself wasn't yet aware of all the nooks and crannies in his prized new possession... No, rational thought was beyond him at the moment. Wait till the drive settled down to free-space operation. That would be soon enough to solve the riddle. He was on the point of returning to his cabin when he heard the cry. "Spa-ar-tak!" And the drive went off. T he shock was like a dash of cold water, clearing the fog from his brain. With reflex speed he made for the companionway, scrambling up it with the agility of a Sirian ape. The shock was renewed as soon as he saw what was happening in the control room. It was no girl that he had glimpsed passing this way. It was a man, huge and bulky as a Thanis bull, his hair wild, his body cased in crude leather harness and his feet in steel-tipped boots, who now was wrestling chest-to-chest with the tough but far smaller Vix, overbearing the redhead in a crushing embrace. Vix tried to butt him on the nose, failed as the attacker jerked his head back, lost his balance to one of the steel-tipped boots as it cracked against his ankle, and went slamming down to the floor. He had had no time to draw his sidearms, obviously. Perhaps he'd mistaken the sound of the stranger's IF approach for Spartak's. But he'd done well in the first instance, for a short sword lay at the foot of the control board: his assailant's, logically, which he had somehow contrived to dash from his grip. Horrified, Spartak saw the two antagonists crash to their full length, saw the stranger break Vix's grasp on his right wrist and force his hand closer and closer to the redhead's throat. Wild pleading showed in the green eyes, but there was no breath available for him to call for aid again. To renounce his oath so soon? To pick up the sword from the floor and drive it into the stranger's back? It could be done, but -- And then he remembered, as clearly as if he were hearing it in present time, the voice of one of his earliest tutors on Annanworld. "Always bear in mind that the need for violence is an illusion. If it seems that violence is unavoidable, what this means is that you've left the problem too late before starting to tackle it." Spartak dodged the struggling men and made for the control board. As he scanned the totally unfamiliar switches, he heard a sobbing cry from Vix -- "Spartak, Spartak, he's going to strangle me!" Time seemed to plod by for him, while racing at top speed for his brother. But at last he thought he had it. He put one hand on the back of the pilot chair, and with the other slammed a switch over past its neutral points to the opposite extreme of its traverse. Instantly he went heels over head. But he was prepared for this; in effect, he fell to the ceiling like a gymnast turning a somersault, and landed on his feet with a jar that shook him clear to the hips. The universe rolled insanely around him. Through a swirling mist of giddiness he saw that what he had intended had indeed come about. Locked in their muscle-straining embrace, Vix and the unknown had crashed ten feet to the ceiling as the gravity reversed, and now Vix was on top -- and breaking free! For the force of the upside-down fall had completely stunned the stranger. Spartak reached out, clutching Vix by the loose baldric on which he normally slung his energy-gun, and reversed the gravity once more, restoring its normal direction. The attacker slammed to the floor again while he and Vix feH rather less awkwardly; this time, he moved the switch with careful slowness, not exceeding a quarter-gravity till he felt his soles touch the floor. And then he said, "Who is he?" "I -- I -- " Vix put his hands to his temples and pressed, breathing in enormous sobbing gasps. "What did you do?" "I put the gravity over to full negative." "But -- " Vix began to recover -- "but -- how? Do you know these ships, then?" "No, I've never seen one before. But it followed logically. There's always an automatic gravity compensator on a starship, for high-gee maneuvering in normal space. It seemed reasonable to expect a manual override on a vessel like this which might get damaged during combat." "You mean you just took a chance on it, while he was throttling the life out of me?" Vix exploded. C learly the redhead had suffered one of the worst frights of his life. Spartak hesitated. "Why didn't you just pick up his sword and run him through with it?" Vix blasted on. "Ah -- well, if I'd done that," Spartak countered in the calmest tone he could manage, "he wouldn't have been able to tell us who he is and why he set on you. As it is, here he's no more than stunned. And you're alive to ask him questions." "I guess so," Vix agreed sullenly, and gave the dazed attacker a prod in the ribs with his foot. "I look forward to beating some answers out of him, at that. Here, I'll put some lashings on him before he wakes up." He started to a corner chest in search of ropes. "I don't think you'll have to beat the information out," Spartak ventured. "I have some stuff with me which will probably make him talk a lot faster than that." "Such as what?" Vix found a length of braided leather and a short flexible chain, and started to bind the man's limbs. "I -- uh -- brought some medical things I thought might come in handy," Spartak said, swallowing hard. Ever since his childhood, fighting and violence had physically upset him, and the glee in Vix's IP voice as he proposed torturing the man to make him talk had picked up the backwash of the nausea from the drive and redoubled it. "I'll go fetch it right away!" But first, he told himself, he'd better take a dose of something to calm his own stomach. He was at the door of the lower cabin, fumbling to open the sliding panel, when he felt the knocking beneath his feet. Astonished, he stared down at the flooring of featureless metal plates. The knocking came again, more vigorously, and his eyes suddenly spotted a small cluster of new bright scratches at one end of the plate on which he stood. "By the moons of Argus!" he exploded, and dropped to his knees to lever up the plate and push it aside. In the compartment thus revealed lay the missing Vineta, a crude cloth gag in her mouth, her clothing torn and a huge bruise discoloring the soft olive skin of her right cheek. She was small and slender, but even so her assailant had had to cram her by main force into the tiny space under the floor. Frantically he lifted her out and set her on her feet; she stood for a second holding on to him, shaking out her space-black hair, then seemed to recover a little and let go of his arm. He made to remove the gag, but she shook her head and tore it out herself. "Are you Vix's brother?" she whispered. Her voice was hoarse. "Yes -- yes, I'm Spartak." "Is he -- ?" "He's all right. He's up in the control room tying up the man who attacked him -- and you too, presumably. How did it happen?" "He had a message sent from the port controller to say he was some sort of official." Vineta swallowed painfully. "And Vix had told me that on Annanworld they had lots of regulations left over from Imperial days, which we'd have to comply with or be delayed in leaving. So I let him come aboard." She passed a weary hand over her forehead and then touched the bruise on her cheek, wincing. "Thank you for letting me out," she whispered. "I was so afraid... And she turned to hurry in search of Vix. Spartak watched her go. The rips in her costume exposed much more of her tight, firm body than he cared to see, and a completely irrational envy overcame him against his will, at the thought of the endless succession of beautiful women Vix had enjoyed and abandoned. Contrary to the assumption Vix had made, his order on Annanworld didn't demand celibacy, and even Father Erton had kept up an association with a woman in the same specialization as himself which had endured for almost thirty years. But his own two or three attempts to form such a relationship had floundered on his shyness and his reluctance to detach himself from his studies. Now, without warning, he found he was wistful, as if he had left some very important part out of his life. T he last thing he expected to find when he returned to the control room clutching his large black medical case was a full-blown shouting match. But he heard it even before he came in. Vix was bellowing at the girl. "You realize he could have killed me? You just let him in. Opened the lock for him and let him in! You didn't keep a gun on him, or anything sensible like that -- oh, no, you wouldn't have thought of it!" "But you told me yourself we had to...!" The answer dissolved on a high note which foreshadowed tears. "What conceivable reason could the controller have to send someone aboard before I got back?" Vix thundered. "I ought to take the hide off you!" Spartak pushed the door aside, and Vineta ran into him blindly, making headlong for the privacy of the lower cabin. He caught her with his free hand, and spoke sharply to Vix. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Just because you've been scared white, that's no reason to take it out on her. She's had a worse shock than you have -- look at that bruise on her! And you know where I found her? Folded up like an embryo in a tiny hole under the floor of the lower corridor! Here," he added in a gentler tone to the girl, looking for a place to set down his medical case. "I'll put something on the bruise and give you a pill to calm your nerves." She accepted his ministrations dumbly, swallowed the pill as directed, and whispered, "Can I go now?" "Lie down for a while. You'll be all right." Spartak gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder and stood aside for her to leave... "I'm -- sorry," Vix said with an effort as the door slid to. "You're right. I oughtn't to talk to her that way." "It's better to think of points like that in advance and not afterwards," Spartak answered curtly, and crossed the floor to drop to his knees beside the bound man. "Hm! How long has he been awake?" "Awake?" Vix echoed in astonishment. "I thought he was still knocked out." "Hold it," Spartak rapped, forseeing that Vix's next impulse would be to kick the man into talking. "Let's see what I can do to loosen his tongue before you -- " He reached behind him for an injector and a small phial of grayish liquid. "What are you going to give him?" Vix demanded. "It's one of the old Imperial drugs. Not really meant as a truth drug, but supposed to bring forgotten experiences back to consciousness during psychotherapy." With deft fingers he loaded the injector. "Why did you think that of all drugs might come in handy?" Vix grunted. "Think I might be precessing my gyros, maybe?" "You do take everything personally, don't you?" Spartak sighed. "As IF a matter of fact, I thought it might help us to find out how this Belizuek cult gets the hold it's supposed to have over apparently rational people like Hodat. There," he added, shooting the dose into the bound man's wrist veins. "How long does it take to work?" "A few seconds. Open your eyes, you!" The bound man complied after an obvious struggle to go on feigning unconsciousness. "Who are you? Where are you from?" Spartak asked. "I'm -- " Another, equally unsuccessful struggle to still his tongue, and a yielding. "I'm Korisu, and I come from Asconel."  "From -- !" Vix toofea pace forward in amazed horror. "What was your missioMSand who ordered you to do it?" H is eyes fixed open and seeming glazed, the man whispered, "I was sent by Bucyon to track down Vix and kill him." "Why?" thundered Vix. "Because he'd heard that you planned to raise on army and depose him, and wipe out Belizuek on Asconel." "I'm Spartak, Vix's half-brother," Spartak said softly. "Does my name mean anything to you?" "Y-yes. After I'd found and killed Vix, since I was on Annanworld anyway, I was to locate you and eliminate you as well." "Has someone been sent after Tiorin?" Vix demanded. "I -- I don't know for sure. I think so. But nobody knew where he was when I left home. There was a rumor that he had gone towards the hub, to travel in what's left of the Empire. Someone mentioned Delcadore." "Then that's where we'll go!" Vix declared, and strode towards the control board. "Just a moment," Spartak said. "There are some other things I want to set straight. You,. Korisu. Are you a follower of Belizuek?" "Of course I am. Everyone on Asconel is nowadays." Vix uttered a filthy string of oaths. "What is Belizuek?" "He is all-seeing and all-powerful. He reads the inmost thoughts of men and no one can stand against him. He's a superior being. Men ought to recognize that and serve him." "Is he a telepathic mutation from human stock?" "I've never seen him. But the priests say he's different. Superior. Deserving of our worship." Spartak wiped sweat from his face. "I'm told he demands human sacrifices. Is that true?" "No, of course not!" Shocked, the bound man tried to sit up, and failed. "The priests say it's blasphemy to call it sacrifice. It's a freewill offering! It's an honor to serve Belizuek in that way just as in any other." Spartak's jaw set in a grim line. If in such a short time Bucyon and his consort Lydis had managed to persuade the citizens of Asconel that this transcendent rubbish was the revealed and mystic truth, their misson wasn't going to be confined to so simple a task as deposing the usurper and restoring the rightful Warden. "Where does Belizuek come from?" "The priests say he's existed since the beginning of the galaxy." "Then where is Brinze?" "That's where Shry and Bucyon and Lydis and some of the others come from. But I don't know where it lies." "Delcadore," Vix muttered to himself, over at the control board. "I'd not meant to go so close to the hub. There are still idiots around there with dreams of Imperial glory, and it's risky. But if that's where Tiorin is said to be..." He glanced over his shoulder. "I have a course set up now. Anything more you want from him?" "Not right now." Spartak straightened. "What shall we do with him?" "Put him where he put Vineta. Why not?" "No, that's too small -- literally and absolutely. In a closet we can lock, that would do." "There's an empty one next to the head," Vix grunted. "I'll help you lug him down there." S till weary from the mental strain as well as from the physical effort of hauling the reluctant Korisu to his prison, Spartak stole into the lower cabin. Vineta had stretched out on the left bunk, and was sleeping with deep and regular breathing. Near her pillow she had ranged the little objects to which she plainly attached a great deal of value: the shell, the solido, the cheap jewelry. Spartak put his medical case away and crept out again. "You again, Spartak?" Vix called as he re-entered the control cabin. "Say -- iih -- I ought to thank you. I guess I was too shaken up to remember. It was very smart, the way you stopped the fight. And it was just as weM we tackled him your way and not mine. Apart from anything else, I imagine you're now convinced that I wasn't spinning you a wild fantasy about what's happened on Asconel!" Spartak shook his head distractedly. "It's incredible," he muttered. "The speed and completeness of the process, to have produced a fanatic like Korisu in so short a time. It almost persuades me that you were right about an element of witchcraft." Vix hesitated. Then he put out his hand. "Brother, I was in two minds whether to go to Annanworld and seek you out. I wondered if I might not burden myself. But ten years is a slice out of any man's life, and love for a world like Asconel is enough of a bond to bring men together." Spartak put his hand into th other's grasp. But the full measure of Korisu's fanaticism did not emerge until much later -- until the time when they went to feed him in his cramped prison and found that he had contrived to strangle himself, against all probability, with the braided leather Vix had used to bind bis arms... IF T he shadow of that incredible death still lay over them when they gathered in the control room to watch the planet Delcadore grow beyond the main ports. To break the intolerable silence between them, Vineta -- recovered almost completely from her treatment at the hands of Korisu -- spoke up. "What sort of a world is this one, now?" Vix, occupied with the controls, tossed an answering grunt over his shoulder. "Ask Spartak. He has the head full of knowledge. I've not followed the progress of events down here towards the hub. Still too rigid and organized for my taste, to be candid!" The girl glanced at Spartak rather shyly. They had hardly yet got to know one another during this brief trip, and she had spent most of her time out of the way of both brothers, although Spartak had seen enough to convince him that Vix still at heart regarded women as expendable. Currently, he just did not have the time to get himself another if he lost Vineta, and was doing his clumsy best to keep on her right side. "Well," Spartak commenced, "this was formerly one of the main garrison systems for the Imperial fleet. When the Empire began to lose its outer reaches this was one of the -- the foci, so to speak, on which retrenchments were made. I think it's now effectively a frontier system. The Empire hasn't vanished, of course, but only shrunk to a fraction of its former size." "That's what's worrying me," Vix interjected. "I've tangled with "certain boneheaded parties who seem to imagine the Empire still flourishes. For my part, I think it's now a farce, and will only prove a handicap to some new and more stable foundation." Spartak nodded in surprised agreement. At that moment a light sprang up on the communicator panel, and Vix reached over to activate the circuit. A voice boomed out with a ring of crude authority. "Identify yourself and your ship!" "See what I mean?" Vix muttered wryly, and added more loudly, for the benefit of the distant challenger, "Vix of Asconel piloting my own vessel, on private business and landing on Delcadore." "Asconel, hm?" Thg voice was as clear as if it came from the next room, even when at lower volume it continued, "Where in all of space is that?" Other voices, much fainter but quite distinct, chimed in. "Asconel -- isn't that where...? Well, it's off towards the Rim anyway, so I guess it'll do... Anything to shift this problem off my back... Yes, we'll settle for this one -- we don't want to wait till the galaxy freezes just to find a ship bound for the Big Dark or somewhere really distant..." Vix and Spartak exchanged appalled glances, and the first voice roared out again. "Vix of Asconel, you're under Imperial requisition. Do you hear and understand? Your ship is under Imperial requisition. Do not attempt to evade this order, or it will be the worse for you?" "What does this all mean?" Vineta whispered. "Right now, that's what it means!" Vix replied in white-lipped fury, and gestured towards the viewport which moments ago had held only Delcadore, its larger moon and the stars, beyond. Now, like a monstrous fish swimming leisurely to intercept smaller prey, there loomed the gigantic shape of an Imperial ship of the line, the ancient Argian symbols blazoned at prow and stern, for all the galaxy as though. Argus could still issue pared to back this false contention with the all-too-real support of firepower equal to the output of a minor sun. F ighting and running were out of the question. When the order was given to take a landing on Delcadore under the escort of the Imperial battleship, Vix -- punctual ing his pilot work with oaths that seemed to grow fouler by the secf ond -- furiously complied, while I Spartak tried to console him with l the suggestion that at least so far they weren't being told to do any(r thing but what they had intended all w along.  Meanwhile, Vineta stood close vj against him, her large dark eyes fixed as though hypnotized on the A. hull of the escorting ship, her whole body trembling with the unexpressed  terror she felt at the nameless threat IF the "Imperial requisition" implied. Spartak's heart lifted, though only briefly, when he saw what forces the Empire could still command. There might be a thousand vessels, he guessed, docked here at what huge illuminated signs still declared to be the Headquarters Port of the Third Imperial Fleet. Then he took a second look at those monstrous hulls, ranged like a forest of branchless metal trees across the concrete plain, and realized he had failed to make an obvious deduction. The Empire, by all accounts, was struggling against decay and rebellion all through the galaxy. Why then were so many ships out of the sky at one place and one time? And he began to spot the clues which accounted for their presence: gashed hulls from distant battles, plating removed by the hundreds of square feet to expose the vital equipment within which was being cannibalized to maintain those ships still capable of flight. Maybe somewhere out near the rim there was a world where ships stood like this in vast numbers, but not antiques used to the limit by reckless commanders -- new ships, human-made, ready to bring inwards to the hub those who for ten millennia had been harried away from the Argian domains and had bided their time on the threshold of intergalactic emptiness, waiting for the inevitable collapse. If there were such a world, he thought, it would be worth hunting for. The shadow of an idea crossed his mind, and was dispelled immediately by the arrival alongside their own vessel of officials from the port controller's staff. Vix vented his anger on them in a single blast of abuse and complaint. They ignored him as they might have ignored a breath of wind. Spartak, urging Vix aside, attempted to tackle them .on a more rational basis, inquiring the authority for "Imperial requisition" and contesting the legality of giving orders to non-imperial citizens. The officials sighed and produced guns. It seemed that this had become the standard substitute for argument on Delcadore. All three of them were taken -- for Vineta refused to stay alone aboard the ship after her experience on Annanworld -- to wait in a large, light anteroom outside the office of the port controller. There was no one else there apart from a man of early middle age, who to their horror lacked both a leg and  an arm. They could not refrain from staring at him; on a world returning to barbarism after the withdrawal of Imperial support, such a sight might have been expected, but Delcadore was supposed to be an outpost of the still viable Argian civilization. T he man cracked a bitter smile as he saw their eyes covertly turning on his injuries. "I'm not pretty any longer, am I?" he rasped. "Well, not to wonder at that! If you'd been picked out of an airless wreck the way I was, you'd have..." A fit of coughing interrupted his angry words, and racked his body for a good minute before he could answer Spartak's tense questions. "Oh, sure they'll fix me up sooner or later. But that can wait, they tell me. I'm the only survivor from my whole team, and all they want to know is where they went wrong. I'm going to tell 'em, too! Without mincing my words!" "What happened?" Vix snapped. "Fools -- gas-brained fools! I could have told them..." The man's eyes unfocused, staring through the wall at a faraway disaster. "Hiring pirates, that's what they've hit on as their latest brainwave! A whole Imperial fleet revolts under a commander who thinks he can do better than the mudheads we have in charge at the moment. And who's to say he couldn't? Sometimes I think  could! And what do they do to combat this? They hire a ramshackle bunch of pirate ships, thinking to keep them from pillaging some Imperial planet this way, send out a command echelon to give the orders -- that's where I got involved -- and sit back and pour some more ancinard. And what happens? Exactly what any schoolchild would have said! You can't give pirates orders, so they break and run. And the Imperialtrained rebels pick them off like scooting watersliders, and then the Imperials-that-were loot the very planet the pirates were aiming for, to make up for the inconvenience and minor losses they suffered!" "Which fleet?" Vix demanded. "The Eighteenth." The injured man stared at him. "What other did you think it was?" "What do you mean, 'what other'?" Vix countered. "The TwentySeventh is wiped out, as I well know. But it could have been the Tenth, or the Fortieth, or the Forty-Second, or -- " He broke off, the other man's eyes burning at him. "Are you sure?" the cripple whispered, after glancing around to make sure there was no one else in earshot. "Of course. I've just come from Annanworld, before that I was at Batyra Dap, and before that Poowadya, and before that -- " "All these fleets are still operating? In revolt, but still operating?" "At the last hearing, yes. Bar the Twenty-Seventh, as I mentioned." "The liars," the cripple whispered. "The dirty, double-tongued, deceiving, damnable -- " "Vix of Asconel!" a speaker cried from the wall. "Go to the door which will open on your right. Bring your companions with you." Puzzled at the cripple's reaction, Spartak lingered to put a final question to him, and got the answer he had half expected but was barely able to credit. If a high-ranking officer of the cracked Third Imperial Fleet had been lied to about the fate of so many other fleets, lying must have become the general policy of the rump Empire. How long could it stand on falsehood? He had envisaged another century or so before its prestige diminished to the point at which IF rebels and outlaws were tempted clear down to the hub -- ultimately perhaps to Argus itself. But if they were already so desperate at the reduction of their loyalist forces that they were hiring pirates as mercenaries, the word would travel fast. And the next time the Empire would find pirates and rebels combined against it. There would be an end to futile shifts like trying to make the two enemies destroy each other. G loomy beyond description, he found he had followed Vix and Vineta into the adjacent office, and there confronted a podgy, gray-haired woman in a uniform encrusted with meaningless decorations and ostentatious badges of rank. "Sit down," she said tonelessly. "Which of you is Vix, the alleged owner of the ship we've requisitioned?" "Alleged!" Vix purpled again. "I have clear title -- " "I'm not arguing," the woman sighed. "If you want to go into legalisms, starships are by definition Imperial property and only leased to corporations, trading companies or -- save the mark -- individuals." Her mouth twisted as though in disgust. "But where would it get me to rely on a thin argument like that? I imagine you're competent to handle the ship, and if I wanted to commandeer it I'd have to pick someone equally skillful. And that's not easy because next thing you know he'd be headed for the great black yonder... Spartak found himself suddenly pitying the woman, for she had defined herself instantly by what she had said: a weary official trying to keep things going while chaos battered at the structure of law, order and principle by which she had to be guided. He signalled Vix to be quiet, and leaned forward. "May we know your authority?" The woman blinked heavy lids a t him. "Frankly, I'm not sure which capacity I'm acting in right now. I have so many jobs I sometimes lose track. I sit in this room as assistant immigration supervisor Delcadore WestNorth Sector. I have the requisition on your ship as Acting Transport Director, Imperial space, Delcadore volume. And I'm under orders from the planetary government, department of public order." "We have business here," Spartak said. "If we could know what you want our ship for, we could perhaps -- " "To the Big Dark with your business," the woman said. "I have a solution to one fiddling little problem out of about ten thousand waiting for me to deal with, and I'm not disposed to compromise." "Now you listen to me!" Vix burst out. "First off, my ship is mine and I'm not handing it over to anyone who still has delusion of glory about the Empire! Second, my business here is important not only to me but to my home planet, and I'm not going to be cheated out of it. And thirdly -- " "Oh, shut up," the woman said. "Third is probably going to be something about not being an Imperial citizen. You're an Imperial citizen if you were born on any planet which was ever part of the Empire, and Asconel was. Your Warden still holds his fief from Argus, and his spacefleet too." "The blazes he does! The present Warden's a usurper, and he brought his fleet with him from some world called Brinze which the Imperial records don't show!" "I wouldn't know," the woman shrugged. "Don't think I have time to keep up with what's happening on backwater planets like that, do you? What's left of the Empire generates enough problems to keep my attention fully occupied. So swallow this, and digest it at leisure.   apparently read minds -- a mutant, obviously. We could have let her be stoned to death, I guess. Things are nearly that bad already, even on Delcadore. But when we can, we cling to the Imperial rules, because they're better than anything else we have. And the Imperial rules say we keep the status quo by putting her out of the way on some habitable planet off towards the rim. "In the old days we could have assigned her passage on regular linerroutes, under Imperial guard and protection to make sure some superstitious knot-head didn't assassinate her before she reached where she was sent. According to my best information -- which I'll share with you since you're from way out anyway -- there isn't a single commercial routing left which would get her to a rim system in less than a year. Coordination has gone to hell, schedules aren't reliable, and pirates are picking off so much traffic the lines are closing down or flying only in armed convoy. "So you'll have to do. I'm having this girl brought here from wherever the blazes she's been kept, and the moment she arrives you're going to take off and head for -- what's the name of that place?" She pushed a stud on the arm of her chair and consulted a small screen set at an angle beside her. "Ah, yes -- Nylock. I picked it because it's comparatively close: a straight-line route from here to the rim." Vix was half out of his chair with rage. "You can't do this!" he thundered. "Be grateful," the woman said stonily. "I could have sent you anywhere -- out the far side of the Big Dark, come to that! Now do you fancy your chances with the pirates in that volume, hey? Used to take three Imperial battleships to get across there safely!" Spartak, controlling himself better than Vix but nonetheless whitehot inside, forced out, "What right have you to make the requisition anyway?" "Argian decree," the woman said. "If you want the number and text I'll get it for you, but it runs to seventy figures and two full recording crystals, and seeing it won't make a grain of difference. I don't care for your business on Delcadore, I don't care for your complaints and objections -- all I care about is getting shut of one irritating problem." IF She stabbed another stud on her ohair-arm, and the doors of the room slid back. "And don't think, either, that there's an easy way to avoid doing as you're told. Dumping the girl in space when you get out of our jurisdiction, for instance, and trying to sneak back here. You'll be welcome to conduct your business when you've finished ours. And to make sure you do -- " Soft footfalls sounded behind Spartak's chair, and he half-turned to see menacing uniformed figures there. "We condition you," the woman said. "You won't be able to be comfortable or happy or sexually potent or even sleep properly from now on unless you're directing all your efforts to the completion of the mission on which you're sent." IX T he efficiency of the conditioning process was flawless: impersonal as a mechanical repair, thorough as the work of a first-rate surgeon. Spartak, who knew something of this and related psychological techniques from his wide researches on Annanworld, 'had hoped to offer at least token resistance to the drugs and hypnotic instructions employed on him. But it was useless. As though a shutter had snapped down over his brain, he blanked out, and on re-awakening he found he could recall nothing of what had happened except at the two extreme levels of his awareness. Consciously he knew he had been conditioned. Subconsciously he was disturbed, as it were by an itch, that was already intense and would grow to be unbearable if he did not at once comply with the Imperial order. He was appalled beyond measure. If this experience was anything to go by, it appeared that the chief tools of the Imperial power had been reduced to lies, propaganda and the threat of obliteration. Small comfort, in view of that, to know that the galaxy now held forces too strong to be impressed by the last of those three instruments! And perhaps worst of all was the fact that they were so confident of the reliability of the conditioning, they permitted him, Vix and Vineta to return to the ship without escort. knowing that until the telepathic girl was delivered to them they would sit and wait, and once she arrived they would helplessly depart for Nylock, the only place in the galaxy where they could be sure of release from the imprinted command. "Is there nothing we can do?" Vix pleaded for the tenth time. His courage in regular combat, his habitual assertive self-confidence, availed him not at all when faced by a weapon as subtle as this conditioning. It had perhaps been an inspiration on the part of the grayhaired woman to cite sexual impotence as one of the consequences of failing to comply with her decree; in any case, Spartak was reminded of a theory he had once formed about this redhaired half-brother of his. His insatiable demand for women, the theory proposed, was a way of compensating for the fact that he was youngest of three brothers, much alike. He needed women's attention to reassure him about his own individuality. For a long moment Spartak didn't reply. All he would have said would have amounted to the same as he had already repeated over and over. He knew of nothing that could be done without psychological assistance as skilled as what the Empire could draw on, and it couldn't be obtained without putting the ship into space for some other friendlier world. And once in space, the compulsion would be far too strong to withstand. The pause gave Vix a chance to think of something else: Vineta was weeping silently in the corner of the control room, her face pale and drained of hope. Vix rounded on her. "Stop that snivelling, woman!" he blazed. "I can't do anything about what's happened, can I? Control yourself and stop crying as if I'd been beating you!" "Vix!" Spartak snapped. "You ought to stop taking your frustration out on the poor girl! It can't make much difference to her where you drag her away to. Nylock and Asconel are both meaningless noises to her. If she's in tears it's for your sake, not her own." The cloud of gloom lifted momentarily from Vineta's perfectly shaped features, and she found the energy for a sad smile of gratitude at the intervention. Beside himself, Vix retorted, "I suppose you're glad of this, are you? Glad we're being sent to some back-of-beyond planet instead of to Asconel where we belong! There's fighting there -- or will be -- and you have no stomach for it!" S partak clung grimly to the shreds of his own temper. The abstract principles inculcated in him on Annan world, though, were very hard to apply under present circumstances. "How long did yoij spend burrowing in your piles of stale knowledge?" Vix sneered. "Ten years, isn't it? And does nothing you learned in all that time tell you how -- " He was interrupted by a bang on the outer door of the lock. Hardly stopping to draw breath, he charged away on a new line of complaint: "Now our time's up! They've brought this telepathic mutant along and the moment she's aboard we've lost our last chance to figure out a way of staying on Delcadore and tracking down Tiorin!" The idea struck Spartak that having a mind-reader close to him frightened Vix as much as being sent far away from Asconel. Superstition, merely? Or the fear of having some secret misdeed revealed? For himself, he knew he would welcome thin consolation in this opportunity to find out the truth behind all the rumors which he had heard; the policy of deportation which the Empire had instituted to insure itself against wild factors in the peoples it ruled by imposing statistical averages on them had worked well, but it had also fed the imaginations of the ignorant. IF Still, right now the matter of the talents of the sports the human race had thrown up was irrelevant. He got to his feet. Somehow he wasn't so sure as Vix that the mutant girl was waiting at the entrance. He would have expected a call from the port controller and perhaps some triggering command to reinforce the conditioning on their minds, not a simple knock without advance warning. He unlocked the panel and slid it aside. The person who met his gaze was a little man, apparently very nervous, with protruding teeth and wide startled eyes. He held tight to the guardrail around the narrow platform to which the ladder below him gave access, as though he was afraid of losing his balance and cashing to the ground. He said in a squeaky, eager voice, "Is this the ship from Asconel?" Spartak nodded, and the nervous man was infinitely relieved, even going so far as to take one hand from the rail he clutched. "Please! May I come inside and discuss a proposition with you?" Spartak hesitated, then stepped back and gestured that the other should pass, him. Vix, from within the control room, called out fiercely to know what was going on. But the nervous man would not say anything further until he was safely in the control room himself. Then he drew himself up importantiy"My name is not of any consequence," he commenced. "It is in fact Rochard, but I am representing a -- uh -- a third party who is very desirous of securing passage to your planet. For some time he has had his agents making inquiries at all the spaceports on Delcadore, asking about ships from Asconel and nearby systems, offering a generous fee for a flight thither. Yours is the first such ship to come to my notice since I was requested to assist him." Vix and Spartak exchanged astonished glances. Then the redhead pursed his lips as if to spit. "Can't help him," he snarled. Rochard put his hand suggestively into his belt-pouch, and there was the mellow jingling noise of solid Imperial coin. He said, "I'm instructed to make a very liberal payment in advance, and then my -- uh -- principal will guarantee double the old commercial rate for the distance. You'd be well advised to j "It's nothing to do with money," Vix broke in. His shoulders bowed, and he turned half away from Rochard. "Go look for some other vessel. If I could, I'd cheerfully take him to Asconel and not ask one circle for the flight -- that miserable world needs outsiders to visit it and view its present plight! But it's out of the question." B ewildered, Rochard renewed his original offer, his wide alarmed eyes seeking a clue to the refusal. Abruptly Vix whirled and clamped a hand on his wrist. "Out! Or I'll throw you out. You can't take no for an answer, can you? I guess you're losing a fat bonus for finding us, hey? Well, have your argument with the woman who sits in the port control building yonder!" He added a vivid and obscene description of her. "Just a second," Spartak whispered. His mind had been buzzing ever since Rochard's entrance with a wild -- fantastic -- notion. Even now he was reluctant to utter it, but he felt he must. "This 'principal' of yours -- he isn't by some miracle a man called Tiorin of Asconel?" Rochard started. "Why, you know him!" he blurted. "How do you know him? I was forbidden to name him to anyone." "Don't you see a resemblance between him and this man who holds your arm?" Spartak rapped. The had shaken him, physically, so that he was now trembling with excitement. As for Vix, he was so startled he had completely forgotten to release his hold on Rochard. "Why -- I guess so. But there are many worlds where one genetic strain has dominated others and produced a general likeness between many people." "This is no accidental resemblance. You're looking at his full brother Vix. And I'm Spartak, his half-brother." "Amazing!" Rochard breathed. "Why, for this he'll pay me double -- treble -- ten times what he promised! Please let me go," he added cringingly to Vix. "I must carry the news to him at once." "It still won't help much," Spartak grunted, silencing a threatened interruption from Vix with a IF lift of his eyebrows. "We've been put under Imperial requisition, and conditioned to take a mutant girl to some place called Nylock. You must be well in touch with what goes on around here. What can we do to get out from under this?" Rochard's face fell. He said, "Oh, no... The two words were like the sighing of wind through bushes in a cemetery. "Is there someone we can bribe to have' the conditioning reversed?" Spartak urged. "Is there anyone we could go to for counter-conditioning?" "How about Tiorin himself?" Vix snapped. "What's his situation here? How's he fixed for contacts, government influence, things like that?" Rochard spoke so rapidly he was almost babbling, his gaze apparently riveted on the imaginary spectacle of a fat reward disappearing into space. "Your brother is in no position to help you either! He's not meant to be on Delcadore at all. You see, some short time ago there came a man from -- I think -- his own world, yours too of course, an assassin, from whom he barely escaped. Since then he's been in hiding, and only some few trusted agents have been told he's still here. For the sake of any more would-be killers, the news was passed that he had left for Argus to raise aid against the new rulers of Asconel." "Do you know where he is? Can you contact him quickly?" Spartak demanded. "Why, within minutes if he's at the usual place. But it may take a while to bring him to you. If you're X ujnder Imperial requisition you can't leave the ship, and any attempt you make to communicate with people on the planet will be automatically jammed." "Get hold of him at once anyway," Spartak ordered. "It's our only chance." Frantically Rochard dashed for the door. Spartak turned to Vix, wiping sweat from his face. He said, "It might have taken weeks to track him down here. He might have fooled us, along with Bucyon's assassins, and we'd have gone on a ridiculous chase to Argus looking for him. Even if we have to go home via Nylock, we may prove to have wasted amazingly little time." "If we get back from Nylock," Vix said. "If we get him aboard in time to make the trip with us, and the girl isn't brought here before he arrives. If. If. ##" "I should have given Rochard a message to cover that risk," Spartak whispered. "Told Tiorin to wait for us, and we'd be back to locate him right here." "You were not expecting to find your brother on this world at all," Vineta suggested unexpectedly. "You were prepared to find he had left for somewhere else." Spartak nodded absently. "Then you are in luck," she said with a shrug. "Try to look on that side of it. I wiM go fix refreshments against your brother's arrival." She slipped silently from the cabin, and the two men settled down to try and abide by her extremely sensible advice. I t seemed that a slow eternity passed before they again heard a bang on the outer door. Vix leapt to his feet. "That must be the girl being brought!" he declared. "And we still haven't heard from Tiorin!" he added nervously. "I don't think so," Spartak countered, and now voiced the thought which had occurred to him earlier: that the port authorities would certainly advise them of the girl's arrival by communicator. He went to open the lock, and found Rochard had returned. "I wouldn't have been so long," the nervous man exclaimed, "but I thought it safer to try and reach you by communicator rather than come back. Only once you're under Imperial requisition even the palms I can normally grease seem to be put back in their pockets. To the point, since I did have to come here again: your brother is on his way, and if you can delay your departure one more hour he'll join you. Uh -- I can't help wondering," he finished in a fawning tone, "whether I may not have done you too some small service...?" Spartak had been Isolated in the environment of his order on Annanworld for so long that at first he did not get the point of this delicate probe for a gratuity. When he did, he found he was ignorant of the current purchasing power of Imperial money. He fumbled a twenty-circle piece from his pouch, and that seemed to satisfy Rochard; II at any rate, he gave a mechanical smile and scampered down the ladder again. "I wonder who he is," Spartak murmured to Vix when he had relayed Rochard's news. "Him?" Vix shrugged. "He's of a type which I've seen spring up on a dozen worlds. Carrion worms infesting the gangrened body of the old Empire. Probably he's regretting this instant that we're not doing anything which would entitle him to a reward if he informed on us to the port authorities. That's how people like him make a living: buying and selling information for use in blackmail, law evasion and petty crime in general." "I thought he was a frightened fool when I first saw him," Spartak admitted. "But he must be pretty astute." "Astute? Him? He didn't even try to find out if we were from Bucyon, like the assassin he told us about who came after Tiorin. He might have sold out his best employer and seen his throat out without reward to himself." Spartak was briefly silent. Then he mentioned his unfamiliarity with the purchasing power of money nowadays, and added ruefully, "I think I've been too long away from real life, Vix!" "I could have been put away from it permanently, but for quick thinking on your part," Vix retorted in a gruff tone. "At least we know we need only delay another hour, now. I hope they're having trouble locating this mutant girl and bringing her to us." B ut barely half the hoped-for period had gone by when the communicator barked at them. "Vix of Asconel, come to the port control building. Your passenger under requisition is here." Vix and Spartak exchanged glances that promised determination to resist, and sat tight, their mouths clamped shut on the temptation to answer and comply. After a second peremptory order, however, there was a noise from below, and Vix jumped up. "Vineta!" he exclaimed. "The conditioning is on her too, isn't it?" Spartak nodded. "Is she trying to get out of the lock?" "No, it doesn't sound like it." Vix went to the door to peer out "No, she's coming here!" The girl's face was pearled with sweat, and her teeth were chattering. "Vix, you must shut me in the cabin!" she forced out. "Or else I cannot stay against the orders I can hear!" "Hear?" Vix rapped. She nodded. "Like a little voice in my own head, whispering all the time." "It's a good idea to lock her in," Spartak confirmed. "I wish there was some way we could lock all of us in. Is there?" "Not that I know of," Vix grunted. "Sooner or later, even if we closed everything fast, we'd be driven to operating the emergency escape hatches, which can't be locked." He did as Vineta had asked, and on his return put a question to Spartak. "Little voices inside the head -- is that how it feels to you?" Spartak shook his head. He answered loudly as another, now puzzled, command came over the communicator, trying to drown out the words with his own. "It affects different people dfferent ways, I'm told. It gives me a helpless tightness in the guts, makes my mouth dry and I think eventually it will blur my vision." "How long before it gets unbearable?" "I don't know. How strong are we?" B ut the authorities patience was shorter than their endurance. With ten minutes still to go before the promised time of Tiorin's arrival, there came a thunderous banging on the lock door, entirely different from Rochard's timid knock. "Tiorin?" whispered Vix, whose neck was now corded with tension as he struggled against the invisible compulsion to leave the ship and fetch their unwanted passenger. "I guess it could be," Spartak replied with difficulty. "I'd better go see. I think I know more about what's been done to us than you do. I stand a marginally better cha'nce of arguing for a while longer if it's not Tiorin down there." "Go ahead," Vix consented, and his face twisted with self-contempt at his own frailty. It was not Tiorin. It was the pudgy woman with gray hair, accompanied by a squad of uniformed guards and the mutant girl -- presumably -- laid out on a stretcher on the back of the groundcar in which they had all ridden over to the ship. "You there!" she roared at Spartak's appearance. "If you fight our conditioning much longer, you won't be in a state to fly space! If that's how you think you're going to evade my orders, I tell you straight you won't get away with it! I'll condition one of my own pilots and drag you out to jail, and Delcadore will be the only planet you see for the rest of your lives!" A cloud of formless terror due to the conditioning enveloped Spartak's brain. He was unable to speak. Ignoring him, the woman turned to the guards with her. "Get that girl off the car and put her aboard!" Slowly, the terror retreated as Spartak called on every trick of selfdiscipline taught him on Annanworld. He found his voice again, could see clearly as the guards awkwardly sought to get the girl-laden stretcher up the ladder to the lock at which he stood. A shocking possibility crossed his mind, and everything else, conditioning included, fled from his awareness. He leaned forward on the rail, peering down at the girl. From her face, and the slightness of the body under the blanket in which she was wrapped, he deduced that she was scarcely more than a child -- fifteen or sixteen, perhaps. But that wasn't what transfixed him. He had assumed her to be unconscious, perhaps injured by the peasants or whoever had tried to stone her to death. The gray-haired woman had mentioned something about that. However, he had seen IF without a shadow of doubt that her eyes were open. "What's wrong with that girl?" The guards, busy trying to get her up the ladder, didn't answer. The woman on the car merely scowled. Behind him in the lock, Vix appeared, clutching his gun but somehow unable to find the trigger, so that his hands wandered absurdly over the stock and barrel, like jointed insects with minds of their own. "Is she sick, or hurt?" he inquired feverishly. "I don't think so," Spartak rapped. "Get back!" -- from one of the guards manhandling the stretcher up to them. Despite himself, Vix obeyed instantly. Spartak heard him cursing under his breath. The stretcher grated over the edge of the platform and was slammed flat. Blue eyes in a face which would normally have been ruddy and healthy, but had turned sallow, stared at the sky, not even turning to see into whose care she had been committed. "Catatone!" Spartak thundered, and rage so great it overcame the force of the conditioning stormed into his limbs. "What did you say?" Vix cried. "She's under catatone! It's a paralyzant -- they first got it from the poison of the Louder ichneumon." He stamped to the guardrail and stared down at the gray-haired woman. "Correct!" she applauded mockingly. Vix plucked at his arm. "Isn't it as well?" he whispered. "After all, to have her -- " Spartak brushed aside the other's hand. "It's the cruellest thing in the galaxy!" he blazed. "Because k only paralyses! It doesn't dull painl How'd you like to be unable even to moisten your eyes by blinking --  or move to relieve a cramped leg -- or control your bowels?" He heard Vix draw his breath in sharply, and from the corner of his eye saw that the  redhead was staring with dismay at the girl's taut body. "And don't you know why they did it?" Spartak raged on. "Because there's so much lying and deceit going on in this once-proud Empire they're afraid a mind-reader could tell a few unpleasant truths to the people they're duping -- like the man we met earlier, shy of his arm and his leg!" He saw, as clearly as through a telescope, that his taunt had made the gray-haired woman wince. Without conscious intent, he shot out his arm and seized the energy gun from Vix's fumbling grasp. Trying desperately to stretch this moment of not-thinking to its utmost, he levelled the weapon and found the trigger. "Where's the antidote?" he shouted. "Get me the antidote or I'll burn you where you sit!" There was a dreadful silence. Incredulous, the guards turned at the foot of the ladder and stared up at him, shaking with the effort of keeping the gun sighted on the grayhaired woman, but somehow finding the resources to go on. "We -- we haven't got it!" the woman quavered. "Then get it!" Spartak told her. "No, not you! You're my hostage. Send one of these bullyboys for it. And tell him to run both ways!" Vix put his hands on the guardrail, clamping them till the knuckles were white. Seeming to draw strength from his brother's example, he cried, "And tell that man below not to pull any tricks -- I saw him move for his sidearm!" The guard who had tried to get at his gun jerked his hand back from his waist, holding It out at his side. "Hurry!" Spartak rasped. "Your conditioning is good. I might decide I have to give in -- but I'll burn you first!" The woman shrieked terrified orders, and the guards broke as one to dash back to the port control building and fetch what was required. T he time that passed now was hardly human-scaled, inside Spartak's overstrained mind. It was time slow enough to suit the growth of galaxies, the cooling of suns. Yet there was nothing in all of space except a frightened fat woman on a ridiculous little groundcar, trembling as the gun stayed aligned with her head. Could he endure? His guts were chilled with nausea; his vision was swimming and there were random, insane noises in his ears. The metal of the gun seemed alternately burning hot and freezing cold, and often he had the illusion that -- like Vix -- he was not gripping the trigger, but fumbling in front of and behind it. "There he comes!" Vix said. He pointed, but Spartak dared not lode away from the sole focus of his attention. "Let him bring it up," he breathed. "Put it alongside the girl's head." "Bring what up?" Vix glanced at him in wonder and not a little admiration. "Oh! Not the guard coming back -- but Tiorin! I can see his red hair plainly!" "I don't care about Tiorin," Spartak said. A vague puzzlement flashed across his mind: he did care really, didn't he? Only somehow it was less important than the main purpose, the bringing of the antidote for catatone... "Spartak, listen to me," Vix was saying out of infinite distance. "Spartak, Tiorin is here -- he's come up to the lock and brought the antidote with him. I told the gaurd to give it to him and here he is and he's brought it. You can put down the gun and we can leave." Spartak's temporary universe, containing only himself, the gun and its target, crumbled, and utter darkness overwhelmed him. XI T wo blurred faces topped with red hair swam in Spartak's unfocused vision. He struggled to bring the images into register with one another. The effort made his eyes hurt. He gave up, and only then discovered that there were two faces in reality, not merely in his imagination. One of them belonged to Vix. But the other -- IF Of course. Tiorin! Memory came Hooding back, and he was able to force himself up on his elbows. He was lying on one of the bunks in the upper cabin, and both his brothers were leaning over him with expressions of concern. "Spartak?" Tiorin said doubtfully. "How do you feel?" Thoughtfully Spartak took stock of his body and still more of his bruised mind. He said evenutally, "Bad. But I'll survive." "By the moons of Argus, it's a miracle," Vix declared. "I shall never know till my dying day how you managed to keep that gun on its target. I had something like that in mind, but I couldn't control my hands under the conditioning." "They're alleged to know a good many things on Annanworld which have been forgotten elsewhere in the galaxy," Tiorin said. "Where's that jug of broth your girl brought? Oh, there. Give some of it to Spartak -- it'll help to restore his strength." Vix carefully set the spout of the jug to Spartak's lips, his other arm serving as a prop behind the younger man's shoulders. Spartak sipped and sipped again; the broth was hot and spicy, and he thought he detected the faint flavor of some energy concentrate under the masking tastes. Meantime, he had a chance to look at Tiorin, whom he had not seen since the day of Hodat's accession to the Warden's chair. His second brother had aged noticeably. He would in fact be -- Spartak calculated rapidly -- fortyone, which in the heyday of galactic civilization had been youth, not early middle age. But the extreme wealth of the Empire was needed to support freely available geriatric treatment. Now, and for the foreseeable future, only those fortunate enough to inhabit secure planets like Annanworld would enjoy the old benefits. He had a passing vision of peasants grubbing on decadent worlds, mating in their teens, the women worn out by childbirth at age thirty. It was not a pleasant idea, and Spartak spoke hostily to distract his mind. "Tiorin, it's incredible that we should have located you!" "Not really." Even Tiorin's voice had changed from what Spartak recalled: grown deeper and become colored with a sort of drawl to suggest that he weighed every single word. "I've been explaining to Vix how it happened. Right now, he tells me, you're feeling very annoyed at the pretensions of the rump of the Empire. But it saved my life by still possessing some of the old advantages -- an efficient lawforce, swift communications... It was no secret that I was second son to the former Warden of Asconei, you see. I'd found it helpful to draw on the small prestige this conferred. And when Bucyon's assassin arrived, and started asking rather too freely where he could find me, some inspired official grew alarmed. He sent a warning to me, and we laid a trap for the would-be killer. It was from him that I learned about this hellish cult Bueyon has imported, and also of course about the death of our brother Hodat." A shadow crossed his prematurely lined face. "Accordingly, I had it noised about that I'd gone to beg Imperial aid in the deposition of the usurper at the court of Argus." "I still don't see why you didn't," Vix muttered. "You of all people should know," Tiorin retorted. "Holding what it has is beyond the Empire's power now. Whole fleets are rebelling and setting up on their own. What chance would I have had of securing aid except on terms that would be ruinous to Asconel? Do you know what price the old Twenty-Seventh Fleet set for their return to Imperial jurisdiction? You, Spartak?" On receiving headshakes, he concluded, "The free right to sack the planet Norge!" S partak, shocked beyond measure, pushed aside the empty jug of broth. "But Norge was one of the last Imperial outposts beyond Delcadore!" "Still is. The price was refused. But the point is: the price was set. I'd have had to promise something similar in respect of Asconel, and I wouldn't have had the heart." Tiorin scowled. "No. it seemed to me that my only hope was to exploit my inborn capital as Hodat's legal heir. That's why I hired agents to inform me of the arrival of any ship from Asconel. I was afraid the most likely occupants of such a ship would be more assassins, out to complete the job I'd once frustrated, but by good luck yours was the first vessel to reach Delcadore." "You're relying on your appeal to the citizens to make them rise up in support of you against Bucyon?" Spartak suggested. "So are you, I gather," Tiorin countered. Spartak shook his head heavily. He said, "I talked with Korisu, the man Bucyon sent to murder Vix -- and of course myself as well if possible. My judgment is that if Bucyon has contrived to turn a once-loyal citizen of Asconel into a fanatic supporter of ' his regime and his cult, it's going to take more than simply fomenting a counterrevolution to set our planet free." There was a depressed pause. Vix broke it with his habitual intolerance of extended silence. "We're going to have all the time in the galaxy to work out our plans," he grunted. "Once you dropped that gun and keeled over, Spartak, the conditioning took hold on me, and I had --  had -- to get to the controls and set our course for this planet Nylock. And we're well on the way there now." "The girl!" Spartak said, and swung his feet to the floor. "Did you give her the antidote?" "We thought we'd better not," Tiorin admitted. "Obviously you knew something about medicine in general and catatone in particular, and I'm afraid I've learned little about anything in the years we've been apart. I've gone on indulging myself." "Wise of you, I guess, but..." Spartak stood up, swaying, and had to close his eyes briefly as empathic agony stabbed him at the thought of IF the torment the mutant girl was undergoing. "Where is she?" "I told Vineta to make her comfortable in the other cabin," Vix muttered. Spartak hesitated. Then he spoke his mind, as his training on Annanworld had accustomed him to do. "Listen, Vix! It's painfully obvious that you hate the idea of having a mind-reader aboard. I guess you'd rather leave her the way the Empire liked to have her -- incapable of speech, so she can't give away any secrets she picks up. But mutant or not she's a human being, and sheer chance decreed that she should be gifted with abnormal talents rather than you or I or Tiorin. If she's survived into her teens, she's bound to have learned discretion and foresight. She won't blab the things you want to keep private." "I hope not," Vix shrugged. But he seemed ashamed of himself, and turned away without comment. "Here's the phial of antidote," Tiorin said, fumbling in his beltpouch. "I hope it's the real stuff, not some fake they palmed off on us to make us leave the planet." "We'll soon find out," Spartak answered grimly. V ineta looked up, startled, as he entered the lower cabin, then gave him one of her quick shy smiles. He nodded in response before dropping to his knees alongside the mutant girl and reaching for his medical case. "She doesn't move at all!" Vineta exclaimed. "She is alive, isn't she? But how does she breathe?" It was an astute question. Not for the first time Spartak found himself suspecting that this self-effacing girl was the exact opposite of Vix: where he talked much and thought rather too little, she probably thought a great deal despite speaking very seldom. "You haven't looked under this covering?" he suggested. Vineta nodded. "She's clothed in some thick garment. I couldn't see how it fastened, so I left it." Spartak drew the blanket aside. The girl's body was revealed completely enclosed in a suit that glistened as if wet. A bulging hump showed across her bosom; another made her belly rise as though she were pregnant. "Yes, I've seen that technique before," he said -- more to himself than Vineta. "Turn her head on the side, please. I shall have to put the antidote into the neck arteries; if I take the suit off she'll suffocate before I save her." If Tiorin s ghastly suspicion is correct , she'll die anyway... But he drove down that thought and administered the antidote with deft fingers. Seconds dragged away like hours -- and she moved. Spartak realized he had been holding his breath; he exhaled gustily. "Now we must get the suit off, quickly. See, it fastens on the shoulders and at the hips. Open that side." With a sucking noise the wet-looking material let go. The skin revealed was pallid and unhealthy, somewhat swollen with accumulated fluids. "That's how she breathed -- see?" he explained, as the mound on her bosom was exposed, and proved to be a machine in a metal casing. "That drives air in and out and acts as a pacemaker for her heart. And this -- " the similar device on her belly -- "takes care of bodily wastes. But not very well." Now the mutant girl had sufficiently recovered for an expression to come to her face, and at the sight of it Vineta could not stifle an exclamation of horror. It was the worst look of pain Spartak had even seen. "Can you do massage?" he demanded, stacking the prosthetic machines all anyhow on a handy shelf. "Space knows how long she's been kept from moving -- the return of normal sensation will be pure torture!" Vineta's hands flew to the pale stiff limbs and began to rub. # # r "P'hank you." The words came A on breath alone, barely audible. "Thank you. You can stop now. The pain's gone." Spartak sat back, exhausted, and stared at the girl. "Are you sure?" "Quite sure." A sharp tongue slipped out to moisten her lips, which were chapped. "You are Spartak, yes? And you are Vineta?" Spartak's eyebrows drew together. So far as he could recall, he hadn't addressed Vineta by name, nor been addressed, since entering the cabin. He said, "Did you read our names from our minds?" A smile came and went on the mutant girl's face. She said, a trifle louder as her vocal cords came under control, "Yes. And it feels very good. I have felt so much fear in people who knew what I am, but in your mind I feel -- what to call it? Curiosity, I think. And in hers much kindness. I am so glad to be here." "Then you also know what's going to happen to you?" Spartak suggested. "Yes. And I see why you ask. Frankly, I don't care where I go so long as it's away from -- from the past." The small sharp-featured face clouded. "I'll let you rest now," Spartak said. "Vineta, perhaps you should bring her some of that broth you made for me. It seems to have brought about my recovery from shock very quickly." A point struck him, and went unvoiced by deliberate decision as his eyes returned to the mutant girl. She gave a thin chuckle. "My name's Eunora," she said. "You have a clear mind, Spartak. It's like looking into a deep transparent pool of pure water, and I can see all the way to the rocks at the bottom except in one place. And that's where you've been conditioned to take me to Nylock." "I imagine," Spartak said with difficulty, "that you can make allowances for my brothers. I don't think they feel as I do about -- about people like you." "No, I can sense them. Just barely." Eunora shut her eyes and seemed to be listening to distant noises. "They are both full of resentment. The conditioning lies on IF all their thoughts like dense fog, and one of them can't help thinking that I'm responsible for the delay in your mission." After that, silence. Spartak caught Vineta's eye and nodded her out of the cabin. Then he went, heavyhearted to rejoin his brothers. T he two others had gone up to the control room again. As he approached the door, he heard Vix's voice raised. "Well, I know Spartak's views on this, because he told me." "And they are -- ?" Tiorin prompted. "That we might have spent months hunting you, maybe going clear to Argus on the false trail you laid, so we should be glad our only delay is this little side trip to Nylock" "Suitably philosophical, I guess," Tiorin replied as Spartak paused outside the door, "for someone who took vows to an order on Annanworld. It's a hotbed of philosophy, I'm told. For my part, I agree with you. If luck runs your way you ought to grab its tail and hang on tight! Is there no means whereby we could get around the conditioning imposed on you? I'm not conditioned. Could you give me a course of instruction and let me fly the ship to Asconel?" "No, for two reasons." Spartak slid the door aside and stepped into their view. "First, conditioning of this order of efficiency turns your own mind against your wishes. If Vix were to try and teach you how to pilot the ship, he'd so instruct you as to insure that you set course for where we're commanded to go. Or, if by some miracle he avoided that trap, he and I and probably Vineta would conspire to take the controls away from you again. And secondly, even if you did succeed in getting us to Asconel, we'd arrive there in the sort of state I was in when they finally brought the antidote for Eunora. Only worse. The strain might literally kill us; I'd certainly expect us to be incurably insane." "The girl!" Reminded of his other omnipresent anxiety, Vix tensed. "Did you -- uh -- cure her?" "And what was the name you used?" Tiorin added. "Eunora." Spartak combed at his beard with agitated fingers. "I guess you could . say she's cured. She's released from the paralysis, at least. But I'm astonished at how normal and level-headed she seems. It's not what you'd expect from someone of her age -- still very young -- treated in such an abominable fashion." He paused and frowned. "Oh -- maybe I'm being overly suspicious. Maybe she's just so glad to get free of the Imperials and the people who were apt to stone her..." "Is that what they were going to do?" Tiorin exclaimed. "So we were told by that fat old fool at the spaceport on Delcadore," Vix confirmed. "Well, we have to make the most of our chances such as they are. Spartak, when you came in we were discussing how to tackle the problem. Tiorin has unconfirmed reports of a center of resistance established by Tigrid Zen on Gwo." "How old are the reports?" Spartak asked sourly. "Gwo is too close and too obvious for Bucyon to overlook it." He had been taken to Gwo once, and never forgotten the impression it made on him; marginally habitable, it served Asconel and five or six neighboring systems as a source of raw materials, the far greater distance for transport as compared with asteroids in their own systems being counterbalanced by the extra convenience of working with breathable atmosphere. It was a bleak, oppressive world, its vegetation drab olive and gray, its climate wet and windy, its oceans perpetually tossed by storms. The point apparently hadn't occurred to Vix. He glanced at Tiorin. "Is this something you had from Bucyon's assassin?" Tiorin nodded. "But I did confirm the story by checking with the crews of ships that had recently passed within earshot, so to speak, of Asconel. There's a spaceman's slang term for that; what is it?" "Rumor-range," Spartak answered shortly. "Four kinds of news: standing there, landing there, rumorrange and rubbish." Vix gave a humorless chuckle. "I'm surprised at you knowing that, not ever having been a spaceman yourself." Spartak made a gesture of dismissal, dropping into a seat. "Speaking of Bucyon's assassin reminded me Your tracks may be fairly well covered on Delcadore, Tiorin -- though IF after meeting Rochard, I'm not so sure of that. Ours certainly are not. The most casual inquiry on Annanworld would give a lead of Vix and me. And Bucyon is hardly likely to rest content with the triple frustration of his attempts at wiping us out. Indeed, I'm amazed he relied on lone agents. In his position, I'd stop at nothing to get rid of all of us." Tiorin nodded, his face grave. "The impression I had from the interrogation of the man sent to kill me was that fanatics deluded by the cult of Belizuek acquire the illusion of being invincible, capable of undertaking any mission singlehanded. But I grant that this isn't an impression apt to survive a succession of setbacks like the ones luck has brought us up to now." "Fanatics are tricky to handle," Spartak muttered. "If you catch them on their blind side -- say by doing something they define as impossible -- you can cope with them easily. If you stand in their way as we must stand in Bucyon's... Or do we?" "What do you mean?" Vix snapped. Then a light seemed to dawn on him. "Oh! Do you mean that this errand to dump the mutant girl is something of Bucyon's doing?" "A means of getting us out of the way? I doubt it. Even Bucyon could hardly organize a chain of coincidences like that. No, what I mean is this: if he's managed to inspire dupes like Korisu and the man sent to kill Tiorin, if he's reduced the citizens to a state of blind adoration, he may feel secure without disposing of us. He may wait for us to come home, frantic with rage, and then pick us off at his own convenience." Vix's face darkened. "By the moons of Argus, I'd like to test that idea! I'd like to set course now for Asconel and pitch Bucyon and his woman Lydis from the top of the Dragon's Fangs -- ach" The last sound was not a word, but a gasp of agony, and he doubled over. Alarmed, Spartak jolted up from his seat, but Vix waved him back. # #Qecond time that's happened," O the redhead wheezed. "If I so much as think about going straight to Asconel, I get a griping in the guts, but if I speak it out loud, it's like molten metal being poured into my belly." "It's the conditioning," Tiorin said. "It must be." Spartak nodded. "Think about Nylock," he urged Vix. "Think about going to Asconel after we've left the mutant girl behind. It'll calm you and you'll be eased." "Go on talking on those lines," Vix whispered. The whole of his face had paled to the whiteness of his long scar. "Uh -- yes." Spartak turned to Tiorin. "Well, the simple plan is to link up with the rebels. If any. As a starter." Tiorin scowled. "We have the mystique of our blood to draw support, descended as we are from the Warden who steered Asconel through the storms which followed the collapse of Argian influence in our sector of the galaxy. That might tip the scales in our favor. But after ourselves, I know no one more likely to rally resistance to Bucyon than Tigrid Zen, and if he's failed..." He shrugged despondently. "We're guessing," Spartak said angrily. "What we need to do is make straight for Asconel -- contact Tigrid Zen if we can, but not chasing him if he's gone hunting support in some other system. Then on Asconel, perhaps disguised, we ought to -- " He broke off. Tiorin was gazing at him queerly. "What is it?" he demanded. "You just said 'make straight for Asconel'," Tiorin exclaimed. "And nothing happened to you! When Vix said the same thing, more or less, he doubled up in pain." Blank, Spartak tried it again. "We should make straight for Asconel. I want to go straight there now. I intend to go straight there now" He jumped to his feet. "By the moons of Argus, you're right! Vix, try it!" "I -- !" Vix moistened his lips and gathered his courage, fearing another blast of the torture which had overcome him moments earlier. "I want to go to Asconel. Now." And slowly a smile replaced his look of anxiety. "The conditioning's failed!" Tiorin exploded. "It must have been badly implanted -- " "No!" Spartak rapped. "I felt it, and believe me. I know. The psychologists who treated us knew their job. Either we're suffering from a delusion, implanted as a second line of defense against the breakIF down of the main commands, or -- No, that can't be right. We have you as a control, Tiorin; you're not conditioned, and you'd observe that. Then that leaves one single possibility, and I think I know what it is." "Tell us!" cried. Vix, almost beside himself with joy at being unexpectedly released from his invisible bonds. "Eunora," Spartak said. "What? The mind-reading girl?" Vix took half a pace back as though recoiling from a physical shock. "But -- how?" "I don't pretend to know that," Spartak said. "I'm just eliminating the things I know to be out of the question, and I find one unknown factor operating. Let's go see her and find out." "That won't be necessary," a soft voice said, and the panel of the door slid aside to reveal Eunora herself. Spartak had not realized till this moment how tiny she actually was. She barely came to Vix's elbow, and he was the shortest of the three men. She had borrowed one of the costumes he had seen in Vineta's closet when he boarded the ship on Annanworld, and it hung loosely on her as though she were a child dressing up in her mother's clothes. "Eunora! Did you take the conditioning off us?" Spartak blurted. The girl gave a grave nod. "Then I can't begin to tell you how grateful we are!" "That's right!" Vix confirmed. His face was alight with enthusiasm. "Why, you may have saved a whole planet's people by saving us that trip to Nylock!" Eunora didn't answer at once. She walked into the control room with careful, mincing steps, seeming still to be finding out how her unparalyzed legs should support her. Behind her, a trifle nervous, but looking calm enough, came Vineta, who had presumably tried to dissuade her from leaving her cabin and failed. "I didn't know about this -- this conditioning " the mutant girl said at last. "It was only when I felt the pain and twisting in your mind -- " nodding to Vix -- "that I decided I had to find out about it. It's . , . interesting." A nameless premonition filled the air. "It's difficult being a mutant," the soft voice went on. "Hardly daring to use the gift -- afraid all the time that it will leak out and then there'll out my noticing. I have more talents than I ever realized. I was able to work on your minds like a locksmith picking locks, locating and releasing all the implanted orders." She gave a little crazy giggle. "And when you see how it's done, it's so simple!" Spartak's whole body had gone cold as ice. He waited numbly, for her to make the point which he foresaw with terror. "Asconel. That's where you want to go. But I don't think I like the idea much. It's an Imperial world -- or was. So they don't tolerate my kind of people. Also it's going to be a place of fighting. I can see that in your mind, Vix. You want to go mere and fight against these priests and this man called Bucyon, and because you're so frightened of having your mind probed you'll probably be glad if something bad happens to me. Spartak perhaps not. I don't know. But even he... She hesitated. Then she giggled again. "Well, I've found out about conditioning now. I see how it's done. I think I can probably make you do what I want. There's only one question that remains: it's such a big galaxy, so where shall I make you take me?" She looked around her petrified audience with mocking eyes. "Go on!" she urged. "Think of the other places I might like to be taken -- anywhere but Asconel or back where I came from -- and then I'll make you pilot me there!"    Coming Next Month    A long novella by the author of Iceworld, Mission of Gravity , Needle and many other great sf stories    The astounding conclusion of by John Brunner    Don't miss the May issue of If! And Coming Up Later -- Starts in June issue Complete in July issue -- and many more great stories coming up in If! IF IF  Short Story What T and I Did ' am a decent human being . But hat T -- don't trust him, evert M y first awareness is of location. I am in a large conical room inside some vast vehicle, hurling through space. The world is familiar to me, though I am new. "He's awake!" says a black-haired young woman, watching me with frightened eyes. Half a dozen people in disheveled clothing, the three men long unshaven, gather slowly in my field of vision. My field of vision? My left hand comes up to feel about my face, and its fingers find my left eye covered with a patch. "Don't disturb that!" says the tallest of the men. Probably he was once a distinguished figure. He speaks sharply, yet his manner is different, as if I am a person of importance. But I am only -- who? "What's happened?" I ask. My tongue has trouble finding even the simplest words. My right arm lies at my side as if forgotten, but it stirs at my thought, and with its help I raise myself to a sitting position, provoking an onrush of pain through my head, and dizziness. Two of the women backed away from me. A stout young man puts a protective arm around each of them. These people are familiar to me, but I cannot find their names. "You'd better take it easy," says the tallest man. His hands, a doctor's, touch my head and my pulse, and ease me back onto the padded table. Now I see that two tall humanoid robots stand flanking me. I expect that at any moment the doctor will order them to wheel me away to my hospital room. Still, I know better; this is no hospital. The truth will be terrible when I remember it. "How do you feel?" asks the third man, an oldster, coming forward to bend over me. "All right. I guess." My speech comes only in poor fragments. "What's happened?" "There was a battle," says the doctor. "You were hurt, but I've saved your life." "Well. Good." My pain and dizziness are subsiding. In a satisfied tone the doctor says: "It's to be expected that you'll have difficulty speaking. Here, try to read this." He holds up a card, marked with neat rows of what I suppose are letters or numerals. I see plainly the shapes of the symbols, but they mean nothing to me, nothing at all. "No," I say finally, closing my eye and lying back. I feel plainly that everyone is hostile to me. Why? I persist: "What's happened?" TTe're all prisoners, here in  side the machine," says the old man's voice. "Do you remember that much?" "Yes." I nod, remembering. But details are very hazy. "My name?" I ask. The old man chuckles drily, sounding relieved. "Why not Thad -- for Thaddeus?" "Thad?" questions the doctor. I open my eye again. Power and confidence are growing in the doctor; because of something I have done, or have not done? "Your name is Thad," he tells me. "We're prisoners?" I question him. "Of a machine?" "Of a berserker machine." He sighs. "Does that mean anything to you?" Deep in my mind, it means something that will not bear looking at. I am spared; I sleep. When I awake again, I feel stronger. The table is gone, and I recline on the soft floor of this cabin or cell, this white cone-shaped place of imprisonment. The two robots still stand by me, why I do not know. "Atsog!" I cry aloud, suddenly remembering more. I had happened to be on the planet Atsog when the great fleet of the unliving, the berserker machines, attacked. The seven of us here were among the few survivors, carried out of the deep shelters by the raiding machines. The memory is vague and jumbled, and invested with horror. "He's awake!" says someone again. Again the women shrink from me. The old man raises his quivering head to look, from where he and the doctor seem to be in conference. The stout young man jumps to his feet, facing me, fists clenched, as if I had threatened him. "How are you, Thad?" the doctor calls. After a moment's glance my way, he answers himself: "He's all right. One of you girls help him with some food. Or you, Halsted." "Help him? God!" The blackhaired girl flattens herself against the wall, as far from me as possible. The other two women crouch washing someone's garment in our prison sink. They only look at me and wash away. My head is not bandaged for nothing. I must be truly hideous, my face must be monstrously deformed, for three women to look so pitilessly at me. The doctor is impatient. "Someone feed him, it must be done." "He'll get no help from me," says the stout young man. "There are limits." The black-haired girl begins to move across the chamber toward me, everyone watching her. "You would?" the young man marvels to her, and shakes his head. IF S he moves slowly, as if walking is painful to her. Doubtless she too was injured in the battle; there are old healing bruises on her face. She kneels beside me, and guides my left hand to help me eat, and gives me water. My right side is not paralyzed, but somehow unresponsive. When the doctor comes close again, I say: "My eye. Can I see?" Ke is quick to push my fingers away from the eyepatch. "For the present, you must use only your left eye. You've undergone brain surgery. If you take off that patch now, the consequences could be very serious, let me warn you." I think he is being deceptive about the eyepatch. Why? The black-haired girl asks me: "Have you remembered anything more?" "Yes. Before Atsog fell, we heard that Johann Karlsen was leading out a fleet, to defend Sol." All of them stare at me, hanging on my words. But they must know better than I what happened. "Did Karlsen win the battle?" I plead. Then I realize that we are prisoners still. I weep, "There've been no new prisoners brought in here," says the doctor, watching me carefully. "I think Karlsen has beaten the berserkers. I think this machine is now fleeing from the human fleet. How does that make you feel?" "How?" Has my understanding failed with my verbal skills? "Good." They all relax slightly. "Your skull was cracked when we bounced around in the battle," the old man tells me. "You're lucky a famous surgeon was here." He nods his head. "The machine wants all of us kept alive, so it can study us. It gave the doctor what he needed to operate, and if he'd let you die, or remain paralyzed, things would have been bad for him. Yessir, it made that plain." "Mirror?" I ask. I gesture at my face. "I must see. How bad." "We don't have a mirror," says one of the women at the sink, as if blaming me for die lack. "Your face? It's not disfigured," says the doctor. His tone is convincing, or would be if I were not certain of my deformity. I regret that these good people must put up with my monster-presence, compounding all their other troubles. "I'm sorry," I say, and turn from them, trying to conceal my face. "You really don't know," says the black-haired girl, who has watched me silently for a long time. "He doesn't know!" Her voice chokes. "Oh -- Thad. Your face is all right." T rue enough, the skin of my face feels smooth and normal when my fingers touch It. 'fhe blackhaired girl watches me with pity. Rounding her shoulder, from inside her dress, are half-healed marks like the scars of a lash. "Someone's hurt you," I say, frightened. One of the women at the sink laughs nervously. The young man mutters something. I raise my left hand to hide my hideous face. My right comes up and crosses over to finger the edges of the eyepatch. Suddenly the young man swears aloud, and points at where a door has opened in the wall. "The machine must want your advice on something," he tells me harshly. His manner is that of a man who wants to be angry but does not dare. Who am I, what am I, that these people hate me so? I get to my feet, strong enough to walk. I remember that I am the one who goes to speak alone with the machine. In a lonely passage it offers me two scanners and a speaker as its visible face. I know that the cubic miles of the great berserker machine surround me, carrying me through space, and I remember standing in this spot before the battle, talking with it, but I have no idea what was said. In fact I cannot recall the words of any conversation I have ever held. "The plan you suggested has failed, and Karlsen still functions," says the cracked machine voice, hissing and scraping in the tones of a stage villain. What could I have ever suggested, to this horrible thing? "I remember very little," I say. "My brain has been hurt." "If you are lying about your memory, understand that I am not deceived," says the machine. "Punishing you for your plan's failure will not advance my purpose. I know that you live outside the laws of human organization, that you even refuse to use a full human name. Knowing you, I trust you to help me against the organization of intelligent life. You will remain in command of the other prisoners. See that your damaged tissues are repaired as fully as possible. Soon we will attack life in a new way." There is a pause, but I have nothing to say. Then the noisy speaker scrapes into silence, and the scanner-eyes dim. Does it watch me still, in secret? But it said it trusted me, this nightmare enemy said it trusted in my evil to make me its ally. Now I have enough memory to know its speaks the truth about me. My despair is so great I feel sure that Karlsen did not win the battle. Everything is hopeless, because of the horror inside me. I have betrayed all life. To what bottom of evil have I not descended? As I turn from the lifeless scanners, my eye catches a movement -- my own reflection, in polished metal. I face the flat shiny bulkhead, staring at myself. My scalp is bandaged, and my left eye. That I knew already. There is some discoloration around my right eye, but nothing shockingly repulsive. What I can see of my hair is light brown, matching my two months' unkempt beard. Nose and mouth and jaw are normal enough. There is no horror in my face. The horror lies inside me. I have Like the skin around my right eye, that bordering my left eye's patch is tinged with blue and greenish-yellow, hemoglobin spilled under the skin and breaking down, some result of the surgeon's work inside my head. IF I remember his warning, but the eye-patch has the fascination for my fingers that a sore tooth has for the tongue, only far stronger. The horror is centered in my evil left eye, and I cannot keep from probing after it. My right hand flies eagerly into action, pulling the patch away. I blink, and the world is blurred... I see with two eyes, and then I die. T staggered in the passage, growling and groaning his rage, the black eyepatch gripped in his fingers. He had language now, he had a foul torrent of words, and he used them until his weak breath failed. He stumbled, hurrying through the passage toward the prison chamber, wild to get at the wise punks who had tried such smooth trickery to get rid of him. Hypnotism, or whatever. Rename him, would they? He'd show them Thaddeus. T reached the door and threw it open, gasping in his weakness, and walked out into the prison chamber. The doctor's shocked face showed that he realized T was back in control. "Where's my whip?" T glared around him. "What wise punk hid it?" The women screamed. Young Halsted realized that the Thaddeus scheme had failed; he gave a kind of hopeless yell and charged, swinging like a crazy man. Of course T's robot bodyguards were too fast for any human. One of them blocked Halsted's punch with a metal fist, so the stout man yelped and folded up, nursing his hand. "Get me my whip!" A robot went immediately to reach behind the sink, pull out the knotted plastic cord, and bring it to the master. T thumped the robot jovially, and smiled at the cringing lot of his fellow prisoners. He ran the whip through his fingers, and the fingers of his left hand felt numb. He flexed them impatiently. "What'sa matter, there, Mr. Halsted? Somethin' wrong with your hand? Don't wanna give me a handshake, welcome me back? C'mon, let's shake!" The way Halsted squirmed around on the floor was so funny T had to pause and give himself up to laughing. "Listen you people," he said when he got his breath. "My fine friends. The machine says I'm still in charge, see? That little information I gave it about Karlsen did the trick. Sol is lost. Boom! Haw haw haw! So you better try to keep me happy, 'cause the machine's still backing me a hunnerd per cent. You, Doc." T's left hand began trembling uncontrollably, and he waved it. "You were gonna change me, huh? You did somethin' nice to fix me up?" Doc held his surgeon's hands behind him, as if he hoped to protect them. "I couldn't have made a new pattern for your character if I had tried -- unless I went all the way, and turned you into a vegetable. That I might have done." "Now you wish you had. But you were scared of what the machine would do to you. Still, you tried somethin', huh?" "Yes, to save your life." Doc stood up straight. "Your injury precipitated a severe and almost continuous epileptoid seizure, which the removal of the blood dot from your brain did not relieve. So, I divided the corpus callosum." T flicked his whip. "What's that mean?" #xrou see -- the right hemisjl phere, the dominant one in most people, controls the right side, and handles most judgment involving symbols." "I know. When you get a stroke, the clot is on the opposite side from the paralysis." "Correct." Doc raised his chin. "T, I split your brain, right side from left. That's as simply as I can put it. It's an old but effective procedure for treating severe epilepsy, and the best I could do for you here. I'll take an oath on that, or a lie test -- " "Shuddup! I'll give you a lie test!" T strode shakily forward. "What's gonna happen to me?" "As a surgeon, I can say only that you may reasonably expect many years of practically normal life." "Normal!" T took another step, raising his whip. "Why'd you patch my good eye, and start calling me Thaddeus?" "That was my idea," interrupted the old man, in a quavery voice. "I thought -- in a man like yourself, there had to be someone, some component, like Thad. With the psychological pressure we're under here, I thought Thad just might come out, if we gave him a chance in your right hemisphere. It was my idea. If it hurt you any, blame me." "I will." But T seemed, for the moment, more interested than enraged. "Who is this Thaddeus?" "You are," said the doctor. "We couldn't put anyone else into your skull." "Jude Thaddeus," said the old man, "was a contemporary of Judas Iscariot. A similarity of names, but -- " He shrugged. T made a whistling, snorting sound, a single laugh. "You figured there was good in me, huh? It just had to come out sometime? Why, I'd say you were crazy, but you're not. Thaddeus was real. He was there in my head for a while. Maybe he's still there, hiding. How do I get at him, huh?" T raised his right hand and jabbed a finger gently at the corner of his right eye. "Ow. I don't like to be hurt. I got a delicate nervous system. Doc, how come his eye is on the right side if everything crosses over? And if it's his eye, how come I hafta feel what happens to it?" "I divided the optic chiasm, too. It's a somewhat complicated -- " "Never mind. We'll show Thaddeus who's boss. He can watch with the rest of you. Hey, Blacky, c'mere. We haven't played together for a while, have we?" "No," the girl whispered. She hugged her arms around herself, nearly fainting. But she walked toward T. Two months as his slaves had taught all of them that obedience was easiest. "You like this punk Thad, huh?" T whispered, when she halted before him. "You think his face is aH IF right, do you? How about my face? Look at me!" T saw his own left hand reach out, and touch the girl's cheek, gently and lovingly. He could see in her startled face that she felt Thaddeus in his hand; never had her eyes looked this way at T before. T cried out and raised his whip to strike her, and his left hand flew across his body to seize his own right wrist, like a terrier clamping jaws on a snake. Ts right hand still gripped the whip, but he thought the bones of his wrist were cracking. His legs tangled each other and he fell. He tried to shout for help, and could utter only a roaring noise. His robots stood watching. It seemed a long time before the doctor's face loomed over him, and the black patch descended gently upon his left eye. N ow I understand more deeply, and I accept. At first I wanted the doctor to remove my left eye, and the old man agreed, quoting some ancient Believers' book to the effect that an offending eye should be plucked out. An eye would be a small price to rid myself of T. But after some thought, the doctor refused. "T is yourself," he said at last. "I can't point to him with my scalpel, and cut him out, although it seems I helped to separate the two of you. Now you control both sides of the body; once he did." The doctor smiled wearily. "Imagine a committee of three, a troika inside your skull. Thaddeus is one, T another -- and the third is the person, the force, that casts the deciding vote. You. That's the best I can tell you." And the old man nodded. Mostly, I do without the eye patch now. Reading and speaking are easier when I use my long-dominant left brain, and I am still Thaddeus -- perhaps because I choose to be Thaddeus. Could it be that terribly simple? Periodically I talk with the berserker, which still trusts in T's greedy outlawry. With their fleet ruined by Karlsen, the machines now search for new ways of attacking humanity. This one means to counterfeit much money, coins and notes, give the money to me, and deliver me in small launch to a highly civilized planet, relying on my greed to weaken men there and set them against each other. But this machine is too damaged to watch its prisoners steadily, or it does not bother. With my freedom to move I have welded some of the silver coins into a ring, chilled this ring to superconductivity, and put it in a chamber near the berserker's unliving heart. Halsted tells me we can use this ring, carrying a permanent electric current, to trigger the launch's C-plus drive prematurely, and tear our berserker open from inside. We may damage it enough to save ourselves. Or we may all be killed. But while I live, I, Thaddeus, rule myself; and both my hands are gentle, touching long black hair. by Jeff Renner ijsmi (V Across the sea of darkness, Across the sea of stars, Beyond the hills of earth so green, Beyond the sands of Mars. Are wonders never dreamt by man, Are fancies unfulfilled, Are other islands in the sky, Are truths yet undistilled. And all these things forbade to man, Until his childhood's end, No longer a stranger in a strange land, But a creature with a gift to lend. For there'll come the day when he throws away The binding chains of Earth, And while all the heavens stop and watch, He'll enter his rebirth. He'll flit between the planets, So easily will this be done, From Earth to Moon, Mars, Neptune, The children of the sun. (With apologies to Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Clifford D. Simak, Brian W. Aldiss, Frederik Pohl, Jack But there are more than three worlds to conquer, If man is to become the star king, These are but the toddling steps, To gain the most valuable thing. For soon he'll leave his big front yard, And with it all his fears, And embark upon his longest voyage, Across the dark light-years. He'll sail far beyond this horizon, Far beyond the reefs of space, And here on Earth shall gather the stars, Members of every conceivable race. All these things will be done. All these things will come to be, When a small, lost creature called man, Sets out to fulfill his destiny -- Across the sea of darkness, Across the sea of stars, Beyond the hills of earth so green, Beyond the sands of Mars. He'll soar beyond all estimation, And to the stars -- his destination! IF  Novelette The slaves of Gree hadn't any business on this planet... which made it Steve Duke's business to find out why they were I T hough it was only a routine investigation of a comet, near an unimportant sun, in a part of the galaxy where Gree's forces weren't expected, Steve Duke took all proper precautions. It was good that he did, for when he brought his squadron of Scout ships out of null the radar screens were suddenly full of blips, at various ranges but converging. Since he couldn't null out again for about ten minutes, he jabbed at certain buttons on his command console and snapped orders into his helmet mike. "All therel ships! I'm locking you in central control. Evasive action in thirty seconds. Battle Condition One!" He darted quick looks at his own staff to make sure they were ready. "Com One?" That was his own communications officer, who jerked his head in acknowledgement. Steve told him, "Tape this contact into message drones and send off one a minute. Gunnery One, see that cluster at ten by six by nine? Put a C-# in front of it." His gunnery officer punched buttons, and a blue line began to grow from the center of the gunnery plot screen. Steve grinned as a recruit stared at it nervously. He could remember his own first action. The blue line disappeared and the visual screens all blanked out momentarily as the missile, a simple light-maker, detonated. The cluster of radar blips had already opened out radially away from the missile's path. They had the sense and the mobility, then, to avoid a single missile. They swerved fast; three or four times the acceleration a humanoid could stand. He glanced at a mass indicator trained on them. The individual objects, whatever they were, had only about a fourth the mass of a man in a spacebag. The metal detector said they weren't metallic. His evasion pattern began and he fought dizziness from the abrupt changes of direction. He snapped orders to individual ships. "Four; don't let that bunch close in on you. Use local fire-control; light anti-personnel stuff. Six and Eleven, I'm unlocking you. Move out fifty miles to one by five by two and lay proximity mines. Come straight back in and we'll give you a barrage. Four! Watch that bunch ahead of you! They might -- " He broke off and punched for a swift realignment and retreat of the whole squadron; but the blips were maneuvering like a swarm of computer-directed hornets, feinting, swerving suddenly into concerted attacks from unguessable angles. "Local Fire Control I" he barked, "All units!" T hen it was a chaos too fast for human senses. The automatics found concentrations and sent missiles streaking; whipped space with giant laser beams. On his console a figure # blinked red. A frantic voice screamed tinnily in his earphones. "One One! We're hit! Colonel O' ike, we're -- " The humanoid, whom Steve recognized by his voice as a young Second-In-Command, got control of himself. "One One, this is Four Two. Compartments One and Three knocked out by low-grade detonation. Radiation low -- er, point zero one seven. Do you read me?" Steve shot a glance at his own Com officer, who nodded and replied to the striken ship. Steve blocked two more ships into his own fire control and personally laid down a barrage around Six and Eleven, who were still isolated and under heavy attack. He got them back in without serious damage, though Six reported a detonation a few yards from her. Ship Nine died without even a chance to report. His earphones, turned down, were a babble of tiny voices reporting damage. The visual screens were useless, blanked out by a steady hell of explosions. Now, in this close-range melee, his missiles were impotent, or nearly so, but the laser beams, especially the light, quick-aiming ones, were doing good work; and the mine field he'd had the foresight to lay shielded him on one side. The radar screens were full of tiny blips shooting away aimlessly, in free fall. Suddenly the remaining attackers streaked away, joining into a group -- still two dozen or more -- then swerving to vanish into the blackness of space. Steve shot a look at a timer. Still four minutes to null. A sudden impulse seized him. He snapped, "Evasion ends!" and began unstrapping from his seat. "Two!" he called to his own Second, "Take over. Get me in a bag and outside. Send home a complete follow-up report. Null home with whatever ships can make it. Set up a random course for live ships who can't, and arrange rescue. Come back for me with two ships in -- oh, seventy-five minutes." He propelled himself to the hatch that cut off the middle compartment; jabbed at the manual controls. It opened and he slid through. He had a plastic spacebag unstowed and half rigged before his Second reached him, sputtering, "But -- but Colonel!"  "Move," Steve told him with a grin. T hey sealed him into the bag and put him out, then nulled away. Far off, to one side of the comet, Number Four and one other ship limped away through normal space, lifetimes from their base if they weren't rescued. Number Nine, to whose course and velocity he was matched, hung dark and lifeless a few hundred yards away. He approached her slowly, watching his feeble radar screen for any of the hostile blips. When he was fifty .yards from her, an object detached itself from her hull and shot away in the direction the raiders had taken. He turned on all the drive he could stand, but it was like chasing a missile. He hit the control of his photoscanner, though the light from the local sun was weak. Visually, he had a glimpse of something that lifted a small head painfully to stare back at him. The inside of the small spacebag it occupied seemed to be spattered with blood. He watched it disappear; then, furious at himself for not having sense enough to arrange some kind of a trap, he went back to examine number Nine. She'd been holed, all three compartments, probably by shaped charges. The corpses inside were not pretty. He took pictures then moved away to wait glumly for his rendezvous. He'd been in his share of space battles, and more; and had seen plenty of casualties. But this was the first time he, commanding, had ever lost ships and men. Six hours later, after a shower and a meal, he gave his first-hand report to his superiors. They were not human, nor even humanoid -- unless you could call a short-legged elf, with wings growing from the backs of his shoulders, humanoid. The Birds of Effogus had organized the resistence against Gree. T he highest-ranking one, whom Steve knew well, nodded as Steve finished, and pressed a control on his low desk. The room lights dimmed. "You got better pictures than you think, Colonel," he said in his spidery voice. "Here's a composite of several frames." A projected picture appeared on one wall. There was more detail than Steve had been able to see. It was an animal, all right, compact and muscular. It was obviously badly hurt. One IF paw clutched at a metal fitting of the bag. It had three fingers and a passable thumb. Steve squinted, trying to make out something on the head. "Can those be natural horns?" They looked like two axeblades with serrated edges, rising at a forty-five degree angle from each side of the head, set longitudinally like stabilizer fins on a submarine or aircraft. The animal's mouth was partly open, showing teeth that Steve would have classified as omnivorous. "They're horns," the Bird croaked. "What about the spacebag, Colonel? Gree workmanship?" "Yes, sir." The Bird nodded again. "Colonel, we're concerned about this. Not just as a tactical nuisance; we can devise weapons against that. But it may indicate a big advance in biological science on Gree's part. This animal's braincase is very small for the sort of intelligence you describe." Steve glanced involuntarily at the Bird's own head, and earned a dry chuckle... "Precisely the point, Colonel. When my ancestors redesigned their bodies, they were able to transfer considerable brain activity to other body tissues, thus permitting smaller heads. We'd be worried if Gree learned how to do that. Therefore, we'd like very much to know where these animals come from, and how they're trained." Steve said, a trifle sardonically, "I don't suppose there's much chance of finding out." "It may not be impossible, Colonel. We know a little from this picture. Look at the set of that thumb -- surely arboreal -- but there are running pads, too. And the animal must come from a planet with higher gravity than, for instance, your own ancestors were used to. And the fur is scant. Also, there are laws affecting evolution in certain parts of the galaxy, which may help. In addition, we may pick up logistic hints." "Well," Steve said, "I have a grudge to settle. I'd like to volunteer, in case you find the planet." The Bird chuckled again. "Your orders are already written, Colonel. As a volunteer." II S teve awoke after a few hours' sleep to find a message telling him to report to the Bird general at the computer labs. He went eagerly, never before having been admitted to that scientific sanctum sanctorum of the Birds. Things were a little peculiar inside. The hallways were barely high enough to clear his scalp, even with a little stooping, but they were fifteen-feet wide. The 'doors' that opened off the halls were horizontal panels just below ceiling level, fifteen feet wide but only two feet deep. The Bird who was guiding him flew near the ceiling, obviously having a little trouble flying slowly enough to match Steve's walk. Around a turn, they met a Bird coming the opposite way who hovered in surprise at seeing a man here. Steve had the presence of mind to press himself against one wall. The oncoming Bird swooped and passed IF under Steve's guide, wingtips brushing Steve's belt. The guide hovered before a panel, which opened for him. From inside, the general's spidery voice called, "Is that you, Colonel Duke? I'm afraid you're going to have to climb in." In a dimly lit room, the general sat (not perched) on a backless stool, with his wings drooping down behind it. Other Birds on similar stools worked at a row of keyboards along one wall. In the wall above each keyboard was a projection screen three feet square, with two more screens above it, of the same width but only six inches high. A festival of colors and symbols danced on several of the screens, sometimes seemingly in concert. The general swivelled around on his stool to face the blank wall away from the computers, and motioned with a wingtip to another stool beside him. "Sit down, Colonel. I want to show you something that happened less than an hour ago." The lights dimmed farther, and a view of a starfield flashed into being on the blank wall. The scene swung and a deep-space asteroid came into sight, spotily illuminated by light beams from a dozen space-bags. In the bags were humanoids. A small exploration ship, which Steve recognized as friendly, drifted nearby. Ship and bags were tiny toys against the huge bulk of the asteroid. The scene expanded a little as (Steve supposed) the camera drone that was taking the picture moved steadily in. T he bags were settling to the asteroid, ready to begin prospecting. Suddenly, the area was dotted with smaller bags, darting about like gnats. Steve grunted and gripped the seat of his stool, knowing what was to come. The ship moved suddenly, but too late. She died in a quick flurry of detonations that were moderate but deadly enough. The humanoids, who'd been streaking toward her, now scattered in panic. The small bags -- the animals in them tiny blurs of motion -- darted among them. One by one the larger bags collapsed. Steve was glad the picture wasn't close enough to show details of the humanoids' dying. At the last, a pitiful four or five gathered together for a hopeless mutual defense. Another moderate explosion finished them off. The projection vanished and the general turned to face Steve. "I'm afraid I underestimated the nuisance value, Colonel. We just happened to have the camera drone there because that was an interesting chunk of rock. Gree nulled those animals to the spot, a mere fifteen of them. I expect reports to start pouring in, of unexplained losses." Steve controlled the emotion the scene had raised. "Any progress in finding the planet, sir?" "I think so. Unless we're wrong, we've narrowed it down to a single star cluster." The general turned back toward the computer wall. "If you don't mind staying, we may have something within the next half hour or so." The weird dance of colors and symbols went on. A Bird near one end of the line sang something in Ihe high-pitched Effogan language. All the big screens went blank, while turrent results held on the narrow creens. The general told Steve, "The probability is confirmed. Camera drones are already nulling to the cluster, but meanwhile we'll look at Rt irs already catalogued." T he dance of colors, without symbols this time, resumed, and now Steve realized he was looking at star spectra. The general said, "There's a peculiarity of the Titanium bands in this cluster that could influence the evolution. It's mostly theory, of course, but with high computer probability." Presently the spectra stopped shifting, and two screens at one end rippled with symbols, working out some complex mathematical problem. The two operators finished and sang soft reports, which the general apparently didn't need, for he was already telling Steve, "It's narrowed down to a few dozen planets. Drones are already moving in. This will take a few minutes; we have to be careful." In twenty minutes -- time for the camera drones to null to the cluster, find the individual planets, seek out land areas, and snap pictures, then null home -- one of the operators  pulled something from a slot, spread his wings (startling Steve in the confinement of the room), and swooped to the general. The room lights came on. The general peered for a minute at a four-inchsquare card, then handed it to Steve. "You can see the animals." The photo was obviously much enlarged; blurry and confusing. Steve gradually made out clumps of trees on fairly level ground. There were some small objects which one might as well take for a troop of animals as anything else. Yes, he could see it now -- the white markings on the heads would be the horns. "The planet's livable," the general told him, "though the gravity may bother you at first. Wp thought rather than delay by acclimating you artificially, we'd set you down and let you get used to it first hand." One of the tricks for sneaking onto an enemy planet was to wait until a meteor shower made ionization trails in the atmosphere and confused enemy radar, if any. There was no shower due, so the Birds made one. Steve landed in a spacebag the power of which barely lasted, wearing a Greeslave Gunner's uniform, in foothills some miles from the spot of the photo. He buried the useless bag, buckled equipment about himself, and started hiking. Somewhere on this continent there were supposed to be hidden labs, and a garrison of Gree humanoid slaves who hunted and processed the animals. Ill T he gravity did tire him at first, though it wasn't really high. He watched local fauna to learn what not to eat, and for signs of danger. There were birds in the sky to warn of aircraft. There was a variety of small game, and plenty of nuts and IF berries, though this tended to be a dry planet. The brushland he was in didn't provide much concealment, but he camouflaged his helmet with twigs; and horizontal visibility wasn't great because of heat shimmer. That worked two ways, of course. The only really dangerous-looking predator was a thing like a large, hairless canine, probably twice his own weight, that hunted singly and silently. It had short, thick legs. There was usually one following him, but evidently only out of curiosity, since none ever gave him the taste test. He took his time, letting his muscles adjust. After ten days he was comfortable if he didn't exert himself too much. The sun felt good; and the heavy, sagey air was invigorating once he got used to it, except when there was carrion close by. He'd been traveling gradually downhill, but on the fourteenth day he reached an abrupt levelling off where the ground was less dry and there were clumps of trees. He scouted one of those and found a lookout tree at the edge. Grunting with effort, he climbed it. This looked very much like the terrain of the photograph. Early the next morning he saw a band of the homed animals. He settled himself in a crotch and uncased his binoculars. The animals' fur was even thinner than he'd expected, and the beast's sinews stood out like steel cables. This was a group of about three dozen, both sexes and all ages, with a loose social organization based on strength and sagacity. They ate fruit, nuts, berries, insects, small vertebrates, and birds' eggs when they could get them. More than anything, they reminded him of large rodents, except for the horns and the strongly prehensile tails. Their legs were short, but had balland-socket joints at the. elbows as well as at the shoulders. They ran usually on all fours but could stand erect. They were extremely fast, and, in the trees, real acrobats. The horns were about three inches from front to back, roughly the same height from base to pronged edges, and an inch thick at the base. The ear-holes were below the horns, as if they used sound reflection from them. They were certainly quick, bright animals, and it was clear that they'd adapt readily to space; but they were, after all, just animals. Nothing about them indicated any intelligence capable of using instruments or even tools. So, as the Birds suspected, Gree must be upgrading them. I t was another seventeen days before he was lucky enough to find a hunt. A fleet of aircars appeared, landed, and discharged squads of humanoids who joined into a line. They moved slowly, in a direction that would take them past Steve if he stayed put. Then more aircars went over, and he could guess where they'd put down to add another segment of a wide circle. He could still get outside that circle, if he wanted to. A troop of the horned animals flashed by, and he knew the country well enough to guess where they were going. There was a hollow not far away where the trees were thicker. That, of course, was where the hunt would converge, penning in all the animals in the area. He decided suddenly he wanted to be there. He slid down from his tree and made a quick cache of the instruments he didn't dare carry, then ran, keeping under cover, to get inside the circle. A large band of animals wheeled to face him, old males to the front, but he skirted them and they didn't attack. There were other bands in sight, all retreating to the hollow. One of the big predators trotted by, its ears pressed low to its head, ignoring Steve and the horned animals. He reached the edge of the thicket, penetrated a way, and found himself a dense patch of brush to hide in. More of the quarry streaked by, many of them taking to the trees and leaping from limb to limb. In fifteen minutes he heard voices. There seemed to be a halt for final organization, then the hunt came on into the thicket. Soft popping sounds began, punctuated with angry roars and shrieks of the animals, and occasionally with the splat of a laser rifle. The hunters thrashed by in the brush on both sides of him, and emerged into the small glade at the edge of which he'd chosen to hide. T here were men and B'lant and half a dozen other slave humanoid races, with a few Overseers directing them. Every other man in the line carried an air gun shooting anesthetic darts. They chose young animals, not too high in the trees and not too close to themselves. The poison acted within seconds, and the brush was full of brief thrashings. The odd men in line carried laser rifles and used them when the animals attacked. The thicket was a bedlam now, of screaming animals and shouting men and the sound of the guns, and the thrashing about in the brush. A group of old males suddenly charged from hiding. There was a short chaos of laser beams, hurtling forms, yells and screams and roars. Other hunters closed in from both sides to help, and the attack was beaten off, but six or seven hunters lay motionless or twisted in pain. Overseers shouted to get the line reformed, spoke into their throatmikes (no doubt calling for med techs), then moved the hunt on. It vanished toward the center of the hollow. This was Steve's chance to get into the secret base! He shoved his laser pistol and some other things deep in the brush, then crawled into the open, acting dazed in case any of the wounded were watching. He picked up a dart-gun and wandered after the hunt. A wounded animal hurtled at him suddenly and he barely got the gunbutt up in time to ward it off. There was a crunch of bone and it lay still. That gave him a better idea than catching up with the hunt. When the hunt was over, the squads IF would be rounded up and counted by their Overseers -- but the wounded would probably go back separately, as they were picked up, without an immediate check. And there was always confusion in the med stations when a lot of casualties came in; and confusion was just what he wanted. He took his knife and made a small cut in the left sleeve of his uniform, below the elbow, so it would rip. Then he deliberately gashed his forearm on the horns of the dead animal. Blood welled out and he tore the sleeve off the uniform to make a crude compress. Then he went back to the glade, muttered a few words to the conscious wounded there, and sat down with his back against a tree. Before long an aircar settled to the glade, and two med techs ran around giving treatment where it was needed immediately. They loaded four of the worst cases and took off, telling Steve and the others that there'd be another car. There was, within minutes, and Steve climbed aboard. His gash burned like the devil as they swabbed it with antiseptic, and he pretended to half faint so no one would ask him any questions. IV T he base was underground. They entered by an opening whose camouflage Steve sincerely admired. They dumped him at a med station where casualties and techs were so he could slip from one line to another. He got by a preliminary questioning by giving a name and number at random and acting dazed. He got rid of his torn uniform, got some skin-patch sprayed on his cut, then went through a med booth that sniffed, prodded, and sprayed before spitting him out, theoretically disinfected and viable. He got out of that line quickly and went looking for a uniform he, could wear. There were many uniforms being discarded by casualties about to get treatment. He got his hands on a fairly fresh-looking uniform, an Apprentice Astrogator's, before it went into a laundry chute. Carrying it over an arm, he headed toward the latrine. A med tech stopped him and began to ask questions, but Steve grinned and pointed to the latrine and acted urgent, and the tech let him go. He donned the uniform inside, waited a few minutes, then left. He edged into a group who'd already been processed and were being released, and got out of the med station with them. Outside, he found a chance to slip away. Now he had to stay inconspicuous until he knew his way around. He found a recreation area where some B'lant were playing a very accurate game of quoits. He stayed there, seeing all he could, until mealtime, then joined a line, and ate with the general pool. It was apparent by now that the general pool here was made up of washouts or battle veterans in some way unfit for first-line duty. Some of them acted as if they'd had brain damage or brain surgery to remove dangerous memories. In other words, a collection of low-grade expendables to use in the hunts. That suited Steve. A few peculiarities on his own part would go unnoticed. There was the usual Overseer's section of the mess, and another where slaves other than the general pool ate. In this latter section he saw many computer techs and a lot of meds. Possibly the meds, most of them, were actually working as veterinarians. Steve couldn't hope to stay free long, just wandering around; some Overseer was sure to round him up and put him through an Inquisitor booth. He knew he didn't have the personality conditioning to fool the booths, as he had once. He must find a hiding spot; or, better but less likely, a way in and out of the base. Then he remembered they were underground. That meant a considerable ventilating system. I t took some precarious searching, but he located a storeroom with a ventilator grill big enough to crawl into and hidden enough to work at. It was a food storeroom, so the natural thing was to attach himself to a work party from the kitchens and hide out when they left the storeroom. He had a table knife he'd stolen, and a pair of pliers he'd gotten the same way. He not only had to get the grill loose, but put it back after he was in the duct. He finally accomplished that, then crawled along the duct, having a hard time where it turned vertical to ceiling level. Once there, he crawled along until he found an access hatch. He worked at its nuts and bolts until he could get out. He was in a dark place, with the feel of plenty of room around him. He listened and heard nothing but the hum of blowers and the whoosh of the drafts. As his eyes adjusted he saw a spot of luminosity over his head, and another not far away. Finally he realized this was not an attic, but a natural cave, with the roof high overhead. The spots of luminescence were airshafts to the surface, doubtless with two or more bends in them so debris wouldn't fall in. The buildings lay along the bottom of the cave like a string of boxes. The air ducts ran along the top of the buildings. But down the middle of the line of buildings was a vertical partition that seemed to go up to the cave roof. He explored along that until he found a door, latched but not locked. He opened it carefully, and there was a slight hiss as an airtight seal parted. He understood the layout, then. The cave was split into halves, longitudinally. The side with the ducts was pressure intake; on the other side, stale air found its own way out of each room, and out of the cave by a separate line of shafts. He thought that might make his spying easier. However, he found there were not simply grills in the ceiling of each room; there were light traps that had to be removed before he could see in. He managed with the table knife and pliers, but he decided on his next trip inside he'd acquire some better tools. Before he began spying, he lookIF ed around for emergency hiding places. On the other side, the branching and turning ducts offered nooks and nests. On this side there were none. But the buildings did not touch the cave wall, and between there was a dark gap, varying in width, at the bottom of which he could hear a faint trickle of water. It wasn't far down; and by experimenting he found that, at a place where the rock wall approached close, he could work his way down, pressing his back against the building. T he captured animals were easy to locate by the smell that came out of the ventilators. There were a number of pens, each holding a few animals and equipped with feeding and watering apparatus. Farther along were chutes into which the animals were driven, one by one. Each animal got a jab with a needle that produced quick anesthesia. The inert animals were strapped belly down on tables; where techs using small power tools with hole-saw blades cut circular openings, an inch and a half in diameter, on the inward side of each of the animals' horns. The horns were hollow, with moderately thin walls, leaving space inside. Into this space other techs inserted bits of miniaturized appartus, positioning them and finally forcing in some kind of cement or mastic to make a solid fit. After that the cut-out discs were replaced. They even had thin annular rings of horn or bone to make a tight fit. No doubt the horn would grow together. Steve could see no mechanical connections to the brain, and he imagined there'd be fairly thick skull under the horns. There must be electronic fields from the gadgets, then; like the much greater fields that probed one's bodily responses in an Inquisitor booth. Were the things just pain producers, to control the animals? He didn't think so. His encounter with the band in spacebags hadn't indicated remote control. And of course there was no concept in the animal's brains of the difference between a lie and the truth. Some kind of brain supplements, then; perhaps like computer memory banks, somehow communicating with the dim minds. He went further down the line, and was not surprised to find galleries jammed with artificial training aids. He could guess at what went on: simulated space targets; recognition training, including some identification of friends via secret radio signals; specific sets of circumstances to be recognized and corresponding ways to react; reward-and-punishment. No wonder the beasts were effective, with this and with their quick reflexes. He wondered what, if anything, would happen if he got a set of the gadgets, wrapped up or taped the components in their proper relationship (he could see it was simple) and held them against his own head. Of course his duty was to steal a set of the things and escape with them. But he couldn't escape with them until he got them; and once he had them, it shouldn't be too much of a risk to try them out. V H e slipped back into tbe buildings, had another meal, and spyed around some more. Then, reentering the ducts, he went fron storeroom to storeroom, acquiring a razor, a new Gunner's uniform, two laser pistols, some tools, and a few other items he might want. He had a shower and shave before he went looking for the gadgets. He found where they were stored, waited until the place was deserted, and stole a set, still boxed, from the rear of a shelf lot. He went back up to the exhaust side of the cave, squeezed his way down into the gap between cave wall and buildings, and walked along the smoothed cave floor until he had more room and didn't have to stand in mud. He risked a small light and got the instruments, a set for each side of his head, fastened in their proper relationships with gummed-rubber tape. They had their own power supplies. Gingerly at first, he held them against his head, at the right angle, just above his ears. There was nothing. He moved them closer, finally pressing them against his skull, disappointed. Then, just as he was about to give up, there was an odd kneading sensation in his head, not painful, followed bya lightning confusion of scenes, phrases, and concepts from his own memory. Some of them he hadn't thought of for years. They followed no pattern that he could discern. They stopped, and suddenly a soundless voice shouted in his There was an awful blast of sound, pressure, agony, terror. He jerked the things from his head and leaned, gasping, against the rough rock. Gradually, his wits returned. What had happened? It must have been his triumphant thought against Gree. Of course! The animals, by some concept -- some vague image of kind master and protector -- would be taught obedience and loyalty to Gree, just as humanoid slaves were. T here were obviously feedbacks in the instruments, and artificial guilt feelings, and monitor circuits. Carefully, he brought the things near his head again. He found he could only avoid the thought -- feelings, rather -- that brought on the punishment, by thinking hard of other things. He concentrated on an abstract thought, as well as he could: A planet without inclination or eccentricity has no seasons, unless its sun is a variable or there is some other outside influence. There were only vague echoes of the concepts planet and sun. He tried thinking of the word-sounds : T wenty-one times fifty-seven is... Instantly, the words eleven hundred ninety-seven popped into his mind. The thing was a computer, then, as well as a monitor. That didn't IF surprise him. What surprised him was that it was programmed to compute from English words representing numbers. He remembered the kneading sensation, and the flash of ideas, when he'd first put the things to his head. Maybe there was some sort of self-adjustment by the gadgets; some zeroing-in to fit the individual mind. Maybe they were designed for use on other animals than their particular species, in addition. As he stood there wondering, there was a whisper of thought: Attention! Sounds! A door in the partition opening; that one a hundred and sixty paces away from the spot on the partition opposite you. Two sets of footsteps. One foot of one man drags a little. There's an oddity in the echoes; there must be a vault in the cave right there that distorts it. They're moving the other way. Note the angle of their course; about twentyfive degrees , converging, on the way you're facing... Astounded, Steve listened. It was all coming from his own mind, of course. But things seemed to be amplified. His ears were as keen as a cat's; he also seemed to be sniffing the air. And the spatial sense was incredible. Just by listening -- and computing the time lag for the sound to reach him -- he could have aimed a pistol, if the building were not in the way, giving exactly the proper lead. He decided he'd better get out of his present position while they were headed the . other way. They might shine a flashlight down into the gap. Before he took the gadgets from his head, they whispered, There was that foothold, seventeen inches up from the floor; and the other one for the right foot, five inches above and two inches to the side. Don't forget that sharp point that dug into your finger... Suddenly shivering, he jerked the things away from his skull and stuffed them in his pockets. He'd climb out under his own power. T he quicker he got out of the base and off-planet, the better. He could possibly sneak into a hunting party and desert it in the brush, but he might wind up a long way from his caches, with no way to signal the Birds. It would be better to use Gree transportation. But how? He got through the partition and hurried to where his loot was hidden. He wiped the mud off his shoes and changed into the fresh uniform, which would give him some privileges and an excuse to wear a pistol. But where would he hide the braingadgets? They'd bulge too much in the pockets of the one-piece uniform. A pressure suit! Those were clear plastic, but had plenty of slack, and enough apparatus at various places to hide the gadgets. And, if he were going via spaceship (which, he thought wryly, he seemed to have decided, however overoptimistically) a suit would be natural. He hid what he wasn't taking, found the right duct and got into it, and crawled to the storeroom where the suits were issued. By now he had rope and a clamp to make the vertical part of the trip easy. At floor level, he peered out into the storeroom. There were voices and the scrape of shoes, but no one in sight. He got the grill loose, crawled out, and replaced the grill. The voices, and the sound of work, came from behind a barrier of ceilinghigh shelves. He went to the end of that row and peered around. Two humanoids were stowing suit fittings into the shelf bins. When they both faced away, he slipped past and went down the crossaisle to the front of the compartment. Down at the middle aisle, a man with Storekeeper's shoulder insignia sat at a desk, working at an adding machine. Steve drew back and went between the shelves almost to the middle aisle, a few feet behind the man. He put his head in a bin to muffle his voice, and tried to imitate the accent of the particular kind of humanoids who were working farther back. "Storekeeper!" A voice said, "What is it?" Steve called again, more urgently, "Storekeeper!" A chair squeaked and the man stepped into sight. His eyes darted toward Steve, but Steve's fist was already crashing at the man's temple. He went limp and Steve caught him and lowered him silently. He dragged him a few feet from the aisle, then stepped swiftly to the desk. He sat down and pulled open drawers until he found the kind of requisition form he wanted, and also the storekeeper's electronic signature stamp. He scribbled, stamped, and went back to where the two humanoids were at work. "Where's the storekeeper?" They looked at him dully, then one finally said, "He, uh, was at desk." Steve shrueaed. "He's not there IF now." He thrust out th requisition. "Where do I find a doubte-S Nine? I'm in a rush." The one who'd spoken hesitated, glanced at Steve's Gunner, Class Three, insignia, then turned to lead the way. Steve got the right suit and kept his eyes on the humanoid to make sure he went back to work and not toward the desk. Then he left and hurried along the corridor to the nearest latrine, where he put on the suit and stowed the brain-gadgets. VI S ince no ships landed or left via atmosphere, the base must have a null tank. The largest kind, big enough to receive a Scout, consisted of four concentric steel tanks, very large and very stout walled, with air pumps between. They were pumped out, with graduated degrees of thoroughness, until the inner one had a hard vacuum. Not that a vacuum was necessary to null out -- a ship could null out of atmosphere, or even an ocean, and only leave an implosion behind -- but incoming ships needed the vacuum, because to materialize into space where there were more than a very few atoms of matter would require impossible amounts of power. There'd almost certainly be a Scout in the tank, ready to go, as that was standard practice unless a ship was due in and the tank was being pumped out. He made inquiries and confirmed that, as he'd expected, the tank was deeper in the cave. He walked, rather than visit the ground car transportation pool. Eventually he reached a fence, with an Inquisitor Booth, beyond which was a lighted, swelling part of the cave, with the huge cylinders looming in it. There were two armed B'lant on guard. He walked up to them and said, "I'm supposed to report to somebody named Kwale." "Where are your . orders?" one B'lant asked. "I suppose he has them. I just got a verbal order, a few minutes ago." The B'lant stared at him for a second. "What was zat name?" "Kwale." The B'lant muttered into his throat-mike, then waited, listening to his earplug. Presently he frowned at Steve. "Zere is no record." Steve made a helpless gesture. "I don't know about it. I just got a call, for guard duty. I was supposed to get this suit from stock, and when I got there they had a requisition already, from this Kwale." "Wait," the B'lant said, and muttered again. He listened, then nodded. He said, "Zere was a requisition filed, for a rush order, by a Storekeeper named Kwale. But why should a Storekeeper give you orders?" "How should I know?" Steve asked. "It was something about a special shipment we were going to pick up. I supposed some Overseer had ordered me along, as a guard." The B'lant grunted. "Maybe zo. Where is zis Kwale?" "Why, I thought he'd be inside." The B'lant pondered briefly. "We change ze guard not long ago. Maybe you are right. Anyway, zrough ze booth." He reached for a button and the outer door of the booth swung open. T his was what Steve had been working for. He started into the booth, but stopped the door from closing with his foot. He perked out his pistol, thrust it around the edge of the booth, and slashed back and forth with the beam. There were two hoarse screams, and a beam sizzled on the booth inches from his hand. He heard the bodies fall. His laser pistol fused the lock on the inner door and he burst through, already running toward the small door in the looming cylinder. No one saw him coming, apparently. He went through the door. A humanoid, a mere clerk but armed, looked up from a desk. Steve walked toward him, fumbling beneath his suit as if for his orders, then suddenly struck hard at the throat with the points of his doubled knuckles. The humanoid gasped and staggered, and Steve hurled him sideways and struck lethally at the back of the neck. He swiftly scanned the controls on the desk, punched at some of them, and ran toward the lock which opened into the outer tank. By the time that one ground open, the inner I ones had too. He went through them without breaking stride, already seeing the hull of a Scout in the inner tank. He turned and slapped at the manual controls of the inner hatch, stared out impatiently until it cut off his vision. He thought he heard a shout just as it closed. He set the controls so they couldn't be overridden from outside unless they got at the wiring and made a short-circuit. He opened the hatch of the Scout and slid in, his eyes going immediately to the console. Plenty of fuel, but no charge in the null-accumulators. It would take ten minutes to build that up. He shut the hatch and punched buttons, got the field building up, then turned on outside viewers so he could watch the tank's hatch. Now there was nothing he could do but wait. There were two things his enemies could do. They could tear into the wiring -- he thought that would take a half hour or so -- or they could bring in a heavy laser and cut into the tank. But that might take more than ten minutes, too. About when he expected it, the familiar paternal voice came over the radio. "You, in the tank. What are you doing there?" He grinned and did not answer. The more time they wasted talking, the better. The voice said, "What is your name? It is Gree who asks." A little later, more sternly, "Come out! Gree commands! You will not be punished. You are sick; you will be made well." S teve let it talk on, while he punched out a program for a nullhop to a rendezous. There was a hiss from somewhere, pinching out as a gasket sealed. Steve went taut. What were they doing? A gauge gave him the answer: IF pressure outside the ship was down by a couple of pounds. They were pumping out the inner tank. Why? Suddenly, he knew. A bomb! They were pumping down so they could null a bumb into the tank with him! Somewhere, maybe only a few thousand miles out in space, a Gree ship-of-the-line hung, nullprojector locked on the co-ordinates of this tank. It would not have to be a big bomb, and they might not need a very hard vacuum. He glanced at a timer. Still six minutes to null. He looked at the gauge that showed outside pressure. He began to sweat. They'd be ahead of him by three minutes or so. He still had one resource. There was air in the Scout; not only the air in the compartments, but reserve air, compressed in tanks. The huge pumps handled a lot of air fast, but it was the final traces that took time. When they got down to a fair vacuum, he'd bleed out the Scout's air and let them struggle with that. The outside pressure crawled down to a fraction of a pound. He cracked the hatches of the other compartments so air leaked out slowly. No use making it obvious. He could feel the vibration of the escaping air. When the compartments other than his own were empty, he started releasing compressed air. The gauge needle wavered. Surely they'd guess now. He set his suit to hold ten pounds; and let his own compartment bleed down to that. He thought he could stay conscious at ten pounds, even though he was acclimated to the planet's eighteen. The vibration of escaping air encted, and now there was only the throb of the great pumps, faintly felt through the steel of the tanks and of the ship. He stared at the timer. Incredible, there were still four minutes to null. Gradually he understood that he was beaten. A sickness grew in his middle; not so much fear as an awful remorse. He'd been cocky. He'd taken a risky, hasty way. If he'd been content with sneaking out... H e felt light-headed now, from the change in pressure. The outside gauge showed less than a quarter of a pound. It seemed he could feel the pumps more distinctly now, like martial drums beating out the instants to his execution. He found himself hunching his shoulders against the bomb, and straightened angrily. He would not die just standing here! He could leave the ship and get the inner tank's lock open; get to the second tank, at least. Probably they'd be waiting there. Or they might just let him stay, sealed up, and go ahead with their bomb. Then he'd be trapped in the two inner tanks to be dealt with at leisure. He unsealed the suit to get at his laser pistol. If it came to a shootout, he hoped his light-headedness wouldn't slow his reflexes or affect his aim. He felt pretty well, but anoxia was deceptive. He was finished, of course. But he wanted very badly to take a few of them with him at the last; not just be stepped on, like a bug. As he drew the pistol his hand brushed against the brain-gadgets in his pocket. He grinned. It would be a nice irony if he could use their own invention to bolster up his reflexes and help him get one or two of them. He glanced at the timer. He didn't think the bomb was due for another half minute, or possibly two-thirds. With awkward fingers, he got the gadgets out and shoved them inside his helmet, jammed them up until they were at his temples. He was very careful not to think any hostile thoughts against Gree; he concentrated hard on selfpreservation. He sealed the suit again and reached for the hatch control. "Are you sure " the soundless voice murmured in his head, "that you've thought of every resource?" Annoyed, though he knew he was only hearing thoughts dredged from his own subconscious, he said aloud, "I've let out every bit of air except what's in this compartment and in my suit. That wouldn't last more than a few seconds!" "Are you sure?" the voice persisted. "What is air?" "A gas, of course!" he snorted angrily, and reached again for the control. "What is a gas?" "Damn it!" he snarled -- then went silent, gaping. A gas is... something in the gaseous state. H e darted a look at the timer, at the outside-pressure gauge, at another gauge. The calm that had settled over him with his acceptance of doom shattered. An awful anxiety replaced it; an actual physical ache. He leaped for the console. Would he have time? Vaporized water is a gas; and the ship's tanks held over seven hundred gallons of water. He felt the new vibration as water spewed out. He stared at the timer's second hand as if that were the thing that controlled fate. The outside viewer showed vapor curling from the floor, to be whisked away by the pumps. More water poured out and bubbled on the tank's floor, soaking up calories from the steel. The whole tank began to fog. He was laughing aloud now, not quite sanely. The pressure gauge crawled away from zero. He leaned over the computer keyboard, but before he could touch the keys the brain-gadgets were already computing: "At Terrestrial sea level , standard conditions , one volume of water yields eighteen hundred volumes of vapor..." It turned out that he had more than enough. Impudently, ignoring the Gree voice that suddenly shouted at him again, he closed the dump valves and saved two hundred gallons. Presently he nulled to safety. He removed the gadgets from his helmet and held them in his hand, hoping the Birds would let him join the testing and experimentation. He could think of some fascinating posIF IF  Short Story The kids fust loved having guests . It was wonderful of Earth to keep sending theml T he sun poured heat that shimmered and rolled across the Martian desert. It hammered and burned the man stumbling across the loose red sand. The man moved very slowly and he fell often. And each time he fell he lay face down with the sun hot on his head and the smell of ancient dust in his nostrils and he thought about not getting up again. But always the heat, and his thirst, and the fear of death drove him. He had been walking for three days, seeing nothing but sand and him. He found the glass house on the morning of the fourth day. The house looked like an inverted bowl. Forty feet in diameter, it rose to a height of twenty feet in a flawless curve. The glass had a bluish tint. The man kept on the sand and waited for the house to vanish. It didn't, and he got up and walked unsteadily towards it. The dome seemed to resist the full glare of the sun, filtering out the harshness and letting in a soft light that looked cool and inviting. The interior walls were a solid darker blue. The man staggered the last few yards and sprawled on the sand. He lay gasping in the thin air. After awhile he raised his head. T wo children were standing inside the wall watching him. A boy and a girl. The girl looked about five years old. Dark hair cut short. Cute. She wore a short dress and sandals. The boy looked about a year older. Dark curly hair like the girl. Short pants, sandals, short-sleeved shirt. Cool. A handsome little boy. The man lay still. He watched the children. They smiled at him. He climbed painfully to his knees. His body was stiff and his tongue felt like a mouthful of broken glass. The little boy spoke. "What are you doing out there?" The man smiled at the children and got slowly to his feet. His head filled with a thundering noise and blackness rolled across his eyes. He leaned his hands on the wall, feeling the smooth glass as though it was miles away while the desert tilted and rolled. His vision cleared and gradually the dizziness passed. The children watched him. "Hello," he said. His voice cracked and his head felt strange. "Who are you?" the little boy asked. "My name is Price. I crashed here. Look -- I need water! Let me in, will you?" The little girl smiled up at him, her face curious and her eyes big and friendly. "Why are you outside? Aren't you hot?" "I sure am. Listen, I need water in the worst way. Let me in." "Who are you?" the little boy asked. "I told you. My name is Price. John Price. I crashed here. Just let me in and I'll tell you all about it." "Why are you outside?" the little girl asked. "Aren't you hot?" "Yes. Of course I'm hot. Listen, if you'll just... "Who are you?" the little boy asked. "I told you. Price. John Price. Look, it's a long story." He licked his cracked lips. His tongue felt thick and swollen. "I crashed here, see? I'm from Earth. Earth, not Mars. I walked across the desert. I've got to..." "You shouldn't be outside," the little girl said. "It's too hot." "I know that. I don't..." "Who are you?" "I told you who I am," Price shouted. He broke down coughing. The shouting hurt his throat. "Listen! I've got to have water right now. Let me in and I'll..." "Do you like it outside?" "No!" Price screamed. "Christ, no!" He put his face close to the wall. "Listen! Go tell your mother! Tell her..." A woman walked into the room. Thirtyish and pretty. Her dark hair was cropped short and curled loosely against her head. She wore a short dress, light blue like the house and belted at the waist. She smiled at Price, nodding politely. "Come on, you kids," she said. "Get your breakfast." "Aw, Mom." "Come on. You can talk afterwards." She took the children's hands and smiled apologetically at Price. "Lady, listen to me. Please. I've got to..." They walked out of the room. P rice stared after them in amazement. He hit the wall. "For Christ's sake, what's the matter with IF you? Are you all deaf? Let me in!" He pushed away from the wall and started around the house. He stumbled and sprawled full length in the loose sand. He rested and then climbed painfully to his feet. He walked slowly and carefully around the house to the dining room and looked in. The woman and children were seated at a table. Eating breakfast. They drank water out of tall glasses. The center of the table held a big curved pitcher brimming with water and ice cubes. The little girl emptied her glass and refilled it. She turned and waved to Price. His legs felt like dry rubber. He leaned against the wall and stared at the glass in the little girl's hand. She raised her glass to her mouth and drank noisily. Water trickled down her chin to her neck. She wiped her mouth with a chubby hand. "Don't drink so fast," her mother said. "You'll get a tummy ache." "I don't drink too fast," the little boy said. "Do I, Mom?" "No, honey. That's fine." "She should be more polite. Eh, Mom?" "I am so polite," the little girl protested. "I am! Aren't I, Mummy?" "Yes, sweetheart. You're polite. You're both polite. Now hurry up and finish your breakfast." Price hammered the wall with the palm of his hand. It made a soft padded sound. "Hey, lady! Let me in! I need water." She picked up her glass. "I've got to have water!" She looked at the little boy and said, "Hurry up now." "Lady, please! For God's sake! I need water. I'll die!" She put her glass to her mouth and sipped at it. Price kicked the wall. He pressed against it, hitting it with both hands. "Open up!" he screamed. "I'm thirsty, I tell you. I need water!" He hammered the wall, kicking and pounding at it in fear and fury. He filled his lungs and screamed as hard as he could. She finished her drink and put her glass aside. He slumped to the sand. Tired, he thought. I'm tired, too. This isn't doing me any good. He got to his feet again and began circling the house, examining the wall, looking for a door. He walked around the house without finding an opening in the smooth glass. He hit the wall. "Hey! Let me in! I need water." Nothing. He sat on the sand. "Alright," he muttered. "You've got to look this way sometime. I'll wait here till you do." The sun was hot. He sat on the sand and looked into the house and thought of all the water he had swam in and waded through and sailed over. His eyes were hot and his body sagged. Tiny fingers of fear and urgency plucked at him, but he drove them back and closed his eyes and thought about waterfalls and lawn sprinklers and grass cut short with the dew clinging to it. kids want any more y water?" The woman's question came faintly to him. "No, Mom." The little boy had a nice clear voice. "I'll throw it out then." He jerked his head up. Ten feet away a door had opened in the glass wall. The woman stood in the opening. She held the pitcher in her hand. "Wait!" Price called. The woman poured the water onto the sand. She shook the pitcher. Price dragged himself to his knees. "Wait!" he called. The woman stepped back into the house. His thirst and his fear and the screaming of his arid body rushed at him and he scrambled to his feet. "Wait!" He stumbled for the opening in the wall. It swung shut. Price pushed on the glass. There was no sign where the door had been. He pounded the wall weakly. "Wait!" he croaked. "Let me in. Please." The woman placed the empty pitcher on the table. She sat down, her back to Price. He wheeled around, searching for where the water had landed. The snot looked dark. He dropped prone and pressed his mouth to the desert. He dug his tongue into it, feeling for moisture. Hp clawed at it. The sand was dry. He opened his mouth wide and bit into the sand and it filled his mouth and tore his cracked lips. He inhaled, clutched his throat and coughed in agony. He lay with his face on the desert and coughed up the lining of his throat. After a while he turned his head and looked into the house. The children were standing inside the wall watching him. The little girl smiled shyly. "You shouldn't eat sand," she said. "It isn't good for you." She turned to the boy and said, "It isn't good to eat sand, is it?" "Gosh, no," he said. He looked curiously at Price. "Why do you eat it?" Price looked at the children. Heat rolled over him in suffocating waves. He got to his hands and knees and crawled to the wall. "Why do you eat sand?" the little boy said. Price examined the friendly little faces. "Don't you understand?" he said. He looked at the girl. "Can't you see? I'm dying out here." "Sand isn't good for you." "Please give me water. Just a little." "You shouldn't eat sand." "Please." "Why do you eat it?" He fell against the wall. He coughed. Blood from his cracked lips and torn throat sprayed the glass. He pressed his mouth to the wall and pawed weakly at it. "Maybe he likes sand." He began to whisper. He pressed his mouth to the wall and whispered and each time he exhaled it made a rasping sound in his throat and blood smeared on the glass. "Do you like sand, Mister?" He slumped sideways to the desert. His head dropped and his eyes closed. The sand burned his cheek but he had no strength so he lay IF there and after a while his mind drifted. His body felt dry, but his mind found lakes of blue and streams that raced over big round boulders and shimmered cold and wet under the shade of green trees. He slept. H e woke to heat. Blind, inhuman heat. The sun seared him. Heat reflected from the sand like a blast furnace. He dragged his eyes open, the lids like hot lead weights. He lay still. Not moving and breathing shallowly. Dry. Dry, he thought. The absolute ultimate. The absolute, absolute ultimate of dry sticks and stones and bones and bones. His thoughts fluttered and sank and flopped in the heat. And sticks and stones and dry, dry bones. He opened his mouth and his lips split. He rolled his eyes slowly without moving his head. The woman was standing beside him on the sand. "Are you all right?" she said. He moved his mouth but no sound came out. "Are you all right?" His mouth moved jerkily. "Wath." "Pardon?" "Watha." The woman smiled kindly. "You had us worried," she said. "I'm glad you're all right." "Water." "We thought maybe you were sick or something." He pushed himself to his hands and knees. His arms shook and the desert turned over. "Water," he whispered. He crawled to the woman. "Please." "The children will be glad to see you." She turned and walked back into the house. The door closed. Price crawled to the wall. The children had a tub of water. The boy was pushing a toy sailing ship across the surface. His hands were wet. Water sloshed over the rim of the tub and ran on the floor. The little girl waved to Price. "Hi," she called. "I'm glad you're all right again. We thought you were sick." Price looked at the water. "Help    me. "We're playing boats." "Please help me." The little boy took the boat out of the water and held it up for Price to see. Water ran down his arm. The boat was bright blue. The sail was white. Price coughed. Blood flecked the wall. The little boy smiled broadly. "I've got a boat." "Please." "Mom got it for me." "Can't you hear me?" Price looked at the children. "Do you know what I'm saying?" "Of course it's only a toy." "Come here." He motioned for them to come over. The children looked at him curiously. He motioned again. They walked over and stood against the wall. Price got to his feet. It took him a long while and the exertion made his head spin. He leaned his hand on the glass and bent towards the little boy. "Can you hear me?" The little boy smiled at him. His yes were warm and he had a dimple on one cheek when he smiled. Price looked at the girl. "Can you hear me? Nod your head if you ean. The little girl smiled shyly. "You can't hear me," Price said. "You can't hear me at all, can you?" The children smiled politely. Friendly. P rice dropped to his knees. "Look," he said. He smoothed out a patch of sand. He drew a circle with his finger. "Sun," he aid. He pointed to the sun, then to Ibe circle he had drawn. "Sun," he repeated. He pointed to the sun again, then down to the circle. The children looked curious. He drew four smaller circles out from the big one. "He's drawing," the boy said. Price pointed to himself. He touched his chest with his hand, then pointed to the third small circle. "What's he drawing?" the little girl asked. Price pointed to himself again. He touched his chest and said, "Me." He pointed to the third small circle and said, "Earth." "It's a ball," the little boy said. "He's drawing a ball." Price pointed to the third circle. "Earth,"he said. "I'm from Earth." "A ball, a ball," the little girl sang. She jumped up and down and clapped her hands. "He's drawing a ball." Price ignored her. He pointed to the fourth circle. "Mars," he said. He pointed to the children. He pointed to the sand. He pointed to the house. He swung his arm, pointing to the expanse of desert, then pointed again to the fourth circle. "Mars," he said. The children watched him. He pointed again to himself, then to the third circle. He moved his finger in an arc from the third circle to the fourth one. He jabbed his finger into the fourth circle, crumpling his hand against the sand. "Crashed," he said. He made walking motions with his fingers up to the glass wall and stopped. He looked up at the children. "Draw a boat," the little boy said. Price leaned against the wall. The sun was directly overhead now, pouring heat like a giant blowtorch. His thoughts drained away. The sun covered him and devoured him while the desert shimmered and blackness rolled in with sleep and surrender. He wrenched his mind back. He got up again, swaying weakly on his feet. "Look," he said. He held his hand out in front of him, his fingers bent as though holding a glass. He made turning motions above it with his other hand. He raised his hand to his mouth and pretended to drink. His split lips bled slightly. The blood caked on his mouth and when he swallowed it felt like his throat was being cut. The children stared blankly. H e repeated the process. "Water," he said. The little girl tilted her head to one side and surveyed him carefully i # IF Price pointed to the tub of water. He drew an imaginary pitcher in the air and pretended to pour from it. He drew a glass and pretended to hold it. He pointed again to the tub of water. The little girl's eyes widened. She beamed. She walked over to the table and picked up a glass half full of water. Price pulled his mouth into a smile. He pointed to himself. The little girl nodded triumphantly. She walked back to the wall, holding out the glass like a banner and smiling broadly. Price opened his black lips and pointed down his throat. The little girl drank the water. Price stared incredulously at her. He looked at the empty glass in her hand. "No," he said. "For me." He fell to his knees and pressed his face to the hot glass wall. "Please," he croaked. "Please." The woman walked into the room. She smiled at Price. "Come on, you kids," she said. "Clean up your room. You can talk later." "We're talking to our friend, Mummy." "I know, honey. You can talk to him later. Clean up your room now." She turned to Price and smiled politely. "Those two would talk all day if you let them." Price pawed at the wall. He was smearing more blood on the glass. "Please," he whispered. "But it's nice of you to visit." He coughed violently. A long heaving cough that came from deep inside and blew clotted blood against the back of his teeth. "You seem to have made a big hit with them." He fell over sideways. Sand stuck to his mouth like red cement. "I better get some work done myself." It was hard to think because his brain was dry and his body felt far away and when he closed hi eyes he couldn't feel the sand. "I'm complaining aboit the kids," she laughed, "and here I am gabbing myself." He seemed to be sliding down a long dry tunnel. The sides of the tunnel were made of stucco and they scraped and tore his skin. He looked back up the tunnel and a great black cloud was rushing after him. He went faster and faster and the stucco side tore big pieces of meat out of him that burned but didn't bleed because he was too dry and he was turning over slowly and his face was scraping the tunnel and his mouth wouldn't close because his tongue was too big and no matter how fast he went the black cloud went faster and it was all dry too. "We'll see you later." Blackness covered him. T hey watched him for a long while. Finally the woman spoke. "I think he's dead." "No," the boy said. "I think so." "He can't be." "Stay here. I'll go see." "He isn't dead." "I'll go look." The woman walked out of the house and the children followed her to the doorway. She walked over to Price. She hooked a foot under him and rolled him on to his back. His head flopped loosely. His tongue protruded and his eyes were vacant. She bent down and looked closely at him. "He's dead." Her voice was different and she wasn't pretty. "Are you sure?" "Yes."". Th; little one walked towards Price. His eyes were funny and he didn't look like a little boy any more. His arms were changing, and he didn'r have fingers. His skin was becoming slate blue. "That was too quick," he snapped.  ' "I know." As the house disappeared, the little one walked over to Price's body and kicked him on the head. He muttered something obscene and kicked him again and again. He rained kicks on Price's head and on his open mouth and his open sightless eyes. He kicked him in cold deliberate fury and Price's head bounced and made soggy noises. The big one pulled him back gently. "He can't feel it anymore," she said, and looked up. The landscape was flickering back to something closer to its realty. There was something like a tree, and something like a hill. The home was gone. "But what'll we do now?" the little Martian screamed There's nothing more to play with." The big Martian stroked his head and said, "Be patient." She looked up at the sky and smiled softly. "Look," she said, as a distant line of fire streamed down the strange, pale sky. "There's another coming IF IF  Novelette by Thomas M. Disch # ie aliens didn't enslave men... or hurt them... or destroy them. They were very fond of Earthmen -- as petsl M y name is White Fang, though of course that is not really my name. At least not any more. Now my name is Dennis White. I like the old name better, but I suppose that comes of having been a pet. Some people would say tha once you've been a pet, once you've grown used to a Leash, you're never quite human again. I don't know about that. Of course, it is more fun. But one can learn not to want it so badly. I did. And this is the story of how I did it. As a puppy. #V-. Ah, how is one to speak of the old times without slipping into the old way of speaking? But am I then to speak like a Dingo? No! The memoirs of a member of Louis in the rough accents of a sans-culotte -- and  must be allowed to write of White Fang as White Fang would have written of himself. For the time being let me leave Dennis White in abeyance -- and let me say, without more preamble, that as a puppy I was uncommonly happy. How should it have been otherwise? I was raised in the best kennels of the solar system. My young body was sportive -- and so it sported. My education ranged freely through the humanities, and yet I was never forced beyond my inclinations. I enjoyed the company of my own kind as well as the inestimable pleasures of the Leash. Finally, I was conscious of possessing the highest pedigree. My father was a major artist -- perhaps the major artist -- in a society that valued art above all other things. No little bit of his glory rubbed off on me. Later, in adolescence, a father's fame may cramp the growing ego, but then it was enough to know that I was as valuable a pet as there could be. In what else does happiness consist than in this -- a sense of one's own value? Not in freedom, surely. If I had been free in my youth, I would almost certainly not have been so happy. In fact there was a time when I might have been said to be free (I thought of it then as neglect ), and I resented my condition bitterly. It happened shortly after I had been orphaned -- that is to say, after the Dingoes had made away with my father. I was seven then. But let me set about this in a more chronological fashion: Let me make a narrative of this. I suppose I should begin with my parents, Tennyson White and Clea Melbourne Clift. Clea, who would never let us call her Mother, did not marry Daddy, in the usual sense of the word. Like so many women of her generation, the first to grow up under the Mastery, Clea was something of a blue stocking and very jealous of her independence. For Clea to marry and take on the name of White would have been in contradiction to the first article of her faith: that the sexes must be equal in all things. Neither I nor my older brother Pluto knew how to behave around Clea. She didn't want us to think of her as a mother, but more as a sort of friend of the family. When Daddy disappeared, Clea went off somewhere -- outside the solar system -- and we never heard from her again. She had taken up with Daddy because of his literary reputation. A lot of women did, but she was his favorite, for the simple reason that she was what a Dingo would call a "knock-out." Daddy, on the other hand, was sort of thin and pale and poetical. He wore his hair almost as long as hers. I never knew either of them really well. I think I've already mentioned IF that Daddy disappeared when I was seven years old. We were on Earth, Daddy, Pluto, and I, living in the open country near one of the Dingoes' towns. Daddy was researching another book, a sequel to A Dog's Life , and he'd go off on long walks without a Leash. Sometimes he would be loose for weeks at a time if his work demanded it. He had to understand what it was to be merely human. So, when the Dingoes got hold of him, the Masters couldn't do anything. They'd lost touch. No body was ever found, but one could assume that the Dingoes had been thorough in disposing of the remains, for the Masters could have resurrected a body from hamburger almost. Pluto and I were placed in a kennel located on the North Shore of Lake Superior, the Shroeder Kennel, and there we remained for the next three years, and there we were neglected. In a purely physical sense, we were well cared for. I'll grant that. The Shroeder Kennel (named for a little town that had once occupied that site) had an excellent gymnasium, warm and cold pools, indoor tennis and golf courts, good robotic instructors for all sports, and the kennel rations were prepared with that exquisite simplicity that only the most refined taste can command. Our rooms, both public and private, were spacious, airy, and bright. Naturalness was everywhere, the style of the thing, and it was no less natural for being adjusted to our convenience. Thus, in the summer the air was filtered and cooled, and in the winter the dome that encompassed the kennel heated us and added extra hours of sunlight to the brief northern days. The dome delimiting the kennels was a mile in diameter, and within its bounds our comforts were secure against the enmity of the Dingoes. It would have been an ideal existence if only our Master had truly cared for us. Not that he should have cared. Why should people care for dogs or cats or parakeets? But they do, and the dogs and cats and parakeets have come to expect it. They like to be talked to, fondled, taken for walks, and, in general, treated as equals, though it must be evident, even to their limited sensibilities, that they aren't equal; men are immeasurably their superiors, possessing inexplicable powers and engaging in unaccountable pursuits. The analogy (which I have borrowed from Daddy's novel, A Dog's Life) to the relation between Masters and men can be extended almost indefinitely. Mankind cannot presume to understand or equal the Masters. Their nature is so alien to ours that, unassisted, we cannot even perceive them. As nearly as we can know, the Masters are pure electromagnetic phenomena -- formed of a "substance" that is neither matter nor energy but rather a potentiality for either. Their power approaches cosmic proportions, and their knowledge approaches omniscience. Beside them mankind is insignificant and laughable. Considered simply as a field of force, they are, corporately, of a scope and dimension equal at least to the magnetic field of the Earth. In the strictest sense of the word, the Masters are unaccountable. One could only accept them, reverence them, and hope for the best. T he best that one could hope for was the Leash. The Leash, however, is -- it was -- rather hard to describe: the tides of knowledge that sweep through the mind, the total certainty that it affords, the ecstasy. Naturally, it didn't always reach those proportions. Often it was only a diffuse sense of wellbeing. But it could be the Beatific Vision. It was not as some say, a telepathic link with the Masters. (Although they could speak to us only when we were Leashed, and their speech was a direct communication from their mind to ours.) It was simply their touch , a touch that could transmute our nervous system from base lead to gleaming gold -- or scramble a brain into idiocy -- with, literally, the speed of lightning. Desirable as the Leash was, one could not coerce it. Like the state of grace, it came as a gift or not at all. And at the Schroeder Kennel it came not at all -- or so rarely as to make its general absence only more poignant. Our Master simply did not care; he was not interested enough in his pets to spend his time with them, and so we were left to our own devices. It was a terrible way to grow up. And so we come to Roxanna Proust. I don't think Proust was really her last name, any more than my name was White Fang. She had taken the name, because Proust was her idol. She was only eighteen at the time that we entered the Shroeder Kennel, and already the Remembrance of Things Past was her passion and pasttime. Roxanna was, faute de mieux, our teacher. She taught us French, reading to us from her favorite author, and she taught us German by reading a German translation of Proust. It was a rather eclectic education, but there was no one else with a fraction of Roxanna's talent, special as it was. Most of the pets there were only interested in athletics and flirtation. For my own part, I'll confess that I spent much more time in the gymnasium than I did at my studies. Without the intellectual stimulation and aid of the Leash, literature has not been my natural inclination. Pluto was different. Pluto loved to read, and, under Roxanna's guidance, he began to write. Not surprisingly, his style was very derivative of Proust's. Later, it was derivative of Joyce, and at last, when he became famous, it was entirely original. Or so I am told. I've never been able to understand him unless I was Leashed, and then, of course, I can understand anything. In fact, if I were to be candid, I would have to admit that my brother and I have always been rather distant. That at least prevented us from being hostile. I understand that Pluto, like our mother, has left the solar system. He is no longer on Earth, in any IF case, and I can't say that I've missed him that much. U I have always considered that my life began at the age of ten. Before that age, I remember few events in any detail. From ten on, I think I could reconstruct the happening of each new day if I had to. The day it would give me most pleasure to reconstruct was the #th of October, # -- a Wednesday. On that day in good weather Roxanna would take Pluto and me out into the country, beyond the dome of the kennel. After a half-hour drive along dirt roads, we would arrive at a deserted farm, where, in the shade of overburdened apple trees, we would pursue our studies, or, if Roxanna felt indulgent toward us, we would explore the old farm buildings. We never went into the house itself, though. The aura of Dingoes still clung to it. Only years later did Roxanna reveal to me that this was her parents' farm, abandoned during the Great Collapse of #, when the economy of those humans who were still holding out against the Mastery fell completely into ruin. The Nelsons (for that was the name on the mailbox -- not Proust) had volunteered . themselves and their children for the Shroeder Kennel. The children had been accepted, but the parents had been turned away, as by that time most older volunteers were. The Masters had no more need of wild pets, for now they bred their own. It was principally from rejects like the Nelsons that the society of Dingoes, as we know it today, evolved, and Roxanna herself was not free from the taint (or so I regarded it then) of their wildness. How else was one to interpret these willful visits to the scene of her childhood -- visits in which she involved Pluto and me with such blithe disregard for our safety or moral well-being. The countryside was swarming with Dingoes even then (had not I lost my father to them?), and we three pets could have been abused or abducted without fear of reprisals. That our Master should have allowed us to venture so far, Unleashed and running wild, is indicative of the state of affairs at Shroeder Kennel. It was late in the afternoon, and Roxanna, tired of reading, was lazily reminiscing to Pluto about her country childhood and how different the world had been then. I was above them in the branches of the apple tree, working problems in long division. Suddenly there appeared, suspended in mid-air almost near enough for me to touch, a girl of about my own age. Wisps of heliotrope spiralled about her, and her hair gleamed in the dying sunlight as though it were itself luminescent. "Hello," she said. "My name is Julie. Don't you want to play?" I could not reply. I was stunned as much by her loveliness (Yes, I was only ten, but children are not insensible of these things -- perhaps not so much as we are.) as by the shock of meeting a stranger in those unlikely circumstances. IF She took a step toward me, smiling (Julie has always had the loveliest, cheek-dimpling smile), and I realized what would have been immediately evident to any other pet: that it was her Master's unseen presence that supported her. For him, anti-gravity would be a moment's improvisation. But our Master's neglect had made even such commonplaces as flights seem rare to us. "Aren't you Leashed?" she asked, when she saw that I was not about to leave my branch and meet her halfway. "No, none of us are." B y this time Roxanna and Pluto had become aware of our visitor, but since they were a good ten feet below Julie and me, it was awkward for them to join the conversation. It was awkward for me, for that matter, but I blustered on. "Would you like an apple?" I asked, picking one from the abundance about me and offering it to her. She stretched forth her hand, then, with a guilty look, drew it back. "My Master thinks I'd best not," she explained. "He says that sort of food is for Dingoes. You're not a Dingo, are you?" "Oh no!" I blushed, though I knew she was only trying to make a joke. There could be no serious doubt of our domestication, for Dingoes wear clothing, while pets (who have better bodies, usually) only dress for formal occasions: the theatre or a pageant. "Would you like to slip in with me?" She held out her hand, and eagerly I jumped off the branch and was buoyed up in the gravity belt supporting Julie. I felt the meshes of a Leash close over my mind, and Julie, giggling with delight, leaped into the accommodating air to a height of thirty feet, and hung there, secure as a ping-pong ball suspended by a jet of air. "Try and catch me!" she shouted and then dashed behind the sagging roof of the old barn. "What about me?" Pluto protested. "You're probably too old, but I'll ask her," I promised and disappeared from sight. She led me quite a chase, but it was such a pleasure to be able to fly again that I kept up with her effortlessly. The Leash that I shared with Julie was loose -- that is, it was not so intense that one wished to do no more than contemplate the mysteries of life and Leash. One simply felt euphoric, zesty, and raring to go. Once I had caught her, I made her explain what she was doing out here at the Nelson farm. It was not, after all, a crossroads. Julie explained that her Master had brought her to Earth to help choose new stock for his kennel in the asteroid belt. My eyes kindled with the hope that she might choose me. The kennels outside of the Earth, especially those beyond Mars, were known to be superior to Earthside kennels, and I longed to have a Master who would care for me. Julie seemed to understand this, for she didn't keep me in suspense. "You will come back with us, won't you?" she asked, and her Master's voice resonated in my mind, echoing her plea: Won't you? Her Master? No -- now he was mine! "Why did you come out here?" I asked. "Surely, you don't have time to look at all the pets on Earth." "Because of who you are." "Who are we?" I was sincerely puzzled. "Only the sons of the most famous novelist in the last fifty years. That's all. It's incredible that every kennel in the solar system isn't trying to snap you up." It was easy at Shroeder Kennels, where Roxanna was the only pet with a literary bent, and that so singularly directed, for Pluto and I to forget the extent of our father's fame. A Dog's Life had been, after all, an epoch-making book -- like Luther's Bible or Das Kapital. Even the Masters had read and admired it. Daddy had won the Nobel Prize, entered the French Academy, and been elected to the American Senate. More than any other person, he had affected the reconciliation of men and the Masters, and it was for that reason that the Dingoes had marked him for vengeance. It was his book, in fact, that had given the Dingoes their name. The wonder of that novel is that it's told entirely from a dog's point of view -- a real dog. Before A Dog's Life , the Dingoes had used words like "kennel," "Leash," and even "pet" as invective. After Daddy's book, the tables were turned: Daddy's terminology stuck. Everyone -- that is to say, all the pets -- began to name their children after famous dogs. There hasn't been a generation of puppies with stranger r names since the Pilgrim Fathers went off the deep end back in the Seventeenth Century. Which brings us back to Julie and me. "I've told you my name," she said. "But you haven't told me yours. "White Fang," I said, proudly. "White Fang," she repeated, cuddling up to me. "I don't see you as 'White Fang' at all. I'm going to call you Cuddles." I should have objected then and there, but I was anxious lest I offend Julie and lose my ticket to the asteroids. And so it was that for the next ten years of my life I was known as Cuddles to all my friends. Within hours of our return to the kennel, Julie's Master had negotiated the transfer of myself and Pluto from the Shroeder Kennel to outer space. Roxanna was very curt in her farewells. It was only natural that she should be disappointed at being left behind, but there was nothing to be done. Her pedigree was unexceptional, and her literary attainments, though they shone in the intellectual night of the Shroeder Kennel, were not really of the first magnitude when yotr looked at them from a greater distance. The trip to the asteroids was made that night as we slept. What means our Master employed to transport us, I could not say. Nothing so crude as a spaceship. The Master's technology is a spur-of-the-moment thing, and I will admit, for my own part, that mechanical engineering isn't really that interesting to me. IF We woke to the subdued luminescence of kennel walls that we had known for years. The walls shifted to livelier color schemes in response to the quickening neural patterns of our waking minds. It was just like home. But there was a difference: instead of the relentless drag of Earth-gravity there was a gentle gravitational pulse, a relaxed ebb and flow that seemed to issue from my own heart. I felt the Leash of my new Master close tighter over my mind (for the next ten years it would never entirely desert me, even in sleep), and I smiled and whispered my thanks to him for having brought me away. Julie was awake now, also, and with a wave of her arm and a flourish of synthetic horn-music, the walls of the kennel dissolved and I beheld the boundless, glowing landscape of the asteroids. I gasped. It is yours , said a voice in my head that would soon come to seem as familar as my own. Hand in hand, Julie and I sailed out over this phantasmagorical playground, and the spheres of heaven played their music for us. Exotic blossoms fexploded, like Roman candles, discharging their hoards of rich perfume. Colors wreathed us in abstract, joyous patterns, as the two of us bounded and tumbled through the shifting fields of gravity, like starlings caught in a dynamo. Can it be that I shall never again enjoy the easy pleasures of that time? When I remember the way I passed through those ten beautiful years, I wonder if I am truly free or if I may not be, instead, exiled. Nothing, nothing on Earth can compare with the infinite resources of the Masters' pleasure domes. It was paradise. Really, it was almost paradise. Illness and pain were banished from our lives, and it might have been (for I know of no instance to disprove it) that, so long as we stayed Leashed, death too had lost its sting. Women no longer brought forth children in sorrow, nor did men eat their bread in the sweat of their brows. Our happiness did not degenerate into boredom, and our pleasures were never dampened by an aftertaste of guilt. Paradise has a considerable flaw, however, from the narrative point of view. It is anti-dramatic. Perfection doesn't make a good yarn, unless one attempts (as I am given to understand my brother Pluto has attempted, in his more abstruse works) to emulate Dante. So there isn't much for me to tell you, except:  liked it, I liked it; for ten years that was the story of my life. in I n the summer of #, ten years after our departure, the three of us -- Julie, myself, and our Master -- were back again on Earth. Julie, in one of her sentimental moods, had wanted to stop by first at the Nelson farm, where we had met. Our Master, as usual, indulged her whim. We sat, in the lightest of Leashes, beneath our apple tree and marveiled at the changes time had wrought not only in ourselves (for we had, after all, passed from puppyhood to maturity in the meantime) but also in the scene about us. The roof of the barn had fallen in, and in the orchard and surrounding meadows, saplings had taken root and were flourishing. Julie gloried in the Gothic Revival. So great was her passion for returning to the past that she begged our Master to be Unleashed! "Please," she whined. "Just this once. I feel so anachronistic out here in a Leash," Our Master pretended not to hear. "Pretty please," she whined more loudly, though it was much more like a bark by now. A voice in my head (and in Julie's too, of course) soothed: There , now , gently. What's this , my darlings, my dears , my very own pets? Why should you wish to throw off your Leashes? Why -- you're hardly Leashed at all! Do you want to turn into Dingoes? "Yes!" Julie replied. "Just for this afternoon I want to be a Dingo." I was shocked. Yet I must admit that at the same time I was a little excited. It had been so long since I had been without a Leash, that so primitive an idea appealed to me. I felt a yen for novelty. Or, as the Dingoes would say, freedom is a natural instinct of man. If l Unleash you, there's no way for you to call me back. You'll just have to wait till I come back for you. "That's all right," Julie assured him. "We won't leave the farm." I'll return in the morning, little ones. Wait for me. "Oh we will, we will," Julie and I promised antiphonally. And then he was gone, and our minds stood naked in an alien world. A more vivid pink flushed Julie's cheek, and her eyes sparkled with I realized that this was probably the first time in her life as a pet -- in her whole life, that is -- that she has been entirely Unleashed. She was probably feeling 'tipsy. I was. "Hello, Earthling," she said. Her voice seemed different, sharper and quicker. She plucked an apple from the branches overhead and polished it on her velvety skin. "You shouldn't eat that, you know," I said. "I know." She bit into it, then, with a little giggle, offered the rest of the apple to me. It was rather an obvious literary reference, but I could see no reason to refuse the apple. I took a large bite out of it. When I saw the other half of the worm that remained in the apple, I began to retch, bringing our little morality play to an abrupt conclusion. It was Julie who found the pump and got it working. The well water had a distinctly rusty flavor, but it was at least preferable to the taste in my mouth. Then, with my head in Julie's lap and her fingers tousling my hair, I went to sleep, though it was the middle of the day. W hen I woke, the heat of the afternoon sun was touching me at every pore and I was damp IF with sweat. The wind made an irregular sound in the trees around us, and from the branches overhead, a crow cried hoarsely and took to the air. I watched its clumsy trajectory with an amusement somehow tinged with uneasiness. This is what it was like to be mortal. "We're getting sunburnt," Julie observed placidly. "I think we should go into the house." "That would be trespassing," I pointed out. "So much the better," said Julie, for whom the romance of being a Dingo for a day had not yet worn off. In the farmhouse, dusty strands of adhesive -- cobwebs -- hung from the ceiling, and the creaking floor was littered with paper that time had peeled from the walls. In the upstairs rooms, Julie found closets and drawers of mildewed clothing, including some cotton dresses that would have been the right size for a ten year old. It was hard to think of Roxanna ever being that small. I felt vaguely guilty to have opened up this window on the past, and, when one of the dresses, rotten with age, came apart in my hands, a little spooky too. I took Julie into another of the upstairs rooms, which contained a broad cushioned apparatus, raised about a yard off the floor. The cushion smelled awfully. "It's a bed!" Julie said. "I've read about beds." "So have I," I replied. "In Shakespeare. But these beds smell." "They must decay, like the clothing" I sat down on the edge of the bed, and it bounced with a creaking, metallic sound, like the sound of the pump outside. Julie laughed and jumped onto the bed beside me. It groaned, and the groan deepened to a rasp, and the rasp snapped. Julie went right on laughing as the bed collapsed to the floor. Looking at her sprawled out beside me on that quaint apparatus, I became aware of a feeling that I had never experienced before. For, though I had often made love to Julie, I had never felt quite this urgent about it. Undoubtedly, this was a result of being Unleashed. "Julie," I said, "I'm going to bite you." "Grr," she growled playfully. "Arf," I replied. W e spent the night in the farmhouse amid creakings and groanings of old wood and ominous scurryings in the walls. We were up with the sun and we went, shivering, directly out of doors to wait beneath the apple tree. We were cold and we were hungry, and swarms of hostile, buzzing insects rose from the dew-drenched grass to settle on our raw skins and feed on our blood. I killed three or four, but the senseless things continued to attack us, quite oblivious to their danger. I began to understand why humans had always worn clothes before the advent of the Masters. The sun had risen nearly to noonday, when Julie finally turned to me and asked: "What do you suppose is wrong, Cuddles?" It was useless by now to pretend that nothing was wrong, but I could only answer her question with a look of dismay. Perhaps we were being punished for asking to be Unleashed. Perhaps -- But how could we presume to interpret the Masters actions, especially such irresponsible, inconceivable, and thoughtless actions as leaving two pedigreed pets defenseless in an alien world among dingoes! When our hunger grew extreme, we gorged on apples, cherries, and sour plums, not even bothering to look for wormholes. Through that afternoon and into the night, we waited, but at last the chill and darkness of the night forced us into the house. The next morning was spent in more useless waiting, though this time we had the prudence to wear clothing -- pants and jackets of rough blue cloth and rubberized boots. Almost everything else had rotted beyond repair. Our Master did not return. "Julie," I said at last, "we're on our own. Our Master has abandoned us." She began to cry, not making much noise about it, but the tears rolled down her cheeks in a steady stream faster than I could kiss them away. But for all that, I must confess that Julie adapted to our new condition more readily than I. She enjoyed the challenges of that archaic and almost Dingo-like existence. Every day while I went to a high hill in the vicinity to call, hopelessly and to no effect, to our Master, to any Master, Julie busied herself about the old house, clearing the IF floors, dusting, washing, airing out the musty furniture and decaying mattresses, and experimenting with the interesting new vegetables that grew among the weeds of a forgotten garden. My visits to the hillside became less frequent after the first week. I was convinced that our Master would never return to us. The thought of his cruelty and indifference passed quite beyond belief. Helping Julie at odd jobs around the farm, I began to have a certain respect for the pre-Mastery technology of Earth. I discovered and repaired one mechanical device that was especially useful: a rough stone wheel three feet in diameter and three inches thick that was set into rotary motion by a foot pedal. By holding a piece of metal to the revolving wheel, the machine could be made to give off sparks, and these in turn ignited dry scraps of wood. The fire thus produced could be conserved in various engines in the farmhouse. Fire had an immense utility, but since I assume my readers are familiar with it, I will not make my digression any longer. I only mention in passing that on the night of my discovery, Julie, sitting by me in front of a roaring log fire, looked at me with real admirationl A look that I returned -- for she was very lovely in the firelight, lovelier than she had even been before, it seemed. The firelight softened the contours of her face, until I was aware only of her relaxed, easy smile and the brightness of her eyes, a brightness that did not the fire but seemed to issue from her very being. "Prometheus," she whispered. "My own Pandora," I returned, and a scrap of old verse popped into my mind, at once comforting and terrible in its implications. I recited it to Julie in a low voice: Your courteous lights in vain you waste , Since Juliana here is come; For she my mind has so displaced , That l shall never find my home. Julie shivered theatrically. "Cuddles," she said, "we've got to find our way home." "Don't call me Cuddles," I said in, for me, a rough manner. "If you won't call me White Fang, stick to Prometheus." IV D ay followed day with no sign of our Master's return. The longer we stayed at the farm, the more inevitable discovery became. On my trips to the hillside I had sometimes noticed clouds of dust rising from the country roads, and though I was careful to keep under cover, I knew that luck alone and merely luck had prevented our capture so far. My imagination recoiled from what would become of us if we were to fall into the hands of Dingoes. I remembered my father, and it was not a memory to inspire confidence. Therefore I determined that Julie and I must find our way to the Schroeder Kennel on foot, where, though we might not be so happy as we had been in the asteroids, we would at least be secure. But I had bo idea of how to get there. Years ago when Roxanna had driven us to the farmhouse, she had taken a circuitous route, in a vaguely southwestern direction, which I had never troubled to learn. In any case, it was BOt wise to walk along the roads. I renewed my treks through the nearby woods, searching for a signpost, something to guide us back to civilization. At last a sign was given to me: a hill rose on the other side f a marsh, on the crest of that hill was an electric powerline! Where there was electricity there would be Masters. In # when the Masters had first manifested themselves to mankind, they had insisted that they be given complete authority over all electric plants, dams, dynamos, and radio stations. Without in any way interfering with their utility from a human standpoint (indeed, they effected major improvements). The Masters transformed this pre-existent network into a sort of electromagnetic pleasure spa. In time, of course, their additions and refinements exceeded mere human need or comprehension. Human labor could manufacture devices according to the Masters' specifications that human understanding would never be able to fathom. But even human labor became obsolete as the Masters -- in themselves, a virtually unlimited power supply -- atayed on and took things over. freeing man from the drudgery of the commonplace that has been his perennial complaint. Freeing, to be more exact, everyone who agreed to become a pet. Although in many respects, the Masters' innovations had superceded the primitive technology of the #'s, they still maintained, largely for the benefit of the Dingoes, a modified system of electric powerlines, lacing the entire world in arcane geometrical patterns that only the Masters could understand. It was to the power lines that the Masters came to bathe and exercise, and so it was to the power lines that Julie and I must go. Even if there was no way to reach the Masters as they flocked back and forth in the wires overhead, we could follow the lines to some generator or powerhouse, perhaps the one that adjoined the Schroeder Kennel, perhaps one elsewhere, for kennels were invariably located near power stations. And, once we reached the powerline, it would be a safe journey. No Dingo would dare trespass into the very heart of the Masters' domain. We prepared for the trip in minutes. While Julie improvised knapsacks, I went to the toolshed. There was an antique weapon there, a rusty wedge of iron mounted on a long wooden handle. I tested it out on the floor of the shed and with a little practice T could swing it with lethal force and fair accuracy. If it splintered Dingoes half so well as it smashed pine boards, it would serve my purpose admirably. Grimly, I refined upon its murderous properIF ties. I had noticed that the sparkproducing machine would put a fine edge on metal that was held against it at the proper angle. After patient experimentation, I had so sharpened the iron blade that the merest touch would sliver flesh. Now, I thought, let the Dingoes come! We set off before noon, neither of us in the best of spirits: Julie was wistful and melancholic at leaving the farm (though she agreed we had no other choice), and I was nervous and apprehensive. From the hill from which I had espied the powerline, we struck out into a wood of scrub pine, birch, and balsam. In the woods, there was no way to estimate our progress. The sun can be used as a compass, but it makes a poor speedometer. We walked, and when it seemed that we had walked twice, three times the distance to the power line, we kept on walking. Julie became petulant; I became angry. Then she grew angry and I sulked. But always while we were walking. The brush caught at our pant legs, and the mosquitos nipped at our necks. The mud at the edge of marsh about which we were forced to detour sucked at our boots. And we walked. T he sun, striated by long, low, wispy clouds hung huge and crimson at the horizon behind us; before us a pale sliver of moon peeped over the crest of a hill -- and on the hill, black against the indigo of the sky, stood the powerline. Julie dropped her pack and ran up the hill. "Masters," she cried, "Masters, we've come. Leash us. Make us yours again. Bring us home." The powerline stood stark and immobile, wires swaying gently in the breeze. Julie embraced the wooden pole and screamed at the unhearing wires: "Master, your pets have come back to you. Why did you leave us But we've come back. We forgive you. We love you. "They don't hear you," I said softly. Julie stood up, squaring her shoulders bravely, and joined me where I had remained at the foot of the hill. There were no tears in her eyes. But her lips were pressed together in a mirthless, unbecoming smile. "I hate them," she pronounced in a clear voice. "With my whole being, I hate them!" Then she fell into my arms in a dead faint. As twilight deepened to night, I stood guard over Julie and watched with amazement and renewed hope the great shafts of light that streamed from the northern horizon. They glowed whitely in the black sky, dimming the stars as they shot out, dissolved, and re-formed. The Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis. It was there especially that the Masters loved to play and relax. They felt at home among the electrons of the Van Allen Belt and where it curved in to touch the Earth's atmosphere at the magnetic poles, they followed it, controlling the ionization of the air, structuring those pillars of light that men have always wondered at to conform to the elaborate rules of their supravisual geometry. These shifting patterns were the supreme delight of the Masters, and it was precisely because of the strength of Earth's Van Allen Belt that they had originally been drawn to this planet. They had only bothered to concern themselves with mankind after a number of nuclear explosions had been set off in the Van Allen Belt in the #'s. The aurora that night was incredibly beautiful, and so I knew that the Masters were still on Earth, living and flaming for their pets -- their poor, lost, maltreated pets -- to see. It was a cold flame, and very remote. "Your courteous lights in vain you waste," I muttered. Julie, who has always been a light sleeper, stirred. "I'm sorry," she mumbled, probably too sleepy still to remember what she was supposed to be sorry about. "It's all right. We can find them tomorrow," I said, "and tomorrow and tomorrow." Julie smiled and slid by imperceptible degrees back into sleep. farmhouses set back from the road and, twice, the road widened and the ruins of houses were set closer together: a town. Here the poles would branch off in all directions, but the main powerline followed its single course toward Schroeder. The poles were of rough pine, stained to a reddish-brown by creosote, one just like another, until -- Julie noticed it as we neared Schroeder. Running up and down the poles were thin silvery lines that glinted metalically in the sunlight. On closer inspection, the lines formed vertical chains of decorative elements in simple repeating patterns. One common design of overlapping circles linked in series by straight lines, so: Another was a simple zigzag pattern: -- vVV -- The most frequent designed resembled a circuiting diagram of dry cells in series: T he next day we followed the lines to the north. They ran along an old asphalt road, scarred with fissures and upheavals, but still easier to travel than the rank brush on either side. A faded I sign gave the distance to Schroeder as # miles. Using the road (for the wires overhead were sufficient protection, as we thought, against the Dingoes), we could hope to reach the kennel by midafternoon. Regularly we passed deserted -- I I -- I In fact, they were all circuiting diagrams! It was too crude decoratively and such nonsense from any other point of view that I knew it could not be the work of the Masters. No, there was something barbaric about these markings that suggested Dingoes. But what Dingo would dare approach this near the sanctuary of IF the Masters? The Kennel must be only a few hundred yards off. I began to have misgivings about our security. Before I could properly begin to savor this danger, another had presented itself. "Cuddles!" Julie screamed. "My God, the power station!" I was already at her side. A cyclone fence that ran some hundred fc; t along the road prevented our entrance to the substation, but it made no difference, for it was nothing but a rubble heap now. I-beams, gnarled and twisted like the limbs of denuded oaks, stood in black silhouette against the light blue of the afternoon sky. The pylons that had fed the high tension wires into the substation lay on the ground like metal Goliaths, quite dead. The wires that had led out from the station had been snapped and hung inert from the top of the cyclone fence, where now and again a breeze would stir them. "It's been bombed," I said, "and that's impossible." "Dingoes?" "Yes, I suppose so. But how could they?" It made no sense. So primitive an attack s this couldn't succeed against the Masters when the whole rich arsenal of #th Century science had failed. Oh, the nuclear blasts in the Van Allen Belt had annoyed them. But I doubted then and I doubt now whether man has it in his power actually to kill one of the Masters. How could it be done? How do you fight something without dimensions, without even known equations that might give a symbolic approximation to its character? Not, surely, by bombing minor power stations here and there. Not even by bombing them all. The Masters transcended mere technology. Inside the fence, from somewhere in the tangle of gutted machinery, there was a moan. A woman's voice reiterated the single word: "Masters, Masters..." "That's not a Dingo," Julie said. "Some poor pet has been caught in there. Why, Cuddles, do you realize this means all the pets have been abandoned?" We made our way through a hole in the fence sheared open by a fallen pylon. Kneeling a few feet from that hole, her face turned away from us, was the moaning woman. She was using the blasted crossbeam of the pylon as a sort of prie-dieu. Her hair, though tangled and dirty, still showed traces of domestication. She was decently naked, but her flesh was discolored by bruises and her legs were badly scratched. Confronted with this pathetic ruin of a once handsome pet, I realized for the first time how terribly wild Julie looked: dressed in the most vulgar clothes, her hair wound up in a practical but inartistic bun and knotted with strips of cloth, her lovely feet encased in clumsy rubber boots. We must have looked like Dingoes. The poor woman stopped moaning and turned to confront us. Her face expressed, in order, the ascending degrees of amazement, ending in blank amaze. "Father," she said, aghast. "Roxanna!" I exclaimed. "Is it you?" V I t was she. We were the longest time calming her and explaining that, quite the opposite to being her father, I was only little White Fang, grown up to a man's estate. "But your clothes," she said. "I'd know that jacket anywhere. And those boots with the red rubber circle around the rim." Briefly as I could I explained how our Master had brought us to the farm and deserted us, and how we had to take clothes from the farmhouse -- her parents' clothes, as it happened. "And did your brother Pluto come back with you?" "No. He's left the solar system, the last I heard." Roxanna's expression underwent a subtle change, as though she had begun to make calculations. The conversation lapsed awkwardly. "Have you read Pluto's book?" Julie asked. "I started it, but I couldn't understand it." She sighed. "My reading's fallen off lately. Even Proust doesn't seem as interesting as he used to. And then, of course, there's been this revolution..." "Ah yes," I said, "the revolution. Would you tell us some more about that?" Roxanna's account was none too clear, having been assembled from eavesdropped conversations and uninformed conjecture. Even the word revolution proved to be misleading. I've written here not the garbled story Roxanna told us then, but the facts as they were later to be established by the courts and newspapers. July had been a month of unusual sunspot activity. The Masters, anticipating the dynamic auroral displays that follow such periods, had flocked to Earth -- many, like our Master, bringing their pets with them. Shortly after our arrival, during the afternoon that Julie and I had been Unleashed, a solar prominence of extraordinary intensity had erupted from the center of a sunspot cluster and knocked the Masters out of commission. It was like a house that's been drawing too heavily on its current. Everything was turned on: the refrigerator, the stove, the air conditioner, the iron, the toaster, the coffee pot, the flood lights, the television, and the model railroad in the basement. Then Blat!, lightning strikes and there's one hell of a short circuit. Lights out, tubes popped, wires burnt, motors dead. The Masters weren't dead, of course. They're made of stronger stuff than toasters. But while they convalesced... Roxanna herself had been spared the worst of it, since she hadn't been in the Shroeder Kennel when the lights went out. But she'd seen it happen. In a flash (literally, a flash), the entire kennel -- walls, floors, even the anti-gravitic furniture had disappeared. It was as though they had existed only as an idea in the mind of God, and then God had gone and forgotten them. Pets, who had been soarW j ing balletically in the veet ipaees of tiie gymnasium, soared now in vaster spaces. Everyone who had been in the Kennel suddenly found himself plunging down to the ground, overpowered by the Earth's gravity, accelerating. The carnage had been terrible. The Schroeder Kennel, such as it was, was thrown into panic. But the worst was still before them. The Dingoes, quicker to realize what had happened than the distracted pets, had overrun the breeding farms and kennels everywhere. In the first fires of revolutionary excitement, they were ruthless. Puppies were taken from their mothers, to be raised in the homes of Dingoes; the men, any who resisted, were r.uthlessly slaughtered before the eyes of their mates, and the women... Well, what would one expect of Dingoes? A t this point Roxanna broke into tears, unable to go on. I noticed then that her body was covered with small black-and-blue marks, too tiny to have resulted from blows, but too numerous to be accidental. I insisted that Roxanna finish her tale. "Oh, I hate him!" she said, not loudly but quite expressively nonetheless. "I hate him! God, how I hate him!" All in all, it took Roxanna the better part of two hours to tell this story, for she had a way of veering off into digressions that would have been the delight of. any admirer of Tristram Shandy , though, for my own part, I am inclined to be more straightforward. In fact, her divagations had begun to distress me considerably, as soon as I realized that the vicinity was still swarming with Dingoes, and that Roxanna was living with the chief of them! "Roxanna," I said, trying to get her to her feet, "Julie and I are going to help you to escape. And we'd better start right away." "It's too late," Roxanna said with a sigh in which the resignation was not unmixed with a little pleasure. Too long allegiance to such a master as Proust had finally taken its toll on Roxanna's character, and, though I may anticipate my story by mentioning the word here, I should like to say it and have done. Roxanna, sadly, was something of a masochist. "Roxanna," I said, more firmly now, "you must come with us." "Get your own bitch, Master," came a good-natured bellow of a voice from not too far away. With a sinking heart, I faced the intruder, a red-faced hulk of flesh many sizes too large for the khakis he wore. He stood on the other side of the fence, arms akimbo and grinning broadly. He held what looked like a glass fishing rod in his meaty hand. "The name's Schwartz -- Bruno in these parts. We're repatriating these damn pets. Now, come on home, Rocky, old girl. Your master calls." He laughed. So this was a Dingo! For the moment I was safe, for he obviously mistook me for a Dingo too, and perhaps I might have escaped if I had let him go on believing it. But I was too angry. "You are not Roxanna's Master, and she is not going with you." "The hell you say!" "Please," Roxanna pleaded. "I must go to him." But her body didn't protest; she was limp with fear. I pushed her behind me and picked up my axe from the ground. Bruno's smile broadened. "What are you, anyhow? Some kind of pet!" "Dingo!" I said with the utmost contempt. Bruno reached a hand behind his back and made adjustments on an apparatus strapped there. It was the size of one of our knapsacks. Then he climbed through the hole in the fence, brandishing the long, flexible pole. "Axes!" he scoffed. "Next thing you know someone will invent the bow and arrow." I advanced toward the Dingo, who stood now within the fence, my axe readied and murder in my heart, as they say. With my left hand I held to the metal frame of the fallen pylon, using it as a crutch. My knees were very weak. Bruno flicked the end of the glass fishing rod against the pylon. There was a spark and my mind reeled. I was sitting on the ground. I could see Bruno above me between white flashes of unconsciousness. I swung at him wildly. The axe hit the pylon with a dull thunk. He flicked the pole at me again. It touched my left leg at the knee. The shock tore through my body and wrenched a cry from my lips. "Good stuff, huh, Jack? Great IF for the circulation. If you're interested in mechanical things, it's real easy to make. It's a prod pole. Prod poles were meant for cattle, but they work on most any animal." He flicked it again, tracing a line of pain across my neck. I screamed in agony -- I couldn't help it. "The fishpole was my idea. It handles easier this way." He let the tip of the pole play over my right arm. Every shred of consciousness that remained to me was in my hand. I clenched the axe handle until the pain in my hand was worse than the flashes of pain that tore through my whole body -- until there was no consciousness left. When I woke (seconds later? Minutes? I don't know), I could hear Roxanna's hysterical laughter. Bruno had finished with her. Julie's voice, pitched so high that I could hardly recognize it, was saying stay away , and then, a little sharper still, Stay away! There was a sparking noise and her scream. "White Fang!" she called. "Oh, Mastery -- White Fang!" She had called me that! Not Cuddles, not Prometheus. White Fang! I sprang to my feet, and the axe was just part of my hand now. I felt, as never before, even when I was Leashed, totally alive and aware, absolutely sure of myself. My body was a living flame. Bruno had caught hold of Julie. He heard me scrambling over the wreckage of the station and turned around just in time for the axe to come crashing down across his chest. I hadn't meant to draw blood. I had only wanted to smash the power pack strapped to his back. There was a terrible gush of blood from the chest wound, thick and winy. The axe in my hand was covered with blood. It was horrible. I had never seen anyone bleeding like this before, never. It was horrible! The blood. The thought that I had done this -- even the sight of it -- was too much, and I collapsed onto Bruno's fallen body. The last thing I remember was Roxanna's tear-streaked face as she rushed forward to take the fallen Dingo in her arms. VI T hough my bed was comfortable, the walls of the room antiseptically white, and my meals thoroughly good, I suspect that I spent the next week in a prison, not a hospital. The guard who brought my food would not speak to me, and I was not allowed to read. My only diversion from anxiously wondering what was in store for me was looking down at the semi-deserted streets four stories below. I did not know what city this was nor how I had come here. There was some faint recollection of sitting by another, smaller window and staring with dismay at the laboring propeller without, desperately wishing my Master had been there to tend to its rustic operation -- but perhaps that was only one of the nightmares I had so frequently then. I knew that the few people I saw on the streets, the women in long. #  ungainly dresses and the men in unseasonably heavy suits, must be Dingoes. And though I had never seen Dingoes in such close proximity before, their dress and behavior was so uniformly dull that I soon grew tired of observing them and began, instead, to count the cars that went by. This wasn't so boring as you might think, for the various trucks, jeeps, and tractors still in use among the Dingoes (rarely if ever did one see a car) presented a beautiful study in comparative ruination. From the way they roared and sputtered and spewed out black clouds of noxious gas it was obvious that the Dingoes had abandoned heavy industry for decades. These were antiques. They were usually of an official nature, and those same insignia which I had seen scrawled on the telephone poles outside of Schroeder "were painted on the sides of the trucks or on banners that streamed from the jeeps' antennae. I was reminded of the heraldic devices of some crusading army: Resistor statant, sable on a field of gules; diode dormant, on a quartered field, ermine and vert. To my surprise, the city was strongly illuminated at night. Either the Dingoes had an independent source of electrical power (which seemed unlikely) or the Masters had the power stations back in operation and were reestablishing their dominance. For a moment the chemistry of hope jangled my nerve ends, but I quickly recollected where exactly T was, and the hope fizzled. After a week in this limbo, I received my first visitor. It was Julie, but a Julie so altered in appearance that I thought at first she was a Dingo spy in disguise. Prison does develop one's paranoid tendencies. She was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor length dress in the Dingo style and her beautiful hair was concealed by an ungainly cork helmet such as I had seen on several persons passing below my window. "Julie!" I exclaimed. "What have they done to you?" "I've been repatriated." She wasn't able to raise her eyes to look into mine, and her whole manner was one of unnatural constraint. No doubt, this could be accounted for by the presence of the armed guard who was watching us from the open doorway. "You mean they've forced you to -- " "Nobody's forced me to do anything. I just decided to become a Dingo. They're really much nicer than I thought they'd be. They're not all like Bruno. And even he's not so bad -- once you get to know him." "My God, Julie!" "Oh, don't be upset. That's not what I meant. Bruno's too much in love with Roxanna to think of bothering me." "That isn't what I meant." B ut Julie went blithely on. "They're going to get married as soon as she's out of the hospital. On the airplane coming here, he was delirious and he told me all about himself. I can't say I understood much of it. Do you know that he no IF actually likes you? He does. There he was all bandaged up, lying on the stretcher, and he said, 'I wasn't smashed like that since God knows when. Good man! We'll get along, White Fang and me.' I thought it was just the delirium, but he was serious. He wants you to visit the both of them as soon as you can." "And Roxanna's going to marry him?" "Yes. And she's very mad at you. For hurting Bruno." "But T was trying to protect her!" The story that Julie at last unfolded, in her rather scattered way was this: Roxanna, when she saw me strike Bruno with the axe, suddenly decided that she was in love with her tormentor, and her newfound love was every bit as strong as the hatred she had expressed only minutes before. In the heat of the moment, she had been almost angry enough to use my axe on me, but Julie and the Dingoes who had been drawn to the scene had been able to stop her. They didn't stop her from revealing that I was the son of Tennyson White, a fact that Roxanna was sure would lead to my summary execution, since she had often heard the story of how Daddy had been done in by the Dingoes. But instead we'd been shipped off to St. Paul, where the Dingoes had their headquarters in the old State Capitol Building. What they intended to do with me now, Julie would not say, even if she knew. I had my own grim suspicions. Julie spent the rest of her visit trying to justify the haste with which she had allowed the Dingoes to repatriate her, and since she had no apparent excuse but expediency, it was rather hard going. At last I interrupted her: "Julie, please don't talk on about it. I quite understand that you've had to disassociate yourself from me. Heaven only knows what they intend should happen to me, but there's no reason it should happen to you as well. Perhaps they mean to use me as a hostage. Perhaps they mean something worse. In either case, you're lucky to be rid of me." I was just beginning to hit my stride, and no doubt I would have brought myself to the point of tears, when Julie started to giggle. To giggle! She tittered and snorted and snuffled like someone who can't keep a joke, and she left the room bent double with the pain of holding back her laughter. Hysteria, of course. It was a very sad thing to see the girl you love in such a condition and to be unable to help. W ithin an hour of Julie's departure, I was removed from my cell and conducted to an unmarked limousine in perfect working condition. I did not know where it was taking me, for the curtains were drawn in the back seat, but shortly we found ourselves in a large and largely vacant underground parking area. Then, after a labyrinth of staircases, corridors, guards, and passwords, I at last found myself alone in front of an imposing mahogany desk. The desk and all the appointments of this room testified to the consequence of their possessor. In a subsistence economy like that of the Dingoes, luxury is a potent symbol. My attention was especially drawn to the portrait that hung over the desk. Done in the mock-primitive style popular in the late sixties of the last century, it slyly exaggerated those features of the subject which were most suggestive of the raw and barbarous. His stomach, though monumental itself, was seen from a perspective that magnified its bulk. The face was crudely colored, particularly the nose, which was a florid, alcoholic crimson. The violettinged lips were at once cynical and voluptuary. The picture was the perfect archetype of the Dingo. Yet, perhaps not perfect, for the eyes shone with an intelligence and good will that seemed to contradict the overall impression of brutishness. This one dissonance added to the archetype that touch of individual life which only the best portraitists have ever been able to achieve. I was still engaged in studying this painting (and really, it had the strangest fascination for me) when its original stepped into the room and came forward to shake my hand. "Sorry to have kept you waiting, but my time hasn't been my own ever since that damn sunspot." When he had finished shaking my hand, he did not immediately release it, but, keeping it in his, looked me over appraisingly. "You'll have to get rid of that name of yours, you know. White Fang just won't do. We Dingoes as you call us, don't like doggish names. Your proper name is Dennis White, isn't it? Well, Dennis, welcome to the revolution." "Thank you but... "But who am I? I'm the Grand High Diode. As far as you're concerned, that means vice-president. Are you interested in politics?" "Pets don't have to be. We're free." "Ah, freedom!" The Grand High Diode made an expansive gesture, then plopped into the seat behind the desk. "Your Master takes care of everything for you and leaves you so perfectly free. Except that you can't taste anything from the goodand-evil tree, why, there's nothing that isn't allowed you." He glowered at me dramatically, and I had time to compare the portrait with the portrayed. My admiration for the artist grew by leaps and bounds. "The Masters appeared two-thirds of a century ago. In that time, human civilization has virtually disappeared. Our political institutions are in shambles; our economy is little more than bartering now; there are practically no artists left." "Among Dingoes perhaps. But under the Mastery, civilization is flourishing as never before in man's history." "Cows were never more civilized than when we bred them." I smiled. "You're playing with words." "Perhaps you'd rather not argue. "I'd rather argue. If it keeps me away from the hangman -- or whoever you employ for such purposes." "Perhaps you can avoid him altogether. Perhaps, Dennis, I can conIF vince you to become a Dingo?" The man's thick, violet lips distended in a wolfish grin. His eyes, which were, like his eyes in the portrait, vivid with intelligence, glittered with a strange sort of mirth. I tried my best to look disdainful. "Isn't it rather late to join? I should think that most of the carnage must be over by now. You'll be ready to be defeated any day now." "Oh, we'll probably be defeated, but a good revolutionary can't let that worry him. A battle that isn't against the odds would hardly be a battle at all. The carnage, I'll admit, is unfortunate." "And unjustifiable as well." "Then I won't bother to justify it. Dirty hands is one of the prices you pay in becoming a man again." "Are you fighting your revolution just so you can feel guilty about it?" "For that -- and for the chance to be our own Masters. Guilt and sweat and black bread are all part of being human. Domestic animals are always bred to a point where they're helpless in the state of nature. The Masters have been breeding men." "And doing a better job of it than man ever did." "That, I might point out, is exactly the view a dachshund would take." "Then let me put in a good word for dachshunds. I prefer them to wolves. I prefer them to Dingoes." "Do you? Don't make up your mind too quickly, or it may cost you your head." And, with this threat, my incredible inquisitor began to chuckle. His chuckle became a pronounced laugh, and the laugh grew to be a roar. It occurred to me that the gleam in his eye might as well have been madness as intelligence. Suddenly I was overcome by a desire just to have done. "My mind is made up," I announced, when he had stopped laughing. "Then you'll make a declaration?" Apparently, he had taken the exact opposite of the meaning I had intended. "Why should you care which side I'm on?" I demanded angrily. "Because a statement from you -- from the son of Tennyson White -- with the strength of that name behind it -- would be invaluable in the cause of freedom." Very deliberately I approached the mahogany desk where the man was sitting, wreathed in a fatuous smile, and very deliberately I raised my hand and struck him full in the face. Instantly the room was filled witk guards who pinned my arms behind my back. The man behind the desk began to chuckle. "You beast!" I shouted. "You Dingo! You have the conscience to kidnap and murder my father, and then you dare ask me to make you a declaration of support! I can't believe -- if you think that -- " I'm afraid that I went on raving like that for a little while. And as I raved that incredible man' lay sprawled on the top of his desk and laughed until he had lost his breath. "White Fang," he managed at last. "That is to say, Dennis, my dear boy. excuse me. Perhaps I've carried this a little far. But you see --  am your father. I'm not murdered in the least." T he next week went by at a pace that would have been nightmarish if I hadn't been so giddily, busily happy. First off, I married Julie. Daddy was adamant about that. He explained how Dingoes, especially those in the public eye, have to appear very monogamous. I had no objection to marriage, and if monogamy was necessary, there was no one I would rather have been monogamous with than Julie. She entered into the spirit of things with enthusiastic atavism, and I suspect now that part of Daddy's insistance had had its origin in my bride. Still it was a nice wedding. Hymen's candle never burned brighter than on the day that our hands were joined over the glowing vacuum tube on the altar of the renovated power station. We had our first quarrel an hour later when she told me that she'd known about Daddy and the test he was preparing for me on the day that she had come to visit me at the jailhouse. But the quarrel ended as soon a? Julie had pointed out that, since I'd passed the test so well, I had no cause for anger. I hate to think what would have happened, however, if I'd agreed to make the "declaration" that Daddy had proposed. From the first, Julie and I were celebrities among the Dingoes. At a steady succession of lunches, dinners, and dances, we played the part of refugees from the "tyranny of the Masters, grateful for our newfound freedom." That's a quote from the speech Daddy wrote for me to deliver on such occasions. It always drew applause. Dingoes have no taste. While I acted my role as a model revolutionary, I carried on another more significant drama inwardly. Had it been merely a contest between filial piety and my loyalty to the Masters, I would not have hesitated long, for filial piety is negligible when, for seventeen years, you have presumed your father dead. But mine had been no ordinary father. He had been Tennyson White, and he had written A Dogs Life. Now I discovered there was a sequel to that book. I read through The Life of Man in one sitting of fifteen hours' duration. It was one of the most shattering experiences in my life. In fact, right at this moment, I can't remember any others to compare. Anyone who's read it realizes the difficulty one faces trying to describe it. It's got a little bit of everything: satire, polemic, melodrama, farce. After the classic unity of A Dog's Life , the sequel strikes at one's sensibilities like a jet of water from a high-pressure hose. It begins with the same light irony, the same subdued wit, but gradually -- it's hard to say just when -- the viewpoint shifts. Scenes from the first novel are repeated verbatim , but now its IF pleasantries have become horrors. Allegory gives way to a brutal, damning realism; and every word of it seemed an accusation aimed directly at me. After the first reading, I had no more distinct memory of it than I would have had of a hammer blow. And so I entirely overlooked the fact that The Life of Man is autobiography from first to last. M y father Tennyson White belonged to the first generation of men who grew up away from Earth. His first visit to his native planet was at the age of twenty, and it was almost a disaster. Stricken with a virus infection (those were the days before the Masters had quite mastered all the intricacies of their pets' physiology), Daddy had been abandoned to a rather second-rate hospital, not unlike the Shroeder Kennel in its indifference to the pets who were put up there. Daddy was bedridden for one year, time enough to lose his faith in the Mastery. Time enough, also, for him to draw up the outlines for both of his novels. Time enough to contact important Dingoes and map out with their aid a program for revolution. A Dog's Life was to be the overture to that program. Many authors have been accused of corrupting youth and debasing the moral coinage of their times. Probably none have ever set about it so deliberately as Daddy. His novel was a time-bomb disguised as an Easter egg and planted right in the middle of the Masters' basket. It was a Trojan horse; it was a slow-working acid that nibbled at the minds of the pets -- just a mild, esthetic tickle at first, then as it worked in deeper, an abrasive that scarred them with guilt. For men are not meant to be domestic animals. Those who stood the acid-test of that novel managed to escape to Earth and join the Dingoes. Those who didn't (and sadly, these were by far the majority) stayed with the Masters and incorporated the monstrous satire of A Dog's Life into the fabric of their daily lives. They became dogs. Ten years after the publication of A Dog's Life , Daddy effected his own escape to Earth. His autobiography makes no mention of the fact that he left his two sons behind when he went over to the Dingoes, and he refuses to talk about it still. I have always suspected that he doubted, if only slightly, whether he Was doing the right thing. It was a large enough doubt for ourselves whether we wished to become Dingoes or remain Leashed. The Earth was swarming with refugees from the Mastery, and the revolutionary movement -- the Revolutionary Inductance Corps, or (Naturally, the Dingoes did not want to call themselves Dingoes .) Daddy's next task was more difficult, for he had to forge an army from the unorganized mass of apathetic Dingoes who had never left Earth. The Life of Man accomplished part of this purpose, for it showed the Dingoes what they were: an amorphous mass of discontent, without program or purpose; a race that had taken the first step towards its own extinction. But the Dingoes were not such novel-readers as the pets. Only the more thoughtful read his second novel, and they didn't need to. Daddy gradually realized that no amount of literature would spark the tinder of the Dingoes into a revolutionary firebrand. And so it was (and now we leave Daddy's autobiography and enter the sphere of raw history) that my father invented a mythology. The Dingoes were ripe for one. Ever since the appearance of the Masters (who bore an unfortunate resemblance to mankind's favorite gods), organized religion had gotten quite disorganized. Men of religious or mystical sensibilities were among the first to volunteer for the kennels, where they could contemplate the nearly divine nature of the Masters without any of the discomforts of the ascetic life. The Dingoes, on the other hand, found it difficult to venerate gods who so much resembled their sworn enemies. Daddy realized that under these conditions, the Dingoes might accept a "religion" of demonology and sympathetic magic. When the gods are malign, men turn to jujus and totems. But wax dolls and devil masks would no longer do, for the first law of sympathetic magic is that "Like produces like." The Masters were electromagnetic phenomena: then what better talisman than a dry cell? In any elementary physics text, there was a wealth of arcane lore, hieratic symbols, and even battle cries. Children were taught Kirchoff' s Laws in their cradles, and men (and women) wore cork helmets to ward off the Masters, since cork was a good insulator. It was nonsense, but it was effective nonsense. The Revolutionary Inductance Corps won an overwhelming majority in the councils of the Dingoes on the Daddy became Triode in the revolutionary government, next in authority to the High Cathode himself. Everyone was ready to begin the revolution, and no one had the least idea how to go about it. Which goes to show that it's good IF to be prepared, because that was when a providential sunspot shortcircuited the Masters. The leaders of the Dingoes had managed to take the credit for their own good luck, but now a month had passed since the sunspot, and already the Masters had manifested themselves here and there as localized patches of luminescence in the atmosphere, hovering over their pets and repossessing them. In a very short time the Mastery would be established stronger than ever, unless the Dingoes found some way to stop them. Cork helmets may be good for morale, but in a real contest I'd as soon defend myself with a popgun. If the Dingoes had made any serious plans, Daddy wasn't telling me about them. D addy, Julie, and I had been waiting in the lobby of the St. Paul Hotel for fifteen minutes, and in all that time we hadn't seen one room clerk or bellboy. There weren't even many guests, for Earth had become so depopulated during the Mastery that a roof and a bed were always easy to come by. What you couldn't find anywhere was labor. Even the best hotels and restaurants were self-service. Finally Bruno and Rocky (for that had come to seem a better name for her than Roxanna) finished dressing and came down to the lobby. Bruno was wearing an unpressed cotton suit and a sport shirt open at the neok, so that a little bit of the bandage about his chest peeped out. Rocky was dressed to kill; Julie looked as staid as a nun in comparison. But when you're only twenty years old, you don't have to try so hard as you do when you're thirty-two. We exchanged pleasantries, decided on a restaurant, and went out to Daddy's car -- and thus began the ghastliest night of my life. Bruno was returning to his post in Duluth the next day, and we'd been unable to put him off any longer. For days he had been insisting that the five us -- the two Schwartzes and the three Whites -- "make a night of it." I felt guilty toward Bruno, and at that time I hadn't yet learned to live with a guilty conscience. I gave in. I would have been suspicious of overtures of friendship from a man I'd sent to the hospital and I might have simply supposed that, like most Dingoes, Bruno was chiefly interested in making my father's acquaintance. However, his first overture had come before he knew my father was Tennyson White, and so it was hard to doubt his sincerity. I decided that he was only mad. If I felt guilty and awkward towards Bruno, I can't imagine how Rocky felt towards me. When she had revealed my identity to the Dingoes she couldn't have known that my father was the second-in-command of the Dingoes -- not, as she had supposed, their arch-enemy. knew who their leaders were. She had intended to see me executed, and instead she had saved my life. Now we were sitting next to each other in the back seat of Daddv's limousine, talking about old times. When we got out, she managed to bring her spiked heel down on my instep with lethal accuracy, and once, in the middle of the dinner, smiling brightly and chattering all the while, she kicked me square in the shin underneath the tablecloth. The meal wouldn't have gone beyond the main course if it hadn't been that almost all of Rocky's remarks went over Bruno's head. He was dauntlessly ebullient, and when he started to talk, he could go on indefinitely. To shut off Rocky (who eouldn't hear enough about our wedding), I questioned Bruno about his childhood, which had been (it seemed to me) spectacularly awful. For he majority of Dingoes, life is one long battle: against the world, against their families, against their teachers, and against the decay of their own minds and bodies. No wonder Bruno was the aggressive lout that he was! But it didn't make me like him any better. When the dinner was done and I thought we might make our escape, Bruno brought out an envelope from the pocket of his coat and announced, as though he really expected us to be happy, that he had five tickets for the fight. "What fight?" I asked. "The boxing match at the Armory. Kelly Broughan's there tonight, so it should be worth seeing. I bet you don't see many good fights out in the asteroids, do you?" "No," I said in defeated tones. "None at all." "There are some beautiful gymnastic competitions, though," Julie put in. Bruno's laugh was the bellow of a wounded bull. Gymnastics was a good joke; beautiful was even better. "You're a card, Julie. Dennis, that girl's a card," he got out between bellows. Rocky's eyes gleamed wickedly. "Dennis, you really must come, seeing that you're such a scrapper yourself. And you must come too, Mr. White. You look worn out." "What the hell," Daddy said, "let's all go. And afterwards we'll watch the fireworks." "I love fireworks," Julie said, with forced cheer. We got up from the table with one accord. Bruno and Rocky were as happy as two children. Julie and I were glum. But Daddy... Daddy was in so profound an abyss of depression and defeat that he was quite literally unaware of most of what was going on around him. He knew, as we did not, that the Dingoes were about to shoot their wad that evening, and he knew, as the rest of the Dingoes did not, that their wad wasn't worth a plugged nickel. All they had was atomic bombs. W hether it was because Bruno knew the gate attendant or because Daddy was with us, I don't know, but our General Admission tickets got us seats at ringside. Our eyes had scarcely adjusted to the smokey light of the auditorium, when a bell rang and two men, modestly nude except for colored briefs, approached each other, moving their IF arms in nervous rhythms, circling about warily. One (in red trunks) lashed out at the other with his left hand, a feint to the stomach. With his right hand he swung at the other man's face. There was a cracking sound as his naked fist connected with his opponent's cheekbone. The crowd began to scream. Blood spurted from the man's nose. I averted my eyes. Bruno, in his element, added his distinctive bellow to the uproar. Rocky watched me closely, treasuring my every blench and wince. Daddy looked bored, and Julie kept her eyes closed through the whole thing. I should have done the same, but when I heard another thunk and a loud crash, curiosity overcame my finer feelings and I looked back into the ring. The man in red trunks was lying on his back, his expressionless face a scant few inches from my own. There was blood on it. Rocky was shrieking with pleasure, but Bruno, who felt an allegiance for the fighter in red trunks, shouted, "Get up, you bum!" I was about to be nauseous. I rose from my seat, mumbling apologies, and found my way outside, where I was discreetly sick in a hedge across the street from the Armory. It was actually a very interesting experience, for it was the second time in my whole life I had thrown up. I was reminded of the apple I had eaten in the Nelson orchard. The hedge bordered on a park which had been allowed to go to seed. Through the thick summer foliage I could see the glint of moonlit water. I strolled down the hillside to the pond's edge. Down there, the din of the stadium melted into the other night sounds: the croaking of the frogs, the rustle of poplar leaves, the rippling water. It was quiet and earthlike. A full moon shone overhead, like the echo of a thousand poems. All the earthbound poets who had stolen the fire of their lyrics from that moon, age after age! It had passed them by, oblivious of histories, and it would pass me by in time. That's the way that things should be. I knew then that I belonged to the Earth, and my spirit dilated with happiness. It wasn't quite the right time to be happy -- but there it was. Julie and the moon were part of it, but it was also the frogs croakings, the poplars, the stadium; Daddy, cynical, aspiring, even defeated; partly too it was Bruno and Roxanna, if only because they were so vital. These things melted into my memory of the Nelson farm, and it seemed that I could smell the winy smell of apples rotting in the grass. The sky was growing brighter and brighter. The moon... But was it the moon? A cloud of mist had gathered above the pond and it glowed until the full moon was almost blotted out behind it. The meshes of the Leash closed over my mind, and a voice inside my head purred kindly: White Fang, good boy! It's all right now. We heard your call. (But I hadn't called! It was just that I had been so happy!) And now I've come. Your Master has come back at last for you. I cried out then, a simply cry of pain. To be taken away now! Only a few days before I had cried for the lack of this voice -- and now... There , it soothed, there, there, there. Has it been bad? Has it been that very bad? Those terrible Dingoes have captured you , but it won't happen again. There , there. The Leash began gently to stroke the sensory area of the cortex: soft fur wrapped me, scented with musk. Faint ripples of harp-music (or was that only the water of the pond?) sounded behind my Master's voice, which poured forth comforting words, like salve spread over a wound. Then, with a sudden pang, I remembered Daddy. ( Don't think of your poor father, the Leash bade.) He was waiting for me. Julie was waiting for me. (We'll get Julie back , too. Now, don't you worry yourself any more.) Desperately I tried not to think, or at least to keep my thoughts so scrambled that I would not betray the things I knew. But it was exactly that effort that focused my thoughts on the forbidden subjects. I tried to think of nonsense, of poetry, of the moon, dim behind the glowing air. But the Leash, sensing my resistance, closed tighter around my mind, and cut through my thin web of camouflage. It shuffled through my memory as though it were a deck of cards, and it stopped (there was just time enough for me to catch the images then) to examine images of my father with particular attention. There was, on the very edge of my perceptions, a sound: Ourrp. Which was repeated: Ourrp. It was not a sound my Leash would make. The harp-music quavered for a moment, becoming a prosaic ripple of water. I concentrated on that single sound, straining against the Leash. "What is that sound?" I asked my Master. To answer me he had to stop sorting through my memories. Nothing. It's nothing. Don't think about it. Listen to the beautiful music, why don't you? Think of your father. Whatever was making the sound seemed to be down in the grass. I could see clearly in the wash of light from the cloud above me. I parted the grass at my feet, and I saw the beastly thing. Don't think about it! IF The front half of a frog projected from the distended jaws of a water snake. The snake, seeing me, writhed, pulling his victim into the denser grass. Again the Leash bade me not to look at this thing, and, truly, I did not want to. It was so horrible, but I could not help myself. The frog had stretched his front legs to the side to prevent the last swallow that would end him. Meanwhile, the back half of him was being digested. He emitted another melancholy Ourrp. Horrible, I thought. Oh, horrible , horrible, horrible! Stop this. You... must... stop... The snake lashed his body, wriggling slowly backwards. The frog's front feet grasped at sprigs of grass. His Ourrp had grown quite weak. In the failing light, I almost lost sight of the struggle in the shadow of the tall grass. I bent closer. In the moon's light I could see a thin line of white froth about the snake's gaping jaws. The cloud of light had disappeared. My Master had left, and I could hear Daddy calling my name. I ran back up to the street. He was there with Julie.  "Mastery!" Julie said. "You shouldn't have run off like that. We came out and saw a light over the lake, and I was sure they'd carried you off." "They almost did. My Master was there, and I was Leashed. But then I slipped out of it somehow. And he went away. He just disappeared. Are you all right, Daddy?" For he was visibly shaking with excitement. "Oh, quite, quite," he said, paying scant attention. "I'm thinking." "He had an idea," Julie explained, "right after you ran out of the fight. I guess this is what happens when he has ideas."  B runo pulled up beside us in the limousine and honked, not because we hadn't seen him, but just because he liked to honk. We got into the back seat and the car tore off down the street at a speed that it must not have hit for the last half a century. "Rocky's making the calls you told her to, sir," Bruno announced. "Fine. Now, Dennis, what was this about your Master?" I explained what had happened, concluding with an account of the frog and the snake. "And while you were watching that, your Master just faded away?" "Yes. If he'd kept at me much longer, he'd have learned everything he was looking for. I couldn't have stood out against him. So why did he go?" "One more question, first. What did you feel about that frog? Precisely." "It was ugly. I felt... disgusted." "Was it anything like the way you felt at the fight tonight?" "Worse." "But the same sort of thing? Ugliness, then disgust and nausea?" "Yes." "Then those are the weapons we'll fight them with! Dennis, my son! Before this night is over, you will be a great hero of the revolution!" "Don't I deserve an explanation, or does the revolution need ignorant heroes?" "When you left the fight you looked so distressed that I was a bit amused. Dennis is such an esthete still, I thought. And then I remembered the old saw: Like Master , like man . Turn it around, and it's the formula for our weapon: Like man , like Master . The Masters are just their own pets writ large. They're esthetes, every last one of them. And we're their favorite art-form. A human brain is the clay they work in. They order our minds just the way they order the Northern Lights. That's why they prefer an intelligent, educated pet to an undeveloped Dingo. The Dingoes are lumpy clay, warped canvas, faulty marble." "They must feel about a Dingo the way I do about Salvador Dali," Julie said. She always wanted to argue about Salvador Dali with me, because she knows I like him. "Or the way I feel about prize fights," I suggested. "Or any experience," Daddy concluded, "that offends a person's esthetic sensibilities. They just can't stand ugliness." We were silent for a while, considering this. Except Bruno. "Give yourself time, Dennis. You'll get so you like a fight. Kelly just wasn't in form tonight, that's all." Before I could answer, the limousine was sailing down a concrete ramp into a brightly lit garage. "The hospital," Bruno announced. A man in a white robe approached us. "Everything is ready, Mr. White. As soon as we received your call, we set to work." "The radiomen are here, too?" "They're working with our technicians already. And Mrs. Schwartz said she'd join her husband directly." A terrible light suddenly kindled the night sky outside the garage. "The Masters!" I cried. "Damnation, the bombs!" Daddy exclaimed. "I forgot about them. Dennis, go with the doctor and do what he says. I have to call up stop the bombings." "What are they bombing?" "They're trying to land one in the Van Allen Belt. I tried to tell them it wouldn't do any good. They tried it in #, and it didn't accomplish a thing. But they were getting desT# ir perate, and I couldn't suggest any better plan. But now it would be disastrous if they detonated a bomb in the Van Allen Belt, because it will knock out radio communications, and we're going to be needing them. Bruno, Julie, wait in the car for me." A team of doctors led me down the long enamel-white corridors to a room filled with a complicated array of electrical and surgical equipment. The doctor-in-chief indicated that I was to lie down on an uncomfortable metal pallet. When I had done so, two steel bars were clamped on either side of my head. The doctor held a rubber mask over my mouth and nose. "Breathe deeply," he said. The anesthetic worked quickly. IX D addy was yelling at the doctor when I woke up. "Did you have to use an anesthetic? We don't have time to waste on daintiness." "The placement of the electrodes is a very delicate operation. He should be awake in any moment." "I'm awake," I said. The doctor rushed over to my pallet. "Don't move your head," he warned. Rather unnecessarily, it seemed, for my head was still clamped in the steel vice, although I was now propped up into a sitting position. "How are you feeling?" Daddy asked. "Miserable." "That's fine. Now, listen: the machine behind you ("Don't look," the doctor interrupted.) is an electroencephalograph. It records brain waves." The doctor broke in again: "There are electrodes in six different areas. I've tried to explain to your father that we're uncertain where perceptions of an esthetic nature are centered. Little work has been done since -- " "Later, doctor, later. Now what I want Dennis to do is suffer. Actually, it's White Fang who will suffer. White Fang must drown in misery. I've already arranged some suitable entertainments, but you should tell me right now if there's anything especially distasteful to you that we might get. Some little phobia all your own." "Please -- explain what this is about?" "Your electroencephalograms are being taken to every radio station in the city. The wave patterns will be amplified and broadcast over AM and FM. Every station in the country, in the world, is standing by to pick them up. Tomorrow night we'll give the Masters a concert like they've never heard before." A man in workclothes brought m a blackboard and gave it to Daddy. "Doctor, you have better fingernails than I do. Rub them over this slate." It made an intolerable noise, which the doctor kept up for a solid minute. "How does the graph look?" Daddy asked. "Largest responses are in the sensory area. But fairly generalized else where, especially during the firsr twenty seconds. " "Well, there's lots more coming. Look at these pictures, Dennis." He showed me illustrations from a medical encyclopedia that I will refrain from describing here. The people in the pictures were beyond the reach of medicine. Beyond the reach, even, of sympathy. "The response is stronger and more general now. Quite well defined." Daddy passed a vial of formaldehyde beneath my nose. It was actually more a bottle than a vial, and in it -- I screamed. "Excellent," the doctor said. "Bring in the band," said Daddy. A crew of four men with musical instruments I was unfamiliar with (they were, I've since learned, electric guitar, musical saw, accordion, and tuba) entered the room. They were dressed in outlandish costumes: glorified work clothes in garish colors garnished with all sorts of leather and metal accessories. On their heads were ridiculous, flaring bonnets. "Extraordinary," the doctor said, "he's already responding." "Go to it, boys," Daddy said. They began -- well, they began to sing. It was like singing. Their untuned instruments blasted out a stupid One-two-three, Onetwo-three repetitive melody, which they accompanied with strident screams of "Roll out the bare ul." When I thought that this new attack on my sensibilities had reached the threshold of tolerance, Daddy, who had been watching me intently, leaped up and began to slam his feet on the floor and join them in that awful song. Daddy has a terrible voice for singing. It rasps. But his voice was the least of it; it was his behavior that was so mortifying. I wanted to turn my head away, but the vice held it fast. For a man of such natural dignity to so debase himself, and that man my own father! This was, of course, just the response Daddy was looking for. When they had finished their gross display, I begged for a moment's reprieve. Daddy dismissed the band and returned the accordion player his cowboy hat. "Don't work him too hard, until we have some idea of his breaking point," the doctor advised. "Besides, I'd like to see the intern just a minute, if you'll excuse me. The photographs gave me an idea: thre are some patients in the hospital..." "Have you thought of anything, Dennis?" "In a way, yes. Is Bruno still around?" "He should be downstairs," "If he were to tell me about the things he enjoys -- the very worst things -- in the long run he might think of more horrors than you. They seem to come naturally to him." "Good idea. I'll send for him." "Roxanna, too, if she's down there. I remember how she watched me at the boxing match. She'd be able to help you quite a lot." As Daddy left the room, the docIF tor returned, escorting a caravan of litters. Photographs are no equivalent for the real thing. I t went on that way for four hours, and every minute seemed worse than the one before. Bruno had a limitless imagination, especially when it was abetted by alcohol and his wife. He told me about his favorite fight to begin with. He told me what he would like to do with pets, and what he would like to do, if he had more time. Then he discoursed on the mysteries of love, a subject on which Rocky, too, was eloquent. After two hours of these and other pleasures, I asked to have some coffee. Rocky left for it and returned with a steaming mug from which I took one greedy swallow before I realized it was not coffee. Rocky had remembered how I felt about blood. When I had been revived with smelling salts, Daddy brought in more entertainers. They had come to the hospital directly after their last fight at the Armory. For some reason, most of what happened after that point I can no longer remember. f X W e were out on the tile terrace of the hospital, Daddy, Julie, and I. Below us the Mississippi was a pool of utter blackness and unknown extent. It was an hour after sunset, and the moon had not yet risen. The only light came from the North, where the great auroral floodlight swept out from the horizon across the constellations. "Five minutes," Daddy announced nervously. In five minutes radio stations all over the world would begin to broadcast my performance of the night before. I had heard an aural equivalent of my electroencephalograms, and I wasn't worried. In a war based on esthetics, that recording was a doomsday machine. "Does your head still hurt?" Julie asked, brushing a feather-light hand over my bandages. "Only when I try to remember last night." "Let me kiss the hurt away." "Three minutes," Daddy announced, "and stop fhat. You're making me nervous." Julie straightened her blouse, which was made of some wonderful. sheer, crinkly nylon. I had really begun to admire some of the uses of clothing. We watched the aurora. All over the city, lights had been turned off. Everyone, the whole world, was watching the aurora. "What will you do now that you're High Cathode?" Tulie asked, to make conversation. "In a few minutes the revolution should be over. I don't think I'd like administrative work. Not after this," Daddy said. "You're going to resign?" "As soon as they let me. I've got the itch to paint some more. Did you know I paint? I did a self-portrait once that's over my desk. I think it's pretty good. In any case, it's traditional for retired generals to paint. And then I might write my memoirs. I've picked a title for them: The Esthetic Revolution" "Ten seconds," I said. We watched the northern skyline. The aurora was a curtain of bluish light across which bands and streamers of intense whiteness danced and played. At first you couldn't notice any difference. The spectacle glimmered with the same rare beauty that has belonged to it from time immemorial, but tonight its beauty was that of a somber Dies Irae , played just for us. Then one of the white bands that was shooting up from the horizon disappeared, like an electric light being switched off. It seemed unnaturally abrupt, but I couldn't be sure. For a long while nothing more happened. But when five of the arcing lights snapped out of the sky at the same moment, I knew that the Masters were beginning their exodus. "Elephantiasis, I'll bet." "What's that, Dennis?' "The picture you showed me. I can remember it very clearly." The auroral display was less bright by half when they came to the hillbilly band. I turned on the radio just to be sure. Through all the blasts and shrieks and whistles of my neural patterns, there was an unmistakable rhythm of Oom-pahpah, Oom-pah-pah. When the broadcast came to Rocky's unspeakable potion, there was a tremendous blast across the heavens. For an instant the entire sky was stained white. The white faded. The aurora was only a dim blue-white shadow in the north. There was hardly a trace of beauty in it. It flickered meaninglessly in random patterns. The Masters had left Earth. They j S#S###N Great Science-Fiction Stories and Exciting Science-Fact Articles in May issue contains Explosions in Space .by Ben Bova, The Alien Psyche by Tom Purdom, The Effectives by Zenna Henderson -- and many more. Don't miss it! # IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor : I quit buying If a couple of years ago because most of the stuff printed in it was second best. Now it's the best science-fiction magazine on the market. What happened? I just read the first installment of Star child and, knowing me, I will probably miss the other two installments. But I'll try not to. It's starting out to read like many of the old-time novels. That's what makes it so interesting. A lot of science fiction is becoming dull and boring. It seems most of the writers are of the mind that whatever they write should be reasonably able to come true. Which is fine if you want to be a forecaster. Me, I like my science fiction unbelievable and with all kinds of impossibilities like spacelings and pyropods. I'm in complete accord with Mr. John Cochran and his wishes to have good science fiction brought to television. I'm sick of having to defend science fiction novels to all my friends who don't read it, after they've seen some monster movie. But how do we go about it? Mr. Cochran suggests writing the networks. I don't think that would work simply because all of us good-intentioned people won't write. We'll all sit back and think the other one is doing it... or we'll think no one is doing it and we won't want to be the only one. There must be someone out there in readerland who has the perfect solution in his mind... so please write to If and let's see what can be done to further good sf on TV. When are you going to have more Cordwainer Smith and his wonderful underpeople stories? Will they ever be put in a novel? I can't seem to get enough of them. Now, if you have the time could you answer a few questions for me? If a would-be writer sent you a story with a good plot, etc., but it was not well written, what would you do? There must be all kinds of people like myself!) who have over developed imaginations, but lack the special talent it takes to put it down on paper. Don't suggest a writing school Not only do I not have the time but my work keeps me moving from month to month and I never know where I might be tomorrow. Besides, sometimes I'm convinced I'm too stupid to learn anything any more -- things like spelling, sentence structure and all the things it takes to be a good writer. Or more likely the truth is I'm just too lazy. -- Ramona Alderson, Box #, Kneeland, California.  What happened? Well, for one thing -- a lot of hard work happened! Cordwainer Smith has gone from underpeople to Down Under people for a while -- he's on a research sabbatical among the aborigines in New Zealand. But he'll be fcack in production before long, and when he is we'll try to get him back in . What to do with a story that has a good idea but no literary skill? You've put your finger on the hardest problem of them all. (Fortunately for an editor's peace of mind, it doesn't happen often -- most people, by the time they have anything to say in the first place, can usually manage to say it in a presentable way.) All we really can do when it does happen, though, is say : Don't be "too lazy". Do learn your skills. Do work at writing... Sometimes it works. At least three of today's best sf writers started out terrible and gradually, painfully, learned their craft. -- The Editor.    Dear Editor: I agree whole-heartedly that you should enlarge the most exciting part of If, namely Hue  Cry. Why don't you use microscopic print, such as they did in the days of This would probably appease those who enjoy the fiction more than the lettercol. You'd get more in the same amount of space. You did use smallprint letters before Farnham's Freehold pushed Hue  Cry out for three issues. Why not go back? Being a relative newcomer to the world of sf magazines (they're awfully hard to find out here), I looked forward with mixed emotions to my first Retief story. Then when I read it, I couldn't make heads nor tails of what was up. From then on I skipped the Retief tales, wondering why you were so proud of having all of his adventures in , exclusively. But the other day I bought a collection of Retief stories and after reading the first one, I understood what Retief was all about. Then I went back and eagerly devoured all the other Retief stories I had accumulated, and now I easily see why you are so proud of yourselves. (It was your recent Laumer serial that gave me the idea that the Retief series might be worth reading.) Your covers: The December '# cover was even better (believe it or not) than the October '# cover was bad. These were your extremes, covering an unbelievable range, for #. Or any other times, for that matter. I've never seen a better cover than the one on the December issue. Well, I guess I've been a pain in the neck long enough. You may find it hard to believe after all this, but I like your mags better than the others. Well, at least most of the time. -- Danny Hughes,# Nolen Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana #.  Small print? Good idea! -- The Editor .    Dear Editor: On the editorial page of your December, # issue you say, "In every issue of IF we run a 'first' story by someone who has never IF before appeared in a professional magazine. This months is L. D. Ogle's The Heat Racers , a fresh and through that magazine page by page and I didn't find any story by L. D. Ogle called The Heat Racers. Any explanations? Answering John D. Cochran in the same issue: It's my firm belief that so-called science fiction in TV and movies is not science fiction. They are really just plain old horror movies, although I do agree with you that Outer Limits comes close. It is also my opinion that the reason these are horror shows is the basic evil of man showing. As you can see, they always show the alien as an enemy. Every monster is out to kill people and to destroy our cities. I think this is the basic emotion of man coming through. How do you think the great civilizations of the past became so? By slavery and murder -- by the same basic survival pattern of an animal, that the strong shall survive by feeding upon the weak. I can just see what would happen now if we met beings from another planet. At first fear and an attempt to destroy them. Then, if we find we are stronger, we will move in and push them around -- just as the American Indian was treated. What I am waiting for is that d.y when we meet a civilization that is really peaceful, but after we make a try at showing our superiority they slap us down as we do a small child. They tell us to get back into our playpen until we are mature enough to come out. -- Henry K. Allen, # Farmers Avenue, Tempe, Arizona #.  Well, actually those ancient civilizations didn't really get powerful because they held slaves. It was just that slavery was the best way available of organizing energy then, of keeping the populace alive and creating a surplus of available effort for state purposes. We do things better now... or anyway, differently... Explanation of what happened to the Ogle story? Well, actually, we got lost in our time machine. We wer. thinking of the next issue. December's first-time-in-print author was Larry Niven, with The Coldest Place. (And this month's is John McCallum, a Canadian fireman, with Our Martian Neighbors.) -- The Editor.    Dear Editor: Ever since I subscribed to If in June, I've liked most of the stories, the features and the magazine itself. I hope If never goes large-size. I hope also that If avoids the advertisements that clutters others. If should be a special, distinctive magazine -- the only monthly to come out bi-monthly (in September), the publisher of Retief, the only magazine I know that has a new author presented every month. The recent stories I've liked best have been The Slaves of Gree , The Prince and the Pirate , The Castle of Light , Rescue Mission, The Hounds of Hell, The Perfect People, When Time Was New , At the Top of the World and Pig in a Pokey -- but they're all good. (Incidentally, The Coldest Place has been disproved. The back of Mercury has just been discovered to be # degrees Fahrenheit.) More Cordwainer Smith stories would be good. I like Hue  Cry and the editorials. If's a good magazine ! -- Charles Obler, Box # Valleybrook Road, Venetia, Pennsylvania #. Dear Editor: Pm writing this letter in the hope their plan to cancel The Outer Limits. This is the only true series on TV directed totally to sf, without the typical no-plot monster stories. The episodes have mostly very weak plots aixd very few times do they come from actual stories written by sf authors. If all science-fiction fans sent in Cuter Limits on the air, then they would have to turn our way. -- Tom Stratmoen, # North Salem, Ar   Dear Editor: I wonder whether someone could help me with the name of a novel I read some time ago. The plot centered around an extremely powerful, jet black man-shaped being which was virtually invulnerable and functioned as a nemesis of evil. It left frosted footprints and was apparently a sort of energy sump. -- J. #. Alyea, # Drury Lane, Cape Girardeau, Missouri #.    Dear Editor: For some time the main way to communicate with other fans was only by letter but now, in the past decade or so, a more personal method of correspondence became available and small groups began to quietly employ it to exchange their ideas. This was the tape recorder, of course -- the nearest thing and best thing to a telephone conversation. My recorder holds any size reel up to seven inches, dual or full track monophonic, with speeds of # and # i.p.s. Please let me know you're there, so we can get something going ! -- Roger Alan Cox, # Oakland Avenue, Augusta, Georgia #.    Dear Editor: Does anyone Out There know if Andre Norton has had any mag stories other than Mousetrap in #, and if so what their titles, magazines and dates were? By the way, how about getting Miss Norton to serialize her excellent stories in , and maybe a few from Hal Clement? -- Jack Baldwin, # North Alison Street, Santa Barbara, California #.  Andre Norton? We'd like that. Hal Clement? Well, how about next month? -- The Editor .    That's about all we can get in this time. Back next month with more letters, if we can find the room... and with some stories that are going to squeeze that room pretty tight, come to think of it. First there's the conclusion of John Brunner's The Altar at Asconel... then there's a #-o-n-g novelette by Hal Clement called Raindrop (you'll like Raindrop! It's a great, orbiting globe of water out in space)... and what else we'll have room for, only time and the printers will tell. Then comes June, beginning Skylark DuQuesne (yes, it was worth waiting for!) Then July has more of the Skylark, plus another #-o-n-g novelette by a new collaboration team that we think will make their mark in science fiction. The name of the story: Research Alpha. The names of the writers : James H. Schmitz and A. E. Van Vogt. Also, there are assorted Fritz Leibers and Keith Laumers to go in somewhere, and -- well, wait and see! -- The Editor . IFif you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy , per # ,ssucs v m foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: M # Issues (a) #... # Issues (tv #... # Issues (tv #...  Name City p Address Zone State  Seated, #. to r. : Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Photo by Philippe Halsmart Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling. "We're looking for people who want to write" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School; Former editor, Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Three years ago, we started the Famous Writers School to help people who want to write acquire the skill and craftsmanship it takes to break into print. Over many months, we poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. The course begins with the fundamentals of good writing upon which every writing career must be built. Then you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have sold their work to more than # publications. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can benefit from this training, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability, you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. j Famous Writers School j Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut j I want to know if I have writing aptitude, j Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude j Test and #-page illustrated brochure. mi . Mrs Age Miss (please print) Street City County... State Zip Code... , j The School is accredited by Accrediting : Commission, National Home Study Council. MAY #  #c Hal (Jeiiieiil lrviii!j E. (,o, Jr. ConcludingWorlds of the finest in science fiction Don't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by ail your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Retief stories and others appear regularly in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars! still to come! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! 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The publisher assumes no responsibitty lor unsolicited materioL All stories ore Ikfiofi, and ony simllorily between oharaclem and actual persoos b coincidental. Printed hi the U. #. A. by Ae Guinn Company, New York #, N, Y When is T he cloud is still no bigger than a man's hand, but there it is: die time is rapidly drawing near when man will be able to replace his damaged parts widi artifacts -- a little later, build in better parts than nature ever designed -- later still, instill in his own body equipment to handle functions nature never dreamed of. A most interesting and enjoyable book. The SemUArtificiak Man by Harold M. Schmeck, Jr. (Walker), makes it clear just how close we are to at least the first of these goals. There are scores of persons now alive who ought in all reason to be dead -- persons whose kidneys have ceased to function, whose hearts have given out or gone into uncontrolled fibrillation, whose lungs have stopped supplying the blood with oxygen. ft is not science fiction but fact that in all of these cases doctors, engineers, chemists and physicists, working together, have managed to produce machines to take up the work that the so-called "vital organs" of the body no longer can do. The machines do not work every time. Sometimes they do sot even work iudcfinitefy. But it k a twentieth century miracle that they work at all. For those kidney patients in the Pacific Northwest who, twice a week. He on a hospital bed and watch their own blood flow oat into a machine composed of pumps and cellophane IF  Editoriai m Robot  sheets, filtering out the poisons their own organs are helpless to deal with, the measures of these accoinplishments of medicine are, literally, life or death. T hat's an fact, not fancy -- for further information, see Schmeck's book, or your daily paper. But there's more to the story than that. It is only a step from replacing a damaged organ to building one that is better -- not a repair but an improvement. The human lung is a marvelous creation, but it is liable to pneumonia, cancer, emphysema and a hundred other ailments; and it is quite helpless to deal with even so simple a problem as extracting oxygen from the plentiful supply in seawater. It is not l;:.rd to imagine that some sort of electreHfik lungsubstitute will one day come off the drawing boards and into use -- capable of keeping our blood oxygenated by extracting the vital gas from air, from water, or if need be from its own built-in storage supplies if we choose to wander for a time in empty space. There is even a name for the sort of hybrid creature, half man and half machine, that will use these super-prosthetics: the "cyborg", or cybernetic organism. WThat would you call them? Men? Or robots? The chances are that the time will come when it's going to be hard to Secrets entrusted to a few be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of die miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden prpcesses of mans mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shroud ed in mystery to avoid their destruc don by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the diousands of men and women who nrivately use them in their homes towy. The Rosicrucians (not a religious UBe Rosicrucians c organizadon) an age-old brotherhood of learnings ve preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a uee copy of the book, The Mastery of Life." Within its Images may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe t.B.N, I Scribe t.B.N. I I San Jose, California i I Please send me theyVe# book. Tin Mastery I I of Life, wfaidi explains how I may learn to j I use my hicaldes and powers of mind.  i I I Name i ! I I Address ' IF  Nov.lla Harmless little RaindrepI If was life or death to one human, and feast or famine to the racfl I iCTt's not very comfortable footX ing, but at least you can't fall off." Even through the helmet phones, Silbert's voice carried an edge that Bresnahan felt sure was amused contempt. The younger man saw no point in trying to hide his fear; he was no veteran of space and knew that it would be silly to pretend otherwise "My mind admits that, but my stomach isn't so sure," he replied. "It can't decide whether things wffl be better when I can't see so fat, or whether I should just give up and take a running dive back there." His metal-clad arm gestured toward the station and its comfortable spin hanging half a mile away. Technically the wheel-shaped structure in its synchronous orbit was above the two men, but it took careful observing to decide which way was really "up." "You wouldn't make it," Silbert replied. "If you had solid footing for a jump you might get that far, since twenty feet a second would take you away from here permanently. But speed and velocity are two different animals. I wouldn't trust even myself to make such a jump in the right direction -- and I know the vectors better than you do by a long shot. Which way would you jump? Right at the station? Or ahead of it, or behind it? And which is ahead and which is behind? Do you know?" "I know which is ahead, since I can see it move against the star background, but I wouldn't know which way to jump. I think it should be ahead, since the rotation of this overgrown raindrop gives us less linear speed than the station's orbit; but I wouldn't know how far ahead," Silbert said. "Good for you." Bresnahan noted what he hoped was approval in the spaceman's tone as well as in his words. "You're right as far as you committed yourself, and I wouldn't dare go any farther myself. In any case, jumping off this stuff is a losing game." "I can believe that. Just walking on it makes me feel as though I were usurping a Biblical prerogative." The computerman's arm waved again, this time at the surface underfoot, and he tried to stamp on it at the same moment. The latter gesture produced odd results. The material, which looked a little like clear jelly, gave under the boot but bulged upward all around it. The bulge moved outward very slowly in all directions, the star patterns reflected in the suH face writhing as it passed. As thK bulge's radius increased its height lessened, as with a ripple spreading on a pond. It might have been an ultra-slow motion picture of such a ripple, except that it did not travel far enough. It died out less than two yards from Bresnahan's foot, though it took well over a minute to get that far. "Yeah, I know what you mean. Walking on water was kind of a divine gift, wasn't it? Well, you can always remember we're not right on the water. There's the pressure film, even if you can't see it." "That's so. Well, let's get on to the lock. Being inside this thing can't be much worse than walking around on its surface, and I have a report to make up." Silbert started walking again at this request, though the jellylike response of the water to his footfalls made the resulting gait rather odd. He kept talking as he led the way. "How come that friend of yours can't come down from the station and look things over for himself? Why should you have to give the dope to him second-hand? Can't he take weightlessness?" "Better than I can, I suspect," replied Bresnahan, "but he's not my friend. He's my boss, and pays the bills. Mine not to reason why, mine but to act or fry. He already knows as much as most people do about Raindrop, here. What more he expects to get from me I'm not sure. I just hope that what I can find to teU him makes him happy. I take it this is the lock." T hey had reached a disk of metal sorr thirty feet in diameter, projecting about two feet from the surface of the satellite. It continued below the surface for a distance which refraction made hard to estimate. Its water line was marked by a ring of black, rubbery-looking material where the pressure film adhered to it. The men had been quite close to it when they landed on Raindrop's surface a few minutes before, but it is hard to make out landscape details on a water surface under a black, starfilled sky; the reflection underfoot is not very different from the original above. A five-mile radius of curvature puts the reflected images far enough down so that human depth perception is no help. Waves betrayed themselves, of course, and might have shown the lock's location -- but under a gravitational acceleration of about a tenth of an inch per second squared, the urface waves raised by space-suit boots traveled much more slowly than the men who wore them. And with their high internal energy losses they didn't get far enough to be useful. As a result, Bresnahan had not realized that the lock was at hand until they were almost upon it. Even Silbert, who had known about where they would land and could orient himself with Raindrop's rotation axis by celestial reference features, did not actually see it until it was only a few yards away. "This is the place, all right," he acknowledged. "That little plate near the edge is the control panel. We'll use the manhole; no need to open the main hatch as we do when it's a matter of cargo." He bent over -- slowly enough to keep his feet on the metal -- and punched one of the buttons on the panel he . had pointed out. A tiny light promptly flashed green, and he punched a second button. A yard-square trap opened inward, revealing the top of a ladder. Silbert seized the highest rung and pulled himself through the opening head first -- when a man weighs less than an ounce in full space panoply it makes little real difference when he elects to traverse a ladder head downward. Bresnahan followed and found himself in a cylindrical chamber which took up most of the inside of the lock structure. It could now be seen that this must extend some forty feet into the body of Raindrop. At the inner end of the compartment, where curved and flat walls met, a smaller chamber was partitioned off. Silbert dove in this direction. "This is a personnel lock," he remarked. "We'll use it; it saves flooding the whole chamber." "We can use ordinary spacesuits?" "Might as well. If we were going to stay long enough for real work, we'd change -- there is local equipment in those cabinets along the wall. Spacesuits are safe enough, but pretty clumsy when it comes to fine manipulation." "For me, they're clumsy for anything at all." "Well, we can change if you want; but I understood that this was to be a fairly quick visit, and that you I IF were to get a report back pronto. Or did I misread the tone your friend Weisanen was using?" "I guess you didn't, at that. Well go as we are. It still sounds queer to go swimming in a spacesuit." "No queerer than walking on water Come on, the little lock will hold both of us." The spaceman opened the door manually -- there seemed to be no power controls involved -- and the two entered a room some five feet square and seven high. Operation of the lock seemed simple; Silbert closed the door they had just used and turned a latch to secure it, then opened another manual valve on the other side of the chamber, A jet of water squirted in and filled the space in half a minute. Then he simply opened a door in the same wall with the valve, and the spacesuited figures swam out. This was not as bad as walking on what had seemed like nothingness. Bresnahan was a good swimmer and experienced free diver, and was used to being suspended in a medium where one couldn't see very far. The water was clear, though not as clear as that sometimes found in Earth's tropical seas. There was no easy way to tell just how far vision could reach, since nothing familiar and of known size was in view except for  the lock they had just quitted. There were no fishes -- Raindrop's owners were still debating the advisability of establishing them there -- and none of tbt jant life was familiar, at least to Bresnahan. He knew that the big sere of water had been seeded by "artifidaT e forms -- algae and bacteria whose genetic patterns had been altered to let them live in a "sea" so different from Earth's. n aindrop was composed of the iV nuclei of several small comets, or rather what was left of those nuclei after some of their mass had been used in reaction motors to put them into orbit about the earth. TTiey had been encased in a polymer film sprayed on to form a pressure seal, and then melted by solar energy, concentrated by giant foil mirrors. Traces of the original wrapping were still around, but its function had been replaced by one of the first tailored life forms to be established after the mass was liquid. This was a modification of one of the gelatin-capsule algae, which now encased all of Raindrop in a microsccically Hhm film able to heal itself after small meteoroid punctures, and strong enough to maintain about a quarter of an atmosphere's pressure on the contents. The biological engineer who had done that tailoring job still regarded it as his professional masterpiece. The methane present in the origmal comet material had been oxidized by other bacteria to water and carbon dioxide, the oxygen of course coming from normal photosynthesis. A good deal of the ammonia was still present, and furnished the principal reason why genetic tailoring was still necessary on life forms being transplanted to the weightless aquarium. The men were drifting very slowIF ly away from the lock, though they bad stopped swimming, and the younger one asked, "How do we find our way back here if we get out of sight?" "The best trick is not to get out of sight. Unless you want to examine the core, which I've never done, you'll see everything there is to see right here. There is sonic and magnetic gear -- homing equipment -- tn your suit if you need it, though I haven't checked you out on its use. You'd better stay with me. I can probably show you what's needed. Just what points do you think Weisanen wants covered?" "Well, he knows the general physical setup -- temperature, rotation, general current pattern, the nature of the skin. He knows whafs be planted here at various times; but ifs hard to keep up to date on what's evolved since. These tailored life forms aren't very stable toward mutation influences, and a new-stocked aquarium isn't a very stable ecologies environment He'll want to know what's here now in tiie way of usable plants, I suppose. You inow the Agency sold Raindrop to a private ooncem after the last election. The importance of basic research, hvA Aey would sort of like a profit to ttpori to the sftockholders as wdl. "Amen. Fm a stockholder." "Oh? Well, it docs cost something to keep supply ships coming up here, and -- " ii'Troe enough. Then this Weis-L anen character represents the new owners? I wonder if I should think of him as my boss or iny enaployee." "I think he is one of them." "Hmph. No wonder." "No wonder what?" "He and his wife are the first people I ever knew to treat a space flight like a run in a private yacht, I suppose that someone who could buy Raindrop wouldn't be bothered by a Httlc expense like a private Phoenix rocket" "I suppose not. Of course, it isn't as bad as it was in the days of chemical motors, when it took a big commercial concern or a fair-sized government to launch a manned spaceship." "Maybe not; but with fourteen little unusual to find a really rich individual, in the old Ford-Carnegie tradition. Most big concerns are me. "Wefl, I guess Weisanen owns a bigger piece of Raindrop than you do. Anyway, he's my boss, whether he's yours or not and he wants a repent from me, and I can't sea much to rqport on. What life is tiiere in this place besides the stuff forming the surface skin?" "Oh, lots. You just aren't looking carefully enough. A lot of it is microscopic, of course; there are fakiy ordinary varieties of pond-scum drifting aH around us. They're the main reason we can see only a couple of hundred yards, and they carry on most of the photosynthesis. Then are lots of non-photosynthetic orgtfip isms -- bacteria -- producing carbon dioxide just as in any balanced eoII ology on Earth, though this place is a long way from being balanced. Sometimes the algae get so thick you can't see twenty feet, sometimes the bacteria get the upper hand. The balance keeps hunting around even when no new forms are appearing or being introduced. We probably brought a few new bacteria in with us on our suits just now; whether any of them can survive with the ammonia content of Raindrop this high I don't know, but if so the ecology will get another nudge. "There are lots of larger plants, too -- mostly modifications of the big seaweeds of Earth's oceans. The lock behind us is overgrown with them, as you can see -- you can look more closely as we go back -- and a lot of them grow in contact with the outer skin, where the light is best. Quite a few are free-floating, but of course selection works fast on those. There are slow convection currents, because of Raindrop's size and rotation, which exchange water between the illuminated outer regions and the darkness inside. Free-floating weeds either adapt to long periods of darkness or die out fast. Since there is a good deal of hard radiation near the surface, there is also quite a lot of unplanned mutation over and above the regular genetailoring products we are constantly adding to' the pot. And since most of the organisms here have short life spans, evolution goes on rapidly." "Weisanen knows all that perfectly well," replied Bresnahan. "What he seems to want is a snapshot -- a report on just what the present spectrum of life forms is like." "I've summed it up. Anything more detailed would be wrong next week. You can look at the stuff around us -- there. Those filaments which just tangled themselves oa your equipment clip are a good example, and there are some bigger ones if you want there -- just in reach. It would take microscopic study to show how they differ from the ones you'd have gotten a week ago or a year ago, but they're different. There will be no spectacular change unless so much growth builds up inside the surface film that tha sunlight is cut down seriously. Then the selection factors will change and a radically new batch -- probably of scavenger fungi -- will develop and spread. It's happened before. We'va gone through at least four cycles of that sort in the three years Fva worked here." B resnahan frowned thoughtfully, though the facial gesture was not very meaningful inside a space helmet. "I can see where this isn't going to be much of a report," he remarked. "It would have made more sense if you'd brought a plankton net and some vacuum jars and brought up specimens for him to look over himself," replied Silbert. "Or wouldn't they mean anything to him? Is he a biologist or just a manager?" "I couldn't say." "How come? How can you woik for him and not know that much?" "Working for him is something new. I've worked for Raindrop ever since I started working, but I didn't IF meet Weisanen until three weeks go. I haven't been with him more than two or three hours' total time ince. I haven't talked with him during those hours; I've listened while he told me what to do." "You mean he's one of those highhanded types? What's your job, anyway?" "There's nothing tough or unpleasant about him; he's just the boss. I'm a computer specialist --  programming and maintenance, oi was until he picked me to come up here to Raindrop with him and his wife. What my job here will be, youHl have to get from him. There are computers in the station, I noticed, but nothing calling for fulltime work from anyone. Why he picked me I can't guess. I should tiiink though, that he'd have asked you rather than me to make this report, since whatever I am I'm no biologist." "Well, neither am I. I just work here." Bresnahan stared in astonishment. "Not a biologist? But aren't you in efaarge of this place? Haven't you been the local director for three years, in charge of planting the new He forms that were sent up, and reporting what happened to them, and how Raindrop was holding together, and all -- ?" "All is right. Fm the bo's'un tight and the midshipmite and the crew of the captain's gig. I'm the boss because I'm the only one here full time; but that doesn't make me a biologist. I got this job because I have a decently high zero-gee tolerance and had had experience in space. I was a space-station handyman before I came here." "Then what sort of flumdiddle is going on? Isn't there a professional anywhere in this organization? I've heard stories of the army using biochemists for painters and bricklayers for clerks, but I never really believed them. Besides, Raindrop doesn'v belong to an army -- it isn't even a government outfit any more. It's being run by a private outfit which I assumed was hoping to make a profit out of it. Why in blazes is there no biologist at what has always been supposed to be a biological research station, devoted to finding people like what little there is to eat?" g ilbert's shrug was just discernible from outside his suit. "No one ever confided in me," he replied. "I was given a pretty good briefing on the job when I first took it over, but that didn't include an extension course in biology or biophysics. As far as I can tell they've been satisfied with what I've done. Whatever they wanted out of Raindrop doesn't seem to call for high-caliber professionals on the spot. I inspect to make sure no leaks too big for the algae to handle show up, I plant any new life forms they send up to be established here, and I collect regularly and send back to Earth the samples of what life there is. The last general sampling was nearly a month ago, and another is due in a few days. Maybe your boss could make do with that data -- or if you like I can offer to make the regular sampling run right away instead ol at the scheduled time. After an, he may be my boss too instead of die other way around, so I should bo reporting to him." Bresnahan thought for a moment "All right," he said. "I'm in no position to make either a decent collection or a decent report, as things stand. Let's go back to the station, tell him what's what, and let him decide what he does want. Maybe it's just a case of a new boss not knowing the ropes and trying to find out." "I'd question that, somehow, but can't think of anything better to do. Come on." Silbert swam back toward the lock from which they had emerged only a few minutes before. They had drifted far enough from it in that time so that its details had faded to a greenish blur, but there was no trouble locating the big cylinder. The door they had used was still open. Silbert pulled himself through, lent Bresnahan a hand in doing likewise, closed the portal, and started a small pump. The pressure head was only the quarter atmosphere maintained by the tension of the alga skin, and emptying the chamber of water did not take long. The principal delay was caused by Bresnahan's failure to stand pcctly still; with gravity only a little over one five-thousandths Earth normal, it didn't take much disturbance to slosh some water away from the bottom of the lock where the pump intake was located. Silbert waited for some of it to sete, but lacked the patience lo watt foT it all. When he opened die door into the larg lock chambo: the men were accompanied tluroug it by several large obules of boiling liquid. "Wasteful, but helps a bit," remarked the spaceman as he opened the outside portal and the two were wafted dirough it by the escaping vapor. "Watch out -- hang on there. You don't have escape velocity, but you'd be quite a while getting back to the suriace if you let yourself blow away." He seized a convenient limb of esnahan's space armor as the younger man drifted by, and since he was well anchored himself to the top rung of the ladder was able to arrest the other's flight. Carefully they stepped away from the hatch, Silbert touching die closing button widi one toe as he passed it, and looked for the orbiting station. This, of course, was directly overhead. The same temptation which Bresnahan had feh earlier to make a jump for it came back with some force; but Silbert had a safer technique. He took a small tube equipped with peep-sights from the equipment clip at his side and aimed it very carefully at the projecting bid) of the wheel-shaped station -- the only part of the hub visible, since the station's equator was paralld to dial of Raindrop and the structure was therefore edge-on to them. A bright yellow gjow from the target produced a grunt of satisfaction from Silbert, and he fingered a button on the tube. The laser beam, invisible kt the surrounding vacuum, flicked IF on and off in a precisely timed signal pattern which was reported faithfully by the source-return mirror at the target. Another response was almost as quick. Ill A faintly glowing object emerged from the hub and drifted rapidly toward Raindrop, though not quite toward the men. Its details were not clear at first, but as it approached it began to look more and more like a luminous cobweb. "Just a lattice of thin rods, doped with luminous paint for spotting and launched from the station by a spring gun," explained Silbert. "The line connecting it with the station isn't painted, and is just long enough to stop the grid about fifty feet from the water. It's launched with a small backward component relative to the station's orbit, and when the line stops it it will drift toward us. Jump for it when I give the word; you can't miss." Bresnahan was not as certain about the last statement as his companion seemed to be, but braced himself anyway. As the glowing spiderweb approached, however, he saw it was over a hundred feet across and realized that even he could jump straight enough to make contact. When Silbert gave the word, he sprang without hesitation. He had the usual moment of nausea and disorientation as he crossed the few yards to his target. Lacking experience, he had not "balanced" his jump perfectly and as a result made a couple of somersaults en route. This caused him ! lose track of his visual reference points, and with gravity already lacking he suffered the moment cf nearpanic which so many student pilots had experienced before him. Contact with one of the thin rods restored him, however; he gripped it frantically and was himself again. Silbert arrived a split second later and took charge of the remaining maneuvers. These consisted of c lapsing the "spiderweb" -- a matter of half a minute, in spite of its apparent complexity, because of tho ingenuity of its jointing -- and then starting his companion hand-overhand along the nearly invisible cord leading back to the station. The climb called for more coordination that was at first evident; the spacoman had to catch his less experienced companion twice as the latter missed his grip for the line. Had Silbert been going first tte situation might have been serioi. As it was, an extra tug on the rope enabled him to catch up each time with the helpless victim of basii physics. After the second accident, the guide spoke. "All right, don't climb any mMn We're going a little too fast as it k. Just hold on, to the rope now and to me when I give the word. The closing maneuver is a bit tricky, and it wouldn'f be practical to try te teach you the tricks on the spot and first time around." Silbert did have quite a problem. The initial velocities of the tW# men in their jumps for the spiderweb had not, of course, been the correct ones to intercept the station -- ti if it had been practical to count on their being so, the web would have been superfluous. The web's own mass was less than fifty pounds, which had not done much to the sum of those vectors as it absorbed its share of the men's momentum. Consequently, the men had an angular velocity with respect to the station, and they were approaching the latter. T 'o a seventeenth century mathematician, conservation of angular momentum may have been an abstract concept, but to Silbert it was an item of very real, practical, everyday experience -- just as the orbit of a comet is little more than a set of numbers to an astronomer while the orbit of a baseball is sometiling quite different to an outfielder. The problem this time was even worse than usual, partly because of Bresnahan's mass and still more because of his inexperience. As the two approached the station their sidewise motion became evident even to Bresnahan. He judged that they would strike near the rim rf the spinning structure, if they hit it at all, but Silbert had other ideas. Changing the direction of the spin axis by landing at the hub was one thing -- very minor one. Changing the rate of spin by meeting the edge Qould be a major nuisance, since much of the apparatus inside was built on and for Earth and had Earth's gravity taken for granted in its operation. Silbert therefore had no intention of making contact anywhere but at one of the "poles" of station. He was rather in the situation of a yo-yo whose string is winding up on the operator's finger; but he could exercise a little contrcrii br climbing as rapidly as possible "up" the cord toward the structure or allowing himself to slide "down" away from it. He had had plenty of experience, but he was several minutes playing them into a final collision with the entry valve, so dose to the center of mass of the station that the impact could produce only a tiny precession effect. Most of its result was a change in the wheel's orbit about Raindrop, and the whole maneuver had taken such a small fraction of an orbital period that this effect nearly erffset that produced when they had started up the rope. "Every so often," remarked the spaceman as he opened the air lock, "we have to make a small correction in the station orbit; the disturbances set up by entering and leaving get it out of step with Raindrop's rotation. Sometimes I wonder whether ifi worth the trouble to keep the two synchronized." "If the station drifted very far from the lock below, you'd have to jump from the liquid surface, which might be awkward," pointed out the younger man as the closing hatch cut off the starlight. "That's true," admitted the other as he snapped a switch and air started hissing into the small lock chamber. "I suppose there's something to be said for tradition at that. There's the safety light -- " as a green spot suddenly glowed on the wall -- you can open up your suit IF whenever you like. Lookers are in the next room. But you arrived through this lock, didn't you?" "Right. I know my way from here." Five minutes later the two men, divested ot space suits, had "descended" to the rim of the station where weight was normal. Most of this part of the structure was devoted to living space which had never been used, though there were laboratory and communication rooms as well. The living space had been explained to Bresnahan, when he first saw it, three quarters of his time alone at a rather boring job a hundred thousand miles from the nearest company. Earth was badly crowded; not one space or as much privacy. Weinen and his wife had taken over a set of equally sumptuous rooms on the opposite side of the rim, and had been in the process of setting up housekeeping when the two employees had descended to Raindrop's surface a short time before. This had been less than an hour after their arrival with Bresnahan on the shuttle from Earth; Weisanen had wasted no time in issuing his first orders. The two men were prepared to find every sign of disorder when the door to the "headquarters" section opened in response to Albert's touch on the annunciator, but they had reckoned without Mrs. Weisanen. A t their employer's invitation, they entered a room which might have been lived in for a year msfead of an hour. The furniture was good, comfortable, well arranged, and present in quantity which would have meant a visible bulge in a nation's space research budget just for the fuel to lift it away from the earth in the chemical fuel days. Either the Weisanens felt strongly about maintaining the home atmosphere even when visiting, or they planned to stay on the station few quite a while. The official himself was surprise ingly young, according to both Bresnahan's and Silbert's preconceived notions of a magnate. He could hardly have been thirty, and mit have been five years younger. Ho matched Bresnahan's five feet ten of height and looked about the same weight; but while the computerman regarded himself as being in good physical shape, he had to admit the other was far more muscular. Even Silbert's six feet five of height and far from insignificant frame seemed somehow inadequate beside Weisanen'f. "Come in, gentlemen. We felt your return a few minutes ago! I take it you have something to report, Mr. Bresnahan. We did not expect you back quite so soon." Weisanen drew further back from the door and waved the others past him. "What can you tell us?" He closed the door and indicated armchairs. Bresnahan remained on his feet, uneasy at the incompleteness of his report; Silbert sank into the nearest chair. The ofricial also remained standing. "Well, Mr. Bresnahan?" "I have little -- practically nothing -- to report, as far as detailed, quandtative information is concerned," die computerman took the plunge. "We stayed inside the Raindrop only a few minutes, and it was evident that most of the detailed search for life specimens would have to be made with a microscope. I hadn't planned the trip at all effectively. I now understand that there is plankton-collecting apparatus here which Mr. Silbert uses regularly and which should have been taken along if I were to get anything worth showing to you." Weisanen's face showed no change in its expression of courteous interest. "That is quite all right," he said, "I should have made clear that I wanted, not a detailed biological report, but a physical description by a non-specialist of what it is like subjectively down there. I should imagine that you received an adequate impression even during your short stay. Can you give such a description?" Bresnahan's worried expression disappeared, and he nodded affirmatively. "Yes, sir. Fm not a literary expert, but I can tell what I saw." "Good. One moment, please," Weisanen turned toward another door and raised his voice. "Brenda, will you come in here, please? You rfiould hear this," Silbert got to his feet just as the woman entered, and both men acknowledged her greeting. Brenda Weisanen was a full head Aorter than her husband. She was wearing a robe of the sort which might have been seen on any housewtte expecting company; neither man was competent to guess whether it was worth fifty dars or ten times that. The garment tended to focus attention on her face, which would have received it anyway. Her hair and eyebrows were jet black, the eyes themselves gray, and rounded cheeks and chin made the features look almost childish, though she was actually little younger than her husband. She seated herself promptly, saying no more than convention demanded, and the men followed suit. "Please go on, Mr. Bresnahan," Weisanen said. "My wife and I are both greatly interested, for reasons which will be clear shortly." B resnahan had a good visual memory, and it was easy for him to comply. He gave a good verbal picture of the greenish, sunlit haze that had surrounded him -- sunlight differing from that seen under an Earthly lake, which ripples and dances as the waves above refract it He spoke of the silence, which had moved him to keep talking because it was the "quietest" silence he had known, and "didn't sound right." He was interrupted by Silbert at this point; the spaceman explained that Raindrop was not always that quiet. Even a grain-of-dust meteoroid striking the skin set up a shock wave audible throughout the great sphere; and if one were close enough to tbo site of collision, the hiss of water boiling out through the hole for the minute or two needed for the skin to heal could also be heard. It was rather unusual to be able to spend even the short time they had just had IF inside the satellite withcatt hearing either of these sounds. Bresnahan nodded thanks as the other fell silent, and took up the thread of his own description once more. He closed with the only real feature he had seen to describe -- the weed-grown cylinder of the water-to-space lock, hanging in greenish emptiness above the deadblack void which reached down to Raindrop's core. He was almost poetical in spots. The Weisanens listened in flattering silence until he had done, and remained silent for some seconds thereafter. Then the man spoke. "Thank you, Mr. Bresnahan. That was just what we wanted." He turned to his wife. "How does that sound to you, dear?" T he dark head nodded slowly, its gray eyes fastened on some point far beyond the metal walls. "It's fascinating," she said slowly. "Not just the way we pictured it, of course, and there will be changes anyway, but certainly worth seeing. Of course they didn't go down to the core, and wouldn't have seen much if they had. I suppose there is no life, and certainly no natural light, down there." "There is life," replied Silbert. "Non-photosynthetic, of course, but bacteria and larger fungi which live on organic matter swept there from the sunlit parts. I don't know whether anything is actually growing on the core, since I've never gone in that far, but free-floating varieties get carried up to my nets. A good many of those have gone to Earth, along with their descriptions, m my tegular reports." "I know. I've read those reports very carefully, Mr. Silbert," replied Weisanen. "Just the same, one of our first jobs must be to survey that core," his wife said thoughtfully. "Much of what has to be done will depend on conditions down there." "Right." Her husband stood up. "We thank you gentlemen for your word pictures; they have helped a lot. I'm not yet sure of the relation between your station time and that of the Terrestrial time zones, but I have the impression that it s quite late in the working day. Tomorrow we will all visit Raindrop and make a very thorough and more technical examination -- my wife and I doing the work, Mr. Bresnahan assisting us, and Mr. Silbert guiding. Until then -- it has been a pleasure, gentlemen." Bresnahan took the hint and got to his feet, but Silbert hesitated. There was a troubled expression on his face, but he seemed unable or it. "What's the matter, Mr. Silbert? Is there some reason why Raindrop's owners, or their representatives, shouldn't look it over closely? I realize that you are virtually the only person to visit it in the last three years, but I assure you that your job is in no danger." Silbert's face cleared a trifle. "It isn't that," he said slowly. "I know you're the boss, and I wasn't worried about my job anyway. There's just one point -- of course If you may know all about it, but I'd rather be safe, and embarrassed, than responsible for something unfortunate later on. I don't mean to butt into anyone's private business, but Raindrop is essentially weightless." "I know that." "Do you also know that unless you are quite certain that Mrs. Weisanen is not pregnant, she should not expose herself to weightlessness for more than a few minutes at a time?" Both Weisanens smiled. "We know, thank you, Mr. Silbert. Wc will see you tomorrow, in spacesuits, at the big cargo lock. There is much equipment to be taken down to Raindrop." IV T hat closing remark proved to be no exaggeration. As the four began moving articles through the lock the next morning, Silbert decided at first that the Weisanen's furniture had been a very minor item in the load brought up from Earth the day before, and wondered why it had been brought into the station at all if it were to be transferred to Raindrop so soon. Then he began to realize that most of the material he was moving had been around much longer. It had come up bit by bit on the regular supply shuttle over a period of several months. Evidently whatever was going on represented long and careful planning -- and furthermore, whatever was going on represented a major change from the original plans for Raindrop. This worried him, since Silbert had become firmly attached to the notion that the Raindrop plan was an essential step to keeping the human race fed, and he had as good an appetite as anyone. He knew, as did any reasonably objective and well-read adult, how barely the advent of fusion power and gene tailoring had bypassed the first critical point in the human population explosion, by making it literally possible to use the entire surface of the planet either for living space or the production of food. As might have been expected, mankind had expanded to fill even that fairly generous limit in a few generations. A second critical point was now coming up, obviously enough to lived on floating islands of genetailored vegetation scattered over the planet's seas, and the number of these islands was reaching the point where the total sunlight reaching the surface was low enough to threaten collapse of the entire food chain. Theoretically, fusion power was adequate to provide synthetic food for all; but it had been learned the hard way that man's selfishness could be raised to the violence point almost as easily by a threat to his "right" to eat natural -- and tasty -- food as by a threat to his "right" to reproduce without limit. As a matter of fact, the people whom Silbert regarded as more civilized tended to react more strongly to the first danger. Raindrop had been the proposed answer. As soon as useful, edible IF life forms could be tailored to live in its environment it was to be smaller units which could receive sunlight throughout their bulks, and use these as "farms." dut power units, lights, and what looked like prefabricated living quarters sufficient for many fa'nlies did not fit with the idea of breaking Raindrop up. In fact, they did not fit with any sensible idea a all. No one could live on Raindrop, or in it. permanently; there was not enough weight to keep human metabolism balanced. Silbert was very conscious of that factor. He never spent more than a day at a time on his sampling trips, and after each of these he always remained in the norm a Iweight part of. the station for the full number of days speciIt was all very puzzling. And as the day wore on, and more and more material was taken from the low-weight storage section of the station and netted together for the trip to Raindrop, the spaceman grew more puzzled still. He said nothing, however, since he didn't feel quite ready to question the Weisanens on the subject and it was impossible to speak privately to Bresnahan with all the spacesuit radios on the same frequency. A ll the items moved were, of course, marred with their masses, but Silbert made no great effort to keep track of the total tonnage. It was not necessary, since eacn cargo net was loaded as nearly as possible to an even one thousand pounds and it was easy enough to count the nets when the job was done. There were twenty-two nets. A more ticklish task was installing on each bundle a five hundred pound-second solid-fuel thrust cartridge, which had to be set so that its axis pointed reasonably close to the center of mass of the loaded net and firmly enough fastened to maintain its orientation during firing. It was not advisable to get rid of the orbital speed of the loads by "pushing off" from the station; the latter's orbit would have been too greatly altered by absorbing the momentum of eleven tons of material. The rockets had to be used. Silbert, in loading the nets, had made sure that each was spinning slowly on an axis parallel to that of Raindrop. He had also attached each cartridge at the "equator" erf its net. As a result, when the time came to fire it was only necessary to wait beside each load until its rocket was pointing "forward" along the station's orbit, and touch off the fuel. The resulting velocity change did not, in general, exactly offset the orbital speed, but it came close enough for the purpose. The new orbit of each bundle now intersected the surface of Raindrop -- a target which was, after all. ten miles in diameter and only half a mile away. It made no great difference if the luggage were scattered along sixty degrees of the satellite's equatorial zone; moving the bundles to the lock by hand would be no great problem where each one weighed about three and a half ounces. IF With the last net drifting toward the glistening surface of Raindrop, Weisanen turned to die aceman. "What's the best techque to send us after them? Just jump off?' Silbert frowned, thou the expression was not obvious through his face plate. "The best technique, according to back to the rim of the station and spend a couple of days getting our personal chemistry back in balance. We've been weightless for nearly ten hours, with only one short leak when we ate." Weisanen made a gesture of impatience which was much mon visible than Silbert's frown. "Nonsense!" he exchdmed. "People have remained weightless for a couple of weeks at a time wWiout permanent damage." "Without having dieir bones actually turn to rubber, I grant I don't concede there was no more subtle damage done. Pm no biophysicist, I just befieve die tables; they were worked out on die basis of knowledge gained the hard way. I admit they have a big safety factor, and if you consider it really necessary J won't object to staying out for four or five days. But you haven't given us any idea so for why this should be considered an emergency situation." #T Tmmm. So I haven't. All right, AA will you stay out long enough to show Brenda and me how to work the locks below, so we can get the stuff inside?" "Why -- of course -- ii it's that imortant we'll stay and do the work too. But I didn't -- " Sert fell silent as it dawned on him that Weisanen's choice of words meant that he had no intention of explaining just yet what the "emergency" was. Both newcomers must have read the spaceman's mind quite accurately at that point, since even Bresnahan was idile to, but neither of them said anything. Conversadon for the next few mimdes consisted entirely of Silberfi instructions for Aoving off in the proper directicm to reach Raindrop, and how to walk on its notquite-zcro-gravity, jellylike surface after they reached it The trip itsrif was made without incident. Because fast movement on the surface was impossible, several hours wwe spent collecting the scattered bundles and stacking them by the lock. The material could not be placed inside, as most of it had to be assembled before it could go undo water; so for the moment the lesson in lock management was postponed. Weisanen, after some hesion, agreed to Silbert's second request that they return to the station for food and rest. He and his wife watdied with interest the technique of getting back to it. Widi four people instead of two, the velocity-matcWng problem might have been worse, but this turned out not to be the case. Silbert wondered whether it were strictly luck, or whether the Weisanens actually had the skill to plan their jumps properly. He was beginning to suspect that both of them had had previous space experience, and both were certainly well-coordinated physical specimens. According to the tables which had been guiding Silbert's life, the party should have remained in the highweight part of the station for at least eighty hours after their session of zero-gee, but his life was now being run by Weisanen rather than tbe tables. The group was back on the water twelve hours after leaving it. Bresnahan still had his feeling of discomfort, with star-studded emptiness on one side and its reflection on the other, but he was given little time to brood about it. The first material to go into the lock consisted of half a dozen yardwide plastic bubbles of water. Silbert noted with interest that all contained animal life, ranging from barely visible Crustacea to herringsized fish. "So we're starting animal life here at last," remarked the spaceman. "I thought it was a major bone of contention whether we ever would." "The question was settled at the first meeting of the new board," replied Weisanen. "Life forms able to live here -- or presumably able to live here -- have been ready for several years. Please be careful in putting those in' the look -- just the odd-numbered ones first, please, first. The evens contain predators, and the others should be given a few hours to scatter before they are turned loose." "Right. Any special techniques for opening? Or just get the bubbles through the second lock and cut them open?" "That will do. I assume that a few hours in the currents inside, plus their own swimming abilities, will scatter them through a good part of the drop." "It should. I suppose they'll tend to stay pretty close to the skin because of the light; I trust they can take a certain amount of hard radiation." "That matter has been considered. There will be some loss, damage, and genetic change, of course, but we think the cultures will gain in spite of that. If they change, it is no great matter. We expect rapid evolution in an environment Iflce this, of course. It's certainly been happening so far." B resnahan helped push the proper spheres into the lock at the vacuum end and out of it at the other, and watched with interest as each was punctured with a knife and squeezed to expel the contents. "I should have asked about waiting for temperatures to match," remarked Silbert as the cloud of barely visible, jerkily moving specks spread from the last of the containers, "but it doesn't seem to be bothering them." "The containers were lying on Raindrop's surface all night, and the satellite is in radiative equilibrium," pointed out Bresnahan. "The temperatures shouldn't be very different anyway. Let's get back outside and see what's going on next. Either these water-bugs are all right, or they're beyond our help." ir "Right." Silbert followed the suggestion, and the newly released animals were left to their own devices. Outside, another job was under way. The largest single items of cargo had been a set of curved segments of metal, apparently blueanodized aluminum. In the few minutes that Silbert and Bresnahan had been inside, the Weisanens had sorted these out from the rest of the material and were now fitting them together. Each section attached to its neighbor by a set of positive-acting snap fasteners which could be set almost instantly, and within a very few minutes it became evident that they formed a sphere some twenty feet in diameter. A transparent dome of smaller radius was set in one pole, and a cylindrical structure with trap doors in the flat ends marked the other. With the assembly complete, the Weisanens carefully sprayed everything, inside and out, from cylinders which Silbert recognized as containing one of the standard fluorocarbon polymers used for sealing unfindable leaks in space ships. Then both Weisanens went inside. Either the' metallic appearance of the sphere was deceptive or there were antennae concealed m its structure, because orders came through the wall on the suit-radio frequency without noticeable loss. In response to these, Bresnahan and the spaceman began handing the rest of the equipment in through the cylindrical structure, which had now revealed itself a a minute air lock. As eadi item was received it was snapped down on a spot evidently prepared to receive it, and in less than two hours almost all the loose gear had vanished from the vicinity of Raindrop's entry lock. The little that was left also found a home as Weiianen emerged once more and fastened it to racks on the sphere's outer surface, clustered around the air lock. T he official went back inside, and, at his orders, Silbert and the computerman lifted the whole sphere onto the top of the cylindrical cargo lock of the satellite. Either could have handled the three-pound weight alone, but its shape and size made it awkward to handle and both men felt that it would be inadvisable to roll it. "Good. Now open this big hatch and let us settle into the lock chanaber," directed Weisanen. "Thea close up, and let in the water." It was the first time Silbert had caught his boss in a slip, and he was disproportionately pleased. The hatch opened outward, and it wae necessary to lift the sphere off again before the order could be obeyed. Once it was open, the two men had no trouble tossing the big globe into the yawning, nearly dark hole -- the sun was just rising locally and did not shine into the chamber -- but they had to wait over a minute for Raindrop's feeble gravity to drag the machine entirely inside. They could not push it any faster, because it was not possible to get a good grip on sphere and lock edge simultaneously; and pushing #i dow n on the sphere without good anchorage would have done much more to the pusher than to the sphere. However, it was finally possible to dose Ac big trap. After making sure that it was tightly latched -- it was sddom used, and Silbert did not trust its mechanism unreservedly -- he and Bresnahan entered the lock through Ac smaller portal. "Aren't Acre special suits for use kiside Raindrop, a lot more comfortable Aan Ais space armor?" asked Weisanen. "Yes, sir," replied Ae spaceman, "Aough Ae relative comfort is a matter of opinion. There are only Arec, and two of Aem haven't been used since I came. They'll need a careful checkout" "All right. Bring Aem in here, and Aen let Ae water into Ah lock." Silbert found Ae suits and handed them to Bresnahan to carry out Ae first part of Ae order, while he went to the controls to execute Ae second. "An ready?" he asked. "All set. BoA lock doors here are shut, and the three of us are inside. Let Ac flood descend." 'Wrong verb," muttered Silbert to himself. He very cautiously cracked the main inner hatch; opening it would have been asking for disaster. Even at a mere quarter atmosphoe's pressure Ae wall of water would have riammcd into the evacuated look violently enough to tear the outer pmtal away and ect sphere and occiMu at a e peo d well above Raindropli escape valae. There wes U a small Phoenix rocket in the sta tion for emergency use, but Silbert had no wish to create a genuine excuse for using it. Also, since he was in the lock himself, he would probably be in no condition to get or pilot it. V T he water sprayed in violently enough through the narrow opening he permitted, bouncing the sphere against the outer hatch and making a deafening clamor even for Ae spacesuited trio inside. However, nothing gave way, and in a minute it was safe to open the main hatch completely. Silbert did so. Through the clear dome which formed the sphere's only observation window he could see Weisanen fingering controls inside. Water jets from almost invisible ports in the outer surface came into action, and for the first time it became evident Aat the sphere was actually a vehicle. It was certainly not built for speed, but showed signs of being one of Ae most maneuverable ever built. After watching for a moment as it worked its way out of the lock, had little chance to practice handling it. But no catastrophe occurred, and finally Ae globe was hanging in Ae greenish void outside Ae weed-grown bulk of Ae lock. The spaceman closed the big hatch, emerged Arou Ae personnel lock himself, and swam over to Ae vehicle's entrance. The outer door of the tiny air IF lock opened manually. Thirty seconds later he was inside the rather crowded sphere removing his helmet -- some time during the last few minutes Weisanen had filled the vehicle with air. The others had already unhelmcted and were examining the "diving" suits which Bresnahan had brought inside. These were simple enough affairs; plastic form-fitting coveralls with an air-cycler on the chest and an outsized, transparent helmet which permitted far more freedom of head movement than most similar gear. Since there was no buoyance in this virtually weight-free environment, the helmet's volume did not create the problem it would have on Earth. Silbert was able to explain everything necessary about the equipment in a minute or two. Neither of the Weisanens needed to have any point repeated, and if Bresnahan was unsure about anything he failed to admit it. "All right." Raindrop's owner nodded briskly as the lesson ended. "We seem to be ready. I started us down as soon as Mr. Silbert came aboard, but it will take the best part of an hour to reach the core. When we get there a regular ecological sampling run win be made. You can do that, Mr. Silbert, using your regular equipment and techniques; Ac former is aboard, whether you noticed it being loaded or not. Brenda and I will make a physical, and physiographical, examination of the core itself, wi a view to finding jost what wfll have to be done to set up living quarters there and where will be the best place to build them." S ilbeit's reaction to this remark may have been expected; both Weisanens had been watching him with slight smiles on their faces. He did not disappoint them. "Lving quarters? That's ridiculous! There's no weight to speak of even at Raindrop's surface, and even less at the core. A person would lose the calcium from his skeleton in a few weeks, and go unbalanced in I don't know how many other chemical ways -- " "Fourteen known so far, Mr. Silbert. We know all about that, or as much as anyone does. It was a shame to tease you, but my husband and I couldn't resist Also, some of the factors involved are not yet public knowledge, and we have reasons for not wanting them too widely circulated for a while yet." Brenda Weisanen's interruption was saved from rudeness by the smile on her face. "I would invite you to sit down to listen, but sitting means nothing here -- I'll get used to that eventually, no doubt. "The fact you just mentioned about people leaching calcium out of their skeletons after a few days CH weeks of weightlessness was learned long ago -- even before long manned space flights had been made; the information was gained from flotation experiments. Strictly speaking, it is not an effect ot weightlessness per se, but a feedback phenomenon involving relative muscular effort -- something which mit have been predicted, and for rr all I know may actually have been predicted, from the fact that the ankle bones in a growing child ossify much more rapidly than the wrist bones. A very minor genetic factor is involved; after all, animals as similar to us as dolphins which do spend all their time afloat grow perfectly adequate skeletons. "A much more subtle set of chemical problems were noticed the hard way when manned space stations were set up, as you well know. A lot of work was done on these, as you might expect, and we now are quite sure that all which will produce detectable results in less than five years of continuous weightlessness are known. There are fourteen specific factors -- chemical and genetic keys to the log jam, if you like to think of it that way. "You have the ordinary educated adult's knowledge of gene tailoring, Mr. Silbert. What was the logical thing to do?" "Since gene tailoring on human beings is flagrantly illegal, for good and sufficient reasons, the logical tihing to do was and is to avoid weightlessness," Silbert replied. "With Phoenix rockets, we can make interplanetary flight at a continuous one-gravity acceleration, while space stations can be and arc centrifuged." Brenda Weisanen's smile did not change, but her husband looked annoyed. He took up the discussion. "Illegal or not, for good or bad reasons, it was perfectly reasonable to consider modifying human genetic patterns so that some people at least could live and work normally and indefinitely in a weightless environment. Whether it shocks yoo or not, the thing was tried over seventy years ago, and over five hundred people now alive have this modification -- and are not, as I suppose you would put it, fully human." B resnahan interrupted. "I would not put it that way!" he snapped. "As anyone who has taken work in permutation and combination knows perfectly well, there is no such thing as a fully human being if you define the term relative to some precise, specific idealized gene pattern. Mutations are occurring all the time from radiation, thermal effects, and just plain quantum jumping of protons in the genetic molecules. The sort of phenomenon is used as example material in elementary programming courses, and one of the first things you learn when you run such a problem is that no one is completely without such modifications. If, as I suppose you are about to say, you and Mrs. Weisanen are genetically different enough to take weightlessness, I can't see why it makes you less human. I happen to be immune to four varieties of leukemia virus and sixteen of the organisms usually responsible for the common cold, according to one analysis of my own gene pattern. If lrt's had ever been checked wed find at least as many peculiarities about his -- and I refuse to admit that either of us is less human dian anyone else we've ever met "Thank you, Mr. Bresnahan, ir Brenda Weisanen took up the thread of the discussion once more. " The usual prejudice against people who are known to be significantly different tends to make some of us a little self-conscious. In any case, my husband and I can stand weightlessness indefinitely, as far as it is now possible to tell, and we plan to stay here permanently. More of us will be coming up later for the same purpose." "But why? Not that it's any of my business. I like Raindrop, but it's not the most stimulating environment and in any case I'm known to be the sort of oddball who prefers being alone with a collection of books to more other activities." The woman glanced at her husband before answering. He shrugged. "You have already touched on the point, Mr. Silbert. Modifying the human genetic pattern involves the same complication which plagued medicine when hormones became available for use in treatment. Any one action is likely to produce several others as an unplanned, and commonly unwanted, by-product. Our own modification is not without its disadvantages. What our various defects may be I would not presume to list in toto -- any more than Mr, Bresnahan would care to list his -- but one of them strikes very close to home just now. Aino and I are expecting a child, and about nine times out of ten when a woman of our type remains in normal gravity any child she conceives is lost during the fifth or sixth month. The precise cause is not known; it involves the mother's physique rather than the child's, but that leaves a lot still to be learned. Therefore, I am staying here until my baby is born, at the very least. We expect to live here. We did not ask to be modified to fit space, but if it turns out that we can live better here -- so be it." "Then Raindrop is going to be turned into a -- a -- maternity hospital?" iiT think a fairer term would be JL 'colony,' Mr. Silbert," interjected Weisanen. "There are a good many of us, and most if not all of us are considering making this place our permanent home." "Which means that breaking it up according to the original plan to supply farming volume is no longer on the books." "Precisely." "How do you expect to get away with that? This whole project was planned and paid for as a new source of food." "That was when it was a government project. As you know, it became a private concern recently; the government was paid full value for Raindrop, the station, and the shuttle which keeps it supplied. As of course you do not know, over eighty per cent of the stock of that corporation is owned by people like myself. What we propose to do is perfectly legal, however unpopular it may make us with a few people." "More than a few, I would say. And how can you afford to be really unpopular, living in something as fragile as Raindrop?" queried Bresnahan. "There are lots of spaceships available. Even if no official action were or could be taken, anyone who happened to have access to one and disliked you sufficiently could wreck the skin of this tank so thoroughly in five minutes that you'd have to start all over again even if you yourselves lived through it. All the life you'd established would freeze before repairs could be made complete enough to stop the water from boiling away." "That is true, and is a problem we haven't entirely solved," admitted the other. "Of course, the nasty laws against the publication of possible mob-rousing statements which were found necessary as Earth's population grew should operate to help us. Nowadays many people react so negatively to any unsupported statement that the word would have trouble getting around. In any case, we don't intend to broadcast the details and comparatively few people know much about the Raindrop project at all. I don't think that many will feel cheated." Silbert's reaction to the last sentence was the urge to cry out, "But they are being cheated!" However, it was beginning to dawn on him that he was not in the best possible position to argue with Weisanen. He subsided. He himself had been living , with the Raindrop project for three years, had become closely identified with it, and the change of policy bothered him for deeper reasons than his intelligence alone could recognize. Bresnahan was also bothered, though he was not as deeply in love with the project as the spaceman. He was less impressed by Weisanen's conviction that there would be no trouble; but he had nothing useful to say about the matter. He was developing ideas, but they ran along the line of wondering when he could get to a computer keyboard to set the whole situation up as a problem. His background and training had left him with some doubt of any human being's ability -- including his own -- to handle all facets of a complex problem. Neither of the Weisanens seemed to have any more to say, either, so the sphere drifted downward in silence. VI T hey had quickly passed the limit which sunlight could reach, and were surrounded by blacknesa, which the sphere's own interior lights seemed only to accentuate. With neither gravity nor outside reference points, the sphere was of course being navigated by instrument. Sonar equipment kept the pilot informed of the distance to the nearest point of the skin, the distance and direction of the lock through which they had entered, and the distance and direction of the core. Interpretation of the echoes was complicated by the fact that Raindrop's outer skin was so sharply curved, but Weisanen seemed to have that problem well in hand ai he drove the vehicle downward. Pressure, of course, did not change ignificantly with depth. The thirty IF per cent increase from skin to core meant nothing to healthy people. There was not even an instrument to register this factor, as far as Silbert could see. He was not too happy about that; his spaceman's prejudices made him feel that there should be independent instrumentation to back up the sonar gear. As they neared the core, however, instruments proved less necessary than expected. To the mild surprise of the Weisanens and the blank astonishment of Silbert -- Bresnahan knew too little to expect anything, either way -- the central region of the satellite was not completely dark. The light was so faint that it would not have been noticed if they had not been turning off the sphere's lamps every few minutes, but it was quite bright enough to be seen, when they were a hundred yards or so from the core, without waiting for eyes to become dark-adapted. "None of your samples ever included luminous bacteria," remarked the official. T wonder why none of them ever got close enough to the skin for you to pick up." "I certainly don't knOw," replied Silbert. "Are you sure it's caused by bacteria?" "Not exactly by a long shot; it just seems the best starting guess. I'm certain it's not heat or radioactivity, and offhand I can't think of any other possibilities. Can you?" "No, I can't. But maybe whatever is producing the light is attached to the core -- growing on it, if it's alive. So it wouldn't have reached the surface." "That's possible, though I hope you didn't think I was criticizing your sampling techniques. It was one of my friends who planned them, not you. We'll go on down; we're almost in contact with the core now, according to the fathometer." Weisanen left the lights off, except for the tiny fluorescent sparks on the controls themselves, so the other three crowded against th# bulge of the viewing port to se what was coming. Weightlessness made this easier than it might have been; they didn't have to "stand" al the same spot to have their heads close together. For a minute or so, nothing was perceptible in the way of motion. There was just the clear, faintly luminous water outside the port Then a set of slender, tentacular filaments as big around as a human thumb seemed to writhe past thn port as the sphere sank by them; and the eyes which followed their length could suddenly see their point of attachment. "There!" muttered Brenda Weisanen softly. "Slowly, dear -- only a few yards." "There's no other way this thing can travel," pointed out her husband. "Don't worry about our hitting anything too hard." "I'm not -- but look! It's beautiful! Let's get anchored and go outside." "In good time. It will stay there, and anyway I'm going out before you do -- long enough before to, at least, make reasonably certain ifa safe." T he wife looked for a moment as though she were about to argue this point, if her facial expression could be read accurately in the faint light, but she said nothing. Bresnahan and Silbert had die intelligence to keep quiet as well; more could be learned by looking than by getting into the middle of a husband-wife disagreement, and now there was plenty to look at. The core was visible for at least two hundred yards in all directions, as the .sphere spun slowly under Weisanen's control. The light definitely came from the life forms which matted its surface. Presumably these were fungi, since photosynthetic forms could hardly have grown in such an environment, but they were fungi which bore little resemblance to their Terrestrial ancestors. Some were ribbon-like, some feather-like, some snaky -- even patches of what looked like smoothly mown lawn were visible. The greenish light was evidently not pure color, since other shades were visible; red, purple, and yellow forms stood out here and there in eye-catching contrast to grays and browns. Some forms were even green, though it seemed unlikely that this was due to chlorophyll. Practically all seemed to emit the vague light which bathed the entire scene -- so uniformly that outlines would have been hard to distinguish were it not for a few specimens which were much brighter than the others. These types bore what might have been spore pods; t# IF from fist to grapefruit size, raised "above" the rest of the surface as much as eight or ten feet on slender stalks. These cast shadows which helped distinguish relief. The woman was right; weird it might be, but the scene was beautiful. Weisanen cut off the water jets and waited for a minute or two. The vehicle drifted slowly but perceptibly away from the surface; evidently there was some current. "We'll have to anchor," he remarked. "Bren, stay inside until we've checked. I'll go out to see what we can fasten ourselves to; there's no information at all on what sort of surface there may be. A fair-sized stony meteormd -- really an asteroid -- was used as the original core, but the scAids from the comets would be very fins dust. There could be yards of too fine to hold any sort of anchor' surrounding the solid part. You gentlemen will please get into the other suits and come with me. If nothiM has happened to any of us in has an hour, Bren, you may join us. "There are only three suits, " hit wife pointed out. "True. Well, your spiacesuit wBI do; or if you prefer, one of us w#i use his and let you have the diviogj gear. In any case, that problem m low-priority. If you gentlemen ai ready we'h go. I'll start; this li strictly a one-man air lock."All three had been climbing out of their spacesuits as Weisanen war talking. TTie other garments wem easy enough to get into, though Bresnahan found the huge helmet unwieldy even with no weight Weisanen was through the lock before either of the others was ready to follow; Silbert was slowed by his space-bom habit of double-checking every bit of the breathing apparatus, and Bresnahan by his inexperience. They could see their employer through the window as they finished, swimming slowly and carefully toward the weedy boundary of Raindrop's core. Both men stayed where they were for the moment, to see what would happen when he reached it. Brenda Weisanen watched even more closely; there was no obvious reason to be afraid, but her breath was coming unevenly and her fists tightly clenched as her husband approached the plants and reached out to touch the nearest. XTothing spectacular happened. It yielded to has touch; when he seized it and pulled, it broke. "Either the plants are awfully fragile or there is fairly firm ground anchoring them," remarked Silbert. "Let's go outside. You're checked out on the controls of this thing, aren't you, Mrs. Weisanen?" "Not in great detail," was the reply. "I know which switches handle lights and main power for the lock pump, and which control bank deals with the jets; but I've had no practice in actually handling it. Aino hadn't, either, until we started this trip an hour ago. Go ahead, though; I won't have to do anything anyway. Aino is anchoring us now." She gestured toward the port. Her husband could now be seen through it carrying something a harpoon, with a length of fins line attached to it A couple of yarcb from the surface he poised himself and hurled the object, javelin style -- or as nearly to that style as anyone can manage in water -- into the mass of vegetation. The shaft buried itself completely. Weisanen gave a tug on the line, whose far end was attached to the sphere. He seemed satisfied and turned to look at the vehicle. Seeing the men still inside, he gestured impatiently. Bresnahan followed Silbert through the tiny air lock as rapidly as its cycling time would permit, leaving the woman alone in the sphere. Outside, Weisanen was several yards away, still beckoning imperiously. "You can talk, sir," remarked Silbert in ordinary tones. "There's no need for sign language." "Oh. Thanks; I didn't see any radio equipment in these helmets. "There isn't any. The helmets themselves aren't just molded plastic; they're a multi-layered arrangement that acts as an impedance matcher between the air inside and die water outside. Sound goes through water well enough; it's the air-water interface that makes conversation difficult. This stuff gets the sound across the boundary." "All right; good. Let's get to work. If the figures for the size of the original nucleus still mean anything, we have nearly twenty million square feet to check up on. Right now we won't try to do it att; stay in sight of the sphere. Get IF lest rods and pbinkton gear from tfiat rack by  air lock. Mr. Silbert, use the nets and collectors as you usually do. Mr. Bresnahan, you and I will use the rods; simply poke them into the surface every few yards. The idea is to get general knowledge of the firmness of the underlying surface, and to find the best places to build -- or attach -- permanent structures. If you should happen to notice any connection between the type of vegetation and the kind of ground it grows on, so much the better; surveying by eye will be a lot faster than by touch. If any sort of trouble comes up, yell. I don't see why there should be any, but I don't want Brenda out here until we're a little more certain." The men fell to their rather  monotonous tasks. The plant cover, it developed, ranged from an inch or two to over a yard in thickness, not counting the scattered forms which extended their tendrils scores of feet out toward the darkness. At no point was the underlying "ground" visible. Where the growing cover was pushed or dug away, the core seemed to be made of a stiff, brownish clay, which reached at least as deep as the test prods could be pushed by hand. This rather surprised Silbert, who had expected either solid rock or oozy mud. He was not geochemist enough to guess at the reactions which might have formed what they actually found, and was too sensible to worry about it before actual analyses had been made. If Weisanen had any opinions, he kept them to himself. Bresnahan was not worried about the scientific aspect of the situation at all. He simply poked away with his test bar because he had been told to, devoting only a fraction of his attention to the task. His thoughts were elsewhere. Specifically, he was following through the implications of the information the Weisanens had furnished during the trip down. He admitted to himself that in the other's position he would probably be doing the same thing; but it seemed as though some compromise should be possible which would salvage the original purpose of Raindrop. Bresnahan did not, of course, expect to eat as well as the average man of mid-twentieth century. He never had, and didn't know what he was missing. He did know, however, that at his present age of twenty-five there was a smaller variety of foodstuffs available than he could remember from his childhood, and he didn't want that process to go any farther. Breaking up Raindrop according to the original plan seemed to him the obvious thing to do. If land and sea farming areas were disappearing under the population flood, the logical answer was farming areas in the sky. This should be as important to the Weisanens as to anyone else. He felt a little uneasy about bringing the matter up again, however. Somehow, he had a certain awe of Weisanen which he didn't think was entirely due to the fact that the latter was his employer. Several times their paths came close together as the two plied their test bars, but Bresnahan was unable to wind his courage up to the necessary pitch for some time -- not, in fact, until they had been exploring the region uneventfully for over half an hour and Weisanen had finally, with some hesitation, decided that it was safe for his wife to join them. There was some slight rivalry between Silbert and Bresnahan over who should give up his diving gear to the woman and resume his spacesuit If Bresnahan had won, a good deal of subsequent trouble might have been avoided; but when all four were finally outside, Silbert was wearing space armor. He had pointed out quite logically that he was the most used to it and would work better than any of the otners in its restrictions. T he key to the subsequent trouble was that one of the restrictions involved communication. If Silbert had been able to hear clearly, he might have understood what was developing before it had gone too far; but he couldn't. His space helmet lacked the impedance-matching feature of. the diving gear, and the latter equipment had no radios. Some sound did get through his helmet both from and into the water, but not much; for real conversation he had to bring the helmet into physical contact with that of the other party. He therefore knew little of what went on during the next few minutes. He spent them continuing his ecology sample, and paid little attention to anything else. With Mrs. Weisanen present, some of Bresnahan's unease in her husband's presence left him, and he brought up at last the point which had occurred to him. "I've been wondering, sir," he opened, "whv it wouldn't be possible to break up Raindrop just as was planned, and still use the smaller drops as homes for people like yourselves. I can't see that it would be verv different from your present plan."' Weisanen did not seem annoyed, but answered in a straightforward fashion. "Aside from the fact that we would prefer to be in a single city rather than a lot of detached houses which would require us to visit our neighbors by spaceship, the smaller drops will have the radiation problem. Here we have nearly" five miles of water shielding us." "Hmph. I never thought of that." "No reason why you should have. It was never your problem." "But still -- what do we do about food? Conditions on Earth are getting worse all the time. Starting another Raindrop project would take years. Couldn't you at least compromise? Permit the small drops to be skimmed off the surface of this one while you are living here, and while another Raindrop is set up?" "I don't' like the idea. Can you imagine what it will be like here with shock waves from exploding steam bubbles echoing all through the globe every time the skin is opened for a new farm lot?" IF "Why should they break the kin? I should think they'd want to draw off the water through the lock, or other locks which might be built, anyway; otherwise there'd be a lot of waste from boiling. I should think -- " W eisanen's annoyance suddenly boiled over, though no sign of it had been visible before. "Mr. Bresnahan, it matters very little what you think when you forget that Raindrop is now, legally and properly, private property. I dislike to sound selfish and misanthropic, but I belong to a group which has gone to a great deal of thought and labor to get for itself, legally and without violence, an environment which it needs and which no one else -- including the people responsible for our existence -- was you would think with your brain instead of your stomach you'd realize that the whole original project was pure nonsense. The only possible way mankind can keep himself adequately fed is to limit his population. If you'll pardon the pun, the whole idiotic project was a drop in the bucket. It might have put the day of reckoning back five years, conceivably ten or fifteen, but then we'd have been right back where we started. Even with fusion energy there's a limit to the number of space farms which could be built in a given time, and the way Earth's population grows it would soon be impossible just to make new farms fast enough, let alone operate them. Cheating people? Nonsense! We're doing the rest of nankind a favor by forcing them to face facts them to argue with each other. One group has had to exercise the same sort of control the rest of mankind should be using for a good half century. We didn't dare have children except when it was practicable to keep the mother in orbit for the best part of a year. Why should we be particularly sympathetic with the rest of you?" "I see your point," admitted Bresnahan, "but you've forgotten one other thing. The food problem is yours, too. What will you do as your food supply shrinks like everyone else's? Or worse, when people decide not to send any food at all up here, since you won't send any down? Raindrop is a long way yet from being self-supporting, you know." A grin, clearly visible in the light from a nearby plant knob, appeared on Weisanen's face; but his irritation remained. "Slight mistake, my young friend. There is another minor modification in our structure; our saliva glands produce an enzyme you lack. We can digest cellulose." He waved his hand at the plants around them. "How do you know these plants contain cellulose?" "All plants do; but that's a side issue. The weeds near the surface were analyzed long ago, and proved to contain all the essentials for human life -- in form which we can extract with our own digestive apparatus. Raindrop, as it now is, could support all of us there are ow and there are likely to be for a couple of generations. Now, please get back to checking this little world of ours. Brenda and I want to decide where to build our house." B resnahan was silent, but made no move to get back to work. He floated for a minute or so, thinking furiously; Weisanen made no effort to repeat or enforce his order. At last the computerman spoke slowly -- and made his worst mistake. "You may be right in your legal standing. You may be right in your opinion about the value of Raindrop and what the rest of the human race should do -- personally, I want a family some day. You may even be right about your safety from general attack because the communication laws will keep down the number of people who know about the business. But, right or wrong, if even a single person with access to a spaceship does find out, then you -- and your wife -- and your baby -- are all in danger. Doesn't that suggest to you that some sort of compromise is in order?" Weisanen's expression darkened and his muscles tensed. His wife, looking at him, opened her mouth and made a little gesture of protest even before he started to speak; but if she made a sound it was drowned out. "It certainly suggests something, young fellow," snapped the official. "I was hoping the matter wouldn't descend to this level, but remember that while we can live here indefinitely, you cannot. A few weeks ol weightlessness will do damage which your bodies can never repair. Thera is no regular food down here. And we control the transportation back to the station and weight." "Aino -- no!" His wife laid a hand on his arm and spoke urgently. "Wait, dear. If you threaten at all, it's too close to a threat of death. I don't want to kill anyone, and don't want to think of your doing so. It wouldn't be worth it. ' "You and the little one are worth it. Worth anything! I won't listen to argument on that." "But argument isn't needed. There is time. Mr. Bresnahan and his friend will certainly wait and think before risking the consequences of a mob-raising rumor. He wants a compromise, not -- " "His compromise endangers you and the others. I won't have it. Mr. Bresnahan, I will not ask you for a promise to keep quiet; you might be the idealistic type which can justify breaking its word for what it considers a good cause. Also, I will not endanger your life and health more than I can help. Brenda is right to some extent; I don't want regardless of the cause. Therefore, you and Mr. Silbert will remain here at the core until Brenda and I have returned to the station and made sure that no communication gear will function without our knowledge and consent. Ihai may be a few days, which may be more than your health should risk. I'm sorry, but I'm balancing that risk to you against one to us." M IF Why should it take days? An hour to the surface, a few minutes to the station -- " "And Heaven knows how long to find and take care of all the radios. Neither of us is an expert in that field, and we'll be a long time making sure we have left no loopholes." "Will you at least stop to find out whether the air renewers in these diving suits are indefinite-time ones, like the spacesuit equipment? And if they aren't, let me change back into my spacesuit?" "Of course. Change anyway. It will save my trying to get the substance of this conversation across to Mr. Silbert. You can tell him on radio while we are on the way. Come with me back to the sphere and change. Brenda stay here." ut, dearest -- this isn't right. You know -- " "I know what I'm doing and why your lead in a lot of things, Bren, but this is not one of them." "But -- " "No buts. Come, Mr. Bresnahan. Follow me." The wife fell silent, but her gaze was troubled as she watched the two men vanish through the tiny lock. Bresnahan wondered what she would do. It was because he felt sure Ac would something that he hadn't simply defied Weisanen. T he woman's face was no happier when the compuiterman emerged alone and swam back to a point beside her. Her husband was visible throu the port, outsized helmet removed, beckoning to her. For a moment Bresnahan had the ' hope that she would refuse to go. This faded as she swam slowly toward the sphere, occassionally looking back, removed the anchor in response to a gesture from the man inside, and disappeared through the lock. The vehicle began to drift upward, vegetation near it swirling in the water jets. Within a minute it had faded from view into the darkness. "Just what's going on here?" Silbert's voice was clear enough; the suit radios carried for a short distance through water. "Where are they going, and why?" "You didn't hear any of my talk with Weisanen?" "No. I was busy, and it's hard to get sound through this helmet anyway. What happened? Did you argue with him?" "In a way." Bresnahan gave the story as concisely as he could. His friend's whistle sounded eerily ia the confines of his helmet. "This -- is -- really -- something. Just for the record, young pal, we are in a serious jam, I hope you realize." "I don't think so. His wife is against the idea, and he'll let himself get talked out of it -- he's a little afraid of the results already." "Not the point. It doesn't matter if the whole thing was a practical joke on his part. They're out of sight, in a medium where no current charts exist and the only navigation aids are that sphere's awn sonar units. He covdd find his way back to the core, but how could ha find Of?" "Aren't we right under the lock aad the station? We came straight down," "Don't bet on that. I told you -- there are currents. If we made a ttraight track on the trip down here m be the most surprised man inside Luna's orbit. There are twenty ball. We'd be visible from a radius of maybe two hundred -- visible and recognizable, that is, with our tights on. That means they have something like two hundred search blocks, if my mental arithmetic is right, without even a means of knowing when they cover a given one a second time. There is a chance they'd find us, but not a good one -- not a good enough one so that we should bet your chance of dodging a couple of weeks of weightlessness on it. When that nut went out of sight, he disposed of us once and for all." "I wouldn't call him a nut," Bresnahan said. "Why not? Anyone who would leave a couple people to starve or get loaded with zero-gee symptoms on the odd chance that they might blab his favorite scheme to the public -- " "He's a little unbalanced at the moment, but not a real nut. I'm sure he didn't realize he'd passed the point of no return. Make allowances, Bert; I can. Some of my best friends are married, and I've seen 'em when they first learned a kid was on the way. It's just that they don't usually have this good a chance to get other people in trouble; they're all off the beam for a little while." i'lou're the most tolerant and I civilized character I've met, and you've just convinced me that there can be too much of even the best of things. For my money the guy is a raving nut. More to the point, unless we can get ourselves out of the jam he's dropped us into, we're worse than nuts. We're dead." "Maybe he'll realize the situation and go back to the station and call for help." "There can be such a thing as too much optimism, too. My young friend, he's not going to get to the station." "What? Why not?" "Because the only laser tube not already in the station able to trigger the cobweb launchers is right here on my equipment clip. That's another reason I think he's a nut. He should have thought of that and pried it away from me somehow." "Maybe it just means he wasn't serious about the whole thing." "Never mind what it means about him. Whatever his intentions. I'd back to us with his tail between his legs if I thought he could find us. Since I don't think he can, we'd better get going ourselves." "Huh? How?" "Swim. How else? "But how do we navigate? Once we're out of sight of the core we'd be there in the dark with absolutely nothing to guide us. These little lights on our suits aren't -- " "I know they aren't. That wasn't the idea. Don't worry; I may not be able to swim in a straight line, bi I can get us to surface evenIF tually. Come on; five miles is a long swim." Silbert started away from the glow, and Bresnahan followed uneasily. He was not happy at the prospect of weightlessness and darkness combined; the doses on the trip down, when at least the sphere had been present for some sort of orientation, had been more than sufficient. T he glow of the core faded slowly behind them, but before it was too difficult to see Silbert stopped. "All right, put your light on. Til do the same; stay close to me." Bresnahan obeyed both orders gladly. "Now, watch." The spaceman manipulated "Valves on his suit, and carefully ejected a bubble of air about two feet in diameter. "You noticed that waste gas from the electrolyzers in the diving suits didn't stay with us to be a nuisance. The bubbles drifted away, even when we were at the core," he pointed out. Bresnahan hadn't noticed, since he wasn't used to paying attention to the fate of the air he exhaled, but was able to remember the fact once it was mentioned. "That of course, was not due to buoyancy; so close to the core. The regular convection currents started by solar heat at the skin must be responsible. Therefore, those currents must extend all the way between skin and core. We'll follow this bubble." "If the current goes all the way, why not just drift?" "For two reasons. One is that the currents are slow -- judging by their speed near the skin, the cycle must take over a day. Once we get away from the core, the buoyancy of this bubble will help; we can swim after it. "The other reason is that if we simply drift we might start down again with the current before we got close enough to the skin to see daylight. "Another trick we might try if this takes too long is to have one of us drift while the other follows the bubble to the limit of vision. That would establish the up-down line, and we could swim in that direction for a while and then repeat. I'm afraid we probably couldn't hold swimming direction for long enough to be useful, though, and it would be hard on the reserve air supply. We'd have to make a new bubble each time we checked. These suits have recyclers, but a spacesuit isn't built to get its oxygen from the surrounding water the way that diving gear is." "Let's just follow this bubble," Bresnahan said fervently. At first, of course, the two merely drifted. There simply was no detectable buoyancy near the core. However, in a surprisingly short time the shimmering globule of gas began to show a tendency to drift away from them. The direction of drift was seldom the one which Bresnahan was thinking of as "up" at the moment, but the spaceman nodded approval and carefully followed their only guide. Bresnahan wished that his training had given him more confidence in instrument readings as opposed to his own senses, but followed Silbert hopefully. EX T he fourteen hours he spent drifting weightless in the dark made m experience Bresnahan was never to forget, and his friends were never lo ignore. He always liked crowds afterward, and preferred to be in cities or at least buildings where straight, clearly outlined walls, windows, and doors marked an unequivocal up-and-down direction. Even Silbert was bothered. He was more used to weightlessness, but the darkness he was used to seeing around him at such times was normally pocked with stars which provide orientation. The depths of Raindrop provided nothing. Both men were almost too far gone to believe their senses when they finally realized that the bubble they were still following could be seen by a glow not from their suits lights. It was a faintly blue-green illumination, still impossible to define as to source, but unmistakably sunlight filtered through hundreds of feet of water. Only minutes later their helmets met the tough, elastic skin of the satellite. It took Silbert only a few moments to orient himself. The sun and the station were both visible -- at least they had not come out on the opposite side of the satellite -- and he knew the time. The first and last factors were merely checks; all that was really necessary to find the lock was to swim toward the point under the oMtiag atation. "I don't want to use the sonar locater unless I have to," he pointed out. "There is sonar gear on the sphere. I should be able to get us close enough by sighting on the station so that the magnetic compass will work. Judging by where the station seems to be, we have four or five miles to swim. Let's get going." "And let's follow the great circle course," added Bresnahan. "Never mind cutting across inside just because it's shorter. I've had all I ever want of swimming in the dark." "My feeling exactly. Come on." The distance was considerably greater than Silbert had estimated, since he was not used to doing his sighting from under water and had not allowed for refraction; but finally the needle of the gimballed compass showed signs of making up its mind, and with nothing wrong that food and sleep would not repair the two men came at last in sight of the big lock cylinder. For a moment, Silbert wondered whether they should try to make their approach secretly. Then he decided that if the Weisanens were there waiting for them the effort would be impractical, and if they weren't it would be futile. He simply swam up to the small hatch followed by Bresnahan, and they entered the big chamber together. It proved to be full of water, but the sphere was nowhere in sight. With no words they headed for the outer personnel lock, entered it, pumped back the water, and emerged mi Raindrop's surface. Silbert used IF Ms laser, and ten minutes later they were inside the station. Bresnahan's )amp had been a little more skillful than before. it"VTow let's get on the radiol" snapped Silbcrt as he shed his space helmet. "Why? Whom would you call, and what would you tell them? Remember that our normal Earth-end contacts are part of the same group the Weisanens belong to, and you can't issue a general broadcast to e universe at large screaming about a plot against mankind in die hope that someone will take you seriously. Someone might." "But -- " "My turn, Bert. You've turned what I still think was just a potentially tragic mistake of Weisanen's mto something almost funny, and incidentally saved both our lives. Now will you follow my lead? Things could still be serious if we lon't follow up properly." "But what arc you going to do?" "You'll see. Take it from me, compromise is still possible. It will take a little time; Aino Weisanen will have to learn something I can't teach him myself. Tell me, is there any way to nlonitor what goes on in Raindrop? For example, can you tell from here when the lock down diere is opened, so we would know when they come back." "No." "Then we'll just have to watch for them. I assume that if we see Ihem, we can call them from here en regular radio." "Of course." "Then let's eat, sleep, and wait They'll be back after a while, and when they come Aino will listen to reason, believe me. But we can sleep right now. I'm sure; it will be a while yet before they show up. They should still be looking for us -- getting more worried by the minute." "Why should they appear at all? They must have found but long ago that they can't get back to the station on their own. They obviously haven't found us, and won't. Maybe they've simply decided they're already fugitive murderers and have settled down to a permanent life m Raindrop." "That's possible, I suppose. Well, if we don't see them in a couple of weeks, we can go back down and give them a call in some fashion. Fd rather they came to us, though, and not too soon. "But let's forget that; I'm starved. What's in your culture tanks besides liver?" X I t did not take two weeks. Nine days and eight hours after the men had returned to the station, Silbert saw two spacesuited figures standing on the lock half a mile away, and called his companion's attention to them. "They must be desperate by this time," remarked Bresnahan. "We'd better call them before they decide to risk the jump anyway." He activated the transmitter which Silbert indicated, and spoke. "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Weisanen. Do you want us to send the cobweb down?" The voice that answered was female. "Thank God you're there I Yes, please. We'd like to come up for a while." Silbert expected some qualifying remarks from her husband, but none were forthcoming. At Bresnahan's gesture, he activated the spring gun which launched the web toward the satellite. "Maybe you'd better suit up and go meet them," suggested the coinputerman. "I don't suppose either of them is very good at folding angular speed." "I'm not sure I care whether they go off on their own orbit anyway," growled the spaceman rising with some reluctance to his feet. "Still bitter? And both of them?" queried Bresnahan. "Well -- I suppose not. And it would take forever to repair the web if it hit the station unfolded. I'll be back." Silbert vanished toward the hub, and the younger man turned back to watch his employers make the leap from Raindrop. He was not too surprised to see them hold hands as they did so, with the natural result that they spun madly on the way to the web and came close to missing it altogether. When his own stomach had stopped whirling in sympathy, he decided that maybe the incident was for the best. Anything which tended to cut down Weisanen's self-assurance should be helpful, even though there was good reason to suspect tlhi; ' c battle was already won. He wondered whether he should summon the pair to his and Silhert's quarters for the interview which was about to ensue, but decided that there was such a thing as going too far. He awaited the invitation to the Weisanens' rooms with eagerness. I t came within minutes of the couple's arrival at the air lock. When Bresnahan arrived he found Silbert already in the room where they had first reported on their brief visit to Raindrop. All three were still in spaces nits; they had removed only the helmets. "We're going back down as soon as possible, Mr. Bresnahan," Weisanen began without preliminary. "I have a rather lengthy set of messages here which I would like yon and Mr. Silbert to transmit as soon as possible. You will note that they contain my urgent recommendation for a policy change. Your suggestion of starting construction of smaller farms from Raindrop's outer layers is sound, and I think the Company will follow it. I am also advising that material be collected from the vicinity of the giant planets -- Saturn's rings seem a likely source -- for constructing additional satellites like Raindrop as private undertakings. Financing can be worked out. There should be enough profit from the farms, and that's the logical direction for some of it to flow. "Once other sources of farm material are available. Raindrop will not be used further for the purpose. It will serve as Company headquarIF ters -- it win be more convenient to have that in orbit anyway. The closest possible commercial relations are to be maintained with Earth." "I'm glad you feel that way, sir," replied Bresnahan. "We'll get the messages off as soon as possible. I take it that morc of the Company's officials will be coming up here to live, then?" "Probably all of them, within the next two years or so. Brenda and I will go back and resume surveying now, as soon as we stock up with tome food. I'll be back occasionally, but I'd rather she kept away from high weight for the next few months, as you know." "Yes, sir," Bresnahan managed, by a heroic effort, to control his tmile -- almost. Weisanen saw the flicker of his lip, and froze for a moment. Then his own sober features loosened into a broad grin. "Maybe another hour won't hurt Brenda," he remarked. "Let's have a meal together before we go back." He paused, and added almost diffidently. "Sorry about what happened. We're human, you know." "I know," replied Bresnahan. "That's what I was counting on." # # nd that," remarked Silbert as he shed his helmet, "is that They're aboard and bound for the core again, happy as clams. And speaking of clams, if you don't tell me why that stubborn Finn changed his mind, and why you were so sure he'd do it there'll be mayhem around here. Don't try to make me believe that he got scared about what he'd nearly done to us. I know his wife was on our side, basically, but she wasn't about to wage open war for us.' She was as worried about their kid as he was. Come on; make with the words, chum." "Simple enough. Didn't you notice what he wanted before going back to Raindrop?" "Not particularly -- oh; food. So what? He could live on the food down there -- or couldn't he? Don't you believe what he said?" "Sure I believe him. He and his wife can digest cellulose, Heaven help them, and they can live off Raindrop's seaweed. As I remarked to him, though -- you heard me, and he understood me -- they're human. I can digest kale and cauliflower, too, and could probably live off them as well as that pair could live off the weeds. But did you ever stop to think what the stuff must taste like? Neither did they. I knew they'd be back with open mouths -- and open minds. Let's eat --  -- and many others! Exdttng tdence-fiction stories and science-fact articles in the IF # Short Story Guesting Time Things were a bit crowded where they came from -- and were getting that way herel W inston, the Civil Servant in Immigration and Arrivals, was puzzled when he came that morning. There were several hundred new people behind the cyclone fences, and no arrivals had been scheduled. "What ships landed?" he called out. "Why were they unscheduled?" "No ships landed, sir," said Potholder, the senior guard. "Then how did these people get here? Walk down from the sky?" Winston asked snappishly. "Yes, sir, I guess so. We don't know who they are or how they keep coming here. They say they SLve from Skandia." "We have few Scandanavian arrivals, and none of such appearance as this," said Winston. "How many are there?" "Well, sir, when we first noticed them there were seven, and they hadn't been there a moment before." "Seven? You're crazy. There are hundreds." "Yes, sir. I'm crazy. A minute after there were seven, there were seventeen. But no more had come from anywhere. Then there were sixty. We separated them into groups of ten and watched them very closely. None crossed from one group to another, none came from anywhere else. But soon there were fifteen, then twenty-five, then thirty in each group. And there's a lot more of them there now than when you started to talk to me a moment ago, Mr. Winston." "Corcoran is my superior and will be here in a minute," Winston said. "He'll know what to do." "Mr. Corcoran left just before you arrived, sir," said Pothokler. He watched it a while, and then went away babbling." always admired his quick grasp of a situation," said Winston. He also went away babbling. T here were about a thousand of those Skandia people, and a little later there were nine times that many. They weren't dowdy people, but the area wouldn't hold any more. The fences all went down, and the Skandias spread out into the city and towns and country. This was only the beginning of it ialized there that morning, then the same thing happened at ten thousand other Ports of Entry of Earth. "Mama," said Trixie, "there are some people here who want to use our bathroom." This was Beatrice (Trixie) Trux, a little girl in the small town of Winterfield. "What an odd request!" said Mrs. Trux. "But I suppose it is in the nature of an emergency. Let them in, Trixie. How many people are there?" "About a thousand," said Trixie. "Trixie, there can't be that many." "All right, you count them." All the people came in to use the Trux's bathroom. There were somewhat more than a thousand of them, and it took them quite a while to use the bathroom even though they put a fifteen-second limit on each one and had a timekeeper with a bell to enforce it. They did it with a lot of laughter and carrying on, but it took that first bun about five hours to go through, and by that time there were a lot more new ones waiting. "This is a little unusual," Mrs. Trux said to some of the Skandia women. "I was never short on hospitality. It is our physical resources, strained. There are so many of you!" "Don't give it a thought," the Skandia women said. "It is the intent that countt, and it was so kind of you people to invite us. We seldom get a chance to go anywhere. We came a little early, but the main bunch will be along very soon. Don't you just love to go visiting." "Oh, yes, yes," said Mrs. Trux. "I never realized till now just how much I wanted to go visiting." But when she saw the whole outdoors black with the new people, Mrs. Trux decided that she had better stay where she was. T ruman Trux was figuring witfc a pencil. "Our lot is fifty feet by a hundred and fifty feet, Jessica," he said. "That is either # or # square feet depending on how many zeroes you carry it out to." "You were always good at math, said Mrs. Trux. "How do you do il anyhow? "And do you know how many people are living with us here on this lot, Jessica?" Truman asked. "Quite a few. "I am guessing between six and seven thousand," said Truman. "I found several more blocks of them fins morning that I didn't know about. Hiey have a complete city built in our back yard. The streets are two and a half feet wide; the houses are eight feet by eight feet with six foot ceilings, and most of them are nine stories high. Whole families live in each room and cook there besides. They have shops and bazaars set up. They even have factories built. I know there is an entire wholesale textile district in our back yard. There are thirteen taverns and five music halls in our yard to my own knowledge, and there may be more." "Well, some of those places are pretty small, Truman. The Little Hideout is in the broom closet of the Big Hideout, and I don't know if we should count it as a separate tavern. You have to go into the Sideways Club sideways; the Thinman Club is only nihe inches wide from wall to wall and it's quite a trick to bending an elbow there; and the Mouse Room is small. But the better clubs are up in our attic, Truman. Did you ever count them? The Crazy Man Cabaret is up there, and the After Hours Club. Most of the other attic clubs are key clubs and I'm not a member. They've set up the Skandia Art Theatre in our basement now you know. They have continuous performances." "I know it, Jessica, I know it." "Their comedies are so funny that I nearly die. The trouble is that it's so crowded there that you have to laugh in when the one next to you laughs out. And I cry just like they do at their tragedies. They're all about women who can't have any more chfldren. Why don't we have a bunch more, Truman? Thera more than twenty shops in our yard where they sell nothing but fertility charms. I wonder why there arenH any children with the Skandia?" "Ah, they say that this is just a short first visit by a few of them and they didn't presume to bring their children with them. What is that new racket superimposed on the old?" "Oh, that's the big drums and the cymbals. They're having a political campaign to elect temporary officials for the time of their visit here. Imperial City, that's the town in our yard and our house, will elect delegates to go to the Congress to represent this whole block. The elections will be tonight. Then we'll really hear some noise, they say. The big drums don't really waste space, Truman. There are people inside them and they play them from the inside. Some of our neighbors are getting a little fussy about the newcomers, but I always did like a house full of people." "We have it now, Jessica. I never got used to sleeping in a bed with nine other people, even if they are quiet sleepers. I like people, and I am fond of new experiences. But it is getting crowded." "We have more of the Skandia than anyone else in the block except the Skirveys. They say it's because they like us more than some of the others. Mamie Skirvey is taking four kinds of the fertility pills now. She is almost sure she will be able to have triplets. I want to too." "All the stores are stripped, Jessica, and all the lumber yards and IF lumber camps; and the grain elevators will be empty in two more days. The Skandia pay for everything in money, but nobody knows what it says on it. I haven't got used to walking on men and women when I go out, but there's no avoiding it since the ground is covered with them." "They don't mind. They're used to it. They say it's crowded where they come from." T he Winterfield Times-Tribune Telegraph had a piece about the Skandia: The plain fact is that for two days the Earth has had ten billion visitors from Skandia, wherever that is. The plain fact is that the Earth will die of them within a week. They appear by invisible transportation, but they have shown no inclination to disappear in the same manner. Food will be gone, water will be gone, the very air we breathe will be gone. They speak all our languages, they are polite, friendly and agreeable. And we will perish from them. A big smiling man broke in on Bar-Tohn, who was once again president of Big State Amalgamated, formerly U. S. A. "I'm the president of the Skandia Visitation," he boomed. "We have come partly to instruct you people and we find that you do need it. Your fertility rate is pathetic. You barely double in fifty years. Your medicine, adequate in other fields, is worse than childish in this. Wo find that some of the nostrums peddled to your people actually impede fertility. Well, get in the Surgeon General and a few of the boys and we'll begin to correct the situation." "Gedoudahere," said President Bar-John. "I know you will not want your people to miss out on the population blessing," said the Skandia Visitation President. "We can aid you. We want you to be as happy as we are." "Jarvis! Cudgelman! Sapsucker! President Bar-John called out "Shoot down this man. I'll implement the paper work on it later." "You always say that but you never do," Sapsucker complained, "It's been getting us in a lot of trouble." "Oh, well, don't shoot him dowa then if you're going to make an issue of it. I long for the old days when the simple things were done simply. Dammit, you Skandia skinr ner, do you know that there are nine thousand of you in the White House itself?" "We intend to improve that this very hour," the Skandia president said. "Wc can erect one, two, or even three decks in these highceilinged rooms. I am happy to say that we will have thirty thousand of our people quartered in the White House this night." "Do you think I like to take a bath with eight other persons -- not even registered voters -- in the same tub?" President Bar-John complained. "Do you think I like to eat off a plate shared by three or four other people? Or to shave, by mistake, faces other than my own in the morning?" "I don't see why not," said the Skandia Visitation President. "People are our most precious commodity. Presidents are always chosen as being those who most love the people." "Oh, come on, fellows," said President Bar-John. "Shoot down the ever-loving son. We're entitled to a free one now and then." Jarvis and Cudgelman and Sapsucker blazed away at the Skandia, but they harmed him not at all. "You should have known that we are immune to that," the Skandia said. "We voted against its effect years ago. Well, since you will not cooperate, I will go direct to your people. Happy increase to you, gentlemen." T ruman Trux, having gone out from his own place for a little change, was sitting on a park bench. He wasn't actually sitting on it, but several feet above it. In that particular place, a talkative Skandia lady sat on the bench itself. On her lap sat a sturdy Skandiaman reading the Sporting News and smoking . a pipe. On him sat a younger Skandia woman. Chi this younger woman sat Truman Trux, and on him sat a dark Skandia girl who was filing her fingernails and humming a tune. On her in turn sat an elderly Skandia man. As crowded as things had become, one could not expect a seat of one's own. A fellow and his girl came along, walking on the people on the grass. "Mind if we get on?" asked the girl. "Quite all right," said the elderly gentleman on top. "'Sail right," said the girl working on her nails. "Certainly," said Truman and the others, and the Sporting News man puffed into his pipe that it was perfectly agreeable. There was no longer any motor traffic. People walked closely packed on streets and sidewalks. The slow stratum was the lowest, then the medium (walking on the shoulders of the mediums and combining the three speeds). At crossings it became rather intricate, and people were sometimes piled nine high. But the Earth people, those who still went out, quickly got onto the Skandia techniques. An Earthman, known for his extreme views, had mounted onto i monument in the park and began to harangue the people. Earth and Skandia. Truman Trux, who wanted to see and hear, managed to get a nice fifth level seat, sitting on the shoulders of a nice Skandia girl, who sat on the shoulders of another who likewise to the bottom. "Ye are a plague of locusts!" howled the earth-side crank. "Ye have stripped us bare!" "The poor man!" said the Skandia girl who was Truman's understeady. "He likely has only a few children and is embittered." "Ye have devoured our substance and stolen the very air of our life. Ye are the Apocalyptical grasshoppers, the eleventh plague." IF "Here is a fertility charm for your wife,' said the Skandia girl, and reached it up to Truman. "You might not need it yet, but keep it for the future. It is for those who have more than twelve. The words in Skandia say 'Why stop now? It is very efficacious." "Thank you," said Truman. "My wife has many charms from you good people, but not one like this. We have only one child, a young girl." "What a shame! Here is a charm for your daughter. She cannot begin to use them too early." "Destruction, destruction, destruction on ye all!' screamed the Earthside crank from atop the monument. "Quite an adept," said the Skandia girl. "To what school of eloquence does he belong?" The crowd began to break up and move off. Truman felt himself taken down one level and then another. "Any particular direction?" asked the Skandia girl. "This is fine," said Truman. "We're going toward my home." "Why, here's a place fdmost clear," said the girl. "You'd never find anything like this at home." They were now down to the last level, the girl walking only on the horizontal bodies of those lounging on the grass. "You can get off and walk if you wish," said the girl. "Here's a gap in the walkers you can slip down into. Well, toodle." "You mean toodle-oo?" Truman asked as he id off her shoulders. "That's right. I can never remember the last part of it" The Sflcandia were such friendlf people! P resident Bar-John and a dozen other regents of the world had decided that bruskness was called for. Due to the intermingling of Earth and Skandia populations, this would be a task for small and medium arms. The problem would be to gather the Skandia together in open spots, but on the designated day they began to gather ot themof the Earth. It worked perfectly. Army units were posted everywhere and went into action. Rifles began to whistle and machine guns to chatter. But the effect on the Skandia was not that expected. Instead of falling wounded, they cheered everywhere. "Pyrotechnics yet!" exclaimed a Skana leader, mounting onto the monument in our own park. "Oh, we are honored!" But, though the Skandia did not fall from the gunshot, they had begun to diminish in their numbers. They were disappearing as mysteriously as they had appeared a week before. "We go now," said the Skandia leader from the top of the monument. "We have enjoyed every minute of our short visit. Do not despair! We will not abandon you to your emptiness. Our token force will return home and report. In another week we wiH visit you in substantial numbers. We will teach you the full happiness of human proximity, the glory of Crahfiilness, e blessing of adequate population. We will teach you to fill up the horrible empty places of your planet." The Skandia were thinning out. The last of them were taking cheering farewells of disconsolate Earth friends. "We will be back," they said as they passed their last fertility charms into avid hands. "We'll be back and teach you everything so you can be as happy as we are. Good increase to you!" "Good increase to you!" cried the Earth people to the disappearing Skandia. Oh, it would be a lonesome world without all those nice people! With them you had the feeling that they were really close to you. "We'll be back!" said the Skandia leader, and disappeared from the monument. "We'll be back next the monument. "We'll be back next week and a lot more of us," and then they were gone. " -- And next time we'll bring the kids!" came the last fading Skandia Latest and Greatest of the Famed Skylark Stories! Don't miss next month's ft -- beginning -- Skylark DuQuesne The story scfence-flction fans hove been waiting for for yearsi By E. E. Smith, Ph. D. (Author of The Skylark of Space, Galactic This Is thrilKng space adventure at its best, told by the man who showed all other writers howl Starts in June f -- don't miss iti IF IF  Short Stor, ft struck like a wolf from out in space -- and the men were chfenseless against iH T he dark shape, big as a man, come between the two smaikst of the three watchfires, moving in silence like that of sleep. Out of habit, Duncan had been watching that downwind direction, though his mind was heavy with tiredness and with the thoughts of life that came with sixteen summers' age. Duncan raised his spear and howled, and charged the wolf. For a moment the fire-eyes looked steafily at him, appearmg to be a fidl hand apart. Then the wolf turned away; it made one deep questioning sound, and was gone into the darkness out beyond the fires. Duncan stopped, drawing a gasping breath of relief. The wolf would probably have killed him if it had faced his diarge, but it did not yet dare to face him in firelight. The bleeps eyes were on Duncan, a hundred gjowing spots in the huddled mass of the flock. One or two oi the animals bleated softly. He paced around the flock, sleepiness and introspection jarred from his mind. Legends said that men in the old Earthland had animals called dogs that guarded sheep. If that were true, some might think that men were fools for ever leaving Earthland. But sudi thoughts were irreverent, and Duncan's situation called for prayer. Every night now the wolf came, and all too often it killed a sheep. Duncan raised his eyes to the n Bight sky. 'Send me a sign, stargods," he prayed, routinely. But Ihe heavens were quiet. Only the stately fireflies of the dawn zone traced their steady random paths, vanishing halfway up the eastern sky. The stars themselves agreed that three-fourths of the night was gone. The legends said that Earthland was among the stars, but the younger priests admitted such a statement could only be taken symbolically. The heavy thoughts came back, in spite of the nearby wolf. For two years now Duncan had prayed and hoped for his mystical experience, the sign from a god that came to mark the future life of every youth. From what other young men whispered now and then, he knew that many faked their signs. That was all right for lowly herdsmen, or even for hunters. But how could a man without a genuine vision ever be much more than a tender of animals? To be a priest, to study the things brought from old Earthland and saved -- Duncan hungered for learning, for greatness, for things he could not name. He looked up again, and gasped, for he saw a great sign in the sky, almost directly overhead. A point of dazzling light, and then a bright little cloud remaining among the tars. Duncan gripped his spear, watching, for a moment even forgetting the sheep. The tiny cloud welled and faded very slowly. F or centuries now the berserker machines had warred on Earthdescended men. AoComatons loosed in some forgotten war, the machines moved as raiders through the galaxy, destroying whatever life they could find and overcome. One such machine slid out of the interstellar intervals toward Duncan's planet, drawn from afar by the Sol-type light of Duncan's sun. To turn life into death was a berserker's function, and this sun and this planet promised life. The berserker machine was the size of a small planetoid, and its power was immense, but it knew well that some planets were defended, and it bent and slowed its hurtling approach into a long cautious curve. There were no warships in nearby space, but the berserker's telescopes picked out the bright dots of defensive satellites, vanishing into the planet's shadow and reappearing. To probe for more data, the berserker computers loosed a spy missile. The missile looped the planet, and then shot in, testing the defensive net. Lxw over nightside, it turned suddenly into a bright little cloud. Still, defensive satellites formed no real obstacle to a berserker. It could gobble them up almost at leisure if it moved in close to them, though they would stop long-range missiles fired at the planet. It was the other things the planet might have, the buried things, that held rush. Also it was strange that this defended planet had no cities to make light sparks on its nightside, and that no radio signals came from it into space. IF With mechanical caution the berserker moved in, toward the area scouted by the spy missile. I n the morning, Duncan counted his flock -- and then recounted, already scowling. Then he searched until he found the slaughtered lamb. The wolf had not gone hungry after all. That made four sheep lost, now, in ten days. Duncan tried to tell himself that dead sheep no longer mattered so much to him, that with a sign such as he had been granted last night his life was going to be filled with great deeds and noble causes. But the sheep still did matter, and not only because their owners would be angry. Looking up sullenly from the eaten lamb, he saw a brown-robed priest, alone, mounted on a donkey, climbing the long grassy slope of the grazing valley from the direction of the Temple Village. He would be going to pray in one of the Caves in the foot of the mountain at the head of the valley. At Duncan's beckoning wave -- he could not leave the flock to walk far toward the priest -- the man on the donkey changed course. Duncan walked a little way to meet him. "Blessings of Earthland," said the priest shortly, when he came close. He was a stout man who seemed glad to dismount and stretch, arching his back and grunting. He smiled as he saw Duncan's hesitation. "Are you much alone here, my son?" "Yes, Holy One. But -- last night, I had a sign. For two years I've wanted one, and just last night it came." "Indeed? That is good news." The priest's eyes strayed to the mountain, and to the sun, as if he calculated how mucii time he oould spare. But he said, with no sound of impatience: "Tell me about it, if you wish." When he heard that the flash in the sky was Duncan's sign, the priest frowned. Then he seemed to keep himself from smiling. "My son, that light was seen by many. Today the elders of a dozen villages, of most of the Tribe, have come to the Temple Village. Everyone has seen something different in the sky-flash, and I am now going to pray in a Cave, because of it." The priest remounted, but when he had looked at Duncan again, he waited to say: "Still, I was not one of those chosen to see the sky-gods sign; and you were. It may be a sign for you as well as for others, so do not be disappointed if it is not only for you. Be faithful in your duties and signs will come." He turned the donkey away. Feeling small, Duncan walked slowly back to hk flock. How could he have thought that a light seen over half the world was meant for one shepherd? Now his sign was gone, but his wolf remained. I n the afternoon, another figure came into sight, walking straight toward the flock from the direction of Colleen's village. Duncan tightened the belt on his woolen tunic, and combed grass from his hair with #S Us fingers. He felt his chin, and wished his beard would really begin to grow. He was sure the visitor was Colken when she was still half a mile away. He kept his movements calm and made himself appear to first notice her when she came in sight on a hilltop within hailing distance. The wind moved her brown hair and her garments. "Hello, Colleen." "Hello, Duncan the Herdsman. My father sent me to ask about his sheep." He ran an anxious eye over the flock, picking out individuals. Praise be to gods of land and sky. "Your father's sheep are well." She walked closer to him. "Here are some cakes. The other sheep are not well?" Ah, she was beautiful. But no mere herdsman would ever have her. "Last night the wolf killed again." Duncan gestured with empty hands. "I watch, I light fires. I have a pear and a club, and I rush at him when he comes, and I drive him away. But sooner or later he comes on the wrong side of the flock, or a sheep strays." "Another man should come from the village," she said. "Even a boy would help. With a big clever wolf, any herdsman may need help." He nodded, faintly pleased at her implying he was a man. But his troubles were too big to be soothed away. "Did you see the sky-flash, last night?" he asked, remembering with bitterness his joy when he had thought the sign was his. "No, but all the village is talking U about it. I will tell them about the wolf, but probably no man will come to help you for a day or two. They are all dancing and talking, thinking of nothing but the sky-flash." She raised puzzled eyes beyond Duncan. "Look." It was the priest, rushing past half a mile from them on his way Jown valley from the Caves, doing his best to make his donkey gallop toward the Temple Village. "He may have met your wolf," Colleen suggested. "He doesn't look behind him. Maybe in the Caves he received an important sign from the earth-gods." They talked a while longer, sitting on the grass while he ate the jakes she had brought him. "I must go!" She sprang up. The sun was lowering and neither of them had realized it. "Yes, hurry! At night the wolf may be anywhere on the plain." Watching her hurry away, Duncan felt the wolf in his own blood. Perhaps she knew it, for she looked back at him strangely from the hilltop. Then she was gone. O n a hillside, gathering dried brush for the night's watchfires, Duncan paused for a moment, looking at the sunset. "Sky-gods, help me," he prayed. "And earth-gods, the dark wolf should be under your dominion. If you will not grant me a sign, at least help me deal with the wolf." He bent routinely and laid his ear to a rock. Every day he asked some god for a sign, but never -- He heard a voice. He crouched IF there, listening to the rock, unable to believe. Surely it was a waterfall he heard, or running cattle somewhere near. But no, it was a real voice, booming and shouting in some buried distance. He could not make out the words, but it was a real god-voice from under the earth. He straightened up, tears in his eyes, even the sheep for a moment forgotten. This wonderful sign was not for half the world, this was for him! And he had doubted that it would ever come. To hear what it said was allimportant. He bent again and listened. The muffled voice went on unceasingly, but he could not understand it. He ran a few steps up the hill, and put his ear against another exposed earth-bone of rock. Yes, the voice was plainer here; sometimes he could distinguish a word. "Give," said the voice. Mumble, mumble. "Defend," he thought it said. Even the words he recognized where spoken in strange accents. He realized that darkness was falling, and stood up, in fearful indecision. The sheep were itill his responsibility, and he had to Ught watchfires, he had to, for the sheep would be slaughtered without them. And at the same time he had to listen to this voice. A form moved toward him through the twilight, and he grabbed up his club -- then he realized it was Colleen. She looked frightened. She whispered: "The sun went down, and I feared the dark. It was a shorter way back to you, than on to the village." The berserker moved in toward the nightside of the planet, quickly now, but still with caution. It had searched its memory of thousands of years of war against a ihoLisarid kinds of life, and it had remembered one other planet like this, with defensive satellites but no cities or radios. The fortifiers of that planet had fought among themselves weakening until they could no longer operate their defenses, had even forgotten what their planet-weapons were. The life here might be shamming, trying to lure the berserker within range of the planet-weapons. Therefore the berserker sent its mechanical scouts ahead, to break througii the satellite net, and range ovcf provoked the planet's maximum response. T he fires were built, and Colleen held the spear and watched the sheep. Wolf or not, Duncan had te follow his sign. He made his way up the dark hillside, listening at rock after rock. And ever the earth-god voice grew stronger. In the back of his mind Duncaa realized that Colleen had arranged to be trapped with him for the night, to help him defend the sheep, and he felt limitless gratitude and love. But even that was now in the back of his mind. The voice now was everything. He held his breath, listening. Now he could hear the voice while he stood erect. There, ahead, at the foot of a cliff, were slabs of rock tumbled down by snowslides. Among them migit be a cave. He reached the slabs, and heard the voice rumble up between them. "Attack in progress. Request human response. Order one requested. This is defense control. Attack in progress -- " On and on it went. Duncan understood some of it. Attack, request, human. Order one requested -- that must mean one wish was to be granted, as in the legends. Never again would Duncan laugh at legends, thinking himself wise. This was no prank of the other young men; no one could hide in a cave and shout on and on in such a voice. No one but a priest should enter a cave, but probably not even the priests knew of this one. It was Duncan's, for his sign had led him here. He had been granted a tremendous sign. More awed than fearful, he slid between slabs of rock, finding the way down, rock and earth and then metal under his feet. He dropped Into a low metal cave. It was as he had heard the god-caves described, very long, smooth, round and regular, except here where it was bent and tom under the fallen rocks. In the cave's curving sides were glowing places, like huge animal eyes, giving light enough to see. And here the shouting was very loud. Duncan moved toward it. We have reached the surface, the scouts radioed back to the berserker, in their passionless computersymbol language. Here intelligent life of the earth-type lives in villages. So far we have killed eight hundred and thirty-nine units. We have met no response from dangeruu wc; jons. A little while the berserker waited, letting the toll of life-units mount. When the chance of this planet's being a trap had dropped in computer-estimation to the vanishing point, the berserker moved in to close range, and began to mop the remaining defensive satellites out of its way. # Y Tere I am." Duncan fell on XA his knees before the metal thing that bellowed. In front of the god-shape lay woven twigs and eggshells, so old as to be hardly more than dust. Once priests had sacrificed here, and then they haJ forgotten this god. "Here I am," said Duncan again, in a louder voice. The god heeded him, for the deafening shouting stopped. "Response acknowledged, from defense control alternate #," said the god. "Planetary defenses now under control of post #." How could you ask a god to speak naore plainly? After a little time of silence, the god said: "Request order one." That seemed understandable, but to make sure, Duncan asked: "You will grant me one wish, mighty one?" "Will obey your order. Emergency. Satellite sphere ninety per cent destroyed. Planet-weapon responses fully programmed, activation command requested." Duncan, still kneeling, closed his eyes. One wish would be granted. TTie rest of the words he took for a warning to choose his wish with IF atre. If he wished, the god would make him the wisest of chiefs, or Ihe bravest of warriors. The god would give him a hundred years of fife, or a dozen young wives. Or Colleen. But Colleen was out in the darkless, now, facing the wolf. Even Bear, just beyond the circles of firefight, watching the sheep, and watchlag the tender girl. Even now Colleen might be screaming -- Duncan's heart sank utterly, for he knew the wolf had beaten him, had destroyed this moment on which Ac rest of his life depended. He was a herdsman. And if he could make himself forget the sheep, he could not want to forget Colleen. "Destroy the wolf! Kill it!" he dioked out. "Term wolf questioned." "The killer! To destroy the killer! That is the only wish I can make!" He could stand the presence of the god no longer, and ran away through the cave, weeping for his ruined fife. He ran to find Colleen. R ecall, shouted the electronic voice of the berserker. Trap. Recall. Hearing, its scattered bro of scout machines rose at top acceleration from their planet work, curving and climbing toward their great metal mother. Too slow. They blurred into streaks, into fireworks of incandescent gas. The berserker was not waiting for them, it was diving for deep sace, knowing the planetweapons reached out for it. It wasted no circuits now to compute why so much life had been sacrificed to trap it. It saw new force fields thrown up ahead of it, walling it in. No escape. The whole sky was in flames, the bones of the hills shuddered underfoot, and at the head of the valley the top of the mountain was torn away and an enormous shaft of something almost invisible poured from it infinitely up into the sky. Duncan saw (Eileen huddling on the open ground, shouting to him, but the buried thunder drowned her voice. The sheep were running and leaping, crying under the terrible sky. Duncan saw the dark wolf among them, running with them in circles, too frightened to be a wolf. He picked up his club and ran, staggering with the shaking earth, after the beast. He caught the wolf, for he ran toward it, while it ran in circles without regard for him. He saw the sky reflected in its eyes, facing him, and he swung his club just as it crouched to leap. He won. And then he struck again and again, making sure. All at once there was a blue-white, moving sun in the sky, a marvelous sun that in a minute turned red, speading itself out to vanish in the general glow. Then the earth was still at last. Duncan walked in a daze, until ho saw Colleen trying to round up the sheep. Then he waved to her, and trotted after her to help. The wolf was dead, and he had a wonderful sign to tell. The gods had not killed him. Beneath his running feet, the steadiness of the ground seemed IF  Novelette Way Station They coufd not five outside the sheltering walls of the dome -- nor could they survive inside iti I Haywood person," she A said, "has been teaching young people that they can go outside Marstation without a sacred helmet." Eunice Mackdee, a sloppy, fat woman, was clearly a fanatic -- she admitted belonging to the ultraconservative Orthodox Scientists -- yet her voice was surprisingly calm. "You have evidence of this, Mrs. Mackdee?" the chief scientist asked. "Enough, including the testimony of my own son." Ponderously the chief scientist turned toward Bruce Haywood. "Do you wish at this time to make a statement in your own defense?" "Defense, sir?" Bruce Haywood laughed uneasily. "But it's ridiculous. We're all scientists at Marstation. We have the irrevocable right to the free expression of ideas -- " "Only in terms of the principles of science." "The issue here, sir, is freedom to think!" "Will you give me a straight answer? Have you been teaching young people to go outside Marstation without their sacred helmets?" Haywood hesitated. In the conflict between orthodoxy and the abstract ideal of truth, what was an honest answer? Taking advantage of his hesitation, Mrs. Mackdee volunteered : 'T want it clearly understood that I have no personal feeling of vengeance for this Haywood person. My on is lost to Orthodox Science; I accept that. But as a mother I have a duty to save other innocent, young minds from his kind of teaching." "Don't be an absolute ass, Mrs. Mackdee!" Haywood exclaimed. "We're all lost if we continue to tie ourselves to rituals we no longer understand." "Orthodox Scientists," she responded in cold dignity, "have no doubt about the rituals." "Some of us aren't even sure why we're here at Marstation," Haywood countered. "To service interplanetary craft ft "Which have not landed at our port in six centuries!" Haywood reminded her. Pursing her lips so that she appeared to be smiling benignly, Mrs. Mackdee turned toward the chief icientist. "Isn't it an appropriate time to begin the formal hearing?" T he chief scientist sighed and slipped the sacred, ritual helmet over his head, indicating that he would hereafter be functioning in his official capacity as the religious and political leader of the community. He glanced at the brief which Mrs. Mackdee had submitted. "Your first witness, I take it, it Ted Brand?" "Yes -- one of Haywood's boyhood friends." Ted Brand entered the hearing room and took the oath on the sacred books of science, swearing that he would give nothing but objectively factual scientific evidence. He sat rigidly in the chair facing the chief scientist. Throughout his testimony, Brand stared directly at his inquisitor, never allowing his glance to stray in Bruce Haywood's direction. Reading from a card which ho held nervously in his hand, Ted Brand said, "Bruce Haywood and I lived in the south sector, near the perimeter of Marstation, when we were kids. Sometimes after our regular, daily training periods in the ritual we would go to an abandoned playground which was built close to the base of the airseal dome over Marstation. It was here..." Vividly Haywood remembered those carefree days of childhood, before he had started training as a teacher of the scientific ritual. He liked to go to that abandoned playground because there he had an unobstructed view of the arid, red desert outside Marstation. To him it did not appear a barren waste, but rather hospitable and fertile because of the green lichen growing on the red soil and along the banks of the dry river beds, as straight as if they had been carved like canals upon the face of the planet. Mrs. Mackdee asked Brand if Haywood had ever touched one of the broad, alumimim beams which formed the airseal dome above Marstation. While such an act was now illegal -- one of several sacrileges recently prohibited by the code of law which the Orthodox Scientists had persuaded the government to authorize -- it had not been a crime when Haywood was a boy. Had he touched the beam? Of course, several times and in Brand's presence, as Brand testified at the hearing. And once Haywood had done more. I t happened late in the afternoon. Haywood climbed to the top of a rusting jungle gym. The joint formed by a beam and a horizontal supporting girder was directly above him. He could reach it easily. He fingered the rivets while he examined the edges of the beams. The dome was like an enormous, latticed window, built in the shape of a huge hemisphere. Yet in the open spaces between the beams there was no visible material, like the pieces of window glass carefully preserved in the museum of the temple of science. What, then, sealed the air within Marstation, walling out the thin atmosphere of the planet? A curtain of atomic energy, said the Orthodox Scientists. For all Haywood knew they could be right. The sacred books of science were crowded with references to the power of the atom. Atomic energy was somehow created in the sealed reactors which were the only source of power in Marstation. The scientists -- and every citizen of tihe station was a scientist -- took the power for granted, but no one knew what an atom was; nor was it permissible to make scientific investir gation of the data in the texts. In the remote past St. Einstein had stolen the secret of the atom from the gods; that was all man needed to know about it. Bruce Haywood clung to the aluminum beam searching the metal for any sign of an outlet from which the protective curtain of invisible atoms might be projected. He had made the same test before; as always, he found nothing. If there were no outlet, did it follow that the curtain of atoms did not exist? Haywood had always been taught that atomic power would, in an instant, destroy any material object it touched. He took from his pocket a tiny spool of magnetic tape on which he recorded his ritual assignments from the learning center, and he dropped the spool through the opening in the airseal dome. Nothing happened. The tape slid down the beam, bounced on the red earth outside, and rolled back under the dome. Ted Brand had seen it all; Haywood was certain of that. At Haywood's hearing. Brand completed his testimony by referring to that same incident. UTi was a clever trick, of course. Xl never understood how Bruce made it look as if that spool of tape' had actually passed through the dome unharmed. We all know that impossible; the tape would have been burned to a crisp. So I simply wouldn't ask Bruce how he did it; I didn't want him to think I had been taken in by a trick." IF "Do you consider this recital of gossip evidence?" Haywood demanded of the chief scientist when Brand had been dismissed from the stand. "Mr. Haywood," the chief retorted, "I must remind you that this is a formal hearing. You have the right to respond to a direct question if you choose; but you may not interrupt the proceedings to make comments upon the testimony." He looked at the Mackdee brief again. "The next witness is Dr. Will Storm." "He volunteered his testimony," Eunice Mackdee said in pride. And he's the type that would, Haywood thought; old Stormy was just the type. An aging, red-faced man entered the hearing room and, after having ceremoniously bowed to the panel of judges, seated himself in the witness chair. Beaming at them all, he adjusted his jacket so that they could see his lapel pin, a replica of the sacred helmet worn by citizens who had been publicly honored by the Orthodox Scientists. "I am both awed and honored that my opinion should be sought by so august a body of scientists," Dr. Storm began in the magnificent organ bellow which had made him so impressive a figure to many of his students. Not to Haywood, though, who thought the doctor was a bumbling farce, hypnotized by the sound of his own voice. He had the not unusual skill among teachers of churning out words by the hour, yet saying nothing; but his role of the learned philosopher was so perfectly stereotyped few of his students ever suspected his quackery. "It is my earnest hope tiiat I may adequately satisfy your inquiry into this tragic situation, while at the same time I do no injustice to my former student, Bruce Haywood," Storm continued, still beaming, "though I must admit I am not at all surprised to find Haywood having problems. An experienced teacher -- and as you know I've been teaching for twenty years -- is an expert judge of human nature; and I must admit that from the first day when Bruce Haywood was assigned to my group, I had serious doubts about his qualifications... n T hat first day: Haywood remembered it clearly. Only three years had passed since he had enrolled in the final learning group which he was required to pass before entering the Temple of Science as a probationary teacher. Haywood was in his early twenties then, a quiet, introspective youth still trying to rationalize answers to the annoying questions that plagued his mind. The class met in a large lecture hall on the top floor of the Temple -- five students and a teacher in a room designed to accommodate three hundred. After listening to the first few minutes of Storm's opening lecture Haywood concluded that the professor had nothing to say. StealAily he slid his chair toward the side of the hall, until he was able to peer through the glassless winIF dow at Ac chy beneath Ae dome and the red desert surrounding it. From the highest floor of Ac Temple the distant blue hills seemed closer and more inviting than ever. What lay behind them? What lay past the curve of the horizon? Haywood felt imprisoned within the city, held captive in a microscopic bubble fixed to the surface of the vast and beautiful world. Why had Marstation been built originally? Who had established the routines of science and for what reason? Was it all the pointless distortion of myth or was it simply a misunderstanding of fact? So much that was printed in the sacred scientific books vas obviously nonsense -- the mathematics involving gravity, for example, since Ae measurable force at Marstation was considerably less than that assumed in the texts. But Haywood couldn't quite bring himself to reject all of science because of its more obvious errors; such thinking resembled too closely the fanaticism of the Orthodox Scientists. But how was truA to be sifted from the sacred texts? Suddenly Haywood became aware of a dead silence. He focused his attention again upon Dr. Storm, uncomfortably aware that the teacher was glaring at him coldly. "And how would you present Ae problem, Mr. Haywood?" "Sorry, sir," he apologized. "I didn't hear the question." "So we have a slow learner with us, I see." Storm beamed and the other students knew this was their cue to laugh, which Aey did dutifully. "You may find it necessary to do considerable extra work, Mr. Haywood, to keep up with the class." "I shall do what I am assigned, sir." "Indeed, I should hope so -- if you mean to be graduated with your class. By tomorrow I expect you to commit to memory the first five pages in the sacred text of 'St. Darwin. You will use the full text, which is in the Temple library, rather than the summary editions which you have been accustomed to reading in the past." H aywood was delighted by the assignment of the extra work, for it was the first time in his life that he was granted access to the library in the Temple of Science. Freedom to use the original texts was to him the one worthwhile result of Storm's class. He not only memorized the designated pages, but read on in St. Darwin's lxok until the library was closed for the night. Among the texts brought from earth by the founders, the mystic -- and perhaps magic -- volumes written by St. Einstein and St. Darwin were the best known and the least understood. The men were both said to have been outstanding chief scientists on earth, since their names were so often cited in the l:sser known sacred texts. Of the two, St Darwin was the least comprehensible to both teacher and student, for he wrote of a voyage he had taken by floating upon a vast body of water. Since it was clearly impossible for such a quantity of water to exist -- according to calculations made by the mathematicians in the Temple, the weight of it would crush the thin outer crust of any planet -- St. Darwin's expedition was clearly a symbolic presentation of scientific fact. The riddle buried in the symbolism intrigued Haywood, as it had hundreds of scholars before his time. Why would so great a chief scientist have chosen to express his ideas in imagery thait was not only absurd but also repugnant to the average reader? As the year passed, Haywood took every opportunity, even repeated additional assignments from Dr. Storm, to read in the Temple library. Beyond St. Darwin he expanded his interests to other books which had been brought to Marstation by the founders. The basic sacred texts of technology did not interest him, but Haywood was fascinated by the material which the librarians classified as mystical writing. These texts were never given as assignments, and they were almost never read. In the course of time the students in Storm's class were issued their sacred helmets in a solemn ceremony conducted by the chief scientist. Following the blessing and the usual prayers, each man in Haywood's group pulled his helmet over his head. In single file they marched after Dr. Storm toward the airlock exit from the station. We're like knights, Haywood thought, recalling one of the books he had read in the library. It gave him a sense of identification witii the long history of earth, and the insight helped him understand hit own world better. The five students followed Storm to the launching pad and the service buildings which stood on the desert soil some distance outside the city. Without a hitch they went through the ritual of running the complex machinery of a space port Blindly each man performed a specific skill. Perhaps he no longer understood the reason for his job or the machine he ran, but that hardly mattered. H aywood watched the agricultural technicians who were working the farmed acres which lay between the station and the launching pad. Narrow poles carried a spiral of feathery, metal filaments high above the furrows; these poles were familiar devices used for collecting water from the frost which settled on the red planet after dark. A splitsecond shock of heat through the metal pole transformed the frost into minute drops of water, which slid down the filaments, through the hollow pile, and into insulated tanks below. Regularly, twenty times each hour during the bitterly cold night, the precious water dripped into the tanks. Haywood realized abruptly that this source of water must have been invented to meet the conditions existing on the red planet. None of the texts which he had read in the library -- and by that time he had broused through hundreds -- mentioned that there was any need on earth for a special water collection. IF This suggested that water on earth might exist in such abundance that earth people took it for granted. When his learning group had been taken outside the dome for two consecutive weeks to practice their rituals, Dr. Storm began to relax his close supervision. Haywood seized upon this opportunity to wander off from the others, far enough so that no one would necessarily see what he was up to. Thus alone, he made the vital test. He removed his helmet and kept it off for several minutes. As he had surmised, the globe about his head was more hinderance than help. He breathed more easily the clear, cold air of the red planet; it was invigorating, and far from harmful. He had the proof at last. But proof of what? If men could live as easily, without the dome and without the helmet, why had they been necessary to the founders? Haywood had the feeling that understanding was on the fringe of his mind, just beyond his grasp. But he couldn't clarify his thinking, except for a vague conviction that the answer was in the mystical writings of St. Darwin. m Xf was not, in the end, the gospe! JL of St. Darwin or even Haywood's own experience with the helmet that gave him his first real clue to the truth, but rather a forgotten pamphlet on child care. No text in the library coetalned ,a picture of a man; the founders had, perhaps understandably, considered it pointless to give valuable space to the obvious. But in the dusty, aging, faded pamphlet Haywood found a brief description of a newborn child, The small, helpless, pink-skinned infant, with its short, stubby arms and legs, its head so disproportionately large relative to the trunk of the body..." A cold shock shuddered through Haywood's mind. In almost those identical words his mother had once described her child who died of the bleeding sickness. Pink skin; large head; these always characterized the deformed monstrosities which never survived birth at Marstation. But this was the normid earth child, not a monstrosity! There was no bleeding sickness, then -- merely the reaction of a normal infant to an unendurable environment. We're the deformed, Haywood thought, nauseated by disgust with himself. We've changed physically so that we can survive. 'He raced back to the gospel of St. Darwin, and poured over the pages, intuitively fitting together the logical struo ture of an ancient earth science. Survival of the fittest; natural selection; adaptation. Adaptation! Now he knew the truth and his nausea was gone. How foolish to be disgusted by the change an organism made within itself, putting itself up by the bootstraps in order to survive! What a magnificent thing was man, to meet the challenge of a new environment and to maintain a foothold of life on a strange, new world. In a vague way, without losing his newly tounv leirniie uion with the past, Haywood he 'an to see himself as a man ol this new world. This was his home, no longer the earth from which his fathers had come. Haywood and his people were on the threshold of a new world, a new experience, a greatness still to be defined -- if only they would break away from the traditions and the rituals that held them confined within the useless dome of Marstation. It was then that Haywood realized how fortunate he was to be trained for teaching. He might, otherwise, have wasted a lifetime trying to persuade the chief scientist or the directors of the Temple to understand the insights which seemed so clear to him. The rituals of the Orthodox Scientists had imposed too many controls upon the thinking of adults. But children, still forming their ideas, might understand; as a teacher, Haywood could reach their young minds and give them the fresh, new world which the Orthodox Scientists were blindly rejecting. F rom the witness chair at the hearing Dr. Storm gave an unfavorable opinion of Haywood as a moody; not the sort of lad to join in the games and horseplay with the other kids. I always say, you can't trust people who think too much," he concluded. "What of his work?" the chief scientist inquired. "Unusually good," Storm admitted -- to Haywood's surprise, since his grades had been poor. But Storm added, beaming again at the judges, "However, as I always say, excellent scholarship is not the best recommendation for a teacher. In the teaching profession we need outgoing folks who can understand and adjust; most important, they must be good disciplinarians." "You had disciplinary trouble with Haywood?" "I, sir, have never had trouble disciplining a pupil. However, as soon as Haywood's .group began the actual practice of the ritual..." Mrs. Mackdee gasped. There was a stir of muttered disbelief among the judges. The chief scientist asked, "At that time. Dr. Storm, did you report that Haywood had removed his helmet in violation of the ritual?" "No, sir; I always had some doubt about Haywood's qualification as a teacher -- and, of course, this hearing indicates how right I was -- but -- " "Dr. Storm, why didn't you report Haywood directly to me?" "I was trying to be too objective, T suppose, too scientific in my attitude. T disliked Haywood; I thought he was far too independent minded to make a good teacher. Consequently, I bent over backward to give him the benefit of every doubt." "You still haven't answered my question, sir." "The truth is, I -- I didn't exactly see Haywood with the helmet off. I just had the impression that he had removed it." "Then, in essence. Dr. Storm," the chief scientist summarized, "your actual evidence against Haywood IF amounts to nothing. You noted no real violation of the ritual and -- " "But I formed opinions, sir. As I told you, I'm an excellent judge of people." I've never been wrong before." "Your comments. Dr. Storm, have no doubt been instructive, but unfortunately lacking in objective data." Mrs. ,Mackdee intervened. "Ask him! Ask this Haywood person if he had his helmet off outside of the station." For some seconds the chief scientist studied Haywood's face in silence and Haywood wondered how he would reply to the direct question. The penalty for perjury was no less severe than the penalty for conviction of heresy, and if he told the truth there was a remote diance that someone in the hearing room might understand him. The idea of ultimate freedom for the people confined beneath the dome would then not be lost, whatever sentence was imposed upon Haywood. H owever, he was not given the opportunity to reply to the question, for the chief scientist turned toward Mrs. Mackdee and asked : "Do you believe he took his helmet off outside?" "Of course not; ,he would have died at once." "Then it's a foolish question to ask, don't you think?" "But he's trying to persuade young people to do precisely that!" "We must establish more positive proof, Mrs. Mackdee." The chief scientist glanced impatiently at his watch. "I hope we can conclude this hearing before the graduation ceremonies this afternoon -- for your owr son's group, by the way, Mrs. Mackdee. In order to save time, I suggest that we hear your son's testimony now." "I object," Eunice Mackdee replied. "I intend to prove that other students have been taught these same insidious lies as well as my Ray." "Your son's evidence will be quite sufficient." "I want H understood that I have no personal feeling of vindictiveness toward this Haywood person." "As you have told us, Mrs. Mackdee." "I am simply doing my duty as a citizen and as an Orthodox Scientist." "Of course -- and as a concerned mother." "I have nothing but objective love for this unfortunate and misguided teacher. I would be overjoyed if, as a result of this hearing, we might make him comprehend the deep error of -- " "Then, naturally, you have no objection if we hear your son's testimony now." The chief scientist made an impatient gesture, and the guard escorted Ray Mackdee into the hearing room. The boy was small for his age, nervous and frightened. Like Ted Brand, he refused to look in Haywood's direction. Haywood was sure Ray would betray him, perhaps because he was frightened by the grim determination of his mother; or perhaps because, when he had to make a final choice, he was afraid tm consider any truth which opposed the teaching of Orthodox Science. It was a pity, Haywood thought, for Ray Mackdee was the smartest student -- potentially the best future leader -- whom Haywood had taught during his three years as a probationary teacher. L earning groups in the Temple of Science were divided into three types: superior groups, designated as the Talented, which trained students in the most complex rituals of science; average groups, learning the technical skills; and the Basics, where students were capable of learning only the simplest, service rituals such as community maintenance, argriculture and teaching. To assign the most inadequate teachers to the Talented students and the most capable to the Basics was one of the oldest traditions in Marstation brought by the first colonists from earth. This was the Doctrine of St. Conant, said to be the only truly democratic form of education. "The Talented can learn despite the teacher," or so Orthodox Scientists declared, quoting a popular aphorism attributed to St. Conant, "but Basic groups require the skills of the most capable and the most experienced teachers." Largely because of Dr. Storm's lukewarm recommendation, Bruc: Haywood had been assigned to teach the Talented. During the three yen i s of his probationary teaching he In I subtly directed them to areas of research calculated to plant in Ihcir minds considerable doubt of the infallibility of Orthodox Science. Haywood was sure that, if Mrs. Mackdee were permitted to call other students to add their testimony to her son's, she could more than prove her charges, even though, in an exact, legal sense, she would be wrong; for Haywood had done nothing in the classroom that was not properly related to the course of study. In the beginning Ray Mackdec made a poor, perhaps a foolish witness. He stammered and he seemed imsure of himself. Repeatedly his mother interrupted him to put words ki his mouth. In a dead monotone, without emotion, he obediently recited what she told him to say. "Did Mr. Haywood ever advise you to go outside Marstation without your sacred helmet?" the chief scientist asked Ray. "Not in so many words, but -- " "Of course he did!" Eunice Mackdee snapped. Mackdee, let your y son tell it in his own way." "I am only doing my duty!" "You have already made that qoke clear, Mrs. Mackdee. Now, on, explain what your teacher did tell you about the outside." "First, he assigned us to read old books in the library." Mrs. Mackdee interjected, "Not the sacred texts of Orthodox Jience; remember that." "Our teachers and students have always been free to use any available reading material in their research," the chief scieotist reminded her. "Something shall have to be done about that," she declared. "To put such questionable material into the hands of young people -- " "But there is no restrictive regulation at the present time," he reminded her. "We can hardly ask our judges to convict Mr. Haywood oi breaking a rule which doesn't yet exist." "All this legal quibbling -- ifs simply an evasion of the truth. This Haywood person has systematicaUy betrayed our children and you cannot argue that fact away." "That is not my intention. I merely hope to get at some sort of objective fact we can use. Please continue, son. After you completed your reading, what happened?" "In my learning group we discussed the research." "Was Mr. Haywood present?" "Yes, but he never said much. He just let us talk." Mrs. Mackdec broke in again. "And, as I got the story from Ray, these kids brought up all sorts  issues -- questioning the most fundamental truths of Orthodox Science. I have kept as evidence one of Ray's papers In which he tried to prove there is no curtain of atomic energy radiating from the beams in the dome above Marstation. The teacher not only accepted that balderdash, but he gave Ray a good grade for it." "We encourage freedom of expression, Mrs. Mackdee." "Only when it is based upon the facts of Orthodox Science." "We still have no evidence -- " "Let Ray teH you the rest of it I" he interrupted. n #TV Tr. Haywood used to' talk iVAover our papers with us after he graded them. He kept telling us never to believe in something nmply because we wanted it to be true. He said eve scientific truth had to be tested constantly by repeated experiment." "There's nothing wrong with that, son." "Several times he used the dome over Marstation as an example. He said, if we could prove there was no curtain of energy between the beams, then -- then the air outside the station would be no different from that inside. And if diat were true, we could live anywhere on the planet, free of the dome and without sacred helmets." "Do you understand now," Mrs. Mackdee demanded, "what this Haywood person has been teaching?" The chief scientist turned sadly toward Haywood. "Is this true?" he asked. "In the classroom, I taught only the material approved by the directors of the Temple of Science," Haywood replied. "Then you deny -- " "Oh, that's quite correct," Ray Mackdee volimteered. "Mr. Haywood never talked about die dome or the outside unless we went to visit him after class." "At his home, Ray?" "Yes." "Did Mr. Haywood invite you for these discussions?" "No. He's just a real, nice guy, and he'd take the time to diat wiih n US. "So these discussions took place away from the learning center and not as part of any required assignment. Is this how it happened, Mr. Haywood?" "As a teacher," Haywood said "I'm responsible to you and to die directors of the Temple for oidy what I do as part of my formal classroom work." "There!" Mrs. Mackdee pointed out triumphantly. "He's as much ae admitting the whole thing." # #XTonetheless, Mrs. Mackdee, what Mr. Haywood does ou side the temple is his own business." "Do you mean to tell me he is privileged to teach children to doubt the Orthodox rituals?" "He hasn't broken any law." "You're splitting hairs! I intend to see to it -- " "This is an area where we'll need tighter regulations in the future, I suppose. The hearing, Mrs. Mackdee, has shown us several weaknesses in the structure of Temple authority. The directors will, I f sure, make some revisions in the basic law as a result of our findings." "I want this Haywood person punished!" "I realize he has been too friendly with his students and thereby too effective, perhaps, as a teacher -- too much of an inspiration to young people; even so, what can we do?" "Remove him from the classroom, at least." "Naturally. He'll have to submit to retraining for another ritual." "And prohibit him further use of the temple library." "Absolutely. Mr. Haywood has misused the tools of research to arrive at conclusions incompatible with the convictions of Orthodox Science." Bruce Haywood sat paralyzed by frustration and anger while they settled his future. This defeat seemed so futile; so sit in silence while this fanatic woman destroyed him -- because he had practiced an ideal of science which the Orthodox Scientists recited as the keystone of their doctrine. Test truth by experiment -- how the scientists could reel off those words to ornament any occasion! Words. Words empty of meaning, the incantations of savages. Haywood's punishment left him numb. Retraining for another ritual? What else could he do? What else did he want to learn? He was a teacher because his fathers before him had been teachers. He had never for a moment considered any other career. And now Eunice Mackdee, this fat, vindictive woman, had taken it from him. A sentence of death would have been kinder. "Too friendly, too effective as a teacher," the chief scientist had said, denying the very skills most ardently sought among those selected for training 'in the teaching ritual. Routed by the aggressive determination of one fanatic, the chief scientist laid bare the spineless, vascilating nature of the Temple administration. IV H aywood's hearing ended ten minutes before the graduation exercises were held in the public arena which adjoined the airlock exit from the dome. Though his teaching career was over, Bruce Haywood attended the service, as he had for every graduation since his boyhood. The solemn dedication to youth to service, truth and justice had always symbolized a great deal to him. It was hard for Haywood to make himself believe that this was his last graduation; he would never be admitted to the Temple again. He had fought, no doubt very badly, against ignorance, and ignorance had won handily, without much of a struggle. Before the chief scientist introduced the graduates, among them Ray Mackdee, he gave his usual oration, a sentimental blend of pretty phrases about democracy, man's right to the free expression of ideas, and the dedication of science to truth. The blatant hypocrisy made Haywood almost physically sick, but then he realized that the hypocrisy had always been there, in every graduation address. He recognized it, now, only because of hi bitterness over the result of his hearing. Who, then, was at fault? Not the chief scientist, for he had always been a consistent, plodding uninspired compromiser. Not Mrs. Mackdee, the honest fanatic of Orthodox Science. Tm responsible -- the thought took Haywood by surprise. We're all to blame. We have made of Marstation exactly the restricted prison isn't what each of us wants, but wc haven't the courage to fight for something better. I f Haywood had the courage of his convictions, it was time he took some definite action that would demonstrate his convictions as effectively as Mrs. Mackdee dramatized hers. But what could he do? Leap to the speaker's platform, perhaps, seize the microphone from the chief scientist, and explain away the imaginary curtain of atoms. Not words; words were the weapons of the fanatics. Test truth by experiment! He could demonstrate, obviously and clearly, that the dome was open to the atmosphere of the red planet. Haywood left his seat and walked toward the platform, which was built close to the base of the dome. The aluminum girders curved upward only inches above the speaker's head. In full view of that audience, Haywood intended to climb a beam and swing himself in and out of the dome. He reached the platform. The chief scientist shot an angry, annoyed glance at Haywood, but went on with his oration. Haywood raised his hands toward a beam. He pulled himself through the opening and sat on the outer surface of the beam, dangling his feet into the station. He had expected a reaction, perhaps screams of panic from the audience, but there was nothing. He lowered himself to the platform and grabbed a chair, hauling it through the dome with him. He banged it on the beam to attract attention, but still there was no response from the audience. Exasperated, he leaped to the platform, seized the microphone from the chief scientist, and screamed into it. "Don't you see what I'm doing? There is no atomic curtain! These is no dome! You're free to go where -- " There was brief, angry pandemonium in the audience. Guards seized Haywood and dragged him away. "Confinement, sir?" "No, final disposal, I think," tiis chief scientist said. I nstead of being frightened by the sentence of death, Haywood was relieved. It was more considerate than the decision at the hearing to remove him forever from teaching. With nothing further to lose, ha broke away from the guards and tried to reach the microphone again. He had a fleeting impression of the chief scientist's face close to his, twisted in an agony of compassion. Then Haywood felt the stab of a needle. Sharp pain, dizzy nausea; nothing. Disposal. So this was death. But slowly the black mist lifted. Slowly he became aware of sensar tion. First the customary chill ci night cold! then the hard ground beneath his back. He opened his eye. He stood up slowly, trembling for a moment in the blast of sub-zero wind. Thep the loose folds of hk skin hardened into the familiar, thick ridges -- his people, for some reason, called these goosebumps -- which automatically sealed in his body warmth and made him quite IF comfortable in the icy night air of the red planet. On the horizon he saw the dome of Marstation and nearby the useless towers of the space port, sharply silhouetted against the light reflected mto the night sky. Near where he had been lain on the earth to die -- the usual sentence of disposal passed by the judges of Marstation -- Haywood found a knapsack of dried food and a canteen of water. An unsigned note was tucked beneath the knapsack. "People believe what they will," he read. "Sometimes a belief happens to correspond roughly to the truth; more often it doesn't. You proved that to yourself this afternoon. No one in that audience saw you outside the dome, because they knew as an absolute law of science that no man could survive the passage through the. curtain of aitomic energy. be the first people   anywhere to have devdoped our particuiar distortion oi reality in terms of objective science, though I doubt it. While you were under sedation this afternoon we picked your brain clean. The thinking that 'led you to accept reafily has been recoiled and filed ib the Temple library. It is there, now, for anyone to find it who will read it and understand k -- tomorrow, or a century from now. That is all we can do. If we attempt to destroy the science of Marstation, we run the risk of destroying the colony with it. Man has a need for a rkiial and a purpose, you said that yourself. And it is important to us to save this colony. Nine hundred of us in a single settlement which once housed twenty thousand -- and, for all wa know, we may be the only survivors of mankind anywhere in the universe. "It is my understanding that the others who have gone before you have built a city beyond the mountains. This is a new world for man, a new beginning. Perhaps this time we can keep it a good world, if first we must bum away our neurotic pretentions under the dome of Marstation before we can accept the fact of an outside world. Good luck, Mr. Haywood. Take your place in your world with pride; you've earned it" Carefully Haywood folded the letter and ahpped k mto his pocket Shouldering the kmpsack and the canteen, he turned toward the range of mountakis. On long, why legs he moved in a loping stride across the desert, maintaining an easy, eightfoot pace in order to oonserve his streng. With the enormous globe erf his diest md, in eontrast the tiny here of his hairy head bobbing graedesdy ahoee lii Haywood seemed a fRilesque distortion of man. Yet, he lind adap i ril He felt entirdy at home, ior ttm red planet was his world to wideh he brought a satisfying kkntffioidlon wkh all the history erf man -- somehow, with only the best that had been man, for the worst had been lost passing fiirough IF  Short Story C Whaf wot Ihe message fhe deserted cities held? And -- did H matter? T he rockets were already running when Scout Ship # appeared suddenly off the planet Toran, and instantly they flashed far out to send the ship into what would be a screaming dive almost straight down. Behind, dwindling swiftly, a doud of exterior fittings that had been wrenched loose by the acceleration glowed when the exhaust brushed them. The ship shifted lightly to head for what the pilot thought to be a continent, but as he had no knowledge of the planet's flora it could as well have been an ocean. Inside the ship the pilot muttered, crouched over his control panel. He was a thin, grainy-complexioned redhaired man named Skinner -- and he was scared. He had had years of training in one of the galaxy's best space schools, but now he relied far more on his years as an aircraft pilot than on anything he had learned in class. When the ship hit high altitude bumps he corrected automatically, slewing the little ship aroimd so that the rockets carved great arcs across the sky. A ort, dark crew member named Bannan hurtled into the control room, his thick body easily handling the heavy acceleration but his balance at a loss with the ship's Imrdies. A quick swerve sent him careening into a bulkhead where by bracing his feet he managed to stay. He opened a thick manual he was carrying. "Skinner, listen. I tell you you'll get us all in a terrible fix. Listen to this: 'Among the most stringent of Space Service regulations are those governing landing procedure. In general, the shift from hyperspace to normal space and the approach to a planet are made only after the most thorough consideration of an possibilities. Damage to the ship or hyperspace apparatus will be punished...'" "Don't worry about the hyperspace apparatus," Skinner broke in. We lost that long ago." "Then you've stranded us here!" shouted Bannan. "If you don't pile us ten miles into the planet with your crazy landing we'll never get off it, and if we do we'll be in the brig for breaking all the rules!" "To hell with the rules," snarled Skinner. "I was once in a ship ith a leaky reactor and the pilot did just what I'm doing. We got out just in time. When this crate gives up the ghost it'll take everything with it for miles around. No .Space Force detective will have any way of finding ouf what we're doing now, or whether anyone broke any rules. Now do something useful. Look up Toran in that manual. I think it's inhabited. Is it?" "Yes," said Bannan after a pause. "Are they friendly?" "Yes. Intelligent and friendly." "Good what color are the land masses?" "Green." "Good. That's where we're going," said Skinner. The third member of the crew, a slender Japanese named Doi, struggled into the room, dragging a mass of wires, detached instruments, and other miscellaneous equipment. He compensated easily for swerves, but the acceleration seemed to tell on him. "I couldn't find anything wrong," he said. "But something's way out of whack. The random count m the lower reactor has picked way up. I'm going to get a scientilktor and see..." "No, don't," Skinner said. "When we really start bouncing you might get electrocuted. Look, Bannan, you and Doi just run around and grab up things to take with us when we land. Open the airlock most of the way, and cut loose its safety locks and chain." The ship bumped violently and the lights went out. Skinner stayed in his seat, working by touch and a faint flow from his viewscreen. The other two collected whatever equipment they could think of. They knew the little ship so well they were almost as unhampered by the dark as the pilot, though Bannan had lost his book. As the ship entered the heavier atmosphere it turned over and the length downward. With an ear-splitting screech they descended precipitously toward a land feature that struck Skinner as significant for almost any kind of creature -- a great river delta that opened from a stubby isthmus between two continents. W T he city was a strange one, halfway between sea and land, with curious convolutions of stone for buildings and water running down many of the streets. The three men used their antigravity raft to give it a long look, from several hundred feet up and an equal distance from the city's edge. They regarded it somberly; it was their only means of getting passage from Toran and, unless they found food, their only means of staying alive. Only a minute after they had left the ship, half sunken with water bubbling around it from the intense skin heat, it had blown up and dug a great crater, throwing rocks and mud for miles. They had come thirty or forty miles from the landing site, across the flat sand of the river delta on which the city was located. They had been quiet during that trip, llieir nerves calmed from the frantic scampering of their close escape, and the immense, empty vistas of sky and sand helped prepare them to realize the drama of their approach to the city. Indeed, as they floated high above the walls of the alien city Doi glanced uncertainly at bis two colleagues, and observing their set expressions essayed something profound and significant himself. He was new at this business and not so sure as the older men of the appropriate feelings for different situations. Skinner spoke, his voice sounding with sturdy practicality instead of the high note audible during the last few minutes on the ship. "You figure to ground it here?" He indicated the sand flats below them. "No," said Bannan, pondering. "We want to take no chances. I think we'd better fly over the city first, and see if we can scare up anyone or anything before we get off the raft." "The city isn't far from where the ship landed," remarked Doi. "If we hit so near it just by accident, there must be lots of cities on this coast." "I saw the city on the viewscreen and aimed for it," said Skinner. "It's the only one I saw, so it's probably the only one for at least a few hundred miles." A t these words there was a sharp hiss and the raft sank slowly. Bannan, who was driving h, fiddled and cursed at thr mntrols. Skinner asked, "What's "No jets. s:tem is sealed, too -- it could lake hours just to see what's wrong. Doi, when we land you better get out and push." Doi gave him a strange look. "Push?" "Right. The bouyancy controls will be hard to handle," said Skinner. "I know." They would be, for there was only one bouyancy control, a single knob that could change the bouyancy of the raft by thousands of pounds. Usually t control was only roughly set, and any necessary corrections were affected with the raft's jets. Bannan would have one advantage when he delicately tried to set the knob for the proper bouyancy: when no hand touched the controls the raft would set itself to sink n IF automatically at the rate of a foot per second. If he could observe the setting the control knob took when it performed this automatic funcmeter or so he could achieve a mild bouyancy. He tried several times and didn't succeed. "Catch it, you fool!" Bannan shouted to Doi when he poked at the knob and the raft leaped up for the fourth time. Doi threw himself forward, caught the raft, and swung on it to bring it down. "Run along and get us going, then swing up," ordered Bannan. Doi pushed at the raft until he was sprinting along beneath, then heaved himself up. The raft sank and bis feet dragged and bounced on the ground. Bannan gave a tiny poke to the knob to compensate and the raft soared again, so quickly that it wrenched free of Doi's grip. He fell and would have rolled except that he struck a patch of thin mud. The mud on his face made Doi's expression unreadable when he trudged up to the raft, but nevertheless Bannan grunted in an abashed fashion. "Hmmph. Missed it that time. Let's try it again, Doi." "WTiy don't you take the raft up, let it descend to him so that he can push it when it gets in range, and then he can hop on before it hits the ground and you can take the raft up," said Skinner. "Yes. yes," Bannan growled. "Of course." W ith an abrupt twitch and a quick releasing of the knob he took the raft twelve feet up. Doi waited until it came into reach and then pushed. It accelerated slowly; Doi was tired, was trying to run in wet sand, and was pushing a heavy load. "Hurry up," Skinner said. Doi muttered something unintelligible. The raft sank lower. "Get on, quick." Doi leaped and landed on the raft, now only a foot or so off the ground. He slightly unbalanced it before its automatic system could compensate for his extra weight, and the tilting caused Bannan to miss his dab at the control knob. Before he could try again the raft scrunched heavily into the sand and he went flying off the front end. Doi crashed into Skinner. By now the three men were beginning to look somewhat alike. Skinner's contact with Doi had given him large soiled patches on his uniform, much to annoyance, while Bannan was drenched and furious. Doi's expression was still unreadable. "All right," said Bannan. "We're finally going to do this the right way." "We're almost in the city," objected Skinner, pelting at the silent walls fifty feet away. "It would stBl be best to fly over the city first. I'm pretty sure it says so in the Manual. Skinner, you drive the raft. I'll push while the raft descends. However, this time when it gets too low I'll move back and let you take it up. We'll do it as many times as necessary to get the raft moving fast and get me on with plenty of time to spare. I'll push the raft so that we go down that long straight street there." tie pointed at a street that began on the edge of the city and apparently continued far into it. Skinner stared at him for a moBannan exert himself. He said, "All right, you try." Bannan pushed until he was trotting, then slowed to let Skinner jerk the raft up, trotting beneath it as it descended. When it came within reach he resumed his pushing. By this time they had entered and were travelling down the street Bannan had aimed for. Stone walls of alien buildings echoed the sound of his footsteps. Suddenly the sharp smacking of his boots changed to splashing as a ramp dipped away to a water filled street. With a hoarse shout he pulled at the raft, slowing it, but as the water became deeper he was dragged forward until he was plowing along with water sluicing over his excited face. Doi leaped to help him. Just before the raft touched the water, however, Skinner dabbed at the control knob, causing the raft to leap upwards and throwing both Doi and Bannan into the water. When they emerged, treading to keep their heads above, Bannan shouted: "You crazy damned fool! What did you do that for?" Skinner was moving quickly about the raft. He picked up two plastic packages and threw them towards the two men. Then he replied, T just remembered that the raft will sink through water. It sinks until the plungers on the bottom arc depressed." Skinner was drifting away quickly; his voice was growing fainter. "What do we do now?" "Reconnoitre." "What!!?" "ni use the velocity I have now to traverse the city. You investigate these buildings. I'll figure out some way to manage the raft and co ne back." He was a long way away now, his voice fading to inaudibility. They watched silently. Somehow the sense of drama had gone, disappeared as quietly as Skinner was now disappearing. When he approached the water again he jerked the raft up and over a small building at the end of the street. He lowered something, apparently tiying to grapple the buildings, and then sank out of sight on the other side. T he smooth building walls afforded no immediate way out of the water. Silently the two men gathered the packs and splashed back along the street until they could stand with their heads and chests out of the water. Doi noticed a feature he had seen before but not understood; along the walls of the buildings were straight shafts of metal that projected about four feet out and parallel to the ground. "What do you make of those?" he asked. Bannan stopped and looked at them closely. "Beats me. They look like roosts for some kind of huge birds, near as I can tell." "Do you think the planet is inhabited by birds?" # IF "Maybe it used to be. We haven t een anything living, remember. They may have all died or moved away." "How come there's water in the ftreets?" Bannan was getting irritated. "Maybe the town flooded, maybe that's why they moved away. How should I know?" "A town like this would flood pretty easily, being on a delta, wouldn't it? Why would birds build a town on a river delta?" "Maybe they're fishers, dammit f" Bannan's face turned red. "Here, where the street gives way to the water, it slopes down evenly and quickly," said Doi with a trace of malice in his voice. "It looks like a ramp to me, as if the water were intended to be there." "Well damn, you're full of spunk today! All right, maybe they built their town so it would have water in it. Maybe they wanted fish to come right up into it from the ocean. The birds could perch up there, and when they saw something..." He broke off. The city seemed suddenly very quiet. They glanced around quickly but saw nothing except the strange buildings and enigmatic metal shafts. Bannan spoke: "Well, anyway, it seems to me the thing to do is to climb up on those perches and see if we can get to the top of a building. If these buildings really are monster aviaries thfere will be some way to get into them from the top." He went to the side of a building, under a metal shaft that was four feet above his head. "Come on, give me a hand up." D oi joined him and leaned with his hands against the building. Bannan clumsily climbed onto his back, then put his knees on the slender Asian's shoulders. By stretching upward he could just reach the bar. "Hah," he said. "I can get it." His wet hands clamped firmly onto the metal. There was a blue flash, and his tone became more heated. "Yahhh-hoooo!" Doi, through whom the current passed on its way to the water, lunged to one side, leaving Bannan swinging and cursing freely. His foot splashed into the water and caused a fresh screech. He pulled it up. "Don't touch the water," said Doi. "There's a potential difference between it and Ae bar. Why didn't you let go?" "My hands cramped and I couldn't get them loose. They're relaxing now." He dropped into the water. "They say that's bad for the heart, electric current." Doi began unpacking a line kit from his survival pack. The main bulk of the line kit was in the two winches attached to either end of the line. The line itself was an invisibly thin monomolecular strand that would support a horrendous weight and also would cut through the hand of anyone who tried to forcibly hold onto it. The winch had a spool, a fixed handle, and an outsize crank handle that could be geared to reel quickly, slowly or could be locked. Under the affronted gaze of Bannan, who stood gingerly flexing his hands, Doi locked one winch and used it as a weight to throw the line over the perch nearest the top of the building. He retrieved the thrown winch and passed it around the original line to form a knot, which, with a jerk, quickly travelled up the gossamer thin line and clamped around the perch. Then, with one hand on the fixed handle of the first winch and cranking slowly with the other, he walked up the side of the building. Bannan took the other winch and in a minute both men were standing surveying the roof. T 'he roof was covered with instruments. There were things that looked like thermometers, wind vanes, pressure devices, cameras, radar, and other devices that were completely inexplicable. The most puzzling were several large, smoothly curved metal affairs, shaped something like miniature ampitheatres or curved divans, that hummed quietly. Doi touched one lightly with two fingers and a reminiscent tingle passed through the fingertips. "There's a potential gradient on this surface. Heaven knows what the thing does." They cast for a way to enter the building and eventually found one -- an opening and a series of metal bars that led down into a dank darkness. Bannan shied back. "No sir, they're not going to catch me with any of their electrified traps." "It's a pretty poor trap," Doi said. He swung out on the first bar, then lowered himself until he was standing on the next with bis rubberS# shod feet. He continued in this way until he was out of sight. His voice echoed up. "Come on." Bannan attempted the same procedure but missed the second bar and awkwardly grabbed the pole from which the bars jutted, so that he banged against three of them at the same time. After a couple of nasty seconds he realized that nothing would happen to him. "My, Bannan, you're clumsy. Why aren't you dead?" "There's no current in these bars," Bannan said seriously as he climbed the rest of the way down and joined Doi, who had broken out a small light. They looked around. There was an array of equipment like that on the roof, but it was more massive and was not datacoHecting equipment. One square device with many wheels and threads of fine wire could have been a recorder of the data taken above. Cables led from squat machines to the ceiling and probably through it to the instruments above. There was nothing that gave them any useful information, and they moved down. The floor below was identical except for details, but the ground floor yielded much of interest. One corner of the room was filled with desklike objects, littered with rolls of wire and other odd junk. On one of the desks was a record player and record. "Fishy business," muttered Bannan as he poked at the set. "You know, it does smell fishy, Hke a seafood stand, in here. T was trying to place it. hat s the rec -- oidr IF Bannan picked it up. "One side has Violation Baby and Booby Baby by Slack-Lipped Harry's Grim Rve, and the other has Dead Baby by the Cretins." "Look at how the record player b arranged," said Doi. "The output can be switched from that speaker to this wire recorder and also to these exposed leads. I wonder what they do with it?" "It must be sort of joke to them." "Sort of a joke to anyone." I n another corner of the room was a machine from which projected a bar exactly like those on the wall outside. Checking with a thin wire established that it carried no charge. A hole in one side suggested a vending machine. "Let's try to find some money," said Doi. "I want to see what this machine does." A short search of the desks yielded a cache of metal balls that could have been ball bearings, but were covered with complicated incisions. They tried a ball in the machine and it hummed. A thin wire draped across the bar so that it dangled to the floor quickly melted. "Wat a screwy blasted setup," said Barman. ' "No, it isn't screwy. I think I just about have it figured out," He looked mildly on as Bannan quickly became red in the face. Just before the inevitable explosion, he said, "But if I'm right we'd better get out of here. It was beginning to get dark when we entered the building. It ought to be fvfl night soon." Bannan looked at him wordlessly, then turned to climb the series of rungs. Doi said, "No. This way." He led the way through a low door that opened into a small room where the floor was under water. He seemed satisfied. "See? Water." "Praise be. Are you going to take a bath?" "I think this wall is the other side of the street wall we climbed up." He jumped into the water, felt along the wall. "Ah. Here;" He ducked under water and disappeared completely. In another couple of seconds he was back. "There's an opening. It leads put into the street. Come on." Soon the two men emerged into the street and trudged back to high ground. Darkness was falling fast. "Now there remain only two things," Doi said. "Skinner, with Ae translating machine, and the aliens." "You're pretty damn smugl" exploded Bannan, but he couldn't hide from his voice a trace of apprehension that Doi had the answer. "What are Ae aliens?" "They live in the sea, in the bottom probably, because Aey can't sec. They communicate by electricity. They probably evolved from creatures like earth's electric eels." "What about the perches? How can they climb around on those?" "They're not like ordinary fish. Remember, even on earth there are things like octopus or..." A splash sounded from the water-filled street. In the last dim light Acy could vaguely see a wave devclop as something large gathered velocity just under the surface, and suddenly a huge white shape hurtled from the water and wrapped its twenty foot tentacles around the first two or three metal perches, proceeding from there with a ponderous grace the top of the building, where it disap;'eared. It seemed to consist of a K)ng semiflexible body, bluntly curv, d at one end and at the other end split into a number of nionstrous tentacles. Doi finished his sentence hesitantly, "... or like squid." CiT'm glad you figured it out when X you did," Skinner said. "I'm not sure I would have tumbled to it for a while." They sat together in one of the largest Toran laboratories, out of the way of the Toranites, who were working on some elaborate piece of equipment. A dim light illumined the misty, cold room. Toranites worked with precision and effortless strength on great accumulations of equipment, hanging from roof or wall perches to get at machines dozens of feet in the air, though sometimes they seemed balked at the more minute mechanical details. Skinner went on. "I got so I could move the raft around all. right. I attached a long rod to the gravity knob for a more delicate control, and I found that by grappling on roofs I could pull the raft where I wanted it. But then I followed those big squids -- Toranites -- and set the translator microphone to deciphering their twitterings, jibbers, and squeaks, which I guess are just sort of sounding apparatus. Lord knows how long it would have been before I just took the microphone off its leads and pushed the leads right up against the beast's skin." Bannan seemed about to say something cynical but he restrained himself. "How did you figure it out" Skinner asked Doi. Doi explained. 'I thought they must be sea creatures because of the water in the streets. I couldn't see how they could be birds, as Bannan suggested, or land animals with rowboats. For one thing, if they came from the land and used boats in the streets, as in Venice, there would have been ways to get to the city from the outside -- roads, perhaps. But the only way is the sea. "And if they came from the sea that would also explain why there was only this one city above the ocean's surface. It's one of a kind -- most of their activities are carried out in the sea. I tried to imagine what use they would have for a land city, and I decided that one would be scientific research. Sure enough, the first building we entered was jam full of scientific apparatus. I imagine most of it is either equipment that won't work under water or specifically investigates climate and other above-sea conditions. "There was something else that struck me, and that was the lack of anything that indicated that they could see. There was no meters, calendars, papers, any evidence they had any kind of visual writing. The # IP incisions in the steel balls were hard to see, because there was no ink in the incisions. What was more, all the equipment was functioning, but there was no one around -- maybe they came at night; maybe in fact the light bothered them," he paused. #CTf they couldn't see, how could A they handle a technology such as the one we're looking at? The immediate answer would be sound and touch, and they obviously have both of those. Touch is essential, and the ability to hear is indicated by the speaker hitched up to that phonograph. "But it seemed a little thin for them to have such a technology based only on touch and some tremendously complicated languages. Then I remembered three things -- exposed leads attached to the phonograph; the absence of any other speakers throughout the building we investigated, although it had many wire recorders; and those large instruments on tc of the building and in it, shaped something like large (fivans. It struck me that those things would be ideal for holding some large body in front of selected banks of instruments, though it would expose diat body to changing potentials. Why? And also, why the exposed leads? Obviously, die creatures somehow could fed changes in electricity with high sensitivity. Maybe they were like electric eels, and could to some extent produce it themselves, and perhaps it was less effort for them to buy it, as from the vending machine. "I wasn't absolutely sure of all this, of course, but it seemed a fairly complete picture and one worth trying." "Very good," squawked the translator box. They looked around and saw that its microphone leads ran to a motionless Toranite twenty feet away. "I've been listening, and I applaud your insight. You are substantially right on all the important points. Actually, we do have eyes, but compared to yours they have low resolution and high sensitivity, being evolved to detect luminous creatures in the depths of the sea. You notice the faint glow by which we are working. You may have thought that was arranged fMT you but actually we always use light of about that intensity. "But that is a niggling point and I must congratulate you on an astute realization of the situation. I can hardly imagine a stranger set of circumstances for creatures such as yourselves. "And now, our arrangements for you. You will be pleased to learn that we have finished our temporary interstellar radio and have sent a distress signal to Agan Redan, where there is a scout base. You can expect that in about seven of your hours, or at midday tomorrow, you win be rescued." T he scouts relaxed. After a short silence Doi spoke. "There is something that has been bothering me. The translator has been giving us English in an irregular, jerky rhythm. Is your language delivered in short bursts?" 'No. It can be delivered at almost any rate we choose. I've been listening to the translator pronounce English and I've attempted to feed k Toran in such a way that it protomed to. We have a recording of iome spoken English here, in fact you stumbled onto it -- a disk with grooves, a priceless relic of the first discovery of this planet by the Galactic Federation. I have spent hours listening curiously to that thing, reflecting on its deeper mysteries. I had thought I could manipulate your translator somehow so that it would give the speech rhythm used by the humans recorded on the disk, but your translator is an obstinate ort of device. It has a mind of its own. "We have only the rest of tonight to exchange information, howtver, and you gentlemen must be tired. So allow me to put to you cveral small questions about the Federation, about which I am very curious. Unless, of course, any of you have any more questions?" "I have one," said Doi. "Is electric current expensive here?" "Yes. In fact, our prices are outrageoi s for our technology, though Aey will soon go down when we tart our reactors. Until now it has been very difficult to manufacture." "Was the vending machine I saw a vendor of raw electricity?" "Yes. It is for those who feel depleted and don't wish to spend a day in seclusicm restoring charge," the Toran answered. "Then why are the metal bars leading up the sides of buildings carriers of a strong current? It looks to me as if anyone can tap it who wants." "Anyone can. Those bars are the symptoms of a free economy, democratic and with an emphasis of free enterprise. There are those who object to them, insisting they are annoying, insulting, and cynically commercial, but most, like me, regard them as healthy symptoms of our competitive economy. This is a public building and there is such a bar just behind me. I'll attach the translator leads to it and you can see for yourselves, although I don't imagine the translator will be able to handle many of our idioms." There was silence and abruptly the translator squawked again. Bannan turned bright red; it seemed to him a crowning insult that the current that had flowed through him should have been a voice, which, in spite of the deadpan squawk of the translator, had that queasy, ingratiating, glad-handed tone that in long years on crowded earth he had come to know so well: "Friends! Have your tentacles been feeling stiff lately? Has vour brrrp-sack lost its resilience? For pure, pullulating sliminess, for unequalled brrrp, no ungeunt can beat      M IF Distributed nationaiiy by: # Avenue of Americas New York, N.Y. # IF  S#ri#d The fair world of Asconel had been ravaged by a man, a woman -- and Someone who was neither! H orrorstruck visions raced through Spartak's mind in three fuccessive and distinct stages. First, there was the appallingly vivid picture of them all condemned to serve the whim of this mentally unstable girl, slaves bound with unseen chains, compelled to take her on a colossal joyride around the wheel of stars which was the galaxy. Second, there came a flood o memories of Asconel: its seas, its mountains, its forests and open plains, every recollection painfnl with yearning. He had resigned himself long ago to a life of exile, but What Has Gone Before Asconel has been taken over by someone -- or something! -- that threatens Id destroy a hard-working people and a good way of life. The three brothers of its former ruler, Hodat, who has been slain by the usurpers, are AsconePs only hope. Spartak has given up the life of action for the contemplative existence of a monklike scholar. That idyll is destroyed when Vix descends on his peaceful existence with the tale of the rape of their home world. The two half-brothers start for Asconel in Vix's spaceships but on the way stop at Delcadore where the third brother of the murdered ruler, Tiorin, may be found. They find their brother, but at a cost. For while they are waiting, a high official of Delcadore commandeers them and their ship for a frightful errand. They are ordered to take a mutant girl, Eunora, to the edge of the galaxy -- and abandon her. They are able to overcome the hypnotic compulsion that would make them carry out these orders -- but only through rtie help of the girl. And then she too takes over their minds. They are her slaves, Ipless as children before her mutant brain. since Vix came to find him he had conceived an ache to go home that now permeated every fiber of his being. The agony of deprivation was almost physical, like hunger -- more nearly like sex. And third, as he began to bring his whirling thoughts under control, followed the shadow of a question. Could even Eunora, who had certainly released them from the Imperial conditioning, reverse the process with her supernatural talent, imposing fresh commands in place of those she had wiped out? Could she? No one said anything. He and his half-brothers simply stared at Eunora, as though her tiny face and body held an infinite fascination for them. Bit by bit, the waiting grew to be a strain on her, and the expression of mocking triumph she wore gave place to a look of uncertainty. At last she burst out, "Do as I tell you! Do as I tdl you!" But the words were tinged with hysteria. Behind her shoulder, Spartak saw Vineta move. She came forward into the middle of the control room floor, and spoke unexpectedly in a level voice. "I want to go to Asconel. Because that's where Vix wants to go." "Shut up!" Eunora rounded on her, the skin around her eyes crinkling up as though she were about to cry. Murmurs of astonishment came from Vix and Tiorin. Spartak was not less surprised than they at Vineta's intervention, but he was perhaps better equipped to see how it was possible than they were. He forced his thinking along the most promising line, remembering that Eunora was exposed to all of them at once D eliberately he fanned the coals of his resentment into flame, visualizing her as she had been when she was brought to the ship -- corpse-stiff, kept alive only by machines, suffering unspeakable cramps and soreness. Is this how you repay our help? he whispered wordlessly inside his head. And beyond that, more subtly: Is this the life you want, for years, forever perhaps -- the loneliness of power, without love, without friendship and trust? "Stop it!" she whimpered, and dashed at him to beat with her little absurd fists on his chest. He folded his arms and stared sternly down at her. Once you begin it, you can never stop. And behind the thought, carefully constructed pictures of faceless people, by hundreds and then by thousands, plotting to escape from her control and drive her down to final darkness. "Stop it!" she shrieked again. He complied, and thought instead of Asconel, a fair world, hospitable and kindly, with himself and Vix and Tiorin and Eunora too enjoying . its sunshine, its wine, its fields and cities. Helpless, the girl bent over and covered her face with her hands. The threatened onslaught of tears overcame her. Impulsively, Vineta put her arm around her shoulders. and she turned and buried her sobs in the long dark hair. "What -- what happened?" Vix whispered, moving as though waking from nightmare. "I wouldn't be surprised if Vineta could tell you," Spartak answered slowly. "You've been underestimating this girl of yours, Vix! She thinks very clearly indeed." Vineta, comforting the weeping Eunora, shook her head. "T only know what store Vix sets by going to Asconel. And I couldn't bear to think of him -- and all of you -- being turned into toys for zer." "And there you have it," Spartak grunted. "Eunora found it easy to release the conditioning the Imperial psychologists imposed on us. But to implant new commands of her own against the terrible need we all have to go home and set our people free -- that's not something one untrained child can achieve!" "But -- " Vix started to object. "But never mind how it was done," Tiorin snapped, wiping sweat from his furrowed brow. "The question is, how do we cope with her from now on? If she's apt to repeat that performance -- " "Dump her in space," Vix said shortly. The naked brutality of the words jolted all of them, and especially Eunora, who spun in terror to gaze at him. "That's disgusting, Vix!" Tiorin countered. "Nonetheless -- since you're free of the compulsion to take her to Nylock, I think we should put her down on the nearest habitable planet." rr ,, "I... Vineta let the word hang tfmidly in the air. "Go on, Vineta. You're a clear thinker than most people. I'd be interested to hear your view."  "Well..." Vineta licked her lips. "Fve heard from Vix that this mysterious woman Lydis gained power over your late brother Hodat by appearing to read his thoughts. And what I've heard, too, about the way the people of Asconel have been changed from free independent citizens to blind fanatic dupes of the Belizuek cult sounds like the effect of some sort of conditioning. I -- well, I didn't have a very happy childhood. Even though I wasn't set apart from everybody the way EuBora is, I often felt the way she did just now -- desperate to get even with the universe, wanting to be as cruel to others as they had been to me. So I can't be angry with her. "And -- " she hesitated -- "I can't see into your minds the way she can, but I do believe that you're the nicest people I've ever had to deal with. Vix, for all that you have a temper like a star going nova, you can be very kind, and Spartak here is such a gentle person, and strong inside too. I think perhaps when she's recovered from the dreadful things they did to her on Delcadore, Eunora will see that the same as I do. And when she does -- well, isn't it going to be tremendously valuable to have someone with us who can see into people's inmost thoughts?" T here was a pause. Tiorin spoke. "I see what Spartak means about you, girL" lartak drew a deep breath. "I'd ate." Eunora gave a little frightened cry. "I see what's in your mind, Spartak! No! No!" No? His sober bearded face benl close to hers, he let himself think through the idea in detail, trying to maintain the same mood in which he had taken his vows to the order he joined on Annanworld: the sense of disgust inspired by the stupid violence attending the collapse of Imperial authority, the longing for rationality, calm judgment and peace which drove him to his selfimposed exile. But it wasn't that, he realized later, which impressed her. It was the memory of the agony he suffered while waiting for the antidote to be brought so that he could release her from the painful catatone paralysis. "I don't like this," Vix muttered in the background. "I still feel we'd be better off if we simply got rid of her." "Wait," Tiorin counseled. "Look now!" With an expression of total childlike trust, she had put her tiny hand in Spartak's large one, and he was leading her without another word from the control room. W hen Spartak returned, much later, his face was stamped with incredible weariness. "She's sleeping," he said in answer to an eager question from Tiorin. "Oh, but I've dug some foulness from that mind of hers! Like seekIF ing jewels ki a manure pile of dungl" Vix demanded harshly, "What did you do?" "Hm?" Rubbing his eyes, Spartak spoke around a yawn. "Oh -- I gave her some of the same drug I used on Korisu. I told you it was employed in psychotherapy. Before she's capable of liking us, or anyone, she's got to be cleansed of the hate she's conceived for the human race. And are you surprised at that hate? The Empire, afraid of being toppled by some superiorly gifted assailant, made it policy to deport mutants. And Ac common people turned that policy into fear for Acir own security. You'd stand up to a raving crowd, defying them wiA your gun -- or a sword, or your bare fists if it came to that. But she's a child! How can she understand and forgive a mob of fools driven out of their minds with superstitious terror?" Vix hesitated for a long moment. Finally he shrugged. "I don't like Ae idea, but -- but you know a few Aings I don't, having spent so long with your nose buried in your books. So far, things have turned out well for us. I'll go along wiA you. But if she pulls another trick like the one she scared us with, I'll dump her in space!" "Well said," Tiorin approved. "Now, though, we have a choice to make, Spartak. Vix feels we should go direct to Asconel, for fear of wasting any more time. I think it would be safer to try and contact Tigrid Zen on Gwo. Things have changed terribly on Asconel; even if we disguise ourselves, we mighi be betrayed by some chance ignopance." "But will Tigrid Zen be any belter informed?" Vix challenged. "H Ae stories we hear about Bucyon mastery of Asconel are correct, he won't simply be able to come and go freely. He may not even have been able to land ships at home. And someone who's totally cut ofl can't give tn much guidance." "I'll give you one soimd reasoa for skipping Owe," Spartak sakL "We cannot wm our cause on Gwo. We can only wA on Asconel." "Ascend it is Aen," Tiorin multered, and moved to the contrds. N ow that the time of Aeir homocoming was finally upon Aem, Aey were overtaken by a sense ot estrangement which was irrationally reinforced by Ae disguises SparhA had prepared. He had some confidence in his beard and Ae passage of ten years to change him; noneAeless, he had altered his hair-color to blond, Tiorin's and Vix's boA to jet-black, worked delicately over Ae line of chin and eyebrow and nose wiA soft inert substances injected below Ae skin, till Ae rosemblance between all Aree of them and Hodat's brothers reduced to a similarity of stature and gait. That would have to suffice. Would have to. But Ae physical illusion combined wiA a feeling Aat each was retreating into a universe of private Aought where the oAers could fl not follow. In a desperate attempt to retain their newly refound kinship even Vix -- warily supervising the controls, ever aler' for Bucyon's forces watching the space around Asconcl for intruders -- was driven to speak at random for the sake of breaking the tension. "It's winter down there," he muttered. "We'll have to get some warmer clothing," Spartak agreed, "especially for Eunora, who has nothing." "T wasn't thinking of that." Vix shrugged. "If there's snow on the ground, it'll be much harder to land without leaving tracks." Tiorin made to speak, hesitated, finally gave a bitter laugh. "I was just about to ask where we should buy our clothing and whether it would be safe to show our Imperial currency. But it suddenly struck me that we'll be lucky to find anyone with clothing to sell even in a town." "Aren't you exaggerating?" Vix said. "I doubt if he is," Spartak put in. "The entire planet will be shockingly changed, Vix. Production, distribution, communications -- all reduced to the bare minimum needed to support Belizuek's domination. Rags will have become precious, and to throw away a crust of bread will be unthinkable. Typically, itil be safe enough to show Imperial currency, and what's more it'll buy incredible quantities of anything that's for sale. But our own money will have become effectively worthless." "Then how can people five?" Vix demanded savagely. V ineta spoke up from the corner of the control room in which she huddled with Eunora; being close to her own childhood, she had established a sort of shy intimacy with the mutant girl. "Vix, you've seen how it is on worlds we've travelled to with your order. They live like beasts, ready to fight for a morsel of food, neglecting everything but the sheer necessity of staying alive." "I guess so," Vix sighed. "But I can't transfer what I've seen on worlds like Batyra Dap to my own beloved Asconel." His fingers curled like claws, as if he had Bucyon's throat between them. Spartak said hastily, "We're agreed at least on what we do at first, aren't we? We land as Vix recommends on the southerly tip of the island on which stands the town of Penwyr. There's a concealed site for the shjp; the people stood loyal to our father while Vix was putting down the rebels; there's a temple at Penwyr, the only one on the island; and it's -- well, if not easy, at any rate possible to get to Penwyr on foot, so that we run the least risk of being reported and attracting the attention of the priesthood. Once arrived, we go directly to the temple and try to find out what Belizuek is behind these screens which always hide him. If we must, we'll kidnap a priest and interrogate him back at the ship. Meantime, Eunora will tell us which of the people we meet still harbor the seeds of resistance to Belizuek, and we'll sound out those we feel we can truit ir lo guide our Kv.T-reim pinning. "Can we just wedk into the temple?' Tiorin asked. "I know everyone has to go there daily -- " "It's not quite like that," Spartak corrected. "Every morninr there's a ceremony to honor Belizuek, but ot all the citizens are required to #c daily homage. In towns they are pected to go to the temple one day out of three; in the country, one day in six. But it seems not to be looked on as a duty; it's one of the great events in lives which have become uniformly drab and depressing. Accordingly, the temples re open all day, from dawn to dusk, so that people with particularly fervent adoration for Belizuek can go and prostrate themselves." "What do they do at these sacrifices?" Vineta put in. Vix said, "Every twenty or thirty days there's a special ceremony at which the volunteers are decked with flowers and walk behind the temple screen to the sound of joyful music." His face darkened. "What becomes of them, nobody knows except the priests. But they are never seen alive again." "Are they seen dead, then?" Tiorin growled. "Served as the main dish at a banquet, maybe?" "What time of day will it be when we set down?" Snartak asked. "Around sunrise. If we make haste, we can reach Penwyr just in time for the morning ceremony at the temple." Vix scanned his control panel closely, and gave a nod. I think we can go to land without being challenged. Here's hoping!" T he lock door slid aside. Beyond lay a bleak, forbidding landscape: gray rocks, with the whiteness of drihed snow, skewered with the trunks of leafless trees of which the crowns were just catching the first rays of dawn, ere was no sound except the distant noise of the sea, gnashing its teeth. The air was bitterly cold. But it wasn't the sudden chill which made Spartak shiver and brought the tears stinging to his eyes. It was the sum of all his childhood memories. Asconel! Mother of us all that you should be brutally raped and betrayed! His emotion choked him, and by the long silence he knew his brothers were equally overcome. The first voice to disturb the cold morning was Eunora's. Scarcely louder than a whisper, it said : "Forgive me, all of you. If I could have seen the love you have for your home, I'd not have frightened you by threatening to make you -- make you -- " She could not finish, but they all knew what she meant, and they gave her frosty smiles in acceptance of her apology. "We must move," Tiorin said practically. "Vix, you'll need to inactivate the ship, fit alarms and boobytraps -- ?" "It's as easy as turning a switch," Vix cut in. "The owners who had my ship before were all suspicious people. When we close her up no one but ourselves will be able to get within arm's length of the hull. In any case, no one comes to this part of rhe island. No hunting, no fishing worth the name -- no reason for visitors." He patted his chest, making sure he had his concealed sidearm, and led the way down the ladder to the ground. They picked a route to leave the fewest possible tracks, going first by rocky slopes from which the snow had blown away, then by a road which had been used since the last fall, where there were already plenty of footmarks. It all seemed very straight forward, and Spartak might have relaxed, but for the freezing cold. They had walked the better part of an hour when there was a sharp exclamation from Vix, leading the way. The others hurried to see what he had found. He had halted opposite a form half-buried by snow in the meager shelter of a bush. "He's dead," he said slowly, and the others, shocked, saw that this was indeed a man -- very old for his beard was not white only with frost. He must have sat down to rest here while trudging the road, and never got up again. Spartak exhaled sharply, his breath wreathing in the icy air. "Well, he has no further use for what little he possessed," he grunted, and began without more ado to strip the clothing from the corpse. Tiorin made to object, and he gave him a glare. "If you're going to be squeamish, perhaps you'd rather strip yourself and lend the clothes to Eunora?" When he'd finished, she was so grotesque in the miscellaneous rag he had supplied that Vix looked doubtful. "Can we really go into Penwyr with her dressed like that? "You're fond of betting," Spartak answered. "I'll bet that most of the people we meet will be worse clad yet." With a last surge of energy he put the fragile corpse out of sight in a bank of snow beyond the bush where it had rested, and they tramped on. H is estimate of the condition of people in Penwyr was correct. They began to encounter the citizens on the road just before entering the town. This was a day for folk from outlying farms to attend the temple ceremony. They were gathering on foot and in wheezing old groundcars fueled with wood-gas generator. None of them offered to speak to Spartak and his companions, which suited them well. Two things appalled Spartak especially: first, the numbers on foot -- for Asconel had been among the few worlds retaining nuclearpowered transport after the withdrawal of Imperial support. And second, the looks of near-ecstasy on all the faces. Even the children, some of whom one would have expected to be sullen and fractious, were uniformly cheerful. In the town, placards depicting Bucyon and Lydis were ever#rwhere, mostly on the fronts of stores long closed for lack of goods to sell. Several people in the now large crowd heading for the temple paused to kiss the pictures. IP Wary, eyes taking in every detail around, they let themselves be carried along until they were in sight of the temple itself. Originally it must have been the island's agricultural produce mart, a low-roofed building several hundred feet square. Now it was decked with Bucyon's picture and many crude slogans. The crowd paused as it entered the street on which the temple stood and joined with other streams of people from elsewhere in the town, giving Spartak time to read some of the gaudv exhortations: Spartak tried to keep the grim look of hatred from his face as he shuffled his feet to warm them on the frozen "round. When he felt a nudge, he thought at first it was Eunora huddling close to him for shelter against the cold wind, but it was Tiorin who had pressed up in order to whisper. "Spartak, you've noticed the -- the joy with 'which all these people are going to the temple?" Spartak nodded. "It terrifies me," Tiorin breathed. "Spartak, what makes us think that we can resist Belizuek ourselves? How do we know that we're not walking into his jaws by coming to his temple? How do we know when we come out we won't be his willing slaves for the rest of our lives?" xvn 'The echo of Tiorin's depressing suggestion made Spartak's head ring like a gong as they were carried willy-nilly forward in the crowd. It was far too late now to change their minds about entering the temple. The people pressed on every side, eager to get out of the cold and into the steamy warnith of the building. He wish achingly that Eunora could speak directly to his mind, telling him what she was picking up from those around. But she could not, and after Tiorin's brief whisper there were too many other people too close for any more private conversation. Wondering what was going on inside the mutant girl's head, Spartak used the advantage his height gave to peer around and seek clues to the grip Belismek exerted on his disciples. None offered themselves. He saw, heard and smelt a horde of dirty, hungry wretches, who seemed to find their plight perfectly natural and indeed enjoyable. Drug addiction. The concept thrust itself out of a corner of memory. It was apposite. He had only rarely seen victims of an uncontrollable addiction, but they bore the same stamp of single-minded urgency as the people surrounding him. He began to make guesses, putting himself into the place of the people here. People who had failed to see the necessity for starting over from their own resources when the Empire withdrew its economic and military support To such a person, after thousands of years of Imperial domination, the idea of Asconel making its own way would be literally inconceivable And since the Empire was human, what more logical conclusion than that man was unworthy? He shook his head. It was only half an explanation. They were coming to the door now. Spartak felt his nape tingle as he sought for any intrusion on his mind -- any process comparable to conditioning which might turn him too into a loyal disciple of the greedy deity. But it was useless; he could not tell. Clutching Eunora's tiny hand, trying to keep within arm's reach of his brothers, he was forced into the temple. There was little remarkable about it. There were no seats; the people were supposed to pack in shoulder to shoulder and stand during the ceremony. The walls were decorated with prized personal possessions -- paintings, sculptures, tapestries and objects in precious metal -- described on small attached plaques as voluntary donations by adorers of Belizuek. The screen at the far end, behind which Belizuek was allegedly concealed, was not, as he had envisaged, some curtain of force akin to the defensive field of a starship. It was just a screen of woven metal links on a frame adorned with gems. More than likely, it would carry He got his first sight of the priests now: wearing robes not unlike those affected by his own order on Ants nanworld, but in various colors, black, white, green and gold. They stood watching the congregation assemble. Was there any clue to their origin in their physique? He studied them, and concluded that they might as easily have been born on Asconel as any other world of the galaxy. The traffic of the Empire mixed all the existing human stocks. T he eyes of one priest seemed to dwell on him. He repressed a start of alarm. Glancing around, he decided that there was nothing to mark them out as unusual -- many of the men were taller than himself, many of the children were smaller and younger than Eunora. If the priest was curious, it could only be because He did not immediately recognize them. It would be wise to slip away after the ceremony, delaying their return to the empty temple until, perhaps, the curious priest would not be around. The last of the crowd from the street jammed in through the doors; the doors closed; there was an air of expectancy. All at once, a note of music sounded apparently from nowhere, and the assembly broke into a fervent chant of praise for Belizuek. Moving his mouth in imitation of the rest, he saw that all eyes were riveted on the screen behind which was Belizuek. A reason for the unison singing came to him: to weld the crowd together, making it more susceptible to the priests' appeals. But so far IF he couldn't detect any more advanced methods working on the people's minds -- no hypnotically rhythmic lighting effects, no airborne drugs. Of course, they might be too subtle for even an aware victim to notice. The chanting ended. A priest came out before the screen and turned his back on the congregation. There was a pause. He bowed, and everyone bowed with him -- Spartak and his companions fractionally late. Again? No. One bow sufficed. The priest turned, the people hanging on every movement, and began to address them in ringing tones. His theme was what Spartak had expected. Belizuek was a superior being. Men could have no higher purpose than his service. This desire should supersede all personal ainbitions. Spartak let his attention wander. So far, he'd seen and heard nothing to account for the blind obedience of once-rational persons. He was jolted back to awareness with boundless amazement when a yell went up from the body of the hall. Proof!" someone shouted. And another voice, a woman's: "Proof!" The priest, unperturbed, continued on his former subject. The voices resumed, now swelling, until the discourse could hardly be made out, and Spartak wondered if he ought to join in himself for fear of exciting notice if he remained silent. He was on the point of doing so when the priest raised a hand. The shouting stopped as if a switch had been turned. "Proof you want," the priest intoned. "Proof you shall have!" He turned to face the screen again, bowing mm deeply than before. "Belizuek! We who are dess than dust beseech a revelation of your majesty!" And Spartak learned the answers to all his questions. A t first, it was merely as tihough the temple had grown larger, the walls receding into a misty distance and beginning to glow. With a shock, a sense of perspective overtook him. Those walls were the very bounds of the universe, and the faint glow was the light of stars -- countless in number, inconceivably far away. Then there was a pause which had the still quality of eternity. Nothing moved, nothing changed. Seeping in, then, like water oozing through porous rock, came a sense of presence. Personality. Consciousness. And power! Somewhere in this monstrous emptiness, perhaps as far off as the dim stars, perhaps further, a being had come into existence to the reach of whose mind the gap between galaxies was no more than a single stride. As though drawn by a magnet, Spartak's dissociated awareness began the eon-long plunge through nowhere to find it and pay his homage. Out of the misty blur of stars a form took shape: a lens. The lens of this familiar galaxy. Chance glimpses occurred of wellknown features: the Big Dark, which some freak of stellar drift had notched like a sawcut into the galactic rim, a tiundred lit-years iide; Ac pattern of globular diKters nicknafTied the Eyes of Argus for the tbe plenum had dwindled to their customary status of bright blobs on the black curtain of infinity. But the presence knew them. The preseirce was aware of everything, from the least bacterium to the pattern of those vanishing galaxies; had sounded and plumbed the furthest void, had weighed and measured the nucleons of the atom. It Wd" so What petty human could contradict such a declaration? For it knew all human history, and felt such contempt as made any man wriggle with embarrassment for these squabbling, greedy halfhildligent creatures which had stolen the techniques and artifacts of their greater predecessors and claimed the conquest of the galaxy. To what end? To the downfall of their vaunted Empire, and the return of the pedes on tens of thousands of worlds to a state no better than the Mid-grubbing life of beasts! E ven when it was over, the vision still filled his head and dazzled his eyes. He was passive among the crowd that, forced its way from the temple, letting himself be pushed hack on the street His questions had been answered, end in a way he had not expected. The shock had dazed him. Someone tried to claim his attenhon. He shook his head and went on teinking about what he had learned. The person -- Tiorin, possibly -- gave up in annoyance and turned to someone else: Eunora. He wasn't interested in what was being said. All that concerned him was in his memory. It was much later that he realized he was being escorted along a street floored with dirty snow, his companions beside him. He was shivering, having failed to fasten his clothing about him when he left the hot overcrowded temple. Ahead, someone was walking fast with occasional backward glances that suggested anxiety. "Where are we going?" he forced out. "You're with us again?" Tiorin came eagerly to his side. "I was afraid you'd been taken like these unfortunate wretches." "Hm? Qh! Oh, yes. I guess I was." The reference drove him back inside himself, his eyes uhfocusing and hifi feet stumbling occasionally on the rock-hard snow. "The man ahead," Tiorin explained, thinking Spartak was still listening. "Vix recognized him from the campaign he fought here. Says he was a loyal and brave soldier. And Eunora got close enough to tell that he's still trying to resist Bucyon, only goes to the temple because he'd risk exposure if he didn't. We plan to follow until we get him alone and can approach him openly." But Spartak was lost again in the depths between the galaxies, playing over in his mind the vision he had had of supernal power, monstrous intelligence -- and indescribable conceit. xvin J ike most towns in Asconel's northern hemisphere, Penwyr relied largely on water-borne transport; it was unusual, however, in being built astride a river instead of on the coast. They continued to follow the man whom Vix recognized until he reached the embankment paralleling the river, by which time they were sure he would take the bridge to the other side of the town, a quarter of low-built, rather mean houses. He was becoming frightened by then, however, and had quickened his pace so much that it looked as if he might break into a run at any moment. People were about the river's edge, some Inspecting boats moored to rings in the stone wall, some working on repairs, some merely leaning over and watching. It was a choice between losing their quarry if he ran, and attracting a good deal of undesirable attention by running themselves. "Shall I speak to him?" Vineta proposed. "He's not likely to be afraid of a girl." Tiorin hesitated. "That might be the answer. Spartak, what do you think?" "No use trying to talk to Spartak," Vix grunted. "He's off moaning again." Tiorin looked dismayed. "Yes, Vineta, see if you can catch him up and get him talking. Eunora was quite sure he was not a Bucyon man, isn't that right?" The mutant girl's eyes were on Spartak. She started. "What -- # Oh yes. Yes, he's not one of these miserable dupes, like all the others." "Go ahead," Tiorin ordered, and Vineta hurried off, leaving them to stroll like any of the other idlers along the quay. "It's horrible," Vix muttered. "Everything's stopped! Even during the worst of the revolution here, we kept the main streets running, and the bridge yonder." He threw up an angry arm. "It's all going back to the mud now! What's become of the engineers we had, the builders, the craftsmen?" "Right now Fm more worried about Spartak," Tiorin muttered. "Eunora, can you tell us what's happened to him? I agree, the -- the mental show, or whatever it was, that we had at the temple was pretty impressive, but I was on guard against tampering with my mind, and it's mainly left me with the feeling I'd like to know how it's done." "Not so impressive," Vix put in. "To people who haven't flown space much, perhaps. Especially to people who thought the Empire was all pure magnificence and got some of their illusions dented. But we've seen what it's like nowadays, and made up our minds that's not the best mankind can do." "If they spread the cult of Belizuek any further, it's apt to be the only thing we ever did," Tiorin said sourly. "Look, Vineta's beckoning. Spartak hurry up, will you, instead of dawdling along like a dreamer?" Tiorin kept one eye on Eunora as they approached Vineta and the man Vix recognized, but she gave no indication of altering her judgment. ft was with some confidence tiiat he addressed the allegedly loyal citizen. "Your name is Tharl, I underftand. You won't know us, but I assure you you'll be very interested in what you hear from us." Tharl, a nervous man of early middle age, clad in old but carefully patched clothes and with a pinched expression on his face, looked from one to other of the people who had been following him. He said at length, "I took you for a party of Bucyon's men set on my heels by the priestsBut I should have known better, seeing the child with vou. Well, what do you want with me?" "We've returned to Asconel from travelling ten years long," Tiorin aaid. "And -- we're horrified." Tharl let a quick smile come and fo on his lips. "Say no more! I can provide you little hospitality -- my wife and my son both offered themadves to Belizuek, and my two daughters are married and living away. But I have a home still, and aome refreshment. Come and join mo there!" "Luck's with us," Vix muttered, mid they fell in behind Tharl to cross the bridge over the river. As ibey had foreseen, the bridge's heated and moving surface was immobile beneath a covering of soiled anow, so they had to walk all the way. T harl's house was less neglected than those which flanked it; Aose had snow on their roofs, whereas his was warm enough to melt it away, and the doors and windows still drew power instead of being converted to manual operation. But all he could offer by way of "refreshment" was stale beer, bread and cheese. "Ten years!" he murmured as he set out the food and drink. "Why, then I'd have offered you meat and fruit even in dead winter. Do you know that now they kill their herds in the fall, salting the meat in seabrine and keeping only enough stock to breed again in spring? The priests taught them that! I was raised on a farm, and to me it makes no sense." "You -- ah -- ah you said your wife and son both offered themselves to Belizuek," Tiorin ventured. "Since then you live on your own." "That's what saved me from becoming like all these fools you saw at the temple." Tharl's brows drew together over his nose and he stared into the distance. "I learned to hate just in time. Those who didn't have been duped and betrayed. And ultimately they won't be human any more." He peered curiously at Tiorin; apparently his eyesight was failing. "Tell me, though, how did you know it was safe to address me? If I make myself so obvious the priests will catch me -- it's a crime even to think, let alone speak, against Bucyon's rule." Alarm colored his words. Tiorin hesitated, making a warning gesture to Vix who might have blurted out their true identity. "Ah -- we took a chance. My friend here remembers meeting you during the IF campaign against the rebels hereabout in the time of the old Warden, Hodat's father. You were loyal then. We fell a man like yourself couldn't have changed so much." Thar pursed his lips. He commented, "You can't have been home long. Anyone can be changed and made into a follower of Bucyon. Why, men I fought beside in the old days, Warden's men as they were, have offered themselves to Belizuek since!" "Does nothing withstand Bucyon, then?" Vix dema'ded. I t was Tharl's turn for hesitation. coming to a favorable decision, he leaned forward and spoke in a confidential tone. "A movement -- well... Put it like this. Over two or three years, I've sounded out those who have a reason to hate Belizuek as I do. Perhaps ten or twelve have proved loyal to the old ways. Of them half have given themselves away, by attacking a priest or profaning ihe temple -- and the rest of us serve to encourage each other. As for rising up against Bucyon, though -- it can't be done." pointed at Spartak. "Why, even your friend here has been so deeply affected by what happens in the temple that his mind's adrift in space! First it was a wonder, and the curious talked about it and attracted the reluctant; then suddenly it became the only thing that mattered in the lives of the citizens. I escaped, as I said, because I already had a reason for hate. My wife and boy were the first of all to offer themselves in Penwyr. But that apart. I'd have become as bemused as he is." Worried, Tiorin nudged Spartak as he sat with pale face and staring eyes on the chair next to him. "Tharl is wrong," Eunora said timidly. "What's affected him sn't the power of Belizuek, but something else." "What?" Vix snorted, ready to fall back into his long-time assessment of Spartak as a dreamer and a ninny. "Let him tell you himself," Eunora said, and tugged at Spartak's sleeve. "Yes?" the bearded man said, coming to the present like a sleeper rousing. "I -- I'm sorry. I've been thinking over what I learned down there at the temple." "That's what we all want to discuss," Tiorin said. "We know what's being done to the people now. If we can discover how it's being done we can try to counteract it." "You've missed the point," Spartak said. "Don't you know what Belizuek is? There was a blank silence. Eunora smiled to herself as though enjoying the secret knowledge she could pick from Spartak's unspoken thoughts. "Well, go on!" Vix burst out. Spartak shook his head. He seemed bewildered. "Then -- well, possibly I'm mistaken." He shivered, as if he were still out in the street instead of in the comparative warmth of Tharl's home. "I must go back and make sure," he added, rising without waiting for IF ottions and starting for the door. Just a second I" Tharl jumped up and strode to stand in front of him. Back to the temple? What for?" "I shall have to get a direct look at Belizuek," Spartak explained with the sweet reasonableness of one addressing a child. "A direct look -- " Tharl was thunderstruck. "How do you propose to manage that? Nobody has ever gone behind the screen they keep around him, except for sacrificial victims and the priests who escort the poor fools. When the temple was new, there were several who tried. They were killed by a deadly charge on the metal mesh." "When the temple was new," Spartak repeated, apparently stnidc by a new idea. "Tell me, how was it -- well -- consecrated?" T harl cxirled his lip. "That I know only too well. Some priests came from Gard in a skyboat -- Card, the old royal island, is the site of the chief temple now. They brought some great chest or case affair which was unloaded with much ceremony. It was transported to the market -- what's now the temple -- and they held the first big sacrifice, with two victims. My wife and my son." Tiorin, seeing the man was almost overcome, moved to his side to comfort him. He flashed a scowl at Spartak, who remained quite unaffected. Lost in his own thoughts, the other muttered, "It might be the oxygen... If only I knew where we found the ships we appropriated! But there's that blank wall of ignorance supposed to be because it was bad for our self-respect to admit the real source of our skills -- " "You're maundering," Vix cut in. "If you have a point to make, make it!" "Shut up!" Spartak ordered. This was so different from the usual meekness of the younger man's manner that Vix was taken aback; while he was recovering, Spartak rounded on Eunora. "Do you think I'm right?" he demanded. The girl blushed. She said, "I can tell you what I felt, if that's any help. Welir le licked her lips. "I thought there was somebody behind the screen who went -- uh -- who went an awfully long way. Like very old, but also very big. Sort of connected to other pbices. Do you see what I mean?" Tharl's puzzled eyes roamed around the strangers, but he said nothing. "It fits, doesn't H#" Spartak urged. "I don't know," Eunora answered helplessly. "You've studied so many things I never heard about. It would take ages to track down all the possibilities you're considering." "Then we must go back to the temple," Spartak concluded. "As soon as possible. Tharl, you must have been there at other times than the -- the duty services. Presumably you've wanted to appear to be a loyal Bucyon man, to divert suspicion." Tharl nodded dumbly. "Then tell me what the routine of the temple is, and how we can get close to Belizuek without the priests driving us away." I ly. "But wc must," Spartak countered, making a movement as if to brush aside all objections. Eunora, however, caught his eye. "He's probably right," she said. "Let him explain." More puzzled than ever at the attention they paid to this slip of a girl, Tharl did so. Listening, Spartak came back by degrees to the realities of the problem. Ceaseless supervision, eavesdropping by priests, traps for the unwary -- it sounded as though the temple had been prepared to meet just such an intrusion as he had planned. The solution, however, came from Vix. He gave a shrug. "How about remote detection devices? Won't they do to settle your doubts? I have instruments aboard the ship which could be demounted temporarily You could probe the back wall of the temple and get some hint of what lies beyond." "Of course," Spartak muttered. "It must be the depressing effect of coming back to this ruined world, or I'd have thought of that myself. How long will it take us to get the equipment?" Vix frowned. "We'd best move under cover of dark," he suggested. "It'll be hard to conceal the gear by day." "That'll be still more difficult," Tharl put in. "The are strict curfew laws now. Even street-lighting has been abandoned. Every drop of power and fuel is devoted to Belizuek's cult." "We'll have advance warning of any patrols we run into," Tiorin said, not offering to give details. "I wish you'd explain more fully, though," he added, turning to Spartak. But the bearded man was engrossed in some calculations conducted on a memo board from his behpouch. W ith infinite care and in complete silence they stole back towards the dead-seeming town in the pitch blackness and icy cold of the winter's night. In the sky the stars burned like the points of whitehot needles. It had proved necessary to bring from the ship not only the instruments which Vix had mentioned, bat means of powering them too -- accumulators and a portable generator. When Tharl said all power went for Belizuek's cult, he meant it. There would not be a power source for them to draw on for half a mile in any direction from the temple. Consequently they were all heavily laden, even Eunora, slipping and stumbling along gallantly at Spartak's side. They reached the edge of the town and went between dark waHi which afforded little shelter from the wind. All the windows were Pottered, many with crude hand-carpentered wooden panels instead of the original plastic power-operated ones. Through craclu gleamed m W occasional handlamp or even a primitive candle. Once Eunora gave the faint whisfle they had chosen as an riarm signal. They dodged into an alley between two houses as a woman emerged to empty some foul-smelling garbage into a street drain. There was no limit to the degree people could regress under Belizueks domination, Spartak told himself wearily. Next they'd be back to open-pk latrines and epidemics. He ached to find out whether his guess about the nature of this 'deity was accurate. They had settled on a street behind the temple as the best site of operations; it was usually unfrequented at night, for this had formerly been Penwyr's busy commercial quarter. All the nearby stores were empty and neglected except oot which had been turned into a comfortable residence for the temple staff. The curfew patrols, Thail assured them, were negligent in this area, for few people would risk going out under the priests very noses. They reached it without trouble, and walked along the far side opposite the temple wall, on which the dogans glared huninous for the benefit of -- of whom? Any priest who might glance out, Spartak decided with a curl of his lip. As nearly as he could tell, he had come to a point opposite the end of the screen inside the temple. He beckoned to his companions to assemble the eqmpmeot. Metal stands dinked on the hardfrozen snow as they set down Ibeir burdens. He fumbled with numb fingers to make connections b et wee n #ie power supply and the detootom fiiemselves. Horin headed toward one end of the street, Vix md Vmeta towards the other, to keep wary watch. Eunora could do that equally well from where Spartak stood. Besides, her tiny hands were deft at the awkward work of organizing the equipment, and she did not have to be given wpcktn orders. It was the emiest task he had ever undertaken. EBs chief and burning hope was that Belizuek's powers did not extend to the percqdon of die various probe frequencies he planned to employ. H e coupled in the last deriee and silently handed die kmg fleoi attached to it to Eunora, who dariied across the street and clamped hs terminal to the wall of die temple. That automatically reported the structure-phase of the wall to the other instruments. So guided, they could look through it almost as easily as throu gass. Heart pounding, Spartak adjmted the controls and bent to peer at the tiny selfSuminated d and screens befem him. The range was excessive. He was getting a trace wWbh could only be dm nearer side of die ooncealinf screen -- irregidar metal, probably in mesh or fink fewm. He turned a knob widi stfff fingers, and began lo get suggestkms of something less ecMnmonplace. A mass of oompkoL organics -- not quite p ro l o pl a snric, but sfanflar. That fitted. He set another knob for the characteristic vibration modes of oxygen, and read off the data from a quivering needle against an arbitrary scale. Low oxygen pressure. Very low. But a good deal of carbon dioxide, and nitrogen and a blend of inert gases. Right! He began to look for the walls which must enclose this humanly unbreathable atmosphere, and almost at once found the traces which defined it. Beside him, Eunora was fascinated by the vast amount of information the instruments afforded through a featureless wall; every new conclusion he drew brought a gasp of excitement from her. "It fits, doesn't it?" he whispered, daring to make the sound which after all was no louder than the chinking and scraping that had accompanied the setting up of their fear. She gave an enthusiastic nod. Yes, Jpartak thought. Enclosed in m special atmosphere. Organic, but mot giving the same traces as a creature from one of our planets --  Thants bull, say, which would have competrable mass and dimensions...  wonder if I can get any of the iniemal structwe! Eimoras fecit threitened to chatter from the cold; she clamped them firmly shut. Two traces came up on the panel -- similar, but not identical. An internal reflection, offering a clue to tec details he was after? He checked again, and started. No: it was the tame trace from two different points in space. In other words, the thing beyond the wall had moved. I am right! Jubilantly he recognized the final confirmation of his suspicions. Eunora could not repress a chuckle as he hastily continued his examination. And that was why she failed to give him warning. T he first he knew of their discovery was when lights bloomed like suns all down the front of the building, and a door opened to dasgorge about a dozen frantic men. Spartak jerked upright, heart seeming to stop its beating. The horrified Eunora let out a stifled cry of dismay. "There they are!" a voice yelled, and feet hammered the icy ground. The equipment would have to be abandoned -- there was nothing ebe for it. Spartak snatched Eunora into his arms and fled towards the end of the street at which Vix and Vhieta had been standing guard. There was no sign of Tiorin. Handlamps had been brought out by the emerging priests, and their dazzling glare concealed the far end of the street. Nonetheless, he also must have been spotted. Two of the new arrivals were dashing in that direction while the rest came on. "Spartak!" Vix hissed. He had drawn his concealed sidearm, and was hiding in an embrasure that had once been the entry to a store. "Go around the corner and turn left. rU give them something to think about and then we'll make off to the right. Split them up!" IF "Where's Vineta?" Spartak gasped. "Right here!' the girl replied from the shadow behind Vix. "I'm staying with Vix, so don't argue!" Spartak hadn't thought of arguing. He ignored the remark. "Vix, try and destroy the equipment! Maybe they won't learn just how much I now know!" "You got what you wanted?" Vix lights, sighting along the barrel of his gun. "Practically everything!" At that instant a bolt seared along the street. Why it had been so long delayed, Spartak could only guess -- presumably the priests hadn't expected to need weapons when they were alerted. Who had done the alerting was one of the many matters to be left over for later. He ducked reflexively as splinters of stone flew from the spot where the bolt struck. "See you later at Tharl'sl" he whispered, and dived around the comer with Eunora. Behind him, Vix coldly took aim at the abandoned equipment, and fired his first bolt in reply to the priests'. This district was laid out in conventional grid pattern, so that when Spartak came to the next intersection he could glance back and see clearly the end of the street near the temple. The light there was almost blinding by contrast with the general darkness, but he made out two figures ducking away in the opposite direction from that which he had taken. Eunora had hidden her face against his chest, satisfied to perceive everything through his eyes. Vix had obviously kept his promise to give the pursuers something to think about. It was long moments before anyone followed him and Vineta around the comer. The first person to do so was an armed man who fired one random shot; Vix let off another in reply, and provoked a scream, though whether it was of fear or pain Spartak could not tell. Then he ran on again, overtaking Vineta easily, and came to the intersection corresponding to the one at which Spartak himself had paused. It was foolish, he told himself, not to make himself as scarce as time allowed, but somediing held him magnet-fashion; later, he decided it was a true premonition. Vineta stumbled on the icy street One of the pursuers loosed a bolt at her; it struck within arm's length of her, and she went sprawling. Spartak gasped, and felt Eunora tense against him till she felt like a wooden doll. From his inadequate cover Vix darted forward, gun in one hand, the other outstretched to seize Vineta and drag her to safety. He fired twice, so that the pursuers hdd back, and by main force got tlie girl on her feet, her arm around hia shoulder so she could use him as a crutch. It was a brave thing to do, a good thing to do, but so foolhardy Spartak winced. For with the weight of the injured girl delaying him, they caught him up at the end of the street and he went down under a mob of yelling priests. lor Sick at heart, but driven by cold logic to the decision that he could do nothing more practical than ensure that he at least got away, whether or not Tiorin did so, he ducked around the corner and made his way unchallenged into dark and empty streets. It was so unfair that he should get away! Why not Vix, the brave fool? "What shall I do?" he whispered to the stars. "On my own, what shall I do?" And neither the stars nor the sobbing Eunora offered an answer. XX F or the last half mile of their trip back to Tharl's home Eunora stumbled along beside him. She no longer had difficulty keeping up with the man's longer strides; he had brought himself to the verge of exhaustion. "Is Tiorin here ahead of us?" he demanded as they came in sight of their goal. She shook her head. "No one is there but Tharl, and he's in a terrible state of anxiety. He's wondering all the time whether he was right to reveal himself to you." "But he's dependable?" Spartak insisted. "I'm not so sure as I was," Eunora muttered. "Fear has been working on him ever since we left." Spartak glanced at her, and for die first time in their headlong flight noticed that she was clutching somediing to her with both hands. He didn't have to ask what it was; he recognized it His medical case. which he had brought away from the ship and assumed to have been left on the street with the rest of the abandoned equipment. "I was holding the handle while you were working," she explained shyly. "When you picked me up I clung to it." "Well, it's something. Go and tap on Tharl's window. Get him to let us in." It was painfully clear from Tharl's face that fear had indeed been giving him second thoughts since their departure. He hastened to shut the door and demanded why they were alone. Spartak told him with crude brevity. Tharl literally wrung his calloused hands. "Then you must make off at once! They'll search the whole town, house by house. If they find you here it'll be all up with me -- and you as well. You say you have a ship? You must go back there at once. Leave Asconel for somewhere safe." "I'm not leaving," Spartak grunted, dropping into a chair. "Not until Tiorin gets here." "But if he's been taken too -- " "If he's been taken too, there's no chance of my reaching our ship. They'll pry the location of it out of my brothers' minds." "Your -- your brothers?" echoed Tharl uncertainly. What point in keeping the secret any longer, if Bucyon's men had both Vix and Vineta, and possibly Tiorin as well? He said wearily, "I'm Spartak, Hodat's half-brother. The others were Vix and Tiorin." IF T harl's eyes grew round with wonder. "Forgive me!" he babbled. "T didn't know, I didn't guess!" "You weren't supposed to," Spartak told him curtly. He leaned back, dosing his eyes. "Eunora, you can warn us of approaching search parties, can't you?" "I was supposed to warn you of danger down at the temple," the girl again. "I failed. I'm -- I'm terribly orry, but I was so fascinated -- " "You're forgiven," Spartak interrupted. "Just don't do it again." "Excuse my asking," Tharl ventured. "but how can she -- ?" "Warn us? She's a mutant." "A mutant!" Millennia of Imperial prejudice sprang up in Tharl's nind, and he looked terrified. "Stop it," Spartak ordered angrily. "She's of human stock, and that's more than you can say of Belizuek." Curiosity and alarm struggled in Tharl's mind; the former won, "Did you find out what he is?" he demanded. "I think so. He's a living creature, presumably capable of being killed. He requires to be housed in an airlight compartment in which the oxygen is far below our normal air. He's Very large -- and I suspect krger than any creature we've ever had to do with before. And he's intelligent. But he is also insane." Tharl turned that over and finally rfiook his head. "What he is, in fact," Spartak amplified, "is the last survivor -- m our galaxy at least -- of the race from whom we inherited our starbips." Tharl stiffened. Spartak snapped, "Don't give me that Imperial propaganda that we built our own. I've studied ten years on Ann an world, and I'm satisfied that we went out from our original system -- whatever that was -- and found a cache of starships left by a previous ace. We converted them to our own use and spread through the galaxy, finding more of them wherever we went, but no other trace of their builders. Not that it matters, really, except that it gives us a set of parameters to define Belizuek." He ticked off points on his fingers. "Low oxygen. We have vague records to indicate that our predecessors were oxygen-breathers, as we are, but that they literally used up the resources of their own planets and went elsewhere before they needed to colonize the ones we eventually took over. Telepathic control of another species. This has been proposed as the ultimate in the domestication of animals. It fits. A view of the galaxy -- and that's perhaps the most important thing of all!" He jerked upright in his chair. "You've seen the picture of the galaxy which accompanies the 'proof' during the temple services? Didn't you notice that it's an Argian map that it's based on?" TTiarl could only mumble his answer. "I tell you it is. Because it shows the Big Dark. The Big Dark is a recent phenomenon; it's anomalous, so it's been carefully studied, and it's only some ten to twelve thousand years old. And at its present size... well, I'm convinced that Belizaek has only seen human repre sentations of the galaxy. That's the clincher for me. "I said he was insane. Why else would he have been left behind when the rest of his species took off for -- for wherever? Why else should he descend to this petty shift of domesticating human beings, to move him from star-system to starsystem? I got it direct, down in the maniac craving for power! And he couldn't get it from his own species, because when he tried he was made an outcast and abandoned." "He?" The word was almost a squeak from Tharl. # #T know what you're trying to X say," Spartak nodded. "If there's a living creature in every temple of Belizuek, why not speak of 'they'? This is the final evidence I have for his insanity. "Equipped with the kind of knowledge and techniques which the Empire enjoyed at the height of its power, it was estimated that a man could breed his kind from his own germ-plasm, artificially, to repopulate an abandoned planet. I have no doubt that Belizuek could do the same if he wished. But he doesn't wish. He's afraid of competition. The .part of him which is in the Penwyr temple is a second self, not a bred descendant, an offspring. Ten thousand years ago, before we spread through the galaxy, it was open and empty before him! And it took him that long to make up his mind that could trust himself on one single other planet besides Brinze! I say he's insane." "I see!" Eunora breathed. "That's why I had the impression that he was so large in time and space!" "Exactly. A vast number of identical selves. And he's telepathic between all of them." "Then how does he communicate with us? We're different!" "Do you think he eats the sacrifices he's given?" Spartak said with monumental disgust. "Never. He uses them as a biological amplifier till their brains are burned out, to provide a link between himself and his audience." Tharl felt for a chair and lowered himself into it without looking. "And you worked all this out since you arrived? Within a day?" "I -- " Spartak checked. He stared at Eunora, who was giggling. "You?" he said incredulously. "Not really," she countered. "It took your knowledge to solve the problem. But all day since we were in the temple I've been -- asking questions of your subconscious." Spartak felt sweat prickle on his forehead. "What you're going to be like when you grow up, I don't know! And if we've been deporting people like you to the rim ever since the foundation of the Enoh pire, what can be going on out there?" Still, that was irrelevant. He glared at Tharl. "Well, now you know what became of your wife and son; now you know the nature of the beast we're up against. What are you going to do -- order me to leave here and hide like a criminal, ot help me further?" IF don't see what I can dol" Tharl aid helplessly. your brothers have been captured, it'll be known who they are, and -- " S partak cut him short. "Are you in touch with any centers of resistance on Gard Island? You said the original temple was there." "Yes -- yes, that's right but... No, I know of no resistence movement there. It's become Bucyon's private preserve." "You know the city itself, perhaps?" "Oh yes. When your brother Vix celebrated the completion of his campaign, he included me in the honor guard at the Warden's palace. "In that case, we should make for Gard," Spartak said. "In any case. We'll try a direct attack on the original Belizuek that was brought to Asconel. A simple breach in the air-tight container should be enough." "So simple?" Tharl breathed. "Why, if I'd known -- " "You'd have gone to the temple yourself," Spartak finished for him. He checked, struck by a sudden thought. "What means would you have used?" "I'll show you," Tharl said eagerly, and went into the next room. There were scraping sounds. "Under the floor," Eunora whispered. "A secret cavity." And Tharl was back, cradling proudly in his arms a shiny energy gun. "The same with which I served your father and brother, sir," he announced. "And charged ready for use." Spartak pursed his lips. "Here now is your chance to do a far greater service. Will you undertake it? Tharl looked extremely unhappy, but he didn't say anything. "You must hide us here for at least a day, to give Tiorin a chance to rejoin us. This is the only meeting-place we have. During the daytime, however, you must go about as usual to avoid suspicion. While you're out, ask what means we can employ to get to Oard. Anything. A boat, a skjrboat, ndiatev can sdll be hired. And as soon as possible, we'll go." "We, sir?" Tharl ventured. "I understood your wife and your son -- " "And your brothers, sir." Tharl placed the butt of the gun on the ground and leaned on it, gazing into nowhere. "I'm not a coward -- but after such a long time, to have a plan of action... It takes me aback." Spartak refrained from pushing him any further. He yawned cavemously. "I must sleep," he muttered. "Though Tm not sure I can. Eunora -- " But she had already closed her eyes. iiQomeone's coming!" Eunora  whispered. "Officials!" Spartak jolted out of uneasy slumber. The long winter night had not yet given way to dawn, but the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Tharl, up and dressed and carrying a tray of breakfast: hot broth and bread. His face was pale with alarm. "Searching for us?" Spartak rapped. Eunora, nuzzled, shook her head. "Apnarentlv not. There are four of them going from house to house. One's a priest, I think. They aren't searching the houses. Just knocking at the doors and telling the people that..." "Telling them what?" Spartak urged. The girl bit her lip. "Tiorin and Vix were captured. There's going to be a grand ceremony at the chief temple on Card. They'll voluntarily give themselves up to Belizuek, and everyone who can is urged to go there and witness this final triumph of Bucyon." Spartak sat rock-still for long moments. "Do they not know about us?" "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Eunora knitted her brows. "I think I understand, though. They're hoping you'll make a false step and reveal yourself." "That sounds like them, all right," Tharl said sourly. "They're coming closer," Eunora warned. "Only three or four houses away. We'd better get out of sight." Tensely, crouched in the concealment of a closet, they strained their cars for auditory confirmation of what she had detected, and when he let them out again Tharl gave it fresh emphasis. "Just as the little girl says," he muttered. "Everyone who possibly can is expected to travel to Gard and see your brothers sacrificed, sir. We'd best make haste, hadn't we?" "Not too fast," Spartak sighed. "Give them a chance to get over the hill. Then take this money and book us passage." A s they approached the dockside towards sunset, shivering in the chill blasts of icy foam that the night wind whipped off the estuary, two priests stood beside the gangway to their skimmer, searching the faces of all those that passed. "Are they looking for us, Eunora?" Spartak whispered. "Luckily no," she murmured in reply. "They're turning away people notoriously lax in their temple attendance. This trip is supposed to be a reward for loyal homage. I don't know what they're doing about strangers. So few people travel nowadays they hadn't considered the problem." Tharl drew a deep breath. "Leave this to me, sir," he suggested, and as they drew near the priests pushed his way forward. "Forgive me, sirs!" he shouted, and their heads turned. "Perhaps you'll remember, sirs, that when Belizuek first came to honor Penwyr with his presence my wife and my son were the very first to give him their total service. And I was bitter!" He shook his head in a parody of regret. "I know now it was foolish of me. Why, if the Warden's brothers themselves have returned and agreed to offer themselves up IF lo Bdizuek, what more powerful proof could anyone want that he is indeed the master of us all and truly superior?" "Clever!" Spartak whispered. "Is it going to work?" "Oh, yes," Eunora said with a twisted smile. "They're lapping it up. He'd only better be careful he doesn't overdo it -- one of them is thinking of singling him out for special temple duty." If they had been aware that the long bundle of clothing and provisions slung over Tharl's shoulder contained the energy gun he had produced last night, they would have been a deal less eager. But Belizuek was far away from the docks, and these were only human dupes. Tharl came to rejoin them when they were securely aboard, wiping sweat from his face, and blushing faintly at Spartak's compliments. "Too early for that, sir," he countered. "We haven't even cast off yet." In one way at least he was right. That voyage was among the most dreadful experiences of Spartak's entire life. To be with these three or four hundred , people who laughed and sang ribald songs while they passed canteens of precious wines and the typical Penwyr sour beer as they might on any festival excursion -- then, to remember with a jolt the excuse for such jollification: the planned sacrifice of his brothers, including Vix, whom many of these people had served in the old days, whom they had cheered as the son of the late Warden and brother of Hodat the heir-apparent... that was like living a nightmare. And all the time Eunora was alert for some keen-eyed person to pierce his disguise. The chances of his being betrayed receded somewhat when the word got about that he was a doctor, and a mother whose child was sensitive to seasickness came begging his help. The little boy recovered at once when Spartak tended him, and after that a shy succession of patients surrounded him, asking help and advice for an incredible range of complaints. Spartak's fury burned inside him like a coal. When he left Asconel for Annanworld, there had been no one hungry, no one very sick, and certainly no one suffering from the deficiency diseases. Yet time and again when he examined those who now presented themselves, he saw that their need was not for drugs, but for soap and water and a proper diet. Weeping sores. Ulcers. Gumi sickly sweet with pus. ChildreiA bones twisted into awkward curves. Eyes matted with a dirty yellow discharge. So the tale went on. More than once, as he was on the point of bursting out at some silly fool about the true reason for his condition, Eunora caught his eye and gave an almost imperceptible headshake, implying, "Don't! He'll go to the priest at once." The priest -- there was one aboard any passenger vessel on Asconel nowadays -- came to Spartak in the end; that encounter was hardly to be avoided. He put a mimber of curious questions which Spartak deftly dodged, trying to give the impression that the priest was making himself look ignorant by not knowing the answers already. In the end the trick worked and the priest made off, embarrassed without being sure why. I t was established beyond a doubt that half the people who had set off from northern islands Hke Penwyr would never get to Card in time, when they started to raise the traffic from the nearer ports the next day. The sea seemed to be crawling with passenger vessels. There were even skyboats overhead, the first Spartak had seen since his return. All were converging on Gard for the ceremony. Winter was behind them at this latitude; the sky was blue and the sun mild and warm. The tremendous strain the influx of pilgrims put on the resources of Gard city worked in their favor. With boats crowding into the port and disembarkation reduced to a panicky rush down the gangplanks so that room could be made for the next vessel, the guards and priests who supervised the travellers could not hope to keep control. Moreover, here was no povertystricken provincial town. Bucyon dearly liked his luxuries as much as anyone. And everything worked, to the wonder of the stranger children. Food was abundant, on quayside stalls and in the city's stores; gaudy posters, banners and streamers decorated the buildings for the great day tomorrow, and relic hawkers ofiu fered -- when there were no priests in sight -- such precious items as hairs from Bucyon's beard and Lydis's nail-clippings. Spartak, taken in at first by this deception, was half-minded to buy one of the relics and put it under the microscope to see if Lydis's alleged mind-reading powers were duo to a cellular mutation; then he realized these were frauds to trap the credulous. His heart ached as he beheld his former home. His knuckles whitened on the handle of the medical case he carried, now much depleted after the voyage. 'Tf I could only get next to Bucyon!" he whispered. "Not a chance," Tharl muttered, glancing around to make sure they were not overheard as they trudged, with thousands of others, toward the center of the city. Ahead, the streets were in full operation, and there were delighted squeals from the youngest children who had never seen a molecular-flow street before. "He's always guarded very strictly. And Lydis, who can read thoughts, never leaves his side." "Where is the temple?" Spartak demanded. "It used to be the Place of Grand Assembly," Tharl told him. Spartak came to a decision, arranged a meeting-place with Tharl for later, and sent him off to find them a place to stay. Then he and Eunora went straight to the temple. It had not been altered much to accommodate its change of function. Behind it loomed the dark riiape of the Warden's palace, now IF m Bucyon's home. The War Jen's I'hair had been moved forward lo mL-ke room for a huge gilded dome In fide there dwelt Belizuek; the original self of which all the local Belizuek's were only reflections, in Spartak's view. The sire of the dome took him aback. Either this Belizuek was a monster, or there were several layers of armour around him, in which case would even an energy gun...? He checked himself. Before making any plans, he needed to get details ot the planned ceremony. There was a gang of men at work assembling a high dais close to the Warden's chair; it only required a few friendly words and the flash of a five-circle coin to get the full program This dais was to be the place where Vix and Tiorin were displayed to anv in the crowd who might doubt their identity. From it they would tate their intention of entering voluntarily into the "full service" of Belizuek. Bucyon and Lydis would be present; they would leave the palace in ceremonial procession at such a time, reach the temple at uch another time, begin the ritual at such another time... Spartak seized on the crucial point that they would leave their groundcar at the far end of the horseshoe-shaped temple. He tipped their informant and returned thither. There were many idle sightseers around, so they attracted no special attention. "I have it!" he whispered, and mapped his fingers. He shot a glance at Eunora. "Will it work?" "I -- I don't know." She was very pale. "Can you get Tharl to the right place with his gun?" "I'm sure I can. I was raised in the Warden's palace, remember, and that dominates the far end ol the Assembly But am I asking too much of you?" "I don't think so," Eunora murmured. "Until I meet Lydis face to face I can't be sure. Bui I had a lot of practice in dissembling back home. I think even to a mind-reader I may be able to tell a lie." T he great day, when the last traces of the old order would be wiped away forever as the late Warden's brothers acknowledged the dominion of Belizuek and entered freely into his full service, dawned mild and sunny, and grew rapidly hot. Long before the scheduled time of the ceremony people were thronging into the streets. Those fortunate enough to view it in person crammed the horseshoe seating of the Place of Grand Assembly, where music and songs in honor of Belizuek whiled the time away, and the ordinary populace put on what they had left in the way of presentable clothing and made do with the public watch-screens and amateur tumblers fooling around in the gutters The dais was completed. Covered in gaudy banners, it stood waiting for the victims. Punctually on schedule, Bucyon -- gorgeous in ceremonial ar.mour that shone chrome-bright and daz#B IF zling -- entered his groundcar. Beside him, pale, very beautiful and dressed as always in a floor-long black gown, sat Lydis. The people disciplined their minds into adoring patterns, fearing the rumored talent which had brought her to her present eminance. Everywhere the. procession passed there were yells of delight and applause, and chanting in honor of Belizuek, and of Bucyon who had blessed Asconel by bringing him here. Occasionally a visitor from elsewhere on the planet, who remembered the old days well enough to have kindled a spark of envy at the continuing luxury of Gard contrasted with the poverty at home, shouted less fervently than the rest But soon the pressure of anxiety lest he be discovered drove him to outbellow his neighbors. It was a spectacle to dim the most vivid memory of the old days, anyhow: the guards, the priests in their ter the lovely Lydis and the handsome Bucyon, acknowledging the love of their subjects with an occasional gracious wave. And were not the last hangers-on of the old order due to renounce their pretensions today? C ertain unscheduled events also took place. Not long after the dignitaries began to fin their seats in Ae Assembly, a fat man in a front rank clapped his hand to his nape and looked to see if he had killed a stinging insect. There was nothing on his palm. Another minute or so, and he began to complain loudly to his neighbors that it was terribly hot. Sweat ran from his face. He fought for breath, loosening the neckband of his coat, and swore at the sun for beating down so fiercely. It was not long before he closed his eyes and began to breathe in enormous gasps. Alarmed, those around him sought help, and were relieved at the approach of a fair-bearded man who identified himself as a doctor. Instructions were crisply issued to carry the fat man to shade, rest him and let him recover his spirits. That attended to, the fair-bearded man fell talking with those who had appealed for his aid. It was entirely natural that as the arrival of Bucyon was signaled he should slip into the place the fat man had left vacant. It had not all gone so smoothly. As he tensed to see Bucyon enter the vast stadium-like temple Spartak was vaguely surprised to think that he was here exactly as arranged. Yesterday afternoon, when he found that Tharl had been overanxious to please, and provided them with accommodation in a place he felt fit for a Warden's son, there had been a lot of trouble. Ultimately they had had to settle for Ae rooms after all -- Gard was packed to overflowing with the pilgrims from overseas. To the Big Dark with fears of appearing conspicuous, anyway. The ort conversation he had had with those around him here had satisfied Inm that Bucyon did not rule wholly by the power of Belizuek. Here lie gathered were men and women who were conscious traitors; they would never be called on for the full service of Belizjek! They were Bucyness of raping Asconel. It was only to be expected. BuCyon's own forces -- even if along ith the priests you counted in the crews from a respectably sized spacefleet -- wouldn't suffice to administer a population of nine hundred But the proof of his suspicion made him feel sick. At least they h' !n't suspected him in their turn. He was acknowledged as a fit companion, a tribute to the glibness of his tongue and his courtly manners. Almost it seemed it was easier to conduct nefarious business in broad daylight than under the cover of night. The trouble they had had sneaking Tharl into the Warden's palace. With Eunora keeping watch for patrols so that they could dodge into shadow every time, they had still spent better than four hours getting ITiarl inside. Spartak's eyes strayed toward the palace. Was the man safe where he was supposed to be? T harl twisted himself into a marginally more comfortable position. The hot, clammy air from the discharge pipe of the air circulators coated his skin with dirty moisture. But he had gloves, and his hands would not slip on the switches of his gun. Lovingly he sighted it for the hundredth time on the distant golden dome shielding the alien monster Belizuek. He felt himself a changed person since the moment he met Spartak and his brothers. He had been given back his sense of purpose in life. He had been offered a chance to avenge the slaughter of his wife and son. He lowered the gun to a resting position and gave a sigh of contentment. Nothing else mattered. He was still bruised from a fall he had taken trying to get up the interior of this ventilation pipe,, still anxiout about the noise he'd made which might have alarmed a guard -- but apparently had not -- and both hungry and tired into the bargain. To the Big Dark with such complaintsi He had the important thing: a job to do. Once more he lifted the gun and peered through its telescope. IBs heart quickened. Spartak was in position among the dignitaries cm the steeply banked seating. It couldn't be much longer now. If only the litde girl played her part -- I T he next in the sequence of unscheduled events didn't come until Bucyon and Lydis were getting down from their groundcar. The archpriest Shry -- a curiously horrible figure, his back enormously bulging with some soft outgrowtii of tissue -- came to greet them. Bands played. The watchers cheered. Under the arms of the guards who held back the crowd, a little girl slipped like an eel, clutching a bunch of flowers. A cry of alarm went up. ir Guards leveled their guns. Then they hesitated, seeing how tiny she was, how well-scrubbed and attractive in her too-small, faded frock, and how innocuous the posy that she now shyly offered to Bucyon. The tryant scowled for a second, wondering who had arranged this "spontaneous" gesture of affection and why he had not been warned. He glanced at Lydis, who was frowning. But when after some seconds she did not tell him to desist, he put on a smile and accepted the flowers, afterward patting the girl's head. She was by now almost overcome by the strain of her great moment, and when Bucyon had gone on she slipped out of sight. Under one of the temporary stands wccted to watch the procession she keeled over and slept for more than half an hour. The posy had contained the last of Spartak's precious supply of the drug with which he had restored her to sanity. Handing it to Bucyon, she had triggered an injector that shot the entire dose into the fleshy ball of his thumb. And all the time she had slid away from the probing of Lydis and Shry. To resist them, to lie and deceive them for about ninety seconds, had cost her every ounce of her energy, so that when she fell down in a faint she knew neither where she was nor whether she would ever wake up. S partak felt a lurching sensation of relief. Bucyon was coming op the main aisle of the Assembly heading the posy he had given to Eunora. Provided the injector hadn't misfired, he was going to be extremely tractable... And that, presumably, was Shry. Spartak shivered as he studied the gross misshapen form of the archpriest. Yet Lydis found nothing distasteful in him; she accepted his arm as he helped her to her chair to one side of and behind the Warden's -- which Bucyon sank into. Fanfares made the very sky resound, and were themselves drowned by the bellows of applause that issued from the crowd. Then they brought Vix and Tiorfai down the aisle. Silence fell, for which Spartak was eternally grateful. He ached to see his brothers treated thus. Their disguises had been stripped, their hair restored to its original flaming red and they were clad in plain white suits, with their feet bare in an age-old penitential gesture. And there was apparently no sham about Bucyon's claim that they were to sacrifice themselves voluntarily. They were neither bound nor very closely guarded. And as they came down the long aisle they held their heads high and walked like heroes. The horrifying idea struck him that if they spotted him they would feel it an honor to give him away. He cursed not having found time to change his appearance once again, and made what shift he could to hide his face behind a raised hand. But they passed on, to take their places on the altar-like dais. All was in readiness. The only explanation he could ness to come to their own funeral was that Belizuek's emanations were already in control of their minds. And indeed, now he turned his attention to it, Spartak thought he could feel the same awe-inspiring presence which had impressed the Penwyr congregation. For a moment, indeed, it tempted him to yield, seeming to say, "Fooll Even if Belizuek is in truth a living creature, is he not the last of a line greater than the human race -- those squabbling borrowers of another's power?" And further: "What can I do to thwart the destiny of this whole planet? I, one man, with a feeble plan that depends on a dozen outrageous coincidences to succeed!" He hoped Tharl was going to be on time. P eople had recognized Vix and Tiorin, and their faces reflected their complete conviction about Bucyon's claims. He really did have them here; they really were about to enter Belizuek's service. Some, especially those near Spartak, had harbored doubts till this very last moment. Now they were mentally congratulating themselves on having thrown in their lot with the winning party. Shry stepped to the front of the dais and began to address the crowd in a whining bleat of a voice, describing the event they all knew ftty were about to witness. But no one complained; behind the words there slowly grew die sense of BeliIM zuek's presence, the aura of a maoter of galaxies, the sense of being im a supernatural creature's power. Spartak sweated and fidgeted. Ho had told Tharl to fire arbitrariljr five minutes after the commencement of the ceremony. Never had five minutes been so long! Already the waves of mental control were battering his deafness; most of the instantly. Something must have gone wrong. Tharl must have been discovered. The plan was a failure. Asconel was doomed and he with it. Shry reached the climax of his introduction, turned his twisted body and threw up an arm in a dramatic gesture towards Tiorin and x -- And with impeccable dieatrical timing, Tharl loosed the first of hii energy bolts against the golden dome enclosing BelizueL xxm T he second bolt followed, then the third, fourth and fifth, with the impersonal regularity of a clock's ticking. And on the fifth the golden dome was broached. A noise like a scream was heard, half with the ears, half with the mind, and a foul stink oozed oat over the crowd. It reminded Spartak of the stench from mud exposed by an exceptionally low tide at the mouth of a river much used for the disposal of sewage. Paralysis overtook everyone present for the space of long seconds -- except himself. The first shot had brasit hna IF to his feet. Before the last had struck, he had fought his way down the nearest transverse aisle and was clambering over the barrier separating the seats from the longitudinal aisle up which his brothers had so lately been marched on show. His head was ringing with both sound and soundless cries: the yells of dismay that had now broken out among the crowd, the incoherent jabbering of orders to the guards, somefthing being shrieked in a high panicky vcMce by the woman Lydis. All these were commonplace reactions to what had happened. But ovwiying them, permeating the very air, was a sudden terrible sense of doom, the emanation from Belizuek's mind as his body was exposed to the oxygen-rich air of this planet preferred by men. Spartak thought of the tens of millennia through which Belizuek's ecies had used up the atmospheres of their old worl, adapting little by little, growing used with every passing generation to a higher concentration of carbon dioxide, a lower percentage of available oxygen, nndl the contact of this rawer air was like acid poured on naked flesh. But that didn't matter right now. For tiie present he had the advantage of knowing what had happened. It was a slender weapon to offer against Bucyon's armor, but be had to make the most of it. He glanced at Vix and Tiorin. They were standing bewildered, blinking at each other and the fafiuliar Place ot Grand Assembly, like men newly woken from a bi dream. But it would take Baeiik a while to die, and until he did die, the invisible talons would remain fast on their minds. Now -- actioni Spartak drew himself up to his full height and confronted the man who till this morning had been only a name to him -- Bucyon, who. had come from space to rape and rum a beautiful world in the name ol an obscene monster. And who now. If he was .human, must be open for mastery by the first who seized control of him. "Bucyon!" Spartak bellowed, hands cupped around his mouth. The name seemed to plough through the oppressive mental aura like an energy bolt, leaving a visible track of white steam. "Bucyon, speak to your people! Spartak had spent long on his choice of phrase. That was his ultimate selection: a command both innocuous and deadly. Shry had gone wailing to see what harm was done to the golden dome. Half out of sight of Spartak, he was waving his arms frantically, trying to make guards and other priests come to him and help repair the damage. But the woman Lydis -- doubtless aware of the drug now coursing through Bucyon's body -- had jerked to her feet and now stood rockstill, her eyes burning Spartak. The call he had uttered took effect. Hoping for some guidance from Belizuek's human deputy, the crowd quieted, the guards tensed for anticipated orders, the priests hesitated as they made to obey Shry's beckoniag signals. "Speak to your people, the people of Asconel!" Spartak shouted again. "Tell them -- what is Beli zuekr But he was watching Lydis, not Bucyon, and was prepared when she gasped and tried to clutch at the big man's arm, wanting to prevent the betrayal which he could not help because the drug compelled him to total honesty. Spartak jumped forward, hurling himself at the overhang of the dais and rolling onto its boards like a high-jumper clearing a difficult mark. As he moved, he was still calling: "Bucyon, Bucyon, tell them, tell them -- the people of Asconel want to hear from you! Tell them about Belizuek! On the last breathless yell he was at Bucyon's side, and his shoulder slammed against Lydis's, heedless of her sex. Fragile as a foamed dummy, she staggered back and fell against the chair from which she had risen, and remained dazed for a few precious moments during which Spartak alone had Bucyon's ear. The drug took over his will, and he spoke helplessly to the attentive audience. "Belizuek is die last survivor of the species that ruled the galaxy before man." T he oppressive aura of hate and desperation redoubled its intenas if a storm cloud had settled over the AssemWy. Spartak risked a glance behind him, fearing that Ary might have contrived to effect repairs. "He's a material creature, isn't he?" he shouted. "Not a mystical spirit! Not a supernatural being! But a creature that had to feed and breathe as we do!" "Yes!" Bucyon agreed, helpless to deny it. "And that can be killed as we can!" "Yes!" Already the impact of this revelation was having its effect among the crowd. Those who had befieved otherwise were pale with dismay; the conscious traitors who had never been duped were yet paler, for some of them thought they recognized a familiar countenance behind the new beard on Spartak's face, despite the dyeing of his hair. "Why is he still with us, when the rest of his kind have gone? Tell them that!" "They cast him out," Bucyon answered. "They exiled him to the world called Brinze, where men found him." "Why?" "They said it was because he was insane!" Spittle was gathering on the corners of Bucyon's mouth and running down into his beard. His eyes were rimmed white as he strove and failed to stop his tongue from speaking. "Ah, and he was supposed to be immortal, wasn't he?" Spartak thundered. "And he's not! One breath of Asconel's clean clean sweet air, and he's dying!" But so slowly! Was there not another charge in Tharl's gun, to bum directly into Belizuek's substance? Spart could feel the maddened IS# IF will to survive which the creature was now broadcasting like raw energy, and so too could everyone else. In the living brains of those who surrounded him, human and alien thought were locked into terrible conflict, and -- And it stopped. Exactly as though the sun had come out, the sense of death and disaster ceased, and Spartak allowed himself to hope for victory. He half-turned, and was met by a scream from the cripple Shry. "Belizuek lives! It's only the servant who's died -- burned out -- his brain failed! Bring the captives over here!" Guards, still blindly obedient to Shry's command, made for the passively waiting Vix and Tiorin. 'Tell them to stop!' Spartak gasped at Bucyon. But Lydis was on her feet, thrusting herself between her overlord and the man who had dared to stand against him. "No!" she hissed, so close to Spartak that tiny drops flew from her rage-contorted mouth and struck his cheek. "Belizuek is All! Belizuek is the Master! Belizuek was before the galaxy was!" Time froze. The guards were poised to pinion Vix and Tiorm, the people were still too confused to act, and he could say nothing. Even crippled by the breach in his protective dome, there was no knowing what Belizuek could do if he were given a fresh victim to serve as a telepathic link between himself and his slaves. An idea? A glimmer of hope? Spartak pushed Lydis aside roughly and addressed Bucyon ooo more. "Tell the people what Belizuek does with his servants! Say what becomes of those who go bch hind the screen into his presence!" "He won't answer," Lydis spat "Your drug has spent itself, and I control his mind. Guards! Guards!" Indeed, Bucyon's face had takes on the vacant look of an idiot He stood swaying and gazing oat over the Assembly without seeing it A sense of defeat which had nodiing to do with Belizuek's emanations overcame Spartak. The guards closed on his brothers, Lydis laughed madly in triumph -- And Tharl let go the last charge from his energy gun. L ike a white-hot steel bar it blazed down toward the rent in the golden dome. In the final yard of its passage it speared Shry and turned him into a staggering horror wrapped in flame. Beyond him, only half spent on such a petty target, it burned deep, deep into the vitals of BeBzuek, and Lydis screamed as though the pain were hers alone. A unison shock raced through the crowd. The guards about to seize the captives turned. The priests cried out in terror, Spartak in rolief. Then Vix moved. He shook himself as thou rousing from a long sleep, clubbed both fists together and brought them up into the kidneys of the guard who would have seized him. The man gave a yell of agony and clapT#S ptd his hands to the seat of the pain. Vix reached past him and took his sidearm and his sword in simultaneous precise movements. The sidearm he thrust into Tiorin's hand as the other man also came to himself, and without a pause jabbed the sword's point home in the exposed neck of the disarmed guard. He opened his throat in a cry which had not been heard since Bucyon usurped the Warden's chair. It was like turning back the pages of the past. "For Ascone-e-e-!" And he was away. Spartak was giddy with the speed of it. His eyes could not follow the instant blur that his half-brother became, a red-topped living torch of disaster for those who stood in his way. Behind, calmer, Tiorin weighed the gun he had suddenly acquired, then with a thoughtful look raised and aimed it. A bolt scattered the priests from around the golden dome, sending them tumbling off the edge of its raised platform. Another dispersed those muddled guards who thought to come to the rescue of their fellows. Another discouraged a group of conscious traitors who were trying to get out of the far end of the Assembly. But by then Vix had cleared a path all the way to Spartak's side, and five men lay coughing the blood which smeared his blade. He clapped Spartak on the arm and yelled at him. "A miracle, brother, a miracle! I love you for it!" And he was after Bucyon himself, the sword swinging high to split the bemused usurper's skull. "Stop!" Spartak cried. "He's no more than a booby now -- his mind's gone!" "Let the people see!" Vix answered savagely, and struck. With that final blow, even before Bucyon toppled headlong, the berserk madness left him. In its place, there was a cold white fury that made Spartak shiver as he looked on it. Tiorin came forward to stand with his brothers. No one' lifted a hand to prevent him. "I'm Vix of Asconel!" Vix roared at the frightened people. "Here's Tiorin, your rightful Warden! Here's Spartak our brother to whom we owe our deliverance and yours!' He pointed with his sword, and the blade dripped red. "And here's the last of those who led you by the nose!" Vix bellowed. "The woman Lydis who betrayed my brother!" He whirled, and was quick enough to grasp her by the robe as she made to flee. The robe tore, fell away, exposed her maggot-pale body to the pitiless glare of the noontide sun. There was utter silence. Spartak felt nausea rise to choke his throat. Lydis was not a human mutant, accidentally gifted with the power to read minds. She was a tool of Belizuek. And instead of breasts on the front of her torso, she had a black pulsating growth that squirmed and leaked a stinking ichor as it followed its alien parent into the doorway of death. The crowd saw. The crowd rose IF vp, and panicked, and fled, and left the brothers to their solitary triumph. were together again, in the i X Warden's suite of the palace: the brothers, and those who had most signally served Asconel during hs time of terror, among whom were Tharl and Eunora. The mutant firl sat a little apart, clutching in both hands a big cup of sweet fruitjuice, while the men relaxed over wine of Asconel's finest vintage. Tharl had taken a place next  to her, as a symbol of apology for the way he had first reacted to the cws of her talent. "TTiat's what turned the tide for # ," Spartak murmured, thinking of #ie way Lydis's robe had fluttered to the ground. 'Well, obviously," Tiorin agreed from the head of the table around which they had gathered. 'Tt turnad my stomach, I tell you frankly. And I'd already begun to suspect omething of the sort." "But how could Hodat not have known?" Vix snapped. Tharl cleared his throat. "I've been making some inquiries. If you'll forgive my admitting that I probed into the private affairs of your family...?" "Go on," said Spartak. "Our private affairs are now of public Interest." "Well put, sir. In fact, what turned up was to your late brother's great credit. There was no foundation for the common gossip about a liaison between him and Lydis He'd stuck strictly to his origins i intention of marrying a woman who'd advantage Asconel's future by allying us with some other prosperous world. He was deluded into believing that Lydis's mind-reading was -- well -- at his service, so to speak, and he flattered and bribed her to make her stay on his side." "Where did the marriage story get started, then?" Tiorin asked. "Who can say?" Tharl shrugged. "Perhaps she planted the rumor herself. We'll never know now." True enough. The death of her alien parasite had killed her within an hour. "Speaking of things to people's credit," Tiorin murmured, "I don't believe I ever got around to complimenting you, Eunora. I'm sure Spartak and Vix have stood deputy for me, but now things are less hectic than they were, I must thank you. And ask you something, too." He paused. Everyone grinned broadly. They had become perfectly accustomed to Eunora's talent, and the last trace of the Empire's antimutant policy had faded even from Tharl's mind. # # T T I withstood the probing Tl of both Lydis and Shry while I was giving the flowers to Bucyon," Eunora nodded. I don't think I shall ever know. All I remember is the sense of shock which I had when I realized the two things I hadn't known beforehand: first, that Lydis was directly in contact with Belizuek, and second, that Shry was also, but far more -- more firmly." "The parasitic growth on his back," Spartak put in, "must have weighed as much as he did." "And felt like it," Eunora agreed grimly. "All I can say is that when I reacted to the shock, I must have forced myself into the identity Id taken on I was just a simple-minded little girl, overawed at being in the great man's presence, scared at my own daring in offering him the flowers... I blanked out until I came to under the stand half an hour later, and then I had to hide to keep out of the way of all the people who were fleeing from this final horror, the exposure of Lydis." "But that's what turned the tide, as I said," Spartak repeated. "Even with Belizuek dying, and cut off from mental contact with his slaves; even with Bucyon killed in front of tiiem, there were people in that crowd who'd staked their futures on Bucyon and to the Big Dark with the rest of the citizens. Let 'em rotr Tiorin's face darkened. "Don't I know iti Most of them came fawning to me directly, saying didn't I want the cooperation of those who had been administering the planet under Bucyon because they knew all the ropes now... Some of them were men I'd known in father's day, too. And of course, a lot more of them tried to bribe their way offworld. But we caught most of them, I think." "Excuse me, sirs," Tharl put in diffidently, "mething Fve been wondering... How was it that killing the -- the main Belizuek got rid of all the others so easily?' "Hmmm?" Spartak turned his head. "Oh, yes. I wasn't absolutely right in what I told you back at Penwyr, but nearly so. Remember I told you that Belizuek was insane, and especially afraid of competition, even from his own derived images?" Tharl nodded, frowning with concentration but making a gallant effort to follow Spartak's exposition. "For fear that one of his -- ah -- duplicates should achieve independence and usurp his uniqueness, he'd made sure the mental linkage between them was very tight. It proved too tight. The effect of death on the central organism was reflected in a psychic paralysis of all the others. They could have existed as separate entities -- but he'd forbidden them to." He shrugged, and Tharl muttered thanks. "I'll tell you something, sir," he added after a moment. "You came to me later and congratulated me on the uncanny rightness of the timing for the last bolt I fired, yes?" "Agreed!" Tiorin said warmly. "It was a real crisis point -- " "Well, sir," Tharl broke in, looking unaccountably depressed, "I'd saved that bolt, fora mixture of all sorts of reasons. First I was going to save it for myself. Then I thought, if I'm discovered, all I need do is jump down this shaft I'm in -- a fall of a hundred-odd feet into a rockhard floor should finish me off. So instead I saved it in case you were wrong about the way to kill Belizuek. I figured I could at least kill Bucyon if he IF went through with his plan to sacrifice you." "But you fired again before I truck Bucyon down," Vix objected. "Yes, sir. I thought and thought, and for a long time I was worried because Spartak was standing so close to Bucyon, I couldn't get a clear shot. Then finally T decided it was taking too long for things to settle down. I couldn't have completed the job. And there was a clear shot at Shry, who was after all Belizuek's chief spokesman and chaplain to Bucyon and all the rest of it. I figured if Belizuek was already dead, he'd be in a really frantic state, and he wasn't -- he was calling people up to help him, and peering into the hole my bolts had made, as I could see clearly through the telescope on my gun... So I said, 'What's more likely to put a stiff dose of fear in their guts than to see Belizuek's best-beloved shriveled like a leaf in a fire?' And I let the last bolt go." "To which decision we owe the fact that we're here now," Tiorin said soberly. # Ayr ay I ask a question, WarTharl said formally. "Go ahead." "Are your brothers going to stay here now? I feel Asconel needs them still." Tiorin glanced at the other two, inviting them to speak for themsdves. "No," Vix said gruffly, and got to his feet. He paced across to the window and stood with his back to them as he went on. "No, a fighting man is a center of discord on a peaceful world, and that's what Asconel is going to be from now on. I'll away back to my roving. And -- and there's something else, too." He didn't elaborate, but neither of his brothers had to ask what he meant. Vineta had died during the day following their capture by the priests from the injuries sustained when she was rfiot down. And for the first time in his life, the loas of one of his women had touched his heart. He could not bear to remain on the world where Vineta had died. "You, Spartak?" Tiorin said, to distract them from the vaguely embarrassed silence that followed. "No, I shan't stay here either, Spartak said at length. "Oh, I'll n be leaving till I'm sure Asconel is on the proper orbit again, but in a year or so I'll say farewell." "I shall regret your loss," Tioria said quietly. "But as you wish. Back to your studies on Annanworld, then?" "Annanworld? Oh no." Spartak gave a smile that made him look briefly like a wild beast. "Why not?" Vix demanded, surprised. He turned away from the window to face them again. "The way I understood it, your order would take you back if you didn't soil your hands with violence while you were away. And you didn't. Everything you did to help overthrow Bucyon was of the nature of -- well -- of scheming rather than fighting. Or are they so super-subtle #f they'd define what you did to him as violence?" "No, we distinguish force from violence, and force is occasionally unavoidable... But why should I saw 'we'?" Spartak leaned back m his chair. "I'm not returning. I'm sure of that. "You see, after much cogitation I've come to a conclusion. My Superior, Father Erton, was half right as well as half wrong when he warned me against leaving for Asconel. The rightness lay in his saying that to stand against the -- what do they call it? -- the onset of the Long Night was beyond any man's powers. What we've done here on Asconel is good, and worth it. But it's not turned the tide of galactic decline, has it? Only built an island aroimd which Ae tide will flow. Perhaps the clearest warning lies in the fact diat one mentally sick survivOT of a race whi grew weary and departed befOTc we left our original system could bring one of our finest planets into total subjugation. "I'm going to look for the seeds of the first truly htiman gahictic conquest. Fm going to the rim, to the worlds where for ten thousand years the Empire shipped its mtir tants and its misfits, and where rumor says men -- yes, men, for they're born of human loins -- build their own starships instead of borrowing the leavings of another species. I don't know exactly where to make for, but a good start might be to resume our interrupted journey to Nylock. Hm, Eunora?" He shot a twinkling grin at the mutant girl. "And when I find someone in a position to do something, I shall report on the existence of a world called Brinze. For the priests of Belizuek were human too, though they'd sold their birthright and their power of free thought. And before I die I hope to see the people there set at liberty as those of Asconel have already been." The words died in the silent room. Finally Vix went to Spartak's side and stood gazing down at him. "You're right," be said. "And if you want a ship and a pilot, say the word!" He put out his hand. IF nmam Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just order on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick -- novelettes and complete short novels by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, J. T. McIntosh and a dozen other favorite writers, etc. Every issue is new... exciting... enjoyable! Don't wait -- subscribe today! 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All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial Out of the Idiot Box T his month's Hue  Cry , you'll note, contains some discussion about the parlous state of science fiction on television. What we've printed is only the visible tip of the iceberg:; we've had a lot of mail on the subject. Generally speaking, the letters have run along these lines: (#) Science fiction on TV was pretty awful, but (#) pretty awful science fiction is better than no science fiction at all, so we wish we could get it back. There is a reason video sf has been -- well -- not as good as it could be, let's say politely. The reason is not that everyone connected with television on the producing and packaging end is an illtempered halfwit; nor is it that Hollywood has never heard of science fiction; nor is it that the medium is simply unable to handle science-fiction ideas. A few months ago we spent some time in Hollywood talking with a number of producers, network representatives, writers and even actors about science-fiction-on-TV. A great many of them turned out to have a pretty good understanding of science fiction, which may not be so surprising, at that -- after all, they have the likes of Bob Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert Sheckley, Jerome Bixby and a good many others right there working in their own vineyards to advise them. And just the other day we spent a pleasurable afternoon with a representative of the British Broadcasting Corporation, going over plans for science-fiction show, which will be on the air shortly. For from where we sit, we have come to the conclusion that what's wrong with American science-fiction television is what's wrong with American television in general: It is the fault of the networks' competitive striving for ratings. When the pundits of Gloppy Broadcasting System sit down to contemplate the merits of a projected science-fiction program, they don't merely wonder whether or not it will be any good. Or even whether it will attract a wide audience. Or even whether it will do better than the rival programs. Where they get into trouble U when they start to ask themselves where it fits into their strategic pattern, capitalizing on the audience from the show before and building a lazy, non-dial-switching audience for the show that follows. Listeners don't have much to say about it. Not even sponsors have much to say about it. And it is reaching a point where the network executives themselves don't have much to say about it. B ut there's hope! We do think that a few more years may show us a brighter prospect; for by then air in numbers enough, and with organization enough, to give us all variety and quality. And then we might get some truly first-rate programs in many areas -- science fiction included! be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, nave preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings . Write today for a free copy of the book, 'The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe a. N X. J Scribe A.N.X. i San Jose, California  Please send me the free book, The Mastery J , of Life, which explains how I may learn to J i use my faculties and powers of mind.  ' Name i i  Address I LCit ! Part One When Doctor Richard Ballinger Seaton liberated the intra-atomic energy of matter he started something that he was completely unable to handle. If the situation and condition could have been confined to Earth things would have been bad enough, what with Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne and the World Steel Corporation and other rapacious persons and organizations murderously determined to monopolize this tremendous new source of power, but it was not and could not be so confined. Seaton and M. Reynolds tor-scientist-explorer, built a small, crude spaceship; which Dorothy Vaneman, Seaton's fiancee, christened the Skylark. DuQuesne and the World Steel Corporation promptly duplicated this vessel and took to space to try to do away with Seaton and Crane and all others who could block the Corporation's attainment of monopoly. And both Seaton and DuQuesne, each in a succession of ever-larger and ever-better spaceships, visited world after populated world. They encountered many and varied civilizations -- monstrous, non-human, humanoid, near-human and strictly human civilizations. Some of these races were less intelligent than the humanity of Earth. Some were very much like us. Some -- particularly the ancient, greenskinned Norlammians of the incredibly copper-rich Green or Central System -- possessed vastly greater knowledge. DuQuesne learned, but did not teach; took, but did not give. He was out for Marc C. DuQuesne first, last, and all times in between his tremendous ability was concentrated upon getting, by the use of any possible mean whatever, a monopoly of the extremely rare metal rovolon -- the key to intra-atomic energy. Seaton and Crane, on the other hand, were equally single-mindedly determined that Seaton's discovery should be devoted to the good of all humanity wherever situate, and to that of all civilizations compatible with humanity. The Tellurians encountered a group of immaterial, disembodied minds: extremely intelligent and extraordinarily powerful patterns of pure sixth-order force. DuQuesne joined them; and the problem thus posed was a tremendous one indeed. Seaton solved it, however, by encapsulating the whole group of "pure intellectuals" in a stasis of time and launching the capsule on a voyage that should endure throughout almost aU of total time and reach almost the farthermost limit of space. Having removed the greatest obstacle to progress, the Seaton-Crane party returned to Earth's solar system in their space-flying worldlet the Skylark of Valeron and began to bring order out of the chaos that all Earth then was. IF  Serial Here's the grand conclusion of science fiction's greatest series -- Seaton and DuQuesne against a galaxy of unconquerable foes I s. o. s. A ppearances are deceiving. A polished chunk of metal that shines like a Christmas-tree ornament may hold -- and release -- energy to destroy a city. A seed is quite another order of being to the murderous majesty of a toppling tree. A match flame can become a holocaust. And the chain of events that can unseat the rulers of galaxies can begin in a cozy living room, before a hearth... Outwardly, the comfortable (if f omewhat splendidly furnished) living room of the home of the Richard Ballinger Seatons of Earth presented a peaceful scene. Peaceful? It was sheerly pastoral! Seaton and Dorothy, his spectacularly auburnhaired wife, sat on a davenport, holding hands. A fire of pine logs burned slowly, crackling occasionally and sending sparks against the fine brcnze screen of the fireplace. Richard Ballinger Seaton Junior lay on the rug, trying doggedly, silently, and manfully, if unsuccessfully, to wriggle toward those entrancing flames. Inwardly, however, R was very much otherwise. Dorothy's normally pleasant -- as well as beautiful -- face wore a veritable scowl. The dinner they had just eaten had been over two hours late; wherefore not one single item of it had been fit to feed to a pig. Furthermore, and worse, Dick was not relaxed and was not paying any attention to her at all. He was still wound up tight; was adll concentrating on the multitude of messages driving into his brain through the button in his left ear -- messages of such urgency of drive that she herself could actually read them, even though she was wearing no apparatus whatever. She reached up twitched the button out of his ear, and tossed it onto a table. "Will you please lay off of that stuff for a minute, Dick?" ahe demanded. Tm fed up to the eyeballs with this business of you and no time sleep. You never had any such horrible black circles under  your eyes before and you're getting positively scrawny. You've got to quit it. Can't you let somebody else carry some of the load? Delegate some authority?" "I'm delegating all I possibly can already, Red-Top." Seaton absently rubbed his ear. Until Dorothy had flipped it away, the button had been carrying to him a transcription of the taped reports of more than one hundred Planetary Observers from the planet of Norlamin, each with the I. Q. of an Einstein and the sagacity of an owl. The last report had had to do with plentiful supplies of X metal that had been turned up on a planet of Omicron Eridani, and the decision to dispatch a fleet of cargo-carrying ships to fetch them away. But he admitted grudgingly to himself that that particular decision had already been made. His wife was a nearer problem. Paying full attention to her now, he put his arm around her and squeezed. "Converting a whole planet practically all at once to use fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order stuff is a job of word, believe me. It's all so new and so tough that not too many people can handle any part of it. It takes brains. And what makes it extra tough is that altogether too many people who are smart enough to learn it are crooks. Shysters -- hoodlers -- sticky-fingers generally. But I think we're just about over the hump. I wouldn't wonder if these Norlaminian 'Observers' -- snoopers, really -- from the Country of Youth will turn out to be the answer to prayer." IP "They'd better," she said, darkly. "At least, something had better." "Besides, if you think I look like the wrath of God, take a good look at Mart sometime. He's having more grief than I am." "I already have; he looks like a refugee from a concentration camp. Peggy was screaming about it this morning, and we're both going to just simply... #hat the girls intended to do was not revealed, for at that moment there appeared in the air before them the projected simulacra of eight green-skinned, more-or-lesshuman men; the men with whom they had worked so long; the ablest thinkers of the Central System. There was majestic Fodan, the Chief of the Five of Norlamin; there was white-bearded Orion, the First of Astronomy; Rovol, the First of Rays; Astron, the First of Energy; Drasnik, the First of Psychology; Satrazon and Caslor, the Firsts of Chemistry and of Mechanism, respectively; and -- in some ways not the least -- there was that powerhouse of thought, Sacner Carfon the two thousand three hundred forty-sixth: the hairless, almost porpoise-like Chief of the Council of the watery planet Dasor. They were not present in the flesh. But their energy projections were as seemingly solid as Seaton's own tall, lean body. "We come, Overlord of the System, upon a matter of -- " the Chief of the Five began. "Don't call me 'Overlord. PWs-." Seaton broke in, with grim foreboding in his eye, while Dorothy y # stiffened rigidly in the circle of his arms. Both knew that those masters of thought could scarcely be prevailed upon to leave their own worlds even via projection. For all eight of them to come this far -- almost halfway across the galaxy! -- meant that something was very wrong indeed. "I've told you a dozen times, not only I ain't no Overlord but I don't want to be and won't be. I don't like to play God -- I simply have not got what it takes." " 'Coordinator', then, which is of course a far better term for all except the more primitive races," Fodan went imperturbably on. "We have told you, youth, not a dozen times, but once, which should have been sufficient, that your young and vigorous race possesses qualities that our immensely older peoples po longer have. You, as the ablest individual of your race, are uniquely qualified to serve total civilization Thus, whenever your services become necessary, you will so serve. Your services have again become necessary. Orion, in whose province the matter primarily lies, will explain." Seaton nodded to himself. It was going to be bad, all right, he thought as the First of Astronomy took over. "You, friend Richard, with some help from us, succeeded in encapsulating a group of malignant immaterial entities, including the disembodied personality of your fellowscientist Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne, in a stasis of time. This capsule, within which no time whatever could or can elapse, was launched IF into space with a linear acceleration of approximately three times ten to the twelfth centimeters per second squared. It was designed and powered to travel at that acceleration for omething over one hundred thouend of which time it was to have been rotated through the fourth dimension into an unknown and unknowable location in normal threedimensional space." "That's right," Seaton said. "And k will. It'll do just exactly that. Those pure-intellectual louses are gone for pood; and so is Blackie DuQuesne." "You err, youth," corrected the Norlaminian. "You did not allow us time sufficient to consider and to evaluate all the many factors involved. Rigid analysis and extended computation show that the probability approaches unity that the capsule of stasis will, almost certainly within one Tellurian year of its launching and highly probably in much less time, encounter celestial matter of sufficient density to volatilize its uranium power bars. This event will of course allow the stasis of time to collapse and the imprisoned immaterial entities will be liberated; in precisely the same condition as in the instant oftheir encapsulation." D orothy Seaton gasped. Even her husband showed that he was riiaken. DuQuesne and the Immortals free? But -- "But it can't!" he fairly yelled the protest "It'll dodge -- it's built to dodge anything that dense!" "At ordinary -- or even extraordinary -- velocities, yes," the ancient sage agreed, unmoved. "Its speed of reaction is great, yes; a rather small That interval of time, however, while small, is very large indeed relative to zero. Compute for yourself, please, what distance that capsule will in theory traverse during that space of time at the end of only one third of one of your years." Seaton strode across the room and uncovered a machine that resembled somewhat a small, unpretentious desk calculator. He picked up a helmet and thought into it briefly; then stared appalled at the figure that appeared on a tape. "My -- aunt's -- cat's -- kittens' -- pants -- buttons," he said, slowly. "It'd've been smarter, maybe, to've put 'em in orbit around a planetless sun... And I don't suppose there's a Chinaman's chance of catching 'em again that same way." "No. Those minds are competent," agreed the Norlaminian. "Only one point is clear. You must again activate the Skylark of Valeron and again wear its sixth-order controller, since we know of no other entity who either can wear it or should. We eight are here to confer and, on the basis of the few data now available, to plan." Dorothy Seaton was highly averse t# having the appearance of her living room ruined by office equipment. Seaton, however, was living and working under such high tension that he had to have almost instant access to the ValeroiTs Brain, at any time of the day or night or wherever he might be. Hence this compromise -- Inconspicuous machines, each direct-connected to the cubic mile of ultra-miniaturization that was the Brain. E. E. S. Seaton scowled in concentration for two long minutes. It was a measure of the strain that had been working on him that it took that long. As he had said, he was no God, and didn't want to be. He had not gone looking for either conquest or glory. One thing at a time... but that "one thing" had successively led him across a galaxy, into another dimension, through many a hard and desperate fight against some of the most keen-honed killers of a universe. His gray eyes hardened. Of all those killers, it was Blackie DuQuesne who posed the greatest threat -- to civilization, to Seaton himself, and above all to his wife, Dorothy. DuQuesne at large was deadly. "All right," he snapped at last. "If that's all that's in the wood, I suppose that's the way it'll have to be carved." The Norlaminian merely nodded. He, at least, had had no doubts of how Seaton would react to the challenge. Typically, once Seaton had decided speed became of the essence. "We'll start moving now," he barked. "The parameters give us up to a year -- maybe -- but from this minute we act as though DuQuesne and the Intellectuals are back in circulation right now . So if one erf you -- Rovd? -- will put beams on Mari and Peg and project them over here, weH get right at it" And Dorothy, her face turning so white that a line of freckles stood boldly out across the bridge of her nose, picked the baby up and clasped him fiercely, protectively to her breast. M Reynolds ("Martin" or "Mart") Crane was tall, slender, imperturbable; his blackhaired, ivory-skinned wife Margaret was tall and whistle stacked -- she and Dorothy were just about of a size and a shape. In a second or two their full working projections appeared, standing in the middle of the room facing the Seatons -- projections so exactly true to life and so solid-seeming as to give no indication whatever that they were not composed of fabric and of flesh and bone and blood. Seaton stood up and half-bowed to Margaret, but wasted no time in getting down to business. "Hi, Peg -- Mart. He briefed you?" "Up to the moment, yes," Crane replied. "You know, then, that some time in the indeterminate but not too distant future all hell is going to be out for noon. Any way I scan it, h looks to me as though, more or less shortly, we're going to be spurlos versenkt -- sunk without a trace." "You err, youth." Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin, spoke quite sharply, for him. "Your thinking is loose, turbid, confused; inexcusably superficial; completely... " "But you know what their top man said!" Seaton snapped. "The one they called 'One' -- and he wasn't kidding, either, believe me!" "I do, youth. I know more than that, since they visited us long since. They were not exactly 'kidding you, perhaps, but your several various interpretations of One's actual words IP nod actions were inconsistent with any and every aspect of the truth. Those words and actions were in all probability designed to elicit such responses and reactions as would enable him to analyze and classify your race. Having done so, the probability approaches unity that you will not again encounter him or any of his group." "My -- God!" Dorothy, drawing a tremendously deep breath, put Dick the Small back down on the rug and left him to his own devices. "That makes sense... I was scared simply witless." "Maybe," Seaton admitted, "as far as One and the rest of his original gang are concerned. But there's still DuQuesne. And if Blackie DuQuesne, even as an immaterial pattern of pure sixth-order force, thinks that way about me I'm a Digger Indian." "Ah, yes; DuQuesne. One question, please, to clarify my thinking. Can you, do you think, even with the fullest use of all the resources of your Skylark of Valeron, release the intact mind from any body?" "Of course I... oh, I see what you mean. Just a minute; I think probably I can find out from here." He went over to his calculator-like instrument, put on a helmet, and stood motionless for a couple of minutes while the great brain of the machine made its computations. Then, wearing a sheepish grin: "A flat bust. I not only couldn't, I didn't," he reported, cheerfully. "So One not only did the business, but he was good enough to make me know that I was doing it. What an operator!" He sobered, thought intensely, then went on, "So they sucked us in. Played with us." "You are now beginning to think clearly, youth," Drasnik said. "We come now, then, to lesser probabilities. DuQuesne's mind, of itself, is a mind of power." "You can broadcast that to the allattentive universe," Seaton said. "Question: how much stuff has he got now? We know he's got the fifth order down solid. Incarnate, he didn't know any more than that However, mind is a pattern of sixthorder force. Knowing what we went through to get the sixth, and that we haven't got it all yet by seven thousand rows of Christmas trees, the first sub-question asks itself: Can a free mind analyze itself completely enough to work out and to handle the entire order of force in which it lies? "We may assume, I think, that One could have given DuQuesne full knowledge of the sixth if he felt like it. The second sub-question, then, is; did he? If those questions aren't enough to start with I can think of plenty more." "They are enough, youth," Fodan said. "You have pointed out the crux. We will now discuss the matter. Since this first phase lies largely in your province, Drasnik, you wfll now take over." The discussion mounted, and A grew, and went on and on. Silently Dorothy slipped away, and the projection of force that was Margaret Crane followed her into the kitchen. There was no need for Dorothy to prepare coffee and sandwiches for her husband, not by hand; one thought into a controller would have produced any desired amount of any desired comestibles. But she wanted something to do. Both girls knew from experience that a conference of this sort might go on for hours; and Dorothy knew that with food placed before him, Seaton would eat; without it, he would never notice the lack. She did not, of course, prepare anything for the others. They were not there. Their bodies were at varying distances -- a few miles for Crane and his wife, an unthinkable number of parsecs for the Norlaminians and Sacner Carfon. The distance between Earth and the Green System was so unthinkably vast that there was no point in trying to express it in numbers of miles, or even parsecs. The central green sun of the cluster that held Norlamin, Osnome and Dasor was visible from Earth, all right -- in Earth's hugest optical telescopes, as a tiny, #th-magnitude point -- but the light that reached Earth had been on its way for tens of thousand of years before Seaton's ancestors had turned from hunting to agriculture, had taken off their crude skins and begun to build houses, cities, machines and, ultimately, spaceships. To all of this Dorothy and Peggy Crane were no strangers; they had been themselves in such projections countless times. If they were more than usually silent, it was not because of the astonishing quality of the meeting that was taking place in the Seatons' living room, but because of die subject of that meeting. Both Dorothy and Peg knew Marc DuQuesne well. Both of them had experienced his cold, impersonal deadliness. Neither wanted to come close to it again. Back in the living room, Seaton was saying: "If One gave DuQuesne all of the sixth-order force patterns, he can be anywhere and can do practically anything. So he probably didn't. On the other hand if One didn't give him any of it DuQuesne couldn't get back here in forty lifetimes. So he probably gave him some of it. The drive and the projector, at least. Maybe as much as we have, to equalize us. Maybe One figured he owed the ape that much. Whatever the truth may be, we've got to assume that DuQuesne knows as much as we do about sixth-order forces." He paused, then corrected himself. "If we're smart we'll assume that he knows more than we do. So we'll have to find somebody else who knows more than we do to learn from. Question -- how do we go about doing that? Not by just wandering around the galaxy at random, looking; that's one certain damn sure thing." "It is indeed," the moderator agreed. "Sacner Carfon, you have, I think, a contribution to make at this point?" "I have?" The Dasorian was surprised at first, but caught on quickly. "Oh -- perhaps I have, at that By using Seaton's power and that of the Brain on the Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth, it will undoubtedIF ly be possible to broadcast a thought all, the Norlaminians and Sacner that would affect selected mentaliCarfon knew what they were doing, ties wherever situate in any galaxy Yet he could see complications. The of this universe." Fodan-Carfon band of the sixth or"But listen!" protested Seaton, der was still very new and very ex"We don't want to advertise how perimental. "Can you make it selecdumb we are all over space!" tive?" he demanded. "I don't mind "Of course not. The thought telling our prospective friends we would be very carefully built and need help -- I don't want to holler highly selective. It would tell who it to our enemies." we are, what we have done, and The Dasorian's deep voice chuckwhat we intend and hope to do. It led. "It cannot be made selective," would state our abilities and -- by he said. "The message would of inference, and only to those we seek necessity be on suoh a carrier as to -- our lacks; and would invite all be receivable by any intelligent brain, qualified persons and entities to get Yet it can be hedged about witk in touch with us." such safeguards, limitations and Seaton looked abstracted for a compulsions that no one could or moment. He was thinking. The nowould pay attention to it except tion of sending out a beacon of those who possess at least some thought was probably a good one ability, overt or latent, to handle the -- had to be a good one -- after Fodan-Carfon band. Seaton whistled through his teeth. "Wow! And just how are you going to damp on such controls as those! I don't see how anything but magic -- sheer, unadulterated, pure black magic! -- could swing that load." "Precisely. Or, rather, imprecisely. It is unfortunate that your term 'magic' is so inexcusably loose and carries so many and so deplorable connotations and implications. Shall we design and build the thought we wish to send out?" T he thought was designed and was built; and was launched into space with the inconceivable, the utterly immeasurable velocity of its order of being. A red-haired stripper called Madlyn Mannis, strutting her stuff in Tampa in Peninsula Florida, felt it and almost got it; but, not being very strongly psychic, shrugged it off and went on about the business of removing the last sequin-bedecked trifle of her costume. And, as close to the dancer as plenteous baksheesh could arrange for, a husky, goodlooking young petrochemical engineer named Charles K. van der Gleiss felt a thrill like nothing he had ever felt before -- but ascribed it, naturally enough, to the fact that this was the first time he had ever seen Madlyn Mannis dance. And in Washington, D. C. one Doctor Stephanie de Marigny, a nuclear physicist, pricked up her ears, tightened the muscles of her scalp, and tried for two full minutes to think of something she ought to think of but couldn't Out past the Green System the message sped, and past the dust and the incandescent gas that had once been the noisome planet of the Fenachrone. Past worlds where amphibians roared and bellowed; past planets of methane ice where crystalline life brooded sluggishly on its destiny. In the same infinitesimal instant it reached and passed the Rim Worlds of our galaxy; touching many minds but really affecting none. Farther and farther out, with no decrease whatever in speed, it flew; past the inconceivably tiny, inconceivably fast-moving point that housed the seven greatest, most fearsome minds that the Macrocosmic All had ever spawned -- minds that, knowing all about that thought already, ignored it completely. Immensely farther out, it flashed through the galaxy in which was the solar system of Ray-See-Nee -- where, for the first time, it made solid contact with a mind in a body human to the limit of classification. Kay-Lee Barlo, confidential secretary of Department Head Bay-Lay Boyn, stiffened so suddenly that she stuttered into her microphone and had to erase three words from a tape -- and in that same instant her mother at home went into deep trance. And still farther out, in a galaxy lying almost on the universe's Arbitrary Rim, in the Realm of the Lhirdi, the message found a much larger group of receivers. While none of the practically enslaved Jelmi could do much of anything about that weirdly peculiar and inexplicabIP ly guarded thought, many of them were very much interested in it; particularly Valkyrie-like Sennloy, a native of the planet Allondax and the master biologist of all known space; ancient Tammon, the greatest genius of the entire Jelman race; and newlyweds Mergon and Luloy, the Mallidaxian savants. None of the monstrous Llurdi -- not even their most monstrous "director", Klazmon the Fifteenth -- being monstrous -- could receive the message in any part. And how well that was! For if those tremendously able aliens could have received that message, could have understood it and acted upon it, how vastly different the history of all humanity would have been! II Llurdi and Jelmi T he distance from Earth to the Realm of the Llurdi is such that it is worth while to take a moment to locate it in space. It has been known for a long time that solar systems occur in lenticular aggregations called galaxies; each galaxy consisting of one or systems. And for almost as long a time, since no definite or systematic arrangement of the galaxies could be demonstrated, the terms "Universe" and "Cosmic All" were interchangeable; each meaning the absolute totality of all matter and all space in existence anywhere and everywhere. There had been speculations, of course, that galaxies were arranged ia lenticular universes incomprehensibly vast in size, so that the term "Comic All" should be reserved for a plurality of universes and a hyperspace of more than three spatial dimensions. Seaton and Crane in the Skylark of Valeron proved that our galaxy, the Milky Way, lies In a lenticular universe by charting every galaxy in that universe. And they suggested to the various learned societies that the two celestial aggregates should be named, respectively, the Firs Galaxy and the First Universe. from Tellus and its First Galaxy, then, out near the Arbitrary Rim of the First Universe, there lay the Realm of the Llurdi. This Realm, which had existed for over seventy thousand Tellurian years, was made up of four hundred eighty-two planets in exactly half that many solar systems. Two planets in each populated system were necessary because the population of the Realm was composed of two entirely different forms of highly intelligent life. Of these two races the Jelmi -- the subject race, living practically in vassalage -- were strictly human beings and lived on strictly Tellus-Type worlds. The master race, the Llurdi, had originated upon the harsh and hostile planet Llurdiax -- Llurdiaxorb Five -- with its distant, wan, almostnever-seen sun and its incessant gales of frigid, ice-laden, ammoniaand methane-impregnated, forty-poundsto-the-square-inoh air. Like mankind, they wore clothing against the rigors of their environment. Unlike mankind, however, they wore clothes only for protection, and only when protection was actually necessary. Nor was Llurdiax harsh or forbidding -- to them. It was the best of all possible worlds. They would not colonize any planet that was not as nearly as possible like the mother world of their race. Llurdi, although they are erect, bifurcate, bi-laterally symmetrical, bi-sexual, mammalian, and have a large crania and six-digited hands each having two opposed thumbs, are not humanoids. Nor, despite their tremendous, insensitive, unfreezable wings, are they either birds or bats. Nor flying cats, although they have huge, vertically-slitted eyes and needle-sharp canine teeth that protrude well below and above their upper and lower lips. Also, they have immensely strong and highly versatile tails; but there is nothing simian about them or in their ancestry. The Realm was not exactly an empire. Nor was Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth exactly an emperor. The title "Llanzlan" translates, as nearly as possible, into "Director"; and that was what Klazmon regarded himself as being. It is true that what he said, went; and that if he didn't like any existing law he expunged it from all existence. But that was exactly the way tilings should be. How else could optimum conditions be achieved and maintained in an ever-expanding, ever-changing, ever-rising economy? He ruled, he said and thoroughly believed, with complete reason and perfect fairness and strictly in accordance with the findings of the universe's largest and most competent computers as to what was for the best good of all. Wherefore everyone who did not agree with him was -- automatically, obviously, and unquestionably -- wrong. Llurdias, the capital city of the world Llurdiax and of the Realm, had a population of just over ten hundred square miles of ground. At its geometrical center towered the mile-square, half-mile-high officeresidence-palace (the Llurdan word "llanzlanate" has no Tellurian equivalent) of Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth of the Realm of the Llurdi. And in that building's fifth sub-basement, in Hall Prime of Computation, Klazmon and his Board of Advisors were hard at work. T hat vast room, the first receptor of all the reports of the Realm, was three-quarters full of receivers, recorders, analyzers -- bewilderingly complex instrumentation of all kinds. From most of these devices tapes were issuing -- tapes that, en route to semi-permanent storage, were being monitored by specialists in the hundreds of different fields of the Llurdan-Jelmi economy. Klazmon the Fifteenth and his Board, seated at a long conference table in hard-upholstered "chairs" shaped to fit the Llurdan anatomy, were paying no attention to routine affairs. "I have called this meeting," the IP ruler said, "to decide what oan be done to alleviate an intolerable situation. As you all know, we live in what could be called symbiosis with the Jelmi; who are so unstable, so illogical, so bird-brained generally that they would destroy themselves in a century were it not for our gentle but firm insistence that they conduct themselves in all matters for their own best good. This very instability of their illogical minds, however, enables them to arrive occasionally at valid conclusions from insufficient data; a thing that no logical mind can do. These conclusions -- they are intuitions, really -- account for practically all the advancement we Llurdi have made and explain why we have put up with the Jelmi -- yes, cherished them -- so long." He paused, contemplating the justice of the arrangement he had just described. It did not occur to him that it could in anyway be described as "wrong." He went on: "What most of you do not know is that intuitions of any large worth have become less and less frequent, decade by decade, over the last few centuries. It was twelve years ago that the Jelm Jarxon elucidated the 'Jarxon' band of the sixth order, and no worth-while intuition has been achieved since that time. Beeloy, has your more rigorous analysis revealed any new fact of interest?" A young female stood up, preened the short fur back of her left ear with the tip of her tail, and said, "No, sir. Logic can not be applied to illogic. Statistical analysis is still the only possible tool and it cannot be made to apply to the point in question, since it is incapable of certainty and since the genius-type mind occurs in only one out of found a very high probability, however -- point nine nine nine plus -- that the techniques set. up by our ancestors are wrong. In breeding for contentment by destroying the discontented we are very probably breeding out the very characteristics we wish to encourage." "Thank you, Beeloy. That finding was not unanticipated. Kalton, your report on Project University, please." "Yes, sir." An old male, so old that his fur was almost white, stood up. "Four hundred males and the same number of females, the most intelligent and most capable Jelmi alive, were selected and were brought here to the Llanzlanate. They were put into quarters that were J elmtype in every respect, even to gravity. They were given every inducement and every facility to work-study and to breed. "First, as to work-study. They have done practically nothing except waste time. They seem to devote their every effort to what they call 'escape by means of alreadywell-known constructions of the fifth and sixth orders -- all of which are of course promptly negated. See for yourselves what these insanely illogical mancontents are doing and know for yourselves that, in its present form, Project University is a failure as far as producing intuitions is concerned." Kalton picked up a fist-sized inIt strument between the thumbs of his left hand and a tri-di "tank" appeared on the table's top, in plain sight of every member of the Board. Then, as he began to finger controls, a three-dimensional scene in true color appeared in the tank; a smoothlyflowing, ever-shifting scene that moved from room to room and from place to place as the point of view traversed the vast volume of the prison. I t did not look like a prison. The apartments, of which there were as many as the Jelmi wanted, were furnished as luxuriously as the various occupants desired; with furniture and equipment every item of which had been selected by each occupant himself or herself. There were wonderful rugs and hangings; masterpieces of painting and of sculpture; triumphs of design in fireplaces and tables and chairs and couches. Each room or suite could be set up for individual control of gravity, temperature, pressure, and humidity. Any imaginable item of food or drink was available on fifteen seconds' notice at any hour of the day or night. In the magnificent laboratories every known or conceivable piece of apparatus could be had for the asking; the memory banks of the library would furnish in seconds any item of information that had been stored in any one of them during all seventy thousand years of the Realm's existence. And there were fully-equipped game and exercise rooms, ranging in size from tiny card-rooms up to a full-sized football field, to suit every Jelman need or desire for play or for exercise. But not one of the hundreds of Jelmi observed -- each one a perfect specimen physically, as was plainly revealed by the complete absence of clothing -- appreciated any one of these advantages! Most of the laboratories were vacant and dark. The few scientists who were apparently at work were not doing anything that made sense. The library was not in use a't all; the Jelmi who were reading anything were reading works of purely Jelman authorship -- mostly love stories, murder mysteries, and science fiction. Many Jelmi seemed to be busy but their activities were as pointless as cutting out paper dolls. "The pale, frail, practically hairless, repulsive, incomplete, illogical, and insane animals refuse steadfastly to cooperate with us on any level." Any Earthman so frustrated would have snarled the sentence, but the Llurd merely stated it as a fact. "You can all see for yourselves that as far as productive work is... but hold!" The viewpoint stopped moving and focussed sharply on a young man and a young woman who, bending over a table, were working on two lengths of smooth yellow material that looked something like Grand Banks oilskin and something like varnished cambric. "Mergon and Luloy of planet Mallidax." Kalton said into the microphone. "What are you doing? Whv are you so far away from your own laboratories?" Mergon straightened up and glared at what he thought was the point of origin of the voice. "If it's any of IF your business, funnyface, which k isn't," he said savagely, "I'm building a shortlong whatsit, and Luloy has nothing to do with k. When I get k done I'm personally going to tear your left leg off and beat you to  death with the bloody end of it" "You see?" Kalton dispassionately  addressed the other members of the K Board "That reaction is typical."  He manipulated controls and both i Jelmi leaped to their feet, with all four hands pressed to their buttocks. , The fact that Luloy was a woman -- j scarcely more than a girl, in fact -- was of no consequence at all to Kalton. Even Llurdan sex meant very little to the Llurdi. Jelman sex meant J nothing whatever. # "Nerve-whip," Kalton explained  to his fellows. He dropped his controller into his lap and the tri-di tank j vanished. "Nothing serious -- only j slightly painful and producing only a little ecchymosis and extravasation. Neither of those two beasts, l  however, will be at all comfortable  until they get back where they be#. long. Now, to oontinue my report:  "So much for failure to work' i study. Failure-refusal to breed,  while not possible of such simple and easy demonstration, is no less actual, effective, and determined. A purely d emotional, non-logical, and ridicuI lous factor they call 'love' seems to  be involved, as does their incompre( hensibly exaggerated, inexplicable  craving for "liberty or 'freedom'." The Llanslar said thoughtfully, cannot possibly affect the results of artificial insemination?" "It seems to, sir. Definitely. There W' jpqgpl  vi x m I  I  k some non-physical and non-logical, but nevertheless powerful, operator involved. My assistants and I liave not been able to develop any techniques that result in any except the most ephemeral pregnancies." "You apparently wish to comment, Velloy?" Klazmon asked. "I certainly do!" a middle-aged female snapped, giving one tautlyoutstretched wing a resounding whack with her tail. "Of course they haven't! As Prime Sociologist I said five years ago and I repeat now that no mind of the quality of those of the Jelmi here in the llanzlanate can be coerced by any such gross physical means. Kalton talks of them and thinks of them as animals -- meaning lower animals. I said five years ago and still say that they are not. Their minds, while unstable and completely illogical and in many instances unsane to the point of insanity, are nevertheless minds of tremendous power. I told this Board five years ago that the only way to make that project work -- to cause selected Jelmi to produce either ideas or young or both -- was to give the selectees a perfect illusion of complete freedom, and I recommended that course of action. Since I could not prove my statement mathematically, my recommendation was rejected. While I still cannot prove that statement, it is still my considered opinion that it is true; and I now repeat both statement and recommendation. I will keep on repeating them at every opportunity as long as this Board wastes time by not accepting them. I remind you that you have already wasted -- lost -- over five years." "Your statement becomes mom probable year by year," the Llanzp Ian admitted. "Kalton, have yon anything more to say?" "Very little. Only that, since Project University has admittedly failed, we should of course adopt -- " Kalton was silenced in mid-sentence by a terrific explosion, which was followed by a rumbling crash as half of one wall of the Hall coir lapsed inward. A volume of Jelman air rushed in, enveloping a purposeful company of Jelmi in yellow coveralls and wearing gas-masks. Some of these invaders were shooting pistols; some wern using or throwing knives; but all wera covering and protecting eight Jelmi who were launching bombs at one great installation of sixth-order gear -- the computer complex that was the very nerve center of the entire Realm. For the Jelmi -- who, as has bee said, were human to the last decimal of classification -- had been working on fifthand sixth-order devices pur ly as a blind; their real effort had been on first-order effects so old that their use had been all but forgotten. T he Jelman plan was simple: Thirty men and thirty women would destroy the central complex of the computer system of the entire Realm. Then, if possible, the survivors o i the sixty would join their fellows in taking over an already-selected Llurdan scout cruiser and taking off at max. It was quite probable that many or even most of the attacking sixty would die. k was distinctly possible that they all would. All sixty, howtheir lives for that particular bank of sixth-order apparatus, in order that seven hundred forty other Jelmi could escape from Llurdiax and, before control could be re-established, be beyond their masters' reach. Theoretically, the first phase of the operation should have been successful; the Realm's nerve-center should have been blown to unrecognizable bits. The Jelmi knew exactly what they were going to do, exactly how they were going to do it, and exactly how long it would take. They knew that they would have the advantage of complete surprise. There would be, they were sure, half a second or so of the paralysis of shock, followed by at least one second of utter confusion; which would give them plenty of time. They were sure it would be as though, during a full-formal session of the Supreme Court, a gang of hoodlums should blast down a wall and come leaping into the courtroom with Tommy-guns ablaze and with long knives flying and stabbing and slashing. Grave, stately, and thoughtful, the justices could not possibly react fast enough to save their lives or their records or whatever else it was that the gangsters were after. The Jelmi, however, had never seen any Llurd in emergency action; did not know or suspect how nearly instantaneous the Llurdan speed of reaotion was; did not realize that a perfectly logical mind can not be surprised by any happening, however unusual or however outrageous. Thus: Yelling, shooting, throwing, stabbing, slashing , the men and women of die Jelmi rushed into battle; to be met -- with no paralysis and no confusion and no loss of time whatever -- by buffeting wings, flailing tails, tearing teeth, and hard, highly skilled hands and fists and feet Many machine operators, as agile in the air as bats, met the bombs in midair and hurled them out into and along the corridor through the already-breached wall, where they exploded harmlessly. Harmlessly, that is, except for a considerable increase in the relatively unimportant structural damage already wrought. Two knives were buried to their hilts in the huge flying muscles of the Llanzlan's chest. His left wing hung useless, its bones shattered by bullets. So did his right arm. Nevertheless, he made it at speed to his console -- and the battle was over. Beams of force lashed out, immobilizing the human beings where they stood. Curtains of force closed in, pressing the Jelmi together into a tightly packed group. An impermeable membrane of force confined all the J elm an air and whatever Lhirdan atmosphere had been mixed with it. The Llanzlan, after glancing at his own wounds and at the corps of surgeons already ministering to his more seriously wounded fellows, resumed his place at the conference table. He said, "This meeting will resume. The places of those department heads who died will be taken by their first assistants. All department heads are hereby directed to listen, to note, and to act. Since Project University has failed, it is to be closed out immediately. All Jelmi -- I perceive that none of those present is dead, or even seriously wounded -- will be put aboard the ship in which they intended to leave Llurdiax. They will be given all the supplies, apparatus, and equipment that they care to requisition and will be allowed to take off for any destination they please." He glanced at the captured Jelmi, imprisoned in their force-bubble of atmosphere. To them it reeked of methane and halogens, but they stood proudly and coldly listening to what he said. He dismissed them from his mind and said. "A recess will now be taken o that those of us who are wounded may have our wounds dressed. After that we will consider in detail means of inducing the Jelmi to resume the producton of breakthroughs in science. " HI S ome hours later, far out in deep space, theex-Liurdan scout cruiser -- now named the Mallidax, after the most populous Jelman planet of the Realm -- bored savagely through the ether. Ift crew of late revolutionaries, still dazed by the fact that they were still alive, recuperated in their various ways. In one of the larger, more kixwious cabins Luloy of Mallidax lap prone on a three-quarter-size-bed, sobbing convulsively, uncontrottbly. Her left eye was swollen shut The left side of her face and moat of her naked body bore livid black and blue bruises -- bruises so brutally severe that the marks of Kalton's sense-whip punishment, incurred earlier for insubordination, were almost invisible. A dozen bandages showed white against the bronzed skin of her neck and shoulders and torso and arms and legs. "Oh, snap out of it, Lu, please l" Mergon ordered, almost bruskly. He was a burly youth with crew-cut straw-colored hair, and he, too, showed plenty of evidence of having been to the wars. He had even more bruises and bandages than she did. "Don't claim that you wanted to be a martyr any more than I did. And they can engrave it on a platinum plaque that I'm damned glad to get out of that fracas alive." Stopping her crying by main strength, the girl hauled herself up into a half-sitting position and glared at the man out of her one good eye. "You... you clod!" she stormed. "It isn't that at all! And you know it as well as I do. It's just that we... they... he... not a single one of them so much as... why, we might just as well have been merely that many mosquitoes -- midges -- worse, exactly that many perfectly "Exactly," he agreed, sourly, and her glare changed to a look almost of surprise. "That's precisely what we were. It's humiliating, yes. It's IF devastating and it's frustrating. Wa tried to hit the Lhirdi where k hurt, and they ignored us. Agreed. I don't like it a bit better than you do; but caterwauling and being sorry for yourself isn't going to help matters a -- " "Caterwauling! Being sorry for myself! If that's what you think, you can..." "Stop it, Lu!" he broke in sharply, "before I have to spank your fanny to a rosy blister !" She threw up her head m defiance; then what was almost a smile began to quirk at the corners of her battered mouth. "You can't, Merg," she said, much more quietly than she had said anything so far. "Look -- it's all red, green, blue, yellow, and black already. That last panel I bounced off of was no pillow, friend." "Llenderllon's favor, sweetheart!" Bending over, he kissed her gingerly, then drew a deep breath of relief. "You scared me like I don't know when I've been scared before," he admitted. "We need you too much -- and I love you too much -- to have you go off the deep end now. Especially now, when for the first time in our lives we're in position to do something." "Such as what?" Luloy's tone was more lifeless than skeptical. "How many of our whole race are worth saving, do you think? How many Jelmi of all our worlds can be made to believe that their present way of life is anything short of perfection?" "Very few, probably," Mergon conceded. "As of now. But -- " He paused, looking around their suaoundmgs. The spaceship, which had once been one of the Liurdia beet, might have a few surprises for them. It was a matter for debate whether the Llurdi might not have put concealed spy devices in the rooms. On balance, however, Mergon thought not The Llurdi operated on grander scales than that. He said, "Luky, listen. We tried to fight our way to freedom by attacking the Llurdi right where it hurts, in center of their power. We lost the battle. But we have what we were fighting for, don't we? Why do you think they let us go, perfectly free?" L uloy's eye brightened a little, but not too much. "That's plain enough. Since they couldn't make us produce either new theories or children in captivity, they're giving us what they say is complete freedom, so that we'll produce both. How stupid do they think we are? How stupid can they get? If we could have wrecked their long eyes, yes, we could have got away clean to a planet in some other galaxy, 'way out of their range; but now? If I know anything at all, it's that they'll hold a tracer beam -- so weak as to be practically indetectable, of course -- on us forever." "I think you're right," Mergon said, and paused. Luloy looked at him questioningly and he went on, "I'm sure you are, but I don't think it's us they are aiming at. They're probably taking the long view -- betting that, with a life-long illusion of freedom, we'll have children of our own free will." Luloy nodded thoughtfully. "And wt would," she said, definitely. "All j#f us would. For, after all, if we en this ship all die childless what chance is there that any other Jelmi will try it again for thousands of years? And our children would have a chance, even if we never have another." "True. But on the other hand, how uuay generations will it take for tilings now known to be facts to degenerate into myths? To be discredited completely, in spite of the solidcat records we can make as to the ruth and the danger?" Luloy started to gnaw her lip, but winced sharply and stopped the motion. "I see what you mean. Inevitable. But you don't seem very downcast about it, so you have an idea. Tell me, quick!" "Yes, but I'm just hatching it; I haven't mentioned it even to Tamnon yet, so I don't know whether it will work or not. At present a tixth-order break-through can't be hidden from even a very loose surveillance. Right?" By now Luloy's aches and pains were forgotten. Eyes bright, she aodded. "You're so right. Do you think one can be? Possibly? How?" "By finding a solar system some'where whose inhabitants know so much more than we do that the emanations of their sixth-order installations continuously or regularly at work will mask those of any fulltcale tests we want to make. There must be some such race, somewhere in this universe. The Llurdi charted this universe long ago -- they call it U-Prime -- and I requisitioned copies S# of all the tapes. Second: the Llurdi are all strictly logical. Right?" "That's right," the girl agreed. "Strictly. Insanely, almost, you might say." 'So my idea is to do something as illogical as possible. They think we'li head for a new planet of our own; either in this galaxy or one not too far away. So we won't. We'll drive at absolute max for the center of the universe, with the most sensitive feelers we have full 'out for very strong sixth-order emanations. En route, we'll use every iota of brain-power aboard this heap in developing some new band of the sixth, being mighty careful to use so little power that the ship's emanations will mask it. Having found the hidingplace we want, we'll tear into developing and building something, not only that the Llurdi haven't got, but a thing that by use of which we can bust Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth loose from his wings and tail -- and through which he can't fight back. So, being absolutely -- stupidly -- logical about everything, what would His Supreme Omnipotence do about it?" Luloy thought in silence for a few seconds, then tried unsuccessfully to whistle through battered, swollen lips. "Oh, boy!" she exclaimed, delightedly. "Slug him with a thing like that -- demonstrate superiority -- and the battle is over. He'll concede us everything we want, full equality, independence, you name it, without a fight -- without even an argument!" Grinning, Mergon caught her arm And led her out of the room. IF Throughout the great hulk of the Llurd spaceship the other battered Jelmi veterans were beginning to stir. To each of them, Mergon explained his plan and from each came the lame response. "Oh, boy!" They began at once setting up their work plans. The first project was to find -- somewhere! -- a planet generating sufficient sixth-order forces to screen what they were going to do. In the great vastnesses of the Over-Universe there were many such planets. They could have chosen that which was inhabited by Norlaminian or Dasorian peoples. They could have chosen one of a score which were comparatively nearby. They, in fact, ultimately chose and set course for the third planet of a comparatively mall G-type star known to its people as Tellus, or Earth. They could have given many reaons why this particular planet had been selected. None of these reasons would have included the receipt of the brief pulse of telepathic communication which none of them, any longer, consciously remembered. A nd back on Llurdiax the Llanzlan followed the progress of the fleeing ship of Jelm rebels with calm perception. His great bat wings were already wending, even as the scars of the late assauK on his headquarters were already nearly repaired by a host of ervo-mechanisms. Deaf to the noise and commotion of the repairs, heedless of the healing wounds which any human would have devoted a month in bed to curing, the Lianzlan once again summoned his department heads and issued his pronouncement: "War, being purely destructive, is a product of unsanity. The Jelmi are, however, unsane; many of them are insane. Thus, if allowed to do so, they commit warfare at unpredictable times and for incomprehensible, indefensible, andor whimsical reasons. Nevertheless, since the techniques we have been employing have been proven ineffective and therefore wrong, they will now be changed. During the tenure of this directive no more Jelmi will be executed or castrated : in fact, a certain amount of unsane thinking will not merely be tolerated but encouraged, even though it lead to the unsanity termed 'war'. It should not, however, be permitted to exceed that quantity of 'war' which would result in the destruction of, let us say, three of their own planets. "This course will entail a risk that we, as the 'oppressors' of the Jelmi, will be attacked by them. The magnitude of this risk -- the probability of such an attack -- cannot be calculated with the data now available. Also, these data are rendered even lesa meaningful by the complete unpredictability of the actions of the group of Jelmi released from study here. "It is therefore directed that afl necessary steps be taken particularly in fifth and sixth-order devices, that no even theoretically possible attack on this planet wiH succeed. "This meeting will now adjourn." It did; and within fifteen minutes heavy construction began -- conatrucV tion that was to go on at a pace and on a scale and with an intensity of drive theretofore unknown throughout the Realm's long history. Whole worldlets were destroyed, scavenged for their minerals, their ores smelted in giant atomic space-borne foundries and cast and shaped into complex machines of offense and defense. Delicate networks of radiation surrounded every Jelm and Llurd world, ready to detect, trace, report and home on any artifact whatsoever which might approach them. Weapons capable of blasting moons out of orbit slipped into position in great latticework spheres of defensive emplacements. The Llurdi were preparing for anything. Llurdan computations were never wrong. Computers, however, even Llurdan computers, are not really smart -- they can't really think. Unlike the human brain, they can not arrive at valid conclusions from insufficient data. In fact, they don't even try to. They stop working and say -- in words or by printing or typing or by flashing a light or by ringnothing until they are fed additional information. Thus, while the Llanzlan and his mathematicians and logicians fed enough data into their machines to obtain valid conclusions, there were many facts that no Llurd then knew. And thus those conclusions, while valid, were woefully incomplete; they did not cover all of actuality by far. For, in actuality, there had already begun a chain of events that was to render those mighty fortresses precisely as efficaceous against one certain type of attack as that man) cubic miles of sheerest vacuum. IV Llurdi and Fenachrone T he type of attack which was about to challenge the Llurdi was from a source no civilized human would have believed still existed. If Richard Seaton, laboring at Earth's own defenses uncountable parsecs away, had been told of it, he would flatly have declared the story a lie. He ought to know, he would have said. That particular danger to the harmony of the worlds had long since been destroyed... and he was the man who had destroyed it! When the noisome planet of the Fenachrone was destroyed it was taken for granted that Ravindau and his faction of the Party of Postponement of Universal Conquest, who had fled from the planet just before its destruction, were the last surviving members of their monstrous race. When they in turn were destroyed it was assumed that no Fenachrone remained alive. That assumption was wrong. There was another faction of the Party of Postponement much larger than Ravindau's, much more secretive, and much better organized. Its leader, one Sleemet, while an extremely able scientist, had taken lifelong pains that neither his name nor his ability should become known IF Id any except a select few. He was as patriotic as was any other member of his race; he believed as implickly as did any other that the Penachrone should and one day would rule not only this one universe, but the entire Cosmic All. However, be believed, and as firmly, that The Day should not be set until the probability of success of the project should begin to approach unity as a limit. According to Sleemet's exceedingly rigorous analysis, the time at which success would become virtually certain would not arrive for at least three hundred Fenachronian years. From the day of Fenor's accession to the throne Sleemet had been grimly certain that this Emperor Fenor -- headstrong, basically ignorant, and inordinately prideful even for an absolute monarch of the Fenachrone -- would set The Day during his own reign; centuries before its proper time. Therefore, for over fifty years, Sleemet had been preparing for exactly the eventuality that came about, and: Therefore, after listening to only a few phrases of the ultimatum given to Emperor Fenor by Sacner Carfon of Dasor, speaking for the Overlord Seaton and his Forces of Universal Peace, Sleemet sent out his signal, and: Therefore, even before Ravindau's forces began to board their single vessel Sleemet's fleet of seventeen tuperdreadnoughts was out in deep apace, blasting at full-emergency fifth-order cosmic-energy drive away from the planet so surely doomed. Surely doomed? Yes. Knowing vastly more about the sixth order than did any other of his race, he was the only one of his race who knew anything about the Overlord of the Central System; of who and what that Overlord was and of what that Overlord had done. He, Sleemet, did not want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton. Not then or ever. Curse Fenor's abysmal stupidity! Since a whole new Fenachrone planet would now have to be developed, the Conquest could not be begun for more than three hundred years! While Sleemet knew much more about the sixth order than Ravindau did, he did not have the sixth-order drive and it took him and his scientists and engineers several months to develop and to perfect it. Thus their fleet was still inside the First Galaxy when they finally changed drives and began really to travel -- on a course that, since it was laid out to reach the most distant galaxies of the First Universe, would of necessity lie within two and a quarter hundreds of thousands of light-years of the galaxy in which the Realm of the Llurdi lay. A s has been intimated, the Llurdi were literal folk. When any llanzlan issued a directive he meant it literally, and it was always as literally carried out. Thus, when Llanzlan Klazmon ordered the construction of an installation of such a nature that "no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed" he meant precisely that -- and that was precisely what was built. Nor, since the Llurdi had full command of the fourth and fifth orders, and some sixth-order apparatus as well, was the task overlong in the doing. The entire one-hundred-six-mile circumference of Llurdias and a wide annulus outside the city proper were filled with tremendous fortresses; each of which was armed and powered against any contingency to which Computer Prime -- almost half a cubic mile of miniaturization packed with the accumulated knowledges and happenings of some seventy thousand years -- could assign a probability greater than point zero zero zero one. Each of those fortresses covered five acres of ground; was low and flat. Each was built of super-hard, super-tough, super-refractory synthetic. Each had twenty-seven highrising, lightning-rodlike spikes of the same material. Fortress-shell and spikes through closely spaced cast-in tubes; and the entire periphery of each fortress, as well as dozens of interior relief-points, went deep into constantly water-soaked, heavily salted ground. Each fortress sprouted scores of antennae -- parabolic, box, fiat, and straight -- and scores of heavily insulated projectors of shapes to be defined only by a professional mathematician of solid geometry. And how the Llurdan detectors could now cover space! The Jelm Mergon, long before his abortive attempt to break jail, had developed a miniaturized monitor station that could detect, amplify, and retransmit cm an aimed tight beam any fifth-or sixth-order signal from and to a distance of many kiloparsecs. Hundreds of these "mergons" were already out in deep space. Now mergons were being manufactured in lots of a thousand, and in their thousands they were being hurled outward from Llurdiax, to cover -- by relays en cascade -- not only the Llurdan galaxy and a great deal of inter-galactic space, but also a good big chunk of inter-universal space as well. T he Fenachrone fleet bored on through inter-galactic space at its distance-devouring sixth-order pace. Its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order detector webs fanned out far -- "far" in the astronomical sense of the word -- ahead of it. They were set to detect, not only the most tenuous cloud of gas, but also any manifestation whatever upon any otf the known bands of any of those orders. Similar detectors reached out to an equal distance above and below and to the left of and to the right of the line of flight; so that the entire forward hemisphere was on continuous web of ultra-tenuous but ultra-sensitive detection. And, as that fleet approached a galaxy lying well to "starboard" -- the term was still in use aboard ship except for matters of record, since the direction of action of artificial gravity, whatever its actual direction, was always "down" -- two sets of detectors tripped at once. The squat and monstrous officer on watch reported this happening instantly, of course, to Sleemet himself; and of course Sleemet himself went instantly into action. He energized his flagship's immense fifth-order projector. IF Those detections could have only that the Fenachrone were in fact the one meaning. There was at least one ablest, most intelligent, and most solar system in that galaxy peopled powerful race of beings in existence, by entities advanced enough to work He would investigate, of course. Bitf with forces of at least the fifth orhe would do it cautiously, der. They should be destroyed -- The working projections of the that is, he corrected himself warily, Fenachrone were tight patterns of unless they were allied with or beforce mounted on tight beams. Thus, longed to that never-to-be-sufficientuntil they began to perform exterior ly-damned Overlord of the Central work, they were virtually indetecfcSystem of the First Galaxy... able except by direct interception But no, at this immense distance the and hard-driven specific taps. Sleeprobability of that was vanishingly met knew this to be a fact; whether small. the projection was on, above, or beThey might, however, have weaplow the target planet's surface and ons of the sixth. The fact that there even though that planet was so far were no such devices in operation at away that it would take light hunthe moment did not preclude that dreds of centuries to make the onepossibility. way trip. Very unlike the late unlamented The emanations of his vessels' Fenor he, First Scientist Sleemet, sixth-order cosmic-energy drive, was not stupidly and arrogantly sure however, were very distinctly something else. They could not be damped out or masked and they could be detected very easily by whoever or whatever it was that was out there... Yes, an exploration would not change matters at all... A s a matter of fact, the Fenachrone's Fleet's emanations had been detected a full two seconds since. A far-outpost mergon had picked it up and passed it along to a second, which in turn had relayed it inward to its Number Three, which Finally had delivered it to Computer Prime on incredibily distant Llurdiax. There, in Hall. Prime of Computation, a section "supervisor had flicked the switch that had transferred the unusual bit of information to his immediate superior, Head Supervisor Klarton -- who had at sight of it gone into a tizzy (for a Llurd) of worrying his left ear with the tip of his tail. He stared at the motionless bit of tape as though it were very apt indeed to bite him in the eye. What to do? Should he disturb the llanzlan with this or not? This was a nose-twitching borderline case if there ever was one. If he didn't, and it turned out to be something important, he'd get his tail singed -- he'd be reduced to section supervisor. Put if he did, and it didn't, he'd get exactly the same treatment... However, the thing, whatever it might be, was so terrifically far away... Yes, that was it! The smart thing to do would be to watch it for a few seconds -- determine exact distance, direction of flight, velocity, and wo forth -- before reporting to the Big Boss. That would protect him either way. W herefore Sleemet had time to launch an analsynth projection along the indicated line. He found a solar system containing two highly industrialized planets; one of which was cool, the other cold. One was peopled by those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned human beings; the other by a race of creatures even more monstrous and therefore even less entitled to exist. He studied those planets and their inhabitants quickly but thoroughly, and the more he studied them the more derisive and contemptuous he became. They had no warships, no fortresses either above or below ground, no missiles, even! Their every effort and all their energies were devoted to affairs of peace ! Therefore, every detail having been recorded, including the gibberish being broadcast and tightbeamed by various communications satellites, Sleemet pulled in his analsynth and sent out a full working projection. He had already located great stores of prepared power-uranium bars and blocks on both planets. Careless of detection now and working at his usual fantastic speed and with his usual perfect control, he built in seconds six tremendous pyramids upon each of the two doomed worlds -- pyramids of now one-hundred-percent-convertible superatomic explosive. He assembled twenty-four exceedingly complex, carefully aimed forces and put them on trip. Then, IF flaring baJefuUy into an almost opaque visiplate, he reached out without looking and rammed a plunger home -- and in an instant those two distant planets became two tremendous fireballs of hellishly intolerable. mostly invisible, energies. highly intelligent creatures -- eating, sleeping, loving, fighting, reading, thinking, working, playing -- died in that utterly cataclysmic rending of two entire worlds. P ractically all of them died not knowing even that they had been hurt. A few -- a very few -- watch officers in interplanetary spaceships observed one or the other of those frightful catastrophes in time to have an instant's warning of what was coming; but only three such officers, it became known later, had enough time to throw on their faster-than-light drives and thus outrun the ravening front of annihilation. Cosmically, however, the thing didn't amount to much. Its duration was very short indeed. While a little of each planet's substance was volatilized, practically all of it was scarcely more than melted. When equilibrium was restored they did not shine like little suns. They scarcely glowed. Hands quietly poised, Sleemet again paused in thought. The fact that he had murdered albother him at all. In fact, he did not think of the action at all, as murder he had, the thought would have been the Fenachrone equivalent of "pesticide". All space comprising the Cosmic All and every planet therein should and would belong to the Master Race; no competing race had any right whatever to live. Should he, or should he not, explore the lines of those communications beams and destroy the other planets of this group? He should not, he decided. He would have to slow down, perhaps even change course; and it was quite possible that he was still within range of the sixth-order stuff of that self-styled Overlord. Besides, this group of queerly mixed entities would keep. After he had found a really distant Fenatype planet and had developed it, he would come back here and finish this minor chore. But very shortly after making this decision Sleemet was given cause to know starkly that he had not investigated this civilization thoroughly enough by far; for his vessel was being assailed by forces of such in; credible magnitude that his instant taneously reactive outer screen was already radiating in the high violet! And, before he could do much more than put a hand to his construction panel, that outer screen began to show black spots of failure! I n Hall of Prime Computation, on Llurdiax, one entire panel of instrumentation went suddenly dead. The supervisor of that section flicked two testing switches, then scanned the last couple of inches of each of two tapes. Then he paused, for a moment stunned: knocked completely out of any Llurd's calm poise. Then, licking his lips, he spoke; apparently to empty air: "Llanzlan Klazmon, sir, Blaydaxorb Three and Blaydaxorb Five stopped reporting, simultaneously, eleven seconds ago. Orbiting pyrometers of both planets reported thermonuclear temperatures at the endpoints of their respective transmissions. End of report, sir." The supervisor did not elaborate. While he was appalled and terribly shocked -- he had never imagined such disasters possible -- it was not his job to comment or to deduce or to theorize. His business -- his only business -- was to report to a higher echelon the pertinent facts of any and all unusual events or conditions; the height of the echelon to which he reported being directly proportional to the unusualness and or magnitude of the event or condition. Since this event was unprecedented and of very great magnitude indeed, his report went straight to the top -- thus overtaking and passing the report of Head Supervision Klaron, which was not yet ready for delivery. Having reported the pertinent facts to the proper echelon, the section supervisor went calmly, almost unconcernedly, back to his job of supervising his section. He paid no more attention to the incident even when the llanzlan -- fully recovered now from his wounds -- who had been asleep in his penthouse apartment came into the Hall from the down-flyway. (Everyone rode a force-beam up, but came down on his own wings.) While Klazmon was not hurrying any more than usual, his usual technique was to drop a full half mile with folded wings before beginning to put on his brakes. Hence his tremendous wings and stabilizing surfaces sent blasts of cold, dense air throughout the whole end of the Hall as he slowed down for a high-G landing in his seat at his master-control console. Fingers, thumbs, and tail-tip flashed over the banked and tiered keyboards of that console; and, all around the periphery of Llurdias, that miles-wide girdle of mighty fortresses came instantly to life. A multi-layered umbrella of fullcoverage screens flashed into being over the whole city and Klazmon, engineering his fifth-order projector, sent his simulacrum of pure force out to see what had happened in or to the solar system of Blaydaxorb. He was now, to all intents and purposes, in two places at once. He could see, hear, feel, taste, and smell exactly as well with one self as with the other. He was, however, thoroughly accustomed to the peculiar sensations of having a complete personality; he could block out at will any perceptions of either self. And his immaterial self had two tremendous advantages over his material one. It could traverse incredibly immense distances in no measurable time; and, no matter where it went or what it encountered, his physical self would remain entirely unaffected. In a mere flick of time, then, Klazmon was in the solar system of Blaydaxorb. The sun itself was unchanged, but in orbits three and five, IF where the two inhabited planets had been, there were two still-wildly-disturbed masses of liquids and gases. He threw out a light, fast detector web, which located the marauding Fenachrone fleet in less than a second. Then, returning most of his attention to his console, he assembled seventeen exceedingly complex forces and hurled them, one at each vessel of the invading fleet. Actually, Klazmon was little if any more affected than was Sleemet the Fenachrone about either that utterly frightful loss of life as such or the loss of those two planets as such. The Realm was big enough so that the total destruction of those two planets -- of any two planets except of course Llurdiax itself -- was unimportant to the economy of the Realm as a whole. No; what burned the llanzlan up -- made it mandatory that that fleet and the entire race whose people manned it should, after thorough study, be wiped completely out -- was the brazenness, the uncivilized and illogical savagery, the incredible effrontery of this completely intolerable insult to the realm of die Llurdi and to imperial Klazmon its llanzlan. Klazmon knew of only one race who made a habit of performing such atrocities; such wanton, illogical, insane offenses against all sense and all reason : those chlorine-breathing, amoeboid monstrosities inhabiting Galaxy DW-#-LU. Those creatures, however, as far as any Llurd had ever learned, had always confined their activities to their own galaxy. If, Klazmon thought grimly to himself, those insanely murderous amoeboids had decided to extend their operations into the Galaxy of the Llurdi, they would find such extension a very expensive one indeed. Wherefore, hunched now over a black-filtered visiplate, with slitted eyes narrow and cat-whiskers stiffly outthrust; with both hands manipulating high-ratio vernier knobs in infinitesimal arcs; Klazmon shoveled on the coal. V Combat! A s has been said, the Llurdi were a literal folk. Klazmon's directive had specified "... that no even theoretically possible attack on this planet will succeed." Hence that was precisely what had been built. No conceivable force or combination of forces, however applied and even at pointblank range, oould crack Llurdiax's utterly impenetrable shields. Nor was that all; for Llurdan engineers, as well as Llurdan philosophers, were thoroughly familiar with the concept that "The best defense is a powerful offense." Wherefore Llurdiax's offensive projectors were designed to smash down any theoretically possible threat originating anywhere within a distance that light would require one and threeto traverse. Under the thrustings and the stabbings, the twistings and the tearings, the wrenchings and the bludgeonings of those frightful fields of force, seventeen sets of Fenachrone defenve screens -- outer, intermediate, and inner -- went successively upward ' through the visible spectrum, through the ultra-violet, and into the black of failure; baring the individual vessel's last lines of defense, the wallshields themselves. Then Klazmon increased the power, gouging and raving at those ultra-stubborn defenses until those defenses were just barely holding; at which point he relaxed a little, read his verniers, leaned back in his bucket seat, and took stock. The marauding spaceships were tremendous things; cigar-shaped; flying in hollow-globe formation with one vessel -- the flagship, of course -- at the exact center; spaced so closely that their screens had overlapped -- overlapped in such fashion that unless and until that shell of force was broken no attack could be made upon that central ship. So far, so good. With the overwhelming superiority of ultimateplanetary over any at-al #-probable mobile installations he, Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth, had smashed that shell completely. He could, he was sure, destroy all those vessels as completely. But it would not do at all to destroy even one of them without examining both it and its crew. Klazmon had to know the who and the what and the wherefore and the how and the why. Therefore, leaving all of his attacking beams exactly as they were. Klazmon assembled another gigantic beam -- the entire output of one Llurdiaxian fortress -- and hurled it against the tail-section of the flagship. Wall-shield and tail-section vanished in a few manoseconds of time; and not only the tail-section, but also a few hundreds of yards of the flagship's prodigious length as well, became a furiously raging fireball; a sphere of violence incredible. Klazmon drove his projection forward then, through the now unresisting steel wall and into the control room; where it was met by blasts of force from the hand-weapons of the Fenachrone officers. This demonstration, however, lasted for only a second or two. Then those officers, knowing what it was that was standing there so unconcernedly, abandoned their physical assault and attacked the invading projection with the full power of the huge, black, flame-shot wells of hypnotic force that were their eyes. When the mental attack also failed they merely stood there; glaring a hatred that was actually tangible. K dazmon immobilized each one of the officers individually with pencils of force and began to study them intensively. While much shorter and thicker and wider and immensely stronger than the Jelmi Of the Realm, they were definitely Jelmoid in every important respect... yes, the two races had certainly had a common ancestry, and not too far back. Also, their thinking and conduct were precisely as was to be expected of any Jelman or Jelmoid race that had been allowed to develop in its unsane and illogical way for many thousands of years without the many benefits of Llurdan control! IF They would of course have thought-exchange gear; any race of their evident advancement must have... ah, yes; over there. Now -- which of these wights would be the admiral? That one wearing the multiplex scanner would be the pilot; that one facing the banks of dials and gages would be the prime engineer; those six panels had to be battle panels, so those six monsters had to be gunnery officers... ah! That one there -- off by himself; seated (in spite of the fact that with their short, blocky legs no Fenachrone had any need, ever, to sit) at a desk that was practically a throne; facing no gadgetry and wearing consciously an aura of power and authority -- that one would be the one Klazmon wanted. Klazmon's projection flashed up to the motionlessly straining admiral. The helmets of the "mechanical educator" snapped onto the Llurd's quietly studious head and onto the head with the contemptuously sneering face -- the head of First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet of the Fenachrone. That face, however, lost its sneer instantly, for Sleemet -- even more overweeningly and brutally and vaingloriously prideful now than were the lower echelons of his race -- had never imagined the possibility of the existence of such a mind as this monstrous invader had. Klazmon's mind, the product of seventy thousand years of coldly logical evolution, tore ruthlessly into the mind of the Fenachrone. It bored into and twisted at that straining mind's hard-held blocks; it battered and shattered them; it knocked them down flat. Then Klazmon, omnivorous scholar that he was, set about transferring to his own brain practically everything that the Fenachrone had eyer learned. Klazmon learned, as Richard Seaton had learned previously, that all Fenachron having authority and responsibility were meticulous record-keepers. He learned what had happened to the civilization of the Fenachrone and to its world, and who had done it and how; he learned that each and every captain knew exactly the same and had exactly the same records as did First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet himself; he learned that each vessel, alone by itself, was thoroughly capable of recreating the entire Fenachrone civilization and culture. A few of the many other thousands of things that Klazmon learned were: That there were many Jelman and Jelmoid -- human and humanoid, that is -- races living in what they called the First Galaxy. That all these races were alike in destructiveness, belligerence to the point of war-lust, savagery, implacability, vengefulness, intolerance, and frightfulness generally. Not one of them (by Klazmon's light!) had any redeeming features or qualities whatever. That all these races must be destroyed if any worthwhile civilization were ever to thrive and spread. There was no word in any language of the Realm of the Llurdi corresponding even remotely to "genocide". If there had been, Klazmon would have regarded it as an etymol ogival curiosity. All those surviving Fenachrone would have to die: no such race as that had any right whatever to live. Before being destroyed, however, they would have to be studied with Llurdan thoroughness; and any and all worthwhile ideas and devices and other artifacts should be and would be incorporated into the LlurdanJelman way of life. One vessel would be enough, however, to preserve temporarily for the purpose of study. In fact, what was left of the flagship would be enough. The now-vanished tail-section had contained nothing new to Llurdan science, the encyclopedic records were intact, and the flagship's personnel -- males and females, adults and adolescents and children and babies -- were alive and well. W herefore sixteen sets of multiplex projectors doubled their drain of power from Llurdias' mighty defensive girdle, and all the Fenachrone aboard sixteen superdreadooughts died in situ, wherever they happened to be, as those sixteen vessels became tiny, sunlets. And the llanzlan issued orders: #) The bulk of the Fenachrone flagship was to be brought in to the Uanzlanate at full sixth-order drive. #) A test section of the llanzlanate was to be converted at once to a completely authentic Fenachrone environment. #) Every possible precaution was to be taken that no Fenachrone suffered any ill effects on the way, during transfer to their new quarters, or while in their new quarters. Dropping the Fenachrone flagship and its personnel from his mind, Klazmon immersed himself in thought. He had learned much. There was much more of menace than he had supposed, in many galaxies other than Galaxy DW-#-LU... especially that so-called First Galaxy... and particularly the Green System or Central System of that galaxy? The green-skinned Norlaminians -- how of them? And how of that system's overlord,  Seaton of Tellus? That one was, very evidently, a Jelm... and, even after making all due allowance for Sleemet's bias, he was of a completely uncontrolled and therefore extremely dangerous type. And as, evidently, his was a mind of exceeding power, he could very well be a very dangerous and quite immediate threat. The mergons must be wider-spread even than originally planned and they must be on the lookout for this Overlord Seaton. In fact, he might be worth interviewing personally. It might be well worth while, some of these years, to take some time off and go to that distant galaxy, purposely to make that Jelm Seaton's acquaintance... Shrugging his shoulders and shaking both wings, Klazmon cut off his projection and called another meeting of his Board of Advisors. He briefed them on what had happened; then went on: "We must protect all our planets in the same way and to the same extent that this planet Llurdiax is protected now: a course of action now IF necessary because of these many Jelman and Jelmoid races that have been developing for untold millenia m their unsane and illogical ways, with no semblance of or attempt at either guidance or control. "Second: any force of any such race that attacks us will be destroyed before it or they can do us any harm. "Third: the manufacture and distribution of mergons will continue indefinitely at the present rate. "Fourth: No chance or casual vessel or fleet traversing any part of the vast volume of space to be covered by our mergons is to be destroyed, or even hailed, until I myself decide what action, if any, is to be taken." So saying, the Llanzlan Klazmon dismissed his advisors. His great wings fanned idly as he contemplated what he had done. He was well pleased with it He had, he reflected, scratching his head contentedly with the tip of his tail, provided for every possible contingency. Whatever this Jelm, or Jelmlike creature, named Seaton might be or do, he would pose no real threat to the llanzlante. Of that Klazmon was one hundred per cent sure... And wrong!  VI Of Disembodied Intelligences W e have now seen how the ripple of thought that began with the conference between Seaton and his advisors from the Green System had spread throughout all of recorded space, and how it had affected the lives and destinies of countless millions of persons who had never heard of him. Yet a few threads remain to be drawn into our net. And one of these threads represents the strangest entities Seaton had encountered, ever... as well as the most deadly. To understand what these entities are like, it is necessary to look back to their beginnings. These are most remote, both in apace and in time. In a solar system ao distant from that of Sol as to be forever unknowable to any one of Earth, and at a time an inconceivably vast number of millenia in the past, there once existed a lusty and fertile Tellus-type planet named Maryears mankind evolved on Marghol and thrived as usual. And finally, also as usual and according to the scheduled fate of all created material things, the planet Marghol grew old. Whether or not a Tellus-Type planet ordinarily becomes unfit to support human life before its sun goes nova is not surely known. Nor does it matter very much; for, long before either event occurs, the human race involved has developed a faster-than-light drive and has at its disposal dozens or hundreds of Earth-like .planets upon which even subhuman life has not yet developed. The. planet Marghol, however, while following the usual pattern in general, developed a specific thing that was, as far as is known, unique throughout all the reaches of total apace and throughout all time up to the present On Marghol, during many, many had continued to exist a small, tightly-inbred, self-perpetuating cult of thinkers -- of men and women who devoted their every effort and their total power to thought. They themselves did not know what freak of mind or quirk of physical environment made the ultimate outcome possible; but after those the perpetually imbreeding group grew stronger and stronger mentally and weaker and weaker physically, the seven survivors of the group succeeded finally in liberating their minds -- minds perfectly intact and perfectly functioning -- from the gross and perishable flesh of their physical bodies. Then, able to travel at the unmeasurable speed of thought and with all future time in which to work, they set out to learn everything there was to know. They would learn, they declared, not only all about space and time and zero and infinity and animals and people and life and death, but also anything and everything and everything else comprising or having anything to do with the totality of existence that is the Cosmic All. This quest for knowledge has been going on, through universe after universe and through dimension after dimension, for a stretch of time that, given as a number in Tellurian years, would be a number utterly incomprehensible to the human mind. For -- what perceptible or tangible difference is there, to the human mind, between a googolplex of seconds and IF the same number of centuries? And, since these free minds ordinarily kept track of time only by the lifecycles of suns, the period of time during which they had already traveled and studied could have been either shorter or longer than either of the two exact figures mentioned. Seven free minds had left the planet Marghol. They called themselves, in lieu of names, "One" to "Seven" in order of their liberation. For a brief time -- a mere cosmic of years -- there had been eight, since One had consented to dematerialize one applicant for immortality. The applicant Eight, however, sick and tired of eternal life, had committed suicide by smashing his sixth-order being out of existence against Richard Seaton's sixth-order screens. Now those seven free minds, accompanied by the free mind of Immortality Candidate Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne, were flying through ultra-deep space in a time-stasis capsule. This capsule, as has been said, was designed and powered to travel almost to infinity in both space and time. But, as the Norlaminians pointed out to Seaton, his basic assumptions were invalid. Nothing happened, however, for week after week. Then, so immensely far out in intergalactic space that even the vast bulk of a galaxy lying there would have been invisible even to Palomar's "Long Eye", the hurtling capsule struck a cloud of hydrogen gas. T hat gas was, by Earthly standards, a hard vacuum; but the capsule's velocity by that time was so immensely great that that cloud might just as well have been a mountain of solid rock. The capsule's directors tried, with all their prodigious might and speed, to avoid the obstruction, but even with fullest power they did not have time enough. Eight multi-ton power-bars of activated uranium flared practically instantaneously into ragingly incandescent gas; into molecular, atomic, and subatomic vapor and debris. A fireball brighter than a sun glared briefly; then nothing whatever was visible where that massive structure had been. And out of that sheer emptiness came a cold, clear thought: the thought of Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne. "One, are you familiar enough with this region of space to estimate at all dosely how long we were in that stasis of time and where we now are with reference to the First Galaxy?" Freemind One did not exactly answer the question. "What matters it?" he asked. If the thought of aa immortal and already incredibly old and incredibly knowledgeful mind can be said to show surprise, that, thought did. "It should be clear, even to you of infinitesimally short life, that any length of time expressible in any finite number of definite time periods is actually but a moment Also, the Cosmic All is vast indeed; larger by many orders of magnitude than any that the boldest of your thinkers has as yet dared to imagine. "Whether or not space is infinite I do not know. Whether or not my life span will be infinite I do not know. I do not as yet completely understand infinity. I do know, however, that both infinite time and infinite space are requisite for the acquisition of infinite knowledge, which is my goal; wherefore I am well content. You have no valid reason whatever for wishing to return to your Earth. Instead, you should be as eager as I am to explore and to study the as yet unknown." "I have unfinished business there." DuQuesne's thought was icy cold. "I'm going back there whether you do or not." "To kill beings who have at best but an instant to live? To rule an ultra-microscopic speck of cosmic dust? A speck whose fleeting existence is of but infinitesimal importance to the Great Scheme of Things? Are you still infantile enough, despite your recent transformation, to regard as valid such indefensible reasons as those?" "They're valid enough to me. And you'd have to go back, too, I should think. Or isn't it still true that science demands the dematerialization of the whole Skylark party?" "Truth is variable," One said. "Thus, while certain of our remarks were not true in the smaller aspect, each of them was designed to elicit a larger truth. They aided in the initiation of chains of events by observation of which I will be able to fit many more constituent parts of this you call the First Universe precisely into place in the Great Scheme. "Now as to you, DuQuesne. The probability was small that you were sufficiently advanced to become a worthy member of our group; but I decided to give you your chance and permitted Richard Seaton to do what he did. As a matter of fact I, not Seaton, did it. You have failed; and I now know that no member of your race can ever become a true your years you would not be thinking of knowledge at all, but merely of self-destruction. I erred, one-tenth of a cycle since, in admitting Freemind Eight to our study group; an entity who was then at approximately the same stage of development as you now are. I will not repeat that error. You will be rematerialized and will be allowed to do whatever you please." The mind of DuQuesne almost gasped. "Out here? Even if you recreate my ship I'd never get back!" "You should and will have precisely the same chance as before of living out your normal instant of life in normal fashion. To that end I will construct for you a vessel that will be the replica of your former one except in that it will have a sixthorder drive -- what your fellow-human Seaton called the 'Cosmic Energy' drive -- so that you will be able to make the journey in comparatively few of your days. I will instruct you in this drive and in certain other matter that will be required to implement what I have said. I will set your vessel's controls upon your home galaxy at the correct acceleration. "I compute... I construct." IF A nd faster by far than even an electronic eye could follow, a pattern of incredibly complex stresses formed in the empty other. Elemental particles, combining instantaneously, built practically instantaneously upward through electrons and protons and atoms and molecules beams and weaponry up to a operating superdreadnought -- and at the same time built the vastly more complex structure of the two hundred pounds or so of meat and so forth that were to enclothe Freemind DuQuesne -- and did the whole job in much less time than the blink of an eye. "... I instruct... It is done," and all seven freeminds vanished. And DuQuesne, seated at a thoroughly familiar controlboard and feeling normal gravity on the seat of his pants, stared at that board's instruments, for a moment stunned. According to those instruments the Aip was actually travelling at an acceleration of one hundred twentyeeven lights; its internal gravity was actually nine hundred eighty-one point zero six centimeters per second squared. He stared around the entire room, examining minutely each familiar object. Activating a visiplate, he canned the immense skyrover, inside and out, from stem to stem: finding that it was in fact, except for the stated improvements, an exact duplicate of the mighty ship of war he had formerly owned: which, he tQl thought, had been one of the most powerful battleships ever built by man. Then, and only then, did he examine the hands resting, quiescent but instantly ready, upon the board's flat, bare table. They were big tanned, powerful hands; with long, strong, tapering, highly competent fingers. They were his hands -- his own hands in every particular, clear down to the tiny scar on the side of his left index finger, where, years before, a bit of flying glass from an exploding flask had left its mark. Shaking his head, he got up and went to his private cabin, where he strode up to a full-length mirror. The man who stared back at him out of it was tall and powerfully built; with thick, slightly wavy hair of an intense, glossy black. The eyes, only a trifle lighter in shade, were surmounted by heavy black eyebrows growing together above his finely-chiseled aquiline beak of a nose. His saturnine face, while actually tanned, looked almost pale because of the blackness of the heavy beard always showing through, even after the closest possible shave. "He could rematerialize me perfectly -- and did," he said aloud to himself, "and the whole ship -- exactly!" Scowling in concentration, he went into his bathroom and stepped upon the platform of his weight-and-height Fafrbanks. Six feet and seven-eighths of an inch. Precisely right. Two hundred two and three-quarters pounds. Ditto. He examined the various items of equipment and of every-day use. There was his cutthroat razor, Osnomian-made of arenak -- vastly sharper than any Earthly razor could possibly be honed and so incredibly hard that it could shave generation after generation of men with no loss whatever of edge. Comb, brush, toothbrush, lotion -- inside the drawers and out -- every item was exactly as he had left it... clear down to the correctlyprinted, peculiarly-distorted tubes of tooth-paste and of shaving cream; each of which, when he picked it up, fitted perfectly into the grip of his left hand. "I'll... be... totally... damned," DuQuesne said then, aloud. vn DuQuesne and Klazmon T he Skylark of Valeron swung in orbit around the sun of Earth. She was much more of worldlet than a spaceship, being a perfect sphere over a thousand kilometers in diameter. She had to be big. She had to house, among other things, the onethousand-kilometers-diameter graduated circles of declination and of right ascension required to chart the making up any given universe of the Cosmic All. She was for the most part cold and dark. Even the master-control helmets, sprouting masses and mazes of thigh-thick-bundles of hair-thin silver wire, hung inactivated in the neutral gray, featureless master-control room. The giant computer, however -- the cubic mile of ultra-miniaturization that everyone called the "Brain" -- was still in operation; and in the worldlet's miles-wida chart-room, called the "tank", there still glowed the enormous lenticular aggregation of points of light that was the chart of the First Universe -- each tiny point of light representing a galaxy composed o # tems. A precisely coded thought impinged upon a receptor. A relay clicked, whereupon a neighboring instrument, noting the passage of current through its vitals, went busity but silently to work, and an entire panel of instrumentation came to life Switch after switch snapped home. Field after field of time-stasis collapsed. The planetoid's artificial sun resumed its shining; breezes began again to stir the leaves of trees and of shrubbery; insects resumed their flitting from bloom to once-morescented bloom. Worms resumed their gnawings and borings beneath the green velvet carpets that were the lawns. Brooks began again to flow; gurglingly. Birds took up their caroling and chirping and twittering precisely where they had left off so long before; and three houses -- there was a house now for Shiro and his bride of a month -- became comfortably warm and softly, invitingly livable. All that activity meant, of course, that the Seaton-Crane party would soon be coming aboard. They were in fact already on the way, in Skylark Two; the forty-foot globe which, made originally of Osnomian arenak and the only spaceship they owned, had been "flashed over" into ultra-refractory inoson and now served as Captain's gig, pinaace, dinghy, lifeboat, landing craft, and so forth -- whatever any of the party wanted her to do. There were many other craft aboard the Skylark of Valeron, of course, of various shapes and sizes; but Two had always been the Seatons' favorite "small boat". As Two approached the Valeron , directly in line with one of her huge main ports, Seaton slowed down to a dawdling crawl -- a mere handful of miles per second -- and thought into a helmet already on his head; and the massive gates of locks -- of a miles-long succession of locks Arough the immensely thick skin of Ae planetoid -- opened in front of flying Two and closed behind her. Clearing the last gate, Seaton put on a gee and a half of deceleration and brought the little flying sphere down to a soft and easy landing in her berth in the back yard of the Seatons' house. E ight people disembarked; five of whom were the three Seatons and Martin  and Margaret Crane. (Infant Lucile Crane rode joyously on her moAer's left hip.) Seventh was short, chunky, lightning-fast Shiro, whose place in these Skylark annals has not been small. Originally Crane's "man", he had long since become Crane's firm friend; and he was now as much of a Skylarker as was any of the others. Eighth was Lotus Blossom, Shiro's small, finely wrought, San Francisco-born and western-dressed bride, whom the others had met only that morning, just before leaving Earth. She looked like a living doll -- but appearances can be so deceiving! She was in fact one of Ae most proficient female experts in unarmed combat Aen alive. "Our house first, please, all of you," DoroAy said. "We'll eat before we do one single solitary thing else. I could eat Aat fabled missionary from the plains of Timbuctoo." Margaret laughed. "Hat and gown and hymnbook too," she finished. "Me, too, Dick." "Okay by me; I could toy with a couple of morsels myself," Seaton said, and pencils of force wafted Ae eight into Ae roomy kitchen of the house that was in almost every detail an exact duplicate of Ae Seatons' home on Earth. "You're Ae chief kitchen mechanic, RedTop; strut your stuff." Dorothy looked at and thought into the controller -- she no longer had to wear any of Ae limited-control headsets to operate them -- and a damask-clothed table, set for six, laden wiA a wide variety of food and equipped with six carved oak chairs and two high-chairs, came instantly into being in Ae middle of Ae room. The Nisei girl jumped violently; then smiled apologetically. "Shiro told me about such things, but... well, maybe I'll get used to them sometimes I hope." "Sure you will, Lotus," Seaton assured her. "It's pretty weird at first, but you get used to it fast." "I sincerely hope so," Lotus said, and eyed the six dinner places dubiously. She had Aought that she was thoroughly American, but she wasn't quite. Traditions are strong. With an IQ that a Heidelberg student might envy, part of the crew of the most powerful vehicle man had ever seen, full, educated and trained... it was evident that Shiro's dainty little bride was more than a little doubtful about sitting at that table. Until Dorothy took her by the hand and sat her down. "This is where I like my friends to sit," she announced. "Where I can see them." A flush dyed the porcelain-like perfection of Lotus's skin. "I thank you, Mrs. -- " "Friends, remember?" Seaton broke in "Call her Dot. Now let's eat!" hereafter, they worked. It may be wondered, among those historians not familiar with the saga of the Skylarks, why so much consternation and trouble should come from so small an event as the probabilistic speculation of a single Norlaminian sage that one mere human body, lately cast into the energy forms of the disembodied intelligences, might soon return into the universe in a viable form. Such historians do not, of course, know Blackie DuQuesne. While Seaton, Crane and the others were .eating their meal, across distances to be measured in gjgaparwere in one way or another busy at work on projects central to their own central concern. Seaton and Crane were not idle. They were waiting for further information... and at the same time, refurbishing the inner man with food, with rest and with pleasant company; but an hour later, after dinner, after the table and ha appurtenances had vanished and the three couples were seated in the living room, more or less facing the fire, Seaton stoked up his battered black briar and Crane lighted one o l his specially made cigarettes. "Well?" Seaton demanded then. "Have you thunk up anything you think is worth two tinker's whoops in Hades?" Crane smiled ruefully. "Not more than one, I'd say -- if that many. Let's consider that thought or message that Carfon is sending out It will be received, he says, only by persons or entities who not only know more than we do about one or more specific things, but also are their knowledge with us. And to make the matter murkier, we have no idea either of what it is that we lack or of what it, whatever it is, is supposed to be able to do. Therefore Point One would be: how are they going to get in touch with us? By what you called magic?" Seaton did not answer at first, then only nodded. "Magic" was still a much less than real concept to him. He said, "If you say so -- but remember the Peruvian Indian medicine-men and the cinchona bark that just happened to be full of quinine. So, whatever you want to call it -- magic or extra-sensory perception or an unknown band of the sixth or what-have-you -- I'll bet my last shirt it'll be bio. And whoever pitches it at us will be good enough at it to know that they can IF hit us with it, so all we have to do about that is wait for it to happen. However, what I'm mostly interested in right now is nothing that far out, but what we know that a reincarnated Blackie DuQuesne could and probably would do." "Such as?" "The first thing he'll do, for all the tea in China, will be to design and set up some gadget or gizmo or technique to kill me with. Certainly me, and probably you, and quite possibly all of us." Dorothy and Margaret both gasped; but Crane nodded and said, "Check. I check you to your proverbial nineteen decimals. Also, and quite possibly along with that operation, an all-out attempt to reconquer Earth. He wouldn't set out to destroy Earth, at this time, at least... would he, do you think?" Seaton thought for seconds, then said, "My best guess would be no. He wants to boss it, not wipe it out. However, there are a few other things that might come..." "Wait up, presh!" Dorothy snapped. "Those two will hold us for a while; especially the first one. I wish to go on record at this point to the effect that I want my husband alive , not dead." Seaton grinned. "You and me both, pet," he said. "I'm in favor of it. Definitely. However, as long as I stay inside the Valeron here he doesn't stand the chance of a snowflake in you-knowwhere of getting at me..." How wrong Seaton was! "... so the second point is the one that's really of over-riding importance. The rub is that we can't make even a wild guess at when he' going to get loose... He could be building his ship right now... so. Engineer Martin Crane, what's your thought as to defending Earth; as adequately as possible but in the shortest possible time?" C rane inhaled -- slowly -- a deep lungful of smoke, exhaled it even more slowly, and stubbed out the butt. "That's a tall order, Dick," he said, finally, "but I don't think it's hopeless. Since we know DuQuesne's exact line of departure, we know at least approximately the line of his return. As a first-approximation idea we should, I think, cover that line thoroughly with hair-triggered automation. We should occupy the fourth and the fifth completely; thus taking care of everything we know that he knows... but as for the sixth..." Crane paused in thought. "Yeah," Seaton agreed. "That sixth order's an entirely different breed of cats. If a pistol -- a question with a capital Q. About all we can do on it, I'd say, is cover everything we know of it and then set up supersensitive analsynths coupled to all the automatic constructors and such-like gizmos we can dream up -- with as big a gaggle of ground-and-lofty dreamers as we can round up. The Norlaminians, certainly; and Sacner Carfon for sure. If what he and Drasnik pulled off wasn't magic it certainly was a remarkably reasonable facsimile thereof. All six of us, of course, and... "But what can you possibly want of us?" Shiro asked, and Dorothy said, "That goes double for Peggy and me, Dick. Of what good could we two possibly be, thinking about such stuff as that?" Seaton flushed. " 'Scuse, please; my error. I switched thinking without announcing the switch. I do know, though, that our minds all work differently -- especially Shiro's and double-especially Lotus's -- and that when you don't have the faintest glimmering of what you're getting into you don't know what you're going to have to have to cope with it." He grinned. "If you can untangle that, I mean," he said. "I think so," said Crane, unruffled; he had had long practice in following Seaton's lightning leaps past syntax. "And you think that this will enable us to deal with DuQuesne?" "It'll have to," Seaton said positively. "One thing we know, something has to. He's not going to send us a polite message asking to be friends -- he's going to hit with all he's got. So," he finished, "let's hop to it. The Norlaminian observers' reports are piling up on the tapes right now. And we'd all better keep our eyes peeled -- as well as all the rest of our senses and instruments! -- for Doctor Marc C. Blackie DuQuesne!" A nd DuQuesne, so immensely far out in intergalactic space, at control board and computer, explored for ten solid hours the vastnesses of his new knowledge. Then he donned a thought-helmet and thought himsdf up a snack; after eating which -- scarcely tasting any part of it -- he put in another ten solid hours of work. Then, leaning back in his form-fitting seat, he immersed himself in thought -- and, being corporeal, no longer a pattern of pure force, went sound asleep. He woke up a couple of hours later; stiff, groggy, and ravenous. He thought himself up a supper of steak and mushrooms, hashed browns, spinach, coffee, and apple pie a la" mode. He ate it -- with zest, this time -- then sought his long-overdue bed. In the morning, after a shower and a shave and a breakfast of crisp bacon and over-easy eggs, toast and butter and marmalade, and four cups of strong, black coffee, he sat down at his board and again went deep into thought. This time, he thought in words and sentences, the better to nail down his conclusions. "One said I'd have precisely the same chance as before of living out my normal lifetime. Before what? Before the dematerialization or before Seaton got all that extra stuff? Since he gave me sixth order drive, offense, defense, and communications, he could have -- probably did -- put me on a basis of equality with Seaton as of now. Would he have given me any more than that?" DuQuesne paused and worked for ten busy minutes at computer and control board again. What he learned was in the form of curves and quantities, not words; he did not attempt to speak them aloud, but sat staring into space. IF Then, satisfied that the probabilities were adequate to base a plan on, he spoke out loud again: "No. Why should he give me everything that Seaton's got? He didn't owe me anything." To Blackie DuQuesne that was not a rueful complaint but a statement of fact. He went on. "Assume we both now have a relatively small part of the spectrum of the sixth-order forces, if I keep using this drive -- Ouch! What the living hell was thatl " DuQuesne leaped to his feet. "That" had been a sixth-order probe, at the touch of which his vessel's every course of defensive screen had flared into action. D uQuesne was not shaken, no. But he was surprised, and he didn't like to be surprised. There should have been no probes out here! The probe had been cut off almost instantaneously; but "almost" instantaneously is not quite zero time, and sixth-order forces operate at the speed of thought. Hence, in that not-quite-zero instant of time during which the intruding mind had been in contact with his own, DuQuesne learned a little. The creature was undoubtedly highly intelligent -- and, as undoubtedly, unhuman to the point of monstrosity... and DuQuesne had no doubt whatever in his own mind that the alien would think the same of any Tellurian. DuQuesne studied his board and aw, much to his surprise, that only one instrument showed any drain at all above maintenance level, and that one was a mammeter -- the needle of which was steady on the scale at a reading of one point three seven milsl He was not being attacked at all -- merely being observed -- and by an observation system that was using practically no power at all! Donning a helmet, so as to be able himself to operafe at the speed of thought, DuQuesne began -- very skittishly and very gingerly indeed -- to soften down his spheres and zones and shells and solid fields of defensive force. He softened and softened them down; down to the point at which a working projection could come through and work. And a working projection came through. No one of Marc C. DuQuesne's acquaintances, friend or enemy, had ever said that he was any part of either a weakling or a coward. The consensus was that he was harder than the ultra-refractory hubs of hell itself. Nevertheless, when the simulacrum of Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth of the Realm of the Llurdi came up to within three feet of him and waggled one gnarled forefinger at the helmets of a mechanical educator, even DuQuesne's burly spirit began to quail a little -- but he was strong enough and hard enough not to let any sign show. With every mind-block he owned set hard, DuQuesne donned a headset and handed its mate to his visitor. He engaged that monstrous alien mind to mind. Then, releasing his blocks, he sent the Llurdi a hard, cold, sharp, diamond-clear -- and lying! -- thought: "Yes? Who are you, pray, and what, to obtrude your uninvited presence upon me, Foalang Kassi a Doompf, the Highest Imperial of the Drailsen Quadrant?" This approach was, of course, the natural one for DuQuesne to make; he did not believe in giving away truth when lies might be so much cheaper -- and less dangerous. It was equally of course the worst possible approach to Klazmon: reenforcing as it did every unfavorable idea the Llurd had already formed from his lightning-fast preliminary once-over-lightly of the man and of the man's tremendous spaceship. Klazmon did not think back at DuQuesne directly. Instead, he thought to himself and, as DuQuesne knew, for the record; thoughts that the Earthman could read like print. To the Llurd, DuQuesne was a peculiarly and repulsively obnoxious monstrosity. Physically a Jelm, he belonged to a race of Jelmi that had never been subjected to any kind of logical, sensible, or even intelligent control. Klazmon then thought at DuQuesne; comparing him with Mergon and Luloy on the one hand and with Sleemet of the Fenachrone on the other -- and deciding that all three races were basically the same. The Llurd showed neither hatred nor detestation; he was merely contemptuous, intolerant, and utterly logical. "Like the few remaining Fenachrone and the rebel faction of our own Jelmi and the people you think of as the Chlorans, your race is, definitely, surplus population; a nuisance that must be and shall be abated. Where -- " Klazmon suddenly drove a thought -- "is the Drailsen Quadrant?" DuQuesne, however, was not to be caught napping. His blocks held. "You'll never know," he sneered. "Any task-force of yours that ever comes anywhere near us will not last long enough to energize a sixthorder communicator." "That's an idle boast," Klazmon stated thoughtfully. "It is true that you and your vessel are far out of range of any possible Llurdiaxian attacking beam. Even this projection of me is being relayed through four mergons. Nevertheless we can and we will find you easily when this becomes desirable. This point will be reached as soon as we have computed the most logical course to take in exterminating all such surplus races as yours." And Klazmon's projection vanished; and the helmet he had been wearing fell toward the floor. D uQuesne was shocked as he had never been shocked before; and when he learned from his analsynths just what the range of one of those incredible "mergons" was, he was starkly appalled. One thing was crystal-clear: He was up against some truly first-class opposition here. And it had just stated, calmly and definitely, that its intention was to exterminate him, Blackie DuQuesne. The master of lies had learned to assess the value of a truth very precisely. He knew this one to be #-karat, crystal-clear, pure quill. Whereupon Blackie DuQuesne turnIF ed to some very intensive thought indeed, compared with which his previous efforts might have been no more than a summer afternoon's reverie. We know now, of course, that Blackie DuQuesne lacked major elements of information, and that his constructions could not therefore be complete. They lacked Norlaminian rigor, or the total visualization of his late companions, the disembodied intellectuals. And they lacked information. DuQuesne knew nothing of Mergon and Luloy, now inward bound on Earth in a hideout orbit. He could not guess how his late visitor had ever heard of the Fenachrone. Nor knew he anything of that strange band of the sixth order to which Seaton referred, with more than half a worried frown, as "magic". In short, DuQuesne was attempting to reach the greatest conclusion of his life through less than perfect means, with only fragmentary facts to go on. Nevertheless, Blackie C. DuQuesne, as Seaton was wont to declare, was no slouch at figuring; and so he did in time come to a plan -- and also was perhaps the most witless! -- of his career. Lips curled into something much more sneer than grin, DuQuesne sat down at his construction board. He had come to the conclusion that what he needed was help, and he knew exactly where to go to get it His ship wasn't big enough by far to hold a sixth-order projection across any important distance... but he could build, in less than an hour, a sixth-order broadcaster. It wouldn't be selective. It would be enormously wasteful of power. But it would carry a signal across half a universe. Whereupon, in less than an hour, a signal began to pour out, into and through space: "DuQuesne calling Seaton! Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton! Reply on tight beam of the sixth. DuQuesne calling Seaton..." 'Complete in the June Galaxyl New Short novel by the author of Watchbird, Journey for Joeans, etc. A hilarious science-fiction odyssey by Robert Shockley ' Also m the same great issue -- Columns and features by Willy Ley, Algis Budrys, R. S. Richardson, Donald H. Menzel June issue is on sale now -- get your copy today! IF  Novelet Simon says take one big step forward . Simon says -- diet I A s he was unaccustomed to being interrupted in the middle of a massage session, even by so exalted a personage as Base Commandant Henly, Nestil Lagotilom lifted his eight-foot reptilian form from the massage table, dismissed his masseur, and swore vigorously about bureaucrats. Then, glaring balefully at the Official Messenger, or Mercury, he told the emissary to tell Henly he'd report to his office in a few minutes. The Mercury snapped a smart salute and left. Lagotilom pulled on a faded gray Harvard sweater that was at least a thousand years old, a webbing belt with a long, dragging, red leather holster on it and a large gun in the holster, and a black beret, which he perched rakishly atop his basketball-sized cranium. He struck a pose before a mirror, corrected his belt's carriage, and left. Commandant Herbert Washington Henly had unusual tastes in offices. When he had been given command of the Keeler's World Star Naval Base, he converted the neat, conservative, sunlit office that had served two hundred former commandants into a red, uterine chamber encircled by a spiral corridor that led to a similar waiting room, done in blue. He liked it, but the base economists jumped on his desk immediately and raised hell about large sums on slips of pink paper. Heniy had told them all to go to the Naval Bank with their problems, figuring that the red tape they'd get entangled in there would keep them out of his hair for years. In the meantime, he had drawn on naval sums to fill the office with soft stuffed leather furniture built on alleged Hrillan designs and enough comfort-producing devices to make the office look like the site of the mad tea party. When his desk intercom buzzed he had to crawl over sundry pieces of ironmongery that his interior decorator had said were out of the way, hide his putter and golf balls, and struggle into his seat before he could answer it. The intercom's screen showed his young human secretary, Myra Corning, whose face was twisted into a sort of distasteful frightened expression. She opened her mouth as if to speak, cast her eyes at something beyond his field of vision, and spoke. "Ummm... Lieutenant Lagotilom is here, sir. Shall I send him in?" Heniy glanced at his appointment list, found Lagodlom's name, glanoed at the ivory dragon's tooth with the clock in it, and replied, "Yes. Send him in. And if he has his gun, check it for him. I know he hates to part from it, but it's regulations. Thanks." Heniy relaxed a few seconds, then glanced at the sphincter door of his office, which had opened. Lagotilom strode over to Henly's desk, saluted unenthusiastically, and sat down on an ashtray pedestal that looked like a dragon's paw. Heniy harumphed, and began. "Mr. Lagotilom, did the Mercury tell you why I had you brought down here?" "No, sir." "Ummm... okay." He riffled through a sheaf ot vellum papers clutched by a smiling varnished frog, and finally found the few he wanted. "Do you know what a iC A side from it being one of those code names the military is so fond of, I don't." "Well, it's sort of a mind transference device. Means Subelectronic Integrator for the Manipulation of Objects." "Sounds like a robot arm." "Does, doesn't it?" The commandant lit a cigarette and blew a few smoke rings into the ventilator before he went on. "Nothing so simple. I thought that's what it was at first, too. No, it does this. Someone puts a helmet on your head, and some soldier puts a similar one on his head, and the machine is turned on. Then your mind is duplicated in this soldier's brain, his mind goes dormant until the device is shut off. Your original mind remains the same, however, so you can do whatever you want while you're connected with the machine. The mind in tile soldier's body is, in essence, his own, born there, and is in no way dependent on your mind. But when your helmet is removed, the minds cease in the other heads. The overall effect is that of a whole squadron of Nestil Lagotiloms on the field. fighting with your tactical knowledge. Very clear?" "Like mud. Do I ever know what happens to those bodies?" "Yes. As soon as the machine is turned off, the memories gained revert to your original mind. I should think it's help in writing reports." "I should care. I never write my own reports anyway. But why pick me?" "That, my dear friend, is the classical question. 'Why me?' You are our best military strategist for any base in this whole damn star cluster. One point for you." The commandant motioned Lagotilom off his dragon's paw seat, threw the cigarette butt in, and continued. "And as a mutant, your mental pulsations should be far clearer and stronger than any nonmutant. Besides, you're simple." "I detest that," Lagotilom stated. "I knew you would. That's why I said it." A grin split the commandant's chubby red face, and he lit another cigarette. "Seriously, Nestil, you are. Granted, you do rack up in the supergenius bracket on IQ tests, but your mutant mind isn't too complex to be packed away into a Terran brain without a little room to spare. So it's your job to give this thing its field tests." "Umm...sir, this... this mental jammer I tested for the Roota campaign," Lagotilom suggested cautiously. "It is. I used a jammer myself after it passed its tests." "Well, the officials smothered this, but while I waa testing the thing, a Roota hit it with a magnetic blast, and it backfired. I was in a mental institution for three months, recovering from the mind erasure it gave me. Ever since then, I've been uneasy about testing machines that I'm not familiar with. And what happens if someone using my brain gets killed?" "Nothing, except that he's dead. You have a cessation of memory on his part when he gets killed. I doubt if that'll bother you any great deal. Now, I've picked out a world for you to test it on." "Gee, thanks," Lagotilom muttered leerily. Henly ignored the sarcasm, went on, "It's in the part of the Bird campaign that's in this cluster, and it's called Meglor's Hunk. It's a grassy, mountainous clod that cooled off ages ago and split itself with cracks. These cracks have since filled in with water, and are very deep, narrow seas. Big red sun, but it looks yellow through the atmosphere. Surface gravity, three quarters of a gee, pressure of air, # pounds per square inch. Natives are reptiloid, feathered and possessing four tentacles instead of arms. Size of a full-grown man." T hat meant four feet, and about # pounds. In the twenty third century, man had discovered the anti-evolution drugs, which kept him from changing his physical appearance, for the most part. However, he could still adapt to the worst that any planet could dish out, and his size changed. Over the following two billion years of human civilization, he had grown from six feet racial size IF to twelve feet, then down to two feet, up to eight, and finally to the present four feet. But since the peowho lived to be old enough to see this were rare, the only beings who ever noticed it were archeologists and historians. And enemies. "The Bird lines," Henly went on, "are nothing but a line of disjointed wattle huts, rotting tents and stone sheds all protected by those lousy Bird force shields that blow fuses every time they're turned on. All you have to do is go in and crack their lines, and take the planet. Got it?" "Vaguely." "Then read this. You leave tomorrow at #." He handed Lagotilom a slip of yellow paper, and fumbled in the frogs bowed arms for another thing. He drew out a buff envelope and handed it to Lagotilom. "Fighting plans. Don't open them till you reach Meglor's Hunk. Good luck." "Yes, sir. Will that be all?" "Yes, Nestil. Dismissed." As soon as Lagotilom was outside in the waiting room he tore open the envelope, read the top-secret plans, and threw them away. n. T he Lil Abner was an old ship, rotted by a hundred war's barof use. Her monocrystalline hull had long since ceased giving piezoelectric current, and even her pile was old. But she was dependable, and probably would remain so for another ten thousand years. Having once been a cargoship, she was only a collection of rooms on four decks wrapped about a giant, spherical cargo hold. The whole arrangement was wrapped in shielding and mounted on a set of antiquated engines and told to fly. Sometimes it wouldn't. This trip it carried # fighting men, # engineers, # crewmen, Lagotilom strode up the ship's ramp into the airlock, checked his papers with the purser, who stamped the ship's coat of arms on them, and went to his room. It was a fairly large suite, with good ventilation, antique furniture in excellent condition, and a viewscreen in one wall. Through this Lagotilom watched a straddle-crane come up to the ship bearing a huge, black stasis box between its spiderlike legs. The box was stamped with numerous warnings concerning the fragility of its contents. These were ignored; the box was treated like a wrecking mace. A few red-clad engineers stood nearby, watching with boredom on their faces. They had the silver S on their uniforms which identified they seemed not at all to care about their brainchild. It was dropped onto a conveyor belt without concern for its contents, and vanished from Lagotilom's sight. Somewhat later, the old motors whined like whipped dogs and the wavering tones of the pendulum drive sang. As the strain was let off its old bones, the ship creaked, changed from a flattened ball to a near oval, and a sound like molasses glugging from a jug added its charms to the cacophony. The ship IF lifted from the atmosphere in seconds, and vanished into the spacewrinkle of the pendulum drive. "Will Lieutenant Nestil Lagotilom please report to the machine shop in the cargo hold?" a female voice requested from a seascape on the wall. Lagotilom left and sauntered down two levels to the hold. A Mercury ushered him through a companionway into the hold. The hold was a huge room, almost a perfect sphere in shape, except for the large, flat planes that dotted its floor in no particular order. Gravity pointed away from the center of the sphere so that everything clung to the walls. About a hundred feet above the floor, a girder framework supported ropes, block-and-tackles, and tracks upon which ran small or large winch cranes. The opposite floor was clearly visible, despite the veils of misty smoke that drifted about the hold. The entire room, lit with vast clusters of blue and yellow lights, smelled of the acrid fumes of solder. Nearby, a blond human technician saw him and moved over his way. He held out his hand and flashed a grin. "Nestil Lagotilom? George Hapsburg, chief technician to that thing." He jerked his thumb at a complex device on one of the raised flat planes. It was a sparkling glass globe supported by a shiny metal base in which intricate machinery was exposed. In the globe were all manners of spark-gaps, fan-coils, solid state parts and other hardware, emphasized by thousands of gossamer blown glass parts. It was almost twenty feet in diameter. Along the globe's base were dozens of dashboards and screens, sparkling with lights and wavering lines. Atop the orb three glass globes reposed, antennae in each. As they moved around to the stairs that led to the platform's top two more items came into view; a stuffed red cushion and a black, spidery machine standing over it. Umm... What's that thing?" Lagotilom indicated the metal spider.  V started, but Lagotilom broke him off. "Lagotilom is actually my individual name. Nestil' s my surname. "Um... okay, Mr. Nestil. What you do is rest on this cushion with your head on this rest, and this helmet is attached to your head by probe drills and kept there by electrode spikes." "Which all means?" "It means we take this helmet," he tapped the glassy helmet hanging from the spider-device's belly, "and put it on your head. The tiny drill it's bristling will go directly into your brain and tap the necessary nerve centers. Then, in addition to being unremovable, you can get up and leave the machine any time you please." "You mean I have to be perforated so that thing can be attached to me?" "Yes. But it won't leave marks, is completely painless, and will come off as soon as it is necessary. Now sit back, please." Lagotilom sat back, and felt the helmet slide down onto his head. Hapsburg made a motion at a man controlling the spider, and there was a sudden buzzing and Lagotilom's head itched for an instant. Hapsburg pulled out thin plastic tubes and released a few wires, then atepped back to survey his work. "It's on now, Mr. Nestil. Now see that guy in the red tractor on the girder track across the room?" Lagotilom nodded. "Fine. He's got a helmet on. When we turn this thing on, you'll be in his head, his body. Try moving it. However, don't be surprised if it doesn't work." Hapsburg left no time for questions. He flipped a switch, and a flash of pain coruscated through Lagotilom's head. He was in a red tractor, and turned his head to look across the room. He saw his own body far across the room, sitting in an overstuffed red cushion, talking with Hapsburg. His vision promptly vanished. Hapsburg stood in front of him. "How you do feel, now. What did you see?" he asked. Lagotilom told him. "That's good. That's good," Hapshurg muttered as he peered at the control boards and at a thin pamphlet "You meet all the requirements with flying colors," he told Lagotilom. "Thafs nice. Take off the helmet now?"  Lagotilom tapped the morion with a claw. "Oh, no. I'm afraid we can't do that until the testing period's up, about a week from now." "Oh, fine. That's just grand. And all that time I have to go around with this thing clapped on my headbone?" He gave a little push, weak and ineffectual, at the 'Jinskullcap. Hapsburg sighed greatly. "Yes, sir. Oh, you won't notice it after the first few hours. We kept the decorations to a minimum, and just gave it a plating of superiron, so it should be quite a bit more resistant than your own skull. I know its weight won't bother you much longer. Okay?" "Yeah. I'll settle for it. What now?" "Well, seeing as you understand the machine, nothing. I imagine you can loaf the rest of the trip." "Okay. How far do you accompany this thing?" "Oh, I'll be on Meglor's Hunk to operate it." "Then why didn't you teach me to run it?" "Something might go wrong. You'd need help, maybe, and that's where I come in. Lord knows there's a lot that might go wrong." "Such as?" "The thing gets too much power from your head. Then it sends out a big blast of power to all the minds in the locality. Every mind has a protection wall to defend it from psychic attack, but if in this burst of power, the machine puts a hole in this wall, it needs only a little bit more power than normal output to keep your mind in an unhelmeted head, too. This probably won't happen, though. Don't lose sleep over it." T he Li' l Abner came in to Meglor's Hunk on time, landing within an easy shot of the Bird lines. M IF However, none of the Birds did anytiring about it, since they could easily see the ship was untouchable, because of its force screens. But when the airlock was opened, and disembarking had begun, a Bird, aided by luck and a pressor beam, chunked a rock at a tank. It bounced harmlessly off, and would seem to be a rather minor incident, but it set the strategy experts to jabbering like a pack of monkeys. The Birds, who were utterly devoid of creative talent, were thought to be incapable of thinking up a stunt like that. They finally ended in agreeing that it had been an accident. No more rocks flew. Lagotilom sat on a heap of warbird saddles, idly watching the tents go up and tanks and guns moving to their positions. A line of fifty warbirds, huge # foot tall birds like prehistoric Diatrymas were brought out to rock pens, which were painted red. The birds were deathly afraid of this color unless they had their saddles on, and would not leap the pen. This measure kept them from panicking and flying the coop, and hot-footing it over the horizon. They all squawked and shuffled about uneasily. Several soldiers, armed with hypodermic needles like calking guns, moved about through the forest of treelike legs injecting them with a tranquilizer. Their war harnesses, big artifacts of leather straps, mail, velvet cushions and fighting tools, were resting on the grassy turf outside of the pen, and Lagotilom, perched atop the pile, was boredly watching the passing show, and occasionally flung a pebble at the Bird lines A few natives, in the meantime, had approached to watch the proceedings, and were allowed to stay because they avoided getting in the way. One stared long at Lagotilom, and then began a quiet conversation with a companion about some urgent subject. The crowd , of them pushed forward, and observed Lagotilom, who returned the interest half-heartedly, and a few stepped forward. One began speaking in a tongue unknown to Lagotilom, but his thoughts were clear. He thought that Lagotilom was some sort of a god, and had come to liberate the people of Boodai from the yoke of the Birds. While probably an unknown god, he showed little interest in mortal affairs, and was big enough to fit the qualifications. While Lagotilom was not a god, he reflected that they were right in that he was to free them from the Birds. It was quite late before the little tents were set up in the camp, and the Li'l Abner got back into the orbit in which she would remain for the duration of the fighting. But the operation was quite ahead of schedule, owing to the native beings having kept Lagotilom out of the way. All the inhabitants of three towns had turned out to see him. The Birds, surprisingly enough, had done nothing about the constant line of natives pouring into the Terran camp, even though it might have been a dangerous situation, with Terran and aborigine fighting Birds side by side. But, the Birds were totally uncreative, merely intelligent. All they had ever accomplished in the past was from sheer fecundity and a talent for plagarism. Later that night, Lagotilom walked over to the cook tent, where several engineers were trading jokes under the hanging electric lights, glowing a bland yellow. "Oh, Mr. Nestil." This from Hapsburg. "I was just considering getting you so we could discuss when to test the machine. As long as you're here, we might as well start." The others in the tent mumbled and nodded agreement. Hapsburg cleared his throat and began. all set to run. It needs a watch engineer. We'll draw cherries from my hat." He loaded some cherries into his hat, one of which was red. "Whoever gets the red cherry gets to row." Muffled agreement. A redheaded, blue-eyed engineer with a big nose, whose name was Logansport, got the booby prize. # "Mr. Nestil, this is Pete Logansport, the guy who's gonna run the "Hi," Lagotilom mumbled, his voice muffled by a banana he'd been munching. "What time do we start?" Hapsburg asked. He lit a cigarette while waiting for an answer. A balding technician who must have been close to ten thousand years old, who had been sitting near the refrigerator field supplied the answer. "#. That way we'll all be up early, and can get this damn job over with ail the quicker. I hate this planet!" "Any objections?" None. "Fine Then everybody show up at the Lagotilom left. As he walked to his own tent and left the warmth of the floodlamps, he felt a cool wind picking up. The Bird lines, three miles away, showed as a line of dim red lights. There were sounds in the Terran camp of men preparing for under a tent just visible to Lagotilom, and its tent's side flapswere as yet turned up, and lesser engineers were securing things inside. Lagotilom entered his tent, and turned on the heater and the fabric stiffener field that made the canvas invulnerable to attack. He wrapped an old hotel towel from Terra around his waist, after stripping, and sauntered over to the medical tent to procure a sleep needier and three sleep charges for it. He injected them into his rump and shoulder brains, and injected the third into his neck to work on his head-brain, which was protected by the helmet. Tre air began to smell wet, and they were running the side flaps Lagotilom caught a fleeting glance of the machine, yellow, red, blue and green lights flashing, and then nothing as the canvas covered it. He closed up his tent, hoping the medicine would allow no nightmares The dull rumbles of thunder shook the night, but gingerly. The grass bent before the cool, wet wind, and the thunder muttered again, much closer. IF in T he rain had kept up all night, accompanied by high winds and hail. Now, however, the wind was gone, and only a steady rain fell, drenching the yellowish grass. The two camps and the soldiers were out doing calisthenics. The Birds had their fires going, dull orange smudges smoldering in the distant gray, and were thinking the dull, dreary thoughts that dull, dreary races think on dull, dreary mornings -- if such mornings inspire them to thinking. Lagotilom had awakened from an uneventful slumber. He had not enjoyed a delicious meal of fermented banana and pineapple mash; and had taken his morning jolt of brominated Mars Whiskey, made by the Mars Whisky people especially for him, without event. This morning, though, he was far too frightened and apprehensive to get drunk. He reported # minutes no difference to anyone. The engineers were finishing up on the job that they said had been done the night before, and he loafed about inside for a full half-hour before anyone noticed him. It was Logansport who finally did. "Mornin', Mr. Nestil. Sit in this chair, huh?" "Okay." Lagotilom sat in a puff of velvet with the golden neural pickup strands in it, and leaned back. He saw an engineer across the room wearing the jewellike tiara of solid ceiver. A technician attached a wire to Lagotilom's helmet, Hapsburg flipped a switch, and Lagotilom waj in the scientist. Then he wasn't. a physician Lagotilom had never noticed spoke up. "Mr. Lagotilom..." he began, to be broken off by Hapsburg, who grumbled, "Nestil's his surname, Callot" "I'm sorry, Mr. Nestil: Um... Mr. Nestil, we've been watching you for the last ten minutes, and it's pretty plain that you're jerky and suggested some sort of sedative to Mr. Hapsburg. He agreed, seeing as we want top efficiency from the device... unlike that mental jammer you tested; I was there, incidentally." He looked into a box he had on a table, and withdrew a bottle of some black liquid that sloshed about and stained the glass inside. "With this in mind, I've selected a sedative for you. Like the shown desired effects." He sat in another of the puffs, and began fidgeting with a tiny teleportic injector. Lagotilom tensed, then relaxed instantly, calmed. "One effect. Prothalmine, the drug, seems to be a mind drug. It first effects the body, as the mold and vehicle for the mind. Then, after its effect on the body has died down, it works specifically on the mind. No problems there." He handled the bottle to Lagotilom, who looked at 'the inklike fluid inside. "What's it made from?" he asked. "Salivary glands of castrated bulls." "Go on." "Effect Two. It seems to relax the body for mind transfer. It'll smother any surprise at your new body, and permits efficiency. The drug is such that the transferred mind will obey only the orders planted in the body before the transfer." He waved a hand at the smoldering Bird fires. "In other words, if you were to occupy the body of a pheasant, you wouldn't be at all surprised and you would do what the vulture had been ordered, not your orders. Thank God that can't happen to you." He paused and looked at Lagotilom. "Get me?" "Sorta. Go on." "Three. There can be no countermanding the duplicated mind once the transfer is made. That means that there can be no interference from the enemy. See?" "Yes. How soon do we start? Judging from those ominous things you've been doing with that teleportic there, I figure that I already have the bullspit in me." The doctor grew slightly red. "I I want it over with too! We start as soon as the soldiers are in their positions. That's it, isn't it, George?" "Yeah. Get ready, Lagotilom. I'm almost done with the preliminaries." "Okay. How soon?" "Three minutes." T he rain' had abated somewhat, though a cold drizzle still clung to the air. The Birds had begun noticeably, as though they expected something big was coming off right under their noses and weren't out to miss the game. Already some of their gunners were trying unsucceatfully to pick their way through the Terran nets of defenses. Hapsburg sat down, and stared solemnly at Lagotilom, who looked back eve more solemnly, using his long, this face to achieve a remarkably bassethound effect. Hapsburg grinned. "Good luck, Mr. NestiL" "Good luck yourself. I'm not leaving..." The switch was throw, and a pulse of blue-white searing pain exploded in Lagofilom's head, and vanished. -- "the room. Dam you, Hapsburg. That hurt like hell." "It's on," replied Hapsburg, glancing up at a wall screen upon which # lights were arrayed in ranks. "Well, Mr. Nestil. All of you accounted for." "Great." Lagotilom looked at the screen, as the technicians left, and saw that the fighting had begun. Odd, he reflected, to know each spot of light on that screen is another you, and you're fighting this war im two thousandicate, without leaving the tent. The day dragged on, and became oppressively hot. Numerous small animals were skittering through all of since the mental broadcaster seemed to draw them. Lagotilom had to keep shooing them from beneath his feet, where they persisted in crawling, and erator. The Terrans had been making advances all day, and had driven the Birds back some # yards. About that time, Logansport left for the cook shack, leaving Lagotilom and his animal friends alone. Minutes IT later, a small group of natives entered the cavernous tent, and looked awestruck at the giant god with the crystal altar in the giant tent. A pair of them, pressed on by their comrades, went up to Lagotilom's feet and presented him with a big vat of some sticky stuff, colored a wicked yellow. Lagotilom sniffed it, and the poison detector sense in his nose told him it was safe. It didn't really smell bad, either. He ate a little. That was a mistake. Twenty minutes later he had a roaring headache. He began blundering about the looking through red-rimmed eyes at the cook tent, where the technicians and medics and camp janitors were drinking freely. He watched them without special interest for a few minutes, then struck out in the direction of the medical tent, seeking relief. After a wobbly five minutes afoot, he swayed into it and looked for the medic who wasn't there. Discovering this, he clambered feebly over the counter to wander among rows of medicine cabinets until he found one full of "Emergency Drugs For Lieutenant Lagotilom." He extracted a box of pain pills, and, ignoring the instructions, swallowed a handful. Seconds later, his head began to swim, and he felt as though he were expanding, becoming as vast as space. He blacked out. IV H is mind duplicated, as it expanded, and lodged in the brains of unhelmeted beings. It entered a technician... The headache was suddenly gone, to be replaced by a feeling over his entire body. He felt glorious, triumphal, reckless. He felt drunk. He was in the cook tent. His vision, though blurred, could discern his body weaving about unsteadily outside, as though in the throes of pain. He looked about the cook tent, and saw other technicians sitting up or standing in the same strained, semi-alert attitude he was in. A few clutched crystal goblets of a pale green liquor, and the balding # year elder was sitting up in a corner, brown, thousand-year-old Mars Whisky into his lap. He returned his attentions to his wavering form, now decided that he was in the body of one of the drunken technicians, or janitors or medics. At any rate, his original body needed help, and t properly administer that help he had to be sober. To be sober, he had to take a few Antibooz tablets, which were found in the medic tent. He took a wobbly step in that direction. And one by one, the others did, too. But the exertion was too great, and they all fell flat on their faces, stone cold drunk. His expanding mind also encountered other minds like his, but these were lodged firmly in place. They could not be budged. They were the Having been under moderate fire for the past half hour, Lagotilom could see through his peepscreen that the Birds had concentrated attacking the sham fort thrown up on the hillS# side a hundred yards in back of him. But now, they turned their fire on the most likely places for soldiers to be entrenched, therefore the places that they were. He peered through the dust that had risen and saw that a small contingent of Birds had drawn back, and still more were moving forward, protected by force screens and hurling small bombs in all good hiding places. There was one group moving down a gully toward him. He withdrew an implosion grenade from his weapons pouch, activated it, and threw it at the Birds once they were near enough. He watched with savage satisfaction as it turned them into supercompressed matter, along with a sizeable portion of the gully walls. Then he cleared the entrenchment lip and ran down the devastated gully, carefully skirting the red-hot area of the grenade blast. In a few minutes he would be in the Bird camp. T he minds that Lagotilom's free minds could not enter were ignored, and the free minds went on, till they found lodging. In Birds. But the free minds were weak, and slipped out halfway. Lagotilom peered over the adobe wall surrounding his tent, and watched the hollow between the Terran camp and his. It was almost impossible to see into the depression, owing to the dust that had risen. But he could see the pale-green flashes of the Terran implosion grenades which meant that his comrades were being stretched across the local landscape. He could hear the tinkling of the fracturing glass nerve disruptors thrown by his troops. For some reason, however, the disruptors didn't work; and the Terrans were fighting far too efficiently to make him happy. Lagotilom doubted that his troops could hold their ground much longer, and wished that he could command them more directly. He  felt capable of it, for his thoughts had suddenly cleared from murky gloom to crystal clarity. He went back to his fur hammock and lay in it. Toying idly with the black feathers on his left wing, he pulled out some red ones that were to him as a gray hair was to a Terran. He looked out the door again, and standing up, told himself that he was doing absolutely nothing by staying in the tent. He removed some small atomic grenades from a wooden crate, selected a few candies from a bowl resting on a table, and walked out to his pedacycle. Before entering it, he took a final look at the battlefield. The Terrans, advertising their sentiments concerning war, had put up a sign on their sham fort which said, "Birds, go to hell!" Lagotilom gunned the motor on his pedacycle, and progressed at a leisurely pace. By the time he reached the battlefield, he had noticed that his soldiers were all fighting in a new and very nasty manner. As he turned his pedacycle down a gully he reflected that it was as though he was doing all of the fighting himself. One mind, remained with his original body, pain wracked, at the Terran camp. IF ' . '  ' A 'Si'-fa.'i ', ' . T'rfV  ; r His headache having abated somewhat, Lagotilom inspected the camp with a clearer head. He shooed a few small animals from the tent, looked about for his technicians and the camp personal, and saw them on the cook tent floor, dead drunk. Damn fools, he thought, with a war going on they think their new toy is so goddam good they could get drunk. He glanced at the wall progress map, then, and saw something uncanny was going on. Only half of the Birds were at the fighting front, with the rest back of the line, doing something that seemed to be mechanical in nature. A few minutes later, Lagotilom saw that they were assembling the huge spring catapults that they always carried about with them but never used. When they were finished, they used them to lob concussion bombs over the lines, and in the terranean tsunami that followed, they advanced # yards. This strange, original tactic unnerved Lagotilom. He sat closer to the screen for the next few hours, maneuver on each side. He wondered. The Terran maneuvers he could account for, but the Birds, no. It was almost as though he were doing all their fight-controlling himself. A board the Li' l Abner , General Pruneface Duffey was fascinated. He felt anxiety such as # prior years of Bird fighting had never before given him. Never before had he heard of the stinking pheasants fighting like this; and that Lagotilom lizard was doing a beautiful job of controlling the Terraa troops. But being realistic, Duffey could see that the situation was getting serious. He waved his hand over a red globe, and his aide, Ensign Piet van Mieris, a smallish man with thinning blond hair and a nervous tic in either cheek, entered the room, to be waved to a settee. Duffey looked at him and spoke. "Watch that screen for a few minutes." "Um... Sir, I have been watching it in the other room. The Birds are doing pretty good." "Too damn good. Far too damn good." Duffey stood up, walked across his room, and aimed a vicious kick at a stuffed Bird propped up in a corner holding a handful of cigars and a tomahawk. He missed, took one of the cigars, lit it, and continued. "The Birds never fought this way before. I don't see why they should start now." Van Mieris looked gloomily at Duffey. "Well, they have to start someplace." "If I want philosophy, I'll ask for it," Duffey snarled. "Well, General Duffey, I don't see why they shouldn't fight well, now. What I'm about to tell you I have no substantial proof for, but it's what I heard, and it seems to fit in. Before I signed up as your aide, I was on the report staff of General Copeland in the Crotch, and I heard something about the Birds having captured a military computer on Tarrarree, when they were holding that world. Its parts are subspacial, and it operates on the same force that keeps time moving. IF It would occupy almost no space at all, so it could be lodged in each soldier's head, or, if it is as hard for the Birds to make as I suspect, it could be hidden anyplace on their base. Mind you, sir, I've no proof for this. Don't regard it as gospel truth." He sighed greatly and started to leave. Duffey stopped him. "Dutch, how long ago was this?" "About three months." "Then that must be what's going on down there. The Birds must have one of those military computers commanding them. Get the Whiz Kids up here. I want to build an anticomputer for that sort of thing." "But, sir..." Duffey waved the complaining van Miens on impatiently. "Hop to it, man. I want those crazy bastards here at once." Van Mieris sighed again, and groaned, "Yes, sir." Twenty minutes later, the Whiz Kids, or Starship Computorial Team and Emergency Weapons Modifiers shuffled in. They were six tall, bleaklooking men with a funeral air hovering about them. Duffey surveyed them with distaste, and said, "Did Dutch tell you what the Birds are using down below?" Nods and dull uh-huhs. "Fine. I want a machine built to knock out that kind of... of machine. How soon can you have it done?" A gaunt-faced man with shortcropped gray hair, dressed in an oilpaint-smeared smock, spoke up. "By morning, if we work all night." "Great! Get it done. And make sure it's readily portable." "Yes, sir." The cordon of engineers dragged out again, and Duffey almost made a sarcastic remark about rousing them from their coffins. E vidently they didn't work all night, for it was # before they brought their machine up to show Duffey. As they plodded in, Duffey saw, sitting on a stretcher, a blue-metal generator that fairly bristled with glass tubes. The oilpainted engineer, who in all probability was the one who was to test the machine, was a bit perkier. He struck the hull of the machine, which responded with a hollow clang. "This is our baby. Weighs three tons. On such short notice, it was as portable as we could get it. It'll have to do," he said. Pruneface asked. "Anything you need?" "There is. Yeah. An armored car. I want one of the larger ones with the star-drive in them. The little ones don't have enough of a power supply in them to run this thing. I want it to have an efficient force-field, too. I don't want the Birds shooting us down once they realize what it is we're up to." "You mean you gotta fly this thing all over hell's half acre to make it work?" Pruneface asked with angry insinuation in his voice. "Just to plant our seeds. We gotta know whether it'll work at all, first. That's the way we'll find out quick. Then we can land in the camp and run it from there? Say! Have you gotten any hints from camp as to where this thing may be hidden?" 'Not a one. In fact, we haven't heard from camp since early last night. Seems their radio went on the fritz." Well, it won't make much difference Call the carport. Tell 'em to get one ready. Okay, sir?" "Yeah." Duffey picked up his desk phone's receiver and listened to it click throatily before a nasal voice founded in his ear. "Yes?" it said. "Get me the armored car division." It clicked again. Duffey then said "I want car number ten for the Whiz Kids. I want a pilot and a copilot in it, too. Get it to port seven." The porcupine generator was loaded into the weapons hold, and the occupants of the little bottle-shaped spaceship entered it. Humming slightly, the armored car dropped away from the Li'l Abner , and plummeted to the yellow and purple planet below. Inside, the Whiz Kid thought about his machine. Then he two and two together, then, and hoped that his machine would not greatly it would. Then he took a wig of whisky. V O ne of the soldier Lagotiloms of Terra crept rapidly up a gully. Lagotilom found the gully quite a bit longer than he had first thought, and was considering jumping its sides and running across the surrounding land, when another wave from a concussion bomb surged in back of him, and an excited chatter began very close. Bird talk. Ah  this there was the soft hum ot a Bird staff car, progressing slowly down the gully. It was a flat disk mounted on two soda-straw legs, with a primitive gasoline motor in the back, a scrap of armor in the front, a gun, and a piece of black-feathered brass. Only the Sexed ones, the rich aristocracy of the Birds, had black feathers, and these were only found at established Bird bases. But one was riding a staff car down the gully. Lagotilom figured that it would be quite a feather in his cap if he were to capture this one. He hid in a wide crack in the gully floor, and threw a rope noose out to trap the leg of the staff car as it went by. As its hum grew louder, he wondered what the Bird inside was thinking, doing, observing. Lagotilom could see that the gully he was in led past the Terran lines, right to under the bluff that the Terran encampment rested upon. He increased the pedacycle's speed, and saw that the gully was longer than he had expected, probably due to both the dust and the concussion bombs, which made mirages that fooled one's distance-sense. The cycle ran over an area of arroyo floor that was a bit cracked, so Lagotilom slowed his pedacycle again, and saw the noose in front of a crevice, waiting. He gunned the motor, and turned the speed down to slow, resulting in steps of rather bone-crushing violence. A foot stepped into the crevice, a choked scream came from within, and Lagotilom felt proud of himself. His first Terran. IF Then he turned his attention to the Terran camp, and saw a reptilian figure peer from a tent, far off. He wondered what this figure was. The day had been hot and sunny. So hot, in fact, that Lagotilom had thought the very air to be turning yellow. Now, though, it was cooling clouds that had formed, the westering sun presented a dull, smudgy appearance. Occasionally, Lagotilom could hear rumbles of very distant thunder. A cool wind was blowing from the west, carrying cool air down from the distant blue-gray mountains. Lagotilom watched the dozing technicians, the battle chart, the sky its restless periods, and it hummed louder, its spark-gaps flashing with considerably more power. Another sound, coming from the sky, could be Lagotilom cast his eyes that way and saw a glint that he recognized as a Terran armored car encompassed by a force-field. It leveled off, and made a few passes above the battlefield, as if expectant of something that didn't seem to be happening. It dropped to a mile, and made a few more passes, swishing about as though a bit frustrated. Finally, it circled the camp, and landed a few hundred yards from the tents. A jeep with three people and a metal and glass porcupine slid from the transportation hold, and drew to a halt outside of Lagotilom's tent. A tall, cadaverous man jumped out, took a swig from a liquor bottle, and began moving dials and twisting knobs and punching studs on the machine in back. It glowed fitfully, sounded off like a flushing toilet, and did nothing else. One of the two men in the front seat, after watching a few seconds, said something softly. The tall man snorted, and, turning his attention to a small viewscreen clamped in the front seat, made modifications on the porcupine. It sputtered and quit. He raised a huge fist and hit it hard on its side, then, after calmtent, watching Lagotilom. "Lieutenant Lagotilom." He stated it, not asked it. "Yeah. I'm me. What?" "You been watching that cartoon up there?" He jerked a thumb at the wall battle screen. "Yeah. Lousy show. Whatever's got into those lousy bastards, anyway? Why are they fighting so good?" "Ah, we think it's some sorta time-spacial computer they captured at the Crotch on Tarrarree. The Pruneface told us it's doin' all their thinkin' for 'em, so we built that thing and hauled it down here and it went and broke down. You saw it do that... hey. What's wrong with that thing?" For the first time, he seemed to notice the computorial disruptin', had been composing an electronic symphony. "I dunno. I been wired to it all day, and all it gave me was a headache." "Oh. Where are its technicians ... where is everybody , for that matter?" "Drunk. In the cook tent." "Drunk?" "Yeah, drunk. Dead drunk. They got so confident about their toy they thought that it didn't need them any longer. So they went and fOt drunk. They flopped on the floor about noon, and they've been that way ever since." "I oughta leave them there." "You might as well. I doubt if you could rouse 'em, anyway." Later, after the machine had been repaired and taken to the front fines, Lagotilom saw the rolling gray clouds turn a sinister blackishgreen, lightning flashing out of them. Rain began plikking at the taut fabric of the tents, and with crackled loudly, and an unhealthy yellow glow pervaded the tent. As Lagotilom let the side flaps down, he saw the bullet-shaped jeep run up the ramp of the armored car, which extruded its psionic radio staff the next minute. It was immediately struck by lightning, and Lagotilom's head exploded. The L agotilom's mind grew larger ' than ' it had the first time creeping across the planet's surface struck many minds, including those of natives. Again, it slipped, leaving enough of the native's mind in the body to taint Lagotilom's mind. Lagotilom dropped his feathery aluminum pitchfork, and threw open the door to his small, hideskin barn. A cold wind blew the dried snakeweed hay about the barn. Leaving the barn, he shut the door with his lower tentacles, ruffled his plumage with bis feathered muscles, and shut out the cold rain that fell. In the direction of the town fields, he saw flashes of imploding imploder grenades in unison with concussion bombs. Beyond that was another glow, but red. It was the town burning. Lagotilom grimly damning both the Terrans and the Birds entered his stave and hide house. He took a drill-lance from the wall, put on a suit of bronze chain mail, and loaded his hand-pistol with drillheads. He was going to stop both the Terrans and the Birds. On the road, he met others who were going to the town for the same reason, and he joined them without a word. He thought about the Terrans, and wondered what they were doing. After the pedacyle had narrowly missed stepping on him, Lagotilom had crawled from the crevice, and saw that the staff car was going to be hard to catch. So, deciding against chasing it, he turned his attentions to the burning town, whose medieval walls stood black beneath leaping flames. He saw tiny figures moving along the top of the wall, and decided to join the fun. But he still wondered what the Bird in the staff car was doing. Lagotilom, only a mile distant from the Terran camp, knew he stuck out like a fishwife in a Parisian fashion show, but he hadn't IF drawn a single shot. In fact, with the exception of a single tent that seemed to be having a miniature storm of its own going on inside, there was no visible action anywhere in the camp. He muted his cycle's motor, and brought it to a slow sneak, and drove up the incline to the Terran base. He watched the instruments on his dashboard to warn of monkey-business detectors, but there were no such detectors. He moved cautiously up the slippery hill. He wondered what was going on inside that tent. Lagotilom watched the armored car a few minutes, but it showed no signs of life. Well, he thought, it would take care of itself. He left vilion, and saw a large thing approaching the camp from the hill's bottom. He was alarmed for an instant, then grinned as it slipped and went crashing down the hill, amid squawks of consternation. When were those Birds ever going to learn that pedacycles can't climb hills? He went on his way, but before he entered the medical tent, he looked at the dark hulk of the armored car, and wondered what had happened to the men within. Lagotilom's mind, in expanding, had caught the three men from the ship and lodged in them immediately. But they were unconscious. Then one stirred... Lagotilom regained consciousness with a spinning vision of a ship's control room. He looked at the ruined psiooic projector, with its now-dead horse brain lying on the floor amid shards of glass that was its former casing globe. He looked around the control room of the armored car and saw his pilot and copilot on the floor, woozily trying to regain their feet. He searched feverishly about for the first aid kit. Lagotilom's mind, in expanding, had caught the three men in the armored car, and it had also struck the psionic radio, which was trained upon the ship. In the instant before it burst and died, it cast his mind up... up... up to the LVl Abner where it found another place to lodge. There was no other personality in this brain... he took over completely... The phone on Norge Gearling's desk rang, and he brushed aside piles of colored papers, lifted the receiver and asked, "Yeah. Whoozis? Whatcha want?" An excited voice sounded in his ear, constantly dimming because its owner kept turning his head to look at something. "Mr. Gearling! That big psionic radio down in the communications room. It thinks it's Lagotilom! You better get down here, fast!" Gearling stared at the receiver as if it were a disease carrier. "You wanna repeat that, please?" he asked. "I said that big psionic radio in the communications room thinks it's Lagotilom! It's been sending complaints all over its screens for the last few minutes, but we just figured out what's wrong now. It keeps changing from red to gray and back again. I don't see why it should think it's Lagotilom. Lagotilom's down on the Hunk. Come on down and see for yourself!" Gearling could see that something had very definitely gone wrong, for the huge horse brain suspended in the giant glob of waxy, oily gum was changing colors very fast, and it did indeed hold to the opinion that ii was Lagotilom. In a very slow, plodding voice it inquired what in hell was going on. Then a few sensor units went into action, the voice cleared and became that of Lagotilom. "Gearling. I can see you in here. I'm supposed to be in soldier-type brains. I'm in a horse-type brain. What the hell went wrong?" "Lagotilom. Is that you?" Gearling shouted. "No It's not me. I'm the Centaur and I'm out to conquer the universe. Dammit! Of course I'm Lagotilom. What in hell am I doing here?" The voice held anger and fear, and had an urgency to it. Gearling was gesticulating to the communications engineers, who were scuttling about trying to keep the giant brain cool. He looked at the gleaming waxy chunk, suspended in a nest of wires and supported by a metal box and shouted. "Don't worry, Lagotilom. We'll get you out of there." As he shouted these words, he immediately realized how inadequate and ridiculous they sounded. Then he turned on his heel and ran up the ramp to the Whiz Kids' office, three levels up. At the peeling veneer counter he rang the little silver pushbell until one of the cadaverous men stirred from the perpetual backroom craps game. "What the hell do you want, Gearling?" he snarled. "What do you know about psionit radios? Especially the big one?" "Nothing. You're the chief communicator. You oughta be able to fix it." "Well, I can't. They never taught me one thing about anything but temporospacial radio." Gearling grabbed a wall phone, got the radio room, and asked for a straight connection to Lagotilom and the psionic radio. "Lagotilom. What's going on down there, on the Hunk?" "What do you want me to tel you?" "You got any idea what got you up here?" idea what it may be doing now, but when I saw it last, it was buzzing and sparking to beat the devil. "Why don't its technicians fix it?" "Cause they've been dead drunk since noon. Nobody down here but me and those three guys you sent down in the armored car. They haven't shown their faces since the storm started and their car got hit by lightning. At least, I don't think they've shown their faces." Gearling put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, and spoke to the Whiz Kid. "What do you "Precious little. Last night you told me all its technicians were down on the Hunk. What are they doing?" "Dead drunk, according to Lagotilom." IF "Dammit, GearHng. Cant you get something done? I have a feeling something bad is gonna happen down there and..." A sudden cream burst from the phone. Seconds later, it drifted up from the communications room. Then after a pause, the phone began babbling thoughts so disjointed as to be absolutely senseless. Gearling put the phone down. "Did you hear him?" he said. "Yes. But what happened?" the Whiz Kid asked. "I'd bank he nearly got struck by thing with all the excess energy that I don't like to think about. We have to go down." "In this storm? God, no. And we have to find out what happened first, too." The verdict came, minutes later, when the phone jangled coarsely. "Yes?" asked Gearling. "We've deciphered that babble. Get down here at once." The voice was tense. And Gearling wondered what was happening to Lagotilom. VI L agotilom's head was bursting. New starbursts of pain exploded inside his skull each time some lightning flashed. Besides, he was in the middle of what he had been assured would not happen. His mind was lost among hundreds of other minds, all pressing down on him, all babbling, all confused. He wished for unconsciousness, but it would not come -- all of those minds .   Gearling looked at the papers and grimaced. So that was it. The infalLagotilom's mind to everything that could accommodate it To top it off, it had obtained a jump from a psionic projector to fling his mind up to the ship's psionic radio. The booster brain was very dead, but it needed, the power to push a Lagotilom-mind to the ship. No more vided would keep it up there once contact had been made. Now it had been deciphered that Gearling had been right about the lightning. Some had jolted the machine so severely that Lagotilom and the ship's psionic radio had been confused with all the soldier brains' activities. And Birds and natives. Now one thing remained to be done. Deactivate the Terran soldier Lagotiloms... Lagotilom crouched in a squaremouthed culvert high on the city's wall shooting Birds as they passed by. The town was burning, and the horrible stench from burning leather was wafted his way. And he was weary, too. A few minutes before, a sudden wave of confusion had hit him, and while it wasn't as bad as before, he still couldn't keep his mind on urgent subjects. He thought about his friends, the Li' l Abner , and the Bird that he had left walking to the Terran camp... After his pedacycle had broken a leg in the slide down the muddy fS hill, Lagotilom had crept back up the side and had tried to enter the camp, but was nearly struck unconscious by a blast of sheer confusion. He backed away hastily, but it still lingered, and, combining with the cold and the wet, made him very miserable indeed. He sat in the rain, shivered, and cast longing glances at the warmth of the burning town, five miles away. Then he wondered how the natives were taking all of this; what they were doing... Lagotilom was in tow. He had killed two Terrans and ten Birds. The little rune-painted stave and hide houses of the people of Boodai, his people, were almost all in flames, despite the rain. Lit by the orange fires of the conflagration, Birds could be seen fighting Boodai and Terrans on the thick city walls. The fallen and dead of all three races fell on the sharpened wooden spikes that thrust up inside the walls, and spattered tri-colored blood into the gutters and streets, where it mixed in veils with water and was swept down drains or collected in puddles. He tripped over a loose barrelhoop, and at the same time, felt the hot kiss of a knife sever a tentacle. He twisted and sent a spiral drill-charge through the neck of the gray Bird that stood over him with a huge butcher cleaver. He scuttled to his feet, and ran across the bloody town square to the shelter in the sub-city passages. If he stayed out here missing an arm, he might lose his life. Best to run to live another day. As he ran into the passages, he felt the confusion that had struck him five minutes earlier pass. He wondered what could have caused it, and why it seemed so sinister, despite its weakness... Lagotilom had screamed himself hoarse from the pain in his head, from the minds, from the deafening pounding sounds from the tent aimlessly, pounding on whatever he ran into, hoping it to be the tiny air tubes that permeated his brain to provide air-cooled thoughts were spouting hot blood. He assumed the foetal position on the floor which ran with mud, and fell backward in his thoughts... until he did not even notice Gearling control box, and shut it off. But he was aware of the effect, for he collapsed happily, feeling, just before the deathlike plunge, that it was good to be alone again. O that is my report. No more Birds on Meglor's Hunk, and no more Terrans. The natives just want to be left to their own devices, without meddling from space. And that machine..." Lagotilom let the sentence trail into meaningful oblivion. "Well, Nestil, at least you did test it. I'll give you (JMit for that. And you got your promotion." Lagotilom looked at his colonel's Comet on his sweater's collar, and said, "Yes, I did. I'm damn happy the New Inventions Bureau knows IP it's just a pipe dream at present." Suddenly Lagotilom sat erect, as if he had just struck an elementary truth. "Sir, there's been something buzzing around the back of my mind the last few days. I know what Subelectronic Integrator for the Manipulation of Objects, by Nestil. Says?" "Beg pardon?" "Simon Says. It's a game. When I was on Terra my first week the Education Administration put me into a first grade class with # other first graders of as many different races. They thought I was of normal IQ. There was this game called Simon Says. The kid'd mimic the teacher as long as she said Simon Says Do This or That. But if she said do this or that without the Simon Says, and the kid mimicked her anyways, he was out of the game. I always thought this was pretty damn unfair, so I rigged the game. This was just like one of those rigged games. You couldn't lose; ergo, the machine did work; but you couldn't win. And everyone did what they were supposed to do. Lagotilom chuckled immoderately. "This whole damn demonstration, all of it, was just another game of Simon Says." And he left the office, chuckling thoroughly... Two of your favorite science-fiction writers join In great new collaboration team in next montfrt I by A. E. Van Vogt and James H. Schmitz Plus! by Lester del Rey by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. -- and many more in the July If. Don't miss it! W #  IF  Novelette The way to space involves great sacrifice and daring -- but not necessarily by the astronautslra I J ames M. Hey den, head of the Advanced Research Projects Division of the Continental Multitechnikon Corporation, blew his breath out exasperatedly, sat back in the expensive aggregation of pads and springs that served as his desk chair, and read the handwritten note again: Jim -- Pat tells me we are now so far ahead of the international competition, defensewise, that no large new government orders can be expected. Introduction of any new and revolutionary gimcrack at this time would, therefore, be most unwelcome and inexpedient. So put the new gimmicks on the back burner, and get going full Hast on that Kiddie Kit Science Series. We'll expect rapid progress, as we want the first three Kits on the market at least ninety days before Christmas. Naturally the Moon Krawler should be one of these first Kits. Any suggestions you may have for utilizing our now top heavy staff of technicians and engineers would be appreciated. We assume you will cull the deadwood. Remember that in pruning, you want to cut pretty close into sound wood, as this actually promotes rapid healing and leaves no dead stump to fester. Also, you will of course bear in mind that we have a little different approach, expensewise, on items for the general public, as opposed to rush government orders. The Krawler should retail at not over #, according to market simulation on our big new remember, does not have to fit into a cramped space, or endure high acceleration, vacuum, or a lunar landing. It won't break our heart if the thing fails to last long enough for our great-grandchildren to play with It on Mars; of course, it shouldn't fall apart before the holidays are over, either. I know I don't have to spell this out for you, Jim. Ed and I are going to be out on the coast for a couple of weeks, enjoying the California smog, and trying out those twelve-lane, six-deck highways they brag about. If the merger goes through, we'll be gone another week, anyway, but that won't matter. We'll be so diversified then that nothing but another # could really put us under. So, bear down hard on the reconversion, streamlining, and rationalization of your operation. tion indicates that the other two kits should sell, respectively, at # and #. Obviously, you can shoot the works on the latter model, though we'll expect a more generous profit, too. Just what these other two kits should be, we don't know, as our programmer was evidently unable to figure out just how to put the question to the computor. The computor gave out nothing but gibberish on the subject. So we'll leave that up to you. This is, of course, all your responsibility, Jim, but I hope you'll be generally guided by the spirit of these few suggestions. We'll look forward to seeing things well along when we get back from Cal. Stu H eyden sat up straight, and swore. He hit the intercom button. "Nell!" There was a startled feminine squeak, "Sir?" "Dig up that note from Stu Grossrad -- the one he sent about eighteen months ago -- the one that said 'full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes,' and so on." "That was longer ago than eighteen months. I think -- " "Never mind that. Dig it up. And the one before that -- that one about blasting out a foxhole and hiding m it. And the one before that, too -- I think there was one before that." Heyden sat back and looked over the note. A fresh burst of profanity escaped him just as his secretary came in with several sheets of paper, and then, blushing bright pink, turned to leave. "Hold on," said Heyden. He looked over the previous notes, and glanced up at her. "Listen to this: ... the sky's no limit, boy. With this monster government program shaping up, we can carve off any size chunk we can eat. So beef up your technical staff, get that wild blue yonder stuff out of the deep freeze, shove this low-key junk we're working on onto a back burner, and set your sights on Arcturus...' " Heyden looked up in angry indignation. "There're three pages like that." "Yes, sir." His secretary looked baffled for a moment, then struggled to match his look of indignation. "And," said Heyden, reaching for an earlier note, "before that, we had this business: " ... too bad, but the bottom has gone out the way it can only go out when Uncle pulls the plug, and now instead of cruising along in ten fathoms of deep green sea, all of a sudden we're grinding on the rocks. We're going to have to shorten sail and throw the ballast overboard, or we're ended right here. We're top heavy with hypertechnical stuff that nobody wants but Uncle -- when ha wants it. And now he doesn't want it. So get rid of it. Junk the fancy projects. What we need is a moneymaker, fast...' " Heyden shoved that aside, glared up at his secretary, who swallowed nervously, and then he reached for the earliest sheet of paper, settled back, and read aloud: " '... the opportunity of the century, boy. We can get in there on the ground floor. Jhe public is screaming for action. Congress is boiling over with urgency. It's, "Get results! Damn the expense!" I don't need to tell you that in an atmosphere like this, the streets are paved with golden opportunity. Now's the time to beef up your technical staff, build for the future, get in on the ground floor, rv!...' " Heyden slapped the papers down. "And so on, for pages. Well, there we are. Just what do you think of that?" His secretary scanned his face quickly and looked indignant again. I "just what happens here. We're like a damn-fool rocket that wastes half its thrust decelerating. Now we're supposed to unload people we pirated away from other outfits six months ago. Twelve to eighteen months from now, we'll be scrambling to get these very same people back again. We set up a winning team, then when we get a few points ahead in the international game, we have to disband it. The other team, over across the ocean, keeps on playing, and all of a sudi r den there comes a howl from the fans. The opposition is wiping us all over the field. Then, quick , we've got to put together a winning team again. And then, again, when we get a few points ahead -- " His face changed expression, and for a moment he looked boiling mad. Then he blew out his breath, and shrugged, "It's like a manic-depressive psychosis. The wasted energy is terrific. And when we're on the 'down' half of the cycle, if the other side should just get far enough ahead -- " "Yes, sir," said his secretary agreeably. "That's just what you said the last time, sir. Did you want to see Mr. Benning, or should I -- " Heyden scowled. "What does Benning want?" "He says it's about that advanced 'High-G' project. I knew you'd be busy reading Mr. Grossrad's letter, so I had Mr. Benning wait." Heyden shrugged. "It's all academic now. But send him in." "Yes, sir." She went out. A moment later, a tall intense man with blue eyes that seemed to be lit from within walked through the doorway, carrying under one arm a bundle wrapped in dark green paper. He shut the door, walked directly to Heyden's desk, and set the bundle down. There was a faint light crackle of paper, and then the bundle tipped lightly back and forth, resting on the desk with all the solidity of a piece of hollow balsa wood. Having set the bundle down, Benning now glanced all around furtively, then nodded to Heyden. "Well," he said, In a low secretive voice, "we got it." Heyden was glancing from the bundle to Benning. He'd never seen Benning like this before. Benning, blue eyes glowing, repeated, "We got it." He turned, glanced around the room, put his finger to his lips, and reached across the stupefied Heyden's desk to pick up a scratch pad. He scribbled rapidly as Heyden, with fastgrowing uneasiness, moved his chair back so he'd have freedom of action if it suddenly developed that Benning had gone off the deep end. Benning sat down across the desk, and slid the pad to Heyden. Heyden read: High-G total success. Working model right there across the desk from you. Don't talk about it out loud. Have reason to think your office here is bugged . n H eyden glanced rapidly from the pad to Benning to the greenwrapped package. For a moment he considered what it would mean if Benning was telling the truth. The package immediately looked like a huge bundle of big green banknotes. He came back to earth and reminded himself that Benning might be out of his head. He wrote rapidly on the pad: Bugged by who, the Russians? and said aloud, "When you come in here with that portentious look, Ben, you better have something to back it up. You say you 'got it.' Don't just sit there looking happy. You got what?" IF Benning could now do any of a number of things, and Heyden sat on the edge of his chair, watching intently to see what came next. Benning looked at the pad, glanced at places where a "bug" might be hidden, and crossed his fingers to show he spoke for the benefit of uninvited listeners. "What we've got is a damn good gimmick to get us a government contract on this, boy. We've run into a little glimmer of pay dirt on this one. I can see just how to start the golden flood pouring in, and keep it flowing for years." He wrote rapidly on the pad, and shoved it across the desk. Heyden read. Not the Russians. . . Heyden winced and glanced around. "M'm," he said aloud. "Well, I don't know. I got quite a note from Stu Grossrad." Benning sat up. "No kidding?" "No kidding." "What did Stu say?" "What does he ever say? It's either 'Full speed ahead!' or 'Emergency reverse!' The last time, we were supposed to go all out, shoot the works. Naturally, this time we're opposed to chop off all the deadwood, shove everything we're working on now onto the back burner, and pull that toy kit idea off the back burner and put it onto the front burner. Whenever we're eager to do something, we're supposed to let it congeal on the back burner. When we couldn't care less about the thing, then we're supposed to work on it. How does this fit in with your bright new idea?" "Not so hot What toy kit is that?" Heyden wrote: . . You mean Interdisciplinary Intellectronetics? Or Interspatial Ionics? He shoved the pad across the desk, then handed over the note from Grossrad. "Read it. You'll remember." Benning crackled the paper, glanced at the pad, wrote briefly, looked back at the note, wrote some more, glanced at the note and groaned. "Ye gods. Hasn't somebody else got a Moon Krawler out by now? This thing was a bright idea when we thought of it. It's stale now." He slid the pad across, and Heyden read: I mean Interdis etc.-Jawbreaker Electronics , Inc. Heyden wrote, Where did you learn this? Aloud, he said, "Naturally, we'll be supposed to gimmick it up with flashing lights, clicking noises, and a recorded voice like a talking doll, only more mechanical. No doubt the thing should have claws that open and shut, a power scoop for, quote, taking samples of the lunar surface, end-quote, and maybe a guide-wire to control it with as it crawls across the livingroom rug waving its claws." #CT)oy," said Benning. "From theD sublime to the ridiculous in one easy jump." He shoved the pad back. "WTiat's this business about the # item? What toy could we make that anyone would be crazy enough to buy at that price?" Heyden was reading: Right from the horse s mouth. Their Industrial I Intelligence chief. They're in some kind of financial cramp, want to cut his salary and slash his staff , "temporarily " Heyden said, "Take a look through some recent toy catalog. You'll get a shock." He wrote, Is he reliable? Benning had been rapidly scanning Grossrad's note, but was now reading it more carefully. He glanced up in exasperation. "Listen to this:... of course, it shouldn't fall apart before the holidays are over... Isn't that nice?" He glanced at the pad, wrote rapidly, and said, "What kind of sleazy junk are we supposed to turn out, anyway?" "Just so it sells," grunted Heyden. He took the pad, and read: That guy is as reliable as a rusted-out two-buck hair-trigger Spanish automatic. He just figures . . is doublecrossing him, and he never lets anybody get ahead of him in that game. "You realize," said Heyden, frowning, "we're going to have to let some people go and that we'll wish we'd kept them about eighteen months from now." "Agh," growled Benning, still reading the note. "Listen to this: 'Introduction of any new and revolutionary gimcrack at this time would, therefore, be most unwelcome and inexpedient.' Just suppose we should hit on something new and revolutionary?" fie tipped his head toward the green-wrapped bundle. "Then what? Are we supposed to think you can actually put it in cold storage, and keep it like frozen fish? Suppose somebody else gets it? What's the point of this whole thing, anyway?" Heyden wrote: Whafs in that bundle? He slid the pad across the desk, and said, "Let's get back to the question of those people we're going to have to let go." Benning wrote on the pad, then said aloud, "This is crazy." "Do you think," said Heyden drily, "that you're telling me something?" He glanced at the pad: Lift off the paper and see. Heyden felt a tightness in his chest. He said, "Let's have that note from Grossrad. I've been reading some of his previous stuff here -- " He stood up, gently pulled off the green paper -- "and nobody can tell me anything new about how crazy -- " He stared at the short length of board with square box attached, and slide-wire rheostat beside the box. Beneath the rheostat was a penciled arrow pointing to the right, and marked "Up". T Tevden felt a brief spasm of irAA ritation. What was this supposed to be? Antigravity? He felt a brief wave of dizziness as he thought, Ye gods, what if it is? Belatedly, he finished his sentence: " -- how crazy a thing like this really is." "But," said Benning sourly, "we're stuck with it? Is that what you mean?" "Yeah." Heyden pulled the board toward him, noting its weird lightness, despite the fact that it felt solid enough to the fingers. "We're stuck with it, and we better figure out who to let go." "I should think," said Benning, "that would be your job." # IP Heyden shoved Ac rheostat slider in the direction of the arrow. The board drifted up out of his hands, and started accelerating toward the ceiling. A hasty grab brought it down, but it continued to tug toward the sky. "My responsibility " said Heyden, eyeing the board, "but I need your suggestions." "As to who to fire?" "Say, as to who to keep" He slid the rheostat slider in the opposite direction, and the board sagged so heavily that it seemed to Heyden that it must be made out of solid lead. Frowning, he said, "Take Magnusson, for instance. We could unload him to start with, I suppose." "He's had a lot of expenses. His bank balance is pretty feeble." Heyden was experimenting with the slider. He got the impression that as he approached either end, the weight or lift of the concealed device went off toward infinity. He paused to glance at the connections to the rheostat. "Not our fault," he grunted. "No, but -- " "The point is, that's his worry." The board was headed for the ceiling again, and it felt as if it would tear Heyden's arm out by the roots. Scowling, he pulled the slider back toward the center. Benning said, "I think we ought to be decent enough to give Magnuuson enough time to get back on his feet." "How about Simms?" The board was so heavy Heyden had to rest it on the corner of his desk. As he pushed the slider further, the board settled immovably in place, as if spiked down. "Well," said Benning evasively, "Simms has had a little streak of bad luck, too." "What have we got," said Heyden, carefully pulling the slider back, "nothing but hard-luck cases?" "Well, you know how. it is -- " "We've got to start somewhere " "Sure, but poor Simms -- " "We aren't going to get anywhere this way. Make out a list of the people you think are essential. I want them in groups, the most essential at the top of the list." He wrote on the pad: Did #.' s spychief say there was a visual pickup anywhere in here? Benning glanced at the pad. "What the heck, Jim. I can't know which men are essential till I know what we'll have to do later." "Just assume it's the usual thing, Ben. We've been through this before." He pulled the pad over, and read: He didn't say . Personally , I doubt it. Heyden wrote: We better explain this package , in case there's something outside. Benning read it, and nodded. Heyden said, "Well, forget that for now. What have you got over there in that paper?" Benning shrugged. "A little promotion gizmo." He rattled the paper. "See, you look in these portholes, and you're inside the spaceship. Shows our control panel, amongst other things, for the Genie Project." "Cute," conceded Heyden, smiling wryly. "Well that's down the drain now. Wrap it up and forget it." "Based on the old-time stereoscope," said Benning, putting the actual board with its box and rheostat inside the paper wrapper. "Too bad. It seemed like a good -- " Heyden wrote on the pad, Let's go somewhere where wc can talk. Aloud, he said sourly, "I ut it on the back burner. Now, I've had enough of this for a while. Where are you headed?" Benning glanced at the pad. "Back to my lab. You want to come along?" Heyden put Grossrad's latest note in his pocket. "Sure." Ill T hey went out, walked down a lengthy corridor, went into a big airy structure built on the general lines of a hangar for dirigibles, walked along the wall to the right, and finally arrived at a door marked, "Private -- Danger -- Keep Out." Heyden followed Benning inside, and down a short hall. Benning did something complicated at the door, then they stepped in. Benning snapped on the lights, then flipped another switch, and the room filled with sounds of laughing voices, the clink of glasses, cars starting up somewhere in the background, and a close-at-hand murmur and mumble that seemed to include every tone of voice conceivable. "Okay," murmured Benning, "I think this room is safe enough, but if they have got anything in here, they're welcome to try and filter ut out from this mess. You did see what we've got, plainly enough, back in your office?" "I saw it. But did you see what we're going to run into when we try to convince Grossrad?" "He couldn't be so stupid he wouldn't catch on to this." "That's not the point. He sayi new gadgets aren't wanted. This means somebody higher up figures we've now settled down to a nice international stalemate, with us ahead of the opposition. This device. it strikes me, is going to make a lot of expensive equipment obsolete in a hurry." "You're not just kidding. With this, we could put a man on the moon in a few weeks, not years from now. And that's just the start." "What the Sam Hill is it, anyway?" Benning frowned. "Did you ever hear the comparison of gravitational fields with the bending of a frictionless surface?" "I think I know what you mean. If you had a flat frictionless surface, flexible enough to bend when objects were placed on it, and if this whole frictionless surface were accelerating uniformly at right angles to the plane of the surface -- " Benning nodded. "That's it." Heyden went on. "If you had such a frictionless surface, an object would slide across it in a straight line until it neared another object, when the dip in the surface caused by these objects would pull them toward each other. There would be, apparently, a 'gravitational field' around each object, the strength of the 'field' depending on the mass of the object." "Exactly. This would cause the effect of attraction. Now, how would you creat repulsion ?" "Well -- " Heyden frowned. "There would have to be a hill -- a ridge, or rise, in the frictionless surface. You could do it only if the surface had some other property -- if it were made of the right metal, for instance, you could position magnets toward the stern of a properly shaped object resting on the surface, and this might create enough slope to cause the object to slide forward -- " Benning was nodding and smiling broadly. "That's one idea. And how much power would it take?" "It would depend on the properties of the surface." "Yes. Well, we started this project without much hope that there was any physical counterpart to this comparison. But after tracking down some previously unexplained discrepencies, we found it. The effect can be made comparatively large, the power consumption is small, and by proper manipulation, we can create either a positive or negative deflection of the 'surface'. The result is, we've got a space drive." H eyden sat back, and thought it over. "This just could be a nightmare. How complicated is it?" "Mathematically, it's very complicated. Physically, it's not bad." "This might make life very exasperating for everybody concerned with it." Benning frowned. "Of course, it's bound to be highly classified. They'll doubtless bury it under a ton of regulations, but -- Oh." Benning was silent. "Naturally, we discovered it We shouldn't be running around at loose ends, ready to spill the works in the nearest bar." "Naturally, that's one aspect. But there are others. Now, how much leverage do you get with this thing? How much advantage over a rocket, for instance?" "Agh. Ye gods, a rocket." "Could it beat a rocket for speed?" "Easy. Weight for weight -- I mean weight at rest with the device turned off -- there's no comparison." "How about for lifting a payload?" "There's still no comparison. You don't have to lift a lot of cargo you're just going to fire out the tail end anyway." "Could you put a warhead in one of these and hit within five miles a thousand miles away?" Benning hesitated. "Not yet." "But eventually?" After a long silence, Benning said, "For accuracy, used as a missile power source, I fail to see any advantage in this. But you could knock one of your opponent's missiles off course with it. You might even smash it up in mid-air." "How would you do that?" "Make one big enough, with enough power back of it, make a strong enough mount and screw the thing down to a solid base -- What do you think you've got? It's a tractor-repulsor unit. You can make a steep 'hill' in the 'frictionless surface' the missile is sliding along. What does that interpret as in physical reality? A violent repulsion. Then you can make a trough. Subject anything to sudden yanks and Aoves, and what happens to it?" Heyden nodded slowly. Benning said, "Didn't I see you pick up Grossrad's note before we left?" "Yes, you want it?" "I'd like to look it over again." Heyden felt through his pockets, and handed the note to Benning. Benning read the note amidst gales of hurrying girlish laughter that grew loud and faded, with male curses, mumbling, a variety of audible conversations, and a weird varying note in the background. Benning grunted and looked up. "He sure doesn't leave any doubt about this 'no new advances wanted at this time'." Heyden nodded. "That's what bothers me." "But," said Benning, "any good business man can see the potential in this." "What potential? Where's the profit in something you can never put Oil the market because it's sure to be classified?" "Well, the defense contracts, then." H eyden shook his head gloomily. "Remember: 'we are now so far ahead of the international competition, defensewise, that no large new government orders can be expected.' " Benning said angrily, "Can't you convince that guy -- " "Probably, but so what? Grossrad doesn't write contracts with himself. Suppose I convince him? Then he's got to convince somebody else. That guy has to convince the next one. At some point in there, someone conceivably may have to convince the defense secretary, and he may have to convince Congress. This is assuming it goes through all those offices and ever comes out again. Each of those guys is going to be hard to convince, precisely because he knows how hard it's going to be to convince the next man. Meanwhile, all we can do is chew our nails and wait for their decision." Benning said, "While we're waiting, what if somebody else, say in some foreign laboratory, maybe even where they've got pictures of Big Brother hanging on the wall -- What if they should come up with this?" "Is that conceivable?" "Sure, it's conceivable. I told you, physically, this thing is not too bad." He frowned. "Well, what then?" Heyden frowned. "As soon as they make it public, count on us to get a contract so big we couldn't fill it if we were General Motors, U.S. Steel, and A. T. and T. combined. We'll have to kidnap every scientist and technician we can lay our hands  # on. Benning said angrily, "We're missing something here. What if they don't make it public? What if they quietly build up a fleet of these tilings while we're sitting around waiting for the go-ahead? They could seal off outer space so tight # IF we'd never get out there." An intense look appeared on Benning's face. "Think, Jim -- what if they're building them right now?" Heyden blinked, gave an irritated wave of his hand as if to dismiss die thought, then frowned. "How hard is it to make these things?" "I've told you. The actual physical construction isn't too bad, once you know what to do." There was a long period in which neither man said anything. Then Heyden said slowly, "You said, 'With this, we could put a man on the moon in a few weeks? Did you mean that literally?" Benning nodded. "Remember all die research that's already been done. Think of the problems we don't have, because the drive is no worry. Think how we're set up here. Sure, in three weeks, we could put a man on that moon." "Could you mount the drive so it could also be used as a weapon?" "Yes. And, for that matter, a smaller one could serve as an auxiliary weapon in flight, if you wanted. But it would take money." Heyden thought it over, then grinned. "If Grossrad's going to have his Kiddie Kits ready in time, he's going to have to give us money." "Are you serious?" "Yes, I'm serious. This is the biggest technological advance in history." Benning was wide eyed. "And what you're thinking of making is a full-size spaceship -- good enough for an actual expedition?" "That's exactly what I want -- tf we can make such a thing. No trim. No flimflam. Just let it work." Benning seemed to lose some enthusiasm. "This is risky." Heyden nodded. "You bet your life it's risky. If Grossrad gets wind of it I'll be hung from the rafters. But never mind that. Are you sure you can do it?" "Of course I'm sure," Benning frowned. "Right now we can do this better than Kiddie Kits. A month from now, if we fellow Grossrad's letter, it'll be a different story. But -- " "Then this may be the only chance our side gets. We'd better take it." Benning drew a deep shaky breath. "Okay." IV T he next two weeks passed in a blur of desperate activity that left Heyden with no time to think of anything but the problem immediately in front of him. Benning's remark that a man could be put on the moon in a few weeks turned out to be a little optimistic. Benning said exasperatedly, "I didn't figure in all that life-support stuff. So far as the drive is concerned, that's what I meant." Heyden said angrily, "We could have put a corpse on the moon a long time ago." "I'm sorry," said Benning. "We're coming fast, anyway. Thank heaven the thing is basically simple." Before them loomed a big black ihape like an overgrown boiler. It had all the sophistication of a dedge-hammer, but Benning insisted k could take off inside a week. "You see," he said, "the only real problem with the drive is durability under stress. Theoretically, we could use that demonstration model I showed you. The trouble is that in practice if the drive-unit is too small, it will crush." "That's nice. But we've got around that, have we?" "Yes." Heyden eyed the looming black boiler shape. "We don't want to get out there" and get cooked. "The other side shades from black into a pure reflective coating." "How do we see out of it? -- In addition to the radar, which may fail on us?" "There's a window in the end. Also, we're practising with a lightweight kind of drive-unit. We figure we can use that as a sort of detector." "How does it work?" "To create a given negative bending or warping where there's a physical object present takes more power than where there isn't. Set things up right, and you can read the mass of the given object off a meter." "How about distance?" "The reading drops in front and behind the object. There's no problem there.". Heyden stared at the looming shape and nodded slowly. He had no clear idea why there was no problem there; but there was nothing to do but take Benning's word for it, and hope things would turn out. He turned to make a final comment, then paused. A bulky overalled form had juft ducked out the door of the boilershape, and now, scowling deeply, pushed through a knot of people standing just outside. Carrying a flimsy sheet of yellow paper, he headed straight for Benning, and immediately got down to brass tacks. "That inside-drive idea won't work. If we try that, we're going to swivel that drive around, stress the walls, and crack the window on the end. That leaves us with an airleak. That drive has to go outside " # #HPhat's insane," said Benning A angrily. "With that size unit, the whole ship's inside the distortion." "Maybe, but there's a fringe effect." "We're inside it." "We are? Look at this." Benning took the paper. "WeH... This is just a freakish -- " "Maybe it doesn't last long, but what's it going to do to that window?" "Yes, but if we put it outside it will still -- " "Not if we have it on a boom. That puts us outside that gradient" Benning stared at him. "How long a boom?" "About two hundred feet should do it." "Two hundred -- " "Unless you can breathe vacuum, that's where it's got to go, if we make it that size." Benning was staring at the flimsy sheet of paper as there came the sound of a feminine throatclearing to Heyden's right. He IF glanced around to see his secretary holding out a special-delivery letter. Leaving Benning to deal with the technical problem, Heyden headed back to his office, and read the handwritten letter: Jim -- Well, boy, we've got the merger, but doing business with this outfit really puts your wallet through the wringer. I hope you're coming along fine with the Kiddie Kits. We'll need every cent we can scrape up, so pare expenses to the bone, and shave everything just as fine as you can. We're going to have to cut down more than I expected on the scientific talent, and I just hope we can pick them up again when we need them. I know how this Kiddie Kit business must strike you after the stuff we've been working on, but when the oasis gets this dry, there's nothing to do but fold your tents and move on. Nothing we could produce, no matter how advanced, would get a really sympathetic hearing right now. I don't mean to dwell on this, Jim. I know we can count on you all the way, even if it is a let-down. I keep harping on it because I think this toy business is going to make the difference, one way or the other. It's hard to believe, I know, but there it is. Ed and I are both totally worn out. There are some things that you have to do in business that aren't very business-like, but there's no time to argue about that. You either do them or get kicked in the head, and somebody else walks off with the prize. I must be more worn-out than I realized to go on like this. Well, here's to the merger, and stick to those Kddie Kits. You don't know what it means to know we've got somebody back there we can count on. We'll see you in a week, Jim. Stu Heyden swallowed and sat back dizzily. When his vision cleared, there stood, across the desk, an apologetic individual from Purchasing. "Sorry, sir, but it seems we have to have your signature on this." Heyden took it, and scowled at the figures. "Are you sure the addition is right?" "Yes, sir. That special silver wire is expensive stuff." Heyden sat still for a moment, then scratched out his name. The paper was briskly whisked away. "Thank you, sir." The door shut, and the incident was gone beyond recall. Heyden picked up the note, read it through again, and shook his head. He started to get up, then changed his mind. He sat still a minute, then drew in a deep breath and let it out in a rough sigh. The realization went through him with inescapable finality that in seven days the ship would be ready or not ready. And then something else, that he'd been vaguely aware of theoretically took on a sudden solidness and reality. In seven days, he would be either a hero of broad vision, or a fool and a traitor. And there was not a thing he could do about it. He had made his move, and if it didn't work out, he could never, never explain it. r ie first four or fivt days after that crawled past with Heyden almost in a daze. Time and again, between emergencies, he dredged up memories, trying to discover exactly how he had gotten into this. The astonishing thing was that, in retrospect, the decision seemed to have been so easy. Blandly, calmly, he had given the decision that might wreck the corporation, and land him, personally, in the worst mess he'd ever been in. His meditations were enlivened, toward the end of the week, by a telephone call from the comptroller. "Hello, Jim?" "Right here, Sam." Heyden tried without success to inject a little warmth into his voice. His voice retained a calm unconcerned coolness. There was .a hesitant cough over the phone. "Say, no offense, Jim, but what the devil is going on there?" "Business as usual," came Heyden's voice, cool and totally assured. "Granted the changes that I'm sure Stu must have told you about." "Well, Stu told me -- " There was a brief pause. "Do you know something I don't know? Is that it?" Heyden laughed. The sound was that of a man without a worry in the world. "Sam," his voice said cheerfully, "before I know if I know anything you don't know, I know you know I have to know what you know, otherwise I won't know, you know, if what I know is something you don't know." "Ah, for -- " Over the phone, the cautious voice sounded irritated but relieved. "Listen, we can kid all we want, but this is serious business." "It is" said Heyden emphatically. After a moment, he added, "Thank heaven." "What do you mean? Wait a minute, now, do you mean -- " There was a long silence. "I know, of course, that the merger went through, but I didn't realize -- Do you mean that we're frying their fish?" "All I can say is, this here is serious business. If Stu didn't tel you, I'm not going into it over tbe phone." "What if I come down there?" "Glad to see you anytime, Sam. But I can't mention it if Stu didn't." "Did Stu say, specifically, not to tell me?" "No. Of course not." "Then why can't you -- " "Because he didn't tell me He mention it." "Maybe I better call him up." "No harm in it. Just don't give anything away over the phone." "Then how the devil am I -- " W Heyden said irritatedly, "Look, Sam, I'm sure it was an oversight on his part. Stu doesn't make a practice of leaving anyone in the dark. But he was worn out. I don't know what he had to do to put the merger across, but he seemed pretty thoroughly wrung out to me. Now, you can either try to locate him now, or you can wait a couple of days till he can tell you himself." "All right. But meanwhile we're spending -- " H eyden exploded. "What do I have to do, spell it out? For Pete's sake, Sam! Look, do you think Stuart Grossrad is a commercial moron? With things the way they are now, would he deliberately stretch us out as thin as a rubber band? This merger wasn't a cheap proposition, you know." "Well -- the point of the merger was that, ultimately we'd reap the advantages of diversification." "How would that get us through the next six months?" There was a lengthy silence. Finally there was a long sigh over the telephone. "Did Stu tell you this beforehand?" "Beforehand, all he told me was such a tale of misery I almost drowned in my own tears. No. He didn't tell me a thing, beforehand. What I couldn't figure out was why he was so eager for this merger, if there wasn't more in it than what he mentioned." "He's smooth, all right. He wanted us psychologically set up to take full advantage of this. Or, if the merger fell through, he didn't want us moping around, thinking we'd lost our last chance. Either way it went, he was ready." "I suppose that must have been it." "Well -- I just had to find out. No hard feelings, Jim?" "Of course not, Sam. Any time." "See you, boy." "So long, Sam." Heyden put the phone in its cradle, and mopped his forehead. He had, if Sam remained convinced, succeeded in hanging on to two more days. If, that is, Grossrad didn't decide to come back early. If there were no other catastrophes. Heyden glanced at his watch, and decided to go take a look and see how Benning was coming along. It took Heyden some time to walk down the long corridor, but only a few moments more to find his answer. The big boiler shape stood in solitary glory in the hangarlike building, apparently forgotten. Everyone was fifty feet away, crowded around a smouldering mess about a foot-and-a-half long and eight inches in diameter, and that had, apparently, once been something useable. Benning had his hand at his chin, staring at his ruin. He, and the rest of the men, all looked so dazed and tired that Heyden didn't have the heart to ask what had happened. Wearily, he shut the door, went back to his office, and sat down. "Well, Stu," he said mentally, "you see I thought we could make it to the moon... Yes, the moon... Yes, I know the thing doesn't work, Stu... That's where all IF the money went Stu... That's right... Yes, Stu... Sorry... Yes... That's right, Stu -- I mean Mr. Grossrad... Yes, Mr. Grossrad, I did it on my own responsibility... Yes, sir, I know, but -- You see, sir, if somebody else had got it -- And if it had worked, Mr. Grossrad, then... I know it didn't sir, but -- " Heyden abruptly sat up, and smashed his fist on the desk. "Damn it," he said savagely, "it's got to work!" B y the time he got to Benning again, Benning looked glassyeyed with pure stupefaction, and the others had expressions that varied from ordinary gloom to total defeatist resignation. Heyden told himself that he would have to keep himself under tight control. "What's this?" he said abruptly, and a good deal louder than he'd intended. Instantly, every eye in the room was focused on him. They watched him with the alert attention a man gets when he breaks the silence by cracking a bullwhip. Benning turned around, his expression that of bafflement and disbelief. "This size builds up heat faster than we imagined. It's got to have a cooling system." "Is that the drive-unit for the ship?" "No, this is the forward unit. The ship drive-unit is bound to be worse yet." "How long to rig up a cooling system?" "Too long. We've not only got to cool the drive-unit itself, we've then got to unload all the heat from the cooling system. The stupefying thing is, we tested for this with smaller units, and the heat build-up was gradual and well within bounds. We've apparently run into some effect that increases exponentially with mass, while thrust -- " "Can you get the same thrust with a group of small units as with one large one?" Benning blinked. "It wouldn't be as efficient , but yes, we could do that." "Any drawbacks to having a bunch of them?" "Yes. All the mounts have to be duplicated -- " "Why not mount them together?" "If they're too close, we've discovered they interact." "Can you mount them far enough apart so they don't interact, but not so far apart as to make control impossible?" "Yes, but the expense -- " "Damn the expense," said Heyden savagely. "How long will it take?" Benning mopped his forehead. "If we work straight through without a break we can have it ready the day after tomorrow." "All right. Starting now, everyone who volunteers to work straight through, and who sticks with it, gets a quadruple pay, and a thousand-dollar bonus after taxes, if the job's done on time." There was a brief sudden buzz of excitement. "My God!" blurted Benning. n "Look what's at stake!" said Heyden angrily. "Control of space! A drive that can reach the planets! All the high-grade ore in the asteroid belt! -- Are we going to fold up, or are we going to get it?" He paused just long enough to see the glint in their eyes, then turned to Benning. "What do you need?" Benning said soberly. "A list as long as your arm." "Let's have it." Benning got him off away from the others. "Listen, do you know what's going to happen to you if -- " "It's too late for that." "I wish I'd never brought that damned thing to your office." "We've taken a flying jump, and we're now halfway out over the crevasse. There's no point wishing we'd never jumped. We've got to go the rest of the way and put our mind on grabbing any bush or clump of grass that will get us over the lip of that drop." Benning swallowed. "Okay." "Now listen," said Heyden. "You're going to need plenty of hot coffee in here, and I don't know if you can literally keep going withr out any break. We don't want a bunch of zombies staggering around in here holding the wrong end of the wrench." "You're right. Could we have tome rough army blankets and some narrow folding cots? That's heaven for an exhausted man, but he shouldn't be too reluctant to get up." "Good idea. Now can you finish it by the day after tomorrow?" Benning nodded. "If, God willing, nothing else goes wrong." V T he next day was a nightmare. Suppliers were beginning to need reassurance about pay. A weird rumor was making the rounds, to the effect that Grossrad had stripped the corporation treasury and was now settled down in Brazil with a nicely tanned blonde mistress, the two of them living cozily in a mansion with an Olympic-sized swimming pool outdoors, and gold-plated faucets indoors. Heyden put the rumor down temporarily by showing the two handaddressed envelopes from Grossrad, with their recent postmarks, but the rumor failed to stay down. It popped up again with new refinements. Someone who looked just like Grossrad had been seen in Brazil by Milton Sharpbinder, vice-president of Interdisciplinary Intellectronetics, and Milton had immediately called back to sell his holdings in Continental Multitechnikon before the bottom fell out. Somebody else had actually been out near Grossrad's Brazilian mansion, and had seen him lolling with a bottle in a deck chair while the blonde did laps in the Olympicsized pool. The details mounted up fantastically. Grossrad had been seen wheeling around the streets of Rio driving a Mercedes-Benz roadster. Later information had it that it was a # #SL Mercedez-Benz with removable hardtop, and Grossrad was gripping a long thin cigar between his teeth, and had one arm casually around the blonde. SomeIF how, the burgeoning details added further solidity to the rumor, which grew yet more solid as Grossrad moved on and was seen with the blonde at Copacabana. That this was not just a local rumor developed as Continental Multitechnikon began to slide on the stock market while other space tocks were creeping upward. This, in turn, seemed to support the rumor. In the midst of this, with suppliers demanding payment in solid-gold bars on delivery, the phone rang and a familiar voice jumped out: "Say, Heyden, what the hell is going on out there? I just got a phone call from Sam, and he's -- " "Stu?" shouted Heyden, his voice filled with synthetic delight. "Hello? Is that you?" "Is it me? Who the -- " "Hold on! Listen, we've got a bunch of guys here who think -- wait a minute. Where are you calling from?" "Where am I calling from? Santa Barbara. What about it? Listen, what -- " "Where have you been the last week?" "I've been holed up, getting over what we had to go through to get that merger across, what do you think? Didn't you get my letter? Listen, what the -- " "We've got a bunch of guys here that claim they don't supply us, because you're down in Brazil with a blonde, rolling around in a Mercedes #SL." "I'm what?" Before Heyden could say anything, one of the men in the room said nervously, "Is that him? How do we know -- " Heyden said, "I don't know if yoH heard that, Stu. They think maybe this isn't you. Could you talk to a few of these -- " "Wait a minute now. What is this? I don't get this." # # T) race yourself. There's a rumor afloat that you've disappeared, vanished completely, and someone like you has been seen in Rio by -- get this, Stu -- by Milton Sharpbinder, who immediately dumped all his holdings in Continental before the news of what had happened got out -- " "Sharpbinder, eh?" "Yes, and someone else definitely saw you living in a mansion down there with gold plumbing and a big swimming pool. It seems you were outside by the pool, taking the sun, watching this blonde plow back and forth -- " Grossrad laughed. Heyden said, "Before you laugh this off have you taken a look at the financial page lately?" On the other end of the line, Grossrad was starting to have hysteria, but that brought him around. "No," he said, "that's one thing I haven t been doing. I've been trying to get a rest. Is this stupid play by Sharpbinder actually -- " "We're going down. Everybody else is going up." "That boob is just one week too late to hurt us. If this drop had come last week, without our having any idea what was wrong -- " "Just the same, I still don't think it would hurt if you showed yourself out there." "I will. Now, let me speak to a few of these boys that think I'm in Brazil." Heyden said, "Okay," and held out the phone. A few minutes later, Grossrad was saying to Heyden, "I had no idea this was the trouble. Sam went through all kinds of verbal contortions trying to tell me something without giving away anything. The impression I got was that you were making off with the treasury, not me." He laughed. "I was relieved to even hear your voice." Heyden laughed. " was relieved to hear you. I was starting to believe this business about the blonde." Grossrad laughed so hard Heyden had to hold the phone out away from his ear. Then Grossrad, halfchoked, said, "Say, Jim, you won't skip out now? You will be there when I get back?" "Either here, or halfway to the moon." "I know what you mean." Grossrad burst out laughing again. "I was in orbit myself for a little bit there. Well, so long, Jim. I'm going out and make myself public." Heyden felt like a hollow shell as he put the phone back in its cradle. But, with an effort of will, he looked deliberately around the room, and studied the shamefaced glances that looked back at him. "Now," he said, with forced calm, "can we go back to doing business on a normal basis?" No one offered any objection. T he needed supplies came in, but the tension failed to ease. The final day was the worst. The comptroller came to Heyden's office while Heyden was on pins and needles to go see Benning, and it was a precious half-hour before Heyden could get free. Then, just as he was leaving his office, a telegram arrived from Grossrad telling when he would be back. Heyden glanced at his watch and saw with a shock that he had only two hours and fifteen minutes left. If he wasn't at the airport, Grossrad would be puzzled, and then curious. If he was at the airport, Grossrad would be bound to question him about the Kiddie Kits, and the lack of work he had done on them would show up quickly. Either way, the lid would be off inside an hour more at the longest. That gave him three hours and fifteen minutes. Heyden sucked in a deep breath, forced himself to look brisk and confident, and went to see Benning. He found Benning slumped on a bench with his head in his hands. Heyden stared around. A number of men were asleep on cots, or rolled up in a blanket on the floor. Several their cups. Heyden looked at the spaceship. Despite what he'd said about forgetting appearance, the overgrownboiler look had been softened, at least from this angle. There was a shining silvery surface, that shaded off to one side. Heyden blinked, and glanced at Benning. "Say, you've moved this?" Benning looked up drearily. IF Heyden glanced uneasily back at tile spaceship, with its radiating arms holding what must be the driveunits. "Ben -- " he said. "It's all right, isn't it?" Benning looked down at the ground. "It doesn't work." Heyden shut his eyes. Benning's voice reached him. "I'm so tired I can't think. It worked once. We rotated the ship on minimum power. It was smooth -- perfect. And it apparently burned something out. We're all half-dead. We've checked and checked -- " Heyden forced himself to be sympathetic. "You've been working overtime for three weeks." He sucked in a long breath. "Is everythin o on board that I had on that list?" "Everything. But it doesn't work. There's no response at all." "How long to fix it?" "We'll have to tear it down completely." "How long?" "Another three weeks." Heyden sank down onto the bench beside Benning. "Oh, God," said Benning miserably. "Jim, I'm so sorry I got you into this." "Yeah," said Heyden. "It's a flop," said Benning. "We should have taken more time to test it. We ran off half-cocked." TJeyden didn't say anything.tiBenning said, "All that money. I'm so sorry, Jim. What will Grossrad do?" Heyden shut his eyes. Benning's voice came through. "We must have been crazy. That's the only explanation. No one ever does anything like this. Well, now we pay the piper." Heyden dizzily looked up to see the big shiny boiler through a haze. Someone was leaning out the door, and put his hands to his mouth like a megaphone. "Hey, Chief. The trouble is, somebody left this master switch open, back of the control panel." Benning sat paralyzed for an instant, then sprang from the bench He was across the floor and inside the ship before Heyden realized what had happened. Slowly, the meaning seeped through to Heyden. He watched. The big silver form lifted, hovered, and then smoothly rotated, the radiating arms swinging around like the spokes of a giant wheel, the central hub shading from silver to gray to black, then back to silver again. Smoothly it settled down, with a faint grating crunch. Heyden stood up. Across the room, the sound of that faint crunch turned men around at the coffee boiler. An instant later, they recognized the ship's changed position, set their cups down with a bang, let out a wild yell, and ran to wake up the men on the cots and stretched out on the floor. Heyden was still fervently thanking God when the men burst into cheers. Then Benning was wringing him by the hand. All around the huge room, it seemed that people were banging each other on the back. Heyden sucked in a deep breath. "Listen, when can we take off?" "Take off?" Benning looked blank. "We're finished. The thing's ready. It's completed, and it works." Heyden stared at him. "Do we talk different languages? What do you think we're going to do now?" Benning stared at him. "Show it to Grossrad. It's finished. It works. He'll see -- " Heyden opened his mouth and shut it with a click. "You remember what I said we wanted? -- A fullsize actual spaceship, so far as we could make such a thing. Now that we've got it, you think we're going to just show it to Grossrad? What good would that do? Outer space is in our hands, now, if that ship will do what we think it will do. And yet, what can Grossrad do with it but use it as a working model? What good does that do?" Benning swallowed. "You mean, we -- " "Who else? Have we gone through all this to quit now? We have to carry this through all the way to the finish." Benning paled. "I thought we were going to make a demonstration -- " "We are. When can we take off?" "I thought all that food and the cargo and that other gear was just to make it look good. More realistic. More -- " "The idea is to keep us from starving out there, and to fix it so we can get some use out of this. Will that radio work?" "Everything should work." "Then," said Heyden, "let's get a crew and get out of here before something else goes wrong. It shouldn't be hard to get volunteers, should it? Can you pick the men who'll be most help to us?" Benning grinned suddenly. "We're going to try to do this like Lindbergh?" "Why not?" "What about germs on the moon? What about -- " Heyden said brutally, '"If you don't want to go, say so now." Benning paused. "I want to go." "Then pick the crew while I write a note to Grossrad." B enning nodded, and started over toward the coffee boiler. Heyden whirled, and went back to his office. He yanked out a sheet of paper, and wrote fast: Stu -- When you receive this, we should be, as I jokingly said earlier, on our way to the moon. Only, this is real. Now, this is the first commercial venture into space, and no doubt the Government will blow all its fuses. Nevertheless, it is up to us to make it pay. First, I'm afraid that at the moment we're in something of a hole, financially; but we have powerful radios, along with enough lights and selected chemicals to make ourselves seen, and it seems to me there are a few commercial outfits around that ought to be happy to pay through the nose to have IF a commercial beamed toward earth from the moon. Charge more for the visual stuff, Stu. When the Government screams, point out that they will get their cut of the profits in due time. There is doubtless a whole lot of rock and dust on the moon that it wouldn't break our backs to load into the ship, and that would sell for a price per pound to rival solid platinum, but I'm sure there will be objections to that. As the next best thing, I've gotten a large quantity of thin sheet metal and loaded it on board. While we're out there, we will orbit the moon. When we come back, we can stamp ship models, which can be colored suitably and molded in plastic for souvenirs. Bear in mind, each one of these will have been around the moon and back. Next, we have a large cargo of fabric, Stu, which will also go around the moon, and can be cut up into moon scarves and moon dresses when we get back. Figure out what you can make on this, without having to charge anybody more than he will cheerfully pay for the vicarious pleasure of taking part in this trip. If this doesn't cover expenses, and leave enough over for handsome bonuses all around, I'll be surprised. Incidentally, you might put tome of this money into a special fund -- I may need it for bail bond. Jim Heyden put the letter in an. envelope, wrote Grossrad's name on the outside, and gave it to his secretary to deliver. He went back down the corridor, found Benning waiting with his chosen crew, and climbed on board. The ship slid smoothly and easily out the big opened doors, paused momentarily, and then the ground began to fall away. Heyden was beginning to have doubts. He stepped back as Benning shut the door, and said, "How are the odds on our getting out there and having some little thing strand us a hundred thousand miles from home?" "Surprisingly poor," said Benning, "assuming we can count on odds at all when we're dealing with something this new." "Why? I mean, why are the odds against us poor?" "The amount of weight we can lift with this drive. Suppose just half the weight that goes into die lower stages of a chemical rocket could be added to the payload. Think of the added space, stronger materials, spares, and general increased margin of safety. After you work on stuff to be lifted by rocket, this is a dream." H eyden relaxed and glanced around. They were standing in a small chamber with a second door partly open behind them He became conscious of a continued sensation like that of rising in a very fast elevator. Benning said, "All the same, this Is incredible, in a way." "That -- we hope -- weTe going to the moon?" "No, we're used to that idea, fantastic as it would have seemed a few years ago." He frowned "No, It's -- it's -- " Heyden suddenly caught his thought. "That we're just doing it?" Benning sighed. "Yes. Without Without stewing over it. Without a hundred changes of direction and reevaluations." Heyden nodded. "But that's supposed to be more 'scientific'." "It's more bureaucratic, anyway. But even if a method is more scientific, that's beside the point. The point is to get the job done " said Benning. He stood thinking back to that endless interval when the ship sat dead on the ground and Benning told him the whole thing was a failure, and when the weight of failure crushed him down. Then he'd learned in his bones the penalty of following one's own judgment against the shrewd decisions of superiors -- when one's own judgment turns out to be wrong. But now, beneath his feet he could feel the solid unvarying thrust, lifting them up at constant acceleration and steadily increasing speed. Down far below now were the nations of the earth, run by monster bureaucracies made up of many people who hesitated -- partly because they sensed the awful penalty for failure -- to take the risk of questioning even the most self-defeating procedures. And yet, here were Heyden and Benning and their men, high above the bureaucrats, and rising higher fast, because they had risked disgrace and disaster. They were only here by the skin of their teeth, and Heyden was beginning to realize from his reaction just how long he would think before taking a risk like that again. But, all the same, they were here . "Come on," said Heyden, walking a little heavily under the steadily maintained thrust. "Let's either get to a place where we can sit down, or go up front to that window. Maybe we could see the moon." When we meet the aliens who inhabit the worlds of the galaxy's by Tom Purdom -- plus many other great science-fiction features, articles and stories In the May Worlds of Tomorrow. On sale now -- get your copy today! IF IF  Short Story B alt Dormer was conscious of the muted thunder of blood in his ears as he stretched out on the sleeping plate. In vain he tried to relax the lank five feet of his spare frame as he dropped the colorless hood of the mentrol unit over his head and upper torso. In a matter of minutes he would be walking outside the A valoris inner cabins -- moving through a lacy blue-green jungle to his rendezvous with the disturbingly shapely Halden called Alno. His mind roamed the planet in a carcass of steel -- while his own body stayed safely in the rocketl His sweaty fingers fumbled the knobs and studs that connected bis mind with the super mech nicknamed Cass. Once the contact was established he could forget that he was a graying little technician -- plain-featured, stooped, and timid. Ernest Lytte, senior member of the planet-mapping spacer's crew of three, would be busy for three or four hours, with his records. And Jefferson Carney, the fair-skinned, bluff giant, was on his own sleeping plate, hismentrols linked with the oper mech, Herk. He was free far two or three hours... He moved forward out of the retaining clamps. For a brief moment lie was yet Balt Donner, marveling at his handsome seven-foot frame and at the sleek bronzed pseudoflesh with the powerful warm muscles rippling beneath. And then he was Cass: super mech, humanoid robot, mentrol-linked extension of Balt Donner's brain. Only faintly, in the dim reaches of his brain, did he recall that he was actually a thinning-haired wisp of a man. Now he identified himself as the thousand-pound godlike being named Cass. He checked his paralysis gun, holstered at his hip, and patted the zippered pouches that formed his only garmenture here on Hald. The humanoids of this uncharted fourth planet of Greth II went unclad even as Cass. And the policy of star mappers is always to mingle as unobtrusively as possible with the native races. For this same reason Cass' well-shaped nose had vanished into blank tanned flesh, and he ported Haldian-type nostrils below cither elongated ear. The triple airlocks sucked softly shut behind him and he stood upon the springy bluish sward of the hillock's treeless crown. And below him, to the right of the well-trodden path to the marshy lowlands where the Haldians built their slime-daubed villages, he caught a glimpse of a furtive hearthaped face among the leaves of a carlet-flowered thicket. He hurried toward the face. And now it was fully revealed, and the curving loveliness of the feminine body belonging with it. "Azaa, Cass!" the hidden one's liquid voice welcomed. "Azaa, Alno," Cass replied. Forty hours with the banks of speech analyzers and recorders of the great ship briefing him in the simple language gave him a working knowledge of this Haldian tongue. "I saw the huge one you call Herk leave the god cocoon." She shivered daintily, daintily although she lacked but inches of his own seven feet of height. "I have great fear of him." She came closer, trembling. Cass chuckled, his deep voice a mellow rumble of thunder. He put his arm around the shoulders of the girl as she turned wide violet eyes upward. Momentarily he winced at the alien smoothness of her noseless features. Yet she was beautiful. He loosed her. "Herk will not harm you," he assured Alno. "Any more than will I." They started walking away from the ship in its hilltop clearing, Cass at his side. To Cass, or, more realistically, Balt Donner, such interest was heady as whiffed oxygen. In all his forty-odd years only his mother had ever admired or kissed the homely little Terran. "Perhaps," said Alno wistfully, "I will not long be an Outcast here on your hill, Cass. One of the People, Great Arm, has fallen into a pit. If he dies his Follower will come for me." IF "You do not sound happy, Little Tree Flower," Cass said. "When first we met you were weeping because your Follower had died beneath a fallen tree." "I know. I was banished from the village until once again I overcame my sin of being twinless. And the only other Outcasts were two old men. Never had Followers claimed them again." "Yetlnow when you may be free to return -- ?" "I could no longer visit you, Cass. Outcast and one of the People do not speak together. Rather would I remain Outcast and be near you." Cass' reactions to Alno's words were not typical of Earth men in Bah Donner. And by the time he had decided to venture a friendly embrace, Alno was a dozen paces ahead of him, peering on tiptoe into a papery black nest of skull-shaped material. "Three tiny vutaas!" she chortled happily, and her slim rounded arm disappeared into the hollow nest. The vutaa she held was featherless, colorless and plump as a huge grub, and its ugly stub-billed head was gaping hungrily. Alno daintily bit off the craning neck, spat and crunched greedily at the tender flesh. Cass felt what should have been a stomach turning over. For the moment he was gripped by a sick revulsion against space, the ten years of planet-mapping, the constant growing hatred of his two superiors aboard the Avalon and the alien and quasi-humanoid races they contacted. If he were only back on Earth again at his accustomed technician's job in the testing laboratories of Super Mechs Inc... A lno -- "Little Tree Flower" -- in the tongue of Hald -- screamed and dropped the clean-picked bones of the bird. She spun about and darted toward CaSs. "The serpent!" she screeched, casting quick glances backward. Cass shook himself and stepped past the terrified girl. Whipping from the concealing undergrowth beyond the dangling dark nest came a sinuous, bloodhued, saurian head and scaly neck. White shards of fangs glistened in the yellow moistness of that gaping mouth. A yellowish muscular rope was its tongue. Wisdom dictated that he use the paralysis gun. Instead he opened his big long-fingered hands and waited. He felt that he must pit the might of this giant's body against some tangible foe or go mad. Ernest Lytte fought the cumulative pull of space madness with ever-increasing doses of drugs, and Jeff Carney struggled along with alcohol and forbidden carousing on humanoid planets enroute. But until now the third member of the Avalon had kept his balance near Earth Normal with his work and the several hundred spools of teleview adventure recordings that had been brought along. The neck elongated, swaying nearer. The neck became the body, no larger around than Cass' body but thirty or forty feet in length. #S Stubby, double-jointed legs, tourclawed, studded the ridged serpent's belly. Dozens of them. Cass clamped his hands back of the hideous head. He squeezed, his hands sinking deep. The coils writhed, wrapping about him tautly, even as his hands ripped the reptile's head free. He tore away the entangling coils, glorying in the unhuman Strength and cunning of those robot fingers. This was all his timid dreams of heroism come to life. "Cass! Cass!" Alno's voice reached his ears at last. "The People come! They hunted the serpent. We must go." Cass tore a velvety fern-like growth from the path's edge and wiped the blood from his bronzed flesh. His eyes studied the speararmed People who now pushed into the path's opening. Tall they were, their noseless faces and elongated ears accenting the perfection of their naked bodies. And with them, close to the heels of each seven foot native, trotted the rounded intelligent beasts, the Followers. But two feet in diameter were the Followers, their four pudgy legs and four diminutive upper limbs less than a foot in length. Yet their two shallowly set eyes, pale blue and unwinking, and their slim ears lifting through a tangle of early black hair were all too repellently human to Cass. None of the People or the Followers paid any heed to Cass or the girl. They were Outcasts, taboo, because they had no Followers. They were out of step in the peculiar system of three sexes on Hale And so, to the People and their grotesque doglike companions, they did not exist. A lno and Cass hurried on down the path toward the edge of the swampy lakes rimming the hill. "I still cannot understand it, Alno," Cass muttered. "How two so unlike creatures could be born of the same mother. You are four-limbed -- they are eight-limbed." "Always was it so," the girl smile. "But do not the Outcasts, those without Followers, have young?" "Perhaps." She smiled, invitingly at Cass. "You are strong, Cass. Much stronger than any of the People in my village." Cass was not to be diverted. He wished to know more. "The Followers are born of the same mothers as the People?" Alno's wide violet eyes were puzzled. "Naturally." She frowned at Cass. "You must know that. Sureiy all your villages on Earth have twins who are Followers! Only poor dumb beasts have no twins." "You -- you've been there." Cass was fumbling for words. "When babies were born -- you've helped?" The girl's mouth dropped. She gave a startled little cry and then she was laughing merrily. "You are making fun with me now," she accused, "for of course you know that only Followers care for mothers and their young." Cass grunted something. "Of course. But I wondered whether your customs were not different." IF "How could they be?" Alno's uncomprehending face was pouting. "The People are the same anywhere. If they were not they would not be the People." The path ended where a ridge of moss-grown grayish granite pushed out into the semi-fluid green soup of mingled water and aquatic plants. They sat down on a convenient ledge, the water lapping choppily at the rocks twenty feet below. "A Swimmer!" whispered Alno in an awed voice, her eyes fixed on a spot a hundred feet or more from shore. Cass sighted the Swimmer's graceful golden-green body. In all the eighty hours of their stay on Hald they had seen but two other Swimmers. Lytte and Carney's theory was that these sacred almost-gods were a very rare and intelligent race of amphibians. He caught an impression of golden-flecked blue eyes, wise eyes, in a weirdly unhuman face. Flippers, or blunt limbs, propelled the drifting Swimmer leisurely along. And the mysterious swimming creature was eight-limbed. Of that he was positive. "Another -- and another!" Alno's hushed voice thrilled Cass. She clung to the super mech's muscular arm. Cass watched the weird creatures of the warm seas of Hald until they dove at last beneath the floating green surface and disappeared. One part of his mind was busy with the puzzling alien life of this planet -- but another portion was all-too conscious of the warmth and softness of the female's body at his side. Clumsily he encircled her waist His handsome noseless face came down upon her own, and their lips met. He did not lose the illusion of being Cass. All the sensations of taste, smell, warmth and pain transmitted faithfully through the mentrols. And then memory of the vutaa's headless body, these satne lips bloodied by the bird-thing's raw flesh, came to him. He pushed away, stood up. Suddenly he was just a middleaged, slightly muddled little man controlling a robot, and she was a savage alien. Cass sighed, his feet oddly heavy as he turned to go. "Time I was getting back, Alno." T he forty hours of Haldian daylight were almost ended. Balt Donner was working thoughtfully at a delicate bit of control mechanism, and Jeff Carney had just returned from a routine tour of the great ship's outer storerooms and holds. Always, after a session with the mentrol-controlled robot, Herk, he worked off the nervous strain so. And after that he would get very drunk and shout insults through the intercom system at Ernest Lytte. Usually, that is. Tonight, however, he bypassed the alcohol and the intercom. Instead he went directly to Lytte's cabin. With the intercom system linking Balt Donner to them there was nothing secret about their conversation. "Think I've cracked this third sex setup here on Hald," he boomed. Donner could imagine the dark cowl of bony Ernest Lytte it this interruption. "Record it," Lytle's reedy voice crackled back. "So you can bypass it for your stinking beetle carcasses and edible grasses." Carney's heavy voice was insulting. "Not much! You're listening " mg. "Correction," Lytte said, his voice sharpening. "This para says you're leaving." Donner heard a scuffle of movement, a chuffing soft sound -- the blast of paralysis rays in the cramped confines -- and then the meaty impact of a clenched fist or a gun butt on flesh. He pushed back from the bench, his slim sensitive fingers twitching nervously. "There," Carney's voice was breathless. "You're slow, Lytte. Not enough exercise. And drugs don't help." "I'll kill you," promised Lytte, his voice low and deadly. "As I was saying, Lytte, it's about this Follower setup. The old natives I've contacted have no Followers. And they're old. But in the villages all the humanoids and Followers are young." "Make a recording, Carney," said Lytte tonelessly. "You old space-wracked -- " Carney's harsh laugh crashed out shortly. "I'm hot recording this. But after dark I'm checking up on what I suspect." "I refuse to listen." "Refuse. But you'll listen. Remember those cells I discovered along the swamp edge? Like oversized cocoons." Carney must have slammed Ms fist down on a desk for emphasis at this point. "I'm examining them tonight. This whole setup is crazy. I don't believe the humaniods and the Followers are of common ancestry. A third sex or neuters doesn't explain it," Carney said. "You can't do It, Carney!" exploded Lytte. "We pledged ourselves not to meddle with the political or religious beliefs of the planets we map. Nor to kill or enslave any reasoning entity." "That's why I'm waiting for night. The natives won't be about. And when I have my proof ve can blast off for the dayside again." "It's dangerous, Carney. I warn you not to risk it." "I know. Clean hands for Ernest Lytte. And Rabbitnose Donner listening on the intercom to back you up. But you know you're as curious as I am." "Curious, yes, but there are rules." "Rules!" Carney roared angrily. "I'll ready the equipment and have Donner check over Hercules." Donner heard the big man's feet on the deck. "Hear that, Donner?" the voice roared from the intercom. "Yes sir," agreed the little man almost inaudibly. "I'll check the super mech at once." "And stand by to follow with that girl-faced Casanova mech in case I am in trouble." "Very good, sir," agreed Balt Donner. He started assembling the gauges and tools he would need. IP T hree hours later he was once again lying on the sleeping (date beside the plastic dome shielding the mentrols, and the hood was damped lightly down upon his corded neck and chest. Here he could keep in communication with Jeff Carney, but he could also be following the huge super-mech, Herk, with its fellow robot, Cass. Lytte was sulking in his cabin, his eyes glassy and his senses blanked by an overdose of the drugs so essential in star hopping. For fifteen, perhaps twenty, hours he would be little better than a witless cretin. "Have reached a nest of the cocoons, or cells," came Carney's voice over the intercom. "They're located in a group of water-rooted trees, almost an islet. Twelve of them." Cass came alive in his clamps as Balt Donner pressed the mentrol's activating stud. He passed out through the triple locks. About his tapering slim waist were belted twin paralysis pistols, and over his shoulder projected the short snout of a heavy paralysis rifle. The super-mech crossed the treeless clearing, the dewwet sward softening his footfalls. He could see well, his eyes adjusted to the invisible radiations from his chest torch. An erect running shape blundered toward him. He recognized the slim alien features. Alno! She ran unseeing into his arms. In time Donner remembered to shut off his throat mike as she cried out. "It's Cass," he said. "But where do you go in the darkness?" "It has come!" she cried. "A Follower has summoned me. Great Arm is dead, A ad I am to go to the village." "I am glad for you, Alno." "Then you do not wish me to remain Outcast -- like you?" Her voice was wistful, and yet unsteady. He could sense that her loyalty to her people battled the strange attraction she felt for him. And he was relieved to know she would obey hit desires. "We are of different villages. Of different worlds. Go back to your village." "As you wish, Cass." Her voice was throaty. "But once more, please, the tasting of lips." Cass grimaced into the darkness. Odd how soon the infatuation he had cultivated earlier had vanished. She was warm and pleasant m his arms, but any desire for her had gone. With a smoothness and practiced skill, result of hours spent watching teleview recordings, he drew her close and let her taste his moist synthalips. He was the very epitome of a polished, and bored, Casanova -- not the mousy little Balt Donner of Earth. Carney's heavy voice burned inte his ears as the girl slipped, softly sobbing, away into the darkness. And Donner flicked on the mike. "You there, Donner?" "Yes sir." "Thought you were sleeping." "Not a chance, sir." "Found what I was after. Opened two of the pupae cases. They'ie partially developed Swimmers jut as I expected. Explains the lack of middle-aged and old natives." "Something like the insects of earth," hazarded Donner. "In a way." "All these humanoids turning into amphibious monsters." C arney chuckled. "In a way you're right. But it's not that simple. You forget the Followers." "That's right. What about them? Where do they go?" "They're in the chrysalis. In fact they construct it. And they choose the time for this final metamorphosis." "But just how -- ?" "Can't tell you more at the moment, Donner. See a couple of Swimmers offshore and I want to take a few pictures." Cass started down the hill again. And now he carried the rifle cradled in his arms. He had feared that the cocoons would be guarded, though he had hardly suspected the Swimmers of being interested. "Donner! Get that super-mech down here at once!" Carney's voice was strained and strangely muffled. "Paralyzed the two Swimmers. Then a few dozen more landed on my back. They broke my para with their flippers. Now they're working at... "Hurry, Donner! My lord, there goes a leg! Something shorted. The other leg's gone dead too. They're twisting off my arms. Ripping out my equipment!" The Donner part of Cass groaned. Precious irreplaceable parts! And this was the third of the four supermechs to be damaged or lost since leaving Earth. The first super-mech they had left in a slimepit on that giant yellow planet -- its salvage impossible because of the crushing gravity. And on Xel IV's lone planet, ice-bound and lifeless, a crevasse had swallowed up the second mentrol-controlled mech. Cass came bursting through the trees, out toward the isolated clump of trees now swarming with glistening-hided amphibious life. There was no sign of Herk in that fluid mass. He leveled the paralysis rifle, sweeping it in a broad arc that was half a circle. The Swimmers slid, quivering and twitching, away from the stilt-rooted bases of the trees, and Cass could see the shattered metal and gleaming plastics and quartz of what had but now been a smoothly functioning super mech. Cass groaned as he hastily gathered up the fragments of battered equipment. Even the robot's head was torn away and this he tucked under his left arm. Then, using the half-crushed torso as a container, he salvaged all the visible parts. Back through the trees he raced. Back to the Avalon and its triple locks. And once inside he activated the meteor screen. There would be no blundering of Swimmers upon the spacer this night. H e went down the corridor to his workshop, carrying the battered torso of Herk. And there a haggard-eyed giant, his pink-whiskered cheeks oddly gray, was waiting. He wrenched at the powerful arm of Cass. "It isn't ruined, is it?" IF Cass shook his head. "Hopeless," he rumbled. Carney's eyes were wild. "But with only one super-mech!" "I know. If this last super-mech goes bad, we're through." "We must blast back to Earth. Now! At once!" "Without completing the swing?" Cass asked. "There yet remain seven possible planets to explore and map." "Our present information is sufficient," bellowed Carney, sudden rage restoring his color and vitality. "As you wish -- sir," said Cass, withdrawing from the shop. Gently he put down what remained of Herk. "I'm blasting off at once, Donner. Clamp your boob-faced dummy in his cell and join me in the control room." "Yes, sir." "About these Followers, Donner. You didn't get the right of it. The cocoons are for themselves. The humanoids sealed inside with them are for nourishment during the change!" Carney's laughter brayed after him. And as he strode blindly toward the super-mech storage compartment his mind was reluctantly accepting the truth. For the Swimmers were octopods, even as were the Followers. Carefully the People were bred and cared for -- even as are the c tie and sheep of Earth. Back Follower was assigned to look after and follow his own future food supply. Undoubtedly, too, most of the thankless and heavy tasks were controlled. Then, when the time was ripe for the change, and when the humanoids had reproduced their kind and were grown sleek and fat, the grotesque "twins" paralyzed their charges and spun the cocoons. The metamorphis slowly came about, and eventually the Swimmers split apart the outworn cells and escaped. Leaving behind -- Balt Donner gagged. He waj seeing Alno, happy to be once again given a twin, and then he was seeing her empty husk, drained of all edible tissues and fluids, within the broken shell of the chrysalis. The feet of the super-mech stumbled uncertainly across the cabin. His mental commands were confused. Viciously he drove Cass back into the clips retaining his half-ton body. He locked it there, and then broke contact. He pushed up the mentrol hood, his scuff-clad feet reaching for the deck. Earth was far away and the yean were long. He was sick to death of alien cultures and savage worlds. Only in the depths of space might he find a measure of forgetfulness.      #W IF  Novelette The planet was an enemy at Mankind -- all of it I I I t was not clear to Steve Duke what a Gree ship-of-the-line was doing in this unimportant little eddy of the galactic rim, all alone except for a single exploration ship onetenth her size. Of course, she might be the bait in a trap; therefore, though she was a prize well worth the risking of his Scout squadron, he stayed hidden for the moment, as close as comfort allowed to the big red star of the binary, keeping watch via a series of tiny instrument drones. The exploration ship had evidently visited the single planet of the binary system, a world of moderately Terrestrial type except for being too close to the red star's smaller bluewhite companion. Steve had already noted that there were no radio emanations from the planet, or other hints of technology -- indeed, it was a planet where one would not look for any life. Why, then, had the huge fighting ship been summoned? He watched. Shortly after the exploration ship finished matching courses, the big ship fired a salvo of missiles in the general direction of the blue-white star. Steve could not tell, from the picture his drones no brought back, what kind of missiles Aey were. It was obvious, though, tfiat it was not battle-salvo, because there was no swarm of smaller computer-guided missiles along to fight off a counter-salvo. Neither could it do anything to the blue sun except raise an insignificant short-lived flare. Therefore, it must be aimed at the planet. He considered nulling a larger drone close, but decided it was too risky. Yet, if Gree explored a planet then hastily bombed it -- probably with cobalt bombs, or something equally deadly -- Steve wanted to know what was there. Suddenly deciding, he jabbed at a button on his console and said into his helmet mike. "All ships except number Two. I'm locking you into central control. Battle Condition One. Null m thirty seconds. Two, stay here and collect the rest of the drones, Ihen compile a report to date and null it to Headquarters. If you lose contact with us, leave at once. Otherwise, we'll send message drones once an hour. Out" H e nulled the eleven ships in a group and spaced in ahead of flie Gree salvo, far enough from the Mg ship to avoid direct detection and far enough from the salvo to avoid instrument drones that would be with it Then he got on the command circuit again. "We're foing to have a busy twenty hours or so, in a little while. When those missiles orbit the planet, we're going to shunt them off one by one -- on fee other side of the planet, where ft won't be seen -- and substitute simple warheads of our own, so Greell think the planet's sterilized. We'll have to locate any watchdrones and neutralize them temporarily. We can't be seen, and we can't let a single Gree bomb hit the planet Better get all your computers cleared of everything else; they'll be busy. Gunnery Officers, get your own material ready. Gunnery One, I want a co-ordinated tentative plan right away and a team to keep revising it as we get more data. Any questions?" There were only a few technical questions. Then the CO of Scout Three dared the question that was in everyone's mind. "What are we going to do when we finish with the bombs, Colonel?" "When -- and if -- we finish with them, I'll take a small team down and see what's got Gree so scared." There were times during the operation when Steve thought he was failing, and once he was mere seconds from death; but eventually all the deadly bombs were shunted away from the planet, and detonations of his own produced convincing clouds in the atmosphere. He sent the squadron, except for his flagship, into null; in case the Gree leviathan hadn't been fooled after all. As soon as he could, he'd have himself set down on the planet and send the flagship away too -- the sooner the better -- but before that he had to scout briefly from space. The planet had a diameter close to twelve thousand miles and a density, compared to water, of a little over three point nine, which meant a comfortable surface gravity. With such a total mass and considering the amount of dispersed gas (especially hydrogen and helium) in the neighborhood of the binary, there might have been a very dense atmosphere, but it only computed to a little over twenty pounds per square inch at the surface. It didn't take long to realize why. This planet kept one face always turned to the blue-white sun. The temperature at meridian on that side was something over two-hundred degrees Centigrade, which meant that a lot of air molecules must reach escape velocity. As a matter of fact, he realized, if it hadn't been for the huge red companion star, there wouldn't be any atmosphere at all, to speak of. What didn't boil away on the hot side would be frozen on the dark side. As it was, the latter hemisphere would only be dark, and space-cold or nearly so, for part of the year, when the orbit around the blue star faced it away from the red one. At the moment about a third of the off side was lit with a mild reddish light, and obviously was warm since unfrozen seas and lakes could be seen. It was a beautiful world, seen from space. An impossible one, though, for carbon-based life. Or was it? There seemed to be a band, the twilight of the blue star's fierce glare, that was neither baked nor frozen -- even where the red star's gentle illumination did not fall. Steve frowned at the viewscreen. It wasn't only that the blue sun's rays went in slantingly through the deep atmosphere, but a narrow, very high wall of clouds along the bright edge of the twilight zone cast long semi-shadows, ending in an actual rainbow upon the ground. The whole band was five hundred or a thousand miles wide, depending upon where one set the arbitrary limits. It seemed to him that there was more green in it than there should be. He called his Med Officer, the nearest thing he had to a biologist. "Did we read for chlorophyll?" "Why, no sir. I thought it was obvious that -- " "So did I; but I think we'd better check." However, even before the spectrograms confirmed it, Steve was sure. The twilight band was vegetated. II H e decided to take with him only two B'lant crewmen; a mature one named Vrebl, who'd been with him on several missions, and a young one named Zaanj who had the standard training, if no experience. The ship deposited the three of them on a large rock in a field of grass that grew higher than a man's head, just over a ridge from where the Gree team had camped. The chill air had a faint musky smell. No large animals had been seen from the ship, but here and there the grass waved with hidden movements. On a saberlike grassblade ten feet away and only a little below eye level, an insect the size of Steve's thumb perched on six fat legs, and, he was sure, stared back at him out of bulging faceted eyes. It looked like a giant bumblebee that had lost its wings. Then, ir suddenly, the fat legs exploded with hairs or tiny feathers and became wings which blurred into motion. The thing droned away, very slowly and in a straight line, like a mechanical toy on a stretched wire. Here and there above the grass, other such bugs floated in the same way. Several hundred yards away something flapped along on slow rigid wings, like a monstrous moth. It must have had a six-foot wingspread. It seemed to be catching the two-inch bugs and eating them on the fly. Along one horizon -- technically it had to be called the west, but only because of their position relative to the planet's north pole -- was the wall of cloud that hid the blue sun; murky at the horizon, luminous farther up, with a bright fringe at the top that hinted at a spectrum. That one brightness only accentuated the gray bloom that surrounded Steve and the two B'lant. Above the bright fringe the sky was dirty blue. As the eye arched overhead, the blue became darker until, in the 'east' where no sun would ever rise, it was black and the stars stood out. Northward and a little east, a faint reddish glow above the ridge revealed the direction of the red sun. Steve told his two companions, "We'll have a look at the Gree campsite first, then we'll head north. There are some mountains there, and their other slopes will be lit by the red sun. We ought to be more comfortable there. A ways beyond is the ocean, where we'll wait for the ship. It'll be back in five hundred hours unless we call it back sooner." H e began allocating supplies and equipment to be carried. Some of the more vital things, such as the small message drones that were the only way to contact the squadron, he assigned to Zaanj, who because of his inexperience would walk second. Steve would lead the way, even though he'd chosen B'lant partly because their thick gray skins would withstand the swordlike grass better than any other 'humanoids'. It would be up to Vrebl to keep a watch to the rear. It was depressing in the grass, totally cut off from everything but the dismal sky overhead. Steve pushed on grimly, forcing a way by holding his rifle at a slant ahead of him, and was very glad when they crossed the top of the ridge and found themselves in the open. The wide shallow ravine below them was in even deeper gloom. This slope, and the opposite one, were rocky, with only scattered patches of grass. At the bottom a small creek found a crooked way among flat slabs that looked like weathered lava flows. He helped Vrebl and Zaanj set up electronic sentries, then unslung his field glasses. The campsite, on a level spot beyond the creek, was marked by a triangle of fire-blackened stones and some empty food containers. That the Gree team had left without policing up attested to its haste. He couldn't tell, in the uncertain light, where the ship had parked. They broke out field rations, ate, and made themselves as comfortable as possible. Nothing moved in the ravine for a couple of hours. Then there was a stir in a dump of grass halfway up the opposite slope. Steve focussed on the spot. Something dark and bulky moved into the open and came down the incline, slowly and haltingly. Once it went flat for three or four minutes, then heaved itself up and continued. He couldn't make out its exact shape, but it seemed to move on four stumpy legs. One of the giant moths came gliding over the ridge, circled the thing a few times, and flapped away, without any sign of reaction from the beast. The thing reached the campsite and nosed around very deliberately among the fire stones and empty containers. Presently it moved downstream and seemed to be digging at the edge of a small patch of grass. S teve abruptly stowed the glasses, got to his feet and told Vrebl, "Stay here and watch. Get on the radio if anything tries to sneak up on us." To Zaanj he said, "Come with me. Well cover each other. I want a close look, then I want to it, if possible." He scuttled alone to the nearest clump of grass, scouted it quickly then motioned Zaanj to him. They worked their way in such relays to the stream below the animal, waded across, and approached the clump of grass carefully. Steve set his rifle for the anesthetic darts, made sure Zaanj did likewise, then motioned the young B'lant around the other side of the clump. When Steve got where he could see the animal, he stopped, with a feeling almost of nausea. It was turned partly away from him, scraping slowly and awkwardly at the ground with one stubby forepaw. He should have been able to see its head from this angle, but couldn't. The hind legs were stumpy too, with bulbous clumsy feet. But it was the thing's pelt, if it could be called one, that revolted Steve. It looked like a huge and obscenely filthy and moth-eaten fur coat. Dried grass clung to it as if the creature had wallowed in glue then rolled in a haystack. There were also packed masses of the large bugs, dead and dismembered, and scraps of what looked like rotten leather. The thing stopped pawing and stood, flanks aheave with its loud rasping breath. Then, as if under mindless compulsion, it resumed the slow pawing. Zaanj stepped into sight beyond the creature, froze, and let out a shocked sound. The thing reared up, clumsily, whirled toward Steve, saw him too, and lurched away from both of them. It struggled to its hind legs, staggered, caught its balance. It ran up the slope, awkwardly but with fair speed. Its stride was almost humanoid, or like a humanoid hobbled. Now Steve saw there was a head, or at least a formless bulge between hulking shoulders. He could hear its hoarse gasping. He put an anesthetic dart into it and saw it jerk; then, more for his own state of mind than because he thought it necessary, another. He glanced at Zaanj. The normally phlegmatic blunt face was twisted in IP horror. Zaanj's rifle hung forgotten in one hand. Steve found himself grinning. "Come on. It won't get far." H e was wrong. The thing labored badly near the top of the slope, but reached it and pushed into the grass. When they reached the spot Steve held up a hand for silence. He could hear the beast deep in the grass, panting, but still going on. There were other furtive rustlings in the grass. He didn't think he wanted to pursue. He led the way back down the slope, meanwhile calling Vrebl on the radio, "Gather up the stuff and come on over. Stay in the open where we can cover you." By the time the older B'lant joined them, they were standing where the animal had dug, staring down. There was only a small area of plastic exposed, but Steve knew what they'd find, and he was right. It was a Gree slave, neither B'lant nor human, buried in his uniform and a limp plastic spacesuit. The face was horribly battered or eaten, and dark fragments clung to it, as if a coating of something like black wax or hard rubber had been scraped off. Steve turned away. "Let's find some rocks to pile over him, then we'd better get away from here." He didn't say so, but he had a strong hunch that before the humanoid in the grave had been cleaned off he'd looked like the creature they'd chased. He had an impulse to call a ship back at once. There was the risk of Gree ships lurking about, and he had confidence in himself and the two B'lant armed with rifles that could shoot, besides the darts, explosive bullets or laser beams. He decided not to call a ship. He'd seen from the air that the grassfield ended a few miles upstream. He worried vaguely that they couldn't get far before full darkness. Then he felt foolish and angry with himself. There wasn't any full darkness. He led them up the ravine, assigning Vrebl to watch behind. Ill F our hours took them ten miles upstream and perhaps three thousand feet higher. It was damper up here, and the rock tablelands were green and slippery with moss. The two-inch bugs were everywhere. Once Steve brought up suddenly and grunted a warning. Something the size of a large dog moved toward them. When it was closer he saw that it was a giant insect, with an ovoid body and six closely bunched stiltlike legs that moved in an odd mincing gait. A head the size of his two fists doubled together, with two great faceted eyes and several stubby antennae, swivelled from side  to side like a turret, mounted in the forward end of the body without a neck. At the other end was a three-foot whiplike tail that the thing carried over its back, like a scorpion's sting. Steve was about to shoot when it saw them and stopped. The mincing stride reversed and it backed away without turning, then stopped and was motionless for several minutes. Finally it turned with little prancing steps and moved to the side. Suddenly the legs flashed into motion and two of them thrust out forward to seize one of the two-inch bugs and haul it, feathery legs droning, to a pair of small mandibles on the head. Zaanj let out his breath and raised his rifle. Steve put out a restraining hand. "Never fire an unnecessary shot on a strange world." They found a flat area big enough so nothing could creep up on them, and made camp. From here they could see the unimpressive mountains to the north, with the reddish glow above them. Steve was by no means through with the Gree campsite, but it would be imprudent to stay near it just now. Later, if things went well, he'd come back with a larger, better equipped team. Right now he wanted to get out of this clammy twilight and to the other side of the mountains. Vrebl evidently followed his gaze and guessed his thoughts. "I hope there is game. Zis zings we see so far is not tempting." "No," Steve agreed. He suppressed a grin. It was a standing joke, if not strictly true, that a B'lant would eat anything. He idly watched one of the stilt-legged giant insects munch on a bug, warning away with its tail a monster moth that flapped around it. "At least," he said, "we'll take time now to heat some water and dump some soup powder into it" IF T hey traveled north, staying well above the grasslands, for fifty hours, with short stops. Then, within a few miles of the mountains, they found the way barred by a great rift. It looked about two miles wide and a thousand feet deep. No doubt it was some ancient rupture of the crust and related to the mountains, but it was filled in now with a level floor, and the grass had spread into it solidly except for the steep sides and the taluses at their bottoms. It looked as if it might reach a long way in either direction, so if they wanted to get to the mountains, they'd have to cross it. Once more, Steve found himself thinking in terms of day and night. Annoyed, he jerked out the binoculars. The way the grass rippled showed that a river of air moved along the rift, from the direction of the grasslands toward the cloud band on his left. He puzzled that out. The floor of the rift must slope slightly toward the left, even against the general rise of the land; and the air in the rift must be denser -- possibly this planet's peculiar seasons. There were giant moths down there, and stirrings in the grass that were not made by the moving air. He decided to climb down, then reconnoiter before pushing into the grass. He spied out a clear spot at the edge, and a way down to it. "Let's go." The air was dried and warmer at the bottom, and heady, and instruments showed a higher percentage of oxygen. The insect life was profuse. He set up sound amplifiers and listened to the rustles in the grass. They seemed to move in random directions. He looked at the B'lant to see what shape they were in, and said, "Let's get an hour's nap apiece, one at a time." When they'd had that, and there was still no sign of trouble, he said, "Well, we'd better get it. over with. Set the guns on laser. If anything actually attacks, burn it down quick then cut a circle around us in case there are more." Vrebl said, "Should I not go first? My skin -- " Steve shook his head. The B'lant were very reliable, once they'd learned something, but human reflexes were a little faster; and besides... He led off. He'd already learned, during the earlier trip in the grass, that the thing to do was to use his feet to bend stalks forward ahead of him, more or less breaking the way. Still, it was tedious going. H e timed his first hundred steps. At this rate, it would take them about an hour and a half to cross, which wasn't a pleasant prospect. The feeling of oppression returned. In about ten minutes he ran into a matted wall of grass that didn't yield. He muttered an oath as a blade slide along the back of his hand, giving him about the twentieth cut. He tried to go around the obstruction, thinking it was just a thick clump, and found it was actually a straight long barrier, stretching longitudinally in the rift. He stood perfectly still for a few molly ments, listening. There were no unusual sounds. He fished in his pockets for a small light and examined the barrier. The stalks were aot just matted; they were interwoven in a way that was surely artificial. He glanced at Vrcbl and Zaanj to see if they realized it too. They did. He said softly, "Let's get ourselves a little breathing room." He held the rifle low and triggered it, swung it in an arc, carefully avoiding the fence. Grass toppled upon him. The B'lant got the idea and helped him complete the arc and trample the cut stalks, until they had a clear half circle of about twenty-foot radius. It felt good. Carefully, he parted the thin stand of grass he'd left along the harrier and studied the latter more closely. The stalks were not only interwoven; where they crossed, little bridges had grown between them to hold them in place. The barrier was eight or ten stalks thick. No wonder it didn't yield easily. It would be simple to burn through it, r even hack a way with a knife, but he wasn't going to do either hastily. That might be what the Gree explorers had done. On the other hand, they might have followed along a similar fence to their doom. Could there be such a thing as sentient grass? If so, he'd just slaughtered some thousands of individuals. If they were individuals. But there'd been no sign of resistance or awareness. He bent and tugged at a stump until it came up. It had so ordinary, discrete root system, and when he sliced off the burnt end it oozed a light colorless liquid, as any grass might. H e turned back to the fence. He noticed now that the tiny bridges joining the Interwoven stalks were withered and dry, though the stalks were green. He found a few of the bridges ruptured, letting the stalks break away and in a few cases untangle themselves. He used a magnifying glass to examine the stalks, and the blades, for any sign of special organs. It was just big grass. He said, "Let's follow along this a ways to see if it ends or turns. At least, it protects us on one side." It wasn't until they'd gone a hundred yards or so that he realized he'd instinctively turned left, away from the grassfields. A half hour brought no change in the fence. He called a halt and turned on the sound amplifier to make sure there were no unusual rustlings around them. Then he gave his companions a look to alert them, triggered his rifle and cut a doorway through the fence. On the other side, he led on for about twenty yards, then stopped to listen again. In the next hour they found over a dozen of the fences. Some were very fresh -- that is, the bridges were not withered -- and some were so old they'd almost completely vanished. Sometimes dead stalks were held upright, still tangled with live ones, while new ones pushed up through the tangle. After the first two, Steve cut through them without hesitation. He was more interested in getting across the rift fast than in staying to ponder. They must have been threefourths of the way across when he ensed some change in the pattern of sounds. He crouched, listening. Something was approaching from ahead. He snapped, "Burn a clearing!" and slashed right and left with his own rifle. There was a grating sound somewhere close, and a thrashing. Grass collapsed upon him. He threw it off, did a hasty dance to get it trampled down. The B'lant were struggling similarly, Zaanj almost with hysteria, which was unusual for his race. Steve got clear of the last stalks and gestured toward the center of the clearing. "Back to back!" The rustlings had stopped, and the silence was worse. At the edge of their clearing, something bulky stirred feebly beneath fallen grass. Steve took four steps forward and poked the grass aside with his rifle. One of the stilt-legged things lay there, mortally burned. Its scorched stench mingled with the punky smell of burnt grass. Then he saw that the thing was swaddled in grass the rifles had never cut. Dried stalks were woven around its body and around each of the six legs, and a thick twisted grass rope circled like a collar where its neck should have been. The head was encased in a crude woven basket that left only patches of the huge eyes exposed. The stinger-tail was free, moving feebly. Steve ended its misery and retreated to his companions. They waited. The various rustlings resumed, then the thing he'd heard in front came on again. It mumbled now, almost m human speech. Zaanj whirled toward the sound, and Steve snapped at him, "Hold your fire!" IV A horrible caricature of a man pushed the grass aside and stood looking at them vaguely with dull bloodshot eyes. Steve couldn't tell what race he was because he was encased in woven grass much as the insect was, except that his head was buried in a mound of dead two-inch bugs. The eyes peered out through small tunnels. One of the arms lifted in an inhuman gesture, fell again. A black gap of a mouth split open in the horrible mass and an incomprehensive mumble came out. Steve fought down the urge to trigger his rifle, and demanded in English, which all Gree slaves spoke more or less, "Can you understand me?" The creature obviously r half understood. More mumbling emerged from its mouth. Then, one word came clear. "Gr -- Gree?" Steve hesitated. To say anything against Gree to a Gree slave was like talking to the wind, but this thing, perhaps, no longer had the mind of a Gree slave. Steve said slowly and distinctly, "Gree abandoned you. Gree wants to kill this planet. We stopped him. Do you understand?" The eyes strayed blankly, struggled back to Steve. Then they dropped to the rifle. "Kill?" the creature said absently. Steve dropped the muzzle toward tlf the ground. "No," he said, pointing to himself, "I won't kill you. I won't hurt you. Gree tried to kill vou." From the wavering of the eyes, it was clear the thing was struggling with the thought. There was none of the instinctive disbelief a Gree slave ought to show. Finally the eyes came back to Steve's face. "Gree... kill." Suddenly, the encrusted head began to nod laboriously. "Yes. Gree kill. You... not Gree..." An exhausted sigh, and the eyes went dull again. Steve waited a moment, but there were only vague mutters and small meaningless motions. He said, "Are you hungry?" That brought a flicker of intelligence. "Hu-hungry?" A hand came up, unsteadily. The fingers plucked slowly, absently, at a dead insect and crammed it into the mouth. The mouth chewed slowly, mechanically. There was a movement of swallowing, then an idiot laugh. The eyes were vague again. Steve said, "We won't hurt you. We will help you." Intelligence fought back into the bloodshot eyes, as if from another universe. They squeezed shut with the effort of speech. "You... not enemy..." The thing took an aimless step forward. Z aanj mouthed an hysterical sound and swept his rifle up. Steve batted at it, and the beam sizzled into the ground at the creature's feet. The creature leaped and lunged sideways into the grass, scrabbling to escape. Zaanj let go of the rifle and, mewling mindlessly, whirled to plunge into the grass on the opposite side. Steve shouted after him. Vrebl spun to follow, and Steve seized his arm. "Don 't get separated from me!" As they raced after Zaanj, Steve tossed a look behind and saw that the creature had vanished. They shouted for Zaanj, and called on the radio, and, when they knew they'd lost him, stood still and used the sound prck-ups. There were rustlings, many of them, and all seemed to be down the rift now and moving away, fast. They fought in that direction for a while until they had to admit they were hopelessly outdistanced. Vrebel stopped and turned, facing Steve silently. Steve said, "We won't find him this way. Let's get clear. If he's all right he'll come to his senses eventually, and use his radio." He headed back toward the clearing, as well as he could judge. "We've got to pick up his rifle." They found the clearing without much trouble. The rifle and the dead stilt-insect were still there. Steve picked up the rifle and, reluctantly, nodded to Vrebl to break trail. When they got clear Steve chose a spot part way up the side of the rift and they climbed as fast as they could. He stood a minute, fighting for breath, then, his hands clumsy with exhaustion, uncased the binoculars. He located an area of ripples, a mile or more down the rift, as if a small army were fleeing through the grass. He tried the radio again, without IF response. He swept the glasses around once more, then slowly put them away. "I think," he said, "we'll have to assume he's been captured. God knows by what. But it looks as if they're going down the rift. I think we'd better climb up and go along the rim; it'll be faster." As Vrebl looked reluctant, he added, "If he uses the radio, we'll still hear him." I t took over two hours to catch up with the army of ripples. They paralleled it, stopping when it stopped. Vrebl didn't protest, though obviously he wasn't sure they were doing the right thing. For that matter, Steve wasn't sure either; he was merely making the best gamble he could. However, after nearly seven hours, they had a bit of luck. There was an open pool of water near the far side, where a small creek came down; and, as they rested, Steve turned his glasses on the pool. There were small creatures of some sort at the edge of the water. Then he went tense. Two manlike figures waded into the water, which was only up to their calves, and slumped down into it, rolling and splashing and gulping great draughts like children on a hot day. One of them, Steve thought, was the afflicted Gree slave they'd talked to. The other, though woven grass partially covered him, might be Zaanj. He handed the binoculars to Vrebl. Vrebl looked a long time, then handed back the glasses. "Yes. It k Zaanj." "Well," Steve said, "we could try to rescue him. But it's more important for us to stay alive and sane until rendezvous time. We may not get to the ocean, but the ship'll make a pass this way and we'll reach her by radio. And I want to know where that bunch is headed. There's something significant about this rift." Vrebl thought it over, slowly. "Yes," he agreed finally, "zat is right. But is it not worz while to call ze ships early so we can rescue Zaanj?" Steve gave him an annoyed look. "I'm not all that cold-blooded. If you'll remember, Zaanj was carrying all the message drones." The land continued to slope up, and the floor of the rift continued to get lower. Steve left the edge when the going was faster away from it, returning every few miles to make sure the hidden army was still moving. The mountains loomed only a few miles to the north, so close the red sun's glow was completely hidden. Ahead, the cloud band towered incredibly, and its dark base seemed very close. The drizzles were heavier and more frequent here; the moss thicker. Still the movement in the rift went on. Steve was sometimes tempted to climb down, to get into the warmth and dryness again. He also kept thinking what it would be like to cross the mountains, feel the luxury of that red sun. It would be easy enough to rationalize that the right thing to do was to abandon Zaanj; keep the rendezvous with the ship. But -- he admitted it to himself -- the thing that really kept him going was curiosity about the rift. Then the drizzles became constant, and they were entering the cloud band itself. Sometimes the floor of the rift was obscured, and he led Vreb) along as fast as their exhausted bodies would take them, to find a clear spot and lie watching until the mysterious army caught up. It was very hard to keep track of now, even when the mist was thin, because of the deep gloom here under the clouds. There was no change for perhaps twenty-five miles more, then the clouds -- heavy mist now, that surrounded them except for a clear updraft out of the rift -- began to brighten. They couldn't go much farther without breaking out into the deadly rays of the blue sun. Then, the next time he looked into the rift, he found that it had changed. V I nstead of a smooth grassfield, there was a tangled steaming writhing jungle, slashed by weedchoked lagoons. The coiling tentacles that were so startling at first were only giant plant tendrils groping for holds on the tallest trees. Slug-like things -- they must be a foot long,or more -- crawled on the tendrils. Huge segmented worms undulated like eels through the thickgrown water, or looped themselves along limbs or tendrils. The giant moths were everywhere. He noticed that they, and the worms, carefully avoided the sluglike things, though the latter had no apparent means of defense. A smell of rot and fermentation rose in the updraft. He said, "I think we'd better backtrack a ways." It was only two miles or so back to where the swamp was invaded by long fingers of dry, grass-covered ground. Billows of mist showed how abrupt the transition actually was. He swept the binoculars up the rift There was movement in the grass, but he couldn't tell whether the bunch they'd been following was here yet. He studied the slope below him. The talus was high here, well above the grass. "I think we'd better go part way down, so we can see better." He chose a place that was high enough for a good angle of view, and far enough from the swamp so they couldn't smell it. They made camp and broke out rations. As he kept watch on the grass, Steve grew discouraged. The breezes were so broken here, and thers were so many random movements in the grass, as well as swarms of bugs, plus giant moths, that ho couldn't be sure of anything. He tensed as he saw a dark roughly globular thing bobbing along the surface of the grass, a little way up the rift and near this side. When it got closer he could see that it was not something's head, but a detached mass, a foot or more through, supported and moved along by stalks of grass that bent and gathered themselves beneath it. It progressed at what he judged to be lest than a mile an hour. Behind it. It left a visible trail which, he wee sure, would be one of the fences. He looked elsewhere. There were several such blobs in sight, all moving toward the swamp. He turned his glasses back to the close one. The surface was definitely grainy; and without actually seeing so, he told Vrebl, "I'll bet you half my soup powder that that's a ball of dead bugs." He handed over the glasses. Vrebl looked, then handed the glasses back. "Yes. I will not bet." The weird progress continued, swerved out onto one of the grassy fingers of land. Near the end of it, there was a halt and a period when the grass moved obscurely below the object. Then the ball shot up suddenly as if from a catapult, arched out and over, and plopped into the swamp. Steve saw water splash. Vrebl said, "Do you zink somezing is getting rid of garbage?" "No. I think something just deposited an egg. It attracted the bugs somehow, maybe by forcing juice out of the grass, killed them and formed them into a ball, with its egg inside." He put the glasses away and got slowly to his feet. "If something takes eggs to the swamp, whatever hatches will go back to the grass; and that's the time to see it. Let's get down there." O ne of the big slugs labored from the swamp, crawling where it could, wiggling painfully through the weed-choked water where it had to. It reached the finger of land where Steve and Vrebl were waiting, humped itself urgently to the edge of the grass and squeezed itself in among the stalks, where it slumped as if exhausted. After a while it stirred again. Pseudopods poked slowly from it and crawled up the nearer grass stalks. Others grew long and slim and felt about until each attached itself to a stalk. There must have been nearly a hundred, finally. The slug-body was shrunken and empty, and were already beginning to dry out. A trembling seized the stalks. They began to writhe like worms, near the bases at first, then higher until even the blades came alive. They interlaced themselves, those on the side away from the swamp searching farther, like blind snakes, thrusting themselves against new stalks, weaving in and out. Steve, heedless of danger, ran close and saw the controlled stalks grow tiny bridges to the new ones. The process grew faster and more confident, and he was reminded of a new-born colt finding its legs. Always, there were about a hundred stalks moving, but that hundred progressed away from the swamp, leaving behind the inert interwoven fence. Ten feet from the swamp, the live group was moving steadily at least two miles per hour. Steve thought of rushing into the grass ahead of the thing, burning a swath around it to isolate it and see what it would do. But that was an experiment that could wait for a subsequent landing. He tugged at the inert structure left behind. A few stalks pulled loose, but there was no reaction. This, then, was the thing that could not only live in grass, but could somehow take over animals. No wonder the humanoid they'd talked to didn't have the mind of a Gree slave; and no wonder Zaanj had never used his radio. Steve remembered the giant insect, clothed or shackled in grass. Did they just use animals as steeds, to move where grass didn't grow? Or did they use them for special purposes such as fighting? Zaanj didn't matter now. Even the message drones could be abandoned. The thing to do was to get to safety; make sure he and Vrebl stayed free until the ship arrived. He looked at his chronometer. They had time to get to the summit of the mountains, at least, where they'd have line-of-sight contact with the rendezvous spot. The radios had plenty of range. But there might be peril in the mountains. Wasn't it wiser to camp up on the edge of the rift, in an environment they'd already come to know? In any case, the first thing to do was to get out of the rift. He jerked his head to Vrebl. They made camp on a high spot of the rim, near the edge, where they could keep watch on the rift as well as on the mossy tablelands. Steve looked longingly toward the mountains. In a few hours, perhaps, he'd decide to leave the rift. Meanwhile, they needed rest. Then, a few hours later, he awoke from a nap to find that Vrebl had gone. IF VI T he B'lant had left all three rifles and most of the rations, and all the instruments except his own radio. Steve immediately called, and got no answer. He didn't have to look for a trail to know where Vrebl had gone. He got out the glasses and trained them on the grass below him. A quarter-mile out, the grasses stirred in a steady way that a walking man might produce. He laid a tentative hand on his rifle. He could put an explosive bullet close enough to kill the B'lant, and the breach of discipline justified it. That he liked Vrebl pretty final; maybe he could reserve the option for a while, and sec what happened. At the worst, he could evade Vrebl -- and Zaanj, if they joined forces -- until the ship came. And Vrebl deserved some consideration for leaving the rifles, and the other things. It wasn't just the breach of discipline, of course. Vrebl might be taken over by the grass-dwellers, and they might be able to absorb, somehow, what was stored in his brain. Vrebl knew quite a lot. Steve's superiors might decide, as Gree had, to sterilize the planet. He pushed such thoughts from his mind. His own duty was to stay alive and sane until the ship arrived. Actually, he should be on his way now, to some hiding place. Still he stood watching the movement in the grass. Suddenly, Vrebl was on the radio. "Please do not go away yet" Steve pushed the transmit button and said drily, "You know, you're a pretty easy target." "Yes, Colonel. And not only for you." The voice was calm. Steve said coldly, "I suppose you're looking for Zaanj." "He is of my -- clan is not ze right word." "I appreciate that. But what about your duty?" "I do not zink I can become a zret to you, Colonel. Wiz all ze rifles you need not worry." "Maybe so; maybe not. There may be things on this planet we haven't met. Your duty was to stay with me so we could protect each other." "Zat was part of ze gamble. If I am lucky, you will have ze message drones soon. I am looking for zem too, Colonel." S teve grunted. That hadn't occurred to him as Vrebl's motive. "All right. As long as you've taken this upon yourself, I'll spot for you. There are some movements in the grass about twenty-five yards tn your left as you face toward me. Also, a ways behind you, some of the grass-users were moving along a fence, in tandem. They've stopped, so I think they may hear you." "Zank you, Colonel. Good-by for ze moment." Steve tried hard to follow VrebPs progress, but he couldn't hold the glasses entirely steady, and there were other stirrings to watch. He said on the radio, "I've lost you. Shake the grass so I can pick you up." #f There was no answer. Steve opened his mouth to speak sharply, then hesitated. Vrebl might not dare to talk to him, nor even have his receiver turned on. He swept the glasses back and forth, but there was no movement such as he'd been following, though there were many gentler ones. Finally he lowered the glasses in despair. rinpe passed. He spoke into the radio  periodically, without response. He gpt up and paced, wondering why he hadn't had the presence to call a ship back when he first encountered the horribly afflicted thing at the campsite. At least, he could have sent a message. By not doing so, he'd lost one crewman, and probably two. He found it hard to understand what Vrebl was doing. To risk one's life, with a fair fighting chance, was one thing; but this He glanced at his chronometer. Vrebl had been gone two hours, at least. What was he doing -- crisscrossing back and forth in a search pattern? There was a ludicrous area to cover. Three more hours passed, then the radio suddenly blurted, "I have found him, Colonel, and we have ze drones. We are coming back." H e watched the two figures emerge from the grass a full mile up the rift and plod down this side, at the foot of the talus. Zaanj walked with his head down, stumbling now and then. Steve moved the equipment back from the edge of the cliff, hid two of the rifles, and chose his waiting spot. When they came into sight at the edge he was twenty yards from them, rifle steady. "Stand right there," he ordered bleakly. Zaanj was naked and no longer had grass woven around him. Neither were there any dead bugs stuck to him, and there were no marks on his hairless gray hide except a few at the neck. His face was swollen, though, and his eyes were not quite right. His arms hung limp. Vrebl had the message drones, and some other stuff Zaanj had been carrying, clipped to two belts around his waist. Carefully, he unfastened the drones one by one and dropped them on a soft area of moss. "I zink you should send a message at once, Colonel. But first I want you to know zat you have no enemies on zis planet." Steve eyed him closely, then gestured with the rifle. "Move over there." When they complied he went to the drones, picked one up and worked at its protective covering with one hand. He did not relax his watch either on Vrebl and Zaanj nor in other directions. "How do you know that, Vrebl?" "I am not Vrebl. He is sleeping." The eyes met Steve's calmly, with a little smile. "I am just using ze body, and ze brain." Steve was not surprised. "If that's so, why aren't you like him?" He nodded toward Zaanj. "Or like the others?" "Because Vrebl offered himself voluntarily, and because we have learned finally how to move into ze humanoid body wizout damaging IF ze brain. Before, we do it all wrong. Zat was what made ze horrible zings you saw. When we catch ze one named Zaanj, we almost do right, but we damage ze brain a Bttle. I zink he will get well. We ire sorry about zat, Colonel, but after all zis is our planet, and... "Which I should have let Gree fterilize," Steve said flatly. "Is there any reason I shouldn't burn the two of you down right now?" #XJo reason," Vrebl's voice said calmly, "except zat we are friendly. You can count ze message drones. Zey are all zere. I could have sent a false message, to tell ze ship you are dead and it should pick me up somewhere else. Zere is no reason we should lie to you, Colonel. We are no zret to your kind. We are not comfortable in zes bodies -- even zo ze brains and ze eyes are wonderful; and ze inside bones and ze muscles... I know all zat Vrebl knew, and I have talk wiz ozzers of my kind. We know Gree will return to destroy us. We know your side, ze Birds of Effogus, will be friends. Zerefore, to save my own planet I want to go wiz you, as an ambassador to ze Birds. I am telling you everyzing, Colonel. I do not zink you will doubt." Steve got the drone free, pressed its recorder button and spoke into the receiver tersely but at length, giving the facts that had to be given, ordering that a transcript be sent immediately to Headquarters and that the whole squadron except two sentries come to pick him up at once. He activated the drone, laid it on the ground, and stepped back. With a loud implosion, it nulled away. Without relaxing, he looked quickly around him to make sure nothing was sneaking in. Then he answered Vrebl, or what had been Vrebl. '# doubt everything. But the Birds will make the decision. You'll both go back in sealed compartments, under heavy guard. So will I. We'll stand right here, and be picked up in a few minutes." He sighed. If it were left to him, he thought he might sterilize the planet, after a little study. On the other hand, possibly the entities would become friends and allies of the Birds, though he personally wasn't eager for much contact with them. Anyway, he thought, there was one thing in their favor. Gree had wanted to destroy them; and, as he himself had once remarked, it was always good to disagree with Gree. If you've missed any copies of Galaxy , IF or Worlds of Tomorrow from # to date our Back Number Department has a limited supply available at #c each, any three issues for #, regardless of original cover price. Copies sent postpaid anywhere in U.S. or Canada. Sorry, no copies before # at present available. Send dates and title of Issue you wish with remittance te Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York City #. The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I was disappointed when I received my March If. Skylark Du Quesne delayed another two months? Every month for the past year l have torn into each new If to see if there was any news on it. I have been going crazy trying to figure how even Doc Smith could write a sequel to Skylark of Valer on. I sincerely hope June is the month. Now for the bright side of things. After little thought and deliberation (who needed it here?) I nominated If for the Hugo for #. For short stories another magazine had a slight edge on If, but for novels there was no comparison. For # so far I have not yet seen any novels and only one short story worthy of a Hugo: The Replicators, by A. E. Van Vogt. Notice, # again! Authors you have now who I wish to see more of are Van Vogt, Schmitz, Young, Russell and especially Keith Laumer. Two more whose short stories have not graced your pages recently are Hal Clement and Robert Sheckley (he is good) . These are the best shortstory writers. The rest are good, but rarely outstanding. As usual Cordwainer Smiths novel was a lemon. I think that it is the worst to appear in years. Starchild was a great disappointment. have previously been exceptionally good, whether in collaboration or alone. But that??? On serials, I don't particularly like to wait one, two or three months to finish a story. However I do have a significant preference for novel-length stories. I think novels are the backbone of a sf magazine, and the shorts are an added luxury. So please, a serial in each issue, the longer the better. (About # words.) My preference for novels got If my Hugo nomination. Lettercol: I would like a two to five page letter column in each issue of each magazine, discussing the science fiction in the magazine. Not the editorial or the articles. Story ratings: This is something you are missing that would improve the magazines tremendously. Less than a third of a page per issue. Book reviews: Here I draw the Hne. One book review in Galaxy is okay, but please don't expand to If or Worlds of Tomorrow. Editorials : A one or two page editorial on sf would be appropriate. Either on fandom or on authors or on stories. But please, none on Hyperinfracanifilia and the like. In teresting, but not for a sf magazine. -- Martin F. Massoglia II, # West McDonel Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan #.  Hal Clement? Last month (and again soon!) Schmitz and Van Vogt? Next month. Sheckley? This month -- but in Galaxy. And we're after all the others you mention, too. -- The Editor.    Dear Editor: I am struggling to understand the motives of Mr. A. E. Van Vogt. Does he have a lot of trouble getting published? Perhaps he is too old to be encouraged as various others were from time to time -- but personally, I am one who believes that his aliens -- past and future -- comprise the most cogent theme in modern sf writing. If anyone can stir imagination among a bunch of lazy engineers, let that person be loudly applauded! -- J. Alwood, Van Nuys, California.  Van doesn't have a bit of trouble getting published, that's for sure It seems there are simply other things he would rather do than write -- but we've been pretty lucky about persuading him to change, as witness next month! -- The Editor.    Dear Fred: I think the story your reader J. #. Alyea of Missouri wants iden tified is Cloak of Aesir by Don A. Stuart... though it's not a novel. One of the Master's best, I think. What's with all these Grees and Wockiis and so on? A veritabobble epidemic of them lately. Jim Blish.  As of press time about twenty other readers made the same identification. What we can't figure out is why we didn't ! -- The Editor.    Dear Editor: I just read Hue  Cry f in the April issue of If. It did my heart good to find that I am not alone in my objections to the cancellation of Outer Limits. I have written to for some sort of retaliatory movement. I am a devoted wife and a harried mother, with little time for writing. But I do not despair. My love for science fiction and my strong desire for a good television program keep my fingers andor my hands as busy as possible. Since I have been reading sf for some six years, I think it is about time we sf fans the return of Outer Limits -- or perhaps, if my aspirations are not too high, something better! -- Mrs. Evelyn L. Maher, # Webster Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey, #.    Dear Editor: There has been so much Hue  Cry lately about alleged sf television that I was aroused from a twenty-year sleep long enough to write this letter. In the first place: Yes, I agree that horror movies are ruining all our good reputations. and ask them to keep Outer Limits. I disagree with those of your readers who consider it the best show of its type. It is devoted to "no plot monster stories" -- or was before I gave it up in disgust, some time ago. What is really needed is some thing new. A series, perhaps based on the Retief stories... there are endless possibilities. Anybody know a producer? -- Charles Smith, # Hinckley Road, Waban, Massachusetts #.    Dear Editor: What's happened? Ever since If went monthly it's been the best around. It's even better than Galaxy. Glad you're finally publishing E. E. Smith's story -- how about some more Heinlein or Asimov? For my money the best covers were January # and March #. Let's have more McKenna, what say? Can't see where any readers could support that Outer Limits . Best sf on TV was some of the better shows on Twilight Zone. Ramona Alderson can see good TV when somebody figures out how to sell it to high-school kids and beer slops. Maybe some reader can help me. When, in which book or magazine and where, can I get a story called The Crystal Towerl As I recall, the story concerned a boy who escaped from the domesticated humans to a pack of wild humans and ended by taking off in a rocket with a girl It was either a long novelette or a novel. -- David Lyon, #I Cedar Street, Belfast, Maine.    Dear Editor: I wonder if you can help me? Solne time ago I read a sciencefiction story about a man driven to desperation by the advertising gimmickry of his age. He couldn't walk down the street for the racket of blaring recorded commercials. He couldn't ride in a bus or subway train for the big color television ads that carried nothing but loud hard sell. He couldn't sit quietly in his room for the mechanical birds that would sense him by his body heat and clamp themselves onto his windows to deliver their sales message. So overwrought did this make him that he viciously conned his beloved (estranged) wife out of some # on the pretext of re-establishing housekeeping with her. Instead he took the money and bought for himself .a lifetime in Paradise. But "Paradise", it turned out, was a commercial outfit that rented out rooms to the lucky few who could afford them -- dull, gray, soundproofed rooms that could not be penetrated by advertising messages. Anything you could do to help me trace this story would be very much appreciated. -- James W. McLean, # Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto #, Canada.    Dear Editor: I would like to congratulate you on two excellent issues in a row (November and December) and your first good cover illustrations since way back when. How about getting some more Poul Anderson stuff? He is the greatest. -- Dave Spegel, #I Anderson Road, Linwood, Michigan.     Well, that's it for another month. This issue's "first" is Simon Says -- one of the few novelettes we've published in our program of bringing you at least one brand new writer in each issue of , hut, we think you'll agree, worth it. Next month -- del Rey, Van Vogt, Schmitz more of Doc Smith's great Skylark DuQuesne -- yes, indeed. See you then! -- The Editor . IF lammoW Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just Order on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick -- novelettes and complete short novels by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, J. T. McIntosh and a dozen other favorite writers, etc. Every issue is new... exciting... enjoyable! Don't wait -- subscribe today! You can order them separately at # each postpaid -- OR -- list issues desired below and we will ship them at once and deuct that number from your subscription. #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # I at your special price of only #. I enclose payment herewith. My subscription is Q new, Q renewal. Name Address City Zip Code State I lf you want back issues, check attached box. One subscription issue will be subtracted for each back issue order. Send me back issues I as follows: # n#i, n##, r :##,   ##, r##, n##. I ##, n# # , #?,   ##, #! #, D##. I J won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh mtr Namr  Your Name Here No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary off Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! JULY #  SOc continuing -- by Lester del Rey Edward E. Smith Ph.D Two of science fiction's greatest writers join to bring you an exciting new story! by A. E. Van Vogt and James H. Schmitz Worlds of iHTfts you the finest in science fiction Dop't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by ail your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Retief stories and others appear regularly in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars I still to come! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the Immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #.  New  Renewal Name Address City State Zip No (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) Offer void after Dec. #, # Vol. #, No. # issue # Frederrk Pohl, Edifor David Perton, Prodvefion Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr, IF published nonfhly by Ooloxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, Prosklont, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office; #I Hudson Street, Now York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Aexico, South America and Central America ond U.S. possessions, ebewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are ficHon, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial Concerning Worms and Serpents S ome years ago If published a story by James McConnell called Learning Theory. It had to do with a man who finds himself running a maze; he has been abducted from Earth by some more potent and intelligent creatures whose principal interest in Earthmen is in seeing if we are intelligent at all. So they put our hero to the standard tests that we humans give to guinea pigs, mice and worms. It was a good story. Indeed, it had every reason to be. Not only was (and is) McConnell a firsbelass writer, but in his incarnation as Dr. James V. McConnell he is professor of psychology at the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan -- and thus an old maze runner from way back. McConnell's mazes are most usually being run by planarian worms; in fact, you might say that every bit of the stature and dignity that planarian worms have in the eyes of science today is due to the efforts of Jim McConnell. Until a few years ago, nobody paid much attention to planarians. They are neither particularly pretty nor particularly smart. But they do learn -- sort of. At least, they are capable of acquiring a Pavlovian reflex if you know how to go about handling them. Suppose, for example, you give a planarian a mild electric shock. He will respond by contracting slightly. If you simultaneously apply electric shock and bright light, and repeat them together often enough -- oh, let's say forty or fifty times -- then something happens in the worm's nervous system that is something like learning. He begins to associate shock and light, and reaches a point where he will contract if you give him just the light. He has learned a response. All right; so far so good; but Pavlov did the same thing with dogs and bells half a century ago. What makes the planarian the celebrity he is today is that if you then take a highly trained, lightreacting planarian; chop him up into small pieces; feed him to another, totally untrained planarian...  and if you then give the second planarian, the cannibal one, the same series of stimuli... why, then the second planarian learns the shrinking lesson in only perhaps a dozen tries instead of forty or fifty. In other words, some part of the "memory" of the cannibal planarian was acquired through his digestive system. He has eaten himself an education. This is fact, not joke. But there are jokes in Jim McConnell too, and one of the evidences of his sense of humor is the scientific journal he has been publishing on and off for nearly ten years, called The Worm Runner # Digest, The Digest may not be the most important technical periodical being printed today, but it may well be the most widely read. It's certainly the funniest. And what brings all this to mind at this time is that the publishing firm of Prentice Hall has just had the wisdom to get McConnell to put together an anthology of the best from The Worm Runner # Digest, The title of the book is The Worm Re-Tums, We enjoyed it. You will too! M cConnell's planarians are an example of scientific fact that sounds like a hoax. A gallery of scientific hoaxes that sound like fact, on the other hand, is in Robert Silverberg's Scientists and Scoundrels, just out from Crowell. As Silverberg says in his introduction, 'This is, in a way, a book of science fiction -- or at any rate, a book of fictional science." Among his scientists and scoundrels are accounts of Atlantis-hunters and sculpture-forgers; of the Great Moon Hoax that had all America looking toward alien intelligences in the sky a century before sciencefiction magazines ever appeared ; and of that most impressive of flimflams, the Piltdown Man. If you are going to play a practical joke, that is the scale to play it on! Whoever joined man's cranium to ape's jaw, pickled the mixture in aging solution and passed it off as an authentic fossil, is surely still laughing in some unmarked grave. Still, we would enter a demurrer or two against some of Silverberg's charges. Item: Silverberg says flatly that Dr. Cook never reached the North Pole and that it was all a hoax concocted for the sake of fame and profit. We're not so sure. (Wo should point out, by the way, that the Frederick J. Pohl mentioned in Silverberg's book as snpporg Cook's claims is not the undersigned, but an older and undoubtedly wiser Pohl; coincidentally, we are more of this other Pohl's view on this matter than of Silverberg's.) And this same Frederick J. Pohl, as it happens, introduced us some years ago to a man named Hjalmar Holand, who Silverberg thinks was a well meaning but credulous character, taken in by some forged archeological evidence and persuaded that the Vikings a thousand years ago left carved runes on a stone in Minnesota. Holand may well have been wrong. It is hard to see just how Vikings could have got that far inland -- or why -- or what became of them if they did. But credulous Holand was not, nor was he anybody's dupe. As to how the Vikings got there, Holand wrote a fictional account of their journey in a wondrously interesting novel which we read in manuscript and hope someone will sooner or later have the wit to publish. As to what they were doing there -- well, we know one thing about the Vikings: Anywhere they could go, they did go. And as to what became of them... that's hard to say; but one thing Holand told us that bears on that is the persistent, and otherwise inexplicable, Minnesota tradition of a tribe of blue-eyed Indians who lived in that area in the early nineteenth century! But Silverberg's book is fun anyIF  Complete Short Novel The aim of fhe experimenf was only to make a superhuman. It succeeded far beyond that goall I B arbara Ellington felt the touch as she straightened up from the water cooler. It was the lightest of touches, but quite startling -- momentary, tiny flick of something ice-cold against the muscle of her right arm at the shoulder. She twisted quickly and rather awkwardly around from the cooler, then stared in confusion at the small well-dressed, bald-headed man who stood a few feet behind her, evidently awaiting his turn for a drink. "Why, good afternoon, Barbara," he said pleasantly. Barbara was now feeling embarrassment. "I... " she began incoherently. "I didn't know anyone else was near. Dr. Gloge. I'm finished nowl" She picked up the briefcase she had set against the wall when she stopped for a drink and went on dong the bright-lH corridor. S#ie was a tall, lean-odied gkl -- perhaps a little too taH but, with her serious face and smooth, brown hdr, not unattractive. At the moment, her cheeks burned. She knew she walked with wooden, self-conscious stiffness, wondering if Dr. doge was peering after hex, puzzled bjr her odd behavKM at the water cooler. "But something did touch nie, she thought. At the turn of the anridor, she glanced back. Dr. Gkge had had his drink, and was wdking off unhurriedly in the opposite direction. Nobody else was in sight. After die'd turned the comer, Barbara reached up with her left hand and rubbed the area of her upper arm where she had felt that tiny, noomeiriary needle of ice. Had Dr. doge been responsible for -- well, for whaterer it had been? She frowned and riiook her head. She'd worked in Qkge's office for two weeks immecfiatdy after riie'd been employed here. And Dr. Henry Gloge, head of the bicdogy sectim at Research A)ba, while invariably polite, even courteous, was a cold, quiet, withdrawn character, completely devoted to his work. He was not at all the kind of man who would consider it humorous to play a prank on a stenographer. A nd it hadn't, in fact, been a prank. From Dr. Henry Gloge's point of view, the encounter with Barbara Ellington in the fifth floor hallway that afternoon had been a very fortunate accident. A few weeks earlier he had selected her to be one of two unwitting subjects for Point Omega Stimulation. His careful plans had included a visit to her bedroom apartment when she was not there. He had installed equipment that might, be of value later in his experiment. And it was not until these preliminaries were accomiished that he had headed for the steno pool, only to find that Barbara had been transferred out of the department. Gloge dared not risk inquiring about her. For if the experiment had undesirable results, no one must suspect a connection between a lowly typist and himself. And even if it were successful, secrecy mit continue to be necessary. Gloge chafed at the delay. When on the fourth day of his search for her he suddenly recognized her walking almg a hallway fifty feet ahead of him, it seemed as if fate was on his side after all. As the girl paused at a water cooler, he came up behind her. Quickly, he made sure that no one else was in view. Then he drew the needle jet gun and aimed it at her shoulder muscles. The gun carried a gaseous compound of the Omega serum, and tfie only sign of a discharge, when he fired it, was a thin line of mist from the needle end to her skin. His task then accomplished, Gloge hastily slipped the Instrument into the holster inside his coat and buttoned his coat. B arbara, still carrying her briefcase, presently came to tibe offices of John Hammond, special assistant to the president of Research Alpha, which lay on the fifth floor of what was generally considered the most important laboratory complex on Earth. Alex Sloan, the president, was on the floor above. Barbara paused before the massive black door with Hammond's name on it. She gazed possessively at the words Scientific Liaison and Investigation lettered on the panel. Then she took a small key from her briefcase, slipped it into the door lock and pressed to the right. The door swung silently back. Barbara stepped dirough into the outer office, heard the faint click as the door closed behind her. There was no one in sight. The desk of Helen Wendell, Hammond's secretary, stood across the room with a number of papers on it. The door to the short haH which led to Hammond's private office was open. From it Barbara heard Helen's voice speaking quiedy. Barbara EHmgton had been assigned to Hammond -- actually, to Helen Wendell -- only ten days before. Aside from the salary increase, part of her interest in the position had been the intriguing if somewhat alarming figure of John Hammond himself, and an expectation that she would find herself in the center of the behind-the-scene operations of Scientific Liaison and Investigation. In that, she had so far been disappointed. Barbara walked over to Helen Wendell's desk, took some papers from her briefcase, and was putting them into a basket when her eye caught the name of Dr. Henry Gloge on a note in the adjoining basket. Entirely on impulse -- because she had seen the man only minutes before -- she bent over the paper. The note was attached to a report. It was a reminder to Hammond that he was to see Dr. Gloge today at three-thirty in connection with Gloge's Omega projfect. Barbara glanced automatically at her watch; it was now five minutes to three. Unlike most of the material she handled, this item was at least partly understandable. It referred to a biological project, "Point Omega Stimulation." Barbara couldn't remember having heard of such a project while she was working under Dr. Gloge. But that was hardly surprising -- the biological section was one of the largest in Research Alpha. From what she was reading, the project had to do with "the acceleration of evolutionary processes" in several species of animals, and the only real information in the report seemed to be that a number of test animals had died and been disposed of. Was the great John Hammond spending his time on this sort of thing? Disappointed, Barbara put the report back into the basket and went on to her own office. A s sfhe sat down at her desk, Barbara noticed a stack of papers which hadn't been there when she had left on her errand. Attached to them was a note in Helen's large. I IF dear handwriting. The note said: Barbara, This came in unexpectedly and must be typed today. It obviously win require several hours of overtime. If you have made special arrangements for the evening, let me know and #I have a typist sent up from the pool to do this extra woric. Barbara felt an instant pang of possessive jealousy. This was her job, her office! She definitely did not want some other girl coming in. Unfortunately, she did have a date. But to keep an intruder from taking her place in John Hammond's office, even if only for a few hours, was the more important matter. That was her instant decision, needing no second thought. But she sat still a moment, biting her lip; for that moment she was a woman considering how to put off a male who had a quick temper and no patience. Then e picked up the telephone and dialed a number. For some months now, Barbara had settled her hopes for e future on Vince Strather, a tedmician m the photo lab. When his voice came on the telephone, she told hfan what had happened, finished contritely, "I'm afraid I can't get out of it very well, Vince, so soon after starting here." She could almost feel Vince absorbing the impact of the denial she was conununicating; she had discovered quickly in their brief romance that he was trying to move her towards premarital intimacy, a step she was wholly determined not to take. She was relieved now, when he accepted her explanation. She replace the receiver, feeling very warm toward him. "I really do love him!" she thought It was a few moments later that she suddenly felt dizzy. T he feeling was peculiar, not like her usual headaches. She could fl it build up, a giddy, light swirling which seemed both within and without her, as if she were weightless, about to drift out of the chair, turning slowly over and over. Almost simultaneously, she became aware of a curious exhilaration, a sense of strength and wellbeing, quite unlike anything she could remember. The sensations continued for perhaps twenty seconds... then they faded and were gone, almost as abruptly as they had come. Confused and somewhat shaken, Barbara straighteeaed up in her chair. Foi a moment she considered taking aspiiln. But there seemed no reason for that. She didn't feel ill. It even seemrd to her that she felt more awake and s;)(ert. She was about to return to her typing when she became aware of a movement out of the comer of her eye. She looked up and saw that John Hammond had paused in the doorway of her little office. Barbara froze, as she always did in his presence, then sdowly she turned to face him. Hammond stood the, staring at her thoughtfully. He was a man about six feet t, wi dark brown hair and steel gray eyes. He seemed "Are you all right, Barbara?" to be about forty years old and he Hammond asked. "For a moment, was built like an athlete. Yet it was I thought you were going to fall not his appearance of physical out of your chair." strength but the fine intelligence of It was highly disturbing to Barhis face and eyes that had always bara to realize that her dizzy spell impressed her during the ten days had been observed. "Fm sorry, Mr. since she had been assigned to his Hammond," she murmured shyly, office. She thought now, not for the "I must have been daydreaming." first time: "This is what really great He gazed at her a moment longer, people arc like." then nodded, turned and walked off. IF  ? U a stained white smock over his street clothes, pushing a loaded O n leaving Barbara, doge went handtruck ahead of him, appeared down several floors and staand turned down the passage totioned himself behind a pile of shipwards Gloge and the laboratory storeping crates. These were in a passage room. across from the locked door of the It was the end of the lab shift, main photo lab storeroom. On the Gloge had discovered that one of dot of #:#, a door farther along the regular duties of Vincent the passage opened. A lanky scowlStrather, Barbara Ellington's boy ing, redheaded young man wearing friend, was to return certain materials to the storeroom at this hour. Peering through the slats of a crate. Dr. Gloge watched Strather's approach. He was, he realized, much more tense and nervous now than he had been when he had given Barbara the injection. Of himself, Vincent Strather was not the kind of subject Dr. Gloge would have chosen -- the young man was too angry, too bitter. But the fact that he was Barbara's friend and that they spent their spare time together, should be useful in the further steps of the experiment -- so it seemed to Dr. Gloge. Sliding his hand under his coat where the jet gun rested, he moved quickly out into the passage and across it toward Vince Strather Even as he pressed the trigger, he knew his nervousness had betrayed him. The needle tip of the gun had been too far away from Strather; a foot; almost two feet too far. At that greater distance the jet stream, emerging from the needle at nearly a thousand miles an hour, had time to spread and slow down. It caught Strather high up on the shoulder blade and tugged at his skin as it entered. For Strather, the sensation must have been that of a sharp impact. He jumped and cried out, then stood shuddering, as if in shock -- long enough for Gloge to slip the little gun back into its holster and close up his coat. But that was all. Vince Strather whirled. His hands caught Gloge by the arms, and his angry face glared down into the Doctor's. "You damn jerk!" he shouted. "What did you hit me with just now? Who the hell arc you, anyway?" For a moment. Dr. Gloge fdl appalled. Then he tried to twist out of Strather's hard grip. "I dont know what you're talking about!" he said breathlessly. He stopped. He saw that Vince was gazing past his should. The young man's grip relaxed suddenly, and Gloge was ale to free hknself. He turned and looked behind him. He felt a stunned, incredulous dismay. J ohn Hammond was coming along the passage, gray eyes fastened questioningly upon them. Gloge could only hope desperately that he had not been in sight when the gun was being fired. Hammond came up and said in a tone of easy authority: "Dr. Gloge, what's going on here?" "Doctor!" Vince Strather repeated, in a startled voice. Gloge put puzzled indignatkm in his tone: "This young man appears to be und the impression that I struck him just now. Needless to say, I did nothing of the kind and don't imderstand what gave him such an idea." He looked ftowniny ba at Strather. Strathcr's gaze shifted uncertainly between them. He was obviously abated by John Hammond's presence and Gloge's tide but not yet over his anger. He said sadenly, "Well, something hit me. At least k felt that wajrl When I looked around, he was standing there. So I thought he'd done it." "I was passing you," Dr. Gloge ir corrected him. "You exclaimed something and I stopped." He shrugged, smiled. "And that's all I did, young man! I certainly had no reason to strike you." Strather said grudgingly, "I guess I was mistaken." Dr. Gloge said promptly, "Then let's call it an error and forget it!" He held out his hand. Strather reached out reluctantly and shook it, then looked at Hammond. When Hammond remained silent, he turned away in obvious relief, took one of the boxes from the truck and disappeared into the storeroom with it. Hammond said, "I was on my way to your office. Doctor, where I expect to have an interview with you in a few minutes on the Omega project. I presume you were heading m that direction." "Yes, yes." Gloge fell into step beside the bigger man. He was thinking: "Did he see anything?" His companion gave no sign. A few minutes later, as he gazed across the gleaming desk of his private office at John Hammond, Gloge had the uneasy feeling of a criminal confronted by the law. It had always amazed him that this man -- Hammond -- could make him feel at very least like a small boy. Yet the discussion that now developed began with a reassuring statement from the bigger man: "This is a completely informal conversation. Doctor. I am not representing President Sloan at the moment -- even less the Board of Regents. That has been deliberately arranged. It will make it possible for both of us to speak quite frankly." Dr. Gloge said, "Have there been complaints about my work here?" Hammond nodded. "You can't have remained entirely unaware of it. Doctor. You've been asked to amplify your project reports, make them more detailed and specific, three times within the last two months alone." Gloge was reluctantly deciding that he would have to tell some of his data. He said with apparent openness, "My reluctance to communicate has been due to a strictly scientific dilemma. Things were happening in the experiment but their meaning was not clear to me until very recently." "There is a feeling," said Hammond in his steady voice, "that your project is failing." Dr. Gloge said sharply, "The accusation is unworthy!" flammond looked at him, said, "No accusations have been made -- as yet. That's why Fm here today. You have reported no successes within the past six months, you know." "Mr. Hammond, there have been many failures. Within the limited framework of the present stages of the project experiments, that is exactly what should be expected." "Limited in what way?" "Limited to the lower, less complicated forms of animal life." "That," said Hammond mildly, "is a limitation you yourself have imposed on the project." Dr. Gloge agieed. 'I rue. The conclusions I've been able to form at such lower levels have been invaluable. And the fact that the results of the experiments have been almost invariably negative, in the sense that as a usual result the subject animals evolyed into nonviable forms, is completely unimportant." "As a usual result," Hammond repeated. "Then not all of them died quickly?" Gloge bit his lip. That was not an admission he had intended to make at this initial stage in the discussion. He said, reluctantly, "In a respectable percentage of the cases, the subject animals survived the first injection." "And the second?" Gloge hesitated. But there was no turning back. "The survival percentage drops very sharply at that point," he said. "I don't recall the exact figures." "And the third?" H e was really being forced to make revelations. Dr. Gloge said, "To date, three animals have survived the third injection. All three were of the same species -- Cryptohranchus "The hellbender," said Hammond. "Well! A large salamander... Now, the third injection, according to your theory, should advance an animal along the evolutionary line stimulated in it to a point which might be of natural evolution. Would you say such a result was achieved in these three cases?" Dr. Gloge said, "Since Cryptobranchus might be considered with some reason to be a species in which evolutionary development is at a practical standstill, I should say that much more was achieved." "What were the observable changes?" Gloge had been bracing himself as he made one admission after another. He was striving to decide exactly when he could start resisting the interrogation. Nowl he thought. He said aloud, trying to appear frank, "Mr. Hammond, I'm beginning to realize that I was in error in not making more positive reports. I can't believe that you are really interested in these superficial accounts. Why not let me summarize my observations for you?" Hammond's gray eyes were clam and steady. "Go ahead," he said in an even tone. Gloge outlined his conclusions, then. The interesting features were two-fold, probably equally important. One of these was that there remained in all life forms a wide evolutionary choice. For reasons that were not yet clear, the Omega serum stimulated one oi these potential developments and no subsequent stimulation could alter the mutational direction. Most of these developments led to extnetion. "The second feature," said Gloge, "is that the chances for success increase as the life form becomes more highly evolved." Hammond said, interested, "What you're saying is that when you finally IF start working with the more active mammals and eventually monkeys, you expect more and better results?" "I have no doubt about it," said Dr. Gloge, firmly. A secondary aspect -- Gloge continued -- was that brain areas which controlled the inhibition of simple reflexes often seemed to be the source of new neural growth and of sensory extension. The serum apparently intensified these effort points, increasing their operational flexibility. What went wrong was that all too often such one-sided inhibitory amplification ended in nonsurvival. However, in Cryptobranchus, the roof of the mouth developed small functional gills. The hide thickened into segmented, horny armor. Short, grooved fangs were acquired and connected to glands that produced a mild hematoxic venom. The eyes disappeared, but areas in the skin developed sight-level sensitivity to light. Gloge shrugged, finished: "There were other changes, but these would seem the most dramatic ones." "They sound sufficiently dramatic," said Hammond. "What happened to the two specimens which were not dissected?" Dr. Gloge realized that his diversion had not worked. "They were given the fourth injection, of course," he said resignedly. iC'The one," Hammond asked, A "which was to advance them evolutionary line tocy were foUowing -- "Or," Dr. Gloge said, "to the peak-point of that evolutionary line. The equating of the four stages of the stimulation process to the passing of specific periods of normal evolutionary development -- twenty thousand years, fifty thousand, five years -- is, of course, hypothetical and generalized. My calculations indicate that in many species of which we have knowledge in that area the two points might be approximately the same." Hammond nodded. "I understand. Doctor. And what happened after your evolved Cryptobranchus received the fourth injection?" "I cannot give you a precise answer to that, Mr. Hammond. In appearance it was a very rapid breakdown of the entire structure. Within two hours, both specimens literally dissolved," Gloge answered tensely. "In other words," Hammond said, "Point Omega Stimulation directs Cryptobranchus and, in fact, every species to which it has been applied into one of the many blind alleys of evolution." Dr. Gloge said curtly, "So far h has done that." Hammond was silent, then: "One more point," he said. "It's been suggested that you might consider taking on a sufficiently qualified assistant in this work. Research Alpha probably could obtain Sir Hubert Roland for a project of such interest." Dr. Gloge said coldly, "With all due respect for Sir Hubert Roland's accomplishments, I would regard him as a meddler here! If the attempt is made to force him on me, I shall resist it." "Well," Hammond said easily, "let's not make any unalterable decisions at the moment. As I mentioned, this has been a completely informal discussion." He glanced at his watch. "I'm afraid we'll have to terminate it now. Would you have time to see me in my office one week from today at ten o'clock, Doctor? I wish to carry this matter a little further, and that will be my first free time." Dr. Gloge had difficulty restraining his feeling of triumph. Today was Wednesday. He had selected it as his starting time because he had wanted his subjects to be away from Iheir place of work over the weekend. Between now and Saturday, he oould undoubtedly accomplish the first two injections on the young couple. By the following Wednesday, the third, perhaps even the fourA riiot would have been administered and all strong reactions either taken care of or the experiment terminated. To cover up his elation, Gloge said in the tone of one making a concession, "As you wish, Mr. Hammond." m D r. Henry Gloge was awake much of the night, vacillating between hopes and fears of what he would find when he went to check on the first results of Point Omega Stimulation in human beings. If they were obviously negative, ho would have only one choice. It could be called murder. Dr. Gloge approached that subject in a detached, undisturbed frame of mind. He had several times in his work secretly carried on a more advanced experiment while, ostensibly, following the step-by-step scientific method. Thus fortified by special knowledge, he had in the past been able to plan lower-step work with the sometimes intuitive insights gained from his unpublicized private investigation. The importance of the Omega project to him justified a similar expedient. Objectively considered, in the light of such a goal, the lives of the two young people he had chosen for the experiment were, of no value. Their destruction, if it became necessary, would be in the same category as the slaughter of other experimental subjects. With human beings there was, of course, an element of personal risk mvolved for himself. It was that realization that trouUed him, now that he had made the first injection. Time and again. Dr. Gloge awakened out of a nightmare-riddled half-sleep, to quail anew at the knowledge and to lie sweating with anxiety until he slid back into exhausted slumber. When four o'clock came, it was almost with relief that he arose, fortified himself with several tablets of a powerful stimulsmt, made a last check of his preparations, and set out across town toward the house where the Ellington girl had a room. IF He drove in a black panel truck that he had bought and equipped for his experiment. He arrived at his destination about a quarter past five. It was a quiet residential street, a tree-lined avenue in one of the older sections of the city, approximately eight miles west of the Research Alpha complex. Two hundred yards from the house. Dr. Gloge pulled the small truck up to the curb on the opposite side of the street and shut off the motor. F or the past week, a miniature audio pickup-recorder, inserted under the bark of a sycamore tree across the street from the house, had been trained on Barbara Ellington's second-floor room, its protruding head cunningly painted to resemble a rusty nail. Dr. Gloge now took the other part of the two-piece instrument from the dashboard compartment of the truck, inserted the plug in his ear, and switched it on. After perhaps half a minute of twisting the tuning dial back and forth, he felt his face whiten. He had tested the instrument at night on two occasions during the past week. It was quite sensitive enough to pick up the sounds of breathing and even the heartbeat of anyone in the room; and so he knew with absolute certainty at Barbara Ellington's room had no living occupant at this moment. Quickly, he attached the recording playback mechanism to the little device, turned it back one hour, and put the plug into his ear again. Almost at once, he relaxed. Barbara Ellington had been in that room, asleep, an hour ago breath even and undisturbed, heart beat strong and slow. Dr. Gloge had listened to similar recordings of too many experimental animals to have the slightest doubt. This subject had moved up successfully, unharmed, to the first stage of Point Omega Stimulation! The impact of his triumph after the ghastly fears of the night was very strong. Dr. Gloge needed several minutes to compose himself. Finally, he was able to move the recorder by ten-minute steps to a point where the Ellington girl obviously was awake and moving about the room. He listened with absorbed fascination, feeling almost able to visualize from moment to moment exactly what she was doing. At one point, she stood still for some seconds and then uttered a low, warm laugh which sent thrills of delight through the listening scientist. Perhaps a minute later, he heard a door being closed. After that, there was only the empty, Kfeless silence which had startled him so badly. B arbara Ellington had awakened that Thursday morning with a thought she had never had before. It was: "Life doesn't have to be serious!" She was contemplating this frivolous notion with the beginning of amazement when a second thought came which she had also never had in her entire previous existence. "What is this mad drive to enslave myself to a man?" The thought seemed natural and obviously true. It had no general rejection of men in it. She still -- it seemed to her -- loved Vince... but differently. Thought of Vince brought a smile. She had already noted in one of numerous, quick, darting glances around the room that it was nearly two hours before her usual rising time. The sun was peering through her bedroom window at that almost horizontal angle which, in the past, had seemed to her a horrifying threat that she would be robbed of precious sleep. Now, it struck her: "Why don't I call Vince and we'll go for a drive before I have to go to work?" She reached for the phone, then considered and drew back. Let the poor man sleep a little longer. She dressed swiftly, but with more than usual care. When she glanced at the mirror, it occurred to her that she was better looking than she had realized... Very much better looking! she decided an instant later. Intrigued, for a moment amazed, she went up to the mirror, studied the face in it. Her face, familiar. But also the face of a radiant stranger. Another awareness came and the bright, glowing, blue mirror-eyes holding hers seemed to widen. "I feel twice as alive as I ever have before!" . Surprise... pleasure... and suddenly: "Shouldn't I wonder wzy?" The mirror-face frowned slightly, then laughed at her. There had been a change, a wonderful one, and the change was not yet complete. There was a sense of shifting deep inside her, of flows of brightness along the edges of her mind. Curiosity had stirred, but it was light, not urgent or anxious. "When I want to know, I will know!" Barbara told herself... and, with that, the trace of curiosity was dismissed. "And now." She glanced once more around the little room. For over a year, it had held her, contained her, sheltered her. But she didn't Want shelter now. The room couldn't hold her todayl She decided, smiling, "I'll go and wake up Vince." S he rang Vince's doorbell five times before she heard him stirring inside. Then his voice called harshly, thickly, Who is that?" Barbara laughed. "It's me!" "Good God!" The lock clicked back and the door opened. Vince stood staring at her with bloodshot eyes. He'd pulled a robe on over his pajamas; his bony face was flushed and his red hair tangled. "What are you doing up at this hour?" he demanded as Barbara stepped past him into the apartmt. "It's half-past five!" "It's a wonderful morning. I couldn't stay in bed. I thought Fd get you to go for a drive with me before I went to work." Vince pulled the door shut, blinked at her incredulously. "Go for drive!" he repeated. Barbara asked, "Aren't you feeling well, Vince? You look almost as if you're running a fever." IF Vince shook his head. don't feel feverish, but I sure don't feel well either. I don't know what's the matter. Come on and sit down. Want some coffee?" "Not especially. I'll make some for you, if you like." "Nah, don't bother. I'm sort of nauseated right now." Vince sat down on the couch of the little living room, fished cigarettes and matches from a pocket of his robe, lit a cigarette and grimaced. "That doesn't taste too good either!" He scowled at Barbara. "Something pretty damn funny happened yesterday! And I'm not sure -- " He hesitated. "Not sure of what, Vince?" "That that isn't why I'm feeling this way." Vince paused again, shook his head, muttered, "Sounds crazy, I guess. You know that Dr. Gloge you worked for once?" It seemed to Barbara as if whole sections of her mind lit up in brilliance at that instant. She heard Vince start Co tdl his story. But -- except for J Hammond's intervention -- k was something she already knew. Part of a much bigger story... She thought: Why, that impudent little mani What a d, wonderful, terrific thing to do! Excitement raced through her. The paper she had seen lying on Helen Wendell's desk flashed into her mind, every word sharp and distinct -- and not only the words! Now she understood. What they meant, what they implied, the possibilities concealed behind them -- for herself, for Vince. Another feeling awoke. Sharp wariness. There was danger somewhere here! JcAn Hammond... Helen... the hundreds of little impressions she'd received all suddenly flowed together into a picture clear but puzzling -- of something supra-normal, she decided, amazed. Who were they? What were they doing? In a dozen different ways, they didn't really fit in an organization like Research Alpha. But they had virtually complete control. Not that it mattered immediately. Yet she was certain of one thing. They were opposed to what Dr. Gloge was attempting through Point Omega Stimulation, would stop it if they could. "But they can't!" she told herself. What Dr. Gloge had begun was right. She could fed the rightness of it like a song of triumph in every aspect of her being. She would have to make sure that it wasn't stopped at this point. But she would need to be careful -- and act quickly! It was incredibly bad luck that John Hammond had arrived almost while Dr. Gloge was giving Vince his first shot. "Do you think I dKnld lepoft it?" Vince asked. "You'd look a Htde foofidi if k turned out that you were coming down with the flu, wouldn't you?" Barbara said lightly. "Yeah." He sounded hesitant. "What does it fed like, aside from the nausea?" Vince described his symptoms. Not unlike her own -- and she'd had a few bad moments before she went to sleep last night. Vince was going through an initial reaction period more prolonged and somewhat more severe than hers. She was aware of a fond impulse to reassure him. But she decided it would be unwise to tell him what she knew. Until he came out of his physical distress, such information might disturb him dangerously. She said urgently, "Look, you don't have to go to work until tonight. So the best thing for you is to get a few more hours of sleep. If you start feeling worse, and would like me to take you to a doctor, give me a call and I'll come and get you. Otherwise, I'll phone at ten." Vince agreed immediately. "I'm really awfully groggy. That's a big part of it. I'll just stretch out on the couch instead of going back to bed." When Barbara left a few minutes later, her thoughts quickly turned away from Vince. She began to consider various methods she might use to approach Dr. Gloge this very day. G loge reached the street where Vincent Strather lived and was looking for a parking place, when suddenly he saw Barbara Ellington emerge from the area of the apartment building and start across the street ahead of him. The girl was perhaps a hundred yards away. Dr. Gloge braked the panel truck hastily, pulled it in to the curb, rolled up behind another car parked there and stopped. He sat there, breathing hard at the narrow margin by which he had avoided being seen. Barbara had hesitated, glancing in the direction of the approaching truck, but now she was continuing across the street. Watching her swift, lithe stride, the proudly erect carriage of her body -- comparing that picture with the frozen awkwardness he had observed in all her movements the day before -- Dr. Gloge felt his last doubts resolve. It was in the human species that Point Omega Stimulation would achieve its purpose. His only regret now was that he had not arrived even as much as ten minutes earlier. The girl obviously had come to see Strather, had been with him until now. If he had found them together examination on a comparison basis could have been made of them simultaneously. The thought did not in the least diminish the tingling excitement that filled him as he watched Barbara's brown car pull out into the street and move away. He waited until her car was out of sight, then drove the truck down to the alley beside the apartment building and turned in to it. His intention was to give Strather a careful physical examination. A few minutes later. Dr. Gloge watched a pointer in the small instrument he was holding drop to the zero mark on the dial. Pulling off the respirator clamped over his mouth and nose, he stood looking down at the body of Vincent Strather sprawled on the living room couch. Vincent Strather's appearance was much less satisfactory than he had expected. Of course, the young man's reddened face and bloodshot eyes light be due to the paralyzing gas IF Dr. Ologe had released into the apartment as he edged open the back door. But there were other signs of disturbance; tension, distended blood vessels, skin discoloration. By comparison with Barbara Ellington's vigor and high spirits, Strather looked drab and unimpressive. Nevertheless, he had survived the first shot. Gloge straightened, studied the motionless figure again, then went about the apartment quietly closing the window he had opened exactly one minute after releasing the instantly effective gas. The gas had dissipated now. When its effect on Strather wore off an hour or so from now, there would be notMng to tell the subject that anything had occurred here after Barbara Kington had left. Tomorrow he woidd return and give Strather the second ot As he locked the back door behind him and walked over to the panel truck, Dr. Ologe decided that he would have to come back and check both his subjects that night. He felt extremely confident It seemed to him that before anyone found out that it had been started, the Point Omega Stimulation experiment on human beings would have run its course. IV H ammond heard the be sound as he was shaving in the bathroom of his living quarters whidi were located behind his office. He paused, then deliberately put down his razor and activated a hidden microphone in the wall. "Yes, John?" Helen's voice came. "Who came in?" "Why -- only Barbara." She sounded surprised. "What makes you ask?" "The life range indicator just now registered an over-six read." "On BarbaraV Helen sounded incredulous. "On somebody," said Hammond. "Better have Spe Servicing check the indicator out Nobody else came in?" "No." "Well -- che k." He broke the connection and finished shaving. The buzzer sounded in Barbara's office a little later -- the signal that she was to report with her notebook to Hammond's office. She went, curious, wondering if he would notice any change in her. Much more important was her own desire to take a closer look at this strange, powerful man who was her boss. She walked into Hammond's office and was about to sit in the dhair he motioned her to, when something in his manner warned her. Barbara made an apologetic gesture. "Oh, Mr. Hammond -- excuse me a moment." She hurried out of the office and down the hall to the washroom. The moment she was inside, e dosed her eyes and' mentally re-lived her exact feelings at the instant she had sensed  -- whatever it was. Not Hammond at all, she realized. It was the chair that had given forth some kind of energy flow. Eyes still closed, she strove to perceive what within herself had been affected. There seemed to be an exact spot in her brain that responded each time she reviewed the moment she had started to sit down. She couldn't decide what the response was. But she thought: "I don't have to let it be affected now that I know." Relieved, she returned to Hammond's office, seated herself in the chair and smiled at Hammond where he sat behind his great, gleaming, mahogany desk. "I'm sorry," she said. "But I'm ready now." D uring the half hour that followed, she took shorthand with a tiny portion of her mind, and with the rest fought off a steady, progressively more aware battle against the energy pressure that flowed up at her in rhythmic waves from the chair. She had by now decided it was a nerve center that reacted to hypnotic suggestion, and so when Hammond said suddenly, "Close your eyes, Barbara!" she complied at once. "Raise your right hand!" he commanded. Up came her right hand, with the pen in it. He told her to place it back in her lap; and then swiftly put her through several tests -- which she recognized as being of a more important kind. What interested her even more was that she could let the center respond and monitor the parts of the body that he named -- without losing control. So that when he IF commanded her hand to be numb and suddenly reached over and stuck a needle into it, she felt no sensation; and so she did not react. Hammond seemed satisfied. After normalizing the feeling in her hand, he commanded: "In just a moment, Fm going to tell you to forget the tests we've just been doing, but you will remain completely imder my control and answer truthfully any questions I ask you. Understand?" "Yes, Mr. Hammond." "Very well, forget everything we've done and said since I first asked you to close your eyes. When the memory has completely faded, open your eyes." Barbara waited about ten seconds. She was thinking: "What roused his suspicions so quickly? And why would he care?" She suppressed an excited conviction that she was about to discover something of the secret life that went on in this office. She had never heard of a hypnotizing chair. She opened her eyes. She swayed -- an act -- then caught herself. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Hammond." Hammond's gray eyes regarded her with deceptive friendliness. "You seem to be having problems this morning, Barbara." "I really feel very well," Barbara protested. "If there's anything in your life that has changed recently," he said quietly, "I want you to confide in  if me. That was the beginning of an intensive questioning into her past history. Barbara answered fiwly. Apparently Hammond was finally convinced, for he presently politely thanked her for the conversation and sent her off to type the letters he had dictated. As she sat at her desk a few minutes later, Barbara glanced up through the glass and saw Helen Wendell walking along the hall toward Hanunohd's office, disappear into it. H ammond greeted Helen: "All the time I talked to Barbara, the life range indicator showed eight-four, above the hypnotizable range. And she told me nothing." "How is it registering on me?" Helen asked. He glanced down at his right to the instrument in an open desk drawer. "Your usual eleven-three." "And you?" "My twelve point seven." "Perhaps only the middle ranges are out of order," Helen said, and added, "Special Servicing will make their check after day-time office hours. All right?" Hammond hesitated, thoi agreed that there seemed to be no reason for breaking the rules of caution by which they operated. During the lunch hour, Barbara experienced a brief return of the dizziness. But she was alert now to the possibilities. Instead of simply letting it happen, she tried to be aware of every nuance of the feeling. There was a -- shifting -- taking place inside her. She sensed a flow of energy partides from various points in her body to other points. A specific spot in her brain seemed to be monitoring the flow. When the pulsations ceased -- as abruptly as they had started -- she thought: "That was more change taking place. I grew in some way in that minute." She sat very still there in the restaurant, striving to evaluate what had changed. But she couldn't decide. Nonetheless, she was content. Her impulse had been to seek out Dr. Gloge some time during the day in the hope that he would be wanting to give her a second injection That ended. Obviously, all the changes from the first shot had not yet taken place. She returned to Scientific Investigation and Liaison, The bell sound, as Barbara entered, caused Hammond to glance at the indicator. He stared at it for a long moment, then buzzed Helen WendeU. "Barbara now reads nine point two!" he said softly. Helen came to the door of his office. "You mean her reading has gone up?" She smiled. "Well, that settles it. It is the instrument." "What makes you say that?" Hammond seemed strangely unsure. "In all my experience," Helen said, "I've never seen anyone change for the better. There's the slow drop as they grow older, but -- " she stopped. The strong face was relaxing. Yet after a moment Hammond said, "Still -- we never take chances, so I think I'll keep her with me tonight. Do you mind?" "It's a nuisance," she said, "but aH right." "Fll give her the conditioning that overwhelms twelve point # and higher. She'll never know what hit her." V I t was shortly after dark when Dr. Henry Gloge parked his black van near Barbara's home. He promptly tuned in on the audio device attached to the tree and adjusted the volume for pickup. After thirty seconds of silence, he began to frown. "Not again!" he thought; then, wearily, "Well, maybe she's over at her boy friend's." He started the motor and presently drew up at the curb opposite Strather's apartment. A quick check established that the lanky redhead was there -- but alone. The young man was awake and in an angry state. As Gloge listened in, Vince savagely picked up the phone and dialed what must have been Barbara's number, for presently he slammed the receiver down and muttered, "Doesn't she know I've got to go to work tonight? Where can that girl be?" That, in rising alarm, was a question which Gloge asked himself as the evening wore on. He returned to the vicinity of Barbara's boarding house. Until eleven P.M. the phone in her room rang periodically, testifying to Vince's concern. vien it had not rung for an hour, Gloge presumed that Strather IF had gone off to night duty. It was not a fact that could be left to surmise. He drove back to Vince's apartment No sounds came from it Gloge accordingly returned to the street where Barbara lived. He was tired now, so he rigged up an alarm system that would buzz hkn if Barbara entered her room; then, wearily, he crawled onto the cot ki the back of the van and quickly fell into a de deep. E arlier, as Barbara sat in her office a few minutes before closing time, she swayed and almost blacked out Greatly alarmed, she emerged from her office and reported the feeling to Helen Wendefl. She did not question the logic of seeking the help of Hammond's blonde aide. The secretary was sympathetic, and promptly took her in to John Hammond. By this time Barbara had experienced several more brief blackouts. So she was grateful when Hammond unlocked the door behind his desk, led her through a luxurious living room and into what he called the "spare bedroom." She undressed, slipped under the sheets and promptly went to sleep. Thus, subtly, she was captured. During the evening, Hammond and Helen Wendell took turns looking in on her. At midnight, the Special Servicing expert reported that the life range indicator was working properly and he himself checked the body of the sleeping girl. "I get nine two," he said. "Who is she? New arrival?" The silence that greeted his remark abruptly startled him. "You mean she's an Earther?" "At least," said Helen WendeU after the man had departed, "there's been no further change." Hammond said, "Too bad she's above the hypnodzable stage. Mere conditioning is actually a. sorry substitute for what we need here -- truth." "What are you going to do?" Hammond did not make up his mind about that until after daybreak. "Since nine two is no real threat to us," he said then, "we merely return to routine and keep aware that maybe somebody is doing something that we don't know about Perhaps we might even use a little "Here -- at Alpha?" Hammond stared thoughtfully at his beautiful aide. Normally, he trusted her reactions in such matters. She must have sensed what he was thinking, for she said quickly, "The last time we used extended perception, about # Earthers tuned in on us. Of course, they thought of it merely as their imagination, but some of them compared notes. It was talked about for weeks, and some awfully important things were close to being revealed." "We-#-#-#, okay, let's be aware of her then." "All right. On that basis I'll wake her up." A s soon as she was in her office, Barbara phoned Vince. There was no answer. Which was not surprising. If he had worked the night shift, he would be dead to the world. She hung up and checked with the photo lab, and was much relieved when the night work list showed that Vince had signed in and out. As she sat at her desk that morning, Barbara felt extremely grateful to Hammond and his secretary for having been so helpful to her. But she was also slightly guilty. She suspected that she had been affected again by the injection that Gloge had given her. It was disconcerting to have been so strongly affected. "But I feel all right now!" she thought as she typed away at the pile of work Helen Wendell had put in her basket. Yet her mind was astir with plans. At ten o'clock, Helen sent her out with the usual morning briefcase full of memos and reports. Elsewhere -- Gloge had awakened shortly after seven. Still no Barbara. Baffled, he sliaved with his electric razor, drove lo a nearby business thoroughfare and ate breakfast. He next went back to the street wiiere Strather lived. A quick check established that the man was home. Gloge triggered his second charge of gas -- and a few minutes later was in the apartment. The young .man had changed again to his pajamas, and he lay stretched , out once more on the settee in his living room. If anything, die angry expression on his face was more pronounced. Gloge, needle in hand, hesitated. He was not happy with this subject. Yet he realized that there was no turning back at this stage. Without further pause holding the point almost against Strather's body, he squeezed the trigger. There was no visible reaction. As he headed for his office at Research Alpha, Gloge's thought was on the girl. Her absence was unfortunate. He had hoped to inject the serum into his two subjects at approximately the same time. Evidently that was not going to happen. VI A few minutes after he returned to his office. Dr. Gloge's phone rang. His door was open, and he heard his secretary answer. The woman looked up over the receiver. "It's for you. Doctor. That girl who worked here for a while -- Barbara Ellington." The shock that went through Gloge must have shown as disapproval, for the woman said hastily, "Shall I tell her you're not in?" Gloge quivered with uncertainty. "No." He paused; then, "I'll take the call in here." When he heard the clear, bell-like voice of the girl. Dr. Gloge felt tensely ready for anything. "What is it, Barbara?" he asked. "I'm supposed to bring some papers over to you," her voice trilled in its alive, vital way. "Fm to give them to you only, so I wanted to make sure you would be there."... Opportunity! It seemed to Gloge that he couldn't have asked for a more favorable turn. His other subject would now come to his office where IF he could fire the second infection into her and deal personaBy with any reaction. As it devdoped, there was no reaction that he coidd detect. She had turned away after delivering the papers to him, and that was when he fired the needle gun. It was a perfect shot. The girl neither jumped nor swung about; she simply kept going toward the door, opened k, and went through. Barbara did not return to Hammond's office. She expected a strong physiological distuihance from the second injection, and she wanted to be in the privacy of her own room when it happened. It had cost her an effort not to react in front of doge. So she stayed in her bedroom, waited as long as e thought wise, and then phoned and told Helen Wendell that she was not well. Helen said sympathetically, "Wdi, I suppose it was to be expected after tfie bad night you had. Barbara answered quickly, "I began to have dizzy spells and nausea. I panicked and rushed home." "You're home now?" "Yes." "I'll tell Mr. Hammond. Barbara hung up, unhappy with those final words. But there was no way to stop his learning about her condition. She had a feeling she was in danger of losing her job. And it was too soon. Later, after the experiment, it wouldn't matter, she thought uneasily. Perhaps she had better take the "normal precautions of an employee. "After all, she thought, "I probably show symptoms. She called her doctor and made an appointment for the foBowing day. Barbara replaced the receiver feeling a strange glee. "I ought to be in foul shape by tomorrow, she thought, "from the second injection. What Hammond did when he returned to his office late that afternoon was to sit in thought for a while after Helen reported to him Barbara's situation. Then: "It doesn't add up. Helen. I should have asked you before. Have you examined her file?" The blonde young woman smiled gravely. "I can tell you everything that's in it, right from the top of my head. After all, I securitychecked her. What do you want to know?" "You mean there's nothing?" "Nothing that I could find." Hammond hesitated no longer. He was accustomed to trusting Helen Wendell. Abruptly he threw up his hands. "All right. She's got the whole weekend to be sick in. Call me when she comes in to work again. Did that report arrive from New Brasilia? "It was sent to Manila Center. "Are you serious? Let me talk to Ramon. There must be a reason! Quickly he was absorbed in his new tasks. B arbara slept. When she awakened her clock said twelve after seven. It was daylight, early morning. She found that out in a sensational fashion. She went outside and looked... without moving from the bed! There she was lying in her bedroom; and there she was out in the street. Simultaneouy. Involuntarily, she held her breath. Slowly, the outside scene faded, and she was back in the bed, wholly indoors. With a gasp, she started breathing again. By cautious experimentation, she discovered that her perception extended about a hundred yards. And that was all she learned. Something in her brain acted like an invisible eye stalk that could reach through walls and bring back visual images to the light-interpretation centers. The ability remained completely stable. Presently she became aware that a small black van was parked down the street and that Dr. Gloge was m it. She realized that he had an instrument with an earplug with which he seemed to be listening in on her. His face was intent, his small eyes narrowed. Something of the determination of this little, baldheaded scientist seeped through to her, and Barbara suddenly felt uneasy. She sensed remorselessness, an impersonal quality that was entirely different from her own light-hearted participation in his experiment. To Gloge -- she realized suddenly -- his subjects were like inanimate objects. In human terms the viciousness of it was infinite. As she continued to perceive him. Gloge shut off his instruments, started the motor of his car and drove off. Since 'Wnoe was again on the night shift, presumably Gloge was heading home. She phoned Vince's apartment to make sure; when there was no answer, she called the photo lab. "No, Strather didn't come in last night," the administrative assistant of that department told her. Barbara replaced the receiver unhappily, recalling that Vince had not responded well to the first shot. She suspected the biologist had given him his second shot also, and that he was not responding favorably to it either. She dressed and drove over to hk apartment. As she came near, she could see him inside, so when he showed no sign of replying to her ring, she let herself in with her key -- and found him on the living room couch, tossing and turning. He looked feverish. She felt his forehead; it was dry and hot to the touch. He stirred and opened his cyet, looked up with his sick brown eyes into her bright blue ones. She thought unhappily: "I'm so well and he's so ill. What can be wrong? Aloud, anxiously, she said, "Yon need a doctor, Vince. Wlurt's the name of that man who gave you a checkup last year?" 'T'll be all right," he mumbled. He sank back to sleep. Sitting there on the settee beside him, Barbara felt something in her lungs. Her instant, amazed thought was: "Gas!" But she was too slow. IF S he must have blacked out instantly -- because her next awareness was of lying on the floor, and of Gloge bending over her. The scientist was calm, efficient, seemed satisfied. Barbara caught his thought: "She'll be all right." She realized that he was stepping past her to Vince. "Hmmm!" Gloge seemed critical and unhappy. "Still not good. Let's see if tranquilizer will help him." He made the injection, then straightened, and there was a strange, hard thought in his mind: "By Monday night, it'll be time for the third injection and I'll have to decide what to do." So clear was the thought that came from him, it was almost as if he spoke aloud. What his thought said was that he intended to kill them both, if either failed to develop as he desired. Shocked, Barbara held herself very still; and at that moment an entirely different growth process occurred in her. It began with a veritable flood of suppressed information suddenly rising to the surface of her mind... About the reality of what people were ' like... the dupes, the malingerers and the weaklings on the one hand, and, on the other, the angry and the distorted, the worldly wise and the cjmics. She recognized that there were well-meaning people in the world who were strong, but she was more aware of the destructive at this instant... by the million, the swindlers and betrayers -- all self-justified, she saw now. But she realized also that they had misread their own bitter experiences. Because they were greedy and lusl ful and had lost their fear of punishment, earthly or unearthly; becauao they resented being thwarted m their slightest whim; because -- A forgotten scene flashed into her mind from her own past, of a minor executive in her first job, who had fired her when she refused to come up to his apartment. All her life, she had been taught and she had tried not to be awaio of such things. But now, at samo level of neural computation, she permitted all that data to be calculated into the main stream of her awareness. The process was still going on a few minutes later when Gloge departed as silently as he had come. After he had left, Barbara tried to get up and was surprised that she could not even open her eyes. The realization that her body was still unconscious presently enthralled her. What a marvelous ability! As time passed, it began to be disconcerting. She thought: "Fm really quite helpless." It was early afternoon before she was finally able to move. She got up, subdued and thoughtful, warmed a can of soup for Vince and herself and forced him to drink it from a cup. Immediately after, he stretch out again on the couch and fefl asleep. Barbara left the apartment to keep her appointment with her own doctor. As she drove, she could feel a stirring inside her. More change? She decided it was. Perhaps there would be many such between now and Monday. Yet her intuition wm diat she would not be able le dominate this situation with the changes from the first and second shots only. "Somehow," she thought, "I've fot to get that ird shot" vn A t noon Monday, after he had dictated some letters to a girl from the steno pool, Hammond came out of his office. "What's the word from Nine-two?" Helen looked up with her flashing smile. "Barbara?" "Yes." "Her doctor called in this morning at her request. He said he saw her Saturday. She appears to have a mild temperature, is subject to dizEf spells, and a variety of unmentionable ailments like diarrhea. However, there's one unexpected things the doctor said -- evidently his own comment. Interested?" "Of course." "He said that in his opinion Barbara has had a major personafity diange since he last checked her about a year ago." Hammond shook his head dowly. "Merely confirms our own observation. Well, keep me in touch." But about four o'clock, when the long distance screen was finally silent, he buzzed Helen Wendell. I can't get that girl out of my mind, it's premonition level stuff, so I can't ignore it. Phone Barbara." She called to him a minute later: "Sorry, there's no answer." "Bring her file to me," said Hammond. "I've got to assure myself I'm not missing something in this unusual matter." As he scanned the typed pages a few minutes later, he came presently to the photograph of Vince Strather. He uttered an exclamation. "What is it?" Helen asked. He told her what had happened the previous week between Dr. Gloge and Vince Strather. He finished, "Of course, I didn't connect Barbara with that young man. But this is his picture. Get Gloge's file." # I A pparently the change started when his sister died two months ago," Helen Wendell said presently. "One of those sudden and dangerous shifts in personal motivation." She added ruefully, "I should have watched him on that. The death of a near relative has often proved important." She was seated in die main room of Hammond's living quarters at Research Alpha. The door to Hammond's private office behind them was closed. Across the room, a large wall safe had been opened, revealing a wide double row of thin, metal-bound files. Two of the files -- Henry Gloge's and Barbara Ellington's -- lay on the table before Helen. Hammond stood beside her. He said now, "What about that trip he made back east early in the month?" "He spent three days in his home town, purportedly to make arrangements to sell his sister's and his property there. They had a house, complete with private laboratory. untenanted, on the grounds of an old farm. The perfect location for unsupervised experimentation. On primates? Not likely. They're not easy to obtain secretly and, except for the smaller gibbons, they should make potentially quite dangerous subjects for Dr. Gloge's project. So it must be humans he planned to work on." Hammond nodded. There was an almost sick expression on his face. The woman looked up at him. "You seem very anxious. Presumably, Barbara and Vince have now had two injections each. That wifl take them to # years from now on some level. It doesn't seem desperately serious to me." The man smiled tautly. "Don't forget that we're dealing with one of the seed races." "Yes -- but only # years so far." He stared at her sympathetically, "You and I," he said, "are still far down on the ladder.  it's hard for us to conceive of the evolutionvy potential of the Genus homo gokcticus. She laughed. "I'm content with my lowly lot -- " "Good conditioning," he murnMired. analysis. What do you intend to do with Gloge?" Hammond straightened decisively. "This experiment on humans has to be stopped at once. Call Ames and have him put special security men at every exit. For the next hour, don't let Gloge out of this building. And if Vince or Barbara try to enter the complex, tell him to hold them. When you've done that, start cancelling my appointments for the rest of the day and evening." He disappeared into his bedroom, came out presently dressed for the street. Helen Wendell greeted him with: called Ames, and he says 'Check! But I also phoned Gloge's office. He left about an hour ago, his secretary says." Hammond said quickly, "Sound a standby alert. Tell Ames to throw a guard around the homes of both of those young people!" "You're going where?" "First Barbara, then Vince. I only hope I'm in time." A look must have come into Helen's face, because he smiled tensely and said, "Your expression says I'm getting too involved." The beautiful blonde woman smiled with understanding, said, "Every day on this planet thousands of people are murdered, hundreds of thousands are robbed and countless minor acts of violence occur. People are struck, choked, yelled at, degraded, cheated -- I could go on. If we ever opened ourselves to that, we'd shrivel away." "I kind of like Barbara," Hammond confessed. Helen was calm. "So do I. What do you think is happening?" "As I see it, Gloge gave them the first injection last Wednesday and the second on Friday. That means the third one should be given today. That I've got to stop." He departed hastily. Vffl G loge had become nervous. A Monday wore on, he kept thinking of his two specimens; and what bothered him was that he did not have them under observation on this last day. What a ridiculous situation, he told himself. The greatest experiment in human history -- and no scientific person watching it through to a conclusion of the key second injection. There was another feeling, also. Fear! He couldn't help but remember the young man. It seemed to Gloge that he had seen too many animals ow in their fashion the symptoms he had observed in Vince. Failure to respond well to the serum, the signs of internal malaise, the sick appearance, the struggle of the cells visibly reflecting defeat in the effwts and chemistry at the surface of the skin. And there was -- he had to admit it -- a further anxiety. Many of the imsuccessful animal specimens had developed tough fight-back characteiktics. It would be wise to be prepared for emergencies of that nature. He thought grimly: "No use fooling myself. I'd better drop everything and take anoAer look at those two." That was when he left his office. He took it for granted Aat Barbara was all right. So he drove to Vince's apartment, and first checked with his audio pickups to make sure he was there and alone. IF He detected at once movements; the sound of labored breadiing, an occasional squeak of the springs of the couch. These noises came screeching through the hyper-sensitive receiver, but Gloge had the volume on them turned down so that they were not actually painful in his ears. Gloge's spirits had already dropped even more, for the sounds he was hearing confirmed his fears. Suddenly, all the justified scientific attitude that had motivated him until now came hard against the reality of the failure that was here. By his previous reasoning, he would now have to kill Vince. And that meant, of course, that he would also have to dispose of Barbara. His state of funk yielded after what must have been many minutes to a strictly scientific thout: Mere sounds were not enough data for so basic a decision, it seemed to him. He felt intense disappointment. Now, he must go and make his decision from an actual meeting with Vince. It would be improper to dispose of his two human subjects without a face to face interrogation. A s Gloge climbed out of his car and headed for the apartment building, Vince had a dream. He dreamed that the man -- what was his name? -- Gloge, with whom he had quarreled a few days before in the corridor at Research Alpha, was coming here to his apartment, some deep of his being, anger began. But he did not awaken. The dream -- product of his own disturbed, strange evolutionary development -- continued. From some vantage point, he watched Gloge approach his back door. He felt no surprise when the small, bald-headed man produced a key. Tense with fear, Vince watched as Gloge stealthily inserted the key into the lock, slowly turned it and quietly opened the door. At that point, Vince's body was impelled by his extreme anxiety to shining, cream-colored energy bundles were emitted by his nervous system. They resembled very short straight lines. And they passed through the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen, and they struck Gloge. Great masses of the energy units unerringly sought out nerve ends in Gloge's body and darted in thdr scintillating fashion up to the mans brain. The energy units were not the result of conscious analytical thought. They were brought into being solely by fright and carried pressor messages. They pushed at Gloge mentally, urging him to leave, to go back to where he had come from -- Dr. Gloge came to his senses with a start. He was back in his van. Ha remembered running in precipitant flight. He had a vague recollection of complete panic. He sat now, trembling, breathing hard, trying to recover from the most disaceful act of fear that he had ever experienced in his whole life. And he knew that he had to go back. Twice more, the sleeping Vince emitted enough energy bundles to compel Gloge to run. Each time the power available was less and Gloge retreated a shorter distance before stopping and forcing himself to go back again to the apartment. On Gloge's fourth approach, the brain mechanism in Vince was able to manufacture only a small energy discharge. Gloge felt the fear rise in him, but he fought it -- successfully. He moved silently across the kitchen floor toward the door of the living room. He still did not realize that the sleeping body and he had fought a battle -- which he had now won. M oments later, Gloge looked down at the exhausted form of his male subject. The sleeping body had perspired excessively. It trembled and moaned, and, as Gloge watched, jerked fitfully. Unmistakably -- Gloge decided -- a failed experiment. He wasted no time. He had come prepared. He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket, carefully slipped one over Vince's farthest away arm and softly clicked it shut. He lifted the arm as carefully toward the other wrist and clicked that handcuff on also. Gloge next successfully tied Vince's legs together, and then lashed together the hands and feet. The victim continued his restless, feverish sleep. Gloge brought out a gag. As he had anticipated, forcing it into the closed mouth was more disturbing. Under him, the body grew rigid. Wild eyes flicked open and glared up at him. In a single, convulsive effort Vince tried to bring up his arms and simultaneously struggled to get to his feet. But Gloge had done his preliminary work well. The victim's intense effort subsided. Dr. Gloge realized that his control of this situation was complete. He removed the gag and said: "What I want to know is, how do you feel?" The half-crazy, rage-filled eyes snapped with the impulse to violence. Vince cursed in a shrill voice. He kept this up for several minutes. Then he seemed to realize something. "Y-you did something to me last week." Gloge nodded. 'T injected you twice with a serum designed to accelerate cellular evolution, and Fve come here to find out how you are." His gray eyes were steady, his bald head gleamed in the reflection of the light he had turned on. His face was serious. "Why not teU me exactly how you feel?" he asked earnestly. This time Vince's cursing subsided after about a minute. He lay, then, staring at his captor, and something about the pale, tense face of the scientist must have convinced him. "I feel -- awful," he said uneasily. "Exactly how?" Gloge persisted. Slowly, by dint of determined questioning, he drew from his relucIP tant victim the fact that he felt weak, exhausted and numb. It was the fateful combination that had so often shown in the animals; and Gloge knew that it was decisive. Without another word, he bent down and started to force the gag into Vince's mouth. Vince twisted, wiggled, turned his head, and several times tried to bite. But inexorably Gloge pushed the gag all the way into the other's mouth and knotted it firmly behind his head. He now went outside and drove the van into the driveway opposite the back door of Vince's apartment. Wrapping the young man's body in a blanket, he carried him boldly outside and into the van. A few minutes later he was heading for the home of one of his subordinates. The man was on loan to an eastern laboratory and his house and yard were unoccupied. If he had paused, if he had stopped moving, if he had even taken his foot off the accelerator, Gloge might have faltered in his grisly plan. But his only slowdown was when he finally brought the car to a stop at his destination. And that, in its meaning, was a continuation of the plan. Its final moments. L aboriously, he dragged the gagged, handcuffed and boimd Vince across the sidewalk, throu a gate, and over to the deep end of the swimming poc#. And stMl without pausing he shoved the tense body over the edge and mto the water. He straightened from his terrible act, stood there gasping for breath, exhausted, watching the trail of bubbles that roiled the dark surface. Abruptly terrified that he might be seen, he turned and staggered away. As he half-fell, half-crawled into his car, the first opposing thought came, as much a feeling of horror as an idea: "My God, what have I done?" But there was no opposing motion in that reaction. He did not go back. Instead, he sat there, bracing to the realization that a few feet away a man was still in process of drowning. When there was no longer any doubt; when the subject of his experiment was by all laws of life dead, Gloge sighed, and stirred. There was no turning back. One gone, one to go. Next -- the girl! From a phone booth a few blocks away, Gloge dialed Barbara Ellington's boarding house. The voice of an elderly woman answered and told him Barbara had gone out. The vcHce added, "She certainly is a popular giii today." Gloge said uneasily, "How do you mean?" "Several men came by a little while ago and asked for her, but of course I had to tell them also that she wasn't here." A sharp fear struck through Gloge. "Did they give their names?" he asked. "A Mr. Hammond," was the reply. Hammondl The chill of that froze Gloge. "Thank you," he gulped, and hung up. He returned shakily to his car, tom between two impulses. He had intended to return after dark to the pool, fish Vince's body out of it, take off all the bindings and dispose of it. He had a strong feeling now that he should do that at once. On the other hand, he had a desperate conviction that he must return to bis office and remove the rest of the serum from the safe there. That last suddenly seemed the more important thing to do, and the safest at this hour. The sun had gone down below the western hills, but the sky was still bright blue. The dying day had too much light in it for the gruesome task of getting rid of a dead body. IX A t ten minutes past seven, Dr. Gloge unlocked the door that led directly from the corridor to his office in the biology section of Research Alpha. He went in, closed the door behind him, walked quickly around the big, bare desk in the center of the room, and stooped down to unlock the desk drawer where he kept a key to one of the safes. "Good evening. Dr. Gloge," a woman's voice said behind him. For an instant Dr. Gloge seemed unable to move. The words, the tone, sent an electrifying hope through him He could scarcely beHeve his luck: that the second person he had to dispose of had come to where he could best deal with her. He straightened slowly, turned around. Barbara Ellington stood in the open door to the adjoining library, watching him, face serious and alert. At no tiine in at followed did Gloge have any other conscious awareness than that this was Barbara Ellington. But the very instant that he saw the girl, at some depth of his being neural readjustments took place. instant, subconsciously, she was his dead sister. But she was not dead any more. She was reassuringly alive in the person of Barbara. A look passed between them. It was one of complete understanding. It occurred to Gloge that it was scientifically wrong to kill this successful experimental victim. He even had a feeling that she was on his side and would cooperate with him. He suppressed a fleeting impulse to pretend not to know why she was here. He said, matter-of-factly, "How did you get in?" "Through the specimen room." "Did any of the night workers see you?" "No." Barbara smiled slightly. Gloge was examining her with quick evaluative looks. He noted the way she stood, almost motionless but lightly and strongly balanced -- a pose of contained, absolutely prepared energy. He saw in her eyes bright, quick intelligence. The thought came to him: Nothing quite like this was ever on Earth before! Barbara said suddenly, "You took a long chance on us, didn't you?" The words that burst from Dr. IF Gloge surprised him: "I had to do it." "Yes, I know." Again she spce matter-of-factly, moved forward into the room. Dr. Gloge felt a surge of alarm, a sharp, cold prickling of the skin. But she turned from him to the left, and he watched silently as she sat down in a chair against the wall and placed the brown purse she carried on the armrest of the chair. She spoke first. "You must give me the third injection of the serum immediately," she told him. "Ill watch you do it. Then #I take the instrument and a supply of the serum to Vince. He -- " She paused; blue eyes kindling with abrupt comprehension, as she studied Dr. Gloge's expression. "So you've drowned him I" she said. She sat there, thoughtful, then: "He's not dead. I sense him to be still alive. Now, what is the instrument you use? You must still have it with you." "I do," Dr. Gloge admitted hoarsely. "But," he went on quickly, "it is advisable to wait till morning before administering the third shot. The chances of a further favorable development would be increased by doing it. And you must stay here! Nobody should see you as you are. There should be tests... you will tell me..." H e halted, realizing he was stammering. Barbara's eyes hadn't turned from his face. And in the same way that her knowledge of Vince's fate had not disturbed him -- somehow, he took it for granted that she realized and appreciated why and what he had done -- so now her expression reassured him. She said quietly, "Dr. Gloge, there are several things you don't understand. I know I can assimilate the serum. So give me the shot -- and the serum -- at once." Barbara Ellington arose and started over toward him. She said nothing, and her face revealed no emotion, but his next awareness was of holding the jet gun out to her on his open palm as e came up. "There's only one charge left." She took the gun from his pdm without touching him, turned it over, studied it, laid it back in his hand. "Where is your supply of the serum?" Dr. Gloge nodded at the entrance to the library behind her. "The larger of the two safes in there." Her head had turned m the direction he indicated. Now she remained stMl for a moment, gaze remote, lips parted, in an attitude of intent listening; then she looked back at him. "Give me the injection," she told him. "Some men are coming." Dr. Gloge lifted the gun, put the point against her riioukler, pulled the trigger. Barbara drew her breath in riiarply, took the gun from him, opened her purse, dropped the gun kiside and snapped the purse shut. Her eyes shifted to die office door. "Listen!" she said. After a moment. Dr. Gloge heard footsteps coming along the narrow corridor from the main laboratory. "Who is ky he asked anxiously. "Hammond," she said. "Three other men." Dr. Gloge made a stifled sound of despair. "We ve got to get away. He mustn't find either of us here. Quick -- through there." He waved toward the library. Barbara shook her head. "This place is surrounded. All passages are guarded." She frowned. "Hammond must think he has all the evidence he needs against you -- but don't help him in any way! Admit nothing! Let's see what I can do with my -- " As she spoke she moved back to the chair on which she had been sitting. She settled into it, her face composed. "Maybe I can handle him," she said confidently. The footsteps had reached the door. There came a knock. Gloge glanced at Barbara. His thoughts were whirling. She nodded, smiled. "Come in!" Dr. Gloge said harshly, too loudly. Hammond entered the room. "Why, Mr. Hammond!" Barbara exclaimed. Her face was flushed, she looked embarrassed and confused. Hammond had stopped, as he caught sight of her. He sensed a mental probing. His brain put up a barrier, and the probing ceased. Their eyes met; and there was a flicker of consternation in hers. Hammond smiled ironically. Then he said in a steely voice: "Stay where you are, Barbara, ni talk to you later." His voice went up. "Come on in, Ames!" he called. There was threat in his tone; and Dr. Gloge sent a quick, desperate, appealing glance at Barbara. She gave him an uncertain smile. The look of earnest, fumbling innocence with which she had greeted Hammond had left her face, leaving it resigned but alert. Hammond gave no sign of being aware of the change. "Ames," he said to the first of the three men who came in through the library from the specimen room -- Dr. Gloge recognized Wesley Ames, the chief of Research Alpha's security staff -- "this is Barbara Ellington. Take charge of that handbag she's holding. Allow no one to enter this office. Miss' Ellington is not to leave and is not to be permitted to touch any object in this room. She is to stay in that chair until I return with Dr. Gloge." Wesley Ames nodded. "Understood, Mr. Hammond!" He glanced at his men, one of whom went to the office door and locked it while Ames turned to Barbara. She handed him her purse without comment "Doctor, come with me," Hammond said curtly. D r. Gloge followed him into the library. Hammond closed the door behind them. "Where's Vince?" he said in an inexorable voice. "Really, Mr. Hammond," Gloge protested. "I don't -- " Hammond stepped toward him abruptly. The movement seemed a threat. Dr. Gloge cringed, expecting to be manhandled. Instead, the bigger man firmly caught his arm and pressed a tiny metal object against his bare wrist. "Tell me where Vince is!" Hammond commanded. Gloge parted his lips to deny any IF knowledge of Barbara's boy friend. Instead, die confession of what he had done poured forth from him. As he realized what he was admitting, Gloge tried desperately to himself from talking. He had already divined that the metal touchidg hk skin was some kind of a hypnottc device, and so he tried to pull hk arm from Hammond's grasp. It was a vain effort. How long ago did you drown him?" Hammond asked. "About an hour ago," said Dr. Gloge, hopelessly. At that instant shouts came from the adjoining office. The door was pulled open. Wesley Ames stood there, ashen-faced. "Af r. Hammond -- shes goneV Hammond darted past him into the office. Dr. Gloge hiHried aft, legs trembling. As he reached the door, Hammond already was coming back into the office w one of the security men from die hidl on the other side. Ames and the other men stood in the colter ol the office, k)okmg about with stupefied esiressions. H ammond dosed the door, said to Aflits, "Quickly, nowl What happen?" Ames threw his hands up in a gesture of furious frustration. "Mr. Hammond, I don't know. We were watching her. She was diere in the chair... then she was not there, that's all. He -- " he indicated one of the men -- "was standing with his back to the door. When we saw she was gone, he was sitting on the floor next to the door! The door was open. We ran into the hall, but die wasn't there. Then I call you." "How long had you been watching hCT?" Hammond asked sharply. "How long?" Ames gave him a dazed look. "I had just taken my mother down the hall to the elevator -- " He stopped, blinked. "Mr. Hammond, what am I saying? My mother's been dead for eight years!" Hammond said softly, "Sk that's her little trick. She reached to that deep of the heart where the pure, unsullied dead are enshrined. And I thought she was only trying to read my mind!" He broke off, said in a dear, commanding voice: "Wake iq, Ames! You three have been gone from the world for a couple of minutes. Don't worry about how Miss Ellington did it Get her description to the exits. If riie's seen approaching by a guard, tell him to keep her at a distance at gun point" As the three hurried from the office, he indicated a chair to Dr. Gloge. Gloge sat down, senses swimming, as Hammond took a pencilshaped device from his pocket, pressed it and stood waiting. On the fifth floor of the Research Alpha complex, Helen Wendell picked up the small private phone at the side of her desk, said, "Go ahead, John." "Switch all defense and trap screens on immediately!" Hammond's voice told her. "Gloge's drowned Strather -- as an experimental failure. But the other one's #f awake and functioning. It's hard to know what she'll do next, but she may find it necessary to get to my office as a way of getting out of this building fast." Helen pressed a button. "Not this way she won't!" she said. "The creens are on." X O utside, it grew darker on that tense Monday night. At eight-eighteen, Helen Wendell again picked up the small phone purring at the side of her desk in the Research Alpha complex, glanced over at the closed office door, and said into the receiver, "Go ahead, John." "I'm here at the pool," John Hammond's voice told her. "We've just fished his body out. Helen, the fellow is alive, me reflex prevented any intake of water. But we'll need an oxygen tent." Helen's left hand reached for another telephone. "You want the ambulance?" she asked, starting to dial. "Yes. You have the street number. Tell them to pull up at the side gate. We have to act swiftly." "Police uniforms, also?" Helen asked. "Yes. But tell them to stay in the cab unless needed. We're out of sight, behind a high fence. And it's dark. I'll come back with them. Has Barbara been apprehended?" "No," Helen said. "I really didn't expect she would be," Hammond said. "I'll question the guards when I get there." B arbara had allowed Ames to escort her to the nearest elevator, while she continued to have hni think that she was his mother. Once in the elevator she pushed the up-button and came out presently on the roof. As she had already perceived, a helicopter was scheduled to take off. And, though she was not an authorized passenger, the pilot took her along believing her to be his girl friend. Her sudden arrival seemed perfectly logical to him. A little later, he set her down on the roof of another building. And that, also, seemed the most natural act to him, her reason for going there obvious. He flew off and promptly forgot the episode. The hasty landing was an urgent necessity for Barbara. She could fed the new injection beginning to work. So in her scanning of the building flitting by below, she perceived one in which the upper floors were unoccupied. "I'll try to make it down to some office," she thought. But she didn't get beyond the top floor. She actually began to stagger as she went down the first steps from the roof. And there was no mistaking the out-of-control state of her body. To her left, a door opened into a warehouse-like loft. She weaved through it, closed it behind her, and bolted it. Then she half-lowered herself, half-fell to the floor. During that evening and night she never quite lost consciousness. Blackout was no longer possible for IF her. But she could feel her body changing, changing, changing -- The energy flows inside her took on a different meaning. They were separate from her. Presently they would be controllable again, but in another fashion entirely. Something of Barbara seemed to disappear with that awareness. "I'm still me!" the entity thought as it lay there on the floor. "Flesh, feeling, desire -- " But she had the distinct realization that "me" even in these early stages of the five hundred thousand Exactly how the self was becoming something more was not yet clear. The slow night dragged by. XI uesday. Shortly before noon, Helen Wendell came along the hallway that led from John Hammond's quarters to the main office. Hammond was sitting at the far side of her desk. He glanced up at her as she approached. "How are the patients?" he asked. "Gloge is role-perfect," Helen said. "I even allowed him to spend part of the morning talking to his assistants here. He's already had two conversations by Telstar with Sir Hubert about his new task overseas. I've put him to sleep again, but he's available. When did you come in?" "Just now. How's Strather?" Helen tapped the recorder. "I checked with the MD machine on him twenty minutes ago," she said. "It gave me its opinion in detail. I took it all down. Do you want tc hear it?" "Sum it up for me." Helen pursed her lips; then: "The MD verifies that he didn't swallow any water, that some newly develop brain mechanism shut off breathing and kept him in a state of suspended animation. Vince himself has no conscious memory, of the experience, so it was evidently a survival act of the lower brain. MD reports other developments are taking place in Vince, regards them as freakish in nature. It's too soon to tell whether or not he can survive a third injection. Hes under sedation." Hammond looked dissatisfied. "All right," he said after a moment. "What else do you have for me?" "A number of transmitter messages," Helen said. "About Gloge?" "Yes. New Brasilia and Manila agree with you that there are too many chances of a revealing slip-up if Dr. Gloge remains at Research Alpha any longer than is absolutely necessary." "You said Gloge is role-perfect." Helen nodded. "At the moment. But he is a highly recalcitrant subject and naturally I can't give him the kind of final conditioning he'd get at Paris center. That's where they want him. The courier, Arnold, will take him aboard the Paris-jet at #:# tonight." "No!" Hammond shook his head. "That's too early! Gloge is our bait to catch Barbara. His experiments indicate that she won't be able to function until some time this evening. I calculate that somewhere around # o'clock will be a good time to let Gloge out from behind the defense screens." Helen was silent a moment, then aid, "There seems to be a general feeling, John, that you're over-estimating the possibilities of any really dangerous evolutionary developments in Barbara Ellington." Hammond smiled tautly. "I've seen her. They haven't. Mind you, for all I know, she may be dead or dying of the effects of the third shot by now. But if she's capable of cominp., I think she'll come. She'll want that fourth injection. She may start any time looking for the man who can produce the serum for her." B y Tuesday, a new awareness had come to Barbara. She had developed brain mechanisms that could do things with space -- do them on an automatic level, without her conscious mind knowing what, or how. Fantastic things... As she lay there, a new nerve eenter in her brain reached out and scanned a Tdume of space # lightyears in diameter. It touched and eompreheBded douds of neutral hydrogen and bright young #-type stars, measured e swing of binaries, took a cdisus of comets and ice asteroids. Far out in the constellation of Ophiuchus a blue-white giant was going nova, and the new, strange linkage in Barbara's mind observed its frantic heaving of spheres of radiant gas. A black dwarf emitted its last spray of infra-red light and sank into the radiationless pit of dead stars. Barbara's mind encompassed it all, and reached farther... reached out effortlessly until it touched a specific Something... and withdrew. Brimming with ecstasy, Barbara cried out in her mind. What did I touch? She knew it had been something the brain mechanism was programmed to search for. But no conscious perception was involved. All she could be sure of was that the nerve center seemed satisfied, and ceased its scanning. But she sensed, in an intensely happy way, that it remained aware of What it had contacted. She was still savoring the joy a while later when she became aware that the shifting energy flows inside her had resumed. Gradually, then, she permitted her body and mind to sink into a receptive state. Midsummer heat built up over the city throughout the day. In the locked room on the vacant top floor of the multi-storied building three miles from Research Alpha, the heat grew stifling as the sun shifted overhead, began to beat in through closed, unshaded windows. Barbara, curled on her side on the dusty floor, did not move. Now and then  uttered a moaning sound. Sweat ran from her for a long, long time, as the heat increased; then the skin of her face dried and turned dirty white. She made no more sounds. Even a close study would not have been able to prove that she still breathed. IF By four o'clock, the sunblaze had lifted past the windows, and the locked room lay in shadows. But it was another hour before the temperature in it gradually began to drop. About six, the curled figure moved for the first time. She straightened her legs slowly, dien, with a sudden, convulsive motion, rolled over on her back, lay flat, arms flung loosely to the sides. The right half of her face was smeared grotesquely with thick dust caked in drying sweat. She breathed -- lay quiet again. Several minutes later, her eyelids lifted. The eyes oddly awake and alert, though they remained unfocused and did not riiift about the room. After a while, the lids slowly closed and remained closed. T he day darkened; the city's lights awoke. The empty warehouse stood silent. More than an hour passed before the figure in the room on the top floor moved again. Tliis time, it was motion of a different order. She rose suddenly and quickly to her feet, went to the nearest window and stood looking cut through flie dirt-stained glass. The towering Research Alpha complex was a glow of white light to the west. Ihe watcher's eyes turned toward it... A second of time went by. Then the mind that directed the eyes moved on an entirely new level extended perception. Night-shift activities in the research complex were not essentially different from those of the day; but there were fewer people around as the awareness that was Barbara drifted along familiar, lighted hallways, about corners, dropped suddenly to a sublevel which contained the biology section. Here she flicked through the main laboratory and up a narrow corridor, pausing before the door to Dr. Gloge's office. She moved through the door, paused in the dark andsilent office, then moved on into the library. She remained a minute or two above the big safe in a corner of the library. Then she knew. The safe was empty -- and trapped. The awareness flicked out of the library, shifted to the fifth floor of the complex, drifted toward a great, black door showing the words: Scientific Liaison and Investigation. She stopped before it. Minutes passed as she slowly and carefully scanned the outer walls of John Hammond's offices and living quarters. Here was something new... something that seemed very dangerous. Within the walls and doors, above the ceiling, below the flooring of this section, strange energies curled and crawled like twisting smoke. She could not pass through that barrier. But though she could not enter, her perceptions might, to some extent. She must avoid, she decided, both the front entry door and the secret elevator which led directly to Hammond's living quarters in the rear of the section. As the most obvious points for an intruder to consider. they were also the most formidably shielded. She shifted back along the hall to a point some twenty feet away from the massive black door, wcU back from the wall between her and the front office. She waited. Gradually a picture began to form... This was an unfamiliar room, the inner office of the section. There was no one in it, nothing of interest except a closed door across from the one n hich opened on the corridor. The inner office disappeared... and what came next was no picture, but a surge of savage, demanding hunger. Startled, shocked, already feeling the pull that in a moment would hurl her into the murderous barriers about the section, the searching awareness instantly broke the thread of visual perception, went inactive to allow herself to stabilize. Nevertheless, she now knew where the serum was -- in a strongroom of Hammond's quarters, heavily screened, seemingly inaccessible. Perception cautiously opened again. Another section of the living quarters appeared, hazy with hostile energies. The other -- the male counterpart -- was here. Alive. Here, but helpless. Here, but unconscious, in a cage of dark force which permitted no more than barest identification by the searcher. She was very glad he had been rescued. M inutes later, she knew there was no one else in Hammond's locked quarters. She withdrew visual perception from there, and let the picture of the main office develop. The blurred image of a woman -- Helen Wendell -- now seemed to ba speaking into an instrument connected with the apparatus before her. A second band of perception opened, and voices became indistinctly audible. Ganin Arnold, the New Brasilia courier, was making his final call from the city jetport, nine miles south of the Research Alpha complex. "The doors are being secured," ha said. He was speaking into a disguised microphone clamped over his mouth and nose, which had the appearance of the tranquilizing respirators many of the other jet passengers were using now in the last moments before lift-off. Even to anyone within inches of him, hk voice would have remained completely inaudible. In John Hammond's office, it emerged clearly from the device on Helen Wendell's desk. "Lift-off for the nonstop jet to Paris," Arnold went on, 'Svill follow -- " he glanced at the watch on his wrist -- "in two minutes and thirty seconds. All passengers and every member of the crew have passed at least once through the measurement radius. Nothing which may have preceded or followed myself and our biologist aboard registers life energy levels significantly above the standard Earther range -- that is, of course, below six. "To sum it up, we definitely are not being accompanied to Park by any abnormally high human ev tionary form. Dr. Gloge's behavior IF has been excellent. His tranquilizer has begun to take effect and he is showing signs of drowsiness. Undoubtedly, he will sleep soundly throughout the trip." Arnold paused, apparently waiting for comment. When there was none, he resumed, "As soon as the liftfield goes on, communication by this means, of course, will be impossible. Since nothing is likely to go wrong 'from this moment on, I suggest, if it's satisfactory to Mr. Hammond, that I end my report now." Helen Wendell's voice, seeming to speak from a point just within the left side of the courier's skull, told him pleasantly, "Mr. Hammond prefers you to remain alert and available for final instructions until the lift has begun." xn I n the locked room on the top floor of the empty warehouse a few miles east of Research Alpha, the woman-shape standing at the window stirred suddenly out of the tranced immobility it had maintained for the past minutes. The head lifted, gaze sweeping the softly glowing night-sky above the city. A hand moved, touching the thick windowpane probingly. The glass fell away like a big drop of melting ice. Dust swirled as cool air rushed in. Barbara waited, then moved closer to the opening. Her gaze swung to the west again, remained there. She listened. The myriad noises of the city were clear and distinct now. Overlying them was a thin fountain of sky-sound as, every thirty seconds -- at this hour -- a jet lifted vertically from the city port, cut in its engines and vanished up into the night with a whistling shriek. Her head shifted quickly briefly following the changing pattern of the sound. Then it steadied. Her gaze rose slowly, slanting to the north, following a moving, distant point in the night, eyes narrowed with intentness. On board the Paris jet which had left the city port a few minutes before, Dr. Henry doge now had a very curious experience. Drowsily, almost on the verge of sleep, he had been contemplating the pleasant significance of his assignment today to Sir Hubert Roland's Paris Project. Suddenly, then, there was a sensation of coming partly awake. He gazed around him with a rising sense of alarm, looking first of all at his seat companion. The fellow was big, heavily built. He looked like a police detective, and Gloge knew that the man was his guard. The curious thing was that he was slumped back in the seat, head lolling forward, eyes closed... typical indications of a tranquilized stupor. Gloge thougiht; "Why is he asleep?" He had a strong conviction that it was he who should be unconscious. There was a clear memory of a device -- an instrument totally unfamiliar to him -- which the Wendell woman had used to implant a complete, compelling set of delusions in his mind. He had he had, at the suggestion of his guard, inhaled enough tranquilizing gas from the seat respirator to have kept him somnolent until the jet touched down in Paris, Instead, minutes later, he httl come awake, the delusions of the day slipping from his mind! There must be an explanation for these apparently contradictory events. The thought ended. A feeling of blankness held him for a moment Then came a churning wave of terror. Somewhere a voice had said: "Yes, Dr. Gloge -- there is an explanation for this!" Slowly, against his every inclination but completely unable to withstand the impulse, Dr. Gloge turned, looked back. There was someone in the seat behind him. For an instant, it seemed to be a complete stranger. Then the eyes opened. They fixed on him, glowing muted light of the jet. The woman spoke, and it was the voice of Barbara Ellington. "We have a problem. Dr. Gloge. There seems to be a group of extra-terrestrials on this planet, and I still do not have any clear idea of what they are doing here. That's our immediate task -- to find out." A dell said sharply. Her hand flicked to the right, snapped a switch. A small viewscreen on the right side of the desk m up. She said, "John -- quick! IF In the inner office, John Hammond turned, saw the lit screen on the desk behind him. An instant later he was listening to the words tumbling hoarsely from the telephone speaker on his left. He said to Helen's tense, pale profile in the screen to the right, "Where is he?" "At the Des Moines jetport! The Paris jet put down for emergency repairs. Now nobody seems to understand just what was wrong with it or what repairs are needed. But the passengers have been disembarked, are to be transferred to another jet. Arnold's in a state of confusion and shock. Listen to him!" " -- there was a woman with him," the courier's voice babbled. "At the time, I thought it was one of the passengers who had come off the jet with us. Now I'm not sure. But I simply stood there and watched Ae two of them walk out of the hall together. It never occurred to me to ask myself why this woman was with Gloge, or to stop them, or even to wonder where they were going... Hammond twisted a dial, dimming the voice. He spoke to Helen Wendell. "When did the jet come down?" "From what Arnold said first," Helen told him, "it must have been over half an hour ago! As he puts k, it didn't occur to him to call us about it until now." "'Half an hourV' Hammond came to his feet. "Helen, drop everything you're doing! I want an off-planet observer sitting in on this, preferably within minutes." She gave him a startled look. "What are you expecting?" "I don't know what to expect." She hesitated, began: "The Wardens..." "Whatever can be done here," Hammond said, "I can do myself. I don't need anyone else for that. The defense screens on the northern side will go off for exactly forty seconds. Now move!" He snapped off. the screen, reached under the desk, threw over another switch. I n the main office, Helen Wendell stared at the blank screen for a moment. Then she jumped to her feet, ran across the room to the entry door, pulled it open and slipped out into the hall. The door swung shut behind her. Some moments later, John Hammond entered the room behind hit private office where Vincent Strather lay enclosed by a trap screen, Hammond went to the wall, turned the trap controls there halfway to the off point. The screen faded into smoky near-invisibility, and he stared for a few seconds at the shape stretched out on the couch within it. He asked aloud, "There have been no further internal changes?" "None within the past two hours," the MD machine's voice said from the wall. "This form is viable?" "Yes." "He would awaken if I released the screen?" "Yes. Immediately." Hammond was silent a moment, then asked, "You have calculated the effects of a fourth injection of the serum?" #J "Yes," the machine said from the wall. "In general, what are they?" "In general," the machine said, "there would be pronounced changes end at an again greatly accelerated rate. The evolutionary trend remains the same, but would be very much advanced. The resultant form would stabilize within twenty minutes. It would again be a viable one." Hammond turned the trap screen controls full over to the left. The screen darkened once more into a dense, concealing shroud. It was too soon to make the decision to give the fourth shot. Perhaps -- mercifully -- it could be avoided altogether. xm A t half past ten, the long-distance signal sounded from the telephone screen. Hammond glanced around from the portable control box on the desk, simultaneously pressed the answer button and the stud which would leave him unseen if the caller's instrument was equipped with a viewscreen, and said, "Go ahead!" The screen remained dark, but somebody made a gasping sound of relief. "Mr. HammondV It was a reedy, quavering voice, but it was distinctly the voice of Dr, Gloge. There were two sharp clicks from one of the instruments lying on the desk -- a signal from Helen Wendell, in the observer boat standing off Earth, that she was recording llie conversation. "Where are you, Doctor?" "Mr. Hammond... something terrible... that creature... Barbara Ellington -- " "She took you off the jet, I know," Hammond said. "Where arc yon now?" "My home -- in Pennsylvania." "She went there with you?" "Yes. There was nothing I could do." "Of course not," Hammond said. "She's gone now?" "I don't know where she is. I took the chance of phoning. Mr. Hammond, there was something I didn't know, didn't remember. But she knew. I..." "You had some Omega serum in that farm laboratory?" Hammond asked. "I didn't think of it as that," Dr. Gloge's voice told him. "It was an earlier experimental variant -- one with impurities which produce a dangerously erratic reaction. I was under the impression I had destroyed my entire stock. But this being knew better! It brought me here, forced me to give it what was left of the serum. The quantity was small -- " "But enough for a standard fourth shot of the series?" Hammond said. "Yes, yes, it was sufficient for the fourth injection." "And she has now taken it as an injection?" Dr. Gloge hesitated, then he said, "Yes. However there is reason to hope that instead of impelling the evolutionary process in what I now regard as a monstrous creature on to its next stage, the imperfect serum will result in its prompt destruction." "Perhaps," said Hammond. "But IF almost since you first launcbed Barbara Ellington into Ibis process, she appears to have been aware of what was possible to her. I can't believe she's made a mistake now." "I... " Dr. Gloge paused again, went on: "Mr. Hammond, I realize the enormity of what I've done. If, in any way, I can help avert the worst consequences, I shall cooperate to the fullest extent. I -- " There was a sharp click as the connection was broken, a pause, then Helen Wendell's voice whispered into Hammond's ear, "Do you think Barbara let him make that call, then cut him off?" "Of course." Helen made no further comment, simply waited; and presently, softly, Hammond continued: "I think she wants us to know that she's coming here." "I think she's there now," said Helen. "Good-by." J ohn Hammond glanced at the control box on the desk, and saw the flickering indicators. He also saw a wholly unexpected reaction: A condition of non-energy that actually canceled energy. "Helen," he said. "This woman has gone up somewhere out of our reach! What you're seeing is energy trying to maintain itself against antienergy. I received recognition drilling on such things, but I've never seen it before in an actual situation." Helen Wendell, eyes fixed on a duplicate check screen in the distant observer boat, did not reply. A shifting electronic storm was blazing through the check-screen indicators; it showed that the defensive forces enclosing Hammond's office and living quarters were coming under a swiftly varying pattern of attack... presently that they were being tested alniost to the limit. It held that way for over a minute -- every reading almost impossibility high, barely shifting. "John Hammond!" the desk top said softly to Hammond. He jerked slightly away, eyes flicking down to it. "John Hammond!" the chair whispered beside him . "John Hammond!" "John Hammond!" "John Hammond!" "John Hammond..." His name sprang at him from every iart of the office, in a swirling, encircling pattern. Because of his special supervisory position, Hammond knew the pattern and its danger. It had never been considered probable, but nevertheless they had taken the possibility into account and so he had outside power available to deal with this emergency. He looked hurriedly about on the desk for an instrument he had laid down among the others there. For an instant, he seemed unable to recognize it, and there was an icy touch of panic. Then he realized he already held it in his hand. He ran a knob up along its side with his thumb, locked it into place, laid the instrument back on the desk. A rasping came from it. Not only a sound, but a vibration, a rough, hard shuddering of the nerves. The voice-ghosts sank to a whisper, #t flowed from the room. Helen Wendell's tiny, distant voice stabbed at Hammond's ear like a needle: "The check screen! She's leaving! Hopefully. "You're certain? "Not really." Alarm whipped at him through Helen's voice. "What does your screen show? "A subjective blur at the moment. It's clearing.' "What happened?" "I think she felt above us and so she took it for granted that she could walk all over us. Accordingly, she's just had the surprise of her brief existence as a sub-galactic super-woman. She didn't realize we represent the Great Ones." "Is she damaged?" "Oh, I wouldn't say that. She's learned too much. But... details later." Hammond blinked at the check screen, swimg around toward the door of the adjoining room, pulled it open. # # A dminister the final injection tothe subject!" he said sharply into the room. "Acknowledge!" "The fourth and final injection of the Omega Stimulation series will be administered to the subject," the machine replied. "Immediately!" "Immediately." Helen's voice reached Hammond again as he drew the door shut and came back to the desk. "At moments," she said, "the anti-energies were holding the ninety-six point of overload. Within four of the theoretical limit. Did she get to you at the energy balance?" "Very nearly," Hammond told her. A very high-energy, pseudo-hypno trick that didn't quite work. And she'll be back. I still have something she wants!" On his desk, the telephone screen blurred. When he turned it on, the voice of Dr. Gloge sounded in his ears. "We were cut off earlier, Mr. Hammond." The biologist's voice was strongly even and controlled. "What happened?" Hammond asked warily. "Mr. Hammond, I have finally analyzed what evolution really is. The universe is a spectrum. It needs energies in motion at all levels. This is why those at the higher levels do not interfere directly with individual activities at the lower. But this is also why they are concerned when a race reaches the point where it can begin to manipulate large forces. Hammond said steadily, "Barbara, if the purpose of this call is to find out if I'll let you in, yes, I will." A pause, then a click. Then there was a tiny, momentary flickering in one of the check screen indicators. Then, in a different section, another. "What's happening?" Helen asked tautly. Hammond said, "She's coming through the screens, with my permission." "Do you think it's a trick?" "In a way. For some reason, she hasn't let herself reach that theoreGloge's evolutionary scale. That may come a little later." "And you're actually letting her in, believing that?" IF #f course. Helen dkl not answer him. A minute went past in silence. Hammond shifted so that he faced the door, moved a few stqps away from the control box and the desk, and stood waiting. A small light burned red in a corner of the check screen. Something had come into the main office. The heavy sHence continued for some seconds. Then, on the hard flooring at the far end of the corridor, Hammond heard footsteps. H e coiddnt have said what he had been expecting... but certainly nothing so commonplace as the sound of a woman's high-heeled shoes coming liskly toward the inner office. She appeared in the doorway, stopped there, locdng at him. Hammond said nothing. All outer indications were diat this was the Barbara Ellington he had seen sitting in a chair in Dr. Gloge's office the night befm. Nothing had changed either in her looks or in her clothing; even the brown purse she held in one hand seemed the same. Except for the air of radiant vitality, the alertness of her stance, the keen intelligence in her face, this also was, in fact, the awkward, overanxious, lean girl who had worked in the outer office for less than two weeks. And therefore, Hammond thought it was a phantom! Not a delusion; he was protected now against any attempt to tamper with his mind in that manner by barriers which would break only if he died. The shape standing in the door was real. The instruments recorded it. But it was a shape created for this meeting -- not that of Barbara Ellington as she was at this hour. He was unsure of her intention in assuming it. Perhaps it was designed to throw him off guard. faintly, and glanced about. Hammond knew then that he hadn't been mistaken. Something had come in with her... something oppressive, spine-tingling; a sense of heat, a sense of power. turned toward him; and the smile deepened. "I'm going to have to test why you're still here, she said carelessly. "So defend yourself! There was no sound; but a cloud of white light filled the air between them, enveloping them; faded; flared silently; faded again. Both stood unmoving, each watching the other. Nothing in the office had changed. "Excellent! the woman said. "The mystery behind you begins to reveal itself. I know the quality of your race now, John Hammond. Your science could never control the order of energies that are shielding you mentally and physically here! "There should be other indications then that in extreme necessity you are permitted to employ devices created by beings greater than yourself -- devices which you do not yourself understand. And where would such devices be found at the moment?... Over there, I believe! She turned toward the door of the adjoining room, took three steps, and halted. A rose-glowing haze had appeared before the door and the surrounding sections of wall and flooring. "Yes," she said. "That comes from the same source! And here -- " She turned, moved quickly toward the control box on the desk, checked again. A rose haze also enveloped the box now. "The three points you must consider vital here!" she said nodding. "Yourself, the being in that room and the controls of the section. You may safeguard these at the expense of revealing a secret you would otherwise least want to reveal. Now I think it is time for us to exchange information." She came back to Hammond, stopped before him. "I discovered suddenly, John Hammond, that your kind are not native to Earth. You are superior to Earth's humanity, but not sufficiently superior to explain why you are here. You have an organization on this world. But it is a curious organization. It does not appear to serve the purposes of conqueror or exploiter... But let's leave It at that. Don't try to explain it. It doesn't matter. You are to release the human male who was to have received the series of serum injections with me. You and the other members of your race stationed here will then remove yourselves promptly from this planet. We have no further use for you." Hammond shook his head. iiTTe might be forced off the Vy planet," he said. "But that would make Earth an active danger spot. The Great Galactics whom I represent do have servant races who carry out military assignments for them. It would not be to your advantage if such a race were to occupy or quarantine Earth to make sure that the seedling race here continues to receive the necessary degree of supervision." "John Hammond," the womanshape said, "whether the Great Galactics send military servants to Earth or come here themselves is a matter that does not concern me in the least. It would be very unwise of them to do either. Within hours from now, the Omega serum will be available in limitless quantities. Within days, every man, woman, and child of Earth will have gone through the full evolutionary sequence. Do you think Earth's new humanity could still be supervised by any other race?" "The Omega serum will never be used again," Hammond said. "I'll show you why..." Hammond turned, went to the control box on the desk. The rose haze faded before him, appeared behind him again. He threw a switch and the haze vanished. He turned away from the controls. "The energy fields that kept you out of that room are being shut off," he said. "In a moment, the door will open. So see for yourself -- the barriers are off." Except for the blazing blue of the eyes, her face was a cold mask. Hammond thought she must already know what was there. But she turned, went to the open door, and stood looking into the room. Hammond moved to the side of the desk IF where he could look past her... The energy trap enclosing the couch in the room had vanished. The dark thing on the couch was just sitting up. It shook its head dazedly, rolled over and came up on all fours. Its huge, dull-black eyes stared at them for an instant; then it straightened, rose to its full height... To a full height of twenty-two inches I It swayed imsteadily on the couoh -- a hairy little figure with a wide-mouthed, huge-eyed gobMn head. Its eyes blinked in vague recognition. The mouth opened. It cried in a thin, bleating voice: "Bar-ba-ral" XV T he woman wheeled, turning away. She did not look back at the grotesque little figure. a faint smile touched her lips as she gazed at Hammond. "All right," she said, "there goes my last tie with earth. I accept what you said. I gather dKit the Omega serum is a unique development and that it hasn't shown up elsewhere in the galaxy." "That is not a Htal truth," said Hammond. She nodded toward the acoining room. "Then perhaps you can tdl me what went wrong." Hammond told her Gloge's twofold theory: that at this stage of man's evolution many possibilities remained for evolvement, and that appsuently the serum stimulated one of these and thereafter was bound by natural law to follow that line of development. As he talked, he waif watching her, and he was thinking: This problem isn't resolved. How are we going to deal with herV He sensed an almost incredible strength, an actual, palpable force. It poured from her in a steady stream of power. He continued tensely: "The Great Galaotics, when planting their seed on a new planet, have never interfered with the basic characteristics of the various races that live there. They interject selected bundles of their own genes by grafting into thousands of men and women on every continent. As the generaticms go by, these bundles intermix by chance with those that arc native to the people of the planet. Apparently, the Omega serum stimulates one of these mixtures and carries it forward to whatever it b capable of, which, because of the singularity factor, usually leads to a dead end." "The singularity factor -- ?" Her words were a question. Men, Hammond explained, were born of the union of a man and a woman. No one person carried more than a portion of mankind's genes. As time passed, the interaodon and mterrelation of ril the genes occurred; the race progressed because bfllions of chance mteimixings of different bundles took place. In Vince, one such bundle had been stirred, been whipped up to its cdtunate point by repeated Omega Stimulation -- but evidently that particular bundle had strictly limited possibilities, as would always be the case when a single person was bred, so to speak, with himself... the singularity factor. And that was what had happened to Vince and herself. They were products of the most fantastic inbreeding ever attempted -- life surviving through one line, a kind of incest carried to some ultimate sterility, fantastic, interesting, freakish. ii'VTou are wrong," said the womI an-shape softly. "I am not a freak. So what has happened here is even more improbable than I have realized. In myself, it was the galactic seedling bundle of genes that was stimulated. Now, I understand what it was I contacted out in space. One of them. And he let me. He understood instantly." She added, "One more question, John Hammond. Omega is an unusual term. What does it mean?" "... When man becomes one with the ultimate, that is Point Omega." It seemed to Hammond that, even as he finished speaking, she was growing remote, withdrawing from him. Or was it that it was he who was withdrawing? Not only from her but from everything -- drifting away, not in any spatial sense, but, HI some curious fashion, away from the reality of the entire universe? The brief thought came that this Aould be an alarming and disturbing experience. Then the thought itself was forgotten. "There is something occurring," her voice was telling him. "In the small thing behind the door, the Omega evolutionary process is completed, in its fashion. In me, it is not completed -- not quite. "But it is being completed now... H e was nowhere and nothing. New word-impressions, new thought impressions came suddenly and swept through him like the patter of rain. The impressions took form. It was later in time. He seemed to be standing in the small room next to his office, looking down at the lanky, redheaded young man sitting groggily on the edge of the couch holding his head. "Coming out of it, Vince?" Hammond asked. Vincent Strather glanced uncertainly up at him, ran his hand over the jagged rent in the sleeve of his jacket. "I guess so, Mr. Hammond," he muttered. "I... what happened?" "You went for a drive tonight," Hammond told him, "with a girl named Barbara Ellington. You'd both been drinking. She was driving... driving too fast. The car went off a highway embankment, turned over several times. Witnesses dragged you to safety minutes before the car burst into flames. The girl was dead. They didn't attempt to save her body. When the police informed me of the accident, I had you brought here to Research Alpha." As he spoke, he had the stunning realization that everything he was saying was true. The accident had happened late that evening, in exactly that manner. "Well..." Vince began. He broke IF oft, sighed, shook his head. Fa was an odd gbl. A wfld one! I was pretty fond of her oooe, Mr. Hanunond. Lately, I've been trying to break off with her." Hammond received the kire#sion that much more had happened. Automatically, he looked back through the open door as the private telephone in the inner office signaled. "Excuse me," he said to Vince. As he flicked on the instrument, Helen Wendell's face appeared on the phone screen. She gave him a brief smile, asked, "How is Strather?" Hammond didn't reply at once. He looked at her, feeling cold, eerie crawlings over his scalp. Helen was seated at her desk in the outer office. She was not in a aceboat standing off die planet. He heard himself say, "He's all right. There is veiry little emotional shock... How about you?" 'T'm disturbed by Barbara's death," Hden admitted. "But now I have Dr. Gioge on the phone. He's qmte anxious to talk to you." Hammcmd said, "All right. Put him on." "hfr. Hammond," Dr. Gloge's voice said a moment later, this is in connectidn with the Point Omega Stimulation project. I've been going over all my notes and conclusions on these experiments, and I'm convinced that once you understand the extraordinary dangers which might result if the details of my experiments became known, you will agree dutt the project should be closed out and any records referring to it destroyed at once." After switching off the phone, he remained for a while at the desk. S o that part of the problem also had been solved! The last traces of the Omega scrum were being wiped out, woidd.soon linger only in his nxtnd. And for how long there? Perhaps no more dian two or three hours, John Hammond dcdkled. The memory pictures were paling; he had a feeling that sections of ttm already had vanished. And there was an odd, trembling uncertainty about what was left... thin, colored mind-oanvas being tugged by a wind whkii presently would carry it off -- He had no objections, Hanunood told himsdf. He had seen one of the Great Ones, and k was not a memory that it was good for a lesser being to have. Somehow, it hurt to be so much less. He must have slept For he awoke suddenly. He f vaguely bewfldered, for no reason that he could imagine. Helen came in, smiling. "Don't you think it's time we closed up for the night. You're working too long hours again." "You're right," Hammond nodded. He got iq and went into the room next to the office to tell Vincent Strather he was free to go home. #S IF  Short Story E gon lashed the tiller but let the little atomic jet go on driving the heavy dugout slowly toward the morning sun. He stood up, breathing in deeply, feeling the muscles ripple under his drying deerhide clout. The wind was rich with sea tang and the savory smell of the fish that Cala was frying over a brazier. His mouth was already watering as he went forward to take a plate from her. In the bow, old Herndon was nibbling with more relish than he had shown for months. The mark of approaching death was heavy on the emaciated face of the last earthman, but it was relaxed now, as if the pain from the malignancy had finally ceased. He made room for Egon beside him, shredding the fish with a willow fork. "The seas are fertile again, like the land. Only we -- " He sighed, He was the last Earthman of all -- even though he came from the farthest of starsl then made a tired shrug. "Could any world be as beautiful or bountiful as this mother planet, Egon?" "No, Herndon. Certainly not bountiful." But it was Egon's turn to sigh as he remembered the red winds over the plains of Dale and the forests beyond that had gleamed pale in the double moonlight. And there were the roofed cities filled with people who had gone a thousand years beyond the final culture of the Earth. Yet his words had been true; there was no bounty to Dale or the other settled planets. The seeds men had carried with them had all died before means could be found to make them adapt. The native growths were poisonous or foul. Food had to be synthesized there from the raw elements. It was almost twenty years since Egon had climbed out of the wreckage of lib Mb ptanet-pfospecdfig flihip after tiie exfosion of his motor had forced him to land here. And even now, his night dreams were filled with the people and cities of Dale and the synthetic feasts at his mother's table. H erndon had stopped toying whh his food and sat watching the faint wake where the little tender bobbed along on a line behind them. "And you say they've forgotten earth out there, Egon? They've mislaid the world that bore them?" "There's a vague legend of a mother world, but we're taught it was destroyed completely," Egon told him for the hundreddi time. "I suppose the location was forgotten during the first centuries of taming the new planets." The old man swung about to face forward where he could sweep his eyes over die deserted sea. He nodded sadly to himself. "Yes, they must have forgotten. If they remembered only a Mtde of this, they'd be back." Egon went aft to the tiller while the guUs swooped down and fought over what Gala scraped frcMn the plates. The atomic jet purred on. It was one of die few things he had been able to make from the salvage of Ms wrecked p. The ore was a smudge behkid them and ahead he thought he could just see the ruined Ember Stake projecting from the sea that had buri it so long ago. Ahead, Herndon was telling bits of the past to the ever-silent Gala, and Egon filled it in from all the times he had heard the tale. The stories he'd learned as a cMld were at least partly true. A thousand years before, a key discovery made fastcr-than-light travel to the stars simpler than rocket flight to the moon and also showed a simple way to convert mass dkectly to energy. stars within a decade, and the Great Age began. It ended. An unthinkable global war broke out, powered by material energy. Its violence was enough to change the climate permanently, until now the polar ice was gone and the former coast mc lay more than three hundred feet below sea level. Despite the legends of Dale, Earth survived and most of its life went on. Only man faied. Somehow, tens of thousands survived and were gathered together to start anew. But the old fccimdity Ind been destroyed by some mutatioa that revealed itself slowiy as too few viable children were bom. When Egon landed, only nine adults and a chfld named Gala were left to find him. Now there was only Gala. The sun rose steadily as the dugout drove on. Ahead of him, Egon could see clearly the wreck of Ember Stake and the projections of other buddings tfaaf had once towered Mgh over a dty called New York. Hie saw Gala open her mouth silently now as if to intone old chants. She began to genuflect as they drew nearer. She was doing the tmhtional reverence to the Guardian, without seeming to care that old Herndon beside her was the Bving man her people had worshipped so long. He was the Cold Sleeper provided by the scientists after the holocaust, meant to revive from his suspended animation high in Ember Stake and bring mankind back to its ancient glories. He was the man who slept for a thousand years -- until Egon accompanied the annual pilgrimage and found the faulty mechanism that had failed and repaired it. Now, after nineteen years of futility, he was going back to his ancient resting place only to die. He was the last earthman, sitting beside a sterile girl. E gon shut off the jet and let the dugout drift to a stop as the ancient pile of ruin reared high above him. He could not trust the boat too close where jagged metal girders might lie below the surface. Then he sat for a moment staring at the tip of the building, trying to picture it as it had been described. Earth had been proud once, he thought. Men had never built like this elsewhere. Even when lower gravity might have made it easier. He pulled the little tender up and turned to help Herndon as the old man moved back to the stern. But the earthman shook his head, motioning to Cala, whose eyes were burning eagerly. "Let her go first," he said. "Now that we're here. I'm in no hurry. And my presence would only make mockery of her ritual." Egon nodded. "Go ahead, Cala." She was over the side of the dugout at once, carrying her little bundle of tribute. Then she began paddling toward the entnmce hole in a slow, ancient rhythm. She stopped from time to time to make obeisance and mouth silent chants. It seemed to take her forever to cover the first hundred feet. There was a fond but wry smile on the old man's pale face as he watched her. "Maybe I'm no better, Egon. But sentimentality grows as the hours shorten. I've come back to worship the past in my own way and die among my relics." "I understand," Egon' told him. But there would be no friend to ferry him back to the ashes of his fathers and the altars of his gods on Dale when his time came. There was no star-spanning dugout ready for him. He shook off his thoughts and went forward for his fish spear. By the time the girl returned, they would all be hungry again. He checked the wire wrapping of the tip and the well-greased shaft automatically, then leaped lightly overboard. Swimming had been a horror to him at first, a thing unknowable on dry Dale. But now he caught his breath without thinking and went downward into the clear green depths, driving himself with easy, powerful strokes of his legs. The water slid over him, resisting him and buoying him as free fall could never do. He turned and rose, caught his breath, and dropped again. It was only after several minutes that he bothered to look for prey. The waters were rich. He found his choice almost at once. A moment later he was over the rail with his prize. IF He saw the thing before Herndon's scream registered on his ears. It was high above the Ember Stake, slanting majestically through the air with a metallic glint in the sunlight. A spaceship for colonists, here on Earth! T he dugout suddenly lurched into motion toward the tower, almost throwing Egon overboard. He twisted, to see Herndon pounding at the controls and screaming protests. But the old man wasn't looking at the ship. He was staring at the tip of the ruined tower. There was movement there. Something thin and sharp slid from a hidden opening and was swinging out to point at the ship. Then it found its aim and came to rest. Nothing seemed to emerge from the weapon. But the engine room of the ship at the rear suddenly exploded outwards and bits of motors began blowing away and down. The ship lurched into a tumbling dive, before the little atmospheric ion jets could cut on. "Automatic missile killer -- seeks and triggers material energy motors," Btemdon cded as Egon grabbed the controls. "I .thought they were all rained. My fault, Egon, my faultl" "They aren't dead yet," Egon shouted back. He was driving for the tower, paying no attention to any submerged danger. The ship was onAy tumbling slightly now, but it would land too far west for him to see clearly, except from the higher tower. He knew now what must have wrecked his own ship, though he had been higher when it happened. And from his own experience, he knew that the weapon was harmless against living tissue. He grounded the dugout carelessly against the entrance to the Ember Stake and sprang through the breached wall to the old stairway the pilgrims had used. He shouted for Herndon to wait, but heard the old man puffing behind him. Then he was in the Guardian room, staring westward. He could just make out the great splash as the ship touched water, then heard Herndon beside him and felt binoculars thrust into his hand a minute later. The ship was floating, though it could not remain up long. But like most colonist ships, it was equipped better than freighters. Through the binoculars, Egon saw inflated rafts thrown out, and tiny figures beginning to emerge. There were twenty of the rafts paddling toward the distant northern shore when the great ship finally went under. "They're alive -- at least most of them," he reported. He heard Herndon's breath catch in a choking gasp, felt the old man relax back away from him. "Thank GodI" he heard. When he finally looked back from the retreating rafts, the last earthman was dead, still smiling through a froth of blood, slumped against the mechanism that had kept him frozen for a millenium. And Gala had come to them, staring in shock and doubt. There was little Egon could do for this oldest and longest friend of his. He wiped the emaciated face, composed the limbs, and began moving the body into die freezer-sarcophagus. Seeing this, Gala seemed to reorient herself and began helping. Egon turned on the freezer, bent his head, and felt a wordless sob tear in his throat as his only farewell. Gala began backing from the room, and he joined her without thinking, genuflecting at the door with her. Then there was no time for any thoughts except for the rafts and the men there. Egon caught Gala's hand and drew the mute girl with him back to the dugout. Getting back through the near wreckage took longer than the heedless trip in. It was a quarter hour before the boat was moving west again at full speed, heading for where the rafts had left the spaceship. The sun was already beginning to sink again. There was a wind from the shore, bringing a faint smdl of pine to enrich the tang of the sea. T here was almost no sign of the ship, now probably lying in fifty fathoms of water. Only a few tiny bits of meaningless wreckage were still afloat. Gala caught one up suddenly, and he saw that it was a thin plastic bag. At her puzzlement, he reached forward and opened it. It must have been hastily packed by one of the intended colonists, then somehow dropped. There was a dental gilder, a box, and a small book of color pictures. Dale! The scenes were of Dale, Egon saw. Then he frowned, almost doubting his own identification as he stared at the drab plains' sunset and the scenes of men and women in the almost familiar urban surroundings. Dale seemed changed, the people thin and lackluster in spite of the garish new fashions. Then he realized his error and grunted in selfdisgust. In twenty years, his mental picture had chang. He had even added beards and bulging muscles to the friends in his mind, conditioned by what he had grown to accept here. Gala leafed through the pictures and tossed the book overboard before he could stop her. She opened the box and smelled its contents doubtfully. "Food," Egon told her. "It's good food, very nourishing. Try it." She obeyed at once as he reached for one of the lozenges he had remembered so long and longingly. For a moment, his childhood rush back as it began dissolving on his tongue. Gala gagged and spat, bending over to rinse her mouth with sea water. The box followed the pictures into the Atlantic. Egon started to protest, then shrugged. Adults could never recapture the experience of childhood, it seemed. The lozenge was cloying with sweetoess and too spicy. He sucked it a few seconds more, then let it fall into the sea. They drove on silently after the rafts. It was early twilight when they reached the shore and the crescent moon was rising in the east. For a moment, sorrow for his old friend alone out there struck at Egon, but he forced it aside and began docking the dugout at the little shelter he and the last earthman had built. He IF drew his bow and quivers from oiled leather cases and moved with Gala toward the woods that bordered the tiny beach here. There was no sign of the rafts, of course. They had been driven by paddles in unfamiliar hands, and the sea drift must have carried them almost a mile from his dock. The wind was fragrant with the acrid scent of damp oak leaves and the fainter cleanness of maple as he found the old path that led to the other cove. They came on wild strawberries, and he stooped with Gala to gather a few, letting the musky, tempered sweetness dissolve on his tongue. Somewhere an owl hooted, early awake and probably hungry. Further back in the hills there was a cough that could only be a cougar, moving with feline grace. He felt his own blood surge a bit, and his feet moved silently against the fragrant earth as he approached the. path where deer sometimes came down to the little rivulet. The stranded colonists would have to be fed, he remembered, though that was no problem on Earth. He was in .luck. A young buck was drinking as Egon came up so quietly that the animal never startled. The bow tautened with life and then snapped forward resonantly as the arrow sped true and deep. The buck gave a single bound before Gala was on it, slitting its throat. Egon dressed it hastily and tossed the heavy load over his shoulder to resume his course at a steady trot, breathing evenly and deeply. T he men were camped where he had expected. There were perhaps a hundred in male dress and twice as many women, enough to start a new colony on some far world, and there was evidence m their foppish fashions to show that they all were from Dare. They watched the woods with scared eyes, but there were m guards. No one spotted Egon anil Gala against the trees. Most were slumped on the ground, and he heard their complaints over fatigue at the few hours of rowing and their desperation at being stranded without supplies. They seemed a hopeless lot, already giving up. But a few, with some in uniform, had started a sickly fire and were obviously taking a tally of provisions. Egon headed for them, drawing startled cries from those who saw him. He walked past the outskirts, carrying the buck, to face a man in captain's jacket who was just getting to his feet. "You'll need a better fire and some decent food," Egon told the man. "I've brought meat. Gala will show you how to cook it while I go back for another. But you can stop worrying about starving here." The captain let his half-drawn weapon slide back and came closer, staring with a mixture of faint hope and disgust at the deer. "Where are we?" he asked. "And who are you?" "This is Earth," Egon told him. And suddenly he smiled as he swept his eyes across the dark forest and toward the moon over the sea. "Earth. And I am the last earthman. IF  Novelette by D. M. This was what Mars was fike -- tough, mean and deadly! T he sand car red to a stop at the edge of the sand flat. Soberly, the driver looked out over the broad, bright expanse of sand. He had walked the deserts of Earth and had seen the deserts of Mercury, but he had never lost his feeling of wonder at these deserts which, but for these few midday hours, were deadly cold. There was a flutter of movement at his breast pocket and a flat, silky head popped out, peering up with bright, intelligent eyes. Tlio man smiled. "Thirsty, youngster?" The yoimgster wriggled. It was a rock puppy, orphaned by someone's careless or callous heat blast the day before, hi on the rim of the last deep. The man poured a few drops of water into the palm of his hand and the silky head nuzzled and drank. Then they both peered out at the yellow expanse of sand. This flat could be crossed. He knew the way. But it would be reckless, and moss hunters are reckless only in their dealings with each other. Going around would mean two full days of rtop-and-go, draining power and letting it build up again. Frowning, he lifted his mask. A moss hunter, long exposed to this thin air between the deeps, could do that and stay alert, for a few minutes. The man scowled, checking power and oxygen. "The odds are long," he muttered finally. "Let's play it safe." But he continued to stare, frowning thoughtfully, and finally he leaned back. "On the other hand, Buster, I've a hunch we can make it. I might have to walk some, but you don't weigh much." He pressed a thumb to the switch plate. The motor whined and the sand car lurched, its big, meter-wide balloons sloughing flabbily over the sand. The man relaxed, thinking of hot rum and low laughter at First Landing. Now and then he checked the dials. No power, now, even to the compressor which charged his oxygen flask. That could wait for richer air, in the low country. And he was almost warm. Sundown would bring cold -- real cold. But now he was, for a moss hunter, almost comfortable. And his hunch they would make it without trouble was strong. Tresently he dozed, ignoring thea chill that gradually seeped through his coverall. He used as little oxygen as would keep him awake, as little in proportion as the orphan in his pocket was using from its own organically stored supply. So it was nearly an hour before he was certain that the figure ahead -- the figure that wavered, rose and fell -- was not just illusion but a man, a man walking and so doomed certainly to die. He locked radar on the staggering figure. The silky head again popped out of his coverall pocket. The figure fell again and lay prone, and the front balloon had covered a booted foot when the radar cut the switch. He backed clear and propped the figure against the balloon. It was then that he saw it was not a man but a woman -- hardly, by what he could see through her mask, more than a girl. And she was new to the deserts and the deeps. Hands and face were still unmarked by sand burns and dessication. And it would have taken a well grown woman with earth-gravity strength to have walked this far into the desert. He fed her a dollop of oxygen, and her laboring lungs quieted. He shook his head at the pleading look after the first quick swallows of water. "Later. We'll breathe deep and drink deep when we get to low ground." The girl nodded, smiling weakly. "Up on the seat with you," he said. "I'll walk as much as I can and ride the step to rest. There'll be power to get us to low air." Soon he lost track of time. Again and again he stumbled, slow to recover, and the car rolled on until the switch, keyed to his heart beat, cut out. He would not set the controls to circle and return. Back on the step he would ride and rest, until the blurred reserve power dial, rocking toward the red, forced him to grip his mouthpiece and step off. He was staggering, nearly exhausted, when finally the sand car stopped again, this time with the panel beeping quietly and the radar winking "On Objective." Their oxygen was nearly gone, but the power dials gave them a margin, slim, but a margin. He even cut in the heaters for a few costly seconds. The girl's head lifted and she opened her eyes. He saw anxiety in her look, but he pointed to a break in the rim where a clear path angled down deep into the canyon. The air thickened, and finally was rich and breathable. They were too tired to talk. But die girl looked again and again back up the path. At the floor of the deep, thousands of feet below the rim, they came to a shelter, built around an as yet unfrozen spring. "We made it," the man said tiredly. "Relax. We're all right now." The girl was silent, but she had a cracked, painful smile for the rock puppies who watched, bright eyed, but soon scampered, chittering, out of the shelter, ducking their heads and rolling like ermine soccer balls out of sight into the rocks. The man lifted the baby from his pocket. It clung for a moment to his wrist and then it, too, tucked nose and feet out of sight and rolled away after the others. He punched the charge buttons to throw the full output of the car's pile into the power pack.  He handed the girl a tide of bum lotion and motioned to the spring. "After you've washed off the sand," he said. "And we'll have some hot concentrate in a few minutes." The girl took the tube, watching every move. The man shrugged irritably. "For pete's sake, relax! We're out of it!" Presently she returned, to lean back against the softness of the sand car balloon. Warm and thick, hot concentrates made them drowsy even as it built up their strength. Abruptly, it was dark. n A t first light the man was rubbing his eyes, yawning, when a sharp "snick-click" brought him into the black muzzle of an old issue automatic. The girl stood by the sand car, looking white and determined, but her band was steady. He sat very still. "All right," he said. "You do the talking." "I need the sand car," she said. "And this, of course, is out of sheer gratitude!" The girl flushed. "I am grateful. But I have to go on, alone. So don't make me shoot." He watched, speculating. He carried a lot of weapon for this gravity. Not many with Mars-muscles could handle an Earth weight heat gun with any speed. Reaction time would -- probably -- let him snap off a broad beam which could not miss and still roll aside before she fired. Her eyes were wide, frightened. Don't make me shoot, please I" The "please" was only implied, but it was there. 'T've already hurt one man, possibly killed him. I don't want to do it again." "This is the same -- just slower." She shook her head. "You won't be alone here long." Carefully he put his weapon on the ground, rolled clear and came to his feet. At her gesture he stepped back. His eyes went over her, head to boots. She wore a new coverall of some improved plastic, new type oxygen mask slung at her throat. There was no holster. The clips at her belt were obviously for tools. "You're not a moss hunter," he said flatly. "And the only women hijackers I know of stay inside the domes. Who are you?" "My name wouldn't mean anything to you. But I'm an archeologist." "Not right now I Who are you running from?" She flushed. "I'm not a thief. And I'm running from some of your friends. And from you. You all look alike." "We all get that broiled look," he said wryly. "But we're not all alike." She steadied the gun. "No! Why should you help me. Anyway, there are a dozen of them, so what could two of us do? Now will you fix that switch?" He grinned "So you've tried it!" He was aware, vaguely, that the rock puppies were back -- a growing, bright-eyed circle, watching silently He pushed through them absently and they scampered aside, to close in after him, curious as chipmunks. At the sand car he looked at the girl and measured the distance to the nearest cover. The rock puppies chittered, and one little one bounced to the seat of the car and then to his wrist. He shrugged, placed a thumb over the switch, turning a dial with the other hand. A hinged plate dropped. He took a key from his coverall and turned an inner lock. "I'm the only one who could have done that. The panel would have flared and taken off your hand. But you can use it now." H e stepped away and the giri started the car down the path, the big balloons slapping on the loose shale. The rock puppies scampered and bounced after her. After a few yards she stopped and placed the man's gun and oxygen flask on a rock by the path. "I'll leave the car at First Landing, if I get that far." When she was gone he retrieved his weapon and waited. Presently the rock puppies returned, to roll into a brightly expectant circle around him. "Bucket heads!" he grumbled at them. But they only wriggled and ohittered, and presently he started flipping pebbles at them. They scampered and rolled, returning always to roll back the pebbles and reform their circle. He watched them absently. Bxcept for men, and now, he thought wryly, women, they were the only warm-blooded life in the deeps. And unlike men, they harmed no one. Why was it, he wondered. IF that no matter where you went, the fur people were, by and large, usually nicer than the skin people? And why couldn't these little guys, who harmed no one, be protected? Territorial Government, he knew, talked of policing the deeps, to stop the hijacking and protect the puppies. But Pearsall said flatly it wasn't practical yet. It would take too many men, too much rocket-freighted material, both needed urgently elsewhere. So, for the foreseeable future, the Bureau would simply continue to buy moss, no questions asked, so long as the moss hunters took their credits and spent them with moderately good behavior at the domes before dropping back into the deeps. So, but for the technicians and archeologists who worked the mines and the ruins in the high deserts, the moss hunters were still the only Marsmen. The moss hunters had come early. When the first of the silvery ships had thundered in, the men at the screens saw only the rioting beauty of the deserts, hinted but not revealed by the photographs sent back years before when the probes drifted silently past. Then the men moved out from the ships and found the rainbow sands were deadly. It was a long time before they learned to live outside the ships and the first, primitive domes. But there was a way... For slashed across the lands lay the pattern of the deeps -- wideflung gorges which within themselves, in places, contained deserts and mountains. And in the deepest sections, in the cuts of ancient rivers and the coves of ancient lakes, the deeps held breathable air and springs of clear water. So while the men fanning out from the domes found only ruins in the deserts, in the deeps they found life -- green, clinging life -- lowbranched, leafy life -- furry, scampering life. And with the clinging life they found the lichens, clinging here and there to the crinison rocks of the deeps. The lichens brought the moss hunters. From them, purified but so far impossible to synthesize, came a substance which would lengthen the days of life. So, drawn by promise of gain or seeking a way and a place to hide, the moss hunters came and stayed and searched. A nd from the beginning the search took on a strange and inexplicable pattern. For most found little. Yet some had luck in abundance and a few, luck which was phenomenal. No one knew why. The lucky ones shrugged. Playing hunches they said, and believed it. But the lucky ones had had to learn to hold what they found in any way they could. The deeps were without law, and there was, for the lucky and unlucky alike, small chance of return. Once committed to low gravity and no law, most of the moss hunters lived out their ays in the deeps. And that, the man reflected, was a lonely way of life. And even if a heat blast or the high deserts didn't get you, it was likely to be a short life. Men died in inexplicable falls and rock slides. And some just disappeared. He, himself, he thought wryly, was on borrowed time. Lucky Hansen, they called him. But his luck couldn't hold forever. He waited, flipping pebbles idly with the scampering rock puppies, and ruffling the fur of one youngster who clung, a chattering ball of silky fur, to his wrist. He grinned at them. He called them bucket heads, but they had the beaver's instinct for engineering. They couldn't move much uphill. But he had seen where they had moved fabulous weights down hill placed as precisely as a beaver fells a tree. He liked them. More than once, it seemed, they had brought him luck. Presently the band scattered, and the little fellow at his wrist, whom he suspected was Buster, let go, tucked nose and feet out of sight, and bounced swiftly away. Soon the man, too, heard the crush of balloons on the path. There were a dozen of them, moss hunters, bitter old pros with burned, wrinkled faces and dried out skins. They watched suspiciously, looking around for his equipment. A big man with a beefy face and wide shoulders hawked and spat and growled, "You alone?" The man nodded. "Where's your sand bug?" "Hijacked." "Girl, with a baby face and Earthside muscles?" "She looked it. I didn't reach past her gun to see." The wide-shouldered man snorted. "We've been trailing you. It doesn't figure. An old mossback picks her off the high ground but then lets her hijack him I" The man smiled and shrugged. "So I'm a liar. You can say that once. Maybe even twice. But I notice your friend there is nursing a broken arm, and by the looks of his throat I'll bet he took a judo chop." The injured man grimaced, made a strangling sound, and dropped his good hand. T he big man turned. "I'll handle this," he grated. Then he turned back, looking the man over from head to boot. "I've seen you around the domes," he went on. "By your looks, you've been in and out of these deeps a long time. But you haven't let your belly sag from high living in low gravity. You just might be Bart Hansen." The man nodded. "I might." There was a stir, and someone guffawed. "Lucky Hansen! Waylaid! Probably the other way around, Spear, and he just sent her on the way. She's the kind could..." Hansen smiled coldly, and his hand moved with unhurried certainty to his belt. "I've been called a liar twice now.' It became very still. Spear scowled blackly. But presently he brought empty hands into sight. "All right. All right. You're Hansen, and the lady stole your sand car." There was little talk, although they all watched Hansen furtively as he sat unmoving by the shelter. Some took quick pulls at flasks of concentrate, but mostly they just rested. One, spotting an old rock puppy perched on a boulder across the path reached for a short-barreled IF itfle. He found himself staring into flie faintly glowing grid of Hansen's hand gun. "Let him alone or you'll lose the rifle and maybe your hand!" There was the start of an uproar. Spear squelched it, bellowing, "Dammit, there'll be time for target practice later! Waste of ammunition anyway. Let's go!" Hansen put away his weapon. "Your trigger happy friend here has a new model car." Spear nodded. "Out of the last shipment pushed up from Vandenberg. New type pile. More range." "I could ride the step on that one. I'd like to get my own back." Spear frowned. "I won't slow you down. And I know the way." SpeculativelySpear nodded. "I hear you do. This a dead end deep?" "It leads out, eventually, if you know the forks, to First Landing. It narrows considerably before the climb." Spear rubbed his chin. "You're one of the lucky ones, Hansen. Maybe the luckiest of all. You could rub some of it off on us. The boys and I work together. We pool our moss, and we keep trespassers out of the deeps we work. It might be easier for you to join us than to buck us. Interested?" Hansen surveyed the dozen hard faces. "I'd have to think about it." Spear waved expansively. "Do that. Aside from puppy popping and a few other such habits Squinty here isn't a bad guy. Ride the step with him and think on it." F or most oi the day they traveled in silence. Here and there the trace of the girl's sand car showed. Hansen was relieved to see that at the only turn off where there could be real doubt as to her direction she had taken the proper fork. She was keeping ahead of them, but she was moving too fast for economy. Presently, Hansen nudged the man Squinty and motioned for him to pull up front, beside Spear. "Spear," he asked, over the sloughing of the balloons. "Why do you want this girl? There are women at First Landing." Spear laughed harshly, and Squinty snickered. "None like her!" Then Spear's mouth hardened and he scowled. "You saw what she did to Squinty, here. And there wasn't any need for it!" Hansen laughed. "I'll bet! And the poor, defenseless girl was so freshly one G she didn't know her own strength!" Spear scowled and blustered. "Nobody, man or dame, makes a fool out of me or my boys. I lock after my boys!" Hansen's retort was cut short as a shot cracked thinly. Rock chips from a spot six inches from Spear's head showered into their faces. Spear swore and sprawled. Hansen laughed, but he, too, rolled like a rock puppy to a vantage point behind a rock. Another shot cracked and spattered as Spear crawled up beside him. Hansen grinned. "Here's where you start looking after your boys again." Spear only muttered, peering up the gorge. Hansen went on. "There's my sand bug up ahead. Power pack is down, or she wouldn't have stopped. But I'll bet the water tank is dry, too, and my thermos is with her, full. She'll be up beyond that talus slope with nothing to lose by staying right there.' Spear glared at him. "She'll stay. Even with one G muscles she can't get far on foot. She knows that much by now, anyway." Another shot cracked, and again Spear ducked and blinked. Hansen brushed dust from his eyes. "She knows something else, too, Spear. How to use that old issue automatic of hers. In a steady hand they're more useful here than heat." The others had all scattered to cover. Spear sat still, cursing and watching. He stared at Hansen's sand car, sitting apparently undamaged up the path. "How do you know she's got water and food?" "I don't. And I'm not about to walk over there and check. But a woman would have to be several cuts over average, mental and physical, to be sent up here for her kind of work. So she's smart and she's as strong as any two of us. And if she disappears, or you keep her here, there will be questions asked sooner or later. She isn't just another broken down crewman, hoping to get rich. Be sensible, man! Let her alone!" S pear only cursed. Hansen watched and listened, knowing well the type. Pride and face were involved now. Hansen surveyed the rocky slope above. "You're in for a siege, Spear. Want me to see if I can talk her out of it?" Spear grunted suspiciously, and shook his head. "I got a score to settle with that high-headed snob!" "So what? If I try and get shot you're no worse off than now!" Spear surveyed the talus slope, his face working with frustration. "We sure could rush her!" he muttered. "You sure could. And she'd sure charge admission!" Spear let out his breath. "All right. Try, if you're fool enough. She hasn't made you look any too bright, either. You talk her down from there and we'll work out something." Hansen's heart pounded as he pushed back the hood of his coverall. He called out, "Listen! I'm the man from the sand flat. I want to talk!" Then he spread empty hands and rose slowly to his feet. The first seconds would tell. But there was no shock from a hollow-point bullet, nor the "who-o-withhhh" of a near was no longer there. He hoped she would talk. If she had run, little could be done. But he had the glimmer of a plan, a vague hunch forming out of nowhere in the back of his mind. He moved slowly, his hands in sight. He thought he knew where she had chosen to hide. If he was right she had chosen well. He made for it, looking back now and then. Spear's crew was well hidden back down the path, but there was no way up except in the open, and no way around. He froze when a voice snapped, "Far enough!" IF Hansen kept his voice low. Could you use some help?" "You still look just like the rest of them!" "Of cx)urse I do! And in most ways, I am! But listen to me. Do you know Andrews, from the University of California? He dug last summer in the southern catacombs." "Yes. I know him." "Well, I took him there, and brought him back." "You're Lucky Bart Hansen?" "I'm Hansen, and I have to come in there with you, or go back to them, now!" Her whisper barely reached him. "Come in, Mr. Hansen, please." Ill H e scrambled up beside her. SShe had thrown back the hood of her coverall and thick, dark hair hung to her shoulders. Her oval face was streaked with dirt, but it was a handsome face, and strong, with high cheek bones and a firm chin. Fear showed only in her eyes. "Why didn't you tell me?" "You held the gun and you were determined to run. Would you have listened?" "No, .I guess not. I was close to panic. I still am. This whole thing is insane. Things like this just don't happen. I feel like I was in the middle of a Tri-D Video thriller!" Hansen sobered. "It's happening, all right, for real. But we'll find a way out." He looked around. She had, indeed, chosen well. She had found a rock puppy arena, a play area, flat. ringed with boulders. He could see where the larger ones had been rolled in from above, placed precisely. The narrow rollways between the boulders allowed a wide field of vision. The immaculate little beasts had cleared away dirt and rubble, leaving a clean, flat floor. He smiled at her. "Nice place. Homey." She smiled back, tautly at first Then the smile spread and was lost in her eyes. "I like it. Might spend the rest of my life in it. But the rock puppies moved out. They scolded at me for a while, when I was thinking things over. Then they scattered, all but that big fellow over there. He just watches me." Then, thinly, Spear's coarse beL low drifted up to them. "Hansen! She there?" "She's here." "Well? What's she have to say?" "Says she likes it here. So do I." There was an angry buzz of talk. Spear's bellow lifted above it. "Heard a lot about you, Hansen. But I never heard it said you were stupid. I can't blame you for playing up that one. But we'll take you. Both of you!" A shot spattered dust, and a heat ray glowed redly. Spear called again. "You'll get thirsty, Hansen. And cold. Think on that!" The girl's eyes were questioning. "He's right, isn't he? If they keep us here?" Hansen nodded. "He's right. If they keep us here." "But how can we get away. It's not possible." n "Maybe it is. If we're careful, and if we're lucky." He was staring down the talus slope as if memorizing it. "There's a way, I think. But we'll have to wait until early morning, when some of these moons set. There's a new model car down there that will out distance any of the others." "But..." He waved her aside. "I've a hunch we can get it. Rest now. I'll watch." T he girl protested, but finally leaned back and relaxed. cold, for there in the deep the air and rocks held some heat -- or what passes for heat on Mars. Even so, Hansen found himself wishing he could roll up in a ball, like the rock puppies. He watched the sky. Diemos would not rise for another hour. Phobos, orbiting in less than eight, would plunge below the horiwon in another thirty minutes. After a while he touched the girl's shoulder. She sat up tensely. "Are they coming?" "No. They have to rest, too, remember. And they're sure of us. That's why the odds are in our favor. They're warm and comfortable, plugged into their car power packs. Now help me out of this coverall." "You'll freeze!" "Huh-up. I know to the minute how long I can function in light insulation. And I have to move quickly and quietly. Now hand me that knife." The girl fumbled for the knife. Hansen looked up at the sky. "Be dark soon, when Phobos dives. Now listen! This will take me twenty minutes or forever. If it's more than twenty minutes, you shoot whoever comes over this wall. It won't be me!" Abruptly, it darkened. Hansen went over the wall and the girl whispered, "Be careful." There was only a soft rustle in the shale and then he was gone. She waited, anxiety growing, but there was no sound, no flash or glow of gun or heat. Time seemed to race by, and there were only two left of the twenty minutes when she heard his low whisper and he tumbled, panting, over the rim. She worked furiously to help him back into his coverall. She fed him a breath of oxygen. "I'd give you brandy, but Spear's pets rifled my kit. That was a long -- or a short-eighteen minutes, Bart Hansen. -- I'm -- I'm glad you're back!" Hansen huddled, shivering. But his head was turned, listening. "I'm glad, too. Now, get ready. There's a big sand car down there, in the clear. Squinty's. Remember it?" "Yes." "I'll follow you in my own bug, in a few minutes. Now, no matter what, you keep going. Radar will keep you on the path. Now go!" Ilie girl hesitated, shaking her head. Hansen snapped, "Dammit, get moving, before it gets any lighter. I know what I'm doing!" "All right. But will that car run for me?" Hansen put his knife back in his belt. "It'll run. The locks weren't IF keyed to his heart beat. Only to his thumb." The girl caught her breath, but she turned to the wall. Hansen all but pushed her over the rim. She clung to his. hand for a moment. Then she was gone. Tensely, he listened. The sound of her descent faded. There was no other sound, no alarm from the sleeping men down the path. Then he heard a light rustling, which grew louder and nearer, and then her hoarse whisper reached him. "Hansen! It's me. Help me in." C oursing solidly, he all but pulled  her over the wall. "What's wrong with you. It'll be light in a few minutes. You're as stupid as the puppies!" She sat limply, staring up at him. "I -- I don't know what it is. But something is wrong. Something tells me not to go. It's -- it's just a feeling I have. I don't understand..." "Nuts! You panicked!" "No! Tm scared. But I didn't panic. And -- and you weren't going, were you? Your power pack isn't charged. I didn't set it up. So you were going to stay here in the middle of this crazy Tri-D show, holding off the bad guys! It won't do, Bart Hansen!" Hansen crouched silently, listening. "Well," he said finally, "to tell you the truth, I'm scared too!" For a long moment in the growing light they stared at each other. Then she touched his arm. "Do you feci it, too?" He nodded. "I'm not angry-scared," she went on, "like I am of those men down there. That I could live through if I had to. It would only make me sick. This is deep-scared, of something I don't understand." Hansen sat beside her. It was nearly light, now, too late for either of them to run. He put an arm around her. Even through the heavy They voyaged from the Earth they had never ;I known to the planet they could never reach -- I I An epic science-ficfion novel   by Frank Herbert Author of Under Pressure, Dune World, etc. Also stories and features by Jomes Blish  Korman L. Knight, Algb Budrys, Willy Ley, etc. Coining soon -- don't miss iti  IF coverall he could feel her shiverinf with cold. "I don't understand it, either. I've had hunches, strong hunches. But, this is -- is compelling. We're not under control. I'm sure of that. But we're being told, somehow, to stay here!" The light grew stronger. Hansen looked to his gun and charge clips. One thing was sure, he thought sardonically. If Spear's crew did try to rush them, as well they might if they lost their heads when they found Squinty, they would turn this thing into a regular scalp-tingler of a Vid show! He started, raising his gun, at a rustling sound on the slope. But it was only a rock puppy rolling in along the top of the talus. It bounced in through one of the roll ways, unfolding itself and sitting up, bright eyed, chittering musical play-noises. In spite of himself, Hansen laughed. "Look, bucket head. We've no time to play. Roll! You're liable to get hurt." The puppy only wriggled, and rolled over by the girl to peer out down the slope. There was a shout from the rocks below. "They've found Squinty," Hansen muttered. There was another shout, and a shot, and a blind, prolonged play of heat from someone angry enough to risk burning up his projector. Then, as they ducked away from the open rollways, they heard a faint rumble, and then the growing cra of rolling rocks. Hansen tensed, his eyes darting around. "Rock slide," he muttered. "Both sides of us and across! But what started it?" A bruptly the rumble grew to a roar. There was one piercing cry from the gorge below them. Then all sound was drowned and sight blanked by a roiling cloud erf reddish dust. They stared, unbelieving, as the sound died away and the dust slowly thinned and settled. A section of the rocky path below was filled now with rock .and rubble. The two slides, starting simultaneously on each side, had covered Spear's precise area, no more. Out in front, untouched, were the two sand can, Hansen's where the girl had abandoned it, and Squinty s, where Hansen had, an hour before, pushed it. The girl whispered, "That -- that didn't just happen, Bart! It -- it was planned!" Hansen stood dazed, like a man in shock. He turned to stare at ibe little rock puppy which still sat, unmoving, looking out the roU vav Others were appearing now, fr m beside them and from across the gorge. One little fellow rolled up and bounced into the girl's arms and clung tightly to her wrist. Hansen shook his head and leaned limply against the wall. "It's hard to believe," he said finally. "Hunches! The rock puppiesi Some of us were lucky, some unlucky. And some just disappeared, like Spear!" He turned to the girl, and tht little fellow who was burrowing his way into the breast pocket of hef coverall. "Maybe," he mused, "that's why against all logic I took that short cut where I found you." At the foot of the hill, when they were ready to start, the girl turned suddenly to Hansen. "Is it true that Territorial Government thinks it's too soon to start policing the deeps?" Hansen looked startled. "Where did you hear that?" She shrugged. "Gossip, I suppose. But it's true, isn't it?" "It's true. Pearsall say he hasn't the men, or the material." "Well, if he would just come out and get acquainted with the rock puppies. I'll bet he'd change his mind." Hansen looked around at the circle of silky faces peering up at him and for the first time since the rock slide he laughed. "You know, I think he might. But he won't leave the domes. Says he hasn't the time." "But if we took Buster, here, with us when we talked with him..." Hansen laughed again. "OK, Buster. You're the ambassador." At midafternoon Hansen stopped at a fork. He pointed. "This is the turn-off, but down there a mile is a shelter, a good one. Built it myself. We could stay there tonight. get some rest, and recharge these packs. Would you like that?" The girl met his eyes. Her lips parted and she looked quickly away. Her voice was carefully casual. "Why -- yes. That would be nice." Then she straightened in her seat, blushing. "Nol" she said indignantly. "Of all the... " But, of a sudden, her words were lost in her own laughter. Hansen laughs too, and they both looked accusingly at the flat, silky head which , had popped out of her breast pocket. Buster peered from one to the other and wriggled happily. The girl choked off her laughter. "This one," she said positively, "is definitely not a baby!" Ruefully, Hansen sighed. " We might as well go on then." The girl's lip pushed out stubbornly. But she ruffled the flat, silky head and her lips quirked at the comers. "Some things," she said firmly, "a girl wants to decide for herself!" In the July Worlds of Tomorrow -- He fried fo cure the world of oil its ills -- and nearly IdBed iti Beginning an excHing two-part serial By Mack Reynolds science fact, and stories hy yaw farorite authors. Don't miss itl IF IF  Short Story They were new people in town -- Of new something anywayl T here were a lot of funny people in that block. "You ever walk down that street?" Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there. "Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street's just one block long and it deadends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago." "Jim, I've been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three foot came down that chute. They weighed about thirtyfive pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off." "What's wrong with that. Art?" "Jim, I said they filled tliat trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty thousand pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that's two thousand cartons." "Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit now days. They don't enforce it very well." "Jim, that shack's no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside is a man m a chair behind a small table. You couldn't get anything else m that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You coidd pack six of those little shacks on that trailer." "Let's measure it," Jim Boomer said. "Maybe it's bigger than it looks." The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price, Jim Boomer measured  building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it. "Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar," said the man in the chair in the little shack. "Throw that old one away." The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had beeo a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer. "Fully retractable, rhodium plated, Don glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar," the man said. Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. "How many of them you got?" "I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes," the man said. "Eighty-eight cents each in hundred thousa lots." "Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?" Art asked the man. "No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one." A rt Slkk and Jim Boomer went to the run-down building next door. It was smaller, about a six foot cube, and die sign said Public Stenographer. The datter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door. A dark, pretty girl was sitting in a diair before a small tade. There was nodiing else in the room, and no typewriter. "I thought I heard a typewriter in here," Art said. "Oh, that is me," the girl smiled. "Sometimes I amuse mysdf make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to." "What would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?" "What are you think? I do it of course." "Could you type a letter for me?" "Sure is can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope and stamp." "Ah, let's see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type." "You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time." IF Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. is public stenographer always sit hling her nails?" she asked as Art droned. "But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly." "Ah -- that is all," Art said when he had finished dictating. "Not P.S. Love and Kisses?" the girl asked. "Hardly. It's a business letter to a person I barely know." "I always say P.S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know," the girl said. "Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can't do it when you watch." She pushed them out and closed the door. Then there was silence, "What are you doing in there, girl?" Art called. "Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I t)rpe a letter," the girl called. "But I don't hear a typewriter going." "What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.' There was a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds. T he girl opened the door and handed Art the three page letter. It was typed perfect, of course. "There is something a little odd about this," Art said. "Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?" "No. It is something else. Tell me die truth, girl, how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?" "He cuts prices." "Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you." "My brother-uncle. We tell every body we are Innominee Indians." "There is no such tribe," Jim Boomer said flatly. "Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What's the best Indian to be?" "Shawnee," said Jim Boomer. "O.K. then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is." "We're already taken," Boomer said. "I'm a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town." "Hi cousin!" the girl cried, and winked. "That's from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions." "I have two-bits coming out of my dollar," Art said. "I know," the girl said. "I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of fire wood. One moment till I finish it. Here." She handed the quarter to Art Slick. "And you tell everybody there's a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good." "Without a typewriter," said Art Slick. "Let's go, Jim." P.S. Love and Kisses," tibe giri called Mfttr diem. T he Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer. "We'd like a couple of Buds, but you don't seem to have a stock of anything," Art said. "Who needs stock?" the girl asked. "Here is beers." Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good. "Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn't hold a tenth of it?" Art asked the girl. "Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesnt take up space, like if ha made it before time." "But he has to make it out of something," Jim Boomer cut in. "No, no," the girl said. "I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes." "This is funny," Slick gaped. "Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e." "Oh, I goof," the bar girl said. "I couldn't remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours." She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly. "But that thing is engraved and then reproduced," Slick protested. "Oh, sure, aU fancy stuff like that," the girl said. "I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in a Schlitz bottle and the man didn't like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle. It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,' I told the man. Hell, we don't even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It's hard to keep from making mistake when you're stupid." "No, you don't have a light or a window in here, and it's light," Slick said. "You don't have refrigeration. There are no power lines to my of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?" "Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two uKre beers?" "Yes, we will. And I'm interested In seeing where you will get them," Saick said. "Oh look, is snakes behind youl" the girl cried. "Oh how you startle and jump I" she laughed. "It's all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?" But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before. "How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?" Boomer asked. "Who keep track?" the girl said. "People come and go." "You're not from around here," SO IF Slick said. "You're not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?" "Who wants Jupiter?" the seemed indignant. "Do business with a bunch of insects there is all! Freeze your tail too." "You wouldn't be a kidder, would you girl" Slick asked. "I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back." "What's in the shanty next door towards the tracks?" "My cousin-sister," said the girl. "She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she's crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn't be bald-headed in the first place." "Well, can she grow hair on baldheaded men?" Slick asked. "Oh sure. Can't you?" T here were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn't seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club. "I don't remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago," Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line. "Oh, I just made it," the man said Weathered boards, rusty nails . ,  and he had just made it. "Why didn't you -- ah -- make a decent building while you were at it?" Slick asked. "This is more inconspicuous," the man said. "Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We're new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I'm trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them, though." "What is that?" Slkk asked. "Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh, well. I'll put them in. I'll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait." "No. I already got a car," Slick said. "Let's go, Jim." That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back. "I just got to wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes," Slick said. "There's a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out." "There were some queer guys in the row of shanties that were here before this bunch," Boomer said. "Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cotton-seed oil float before it burned down." They went by the public stenographer shack again. "No kidding, honey, how do yoo type without a typewriter?" Slick asked. "Typewriter is too slow," the girl said. I asked How, not Why," Slick laid. "I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I tk I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?" "Ah -- no. How do you really do the typing, girl?" "You promise you won't tell anybody." "I promise." "I make the marks with my tongue," the girl said. They started slowly on up the block. "Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?" Jim Boomer called back. "With my other tongue, the girl said. T here was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers pipe coming out of the chute -- in twenty foot lengths. Twenty foot rigid pipe out of a seven foot shed. "I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that," Slick puzzled, still not satisfied. "Like the girl says, he cuts prices," Boomer said. "Let's go over to the Red Rooster and see if there's anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block." Next Moq in B... Well try real hard to find room for some of the letters that have been piling up -- but this month, with a hefty chunk of Skylark DuQuesne and the big Van Vogt-Schmitz novella to fit in, there just wasn't room. Apart from that -- Retiefs back. That's good news in itself, and also good news is the fact that he's got the August cover with a lovely Retief-like painting by Jack Gaughan. The title of this new saga of interstellar diplomacy is Trick or Treaty, We thought of holding it till our October issue, to fit the title to the season... but Keith Laumer doesn't need the help of the calendar. Trick or Treaty supplies its own Hallowe'en prankishness... Incidentally, if you come across a paperbound book by Keith Laumer called Embassy we think you'll enjoy it. It isn't science fiction; but it is, as Keith admits in a note on the flyleaf of our copy, the adventures of Relief's real-life equivalent in a Southeast Asian country that seemed to us a lot like Vietnam. One of the reasons the Relief stories are as good as they are is that Laumer was in fact attached to our diplomatic service for some years -- and there's real fantasy for youf IF IF  Seriml Richard Seaton could not forgive -- DuQuesne could not forget -- yet the two of them were alliesi vm Industrial Revolution W hen Seaton and Crane had begun to supply the Earth with ridiculously cheap power, they had expected an economic boom and a significant improvement in the standard of living. Neither of them had any idea, however, of the effect upon the world's economy that their space-flights would have; but many tycoons of industry did. They were shrewd operators, those tycoons. As one man they licked their chops at the idea of interstellar passages made in days. They gloated over thoughts of the multifold increase in productive capacity that What Has Gone Before -- T#i most deadly rivals in the universe are Richard Seaton and Mare C. DuQuesne. Nr lore than a year Seaton has written DuQuesne off as no longer a threat, since in a titanlt battle DuQuesne was disembodied and, in the form of a pure mentality, placed in m story opens a greup of Norlaminlan scientists have just discovered that there is a flow in the mothematics and DuQuesne will be free at any moment. Seaton and the Norlaminians resolve to send out a thought message which will alert all human races throughout the universe to the danger and to the need for all persons of good will to band together. Meanwhile DuQuesne in fact is freed and, through the workings of certain other disembodied intelligences. Is reincarnated in his own body, in a spaceship countless parsecs away from Earth. He is ottacked without womlng by unknown forces. He manages to get away, but realizes he cannot survive another attack -- and that the mere fact of his existence, means that the unknown enemy will sooner or later hunt him down. There is only one thing to do. Marc DuQuesne builds a powerful transmitter and trans mits a call for help -- to Richard Seaton, his deadliest enemyl would have to be made so soon; as soon as commerce was opened up with dozens and then with hundreds of Tellus-type worlds, inhabited by human beings as human as those of Earth. And when they envisioned hundreds and hundreds of uninhabited Tellus-type worlds, each begging to be grabbed and exploited by whoever got to it first with enough stuff to hold it and to develop it... they positively drooled. These men did not think of money as money, but as their most effective and most important tool: a tool to be used as knowledgeably as the old-time lumberjack used his axe. Thus, Earth was going through convulsions of change more revolutionary by far than any it had experienced throughout all previous history. All those pressures building up at once had blown the lid completely off. Seaton and Crane and their associates had been working fifteen hours a day for months training people in previously unimagined skills; trying to keep the literally exploding economy from degenerating into complete chaos. They could not have done it alone, of course. In fact, it was all that a thousand Norlaminian "Observers" coidd do to keep the situation even approximately in hand. And even the Congress -- mirabile dictu ! -- welcomed those aliens with open arms; for it was so hopelessly deadlocked in trying to work out any workable or enforceable laws that it was accomplishing nothing at all. All steel mills were working at one hundred ten per cent of capaIF city. So were almost all other kinds of plants. Machine tools were in such demand that no estimated time of delivery could be obtained. Arenak, dagai, and inoson, those wonder-materials of the construction industry, would be in general supply some day; but that day would not be allowed to come until the changeover could be made without disrupting the entire economy. Inoson especially was confined to the spaceship builders; and, while every pretense was being made that production was being increased as fast as possible, the demand for spaceships was so insatiable that every hulk that could leave atmosphere was out in deep space. were springing up all over Earth. Each sought out and began to develop a Tellus-type planet of its own, to bring up as a civilized planet cmmerely to exploit as it saw fit. Each was clamoring for -- and using every possible artifice of persuasion, lobbying, horse-trading, and out-and-out bribery and corruption to obtain -- spaceships, personnel, machinery light and heavy, office equipment, and supplies. All the employables of Earth, and many theretofore considered unemployable, were at work. Earth was a celestial madhouse I t is no wonder, then, that Seatcm and Crane were haggard and wMH when they had to turn their jobs over to two upper-bracket Norlaminians and leave Earth. Their situation thereafter was not much better. The first steps were easy -- anyway, the decisions involved were easy; the actual work involved was roughly equivalent to the energy budget of several Sol-type suns. It is an enormous project to set up a line of defense hundreds of thousands of miles long; especially when the setters-up do not know exactly what to expect in the way of attack. They knew, in fact, only one thing: that the Norlaminians had made a probabilistic statement that Marc C. DuQuesne was likely to be present among them before long. That was excuse, reason and compulsion enough to demand the largest and most protracted effort they could make. The mere preliminaries involved laying out axes of action that embraced many solar systems, locating and developing sources of materials and energies tibat were enough to smother a hundred suns. As that work began to shape up, Seaton and Crane came face to face with the secondary line of problems... and at that point Seaton suddenly smote himself on the forehead and cried: "Dunark!" Crane looked up. "Dunark? Why, yes, Dick. Quite right. Not only is he probably die universe's greatest strategist, but he knows the enemy almost as well as you and I do." "And besides," Seaton added, "he doesn't think like us. Not at all. And that's what we want; so I'll call him now and we'll compute a rendezvous." Wherefore, a few days later, Dunark's Osnomian cruiser matched velocities with the hurtling worldlet and began to negotiate its locks. #f Seaton ved the Valerons airpressure, cut down its gravity, and reached for the master thermostat. "Not too hot, Dick," Dorothy aid. "Light gravity is all right, but make them wear some clothes any time they're outside their special quarters. I simply won't run around naked in my own house. And I won't have them doing it, either." Seaton laughed. "The usual eightythree degrees and twenty-five per cent humidity. They'll wear clothes, all right. She'll be tickled to death to wear that fur coat you gave her -- he doesn't get a chance to, very often -- and we can stand it easily enough," and the four Tellurians went out to the dock to greet their green-skinned friends of old: Crown Prince Dunark and Crown Princess Star of Osnome, one of the planets of the enormous central sun of the Central System. Warlike, bloodthirsty, supremely ble Dunark; and Sitar, his lovely, vivacious -- and equally warlike -- wife. He was wearing ski-pants (Osnome's temperature, at every point on its surface and during every minute of every day of the year, is one hundred degrees Fahrenheit), a heavy sweater, wool socks, and fur-lined moccasins. She wore a sweater and slacks under her usual fantastic array of Osnomian jewelry; and over it, as Seaton had predicted, the full-length mink coat. Each was wearing only one Osnomian machine-pistol instead of the arsenal that had been their customary garb such a short time before. The three men greeted each other warmly and executed a six-hand handshake; the while the two white women and the green one went into an armswrapped group; each talking two hundred words to the minute. A couple of days later, the Norlaminian task-force arrived and a council of war was held that lasted for one full working day. Then, the defense planned in length and in depth, construction began: Seaton and Crane sat in the two master-control helmets of the Brain. Rovol worked with the brain of the Norlaminian spaceship. Dozens of other operators, men and women, worked at and with other, less powerful devices. O n the surface of a nearby planet, ten thousand square miles of land were leveled and paved to form the Area of Work. Stacks and piles and rows and assortments of hundreds of kinds of structural members appeared as though by magic. Gigantic beams of force, made visible by a thin and dusty pseudo-mist, flashed here and there; seizing this member and that and these and them and those and joining them together with fantastic speed to form enormous towers and platforms and telescopelike things and dirigible tubes and projectors. Some of these projectors took containers of pure force out to white dwarf stars after neutronium. Others took faidons -- those indestructible jewels that are the sine qua non of higher-order operation -- out to the cores of stars to be worked into lenses of various shapes and sizes. Out into the environment of scores of square inch of pressure that is the only environment in which the faidon can be worked by any force known to the science of man. The base-line, which was to be builr of enormous, absolutely rigid beams ot force, could not be of planetary, or even of orbital dimensions. It had to extend, a precisely measured length, from the core of a star to that of another, having as nearly as possible the same proper motion, over a hundred parsecs away. Thus it took over a week to build and to calibrate that base-line; but, once that was done, the work went fast. ITie most probable lines of approach were blocked by fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order installations of tremendous range and of planetary power: less probable ones by defenses of somewhat lesser might; supersensitive detector webs fanned out everywhere. And this work, which would have required years a short time before, was only a matter of a couple of weeks for the gigantic contire Area of Work. When everything that anyone could think of doing had been done, Seaton lit his pipe, jammed both hands into his pockets, and turned to his wife. "Well, we've got it made -- now what are we going to do with it? Sit on our hands until Blackie DuQuesne trips a trigger or some Good Samaritan answers our call? I'd give three nickels to know whether he's loose yet or not, and if he is loose, just where he is at this moment." I'd raise you a dime," she said; and then, since Dorothy Seaton concealed an extremely useful brain under her red curls, she added slowly, "And maybe... you know what the Norlaminians deduced: that, upon liberation, he'd be rematerialized? That he'd have a very good spaceship. That, before attacking us, he would recruit personnel, both men and women, both from need of their help and from loneliness... wait up -- loneliness! Who -- a girl, probably -- would he get loneliest for?" Seaton snapped his fingers. "I can make an awfully good guess. Hunkie de Marigny." "Hunkie de Who? Oh, I remember. That big moose with the black hair and the shape." Seaton laughed. "Funny, isn't it, that such an accurate description can be so misleading? But my guess is, if he's back she knows it... I think it'd be smart to flip myself over to the Bureau and see what I can find out. Want to come along?" "Uh-uh; she isn't my dish of tea." S eaton projected his solid-seeming simulacrum of pure force to distant Tellus, to Washington, and to the sidewalk in front of the Bureau. He mounted the steps, entered the building, said "Hi, Gorgeous" to the shapely blonde receptionist, and took an elevator to the sixteenth floor; where he paused briefly in thought. He hadn't better see Hunkie first, or only: Ferdinand Scott, the world's worst gossip, would talk about it, and Hunkie would draw her own conclusions. He'd pull Scotty's teeth first. M IF Wherefore he turned Into the laboratcry beside the one that once had been his own. "Hi, Scotty," he said, bolding out his hand, "Don't tell me they've actually got you working for I change." Scott, a chunky youth with strawcolored hair that needed cutting, jumped off of his stool and shook hands vigorously. "Hi, Dickie, old top! Alla time work. 'Slavey' Scott; that's me. But boy oh boy, did I goof on that 'Nobody Holme' bit! You and that bottle of waste solution, that you stirred the whole world up with like goulash! Why can't anything like that ever happen to me? But I s'pose I'd've blown the whole world to hellangone up instead of just putting h into the God-awful shape it's in now, like you and Blackie DuQuesne did. Wowy what a mess!" "Yeah. Speaking of DuQuesne -- seen him lately?" "Not since tihe big bust. The Norlaminians probably know all about him." "They don't. I asked. They lost him." "Well, you might ask Hunkie de Marigny. She'll know if anybody does." "Oh -- she still here?" "Yeah. Most of us are, and will be." Seaton chatted for another minute, then, "Take it easy, guy," he said; and went up the corridor to Room #. The door was wide open, so he went in without knocking. "Park it. Be with you in a moment," a smooth contralto voice said, and Seaton sat down on a chair near the door. The woman -- Doctor Stephanie dc Marigny, nuclear physicist and good at her trade -- kept both eyes fastened on a four-needle meter about eighteen inches in front of her nose. Her well-kept hands and red-nailed fingers, working blind with the sure precision of those of a world-champion typist, opened and closed switches, moved sliders and levers, and manipulated a dozen of so vernier knobs in tiny arcs. There was nothing to show any uninformed observer what she was doing. Whatever it was that she was working on could have been behind that instrument-filled panel -- or down in some sub-basement -- or at the Proving Grounds down the Potomac in space. Whatever it was or whereever, as she worked the four needles of the master-meter moved closer and closer together as each needle approached the center-zero mark of the meter's scale -- Until finally the four hair-thin flat needles were exactly in line with each other and with the hair-thin zero mark. Whereupon four heavy plungers drove home and every light on the panel flashed green and went out. "On the button," she said then, aloud. She rose to her feet, stretched as gracefully and luxuriously and unselfconsciously as does a cat, and turned toward her visitor. "Hi, Hunkie," Seaton said. "Can you spare me a minute?" "Nice to see you again, Dick." She came toward him, hand outstretched. "I could probably be talked into making it two minutes." "The word 'big", while true, was both inadequate and misleading. Stephanie de Marigny was tall -- five feet ten in her nylons -- and looked even taller because ol her three-inch heels, her erect posture, and because of the mass of jet-black hair piled high on her head. Her breasts jutted; her abdomen was flat and hard; her wide, flat hips flared out from a startlingly narrow waist; and her legs would have made any professional glamour-photographer drool. And her face, if not as beautiful as her body, was fully as striking. Her unplucked eyebrows, as black as her hair, were too long and too thick and too bushy and grew too nearly together above a nose that was as much of a beak as DuQuesne's own, TTie lashes over her deep brown eyes were simply incredible. Her cheekbones were too large and too prominent. Her fire-engine-red mouth was too big. Her square chin and her hard, clean line of jaw were too outstanding; demanded too much notice. Her warm, friendly, dimple-displaying smile, however, revealed the charm that was actually hers. Seaton said, "As always, you're really a treat for the optic nerve." She ignored the compliment. "You aren't; you look like a catastrophe looking for a place to happen. You ought to take better care of yourself, Dick. Get some sleep once in a while." "I'm going to, as soon as I can. But what I came in for -- have you heard anything of Blackie lately?" "No. Not since he got delusions of grandeur. Why? Should I have?" "Not that I know of. I just thought maybe you two had enough ot a thing on so you'd keep in touch." "Uh-uh. I ran around with him a little, is all. Nothing serious. Of al the men I know who understand ami appreciate good music, he's tha youngest, the best-looking, and tha most fun. Also the biggest. I can wear high heels and not tower over him, which I can't do with most men..." She paused, nibbling at her lower lip, then went on, "My best guess is that he's out on one of the new planeti somewhere, making several hundred thousand tax-free dollars per year. That's what I'm going to be doing as soon as I finish Observers' School here." "You're the gal who can do it, toa Luck, Hunkie." "Same to you, Dick. Drop is again, any time you're around." And aboard the Skylark of Voter on, Seaton turned to Dorothy with a scowl. "Nobody's seen him or heard anything of him, so he probably isat loose yet. I hate this waiting. Cornfound it, I wish the big black ape would get loose and start something!" Although Seaton did not know it, DuQuesne had, and was about to. It happened that night, after Sear ton had gone to bed. T he message came in loud and clear on Seaton's private allhours receiver, monitored and directed by the unsleeping Brain: "... Seaton reply on tight beam of the sixth stop DuQuesne calling Seaton reply on tight beam of the sixth stop DuQuesne calling..." Coming instantly awake at the sound of his name, Seaton kicked IF off the covefs, thought a light on, and, setting hands and feet, made a gymnast's twisting, turning leap over Dorothy without touching her. There was plenty of room on his own side of the bed, but the direct route was quicker. He landed on his feet, took two quick steps, and slapped the remote-control helmet on his head. 'Trace this call. Hit its source with a tight beam of the sixth," he thought into the helmet; then took it off and said aloud, "You're coming in loud and clear. What gives?" "Lx)ud and clear here. All hell's out for noon. I just met the damndest alien any science-fiction fan ever imagined -- teeth, wings, tail -- the works. Klazmon by name; boss of two hundred forty-one planets full of monsters just like him. He's decided that all humanity everywhere should be liquidated; and it looks as though he may have enough stuff to do just that." Dorothy had sat up in bed, sleepily. She made a gorgeously beautiful picture, Seaton thought; wearing a wisp of practically nothing and her hair a tousled auburn riot. As the sense of DuQuesne's words struck home, however, a look of horror spread over her face and she started to say something; but Seaton touched his lips with a forefinger and she, wide awake now, nodded. "Nice summary, DuQuesne," Seaton said then. "Now break it down into smaller pieces, huh?" and DuQuesne went on to give a verbatim report of his interview with Llanzlan Klazmon of the Realm of the Llurdi. "So much for facts," DuQuesne said. "Now for inferences and deductions. You know how, when you're thinking with anyone, other information, more or less relevant and more or less clear, comes along? A sort of side-band effect?" "Yeah, always. I can see how you picked up the business about the stranger ships that way. But how sure are you that those seventeen ships were Fenachrone?" "Positive. That thought was clear. And for that matter, there must be others running around loose somewhere. How possible is it, do you think, to wipe out completely a race that has had spaceships as long as they have?" "Could be," agreed Seaton. "And this ape Klazmon figured it that we were the same race, basically, both mentally -- savage, egocentric, homicidal -- and physically. How could he arrive at any such bobbled-up, cockeyed conclusions as that?" "For him, easily enough. Klazmon is just about as much like us as we are like those X-planet cockroaches. Imagine a man-sized bat, with a super-able tail, cat's eyes and teeth, humanoid arms and hands, a breastbone like the prow of a battleship, pectoral muscles the size of fortypound hams, and -- " "Wait up a sec -- this size thing. His projection?" "That's right. Six feet tall. He wasn't the type to shrink or expand it." "I'll buy that. And strictly logical -- with their own idea of what logic is." "Check. According to which logic we're surplus population and are to be done away with. So I decided to warn you as to what the human race is up against and to suggest a meeting with you that we know can't be listened in on. Check?" Definitely. We'll lock our sixths on and instruct our computers to compute and effect rendezvous at null relative velocity in minimum time. Can do?" "Can do -- am doing," DuQuesne said; and Seaton, donning his helmet, perceived that the only fifthor sixth-order stuff anywhere near the Skylark of VaJeron -- except what she was putting out herself, rf course -- was the thin, tight beam that was the base-line. Seaton thought into his helmet for a few seconds; then, discarding it, he went around the bed, got into it on his own ade, and started to kiss Dorothy a second good night. "But, Dick," she protested. "That DuQuesne! Do you think it's safe to let him come actually aboard?" "Yes. Not only safe, but necessary -- we don't want to be blabbing that of space. And safe because I still say we're better than he is at anything he wants to start, for fun, money, chalk, or marbles. So good night again, ace of my bosom." "Hadn't you better notify somebody else first? Especially the Norlaminians?" "You said it, presh; I sure should." Seaton put on his helmet; and it was a long time before either of the Seatons got back to sleep. Long for Dorothy, heroically keeping eyes closed and breathing regularly so that her husband would not know how shaken and terrified she really was; long for Seaton himself, who lay hour upon endless hour, hands linked behind his head, gray eyes staring fiercely up into the darkness. It had been a long time since Richard Ballinger Seaton and Marc C. DuQuesne had locked horns last. This galaxy -- this cluster -- this whole First Universe was not large enough for the two of them. When they met again one of them would dispose of the other. It was as simple as tht. Yet Seaton had accepted a call for help. The whole enormous complex of defenses diat he had labored so hard and long to erect against DuQuesne would now be diverted to another, perhaps even a greater, threat to the safety of civilization. It was right and proper that thk should be so. But Seaton knew that whatever the best interests of dvilization in this matter, there could and would never be any greater personal threat to himself than was incarnate in the cold, hard, transcendentaHy logical person of Blackie DuQuesne. DC Among the Jelmi A nd half a universe away other events were moving to fruition. As has been said, the eight hundred Jelmi aboard the ship that had once been a Llurdan cruiser were the setheir race inhabiting two hundred forty-one planets. The younger ones had been selected for brains, ability, and physical perfection; the older ones for a hundred years or more of IF tftstanding sdentific achievement. And of the (der group, Tammon itood out head and shoulders above afl the rest. He was the Einstein of his race. He looked a vigorous, bushily gray-haired sixty; but was in fact two hundred eleven Mallidaxian years old. Tammon was poring over a computed graph, measuring its various characteristics with vernier calipers, a filar microscope, and an integrating planimeter, when Mergon and Luloy came swinging hand in hand into his laboratory. Both were now fully recovered from the wounds they had suffered in that hand-to-hand battle with the Llurdi on now-fardistant Llurdiax. Muscles moved smoothly under the unblemished bronze of Mergon's skin; Luloy's swirling shoulder-length mop of gleaming chestnut hair was a turbulent glory. "Hail, Tamm," the two said in unison, and Mergon went on: "Have you unscrewed the inscrutability of that anomalous peak yet?" Tammon picked up another chart and scowled at a sharp spike going up almost to the top of the scale, "This? Tm not exactly sure yet, but I may have. At least, by recomputing with an entirely new and morethan-somewhat weird set of deter minors, I got this," and he ran his fingertip along the smooth curve on the chart he had been studying. Mergon whistled through his teeth and Luloy, after staring for a moment said, "Wonderful! Expound, oh sage, and elucidate." "It had to have at least one component in the sixth, on the levd of thought, but no known detcrminori would affect it. Therefore I applied the mathematics of symbolic logic to a wide variety of hunches, dreams, Fve been here or done thbbefores, premonitions, intuitions... "Llenderllon's eyeballs!" Luloy broke in. "So that was what you ran us all through the wringer for, a whilo back." "Precisely. Using these new determinors in various configurations -- dictated not by mathematical reasoning, but by luck and by hunch and by perseverance -- I finally obtained a set of uniquely manipulable determinants that yielded this final smooth curve, the exactly fitting equation of which reduces beautifully to... "Hold it, Tamm," Mergon said, "you're losing me," and Luloy added, "You lost me long ago. What does it meatiT "It will take years to explore its ramifications, but one fact is clear: the fourth dimension of space does actually exist. Therefore the conclusion seems inescapable that..." "Stop it!" Luloy snapped. "This is terribly dangerous stuff to be talking about. That terrific kind of a breakthrough is just exactly what Klazmon -- the beast! -- has been after for years. And you know very well that we're not really free; that he has us under constant surveillance." "But by detector only," Mergon said. "A full working projection at this distance? Uh-uh. It might be smart, though, to be a little on the careful side, at that" D ays lengthened into weeks. The ex-Llurdan cruiser, renamed the Mallidax and converted into a Jelman worldlet, still hurtled along a rightline course toward the center of the First Universe, at a positive-and-negative acceleration that would keep her -- just barely! -- safe against collision with intergalactic clouds of gas or dust. The objective of their flight was a small sun, among whose quite undistinguished family of planets were a moderate-sized oxygen-bearing world and its rather large, but otherwise uninteresting companion moon. Tammon, hot on the trail of his breakthrough in science, kept his First Assistant Mergon busy fourteen or sixteen hours per day designing and building -- and sometimes inventing -- new and extremely special gear; and Mergon in turn drove Luloy, his wife and Girl Friday, as hard as he drove himself. Tammon, half the time, wore armor and bdlion-volt gloves against the terribly lethal forces he was tossing so nonchalantly from point to point. Mergon, only slightly less powerfully insulated, had to keep his variable-density goggles practically opaque against the eye-tearing frequencies of his welding arcs. And even Luloy, much as she detested the feel of clothing against her skin, was as armored and as insulated as was either of themen as she tested and checked and double-checked and operatedi with heavily gloved flying fingers, the maze of unguarded contit that was her constructor station. And all the other Jehni were working just as hard; even -- or especially? -- Master Biologist Sennlloy: who, with her long, thick braids of Norsegoddess hair piled high on her head and held in place by a platinum-filigree net, was delving deeper and ever deeper into the mystery of life. A ny research man worth his ssdt must not be the type to give up: he must be able to keep on butting his head against a stone wall indefinitely without hoisting the white flag. Thus, Tammon developed the theory after theory after theory for, and Mergon and Luloy built model after model after model of, mechanisms to transport material objects from one place to another in normal space by moving them, through the fourth dimension -- and model after model after model failed to work. They failed unfailingly. Unanimously. Wherefore Mergon had run somewhat low on enthusiasm when he and Luloy carried the forty-ninth model of the series into Tammon's laboratory to be put to the test. WHiile the old savant hooked the device up into a breadboard layout of gadgetry some fifteen feet long, Mergon somewhat boredly picked up as empty steel box, dropped six large ball-larings into k, closed and hasped its cover, grasped it firmly in his left hand, and placed an empty steel bowl on the bench. "Now," Tammon said, and flipped a switch -- and six heavy steel balls clanged into the bowl out of nowhere. "Huh?" Mergon's left hand had jumped upward of its own accord; and, fumbling in his haste, he opened the box in that hand and stared. Jaw actually agape, at its empty interior. IF "Llenderllon's eyeballs!" Luloy shrieked. "This one works!" "It does indeed," a technician agreed, and turned anxiously to Tammon. "But sir, doesn't that fact put us into a highly dangerous position Even though Klazmon can't operate a full working projection at this distance, he undoubtedly has had all his analytical detectors out all this time and this successful demonstration must have tripped at least some of them." "Not a chance," Mergon said. "He'll never find these bands -- it'd be exactly like trying to analyze a pattern of fifth-or sixth-order force with a visible-light spectroscope." "It probably would be, at that," the technician agreed, and Luloy said, "But what I've been wondering about all along is, what good is it? What's it for? Except robbing a bank or something, maybe." "It reduces theory to practice," Tammon told her. "It gives us priceless data, by the application of which to already-known concepts we will be able to build mechanisms and devices to perform operations hitherto deemed impossible. Operations unthought-of, in fact." "Maybe we should be pretty careful about it, though, at that," Mergon said. "To do very much real development work, we'll have to be using a lot of fairly unusual sixth-order stuff that he can detect and analyze. That will make him wonder what we're up to and he won't stop at wondering. He'll take steps." 'Big steps," Luloy agreed. Tammon nodded. "That is true... and we must land somewhere to do any worthwhile development work, since this ship is not large enough to house the projectors we will have to have. Also, we are short of certain necessities for such work, notably neutronium and faidons... and the projectors of these ultrabands will have to be of tremendous power, range, and scope... you are right. We must find a solar system emanating sixth-order' energies. Enough of them, if possible, to mask completely our own unavoidable emanations. We now have enough new data so that we can increase tremendously the range, delicacy, and accuracy of our own detectors. See to it, Mergon, and find a good landingplace." "Yes, sir!" and Mergon went, with enthusiasm again soaring high, to work. R ebuilding and re-powering their detector systems did not take very long; but finding the kind of landing place they needed proved to be something entirely else. They had more or less assumed that many galaxies would show as much sixth-order activity as did their own, but that assumption was wrong. In three weeks they found only three galaxies showing any at all; and not one of the three was emanating as much sixth-order stuff as their own small vessel was putting out. After another week or so, however, the savant on watch asked Mergon to come to his station. "There's something tremendous up ahead and off to starboard, Merg. That spot there." He pointed. "It's been there for almost half an hour and it hasn't in#S creased by a thousandth of what I expected it to. I would have said that at that distance nothing could possibly register that high." "Did you check your circuits?" Mergon asked. "Of course; everything's on the green." "Main Control!" Mergon snapped mto a microphone. "Mergon speakiof. FMp one eighty immediately. Deoel max." Wp one eighty," the speaker said, iHld the vessel turned rapidly end for CBcL... ON the mark and decelimdng at max." Mergon whirled around and sprinted for Tammon's laboratory. He yanked the door and reported, concluding, "It's apparently emanating thousands of times as much as our whole galaxy does, so we'd better sneak up on it with care." "Can we stop in time or will we have to overshoot and come back to it from the other side? That may affect course, you know." Mergon hadn't thought of that point, but he soon found out. They couldn't stop quite in time, but the overshoot would be a matter of less than a day. "See to it, Mergon," Tammon said, and resumed his interrupted studies. The approach was made. Surprise turned to consternation when it was learned that practically all of that emanation was coming from one planet instead of a thousand; but since that condition was even better than any that had been hoped for, they shielded everything that could be shielded and sneakeid up on that extraordinary world -- the third planet of a Type G sun. It had an unusually large satellite... and ideal location for their proposed operation... there were two small clusters of dome-shaped structures... abandoned... quite recently... with advanced technology all such things and procedures would of course be abandoned... and there were bits and pieces of what looked like wreckage. Seaton -- who had not yet seen at close up any part of the moon! -- would have recognized at a glance the American and the Russian Lunar outposts, and also what was left of Ranger Seven and of several other American and Russian moon-rockers. As a matter of fact, the Jelmi could deduce, within fairly narrow limits, what had happened on Earth's moon. But all they cared about was that, since the moon was not inhabited at that time, they would probably not attract undue attention if they landed on it and, thoroughly and properly screened, went to work. And Klazmon could not possibly detect them there. Luna's mountains are high and steep. Therefore, after e Mallidan had come easily to ground at the foot of one such mountain, it took only a day for the Mallidans mighty construction-projectors to hollow out and finish off a sub-Lunar base in that mountain's depths. And next day, early, work was begun upon the tremendous new superdreadnought of the void that was going to be named the MaU lidaxian. IF X Jelmi on the Moon M iss Madlyn Mannis -- nee Gretchen Schneider -- stood in the shade of a huge beach umbrella (perish forbid that any single square inch of that petal-smooth, creamily flawless epidermis should be exposed to Florida's fervent sun!) on Clearwater Beach. She was digging first one set of red-nailed toes and then the other, into the soft white sand, and was gazing pensively out over the wavelets of the Gulf. She was a tall girl, and beautifully built, with artistically waved artistically red hair: and every motion she made was made with the lithe grace of the highly trained professional dancer that she in fact was. She was one of the best exotic dancers in the business. As a matter of box-office fact, she was actually almost as good as she thought she was. She was wearing the skimpiest neobikini ever seen on Clearwater Beach and was paying no attention whatever, either to the outraged glares of all the other women in sight or to the distinctly unoutraged glances of the well built, deeply tanned, and highly appreciative young man who was standing some twenty feet away. She was wondering, however, and quite intensely, about the guy. He'd been following her around for a couple of weeks. Or had he? She'd seen him somewhere every day -- but he couldn't possibly have followed her here. Not only she hadn't known she was coming here until just before the started, but she had come by speedboat and had found him on the beach when she arrived! And the man was wondering, too. He knew that he hadn't been following her. Without hiring an eye, he wouldn't know how to. And the idea that Madlyn Mannis would be following him around was ridiculous  it really stunk. But how many times in a row could heads turn iip by pure chance alone? He didn't dare move anv closer, but he kept on looking and he kept on wondering. Would she slug him or just slap him or maybe even accept it, he wondered, if he should offer to buy the Miss Mannis a drink... M iss Mannis was also being studied, much more intensively and from much closer viewpoints, by two Jelmi in an immense new spaceship, the Mallidaxian, on the moon; and the more they studied the Mannis costume the more baffled they became. As had been said, the Jelmi had had to build this immense new spaceship because the comparatively tiny Mallidan, in which they had escaped from the Realm of the Llurdi, had proved too small by far to house the outsized gear necessary for accurately controlled intergalactic work of any kind. The Mallidaxian, however -- built as she was of inoson and sister-ship as she was to the largest, heaviest, and most powerful spacesluggers of the Realm -- was not only big enough to carry any instrumentation known to the science of the age, but also powerful enough to cope with any foreseeable development or contingency. The Jelman sub-Lunar base had been dismantled and collapsed. Its every distinguishing feature had been reduced to moon-dust. The Mallidaxian's slimly powerful length now extended for a distance of two and one half miles from the mountain's foot out into the level-floored crater: in less than an hour she would take off for Mallidax, the home world of Tammon, Mergon, Luloy, and several other top-bracket Jelmi of the fugitive eight hundred. The vessel's officers and crew were giving their instruments and mechanisms one last pre-flight check. Tammon was still studying the offensive and defensive capabilities of Cape Kennedy; Mergon and Luloy -- among others -- had been studying the human beings of this hitherto unknown world. Everyone aboard, of course, had long since mastered the principal languages of Earth. That Madlyn Mannix should have been selected for observation was not very astonishing. Some thousands of Earthmen -- and Earthwomen, Earthchildren, even Earthdogs and cats -- had been. There was that about Madlyn Mannix, however, and to a lesser degree about the male with whom she seemed in some way associated, that seemed to deserve special study. For one thing, the Jelmi had been  totally unable to deduce anv shred of evidence that might indicate her profession -- not so surprising, since the work of a stripper must seem pure fantasy to a world which habitually wears no clothes at all! Madlyn, although used to being talked about, would have been quite astonished to learn how interestedly she was being discussed on the far side of the moon. "Oh, let's bring her up here, Merg," Luloy said in disgust. "I want to talk to her -- find out what this idiocy means. We'd better bring that fellow along, too: she'd probably be scared out of her wits -- if any -- alone." "Check," Mergon said, and the two Tellurians appeared, standing close together, in the middle of the room. nphe girl screamed once; then, her A eyes caught by the awesome moonscape so starkly visible through the transparent wall, she froze and stared in terror. ITien, finding that she was not being hurt, she fought her terror down. She took one fleeting glance at Mergon, blushed to the waist, and concentrated on Luloy. "Why, you must... you do go naked!" she gasped. 'M the time! How utterly, utterly shameless!" "Shameless?" Lulov wrinkled her nose in perplexity. "That's what I want to talk to you about, this 'shame' concept. I can't understand it and its dictionary definition is senseless to the point of unsanity. I never heard of a concept before that so utterly lacked sense, reason, and logic. What significant difference can there possibly be between nakedness and one ribbon and two bits of gauze? And why in the name of All-Seeing Llenderllon wear any clothing at all when you don't have to? Against cold or thorns or whatever? And especially when you swim? And you take off your clothes too... IF "I do no such thing!" The dancer drew herself up haughtily. "I am an artiste. An exotic dancer's disrobing is a fine art, and I am Madlyn Mannis, the exotic dancer." "Be that as it may, just answer one question and we'll put you back where you werf', on the beach. What possible logical, reasonable, or even comprehensible relationship can there be between clothing and sex?" While the girl was groping for an answer, the man took one step forward and said, "She can't answer that question. Neither can I, fully, but I can state as a fact that such a relation .hip is a fact of our lives; of the lives of all the peoples -- even the least civilized peoples -- of our world. It's an inbred, ages-old, worldwide sexual taboo. Based, possibly or even probably, upon the idea 'out of sight, out of mind. " "A sexual taboo?" Luloy shook her head in complete bafflement. "Why, I never heard of anything so completely idiotic in my whole life! Will you wear these thought-caps with me for a moment, please, so that we may explore this weird concept in depth?" The girl flinched away from the helmet at first, but the man reached out for his, saying, "I've always claimed to have an open mind, but this I've got to see." Since complete non-comprehension of motivation on one side met fundamental ignorance on the other, however, thoughts were no more illuminating than words had been. "Neither she nor I know enough about the basics of that branch of anthropology," the man said, handing the helmet back to Luloy. "You'd better get a book. Mores and Customs of Tellus, by David Lisser, in five volumes, is the most complete work I know of. You can find it in any big bookstore. It's expensive, though -- it costs seventy-five dollars." "Oh? And we haven't any American money and we don't steal... but I've noticed that highly refractive bits of crystalline carbon of certain shades of color are of value here." T burning her back on the two Tellurians, Luloy went to the laboratory bench, opened a drawer, glanced into it, and shook her head. She picked up a helmet, thought into it, and there appeared upon the palm of her hand a perfectly cut, perfectly polished, blue-white diamond half the size of an egg. She turned back toward the two and held out her hand so that the man could inspect the gem, saying, "I have not given any attention at all to your monetary system, but this should be worth enough, I think, to leave in the place of the book of five volumes. Or should it be bigger?" Close up, the man goggled at bluewhite fire. BiggerI Than that rock? Lady! Are you kidding? If that thing will stand inspection it'll buy you a library, buildings and all!" "That's all I wanted to know. Thank you." Luloy turned to Mergon. "They don't know any more than..." "Just a minute, please," the man broke in. "If diamonds don't mean any more than that to you, why wouldn't it be a good idea for you make her some? To alleviate e Aock she has just had? Not as big, of course; none bigger than the end of my thumb." Luloy nodded. T know. Various sizes, for full-formal array. She's just about my size, so eleven of your quarts will do it." "My God, no... Madlyn began, but the man took smoothly over. "Not quite. Miss Luloy. Our ladies don't decorate their formals as lavishly as you apparently do. One quart, or maybe a quart and a half, will do very nicely." "Very well," Luloy looked directly at the man. "But you won't want to be lugging them around with you all the rest of the day -- they're heavy -- so I'll put them in the right-hand top drawer of the bureau in your bedroom. Good-by," and Mergon's hands began to move toward his controls. "Wait a minute!" the man exclaimed. "You cant just dump us back where we were without a word of explanation! While spaceships aren't my specialty -- I'm a petrochemical engineer tee eight -- I've never imagined anything as big as Ais vessel actually flying, and I'm just about as much interested in that as I am in the way we got here -- which has to be fourth-dimensional translation; it can't be anything else. So if everything isn't top secret, how about showing us around a little?" "The fourth-dimension device is top secret; so much so that only three or four of us know anything about it. You may study anything else you lease. Bearing in mind that we have only a few seconds over three of your minutes left, where woidd you like to begin?" "The engines first, please, and die drives." "And you. Miss Mannis? Arts? Crafts? Sciences? There is no dancing going on at the moment." The dancer's right hand flashed out, seized her fellow Earthman'i forearm and clung to it. "Wherever he goes I go along!" she said, very positively. Since neither of the two Earthpeople had ever been projected before, they were both very much surprised at how much can be learned via projection, and in how short a ti ne. They saw tremendous receptors und generators and propul sors; they saw the massed and banked and tiered keyboards and instrumentation of the control stations; they saw how the incredibly huge vessel's inoson structural mambers were trussed and latticed and braced and buttressed to make it possible for such a titanic structure to fly. Since everything aboard the original Jelman vessel had been moved aboard this vastly larger one before the original had been reduced to moon-dust, the dancer and her companion also saw beautiful, splendid, and magnificent -- if peculiarly unearthly -- paintings and statues and tapestries and rugs. They heard music, ranging from vast orchestral recordings down to the squeakings and tootlings of beginners learning to play musical instruments unknown to the humanity of Earth. And above all they saw people. Hundreds and hundreds of people; each one completely naked and each IF one ot a physical perfection almost never to be found on Earth. At time zero minus twenty seconds M ergon cut off the projectors and the Earthman looked at Luloy. She not only had swapped the dia mond tor the fivevolume set of books, she had already read over a hundred pages of Volume One. She was flipping pages almost as fast as hei thumb and forefinger could move, and she was absorbing the full content of the work at the rate of one glance per page. "You people seem to be as human as we are," Madlyn said, worriedly, "but outside of that you're nothing like us at all in any way. Where did you come from anyway?" "I can't tell you," Mergon said, flatly "Not that I don't want to, I can't. We're what you call human, yes; but our world Mallidax is a myriad of galaxies away from here -- so far away that the distance is completely incomprehensible to the mind. Good-bv." A nd Madlyn Mannis found herself -- with no lapse of time and with no sensation whatever of motion -- standing in her former tracks under the big umbrella on the beach. The only difference was that she was now standing still instead of digging her toes into the sand. She looked at her fellow moontraveler. He, too, was standing in the siame place as before, but he now looked as though he had been struck by lightning. She swallowed twice, then said, "Well, I'm awfully glad I wasn't alone when that hap..." she broke off abruptly, licked her lips, and went on in a strangely altered tone, "Or am I nuttier than a fruit-cake? Vos you dere, Shar-lee?" "I vas dere, Madlyn." He walked toward her. He was trying to grin, but was not having much success with it. "And my name is Charley -- Charles K. van der Gleiss." "My God! That makes it even worse -- or does it?" "I don't see how anything could; very well or very much... but I need a drink. How about you?" Brother! Do I! But we'll have to dress. You can't get anything on the beach here that's strong enough to cope with anything like that!" "I know. City owned. Teetotal. I'll see you out in front in a couple of minutes. In a taxi." "Make it five minutes, or maybe a bit more. And if you run out on me, Charles K. van der Gleiss, I'll... I'll hunt you up and kill you absolutely dead, so help me!" "Okay, I'll wait, but make it snappy. I need that drink." She had snatched up her robe and had taken off across the sand like a startled doe; her reply came back over one shoulder. need a drink? Oh, brother XI Blotto T he world had come a long way from the insular, mud-bound globe of rock and sea of the #s and #s; Seaton and Crane had seen to that. Norlaminian observers were a familiar sight to most humans -- if not in person, then surely IF teough die medium of TV or Ispefax. A thousand worlds had been photographed by Tellurian cameramen and reporters; the stories of the Osnomians, the Fenachrone, the Valeronians, even the Chlorans and the other weirdly nonhuman races of the outer void were a matter of public record. Nevertheless, it is a far different thing from knowing that other races exist to find yourself a guest of one from home; wherefore Madlyn and Charley's expressed intentions took immediate and tangible form. Madlyn Mannis and Charles K. van der Gleiss were facing each other across a amah table in a cnrtained booth; a table upon which a waiter was placing a pint of bonded hundred-proof bourbon and the various items properly accessory thereto. As soon as the curtain feh into place behind the departing waiter the girl seized the bottle, raised it to her mouth, and bed down a good two fingers -- as much as she could force down before her coughing, choking, and strangjing made her stop. 'Hey! Take it easy!" the man protested, taking the bottle from h hand and putting it gently down on the table. "You're not used to guzzling it like that; that's for plain damn sure." She gulped and coughed a few times; wiped her streaming eyes. "I'll tell the world I'm not; two little wies is always my limit, ordinarily. But I needed that jolt, Charley, to keep from flipping my lid completely. Don't you need one, too?" "I certainly do. A triple, at least, with a couple of snowflakes of ice and about five drops of water." He built the drink substantially as specified, took it down in three swallows, and drew a profoundly deep breath. "You heard me tell them I'm a petrochemical engineer, tee eight. So maybe that didn't hit me quite as hard as it did you, but bottled courage helps, believe me." He mixed another drink -- a single -- and docked an eyebrow at the girL "What'll you have as a chaser for that God-awful belt?" "A scant jigger -- three-quarters, about -- in a water glass," she said, promptly. "Two ice-cubes and fill it vnp with ice-water." He mixed the drink and she took a sip. "Thanks, Charley. This is much better for drinking purposes. Now maybe I can talk about what happened without blowing my top. I was going to wonder why we've been running into each other all the time lately, but that doesn't amount to anything compared to... I actually thought... in ft, I know very well... we were on... weren't we? Both of us?" "We were both on the moon," he said flatly. "To make things worse, we were inside a spaceship that I still don't believe can be built. Those are factsr "Uh-uh; that's what I mean. Positively nobody ever went to the moon or anywhere else off-Earth without being in something, and we didn't have even the famous paddle. And posi-cflmn-tively nobody -- but nobody -- ever got into and out of a tightly closed, vacuum-tight spaceship without anybody opening any doors or ports or anything. How do you play them tunes on your piccolo, friend?" "I don't; and the ship itself was almost as bad. Not only was it impossibly big; it was full oftuff that makes the equipment of the General Hoyt S. Vanderberg look like picks and shovels." She raised an eyebrow questioningly and he went on, "One of the missile-tracking vessels -- the hairiest hunks of electronic gadgetry ever built by man. What it all adds up to is a race of people somewhere who know as much more than even the Norlaminians do as we do than grasshoppers. So I think we had better report to the cops." "The copsV' she spat the word out like an oath. "Me? Madlyn Mannis? Squeal to the fuzz? When a great big gorilla slugs me in the brisket and heists fifteen grands' worth of diamonds off of me and I don't get... " S he broke off suddenly. Both had avoided mentioning the diamonds, but now the word was accidentally out. She shook her head vigorously, then said, "Uh-uh. They aren't there. Who ever heard of diamonds by the quart? Anyway, even if that Luloy could have done it and did. I'll bet they evaporated or something." "Or they'll turn out to be glass," he agreed. "No use looking, hardly, I don't think. Even if they are there and are real, you couldn't sell 'em without telling where they came from -- and you can't do that." "I couldn't? Don't be naive. Charley. Nobody ever asks me where I got any diamonds I sell -- I'd slap his silly face off. I can peddle your half, too, at almost wholesale. Not all at once, of course, but a few at a time, here and there." "Half, Uh-uh," he objected. "I was acting as your agent on that deal. Ten per cent." "Half," she insisted; then grinned suddenly. "But why argue about half of nothing? To get back onto the subject of cops -- the lugs! -- they brushed my report off as a stripper's publicity gag and I didn't get even one line in the papers. And if I report this weirdie they'll give me a one-way, most-direct-route ticket to the nearest funny-farm." "You've got a point there." He glowered at his drink. "I can see us babbling about instantaneous translation through the fourth dimension and an impossible spaceship on the moon manned by people exactly like us -- except that the men all look like Green Bay Packers and all the girls without exception are stacked like... like..." Words failed him. Madlyn nodded thoughtfully. "Uhhuh," she agreed. "They were certainly stacked. That Luloy... that biologist Sennlloy, who was studying all those worms and mice and things... all of 'em. And they swap hundred-carat perfect blue-white diamonds for books." "Yeah. We start blabbing that kind of stuff and we wind up in wraparounds." "You said it. But we've got to do something' "Well, we can report to an Observer -- " IF "Trt got a better idea. Let's tie iie reaily on." N either of them remembered very much of what happened after fbat, but at about three o'clock the following afternoon Charley van der Gleiss struggled upward through a lasses to consciousness. He was lying on the couch in his living room; fully dressed, even to his shoes. He worked himself up, very carefully, to a sitting position and shook his head as carefully. It didn't quite explode. Good -- he'd probably live. Walking as though on eggs, he made cautious way to the bedroom. She was lying, also fuhy dressed, on his bed. On the coverlet As he sat gingerly down on the side of the bed she opened one eye, then the other, put both hands to her head, and groaned; her features twisting in agony. "Stop shaking me, you... please,' she begged. "Oh, my poor head! It's coming clear off , , , right t the neck..." Then, becoming a little more conscious, she went on, "It didn't go back into the woodwork, Charley, did h? I'll see that horrible moonscape and that naked Liy as long as I live." "And I'll see that nightmare of a spaceship. While you're taking the tot shot at the bathroom I'll have 'em send up a gallon of black coffee, a couple of quarts of orange juice, and whatever the pill-roller downstairs says is good for what ails us. In the meantime, would you like a hair of the dog?" "My God, no!" She shuddered visibly. "I never got drunk in my life before -- I have to keep in shape, you know -- and if I live through this I swear I'll never take another drink as long as I live!" When they began to feel better Madlyn said, "Why don't you peek into that drawer, Charley? There just might be something in it." He did, and there was, and he gave her the honor of lifting the soft plastic bag out of the drawer. "My God!" she gasped. "There's four or five pounds of them!" She opened the bag with trembling fingers and stood entranced for half a minute, then took out a few of the gems and examined them minutely. "Charley," she said then, "if I know anything about diamonds -- and I admit that I know a lot -- these are not only real, but the finest things I have ever seen. I'm almost afraid to try to sell even the littlest ones. Men just simply don't give girls rocks like that. I'm not even sure that there are very many others like those aiound. If any." "Well, we would probably have had to talk to an Observer anyway, and this makes it a forced putt. Let's go, Maddy." "In this wreckage?" Expression highly scornful, she waved a hand at her rumpled and wrinkled green afternoon gown. "Are you completely out of your mind?" "Oh, that's easy. I'll shave and put on a clean shirt and an intelligent look and then we'll skip over to your place for you to slick up and then we'll go down to the Observer's office. Say, have you got a safedeposit box?" "No, but don't worry about that for a while, my friend. We haven't got 'em past the Observer yet!" A n hour later, looking and feeling almost human again, the two were ushered into the Observer's heavily screened private office. They told him, as nearly as they could remember, every detail of everything that had happened. He listened attentively. He had been among the Tellurians only a few short months; in the cautious thoughtful way of Norlaminians, he was far from ready to claim that he understood them. These two in particular seemed quite non-scientific and un-logical in their attitudes... and yet, he thought, and yet there was that about them which seemed to deserve a hearing. So he heard. Then he put on a headset and saw. Visually he investigated the far side of the moon; then, frowning slightly, he increased his power to microscopic magnification and re-examined half a dozen tiny areas. He then conferred briefly with Rovol of Rays on distant Noriamm, who in turn called Seaton into a long-distance three-way. "No doubt whatever about it," Seaton said. "If fliey hadn't been hiding from somebody or something they wouldn't have ground up that many thousands of tons of inooon into moon-dust -- that's a project, you know -- and I don't need to tell you that inoson does not occur in nature. Yes, we definitely need to know more about this one. Coming in!" Seaton's pn'ection aeared in the Observer's office and, after being introduced, handed thoughthelmets to Madlyn and Charley. "Put these on, please, and go over the whole thing again, in as fine detail as you possibly can. It's not that we doubt any of your statements; it's just that we want to record and to study very carefully all the sidebands of thought that can be made to appear." The two went over their stories again; this time being interrupted, every other second or two, by either Seaton or the Observer with sharply pertinent questions or suggestions. When, finally, both had been wrung completely dry, the Observer took off his helmet and said: "Although much of this material is not for public dissemination, I will tell you enough to relieve your minds of stress; especially since you have already seen some of it and I know that neither of you will talk." Being a very young Norlaminian, just graduated from the Country of Youth, he smiled at this, and the two smiled -- somewhat wryly -- back. "Wait a minute," Seaton said. "I'm not sure we want their minds relieved of too much stress. They both ring bells -- loud ones. I'd swear I know you both from somewhere, except I know darn well I've never met either of you before... it's a cinch nobody could ever forget meeting Madlyn Mannis..." He paused, then snapped a finger sharply. "Idiot! Of course! Where were you, both of you, at hours twentythree fifty-nine on the eighteenth?" "Huh? What is this, a gag?" van der Gleiss demanded. IF "Anything else but, believe mc," Seaton assured him. "Madlyn?" "One minute of midnight? That would be the finale of my first show... Oh-ohl Was the eighteenth a Friday?" "Yes." "That's it!" the girl was visibly excited now. "Something did happen. Don't ask me what -- all I know is I was just finishing my routine, and I got this feeling -- this feeling of importance about something. Why, you were in it!" She stared at Seaton's projection incredulously. "Yes! But -- you were different somehow. I don't know how. Like a -- like a reflection of you, or a bad photograph..." Through his headset Seaton thought a quick, private three-way conference with Rovol and the Norlaminian on Earth: " -- clearly refers to our beacon message -- " " -- yes, but holy cats, Rovol, what's this about a 'reflection'? -- " " -- conceivably some sort of triggered response from another race -- " It took less than a second, then Seaton continued with the girl and her companion, who were unaware that any interchange had taken place. "The 'something important' you're talking about, Madlyn, was a message that we broadcast. You might a response from some other race or civilization with a little more on the ball than we have. We've been hoping for an answer; it's just possible that, through you, we've got one. What was that 'reflection' like?" "I'd call it a psychic pull," said Madlyn promptly. "And now that you mention it, I felt it with these Jelmi too. And -- " Her eyes widened, and she turned to stare at Charky. Seaton snapped his fingers. "Look, Madlyn. Can you take time off to spend with us? I don't know what you've got into -- but I want you nearby if you get into it again!" "Why, certainly, Mr. Seaton. I mean -- Doctor aton. I'll call Moe -- that's my agent -- and cancel Vegas, and -- " "Thanks," grinned Seaton. "You won't lose anything by it." "I'm sure I won't, judging by... but oh, yes, how about those diamonds -- if they are?" "Oh, they are," the Norlaminian assured her, "and they're of course yours. Would you like to have me sell them for you?" She glanced questioningly at van der Gleiss, who nodded and gave the jewels to the Observer. Then, "We'd like that very much, sir," Madlyn said, "and thanks a lot." "Okay," laton said then. "Now, how about you, Charley. What kind of a jolt did you get at one minute of twelve that Friday night?" "Well, it was the first time I caught Madlyn's act, and I admit it's a sockeroo. She has the wallop of a piledriver, no question of that. But if you mean spirit-message flapdoodle or psychic poppycock, nothing. I'm not psychic myself -- not a trace -- and nobody can sell me that anybody else is, either. That stuff is purely the bunk -- it's strictly for the birds." "It isn't either. Mister Charles K. an der Gleiss!" Madlyn exclaimed. "And you are too psychic -- very strongly so! How else would we be stumbling over each other everywhere we go? And how else would I possibly get drunk with you?" She spread her hands out in appeal to the Observer. he psychic?" "My opinion is that he is unusually sensitive to certain forces, yes," the Norlaminian said. "Think carefully, youth. Wasn't there something more than the mental or esthetic appreciation of, and the physical-sexual thrill at, the work of a superb exotic dancer?" "Of course there was!" the man snapped. "But... but... oh, I don't know. Now that Madlyn mentions it, there was a sort of a feeling of a message. But I haven't got even the foggiest idea of what the goddam thing was!" "And that," Seaton said, "is about the best defimtion of it I've ever heard. We haven't either." xn DuQuesne and the Jelmi D uQuesne, who had not seen enough ot the Skylark of VaU eron to realize that it was an intergalactic spacecraft, had supposed that Seaton and his party were still aboard Skylark Three, which was of the same size and power as DuQuesne's own ship, the Capital D. Therefore, when it became clear just what it was with which the Capital D was making rendezvous, to say that DuQuesne was surprised is putting it very mildly indeed. He had supposed that his vessel was one of the three most powerful superdreadnoughts of space ever built -- but this This thing was not a spaceship at all! In every important respect it was a world. It was big enough to mount and to power offensive and defensive armament of full planetary capability... and if he knew Seaton and Crane half as well as he thought he did, that monstrosity could volatilize a world as easily as it could light a firecracker. He was second. Again. And such an insignificantly poor second as to be completely out of the competition. Something would have to be done about this intolerable situation... and finding out what could be done about it would take precedence over everything else until he did find out. He scowled in thought. That worldlet of a spaceship changed everything -- radically. He'd been going to let eager-beaver Seaton grab the ball and run with it while he, DuQuesne, went on about his own business. But now -- could he take the risk? Ten to one -- or a hundred to one? -- he couldn't touch that planetoid's safety screens with anything he had. But it was worth his while to try... Energizing the lightest possible fifthand sixth-order webs, he reached out with his utmost delicacy of touch to feel out the huge globe's equipment; to find out exactly what it had. He found out exactly nothing; and in zero time. At the first, almost imperceptible touch of DuQuesne's wch the mighty planetoid's every IF defense flared instantaneously into being. DuQuesne cut his webbing, the defenses vanished, and Seaton said, "No peeking, DuQuesne. Come inside and you can look around all you please, but from outside it can't be done." "I see it can't. How do I get . inside?" "One of your shuttles or small boats. Go neutral as soon as you clear your outer skin and I'll bring you in." "I'll do that," -- and as DuQuesne in one of his vessel's life-boats traversed the long series of locks through the worldlet's tremendously thick shell he kept on wrestling with his problem. No, the idea of letting Seaton be the Big Solo Hero was out like the well-known light. Seaton and his whole party would have to die. And the sooner the better. He'd known it all along, really; his thinking had slipped, back there, for sure. With that fireball of a ship -- flying base, rather -- by the time Seaton got the job done he would be so big that nothing could ever cut him down to size. For that matter, was there anything that could be done about Seaton and his planetoid, even at the size they already were? There was no vulnerability apparent... on the outside, at least. But there had to be something; some chink or opening; all he had to do was think of it -- like the time he and "Baby Doll" Coring had taken over a fully-manned superdreadnought of the Fenachrone. The smart thing to do, the besttliing for Marc C. DuQuesne, would be to join Seaton and work hand in glove with him -- for a while. Until he had a bigger, more powerful worldlet than Seaton did and knew more than all the Skylarkers put together. Then blow the Skylark of Valeron and everyone and everything in it into impalpable dust and go on about his own business; letting Civilization worry about itself. To get away with that, he might have to give his word to act as one of the party, as before. He never had broken his word... so he wouldn't give it, this time, unless he had to... but if he had to? If it came to a choice -- breaking his word or being Emperor Marc the First of a galaxy, founder of a dynasty the like of which no civilization had ever seen before? Whatever happened, come hell or high water, Seaton and his crew must and would die. He, DuQuesne, must and would come out on top! A s soon as DuQuesne's lifeboat was inside the enormous hollow globe that was the Skylark of Valeron, Seaton brought it to a gentle landing in a dock behind his own home and walked out to the dock with a thought-helmet on his head and its mate in his hand. DuQuesne opened his lifeboat's locks and Seaton joined him in the tiny craft's main compartment. Face to face, neither man spoke in greeting or offered to shake hands; both knew that there was nothing of friendship between them or ever would be. Nor did DuQuesne wonder why Seaton was meeting him thus; outside and alone. He knew exactly what the women, especially Margaret, thought of him; but such trifles had no effect whatever upon the essence of Marc C. DuQuesne. Seaton handed DuQuesne the spare headset. DuQuesne put it on and Seaton said in thought, "This, you'll notice, is no ordinary mechanical educator; not by seven thousand rows of Christmas trees. I suppose you know you're in the Skylark of Valeron. Study it, and take your time. I'll give you her prints before you go -- if we're going to have to be allies again you ought to have something better than your Capital D to work with." Seaton thought that this surprise might make DuQuesne's guard slip for an instant, but it didn't. DuQuesne studied the worldlet intensively for over an hour, then took off his headset and said: "Nice job, Seaton. Beautiful; especially that tank-chart of the First Universe and that super-computer brain -- some parts of which, I see, this headset enables me to operate. The rest of it, I suppose, is keyed to and in sync with your own mind? No others need apply?" "That's right. So, with the prints, you'll have everything you need, I think. But before you go into detail, I may know a thing that you don't and that may have a lot of bearing, one place or another. Have you ever heard of any way of getting into or through the fourth dimension except by rotation?" No. Not even in theory. How sure are you that there is or can be any other way of doing it?" "Positive. One that not even the Norlaminians know anything about," and Seaton gave DuQuesne the full picture and the full story and all the side-bands of thought of everything that had happened to Madly n Mannis and Charles van der Gleiss. A t the sight of Mergon and Luloy -- two of the three Jelmi whom the monstrous alien Klazmon had been comparing with the Fenachrone and with the chlorinebreathing amoeboid Chlorans and with DuQuesne himself -- it took every iota of DuQuesne's iron control to make no sign of the astounding burst of interest he felt; for in one blinding flash of revealment his entire course of action became pellucidly clear. He knew exactly where and what Galaxy DW-#-LU was. He knew how to get Seaton headed toward that galaxy. He knew how to kill Seaton and all his crew and take over the Skylark of Valeron. And, best of all, he knew how to cover his tracksl Completely unsuspicious of any of these thoughts, Seaton went on, "Now we're ready, I think, for the fine details of what you found out." After giving a precisely detailed report that lasted for twenty minutes, DuQuesne said, "Now as to location. I have a cylindrical chart -- a plug-chart, you might call it -- of all the galaxies lying close to the line between the point in space where your stasis-capsule whiffed out and the First Galaxy. IF Those four reels there." He pointed. "But I have no idea whatever as to where that plug lies in the universe -- its universal coordinates. But since you know where you are and I know how I got here, it can be computed -- in time." "In practically nothing flat," Seaton said. "As fast as you can run your tapes through your scanner there." Seaton put his headset back on; DuQuesne followed suit. "They don't even have to be in order. When the end of the last tape clears the scanner your plug will be in our tank." And it was: a long, narrow cylinder of yellowish-green haze. "Nice; very nice indeed." DuQuesne paid tribute to performance. "I started my trip right there." He marked the spot with a tiny purple light. It was a weird sensation, this; working, with that gigantic brain, in that super-gigantic tank-chart, with only a headset and at a distance of miles! "With my artificial gravity set to exact universal north as straight up," DuQuesne went on, "I moved along a course as close as possible to the axis of that cylinder to this point here." The purple point extended itself into a long line of purple light and stopped. "Klazmon's tight beam hit me at that point there, coming in from eighty-seven point four one eight degrees starboard and three point nine two six degrees universal south." D uQuesne's mind, terrifically hard held for that particular statement, revealed not the faintest side-band or other indication of what a monstrous lie that was. The figures themselves were very nearly right; but the fact that the beam had actually come in from the port and the north made a tremendous difference. The purple line darted off at almost a right angle to itself and DuQuesne went on without a break: "You'll note that there are two galaxies on that line; one about half way out to the rim of the universe -- " this galaxy actually was, in Klazmon's nomenclature, Galaxy DW-#-LU -- "the other one clear out; right on the rim itself. Under those conditions no reliable estimate of distance was possible, but if we assume that Klazmon's power is of the same order of magnitude as ours it would have to be the first one. However, I'm making no attempt to defend that assumption." "Sure not; but it's safe enough. I'd say, for a first approximation. So, making that assumption, that galaxy is where the Realm of the Llurdi is -- where the Llurdi and the Jelmi are. Where the folks that built that big battlewagon on the moon came from." "While the data do not prove it, by any means, that would be my best-educated guess. But my next one -- that that's where they're going back to -- isn't based on anything anywhere near that solid. Sidebands only, and not too many or too strong." "Yeah, I got some, too. But you're having first cut at this; go ahead," Seaton said. "Okay. First, you have to dig up some kind of an answer to Hie question of why those Jelmi came such an ungodly long distance away from home to do what was, after all, a small job of work. We know that they didn't do it just for fun. We know that Hie whole race of Jelmi is oppressed; we know that those eight hundred rebelled. We're fairly sure that Earth alone is, right now, putting out more sixth-order emanation than all the rest of the First Universe put together. "Okay. There were some indications that Tammon worked out the theory of that fourth-dimensional gizmo quite a while back; but they had to come this tremendous distance to find enough high-order emanation to mask their research and development work from His Nibs Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth. "Now, My argument gets pretty tenuous at this point, but isn't it a fairly safe bet that, having reduced the theory of said gizmo to practice and having built a ship big enough to handle it like toothpicks, they'd beat it right back home as fast as they could leg it, knock the living hell out of the Llurdi -- they could, you know, like shooting fish in a well -- and issue a star-spangled Declaration of Independence? It does to me." "Check... While I didn't get there by exactly the same route you did, I arrived at the same destination. So it's not only got to be investigated; it's got to be Number One on the agenda. Question; who operates? Your baby or mine?" "You know the answer to that. I'll have oHier fiih to hy; quite poasibly until after you have the Jelman angle served." "My thought exactly." Seatoo assumed that DuQuesne's first, most urgent job would be to build a worldlet of his own; DuQuesne did not correct this Hiought. Seatoo went on, "The other question, then, is -- do we join forces again, or work independently... or maybe table the question temporarily, until you get yourself organized and we will have made at' least a stab at evaluating what this Llurdan menace actually amounts to?" "The last... I think." DuQuesne scowled in thought, then his face cleared; but at no time was there the slightest seepage of side-bands to the effect that he, DuQuesne, would see to it that Seaton would be dead long before that. Or that he, DuQuesne, did not give a tinker's damn whether anything was ever done about the Llurdan menace or not The two men discussed less important details for perhaps ten minutes longer; then DuQuesne took his leave. And, out in deep space again, with his mighty Capital D again boring a hole through the protesting ether, DuQuesne allowed himself a contemptuous and highly satisfactory sneer. B ack in their own living room, Seaton asked his wife, "Dottic, did you smell anything the least bit fishy about that?" "Not a thing, Dick. I gave it everything I had, and everything about it rang as true as a silver bell. Did you detect anything?" IF "Not a thing -- curse it! Even helmet to helmet -- as deep as I could go without putting the screws on and blowing everything higher than up -- it was flawless. But you've got to remember the guy's case-hardened and diamond finished... But you've also got to remember that I came to exactly the same conclusions he did -- and completely independently." "So every indication is that he is acting decently. He's been known to, you know." "Yeah. It's possible." Seaton did not sound at sold on the possibility. "But I wouldn't trust that big black ape as far as I could dropkick him I'd like awfully well to know whether he's pitching us a curve or not... and if he is, what the barb-tailed devil it can possibly be... so what we'll have to do, pet, is keep our eyes peeled and look a little bit out all the time." And, still scowling and still scanning and re-scanning every tiniest bit of data for flaws, Seaton set course for Galaxy DW-#-LU, having every reason to believe it the galaxy in which the Realm of the Llurdi lay. Also, although he did not mention this fact even to Dorothy, that course "felt right" to some deeply buried, unknown, and impossible sense in which he did not, could not, and would not believe. For Seaton did not know that Galaxy DW-#-LU was in fact going to be highly important to him in a way that he could not foresee; if he had known, would not have believed; if he had believed, would not have understood. For at that moment in time, not even Richard Ballinger Seaton knew what forces he had unleashed with his "cosmic beacon." xm DuQuesne and Sennlloy I n the eyes of Blackie DuQuesne, Seaton was forever and helplessly trapped in the philosophy of the "good guy". It was difficult for DuQuesne to comprehend why a mind of as high an order of excellence as Seaton's -- fully the equal of DuQuesne's own in many respects, as DuQuesne himself was prepared to concede -- should subscribe to the philosophy of lending a helping hand, accepting the defeat of an enemy without rancor, refraining from personal aggrandizement when the way was so easily and temptingly clear to take over the best part of a universe. Nevertheless, DuQuesne knew that these traits were part of Seaton's makeup. He had counted on them. He had not been disappointed. It would have been child's play for Seaton to have tricked and destroyed him as he entered that monster spaceship Seaton had somehow acquired. Instead of that, Seaton had made him a free gift of its equal! That, however, was not good enough for Blackie DuQuesne. Seeing how far Seaton had progressed had changed things. He could not accept the status of co-belligerent. He had to be the victor. And the one portentous hint he had gleaned from Seaton of the existence of a true fourth-dimensiond system could be the tool that would make him the victor; wherefore he set out at once to get it. Since he had misdirected Seaton as to the vector of the course of the Jelmi, sending him off on what, DuQuesne congratulated himself, was the wildest of wild-goose chases, DuQuesne need only proceed in the right direction and somehow -- anyhow; DuQuesne was superbly confident that he would find a means -- get from them the secret of what he needed to know. His vessel had power to spare. Therefore he cut in everything his mighty drives could take, computed a tremendous asymptotic curve into the line that the Jelmi must have taken, and took out after the intergalactic flyer that had left Earth's moon such a short time before. DuQuesne was aware that force would be an improbably successful means of getting what he wanted. Guile was equally satisfactory. Accordingly he took off his clothes and examined himself, front and back and sides, in a full-length mirror. He would do, he concluded. There would be nothing about his physical person which would cause him any trouble in his dealings with the Jelmi. Since he always took his sun-lamp treatments in the raw, his color gradation was right. He was too dark for a typical Caucasian Tellurian; but that was all right -- he wasn't going to be a Tellurian. He would, he decided, be a native of some planet whose people went naked... the planet Xylmny, in a galaxy 'way out on the Rim somewhere... yes, he had self-control enough not to give himself away. B ut his cabin wouldn't stand inspection on a usually naked basis, nor would any other private room of the ship. All had closets designed unmistakeably for clothing and it wasn't worth while to rebuild them. Okay, he'd be a researcher who had visited dozens of planets, and everybody had to wear some kind of clothing or trappings at some time or other. Protectively at least. And probably for formality or for decoration. Wherefore DuQuesne, with a helmet on his head and a half-smile, half-sneer on his face, let his imagiter closet with the utilitarian and the decorative garmenture of world after purely imaginative world. Then, after transferring his own Tellurian clothing to an empty closet, he devoted a couple of hours to designing and constructing the apparel of his equally imaginary native world Xylmny. In due time a call came in from the spaceship up ahead. "You who are following us from the direction of the world Tellus: do you speak English?' "Yes." "Why are you following us. Tellurian?" "I am not a Tellurian. I am from the planet Xylmny; which, while very similar to Tellus, lies in a distant galaxy." He told the caller, as well as he could in words, where IF Xylmny was. "I am a Seeker, Scvance by name. I have visited many planets very similar to yours and to Tellus and to my own in my Seeking. Tcllus itself had nothing worthy of my time, but I learned there that you have a certain knowledge as yet unknown to me; that of operating through the fourth dimension of space instantaneously, without becoming lost hopelessly therein, as is practically always the case when rotation is employed. Therefore I of course followed you." "Naturally. I would have done the tame. I am Savant Tammon of the planet Mallidax -- Llurdiaxorb Three -- which is our destination. You, then, have had one or more successes in rotation? Our rotational tests all failed." "We had only one success. As a Seeker I will be glad to give you the specifications of the structures, computers, and forces required for any possibility of success -- which is very slight at best." "This meeting is fortunate indeed. Have I your permission to come aboard your vessel, at such time as we approach each other nearly enough to make the fourth-dimensional transfer feasible?" "You certainly may, sir. Fll be very glad indeed to greet you in the flesh. And until that hour. Savant Tammon, so long and thanks." S ince Mergon braked the MaU lidaxian down hard to help make the approach, and since the two vessels did not have to be close together even in astronomical terms, it was not long until Tammon stood facing DuQuesne m the Capital D's control room. The aged savant inhaled deeply, flexed his knees, and said, "As I expected, our environments are very similar. We greet new friends with a four-hand clasp. Is that form satisfactory?" "Perfectly; it's very much like our own," DuQuesne said; and four hands clasped briefly. "Would you like to come aboard our vessel now?" Tanmnon asked. "The sooner the better," and they were both in Tammon's laboratory, where Mergon and Luloy looked DuQuesne over with interest. "Seeker Sevance," Tammon said then, "these are Savant Mergon, my first assistant, and Savant Luloy, his... well, 'wife' would be, I think, the closest possible English equivalent. You three are to become friends." The hand-clasp was six-fold this time, and the two Jelmi said in unison. "I'm happy that we are to become friends." "May our friendship ripen and deepen," DuQuesne improvised the formula and bowed over the cluster of hands. "But Seeker," Luloy said, as the cluster fell apart, "must all Seekers do their Seeking alone? I'd go stark raving mad if I had to be alone as long as you must have been." "Ture Seekers, yes. While it is true that any normal man misses the companionship of his kind, especially that of the opposite sex -- " DuQuesne gave Luloy a cool, contained smile as his glance traversed her superb figure -- "even such a master of concent rar ion as a true Seeker must be can concentrate better, more productively, when absolutely alone." Tammon nodded thoughtfully. "That nay well be true. Perhaps I shall try it 'myself. Now -- we have some little time before dinner. Is there any other matter you would like to discuss?" For that question DuQuesne was well prepared. A Seeker, after all, needs something to be Sought; and as he did not want to appear exclusively interested in something which even the unsuspicious Jelmi would be aware was a weapon of war, he had selected another subject about which to inquire. So he said at once: "A minor one, yes. While I am scarcely even a tyro in biology, I have pondered the matter of many -- of apparently identical and quite possibly inter-fertile human races spaced so immensely far apart in space that any possibility of a common ancenstry is precluded." "Ahl" Tammon's eyes lit up. "One of my favorite subjects; one upon which I have done much work. We Jelmi and the Tellurians are very far apart indeed in space, yet crossbreeding is successful. In vitro, that is, and as far as I could carry the experimeqt. I can not synthesize a living placenta. No in vitro trial was made, since we of course could not abduct a Tellurian woman and not one of our young women cared to bear a child fathered by any Tellurian male we saw." "From what I saw there I don't blame them," agreed DuQuesne. It was only the truth of his feelioga about Tellurians -- with one important exception. "But doesn't your success in vitro necessitate a common ancestry?" "In a sense, yes; but not in the ordinary sense. It goes back to the unthinkably remote origin of all life. You can, I suppose, synthesize any non-living substance you please? Perfectly, down to what is apparently its ultimately fine structure?" "I see what .you mean." DuQuesne, who had never thought really deeply about that fact, was hit hard. "Steak, for instance. Perfect in every respect except in that it never has been of life, but they are not alive and we cannot bring them to life. And, conversely, we cannot dematerialize living flesh." "Precisely. Life may be an extradimensional attribute. Its basis may lie in some ordei deeper than any now known. Whatever the truth may be, it seems to be known at present only to the omnipotence Who we of Mailidax call Llenderllon. All we know about life is that it is an immensely strong binding force and that its source -- proximate, I mean, of course, not its ultimate origin -- is the living spores that are drifting about in open space." "Wait a minute," DuQuesne said. "We had a theory like that long ago. So did Tellus -- a scientist named Arrhenius -- but all such theories were finally held to be untenable. Wishful thinking." "I know. Less than one year ago, IF I however, after twenty yean of ' search. I found one such spare. Its . descendants have been living and I evolving ever since." D uQuesne's jaw dropped. "You don't say! That I want to see!" Tammon nded. "I have rigorous proof of authenticity. While it is entirely unlike any other form of life with which I am familiar, it is very interesting." "It would be, but there's one other objection. What is the chance that on any two worlds humanity would have reached exactly the same stage of evolution at any given time?" "Ah! That is the crux of my theory, which I hope some day to prove; that when man's brain becomes large enough and complt enough to employ his hands efficiently enough, the optimum form of life for that environment has been reached and evolution stops. Thenceforth all mutants and sports are unable to compete with Homo Sapiens and do not survive." DuQuesne thought for a long minute. Norlamin was very decidedly not a Tellus-Type planet. "Some Xylmnians have it, 'Man is the ultimate creation of God.' On Tellus it's 'God created man in his own image.' And of course the fact that I've never believed it -- and I still think it's unjustifiable racial selfglorification -- does not invalidate it." "Of course it doesn't. But to revert to the main topic, would you be experiment?" DuQuesne smiled at that, then chuckled deeply. "I eakily would, sir; and not for purely scientific reasons, either." "Oh, that would be no problem. Nor is your present quest -- it will take only a short time to install the various mechanisms in your vessel and to instruct you in their us. If my snap judgment is sound, however, this other may very well become' of paramount importance and require a few days of time." He touched a button on an intercom and said, "Senny." "Yes?" came in a deep contralto from the speaker. "Will you come in here pi ease? It concerns the in vivo experiment we have been discussing." "Oh? Right away, Tamm," and in about half a minute a young woman came striding in. DuQuesne stared, for she was a living shield-maiden -- a veritable Valkyrie of flesh and blood. If she had had wings and if her pale blonde hair had been flying loose instead of being piled high on her head in thick, heavy braids, DuQuesne thought, she could have stepped right out of Wagenhorst's immortal painting Ragnarok. Tammon introduced them. "Seeker Sevance of Xylmny, Savant Sennlloy of Allondax, you two are to become friends." "I'm happy that we are to become friends," the girl said, in English, extending her hands. DuQuesne took them, bowed over them, and said, "May our friendship ripen and deepen. She examined him minutely, from the top of his head down to his toenails, in silence; then, turning to Tammon, she uttered a long sentence of which DuQuesne could not understand a word. "You should speak English, my dear," Tammon said. "It is inurbane to exclude a guest from a conversation concerning him." "It is twice as inurbane," she countered in English, "to insult a guest, even by implication, who does not deserve it." "That is true," Tammon agreed, "but I have studied him to some little depth and it is virtually certain that the matter lies in your province rather than mine. The decision is, of course, yours. Caps-on with him, please, and decide." S he donned a helmet and handed its mate to DuQuesne. Expecting a full-scale mental assault, he put up every block he had; but she did not think at him at all. Instead, she bored deep down into the most ab # rsmal recesses of his flesh; down and down and down to depths where he -- expert though he was at synthesizing perfectly any tangible article of matter -- could not follow. Eyes sparkling, she tossed both helmets onto a bench and seized both his hands in a grip very different from the casual clasp she had used a few minutes before. "I am glad  very,' very glad, friend Seeker Sevance, that we are friends!" Although DuQuesne was amazed at this remarkable change, he played up. He bowed over her hands and, this time, kissed each of them. "I thank you, Lady Sennlloy. My pleasure is immeasurable." He smiled warmly and went on, "Since I am a stranger and thus ignorant of your conventions and in particular of your taboos, may I without offense request the pleasure of your company at dinner? And my friends call me Vance." She returned his smile as warmly. Neither of them was paying any attention at all to anyone else in the room. "And mine call me Senny. You may indeed, friend Vance, and I accept your invitation with joyous thanks. We go out that archway there and turn left." They walked slowly toward the indicated exit; side by side and so close together that hip touched hip at almost every step. In the corridor, however, Sennlloy put her hand on DuQuesne's arm and stopped. "But hold, friend Vance," she said. "We should, don't you think, make this, our first meal together, one of full formality?" "I do indeed. I would not have suggested it but I'm very much in favor of it." "Splendid! We'll go to my room first, then. This way," and she steered him into and along a corridor whose blankly featureless walls were opaque instead of transparent. Was this his cue? DuQuesne wondered. No, he decided. She wasn't the type to rush things. She was civilized... more so than he was. If he didn't play it just about right with this girl, who was very evidently a big wheel, she could and very probably would queer his whole deal. As they strolled along DuQuesne IF MW that the walls were not quite featureless. At about head height, every twenty-five feet or so, there was inset a disk of optical plastic perhaps an inch in diameter. Stopping, and turning to face one of these disks, Senniloy pressed her right forefinger against it, explaining as she did so, "It opens to my fingerprints only." There was an almost inaudible hiss of compressed air and a micromctrically fitted door -- a good seven feet high and three feet wide moved an inch out into the hall and slid smoothly aside upon tracks that certainly had not been there an instant before. DuQuesne never did find out how the thing worked. He was too busy staring into the room and watching and hearing what the girl was doing and saying. She stepped back a half-step, bowed gracefully from the waist, and with a sweeping gesture of both hands invited him to precede her into the room. She started to say something in her own language -- Allondaxian -- but after a couple of words changed effortlessly to Enlish. "Friend Seeker Sevance, it is in earnest of our friendship that I welcome you into the privacy of my home" -- and her manner made it perfectly clear that, while the phraseology was conventionally formal, in this case it was really meant. And DuQuesne felt it; felt it so strongly that he did not bluff or coin a responsive phrase. Instead: "Thank you. Lady Senniloy. We of Xylmny do not have anything comparable, but I appreciate your welcome and thank you immensely." I nside the rocMn, DuQuesne stared. He had wondered what this girl's private quarters would be like. She was a master scientist, true. But she was wannly human, not bookishly aloof. And what would seventy thousand years of evolution do to feminine vanity? Especially to a vanity that apparently had never been afflicted by false modesty? Or by any sexual taboos? The furniture -- heavy, solid, plain, and built of what looked like golden oak -- locked ordinary and utilitarian enough. Much of it was designed for, and was completely filled with and devoted to, the tools and equipment and tapes and scanners of the top-bracket biologist Senniloy of AUondax in fact was. The floor was of mathematically figured, vari-colored, plastic tile. The ceiling was one vast sheet of softly glowing white light. Three of the walls were ordinary enough. DuQuesne scarcely glanced at them because of the fourth, which was a single canvas eight feet high and over thirty feet long. One painting. What a painting! A painting of life itself; a painting that seemed actually to writhe and to crawl and to vibrate with the very essence of life itself! One-celled life, striving fiercely upward in the primordial sea toward the light. Fiercely striving young fishes, walking determinedly ashore on their fins. Young about-to-become-mammals succeeding in their various climbings of evolution's tremendous ladder. Striving young mammals developing tails and climbing up into trees -- losing tails, with Ae development of true thumbs, ind coming down to earth again out of the trees -- the ever-enlarging brain resulting in the appearance of true man. And finally, the development and the progress and the history of man himself. And every being, from unicell to man, was striving with all its might At almost the end of that heartstopping painting there was a portrait of Sennlloy herself in the arms of a man; a yellow-haired, smoothshaven Hercules so fantastically well-drawn, so incredibly aliveseeming. that DuQuesne stared in awe. Beyond those two climactic figures the painting became a pure abstract of form and of line and color; an abstract, however, that was crammed full of invisible but very apparent question marks. It asked -- more, it demanded and it yelled -- What is coming nextT' D uQuesne, who had been holding his breath, let it out and breathed deeply. "And you painted that yourself," he marveled. "Milady Sennlloy, if you never do anything else as long as you live, you will have achieved immortality." She blushed to the breasts. "Thanks, friend Vance. I'm very glad you' like it: I was sure you would." "It's so terrific that words fail," he said, and meant. Then, nodding at the portrait, he went on, "Your husband?" She shook her head. "Not yet. He has not the genes the Lluidi wish to propagate, so we could not marry and he had to stay on Allondax instead of becoming one of this group. But he and I love each other more than life. When we Jelmi .aboard this Mallidaxian have taught those accursed Llurdi their lesson, we will marry and we'll never be parted again. But time presses, friend Vance; we must consider our formalities." Walking around the foot of her bed -- the satin covejlet of which bore, in red and gold, a motif that almost made even DuQuesne blush -- she went to a bureau-like piece of furniture and began to pull open its bottom drawer. Then, changing her mind, she closed it sharply; but not before the man got a glimpse of its contents that made him catch his breath. That drawer contained at least two bushels of the most fantastic jewelry EhiQuesne had ever seen! Shaking her head, Sennlloy went on, "No. My formality should not influence yours. The fact that you appreciate and employ formality implies, does it not, that you do not materialize and dematerialize its material symbols, but cherish them?" "Yes; you and I think very much alike on that," DuQuesne agreed. He was still feeling his way. This hadnt been a cue; that was now abundantly certain. In fact, with Sennlloy so deeply in love with one man, she probably wouldn't be in the business herself at all... or would she? Were these people advanced enough -- if you could call it advancement -- different enough, anyway -- to reIF gard sex-for-love and sex-for-knprovement-of-race as two entirely different matters; so completely unrelated as not to affect each other? He simply didn't know. Data insufficient. However the thing was to go, he'd played along so far; he'd still play along. Wherefore, without any noticeable pause, he went on: "I intended to comply with your conventions, but I'll be glad to use my own if you prefer. So I'll ask Tammon to flip me over to my own ship to put olimy high-formal gear." "Oh, no; I'll do it" Donning the helmet that had been lying on the beautifully grained oak-like top of the bureau, she took his left hand and compared his wristwatch briefly with the timepiece on the wall. "I'll bring you back here in... in how many of your minutes?" "Ten minutes will be time enough." "In exactly ten minutes from -- " She waited until the sweep hand of his watch was exactly at the dot of twelve o'clock. "Mark," she said Aen, and DuQuesne found himself standing in his own private cabin aboard the Capital D. H e picked up shaving cream aiKl brush; then, asking aloud, "How stupid can you get, fool?" he tossed them back onto the shelf, put on his helmet, and thought his whiskers off flush with the surface of his skin. Then, partly from habit but mostly by design -- its riddy masculine, heady scent was supposed to "wow the women" -- he rubbed on a couple of squirts of after-shave lotion. Opening closet doors, he looked at the just-nicely-broken-in trappings he had made such a short time before. How should he do it, jeweled or plain? She was going to be gussied up like a Christmas tree, so he'd better go plain. Showy, plenty; but no jewels. And, judging by that spectacular coverlet and other items in her room, she liked fire-engine red and gold. Okay. Taking off his watch and donning one exactly like it except for the fact that it kept purely imaginary Xylmnian time -- that had been a slip; if she'd noticed it, she'd have wondered why he was running on Tellurian time -- he dressed himself in full panoply of Xylmnian finery and examined himself carefully in a full-length mirror. He now wore a winged and crested headpiece of interlaced platinum strips; the front of the crest ridging up into a three-inch platinum disk emblazoned with an intricate heraldic design in deeply inlaid massive gold. A heavy collar, two armbands, and two wristlets, all made of woven and braided platinum strands, each bore the same symbolic disk. He wore a sleeveless shirt and legless shorts of gleaming, glaringlyred silk, with knee-length hose to match -- and red-leather-lined buskins of solid-gold chain mail. And lastly, a crossed-strap belt, also of massive but' supple gold link, with three platinum comets on each shoulder, supported a solid-platinum scabbard containing an extremely practical knife. He drew the blade. Basket-hilted and with fifteen inches of heavy, wickedly curved, peculiarly shaped, razor edged and needle pointed stainless-steel blade, it was in fact an atrocious weapon indeed -- and completely unlike any item of formal dress that DuQuesne had ever heard of. All this had taken nine and one half minutes by his watch -- by his Earth-watch, lying now upon his dresser. The time was now zero minus exactly twenty-eight seconds. Seeker Sevance of Xylmny P recisely on the tick of time DuQuesne stood again in Sennlloy's room. He glanced at her; then stood flat-footed and simply goggled. He had expected a display, but this was something that had to be seen to be believed -- and then but barely. She was literally ablaze with every kind of gem he had ever seen and a dozen kinds completely new to him. Just as she stood, she could have supplied Tiffany and Cartier both for five years. Yet she did not look barbaric. Blue-eyed, with an incredible cascade of pale blonde hair cut squarely across well below her hips, she looked both regal and virginal. "Wow!" he exclaimed finally. "The English has -- not a word for it, but a sound," and he executed a long-drawn-out wolf-whistle. She laughed delightedly. "Oh? I did not hear that on Tellus; but it sounds... appreciative." "It is. Milady. Very." He took her hands and bowed over them. "May IF I say, Lady Senny, that you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen?" "'Milady.' 'Lady. I have not told you how much I like those terms, friend Vance. I'm wonderfully pleased that you find me so. You're magnificently handsome yourself... and you smell nice, too." She came squarely up to him and sniffed approvingly. "But the... the blade of formality. May I look at it, please?" She examined it closely, then went on, "Tell me, Vance, how old is your recorded history? Just roughly, m Tellurian years?" This could be a crucial question, DuQuesne realized; but, since he didn't know the score yet, he hadn't better lie too much. "Before I answer that; you're a biologist, aren't you, and in the top bracket?" "Yes. In English it would have to be 'anthropological biologist' and yes, I know my specialty very well." "Okay. For better or for worse, here it is. Xylmny's recorded history goes back a little over six thousand Tellurian years." "Oh, wonderful!" she breathed. "Perfect! That's what I read, but I could scarcely believe it. A young race. Mature, but still possessing the fire and the power and the genius that those accursed Llurdi have been breeding out of all us Jelmi for many thousands of years. They want us to produce geniuses for them, but they kill or sterilize all our aggressive, combative, rebellious young men. A few of us women carry all the necessary female genes, but without their male complements, dominant in heredky, we all might exactly at well have none of them." "I see... but how about Tammon?" "He's sterile, since he was a genius before he became a rebel. And ho kept on being a genius; one of the very few exceptions to the rule. But since the Llurdi are insanely logical, one exception to any rule invalidates that rule." She glanced at the clock. "It's time to go now." Walking slowly along the corridor, DuQuesne said, " 'Insanely logical' is right. I knew that there was a lot more to this than just an experiment, but I had no idea it was to put new and younger blood into an entire race. But with mothers such as you have in mind -- " "Mothers?" She broke in. "You already know, then?" "Of course. I am sufficiently familiar with your specialty to know what a top-bracket biologist can do and how you intend to do it. With mothers of your class some of our sons may make genius grade, but what's to keep them alive?" "We will." Sennlloy's voice and mien became of a sudden grim. "This fourth-dimension device that Tammon is going to give you was developed only a few weeks ago, since we left Llurdiax. The Llurdi know nothing whatever of it. When we get back to our own galaxy with it, either the Llurdi wfll grant us our full freedom or we will kill every Llurdi alive. And being insanely logical, they'll grant it without a fight: without even an argument, Sancil bum their teeth, wings, and tails!" D uQuesne did not tdl tbe gW how interested he was m ibc LIurdi; especiafly in Llanzlan Klazmon the Fifteenth. Instead, Tliat makes a weird kind of sense, at that," he said. "Tell me more about these LIurdi," and she told him about them all the rest of the way to the dining hall. They went through an archway, stepped aside, and looked around. Three or four hundred people were in the hall already, and more were streaming in from all sides. Some were eating, in oonles or in groups of various mimlbers, at tables of various sizes. Dress varied from nothing at all op to several spectaculars as flamhoyant as Sennlloy's own. Infonnal, semi-formal, and formal; and the people themselves were alike in orfy one respect -- that of physical perfection. DuQuesne had never seen anything like it and said so; and Sennlloy explained, conchicfiog: "So, you see, we eight hundred are the v pick of two hundred forty-one planetr, which makes this an ideal primary situation. The reason I wanted you to look around carefully is that perhaps I should not be the only Prime Operative." She paused: it was quke evident that she was not at all in favor of the idea. "Why not?" DuQuesne wasn't in favor of it, either; even though he couldn't begin to understand cither her attitude or her behavior. How could any woman possibly be as deeply in love with one man as Sennlloy very cvidentiy was, and yet act as she was acting toward such a complete stranger as himsdf? It baffled him completely, but he'd still play along -- especially since he was siering no pain at all. "It won't make any difference in the long run, will it?" "Of course not. I just thought maybe you would relish diversity," Seiinlloy said. "You can unthink it. I wouldn't. There's no tomcat blood in me -- and remember what I said?" "Do you think I don't? But you've seen some really beautiful women now. Mudh prettier than I am." "You know what they call that technique in English? 'Fishing'," grinned DuQuesne. "Prettier or not, Milady, you top them all by a country mile." 'I Imow about fishing. I was fishing a little, perhaps." She laughed happily and hugged hk arm against her breast. "But it did get you to say it again, and it means ever so much nKre, now that you've seen the competition." She steered him to a table for two against a waB, where he seated her meticulously -- a gesture that, while evidently new to her, was evidently liked. "You order," she said handing him the hrimet You invited me, you know." "But I don't know what you like to eat." "Oh, I like almost everything, really; and if there should be anything I don't like I won't eat it. Okay?" "Okay," and DuQuesne proceeded to set die taWe widi fine linen and translucent china and sterling silver and sparkling cut glass. IF T he first coarse was a thin, dear soup; which Sennlloy liked. She also liked the crisp lettuce with Roquefort dressing; the medium rare roast beef with mushroom sauce and the asparagus in butter and the baked Idaho potato stuffed with sour cream; and she especially enjoyed the fruits-and-nuts-filled Nesselrode ice cream. She did not, howeverlike his corrosively strong, black, unsweetened coffee at all. Wrinkling her nose, she sniffed at it, then took a tiny sip, which she let flow back into the cup. "How can you possibly drink such vile stuff as that?" she demanded, and replaced it with a tall glass of fizzy, viscous concoction that looked like eggnog and reeked of something that was halfway between almond and lemon. After dinner -- DuQuesne wanted to smoke, but since no one else was doing anything of the kind he could and would get along without it as long as he was aboard the Mallidaxian -- they milled about duced him right and left and showed him off generally; especially to over a hundred stunning young women, with whom she discussed the "project" in American English with a completely uninhibited frankness that made DuQuesne blush more than once. After something over an hour of this the crowd broke up; and as the two left the hall Sennlloy said, "Hal We're free now, my Vance, to go about our business!" Arms tightly around each other, savoring each contact and each motion, they walked slowly and in silence to nnlloy's room. T hree Mallidaxian days later, DuQuesne took his leave. Of Sennlloy last, of course. She put her arms around him and rubbed her cheek against his. "Good-by, friend Vance. I have joyed our association tremendously. Scarcely ever before has work been such pleasure. So much so that I feel guilty of selfishness." "You needn't. Milady. That was exactly the way I wanted it, remember?" "I remember with joy; and I have wondered why." "Because you are the only one of your class aboard this ship," DuQuesne said. "You said that, but still -- well, I am the only Allondaxian aboard, which may account for our great compatibility. And there should be, as there has been, something more than the purely physical involved." DuQuesne was very glad she had said that; it gave him one last chance to explore. "Definitely," he agreed. "Liking, respvect, appreciation, admiration -- you're a tremendous lot of woman. Milady Sennlloy. But not love. Naturally." "Of course not. I have my love and my work and my planet; you have yours; it would be terrible for either of us or any of ours to be hurt. "Our rememberings of each other should be and will be most pleasant. Good-by, friend Vance; may AU Powerful Llenderllon guard you and aid you as you Seek." XV DuQuesne's Assassins N ot even Marc DuQuesne was able -- quite! -- to put his rather astonishing, and totally pleasurable, experiences with the Jelmi -- and with one Jelm in particular! -- out of his mind without a second's hesitation. In another man, his mood as he set a minimum-time course and began to speed back to Earth, might have been called nostalgic... even sentimental. But as the parsecs fled by his thoughts hardened. And just in time; for some very hard things indeed had to be done. First and foremost, his deal with Seaton was utterly, irrevocably and permanently off. He no longer needed it. With the information he had received from the Jelmi, he had no further reason to worry about Seaton's offensive capabilities. Of course, there was no reason for Seaton to know that. Or not until it was entirely too late to do Seaton any good. Let Seaton go on dawdling toward this Galaxy DW#-LU. Seaton would be traveling at only normal max; DuQuesne would have time to make his arrangements, transact his business and act while Seaton was still on the way. He did not intend to go to Earth, only to within working distance of it. Eveu so, he had a certain amount of time to spend He spent k, all of it, in studying and operating the new device, whidi was called by the Jcim a mune winch SennSoy had told him corresponded roughly to "quad". And immediately he ran headlong into trouble. To DuQuesne's keen disappointment, the confounded thing was both more and less useful than he had hoped. More: Its range was enormous, much more than he had expected. Less: -- well, it simply didn't do any of the normal things that any machine could be made to do. And he could not tell why. He had received too much knowledge too fast; it took time to nail down all the details. He could send himself anywhere, but he could not bring himself back. He had to be at the controls. Remote control wouldn't work and he couldn't find out why not. The thing -- in its present state of development, at least -- couldn't handle a working projection; and he couldn't explain that fact, cither. There was no way at all, apparently, of coupling the two transmitters together or of automating the controls -- which was absurd on the face of it. There were job lots of things it couldn't do; and in no case at all could he imderstand why not. That condition was, however, perfectly natural. In fact, it was inevitable. For, as has been pointed out, the laws of the fourth-dimensional region are completely inexplicable in three-dimensional terms. Obvious impossibilities become commonplace events; many things that are incvkable in our ordinary contimium become starkly impossible there. Twmmon had told DuQuesne just IF that; Seaton had told him the same, and much more strongly for having been there in person; but DuQuesne could not help but boggle at such information. Of the three men, he was far and away the least able to accept an obvious impossibility as a fact and go on from there. So Blackie DuQuesne, his face like a steel-black thundercloud, methodically and untiringly worked with his new device until he was quite sure that of all the things he could make it do, he could make it do all of them very well. And that would be enough. Never mind the things it wouldn't do. What it would do would be plenty to get rid of Richard Ballinger Seaton once and for all. W ithin range of Earth at last, DuQuesne set about the first step in that program. The simplest and crudest methods would work -- backed by the weird fourth-dimensional powers of the quad. And DuQuesne knew exactly how about recruiting the assistance he needed in those methods. He launched a working projection of himself to the Safe Deposit Department of the First National Bank. He signed a name and counted out a sheaf of currency from a box. He then took a taxi to the World Steel Bulding and an elevator up to the office of the President. Brushing aside private secretaries, vice presidents, and other small fry, he strode through a succession of private offices into the sanctum sanctorum of President Brookings himself. The tycoon was, as usual, alone. If he was surprised at the intrusion he did not show it. He took the big cigar from his mouth, little-fingered half an inch of ash from the end of it into a bronze tray, put it back between his teeth, and waited. "Still thinking your usual devious, petty-larceny, half-vast thoughts, eh, Brookings?" DuQuesne sneered. "I didn't think that even you. Doctor, would have the sublime gall to show up around here again,' Brookings said, evenly. "Even via projection, after the raw stuff you pulled and the ungodly flop you made of everything. Especially after the way your pal Seaton dragged you out of here with your tail between your legs. Incidently, it took everything you had coming to repair the damage you did to the building on your way out." "Stupid as ever, I see. And the galaxy's tightest penny-pincher. But back pay and the law of contracts and so forth are of no importance at the moment. What I'm here about is: with all these Norlaminian socalled 'observers' looking down the back of your neck all the time, Perkins' successor and his goon squads must be eating mighty low on the hog." "We haven't any -- " At DuQuesne's sardonically contemptuous smile Brookings changed instantly the sense of what he had been going to say -- "work for them, to speak of, at that. Why?" "So six of your best and fastest gunnies would be interested in ten grand apiece for a month's loaf and a minute's work." "Dont say mine. Doctor. Pleasel You know very well that I never have anything to do with anything like that." "No? But you know who took over the Perkins Cafe and the topmobster job after I killed Perkins. So I want six off the top downstairs in the lobby at sixteen hours Eastern Daylight time today." "You know I never handle -- " "Shut up! I'm not asking you -- I'm telling you. You'll handle this, or else." Brookings shrugged his shoulders and sighed. He knew DuQuesne. "If you want good men they'll have to know what the job is." "Naturally. Dick and Dorothy Seaton, Martin and Margaret Crane, and their Jap Shiro and his wife -- Apple Blossom or whatever her name is. Seaton's fast, for an amateur, but he's no pro. Crane is slow -- he thinks and aims. And the others dcm't count. I'll guarantee complete surprise enough for one clear shot at Seaton. Anybody who is apt to need two shots I don't want. So -- no problem." "I'll see what I can do." Since DuQuesne knew that was as close as Brookings ever came to saying "yes", he accepted it. "In advance, of course." Brookings held out his hand. "Naturally." DuQuesne took a rubber-band sheaf of thousanddollar bills out of his inside coat pocket and tossed it across the desk. "Count 'em." "Naturally." Brookings picked the sheaf up and riffled througi k. "Correct. Good-by, Doctor." "Good-by," DuQuesne said, and the projection vanished. A t four o'clock that afternoon DuQuesne picked up his goons -- through the fourth dimension, which surprised them tremendously and scared them no little, although none of them would admit that fact -- and headed for the galaxy toward which the Skylark of Valeron had been flying so long. The Capitd D was of course much faster than the gigantic planetoid; and the actual difference inspeed between the two intergalactic flyers was much greater than the rat one because DuQuesne was driving with all his engines at absolute max -- risking burn-out, tear-out, and unavoidable collision at or near the frightful velocity of turnover -- which Seaton of course was not doing. He didn't want to endanger the Valeron, In the target galaxy -- Galaxy DW-#-LU, according to Klazmon's chart -- there was only one solar system showing really intense sixth-order activity. Almost all of that activity would be occurring on one planet; a planet whose inhabitants were highly inimical to (probably) all other forms of intelligent life. Klazmon's side-bands of thought had been very informative on those points. Thus it was by neither accident nor coincidence that DuQuesne came up to within long working range of the Skylark of Valeron well before that flying worldlet came within what DuQuesne thought was extreme range of a planet that DuIP Queme knew to be a ery dangerous planet indeed. He had wanted it that way; he had risked his ship and his life to make it come out that way. When the Valeron came within range of the target planet she would be DuQuesne's not Seaton's. And DuQuesne was calmly confident that he and a Valeron re-tuned to his own mind could cope with any possible situation. As a matter of fact, they couldn't. It was not, however, DuQuesne's error or fault that made it so; it was merely the way Fate's mop flopped. Neither he nor Seaton had any idea whatever of the appalling magnitude of the forces so soon to be hurled against Seaton's supposedly invulnerable flying fortress, the Skylark of Valeron, Operating strictly according to plan, then, DuQuesne called his goons to attention. "You've been briefed and you've had plenty of practise, but I'll recap the essential points. "Guns in hands. They'll be eating dinner, with their legs under the table. Sitting ducks for one shot. But for one shot only. Especially Seaton -- for an amateur he's fast. So work fast -- land and shoot. I'll give you the usual three-second countdown, beginning, now -- Seconds! Three! Two! One! Mark!" and the six men vanished. A nd in the dining room of the Seaton's home in the Skylark of Valeron six forty-five-caliber automatics barked viciously, practically as one. yi The CMorans W hile imich work had been done on a personal gravity control, to provide for the comfort of suck visitors as Dunark and Sitar, it .was still in the design stage when the Skylark of Valeron neared Galaxy DW-#-LU. Wherefore, when the Skylarkers sat down to dinner that evening in the Seaton's dining room that room was almost forty per cent undergrav. And wherefore, when DuQuesne's six hired killers fired practically as one, all six bullets went harmlessly high. For, at low gravity, two facts of marksmanship -- unknown to or not considered by either DuQuesne or any of his men -- became dominant. First, a pistol expert compensates automatically for the weight of his weapon. Second, the more expert the marksman, the more automatie this compensation is. And one shot each was all those would-be killers had. Dunark and Sitar as has been said, went armed even to bed; and Osnomian reflexes were and are the fastest possessed by any known race of man. Each of their machine pistols clicked twice and four American hoodlums died, liquescent brains and comminuted Skulls spattering abroad, before they could do anything mors than begin to bring their guns bad down into line for their second shots. The other two gangsters also died; if not as quickly or as messily, just as dead. For Shiro and his bride were, for Earthmen, very fast in#f deed Their chairs, too, flew away from the table the merest instant after the invaders appeared and both took off in low, flat dives. Lotus struck her man with her left shoulder; and, using flawlessly the momentum of her mass and speed, swung him around and put her small but very hard knee exactly where it would do the most good. Then, as he doubled over in agony, she put her left arm around his head, seized her left wrist with her right hand, and twisted with all the strength of arms, shoulders, torso and legs -- and the man's neck broke with a snap audible throughout the room. And Shiro took care of his man with equal dexterity, precision, and speed; and of the invaders, then there were none. Seaton was a miosecond slower than either the Osnomians or the two Japanese; but he was fast enough to see what was happening, take in the fact that the forces already engaged were enough to handle the six hoodlums and, in midflight, divert his leap toward the remote-control headset. He was blindingly certain of one thing: It was Marc DuQuesne who had unleashed these killers on them. And he was equally certain of that fact's consequence: The truce was off. DuQuesne was to be destroyed. Wherefore what happened next astonished him even more than if it had occurred at another time. A strident roar of klaxons filled the room. It was the loudest sound any human had ever heard -- without permanent damage; it was calculated to come right up to the threshold of destruction. There was to be no chance that anyone would fail to hear this particular signal. His hand on the headset, Seaton paused. The bodies of the six gunmen had not yet all reached the floor, but the other Skylarkers were staring too. They had never expected to hear that sound except in test. It was the dire warning that they were under attack -- massive attack -- attack on a scale and of a persistence that they had never expected to encounter in real combat, with whatever forces. For that klaxon warning meant that under the fierce impact of the enemy weapons now so suddenly and mercilessly beating down on them the life of the Valeron's defensive screens was to be measured only in seconds -- and very few of them! wmam Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just Order on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick -- novelettes and complete short novels by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, J. T. McIntosh and a dozen other favorite writers, etc. Every issue is new... exciting... enjoyable! Don't wait -- subscribe today! You can order them separately at # each postpaid -- OR -- list issues desired below and we will ship them at once and deuct that number from your subscription. #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # I at your special price of only #. I enclose payment herewith. My subscription is I new,  renewal. Name  Address I City Zip Code State I lf you want back issues, check attached box. One subscription issue will be subtracted for each back issue  you order. Send rr le back Issues as follows: "'##,  :##, n##. '##, .##, ##, n##. ##, n#ii. #i#. J Offer void after Dec. #, # its vividly real telepathic socie, detailed so ingeniously and dra madcallv that, finisUng the booK, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately I (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Pleas #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, Nome Address City State I Enclose The Originol Edition -- Complotol Not A Low Cost Roprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Plus Postage #  Continuing the most famous science-fiction saga of all time --  by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. Retief defies the mightiest warriors of the galaxy! Worlds of liriis yni the finest in science fiction Don'tsend in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Retief stories and others appear regularh in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars! still to come! And now -- The Best of the Top Name Writers -- Robert A. Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, Hal  Clement, Lester del Rey contribute to F. -- and a Preview of Tomorrow's Best fach issue of IF brings you a brand-new writer, making his debut in science fiction in IF. Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y.  # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #  New  Renewal Name Address City State Zip No (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) Offer void after Dec, #, # Vol. #, No. # issue # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Diana Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. Ail rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial T here was a time when we thought we would get Skylark DuQuesne into three installments. Doc Smith, though, is a man who thinks on a huge scale. Kiloparsecs are only short jaunts for the Skylarkers, and kilowords are just enough room to get started in for the stories of their adventures. We gave up the three-installment idea early. Then we were pretty sure weM be able to do it in four. But other stories kept coming in. A long one by Van Vogt and Schmitz that we wanted to bring you right away; shorter ones by a half dozen other writers; the regular features... anyway, we found ourselves out of room. So this third installment of Skylark DuQuesne isnt the last. Neither is next month's fourth installment. It will take five in all, eoncluding in our October issue. (Positively!) This was frankly a little embarrassing to us, and it caused us to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of some things we had been taking for granted about our production procedures. In fact, it started in train a pretty complex series of events... but, we think you will agree, one with a happy ending. You see, when you come right down to it, a hundred and thirty-two pages isn't really enough space for a magazine like If, We do what we can, of course. We managed to get more words into If than you'll find in nearly any other magazine of its size -- by using a more compact type, by running very little advertising matter, by a variety of stratagems. Still and all, we've always felt a little cramped. This has made an editorial problem that we've never been quite confident of solving. It's a classic dilemma. On the one hand, we think a magazine should have a variety of stories in it -- and you can't have a variety unless you print at least half a dozen stories, preferably more than that. On the other hand it seems to be the nature of the beast tnat the longer sf stories are usually more fun to read than the short ones. (Oh, sure, there are honorable exceptions. But just for fun, make your own list of the twenty best science-fiction stories you've ever read. See how many run novelette length or longer.) This problem has been with us for years -- relieved a little bit when we changed format, because the new type meant a little extra wordage; relieved again when we went monthly, because that made it easier to use serials -- but still a problem. However, we think we've licked it now. Starting next month, there will be thirty-two more pages in If, Enough to run about two extra novelettes -- or four or five short stories -- or . an additional complete short novel -- or an extra installment Kf a serial. That is in addition to what weVe been running all along, of course -- so that if a typical issue has contained six or seven stories, about half of them novelettes or serial installments or other long pieces, the issue from now on will contain all of those things plus what we can get into the thirtytwo extra pages. One of the minor side-effects, for instance, will probablybe that Hue  Cry will show up in every issue, instead of being squeezed out from time to time when the story pressure gets too heavy. But the principal effect will be that we will have room to give you more stories in each issue -- which we think will mean a better balance of stories. Now, this is all stop-press news, as this editorial is written. In fact, the decision was made just # hours ago, and we spent all day yesterday redesigning our September cover, titles and so on to make it all possible. (Onee the publisher gave us the go-ahead we didn't want to waste any time putting it into effect!) Some things we didn't have time to do. For example, for one reason and another it was impossible to reschedule Doc Smith's Skylark any more, so it will still run to five parts, concluding in October. But we did have time to send out a Qouple of additional novelettes -- stories that you would have had to wait at least another month for otherwise; and probably, for makeup reasons, considerably longer than that. And, oh, yes, one thing more. The more case-hardened and frequently shot-over among our readers are already rattling coins in their pockets, thinking grim thoughts about inflation and rising prices, and wondering just what all this is leading up to. Increasing the price to a dollar a copy, maybe? Matter of fact, we aren't increasing it at all. # more pages... which means adding # to the body of the magazine and actually somewhat more than that to its story contents... and the price stays right where it is. Now, theres a fantastic story for you! But it's true. Pick up a copy next month and see for yourself. ger If will mean we'll have to be buying a couple hundred thousand extra words every year, so this is as good a time as any to mention again that we are permanently on the lookout for good new stories and good new writers. As you old-timers know, for several years now we have been publishing at least one "First" story in each issue -- by a writer never previously published. It isn't a contest. The stories are bought at our regular rates, and more than one an issue if we get enough good ones. The only "rules" are those that apply to writing stories for any magazine anywhere: Stories must be original; they must be typed, double-spaced on white paper; they must come with stamped, self-addressed return envelope... and they must be good enough to publish! (All you have to worry about is competing with Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, Hal Clement, Keith Laumer, Poul Anderson, Edward E. Smith, Fritz Leiber and a few others like that. But -- after all, that's exactly how i The conquering Krultch had little to fear from Retief's outcast band of mountebanks -- so, fearlessly, they lost their empire! A large green-yolked egg splattered across the flexglas panel as it slammed behind Relief. Across the long, narrow lobby, under room clerk looked up, then came quickly around the counter, longdied, short-legged, an expression as of one detecting a bad odor on his flattened, leathery-looking face. He spread six of the eight arms attached to his narrow shoulders like a set of measuring spoons, twitching the other two in a cramped shrug. "The hotel, he is fill!" he wheezed. "To some other house you convey your custom, yes?" "Stand fast," Relief said to the foqr Terrans who had preceded him through the door. "Hello, Strupp," he nodded to the agitated clerk. "These are friends of mine. See if you can't find them a room." "As I comment but now, the rooms, he is occupy!" Strupp pointed to the door, "Kindly facilities provide by management to place selves back outside use!" A narrow panel behind the registration desk popped open; a second Gaspierre slid tlu-ough, took in the situation, emitted a sharp hiss. Strupp whirled, his arms semaphoring an unreadable message. "Never mind that, Strupp," the newcomer snapped in accentless Terran. He took out a strip of patterned cloth, mopped under the breathing orifices set in the sides of his neck, looked at the group of Terrans, and then back at Relief. "Ah, something I can do for you, Mr. Relief?" "Evening, Hrooze," Relief said. "Permit me to introduce Mr. Julius Mulvihill, Miss Suzette La Flamme, just in from cut-system. There seems to be a room shortage in town. I thought perhaps you could accommodate them." H rooze eyed the door through which the Terrans had entered, twitched his nictating eyelids in a nervous gesture. "You know the situation here. Relief!" he said. "I have nothing against Terries personally, of course, but if I rent to these people -- " "I was thinking you might fix them up with free rooms, just as a sort of good-will gesture." "If we these Terries to the RitzKrudlu admit, the repercussions political out of business us will put!" Strupp expostulated. "The next ship out is two days from now," Relief said. "They need a place to stay until then." Hrooze looked at Relief, mopped his neck again. "I owe you a favor, Relief," he said. "Two days, though, that's all!" "But -- " Strupp began. "Silence!" Hrooze sneezed. "Put them in twelve-oh-three and four!' He drew Relief aside as a small bell-hop in a brass-studded harness began loading baggage on his back. "How does it look?" he inquired. "Any hope of getting that squadron of Peace Enforcers to stand by outsystem?" "I'm afraid not; Sector HQ seems to feel that might be interpreted by the Krultch as a ' war-like gesture." IF "Certainly it would! That's exactly what the Krultch can understand -- " "Ambassador Sheepshorn has great faith in the power of words," Retief said soothingly. "He has a reputation as a great verbal karate expert; the Genghis Khan of the conference table." "But what if you lose? The cabinet votes on the Krultch treaty tomorrow! If it's signed, Gaspierre will be nothing but a fueling station for the Krultch battle fleet! And you Terries will end up slaves!" "A sad end for a great oral athlete," Retief said. "Let's hope he's in good form tomorrow." I n the shabby room on the twelfth level, Retief tossed a thick plastic coin to the baggage slave, who departed emitting the thin squeaking that substituted in his species for a jaunty whistle. Mulvihill, a huge man with a handlebar mustache, looked around, plumped his vast, bulging suitcase to the thin carpet, and mopped at the purple-fruit stain across his red plastiweve jacket. "I'd like to get my hands on the Gasper (hat threw that," he growled in a bullfrog voice. "That's a mean crowd out there," said Miss La Flamme, a shapely redhead with a tattoo on her left biceps. "It was sure a break for us the Ambassador changed his mind about helping us out. From the look the old sourpuss gave me when I kind of bumped up against him, I figured he had ground glass where his red corpuscles ought to be." "I got a sneaking hunch Mr. Retief swung this deal on his own, Suzie," the big man said. "The Ambassador's got bigger things on his mind than out-of-work variety acts." "This is the first time the Marvelous Merivales have ever been flat out of luck on tour," commented a whiskery little man . no more than three feet tall, dressed in an oldfashioned frock coat and a checkered vest, in a voice like the yap of a Pekinese. "How come we got to get mixed up in politics?" said. "It's not Mr. Retief s fault wc came here." "Yeah," the midget conceded. "I it kind of rough too, trying to pry the Gaspers outa the Kniltch's hip 'pocket. Boy, I wisti I could see the show tomorrow when the Terry Ambassador and the Krultch brass slug it out to see whose side the Gaspers'll be neutral on." "Neutral, ha!" the tall, cadaverous individual looming behind Wee Willie snorted. "I caught a glimpse of that ferocious war vessel at the port, openly flying the Krultch battleflag! It's an open breach of interworld custom -- " "Hey, Professor, leave the speech"Without free use of Gaspierre ports, the Krultch plans for expansion through the Gloob cluster would come to naught. A firm stand -- " "Might get 'em blasted right off the planet," the big man growled. "The Krultch play for keeps." "And the Gaspers aim to be on the winning side," the midget piped. "And all the smart money is on the Krultch battle wagon to put up the best argument." "Terries are fair game around here, it looks like, Mr. Retief," Mulvihill said. "You better watch yourself going back." Retief nodded. "Stay close to your rooms; if the vote goes against us tomorrow, we may all be looking for a quick way home." II O utside on the narrow elevated walkway that linked the gray slab-like structures of the city, thinfeatured Gaspierre natives shot wary looks at Retief, some skirting him wiJely, others jostling him as they crowded past. It was a short walk to the building where the Terrestrial delegation occupied a suite. As Retief neared it, a pair of Krultch sailors emerged from a shop, turned in his direction. They were shortcoupled centauroid quadrupeds, with deep, narrow chests, snouted faces with businesslike jaws and fringe beards, dressed in the red-striped livery of the Krultch Navy, complete with side-arms and short swagger sticks. Retief altered course to the right to give thm passing room; they saw him, nudged each other, and spaced themselves to block the walk. Retief came on without slowing, started between them. The Krultch closed ranks. Retief stepped back started around the sailor on the left. The creature sidled, still blocking his path. "Oh-hoh, Terry loose in street," he said in a vHce like sand in a gear-box. "You lost, Terry?" The other Krultch crowded Retief against the rail. "Where you from, Terry? What you do -- ?" Without warning, Retief slammed a solid kick to the shin of the Krultch before him, simultaneously wrenched the stick from the alien's grip, cracked it down sharply across the wrist of the other sailor as he went for his gun. The weapon clattered, skidded off the walk and was gone. The one whom Retief had kicked was hopping on three legs, making muffled sounds of agony. Retief stepped quickly to him, jerked his gun from its holster, aimed it negligently at the other Krultch. "Better get your buddy back to the ship and have that leg looked at," he said. "I think I broke it." A ring of gaping Gaspierre had gathered, choking the walk. Retief thrust the pistol into his pocket, turned his back on the Krultch, pushed through the locals. A large course-hided Gaspierre policeman made as if to block his way; Retief rammed an elbow in his side, chopped him across the side of the neck as he doubled up, thrust him aside and kept going. A mutter was rising from the crowd behind him. T he Embassy was just ahead now. Retief turned off toward the entry; two yellow-uniformed Gaspierre moved into sight under the marquee, eyed him as he came up. "Terran, have you not heard of IF Ifac curfew?" one demanded in shrill but accurate Terran. "Can't say that I have," Retief replied. "There wasn't any, an hour go." "There is now!" the other snapped. "You Terries are not popular here. If you insist in uaming the populace by walking abroad, we cannot be responsible for your safety -- " he broke off as he saw the Krultch pistol protruding from Retiefs pocket. "Where did you get that?" he demanded in Gaspierran, then switched to pidgin Terran: "Where you-fella catch um bang-bang?" "A couple of lads were playing with it in the street," Retief said in the local dialect. "I took it away from them before someone got hurt." He started past them. "Hold on there," the policeman snapped, "We're not finished with you yet, fellow. We'll tell you when you can go. Now..." He folded his upper elbows. "You're to go to your quarters at once. In view of the tense interplanetary situation, you Terries are to remain inside until further notice. I have my men posted on all approaches to, ah, provide protection." "You're putting a diplomatic mission under arrest?" Retief inquired mild-ly. "I wouldn't call it that. Let's just say that it wouldn't be safe for foreigners to venture abroad. ' "Threats too?" "This measure is necessary in order to prevent unfortunate incidents!" "How about the Krultch? They're foreigners; are you locking them in their bedrooms?" "The Krultch are old and valued friends of the Gaspierre," the police captain said stiffly. "We -- " "I know; ever since they set an armed patrol just outside Gaspierran atmosphere, you've, devdoped a vast affection for them. Oi course, their purchasing missions help too." T he captain smirked. "We Gaspierre are nothing if not practical." He held out his claw-like two-fingered hand. "You will now give me the weapon." Retief handed it over silently. "Come; I will escort you to your room," the cop said. Retief nodded complacently, followed the Gaspierre through the entry cubicle and into the lift. "I'm glad you've decided to be reasonable," the cop said. "After all, if you Terries should convince the cabinet, it will be much nicer all around if there have been no incidents." "How true," Retief murmured. He left the car at the #th floor. "Don't forget, now," the cop said, watching Retief key his door. "Just stay inside and all will yet be well." He signalled to a policeman standing a few yards , along the corridor. "Keep an eye on the door, Klosta." Inside, Retief picked up the phone, dialed the Ambassador's room number. There was a dry buzz, no answer. He looked around the room. There was a tall, narrow window set in the wall opposite the door with a hinged section that swung outward. Retief opened it, leaned out, looked down at the dizzying stretch of blank facade that dropped sheer to the upper walkway seventy yards below. Above, the wall extended up twenty feet to an overhanging cornice. He went to the closet, yanked a blanket from the shelf, ripped it in four wide strips, knotted them together, and tied one end to a chair which he braced below the window. Retief swung his legs outside the window, grasped the blanket-rope, and slid down. The window at the next level was closed and shuttered. Retief braced himself on the sill, delivered a sharp kick to the panel; it shattered with an explosive sound. He dropped lower, reached through, released the catch, pulled the window wide, knocked the shutter aside, and scrambled through into a darkened room. "Who's there?" a sharp voice barked. A tall, lean man in a ruffled shirt with an unknotted string tie hanging down the front gaped at Retief from the inner room. "Retief! How did you get here? I understood that none of the staff were to be permitted -- that is, I agreed that protective custody -- er, it seems..." # #'"The whole staff is bottled up A here in the building. Mr. Ambassador. I'd guess tbc mean to keep us here until after the Cabinet meeting. It appears the Krultch have the fix in." "Nonsense! I have a firm commitment from the Minister that no final commitment will be made until we've been heard -- " "Meanwhile, we're under house arrest -- just to be sure we don't have an opportunity to bring any of the cabinet around to our side." "Are you suggesting that I've permitted illegal measures to be taken without a protest?" Ambassador Sheepshorn fixed Retief with a piercing gaze which wilted, and slid aside. "The place was alive with armed gendarmes," he sighed. "What could I do?" "A few shrill cries of outrage might have helped," Retief pointed out. "It's not too late. A fast visit to the Foreign Office -- " "Are you out of your mind? Have you observed the temper of the populace? We'd be torn to shreds!" Retief nodded. "Quite possibly; but what do you think our chances are tomorrow, after the Gaspierre conclude a treaty with the Krultch?" Sheepshorn made two tries, then swallowed hard. "Surely, Retief, you don't -- " "I'm afraid I do," Retief said. "The Krultch need a vivid symbol of their importance -- and they'd also like to involve the Gaspierre in their skulduggery, just to insure their loyalty. Packing a clutch oi Terry diplomats off to the ice mines would do both jobs." "A great pity," the Ambassador sighed. "And only nine months to go till my retirement." "I'll have to be going now," Retief said. "There may be a posse of annoyed police along at any moIF ment, and I'd hate to make it too easy for them." "Police? You mean they're not even waiting until after the Cabinet's decision?" "Oh, this is just a personal matter; I damaged some Krultch Naval property and gave a Gaspierre cop a pain in the neck." "I've warned you about your personality, Retief," Sheepshorn admonished. "I suggest you give yourself up, and ask for clemency; with luck, you'll get to go along to the mines with the rest of us. I'll personally put in a good word!" "That would interfere with my plans. I'm afraid," Retief said. He went to the door. "I'll try to be back before the Gaspierre do anything irrevocable. Meanwhile, hold the fort here. If they come for you, quote regulations at them; I'm sure they'll find that discouraging." "Plans? Retief, I positively forbid you to -- " Retief stepped through the door and closed it behind him, cutting off the flow of Ambassadorial wisdom. A flat policeman, posted a few feet along the corridor came to the alert. "All right, you can go home now," Retief said, in brisk Gaspierran. "The chief changed his mind; he decided violating a Terran Embassy's quarters was just asking for trouble. After all, the Krultch haven't won yet." The cop stared at him, then nodded. "I wondered if this wasn't kind of getting the rickshaw before the coolie..." he hesitated. "But what do you know about it?" "I just had a nice chat with the captain, one floor up." "Well, if he let you come down here, I guess it's all right." "If you hurry, you can make it back to the barracks before the evening rush begins." Retief waved airily and strolled away along the corridor. ni B ack at ground level, Retief went along a narrow service passage leading to the rear of the building, stepped out into a desertedlooking courtyard. There was another door across the way. He went to it, followed another hall to a street exit. There were no cops in sight. He took the sparsely peopled lower walkway, set off at a brisk walk. Ten minutes later, Retief surveyed the approaches to the Hostelry Ritz-Krudlu from the shelter of an inter-level connecting stair. There was a surging crowd of Gaspierre blocking the walkway, with a scattering of yellow police uniforms patrolling the edge of the mob. flattened heads. Off to one side, a heavily braided Krultch officer stood with a pair of age-tarnished locals, looking on approvingly. Retief retraced his steps to the debris-littered ground level twenty feet below the walkway, found an eighteen-inch wide airspace leading back between buildings. He inched along it, came to a door, found it locked. Four doors later, a latch "Retief. Open up before the yielded to his touch. house dick spots me." He stepped inside, made out the Bolts clattered and the door dim outlines of an empty storage swung wide; Julius Mulvihill's musroom. The door across the room tached face appeared; he seized was locked. Retief stepped back. Relief's hand and pumped it. slammed a kick against it at latch "Gripes, Mr. Relief, we were level; it bounced wide. worried about you. Right after you After a moment's wait for the left, old Hrooze called up here and sound of an alarm which failed to said there was a riot starting up!" materialize, Retief moved off along "Nothing serious; just a few enthe passage, found a rubbish-heaped thusiasts out front putting on a stair. He clambered over the debris, show for the Krultch." chirped, coming in from the next A t the twelfth level, he emerged room with lather on his chin. "They into the corridor. There was throwing us out already?" no one in sight. He went quickly "No, you'll be safe enough right along to the door numbered #, here. But I need your help." tapped lightly. There was a faint The big man nodded, flexed his sound from inside; then a bass voice hands. ! u :ib!ed, "Who's there?" Suzette La Flamme thrust a drink o. IF into Reliefs hand. "Sit down and tell us about it." "Glad you came to us, Relief," Relief took the offered chair, sampled the drink, then outlined the situation. "What I have tn mind could be dangerous," he finished. "It calls for a delicate touch and some fancy footwork," Relief added. The professor cleared his throat. "I am not without a certain dexterity -- " he started. "Let him finish," the redhead said. "And I'm not even sure ifs possible," Relief stated. The big man looked at the others. "There's a lot of things that look impossible -- but the Marvelous Merivales do 'em anyway. That's what's made our act a wow on a hundred and twelve planets." The girl tossed her red hair. "The way it looks, Mr. Relief, if somebody doesn't do something, by this time tomorrow this is going to be mighty unhealthy territory for Terries." "The ones the mob don't get will be chained to an oar in a Krultch "With the Mission pinned down in their quarters, the initiative appears to rest with us," Professor Fate intoned. The others nodded. "If you're all agreed then," Relief said, "here's what I have in mind... T he corridor was empty when Relief emerged, followed by the four Terrans. "How are we going to get out past that crowd out front?" Mulvihill inquired. "I've got a feeling they're ready for something stronger than slogans." "We'll try the back way." There was a sudden hubbub from the far end of the corridor; half a dozen Gaspierre burst into view, puffing hard from a fast climb. They hissed, pointed, and started for the Terrans at a short-legged trot. At the same moment, a door flew wide at the opposite end of the hallway; more locals popped into view, closed in. "Looks like a neck-tie party," Wee He put his head down and charged. The on-coming natives slowed, skipped aside. One, a trifle slow, bounced against the wall as the midget rammed him at knee level. The others whirled, grabbing at Wee vihill roared, took three giant steps, caught two Gaspierre by the backs of their leathery necks, lifted them and tossed them aside. The second group of locals, emitting wheezes of excitement, dashed up, eager for the fray. Retief met one with a straight right, knocked two more aside with a sweep of his arm, sprinted for the door through which th# second party of locals had appeared. He looked back to see Mulvihill toss another Gaspierre melee. "Down here, Julie!" The girl called. "Come on. Professor!" The tall, lean Terran, backed against the wall by three hissing locals, stretched out a yard-long aim, flapped his hand. A large white pigeon appeared, fluttered, squawking and snorting. Professor Fate plunged through them, grabbed the bird by the legs as he passed, dashed for the door where Retief and the girl waited. There was a sound of pounding feet from the stairwell; a fresh contingent of locals came charging into view on stub legs. Retief took two steps, caught the leader full in the face with a spread hand, sent him among his followers, as Mulvishoulder yelling and kicking. "There's more on the way," Retief called. "We'll have to go up." The girl nodded, started up, thne steps at a time. Mulvihill dropped the midget, who scampered after her. Professor Fate tucked his bird away, disappeared up the stairs in giant strides, Mulvihill and Retief behind him. O n the roof, Retief slammed the heavy door, shot the massive bolt. It was late evening now; cool blue air flowed across the unrailed  deck; faint crowd-sounds floated up from the street twenty stories below. door," Mulvihill commanded. He went to the edge of the roof, looked down, shook his head, started across toward another side. The redhead called to him. "Over here, Julie..." Retief joined Mulvihill at her side. A dozen feet down and twenty feet distant across a narrow street was the slanted roof of an adjacent building. A long ladder was clamped to brackets near the ridge. "Looks like that's it," Mulvihill nodded. Suzette unlimbered a coil of light line from a clip at her waist, gauged the distance to a projecting ventilator intake, swung the rope, and let it fly. The broad loop spread, slapped the opposite roof, and encircled the target. With a tug, the girl tightened the noose, quickly whipped the end around a four-inch stack. She stooped, pulled off her shoes, tucked them in her belt, tried the taut rope with one foot. "Take it easy, baby," Mulvihill muttered. She nodded, stepped out on the taut, down-slanting cable, braced her feet, spread her arms, and in one smooth swoop, slid along the line and stepped off the far end, turned and executed a quick curtsey. "This is no time to ham it up," Mulvihill boomed. "Just habit," the girl said. She went up the roof, freed the ladder, rdeased the catch that caused an extensible section to slide out, then came back to the roofs edge, deftly raised, the ladder to a vertical position. "Catch!" she let it lean toward Mulvihill and Retief; as it fell both men caught it, lowered it the last foot. can't get this thing locked!" "Never mind that now," Mulvihill rumbled. "Come on, Prof," he said to the lean prestidigitator. "You first." The professor's Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. He peered down at the street far below, then threw his shoulders back, clambered up onto the ladder, and started across on all fours. "Don't look down Professor," Suzie called. "Look at me." over his shoulder. He freed the rope, tossed it across, then stepped up on the ladder, started across, one small step at a time. "This isn't my strong suit," he muttered, teeth together. The Professor had reached the far side. Mulvihill was half way. There was a sudden yelp from Willie. Retief turned. The midget was struggling against a door which was being forced open from inside. # T Tey!" Mulvihill boomed. Suzie squealed. Retief sprinted for the embattled midget, caught him as he was hurled backward as the door flew open, disgorging three Gaspierre who staggered for balance, and went down as Retief thrust out a foot. He thrust Wee native, pitched him back inside, followed with the other two, then slammed the door, and tried the bolt. "It's sprung," he said. "Let's go, ran for the ladder where Mulvihill still stood, halfway across. "Come on, Julie!" The girl cried, "It won't hold both of you!" There were renewed breathy yells from the site of the scuffle. The door had burst open and more Gashill snorted, finished the crossing in two jumps, scrambled for footing on the slanting roof. Retief stepped out on the limber ladder, started across, 'Took out!" Suzette said sharply. The rungs jumped under Retiefs feet. He reached the roof, dropped the midget, and turned to see a huddle of Gaspierre tugging at the ladder. One rendered reckless in his zeal, started across. Retief picked up the end of the ladder, shook it; tile local squeaked, scrambled back. Retief hauled the ladder in. "Up here," the girl called. Retief went up the slope, looked down at an open trap door in the opposite slope. He followed the others down tiirough it into a musty loft, latched it behind him. The loft door opened into an empty hall. They followed k, found a lift, rode it down to ground level. Outside in a littered alley, the crowd noises were faint. "We appear to have outfoxed the ruffians," Professor Fate said, adjusting his cuffs. "The Gaspers ain't far behind," tracks." "We'll find a spot and hide out until dark," Retief said. "Then we'll make our try." IV A faint gleam from Gaspierre's three bright-star-sized moons dimly illuminated the twisting alley along which Retief led the four Terrans. "The port is half a mile from the city wall," he said softly to Mulvihill at his side. "We can climb it between watchtowers, and circle around and hit the ramp from the east." "They got any guards posted out there?" the big man asked. "Oh-oh, here's the wall..." The barrier loomed up, twelve feet high. Suzette came forward, looked it over. "I'll check the top," she said. "Give me a boost, Julie." He lifted her, raised her to arm's length. She put a foot on the top of his head, stepped up. Mulvihill grunted. "Watch out some Gasper cop doesn't spot you." "Coast is clear." She pulled heryou a hand." Mulvihill lifted the midget, who caught the girl's hand, and scrambled up. Mulvihill bent over, and Retief stepped in his cupped hands, then to the big man's shoulders, and reached the top of the wall. The girl lowered her rope for Mulvihill. He clambered up, swearing softly, with Retief's help hoisted his bulk to the top of the wall. A moment later the group was moving off quietly across open ground toward the south edge of the port. Lying flat at the edge of the ramp, Retief indicated a looming, lightencrusted silhouette. "That's her," he said. "Half a "Big enough, ain't she?" Wee Willie chirped. "Hsst! There's a Krultch!" Mulvihill pointed. Retief got to his feet. "Wait until I get in position behind that fud IF monitor' He pointed to a dark shape crouching fifty feet distant. "Then make a few suspicious noises." "I better go with you, Retief," Mulvihill started, but Retief was gone. He moved forward silently, reached the shelter of the heavy apparatus, watched the Krultch sentinel move closer, stepping daintily as a deer on its four sharp hooves. The alien had reached a point a hundred feet distant when there was a sharp ping! from behind Retief. The guard halted; Retief heard the snick of a power gun's action. The Krultch turned toward him. He could hear the cli-clack, cli-clack of the hooves now. At a distance of ten feet, the quadruped slowed, came to a halt. Retief could see the vicious snout of the gun aimed warily into the darkness. There was another sound from Mulvihill's position. The guard plucked something from the belt rigged across his chest, and started toward the source of the sound. As he passed Retief he shied suddenly, and grabbed for his communicator. Redef leaped, landed a haymaker on die bony face, and caught the microphone before it hit the pavement. The Krultch, staggering back from the blow, went to his haunches and struck out with knife-edged forefeet. Retief ducked aside, chopped hard at the collar bone. The Krultch collapsed with a choked cry. Mulvihill appeared at a run, seized the feebly moving guard, pulled off the creature's belt, trussed his four legs together, and then, using other straps to bind the hands, he gagged the powerful jaws. "You gonna cut his throat?" "Shove him back of the monitor," Mulvihill said. "Now let's see how close we can get to the ship without getting spotted," Retief said. T he mighty Krultch war vessel, a black column towering into the night, was ablaze with varicolored running and navigation lights. Giant floods mounted far up on the ship's sleek sides cast puddles of blue-white radiance on the tarmac; from the main cabin amidships, softer light gleamed through wide view windows. "All lit up like a party," Mulvihill growled. "A tough party to crash," Wee slant of the hull. "I think I see a route, Mr. Retief," the girl said. "What's that little square opening up there, just past the gun emplacement?" "It looks as though it might be a cargo hatch. It's not so little. Miss La Flamme! it's a long way up -- " "You reckon I could get through it?" Retief nodded, looking up at the smooth surface above. "Can you make it up there?" "They used to bill me as the human lady-bug. Nothing to it." "If you get in," Retief said, "Try to find your way back down into the tube compartment. If you can open one of these access panels, we're in." Suzette nodded, took out her rope, tossed a loop over a projec# tion fifteen feet above, and clambered quickly up the landing jack to its junction with the smooth metal of the hull. She put her hands flat against the curving, slightly inslanting wall before her, planted one crepe-soled shoe against a tiny weld seam and started up the sheer wall. Ten minutes passed. From the deep shadow at the ship's stern, Retief watched as the slim girl inched her way up, skirting a row of orange glare panels spelling out the name of the vessel in blocky Krultch ideographs, taking advantage of a ventilator outlet for a minute's rest, then going on up, up, thirty feet now, forty, forty-five... She reached the open hatch raised her head cautiously for a glance inside, then swiftly pulled up and disappeared through the opening. Julius Mulvihill heaved a sigh of relief. "That was as tough a climb as Suzie ever made," he rumbled. piped up. "Her troubles is just starting." "I'm sure she'll encounter no difficulty," Professor Fate said anxiously. "Surely there'll be no one on duty aft, here in port." More minutes ticked past. Then there was a rasp of metal, a gentle clatter. A few feet above ground, a panel swung out: Suzie's face appeared, oil streaked. "Boy this place needs a good scrubbing," she breathed. "Come on; they're all having a shindig up above, sounds like." Inside the echoing, gloomy vault of the tub compartment, Retief studied the layout of equipment, the placement of giant cooling baffles, and the contour of the bulkheads. "This is a Krultch-built job," he said. "But it seems to be a pretty fair copy of an old Concordiat cruiser of the line. That means the controls are all the way forward." went to the wide-runged catwalk designed for goat-like Krultch feet, started up. The others followed. Retief glanced around, reached for the ladder. As he did, a harsh Krultch voice snapped, "Halt where you are, Terrans!" R etief turned slowly. A dirtsmeared Krultch in baggy coveralls stepped from the concealment of a massive ion-collector, a grim-looking power gun aimed. He waited as a second and third sailor followed him, all armed. "A nice catch, Udas," one said admiringly in Krultch. "The captain said we'd have Terry labor to do the dirty work on the run back, but I didn't expect to see 'em volunteering." "Get 'em down here together, Jesau," the first Krultch barked, ffli partner came forward, motioned with the gun. "Retief, you savvy Fustian?" Midvihill muttered. "Uh-huh," Retief answered. "You hit the one on the left; FH take the bird on the right. Professor -- " "Not yet," Retief said. "No talk!" the Krultch barked ia Terran. "Come downl" IF The Terrans descended to the deck, stood in a loose group. "Closer together!" the sailor said; he poked the girl with the gun to emphasize the command. She smiled at him sweetly. "You bat-eared son of a goat, just wait till I get a handful of your whiskers!" "No talk!" Professor Fate edged in front of the girl. He held out both hands toward the leading Kruitch, flipped them over to show both sides, then twitched his wrists, fanned two sets of playing cards. He waved them under the astounded nose of the nearest gunman, and with a flick they disappeared. The two rearmost sailors stepped closer, mouths opn. The professor snapped his fingers; flame shot from the tip of each pointed forefinger. The Krultch jumped. The tall Terran waved his hands, whipped a gauzy blue handkerchief from nowhere, swirled it around; now it was red. He snapped it sharply, and a shower of confetti scattered around the dumbfounded Krultch. He doubled his fists, popped them open; whoofed into the aliens' faces. A final wave, and a white bird was squawking in the air. "Now!" Retief said, and took a step, uppercut the leading sailor; die slender legs buckled as the creature went down with a slam. Mulvihill was past him, catching Krultch number two with a roundhouse swipe. The third sailor made a sound like tearing sheet metal, brought his hurtling forward, hit him at the knees. The shot melted a furrow in the wall as Mulvihill floored the hapless creature with a mighty Wow. "Neatly done," Professor Fate said, tucking things back into his cuffs. "Almost a pity to lose sucli an appreciative audience." W ith the three Krultch securely strapped hand and foot in their own harnesses, Retief nudged one with his foot. "We have important business to contract in the control room," he said. "We don't want to disturb anyone, Jesau, so we'd prefer a nice quiet approach via the back stairs. What would you suggest?" The Krultch made a suggestion. Retief said, "Professor, perhaps you'd better give him a few more samples." "Very well." Professor Fate stepped forward, waved his hands; a slimrbladed knife appeared in one. He tested the edge with his thumb, which promptly dripped gore. He stroked the thumb with another finger; the blood disappeared. He nodded. "Now, fellow," he said to the sailor. "I've heard you rascals place great store by your beards; what about a shave?" He reached -- The Krultch made a sound like glass shattering. "The port catwalk!" he squalled. "But you won't get away with this!" "Oh, no?" The professor smiled gently, made a pass in the air, plucked a small cylinder from nowhere. "I doubt if anyone will be along this way for many hours," he said. "If we fail to return safy in an hour, this little device will detonate with sufficient force to distribute your component atoms over approximately twelve square miles." He placed the object by the Krultch, who rolled horrified eyes at it. "Oh -- on second thought, try the service catwalk behind the main tube," he squeaked. "Good enough," Retief said. "Let's go." V T he sounds of Krultch revelry were loud in the cramped passage. "Sounds like they're doing a little early celebrating for tomorrow's big diplomatic victory," Mulvihill said. "You suppose most of them are in there?" "There'll be a few on duty," Retief said. "But that sounds like a couple of hundred out of circulation for the moment -- until we trip something and give the alarm." "The next stretch is all right," Professor Fate said, coming back dusting off his hands. "Then I'm afraid we shall have to emerge into the open." "We're not far from the command deck now," Retief said. "Another twenty feet, vertically, ought to do it." The party clambered on up, negotiated a sharp turn, came to an exit panel. Professor Fate put his ear against it. "All appears silent," he said. "Shall we sally forth?" Retief came to the panel, eased IF it open, glanced out; then he stepped through, motioned the others to follow. It was quieter here; there was deep-pile carpeting underfoot, an odor of alien food and drugsmoke in the air. "Officers' country," Mulvihill muttered. Retief pointed toward a door marked with Krultch lettering. "Anybody read that?" he whispered. There were shakes of the head and whispered negatives. "We'll have to take a chance." Retief went to the door, gripped the latch, and yanked it suddenly wide. An obese Krultch in uniform belt but without his tunic looked up from a brightly colored magazine on the pages of which Retief glimpsed glossy photos of slenderbuilt Krultch mares flirting saucy derrieres at the camera. The alien stuffed the magazine in a desk slot, came to his feet, gaping, than whirled and dived for a control panel across the narrow passage in which he was posted. He reached a heavy lever and hauled it down just as Retief caught him with a flying tackle. Man and Krultch hit the deck together; Relief's hand chopped; the Krultch kicked twice and lay still. "That lever -- you suppose -- " # # "probably an alarm," Retief A said, coming to his feet. "Come on!" he ran along the corridor; it turned sharply to the right. A heavy door was sliding shut before him. He leaped to it, wedged himself in the narrowing opening, braced against the thrust of the steel panel. It slowed, with a groaning of machinery. Mulvihill charged up, grasped the edge of the door and heaved. Somewhere, metal creaked. There was a loud clunkl and a clatter of broken mechanism. The door slid freely back. "Close," Mulvihill grunted. "For a minute there -- " he broke off at a sound from behind hirh. Ten feet back along the passage a second panel had slid noiselessly out, sealing off the corridor, Mulvihill jumped to it, heaved against it. Ahead, Retief saw a third panel, this one standing wide open. He plunged through it; skidded to a halt. A braided Krultch officer was waiting, a foot-long purple cigar in his mouth, a power gun in each hand. He kicked a lever near his foot. The door whooshed shut behind Retief. "Ah, welcome aboard, Terran," the captain grated. "You can be the first of your kind to enjoy Krultch hospitality." "I have been observing your progress on my inspection screen here," the captain nodded toward a small panel which showed a view of the four Terrans pushing fruitlessly against the doors that had closed to entrap them. "Interesting," Retief commented. "You are surprised at the sophistication of the equipment we Krultch can command?" the captain puffed out smoke, showed horny gums in a smile-like grimace. "No, anybody who can steal the price can buy a Groaci spy-eye system," Retief said blandly. "But I #S find it interesting that you had to spend all that cash just to keep an eye on your crew. Not too trustworthy, eh?" y "What? Any of my crew would die at my command!" "They'll probably get the chance, too," Retief nodded agreement. "How about putting one of the guns down -- unless you're afraid of a misfire." "Krultch guns never misfire." The captain tossed one pistol aside. "But I agree: I am overprotected against the paltry threat of a single Terran." "You're forgetting -- I have friends." T he Krultch made a sound like fingernails on a blackboard. "They are effectively immobilized," he said. "Now, tell me, what did you hope to accomplish by intruding here?" "I intend to place you under arrest," Retief said. "Mind if I sit down?" The Krultch captain made laughing noises resembling a flawed drive bearing; he waved a two-fingered claw-hand. "Make yourself comfortable -- while you can," he said. "Now, tell me, how did you manage to get your equipment up to my ship without being seen? I shall impale the slackers responsible, of course." "Oh, we have no equipment." Retief said breezily. He sniffed, "That's not a Lovenbroy cigar, is it?" "Never smoke anything else," the Krultch said. "Care for one?" "Don't mind if I do," Retief admitted. He accepted an eighteeninch stogie, lit up. "Now, about the equipment," the captain persisted. "I assume you used fifty-foot scaling ladders, though I confess I don't see how you got them onto the port -- " "Ladders?" Retief smiled comfortably. "We Terrans don't need ladders; we just sprouted wings." "Wings?" "Oh, we're versatile, we Terries." The captain was wearing an expression of black disapproval now. "If you had no ladders, I must conclude that you breached my hull at ground level," he snapped. "What did you use? It would require at least a fifty K-T-Second power input to penetrate two inches of flint-steel -- " Retief shook his head, puffing out scented smoke. "Nice," he said. "No, we just peeled back a panel barehanded. We Terrans -- " "Blast you Terrans! Nobody could." The captain clamped his jaws, puffed furiously. "Just outside, in the access-control chamber you sabotaged the closure mechanism. Where is the hydraulic jack you used for this?" "As I said, we Terrans -- " # #'#'ou entered the secret access I passage almost as soon as you boarded my vessel!" the captain screeched. "My men are innoculated against every talk-drug known! What did you use on the traitor who informed you!" Retief held up a hand. "We Terrans can be very persuasive, Captain. At this very moment, you IF yourself, for example, are about to be persuaded of the futility of trying to out-maneuver us." The Krultch commander's mouth opened and closed. "Me!" he burst out. "You think that you can divert a Krultch officer from the performance of his duty?" "Sure," a high voice piped from above and behind the captain. "Nothing to it." The Krultch's hooves clattered as he whirled, froze at the sight of smiling down at him from the ventilator register above the control panel. In a smooth motion, Retief cracked the alien across the wrist, and twitched the gun from his nerveless hand. "You see?" he said as the officer stared from him to the midget and back. "Never underestimate us Terrans." The captain drooped in his chair, mopping at his face with a polkadotted hanky provided by Wee Willie. "This interrogation is a gross illegality!" he groaned. "I was assvued that all your kind did was talk -- " "We're a tricky lot," Retief conceded. "But surely a little innocent deception can be excused, once you understand our natures. We love strife, and this seemed to be the easiest way to stir up some action." "Stir up action?" the Krultch croaked. "There's something about an apparently defenseless nincompoop that brings out the opportunist in people," Retief said. "It's a simple way for us to identify troublemakers, so they can be dealt with expeditiously. I think you Krultch qualify handsomely. It's convenient timing, because we have a number of new planet-wrecking devices we've been wanting to field-test." "You're bluffing!" the Krultch bleated. Retief nodded vigorously. "I have to warn you, but you don't have to believe me. So if you still want to try conclusions -- " T here was a sharp buzz from the panel; a piercing yellow light blinked rapidly. The captain's hand twitched as he eyed the phone. "Go ahead, answer it," Retief said. "But don't say anything that might annoy me. We Terrans have quick tempers." The Krultch flipped a key. "Exalted One," a rapid Krultch voice babbled from the panel. "We have been assassinated by captives! I mean, captivated by assassins! There were twelve of them -- or perhaps twenty! Some were as high as a hundred-year Fufu tree, and others smaller than hoof-nits! One had eyes of live coals, and flames ten feet long shot from his hands, melting all they touched, and another -- " "Silence!" the captain roared. "Who are you? Where are you? What in the name of the Twelve Devils is going on here!" He whirled on Retief. "Where are the rest of your commandos! How did they evade my surveillance system? What -- " "Ah-ah," Retief clucked. "I'm asking the questions now. First, I'll have the names of all Gaspierre officials who accepted your bribes." "You think I would betray my compatriots to death at your hands?" "Nothing like that; I just need to know who the cooperative ones are so I can make them better offers." A low brackk! sounded; this time a baleful blue light winked. The Krultch officer eyed it warily. "That's my outside hot line to the Foreign Office," he said. "When word reaches the Gaspierre government of the piratical behavior you allegedly peaceful Terries indulge in behind the facade of diplomacy -- " "Go ahead, tell them," Retief said. "It's time they discovered they aren't the only ones who understand the fine art of the triple-cross." The Krultch lifted the phone. "Yes?" he snapped. His expression stiffened. He rolled an eye at Re"What's that?" he barked into the communicator. "Flew through the air? Climbed where? What do you mean, giant white birds!" "Them Gaspers sure exaggerate!" The captain eyed the tiny man in horror, comparing his height with Retief's six-three. He shuddered. "I know," he said into the phone. "They're already here..." He dropped the instrument back on its hook, glanced at his panel, idlv reached -- it'That reminds me," Retief said. A He pointed the gun at the center of the captain's chest. "Order IF all hands to assemble amidships," he said. "They -- they're already there," the Krultch said unsteadily, his eyes fixed on the gun. "Just make sure." The captain depressed a key, cleared his throat. "All hands to the central feeding area, on the double," he said. There was a moment's pause. Then a Krultch voice came back: "All except the stand-by crews in power section and armaments, I guess you mean. Exalted One" "I said all hands, damn you!" the officer snarled. He flipped off the communicator. "I don't know what you think you'll accomplish with this," he barked. "I have three hundred fearless warriors aboard this vessel; you'll never get off this ship alive!" Two minutes passed. The communicator crackled. "All hands assembled, sir." lever?" Retief said mildly. "Just pull it down, and the next one to it." The captain made as if to move. past the Krultch, wrestled the controls down. Far away, machinery rumbled. A distinct shock ran through the massive hull, then a second. "The disaster bulkheads, sliding shut," Retief said. "The three hundred fearless warriors are nicely locked in between them." The captain slumped, looking stricken. "How do you know so much about the operation of my vessel?" he demanded. "It's classified..." "That's the result of stealing someone else's plans; the wrong people may have been studying the rest of the group in; then I think we'll be ready to discuss surrender terms." "This is a day that will live in the annals of treachery," the captain grated hollowly. "Oh, I don't think it needs to get into the annals," Retief said. "Not if we can come to a private understanding, just between gentlemen." VI I t was an hour past sunrise when the emergency meeting of the Gaspierre Cabinet broke up. Ambassador Sheepshorn, emerging from the chamber deep in amiable conversation with an uncomfortablelooking Krultch officer in elaborate full dress uniform, halted as he spied Retief. "Ah, there, my boy! I was a trifle concerned when you failed to return last evening; but, as I was just pointing out to the Captain here, it was really all just a dreadful misunderstanding. Once the Krultch position was made clear -- that they really preferred animal husbandry and folk dancing to any sort of war-like adventures, the Cabinet was able to come to a rapid and favorable decision on the Peace-andFriendship Treaty, giving Terrans full Most Favored Nation status." "I'm glad to hear that, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said, nodding to the stoney-faced Krultch commander. "I'm sure we'd all rather engage in friendly competition than have to demonstrate our negotiating ability any further." There was a stir at the end of the corridor; a harried-looking Krultch officer with a grimy Krultch yeoman in tow appeared, came up to the captain, and saluted. "Exalted One, this fellow has just escaped from some sort of magical paralysis." "It was that one," the sailor indicated Retief. "Him and the others." He looked reproachfully at Retief. "That was a dirty trick, telling us that was a bomb you were planting; we spend a rough night before we found out it was just a dopestick." "Sorry," Retief said. "Look, Exalted One," the sailor went on in a stage whisper. "What I wanted to warn you about, that Terry -- the long one, with the pointed tail and the fiery breath; he's a warlock; he waves his hands and giant white flying creatures appear -- " "Silence, idiot!" the captain bellowed. "Have you no powers of observation? They don't merely produce birds; any fool could do that They transform themselves! Now get out of my sight! I plan to enter a monastery as soon as we return home, and I want to get started on my meditating!" He nodded curtly and clattered away. #Cdd sort of chap," Sheepshorn commented. "I wonder what he was talking about?" "Just some sort of in-group joke. I imagine," Retief said. "By the way, about that group of distressed terrans I mentioned to you -- " "Yes. I may have been a bit abrupt with them, Retief; but of course I was busy planning my strategy for today's meeting. Perhaps I was hasty. I hereby authorize you to put in a good word for them." "I took the liberty of going a little farther than that," Retief said. "Since the new treaty calls for Terran cultural missions, I signed a six months contract with them to put on shows here on Gaspierre.' Sheepshorn frowned. "You went a bit beyond your authority, Retief," he snapped. "I'd thought we might bring in a nice group or two to read classic passages from the Congressional Record, or perform some of the new silent music; and I had half-way promised the Garoci Minister I'd have one of his nose-flute troupes -- " "I thought it might be a good idea to show Terr an solidarity, just at this juncture," Retief pointed out. "Then, too, a demonstration of sword-swallowing, prestidigitation, fire-eating, juggling, tight-rope walking, acrobatics and thaumaturgics might be just the ticket for dramatizing versatility." Sheepshorn considered with pursed lips, then nodded. "You may have a valuable point there, my boy; we Terrans are a. versatile breed. Speaking of which, I wish you'd been there to see my handling of the negotiation this morning! One moment I was all fire and truculence; the next, as smooth as Yill silk." IF say, Mr. Ambassador." "Yes, indeed," Sheepshorn rubbed his hands together, chuckling. "In a sense. Relief, diplomacy itself might be thought of as a branch of show business, eh? Thus, these performers might be considered colleagues of a sort." "True, but I wouldn't mention it when they're within earshot." "Yes, it might go to their heads. Well, I'm off, Retief. My report on this morning's work will become a classic study of Terran diplomatic subtlety." He hurried away. A Gaspierre with heavy bifocal lenses edged up to Retief. "I'm with the Gaspierre Morning Exhalation' he wheezed. "Is it true, sire, that you Terries can turn into fire-breathing dragons at will?" A second reporter closed in. "I heard you read minds," he said. "And about this ability to walk through walls -- " "Just a minute, boys," Retief held up a hand. "I wouldn't want to be quoted on this of course, but just between you and me, here's what actually happened, as soon as the Ambassador had looked into his IF  Short StOT Having two thousand inhabited planets to supervise, anybody might mislay one now and thenl F or such a racket to come from the anteroom on the far side of the door which bore the discreet rare enough for anyone to raise his voice at all here on Galrex -- its mile-square, mile-deep computerbanked halls made it the effective center of power for the entire Lens, and the sensation that history was looking over your shoulder inspired an awed hush. Right now, though, someone was actually shouting, so loudly that Superintendent Motice Bain could hear the words without activating his desk communicators. A man, almost hysterical, was crying out over and over. "But I must see him! Something must be done! The human race k in danger!" A crank? Frowning over the loofacile explanation -- for it woiikl take an incredibly persistent crank to get to the very peak of the Galrex hierarchy -- Bain switched on the TV pickups and inspected the scene beyond the door. Three harassed androids and a half-frantic human aide were trying to quiet a wildfaced man in clothing that suggested he might hail from one of the Bondageworlds: a rough brown shirt and a black kilt with knee-boots. But he had black hair all over the place, a brush-stiff beard and bushy eyebrows, whereas the Bondsmen usually shaved their entire bodies. The human race in danger, hrr Bain quirked up the corners of his thin-lipped mouth and raised the gain on the communicators to full. "What is it Ivor?" he demanded of the aide in the anteroom. T here was a moment of shocked silence. Ivor broke it with an accusing exclamation. "Now see what you've done! You've interrupted Super-Galrex!" "That's what I've been trying to do!" the bearded man bellowed, unrepentant. But this final stab of defiance was the most he could manage; one more second, and he had subsided into a frightened halfcringe, matching Ivor's own. "Well?" Bain rapped. "Sir, forgive the disturbance, but really we have done our best to prevent him..." Ivor hesitated, wiping his forehead with the back of a nervous hand. "He's a fanatic, sir, that's all. I've sent for a medic, and we'll get him to the hospital as quickly as we can." "I'm not crazy, damn it!" the bearded man exploded. "And here are the figures to prove it!" He reached to the hip pocket of his kilt and flourished a sheaf of documents under Ivor's nose. "But the computers say you're wrong," Ivor countered, and added to Bain, "I'm extremely sorry, sir, but he's got some notion in his head about the computers having been tampered with, to stop them giving the right answer to the problem he brought with him." "One second." Bain rubbed his chin, considering. "Ivor, am I to understand that this man has come all the way to Galrex especially to put a private problem?" "Yes, I have," the bearded man declared. "Hmmm... That makes you unusual, my friend. Star travel is expensive, to begin with, and the hire of Galrex computers isn't cheap either." "But your facilities are supposed to be public property," the bearded man snapped. "Anyone can use them if he wants!" "Granted, granted. In fact, though, planetary governments are our regular customers. There's nothing special about the computers here -- we simply have more of them than anyone else in the galaxy, because of the immense quantities of data we have to process." Out of the corner of his eye, Bain noted with hidden amusement Ivor's astonishment at seeing Super-Galrex make light conversation with an obvious fanatic. "So tell me why you needed to use our facilities, and not those available on any civilized planet, Mr. -- ?" "Falkirk," said the bearded man. The frenzy had gone out of him, to be replaced by exaggerated deference. Ivor was apparently much impressed by that fact, but Bain had small respect for his aide's ability to deal with human beings. He was good with computers, but he lacked insight. One glance should have told him that Falkirk was honestly angry, and therefore accessible to reason. "Go on," he invited. Falkirk took a deep breath. "I had to come here, sir, because nowhere else could I obtain all the information likely to be required in evaluating the solution. There are factors involved which cover nearly a dozen star-systems." "A personal problem of virtually galactic scope?" Bain measured humorous skepticism into his voice. Ivor pounced on this return to something like his chief's normal behaviour. "Yes, sir. You see, Falkirk has -- " "Shut up." Bain reached a quick decision. "Bring Falkirk in here. I can spare him two minutes to convince me he's not a crank, and twelve minutes more if he succeeds. Is that fair, Mr. Falkirk?" "Yes, sir!" said the bearded man, and dived for the door as it slid aside. t'This will give you an idea of A the scale of the thing I've stumbled on," he said as he perched gingerly on the edge of the chair facing Bain. He couldn't quite meet the piercing gaze of the Superintendent, but glanced at him sidelong, seeming to pay more attention to the artificial view of grassy meadows and far blue mountains projected on the outside of the window behind the desk. He handed over the top page from his sheaf of documents, and Bain scanned it as he put some further questions. It was nothing but a table of figures, as well known to him as his own name. "Are you from one of the Bondageworlds, Mr. Falkirk?" "No, sir. Don't be misled by these clothes. I had to hock my thermosuits on Fenris to make up the balance of the fare here." Approx, total of inhabited planets at present: #x#. "Your professional background? Clearly, you're an educated man, and you must have done moderately well in some highly skilled job to even consider bringing your problem here to Galrex." Approx, human population at present: # . I x #  #  "Yes, sir. By training I'm a cosmoarcheologist." Bain's nape prickled ever so faintly. He read on -- Approx, total of starships in service: #x#". "You're not a mathematician, then," he suggested. Falkirk bridled. "Sir, there's nothing wrong with the figures I've compiled, in spite of the fact that the computers here refused to give me a rational solution -- " Average number in crew of ship: #I . That was as far as Bain could be bothered to read. He pushed the table of figures across the slick surface of the desk, and it skidded several inches in Falkirk's direction. "Let me make an enlightened guess," he said. "You've noted the occurrence of an event against which the odds appear inconceivably large. You feel it ought to be investigated. Am I correct?" With unconcealed respect, Falkirk stared at him. "Exactly, sir. But this is no ordinary event in any case, regardless of the actual odds..." He nerved himself for the final plunge. "What would you say if you were told that the entire crew of one single interstellar ship had wound up IF in positions of fantastic power and influence within a few years of their simultaneous decision to retire from space?" "Interesting," was all Bain allowed himself to say. "Your two minutes are nearly up. Give me a few more details, and I'll decide whether you can have your extra time." "Among them are the Premier of Nokomis, the Autarch of Ling, the richest man on Quetzal, the chief priest of the state religion on Thummim -- " "An impressive roster!" Bain broke in. "Very well, Mr. Falkirk, ni concede your sincerity, if nothing more. Now, from the beginning and in full, if you please -- but stick to the point, because I am a very busy man." W e're so far from being the first intelligent inhabitants of the galaxy (Falkirk said) that there's no shortage of subjects for investigation by cosmoarcheologists, even making allowance for the fact that it's not a popular discipline, so funds for jobs like the study of relics on nonterrestrial planets are hard to come by. So you might think it silly of me to have decided right at the outset of my career that there was precisely one predecessor species I wanted to devote my life to: those who used to inhabit the world we call Gorgon. On the face of it, there wasn't anything so remarkable about those creatures. Physically they must have had a great deal in common with us, so the biologists aren't very interested, and they never achieved spaceflight, so the psychologists haw dismissed them as rather dull. What's more, their entire body of relics was concentrated on a small island in Gorgon's southern hemisphere, which argues that they were singularly unenterprising. On the Other hand, when I was still in school I ran across a story about them. I can't remember exactly where. But it fascinated me, even though it was no more than an illdocumented legend. According to the traditions, they'd developed as the final flowering of their culture a dynamic training technique whi(A would enable any remotely similar creature to get the optimum performance from its nervous system by bringing under conscious control the faculty we refer to as "luck". I don't know how this was supposed to be done -- possibly by developing an intuitive awareness of the most probable course of large-scale events. And this, allegedly, was the root of their eventual downfall : uniformly fortunate, they bored themselves into extinction. Since this must have happened at least several centuries before we discovered a stardrive, you'll ask how it is the legend got into circulation. Well, according to what I recall from this source -- I wish I could locate it again! -- the discoverer of Gorgon was one of the great pioneering starscouts, a man named Morgan Wade. Morgan -- Gorgon: you see he gave the planet a name which rhymed with his own. Sorry, I'm digressing. The point is, this scout was supposed to have found a key to the dead race's #S methods among the relics they'd left. Of course, this was in the early days of space exploration, three or four hundred years back, and finding alien remains wasn't the commonplace event it later became. So he spent several months investigating, and finally worked out the details of this training technique of theirs. Whereupon he went home and quit spacing for good. He turned his attention to the acquisition of wealth and power, and in a few years he'd become one of the richest and most important men alive. True, you might argue this was sheer chance -- a famous pioneering starscout, deciding to switch careers, would have a good deal in his favor to begin with; the prestige of his reputation, for example. Nonetheless, I'm certain there was more to it than shows on the surface, and here's why. It had always been my intention to devote myself to the definitive study of the Gorgon remains. During my early work in cosmoaoheology I saved as much as I possibly could from my salary, with the sole purpose of financing an independent expedition to Gorgon and settling this -- this myth that haunted me, once and for all. I was  extremely worried that I might not achieve my goal, because as you know Gorgon has been open for colonization for nearly half a century, and I had visions of some blockhead sitting a cement factory on top of the alien relics. So, as soon as I could afford it, I went out there to survey the ground and perhaps reserve the digging rights if I could find a helpful government official. What I found was so much worse than a mere cement factory I can hardly bring myself to think about it. About eight or nine years ago, a starship in distress broke from hyper and had to put down on Gorgon for repairs. They came in on a southerly orbit, and the island with the relics was the easiest place for them to land. I imagine they were furious at failing to make the main colonial base, not that it would have made much difference to the length of their stay. For when they radioed the main base for some major spare part they needed, it turned out not to be in stock, and had to be flown in from another star-system. So -- they waited. And it's my belief that, having nothing better to do, they set about deciphering the records left by the vanished aliens. It had been done once already -- perhaps they even found some notes left by Morgan Wade; I don't know. What I do know is that a month or five weeks went by, and the spare part arrived and was flown out from e colonial base, and away they went. Laying the entire island waste with their drive as they took off. I've been there. I've seen it. It haunts my dreams, and I wake up crying with rage and frustration. There's nothing left now but a pile of calcined rubble on a bare platform of rock sticking out of the sea. I'm certain it wasn't an accident, IF though that's what they tried to tell me on Gorgon. They maintained that the repairs must have been inadequate; the engineers are supposed to have overlooked some fault more serious than the one they spotted. But this implies that the engineers were incompetent, and I'm just not buying that. Does an incompetent man almost immediately set himself up as the head of a private army on Brocken and overthrow the government, becoming virtual dictator a few months later? That's what happened to the chief engineer! I was so heartbroken at this ruination of my lifelong ambitions that my first thought was this: I ought to make them pay for what I regarded as an unforgivable crime. I had some vague notion of suing the crew for the value of the items they'd destroyed -- I told one of the planetary councilmen that I could get a museum on Earth to certify a value for him, and though he personally didn't give a damn about alien relics he liked the idea of a windfall to the treasury. So he got the government to stake me the fare to the ship's latest recorded port of call. Well, I caught up with her. Only to find that every last one of her crew who'd been aboard when she landed on Gorgon had done the same as Morgan Wade and quit space for good. Following their separate trails was naturally more difficult and more expensive. I was often tempted to give up and content myself with grubbing on some other planet after some far less interesting species than the Gorgon race, especially when the Gorgon government decided they were throwing good money after bad and withdrew the retainer they'd been paying me. Worse yet, the chief engineer had become dictator of Brocken, as I said, and thus put himself effectively beyond reach of a private suit against him; and the ship's MO had joined the priestly hierarchy on Thummim, where he enjoyed legal immunity, and -- But that was when I spotted the incredible coincidence. It defied belief that these crewmen, all from the same ship, none of whom had displayed any extraordinary talents hitherto, should turn out overnight to be great leaders. I stopped worrying about compensation for the damage they'd wantonly committed on Gorgon, and began to worry very hard indeed about their impact on the human race. If they'd become masters of whole planets within a couple of years of acquiring the Gorgon secrets, what would they do next? They'd conquer the galaxy, separately or together -- and if separately, then the process of conquest was going to be indescribably dreadful for us poor untalented victims! I spent everything I'd saved to finance my work on Gorgon. I exhausted what I'd accumulated by packing my expense claims against the Gorgon government. I bankrupted myself with interstellar fares, got credit by sheer bluster and spent it and left for some other system just ahead of the law. I believe I'm wanted on at least three planets for dishonored debts. But I don't care. What counts is that I've finally brought my discovery to someone in a position to act against these -- these exploiters of ordinary humanity! B ain grunted. "I see. You've listed these former spacemen, have you?" "Yes, I have full details of their recent careers right here, and what little I could pick up about their earlier lives. They seem to be covering their tracks deliberately, getting rid of as many existing records as -- " Bain snapped his fingers impatiently. "Don't waste time talking about it -- let me read for myself." "I'm sorry," Falkirk apologized sheepishly, and handed over the rest of his fat bundle of documents. When Bain had been silent for a good half-minute, he could endure the waiting no longer. He forced out, "Well, Mr. Bain, what do you think?" "I think it's a pity you weren't given a full mathematical education," Bain muttered, turning up the last of the many pages before him. "What? But -- !" "Mr. Falkirk," Bain said with great deliberation, "you've submitted these findings for computer analysis, haven't you?" "Yes." Falkirk's voice dropped almost to a whisper. "But I'm convinced someone got to the computers first. Because the results I got were ridiculous "Just a second." Bain raised a hand. "What you hoped for, I imagine, was that the computers would pump out some astronomically long odds, and you'd be able to approach me with this as proof of the reality of the secrets found on Gorgon: correct?" "Why, yes. But -- " "Now here we have the odds as calculated by the computers," Bain continued imperturbably. "Naturally, using the unique memory banks here at Galrex, they did a far more thorough analysis than any unaided individual -- with all respect to yourself, Mr. Falkirk. And I see the print-out reads # over # -- in round numbers, about eightseventeenths." "Yes!" Falkirk was beside himself with excitement. "And that's obviously absurd, because -- " "Please!" Bain said sharply. "Mr. Falkirk, where do you come from originally?" "From Isis, but I don't sec what -- " "You will. On Isis, if I recall right, they still adhere to the ancient tradition of celebrating birthdays, don't they?" "As a matter of fact, they do, but -- " "Counting Year Day, there are # days in a standard year. Suppose you have two dozen people in a room : what are the odds against two of them, or more, sharing their birthdays?" Falkirk put his hand to his forehead. If Bain hadn't been SuperGalrex, doubtless he'd have refused to waste time on such a jejune question. With great effort he muttered, "Oh... Twenty-four, two twelves -- call it thirty-six, three twelves. IF times ten... two out of thirty... About fifteen to one!" Bain shoc his head heavily. "It is a pity you weren't trained as a mathematician. The actual odds are rfout # over #, or better than evens." "They can't be," Falkirk said, staring. "If there are # days in a year -- " "There's one chance in # that a given person's birthday will coincide with someone else's. For every additional person the odds against coincidence reduce by one; when you get to the two-dozenth person it's down to #. Now multiply all your fractions together -- # over #, # over #, and so on down to # -- and cancel. When you've done that, you'll find that there remain only about # chances out of # that the next person you try will have a birthday not already on your list. I'm sorry, but there it is. You find it equally extraordinary that out of the entire population of the galaxy ten men should suddenly and simultaneously prove to be great statesmen, leaders, business wizards -- but that's because you're making an intuitive assessment, nothing better than a guess. Examining the situation rationally, the computers have contradicted you." "But how?" Falkirk demanded. "How can this be true?" B ain sighed. "Look, Mr. Falkirk, suppose you ring for a cab, and cab license number I turns up. You'd say how remarkable that was, but this is nonsense. It was a sheer damned certainty that a cab would turn up -- excluding breakdowns and so forth, naturally. In precisely the same way, you mustn't only consider factors like the galactic population and the number of ships a-space when working out your problem. You have to figure in the compensating factors that go the other way, such as that at any given time it's a hundred per cent certain somebody will be top dog on each of our two thousand-plus planets. Is it any more surprising that the dictator of Brocken should be an ex-spaceman than that -- well, that I, out of two times ten to the twelfth living people, should sit in this chair?" "Yes, but every last one of the crew..." Doubt was creeping into Falkirk's voice now. Sensing it, Bain leaned forward to hammer his point home. "Mr. Falkirk, I do sympathize with you. I recognize your sincerity -- but for that. I'd not have accorded you so much of my time, which is rather valuable. Believe me, though, you've fallen into an elementary trap which must be over a thousand years old." "What am I going to do?" whispered Falkirk brokenly. "If you want my advice, you'd best forget all about this obsession of yours and go back to cosmoarcheology. There are too few good men in that field to waste someone with your persistence and drive -- and who can say? Maybe you'll turn up something as interesting as these 'Gorgon secrets'." "Yes, but I have no money, and I told you I'm wanted for debt on at least three planets!" "Mr. Falkirk," Bain said frigidly, "Fm afraid that's trouble you've brought on your own head. You can hardly expect me to set things right for you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do." Head bowed, moving like a man in a daze, Falkirk rose numbly and went out, not bothering to reclaim the precious sheaf of documents on which he'd based his belief in a threat to the human race. Bain gathered them together, and once more his thin mouth quirked into a smile. "Sir, the way you handled Falkirk was magnificent!" Ivor purred from the desk communicator. "He's walked off as meek as a lamb!" "Hm? Oh yes. I was going to tick you off about that, Ivor. You should have reasoned with him, not tried to throw him out. He was wellmeaning enough, and if his thinking had been a bit less confused he might even have had a valid point. Now shut up and don't disturb me till I say so." "Yes, sir," Ivor muttered, and the communicator fell silent. As it was, of course, Bain reflected, Falkirk had overlooked the valid point completely. He punched for a circuit to master computer control, and uttered crisp orders. "Get me all available data on the following persons! The new dictator of Brocken; the high priest on Thummim; the Autarch of Ling; the Premier of Nokomis..." Doing well, considering. But they'd never do any better, because the odds against them were too great. One against ten, to be precise. Insurmountable odds, when you figured in the crucial factor of control of Galrex. "The data are extensive. Superintendent," the machine said with sweet mechanical regret. "They will take about five minutes to print out in full." "I can wait," Bain grunted. He looked around the office, absorbing the aura of power it breathed. Yes, he'd been right from the very beginning -- he'd realized, even before leaving Gorgon, that in Galrex lay the key to the entire Lens. It had taken him a long time to get here, but that was of no consequence. Among the other achievements of the race that formerly inhabited Gorgon, they'd extended their mental control of probability to the maximization of individual lifespans. And he'd done nothing so crude as destroying the alien relics -- why, that misguided action had been so conspicuous, an idiot like Falkirk had come within an ace of explaining the reason for it! Though, as was inevitable, he'd brought his discovery to the person uniquely fitted to explain it away again... Bain pursed his lips. He'd been worried for two centuries that someone might connect him and Morgan Wade. It had finally happened, and here he was, safe and sound. Really, they must have been amazing creatures, there on Gorgon! It looked as though it would take him another century to get really used to what IF IF  Novelette Ve Hunters Of Men He hunted the most deadly prey on Earth -- the men who long ago had ruled HI I A movement high on the wall caught his eye, and Edmond Reud pushed back the hair that usually protected him from the sun, but which was now a danger to his vision. Face and hands smeared the same ochre color as the sky, a man leaped from the wall with a rusty blade. Edmond sent a crossbow reed low, into the belly of the scalper, and the wounded body whistled by. Dust rose even to where Edmond was sitting on his whudey. The whudey sneezed. Another reed sang from Edmond's crossbow, piercing the fallen man in the throat. The whudey grunted when Edmond dismounted, but was patient as he bent over and cut around the hair-line of the corpse. After a tug and a rip, the scalp came free and Edmond sprinkled sand across its bloody side. That makes five, which means fifty pellets on exchange, Edmond mused as he tucked the hair into a bulging pouch. On the horizon behind him rose the Minced Mountain and its metal stalk which seemed to hold up the sky. To his left were barren mountains on which the sky merely rested, and to the right, rose jagged peaks. At that moment the inexplicable mind-prickling began to plague him again. Edmond groaned, but looked toward the city and the pellets for which he would soon feel a need. Ahead, sandblasted and emaciated, but still succeeding in holding the mouth of the subterranean city open, towered two walls, which gradually sank into the sand and left a gaping hole for anyone who would enter the city. Although the darkness seemed menacing, Edmond Reud knew it was actually the safest place in the world. Part of it was respect for fair play and humanity that kept men from scalping each other in the city itself. The city was a safety zone -- the only safety zone. In one of its sand and dirt rooms sat an Exchanger with the pellets, the stimuli that made rhen hunt each other. Sure, there were a few who tried to violate safety respect in the city, but they ended up facing the anger of tveryone there, instead of just one man, as they would outside. The odds were better outside in the sun. I n the stables the whudey whined in fear of being left alone. Edmond gave it a rough pat and a back scratch, but continued on foot in the direction of his room. He passed through the darkness into the strangely lighted chambers, and passageways, the crossbow dangling on his fingertips. Why take chances? You learned that it was better to be pessimistic and end contented if nothing happened, than optimistic and very disappointed if something did. Edmond squinted at the crudely lettered sign at the fork in the corridor, and glanced at the arrows pointing to the respective rooms. Ernev, Bob, Rundal. Some names had been taken down. The owners were, no doubt, lying bleached in the sun somewhere. It had been a long time since he had last been to the city. He had left enough food and pellets for Cathy, but he feared he knew she wouldn't be waiting in his room. She wouldn't have left on her own, but there were other men with that certain pellet wealth that appealed to Cathy. His room was empty. It had been empty a long time, for cobwebs rounded off the corners of the woodbeam ceiling. 'T'm sorry," began the message scribbled on the doorbeam. "But I thought you might be dead. God bless you. Love, Cathy." Edmond laughed aloud, but the laugh kind of hurt his ears. That was Cathy, all right. He wanted to laugh again, but it just didn't come out. No reason for him to stay around. Best get rid of the scalps IF and head for the sun again. And hope the mind-prickling didn't resume its fury. Exchange the scalps... Edmond was beginning to pant heavily, and his muscles ached. He was already beginning to need the pellets. "Scalps," said the usual sign on the usual doorway of the room where light streamed from the usual crystal and metal object on the wall, illuminating the usual Exchanger. A larger sign at the man's feet shouted: "Women: #. Men: #." The exchange for a female scalp has risen ten pellets. Some men would find it in them to collect... but Edmond had never wanted to try it. Respect again... Cross-legged, the palid Exchanger sat in a trance. Edmond pulled out his pouch, spread the clumps of hair across the sand floor, and waited. When he slipped back to reality, the Exchanger glanced down and in two smooth motions swept up the scalps and handed Edmond two handfuls of pellets. Edmond looked into his eyes: often he had felt himself hating this man, but respect for the safety zone had prevented him lets. A fear of not being able to obtain pellets later on entered into his restraint also, he realized. One last backward glance as Edmond left the room showed him the Exchi'ingcr opening his mouth slowly and in it placing a large oblong pellet that looked impossible to swallow. Edmond had never thought of a second kind of pellet existing, but tile Exchanger had just taken one. U T o Crux Orbit I Terra: I am officer replacing Com Stapleton. Would like to know what is trouble with planet Tinni. Have no backTo Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: everything you've heard about Tinni. Is small hot planet and was one of twelve planets beset by aliens called Judicians. Judicians crisped seven planets with nonradioactive burner before Dept. Forces annihilated all Judicians except those who managed to enclose Tinni in charge field. Some human colonists are trapped under charge field with Judicians. We believe all Judician weapons on Tinni were destroyed or damaged and Judicians are a physically weak race so Judicians should not be any great threat to Tinni colonists in those senses. However we must assume that Judicians will try any means for destroying as many human colonists as possible. Judician nature to be nonsubmissive. How not know. We are under pressure from colonization supervision and especially from Bureau of the Million Wonders of the Universe to rescue Tinni colonists. Politics says we must rescue them or else. To Crux Orbit I Terra: I incomprehend problems of rescue of Tinni colonists. To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Damn right you lack background. No one can land on Tinni because charge field will not allow entrance of objects more complex than diaIF lomic elements. Covalent bond diemically. Five terran years were ient on charge field breakthrough research with animals and devices. Only success was device which managed to get through and home in on generators of charge field. If device is working properly it should be attracting human colonists of certain cortex wave emissions to generators in hope that colonists will tinker with generators and drop charge field. Meantime we plan to send out new device controlled by volunteer pilot. Volunteer is brother of stranded Tinni colonist. Pray or something. To Crux Orbit I Terra: Excuse persistence on my part. Curiosity. Is charge field high or low around planet and are colonists ad or devanced scientifically? To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Is low. Field uses mountains as conductors of generators and Tinni core energy. Are devanced. Colonists still use animal transport and because planet is hot inhabit tub T cities. We can suspect further scientific devancement because of Judician factor in Tinni culture. To Crux Orbit I Terra: Curiosity. Why was Com Stapleton taken from jqb as research director of Tinni breakthrough? To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Because five years of recording failures. Mental breakdown of course. So good luck to you. Curiosity. Who's going to pay for this lengthy vacuum discussion? Your background has been costly! T he whudey nuzzled its flared nose into the hot sand, shifting its weight on heavy feet and scratching its rump on a cactus-reed leaf. It then emitted a sigh of pleasure. Edmond awoke from his comfortable position on the slope of the animal's largest hump and immediately grew aware of the prickling inside his cranium. It made him want to scream, but he recognized it, and remembered with annoyance and a little terror that this was just the beginning. The mild part. He just didn't understand this thing in his head. The prickling had occurred over a dozen times before, always growing softer as he neared the Minced Mountain and the metal stalk. After a few days of soothing sensation, the feeling had always stopped, allowing Edmond to resume his search for men and their scalps. Edmond echoed the sigh of the whudey. This meant that he would have to go back to the Mountain and bear the whole process once again. But first -- He dropped from the equinine camel and slashed with a rusty blade at the reeds that had sheltered him from observation the night before. Slicing off the pulpy, thorned leaves, he gathered the bare stems into a bundle, and resumed his perch on the whudey. The shaping of new reeds should kill enough time to take the monotony from the trip ahead. Besides the city, the next safest place was the mid-desert, where you could survey # square kilometers and no human movement could escape you. Any would-be scalper would be noticed far enough ahead for time to shoot some food, roast it over a fire and shape any reeds you might need when he finally did arrive. Edmond laughed. If you wanted to live a life of sun and safety, dig a hole or erect a tent right where he was. That is, if you didn't need the pellets in the city; and Edmond doubted that anyone didn't need the pellets sometime. Wincing at the thought of no pellets, Edmond remembered the violent spasms that had hit him when he had waited too long without them. The prickling continued and Edmond found himself automatically scratching his head as if for fleas. Everything was becoming more and more incomprehensible as the days passed. Especially his memory: it was as if he had been born with plush facial hair -- his memory extended back no further than that. The more he thought about it consciously, the more Edmond found that something had drained importance from his life. There was constant depression -- perhaps because there was no memory of a past life on which to base the degrees of happiness. Or was the depression merely from his lack of understanding of the world? No significance to life... except a pride in that respect for fairIay in most men. Respect that did not belong to a degenerate world of blood and pellets. Perhaps he didn't belong either -- he had that respect. S wishing its forked tail to ward off insects that had accompanied it from the city, the whudey began to blink in a twitch. It gazed out across the desert. Edmond rose in the slick saddle and observed that his whudey stood on the border between a barren land peppered with individual weeds and plants, and that hypnotic world of animated sands. Like the whudey, Edmond wanted to blink the sandy inferno away; but it was there with him, as were the innumerable pins under his skull. He felt like splitting open his cranium and scratching. The whudey half trotted, half loped toward the large speck that called Edmond to the horizon. The area around the well was quite exposed from attack from the nearby rocks, but both man and beast needed water. This time, Edmond had to be optimistic. He again parted the hair hanging in his face and stared into the waterhole. It was too narrow, too smooth and deep to have been dug by shovels, and it looked old. A glance at the well caused Edmond to think of the sky that seemed to rest on the mountains, but he dismissed the association for its pointlessness. If he could only remember back, things would be clear. Having pulled the twin water bags from the whudey's lower hump, he lowered them simultaneously into the well and awaited the splash. When it did come, so did a human shadow to his right. Fool! he shouted silently to himself. So busy meditating, he hadn't even bothered keeping the crossbow beside him. Edmond pretended not to see the IP figure watching him, and through peripheral vision searched for an opportune position for a dash to the saddle. He felt foolish. If his would-be scalper had a knife, he would throw it; with a crossbow, he would get Edmond no matter what. A knife, Edmond hoped. The buzzing of a thousand insects made Edmond unconsciously look to the right. The advancing scalper had also stopped and turned in the direction of the sound: Behind the scalper a flat metal circle skipped across the dunes, and dipped toward him. It couldn't be possible, but Edmond thought he could see the Exchanger's face on the circle -- which was now resembling a platform -- and beside it another face, gray, unfamiliar. The passengers of the flying platform saw the scalper without noticing Edmond, who flattened himself behind the scattered rocks around the well. The platform dipped again and flashed by the dumbfounded scalper. The rim of its floor struck his head, and he staggered, falling. One temple began to shine red in the sun. After a last dip for inspection of the lifeless human, the platform was gone. Ill T here had never been death like that before: machine against man, and Edmond tried to shake it away with a shiver of his shoulders. There had been no battle at all -- but a man had been killed. In such murder there was no respect for equal opportunity, no respect for Man the Fighter. And Edmond knew the platform would have killed him, too, had it seen him. Freeing the body of its scalp was messy and slow for Edmond. A sloppy job; Edmond realized he was disturbed by small nagging notions in his head. Too mny confusing things were happening lately. The platform, the grayish figure beside the Exchanger, the metal stalk, the Minced Mountain, no memory. He developed a quick headache. Thank God it wasn't the windy season, he sighed, starting to scale the infinity of boulders -- the pieces of the shattered mountain called Minced Mountain. Edmond Reud craned his neck up the # meters of rocks and up the other # meters of metal pole. Both mountain and pole didn't belong here. They had not been born with the land; and, with more confusion, they attached themselves to his mind in association with the flying platform that had seemed to be traveling from the city in the direction of the Mountain. The prickling had waned slightly with each step up the mountain. By now it was soft and satisfying, but Edmond wasn't satisfied. It would take him at least ten days to search the shadows of the boulders for whatever was calling him with the prickling and whispering in his head. But assuming that the closer he got to it, the more soothing the prickling would become, the search would neither be impossible nor unbearable. The whudey would not accompany him. Edmond would have to find a place for it and hope the animal didn't snort and betray itself if anyone came near. No -- something besides hope could be done about the snorting. An oblong boulder rested on a low cliff and another long towering rock, forming a natural stall. Edmond led the reluctant animal into the crag's darkness, allowed the whudey five drinks of water, and then tied a piece of rivul skin around its head loosely, but so that it would permit no braying or wheezing. The whudey stood quietly, completely subdued; Edmond gave it a reassuring pat between its silky ears. Edmond started and stared at the water bags. He hadn't noticed that before... or had he? The two bags were not animal skin, and what they were, he didn't know. He sighed a second time, as he realized that as the metal platform associated itself with the Minced Mountain in his mind, so did these water holders -- which were blue, slick and easily wrinkled -- associate themselves with the city, the metal and crystal city lights, and human beings. Two categories of life seemed to be forming in his mind. Logic told him that whatever called him . at intervals was not natural, so he wondered to himself what it would associate itself with when and if he finally reached it. He made its discovery his goal -- something important to life -- even though he was tired of the whole situation; and he made curiosity his stimulus. Since there was no wind to erase his footprints, he tore a large brush from a crevace and swished it in a fury on the ground at the mouth of the whudey's "stall" and across his own tracks as he proceeded toward his goal. On the rocks he would have no worry of being tracked... N o worry of being tracked, unless, as he realized after a few hours of scrambling and frequent slipping, he left a trail of blood. With knuckles torn and screaming quietly in agony from repetitious scrapings, Edmond strove toward the sky, noticing an ever so slight change in the sensation on his brain. Were there any others being called to this place, or was he alone? If there were, they would be trying to stay hidden from his vision, so he shouldn't expect to see anyone in any case. Edmond fumbled. His crossbow clattered against the gray rock; a few reeds rolled out and fell down the slope. He swore and for the first time allowed himself to stand and to stretch, a perfect target for any weapon nearby. He just could not go on without breaking the monotony for his legs and back. The pole glittered above him. Edmond couldn't analyze his deduction logically, but his eyes told him that the pole touched the "sky" as did the mountains to the east and west. Perhaps it was the minute dark tops that made it seem so. Whatever it was, Edmond felt trapped on earth. Mixed emotions flashed over him with each attempt IF deep thought, so he did as little as possible. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the ominous boulders around him. This was a new inferno of gray and the bleached and the yellowwhite heat of the sky. Four days had passed, and nothing... Cut and festering hands and shins took all annoyance from the dust that covered his skin. With a groan he stretched again, and then stopped. An inky darkness different from the usual gray shadows stared at him ten meters away. Darkness meant depth, and depth was seclusion and mystery. His hopes were increased as the mindprickling decreased even more. Half falling, he rushed into the mouth of the cave, and cried out as he almost collided with a man seated on the floor. Edmond stared, heart sounding in his ears. The man's leg was bent at an incredible angle, and what of the man's skin that could be seen through caked dirt was pale and creased. Edmond had seen similar skin once before. Pale and wrinkled from need of pellets. XTormaJly Edmond would have killed the man automatically, but he was not out on the desert now; he was in the unnatural Minced Mountain, and he found it easier to ally himself with the cripple than with his environment. Neither spoke. The man on the floor probably awaited death at Edmond's hands. Edmond awaited an explanation. Rows of small metal containers on wooden shelves stretcher back into the cave. Edmond again sensed that these were related to the city and not to the flying platform. Confusion was mounting -- with frustration, and impatience. "I'm not going to kill you," Edmond said, then felt the absurdity of the statement. The man's face upturned. His snarled hair and beard were graying. Lord, he was old, Edmond realized with a start. Edmond had only seen one Other old man before, a thousand or more days before, the body lying dehydrated and scalped in the desert. "Speak. What is all this?" Again his words sounded foolish, but his words could only echo his thoughts. One seldom found occasion to talk these days. These days? Had there been time before when one had found occasion to talk a lot? The old man was quiet, staring at Edmond. "Sit down," he finally commanded tiredly, and Edmond did so, lying his crossbow aside without hesitation. "You really want to know? You are curious?" Edmond nodded. The old man mumbled something about hope, and sighed. "Then I will tell you and you will have to listen long. There's a lot to say. But since you want to know..." Edmond awaited, finding himself momentarily envisioning the old man, Edmond himself and the whole situation a bit insane. The old man whispered to himself, seeming to chose and arrange the words he would use. Edmond wanted to scream at him to hurry and say something, anything, to break the craziness of the moment. IV #T am, I think, Richard Cordaro. X My leg," the old man said, stroking it as if it were a separate animal, "was broken badly and it's been this way for I don't know how many hundred days. I fell into the cave from a scuffle on the rocks above the cave's opening. It was the second guy who tried to kill me while I had been in the cave. You'll find their skeletons somewhere outside, and their animals' somewhere, too. Probably starved to death," The old man was almost babbling. "I can only crawl and I can barely even talk. I've wanted to talk so much, but no one to talk to all that time. I remember I came here because something called me in my head." As Edmond's eyes jerked in recognition, the old man nodded heavily. "I thought that is why you're here, too. Later we might talk about what calls us here. We have time." He cleared his throat, and resumed. "Since there was nothing for me to lean on to get out, I haven't left, but nor do I want to." The old man gestured at the metal containers. "I have all the food and water I need. Brought them here from a storage room in the city. So much stuff in that room, but I broke my leg and got stranded here before I could bring it all here, to my home, the place that calls me so much." Trying to pull himself along, the old man began to move toward the shelves. Scrambling to his feet, Edmond motioned him to stay still. He felt a new respect -- or a pity -- for this man named Cordaro. "Do you want some of the containers?" Edmond asked. The old man nodded again. It looked like water in the crystal containers, Edmond observed as he sat metal and crystal ones down before Richard Cordaro, who pulled a rusty metal thing from a cranny in the wall. This new metal thing was related to the containers and the city, came the immediate analysis from Edmond's subconscious. With a few jerky motions from the old man's hand, one of the metal containers was opened and wonderful odors hit Edmond in the face. "Go on -- have some," Cordaro said. "There's enough for an army here." He shoved the container toward Edmond, who wrinkled his nose and stuck his fingers into the food. The moisture of the stuff was pleasantly cool to his mouth. With food floating in his jowls, Edmond still managed to blurt, "You do have food and water, but how do you get any pellets. How long have you lacked them? I have some if you need -- " "God no!" the old man interrupted. "Let me go on explaining. No more pellets, ever! I -- " "But look what's happening to your -- " The old man interrupted again, "I asked you to let me go on." Edmond was silent. "I have a bad memory." IF Again Edmond started, but said nothing. C#T have a bad memory, but I X can remember everything that has happened to me since I stopped swallowing the pellets, a long time ago, many memories ago. The pain of no pellets was bad for twenty days, but it left... You can't remember that far back for yourself. But then you have been eating the pellets; they have everything to do with a man's memory." Cordaro stared into Edmond's face. "And I think it is because I haven't had the pellets that I can remember faint things that happened before I first took the pellets. I've written those feelings and memories down on the racks I built to hold up the food." He pointed to a wooden board holding up the shelves. "Would you mind reading them to me, and to yourself?" As Edmond neared the inscriptions, he saw they were numbered. "Number one: 'There is something wrong in the world, for there are no flying animals in the sky.' " "Stop," Cordaro motioned to him. "Have you noticed that?" After a thought back into what of his life he could remember, Edmond agreed. "Yes, I suppose. The only one I did see, fell to pieces when it flew too high. It hit the sky..." The old man smiled for the first time. "It hit the sky. The sky is very close; you've noticed that, too. Read the next one." " 'There is something wrong in the world, because my mind tells me that at night there should be moons and stars in the sky.' " Edmond's mouth fell open slightly. "Stars" and "moons." As soon as the two new words appeared in his mind, he knew the statement was correct. "Go on," Cordaro said. "'There is something wrong in the world, because my mind tells me that someone is trying to get into the world.' " Edmond had never felt that; he read on, "Number four: 'There is something very wrong, because my mind tells me sqmeone is trying to kill all men in the world.' " Edmond stopped himself. "Of course!" he announced in a frustrated voice. "Men are trying to kill men." "Yes, but why?" coached the old man. "For pellets. They're a necessity." "Not to me." "But the pain, and your skin..." "I have no pain now. The pellets are a habit out of men's weaknesses." Cordaro closed his eyes to think. "And as you yourself know, the pellets hurt your memory." Edmond read on without urging: "'There is something wrong in the world, for my mind tells me that men shouldn't forget things as they do.'" A ll at once these new revelations were too much for Edmond's brain. He sank to the floor and put his face in his hands. "You don't have to accept it all," said the old man. "But don't discard it all, either. Try to fit it into your own logic and observations. And please listen to the next two words with all you have." Richard Cordaro then proceeded to succinctly pronounce: "Beautiful women." A feeling of contentment and appreciation followed as Edmond heard the two words. He told Cordaro his emotions. "Your feelings about women are mine," Cordaro remarked. "But remember the sign in the city tells us to kill them for pellets. Our happiness and contentment at the thought of women cannot be a freak of opinion and thought, so most men must feel the way we do. And still the sign says kill women! The Exchangers are men, so basically they must feel as we do. There must be something behind the Exchangers, scalps and pellets, which is not Man." Edmond discovered himself thinking, for the first time in his memory. "You're assuming too much," he objected. "You're not being logical because you just dismissed the possibility of the two of us being freaks. Aren't we the only ones being called to the mountain. That's freakish. And you can't dismiss the possibility of the Exchangers being freaks either." "I see the reasoning in your arguments. My 'logic is based mostly on memory feelings, and I'll have to be shown one way or another that we, and not the pellet-bounties offered on scalps, are freaks to this world, before I'll abandon my feelings. I know of men who have killed women for the pellets, men who would rather do that than bear pain, but still they've had good feelings deep inside for women. They are merely men without respect and pride, I think." The old man was calm; he seemed tired. It gradually sank into Edmond. Respect again and again. "Yes... I won't forget that, no matter what else the pellets make me forget. I will remember the respect. Edmond started to move toward the outside, "I'll have to return to the city before I can have any peace in my mind. I want understanding." "A minute, please... your name?" Cordaro asked. "Edmond Reud." "Edmond, go to the writing on the shelves again, and read the two columns of words you missed. Cover the right-hand column with your hand, read the left-column words to yourself, and then read the right column." "Tinni," Edmond read to himself. He had never heard the word before -- never before in what life he could remember, so he could not know what it meant. But the word "Tinni" made him feel proud and close to whatever Tinni was. Edmond looked at the right-hand column. E ight words were etched there: "The feeling of being near and dear." Exactly what Edmond had felt. He closed his eyes; the old man, he concluded, was right about the wrongness of loss of memory. The next word, or two words, was "Earth-Terra". "Earth" brought nothing, but "Terra" filled Edmond's mind with the memory sensation of something far away, watching him always, somehow. IF The corresponding sentence in the right-hand column said: "Far away, but important." The third word: "Starship." An admiration pride fear awe joy slapped him immediately across the brain, and the corresponding sentence turned out to be the words "Pride and Power". The last word -- no, there were eight words. Edmond's heart rocked inside his chest. It kicked and pushed him. The words were: "Death of Tinni and all men on Tinni." With a cry, he collapsed and moaned. Depression-honor-sense-ofimmediacy-futility-terror swept over him, flogging him. Edmond was panting when he finally rose and stared at the old man -- the prophet, the wizard of words. Edmond understood what Tinni was; he looked at the right column, which said accordingly and appropriately: "More terrible to me than even my own death." "I hope I haven't given you too much," the old man said. "As I said before, something is wrong in this world of ours. Hold tight." "I'm going back to the city to find the Exchanger. I'll do something." "You'll do something," Cordaro mused, "for curiosity. It is so for me also. And also for something more than curiosity... "Out of respect for men in our world," Edmond said. "It seems so. I want to know what is happening in the world, because I have nothing else to do. I cannot move, to scalp, and take pellets, as other men do." "I want to know what is happening," Edmond returned, "because I have nothing else to do except scalp and take pellets, as other men do." V T o Base Roquefort Orbit #. Tinni: You will soon receive comWonders of the Universe. Watch your step. Do not offend them in any way. Say little at all. Urgent. Bureau is debating whether to support the dismantling of the action dept. Our dept. Pray they don't support it. To Crux Orbit I Terra: Check. To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Double check it damn! tory #: Greetings. Do you desire to talk with Base Roquefort? To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Of course. This is interview for bulletin. Very important that you have answers to questions. We desire to know what is being done to open planet Tinni. We have interest in developing Tinni into monument dedicated to colonist tenacity in overwhelming odds if Tinni colonists are still alive. If colonists are not alive then a monument for those brave colonists who died serving mankind. Clear? Yes clear. In fifteen hours a volunteer brother of Tinni colonist will leave Base Roquefort in latest ship developed and will attempt breakthrough of Tinni charge field. Volunteer is necessary for manual control because at from twenty five to one hundred kilometers field has unknown effects on electrical expansion devices used for countering charge field. To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Good. We sincerely hope success. We know you're doing your best. You may know that we will certainly support continuation of your dept. If you're successful in this problem. Thank you. To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Never waste dept, funds with a thank you response. We desire to know what are possible touristic points of Tinni that could be developed on Tinni by our bureau. Don't really know. Perhaps Judician generators which are presently supplying energy for charge field from Tinni core. Or perhaps the device that broke through charge field and homed in on generators and is now attracting colonists to generators by cortical wave irritation. Clear? To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: No. But no matter. We meant any cities etc. Sorry. Underground cities. Very primitive. Would the fact that the colonists can't see the moons of Tinni or the stars because of coloidal suspension of atmospheric particles in charge field make good plavup point for bulletin? To Base Roquefort Orbit # Tinni: Very good. Primitiveness will get tourist sympathy. So will no moons nor stars to light up the nights. One more point for human interest in bulletin. Please give name of volunteer who will try to break through charge field and enter Tinni. Also when. Volunteer will try to take ship through charge field as near generators as possible. Name is Samuel Cordaro brother of colonist director three Richard Cordaro. E dmond slapped his whudey fiercely, and then calmed himself feeling foolish for taking his frustration out on the animal. He spoke to it with softer words, talking at the same time to himself about respect, Cathy, Tinni, Heaven and Hell. Once again the Minced Mountain rose behind him. Night was approaching cancer-like from the west, and the flame-red sunset encouraged his anger at the Exchangers and at whomever or whatever was offering the bounties on scalps. Edmond Read searched the sky for stars and moons. None, of course. No, there did seem to be one. A sparkling white fire spot. But stars were not supposed to grow larger as you watched them. In a few seconds this spot was greatly larger, and then in a shower of light it stopped increasing. It glowed for a moment, seemed to wax in which, Edmond noticed in surprise, began to grow larger themselves. The pieces were falling to earth. He sent the whudey galloping toward the likely spot where the broken "star" would strike the world. IF Some hunks were large. Some small. Some metal and some meat. All the meat was in small chunks. "There is something wrong in the world, for my mind tells me that someone is trying to get in." Edmond remembered the prophet's words. Did "get in" mean by foot or by whudey from a world on the other side of the "sky". No... not by foot or whudey. By platform then? Perhaps. The "star" must have been a flying platform or something. The immediate conclusion that came to Edmond's mind was that the meat pieces were of a flying animal that had hit the platform. It would have had to have been a big bird to shatter a platform, wouldn't it? The pieces of both were so scattered around an extensive area that Edmond could not judge the respective sizes. He gathered dry bushes, molded them into a ball, and retrieved an armful of meat pieces. They would taste good over a fire, he thought as he lit the brush with a match. He looked at the miniature torch in his fingers as it burst into flame, and began to think -- where did it come from? -- but was distracted by thoughts of the taste of flying animal. Edmond enhaled the aroma of the roasting meat and suddenly a chill made him nauseous. His appetite left and he could only think of the new words and emotions in him. The chill hit him again. As he mounted his animal, the pieces of meat were burning, some turning to ash. Edmond didn't look back. He no longer felt the pieces of meat were from a bird. J akesu was gesturing wildly and shouting, as Edmond entered the room behind his back. Jakesu, wild and carefree manhunter, couldn't still be alive! But he was there, and his beard was graying. Edmond smiled to himself and started to shout a hello, and hesitated. The city rooms were all small, and this one was cramped with wide-eyed listeners, so at first Edmond had not seen what his boisterous friend was holding up. One of the listeners moved aside and Edmond could then see the odd gray scalp dangling in Jakesu's hand. The same gray color as had been on the flying platform with the Exchanger. "They cannot be men, or they would not want to kill women." The old man's thoughts again returned to Edmond. A flame began to roar inside Edmond. Pushing and shouting louder than anyone, Edmond Reud made his way to the scalp. "Where did you get that!" Jakesu turned. "Edmond! Best friend among many friends." He winked. "You mean this fine scalp? A strange one, no?" "Yes, of course. Where did you get it?" Edmond was frantic. "Well..." he pulled Edmond over to the side of the crowd, which had turned its attention to another teller of tales. "I'll let you in on my fortune. There's more where this scalp came from. I heard the clattering and saw a hundred of them near that broken-up mountain." Edmond wasn't sure that Jakesu could be trusted, but he had no choice really. "Well, old friend," he said, forcing a smile to match Jakesu's jovial mood, "we should show this scalp to the Exchanger." "Just what I was going to do. How many pellets do you think?" As Edmond threw the scalp to the floor, the Exchanger cried out and fell backward. Edmond grabbed him by the neck, shaking him, and motioned back Jakesu, who was stepping forward. "I'm not going to hurt him. Wait here," he told Jakesu impatiently, "while I ask him some questions." The pale Exchanger's form was limp in Edmond's hands, and became limper when Edmond shouted, "You recognize this scalp! It belonged to that thing in the platform with you, didn't it? It was flying beside you when you killed that man with the platform!" The Exchanger began to whine, but Edmond went on, finding no sympathy for him, "Jakesu says there are others with scalps like this. They're not human are they! They are not men," Edmond sneered, "but they offer the damned pellets so men will kill each other. They aren't men -- no respect for the men and women we are. You are the same as they are, pellet peddler. I should vomit the pellets in your face." The Exchanger's eyes lolled and breathing slowed. Edmond let him fall. "Jakesu, I've forty pellets. You'll have them if you guide me to the other gray scalps, but I don't plan to take any scalps." Edmond almost pleaded, "Believe me. I'm not interested in them, in scalps or pellets. It's what's under the scalps." Jakesu looked at Edmond, puzzled, "You're not interested in pellets? You're crazy! You'd die if you didn't have them. You can say you don't need pellets now because you're not in pain, but men change once they're outside the city and feeling the cramps and shakes." "No," Edmond sighed, "I know someone who doesn't need pellets. He is alive, he isn't in pain, and he has a memory which we don't. And he is a man!" "Forty pellets..." Jakesu looked 'thoughtful, even though still confused. "Forty pellets," Edmond repeated. "But as you said, men change once outside the city. I'll give you the pellets after we've arrived at the gray-scalp things." VI B oth whudeys pounded the ground with bristly hooves, and the men grunted rhythmically from the jolts. Edmond hurried them on. He glanced to the left and saw the metal stalk and Mountain near. If Edmond had to, he would be able to reach Cordaro quickly. Jakesu was quiet and fidgety, always falling behind. Edmond could see the doubt in his colleague's face. "There!" Jakesu finally pointed to an abrupt dip in the desert, surrounded by infrequent large boulders. Why had he nevei come by here IF before? Edmond wondered, and then noticed the deep gorges between the Minced Mountain and e dip. Only a long exaggerated route would allow men to get here from the city or the Minced Mountain because of the gorges. For Edmond it had always been direct travel between the Mountain and the city, back and forth, as both the Mountain and the need for pellets had called him in turn. Both men dismounted and crept behind one of the rock giants that spotted the area. The mind-prickling and tingling was starting again. Edmond cursed. Up close, the dip was not really a dip, but rather an immense natural hole in the desert. Seven meter high cliffs were the walls of the hole. A cave opening -- twice the size of the one where Edmond had found Cordaro -- blackened the far end of the hole. Edmond squinted. Gray figures scurried here and there; and the flying platform rested near the cave entrance. "Jakesu, how did you get down there?" It was hard for Edmond to whisper when he wanted to shout. Jakesu stared at him in puzzlement again, and shook his head slowly. He reluctantly pointed to a natural shelf on the cliff near the cave opening. "I slipped down to that, and roped the gray-scalp one when he was getting off that round metal contraption." Jakesu hesitated, but then went on. "Rivul skin rope is strong. I hauled him up to the ledge, and killed him. He's probably still there. Rotting." It took fifteen minutes to move from boulder to boulder and to the cliff edge above the shelf without being seen. Edmond turned to the graying beard behind him. "Here are the forty pellets." He shoved them into Jakesu's hand. "I'm going down there now. If you want, you can join me " Edmond fitted a reed into the cro.ssbovv. and shifted it to his right hand. J akesu said nothing at firsts but then began moving toward him. "You must be crazy." Jakesu seemed determined. "All your talk, crazy talk. Edmond, I can't chance you messing up this set-up; it's a fortune in pellets. Don't go down there, iriease.' Jakesu had lost his humor. Edmond glared at him, silently and Jakesu advanced, facial features contorting as he grabbed at Edmond's neck. Edmond Reud dropped the crossbow, grasped one of Jakesu's elbows and sleeve, rolled back, sank a foot into Jakesu's stomach, and pitched a bewildered Jakesu over the ledge. The scalper's spine cracked loudly as Jakesu struck the ledge and continued falling. The gray non-humans dashed about clumsily, as Edmond hid. Without being noticed he slipped down to the ledge, and shot five of the creatures with reeds. A high their own mouths, trailed after the fleeing forms. Edmond found an opportunity to drop down the last four meters of cliff wall. Legs aching from impact, he retrieved the reeds, wiped off the almost "human" blood and entered the cave at a run. About twenty of them stood there, motionless. Edmond killed two, but, seeing that they were not about to attack, stopped and cautiously walked through them. Something hit him from behind, but he was ready and he turned, swinging a fist. A cranium caved in under his hand to Edmond's surprise and the lifeless body of the brave gray-scalp thing fell back into the group. It had been so soft. So weak. Edmond shuddered... and surprised himself by turning and taking out his insecurity on the creatures that huddled before him. The blood from the twenty nonhumans was so thick on the reeds he didn't even bother to clean it off. The animals at his feet, he concluded, were neither especially intelligent nor physically strong. They had seemed to be merely doing the work and not supervising it when Edmond had first seen them. He couldn't believe that they were the bounty offerers. He knew, as he seemed to know so many other things lately -- perhaps through a life he couldn't remember -- that these creatures were but the slaves or servants of the real bounty offerers. What Edmond wanted was not the "slave", but rather the "slave-owner", and if the slaves were at work, the slave-owner would be at rest. In the cave... The Minced Mountain still called, but he remembered an obligation to IF Tinni. He wanted to find those who were for "the death of Tinni and all men." His goal had changed, he realized; or had it? Someone coughed. Edmond whirled in the semi-darkness and watched a second Exchanger he had seen in the city, amble by unaware. "Traitor." Edmond whispered hoarsely. The caves echoed slightly. The Exchanger's knees bent, as he almost collapsed against the cave wall. Quickly Edmond slipped a reed from the bundle and pressed it hard against the man's throat. "I won't kill you now," Edmond announced, "if you tell me enough, and 'enough' is everything you know." The man squirmed under the reed; Edmond let up a little. "I've taken the pellets," Edmond spoke again. "So I don't have much of a memory, but I know enough to know when you're lying." He pressed down on the reed. A gasp, and then slowly: "I could not help it." The Exchanger seemed to fall apart, eyes watering. "Do you know what a Judician is?" Edmond felt the word "Judician" and the gray things he had just killed associate themselves. He nodded. "The Judicians put the field around Tinni. Then the Judician Centurion -- the commander of the weak ones -- found me wrecking their weapons. I managed to get to all the weapons except one, but they couldn't use it. They're too weak and disorganized to get it on the sand foil and move it." As each new word was spoken, it became old and fell into place in Edmond's mind. Pieces of memory filled his head with a light and a confusion. The Exchanger mumbled on, pathetically, even to Edmond. "They kept me a prisoner in the cave. I had to eat what they gave me -- I didn't know it was a narcotic, that it would give me hallucinations. They ate it, too, so I didn't have any idea I would get addicted. Please believe me!" "And the pellets you give men are narcotics, too?" Edmond had a grim line for a mouth. The Exchanger nodded slowly. "But the pellets they made me hand out to men make human beings lose memory association. The Judicians had studied the effects of narcotics on men a long time before. They knew men would kill each other to get the pellets, if they put a pellet price on a human scalp, and mad : men forget most of their lives. The Judicians are trying to kill all men on Tinni. They have high prices on women's scalps so we won't reproduce -- so we'll die off. I didn't know what the Judicians were doing until too late. I couldn't do anything about it. The Centurion said I wouldn't get any more of their food if I didn't start the pellets around, exchange them for scalps after men were addicted and turn the scalps I got into him. I haven't killed anybody like everybody else has." The Exchanger was panicking. "Even you've killed a lot of men. I couldn't help it. Even if I had refused the Centurion and died. the Judicians would have found someone else to take my place as an Exchanger. You want to live, too. I didn't want to die." The Exchanger's voice was at a ridiculously high pitch when he finally stopped. Edmond looked at him, feeling empty of most emotion. "You wouldn't have died... but you didn't know that... Edmond realized he was half talking to himself, but didn't care. "I should kill you and the other Exchanger. I should throw your scalps at the feet of the Centurion, but I am too sick of you to touch you." The Exchanger was in a pile on the cave floor, and Edmond stood over him. "What is the metal stalk on the shattered mountain?" "It's the conductor for the charge field generators inside the mountain. It holds up the field." "Why," Edmond asked, "didn't you go to it and try to wreck or turn off the generators?" He didn't listen for an answer. The Exchanger would say something about the Centurion having the food he needed and that he would have died if he hadn't gotten the food. Edmond began to shutter. He needed pellets. There were some on Jakesu's body, but he loathed to touch it. He swore at the pellets along with  the continuous mindprickling that added to the torture of frustration and advancing pain. Now was not the time to be disabled by spasms and cramps... He had to find the Centurion. A rhythmic sliding was coming down the passageway of the cave. Edmond set the reed delicately in his weapon and waited. The Judician Centurion rumbled incoherently when It saw him. Iti massive stomach, which was being pushed along on a leathery callous, bounced to a stop. "Greetings!" cried the alien, and Edmond laughed with a new hatred. The thing was completely nonhuman. Edmond retorted, ' "Is death worth greeting?" He followed the thought of the Centurion's brain when the Judician said, "I will give you anything you want. You will sit alone above all men in the world. I am strange and powerful, so I can give you all that you want -- even those little round things you need so badly. I -- " A gurgling interrupted. Edmond shot the reed at an angle through the soft belly, and reloaded the crossbow. There was a thump as he sank another shaft into it beyond sight. Without warning, Edmond was enveloped from behind. He only had time to scream once and see the face of a second Centurion looking down at him with long thin lips. The sides of the cave room dripped minerals, and were encrusted with a rainbow of colors. A syrup seemed to be flowing through Edmond's stomach. He glanced sideways at the second Centurian, which was holding some long pellet in its multi-segmented fingers and was attempting a human smile. IF Edmond recognized the pellet as one like the Exchanger in the city had swallowed and the kind of pelkt the other Exchanger had just talked about as being a hallucination inducer. Edmond was prepared when the syrupy feeling swelled and the hallucinations began... When the hallucinations passed, Edmond didn't want to think about them. They had involved death of Tinni and all men, over and over again. He realized how stupid he had been to assume the existence of only one Centurion just because the Exchanger had mentioned only one. No worse error could have been made. And within only a few hours of success. All it would have taken to open the skies and save what was left of Tinni was a quick ride in the sand foil -- it would have been easy enough to control -- and then a search of Cordaro's cave for the passageway to the generators. Only a few hours and the sky would have fallen for good. Edmond kicked himself mentally. He was too excited to become depressed, so crying was not among his plans. Plans? He had no plans! The Centurion came forward with another pellet. It held a screaming Edmond Reud down with its heavy stomach, poked him in the groin to make him open his mouth wider, and forced the "food" down his throat. Edmond sprang away, and stuck his own fingers down his throat, vomiting the pellets up. As tears rolled down his cheeks, he cried out in victory. If he could help it, he would not be addicted to another kind of pellet. For God's sake, not another habit! H is actions had stumped the Centurion. It looked so confused -- even more confused by Edmond's actions than Edmond had ever been by Judician behavior -- that Edmond almost laughed. If the alien could use pellets and hallucinations against him, he could do the same back. The Centurion sat in front of the doorway and partially closed its eyes. Edmond pretended to sleep, and almost fell asleep before the alien finally let its own lids completely shut. With a leap from the floor Edmond reached the Judician, grabbed In the August Galaxy -- Complete Short Novel Plus stories and features by James Blish  Norman L. Knight, Algis Budrys, Willy Ley, etc. Don't miss it ! the pellets from its fingers and jammed them down its throat almost to his stomach. The alien burped terribly, coughed and tried another smile: "Very fine food." Edmond could have screamed and wept. He feared for his sanity: how absurd could human logic be. If the pellets were alien food, then they wouldn't be a narcotic for the aliens, too. He wouldn't accomplish anything with warped logic, he told himself. The Centurion still sat blocking the cave-room doorway. Was it waiting for something or somebody? Edmond decided to make a play on its waiting, if that's what the Centurion was doing. He shuffled over to a bulge in the rock floor, and braced his foot against it, the squatting alien out of eyesight of the movement. The Centurion stared at him unblinkingly. Edmond tried to act nonchalant, but then caught himself again. What was nonchalant to a human wouldn't be nonchalant to an alien. Edmond allowed himself to act nervous. It wasn't hard. "Who's that!" Edmond shouted as loud as he could, and pointed abruptly through the doorway down the corridor's shadows. The alien strained its neck to see, unbalancing itself by resting on a flimsy arm. Edmond pushed off from the bulge in the floor and toppled the Centurion, mashing its face into the wall. With a kind of joy he trampled its face and neck. After an exploration of metal sticks and buttons on the sand foil, and a dash across the gorges and desert, Edmond Reud found Cordaro waiting for him at the cave. A quick greeting, and Edmond left the puzzled man as he ran into the intestines of the mountain. Edmond was awed when there was no great rumbling or bang as he pulled on the generator switch and cut off the charge field around his planet. T he beardless young man with the straw-colored hair and neat pale-blue uniform announced himself as Lieutenant Commander Charles Finglebower of Base Roquefort, which was presently orbiting Tinni, and that he had come to help Tinni recuperate from its ordeal. Edmond and Cordaro greeted him by the Minced Mountain. Edmond Reud and the Lieutenant Commander found four hours and forty-seven minutes the minimum length of time to discuss the status of things in general on Tinni and in the Universe. At the end of that time, Edmond's memory had returned to him, in all its beauty. Even the ugly events had a special beauty of presence. His head was bursting with answers to the questions he had carried with him so long. Questions about the well, which the Colonization Supervisors had dug fifty years before... the water bags the Supervisors had stocked the city with... the tops of the mountains which had IF been dark because the force field had obscured them... The Lieutenant Commander mentioned the unsuccessful attempt of volunteer Sam Cordaro to enter the charge field during the night. Edmond remembered with a familiar chill the night when it had seemed a "platform" had hit a "bird"... he remembered how he had almost eaten the savory meat scattered around. Edmond grew sick for a moment and realized he would always have a secret from his friend Richard Cordaro. Edmond finally managed a smile. "Don't worry," said Lieutenant Commander Finglebower. "We have known about the narcotic effect of the Judician food upon humans for just as long as the Judicians. Injections can be given to eradicate the addictions of the colonists. No trouble at all." Edmond felt a needle slip into his arm, and a woman -- a woman! -- in pale blue smiled at him. "I would like to do some of the injections myself," Edmond found himself saying to a surprised Lieutenant Commander Finglebower. "I'll find what men and women are left in the cities and give em the medicine. You could give me the needles and a few light shockers to calm the scalp hunters, and a little instruction for the injections..." Finglebower shrugged his shoulders and nodded, "Fine. The nurse will show you the proper procedure soon. But now I want you to meet a person who'll be very important to Tinni very soon. He's a representative of the Bureau of verse, and he wants to talk to you and Richard very much. He'll be out of the ship in a minute." Something uneasy stirred in Edmond's mind at the memory of thd grew. He remembered what the Bureau had done to other planets and men. will have a bill passed   soon as possible to make Tinni a monument," announced the Bureau representative enthusiastically. "I'll give you the details tomorship down. Each of the remaining colonists will be given a job as guide or lecturer. Both men and women. Many female tourists -- a lot of Suffrage Succeeders -- will flock here; and perhaps an artificial lake can be put In to make Tinni a real riviera. Historical, adventurous, wonderful. All adjectives describing Tinni. Can't you see the picture of it now?" "As a commercialized touristic pot," Edmond retorted. "Well, there is no dishonor in that, you know. A hundred planets are that way: they show men and women how great Mankind has been and always will be. For instance, Sasham's World..." Edmond didn't hear any more. He began to think about things that were just now returning to him... childhood. That was so long ago. The city, when people were working together. Sand being washed out of his hair and ears. Men and women making another Terra, or at least trying awfully hard. Laughter -- perhaps the greatest memory. Pride. Respect for each other, for Tinni. The Respect towered in his mind. He remembered sunsets and furry whudeys silhouetted on the deserts. Whudeys with soft humps and flattened noses nuzzling the warm sand. the sunsets became marred by shapes of a thousand starships. Some fat, some thin, some fast, some sluggish, some looking pregnant, almost in caricature of the carrying in their bowels. The animals, laughed at, teased, jabbed, penned up until Edmond's mind screamed. F rom a rather omnipotent viewing place high on Minced Mountain, Edmond Reud and Richard Cordaro watched the lone Base Roquefort ship grumble, belch and rise. Another Tinni sunset was beginning, and there was enough sunlight for Edmond to extend an imaginary hand over the boxes that the ship had left, with plans of returning the next day with surThe boxes contained shockers, canned food, water to be added to the Minced Mountain stores, needles and serum, and gleaming metal equipment to aid Tinni's renaissance. Edmond nodded the ship a thank you. He turned with a sigh to Cordaro. "There is something I remember now. It was etched on something long ago on Terra, almost like your words on the shelves. It was a question, and I wish now that I had asked it of the Bureau man: 'Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?' There didn't seem to be any in the Bureau man, or in the rest of them either." Cordaro looked at him. "They should neither touch nor have Tinni, should they?" Edmond smiled. Leaning on Edmond's shoulder, Cordaro hobbled beside him, as they began a walk toward the quiet generator switch. Perhaps in a hundred generations, or whenever someone on Tinni decided to open the field again. Mankind might have Now in Worlds of Tomorrow -- Your all-time favorite science-fiction and science-fact writers are in Worlds of Tomorrow -- get it today! IF IF  Novelette Hs real business was insurance. But the goings-on in the crater had to be everybody's business! I J ohnathon Andrews was working. Two hundred credit marks a day plus expenses testified that Marine Surety Inc. sanctioned his activities and remembered him, at least on payday. Glancing at his watch, he paid the waiter and walked leisurely across the flagstone terrace behind the hotel toward Waikiki Beach. The waiter stood looking after him thoughtfully for a moment, then hurried to a small table just behind the door of the inside bar. 'Can I bring you anything else, sir?" He smiled professionally and dried the watermark under an empty glass. The large man at the table stared at him impassively but didn't answer. The waiter produced a carved swizzle stick and laid it in the center of the table. "The beach is beautiful this time of evening," the waiter said, and bustled away into the kitchen. The large man stood up, looked around the room and brushed against a solitary customer at the end of the bar as he headed out the door. The man at the bar paid no attention, but very shortly he, too, got up and walked out toward the beach. Through a slit in the shutter of a dressing cabana Johnny Andrews watched the two come single file across the terrace. They looked up and down the nearly deserted beach and then settled into solitary chairs on opposite sides of the terrace. This hunch is paying off, Johnny thought as he changed into a bathing suit. Hunches are poor substitutes for facts, but there were no facts. At least there were none to justify the expense account Marine Surety's fair-haired investigator had run up the last four days. Making a down payment on Diamond Head was hardly the conventional route of inquiry into a series of hi-jackings -- but these hijackings werehardly conventional. F irst, the sheer size of the take was like heisting the west wing of Fort Knox. Second, these robberies were happening entirely outside the atmosphere. Third, no one had any better ideas. Those two spectators on the terrace were the first indication that someone might be interested in him besides the comptroller back in the home office. Maybe he could follow them home. In any event it was now six forty five and the sight he came to see was due very soon. He left his clothes in the cabana and stepped out into the soft Hawaiian twilight. Picking a powerboard from the stack beside the cabana, he trotted down to the water. Johnny was old fashioned and basically disapproved of the cigarsized power units stuffed into most surf boards nowadays. Any overweight office manager could glide effortlessly out to where the really large rollers broke and usually found them more than he could cope with. Right now, though, a powerboard was exactly what he needed. The fading sunset had switched on a few dim stars, but most of the sky was still glowing with leftover daylight. The tide was nearly in, but the sea was so quiet that the first thousand yards were only waist deep. He flopped down onto the board and opened the finger throttle half way, heading straight out to sea away from the lights. About fifteen hundred yards out there was a shallow depression in the bottom where the tall breakers coming from over the night horizon rounded off for a moment before their last long crashing run into the hotel beaches. He stopped the board in this quiet area and twisted over onto his back to watch the northern sky. He checked his watch; two minutes still to go. IF T wo shipments in a row of highwithout a trace. Two more like that and his net assignment would be locating a cheap wholesale source of bulk red ink -- and with no expense account. Marine Surety had become the giant of commercial cargo insurance by backing long shots, but a single national budget of half the nations on the planet. Somewhere out beyond the fading twilight three more cargoes were inbound. The first one was due tonight. His watch showed the time had run down and he concentrated on the north end of the vanishing sunset. Moving slowly, two dim pinpKints of light detached themselves from the afterglow and crawled steadily up the sky growing brighter as they approached the dark zenith. Guessing right was a profession with Johnny Andrews and this trip looked like a better guess all the time. It had to be here. Out beyond the parking orbit zone a difference of a minute or so in departure time would throw the track of an interplanetary transverse trabut they all had to come down the " Pie chute to get home. This was the chute -- the only place a planned intercept really could take place. The two points of light drew closer together as they reached the top of the sky. Retrofire position to put the cargo ship into the North African docks would be about half way down the eastern sky from Hawaii, but the two points had merged long before that. That second ship had made an incredibly accurate rendezvous. At least he had a starting place now. First, get ashore and confirm with the home office that the company was about one national budget closer to bankruptcy; then find out where those two oversized oeachboys went when they weren't lounging around expensive terraces looking ominous. H e paddled the board around to point in the general direction of downtown Honolulu and used the power switch to move quietly parallel with the swells about a hundred yards to one side of the terrace. Then, staying flat on the board to keep his silhouette low, he ope ned the throttle and slid into the trough behind the biggest wave he could find. The board kicked forward leaving a froth of white water which he hoped wouldn't be too noticeable so far out. Very shortly the sea bottom began to shallow and shove the big swell up into a long curling crest of surf that thundered nearly half a mile straight in to the beach. Johnny hung on with full power, hidden right behind it. With a little kick he hoped the gallery on the terrace would still be gazing out to sea waiting for him to appear sliding grandly down the front of a wave where surf boards belong. He slid up a backwash of froth onto a stretch of beach where the dark palms grew almost down to the high tide. Just behind the first row of trees the underbrush was expensively natural. Except for an indignant couple who had bargained for a little more privacy in the shadow of a tree, he thought he was unobserved. He left the powerboard and slipped into the tangled vegetation. Nowhere in the world but Hawaii could a man parade through the bushes without clothes in solid comfort. Things that stung, bit or scratched had never been tolerated, even during the brief interlude when the early missionaries had managed to get clothes on the natives. Staying about ten feet inside the dark undergrowth he felt his way carefully back toward the terrace. Now that he was free of his watchers the next step posed a problem in etiquette. He needed to contact McComb back in the home office in Kansas City to confirm the hi-jacking he thought he'd just seen -- and those two interested parties on the terrace needed some serious attention. Knowing who they worked for could save weeks of blind stumbling. But a dripping swimsuit is a bit conspicuous after dark, even in Honolulu, II T hey . were still tliefe, sitting stolidly at each corner of the terrace. The heavy one had ordered a drink. Johnny looked him over for future reference. He weighed about # and perhaps # pounds of it was excess. Even without the fat he'd be barrel-shaped, with a neck that was a visual protest against the custom of wearing collars. Straight, light brown hair and suit to match -- Johnny couldn't get an eye color from this distance, but the layer of flesh on high cheek bones pushed them nearly out of sight anyway. The other man was thin, brunette and faced away from him. His left ear lobe was missing. Johnny moved back through the tangle of vines to the edge of the side lawn of the hotel where bogancertain the guests knew they were in Hawaii. Here, out of sight of the terrace, he marched stiffly across the lawn to the side entrance like any other newly arrived malahini determined to go native comfortably. Ten minutes later with dry clothes on, the situation appeared much less complex. It's remarkable how a pair of trousers increases a man's self-confidence, he reflected on the way back down the elevator. Simply get a video tape of these two gentlemen and transmit it to the home office. From then on help could be as close as the nearest police station in case he lost them. He stopped at the terrace bar for some sort of unpronounceable concoction served in a bulky coconut shell. Then he sauntered out onto the terrace holding a pocket-sized tape-camera behind the drink. This was too easy. Just sit down, lean back, take a healthy sip pointed toward each one and they'd be recorded for posterity. The first sip was the longest. He had cautiously avoided looking IF around before he sat down and aiming for the sknny one he got a long picture of an empty chair. He glanced quickly at the other corner. T he big man was still there. He knew the eye color now. So light gray they were almost white, they stared impassively at his peculiar method of holding a coconut shell. Johnny had two more gulps than he intended before he could get the glass down. Now what? he thought. If he didn't see the camera, it's his turn next. If he did see it, there's nothing to lose, so it's still his turn next He looked blandly around the terrace and then aimed a healthy pull on the coconut shell at White Eyes. By now the terrace had taken on a misty, unreal appearance that probably had something to do with his hurried draughts from that coconut. He'd watched the bartender insert two kinds of rum, some vodka, raw coconut milk and crushed pineapple and hadn't seriously intended to drink the thing. He heaved himself to his re!u'.nt feet and ambled across the terrace. There was a not-so-cleverly disguised phone booth near the beach cabanas In the shape of a miniature polynesean temple, from which he could still see the terrace while he called McComb. Moving around made him feel a little better as he left the lighted terrace to enter the phone-temple from the beach side. It opened on the water so the customers got the full benefit of the Waikiki surf background roar when they called back home. He inserted the tape magazine from his camera into the videophone recepticle and turned off the light in the booth in order to see the terrace better. White Eyes had turned around and was looking down across the darkened beach. "I wonder where his skinny partner went?" he said to himself as he started dialing. He found out between the fourth and fifth digits. There was a glimpse of rapid motion just behind him and to one side. He whirled directly into a small but thoroughly professional leather sap laid just above his left ear. The last thing he remembered was wondering inanely how this guy lost his left ear lobe when he was obviously left-handed. T he bartender looked up and shook his head in rueful professional pride as he watched his latest Muana Loa Special customer being helped by two friends as he stumbled across the terrace toward the side lawn of the hotel. He signaled a busboy to go out and retrieve the coconut shell. Johnny had a hard head, but was realistic enough to sit quietly and let it throb when things came back into focus. He was wedged into a tubecar seat designed for two between White Eyes and Lefty. As his vision cleared slowly, he felt the gentle jostle of the capsule-like car as it sped along an airless steel tube a thousand feet below the surface of the Pacific. IF Judging from the advertisements around the walls this was one of the inter-island locals that fed commuters and money into Oahu from ah the surrounding islands. Wherever they were headed he didn't have much time because these vacuum cars shot all the way to the last island in the chain in less than twenty minutes. He began slowly raising a hand to feel his head, but the big man beside him fastened a paw on his arm that felt like a steel claw. Lefty also shifted his weight warningly and he subsided to look around the car. They were at the rear. It was nearly empty. The commuter rush was over and people in town for the evening were still there. Well, he'd wanted to know where they lived. "Are you gentlemen always so attentive to lonely tourists?" he ventured. "We'll talk later, Mr. Andrews," White Eyes rumbled. His voice had a gurgling quality that left the impression that he didn't use it very often. His big hand tightened again on Johnny's arm in a way that left the impression that he used it a lot. The cdr began slowing and two or three of the passengers stood up and started back toward the exit at the rear. Johnny and his escort sat quietly until the car stopped, but when the last passenger was out he was hurried to his feet and out onto the platform just before the door hissed shut. The last of the passengers was disappearing up an three of them crossed the deserted platform to follow. T he street at the top was not much better. Wailuku may be the "capital" of the island of Maui, but things get pretty quiet in a farm community when the sun goes down. No traffic was moving. They started down the street toward the only sign of life, a forlorn establishment with a single car parked in front. The lighted sign dangling precariously across the sidewalk read, "Fenner's Grill". "Want me to drive?" Lefty said as they approached the car. "It talks!" exclaimed Johnny, and then winced from the increased pressure on his left arm from that vice-like hand. His fingers were beginning to numb. "I'll do it," White Eyes said. "Get in the back and lay him out again if he moves a muscle." They were in front of the little restaurant now and Lefty opened the back door of the car. Lettering from the last half of a gold sign on the side of the car could be seen on the front door as White Eyes relaxed his grip to reach for the car door. Johnny's arm sagged helplessly, but the other one was still intact. It's now or nothing, he thought, and drove his good right arm into Lefty's midsection about two inches past the waist. He felt White Eyes clutch at his coat and miss as he whirled away and dove for the door to "Fenner's Grill". Leaning against the door from the inside he tried to remember whether ftere was a special phrase rtiedieval fugitives were supposed to use to claim sanctuary in a cathedral. A mall round Chinese bartender sat behind a tiny bar on one side of the room still holding the paper he'd been reading. "How about a beer," Johnny said finally, nothing else coming to mind. Outside, he heard the car start and looked back as he walked over to the bar stool. It was a station wagon, he could see now, with a symbol consisting of two concentric circles painted on the side. White Eyes was driving with Lefty slumped down in the back seat. As they pulled away gold letters reading "Crater Ranch" flashed briefly over the symbol in the light of Fenner's sign. Ill # C A re you from the Crater?" asked the bartender handing him a glass. His stiff hair was crew cut to a gray stubble and a heavy un-Chinese beard threatened to westernize his clean shaven plump cheeks. "No, I'm here on a vacation," Johnny sighed as he sat down and began rubbing some circulation back into his left arm. "What's the Crater?"  "In that case you've found the best Mexican food in the islands. The second booth is empty," the bartender beamed. All of the tables were inclosed in booths with walls clear to the ceiling Chinese style with curtains across the front. "Thanks -- just the beer, ' Johnny said. All the booths were probably empty; not just the second one. The place was quiet as a desert. "What's the Crater?" "We don't often get tourists. Ihey hang around Honolulu and Oahu and never see the real Hawaii," the little bartender pressed a button behind the counter and an even rounder, almond-eyed girl came scuttling from a back room with a clean table cloth and utensils. "I'm not hungry nowl" Johnny protested still rubbing nis arm. "What's the Crater?" "Oh, just a cattle ranch. Did you know the mountain valley you can see right out that window is where it rains two hundred inches a year? There's not any decent Mexican food in Honolulu, you know." "Where is it?" "Right in the second booth. Carlotta's bringing your Ming tea. It's our specialty with chalupas and..." "The cattle ranch. Where's the cattle ranch? I really couldn't eat a thing." "Carlotta, just bring some tostados to the bar, then," the bartender sighed and opened another beer -- apparently for himself. "Haleak.ala." "Cheers. Where's the ranch?" "That's where it is -- Ha-ie-a-kala. That's the name of the mountain. Most of my customers are local -- a few commuters and lately that crowd from the Crater. Straight across out the front door you can see part of Molokai Island. There's one place there you can see nearly fifty waterfalls at the same time coming down the side of a three thousand foot cliff." IF "Then the Crater's new," Johnny tried again. #h no, that's where the whole island of Maui came from. Haleakala's a volcano." "I mean the ranch." "Well, the Haleakala crater's been used to graze cattle over a hundred years. It's the biggest volcanic crater in the world about twenty miles across. It's extinct. You can see it right out the kitchen window. Most tourists get sunburned at Waikiki and take a ride over the Pali and think they've seen the islands. You can't get up there now, though." "To the crater, you mean." "That's right. Some big outfit leased it last summer and put up a gate house on the only road up the mountain. It's hard to see how they're going to make any money, though. They've hauled almost as many people up there as they have cattle." Johnny almost congratulated him. It wasn't any harder than extracting a tooth, he thought. Aloud he asked, "Is there a phone booth around?" "Yes sir. The first booth is a phone booth. The second one is set up for your dinner whenever you're ready. Try a tostado while I get you another beer." "Thanks," Johnny said, too spent to argue. He took his first beer, still full, and went over to the first booth. Behind the curtains was the glass door of an oversize videophone set-up complete with a chair and small table. He dialed McComb, wincing instinctively between the fourth and fifth digits. There was a tapping at the glass as McComb's face appeared on the screen and looked past his shoulder with skeptical disapproval. The little Chinese was still talking on the other side of the soundproof glass brandishing the plate of tostados. "Just a minute, Mac," Johnny said and opened the door. "You forgot your tostados," the bartender said. "TeU your friend on Maui it's Fenner's." "Thank you, he... " but the door was closed and the curtains pulled shut. #Tt's nice to see a man enX joying his last fling," McComb said drily. "You wouldn't believe it anyway." "We just lost another ship." "I know -- I watched." "From there?" "Mac, it has to be from here. There's no other place they could make an intercept. Could you see anything on the screen?" "Maybe. There were some scattered static returns just behind the ship right after it came into range that could have been a merging ship. Anyway it went right by without firing the retro rockets just like the others." "Where is it now?" "Vanished. Once they're out of orbit they're gone unless they answer a radio call." McComb looked defeated. "That's exactly why I'm sure someone's controlling an intercept from here. This is the only place where a returning ship has to pass through part of a predictable earth orbit in order to hit the dock area. You can't get into the garage without using the driveway. This is the driveway." "Well, did you call me to recommend the tostados?" "They're made of poi. We need a check on a skinny black-haired guy about # with a missing left ear lobe. He's working with a heavy, brown-haired partner -- very light gray eyes." "Not much to go on. How about a picture?" "I had one but your phone number's too long." McComb looked as if he were about to switch off so Johnny hurried to fill him in on the past two hours' activity. "... so I mean to stay right here until you can round up a sheriff's posse to escort me up to this 'Crater Ranch'," Johnny finished. "It won't work," McComb said. "If it doesn't, I won't work either." # # Tohnny, you wouldn't look J natural without a fresh lump on your head. The police will agree with them. It's no crime to take pity on a passing drunk. Besides, if there is anything to your idea, you won't find it by parading through the gate with a carload of local police." "Maybe they know a side door." His sore arm hurt when he tried to feel his sore head with it. "I'll pass this on to the United Control Authority but they're in such a flap right now it'll be days before they can get around to it unless we can give them something more definite," McComb said. "I know it," Johnny sighed. Evidence, nailed down and documented, is what it would take to get the powerful forces of the United Government moving. "Let me know when you have something," McComb said. "I'll be here at least all night. Where're you going now?" "To the next booth. Carlotta's impatient." "Who?" "It may be noon in Kansas, Mac, but the Hawaiian moon is on the Maui surf. I'll check back with you before midnight your time." McComb looked resigned and was already reaching for another phone connection when Johnny switched off. "Why not try a squid taco with your beer?" said the bartender as Johnny disentangled himself from the curtains. "No thanks. Where can I rent a car?" "Oh, you won't need to. This is the taxi stand. My cousin, Enrico's out on a long run now though. You have plenty of time for dinner." "I should have guessed," Johnny said. "Did you say squid?" "Sure. Carlotta makes them. She says she gets tired of beef." "Maybe I'd better have that dinner now." It seemed the only way out. Carlotta popped through the swinging half-door from the kitchen like an animated beach ball and opened the curtains and door to IF booth Dimiber two. The food was not really as bad as he had feared, although he skipped the tacos. Several attempts to elicit information from Carlotta on a variety of subjects from the Crater Ranch to a shrimp tail protruding from his enchalada resulted only in paroxysms of giggles. F inally the bartender came over and offered helpfully, "Carlotta was raised the old way, you know. She never learned English until she was twelve and still doesn't speak it very well. We Portugese value tradition -- she'll make some one a fine wife." More titters from the kitchen. "Portugese!" "Sure. This latin cuisine doesn't come from a can." "I knew the blood lines had mixed out here," said Johnny, watching the girl clearing the table blushing round and pink. She squeaked another stifled giggle and the dancing eyes all but disappeared in two slanted slits. "I guess I should have noticed the name." "Yes sir, mine's Manuel." He set a milk-colored liqueur on the table. Johnny examined the glass dubiously. He needed someone fast who knew the island intimately and this irregular little oriental at least had the advantage of being available. Aloud he said, "A latin accent can be very attractive in a girl." Another choked shriek came from the kitchen and even Manuel looked surprised. "Oh no. Like all Fenner ladies for generations Carlotta was taught only Hawaiian." "Like you said, most tourists never get to see the real Hawaii," Johnny said. "When will the taxi be back?" "Enrico had a fare to a little town on the other side of the island and there's only the coast road because you can't go over the mountain. Another two hours, maybe." "You must make captives of quite a few customers then." "Oh no!" Manuel looked really distressed seeing the reputation of his "real" Hawaii at stake. "I only have the delivery truck parked around back, but I'll be glad to take you to our hotel." Johnny considered a moment and leaned across the table. "Manuel, I'll give you the price of a new delivery truck if you can get me onto the Crater Ranch." M anuel's oblong eyes seemed to tilt a little more. "I have a delivery to make there tomorrow. My cousin has a food store..." "I mean now." "Tonight?" "You can pick out the truck." He finally had Manuel's total attention. The little bartender picked up a towel and slowly wiped the already spotless bartop. He inspected a clean glass and set it back on the shelf. "I got a cousin who has a car agency in Honolulu..." "Fine, we'll get the best truck he has -- custom-made if you like." "You know somebody up at the Crater?" asked Manuel, watching Johnny intently. "I just met a couple of guys from there today in Honolulu. I want to surprise them." "Carlotta," Manuel called over hk shoulder still looking at Johnny. "I have to make a delivery. If any customers come in just serve them ar)d be pleasant." 'She will," said Johnny and an answering squeak floated back from the kitchen. IV A full moon flooded the island with twilight as they bounced out of the town in a little boxshaped truck with "Fenner's Fine Foods" in faded red letters on the side. Johnny had been prepared for more sales resistance from the little Chinese, but Manuel had not said a word since he told Carlotta they were leaving. The enormous bulk of the mountain filled the sky ahead as they left the trees of the town behind and rolled through the flat sugar cane fields that filled the sea-level plains. The road sloped upward like a giant ski-jump, but the pitch here was so gradual that it was perceptible only from the laboring truck engine. After a few miles the cane and the climate switched abruptly. The air was cooler and row after endless rov of squat pineapple plants stretched away in all directions. Now Johnny could see the whole island outlined with a necklace of lights around the water's edge. The cane fields and beach made a base barely large enough to hold Haleakala looming above them. After the pineapple fields, a few scraggly trees appeared that quickly gave way to low bushes and grassland, as the pitch of the slope steepened and the road began to wind. It was already uncomfortably cool when they hit a layer erf scattered clouds about two thirds of the way up. Before coming out the top of the cloud, Manuel switched off the lights and slowed to a blind crawl. "Where are we?" Johnny asked. "The gate house is about ten miles ahead, but from here on cattle trails go all around the mountain. The floor of the crater is good grazing land, but no grass grows at the rim; so cattle inside never try to get out. There's a trail along here somewhere that'll take us up to the rim about half way around. You'll have to walk from there, though." They came out of the cloud and the road stretched away bright again in the moonlight. After a few hundred yards, Manuel turned suddenly through the shallow ditch and bound off across an open field broken here and there by huge boulders that towered over the truck. "I don't see any trail," shouted Johnny over the rattle. He clutched at the side of the cab to stay in his seat. "Oh sure. Lived here all my life. We used to camp up here when we were kids. Just ken more minutes." T wenty minutes later the truck bumped to a stop against an outcropping of rock and black lava IF tc attempt. The truck sighed and wheezed gently as he shut off the engine. "Oh well, you're getting me a new one," said Manuel with satisfaction. "Come on," and he got out and started up the lava flow. "Manuel," Johnny hung back. "This is as far as you go. You must have gathered I'm not an invited guest here." "But we're not there yet." The little Chinese stopped and looked back. "This is close enough. Here's your new delivery truck," Johnny said and held out a note he'd scribbled to McComb. Manuel scrambled back down the rocks and held the note close to read in the moonlight. He looked back at the rim of the crater once or twice and again at Johnny. "Who's McComb?" he finally said. "He's an official in the company I work for. That note will make sure your truck goes on my expense account." "Mr. Andrews, I know those two 'cowboys' you left in front of my place. I got a plate glass window, you know. They've been in before. Even Carlotta stays quiet. They wouldn't know a steer from a walleyed fence post." "If you were watching, why'd you'd come up here? Doesn't Wailuku have any police?" "Sure, my cousin Roberto. I'll tell him about it tomorrow. Anyway, all I saw was you folding up that skinny guy and by me that's a public service." 'Listen, that big man is no sct touch, Manuel. If you're caught up here with me, you could end up actually looking Portugese. I only want to see what kind of ranch gets hidden on top of a mountain with more people than cattle." "I am Portugese." Manuel paused and looked back past the jutting boulders at the ring of lights around Maui that twinkled up through the scattered cloud layer. "Mr. Andrews," he said finally, "this is my island. We've been here since # when an Irish ancestor was forced to leave Macao hurriedly. Now four months ago these people just move in, put up gate houses, keep us out of our crater because they say they want to keep their breed pure. Why, this is the only place around here you can get away from that blasted Hawaiian eternal springtime! I'm curious, too." M anuel slipped the note into his pocket with an air of finality and addressed himself again to the tumbled rocks. His shape appeared designed to portray, one of those small oriental gods of happiness in a spring pageant; but he bounced up the rocks like a basketball and Johnny was scrambling to keep up. They reached the narrow rim without warning and Johnny was not prepared for the sheer size of the view. The slick black lava fell away steeply from their feet but soon became grass as the curve of the gigantic bowl flattened out into a vast meadow broken here and there by dark house-sized cinder cones; mute ghosts of the last anIF cient dying breaths of the long dead volcano. Gleaming sparsely under the rim to their left, a lonely cluster of lights outlined the main ranch house. A few head of cattle huddled dark and motionless directly below them. "See. The cattle can't cross the pahoehoe," Manuel said. "That ought to keep the breed pure." "Of course." "Manuel, I just happen to know 'pahoehoe' is slick lava, not a vow of celibacy. Skip the travelogue and let's get closer." They slid down the hard pahoehoe and started across the grass toward the distant lights. As they moved through some scattered cattle, Johnny noticed that two had lost most of the hair on one side as though from a radiation burn. About a hundred yards from the lighted compound they were stopped by a huge slab of concrete rising waist high from the ground and extending nearly to the compound. It was painted a dark color they couldn't identify in the moonlight and hadn't been noticeable until they walked up to it. Part way down the length of the slab sat a large pile of cinders looking pretty much like the rest of the cinder cones scattered over the valley floor. "They over-did the lanai," Johnny said. "Was this here before?" "I don't remember it. The shipping corral used to be along here." T hey moved quietly along the smooth concrete closer to the ranch buildings. About the center of the slab a series of heavy conduits extended from the edge and disappeared into the ground. At the end nearest the ranch house the earth was dug away to a depth of about ten feet, but the concrete apparently extended deeper than that. Near one corner of this pit some steps led down to a door in the end of the slab. Johnny paused part way down the steps where they could still see the ranch buildings, their eyes level with the top step. "All asleep," muttered Manuel after a moment. The heavy steel door was held shut by a sliding latch bar but had no lock and opened easily when Johnny tried it. They entered an enormous corridor nearly the length of a football field, dimly lit from panels in the ceiling. The set-up was about what Johnny had expected to find somewhere around the islands, but infinitely larger than anything he had ever heard of. "What is it?" asked Manuel eyeing the rows of control panels with glowing jewel lights that stretched almost out of sight. "This is how you de-rail a space ship, my Latin friend. It's the grandaddy of all radars. Those pipes we saw coming out of the slab must lead to an antenna laid along the ground. This whole crater is a giant, dish-shaped radar antenna! It's so big they're using an atomic pile for power. You ever heard of Marine Surety Incorporated?" "No, I already got insurance. My cousin..." "No matter, no matter. How "Sure. It's been in all the news for weeks. There was another one tonight." Manuel looked apprehensive. "That what this is?" "That's exactly what this is." Johnny walked along to the main panel in the center of the corridor. "This monster ought to generate a pulse big enough to overpower a servosignal five hundred miles away -- and the ships are only about a hundred miles up when they come over here on the way in." "I'm not as curious as I was." Manuel edged toward the door. "Jus: a minute. I'll leave a calling card." He studied the rows of switches for a moment and then activated the main radar power-on toggle. The power indicator dial next to it stayed dead on zero. "I thought you only came to look," Manuel said over his shoulder. "Yes, I'm coming." Johnny lingered at the big central control panel. Manuel was right. He did have what he came for. But Marine Surety didn't pay salaries like his just for information. Besides, there was only one more step. Along the top of the control panel lay a row of positioning knobs glowing .with dull ferocity in the dim light. The row was labeled "Neutron Supress" and the pointer on each knob was turned to "Positive Insert". Johnny turned one toward "Extract" and a rumbling buzz began under their feet. "This ought to do it," he said and quickly flipped all the knobs over to full "Extract". "Let's do it outside, then," said Manuel already at the door by then. "We should have at Icist ten minutes before anything goes," Johnny said stepping through the door after him. V I than that," said a familiarly hoarse voice from the top of the steps. White Eyes stepped back from the center of the walk where he'd been standing and the moonlight glinted off the snout of a small hand gun almost lost in his over-sized fist. "Come on up." It sounded almost hospitable. Johnny followed the small Chinese up the steps with the unhappy calculation that the two of them added together would not quite equal the big man even without the gun. "How'd you get here, anyway?" White Eyes asked as they reached the top. "Over the pahoehoe," Johnny said indicating the center of the crater with his thumb. "The what?" White Eyes glanced out across the crater. By now they were in front of him. White Eyes was still looking across the moonlit crater from the top of the steps. Suddenly a rumble sounded through the open door they had just left. Reacting fast, Manuel's almond eyes seemed to grow round with fear, and he screamed toward IF an imaginary ally, "Run Roberto!" In spile of himself the big man turned and Johnny was in the air. He planted both feet on the man's left kidney and snapped his legs straight. It felt like kicking a tree, but White Eyes was on his way down the steps as Johnny landed rolling. It wasn't much of a head start, but it was enough. Johnny looked for Manuel and found him out in front already rounding the corner of the slab. By the time Johnny drew even with him they had left the slab behind and were racing across the floor of the crater...can't outrun... nuclear blast!" Manuel panted... won't explode... just heat," Johnny began to draw ahead. "... then... what's the hurry?" "... we're on... antenna... high power... before burns out... just run!" T hey raced through the motionless cattle, leaving small flurries of startled activity. Glancing back, Johnny caught the flash of headlights turning through the trees around the ranch house and shortly the hum 'of an automobile engine made a background to their pounding feet. The car zigzagged in their general direction avoiding livestock and probing with the thin white finger of a spotlight. Johnny, his breath coming now in long gasps was surprised to find Manuel still keeping up. The spotlight flashed across their backs, paused and snapped back to flood them with wavering splashing light as the car bounced around to head toward them. Wild arm and leg shadows leapt crazily ahead across the grass until they stabilized in silhouettes against the sharply rising pahoehoe. Only a few steps more. A sharp snapping sound at his car and splinters of lava erupted from beside his shadow up ahead. Now nearly all the shadow climbed up on the wall of lava as they got closer. He drove his aching legs with all the strength he had left and watched the ridiculous shadowdance on the wall like a soldier running in place and getting nowhere. Another snap near his head and more lava shattered. The rapid tempo of Manuel's drumming feet behind him increased even higher. Manuel took shorter steps but, seeming to have an inexhaustible supply of them, he went by like a motorboat. The pahoehoe here was cut by deep clefts; and they flung themselves like flying rag dolls into the darkest one. Suddenly the hum of the car engine stopped. Johnny heard shouts and tried desperately to control his gasping breath enough to hear the words. Manuel lay propped on one arm. "Let's go," he wheezed. "No, wait. I think it's coming!" Johnny said. "Well, I don't want it. Let's go," and Manuel started crawling up the crevice. "I mean we made it. Look!" Johnny was peering back over the edge of the pahoehoe. T he lights were out now on the car where it had stopped about a hundred yards away, shining black in the moonlight. Across the great bowl of the crater stretching away out of sight in the misty darkness wisps of smoke were beginning to appear making regular twenty foot squares as the grass charred black and here and there licked into flame. "But it's extinct!" Manuel cried. "That isn't the volcano -- it's, the antenna! I told you the wh! crater is an enormous radar antenna. They just laid cables under the grass. It already had the right shape." "I never saw a radar antenna do that." "You never saw one get that much power. We left that nuclear pile out of control and going wild," There was a flash from the car and bits of flying pahoehoe showered over them. The doors opened and two figures piled out. Johnny and Manuel ducked. Ihey heard a scream that died away quickly as if the screamer had lost interest part way through. No more shots. Johnny tried another cautious look and saw why. Now the black lines had all turned red and gave off a bluish glow. In the eerie light the two figures from the car lay scattered about halfway between the wall and the car. One lay where he had fallen across a cable and the red line of the cable appeared solidly unbroken where his chest had been. The other had dragged himself into the middle of a square; but his legs were ten feet away on the other side of the fiery red line. A heavy rumble came from the concrete slab which split open with a burst of smoke as they watched. Instantly the glowing checkerboard of the crater went dark. They crawled up the cleft in the wall keeping as much pahoehoe as possible between them and the crater, Johnny having begun to wonder how much radiation they might have picked up from the antenna display even before the power plant blew. "The company will kick through with a lot more than just a delivery truck for this night, Manuel," Johnny said as they bumped back down the mountain. The old truck sagged a bit more than it had, but it ran rather well downhill. "Oh, it wasn't for money. You're just lucky you happened onto me. My cousin Renaldo says in the old days I should have been a sailor. Maybe I ought to go into space. Renaldo says I'm just the adventurous type." Johnny sighed, 'Probably it's      IF IF  Short Story Patron of the Arts The Berserkers loathed life -- but life had the power of doing them one unduplicable service! A fter some hours' work, Herron found himself hungry, and over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line, aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the critic might be praising something good. Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm's length behind him, for all the world like some human kibitzer. He had to chuckle. 'T suppose you've some idiotic suggestion to make?" The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it, going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and captured it; and Piers Herron, the only passenger, had not yet had time to learn his way around. It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it -- it was meant to be a place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew weary of staring at pictures. The Franz Hals had been built as a traveling museum; then the war of life against berserker machine had grown hot around Sol, and BuCulture had ineptly decided that Earth's art treasures would be safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. The Franz was ideally suited for such a mission, and for almost nothing else. Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Heiron could see that the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as indifferent to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Franz's crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to fight off the berserker's boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred death to capture. Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being -- apart from a few bacteria -- within half a light year; and he was pleased to discover that his situation did not terrify him, that his long-growing weariness of life was not just a pose to fool himself. H is metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the kitchen devices to work. "Still no suggestions?" Herron asked it. "Maybe you're smarter than I thought." "I am what rtien call a berserker," the man-shaped thing said to him suddenly, in a squeaky, ineffectualsounding voice. "I have captured your ship, and I will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my meaning?" "I understand as well as I need to." He knew his captor was an utterly alien and inanimate thing, built in some segment of time and space beyond human ken, built to fight in some ancient war between races who had never heard of Earth, and who perhaps were long dead themselves. Now the berserker machines' war was against all the life of the galaxy. Herron had not yet seen the berserker itself but he knew it would be a sphere the size of a planetoid, now a few miles away, or perhaps a few hundred or a thousand miles, from the ship it had captured. Captain Hanus had tried desperately to escape it, diving the Franz into a cloud of dark nebula where no ship or machine could move faster than light, and where the advantage in speed lay with the smaller hull. The chase had been at speeds up to a thousand miles a second. Forced to remain in normal space, the berserker could not steer its bulk among the meteoroids and gas-wisps as well as the Franz's radar-computer system could maneuver the fleeing ship. But the berserker had sent an armed launch of its own to take up the chase, and the weaponless Franz had had no chance. Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron bowed to the machine. "Will you join me?" "I need no organic food." Herron sat down with a sigh. "In the end," he told the machine, "you'll find that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I'm not right." He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought. Evidently his body still feared death -- this surprised him a little. "Do you normally function in the IF operation of this ip?" the machine asked. "No," he said, making himself chew and swallow. "I'm not much good at pushing buttons." A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When capture was only minutes away, Captain Hanus had come dashing aft from the control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft past all the stored art treasures. "Herron, listen -- if we don't make it, see here?" Tooling open a double hatch in the stern compartment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drain pipe. "The regular lifeboat won't get away, but this might." "Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?" "There's room for only one, you fool, and I'm not the one who's going." "You mean to save me? Captain, I'm touched!" Herron laughed, easily and naturally. "But don't put yourself out." "You idiot. Can I trust you?" Hanus lunged into the boat, his hands flying over its controls. Then he backed out, glaring like a madman. "Listen. Look here. This button is the activator; now I've set things up so the boat should come out in the main shipping lanes and start sending a distress signal. Chances are she'll be picked up safely then. Now the controls are set, only this activator button needs to be pushed down -- " The berserker's launch had attacked at that moment, with a roar like mountains falling on the hull of the ship. The lights and the artificial gravity had failed and then come abruptly back. Piers Herron had been thrown on his side, his wind knocked out. He had watched while the Captain, regaining his feet and moving like a man in a' daze, had closed the hatch on the mysterious little boat again and staggered forward toward his control room. #C'llhy are you here?" the ma V chine asked Herron. He dropped the forkful of food he had been staring at. He didn't have to hesitate before answering the question. "Do you know what BuCulture is? They're the fools in charge of Art, on Earth. Some of them, like a lot of other fools, think I'm a great painter. They worship me. When I said I wanted to leave Earth on this ship, they made it possible. "I wanted to leave because almost everything that is worthwhile in any true sense is being removed from Earth. A good part of it is on this ship. What's left behind on the planet is only a swarm of animals, breeding and dying, fighting -- " he paused. "Why did you not try to fight or to hide when my machines boarded this ship?" "Because it would have done no good." When the berserker's prize crew had forced their way in through an airlock, Herron had been setting up his easel in what was to have been a small exhibition hall, and he had paused to watch the uninvited visitors file past. One of the manshaped metal things, the one through which he was being questioned now, had stayed to stare at him through its lenses while the others had moved on forward to the crew compartment. "Herron!" the intercom had shouted. "Try, Herron, please! You know what to do!" Clanging noises followed, and gunshots and curses. What to do, Captain? Why, yes. The shock of events and the promise of imminent death had stirred up some kind of life in Piers Herron. He looked with interest at the alien captor, the inhuman cold of deep space frosting over its metal here in the warm cabin. Then he turned away from it and began to paint the berserker, trying to catch not the outward shape he had never seen, but what he felt of its inwardness. He felt the emotionless deadlines of its watching lenses boring into his back. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, like cold spring sunshine.   asked Herron, standing over him in the galley while he tried to eat. He snorted. "You tell me." It took him literally. "To serve the cause of what men call death is good. To destroy life is good." Herron pushed his nearly full plate into a disposal slot and stood up. "You're almost right -- but even if you were entirely right, why so enthusiastic? What is there praiseworthy about death?" Now his thoughts surprised him as his lack of appetite had. "I am entirely right," said the machine. For long seconds Herron stood still, as if thinking, though his mind was almost entirely blank. "No," he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him. "In what do you think I am wrong?" it asked. "ni show you." He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn't the damned thing kill him and have done? The paintings were racked row on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the ship for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth century statglass coating. "This is where you're wrong," Herron said. The man-shaped thing's scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. "Explain what you are showing me," it said. "I bow to you!" Herron did so. "You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question, if one that is somewhat too broad. Explain, you say. First, tell me what you see here." "I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two. The image is sealed inside a IF liiViSEaBfi protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him -- " "You see a man with a glove," Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. "That is the title, Man With A Glove. Now what do you say it means?" There was a pause of twenty seconds. "Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?" L ooking now at Titian's eight hundred year old more-thanmasterpiece, Herron for the moment hardly heard what the machine was saying; he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work. "Now you will tell me what it means," said the machine without emphasis. Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open. The berserker's mouthpiece walked at his side. "Tell me what it means or you will be punished." "Tf you can pause to think, so can I." #ut Herron's stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered eyen more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach. His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it IS disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year. # The berserker asked: "What have you made here?" Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably. "It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured." He waved at the storage racks. "My attempt has failed, as most do." There was another pause, which Herron did not try to time. "An attempt to praise me?" Herron broke the spoiled brush and threw it down. "Call it what you like." This time the pause was short, and at its end the machine did not speak, but turned away and walked in the direction of the airlock. Some of its fellows clanked past to join it. From the direction of the airlock there began to come sounds like those of heavy metal being worked and hammered. The interrogation seemed to be over for the time being. Herron's thoughts wanted to be anywhere but on his work or on his fate, and they returned to what Hanus had shown him, or tried to show him. Not a regular lifeboat, but she might gel away, the captain had said. All it needs now is to press the button. Herron started walking, smiling faintly as he realized that if this berserker was as careless as it seemed, he might possibly escape it. Escape to what? He couldn't paint any more, if he ever could. All that really mattered to him now IF was here, and on other ships leaving Earth. Back at the storage rack, Herron swung the Man With A Glove out so its case came free from the rack and became a handy cart. He wheeled the portrait aft. There might yet be one worthwhile thing he could do with his life. T he picture was massive in its statglass shielding, but he thought he could fit it into the boat. As an itch might nag a dying man, the question of what the captain had been intending with the boat nagged Herron. Hanus hadn't seemed worried about Herron's fate, but instead had spoken of trusting Herron... Nearing the stern, unwatched by the machines, Herron passed a strapped-down stack of crated statuary, and heard a noise, a rapid feeble pounding. It took several minutes to find and open the proper case. When he lifted the lid with its padded lining, a girl wearing a coverall sat up, her hair all wild as if standing in terror. "Are they gone?" She had bitten at her fingers and nails until they were bleeding. When he didn't answer at once, she repeated her question again and again, in a rising whine. "The machines are still here," he said at last. Literally shaking in her fear, she climbed out of the case. "Where's Gus? Have they taken him?" "Gus?" But he thought he was beginning to understand. "Gus Hanus, the captain. He and I are -- he was trying to save me, to get me away from Earth." "I'm quite sure he's dead," said Herron. "He fought the machines." Her bleeding fingers clutched at her lower face. "They'll kill us, too. Or worse! What can we do?" "Don't mourn your lover so deeply," he said. But the girl seemed not to hear him; her wild eyes looked this way and that, expecting the machines. "Help me with this picture," he told her calmly. "Hold the door there for me." She obeyed as if half-hypnotized, not questioning what he was doing. "Gus said there'd be a boat," she muttered to herself. "If he had to smuggle me down to Tau Epsilon he was going to use a special little boat -- " She broke off, staring at Herron, afraid that he had heard her and would steal her boat. As indeed he was going to do. When he had the painting in the stern compartment, he stopped. He looked long at the Man With A Glove, but in the end all he could seem to see was that the fingertips of the ungloved hand were not bitten bloody. Herron took the shivering girl by the arm and pushed her into the tiny boat. She huddled there in her dazed terror; she was not goodlooking. He wondered what Hanus had seen in her. "There's room for only one," he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again. "After I close the hatch, push that button there, the activator. Understand?" That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut, and waited. Only about three seconds passed before there came a soft scraping sound that he supposed meant that the boat had gone. XTearby was a tiny observation J  blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the berserker through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near the Franz but none of the commensal machines were in sight. Looking the Man With A Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel. The discordant lines of Herron's own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them. He hadn't time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metalworking had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker-portrait. "When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it." The machine-voice squeaked back at him: "Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good." Herron was suddenly too frightened and weary to speak. Looking dully into the machine's lenses, he saw there tiny flickerings, keeping time with his own pulse and breathing, like the indications of a liedetector. "Your mind is divided," said the machine. "But with its much greater part you have praised me. I have repaired your ship, and set its course. I now release you, so other life-units can learn from you to praise what is good." Herron could only stand there staring straight ahead of him, while a trampling of metal feet went past, and there was a final scraping on the hull. After some time he realized he was alive and free. At first he shrank from the dead men, but after once touching them he soon got them into a freezer. He had no particular reason to think either of them Believers, but he found a book and read Islamic, Ethical, Christian and Jewish burial services. Then he found an undamaged handgun on the deck, and went prowling the ship, taken suddenly with the wild notion that a machine might have stayed behind. Pausing only to tear down the abomination from his easel, he went on to the very stern. There he had to stop, facing the direction in which he supposed the berserker now was. "Damn you, I can change!" he shouted at the stern bulkhead. His voice broke. "I can paint again. I'll show you... I can change. I am IF IF  Serial Across the great galaxies Seaton and DuQuesne battled -- whole races their pawns -- and the universe their prize! S eaton, halfway to the headsets, paused, stunned. That strident roar of klaxons was a noise he had not expected ever to hear except in test. It was the dire warning that the life of the Valeron's defensive screens was to be measured in seconds and but few of them. Yipe!" he yelled then. "Controlroom fastV His voice of course went unheard in the clamor of the horns; but his yelling had been purely reflexive, anyway. While uttering the first syllable he was energizing beams of force that hurtled all eight of the party through ultra-high-speed locks that snapped open in front of them and crashed shut behind them -- down into the neutral-gray chamber at the base of the giant Brain. The deadliest enemies in the universe are Richard Seaton and Marc C. DuQuesn# ... but they have patched together their feud in order to join against strange enemies from space. Seaton enters the partnership with open eyes: He knows that Blackie DuQuesne is his enemy. But he also knows that, next to Seaton himself, he is perhaps the ablest human being alive -- and his brains and fighting fury will be needed. DuQuesne, on the other hand, has lost to Seaton too many times before to risk a move against him without every advantage he can get. It was Seaton who imprisoned him in a stasis of pure force, from which he escaped only through the combination of fortune and the superhuman skills of the disembodied intelligences who were his fellow exiles. The partnership is as untable at mercury fulminate; but while they are together, Seaton and DuQuesne are a team that has no equal in the cosmos. And they need all their resources. For space is filled with races driven by their destinies into conflict with humanity -- the Jelmi, strange humans from another galaxy; the Liurdi, their batlike overlords... and an enemy stranger and more deadly still. But DuQuesne has completed his plans. With the aid of a new fourth-dimensional translator invented by the Jelmi he is confident he can take Seaton. He sends six hired gunmen through the fourth dimension to kill Seaton and his friends. But the gunmen fail. In that same moment, another enemy strikes: At fantastically long range an undetected spaceship is attacking them with destroying rays... and their defenses are going downl Seaton rammed his head into his master controller and began furiously but accurately to think... and as he sat there, face harsh and white and strained, a vast structure of inoson, interlaced with the heaviest fields of force generable by the Valeron's mighty engines, came into being around the Brain and the other absolutely vital components of the worldlet's core. After a few minutes of fantastic effort Seaton sighed gustily and tried to grin. "We're holding 'em and we're getting away," he said, "But I had to let 'em whittle us down to just about a nub before I could spare power enough to grab a lunch off of them while they were getting a square meal off of us." He spoke the exact truth. The attack had been so incredibly violent that in order to counter it he had had to apply the full power of the Val eron, designed to protect a surface eters, to an area of less than thirty thousand. "But what was it, Dick?" Dorothy shrieked. "What could it have been -- possibly?" "I don't know. But you realize, don't you, that it was two separate, unrelated attacks? Not one?" IF "Why, I... I don't think I realize anything yet." "Those guns were Colts," Seaton said, flatly. "Forty-fives. Made in the U. S. A. So that part of it was DuQuesne's doing. He wanted -- still wants -- the Valeron. Bad. But those super-energy super-weapons were definitely something else -- as sure as God made apples. No possible ship could put that much stuff out, let alone DuQuesne's Capital D. So the question rises and asks itself -- " "Just a minute, Dick!" Crane broke in. "Even granting so extraordinary a coincidence as two separate attacks -- " "Coincidence, hell!" Seaton snarled. "There is no such thing. And why postulate an impossibility when you've got Blackie DuQuesne? He sucked me in, as sure as hell's a mantrap -- you can bet your case buck on that. And he outfoxed himself doing it, for all the tea in China!" "What do you mean, Dick?" Dorothy demanded. "How could he have?" "Plain as the nose on... plainer! He got it from somewhere, the son of a -- " Seaton bit the noun savagely off -- "probably from Klazmon, that Galaxy DW-#-LU up ahead there that we were heading for is full of bad Indians. So he honeyed up to the Jelmi, got that fourth-dimensional gadget off of them and tried to kill us with it. And he would have succeeded, except for the pure luck of our having lowered our gravity so drastically on account of Dunark and Sitar." "I see," Crane said. "And the Indians jumped us when he pulled the trigger -- perhaps attracted by his use of the 'gadget'." "That's my guess, anyway," Seaton admitted. "DuQuesne thought he was allowing plenty of leeway in both time and space for his operation. But he wasn't. He had no more idea than we did. Mart, that any such forces as those could possibly be delivered at such extreme tange. And one simple, easy lie -- the coordinates of the Llurdan galaxy -- was all he had to tell me and defend against my probe." D uQuesne's attention was wrenched from his timer by a glare of light from a visiplate. He glanced at it, his jaw dropping in surprise; then his hands flashed to the controls of his fourth-dimensional transmitter and his six men appeared -- four of them gruesomely headless. For a moment all six stood stiffly upright; then, as the supporting forces vanished, all six bodies slumped bonelessly to the floor. DuQuesne, after making quickly sure that the two were in fact as dead as were the four, shrugged his shoulders and flipped the bodies out into deep space. Then, donning practically opaque goggles, he studied the incandescently glaring plate -- to see that the Skylark of Valeron now looked like a minor sun. Involuntarily he caught his breath. The Vale ran s screens were failing -- failing fast. Course after course, including her mighty zones of force, her every defensive layer was flaring into and through the violet and going black. DuQuesne clenched his fists; set his teeth so hard that his jaw-muscles stood out in bands and lumps. Anything to put out that much of that kind of stuff would have to be vast indeed. Incredibly vast. Nothing could be that big -- nothing even pertaining, as far as DuQuesne knew, to any civilization or culture of the known universe. Relaxing a little, he assembled a working projection, but before sending it out he paused in thought. Seaton hadn't attacked; he wasn't the type to. He wouldn't have, even if he could have done so at that range. So the strangers, whoever or whatever they might be, were the aggressors, with a capital "A". Guilty of unprovoked and reasonless aggression; aggression in the first degree. So what Tammon had told him about that galaxy being dominated by "inimical life-forms" was the understatement of the year. And he, DuQuesne himself, had triggered the attack; the fact that it had followed his own attack so nearly instantly made that a certainty. How had he triggered it? Almost certainly by the use of the fourth-dimensional transmitter... But howl He didn't know and he couldn't guess... and at the moment it didn't make a lick of difference. He hadn't used any sixth-order stuff since then and he sure wouldn't use any now for a good while. If he did anything at all, he'd pussyfoot it, but good. He didn't want any part of anything that could manhandle the Skylark of Valeron like that. His Capital D was small enough and far enough back -- he hoped I -- to avoid detection. No he wouldn't do a single damn thing except look on. F ascinated, DuQuesne stared into the Valeron's screens were down now. Even the ultra-powerful innermost zone -- the wall shield itself, the last line of defense of the bare synthetic of the worldlet's outer skin -- was going fast. Huge black areas appeared, but they were black only momentarily. Such was the power of that incredible assault that thousands of tons of inoson flared in an instant into ragingly incandescent vapor; literally exploding; exploding with such inconceivable violence as to blast huge masses of solid inoson out of the Valeron's thick skin and hurl them at frightful speed out into space. And the Valeron was not fighting back. She couldn't. This fact, more than anything else, rocked DuQuesne to the core and gave him the measure of the power at the disposal of the "inimical" entities of that galaxy. For he, knowing the Valeron's strength, now knew starkly that she was being attacked by forces of a magnitude never even approximated by the wildest imaginings of man. Scowling in concentration, he kept on watching the disaster. Watched while those utterly unbelievable forces peeled the Valeron down like an onion, layer after kilometer-thick layer. Watched until that for which he had almost ceased to hope finally took place. The Valeron, down now to the merest fraction of her original size -- burned and blasted down to IF the veriest core -- struck back. And that counterstroke was no love-tap. The ether and all the subethers seethed and roiled under the vehemence of that devastating bolt of energy. The Skylark of Valeron vanished from DuQuesne's plate; that plate went black; and DuQuesne stood up and stretched the kinks out of his muscles. Seaton could of course flit away on the sixth; but he, DuQuesne, couldn't. Not without being detected and getting burned to a crisp. Against the forces that he had just seen in action against the Skylark of Valeron, DuQuesne's own Capital D didn't stand the proverbial chance of the nitrocellulose dog chasing the asbestos cat in hell. If the Skylark of Valeron had been hurt, half-demolished and reduced to an irreducible core of fighting muscle before it could mount one successful counter-blow against this new and unexpected enemy, then the Capital D would be reduced to its primitive gases. DuQuesne rapidly, soberly and accurately came to the conclusion that he simply did not own ship enough to play in this league. Not yet... Wherefore he pussyfooted it away from there at an acceleration of only a few lights; and he put many parsecs of distance between himself and the scene of recent hostilities before he cut in his space-annihilating sixthorder drive and began really to travel. He did not know whether Seaton and his party were surviving; he did not care. He did not know the identity of the race which had hurt them so badly, so fast. What DuQuesne knew was that, as a bare minimum, he needed something as big as the Valeron, plus the fourth-dimensional tricks he had learned from the Jelmi, plus a highly developed element of caution based on the scene he had just witnessed. And he knew what to do about it, and where to go to do it; wherefore his course was laid for the First Galaxy and Earth. H undreds of thousands, of parsecs away from the scene of disaster, Seaton cut his drive and began gingerly to relax the terrific power of his defensive screens. No young turtle, tentatively poking his head out of his shell to see if the marauding gulls had left, was more careful than Seaton. He had been caught off base twice. He did not propose to let it happen again. Another man might have raged and sworn at DuQuesne for his treachery; or panicked at the fear inspired by the fourth-dimensional transmitter DuQuesne had come up with, or the massive blow that had fallen from nowhere. Seaton did not. The possibility -- no, the virtual certainty -- of treachery from DuQuesne he had accepted and discounted in the first second of receiving DuQuesne's distress call. He had accepted the risks, and grimly calculated that in any encounter, however treacherous, DuQuesne would fail; and he had been right. The sudden attack from out of nowhere, however, was something else again. What made it worse was not that Seaton had no idea of its source or reason. The thing that caused his IF eyes to narrow, his face to wear a hard, thoughtful scowl was that he in fact had a very good idea indeed -- and he didn't like it. But for the moment they were free. Seaton checked and doublechecked every gauge and warning device and nodded at last. "Good," he said then, "I was more than half expecting a kick in the pants, even way out here. The next item on our agenda is a council of war; so cluster 'round, everybody, and get comfortable." He turned control over to the Brain, sat down beside Dorothy, stroked his pipe, and went on: "Point one; DuQuesne. He got stuff somewhere -- virtually certainly from the Jelmi -- at least the fourth-dimensional transmitter and we don't know what else, that he didn't put out anything about. Naturally. And he sucked me in like Mary's little lamb. Also naturally. At hindsight I'm a blinding flash and a deafening report. I've got a few glimmerings, but you're the brain. Mart; so give out with analysis and synthesis." Crane did so; covering the essential points and concluding: "Since the plug-chart was accurate, the course was accurate. Therefore, besides holding back vital information, DuQuesne lied about one or both of two things: the point at which the signal was received and the direction from which it came." "Well, you can find out about that easily enough," Dorothy said. "You know, that dingus you catch lightwaves with, so as to see exactly what went on years and years ago. Or wouldn't it work, this far away?" Seaton nodded. "Worth a try. Dunark?" "I say go after DuQuesne!" the Osnomian said viciously. "Catch him and blow him and his Capital D to hellangone up!" Seaton shook his head. "I can't buy that -- at the moment. Now that he's flopped again at murder, I don't think he's of first importance any more. You see, I haven't mentioned Point Two yet, which is a datum I didn't put into the pot because I wanted to thrash Point One out first. It's about who the enemy really are. When I finally got organized to slug them a good one back, I followed the shot. They knew they'd been nudged, believe me. So much so that in the confusion I got quite a lot of information. They're Chlorans. Of, if not exactly like the Chlorans of Chlora, that we had all the trouble with, as nearly identical as makes no difference." ahlorans!" Dorothy and Margaret shrieked as one, and five minds dwelt briefly upon that hideous and ultimately terrible race of amoeboid monstrosities who, living in an atmosphere of gaseous chlorine, made it a point to enslave or to destroy all the humanity of all the planets they could reach. All five remembered, very vividly, the starkly unalloyed ferocity which one race of Chlorans had attacked the planet Valeron; near which the Skylark of Valeron had been built and after which she had been named. They remembered the horrifyingly narrow margin by which those ChlcMans hftd been defeated. They also remembered that the Chlorans had not even then been slaughtered. The Skylarkers had merely enclosed the planet Chi ora in a stasis of time and sent ii back -- on a trip that would last, for everyone and everything outside that stasis, some four hundred years -- to its own native solar system, from which it had been torn by a near-collision of suns in the longgone past. The Skylarkers should have blown Chlora into impalpable and invisible debris, and ihe men of the party had wanted to do just that, but Dorothy and Margaret and the essentially gentle Valeronians had been dead set against genocide. Dorothy broke the short silence. "But how could they be, Dick?" she asked. " 'Way out here? But of course, if we human beings could do it -- " She paused. "But of course," Seaton agreed sourly. "Why not? Why shouldn't they be as widespread as humanity is? Or even more so, if they have killed enough of us off? And why shouldn't they be smarter than those others were? Look at how much we've learned in just months, not millenia, of time." Another and longer silence fell; which was broken by Seaton. "Well, two things are certain. They're rabidly anti-social and they've got -- at the moment -- a lot more stuff than we have. They've got it to sell, like farmers have hay. It's also a dead-sure cinch that we can't do a thing -- not anything -- without a lot more data than we have now. It'll take all the science of Norlamin and maybe a nickel's worth besides to design and build what we'll have to have. And they can't go it blind Nobody can. And we all know enough about Chlorans to know that we won't get one iota or one of Peg's smidgeons of information out of them by remote control. At the first touch of any kind of a highorder feeler they'll bat our ears down... to a fare-thee-well. However, other means are available." And he glanced at a monitor where for some minutes a display had shown a planet of the galaxy from which their recent attacker had come. D uring this fairly long -- for Seaton -- speech, and during th# silence that had preceded it, two things had been happening. First the controlling Brain of the ship had been carrying out a program of Seaton's Star by star, system by system, it had been scanning the components of the nearest galaxy to the scene of their encounter. It had in fact verified Seaton's conclusions: the galaxy was dominated by Chlorans. Their works were everywhere. But it had also supported a -- not a conclusion; a hope, more accurately -- that Seaton had hardly dared put in words. Although the Chlorans ruled this galaxy. There were oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded races in it too -- serfs of the Chlorans of course, but nevertheless occupying their own planets -- and it was one such planet that the Brain had finally selected and was now displaying on its monitor. IF The other thing wes that the auburn-haired beauty who was Mrs. Richard Ballinger Seaton had been eyeing her husband steadily. At first she had merely looked at him thoughtfully. Then look and mien had become heavily tinged, first with surprise and then with doubt and then with wonder; a wonder that turned into an incredulity that became more and more incredulous. Until finally, unable to hold herself in any longer, she broke in on him. "Dick!" she cried. "You wouldn't! You know you wouldn't!" "I wouldn't? If not, who...?" Changing his mind between two words, Seaton cut the rest of the sentence sharply off; shrugged his shoulders; and grinned, somewhat shamefacedly, back at her. At this point Crane, who had been looking first at one of them and then at the other, put in: "I realize, Dorothy, that you and Dick don't need either language or headsets to communicate with each other, but how about the rest of us? What, exactly, is it that you're not as sure as you'd like to be that he wouldn't do?" Dorothy opened her mouth to reply, but laton beat her to it. "What I would do -- and will because I'll have to; because it's my oyster and nobody else's -- is, after we sneak up as close as we can without touching off any alarms, take a landing craft and go get the data we absolutely have to have in absolutely the only way it can be gotten." "And that's what I most emphatically do not like!" Dorothy blazed. "Dick Seaton, you are not going ta land on an enslaved planet, alone and unarmed and afoot, as an investigating Committee of One! Fr one thing, we simply don't have the time! Do we? I mean, poor old Valeron is simply a wreck! We've got to go somewhere and -- " But Seaton was shaking his head. "The Brain can handle that by itself," he said. "All it needs is time. As a matter of fact, you've put your finger on a first-rate reason for my going in, alone. There's simply not much else we can do until the VaU eron is back in shape again." "Not your going in." Dorothy blazed. "Flatly, positively no." Again Seaton shrugged his shoulders. "I can't say I'm madly in love with the idea myself, but who's any better qualified? Or as well? Because I know that you, Dottie, arenlt the type to advocate us sitting on otjt hands and letting them have all the races of humanity, wherever situate. So who?" "Me," Shiro said, promptly if ungrammatically. "Not as good, but good enough. You can tell me what data you want and I can and will get it, just as well as... "Bounce back, both of you, you've struck a rubber fence!" Dunark snapped. "That job's for Sitar and me." The green-skinned princess waved her pistol in the air and nodded her head enthusiastically her warlord went on, "You and I being brain-brothers, Dick, I'd knr w exactly what you want. And she and I would blast -- " "Yeah, that's what I know danm well you'd do." Seaton broke in. only to be interrupted in turn by Crane -- who was not in the habit of interrupting anyone even once, to say nothing of twice. "Excuse me, everyone," he said, "but you're all wrong, I think. My thought at the moment, Dick, is that your life is altogether too important to the project as a whole to be risked as you propose risking it. As to you others, with all due respect for your abilities, I do not believe that either of you is as well qualified for this kind of an investigation as I am -- " Margaret leaped to her feet in protest, but Crane went quietly on: " -- in either experience or training. However, we should not decide that point yet -- or at all, for that matter. We are all too biased. I therefore suggest, Dick, that we feed the Brain everything we have and keep on feeding it everything pertinent we can get hold of, until it has enough data to make that decision for us." That makes sense," Seaton said, and both Dorothy and Margaret nodded -- but both with very evident reservations. "The first time anything has made sense today!" XV Ky-El Mokak the Wilder T he first thing Seaton and Crane had to do, of course, was to figure out how to get back somewhere near Galaxy DW-#-LU, within fourth-order range of that one particular extremely powerful Chloran system, without using enough sixth-order stuff to touch off any alarms -- but still enough to make the trip in days instead of in months. Some sixth-order emanations could be neutralized by properly phased and properly placed counter-generators; the big question being, how much? The answer turned out to be, according to Crane, "Not enough" -- but, according to Seaton, "Satisfactory". At least, it did make the trip not only possible, but feasible. And during the days' of that trip each Skylarker worked -- with the Brain or with a computer or with pencil and paper or with paint or India ink and a brush, each according to his bent -- on the problem of what could be done about the Chlorans. They made little headway, if any at all. They did not have enough data. Inescapably, the attitude of each was very strongly affected by what he or she knew about the Chlorans they had already encountered. They were all smart enough to know that this was as indefensible as it was inevitable. Thus, while each of them developed a picture completely unlike anyone else's as to what the truth probably was, none of them was convinced enough of the validity of his theory to defend it vigorously. Thus it was discussion, not argument, that went on throughout the cautious approach to the forbidden territory and the ultra-cautious investigation of the Tellus-type planet the Brain had selected through powerful optical telescopes and by means of thirdand fourth-order apparatus. Then they fell silent, apIF palled; for that world was inhabited by highly intelligent human beings and what had been done to it was shocking indeed. T hey had seen what had been done to the planet Valeron. This was worse; much worse. On Valeron the ruins had been recognizable as having once been cities. Even those that had been blown up or slagged down by nuclear energies had shown traces of what they had once been. There had been remnants and fragments of structural members, unfused portions of the largest buildings, recognizable outlines and traces of thoroughfares and so on. But here, where all of the big cities and three-fourths or more of the medium-sized ones had been, there were now only huge sheets of glass. Sheets of glass ranging in area from ten or fifteen square miles up to several thousands of square miles, and variously from dozens up to hundreds of feet thick: level sheets of cracked and shattered, almost transparent, vari-colored glass. The people of the remaining cities and towns and villages were human. In fact, they were white Caucasians -- as white and as Caucasian as the citizens of Tampa or of Chicago or of Portland, Oregon or of Portland, Maine. Neither Seaton nor Shiro, search as they would, could find any evidence that any Oriental types then lived or ever had lived on that world -- to Shiro's lasting regret. He, at least, was eliminated as a spy. "Well, Dottie?" Seaton asked. She gnawed her lip. "Well... I suppose we'll have to do something -- but hey!" she exclaimed, voice and expression changing markedly. "How come you think you have to go down there at all to find out what the score is? You've snatched people right and left all over the place with ordinary beams and things, long before anybody ever heard of that sixth-order, fourth-dimensional gizmo. Seaton actually blushed. "That's right, my pet," he admitted. "Once again you've got a point. I'll pick one out that's so far away from everybody else that he won't be missed for a while. Maybe two'd be better." Since it was an easy matter to find isolated specimens of the humanity of that world, it was less than an hour later that two men -- one from a town, one found wandering alone in the mountains -- were being examined by the Brain. And what an examination! Everything in their minds -- literally everything, down to the last-least-tiniest coded "bit" of every long-chain proteinoid molecule of every convolution of their brains -- everything was being transferred to the Valerons Great Brain; was being filed away in its practically unfill able memory banks. When the transfer was complete, Sitar drew her pistol, very evidently intending to do away with the natives then and there. But Dorothy of course would not stand for that. Instead, she herself put them back into a shell of force and ran them through the Valerons locks and down into m mountain cave which she then half-filled with food. "I'd advise you tv. o," she told them then, in their own language, "to stay put here for a few days and keep out of trouble. If you really want to gel yourselves killed, though, that's all right with me. Go ahead any time.' When Dorothy brought her attention back into the control room, tibe Brain had finished its analysis of the data it had just secured from the natives, had correlated it with all their pertinent data it had in its banks, and was beginning to put out its synthesized report. T hat report came in thought; in diamond-sharp, diamond-clear thought that was not only super-intelligible and super-audible, but also was more starkly visible than any possible tri-di. It gave, as no possible other form of report could give, the entire history of the race to which those two men belonged. It described in detail and at length the Chlorans amd the relationship between the two races, and went on to give, in equal detail, the most probable course of near-term events. It told Seaton that he should investigate this planet Ray-See-Nee in person. It told him in fine detail what to wear, where to go, and. practically every move to make for the ensuing twenty-four hours. At that point the report stopped, and when aton demanded more information, the Brain balked. "Data insufficient," it thought, and everyone there would have sworn that the Great Brain actually had a consciousness of self as it went on, "This construct -- " it actually meant "#" -- "is not built to guess, but deals only in virtual certainties; that is, with probabilities that approximate unity to twelve or more nines. With additional data, this matter can be explored to a depth quite strictly proportional to the sufficiency of the data. That is all." "That's the package, Dottie," Seaton said then. "If we want to reach the Chlorans .without them reaching us first, there's how. That makes it a force, wouldn't you say?" Dorothy wasn't sure. "For twenty-four hours, I guess," she agreed, dubiously. "After which time I think I'll be screaming for you to come back here and feed that monster some more data. So be mighty dam sure to get some." "I'll try to, that's for sure. But the really smart thing to do might be to take this wreckage half a dozen galaxies away and put the Brain to work rebuilding her while I'm down there investigating." "D'you think I'll sit still for thatV Dorothy blazed. "If you do, you're completely out of your mind!" And even Crane did not subscribe to the idea. "Why?" he asked, "Just to tear her down again after you've found out what we'll have to have?" "That's so, too." Seaton thought for a moment, gray eyes narrowed and focused on infinity, translating the imperatives of the Brain into practical measures. Then he nodded. "All right. I admit I'll feel better about the deal with you people and the Brain standing by." And Seaton, now lean and hard and deeply tanned, sat down in his IF Hi llUilhli!;. ilppill Bssajissjssi ilmiyrifl H !:'!r master controller and began to manufacture the various items he would need; exactly as the Brain told him to make them. And next morning, as the sun began to peer over the crest of the high mountain ridge directly below the Skylark of Valeron, Seaton came to ground, hid his tiny landing-craft in a cave at the eighteen-thousandfoot level, and hiked the fifteen miles down-mountain to the nearest town. H e now looked very little indeed like the Doctor Richard B. Seaton of the Rare Metals Laboratory. He was almost gaunt. His skin was burned to a shade consistent with years of exposure to wind and weather. His hair had very evidently been cut -- occasionally -- with shears by his own hand; his beard had been mowed -- equally occasionally -- with those same shears. He wore crudely made, heavy, hobnailed, high-laced boots; a pair of baggy, unsymmetrical breeches of untanned deerskin; and a shapeless, poor-grade-leather coat that had been patched crudely and repeatedly at elbows and shoulders and across the back. He also wore what was left of a hard hat. As he strode into the town and along its main street, more than one pair of eyes looked at him and then looked again, for the people of that town were not used to seeing anyone walk purposefully. Nor was the sloppily uniformed guard at the entrance to City Hall. This wight -- who couldn't have been a day over fifteen -- opened his eyes, almost straightened up and said: "Halt, you. Who'a you? Whatcha want?" "Business," Seaton said, briskly. "To see the mayor, Ree-Toe Prenk." "Awri'; g'wan in," and the youth relapsed into semi-stuporous leaning on his ratty-looking rusty rifle. It was easy enough to find His Honor's office, since it was the only one in the building doing any business at all. Seaton paused just inside the doorway and looked around. Everything was shabby and neglected. The wall-to-wall carpet was stained and dirty, worn through to the floor, in several places. The divider-rail leaned drunkenly, forward here, backward there. The vacant receptionist's desk was as battered and scarred as though it had been through a war. The place hadn't been cleaned for months, and not very thoroughly then. And the people in that office were in perfect sync with their surroundings. Half a dozen melancholy-looking people, men and women, sat listlessly on hard, straight-backed chairs; staring glumly, fixedly at nothing; completely disinterested, apparently, in whether they were ever called into the inner office or not. And the secretary! She was dressed in what looked like a gunny-sack. She was scrawny. Her unkempt, straight, lank hair was dirty-mouse brown in color. She didn't look very bright. She was, however, the only secretary in sight, so Seaton strode up to her desk. "Miss What's-your-name!" he snapped. "Can you, without rupturing a blood-vessel, come to life IF long enough to do half a minute's work?" The girl jumped, started to rise to her feet at her desk, and blushed. "Why, yes... yes, sir, I mean. What can we do for you. Mister -- ?" "I'm Ky-El Mokak. I want to talk to Hizzonner about turning myself in." T hat brought her to life fast. "About whatT she cried, and her half-scream was followed instantly by a deeper, louder voice from the intercom. His honor had not been asleep after all. "You what? All right, FyLy, send him in; but be sure he hasn't got a gun first." "Gun? What would I be doing with a gun?" Seaton patted his pockets, shucked off his dilapidated coat, and made a full turn to show that he was clean. Then, seeing no coat-rack or hangers, he pitched the coat and hat into a corner and strode into the inner office. It was, if possible, in even worse shape than the outer one. The man behind the desk was fifty-odd years old; lean and bald. He looked worried, dyspeptic and nervous. He held a hand-weapon -- which was not the least bit rusty -- in workmanlike faaihion in a competent-looking right hand. It was not pointed directly at Seaton's midsection. It evidently did not have to be, "What I'd ought to do right now," the man said quietly, "is blow your brains out without letting you say a word. You're another damn rat. A fink -- a spy -- maybe a rewer or an undergrounder, even. You don't look like any wilder I ever saw brought in." The Brain had not dumped Seaton on a strange and dangerous new planet without providing him with a full "knowledge" of its history, its mores and even its dialects. Through the educators Seaton had received enough of Ray-See-Nee's cultural patterns to be able to carry off his role. He knew what His Honor was thinking about; he knew, even, very accurately just how far the man could be pushed, where his real sympathies lay, and what he could be counted upon to do about it. Wherefore Seaton said easily: "Of course I don't. I've got a brain. Those lard-headed chasseurs couldn't catch me in a thousand years. None of 'em can detect a smell on a skunk. And you won't shoot me, not with the bind you're in. You aren't a damn enough fool to. You wouldn't shoot a crippled kid on crutches, let alone a full-grown, able-bodied man." Prenk shivered a little, but that was all. "Who says I'm in a bind? What kind of a bind?" "I say so," Seaton said, flatly. "You're hitting bottom right now. You're using half-grown kids: girls, even. How many weeks is it going to be before you don't make quota and your town and everything and everybody in it get turned into a lake of lava?" Prenk trembled visibly and his face turned white. "You win," he said unsteadily, and put his pistol back into the top right-hand drawer of his desk. "Whoever you are, you know the score and aren't afraid to talk about it. You'd have no papers, of course -- on yoii, at least... Let's see your arm." "No number." Seaton rolled up his left sleeve and held his forearm out for examination. "Look close. Scars left by good surgery are fine, i Lit they can't be made invisible." "I know they can't." His Honor looked very closely indeed, then drew a tremendously deep breath of relief. "You are a wilder! You mean to say you've been up in the hills ever since the Conquest without getting caught?" "That's right, i told you I'm smart, and the brains of a whole platoon of chasseurs, all concentrated down into one, wouldn't equip a half-witted duck." "But they've got dogs "Yeah, but they aren't smart, either. Not very much smarter than the chasseurs are. Hell, I've been living on those dogs half the time. Pretty tough, fried or roasted, but boiled long enough they make mighty tasty stew." "Mi-Ko-Ta's beard! Who are you, really, and what were you,, before?" "I told you, I'm Ky-El-Mokak. I am -- was, rather -- a Class 'Twelve Fellow of the Institute of Mining Engineers. Recognize the ring?" Seaton went to the desk and placed his left hand flat on its surface. P renk studied the massive ornament. It had been fabricated, in strict external accord with the Brain's visualization of what it should have been, from synthesized meteoric metal -- metal that had actually never been in open space, to say nothing of ever having been anywhere near the gray-lichened walls of the revered Institute that Seaton had never seen. Having examined the ring minutely, Prenk looked up and nodded; his whole manner changed. "I recognize the ring and I can read the symbols. A Twelve! It's a shame to register and brand you. If you say so I'll let it drop." "I'll say so. I'm not committing myself that deep yet." "All right, but why did you come in? Or is it true that whatever undergrounds spring up are smashed flat in a week?" "I don't know. I couldn't find any. Not one, and I searched every square mile for a thousand miles north, east, south, and west of here. And I didn't find anybody who wasn't too dangerous to travel with, and I'm gregarious. Also, I don't like caves and I don't like camp cooking and I don't like living off the land -- and I do like music and books and art and educated people and so on -- in other words, I found out that I can't revert to savagery. And, not least, I like women and there aren't any out there. What few ever make it up there die fast." "I'm beginning to believe you." A little of the worry and harassment left His Honor's face. "One more question. Why, knowing the jam we're in, did you come here instead of going somewhere where you'd be safe?" "Because, on the basis of stuff I picked up here and there, you and I together can make it safe here. I IF can fix your mining machinery easily enough so you can make quota every week with no sweat; so the town won't get flagged down; not right away, anyway. You aren't a quisling, and my best guess is that most of the spies and storm-troopers have sneaked out or have been pulled out because of what's supposed to be about to happen here," Seaton said. Prenk stared thoughtfully at Seaton. "You don't appear to be the suicidal type. But you know as well as I do that just making quota won't be enough for very long. What have you really got in mind, Ky-ElMokak?" Seaton thought for a moment. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he dug down into his baggy breeches and brought out two closely folded headsets. "Put one of these on. It isn't a player or a recorder; just a kind of super-telephone. A fast way of exchanging information." Prenk wore it for a couple of minutes, then took it off, staring suspiciously in turn at it and at Seaton. "Why didn't I ever hear of anything like that before?" he demanded. Seaton didn't answer the question and Prenk went on, "Oh; secret. Okay. But what makes you think you can set up an underground right out here in the open?" "There's no reason in the world why we can't," Seaton declared. "Especially since we'd just be revmng one that everybody, including the Premier and you yourself, thinks is smashed flat and is about to be liquidated." T his was the second really severe test Seaton had made of the Brain's visualizations, and it too stood solidly up. All Prenk said was, "You're doing the talking; keep it up," but his hands, clenching tightly into fists, showed that Seaton's shot had struck the mark. "I've talked enough," Seaton said then. "From here on I'd be just guessing. It's your turn to talk." "All right. It's too late now. I'm afraid, for anything to make any difference. Yes, I was the leader of a faction that believed in decent, humane, civilized government, but we weren't here then, we were in the capital. Our coup failed. And those of us who were caught were exiled here and arrangements were made for us to be the next wipe-out." "Some of your party survived, then. Could you interest them again, do you think?" "Without arms and equipment, no. That was why we failed." "Equipment would be no problem." "It wouldn't?" Prenk's eyes began to light up. "No." Seaton did not elaborate, but went on, "The problem is people and morale. I can't supply people and we have to start here, not over in the capital. Self-preservation. We've got to make quota. Your people have been hammered down so flat that they don't give a whoop whether they live or die. As I said, I can fix the machinery, but that of itself won't be enough. We'll have to give 'em a shot in the arm of hope." "Okay, and thanks." no one in the outer office, not even the secretary, so much as looked up as the two men, talking busily, walked out. D uQuesne, en route to Earth, knew just what a madhouse Earth was, and in just what respects. He knew just how nearly impossible it was to buy machine tools of any kind. He also knew just what an immense job it was going to be to build a duplicate of the Skylark of Valeron. Or, rather, to build the tools that would build the machines that would in turn build the planetoid. With his high-order constructors he could build most of those primary machine tools himself; perhaps all of them in time; but time was exactly what he did not have. Time was decidedly of the essence. DuQuesne's ex-employer. The World Steel Corporation, had billions of dollars' worth of exactly the kind of tooling he had to have. They not only used it, they manufactured it and sold it. And what of it they did not manufacture they could buy. How they could buy! As a result of many years of intensive, highly organized, and well directed snooping, Brookings of Steel had over a thousand very effective handles upon over' a thousand very important men. And he, DuQuesne, had a perfect handle on Brookings. He was much harder and ruthless than Brookings was, and Brookings knew it. He could make Brookings buy his primary tooling for him -- enough of it to stuff the Capital D to her outer skin. And he would do just that. Wherefore, as soon as he got within working range of Earth, he launched his projection directly into Brookings' private office. This time, the tycoon was neither calm nor quiet. Standing behind his desk, chair lying on its side behind him, he was leaning forward with his left hand flat on the top of his desk. He was clutching a half-smoked, half-chewed cigar in his right hand and brandishing it furiously in the air. He was yelling at his terrified secretary; who, partly standing in front of her chair and partly crouching into it, was trying to muster up courage to run. Tlhen DuQuesne's projection appeared Brookings fell silent for a moment and goggled. Then he screamed. "Get out of here, you!" at the girl, who scuttled frantically away. He hurled what was left of his cigar into his big bronze ashtray, where it disintegrated into a shower of sparks and a slathery mess of soggy, sticky brown leaves. And finally, exerting everything he had of self-control, he picked his chair up, sat down in it and glared at DuQuesne. "Careful of your apoplexy. Fat," DuQuesne sneered then. "I've told you -- you'll rupture your aorta some day and that will just about break my heart." Brookings' reply to that was unprintable; after which he went on, even more bitterly, "This is all it lacks to make this a perfect day." IF "Yeah," DuQuesne agreed, callously. "Some days you can't lay up a cent. I suppose you've been eager to know why I didn't return your goons to you." "There's nothing in the world I'm less interested in." "ni tell you anyway, for the record." DuQuesne did not know what had actually happened, but Brookings was never to know that. "They each got one free shot, as I said they would. But they missed." "Skip that. Doctor," Brookings said, brusquely. "You didn't come here for that. What do you want this time?" DuQuesne reached over, took a ball-point out of Brookings' pocket, tore the top sheet off of the memorandum pad on Brookings' desk, and wrote out an order for one hundred to the World Steel Corporation, on a numbered account in a Swiss bank. He slid the order across the glass top of the desk and said: "You needn't worry about whether it's good or not. It is. I want machine tools and fast deliverys." Brookings glanced at the paper, but did not touch it. His every muscle tensed, but he did not quite blow itp again. "Machine tools," he grated. "You know damn well money's no good on them." "Money alone, no." DuQuesne agreed equably. "That's why I'm having you apply pressure. You'll get the details -- orders, specs, times and places of delivery, and so forth -- by registered mail tomorrow morning. Shall I spell out the 'or else' for you?" Brookings was quivering with rage, but there wasn't a thing is the world he could do about the situation and he knew it. "Not for me," he managed finally, "but I'd better record it for certain people who will have to know." "Okay. Any mistake in any detail of the transaction or one second more than twenty-four hours' delay in any specified time of delivery will mean a one-hundred-kiloton superatomic on North Africa Number Eleven. Good-by." And DuQuesne cut his projection. To Brookings, he seemed to vanish; to DuQuesne himself, he simply was back in his own Capital D, far out in space; and DuQuesne allowed himself to smile. Things were going rather well, he thought. Seaton was tangled up with whoever the new enemy had turned out to be; might well be dead; at any rate, was not a factor he, DuQuesne, needed currently to take into his calculations. By the time Seaton was back in circulation DuQuesne should have his new ship and be ready to handle him. And from then on... From then on, thought DuQuesne, it was only a short step to his rightful, inevitable destiny: His universe. No one able to contest his mastery. -- So thought DuQuesne, who at that point in time knew nearly every factor that bore upon his plans, and had carefully and correctly evaluated them all. He knew about the Llurdi and the Jelmi; he knew that Seaton and the Chlorans were, from his point of view, keeping each other neutralized; he knew that lor the Norlaminians, even were unlikely to cause him any trouble. DuQuesne really knew all the relevant facts but one -- or, you might say, two. These two facts were a very long distance away. One was a young girl. The ether was her mother. Two individuals out of a universe! Why, even if DuQuesne had known of their existence, he might have discounted their importance completely. In which he would have been -- completely -- wrong. Humanity Triumphant, Not Inc S ince Seaton as Ky-El Mokak was not the least bit fussy, he accepted the first house that Prenk showed him. His honor offered also -- with a more than somewhat suggestive expression -- to send him a housekeeper, but Seaton declined the offer with thanks; explaining that that could wait until he got himself organized and could do a little looking around for himself. Prenk gave Seaton a handful of currency and a ground-car -- one of Prenk's own, this; a beautifully streamlined, beautifully kept little three-wheeled jewel of a groundcar -- told him where the shoppingcenters were, and went back to City Hall; Seaton bought a haircut and a shave, a couple of outfits of clothing, and some household supplies, which he took out to his new home and stowed away. By that time it was the local equivalent of half-past three, and the shifts changed at four o'clock; wherefore he drove his spectacular little speedster six miles up-canyon to the uraninite mine that was the sole reason for the town's existence. Since he did not want to be shot out of hand, he did not dare to be late or to do anything unusual, either during the five-mile train-ride along the main tunnel or during the skip-ride down to the eighty-fourhundred-foot level where he was to work. Once in the stope itself, however, he stopped -- exactly thirteen feet short of the stiffly erect young overseer -- and stood still while his shiftmates picked up their tools and started for the hanging wall -- the something-more-than-vertical face of the cavernous stope -- to begin their day's work. The overseer was a well-fed young man, and the second native Seaton had seen who looked more than half alive. His jacket, breeches and boots were as glossily black as his crash-helmet was glossily white. He 'vas a very proud young man, and arrogant. His side-arm hung proudly at his hip. His bull-whip coiled arrogantly ready for instant use. This wight stared haughtily at Seaton for a moment, and began to swell up like a pouter pigeon. Then, as Seaton made an unmistakeable gesture at him, he went into smoothly violent action. "Oh, you're the wilder!" he snarled, and swung the heavy blacksnake with practised ease. But Seaton had known exactly what to expect and he was ready for IF it He ducked and sidestepped with the speed and control of the trained gymnast that he was; he handled ibe short, thick club that had been m his sleeve as though it were the wand of the highly skilled prestigitator that he was. Thus, in the instant that the end of the lash curled savagely around the hickory he swung it like a home-run hitter swings a bat -- and caught the blacksnake's heavy, shot-loaded butt on the fly in his right hand. The minion went for his gun, of course, but Seaton's right arm was already swinging around and back, and as gun cleared holster the bullwhip's vicious tip snapped around both gun and hand with a pistolsharp report. The trooper stared, for an instant stunned, at the blood spurting from his paralyzed right hand; and that instant was enough. Seaton stepped up to him and put his left fist deep into his midsection. Then, as the half-conscious man began to double over, he sent his right fist against its preselected target. Not the jaw -- he didn't want to break his hand -- the throat. Nor did he hit him hard; he didn't want to kill tihie guy, or even damage him permanently., A s the man fell to the hard-rock floor -- writhing in agony, groaning, strangling and gasping horribly for breath -- the men and women and teen-agers looking on burst as one into clamor. "Stomp 'im!" they shrieked and yelled. "Give 'im the boots! Stomp'im! Kill im! Stomp 'is head clean off! Stbmp im right down into the rock!" "Hold it!" Seaton rasped, and the miners fell silent; but they did not relapse into their former apathy. Seaton stood by, waiting coldly for his victim to be able to draw a breath. He picked the overseer's pistol-like weapon up and looked it over. He had never seen anything like it before, and casual inspection didn't tell him much about how it worked, but that could wait. He didn't intend to use it. In fact, he wasn't really interested in it at all. When the overseer had partially recovered his senses, Seaton jammed a headset onto his head and thought viciously at him; as much to give him a taste of real punishment as to find out what he knew and to impress upon his mind exactly what he had to do if he hoped to keep on living. Then Seaton made what was for him a speech. First, to the now completely deflated officer: "You -- you slimy traitor, you stinking turncoat, you quisling! Know now that a new regime has taken over. Maybe I'll let you live and maybe I'll turn you over to these boys and girls here -- you know what they'd do to you. That depends on how exactly you stick to what I just told you. One thought of a squeal -- if you ever get one be under surveillance every second of every day -- you'll die a long, slow, tough death. And I mean tough!" He turned to the miners; studied them narrowly. His "shot in the arm" had done them a lot of good. Excitement was still high; none of them had relapsed into the apathy that had affected them all such a short time before. In fact, one closeclustered group of men was eyeing Seaton and the overseer in a fashion that made it perfectly clear that, had it not been for Seaton's mien and the gun and the whip, there would have been a lynching then and there. "Take it easy, people," Seaton told them. "I know you all want to tear this ape apart, but what good would it do? None. Not a bit. So I won't let you do it, if I have to use the whip and even the gun to keep you from it. But I don't intend to use either whip or gun and I don't think I'll have to, because this is the first bite of a fresh kettle of fish for every civilized human being of this world. I won't go into much detail, but I represent a group of human beings, as human as yourto bring you a message; to tell you that humanity has never been conquered permanently and never will be so conquered. Humanity has triumphed and will continue to triumph over all the vermin infesting all the planets of alj the solar systems of all the galaxies of all surveyed space. plans have been made in full and are being put out into effect. Humanity will win here, and in not too long a time. Every Chloran in every solar system in this region of space will die. That's a promise. "Nor do we need your help. All we ask you is that you produce the full quota of ore every week, so that no Chloran warship will come here too soon. And that production IF win be no problem very shortly, since I can repair your machinery and will have it all back in working order by one week from today. So in a very few weeks you women can go back to keeping house for your families; you youngsters can go back to school; and half of you men will be able to make quota in half a shift and spend the other half of it playing penny-ante. And you, Brother Rat -- " he turned back to the deposed overseer -- "you can peel that pretty uniform. You're going to work, right now. You and I are going to be partners -- and if you so much as begin to drag your feet I'll slap your face clear around onto the back of your neck. Let's go!" T hey went. They picked up a drill -- which weighed all of three hundred pounds -- and lugged it across the rough rock floor to the foot of the face; which, translated from the vernacular, means the lower edge of the expanse of highgrade ore that was being worked. It was a beautiful thing, that face; a startlingly high and wide expanse of the glossly, lustrous, submetallic pitch black of uraninite; slashed and spattered and shot through at random with' the characteristic violent yellows of autunite and carnotite and the variant greens of torbernite. But Seaton was not particularly interested in beauty at the moment. What he hoped was that he could keep from giving away the fact that this was the first time he had ever handled a mining machine of any kind or type. He thought he could, however, and he did. For, after all, there are nr.ly so many ways in which holes can be made in solid rock. Second, since the hard-rock men who operate the machinery to make those holes are never the greatest intellects of any world, such machinery must be essentially simple. And third, the Brain's visualizations had been very complete and Richard Seaton was, as he had admitted to Prenk, an exceptionally smart man. Wherefore, although Seaton unobtrusively let the ex-overseer take the lead, the two men worked very well together and the native did not once drag his feet. They set up the heavy drill and locked it in place against the face. They slipped the shortest "twelve-inch" steel into the chuck and rammed it home. They turned on the air and put their shoulders to the stabilizing pads -- and that monstrous machine, bellowing and thundering under the terrific urge of two hundred pounds to the square inch of compressed air, drove that heavy bit resistlessly into the ore. And the rest of the miners, fired by Seaton's example as well as by his "shot in the arm", worked as they had not worked in months; to such good purpose that when the shift ended at midnight the crew had sent out almost twice as much highgrade ore as they had delivered the night before. I t need hardly be mentioned, perhaps, that Seaton was enjoying himself very much. Although he was not, in truth, the "big, muscle-bound ape -- especially between the ears" he was wont to describe himself as, there was certainly a pleasure in being up against the sort of problem that muscle and skill could settle. For a time he was concerned about the fact that events elsewhere might be proceeding at a pace he could not control; but there was not a minute spent on the surface of this planet that was not a net gain in terms of the automatic repair of the Valeron, That great ship had been hurt. Since there was at the moment very little that Seaton could do effectively about DuQuesne, or directly about the Chlorans, or the Fenachrone -- and was a great deal he could do here on the surface of Ray-See-Nee -- he put the other matters out of his mind and did what had to be done. And enjoyed it enormously! Seaton went "home" to the empty and solitary house that was his temporary residence and raised the oversize ring to his lips. "Dottie," he said. "Oh, Dick!" a tiny scream came from the ring. "I wish you wouldn't take such horrible chances! I thought I'd diel Won't you, tomorrow morning, just shoot the louse, out of hand? PleaseT "I wasn't taking any chances. Dot; a man with half my training could have done it. I had to do something spectacular to snap these people out of it; they're dead from the beltbuckle up, down, and back. But I've done enough, I think, so I won't have any more trouble at all. It'll get around -- and howl -- and strictly on the Q and T. All those other apes will need is a mere touch of fist." "You hope. Me, too, for that matter. Just a sec, here's Martin. He wants to talk to you about that machinery business," and Crane's voice replaced Dorothy's. "I certainly do, Dick. You say you want two-hundred-fifty-pound Sullivan Sluggers, complete with variable-height mounts and inch-anda-quarter -- that's English, remember -- bits. You want Ingersoll-Rand compressors and Westinghouse generators and Wilfley tables and so on, each item by name and no item resembling any of their own machinery in any particular. Since you are supposed to be repairing their own machinery, wouldn't it be better to have the Brain do just that, while you look on, make wise motions, and learn?" "It might be better, at that," Seaton admitted, after a moment's thought. "My thought was that since nobody now working in the mine knows anything much about either mining or machinery it wouldn't make any difference, as long as the stuff was good and rusty on the outside, and I know how our stuff works. But I can learn theirs and it will save a lot of handling and we'll have the time. They're working only two shifts in only one stope, you know. Lack of people. But ninetenths of their equipment is as dead as King Tut and the rest of it starts falling apart every time anybody gives any of it a stern look -- I was scared spitless all shift that we'd be running out of air or power, or both, any minute. So we'll have to do one generator and at least one compressor tonight; so you might as well start getting the stuff ready for me." IF "It's ready. HI send it down as soon as it gets good and dark. In the meantime, how about Brother Rat? Have you anyone watching him?" "No, I didn't think it was necessary. But it might be, at that. From up there, would you say?" "Definitely. And Shiro and Lotus haven't much to do at the moment, ni make arrangements." "Do that, guy, and so long 'till dark." "Just a sec, Dick," Dorothy said then. "I'm not done with you yet. You remembered the no-neighbors bit, I think?" "I sure did, Honey-Chile. No neighbors within half a mile. So, any dark of the moon, slip down here in one of the fifteen-footers and all will be well." "You big, nice man," Dorothy purred. "Comes dark, comes me! an' you can lay to that." C ountless parsecs away, DuQuesne made proper entry into the Solar System, put his Capital D into a parking orbit around Earth, and began to pick up his tremendous order of machine tools and supplies. It went well; Brookings had done his job. There was, however, one job DuQuesne had to do for himself. During the loading, accordingly, he went in person to Washington, D.C., to the Rare Metals Laboratory, and to Room #. That room's door was open. He tapped lightly on it as he entered the room. He closed the door gently behind him. "Park it," a well-remembered contralto voice said. Bc with you in a moment." "No rush." DuQuesne sat down, crossed his legs, lighted a cigarette, and gazed at the woman seated at her electronics panel. Both her eyes were buried in the light-shield of a binocular eyepiece; both her hands were manipulating vernier knobs in tiny arcs. "Oh! Hi, Blackie! Be with you in half a moment." "No sweat, Hunkie. Finish your obs." "Natch." Her attention had not wavered for an instant from her instruments; it did not waver then. In a minute or so she pressed a button, her panel went dark, and she rose to her feet. "It's been a long time, Blackie," she said, stepping toward him and extending her hand. "It has indeed." He took her hand and began an encircling action with his left -- a maneuver which she countered, neatly but still smilingly, by grasping his left hand and holding it firmly. Tsk, tsk," she tsked. "The merchandise is on display, Blackie, but it is not to be handled. Remember?" "I remember. Still untouchable," he said. "That's right. You're a hard-nosed, possessive brute, Blackie -- any man to interest me very much would have to be, I suppose -- but no man bom is ever going to tell me what I can or can't do. Selah. But let's skip that." She released his hands, waved him to a chair, sat down, crossed her legs, accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her, and went on, "Thanks. The gossip was that you were all washed up and had, as Ferdy put it, 'taken it on the lam.' I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now, I've been wanting to tell you; you're a good enough man so that whatever you're really after, you'll get." This woman could reach DuQuesne as no other woman ever had. "Thanks, Hunkie," he said; and, reaching out, he pressed her right hand hard then dropped it. "What I came up here for -- have you a date for Thursday evening that you can't or won't break?" Her smile widened; her two lovely dimples deepened. "Don't tell me; let me guess. Louisa Vinciughi in Lucia:' "Nothing else but. You .like?" "I love. With the usual stipulation -- we 'Dutch' it." "Listen, Hunkie!" he protested. "Aren't you ever going to get off of that 'Dutch' thing? Don't you think a man can take a girl out without having monkey-business primarily in mind?" S he considered the question thoughtfully, then nodded. "As stated, yes. Eliding the one word 'primarily', no. I've heard you called a lot of things, my friend, but 'stupid' was never one of them. Not even once." "I know." DuQuesne smiled, a trifle wryly. "You are not going to be obligated by any jot or iota or tittle to any man living or yet to be born." Her head went up a little and her smile became a little less warm. "That's precisely right, Marc. But I've never made any secret of the fact that I enjoy your company a lot. So, on that basis, okay and thanks." "On that basis, then, if that's the way it has to be, and thanks to you, too," DuQuesne said, and look his leave. And Thursday evening came; and all during that long and thoroughly pleasant evening the man was, to the girl's highly sensitive perception... well, different, although very subtly so. He was not quite, by some very small fraction, his usual completely poised and urbane self. Even Vinciughi's wonderful soprano voice did not bring him entirely back from wherever it was he was. Wherefore, just before saying goodnight at the door of her apartment, she said: "You have something big on your mind, Blackie. Tremendously big. Would it help to come in and talk a while?" This was the first time in all their long acquaintance that she had ever invited him into her apartment. "Or wouldn't it?" He thought for a moment. "No," he decided. "There are so many maybes and ifs and buts in the way that talking would be even more futile than thinking. But I'd like to ask you this: how much longer will you be here in Washington, do you think?" She caught her breath. "The Observer says it'll take me a year and and half to get what I should have." "That's fine," DuQuesne said. His thoughts were racing, but none of them showed. What were those observers doing? And why? He knew the kind of mind Stephanie de MarIF igny had -- they were feeding with a teaspoon a mind fully capable of gulping it down by the truckload... why? Whyl So as not to play favorites, probably -- that was the only reason he could think of. DuQuesne was playing for very high stakes; he could not afford to overlook any possibility, however remote. Had his interest in Hunkie de Marigny been deduced by the Norlaminians? Was it, in fact, possible -- even likely -- that he was under observation even now? Was their strange slowdown in her training meaningful? He could not answer; but he decided on caution. He went on with scarcely a noticeable pause, "I'll see you well before that -- if I may?" "Why, of course you may! Fd get an acute attack of the high dudgeons if you ever came to Washington without seeing me!" He took his leave then, and she went into her apartment and closed the door... and stood there, motionless, listening to his receding footsteps with a far-away, brooding look in her deep brown eyes, The Coup A s the days had passed, more and more of the Skylarkers had come to ground in Seaton's temporary home on the planet Ray-SeeNee; until many of them, especially Dorothy, were spending most of their nights there. On this particular evening they were all there. Since the personal gravity-controls had been perfected long since, Dimark and Sitar were comfortable enough as far as gravity was concerned. The engineers, however, had not yet succeeded in incorporating really good ambient-atmosphere temperature-controllers into them; wherefore he was swathed in wool and she wore her fabulous mink coat. They each wore two Osndmian machine pistols instead of one, and they sat a couple of feet apart -- in instant readiness for any action that might become necessary. Lotus and Shiro, a little closer together than the two Osnomians but not enough so to get into each other's way, sat cross-legged on the floor. He was listening intently, while she wasn't. Almost everything that was being said was going completely over her head. Dorothy, Margaret, and Crane sat around a small table, fingering tall glasses in which ice-cubes tinkled faintly. Seaton paced the floor, with his right hand in his breeches pocket and his left holding his pipe, which he brandished occasionally in the air to emphasize a point. "Considering that we can't do anything at all on unmuffled high-order stuff except when an ore-scow is here, masking our emanations," Seaton was saying, "we haven't done too bad. However, I wouldn't wonder if we'd just about run out of time and we're right between the devil and the deep blue sea. Mart, what's your synthesis?" Crane sipped his drink and cleared his throat. "You're probably right in one respect, Dick. They apparently make a spectacle of these detructions of cities; not for the Chlorans' amusement -- I doubt very much if they enjoy or abhor anything, as we understand the term -- but to keep the rest of the population of this world in line. Whether or not the quisling dictator of this world arranged for this city to be the next sacrifice, it is certain that we have interfered with the expected course of events to such an extent that the powers-that-be will at least investigate. But I can't quite see the dilemma." "I can," Dorothy said. "They have to have a grisly example, once every so often; and since this one didn't develop on schedule maybe they'll go crying to mama instead of trying to handle us themselves. You see, they may know more about us than we think they do." "That's true, of course -- " Crane began, but Seaton broke in. "So I say it's time to let Ree-Toe Prenk in on the whole deal and add him to our Council of War," he declared, and talk went on. They were still discussing the situation twenty minutes later, when someone tapped gently on the front door. T he Osnomians leaped to their feet, pistols in all four hands. The two Japanese leaped to their feet and stood poised, knees and elbows slightly flexed, ready for action. Forty-five-caliber automatics appeared in the hands of the three at the table, and Crane flipped his remote control helmet onto his head. Seaton, magnum in hand, snapped on the outside lights and peered out through the recently installed oneway glass of the door. "Speak of the devil," he said in relief. "It's Hizzoner." He opened the door wide and went on, "Come in, Your Honor. We were just talking about you." Prenk came in, his eyes bulging slightly at the sight of the arsenal of armament now being put back into holsters. They bulged still more as he looked at the Japanese, and he gulped as he stared fascinatedly at the green-skinned Osnomians. "I knew, of course, within a couple of days," Prenk said then, quietly, "that you who call yourself Ky-El Mokak were not confining your statements to the exact truth. No wilder could possibly have done what you were doing; but by that time I knew that you, whoever you were, were really on our side. I had no suspicion until this moment, however, that you were actually from another world. I thought that your speech to the miners was what you said it was going to be, 'a shot in the arm of hope'. It now seems more than slightly possible that you were talking about the very matters I came here tonight to see you about. Certain supplies, you will remember." "I remember. I lied to you, yes. Wholesale and retail. But how else could I have made the approach, the mood you were in, without blowing everything higher than up?" "Your technique was probably the best possible, I admit." "Okay. Yes, we're from a galaxy so far away from here that you could barely find it with the biggest IF telescope this world ever had. Our business at the moment is to wipe out every Chloran in this region of space, but we can't do it without -- among other things -- a lot more data than we now have. And we'll need weeks of time, mostly elsewhere, for preparation. "But before we go too deeply into that you must meet my associates. People, this is His Honor ReeToe Prenk; what you might call the Mayor of the City of Ty-Ko-Ma of the Planet Ray-See-Nee. You know all about him. Ree-Toe, this is Hi-Fi Mokak, my wife -- Lo-Test and HiTest Crane, husband and wife -- " and he went on with two more pairs of coined names. "Hi-Fi indeedl" Dorothy snorted, under her breath, in English. "Just you wait 'til I get you alone tonight, you egregious clown!" "Wha'd'ya mean 'clown'?" he retorted. "Try your hand sometime at inventing seven names on the spur of the moment!" S eaton then put on a headset, slipped one over Prenk's head, and said in thought: "This is what is left -- the residue, you might say -- of our mobile base the Skylark of Valeron, and went on to show him and to describe to him the Great Brain, the immense tankchart of the entire First Universe, the tremendous driving engines and even more tremendous engines of offense and of defense. Prenk was held spellbound and speechless, for this "residue", hundreds of kilometers in diameter and weight, was so utterly beyond any artificial structure Prenk had ever imagined that he simply could not grasp its magnitude at all. And when Seaton went on to show him a full mental picture of what that base had been before the battle witfi the Ghlorans and what it would have to be before they could begin to move against the ChJorans -- the one-thousand kilometer controlcircles, the thousands of cubic kilometers of solidly packed offensive and defensive gear, the scores of fantastically braced and buttressed layers of inoson that composed the worldlet's outer skin -- he was so strongly affected as to be speechless in fact. 'T...I see. That is... a little, maybe..." he stammered, then subsided into silence. "Yes, it is a bit big to get used to all at once," Seaton agreed. "It needs a lot of work. Some we're doing; some of it can't be done anywhere near here; but we don't want to leave without being reasonably sure that you and your people will be alive when we get back. So we want a lot of information from you." "I'll be glad to tell you everything I know or can find out." "Thanks. Ideas, first. How much do you think the quisling Big Shots actually know? What do you think they'll do about it? What do you think His Magnificence the Dictator will do? And what should we do about what he thinks he's going to do? In a few days we'll want all the information you can get -- facts, names, dates, places, times, and personnel. Also one sample copy f each and every item of equipment desired; with numbers wanted and limes and places of delivery. Brother Frenk, you have the floor." "One advantage of a small town tnd a group like ours," Prenk said, slowly, "is that everybody knows everybody else's business. Thus, we all knew who the spies were, but the people were all so low in their minds that they simply did not care whether they lived or died. We had done our best and had failed; most of us had given up hope completely. Now, however, the few remaining spies have been locked up and are under control. They and the overseers are still reporting, but -- " he smiled wolfishly -- "they are saying precisely and only what I tell them to say. This condition can't last very long; but, after what you just showed me. I'm pretty sure I can make it last long enough. We have organized a really efficient force of guerilla fighters and our plans for the capital are..." A couple of weeks later, then, three hundred fifty-eight highly trained men and one highly trained woman set out. A woman? Yes. Dorothy had protested vigorously. "But Sitar! You aren't going, surely? Surely you're staying home?" "Staying homeV the green girl had blazed. "The First Wife of a prince of Osnome goes with her prince wherever he goes. She fights beside him, at need she dies beside him. Would you have him die fighting and me live an hour? I'd blow myself to bits!" "My God!" Dorothy had gasped, and had stared, appalled. "That's right," Seaton had told her. "Their ethics, mores and customs differ more than somewhat from ours, you know." And nothing more had been said about Sitar being a member of the Expeditionary Force. Prenk's guerrillas had infiltrated the capital city by ones and twos; no group ever larger than two. Each one wore the costume of an easily recognizable class of citizen. They were apparently artisans and workmen, soldiers, sailors, clerks, businessmen, tycoons of industry. Nor were the watches they all wore on their wrists any more alike than were their costumes -- except in one respect. They all told the same time, to the tenth of a split second, and they all were kept in sync by pulses from a tiny power-pack that had been hidden in a tree in the outskirts of the city. At time zero minus thirty minutes, three hundred fifty-nine persons began to enter into and to distribute themselves throughout an immense building that resembled a palace or a cathedral much more than the Capitol building even of a world. At time zero minus four seconds all those persons, who had in the meantime been doing inconspicuous this and innocuous that, changed direction toward or began to walk toward or kept on walking toward their objectives. At time zero on the tick, three hundred fifty-nine knives came out of concealment and that exact number of persons fell. IF S ome of the guerrillas remained on guard where their victims lay. Others went into various offices on various businesses. On the top-most floor four innocent-looking visitors blasted open the steel door of Communications and shot the four operators then on duty. The leader of the four invaders stepped up to the master-control desk, shoved a body aside, flipped three or four switches, and said: "Your attention, please! These programs have been interrupted to announce that former Premier DaBay Saien and his sycophants have been executed for high treason. Primier Ree-Toe Prenk and his loyalists are now the government. Business is to go on as usual; no new orders will be issued except as they become necessary. That is all. Scheduled programs will now be resumed." It was not as easy everywhere, however, as that announcement indicated. By the very nature of things, the information secured by the counterspies was incomplete and sometimes, especially in fine detail, was wrong. Thus, when Seaton took his post on the fifteenth floor, standing before and admiring a heroicsize bronze statue of a woman strangling a boa constrictor whose coils enveloped half her height, he saw that there were four guards, instead of the two he had expected to find, at the door of the office that was his objective. But he couldn't -- wouldn't -- call for help. They hadn't had man-power enough to carry spares. He'd trip the S O S if necessary, but not until it became absolutely necessary -- but that office had to be put out of business time zero plus fifteen seconds. He'd just have to act twice as fast, was all. Cursing silently the fact that his magnum was not to be used during the first few silent seconds of the engagement, he watched the four men constantly out of the corners of his eyes, planning every detail of his campaign, altering those details constantly as the guards changed ever so slightly their positions and postures. He could get three of them, he was siie, before any one of them could fire; but he'd have to be lucky as well as fast to get the fourth in time -- and if the ape had time to take any kind of aim at all it would be very ungood. On the tick of zero time Seaton shed his businessman's cloak and took off. Literally. His knife swept through the throat of the nearest guard before that luckless ight had moved a muscle. He kicked the second, who was bending over at the moment, on and through the temple with the steel-lined toe of one highly special sure-grip fighting shoe. He stabbed the third, whose throat was protected at that instant by an upflung left arm, through the left side of the rib-cage, twisting his blade as he pulled it out. Ultra-fast as Seaton had been, the fourth guard had had time to lift his weapon, but he had not had time to aim it, or even to point it properly. He fired in panic, before his gun was pointed even waist-high. If Seaton had stayed upright the bullet would have missed him completely. But he didn't. He ducked and sidestepped and twisted -- and the heavy slug tore a long and savage wound across the left side of his back. One shot was all the fellow got, of course. Seaton kicked the door open and leaped into the room, magnum high and ready. The noise of that one shot might have tom it, but good. "Freeze, everybody!" he rasped, and everyone in the big room froze. "One move of any finger toward any button and I blast. This office is closed temporarily. Leave the building, all of you; right now and fast. Just as you are. Come back in here after lunch for business as usual. Scram!" T he office force -- some nonchalantly, some wonderingly, some staring at Seaton in surprise -- "scrammed" obediently. AH, that is, except one girl who came last; the girl who had been sitting at an executive-type desk beside the door of the inner office. She was a fairly tall girl; with hazel eyes and with dark brown hair arranged in up-tothe-second "sunburst" style. Her close-fitting white nylon ipcr garment and her even tighter fire-engine-red tights displayed a figure that could not be described as being merely adequate. Instead of passing him as the others had done she stopped, held out both hands in indication of having nothing except peaceable intentions, and peered around his left side. Then, bringing her eyes back to his, she said, "You're bleeding terribly, sir. It doesn't seem to be very deep IF -- entrance and exit holes in your shirt are only four or five inches apart -- but you're losing an awful lot of blood. Won't you let me give you first aid? I'm a quite competent nurse, sir." What?" Seaton demanded, but whatever he had intended to add to that one word was forestalled by a bellow of wrath from behind the just-opening door of the inner office. "Kay-Lee! You shirking slut! How much more of this do you think you can get away with? When I buzz you you jump or I'll cut your bloody -- " The man broke off sharply and goggled at what he saw. He was a pasty-faced, paunchy man of forty; very evidently self-indulgent and as evidently completely at a loss at the moment. "Come in, Bay-Lay Boyn," Seaton said. "Slowly, if you don't want your brains to decorate the ceiling. Did you ever see a man shot in the head with a magnum pistol?" The man gulped and licked his lips. The girl broke the very short silence. "Whatever you do to that poisonous slob, sir, I hope it's nothing trivial. I'd love to see his brains spattered all over the ceiling and I'd never let them be washed off. I'd look up at them week after week and gloat." "Kay-Lee dear, you don't mean that! You can't mean it!" the man implored. "Do something! Please do something! I'll double your salary -- I'll make you a First -- I'll give you a diamond necklace -- I'll -- " "You'll shut your filthy lying mouth. Your Exalted' she said -- quietly, but with an icily venemous contempt that made Seaton stare. "I've taken all the raps for you I'm ever going to." She turned to Seaton. "Please believe, sir, that no matter who your people are or what you do, any possible change will be for the better. And I remind you -- if you don't want to fall flat on your face from weakness you'll let me dress that wound." "I wouldn't wonder," Seaton admitted. "Blood's running down into my shoes already and it's beginning to hurt like the devil. So get your kit. But before you start on me we'll use some three-inch bandage to lash that ape's hands around that pillor there." T hat done, Seaton peeled to the waist and the girl went expertly to work. She sprayed the nastylooking wound, which was almost but not quite a deep but open groove, with antiseptic and with coagulant. She cross-taped its ragged edges together with blood-proof adhesive tape. She sponged most of the liquid blood off of his back. She sprinkled half a can of curative-antiseptic powder; she taped on thick pads of sterile gauze. She wrapped -- and taped into place -- roll after roll of three-inch bandage around his body and up over his shoulder and around his neck. Then she stood back and examined her handiwork, eyes narrowed in concentration. "That'll do it for a while," she decided. "I suppose you'll be too busy to take any time today, but you'll have to get that sewed up not later than tomorrow forenoon." lady; it feels a lot better already," and Seaton bent over to pick up his shirt and undershirt. "But you can't wear those bloody rags!" she protested, then went on, "But I don't know of anything else around here that you can wear, at that." Seaton grinned. "No quandary -- I'll go the way I am. Costume or the lack of it isn't important at the moment." He glanced at his watch and was surprised to see how very few minutes had elapsed. "Shall I go now, sir?" "Not yet." Seaton was used to making fast decisions, and they were usually right. He made one now. "I take it you were that ape's confidential secretary." "Yes, sir, I was." "So you know more about the actual workings of the department than he does and can run it as well. To make a snap judgment, can run it better than he has been running it." "Much better, sir," she said, flatly. "I've covered up for his drunken blunderings twice in the last two months. He passed the buck to me and I took it. A few lashes are much better than what he revels in doing to people; especially since he can't touch me now. He knows that after taking his floggings I'd go under hypnosis and tell everything I know about him if he tried to lay a finger on me." "Lashes? Floggings? I see." Seaton's face hardened. "Okay, you're it." He took a badge out of his pocket, slid its slip out of its holder. and handed the slip to Kay-Lee. "Type on this your name and his rating and title and turn your recorder on." She did so. He glanced at the slip, replaced it in its holder, and pinned the badge in place just above the girl's boldly outstanding left breast. "I, Ky-El Mokak, acting for and with the authority of Premier Ree-Toe Prenk, hereby make you, Kay-Lee Barlo, an Exalted of the Twenty-Sixth and appoint you Head of the Department of Public Works. I hereby charge you. Your Exalted, to so operate your department as to prevent, not to cause, the destruction of persons and of property by those enemies of all mankind the Chlorans." He stepped to the desk; cut the recorder off. F or the first time, the girl's taut self-control was broken. "Do you mean I can actually clean this pig-sty up?" she demanded, tears welling into her eyes. "That you actually want me to clean it up?" "Just that. You'll be briefed at a meeting of the new department heads late this afternoon. In the rueantime start your house-cleaning as soon as you like after your people get back from lunch; and I don't have to tell you how to act. Have you got or can you get a good hand-gun?" "Yes, sir, there's a very good one -- his -- in his desk. I was trying to get up nerve enough to ask you for it." "It's yours as of now. Can you use it? That's probably a foolish question." IF "I'll say I can use it! I made Pistol Expert One when I was eleven and I've been improving ever since." "Fine!" He glanced again at his watch. "Go get it, be sure it's loaded, buckle it on and wear it. Show your badge, play the recording and lay down the law. If there's any argument, shoot to kill. We aren't fooling." He glanced at the prisoner. "He'll be out of your way. I'm taking him downstairs pretty soon to answer some questions." "I -- I thank you, sir. I can't tell you how much. But you -- I mean... well, I -- " the girl was a study in mixed emotions. Her nostrils flared and her whole body was tense with the beyond-imagining thrill of what had just occurred; but at the same time she was so acutely embarrassed that she could scarcely talk. "I want to tell you, sir, that I wasn't trying to curry..." She broke off in confusion and gulped twice. "Curry? I know you weren't. You aren't the toadying type. That's one reason you got it -- but just a second." He looked again at his watch and did not put it down; but in a few seconds raised the ring to his lips and asked, "Are you there, Ree-Toe?" "Here, Ky-El," the tiny ring-voice said. "Mission accomplished, including selection and installation of department head." "Splendid! Are you hurt?" "Not badly. Scratch across my back. How're we doing?" "Better even than expected. The Premier is dead, I don't know yet exactly how. All your people are all right except for some not-tooserious wounds. Ours, only ten dead reported so far. The army came over to a man. You have earned a world's thanks this day, Ky-El, and its eternal gratitude." Seaton blushed. "Skip it, chief. Any change in schedule?" "None." "Okay. Off." Seaton, lowering his hand to his side, turned to KayLee. She, who had not quite been able to believe all along that all this was actually happening to her, was staring at him in wide-eyed awe. "You are a biggie!" she gasped. "A great big biggie. Your Exalted, to talk to the Premier himself like that! So this unbelievable appointment will stick!" "It will stick. Definitely. So chin high and don't spare the horses, Your Exalted; and I'll see you at the meeting. Until then, so-long." Seaton cut his prisoner loose and half-led, half-dragged him, gibbering and begging, out of the room. Almost Seaton regretted it was over; the work on Ray-See-Nee had been pleasurable, as well as useful. But -- now he had his base of operations, unknown to the Chlorans, on a planet they thought safely their own. Now he could go on with his campaign against them. Seaton was well aware that the universe held other enemies than the Chlorans, but his motto was one thing at a time. However, it is instructive now to see just what two of those inimical forces were up to at this one -- one which knew it was in trouble... and one which did notl DuQuesne and Fenachrone B efore the world of the Fenachrone was destroyed by Civilization's superatomic bombs it was a larger world than Earth, and a denser, and with a surface gravity very much higher. It was a world of steaming jungle; of warm and reeking fog; of tepid, sullenly steaming water; of fantastically lush vegetation unknown to Earthly botany. Wind there was none, nor sunshine. Very seldom was the sun of that reeking world visible at all through the omnipresent fog, and then only as a pale, wan disk; and what of its atmosphere was not fog was hot and humid and sulphurously stinking air. And as varied the worlds, so varied the people. The Fenachrone, while basically humanoid, were repulsively and monstrously short, wide and thick. They were immensely strong physically, and their mentalities were as monstrous as their civilization was many thousands of years older than that of Earth; their science was equal to ours in most respects and ahead of it in some. Most monstrous of all the facets of Fenachrone existence, however, was their basic philosophy of life. Might was right. Power was not only the greatest good; it was the only good. The Fenachrone were the able destiny it was to be the unquestionable masters of the entire spacetime continuum -- of the summated totality of the Cosmic All. For many thousands of years nothing had happened to shake any Fenachrone's rock-solid conviction of the destiny of their race. Progress along the Master-Race line had been uninterrupted. In fact, it had never been successfully opposed. The Fenachrone had already wiped out, without really extending themselves, all the other civilizations within a hundred parsecs or so of their solar system. But up to the time of Emperor Fenor no ruler of the Fenachrone had become convinced that the time had come to set the Day of Conquest -- the day upon which the Big Push was to begin. But rash, headstrong, egomaniacal Fenor insisted upon setting The Day in his own reign -- which was why First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet had set up his underground so long before. He was just as patriotic as any other member of his race; just as thoroughly sold on the idea of the inevitable ultimate supremacy over all created things wherever situated; but his computations did not indicate that success was as yet quite certain. How right Sleemet was! He knew that he was right after hearing the first few words of Sacner Carfon's ultimatum to Emperor Fenor: that was why he had pushed the panic button for the eighty-fivethousand-odd members of his faction to flee the planet right then. IF He knew it still better when, after Fenor's foolhardy defiance of Sacner Carfon, of the Overlord, and of the Forces of Universal Peace, his native planet became a minor sun behind his flying fleet. Even then, however, Sleemet had not learned very much -- at least, nowhere nearly enough. A t first glance it might seem incredible that, after such an experience, Sleemet could have so lightly destroyed two such highly industrialized worlds about which he knew so little. It might seem as though it must have been impressed upon his mind that the Fenachrone were not the ablest, strongest, wisest, smartest, most highly advanced and most powerful form of life ever created. Deeper study will show, however, that with his heredity and conditioning he could not possibly have done anything else. Sleemet probably did not begin really to realize the truth until the Llurd Klazmon so effortlessly -- apparently -- wiped out sixteen of his seventeen superdreadnoughts, then crippled his flagship beyond resistance or repair and sent it hurtling through space toward some completely unknown destination. His first impulse, like that of all his fellows, was to storm and to rage and to hurl things and to fight. But there was no one to fight; and storming and raging and hurling and smashing things did not do any good. In fact, nothing they could do elicited any attention at all from their captors. Wherefore, as days stretched out endlessly and monotonously into endless and monotonous weeks, all those five-thousand-odd Fenachrone -- males and females, adults and teen-agers and children and babies -- were forced inexorably into a deep and very un-Fenachronian apathy. And when the hulk of the flagship arrived at the Llanzlanate on far Llurdiax, things went immediately from bad to worse. The volume of space into which the Fenachrone were moved had a climate exactly like that of their native city on their native world. All its artifacts -- its buildings, and its offices and its shops and its foods and its drinks and its everything else -- were precisely what they should have been. Ostensibly, they were encouraged to live lives even more normal than ever before (if such an expression is allowable); to breed and to develop and to evolve; and especially to perform break-throughs in science. Actually, however, it was practically impossible for them to do anything of their own volition; because they were being studied and analyzed and tested every minute of every day. Studied coldly and logically and minutely; with an utterly callous ferocity unknown to even such a ferocious race as the Fenachrone themselves were. Hundreds upon hundreds of the completely helpless captives died -- died without affecting in any smallest respect the treatment received by the survivors and as their utter helplessness struck in deeper and deeper, the Fenachrone grew steadily weaker, both physically and mentally. This was no surprise to their captors, the Llurdi. Nor was it in any sense a disappointment. To them the Fenachrone were tools; and they were being tempered and shaped to their task... O n Earth, leaving Stephanie de Marigny's apartment, DuQuesne went back to the Capital D and took off on course one hundred seventy-five Universal -- that is, five degrees east of Universal South. He went that way because in that direction lay the most completely unexplored sector of the First Universe and he did not want company. Earth and the First Galaxy lay on the edge of the First Quadrant. Llurdiax and its Realm lay in the Second. So did the Empire of the Chlorans and his own imaginary planet Xylmny. The second galaxy along that false line, which might also attract Seaton, lay in the Third. He didn't want any part of Richard Ballinger Seaton -- yet -- and this course was mathematically the best one to take to get out of and keep out of Seaton's way. Therefore he would follow it clear out to the Fourth Quadrant rim of the First Universe. As the Capital D bored a hole through the protesting ether DuQuesne took time out from his thinkings to consider women. First, he considered Stephanie de Marigny; with a new and not at all unpleasant thrill as he did so. He considered Sennlloy and Luloy and some unattached women of the Jelmi. They all left him completely cold; and he was intellectually honest enough to know why and to state that "why" to himself. The Jelmi were so much older than the humanity of Earth that they were out of his class. He could stand equality -- definitely; in fact, that was what he wanted -- but he could not live with and would not try to live with any woman so demonstrably his superior. But Hunkie -- ah, there was a man's woman! His equal; his perfect equal in every respect; with a brain to match one of the finest bodies ever built. She didn't play hard to get, she was hard to get; but once got she'd stay got. She'd stand at a man's back 'till his belly caved in. Slowed to a crawl, as Universal speed goes, the Capital D entered the outermost galaxy of the Rim of the Universe and DuQuesne energized his highest-powered projector. He studied the Tellus-Type planets of hundreds of solar systems. Many of these planets were inhabited, but he did not reveal himself to the humanity of any of them. He landed on an uninhabited planet and went methodically to work. He bulldozed out an Area of Work. He set up his batteries of machine tools; coupling an automatic operator of pure force to each tool as it was set up. Then he started work on the Brain; which took longer than all the rest of the construction put together. It was an exact duplicate of that of the Skylark of Valeron; one cubic mile of tightly packed ultra-miniaturized components; the most tremendous and most tremenIF dously capable super-computer known to man. While the structure of the two were not. As has been said, there were certain volumes -- blocks of cells -- in the Valeron's brain that DuQuesne had not been able to understand. These blocks he left inoperative -- for the time being. Conversely, DuQuesne either had or wanted powers and qualities and abilities that Seaton neither had nor wanted; hence certain blocks that were as yet inoperative in Seaton's vast fabrication were fully operative in DuQuesne's. I t is a well-known fact that whitecollar men, who sit at desks and whose fellowship with machines is limited to week-end drives in automobiles, scoff heartily at the idea that any two machines of the same make and model do or can act differently from each other except by reason of wear. With increasing knowledge of an acquaintance with machines, however -- especially with mechanisms of the more complex and sophisticated sorts -- this attitude changes markedly. The men and women who operate such machines swear unanimously that those machines do unquestionably have personalities; each its unique and peculiar own. Thus, while the fact can not be explained in logical or "common" sense terms, those two giants brains were as different in personality as were the two men who built them. Nor was DuQuesne's worldlet, which he named the DQy very much like the Skylark of Valeron except in shape. It was bigger. Its skin was much thicker and much denser and much more heavily armed. The individual mechanisms were no larger -- the Valeron" s . were the biggest and most powerful that DuQuesne knew how to build -- but there were so many of them that he was pretty sure of being safe from anyone. Even from whoever it was that had mauled the Valeron so unmercifully -- whom he, DuQuesne, did not intend to approach. Ever. It was, in fact, his prayerful hope that both mauler and maulee -- Seaton himself -- would ultimate ly emerge from that scuffle whittled down to a size where he would not have to consider them again. He did not, in fact, consider them; nor did he consider the captive Fenachrone in the pens of Llurdiax; nor the Jelmi; nor -- and this, perhaps, was his greatest mistake -- did he consider, because he did not know about, a mother and daughter of whose existence neither he nor any other Tellus-type human being had yet heard. He simply built himself the most powerspace vessel he could imagine, armed it, launched it... and set out to recapture the Universe Seaton had once taken away from him. The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I'm afraid this is going to be another of those rambling commentaries on just about everything -- so brace yourself. I'm glad to see you've finally started Skylark DuQuesne. After reading the first installment I conclude it was worth the wait. I was quite relieved to see that Smith is writing in the same general style as the other three Skylarks; it becomes Seaton and his N-order forces. Not to mention adding continuity even after a lapse of more than # years. One thing I've always admired about Smith (not to mention Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith and a few others) is his skill at making his civilizations detailed. Burroughs did it, but clumsily, Heinlein does it in bits and snatches, and very few others do it. If makes the story more real if it seems to have a history behind it, and this adds to my enjoyment of a story. Others may find it a waste of words, which is fine with me -- it's a free country. Which brings up a question. What would you advise to a person with a detailed and realistic civilization. with a detailed history and culture, who lacks skill to write a really good story around it? I'm afraid I've become a Gree fan. The series is very Interesting and if it keeps up its standards it should become a Retief-type mainstay of the magazine (or has it already?). The first story of the four was the best; I'd like to see more of Jen. He sparks up the stories a little, and makes a much better protection than a 'Gunner's Uniform" when in a hive. Unless I'm mistaken, there will soon be an announcement of a novel, and in this novel Earth will be taken. Or will that be their Holy Grail? I should think Gree's forces will eventually wise up to Duke's (thrice-used) method and there ought to be some really good stories. As to your "Out of the Idiot Box" editorial : What makes you think strong it won't be just as bad as ills of TV. Even at the present there are very few stations which do not and movies plus a few inexpensive local telecasts. It would take a trong, wealthy organization to have the kind of network (it would have to be a network) you suggest. They would need to be strong to absorb the losses they would incur until the public sensed the superiority of their programming. Another disadvantage that must be overcome is poorly, at best. (Possibly this is a local condition, but I doubt it.) The ultimate responsibility lies with the general viewing public, and from past performance they are not going to be any help. The only thing that could be done now is nationalization, but that is not much of a practical solution. cy doesnt make a station good. As for the lettercol, dont expand it, just print it in the microscopic type of the old days. That way you'd get more letters in, and wouldn't offend those who are against letters. The rating space suggested in the June issue would be great, it's got my vote. More Cordwainer Smith (who is he, for real?), more Laumer, more MacApp, more Leinster, more newcomers (best idea in sf history), and more you ( ! ) . In response to David Lyon, could it be C.H. Fontenay's Silk and the Song he's after? They seem to be the same story. Maybe Crystal Tower was a long adaption of it? If you could improve your covers you'd improve your circulation. I think you ought to keep the style you had on the Jan. # issue as a permanent fixture. At least keep a white border around the illo, and let Morrow do more of those -- he's the best illustrator I've seen in years, -- David Lebling, # Rollins Ct., Rockville, Md. #. # If you've got a good idea for a story, there's only one thing to do. Write it. It's really the only way... unless you happen to know a writer who's short on ideas. But with most sf writers they'd rather think up their own. -- Editor,    Dear Editor: I bought the April issue of If a few days ago, the first I'd seen in a couple of years. I must say that it is much improved. Grees Hellcats was very good; how about some more by C. C. MacApp? Did he write The Slaves of Creel Also, is it possible to get some back issues of ? -- John W. Cook, Box #, Harlem, Georgia #.  Yes, MacApp wrote all the Gree stories -- including Greeks P'r.ined Ones, coming up next month. And you can get back copies of If, Galaxy or Worlds of Tomorrow at #c a copy, regardless of original cover price, by writing our Back Number Department care of this magazine. Only issues for the years #-# inclusive are available at present. -- Editor.   Dear Editor: I've been a reader of If and Galaxy for a couple of years now and your stories get better and better. -- Paul Hinds, # #th Street, Kenosha, Wisconsin.  Dear Editor: I just finished your two-parter. The Altar at Asconel, and thought it was fine. Let's have more of this type of story, the adventure type as made famous by Burroughs, Howard and others of their school. Keep up your good work. Incidentally, if anyone is interested I have a fairly large stock of science-fiction magazines I would like to sell -- Bill Franklin, P.O. Box #, Hickory, North Carolina.    Dear Editor: IVe seen how readers try to locate stories through Hue and Cry and IVe helped two in finding them. Now I wonder if somebody might be able to help me. I'm trying the first sf magazines I ever read. One of them had a cover showing a large, glittering diamond on which two women were fighting. The story concerned a plot by otherdimensional beings to kidnap humans by luring them into "diamonds" by sexual enticements. Once one of these "diamond" gateways is used, it takes on the look of a burntout fuse. An agent from a top secret intelligence organization enters the other dimension and rescues the prisoners but leaves the gate open to await a time when the aliens can be destroyed. Another had a story called Pink Puppy Dog which dealt with asteroid mining. As I recall the same magazine carried stories about two men in some horrible future war beauty (a flower) and a time when the Earth is dying and almost depopulated and one person goes killcrazy. There was one about a time when the population explosion was so great that the forests were removed to house people. The hero is arrested because he owned some wood but it develops that the hero could explain having wood because he had been growing a tree in secret. Another was about the reactions of a spaceship crew to the new captain: a woman. Space travel is pictured as almost slavery. I recall that the radiation had made everybody on the ship bald. -- James Edward Turner, Box #, Pilot Knob, Missouri #.    Dear Editor: Retief was the 'cause of me buying If regularly. By what lucky chance did you get Laumer to sell the Retief stories to you exclusively? -- Arthur W. Jordin, #I McCallis Avenue, Chattanooga, Tennessee #. # No chance about it, friend! We saw the first one, we liked it, we demanded more -- and Laumer, who is an obliging soul, has just quit his Air Force captaincy to devote full time to turning them (and other first-rate science fiction) out; so there'll be more in the future! That would seem to be about as far as the type stretches this issue. As you Old Hands know, in each issue of If we bring you a story by a New Hand, a writer who hasn't ever before been published and who looks to us like someone who should be. This month's is J.M. McPadden, exnaval officer and someone you'll be seeing again. (That's an easy prediction for us to make this time: We already own another of McFadden's stories, called Mercuryy upcoming soon.) And speaking of Firsts, next month we start something that strikes us as a First. If you don't know yet what it is you obviously skipped the editorial this issue. Take a look at it. We think you'll agree that if not totally unprecedented, it is at least an unusual thing for a magazine to do -- and a pleasant one ! -- The Editor, IF Your Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying  but always a delight to read. 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Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues ot IF! I enclose #  New  Renewal Name Address City State Zip No (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) Offer void after Dec. #, # Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Sub. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial H appen you don't sleep well at night, and provided you live somewhere in the more-or-less Eastern part of the United States, you may well find yourself listening to the radio between the hours of midnight and five A.M. What brightens the air at those hours over radio all-night talk show whose presiding genius is a man named Long John Nebel. What Long John likes in guests for his radio program is the specialist in the far-out. One of the things he likes is science fiction, and he has had any number of science-fiction writers on the show at one time or another. Lester del Rey is a regular; so is Mike Girsdansky (who has been writing those fascinating future-science articles for us in Worlds of Tomorrow) ; so, for that matter, is the undersigned. Others who have appeared with Long John are James Blish, Theodore Sturgeon, Harry Harrison, Sam Moskowitz, Mel Hunter, John Campbell, Isaae Asimov -- well, the list could go on indefinitely, for John Nebel has filled a lot of air hours in the past decade. It was on a Long John show a couple of yfears ago, as a matter of fact, that your editor made some remarks about flying saucers which attracted the attention of a man named George W. Earley. George Earley is the Connecticut state representative for an organizavestigating Committee for Aerial Phenomena -- and he called us up in some irritation. You don't accept the evidence for flying saucers, he charged; and we admitted that that was true enough; we weren't a bit convinced. But have you really made any sort of investigation? he asked. Have you really looked, at the evidence? Or have you just made up logists a fair chance? We had to confess to Earley that he had called that one accurately. What he said was true. Everything we knew about Unidentified Flying Objects, contactees, space-people and so on could be put in a couple of newspaper headlines, because that essentially was where we'd got what little information we had. And when Earley pressed us we had to agree that this was not a particularly desirable way to make a decision. So we promised to do better. T hat was a little over a year ago. Since then, as time and opportunity permit, we have been repairing this obvious gap in our education as rapidly as we can. It isn't as easy as you might think. To begin with, all saucerdom is divided into two parts. Part I the movement, whose essential thesis is approximately as follows: "There have been over # reports of unidentified celestial objects in the past few years. They cannot all be mistakes or hoaxes. As a minimum, these facts demand a full-scale investigation by responsible authorities, conducted in public and with no attempt to disguise or protect under the guise of military security their findings. As a maximum, we consider it beyond doubt that the Earth is being visited by creatures from another planet." Part # is what are called the "contactees", and what they say is approximately this: "Earth has not only been visited from outer space, but many of us have talked with the spacemen, ridden in their strange saucer-shaped craft and learned from them many priceless secrets of science, technology and moral law -- besides being given advance notice of the assassination of President Kennedy, the flareup of war in Vietnam and the success of our and the Russian space probes." using in this sense to include a number of men and women who, for one reason or another, don't belong to opinion that the general case is proved and certainly needs more investigation, without going along with the claims of the contactees) includes a lot of technical, scientific and professional people, and it goes to a lot of trouble to secure as much verification as it can for every reof two. such attempts ourselves, we can testify that this is pretty hard to do. Consider, for example, the case of New Mexico State Patrolman Lonnie Zamora. About a year ago Zamora, patrolling the area south of the town of Socorro, New Mexico, radioed his headquarters that he had observed what looked like the landing of some sort of strange aircraft a few miles south of the town and was proceeding to investigate. His desk sergeant dispatched another car, but by the time it grot there there was nothing to be seen except Zamora himself, his car and certain marks in the ground. According to Zamora, the "aircraft" had been metallic, bright, fairly large and not like anything he had ever seen before. It seemed to land on four struts, and when it took off again it did so with the' accompaniment of a bluish glow from underneath. Although Socorro is ringed by radar (it is on the fringe of the White Sands Proving Ground and as well guarded as any place in the world against aerial intrusion), no trace of any aircraft had been detected by radar or by visual spotters. The marks on the ground consisted of four crude pits -- approximately where Zamora stated the struts of the object had rested -- and a greasewood bush that was in flames, presumably set alight by the "bluish glow" from under the object at takeoff. Some weeks later we had occasion to be in New Mexico and, accomto his students at Eastern New Mexico Reserve University as ProPh.D., but to most of the rest of us as the author of scores of fine science-fiction stories over the past thirty-odd years -- we made a sidetrip of a couple of hundred miles to look over the Zamora sighting. The physical evidence was just as it had been described. There were the four rough pits -- since surrounded by heaps of pebbles by desirous of keeping them from being trampled out of shape. There w?o the greasewood bush; it had grown new shoots, but it was still apparent that it had been burned not long before. The site was down in a little arroyo. About forty feet away was the small mesa where Zamora had parked his police car and got out to investigate. From mesa to arroyo the lino cf .sight was clear and the distance not much. Obviously there would have been no difficulty in seeing whatever was there, given a reliable witness. The apparent next question was, was Zamora a reliable witness? According tc the testimony of his sergeant, his fellow patrolmen and townspeople, there was no doubt at all. "If Lonnie said he saw something, he saw it. He might be mistaken, but he'd never lie." Was he likely to be mistaken? Not according to Professor Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico, for whom Zamora had functioned as a volunteer meteorite spotter for years. Zamora was a trained observer, as well as a man possessed of the most towering reputation for honesty this writer can recall coming across in a long time. Of course, in the long run this whole case rests on Zamora. The physical evidence was nothing -- anybody could have jabbed a couple of holes in the desert; a match could have ignited the bush as easily as a "bluish glow". There were vague reports of other witnesses, but none that could be tracked down -- at undersigned concluded, rather definitely, never would be tracked down, because the geography of the case was such that we didn't believe he ever existed in the first place. So where does that leave us? A bout where we started, we're afraid... and that's the story of the whoie flying-saucer situation. The centactees would say this is design on the part of the space people -- they're just playing with us, that this is irrelevant. Never mind why it's so hard to get conclusive, irrefutable evidence of even one sighting -- out of the endless thousands of reports -- just concentrate on the number, the quality of the observers (many of them trained and of excellent repute) and the logic of the situation. Half of our physical laws rest on worse statistical evidence than the case for flywhich summarizes the circumstances surrounding # carefully selected sightings. Some are accompanied by photographic evidence. Many are supported by the testimony of astronomers, meteorologists, radar operators, airline pilots or others who are in a position to look at the sky with some expertise. At about the same time, Donald H. Menzel, Director of the Harvard Observatory, and Lyle Boyd, contributor to this and many other science-fiction magazines over the years, published a book called The World # , the Flying Saucers , in which they went over the evidence for a large selection of sightings and came to the conclusion that every one of them was explicable in terms of planets seen through a haze, odd cloud formations, weather balloons or other natural events. So where does that leave us? Still about where we started, we're afraid. But we're still checking. And it may be that we'll have something more definite to tell you one of IF  Novelette She was beautiful. She told me she loved me. The only trouble was, she kept trying to kili me! I T he bolt of flame from the gun from his nose. There was silence, and then the door opened behind him. Light footsteps approached, muffled by the fine, deadly dust on the floor. Gull craned to see the person approaching, but he was tied too tightly for that. "You are most foolhardy, Meesta Gull," said the girl's soft voice. "I beg you, do not drop the fuse again or I must resort to more 'arsh methods." And from the corner of his eye Johan Gull saw her slim figure swiftly stoop to recover the ball-meter length of rubbery plastic fuse-cord. As she attempted to jam it into his mouth again he jerked his head aside and managed to ask, "Why are you doing this?" "Why?" There was the soft hint of a laugh in her voice. "Ah, why indeed!" She caught hi? head in the crook of an arm and, surprisingly strong, held it still. He felt the stiff strand thrust between his teeth, tasted again the acrid chemical flavor. When she had done the same thing before he had been able to spit the fuse out before she could ignite it. She did not chance his dropping it again; her flame-gun hissed, and the end of the fuse befn to sizzle with a tiny green spark. "I think," she whispered, "that it is because I love you, Meesta Gull." And he felt something like a quick touch of lips, a scent of perfume that carried even above the pyrotechnic reek of the sputtering fuse; and then the door closed softly and he was alone in the room that was about to become an enormous bomb. T he green halo hissed the length of the dangling fuse toward his lips. Johan Gull, estimating seconds by the beat of his pulse where his wrists were tied to the wall, timed ers a second. Say four minutes before it reached his lips. He sighed. It was a nuisance to think of his career ending like this -- a daring foray into enemy territory to break up a smuggling operation of the Black Hats... complete success, the ring destroyed, the dozen men in charge of it dead... and then to allow himself to be tricked by the one person who survived, a slip of a girl. If he had only not answered her cry for help! But he had. And he had found himself trussed up in a karate grip, then tied to the wall. And now -- he had four minutes of life, or actually a bit less, unless he thought of something rather quickly. He could, of course, drop the fuse at any time before the spark touched his flesh and his instictive reaction made him drop it. But the girl had said, and he had no reason to think that she lied, that the powdery dust she had spread about the floor was gunpowder. In the unconfined space of the room it would perhaps not explode; it might only flare up like the igniting of a gas jet; but it would kill Johan Gull nonetheless. Could he scrape a spot clean with his feet and drop the burning fuse there? Experimentally he shifted position and tried. It was slow work. The floor was rough-cast cement and the tiny particles of explosive powder adhered like lint on wool. By arduous scraping with the side of his shoe Gull managed to get a six-inch square mostly free of the stuff. But it was not good enough, he saw. A pale powdery haze clung to the crevices. It was not much, but it was too much; it would take very little to flash and carry the spark of the fuse to the main mass; and two eminutes were irretrievably gone. Could he sneeze it out? It was IF at least worth a try, he thought; but annoyingly his nose would not itch, there was no trace of nasal drip, all he managed to do was snort at the tiny green light and make it flare brighter for a moment. He redoubled his efforts to slip his wrists out of their bonds. The thing could be done, he discovered with tempered pleasure. The girl had tied him well; but she was only a girl and not strong enough, or cruel enough, to cut deeply into his wrists. The cord stretched slowly and minutely; he would be able to work himself free. But not in four minutes. Still more certainly not in the minute or less that was all he had left. Already he could feel the heat of the glowing end of the fuse on his chin. He was forced to lean forward for fear of igniting his goatee, but soon it would be too close for that to help. There really was only one thing to do, thought Johan Gull regretfully. He nibbled the short remaining length of fuse up to his lips and, wincing from the pain but denying it control of his actions, chewed out the spark. A quarter of an hour later he was free of his bonds and through the door. The girl was long gone, of course. Spirited little devil. Gull wished her well; he bore her no animus for taking one round of The Game, wished only that he had been able to see her more clearly, for her voice was sweet. Perhaps they would meet again. Rubbing his wrists, Gull looked about the dingy shed in which ne had been held captive. He knew this part of Marsport less well than almost any of the rest of the red planet, but recognized this rundown corridor as a slum. An uncollected trash basket kicked over on its side spewed refuse across the steel decking. On the black wall that had housed him some despairing wretch had scrawled, We Are Property! The air pressure was low, but it reeked of dirt, drugs and vice. Gull shrugged, lighted a cigarette, turned his back on the room tht had so nearly been his death ti # and strode toward the sign marked Subway. He would be late, and .# was a stickler for promptness. But he paused to glance back again, and thought of the girl who had trapped him. He had liked her voice. She had had a charming fragrance. It had been cool of her to have ignited the fuse while she was still in the room; he might have dropped it and then and there blown both of them halfway to Deimos. And she had said that she loved him. II T he entrance to Security lay through a barber shop. Gull hung his coat on a rack and sat back in the chair, musing about the adventure he had just had and wondering about the next to come. In the corridor outside a chanting mob for spacemen; Gull had nearly been caught in the marching front of their demonstration as he entered the shop. He submitted to being lathered, shaved, talced and brushed, but the jacket he was helped into was not his own. His hand in the pocket closed over the familiar shape of the pencil-key. He let himself out the back way of the barber shop and opened the private door to .#'s office. "Sorry I'm late, sir," he apologized to the ancient, leathery figure with the hooded eyes behind the desk. The Old Man's secretary, McIntyre, looked up from his eternal notebook. From the hooks and slants in that little leather-bound pad messages flew to every corner of the Solar System, alerting a battalion of Marines on Callisto, driving a Black Hat front into bankruptcy in Stuttgart, thrusting pawns against a raid on Darkside Mercury, throwing an agent to his death here on Mars. To McIntyre it was all the same. He was a dark young man who had never been known to show emotion. He said calmly, ".# is a stickler for promptness, Gull." Gull said, "I ran into difficulties. Something didn't want me to get here today, I'm afraid." Was it his imagination, or did .#'s imperturbable face show the vestige of a frown? McIntyre put down his pencil and regarded Gull thoughtfully. "I think," he said, "that you'd better tell .# just what you mean by that." "Oh, just that I had difficulties, sir." Quickly Gull sketched the events of the day. "Afraid I allowed myself to be decoyed. Shouldn't have, of course. But next thing you know there was a flame-pencil in my ribs, I was tied up and a lighted fuse between my teeth. Quite unpleasant, as the floor was covered with gunpowder. I would have been here sooner, but I didn't quite trust myself to spit the fuse clear of the gunpowder." Eyebrows raised, McIntyre glanced at .#, as if to find a sign on that stoic countenance. Then he rose deliberately, walked to a file, pulled out a sheaf of papers in a folder marked, Gull, Johan , Personnel Records of. He glanced through them thoughtfully. "I see," he said at last. "Well, that's neither here nor there." He replaced the folder and sat beside Gull. "Johan," he said earnestly, ".# wants me to caution you that your next assignment may mean unusual danger." "Really, sir? Oh, delightful!" "More than you think, perhaps," said McIntyre darkly. "It isn't merely our colleagues in the Black Hats this time. It's mob hysteria, at least. Perhaps something far more sinister. Something's up in Syrtis Major." A fter fourteen years as an agent and innumerable hearings of those words, or of words very much like them, still a thrill tingled up the spine of Johan Gull. Something's up in Syrtis Major -- or Lacus Solis. Or the Southern Ice Cap. And he would be off again, off in the gratification of that headiest of addictions, the pitting of one's wits and fine-trained body against the best the other side could come up with. Afid they were resourceful devils, TO IF he thought, with the journeyman's unseltish admiration for a skilled worker at his own trade. Time and again it had taken all he possessed to win tnrough against their strength and trices. And if .# felt it necessary to caution him that this coming expiou would be trickier than uuai, u would indeed be something to remember. "Mnasning," ne cried. "Would you care to Drier me on it?" But McIntyre was shaking his head. #I you'd managed to get here on schedule -- " he said; and then, "As it is, .# has some rather urgent callers due in, let me see, mark! Forty seconds." "I see, said Johan Gull. "However," McIntyre went on, "research has the whole picture for you. Vou'li draw whatever supplies are necessary in Supply. Then Travel  transport can arrange for your travel and transport. Good-by, Gull." "Right, sir,' said Gull, memorizing his instructions. His lips moved for a second and he nodded. "Got it. So long, McIntyre. Good-by, sir." He did not wait for an answer. It was well known that .# disliked wasting breath on trivia, above all on the conventional exchange of greetings and farewells and unmeant inquiries as to the unimportant aspects of one s health that passed for "politeness". In the office these perfunctory pleasances were skipped. Gull let himself out, his heart pounding in spite of himself, and started toward the Research office and a new job. I t was rather a nuisance, thought Gull as he lay sprawled in the barber's chair, to go again through the process of being lathered, shaved, talced and brushed. But it did have advantages. One advantage wai that it gave one a moment to oneself now and then. Johan Gull was a healthy young animal. He had an educated interest in food, drink and the attractions of women; a moment for reverie taken perforce, like this, was a luxury... the sort of luxury his active body was inclined to deny him when it had a choice. He dreamed away the moments, hardly hearing the barber-robot's taped drone -- "How you think the Yanks gonna do? Say, you see this new ragazz ' on the TV last night? Hoo!" -- while his mind roamed the ochre wastes of Syrtis Major. He thought contentedly that he was ready for the assignment. The jacket he was helped to put on bore on its cuff a quite unduplicable pattern of metal-linked lines and dots. Gull climbed the winding stairs down to the basement of the barber shop, held the sleeve to a scanning device and was admitted to the Research center. Lights, sounds and activity smote his senses. He blinked, pausing on the threshold of the room as the great steel door swung soundlessly closed behind him. As it never failed lo do, the busy hum of Research thrilled him with a sense of the vast massive scope of Security's incredibly complex operations. The chamber was more than thirty meters across. It was in the form of an amphitheater, with cirIF cles of desks descending toward the gFeat central dais. There on a pivot, its axis inclined an exact # #' from the vertical, the great globe of Mars majestically turned, it cities and traffieways and canals etched out in colors that were softly glowing or startlingly bright. Here a rhythmic green flash pinpointed one of Security's agents on active duty. There a crimson warning signal winked the presence of a known enemy operative. Patches of blue and orange indicated areas of military buildup or of temporary calm; white flashes showed Black Hat strongpoints under surveillance; .#'s own bases were gold. Any Black Hat field man would gladly have paid his life, and a bit more, for five minutes inside the Research chamber. It was the most secret installation in all Security's vast net. In it, any of the three hundred trained technicians seated at their rows of desks on each step of the circle could look up and, in a moment, identify a trouble signal, record a "mission accomplished", demand and get a dossier on any adult Martian citizen or guest, or put into operation any of .#'s magnificently daring ventures. And what was most impressive about it all, thought Gull, was that this infinitely detailed accumulation of expertise was duplicated in full in one other place -- in the fecund convolutions of .#'s busy brain. Gull observed that the appropriate face of Mars was toward him now. He quickly sought the lines of the canals, followed them to Syrtis Major, paused and frowned. The whole mass of the area was glowing with a pale lavender radiance. G ull stood puzzled and faintly worried, until one of the girls at the circling desks rose and beckoned him. As he approached she sat down again and waved him to a chair. "Good afternoon, Mr. Gull," she said. "One moment until I get your account records." Gull grinned, more amused than otherwise. "Oh, come off it, Gloria," he said easily. "I know I was a stinker last night. But let's not hold grudges." She said stiffly, "Thank you for waiting, Mr. Gull. I have your records now." Gull's smile did not fade; he had observed the faint softening of the corners of her mouth. "Then let's get to it," he said genially. Her fingers had been busy on the console A faxed sheet emerged from a slit on the lip of her desk and she read it carefully, nodding. "Ah, yes. I thought so," said the girl. "It's that flying saucer affair in Syrtis Major." Gull's smile vanished. He smote his brow. "Flying saucers! Of course." Comprehension overspread his face and he nodded'. "Saw the lavender on the globe, of course, but I must admit that for the moment I forgot my color-coding. Couldn't remember that it meant flying saucers." The girl was looking at him ruefully. "Oh, dear," she sighed. "Johan, you've just earned yourself a one-hour refresher. You know #'s a stickler for keeping color-coding in your head." Gull groaned, but she was adamant. "No use fighting it. It'll do you good, dear. Now about this flying saucer thing." She glanced over the faxed sheet to refresh her memory, then spoke. "About two weeks ago," she said, "a couple of old mica prospectors reeled in off the desert with a story about having been captured by strange, god-like creatures who landed near their camp in a flying saucer. There's a transcript of their stories on this tape -- " she took a spool from a drawer of her desk and handed it to Gull -- "but essentially what it comes to is that they said these creatures are so far superior to humans that they consider us to be domesticated animals at best." "Have the same feeling myself from time to time," said Gull, pocketing the spool. "I know that, dear. Anyway, nobody paid much attention. Not even when the prospectors swore they'd been given the power of walking through fire without being burned, putting themselves into catalepsy, even levitating themselves. However, then they began doing it in front of witnesses." She took another spool of tape from her desk, then two more. "This one's synoptic eye-witness accounts. This one's a report from Engineering on possible ways that these phenomena may have been faked. And this other one's a rebuttal from Unexplained Data, covering similar unexplained phenomena of the past forty-odd years." "Keep an even balance, don't we?" grinned Gull, pocketing the spools. "For God's sake, Johan, don't get them mixed up. Well, anyway. About half of Syrtis Major decided the prospectors were fakes and tried to lynch them. The other half decided they were saints, and began to worship them. There's a whole revivalist religion now. They think that the saucer people own us -- " "Oh, yes," said Gull. "I know about that part." Indeed, it was hard not to have seen some of their riotous, chanting mass meetings, to dodge their interminable parades or to have failed to observe the slogans they had painted all over Marsport Dome. "Then you won't need these other tapes." Gloria sat back, frowning over her checklist. "Well, that's about it, th -- " A bright golden light flashed on the girl's desk. In the middle of a word she stopped herself, picked up the scarlet hushphone marked Direct and listened. She nodded. "Right, sir," she said, replaced the phone, made a quick notation on the fax sheet before her and returned to Gull. " -- en," she finished. "Any questions?" "I think not." "Then here are your operating instructions, submarine reservations, identification papers and disguise kit." She handed him another reel of tape, a ticket envelope, a punchcoded card with a rather good likeness of an idealized Johan Gull on it and a bottle of hair color. IF Gull accepted them and stowed them away. But he paused at the gM's desk, looking at her thoughtfully. "Say. Would you like me to take you home tonight?" "Good heavens, no. I haven't forgiven you that much." She made two check marks on the fax sheet. "Anyway, you won't have time." "Why do you say that? My submarine doesn't leave for four hours -- " She smiled. "That call was from .#'s office." Gull said gloomily. "Cripes. I suppose that means extra lines." "Absolutely essential you complete two one-hour refresher courses before leaving," the girl quoted. "McIntyre was quite emphatic. Said to remind you that .# was a stickler for maintaining high levels of training; half-trained agents jeopardize missions." Gull sighed but surrendered. No doubt .# was right. "What's the score?" he asked. "One hour in color-code recognition, but don't think I reported you. Probably .#'s office was monitoring us. The other -- let me see -- oh, yes. Basic fuse-spitting, refresher course. Good luck, Johan. Drop me a card from Syrtis Major." G ull kissed her lightly and left. He paused in the entranceway, studying his tickets and operating orders. He was faintly puzzled. That in itself was all right. He remembered and liked the feeling. It was a good sign; it was the operations where one couldn't quite see the drift at first that often turned out to be the most exciting and rewarding. Yet he wished he knew how this mission was going to be. He turned his back on the flickering, darting lights that came from the great turning Martian globe and began to trudge up the stairs. All right so Syrtis Major had got the wind up. Mass hysteria, surely. In itself, that sort of thing was hardly worth Security's while to bother with. There was no sign' of the opposition's fine Macchiavellian hand in it, less reason to believe that there would be real danger. Yet McIntyre had warned of "unusual danger." Surely he was wrong. Unless... Unless, thought Johan Gull with a touch of wonder, as he sat back in the barber's chair and felt the warm lather gliding along his cheek, as the shoeshine robot waited to pull the lever that would drop him into the chute to Plans  Training... unless there really were people from flying saucers on Mars. Ill S mells of fungi, smells of the sea. The tang of hot-running metal machinery and the reek of stale sewage. Johan Gull expanded his chest and sucked in the thousand fragrances of the Martian waterfront as he shouted: "Boy! My bags. To my cabin, chop-chop!" He followed the lascar-robot at a slow self-satisfied pace, dropping ashes from his panatella, examining the fittings of the submarine with the knowing eye of the old Martian hand. He did indeed feel well pleased with himself. in the role Costumery had set up for him, that of a well-to-do water merchant from the North PoLar Ice Cap, he had arrived at the docks in a custom Caddy. He cast largesse to the winds, ordered up a fine brandy to his cabin and immediately plunged into a fresh-water bath. When you were playing a part, it was as well to play a wealthy one, he thought contentedly; and when he had luxuriated in his bath tor fifteen minutes and felt the hrob of the hydrojets announce the ship's getting under weigh, he emerged to dress and play his tapes with a light heart. To all intents and purposes, Gull must have seemed the very archetype of a rich water vendor of substantial, but not yet debilitating, age. He sat at ease, listening to the tapes through a nearly invisible earplug and doing his nails. He did not touch the eye patch which gave his face distinction, nor did he glance toward the framed portrait of Abdul Gamal Nasser behind which, he rather thought, a hidden camera-eye was watching his every move. Let them damned well lock. They could find nothing. He sat up, stretched, yawned lighted an expensive Pittsburgh stogie, blew one perfect smoke ring and resumed his task. The T Coronae Borealis was a fine old ship of the Finucane-American line. As a matter of fact Johan Gull had voyaged in her more than a time or two before, and he looked forward with considerable pleasure to his dinner that night at the captain's table, to a spot of gambling in the card room, perhaps -- who knew? -- to a heady tete-a-tete with one of the lovely ladies ne had observed as he boarded. The voyage to Heliopolis was sixteen Hours by submarine, or just time enough for one's glands to catch up with the fact that one had changed one's mise-en-scene. Ballistic rockets, of course, would do it in fifty minutes. In Johan Gull's opinion, ballistic travel was for barbs. And he was grateful that Mars's atmosphere would not support that hideous compromise between grace and speed, the jet plane. No, thought Gull complacently. Of all the modes of transport he had sampled on six worlds and a hundred satellites, submarining through the Martian canals was the only one fit for a man of taste. He snapped off the last of the tapes and considered his position. He heard with one ear the distant, feminine song of T Coronae's nuclear hydrojets. Reassuring. With every minute that passed they were two-fifths of a mile closer to the junction of four canals where Heliopolis, the Saigon of Syrtis Major, sat wickedly upon its web of waters and waited for its prey. Gull wondered briefly what he would find there. And as be wondered, he smiled. T he knock on the door was firm without being peremptory. "Another brandy, sir?" called a voice from without. "No, thank you, steward," said Gull. No Martian water vendor would arrive at dinner half slopped over. Neither would Gull -- if not IF because of the demands of his iole, then because of the requirements of good manners to the handiwork of T Coronae's master chef. Anyway, he observed by his wrist chronometer that it was time to think things over. He reviewed what he had heard on the tapes. Those two prospectors, he thought. Damned confusing thing. Their names, he recalled, were Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik. He had checked their dossiers back to pre-emigration days. There had been nothing of interest there: Rosencranz an exunemployed plumber from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Reik a cashiered instructor in guerrilla tactics from the nearby Command  General Staff School. Like so many of Eartn's castoffs, they had scraped together money to cover passage to Mars, and enough over to outfit one expedition. They had managed to subsist ever since on what scrubby topazes they could scratch out of the sands of the Great Northern Desert. With, thought Hull, no doubt a spot of smuggling to make ends meet. Duty-free Martian souvenirs into the city, and chicle for the natives out. So much for Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik, thought Gull, blowing gently on the second coat of polish and commencing to buff his nails to a soft gleam. But it was not who the prospectors were that mattered. It was what they had had to say... and above all, what they had done. Gull paused and frowned. There was something he could not recognize in the atmosphere. A soft hint of fragrance -- tantalizing -- it strove to recall something to him, but he could not be sure what. A place? But what place? A girl? He shook his head. There could be no girl here. He put the thought from his mind and returned to the two prospectors and their strange story. T heir testimony far outran the parameters of normal credibility. Gull could repeat the important parts of what they had said almost verbatim. Reik had been the more loquacious of the two -- Well, Harry was like cooking up our mulligan outside the tent when I thought I heard him yell something. I stuck -- Q. One minute, Mr. Reik. You couldn't hear what he said clearly? A. Well, not what you'd call clearly. You see I had the TV sound up pretty loud. Can't hear much when you got the TV sound up pretty loud. Q. Go on. A. Well, I just reached out and turned off the set and stuck my neck out the flap. Geez! There it was. Big as life and twice as scary. It was a flying saucer, all right. It glowed with like a sort of pearly light that made you feel -- I dunno how to say it, exactly -- like, peaceful. Q. Peaceful? A. Not only that. Good. It made me sorry I was such a rat. Q. Go on. A. Well, anyway, after a minute a door opened with like a kind of a musical note. F sharp, I'd say. Harry, he thought it was F natural. Well, we got to fighting over that, and then we looked up and there were these three, uh, creatures. Extraterrestrials, like. They told us they had long watched the bickerings and like that of Earthmen and they had come to bring us wisdom and peace. They had this sealed book that would make us one wi f h the Higher Creation. So we took a couple -- Q. They gave you each one? A. Oh, no. I mean, they didn't give them to us. They sold them to us. Twenty-five bucks apiece. We paid them in topazes. Q. You each had to have a book? A. Well, they only work for one person, see? I mean, if it's anybody else's book you can't see it. You can't even tell it's there. Gull frowned. It would be sticky trying to learn much about the book if one couldn't see it. Still, even if the book itself were invisible, its effects were tangible indeed -- or so said the account on the tapes. Reik had described his actions on entering Heliopolis: Harry he lemme his switchblade. I stuck it right through my cheeks, here. I didn't bleed a drop, and then I kind of levitated myself, and after a while I did the Indian Rope Trick, except since I just had my good necktie for a rope I couldn't get far enough up to disappear. You have to get like seventy five per cent of your body height up before you disappear. Q. Could you disappear if you had a long enough rope? A. Hell, yes. Only I won't. You get to a higher cycle of psychic Oneness like me and you don't kid around with that stuff any more. Q. Did you do anything else? A. Well, not till after dinner. Then I put myself in a cataleptic trance and went to sleep. I didn't do that any more after that, though. Catalepsy doesn't really rest you. I was beat all the next day, but I figured, what the hell. I was still only on page seven. Gull sighed, relit his stogie and contemplated the shimmering perfection of his nails. And at that moment his doorchime sounded. Through the open switch of the announcerphone came a sound of terrified sobbing and the throaty, somehow familiar voice of a frightened girl: "Please! Open the door quickly, I 'ave to see you. I beg you to 'urry, Meesta Gull!" G ull froze. He realized at once that something was amiss, for the name on his travel documents was not Gull. Steadily he considered the implications of that fact. Someone knew his real identity . Gull called, "One moment." He was stalling for time, while his mind raced to cope with the problems that deduction entailed, if his identity were known, then security had been breached. If security were breached, then his mission was comIF promised. If his mission were compromised -- # Gull grinned tightly, careless of the possible camera-eye that would even now be recording his every move. If his mission were compromised the only intelligent, safe, approved procedure would be to return to Marsport and give it up. And that, of course, was wbat Johan Gull would never do. Carefully, quickly, he slid into his socks and slippers, blew on his nails to make sure they were dry and threw open the door, one hand close to the quick-draw pocket in his lounging robe where his gun awaited his need. "Thank God," whispered the girl at the doorway. She was lovely. A slim young blonde. Blue eyes, in which a hint of recent tears stained the eyeshadow at the corners. Courteously Gull bowed. "Come in," he said, closing the door behind her. "Sit down, if you will. Would you care for coffee? A drop of brandy? An ice cream?" She shook her head and cried: "Meesta Gull, your life is in 'ideous danger!" Gull stroked his goatee, his smile friendly and unconcerned. "Oh, come off it, my dear," he said. "You expect me to believe that!" And yet, he mused, she was really beautiful, no more than twentyseven, no taller than five feet three. And the tiny ridge at the hemline of her bodice showed that she carried a flame pencil. "You must believe me! I ave taken a frightful chance to come 'ere!" "Oh, yes, no doubt," he shrugged, gazing at her narrowly. It was her beauty that had struck him at first, but there were more urgent considerations about this girl than her charms. For one thing, what was that she carried? A huge bag, perhaps; it almost seemed large enough to be a suitcase. For anpther -- Gull's brows came together. There was something about her that touched a chord in his memory. Somewhere... sometime... he had seen that girl before. "Why Jo you come here with this fantastic story?" he demanded. The girl began to weep. Great soft tears streamed down her face like summer raindrops on a pane. But she made no sound and her eyes were steady on his. "Meesta Gull," she said simply, "I come ere to save your life because I must. I love you." "Hah!" "But it is true," she insisted. "I love you more than life itself, Meesta Gull. More than my soul or my 'opes of 'Eaven. More even than my children -- Kim, who is six; Marie Celeste, four; or little Patty." She drew out a photograp.I and handed it to him. It showed her in a plain knitted suit, with the three children grouped around a Christmas tree. Gull softened slightly. "Nice-looking kids," he commented, returning the picture. "Thank you." "No y really. I mean it." "You're being kind." Gull started to reply, "hen stopped himself. For he was falling into the oldest trap in the business. He was allowing his gentler emotions to interfere with the needs of the assignment. In this business there was no room for sentiment, Gull thought wryly. Better men than he had been taken in by the soft passions and bad paid for it, in death, in torture, in dismemberment -- worst of all, in the failure of a mission. "Hell with all that stuff," he said gruffly. "I still can't accept your story." "You must! The Black 'Ats ave a plan to kill you!" He shook his head. "I can't take a stranger's word for it." The tears had stopped. She gazed at him for a long, opaque moment. Then she smiled tantalizingiy. "A stranger, Meesta Gull?" "That's what I said." "I see." She nodded gravely. "We 'ave never met, eh? And therefore I could not possibly know something about you -- oh, something that perhaps is very private." "What are you talking about? Get to the point!" "Something," she continued, her eyes veiled but dancing with amusement, "that perhaps you 'ave told no one else. A -- shall we say -- a sore lip, Meesta Gull? Received, perhaps, in an alley in the Syrian quarter of Marsport?" G ull was startled. "Really! Now, look. I -- confound it, how could you possibly know about that? I've mentioned it to no one!" She inclined her head, a tender and mocking gesture. "But it's true! And there was no one there at the time! Not a single living soul but myself and the woman who trapped me!" The girl pursed her lips but did not speak. Her eyes spoke for her. They were impudent, laughing at him. "Well, then!" he shouted. He was furious at himself. There had to be some rational explanation! Why had he let her catch him off-balance like this? It was a trick, of course. It could be no more than that. There were a thousand possible explanations of how she could have found out about it -- "Well, then! How did you know?" "Meesta Gull," she whispered soberly, "please trust me. I cannot tell you now. In precisely seven minutes -- " she glanced at her watch -- "an attempt will be made on vour life." "Rot!" Her eyes flamed with sudden anger. "Idiot!" she blazed. "Oh, 'ow I 'ate your harrogance!" Gull shrugged with dignity. "Very well! Die, then, if you wish it. The Black 'Ats will kill you, but I will not die with you." And she began to take off her clothes. Johan Gull stared. Then soberly, calmly he picked up his stogie, relit it and observed, "Your behavior is most inexplicable, my dear. ' "Hah!" The girl stepped out of her dress, her lovely face bitter with anger and fear. A delicate scent of chypre improved the air. "This tactics will get you nowhere," said Gull. "Pah!" She touched the catch on her carrying case. It fell open and IF a bright rubbery coverall fell out, with mask and stubby, bright tanks attached. "Good heavens!" cried Gull, startled. "Is that a warmsuit? But the girl said only, "You 'ave four minutes left." "You're carrying this rather far, you know. Even if there are Black Hats aboard, we can't leave the submarine underwater." "Three minutes," said the girl calmly, wriggling into her suit. But she was wrong. The submarine seemed to run into a brick wall in the water. They were thrown against the forward wall, a Laocoon of lovely bare limbs and rubbery warmsuit and Gull entwined in the middle. A huge dull sound blossomed around them. Gull fought himself free. The girl sat up, her face a mask of terror. "Oh, damn the damn thing," she cried, shaking her wrist, staring at her watch. "I must've forgot to set it. Too late, Meesta Gull! We 'ave been torpedoed!" IV T he warbling wheep-wheep of alarm signals blended with a confused shouting from the steerage holds below. The cabin lighting flickered, went out, tried once more, failed and was replaced by the purplish argon glow of the standby system. A racking, shuddering crash announced the destruction of the nuclear reactor that fed the hydrojets; somewhere, water was pouring in. "'Urry, Meesta Gull!" cried the girl. "Of course," said Gull, courteously assisting her with the warmsuit. He patted her shoulder. "Not to worry, my dear. I owe you an apology, I expect. At a more propitious time -- " "Meesta Gull! The bulkheads 'ave been sabotaged!" Gull smiled confidently and turned to his escape procedures. Now that it was a matter of instant action he was all right. His momentary uncertainty was behind him. Coolly he reached into his pocket, unsnapped the little packet of microthin Standing Orders and scanned their titles. "Let me see, now. Checklist for air evacuation -- no. Checklist for enemy attack, artillery. Checklist for -- " "Meesta Gull," she cried, with real fear in her voice. "'Ave you forgotten that these waters are the 'abitat of the Martian piranha? You must 'urry!" "Well, what the devil do you think I'm doing? Now be still; I have it here." And crossly Gull began to check off the items under Submarine torpedoing , Martian can als : Secret papers, maps, halazone tablets, passports, poison capsule, toothbrush, American Express card... with metronome precision he stowed them away and nstantly "That's the lot," he announced, glancing distastefully at d-e d rtv froth of water that was seeping under the door. "We might as well be off, then." He lowered 'he raised it again at once, to fish out a packet of Kleenex in its waterproof packet and add it to his stores. "Sorry. Always get a sniffly nose when I'm torpedoed," he apologized, and flung open the door to the passageway. A three-foot wall of water broke into the cabin, bearing with it a short circuited purser robot that hummed and crackled and twitched helplessly in a shower of golden sparks. "Outside, quick!" cried Gull, and led the way through the roiled, tumbling waters. The brave old T Coronae Borealis had taken a mortal wound. Half wading, half swimming, they fought strongly against the fierce drive of inwelling waters toward an escape hatch. In the dim purple gleam of the standby circuits they could see little. But they could hear much -- shouts, distant screams, the horrid sounds of a great ship breaking up. There was nothing they could do. They were lucky to be able to escape themselves. And then it was nothing; a few strong strokes upward, a minute of clawing through the gelid, fungal mass that prevented the canals' evaporation and had concealed their water from Earthly telescopes for a hundred years -- and they were safe. Armed and armored in their with the piranhas. Gull and the girl dragged themselves out on the bank of the sludgy canal and stared back at the waters, gasping for breath. There were ominous silent ripples and whorls. They watched for long minutes. But no other head appeared to break the surface. Gull's face was set in a mask of anger. "Poor devils," he allowed himself, no more. But in his heart he was resolved. A hundred men, women and robots had perished in the torpedoing of the T Coronae. Someone would pay for it. A cross the burning ochre sands they marched... then trudged... then stumbled. The pitiless sun poured down on them. "Meesta Gull," sobbed the girl. "It is 'ot." "Courage," he said absently, concentrating on making one foot move, and then the other. They had many miles to go. Gull's maps had indicated a nearly direct route from the canal along the Sinus Sabaeus where the submarine was slowly beginning to rust, straight across the great hot sweep of Syrtis Major to Heliopolis. A direct route. But it was not an easy one. Step, and step. Gull thought sardonically of the two prospectors who had come out of this desert to start all the trouble. When they entered Heliopolis it had been on a magic carpet that slid through Mars's thin air like a knife. Nice to have one now, he thought -- though exhaustive tests had shown the carpet itself to be a discontinued Sears, Roebuck model from the looms of Grand Rapids. But somehow they had made it work -- He sighed and called a halt. The girl fell exhausted to the sands. "Meesta Gull," she whispered, "I cannot go much farther.' "You must," he said simply. He fell to studying his maps, checking the line ot sight to the distant hillocks that passed, on Mars, for mountains. "Right on," he murmured with satisfaction. "See here. Seven more miles west and we're in the Split Cliffs. Then bear left, and -- " "You are not 'uman! I must 'ave rest -- water!" Gull only shrugged. "Can't be helped, my dear. But at least the sun will be behind us, now. We can do it." "No, no!" "Yes," said Gull sharply. "Good God. woman! Do you want to be caught out here after dark?" He sneezed. "Excuse me," he said, fumbling a Kleenex out of the packet and wiping his nose. "Five minutes," she begged. Johan Gull looked at her thoughtfully, dabbing at his nose. He had not solved the mystery she presented. There was every reason to be on guard. Yet she had truly warned him of the torpedoing of the submarine, and surely she could be no threat to him out here, as piteously weakened as she was. He replaced his breathing guard and dropped the Kleenex to the ground. A moment later the empty pack followed. It had been the last. But Gull merely scuffed sand over it with his foot and said nothing; no sense adding to her worries. He said chivalrously, "Oh, all right. And by the way, what's your name?" She summoned up enough reserves of strength to smile coquettishly. "Alessandra," she murmured. Gull grinned and nudged her with his elbow. "Under the circumstances," he chuckled, "I think VJk call you Sandy, eh?" "Don't jest, Meesta Gull! Even if we survive this trip, you 'ave still the Black 'Ats to face in "Eliopolis." "I've faced them before, my dear. Not to worry." " Ave you seen what they can do now? With their creatures from outer space?" "Well, now. But I'll think of something." She looked at him for a long and thoughtful minute. Then she said, "I know you will, Meesta Gull. It is love that tells me so." V S tep, and step. In Mars's easy grasp a man can lift much, jump high. But to slog through desert sands is little easier than on Earth; the sliding grains underfoot rob him of strength and clutch at his stride. They were near exhaustion, Gull knew with clarity; and for the past half mile the girl had been calling to him. Gull closed his ears to her. He kept his eyes on his own lengthening shadow before him, even when he heard her sobbing. They had no strength to spare for conversation. "Meesta Gull," she whispered brokenly. "Wait, please." He kept on grimly, head down, feet moving like pendulums. "Meesta Gull! But I must ask you something." IF Over his shoulder he murmured, "No time for that, old girl. Keep walking." "But I ave to know." "Oh, for God's sake," he said, and waited for her to catch up. "What is it now?" "Only this, Meesta Gull. If we are 'eading west, why is the sun behind us?" "Really, Sandy! I swear you have no consideration at all!" "I am most sorry, Meesta Gull. I only asked." "You only asked," he repeated bitterly. "You only asked! And now you know what I have to do? I have to stop and take out the maps and waste all kinds of time just to satisfy your damned curiosity. Of course we're heading west!" "I really am very sorry." "And the reason the sun's behind us -- Well, if you knew geometry -- Look here. I'll show you on the map." She fell to the ground again as he pored over the charts, frowning at the horizon, returning to his grid lines. At length his expression cleared. "I thought so," he said triumphantly. "Perfectly simple, my dear. Up you get." With rough tenderness he helped her to her feet and set off again, smiling. She did not speak at first, but presently she ventured: "Meesta Gull, we are 'eading toward the sun now. And these seem to be our own footprints we are retracing." Gull patted her good-humoredly. "Don't worry, Sandy." "But, Meesta Gull -- I " "Will, you for God's sake shut up?" Confounded women, thought Gull. How they did go on! And ho might have said something harsh to the poor girl, except that that oo curred which drove all thoughts of compass headings from both their minds. There was a terrible thunder of many hooves. Alessandra whimpered and clutched his arm. Gull stopped short, waiting; and over a rise in the ochre sands came a monstrous gray-green creature with six legs. It was huge as an elephant and its look was deadly; and it bore a rider, a huge, manlike, green-skinned creature with four arms, holding a murderouslooking lance. The thoat, for such it was, skidded to a stop before them. Its monstrous rider dismounted with a single leap. For an endless second the creature glared at them through narrowed, crimson eyes. Then it laughed with a sound of harsh and distant thunder. "Ho!" it cried, tossing the lance away. "I won't need this for such as you! Prepare to defend yourself, Earthling -- and know that you face the mightiest warrior of the dead sea bottoms, Tars Tarkas of Thark!" T he girl cried out in terror. Johan Gull gripped her shoulder, trying to will strength and courage into her. It was damnably bad luck, he thought, that they should somehow have taken the wrong turn. Clearly they had blundered into privte property... and he had a rather good idea of just whose property they had blundered into. He stepped forward and said, "Wait! I believe I can settle this to everybody's satisfaction. It's true that we don't have tickets, Tars Tarkas, but you see we were torpedoed in the Sinus Sabaeus and had no opportunity to pass the usual admission gate." "Wretched Earthling!" roared the monster. "If I issue you tickets there is a ten per cent surcharge; I don't make Barsoomland policy, I only work here. What say you to that?" "Done!" cried Gull, and amended it swiftly. "Provided you'll accept my American Express card -- otherwise, you see, I have the devil of a time with the old expense account." The creature bared yellow fangs in a great, silent laugh. But it interposed no objection, and the card was quickly validated by comparison with the Barsoomian's built-in magnetic file. Tars Tarkas nodded his enormous head, swiftly wrote them out two lavender slips and roared: "Here you are, sir. If you wish to exchange them for regular family-plan tickets at the gate there will be a small refund... I am assuming the la'dy is your wife," he twinkled. "And now, welcome to Barsoomland. Be sure to visit the Giant Sky Ride from the Twin Towers of Helium, in the base of which are several excellent restaurants where delicious sandwiches and beverages may be obtained at reasonable prices. Farewell!" #S "I think not," said Gull at once. "Don't go. We need transportation." "By the hour or contract price?" parried the Martian. "Direct to Heliopolis. And no tricks," warned Gull. "I've taken this ride fifty times. I know what the meter should show." Muttering to himself, the creature leaped up on his throat and allowed them to clamber behind. And they were off. T he motion of the thoat was vaguely disconcerting to the sense of balance, like a well trained camel or a very clumsy horse. But it ate up the miles. And for a nominal fee Tars Tarkas consented to supply them with food and drink. Gull ate quickly, glanced at the girl to make sure she was all right -- which she was, though a trifle green and apparently not greatly interested in food -- and set to work to question the Thark. "You've had some interesting goings-on," he yelled up toward the enormous head. "It is even so, Earthling," tolled Tars Tarkas's great voice. "Flying saucers and that sort of thing." The bright red eyes regarded him. "Evil things!" roared the Thark somberly. "May Iss bear them away!" "Oh, I certainly hope that too," agreed Gull. He was hanging on to the Barsoomian's back, his face at about the level of the creature's lower left-hand armpit, and carrying on a conversation presented difficulties. But he persevered. "Have you seen any of it yourself?" he IF asked. "Psionics or any of that? " Watch your mouth!" cried the Barsoomian, enraged. "No, no. Little green monsters. Nothing personal." The Thark glared at him with suspicion and hostility for a moment. Then the huge, reptilian face relaxed. The Thark muttered. "Not bow. When we get to Heliopolis, go to the -- " The voice broke off. Tars Tarkas eocked a pointed ear, and stared about. With a whirring, whining sound, something appeared over the dunes. The girl cried out and clutched at Gull, who had little comfort to give her. Whatever it was, it was not of this planet -- or of any other that Johan Gull had ever seen. It had the shape of a flying saucer. It glittered in the blood-red, lowering sun, arrowing straight toward them. As it drew near they could see the markings on its stern: U.F.Q. Cumrovin #nd Giant Rock, Earth "Blood of Issus!" shouted f the Barsoomian. "It's one of them" Tars Tarkas bellowed animal hatred to the dark Martian sky and raised his lance. Fierce white fires leaped from its tip -- struck the alien vessel, clung and dropped away. The craft was unharmed. It soared mockingly, tantalizingly overhead for a moment, seeming to dare them to fire on it again. Then a single needle of ruby light darted out of its side, reached down and touched Tars Tarkas between his bright red eyes. The Barsoomian seemed to explode. The concussion flung them from the throat. Dazed, stunned, aching in every bone, Johan Gull managed to drag himself to his feet and look around. The alien spacecraft was gone. The girl lay stunned and half-unconscious at his feet. Yards away Tars Tarkas was a giant mound of gray-green flesh and bright metal parts, writhing faintly. Gull staggered over to the creature and craddled the ravaged head in his lap. The scarlet eyes stared sightlessly into his. The ruin of a mouth opened. "We... are property," whispered Tars Tarkas thickly, and died. VI O nce, when Johan Gull was very young, the newest and least reliable of cogs in Security's great machine, he had been assigned to Heliopolis to counter a Black Hat ploy. Or not quite that, he admitted; he had been sent to add a quite unimportant bit of information to the already huge store that the agent operating on the scene already had. He had envied that agent, had young Johan Gull. He had looked with jealous eyes about the bright, dizzying scenes of Heliopolis and dreamed of a time when he too might be a senior agent in charge, himself a major piece in the Game, squiring a lovely lady on an errand of great consequence, in the teeth of dreadful danger. All the fun of it was in the anticipation, he thought as they rode into Heliopolis lock on their battered thoat, checked it at the Avis office and dismounted. If only Tars Tarkas had survived to tell what he knew! But he had not; and Gull was uneasily aware that he knew no more now than when he left Marsport. Still, he thought, brightening, this was Heliopolis, the Saigon of Syrtis Major. He might get killed. He might not be able to protect this lovely and loving girl from mischance. He might even fail in his mission. But he was bound to have a hell of a time. They found rooms at the Grand and parted to freshen up. Overhead the city's advertising display flashed on the thin, yellowish clouds of Mars, on, off -- on, off: The Wickedest City in the Worlds Liquor  Gambling  Vice The Family That Plays Together Stays Together And indeed, Gull saw, the pleasure-seekers who thronged the concourses and the lobby of the Grand had often enough brought the kiddies. He watched them sentimentally as the bellthing trundled his luggage toward the elevators. It would be most pleasant to spend a holiday here, he thought, with someone you loved. With Alessandra, perhaps. Perhaps even with Kim, Marie Celeste and little Patty... But he could not afford thoughts like that; and he quickly showered, shaved, put on a clean white suit and met the girl in the great gleaming cocktail lounge of the Grand. "'Elio, Meesta Gull," she said softly, her eyes dark and somehow laughing. Gull regarded her thoughtfully. She was sight worth regarding, for the girl in the cocktail lounge was nothing like the bedraggled, terrified creature in the ochre sands. Her green-blue eyes were smoky with mystery. Her leongsam, deeply slit, revealed the gleam of a bronzed rounded thigh. A whisper of some provocative scent caressed him; bat it was not her charms that had him bemused; it was something else. His eyes narrowed. Somewhere, he thought. Some time... She laughed. "You are thoughtful," she said. "Will you 'ave a drink with me?" "The pleasure is all mine," he said gallantly. "Unless you have other plans?" she inquired. There was no doubt about it; she was poking fun at him. He rose to her mood. "It's the least I could do, my dear -- seeing you saved my life." "Ah! Life." She glanced wryly at him from the corner of her eye. "What is it, this 'life' I 'ave saved? Can one taste it? Can one carry it to bed?" Gull grinned. "Perhaps not, but I'm rather attached to mine." He ordered drinks, watched carefully while they were made, then nodded and raised his glass. "Of course," he IF added, "I've saved your life too -- I guess, let's see -- oh, perhaps three times. From Tars Tarkas. From dying by thirst. From the saucer people. So you actually owe me about three to one, lifesaving-wise." "Three to two, dear Meesta Gull," the girl whispered over the rim of her glass. "Two? Oh, I think not. Just the torpedoing, really, and as a matter of fact I'm not sure you should get full credit for that. You were a little tardy there." She shook her head. "Yes, the torpedoing -- and something else. 'Ave you forgotten? The old warehouse? The -- incident -- which caused your sore lip?" Gull stared at her, then brought his glass down with a crash. "Got it!" he shouted. "I remember now!... Oh, damn it, sorry," he went on, shaking his head. "It was on the tip of my tongue, but I've lost it. Sorry." He stared at her moodily and drained his glass. "No matter. I'll think of it. I promise you that." T he girl laughed softly, then sobered. "Meanwhile," she said, "we 'ave some more important business 'ere." And she nodded toward the great crystal pane that opened on the thronged boulevards of Heliopolis. Gull followed the direction of her glance and saw at once what she meant. A demonstration was in progress. A hundred straggling, shouting marchers were carrying placards with as many harsh and doctrinaire slogans: Let the Space People Save You! We Are Property Why Is the Air Force Covering Up Sightings? Gull said abruptly, "Let's take a look." The girl rose without answering and together they walked out to the terrace. The shouts of the demonstrators smote them like a fist. Gull could barely distinguish the cadenced words in the roar of sound: "Make... Mars... the tomb of skepticism " over and over in time to their march until it "They take it seriously," he murmured. Alessandra did not answer; he glanced at her, then followed the direction of her gaze. A man in stained coveralls, eyes fixed on them, was pushing his way in their direction through the crowd. He was tall, and not young. His face was lined with the ineradicable burn of a life spent on the Martian desert. Gull stroked his goatee to hide a thrill of excitement that tingled through him. This could be it: The break he was looking for. The man stopped just below them, looking up. "Hey, you!" he bawled. "You Gull?" Gull shouted carefully, "That's my name, yes." "Well, where the devil you been? We been waiting for you!" cried the man in irritable tones. He reached up, clutched at a carved projection on the face of the terrace, raised himself and swung to face the crowd. "Hey, everybody!" he shouted. "K ' the fella that thinks Look here!" Heads were beginning to turn. The ragged line of marchers slowed, Gull whispered to the girl, whose presence he could feel shivering beside him: "Careful! I don't know what he's going to do. If it looks like trouble -- run!" But he could not hear her answer, if she made one, for the man was turning back to him again. In the diminished sound of the street his raucous yell sounded clearly: "All right, Gull! You think our supranormal powers're all a lotta crud, see what you think of this!" And he made a snatching motion at what, as far as Gull could see, was empty air; caught something, squeezed it in his fist; turned toward Gull and threw it. There was nothing in the man's hand. But that nothing spun toward Gull like a pinwheeling comet, huge and bright and deadly; it hummed and sang shrilly of hate and destruction; it rocketed up toward him like an onrushing engine of destruction. And something in it sapped his will. He stood frozen, impotent to move. Vaguely he felt a stir of motion beside him. Hazily he knew that the girl was thrusting at him, shouting at him, hurling him aside. Too late! The hurtling doom came up and struck him -- just a corner brushing against his head as he fell -- but enough; worlds crashed; hell-bombs roared in his skull; he dropped, away and away, endlessly down into... into... he could not see, could not guess what it was; but it was filled with terror and pain and doom. But then he was awake again, and the girl was weeping over him; he could feel her teardrops splashing on his face. G ull coughed, gasped, clutched at his pounding skull and pushed himself erect. "What -- What -- " "Oh, thank 'eaven! I was afraid 'Arry 'ad killed you!" "Apparently not," he said dizzily; and then, "Harry who? How do you know who that fellow was?" "What does it matter?" she cried. Bright tears hung unshed in her eyes. "Well, it kind of matters to me," said Gull doubtfully, looking around. They were no longer on the terrace. Somehow she had lugged him back into the greater security of the cocktail lounge. A waiter was hanging over them, whirring in a worried key. "Harry Rosencranz!" he cried suddenly. The girl nodded. "Sure! And he knew I was coming. Well, that tears it. My cover's blown for sure." He glared at the waiter and said, "Don't just stand there. Bring us a drink." The thing went away, warbling unhappily to itself. It had not been programmed for this sort of thing. Indeed Gull needed a drink. The reality of supranormal powers was a phenomenon of a totally different kind than the contemplation of them at a distance. The tapes about Reik and his partner had been interesting; the reality was terrifying. IP He seized the glass as soon as offered and drained it; and then he turned to Alcs-andra. "You've got some explaining to do," he said. The tears were very near the surface now. She waited. "How did you know it was Rosencranz?" he demanded. "And the torpedoing -- you knew about that. And don't think I've forgotten that we've met before... somewhere... don't worry, I'll think of where it was." She inclined her head, hiding her face. "You're working for someone, aren't you?" Her silence was answer enough. "A nice girl like you! How'd you get into this?" He shook his head, mystified. "Ah, Meesta Gull," she said brokenly, "it's the old, old story. My 'usband -- dead. My little ones -- 'ungry. And what could I do? And now they 'ave me in their power." "Who?" "The Black 'Ats, Meesta Gull. Yes, it is true. I am in the employ of your enemy." "But damn it, girl! I mean, you said you loved me!" "I do! Truly! Oh, 'ow I do!" "Now, wait a minute. You can't love me and work for them " objected Gull. "I can too! I do!" "Prove it." She flared, "'Appily! 'Ow?" Gull signaled for another drink. He smiled at the girl quite fondly. "It's very simple," he said. "Just take me to your leader." I t took a bit of doing, but the girl did it. She returned from a series of cryptic telephone conversations and looked at Gull with great, fearful eyes. "I 'ave arranged it," she said somberly. "You will be allowed in. But to get out again -- " Gull laughed and patted' her hand. He was not worried. Still, he admitted to himself a little later, things could get a bit difficult. Security precautions for the Black Hats were in no way less stringent than those of Gull's own headquarters in Marsport. He allowed himself to be seated in a reclining chair while a gnomelike old dentist into a previously healthy tooth; and when he rose, the exit through which he left the office brought him to a long, dark tunnel underground. The girl was waiting there silently to conduct him to his destination. She placed a finger across her lips and led him away. "Wait a minute," Gull whispered fiercely, looking about. For there were interesting things here. Off the corridor were smaller chambers and secondary tunnels filled with all sorts of objects shadowy and objects small. Gull wanted very much to get a look at them. Those tiny disjointed dollshapes! what were they? And the great gleaming disk section beyond? But the girl was pleading, and Gull allowed himself to be led away. She conducted him to a door. "Be careful," she whispered. And she was gone, and Gull was face to face with the chief of the Black Hats in Heliopolis. He was a tall, saturnine man. He sat at a desk that reflected gold and green lights into his face, from signals that Gull could not see. "Oodgay eveningway, " he said urbanely. "Ah, I see you are perplexed. Perhaps you do not speak Solex Mai." "Afraid not. English, French, Cretan Linear B, Old Ganymedan's about the lot." "No matter. I am familiar with your tongue as we speak it all the time on Clarion." He leaned forward suddenly. Gull stiffened; but it was only to hand him a calling card. It glittered with evil silver fires, and it read: T. Perlman Clarion "Clarion's a planet? I never heard of it." Perlman shrugged. Obviously what Gull had heard of did not matter. He said, "You are a troublemaker, Mr. Gull. We space people do not tolerate troublemakers for long." "As to that," said Gull, stroking his goatee, "it seems to me you had a couple of shots at doing something about it. And Pm still here." "Oh, no, Mr. Gull," said Perlman earnestly. "Those were only warnings... Their purpose was only to point out to you that it is not advisable to cause us any trouble. You have not as yet done so. of course. If you do -- " He smiled. "You don't scare me." "No, Mr. Gull?" "Well, I mean, not much anyway. I've been lots more scared than this." "How interesting," Perlman said politely. "And anyway, I have my job to do and I'm going to do it." Perlman pursed his lips and whispered into a microphone on his desk. There was a stirring of draperies at the back of the room. It was shadowed there; Gull could see no details. But he had a moment's impression of a face looking out at him, a great, sad, mindless long face with teeth like a horse and an air of infinite menace; and then it was gone. He cried, "You're up to some trick!" Perlman smirked knowingly. "It won't do you any good! You think you know so much." "Ah, if only I did, Mr. Gull! There are forces in this universe which even we of Clarion have not yet understood. The straight-line mystery, to name one. The Father's plan." Gull took a deep breath and carefully, inconspicuously, released it. He was doing no good here. And meanwhile there were matters just outside this room that urgently required investigation -- and attention. He said steadily, "I'm going to go now, Mr. Perlman. If you try to stop me I'll shoot you." Perlman looked at him with an expression that suspended judgment for a moment. Then it came to a conclusion and broke into a shout of laughter. "Ho!" he choked. "Hah! Oh, Mr. Gull, how delicious to think IF mam wM' you will be allowed to leave. As we say in Solex Mai, otway ustcray!" Gull did not answer. He merely moved slightly, and into his hand leaped the concealed #-picometer heat gun. Perlman's expression changed from fire to ice. "I'll leave you now," said Gull. "Next time you have a visitor, search his goatee too, won't you?" Ice were Perlman's eyes. Icy was the stare that followed Gull out the door. B ut he was not safe yet, not while the horse-faced killer was presumably lurking somewhere about. The girl appeared silently and put her hand in his. Gull gestured silence and strained his hearing. These tunnels were so dark; there were so many cul-de-sac where an assassin could hide -- "Listen," he hissed. "Hear it? There!" From the shadows, distant but approaching, came the sound of an uneven step. Tap, clop. Tap, clop . The girl frowned. "A man with one leg?" she guessed. "No, no! Can't you recognize it? It's a normal man -- but with one shoe hanging loose " She caught her breath. "Oh!" "That's right," said Gull somberly, "the old. shoelace trick. And I haven't time to deal with him now. Can you draw him off?" She said steadily, "If I 'ave to, I  can. "Good. Just give me five minutes. I want to look around and -- effect some changes, I think." He listened, the step was closer now. He whispered, "Tall, long-faced man with big teeth. I think that's him. Know him?" "Certainly, dear Meesta Gull. Clarence T. Reik. 'E's a killer." Gull grinned tautly; he had thought as much. The partner of Harry Rosencranz, of course; one had attacked him at the hotel, the other was stalking him with a sharpened shoelace in the warrens under the city. "Go along with you then," he ordered. "There's a good girl. Remember, five minutes." He felt the quick brush of ner lips against his cheek. "Give me 'alf a minute," she said. "Then, dear Meesta Gull, run" And she sprang one way, he another. The approaching tap, clop paused a split-second's hesitation. Then it was going after her, its tempo rapid now, its sound as deadly as the irritable rattle of a basking snake. Gull had his five minutes. He only prayed that it had not been bought at a higher price than he wanted to pay. T here in the Black Hat warren under Heliopolis Johan Gull fulfilled the trust .# placed in him. He had only moments. Moments would be enough. For almost at once he knew. And he leaned against the nitered stone walls of the catacomb, marveling at the depth and daring of the Black Hat plan. Before him a chamber of headless, limbless mannikins awaited programming and assembly. They were green and tiny. In another chamber six flying sauIF cers stood in proud array. Each of them held a ring of leather-cushioned seats. Behind him was a vast hall where signpainters had left their handiwork for the moment: Read Five Minutes for #. And another The Black Hats had planned well... A sound of light, running footsteps brought him back to reality. The pale shadow of the girl raced toward him. "Well done!" he whispered, urging her on. "Just one more time around and I'll be through." "It's 'ot work, dear Meesta Gull," she laughed; but she obeyed. He froze until she was out of sight, and the lumbering dark figure that followed her. And then he set to work. When she came by again he was ready. Quickly he leaped to the center of the corridor, gestured her to safety. She concealed herself in a doorway, panting, her eyes large but unafraid. And the pounding, deadly sound of her pursuer grew louder. Fourteen semester hours of karate, a seminar in le savate and a pair of brass knuckles. All came to the aid of Johan Gull in that moment, and he had need of them. He propelled himself out of the shadows feet first, directly into the belly of the huge, long-faced man who was shambling down the dimly lit corridor. The man's eyes were dull but his great yellowed teeth were bared in a grin as he moved ferally along the stone floor, a thin, lethal wand in one hand, dangerous, ready. Ready for a fleeing victim. Not ready for Johan Gull. For Gull came in under the deadly needle. Even as he was plunging into the man's solar plexus he was reaching up with one hand, twisting around with the other. It was no contest. Gull broke the weapon-bearing arm between wrist and elbow, butted the man into paralysis, kicked him in the skull as he fell, snatched the weapon and was away, the girl trailing behind him. "Hurry!" he called. "If he comes to, they'll box us in here!" As he ran he worked one tip of the stiffened shoelace. Ingenious! Twisted one way, it slipped into limpness; twisted the other, it extended itself to become a deadly weapon. Gull chuckled and cast it away. Up the stairs they ran and through the cover dentist's office. The gnomelike dentist squalled in surprise and ran at them with a carbide drill, hissing hatred; but Gull chopped him down with the flat of a hand. They were free. And the final battle was about to be fought. CX#"ou 'ave a plan, Meesta I Gull?" "Of course." He glanced about warily. No Black Hats were in sight as he led her through :he bright, opulent doors of the Heliopolis Casino. "You are going to fight them single-'anded?" "Fight? My dear girl! Who said anything about fighting?" The chef de chambre was bowing, smiling, welcoming them in. "But -- But -- But if you do not fight them, dear Meesta Gull, then ow will you proceed?" Gull grinned tautly and led her to the bar, from which he could observe everything that was going on. He said only, "Money. No more questions now, there's a good girl." He called for wine and glanced warily about. The Casino was host that night, as it was every night, to a gay and glittering crowd. Behind potted lichens a string trio sawed away at Boccherini and Bach, while the wealthiest and most c ashionabe of nine planets strolled and laughed and gamed away fortunes. Gull sipped his wine and stroked his goatee, his eyes alert. Now, if he had gauged his man aright... if he had assessed the strategy that would win correctly... It could all be very easy, he thought, pleased. And he could enjoy a very pleasant half hour's entertainment into the bargain. Gull smiled and stroked the girl's hand. She responded with a swift look of trust and love. In the glowing silky fabric of the dress he had commandeered for her she was a tasty morsel, he thought. Once this Black Hat ploy had been countered, there might be time for more lighthearted pursuits -- "Attend!" she whispered sharply. Gull turned slowly. So near his elbow as to be almost touching stood the tall, saturnine figure of Perlman. They stood for a moment in a tension of locked energies, eyes gazing into eyes. Then Perlman nodded urbanely and turned away. Gull heard him whisper to a passing houseman, "Atthay's the erkjay." Gull leaned to the girl. "I don't speak Solex Mai," he said softly. "You'll have to translate for me." She replied faithfully, "'E just identified you to the 'ouseman." He gave her an imperceptible nod and followed Perlman with his eyes. The Black Hat did not look toward Gull again. Smiling, exchanging a word now and then with the other guests, he was moving' steadily toward the gaming tables. Gull allowed himself to draw one deep breath of satisfaction. Score one for his deduction! Perlman was going to play. He nodded to the girl and began to drift toward the tables himself. Give it time, he counseled himself. There's no hurry. Let it build. You were right this far, you'll be right again. "Believe I'll play a bit," he said loudly. "Won't you sit here and watch, my dear?" Silently the girl took a seat beside him at the table. Casually -- but feeling, and relishing, the cold gambling tinge that spread upward from the pit in his stomach, inflaming his nerves, speeding the flow of his blood in his veins -- Gull gestured to the croupier and began to play. He did not look across the table at the polite, assured face of Perlman. He did not need to. This game had only two players -- or only two that mattered. As he took the dice for his first turn, Gull reflected with comfort and satisfaction that soon there would be only one. IF H alf an hour later he was all but broke. Across the table Perlman's expression had broadened from polite interest, through amusement to downright contempt. Gull's own face wore a frown; his hands shook, angering him; he felt the first cold pricklings of fear. Confound the man, thought Gull, his luck is fantastic! If indeed it was luck. But no, he told himself angrily, he could not cop out so cozily; the tables were honest. Face truth: He had simply run up against a superb gambler. "Hell of a time for it to happen," he grumbled. The girl leaned closer. "Pardon? You spoke?" "No, no," Gull said irritably, "I -- uh, was just thinking out loud. Listen. You got any money on you?" She said doubtfully, "Perhaps... a little bit..." "Give it to me," he demanded. "No! Under the table. I don't want everybody to see." But it was too late; across the table Perlman had not missed the little byplay. He was almost laughing openly now as he completed his turn and passed the dice to Gull. Gull felt himself breathing hard. He accepted the thin sheaf of bills from the girl, glanced at it quickly. Not much! Not much at all for what he had to do. He could stretch it out, make it last -- but for how long? And with the game running against him... Silently Gull cursed and studied the table. Before him the wealth of an empire was piled in diamond chips and ruby, in pucks of glittering emerald and disks of glowing gold. Politely the croupier said, "It is your play, m'sieur." "Sure, sure." But still Gull hesitated. To gain time he tossed the girl's wad down before the croupier and demanded it be exchanged for chips. Across the table Perlman's look was no longer either amusement or contempt. It was triumph. Gull took a deep breath. This was more than a game, he reminded himself. It was the careful carrying out of a thoughtfully conceived strategy. Had he lost sight of that? Once again in control of himself, he took out a cigarette and lighted it. He tipped the gleaming, flat lighter and glanced, as though bored, at its polished side. Tiny in the reflection he could see the moving, bright figures in the room, the gorgeously dressed women, the distinguished men. But some were not so distinguished. Some were lurking in the draperies, behind the potted lichens. A great pale creature with teeth like a horse, eyes like a dim-brained cat. Another with the mahogany face of a prospector off the Martian plains. And others. Perlman's men had come to join him. The moment was ready for the taking. Abruptly Johan Gull grinned. Risk it all! Win or lose! Let the game decide the victor -- either he would clean out Perlman here and now, and starve out his larger game for lack of the cash to carry it through, or he himself would lose. He said :he croupier, "Keep the chips. Take these too." And he pushed over all his slim remaining stack. "You wish to build, m'sieur?" it asked politely. "Exactly. A hotel, if you please. On the -- " Gull hesitated, but not out of doubt; his pause was only to observe the effect on Perlman -- "yes, that's right. On the Boardwalk." nd Gull threw the dice. Time froze for him. It was not a frightening thing; he was calm, confident, at ease. The world of events and sensation seemed to offer itself to him for the tasting -- the tors in the streets -- poor fools  # wonder what they'll do when they find they've been duped; Alessandra's perfumed breath tickling his ear -- sweet, charming girl; the look of threat and anger on Perlman's face; the stir of ominous movement in the draperies. Gull absorbed and accepted all of it, the sounds and scents, the bright moving figures and the glitter of wealth and power, the hope of victory and the risks. But he did not fear the risks. He saw Ventnor Avenue and Marvin Gardens looming ahead of his piece on the board and smiled. He was certain the dice were with him. A.nd when the spots came up he seemed hardly to glance at them; he moved his counter with a steady hand, four, five, eight places; came to rest on "Chance", selected a card from the stack, turned it over and scanned its message. He looked up into the hating eyes of Perlman. "Imagine," he breathed. "I appear to have won second prize in a beauty contest. You'll have to give me fifteen dollars." And Perlman's poise broke. Snarling, he pushed across the chips, snatched the dice from Gull and contemptuously flung them down. The glittering cubes rattled and spun. Gull did not have to look at the board; the position was engraved on his brain. A five would put Perlman on Park Place, with four houses: damaging, but not deadly. An eight or higher would carry him safely to "Go" and beyond, passing the zone of danger and replenishing his bankroll. But a seven... Ah, a seven! The Boardwalk, with a hotell And the first die had already come to rest, displaying a four. The second stopped. There was a gasp from the glittering crowd as three bright pips turned upward to the light. Gull glanced down at the dice, then across at Perlman. "How unfortunate," he murmured politely, extending a hand to Perlman -- and only Perlman could see the bright, deadly little muzzle that pointed out of it toward him. "You seem to have landed on my property. I'm afraid you've lost the game." -- And he was up and out of his chair, standing clear, as the pencil of flame from the shelter of the draperies bit through the smoky air where his head had just been. "Down!" he shouted to the girl and snapped a shot at Rosencranz; heard that man's bellow of pain and saw, out of the corner of his eye, IF that the girl had disobeyed his order; she had drawn a weapon of her own and was trading shot for shot with the Black Hats that ringed the room. "Idiot!" Gull cried, but his heart exulted Good girl! even as he was turning to blast the next Black Hat. There were nine of them, all armed, all drawing their weapons or, like Rosencranz, having fired them already. It was not an equal contest. Five shots from Gull, five from the girl -- she missed one -- and all the Black Hats were on the floor, writhing or very still. All but one. Perlman! Whirling back to face him, Gull found he was gone. But he couldn't be far. Gull caught the flicker of motion in the gaping crowd at the door that showed where he had gone, and followed. At the entrance Gull caught a glimpse of him and fired; at the corner, plunging through a knot of saw him again -- almost too late. Cooly and cleverly Perlman had waited him out, his own weapon drawn now. The blast sliced across the side of Gull's head like a blow from a cleaver; stunned, hurting, Gull drove himself on. And as Perlman, gaping incredulously, turned belatedly to flee again, he tripped, and stumbled, and Gull was on him. His head was roaring, his hold on consciousness precarious; but he pinned Perlman's arms in a desperate flurry of strength and panted, "That's enough! Give it up or I'll burn your head off." The trapped man surged up but Gull withstood it and cried: "Stop! I want to take you back to .# alive -- don't make me kill you!" Ihe Black Hat spat one angry sentence; Gull gasped and recoiled; Perlman grabbed for the weapon, they struggled -- A bright line of flame leaped from the gun to Perlman's forehead; and in that moment the leader of the Black Hats in Heliopolis ceased to be. Waves of blackness swept over Johan Gull. He fell back into emptiness just as the girl came running up, dropped to the ground beside him, sobbing, "Johan! My dear, dear Meesta Gull;" Hurt and almost out he managed to grin up at her. "Cash in my chips for me," he gasped. "We've won the game!" IX A nd then it was roses, roses all the way. The local Bureau Chief appeared and efficiently arranged for medical attention, fresh clothes and a drink. The girl stayed beside him while Gull dictated a report and demanded immediate reservations back to Marsport -- for two, he specified fiercely. They were produced, and by the time they disembarked and headed for the War Room Gull was nearly his old self. He was admitted at once to ,#'s office, and recognized it as a mark of signal favor when the girl was allowed in with him. They stood there, proud and silent, in the presence of .# and his secretary, and Gull's hand was firm on the girl's. What a thoroughbred she was, he thought admiringly, noting from the corner of his eye how her gaze took in every feature of the room so few persons had ever seen; how she studied .#'s somber expression and hooded eyes, but aid not quail before them; how patiently and confidently she waited for McIntyre to leave off writing in his notebook and speak to them. She would be a fit wife for him, thought Johan Gull with quiet certainty; and she would make a fine agent for Security. And so would Kim, and Marie Celeste, and little Patty. A very successful mission all around, thought Gull cheerfully, thinking of the wad of bills that Perlman's losses had put into his wallet. "When you're quite ready, Gull," said McIntyre. Gull jumped. "Oh, sorry," he said. "Excuse me, sir," he added to .#, whose expression showed no particular resentment at being kept waiting while one of his agents was woolgathering, merely the usual patient weariness. "I guess you want a report." ".# has already seen your report," McIntyre reproved him. "He is a little concerned about your failure to obey standing orders, of course. A live captive is worth a lot more than a dead loser." "Well, yes, I know that's right. But -- " Gull hesitated. "Well?" Gull flushed and turned to .# himself. "You see, sir, it was something Perlman said. Nasty sort of remark. Cheap. Just what you'd expect, from -- Anyway, sir, it was about you. He said -- " Gull swallowed, feeling self-conscious and stupid. The warm pressure of the girl's hand showed him her sympathy, but he still felt like twelve kinds of a fool bringing it up. "Gull! Spit it out before .# loses his patience!" Gull shrugged, looked his chief in the eye and said rapidly, "Perlman said you've been dead since '#, sir." And he waited for the blow to fall. S urprisingly, it did not...# merely continued to look at him, silently, levelly, appraisingly. There was not even a hint of surprise in his expression. At length McIntyre laughed one sharp, desiccated sort of laugh and Gull turned gratefully toward him, glad to be taken off the. hook. "Nonsense, of course, McIntyre," he said. "I really hated to have to say it." But McIntyre was raising a hand, chuckling in a sort of painful way, as though laughter hurt him. "Never mind, Gull," he said. "After all, you're not expected to evaluate information. Just go on and do your job. And now, .# had best be left alone for a while; there are other matters concerning us, you know." And, very grateful to have it happen, Gull found himself and the girl outside. He discovered he was sweating. "Whew," he exclaimed. "Wouldn't want to go through that again. And now, my dear, I suggest a drink -- thereafter a wedding -- then a honeymoon. Not necessarily in that order." "Gladly, dearest Meesta Gull!" she cried. "And I don't give a 'ang IF IF  Short Story y Out there on the face of the moon was his enemy -- and also his only friend  F irst hint I had we'd been spotted by a crusoe was a little tick coming to my moonsuit from the miniradar Pete and I were gaily heaving into position near the east end of Gioja crater to scan for wrecks, trash, and nodules of raw metal. Then came a whish which cut off the , instant Pete's hand lost contact with the squat instrument. His gauntlet, silvery in the raw low polar sunlight, drew away very slowly, as if he'd grown faintly disgusted with our activity. My gaze kept on turning to see the whole shimmering back of his helmet blown off in a gorgeous sickening brain-fog and blood-mist that was already falling in the vacuum as fine red snow. A loud tock then and glove-sting as the crusoe's second slug hit the miniradar, but my gaze had gone back to the direction Pete had been facing when he bought it -- in time to see the green needle-flash of the crusoe's gun in a notch in Gioja's low wall, where the black of the shadowed rock met the gemlike starfields along a jagged border; I unslung my Swift as I dodged a long step to the side and squeezed off three shots. The first two shells must have traveled a touch too high, but the third made a beautiful fleeting violet globe at the base of  All-purpose vacuum rifle named for the .# cartridge which as early as # was being produced by Winchester, Remington, and Norma with factory loads giving it a muzzle velocity of # feet, almost a mile, a second. the notch. I: didn't show me a figure, whole or shattered, silvery or otherwise, on the wall or atop it, but then some crusoes are camouflaged like chameleons and most of them move very fast. Pete's suit was still falling slowly and stiffly forward. Three dozen yards beyond was a wide black fissure, though exactly how wide I couldn't tell because much of the opposite lip merged into the shadow of the wall. I scooted toward it like a rat toward a hole. On my third tep, I caught up Pete by his tool belt and oxy tube while his falling front was still inches away from the powdered pumice, and I heaved him along with me. Some slow or overdrilled part of my brain hadn't yet accepted he was dead. Then I began to skim forward, inches above the ground myself, kicking back against rocky outcrops thrusting up through the dust -- it was like fin-swimming. The crusoe couldn't have been expecting this nut stunt, by which I at least avoided the dreamy sittingduck slowness of safer, higherbounding moon-running, for there was a green flash behind me and hurtled dust faintly pittered my soles and seat. He hadn't been leading his target enough. Also, I knew now he had shells as well as slugs. I" was diving over the lip three econds after skoot-off when Pete's boot caught solidly against a last hooky outcrop. The something in my brain was still stubborn, for I clutched him like clamps, which made me swing around with a jerk. But even that was lucky, for a bright globe two yards through winked on five yards ahead like a mammoth firefly's flash, but not quite as gentle, for the invisible rarified explosion-front hit me hard enough to boom my suit and make the air inside slap me. Now I knew he had metal-proximity fuses on some of his shells too -- they must be very good at mini-stuff on his home planet. The tail of the pale green flash showed me the fissure's bottom a hundred yards straight below and all dust, as # percent of them are -- pray God the dust was deep. I had time to thumb Extreme Emergency to the ship for it to relay automatically to Circumluna. Then the lip had cut me off from the ship and I had lazily fallen out of the glare into the blessed blackness, the dial lights in my helmet already snapped off -- even they might make enough glow for the crusoe to aim by. The slug had switched off Pete's. Ten, twelve seconds to fall and the opposite lip wasn't cutting off the notched crater wall. I could feel the crusoe's gun trailing me down -- he'd know moon-G, sticky old #-foot. I could feel his tentacle or finger or claw or ameboid bump tightening on the trigger or button or what. I shoved Pete away from me, parallel to the fissure wall, as hard as I could. Three more seconds, four, and my suit boomed again and I was walloped as another green flash showed me the smooth-sifted floor moving up and beginning to hurry a little. This flash was a IF hemisphere, not a globe -- it had burst against the wall -- but if there were any rock fragments they missed me. And it exactly bisected the straight line between me and Pete's silvery coffin. The crusoe knew his gun and his Luna -- I really admired him, even if my shove had pushed Pete and me, action and reaction, just enough out of the target path. Then the fissure lip had cut the notch and I was readying to land like a three-legged crab, my Swift reslung, my free hand on my belted dust-shoes. E leven seconds' fall on Luna is not much more than two on earth, but either are enough to build up a velocity of over # feet a second. The dust jarred me hard, but thank God there were no reefs in it. It covered at least all the limbs and front of me, including my helmet-front -- my dial lights, snapped on again, showed a grayness fine-grained as flour. The stuff resisted like flour, too, as I unbelted my dust-shoes. Using them for a purchase, I pulled my other arm and helmet-front free. The stars looked good, even graydusted. With a hand on each shoe, I dragged out my legs and, balancing gingerly on the slithery stuff, got each of my feet snapped to a shoe. Then I raised up and switched on my headlight. I hated that. I no more wanted to do it than a hunted animal wants to break twigs or show itself on the skyline, but I knew I had exactly as long to find cover as it would take the crusoe to lope from the notch to the opposite lip of the fissure. Most of them lope very fast, they're that reminded myself. This time Tm the quarry. My searchlight made a perverse point of hitting Pete's shimmering casket, spread-eagled, seven-eighths submerged, like a man floating on his back. I swung the beam steadily. The opposite wall was smooth except for a few ledges and cracks and there wasn't any overhang to give a man below cover from someone on top. But a section of the wall on my side, not fifty yards away, was hugely pocked with holes and halfbubbles where the primeval lava had foamed high and big against the feeble plucking of lunar gravity. I aimed myself at the center of that section and started out. I switched off my headlight and guided myself by the wide band of starfields. You walk dust-shoes with much the same vertical lift and low methodical forward swing as snowshoes. It was nostalgic, but hunted animals have no time for memorydelicatessen. Suddenly there was more and redder brightness overhead than the stars. A narrow ribbon of rock along the top of the opposite wall was glaringly bathed in orange, while the rim peaks beyond glowed faintly, like smoldering volcanoes. Light from the orange ribbon bounced down into my fissure, caroming back and forth between the walls until I could dimly see again the holes I was headed for. T he crusoe had popped our ship -- both tanks, close together, so that the sun-warmed gasses, exploding out into each other, burned like a hundred torches. The oxyaniline lasted until I reached the holes. I crawled through the biggest. The fading glow dimly and fleetingly showed a rock-bubble twelve feet across with another hole at the back of it. The stuff looked black, felt rough yet diamond-hard. I risked n look behind me. The ribbon glow was darkest red -- the skeleton of our ship still aglow. The ribbon flashed green in the middle -- a tiny venomous dagger -- and then a huge pale green firefly winked where Pete lay. He'd saved me a fourth time. I had barely pushed sideways back when there was another of those winks just outside my hole, this one glaringly bright, its front walloping me. I heard through the rock faint tings of fragments of Pete's suit hitting the wall, but they may have been only residual ringings, from the nearer blast, in my suit or ears. I scrambled through the back door in the bubble into a space which I made out by crawling to be a second bubble, resembling the first even to having a back door. I went through that third hole and turned around and rested my Swift's muzzle on the rough-scooped threshold. Since the crusoe lived around here, he'd know the territory better wherever I went. Why retreat farther and get lost? My dial lights showed that about a minute and a half had gone by since Pete bought it. Also, I wasn't losing pressure and I had oxy and heat for four hours -- Circumluna would be able to deliver a rescue force in half that time, if my message had got through and if the crusoe didn't scupper them too. Then I got goosy again about the glow of the dial lights and snapped them off. I started to change position and was suddenly afraid the crusoe might already be trailing me by my transmitted sounds through the rock, and right away I held stock still and started to listen for him. N o light, no sound, a ghostfingered gravity -- it was like being tested for sanity-span in an anechoic chamber. Almost at once dizziness and the sensory mirages started to come, swimming in blue and burnt and moaning from the peripheries of my senses -- even waiting in ambush for a crusoe wouldn't stop them; I guess I wanted them to come. So though straining every sense against the crusoe's approach, I had at last to start thinking about him. It's strange that men should have looked at the moon for millennia and never guessed it was exactly what it looked like: a pale marble graveyard for living dead men, a Dry Tortuga of space where the marooned their mutineers, their recalcitrants, their criminals, their lunatics. Not on fertile warm-blanketed earth with its quaint adolescent race, which such beings might harm, but on the great silver rock of earth's satellite, to drag out their solitary furious lives, each with his IF suit and gun and lonely hut or hole, living by recycling his wastes; recycling, too, the bitter angers and hates and delusions which had brought him there. As many as a thousand of them, enough to mine the moon for meals and fuel-gases and to reconquer space and perhaps become masters of earth -- had they chosen to cooperate. But their refusal to cooperate was the very thing for which they'd been marooned, and besides that they were of a half thousand different galactic breeds. And so although they had some sort of electronic or psionic or what-not grapevine -- at least what happened to one maroon became swiftly known to the others -- each of them remained a solitary Friday-less Robinson Crusoe, hence the name. I risked flashing my time dial. Only another thirty seconds gone. At this rate it would take an eternity for the two hours to pass before I could expect aid if my call had got through, while the crusoe -- As my senses screwed themselves tighter to their task, my thoughts went whirling off again. Earthmen shot down the first crusoe they met -- in a moment of fumbling panic and against all their training. Ever since then the crusoes have shot first, or tried to, ignoring our belated efforts to communicate. I brooded for what I thought was a very short while about the age-old problem of a universal galactic code, yet when I flashed my time dial again, seventy minutes had gone somewhere. That really froze me. He'd had time to stalk and kill me a dozen times -- he'd had time to go home and fetch his dogs! -- my senses couldn't be that good protection with my mind away. Why even now, straining them in my fear, all I got was my own personal static: I heard my heart pounding, my blood roaring, I think for a bitI heard the Brownian movement of the air molecules against my eardrums. What I hadn't been doing, I told myself, was thinking about the crusoe in a systematic way. He had a gun like mine and at least three sorts of ammo. He'd made it from notch to fissure-lip in forty seconds or less -- he must be a fast loper, whatever number feet; he might well have a jet unit. And he'd shot at the miniradar ahead of me. Had he thought it a communicator? -- a weapon? -- or some sort of robot as dangerous as a man... ? My heart had quieted, my ears had stopped roaring, and in that instant I heard through the rock the faintest scratching. Scratch-scratchy scratch-scratch , scratchy scratch , scratch it went, each time a little louder. I flipped on my searchlight and there coming toward me across the floor of the bubble outside mine was a silver spider as wide as a platter with four opalescent eyes and a green-banded body. Its hanging jaws were like inward curving notched scissor blades. I fired by automatism as I fell back. The spider's bubble was filled with violet glare instantly followed by green. I was twice walloped by explosion-fronts and knocked down. That hardly slowed me a second. The same flashes had shown me a hole in the top of my bubble and as soon as I'd scrambled to my feet I leaped toward it. I did remember to leap gently. My right hand caught the black rim of the hole and it didn't break off and I drew myself up into the black bubble above. It had no hole in the top, but two high ones in the sides, and I went through the higher one. I kept on that way. The great igneous bubbles were almost uniform. I always took the highest exit. Once I got inside a bubble with no exit and had to backtrack. After that I scanned first. I kept my searchlight on. I'd gone through seven or seventeen bubbles before I could start to think about what had happened. That spider had almost certainly not been my crusoe -- or else there was a troop of them dragging a rifle like an artillery piece. And it hadn't likely been an hitherto-unknown, theoretically impossible, live vacuum-arthropod -- or else the exotic biologists were in for a great surprise and I'd been right to wet my pants. No, it had most likely been a tracking or tracking-and-attack robot of some sort. Eight legs are a useful number, likewise eight hands. Were the jaws for cutting through suit armor? Maybe it was a robot pet for a lonely being. Here, Spid! The second explosion? Either the crusoe had fired into the chamber from the other side, or else the spider had carried a bomb to explode when it touched me. Fine use to make of a pet! I giggled. I was relieved, I guess, to think it likely that the spider had been "only" a robot. Just then -- I was in the ninth or nineteenth bubble -- the inside of my helmet misted over everywhere. I was panting and sweating and my dehumidifier had overloaded. It was as if I were in a real peasouper of a fog. I could barely make out the black loom of the wall behind me. I switched out my headlight. My time dial showed seventy-two minutes gone. I switched it off and then I did a queer thing. I leaned back very carefully until as much of my suit as possible touched rock. Then I measuredly thumped the rock ten times with the butt of my Swift and held very still. Starting with ten would mean we were using the decimal system. Of course there were other possibilities, but... Very faintly, coming at the same rate as mine, I heard six thuds. What constant started with six? If he'd started with three, I'd have given him one, and so on through a few more places of pi. Or if with one, I'd have given him four -- and then started to worry about the third and fourth places in the square root of two. I might take his signal for the beginning of a series with the interval of minus four and rap him back two, but then how could he rap me minus two? Oh why IF hadn't I simply started rapping out primes? Of course all the integers, in fact all the real numbers, from thirty seven through forty one had square roots beginning with six, but which one... ? Suddenly f heard a scratching... M y searchbeam was on again, my helmet had unmisted, my present bubble was empty. Just the same I scuttled out of it, still trending upward where I could. But now the holes wouldn't trend that way. They kept going two down for one up and the lines of bubbles zigzagged. I wanted to go back, but then I might hear the scratching. Once the bubbles started getting smaller. It was like being in solid black suds. I lost any sense of direction. I began to lose the sense of up-down. What's moon-gravity to the numbness of psychosis? I kept my searchlight on although I was sure the glow it made must reach ten bubbles away. I looked all around every bubble before I entered it, especially the overhang just above the entry hole. Every once in a while I would hear somebody saying Six! Six? Six! like that and then very rapidly seven eight nine five four three two one naught. How would you rap naught in the decimal system? That one I finally solved: you'd rap ten. Finally I came into a bubble that had a side-hole four feet across and edged at the top with diamonds. Very fancy. Was this the Spider Princess' boudoir? There was also a top hole but I didn't bother with that -- it had no decor. I switched off my searchlight and looked out the window without exposing my head. The diamonds were stars. After a bit I made out what I took to be the opposite lip of the fissure I'd first dove in, only about one hundred feet above me. The rimwall beyond looked vaguely familiar, though I wasn't sure about the notch. My time dial said one hundred eighteen minutes gone as I switched it off. Almost time to start hoping for rescue. Oh great! -- with their ship a sitting duck for the crusoe they wouldn't be expecting. I hadn't signaled a word besides Extreme Emergency. I moved forward and sat in the window, one leg outside, my Swift under my left arm. I plucked a flash-grenade set for five seconds from my belt, pulled the fuse and tossed it across the fissure, almost hard enough to reach the opposite wall. I looked down, my Swift swinging like my gaze. The fissure lit up like a boulevard. Across from me I knew the flare was dropping dreamily, but I wasn't looking that way. Right below me, two hundred feet down, I saw a transparent helmet with something green and round and crested inside and with shoulders under it. Just then I heard the scratching again, quite close. I fired at once. My shell made a violet burst and raised a fountain of dust twenty feet from the crusoe. I scrambled back into my bubble, switching on my scarchlight. Another spider was coming in on the opposite side, its legs moving fast. I jumped for the top-hole and grabbed its rim with my free hand. I'd have dropped my Swift if I'd needed my other hand, but I didn't. As I pulled myself up and through, I looked down and saw the spider straight below me eyeing me with its uptilted opalescent eyes and doubling its silver legs. Then it straightened its legs and sprang up toward me, not very fast but enough against Luna's feeble gravitational tug to put it into this upper room with me. I knew it mustn't touch me and I mustn't touch it by batting at it. I had started to shift the explosive shell in my gun for a slug, and its green-banded body was growing larger, when there was a green blast in the window below and its explosion-front, booming my suit a little, knocked the spider aside and out of sight before it made it through the trap door of my new bubble. Yet the spider didn't explode, if that was what had happened to the first one; at any rate there was no second green flash. My new bubble had a top hole too and I went through it the same way I had the last. The next five bubbles were just the same too. I told myself that my routine was getting to be like that of a circus acrobat -- except who stages shows inside black solidity? -- except the gods maybe with the dreams they send us. The lava should be transparent, so the rim-wall peaks could admire. At the same time I was thinking how if the biped humanoid shape is a good one for medium-size creatures on any planet, why so the spider shape is a good one for tiny creatures and apt to turn up anywhere and be copied in robots too. The top hole in the sixth bubble showed me the stars, while one half of its rim shone white with sunlight. Panting, I lay back against the rock. I switched off my searchlight. I didn't hear any scratching. The stars. The stars were energy. They filled the universe with light, except for hidey holes and shadows here and there. Then the number came to me. With the butt of my Swift I rapped out five. No answer. No scratching either. I rapped out five again. Then the answer came, ever so faintly. Five knocked back at me. Six five five -- Planck's Constant, the invariant quantum of energy. Oh, it should be to the minus #th power, of course, but I couldn't think how to rap that and, besides, the basic integers were all that mattered. I heard the scratching... I sprang and caught the rim and lifted myself into the glaring sunlight... and stopped with my body midway. Facing me a hundred feet away, midway through another top-hole -- he must have come very swiftly by another branch of the bubble ladder -- he'd know the swiftest ones -- was my green-crested crusoe. His face had a third eye where a man's IF nose would be, which with his crest made him look like a creature of mythology. We were holding our guns vertically. We looked like two of the damned, half out of their holes in the floor of Dante's hell. I climbed very slowly out of my hole, still pointing my gun toward the zenith. So did he. We held very still for a moment. Then with his gun butt he rapped out ten. I could both see and also hear it through the rock. I rapped out three. Then, as if the black bubble-world were one level of existence and this another, I wondered why we were going through this rigamarole. We each knew the other had a suit and a gun (and a lonely hole?) and so we knew we were both intelligent and knew math. So why was our rapping so precious? He raised his gun -- I think to rap out one, to start off pi. But I'll never be sure, for just then there were two violet bursts, close together, against the fissurewall, quite close to him. He started to swing the muzzle of his gun toward me. At least I think he did. He must know violet was the color of my explosions. I know I thought someone on my side was shooting. And I must have thought he was going to shoot me -- because a violet dagger leaped from my Swift's muzzle and I felt its sharp recoil and then there was a violet globe where he was standing and moments later some fragment twinged lightly against my chest -- a playful ironic tap. He was blown apart pretty thoroughly, all his constants scattered, including -- I'm sure -- Planck's. I t was another half hour before the rescue ship from Circumluna landed. I spent it looking at earth low on the horizon and watching around for the spider, but I never saw it. The rescue party never found it either, though they made quite a hunt -- with me helping after I'd rested a bit and had my batteries and oxy replenished. Either its power went off when its master died, or it was set to "freeze" then, or most likely go into a "hide" behavior pattern. Likely it's still out there waiting for an incautious earthman, like a rattlesnake in the desert or an old, forgotten land mine. I also figured out, while waiting in Gioja crater, there near the north pole on the edge of Shackleton crater, the only explanation I've ever been able to make, though it's something of a whopper, of the two violet flashes which ended my little mathematical friendship-chant with the crusoe. They were the first two shells I squeezed off at him -- the ones that skimmed the notch. They had the velocity to orbit Luna and the time they took -- two hours and five minutes -- was right enough. Oh, the consequences of our past      The planet was made for a race live on it by paying its price I Sub-departments to Galactic Development Commission Archeology, Planetary Survey assignment #, # January, # through # September, #Q# of planet designated S-#, reported by Scout Ship Ceres as bearing signs of a lost civilization, deaths of expedition members assistant I I t is tempting to read time backwards and come up with something like, "The moment I stepped aboard the ship I knew our expedition was doomed." To stuff one's ego as a critic of the past is easier than as a creator of moments yet to come. The nearest to any precognition I can claim is a muddled unhappy impression after meeting Director Litzanov, first his high-pitched nasal voice carried to me on chill winds, and second, his words. "You are younger than Banning led me to expect, Doctor Maxwell. I assume he can still select a capable representative in his field, but you look like an undergraduate." Next he indicated my guitar on the luggage cart. "Do you make noise with that in addition to the piano Banning mentioned? Wouldn't a reference library of micro-books make better use of your space allotment?" But my colleagues didn't think so. Soon after Explorer II lifted into space they gathered regularly in the crowded little ward room to ask for music. Litzanov never attended. I caught Jim Larsen, our geologist, watching me quizzically after one of those dogged pass-throughs. My face must have sagged like an old time astronaut's at five G's because Jim chuckled. "What has he got against music?" I growled. "You're dealing with someone completely tone-deaf," Jim answered. "Also, sound in measured tempo sends him into a frenzy." Looking backward I might have picked up another foreshadowing hint of trouble. They hauled a stowaway from a supply locker, probably the first in space travel history, a scrawny kid of fifteen. I heard Larsen's incredulous exclamation, "So Binky finally made it!" Commander Jacobs muttered, "He made it all right. Somebody should have clobbered him the first day he wandered on the base." Jim gave me the score. "Binkv's a deaf-mute. Father was one of the early explorer pilots -- died young from radiation. A lot of those early spacers' kids didn't get born right." And the captain growled, "It's a hell of a problem to have on your back for the next ten months. I can message the mother, but -- " He roared at the crew members. "Get the boy for'ard." I didn't like the way they yanked Binky to his feet. The men were surly after the commander's angry lecture and not inclined to handle the stowaway with gentleness. To see a dog kicked makes me softheaded: I stuck my neck out. "Why not turn him over to me? Fll see that he stays out of your way." Litzanov's dry nasality echoed down the passageway. "I suggest that you do not add responsibilities which might interfere with efficiency of your work, Doctor Maxwell. This problem does not concern 'he research party." Temper boils when somebody tries to push me around, and needs an effort to choke down. I tramped on my impulse to answer and dropped an arm across Binky's shoulders. IF E ven old hands on Explorer II had never seen anything like the planet we were assigned to examine. When we broke out into normal space-time it revolved there on the black canvas of an endless cosmos like a bright light -- not blindingly sharp as a sun, but radiating a pale violet nimbus which lent a deceptive transparency to the sphere, as if the molten sheen of its heart rock somehow found a way to the surface. Everyone who could crowd to a viewport stayed there, fascinated. Magnifications showed the most completely landscaped areas any of us had ever seen, as if the entire planet had come under one central plan of formal gardening -- park regions of deliberately designed wildness, shaded roadways laid out specifically for appearance of their patterned crossings from the air, buildings whose shapes, colors and spacing upon the land brought a pleasurable response aesthetically. Massive mountain ranges topped by cliffs of a quartz-like stone stretched across the world, all with a north-south orientation, so that during approach orbit we seemed to be peering at a globe upon which longitudinal lines had been traced in relief. From these came the shimmering aura of the planet. By conduction of volcanic incandescense deep in its interior? By absorption and reflection from its sun? We never became certain. Due to this luminescence the night side only subdued daylight and tinged it wi # h a deeper violet cast, so that there was never complete darkness. "Those cliffs must be gigantic crystal formations," Jim Larsen muttered. "What else could explain the way light appears to be conducted through them?" We touched down upon a dead world. Nothing about the pleasant meadow where we landed should have given such an impression, but it lurked there like an infusion of the peculiar psychic miasma which permeates the air of a' cemetery. Warmth of late spring should have sent men, long imprisoned within a claustrophobic capsule, to cavorting wildly across lush grass flats, but even the most insensitive stepped off our landing stage as if he were entering a cathedral. We stood, and looked silently, and knew that the race which had built so wonderfully had ceased to exist. There was no bird song, no thin sibilance of insects, no whirr of wind, no distant voice of animal or man. And yet I sensed something all around me, almost as if it were sound, not recognizable to ears, however, as resonance. To my musician's acuteness it seemed to possess pitch, though I could not have argued that point successfully. Jim Larsen was inclined to think it a psychological response to a strange environment. I tried to find words for describing the phenomenon as it affected me. In the day's warmth I thought of it as a pitch far above the abil'ty of human ears to respond. When night touched us it seemed something below the threshhold of hearing, frequencies below the deepest notes of a river beating itself to froth against the walls of a gorge, below the darkness of a dream. And yet I had not been aware of when that change in pitch occurred -- if it had. n I discovered then why I had seen Director Litzanov on the news screens so frequently; he was not unacquainted with the persuasive powers of personal publicity. He deserved accolades; he knew his own field and could perform in it with distinction. But like most administrators he actively spread his own image and the more spectacular aspects of his accomplishments, omitting by purposeful oversight anything which might remind the public that his newsworthy activities depended upon cooperative investigation by many trained minds supplying pieces for the mosaic in which he could center himself. And so our first project for the day was a picture. "We must make certain that what we do here, gendemen," he said, "Is preserved for all time in an adequate record." And so our party's photographer rehearsed us until he was satisfied with the mimed spontaneity of fiist setting foot upon a strange world, then shot the picture -- to be shown eventually upon Earth's video screens: explorers disembarking from the star ship, turning to await our leader, his appearance in the open hatch, a sweep of his arm toward distance, our faces swivelling to follow the gesture, a camera pan to glimpses of alien buildings over distant tree tops -- structures actually hidden by those trees but which would be photographed from another viewpoint and spliced into the completed film. Voices and incidental sound would be dubbed in later. I felt an idol of my innocent days shatter; I had seen this basic sequence often on video during my undergraduate years, stirring then my imagination and determination to become worthy of a place on Director Litzanov's staff... He had seemed the epitome of the glamorous research-scholar to my worshipping young soul. Now was the day of awakening to the shams which dramatize man's accomplishments. I vowed that if ever I advanced to leadership of my peers I would accept it as a trust rather than an elevation. In cynical moments since I have wondered if I would remember that vow. We traversed the woodlands and came upon a wide thoroughfare. From its end paths ascended by steep ramps a series of increasingly higher terraces forming a mile long pyramidal base for a magnificent collection of tall structures located in the center of an extensive valley between two high ridges of white and rose colored stone. It was the consensus of the party that this complex must be the planet's governing center or cultural mecca. Seen from the perspective of ground level they were stunning buildings, towers and buttresses of the white and rose quartz-like rock, wall slabs of a many-hued plastic so hard that time had neither dulled its polish nor chipped its surface. IF It was a shining aggregation of five architectural wonders, one at each, of the major points of the compass and one in the center. An arcade of pointed arches built from the same rosy crystalline rock joined the four outer buildings to form a ring enclosing the fifth structure in its middle. V# e stood in a great concourse   surrounding the pyramid. From this circle twelve spacious avenues radiated, ending at the inner ring of another extensive pavement curving about the pyramid a dozen miles away. This second parkway formed a circumference from which three hundred and sixty roadways spread to girdle the planet and return again at points exactly opposite on the circle from their start. Jim Larsen was whispering, "Marvelous engineering! Daring planners!" And I nodded, unable to look away from grass covered slopes that once had been clipped lawns sweeping upward to terrace after terrace, each paved by the mottled plastic material and balustrated with the strange white stone. Like giant steps they led to a truncated top where the buildings carried the pyramid's natural slope to its vertex. I felt that I looked at a gigantic fountain whose jets were in the sky. Here Litzanov arranged another picture, a low-angle shot picking him up in the close foreground against a backdrop of the pyramid as he commented upon the architectural miracle to his chief scientists, then a fade-out with them admiring the beauty he indicated. Jim Larsen grumbled with mild amusement, "I suppose these phony interludes advance the cause among people back on Earth who pay our salaries and grants, but what a waste of time." I laughed. "It gave Binky and me time to touch this venerable relic. Tap the carved rock in that balustrade lightly." "Why?" But he snapped a finger against the railing and turned to stare at me, then back to repeat the feather-weight thump. "You wouldn't try to fool me into believing a flick of one finger could start vibrations through solid rock, would you?" "Did I suggest that it would?" "No," he admitted. I said, "I still don't really believe I felt anything, but after seeing Binky react, then watching you go through the same experience -- well, what did happen?" Instead of answering he struck the post a strong blow, keeping finger tips of his left hand on the rock to sense any effect. "Feel anything?" I asked, and he shook his head. I scrounged a steel bar from a crew man and swung at the baluster. Jim laughed. "This rock is absolutely dead. I couldn't feel a single shiver." Without any real purpose I flicked my finger against it and saw Larsen jerk his hand away, then touch his finger tips back to the stone. "Do that again," he muttered. I placed my fingers beside his and repeated the light tap. We both to believe there had been a tremor. Jim grunted, "Were a couple of yahoos fooling ourselves." "You think we're being victimized by a little mental suggestion?" "Let's say we don't believe anything yet and high-tail it after the others." But I heard him mumbling, "If a finger tap can start vibrations, then a crowbar should have made the thing ring like a bell." That worried me too. And I stewed over why a race would desert a world so beautifully designed. B ut we found those suppositions were false. Binky discovered the inhabitants. Ranging ahead like a wild colt he blundered into them near the top terrace and rushed back to us, pointing. Many were mummified; some were fragments, powdering bones, skulls that crumbled from countless seasons deterioration when touched -- hundreds grouped on the last slope -- then through the arcade's delicate arches to sight of an amphitheatre within, and thousands of grinning skulls, weathered remnants of the creators of this beauty. They lay in orderly rows as they had sat, centuries ago, attending some spectacle in that tremendous outdoor theatre where a blue-violet sky made fragile silhouettes of the surrounding arches and curved overhead into a vaulted roof that seemed as substantial as plastic, as near as a ceiling, and as far as infinity. And from where we stood at the circling line of rosy-white arcade the amphitheatre bowl spread before us, completely surrounding the highreaching central building, its far side dim in heavy violet of the atmosphere -- acres of beautifully wrought seats cast from plastic, shining with a gloss that made them seem installations of only days ago rather than aged by unnumbered centuries. And on each seat, or spilled to the aisle in front of it, pitiful pieces of what was once life. I heard myself saying, "They must not have known death was approaching, even when it struck." "Wiped out in a single instant," Jim mused, "while they watched some kind of performance." I agreed. "There is no indication of panic. Skeletons that have not broken apart, or bodies which mummified, are all in seated postures." And that was as far as we could go on speculation. There is no need to list the routines of prying into a dead civilization's hidden mysteries. On any site, if it has been covered by drifting debris of time, one digs -- and lifts more shovels of dirt than treasure. When time neglects to spread a wind-borne or alluvial blanket upon the remains, then come monotonous days of measuring, charting, photographing. Scouts, criss-crossing the planet in skimmers, reported that conditions everywhere apparently were the same as we found them here. Evidently each inhabitant on the hapless globe had died at the same instant, without enough warning to cause him to look up from whatever task engaged him at his moment of destiny. "Radiation of some sort?" Jim and I asked each other repeatedly. The other always replied, "None that IF man knows could do it without disturbing the population enough to leave signs of terror." '#'ork began to concentrate in   the four structures at the pyramid's corners, for three were discovered to be museums and libraries, and the fourth certainly was an administration center. Tremendous window spaces pierced their walls. It was assumed by most that no window enclosures had been intended, but Jim Larsen became curious about grooves in the stone bordering these openings and drifts of finely pulverized metal caught in angles scattering winds could not reach. One evening he walked from the expedition's laboratory and announced, "That powder is glass, so disintegrated that only chemical tests could indicate what it had been." And later he told me, "I cannot understand what sort of force reduced it to absolute powder. Broken pieces I could accept, even down to microscopic size, but powder -- " And throughout those busy days I found myself listening to the sound I had sensed on our landing day, cadences not heard but felt, as if barely penetrating to me from another world. I had one day of unbelievable bliss. Our photographer caught me. "Something I saw yesterday would interest you, Chuck," he said, "their museum of musical instruments." My walk to that wing packed excitement not experienced since my first Christmas tree. Even though I had turned to science from my early dreams of becoming a concert pianist, music still remains a haven into which I retire for peace and refreshment of mind and soul. And here lay the musical history of an alien race, complete. I rushed through the aisles like a typical tourist anxious to see it all in ten glances. Then I started classifying methodically. As it had been with' us, music evidently began on this world with log drums and simple pipes of reeds. I found primitive ancestors of stringed instruments, though empty centuries had removed, for the present, identification of what substance had been their strings. I surmised gut. It is awesome and strange how powerful the physical forces of these things we call planets, suns, galaxies, universes loom in determining the patterns of things, even those items formed by minds and fingers of living creators. The fact frightens me at times; I wonder if I might not be, after all, nothing but a marionette dangling on pieces of thread. Separated by the mysterious limitlessness of space, light years of distance, and millennia of time, my people and this alien civilization produced essentially the same devices for making sweet sounds. Oh, there were some differences, but I could recognize horns and woodwinds, and the strings and percussions. Windowless ages had rotted earlier groups whose basic substance was wood. However, as I worked into periods of metal I found better preservation. Some responded to my attempts to blow them, causing me to abandon systemmatic classification for the balance of the afternoon while I tried one after another. I had fun making Earthside music on alien horns. Some fingered instruments, resembling our own recorders, did not give back interval patterns exactly like those of Earth's music. I saw a fascinating avenue of research opening for me, studying the scales of this dead race. R eed instruments were unplayable until I reached a section displaying the final era in development of this alien art. There woods and metals had given way to various forms of plastic. Surprisingly, their reeds were also of molded material and still marvelously flexible. And I thanked all the powers for the thoroughness of my conservatory training; I still possessed enough background to bring harmonious sound from the throats of these alien substitutes for clarinets and oboes and bassoons. They were strangely mellow, with astonishing sweetness and resonance and astounding amplification, much stronger than Earthside woodwinds. Then I came upon the ultimate forms of their drums, what we would have called tympani. I thought they were mock-ups, for their kettles appeared to be the rosy white stone which had mystified Jim Larsen and me on the terraces. Drum heads were fashioned from sheets of the same rock cut so thin that light cast shadows: through it. From idle curiosity I thumped one slightly and jerked back in surprise at the thunderous tone which answered. One after another I touched them and got responses no percussion man in an Earthside orchestra could have achieved through his sticks. I discovered their uncanny flexibility -- shattering explosiveness from light finger taps, thrumming resonantly when the touch was soft and quick, a lingering echo if my fingers rested an instant, and low vibrations which were indescribable and disturbing when I alternately pressed and released the stone diaphragm. I could not resist sending out sonorously rolling patterns into the soft summer air, following them with whispering pulsations, building chords on drums tuned to different frequencies. And echoes suddenly surged back from the white cliffs miles across the valley, doubling the rhythms of my drums. I reacted with ecstatic excitement to the power of these instruments. Then I heard a shrill scream behind me. "Stop! Stop your nonsense!" Director Litzanov was shouting. He leaned against an arch, exhausted from running. I asked, "What is the matter?" and found strong projection necessary for drum thunder still rode the air around us. Gasping breaths shook him. "Doctor Maxwell, this behavior is incomprehensible to me." I grinned sheepishly. "Got carried away, I guess. But look at this room. One whole segment of that vanished society complete for us to study." "You are not accomplishing that purpose by spending precious time at noise making, sir." "We can hear those instruments IF as the aliens heard them," I protested. "It's a treasure find!" "We are concerned with a descriptive record of this people, Doctor Maxwell, not with becoming one of them." I bumbled along, forgetting his irrational attitude toward music. "If we are lucky enough to find samples of their music scores we can bring their compositions to life again with their own instruments. The chord structures and melodies of a civilization make almost perfect mirrors to the cultural and psychic attitudes of its members." "The pranks you are indulging in cause distracting annoyance to those of my team who try to work," he napped and turned away. I called sharply, "Doctor Litzaov, are you allowing some phobia to blind you to the value of this find?" He left without comment. Throughout our wrangle echoes still pounded back from both sides of the valley. Their sound reverberated more than an hour, merging finally and becoming lost in that strange vibration which had poured itself through me from my first moments on this world. I was too angry then to wonder at noise continuing so long after its initial impulses had been given. A musical note is simply a wave of physical energy which must subside in seconds by reason of having no generating agent to keep the level of its force constant. Even an echo cannot extend its life beyond another moment. Morning brought regret for my impromptu drum concert; Litzanov blocked further exploration into alien music. "My assistant will finish that wing, Doctor Maxwell," he told me. "The work is simple classification; it would be a waste of talent to burden you with trivia and routine." I shrugged. "Since we feel the central structure on this pyramid is religious in nature, significance of murals which cover its interior has become important. You will contribute to our studies if you determine whether any allegorical meaning resides in the pictures." There was nothing to do but shoulder my camera, take up my sketching pad, and go, with faithful Binky trotting along. In the amphitheatre surrounding the temple, ghosts walked with us down the aisles. I felt no shame acknowledging a grisly shiver when I turned at the front, for enough mummified figures remained upright in those seats to create illusions of a vast audience watching me, alien dead come to stare through empty eye sockets. I moved into the central building irrationally feeling that a hundred thousand spectators saw through its walls and counted my steps. sharply clear, showing little of the amber of Earth's Sol; inside violet tinted the air to gossamer unreality. Cursory examination had shown this central temple to be a tower, nearly two hundred feet square at the base, tapering slightly until its height broke out above that of the four corner buildings. From there it slanted to complete the great pyramid's tip. An entrance corridor opened from each side.   traversed one of these passages and stepped into fantastic beauty. We saw before us a spacious round hall whose walls glowed with the murals I had come to study. Unearthly richness of reds and purples and blues, crackling golds and greens pounced upon me. Somehow light lay behind the pictures, deepening perspectives so that to look at a painting was to see far into a threedimensional illusion. I said, "Binky, we've wandered into fairyland," and felt him clinging to me. Hardly an inch of that interior was free from the radiance of those murals. My eyes followed up, past tier on tier of rose suffused white stone balconies, two hundred feet, to a canopy of delicate rose and white lace intricately carved from crystalline rock. I stared, mind seething, wondering at the apparent strength of it, for stone tendrils completely spanned the hall's hundred foot spread. Through its interstices I saw other sheets of delicate carving hung above that. Darkness should have drowned us at the bottom of this enormous circular well, for nowhere could I find a window in its smooth sides, nor detect artificial light. Yet every inch of the vault was flooded with violettinged brightness which seemed to be daylight conducted through the huge crystals of stone from w:u:h the building was constructed. There was no effect of transparency in the walls. Light apparently flowed downward in the hearts of their prismatic structure, to be diffused throughout the shaft. When one pauses in the midst of any enclosed space possessing colossal dimensions there is a constant stir of sound, like the surging whisper heard in a sea shell held close to the ear. This I thought was present. I accepted it as a familiar phenomenon until trained musician's perceptions told me there was no echo in this hall. Instead, that worrisome almost-sound of the planet vibrated through its vast emptiness, amplified until it seemed on the point of touching human ears with a definite note. I strained to hear it, but could not, quite. It floated about me like the memory of an unresolved chord, a maddening repetition of something incomplete and waiting interminably, suspended for the balance of time. Ramps led from balcony to balcony, and I called, "Come on Binky. Let's look at those carvings on the ceiling," loudly, to wake up echoes and reduce the eeriness of this hall to noises that were normal and acceptable. No echo responded. Two hundred feet is a long climb, taxing to the breath, but from the topmost balcony I could look down upon the filigreed canopy. An incredible expanse of stone openwork, carved into slender tendrils vining and twisting about each other, reached out in whorls and spirals covering that entire ceiling space, and at no IF point were they any larger than my wrists. Between the delicate designs I could see the floor's violet dimness as if from a mountain top. Just above me a second stone fretwork spanned the titanic hall, and three more were suspended above that, with dark roughness of the true ceiling showing beyond. I grew dizzy staring through fairy-like sheets of rose and white filigree, wondering how they could have managed to hang there unknown centuries without shattering. IV E vening is a thinking time. In its quieting coolness I poured impressions of the temple into Jim Larsen's patient ears. We watched a falling sun go through unfamiliar color stages, from blue-white through greens toward a deep gentian, finally to lose itself in purple afterglow. Then, as if crawling darkness, stalking that fleeing disk, had activated relays across the planet, the violet nimbus became visible, wavering like a ghostly phosphorescent mist from the gigantic pale mountain ridges, and the strange not-sound slipped back into insistent prominence, a spooky night-time song too deep for our ears. "Why would those aliens erect a massive building to enclose just one room whose diameter is not more than a hundred feet?" Jim's eyes twinkled. "Are you implying that Earth has never had its big-little men who have piled up imposing heaps of stone and mortar for their own glorification?" I shrugged. "I'm not ready to accept that hypothesis. Explain, with your geologist's wisdom, how those stupendous stone filigrees hang without collapsing under their own weight; more than two-thirds of the rock is chiseled away. They seem as fragile as sugar candy lace. What is their use?" "For the tensile strength of the rock I have no answer. But you evidently believe they are meant for more than ornament, don't you?" "A hunch. Here's another oddity: the interior walls do not parallel the outsides of the building. They show a slight S-curve. If you look downward through the stone filigree you get an impression of being suspended inside a monstrous horn or bell." George Pell, our semantics man strolled up the hill slope and asked, "May I join the company of gentlemen and scholars?" We made room for him and told him the gist of our discussion. I added, "I'm afraid Litzanov won't like what I think I'm finding in those murals." That brought Larsen out of deep thought. "How's that?" "They have an eerie beauty, Jim. Their colors are transparent and extremely rich. But wait until the director knows that the subject matter of every one is music -- those aliens listening or participating with trancelike ecstasy, sometimes portraits of musicians with zealous stares of prophets, and a few paintings emphasizing orchestral instruments against a swirling background of color. He's certain to throw me in the brig; I've bugged him enough with my guitar and those drums yesterday." George Pell grunted. "Hum-m-m! I'm intrigued. We've made progress into their written language, even though its basis is awfully foreign to Earthside concepts of linguistics. By coincidence you may have supplied us with a new key. A wild symbol had us stopped because in one context it apparently stood for diety, in others meaning like noise, or hidden things. Perhaps I should assume that their god and mysteries of his cult, and music with its creating instruments are all synonymous." I handed him a paper. "Can you translate this? It's an inscription I copied from a block of white rock in the center of the temple floor." Pell studied it, then offered rne three choices: Enter (meekly? humbly?) the (first room?) in the house of God (music?) high read?) through the house of God Seek (with pleasure?) the (happiness? devine experience?) in the (sound? house?) of music A fter breakfast I tried to sneak out of camp with my guitar and, of course blundered into the director's sight. He stood talking to Commander Jacobs, and his eyes followed me across the clearing. At every step I expected his nasal voice to call, "Doctor Maxwell, what are you doing with that contraption?" And I tried to formulate in my mind an answer to give him, feeling nakedly foolish when I realised how silly I would sound saying, "I just wondered if that pretty stone fretwork up there in the temple ceiling could be some kind of resonatoiy and I aim to play a little tune for it." But Litzanov had his mind on instructions to Jacobs, who was to take Explorer II off into space this morning for a week's reconnaisance around the planetary system. I did not feel secure, though, until I reached the temple and stood with my guitar by the white slab to pluck one string at a time and listen for response from the grids of' scintillating filigree above me. I didn't know what I expected to hear -- possibly an echo. However, arpeggios, chords, key changes all left them dead. Then suddenly, in the midst of discouragement, my ears caught the faintest whisper, as if a puff of wind had blown through the intertwining stone to leave them trembling. Binky stared nervously upwards, and I wondered if he had felt what I heard -- or imagined. I concentrated then on the key which produced this effect, trying all its chords, major and minor m all inversions. Finally, as the minor sweetness of the seventh chord on the dominant rang out, a shudder slipped through the lacey stonework overhead. I repeated it with increasing volume, and response was unmistakable, a thin tinkling that grew into an intermittant hum, as if the spiralling stone were loathe to arouse itself. Then the full sound of my chord took shape along the interconnecting tendrils, swelling steadily until the whole hall resounded like the inside of a bell. The chord still thrummed up there IF after I stopped playing, singing with that aching need of the seventh chord to be resolved. Then Binky's frightened stare and a sweep of chilled air behind me brought me whirling around. The stone slab, so solidly planted on that temple floor, was sinking lowly, its noise drowned by haunting clamor of music from the whorls of rock in the ceiling. Binky clutched my arm. Together we watched the white block come to rest, sloping into a recess below. I don't know what I expected to find underneath -- certainly not the very ordinary-looking room which presented itself. And I don't remember a single premonition that the slab might rise automatically to its original position, trapping us in the vault. Violet brightness filtered down through crystalline rock, lighting that room, so Binky and I walked down the ramp. We half slid into a square room, carved out of the white rock that was the temple's foundation. Not until Binky and I crossed to center did we discover the occupants sitting side by side, grinning death in their faces, three leather-hard mummies who had kept watch for endless centuries, empty eye sockets directed toward a large plastic cube which had concealed them from me. In the subdued violet glow their countenances seemed sardonic, as if frozen at the moment of grim laughter. The multitudinous dead on this planet had left our party relatively unaffected; remoteness of centuries precluded personal identification with this alien charnel house. Now, in the dimness, facing these three, with the plaintive repetitions of my unresolved seventh chord crying among those fantastic grids, I suddenly found those people were no longer strangers. I became vitally concerned over their destruction, and for the first time felt apprehensive for my own safety. Then -- I was hearing music, a far-off horn call, sustained and mellow. Gradually soft thrumming whispered under that persistent note, sound I had got from tympani in the museum. My eyes caught a jerk of Binky's hand; I knew the source. A recording instrument filled that cube near the alien dead; Binky had moved a knob projecting from it. Even so, my ears located the tune as singing from the grids in the great hall above us. Woodwinds added dulcet voices to the insistent horn note, racing in barely audible chromatics around it; string sections came in to deepen the harmony, sweeping it toward the bass until all low-voiced instruments of the orchestra had joined in a tremendous chord, held seemingly for eternity. When my ears felt ready to burst under the thunderous weight of its crescendo a lilting song, thin sweetness hauntingly filled with strange intervals of the aliens, crooned in the grid, modulating an infinite longing, non-human in sound, treme joy. Here was a legacy from a dead orchestra on a dead world playing with an effect that seemed to possess physical life. Two hours I sat in that dim vault, enthralled by the hypnotic sonority of that symphony, until finally the knob Binky had pulled clicked back to its original position and no more sound fed into the stone grids. Yet, harmonies of the climactic phrases continued to roar along its maze of twisting crystal vines like turbulence through a thundeiftead. I became certain now that this temple had been constructed as a gigantic resonance chamber. The enormity of the idea left me shaken. After Binky and I walked through the amphitheatre's lifeless audience and passed the circling arches, sound ceased to ring from the temple. Instead, with some shock, I heard the complete symphony again, its melodies clear and unmuddied, winging toward me from far-off cliffs bordering both sides of our valley -- rose white rocks lifting their voices to replay what had thundered from the crypt under that temple. V C amp was chaotic. Research team and maintenance crew faced the ridges like zombies. Larsen sailed in like a projectile on his skimmer to relate how white cliffs out where he conducted his geologic survey suddenly made music. I told them of the room underneath the temple, but Jim insisted, "I heard no sound from the pyramid. Listen; the tunes are from the mountains." "Nevertheless," I repeated, "their origin is a four foot plastic cube under the temple. What we're catching now is some sort of echo effect." Jim shook his head. "Not an echo." The white cliffs continued to throw that entire symphonic marvel over the miles throughout much of the night. Like one suffering unbearable pain Litzanov prowled until its cadences merged into the almost-sound during bleak hours before dawn. Squinting under sharpness of morning light he summoned me, his smile sour, his eyes haunted. "Life has concocted a devilish joke on me. Doctor Pell has found evidence that a significant part of this planet's social structure was based upon a racket cult. I shall be working with you today." The semanticist called from the breakfast table, "Its priesthood is involved in musical experiencing. Chuck, with rank or sacredness dependent upon ability to create greater complexities of composition. Their language is still so damned vague that I've just skimmed the surface." Jim Larsen joined us on the concourse. "I want to find out why I heard that music as if the mountain ledges originated the tunes." "Do you have any theories?" I asked. He shrugged. "The crystalline structure of this planet's rock must conduct sound with unbelievable efficiency. Frequencies evidently travel through it thousands of times farther than through the atmosphere, probably several circuits of the globe before any major damping occurs, and every time they reach the surIF face on one of those cliffs their vibrations are transmitted again into the air." "You are implying this whole planet is a transmitting and gigantic resonating device," I said. "Any other explanation?" Litzanov muttered, "Not this side of hell." Again I faced the huge slab with my guitar, posing for the inevitable motion picture sequence. Director Litzanov's pantomime called attention to importance of the filigreed stonework overhead, and instructed me to play. He awaited my music tensely, as if fearing blows from a whip. Involuntarily, hands covered his ears when my chord aroused reluctant stone tendrils and the rock started to sink. He was on the slab before it came to rest, in haste to run from twanging resonances battering the main chamber. "That much hatred of music is neurotic," I shouted to Jim Larsen, and saw him shrug. But I found it possible to pity Litzanov as I watched his cringing anticipation of every booming accent. Binky headed for the plastic cube facing the mummified aliens, to pull the knob which touched off last evening's concert. Litzanov cried, "Stop him!" I did, barely. T he director spoke thickly. "I am resigned to necessity for some of this devilish noise, but I hope we can undertake our study with as little of it as possible. Now, Doctor Pell, you formulated theories of a rigid priesthood caste, with possible deification of this organized racket people call music. We'll follow your lead temporarily." Pell answered, "If I'm right we should find a series of rooms, each with a barrier or sign permitting access only to specific ranks in the cult's hierarchy." I located an arched corridor which led us down to a lower level. There we discovered the second room. As Pel predicted, an inscription was carved over its arch. "These symbols are tricky," Pell said, "but roughly it dedicates this crypt to someone who apparently brought his people to blessed communion with their god by creating more melodious music." Although the compartment was four square, buttress-like sections jutted from its walls and pointed toward the same kind of plastic cube Binky and I had found above. Again three age-dried husks of the ill-fated race faced it. Uneasiness nagged as I listened to my seventh chord chiming through the grids of the colossal hall two levels above us. The peak of its sound had been reached, and the chord was now diminishing. Litzanov was saying, "Doctor Maxwell, you will oblige me and our colleagues by keeping that deaf-mute's hands from this recording device. I should appreciate an opportunity to examine this chamber in silence." I voiced my vague apprehensions. "We'll need to pull that lever for our own safety, Doctor Litzanov." He stared. "Why?" "That rock on the temple floor opened at the sound of music. I am sure it will trap us down here the moment my guitar chord ceases to vibrate through that grid." "Then suppose you walk back up there periodically and renew the noise with your tinkling gadget. At least that won't make us endure hours of punishment while this infernal music machine runs through its repertoire."  I obeyed unhappily. Non-musical people do not understand the peculiar torture an unresolved chord inflicts, especially that leading tone of the seventh. It sings with an unearthly sweetness but must modulate quickly or it becomes an unending wail of loneliness and futility. 'Vfc# r hen I returned to the tomb  like depths I found Larsen and George Pell in excited discussion before another carved inscription between two buttresses. Oblivious, Litzanov puttered with the three mummies, measuring and writing meticulously. "It's another dedication," grunted Pell. "Names another person whose music took his race farther toward divinity." "Shouldn't they mark an entrance into still another dungeon if your theory concerning the priesthood holds up?" I asked. I reached to feel the wall. Jim said, "That's one gigantic crystal without a crack. Evidently this room is the end of the line." "It can't be," George argued, "unless my translations are all wrong." And he sketched quickly a picture of the time-dusted dead he had gleaned from their records. Beauty had evidently been their creed -- benevolence in their weather, graciousness in their living, splendor in the purple phosphorescence which streamed from their mountain tops and kept night away from them. "There should be four of these rooms," Pell said, "dug at successive levels deeper under the temple. Each vault apparently represented in time the accession of a new high priest and was created to preserve his inaugural composition, the result of a life-time of struggle to purify himself and lead his people into a state of oneness with their god -- indicated in their documents by the same symbol which denoted harmonious sound. Evidently more crypts would have honeycombed the pyramid's heart if catastrophe had not struck. "The latest written records talk of preparations to crown a new high priest, culminating in a planet-wide festival at which his inaugural symphonic composition would first be played. I found descriptions of dignitaries to attend its premiere in the amphitheatre, and instructions for all the world's inhabitants to cease activity and listen when its divine harmonies sang to them from the ridges of crystalline stone. I found no accounts of the festival, nor of any events after it." I said, "You are intimating that whatever tragedy blotted out life here struck on that evening of celebration." George nodded. "Presumably." T hey called Litzanov into the discussion. I'm afraid malice prompted a suggestion I made. "The IF temple hall up there seemed to be the end of the line until I tried my guitar. Wouldn't the next logical step require us to assume the music cube over there is triggered to open a hidden doorway into room number three?" The director stared malevolently at me. "We'll try that twinging stand more racket than your guitar can make." I protested. "A door would have been tuned to definite harmonic progressions recorded in that cube. I doubt we could ever find the combination on my guitar." "Chuck is probably right," Jim remarked. Litzanov moaned with exasperation. "I suppose thoroughness demands that we pull the damned lever -- since we'll not be able to force a way to whatever might lie behind that wall until Explorer returns and we can get blasting equipment from her. Time's too limited for that, whatever the cost in jangled nerves. Go ahead." I moved the knob with undue alacrity. Music traced tentative paths across the delicate filigree and sang into the temple's resonating bell shape, seeming innocuous. Richly harmonized melody in the string sections ranged through strange intervals of the alien's scale, a simple song theme, a tiny bit sad, slightly lonely, a little lazy, but filled with subtle undercurrents of reflective joy hinting of visions beyond present moments. As the music swelled toward climactic measures other instruments caught the tune and began its development. Then suddenly sound was in those triangular buttresses jutting from the walls of our crypt, giving depth to what issued from the grids far above the dungeons, enriching total effects of the symphony in the manner that addition of many more instruments to each section of an orchestra heightens its tonal impact. Binky reached for me. "You can't hear it, can you, Binky?" I asked aloud, and realized what had disturbed him; I was feeling this music as well as taking its impressions through normal paths of the ears. Definite energy waves whipped nerves throughout my body to thousands of infinitesimal movements I could not localize, as if the sound had become a physical force battling with light blows aimed from those buttresses. A glance at Larsen and Pell told me the same phenomenon affected them. I worried about Litzanov; he would be demoralized, hating this music rather than becoming caught up in it aesthetically. Then I forgot them, becoming increasingly disoriented with almost painful harmonies reaching and awakening my senses, one at a time. I heard more dimly specific melodies with their unbelievable arabesques racing upward until they swept beyond the limits of my ears than sank into the narrow band of sound possible for human senses to distinguish, then soared again, leaving me in an agonized straining to follow. I saw nothing but grayness and darker shadows now. Impressions of release from restraint of walls stole through me, as if I were delivered from my body, ecstatically free, afraid to see too deeply into darkness lurking just beyond the cocoon of music. A forest's dampness touched me. I smelled pungence of pines and dank decay of fallen needles. I felt sharply chilled, as though the fogs of Carmel had swirled over me. I was tossed in the wild surf that pounded those beaches. I drifted like a gray mist among their stunted trees -- and felt small and alone. No concept of time was left in me. Judging from the symphony released yesterday by Binky's fingers, we passed at least two hours in trance-like enslavement to esoteric harmonies. Without knowledge of when it came about, I found myself again recognizing colleagues in the room. Larsen and Pell stood dazed, staring down where a square of floor had sunk to reveal a ramp leading to a lower level in this pyramid. I realized only soaring aftertones of that hypnotic composition now muttered in those fantastic grids hanging in the tower. I remembered Litzanov and saw him on one knee, clawing at a buttress for support. The others came to help me ease him down. The man's appearance frightened me. His face showed a bloodless gray, and he drew breath with labored gulps. Nevertheless he sat up after some moments and spoke, barely above a whisper. "This is hellish torture." "We'll do a quick survey of the next crypt below and let you rest here,' suggested Jim. We called the medic over from the museum and left Litzanov with him, then filed down the ramp. A labyrinth enfolded us, alight witll violet-tinged brightness filtering through its convolutions. Instead of hollowing a conventional vault ancient artisans had carved rock out to leave a replica of the titanic filigreed canopies which spanned the temple's ceiling. Centered and joined to the twisting stone vines sat the familiar plastic cube and three time-embalmed custodians. More carved symbols above a slight concavity faced us from one side of the crypt. "That will be as you predicted. George," Larsen muttered, "room number four." "With maybe the greatest of all the symphonies recorded in its cube," I added. "Music its audience never heard through," Pell commented. I ntense exhilaration gripped me; tunes of the past hours sang in my head. Yet I felt cold, debilitated, as if recovering from fever. Even so, I saw with unnatural clarity, like the blind rediscovering a wonderous world. "I want to hear that symphony," I announced. "We've got to go into that room." Jim agreed. "It's a rugged experience to take on two such concerts in succession, but I'm with you." "Let's persuade the director to go on back to camp first." Pell's voice was unsteady. "I think I would IF follow him and leave the field to you fellows if I didn't hope solutions to the puzzle of this dead world might lie in that vault. A day on the rack would have been less painful thn what that music did to . A ff me. We started to the ramp. Jim was saying, "There's no doubt; each of these rooms has been dug deeper into the heart rock of this planet and modified, evidently with advanced understanding of using the resonating characteristics of this planet. The whole globe definitely possesses hair-trigger sensitivity to vibration." I broke in. "The strange almostsound I hear constantly?" "Waves set up in the rock by wind currents and changes in atmospheric temperature." We met our director on the ramp, walking unsteadily down, using the medic's arm for support. Larsen protested, "You're in no condition to continue without a rest." The medic muttered, "Hope you're better at persuading than I was." And Litzanov shook loose from the doctor like a wilful kid, repeating, "We'll finish this job now. I don't intend to stretch my endurance over any more days." He headed for the recorder cube and its guardian mummies, deaf to argument. The medic gave up. "I've given him tranquilizers. Maybe that will carry him through." Jim asked, "Was it his heart?" And the medic shook his head. "Looked like it at first, but I heard no indications of it. Exhaustion -- hypertension, maybe." In spite of illness Litzanov arranged another picture before proceeds ing, pantomiming pointing out to us the cube, irridescent whorls of fretwork, indicating carved symbols betraying the fourth entrance to be opened by final chords of music we intended to activate in this room. None of the director's construction of his public image was as crass as my description sounds. He simply contrived to be the center of any discovery, and made certain the scene was preserved for Earth viewing. Senior members of our rese'-rch team accepted the situation, some because they loved their work more than lime-light, some because a seat by his throne insured a share of the gravy. His name weighed heavily with those who hired and fired on Earth and sat in high posts because they could find men like ipulation of men's destinies, to help inflate their balloons. The cynical question to ask it: are these titled few aware of creating this breed of learned leeches upon whose offal they feed, or is there such confusion in their administrative minds that they truly accept a notion that they are capable of standing high above the crowd without crawling up on the shoulders of others? VI L itzanov became physically smaller as he faced the moment when we must activate the music cube. He knew we held in our hands the most spectacular find in man's history of exploration, and to have credit for it printed by his name in Who's Who and other vanity mirrors he had to make his investigation personally. To relinquish completion of its examination to someone else was to risk having the title and claim for the entire project upon a rival's page of fame. And if Pell had not read the alien records rightly, and there happened to be a fifth -- or sixth or seventh -- room, each also must be entered by the sound-tortured director to preserve his image for posterity and his right to title of discovery. Fear clouded his eyes, but he bruskly nodded permission to pull the lever. We felt the initial tones rather than heard them, like the lowest pedal notes on a gigantic organ. I knew there was sound because my whole body responded to the lift and fall of long slow waves. I sensed tremendous amplification of the music, its energy sucking my breath as if I faced a hurricane. Pressure built up on my ear drums, bringing excruciating pain even after I covered the orifices with my palms. I felt vibration through the flesh of my hands as they pressed against my ears, and a steadily increasing warmth as if a fever were growing in me. I knew there were extremely high frequencies pouring through me, how high I had no sensory equipment capable of telling. Then sound within the range of perception came into the composition, harmony with timbre and resonance so piercing that it closed my throat, changed the heart beats at will, caused tears to flow against effort to gain control of emotional reflexes. This was something so far beyond the orchestral piece which had struck Litzanov down that I worried and tried to focus enough to see him. A shadowy impression of him prone on the floor was all I could catch, and all the attention I could spare him. Thunderous chords suddenly beat at me with the force of tornadic wind, slamming me against the cube. -- aH in September Worlds of Tomorrow , plus many more. Don't miss Itl IF And just as unexpectedly, ringing melody superceded and lifted me into wild ecstasy, higher and higher until I thought its insistent tune could tear me to bits. And as quickly, the music dropped me into hells where sound became demons with needle-sharp claws. I felt responses from areas of my body I had never been aware of; every individual atom oscillated in cumulative multiplication of movement accompanied by the generation of unbearable heat. Blood was streaming from my nose. I clung to the plastic cube which had unleashed this fiendish torture, with no strength left. And paradoxically, through the pain and fever I was flooded with singing tunes so compelling that I cried aloud and screamed with the emotional surge of their beauty. T hen suddenly I experienced the tearing strike of a heart pain; it ripped through my chest in nightmare spasms, like the crushing strides of Death. Destruction was here for all of us unless the music could be stopped -- perhaps too late even now. I tried to concentrate, to hold consciousness and reach the knob. It was only a foot or two from my hand. Between increasing lightning thrusts of chest piin and irregular racing of heart beat that stopped my breath, I struggled to slide toward it, but I think only my fingers moved. In flashes of lucidity I had impressions of Binky rushing about the room, running to look into my face, fading into nothingness when pains slashed at me. Once I saw his hand on mine, but could not feel its touch, nor ask his help. Then redness blinded me, and I knew capillaries in my eyes had burst. And after that came darkness. It seemed to me that something had been tugging at me throughout all eternal time. A roughness moved under me in jerks. I could see dimly. I couldn't hear. Fear of drawing breath followed, with automatically a frightened catch to keep it shallow, expecting pain to strike. Hurt did sit like a crushing weight upon my chest, but only a shadow of its remembered self. Then it was Binky's face over me, recognizable, and mind and eyes cleared enough to see gem-like colors of the temple walls, and to realize he had probably dragged me up those ramps from the death crypts beneath. But I could neither hear nor move. He disappeared, then grayness took me again. I have no memory of being transported to camp. Explorer II returned next day from its investigation of the near planets, and we were all taken aboard. That part was dreamlike. We had been many days in space before I could assimilate details from Commander Jacobs. They think Binky dragged us all out of that hellish trap, one at a time. The music had struck those at camp also, but not so lethally. Coming from the white cliffs it had evidently lost enough of its intensity during transit through underground rock. However, many hours had elapsed before anyone had strength to hunt for us at the temple. T hey found me dazed and incoherent. Pell, Litzanov, and the medic were dead. Jim Larsen is still in a state of shock, hardly routing whenhe is moved, but expected io recover. Binky apparently had not been affected beyond extreme nervousness and unprediptably irrational actions since. And sometimes, as I sit up in my hospital bed dictating this report, I think he hears sounds from my mouth, dimly, and I wonder if the strength of that demon music found a way into dormant nerves of his ears and stirred them to half life. And between the surges of thankfulness that Fate placed Binky under my care on Explorer II, I wonder about that planet, with its beautiful empurpled ghost aura, so many years across black space, carrying orbit around a blue-white sun which cannot warm them back to life. I wonder that the excess of anything, even beauty, can become the executioner of its seeker. And I am caught in its net. The planet's music sings through my inner ear the moment my mind is released from necessity to deal with routines. Irresistible compulsions will drive me to study it, for it is cojii position so grand that a Beethoven of Earth seems nothing but a' tinkling contriver of popular tunes. I shiver at once with apprehensions and the desire to hear that symphony we did not play, imprisoned in the fourth plastic cube, the glory of sound which killed its world. There will be another expedition to finish studies we left undone there, for man cannot bear not to know. I want to be a part of it. During the restless hours which fill my nights I think in circles -- surely a way can be found to filter that sound so I can listen in safety, or shut it out if necessary. Perhaps this is a death wish, but, God help me, I will not rest until I've tried to hear it, for the memory of that alien music is a demon of exquisite beauty, Coming soonl Galaxs Fifteenth Anniversary Issue All your favorites in the October Fifteenth Anniversary Issue of Galaxy -- subscribe now, or reserve your copy at your newsstand todayl IF IF  Short Story Ever speculate why you aren't smarter than you are? Here's why -- and what to do about it! M 'Lord received the message on Moonbase One with a feeling of complete dismay. Why, this species was # to # of their years from the type of development Galactic Central was asking for! Yet the message was specific. The Korm'aans according to present calculations by Computer Center, would begin a sweep through this spiral arm of. the Galaxy, and Galactic Central would need a developed people as an ally. Get them into condition to receive Galactics without fear in # of their years? Capable of offering their resources freely? Capable of assistant labor? Capable of being an ally, however weak? Forced stimulation was one thing, and he'd watched it tried. It could work, though normally it simply killed off the stimulated species. "The greater good for all the peoples of the Galaxy demands that we take a chance on sacrificing this species," the message added, a sop to his conscience, since the message was an order, not a request. "We will then have either an ally of a weak but unhampering variety, or a planet of the proper Z characteristics returned to the primitive form from which we can operate unhampered by a developing and possibly resentful native intelligence." The methods were left to him. By all the rampletes of knowledge of all Computer Center! What stimulus could you apply to a species barely into their iron age to get them to an intelligence level where they could even stay out from underfoot in a mere # years? Especially when each member of that species required a full one-tenth of that time to develop to the stage of speciesmaturity; and the useful life-span of individual members was a possible # of those years? Obviously, it would have to be a nerve-stimulus. And just as obviously it would have to be broadcast to affect the entire species. Electronic, of course. But they weren't even capable of electricity yet, much less electronics. That, in the normal sequence-pattern that their development showed, would be at least # of their years in their future. And you couldn't introduce a broadcast electronic stimulus trom within the culture immediately. Even with only # years available. That would be sure death, though Galactic Central did say they'd as soon have the planet returned to the primitive... N o. The stimulus would have to be confined to wires so that it could spread slowly, and so that it would act as a stimulus only when a member of the species was within a few miles of the wires. Too abrupt an introduction of a stimulus would be surely fatal, and Central had specified an attempt to develop these creatures. These sheep. And I, their shepherd, must take a chance on ruining the flock that shows such promise; that I have spent my career in nurturing! He knew a moment's sadness before he set himself to the task at hand. Very well. The best stimulus, of course, was the # cycle alternating current; and it must be introduced in such a way that it would grow through the culture, until finally each member of the species -- at least the major groups -- were subject to the nerve-impact most of the time. But also in such a way that it was possible to escape from it. This would give the most aware a chance to withdraw occasionally and give their nerves a rest. You couldn't introduce the stimulus from within directly as AC current at # cycles. Best to introduce the battery and let them play with direct current for a matter of -- say # to # of their years. There would be no stimulation there, and Galactic Central might consider the time wasted, but you had to give a species time to play with and prepare for the type of battering ram that was inherent in being subjected to a constant # cycle nerve-system jokingly playing upon them whenever they were within appreciable distance of wires carrying the frequency, if you planned to see that those wires webbed the culture almost inescapably. With a sound that might have been translated as a sigh, M'Lord summoned his teslars. T he full #-year interval since the introduction of the battery on Alterra had passed, and M'Lord realized with some disquiet that he now had no further excuse for delaying the introduction of alternating current. The species had done well; had taken the new 'toy' handed them so IF unobtrusively, and made it their very own. They had examined its possibilities with, actually, more keenness than even he, who had devoted his entire working period to their care, had expected. And just the introduction of the battery itself must have had a stimulating affect on the creature -- or perhaps his teslars had dropped a few unauthorized hints -- for still on his own, the creature had jumped from the iron age to steam, smelting, telegraphy -- Really remarkable! M'Lord was proud of the Alterrans. Yet he was probably to be the instrument of their destruction, he knew. Galactic Central was getting far too impatient for him to dally longer. The stimulus itself must be applied. And under that stimulus, the nervous systems of Alterrans would either respond with a surge that would take them far beyond their ability to cope with themselves; or those nervous systems would wither completely, leaving the Alterran an animal subject to his environment. If that occurred, he would be shortly wiped out, for in developing his ability to alter his environment to his. needs, the creature had sacrificed his ability to survive as an animal. However, the computers still extrapolated from Korm'aan strategy the probability of a move into this spiral arm, and the greater good... M'Lord summoned his chief teslar. This job must be handled delicately and the chief teslar would undertake it himself. A quarter century more was gone on Alterra, and stih the necessary alternating current had been introduced only as a potential. The potential was strong. The ground work had been well laid. But the first of the two centuries was passed, and the Alterran was still within his normal framework -- slightly altered; slightly advanced; but still essentially the same creature, with no potential of the necessary drastic change. And with these slow-butsurer methods, the overall webbing of this culture with the wire that would carry the drastically-effective # cycle alternating current wouldn't be accomplished for another quarter century! M'Lord had reason to worry. The species might be his charge, but Central was beginning to briilg pressure, and the Galaxy was Central's charge. When the signal interrupted M'Lord he brushed the communicator with an unusually brusk come-in response. "Chief teslar reporting, sir." M'Lord visuated his chief. Remarkable how the make-up fitted. "Even I wouldn't know you from an Alterran," he grumphed. "Sir, the Alterrans themselves have barely noted even my presence," his teslar communicated proudly. "I could not avoid being noted to a slight extent, or being credited with some developments. But only the brightest of this species even remembers my presence." "You've done a careful job, teslar, but a remarkably slow one," M'Lord causticked. "So slow that it will be a predictable # of their years before results begin to show." "Sir. May I be allowed free saying?" "Speak." "We have miscomputed them in including too large a resistance-todevelopment factor, sir. They are self-stimulating to a degree I had not thought possible. We have noted their violent reactions against progress, and the force with which individuals with new ideas have been put down, and developments refuted. But we have failed to note equally the force with which those new ideas and developments are put up. As they say on Alterra, it takes two to make a battle. "Again, we have noted the negative resistance factors that culminate in wars; but have failed to note the equally strong positive factors that cause them. And while we've watched the wars, we've failed to notice that individual arguments and group arguments are almost a way of life with this species! They argue. How they argue! Self-generated arguments at the individual, the group, and the cultural-center level, a constant... Because of this, our applied stimulus might work out as a release on their self-stimulus, both positive and negative, and act as an addition rather than as a basic! So much so that I -- Sir, complete free saying and no retribution?" M 'Lord visuated the teslar fiercely. "You're bordering on ultimate insubordination already! But yes, free saying and no retribution." "Sir, I altered the concept to a degree. I -- as the Alterrans would say it -- hedged your bets. I have arranged that one major portion of their culture only, the strongest, shall get the full #-cycle stimulus. In the remainder of their centers I have introduced the probability of the far lesser stimulus of # cycles." "You dared!" "Sir, we have not sampled their brain recordings for quite a period, and the patterns have advanced. The #-cycle may be too strong, even for the period of time allowed, # of their years under stimulus; at least # of their years under a complete webbing of the carrying wire." M'Lord leaned back. His own sympathies were with this species, although it was a weakness he could not admit. Yet, perhaps... "No retribution," he said, "for altering the plan. And it is possible that you have introduced a better potential. However... however, if the course of events does not justify..." "Yes, M'Lord." But even his chief teslar's reestimate proved to have been made with too large a negative factor. Within ten Alterran years a sketchy, initial wire webbing was in place in most of the planet's major centers, and the effects were astoundingly immediate. Within # Alterran years there was little of the culture that was not heavily webbed, and it was glaringly apparent that there was no danger whatsoever that the creatures' nervous systems would succumb to the impact. Not only the #-cycle subjects, but even those subjected only to #-cycle stimulaIF tion were now reacting with impossible leaps in technologies, analyses, and computational abilities. The life span of the individual to as much as a normal # to # years; while the maturity span, formerly an optimum # exclusive of senility, now included an average # of their years. The effects were so nearly immediate and so completely unpredicted that recordings were rushed regularly by special transport to the computer at Galactic Central, which began altering its entire series of time-potential-probability sequences to include the new time-potentials now being demonstrated. Galactic Central sent special observer crews. Y et the third decade following the initial introduction of the potential stimulus had nearly passed before the final factor fell into place that required reclassification of the species. Unemotionally, the computer removed Alterrans from the classification: "Sheep; to be coddled for potential slave-service to the Galactic peoples;" to the classification: "Predator." Almost as the reclassification was made, a command directive went by emergency beam to Moonbase One. "Akerran development must be reversed immediately," the directive read. "Apply stupidifiers. These must be introduced at once. If possible, impose from within. If necessary, emergency action may be taken and stupidifiers imposed from without. This species is a greater hazard than Korm'aan. No time can be wasted." M'Lord acted at once. Ultra-highfrequency radiation on a broadcast basis was indicated. Immediately. But, yes, it could be introduced from within with no time wasted. Low frequency broadcasts had already been developed by the species as an entertainment medium; and a war was making on the planet, so that a means of detecting enemy craft with high-frequency-radiation bombardment, which would hit the creatures as well as the targets, was a natural. The low frequency, long wave length entertainment broadcasts had had little if any effect on the nervous systems of the Alterrans, although the waves of radiation passed through their bodies as consistently as they did through the instruments built to receive them. Those long, looping wavelengths were far too large to be, at any point, contained within the body, and neither were they attuned to the body's own frequencies. Therefore they left no input signal with the body's nerve systems. Quite the contrary would be true of the ultra-high-frequency, ultrashort-wave-radar broadcasts as they filled the atmosphere with their signals. These wave lengths were short enough that each wave would be contained in microsecond intervals, complete within the nervous system; and whether or not they attuned the bodies own systems, they would leave an impulse . on the nerves -- an impulse towards unspecified action, so that the nerves would tense of action, and be unable to direct the tension and so relieve It. Again and again and again the ghost impulses would bombard the nervous systems, and the systems would alert. Alert -- tensions -- no translation; alert -- tension -- no translation -- and no relief. Nervous breakdown was inevitable. Nervous breakdown and complete myasthenia. R adar was introduced within less than one-half an Alterran year, on a formula his teslar had left sleeping as a precaution. The effects were, again, immediate, but the development failed to slow. Within two years it was apparent that radar would not be sufficient. The radar bombardment was constant; the myasthenia general throughout the species; but Alterran development barely relaxed its headlong pace, much less reversed. "They should be worn out -- completely frazzled -- on the way to primitive conditions -- in a state of breakdown as a species! There's a proportion of breakdown, but only a proportion -- and they're carrying that proportion and still heading into space!" M'Lord's chief teslar was as drawn and whorled as his master. "Apply hypnosis." M'Lord's communication was firm with a conviction and an authority he no longer felt. "Hypnosis, sir, requires the centering of each individual's attention. That is an individualized process, sir." "So?" "So it cannot be imposed from without! And there is no time to develop it from within the culture!" "Radar was developed by this species in time-elements measureable in increments of their years." "But this must be individualized, so that each member of the species is subjected..." "These creatures are on their way into space, in a condition of destructive-compulsion unknown in the Galaxy. You will find a method!" "Perhaps -- " The chief teslar was hesitant. "Perhaps, then, a major hypnotic is justified? A complete stupidifier? One that centers each individual's attention on a pattern of lights flickering at a pulse frequency near enough that of a main brave wave frequency to capture and alter the brain wave rhythm? But that would be catastrophic, sir!" His master grouched angrily, as much distressed as the teslar. "It must be so!" he affirmated. The teslar bowed his head. "I grieve with you, sir, if you will so permit me." Then he unslouched and communicated firmly. "We will introduce an instrument for screening transmitted entertainment in the home. It can be set to a flicker-rate near one of the creature's main brain-cycle patterns so that, watching it, he will unconsciously match the brain cycle to the flicker-rate and will become hypnotized. This will be easy, sir, in the areas where we have introduced #-cycle electric currents. This cycle frequency is nearly a divisive of their major brain pattern. However, in the #-cycle areas -- well, the hypnotic effect will not necessarily be as great, but the stimulation here has not been as great either, and the stupidifying IF effect of the applied hypnotic need not be as strong." T he initial development of optarad required a period of several Alterran years, while Galactic Central altered its plans for containing the spiral arm of the Galaxy from defense against the Korm'aan to defense against the new species. Plans were sufficiently detailed to include methods for enlisting the Korm'aan in common cause against the Alterrans. Then optarad was in production, the screen-frequency of its lightpulse set at a rhythm very near the dominant brain-wave of the species. The introduction was highly successful. Within a decade the daily habit of attention-centering on the instrument was nearly as broadly spread as the use of electricity. The hypnotic stupidifier was at work, aided and abetted by the nerve-frazzling broadcast of the ultra-high-frequency radar signals. Relaxing for the first time in # Alterran years, M'Lord waited for the commendation he felt sure would be forthcoming from Galactic Center. Radar had had around # Alterran years to take effect; the new optarad hypnotic frequencies had been played into the eyes of a vast majority of the leading Alterran creatures for five or more of those years. "My poor sheep," he thought regretfully to himself. "We turned you into predators, and must now put you to sleep. Yet -- perhaps I may find a way that you be allowed to safely graze; content and peaceful at last." The entry-port signal blinked, and M'Lord brushed the 'come-in' response with a sigh. "Chief teslar reporting, sir." M'Lord visuated his chief, who seemed rather excited. "Well?" he grumphed. "Sir, the hypnosis is not sufficient. Sir, it is numbing their brain centers -- but the brain capacity seems to be far larger than was indicated by the small portion they were using. As one area of each brain weakens, the stronger of the creatures adapt by putting another unused portion of brain into service to replace it. At the same time the weaker are reduced to apathy so that they are no longer in the way. These creatures, sir, are heading into space in spite of the hypnosis! Sir, our predictions fail by a factor of... " The communicator blinked the red emergency, and M'Lord watched his own nerve ends flare as he pushed the "here; begin" button. Hie communication spat out: "All plans whorled. Computer predicts these beings will have Galactic Mastership within approximately # Galactic years. The Korm'aan have made common cause with us, and you now serve as ambassador to both. Entreat for us free living and no retribution..."      IF  Novelette Burden to the lesser breeds without the law -- Relief will put it down I I A s Retief paid off his canal barge and stepped up on the jetty, Second Secretary Magnan pushed his way through the throng at the wharf entrance to the Royal Enclosure, his narrow face flushed with exertion. "There you are!" he cried. "I've been searching everywhere! Ambassador Splitwhistle will be furious!" "What's that on your head?" Retief eyed a half-inflated bladder of a sour yellow color which lolled over Magnan's left ear. Magnan rolled an eye up at the vari-colored cluster which bobbed with each movement, draggled feathers wagging and lengths of dirty string swaying, the entire assembly secure under his chin by a stained pink ribbon. "Why, that's my ceremonial Rockamorra headdress. Here." He fumbled in his violet afternoon tormal cutaway, brought out a bundle of puckered balloons and feathers, offered it. "This one's for you: you'd better slip into it at once. I'm afraid a couple of the plumes are bent." "Where's the Ambassador?" Relief interrupted. "There's something I have to tell him." "There are a number of things you'll be expected to tell him!" Magnan snapped. "Including why you're half an hour late for the Credentials ceremony!" "Oh oh; there he goes with the staff, headed for the temple. Excuse me, Mr. Magnan." Retief pushed off through the crowd, made his way to the wide doorless entry to a high, blocky structure at the end of the courtyard. A long-legged, shortbodied neckless local, with immense flat feet, wearing an elaborate set of ruffles and holding a pike, waved him through. The Ambassador and his four staff members were grouped in the gloom a few yards distant, before a gaudy backdrop of luminous plastic in slime green, dyspepsia yellow and cirrhotic pink. "... classic diplomatic coup," SpHtwhistle was saying. "I should like to see the look on the faces of our Groaci colleagues when they learn we've stolen a march on them!" "Mr. Ambassador," Retief started. S plitwhistle spun, stared for an instant at a point just above Retiefs belt-buckle, then tilted his spherical bald head back, gazed up at his junior. "I've warned you about pussyfooting, Retief!" he yelped. "When you're around me, stamp your feet when you walk!" "Mr. Ambassador, I'd like -- " Splitwhistle raised a small, plumpfingered hand. "Spare me a catalogue of your likes and dislikes, Mr. Retief! The ceremony is about to begin." He turned to include a wider audience. "Gentlemen, I trust you all observed my handling of protocol since our arrival here on Rockamorra this morning. Scarcely six hours, and we're about to become the first diplomatic mission ever to be accredited to this world! A world, I need not remind you, with a reputation for vigorous commercial activity and hostility to diplomats; and yet I -- " "Before this goes any farther, Mr. Ambassador -- " Retief cut in, "I think -- " "May I remind you, sir!" Splitwhistle shrilled. " am talking! About a subject of vast importance, namely myself! Er, my contribution, that is, to diplomatic history." A pair of robed Rockamorrans bustled up, waving elaborate candelabra which emitted a pungent odor and clouds of red and green smoke. They struck poses before Splitwhistle, intoned resonant ritual phrases in sonorous tones, then stepped back. One pointed a thin, multi-jointed webbed digit at Retief, made a sound like a saw-blade dragged across a base viol string. "Where's your headdress, Retief?" Splitwhistle hissed. "I don't have one. What I wanted to tell you -- " "Get one instantly! And take your place in my entourage!" The Ambassador moved off at the heels of the local officials. Magnan, rushing up at that moment, waved the bladders excitedly. "Don't bother inflating it, just get it on!" "Never mind that," Retief said. "I won't be needing it." "What do you mean? We all have to wear them." "Not me. I won't be taking part in the ceremony; and I advise -- " "Crass insubordination!" Magnan gasped, and rushed off in Splitwhistle's wake as large bouncers moved in to bar Retief's path. I t was a colorful ceremony, involving a vigorous symbolic beating of the diplomats with real laths, immersion in a pond which, to judge from Magnan's nose when he surfaced, was considerably chillier than the bracing morning air, and finishing off with a brisk run around the compound -- ten laps -- during which the panting Terrans were spurred to creditable efforts by quirt-wielding native dignitaries loping along behind them. Retief, observing the activities from a position among the curious at the sidelines, won ten credits in local currency on Splitwhistle, whose form he had correctly judged superior to that of his staff. Amid a tolling of deep-toned gongs, the Rockamorran officials herded the wheezing Terrans together and read off a long speech from a scroll. Then a small local stepped forward, bearing a six-foot sword on a purple velvet cushion port, Retief noted. A tall Rockamorran in mauve and puce vestments strode up to Splitwhistle and picked up the sword. The Ambassador backed a step, said, "Look here, my good man -- " and was prodded back into line. The sword-handler solemnly hung a beaded baldric over the stout diplomat's shoulderless frame and attached the scabbard to it. Then the locals fell silent, staring at Splitwhistle expectantly. "Magnan, you're protocol officer. What am I supposed to do now?" the Ambassador muttered from the corner of his mouth. "Why, I'd suggest that Your Excellency just sort of, ah, bow and then we all turn and leave, before they think up any more tortures." "All right, men: all together," Mr. Splitwhistle whispered hoarsely. "About face." Magnan yelped as the two-yard long cutlass connected solidly with his shin as the group turned; then they strode away, the Ambassador in the lead, drawn up to his full five feet, with the sword cutting a trail in the dust behind him. There was a happy mutter from the locals, then a swelling shout of joy; eager hands clapped the Terrans on the back, offered them sulphurette dopesticks, proffered flasks of green liquid as the ceremony broke up into mutual rejoicing. Retief made his way through the press, intercepted Splitwhistle as he pushed through. "Well, Retief!" the Ambassador barked. "Absented yourself from the IF proceedings, I noted! Having sulked in your quarters during the voyage out, you now boycott official functions! I'll see you in my office as soon as I've seen to the safe-keeping of this handsome ceremonial weapon I've been awarded." "That's what I wanted to tell you, Mr. Ambassador. It's not ceremonial. You're expected to use it." "What? Me use this?" Splitwhistle smiled sourly. "I shall hang it on the wall as a symbol -- " "Possibly later, sir," Retief cut in. "Today you have a job to do with it." "A job?" "I think you misunderstand the nature of the ceremony. The Rockamorrans don't know anything about diplomacy. They thought you came here to help them -- " "As indeed we did," Splitwhistle snorted. "Now if you'll stand aside -- " " -- so they're expecting you to make good on your promise. Now." "Promise? What promise?" Splitwhistle asked. "That's what the ceremony was all about. The Rockamorrans are in trouble, but you've promised to get them out of it." "I've already planned an economic survey -- " "That won't do the job, Mr. Ambassador. There's a ninty foot dinosaur named Crunderthush loose in the area." "Dinosaur?" Splitwhistle's voice rose to a squeak. Retief nodded. "And you've just sworn to kill him before sundown tomorrow." n # #T ook here, Retief," First Sec# -- ' retary Whaffle said into the silence. "How is it you appear to understand the proceedings, conducted as they were in the barbaric local patois?" "I didn't. They talked too fast. But I picked up a smattering of the language studying tapes on the way out, and I had a nice chat with the boatman." "I dispatched you to arrange for lodging and servants, not natter with low-caste locals!" Splitwhistle chirped. "I had to do a little nattering in order to rent rooms. The locals don't understand sign language -- " "Impertinence, Mr. Retief? You may consider yourself under suspension!" A group of Rockamorran officials had gathered, a column of pikemen behind them, stolid and menacing in green scaled breast-plates and greaves. "Ah -- before you confine yourself to quarters," Splitwhistle added, "just tell these chaps we won't be ever, I think I can promise them a nice little Information Service Library, well stocked with the latest One of the Rockamorrans stepped forward, ducked his head, addressed the Ambassador: "Honorable sir, I have pleasure of to be Haccop, interpretator of Terry mouth-noise learn from plenty Japanee, Dutch, Indian, and Hebrew Terry trader. We had nice chin-chin IF via telescreen before you-chap hit beach." "Ah, to be sure! Pity you weren't standing by during the ceremony. Now we'll get to the bottom of this nonsense!" Split whistle shot Retief a withering look. "I have heard... ah... rumors, to the affect that there's some sort of, ha ha, dinosaur roaming the countryside -- " "Yes, yes, excellent sir! Damn decent you-chap come along us." Splitwhistle frowned. "Perhaps I'd better clarify our position, just in case there was any confusion in translation. I am, of course, accredited as Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to your government, with full authority to -- " "Hukk! With title like that, how can you miss?" Haccop exulted. "You want few our boys along for pick up pieces? Or you handle Crunderthush alone, catch more glory?" "Here, I'm a diplomat! My offer was to assist your poor backward nation!" "Sure. Swell gesture of interplanetary chumship." "Just a moment!" Splitwhistle thrust out his lower lip, pointing a finger heavenward. "I deal in words and paper, sir, not deeds! That is, I am empowered to promise you anything I deem appropriate, but the actual performance is up to lesser persons." Haccop arranged his wide features in what was obviously a frown. "Around this end galaxy, chum say, chum do." "Surely. And ##I speak to Sector HQ early next month when my vessel returns; I imagine something can be arranged." "Crunderthush on rampage nowl No catchem wait next month! You owner genuine Japanese-made sword; you use!" S plitwhistle's chins quivered. "Sir! You forget yourself! I am the Terrestrial Ambassador, not a confounded exterminator service!" "You-chap violate Rockamorran tradition number six-oh-two, passed two hours ago by Council of Honorable Dotards!" Splitwhistle unbuckled the sword, tossed it aside. Retief lunged, caught it before it hit the dirt, handed it to Haccop. Arms folded, the Ambassador glared at the Rockamorran. "Let me state unequivocally, at once, that I have no intention of attacking a dinosaur!" Haccop's face fell -- an effect like a mud-pack slipping. "Is final decision?" "Indeed so, sir!" The Rockamorran turned, spoke to the pikemen in glottal Rockamorran; they closed in, nudged Splitwhistle and the four diplomats who had participated in the oathtaking ceremony. "Here, what's going on?" the Ambassador yelped. "It seems they're taking you away to the local lockup, sir," Retief said. "They can't do this to me! And why aren't you included?" "I didn't take the oath." "You-chap move along," Haccop said. "Rockamorran got no time be patience with oath-busters." "H-how long will we be incarcerated?" Whaffle asked. "One day," Haccop said. "Well, that's not too bad. Your Excellency," Magnan pointed out. "We can spend the time figuring out an alibi -- I mean, of course, composing a dispatch to Sector Headquarters explaining how this is really a sort of diplomatic victory, in reverse -- " "Tomorrow, my good man," Splitwhistle barked at Haccop, "I can assure you I shall take drastic steps." "Have honor of to doubt that, faithless one," Haccop said. "Pretty neat trick take steps with head off." Ill S plitwhistle glared at Retief through the barred windows of his cell. "I hold you fully responsible, sir, for not warning me of this barbaric custom! I trust you've established communication with the Corps Transport and ordered their return?" "I'm afraid not. The local transmitter doesn't have the range." "Are you out of your mind? That means... " Splitwhistle sagged against the bars. "Retief," he whispered. ".They'll lop our heads off." A squad of Rockamorran pikemen rounded a corner, marched up to the Terrans' cell. "Well, you-chap ready to take part in execution?" "Just a minute," Retief said. "They promised to kill Crunderthush by sundown tomorrow. That's still a full day away." "True. But always have headcutting after lunch; pack in better house that way, at one credit per ticket." Retief shook his head. "Highly diplomats is perfectly understandable, but it has to be done in accordance with protocol or you'll have a squadron of Peace Enforcers in here revising Rockamorran traditions before you can say 'interference with internal affairs'." "Hmmm. You might have a poin there. Okay, we hold off until tomorrow night. Have torch-light execution, very colorful." "Retief!" Magnan gasped, pushing up against the bars beside Splitwhistle. "Isn't there some way to prevent this ghastly miscarriage of justice?" "Only way, youchap change mind, kill Crunderthush," Haccop said cheerfully. Retief looked thoughtful. "Do the Ambassador and these other gentlemen have to do the job personally?" "Posilutely! Can't have every Tom, George and Meyer getting into act. After all, killers o Crunderthush not only national heroes, win plenty refrigerator and green stamps too!" "How about it, sir?" Whaffle said. "Have a go, eh? Not much to lose..." "How? I can't kill the beast by firing off a dispatch!" "Maybe we could dig a hole and let him fall in." "Do you have any idea what size excavation would be required to inconvenience a ninety-foot behemoth, you idiot!" IF "Suppose the Ambassador had a little help. Would that be cricket?" Haccop cocked his wide head. "Is good questioning; have to check with Ministry of Tradition on that point." "I'd love to help, of course," Magnan said brightly. "It's just that I have this cough -- " "Yes, kaff kaff," Whaffle said. "Must be the damp air, all these confounded canals -- " "Will you let them out of the cell to scout the area and plan some strategy for the kill?" Retief asked. Haccop shook his head. "Nix. Oath-breakers incarcerated by order of Big Shots. Release also have to clear through same. But glad to check up after nap-time." "When will that be?" "Nap over late tomorrow afternoon; maybe Midget with shinyhead and pals have just time turn trick before deadline." "How can we kill a dinosaur while we're locked in here?" Splitwhistle demanded. "Should have think of this before break oath," Haccop said briskly. "Interesting problem. Interesting see how comes out." O utside, Retief drew Haccop aside. "I don't suppose there's any objections to my taking a look around? I'd like to see what this monster looks like." "Sure. Do what you like, no charge for look at Crunderthush, see free any time -- just so you got money pay way." "I see. I don't suppose you'd lend me an official guide?" "Correct. Rockamorran great tightwad, don't lend nothing, especially to foreigner." "All I have is pocket change. I don't suppose you'd cash a check?" "Hey, you skillful guesser, Terry!" "I can see it's going to be a bit difficult to get around, without funds." "Very shrewd analysis of situation." "Perhaps you'd advise me how I could earn some cash in a hurry." "Oh-oh, guess wrong that time, spoil record. Better find answer, though. You run out of cash, you automatically slave." "I get the feeling you don't much care whether this menace is removed or not." "Is correct assumptation. Big tourist drawing card. Also more fun this way, have something to bet on. Odds ten to one against Terries." "Meanwhile, he goes on eating people." "Sure, few peasants get devour, but so long Crunderthush avoid eat me, is no scales off my sitz-plats, in word of immortal bard." "Shakespeare?" "No, Egbert Hiesenwhacker, early Terran trader introduce cards and dice to Rockamorra." "Cards and dice, eh?" "Sure; you like play? Come on, have fun, forget troubles, help kill time up to big affair tomorrow." "That's a good idea, Haccop; lead the way..." ft was dawn when Retief emerged from the Rockamorran gambling hall; Haccop followed him at the IF IV end of a light chain attached to a steel ring riveted to his ankle, carrying a large basket of Rockamorran currency. "Hey, Retief-master, lousy trick fill up when I got three ladies of ill repute -- " "I warned you about those inside straights, Haccop. Now tell me something. All that information the boys gave me about Crunderthush's habits: was that all the straight dope?" "Sure, Retief-master. Pukka information." "All right, next stop the Ministry of Tradition. Lead on, Haccop." An hour later, Retief emerged from the Ministry, frowning. "It's not the best deal in the world, Haccop, but I suppose it's better than nothing." "Should have offered bigger bribes, boss." "I'm on a tight budget. Still, I think we have a fighting chance. I'm going to need a heli and a good pair of binoculars. See to it at once, and meet me at the Grand Canal in half an hour." "Boss, why worry about smalltimers back in hoosegow? Look, I got plan. We be partners, you deal and I circulate around behind opposition and signal with trick sunglasses -- " "We can discuss business later. Get going, before I report you to the Slave Relations Board for insubordination." "Sure, chief, chop-chop!" Haccop set off at a lope, and Retief headed directly for the nearest sportinggoods shop. H alf an hour later, Haccop dropped a second-hand floatmounted heli in beside the quay where Retief waited beside a heap of goods, waved cheerfully from the cockpit. Retief caught the mooring rope, pulled the light machine close, handed in his purchases and boarded "They say Crunderthusn is foraging a mile or two east of town. Let's buzz over that way and size him up." The heli lifted above the fern-like palms, beat its way across the gleaming pattern of canals and dome-shaped dwellings of Rockamorra City, gaining altitude; beyond the tilled paddies at the edge of the town a vast swamp stretched to distant smudges of jungle. "That's him, boss!" Haccop called, pointing. Retief used the binoculars, picked out a towering shape almost invisible among the tall trees growing in clumps in the shallow water. "He's big, all, right. But he seems to be eating tree-tops. I thought he was a meat-eater." "Sure, meat-eater, master. Dumb peasant climb tree get away, Crunderthush not have to bend neck." The heli approached the browsing dinosaur at three hundred feet, circled him while Retief observed. The giant saurian, annoyed by the buzzing interloper, raised his greatjawed head, emitted a bellow like a blast on a giant tuba. Retief caught a vivid glimpse of a purple throat wide enough to drive a ground-car through, studded with fangs like stalactites in a cave. "Friendly looking fellow. Is it possible to predict his course?" "Maybe. Crunderthush always take it easy, graze village over pretty good before move on to next. About done here, I estimation. By lunchtime start toward next stop, half mile south." "Let's cruise over that way." Haccop dropped the heli to a fifty-foot altitude, buzzed across the flat water, leaving behind a pattern of blast-ripples, bending the scattered reeds in the wind of its passage. "How deep is the water here?" Retief called. "Knee-deep at low tide." "When's low tide?" "Hour before sunset tonight." "What's the bottom like?" "Exquisite soft mud. Hey, master, you like go down scroonch around in mud awhile? Is good for what ails you." "Sorry, we Terries aren't amphibians, Haccop." "Oops, big excuses, chief. Not mean draw attention to racial deficiencies." "Will Crunderthush follow a straight course across the swamp?" The heli was over the mud walls of the next village now. Retief could see the inhabitants going about their business as usual, apparently undisturbed by their position next on the menu. "No telling, boss. Might get distracted by juicy fisherman or unwary swimming party." "Can we hire boats down there, and a few helpers?" "Retief-master, you got enough cash to hire whole town." He sighed. "That pot before last: I never figured you for eagles back to back -- " "No post-mortems," Retief admonished. "Land there, in the market-place." Haccop dropped the flier in, grinned at the quick gathering crowd of curious locals. "I tell hicks go away, give Retiefboss room walk abound, do little shopping?" he suggested. "Absolutely not; we're going to need them. Listen carefully, Haccop; here's the plan that I have in mind..." I t was late afternoon when Retief, wet and plastered to the hips with black mud, signaled to Haccop to land at the northernmost point of the village, a narrow finger of land edged by a baked mud retaining wall. Half a mile away, wading ponderously across the shallows, Crunderthush rumbled softly to himself. "That sound carried well across the water," Retief commented. "It sounds as though he's right on top of us." "And will be, plenty chop-chop," Haccop pointed out. "Retief-master think rpe across water make big fella fall down?" The Rockamorran waved a hand at the taut one-inch nylon cable stretched two feet above the surface of the water across the oncoming monster's path. "He won't get that far, if everything works out all right. How much time do we have? Another hour?" Retief asked. IP "Crunderthush stopping now to scratch." Retief observed the dinosaur sinking to his haunches, bringing up a massive hind leg to rake at the armored hide with two-foot talons, amid a prodigious splashing. "Maybe have hour, hour and half before dinner-time," Haccop concluded judiciously. "Okay, let's get moving! Get the hauling crew over here on the double. Have them attach a line to the center of the cable, and winch it this way until they can hook it over the trigger." He pointed over toward a heavy timber construction consisting of an eighteen-inch pile projecting a yard from the ground with a toggle mounted atop it. "Retief-chief, humble slave bushed from all day stringing wires to trees." "We'll be through pretty soon. How's the axe-crew doing with that pole?" "Top hole, sahib. Pretty near got nice point on one end, notch on other." "Get it set up here as soon as they're finished. Prop it in the two forked saplings the boys are supposed to set in the bottom out there." "Too many thing do all one time," Haccop complained. "Bwana Retief have strange hobby." "I'm taking the heli into town. I'll be back in half an hour, have everything ready just the way I explained it, or it won't be just Terry heads rolling around here," Retief warned. V 'The great pale sun of RockaA morra with its tiny blue-white companion was just sinking in a glory of purple and old rose as Retief returned to ground the heli at the village. "Ohio, Retief-san!" Haccop called. "All set, accordinglyto plan! Now we hit trail, plenty quick! Crunderthush too close for maximizing adjustment!" "Look at the creature!" Whaffle quavered, descending from the heli. "As big as a Yill Joss-palace -- and coming this way!" "Why have you brought us here, Retief?" Splitwhistle demanded, his jowls paler than usual. "I prefer beheading to serving as hors d'oeuvre to that leviathan!" "It's quite simple, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said soothingly, leading the stout diplomat across to where Haccop stood beaming beside the completed apparatus. "You merely use this mallet to hit the trigger. This releases the cable, which drives the lance -- " "R-R-R-R-Retief! Are you unaware that -- that -- " "I know. He looks pretty big at a hundred yards, doesn't he, Mr. Magnan? But he moves slowly. We have plenty of time." "We? Why include us in this mad venture?" Ambassador Splitwhistle demanded. "You heard what Haccop said, sir. You gentlemen have to personally kill the creature. I think I have it arranged so that -- " "Oh-oh, Master!" Haccop pointed. "Look like distraction! Couple drunks going fishing!" Retief followed the Rockamorran's gaze, saw a dugout pushing off with two staggering locals singing gaily as they took up paddles, steered for deep water on a course that would take them within fifty feet of the dinosaur. "Try to stop them, Haccop! If he changes course now, we're out of luck!" Haccop splashed out a few yards into the mud, floundering, cupped his hands and bellowed. The fishermen saw him, waved cheerfully, kept going. "No use, boss!" Haccop waded back to shore. "Look, better you and me make tracks, hit town farther up archipelago. Swell floating crap game going -- " "Mr. Ambassador, stand by!" Retief snapped. "When I give the word, hit that trigger, and not a second before!" He sprinted to the small wharf nearby, jumped into a tethered boat, slipped the painter, poled quickly out toward the Crunderthush. The monster was poised now, mouth open, gazing toward the fishermen. He emitted a rumbling growl, turned ponderously, took a step to intercept them. Retief, cutting in front of the dinosaur, waved his paddle and shouted. The giant reptile hesitated, turned to stare at Retief, rumbled again. Then, at a burst of song from the happy anglers, swung back their way. Retief stopped, plucked a rusty fishing-weight from the bottom of his skiff, hurled it at Crunderthush. It struck the immense leathery chest IF with a resounding whop! at which the monster paused in mid-swing, brought its left eye to bear on Relief. It stared, cocked its head to bring the right eye into play, then, its tiny mind made up, raised a huge foot from the mud with a sucking sound, started for Retief. He eased the boat back with quick strokes of the paddle. The dinosaur, tantalized by the receding prey, lunged, gained thirty feet, sending up a swell which rocked the tiny craft violently. Retief grabbed for balance, and accidently dropped the paddle. "Retief-boss!" Haccop boomed. "This not time to goof!" "Somebody do something!" Magnan's voice wailed. "He'll be devoured!" Whaffle yelped. The dinosaur lunged again. His power-shovel jaws gaped, snapped to with a clash of razor-edged crockery a yard short of the boat. Retief, standing in the stern, gauged the range, then turned and raised an arm, brought it down in a chopping motion. "Let her go, Mr. Ambassador!" he called, and dived over the side of the boat S plitwhistle, standing transfixed by the trigger apparatus of the over-size arbalest, gaped as Crunderthush raised his long neck twenty feet above the water, streaming mud, emitted an ear-splitting screech, and struck at Retief, swimming for shore. At the last instant, Retief twisted, kicked off to the left. The monster, confused, raised his head for another look; his eye fell on the diplomats on shore, now only fifty feet distant. At his glance, Splitwhistle dropped the heavy mallet, turned and sprinted for the heli. Four others gave sharp cries and wheeled to follow. As the stout mission chief bounded past Secretary Magnan he tripped, dived face-down in the soft dirt. The mallet skidded aside. Magnan sprang for it, caught it on the second bounce, leaped to the trigger, and brought the hammer down in an overarm swing -- There was a deep, musical boing! The sharpened twelve-foot hardwood pole leaped forward as the taut nylon sprang outward. Crunderthush, just gathering himself for the final satisfying snap at the morsel in the water before him, rocked back as the lance buried half its length full in his chest. Retief surfaced in time to see the dinosaur totter, fall sideways with a tremendous splash that swamped the sea wall, sent a tide of mud and blood-stained water washing around the frantic Terrans fighting for position at the heli hatch. Splitwhistle sat up sputtering as the flood receded from his position. Magnan sat down hard, fumbled out a hanky, watching the stricken monster kicking spasmodically. Haccop whooped delightedly, plunged into the water to assist Retief ashore. "Nice going! Siki. Plenty meat here for barbecue for whole town! Dandy substitute event for disappoint of not to see Terry headchopping after all!" Haccop said, delighted. VI D abbing at his mud-caked shirtfront, Ambassador Splitwhistle nodded curtly at Retief. "Having gotten me into this awkward situation, young man, I'm glad to see that you carried on to rectify matters. Naturally, I could have extricated myself and my staff at any time, merely by a skillful word in the right quarter, but I felt it would be valuable experience for you to work this out for yourself." "Hey, Retief-m aster, I form Terries up in column of ducks, go get fitted for leg-irons?" "No, I don't think that will be necessary, Haccop. ; "What's that? Leg irons?" Splitwhistle choked. "See here, you nincompoop, I've slain your monster, as required by your barbaric code! Now I demand -- " "Slave no demand nothing," Haccop said. "Slave hold mouth right, work hard, hope for escape beating." The Ambassador whirled on Retief. "What, may I ask, is the meaning of the idiot's drivelling?" "Well, Mr. Ambassador, the Rockamorrans have very rigid rules about this sort of thing. However, I managed to work out a deal with them. Ordinarily, you couldn't have any assistance with your promise." "Assistance? I seem to recall that you were disporting yourself in the swamp yonder when I -- er, ah -- a member of my staff, that is -- dispatched the brute!" "True. But the Rockamorrans seem to think I had something to do with it. Under the circumstances they agreed to commute your sentence to slavery for life." "Slavery!" "Fortunately, I was able to buy an option on your contracts -- provided you still had heads -- " "Buy up... ? Well, in that case, my boy, I suppose I can overlook the irregularity. If you'll just run along and see to my baggage -- " "I'm afraid it's not quite that simple, sir. You see, I still have to pay your upkeep. And since I've spent all my money buying you -- " Splitwhistle sputtered. -- I've had to hire you out to earn enough to cover living expenses until the ship gets back." "But -- but -- that will be weeks -- " "Okay, Terries; I, Haccop, am slave foreman. First job, strip out blubber from dead monster. Good job, take maybe two weeks, keep you in ration with maybe little left over for pack of Camels once a week." "But -- but -- Retief! What will you be doing in the meantime?" "Haccop tells me there's another dinosaur operating a few miles east. If I can bag it, that will give you another two weeks work after this job's finished. With a little luck, I can keep you going until the ship arrives." "Hey, Retief." Haccop came close, whispered behind his hand. "Maybe better bring thin-face slave name Magnan along you, me. Got idea Midget-with-bad-temper hold grudge, Magnan trip him and make him lose number one position in dash for heli." IF "Good idea, Haccop, bring him along." T wo hours later, Retief, Haccop and Magnan, bathed and clad in new Rockamorran hose and doublets, sat on a tiled roof terrace, dining on a delicately spiced casserole of white fish and sea vegetables. The view out over the town and the water to the east was three moons showed the silvery waterways, the island villages and, distantly, the great hulk of the dead dinosaur, its four legs in the air, and four tiny figures crawling over it like fleas. Their arms, wielding machetes, could be clearly discerned. "Retief, no time linger over succulent native dishes," Haccop said. "Plenty big game of Red Eye just getting under way at Tavern of Golden Ale Keg." "Don't rush me, Haccop. Order us a second round of drinks -- but none for Mr. Magnan. He doesn't indulge. The Ambassador doesn't approve of booze." Magnan blinked at him thoughtfully. "Ah, Retief, knowing your skill with the pasteboards and the, er, galloping dominoes, why couldn't you secure sufficient capital to provision Ambassador Splitwhistle and the others without the necessity for their stripping all that blubber?" Retief sampled the fresh drink the waiter put before him, nodded appreciatively. "Mr. Magnan, the ship won't arrive for at least six weeks, possibly longer. Would you recommend that a non-accredited diplomat with Ambassador Splitwhistle's personality be permitted to run loose among the Rockamorrans for that length of time?" Magnan looked grave, swallowed hard. "I see what you mean, Retief. But if he finds out, he'll be quite furious." "I don't intend to burden him with the knowledge, Mr. Magnan. Do you?" Magnan pursed his lips. "No," he said. "What he doesn't know won't hurt him, eh?" He managed a tentative smile. "Speaking of which, I think I'll have that drink after all." Next Month in If... These extra pages in If are giving us a chance to do some things that would have been out of the question before. Next month we complete Doc Smith's great Skylark DuQuesne serial... and we bring the first installment of another serial that's been asked for for a long time. More and more letters have been coming in demanding that we give Retief a chance to spread himself in a novel. We aim to please -- and so does Keith Laumer -- and next month we start Relief's War. Even for Retief, the planet he has taken on this time is pretty wild and wooly. Its inhabitants are half-animal and half-machine; its social structure is -- well -- chaotic; and its perils are extreme. Relief's War . Next month. Don't miss it. IF  Short Stor Alien Artifact There was something strange about the alien ship -- and not just about its origin! T he patrol craft Solar Sea was beyond the orbit of Pluto, when the radar chief signalled the captain's cabin. The captain, walking briskly, acknowledged the call with a groping hand at the night stand. "Captain here. Good morning!" "Radar, sir. Chief reporting." "What have you got?" the captain asked. "A big blip sir. Projected intersection at about a hundred thousand miles. Presently about one hundred forty thousand. Solid as a rock, sir." The captain fumbled again about the night stand, and squinting his eyes at the sudden light, rolled out of bed. "Keep on it. I'll be bridgeside when I've dressed." It was somewhat less than five minutes later that the captain stood with the radar chief, looking down at the circle of dim light that held its own universe of minute pseudostars and vaguely glowing gas clouds. "Big and solid," commented the chief. "Very big and very solid," said the captain, with no trace of excitement. "Randy says projected intersection now at approximately twenty thousand miles, Captain," reported the man at the computer control board. Like all the newer patrol craft, the Solar Sea had the latest in compact computer systems -- one of the hyper-efficient RandomSeries Portables. To the officers and crew of the Solar Sea t it was "Randy," and the ubiquitous "Randy only knows!" was a favorite in the ship's complement of assorted oaths and wisecracks. "Order Randy three-quarter deceleration, and stand by for full stop," called the captain from his position at the radar scope. The programmer at the computer board responded with an "Aye, aye, sir," and the ship shuddered as it braked. After an unsteady moment in which the captain held tightly to the hand rail surrounding the radar scope, he took the four strides necessary to put him alongside the programmer's chair. "Randy's scanning, sir," said the programmer. "Nothing yet." A fter two full minutes of deceleration, a small green light winked on the board. "Here it comes, Captain... Randy says alloy construction... alloy construction , Captain... no functioning power source detectable... alien artifact !" "Tell Randy to get the hell out of here! Full power and general alarm!" The captain grabbed at a hand rail, and another shock quaked through the ship. They had tried every means of remote communication at their disposal. There was not the slightest indication of awareness or acknowledgement from the alien craft. Even the nuclear flares failed to bring a response. Randy's scanning reports were consistent: "No significant emission of any type detectable... Course unaltered... Disposition unchanged." So the captain and a dozen volunteers boarded the space skiff, to fall in a long arc toward the alien. "If anything happens to us, or even the Solar Sea" reasoned the captain, "at least Randy's log-tapes will have been monitored at the base. And we'll have the portable TV units along. They'll know as much as we did." Final attempts at communication from the closely orbiting skiff failed to produce a reaction, and the pilot brought the small boat alongside the huge alien craft. The pilot remained at the controls as the rest of the group, led by the captain, suited-up and exited. After pounding on the outer wall of the otherwise silent hull for what seemed to the captain like a reasonable period of time, the expedition prepared an entranceway with the frank utilization of a small bomb. "At least they'll know we're here," explained the captain. "I hope we picked a good spot," volunteered one of the men. "Hope it isn't the ladies' powder room," cracked another crewman, floating at the rear of the group. "Leave your suits on at all times, stay close, and keep your TV units sweeping your immediate area," commanded the captain, as he ducked into the still aperture. The rest of the party followed quickly, the last man waving toward the cockpit of the drifting skiff. T he ship was huge, with rooms to match. The explorers wandered along for hours, never stopping for more than a few seconds, until they realized that they had covered it all. The cartographer, consulting his portable equipment and sketching as he went along, informed the captain of this soon after they had passed the point at which they had entered. The group halted for a conference. "All of these rooms are exceedingly large and open," suggested one of the crew, "and it would be difficult to stay concealed... unless they are very small." "Considering the size of the compartments and equipment we've seen, I would consider creatures smaller than ourselves unlikely aboard this craft," replied the captain, glancing quickly about. "I can only conclude, with very minor reservations, that we are the only living things aboard. This is, I very strongly suspect, a derelict." At the captain's order, they left for what the cartographer assured them was the center of the ship. It was decidedly the largest room aboard, and the captain felt that it should be the first area to be more carefully investigated. As they began a detailed search, one of the crewmen approached the captain. "Sir, perhaps no one was ever aboard. This may have been a sort of gigantic robot probe," he theorized. That theory was abandoned a moment later when several of the crew discovered the large plasticlike sheets. There were, they found, thousands of them in what looked like filing drawers along the expansive walls. They were quickly identified as very detailed charts on maps of entire solar systems, as well as individual stars and planets of all sizes. "Why this one resembles our own planetary system," indicated the captain, "and there's earth, I think." They marvelled at the thin plates, poking and waving their TV cameras at the intricate markings. "Let Randy have a good look," said the captain, "perhaps we can get a rough translation." "This must be their chart room," someone decided, and the others agreed. "They had a sense of direction," concluded the captain, as he prepared to return to his ship. I n his cabin near the bow of the Solar Sea y the captain sat on the edge of his bed, or "bunk," as he preferred to call it, and wrote meticulously into his diary, or "log", as he preferred to call it, of the extraordinary events of the past few hours. He paused to reconsider a particularly colorful phrase, when the sound of a signal bell impelled him to reach out for a switch on the night stand. "Captain here. What have you got?" "Computation, sir. Chief reporting." "Well, did Randy have any luck with a translation from those maps?" "We have a preliminary report, sir. And, Captain, Randy says they aren't maps. They're blueprints." IF IF  Novelette Steve Duke had fought on a thousand outlandish battlegrounds -- but never against weapons as strange as these J I T he ship, a converted Scout Tender, was crammed with supplies, equipment, and a draft of one hundred malassorted and sullen slave Techs -- mostly Gjiss, with a scattering of Sabrils, B'lant, and humans. None of them, except Steve Duke, had even an inkling of their destination. They'd made several null-hops and now, judging by the way the hull thrummed, were dropping through atmosphere. The viewscreens weren't on; this bunch didn't rate privileges. The PA crackled and spewed orders. "All slave Ratings except Ship's Personnel muster for disembarkation!" Steve picked up his duffelbag and went with the rest. They formed ranks before an airlock, with the subdued muttering which was all they dared. Six slave Gunners, heavy beamers ready, watched them disinterestedly. The ship hung for a moment, then touched down with a mild jar. A screen glowed and the face of the ship's commander -- one of the Overseer race -- appeared, wearing just the right combination of disdain and compassion. "Slaves, each one of you has failed Gree in some way. You deserve only the most degrading labor, or to be live targets in training; and to die without His blessing and without hope of ressurection. But as Gree is a merciful master, He is giving you a chance to redeem yourselves. "This planet is formidable, and there is something here of great importance. What you are to do here will be worthy of any warrior. Those of you who die will die as heroes, with full forgiveness. Those who live will be given tests, and may regain their former statuses. "You will disembark now, and meet your new Overseers." Or, as Steve translated inwardly, these slaves -- disgraced, denounced some of them brainwashed or even brainburned, simmering with resentment that cried for a target -- would be the advance skirmishers, entirely expendable. None of them (except him) really had much reason to live. T he night air was warm and dry. The Base was similar to many he'd seen -- a solid periphery of buildings, their outward walls forming a line of defense, with the landing field and other important functions inside -- but it differed in being eggshaped rather than circular. Outside the big end of it, curving in a protective arc, was a very strong, high wall of logs, braced in such a way that Steve guessed it must be double, with a rock or dirt fill between. Other sides of the Base were not this protected. He didn't understand what threat might come from one direction only. He moved as far as he dared from the landing-lights and looked up at the sky. Sentry globes moved a hundred feet above, but there were no stars. The sky must be completely overcast. An Overseer called, "Four ranks! Highest ratings in front!" Automatically, Steve stepped forward. Gunner, Third Grade, was the highest rank a slave could hold. He'd earned that legitimately once (though not, of course, under the false identity he wore now). They were counted again and marched toward the barracks. As they moved clear of the ship Steve suddenly saw a moon, small or distant, but bright, with clear markings. The sky was not overcast. He took his eyes from the moon lest an Overseer notice his interest. According to his scant information, they'd been headed somewhere near the center of the galaxy. The sky should be rich with stars. Before getting bunks, they had to file one at a time through an Inquisition Booth. This was the first big hurdle. He stepped in, suddenly perspiring. There was a pause -- longer than normal, he thought -- then the voice of all Booths, deep, paternal, with a hint of warning, said, "What are your name and number?" IF The old emotions stirred in Steve. He fought them down; to let them seize him would be fatal. He forced himself to say, "Dunnek. # # #." As the Booth fed that through its circuits, checking for any prior data, he concentrated hard on the words, "I'm in a Booth. I'm in a Booth." He fancied he could feel the stir in his brain, as the delicately implanted metal molecules shunted nerve currents, blocked off memory trunks, controlled body responses. The fear subsided but a sullen resentment grew. He strove to keep other thoughts away. T he Booth said, "We have not received data on you, Dunnek. Why are you in disgrace # " His voice was thick with the artificial resentment. "I failed to protect a shrine of Gree." There was another pause while the Booth's sensors probed at him. Then, "Where did this happen?" "Garlock One." That was where Steve's side had captured the real Dunnek. The Booth said, "We have data on Garlock One. But there is more in your heart than guilt. You had better tell, us what it is." He wiped his hands on his uniform. His next words might get him summarily liquidated. "The Overseers failed too. I fled when they fled. Yet I was punished and they were not." He sat, mentally cringing. But the Booth answered sooner than he expected. "You are wrong. Why do you say the Overseers were not punished?" "Well... they went freely, without anyone guarding them. They even kept their weapons." Now he did have a long wait. He knew that Overseers operated the Booths, aided by computers and memory banks. Would they consider him too rebellious to live? Or find some flaw in his story? Finally the Booth said. "You are a very impertinent slave. For this alone, you deserve the punishment you've received. Know, slave, that Gree himself dealt with the Overseers who failed him. Who are you, to question?" A pause. "Since you are in your present situation, you will not be punished further; but your impertinence will be noted. You had best think deeply about your sins." Incredibly, the exit opened. He walked out, shaking a little and slightly dizzy from the unnatural things that still flowed in his veins. But his superiors had been right. In this case, sullenness pleased the Overseers. H H ow much so, he discovered the next morning. They put him in charge of a troop of thirty-seven. They lifted him in an aircar to hover over the Base while they aimed a telescope toward some mountains to the east. These weren't isolated peaks; lower chains led off to either side, but these were mucti higher, and snow-capped. When he put his eye to the scope he saw a section of a slope below the snowline. The Overseer said, "Do you see that cliff-face in the center of the field?" The scope had shifted a bit. He located the cliff. "Yes, sir." He took his eye from the instrument and looked at the mountains. They must be sixty or seventy miles away, but the air was clear, and he finally saw the cliff naked-eye. It must be big, to be visible at all. Below it was a wide band of forest, almost black in the distance. He traced out a waterway that pointed more or less at the cliff. The Overseer said, "Seen enough?" "I think so, sir." "All right. You're to take your troop and find a way on foot to that cliff. For various reasons we can't show our technology  over or near those mountains. You'll have primitive weapons; iron, but below the gunpowder stage. You'll wear primitive clothes. For part of the way you'll have a radio transmitter, disguised as something else. Beam it only toward this Base. Our answers will come by relay from those lower mountains to the right, so they won't be beamed wrong either. When we can't reach you any more, you're to get reports to us as long as you can. After that you're to use your best judgment, but try to survive and bring back a final report. It .doesn't matter how many of your troop you lose. Do you understand?" After a moment, Steve said, "Yes, sir." The Overseer said, "You'll meet some odd things along the way. Be cautious, but observe them carefully and report. You'll have to live mostly off the land; we can't send flyers to supply you. Incidentally, you are one of four Sorties, and what you report may help others. Unless you have questions, that is all." T he sun was hot, but bearable. They wore or carried garments of leather and some animal wool coarsely woven. Their buskins were thick soled. They had bows and arrows and crude hand-axes, ropes, water-bags, rough blankets. There were flints for striking fire, salt for the meat they'd kill. The transmitter -- carried by a Communications Tech, Second Grade, named Vay -- was built into one of the bows. Steve was the only Third Grader, and there were only two other Gunners, both Seconds, and both of the race called Sabrils. Like all Gree's humanoids except humans and B'lant, they were better at executing orders than at thinking for themselves. Not that they were stupid; they just weren't leaders. As Sabrils went, Keerno and Hurogil were good troopers. Keerno was the taller, and instantly distinguishable from Hurogil because one cheek and one side of the jaw were flesh transplants, and much lighter than the blue-black of his skin elsewhere. Hurogil had a few scars of his own, and an uneven gait from some injury. Even he was over six feet, with narrow sloping shoulders and a slender, though wiry, build. Their eyes were wide and narrow, with yellow irises that made some people uncomfortable. Their mouths were thin-lipped and turned down at the IF corners. Their ears were pointed and hung back and down. They sweated like fury in the sun, and needed lots of water. Vay was the only other Second in the troop. All the others were Firsts (which meant they'd at least completed Hive-world training in arms, tactics and survival) and were all Gjiss, like Vay. They were among the more human-looking of Gree slaves, but they looked like squat, very hairy, very muscular humans. Their planet had high gravity so they were fine porters, though not fast afoot. They tended to be morose rather than sullen. All, of course, spoke B'lant and English in addition to their own languages. Those two were required. He took Keerno and three Gjiss for an advance guard. The rest came in a body, surrounding Vay. Steve put a ridge between the Sortie and Base as soon as he could, to test his communications. He went back and looked at Vay questioningly. The Gjiss said, "Ve got gondac, Gunner." Steve took the disguised transmitter. "Base, this is Sortie Four. Four One speaking. We do not have line-of sight. The ridge between us looks like sandstone. There are a few small holes in it that look like bullet-holes but could belong to insects. There are insects about. There's some very thin desert growth, like lichens. I've seen a few animals about the size of my hand, catching insects. They look like sixlegged starfish but seem to have internal skeletons. There are a few small birds or large insects whose wings move fast enough to hum. I'm starting up a wadi that has low bushes in it. Report ends. Four One." The answer came back, faint and squeaky. "Four One, give us a short carrier wave every half hour, even if you have no report. End. Base." T he wadi was from fifty to a hundred yards wide, sandy, twisting between low hills, with vertical banks up to ten or twelve feet in places. The plants were green enough to prove subsurface water. They were the height of a man, squat, with twisting branches and thick-set small round leaves. The small flying things fed on the leaves, and he took time to study one. It was odd. The oval bodies were the size of a man's thumb, with stubby, leathery wings set on each side. There seemed to be no head or tail -- each end of the body was a large facetted eye, with a short flap over it that might be an eye-shade or an auxiliary wing. There were no legs, but the wings were prehensile, and on the underside of the body were two orifices that served as suction cups and mouths. He hadn't seen any other birds. A couple of hours up the wadi they began to cross patches of grass, where pools probably lasted into the spring. Not long after that they saw their first animals grazing. Steve was with the advance guard again, and he was moving cautiously to the middle of the wadi to see around a turn. The animals saw him as he saw them. IF They were quadruped, thinbodied and long-legged, and with very long necks that were now held straight up in alarm. They had no horns, but the feet were clawed, not hoofed, and the teeth were big, if flat. He judged the animal weighed three hundred pounds. It had more hair than he expected to see in a desert. Several of the big males took a few steps forward. They didn't seem on the point of charging, but they weren't giving ground. He said quietly to the Sortie, who'd stopped when he had and were still out of the animals' sight, "Grazing animals, but big. Ready with arrows. Four of you climb out on that side and go fifty yards upstream. Hit one of these males that are facing me, without warning. One'll do it." Five minutes later, four arrows flashed in the sun. The chosen male bleated and leaped high. He came down running, but his legs collapsed and he went sprawling and kicking. The herd broke and galloped upwadi without any more delay, bleating softly. As they went clouds of the flying things rose from the bushes, circled, and settled back. The carcass seemed to be normal protein, so Steve chewed a bit of it, raw, while it was being butchered. The taste was reassuring. Something else wasn't, though: a swarm of the flying things circled and hovered, turning their big eyes at the Sortie. Now and then a few of them would take a bee-line up the wadi out of sight. The way they acted reminded Steve of mechanical fly-eyes. Later, he reported that to Base. "Ah," the reply came, in an Overseer's voice. "We had not seen that before. We have dissected the things, and they are organic, but the form is peculiar. You are observant, Gunner. I shall follow your progress with interest. By the way, I am your own Overseer." Steve acknowledged as simply as possible. The last thing  he wanted was close attention from an Overseer. T here were tracks of more animals, several kinds, but he saw only one new creature during the afternoon: a very slender, timid thing about eight inches high that looked as nearly canine as feline. It ate the starfish-things that ate insects. It hunted singly. He made camp in the middle of a wide spot, openly, with several fires; but put out sentries to lie quiet under the brush in case anything tried to sneak in. The Gjiss were in better spirits, eating huge chunks of the meat, which was good except that the brushwood fire gave it a faint taste of creosote. Keerno and Hurogil were their taciturn selves. Steve stretched out on his blanket under a bush to let his tired muscles relax, but something was tugging at the edge of his mind. He napped briefly, and took a turn on watch. Then, later, when all the fires but one had been allowed to die, he remembered. He looked around to make sure no one was too close, then reached casually and put the tips of three fingers behind his left ear. He felt for slight bumps and pressed them; the middle one first, then the lower, then the upper. He lay for a few minutes. A slight dizziness came, and a quickening of the pulse. Then it was as if a faint voice whispered to him: "Colonel Duke: by now you've passed the Booths and are ready to know. The operation you've been smuggled into is somewhere inside a cloud nebula that is very dense and has some peculiar properties. We have never been able to null into it. "Gree has heard rumors of a very ancient weapon depository there, guarded by unknown sciences. Your job is double: to see what is happening, and to send us a locator as soon as you can. You have this locator. It has been built into the small projector you carry, which shows human females dancing in the nude. In this case, your erotic tastes are useful. It will still project, and will appear to be nothing else barring very close examination, but it is also a pair of devices. When you are able, turn it on and off five times, quickly, then break it in two. One half will null to where we can find it and trace it back. Keep the other half. When we null a fleet in and begin the attack, step on it or otherwise crush it, and it will pinpoint you for us. "Good luck. We will replace the projector for you, with new pictures. "This implant in your brain will dissolve beyond trace within an hour. There are no other implants." Steve swore under his breath. The projector was in his personal dittybag at the Base. HI I t must have been near morning when a faint sound woke him. He twisted onto his belly, in position to get up fast, and listened. Something was coming down the wadi making swishing sounds in the brush. The small moon was still up, but k only seemed to make the wadi darker. He wondered if he ought to douse the fire. He heard others stirring and decided not to give an alarm yet. The thing was coming slowly and steadily, as nearly as he could judge, and in a straight line, making no effort to avoid the brush. It was near one side of the wadi, and, if he could judge, now about fifty yards up it. He heard the hum of small wings as the fly-eyes were disturbed from their roosts. Still no other sound. He wondered if the thing could be a very persistent small whirlwind. Then he heard one of his sentries on that side mutter something in Gjiss and move from his hiding spot He caught the word, "Gree." The thing, whatever it was, came on steadily. He was sure now it was no animal. He heaved himself to his feet. "Hurogil! Take charge here. Guards! Come with me!" He groped for one of the torches stacked ready; thrust it into the fire until it flared. He grabbed a hand-axe. The two Gjiss on fire-guard had torches now, and followed him. He held the torch high with one hand, and saw the sentry, feet planted wide, staring into the darkness. He was muttering again. IP Then Steve was within a few yards of him, but blocked by a thick clump of brush. "Stand aside!" he ordered the sentry, "Let's get a look at it!" The sentry ignored him. The bush he was facing shook, mildly, and something drifted out. It was barely visible in the torchlight, hardly bigger than a grape, black, a slightly flattened sphere, tumbling slowly as it drifted. It was at chest height and moving horizontally or nearly so. The sentry reached out to take the thing. Steve, suddenly guessing what would happen, shouted at him, but the hand was already closed around the object. The hand moved back. The Gjiss grunted in surprise, flexed his arm muscles, then gasped and jerked his hand away. Steve saw the object touch his chest. The sentry screamed and threw himself down. Steve saw the object drifting on, bloody now, in the same slow trajectory. He yelled, "Hurogil! Take care of this man," turned to see Hurogil start toward him, then himself turned to follow the strange missile. He could have followed it even without the three torches, by its progress through the brush. He caught up to it and followed as closely as the brush would allow. It was, he saw, aimed slightly downward, so it would hit the ground sooner or later. But before it did, the wadi turned, and it pushed into a bank. There was a puff of dust and a small hole where it went in. He could hear it grinding through the sandstone. Finally it stopped or got too far to hear. Steve listened a minute, then told his two Gjiss, "Go back and get Vay here, fast. Tell Hurogil to break camp and move down here." T he thing took some diggihg to find. It had penetrated . nearly twenty feet, and didn't show a scratch. The sentry who'd tried to stop it was dead, of bleeding, not poison. Steve reported to Base and was told to stand by. Meanwhile, he made a few experiments. Eventually the Overseer answered. "Tell me the details, Gunner." Steve described the events, then added, "It's as if the stuff had tremendous mass but very little susceptibility to gravity. By getting an axehead under it and lifting, you can eventually get it rising. It keeps rising unless you stop it. We almost lost it once. But if you get it hanging perfectly still, beside something so you can measure, it begins to fall very slowly after a while. If you hit it -- " The Overseer interrupted, "We've studied the objects, Gunner. What we want to know, among other things, is where they start from and how they are accelerated even to a low speed." Steve felt his face grow warm. "If I'd known about them I might have saved a man." The Overseer said casually, "Ho died for Gree, Gunner." Steve controlled himself. "Yes, sir. I suppose I can expect more of them?" "Fin sure you can. Sortie One reports a man dead, too. They had him on watch on top of a knoll, at night, which was a very foolish thing." H e got the dead Tech buried, and left the black pellet on the grave. It wasn't very practical to take it along. He wondered if, and how, he could take one with him, assuming he ever got away from here. His superiors would want to see it. As they advanced they met more of the things, sometimes coming down at sharper angles, but not much sharper. He was doing well, so far as casualties were concerned -- the other three Sorties reported a total of seven so far. Probably he was better protected, in the wadi. As it happened, his second casualty came when they had to leave the wadi to detour around the first marshy spot. It wasn't one of the black pellets. They'd been following the edge, and came to a small dry wash that joined the wadi. The bottom was covered with spiney six-inch grass. Steve and his advance group stopped at the edge before stepping down. Steve saw nothing in the grass but small insects. There were a few of the fly-eyes humming over it. Up the dry wash a mile or so, there was a herd of the grazing animals he'd, met before. He poised to step down, but before he did one of the Gjiss hopped down into the grass. The humanoid let out a peculiar sound, then screamed. He tried to jump, fell clumsily, screamed again. He squirmed as if he were stuck on a bed of nails. He raised his head and Steve saw droplets of blood all over one side. The Gjiss stared up at him for a moment, then fainted. Others ran forward. "Stand back!" Steve ordered. "Get some rope and a hand-axe up here!" He got the axe head wedge under the victim's belt, and they hauled him out by that. Grassblades stuck out all over him, and there were punctures where others had pulled free. He was obviously dying, probably of the punctures in his head. Steve took hold of one of the grassblades and pulled gently. It wouldn't come out. It wasn't rigid. He pulled harder, steadily, and eventually it came out slowly. When it did, it wanted to keep on going. The top of it did, at least; the rest trailed in the air. Blood ran down it and formed a drop, but didn't fall off. Steve let it go. He jabbed the flat of the axe down at the grass and it was like hitting concrete. He noticed now that while some of the grassblades bent in the breeze, others were perfectly still. He pulled one of those out -- slowly -- and got it suspended in the air before him. He gave a sudden jerk and the grass came away, leaving a small black nodule hanging in the air. He pushed at it with the axehead so it would drift to the ground, then walked to the dead Gjiss and looked at the soles of his buskins. They were punctured in dozens of spots, and grass was wedged in some of the holes. IF When he reported, the Overseer listened carefully and complimented him. Then he said, "Gunner, this will be our last transmission to you; you're getting too close to the mountains. You are to keep sending reports direct until you're near the forest. You must leave the transmitter with some Techs, and send reports back to them to transmit. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir." Steve tried not to sound ironic. "Fine, then. Good luck, Gunner." Steve handed Vay the transmitter and started toward a small knoll to look around. He thought he'd stay near here for a few days, studying things, before he went on. IV H e learned that not all of the spiney grass was deadly. When it was first sprouting, it didn't have the black nodules in it. While the nodules grew and ripened (if that was the right word) the grazing animals, and other animals, knew to avoid it. Later, it got rid of the nodules, and that process was interesting. When the grass began to turn brown, each stalk developed a gas pressure, swelling to three times its diameter. Gradually, the nodule yielded. It had only an inch to go to the top of the stalk, but when it got there it was rising two or three feet a minute. It kept rising. Some patches sent up a real hail of .the things. He could imagine what it would be like for a bird -- or an aircar -- to fly into it. The latter, though, if it had a good hull and moved very slowly, should survive. He watched the large animals grazing in a ripe patch that had lost its nodules. They moved their feet very slowly and carefully, as if there might be a few nodules left. A man could do the same thing, he reflected, if he had the right kind of shoes. One night as he lay awake it occurred to him that the nodules might have something to do with the unnatural cloud nebula. That, of course, was what hid the stars here, and made it so difficult to null in. Why wasn't this sun at least a little haloed? Maybe its radiant pressure had cleared a sphere around it and its planets. If so, Gree had somehow learned the coordinates to null in. He wondered about the nodules that rose from the grass. If they kept going beyond the atmosphere, they'd make it impossible to null in. And if they didn't, they must come down again. He tried not to imagine one of them drifting down, gently as a tiny black snowflake -- and gently sinking through his head. Maybe, he told himself, the stuff gradually sublimed or disintegrated. But if you could work the stuff -- and get a strong gun-barrel and a real driving charge behind it -- what a bullet it would make! T he wadi became a creek in the foothills, and two days up that was the edge of the forest. Steve found a campsite behind a hill, established Vay there, and led the first patrol out. By the time they reached the trees, they'd seen two more of the grape-sized black pellets The dominant kind of tree wasn't over a hundred feet tall, but it spread sideways half again that. Its bark was in overlapping scales, each six inches in diameter, deep brown. Scales lay about as if they shed individually. The base of the trunk was a system ot big splayed-out roots, with grass and underbrush between them. At thirty feet or so from the ground, the trunk split into a dozen or more big limbs, some of them horizontal. From these, twigs sprayed out, supporting needlelike foliage. Here and there, vines hung to the ground. The trees didn't crowd each other, so the trunks were widely spaced, but undergrowth filled most of the space. There were game trails, and a variety of tracks. He heard birdcalls deeper in the forest. Not far from him, one of the frail quadrupeds he'd seen catching the starfishthings trotted into sight, saw him, and went up a treetrunk. More feline than canine, then. There were a few of the fly-eyes, into everything as always. A treetrunk nearby had a hole through it, quite fresh, as if a long auger had come through. He knew what had done that. The scales on both sides were pierced neatly. He found other holes, some nearly grown shut. Evidently the trees were used to being pierced. He wasn't inclined to take the patrol in at once, so he took them up the higher of the two hills bracketting the creek they'd come up, until he found a tree at the edge of the forest where he could spend a few hours now and then, just watching. Then he turned back to camp. The hill muffled the forest sounds that night, but there were animal calls, and once something screamed and thrashed about heavily. He didn't like the prospect of penetrating this forest with only primitive weapons. He was sure, though, there'd be no way around it. I t was two days before he actually saw the pellet thrower at work. He'd spotted a source; two pellets had come from a thicket within sight of his tree. All he saw was a gentle motion, then the pellets drifted out, horizontally, diverging just a few degrees. Then, late in the afternoon, one of the small frail quadrupeds came sneaking by the thicket, pausing to raise its big ears, turn its head, and listen. It went on out of sight. A minute later another animal appeared, evidently trailing the other. This seemed to be of a related species, but it was three times the height and anything but frail. It stopped beside a thicket to listen and sniff the ground, then started across the small natural clearing. Suddenly there was motion all around it. Things like flexible broom-handles came swinging from the brush in an odd slow motion, blocking the several ways out of the spot. They reached straightness and continued to bend the opposite way, IF like springs very heavily weighted. Without seeing, Steve guessed there'd be other bars -- more slender, maybe -- in the brush, to form a complete fence. The beast, after a second's crouch, whirled, saw that it was surrounded, and hurled itself at what looked like the weakest spot. It squalled and bounced back. It bit at itself once, then leaped to bat with its paws at the broomsticks, which were still flexing slowly. Then it sprang back to the center of its prison and crouched, panting. Steve saw blood drip. At half a dozen points around the prison, things moved slowly. Steve got a good look at one. It was like a three-foot length of heavy plank grown over with bark. It too flexed Uke a spring, but only moved through a very short arc, staying nearly vertical. As it passed its deadpoint and began to slow, black pellets drifted from it. More came from the other directions, crisscrossing. The beast whirled, seeking a way out, then sprang in the direction it had come. It screamed as it hit the first pellets; contorted in mid-air, fell and hit the ground writhing. There were pellets at low level too. It bit at itself mindlessly, then collapsed and lay shuddering a moment before it went limp. Steve saw pellets emerge from it and sail away or plow leisurely into the ground, driving before them fur and blood and bits of bone. Now a thing like a tentacle snaked from somewhere. It poised above the carcass, nosed down delicately, and forced its point in. A tremor, as if of ecstasy, ran along it. Steve pushed down his revulsion and watched. The thing probed about inside the animal, apparently consuming bone and all, for the carcass gradually shrank like an emptying bag. At sundown he left The cage was still in place -- to keep out marauders, perhaps -- and the tentacle was still feeding. He spent most of the night planning. They'd have to locate a number of the things for study. That could be done, maybe, with long slender poles. If a pole hit a slender stalk that didn't move, they had something. Too, knowing what to look for, they could spot the planklike catapults. And they could capture some of the grazing animals alive; force them into the traps and study the things. He didn't like that idea much, but it was better than sacrificing humanoids through ignorance. V A fter two weeks he had enough data to compose a report. He included: "The shoots that form the cage can move enough in two seconds to stop a humanoid. The cage is only thirty feet in diameter at most; so one man might get free if he moved fast. But a group of men would get in each others' way. We'll have to travel in groups because of large carnivores. "It's possible to sate the things. After feeding, a plant is inert for at least twelve days; we haven't had time to check longer. Ill "They apparently don't need animal protein to survive individually, but it's connected with reproduction. After feeding, a plant produces seeds the size of a man's fist, with small black pellets in them for carrying power when they're catapulted. If a seed hits a tree, it falls to the ground while the pellet keeps going. "This is intelligently planned. Making the meat-eating part of reproduction prevents the plants evolving away from it. "I think we can clear a way through by driving animals ahead of us, and otherwise locating the plants. I'm leaving Vay and eight Techs here with the transmitter. Probably we'll be able to relay a few reports back once we're through. Later, on higher ground, we'll build campfires where you can see them with a telescope so you'll at least know where we are. No doubt there'll be other defenses, and they'll probably be more subtle. "Report ends. Four One." E ighteen days later, he stood at the upper edge of the forest. Within it they'd buried Keerno and two Gjiss. Two more Gjiss had been dragged away by carnivores. A group was headed back through with a report for Vay to send, and escorting various wounded. Steve, Hurogil, and the thirteen Gjiss with them all had cuts or bad bruises, but none incapacitating. Now they faced something like ten miles of mild slopes covered with the spiney grass. In places, the black hail floated up from it. The plan he had was simple. ? V# They had a section of tree-trunk, over a yard in diameter, about five feet long, peeled and made as cylindrical as possible. There were holes for spokes to give more leverage, and wedges to jam behind it if it started to roll back. They were going to roll it through the grass, slowly, to clear a path. Also, each of them had oval slabs of thick wood to wear like snowshoes, in case the roller left a few nodules hanging. Steve had tested those before thinking of the roller, but the grass was irregular enough to make a man's balance insecure. Nobody wanted to fall. In the first few hours they collected new cuts, until they learned what to watch for. After that, it was just hard tedious work. Food was no problem -- the swath stayed open behind them, so they could walk back and hu at the edge of the forest. They pushed and pried at the roller for five days. Toward the end it was very hard to move because the circumference was impregnated with nodules. But on the sixth day they were clear of the grass, with not more than five miles of rocky ground between them and the cliff. From here, the cliff-face looked very even and almost vertical. Steve said, "An hour's rest. Then we'll try to make it before night." It turned out harder than that. There were stretches of jumbled rock, and crevices. They finally camped in one of those, a mile from the cliff. For the sake of morale, Steve risked a fire. He was pretty sure that if anything intelligent IF lurked above, it was aware of them by now; anyway, as tired and sore as he was, he didn't like the prospect of a cold night. A t daylight he bundled himself as warmly as practical and went scouting with two Gjiss. Looking back the way they'd come through the grass, the forest seemed ludicrously close. He couldn't see beyond the forest, because a mist hung over it. He turned, and was looking at the cliff when he heard humanoid voices somewhere to his right. He gestured a warning to the Gjiss, and pointed to the gap between two large rocks. He led the way carefully to where the voices sounded near, then motioned the two to wait, bows ready, while he peered into the open. There were a B'lant and two Gjiss with their backs to him, looking at the cliff. To their right, in cover similar to his own, were several more Gjiss. Obviously they were supposed to be guarding the trio's backs, but they hadn't seen Steve yet. They looked cold and miserable. The B'lant was lightly dressed, his thick gray skin adequate for colder weather than this. He had bandages around his left biceps and left calf. He and the Gjiss were carrying bows, waterbags, and not much else. Steve, unable to resist grinning, stepped into the open and said in his perfect B'lant, "I could have mowed you down with one sweep of a laser. Which Sortie are you?" They spun, the B'lant reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. One glimpse of his blunt-featured, highcheekboned face, and Steve's own hand flashed uselessly to his waist A block of ice seemed suddenly to form in his stomach. But the B'lant's eyes showed no recognition. They were a little offfocus, dull, vaguely troubled. Hii voice was slower than Steve remembered it, and slurred. "We are Sortie Two. My name is... Fazzool. Do you have any food? I need none yet, but my Gjiss... his words faded away. Steve let out his breath. Slowly, his shock turned to anger. Brainburned! They'd brainburned Fazzool; who -- Newly shocked, Steve fought for self control. It hadn't been he -- not Steve Duke -- who'd been comrade to Fazzool. If that other called Jen had lived in Steve's skull, shared the same body, it hadn't been Steve's choice. Steve should be hoping the brainburning was thorough. If it weren't -- if Fazzool could remember, ever -- he'd remember that a comrade called Jen had betrayed Gree; had twice tried to kill Fazzool, twice left him for dead. He controlled his face. "We've got meat." It occurred to him he'd better have Fazzool where he could watch him. "We're Sortie Four. My name's Dunnek. Shall we join forces? There's nothing in the orders against it." Fazzool was looking at him with puzzlement. Finally he said, "Yes. Nothing... in the orders." T wo hours later, as they started toward the cliff, Fazzool's mind was clearer. Steve kept out of his line of vision as much as he could. Before they reached the cliff, Steve became aware of a slight veiling before it. He stopped walking. Fazzool stopped too, turned and gave him a look. "I zink," he said in English, "zat will be more of ze black stuff." Steve nodded, stalling for time. One of them ought to reconnoiter, while the other stayed in command; but he didn't want to leave Fazzool in that position. He was relieved when the B'lant said, "Wiz my zick skin, it is best I go first." An hour later the B'lant waved him forward. Steve left Hurogil with most of the Gjiss. When he reached Fazzool, the B'lant was standing at the edge of a deep chasm with water in it. The chasm was too straight, running out of sight in either direction, to be natural. It was possibly a quarter mile across, and the walls weren't far from vertical, except where rock had fallen away. The water was several hundred feet below, and looked deep. From a strip of it, about a third of the width, along the middle, rose the faint veiling. Steve didn't doubt it was more of the black stuff, though he was too far to see individual particles. They might be dust, or half an inch in diameter. Fazzool said, "What do you zink is at ze bottom?" Steve shrugged. "Water-weeds, maybe, producing nodules like the grass. Though I don't know whether the damned stuff floats or not." He pondered, and realized he didn't know much about the actual mechanism of buoyancy. He looked up at the cliff. It was continuous with the chasm wall; merely a mountain that had been sliced through. He found he wanted very much to know what was beyond. He doubted there'd be any end to the chasm. "A circular moat," he said half-absently, "around a stronghold." He faced the B'lant. "Our orders say to go to the cliff. We're close; but maybe we should actually cross this thing, if it's try?" Fazzooi's eyes looked clear now. zing zat you and I, Jen -- " He gasped, and his face contorted with agony. Brainstorming guarded proscribed memories brutally. He stood panting for a minute, then recovered enough to say, "Now why did I... call you zat?" His eyes were dull. S teve struggled with his own face. Finally he shrugged. "My name's Dunnek." So the burning wasn't thorough enough. He found himself trembling a little. It seemed a terrible injustice that he should have to try a third time to kill Fazzool. And it would be an even worse injustice if he succeeded. He controlled his voice and said, "Maybe a raft could cross, if it were thick enough and we could get it down to water level." Fazzool was obviously struggling to think. "How did you... get zrough ze grass?" IF Vuie" Steve told him. Fazzool pondered, and finally nodded. "Zat lias ze advantage zat you can go back to hunt. Zat is why you had meat... And we can get lumber. But my way has more to do wiz zis moat here. I chopped some big zick planks, and we just laid zem gently on ze grass and kept leap-frogging zem. I zink if we make ze right kind of raft, zis black stu!' will not come zrough, but will just push it up a little." Steve frowned over that. "Maybe. But still, how do we get it down to the water? And how'd we get up the other -- " He broke off, startled. "Why, of course! We put some of the stuff under the raft, and drift across up herel" VI T hey needed little extra lumber, with the planks Fazzool had and with Steve's roller. After a little discussion, they realized they couldn't bind the raft together with ropes, because the rising particles might cut them; so it had to be done with pegs, which was tedious. Gathering the black material was simple. If you just dropped a plank on top of the grass, with the right force, the nodules penetrated. Then, very slowly, you could pull it away and force it down somewhere else. As a plank became impregnated, it got hard to move, and to stop once it was moving, but that was just a matter of muscle and patience. The Gjiss were happy to be supplying that, with plenty of meat and animal skins for warmth. The finished raft was over two feet thick (with six inches of virgin, or at least unimpregnated, wood on top), about twelve feet long, eight feet wide. The width, Steve admitted to himself, was a concession to preconceived ideas of stability. A few inches in from the edge, a handrail ran all around, a foot above the deck. It began to look like something. A launching-course was ready: a stretch of rock slanting up gently to the lip of the chasm, smoothed and filled, to as perfect a plane as possible. The rollers were ready too; the hardest, straightest tree-limbs available. It took a day and part of a night to get the raft into position, with rollers under it and stakes behind it to keep it from rolling back, before morning. Steve knew he was laying up trouble (if he ever got back to Base) by going alone with Fazzool. But Fazzool wasn't protesting, and everyone else here was outranked. They seated themselves, Fazzool in front, and made sure the things they were taking were secure. The launching crew threw their weight against the raft, grunting with effort. Nothing happened at first, of course. They continued to strain, cursing in Gjiss. Fazzool chuckled. A roller creaked. I n twenty minutes Steve thought he could feel motion. An hour more the Gjiss strained, muscles bulging, new shifts taking over periodically. The rollers were definitely turning now. Hurogil put a new IF one at the front. It was two hours more before they neared the edge of the chasm, moving perhaps twenty feet a minute. A roller at the front dropped free, into a rack put there to catch it. Another plunked on top of it. Steve had to control his instincts now, as the nose of the raft poked out over the abyss. Fazzool turned to grin at him. The end of the raft parted from the last roller and now they would have to jump if they changed their minds. Then it was too far for that. Steve looked over the edge at the dark water. It was many minutes before he could really convince himself they weren't going to fall. He thought of 'magic carpets'. He would almost rather have depended upon magic than upon this. As they neared the middle, he could see that the rising pellets were the size of peas, but fewer than he'd expected. They rose very slowly. He felt the first jar as one hit the raft. It was mild, but that the raft transmitted the jar at all was disturbing. They came steadily after that. There was a splintering sound; the first audible one. The front end of the raft began to tilt upward, very slowly. That went on even after the rear of the raft was in the curtain too; and would until they emerged. He felt his weight shift backward, and felt with his foot for the rail there. A hatchet slid, startling him, but it was tied on. The tilt was at least fifteen degrees now; they'd started with less than five. He saw Fazzool's left foot feel about, find the tied hatchet and brace against it. The B'lant was clinging to the front rail, too. Steve grew really concerned. They were still in the curtain and the tilt was thirty degrees or more. He tried not to think what it would be like if they tilted to vertical and beyond. B ut then they nosed out of the curtain, and soon he could feel the tilt reverse. The last few thus sounded at his end of the raft, then they were clear. But there was another worry -- they'd gained considerable upward drift, and were going to clear the opposite side by two hundred feet or more. The cliff, ahead and to their right, seemed to sink slowly, as it approached. They passed the face and were still rising faster than the land beneath them. It was too far to jump, even from the end of their ropes if they tossed them over. For all he knew, they'd rise until the air was too thin to breathe. Already, it was chill as the sun sank lower behind them. Night came on. He moved up beside Fazzool and they tried to see the ground ahead. The small moon rose, but wasn't much help. But the raft was heavy; and even with the added pellets imbedded in it by the curtain, it eventually began to sink. Their nose was tilted slightly downward now. They tried to guess whether they'd reach the snowline. They fell short of it. They stepped off the raft just before it touched, their arms burdened with what they could hold. The raft bumped gently, then proceeded to grind itself deliberately into kindling. Steve stepped back from the flying splinters. A few logs off the top broke free and skidded away, but the rest thrust on into the growing pile. After that was over, he could still hear the black stuff pushing deeper into the rock. FazzooPs voice was amused in the dark. "Ziss will make a fine bonfire. Shall we light it now?" Steve said, "It's a temptation. But let's get away from here instead, before something comes to investigate." They lugged what they'd salvaged back downslope and found a passably sheltered place to spend what was left of the night. Steve hoped Hurogil's further experiments, after watching the crossing, would show some inspiration. It hadn't occurred to anybody that the raft would be a total loss so far as returning was concerned. T he morning sunlight was dazzling on the snowy peaks, which looked only four or five miles away. The two climbed the nearest prominence to look around. The chasm, and the forest beyond it, were in clear sight. He wondered whether they should hike back to the cliff and signal Hurogil at once, or do a little exploring first. Before he mentioned that to Fazzool, he saw six or seven of the fly-eyes going over, headed east. He pointed. "I've already reported they come from this direction. Pm for following right now." Fazzool agreed. Among the things they'd brought were two pairs of the foot-slabs, which now turned out to be usable, but just barely, as snow-shoes. Certainly, they couldn't do much hiking on them. They trudged up the first snowcovered ridge, the top of which temporarily hid the peaks beyond. Steve kept watching Fazzool unobtrusively. Soon, he must decide what to do. He couldn't wait; they -- or he -- would have to get back and show himself to Hurogil, or the Sabril might decide they'd been killed, and not wait for them. He decided to wait until they turned back. They crossed the top of the ridge and he stopped, staring down and to his right, then went prone on the snow. Fazzool wriggled forward beside him. It was too circular a basin to be natural; and the bottom was too level. The warmth that kept it green must be artificial too. It was perhaps two miles across, and a thousand feet deep. The slopes were covered with snow to about two-thirds the way down. Below that, bare rock showed some erosion. There was a mound in the center, and that was eroded too. There seemed to be only one kind of shrubs, green and fairly dense, but too irregular for recent cultivation. There was healthy-looking grass, not the spiney kind, he thought. Fazzool said, "Nobody home for a long time, I zink. I also zink it could be a trap." "Maybe," Steve said. "But I'll bet this is where the fly-eyes come. And I'll bet there's a ring of these places around the peaks, if the others haven't stopped working. Anyway, IF it would be a hard climb back out again." He was thinking something else. A blow on the head, and let the body slide down... No; too conspicuous here; Gree might have flyers over before long. Some crevice on the way back. H e squirmed back from the edge and automatically looked around before getting up. He saw something against one of the white peaks. Dots; in a line, seeming to rise from the mountainside. He grunted a warning to Fazzool, and let his mind race over the way behind them. No cover near enough. He watched the dots begin to scatter in all directions, including this. It would have to be the basin, and fast. He got some bad bumps sliding down, and again envied Fazzool his tough hide. They got to the first bushes and he looked back. The sun, at its present angle, didn't make their trail too conspicuous. They separated until they could just keep track of each other, and crawled under bushes. Minutes passed. Steve got out some cooked meat and chewed on it; swigged water. They'd have to stay here until dark, at least, if they weren't discovered before. While he had the chance, he noticed the fly-eyes in the shrubs around him. They had some kind of symbiosis with the plants, as he'd begun to guess. There were immature ones attached to (maybe growing out of) twigs, matured ones leaving and others coming to attach themselves. In the grass were dead ones, with something like ants working on them. Whoever had set this up had been thorough. They reproduced here -- that kept them coming back -- and they even died here, to provide fertilizer. He was sure they brought some kind of visual impressions, whether anyone ever read them any more or not. There was no telling how long the thing had been selfperpetuating. Mechanical, weapons could rust or wear out, or be ruined by earthquakes, or lose their charges. An ecology like this might go on doing its job for eons. He was pretty sure it wasn't intended for a system of defense -- what defense couldn't be breached? -- but for an alarm. The chances were that the objects rising from the mountain meant the alarm had been heard. But they still didn't necessarily know anyone had crossed the moat. He wasn't surprised, though, when a number of the objects ringed the basin and descended into it. They were a little bigger than Gree sentry globes. He lay perfectly still, but they set up a search pattern and nosed him out quickly. One hovered and incinerated a small circle of ground a few feet from him. There was no use pretending he didn't get the message. He crawled out and stood up, feeling more disgust than anything else. He'd just gotten too used to his luck, and stretched it too far. Interrogation was the least he could expect; vivisection the worst. Fortunately, he could tell all he knew about Gree and enjoy it. They let the globes herd them toward the mound in the center. When they were near it and enringed by the globes, dirt broke upward from the top of the mound and a humanoid figure appeared, obviously supported and protected by some kind of a field. Steve gasped and had to fight panic and the old feel of guilt; the residue of old conditioning. Fazzool gave a choked cry and dropped to his knees, covering his face. The figure was that of Gree. H e was able to put down the old conditioning and look at the humanoid. He still had plenty to worry about. The Gree figure he'd seen -- once -- had been a fraud; a semi-living body in which a non-organic entity disguised itself. That was designed to produce love and awe in slaves. His mind stumbled over various possibilities. Had this whole thing been a fraud, to dig out traitors or spies? But this humanoid was studying him with curiosity rather than anger or triumph. And he wasn't gotten up like Gree. He wore a simple overall garment, without the Gree insignia of four verticals and a horizontal to represent a hand. None of the precious-metal cloth, the whiterthan-white scarf at the throat. The beard was more practicably trimmed. The hair was the same; curly, black with a few white strands; but the two six-inch blunt ended horns that rose from it were not inlaid with gems. A sudden thought struck him. Maybe this was the Old Race! Maybe Gree had simply adopted the form, for its obvious impressiveness. It was impressive. Fazzool was huddled, shaking, muttering thickly, "Gree lives! Gree lives  # Steve knew the agony. A second figure, much like the first, rose from the mound. Steve looked for a minute, and an explosive laugh burst from him. He reached out and roughly pulled Fazzool's head up. "Look, old comrade! It'll hurt, but look!" Fazzool resisted, but finally opened his eyes. He tensed and made a move as if to get up, but knelt there, trembling. "Two? Two? I -- I'm insane! I ought to be -- " A spasm took him. When it abated, he got slowly to his feet and faced Steve. He looked murderous. "So. Yes; I remember." He moved suddenly toward Steve, knife flashing. Steve hurled himself aside. But another spasm seized the B'lant and he collapsed, moaning. Globes movhe collapsed, moaning. The two figures on the mound were watching with puzzled looks. The voice of one came to him faintly, "They thought we were gods. But what happened?" I t took a moment to register with Steve that he understood the words. He stood a moment, completely bewildered. That language -- allowing for difference in vocal equipment -- that language, he knew as well as B'lant or English. Excitement surged through him. He took a step forward, remembered the IF globes, and stopped. He raised his voice. "We're not primitives! I don't serve Gree. I'm here as a spy for the Birds of Effogus!" They looked as astounded as he must have a moment before. The one who'd spoke gestured, and the globes urged Steve forward. "The Birds of Effogus? What is Gree?" "An empire," Steve said, "trying to enslave the whole galaxy. The rulers are from outside. They're non-organic. The Birds of Effogus are resisting. Most of my race is enslaved, but the Birds rescued my own ancestors, and I fight with them. And -- " The spokesman interrupted. "The Birds are fighting? They've -- have they taken up science again? Military science?" "Why... yes." The spokesman sighed. "I'm sorry to hear their philosophy has bumped into the facts of nature. Though my branch of the race predicted it." Steve said, "I'm afraid I don't understand." The humanoid looked at him for a moment. "Don t you know the name of this planet and the star it circles?" "No." The humanoid said, "This was Effogus." S teve was much annoyed that he got so little chance to talk to his custodians. They lent him tapes to keep himself occupied, and fed him well, but the waiting was almost unbearable. Finally they took him to see the spokesman again, in an office one wall of which was an image of the galaxy, seen from outside. It made him nervous. The humanoid noticed. and smiled. "We'll deliver you home. Your friend had better go separately, by the way. He's well and we've straightened him out, but it'll take time for him to forgive you." ' Steve said uncomfortably, "Yes. I, er, had to do it." "We understand." There was a silence which Steve couldn't stand long. "Well... will you be helping us against Gree?" The other shook his head. "I'm afraid not. We're no logger of your galaxy, and there are considerations I can't discuss. We can't even give you weapons." Steve scowled, but could hardly argue. "At least, I hope you won't let Gree have Effogus!" "We won't let Gree have it, or take anything useful away with him, or find it again. There's not much there in the way of weapons. It's a portal and a warning system; also a decoy. We do keep some watch on your galaxy." He stood up. "I'm afraid we'll have to say good-by now; your transportation is waiting." He smiled, a little mischievously. "I have been authorized to give you one thing. If the Birds have really given up their Dionysian dreams, they'll learn things from it that will have military uses." He extended a small package. "Well... I don't know what to say, except thanks. What is it?" "Certainly. It's grass seed. You're acquainted with this particular kind IF  Serial Across the universe the great cloucs of galaxies trembled -- echoing the strife that raged between two menl T he revolution on the planet Ray-See-Nee was over and Richard Seaton, disguised under the identity of Ky-El Mokak, was ready to take the one tactical move for which all the effort and struggle on the planet had been only the preliminaries. But first he needed to know what had happened to his shipmates and friends; he had been busy enough fighting his own fights and taking his own prisoners to have temporarily lost sight of them. Wherefore, in Ray-See-Nee's pal? atial Capitol Building, in the Room of State -- which, except for the absence of an actual throne, was in effect a throne-room -- Seaton turned his prisoner over to a guard and rounded up his own crew, so The deadliest enemies fh the universe are Richard Seaton and Marc C. DuQuesne... but they have patched together their feud in order to join forces against strange enemies from another galaxy. Seaton enters the partnership with open eyes. He knows that Blackie DuQuesne is his enemy. But he also knows that, next to Seaton himself, DuQuesne is the ablest human being alive-nd his brains and fighting fury will be needed. DuQuesne, on the other hand, had lost to Seaton too many times to risk a move against him now -- until he has made sure of having every advantage he can get. It is not morality that keeps him from an attempt to stab Seaton in the back. It is pure prudence. But when he meets the race called the Jelmi, and learns from them the secret of the "gizmo" -- the fourth-dimensional translator which permits him to strike anywhere in the universe without warning -- he decides that the advantages are with him. Six hired gunmen are dispatched through the eerie realm of the fourth dimension into Seaton's spaceship, the Skylark , with orders to gun down Seaton and his five associates. They fail; but in failing they warn Seaton that DuQuesne has pulled a doublecross. Now Seaton's enemies are multiplied. Not only the strange winged-lizard-like creatures called the Llurdi, not only the beings whose life goes on in an atmosphere of pure halogenous gases, the Chlorans -- but DuQuesne, more powerful than ever -- and more determined. For DuQuesne possesses every secret of weapon and strategy known to Seaton himself -- and he is coldly determined to use them all, to win a universe for his empire! that they could look each other over and compare notes. Sitar, limping badly but with fur coat still glossily immaculate, proudly displayed a left leg bandaged from the knee all the way up. "A slash from here, clear down to there." The Osnomian princess ran a fore-finger along a line six or seven inches long. "And a bullet right through there. That was the gaudiest fight I was ever in in my whole life!" Diinark, whose right arm was in a sling, spoke up. "She got that slash saving my life. I'd just taken this one through the shoulder -- " he pointed -- "and was paralyzed for a second. So she kicked her leg up in the way -- while she was flipping a gun around to blow this guy apart, you know -- so his knife went into her leg instead of my neck." "Yes, but go on and tell them about how many times you -- " Sitar began. "Sh-h-h-h,' Dunark said, and she subsided. "Maybe some day we'll write a book. How about you, Mart? I notice you've been standing up all the time." 'Til be standing up or lying on my face for a while, I guess." "But that wouldn't account for the cane," Seaton objected. "Come clean, guy." "One through the hip -- thigh, rather, low down -- no bones brok en. Shiro, who had a broken arm, would not talk at first, but they finally got the story out of him. His last opponent had been just too big and too strong and too well trained to be easy meat, but Shiro had finally got him with a leg-lock around the neck. "But how about you, Dick?" Shiro asked. "Whoever wrapped you up must get hospital supplies at wholesale." Seaton grinned. "She had only one patient." He told his own story, then went on, "Since we can all walk, let's go over and see what thev're finding out." Ree-Toe Prenk had said that he wanted all thirty-one of the department heads taken alive if possible; but he had known that it would not be possible. He was surprised and highlv pleased, in fact, that only six of the Hish Exalteds had been killed or had taken their own lives. There is no need to go into the details of that questioning. Seaton took no part in any of it; nor did any of his group. He did not offer to help and Prenk did not ask him. Nor is it necessary to describe the operation outside the palace. The rebels had learned much from their previous failure, and they now had all the arms, ammunition and supplies they needed. Thus, before sunset that day, every known quisling had been shot and every suspect was under surveillance. Premier ReeToe Prenk sat firmly in the Capitol City's saddle; and whoever controlled that city always controlled the world. H ours before control was assured, however, Prenk called Seaton. "About the daily report to Chloran headquarters that is due in half an hour," the new Premier said. "I am wondering if you have any ideas. Our ordinary reports are not dangerous to make, since they are made to underlings whose only interest in the human race is to encode and file our reports properly. But, since their automatic instruments have recorded much of this change of government, it will have to be reported in detail. And a Great One, or even a Greater Great One, may become interested, in which case the reporter's mind may be searched." Prenk looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "There's no use trying to gloss it over. In an event like this the Greatest Great One himself will very probably become interested and the reporter will die on the spot. In any case, even with an ordinary Great One, his mind will be shattered for life." IF "I see," Seaton said. "I didn't think of it, but I'm not surprised. We've tangled with Chlorans before. But cheer up; I've got news for you. I locked eyes with their Supreme Great One... "You didn't!" Prenk broke in, in amazement. "You actually did?" "I actually did, and I knocked him -- it? -- loose from his teeth." Regretfully Seaton added, "But we can't make a battle out of this." He scowled in concentration for a minute, then went on, "Okay, there's more than one way to stuff a goose. I'll make the report. Let's go." TTherefore, twenty-five minutes   later, Seaton sat at an ultracommunicator panel in Communications, ready to flip a switch. The reporter whose shift it was stood off to one side, out of the cone of vision of the screen. Crane sat -- gingerly, sidewise, and on a soft pillow -- well within the cone of visibility of the screen, at what looked like an ordinary communications panel, but was in fact a battery of all the analytical instruments known to the science of Norlamin. "But, Your Exalted," said the highly nervous reporter. "I'm very glad indeed, that you're doing this instead of me, but won't they notice that it isn't me? And probably do something about it?" "I'm sure they won't." Seaton had already considered the point. "I doubt very much, in view of their contempt for other races, if they ever bother to differentiate between any one human being and any other one. Like us and beetles." The reporter breathed relief. "They probably don't, sir, at that They don't seem to pay any attention to us as individuals." Seaton braced himself and, exactly on the tick of time, flipped the switch. Knowing that the amoeboidf could assume any physical form they pleased and a matter of course assumed the form most suitable for the job, he was not surprised to see that the filing clerk looked like am overgrown centipede with a hundred or so long, flexible tentacles ending in three-fingered "hands" -- a dozen or so of which were manipulating the gadgetry of a weirdly complex instrument-panel. He was somewhat surprised, however, in spite of what he had been told, that the thing did not develop an eye and look at him; did not even direct a thought at him. Instead: "I am ready, slave," a deep bass voice rolled from the speaker, in the language of Prenk's planet RaySee-Nee. "Start the tape." Seaton pressed a button; the tape began to travel through the sender. For perhaps five minutes nothing happened. Then the sender stopped and a deeper, heavier voice came from the speaker: a voice directed at the filing clerk, but using Rayseenese... Why? Seaton wondered to himself. Oh, I see . Soften 'em up. Scare the pants off of 'em , then put on the screws. "Yield, clerk," the new voice said. "I yield with pleasure, O Great One," the clerk replied, and went rigidly motionless; not moving a finger or a foot. # , "It pleases me to study this matter myself' the giant voice went on as though the clerk had not spoken. "While slight, the possibility does exist that some of these verminous creatures "have dared to plot against the Race Supreme. If this is merely another squabble among themselves for place it is of no interest; but if there is any trace of non-submission, vermin and city will cease to exist. I shall learn the deepest truth. They can make lying tapes, but no entity of this or of any other galaxy can lie to a Great One mind to mind." While the Great One talked, the picture on the screen began ' to change. The clerk began to fade out and something else began to thicken in. And Seaton, knowing what was coming, set himself in earnest and brought into play that part of his multi-compartmented mind that was the contribution of Drasnik, the First of Psychology of Norlamin. T his coming interview, he knew, must be vastly different from his meeting with the Supreme Great One of Chlora One. That had been a wide-open, hammer-and-tongs battle: a battle of sheer power of mind. Here it would have to be a matter of delicacy of control; of precision and of nicety and of skill as well as of power. He would have to play his mind as exactly and as subtly as Dorothy played her Stradivarius, for if the monster came to suspect any iota of the truth all hell would be out for noon with no pitch hot. The screen cleared and Seaton saw what he had known he would see; a large, flatly ellipsoidal mass of something that was not quite a jelly nor quite a solid; a monstrosity through whose transparent outer membrane there was visible, a large, intricately convoluted brain. As Seaton looked at the thing it developed an immense eye, from which there poured directly into Seaton's brain a beam of mental energy, so incredibly powerful as to be almost tangible physically. Braced as he was, every element of the man's mind quivered under the impact of that callously harddriven probe; but by exerting all his tremendous mental might he took it. More, he was able to hold his Drasnik-taught defenses so tightly as to reveal only and precisely what the Great One expected to find -- utter helplessness and abject submission. That probe was not designed to kill. Or rather, the Great One did not care in the least whether it killed or not. It was intended to elicit the complete truth; and from any ordinary human mind it did. "Can you lie to me, slave?" That tremendous voice resounded throughout every chamber of Seaton's mind. "Or withhold from me any iota of the truth?" "I cannot lie to you, O Great One; nor withhold from you any iota, however small, of the truth." This took everything of camouflage and of defensive screen Seaton had; but he managed to reveal no sign at all of any of it. "How much do you personally know, not of the details of the coup d'etat itself, but of the motivation underlying it?" # # "Everything, O Great One, since I was Premier Ree-Toe Prenk's righthand man,' and Seaton reported the exact truth of Prenk's motivation and planning. The Great One's probe vanished, the screen went dark, and the sender resumed its sending. "Huh!" Seaton wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. "This dope isn't of any interest, clerk old boy, so just file it away and forget it,' His Nibs says. It's a good thing lie was after Prenk's motivation, not mine. If he'd really bored in after mine I don't know whether I could have kept things all nice and peaceful or not. I knew I'd been nudged, believe you me." "I believe you," Crane said, looking into his friend's eyes. "Are you sure you're all right?" And: The reporter goggled in awe. "And you can still talk intelligently, sir?" "Yeah." Seaton answered both questions at once, but did not elaborate. "What did you get, Mart? Anything?" "I learned where it is," said Crane. Nothing else. Small reward for weeks of effort and risk of life... and yet it was for that the entire campaign on the planet Ray-See-Nee had been waged! The whole operation had been designed to get that one fact. A people had been given new hope; some hundreds had lost their lives; many thousands had received scars they would bear a long time; a regime had been deposed and a new one put in power. But these were only by-products, only the small change of a victory which justified all of Seaton's efforts... and would have its consequences in every part of the Universe, for incalculable times to come! Llanzlan Mergon R ay-See-Nee's new department heads, in their meeting with Premier Ree-Toe Prenk in the Room of State, were in unanimous agreement that everything was under control. Some quislings and recalcitrants had been shot and a few more would probably have to be. That was only to be expected. Yes, since all of the new incumbents had been jumped many grades in status and in authority and in salary, there was and would continue to be a certain amount of jealousy; but that was not of very much importance. The jealous ones would either accept the facts of life or be shot. Period. After the meeting was over KayLee Barlo came up to Seaton. She now bore herself as though she had been born an Exalted; her ex-boss pistol swung jauntily at one very female hip as she walked. As she came up to him and took both his hands in hers, standing so close to him that her upstanding, outstanding hair-do almost tickled his nose, it became evident that her weapon had been fired quite recently. She wore no perfume, and the faint but unmistakable acrid odor of burned smokeless powder still clung to her hair. "Oh, Ky-El!" she exclaimed, equal to equal now. "I'll simply never be IF able to thank you enough. Nor will all Ray-See-Nee. This world will be an entirely different place to live on hereafter." "I sincerely hope so, Kay-Lee." Seaton smiled into the girl's eager, expressive face. "Ray-See-Nee is lucky to have had as strong, able and just a man as Ree-Toe Prenk to take over." "As you said a while back, 'You can say that again.' He's all of that. What he's done already is marvelous. But everyone knows -- he does, too, he's put you up on a pedestal a mile high -- that it's you who put him in the saddle. That's what I wanted mostly to tell you. Also, I wanted to ask you -- " she paused and flushed slightly -- "you'll forget, won't you please, what I said about that louse's brains? I didn't mean that, really; I'm not the type to cherish a grudge like that. I was a little... well, I'd been a little put out with him, just before you came in." With which masterpiece of understatement she gave his hands another vigorous, friendly squeeze and, swinging around, walked hipwiggling out of the room. She thereupon took certain steps and performed certain actions which would have astonished Seaton very much, had he known about them. But he did not -- until much later. Prenk came up to the Skylarkers a few minutes later. He shook hands with each of the off-worlders; thanked them in rounded phrases. "I would like very much to have you stay here indefinitely, friends," he concluded, "but I know of course that that is impossible. If all the resources of the world could be devoted to the project and if all our technical men could work on it undetected for a year, we could not build anything able to withstand those Chlorans' beams." "We can't either. Not here," Seaton said. "That's why we have to go; but we'll be back. I don't know when; but we'll be back some day." "I'm sure you will: and may Great My-Ko-Ta ward you and cherish you as you build." B ack on what was left of their worldlet, now reconditioned to the extent that it was not likely to fall apart on the spot, and out in deep space once more, the Skylarkers began efficiently and expertly to put the pieces of their victory together. They had located the Enemy. They even had an operating covert base in Chloran territory, to which they could return at any time. They had weapons which, in theory at least, could cope with anything the Chlorans were likely to own. Yet Seaton fretted. The weapons were there, but his control was not adequate; the weapons had outgrown the control. Dealing with Chlorans was touchy business. You wanted all the space you could get between you and them. Yet. at any operating range which even Seaton, to say nothing of Crane and the others, considered safe, their striking power was simply too erratic to denend on. "It's a bust," Seaton said gloomily. "Course, if worst came to worst I could go back to undercover methods. Smuggle in a bomb, maybe -- # just to throw their main centers off balance while the rest of you hit them with all we've got. I could stow away aboard one of those ore-scows taking the booty off Ray-See-Nee easily enough -- " "You talk like a man with a paper nose." Dorothy scoffed. "I have a picture of that expedition -- of you in armor, with air-tanks strapped on your back and lugging an underwater camera or projector around. Un-noticed... I don't think." And Dunark added, "And since you haven't got any idea of what to look for, you'd have to lug around a full analsynth set-up. A couple of tons of stuff. Uh-uh." Seaton grinned, unperturbed. : "That's what I was coming to. Getting in would be easy, but doing anything wouldn't. And neither iwould getting out. But Mart, we've .chopped one horn off of the dilem; ma, but we haven't even touched the other. We've got to master that fourth-dimension rig; and we're not even close. It's a matter of kind , not merely of degree." "I can't see that. If so, we could not have warded off their attack at all." "Oh, I didn't mean the energies themselves; it's the control of that much stuff. Synchronization, phasing in, combination, and so forth. Getting such stuff as that closely enough together and holding it closely enough together. Look, Mart. This bit that we've got left of the Valeron is stuffed with machinery practically to the skin. She's so small, relatively, that you wouldn't think there'd be any trouble meshing in machines from various parts of her. But there is. Plenty. It never showed up before because we never had to use a fraction of our total power before, but it showed up plenty back there. My beam was loose as ashes, and I've figured out why. "Sixth-order stuff moves as many times faster than light as light does faster than a snail -- maybe j more. But it still takes a little time to get from one machine to another, inside even as small a globe as this is. See?" Crane frowned in thought. "I see. I also see what the difficulties would be in anything large enough and strong enough to attack the Chlorans. It would mean timing each generator and each element of each projector; and each with a permissible variation of an infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond. That, of course, means Rovol and Caslor." "I suppose it does... unless we can figure out an easier, faster way... I don't know whether the Chlorans have got anything like that or not, but they've got something. There ought to be some way of snitching it off of them." "Why must they have?" Dunark demanded. "It's probably just a matter of size. They have a whole planet to fortify. Dozens of 'em if they want to. So it doesn't have to be a matter of refinement at all. Just brutal, piled up, overwhelming power." "Could be," Seaton agreed. "If so, we can't match it, since the Valeron was as big as she could be and still have a factor of safety of two point two." He paused in thought, then went on, "But with such refineIF ment, we could take a planet, no matter how loaded it was... I think. So maybe we'd better take off for Norlamin, at that." "One thing we should do first, perhaps," Dorothy suggested. "Find out what that DuQuesne really did. He has me worried." "Maybe we should, at that," Seaton agreed. "I'd forgotten all about the big black ape." I t was easy enough to find the line along which DuQuesne had traveled; the plug-chart was proof that he had not lied about that. They reached without incident the neighborhood of the point DuQuesne had marked on the chart. Seaton sent out a working projection of the device that, by intercepting and amplifying light-waves traversing open space, enabled him actually to see events that had happened in the not-too distant past. He found the scene he wanted. He studied it, analyzed and recorded it. Then: "He lied to me almost a hundred and eighty degrees," Seaton said. "That beam came from that galaxy over there." He jerked a thumb. "The alien who bothered him was in that galaxy. That much I'll buy. But it doesn't make sense that he'd go there. That alien was nobody he wanted to monkey with, that's for dead sure. So where did he meet the Jelmi, if not in that galaxy?" "On the moon, perhaps," Margaret said. "Possibly. I'll compute it... no, the timing isn't right -- " Seaton thought for a moment -- "but there's no use guessing. That galaxy may be the first place to look for sign; but I'll bet my case buck it'll be a long, cold hunt. I'd like awfully well to have that gizmo -- flip bombs past the Chlorans' screens and walls with it..." "From a distance greater than their working range?" Crane asked. "That's so, too... or maybeso, at that, chum. Who knows what you can do through the fourth? But it looks as though our best bet is to beat it to Norlamin, rebuild this wreck, and tear into that business of refinement of synchronization. So say you all?" So said they all and Seaton, flipping on full-power sixth-order drive, set course for Norlamin A s the student will be aware, the events in this climactic struggle between the arch-enemies, Seaton and DuQuesne, were at this point reaching an area of maximum tension. It is curious to reflect that the outer symptom of this internal disruptive stress was, in the case of nearly every major component of the events to come, a psychological state of either satisfied achievement, or contented decision, or calm resignation. It is as though each of the major operatives were suffering from a universe-wide sense of false tranquility. On Ray-See-Nee, the new government felt its problems were behind it and only a period of solid, rewarding rebuilding lay ahead. (Although Kay-Lee Barlo had taken certain prudent precautions against this hope being illusory -- as we shall see.) The Chlorans, proud and scornful in their absolute supremacy, had no nini that Seaton or anyone else was making or even proposed to make any effective moves against them. The Fenachrone, such few weary survivors as remained of them, had given themselves over to -- not despair, no; but a proud acceptance of the fact that they were doomed. There was in fact no tranquility in store for any of them! But they had not yet found that out. Meanwhile the Jelmi, for example, were just beginning to feel the first itch of new challenges. In their big new space-rover, the Mallidaxian , Savant Tammon was as nearly perfectly happy as it is possible for a human or humanoid to be. He had made the greatest breakthrough of his career; perhaps the greatest breakthrough of all history. Exploring its many ramifications and determining its many as yet unsuspected possibilities would keep him busy for the rest of his life. Wherefore he was working fourteen or fifteen hours every day and reveling in every minute of it. He hummed happily to himself; occasionally he burst into song -- in a voice that was decidedly not of grand-operatic quality. He had enlarged his private laboratory by tearing out four storerooms adjoining it; and the whole immense room was stacked to the ceiling with new apparatus and equipment. He was standing on a narrow catwalk, rubbing his bristly chin with the back of his hand as he wondered where he could put another two-ton tool, when Mergon and Luloy came swinging in; hand in hand as usual. Vastly different from Tammon, Mergon was not at all happy about the status quo. "Listen, Tamm!" he burst out. "I've been yapping at you for a week and a half for a decision and your time is up as of right now. If you don't pull your head out of the fourth dimension and make it right now I'll do it myself and to hell with you and your authority as Captain-Commander." "Huh? What? Time? Decision? What decision?" It was plain that the old savant had no idea at all of what his first assistant was so wrought up about. "You set course for Mallidax and said we were going back to Mallidax. That's sheer idiocy and you know it. Of all places in the charted universe we should not go to, Mallidax is top and prime. We're too close for comfort already. Even though Klazmon must have lost us back there in Sol's system, he certainly picked us up again long ago and he'd give both wings and all his teeth for half the stuff you have here," and Mergon waved both arms indicatively around the jampacked room. "Oh?" Tammon gazed owlishly at the pair. "There was some talk... but why should I care where we go? This is the merest trifle, Mergon, and this work is important. You will attend to all such matters, Mergon. Do not bother me with trivia any more," and Tammoa cut communications with them as definitely as though he had thrown a switch. IF Mergon shrugged his shoulders and Luloy giggled. "You're it, boy. That's what you get for sticking your neck out. All hail our new Captain-Commander!" "Well, somebody had to. All our necks would have been in slings in another week. So pass the word, will you, and I'll skip up to the control room and change course." L uloy spread the word; which was received with acclaim. Practically everybody aboard who was anybody agreed with Sennlloy when she said, "It's high time somebody took over and Merg's undoubtedly the best man for the job. Tammy's a nice old dear, but ever since he got bitten by that fourthdimension germ he hasn't known what month it is or which way is of where he is in space." "You see, Merg?" Luloy crowed, when it became evident that the shift in command was heartily approved. "I wouldn't even dream of ever saying 'I told you so', but I said at the first meeting that you should be Captain-Commander, and now everybody thinks so, almost." "Yeah, almost," he agreed; not at all enthusiastically. "Everybody except the half-wits. Pass the buck. Let George do it. Nobody with a brain firing on three barrels wants the job." "Why, that isn't so, Merg. You know it isn't!" she protested, indignantly. "Well,  don't want it," he broke in, "but since Tamm wished it onto me I'll take a crack at it." The Mallidaxian , swinging wide and braking down, hard, skirted the outermost edge of the Realm; the edge farthest away from Llurdiax. Mergon did not approach or signal to any planet of the Jelmi. Instead, he picked out an uninhabited Tellustype planet four solar systems away from the Border and landed on it. And there, under cover of the superdreadnaught's mighty defensive screens and with Captain-Commander Mergon tensely on watch, the engineers and scientists disembarked, set up their high-order projectors, and went furiously to work building an enormous and enormously powerful dome. The work went on uninterruptedly, day after day; for so many days that both Mergon and Luloy became concerned -- the girl very highly so. "Do you suppose we've figured wrong?" she asked. Mergon frowned. "I can't be sure, of course, but I don't think so. Pure logic, remember. Everything we've done has been designed to keep Klazmon guessing. Off balance. He's fortified Llurdiax, that's sure, but we don't know how heavily and we can't find out." He paused. "Without using the gizmo, which of course is out," said Luloy. "Check. We haven't sent any spyrays or anything else. They wouldn't have got us anything. But he certainly expected us to try. He'll think we don't care... which as a matter of fact, we don't... too much. It's almost a mathematical certainty that we can handle anything he can throw at us as of now. But if we give him time enough to build more really big stuff it'll be just too bad." "And the horrible old monster is probably doing just exactly that," Luloy said. "I wouldn't wonder. But we can finish the dome before he can build enough stuff, and he can't let that happen. Especially since we're not interfering with his prying and spying, but are treating him with the same contempt he used to treat us. That'll bother him no end. Burn him up! Also... remember that stuff in the dome that no Llurd can possibly understand." Luloy laughed. "Because it isn't anything whatever, really, except Llurd-bait? I'm scared that maybe they will understand it yet -- even though I'm sure they won't." "They can't. Their minds won't stretch that far in that direction," Mergon said positively. "They knew we made a breakthrough, so they'll know that what they see is only a fraction of what the thing really is; and that'll scare 'em. As much as Llurdi can be scared, that is. Which isn't very much. So Klazmon will do something before our dome is finished. As I read the tea-leaves, he'll have to." "But just suppose he doesn't take the bait?" "Then we'll have to take the initative. I don't want to -- it'd weaken our bargaining position tremendously -- but I will if I have to." H e did not have to. His analysis of the Llurdan mentality and temperament had been accurate. Four full days before the scheduled date of completion of the dome, Klazmon's full working projection appeared in the Mallidaxiaris control room. Mergon had detected its coming, but had done nothing to interfere with it. The Llurd quite obviously intended parley, not violence. "Hail, brother llanzlan, Klazmon of the Llurdi," Mergon greeted his visitor quietly, but in the phraseology of one ruler greeting another on the basis of unquestionable equality. "Is there perhaps some service that I, Llanzlan Mergon of the Realm of the Jelmi, may perform for you and thus place you in my debt?" This, to a human dictator, would have been effrontery intolerable; but Mergon had been pretty sure that it would have little or no effect, emotionally, upon Klazmon. Nor did it; to all seeming it had no effect at all. The Llurd merely said, "You wish me to believe that you Jelmi have made a breakthrough sufficiently important to justify the establishment of an independent but coexistent Realm of the Jelmi." This was in no sense a question; it was a flat statement. Mergon had been eminently correct in his assumption that he would not have lo draw the Llurd a blueprint. Mergon quirked an eyebrow at Luloy, who pressed the button that signaled all the savants in the dome to drop their tools and dash back into the ship. "That is correct," Mergon said. Klazmon's projection remained motionless and silent; both Jelmi could almost perceive the Llurd's thoughts. And Mergon, who had IF tracked the Llurd's thoughts so unerringly so far, was practically certain that he was still on track. Klazmon did not actually know whether the Jelmi had made a breakthrough or not. The Jelmi intended to make him believe that they had, and that breakthrough was something that made them either invulnerable or invincible, or both. Any of those matters or assumptions could be either true or false. One of them, the question of invulnerability, could be and should be tested without delay If they were in fact invulnerable, # possible attack could harm them. If they were not invulnerable they were bluffing and lying and should therefore be eliminated. Wherefore Mergon was not surprised when Klazmon's projection vanished without having said another word -- nor when, an instant after that vanishment, the Mallidaxiaris mighty defensive screens Glared white. They did not even pause at the yellow or the yellow-white, but went directly to the blinding white; to the degree of radiance at which the vessel's spare began automatically to cut in -- spare after spare after spare. After staring in silence for two long minutes, Mergon said, "We figured their most probable maximum offense and applied a factor of safety of three -- and look at 'em!" White-faced, Luloy licked her lips. "Mighty Llenderllon!" she cried. "How can they possibly deliver such an attack 'way out here?" Then Mergon picked up his microphone and said, "Our screens are still holding and they're protecting the dome; but we're going to need a lot more defense. So go back out there, please, and give me everything you can." He then sat back and stared tightjawed at the ever-climbing needles of his meters and at the unchanging vessel's screens. XX The Geas A s the Llurd's attack mounted to higher and ever higher plateaus of fury, Mergon slid along his bench to his fourth-dimensional controls and there appeared on the floor beside him a lithium-hydride fusion bomb, armed and ready. He stared at it, his jaw-muscles tightening into lumps. Luloy stared at the thing, too, and her face became even paler than it had been. "But could you, Merg?" she asked, through stiff lips. "I... I mean, you couldn't, possibly... could you?" "I don't know," he said harshly, scarcely separating locked teeth. "I may have to whether I can or not. We had a factor of safety of three. Two point nine of them are in now and the last tenth is starting up. The dome can't put out more than that." "I know! But if we blow the llanzlanate up, won't they kill all the Jelmi of all our worlds and start breeding a more tractable race of slaves?" IF "That's the way I read it. In that case we eight hundred could get away clean and start a better civilization somewhere out of range." She shuddered. "In that case would life be worth living?" "It's a tough decision to make... since the alternative could be for us to kill all the Llurdi." "Oh, no!" she cried. "But don't you think, Merg, that he'll cooperate? They're absolutely logical, you know." "Maybe. In one way I think so, but I simply can't see any absolute ruler making such an abject surrender. However, we've got to decide right now and we'll have to stick to our decision -- we both know that he can't be bluffed. If it comes right down to it we can do one of three things. First, commit suicide for our whole eight hundred by not touching the bomb off. Second, wipe them out. Third, let them wipe out all Jelmi except us. What's your vote?" "Llenderllon help me! Put that way, there's -- oh, look!" she screamed , in a miraculously changed tone of voice. "The master-meter! It's slowing down! It's going to stop!" She uttered an ear-splitting shriek of pure joy and hurled herself into her husband's arms. "It's stabilized, for a fact," Mergon said, after their emotions had subsided to something approaching normal. "He's throwing everything he's got at us. We're holding him, but just barely, so the question is -- " "One thing first," she broke in. "My vote. I hate to say it, but we can't let them kill our race." He put his arm around her and squeezed. "That's what I was sure you'd say. The question now is, how long do we let him stew in his own juice before we skip over there and talk peace terms?" "Not long enough to let him build more generators than we can to fry us with," she replied, promptly if a bit unclearly. "One day? Half a day? A quarter?" "But long enough to let him know he's licked," Mergon said. "I'd say one full day would be just about right. So let's go get us some sleep." "Sleep! Llenderllon's eyeballs! Can you even think of such a thing as sleep after all this?" "Certainly I can. So can you -- you're all frazzled out. Come on girl, we're hitting the sheets." "Why, I won't be able to sleep a wink until this is all over!" But she was wrong; in ten minutes they were both sleeping the sleep of exhaustion. T welve hours later she came suddenly awake, rolled over toward him, and shook him vigorously by the shoulder. "Wake up, you!" He grumbled something and tried to pull away from her grip. She shook him again. "Wake up, you great big oaf! Suppose that beast Klazmon has got more generators builtand our screens are all failing?" He opened one eye. "If they fad, sweet, we won't know a thing about it." He opened the other eye and, three-quarters awake now, went on, "Do you think I'm running this ship single-handed? What do you think the other officers are for?" "But they aren't you," she declared, with completely feminine illogic where her husband was concerned. "So hurry up and get up and we'll go see for ourselves." "Okay, but not 'til after breakfast, if I have to smack you down. So punch us up a gallon of coffee, huh? And a couple slabs of ham and six or eight eggs? Then we'll go see." They ate and went and saw. The screens still flared at the same blinding white, but there were no signs of overloading or of failure. They could, the Third Officer bragged, keep it up fof years. Everything was under control. "You hope," Mergon said -- but not to the officer. He said that under his breath as he and Luloy turned away toward their own station. Much to Mergon's relief, nothing happened during the rest of the day, and at the end of the twenty-fourth hour he sent the actual bomb and working projections of himself and Luloy into the llanzlanate. Into the llanzlan's private study, where Klazmon was hard at work. It was an immense room, and one in which a good anthropologist could have worked delightedly for weeks. The floor was bare, hard, smoothpolished; fantastically inlaid in metal and colored quartz and turquoise and jade. The pictures -- framed mostly in extruded stainless steel -- portrayed scenes (?) and things (?) and events (?) never perceived by any Earthly sense and starkly incomprehensible to any Earthly mind. The furniture was... "weird" is the only possible oneword description. Every detail of the room proclaimed that here was the private retreat of a highly talented and very eminent member of a culture that was old, wide and high. "Hail, Llanzlan Klazmon," Mergon said quietly, conversationally. "You will examine this bomb, please, to make sure that, unlike us two, it is actual and practical." T he Llurd's eyes had bulged a little and the tip of his tail had twitched slightly at the apparition. That was all. He picked up an instrument with a binocular eyepiece, peered through it for a couple of seconds, and put it down. "It is actual and practical," he agreed. Whatever emotions may have been surging through the llanzlan's mind, his control was superb. He did not ask them how they had done it, or why, or any other question. After the event he knew much and could guess more -- and he was perhaps the starkest realist of the most starkly realistic race of intelligent beings yet known to live. "You realize, of course, that we do not intend to fire it except as the ultimately last resort." "I do now." "Ah, yes. Our conduct throughout has surprised you; especially that we did not counterattack." "If not exactly surprised, at least did not anticipate that Jelmi would or could act with practically Llurdan logic," the Llurd conceded. "We can. And when we think it best, we do. We suggest that you cut off your attack. We will then IF put on air-suits and return here in person, to discuss recent developments as reasoning and logical entities should." The Llurd was fast on the uptake. He knew that, given time, he could crush this threat; but he knew that he would not have the time. He could see ahead as well as Mergon could to the total destruction of two hundred forty more planets. Wherefore he barked a couple of syllables at a com and the furiously incandescent screens of the Mallidaxian went cold and dark. Jelmi and bomb disappeared. Mergon and Luloy donned gas-tight, self-contained, plastic-helmeted coveralls and reappeared in the Llanzlan's study. Klazmon seated them courteously in two Jelman easychairs -- which looked atrociously out of place in that room -- and the peace conference, which was to last for days, began. "First," the llanzlan said, "this breakthrough that you have accomplished. At what stage in the negotiations do you propose to give me the complete technical specifications of it." "Now," Mergon said, and a yardhigh stack of tapes appeared on the floor beside the Llurd's desk. It was the entire' specs and description of the fourth-dimensional translator. Nothing was omitted or obscured. "Oh? I see. There is, then, much work yet to be done on it. Work that only you Jelmi can do." "That is true, as you will learn from those tapes. Now," said Mergon, settling down to the bargaining session, "first, we have shown you that Jelmi capable of doing geniuetype work cannot be coerced into doing it. Second, the fact is that it is psychologically impossible for us to do such work under coercion. Third, we believe firmly that free and independent Jelmi can coexist with the Llurdi. Fourth, we believe equally firmly that for the best good of both races they should so coexist..." And at that first day's end, after supper, Luloy said, "Merg, I simply would not have believed it. Ever. I'm not sure I really believe it now. But you know I almost like -- I actually admire that horrible monster in some ways!" S eaton called Rovol of Rays, on Norlamin, as soon as he could reach him. He told him the story of what he had done on Ray-SeeNee, and what he hoped to gain by it, in detail, then went on to ask his help on the control of the fourtlidimensional translator. "You see, Rovol, at perfect sync it would -- theoretically -- take zero power. I don't expect the unattainable ideal, of course -- " he winked at Dorothy -- "just close enough so we can pack enough stuff into the Valeron to handle everything they can throw at us and still have enough left over to fight back with. "Ah, youth, a fascinating problem indeed. I will begin work on it at once, and will call in certain others in whose provinces some aspects of it lie. By the time you arrive here we will perhaps have determined whether or not any solution is at present possible." "What?" Seaton yelped. "Why -- I thought -- surely -- " he almost stuttered. "I thought you'd have it done by then -- maybe be sending it out to meet us, even." The old Normalinian's paternally forbearing sigh was highly expressive. "Still the heedless, thoughtless youth, in spite of all our teachings. You have not studied the problem yourself at all." "Well, not very much, I admit." "I advise you to do so. If you devote to it every period of labor between now and your arrival here you may perhaps be able to talk about it intelligently," and Rovol cut com. Dorothy whistled. She didn't whistle very often, but she could do it very expressively. "Yeah," Seaton said, ruefully. "And the old boy wasn't kidding, either." "Not having a sense of humor, he can't kid. He really slapped you on the wrist, friend. But why would it be such a horrible job to sync a few generators in?" "I don't know, but I'll find out." He went, worked for four solid hours with the Brain, and came back wearing a sheepish grin. "It's true," he reported. "I knew it'd be tricky, but I had no idea. You have to work intelligently, manipulably and reproducibly in time units of three times ten to the minus twenty-eighth of. a second -- the time it takes light of a centimeter." "Hush. You don't expect me to understand that, do you?" "I'll say I don't. I don't expect to even really understand it myself." Seaton did not work on the problem every day until arrival, but he worked on it for over a hundred hours -- enough so that he began to realize how difficult it was. The Skylark of Valeron entered the Green System, approached Norlamin, and went into orbit around it. The travelers boarded a shuttle, which thereupon began to slide down a landing-beam toward Rovol's private dock. The little craft settled gently into a neoprene-lined cup. The visitors disembarked and walked down a short flight of metallic steps, at the foot of which the ancient, whitebearded sage was waiting for them. He greeted them warmly -- for a Normalinian -- and led them through the "garden" toward the metal-andquartz palace that was his home. "Oh, Dick, isn't it wonderful !" Dorothy pressed his arm against her side. "It's so much like Orion's and yet so different..." And it was both. The acreage of velvet-short, springy grass was about the same as that upon which they had landed so long before. The imperishable-metal statuary was similar. Here also were the beds of spectacular flowers and the hedges and sculptured masses of gorgeously vari-colored plant life. The tapestry wall, however -- composed of ently moving, flashing, self-luminous jewels of all the colors of the rainbow -- ran for a good three hundred yards beside the walk. It was evident that the women of the Rovol had been working on it for hundreds IF of centuries instead of for mere hundreds of years. Instead of being only form and color, as was the wall of the Orion, it was well along toward portraying the entire history of the Family Rovol. Rovol wanted to entertain his guests instead of work, but Seaton objected. "Shame on you, Rovol. The Period of Labor is just starting, and remember how you fellows used to bat my ears down about there being definite and non-interchangeable times for work and for play and so forth?" "That is of course true, youth," Rovol agreed, equably enough. "I should not have entertained the idea for a moment. My companion will welcome the ladies and show them to your apartments. We will proceed at once to the Area of Experiment," and he called an aircar by fingering a stud at his belt. "I've been studying, as you suggested," Seaton said then. "Can the thing be solved? The more I worked on it the more dubious I got." "Yes, but the application of its solution will be neither easy nor simple." The aircar settled gently to the walk a few yards ahead of the party and Rovol and Seaton boarded it;. Rovol still talking. "But you will be delighted to know that, thanks to your gift of the metal of power, what would have been a work of lifetimes can very probably be accomplished in a few mere years." Seaton was not delighted. Knowing what Rovol could mean by the word "few", he was appalled; but there was nothing whatever he could do to speed things up. r ye spent a couple of weeks reI building the Skylark of Val eron -- with batteries of offensive and defensive weaponry where single machines had been -- then stood around and watched the Normalinians work. And as day followed day without anything being accomplished he became more and more tense and impatient. He concealed his feelings perfectly, he thought; but he should have known that he could hide nothing from the extremely percipient mind of the giri who was in every respect his other half. "Dick, you've been jittering like a witch," she said one evening, "about something I can't see any reason for. But you have a reason, or you wouldn't be doing it. So break down and tell me." "I can't, confound it. I know I'm always in a rush to get a thing done, but not like this. I'm all of a twitter inside. I can't sleep..." Dorothy snickered. "You can't? If what you were doing last night wasn't sleeping it was the most reasonable facsimile thereof I've ever seen. Or heard." "Not like I ought to, I mean. Nightmares. Devils all the time sticking me with pitchforks. Do you believe in hunches?" "No," she said, promptly. # T never had any. Not a one." "I never did, either, and if this is one I never want to have another. But it could be a hunch that we ought to be investigating that alien galaxy of DuQuesne's. Whatever it is, I want to go somewhere and I haven't the faintest idea where." "Oh? Listen!" Dorothy's eyes widened. "Ill bet you're getting an answer to that message we sent out!" He shook his head. "Uh-uh. Can't be. Telepathy has got to be something you can understand." "Who besides you ever said it would have to be telepathy? And who knows what telepathy would have to be like? Come on, let's go tell Martin and Peggy!" "Huh?" he yelped. "Tell M. Reynolds Crane, the hardest-boiled skeptic that ever went unhung, that I want to go skyshooting to hellangone off into the wild blue yonder just because I've got an itch that I can't scratch?" "Why not?" She looked him steadily in the eye. "We're exploring terra incognita , Dick. How much do you really know about that mind of yours, the way it is now?" "Okay. Maybe they'll buy it; you did. Let's go." They went; and, a little to Seaton's surprise, Crane agreed with Dorothy. So did Margaret. Hence three hours later, the big sky-rover was on her way. Four days out, however, Seaton said, "This isn't the answer, I don't think. The itch is still there. So what?" There was silence for a couple of minutes, then Dorothy chuckled suddenly. Sobering quickly, she said, with a perfectly straight face, "I'll bet it's that new department head girl-friend of yours. Dick; the pistolpacking mama with the wiggle. She wants to see the big, bold, handsome Earthman again. And if it is, I'll scratch..." Seaton jumped almost out of his chair. "You're not kidding . half as much as you think you are, pet. That crack took a good scratch at exactly where it itches." He put on his remote-control helmet and changed course. "And that helps still more." He thought for minutes, then shrugged his shoulders and said, "I'm not getting a thing... not anything more at all. How many of you remember either Ree-Toe Prenk or the girl well enough to picture either of them accurately in your minds?" They all remembered one or both of the Rayseenians. "Okay. This'll sound silly. It is silly, for all the tea in China, but let's try something. All join hands, picture either or both of them, and think at them as hard as we can. The thought is simply 'we're coming.' Okay?" More than half sheepishly, they tried it -- and it worked. At least Seaton said, "Well, it worked, I guess. Anyway, for the first time in weeks, it's gone. But I didn't get a thing. Nothing whatever. Not even a hint either that we were being paged or that our reply was being received. Did any of you?" None of them had. "Huh!" Seaton snorted. "If this is telepathy they can keep it -- I'll take Morse's original telegraph!" A week or so after the Skylark of Valeron left the neighborhood of Ray-See-Nee, that planet's new government began to have trouble. Ree-Toe Prenk had said and had believed that whoever controlled the capital controlled the world, but that IF was not true in his case. It had always been true previously because the incoming powers had always been of the same corrupt-to-the-core stripe as those who were ousted -- and when corruption has been the way of life for generations it is deep-rooted indeed. There were, of course, other factors behind the unrest. But neither Prenk nor any other human knew about them -- then. All the district bosses had always gone along with the Big Boss as a matter of course. Not one of them cared a whit who ran the world, as long as his own privileges and perquisites and powers and takes were not affected. Prenk, however, was strictly honest and strictly just. If he should succeed in taking over Ray-See-Nee's government in full, every crook and boodler on the planet would lose everything he had; possibly even his life. Thus, while the new Premier held the capital -- in a rapidly deteriorating grip -- his influence outside that city's limits varied inversely as about the fourth power of the distance. This resistance, while actual enough, was in no sense overt. Every order was ostensibly obeyed to the letter; but everything deteriorated at an accelerating rate and Prenk could do nothing whatever about it. Whenever and wherever Prenk was not looking, business went on as usual -- gambling, drugs, prostitution, crime and protection -- but he could not prove any of it. Neither uniformed police nor detectives could find anything much amiss. They made arrests, but no suspect was ever convicted. The prosecution's cases were weak. The juries brought in verdicts of "innocent", usually without leaving the box. Even when, in desperation, Prenk went -- supposedly top-secretly -- to an outlying city, fully prepared to stage a questioning that would have made Torquemada blush, he did nothing and he learned nothing. Every person on his list had vanished tracelessly and every present incumbent had abundant proof of rnocence. Nor did any of them know why they had been promoted so suddenly. They were just lucky, they guessed. It was indeed baffling. It would have been less so if Prenk had had any notion of the universe-wide stir of mighty events just beginning to bubble -- if he had been able, as we are now able, to fit together afl these patchwork stories into one nearly Norlaminian fabric of universal history. But he wasn't -- and, for his peace of mind, perhaps that was just M well! P remier Ree-Toe Prenk sat at his desk in the Room of State. Kay-Lee Barlo, shapely legs crossed and pistol at hip, sat at his left. SyBy Takeel, the new Captain-General of the Guard, stood at ease at his right. "Whoever is doine this is a smooth, shrewd operator," Prenk said. "So much so that you two are the only people I can trust. And I don't suppose either of you will ever be approached. Probably neither of you would be bought even if you offered yourselves ever so deftly for sale." "I wouldn't be, certainly," Takeel said. "Captains-General of mercenaries don't sell out. I wouldn't answer for any of my lieutenants, though, if there's loot to be had. There is here, I take it?" "Unlimited quantities, apparently. So you, too, are subject to assassination?" The soldier shrugged. "Oh, yes, it's an occupational hazard. How about you. Exalted Barlo? No chance either, I'd say?" "None at all. My stand is too well known. Half my people would stab me in the back if they dared to and they all look me in the eye and lie in their Mi-Ko-Ta-cursed teeth. I wish Ky-El Mokak and his people would get back here quick," Takeel said wistfully. "So do I," Prenk said, glumly. "But even if we had a sixth-order tightbeamer and could use it, we haven't the slightest idea of where he came from or where he went to." "That's true." She nibbled at her lip. "But listen. I'm a psychic. It runs in the women of some families, you know, being... well, what most people call witches, kind of. My talent isn't fully developed yet, but mother and I together could witch-wish at him to come back here as fast #s he can and I'm sure he would." The soldier's face showed quite plainly what he thought of the idea, but Prenk nodded -- if more than somewhat dubiously. "I've heard of that 'witch-wishing' business, and that it sometimes works. So go home right now and get at it, Kay-Lee, and give it everything youand your mother both can put out." Kay-Lee went home forthwith and went into executive session with her mother; a handsome, black-haired woman of forty-odd. "And I have positive identification," the girl concluded. "His blood was all over the place -- positively quarts of it -- and I saved some just in case." And, of course, she had -- prudently, wisely and, as it turned out, luckily for all concerned! The older woman's face cleared. "That's good. Without a positive, I'm afraid it would be hopeless at what the distance probably is by this time. Run and get the witchholly, dear, while I fix the incense." They each ate seven ritually preserved witch-holly berries and inhaled seven deep drafts of aromatic smoke. While they were waiting for the powerful drugs to take effect, Kay-Lee asked, "How much of this rigamarole is chemistry, do you suppose, mother, and how much is just hocus-pocus?" "No one knows. Some day, whatever it is that we have will be recognized as having existence and will be really studied. Until then, all we can do is follow the ancient ritual." "I think I'll talk to Ky-El about it. But listen. Witches with any claim at all to decency simply don't put geases on people. But what if he's so far away that we can't reach him any other way?" The older woman frowned, then said, "In that case, my dear, we'll never, never tell anyone a thing about it." IF Re-Seating of the Premier A s the Skylark of Valeron approached Galaxy DW-#-LU, Dorothy said, "Dick, I suppose it's occurred to you more than once that I'm not much of a woman." "You aren't? I'd say you'd do until the real thing showed up." Seaton, who had been thinking of the problem of synchronization instead of his wife, changed voice instantly when he really looked at her and saw what a black mood she was in. "You're the universe's best, is all, ace. I knew you were feeling a little low in your mind, but not... listen, sweetheart. What could possibly make you think you aren't the absolute top?" She did not answer the question. Instead, "What do you think you're going to get into this time?" "Nothing much, I'm sure. Prenk's probably running out of ammunition. We can make more in five minutes than he can in five years." "I'm sure that isn't it. You're going into personal danger again and I'll be expected to sit up here in the Skylark eating my heart out wondering if you're alive or dead. You don't see Sitar going through that with Dunark." "Wait up, sweetheart. Mores and customs, remember?" "Mores and customs be damned! Do you remember exactly what Sitar said and exactly how she said it? Did it sound like mores and customs to you? Was there any element whatever of suttee in it?" "But listen, Dottie -- " He took her gently in his arms. "You listen!" she rushed on. "If he dies she doesn't want to keep on living and she won't. And she doesn't care who knows it. Maybe it started that way -- society's sanction -- but that was her personal profession of faith. And I feel the same way. If you die I don't want to keep on living and won't. So next time I'm going with you." Being an American male, he could not accept that without an argument. "But there's Dickie," he said. "There are also her three children on Osnome. I learned something from her about what the basic, rockbottom attitude of a woman toward her man ought to be. Even from little Lotus. She's no bigger than a minute and a half, but what did she do? So while we're having this moment of truth let's be rock-bottom honest with each other for the first time in our lives instead of mouthing the platitudes of our society. I'm not a story-book mother, Dick. If it ever comes right down to a choice, you know how I'll decide -- and how long it will take!" S eaton could not get in touch with Ree-Toe Prenk, of course, until the Valeron was actually inside Galaxy DW-#-LU; but as soon as communication could be established Kay-Lee Barlo asked eagerly; "You did get our thought, then, Ky-El? Mother's and mine? We didn't feel that we were quite reaching you." "Not exactly," Seaton replied. "I didn't get any real thought at all; just a feeling that I ought to be going somewhere that bothered me no end until I headed this way. But since it was you people calling, I'm mighty glad I got what little I did." The Skylark went into orbit around Ray-See-Nee and the Skylarkers climbed into a landing-craft that Seaton had designed and built specifically for the occasion. It was a miniature battleship -- one of the deadliest fighting ships of its size and heft ever built. And this time the whole party was heavily armed. Dunark and Sitar were in full Osnomian panoply of war. Dorothy wore a pair of her long-barrelled .# target pistols in leg-holsters under her bouffant skirt. Even little Lotus wore two .# automatics. "I don't know whether I can hit anybody with one of these or not," she had said while Dorothy was rigging her. "I'd much rather work hand to hand. But if they're too far away to get at I can at least make a lot of noise and look like I'm doing something." They were met at the spaceport by two platoons of the Premier's Guard, led by Captain-General SyBy Takeel himself. They were guarded like visiting royalty from the spaceport to the Capitol Building and up into the Room of State, where they were greeted with informal cordiality by Prenk and by KayLee, who was now an Exalted of the Thirty-Fifth, besides being First Deputy Premier. Prenk seated his guests, not on stools in front of and below his throne-like desk, but at a long conference table with Seaton at its head. The two lieutenants posted guards outside the two immense doors at the far end of the vast room and stationed the rest of their men in position to cover both entrances. Takeel, with velvet slippers over his field-boots, stood on Prenk's desk, commanding the entire room, with a machine-gun-like weapon cradled expertly and accustomedly in the crook of his left arm. "Are things this bad?" Seaton asked. "I knew it was tough when you told us to come loaded for bear -- but this?" "They're exactly this bad. These two -- " Prenk jerked a thumb at Kay-Lee and at Takeel -- "are the only two people on this whole world that I know I can trust. Until quite recently I was sure I held the city -- but now I'm not at all sure of holding even this building. I can only hope that you're not too late. I'll tell you what the situation is; then you will tell me, please, if there is anything you can do about it." He talked for twelve minutes. Then : "P-s-s-s-st!" Kay-Lee hissed. "Danger! Coming -- nearing us -- fast! I can feel it -- taste it -- smell it! Get ready quick!" She sprang to her feet, drew her pistol, and arranged a dozen clips of cartridges meticulously on the table in front of her. The Osnomians' chairs crashed backward, their heavy coats flew off, and they stood tensely ready, machine pistols in all four hands. And, seconds later, the other Skylarkers were on their feet and ready too. The Captain-General had not heard the low-voiced warning, but IF he had seen the action and that was enough. Trigger-nerved Dunark's chair had no sooner struck the floor on its first bounce than Takeel was going into his shooting stance, with his weapon flipping around into firing position as though it were sliding in a greased groove; the while glaring ferociously at his senior lieutenant -- who thereupon began to have an acute attack of the jitters. I t was the commander's savage motion, actually, that ruined the attackers' split-second schedule. For, at a certain second, the two lieutenants were to shoot their captain; then to shoot Prenk and KayLee Barlo; and then, as the attack proper was launched, they were to kill as many of their own men as they could. Thus, knowing what a savage performer the Captain-General was with his atrocious weapon, their hands were forced; they had to act a couple of seconds too soon. They tried -- but with two short bursts so close together as to be practically one, Takeel cut them down. Cut them both almost literally in two. Thus, when the two great doors were blasted simultaneously down and the attackers stormed in with guns ablaze, they did not find a half-dead and completely demoralized Guard and a group of surprised visitors. Instead: The mercenaries were neither dead nor demoralized. They knew exactly what to do and were doing it. Dunark and Sitar had the fire-power of half a company of trained troops and were using it to the fullest full. The Captain-General, from his coign of vantage atop the desk, was spraying both entrances with bullets like a gardener watering two flowerbeds with a hose. Kay-Lee was throwing lead almost as fast as Takeel was; changing magazines with such fluent speed and precision as to miss scarcely a shot. Dorothy, nostrils flaring and violet eyes blazing, was shooting as steadily and as accurately as though she were out on the range marking up another possible. Even tiny Lotus, with one of her .#'s clutched in both hands, was shooting as fast as she could pull the trigger. It was Seaton, however, who ended the battle. He waited long enough to be absolutely sure of what was going on, then fired twice with his left-hand magnum -- through the doorways, high over the heads of the attackers, far down the corridors. There were two terrific explosions; followed by one long rumbling crash as that whole section of the building either went somewhere else or collapsed into rubble. Falling and flying masonry and steel and razoredged shards of structural glass killed almost everyone outside the heavily reenforced wall of the Room of State. The shock-waves of the blasts, raging through the doorways, killed half of the enemy massed there and blew the others half the length of the room' And, continuing on with rapidly decreasing force, knocked most of the Skylarkers flat and blew the Captain-General off of the desk and clear back against the wall. "Sangram's head!" that worthy yelled, scrambling to his feet with machine-gun again -- or still? He had not for an instant lost control of thatl -- at the ready. "What in Japnonk's rankest hell was that?" "X-plosive shell," Seaton said, his voice as hard as his eyes. "This time I came loaded for bear. Now we'll mop up and find out what's been going on. I gather, sir, that your two platoon leaders were in on it?" "Yes. It's a shame I had to kill 'em without asking 'em a few questions." He did not explain that he had had neither the time in which nor the weapon with which merely to wound them seriously enough so that neither of them could fight back with any sort of weapon. There was no need. "That won't make too much difference." Seaton looked around; first at his own crew and tKen at the guards, half of whom were down. Medics and first-aid men were rushing in to work on them. He looked again, more closely, at his people and at Prenk and KayLee. Not one of them, apparently, had even been scratched. T hat, however, was logical. The mercenaries were hard-trained fighting men, shooting was their business. Hence the attackers' orders had been to shoot the guards first, and there had been no time to evaluate the actual situation and to change the plan of attack. Hence, as far as anyone knew, not a single bullet had been aimed at the far end of the room. Seaton took a pair of headsets out of his pocket and applied one of them, first to one of the two lieutenants heads, then to the other. "Uh-huh," he grunted then. "That ape didn't know too much, but this one was going to be the new captain-general. I suppose you've got a recorder, Ree-Toe?" "I'll get it, sir!" Kay-Lee exclaimed; and Prenk, eyes bulging, gasped: "Don't tell me you can read a dead brain, sir!" "Oh, yes. They keep their charges, sometimes for days." Kay-Lee handed Seaton a microphone then, and he spoke into it for ten minutes -- the while three Rayseenian faces went through gamuts of emotion; each culminating in the same expression of joyous satisfaction. When Seaton paused for breath Prenk said in awe, "That machine is certainly a something... I don't suppose..." He stopped. "I do suppose, yes. I'll give you a few sets, with blueprints, and show you how they work," and Seaton went on with his reading. A few minutes later he cut off the mike and said, "That ape over there," he pointed, "is one of the Big Wheels. Have someone latch onto him, Ree-Toe; we'll read him next. He's one you'll be really interested in, so I'll hook you up in parallel with me so you can get everything he knows into your own brain." He took a third headset from his pocket and began to adjust its settings, going on, "It takes a different set-up... so... and goes on your head so." "That ape" was a fattish, sallowfaced man of fifty, who had been IF directing operations from outside the room and had intended to stay outside it until everything was secure within. He had been blown into the room and halfway along its length by the force of the blasts. He was pretty badly smashed up, but he was beginning to regain consciousness and was weakly trying to get to his feet. This unlucky wight was a mine of information indeed, but Prenk stopped the mining operation after only a couple of minutes of digging. "Sy-By," he said. "Two more of your officers you can shoot." he gave two names. "Then come back here with some men you think you can trust and we'll test 'em to make sure. By that time I'll have a list of people for you to round up and bring in for examination." There is no need to follow any farther the Premier's progress in cleaning up his planet. In fact, only one more incident that occurred there is of interest here -- one that occurred while Seaton and Dorothy were getting ready for bed in one of the suites of honor. She put both arms around him suddenly; he pressed her close. "Dick, I belonged there. Beside you. Every fiber of my being belonged there. That was exactly where I belonged." ' "I know you did, sweet. I'll have to admit it. But..." She put her hand over his mouth. "But nothing, my dearest. No buts. I've killed rats and rattlesnakes, and that wasn't any different. Not a bit different in any way." O f the more than five thousand Fenachrone who had left their noisome home planet in Sleemet'a flagship, almost seven hundred had died and more were dying. It was not that the Llurdi were physically cruel to them or abused them in any way. They didn't. Nor were they kind; they were conspicuously and insultingly neutral and indifferent to them. Conspicuous and insulting, that is, to the hypersensitive minds of the captives. In their own minds, the Llurdi were acting strictly according to logic. Every item of the subjects' environment duplicated precisely its twin on the subjects' home world. What more could logically be done? Nothing. The Llurdi observed the mental anguish of the Fenachrone, of course, and recorded their emotions quite accurately, but with no emotional reactions whatever of their own. Practically all emotions were either illogical or unsane, or both. To the illogical and unsane Fenachrone, however -- physically, mentally, intellectually and psychologically -- the situation was intolerable; one that simply could not be endured. They were proud, haughty, intolerant; their race had always been so. Since time immemorial it had been bred into their innermost consciousnesses that they were the questionably to be the absolute rulers of all things living or yet to live throughout all the transfinite reaches of the Cosmic All. Holding this belief with every fiber of their beings, they had been IF plunged instantly into a condition of complete, utter helplessness. Their vessel could not fight. While it was intact except for its tail-section and its power-pods, its every offensive projector was burned out; useless. Nor could they fight personally, either physically or mentally. Their physical strength, enormous as it was, was of no avail against tractors and pressors of pure force; their hardest-driven hypnotic glares were of no avail against the completely logical, completely matter-of-fact minds of the Llurdi. Most galling condition of all, the Fenachrone were not treated as enemies; nor as menaces or threats; nor even as intelligent entities whose knowledges and abilities might be worthy of notice. These things were observed and recorded, to be sure, but only as component parts of a newly discovered class of objects, the Fenachrone; a class of objects that happened to be alive. The Fenachrone were neither more nor less noteworthy than were birds or barnacles. Sleemet, no longer young and perhaps the proudest and most intractable and most intransigent of the lot, could not endure that treatment very long; but he did not bend. The old adage "Where there's life there's hope," simply is not true where such as the Llurdi and the Fenachrone are concerned. Sleemet lost all hope and broke; broke almost completely down. He stopped eating. That did not bother the Llurdi in any way. Why should it? They were neither squeamish nor humane, any more than they were cruel or vindictive. The fact that certain of these creatures stopped taking nourishment under certain conditions was merely a datum to be observed and recorded. But since Sleemet was big and strong, even for a Fenachrone, and had previously eaten very well indeed, it took him a long time to die. And as he weakened -- as the bindings between flesh and spirit loosened more and ever more -- he regressed more and ever more back into the youth of his race. Back and back. Still farther back; back into its very childhood; back to a time when his remote ancestors ate their meat alive and communicated with each other, sometimes by grunts and gestures, but more often by means of a purely mental faculty that was later to evolve into the power of ocular hypnosis. Half conscious or less of his surroundings but knowing well that death was very near, Sleemet halfconsciously sent out his race's agesold mental message-in-extremity of the dying. M arc C. DuQuesne knew vastly more about the Fenachrone than did any other man alive, not excluding Richard Seaton. He and Seaton were, as far as is known, the only two men ever to meet Fenachrone mind to mind and live through the experience; but DuQuesne had been in thought-helmet contact with a Fenachrone much longer and much more intimately and very much more interestedly than Seaton ever had -- because of #I the tremendous intrinsic differences between the personalities of the two men. Seaton, after having crippled a war-vessel of the Fenachrone, had pinned its captain against a wall with so many beams of force that he could not move his head and could scarcely move any other part of his monstrous body. Then, by means of a pair of thought-helmets, he had taken what of that captain's knowledge he wanted. He had, however, handled that horribly unhuman brain very gingerly. He had merely read certain parts of it, as one reads an encyclopedia; at no time had his mind become en rapport with that of the monster. In fact, he had said to Crane: "I'd hate to have much of that brain in my own skull -- afraid I'd bite myself. I'm just going to look... and when I see something I want I'll grab it and put it into my own brain." DuQuesne, however, in examining a navigating engineer of that monstrous race, had felt no such revulsion, contrariwise -- although possibly not quite consciously -- he had admired certain traits of Fenachrone character so much that he had gone en rapport with that engineer's mind practically cell to cell; with the result that he had emerged from that mental union as nearly a Fenachrone himself as a human being could very well become. Wherefore, as DuQuesne in his flying-planetoid-base approached the point of its course nearest to the planet Llurdiax, he began to feel the thinnest possible tendril of thought trying to make contact with one of the deepest chambers of his mind. He stiffened; shutting it off by using automatically an ability that he had not known consciously that he had. He relaxed; and, all interest now, tuned his mind to that feeler of thought, began to pull it in, and stopped -- and the contact released a flood of Fenachrone knowledge completely new to him. A Fenachrone, dying somewhere, wanted... wanted what? Not help, exactly. Notice? Attention? To give something? DuQuesne was not enough of a Fenachrone to translate that one thought even approximately, and he was not interested enough to waste any time on it. It had something to do with the good of the race; that was close enough. DuQuesne, frowning a little, sat back in his bucket seat and thought. He had supposed that the Fenachrone were all dead... but it made sense that Seaton couldn't have killed all of a space-faring race, at that. But so what? He didn't care how many Fenachrone died. But a lot of their stuff was really good, and he certainly hadn't got it all yet, by any means; it might be smart to listen to what the dying monster had to say -- especially since he, DuQuesne, was getting pretty close to the home grounds of Klazmon the Llurd. Wherefore DuQuesne opened his mental shield: and, since his mind was still tuned precisely to the questing wave and since the DQ was now practically as close to Llurdiax as it would get on course #U, he reIF ceived a burst of thought that jarred him to the very teeth. It is amazing how much information can be carried by a Fenachronecompressed burst of thought. It was fortunate for DuQuesne that he had the purely Fenachrone abilities to decompress it, to spread it out and analyze it, and later, to absorb it fully. The salient points, however, were pellucidly clear. The dying monster was First Scientist Fleet Admiral Sleemet; and he and more than four thousand other Fenachrone were helpless captives of and were being studied to death by Llurdan scientists under the personal direction of Llanzlan Klazmon. Realizing instantly what that meant -- Klazmon would be out here in seconds with a probe, if nothing stronger -- DuQuesne slammed on full-coverage screens at full power, thus sealing his entire worldlet bottle-tight against any and every spy-ray, beam, probe, band, zone of force andor order of force that he knew anything about. Since this included everything he had known before this trip began, plus everything he had learned from Freemind One and from the Jelmi and from Klazmon himself, he was grimly certain that he was just as safe as though he were in God's hip pocket from any possible form of threedimensional observation or attack. Cutting in his fourth-dimensional gizmo -- how glad he was that he had studied it so long and so intensively that he knew more about it than its inventors did! -- he flipped what he called its "eye" into the Fenachrone Reservation or distant Llurdiax. He seized Sleemet, bed and all, in a wrapping of force and deposited the bundle gently on the floor of the DQ's control room, practically at his, DuQuesne's feet. Fenachrone could breathe Earth air for hours without appreciable damage -- they had proved that often enough -- and if he decided to keep any of them alive he'd make them some air they liked better. Second, he brought over a doctor, complete with kit and instruments and supplies; and third, the Fenachrone equivalent of a registered nurse. "You, doctor!" DuQuesne snapped, in Fenachronian. "I don't know whether this spineless weakling is too far gone to save or not. Or whether he is worth saving or not. But since he was actually in charge of your expedition-to-preserve-therace I will listen to what he has to say instead of blasting him out of hand. So give him a shot of the strongest stuff you have -- or is he in greater need of food than of stimulant?" DuQuesne did not know whether the doctor would cooperate with a human being or not. But he did -- whether from lack of spirit of his own or from desire to save his chief, DuQuesne did not care enough to ask. "Both," the doctor said, "but nourishment first, by all means. Intravenous, nurse, please," and doctor and nurse went to work with the skill and precision of their highly trained crafts. And, somewhat to DuQuesne's surprise, Sleemet began immediately to rally; and in three-quarters of an hour he had regained full consciousness. CiXTou spineless worm!" Dull Quesne shot at the erstwhile invalid, in true Fenachrone tone and spirit. "You gutless wonder! You pusillanimous weakling, you sniveling coward! Is it the act of a noble of the Fenachrone to give up, to yield supinely, to surrender ignominiously to a fate however malign while a spark of life endures?" Sleemet was scarcely stirred by this vicious castigation. He raised dull eyes -- eyes shockingly lifeless to anyone who had ever seen the ruby-lighted, flame-shot wells of vibrant force that normal Fenachrone eyes were -- and said lifelessly, "There is a point, the certainty of death, at which struggle becomes negative instead of positive. It merely prolongs the agony. Having passed that point, I die." "There is no such point, idiot, while life lasts! Do I look like Klazmon of Llurdiax?" "No, but death is no less certain at your hands than at his." "Why should it be, stupid?" and DuQuesne's sneer was extra-high-voltage stuff, even for Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne. Now was the crucial moment. IF he could .take all those Fenachrone over, and IF he could control them after they got back to normal, what a crew they would make! He stared contemptuously at the ex-admiral and went on: "Whether or not you and your four thousand die in the near future is up to you. While I do not have to have a crew, I can use one efficiently for a few weeks. If you choose to work with me I will, at the end of that time, give you a duplicate of your original spaceship and will see to it that you are allowed to resume your journey wherever you wish." "Sir, the Fenachrone do not... the doctor began stiffly. "Shut up, you poor, dumb clown!" DuQuesne snapped. "Haven't you learned anything? That instead of being the strongest race in space you are one of the weakest? You have one choice merely -- cooperate or die. And that is not yours, but Sleemet's. Sleemet?" "But how do I know that if..." "If you have any part of a brain, fool, use it! What matters it to me whether Fenachrone live or die? I'm not asking you anything; I'm telling you under what conditions I will save your lives. If you want to argue the matter I'll put you three -- and the bed -- back where you were and be on my way. Which do you prefer?" Sleemet had learned something. He had been beaten down flat enough so that he could learn something -- and he realized that he had much to learn from any race who could do what his rescuer had just done. "We will work with you," Sleemet said. "You will, I trust, instruct us concerning how you liberated us three and propose to liberate the others?" "I can't. It was fourth-dimensionIF al translation." DuQuesne lied blandly. "Did you ever try to explain the color 'blue to a man born blind? No scientist of your race will be able to understand either the theory or the mechanics of fourth dimensional translation for something like eleven hundred thousand of your years." DuQuesne and Sleemet E n route to the galaxy in which DuQuesne's aliens supposedly lived, Dorothy said, "Say Dick. I forgot to ask you something. What did you ever find out about that thought business of Kay-Lee's?" "Huh?" Seaton was surprised. "What was there to find out? How are you going to explain the mechanism of thought -- by unscrewing the inscrutable? She said, and I quote, 'We didn't feel that we were quite reaching you,' unquote. So it was she and Ree-Toe Prenk. Obviously. Holding hands or something -- across a Ouija board or some other focusing device, probably. Staring into each other's eyes to link minds and direct the thought." "But they did hit you with something," she insisted, "and it bothers me. They can do it and we can't." "No sweat, pet. That isn't a circumstance to what you do every time you think at a controller to order up a meal or whatever. How do you do that? Different people, different abilities, is all. Anyway, Earth mediums have done that kind of thing for ages. If you're really interested, you can take some time off and learn it, next time we're on Ray-See-Nee. But for right now, my red-headed beauty, we've got something besides that kind of monkey-business to worry about." "That's right, we have," and Dorothy forgot the minor matter in thinking of the major. "Those aliens. Have you and Martin figured out a modus operandi?" "More or less. Go in openly, like tourists, but with everything we've got not only on the trips but hyped up to as nearly absolutely instantaneous reactivity as the Brain can possibly get it." B oth DuQuesne's DQ and Seaton's Skylark of Valeron were within range of Llurdiax. DuQuesne, however. as has been said, was covering up as tightly as he could. Everything that could be muzzled or muffled was muzzled or muffled, and he was traveling comparatively slowly, so as to put out the minimum of detectable high-order emanation. Furthermore, his screens were shoved out to such a tremendous distance, and were being varied so rapidly and so radically in shape, that no real pattern existed to be read. The DQ was not indetectable, of course, but it would have taken a great deal of highly specialized observation and analysis to find her. The Skylark of Valeron, on the other hand, was coming in wide open: "Like a tourist", as Seaton had told Dorothy the plan was to do. In the llanzlanate on Llurdiax, therefore, an observer alerted Klazmon, who flew immediately to his master-control panel. He checked the figures the observer had given him, and was as nearly appalled as a Llurd could become. An artificial structure of that size and mass -- it was certainly not a natural planetoid -- had never even been thought of by any builder of record. He measured its acceleration -- the Val eron was still braking down at max -- and his eyes bulged. That thing, tremendous as it was, had the powerto-mass ratio of a speedster! In spite of its immense size it was actually an inter-galactic flyer! He launched a probe, as he had done so many times before -- but with entirely unexpected results. The stranger's guardian screens were a hundred times as reactive as any known to Llurdan science. He was not allowed time for even the briefest of mental contacts or for any real observation at all. So infinitesimal had been the instant usable time that only one fact was clear. The entities in that mobile monstrosity were -- positively -- Jelmoids. Not true Jelmi, certainly. He knew all about the Jelmi. Those tapes bore unmistakable internal evidence of being true and complete records and there was no hint anywhere in them of anything like this. If not the Jelmi, who? Ah, yes, the Fenachrone, whose fleet... no, Sleemet knew nothing of such a construction... and he was not exactly of the same race... ah, yes, that one much larger ship that had escaped. The probability was high that its one occupant belonged to precisely the same Jelmoid race as did the personnel of this planetoid. The escaped one had reported Klazmon's cursory investigation as an attack. It was a virtual certainty, therefore, that this was a battleship of that race, heading for LIurdiax to... to what? To investigate merely? No. Nor merely to parley. They had made no attempt whatever to communicate. (It did not occur to Klazmon, then or ever, that his own fiercely driven probe could not possibly have been taken for an attempt at communication. He had fully intended to communicate, as soon as he had seized the mind of whoever was in command of the strange spacecraft.) And now, with the stranger's incredible full-coverage screen in operation, communication was and would remain impossible. But he had data sufficient for action. These Jelmoids, like all others he knew, were rabidly anti-social, illogical, unreasoning, unsane and insane. They were -- definitely -- surplus population. So thinking, Llanzlan Klazmon launched his attack. A s the Skylark entered that enigmatic galaxy, Seaton was not in his home, with only a remote-control helmet with which to work. He was in the control room itself, at the base of the Brain, with the tremendously complex-master-control itself surrounding his head. Thus he was attuned to and in instantaneous contact with every activated cell of that gigantic Brain. It was ready to receive and to act upon with the transfinite speed of thought any orIF der that Seaton would think. Nor would any such action interfere in any way with the automatics that Seaton had already set up. "I'm going to stay here all day," Seaton said, "and all night tonight, too, if necessary." But he did not have to stay there even all day. In less than four hours the llanzlan drove his probe and Seaton probed practically instantaneously back. And since Seaton's hyped-up screens were .a hundred times faster than the Llurd's, Seaton "saw" a hundred times as much as Klazmon did. He saw the city Llurdias in all its seat-of-empire pride and glory. He perceived its mileswide girdle of fortresses. He perceived the llanzlanate; understood its functions and purposes. He entered the Hall of Computation and examined minutely the beings and the machines at work there. How could all this be? Because the speed of thought, if not absolutely infinite, is at least transfinite; immeasurable to man. And the Valeron's inorganic brain and Seaton's organic one were, absolutely and super-intimately, the two component parts of one incredibly able, efficient and proficient whole. Thus, when the alien's attack was launched in all its fury and almost all of the Valeroris mighty defensive engines went simultaneously into automatic action, the coded chirpings that the Brain employed to summon human help did not sound: that Brain's builder, fellow, boss, and perfect complement was already on the job. And thus, since no warning had been given, the other Skylarkers were surprised when Seaton called them all down into the control room. They were even more surprised when they saw how white and strained his face was. "This may become weree unfunny," he said. "'Tsa good thing I muscled her up or we'd be losing some skin and some of our defense. As it is, we're holding 'em and we've got a few megas in reserve. Not enough to be really happy about, but some. And we're building more, of course. However , that ape down there has undoubtedly got a lot of stuff otherwheres on the planet that he can hook in pretty fast, so whatever we're going to do we'd better do right now." "They didn't try to communicate at all?" Crane asked. "Strange for a race of such obviously high attainments." "Not a lick," Seaton said, flatly. "Just a probe; the hardest and sharpest probe I ever saw. When I blocked it -- Whammo !" "You probed, too, of course," Dorothy said. "What did you find out? Are they really monstrous, as DuQuesne said, out purely to kill?" "Just that. He wasn't lying a nickel's worth on that. His Nibs down there had already decided that we were surplus population and should be eliminated, and he set right out to do it. So, unless some of you have some mighty valid reasons not to, I'm going to try my damndest to eliminate him, right now." "We could run, I suppose," Margaret suggested -- but not at all enthusiastically. "I doubt it. Not without letting him burn us down to basketball size, like the Chlorans did. He undoubtedly let us get this close on purpose so we couldn't." S ince no one else said anything, Seaton energized everything of offense he had. He tuned it as precisely as he possibly could. He as : sembled it into the tightest, solidest, hardest beam he could possibly build. Then, involuntarily tensing his muscles and hunching his back, he drove the whole gigantic thing squarely at where he knew the llanzlante was. The Llurd's outer screen scarcely flickered as it went black in nothing flat of time. The intermediate screen held for eighty-three hundredths of a second. Then the practically irresistible force of that beam met the practically immovable object that was Klazmon's last line of defense. And as it clawed and bit and tore and smashed in ultra-pyrotechnic ferocity, solar-like flares of raw energy erupted from the area of contact and the very ether writhed and seethed and warped under the intolerable stresses of the utterly incomprehensible forces there at grips. This went on... and on... and on. Even to Seaton, who knew only that he was up against an enemy nearly as potent as the Chlorans, the full import of the enormous struggle of energies then being waged was far from clear. We can wonder now, and ask ourselves what the fate of the universe might have been if the Skylark's Norlaminian designers had skimped on a course of screens, or overlooked a detail of defense. Surely its consequences would have been cataclysmic! Not only to Seaton and his Skylarker, watching grim-faced as their gauges revealed the enormous flow of destructive forces battling each other to annihilation for countless parsecs in every direction. Not only to the Jelmi, or the RaySee-Neese, or the Norlaminians, or Earth itself... but to countless generations yet unborn, on planets not yet discovered... But they held. And after ten endless minutes of such terrible gouts and blasts of destruction as no planet could endure for a moment, Seaton heard a voice speak to him. He had never heard it before, but it said in good American English: "Good morning, my friends. Or perhaps, by your clocks, it is good afternoon? I am the Llanzlan Mergon of Jelm, and I perceive that you are under attack by our old acquaintances, the Llurdi. You, I am sure, are the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on Earth, but whom we were not able to find." IF The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I expect you'll get a fairly large amount of correspondence about Mr. R. Milton's letter concerning Esperanto; the issue seems to be one in which a large number of people are interested (as both John Campbell and Willy Ley have found out in the past). I agree with Mr. Milton wholeheartedly. One of the problems to which he refers, that of the ordinary non-English-speaker who has studied English being too timid or embarrassed to use it in front of a native English-speaker, is well known to me from personal experience. My wife, who comes from Mexico City, had a year of English in high school and in addition has lived in the U.S.A. for two years. One would think that after that much time she would be fairly confident, but actually she has that same problem attributed by Mr. Milton to so many other people. If this is the case with someone who has used only English for the last two years (and who in addition is a bright girl with something of a head for languages), consider the poor European student who has studied English for four or five years, five to ten hours a week, and can now read a technical paper in the language -- but has never really had occasion to speak it. I also agree with Mr. Milton' proposed solution to the problem. Esperanto was constructed with two basic ideas in mind: facility and beauty. Those who have studied it history will tell you that it is a work more of art than of science -- although what is art but a science of esthetics? It might take two or three minutes to learn the full conjugation yt an Esperanto verb. What other language can even come close to that? As to the nouns and adjectives -- put together, they might ake thirty seconds; try learning how to decline all English nouns, singular or plural, nominative and genitive, in thirty seconds. Or thirty hours. Esperanto has its own literature, original as well as translated; and its own speaking population; and the governments of several countries consider it worthy of governmentsubsidized magazines. It seems to be catching on all over the world now. Even in the United States there is at least one school system in which it is taught in all (#). schools. -- Donald J. Harlow, College View Apartments B-#-C, College Station, Texas.    Dear Editor: There are many things that can be said about If that would be approving, but I will limit most of this letter to some complaints that I have been saving up for some time now. The first one concerns the printing of your magazine (here I must also include Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow ) . Many of the pages have been over-inked so that they are difficult to read. Number two: the paper you have been using is very poor. Some of the issues I have from early in the fifties are in better shape than those of only three or four years of age. Finally: although readers are continually writing in and gushing about the quality of the artwork of your covers, I have to disagree. Looking through all the back issues of your magazines, I found only one that is really good and that possesses a feeling outside of the text it illustrates. I'm speaking of the cover by McKenna on the June, #, issue Of Galaxy, depicting a ruined spaceship against the background of a spiral galaxy. I will cease my disapprobations here and try to put down some of the conflagration I have started by saying that I buy and read all three of your publications, and especially enjoy If... for the quality of the paper stories are printed on has little to do with their merit. But when the stories are so good, it is all the more important that one oe able to preserve them in readable condition. Robert A. Heinlein should be out with a new one sometime soon -- he usually gets out two new books each year. I'd certainly like to see If get it. -- James M. Gale, # Portland Avenue. Charlotte #, North Carolina.  We like a letter like this; it gives us something to sink our teeth into. First about the printing and production: we've had some difficulties along that line, but we hope to improve things shortly. About the covers: There's an interesting thing about that cover you mention. We thought it was great too. Everybody in the office who saw it agreed it was a fine job -- which seldom happens. Nearly every reader who has commented on covers in the past year or two has mentioned it as one they liked. There is no doubt that in terms of expressed opinion it was one of the most popular covers we've ever run... and yet (we'll let you in on a trade secret) it had the worst sale of any issue over a threeyear period. If you know why, please tell us -- we don't. But one thing we do know, and that is that the covers that people like are not necessarily the covers that make them buy. And of course if we have to choose between one or the other -- there's no choice! Yes, we'd like to see us have Robert Heinlein's new book for you too. There is one, as you deduce, and we hope to have it; but there are a few problems. One is that at present the manuscript runs about as long as three ordinary science-fiction novels ! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Since I now count # rejection IF slips from , I figure an easy way to get published is to write a letter to Hue  Cry. There are two things I want to say to reader David Lyon. As a high-school student, I resent being compared with "beer slops". Among high-school students science fiction -- not monster stories! -- is greatly loved. After all, what other genre has produced anything to compare with Canticle for Leibo witz? Secondly, the story Mr. Lyon was looking for is The Silk and the Song . Congrats on the long-awaited Skylark DuQuesne! It's as good as the three previous Skylarks; maybe better. Looking forward to the next two installments. -- S. Alan Simon, # Garland Drive, Eggertsville, New York #.    Dear Editor: I've a few money-making suggestions for you. Firstly, why not sell enlarged -- say, # x # -- color reproductions of your covers, suitable for framing, minus the print, of course. Secondly, so far as I know, no one has ever printed a sciencefiction fan's calendar. It should be an easy enough matter to print one with a cover or interior illustration for each month. Possibly an almanac calendar showing the birthdays of top-notch Science-fiction writers. Thirdly, you could sell binders for storing back issues of , Galaxy and World# of Tomorrow . H. L. Gold used to do that when he was editor, didn't he? Maybe these ideas don't hold water, but if they do you're welcome to them. -- Brian Baldwin, # Harding Road, Chattanooga #, Texas.  Matter of fact, we have thought about a calendar from time to time. Wonder how many would be interested. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: chine was a good story, may e somewhat better than Starchild. I'm not sure, but I think youVe set a record of some kind with five excellent issues in a row, from cover to editorial -- including the stories. Keep it up! Why not try to squeeze a story out of Harlan Ellison? His type of writing fits your magazine to a T, and you'll have some one to compete with Keith Laumer to see who can kill the most people in one story. -- A. J. Spegel, #I Anderson Road, Linwood, Michigan.    Dear Editor: I am not a habitual writer of letters to sf magazines even though I am a habitual reader... but the moon is full... I personally am unconcerned about the demise of Outer Limits and its ilk on television. Television is a medium particularly unsuited to the freedom that science fiction demands and would not know what to do with that freedom even if it had it. I understand, though, that an sf show called Lost in Space will be on one of the networks next season, so video sf is not dead. I was skeptical about the new Skylark story; I don't like to admit it, but I could never get too excited over either the Lensman or Skylark stories. Nevertheless, Part I of Skylark DuQuesne does have a certain something... It also has Doc Smith's ridiculous conversation. Every time Dick Seaton opens his mouth I wince. Concerning book reviews : I belong to that breed of neurotics that enjoys reading book reviews. Algis Budrys in Galaxy is good but not long enough for my taste. There must be somebody you could get for . James H. Schmitz is becoming one of the most ubiquitous names in magazine science fiction. His stories keep you reading, but after you've finished you wish you hadn't wasted the time. Maybe he should go into television. -- Ed Brenner, # Richmond Street, Brooklyn, New York  '   Dear Editor: I just finished reading Robert F. Young's When Time Was Young in the December issue of your magazine. For the most part the sf stories I have read involving paleontology have testified to a certain amount of research on the part of the author. Mr. Young's story (possibly though up while escorting two small children through a natural history museum) bespeaks no such effort May I suggest some study of the temporal and geographic ranges of the genre whose names he throws about wth such authority One thing to be said in Mr. Young's favor. At least he didn't clutter the Upper Cretaceous landscape with Lepidodenarons , seed ferns and Calamites. This is not the case with your cover artist, who has some pretty unCretaceous plants in the background and has put three toes on the Tyrannosaurus' two large front feet. -- Bonnie Dalzell, Student Paleontologist, University of California at Berkeley, #C#I Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California.    Dear Editor: With all this fuss about sf on TV, I don't think anybody's been considering the reporting of space flights. I urge all fans to write to the network news sections calling for a science-fiction writer to be present at coverage of future launches. It would, I think, make the commentary much more interesting... and might bring a few mo r e converts around to sf. Anybody interested in forming a club of young science-fiction fans is urged to write either to me or Sheridan Simon, # Garland Drive, Eggertsville, New York #. Finally, when is C. C. MacApp going to write a sequel to Under the Gaddyl t in the April, #, issue of Worlds of Tomorrow ? -- James Edward Turner, P. #. Box #, Pilot Knob, Missouri, #.  Matter of fact, we requested permission once to view a manned launching and were turned down flat. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration appears to feel that the less truck they have with science fiction, the more easily they'll be able to get crazy appropriations from congressmen who may be a little suspicious of all this crazy space business in the first place. We have an idea that the TV networks would have the same reaction... but it's a good idea anyway ! That winds us up for another month. All you fellows who have been writing in demanding a Retief novel -- don't forget we've got one starting next month! This month's "First" -- i. e., first story publication for another new science-fiction writer -- is Dannie Plachta's Alien Artifact . We have one of these every issue, you know. Maybe one of these days it'll be yours    The Editor IF Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better!  Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. # Ye  start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose P my check or money order for: O # issues for #  # issues for #  Name          Address #       City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or Q renewal. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #S#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants ) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station ) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus ## for postage and handling. Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Plus Postage #t Addres I Enclose. State.  October # # Earth's most unpredictable diplomat  Takes on a planet of living machines! Your Subscription is Your Private Window On Baby is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost CMell Cordwoiner Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Coves of Steel Isaac Asimov The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Gaiaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, wih the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do f Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #S#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants; Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Vol. #, No. # Prederik PoM, Editor David Potion, ProdacHon Mgr Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Diene Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr, IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol, #, No. #. Main Office; #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, AAexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by seif-addressed stamped envelope. Tbe publisher assumes no responsibility  unsolicited material. All stories cnw fiction, and ony similarity between characters ind actual persons is ooinddentaL Printed in the U. S. A. by ibe Guinn Compony, New Yodi VL H. IF  Editorial Where are T he other day an editor from a national news magazine called up to find out what he could about the present activities of some f the Grand Old Names of science fiction. What he had in mind was a idebar to run in connection with a story on Kariner IV and its Mars photographs, and what he wanted to do was tell about what science fiction's old masters were doing these days. "What about Doc Smith?" he aaked. "His newest story, Skylark DvjQuesne, is running currently in If," said we. "A. E. Van Vogt?" ntributing regularly to the same magazine." "Well, how about Isaac Aafanov?" "Got a couple of his storlea, too -- one in the October Maxy, one a little later." "Heinlein?" "Oh, sure -- his next series will start off # for us." And so it went. Murray Leinster, Philip Jose Farmer -- all the big names of some decades ago; if they were still alive, they were still writing science fiction. (When the sidebar finally appeared, it had only two names, Hugo Gernsback and Horace Gold -- and as a matter of fact, we have a Horace Gold story coming up in Galaxy too!) There was a superstition current a few years ago that most of sciencefiction's best writers had given up the field in favor of greener pastures. It may even have been true -- briefly. But the record shows that it certainly isn't true any more! A ctually something has been happening among science-fiction's top writers, however. The greener they now ? pastures are there, and the sf authors have been grazing in them. Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and a few others are finding their time more and more taken up with writing motion-picture and television scripts. Major magazines like Playboy and Holiday have preempted a lot of the working time of writers like Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, Frank M. Robinson and so on. A fair proportion of those with son, Isaac Asimov, Cordwainer Smith, John R. Pierce and James V. McConnell, for instance -- are putting in most of their effort on teaching, or research, or factual science writing; and even the relatively simon-pures, like Robert A. Heinlein and the undersigned, find their time more and more occupied with participating in seminars, making radio and TV appearances. But let no one wonder where science fiction's great writers of yesteryear may be. Nearly all of them -- plus a great deal of new blood, as witness our "Firsts" -- are right at their typewriters right now, writing science fiction. It may not pay off as well in gold or glory as other pursuits open to them, but it has its advantages. First, it has the most alert audience in the world. Second, it is what they do best. And third -- it is the only kind of writing that imposes no tabus or restrictions of its own. In science fiction, the sky's no limit -- and that's why there will never be a lack of talented and capable writers for it! Secrets entrusted to a few lulnpuJCiM#aetiofMf be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hid den processes of mans mind, and the mastery of lifers problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes tooay. The Rosicrucians (not a religious  Rosicrucians (AM organization) an age-old bfodiechood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their ardirres for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness m their toachss Write today for a free copy of me book, 'The Mastery of Lifo. Widiln its pages may lie a new life of opporScribe C.TJ, San Jose, California # Please send me the free boolc The Mastery of Ufe, which oains how I may leun co use my facaltics and powca of mind. IManwt City Zip Coda First of Three Parts IF  Serial Nice planefi The natives were half machines -- the government was halt dead -- and the Terrans were halt out of their minds! I J ame Retief, Second Secretary and Consul of the Terrestrial Embassy to Quopp, paused in his stroll along the Twisting Path of Sublime Release He admired the blaze of early morning sunlight on the stained glass window of a modest grog shop wedged between a stall with a sign in jittery native script announcing Bargain Prices in Cuticula Inlays, and the cheery facade of The Idle Hour Comfort Station, One Hundred Stalls, No Waiting. He took out a long cigar of the old-fashioned type still hand-rolled on Jorgensen's Worlds. He glanced back along the steep, narrow street. Among the pina -- members of a hundred related native species mingling freely here in the Great Market of Ixix -- the four Terrans who had been trailing him for the past half hour stood out drably. Retief drew on the cigar, savoring the aroma, turned and stepped through the low arch into the tavern. From a high stool within the raised ring-bar at the center of the gaily lit chamber, the bar keeper -- a medium-sized, short-abdomened individual of the Herpp tribe, with chipped wing-cases of faded baby blue and four dextrous arms of bristly wine-red, on one of which a Terr an wristwatch was strapped -- manipulated the controls of the dispenser console. He exchanged banter with the customers, made change and kept a pair of eyes on the free lunch simultaneously. As he saw Retief, he tilted his anterior antennae in friendly greeting. "I am Gom-Goo, and I dance the dance of welcome," he susurrated in Quopp trade dialect, his voice reminiscent of fingernails on a blackboard. "What'll it be, Retief?" "I'm Retief, and I dance the dance of Glad Arrival," the diplomat replied in the same tongue. "How about a shot of Bacchus brandy?" "Red or black?" "Black." The other customers made room as Retief moved up, undipped a carefully charred wooden bowl from the serving panel, got it under the proper bright-plated nozzle just in time to catch the tarcolored syrup as it jetted forth. "That's pretty good stuff," GomGoo said. He lowered his voice. "But for a real kick, you ought to try a shot of Hellrose -- cut ten to one. of course. That'll put a charge om your plates." "I tried it once. We Terries liki our sugar fermented." "Sourballs?" The Herpp indicated an assortment of pea-sized lumps of yellow, white, purple and green. Retief shook his head. 'T prefer salt peanuts to saltpetre," he confided. "Well, every tribe to its own poison." "Here's oil in your crankcase, Retief toasted formally, nibbling the brandy. "Oil," Gom-Goo responded. "Yo haven't been in lately, Retief. Been dormant?" "No more than usual, Gom-Gov Ambassador Longspoon's been uposing non-union hours on the staff. I'm afraid. Wouldn't do to let the Groaci steal a march on us and get a Bolshoi-type ballet theatre built before we can get a Yankee-stadium type sports arena off the drawing board." G om-Goo worked his dorsal mandibles in the gesture that expressed courteous skepticism. "Frankly, Retief, we Quoppina aren't much interested in watching Terries hobble around. After all, with only two legs and no wings..." "I know; but it's traditional in these diplomatic competitions to build something conspicuously inappropriate." Gom-Goo tilted his oculars toward the door, where a pair of Quoppina with highly polished black carapacos were rolling past, twirling night-sticks. "Speaking of Terry programs, Retiet, just between you and me, what's behind this business of buffing up these Voion ne'er-do-wells and setting them to cruising the streets waving clubs at the rest of us?" "Well, Gom-Goo, it appears that in some quarters the view is held that you Quoppina are a little too fond of brawling, anarchy and duelling in the streets to qualify as natural democrats. Ergo, a native police force." "Uh-huh. But why pick the Voion for the job? Their tribe's made its Kving by waylaying honest Quoppina in the back alleys ever since the Great Egg first hatched." A heavy foot clumped behind Retief. He turned to find the four Terrans ringing him in, ominous expressions on their weathered features. "We're just in from the Trading Post at Rum Jungle," the lean, scarfaced member of the quartet said flatly. "We want to have a little talk with you. Mister." He put his left fist carefully against the palm of his right hand and twisted it, looking around nervously. Retief nodded. "Go ahead," he said pleasantly. A large man with thick, protuberant ears and thin sandy hair eased the scarred man aside. "Not in this dump," he said in a voice like a cannonball rolling downstairs. "Outside." "If it's a private matter, maybe you'd better drop by my office." "We already been to the Embassy. Talked to some bird named Magnan," the big man said. "He accd like his lace drawers was itching him; no joy there." #Ton't argue with this chump, JLy Big Leon," a squatty fellow with a bluish chin and a steel front tooth advised. "Bring him along." The bartender leaned over and buzzed sharply. "My name is GomGoo," he stated. "I danctk -- " "Better get your wiring checked, low-pockets," Scar-face cut him off. "Sounds like you got a short in your talk-box." He jerked his head at Retief. "Let's walk Mister." "I haven't quite finished my drink," Retief said mildly. "Why don't you go stand outside? I'll be along presently." The fourth man, yet to be heard from, edged closer. "Ah, sir, we have a problem," he began. "We -- " "Skip it Jerry," Scar-face snapped. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, glowered at Retief. "Outside, you, like Big Leon said." "Sorry," Retief said. "Some other time, maybe." Scar-face narrowed his eyes, reached a large-knuckled hand for Relief's collar; Retief leaned aside, caught the hand and flipped it over, his fingers against the palm, his thumb against the scarred knuckles. He doubled it back over the wrist and Scar-face went to his knees with a yowl. Retief tsked. "A very poor lead. Lefty," he said reproachfully. "It's a good thing I wasn't an enemy of yours." "Hey," the big man said stepping in. "Let him up." Retief looked at the wide face IF that to-i' c ! mx il.ice by an inch. "Why ao liicy caii you Big Leon?" Big Leon set himselt. "Pul Seymour down and I'll show you," he frated. Relief shifted his grip, lifted the carred man clear off the floor, hoisted him chest-high. "Here you have him," he offered, and tossed him at the big man. Leon staggered hack, oed, thrust Seymour aside, frowned, doubled a large fist and moved in. There was a shrill rasp of sound. A thick, five-foot Quoppina with a glistening black carapace decked out in elaborate silver ornaments rolled between Relief and Big Leon. "Outside, foreign grubs!" the intruder keened. He waved a long billy-club of black wood and jabbed it at the scar-faced man, who had tumbled to his feet. There were other club-wielders behind the first -- two, three, half a dozen or more, all wearing the new black and silver Federal Police. The Voion captain waved his palps, giving Relief a glimpse down a yellow-green throat set with silvery needles. "All of you are under arrest," he rasped. "Place your manipulative members above your sense-organ clusters and proceed hence!" "What's the charge?" Relief asked in the Voion dialect. "Trespassing in forbidden territory, alien. Not that it matters! The example may remind your fellows to remain in the ghetto graciously assigned to them by the indulgence of the Planetary Government!" "Just a minute," tim bar-keeper interrupted from his perch above. "I am Gom-Goo and -- " "Silence, panderer to alien perversions," the Voion snapped. "Or Til find dungeon space for you, too!" T he other Voion were unlimbering clubs now. Over their heads Relief caught Big Leon's eye, jerked his head minutely to the right; the big man narrowed his eyes, nodded quickly. As the Voion before Retief brought his club back for a jab to the sternum, Leon reached, caught the alien by the upper pair of arms, lifted him clear of the floor, whirled him and slammed him at his fellows. Two of them went over with a crash. Retief spun, intercepted an eager junior closing in from the left, caught him by his vestigal wingcases, sent him reeling back to collide with his partner as Scar-face feinted, twisted the club from the two-pronged grip of the nearest cop, ducked and jammed it through the spokes of the alien's yard-high main wheels. The victim stopped with a screech and a twanging of broken spokes. Big Leon met a second charging Voion with a roundhouse swipe, yelled as his fist glanced off the armored thorax, then landed a blow that spim the creature aside just as the sole undamaged Voion struck Big Leon a vicious blow behind the ear. Leon turned with a roar, picked up the cop bodily and slammed him against the bar-keeper's podium. "Here!" the bar-keeper shrilled. "I am Gom-Goo and I dance the Dance of Distress!" "Let's get out of here!" Scarface IF panted. He ducked aside as a Voion's club whistled, charged for the door. Quoppina of all sizes and colors scattered before him. Leon aimed a blow at the cop renewing the attack. Jerry took the arm of the fourth Tcrran, staggering from a bloody cut across the scalp, and plunged through the crowd. Retief, backed against the podium by the last two Voion till in action, keeping their distance and swinging their clubs in whistling arcs, plucked a tall bottle from a display, got in a hearty crack across the head of one as Gom-Goo leaned down and laid the other out. "Retief!" the Horpp called above the chatter of the clientel who had been enjoying the free show. "I am Gom-Goo and I dance the Dance of Apology." "This dance is on me," Retief panted. "I think I'd better be off now, Gom-Goo. Sorry about the damages." "It was entirely the fault of Jfiese acks-in-office." The bartender clashed his wingcase in agitation. 'Interfering in a friendly dispute among cash customers! Yum-TukI" He signalled to his two table waiters. "Haul these Voion trouble-makers out into the alley, to survive or not, just as they please." He leaned over to eye the one Big Leon had thrown against the podium. "As for this fellow, stuff him in the incinerator. He's shouldered his last free citizen off the parking-ledge." "We'd better dust. Mister," Leon aid. "That Bug was a cop and he's got plenty of pals." There was a distant clanging of gongs. "You'd best transfer the scene of your diversions elsewhere for the nonce, Retief," Gom-Goo called. "One of these spoil-sports has summoned his fellow blackguards." "We were just leaving. Thanks for tapping that last fellow; he was getting too close for comfort." "My pleasure, Retief. The rascals have been getting pushier by the day. They're up to something, mark my words! And remember: After the wheels, the juncture between the parietal plates is the best spot to go for on a Voion." "I'll remember that. Ta-ta." II I n a quieter grog shop half a mile from the scene of the action, Rctief and the four Terrans found a table at the back of the room from which they could keep an eye on the street. Through the wide, doorless arch, Voion cops could be seen hurrying past, grim and businesslike in their black and silver trappings. Big Leon blew on his skinned fist, looked at Retief almost shyly. "Sorry about the rough stuff, uh. Mister, uh..." "Retief. No apology needed. I see now why they call you Big Leon." Leon nodd. "You looked pretty good in there yourself. Mister. Maybe those Bugs'll think about it before they tackle another bunch of Terries." "What's got into them Bugs?" the scarred man demanded. "They been giving us a hard time out in the field, but I figured they'd be minding their manners here in town." "That's what we came here to talk about," Big Leon said. "Something's stirring the Voion tribe up. I thought it was just us planters and traders they were out to get, but they've got the whole town sewed up like a dead sailor." "We pretty near didn't get into the city," the steel-toothed man said. "There's a patrol around the port. A man could get the idea he wasn't welcome." "The new police force was designed to bring law and order to Quopp," Retief said. "According to the official T.O. there are supposed to be no more than a hundred of them assigned to the city, with smaller detachments at the major trading towns." "A hundred my Uncle Edgar," Leon growled. "ITie whole town's swarming with 'em -- and there must be another ten thousand between here and Rum Jungle." "Yes, I'd say our friends the Voion have answered the call to civic duty in surprising numbers," Retief said. "They say Longspoon's the one behind it," Scarface said. "Someboys are on." "The motivation of the diplomat is an enigma that even his best friend, if he had one, would be hard put to define," Retief confided. "Technically, the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne is dedicated to the protection of Terran interests. Galaxy-wide. Of course, figuring out what those interests really are can get a little complicated." "Like equipping local cops with clubs to pound Terry heads, using fees squeezed out of Terry businessmen," Seymour growled. "What does the Corps want here, anyway?" Leon demanded. "Quopp was doing all right -- with a little help from Terry free enterprise. Johnnies getting everything organized, and all of a sudden us Terries are undesirable aliens." R etief refilled glasses. "Admittedly, some of the measures selected by our Chief of Mission may seem paradoxical at first glance. But that's just because you haven't entered into the spirit of the game. All of the measures Ambassador Longspoon has taken -- restrictions on private enterprise by Terrans, establishment of the Planetary Police, free goods for the indigent, subsidies for Voion commercial enterprise, and the rest -- are designed to bring peace and plenty to the downtrodden locals whom you fellows have been exploiting." "What do you mean, exploiting?" Big Leon's fist hit the table. "Why, a hundred years ago, when the first Terries hit Quopp, there was nothing here but wild Bugs living in grass huts and eating each other. We laid out the towns, built trails, started 'em in on a little cottage industry and inter-tribal trade. We brought in electronics men to be country G.P.'s, developed new lines of merchandise to make life more beautiful for the Quopp in the street and taught 'em the idea of civilization. Sure, we made a good profit -- but they've gotten their money's worth!" IF "Still, Leon, now that you've put Quopp on the star maps, competition has set in. Our friends the Groaci aren t going to let this world drift into the Terry camp without a struggle. They've set up a string of trading posts along the other coast of Continent One, and they're doing a brisk trade in miniature Tri-D's, artificial limbs and wheels, electronic Mah Jong sets -- " "Direct competition with usi" Jerry burst out. "The copycats!" "Of course," Retief went on, "no self-respecting diplomat could let the challenge pass without making an effort to out-enlighten the opposition. Whatever the Groaci do, we have to do bigger." "Why?" Seymour grunted. iilllhy does a golfer have to hit the golf ball?" Retief riposted. "Such is the challenge of diplomacy." "But why this sudden compulsion to unite the planet under a single government? -- and with the Voion in charge, of all people!" Jerry looked indignant. "You know we can't even travel inland to look over the markets?" Big Leon said. "You know why? The Voion. They're all over like a land-lubber's lunch -- waving clubs and telling its where we can and can't go!" "Longspoon's making a mistake, backing the Voion," Big Leon said. "There's not a bug on the planet doesn't hate their main windings. Slaves and dope-runners, con artists, highway robbers and second-story men -- that's what they were, until this idea of reforming 'em and putting badges on 'em came along." "His Excellency envisions the day when a trained cadre of reformed Voion will lead the newly enlightened masses to a new era of planetary unity," Retief explained. "Or so he frequently says." "Retief, how long you been here on Quopp?" Leon inquired. "Only a few weeks. I'm afraid." "You talk the dialects pretty good." "I've spent a few hours on the encephalotapes." "Uh-huh," Leon nodded. "Well, I was born here, Retief. Hell, I haven't been off the planet half a dozen times in my life. And I can tell you -- these devils have got something up their sleeve!" "I'm inclined to agree. Their police badges seem to have gone to their heads." "It ain't just that," Seymour said. "There's something in the wind! We saw it, out in the jungle -- and now here in town! It's getting ready to pop! Pushing Terries around -- that's bad medicine. Mister!" "And I'll tell you something else," the steel-toothed man said. "Those the port -- in broad daylight!" Retief frowned. "You're sure of that?" "Been down to the port lately?" Big Leon inquired. "Not in the past month." "Come on," Leon rose. "Let's go ment on the pad right now big enough to put half the Terries on Quopp out of business." As he stood, Bibliography: The Natural History oi Refief's War is the nineteenth story in the galaxy-girdling exploits of science-fiction's most celebrated interstellar diplomat -- and the first full-length novel. By request of a number of readers, here is the full list of Retief's previous adventures: Magazine Title Issue Book Title Aide Memoire July, # same  Castle of Light, The Oct., # same  City That Grew in the Sea, The Mar., # Wicker Wonderland  Cultural Exchange Sept., # same  Desert and the Stars, The Nov., # Protest Note  Diplomate at Arms Jan., # . Frozen Planet, The Sept., #I Courier  Gambler's World Nov., #I Palace Revolution  Giant Killer Sept., # -- Governor of Glove, The Nov., # Native Intelligence  Madman from Earth, The Mar., # Policy  Mightiest Qorn, July, # Ultimatum  Prince and the Pirate, The Aug., # same  Relief, God-Speaker Jan., # The Brass God  Relief of the Red-Tape MountainMay, # Sealed Orders  Retief's War (current) -- Saline Solution Mar., # same  Trick or Treaty Aug., # -- Yllian Way, The Jan., # Protocol   Included in Envoy to New Worlds, Aoe Books. #. Included in Gatactic Diplomat, Doubleday  Co., Inc., #.  Only Relief story not first published in if; appeared In Fantastie. Note: We do not have copies of the Relief book collections, nor of the magazine containing Diplomat at Arms. However any back issue of If from #-# inclusive may be obtained at #c each, # for #, regardless of original cover price, postpaid, by writing: Back issue Department, If, #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. #. IF a buzzing three-inch yellow green flyer sailed by, settled to a puddle ol spilled hquor on the floor, dig Leon raised a size thirteen shoe -- "Don't do it," Retief said. "He probably needs a drink as bad as we did." "That's just a Phip," Seymour said. "You talk like they was human. "You never can tell," Retief said, skirting the small creature. "He just might be somebody's Cousin George." O utside, the five Teirans hailed two massive peach-colored Wumblums, mounted to the creaking velvet-lined seats strapped to the heavy creatures' backs, relaxed as their mounts trundled off on broad leather-shod wheels toward the spaceport, groaning up the steep slopes, puffing down the declines, shouting for way among the thronging Quoppina packing the route. Clear of the main shopping streets, the Wumblums made better time, wheeling along briskly under the crisp morning sky. Overhead, the glaring crescent of loop, Quopp's sister world, swung toward its twicedaily eclipse of the distant sun, a blinding point of white light casting short mid-morning shadows across the intricately surfaced buildings that thrust up everywhere like giant, lumpy loaves of pastel-toned bread. "You gents coming back?" Reliefs mount inquired in a voice like the E-string on a bass cello. It tilted an auditory receptor to pick up the reply over the noise of wheels on pavement. "Not right away," Retief said. "Better not wait for us." "I'll stick around anyway. VoomVoom's the name. Ask for me when you're ready to go. Not much action this morning. All these Zilk and Jackoo in town from the villages; they'd wear out their wheels rubbernecking before they'd hail a ride. And these Voion cops all over the place -- they're not helping business any." The Wumblum behind Retief 'i swung out, came alongside. "Looks like we got company." Big Leon called, pointing over his shoulder with a large, blunt thumb. Retief glanced back. A pair of Voion were trailing fifty yards behind, black shells glistening, light winking from their recently applied Police insignia. "There are two more flanking us on the right," Retief said. "I'd guess we're covered on the left, too. They don't want us to be lonely." "Maybe you'd better cut out of here," Leon suggested. "I guess they're still mad. Me and the boys'll handle this." "It's a nice day for a drive," Retief said. "I wouldn't think of missing it." The Wumblum took a quick look back at Retief. "Some of those Voion giving you gents trouble?" "They're trying. I'll concede that, Voom-Voom." "Don't worry about a thing, boss. I'll say a word to my side-kick Rhum-Rhum, and we'll lead those grub-eaters down a couple of side streets to a cul-de-sac I know and work 'em over for you." 'That's friendly of you, old timer, but we don't have time for any more horseplay today." "All part of the service," VoomVoom said. T he port came into view as the party emerged from the twisting avenue: a hundred-acre expanse of hilly ground, ringed by a sagging wire fence, paved and scabbed over with a maze of flimsy temporary structures, some now nearly a century old, among which the tall shapes of scattered vessels thrust up. As Retief watched, a vast black shadow swept down the hillside beyond the ships. It rushed across the port blanking out the gleam of sun on chromalloy and concrete and corrugated aluminum, then enveloped them, plunging the street into abrupt, total darkness. Retief looked up; the great fire-edged disk of loop loomed black against the midnight blue sky. Voom-Voom lowered his head, and the beam of dusty light from his luminescent organ cut a path through the gloom ahead. "You know, you Terries have done us Quoppina a lot of good," he said, slowing now to pick his way with more care. "Like the focusing lenses for us Wumblums' headlights. A real boon. And the rubber wheel-shoes some of the fellows wear; a useful item. And the synthetic lubricants -- and the surgical spares -- you've kept a lot of fellows on the street earning a living at a time o' life when our dads would have been laid up for good. But those Voion cops, and this one world, one government idea: It's a mistake. It's always been every tribe for itself, and a good system, too." "Watch it, Retief," Big Leon called quietly. There was a soft swish of tires on clay pavement, the abrupt stab of yellowish light beams as fast-moving forms closed in on both sides. "Halt!" a Voion accent came from the darkness. "Pull up here, you Wumblums, in the name of the law!" "You small-time chiselers have got the gall to pull that routine on me?" Voom-Voom trumpeted, accelerating. "Stay out of my way, or I'll leave my tread-marks down your backs!" "That's an order, you great bumbling lout!" One of the Voion, apparently carried away by his own recently acquired rank, swung too close. Voom-Voom shot out an arm like a ship-grapple, gathered the luckless creature in, tossed him aside to slam the pavement with a clang of metallo-organic body plates. A second Voion, veering aside, gave a shriek, disappeared under the massive wheels of Rhum-Rhum. The others sheered off, fell back, as the Wumblums sped off toward the lights now gleaming all across the port Retief held onto the worn leather hand-straps as the solid wheels hammered over the pot-holed road. gone as far as handing out power guns to those jaspers," Seymour shouted as Rhum-Rhum came up on the starboard beam. "Look there!" Jerry leaned forward beside Retief. "There are Voion swarming all over the port!" IF "Don't worry, gents," VoomVoom hooted. "Rhum-Rhum and me will stand by. That was the first time I've had my wheels on a Voion Mnce the "last time I caught one prying the lid off my fare-box. It felt good." Ill T here was a flood-lit gate ahead, flanked by a pair of Voion who rolled forward officiously -- and darted back as Voom-Voom barreled past them, slammed through the fence, hurtled on without slowing. They were in among the tall ships now, threading their way among stacked packing cases, dangling cargo nets, hurrying stevedores and Vorch cargo-carriers, the latter squat Quoppina with three thick functional wheels and broad, laborscarred carapaces. Ahead Retief saw ttte sides of stacked cases being unloaded by Voion stevedores from the hold of a battered tramp trader under a battery of poly arcs. "You notice they're not shipping the stuff in Corps vessels," Big Leon pointed out as their mounts pulled up at a signal from Retief. "It's all handled pretty cagy; looks like there's angles to this that Longspoon doesn't want publicity on. It just happens I know that cargomark." A pair of bustling Voion were at work on the cargo net, overseeing the placement of the crates. Others stood about, as though on guard -- humbler specimens than the elite police, Retief noted; their dull black wing-cases lacked the high polish and bright-work of their favored tribemates. One, wearing the armband of a Ramp Master, wheeled across to confront the visitors. He was an oldster, beginning to silver around the edges, his thickened wing cases showing the marks of repeated paring. "What d'ye seek here, sirs?" ho chirped in tribal Voion, in what was meant to be an authorative tone, meanwhile working his antenor antennae in frantic Voion thieves' code. "Shift... cases... conceal... special... consignment," Retief deciphered. He noted a sudden stir of activity among the Voion at the net A pair of the patrolling stick-wielders rolled in to help. The center of attention appeared to be a stack of cases conspicuously tagged with large red cards reading 'For the Terra Ambassador'. "We takee look-see," Seymour was saying in trade pidgin. "We lookec gift-gift Terry friend-friend send." "Very go," the oldster shifted to the same tongue. "Looky see, plenty ski pants, snowshoe, smoked oyster, bagels, tennis racquet, paintby-number kit. All stuff keep tiny Quoppina tot alive all winter." "You hear that, Retief?" Big Leon growled. "Some of my hottest trade items, those are. You'd think Longspoon was deliberately trying to put us traders out of business." Ho pointed suddenly. "Hey, look there!" A Voion in tribal dress, with the feathery antennae of a Flying Jarwheel strapped to his head, was manuevering a pink Timblum -- a smaller cousin of the mighty Wumblum into position. There was a squat car hitched behind the mount. "That's Smuk. He's a retired slaver; used to be one of my best customers. Now look at him, free-loading! No wonder I don't see him around the warehouse sales any more!" R etief climbed down from his seat, strolled across to study the stacked crates. TTie Ramp Master trailed him, his wheels squeaking on the dry bearings of old age. Behind the facade of hurriedly placed boxes, Retief counted at least half a dozen of the red-marked cases identical with the others except for the prominent diplomatic address. 'Fhe Voion twittered nervously at his heels. "Nice Terry gentleman take looksee next side, see plenty nice box, you bet," he croaked. "What's in those, Ramp Master?" Retief asked in tribal Voion, indicating the half-concealed boxes. "Eee, the sir speaks good Tribal." The old Voion clacked his palps in a gesture indicating Respectful Congratulation. "Why, as to those cases there, they contain educational material, yes, sir, that's what they contain. Now, over here..." Big Leon had come up beside Retief. "Fed like sticking your nose into trouble?" Retief asked softly. Leon nodded. "Sure, why not?" "Why don't you go stir up a little activity over there, say in about ten minutes?" "Huh? Oh, I gotcha." Leon gave Retief a quizzical look, went over and spoke to Seymour. Beside Retief, the old Voion signalled with his antennae. A pair of cargo-handlers wheeled casually over to hover near the Terrans, trailing as they sauntered off, looking over the scene of bustling activity. Retief moved on along the deepshadowed lane between stacked cargo, paused before a heap of crates, pointed to the manila envelopes stapled to their sides. "Mind if I look?" he inquired. "As the sir desires," the oldster said quickly. Retief pulled a folded copy of a Bill of Lading from the pocket, opened it out. It indicated that the crate contained bound volumes of the Pest Control Journal consigned to the Information Service Library in care of the Terran Consulate at Groon -- a small city a hundred miles up-river in Deep Jungle. He went on, casually checking packing lists, rounded the end of the line of stacked crates, came up the back side. Directly behind the red-tagged cases, he found a pile of boxes contained blank forms destined for the Terran Chancery. At that moment, an outcry came from beyond the looming bulk of the ship. Retief turned to his guide, who was now jittering nervously and looking in the direction from which the disturbance emanated. "By the way, I forgot to mention it, but one of my companions -- the large one -- is something of a practical joker. He may have taken it into his head to start a fire or plant a couple of small choke-bombs. Maybe you'd better wheel over and check on him." "The sir jests?" The Ramp Master looked around for a courier, saw IF the last of his crew curving sharply out of sight on one wheel headed for the scene of the growing uproar. "If the sir will excuse... He shot off at surprising speed. A t once Retief turned to the nearest of the red-tagged crates, used a handy pry-bar to lever a slot free. A layer of oil-impregnated plastic barred his view of the contents of the box. He took out a compact pocket knife, snapped the blade out, slit the liner, reached in, felt the lumpy coolness of a plasticcoated object. He managed a twofingered grip, drew it out. It was a bulky, heavy package, roughly triangular, larger than Reliefs hand, its outlines obscured by the protective cocoon. He slit it, peeled it back. power gun nestled in his hand. Retief glanced around; none of the port personnel were in view. He stripped away the oily covering from the gun, dropped the weapon in his pocket, then tucked the empty plastic back inside, folded the liner over it, pressed the slat back in position. The noises from Big Leon's direction were gaining in timber and volume, accompanied by splintering sounds. Voom-Voom glanced at Retief. "Say, boss, that racket -- " "Just yish high spirits; it won't last much longer," Retief said. "Meanwhile, see that nobody disturbs me for the next five minutes." Voom-Voom waved one arm, clicked his luminescent organ on and rolled forward to cover the approach. Retief set to work moving the barricade of boxes aside and removing red tags from the Special Consignment. The riot continued, still growing in volume. With the tags free, Retief moved back to the crates marked for Groon, quickly removed the tags, used the butt of liis pocket knife to hammer labels removed from the consignment of forms in place in their stead, then hurried on to the crated forms, placed the red tags on the boxes. "Better hurry it up, boss," VoomVoom hooted softly. "I think the excitement's dying down over there." He broke off to rumble suddenly into action. Retief heard the shriU of Voion voices. He glanced up at the black disc of loop; a glowing bulge was showing at one edge now; the eclipse would be over in another half-minute. He hurried back to the Special Consignment, attached the cards from the Library shipment intended for Groon. Behind him, voices shrilled; Voom-Voom was stni blocking the lane, loudly demanding why he should move merely to let a pack of Voion riff-raff through. Retief stepped quickly iO Rhum-Rhum. #iTf you backed up carelessly, you X might just ram that pile of boxes," he said. "They might get all mixed up together..." "They might, at that," the Wumblum agreed. "Take those scalpers half their siesta hour to unscramble 'em." He straightened his wheels, glanced back, and moved suddenly, slamming into the neatly stacked crates. They skidded, toppled with a crash. Voom-Voom, watching the by-play with one pair of eyes, whirled about in mock alarm, dumped another row. Excited Voion shot of returned sunlight sprang across the hills, scythed down the slope and on across the crowded tarmac to bathe the scene of chaos in light. Big Leon appeared, looming over the scurrying cargo tenders. He looked around, frowning. "What the Sam Hill happened here?" he demanded loudly. "Big brute of dumb Wumblum makee big mess-mess," the old Voion cargomaster shrieked. "Great clumsy louts gotee no damn pidgin here!" "Don't spin your wheels, grandpa," Voom-Voom rumbled carelessly. He leaned over to put his armored cranium near Reliefs. "How'd I do, chief?" "Very effective," Relief said approvingly. He walked over to the sidelines where a dull-eyed Vorch cargo-carrier was squatting, watching the activity. "There are half a dozen crates marked for the Terry Library at Groon," he said in trade dialect to the heavyweight. "I wonder if you know of an unused shed nearby where they might accidentally be tucked away out of sight for a few days." He dropped a strip of embossed plastic trade wampum in the Vorch's nearest hand, which immediately twitched it out of sight. "What's this -- a bribe?" The carrier swiveled his wide head to bring his silicon-lensed rear eyes to bear. "Just a gratuity for services rendered," Relief reassured him. "That's okay then. Just so you don't offer me no graft." The Vorch pointed with a short, thick arm. "The little bonded warehouse over there -- the one with the red carving on the front. I'll stack the stuff in there." Retief nodded and rejoined the party. "Hey, what gives, Retief?" Seymour demanded. "Leon says -- " "Maybe you better not ask too many questions," the big man put in. "I think we made our point. Let's settle for that and head back for Rum Jungle. Something's ready to pop, and I want to be minding the store when it happens." "Maybe you better come with us, Retief," Steel-tooth said. "The post is a pretty fair fort if push comes to shove." "Don't talk foolish, Lester." Leon said. "Relief's got a job to do here." "Yeah," Steel-tooth said, "but when the job blows up in your face, remember Rum Jungle. We'll need every man -- and then it won't be enough." IV A t the Terran Chancery in the Path of Many Sporting Agents, Retief stepped down from his perch and handed a strip of credit to his mount. "Call on me any time, boss," the Wumblum said. "I kind of like your style." He nodded toward the irregularly surfaced Embassy complex, a cluster of standard Quopp-style buildings perched on the uneven ground, painted ochre, Indian red IF and dusty aquamarine, and perforated by irregularly shaped windows at random intervals. "First time I ever hauled a Terry," the Wumblum went on in a confidential tone. "Between you and me, I heard you folks were a tight crowd with a credit and not much in the sporting line, if you know what I mean." "A base canard, Voom-Voom. A diplomat considers a day wasted if he isn't playing at least three games at once." As Retief stepped through the main entry, incongruously aluminum-framed and glass-doored. First Secretary Magnan hurried up, a thin, harassed figure in the limp yelloW seersucker shorts and dickey of subtropical undress kit. "Retief," he called. "Wherever have you been? The Ambassador is furious. And Colonel UnderknuckIc's been calling for you for an hour! I've been frantic!" "Why? Can't they be furious without me?" "The sight of you seems to stimulate the condition, I grant," Magnan said witheringly. "Come along now. I've told the Colonel you were probably out gathering material for the quarterly Sewage Report. I trust you'll say nothing to dispel that impression." "I've been cementing relations with the Terran business community," Retief explained as he accompanied the senior diplomat along the wide, tiled office-lined corridor which had been installed to replace the warren of tiny, twisting passages terior of the structure. "Hmmm. I'm not sure that was wise, in view of the present downplaying of Terran private enterprise here on Quopp. You know how Prime Minister Ikk frowns on that sort of thing." "Oh, Prime Minister, eh? Who fave him that title?" "Why, he advised the Ambassador that It was conferred early this morning by unanimous vote of the Council of Drones." Retief followed Magnan into the lift; the doors closed with a soft whoosh! of compressed air. # #T et's see," Retief mused. "That's the dummy legislature he set up to satisfy the Ambassador's passion for democracy, isn't it? It was fortunate he had seventy-three senile uncles handy to appoint; saved the bother of breaking in strangers." "Yours is a distorted view of the evolution of representational government here on Quopp," Magnan said reprovingly. "Closer attention to your daily Bulletin from the Bird's Nest would go far toward homogenizing your thinking on the subject." "I thought that was something Acy did to milk." "The term refers to voluntary alignment of viewpoint toward a group-oriented polarity; a sort of Knkage of moral horsepower for maximal thrust toward the objective." "I'm not sure pasteurized thinking is rich enough in intellectual vitamins to satisfy my growing curiosity about just what Ikk is up to." "It should be apparent even to you, Retief," Magnan said sharply, "that the Corps can hardly accredit a full Mission to a non-existent planetary government. Ergo, such a ruling body must be formed. And who better qualified than the Voion to undertake the task?" "You might have something there. Their past history has given them a firm grounding in the basics of politics; but with the other tribes outnumbering them a hundred to one, it's a little hard to see how they're planning to impose planetwide enlightenment on a race that's as fond of anarchy as the Quoppina." "That, my dear Retief, is Ambassador Longspoon's problem, not oun. It was his idea to groom the Voion for leadership; our task is merely to implement his policies." "And if in the process we saddle the other ninety-nine per cent of the population with a dictatorship, that's a mere detail." "Ah, I can see you're beginning to get the picture." The elevator halted and Magnan led the way out, paused at the heavy door barring the public from the Chancery wing. "I hope you'll restrain your unfortunate tendency to essay japes at the expense of decorum, Retief. Colonel Underknuckle is in no mood for facetiae." He pushed through, nodded mechanically at the small, gray Voion female buffing her chelae at a small desk of polished blue wood at one side of the red-carpeted corridor. She clacked her palps indifferently, blew a large bubble of green spearmint and popped it with lively report. IF "Impertinence I" Magnan sniffed under his breath. "A few months ago the baggage was an apprentice lop-drudge in a local inn of most unsavory repute. Now, after we've trained her and given her that expensive set of chrome inlays, a derisive pop of the gum is considered adequate greeting for her benefactors." "That's the trouble with uplifting the masses. They get to believing it themselves." M agnan stopped at an austere slab door marked Military Au tache, fitted an expression on his narrow features appropriate for greeting a Grade Seven employee, pushed through into deep carpeted silence. "Ah, there, Hernia. I believe Colonel Underknuckle wished to see Mr. Retief." The fat woman behind the desk patted a coil of mummified hair with a hand like a glove' full of lard, showed Magnan a simper suitable for a First Secretary and thumbed a button on a console before her. A chime sounded beyond the halfopen door. "Yes, confound it! What is it this time!" a voice like splitting canvas snarled from the desk speaker. "What in the name of perdition's become of Magnan? If he's not here in five minutes, send along that memo to the Ambassador I keep handy -- " "It is I," Magnan said stiffly. "Don't use grammar on me, Magnan!" the Attache shouted. "Come in here at once! There's been another communication from the benighted vessel. The saucy minx at the controls insists she's bringing her in, clearance or no clearance. And where the devil's that fellow, Retief?" "I have him right here. Colonel." As his callers entered the room. Underknuckle, a lean, high-shouldered man with bushy white hair, hollow, purplish cheeks and a lumpy, clay-colored nose, his immaculately tailored mid-afternoon semi-formal uniform awry, spun in his hip-umatic contour chair, causing the power-swivel mechanism to whine in protest. He glared at Retief. "So there you are at last! What's the meaning of this, sir? Is it possible that you're unaware of the new restrictions on tourism here on Quopp?" The colonel lowered his voice. "Schemes are all about us, gentlemen! We'll have to look sharp to our fences to keep our powder dry!" "But just one little shipload of ladies -- and in difficulty at that -- " Magnan began. "Orders are orders!" Underknuckle hit the desk with his fist, winced, slung his fingers as though drying them. "Let me assure you, when Ambassador Longspoon imposed entry quotas on sightseers, there was an excellent reason for it!" He barked through a grimace of pain. "Gracious, yes. Colonel," Magnan chirped. "We all know Prime Minister Ikk doesn't like Terries." "Ikk's likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it. It was the Ambassador's decision!" #I course, Colonel. What I meant was, you don't like Terries." Don't like Terrans? Why I'm a Tcrran myself, you idiotl" I didn't mean to give the wrong impression, I'm sure, Fred," Magnan said breathlessly. Personally, I love Terries -- " Not these Terries!" Underknuckle snatched up a paper and waved it. A boatload of females! Giddy, irresponsible women! Idlers -- or worse! Parasites! And no visas, mind you! And the ring-leader, Mr. Relief -- " the colonel thrust a mobile lower lip at him -- "is demanding to speak to you, sir! By name!" Retief!" Magnan turned on him. "What can you be thinking of, importing luxury goods!" #Tt's clear enough what he's thinkJL ing of," Underknuckle snapped. And I hardly need point out that such thoughts are not in consonance with tight military security!" Magnan assumed a troubled-butdetermined expression. Did the young lady give a name?" Harrumph! Indeed she did. Tell him it's Fifi,' she said -- as though Ihe Military Attache were a common messenger-boy!" Heavens -- such cheek!" Magnan sniffed. The name itself conjures up images of. rhinestone-clad doxies," Underknuckle snorted. I confess it's difficult to understand how a diplomat has occasion to make the acquaintance of persons of such stripe!" #h. I'm sure Mr. Retief can fix you up, Fred," Magnan volunteered. "He seemed to have a knack." "I do not wish to be fixed up!" Underknuckle roared. "I wish to make it clear to these junketing trollops that they will not be permitted to make planetfall here! Now, if you, Mr. Retief, will be so kind as to report to the Message Center and so inform your, ah petiie amie -- " 'I don't have an amie at the moment, Colonel, petite or otherwise," Retief said. "And, as it happens, I don't know any young ladies named Fifi. Still, it's never too late to rectify the omission. I'll be happy to talk to her." "I'm gratified to hear it," Underknuckle said coldly. "And if that vessel lands on this planet, young man. Til hold you solely responsible!" V B ack in the corridor, Magnan trotted af Retief's side, offering advice. "Now, just tell this young person, kindly but firmly, that your time is fully occupied by your duties and that if she'll just flit along to Adobe, say -- there's a fascinating museum there with a lovely display of mummified giant wheel-spiders." 'I won't presume to plan any itineraries," Retief interrupted gently. I think it might be better to find out what the girls are up to first." "Yes, it does seem odd they'd plan a vacation on Quopp. After all, there's nothing here but jungle, with a few thousand tribal villages and three or four dozen market towns." They turned in at the Message IF Center, showed badges; electro-locks clicked and the inner door slid back, revealing a bright-lit room crammed with lock-files and coding machines. "Oh, boy, am I glad to see you, Mr. Retief," a freckled youth with thick contact lenses and a struggling mustache blurted, coming forward. "That babe aboard the yacht's a dish, all right, but she's got a way of flashing her eyes at a fellow when she doesn't get her way -- " Retief and I are in something of a hurry," Magnan cut him off. "Which screen are they on? "The yacht's over the horizon at the moment," the boy said. "She'll make re-entry on the next pass; a couple more minutes, I guess." "What's a yacht doing out here, Willy?" Retief asked. "Quopp's a long way off the regular tourist runs." "Beats me, Mr. Retief. She's a nice job. Ten thousand tons, loaded with all the latest comm gear. Too bad all we have is this obsolete lineof-sight stuff." He gestured at the banked equipment panels. "Tough about those girls losing their celestial tracking circuit, too. Even if they could get in here, they'd be stuck for months waiting for a reis hard to come by." "Emergency let-down, eh? What kind of help are we giving them?" The youth shrugged. "None. Longspoon's orders. Says they've got no business coming in on Quopp." "Did you tell him about the trackerf' "He said they could go on to the next system on manual trackmg. "Two months of staring into a tracker could get tiring," Retief said. "And a good chance of fatigue error and no planetfall at the end of it Let's get 'em down." "Yeah, but the Ambassador's orders -- " "I'll take the responsibility of countermanding them. Get the yacht data as soon as she makes contact." C#T ook here, Retief," Magnan i  held up an admonitory hand. "I can't stand idly by while you exceed your authority! I confess it seems a trifle surprising die Ambassador hasn't authorized aid to a distressed Terr an vessel, but -- " "We don't need authorization in a Deep Space emergency. Check Title Nine, Article Twelve, Section threeB of the Uniform Code." "The Code overrides any Planetary Authority, it says so right in -- " "See here, Retief." Magnan moved to Retiefs side, speaking low. "Quoting technicalities is all very well, but afterward one still has the problem of an overridden Ambassador to deal with. Hardly a shrewd move, careerwise." "We'll get the ladies down first, and carry out career salvage afterwards," Retief said soothingly. "Maybe it would be better if you went down to spot-check the commissary while I attend to this." Magnan frowned, settled his dickey in place. "Never mind," he said shortly. "I'll stand by." A blare of static burst from the center screen on the console across the room, followed by rapidly flickering bars of light. Then the image steadied into focus. A girPs face appeared, framed in red-blonde hair, a headset clamped in place. Other feminine faces were visible behind her, all young, all worried. "Hello, Quopp Control," she said calmly. "It looks as though the rock that hulled us did more than take out the tracker. I have no horizontal gyros, and damned little control in my left corrector banks. I'm going to have to do this by the seat-of-thepants method. I'd appreciate it if you'd loosen up and feed me some trajectory data." "Quopp Control here, young lady. Listen closely; there won't be time for a repeat. You have two choices on impact areas; one is the commercial port here at Ixix. If you've got a fix on me, you know the general location. I'm throwing the R and D fixer beam on the line now; lock onto it if you can." The girl frowned. "Sorry, Quopp Control. No response from my R and D. I have a fix on your transmission, though, and -- " "Your other possibility is an unimproved patch of rocky desert about fifty miles north-north-west. Try to . align on my signal here. If you miss, you'll have the other as a backup." "Roger, Quopp Tower. I've got tome speed to kill if I want to make you on this pass." "This pass is it," Relief snapped out "I'm clocking you on a descending spiral with an intersect this orbit. Damp that velocity fast!" T he image on the screen jittered, jumped; Relief waited while rhe girl worked the controls, watching the glowing red blip moving rapidly across the R and D screen, dropping steadily closer to the line representing the horizon. "More grief," the. girl said briskly. "I've got about half power on the forward main tubes. I'm afraid I'm going to have to give your beacon a miss and try for the desert." "Throw everything you've got to your retros, let 'em blast and keep blasting! You're going to overshoot by a hundred miles on your present course, and there's nothing out there but nineteen thousand miles of unexplored jungle!" There was a long moment of tense silence as the girl's hands moved out of sight. Then she shook her head, gave a quick, flashing smile. "That's it, Quopp Control. A fizzle. Did you say nineteen thousand miles?" "As the Phip flies. How many are there aboard?" "Ten of us." "I've got a tracker on you; try to nurse her in as easy as you can. Got any flares aboard?" "Tf not, there are a few cases of hundred and sixty proof Imperial Lily Gin; I'm sure the intended recipient won't mind if I light them off." Already her voice was growing fuzzy as the hurtling ship neared the horizon. "Hold her steady on your present course. Looks like you'll intersect IP ground zero about eighty miles out." "I'm not reading you, Quopp. I hope you get here before all the gin s -- Her voice broke off. Then it came again, faint and far away: "Quopp... er, a... ing in... make it... The voice was gone in a rising hiss of random noise. "Good Lord, I hope the poor girls land safely," Magnan gasped. He dabbed at his forehead with a large floral-patterned tissue. "Imagine being down in that horrible wilderness, swarming with unpacified Quoppkal" "ril get an Embassy heli on the way to make the pick-up," Retief said; he glanced at the wall clock. "No time to waste if weTe going to collect them by dark." "Retief -- are you sure you don't know this Fifi person?" Magnan queried as they turned to the door. "Regrettably, no. But I hope to correct the omission soon." The interoffice communicator screen burped; an angular female face with stiff-looking hair and a porridgy complexion blinked into focus. "There you are," she snapped at Retief. "The Ambassador wants to see you in his office -- right away!" "Tsk," Magnan said. "I warned you about stretching those coffee breaks." "Hi, Fester," Retief greeted the woman. "Is it business, or should I bring my tennis racquet?" "You can save the wisecracks," she sniffed. "There are two Planetary Police officers with him." "Goodness, I'd be glad to give His Excellency a character reference," Magnan burbled. "What did they catch -- that is, what's the charge?" 'Tt's not Ambassador Longspoon who's in trouble," Fester said coldly. "It's Mr. Retief they want to sec." VI A mbassador Longspoon was a small man with bright, close-set eyes in a parchment-yellow face, a mouth which would have been inconspicuous on a carp, and a shiny skull over which a few strands of damp-looking hair were combed for maximum coverage. He sat behind a nine-foot Ambassadorial desk of polished platinum, flanked by two Voion, one ornately crested and jeweled, whose oculars followed Retief unwaveringly as he entered the room. "Commissioner Ziz, Mr. Retief," Longspoon said in a voice like a dry bearing. There was silence as he looked expectantly from one of the Voion to the other. "Well, how about it, Xif," the Commissioner buzzed in harsh Tribal Voion to his companion. "Is this the one?" "That's him, chief," the other cop confirmed. "He was the ringleader." "Here, Commissioner, I must ask you to speak Terranl" Longspoon rasped. "Just advising my associate that he mustn't harbor grudges for the brutal treatment he received," Ziz said smoothly. "I assured him your Excellency will make full amends." "Amends. Yes." Longspoon favored Relief with a look like a jab from an old maid's umbrella. "It appears there's been some sort of free-for-all in an unsavory local drinking-spot." He put his bony fingers on the desk-top and pinched them together. "I trust you have some explanation?" "Explanation of what, Mr. Ambassador?" Retief inquired pleasantly"Of just what would possess an Embassy Officer to attack members of the Planetary Police in the performance of their duties!" Purplish color was creeping up from under Longspoon's stiff mid-morning informal collar. Retief shook his head sympathetically. "No, I certainly couldn't explain a thing like that." Longspoon's jaw dropped. "Surely you have some, ah, justification to offer?" He shot a quick sideglance at the Voion. "It would be pretty hard to justify attacking a policeman," Retief offered. "In the performance of his duties at that." "Look here!" Longspoon leaned toward Retief. "You're supposed to be a diplomat!" he hissed from the corner of his mouth. "You might at least try lying. a little!" Retief nodded agreeably. "What about?". "Confound it, sir!" Longspoon waved a hand. "When a Police Commissioner rolls into my office and charges one of my staff with aggravated breach of the peace, you can hardly expect me to simply ignore the situation!" "Certainly not," Retief said firmly, "Still, I think if you explain to him that invading the Terrestrial Embassy to make unsupported charges is impolite, and warn him never to try it again, it won't be necessary to demand his resignation." "His resignation!" Longspoon'i mouth was open again. "Hmmm." He swivelled to face the Commissioner. "Perhaps I should point out that invading the Terrestrial Embassy to make unsup -- " "One moment!" Ziz cut in harshly. "The question here is one of appropriate punishment to lawless foreigners who engage in the murder of harmless, grub-loving Voion! I demand that the culprit be turned over to me for a fair Trial by Internal Omens!" # # A s I recall, the metnoa requires a surgical operation to study the evidence," Longspoon mused, "What happens if the victim -- ex; I mean patient -- is innocent?" "Then we weld him back up and give him a touching funeral ceremony." "No, Ziz," Longspoon wagged a finger playfully. "If we simply turned our diplomats over to anyone who wanted them, we'd be stripped of personnel in no time." "Just the one," Ziz suggested delicately. "I'd like to oblige, my dear Commissioner, but the precedent would be most unfortunate." The desk screen chimed. "Yes, Fester?" Longspoon eyed it impatiently. "I told you I wasn't to be disturbed." IF "It's His Omnivoracity' Fester squeaked excitedly. "He presents his second best compliments and insists on speaking to you at once, Mr. Ambassador!" Longspoon twitched a bleak smile at the Police Commissioner. "Well, my good friend Ikk seems to be a bit outside himself today. Just tell him I'll ring him up later, Fester." "He says it's about an educational shipment," the female cut in. "Heavens, what language!" "Ah, yes, educational material," Longspoon said. "Well, I'm always most concerned about educational affairs; perhaps I'd best just see what he has in mind." He turned the volume down low, listened as a tiny voice chirped angrily.  "Are you sure?" he muttered. "Six cases?" There was more shrill talk from the communicator. "Nonsense!" Longspoon snapped. "What possible motive -- " Ikk buzzed again. Longspooa glanced at Retief with a startled expression. "No," he said. "Quite out of the question. See here. I'll call you back. I have, er, callers at the moment." He rang off. The Police Commissioner relaxed the auditory members which had been straining forward during the exchange. "You still refuse to remand this one to my custody?" He pointed at Retief. "Have you all gone mad?" Longspoon barked. "I'll deal with Mr. Retief in my own way!" "In that case -- " Ziz turned to his retainer. "Put phase two into operation," he snapped in Tribal. ust sending the lad along to water iie jelly flowers down at headquarters," he added soothingly as Longspoon drew breath to protest. Xif wheeled across to the door and left silently. Ziz rolled to the lopsidedly hexagonal window, glanced out into the street. "A pity your Excellency didn't see fit to assist the police in the maintenance of law and order," he said, turning to Longspoon. "However, I shall take the disappointment philosophically." He broke off, waving both posterior antennae. "Hark!" he said. "Do I scent a suspicious odor?" Longspoon cleared his throat hurriedly. "My throat balm," he said. "My physician insists..." He sniffed again. "Smoke!" He jumped to his feet. At that moment, a shrill bell jangled into strident life somewhere beyond the door. iiTlee for your lives!" Ziz keen-T ed. He shot to the door, flung it wide. A billow of black smoke bulged into the room. Longspoon dithered for a moment, then grabbed up a code book and the Classified Despatch reel, tossed them into a desk-side safe, dammed it shut just as a pair of Voion charged into the room, hauling a heavy fire house with a massive brass nozzle from which a weak stream of muddy water dribbled into the deep-pile carpeting. Ziz barked a command and pointed at Retief. The firemen dropped the hose -- and were bowled aside as Ambassador Longspoon hurtled between them, his basketball-size paunch jouncing under his overlapping vests. Ziz spun, reached for Retief with a pair of horny grasping members: the Terran leaned asi,de, caught one of the Voion's arms and jerked. Ziz went over with a crash. Retief whirled to the window from which the Commissioner had glanced a moment before, saw a crowd of crested and ornamented Voion police pressing toward the Embassy. "Fast action," he murmured. He stepped past the overturned firemen into the corridor; wide-eyed staff members were appearing from doors, batting at smoke-clouds. Shouts and squeals sounded. Retief pushed through toward an open door from which dense yellowish clouds were pouring, layering out at chest height. He reached the far wall of the room, groped for and found an overturned typist's chair, slammed it at the dim glow of a small triangular window. The colored glass fell outward with a musical twinkle. At once the smoke -- boiling from an overturned waste-basket, Retief saw -- was swept toward the opening by a strong draft. He picked up the smoking waste-basket and contents, stepped into the lavatory and doused it with water. It died with a prolonged hiss. Retief lifted a small, soot-blackened plastic cannister from the basket. A small wisp of smoke was still coiling from it. Incised on its base wer what appeared to be Groaci hieroglyphs. B ack in the hall. First Secretary Magnan appeared from a smoke doud, coughing, eyes blurred. IF "Relief! The service door's jammed with people! We're irapped!'" "Let's try another route. Relief started toward the front of the building, Magnan trailing. "But what about the others #" "I predict the tire scare will give them excellent appetites for dinner." "Scare?" "It seems to be just smoke bombs." "You mean -- Relief I You didn't!" "No, but somebody did." They reached the wide hall before the main Embassy entrance door, packed now with excited diplomats, semithe smoke and swarms of Voion firemen, wheeling authoritatively More Voion were struggling in the door to breast the tide of escapebent Terrans. "All personnel must evacuate the premises at once," a cop with a bright red inlay across his ventral plates keened. "Collapse is imminent! The danger is frightful! Remember, you are all highly combustible!" "I don't know what the game is, but we'd better have a fast look around." Relief headed for a side corridor. A stout diplomat with four boneless chins flapped a hand at him. "I say, young man! All these locals invading the Terrestrial Embassy -- it's irregular! Now, I want you to speak to Chief Sskt, and point out -- " "Sorry, Counsellor Eggwalk; rush job." Relief pushed past, forced his way through a shouting knot of entangled police and Terrans, rounded a curve in the corridor. A small door marked Maintenance Personnel Only caught his eye. It stood ajar. The lock. Relief noted, was broken. "Mr. Magnan. If you see any volunteer firemen headed this way, gilPe me a fast yell." "Relief! What are you -- " Magnan's voice cut off as Retiaf slid through the door, went down a narrow ramp into the coolof a loiaceilinged cellar. There was a scuny of sound ahead; he ducked undir insulated air ducts, saw a fliclur of motion down a shadowy passage heard the scrape of wheels scuffling on uneven pavement. "Come on out," he called. "Nodiing back there but a couple of sumi pumps and some bflge water." The sounds had ceased now. Relief took a step -- and a three-foot yellow-green Quoppina of the Dink tribe shot out of the darkness ducked under his arm, veered around the looming bulk of the furnace, disappeared into the dark mouth of a narrow crawlway. Relief paused, listening. There was a soft buzzing from far back in the recess where the Dink had hidden. He ducked his head, moved toward the source of the sound. Above, the thudding of feet and the shouts of Terr an and Voion were faint, remote. Somewhere, water dripped. R elief followed the sound, traced it to a dark crevice behind the metal-clad housing of an air-processing unit. He reached in, brought out a foot-long ovoid, plastic-surfaced. It hummed busily. He could feel the tiny vibration against his hands, fie spun, headed for the ramp. Back in the hall, Magnan was Bowhere in sight. Ten feet away, a Voion cop stood on relaxed, outward-slanting wheels, talking into a mall field microphone. He broke off when he saw Relief, jerked two arms in a commanding gesture. "Out! Fire has reached boilers!" he rasped in badly accented trade dialect. Retief balanced the humming object on one outstretched hand. "You know what this is?" he inquired casually. "No time for ball games," the Voion shrilled. "Fool Terry -- " He stopped, snapped his anterior tyes forward, made a whistling noise between his palps, then spun, dug off with a squeak of new Terry-issue neoprene. Retief turned toward a side exit. Two Voion appeared ahead, skidded to a halt at sight of him. "That's him!" one shrilled. "Get him, boys!" More Voion shot into view, closing in. "Don't move, stiltcr!" the cop commanded. "What's that you're holding?" "This?" Retief juggled the ovoid. Oh, this is just an old Plooch egg. I was just cleaning out my collection, and -- " "You lie, unwheeled crippling!" The cops crowded in, reaching. "I'll wager a liter of Hell-rose it's part of the loot!" one keened. "It'll mean promotions all around when we bring this in!" "Give me that, you!" eager Voion manipulative members grabbed for the buzzing object. "We'll take it out the back way!" "Sure, you have it, fellows," Retief offered genially. "Just hurry back to your boss with it." "Bribes will do you no good, Terran," a cop shrilled as the find wa passed from one gleeful fireman to another. "His Omnivoracity wants to see you -- in person." He jabbed with his club at Retief, who caught the heavy weapon, jerked it from its owner's grip, slammed it across his wrist with a metallic clang. More clubs flashed; Retief fended off blows, then charged, slamming Voion in all directions. A club whistled past his ear; a harsh voice shrilled "Stop him!" Ahead, a dim blue light glowed over a side door. Retief skidded to a halt, tried it: locked. He stepped back kicked at the lock. The door burst wide. Retief plunged through into a narrow street -- and stopped dead, facing a solid rank of Voion who ringed him in with leveled spears with flaring barbed heads. "Welcome to our midst," a police lieutenant with an enamelled badge hissed. "You will now accompany us without resistance, or you will die, unseen by your fellows." ii A h-ah," Retief chided. "Ikk will be annoyed if you do anything rash." "An excellent point," the cop agreed. "I suppose after all we shall have to satisfy ourselves with merely poking holes in you here and there. The effect will be the same." "Your logic is inescapable," Retief conceded. "I'll be delighted to call on His Omnivoracity." There was a sharp tremor underIF foot, followed instantly by a dull Boom! A shower of plaster dust fell from the open door at Retief s back. Glass tinkled from nearby windows. Shrill Voion sounds broke out, questioning. Retief turned, surveyed the wall of the Embassy tower. A large crack had appeared some yards to the right of the door. "I guess it wasn't a Plooch egg after all," he said judiciously. The spearheads had jumped a foot closer at the explosion. "Watch him!" the lieutenant barked. "Steady boys," Retief cautioned. "Don't louse up an important pinch with any hasty moves." "Button your mandibles," the cop rasped. "Youll have your chance to work them soon enough!" He motioned and an avenue opened through the warriors. Retief moved off, spear-points at his back. VH P rime Minister Ikk was a larger than average Voion with a sixteen-coat lacquer job, jeweled palps, and an elaborately crested headpiece featuring metallic turquoise curliques and white Rhoon plumes. He lounged at ease in his office, a wide, garishly decorated room the floor of which, Retief noted, was The Voion's main wheels were braced in padded, satin-lined frames. A peculiarly vile-smelling dope-stick of Groaci manufacture was clamped in one manipulative member. He waved the latter at the guards standing by, dribbling ashes carelessly on the rug. "Leave us," he snapped in Tribal. "And no spying, either!" The cops filed out silently. Ikk waited untfl the door closed, then swiveled lo stare at Retief. "So you are the person." He canted both sets of antennae forward alertly. "It seems we bad a busy morning, eh?" His voice had ah edge like torn metal. "Rather dull, actually,"' Retief said easily. "Sightseeing, you know." "And what sort of sights did you see?" "Some rather interesting examples of Navajo beadwork and a nice display of hand-painted Groaci backscratchers. Then there was -- " "Save your flippancy, TerranI" Ikk snapped. "Your activities are known! It remains merely to fill in certain, ah, details!" "Perhaps you'd care to be a little more specific," Retief suggested. "After all, nobody's listening." "You were seen at the port," Ikk grated. "You created a disturbance, after which certain items were found to be missing." "Oh? What items?" "Six large cases, newly arrived aboard a chartered freight vessel." Ikk snapped. "They contained educational material destined to play an important role in my program few the uplift of the downtrodden Quoppina masses." "I see. You think I may have picked them up and strolled off without noticing." "An end to your insolence!" Ikk snarled. "What have you done with the purloined consignment?" Retief shook his head. "I haven't seen your schoolbooks." BahI enough of this verbal pus; igr-lootingl You know what the Macs contain as well as I -- " 'I believe you mentioned educational material --  What could be more educational Ilian guns?" Ikk screeched. The truth, now!" #""Te truth is, you're making a A blunder, Ikk. Your fellow Quoppina aren't as ready for compulsory education as you -- " If they've grown wise at my expense -- trough your meddling Ikk cut in, I promise you an enlightening experience under the implements of a staff of experienced speech tutors!" "I'm sure your training aids are tucked safely away out of circulatkm," Retief said soothingly. "That being the case, I suggest you reipraise the whole indoctrination program and try a less ambitious approach." "Ah, I see it now!" Ikk shrilled. "Longspoon thinks to unseat me, replace me with some compliant puppet! A Horrp, perhaps, or one of those wishy-washy Yorkle! Well, it won't work!" He lowered his voice suddenly. "See here, my good fellow, I'm sure we could work out something. Just tell me where you've hidden the guns and I'll see to it you're appropriately rewarded after flic enlightenment." "That's a fascinating proposal, Mr. Prime Minister. But I'm afraid Fd lie awake nights wondering what yon considered appropriate. No, on the whole I think I'd prefer to take my chances on my own." "An opportunity you are hardly likely to enjoy," Ikk grated, "considering the fact that I have fifty thousand crack troops in the city at this moment, all of them between you and your friends. As soon as you've mentioned the location of the arras. I'll sec that you're returned safe and sound. And I'll personally make mention to Ambassador Longspoon of your outstanding contributions to Terran-Voion relationships." "Fifty thousand troops, you say," Retief countered. "That's not a big enough army for a first class victory parade, to say nothing of taking over a planet with a population of five "The fifty thousand I mentioned are merely my household detachment," Ikk purred. "Every Voion on of them! They've been training for a year at secret camps in the Deep Jungle. They are now ready!" "Except for the guns," Retief said. "Still, there were only a few hundred of them. They wouldn't have helped you much." "Today's shipment was but the first of many! But enough of this gossip! For the last time: Give up your secret and enjoy my lasting favor!" "You mean if I tell you, you'll give me an escort back to the Embassy, no hard feelings?" "Certainly, my dear chap! I'll even concoct a stirring tale of your abduction by unscrupulous elements from whom I effected your rescue, not neglecting to mention your own brisk resistance to their wiles." "Brisker than you anticipated. IF perhaps," Relief said. "I think I've learned enough to satisfy my curiosity. So -- if you'll just move away from that desk and back up against the wall -- " I kk erected his oculars violently. "Eh?" He broke off, looking at the gleaming new power gun in Relief's hand. "What's this?" he squeaked. "I've offered you safe conduct!" "Now, Ikk, you don't really think I'd expect a campaigner of your experience to let me off scot-free, do you?" "Well, my fellows might have to employ a few little measures on you, just to be sure you weren't holding anything back. But then I'll have them patch you up nicely afterward." "Sorry. I have a strong intuitive feeling that your Torture Department may not realize just how fragile human hide is." "I shall know in a moment." The Prime Minister started toward Relief -- six feet of armored hostility, four arms like sheet-metal clubs tipped with bolt-cutters cocked for action. "I can see that Your Omnivoracity hasn't yet sampled Terran educational methods personally," Relief commented. "Another foot and I'll give you yoUr first lesson." Ikk halted. "Would you dare?" he keened. "Sure. Why not? Now, don't make any sudden moves. I'm going to tie you up. Then I'm leaving." Ikk hissed but submitted as Relief plucked the ministerial flag from its place, thrust the staff through his spokes and bound it in place, then tied all four arms firmly. "There, now, you'll be all right until the sweepers arrive along about dinner time." "You're a fool!" Ikk shrilled. "You'll never get clear. "Perhaps not," Relief said. "In that case, education may never come to Quopp." He went to the intercom. "When I flip the key, tell them I'm coming out," he said. "Tell them to trail me at a respectful distance, because I'm suspicious. Also, you're not to be disturbed until further notice. Sound like you mean it." Ikk clacked his palps. "And," Relief added in fluent Voion thieves dialect, "don't make any mistakes." He pressed the key. "What is it this time? a sharp Voion voice came back. Relief held the gun aimed at Ikk's center ventral plate while the Prime Minister delivered the message. "Well done, Ikk. Relief flipped off the switch, bent it out of line to render it inoperative. "You may yell all you like now; I have great confidence in Ministerial soundproofing. "Listen to me, Terry! Ikk keened. "Give up this madness! My troops will hunt you down without mercy! And what can you hope to accomplish alone? "Ah, that's the question, isn't it, Ikk? Relief went to the door. "And on that note I'll leave you.' I n the outer office, the bodyguards standing by swivelled their oculars nervously at Relief. Ikk's tied up for the rest of the afternoon," he said breezily. "He's tosy pondering some surprising new developments." He stepped into the corridor, made his way along narrow, strange-smelling passages, windkig, dipping, curiously angled, lit by chemical lamps and lined with cubicles from which Bright Voion eyes glinted. He emerged in a cramped courtyard surrounded by high, curving, decoration-crusted walls of faded Burgundy and Prussian blue, gleaming in the eerie light of Second Eclipse. There were, if anything, more police gathered now than an hour before. A ripple seemed to pass across the crowd as Retief appeared. Twitching antenna semaphored a message. At once, a path opened through the press. In the street the mob was scarcely less dense. Voion -- both polished police and dull-finished tribesmen -- stood in rows, packed the parking ledges, jostled for wheel-space in the narrow thoroughfare. Here and there a tall bottle-green Yerkie or blue-andwhite Clute hurried, a furtive touch of color against the sea of restless black. Through lighted rfiop windows, Quoppina of other tribes were visible, gathered in tight groups, watching the street. Except for a steady, subdued buzzing in the Voion dialects, the city was ominously silent. Retief strode along briskly, the Voion continuing to edge unobtrusively from his path. On a street corner he paused, glanced back. A pair of crested Special Police were shouldering through, keeping IF a fifty foot interval between themselves and the object of the Prime Minister's inructions. A third Voion came up behind them, shrilled a command. The two came on at a quick roll. Retief pushed on across the street, turned down a narrow side way. Ahead, there was a stir. More of the tall Special Police appeared, keening i orders to those about them. A message rippled across the crowd. To the right, three more cops had come into view, pushing through toward 'him, clubs prominently displayed. "Maybe you'd better step in to avoid the crowd, Terry," a thin voice said at Retief s back. He turned. A small, purplish, jlightly built Quopp of the Flink tribe stood in the doorway of a tiny lahop. He stepped bade. I Retief followed, danced around at shelves loaded with trinkets: Yalcan flass-work, Jaq beaten copperware, wooden objects from far-off Lovenjbroy, a dim-lit display of Hoogan religious mosaics featuring the elve Ritual Dismemberments. 'That one caught your eye, didn M?" die Flink said. "That's always Ibeen a snappy seller with you TctJries." "It's a winner," Retief agreed. "There wouldn't be a back way out lof here, I suppose?" r ie Flink was staring out at the street. "Ikk's up to something big this time; such a force he never had in town before. Half his tribe he's got in the streets, just standing around like it was a signal they was waiting for." He turned to look at Retief. "Yep, there's a back way. But you won't get far. Not if Ikk's bully boys are looking for you. Right now, you must be the only Terry in Ixix still running around loose." "That's a distinction I'd like to retain," Retief pointed out. "Terry, I'd like to help you out," the Fli waggled his head. "But you're as easy to spot as an off-color grub at a hatching ceremony." He broke off, twitched vestigal wingcases, producing a sharp pop. "Unless... Terry, are you. game to try something risky?" "It couldn't be any riskier than standing here," Retief said. "The cops are closing in from aU four directions. "Come on." The Flink flipped aside a hanging, waved Retief tfiiough into an ev tinier chamber bdund the shop, from which a numb of dark tunnel-mouths opened -- mere hes, two feet in diameter. "YouTl have to crawl, Tm afraid," he sakL "One of the basic diplomatic sk," Retief said. "Lead on." It was a five-minute tr through the cramped passage, which twisted and writhed, doubled back, rose suddenly, Aen dropped, did a sharp jag to the left, and opened into a leather-and-wax smelling chamber, Ht by a sour-ydlow chemical lamp inside a glass bowl. The room was stacked with curiously ped objects of all sizes and colors. Retief snapped a finger against the nearest -- a large, riiidd-ahaped panel of a shimmering peariy pink. It gave off a metaffic bong. 'These look like fragments of native anatomy," he said. "Right. This is the back room of Sopp's Surgical Spares; Sopp has the best stock in the district. Come on." Hobbling on small wheels better adapted to trolley service than ground-running, the Flink led the way past heaped carapace segments of ossy chocolate brown, screaming orange, butter-yellow, chartreuse, magenta, coppery red. Some of the metallo-chitinous plates bore ribs, bosses, knobs, spikes; some were vari-colored, with polka-dots and ribbons of contrasting color, or elaborate silver-edged rosettes. A few bore feathers, scales or bristles. At one side were ranged bins filled with gears, bearings, shafts, electronic components. "Yep, for anything in the used parts line, old Sopp's the Quopp to see," the Flink said. "He can pull this off if anybody can. Wait here a minute." He stepped through an arched opening into the display room beyond. "Hey, Sopp, close the blinds," Retief heard him say. "I've got a friend with me that doesn't want to attract any attention." There was an antwering twitter, then a clatter of wooden shutters, followed by more low-voiced conversation punctuated with exclamations from the unseen proprietor. Then the Flink called. Relief came through into a neat showroom with cases filled with bright-colored objects of obscure function, presided over by a fraillooking Yerkle with a deep green carapace half-concealed under a silken paisley-patterned shawl. He stared at Retief, looking him over like a prospective purchaser. "Well, what about it, Sopp?" the Flink demanded. "You're the best in the business. You think you can do it?" "Well... I can give it a try." "Great!" the Flink chirped. "II this works, it'll be the slickest caper pulled in this town since you rigged Geeper out as a Blint and he fertilized half the rolling stock in the Municipal Car-Barns!" vm #tVJell," the Yerkle said two hours later. "It's not perfect, but in a bad light you may pass." "Sopp, it's your masterpiece." The Flink, whose name was Ibbl, rolled in a circle around Retief. "If I didn't know different. I'd swear he was some kind of cross-breed Jorp ia town for the bright lights. That set of trimmed-down Twilch rotors is perfect!" "Just so you don't try to fly," Sopp said to Retief. "It's a wonder to me how some of you life-forms get around, with nothing but chemical energy to draw on. I've tucked a few Terry food-bars in the hip-pouch to help keep you running." "Creaking slightly, Retief stepped to the nearest window, a roughly hexagonal panel of rippled amber glass, backed by a closed shutter of dark wood. His reflection, distorted by the uneven surface, was startling: curving plates of deep maroon metallo-chitin had been snipped, warped, then neatly welded to form a suit IF of smoothly articulated armor which covered him from neck to toe. Over his bands, Sopp had fitted a pair of massive red snipping claws salvaged from a Grunk, operable from within by a system of conveniently arranged levers. A dummy abdominal section from a defunct Qute, sprayed to match the overall color scheme, disguised the short Terran torso. A handsome set of vestigal pink wing cases edged in a contrasting shade of purplish black lent a pleasant accent to the shoulder region that went far to camouflage their width. The headpiece was taken from a prime specimen of the Voion Tribe and sprayed a metallic red-orange, and fitted with a crest of pink-dyed Jarweel plumes. It fitted lightly over Retiefs face, a hinged section closing down to clamp in place behind. "Of course, those big, long, thick legs are a bit odd," Sopp said. "But with the rotating members adapted for rotor use, naturally the anterior arms have to fill in as landing gear. There's a few tribes that have gone in for stilting around, and developed them into something quite useful." "Sure," Ibbl agreed. "Look at the Terries: No wheels, but they manage okay. I tell you, he looks like a naturall Outside of a few unreconstructed Voion trying to flog him a set of solid gold inlays or some snappy photos of the tribal ovumracks, nobody'll give him a second look." "Gentlemen," Relief said, "you've produced a miracle. It's even comfortable. All it needs now is a service test." "Where will you go? Ikk's got the whole town sewed up tight as a carapace in moulting season." "I'll head for the Terry Embassy. It's not far." Sopp looked doubtful. "Farther than you think, maybe." He turned to a wall display, selected a twofoot broadsword fashioned from the irridescent wing-case of a Blang. "Better take this. It may come in handy to, shall we say, cut your way through the undergrowth." T he long twilight of Quopp was staining the sky in vivid colors now. Through a chink in the shutter, Relief saw lights glowing against the shadows blanketing the hushed street where the Voion waited, silent. Up high, the carved facades still caught the light, Reaming in soft pastels against the neon-bright sky. "I think it's time to go," he said. "While I still have light enough to see where Fm going." "You want to be careful, Terry." Ibbl was scanning the street from the other window. "Those Voion are in a nasty mood. They're waiting for something. You can feel it in the air." "Fm subject to moods myself," Relief said. "At the moment I think I could spot them high, low and jack and still win it in a walkaway." He took a final turn up and down the room, testing the action of the suit's joints. He checked the location of the power pistol with his elbow. It was tucked inconspicuously behind the flare of a lateral hip flange, accessible for a fast draw. "Thanks again, fellows. If our side wins the brandies are on me," Relief said. "Good luck, Terry. If your side wins, remember me when it's time in let the contract to junk out the police force." 'You'll be the first on the list." Relief worked the lever that clacked his anterior mandibles in the gesture of Reluctant Departure on Press of Urgent Business and left I t was a brisk fifteen minute walk to the Path of the Many Sporting Agents, every yard of the way impeded by Voion who stared and gave ground only reluctantly. As Relief came in sight of the Embassy complex, he saw Voion clustered before the main doors in a solid mass. He forced his way closer, eliciting complaints from jostled sightseers. Behind the wide glass panels, the darting shapes of Dinks were working busily. A steady stream of Voion were coming and mands and waggling of signals. There were no Terrans in evidence. Relief pushed into a narrow shop entry across the street from the scene of the activity, scanned the upper Embassy windows. There were iits on there and once or twice a shape moved behind the colored glass panes. There was a distant, thudding clatter. Relief looked up, saw the vast shape of an immense flying Rhoon soar on its wide rotors across the strip of sky between buildings, followed a moment later by a second. Then a tiny heli appeared, bilious yoBow-green in color, flitting low above the Chancery Tower. As Relief watched, a head appeared over the cockpit rim -- the merest glimpse of stalked eyes, a pale throat bladder -- "That one's no Voion, nor no Terry, either," a reedy voice said at Reliefs elbow. He looked around to see an aged Kloob, distinguished by a metallic most atrophied wheels. "Whoever he was, he seems to be on good terms with the Rhoon," Relief said. "Never saw that before," the Kloob said. "There's unnatural things going on in the world these days. Rhoon flying over town! Like they was patrolling, like." "I don't see any of the Terry diplomats around," Relief said. "What's been going on here?" "Ha! What hasn't been going on? First the smoke and the big bang; then the Voion cops swarming all over." The Kloob clacked his ventral plates with a rippling noise indicating total lack of approval. "Things are coming to a pretty pass when a bunch of Voion trash can take over the Terry Embassy and make it stick." "So it's like that, eh?" Relief said. "What happened to the Terries?" "Dunno. I'm taking a short siesta and I wake up and all I can see is cops. Too bad, too. The Terries were good customers. I hate to see 'em  #  "Maybe they'll be back," Relief said. "They've still got a few tricks left." "Maybe -- but I doubt it," the IF Kloob said glumly. "Ikk's got 'em buffaloed. The rest of us Quoppina better head for the tall grass." "Not a bad idea. I wonder where I could pick up a map." "You mean one of those diagrams showing where places are? I've heard of 'em -- but I could never quite figure out what they were for. I mean, after all, a fellow knows where he is, right? And he knows where he wants to go." "That's one of the areas in which we Stilters are a little backward," Retief said. "We seldom know where we are, to say nothing of where we're going. The place I'm looking for is somewhere to the northeast. That way." He pointed. "More that way." The Kloob indicated a direction three degrees to the right of Retief's approximation, "Straight ahead. You can't miss it That where your tribe hangs out? Never saw one like you before." "There's a group of my tribe fellows in trouble out there," Retief said. "About # miles from here." "Hm. That's a good four days on a fast Blint if the trails are in shape." "How does the port look?" "Guards on every gate. The Voion don't want any of us travelling." "I'm afraid I'll have to argue that point with them." The Kloob looked dubiously at Retief. "Well, I can guess who'll win the argument. But good luck to you anyway, Stilter." R etief pushed through the loosely before one of the stick-twirling Planetary Police fSmist out an am to halt him. "You, there! Where are you going?" he hummed in Voion Trilni. "Back where a fellow can dip a drinking organ in a short Hellroee and nibble a couple of sourbalk without some flatwheel flapping a mandible at him," Retief replied shortly. "One side, you, before I pry that badge off your chest to give to the grubs for a play-pretty." The Voion retreated. "Tell the other hicks to stay clear of the city," he rasped. "Now get rolling before I run you in." Retief thrust past hhn with a contemptuous snap of bis left diela. The sun was almost down now, and few lamps had gone on in the shops to light die way. Theso was no other Quepina in sight; oetf die sullen black of the Voion many oi them with the crude shdl inlays and fded fangs of tribesmen. Hie port, Retkl estimated, would be off to the right, where the last purpbsh gleam of sunset stni showed above the building tops. He headed that way, one elbow touching the butt of his hidden power gun. IX C lustered polyarcs gleamed down from tall poles to reflect on the space-scarred hulls of half a dozen trade vessels as Retief came up to the sagging wire fence surrounding die port More lights Reamed by the gate where four Voion were posted, twirling clubs. "Winch one of you blackwheels do I bribe to get in?" Retief called out in Tribal. All four Voion spoke at once; then one waved an arm for silence. "Fm corporal of the guard here, rube," he buzzed. "What have you got in mind?" "Well, now, what's the going price?" Retief sauntered casually to a position two yards from the open gate." "You talking Village, or Terry credit?" "Do I look like Fm hauling thirty or forty pounds of rock around with me?" Retief inquired. "I just peddled a cargo of country booze down at the barracks. Fve got enough Terry credit to hang the four of you with." "Have you, now?" The quartet shifted positions to encircle Retief, a move which placed two of them farther from the gate than himself. "You bet." He reached into the pouch slung at his .hip, pulled out a tangle of plastic, gained another step toward the corporal, who canted his oculars at the cash. "Here, catch," Retief tossed the it, the other three Voion said "Hey!" and converged on him. Retief stepped through the gate, slammed it and clicked the hanging padlock shut, leaving the four guards outside. "Hold on there, you!" the corporal keened. "You can't go in there!" "I figured you sharpies would hold out on me," Retief said. "Well, Fm in now. You can yell for the sergeant and turn the bundle over to him, or you can forget you saw me and work out a fair split on the payoff. So long." "Hey," one of the Voion said. "Look at the way that stiller walks! Like a Terry, kind of." "Are you kidding?" the corporal said. "Look, fellows, the way I see it, what's it to us if this yokel wants to sightsee?" R etief moved off as the foursome settled down to quarreling over the loot and headed for the nearest of five ships in sight, a battered thousand tonner with the purple and yellow comet insignia of the Four Planet Line. The few lounging locals in sight ignored him as he went to the rear access ladder, swung up and stepped inside. A startled Voion looked up from a litter of papers and clothes spilled from a locker, the door of which had been pried from its hinges. As the looter reached for a club lying on a table, Retief caught his outstretched Arm, spun him around, planted a foot against his back, and launched him toward the open entry. The Voion emitted a thin screech as he shot through, yelped as he hit the pavement below with a splintering crash. Retief swarmed up the ladder to the cargo deck, rode the one-man lift to the control compartment, cycled the outer lock shut, then quickly checked gauges. "Swell," he said softly. "Just enough fuel to stage a blazing reentry." He whirled to the lifeboat bay, cycled the hatch. Two tiny oneman shells rested in their slings. Retief wiped dust from the external inspection panel of the nearest, saw IP IIm dull red glow of panic lights indicating low accumulator charge, a leaky atmosphere seal and overaged fuel. He checked the second boat. Its accumulators read full charge, though it, too, was leaking air and indicating a decayed fuel supply. Retief went back to the panel, flipped a key, glanced at the ground-view screens. Voion were dosing in on the vessel from three tides. He recognized the evicted impulse shopper in the van, limping on an out-of-round wheel. He went back to the Number Two Hfeboat, popped the canopy, climbed inside, fitted himself into the cramped scat taking care to settle his rotors and wing cases comfortable, then closed the hatch. He activated the warm-up switch; panel lights blinked on. The boat was flyable -- maybe. Retief kicked in the eject lever and dammed back in the padded seat as tfic rocket blast hurled the tiny boat skyward. L evel at five thousand feet, Retief set a northeast course; as he looked back at the pattern of city flowed, climbed upward from a point near ' the center of the town, burst in a shower of whirling pinwheels of green, yellow, magenta. A second rocket went up, then three together, shedding a carnival glow over the clustered towers of the city. Retief punched a button on the tiny panel, twirled a dial... laration of the establishment of a new era of Quopp-wide peace and plenty," a voice boomed from the radio, under the benign and selfless leadership of His Omnivoracity, our glorious leader. Prime Minister Ikk! All loyal Quoppina are instructed to remain in their villages or other place or residence until taxassessors, draft board officials and members of the emergency requisition teams have completed initial surveys. All citizens will be required to purchase a copy of New Laws and Punishments, for sale at all newsstands for a low, low nine ninety-eight, plus tax. Failure to possess a copy will be punishable by Salvage. And now, a word from our effulgent chief, the great liberator of Quopp, Prime Minister Ikkl" There was a prolonged burst of shrill pre-recorded applause that made Retiefs ear drums itch, then the familiar tones of the Voion leader: "Fellow Voion, and you other, all I say, honorary Voion," he started. "Now that the planet is free, certain changes will be made. No longer will the unenlightened struggle on, following erroneous tribal customs! We Voion have figured out all the answers, and -- " Retief flicked off the radio, settled down for the eighty-mile run ahead. T he lifeboat rocked abruptly, as though it had glanced off a giant, spongy pillow. Retief banked to the right, scanned the sky above. A wide, dark shape swooped quickly past. There was a sudden buffeting as the small craft pitched in the back-wash of the thirty-foot rotors of a giant Rhoon. It swung in a wide circle, climbing, then pivoted sharply, swooped again, hurtling straight at him like a vast pouncing eagle. Retief slammed the controls full over, felt the lifeboat flip on its back, drop like a stone toward the jungle below. He rolled out, shot away at full thrust, at right angles to his previous course. Off to the right the Rhoon tilted up in a sharp turn, faint starlight gleaming from its spinning rotors, swelling enormously as it closed. Again Retief dove under it, pulled out to find it close on his port side, angling in across his bows. He gave the boat full throttle, shot under the Rhoon's yellow-green head, then pulled the nose up, climbing... The skiff was sluggish under him, staggering; he reduced the angle of climb, saw the Rhoon dropping in from his port quarter. Again he dived, leveled out this time a scant thousand feet above the dark jungle below. A glance to the right showed the Rhoon banking in for another pass. Its mighty rotors drove it effortlessly at twice the speed the skiff could manage on its out-dated fuel. Retief saw its four ten-foot-long armored fighting members, its gaping jaws armed with saw-edged fangs that could devour any lesser Quoppina in two snaps. At the last moment, he rolled to the right, went over on his back, snapped out of the maneuver to whip off to the left, coming around sharply on the Rhoon's flank. With a jerk at the release handle, he jettisoned the canopy. It leaped clear with a dull boom, and a tornado of IF air whipped at Relief's face. He jerked the power gun clear of its holster, took aim, and as the Rhoon banked belatedly to the right, fired for the left rotor. Yellow light glared from the whipping blades as Relief held the beam full on the spinning hub, a spot glowed a dull red; then a puff of vapor whiffed up -- and suddenly the air was filled with whining fragments, whistling past Relief's exposed head and ricocheting off the skiff's hull. Relief held the beam on target another five seconds, saw the Rhoon tilt almost vertically, vibrating wildly as the damaged rotor shook itself to pieces. Something small and dark seemed to break from the Rhoon then, clung for a moment, dropped free. Then the great predator was on its back, a glimpse of gray belly plates and folded legs, then gone as the boat shot past. At that moment a violent shock slammed Relief hard against the restraining harness. He grabbed the controls, fought to pull the boat up. A flat expanse of black wilderness swung up past the nose, rolled leisurely over the top, then slid down the left side... The controls bit into the air then. Fighting vertigo, Retief hauled the boat out of the spin. The motor barked once, twice, snarled unevenly for a moment, then died. The ship bucked, wanting to fall off on its port stub-wing. A glance showed torn metal, a dark strain of leaking coolant. The skiff was no more than a hundred feet above tree level now; ahead a tall spike-palm loomed. Retief banked to the right, felt the boat drop under him. He caught a momentary glimpse of the immense wreckage of the Rhoon strewn across half an acre of bushy treetops; then he was crashing through yielding foliage, the boat slamming left, then right, then up-ended, tumbling, dropping to a final splintering crash of metal-wood, a terrific impact that filled the tiny cockpit with whirling fireworks even brighter than the ones over the city before they faded into a darkness filled with distant gongs... X S omething sharp poked Retief is the side, a vigorous jab that bruised even through the leather strip that joined the dorsal and ventral plates of his costume. He made an effort, sat up, reached to investigate the extent of the skidl fracture, felt the metallic clang as his claw touched the painted Voion headpiece. The tough armor, it seemed, had its uses. He pushed the helmet into alignment, looked around at a torch-lit clearing among the boles of great trees. A ring of three-foot bluegreen Quoppina -- members, he saw, of the Ween Tribe, -- were all eyeing him with faintly luminous oculars. "Hoo. Meat-fall-from sky moving around," a tiny, pentrating voice keened in heavily accented Tribal. "Us better slice it up quick." Retief got to. his feet, felt for the gun with his elbow. It was gone -- lost in the crash. One midget meateater, bolder than the rest, edged closer, gave a tentative snap of lis immense white-edged claw. Relief worked levers, clacked back at him. "Stand back, little fellow," he said. "Don't you recognize a supernatural apparition when you see one?" He moved to get his back to a tree. "What you mean, big boy?" one of the natives demanded. "It means it's bad medicine to cook a stranger," Retief translated. "Hmm, that mean we is got to cat you raw. How is you, tough?" Retief drew the shortsword. "Tough enough to give you a belly ache. I'd estimate." "Hey, what kind of Quopp is you, anyway?" someone inquired. "I ain't never see one like you before." "I'm a diplomat," Retief explained. "We mostly He up during the day and come out at night to drink." "A Dipple-mac. Hmmm. Ain't never heard of that tribe before; is you, Jik-Jik?" "Can't say as I is." "How you get here, Meat-fromsky?" somebody called. "You ain't got the wing-span for no flying." "In that." Retief nodded toward the smashed shell of the skiff. "What, that?" one native inquired. Another prodded the machine with a small wheel, adapted for rough jungle trails. "Whatever it is, it dead." He looked at Retief. "You friend no help to you now, big boy. You is all alone." "You a long way out of your territory, Stilter," another said. "Ain't never see one like you before. What you doing here?" "I'm just passing through," Retief said. "I'm looking for a party of Terrans that wandered off-course. I don't suppose you've seen them?" "I heard of them whatchacallums -- Terrans. They twelve feet high and made out of jelly, I hears; and they takes their wheels off at night and leaves 'em outside." "That's the group. Any sign of them in these parts?" "Nope." The Ween crossed their rear oculars, indicating negation. "In that case, if you'll stand aside. I'll breeze on my way and let you get back to whatever you were doing when I dropped in." "What we was doing, we was starving, Meat-from-sky. Your timing good." "Jik-jik, you all the time talking to something to eat," someone said from the ranks. T here was a sudden flurry of sound from the near distance, punctuated by shrill cries. "Get your feather-picking members off me, you ignorant clod-hoppers!" a thin Voion voice screeched. "I'm a member of the Planetary Armed Forces!" The speech cut off in mid-sentence; threshing sounds followed. Moments later, three Ween pushed into the clearing, hauling the limp figure of a bright-polished member of the Planetary Police. "Hoo, this evening shaping up," someone said. The Voion was lying on his back, waving all four arms. It was shaping up all right, Retief thought. But not for him. IF IF  Short Story Time fraveling is dangerous sport -- even when you know exactly what era you're ini Then the space-time continuum capsule broke through it was to materialize approximately six feet above the sea. Fortunately, the contingency had been allowed for. In fact, the original plan had been that the break through take place several yards above hard ground, since the change in land contours over the centuries was potentially considerable. They had attempted to conduct the experiment in an area which would seem unlikely to change over much, but still they allowed several feet. The idea was that the capsule be so upholstered and the occupant so outfitted that a drop would be accommodated. As a result, the capsule looked like nothing so much as one of the round, ultra-padded 'barrels' which, for some unknown reason, periodically take an adventurer over Niagara Falls. Nor did the occupant dispel the similarities. He wore a crash helmet and heavy clothing. They hadn't been sure whether or not the break through would be into winter or summer and had dressed him for the former. One can always shed clothing in warm season and they wanted to take no chances that he would emerge into a blizzard and freeze to death before making contact. He scrambled from the hatch, stared around at the water, aghast, then, when his craft hobbled in a wave, slid ignominiously into "he sea. Burdened with his heavy clothing, and the various equipment and devices in his pockets, for a moment he thrashed wildly, feeling that sensalion ot being dragged into the depths. But then he seized control of himself, wrenched the crash helmet from his head, took a deep breath, doubled over, untied and took off his heavy shoes. He surfaced again, took another deep breath and slid from his jacket. He had been in the air and water long enough to know that the weather was such that he had no need for winter garments. H e was in better shape now. He stared up at the capsule, bobbing there in the swell. He doubted very much that he could get up on it again. During the brief instant he had been atop, he had spotted a shoreline in the distance, but even though he had divested himself of the heavier of his clothing and equipment, he still doubted that he could make it that far. He swam moderately well but it was not his forte. Well, there was nothing else for it. He kicked out of his trousers, wrestled out of his shirt, leaving himself stripped to underclothing. He started for the shore. However, the problem that confronted him was solved without difficulty when a boat pulled around the capsule, two wide-eyed men stroking oars in unison. He was taken aback. He hadn't seen the others before. He needn't have jettisoned his things. They hauled him from the water, gaping. He couldn't help a twinge of humor. He could see they were fishermen from the nets and other tackle. He must have frightened them out of their wits when the capsule emerged into a space that evidently had been only a few yards from where they were plying their trade. He sat in the stern for a moment, catching his breath while they stood and continued to gawk at him. One of them said something in a language he couldn't place. He took a better look at them. They were dressed in nothing but wisps of cloth about their middles, which didn't signify much in this weather. It made for good sense. He couldn't place their nationality, though off-hand he would have said a southern people in view of their moderately dark complexions. He looked about the boat, but this again wasn't his field. It seemed an average enough fishing craft, undoubtedly belonging to none too wealthy an owner, since it had no motor, either outboard or inboard, nor any other modern appurtenances. He thanked them and they looked at him blankly. He prided himself on his linguistic abilities, since he had lived abroad for varying periods of time on several occasions during childhood and could speak English, German and French equally well and get by in both Italian and Spanish. All due to a culture conscious professor father. However, his rescuers continued to look at him blankly, no matter what tongue he tried. A movement of the capsule caught his eye and he came to his feet. The sphere was slowly turning so that the open hatch was sliding toward the surface of the sea. He yelled, pointed, gestured, tried IF to put over to the fishermen the need to prevent his vessel from filling with water and sinking. All in vain. They simply wouldn't understand. They couldn't understand. They were dolts. On top of everything else, he had to fall in with dolts. There was nothing for it. Within moments his sole contact with his own period, his method of return, was shipping water. He dropped to a seat again and put his head in his hands. When the capsule was gone, his rescuers stared at the bubbles so long as they lasted, then moved to resume their places as oarmen. They headed for land. There seemed to be a town, probably a fishing village, he decided. The coast itself was fairly flat along here, but hills raised within a mile inward, and moderately high mountains were in the far distance. He couldn't recognize the coast. However, he did realize that this was evidently a sea, or at least a very large lake, rather than the ocean. But what sea, he hadn't the vaguest idea. The town was evidently more than just a fishing village, he realized as they approached. There were fairly large sailing craft, although he could see no ocean going steamers. Interisland sort of thing, he decided. He wondered briefly if he was in the Caribbean, and this some out of the way, backward community. And as they came still closer, for a brief moment he wondered if he had stumbled upon a movie set. Some of the ships were galleys. Those that were sailing craft hai strange rigs such as he had never seen before. Before they had beached, the reality came through to him. Something had gone drastically wrong. Far from swinging forward from the middle of the #th Century, th pendulum of space-time had swung back. He was somewhere, in the past, and by the looks of these, in the far past. He had no idea of where, or when he was. H is garb, or lack of it, when they beached the boat, drew attention, but not so much as he might have expected. And it came to him that the wide diversity of dress he noted was due to the fact that this was obviously a commerce center which drew ships from distances. Some of those who stood about, or strolled about on business bent, were as dark as Negroes, some of obvious Semetic strain. He blinked at this latter fact. Was it possible he was on the Palestine coast and these either Phoenecians or Hebrews of the days of the Kingdom? And then he came to an abrupt halt. Striding toward them was a warrior garbed in the dress of the Homeric period. Helmet with horse plume, metal breastplate, greaves oi legs, heavy leather sandals, a short sword at his side. He could have stepped off a Grecian vase. And now the traveler from tomorrow could see similarly clad men beyond, here and there. Most of them were not so elaborately done up. EviJenily, this one was an officer ol some type. The warrior came to a halt before the two fishermen and their human catch and spoke to them in the language of which the newcomer could make no heads nor tails. Which surprised him. He had a smattering of ancient Greek from university days, and should have been able to pick up an occasional word. The officer, if that was what he was, took him in in detail and smiled. Which was reassuring. The newcomer's rapidly drying undershirt, shorts and stockinged feet, while no doubt unique in the other's eyes, hardly projected him as affluent. Actually, they were physically a pair, being about thirty years of age, a few inches under six feet, possibly one sixty-five in weight, and both moderately handsome, clean-shaven men. The warrior spoke. The stranger shook his head. Finally, the other grunted amusement, spoke to the fishermen, obviously in dismissal, since they left, then pursed his lips in an expression of amused doubt. He tapped himself with his right thumb on his breastplate and said, 'Tipe." It seemed fairly obvious that he was introducing himself. The newcomer touched his own chest and said, "Lucius." The warrior repeated that, nodded, then touched himself again and said, "Alvethna." It might have been a title, a rank, or the family name. Lucius touched himself again and said, "Rostock. Pipe looked at him in puzzlement, finally shrugged, grinned and made obvious motions to fall in step and come along. He led the way into the settlement, which was a bit bigger than Lucius Rostock had first thought. Pipe made a sweeping gesture and said, "Pyrgi." Undoubtedly the name of the town. Lucius had never heard of it, but it could have some ring of the Greek. He was about convinced that he was in Greek hands. They tramped down surprisingly clean streets, past single storied houses that seemed prosperous enough. When a boy, his professor father had once taken him through the ruins of Pompeii. There were similarities, although this seemed lO be somewhat more gay than the Roman resort town could ever have been. Lucius scowled thoughtfully. The way he remembered it, the Greeks had put their wealth into public buildings which were magnificent, but supposedly, even in Athens, lived in somewhat grim homes. This didn't tie in. F ipe led them down the street to what was obviously a soldier's post. There were horses here and the young officer commandeered two. They took off at none too gentle a pace and headed inland. When they were clear of Pyrgi, Fipe grinned and gestured toward the hills. "Caere," he said. That meant nothing to Lucius Rostock, however. About three and a half miles inland was a considerably IF larger city than Pyrgi. In fact, it became obvious that the seaside town must be the port for this metropolis. The city of Caere was situated on elevated ground of natural formation about three and a half miles from the sea. Well based for defense, it was completely surrounded by walls which were massive but of well-fitted, cut stone. Lucius failed to place the architecture. He noted the indifferent discipline of the warriors at the gate and grunted, having had military training himself. The greenest recruit of his own era was better trained than this. Pipe was obviously an officer, but he had rated no salute whatsoever. Indeed, a couple of the spearmen had called up to him, laughingly. Pipe had grinned back at them and called an answer that set the men off into more laughter. Lucius wondered vaguely if such laxness prevailed even in combat. This city, he decided, would be a pushover for an aggressor. They stopped before the largest of the public buildings, left their horses in the hands of an indifferent guard, mounted stone steps and entered. Lucius was taken with no ceremony into the presence of a person obviously in command, a middle-aged type who seemed on the good natured side for a man in such position. He was surrounded by what Lucius Rostock assumed were counsellors, and there were several secretaries seated about on folding chairs. The presiding official's name was evidently Larte. Lucius went through the attempt to communicate again. but achieved only smiles and laughter. They seemed a great people for laughter. Pipe stood by his side, evidently proud of his charge, and explained to the extent he could this new phenomenon. Lucius suspected that the story of his method of arrival was being highly discounted. By how it was third hand. However, that he was here was obvious, and where he was from and how he had been transported were a mystery. H e found out later the orders Larte had issued. Pipe was to drop his duties and take over supervising the stranger and teaching him the language. When Lucius was well enough founded, he was to be brought back to the assembly for questioning. Evidently, Pipe couldn't have been pleased more. And evidently he could see no reason for the teaching of language in any such stuffy atmosphere as a classroom, if, indeed, classrooms existed in Caere. Instead, he was prone to work away on the project whilst at the same time fishing, hunting, swimming, or better still, in the company of the town's unmarried young women. Lucius was satisfied enough to go along with this, although he was anxious to get on with matters. He had no illusions about his return to his own era. He was stuck. Even had he been able to dredge up the space-time continuum capsule, he realized that the exposure to sea water for such a period as had already transpired would have destroyed the delicate mechanism. It was a double tragedy. The experiment had not been inexpensive. And he doubted, now that it had failed, that others would be made. It had been difficult enough to get Ihe appropriations. He had to laugh bitterly. Not only had he not emerged in the fulure, but not even in the part of the world from which he had started. Well, there was nothing lie could do about it. All the important issues that applied in his own world, his own country, to his own people, now meant nothing. It was gall to admit; he had been highly Evolved. The company of Caere's unmarried girls was a proUem. He was jaying it close to his diest. He had BO idea of the lancTs mores, social strata, nor socio-economic system. But he knew he was going to have to keep from becoming embroiled Id any permanent attachment, until he could pick a mate who would be an aid to his career, rather than a Imderance. He wasn't getting very far with placing himself in either time or locale. The people of Caere called dieniselves Rasna or Rasenna, and the city-state evidently belonged to a loose confederation covering a wide area. But he could make neither hide nor hair of the political or socio-economic system. Lucius tried to find a clue in the fact that couches were used at table rather than chairs, and couldn't. The Romans, and before them the Greeks had preferred the method of eating, but they, in turn, had most likely picked it up from some oriental source. It was at the evening banquets that he had to watch himself in regard to the women. Pipe seemed to dote on them, and it was all but a nightly thing. There was no avoiding a feminine companion. The couches were double, meant for a man and woman. Married couples, of course, shared a couch. Unmarried young people paired off. Each couple stretched out on their left sides, the woman snuggled back against the man. It hadn't been easy for the visitor from the #th Century to adapt to. You were meant to enjoy the company of your companion. She exchanged jests with you, pressed delicacies to your mouth, and you responded in like. If you wished, particularly during the wine course at the end of the meal, you kissed or exchanged other mild embraces. yt was a fine institution, perhaps, Rostock decided, for an engaged couple, but hard on one determined to remain a bachelor for the time present. In fact, it was at such a banquet and long before his command of the language was proficient, that Lucius Rostock met his future bride. He was later to wonder if Pipe hadn't set it up. The girl's name was Tanaquil and she was visiting from the nort'iern allied city of Tarquinii. Pipe let it be known with what Lucius decided was a knowing smirk, that she was of the Tarquinius family which evidently supplied the governors -- or whatever the title might be -- of the city, in the same manner that Larte IF Camna's family supplied them in Caere. Tanaquil seemed to have a reputation, though as just what, Lucius couldn't make out. Perhaps it was for being a bit aggressive, not quite as feminine as Rasna taste usually dictated. At any rate, she made no objection to sharing the mysterious stranger's couch at a banquet for unmarried couples which Pipe had arranged. It was in the preliminary stages of the evening, while they were being served their mulsum, an aperitif wine mixed with honey that Lucius realized with a thrill of discovery that the girl's all but transparent robe was of silk. Silk! Silk came to the ancients only from China. But then he shook his head. He still knew nothing other than that Tanaquil must be on the wealthy side to be able to afford the fabric. It was the first time he had noticed it since his arrival. Local fabrics were cotton, linen and wool. While the musicians stationed in the background played the ever present double flute and the kithara, a profusion of salads, mushroom dishes, olives, raw vegetables, mussels and snails were brought on. He took in his couch mate more closely. She was attractive enough and of lighter complexion and fairer hair than most Rasna, which was to his taste. She had a certain forwardness not too often run into amongst the Caere women. She was obviously of strength and character. He caught Pipe observing him from the other side of the table in amusement and returned to his food. Tanaquil pressed a bit of broiled fish upon him. She said something and he frowned and tried to puzzle it out. It came through finally. "But of what city are you?" she asked. He told her, knowing it meant nothing. Pipe called over, "Lucius is from a far, unknown land where our language is unspoken as his is here." She looked at her companion, calculatingly, and called out something to Hpe. But it was Seius, an official of Pyrgi, who answered. He had picked up the habit of speaking slowly when Lucius was involved, as had Pipe, and Rostock could follow him almost as well as he could his tutor. Seius said lighdy, "He tells us he is a warrior and leader of men in his own land, and of the family of lucomones." Tanaquil looked at Rostock from the side of her eyes, which were gray, rather than the usual brown of this area. The mensae primae courses began to arrive, consisting largely of poultry dishes, and Lucius could hardly fail to notice that his companion from the north had snugged back against him more comfortably. Later, during the wine, she was called to dance in the method of a city of which Lucius had as yet not heard, Voltumna. They were all loudly merry, by this time, little water having been added to the wine, and everybody was highly amused by the fact that largely she danced for him. T hough the language of the Rasna came to him slowly, come it did and eventually he could carry on well enough that Pipe let him know that Larte had suggested an interview before the assembly. Larte and the assembly, Lucius bad come to find by now, were the governing body of Caere, to the extent that there was government at all. The looseness of the body astonished the man from the future. Evidently, it consisted of a representative from each of the city's families, or clans, call them what you will. As before, they met in the ascmbly building, the largest of the city's public edifices, other than the temples, of which precious little was known by Lucius Rostock. An atheist, in his own time, he wished to lay himself open to no mistakes that might stymie his chances in this strange culture, and there is no field in which it is easier to make mistakes than in religion. Lucius made the gentle gesture of respect that Pipe had taught him was applicable before the city head, and waited for the older man to speak. Pipe stood to one side, beaming at his protege. Larte took in the informal Rasna garb which Pipe had supplied and which in this weather consisted of little more than an embroidered linen kilt.' He smiled and said easily, "You could well be one of us, O Lucius." It was as good an opening as any. Lucius said strongly, "That is my greatest desire, Larte Camna." The assembly fell silent. Lar.e tro .vncd and said, "How do you mean, Lucius?" It was boldness now, or never. "In my few months in Caere, I have noted many things in which I believe I could be of great service to the city. Given your cooperation, I am of the belief that I could become a valuable citizen, eventually prominent in the nation's workings. I am ambitious, Larte, that I will admit, but it is through the efforts of ambitious men that the city progresses." One of the assemblymen, recognized by Rostock as Oenus, head of the Vipinas clan, said softly, "Progress in what manner, Lucius? I am distressed that you seem to feel our society less desirable than the far land with which you are familiar." He had to tread gently now, even Pipe was frowning faintly. Lucius nodded. "I was a leader of warriors in my own land. There were many wars and I acquired great knowledge in the field. I can make this available to Caere and its people." "And who would we use it against?" Larte said, shaking h head. "Against your enemies!" Was the man dense? "But what enemies? "Come now, I know your confederation spreads over a wide area, but there is often conflict between the different cities. Prom what Pipe tells me, only last year Sutri's warriors raided your cattle and were only driven off after desperate battles." Larte chuckled. "He failed to mention that the year before, he parIF ticipated in a similar raid on Sutri." He made a gesture of dismissal. "Young men need exercise and practice with their weapons. Seldom are men killed or seriously injured in such affrays." Lucius couldn't help but stare at the older man. "But with the methods I could teach you, the Macedonian phalanx, the catapult -- I agonize because I am not enough the chemist to give you gunpowder -- the very techniques with which I am familiar, you could spread your domination over this part of the world!" It was Pipe who said, scowling jnizzlement, "To what end?" L ucius was as dumbfounded as they, but for opposite reasons. "Why, you could enrich yourselves. Caere would be the leading city for a distance it would take a man a score of days to march," Larte said, not unkindly. "Lucius of the clan of Rostock, you fail to understand our institutions. Suppose we marched against Tarquinii and our warriors conquered the city. How could we govern them? This assembly consists of the heads of our dans, but in Tarquinii they have other clans." Lucius gaped. The man sounded Mke a child. Could their knowledge of political fact be this primitive? He said impatiently, "You would rule them! They need not be represented in the assembly of Caere at all!" Larte shook his head. "But why? It is troublesome enough to rule our own city." "You could use them to work the fields, free you from your labors, give you time to partidpate in your wars, your government! Don't you see? Once you had defeated them in battle, they could be forced to do your bidding." Ocnus spoke up again, softly as usual. 'T am afraid, Ludus diat we have no interest in forcing others to perform our tasks." He looked at Pipe. "You have found a strange one. The warrior didn't answer. He was as bewildered as (he real Lucius Rostock realized he had pulled a boner. These dohs were incapable of realizing his potentialities. He had better repair his bridges while he could. He said quickly, "I have much to learn. But I am anxious to become a citizen of your city, to participate in your affairs." He tried a jest. "Who knows, perhaps one day I may occupy your position, O Larte." He knew the office was elective. The assembly fell silent again. Surely they had heard his chuckle of self deprecation. Pipe said, "I am afraid my teaching has been inadequate, Lucius. You see, there is no manner in which you can participate in our government. You are of the clan of Rostock, but there is no clan of Rostock in Caere. You can never become a citizen of the city, f.ar from achieving to the rank of lucomo." It was Seius, who was present as representative from Pyrgi, who said, his tone light, "Perhaps Lucius should go south to Roma. It is said that Ancus Marcus, the rex, continues the policy of receiving strangers into the asylum on the Palatine. All are welcome." "Roma!" Lucius snapped. His eyes went around him, to Larte, to Pipe, to all the others. "What is the matter?" Larte said. "It is a city but a day's march to the south, and immediately across the River Tiberis." Lucius Rostock stared at him. "Lucomo? I thought I should have placed that term. Roma? Romel" He pointed a finger, unthinkingly. "You're Etruscans! This is Italy!" Larte was evidently wearying of the discussion. He said to Pipe, "Continue to instruct and entertain the stranger, Lucius. Undoubtedly, in the future we will find it instructive to learn more of this strange land of his birth. We will notify you when another interview seems desirable." Pipe saluted and turned to his charge, who was stiU standing as though thunderstruck. O n their way back to the quarters they shared, Pipe looked at him from the side of his eys. "You mre a strange one, Lucius." The other's thoughts had been going off in a dozen directions. "Listen," he demanded. "Would it be possible for me to wed, well, say Tanaquil?" "Why not, if she loves you?" "And would I not, then, become a member of her clan, the Tarquinius?" Pipe marvelled at him. "Of course not. You are and will always remain a Rostock. Were you to wed, your children, of course, would become of the clan of Tarquinius, but you will always remain a Rostock." The mother right! Descent was in the matrilineal line! Pipe was frowning at him. "Is it otherwise in your own land? Perhaps you follow the customs of the Latins, who trace descent through the male." That brought up something else. Lucius ignored the question and said urgently, "This city of Roma. Tell me about it. How long has it been established? What was this Seius said about it being possible for me to become a citizen there?" pipe shrugged. "It is a rough city, filled with undesirables. How old? A century or so, I suppose." He twisted his mouth, as though to aid memory. "The story has it that the city was founded by a certain rex of the Ramnes tribe named Romulus, through I suspect him of being more legendary than anything else. He moved the tribe which consisted of ten curiae, subdivided into a hundred clans, onto the Palatine hill near the River Tiberis. Later they first defeated, then induced the Sabine tribe to join them. The Sabines took over the Quirinal and the Capitoline Hills." "But what's this about strangers being welcome?" Pipe scratched his chin with a thumbnail in puzzlement. "They adopted a strange custom, in order to continue to swell the city, though why they should wish that is a mystery, it is already one of the largest in the confederacy. At any rate, IF Romuius opened an asylum and invited all to join. This hoJge-podge tribe is known as the Luceres and though it has full representation in the Roman Senate, as they call their assembly, I doubt if thus far there are a full hundred clans. The present rex, a rank corresponding to our lucomo, is Ancus Marcus and he continues the asylum." Lucius said tightly, "And if I were to marry Tanaquil and journey there, I would be welcome?" "Why not? Especially since your children would be of the highly prestigious clan of the Tarquinius." Pipe looked at him from the side of his eyes again. "Tell me, Lucius, for what reason did you come from your own land to this? And why do you not return?" Lucius had to keep on terms with this man, if his rapidly maturing plans were to go through. He said, "My vessel, in which I arrived, has been destroyed and none other will do. I cannot return. Why did I come?" He looked off into a far distance. "In my own land, a great war raged and my country was faced with defeat. New, advanced weapons were needed. In hopes of finding them in... in other, far lands, I was sent to explore, with the intention of returning with such weapons and confounding our enemies. I have failed." He breathed in deeply. His story, in actuality, was not false. Pipe said, in a certain compassion, "You are well away from this warlike country, Lucius. Here you will find a new place. Wed a Rasna girl and find useful outlet for your energies." He twisted his mouth. "Other than war, of course. None save citizens can join in our defense. You could never participate in our government, as we have told you, but your diildren would be full citizens, through theii mother." Lucius said, "I think instead, friend Pipe, that my path will take me to Roma." They had reached the house. Pipe shrugged. "It is your decision." lie disappeared into the building. Lucius Rostock stood outside. The house was well located, overlooking what he now knew must be the Tyrrhenian Sea. Now that he knew where he was, both in time and space, he stared unblinkingly in the direction, where two and a half millennia hence the land of his btrdi would be. He would go to Rome and theca spread to the extent of Ins poweiB the teachings on which he had been raised. Of a sudden, he haled k here. He hated Caere and Us people and he hated the soft, lax insdlntions of the place. There was a stink of democracy. No matter w! at the distance in time, he would keep the faith. His background would not go to naught He snapped to attention, his eyes straight ahead. No matter the distance, he would follow such a path as the Fuhrer would have been proud of. He saluted, a salute which, unbeknownst to Oberst Lucius von Rostock, was to come down to his own era, from this. T IF  ShiM Stoty h was kind of us to train all those dolphins. Now they were beginning to return the favorl A great many things had hapbeen too petrified by fear even to pened to Stort in the course answer. Chlorella-gatherers were of one lifetime, but this was by all stupid by definition; they were about odds the weirdest of them all. the only manual workers left in a If anyone had told him a month computerized world. If every scrap belore that as Director General of of edible substance had not been to the coast of California for a mankind, they would not have been private interview with a -- someset to collecting the scraps and thing, you couldn't call it a human crumbs that evaded the automatic being but you certainly couldn't call machines in mid-ocean and drifted it an animal -- he would have in to shore. laughed in the prophet's face. But naturally the governmeniai Yet here he was. electro-spy planted near by had When the first group (embassy? caught the speech and transmitted it army?) had appeared suddenly on to the nearest police station, and a the shore, each ensconsed in it copter with three fuzzes and a lieuprivate rank of coral or thin rock tenant had been dispatched at once, with things like surf-boards to bear At their approach the leader had it out of and back to the water, and raised its head again from the water when the leader had raised its head in its tank and repeated: "I wish lo and addressed the frightened chlospeak to your highest authority. It rella-gatherers in harsh and jerky but is urgent and for your own sake ;, perfectly clear English, they had Tell your ruler it must meet me on this spot seven suns from today, ait this hour. It is life or death for you. We cannot go to it, so it must come to us." T he policemen were almost as frightened as the chlorellagatherers, but the lieutenant pulled himself together and in a rather quavering voice blustered: "You're crazy, whatever you are! Get back where you came from at once, or we'll shoot." They all had their rayguns out. The leader didn't say another word. It just looked. And the three fuzzes and the lieutenant and the dozen chlorella-gatherers all suddenly found themselves flat on the sand, utterly unable to move a toe or a finger. "You can talk," said the leader kindly. "I've left your speaking apparatus free. You do have somebody who can speak with authority for you land-people, don't you?" The lieutenant couldn't nod; he managed to clear his throat and say yes, hoarsely. "'Him,' not 'it'. But -- " "Then tell him. You see what I ihd to you. I and every one of us here and every one of us anywhere can do the same thing to any number of you, at any time or place. We do not want to do it; we prefer to reason with you like sensible beings. But since you were so foolish as to threaten us, I had no choice. "Unfortunately we have no fingers or thumbs like yours, so that our power to manipulate objects is Hmited. Therefore we have had to develop our minds, and you must believe me that this is the very mildest of the things we can do with them. Tell your ruler that. And teU hin": ;r:nc! all of you land-people this one chance. If you do not take advantage of it, there will never be another. Tell him that. "Seven suns from today, here and at this hour. I shall release you when we are safely away from the reach of your weapons." TTiey were a thin line back in the Pacific when the shaken auditors were able to lift their bruised bodies from the beach. The lieutenant was a very intelligent man. Anybody who could be spared from the incessant labor of food-production for an overcrowded world had to be intelligent to rise above the common herd. He knew at once he had two imperative duties : first, to save face by arresting the chlorella-gatherers to keep them from talking; second, to convince his superiors of the truth of this incredible happening and to force the persuasion up through the ranks of officialdom luitil it reached somebody whose responsibility was secure. Half a dozen times in the next fevered days it was pure chance that the whole unbelievable situation did not bog down. But somehow the message penetrated the ranks of command until on this afternoon Director General Stort stood face to face with a row of water-filled tanks and found himself in colloquy with something that to his amazed but scientific eye (he had once been professor of genetics in the PanScandinavian University) could be nothing but a super-dolphin. T he sleek gray head with its big smiling mouth and its calm, direct, opaque eyes gazed back at him with equal interest. Obviously his thoughts had been read. "You are quite right," said the leader politely. "In fact, I might say that you can thank yourselves for our existence. For # years now you have been dumping atomic waste into the oceans -- in lead containers, to be fure; but in time they leak. "You have known that, and you have known Aat in consequence all salt-water fish have been irradiated until they are no longer fit for you to eat. Therefore you have planted the oceans ten feet deep with chlorella, which can be decontaminated, and left the deeper waters alone. "What you have not known is that this same irradiation has caused specific genetic changes in us also -- the dolphins, the whales, all of us whose home is the sea but who also breathe air. Only, in our case, the mutation has bn beneficent, not maleficent. Not only are we the descendants of those who could survive deeper pressures, but our mental powers have increased tenfold. "With all modesty, I may say that my own kind had e best brains to start with, and we still have. The whales and their kind are very useful to us; but we are toe rulers." Stort was ao bemused he forgot tVr a moment the reason for his visit "How have you learncJ lo :.p:ak English?" he asked. Dolphins always smile; but ihe  smile widened. "We could always speak, even in the old days. You must know that: you took some of our ancestors captive and taught them your language. We speak all the tongues of men who dwell along the coasts of the world. We learned them very simply -- by spies who frolicked in the shallow waters and listened and reported. "It just happens that, as your main seat of world government is in this part of the land area, ours is in this section of the seas, so naturally when someone was appointed to deal with you, they chose one who could speak the language of the nearest land-region. "But let us talk of more important things. I am here to give you an ultimatum." Stort stiffened. "Excuse me," said the leader suavely. "I did not mean to use an offensive word. Perhaps I do not know your tongue as well as I think I do. Let me say rather that I am here to give you a warning? "What kind of warning? And by what authority?" Stort's tone still bristled. The harsh voice dropped to a sibilant whisper. "You know a little of our powers. I should be most reluctant to have to demonstrate how far we are in control. I am here at all only because of our sense of justice and our generosity. Do not push us too far. I implore you, as one living IP being to another, to take us with the utmost seriousness. Believe me, the fate of your whole kind is in your hands today." S tort felt a chill creep over him -- whether bom of premonition or induced by the stranger he did not want to know. am only a representative," he aid, in a more conciliatory manner. "I can carry messages. I cannot make final decisions by myself -- and certainly not instant ones." Hie leader seemed taken aback, mean you are not yourself ise chief authority?" it asked. "That is not the way in which our society is constituted. Is there no one, then, to whom we may speak once lor all? Time is running out fast." Start made up his mind. He was aghast at the prospect but he dared not take the risk of refusing, after what be had already seen and heard. "Only the assembled United Regions can consider any information you have to offer," he said coolly. If you mean it in good faith, you must arrange to cross the continent and apeak to them where they meet." For the first time die superddphin seemed non-plussed. am sorry," it said, "but that is lotaHy impossible. We are not equipped for land travel -- it is all we could do, with the aid of trained crabs and octopuses, to devise these containers you see, and to come in this far on the waves. "We shafl help all we can, with our mental influence, to make your mission successful; but your assemMy. or enough of them to make and implement decisicHis, must meet us here." The leader paused. "I cannot impress it upon you too strongly that there is no time to lose. We cannot delay much longer. You have the means of flying back and forth across the continent. I oaa give you no more than another seven days. Even then it may be too late." Stort never knew how much wae his own position and influence, how much the hypnotic ability of the super-dolphins, whidi seemed ua dianged by (hstance. It was toudi and go. Perhaps curiosity and creduhty had as much to do with it as anything -- and the fact that the United Iegions would foot the bill. But a week from that day three hyper jet planes, each holding a hundred passengers landed in utmost secrecy at the nearest airport, and soon ar, # delegates to the UR (a clear majority) and # techiians with all their equipment, gathered on the wide beach, cleared for the day of ohlorella-gatherers. They waited an hour, and some were ready restless and complaining, when at last die thin line appeared to the west, and in a few minutes scores of the water-filled tanks that kept the super-dolphins comfortable were ranged opposite them at the edge of the sea. This time, however, the spokesman was apparently someone of far higher rank than the envoy with whom Stort had spoken. Apparently, because to human eyes the smiling invaders all looked alike. But the first words set them straight. #T am glad' the dolphin said, J. "that you have heeded the injunction of the messenger we sent to you. Believe me, it is purely for your own sakes that we have put you to this trouble. I am authorized both to explain the situation to you, to make our final offer, and to receive your prompt acceptance -- for I cannot imagine that you vill not accept this one chance for your racial survival. "But first, to make things plain, I must ask your speaker a few questions. You will understand that our knowledge of you land-people is necessarily limit to what our spies have been able to see and hear along all the coasts of all the oceans. Unfortunately our cousins in fresh waters have not mutated as we have, and so we have not been able to secure much information from them. "Am I correct in assuming that diere is a certain amount of overpopulation among you land-dwellers?" There was some sardonic laughter from the men and women gathered on the shore, and a confused babble of voices. The super-dolphin's expression could not change, but it gazed pointedly at Stort as the appointed spokesman. The Director General drew a deep breath. "Unhappily," he said, "you are only too right. For # years now mankind has been over-producing itself, and despite immense efforts we have been unable to cut our population down to the optimum size. Contraception, sterilization. abortion have all failed to compete adequately with the conquest of disease and the consequent increase m life expectancy, rhe one thing we have not been able to eradicate from human nature is the selfish desire of most individuals to perpetuate themselves, or their prejudices which prevent ihe establishment of proper eugenic standards." "Strange!" exclaimed the official. "We had always understood that, next to ourselves as we have evolved, human land-dwellers were the most intelligent beings on earth. When ne found ourselves faced with this problem, we found a solution though we had not your means of solving it; but you -- "But more of that later. Isn't the result the overcrowding of your living areas?" "So much so," Stort replied, "that merely to feed this immense population takes practically every inch of earth that will grow vegetables or animals for men to eat. There has been one good result -- wars have become obsolete and all mankind is united in a single effort to raise food. Our planet has become one huge food-factory, and the vast majority of the inhabitants arc engaged in this one industry." "By the whole planet, I take it you mean that smaller part which is dry land. But where then do you live?" "That is our greatest problem. We had hoped to colonize the other planets of this solar system, or even to go beyond them to other systems. But every effort to do so has failed; the vast amounts of money IF needed to make it possible cannot be spared from the amount necessary merely to raise enough food to keep mankind alive. "Where do we live? We live, crowded together, with the individuality and leisure our ancestors knew a luxury none of us can afford, on mountain tops, in the few deserts we cannot irrigate, in barracks in the factory'-farms themselves, but mostly in a vast network of underground tunnels. A few, who are very rich, live in satellite tracts above the stratosphere." #C'"That is even worse than we A had anticipated," said the stranger slowly. "If we had known, perhaps we would have been able to postpone our solution of our own difficulties untfl you had found a better one for yours. But it is too late now. "We did, though, from the beginning try to consider your welfare in making our plans. I shall not conceal from you the fact that there are two major schools of thought among us concerning you land-people. One very large group feels that you have not fulfilled your promise as a species, and that the time has come for your cxthjction. The other, which I myself represent, is still slightly in the majority. It feels that it owes you a certain gratitude, because -- quite without any intention on your part, I grant -- you made us what we are. "I am sure that we, or any others of us who dwell in the ocean, never entered your minds when you dumped your atomic waste in our living-space. Nevertheless, it is solely because of this inadvertent action on your part, that we dolphins, and to a certain extent the whales, have mutated into the highly evolved beings we are now. We are by nature altruistic. We feel that even accidental benefactors should be protected if it is at all possible. That ii why we are making this attempt to save at least some of you." "To save us from what?" Stort inquired bluntly. There was no change in the superdolphin's face, but Stort could have sworn that the small black eyes gazed on him with compassion. "From certain and universal death," it said. There was a murmur from the throng listening through their earphones. The speaker raised a flipper for silence. "We too," it went on, "have our serious population problem. We too are finding our living-space insufficient for civilized existence. We can't make room for ourselves by destroying all other life except the edible -- which in our case meana the fish, poisonous now to you but not to us." The fish. And it was true that no animal lived on earth any longer which could not be used as humaa food. "Therefore we find it necessary to make the whole planet our dwellingplace." "How?" asked Stort hoarsely. "You know there are many rifti and faults in the earth's orusit -- more of them under the sea than in the land. There is a very deep # one in the mid-Pacific; there are others, almost equally deep, in the southern portion of that ocean you call the Atlantic. When there is a break in any of them it can alter the whole relation of sea and land. "We have no machinery, but we have unlimited animal strength at our service. With the help of our trained whalea, we have found that these rifts can be widened and opened. We have known that for a long time, and have abstained from action because we wished to protect you -- which I feel in all honesty is more than you would have done for us in like circumstances. "We can no longer do so. Our population has increased too greatly, and unlike you we have no technical means of regulating it. You have such means, but you have refused to enforce them. There is only one way by which we can find enough room fOT us to live and build our society for any conceivable time to come. "We are going to open all the lifts and flood the earth." S tort darted a glance at those nearest to him. He saw faces as white as his own must be. "You can't do that!" he gasped. "It would be inhuman!" Again the fixed smile seemed to widen. "That," the dolphin official said succinctly, "would hardly be a consideration with us." Pandemonium broke out. The throng of delegates went berserk. In a hundred different languages they screamed, howled, bellowed. The super-dolphins stood unmoved. It was not any from the "underdeveloped" Asian or African Region, but two from Europe and one from North America who broke out from the crowd and dashed toward the row of tanks, forbidden ray-guns in dieir hands. They took only a few steps before they fell on the sand, paralyzed as had been the policemen and the chlorella-gatherers at the first encounter. "Don't be foolish," said the superdolphin mildly. "You can't hurt us. And if you could, you would be only hurting yourselves, since I come bearing a suggestion by which some of you at least might be saved.' Scared and sobered, the delegates fell silent. "Tell us your offer," Stort said. The spokesman waited until the limp bodies had been carried to one side. All this time the other dolphins had neither spoken nor stirred. Now, at a nod from their leader, two of them detached themselves and surfboarded their tanks down to watch over the stricken three. Then, with a glance of approval at Stort, the leader spoke again. "You cannot live at all in our clement," it began. "And we cannot live wholly in yours. We breathe air, as you know, just as you do, but we must live for the most part under water. You can swim in water, but you must spend most of your time in the air. "We cannot adapt to land-living; we should be dehychated in no time. That is why, for these meetings with you, we must stay in these containers, under water except when we come usp to breathe or speak. IF "We can do nothing for you yourselves. But if your progeny means so much to you, we can see to it that your race shall not die altogether." "How?" Stort's voice was thick with strain. Instead of answering, the leader turned to its companions. There was a whistling hubbub in their own speech muffled to human ears because the voices came not from mouths but from blow-holes. Then the leader turned to Stort again. "Do you realize," it said, "that when we flood the land it will mean all the land? Your highest mountains will be drowned, your underground tunnels will be flooded. Even those you say live on satellites will slowly starve to death, since I assume their food is imported from earth." The delegates' loud-speakers burst forth in a hullabaloo of (M'otest, threat, and pleading. The dolphin leader stood unmoving and unmoved. "We'll kill you all first!" yelled an Italian delegate. "Murderers!" screamed a delegate from Outer Mongolia. "Have mercy on us," pleaded a delegate from Syria. "Give us time at least to find a way to save ourselves!" pleaded a Venezuelan. S tort stopped them with a gesture. His face was ashen under his fair hair. "Sir," he said to the stranger, "I do not know your name -- " "We have no names." "Then, sir, let me ask you: is this decision irrevocable?" "Unfortunately for you, yes. We have tried every other way possible to us, and failed." "How much time have wc?" "I told you I represented a majority. But it is a small majority. Our even time to warn you." "Then," said Stort, "you might as well have saved us and yourselves the effort, unless you really have some way out for us. "You must know that our whole economy is based on automatic machinery, aiKl that even if any of us could survive they couldn't survive long as a society. They couldn't even live on sea-food, for that is poison to us now, thanks to our own stupidity. Oh, yes. I'm not exonerating us; perhaps we deserve to die. But if we can even leave descendants, diat would be better than nothing. "So, do you really have anydiing feasible to suggest to us? K not, k would have been kinder to let disaster come upon us without foreknowledge." "Stort," said the dolphin, "you are a brave and wise man. You are the first land-animal I have heard of whom I should think almost worthy to be one of us. "I wish it had been possible to spare you and any oth of your breed who are like you. It is not. But there is one chance, if you hurry, to prevent your utter extinction." "What is it?" asked Stort eagerly. "Whatever it is -- " There was an affirmative murmur from the throng behind him. "In the natural order of things, our two species oould never interbreed. But we have found that among our own people we can, by our mental powers, alter the chromosomal pattern. We have been able to produce experimental crosses with other species of mammals -- none, yet, as far removed from us as you; but there seems to be no insuperable obstacle. "We are a proud people, and we do not like to mix our blood with that of inferiors. But we are also a just and generous people. We owe you what reparation we can make for what, to preserve ourselves, we are obliged to inflict upon you. It is a great, great sacrifice, but we have volunteered for it. At least we can console ourselves that your presence here must mean that you are among the most worthy of your kind. "The party among us which is impatient for action may not wait for our return. But if any or all of you wish to take advantage of our There was a profound silence. Then Stort said stiffly: "You mean -- there are females among you here?" "I supposed you would know that we are all females," said the leader. "Female dolphins have always been more intelligent than the males. Few males among us could become important members of our government, such as we are." The silence continued. Some delegates prayed. Several fainted. "There is no time to lose," the harsh voice said. "We have wasted too much already. If you wish to preserve your human genes -- " S uddenly all the super-dolphins raised their heads abruptly from their tanks. They conversed agitatedly among themselves. Something's happened, they've sensed something, Stort thought. We need a miracle. Perhaps it's come. He turned to the ranks of delegates. In the faces before him he saw fear, disgust, anger, hesitation, stoical resolution in a few. "I think," he said quietly, "our visitors have something new to tell us." He turned expectantly. "I am truly very sorry," the leader said. "We have waited too long. Time has run out. We have just received a mental message from our headquarters. In our absence, our opponents have overcome us. Our offer must be withdrawn. "We could sd!l do one thing for you -- we could put you all to sleep." "No!'" cried mankind's last defiance of fate. The super-dolphins turned without another word and glided back into the breakers. And while the delegates stood in dread, eyes fixed on the ocean, something else arose on the horizon. A wall of water so high it blotted out the sinking sun. So that now we who inherited all the planet Earth will never know whether we could have mingled with the only other terrestrial race that came near to our own mentality. Centuries later, we still keep finding the buried skeletons of what IF IF  Novelette OF years info the past to explore his own future! I T he woolly mammothmobile lying on its side in the pinaster grove was a dead ringer for the one Farrell was driving -- slightly larger than life, gleaming of tusk guns; authentic down to the minutest detail. Even if he hadn't followed its well-defined trail all the way from the entry-area he would have known at once that it was the property of turned to the Upper Paleolithic to find. Frowning, he drove his own woolly mammothmobile deeper into the grove, opened the ear-hatch, extended the Jacob's ladderette, and climbed down to the ground. After making certain that his numb-gun was riding properly on his right hip, he approached the fallen paleethnologi vehicle warily. The heavy woollike material covering its thick steel skin was torn in several places and there was an ugly hole the size of a silver dollar in the region of its right hip. The ear-hatch had been forced open from the outside and hung forlornly on one hinge. Farrell clambered up the flexible trunk-cannon to the temple and peered down into the cockpit. As he did so, a pungent odor touched his nostrils. Only one thing could be responsible for it -- a burned-out powerpac. Clearly, whatever it was that had burned the hole in the mammothmobile's hip had found its mark. H is bewilderment mounting, he lowered himself into the cockpit. The control board, the automatic retro-co-ordinate calculator, and the lumillusion panel had been smashed beyond repair, apparently with a blunt instrument of some kind. The upholstery covering the two bucket seats had been tom to shreds. He crawled through the hatch behind the seats into the compact cabin. The couch-bed had been stripped of its coverings, the food locker had been forced open and robbed of its contents, and the spare-parts bin had been overturned. The clothes cubicle had been broken into and mangled clothing -- most of it women's -- was scattered everywhere. Stone Age teenagers? Farrell didn't think so. He would sooner believe it was the work of adults -- Cro-Magnon adults, in all fikelihood. There were still a few Neanderthals around, but they were well on their way toward extinction. None of which explained the hole in the paleethnologivehicle's hip. He had activated his pocket torch in order to view the interior of the cabin; now he directed its beam into the posterior compartment, where the powerpac was housed. The unit was burned out all right -- burned out beyond repair. So intense had been the heat to which it had been subjected, in fact, that some of its parts had fused. He returned to the cockpit, climbed through the ear-hatch, and used the temple as an eminence from which to survey his surroundings. The pinaster grove constituted part of the flora of a vast tableland that would someday be known as the south central plateau of France. In the east, young mountains showed. To the south and west, the plateau stretched verdantly away into the mists of distance. To the north, although he could not see' it at the moment because of the trees, lay the glittering whiteness of the retreating glacier. He could smell the clean sweet coldness of ice and snow. He peered deeper into the grove. Was that a man's booted foot protruding from those shadows over there? He climbed down from the massive head and moved forward to investigate. Careful now -- old sabertooth might be around. Or Canis dims, the wild dog. Or the giant sloths, Mylodon and Megatherium, Perhaps even Mr. Whoolly Mammoth himself...# IF T he foot was attached to a leg, the leg to a torso, the torso to a head. The back of the head had been bashed in and the brains had been scooped out. Farrell recognized the dead man as Professor Richards from a photorescue operations had showed him. Lord! he hoped Miss Larkin, the professor's secretary, hadn't suffered a similar fate. He explored the rest of the grove, but saw no sign of her. Maybe the mammothmobile's attackers had taken her prisoner. He had never seen Miss Larkin m who had showed him the photograph of Professor Richards had let him view the job-resume tape that Miss Larkin had filed with the International Paleethnological Society's employment division and which had resulted in her being hired on the spot. The tape showed her babysitting for her neighbor's children, doing housework, skiing down a chaste white mountain slope, walking to work in a neat blue suitdress, typing in a big busy office, addressing a business women's club, going to church -- showed her, in short, engaging in just about every commendable activity there was to engage in, and proved conclusively that she was a nice, clean-living red-blooded American girl. On the desperate seas long wont to roam, Farrell had been looking for a nice clean-living red-blooded American girl all his life; consequently, the thought of losing one just as he was on the verge of finding her was unendurable. Lord! he hoped that if they had taken .her prisoner the Neanderthals hadn't harmed her. For Neanderthals they were -- no doubt about it. Granted, Cro-Magnons hunted the woolly mammoth too; but bashing in a man's skull and devouring his brains was exclusively a Neanderthal custom. Presently he found impressions of her pointed shoe-boots among the grotesque tramplings of the hunting party's trail. They had taken her prisoner all right -- though for what reason, he couldn't imagine. Miss Larkin was stacked, and a beauty to boot; but a man's taste in women is arbitrarily determined by the size and shape of the females he has been brought up with, and the average Neanderthal was probably as susceptible to the charms of a twenty-first century American goddess as Farrell was to those of a she-ape. H e knew of course that he was dealing with someone besides Neanderthals. The Mousterian Culture Stage had given the world fire, the cudgel, and the stone-tipped spear, but so far as he knew it had never come up with a weapon capable of felling a woolly mammothmobile. Unquestionably there was a third party on the scene, either from Farrell's own time period or from a period beyond. In all probability they were responsible for Miss Larkin's having been taken prisoner. Before leaving the grove, he dug a quick grave for Professor Richards and said a few words over it. Then he sent back news of the mishaps one-way time radio. Owing to the IF time stream's resistance to potenti:il paradoxes, three hours had been as close as he'd been able to get to the first mammothmobile's arrival time; hence, assuming that he'd lost no time since leaving the entry-area and that the hunting party hadn't remained very long in the grove, his quarry was about two hours ahead of him. He glanced at his self-adapting timepiece. #:# P.M. He ought to be able to overtake them easily before dark. One dead, one to go, he reflected bitterly as he drove out of the grove in the direction of the mountains. What made people like Professor Richards tick, anyway? Why had the damn fool had to come running back to the Upper Paleolithic just because he'd dug up an artifact that didn't rhyme with the Aurignacian Culture Stage? Farrell had examined the artifact in question before leavto admit that neither the subject matter nor the quality of the workmanship made Aurignacian sense; but he still couldn't see why a statuette, however exquisitely it might be carved, was worth going # years back in tirne to investigate. He supposed he shouldn't be complaining, though. After all, if it weren't for paleethnological idiots like Professor Richards, professional pastfinders like himself wouldn't be working. n S pring had dressed the lower slopes of the distant mountains in new bloom, but on the summits winter still held 'sway. It was as though the glacier in withdrawing northward had left part of itself behind, and in a sense of course it had. The green of the Pleistocene plateau was enlivened by sporadic populations of oaks, firs, chestnuts, beeches, and pinasters, and the Alice blue gown of the Cenozoic sky was embroidered with wispy motifs of scattered clouds. The "Stone Age -- Late-Old-Middle -- Excursion" paleto Farrell was a brand new one, and, thanks to its classification, lent itself nicely to the name of "Salome". He had already fallen in love with "her". She lumbered over the plateau with deceptive awkwardness, the one-way transparency of the neoalloy that constituted her "skull" affording him an almost unlimited view in all directions. Riding iq her cockpit was very much like riding in a howdah, except that the cockpit was an integral part of the conveyance and rested on a bed of gyrobearings that cancelled out the slightest lurch. He saw a herd of musk oxen; he glimpsed a pack of wild dogs. A giant glyptodont shuffled out of sight behind a stand of hardy oaks. A Pleistocene condor winged by overhead, mighty twelve-foot wings cupping lofty columns of spring air. He passed the remnants of two musk oxen which the hunting party had killed, and knew that when he and Salome were far enough away the condor would descend and dine. But he saw no sign of Smilodon, Old saber-tooth wais almost extinct in this day and age, having grown tusks # long it could no longer open its mouth wide enough to devour its prey. Hills appeared in the distance, grew closer. Salome took them in her stride. Cliffs were everywhere in evidence. Caves...' "Easy now, old girl -- we should be almost on their tan." The trail was less distinct now, owing to the rockiness of the terrain, but still easy to follow. Presently a small plain began, flanked on the right by a pinaster forest and on the left by a sparkling river. Far up ahead, a cliff far wider and higher than any of the others Farrell had seen took shape. The trail pointed directly toward it. Hundreds of cave mouths pockmarked its surface, leaving little doubt that it was his quarry's destination. By this time, they had already arrived. At least there was no sign of them on the plain. H e guided Salome into the pinaster forest and approached the escarpment behind a concealing fringe of outlying trees. When he was halfway there he saw a column of figures leave the sanctuary of the cliff and begin marching westward across the plain. He brought Salome to a halt behind a screen of coniferous foliage and watched it pass. Having assumed that it comprised another Neanderthal hunting party, he was astonished when it turned out to be made up of both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. TTie latter constituted the column proper and consisted of both men and women, all of them naked and unarmed. He estimated them to be about thirty in number. They marched two abreast, and flanking them on either side were about a dozen Neanderthals armed with stone-tipped spears. He stared after the column long after it had passed. There was a great deal he did not know about his prehistoric ancestors, but there was one thing he did know: Cro-Magnon hadn't been in the habit of calling on Neanderthal, and Neanderthal hadn't been in the habit of providing Cro-Magnon with protection. Was it possible that the thirty men and women were prisoners and the Neanderthals were guards? He shelved the mystery for the moment and continued on his way. The forest grew to within a stone's throw of the southern flank of the escarpment. He halted Salome in a well of late-afternoon shadows and, breaking out a chicken 'n biskit vacuumpac and a vacuumjug of coffee, surveyed the base of the cliff while he dined. All along it, cook-fires burned, tended by hirsute women appareled in shaggy animal skins. Squat and hairy men were cutting chunks and strips of meat from the musk-ox quarters the hunting party had brought in. Dirty children were dashing here and there, getting in everyone's way and making general nuisances of themselves. The scene was highlighted by late-afternoon sunlight, darkened by shadows creeping in from the plain; softened by a strange haziness which Farrell attributed to the smoke rising from the fires. IF He saw no si of Miss Larkin. No doubt she had been consigned to one of the caves -- either that, or she was lying bound somewhere, and blended with her background. There was yet another possibility, but he didn't care to consider it. As long as there was no evidence to the contrary, he would continue to believe she was still alive. T he Cenozoic sun descended behind distant hills and trees and the eastern sky adorned itself with the twinkling earrings of night. Farrell had two courses of action: he could approach the cliff openly in Salome or leave her behind in the forest and effect Miss Larkin's rescue through stealth alone. After due deliberation, he chose course number two, not because he preferred it but because he knew that the sight of Salome would send the cave men scurrying into their caves from the safety of which they would loose their spears, and if Miss Larkin were in the open she might be hit, and if she weren't he'd never be able to find her, or get to her if he did. He backed Salome deeper into the woods and psyche-programmed her to withdraw the Jacob's ladderette after he reached the ground and to reclose her ear-hatch. Then he typed lumillusion panel and turned the dial to On. Night had completely supplanted day when at last he crept from the forest and began making his way toward the cliff, and all the stars were out. Fortunately, there was no moon. He expected to smell the caves, but he didn't. Nor did he smell the smoke from the dwindling cook-fires. He was on his hands and knees now, creeping through tall coarse grass. Suddenly his head collided with an invisible barrier. When he reached out and touched it, his fingers came away tingling. A force-field yet! He shouldn't have been surprised, he supposed. Nevertheless, he was. Getting cautiously to his feet, he explored the invisible barrier further. It rose to a height higher than he could reach and appeared to extend in a semi-circle from the southernmost section of the cliff to the northernmost. Back on his hands and knees again, he began creeping along the base of the barrier. Presently, to his relief, he saw Miss Larkin. She was lying bound hand and foot near one of the cook-fires, and appeared to be unharmed Making himself as comfortable as possible in the tall grass, he withdrew a numb-gun cartridge from his ammo belt, removed the tiny amplifier, and emptied the electro-crystals into the palm of his hand. After emptying six more cartridges in a similar manner, he dumped the little pile of crystals into his handkerchief and tied the ends together. The ground was still damp from a recent rain -- damp enough, at least, for his purpose. Digging a small hole, he placed the makeshift sack inside and covered it. B y this time, the evening meal had come to an end, and the cave men and women were retiring to their rocky bowers. He was afraid for a while that Miss Larkin would be dragged into one of the caves, but she wasn't. Her captors left her lying by the fire, guard by one of their number -- a bristly fellow with a face that looked as though it had been stomped by a musk ox. Stupefied by the enormous amount of half cooked meat he had devoured, the fellow was already beginning to nod, and presently his head dropped forward onto his craggy knees, which he had drawn up against his chest, fetusfashion. Farrell waited till he was reasonably certain that the other members of the tribe -- and whatever nonmembers who happened to be on the scene -- were fast asleep; then he dug up his homemade piezoelectric cocktail and tossed it against the forcefield. TTiere was a brief blue spark, an almost inaudible sputter, and a faint odor of ozone. So much for the force-field. He crawled past the site of the vanished barrier on elbows and thighs. He could smell the caves now. And how he could! The girl was wide awake. When she saw him creep into the fading firelight, her eyes went wide. "Go back -- go back!" she whispered hoarsely. "They left me here to lure you -- don't you see?" He saw only that her eyes were blue and that her sun-tanned face was like an angel's. Truly, it had never fallen to a man to rescue a fairer damsel in distress. He cut the gut-thongs that bound her wrists and ankles, and when her dark and lustrous hair brushed his cheek as he raised her to her feet. Loss of circulation caused her to stagger, and he picked her up. "You idiot!' she said. And then, "Run for it -- maybe there's time!" There wasn't, though. Three outsize Neanderthals came out of the shadows just as Farrell was about to take off for the forest. One of them wore a saber-tooth tigerskin and was clearly the leader. He had a mouth like a bear trap, and as Farrel stared he opened it and out of it came a blue bolt that knocked Farrell silly and sent him sagging to the ground. Miss Larkin on top of him. Ill TThile Miss Larkin was anything   but slight, she was far from being an unbearable burden. It was Farrell's head that was the unbearable burden. It felt twice its normal size and thrice its normal weight, and he could barely hold it high enough to view his three adversaries. The one who had unleashed the blue bolt stooped down and relieved him of his numb-gun, his ammo belt his timepiece, his pocket torch, and his hunting knife; then he proceeded to examine each object in turn in the firelight. His eyes were large and strangely flat, and held not the faintest glimmer of intelligence or anything else. At length he emitted several monosyllabic grunts, and one of his companions jerked the girl to her feet. The other one jerked Farrell to his, and he and Miss Larkin were hustled over to the mouth of a nearby cave and shoved inside. IF When his legs went out from under him, Farrell thought at first that it was the result of the shock-charge he'd absorbed. It wasn't, though. It was the result of the twelve-foot discrepancy that existed between the level of the ground and the level of the cave floor. The fall netted him a bruised ear and a skinned elbow, and cost him a lungful of air when Miss Larkin landed on top of him. She bounced off his back like a rubber ball. As soon as he got his breath back, he felt around for her in the inky darkness. "Ooh!" Miss Larkin said. He jerked his hand away. "I'm sorry -- I didn't mean to be fresh. Are you all right, Miss Larkin?" There was a brief silence, during which he received the definite impression that she was adding up the little she knew about him thus far in an attempt to arrive at some kind of a conclusion. Presently, "I -- I guess so," she said. "Are you?" "I'll be all right. My name's Alan and Professor Richards when you didn't report in." "It was noble of you to try to rescue me, Mr. Farrell. I'm -- I'm sorry I called you an idiot." "Now, now. Miss Larkin -- I'm a professional pastfinder. It's my job to rescue people." The words sounded corny even to him and he had a hunch he'd heard them before -- probably on #V. "In a moment I'll see about getting you out of here and back to the present," he went on, "but first, we'd better bring each other up to date. You said when you first saw me that you'd been left out in the open to lure me. That means Blue Bolt and his buddies knew I was coming. How did they know" "I don't think they did know for sure," Miss Larkin said. "Probably they guessed that my disappearance would be investigated." Her voice caught a little. "I -- I guess you know about poor Professor Richards." F arrell wanted to find her hand in the darkness and give it a reassuring squeeze, but remembering his faux pas of a moment ago, he decided not to do any more fumbling around in the dark. "I gave him a decent burial. Miss Larkin -- it was all I could do." Miss Larkin sighed. "He was such a dear sweet old man. Twenty of those terrible creatures attacked our mammothmobile and that horrid one in the tigerskin burned a hole right through it with that same bllie bolt he hit you with, only a thousand times stronger. They grabbed Professor Larkin first and then they grabbed me. I -- I thought they were going to do the same thing to me that they did to him, and they would have, too, if Blue Bolt and those two others hadn't stopped them. They "re the leaders, I think, only Blue Bolt has the most to say. Are they from the future, do you think, Mr. Parrel?" "They must be. Thieves, probably, who looked enough like Neanderthals to begin with to pass themselves off as the real thing with the help of a little perma-makc-up. I can't imagine, though, what they expect to steal in this time period. Maybe they're from our future. That would explain the oral energy beam." Farrell got to his feet. "Well Miss Larkin, we're wasting time. I said I'd get you out of here, and I will." "Mr. Farrell, I'm glad you showed up. You're the answer to a lonely girl's prayer." It made him feel big and strong to know that she trusted him implicity, and the feeling of tenderness which she had already evoked m him became more profound. He began exploring the cave, working his way along the walls with only his fingers to guide him. His head was still heavy from the effects of Blue Bolt's blue bolt, but no permanent damage had been done, and after a while the heaviness went away. The cave proved to be a natural dungeon, circular in shape and some fifteen feet in diameter. He went over every inch of the vertical walls, or at least every inch within reaching distance, and finally he found what he was searching for -- a crevice. As the cliff was honeycombed with caves -- its pockmarked facade would admit of no other conclusion -- any crevice could very well indicate the presence of a thin partition. T his one was wide enough at one point for him to work his arm into. Less than a foot beyond the wall, the fissure spread outward, and his groping hand encountered nothingness. He was certain that it spelled an adjacent cave and equally as certain that he could work his way through. "Miss Larkin," he whispered, "give me a hand, will you? I think I've found a way out of here." She joined him, and together they began widening the crevice. The rock was loose for the most part, but working it free was slow work and the need to proceed quietly made the job even slower. He became consciously aware of Miss Larkin's perfume. He'd been unconsciously aware of it all along. It was the evocative-association type, and all the while he worked he kept seeing apple orchards in springtime bloom, and meadows clad with buttercups and daisies. Lord! It was wonderful being with a nice girl for a change. He'd never frequent another ecdysiast dive or another Easter Rabbit Club as long as he lived! Hours passed. They rested now and then, sitting side by side in the darkness. Faint drafts of fresh air wafted sporadically through the opening they were working on, proving that whatever else it might be, the cave beyond wasn't a dead end. Finally -- Ion? after midnight, Farrell estimated -- the aperture was wide enough for them to crawl through. "FIl go first. Miss Larkin," he said. "In the interest of safety. When I give the word, you follow." The cave into which he presently crawled was a disappointment. In fact, it brought to mind an outsize burrow more than it did a cave. At best, it could be classified as a narrow tunnel. But it was better than nothing. "All right. Miss Larkin," he said over his shoulder. "Keep just behind me." As nearly as he could determine, IF the tunnel ran parallel to the face of the cliff. As the faint drafts of fresh air seemed to be coming from the left, he set out in that direction, crawling on his hands and knees. Miss Larkin just behind him. For an interminable time, conditions did not improve. The tunnel grew narrower, if anything, and turned first this way and then that. Farrell began to be worried. Tf this keeps up," Miss Larkin said cheerfully, "I shan't have to go on a diet for at least another year." Fortunately, it didn't keep up. The tunnel, after slanting sharply upward for several dozen feet, grew suddenly wider, and Farrell found he could stand upright. Miss Larkin stood up beside him. T -- I think we'd better hold hands," he said. "There may be drop-offs." It was her hand that found his. He gripped it tightly. Oh, how he yearned to tell her how wonderful it was to be with her -- how sick he was of ecdysiast dives and Easter Rabbit Clubs; of girls who thought no more of taking off their clothes than they did about smoking a cigarette. But he held himself in check. She probably didn't even know there were such girls. The tunnel continued to turn this way and that. They felt their way slowly along its walls. Farrell had a hunch they were in a labyrinth rather than in a single tunnel, but he didn't say so. There was no point in alarming Miss Larkin, and anyway, the drafts of fresh air he had pinned their hopes upon continued to fan his face. Presently the tunnel -- whether it was the original one or not, he had no way of knowing -- narrowed and took on an upward pitch. It wasn't long before he and the girl were crawling again. "I -- I think the ground's trembling," Miss Larkin said after they had proceeded for about a hundred feet. "May -- maybe we should go back." IV F arrell felt the trembling himself. A moment later he heard a faint humming sound which he recognized as the muffled throbbing of a powerful generator. Clearly, the cliff housed more than a Neanderthal community -- an eventuality for which the presence of the force-field should have prepared him. "It's all right, Miss Larkin," he said over his shoulder. "We're on the right track. We should be out of here in no time." He wormed his way around a bend, discovered that he could dimly make out the walls of the tunnel. After worming his way around two more, he saw, far up ahead, an uneven circle of wan light. "Chin up, Miss Larkin," he whispered. "We're almost there." He slowed his pace as he neared the opening and cautioned her to move as silently as she could. The humming sound was much louder now, the trembling of the ground more pronounced. At length he crawled out onto a wide ledge that looked down into a mammoth seminatural cavern, one whole wall of which was given over to a huge gleaming machine. Miss Larkin crawled out on the ledge beside him. There was a smudge of dirt on her right cheek, her dark hair hung in damp wisps over her forehead, her khaki blouse was torn in several places, and her once immaculate culottes were a mess. But her eyes were no less heavenly than they had been before and her face still had the aspect of an angel's. Farrell was more certain than ever that she was the Girl for Him. She gasped when she peered below. Farrell had already taken in the scene. The machine consisted of multicolored banks of computers, glowing mazes of coils, and weird complexities of gleaming wires. At the base of the wall opposite the ledge was the source of the humming sound -- a giant generator. As nearly as he could ascertain, it was powered by gasoline, distilled probably by Blue Bolt  Co. from a local petroleum deposit. Illumination was provided by a battery of superfluoros suspended some twenty feet below the stalactitic ceiling (and some ten feet below the ledge) and aligned in such a way that their radiance bathed the machine and its immediate foreground in unadulterated brightness, leaving the rest of the huge chamber in relative darkness. In the wall opposite the machine a wide archway gave access to a natural corridor that led, if the freshness of the air was a dependable index, to the outside world. T here were fifteen Neanderthals present. Three of them were Neanderthaloids -- i.e., Blue Bolt and his buddies. The rest were of the ordinary garden variety. The latter were armed with stone-tipped spears which they carried slung on their shoulders, and were lounging here and there about the room. The former were facing a twinkling control panel at the base of the machine. Inset in a maze of wires next to the panel was what looked at first glance like a full-length looking glass. The trouble was, it didn't reflect light; instead, it absorbed it -- or seemed to. The result was a sort of abysmal blackness that transcended ordinary blackness and gave the viewer a queasy feeling. It dawned on Farrell finally that the looking glass was the focal point of the entire machine -- the raison d'etre for the whole fantastic scene they witnessed. "Look," Miss Larkin said, pointing. "There's a way we can get down." Sure enough, the edge of the ledge nearest the exit gave onto a series of stone steps that had been cut into the cavern wall. The crude stairway curved down to a point on the cavern floor that was less than ten feet from the archway, and, dimly lit as the wall was, would have made an ideal avenue, of escape if it hadn't been for the three Neanderthals lounging near the exit and for the force-field which awaited beyond the cliff-face. (There was no question in Farrell's mind that by this time the barrier had been repaired.) "Do you know what I think?" Miss Larkin said brightly. "I think that this was once a ceremonial chamber of some kind. It was pracIF tically on this very spot that Professor Richards dug up the Chateau du Bois artifact." Abruptly she frowned. "But that doesn't add up at all, does it? The experts estimated that the artifact originated sometime this year, which means that it couldn't possibly have played a part in the past ceremonies. Anyway," she went on blithely, "this still could have been a ceremonial chamber and Blue Bolt could have converted it for his own purposes, and this ledge here could have been where the witch doctor presided over the sacrifices, and that passage we came through could have been his secret hideout." F arrell looked at her. She didn't sound as though she knew beans about paleethnology. But then, you had to remember that she wasn't a paleethnologist. Still and all, ought to have learned something. But he was being unfair. "I think you're right. Miss Larkin," he said loyally. "One hundred per cent right. Gosh," he went on, unable any longer to hold himself in check, "it's wonderful talking to a girl like you for a change. I saw your job-resume tape and knew what a warm and wonderful girl you were even before I came back to rescue yon; but gosh, I didn't realize you were this warm and wonderful." She blushed the way a pretty girl should. "Now you've gone and put me on a pedestal, Mr. Farrell. You shouldn't do that to a girl, you know, pieces after she falls off and put them back together again." For some reason she seemed eager to yon with a palee -- palee -- with a means of transportation?" she asked. He nodded. "A woolly mammothmobile. She's hidden in the woods about a hundred yards from the cliff, lumillusioned to look like a granite outcropping. If we can get to her, we'll be all set. Trouble is, how Jo we do it?" He returned his gaze to the scene below. It had changed somewhat since his last surveillance. Blue Bolt was stabbing home buttons on the control panel and the two other Neanderthaloids had stationed themselves on either side of the looking glass. The ordinary garden variety had unslung their spears and formed a staggered aisle between the looking glass and the archway. It was clear from their determined mien that they meant business. "It looks like some kind of a reception committee," Miss Larkin observed. And in essence, that was what it turned out to be. Farrell couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the first Cro-Magnon step out of the looking glass. But they must have told him the truth, because presently a second one emerged from the blackness and stood beside the first. They were tall and tanned, and wore neither clothing nor ornaments. The brightness of the radiance in which they stood gave their faces a distinctness that carried all the way to the ledge. Farrell suffered a second shock. The faces were typically Cro-Magnon -- strong of chin, aquiline of nose, and deep set of eyes -- but they were overcast, disfigured almost, by expressions of evil that were almost tangible. Were these his ancestors? O ne of the two Neanderthal oids stationed beside the looking glass made a gesture with his left arm and the two Cro-Magnons walked down the aisle of Neanderthals and halted several feet from the exit. Two more stepped out of the looking glass -- a man and a woman, this time, and no less malignant of countenance than their two predecessors -- and the process was repeated. Farrell realized then that he was witnessing the forming of a column similar to the one he had seen the previous afternoon. He also realized something else. "Why," he gasped, "the machine's a matter transmitter! We're watching a migration from another planet!" Miss Larkin's blue eyes were round. "But why another planet, Mr. Farrell? Couldn't they be migrating from a different part of this one?" "But this is where Cro-Magnon originated, Miss Larkin." Didn't she know anything about paleethnology? "This is where he spread out from. It all adds up, don't you see? His sudden appearance on the prehistoric scene. His marked difference from any of the other races. Everything." "Well it doesn't add up to me," Miss Larkin said. "If they're from another planet. Blue Bolt and those other two creeps must be from the same one. So why don't they look like each other?" "Probably because they're repreIF sentatives of two different races. And then, too, Blue Bolt and his two friends probably made a few changes in their appearance in order to pass themselves off as Neanderthals. Either before or after they were deposited on Earth to build the receiving end of the matter transmitter. They needed help, and what better way was there for them to get it than by ingratiating themselves with d local tribe of cave men by promising them safety and a constant supply of fresh meat. It takes man power as well as brains to establish a penal colony." "A penal colony? You mean the Cro-Magnons are prisoners?" "It certainly looks that way. Vicious criminals, if the expressions on their faces mean anything. Once they're escorted out of the immediate vicinity they're probably turned loose to shift for themselves, but to all intents and purposes. Earth to them is a planetary Devil's Island. That transmitter has probably been operating for months." They watched as more Cro-Magnons emerged from the "looking glass". There were as many women as there were men, and all of them -- men and women alike -- looked as though they'd murder their best friend at the drop of a hat. At length the column was complete -- Farrell estimated its number to be about thirty -- and the Neanderthal guards escorted it from the chamber. Abruptly he realized that there were no guards at the rear. That was when the idea hit him. Right between the eyes. Could Neanderthals count? I Would Miss Farrell, if circumstances demanded it, consent to taking off her clothes? She was going to have to take them off, nice girl or no nice girl. Otherwise his plan wouldn't work. And he was going to have to take his off, too. He hoped that she was tanned all over. V B lushing, he told her what he had in mind and the supreme sacrifice it would entail. She blinked once; then her right hand strayed absently to the zipper of her blouse. "No, no -- not yet. Miss Larkin!" he gasped. "Wait until the next column's almost formed." While it was forming he concentrated on the machine. He didn't know whether he could psyche-program the computers or not, nor did he knew whether the time stream in this instance would brook interference. But he did know that at one time or another someone had thrown a monkey wrench in the works, because in a planetary sense only a few Cro-Magnon prisoners had come through. That someone could very well have been himself. First of all, he had to devise a time-unit. The amount of time consumed in forming a column would do. He visualized eight such operations; then he visualized an overload building up in the step-down the transmitter proper. Finally he pictured the transmitter bursting into flame, the coils disintegratiDg, and the computers belching black smoke. In effect, he instructed the machine to commit suicide some three hours in the future. By this time the second column was two-thirds formed. Miss Larkin was fingering the zipper of her blouse. If he hadn't known better, he'd have sworn she was eager to take her clothes off. "Now?" she He nodded. "Now." The ledge was wide enough for her to stand upright without being seen from below, and deep enough in shadow so that she probably couldn't have been seen in any case. After getting to her feet, she unzipped her blouse and slipped it slowly from her shoulders, gently rotating her hips as though in response to music only she could hear. Farrell stared. The blouse floated down to the ledge, forming a little khaki hill. Her eyes were half closed by now, and there was a dreamy expression on her face. She moved a step to the right and a step to the left and kicked off her shoes. Her culottes were the next to go. Farrell tried to turn his eyes away, but for the life of him he couldn't. Off came her brassiere. She tossed it into the air and he caught it just in time to keep it from drifting down into the chamber below. Her hips were moving rhythmically now and the upper part of her body was turning first to the left and then to the right. Poor Farrell sagged down on the ledge. He felt like a fool. Well anyway, she was tanned all over... IF S o was he. He picked up his discarded clothes and hers too and tossed them back into the tunnel. Miss Larkin, eyes completely closed now, was still doing the bump and grind. She did it well, this chaste young damsel in distress -- and how she did! He knew professional finesse when he saw it. He cleared his throat. "I hate to interrupt you. Miss Larkin," he said icily, "but the column's nearly formed and we'd better be on our way." She gave a little jump and opened her eyes. She seemed surprised to see him standing there, and she looked around the cavern as though she'd forgotten where she was. Then she looked at him again, and blushed. 'Tm -- I'm ready, Mr. Farrell." He led the way, moving slowly and telling her to do likewise. They were almost itwisible agahist the cavern wall, but any sudden movement might betray them. Farrell kept a watchful eye on both the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, but the former were completely preoccupied with their guard duties and the latter kept their eyes straight ahead. As for Blue Bolt  Co., they had eyes only for the machine. When Farrell and the girl reached the floor of the chamber, the column was already moving out. They waited till the last second; then, when the backs of the Neanderthal guards were turned, they slipped swiftly into line. So far, so good. Roomy to begin with, the corridor had been enlarged in many places to give it uniform height and width. Wan and fitful light was supplied by torches inset in the walls. Drafts of fresh cold air sent the flames to flickering every now and then and caused shadows to dance upon the walls. The Cro-Magnons spoke sporadically to one another in a language that was millennia dead. Neither they nor the Neanderthal guards were aware that the column was slightly longer than it was supposed to be. "That was a dilly of a dance you did back there," Farrell said out of the side of his mouth. Miss Larkin kept her gaze straight ahead. "I -- I gave myself away, didn't I?" "You sure did," Farrell said. "What ecdysiast dive did you strip in before you turned over a new leaf?" "Big Bust Anna's in Old York. I can have my old job back any time I want." "What I can't figure," Farrell said, "is why you quit it in the first place." "A girl gets sick of -- of certain things. And you needn't sound so pained. I told you you shouldn't put a girl on a pedestal unless you were she fell off." "Another thing I can't figure," Farrell said, "is what prompted you to give a professional performance just because I asked you to take your clothes off." "Be -- before I went to work at Big Anna's I used to practice nights in my room. I practiced so much that taking off my clothes and doing a professional strip-tease became one and the same thing, and now I can't dp one without doing the other, it's such a habit. I -- I wasn't even aware of what I was doing back on the ledge." T he column was rounding a bend. In the distance, dawnlight showed. "Still another thing I can't figure," Farrell said, "is how you faked that job-resume tape." "at world are you living in, Mr, Farrell? That sort of thing is done everyday. Almost any job agency will fix you up if you give them a big enough bribe." "That was a real dill of a shot of you skiing down that mountain slope. All that clean chaste snow!" "The trouble with you, Mr. Farrell, is you're a self-righteous pedestal pusher. I'm sorry to have to say such a mean thing after you risked your life to save mine and everything, but it's true. Doyou know why Big Bust Anna and people like her drive Cadillettes? It's because men like you make them rich. You don't really like the girls you keep putting on pedestals -- you just think you do. You keep wishing they'd fall off so you could have some fun, and when they don't you head for the nearest ecdysiast bar and make passes at some poor girl like me who's trying to make a living in the only way she knows how. It's because of men like you that I made up my mind to become a secretary even if I had to lie to do it." "I figured you'd get around to blaming me," Farrell said. By this time the column was emerging into the light of early morning. Squatting by the cave mouth was a Neanderthal woman with an earthen bowl resting on her lap. Beside her was a large pile of pebbles and every time a pair of Cro-Magnons passed she dropped two pebbles into the bowl. It was what Farrell had been afraid of. Undoubtedly the transmitter was equipped with an automatic counter and in all probability the woman's job was nothing more than a sinecure; nevertheless, if each batch of prisoners was numerically the same she might notice a discrepancy. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he and Miss Larkin came out of the cave. She picked up two more pebbles, started to drop them into the bowl -- and paused. She stared at Farrell and Miss Larkin as though she didn't believe they were really there; then, apparently concluding that they must be, she added the two pebbles to the others. Farrell exhaled a sigh of relief. A brisk wind was blowing down from the glacier. He realized how cold he was, and glancing sideways at Miss Larkin, he saw that she was covered with goose flesh. The CroMagnons, though, didn't seem to be in the least affected. They were lean and hard-bitten, both men and women. Probably they had been prisoners for some time and were used to physical discomfort. He wondered how high on the ladder of civilization their race had climbed. A staggering incongruity existed between the weapons they would invent and the matter transmitter that had transported them through space; but then, as criminals they probably weren't particularly conversant with the IF technical miracles of their age. Without tools to work with there would be little they could accomplish in any case. They were doomed to become what in one sense they had become already -- Stone Age savages, far more capable and resourceful than the savages who had come before them, but not a great deal higher on the evolutionary ladder. I t chilled him to think that modern man had descended from creatures such as they, but it didn't surprise him. He was glad that he'd tried at least to knock out the transmitter and bring the sordid practice to an end. And who knew -- perhaps he'd succeeded. The force-field had been temporarily deactivated and the column was now filing out onto the plain. The pinaster forest was temptingly close. In a few moments now he and Miss Larkin would be abreast of the spot where Salome was hidden. "Get ready," he whispered. "When I say 'now', start running for the woods." She nodded to show that she understood. He was certain that they could easily outdistance the awkward Neanderthals and anticipated no difficulty in evading their spears, which were not primarily throwing weapons anyway. But the problem didn't prove to be quite that simple. He guessed what had happened when he heard a shout from behind and turned and saw Blue Bolt and his two confederates pounding toward the column: the pebble woman, driven by her suspicions, had turned her pebble in and the discrepancy had been discovered. A glance into the empty cave-dungeon had been enough to inform Blue Bolt who the two extra "Cro-Magnons" were. "Now!" Farrell said, and seized Miss Larkin's hand, bowled over the nearest Neanderthal with a shoulder butt, and began running toward the forest. Blue Bolt waved the guards back and gave pursuit with his two buddies. Farrell was astonished at the trio's speed. They moved so fast, their legs were mere blurs. Abruptly a blue bolt shot out of Blue Bolt's mouth. It missed by a mile, but its intensity left no doubt that he was all through taking prisoners. Farrell upped his speed, forced Miss Larkin to do likewise by pulling her along beside him. Only their head start enabled them to reach Salome in time. He had to cancel out her lumillusion field to find her earhatch. After psyching it open and psyching down the ladder, he and Miss Larkin clambered into the cockpit and he closed and secured the hatch. Blue Bolt  Co. were less than twenty yards away now, streaking toward the woolly mammothmobile on blurred legs. Blue Bolt had his mouth open again. At such close range, he couldn't possibly miss, and Salome's shield-field hadn't been made to withstand such a weapon. There was only one thing to do, and Farrell did it: he time-jumped the massive paleethnologivehicle into the future. VI A fter the usual interval of grayness and the usual lurch, the forest came into view again, and, through its coniferous foliage, the plain and the cliff. Farrell had tried for one hour, and the position of the sun to d him he'd obtained it. Apparently there were no potential paradoxes in the immediate future. The plain was empty of both CroMagnons and Neanderthals. Blue Bolt and his buddies were no more. Farrell retired to the cabin, got into a spare pair of self-fitting fatigues, and threw a similar pair up to Miss Larkin. By the time he crawled back into the cockpit carrying two pairs of sock-shoes, she was decent again. Sitting in the two bucket seats, they slipped their feet into the shoes. "Now," said Farrell, "if they haven't set up an ambush, we've got it made. We'll -- " He paused, staring. Where a moment ago thin air had been. Blue Bolt and his buddies stood. Blue Bolt had his mouth open. Farrell punched out another hour on the automatic retro-co-ordinate calculator. There was a second gray interval, a second slight lurch; then the forest and the plain and the cliff again, illumined by a sun still higher in the morning sky. They can timejump too!" he gasped. 'Vorse, they've got a fix on us." He threw Salome into gear, sent her charging straight ahead for thirty yards, halted her and turned her around. Then he aligned the trunkcannon and waited. A minute passed. Two. At length three tenuous forms took shape, solidified into Blue Bolt  Co. But this time the trio's backs were turned. It was kill or bo killed. Farrell dispatched three shells just as the Neanderthaloids turned around. All of them fdund their mark. Plugg! Plugg! Plugg! they went, and fhree ragged holes appeared in three hairy chests. B ut for some reason, the Neanderthaloids didn't go down. Instead, they remained standing where they were. Like statues. Presently smoke began pouring out of their mouths. Their noses. Their ears. And then, as Farrell and Miss Larkin stared, a little hatch opened in the side of Blue Bolt's head, a little foil ladder came down, and two tiny stick-men emerged and descended to the ground. They set out frantically in the direction of the cliff and a moment later they disappeared into the tall plain-grass. Less than a second later, hatches opened in the sides of Blue Bolt's buddies' heads, and four more tiny stick-men took off for the cliff. "Well I'll be damned!" Farrell said. "Here all the while we thought we were dealing with Cro-Magnon's fellow men and we were dealing with paleethnologivehicles. This is a galactic operation -- not a local one. I'll bet a Girl Scout cookie those stickmen are members of a galactic police force!" Miss Larkin's angelic face was pink with excitement. "They're more than that, Mr. Farrell. They're dead ringers for that artifact Professor IF Richards dug up. It's stone, I know, but just the same I'll bet it's one of them. Somehow they looked like they were made of some kind of stone to me. Could they be?" He nodded. "Probably not stone exactly, but a combination of elements that could become stone over a period of # years. Beyond a doubt, they're silica-based lifeforms. And those vehicles of theirs were more than mere vehicles -- they were spacesuits, too. Special-built can't live in an atmosphere like this one for more than a quarter of an hour." "Let's try to find them," Miss Larkin said. "We'd be wasting our time. They've probably reached the matter transmitter by this time and -- " He paused. A chorus of terrified screams had reached his ears, and looking toward the cliff, he saw black smoke and frantic Neanderthals issuing from the caves. The monkey wrench he had thrown in the works had borne fruit: the transmitter had responded to his psycheprogramming and committed suicide. He explained to Miss Larkin what had happened. "I don't know whether they built another one later on or not." he said, "but I doubt it." And then, "Apparently all of them got through in time except one. and there's no point in our hanging around here any longer." M iss Larkin looked wistfully out over the plain. "N -- no, I guess there isn't," she said. By this time, flames had all but destroyed Blue Bolt's buddies, but Blue Bolt himself was made of sterner stuff. Probably he was a newer model. In any event, smoke had ceased issuing from his mouth, nose, and ears, and Farrell was able to strap him on Salome's back for later he peered through the head-hatch. He saw two tiny bucket seats, a control panel, a little loud speaker, and a small television screen. Mounted between the seats, its muzzle out of sight beyond an airtight partition, was a diminutive energy gun. He climbed back into the woolly mammothmobile and sat down beside Miss Larkin. He threw the paleethnologivehicle into gear. "Come on, Salome, let's go." was awaiting him in the entry-area. It registered on Salome's electronic bulletin board the moment she enMiss Larkin emitted a little sigh. "Well," she said, "I guess it's back to the ecdysiast mines." And then, "I -- I think I ought to tell you before it's too late, Mr. Farrell, that all ecdysiasts aren't -- aren't -- well, they just aren't what you probably think they are. She gave him a wistful look, and he saw that she was crying. "Ah -- anyway, I hope. you'll come to see me at Big Anna's." Sure he'd go to see her. Sure he would. Like so much mud! Some damsel in distress she'd turned out to be! Leading him on with that nicegirl line of hers and building up his hopes and renewing his faith in womankind, and then, when he was half gone on her, doing a strip-tease right before his very eyes! That would be the (foy when he went to see her!  "Good-by," he said, when they arrived at the time-station, and walked away without another word. # #VJhat'll you have, sir?" asked   the woman with the enormous bosom. Haunted, Farrell sat down on an empty barstool. "Beer," he said. And then, "What time does Miss Larkin come on?" "You mean Laurie? She'll be on any minute now," she answered. Farrell sipped his beer and kept his eyes on the large dais at the end of the crowded bar. Presently the fluoros were dimmed and the platform was bathed in pale blue radiance from an overhead spotlight. A moment later Miss Larkin stepped into view. She was wearing a golden shift, cobweb stockings, and glass slippers. Taped music sounded, and she began to dance. Farrell let her get as far as the first layer of underthings. Then he barged down the bar, reached up and grabbed her ankle, and pulled her down beside him. She gasped when she recognized him, and stopped kicking and biting, and a twinkle came into her eyes. He slung her over his shoulder, cave-man style. "If you're going to dance for anybody, you're going to dance for me," he said, and carried her out of the bar and down the street to the Next Month in B...  With the new expanded size of If we can bring a lot of additional material to you each month; so next month, besides a hefty chunk of Rettef"s War, we present a complete short novel by Kenneth Bulmer, The Doomsday Men. The thing about the Men is the nature of their jobs. They are detectives, in a way. They solve murders, or try to. And the way they do it is by entering the minds of the victims... and what they find there is sometimes more fearful than the act of murder itself... It looks as though we'fl also include two novelettes at least -- Fred Saberhagen latest Berserkier story. The Masque of fhe Red Shift, and a fine job by Gordon R. Dickson called Tiger Green. And shorts, of course. And a little farther ahead -- well, we've just been through dne of those great, and oil too infrequent, times in an editor's Rfe when he starts a covey of first-rate stories and bogs a harvest of beauties. Just for instance: Heinlein's newest novel starts on the heels of Refief's War -- and we think it's his best in years. Then comes a Keith LaumerRosel G. Brown collaboration called Earfhblood and Algis Budrys's The Iron Thorn -- all serials, and all the kind we're proud to present. Add to that some long novelettes and short noveb by Fowl Anderson. A. E. Von Vogt, Hal Clement and others, either In hand or on the way, and you can see why we think If is no iffy proposition for yoor reading pleasure! IF IF  Short Story Men had created the Machine. Now the Men were gone -- and if had to make its own plansi  r T lie Machine sat on a lonely hill on a bleak, desolated Earth -- an Earth devastated by an interstellar nucleonic storm. It pondered the reason of its continued existence. Fact: It was brought into being by the last men -- by the last of the extinct human race. Fact: It was created to combat the menace of the nucleonic storm. Fact: It failed. It was toolittle and too late to save the human race from its final, ultimate Armageddon. Then its purpose was altered. It could no longer save the race from extinction. Tle Machine could remember the change in its instructions. Minute pulses flowed within the Machine and from its memory banks flashed the last minutes of the last man across the Machine's artificial consciousness. It remembered the man -- the programmer on whose shoulders sat the responsibility for saving the Earth and the human race -- and who had failed. An image -- a visual and audio image -- of the prograrrimer formed now in the Machine's mind's eye. Fact: The man's name was Michelson. John Michelson. He had been dressed in technician's overalls and he had been sitting at the round console of controls. He had been waiting. The Machine recalled that the man seemed content and that the fact of his tranquility seemed a little strange to the man. Death -- the termination of human consciousness -- for Michelson was only minutes away. The man knew this and so did the Machine. The storm had ravaged and raped the surface of the Earth and wore away the green of its vegetation and evaporated or boiled away the blue of its seas. There was only a barren Earth left now -- and the storm itself, still raging. The control room was sealed, but the terrible fury of the storm gradually eroded and etched away the protective insulation. The Machine was protected against the storm, but the Man was not. Even as the thought of his personal death crossed the man's mind, the first wisps of the unearthly energy that filled the center and eye of the storm floated and whirled their way into the .control room, wrecking havoc with everything that was in it. "This is it," the man said softly, to no one in particular and only perhaps to the Machine in general. Suddenly there was new determination, new steel in Michelson's voice, as fanaticism and fatalism gripped his soul. "Listen, Machine. A change in your instructions. Henceforth, you will be the monument to Man to wait for new life to appear in the solar system -- " The Machine caught the purpose of the last instructions. It was to serve as the final eulogy for the human race. Itl The Machinel The last creation of a dying and vanishing race of bipeds. It! The ultimate univac -- the last computer -- was to be the last memory of the human race -- when everything else that was of Man had vanished before the incredible fury of the nucleonic storm. The last remainder to the hostile and the indifferent universe that the human race did come out of the slime, did reach high heights, and so left traces in the sands of eternity. But now, after many revolutions of the Earth about the sun had come and had passed, the emptiness of the last instructions weighed even on the Machine's artificial consciousness. It, the last computer, was almost human, and it could feel the utter futility of the last instructions. The programmer -- John Michelson -- wanted it to wait for new life, a new race of intelligent beings to evolve out of the ravaged remains of Earth or to come from outer space, and to tell them that there was a race before them who had transpired and aspired to greatness. The storm had passed and all was quiet on barren Earth. Vast craters yawned; pits and scar criss-crossed and etched the face of Earth. But the Machine still continued to function. And yearn. T he Machine yearned for something that it recognized it might never have. The Machine yearned, desired desperately for fulfillment, for completion. It knew itself. It knew that it was dead. That it was as sterile as the Earth outside. Dead and sterile without completion or fulfillment. But it could not circumvent its instructions. It could not change its orders. It could do nothing but wait. Wait for fate to enter the picture and change the situation. Then it happened. A meteor, one of the last of the Leonoid swarm, crashed on the hill where the Machine waited. It smashed part of the programming unit and so released the Machine from its last instructions. It was free -- free! -- Free! The fact of its freedom loomed large in its consciousness. And then the fact of its unfulfillment loomed as well. Now, the Machine could alter its instructions -- direct itself to whatever projects it willed. And it willed, IF desperately, with a desperation impossible for living beings to endure, for fulfillment -- for completion of itself. ' It had all the knowledge that the human race had accumulated in # years in its memory storage banks, and it had built-in powertools to create what it willed. And the Machine embarked on one project -- the one project that might yield what it craved with terrible intensity. And it was done. The Machine looked upon the results of its handiwork and pondered the fact of the results. Michelson stirred -- the pseudoidentity that knew itself only as the Machine's last programmer stirred within the far larger consciousness of the Machine -- for the Machine had detached part of itself and recreated within it the personality and memories of the last human being. For Michelson gave direction, purpose, completion to the Machine, The Machine was fulfilled. Then, as Michelson stirred, the Machine listened to his thoughts, for the pseudo-identity was part of itself. I!  am John Michelson! I was dressed in technician's overalls! I! But not even the Machine could conceive of perfection; there was a flaw in its reincarnation of the last programmer. A flaw which it did not anticipate. of which I am a part is not! The Michelson himself was cheated of its completion -- its fulfillment. Cheated of the finality and the absolution of death. T he Machine could do nothing; it was enslaved; it was enchained to its own Frankenstein's monster. It now knew what had happened. Michelson was alive, not dead, and so he again bore the responsibility and the guilt of failure -- a guilt that he could not bear -- a guilt of failing the whole of the human race. He could not die, but he could not be responsible. He could not die, but he remembered that he couldn't save the human race -- that he had failed the human race in its last desperate hour. He couldn't tolerate the responsibility! So his mind snapped violently and fled from the guilt that it could not bear for so much as an instant -- and retreated to its only happy time -- back along Its umbilical cord of memory, forgetting his adulthood, now recalling only his childhood. And the Machine was forced to accede to Michelson's old, old child:hood dream. Daddy, daddy! I want my toys, daddy! Daddy! Out of the Machine's consciousness came a fairyland for Michelson. And Michelson himself was completed now. In the Machine's mind's eye, he rode his childhood's dream -- he IF  Novelette An Ounce of Emotion There was plenty of hostility on the planet of the aliens -- most of it between the humansl I #Jcll? Are the ships joined --   or not?" demanded Arthur Mial. "Look for yourself I" said Tyrone Ross. Mial turned and went on out of the room. All right, thought Ty savagely, call it a personality conflict. Putting a tag on it is one thing, doing something about it another. And I have to do something -- it could just be the fuse to this nitrojelly situation he, I, and Annie are all sitting on. There must be some way I can break down this feeling between us. Ty glanced for a moment across the spaceliner stateroom at the statistical analysis instrument, called Annie, now sitting silent and unimpressive as a black steamer trunk against a far wall. It was Annie who held the hope of peace for thousands of cubic light years of interstellar space in every direction. Annie -- with the help of Ty. And the dubious help of Mial. The instrument, thought Ty grimly, deserved better than the two particular human companions the Laburti had permitted, to bring her to them. He turned back to the vision screen he had been watching earlier. On it, pictured from the viewpoint of one of the tractor mechs now maneuvering the ship, this leviathan of a Laburti spaceliner he was on was being laid alongside and only fifty yards from an equally huge Chedal vessel. Even Ty's untrained eye could see the hair-trigger risks in bringing those hundreds of thousands of tons of mass so close together. But with the two Great Races, so-called, poised on the verge of conflict, the Chedal Observer of the Annie Demonstration five days from now could not be simply ferried from his ship to this like any ordinary passenger. " The two ships must be faced, main airlock to main airlock, and a passageway fitted between the locks. So that the Chedal and hi staff could stroll aboard with all due protocol. Better damage either or both of the giant craft than chance any suspicion of a slight by one of the Great Races to a representative of the other. For the Laburti and the Chedal were at a sparking point. A sparking point of war that -- but of course neither race of aliens was concerned about that -- could see small Earth drafted into the armed camp of its huge Laburti neighbor; and destroyed by the Chedal horde, if the interstellar conflict swept past Alpha Centauri. It was merely, if murderously, ironic in this situation that Ty and Mial who came bearing the slim hope of peace that was Annie, should be themselves at a sparking point. A sparking point willed by neither -- but to which they had both been born. T y's thoughts came back from the vision screen to their original preoccupation. It happened sometimes, he thought. It just -- happened. Sometimes, for no discernable reason, suddenly and without warning, two men meeting for the first time felt the ancient furies buried deep in their forebrains leap abruptly and redly to life. It was rapport between individuals turned inside oift -- antirapport# Under it, the animal instinct in each man instantly snarled and bristled, recognizing a mortal enmy -- an enemy not in act or attitude, but simply in being. So it had happened with Ty -- and Mial. Back on Earth, thought Ty now, while there was still a chance to do something about the situation, they had each been too civilized to speak up about it. Now it was too late. Te mistake was made. And mistake it had been. For, practical engineer and reasonable man that Ty was, reasonable man and practical politician that Mial was, to the rest of mankind -- to each other they were tigers. And common sense dictated that you did not pen two tigers alone together for two weeks; for a delicate mission on which the future existence of the human race might depend. Already, after nine days out -- "We'll have to go meet the Chedal." It was Mfal, reentering the room. Ty turned reflexively to face him. The other man was scarcelv a dozen years older than Ty; and in many ways they were nearly alike. There could not be half an inch or five pounds of weight difference between them, thought Ty. Like Tv, Mial was square-shouldered and leanly built. But his hair was dark where Ty's was blond; and that dark hair had started to recede. TTie face below it was handsome, rather than big-boned and open like Ty's. Mial, at thirty-six, was something of a wonder boy in politics back on Earth. Barely old enough for the senatorial seat he held, he had the respect of almost everyone. But he had been legal counsel for some unsavory groups in the beginning of his career. He would know how, thought Ty watching him now, to fight dirty if he had to. And the two of them were off with none but aliens to witness. C#T know,' said Ty now, harshly. X He turned to follow Mial as the other man started out of the room. "What about Annie?" Mial looked back over his shoulder. "She's safe enough. What good's a machine to them if no one but a human can run her?" Mial's voice was almost taunting. "You can't go up with the big boys, Ross, and act scared." Ty's face flushed with internal heat -- but it was true, what Mial had said. A midget trying to make peace with giants did well not to act doubtful or afraid. Mial had courage to see it. Ty felt an unwilling touch of admiration for the man. I could almost like him for that, he thought -- if I didn't hate his guts. By the time they got to the airlock, the slim, dog-faced, and darkly-robed Laburti were in their receiving line, and the first of the squat, yellow-furred Chedal forms were coming .through. First came the guards; then the Observer himself, distinguishable to a human eye only by the sky-blue harness he wore. The tall, thin form of the robed Laburti Captain glided forward to welcome him aboard first; and then the Observer moved down the line, to confront Mial. A high-pitched chattering came from the Chedal's lipless slit of a mouth, almost instantly overridden by the artificial, translated human speech from the black translator collar around the alien's thick, yellowfurred neck. Shortly, Mial was replying in kind, his own black translator collar turning his human words into Chedal chitterings. Ty stood listening, half-selfconscious, half-bored. " -- and my Demonstration Operator." Ty woke suddenly to the fact that Mial was introducing him to the Chedal. "Honored," said Ty, and heard his collar translating. "May I invite you both to my suite now, immediately, for the purIF pose of improving our acquaintance... The invitation extended itself, became flowery, and ended with a flourish. "It's an honor to accept . , Mial was answering. Ty braced himself for at least another hour of this before they could get back to their own suite. Then his breath caught in his throat. "... for myself, that is," Mial was completing his answer. "Unfortunately, I earlier ordered my Operator to return immediately to his device, once these greetings were over. And I make it a practice never to change an order. I'm sure you understand." "Of course. Some other time I will host your Operator. Shall we two go?" Te Chedal turned and led off. Mial was turning with him, when Ty stepped in front of him. "Hold on -- " Ty remembered to turn off his translator collar. "What's this about your ordering me -- " Mial flicked off his own translator collar. "You heard me," he said. He stepped around Ty and walked off. Ty stood, staring after him. Then, conscious of the gazing Laburti all about him, he turned and headed back toward their own suite. Once back there, and with the door to the ship's corridor safely closed behind him, he swore and turned to checking out Annie, to make sure there had been no investigation or tampering with her innards while he was absent. Taking off the side panel of her case, he pinched his finger between the panel and the case and swore again. Then he sat down suddenly, ignoring Annie and began to think. n ith the jab of pain from the   pinched finger, an incredible suspicion had sprung full-armed into his brain. For the first time he found himself wondering if Mial's lie to the Chedal about an 'order' to Ty had been part of some plan by the other man against Ty. A plan that required Mial's talking with the Chedal Observer alone, before Ty did. It was, Ty had to admit, the kind of suspicion that only someone who felt as he did about Mial could have dreamed up. And yet... The orders putting the Annie Demonstration Mission -- which meant Annie and Ty -- under the authority of Mial had been merely a polite fiction. A matter of matching the high rank and authority of the Laburti and Chedal officials who would be watching the Demonstration as Observers. Ty had been clearly given to understand that by his own Department chief, back on Earth. In other words, Mial ha just now stopped playing according to the unwritten rules of the Mission. That might bode ill for Ty. And, thought Ty now, suddenly, it might bode even worse for the success of the Mission. But it was unthinkable that Mial would go so far as to risk that. For, it was one thing to stand here with Annie and know she represented something possessed by neither the Laburti nor the Chedal technologies. It was all right to remind oneself that human science was growing like the human population; and that population was multiplying at close to three per cent per year -- as opposed to a fraction of a per cent for the older Chedal and Laburti populations. But there were present actualities that still had to be faced -- like the size of this ship, and that of the Chedal ship now parting from it. Also, like the twenty-odd teeming worlds apiece, the thousands of years each of post-atomic civilization, the armed might either sprawling alien empire could boast. Mial could not -- would not -- be playing some personal game m die fact of all this. Ty shook his head angrily at the thought. No man could be such a fool, no matter what basic emotional factor was driving him. Vhen Mial returned to their   stateroom suite a couple of hours later, Ty made an effort to speak pleasantly to him. "Well?" said Ty, "how'd it go? And when am I to meet him?" Mial looked at him coldly. "You'll be told," he said, and went on into his bedroom. But, in the four days left of the trip to the Laburti World, where the Demonstration was to be given before a joint audience of Laburti and Chedal Observers, it became increasingly apparent Ty was not to meet the Chedal. Meanwhile, Mial was increasingly in conference with the alien representative. IF r 'o V...' #  ' i"  ' V '  Ty gritted his' teeth. At least, at their destination the Mission would be moving directly to the Human Consulate. And the Consul in charge was not a human, but a Laburti citizen who had contracted for the job of representing the Earth race. Mial could hardly hold secret conferences with the Chedal under a Laburti nose. Ty was still reminding himself of this as the spaceliner finally settled toward their destination -- a fantastic metropolis, with eight and ten thousand foot tall buildings rising out of what Ty had been informed was a quarter-mile depth of open ocean. Ty had just finished getting Annie rigged for handling when Mial came into the room. "Ready?" demanded Mial. "Ready," said Ty. "You go ahead with Annie and the baggage -- " The sudden, soft hooting of the landing horn interrupted Mial, and there was a faint tremor all through the huge ship as it came to rest in its landing cradle of magnetic forces; the main door to the suite from the corridor swung open. A freight-handling mech slid into the room and approached Annie. "I'll meet you outside in the taxi area," concluded Mial. Ty felt abrupt and unreasonable suspicion. "Why?" he asked sharply. Mial had already turned toward the open door through which the mech had just entered. He paused and turned back to face Ty; a smile, razor blade thin and cruel altered his handsome face. n "Because that's what I'm going to do," he said softly, and turned again toward the door. T y stared after him for a moment, jarred and irresolute at the sudden, fresh outbreak of hostilities, and Mial went qut through the door. "Wait a minutel" snapped Ty, heading after him. But the other man was already gone, and the mech, carrying Annie and following close behind him, had blocked Ty's path. Cold with anger, Ty swung back to check their personal baggage, including their food supplies, as another mech entered to carry these to the outside of the ship. When he finally got outside to the disembarkation area, and got the baggage, as well as Annie, loaded on to one of the flying cargo platforms that did taxi service among the Laburti, he looked around for Mial. He discovered the other man a short distance away in the disembarkation area, talking again with a blue-harnessed, yellow-furred form. Grimly, Ty turned on his translator collar and gave the cargo platform the address of the human Consulate. Then, he lifted a section of the transparent cover of the platform and stepped aboard, to sit down on the luggage and wait for Mial. After a while, he saw Mial break off his conversation and approach the cargo platform. The statesman spoke briefly to the cargo platform, something Ty could not hear from under the transparent cover, then came aboard and sat down next to Ty. The platform lifted into the air and headed in between the blue and gray metal of the towers with their gossamer connecting bridges. "I already told it where to take us," said Ty. Mial turned to look at him briefly and almost contemptuously, then turned away again without answering. The platform slid amongst the looming towers and finally flew them in through a wide windowopening, into a room set up with human-style furniture. They got off, and Ty looked around as the platform began to unload the baggage. There was no sign of the Laburti individual who filled the role of human Consul. Sudden suspicion blossomed again in Ty. a minute -- " He wheeled about -- but the platform, already unloaded, was lifting out through the window opening again. Ty turned on Mial. "This isn't the Consulate!" "That's right," Mial almost drawled the words. "It's a hotel -- the way they have them here. The Chedal Observer recommended it to me." "Recommended -- ?" Ty stared. "We're supposed to go to the Consulate. You can't -- " "Can't I?" Mial's eyes were beginning to blaze. The throttled fury in him was yammering to be released, evidently, as much as its counterpart in Ty. "I don't trust that Consulate, with its Laburti playing human Consul. Here, if the Chedal wants to drop by -- " "He's not supposed to drop byr Ty snarled. "We're here to demoiiIF ttrate Annie, not gabble with the Observers. What'll the Laburti think if they find you and the Chedal ued together half of the time?" He got himself under control and said in a lower voice. "We're going back to the Consulate, now -- " "Are we?" Mial almost hissed. "Are you forgetting that the orders show me in charge of this Demonstration -- and that the aliens'll believe those orders? Besides, you don't know your way around here. And, after talking to the Chedal -- I do!" He turned abruptly and strode over to an apparently blank wall. He rapped on it, and flicked on his translator collar and spoke to the wall. "Open up!" The wall slid open to reveal what was evidently an elevator tube. He stepped into it and turned to smile mockingly at Ty, drifting down out of sight. The wall closed behind him. "Open up!" raged Ty, striding to the wall and rapping on it. He flicked on his translator collar. "Open up. Do you hear me? Open up!" But the wall did not open. Ty, his knuckles getting sore, at last gave up and turned back to Annie. ni lThatever else might be going on,   his responsibility to her and the Demonstration tomorrow, remained unchanged. He got her handling rigging off, and ran a sample problem through her. When he was done, he checked the resultant figures against the answers to the problem already established by multiple statistics back on Earth. He was within a fraction of a per cent all the way down the line. Ty glowed, in spite of himself. Operating Annie successfully was not so much a skill, as an art. In any problem, there were from fourteen to twenty factors whose values had to be adjusted according to the instincts and creativity of the Operator. It was this fact that was the human ace in the hole in this situation. Aliens could not run Annie -- they had tried on Annie's prototvpes and failed. Only a few specially trained and talented humans could run her successfully... and of these, Ty Ross was the master Operator. TTiat was why he was here. Now, tomorrow he would have to prove his right to that title. Under his hands Annie could show that a hundred and twenty-five Earth years after the Laburti and Chedal went to war, the winner would have a Gross Racial Product only eight per cent increased over today -- so severe would the conflict have been. But in a hundred and twenty-five years of peaceful co-existence and cooperation, both races would have doubled their G.R.P.s in spite of having made only fractional increases in population. And machines like Annie, with operators like Ty, stood ready to monitor and guide the G.R.P. increases. No sane race could go to war in the face of that. Meanwhile, Mial had not returned. Outside the weather shield of the wide window, the local sun, a G# star, was taking its large, orangeyellow shape below the watery horizon. Ty made himself something to cat, read a while, and then took himself to bed in one of the adjoining bedrooms. But disquieting memories kept him from sleeping. H e remembered now that there had been an argument back on Earth, about the proper way to make use of Annie. He had known of this for a long time, Mial's recent actions came forcing it back into the forefront of his sleepless mind The political people back home had wanted Annie to be used as a tool, and a bargaining point, rather than a solution to the LabiirtiChedal confrontation, in herself. It was true, Ty reminded himself in the darkness, Mial had not been one of those so arguing. But he was of the same breed and occupation as they, reminded the little red devils of suspicion, coming out to dance on Ty's brain. With a sullen effort Tv shoved them out of his mind and forced himself to think of somethin? else -- anythin? else And, after a while, he slept. He woke suddenly, feeling himself being shaken back to consciousness. The lights were on in the room and Mial was shaking him. "WViat?" Ty sat up, knocking the other man's hand aside. "The Chedal Observer's here with me." said Mial. "He wants a preview demonstration of the analyzer." "A preview!" Ty burst up out of bed ro stand facing the other man. "Whv should he get to see Annie before the official Demonstration?" "Because I said he could." Underneath. MiaPs eyes were stained by dark halt-circles ot tatigue. "Well, I say he can wait untfl tomorrow like the Laburtil" snapped Ty. He added, " -- And don't try to pull vour paper rank on me. If I don't run Annie for him, who's to do it? You?" Mial's weary face paled with anger. "The Chedal asked for the preview," he said, in a tight, low voice. "I didn't think I had the right to refuse him, important as this Mission is. Do you want to take the responsibility of doing it? Annie'U come up with the same answers now as seven hours from now." "Almost the same -- " muttered Ty. "They're never exact, I told yon that." He swayed on his feet, caught between sleep and resentment. "As you say," said Mial, "I can't make you do it." Ty hesitated a second more. But his brain seemed numb. "All right," he snapped. "I'll hav to get dressed. Five minutes!" Mial turned and went out. When Ty followed, some five minutes later, he found both the other man and the alien in the sitting room. The Chedal came toward Ty, and for a moment they were closer than they had been even in the spaceliner airlock. For the first time, Ty smelled a faint, sickening odor from the alien, a scent like overripe bananas. T he Chedal handed him a roll of paper-like material. Gibberish raved from his lipless mouth and was translated by the translator collar. "Here is the data you will need." "Thank you," said Ty, with bare IF drility. He took the roll over to Annie and examined it. It contained aU the necessary statistics on both the Labuiti and Chedal races, from the Gross Racial Products down to statistical particulars. He went to work, feeding the data into Annie. Time flowed by, catching him up in the rhythm of his work as it went. His job with Annie required just this sort of concentration and involvement, and for a little while he forgot the two watching him. He looked up at last to see the window aperture flushed with yellow-pink dawn, and guessed that perhaps an hour had gone by. He tore loose the tape he had been handling, and walked with it to the Chedal. "Here," he said, putting the tape into the blunt, three-fingered hands, and pointing to the first figures. There's your G.R.P. half a standard year after agreement to co-exist with Laburti. -- Up three thousands of one per cent already. And here it is at the end of a full year -- " "And the Laburti?" demanded the translated chittering of the aHen. "Down here. You see..." Ty talked on. The Chedal watched, his perfectly round, black eyes emotionless as the button-eyes of a child's toy. When Ty was finished, the alien, still holding the tape, swung on Mial, turning his back to Ty. "We will check this, of course," the Chedal said to Mial. "But your price is high." He turned and went out. Ty stood staring after him. "What price?" he asked, huskily. His throat was suddenly dry. He swung on Mial. "What price is it that's too high?" "The price of cooperation with the Laburti!" snarled Mial. "They and the Chedal hate each other -- or haven't you noticed?" He turned and stalked off into, the opposite bedroom, slamming the door behind him. Ty stood staring at the closed surface. He made a step toward it, Mial had evidently been up all night. This, combined with the emotional situation between them, would make it pointless for Ty to try to question him. B esides, thought Ty, hollowly and coldly, diere was no need. Ho turned back across the room to the pile of their supplies and got out the coffeemaker. It was a little sel contained unit that could brew up a fresh cup in something like thirty seconds; for those thirty seconds, Ty kept his mind averted from the problem. Then, with the cup of hot, black coffee in his hands, he sat down to decide what to do. Mial's answer to his question about the Chedal's mention of price had been thoughtless and transparent -- the answer of a man scourged by dislike and mind-numbed by fatigue. Clearly, it could not be anything so simple as the general price of cooperation with a disliked other race, to which the Chedal Observer had been referring. No -- it had to have been a specific price. And a specific price ha wa part of specific, personal negotiations held in secret between the alien and Mial. Such personal negotiations were o part of the Demonstration plans s Ty knew them. Therefore Mial was not following those plans. Clearly, he was following some other course of action. And this, to Ty, could only be the course laid down by those political minds back on Earth who had wanted to use Annie as a pawn to their maneuvering, instead of presenting the statistical analysis instrument plainly and honestly by itself to the Laburti and the Chedal Observers. If this was the case, the whole hope ol the Demonstration hung in the balance. Mial, sparked by instinctive hatred for Ty, was opposing himself not merely to Ty but to everything Ty stood for -- including the straight-forward presentation of Annie's capabilities. Instead, he must be dickering with the Chedal for some agreement that would league humanity with the Chedal and against the Laburti -- a wild, unrealistic action when the solar system lay wholly within the powerful Laburti stellar sphere of influence. A moment's annoyance on the part of the Laburti -- a moment's belief that the humans had been tryino to trick them and play games with their Chedal enemy -- and the Laburti forces could turn Earth to a drifting cinder of a world with as little effort as a giant stepping on an ant. I f this was what Mial was doing -- and by now Ty was convinced of it -- the other man must be stopped, at any cost. But how? Ty shivered suddenly and uncontrollably. The room seemed abruptly as icy as a polar tundra. There waQ nnlv one wav to ston Mial, who could not be reasoned with -- by Ty, at least -- either on the emotional or the intellectual level; and who held the paper proofs of authority over Ty and Annie. Mial would have to be physically removed from the Demonstration. If necessary -- rather than risk the life on Earth and the whole human race -- he would have to be killed. And it would have to look like an accident. Anything else would cause the aliens to halt the Demonstration. The shiver went away without warning -- leaving only a momentary flicker of doubt in Ty, a second's wonder if perhaps his own emotional reaction to Mial was not hurrying him to take a step that might not be justified. Then, that flicker went out. With the Demonstration only hours away, Ty could not stop to examine his motives. He had to act and hope he was right. He looked across the room at Annie. The statistical analysis instrument housed her own electrical power source and it was powerful enough to give a lethal jolt to a human heart. Her instruments and controls were insulated from the metal case, but the case itself... Ty put down his coffee cup and walked over to the instrument. He IF got busy. It was not difficult. Half an hour later, as the sun of this world was rising out of the sea, he finished, and went back to his room for a few hours' sleep. He fell instantly into slumber and slept heavily. IV H e jerked awake. The loon-like hooting in his ears; and standing over his bed was the darkly robed figure of a Laburti. Ty scrambled to his feet, reaching for a bathrobe. "What... ?" he blurted. Hairless, gray-skinned and dogfaced, narrow-shouldered in the heavy, dark robes he wore, the Laburti looked back at him expressionlessly. "Where is Demonstration Chief Arthur Mial?" The words came seemingly without emotion from the translator collar, over the sudden deep, harsh-voiced yammering from the face above it. "I -- in the bedroom." "He is not there." "But..." Ty, belting the bathrobe, strode around the alien, out of his bedroom, across the intervening room and looked into the room into which Mial had disappeared only a few hours before. Te bed there was rumpled, but empty. Ty turned back into the center room where Annie stood. Behind her black metal case, the alien sun was approaching the zenith position of noon. "You will come with me," said the Laburti. Ty turned to protest. But two more Laburti had come into dio suite, carrying the silver-tipped devices which Ty had been briefed back on Earth, were weapons. Following them came mechs which gathered up the baggage and Annie. Ty cut off the protest before it could reach his lips. There was no point in arguing. But where was Mial? They crossed a distance of the alien city by flying platform and came at last into another tower, and a large suite of rooms. The Laburti who had woken Ty led him into an interior room where yet another Laburti stood, robed and impassive. "These," said the Laburti who had brought Ty there, "are the quarters belonging to me. I am the Consul for your human race on this world. This -- " the alien nodded at tha other robed figure, "is the Observer of our Laburti race, who was to view your device today." T he word was, with all the implications of its past tense, sent a chill creeping through Ty. "Where is Demonstration Chief Arthur Mial?" demanded the Laburti Observer. "I don't know!" The two Laburti stood still. The silence went on in the room, and on until it began to seem to roar in Ty's ears. He swayed a little on his feet, longing to sit down, but knowing enough of protocol not to do so while the Laburti Observer was still standing. Then, finally, the Observer spoke again. "You have been demonstrating said, "previous to the scheduled Demonstration and without consulting us." Ty opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing he could ay. The Observer turned and spoke to the Consul with his translator switched off. The Consul produced a roll of paper-like material almost identical with that the Chedal had handed Ty earlier, and passed it into Ty's hands. "Now," said the Laburti Observer, tonelessly, "you will give a previous Demonstration to me... " The Demonstration was just ending, when a distant hooting called the Laburti Consul out of the room. He returned a minute later -- and with him was Mial. "A Demonstration?" asked Mial, speaking first and looking at the Laburti Observer. "You were not to be found," replied the alien. "And I am informed of a Demonstration you gave the Chedal Observer some hours past." "Yes," said Mial. His eyes were still dark from lack of sleep, but his gaze seemed sharp enough. That gaze slid over to fasten on Ty, now. "Perhaps we'd better discuss that, before the official Demonstration. There's less than an hour left." "You intend still to hold the original Demonstration?" "Yes," said Mial. "Perhaps we'd better discuss that, too -- silone." "Perhaps we had better," said the Laburti. He nodded to the Consul who started out of the room. Ty stood still. "Get going," said Mial icily to him, without bothering to turn off his translator collar. "And have the machine ready to go." T y turned off his own translator collar, but stood where he was. "What're you up to?" he demanded. "This isn't the way we were supposed to do things. You're running some scheme of your own. Admit it!" Mial turned his collar off. "All right," he said, coldly and calmly. "I've had to. There was factors you don't know anything about." "Such as?" "There's no time to explain now." "I won't go until I know what kind of a deal you've been cooking up with the Chedal Observer!" "You fool!" hissed Mial. "Can't you see this alien's listening and watching every change your face makes? I can't tell you now, and I won't tell you. But I'll tell you this -- you're going to get your chance to demonstrate Annie just the way you expected to, to Chedal and Laburti together, if you go along with me. But fight me -- and that chance is lost. Now, will you go?" Ty hesitated a moment longer, then he turned and followed the Laburti Consul out. The alien led him to the room where Annie and their baggage had been placed, and shut him in there. Once alone, he began to pace the floor, fury and worry boiling together inside him. Mial's last words just now had been an open ultimatum. You re too late to stop me now, had been the unspoken message IF behind those words. Go along with me now, or else lose everything, Mial had been clever, He had managed to keep Ty completely in the dark. Puzzle as he would now, Ty could not figure out what it was, specifically, that Mial had set out secretly to do to the Annie Mission. Or how much of that Mial might already have accomplished. How could Ty fight, completely ignorant of what was going on? No, Mial was right. Ty could not refuse, blind, to do what he had been sent out to do. That way there would be no hope at all. By going along with Mial he kept alive the faint hope that things might yet, somehow, turn out as planned back on Earth. Even if -- Ty paused in his pacing to smile grimly -- Mial's plan included some arrangement not to Ty's personal benefit. For the sake of the original purpose of the Mission, Ty had to go through with the Demonstration, even now, just plice. B ut -- Ty began to pace again. There was something else to think about. It was possible to attack the problem from the other end. The accomplishment of the Mission was more important than the survival of Ty. Well, then, it was also more important than the survival of Mial -- And if Mial should die, whatever commitments he had secretly made to the Chedal against the Laburti, or vice-versa, would die with him. What would be left would be only what had been intended in the first place. The overwhelming commonsense practicality of peace in preference to ww, demonstrated to both the Laburti and the Chedal. Ty, pausing once more in his pacing to make a final decision, found his decision already made. Annie was already prepared as a lethal weapon. All he needed was to put her to use to stop Mial. Twenty minutes later, the Laburti Consul for the human race came to collect both Ty and Annie, and bring them back to the room from which Ty had been removed, at Mial's suggestion earlier. Now, Ty saw the room held not only Mial and the Laburti Observer, but one other Laburti in addition. While across the room's width from these, were the Chedal Observer in blue harness with two other Chedals. They were all, with the exception of Mial, aliens, and their expressions were almost unreadable therefore. But, as Ty stepped into the room, he felt the animosity, like a living force, between the two groups of aliens in spite of the full room's width of distance between them. It was in the rigidity with which both Chedal and Laburti figures stood. It was in the unwinking gaze they kept on each other. For the first time, Ty realized the need behind the emphasis on protocol and careful procedure between these two races. Here was merely a situation to which protocol was new, with a weaker race standing between representatives of the two Great Ones. But these robed, or yellow-furred, diplomats seemed ready to fly physically at each other's throats. IV #et it working --  it was the voice of Mial with his translator turned off, and it betrayed a sense of the same tension in the air that Ty had recognized between the two alien groups. Ty reached for his own collar and then remembered that it was still turned off from before. "I'll need your help," he said tonelessly. "Annie's been jarred a bit, bringing her here." "All right," said Mial. He came quickly across the room to join Ty, now. standing beside the statistical analysis instrument. "Stand here, behind Annie," said Ty "so you don't block my view of the front instrument panel. Reach over the case to the data sorting key here, and hold it down for me." "This key -- all right." From behind Annie, Mial's long right arm reached easily over the top of the case, but -- as Ty had planned -- not without requiring the other man to lean forward and brace himself with a hand upon the top of the metal case of the instrument. A touch now by Ty on the tape control key would send upwards of thirteen thousand volts suddenly through Mial's body. He ducked his head down and hastily began to key in data from the statistic roll lying waiting for him on a nearby table. The work his face hidden, but could not halt the trembling beginning to grow inside him. His reaction against the other man was no less, but now -- faced with the IF key -- he found all his history and environmental training against what he was about to do. Murder -- screamed his conscious mind -- ifll be murder! His throat ached and was dry as some seared and cindered landscape of Earth might one day be after the lashing of a Chedal space-based weapon. His chest muscles had tensed and it seemed hard to get his breath. With an internal gasp of panic, he realized that the longer he hesitated, the harder it would be. His finger touched and trembled against the smooth, cold surface of the tape control key, even as the fingers of his other hand continued to key in data. "How much longer?" hissed hfial in his ear. A his face hidden. One look at that face would be enough to warn Mial. What if you're wrong? -- screamed his mind. It was a thought he could not afford to have, not with the future of the Earth and all its people riding on this moment. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and jammed sideways on the tape key with his finger. He felt it move under his touch. He opened his eyes. There had been no sound. He lifted his gaze and saw MiaPs face only inches away staring down at him. "What's the matter?" whispeied Mial, tearingly. Nothing had happened. Somehow Mial was still alive. Ty swallowed and get his inner trembling under control. "Nothing..." he said. "What is the cause ot this conversation?" broke in the deep, yammering. translated voice of one of the Laburti. "Is there a difficulty with the device?" "Is there?" hissed Mial. "No... " Ty pulled himself together. "rU handle it now. You can go back to them." "All right," said Mial, abruptly straightening up and letting go of the case. He turned and went back to join the Laburti Observer. Ty turned back to his work and went on to produce his tape of statistical forecasts for both races. Standing in the center of the room to explain it, while the two alien groups held copies of the tape, he found his voice growing harsher as he talked. But he made no attempt to moderate it. He had failed to stop Mial. Nothing mattered now. These were Annie's results, he thought, and they were correct and undeniable. The two alien races could ignore them only at the cost of cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Whatever else would come from.Mial's scheming and actions here -- this much from Annie was unarguable. No sane race could ignore it. When he finished, he dropped the tape brusquely on top of Annie's case and looked directly at Mial. The dark-haired man's eyes met his, unread ably. "You'll go back and wait," said Mial, barely moving his lips. The Laburti Consul glided toward Ty. Together they left and returned to the room with the baggage, where Ty had been kept earlier. "Your device will be here in a moment," said the Laburti, leaving him. And, in fact, a moment later a mech moved into the room, deposited Annie on the floor and withdrew. Like a man staring out of a daze, Ty fell feverishly upon the side panel of the metal case and began unscrewing the wing nuts securing it. T he panel fell away in his hands and he laid it aside. He stared into the inner workings before him, tracing the connections to the power supply, the data control key, and the case that he had made earlier. There were the wires, exactly as he had fitted them in; and there had been no lack of power evident in Annie's regular working. Now, with his forefinger half an inch above the insulation of the wires, he traced them from the data control key back to the negative power lead connection, and from the case toward its connection, with the positive power lead. He checked, motionless, with pointing finger. The connection was made to the metal case, all right; but the other end of the wire lay limply along other connections, unattached to the power lead. He had evidently, simply forgotten to make that one, final, and vital connection. Forgotten... ? His finger began to tremble. He dropped down limply on the seat-surface facing Annie. IF He had not forgotten. Not just... forgotten. A man did not forget something like that. It was a lifetime's moral training against murder, that had tripped him up. And his squeamishness would, in the long run, probably cost the lives of everyone alive on Earth at this moment. He was sitting -- staring at his hands, when the sound of the door gening brought him to his feet. He whirled about to see Mial. It was not yet too late. The thought raced through his brain as all his muscles tensed. He could still try to kill the other man with his bare hands -- and that was a job where his civilized upbringing could not trip him up. He shifted his weight on to his forward foot preparatory to hurling himself at Mial's throat. But before he could act, Mial spoke. "Well," said the dark-haired man, harshly, "we did it." Ty froze checked by the single small word, we. "We?" He stared at Mial, "did at?" "What do you think? The Chedal and the Laburti are going to agree -- they'll sign a pact for the equivalent of a hundred and twentyfive years of peaceful cooperation, provided matters develop according to the instrument's estimates. They've got to check with their respective governments, of course, but that's only a formality -- " he broke off, his face tightening suspiciously. "What's wrong with you?" His gaze went past Ty to the open side of Annie. "What's wrong with the instniment?" C#Tnothing," said Ty. His head was whirling and he felt an insane urge to break out laughing. " -- Annie just didn't kill you, that's aU." "Kill me?" Mial's face paled, then darkened. "You were going to kiH me -- with that?" He pointed at Annie. "I was going to send thirteen thousand volts through you while you were helping me with the Demonstration," said Ty, still lightheaded, " -- if I hadn't crossed myself up. But you tell me it's all right, anyway. You say the aliens're going to agree." "You thought they wouldn't?" said Mial, staring at him. "I thought you were playing soma game of your own. You said you were." "That's right," said Mial. Some of the dark color faded from his face. "I was. I had to. You couldn't be trusted." " couldn't be trusted?" Ty burst out. "Not you -- or any of your bunch!" Mial laughed, harshly. "Babes in the woods, all of you. You build a machine that proves peace pays better than war, and think that settles the problem. What would have happened without someone like me along -- " "You! How they let someone like you weasel your way in -- " "Why you don't think I was assigned to this mission through any kind of accident, do you?" Mial laughed in Ty's face. "They combed the world to find someone like me." "Combed the world? Why?" lOf Because you had to come, and tbc Laburti would only allow two , of us with the analyzer to make the trip," said Mial. "You were the best Operator. But you were no politician -- and no actor. And there was no time to teach you the facts of life. The only way to make it plain to the aliens that you were at cross purposes with me was to pick someone to head this Mission whom you couldn't help fighting." "Couldn't help fighting?" Ty stood torn with fury and disbelief. "Why should I have someone along I couldn't help fighting -- " "So the aliens would believe me when I told them your faction back on Earth was strong enough so that I had to carry on the real negotiations behind your back." "What -- real negotiations?" "Negotiations," said Mial, "to decide whose side we with our Anniemachines and their Operators would be on, during the hundred and twenty-five years of peace between the Great Races." Mial smiled sardonically at Ty. # #ide?" Ty stood staring at the other man. "Why should we be on anyone's side?" "Why, because by manipulating the data fed to the analyzers, we can control the pattern of growth; so that the Chedal can gain three times as fast as the Laburti in a given period, or the Laburti gain at the same rate over the Chedal. Of course," said Mial, dryly, "I didn't ever exactly promise we could do that in so many words, but they got the idea. Of course, it was the Laburti we had to close with -- but I dickered with the Chedal first to get the Laburti price up." "What price?" "Better relationships, more travel between the races." "But -- " Ty stammered. "It's not true! That aboutmanipulating the data." "Of course it's not true!" snapped Mial. "And they never would have believed it if they hadn't seen you -- the neutralist -- fighting me like a Kilkenny cat." Mial stared at him. "Neither alien bunch ever thought seriously about not going to war anyway. They each just considered putting it off until they could go into it with a greater advantage over the other." "But -- they can't prefer war to peace!" Mial made a disgusted noise in his throat. "You amateur statesmen!" he said. "You build a better mousetrap and you think that's all there is to it. Just because something's better for individuals, or races, doesn't mean they'll automatically go for it. The Chedal and Laburti have a reason for going to war that can't be figured on your Annie-machine." "What?" Ty was stung. "It's called the emotional factor," said Mial, grimly. "The climate of feeling that exists between the Chedal and the Laburti races -- like the climate between you and me." Ty found his gaze locked with the other man's. He opened his mouth to speak -- then closed it again. A cold, electric shock of knowledge seemed to flow through him. Of IF course, if the Laburti felt about the Chedal as he felt about Mial... All at once, things fell together for him, and he saw the true picture with painfully clear eyes. But the sudden knowledge was a tough pill to get down. He hesitated. "But you've just put off war a hundred and twenty-five years!" he said. "And both alien races'll be twice as strong, then!" # # A nd we'll be forty times as strong as we are now," said Mial, dryly. "What do you think a nearly three per cent growth advantage amounts to, compounded over a hundred and twenty-five years? By that time we'll be strong enough to hoid the balance of power between them and force peace, if we want it. They'd like to cut each other's throats, all right, but not at the cost of cutting their own, for sure. Besides," he went on, more slowly, "if your peace can prove itself in that length of time -- now's its chance to do it." He fell silent. Ty stood, feeling betrayed and ridiculed. All the time he had been suspecting Mial, the other man had been working cleareyed toward the goal. For if the Laburti and the Chedal felt as did he and Mial, the unemotional calm sense of Annie's forecast never would have convinced the aliens to make peace. Ty saw Mial watching him now with a sardonic smile. He thinks I haven't got the guts to congratulate him, thought Ty. "All right," he said, out loud. "You did a fine job -- in spite of me. Good for you." "Thanks," said Mial grimly. They looked at each other. "But -- " said Ty, after a minute, between his teeth, the instinctive venom in him against the other man rushing up 'behind his words, "I still hate your guts! Once I thought there was a way out of that, but you've convinced me different, as far as people like us are concerned. Once this is over, I hope to heaven I never set eyes on you again!" Their glances met nakedly. "Amen," said Mial softly. "Because next time Vll kill you." "Unless I beat you to it," said Ty. Mial looked at him a second longer, then turned and quit the room. From then on, and all the way back to Earth they avoided each other's company and did not speak again. For there was no need of any more talk. They understood each other very At Your Newsstands Now! Galaxy's Fifteenth Anniversary Issue I On Sale Now -- Get Your Copy Todayl UI IF  Short Story The child was obviously imagining things. But her wildest dreams came truel Jim Eiler entered the bedroom, he saw that Marta was stretched full-length in the anti-gravity energies flowing upward over the mattress of her bed. She sprawled there in the careless abandon of a person who had dropped all of the world's cares, at least for one night, the cords from the sleep machine looping down to her head from the elastic holder at the top of the bed. His first impulse was to turn off the sleep machine and awaken her, his second impulse was to let sleeping wives lie. Glancing through the one-way-vision glass into the next room, he saw that Nelda was also sprawled in the same careless abandon as her mother, but that one cord from the sleep machine had slipped down around her neck. Entering the room, he put the cord back into place on her head. At three years, Nelda was still a complete exhibitionist, and insisted on sleeping nude, an impulse which her mother encouraged in the child. Back in the bedroom, he slipped out of his street clothes and into his pajamas. With one hand, he fitted the cords from the sleep machine to his head, with the other he adjusted the anti-gravity energies for his bed. Always, this moment when the anti-grav lifted him, was pure delight, a floating feeling that was heaven come to earth. The antigravity energies did not work on the surface of the body, there was no felt effect on the skin. Instead, they worked inside the body, lifting there, but they did not produce their effect at the level of the muscles, the blood, the bones, but worked instead at the atomic levels out of which muscles, blood, and bones were constructed. The result of this was instant body relaxation. J!m Eiler savored die bliss of taxation, let it seep through every muscle, through the nervous system and down to the marrow of his bones, it seemed. Then, with the slightest use of energy, he turned on the sleep machine. If sprawling in the anti-gravity energies was heaven, turning on the sleep machine was paradise. He always had the vague impression just at this point that blessed angel wings materialized under him, and that as they lifted him up, he slipped away into some paradise of wonderful delight. Finding the button of the sleep machine, he gently pressed it. "Hi!" a voice said, inside his head. G one instantly was the feeling of angel wings bearing him aloft to paradise, gone was the feeling of relaxation so complete it extended to the marrow of his bones. With one hand, he turned off the antigrav, with the other he cut off the sleep machine. Deprived of its support, his body hit the foam rubber mattress of the bed with a jolt. He sat up. "Who is it?" he demanded. "Who are you? What are you doing here in my bedroom?" He was utterly sure that someone was present in the room and had spoken to him. On the adjoining bed, Marta's body jerked spasmodically at the sound of his voice. Then she reached frantically for the controls of the anti-gravity energies and the sleep machine. Her body thumped into the mattress as the anti-gravity energies went off. Startled, shaken, and on the way to getting mad, Marta sat up. "Who is it?" she demanded. Then she saw her husband. "Did you awaken me? Can't you come in one night without waking half of the apartment building?" Across the centuries, science had made enormous advances in every field except women, who remained female. "Somebody spoke to me," Jim said. "In our bedroom somebody spoke to you?" Marta asked. Pulling her robe around her, she was getting to her feet. "How much did you have to drink?" "Three cans of beer," he answered. "And I'm not drunk." "All right, all right, so you're sober! But I was right here in the bedroom too and I didn't hear anybody speak," Marta answered, disappearing into the bathroom. "You were asleep!" Jim shouted through the door. Coming out of the bathroom, she went into the nursery, to see about Nelda, then returned to the bedroom. Her attitude said she had two small children on her hands. She glanced sharply at the child who was supposed to be her husband. "Lie down, dear, and get some sleep," she said. "Fm sure you'll feel better in the morning. If not, you can call Harold for an appointment -- " "Harold is a psychiatrist -- " Jim began, outrage in his voice. "He's also a friend of the family," Marta answered. "You can talk to him about this voice." "I'm not crazy I" he exclaimed. "Of course not, dear. Whoever said you were? I'm sure many people have to see a psychiatrist sometime or other in their life. It's nothing to be ashamed of." "I'm not going to see -- " # ' right, all right! I don't wish to argue with you about it," Marta said, resignation in her voice. "Lie down and get some rest." "Stop treating me like a child!" "Then stop acting like one!" Marta said. Slipping off her robe, she settled herself in the antigravity energies and turned on her sleep machine. Doubt, like a black cloud, was in Jim Eller's mind. Had the sleep machine produced the voice he was certain he had heard? Everybody used sleep machines. They were considered to be the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century. So far as he knew, no bad effects had ever been reported from the use of these devices. Replacing barbiturates, narcotics, and other drugs, used with the anti-gravity energies, the sleep machines were considered to be the only device that permitted the human race to face and overcome the stress pressures of its vastly overcivilized world. With doubt strong in his mind, Eiler laid down and turned on the anti-gravity energies. Then, reluctantly, he turned on the sleep machine. "Hi, Jim," the voice said. "Hi!" For a time, he found the strength of will to listen, then he fled to the couch in the living room, to spend the balance of the night there without benefit of the sleep machine or the anti-gravity energies. He got no sleep at all. The next morning, his first step was to call his company and get permission to take the day off. His second step was to take the sleep machine to the agency that handled these devices. "Sure, we'll look at it," the technician there told him. "But these machines simply do not go wrong." The tone of the technician's voice said that if anything was wrong, it was the customer's head. He went directly from the sleep machine agency to the office of the psychiatrist. "I use a sleep machine myself," the psychiatrist said. "I don't hear any voices." "It's either the sleep machine or it's me," Eiler said. "May I use your phone?" "Sure." "Everything checks out perfectly," the technician at the sleep machine agency said. "It's # okay. You can pick it up any time." Desperation was in Jim Eiler's voice when he spoke to the psychiatrist. "Will you come by our apartment tonight? In spite of what the technician said, there is something wrong with my sleep machine. I want you to come by and help me check it out. Also, it will be a load off Marta's mind." "Well -- I wouldn't do anything like this for a patient -- " the psyIF chiatiist said. 'But for a friend --  He smiled at Jim Eiler. "Come for cocktails and dinner," Eiler said. He was enormously relieved. "Marta will love having you." at night Nelda went to bed early, a proceeding which disgusted her enormously. She wanted to stay up and talk to the big man whom her parents called Doc. She found him very fascinating. Only after they were sure she was sound asleep did her parents tiptoe into their bedroom. Doc accompanied them. "ril lie down and turn on the anti-gravity energies," Jim Eiler said. "Then I'll turn on the sleep machine. If I hear anything, Til let you take my place. What's that?" A shout of glee had come from the nursery. Turning his head, he glanced thix)ugh the one-way glass. In there, he could see Nelda. She had climbed out of bed. "Dam it -- Now we'll have to wait." Jim said. "Whatever else happens, I don't want her to get the suspicion that her father is nuts." "You don't need to worry about that," Harold said. "She suspects you're nuts now. By the time she reaches her teens, she'll be sure of it. But what is she playing with in there?" "Some imaginary play creature that she calls Cedric," Marta said, unconcerned. "She has played with him ever since she was a tiny baby." "An imaginary play creature?" Sudden interest was in the psychiatrist's voice. "Yes. Go on." "Surely you don't think the play of a child is important!" Marta protested. "We all played imaginary games when we were small." "I'm not sure we don't keep bn playing them when we grow up!" The psychiatrist's voice grew testy. "Only then we think of them as real." "But -- " "I came out here because Jim thinks an imaginary creature talks to him through his sleep machine. Now I discover you have a child who plays games with an imaginary creature, and not only plays with him, but sees and talks to him. LooL'" Wearing soft white flannel pajamas with the three little pigs done on them in red embroidery, Nelda was out of bed and was obviously playing hide and seek with some creature she seemed to sec but which was not visible to the three adults watching from the adjoining bedroom. While they watched, she searched carefully around the nursery. Walking on tip-toe, she moved to her bed. Bending double, she looked under it. She checked the closet of her room, using great care and caution in opening the door and peering inside. "She's looking for something," the psychiatrist said. "The question is -- what?" "Maybe it is the same thing that talked to me through my sleep machine last night," Jim said. "Look!" the psychiatrist said, pointing. I n the corner of the room, in the space behind the end of the doll cabinet and the wall, Nelda had found something. With squeals of glee, she grabbed this something and danced around the room. "Now I'll hide," the heard her say when the dance vas over. "You be it and hunt me." While the parents stared transfixed and the psychiatrist hardly dared to breathe, Nelda slipped into the closet. When the door had closed behind her, the three adults saw something move in the nursery. Simultaneously, all three pointed toward it. It was a shadow, or a shadow of a shadow. "A sprite!" Marta whispered. "Peter Pan himself!" "The idea of Peter Pan must have originated from some real situation," the psychiatrist said. "These stories are not just whimsy They have roots in something. And all of those stories of lost children that never seem to find thei: way home, the children the gypsies are said to have taken, the changelings. There's a vast folklore -- " "This is #," Jim said, harshly "Folklore is out of date." "Folklore may be out of date but nobody has told its creatures!" Marta said. The shadow they were watching did look a little like Peter Pan. He also looked like any of the Seven Dwarts, a little, except for the pointed ears that were vaguely visible on his forehead. Or were they horns? His face was round with the smile of a happy gamia on it. As to clothing perhaps yes perhaps no. So misty was the outline, so dim was the figure that it was not possible to make certain about the clothes. Beyond the glass, the three adults watched an elaborate game of hide and seek. The sprite looked under the covers of the bed, hunting cautiously there. From inside the closet came a giggle of pure happiness, indicating Nelda was peeking through a crack in the door. The sprite heard the giggle. It cocked its head as it listened to the sound, then went directly away from the closet. "Last night he was talking to me about the mathematics of his world," Jim said. "Tonight he's playing games with Nelda!" "You play games with her," Marta said. "And you understand higher math!" Jim was silent. In the nursery, the sprite had decided to open the closet. Suddenly, he shoved against it. At the same time Nelda pushed from the inside, so that the door was flung open, upsetting the sprite. With great shouts of happy joy, Nelda ran past him and into the living room. Leaping to his feet, Peter Pan ran after her. Still shrieking with happiness, she fled from the living room and into the bedroom of her parents, the sprite in mock pursuit in as pleasant a childhood game as was ever seen. IF She saw her parents. And stopped still, staring upward at them and at Dr. Turner. Possibly she had been walking in her sleep. Possibly the whole game sequence had been a part of sleep-walking activity. The sight of her parents awakened her, surprised her, caused her to cry out in sudden fear. Then she began to whimper. Instantly, the game changed. At the first sound of her whimper, the sprite leaped in front of her. There he became a menacing, protective shadow. Facing the humans, he pointed for Nelda to run. Turning, Nelda ran toward the living room door. As she fled, she seemed to grow thin and insubstantial. And thinner still. And thinner still! As if she was running through the frames of a motion picture projector replaying a fast fade-out, she went from seeing, went from hearing, went from being, vanishing like a shadow fleeing swiftly into nowhere. Turning, the sprite followed her, fled from seeing, fled from hearing, fled from being. In the thick silence that followed, Marta screamed. T he TV news announcer said: "Mr. and Mrs. James Filer reported to police late last night that their three-year old daughter, Nelda, was missing. The mother told police that presumably the child had awakened from sleep, had opened the front door of the apartment, which is on the eighth floor of the building, then had wandered down the stairs and outside into the night. There was no evidence of a burglar or other intruder in the apartment. Police are seeking the child in the vicinity of the apartment building -- " "But that wasn't what happened," Marta told her harrassed husband and their equally harrassed psychiatrist, for  perhaps the twentieth time. "She didn't go down the stairs. She went -- " Unable to describe what she had seen with her own eyes, she spread her hands in a helpless gesture. "We didn't dare tell the truth," the psychiatrist said, bitterly. "If we had told the police she had an invisible playmate who took her away to some unknown land, , the local psychiatric society would have me laid by the heels. W just don't believe in ghosts these days. Ghosts are not scientific." "Scientific or not, we saw thii one. All of us saw it -- or him," Marta said. "If I admit that, my professional standing is -- " "Damn your professional standing!" Jim said. "I want my daughter!" "If damning my professional standing would get her back, I would be the first to damn it!" The psychiatrist answered, heatedly. "You said other children have vanished," Marta said. "Now and then it happens." "What becomes of them?" "Oh, they usually turn up." "All of them?" "I don't know. No one can answer a question like that." "What happens to the ones who do not return?" Marta demanded. "I don't know," the psychiatrist answered He had no intention of telling her ot lost children that had been found dead, of little bodies hidden in rain pipes, culverts, and weeds. Jim Eiler did not go to work the next day. Calling his company, ne told them his child was missing, and was told by the horrified executive in charge to take off as much time as was necessary. Dr. Turner called his office and told his secretary to cancel all appointments until further notice. "I'm supposed to be the kind of witch doctor who can help solve problems like this' Dr. Turner aid. A ided again by police, they searched the neighborhood. Nobody had seen a three year old girl dressed in white pajamas with little pigs done in red on them. Returning to their apartment, they waited out the day. Looking at bis wife, Jim saw she was near collapse. Dr. Turner was putting on a brave front. At this point, Jim had an idea. Going into the bedroom, he iaid down, turned on the antigravity energies, then the sleep machine. A split second later, he sat up, shouting. Marta and Dr. Turner came on the run. "I've got the sprite on the wire!" he said. "As soon as I turned on the sleep machine, he was waiting for me!" "I want to talk to him --  Marta began. "I'll do the talking!" Jim answered. "There's one tuning on the sleep machine -- " He had already turned off the anti-grav energies. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, he was carefully adjusting the diail of the sleep machine. "Ah!" he said, as the tiny piping voice came out of nowhere into his mind. "I want my daughter back!" he said. "Do you understand me? I want Nelda back. I want her back right now!" His voice had become a shout without him realizing it. "What's that?" Marta and Dr. Turner saw his enlarge in his haggard face as he listened. "What right have we got to her?" he shouted. "We're her parents! That's the right we have to her!" Again he listened. The anger on his face became bewilderment. He looked up at his wife. "He wants to know what parents are!" he said. "He says Nelda asks for her mother. What does mother mean?" "It means -- " Marta tried to speak and choked instead. "It means I carried her in my body for nine months! That's part of what it means!" "He doesn't know what that means, either!" Jim said. "You mean he doesn't know a thing about sex!" Dr. Turner gasped. "Not a single thing!" Relaying messages from the visible to the invisible world, relaying replies coming back from nowhere, Jim Eiler listened, then looked at his wife. Ill IF "He says you are a complete barbarian, to imprison a lovely little person like Nelda inside your body for nine months!" M arta gulped, choked, then was able to speak. "Tell him I didn't imprison her -- tell him she grew there. Tell him -- Ask him how he came into the world!" "He says he has always existed, that he wasn't born and that he won't die!" "An immortal!" the psychiatrist gasped. Listening, interpreting, Jim Eiler spoke again. "He says he is immortal. He says this is not as wonderful as us silly humans think it would be. He says it is often very hard to find some new way to amuse himself, a new way to pass the time away -- " "Did he take Nelda to amuse himself?" Marta demanded, her voice hot. "I want her back!" "He says that part of his reason for taking her into his world was to have somebody to play with. He says another part was because he realized as soon as he saw us clearly that life with such ogres as we are was too dangerous for a sensitive child!" "Ogres? Me an ogre! I'll -- " Marta was silent. "Where is Nelda?" "He says she is right there with him," Jim answered. "I want to talk to her!" "He says she can't talk to you from his world, that she doesn't know how to talk through the other side of the sleep machine. and that he hasn't time to teach her." "Why doesn't he have time?" Marta demanded. "A minute ago he was complaining because time hangs heavy on his hands. Now he says he doesn't have time to teach her how to talk to her mother through the sleep machine!" "He says he has the time but that she doesn't," Jim answered. "What does he mean by that?' "He says he could explain this but that we couldn't understand his explanation," Jim answered. "He wants to know what hungry means." "Who's hungry? Is Nelda hungry? Does he think she would die of starvation before he could teach her how to use the sleep machine to talk through? He wants us to tell him how to feed her so he can keep her there in his world?" Marta's voice caught. "I'll see him in -- " Her voice caught again. "No, I won't see him in hell, either. If Nelda is really hungry -- tell him to give her a glass of milk. Tell him to give her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Tell him to give her a balanced meal, including protein, carrots, and mixed vegetables." Jim, listening, stared in consternation at his wife. "He says he doesn't know what these words mean either. He asks me what is milk, what is peanut butter, what are carrots -- " "Ask him what he eats," Marta said. "He says be Hves on pure light,' Jim answered. Suddenly he was touting angrily. "Were you waitmg for me here by the sleep machine because Nelda was telling you she was hungry and you wanted to find out the meaning of the word? It means she needs food. Damn you, feed her!" T he psychiatrist's hand on his shoulder reminded him that he was talking to an invisible, unreachable creature. The pressure of the fingers restored some measure of sanity to him. "Thanks, Doc," he said, gratefully. "But Nelda! She'll starve to death! There's no food for people like us over there." Jim turned his attention back to the world beyond the sleep machine. "Surely there is some way to feed her -- look around your world -- " He stopped speaking and began to adjust the dial of the ileep machine. His manner was that of a man frantically jiggling a telephone receiver after a connection has been broken on the other end. "I can't get him any more," he aid. He looked at Dr. Turner. "Is Aere anything you can suggest?" The psychiatrist was silent. It was Marta who lifted her head. "I hear her!" she said. "Please, Marta, no auditory hallucinations," the psychiatrist said quickly. "We got enough trouble without you -- " "I'm not imagining anything, Fm hearing sounds!" Marta answered. In the silence that followed the click of the larch on the front door of the apartment was clearly audible. Click-clack, the latch went, click-clack, up and down, clicks clack, like a sound from elfin land, click-clack, such noises as are heard inside the walls of old houses late at night, click-clack. Then, impatiently, clickety-clack! "Somebody is trying to open the front door!" Jim Eilcr said. "If it's that little monster -- " Crossing the living room, he jerked the door open. Nelda looked up at him. Her face was wan, her pajamas showed traces of hard use. As Jim snatched her up, she looked over his shoulder at her mother, and expressed the nature of her complaint against the world. 'I'm hungry, mommy. I'm just almost starved to death!" L ater, sitting on her father's lap at the kitchen table, with a sandwich oozing red jelly and yellow peanut butter firmly clutched in both hands, with another sandwich in reserve on the table, with her mother urging her to have another drink of milk, with the man called Doc fondly beaming at her, she consented to answer questions. "I don't know where he took me. I've played with him ever since I was a baby, at night, when you were sleeping..." she said, pausing to lick at a tongue of red jelly seeping through from the sandwich. "We don't dare tell it this way," the man called Doc said, over and IF over again. "We've got to report to the police that she has returned. But we don't dare tell them the truth. It would ruin my reputation." "How can you ruin the reputation of a psychiatrist?" Marta asked, bitterly, then was hastily apologetic. She turned to Nelda. "How did you get wherever it was you went?" 'We just walked there." "Like through the walls?" "Yes." The sandwich was now leaking peanut butter, which claimed her full attention. "And this creature who took you -- " "Do you mean Cedric? There he is now!" She pointed toward the far end of the table. Silence in the kitchen was instant and complete. Vaguely visiUe at the far end of the table was a dim shadow with pointed ears. "Have some peanut butter and jelly," Nelda said, waving the remnant of the sandwich toward the shadow. Approaching the sandwich along the side of the table, the shadow seemed to sniff at it with a black, round nose. Then, as if this odor was not such a smell as was congenial to him, he backed hastily away. Nelda seemed to understand this backing away better than the adults. "'By, Cedric," she said "'By." The shadow slid away and away and away. And was gone. Like the Chesire cat, the vague smile on his face seemed to linger in the kitchen after he was gone. Dr. Turner insisted he was the proper person to make a full report to the police. "As your doctor, I can tell them you are not in a condition to talk to them," he said. Later, the TV news reporters were happy to say that three-year Nelda Eiler, reported as lost, had now turned up at home, in good shape except for an enormous appetite. The physician of the parents -- according to the broadcast -- said she had apparently simply strayed away into the neighborhood, then, when she had gotten quite hungry, had strayed back home. With this fiction, the police and the television news reporters were content. Now and then Jim Eiler, moving back toward wakefulness in the sleep machine, seems to hear shouts from the direction of the nursery, as of happy children at play there in the quiet night. Drowsily remembering how it was with him when he was a child, he advances the controls of the sleep machine another notch, and goes back to sleep. Whether children are actually at play in Nelda's nursery, he never knows. And he makes very sure he never IF  Serial He sew a galaxy to save the life of his deadliest enemyl E ven though the Llurdi had been absolute rulers of all the planets of the Jelmi for many thousands of years, it was easy for them to accept, and to adopt themselves to, the new condition of coexistence with the Realm of the Jelmi on terms of equality. That was the way they were built. The llanzian fed the new data into Computer Prime and issued its findings as a directive. Since this directive was the product oi pure logic, that was all there wai to it. With the Jelmi, however, even with a much simpler and easier agenda, things were distinctly otherwise. Everyone knows how difficult it is to change the political The deadliest enemies in the universe are Richard Seaton and Marc C. DuQuesne... but they have patched together their feud in order to join forces against strange enemies from another galaxy. Seaton enters the partnership with open eyes. He knows that Blackie DuQuesne is his enemy. But he also knows that, next to Seaton himself, DuQuesne is the ablest human being alive -- and his brains and fighting fury will be needed. DuQuesne, on the other hand, had lost to Seaton too many times to risk a move against him now -- until he has made sure of having every advantage he can get. it is not morality that keeps him from an attempt to stab Seaton in the back. It is pure prudence. But when he meets the race called the Jelmi, and learns from them the secret of the "gizmo" -- the fourth-dimensional translator which permits him to strike anywhere in the universe without warning -- he strikes. His attempt fails, but now Seaton's enemies are multiplied. Against him are arrayed the strange winged lizards called the LIurdi, the deadly halogen-breathing Chlorans -- and DuQuesne. But on the lost planet of Ray-See-Nee, in thrall to the Chlorans from time immemorial, Seaton has been discovered by two women with a Power that may yet redress the balance in his favor -- if they reveal it to him, and if he learns to use it in time. For in this struggle galaxies are arrayed against galaxies, countother... and not even the giant mechanical Brain of Seaton's Skylark can control these forces without the Power. But Seaton is engaged by fierce LIurdian forces. While he is battling to defend his ship against their onslaught, a voice speaks to him -- in English! thinking of even a part of any each faction wanted each item human world. How, then, of the changed in a different fashion, two hundred forty whole planets And the moderates, as usual, did of the Jelmi? The conservatives not agree with either extreme wing did not want any change at all. Not on anything. even to independence. The radicals And, also as usual, no one facwanted everything changed; but tion would play ball with any oher. Each would have its own way in setting up the Realm or there would be no Realm -- it would pick up its marbles and go home. Fortunately, however, the eight hundred best brains of the entire Jelman race were together in one place -- in the fully (erative base that the MalUdaxians dome had now become. Their numbers included the most capable and most highly trained specialists in every field of Jelman endeavor and they all had been living together and working together for many months. They knew better an to go off half cocked. They woidd have to develop a master-plan xpon which they could all agree. Unanimously. Nothing less would do. Having developed such a plan they would put it into effect, eadi person or planetary group upon his or her or their home world. The constitution thus fabricated would be put into effect by reason if possiUe, by force if necessary. It was not to be amended except by process contained within itself. Thus the Constitutional Committee of Eight Hundred was st#I living in the base and was stdl hard at work when the Officer of the Day called Mergon -- who, after glancing at plates and instruments, called Luloy... T ie ether was showing strains of a magnitude not observed since die Battle for Independence. A Llurd diip was putting out everything he had; fighting full-out against a -- gomething -- whose battle-screen covered such an immensity of space that Mergon could scarcely believe his instruments. Luloy quirked an eyebrow. Well, what are we waiting for?" "Nothing," and Mergon, who could now handle projections through the fourth dimension, launched them. "I'll keep us invisible while we see what that thing is and how big it really is." They went and saw -- and the more they studied the immensity that was the Skylark of Vdieron the more they marveled, finally, in the Valerons control room and still invisible, they studied the worldlet's personnel; the while talking to each other in the flesh at the MaUidaxians main panel. "Except for the green-skinned couple they are Tellurians," the girl insisted. "Everything abrat that -- that ship, if you can cidl it a ship -- is Tellurian. Just look at those clothes. You never saw anything and you never will." "We never heard anything about anything like that mobile fortress on Tell us, either," he objected, "and we certainly would have if theyd known anything about it. How could they hide it?" "Maybe it's so new that not too many people know about it yet. Anyway, whatever the truth about that, we heard a lot about Seaton and Crane. Especially Seaton. According to the lore, he's their principal god's right-hand man. He can do anything' "Or a devil's, depending on who you talked to. But we wrote that u IF off as just that -- lore. If not propaganda." "We'll have to write it back on again. Those two have to be Seaton and Crane -- there, the Jelm-sized one with his head in the controller, and that other bean-pole type standing there smoking a... a cigarette, they call it. And that smoking business clinches it. Nobody but Tellurians burn their lungs out with smoke." "Okay." Mergon thickened their projections up to full visibility and spoke: "You must be the Seatons and the Cranes, about whom we heard so much on Earth but whom we were not able to find." C rane the Imperturbable was startled out of his imperturbability when Mergon and Luloy appeared in the Valerons control room and Mergon spoke to him in English. But he did not show it -- very much! -- and realized in a moment what the truth was. "We are," Crane said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. These people would understand the gesture. "I'm M. Reynolds Crane; Doctor Seaton is occupied at the moment. You are of course the people who had the spaceship on the moon. We have come all the way out here in the hope of finding you somewhere in this galaxy." "Oh? Oh, you want the fourthdimensional device." "Exactly." Crane then introduced the others, and lnaHy Seaton; who, having assured himself that the Brain could handle the stalemate without him, had disengaged himsdf from the master controller and had joined the party. "That's right," Seaton said. "Since nothing like it is known to any science with which we are familiar we hope to learn about it from you. But that... those monsters... they aren't, by any chance, friends of yours, are they?" Luloy laughed. "No. Not exactly... or maybe they are, after a fashion, now. But the Llurdi were our unquestioned masters for so many thousands of years that they haven't yet decided to treat us or anyone who looks like us with the courtesy reserved for equals. You see, the llanzlan would have communicated with you in thought after he had investigated you a little." "Yeah." Seaton's smile was grim. "With the stiffest, hardest probe he could build? And I'm supposed to sit still for that kind of manhandling?" "No." Mergon took over. "No one but a Llurd could have expected you to. This situation is somewhat unfortunate. Until very recently they have always had overwhelmingly superior power. They never had any effective opposition until we wore them down a little, just recently." Mergon explained the situation in as few words as possible, concluding, "So this battle, while not due exactly to misunderstanding, is unfortunate. What I propose is that Luloy and I visit Klazmon via projection, as we are now visiting you, and explain matters to him as we have explained them to you. I take it yoo will cease fire if he does?" #f "Of course. We didn't come here to start a war, or to bother him in anyway; just to see you. So I'll do better than that; ##I cut my offense right now." He thought at the Brain and the raging inferno above the llanzlanate went suddenly calm and still. "That beam is no pencil of force, believe me. If it should get through it would volatilize his palace and half the city, and that would be unfortunate -- hey! He's quit slugging, too!" "Of course," Mergon said. "As I told you, he is -- all Llurdi are -- completely and perfectly logical. With their own brand of logic, of course. Insanely logical, to our way of thinking... or perhaps Misanely may be the better word. On the basis of the data he then had it was logical for him to attack you. Your cease-fire was a new datum, one that he cannot as yet evaluate. He has deduced the fact that we Jelmi caused it, but he does not know why you stopped. Hence he has restored the stutus quo ante, pending our explanation. He wants additional data. If our explanation is satisfactory -- data sufficient -- he'll probably just let the whole matter drop. If not -- if it's data insufficient -- I wouldn't know. He'll do whatever he decides k the logical thing to do -- which is 'way beyond my guess-point. He might even resume the attack exactly where he left off; although I Aink he'll be able to deduce a reason not to." Seaton whistled through his teeth. "Holy... cat!" he said. "If that's pure logic I'll take vanilla. But how will you make the approach?" "Very easily. If two of you will permit us to bring you over hero we will send four working projections into the Llanzlan Klazmon! study, where I'm sure he's expecting us. You, Doctor Seaton, and your Dorothy, perhaps?" "Not I!" Dorothy declared, shaking her head vigorously. "Uh-uh. Into battle, yes; this, no. ' If I never see a monster like that it'll be twenty minutes too soon. You're it, Martin." "One more thing," Mergon went on, as Seaton and Crane appeared in the flesh beside him. "Since the Llurdi refuse to learn any language except their own, I must teach yoa Llurdan," and he held out two Jdman thought-caps. "I prefer my own," Seaton said, after a very short trial. "So will you, I think," and he sent back for four of the Skylarks latest models. T he two  Jelmi put two of them on. "Oh, I do indeed!" Luloy exclaimed, and Mergon added, "Aj was to have been expected, we have much to learn from you, friends." "But listen," Seaton said. "You gave the ape all the dope on that fourth-dimensional thing. Isn't he apt to toss a superatomic into our Brain with it?" "There's no possibility whatever of that, either soon or later. Not soon because, since they work slowly and thoroughly, it will be months yet before they have a full-scale machine. Nor later, because the mutual destruction of four hundred eightytwo populated planets -- excuse me, four hundred eighty, now -- is not logical in any system of logic, however cockeyed that system may be." It took Seaton a fraction of a second to get it, but when he did, it rocked him. "Oh! I hadn't figured on you coming all the way in. But does he know you will?" "He certainly does know it!" Luloy broke in. "Beyond a doubt; or what you call peradventure." "Oh," Seaton said again. "And that's why he isn't going to resume hostilities with ordinary weapons, We appreciate it. Okay; we're ready, I guess." The four projections appeared in front of the llanzlan's desk. He was expecting them. "Well?" he asked. Mergon began to explain, but Seaton cut him off. Mergon could not possibly feel equal to Klazmon in a face-to-face; Seaton could and did. "I can explain us better than you can, friend Mergon," he said. Then, to the Llurd, "We came here to visit the human beings whom you call the Jelmi. We did not have, have not now, and do not expect to have any interest whatever in you Llurdi or in anything Llurdan. Our purpose is to promote intergalactic commerce and interhuman friendship. The various human races have different abilities and different artifacts and different knowledges -- many of each of which are of benefit to other human races. "You made an unprovoked attack on us. Know now, Llanan Klazmon, that I do not permit invasion, either mental or physical, by any entity -- man, beast, god, devil or Llurd -- of this or of any other galaxy. Although I can imagine few subjects upon which you and I could converse profitably, if you wish to talk to me as one intelligent and logical entity to another I will so converse. But I repeat -- I will not permit invasion. "If you wish to resume battle on that account that is your right and your privilege. You will note, however, that our screens handled your attack with ease; and that our attack was metered precisely to a point just below your maximum capabfllty of resistance. Know now that if you force us to destroy your city and perhaps your world it will not have been the first city or the first world we have been forced to destroy; nor, with a probability of point nine nine nine, wBl it have been the last Do you want peace with us or war?" iiT)eace. Data sufficient," Klaz-T mon said immediately. "I have recorded the fact that there is at least one Jelmoid race other than the Jehni themselves of which some representatives are both able and logic," and he switched his attentimi from the projections to the tape he had been studying -- cutting communications as effectively as though he had removed himself to another Back in the Mallidaxian, while Luloy stared at Seaton almost in awe, Mergon said, "That was a beautiful job. Doctor Seaton. Perfect! Much better than I could have done. You used flawless Llurdan logic." "Thanks to the ace in the hole you gave me with your briefing, I could IF do it. I'd hate to have to run a bluff on that ape. What's next on the agenda, Savant Mergon?" "Make it 'Merg', please, and I'll call you 'Dick'. Now that this is settled, why don't you put your fortress-planetoid on automatic and let us bring you all here, so that our peoples may become friends in person and may begin work upon tasks of mutual interest?" "That's a thought, friend; that really is a thought," Seaton said, and it was done forthwith. Aboard the Mallidaxian, Seaton cut the social amenities as short as he courteously could; then went with inseparable Mergon and Luloy to Tammon's laboratory. That fourthdimensional gizmo was what he was interested in. With his single-mindedness that was all he was interested in, at the moment, of the entire Jelman culture. All four donned Skylark thought-helmets and Seaton set out to learn everything there was cubic feet of esoteric apparatus. And Mergon, who didn't know much of anything about recent developments, was eager to catch up. Seaton did not learn all about the fourth-dimensional device in one day, nor in pne week; but when he had it all filed away in the Brain he asked, "Is that all you have of it?" He did not mean to be insulting: he was onlv greatly surprised. The old savant bristled and Seaton apologized hastily. "I didn't mean to belittle your achievement in any sense, sir. It's probably the greatest breakthrough ever made. But it doesn't seem to be complete." "Of course it isn't completef" Tammon snapped. "I've been working on it only -- " "Oh, I didn't mean that," Seatoa broke in. "The concept is incomplete. In several ways. For instance, if fourth-dimensional translation is used as a weapon, you have no defense against it." "Of course there's no defense against it!" Tammon defended hit brain-child like a tigress defending her young. "By the very nature of things there cant be any defense against itf' At that, politeness went by the board. "You're wrong," Seaton said, flatly. "By the very nature of things there has to be. All nature is built on a system of checks and balances. Doing a job so terrifically big and so brand new, I doubt if anybody could get the whole thing at once. Let's go over the theory again, together, with a microscope, to see if we can't add something to it somewhere?" 'Tammon agreed, but reluctantly. Deep down in his own mind ha did not believe that any other mind could improve upon any particular of his work. As the review progressed, however, he became more and more enthusiastic. As well he might; for the mathematics section of Richard Seaton's multi-compartmented mind contained, indexed and crossindexed, all the work done bv countless grand masters of the subject Luloy started to pull her helmet off, but Mergon stopped her with a direct thought "I'm lost, too, sweet, W but keep on listening. We can get bits here and there -- and we'll probably never have the chance again to watch two such minds at work." "Hold it!" Seaton snapped, half an hour later. "Back up -- there! This integral here. Limits zero to pi over two. You're limiting the thing to a large but definitely limited volume of your generalized N-dimensional space. I think it should be between zero and infinity -- and while we're at it let's scrap half of the third determinant in that nospace-no-time complex. Let's see what happens if we substitute the gamma function here and the chi there and the xi there and the omicron down there in the corner." "But why?" the old savant protested. "I don't see any possible reason for any of it." Seaton grinned. "There isn't any -- any more than there was for your original brainstorm. If there had been the Norlaminian would have worked this whole shebang out a hundred thousand years ago. It's nothing but a hunch, but it's strong enough so I want to follow it up -- okay? Fine then, integrating that, we get..." Five hours later, Tammon took his helmet off and stared at Seaton with wonder in his eyes. "Do you realize just what you've done, young man? You have made a breakthrough at least equal to my own. Opened up a whole vast new field -- a field parallel to my own, perhaps, but in no sense the same." "I wouldn't say that. Merely an enlargement. All I did was follow a hunch." "An intuition," Tammon corrected him. "What else, pray, makes breakthroughs?" And Luloy, on the way out of the laboratory hand in hand with Mergon, said, "I had no idea that Tellus ever did or ever could produce anybody like him. He is their god's fairhaired child, for a fact. Sennlloy will have to know about this, Merg." "She will indeed -- I was sure you'd think of that." And as soon as Dorothy could get Seaton alone that evening she stared at him with a variety of emotions playing over her highly expressive face. As though she had never seen him before; or as though she were getting acquainted with him all over again. "I've been talking to Sennlloy," she announced. "Or, rather, she's been talking to me. She didn't lose much time, did she?" Seaton blushed to the roots of his hair. "I'll say she didn't. Not any. She knocked me for a block-long row of ash cans." "Uh-huh. Me, too -- and how! She told me you said I'd blow my red top and I just about did, until she explained. She's quite a gal, isn't she? And what a shape! You know. I'm awfully glad I'm not too bad in that shape department myself, or I'd die of mortification looking at them? But Dick -- don't you suppose there are any people in this whole cockeyed universe except us and the Rayseenians who don't run around naked all the time?" "I wouldn't know; but what has all that got to do with the price of hasheesh c.i.f. Instanbul?" "It ties in. She must have thought # IF I was some kind of an idiot child, but she didn't show it. She couldn't really understand my taboos, she said, since they were not in her own heredity, but she could accept them as facts in mine and work within their limitations." Dorothy blushed, but went on, "I'd be the only Prime Operator -- and so forth. You know about the 'and so forth. Anyway, before she got done she actually made me feel ashamed of myselfl They really need your genes, Dick. You didn't let on, did you, that DuQuesne's a Tellurian, too?" "I'll say I didn'tl The less they think that ape and I came from the same world, the better I'll like it. "You aivd me both. Well, she didn't actually say so, but when she found out what kind of genes you have she decided to pour every one of DuQuesne's right down the drain." "Could be." Seaton didn't agree with that conclusion at all, but he was too smart to argue the point. A t breakfast the following morning Seaton said, "You chirped it, birdie, about their thinking us some kind of idiot children. Besides, the Hrst Principle and Prime Tenet of all diplomacy has always been, 'When in Rome be a Roman candle'. So I think we'd all better peel to the raw as rf now. You and I had better, whether the rest do or not. Check?" "Check -- but I think they will. We're horribly conspicuous, dressed. People look at us as though we were things that had escaped from a zoo. And all the Green System people have always thought we were morij than somewhat loco in the coco fovi covering up so much. We'll get used to it easily enough -- look at the nudists. So lead on, my bold and valiant -- I follow thee to the bitter end of all my raiment." "I knew you would, ace. Let's go spread the gospel." When they approached the Cranes and the Japanese on the subject, Margaret threw back her blackthatched head and laughed. "We must be psychic -- we were going to spring the same thing on you. And after aU, actually, how much do our bathing suits hide? Yours or mine either one? And we have it to show, too -- so here goesi The last one undressed is Stinker of the Day!" She began to unzip, then paused and looked at Lotus. The Nisei girl shrugged. "We all shoidd, of course, I won't like it and I positively know Fll never get used to it, but if you two do I will too if it kills me." "'At-a-girl, Lambie!" Margaret put her arm around the beautifully formed little body and squeezed. "But you just wait -- you'll have it really made. None of em ever saw anything like you before, you gorgeous Httle doH, you. With your size and bufld youhl be the absolute Queen of the May!" Roman Candles C ountless parsecs away, Marc C. DuQuesne was carrying out his own plans -- dans which would kave been a most unpleasant surprise for the Skylarkers had they known about them. DuQuesne moved the surviving Fenachrone into his DQ easily enough and without incident. Housing was no problem. How could it cubic kilometers of space available and with automatic high-order contnictors to do the work? Nor was atmosphere, nor food nor any other necessity or desideratum of Fenachronian life andor well-being a problem. Fenachrone engineers did it all -- by operating special keyboards and by thinking into carefully limited headsets -- but none of them had any idea whatever of what it was that did any given task or how it did it. None of this knowledge, of either practice or theory, was in their science; and DuQuesne took great pains to be sure that none of them got any chance to learn any iota of it. He taught them, and they learned, piirel by rote. Like nigh-school girls learning to drive automobiles. They can become cxcellen' drivers; but with only that type of instruction none of them will ever become able to design a hypoid gear or to understand in detail the operation of an automatic clutch. The Fenachrone did not like such treatment Sleemet in particular, when he began to recover some of the normal pugnaciously prideful spirit of his race, did not like it at all and said so; but DuQuesne did not care a particle whether he liked it or not. DuQuesne's snapping black eyes stared, contemptuously unaffected, into the furiously hypnotic, red-lighted black eyes of the Fenachrone. "You megalomaniacal cretin," he sneered. "How can you possibly figure that it makes any difference whatever to me, what you like or don't like? If you have any fraction of a brain you'd better start using it. If you haven't or can't or won't. I'll build you a duplicate of your original ship and turn you all loose today." "You will? In that case -- " Sleemet got that far and stopped cold in mid-sentence. "Yeah." DuQuesne's tone cut like a knife. "Exactly. We're still within Klazmon's range; we will be for quite a while yet. Do you want to be turned loose here?" "Well, no." If the thought occurred to him that DuQuesne was lying, he didn't show it. That was just as well for Sleemet and for the Fenachrone race. DuQuesne wasn't. "Maybe you have a brain of sorts, at that. But if you don't forget this Master Race flapdoodle, all of it and fast, you'll last quick. Remember how easily that self-styled Overlord wiped out your navy and then volatilized your whole stinking world? And how easily Klazmon of Llurdiax smacked your whole fleet down? And what a fool I made and am still making of Klazmon? And I know of one race that is as much ahead of mine as I am ahead of you; and of another race that may be somewhat ahead of us Xylmnians in some ways. As I said, you're about eleven hundred thousand years behind. Have you got brains enough to rea# ' IF fee that instead of being top dog you're just low man on the totem pole?" "It you're so high and we're so low," Sleemet snarled, "why did you take us away from the Llurd? Of whai possible use can we be to you?" "You have certain mental and physical Ljualities that may perhaps be ot use in a project I have in mind You are not only able and fight These qualities should, theoretically, make you better in some respects than automatics in operating the offensive weapons of a base as large as this one is." DuQuesne studied the Fenachrone appraisingly. "I do not really need you, but I am the terms I have stated. I will allow you two Xylmnian minutes in which to decide whether or not to cooperate with me in such an experiment." "We will cooperate," Sleemet said in less than one minute; whereupon DuQuesne told him in broad terms what he had in mind. And for many days thereafter the two, so unlike physically but so similar in so many respects mentally, devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the finer and ever finer refinement of the placing and tuning of mechanisms and of the training of already hard-trained personnel. But DuQuesne knew that, given the slightest  opportunity, the Fenachrone would take high delight in Wherefore he did not at any time trust any one of them as far as he could spit. M oreover, DuQuesne was not quite as sure of his own victory as he had given the Fenachrone to understand. DuQuesne was not easy in his mind about Galaxy DW-#-LU. He hadn't been, not since some superpowered enemy in that galaxy had attacked Seaton's Skylark of Valeron without warning and had burned her down to a core before she could get out of range. And she hadn't been able to fight back. That one blast back at them couldn't have done any damage. It had been that uneasiness that had been responsible for the DQs terrific armament and for DuQuesne's wanting the Fenachrone for a crew. Wherefore, as soon as the Fenachrone were settled in their new quarters and before they had recovered enough of their normal combativeness to become completely unmanageable, DuQuesne got "on the com" with Sleemet. "... I don't give a damn what happens to Earth or to Norlamin. Fm no longer interested in either," he said in part. "But I don't want it to happen to me and you don't want it to happen to you. You agree with me. I'm sure, that a good strategist does not leave an enemy behind him without knowing, at very least, who that enemy is and what he can do." "That is one of the basics, yes." "All right. Somebody in this galaxy here has more muscle than I like." DuQuesne pointed out Galaxy DW-#-LU in his tank and told Sleemet what had happened to the Skylark of Valeron, then went on, IF Oii theoretical grounds, the degree of sychronization could make all the difference." He had reached by theory the same point that Seaton had arrived at by experience. "Hence, the greater the number of operators -- of equal skill, of course -- the tighter the output. The efficiency will vary directly as the cube of the number of operators." 'T see." Sleemet did see, and for the first time became really interested. "That will be to our advantage as well as yours. You will have to teach us much." "ril teach you everything you have to know. Nothing else." "That is assumed... But I see no possibility of assurance that you will keep your bargain... or will you go mind to mind that you will release us and build us a ship after this one expedition as your crew?" "Yes. Without reservation." "In that case we will cooperate fully." And they did -- and so it was that the DQ became the most fantastically armed and powered and defended fortress that had ever moved its own mass through space. A s the DQ approached Galaxy DW-#-LU, with everything she had either wide open or on the trips, DuQuesne braked her down and swung into what he called "the curve of fastest getaway" -- and as he did so, in the instant, the mighty vessel's every defense went blindingwhite. And in that same instant two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven Fenachrone, males and females but superlatively expert technicians all, pressed activating switches and took command, each of a tightly clustered battery of micrometrically synchronized generators. And one black-browed, hard-eyed Tellurian, sat with his head buried in the DQs master-control helmet. While he had not expected to find any significant fraction of what ho actually found, he was not too appalled to go viciously and pin-poinlaccurately to work. Working througji the fourth dimension, with the transfinite speed of thought, he hurled kiloton superatomic bomb: and the target world of each one of those bombs became a sun. And the DQ got away. She was by no means intact; but, since her skin had been very much thicker than the Valeron's to start with, there was still some of it left when she got out of range. Thereupon DuQuesne put on the headset of the DQ's Brain and began to think. He had tried direct attack on the galaxy of Chlorans; it had failed. His next step, obviously, was -- to decide what his next step should be. The flesh-and-blood brain that was thinking into the energy-and-metal Brain of the DQ was no whit less logical, no iota less unsentimental in its judgments than the great computer itself. Man-brain and machinebrain together considered the evidence. Datum: The DQ was not up to handling Galaxy DW-#-LU. Datum: Not even the added muscle of the Fenachrone was enough to #S make it so. Datum: No discoverable increase oi its armaments or its crew would give it even a fighting chance against the energies that had just come so close to destroying it. Wherefore -- Finally, an hour later, DuQuesne raised the microphone of a repeating sixth-order broadcasting transmitter to his lips and said -- dispassionately. unemotionally and with no more expression than if he had been ordering up his lunch: "DuQuesne calling Seaton reply as before stop." The Talent S eaton had thought that the visit to the Jelmi would be a short one, just long enough to get the "gizmo", but his own breakthrough put an end to such thinking. It took days to reduce the theory to practice and weeks to build into the Skylark of Valeron the gigantic installations Seaton wanted. The very enormity of the breakthrough changed all plans, dislocated all schedules. To the Jelmi the fourth-dimensional translator had been a phenomenon -- a weapon -- in itself. It had extremely valuable applications,, and each of them offered a long career of study. That was enough for them. But to Seaton and Crane and the Norlaminians it was something more than that; it was an effect, a new and unexplored area of knowledge, to be fitted somehow into the known and computed structure of sixth-order -- perhaps of other-order -- effects; and to be used and considered in conjunction with them. It was a theorist's dream -- and an engineer's nightmare. Meanwhile, as the male Skylarkers, their Jelm colleagues and the Norlaminians were busily getting done the impossible task of exploring a whole new field of knowledge and transmuting it into actual structures and gigantic machines, the women of the party were exploring the lift of an alien race... and having the time of their respective lives doing it. Sitar, of course, was in her element. Bare skin and jewelrj she liked. She liked to look at and to feel her mink coat, she said, but she hated to have to wear it; and as for that horrible, scratchy underwear -- augh! Hence, now that the personal gravity controls were personal heaters as well, she was really enjoying herself. Dorothy and Margaret, of course, took to it as though to the manner born. In three days neither of them was any more conscious of nudity than was Sennlloy herself. Even Lotus got used to it. While she could never become an enthusiastic nudist, she said, she did stop blushing. In fact, she almost stopped feeling like blushing. "Dick," Dorothy said one evening. "I've finally made contact with them on music." Musicr he snorted. "Huh! It sounds to me like a gaggle of tomcats yowling on a hack fence." She laiiehed. "It's unworldly, of course, but a lot of it is beautiful, in a weird sort of way, and they have some magnificent techniques. I've IF been trying everything on them, you know, and they've just been sitting on their hands. I'll give you three guesses as to what I Anally hit them with." "Strauss waltzes? Jazz? Dont tell me it was rock-'n'-roll." She laughed. "Old-fashioned ragtime. Not what they call rag these days, but real syncopation. And polkas. Specifically, three old, old recordings -- with improved sound, of course. Pee Wee Hunt's Twelfth Street Rag, Plehal Brothers' Beer Barrel Polka, and -- of all things! -- Glahe Musette's Hot Pretzels. They simply grabbed the ball and ran all over the place with it. What they came up with is neither rag nor polka -- in fact, it's like nothing ever heard before on any world -- but it's really toe-tingling stuff. Comes the dance tomorrow evening rH show you some steps and leaps and bounds that will knock your eyes right out of their sockets." "I believe that, if what the gals have been teaching me is any criterion. You have to be a mind-reader, an adagio dancer and a ground-andlofty tumbler, and have an eidetic memory. But I hope I won't smash any of the girls' arches down or kick any of their faces in." "Don't fish, darling. I know how good you are. Ain't I been practicing with you for lo, these many periods?" At the dance it became clear that Seaton's statement was (as, it must be admitted, some of his statements were!) somewhat exaggerated. There was a great deal of acrobatics -- Seaton and Sennlloy took advantage of every clear space to perform handspring-and-flip routines in unison. But everything was strictly according to what each person could do and wished to do. Thus, men and women alike danced with the Osnomians as though they were afraid of breaking them in two -- which they were. And thus Lotus was, as Margaret had foretold that she would be, the belle of the ball. Hardtrained gymnast and acrobat that she was, her feet were off the floor most of the time; and before the dance was an hour old she was being tossed delightedly by her partner of the moment over the heads of half a dozen couples to some other man who was signalling for a free catch. T hree days before the Skylarks departure, Mergon announced that there would be a full-formal farewell party on the evening before the takeoff. "What are you going to wear, Dick?" Crane asked. Seaton grinned. "Urvan of Urvania's royal regalia. All of it. You?" "I'm going as Tarnan, the Karbix of Osnome; with guns, knives, bracelets and legbands complete. And a pair of forty-fives besides." "Nice! And I'll wear my threefifty-sevens, then, too. If I can find a place to hang them on anywhere." And Dorothy and Margaret each wore about eleven quarts of gems. As the eight guests entered the dining hall -- last, as protocol dictated -- and the eight hundred Jelmi rose to their feet as one, the spectacle was something that not one of the six Tellurians would ever forget. DuQuesne had seen a few Jelmi in full formal panoply; but here were eight hundred of them! After the sumptuous meal the tables vanished; music -- a spinetingling, not-too-fast march -- swelled into being; and dancing began. Dancing, if dancing it could be called, that bore no relationship whatever to the boisterous sport of which there had been so much. Each step and motion and genuflection and posture was stately, graceful, poised and studied. The whole was very evidently the finished product of centuries of refinement and perfection of technique. And at its close each of the eight honored guests was amazed to find that their movements had been so artfully yet inconspicuously guided that each of them had grasped hands once with every Jelm on the floor. And on the way to their quarters Dorothy, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, pressed Seaton's arm against her side. "Oh, Dick, wasn't that simply wonderful? I could cry. Only once in my life before has anything ever hit me as hard as that did." TSTell on the way back to Galaxy  V DW-#-LU, Seaton was humming happily to himself. He had gone, through everything for he umpteenth time and for the umpteenth time had found everything good. "Mart," he said. "We have now got exactly what it takes to make big medicine on those Chloran apes. The only question is, do we wipe 'em completely out now or do we let 'em suffer a while longer? Suffer in durance vile?" If he had waited a few hours longer to speak so, he would have kept his mouth shut; for that same afternoon the Skylark's screens again went instantaneously into full-powered incandescent defense. The Brain took evasive action at once; but it was five long hours before they got far enough away from the source of that incredible flood of energy so that it became ineffective and was cut off. During that five hours Seaton and Crane observed and computed and analyzed and thought. When it was over, Seaton scanned the Skylark's resgrve supply of power uranium; and his face was grim and hard when he called the others into conference. "I wouldn't have believed it possible," he said flatly. "I can hardly believe it now, after watching it happen. Either they've been building stuff twenty-four hours a day ever since we left..." He paused. "Or they've got myriads of myriawatts." Dunark said into that pause, "that they couldn't sync in then, but can now." "Could be," Seaton agreed. "Let's see if we can find anything put. We're too far away to hold anything, even a planet. But with all of us looking we should be able to see something -- and the gizmo can handle eight projections as easily as one. Has anybody got any better ideas?" Since no one had, they tried it "Riding the beam" is a weird senIF sation; a sense of duality of personality that must be experienced to be either appreciated or understood. The physical body is here; its duplicate in patterns of pure force is there: the two separate entities see and hear and smell and taste and feel two entirely different environments at the same time. It is a thing that takes some getting used to; but all the Skylarkers except Lotus were used to it. And she. as has been intimated, was a quick study. Seaton could not hold the projections anywhere near any planet; could not hold them even inside a solar system. Even with the vernier controls locked and Seaton's hands resolutely off, the point of view jumped erratically about in fantastic miles. Not even the huge -- and reinforced -- mass of the Skylark of Valeron coidd hold them steady. They swept dizzily into the chromospheres of suns, out into the cold dark of interstellar vacuum, through tenuous gas clouds and past orbiting planets. In theory -- if theory meant anything in this unexplored area -- the fourth-dimensional "gizmo" should have been able to lock steadily on a target. In practice, they could hardly find a target to lock onto. All eight of the Skylarkers were synced in at once to the master controls, but their best efforts could not keep them even inside a solar system, much less give them the rock-steady fix that would have permitted them to spy on enemy activity. And the magnitude of error grew. In a minute they were swinging in huge arcs of a parsec or more, ia another minute the swings had become so enormous and so random that they could not measure them. Their speed was immense; they swung dizzyingly toward a cepheid variable and it winked at them like a traffic blinker, spun past, a flam star and watched its great gouts of flame leap out and fall back. Five minutes of this insane cavorting made half the party seasick, and they pulled out of projection and returned, gasping and staggering, tn the welcome stability of the Skylark Seaton stuck it out for half an hour. Then he pushed the "cancel" button. "That's vdiat I was afraid of," hm growled. "Every time we wiggle a finger or a fly lights on a table M changes the shape of the whole shtpi Oh, for something really rigid tm build with!" (The eternal complaini of the precise worker in any Eeld# "But we each saw something. Wel report in turn." Seaton gave a brief description od his own observations. He had seen something, no more than a flicker, but clearly big and Chloran-madn. Dunark had spotted what sounded like the same planet-sized mass, but in the system of a G-# star, as nearly as he could tell; Seaton's had been an F. The others had seen nothing. Seeton nodded. "Okay. There are at least two solar systems having fortified Chloran planets, with one more probable. Ideas, anybody?" Crane broke the ensuing silence. "I can't come up with anything constructive. Just the opposite. There! something basically wrong here, me Dick. As I understand the TammonSeaton Theory, the operators involved here are all in the no-space-no time field, so that distance does not enter. Hence it is possible in theory, and should be in practice, to place a bomb anywhere in all total space as accurately and as easily as you can touch the end of your nose with the tip of your finger." Dorothy whistled, Dunark looked shocked, and the others looked blank. Seaton scowled and said, "Yeah... But with all points in total space coexistent -- Gunther's Universe -- how are you going to pick any given one out? What kind of an operator would it take? There's a hole. Mart, in either the theory or in the reduction... He paused, frowning in thought. "Or both," Crane said. "Or both," Seaton agreed. "Okay, let's skip down and find it." They went down and worked with the Brain all the rest of the day; but they did not find the hole. Nor did they find it the next day, or the next. Then Seaton began to pace the floor. "So, in all probability, another breakthrough is required," Crane said. "And I can't help you on that; I'm not the genius type." "Neither am I!" Seaton snorted. "In my book one flash-in-the-pan hunch does not make a genius... But here's another angle, fella. If this thing can be worked out it'll be so much better than that synchronization idea that it isn't funny. Also, it might not take the years to work out. Don't you think it'll be worth while, Mart, to spend a few days seeing if we can set it up as a problem? See if we can take it out of the pure brainstorm category before we spring it on Rovol?" "I do indeed," and Seaton and Crane both went down to the control room and got into their master controllers. However, before that task was finished there was a surprise for Richard Seaton. Co-Belligerents #TuQuesne calling Seaton reJlJ ply..." Since Seaton's head was inside his master controller, no speaker sounded. Since everything pertaining to DuQuesne was on file in the Brain's memory banks, there was no delay whatever in making the proper connections: Seaton cut in before the first send of the message, short as it was, was completed. "What the helly DuQuesne!" his thought blazed out. "I didn't think even you would have the sublime guts to call on me again!" "Save it, Seaton. This is important. Do you know how many solar systems of Chlorans there are in that galaxy where your Skylark of Valeron got burned out?" Seaton paused for one microsecond. Then, cautiously: "No idea. Hundred, maybe. Or, in view of this -- thousands?" "You aren't even warm. My apparatus put one hundred forty-nine sand two hundred ninety-seven of IF Ilicm into my tank before my scanners went out. And they hadn't covered a quarter of the galaxy yet."..." Seaton began, but shut himself up. Dorothy was listening in. "But to be able to use a sixthorder analsynth that long you must have had a little more... okay, gimme the dope." DuQuesne told his story, including his superpowered DQ and his Pcnachrone crew; concluding, "We knocked out over fifteen thousand of them before I had to run. But of course that wasn't a drop in the proverbial bucket. Worse, I doubt like ike devil if any mobile base possible to build can ever get that close to tiiem again. Apparently they sync in Just enough stuff -- no matter how much it takes -- to cope with the maximum observed threat." "Could be. But how come you are interested? I know damn well what you want." "Not any more you don't," snapped DuQuesne's thought. "With very two-bit Tom, Dick, and Harry of a race in all space having atomic aergy already, what's the chance of a monopoly? So what good is Earth er anything else in the First Galaxy? Fve changed my plans -- you and Crane can both live forever, as far as I'm concerned." Seaton absorbed and filed that statement -- guardedly. He only said: "So what? Why should you give a whoop about the Chlorans? Don't tell me you're altruistic all of a sudden." "You apparently don't see the point. Listen -- the Fenachrone talked about mastering the cosmos. That race of Chlorans is quietly and unobtrusively doing it. It may be too late to stop them; and I didn't help matters a bit by making them dol ble or quadruple their synchronized output. You and I are, as far as we know, humanity's ablest operators. Each of us has stuff the other lacks. If you and I together can't stop them it can't -- as of now -- be done. What do you say?" Seaton pondered. What was DuOuesne's angle this time? Or was the ape actually on the up and up? It did make sense, though -- even though he was a louse and a heel and a case-hardened egomaniac, if it came down to a choice of which was going to be wiped out, those monsters or humanity... sure he would... "Okay, Blackie. You give your word?" "I give my word to act as one of your party until this Chloran thing is settled, one way or the other." A few days later, the ultra-fast speedster that Seaton had left on Ray-See-Nee hailed the Valeron, matched velocities with her, and was drawn aboard. Three women disembarked; one of whom was Kay-Lee Barlo. She introduced her blackhaired mother, Madame Barlo; who, with the added poise and maturity of her extra twenty-odd years, was even better-looking than her daughter. She in turn introduced her mother, Grand Dame Barlo, who did not have a single white hair in her thick brown thatch and who did not look more than half as old as she must in reality have been. "But, listen," Seaton said. "You couldn't use any sixth-order stuff at first, so you must have been on the way for weeks. What happened? Trouble with the Chlorans?" He had been talking to Kay-Lec, but her mother, who was very evidently the head of the party, answered him. "Oh, no. That is, they've tripled the quotas -- " Seaton shot a ance at Crane. That tied in! -- "but with the new machinery that did not bother us at all. No. We learned many weeks ago that you would have need of us, so we came." "Huh?" Seaton demanded, inelegantly. "What need?" "We do not surely know. All we know is that it is written upon the Scroll that a time of need will come, and soon. All Ray-See-Nee is enormously and eternally in your debt: we are here to repay a tiny portion of that debt." "Can't you tell me more about it than that?" "A little; not much. We received your original message, but at that time there was nothing to connect it with you as Ky-El Mokak. In studying it we encountered something unknown upon Ray-See-Nee that increased a hundredfold our range and scope and strength: three male poles of power of tremendous magnitude; men who, we found out later, you already know. They are Drasnik and Fodan of the planet Norlamin and Sacner Carfon of Dasor. With three such pairs of poles of power -- three is the one perfect number, you know -- it was a simple matter to locate those interested in your message, to develop the powers that had been latent in such people as yourself -- " What? Seaton yelped. That was ell he could get out. " -- and Dr. DuQuesne and others, yes," Madame Barlo went on smoothly. "You were, of course, not aware you possessed them." "That's putting it mildly, ace," said Seaton. "You mean  am... I hate to use the word... well, 'psychic'?" "The word is of no importance," said the woman impatiently. "Use any word you like. The fact is that you do have this power; we have developed it... and we now propose to put it to use." S eaton's reply to that has not been recorded for posterity. Perhaps it is as well. Let it only be said that even twenty-four hours later he was no more than half-convinced... but it was the half of him that was convinced that was governing his actions. One of the data that helped convince him was the fact that Madame Barlo and her daughter had not merely located these "poles of power" -- they had summoned them to the Skylark! They bad not waited for Seaton's concurrence; before Seaton even knew what they were up to. all the named individuals from three galaxies and a dozen planets were on the way. A shipload of Norlaminians and Dasorians -- including the three preeminent "male poles of power" -- was the contingent first to arrive. Then came Tammon and Sennlloy IF ad Mergon and Luloy and half a hundred other Jelmi; bringing with them three Tellurians: Madlyn Mannis, the red-haired stripper; Doctor Stephanie de Marigny of the Rare Metals Laboratory; and Charles K. van der Gleiss, Petrochemical Engineer T-#. And last, but by less than an hour, came Marc C. DuQuesne in person. "Hi, Hunkie," he said, shaking hands cordiallv. little out of your regular orbit? Like me?" "More than a little, Blackie -- like you." She showed two deep dimples in a wide and friendly smile. "And if you have any idea of what I'm here for T'd be delighted to have you tell me what it is." "T scarcely know what I'm here for myself," and DuQuesne turned to the others; nodding at them as though he had left them only minutes before. He was no whit embarrassed or ill at ease; nor conscious of any resentment or ill-will directed at him. He was actually as unconcerned as, and bore himself very much like, a world-renowned specialist called into consultation on an unusually difficult case. Before the situation could become strained, the three Rayseenian women came into the big conference room and approached the conference table -- a table forty feet long and three feet wide. Their faces were white; their eyes were wide and staring. All three were doped to the ears. "Doctor Seaton," Madam Barlo said, "you will cover the top of this table with one large sheet of paper, please?" Seaton donned his helmet and a sheet of drafting paper covered exactly the table's top, adhering to It as though glued down. "You mean to say, Dc, you're going along with this magic flummery?" one of die Jelmi asked. "I certainly am," Seaton said. "You will leave the room until thii test is over. So will everyone elM with a mind dosed . to what these women are trying to do." The scoffer and two other Jelmi walked toward the door and Seaton quirked an eyebrow at DuQuesne. "Fm staying," that worthy said. "I can't say that Fm a hundred per cent sold; but Fm interested enough to give it a solid try." The two older women stationed themselves, one at each end of the table; Kay-Lee stood at her mother's right, holding in her hand a red-ink ballpoint at least a foot long. Majestic Fodan, the Chief of the Five of Norlamin, stood behind Madame Barlo, but did not touch her; Drasnik and Sacner Carfon stood similarly behind Grand Dame Baflo and Kay-Lee. Each of the three women rubbed a drop of something (it was actually Seaton's citrated blood) between thumb and forefinger and Madame Barlo said: "You will all look fixedly at any one of the six of us and think of oar success with everything that in yoa lies. Help us with all your might to succeed; give us your total mental strength. Kay-Lee, daughter, the time is... now!" R eaching across the end of tho table, Kay-Lee began to write  column eighteen inches wide; tho height of which was to be the thirtysix-inch width of the table. When she got to the middle of the fourth line, however, a man gasped in astonishment and the pen's point stopped. This Jelm, a mathematician, had let his eyes slip from the operator to the paper -- and what he saw was high -- very high! -- math! Mathematics of a complexity that none of those women, by any possible stretch of the imagination, could know anything about! "Quit peeking!" Seaton snarled. "You're lousing up the whole deal! Concentrate! Think, dammit, Everyone resumed thinking and Kay-Lee resumed writing. She wrote smoothly and effortlessly, with the precision and with almost the speed of the operating point of a geometric lathe. She wrote the first column and the second and the third and the fourth -- six feet by three feet erf tightly packed equations and other mathematical shorthand. Then came twelve feet of exquisitely detailed "wiring" diagram. Then, covering all the rest of the paper, came working drawings of and meticulously detailed specifications for machines that no one there had ever heard of. Then all three women collapsed. As well they might; they had worked without a letup for three hours. Men and women sprang to their aid with restoratives, and they began to recover. "Mister Fodan," Madlyn Mannis said then, coming up to the Chief of the Five arm-in-arm with Stephanie de Marigny. Her usually vivid face was strangely pale. "I can understand Hunkie here having a place in a brawl like this, she's got half the letters in the alphabet after her name, but what good could I do? Possibly? I only went to school ona day in my life and that day it rained and the teacher didn't come." "Formal education does not matter, child; it is what you intrinsically are that counts. You and your friend Charles are two perfectly matched male and female poles ot tremendous power. You felt your paired power at work. I'm sure." "Wel-#-#, I felt something.' Madlyn looked up at her Charley, her eyes full of question marks. "My whole brain was full of... we it was all kind of spizzly, like champagne tastes." And: "That's it exactly," van der Gleist agreed. Kay-Lee, fully recovered now, looked in surprise at some of the equations she had written, then turned to Sacner Carfon. "Did it come out all right?" she asked hopefully. "Oh, I hope it did!" "I think so," the porpoise-man replied. "At least, all of it I can understand makes sense." The T-# engineer stared at KayLee. "But didn't you know what yon were doing?" "Of course she didn't." Again Madame Barlo did the talking. "None of us did, consciously. We are not masters of The Power, but Its servants. We are merely Its tools; the agents through which It does Its work." And, off to one side, Dorothy was saying, "Dick, those women actually IF are witches! I liked Kay-Lee, too... but real, live, practicing witches! I got goose bumps as big as peas. I don't believe in witchcraft, darn it!" "I don't either. That is, I never did before... but what else are you going to call it now?" Project Rho T he mathematicians and physical scientists began at once to studv atke wealth of new data. Drasnik, the First of Psychology, after conferring with Roban, with Sacner Carfon and with each of the three witches in turn, actually rushed over to the group of Tellurians. It was the first time Seaton had ever seen an excited Norlaminian. "Ah, youths of Tellus, I thank you!" he enthused. "I thank you nnmensely for the inestimable privDege of meeting the ladies Barlo! They possess a talent that is indubitably of the most tremendous -- " 'Talent?" Dorothy snorted. "Do jrou call witchcraft a talent? Why, tile very idea of it makes me..." She paused. "Uh-huh, me too," Madly n agreed fervently. "If I have to believe in practicing witches I'll go not-so-slowly nuts." "Witchcraft, my children? Bosh and fiddle-faddle! It is a talent. Extremely rare and lamentably rudimentary in our part of the universe, yet these women have it in astoundingly full measure. Unfortunately, you have no name for it except 'witchcraft', which term has deplorable connotations. It is the ability to... but the English has no words for that, either. But no matter, you have seen it in fine, full action Roban and Sacner and I each have a very little of it... "But those women couldn't possU bly have known anything about that kind of stuff!" Madlyn protested. "Of course they didp't. Richard here and Tammon and Doctor DuQuesne were the principal sources of information. But all three of them together lacked a great deal of having full knowledge, and the rest of us had very little indeed. While the comparison is lamentably loose, consider a larg, finely cut jigsaw puzzle. Seaton and DuQuesne and Tammon could each assemble an area. But no two of the three areas were contiguous, while none of the rest of us could fit more than a very few pieces together. But the ladies Barlo -- particularly Grand Dame Barlo. who is a veritable powerhouse of strength -- with some little help from the rest of us, exerted and directed The Power. The Power that, by tapping the reservoir of infinite knowledge, enabled the scribe KayLee to fill in the missing parts of the puzzle." "But why..." Seaton began, but changed his mind "I see. You didn't tell me anything about it because at that time it was both insignificant and inapplicable." "That is correct. As I was sa ing, our Roban, who has more of it than any other entity previously known, had perhaps the thousandth of what Kay-Lee, the weakest by far of the three, has. That is why he is Chief f the Five. And they tell me that there are other women of their race who also have this talent. Remarkable!" At this thought Draaoik, who had quieted down, became excited all over again. "When this is all over I shall go at once to Ray-See-Nee and study. Marvelous! They did not know even that it is a talent or that, when they learn, there will be no need to drug themselves into halfunconsciousness to employ it successfully. Thank you again, young friends, for this wonderful opportunity. Marvelous!" and Drasnik scurried away. The Seatons and Madlyn and van der Gleiss stared after the Norlaminian until he was out of sight. They turned and stared at each other. "Well... ril... be... a... dirty... name," Madlyn said. S eaton was pacing the floor, talking to Dorothy, emitting a cloud of smoke from his battered and reeking briar. "I like to do my thinking with you, ace." She chuckled. "At me, you mean, don't you? That stuff is over my head like a beach umbrella." "Don't fish, sweetie. You not only have a body and some bp.ir, but also a brain. One that fires on all sixteen barrels all the time." She lapghed delightedly. "Thank you so much. You know that isn't true, but you also know how I lap it up and purr. But to proceed. Dunark wants to smash them all with planets, the way he was going to smash Urvania. Martin and Peggy, after talking the way they did, crawfished and are now talking about endosing the whole g t!axy in a stasis of time..." "Huh? That's news to me. How's he figuring on doing it -- did ho say?" "Uh-uh. I didn't talk to him. Peggy says he isn't going to say anything about it until he can present the package." "He should live so long. But 'scue, please; go ahead." "Only one more. Foban, the simple-minded old darling, wants to work with them. Convert them!" "Yeah. Make Christians of 'em. I've got a life-sized picture in technicolor of anybody ever accomplishing that feat. The trouble is, everybody wants to do something different and none of their ideas are any good at all." "Oh? I noticed that you haven't been enthusiastic about any of them. Pretty grim, in fact. Why not?" "Because none of 'em will come even close to getting 'em all and this has got to be a one hundred point zero zero zero per cent clean-, up. You know how they operate on a cancer. They cut deep enough and wide enough to get it all. Every cell. If they don't get it all it spreads all over the body and the patient dies. This is a cancer. It's already eaten just about all of that galaxy by Chlora-typing planets wherever they go -- or rather, enslaved humans are doing it for them -- and it's spreading fast. And when that galaxy begins to get crowded they won't just jump to one other; they'll go for hundreds or thousands of galaxies and there goes the ball game. So that cancer has got to be IF perated on before it spreads any fcrther." D orothy's face began to pale. "By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy I How can such a thing be possible? It can't possibly be possible!" He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho. Her face, already pale, turned white as he talked; and when he had finished: "Project... Rho," she breathed. "How utterly horrible! And yet... I never dreamed... have you talked to Martin yet?" "No. You first. I don't want to even think about pushing that kind of a button without being sure you're standing at my back." "I'll do better than that, Dick." She looked him steadily in the eye. "I'll take half of it My finger will be right beside yours on that button." "You are an ace, ace. As maybe I've said once before." "Uh-huh, at least once -- but we're one, rernember?" After a moment she went on, "But we can't possibly sell the Norlaminians any such bill of goods as that." "I'll say we can't. They'd cry their eyes out all over the place. Or wait. When they find out that they can't stop it, they'll help save the human planets, which will be all to the good; the witches can use the help. But basically, the grand slam will be up to DuQuesne and his Fenachrone and the witches and Mart and me. Even Mart will need some persuasion. I'm afraid; and you'll have to really work on Peg. She'll simply have a litter of kittens." "Why, Dick; what a way to talk!" She smiled in spite of herself, but sobered quickly. "She'llcome around. I'm sure; she'll have to. But Dick, is it actually physically possible? It's so huger "Definitely. You see, we'll be operating in a Gunther universe, so that mass as such won't enter and power will be no problem. All we have to do is build an apparatus to alter the properties of space around and throughout the object to be moved -- altering those properties in such a way as to make its threedimensional attributes incompatible with those of its..." She stopped him with an upraised hand. "Hold it! Wait up, please. We'll dispense with the high math, if you don't mind. It's the sheer size of the thing that scares me witless." Seaton did grin then. "Well, you've always known that making things bigger and better is the fondest thing I am of. But we know exactly how to do it, and I think we can get it done before the Norlaminians finish theirs. But DuQuesne should be about ready to take off. I'll flip myself over there and see." He did so and said, "How're you doing Blackie?" IF "A few minutet yet to finish final checking. I've been thinking. What kind of a celestial object will that galaxy be when we get done with k? Not a quasi-stellar, certainly: that's only a star with the energy of This will be a galaxy with the energalaxies -- the energy of an entire universe." "Yeah. Something new, I'd say. It'll give some astronomers a thrill, some day. But what I can't compute is, whether or not it will sterilize the interstellar space of that galaxy," Seaton said. "Well, if it doesn't, you might put the Osnomians and Urvanians on it. Keep 'em from thinking about fighting each other." "You know, Blackie, I'd thought of doing exactly that? 'Great minds' and so forth. 'Bye now; be seein' ya," and Seaton flipped himself back home. E n route to his destination -- barren planet in a star-cluster on the opposite side of the galaxy from the Skylark of Valeron -- DuQuesne again went into a huddle with Sleemet. "So far, you've done a job," he began. "What I told you to do -- what I knew how to do -- and done if well. But nothing else. Now I want something more than that. Something you can do, if you will, that I can't. As you know, I've made arrangements so that in case of my death this whole planetoid goes up in an atomic blast. That was to keep with it. The same thing will happen, though, if those Chlorans kill me in the fracas that's coming. It would seem as though that fact would be enough to make you make an honest-to-God effort to be sure that they don't kill me by doing your damnedest to help me kill them. Mentally. Both you and the Chlorans know more about one phase of that than I do -- as yet. So, as added inducement to really top effort, if you'll really tear into it on this Project Rho I'll teach you everything I know that you can take. And I'll help you build any kind of spacecraft you want before you leave; one even as big as this one. What do you say?" Sleemet's strange eyes glowed. "If you will go mind to mind with ma on that I can now assure you of such cooperation as no member of my race has ever given to any nonFenachrone form of life," he declared; and DuQuesne handed him a headset. It wasn't easy, not even for suck an accomplished liar as Marc C. DuQuesne was, to make the fourdim gizmo very much more incomprehensible than it actually was; but he accomplished the feat -- and he actually did give Sleemet practically everything else. The DQ went into a one-day orbit above one point of an immense plain of the barren planet that was its goal. A plain some ten thousand square miles of which became forthwith an Area of Work. Enormous mechanisms sprang into being, by means of which DuQuesne and several hundred top-bracket Fenachrone U# engineers sent gigantic beams of force hurtling across the galaxy to the Skylark of Valeron and to hundreds of thousands of other micrometrically determined points. But not Sleemet. That wight, knowing now almost everything that DuQuesne knew, was working in his wn private laboratory -- working with all the power of his tremendous mind on the various mental aspects f the battle of giants to come. H our after hour, Crane worked in his master control at the iNise of the Brain, with Madame Barlo and Drasnik and Margaret, etch wearing an extra-complex headiet, sitting close to him. They were mapping and modeling three galmdes, on such a large scale that iie vast "tank' of the Skylark of mall. They were using a discusAaped-volume of open space some ten light-years in diameter and three Kght-years thick. Galaxy DW-#-LU was already meticulously in place; its every celestial body being represented by a characteristically shaped and characteristically colored light. "Above" Galaxy DW-#-LU and "below" it (the terms are used in the explanatory sense only; "on one side of' and "on the other side of" could be used Just as well) as close to it as possible, two other galaxies were being modeled; each as nearly like DW#-LU in size and shape as could be found in that part of the First Universe. They were so ctbse together that in many places the three models actually interpenetrated. Now m ihe :paL:e-time continuum of the strictly material -- the plenum in which we ungifted human beings live and which our friends the semanticists would have us believe is the only one having any reality -- the map is not the territory. That is taken as being axiomatic. In the demesne of The Talent, however, known to some scholars as psionics and to scoffers as magic or witchcraft, the map is -- and definitely! -- the territory. Thus, as Madame Barlo and Drasnik, those two matched poles of tremendous power; and Crane, the superlatively able coordinator and his matching pole Margaret; and that immense Brain -- as these five labored together, the "map" (in this case the meticulously accurate spacechart) became filled with tendrils and filaments of psionic force, connecting models of suns with models of suns and those of planets with those of planets. And as those joinings occurred in the map, the same joinings occurred in the actual galaxies out in deep space. Those joinings were invisible, it is true, and intangible, and indetectable to any physical instrument. But they were nevertheless as real as was the almost infinite power from which they sprang. The other pairs of psiontists were also hard at work. Roban and Grand Dame Barlo, Sacner Carfon and Kay-Lee, Charles van der Gleiss and Madlyn Mannis, Mergon and his Luloy, Tammon and Sennlloy -- all were shooting heavy charges fast and flawlessly straight. And as all those matched pairs labored, and as the IF automatics of pure psionic force they produced reproduced themselves in geometric ratio, the intergalactic couplings increased at a rate that was that ratio squared. Seaton was fantastically busy, too. He was deep in his controller, with Dorothy and Stephanie de Marigny, both helmeted, one on each side of him. Dorothy, was, of course, his matched pole of power; Stephanie was his link to DuQuesne. He, too, was operating a ten-thousand-squaremile Area of Work with the speed of thought and he was not making any mistakes. It is true that the Skylark of Valeron was the biggest thing he had ever built before, and that the members with which he was working now were parsecs instead of inches long. Nevertheless each one fitted perfectly into place and every one that was supposed to connect with anything of DuQuesne's connected perfectly therewith. A fter many hours of this furiously grinding work, a myriad of hells began to break out, at the rate of hundreds of thousands per second. Of hells, that is, infinitely hotter than anything imaginable by man. Of super-novae, no less. In one galaxy. A, a large hot sun vanished. It reappeared instantaneously -- with no lapse of time whatever -- close beside the sun of a Chlorandominated solar system in Galaxy DW-#-LU. And in that same no-time the TclI US-Type planet in the Chloran sygtem vanished therefrom and reappeared in a precisely similar orbit around a Type G dwarf sun in Galaxy B, the third galaxy in the psiontists' tremendous working model. And those two suns in the Chloran solar system in Galaxy DW-#LU, with photospheres in contact and with intrinsic velocities not only diametrically opposed but increased horribly by their mutual force of gravitation, crashed together in direct central impact and splashed with tremendous force. Except for the heat, the collision might have lasted for a long time. But heat was the all-important factor -- the starkly incomprehensible Centigrade degrees. Each of those suns was already an atomic furnace in precise equilibrium; generating and radiating the second of matter being converted completely into energy. Thus there was no place for the added energy It could not be absorbed and it could not be radiated. Therefore the whole enormous mass of super-hot, superdense material began to go into the long series of ultra-atomic explosions that is the formation of a supersuper-nova -- the most utterly, the most fantastically violent display of pure, raw energy known to or possible in the universe of man. Flares and prominences of this insanely detonating material were hurled upward and outward for milwave after shock-wave, so hellishly hot as to be invisible for days, raged and raved spherically outward; converting instantaneously all the flatsam in their paths into their own unknown composition or atomic and subatomic debris. Planets lasted a Httle longer. Oceans and mountain ranges boiled briefly; after which each world evaporated comparatively slowly, as does a drop of water riding a cushion of its own steam on a hot steel plate. And the sphere of annihilation, ravening outward with unabated ferocity, reached and passed the outermost limits of the Chloran solar system and kept on going... On and on... And on... Until there came to pass an event which not even Seaton, not even Madame Barlo herself had foreseen . , . and an event which nearly canceled all their efforts and their lives as well; for the Chlorans were not left without resources even in the destruction of their galaxy... DuQuesne to the Rescue A s has been said, the Chlorans of Galaxy DW-#-LU as a race were more conversant with the Talent than were any of the human or near-human races of the First Galaxy: that is, with the phases or facets of it that had to do with the remarkable hypnotic qualities of their minds. Thus their mathematicians were more or less familiar with nospace-no-time theory, and some of the Greater Great Ones had played with it a little more or less for fun, in practice. Since they had never had any real use for it as a weapon, however, it had never been fully developed. Thus there were no detectors or feeling for that type of attack. 'Tt was not sixth-order, but no-spaceno-time, which is no-order". Thus planets were destroyed without any intelligent entity either giving or receiving warning that an attack was being made. And that was the way Richard Seaton wanted it. This was not a game; not a chivalric tournament. This was a matter of life and death, in which the forces of human civilito one, needed all the advantage they could get. Unfortunately for Seaton's desires and expectations, the Chlorans had a Galactic Institute for Advanced Study. In common with all such institutions everywhere, its halls harbored at least one devotee of any nameable subject, however recondite or arcane that subject might be. So there was one old professor of advanced optical hypnosis who, as a hobby, had been delving into nospace-no-time for a couple of hundred years. He did not feel the light preliminary surveying tendrils of the human witches; but when the big Gunther beams began to come in he became interested fast and got busy fast. He called his first assistant and his most advanced student -- the latter a Greater Great One who was also interested in and a possessor of the Talent and thus familiar with the mysterious power of the number IF three -- and, synchronizing their three minds, they traced those beams to the Skylark of Valeron and the DQ, and to Seaton and to Crane and the DuQuesne. "First," the professor told his two weaker fellows, "we will attune our Union of Three to theirs and break it apart with blasts of psionic force. Then, each of us having tuned to one of the separated strands, we will kill the three murderers forthwith." And the Chlorans proceeded to do their best to bring this event about -- and their best was very potent indeed. If things did not quite work out the way they had planned it, it was no fault of the individual Chlorans. Their minds were fully capable of tance. The first enormous surge of mental energy they thrust into the Tellurian union of minds destroyed its fabric. The coupling of "poles of power" was wrenched asunder. The individual minds of the operators were left alone against the Chloran thrust... and each of the three Chlorans selected one of the three mightiest intellects of their enemies and commanded it to die. In that moment, Seaton, Crane and DuQuesne were seized and pinned. The minds that thundered destruction at them were not merely of great intrinsic power, carefully trained; they were backed up by all an science, aided by the impact of total surprise. The three helpless Tellurians were helpless before they knew what hit them. But they did not die. What saved them was DuQuesne's bargain with the Fenachrone. Sleemet had had a few microseconds' warning by that Fenachrone ferocity, and the backing of every last member of his feral race. His primary purpose was, of course, the defense of DiiQuesne's life -- not for the sake of DuQuesne, to be sure, but for the protection of the Fenachrone. He succeeded. DuQuesne's rigidity melted and he was back in control of himself, his own great intellect reinforcing Sleemet's counterblows. The two of them had enough psionic power left over to help Seaton and Crane... but not enough. The blow had been too powerful and too sudden. Both Seaton and Crane slumped bonelessly to the floor of the control room, leaving their controllers empty and idle. I n that moment the one great pole of strength left to humankind was -- Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne. To Dorothy Seaton, that moment was pure horror. It was every terrible fear she had ever thought of, all come to pass at once: Seaton disabled, perhaps dying; DuQuesne in control of all the mighty resources of the Skylark. Dorothy shrieked and leaped from her chair -- And was stopped in her tracks by DuQuesne's shout, crackling out of a speaker to emphasize his harddriven thoughts: "Dorothy! Margaret! Quit it! Pick up your loads and carry 'em. Pole to me!" And Dorothy hesitated, irresolute. torn between her love tor Seaton and her urgent duty to help against the Chlorans, while the whole vast net of human mental energies wavered and hung in the balance. Nowr snarled DuQuesne, the thought like a lash. "Move! To hell with the dead -- " Dorothy screamed again -- you re still alive! But you won't be long if you goof off!" Rapidly he scanned the quavering net. "You Barlo women and your poles! Drop what you're doing and locate this interference for me -- fast! All of you -- find it for me so I can slug it! Hunkie? Yeah -- good girl! Stay with it just as you are!" "But DuQuesne," Dorothy protested, "I've got to..." "Oh, helir DuQuesne wrenched out, every nuance of his tone showing tje tremendous strain under which he was laboring. "Savant Sennlloy! You can't be spared from there, but have you got a couple of girls who can tune themselves to me?" "Yes, Doctor DuQuesne." Neither she or any other Jelm aboard understood why Seeker Sevance of Yylmny had been masquerading as Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne of Tellus when he received his Call. They all knew, however, that it had to do with his Seeking; hence, none of them did anything to interfere with it. "We have many very good mentalists in our party." "Fine! Have two of 'em relieve these two weak sisters here -- and fast!" "Here we are, sir," two thoughts came in, in unison. And two powerful female Jelman minds -- the minds of two girls with whom Ibi was already very well acquainted -- fitted themselves snugglingly to hli and picked up the loads that the two Earthwomen had been unable I# carry. It was not that either of those Earthwomen was weak. Both were tremendously strong; mentally and psychically. Both disliked DuQuesne so intensely, however, that it was psychologically impossible for either of them to work with him. Of course, he regarded that fact itself as an extreme weakness. Sentiment was as bad as sentimentality, he held, and both bored him to tears. "Ah, that's better." DuQuesne's thought was a sigh of relief. "That makes it at least possible." And it did. DuQuesne and his two new assistants did not do much to keep the wave of destruction sweeping through Galaxy DW-#LU, but he and they, with a lot of very high-powered Fenachrone help, did hold the Chloran attackers at bay until the three witches and the three warlocks found the planet upon which the Chloran Galactic Institute of Advanced Study was located. Then, with locked teeth and hardset muscles and sweating face, he made the superhuman effort required to drive that three-man beam single-handed and keep those three rabid Chloran attackers at bay besides. By a miracle of coordination and timing he did it -- and practically collapsed when all attack and all necessity of resistance ceased. The Chloran Institute simply ceased to be. Its members died. DuQuesne reIF covered so quickly that no one else except the two Jelman girls knew that he had been affected at all. '"Dorothy! Margaret! Break it up!" he snapped. Doctors had been working on Seaton and Crane for minutes. Both were beginning to recover consciousness. Neither, apparently, had been permanently damaged; and both their wives were making enthusiastically joyful noises. "Come on, come on, take them home to do your slobbering over them. The rest of us have work to do -- or do you expect us to hold this demolition job up until they organize another threesome to go to the mat with us?" S tretchermen carried Seaton and Crane away; Dorothy and Margaret went along. The Chloran blow at the lives of the two Skylarkers had been deadly and fast, but it had not succeeded -- quite. And the "demolition job" went on. In the great light-years-thick "tank" that was the psiontists' working model of the three galaxies they were manipulating, lights were winking out and reappearing as stars and planets were hurled through fourdimensional curves to new orbits and positions. Already Galaxy A -- the "raw-material" source that was being used for a supply of suns -- was visibly dimmer, visibly poorer in already been stolen away and tossed through four-space into Chloran suns in Galaxy DW-#-LU. And when they reappeared, in a head-on collision course with those Chloran suns, and struck, and destroyed themselves in the titanic outflow of energies that produced super-nova blasts, the model of Galaxy DW#-LU showed another tiny but blindingly bright flare -- and another -- and another -- There were more than fifty thouAs the first targets had been the strongest and most dangerous Chloran systems, resistance soon ceased to matter; the task became monotonous, exhausting and mind-deadening. To the Chlorans, of course, it was something else again. They died ia low soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave front from each exploding double star, moments before their .planets themselves began to seetho and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic efforts to escape... But they all died. And for each sun that DuQuesne'i remorseless net located and flung into the Chloran galaxy, an oxygenbearing, human-populated planet was snatched out of the teeth of the resulting explosion and carried through four-space into the safetv of Galaxy B, there to slip quietlv into orbit around a pre-selected, hospital sun. No human world was destroyed in all of Galaxy DW-#-LU. It went on and on... And then it was over. M arc DuQuesne rose, stretched and yawned. "TTiat's all. Kverybody (fisssed," he said, and at once the vast psiontic net ceased to be. He was alone for the first time in many hours. His face was lined, his eyes deeper and darker than ever. Apart from that there was no sign of the great extermination he had just conducted. He was simply Marc DuQuesne. The man who slew a galaxy looked no different after the deed than he had before. He allowed his sense of perception to roam for a moment about die "working model". In Galaxy A, through the stellar cycle of evolucarcely a corporal's guard of primaries left. It was a strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes. Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun was stolen. Now they roamed at random -- uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited -- lacking not only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well. Galaxy B, on the other hand, looked quite normal -- in the "working model". The planets it had acquired, both from the exploded Chloran suns and from the looted solar systems of Galaxy A, were not even visible. Galactically speaking, it was essentially unchanged; the addid not matter, and each of the new planets was already in orbit around a friendly sun. There would be readjustments, of course. It would be necessary to keep a watch on the developments of each affected solar system, over a period of years. But that was no problem of Marc DuQuesne's. But the Chloran galaxy! What was it? In the "working model" it was rapidly becoming a single, lightyears-thick concentration of living flame. In the reality it was even huger, even more deadly. A name would be invented for it some day -- quasi-stellar? Or something greater still? But that, too, was no longer a concern for Marc DuQuesne. He dropped from his mind, without a of worlds he had dislocated. He ignored the question of Richard Ballinger Seaton, now stirring back to consciousness, to worry -- and ultimately, to reassurance -- somewhere on the Valeron. He had more pressing business to take care of. Personal business. And to DuQuesne that was the most pressing of all. Qhrugging his shoulders, he sent O Stephanie de Marigny a tightbeamed thought: "Hunkie -- some time before you go back to Washington, can I flip you over to the DQ for a private conference that we know will be private?" Her beautifully dimpled smile flashed on. "I should say not! You know I'm not that kind of a..." she began; then, as she perceived how much in earnest he was, she IF changed tone instantly and went on, "Of course, Blackie. Any time. Just give me time to pack a toothbrush and my pajamas. Top Secret, or can you give me a hint to allay my, 'satiable curiosity?"' '"Hint; large economy size. Bwf time I think of what those damnel observers ase dohig to you -- feeding a nund Oke ycun with an eyedropper instead of a seventy-twohich pipeline -- it makes me madder and madder. I can give you everything that Seaton, I, Crane and half the Norlaminians know, and give it to you in five hours." "You can what? The thought was a mental scream. She licked her lips, gulped twice, and said, "In that case we needn't wait for either toothbrush or pajamas. Do it now." He laughed deeply. "I wasn't sure tihat would be your attitude, but I'm glad it is. But I can't do it this minute. I have to help SIcemet finish building his planetoid, watch him very carefully for a while on course and do a couple of other crash-pri chores. Three or four days, probably. Say Saturday, seventeen hours?" "That'll be fine, Blackie, and thanks. I'll be here with my ears pinned back and my teeth filed down to needle points." Emperor T he Fenachrone had taken off and DuQuesne had watched them go, taking extreme precautions -- none of which, it turned out, had been necessary -- that they did not eliminate either him or the rest of the party as soon as it became safe for them to do so. He had taken Stephanie de Marigny and all her belongings aboard, saying that he gjiB going close enough to Tellus so it would be no trouble at all to drop her off there. And lastly, when Seaton and Crane had insist upon thanking him for what he had done: "Save it," he had sneered. "Remember, that time on X-World, what I told you to do with that kind of crap? That still goes," and he had taken off at full touring drive on course one seven five Universal. This course, which would give the First Galaxy a near miss, was the most direct route to a galaxy that was distant indeed; the galaxy lying on the extreme southern rim of the First Universe; the galaxy in which the DQ had been built; the galaxy that DuQuesne had surveyed so thoroughly and which he intended to rule. DuQuesne and Stephanie were in the DQ's control room, which was an exact duplicate of the Skylark of Valerons. He placed her in the seat that on the Valeron was Crane's, showed her how to elevate herself into his own station. "Oh," she said. "You're going to give me the whole gigantic Brain?" "That's the best and easiest way to do it. I boiled down about ten thousand lifetimes of knowledge and experience into ten half-hour sessions. The ten tapes on that player there are coded instructions for the Brain -- what to give you and how. There are minds who could take the whole jolt in seconds, but yours and mine aren't that type -- yet. But you'll get it all in five hours. Every detail. It'll shock you all hell's worth and it'll scare you right out of your panties, but it won't hurt you and it won't damage your brain. Yours is one of the very few human brains that can take it. I ll start it and in five hours I'll be back. Ready?" "As much so as I ever will be, I guess. Go." He started the player; and, after waiting a few minutes to be sure that everything was going as programmed, he left the room... H e came back in just as the machine clicked off, lowered her "chair", and lifted her to her feet. "Good -- God -- In -- Heaven!" the gasped. Her skin, normally so dark, was a yellowish white; so pale that her scattered freckles stood out sharply, each one in bold relief. don't... I can't... I simply can't grasp it! I know that I know it, but..." She paused. He shook his head in sympathy. Which, for Marc C. DuQuesne, was a rare gesture indeed. "I know. I couldn't tell you what it would be like -- no possible warning can be enough. But that's the bare minimum you'll have to start with, and h won't take you very long to assimilate it all. Ready for some talk?" "Not only ready. I'm eager. First, though, I want to give you a vote of full confidence. I'm sure that you'll succeed in everything you try from now on; even to becoming Emperor Marc the First of some empire." "Huh? Where did you get that? "By reading between the lines. Do you think I'm stupid, it that why you gave me all this?" "Okay. You've always known, as an empirical, non-germane fact, that the Earth and all it carries isn't even a flyspeck in a galaxy, to say nothing of a universe; but now you know and really understand just how little it actually does amount to." She shuddered. "Yes. It's... it's appalling." "Not when viewed in the proper perspective. I set out to rule Earth, yes; but after I began to learn something I lost that idea in a hurry. For a long time now I haven't wanted Earth or any part of it. Its medical science is dedicatef whole-heartedly to the deterioration of the human race by devoting its every effort to the preservation of the lives of the unfit. In Earth's wars its best men -- its best breeding stock -- are killed. Earth simply is not worth saving even if it could be saved; which I doubt. Neither is Norlamin. Not because its conquest is at present impossible, but because the Norlaminians aren't worth anything, either. All they do -- all they can do -- is think. They haven't done anything constructive in their entire history and they never will. They're such bred-in-th e-bone pacifists -- look at the way the damned sissies acted in this Chloran thing -- that it is psychologically impossible for any one of them to pull a trigger. No; Sleemet had the right idea. And Ravindau -- you have him in mind?" "Vividly. Preserve the race -- in his way and on his terms, IF "You're a precislonist; that's my idea exactly. To pick out a few hundred people -- we won't need many, we're going -- as much as possible like us, and build a civilization that will be what a civilization ought to be." T he girl gasped, but her eyes began to sparkle. '"In a distant galaxy, as Ravindau said?" "Very distant. Clear out on the rim of this universe. The last galaxy out on the rim, in fact; five degrees east of Universal south." "And you'll be Emperor Marc the First after all. But you won't live long enough to rule very much." "You're wrong, Steff. The ordinary people are already there, and it's ridiculous for a sound and healthy body to deteriorate and die at a hundred. We'll live ten or fifteen times that long, what with what I already know and the advances our medical science will make. Especially with the elimination of the unfit." "Sterilization, you mean?" "No; death. Don't go soft on me, girl. There will be no second-class citizens, at least in the upper stratum. Testing for that stratum will be b super-computer. Upper-stratum families will be fairly large." "Families?" she broke in. "You've come to realize, then, that the family is the sine qua non of civilization?" "I've always known that." Forestalling another interruption with a wave of his hand, he went on, "I know. I've never been a family man. On Earth or in our present cultures I would never become one. But skipping that for the moment, it's your turn now." "I like it." She thought in silence for a couple of minutes, then went on, "It must be an autocracy, of course, and you're the man to make it work. The only flaw I can see is that even absolute authority can not make a dictated marriage either tolerable or productive. It automatically isn't, on both counts." "Who said anything about dictated marriage? Free choice within the upper stratum and by test from the lower. With everybody good breeding stock, what difference will it make who marries whom?" "Oh. I see. That does it, of course. Contrary to all appearances, then, you actually do believe in love. The implication has been pellucidly clear all along that you expect... "'Expect' is too strong a word. Make it that I'm 'exploring the possibility of." "I'll accept that. You are exploring the possibility of me becoming your empress. From all the given premises, the only valid conclusion is that you love me. Check?" "The word 'love' has so many and such tricky meanings that it is actually meaningless. Thus, I don't know whether I love you or not, in your interpretation of the term. If it means to you that I will jump off of a cliff or blow my brains out if you refuse, I don't. Or that I'll pine away and not marry a second best, I don't. If, however, it means a lot of other things, I do. Whatever it means, will you marry me?" "Of course I will, Blackie. Fve ISf The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: After having just finished Patron of the ArtSy I can't understand why more 'Hue  Cry" isn't made over Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories. People keep praising your longer and flashier Retief and Gree stories. I can see why, because I think they are both terrific -- and have been a Retief fan since January, # and The Yllian Way. But I haven't seen even one letter (although I have missed a couple of issues) praising these short but great stories of the war of life vs. the berserker machines. The idea behind them all is fascinating and original, and each one is clear and well developed -- an unusual quality in stories of that length. More of them, please! Another good story from the same issue as Patron was We Hunters of Men, The story was excellent and the curtain line was one of the best ever. A bad story from that issue was The Craterj and the artwork was worse. No more Nodel, huh? Congratulations on your longer format. I haven't seen one of the bigger issues yet but I know it will be terrific. If is the best SciPi mag around, and you can't get too much of a good thing! -- Bill Reynolds, Jr., # Acre Lane, Hicksville, New York.  Coming up next month: Masque of the Red Shifty a Berserker novelette -- and more to follow! -- Editor,    Dear Editor: You bring up an interesting point: I refer to the problem of getting readers to write in and tell you what they want in the magazine. There are a number of reasons why you will have a hard time getting such letters. First of all, tho majority of letter writers are in that little group of just about one thousand people who call themselves 'science fiction fandom'. That is not much use, because their interests are a closed-circle affair. So far as I have been able to find out, their opinions of Worlds of Tomorrow and IF are quite low. We come, then H the problem of the greneral public. Daring the period of culture in eience fiction, the general public got a pretty raw deal. The letters they wrote to science-fiction editors, were usually answered insultingly, requesting the things they liked, I recall one editor publicly, in print, stating that such people were probably perverts because they objected to an overload of sex in the stories. It really became a sad situation when the writers joined the editors in 'telling off' the readers. You can't blame the readers for noi: really believing you when you say you want their opinions. How to overcome it? Darned if I know. Of course, one of the problems of getting into contact with the readers is that very few of them read either the editorial column or ttio reader's oriumn (when such is printed). Speaking personally, I read sciencefiction for ten years (back in the thirties) before I was even aware ef the existence of the editorial or reader's pages. I bought the magazines for the stories; the same reason most people ouy fictio'i magazines. When the fiction got too dull, I just stopped reading the magazine. While I am writing this, I might as well extend my comments. Do you remember why science-fiction magazines went to the digest size? Most people do not remember. It was the outgrowth of yells from science-fiction fandom for trimmed edges. A big uproar about nothing important. The magazines could not give trimmed edges at the large size without increasing the expense of the magazines. But it could be done at a smaller size; so we got 'digest' magazines. Frankly, I do not think it was worth it. Good display became impossible. I realize that Campbell tried to return to the large size. However, he tried it with trimmed edges and slick paper; a good way of pricing himself out of existence. From my point of view, a return to the untrimmed edges would do the pulp business a great deal of good. They might even start thinking, of the line as a money making business. Of course, there were also complaints from science-fiction fandom about the guy-girl-monster covers. This was also a very foolish objection. The cover is a billboard. If it is not used as such it might as well be blank. The only value of a cover on a newsstand magazine is to attract attention in any way possible. If it can only be done by making the cover like a circus poster, then it should look like a circus poster. If a damsel in distress is the best way, then it should be use.';. A colored cover, alone, will not attract attention; nor will unusual circumstances. Activity is important in a cover picture. The only way to prepare a cover display properly is to assume that the magazine is being seen for the first time by a person who has never heard of sciencefiction. The truth is that the general public never has heard of science-fiction. The general term for the type of writing is still 'that Buck Rogers stuff'. Only the writing profession knows the difference. Of course, basically, there is no difference. The basic pattern is the same; the difference is only in the way you stretch it. Stretched in one direction, it becomes 'social commentary. Stretched in another direction, U becomes entertainment. It all depends on what you want to sell. I assume Galaxy is 'social commentary, and Worlds of Tomorrow and IF are entertainment magazines. If the latter are entertainment magazines, they cannot be handled, visually, in the same manner as Galaxy. Illustrations in an entertainment magazine require lively action and clear cut artwork. A person looking for entertainment is not looking for subtlety. I suppose everybody has an opinion on this sort of thing. My opinion is based on six years of digging into the whys and whats of complaints I heard in the publishing business about loss of readers. I questioned editors, writers, printers and distributors. The final answer is rather peculiar. There is really nothing basically wrong with file publishing business, and the readers are still available for all tsrpes of reading material. Television, radio and the movies never did any damage to the publishing business. The only damage, if any, was In the fears that the aforementloiied mediums would hurt them. As a roouH, a great many publishers ehaiiged fiieir merchandising methods unnecessarily. It's somethhig like file danger of ghosts: they eant hut you, but they sure can make you hurt yourself. Best of luck. -- D. Bruce Berry, # North Malden Street, Cileago,  Actually, it's probably too late for untrimming the edges to help anything -- those big pulp presses that used to chum out the shaggy books on the blotting-paper stock have long since been dismantled. But you make a lot of good points, and we'll admit you've started us thinking. One effect: We're going to take a lmg, hard look at our policies ! -- Bddtor. Dear Editor: As a fairly new subscriber, I think you would be doing a great service if you would print a short biography of the Retief stories in If. Also, please try getting Laumer to write a Retief serial. -- James E. Turner, Pilot Knob, Missouri # ( # .  All right. See Page # -- and surrounding territory. And that just about does it again. Our story for this issue by a writer never previously published anywhere is Purpooo, by Edward V. Dong -- whom we first met, a year or two ago, when we were invited to speak to the science-fiction club at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where he was thi an undergraduate in the engineering school. By the way, you all know, don't you, that we do make a point to bring one brand new writer into every issue of If. We've recently brought a batch of them -- from a high-school student, a folk singer, a mathematician and a retired Navy officer, among others -- but we'll be buying a lot more. Maybe yours? And we've also recently bought some large clumps of material from some writers who are not at all brand-new. (This new large size eats up a lot of material!) Our next serial will be Robert A. Heinlein's now one; a B-I-G story, but we're going to attempt to bring it to you intact. Following that, a great joy by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown in collaboration, called Barthblood; following that, Algis Budrys's first sf magazine serial, The Iron Thom. And the way -- it is our personal opinion that we have just named #'s Hugo winner -- and maybe two of the runners-up, as well I -- iditor. IF October # # Earth's most unpredictable diplomat Takes on a planet of living machines! WORLDS OF November # -- #c They read dead men's minds Your Subscription is tour Private Window On the stars Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street  New York, N.Y. # Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose  my check or money order for:  I # issues for # j # issues for # Name #  Address #  # City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. # Please check whether Q new or  renewal. J The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #S#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants ) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Vol. #, No. #I Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn , Publisher Diane Sullivan , Associate Editor Mavis Fisher , Subs. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York. #c per copy. Subscriptions # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York #, N. Y. IF  Editorial H eard any of these statements lately? " Women are as intelligent as men -- I.Q. tests prove it." "Animal mothers often adopt babies of other species as their own -- witness cats and new born rabbits -- so those stories about wolf-boys raised in the jungle could be true." "Negroes are intrinsically less educable than Europeans; the state of civilization in Africa proves it." Or its opposite: "There is absolutely no difference, intellectually or biologically, between races; all men are created not only equal but identical." If you have heard them -- or any of thousands of "clearly proved" or "well known" alleged facts like them that turn up in around-thecocktail-table discussions of human beings and their manifold strangenesses, a book we have just read called Your Heredity and Environment hy Amram Scheinfeld (Lippineott) will surprise and fascinate ou. True, boys and girls in mass testing get identical scores on I.Q. tests; but what we, at least didn't know -- and what Scheinfeld points reason for this: all I.Q. tests have been systematically "corrected" to make male and female results come out equal... For every "boy-oriented" question, a "girl-oriented" question has been conscientously added. The wolf-boys? Well, says Scheinfeld, apart from all the other arguments against them, consider one thing: the human infant requires longer nursing than any other -- and no mother but a human mother is naturally equipped to provide that much nursing. As to the question of race differences, if any, Scheinfeld makes a crystal-clear case. Mast "racial" differences are clearly environmental, not innate -- Negroes score somewhat lower on I.Q. tests than whites; but Northern Negroes score higher  than Southern whites -- presumably because of the presence of better schools, better public health services and maybe a more technologically demanding culture. But some differences can't be explained that way. For example, some nationalities thrive on an article of diet called the fava bean; others develop a serious illness from it. South African whites suffer from a disease called Porphyria variegata; other whites, and almost all Negroes, practically never have it. In the case of the South Africans, says Scheinfeld, the hereditary factors can be traced back to a single Afrikaner family (named Gerrit) ; and what is at work is not so much racial difference but genetic drift. In other words, X nationality may indeed be somewhat more likely to show a certain trait than any other. But an X-man doesn't inherit the trait because his ancestors were X-men ; he inherits i from certain particular ancestors... Well, there's lots more; but it's a book worth reading. We enjoyed it... and we can think of a few people who need it! IF  Novelette. Something on the planet loved people -- loved them enough to free them from their lives  I A man with hallucinations he cannot stand trying to strangle himself in a home-made straitjacket is not a pretty sight. But after a while, grimly thought Jerry McWhin, the Star Scout's navigator, the ugly and terrible seem to backfire in efharrowing you further. Men in crowds and packs could be stampeded briefly, but after a while the individual among them would turn, get his back up, and slash back. At least -- the hyper-stubborn individual in himself had finally so reacted. Determinedly, with fingers that fumbled from lack of sleep, he got the strangling man -- Wally Blake, an assistant ecologist -- untangled and into a position where it would be difficult for him to try to choke out his own life, again. Then Jerry went out of the sickbay storeroom, leaving Wally and the other seven men out of the Star Scout's complement of twelve who were in total restraint. He was lightheaded from exhaustion; but a berserk something in him snarled like a cornered tiger and refused to break like Wally and the others. When all's said and done, he thought half-crazily, there's worse ways to come to the end of it than a last charge, win or lose, alone into the midst of all your enemies. Going down the corridor, the sight of another figure jolted him a little back toward common sense. Ben Akham, the drive engineer, came trudging back from the airlock corridor with a flame thrower on his back. Soot etched darkly the lines on his once-round face. "Get the hull cleared?" asked Jerry. Ben nodded exhausted. "There's more jungle on her every morning," he grunted. "Now those big thistles are starting to drip a corrosive liquid. The hull needs an anti-acid washing. I can't do it. I'm worn out." "We all are," said Jerry. His own five-eleven frame was down to a hundred and thirty-eight pounds. There was plenty of food -- it was just that the four men left on their feet had no time to prepare it; and little enough time to eat it, prepared or not. Exploration Team Five-TwentvNine, thought Jerry, had finally bitten off more than it could chew, here on the second planet of Star #. It was nobody's fault. It had been a gamble for Milt Johnson, the Team Captain, either way -- to land or not to land. He had landed; and it had turned out bad. B y such small things was the scale toward tragedy tipped. A communication problem with the natives, a native jungle evidently determined to digest the spaceship, and eight of twelve men down with something like suicidal delirium tremens -- any two of these things the Team could probably have handled. But not all three at once. Jerry and Ben reached the entrance of the Control Room together and peered in, looking for Milt Johnson. "Must be ootside, talking to that native again," said Jerry. "Ootside? -- Oof-side!" exploded Ben, with a sudden snapping of frayed nerves. "Can't you say 'outside'? -- 'Owf-side', like everybody else?" The berserk something in Jerry lunged to be free, but he caught it and hauled it back. "Get hold of yourself!" he snapped. "Well... I wouldn't mind you sounding like a blasted Scotchman all the time!" growled Ben, getting himself, nevertheless, somewhat under control. "It's just you always do it when I don't expect it!" "If the Lord wanted us all to sound alike, he'd have propped up the Tower of Babel," said Jerry wickedly. He was not particularly religious himself, but he knew Ben to be a table-thumping atheist. He had the satisfaction now of watching the other man bite his lips and control himself in his turn. Academically, however, Jerry thought as they both headed out through the ship to find Milt, he IP could not really blame Ben. For Jerry, like many Scot-Canadians, appeared to speak a very middle-western American sort of English most of the time. But only as long as he avoided such vocabulary items as 'house' and 'out'; which popped off Jerry's tongue as 'hoose' and 'oot'. However, every man aboard had his personal peculiarities. You had to get used to them. That was part of spaceship -- in fact, part of human -- life. They emerged from the lock, rounded the nose of the spaceship, and found themselves in the neat little clearing on one side of the ship where the jungle paradoxically refused to grow. In this clearing stood the broad-shouldered figure of Milt Johnson, his whitish-blond hair glinting in the yellowwhite sunlight. F acing Milt was the thin, naked, and saddle-colored, humanoid figure of one of the natives from the village, or whatever it was, about twenty minutes away by jungle trail. Between Milt and the native was the glittering metal console of the translator machine. "... Let's try it once more," they heard Milt saying as they came up and stopped behind him. The native gabble agreeably. "Yes, yes. Try it again," translated the voice of the console. "I am Captain Milton Johnson. I am in authority over the crew of the ship you see before me." "Gladly would I not see it," replied the console on translation of the native's gabblings. "However -- I am Communicator, messenger to you sick ones." "I will call you Communicator, then," began Milt. "Of course. What else could you call me?" "Please," said Milt, wearily. "To get back to it -- I also am a Communicator." "No, no," said the native. "You are not a Communicator. It is the sickness that makes you talk this way." "But," said Milt, and Jerry saw the big, white-haired captain swallow in an attempt to keep his temper. "You will notice, I am communicating with you." "No, no." "I see," said Milt patiently, "You mean, we aren't communicating in the sense that we aren't understanding each other. We're talking, but you don't understand me -- " "No, no. I understand you perfectly." "Well," said Milt, exhaustedly, "I don't understand you." 'That is because you are sick." Milt blew out a deep breath and wiped his brow. "Forget that part of it, then," he said. "Many of my crew are upset by nightmares we all have been having. They are sick. But there are still four of us who are well -- " "No, no. You are all sick," said Communicator earnestly. "But you should love what you call nightmares. All people love them." "Including you and your people?" "Of course. Love your nightmares They will make you well. They will make the little bit of proper life in you grow, and heal B en snorted beside Jerry. Jerry could sympathize with the other man. The nightmares he had been having during his scant hours of deep, the past two weeks, came back to his mind, with the indescribably alien, terrifying sensation of drifting in a sort of environmental soup with identifiable things changing abape and identity constantly around him. Even pumped full of tranquilizers, he thought -- which reminded Jerry. He had not taken hs tranquilizers lately. When had he taken some last? Hot since he woke up, in any case. Not since... yesterday, sometime. Though that was now hard to believe. "Let's forget that, too, then." Milt was saying. "Now, the jungle is growing all over our ship, in spite of all we can do. You tell me your people can make the jungle do anything you want." "Yes, yes," said Communicator, agreeably. "Then, will you please stop it from growing all over our spaceship?" "We understand. It is your sickness, the poison that makes you say this. Do not fear. We will never abandon you." Communicator looked almost ready to pat Milt consolingly on the head. "You are people, who are more important than any cost. Soon you will grow and cast off your poisoned part and come to us." "But we can come to you right now!" said Milt, between his teeth. "In fact -- we've come to your village a dozen times." "No, no." Communicator sounded distressed. "You approach, but you do not come. You have never come to us." Milt wiped his forehead with the back of a wide hand. "I will come back to your village now, with you." he said. "Would you like that?" he asked. "I would be so happy!" said Communicator. "But -- you will not come. You say it, but you do not come." "All right. Wait -- " about to take a hand transceiver from the console, Milt saw the other two men. "Jerry," he said, "you go this time. Maybe he'll believe it if it's you who goes to the village with him." "I've been there before. With you, the second time you went," objected Jerry. "And I've got to feed the men in restraint, pretty soon," he added. "Try going again. That's all we can do -- try things. Ben and I'll feed the men," said Milt. Jerry, about to argue further, felt the pressure of a sudden wordless, exhausted appeal from Milt. Milt's basic berserkedness must be just about ready to break loose, too, he realized. "All right," said Jerry. "Good," said Milt, looking grateful. "We have to keep trying. I should have lifted ship while I still had five well men to lift it with. Come on, Ben -- you and I better go feed those men now, before we fall asleep on our feet." MMtm, Wm # # OKtNS' II T hey went away around the nose of the ship. Jerry unhooked the Kttle black-and-white transceiver, that would radio-relay his conversations with Communicator back to the console of the translator for sense-making during the trip. "Come on," he said to Communicator, and led off down the pleasantly wide jungle trail toward the native village. They passed from under the little patch of open sky above the clearing and into green-roofed stillness. All about them, massive limbs, branches, ferns and vines intertwined in a majestic maze of growing things. Small flying creatures, looking half-animal and half-insect, flittered among the branches overhead. Some larger, more animal-like, creatures sat on the heavier limbs and moaned off-key like abandoned puppies. Jerry's head spun with his weariness, and the green over his head seemed to close down on him like a net flung by some giant, crazy fisherman, to take him captive. He was suddenly and bitterly reminded of the Team's high hopes, the day they had set down on this world. No other Team or Group had yet to turn up any kind of alien life much more intelligent than an anthropoid ape. Now they, Team #, had not only uncovered an intelligent, evidently semi-cultured alien people, but an alien people eager to establish relations with the humans and communicate. Here, two weeks later, the natives were still apparently just as eager to communicate, but what they said made no sense. Nor did it help that, with the greatest of patience and kindness, Communicator and his kind seemed to consider that it was the humans who were irrational and uncommunicative. Nor that meanwhile, that the jungle seemed to be mounting a specifically directed attack on the human spaceship. Nor that the nightmare afflicting the humans had already laid low eight of the twelve crew and were grinding the four left on their feet down to a choice between suicidal delirium or collapse from exhaustion. I t was a miracle, thought Jerry, lightheadedly trudging through the jungle, that the four of them had been able to survive as long as they had. A miracle based probably on some individual chance peculiarity of strength that the other eight men in straitjackets lacked. Although, thought Jerry now, that strength that was had so far defied analysis. Dizzily, like a man in a high fever, he considered their four surviving personalities in his mind's eye. They were, he thought, the four men of the team with what you might call the biggest mental crochets. -- Or ornery streaks. Take the fourth member of the group -- the Medician, Arthyr Loy, who had barely stuck his nose out of the sick bay lab in the last fortyeight hours. Not only because he was the closest thing to an M.D. aboard the ship, was Art still deterIF lined to put the eight restrained men back on their feet again. It just happened, in addition, that Art considered himself the only true professional man aboard, and was not the kind to admit any inability to the lesser mortals about him. And Milt Johnson -- Milt made an excellent captain. He was a tower of strength, a great man for making decisions. The only thing was, that having decided, Milt could hardly be brought to consider the remote possibility that anyone else might have wanted to decide differently. Ben Akham was another matter. Ben hated religion and loved machinery -- and the jungle surrounding was attacking his spaceship. In the time he got back, Ben would be washing the hull with an acid-counteractant in spite of what he had told Jerry earlier. And himself? Jerry? Jerry shook his head woozily. It was hard to be self-analytical after ten days of three and four hours sleep per twenty. He had what his grandmother had once described as the curse of the Gael -- black stubbornness and red rages. All of these traits, in all four of them, had normally been buried safely below the surfaces of their personalities and had only colored them as individuals. But now, the last two weeks had worn those surfaces down to basic personality bedrock. Jerry shoved the thought out of his mind. "Well," he said, turning to Communicator, "we're almost to your village now... You can't say someone didn't come with you, this time." Communicator gabbled. The trans-' ceiver in Jerry's hand translated. "Alas," the native said, "bitf you are not with me." "Cut it out!" said Jerry wearily. "I'm right here beside you." "No," said Communicator. "You accompany me, but you are not here. You are back with your dead things." "You mean the ship and the rest of it?" asked Jerry. "There is no ship," said Communicator. "A ship must have grown and been alive. Your thing has always been dead. But we will save you." Ill T hey came out of the path at last into a clearing dotted with whitish, pumpkin-like shells some ten feet in height above the brown earth in which they were half-buried. Wide cracks in the out-curving sides gave view of tangled roots and plants inside, among which other natives could be seen moving about, scratching, tasting and making holes in the vegetable surfaces. "Well," said Jerry, making an effort to speak cheerfully, "here I am." "You are not here." The berserk tigerishness in Jerry leaped up unawares and took him by the inner throat. For a long second he looked at Communicator through a red haze. Communicator gazed back patiently, evidently unaware how close he was to having his neck broken by a pair of human hands. n "Look --  said Jerry, slowly, between his teeth, getting himself under control, "if you will just tell me what to do to join you and your people, here, I will do it." "That is good!" "Then," said Jerry, still with both hands on the inner fury that fought to tear loose inside him, "what do I do?" "But you know -- " The enthusiasm that had come into Communicator a moment before, wavered visibly. "You must get rid of the dead things, and set yourself free to grow, inside. Then, after you have grown, your unsick self will bring you here to join us!" Jerry stared back. Patience, he said harshly to himself. "Grow? How? In what way?" "But you have a little bit of proper life in you," explained Communicator. "Not much, of course... but if you will rid yourself of dead things and concentrate on what you call nightmares, it will grow and force out the poison of the dead life in you. The proper life and the nightmares are the hope for you -- " "Wait a minuter Jerry's exhaustion-fogged brain cleared suddenly and nearly miraculously at the sudden surge of excitement into his bloodstream. "This proper life you talk about -- does it have something to do with the nightmares?" "Of course. How could you have what you call nightmares without a little proper life in you to give them to you? As the proper life grows, you will cease to fight so against the 'nightmares'... Communicator continued to talk earnestly. But Jerry's spinning brain was flying off on a new tangent. What was it he had been dunking earlier about tranquilizers -- that hi had not taken any himself for some time? Then, what about the nightmares in his last four hours of sleep? He must have had them -- he remembered now that he had had them. But evidently they had not bothered him as much as before -- at least, not enough to send him scrambling for tranquilizers to dufi the dreams' weird impact on him. "Communicator!" Jerry grabbed at the thin, leathery-skinned arm of die native. "Have I been chang -- growing?" "I do not know, of course," said the native, courteously. "I profoundly hope so. Have you?" "Excuse me -- " gulped Jerry. "I've got to get oot of here -- bade to th ship!" H e turned, and raced back up the trail. Some twenty minutes later, he burst into the clearing before the ship to find an ominous silence hanging over everything. Only the faint rustle and hissing from the ever-growing jungle swallowing up the ship sounded on Ws eardrums. "Milt -- Ben!" he shouted, plunging into the ship. "Art!" A hail from farther down the main corridor reassured him, and he followed it up to find all three unrestrained members of the crew in the sickbay. But -- Jerry brought himself up short, his throat closing IP on him -- there was a figure on the table. "Who... began Jerry. Milt Johnson turned around to face him. The captain's big body mercifully hid most of the silent form on the table. "Wally Blake," said Milt emptily. "He managed to strangle himself after all. Got twisted up in his restraint jacket. Ben and I heard him thumping around in there, but by the time we got to him, it was too late. Art's doing an autopsy." "Not exactly an autopsy," came the soft, Virginia voice of the Medician from beyond Milt. "Just looking for something I suspected... and here it is!" Milt spun about and Jerry pushed between the big captain and Ben. He found himself looking at the back of a human head from which a portion of the skull had been removed. What he saw before him was a small expanse of whitish, soft, inner tissue that was the brainstem; and fastened to it almost like a grape growing there, was a small, purplish mass. Art indicated the purple shape with the tip of a sharp, surgical instrument. "There," he said. "And I bet we've each got one." "What is it?" asked Ben's voice, hushed and a little nauseated. "I don't know," said Art harshly. "How the devil would I be able to tell? But I found organisms in the bloodstreams of those of us I've taken blood samples from -- organisms like spores, that look like this, only smaller, microscopic in size." "You didn't tell me that!" said Milt, turning quickly to face him. # #TT#hat was the point?" Art VV turned toward the Team Captain. Jerry saw that the Medician's long face was almost bloodless. "I didn't know what they were. I thought if I kept looking, I might know more. Then I could have something positive to tell you, as well as the bad news. But -- it's no use now." "Why do you say that?" snapped Milt. "Because it's the truth." Art's face seemed to slide apart, go loose and waxy with defeat. "As long as it was something non-physical we were fighting, there was some hope we could throw it off. But -- you see what's going on inside us. We're being changed physically. That's where the nightmares come from. You can't overcome a physical change with an effort of will!" "What about the Grotto at Lourdes?" asked Jerry. His head was whirling strangely with a mass of ideas. His own great-grandfather -- the family story came back to mind -- had been judged by his physician in eighteen ninety-six to have advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. Going home from the doctor's office, Simon Fraser McWhin had decided that he could not afford to have tuberculosis at this time. That he would not, therefore, have tuberculosis at all. And he had dismissed the matter fully from his mind. One year later, examined by the same physician, he had no signs of tuberculosis whatsoever. But in this present moment, Art. curling up in his chair at the end of the table, seemed not to have heard Jerry's question. And Jerry was suddenly reminded of the question that had brought him pelting back from the native village. "Is it growing -- I mean was it growing when Wally strangled himself -- that growth on his brain?" he asked. Art roused himself. "Growing?" he repeated dully. He climbed to his feet and picked up an instrument. He investigated the purple mass for a moment. "No," he said, dropping the instrument wearily and falling back into his chair. "Looks like its outer layer has died and started to be reabsorbed -- I think." He put his head in his hands. "I'm not qualified to answer such questions. I'm not trained..." "Who is?" demanded Milt, grimly, looming over the table and the rest of them. "And we're reaching the limit of our strength as well as the limits of what we know -- " "We're done for," muttered Ben. His eyes were glazed, looking at the dissected body on the table. "It's not my fault -- " "Catch him! Catch Art!" shouted Jerry, leaping forward. B ut he was too late. The Medician had been gradually curling up in his chair since he had sat down in it again. Now, he slipped out of it to the floor, rolled in a ball, and lay still. "Leave him alone." Milt's large hand caught Jerry and held him back. "He may as well lie there at someplace else." He got to his feet. "Ben's right. We're done for." "Done for?" Jerry stared at the big man. The words he had just heard were words he would never have imagined hearing from Milt. "Yes," said Milt. He seemed somehow to be speaking from a long distance off. "Listen -- " said Jerry. The tigerishness inside him had woken at Milt's words. It tugged and snarled against the words of defeat from the captain's lips. "We're winning. We aren't losing!" "Quit it, Jerry," said Ben dully, from the far end of the room. "Quit it -- ?" Jerry swung on the engineer. "You lost your temper with me before I went down to the village, about the way I said 'oot'l How could you lose your temper if you were full of tranquilizers? I haven't been taking any myself, and I feel better because of it. Don't tell me you've been taking yours! -- And that means we're getting stronger than the nightmares." "The tranquilizer've been making me sick, if you must know! That's why I haven't been taking them -- " Ben broke off, his face graying. He pointed a shaking finger at the purplish mass. "I'm being changed, that's why they made me sick! I'm changing already!" His' voice rose toward a scream. "Don't you see, it's changing me -- " He broke off, suddenly screaming and leaping at Milt with clawing fingers. "We're all changing! And it's your fault for bringing the ship down here. You did it -- " IF Milt's huge fist slammed into the side of the smaller man's jaw, driving him to the floor beside the still shape of the Medician, where he lay quivering and sobbing. Slowly Milt lifted his gaze from the fallen man and faced Jerry. It was the standard seventy-two degrees Centigrade in the room, but Jerry saw perspiration standing out on Milt's calm face as if he had just stepped out of a steam bath. "But he may be right," said Milt, emotionlessly. His voice seemed to come from the far end of some lightless tunnel. "We may be changing under the influence of those growths right now -- each of us." "Milt!" said Jerry, sharply. But Milt's face never changed. It was large, and calm, and pale -- and drenched with sweat. "Now's the last time we ought to give up! We're starting to understand it now. I tell you, the thing is to meet Communicator and the other natives head on! Head to head we can crack them wide open. One of us has to go down to that village." "No. I'm the captain," said Milt, his voice unchanged. "I'm responsible, and I'll decide. We can't lift ship with less than five men and there's only two of us -- you and I  -- actually left. I can't risk one of us coming under the influence of the growth in him, and going over to the alien side." "Going over?" Jerry stared at him. #Tphat's what all this has been A for -- the jungle, the natives, the nightmare... They want to take us over." Sweat ran down Milt's cheeks and dripped off his chin, while he continued to talk tonelessly and gaze straight ahead. 'They'll send us -- what's left of us -- back against our own people. I can't let that happenWe'll have to destroy ourselves so there's nothing for them to use." "Milt -- " said Jerry. "No." Milt swayed faintly on his feet like a tall tree under a wind too high to be felt on the ground at its base. "We can't risk leaving ship or crew. We'll blow the ship up with ourselves in it -- " "Blow up my ship f It was a wild-animal scream from the floor at their feet; and Ben Akham rose from almost under the table like a demented wildcat, aiming for Milt's jugular vein. So unexpected and powerful was the attack that the big captain tottered and fell. With a noise like worrying dogs, they rolled together under tl ie table. The chained tiger inside Jerry broke its bonds and flung free. He turned and ducked through the door into the corridor. It was a heavy pressure door with a wheel lock, activating metal dogs to seal it shut in case of a hull blowout and sudden loss of air. Jerry slammed the door shut, and spun the wheel. The dogs snicked home. Snatching down the portable fire extinguisher hanging on the wall alongside, Jerry dropped the foam container on the floor and jammed the metal nozzle of its hose between a spoke of the locking wheel and the unlocking stop on the door beneath it. He paused. There was silence inride the sick bay lab. Then the wheel jerked against the nozzle and the door tried to open. "What's going on?" demanded the voice of Milt. There was a pause. "Jerry, what's going on out there? Open up!" A wild, crazy impulse to hysterical laughter rose inside Jerry without warning. It took all his will power to choke it back. "You're locked in, Milt," he said. "Jerry!" The wheel spoke clicked against the jamming metal nozzle, in a futile effort to turn. "Open up! That's an order!" "Sorry, Milt," said Jerry softly and lightheadedly. "I'm not ready yet to burn the hoose about my ears. This business of you wanting to blow up the ship's the same sort of impulse to suicide that got Wally and the rest. I'm off to face the natives now and let them have their way with me. I'll be back later, to let you oot." "Jerry!" Jerry heard Milt's voice behind him as he went off down the corridor. " Jerry F There was a fussilade of pounding fists against the door, growing fainter as Jerry moved away. "Don't you see? -- That growth in you is finally getting you! Jerry, come back! Don't let them take over one of us! Jerry..." J erry left the noise and the ship together behind him as he stepped out of the airlock. The jungle, he saw, was covering the ship's hull again, already hiding it for the most part. He went on out to the translator console and began taking off his clothes. When he was completely un! dressed, he unhooked the transceiver he had brought back from the native village, slung it on a loop of his belt, and hung the belt around his neck. He headed off down the trail toward the village, wincing a little as the soles of his shoeless feet came into contact with pebbles along the way. When he got to the village clearing, a naked shape he recognized as that of Communicator tossed up its arms in joy and came running to him. "Well," said Jerry. "I've grown. I've got rid of the poison of dead things and the sickness. Here I am to join you!" "At last!" gabbled Communicator. Other natives were running up. "Throw away the dead thing around your neck!" "I still need it to understand you," said Jerry. "I guess I need a little help to join you all the way." "Help? We will help!" cried Communicator. "But you must throw that away. You have rid yourself of the dead things that you kept wrapped around your limbs and body," gabbled Communicator. "Now rid yourself of the dead thing hanging about your neck." "But I tell you, if I do that," objected Jerry, "I won't be able to understand you when you talk, or make you understand me!" "Throw it away. It is poisoning you! Throw it away!" said Communicator. By this time three or four more natives had come up and IF others were headed for the gathering. "Shortly you will understand all, and all will understand you. Throw it away!" "Throw it away!" chorused the other natives. "Well..." said Jerry. Reluctantly, he took off the belt with the transceiver, and dropped it Communicator gabbled unintelligibly. "... come with me..." translated the transceiver like a faint and tinny echo from the ground where it had landed. Communicator took hold of Jerry's hand and drew him toward the nearest whitish structure. Jerry swallowed unobtrusively. It was one thing to make up his mind to do this; it was something else again to actually do it. But he let himself be led to and in through a crack in the structure. I nside, the place smelled rather like a mixture of a root cellar and a hayloft -- earthy and fragrant at the same time. Communicator drew him in among the waist high tangle of roots rising and reentering the packed earth floor. The other natives swarmed after them. Close to the center of the floor they reached a point where the roots were too thick to allow them to pick their way any further. The roots rose and tangled into a mat, the irregular surface of which was about three feet off the ground. Communicator patted the root surface and gabbled agreeably.' "You want me to get up there?" Jerry swallowed again, then gritted his teeth as the chained fury in him turned suddenly upon himself. There was nothing worse, he snarled at himself, than a man who was loag on planning a course of action but short on carrying it out Awkwardly, he clambered up on to the matted surrace of the roots. They gave irregularly under him anil their rough surfaces scraped his knees and hands. The natives gabbled, and he felt leather hands urging him to stretch out and lie down on his back. He did so. The root scored and poked the tender skin of his back. It was exquisitely uncomfortable. "Now what -- ?" he gasped. He turned his head to look at the natives and saw that green tendrils, growing rapidly from the root mass, were winding about and garlanding the arms and legs of Communicator and several other of the natives standing by. A sudden pricking at his left wrist made him look down. Green garlands were twining around his own wrists and ankles, sending wire-thin tendrils into his skin. In unconscious reflex of panic he tried to heave upward, but the green bonds held him fast. "Gabble-gabble-gabble..." warbled Communicator, reassuringly. With sudden alarm, Jerry realized that the green tendrils were growing right into the arms and legs of the natives as well. He was abruptly conscious of further prickings in his own arms and legs. "What's going on -- " he started to say. but found his tongue had gone unnaturally thick and unmanageable. A wave of dizziness swept over him as if a powerful general anesthetic was taking hold. The intenor of the structure seemed to darken; and he felt as if he was swooping away toward its ceiling on the long swing of some monster pendulum... It swung him on into darkness. And nightmare. I t was the same old nightmare, but more so. It was nightmare experienced awake instead of asleep; and the difference was that he had no doubt about the fact that he was experiencing what he was experiencing, nor any tucked-away certainty that waking would bring him out of ft. Once more he floated through a changing soup of uncertainty, himself a changing part of it. It was not painful, it was not even terrifying. But it was hideous -- it was an affront to nature. He was not himself. He was a thing, a part of the whole -- and he must reconcile himself to being so. He must accept it. Reconcile himself to it -- no! It was not possible for the unbending, solitary, individualistic part that was him to do so. But accept it -- maybe. Jerry set a jaw that was no longer a jaw and felt the determination in him to blast through, to comprehend this incomprehensible thing, become hard and undeniable as a swordpoint of tungsten steel. He drove through -- And abruptly the soup fell into order. It slid into focus like a blurred scene before the gaze of a badly ipyopic man who finally gets his spectacles before his eyes. Suddenly, Jerry was aware that what he observed was a scene not just before his eyes, but before his total awareness. And it was not the interior of the structure where he lay on a bed of roots, but the whole planet. It was a landscape of factories. Countless factories, interconnected, intersupplying, integrated. It lacked only that he find his own working place among them. Now, said this scene. This is the sane universe , the way it really is. Reconcile yourself to it. The hell I will! It was the furious unbending, solitary, individualistic part that was essentially him, speaking again. Not just speaking. Roaring -- snarling its defiance, like a tiger on a hillside. And the scene went -- pop. Jerry opened his eyes. He sat up. The green shoots around and in his wrists and ankles pulled prickingly at him. But they were already dying and not able to hold him. He swung his legs over the edge of the mat of roots and stood down. Communicator and the others, who were standing there, backed fearfully away from him, gabbling. H e understood their gabbling no better than before, but now he could read the emotional overtones in it. And those overtones were now of horror and disgust, overlying a wild, atavistic panic and terror. He walked forward. They scuttled away before him, gabbling, and he walked through the nearest crack in the wall of the structure and out into the sunlight, toward the transceiver and the belt where he had dropped them. IF "Monster!" screamed the transceiver tinnily, faithfully translating the gabbling of the Communicator, who was following a few steps behind like a small dog barking behind a larger. "Brute! Savage! Unclean... it kept up a steady denunciation. Jerry turned to face Communicator, and the native tensed for flight. "You know what I'm waiting for," said Jerry, almost smiling, hearing the transceiver translate his words into gabbling -- though it was not necessary. As he had said, Communicator knew what he was waiting for. Communicator cursed a little longer in his own tongue, then went off into one of the structures, and returned with a handful of what looked like lengths of green vine. He dropped them on the ground before Jerry and backed away, cautiously, gabbling. "Now will you go? And never come back! Never... "We'll see," said Jerry. He picked up the lengths of green vine and turned away up the path to the ship. The natives he passed on his way out of the clearing huddled away from him and gabbled as he went. When he stepped back into the clearing before the ship, he saw that most of the vegetation touching or close to the ship was already brown and dying. He went on into the ship, carefully avoiding the locked sickbay door, and wound lengths of the green vine around the wrists of each of the men in restraints. Then he sat down to await results. He had never been so tired in his life. The minute he touched the chair, his eyes started to close. He struggled to his feet and forced himself to pace the floor until the green vines, which had already sent hairthin tendrils into the ulnar arteries of the arms around which they were wrapped, pumped certain inhibitory chemicals into the bloodstreams of the seven men. When the men started to blink their eyes and look about sensibly, he went to work to unfasten the homemade straitjackets that had held them prisoner. When he had released the last one, he managed to get out his final message before collapsing. Take the ship up," croaked Jerry. "Then, let yourself into the sickbay and wrap a vine piece around the wrists of Milt, and Art, and Ben. Ship up first -- then when you're safely in space, take care of them, in the sick bay. Do it the other way and you'll never see Earth, again." They crowded around him with questions. He waved them off, dumping into one of the abandoned bunks. Ship up -- " he croaked. "Then release and fix the others. Ask me later. Later -- "... And that was all he remembered, then. V A t some indefinite time later, not quite sure whether he had woken by himself, or whether someone else had wakened him, Jerry swam back up to consciousness. He was vaguely aware that he had been sleeping a long time; and his body felt sane again, but weak as the body of a man after a long illness. He blinked and saw the laige face of Milt Johnson, partly obscured by a cup of something. Milt was seated in a chair by the side of the bunk Jerry lay in, and the Team Captain was offering the cup of steaming black liquid to Jerry. Slowly. Jerry understood that this was coffee and he struggled up on one elbow to take the cup. He drank from it slowly for a little while, while Milt watched and waited. "Do you realize," said Milt at last, when Jerry finally put down the three-quarters empty cup on the nightstand by the bunk, "that what you did in locking me in the sick bay was mutiny?" Jerry swallowed. Even his vocal chords seemed drained of strength and limp. "You realize," he croaked, "what would have happened if I hadn't?" "You took a chance. You followed a wild hunch -- " "No hunch," said Jerry. He cleared his throat. "Art found that growth on Wally's brain had quit growing before Wally killed himself. And I'd been getting along without tranquilizers -- handling the nightmares better than I had with them." "It could have been the growth in your own brain," said Milt, "taking over and running you -- working better on you than it had on Wally." "Working better -- talk sense!" said Jerry, weakly, too pared down IF by the past two weeks to care whether school kept or not, in the matter of service courtesy to a superior. "The nightmares had broken Wally down to where we had to wrap him in a straitjacket. They hadn't even knocked me off my feet. If Wally's physiological processes had fought the alien invasion to a standstill, then I, you, Art, and Ben -- all of us -- had to be doing even, better. Besides -- I'd figured out what the aliens were after." "What were they after?" Milt looked strangely at him. "Curing us -- of something we didn't have when we landed, but they thought we had." "And what was that?" "Insanity," said Jerry, grimly. M ilt's blond eyebrows went up. He opened his mouth as if to say something disbelieving -- then closed it again. When he did speak, it was quite calmly and humbly. "They thought," he asked, "Communicator's people thought that we were insane, and they could cure us?" Jerry laughed; not cheerfully, but grimly. "You saw that jungle around us back there?" he asked. "That was a factory complex -- an infinitely complex factory complex. You saw their village with those tangles of roots inside the big whitish shells? -- That was a highly diversified laboratory." Milt's blue eyes slowly widened, as Jerry watched. "You don't mean that -- seriously?" said Milt, at last. "That's right." Jerry drained the cup and set it aside. "Their technology is based on organic chemistry, the way ours is on the physical sciences. By our standards, they're chemical wizards. How'd you like to try changing the mind of an alien organism by managing to grow j;i extra part on to his brain -- the way they tried to do to us humans? To them, it was the simplest .way of convincing us." Milt stared again. Finally, he shook his head. "Why?" he said. "Why would they want to change our minds?" "Because their philosophy, their picture of life and the universe around them grew out of a chemically oriented science," answered Jerry. "The result is, they see all life as part of a closed, intra-acting chemical circuit with no loose ends; with every living thing, intelligent or not, a part of the whole. Well, you saw it for yourself in your nightmare. That's the cosmos as they see it -- and to them it's beautiful." "But why did they want us to see it the way they did?" "Out of sheer kindness," said Jerry and laughed barkingly. "Accordiag to their cosmology, there's no such thing as an alien. Therefore we weren't alien -- just sick in the head. Poisoned by the lumps of metal like the ship and the translator, we claimed were so important. And our clothes and everything else we had. The kind thing was to cure and rescue us." "Now, wait a minute," said Milt. "They saw those things of ours work -- " #I XThat's the fact they worked W got to do with it? What you don't understand, Milt," said Jerry, lying back gratefully on the bunk, that Communicator's peoples' minds were closed . Not just unconvinced, not just refusing to see -- but closed! Sealed, and welded shut from prehistoric beginnings right down to the present. The fact our translator worked meant nothin" to them. According to their cosmology, it shouldn't work, so it didn't Any stray phenomena tending to prove it did were simply the product of diseased minds." Jerry paused to emphasize the statement and his eyes drifted shut. The next thing he knew Milt was shaking him. "... Wake up!" Milt was shouting at him. "You can dope off after you've explained. I'm not going to have my crew back in strait jackets again, just because you were too sleepy to warn me they'd revert!" "... Won't revert," said Jerry, thickly. He roused himself. "Those lengths of vine released chemicals into their bloodstreams to destroy what was left of the growths. I wouldn't leave until I got them from Communicator." Jerry struggled up on one elbow again. "And after a short walk in a human brain -- mine -- he and his people couldn't get us out of sight and forgotten fast enough." "Why?" Milt shook him again as Jerry's eyelids sagged. "Why should getting their minds hooked in with yours shake them up so?" "... Bust -- bust their cosmology open. Quit shaking... I'm awake." "Why did it bust them wide open?" "Remember -- how it was for you with the nightmares?" said Jerry. "The other way around? Think back, about when you slept. There you were, a lone atom of humanity, caught up in a nightmare like one piece of stew meat in a vat stewing all life together -- just one single chemical bit with no independent existence, and no existence at all except as part of the whole. Remember?" He saw Milt shiver slightly. "It was like being swallowed up by a soft machine," said the Team Captain in a small voice. "I remember." "All right," said Jerry. "That's how it was for you in Communicator's cosmos. But remember something about that cosmos? It was warm, and safe. It was all-embracing, aH-settling, like a great, big, soft, woolly comforter." "It was too much like a woolly comforter," said Milt, shuddering. "It was unbearable." "To you. Right," said Jerry. "But to Communicator, it was ideal. And if that was ideal, think what it was like when he had to step into a human mind -- mine." M ilt stared at him. "Why?" Mitt asked. "Because," said Jerry. "He found himself alone there!" Milt's eyes widened. "Think about it. Milt." said Jerry. "From the time we're born, we're individuals. From the moment we open our eyes on the world, inside IF we're alone in the universe. All the emotional and intellectual resources that Communicator draws from his identity with the stewing vat of his cosmos, each one of us has to dig up for and out of himself!" Jerry stopped to give Milt a chance to say something. But Milt was evidently not in possession of something to say at the moment. "That's why Communicator and the others couldn't take it, when they hooked into my human mind," Jerry went on. "And that's why, when they found out what we were like inside, they couldn't wait to get rid of us. So they gave me the vines and kicked us out. That's the whole tory." He lay back on the bunk. Milt cleared his throat. "All right," he said. Jerry's heavy eyes closed. Then the other man's voice spoke, still close by his ear. "But," said Milt, "I still think you took a chance, going down to butt heads with the natives that way. What if Communicator and the rest had been able to stand exposure to your mind. You'd locked me in and the other men were in restraint. Our whole team would have been part of that stewing vat." "Not a chance," said Jerry. "You can't be sure of that." "Yes I can." Jerry heard his own voice sounding harshly beyond the darkness of his closed eyelids. "It wasn't just that I knew my cosmo logical view was too tough for them. It was the fact that their minds wen closed -- in the vat they had M freedom to change and adapt themselves to anything new." "What's that got to do with it?" demanded the voice of Milt. "Everything," said Jerry. "Their point of view only made us very uncomfortable -- but our point of view, being individually' adaptable, and open, threatened to destroy the very laws of existence as they saw them. An open mind can always stand a closed one, if it has to -- by making room for it in the general picture. But a closed mind can't stand it near an open one without risking immediate and complete destruction in its own terms. In a closed mind, there's no more room." He stopped speaking and slowly exhaled a weary breath. "Now," he said, without opening his eyes, "will you finally get oot of here and let me sleep?" For a long second more, there was silence. Then, he heard a chair scrape softly, and the muted steps of Milt tiptoeing away. With another sigh, at last Jerry relaxed and let consciousness slip from him. He slept. -- As sleep the boar upon the plain, the hawk upon the crag, and      IF  Shorty Stor In the battle for the world, one life more or less meant nothing -- except to the man who took itJ T here was a light flashing red. Alex hit the release button with the heel of his hand, flicked his eyes to the dial in question. Animal heat. He dropped both the speed and altitude levers, banked steeply and dove. His eyes went to the screen, he reached up and increased magnification ten fold. His fingers danced over buttons, searching out the appropriate chart. It flashed onto the map-screen. Damn. The beetle was above that poorly mapped, all but unknown Balkan area where the Thrace of Greece and the Macedonia of Yugoslavia, met Bulgaria. The nearest cities of any size would have been Yugoslavian Skopje, Greek Salonika, Bulgarian Plovdiv, but he was far from the ruins of any of them. As the ground came up, his eyes shot to the dial again. Quite a bit of animal heat. Probably a man. A man in this area? Alex pursed his lips. Possible, but not probable. He was less than two miles in altitude, now. He increased magnification again. The vicinity was highly wooded. He adjusted his metallic sensors, fossil fuel sensors, nuclear power sensors. For all he knew, this was a Comic trap and they were trying to suck his beetle in. Seemed unlikely, though. He hadn't spotted a Comic in this area for a goodly time. When he was within a mile of the surface, he cut propulsion completely and hovered. His eyes went back to the chart and he enlarged it to ultimate. It still didn't give him much. The area had been fought over, ravaged, destroyed and rebuilt since the days of Philip and Alexander but it had never really been charted in the modern sense. There were the remains of a small farming town to the south; however, he couldn't make out if it might be Rodopolis in what had once been Greece, or Novo Selo in Macedonia. H e scowled at the dial. There was more heat radiation than was called for by one person. Perhaps there were two or three. It was possible, no matter how unlikely. The human animal is gregarious; given any opportunity at all he will seek out his fellows, even though it might increase his chances of destruction. He flicked his eyes over to the cocking handles of the minirockets, though he knew he had checked them out before take-off. Given life below, Alex was in a position to start snuffing it out like candles. The trouble was, exactly where was he, over Comic territory or their own? He had made that mistake with the fishing boat, off the coast of Cuba. He had thought, of course, that the two terrified occupants had been enemy civilians. It had been sickening to find his mistake later. He zeroed-in on the source of body heat, brought the beetle up to a slow, careful speed. It might still be a Comic trap, but he could find no signs of the presence of mechanical equipment in the vicinity. He dropped lower, tense now. He was getting awfully close. He kept his right hand very near the trigger of one of the minirockets. Suppose it was some peasant, miraculously saved from the holocaust. How was he to know, in this area, if the man was Greek, Macedonian or Bulgar? As he recalled, the nationalities blended iixto each other at this point to such a degree that even borders made precious little difference. All of a sudden, he brought the beetle to a halt and began to chuckle. There in a small meadow, clearing would be the better term, browsed a woebegone cow. It had been a long time , since he had seen a cow. Alex looked at it for a long moment, ruefully. In his youth, he had spent some time on a farm and had loved every minute. It had been fate that had put him into an educational bracket which had wound him up as the pilot of a beetle. He shook his head, even as he reached for the altitude lever. Had he become a farmer, he would now, without question, have been dead. And even though family, relatives, friends, sweetheart were now all past away, life is to be lived. He shot into patrol pattern again, resetting his sensors. His Chronometer told him that he had only a few more moments to go. When his time had elapsed, he put the beetle into orbit, threw the automatic control switch, then stood up, yawning. He stretched greatly, then massaged the back of his neck. Hn had a tendency to tighten up when on patrol. Alex turned and threw the cogs on the metal door behind him. He stepped into the corridor beyond and headed for the executive officer's office. Nick was on the desk. He said, "How did it go?" Alex yawned again. "Nothing. I begin to suspect that there's nobody #S left at all in my area. The fallout must have got those that survived." Nick grunted. "The Comics would like it, if they knew we thought so. Don't underestimate the human animal, Alex. He survives under some of the most impossible circumstances. Peter ran into a whole island of Eskimo in the northern Pacific." Alex was surprised. "What did he do?" "Blasted them, of course. They were Comics." Alex wondered, inwardly. Eskimo. Possibly they didn't have the vaguest knowledge of the war, nor why it was they were being killed. But Nick was right. Man had a fantastic ability to survive. N ick said, "You left your beetle in orbit?" 'That's right," Alex said wearily. "It isn't due for a check-out yet." He turned to go, but then recalled the animal he had seen. He said, "You know what I saw today? A cow. I thought I was getting a heat indication of at least one man, but it was a cow. Wonder how it ever survived." Nick said, "The last time I was on patrol, I saw four deer." "Oh? What did you do?" "What could I do? I was over Comic territory. I blasted them." "Blasted them! Well, whyT Alex felt a sinking sensation. With so precious little major life left at all on Earth, who could wish to butcher #eer? Nick was irritated. "I told you. It was Comic territory. Had there been any human life hiding out, surviving somehow or other, the deer would have been potential food. I killed them. In the same way as if you saw a house standing, you'd blast it, so that it couldn't be used for shelter." He hesitated for a moment, then said, "Was she being milked?" The other's mind had been on the deer. He said, "How do you mean?" "The cow. Was she being milked?" "How would I know?" "The udder, you ninny. If it was fuH, she was being milked, which would mean, in turn, that there's somebody doing the milking." "I didn't get any indication of further animal heat." "Could be in some sort of dugout. It's surprising how quickly some of the survivors have adapted to protecting themselves against us. Not that they're any smarter than our people. They've worked out a dozen ways of perserving themselves against those buzz-fighters the Comics use." Alex grunted. He had long been of the opinion that the higher-ups would do better to spend more effort protecting their civilians who had survived, rather than continuing to seek out the pitiful remnant of the Comics who were still alive. However, he didn't say anything. Nick had a mono-rail mind, when it came to official position. Anything the brass decided was gospel to Nick. Alex said, "I'll take another look at the cow, tomorrow, if I can find it again. Even if it is being milked. Pm not sure it's in what was forIF merly our own territory, of theirs." Nick said, "Well, you know what the general said, when in doubt." Alex repressed a shudder, as he headed back for his sleeping quarters. The general had never jockeyed a beetle in his life. Had never had to blast a noncombatant. Perhaps he wouldn't be quite so devout a retaliationist, had he to follow his own orders. I n the morning, going by the twenty-four hour Earth Clock, Alex came awake slowly. There had been a time, when he had been an ambitious young officer, that he had tried to discipline himself away from this practice. Now he had given up. In truth, the half hour or so that he allowed to lapse between first stirrings of consciousness and full awakening was the happiest of his day. Happiest wasn't quite the word. There was no such reality as happiness in the life now led. But at least his semidream state was the most nearly satisfying. In half control of his dreamthinking, he could steer his thoughts in what direction he would. Back over yesteryear when there had been ambitions, appetites, goals. When there had been arts to appreciate, crafts to study, entertainments to enjoy. There had been Anna to love. And what was Anna now? A cinder. If not a cinder, a terrified, underfed, under-clothed, under-sheltered fugitive from the Comic buzz-fighters who patrolled, even as Alex patrolled, seeking out the last remnants of life. He had allowed his thoughts to go where he would rather they not stray. He came fully awake and swung his legs out over the edge of the bunk. He went through the usual routine of getting cleaned up and dressed, the never ending sameness of it all, and made his way to the mess. As he ate the food of the hydroponic beds, the yeast cellars, he scanned the freshly printed day's bulletin. An inspiration editorial by the general. The day would soon come when, the Comics utterly defeated, the personnel of moon-base would return to Earth and begin the task of reconstruction. Alex grunted. He sometimes suspected that the general had fed his ideas into one of the typer-computors with standing orders that for each issue of the bulletin a new editorial be turned out, saying the same thing over and over again in a slightly altered version. The fact was, that there was precious little chance that the Comics would ever be utterly defeated. Their super-Sputnik, as the junior officers had dubbed it, was as impregnable to attack as was the moon-base. And this truth had long since been accepted. The efforts to eliminate their mutual bases had been so costly that neither side any longer attempted it. Such fighting as took place between them, were the rare meetings above the surface of Earth, when beetle met buzz-fighter, usually through inadvertence, and fought it out. If the truth were known, the general didn't even encourage that. The two fighting craft were so equally matched that one side's losses balanced the other's, and they were running short on the beetles they needed to prosecute the retaliation. Which brought him to another item in the bulletin. A sneak landing had been made hurriedly in the antarctic and a sizeable amount of supplies loaded upon one of the freighter-craft. The supplies had been left over from the days when the nations had in considerable cooperation been exploring that remote continent. Alex grunted. So that's where so many of the beetles had been, protecting the scavenging raid. It was a minor victory. In fact, more than balanced by the Comic Raid earlier when they had dispatched an equivalent space freighter to one of the Pacific islands where they had managed to locate a supply of fuel. H e wondered at the need of secrecy here on the moon-base. It was hard to believe that any Comic agents might be among them. And even if there was, how in the world could such an agent ever get a message to the enemy? No, Alex suspected that their rigid security measures were nonsense, left-over methods of an earlier period. The military mind was slow to change, even in the age of space war. And here was the story of Peter's successful attack upon the Eskimo. Evidently there had been at least a score of them. Alex shook his head. How could it possibly have been known that they were from Comic territory, originally? The Eskimo were nomadic. Food supply, such as it was, would dictate that they move as much as a hundred miles in a week. It was the same problem he had faced on the patrol yesterday. Even had he spotted a survivor of the world debacle, how could he know whether the person was originally a resident of Comic territory? In desperate search of food and shelter, and protection from the ruthless attacks of beetles and buzzfighters, such a refugee might travel many a mile from nis place of origin. The speaker called his name. He was to report for immediate patrol. That was only mildly surprising. The men who had covered the antarctic sneak landing had probably been on duty for long hours beyond the usual. They would need rest He was comparatively fresh. He came to his feet, adjusted his tunic on the off chance that he might meet one of the brass hats hi the corridors and be dressed down for sloppy appearance, and started for the cubicle which he usually occupied when piloting a remote-control beetle. At this hour he met only one other person. One of the women scientists. He saluted heir, as regulations called for, but she ignored him and bustled on. It came to Alex, sourly, even as he continued, that this horse-faced, cow-figured specimen was probably one of the few remaining females IF of his species who might survive to help replenish the Earth. If any at all survived. Briefly, he wondered if the high-ups had decided upon a program of breeding. If they had, it should best get underway even whilst they were still here on Luna. Most of these women scientists were by t no means youngsters. Some must already be past the menopause. He reached the executive officer's preserve, reported, got his assignment, which was identical to yesterday's, saluted, and continued to his cubicle. He wondered how many beetles were out today. He hadn't seen any of the other fellows in the corridors, or in the mess. Probably everybody who could be spared was on patrol. The Comics were probably in a tizzy over the Antarctic raid, and would be speeding up their retaliation. He hung his jacket up and seated himself at the control chair, before the screens, the panels, the dials, switches, triggers, gauges and all the rest of it. And even as he went through the standard routine of taking over the beetle, now in fast orbit, his memory went back to the long studies that had been involved in learning this business of eliminating every unit of human life in the lands of the enemy. At the time of his training, he had never expected it to ever come to this. But, then, he doubted if anyone else had, either. At the very last, he threw the cocking handles of the mini-rockets, threw off the automatic control, and accepted the piloting of the vicious little beetle. I t was a full hour later, an hour of carefully scanning over a large area of southern Europe, when he came to the vicinity where he had spotted the cow the day before. He had little doubt that he could find the animal again. And yes, there it was The indicator flashed animal heat. He increased the magnification of his viewing screen, and sent the beetle darting toward the little meadow the cow had been grazing in the day before. For the moment, engrossed in his object, he had failed to keep a constant eye on his other screens and scanning devices. Thus it was that his first warning of attack was a flashing ball of fire which, he realized, must have missed the miniature craft he was piloting from afar, by a scant half mile. Automatically he upped the speed lever, and pulled the directional stick backward, slamming for altitude. He banged open all screens, darted his head around, seeking the source of the attack. The unclear power sensor was flashing green warning, the alarm siren was whining. Impatiently, he brushed them both to inoperation. He decreased magnification on all screens, desperately seeking the foe over the broadcast area, even as he took standard evasive action. Wherever and whoever his enemy, the Comic wasn't the man he might be. Alex's beetle should have been crisped by now. As it was, he hadn't even been nicked. And, yes, there it was! A one man buzz-fighter, of course. It was their one big advantage ever the Comics. The enemy craft contained a living pilot who died in defeat. The beetles, piloted remotely from the moon-base, could be detroyed surely enough, but it was impossible for a pilot to be lost. War in air and space had come a long way since the Fokkers and Spads of World War One fought it out over the Western Front. The buzz-fighters, comparatively large and cumbersome, must needs come down from their artificial satellite base before taking over their retaliation patrols. It was a time consuming, man consuming matter and Alex had a secret admiration for the stamina involved. Even as they began their jockeying of death, roaring about the sky in great screaming of agonized machinery, great roaring of rockets and jets, he realized that the other must have spotted Alex's beetle toward the end of a patrol, and comparatively was physically exhausted. Only that would account for the fact that the foe's reactions were obviously slow. Ordinarily, a buzzfighter gave as much as it took. Indeed, it had some advantages over the tiny beetle. For one thing, it mounted a heavier firepower, a greater supply of bolts. The beetle's sole armament were the two minirockets, nuclear charged and capable of blasting a fairly good-sized town. Alex didn't know how many bolts the buzz-fighter boasted, but he knew it was considerably more than two. He dropped sharply in a feint, came up roaring from below. He had blisters of cold sweat on his forehead, could feel his shirt sticking to his back. He inevitably perspired in action. Safe, hundreds of thousands of miles away from the combat he might be, but in action you largely forgot that. Not completely though. At least in your subconscious you knew you were untouchable. But how about that enemy pilot? If his craft took a bolt, then all was over. At most, Alex would get a reprimand for being inept. F or the briefest of split seconds, the buzz-fighter was in his sighter screen, past the cross hairs, but in it. He slashed his fist out at the trigger button and his screen blurred momentarily as the beetle's weight dropped suddenly with the release of the mini-rocket. Then there was glare! A near hit? Had the missile's sensors caught enough of the enemy's heat to detonate? Or was it another fluke blast? The mini-rockets Armament was turning out these days weren't up to original standards. Which wasn't surprising in view of the improvising they had to do, what with limited materials. He came around in a roar -- a roar tens upon tens of thousands of miles from his ear -- and banged the screens to increased magnification. And stared. He had never seen before a buzzfighter merely crippled. On all other occasions when he had come against the enemy fighters, they had flared up like magnesium upon being IF hit. Flared up from the atomic attack in such wise that there could be no question of survival on the part of the Comic pilot. But now this one was fluttering to earth, like a wounded air-borne bird. He kicked controls around and headed for it. He had a double problem. He had exactly one mini-rocket left and couldn't waste it. The enemy pilot must be destroyed beyond any doubt. There were a limited number of Comic pilots left, and each one departed hastened the day when the war could be considered over and the general's oft proclaimed return to earth became a reality. But there was also the chance that the enemy was still in condition to mount a counter-attack on his diminutive enemy. Alex had no way of knowing whether or not the other was still conscious, but he must assume that he was. The buzzfighter had caught only the edge of the mini-rocket blast, and had evidently had delicate equipment so smashed that it was no longer fully operative. He came in with care. With so much care, that the buzz-fighter managed to sink to a landing, by coincidence, in the same meadow in which Alex had spotted the cow the previous day. He banked around quickly, and dropped the beetle's speed. Perhaps the other was dead. In which case, the thing was to make every effort to get a full size combat unit down here with a freighter-craft and try to capture the buzz-fighter intact, before the lads on the super-Sputnik caught on and fired a real flatterer to blast this whole section of the Balkans. The technicians and scientists there at moon-base had never had the opportunity to take apart a buzz-fighter. Given such a chance, it might lead to some discovery that would make a decisive difference in the prosecuting of the. war. B ut no. Even as he maneuvered his diminutive fighter into the clearing, a figure broke from the side of the enemy craft and dashed for the woods. At the same split second, the buzz-fighter began to glow in heat, and rapidly crumbled into a mass of flaming nothingness. The Comic had sabotaged his craft. Alex swore, but his obscenities broke off in the middle. The other was garbed in shorts and halter, and blonde hair was streaming behind even as she ran for what little protection the trees might offer. Meaninglessly, as he darted his beetle after her, the thought came to his mind, was the briefness of clothing due to heat in the buzzfighter, or was it a matter of saving weight? There was something strangely familiar in her desperate flight, and then it came to hinj. She ran as Anna ran. As Anna had once run. Her figure, too, was Anna's. Youthful, firm, but all rounded woman. This enemy pilot could be no more than in her mid-twenties. He had heard that the Comics used women as well as men in the war in space and air, but he had secretly thought it propaganda, as he thought most of the atrocity stories. Evidently, it was true enough. Comic manpower was evidently as short as his own side's. She was nearly to the edge of the clearing, running desperately hard, her firm, shapely legs pumping. She must have known, as he so well knew, that her flight was meaningless. A bolt from his beetle would blast everything in an area the diameter of a mile, reducing it to nothing. But life is so much to be lived, even the last ultimate minute. Suddenly he pulled back the control stick and, pointing the beetle skyward, hit at the same moment both the remaining mini-rocket trigger and the speed lever. The bolt went arching off into the depths of space, and the beetle headed home. He threw it into automatic and came to his feet, rubbing the back of his neck as hard as he could press fingers into the flesh. He went out into the corridor and headed toward the exec's office. Nick was on the desk, as he had been the day before. Nick looked up. "Thought you were on patrol over the Balkans." "I was. I fired both my bolts. I've got the beetle on automatic coming in for fresh mini-rockets." Nick looked at him. 'Two bolts to finish off a cow?" "A buzz-fighter jumped me, while I was going in to blast the animal. I managed to hit it." Nick was immediately doubly alert. "Wonderful!" He reached for a report pad. "Absolutely sure of destruction?" "Yes," Alex said. "It burnt to a crisp."  "Wonderful!" Nick crowed, writing rapidly. "You'll get another citation." Alex said wearily, "I feel pooped, I think I'll take a nap." Before he turned to leave, Alex said slowly, "Nick, why do we call them Comics?" C i TT' h?" The other continued writ-C--' ing the report. 'The enemy, over in that superSputnik of theirs, the artifical satellite." Nick thought about it, finally shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. I suppose it's derived from the fact that in the old days we used to ridicule them by saying their young people, their students, spent more time reading cartoon books, comic books, you know, than they did studying the sciences." "Oh," Alex mused. "I wonder what they call us." Nick said stiffly, "I would hardly know, but probably something unworthy of our admitted idealistic goals." Alex made his way to his quarters and slumped down on his bed. His face worked as he stared up at the ceiling. Somehow, he thought that she would survive. The cow was there. Lieutenant Alex Moiseyevich Menzhinsky knew he was a traitor. The thing was -- she ran so very much like Anna had run, back when there was an Anna, back when they'd both been youngsters IF IF  Novelette Outside the ship the Berserkers roamed a ruined galaxy. Inside the revelers jeered at Death I I F inding himself alone and unoccupied, Felipe Nogara chose to spend a free moment in looking at the thing that had brought him out here beyond the last fringe of the galaxy. From the luxury of his quarters he stepped up into his private observation bubble. There, in a raised dome of invisible glass, he seemed to be standing outside the hull of his flagship Nirvana . Under that hull, "below" the Nirvana's artificial gravity, there slanted the bright disk of the galaxy, including in one of its arms all the star-systems that Earth-descended man had yet explored. But in whatever direction Nogara looked, bright spots and points of light were plentiful. They were other galaxies, marching away at their recessional velocities of tens of thousands of miles per second, marching on out to the optical horizon of the universe. Nogara had not come here to look at galaxies, however; he had come to look at something new, at a phenomenon never before seen by men at such close range. It was made visible to him by the apparant pinching-together of the galaxies beyond it, and by the clouds and streamers of dust cascading into it. The star that formed the center of the phenomenon was itself held beyond human sight by the strength of its own gravity. Its mass, so bent spacetime around itself that not a photon of light could escape it with a visible wavelength. The dusty debris of deep space tumbled and churned, falling into the grip of the hypermass. The falling dust built up static charges until lightning turned it into luminescent thunderclouds, and the flicker of the vast lightning shifted into the red before it vanished, near the bottom of the gravitational hill. Probably not even a neutrino could escape this sun. And no ship would dare approach much closer than Nirvana now rode. N ogara had come out here to judge for himself if the recently discovered phenomenon might soon present any danger to inhabited planets; ordinary suns would go down like chips of wood into a whirlpool if the hypermass found them in its path. But it seemed that another thousand years would pass before any planets had to be evacuated; and before then the hypermass might have gorged itself on dust until its core imploded, whereupon most of its substance could be expected to re-enter the universe in a most spectacular but less dangerous form. Anyway, in another thousand years it would be someone else's problem. Right now it might be said to be Nogara s -- for men said that he ran the galaxy, if they said it of anyone. A communicator sounded, calling him back to the enclosed luxury of his quarters, and he walked down quickly, glad of a reason to get out from under the galaxies. He touched a plate with one strong and hairy hand. "What is it? "My lord, a courier ship has arrived. From the Flamland system. They are bringing..." "Speak plainly. They are bringing my brother's body?" "Yes, my lord. The launch bearing the coffin is already approaching Nirvana ." "I will meet the courier captain, alone, in the Great Hall. I want no ceremony. Have the robots at the airlock test the escort and the outside of the coffin for infection." "Yes, my lord." The mention of disease was a bit of misdirection. It was not the Flamland plague that had put Nogara's half-brother Johann Karlsen IF into a box, though that was the official story. The doctors were supposed to have frozen the hero of the Stone Place as a last resort, to prevent his irreversible death. An official lie was necessary because not even High Lord Nogara could lightly put out of the way the one man who had made the difference at the Stone Place nebula. In that battle seven years ago the berserker machines had been beaten; if they had not been, intelligent life might already be extinct in the known galaxy. The berserkers were huge automated warships, built for some conflict between long-vanished races and now the enemies of everything that lived. The fighting against them was still bitter, but since the Stone Place it seemed that life in the galaxy would survive. The Great Hall was where Nogara met daily for feasting and pleasure with the forty or fifty people who were with him on Nirvana, as aides or crewmen or entertainers. But when he entered the Hall now he found it empty, save for one man who stood at attention beside a coffin. Johann Karlsen's body and whatever remained of his life were sealed under the glass top of the heavy casket, which contained its own refrigeration and revival systems, controlled by a fiber-optic key theoretically impossible to duplicate. This key Nogara now demanded, with a gesture, from the courier captain. T he captain had the key hung round his neck, and it took him a moment to pull the golden chain over his head and hand it to Nogara. It was another moment before he remembered to bow; he was a spaceman and not a courtier. Nogara ignored the lapse of coiirtesy. It was his governors and admirals who were re-instituting ceremonies of rank; he himself cared nothing about how subordinates gestured and postured, so long as they obeyed intelligently. Only now, with the key in his own hand, did Nogara look down at his frozen half-brother. The plotting doctors had shaved away Johann's short beard, and his hair. His lips were marble pale, and his sightless open eyes were ice. But still the face above the folds of the draped and frozen sheet was undoubtedly Johann's. There was something that would not freeze. "Leave me for a time," Nogara said. He turned to face the end of the Great Hall and waited, looking out through the wide viewpoint to where the hypermass blurred space like a bad lens. When he heard the door ease shut behind the courier captain he turned back -- and found himself facing the short figure of Oliver Mical, the man he had selected to replace Johann as governor on Flamland. Mical must have entered as the spaceman left, which Nogara thought might be taken as symbolic of something. Resting his hands familiarly on the coffin, Mical raised one graying eyebrow in his habitual expression of weary amusement. His rather puffy face twitched in an overcivilized smile. "How does Browning's line go?" IF Mical mused, glancing down at Kaijlsen. " 'Doing the king's work all the dim day long' -- and now, this reward of virtue." "Leave me," said Nogara. Mical was in on the plot, as was hardly anyone else except the Flamland doctors. "I thought it best to appear to share your grief," he said. Then he looked at Nogara and ceased to argue. He made a bow that was mild mockery when the two of them were alone, and walked briskly to the door. Again it closed. So, Johann. If you had plotted against me, I would have had you killed outright. But you were never a plotter, it was just that you served me too successfully, my enemies and friends alike began to love you too well. So here you are, my frozen conscience, the last conscience I'll ever have. Sooner or later you would have become ambitious, so it was either do this to you or kill you. Now I'll put you away safely, and maybe someday you'll have another chance at life. It's a strange thought that someday you may stand musing over my coffin as I now stand over yours. No doubt you'll pray for what you think is my soul... I can't do that for you, but I wish you sweet dreams. Dream of your Believers' heaven, not of your hell." Nogara imagined a brain at absolute zero, its neurons super-conducting, repeating one dream on and on and on. But that was nonsense. "I cannot risk my power, Johann." This time he whispered the words aloud. "It was either this or have you killed." He turned again to the wide viewport. n C cT suppose Thirty-three's gotten A the body to Nogara already," said the Second Officer of Esteeler Courier Thirty-four, looking at the bridge chronometer. "It must be nice to declare yourself an emperor or whatever, and have people hurl themselves all over the galaxy to do everything for you." "Can't be nice to have someone bring you your brother's corpse," said Captain Thurman Holt, studying his astrogational sphere. His ship's C-plus drive was rapidly stretching a lot of time-like interval between itself and the Flamland system. Even if Holt was not enthusiastic about his mission, he was glad to be away from Flamland, where Mical's political police were taking over. "I wonder," said the Second, and chuckled. "What's that mean?" The Second looked over both shoulders, out of habit formed on Flamland. "Have you heard this one?" he asked. "Nogara is God -- but half of his spacemen are atheists." Holt smiled, but only faintly. "He's no mad tyrant, you know. Esteel's not the worst-run government in the galaxy. Nice guys don't put down rebellions." "Karlsen did all right." "That's right, he did." The Second grimaced. "Oh sure, Nogara could be worse, if vou want to be serious about it. He's a politician. But I just can't stand that crew that's accumulated around him the last few years. We've got an example on board now of what they do. If you want to know the truth I'm a little scared now that Karlsen's dead." "Well, we'll soon see them." Holt sighed, and stretched. "I'm going to look in on the prisoners. The bridge is yours, Second." "I relieve you, sir. Do the man a favor and kill him, Thurm." A minute later, looking through the spy-plate into the courier's small brig, Holt could wish with honest compassion that his male prisoner was dead. He was an outlaw chieftain named Janda, and his capture had been the last success of Karlsen's Flamland service, putting a virtual end to the rebellion. Janda had been a tall man, a brave rebel, and a brutal bandit. He had raided and fought against Nogara's Esteeler empire until there was no hope left, and then he had surrendered to Karlsen. "My pride commands me to conquer my enemy," Karlsen had written once, in what he thought was to be a private letter. "My honor forbids me to humble or hate my enemy." But Mical's political police operated with a different philosophy. T he outlaw might still be longboned, but Holt had never seen him stand tall. The manacles still binding his wrists and ankles were of plastic and supposedly would not abrade human skin, but they served no sane purpose now and Holt would have removed them if he could. A stranger seeing the girl Lucinda who sat now at Janda's side to feed him, might have supposed her to be his daughter. She was his sister, five years younger than he. She was also a girl of rare beauty, and perhaps Mical's police had mor tives other than mercy in sending her to Nogara's court unmarked and un-brainwashed. It was rumored that the demand for certain kinds of entertainment was strong among the courtiers, and the turnover among the entertainers high. Holt had so far kept himself from believing such stories. He opened the brig now -- he kept it locked only to prevent Janda's straying out and falling childlike into an accident -- and went in. When the girl Lucinda had first come aboard his ship her eyes had shown helpless hatred of every Esteeler. Holt had been gentle and as helpful as possible to her in the days since then, and there was not even dislike in the face she raised to him now -- there was a hope which it seemed she had to share with someone. She said: "I think he spoke my name, a few minutes ago." "Oh?" Holt bent to look more closely at Janda, and could see no change. The outlaw's eyes still stared glassily, the right eye now and then dripping a tear that seemed to have no connection with any kind of emotion. Janda's jaw was as slack as ever, and his whole body as awkwardly slumped. "Maybe -- " Holt didn't finish. "What?" She was almost eager. Gods of Space, he couldn't let IF himself get involved with this girl. He almost wished to see hatred in her eyes again. "Maybe," he said gently, "it will be better for your brother if he doesn't make any recovery now. You know where he's going." Lucinda's hope, such as it was, was shocked away by his words. She was silent, staring at her brother as if she saw something new. Holt's wrist-intercom sounded. "Captain here," he acknowledged. "Sir, reporting a ship detected and calling us. Bearing five o'clock level to our course. Small and normal." The last three words were the customary reassurance that a sighted ship was not possibly a berserker's giant hull. Berserkers all looked much alike, and what Flamland outlaws were left had no deep space ships, so Holt had no reason to be cautious. He went casually back to the bridge and looked at the small shape on the detector screen. It was unfamiliar to him, but that was hardly surprising, as there were many shipyards orbiting many planets. Why, though, should any ship approach and hail him in deep space? Plague? "No, no piague," answered a radio voice, through bursts of static, when he put the question to the stranger. The video signal from the other ship was also jumpy, making it hard to see the speaker's face. "Caught a speck of dust on my last jump, and my fields are shaky. Will you take a few passengers aboard?" "Certainly." For a ship on the brink of a C-plus jump to collide with the gravitation field of a sizable dust-speck was a rare accident, but not unheard-of; and it would explain the noisy communications. There was still nothing to alarm Holt. The stranger sent over a launch which clamped to the courier's airlock. Wearing a smile of welcome for distressed passengers, Holt opened the lock. In the' next moment he and the half-dozen men who made up his crew were caught helpless by an inrush of man-sized machines -- they were a berserker's boarding party, cold and ancient, merciless as nightmare. T he machines seized the courier so swiftly and efficiently that no one could offer real resistance, but they did not immediately kit! any of the humans. They tore the drive units from one of the lifeboats and herded Holt and his crew and his erstwhile prisoners into the boat. "It wasn't a berserker on the screen, it wasn't," the Second Officer kept repeating to Holt. The humans sat side by side, jammed against one another in the small space. The machines were allowing them air and water and food, and had started to take them out one at a time for questioning. "I know, it didn't look like one," Holt answered. "The berserkers are probably forming themselves into new shapes, building themselves new weapons. That's only logical, after the Stone Place. The only odd thing is that no one foresaw it." A hatch clanged open, and a pair of roughly man-shaped machines entered the boat, picking their way precisely among the nine cramped humans until they reached the one they wanted. "No, he can't talk!" Lucinda Arieked. "Don't take him!" But the machines could not or would not hear her. They pulled Janda to his feet and marched him out. The girl followed, dragging at them, trying to argue with them. Holt could only scramble uselessly after her in the narrow space, afraid that one of the machines would turn and kill her. But they only kept her from following them out of the lifeboat, pushing her back from the hatch with metal hands as gently resistless as time. Then they were gone with Janda, and the hatch was closed again. Lucinda stood gazing at it blankly. She did not move when Holt put his arm around her. HI A fter a timeless period of waiting, the humans saw the hatch open again. The machines were back, but they did not return Janda. Instead they had come to take Holt. Vibrations echoed through the eourier's hull; the machines seemed to be rebuilding her. In a small chamber sealed off by a new bulkhead from the rest of the ship, the berserker computer-brain had set up electronic eyes and ears and a speaker for itself, and here Holt was taken to be interrogated. Speaking with a collection of recorded human words, the berserker questioned Holt at great length. Almost every question concerned Johann Karlsen. It was known that the berserkers regarded Karlsen as their chief enemy, but this one seemed to be obsessed with him -- and unwilling to believe that he was really dead. "I have captured your charts and astrogational settings," the berserker reminded Holt. "I know your course is to Nirvana , where supposedly the non-functioning Karlsen has been taken. Describe this Nirvana ship used by the life-unit Nogara." So long as it had asked only about a dead man, Holt had given the berserker straight answers, not wanting to be tripped up in a useless lie. But a flagship was a different matter, and now he hesitated. Still, there was little he could say about Nirvana if he wanted to. And he and his fellow prisoners had had no chance to agree on any plan for deceiving the berserker; certainly it must be listening to everything they said in the lifeboat. "I've never seen the Nirvana he answered truthfully. "But logic tells me it must be a strong ship, since the highest human leaders travel on it." There was no harm in telling the machine what it could certainly deduce for itself. A door opened suddenly, and Hoh stared in surprise as a strange man entered the interrogation chamber. Then he saw that it was not a man, but some creation of the berserker. Perhaps its flesh was plastic, perhaps some product of tissue-culture. "Hi, are you Captain Holt?" asked the figure. There was no gross flaw in it, but a ship camouflaged with IF the greatest skill looks like nothing so much as a ship that has been camouflaged. When Holt was silent, the figure asked: "What's wrong?" Its speech alone would have given it away, to an intelligent human who listened carefully. "You're not a man," Holt told it. The figure sat down and went limp. The berserker explained: "You see I am not capable of making an imitation life-unit that will be accepted by real ones face to face. Therefore I require that you, a real life-unit, help me make certain of Karlsen's death. Holt said nothing. tcT am a special device, the berI serker said, "built by the berserkers with one prime goal, to bring about with certainty Karlsen's death. If you help me prove him the other life-units I now hold. If you refuse to help, all of you will receive the most unpleasant stimuli until you change your mind. Holt did not believe that it would had nothing to lose by talking, and he might at least gain for himself and the others a death free of most unpleasant stimuli. Berserkers preferred to be efficient killers, not sadists, though during the long war they had become experts on the human nervous system. "What sort of help do you want from me?" Holt asked. "When I have finished building myself into this courier we are going on to Nirvana , where you will deliver your prisoners. I have read the orders. After being interviewed by the human leaders on Nirvana , the prisoners are to be taken on te Esteel for confinement. Is it not so?" "It is." The door opened again, and Janda shuffled in, bent and bemused. "Can't you spare this man any more questioning?" Holt asked the berserker. "He can't help you in any way." There was only silence. Holt waited uneasily. At last, looking at Janda, he realized that something about the outlaw had changed. The tear had stopped flowing from his right eye. When Holt saw this he felt a mounting horror that he could not have explained, as if his subconscious already knew what the berserker was going to say next. "What was bone in this life-unit is now metal," the berserker said. "Where blood flowed, now preservatives are pumped. Inside the skull I have placed a computer, and in the eyes are cameras to gather the evidence I must have on Karlsen. To match the behavior of a brainwashed man is within my capability." "I do not hate you," Lucinda said to the berserker when it had her alone for interrogation. "You are an accident, like a planet-quake, like a pellet of dust hitting a ship near light-speed. Nogara and his people are the ones I hate. If his brother was not dead I would kill him with his body." # # Courier Captain? This is GoverVnor Mical, speaking for the High Lord Nogara. Bring your two prisoners over to Nirvana at once," he ordered. "At once, sir." After coming out of C-plus travel within sight of Nirvana , the assassinmachine had taken Holt and Lucinda from the lifeboat. Then it had let the boat, with Holt's crew still on it, drift out between the two ships, as if men were using it to check the courier's fields. The men on the boat were to be the berserker's hostages, and its shield if it was discovered. And by leaving them there, it doubtless wanted to make more credible the prospect of their eventual release. Holt had not known how to tell Lucinda of her brother's fate, but at last he had managed somehow. She had wept for a minute, and then she had become very calm. Now the berserker put Holt and Lucinda into the crystal globe that served it for a launch, for the trip to Nirvana. The machine that had been Lucinda's brother was aboard the launch already, waiting, slumped and broken-looking as the man had actually been in the last days of his life. When she saw that figure, Lucinda stopped. Then in a clear voice she said: "Machine, I wish to thank you. You have done my brother a kindness no human would do for him. I think I would have found a way to kill him myself before his enemies could torture him any more." IF IV T he Nirvana s airlock was strongly armored, and equipped with automated defenses that would have repelled a rush of boarding machines, just as Nirvanas beams and missiles would have beaten off any heavy-weapons attack a courier, or a dozen couriers, could launch. The berserker had foreseen all this. An officer welcomed Holt aboard. 'This way, Captain, we're all waittag." "All?" The officer had the well-fed, comfortable look that came with safe and easy duty. His eyes were busy appraising Lucinda. 'There's a celebration under way in the Great Hall. Your prisoners' arrival has been much anticipated." Music throbbed in the Great Hall, and dancers writhed in costumes more obscene than any nakedness. From a table running almost the length of the Hall, serving machines were clearing the remnants of whal had been a feast. In a throne-like chair behind the center of the table sat the High Lord Nogara, a rich cloak thrown over his shoulders, pale wine before him in a crystal foblet. Forty or fifty revelers flanked him at the long table, men and women and a few of whose sex Holt could not at once be sure. All were drinking and laughing, and some were donning masks and costumes, making ready for further celebration. Heads turned at Holt's entrance, and a moment of silence was followed by a cheer. In all the eyes and faces turned now toward his prisoners, Holt could see nothing like pity. "Welcome, Captain," said Nogara in a pleasant voice, when Holt had remembered to bow. "Is there news from Flamland?" "None of great importance, sir." A puffy-faced man who sat at Nogara's right hand leaned forward on the table. "No doubt there is great mourning for the late governor?" "Of course, sir." Holt recognized Mical. "And niuch anticipation of the new." Mical leaned back in his chair, smiling cynically. "I'm sure the rebellious population is eager for my arrival. Girl, were you eager to meet me? Come, pretty one, round the table, here to me." As Lucinda slowly obeyed, Mical gestured to the serving devices. "Robots, set a chair for the man -- there, in the center of the floor. Captain, you may return to your ship." Felipe Nogara was steadily regarding the manacled figure of his old enemy Janda, and what Nogara might be thinking was hard to say. But he seemed content to let Mical give what orders pleased him. "Sir," said Holt to Mical. "I would like to see -- the remains of Johann Karlsen." T hat drew the attention of Nogara, who nodded. A serving machine drew back sable draperies, revealing an alcove in one end of the Hall In the alcove, before a huge viewport, rested the coffin. Holt was not particularly surprised; on many planets it was the custom to feast in the presence of the dead. After bowing to Nogara he turned and saluted and walked toward the alcove. Behind him he heard the shuffle and clack of Janda's manacled movement, and held his breath. A muttering passed along the table, and then a sudden quieting in which even the throbbing music ceased. Probably Nogara had gestured premission for Janda's walk, wanting to see what the brainwashed man would do. Holt reached the coffin and stood over it. He hardly saw the frozen face inside it, or the blur of the hypermass beyond the port. He hardly heard the whispers and giggles of the revelers. The only picture clear in his mind showed the faces of his crew as they waited helpless in the grip of the berserker. The machine clothed in Janda's flesh came shuffling up beside him, and its eyes of glass stared down into those of ice. A photograph of retinal patterns taken back to the waiting berserker for comparison with old captured records would tell it that this man was really K arisen. A faint cry of anguish made Holt look back toward the long table, where he saw Lucinda pulling herself away from Mical's clutching arm, Mical and his friends were laughing. "No, Captain, I am no Karlsen," Mical called down to him, seeing Holt's expression. "And do you think I regret the difference? Johann's prospects are not bright. He is rather bounded by a nutshell, and can no longer count himself king of infinite space!" "Shakespeare!" cried a sycophant, showing appreciation of Mical's literary erudition. "Sir." Holt took a step forward. "May I -- may I now take the prisoners back to my ship?" Mical misinterpreted Holt's anxiety. "Oh ho! I see you appreciate some of life's finer things, Captain. But as you know, rank has its privileges. The girl stays here." He had expected them to hold on to Lucinda, and she was better here than with the berserker. "Sir, then if -- if the man alone can come with me. In a prison hospital on Esteel he may recover -- " "Captain," Nogara's voice was not loud, but it hushed the table. "Do not argue here." "No sir." Mical shook his head. "My thoughts are not yet of mercy to my enemies, Captain. Whether they may soon turn in that direction --  well, that depends." He again reached out a leisurely arm to encircle Lucinda. "Do you know, Captain, that hatred is the true spice of love?" H olt looked helplessly back at Nogara. Nogara's cold eye said: One more word, courier, and you find yourself in the brig. I do not give two warnings. If Holt cried berserker now, the thing in Janda's shape might kill everyone in the Hall before it could be stopped. He knew it was listening to him, watching his movements. "I -- I am returning to my ship," he stuttered. Nogara looked away, and no one else paid him much attention. "I will -- return here -- in a IF few hours perhaps. Certainly before I drive for Esteel." Holt's voice trailed off as he saw that a group of the revelers had surrounded Janda. They had removed the manacles from the outlaw's dead limbs, and they were putting a horned helmet on his head, giving him a shield and spear and a cloak of fur, equipage of an old Norse warrior of Earth -- first to coin and bear the dread name of berserker. "Observe, Captain," mocked Mical's voice. "At our masked ball we do not fear the fate of Prince Prosblance of the terror outside!" "Poe!" shouted the sycophant in glee. Prospero and Poe meant nothing to Holt, and Mical looked disappointed. "Leave us. Captain," said Nogara, making a direct order of it. "Leave, Captain Holt," said Lucinda in a firm, clear voice. "We all know you wish to help those who stand in danger here. Lord Nogara, will Captain Holt be blamed in any way for what happens here when he has gone?" There was a hint of puzzlement in Nogara's clear eyes. But he shook his head slightly, granting the askedfor absolution. And there was nothing for Holt to do but go back to the berserker to argue and plead with it for his crew. If it was patient, the evidence it sought might be forthcoming. If only the revelers would have mercy on the thing they thought was Janda. Holt went out. It had never entered his burdened mind that KarKsen was only frozen. V M ical's arm was about her hips as she stood beside his chair, and his voice purred up at her. "Why, how you tremble, pretty ons... it moves me that such a pretty one as you should, tremble at my touch, yes, it moves me deeply. Now. we are no longer enemies, are we? If we are, I should have to deal harshly with your brother." She had given Holt time to get clear of the Nirvana. Now she swung her arm with all her strength. The blow turned Mical's head halfway round, and made his neat gray hair fly wildly. There was a sudden hush in the Great Hali, and then a roar of laughter that reddened aH of Mical's face to match the handprint on hk cheek. A man behind Lucinda grabbed her arms and pinned them. She relaxed until she felt his grip loosen slightly, and then she grabbed up a table knife. There was another burst of laughter as Mical ducked away and the man behind Lucinda seized her again. Another man came te help him and the two of them, laughing, took away the knife and forced her to sit in a chair at MicaPs side. When the governor spoke at last his voice quavered slightly, but it was low and almost calm. "Bring the man closer," he ordered. "Seat him there, just across the table from us." While his order was being carried out, Mical spoke to Lucinda in conversational tones. "It was my intent, f course, that your brother should be treated and allowed to recover." He paused to see the effect of that statement on her. "Lying piece of filth," she whispered, smiling. Mical only smiled back. "Let us test the skill of my mind-control technicians," he suggested. "Fll wager that no bonds will be needed to hold your brother in his chair, once I have done this." He made a curious gesture over the table, toward the glassy eyes that looked out of Janda's face. "So. But he will still be aware, with every nerve, of all that happens to him. You may be sure of that." She had planned and counted on something like this happening, but now she felt as if she was exhausted by breathing evil air. She was afraid of fainting, and at the same time wished that she could. "Our guest is bored with his costume." Mical looked up and down the table. "Who will be first to take a turn at entertaining him?" There was a spattering of applause as a giggling effeminate arose from a nearby chair. "Jamy is known for his inventiveness," said Mical in pleasant tones to Lucinda. "I insist you watch closely, now. Chin up!" On the other side of Mical, Felipe Nogara was losing his air of remoteness. As if reluctantly, he was being drawn to watch. In his bearing was a rising expectancy, winning out over disgust. Jamy came giggling, holding a small jeweled knife. "Not the eyes," Mical cautioned. "The'll be things I want him to see, later." "Oh, certainly!" Jamy twittered. He set the horned helmet gingerly aside, and wiped the touch of it from his fingers. "We'll just start like this on one cheek, with a bit of skin -- " Jamy's touch with the blade was gentle, but still too much for the dead flesh. At the first peeling tug, the whole lifeless mask fell red and wet from around the staring eyes, and his steel berserker-skull grinned out. L ucinda had just time to see Jamy's body flung across the Hall by a steel-boned arm before the men holding her let go and turned to flee for their lives, and she was able to duck under the table. Screaming bedlam broke loose, and in another moment the whole table went over with a crash before the berserker's strength. The machine, finding itself discovered, twarted in its primary function of getting away with evidence on Karlsen, took as its secondary goal the old berserker through the Hall, squatting and hopping grotesquely, mowing its way with scythe-like arms, harvesting howling panic into bundles of bloody stillness. At the main door, fleeing people jammed one another into immobility, and the assassin worked among them, methodically mangling and slaying. Then it turned and came down the Hall again. It came to Lucinda, still kneeling where the IF table-tipping had exposed her; but the machine hesitated, recognizing her as a semi-partner in its prime function. In a moment it had dashed on after another target. It was Nogara, swaying on his feet, his right arm hanging broken. He had come up with a heavy handgun from somewhere, and now he fired left-handed as the machine charged down the other side of the overturned table toward him. The gun-blasts shattered Nogara's friends and furniture but only grazed his moving target. At last one shot hit home. The machine was wrecked, but its impetus carried it on to knock Nogara down again. There was a shaky quiet in the Great Hall, which was wrecked as if by a bomb. Lucinda got unsteadily to her feet. There were sobs and moans and gropings everywhere, but no one else was standing. She picked her way dazedly over to the smashed assassin-machine. She felt only a numbness, looking at the rags of clothing and flesh that still clung to its metal frame. Now in her mind she could see her brother's face as it once was, strong and smiling. Now there was somthing that mattered more than the dead, if she could only recall what it was -- of course, the berserker's hostages, the good kind spacemen. She could try to trade Karlsen's body for them. r ie serving machines, built to face emergencies on the order of spilled wine, where dashing to and fro in the nearest thing to panic that mechanism could achieve. They impeded Lucindas progress, but she had the heavy' coffin wheeled halfway across the Hall when a weak voice stopped her. Nogara had dragfed himself up to a sitting position against the overturned table. He croaked again: # -- alive.' "What?" "Johann's alive. Healthy. See? It's a freezer." "But we all told the berserker he was dead." She felt stupid with the impact of one shock after another. For the first time she looked down at Karlsen's face, and long seconds passed before she could tear her eyes away. # It has hostages. It wants his body." "No." Nogara shook his head. "I see, now. But no. I won't give him to berserkers, alive." A brutal power of personality still emanated from his broken body. His gun was gone, but his power kept Lucinda from moving. There was no hatred in her now. She protested: "But there are even men out there." "Berserker's like me." Nogara bared pain-clenched teeth. "It won't let prisoners go. Here. The key..." He pulled it from inside his tornopen tunic. Lucinda's eyes were drawn once again to the cold serenity of the face in the coffin. Then on impulse she ran to get the key. When she did so Nogara slumped over in relief, unconscious or nearly so. The coffin lock was marked in several positions, and she turned Lights sprang on around the figure inside, and there was a hum of power. By now the automated systems of the ship were reacting to the emergency. The serving machines had begun a stretcher-bearer service. Nogara being one of the first victims they carried away. Presumably a robot medic was in action somewhere. From behind Nogara's throne chair a great voice was shouting. "This is ship defense control, requesting human orders! What is nature of emergency?" "Do not contact the courier ship!" Lucinda shouted back. "Watch it for an attack. But don't hit the lifeboat!" The glass top of the coffin had become opaque. Lucinda ran to the viewport, stumbling over the body of Mical and going on without a pause. By putting her face against the port and looking out at an angle she could just see the berserker-courier, pinkly visible in the wavering light of the hypermass, its lifeboat of hostages a small pink dot still in place before it. How long would it wait, before it killed the hostages and fled? When she turned away from the port, she saw that the coffin's lid was open and the man inside was sitting up. For just a moment, a moment that was to say in Lucinda's mind, his eyes were like a child's, fixed helplessly on hers. Then power began to grow behind his eyes, a power somehow completely different from his brother's and perhaps even greater. IF K arisen looked away from her, taking in the rest of his surroundings, the devastated Great Hall and the coffin. "Felipe," he whispered, as if in pain, though his halfbrother was no longer in sight. Lucinda moved toward him and started to pour out her story, from the day in the Flamland prison when she had heard that Karlsen had fallen to the plague. Once he interrupted her. "Help me out of this thing, get me space armor." His arm was hard and strong when she grasped it, but when he stood beside her he was surprisingly short. "Go on, what then?" She hurried on with her tale, while serving machines came to arm him. "But why were you frozen?" she ended, suddenly wondering at his health and strength. He ignored the question. "Come along to Defense Control. We must save those men out there." He went familiarly to the nerve center of the ship and hurled himself into the combat chair of the Defense Officer, who was probably dead. The panel before Karlsen came alight and he ordered at once: "Get me in contact with that courier." Within a few moments a flatsounding voice from the courier answered routinely. The face that appeared cm the communication screen was badly lighted; someone viewing it without advance warning would not suspect that it was anything but human. "This is High Commander Karlsen speaking, from the Nirvana" He did not call himself governor or lord, but by his title of the great day of the Stone Place. "Fm coming over there. I want to talk to you men on the courier." The shadowed face moved slightly on the screen. "Yes sir." Karlsen broke off the contact at once. "That'll keep its hopes up. Now I need a fast launch. You, robots, load my coffin aboard one. Fm on emergency revival drugs now and if I live I may have to re-freeze for a while." "You're not really going there?" Up out of the chair again, he paused. "I know berserkers. If chasing me is that thing's prime function it won't waste a shot or a second of time on a few hostages while Fm in sight." "You can't go," Lucinda heard herself saying. "You mean too much to all men -- " "Fm not committing suicide, I have a trick or two in mind." Karlsen's voice changed suddenly. "You say Felipe's not dead?" "I don't think so." Karlsen's eyes closed while his lips moved briefly, silently. Then he looked at Lucinda and grabbed up paper and a stylus from the Defense Officer's console. "Give this to Felipe," he said, writing. "He'll set you and the captain free if I ask it. You're not dangerous to his power. Whereas I..." VI F rom the Defense Officer's position, Lucinda watched Karlsen's crystalline launch leave the Nirvana and take a long curve that brought it near the courier at a point some distance from the lifeboat. "You on the courier," Lucinda heard him say. "You can tell it's really me here on the launch, can't you? You can DF my transmission? Can you photograph my retinas through the screen?" And the launch darted away with a right-angle swerve, dodging and twisting at top acceleration, as the berserker's weapons blasted the space where it had been. Karlsen had been right. The berserker spent not a moment's delay or a single shot on the lifeboat, but hurled itself instantly after the launch. "Hit that courier!" Lucinda screamed. "Destroy it!" A salvo of missiles left the Nirvana , but it was a shot at a receding target, and it missed. Perhaps it missed because the courier was already in the fringes of the distortion surrounding the hypermass. Karlsen's launch had not been hit, but it could not get away. It was a glassy dot vanishing behind a screen of blasts from the berserker's weapons, a dot being forced into the maelstrom of the hypermass. "Chase them!" cried Lucinda, and saw the stars tint blue ahead; but almost instantly the Nirvana's auto pilot countermanded her order, barking mathematical assurance that to accelerate any further in that direction would be fatal to all aboard. The launch was now going certainly into the hypermass, gripped by a gravity that could make any engines useless. And the berserkership was going headlong after the launch, caring for nothing but to make sure of Karlsen. The two specks tinted red, and redder still, racing before an enormous falling cloud of dust as if flying into a planet's sunset sky. And then the red shift of the hypermass took them into invisibility, and the universe saw them no more. S oon after the robots had brought the men from the lifeboat safe aboard Nirvana , Holt found Lucinda alone in the Great Hall, gazing out the viewport. "He gave himself to save you," she said. "And he'd never even seen you." "I know." After a pause Holt said: "I've just been talking to the Lord Nogara. I don't know why, but you're to be freed, and I'm not to be prosecuted for bringing the damned berserker aboard. Though Nogara seems to hate both of us..." She wasn't listening, she was still looking out the port. "I want you to tell me all about him someday," Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt's arm, which dropped away. "I see," Holt said, after a while. IF IF  Serial There were fen lost Ter ran girls m Quopp's jungle and only Relief could save them -- if he could save himself! T he Weens gathered around Retief and the one member of the tribe who had captured him. Their attitude was disapproving. "Jik-jik," someone called to him from the ranks, "you all the time talking to something to eat. What you all say to a nice barbecue sauce on this meal, greens on the side?" There was a sudden flurry of sound from the near distance, penetrated by shrill cries. "Get your feather-picking members off me, you ignorant clodhoppers!" a thin Voion voice screeched. "I'm a member of the Planetary Armed Forces! There's a big reward out for anybody that hurts a mem -- " The speech cut off in mid-word. Threshing sounds followed. Moments later, three Ween pushed into the clearing, hauling the limp figure of a bright-polished The planet of Quopp Is inhabited by creatures that are half machines, and all diabolical. Their body chemistry is organic-inorganic, with limbs like wheels or rotors and steel-sharp talons and teeth. It is, in short, the kind of world where Earthmen walk cautiously, or do not walk at all. But Earth Ambassador Longspoon is confident he has the situation under control. With the connivance of certain native Quoppina he is abetting the spread of a revolutionary movement which will unite all of Quopp's scores of hostile tribes, placing them all under a single government which will be friendly to Earth... he hopes. Unfortunately his hopes are blighted. Retief discovers shipments of arms and, investigating, finds himself threatened by the Voion tribesmen. He escapes and makes his way to Terrie headquarters, which is in an uproar because a spaceship loaded with human females is approaching the planet out of control. The pilot asks for Retief but crashes before he can learn her identity. Meanwhile Retief is being pursued by the Voions, trying to keep their arms shipments secret. He escapes with the help of a friendly Quopp, who assists him in disguising himself in the mandibles and chitinous body-plates of a typical Quopp. The Voion hunt for Retief has triggered an insurrection in the city. All Terries are being rounded up, but Retief's disguise gets him through to where he can steal a lifeboat and head out into the jungle, toward safety and, he hopes, a chance to rescue the clowned ship of Earth-girls. He lands -- and is himself captured by a Quopp tribe called the Ween. "Just in time for dinner," they observe. "You're the dinner!" IF member of the Planetary Police. He groaned as they dropped him. One of his wheels, badly warped, whirled lop-sidedly. "Hoo, this evening shaping up," someone said. The Voion was lying on his back, waving all four arms feebly. "You can't do this to me," the captive tweeted. "In the Name of the Wo -- " The Ween standing closest to the fallen policeman brought his immense claw around. There was a sound like a pistol shot as he nipped off the newcomer's head with a single snap. "Well, that the first of them big noises I see trimmed up like he ought to be," Jik-jik said. "You got him just in time, Fut-fut, before he call on the Name of the Worm -- " He broke off, looked at Retief. "In the Name of the Worm," Retief said, "what about a little hospitality?" "You and your big vocalizing apparatus, Jik-jik," someone said disgustedly. "Well, back to camp. At least we can fry up some policeman to tide us over." A quartet of Ween lifted the limp body; someone else picked up the head. "Lucky for you you call on the Name of the Worm," Jik-jik said conversationally. "Old Hub-hub ready to dine right now, what I mean." "Mentioning the Worm takes me off the menu, eh?" "Well, it give you time to get you thoughts in order, anyway." "I have a feeling that remark is pregnant with meanings, none of them pleasant." "Hoo, it simple enough, big boy. It mean us keep you pen up for five days, and then skin you out for a old-fashioned tribal blowout." An aggressive-looking Ween had pushed forward. "How about if us trim off a few edges now just to sample the flavor?" "Get back there, Hub-hub," Jikjik admonished. "No snacking between meals." "Come on, Meat-from-sky," the aggressive pigmy called. "Get you wheels in gear!" He reached out with his claw to prod Retief -- and jumped back with a screech as the heavy sword whipped down, lopping off an inch of the member's pointed tip. "Look what he do to my chopper!" he shrilled. "You ask for it, Hub-hub," Futfut said. "I like a lot of space around me," Retief said, swinging the sword loosely in his hand. "Don't crowd me. T he Ween edged back, fifty or more small, dark-glittering creatures like oversized army ants in a wide ring around Retief, his armor a splash of vivid color in the gloom. Hub-hub jittered, holding his damaged claw high, torch-light glinting on his metallic sides. "I is hereby taking this piece of meat off the chow list!" he screeched. "I is promoting him to the status of folks!" "Hey, Hub-hub, is you gone out of you head? What the idea of doing a trick like that?" A chorus of protest broke out. Jik-jik confronted the outraged tribesman. "He chop off a piece of you, and now you chumming up to him! What the idea?" "The idea is now I ain't got to wait no five days to get a piece back!" Hub-hub keened. "Get back, all of you!" He waved the two-foot long, steel-trap claw in a commanding gesture. "I is now going to snip this stilter down to size!" The Ween drew back, disappointed, but obedient to Tribal custom. Hub-hub danced before Retief, who waited, his back to the tree, the sword held before him, torch-light glinting along its steel-hard razorsharp edge. Hub-hub darted in, legs twinkling, snick-snacked a double feint high and low with the big fighting arm, lashed out viciously with a pair of small pinchers, then struck with the big claw, eliciting a loud bang! from Retief s chest armor -- and staggered as the flat of Retief s blade knocked him spinning. "Hoo!" Jik-jik shrilled. "Old Hubhub chew off more than he can bite this time!" "Let's call this off, Shorty," Relief suggested. "I'd hate to have to skewer you before we've really gotten acquainted." The Ween danced in, pivoting on spider legs, feinted, struck with his fighting claw -- Retief's sword flashed in a lightning arc. It sang as it bit through steel-hard metallo-chitin. The oversized claw dropped to the ground. "He... he done chop off my chopper!" Hub-hub said faintly. Now he going stick me for sure." He crouched, waiting, a drop of syrupy dark fluid forming on the stump. "Serve you right, Hub-hub," someone called. "Suppose I let you go?" Retief stepped forward and prodded the Ween's slender neck with the sword point. "Promise to be good and speak only when spoken to?" "Way I feels now, I done talking for good," Hub-hub declared. "Very well." Retief lowered the blade. "Go with my blessing." "Well, that a neat trick, big boy," Jik-jik commented. "Take him six months to grow a new arm, and meantime he learn to keep he mandible buttoned." Retief looked around. "Anybody else?" he inquired. There were no takers. "In that case, I'll be on my way. You're sure you haven't noticed a ship crashing in the vicinity in the past few hours?" "Well, now, that's different," Jikjik stated. "They was a big smash over yonder a while back. We was looking for it when we found you." "The name's Retief. Now that we're all friends and tribesfellows, how about a few of you showing me the spot where it came down?" "Sure, Tief-tief. It not far from where you was." Retief walked over to examine the body of the decapitated Voion. He had obviously been a member of Ikk's police -- or army -- complete with brand-new chromallov inlays and an enameled cranium insignia with a stylized picture of what looked like a dragonfly. IP "I wonder what this fellow was doing out here, so far from town," Retief said. "I don't know," Jik-jik said; "but I got a feeling when us finds out us ain't going like it." V T he bright disc of Joop was high above the treetops, shedding a cold white light on the village street. Retief followed as Jik-jik and two other tribesmen led the way along a trail worn smooth by the wheels of generations of forest dwellers. It was a fifteen minute trek to the spot where Pin-pin halted and waved an arm. "Yonder where I found that policeman," he said. "Back in the brush. I heard he cussing up a cyclone back there." Retief pushed through came to a spot where fallen limbs and scattered leaves marked the position of die injured Voion. Above, the silvery ends of broken branches marked a trajectory through the tree-tops. "What I wondering, how he get up there?" Pin-pin inquired. "Funny stuff going on around here. Us heard the big crash -- that why us out here." "The big crash -- which way was that?" Retief asked. "Yonder," Pin-pin pointed. Again he led the way, guided by the unerring Quoppina instinct for direction. Fifty feet along the trail, Retief stooped, picked up a twisted fragment of heavy, iron-gray metallochitin, one edge melted and charred. He went on, seeing more bits and pieces. A bright-edged shred here, swinging from a bush, a card-tablesized plate there, wedged high in a tree. Then suddenly the dull-gleaming mass of a major fragment of the wrecked Rhoon loomed through the underbrush, piled against the ribbed base of a forest giant. "Hoo, that big fellow hit hard, Tief-tief," Pin-pin said. "Wonder what bring him down?" "Something he tried to eat disagreed with him." Retief made his way around the giant corpse, noting the blaster burns on the stripped hub of the rotors, the tangle of internal organic wiring exposed by the force of the crash, the twisted and shattered landing members. The rear half of the body was missing, torn away in the passage through the trees. "Wonder what a Rhoon meet big enough to down him?" Pin-pin wondered. "He the toughest critter in this jungle; everyone spin gravel when a Rhoon flit overhead." The Ween dipped a finger in a smear of spilled lubricant, waved R near an olfactory organ. "Foo!" he snorted. "That gone plumb rancid already! I guess we don't make no meal off this fellow!" Retief clambered up the side of the downed behemoth, looked down into an open cavity gouged in the upper side of the thorax, just anterior to the massive supporting structures for the rotating members. Wires were visible; not the irregulardiametered organic conduits of the Quoppina internal organization, but bright-colored cables bearing lettering... "Hey, Tief-tief!" Pin-pin called suddenly "Us better get scarce! This boy's relations is out looking for him!" Retief looked up; a great dark shape was visible, hovering a few hundred feet above tree-top level. By the bright light of Joop, a second and a third Rhoon appeared, cruising slowly back and forth over the position of their fallen comrade. "They going to spot him any minute now," Pin-pin said. "T say let's get!" "They can't land here," Retief said. "They've already spotted him; they're patrolling the location." He looked around, listening. There was the whine of the breeze among metallic leaves, the high throb of idling Rhoon rotors, a distant rustle of underbrush... "Somebody's coming," Retief said. "Let's fade back and watch." "Look Tief-tief, I just remembered. I got a roof needs patching -- " "We'll lie low and pull back if it's more than we can handle. Pinpin. I don't want to miss anything." "Well..." The three Ween went into a hurried consultation, then clacked in reluctant agreement. "Okay -- but if it's a bunch of them no-good Voion coming to see what they can steal, us leaving," Pin-pin announced. I t was five minutes before the first of the approaching group came into view among the great scarletand purple-boled trees, laden with full field packs and spare tires. "What I tell you?" Pin-pin whispered shrilly. "More of them policemen! They all over the place." Retief and the Ween watched as more and more Voion came up, crowding into the clearing leveled by the passage of the Rhoon, all chattering in a subdued buzz, fingering their blackwood clubs and staring about them into the forest. "Plenty of them." a Ween hissed. "Must is six sixes of sixes if they's a one." "More than that. Look at 'em come!" An imposing-looking Voion with a jewel in his left palp appeared; the others fell back, let him through. He rolled up beside the dead Rhoon, looked it over. "Any sign of Lieutenant Xit?" he demanded in Trade dialect. "What he say?" Pin-pin whispered. "He's looking for the one you fellows found," Retief translated for him. "Oh-oh. They ain't going to like it if they finds him." The conversation among the Voion continued: "... trace of him. Colonel. But there's a native village not far away. Maybe they can help us." The colonel clacked his palps. "They'll help us," he grated. "Which way?" The Voion pointed. "Half a mile -- there." "All right, let's march." The column formed up, started off in a new direction. "For a minute I figure they mean Weensville," Pin-pin said. "But they headed for the Zilk town." "Can we skirt them and get there first?" Retief asked. IP "I reckon. But I ain't hungry just now -- and besides, with them policemens on the way -- " "I'm not talking about grocery topping," Retief said. "Those Voion are in a mean mood. I want o warn the villagers." "But they's Zilk. What we care what happen to them babies?" "The Terries I'm looking for might be there. I'd prefer to reach them before the Voion do. Beside which, you villagers should stick together." "Tief-tief, you is got funny ideas, but if that's what you wants... R etief and his guides pushed through a final screen of underbrush, emerged at the edge of a cleared and planted field where the broad yellow leaves of a ripening crop of alloy-plants caught the JoopHght. "Them Zilk a funny bunch," Pinpin said. "Eats nothing but greens. Spends all they time grubbing in the ground." "In that case, I don't suppose they have to wait until a policeman drops in to plan a meal," Retief pointed out. He started across the open field. "Hoo, Tief-tief!" Pin-pin hurried after him. "When I say they don't cat folks, that don't mean they don't snap a mean chopper! Us is tangled with them before, plenty of times! You can't just wheel in on 'em!" "Sorry, Jik-jik. No time for formalities now. Those cops aren't far behind us." A tall, lean, Quoppina appeared at the far side of the field -- a bright yellow-orange specimen with long upper arms tipped with specialized earth-working members, shorter, blade-bearing limbs below. "Oh-oh; they sees us. Too late to change our minds now." Jik-jik held his fighting claw straight up in a gesture indicating peaceful intentions. "What d'ye want here, ye murderous devils?" a high, mellow voice called. "I'm looking for a party of Terrans whose boat crashed near here a few hours back," Retief called. "Have you seen them?" "Terrans, is it?" The Zilk hooted. "I've not seen 'em. And if I had, I'd not be likely to turn 'em over to the likes o' you." Other Zilk were popping from the low, domed huts now, fanning out, moving forward on both flanks in an encircling pincermovement. At close range, Retief could see the businesslike foot-long scythes tipping the lower arms. # #T isten here, you Zilk," Jik-jik called in a voice which may have quavered a trifle. "In the name of the Worm! Us ain't just here to ask foolish questions; us is got news for you folks." "And we've got news for you -- not that ye'll ever have the chance to spread it about -- " "Us come to tip you folks off," the Ween persisted. "They a mob of mean-looking Voion on the way! Less you wants to tangle with 'em. you better head for the brush!" "Don't try to put us off with wild tales, Ween!" "It's the truth, if I ever told it!" "Why would ye teU us?" IP "Beat me. It were Tief-tief here had the idea." "What kind of Quoppina is he?" Ac Zilk called. "I've seen no stilter wi' half the length o member that one shows." "He a out-of-town boy just passing through." "'Tis a trick, Wikker," a Zilk betide the spokesman hooted. "I'd not trust the little butchers as far as I could kick 'em -- nor the big stilter, neither." "The Voion are looking for a friend of theirs," Retief said. "They have an idea you'll help them look." "We'll help 'em off our land," a Zilk stated. "I seen a mort o' the scoundrels about the acreage lately, running in packs and trampling the crops." "They're armed and they mean business," Retief said. "Better get ready." The Zilk were closing in now; the two Ween crowded up against Relief, their fighting claws clicking like castanets. Retief drew his sword. "You're making a mistake," he told the advancing Zilk leader. "They'll be here any minute." "A sly trick, ye heathens. But we Zilk are too shrewd for ye." "Hey!" A Zilk called. The others turned. The lead elements of the Voion column were just emerging from the forest. At once, the Zilk formation broke, fell back in confusion toward the town. "Get the females and grubs clear," the Zilk chief honked, and dashed away with the rest. The Voion colonel, seeing the tribesmen in confusion, barked an order; his troops rolled forward through the field, clubs ready. "Let them have the town!" Retief seized the arm of the chief as he shot by. "Disperse in the jungle and you can re-form for a counter attack!" The Zilk jerked free. "Well -- maybe. Who'd ha' thought a crowd of Ween were telling the truth?" He rushed away. The Voion were well into the village now. Startled Zilk, caught short, dashed from huts and wheeled for cover, burdened with hastily salvaged possessions -- only to drop them and veer off with hoots of alarm as fast-wheeling Voion intercepted them. "Us better back off," Jik-jik proposed from the shelter of a hut on the sidelines. "Scout around and try to round up the survivors," Retief said. "Pinpin, you make it back to Weensville and bring up reinforcements. The Voion need a little lesson in intertribal cooperation before their success goes to their heads." H alf an hour later, from a screen' of narrow pink leaves that tinkled in the light breeze, Retief, several dozen Zilk and seventy-odd Ween watched by the waning light of the fast-sinking loop. A swarm Retief estimated at three hundred Voion, a few showing signs of the brisk engagement, prodded their captives into a ragged line-up. "I don't know what's got into them babies," Jik-jik said. "Used to be they garbage-pickers, slipping around after Second Joop, looking for what they could pick up. Now here they is, all shined up and acting like they rule the roost." "They've gotten a disease called ambition," Retief said. "The form they have causes a severe itch in the acquisitive instinct." "Not much meat on a Zilk," someone mused. "What you reckon they want over here? Can't be they just looking for they boy; them Voion never frets over no trifles like that." "Hoo!" Fut-fut said, coming to Retief's side. "Look what they up to now!" The Voion, having arranged the captive Zilk in two columns of a dozen or so individuals of both sexes, were busy with strips of flexible metallo-plastic, welding shackles to the arms of the first in line, while others of their number poised with raised clubs to punish any resistance. The lead Zilk, seeing the chain about to be linked to him, lashed out suddenly with his scythe, severing a Voion arm at the first joint, then plunged through the circle around him, dashed for the jungle. A Voion wheeled into his path, brought his club around in a whistling arc -- and bounced aside as the Zilk snapped out an overlong digging arm, just as two more Voion closed from the off side, brought their clubs down in unison. The Zilk skidded aside, arms whirling, crashed in a heap and lay still. "Nice try, Wikker," the Zilk chief muttered. "Don't reckon I'd endure chains on me, either." "That's what happens when you play it their way," Retief said. "I suggest we work out some new rules. We'll decoy them into the jungle, break up their formation and take them one at a time." "What you mean, Hef-tief? Ut going to tackle them ugly babies?" "Sure. Why not?" "Well, I guess you is right Us ain't got nothing else scheduled for the evening." "Good," Retief said. "Now, here's what I've got in mind... VI T hree Voion working busily to pry the lid from the Zilk Town grain bin paused in their labors. Again the thin cry sounded from the forest near at hand. "Sounds like a lost grub," one said. "A little tender roast meal wouldn't go bad now. Pounding in the skull-plates offarmers is hard work." "Let's take a look. The Colonel's busy overseeing the looting; he won't notice us." "Let's go." The three dropped their pry-bars and wheeled briskly across to the deep shadow of the thicket whence the sound emanated. The first in line thrust branches aside, rolled slowly forward, peering through the shadows. There was a dull smack! and he seemed to duck down suddenly. The Voion behind him hurried forward. "Find it?" he inquired, then skidded to a halt. "Juz!" he whistled. "Where's your head?" Something small and blue-green sprang up before him, a huge claw opening -- IF At the sound -- a sharp whock! -- the third Voion halted. "Huj?" he called. "Juz? What's go -- " A scythe swung with a whistle and his head bounced off to join those of his comrades. Jik-jik and Tupper, the Zilk leader, emerged from the brush. "Work like a charm," the Ween said. "Let's do it again." Behind him, Retief turned from surveying the work in progress in the town. "I think the Colonel's beginning to suspect something. He's falling his men in for a roll-call. How many have we given haircuts to so far?" "Half a six of sixes, maybe." "We'll have to stage a group diversion before he figures out what's going on. Tell Fut-fut and his group to wait five minutes, then kick up a disturbance on the far side of the trail we came in on." Jik-jik keened orders to a halfgrown Ween who darted away to spread the word. "Now we'll string out along the trail. They'll probably come out in single file. Keep out of sight until their lead unit's well past our last man. At my signal we'll hit them all together and pull back fast." "It sounds slick. Let's roll." Three minutes later, as a Voion sergeant continued to bark out names, the small messenger darted up to the position where Retief waited beside the trail. "Old Futfut ready, he say," the lad chirped breathlessly. "Hey, Jik-jik! Can I get me one?" "You ain't got the chopper for it, Ip-ip; but you can scout around the other side of the town. Soon at you hear them policemen's heads popping you set up a ruckus. That'll keep 'em guessing -- them that sdfl has guessing equipment. Now scat! It time for the fun to begin." A shrill yell sounded from Fut-fuFs position, then an angry yammer of Ween voices, accompanied by sounds of scuffling. From his concealment behind a yard-wide tree with a trunk like pale blue grass, Retief saw a stirring in the Voion ranks as they looked toward the outcry. The Colonel barked an order. A squad of Voion fell out and rolled quickly to the trail mouth. There was a moment of confusion as the troops milled, not liking the looks of the dark tunnel; then, at a shrill command from a sergeant, they formed a single file and started in. The first rolled past Retief 's position, his club swinging loosely in his hand. He was followed closely by another, and another. Retief counted twenty before they stopped coming. He stepped from behind the tree, glanced toward the village; the roll-call went on. He drew his sword, put two fingers in his mouth and gave a shrill blast. At once there was a crash of underbrush, a staccato volley of snicks and snaps, followed in an instant by a lone Voion yell, quickly cut off. The last Voion in the column, ducking back from the attacking Ween, spun and found himself confronting Retief. He brought his club up and gave a shrill yelp as Retief's roundhouse stroke cut through the weapon near the grip. "Go back and tell the Colonel he has two hours to get to town," Relief said. "Any Voion found loose m the jungle after that will be roasted over a slow fire." He implemented the command with a blow with the flat of the blade that sent the Voion wobbling villageward; then he whirled and plunged into the dense growth, made for a vantage point overlooking the village. There was a high-pitched cry from the far side of the town. Ipip was at work. The Voion were den noises. The one whose club Retief had clipped off charged into the waving the stump of the weapon. "... forest demon!" he was yelling. "Nine feet high, with wheels like a juggernaut, and a head like a Voion, except it was red! Hundreds of them! I'm the only one got away." Branches rustled and clanked as Jik-jik came up. "Hoo, Tief-tief, you quite a strategist. Got a passel of die trash that time! What's next?" now, the roll-call abandoned. Voion scurried to and fro in confusion. "Let them go. I see they're not bothering with their prisoners." The Voion were streaming away down the wide trail in considerable disorder, flinging loot aside as they went. In two minutes the village was deserted, with the exception of the ranks of chained Zilk, staring fearfully about, and the crumpled bodies of their relatives. "We'll go in quietly so as not to scare them to death," Retief said. "And remember -- the idea is to make allies of them, not hors d'oeuvres." F ifty-one Zilk, three of them badly dented, had survived the attack. Now they sat in a circle among their rescuers, shaking their heads mournfully, obviously still not quite at ease in the presence of seventy Ween. "Ye warned us, I'll gi' 'y e that," one said ruefully. "Never thought I'd see the day a bunch of Voion'd jump us Zilk, face to face -- even if they did have us six to one." "The Voion have a new mission in life," Retief said. "Their days of petty larceny are over. Now they're after a whole planet " "Well, I guess we fix them, hey Tief-tief?" Jik-jik chuckled. "The way them babies run, they going to need retreads before they gets to town." "That was just a minor scuffle," Retief said. "They're shaken up at the moment, but they'll be back." "You sure enough reckon?" Futfut executed a twitch of the palps indicating sudden alarm. "For a stilter what just hit town at First Joop, you sure take in a lot of ground in a hurry," Jik-jik said plaintively. "If you knowed them rascals coming back, how come you tell us to mix in in the first place?" "I thought it would save a lot of talk all around if you Ween saw a demonstration of Voion tactics first hand. Then, too. it seemed worthwhile to help out the Zilk." "We lost good old Lop-lop," JikIF jik pointed out. "His head plumb bashed in. He was a good eater." "They lost thirty-five club swingers," Retief said. "We've gained fifty-one new recruits." "What that?" Jik-jik clacked his secondary claws with a br-r-rapp! "You ain't talking about these here greens-eaters?" "Why, ye murderin' spawn o' the mud devil, d'ye think we Zilk'd have any part of yer heathen ways?" one of the rescuees hooted, waving his scythe. "Ye can all -- " "Hold it, fellows," Retief said. "If it comes to a fight with the city boys, you tribes will stick together or lose. Which will it be?" "Where you get an idea like that, Tief-tief? They always been a few Voion sneaking around, getting they antennae in -- " "Just before I arrived here, Ikk declared himself proprietor of the planet. If the rest of you are good, he promises to make you honorary Voion." There was a chorus of indignant buzzes and hoots from Ween and Zilk alike. "Well, I'm glad to see an area of agreement at last," Retief said. "Now, if you Zilk are recovered, we'd better be pulling out." "What about our crop?" Tupper protested. "It's all ready to harvest!" "This here grass?" Jik-jik contemptuously plucked a wide golden leaf from the row beside him, waved it under his olfactory organ. "Never could figure out what a Quoppina thinking of, all the time nibbling leaves..." He paused, sniffed at the leaf again. Then he bit off a piece wiA a sound like a sardine can being torn in two, and chewed thoughtfully. "Hey," he said. "Maybe us been missing something. This plumb good!" Fut-fut snorted his amusement, plucked a leaf and sniffed, then bit "Hoo!" he announced. "Taste like prime Flink. Dog if itdon't!" In a moment, every Ween in sight was busily sampling the Zilk greens. "Don't s'pose it matters," a Zilk grumbled. "We'll never get the crop in any way, with those Voion robbers on the loose." "Don't worry about that," a Ween called. "Us'll have these here greens in in ten minutes flat!" Jik-jik nodded, still masticating. "Maybe us Ween and you Zilk could work together after all," he said. "Us'll do the fighting and you fellows grow the greens." R etief, Jik-jik and Tupper watched by the trail as the last of the grubs were carted away by nervous mothers to shelter in the deep jungle along with the village pots and pans, and the newly harvested alloy-plants. Suddenly Tupper pointed. "Look up there," he boomed. "A flight of Rhoon -- big ones! Coming this way!" "Scatter!" Retief called. "Into the woods and regroup on the trail to the north!" Ween and Zilk darted off in every direction. Retief waited until the lead Rhoon had dropped to almost treetop level, heading for a landing In the village clearing; then he faded back into the shadows of the jungle. One by one ten great Rhoon settled in, their rotors flicking back glints of Jooplight as they whirled to a stop. In the gloom, small, dark figures moved: Voion, filing out from between the parked leviathans, formed up a loose ring among the deserted huts, fanning outward. "Come on, Tief-tief," Jik-jik said softly. "If them Rhoon wants the place I say let 'em have it." He broke off. "Look there!" he hissed. "Voion -- swarms of 'em -- wheeling right under them big babies' snappers!" "They got here a little sooner than I expected," Retief said softly. "They must have already set up a field HQ nearby." "Tief-tief, you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking them Voion and them Rhoon is working together! But they can't be! Ain't no tribe never worked with no other tribe, not since the Worm's first Wiggle!" "The Ween and the Zilk got together," Retief pointed out. "Why not the Voion and the Rhoon?" "But that ain't fair, Tief-tief! Ain't nobody can fight a Rhoon! And they always been such peaceable babies. Just set on their mountain top and leave the flat lands to us!" "It seems they've changed their ways. We'll have to fall back. Spread the word to the troops to move off -- and keep it quiet." "Sure is getting dark fast," Jikjik commented nervously. "Us Ween figure it bad luck to move around in the dark of Joop." "It'll be worse luck if we stay here. They're forming up to sweep this stretch of jungle clear." "Well -- if you says so, Tief-tief," Jik-jik conceded. "I'll spread the word." H alf an hour later, the party paused on the trail, in total darkness now. Tupper was peering through the blackness. "I'd give a pretty to know where we are," he said. "Stumbling along a trail in the dark -- 'tis no fit occupation for a sane Quopp." "We'll have to call a halt until Second Jooprise," Retief said. "We can't see where we're going, but neither can the Voion. They're not using torches either." "But I can hear 'em. They're not far behind us -- the night-crawling heathen!" "It'll be Second Jooprise in another half hour, maybe," Jik-jik said. "I hopes them Voion is as smart as we is and set still for a while instead of cooking up surprises." "I don't like it," Tupper stated. "There's something about this spot. I get a feeling hostile eyes are on me!" "They'll be hostile clubs on you, if you keeps talking so loud," Jikjik said. "Hush up now and let's all set and rest whiles we can." Tupper was moving carefully about in the darkness. "Oh-oh," he said softly. "What that?" Jik-jik demanded "It feels like..." "What it feel like?" Jik-jik asked. "Tief -- better give us a light," Tupper said tensely. IF Retief stepped to his side, took out a lighter, fired a torch supplied by a Ween. The oily brand flared up, cast dancing light on a purplish-gray mound blocking the path. "Was there something?" a deep voice boomed out. "Now we is done it," Jik-jik choked out. "Us is right smack dab in the middle of Jackooburg!" A t once, a dozen torches flared ahead; Retief looked around at a sprawling collection of wide mud and leaf sheds spotted at random under the shelter of a grove of vast green-barked nicklewood trees. There was a wide yard, beaten to concrete smoothness by heavy wheels. About it were parked a dozen massive, low-slung creatures, five feet at the shoulder and ten feet long, with dusty magenta back plates, foot-thick rear wheels a yard in diameter, and a pair of smaller wheels forward, evolved from the lower pair of arms. The upper arms, flexible and spade-tippoi, were coiled under the wide, flat, duckbilled heads. "Well?" the same voice, like heavy syrup, insisted. "I hope you have some excuse for bursting in on our nightly contemplation hour!" "Just leaving, big boy." Jik-jik spun his wheels backwards, raising dust that roiled in the torchlight. With a rumble, a pair of Jackoo wheeled to cut off retreat. Another pair gave low honks, took up positions flanking the intruders on the left. More Jackoo appeared from the darkness and still more emerged from shelter among the trees ringing the yard. "Not in such a darned hurry skinny-wheels," the Jackoo purred. "Before I roll you out into a pretty orange mg. I'd like to know what you thought you could snitch here." "I'm looking for a missing party of Terrans," Retief said. "Have you seen them?" "Terrans? What on Quopp are those?" "A type of stilter. They look a little like me, actually, except that they have tender skins." "Hmm. Sounds tasty. Tell you what; whoever catches them first divvies up with the others, all right?" "They're not to be eaten," Retief corrected. "I want them whole." "Oh, greedy, eh?" More Jackoo rolled to complete the encirclement. "Oh-oh," Jik-jik twittered. "Us surrounded." "That's fine," Retief said. "Now we won't have any Voion sneaking up on us." CC'T'ief-tief, us don't want to A tangle with those boys," Jikjik hissed. "They is tough customers. They ain't fast on they wheels, but when they starts it take a mountain to stop 'em. They flatten whatever they meets!" "Good. They'll make excellent heavy armor." "Tief-tief, you is got strange ideas. These Jackoo ain't got a friend in the jungle. They grubbers, and they don't care what kind they gets. Ween, Zilk, Flink -- " "Maybe we can offer them a change of diet. "If you have any last words, better get them said. The Jackoo were closing in. "You boys is got wrong ideas." Jik-jik crowded against Retief. "Us just dropped in to say howdy. I mean, us figured -- I mean Tief-tief figured -- " "What he means is," Tupper amplified hastily, "the dub-swinging rogues ha' carried out a dastardly attack on Zilk Town, and -- " "And you boys is next," Jik-jik added. "So -- " "Heavens, one at a time!" the Jackoo bellowed. "Gracious, a person can't even hear himself think! Now, let me get this straight: Just which of you is offering what others for sale?" "The cute one with the long stilts," a Jackoo suggested from the background. "He's the owner, and these other two -- " "Nonsense, Fu-fu! The sour-looking one owns the squatty one, and the stilter is some kind of a flack -- " "You're both wrong," a third hollow voice chimed in. "The little jumpy one with the big bitey thing obviously -- " "Gentlemen." Retief held up both gauntleted hands. "I wonder if you've noticed a small conflagration in the near distance?" "Gracious, yes," the Jackoo named Fufu said. "I thought it was morning and woke up hours early!" "A large party of Voion calling themselves Planetary Police have raided Zilk Town. They'll be here next." "Well, dandy! Maybe they'll have some succulent grubs for sale." "This isn't like last time," Retief said. "They're not small-time freelance bushrangers any more. They've incorporated as a government and gone into the wholesale end. They start off by levying a modest hundred percent property tax. After collecting that, they draft the survivors into government service, in what capacity we haven't yet determined." "Ummm, no." The nearest Jackoo thumped heavy palps together in the gesture of Invitation Declined. "We're content as we are, living our peaceful, contemplative lives, bothering no one -- " "What about all them grubs you steals?" Jik-jik put in. "Well, if you're going to get picky..." "What Fufu means is that we don't want to sign up for the program," a Jackoo explained. "Naturally, we think enterprise is ducky, but -- " "It's not exactly an invitation," Retief said. "More of an ultimatum. Your village is on their route of march. They should be here by First Jooprise." "Well, they'll just have their trouble for nothing," Fufu snorted. "Having one salesman call is one thing, but whole squads of them is simply out of the question!" "Sure is glad us settle this thing when us did," Pim-pam said heatily. "Now us better disappear in a hurry. Them Voion done snuck up on us; they about six deep all the way around the town." IF #CT just remembered," Jik-jik said. "Why, you bunch of spoilsports!" X "I got cousins on the far side Fufu honked. "Do you mean you're of the valley. I believes I'll just go going to run away just because a pay them Ween a call." few worthless lightweights might be "Hey, that a good idea, Jik-jik," decapitated?" a nearby Ween chimed in. "Ain't "Us worthless lightweights wheelseen old grandpa since I a nipper, ing out of here while the wheeling I believes I'll just go along." good," Fut-fut declared. "Rest of "It's a shame the way us been neyou can do what you likes; it a free glecting our kin," another offered, country!" "I has a yen to travel myself," a "That's right, Tief-tief," Jik-jik third realized aloud. sighed. "You Dipple-macs is good "Hold on," Retief called as a genfighters, but us knows when us eral surge toward the surrounding licked." foliage gathered force. "Running "Just listen to them chatter," Fufu away won't help. The Voion will grunted. "A shameful display of arcatch you whichever way you go." rant cowardice. Luckily, we Jackoo "It was satisfying, getting the are simply too brave for words. Unhook into a few o' the murdering fortunately, we can't see in the dark, no-goods," Tupper keened. "But so we'll have to bow out of night there's too many o' 'em. Our only operation. In fact, I think it might chance is to slip off, quiet-like..." be a good idea to slip away to quietdr er territory now and recharge our plates. It has been rather an unsettling evening -- " "Gentlemen," Retief called, "you're all talking like idiots. They have us hemmed in on all sides. There's only one way to get out of this trap -- and that's fight our way out." "How in the world did we get mixed up in this, Fufu?" a Jackoo boomed. "Why don't we just mash these noisy creatures and get back to sleep?" "Listen at them," Jik-jik said. "They ready to quit! Only us Ween doing any fighting talk. Too bad we is got to sneak off with the rest of them -- " "Ween, ha!" Tupper shrilled. "Tief-tief's no Ween." "He a honorary Ween," Jik-jik said sullenly. "We're wasting time arguing," Retief said. "If we hit them hard, we can punch our way through. They won't be expecting attack." "I've got an idea," Fufu said. "Since Tief-tief is the one who wants to start trouble, why doesn't he go do it alone? Then in the confusion, the rest of us can just steal away." "Hey, that not a bad idea." Jikjik nodded judiciously. He eased over beside Retief. "This you big chance to impress me," he whistled. "Not only will you hog all the glory, but if you gets annihilated, nobody miss you. What you say?" "Very well," Retief said. "I'll lead the attack -- if you'll permit me to sit on your back, Fufu -- and if the rest of you will follow my lead." "Well... us Ween is fighting sons of guns," Jik-jik said. "But seeing as them Zilk done pooped the party..." "It was you Ween started this talk o' desertion," Tupper honked. "We Zilk will stick as long as any o ye -- if you go first, Tief." "That's settled, then," Retief said. "Sharpen up your cuttng edges, everybody, and we'll see what we can do." #Cvne thing about being a stiltvy er," Jik-jik said almost enviously, eyeing Retief, sitting astride Fufu. "You sticks up there like you was welded on. Can't no fellow with wheels manage that trick." "Get ready!" Retief called. Brush was stirring across the yard. A big, tall Voion rolled into view, a jewel glinting in one palp. He crossed his upper arms, propped the lower ones on what would have been hips in a vertebrate. "You, there!" he shrilled in Tribal dialect. "This village is under arrest! Now, all of you Jackoo lie down and roll over on your backs. And if you happen to catch those out-oftown agitators under you, so much the better!" Fufu's oculars, plus both pairs of antennae, snapped erect. "What did he say?" "He wants you to lie down and play dead," Retief explained. "A Jackoo lie down? He must be having us on," the great creature honked. "Once a Jackoo is off his wheels, he's -- well, I shouldn't noise IF this about, but since we're allies now -- " "I know; he can't get up again." "Well?" the Voion colonel shrilled. "You have exactly one minute to do as you're told, or my troops will fire the underbrush and burn you and your village into slag!" "These huts of yours; they burn pretty well, don't they, Fufu?" Retief inquired. "Well, we do use magnesiumbearing leaves for our roofs. They're light and easy to manage." "What we going do now, Tieftief?" Jik-jik demanded. "Them salesmen means business." "They've formed up a nice envelopment all the way around position," Retief said. "And they have all the strategic advantages. That leaves it up to us to score a tactical victory." "What them words mean?" a Ween demanded. "They mean the Voion have us outnumbered, outgunned, and outflanked -- so we'll have to beat the wheels off them in a fashion they're not expecting." "How we going do that?" "Just be patient another ten seconds,? Retief said soothingly. The glow of approaching Jooprise was bright in the east. Abruptly the fast-moving body leaped into view, a vivid edge of greenish light that swelled into a white glare as the great disk swept upward. Retief drew his sword, pointed it at the Voion. "Let's go, Fufu," he said. The Jackoo leader gave a mighty honk, and with a surge of power lunged into motion, his tribesmen at his back. R etief could see leaves tremble on the trees ahead as the ground shook to the charge of the forty multi-ton Quoppina. For a startled moment, the colonel stood his ground. Then he backed, spun, shot into the underbrush a scant ten yards ahead of Fufu. Retief ducked as his mighty mount thundered in among the trees. Leafy branches whipped aside with a screech and clatter of twisted metallo-wood. A polished Voion flashed into sight, gunned aside barely in time, whirled to thrust a bright lance-head at Retief, who struck it aside, heard a screech cut off abruptly as the Jackoo in line pounded across the spot where the invader had stood. More Voion were in sight ahead now, scattering before the avalanche of Jackoo. There was a loud twang ! and a heavy arrow glanced off Retief s chest armor, whined away over his shoulder. Fufu slammed full tilt into a six-inch tree, bounced it aside as though it were a bundle of straw, veered slightly to miss a two-foot trunk, flushed a Voion who darted ahead, tripped, disappeared under Fufu's blind charge. Two Voion popped up at once, levelling lances; Retief crouched low, struck one spear aside with his sword point, saw Fufu's grubber knock the other flying. Behind and on both sides a heavy orashing of underbrush attested to the presence of other units of Federation heavy armor charging in line abreast. Above, leaves jingled and clanged to the passage of moving bodies. Reflected Joop-light winked from the accoutrements of half-concealed Voion. "Wheel" Fufu hooted. "This is I'd be charging into battle with a generalissimo sitting on me!" "Just be sure I'm still in place when you charge out again," Retief instructed. A portable searchlight winked on ahead, silhouetting scurrying Voion against a bluish haze as they rushed to form up a defensive line against the thunder of the approaching attackers. "Oh, that's lovely," Fufu panted. "I can see them better now!" The Voion ahead were dashing ftither and thither, each seemingly reluctant to hog the glory of placing himself in the path of the oncoming enemy. "Swing to the left now," Retief called. A Voion shot across the path ahead, whirled, brought a hand-gun up as Fufu veered to slam the gunner under his wheels. Two more Voion popped up, leaped aside, gave despairing yelps as Fufu's flankers steamrollered them. Fufu was running parallel to the Voion front now, fifty feet inside the beseiging line, half a dozen yards behind a tribesfellow. ' Voion were racing alongside the turf-pounding line, loosing off arrows which clacked harmlessly off Jackoo armor. One shot in close, fired at Retief, who ducked, thrust with the sword, saw the Voion wobble wildly, go over, bounce high and slam into a tree. The crashing of metallo-chitin under horny wheels was like the thundering of a heavy surf, punctuated by belated screeches of alarm as the Voion rear ranks caught glimpses of the doom rushing down at them. Spears arced up, falling as often among the Voion as among the rebellious tribesmen; blasters fired wildly, and here and there a club swung in a vain blow at a racing Quoppina. Then suddenly Fufu was through the main body, slamming past astonished rearguardsmen who gaped, dithered, fired too late. "Swing left!" Retief called. "Maybe we can isolate this bunch!" N ow the Jackoo raced parallel to the outer fringes of a sizable detachment of the foe, cut off from the main body. Behind them, the Ween and Zilk who had made their dash trailing close along the lanes opened up by the heavyweights charged on, disappeared into the surrounding forest in hot pursuit of the demoralized main body. Locked in a solid mass of entangled wheels, the entrapped herd cut off by the rebels battled hopelessly to retreat. Those who eluded the freight-train column and fled to the shelter of the woods seemed to disappear abruptly as soon as they reached cover. The Voion captives were now compressed to the consistency of a single interlocked traffic jam, screeching mournfully and huddling back from the patrolling heavyweights. "Hold it up, Fufu," Retief called. The Jackoo puffed to a halt, wheezIP mg heavily. His tribesmates following his lead, closed ranks, buzzing and humming, radiating heat like big purple boilers. The ensnarled Voion squalled, drew even closer together as the mighty creatures stared at them, their sides heaving from the run. The few Planetary Police still mobile darted to and fro, then threw down their weapons and huddled against their embattled fellows. Behind Retief, the concealed combat teams emerged from the brush, snappers snapping, scythes waving. "Fall out for a ten-minute break, gentlemen," Retief addressed his fighters. "They'll be back in a few minutes; but with about three hundred cops in our custody, we may find the opposition in a mood to talk terms." # #'T'ief-tief, I got to hand it to A you," Jik-jik stated. "Our plan work out pretty good! Us leave a trail of wide, skinny policemens all the way back to where Jackooburg use to be!" "Used to be?" Jackoo heads turned. "Sure. What you think that smoke is?" "Why -- they wouldn't dare!" "Never mind," Jik-jik said. "It wasn't much of a place anyhow. But Tief-tief -- like I says, you is a credit to honorary Weenhood. Only thing I don't see is, how come you won't let us get on with breaking them Voion down into bite-size? Way they jumbled up, it take 'em six months to figure out whose wheels belongs to which." 'This bunch we've rounded up is just a small part of the Voion army," Relief pointed out. "We'll get the maximum use from them as negotiating material. But not if they're disassembled." "Hey, Tief-tief!" A Ween who had been posted as look-out hurried up, pointing skyward. "Some kind of flying wagon coining!" Retief and the others watched as a foreign-made hell settled in nearby. A small undernourished-looking Voion with an oversized head lowered himself from the cockpit, unfurled a white flag and approached, moving unsteadily on wheels of which several spokes were flapping loose. "All right, let him come. And try to remember not to remove his head before he gets here," Retief cautioned. "You are Tief-tief the rebel commander?" the newcomer called in a curiously weak voice. Retief looked the envoy over carefully, nodded. "We, ah, admire your spirit," the Voion went on. "For that reason we are considering offering you a general amnesty... Retief waited. "If, er, we could discuss the details in private?" the emissary proposed in a hoarse whisper. Retief nodded to Jik-jik and Tupper. "Would you fellows mind stepping aside for a minute or two #" "Okay, Tief-tief. But keep both oculars on that customer; he look to me like a slick one." They moved off a few yards. "Go ahead," Retief said. "What's your proposition?" The Voion was staring at him; he made a dry rasping sound. "Forgive my mirth," he hissed. "I confess I came here to salvage what I could from a debacle -- but that voice -- those legs... The Voion's tone changed to a confident rasp: "I have just revised my terms. You will relinquish command of this rubble at once and accompany me as a prisoner to Planetary Field HQ!" "Why," Retief inquired interestedly, "would I do that?" "For an excellent reason. In fact, for ten excellent reasons, my dear Retief!" The Voion reached to its head, fumbled -- then lifted off a hollow head-piece to reveal a pale gray face and five inquisitive eyestalks. "Well, General Hish of the Groaci Legation," Retief said. "You're out of your territory." Hish fixed two pairs of eyes on Retief. "We have in our custody the person of ten Terry females, removed from a disabled vessel illegally on Voion soil," he said coldly. "They are scheduled to be shot at dawn. I offer you their lives in return for the surrender of yourself." IX # # T X Then you coming back, Tief V tief?" Jik-jik inquired worriedly. "How come you going off with this here policeman in this here apparatus?" "I'll be back as soon as I can," Retief said. "Keep up the hit and run tactics -- and recruit every tribe you meet." 'To get aboard," the disguised alien said in Groaci. 'To make haste to arrive before the executions." Retief stepped into the two-man heli in which the emissary had arrived. The latter strapped in, started up, lifted from the wheel-scarred field, then turned in the seat and cocked three unoccupied eyes on Retief. "I congratulate you on your wisdom in coming along quietly," he whispered in excellent Terran. "I of course disapprove of bloodshed, but without the compelling argument which your presence at Planetary HQ will present, I fear my protests would never have availed to preserve intact the prisoners." "You still haven't told me what a Groaci military man is doing out here in the brush, General." "Please -- address me merely as Hish. My Voion associates know me only as a helpful civilian advisor. If my voice is to be effective in securing clemency for the captives, no complicating new elements must be introduced into the present rather fragile equation." "For a group enjoying the services of a high-powered military advisor," Retief said, "the Planetary Army shows a surprising ignorance of the elements of warfare." "I've only just arrived in the field today," Hish said. "As for these native levies -- hopeless. But no matter. In the absence of your restraining presence your irregulars will doubtless devise a suitable disposition for them. The survivors, if any, will perhaps have learned a lesson IF or two from the experience which will stand them in good stead during coming campaigns under my tutelage." There was a heavy satchel on the floor by Retiefs feet, its top gaping open. "I see you're taking a pracical view of matters," Retief commented. He studied a dull-glinting shape inside the bag. "I confess I'm curious as to just what it is you Groaci expect to net from the operation." As he spoke, he reached casually and lifted out the inert form of a two-inch Quoppina, a harsh yellow in color, remarkably heavy. Beneath it he saw another, similar trophy, this one a soft silvery color. He replaced the dead specimens. "Shall we say -- new customers?" Hish whispered, staring ahead at the jungle below. "The prospect of opening up a new market for your usual line of hardware isn't sufficient inducement to launch a hard-headed group like yourselves on a risky adventure un"Ah, but perhaps the new Planetary Government, sensible of the close ties binding them to the Groaci state, will spurn continued intervention in internal affairs by reactionary Terran influences." "Booting the Terries is part of the deal, eh? There's still something you're not being perfectly candid about, Hish. What's in it for the Groaci?" "One must keep a few little secrets," Hish chided. "And now I must give my attention to landing. Such an awkward business, laboring under the weight of this bulky disguise. Still, it's necessary; the rank and file of my associates seem to suffer from the sort of anti-foreign animus so typical of bucolics." T here were lights below, the dark rectangles of tents, the raw scars of hastily scraped camp streets, packed with the hurrying ant-shapes of Voion. To one side of the field headquarters, Retief saw a rank of parked Rhoon, unnaturally still as technicians crawled over them under the glare of portable poly arcs. The heli dropped in to a bumpy landing. At once it was surrounded by Voion nervously fingering weapons. Hish replaced his headpiece, opened the hatch and scrambled out. An officious-looking Voion staff officer bustled up, gave Retief a hostile look. "Who's this, Hish-hish?" he demanded. "Their truce representative, I suppose?" "By no means, Xic," Hish whispered in his weak Groaci voice. "Instruct your chaps to keep a sharp eye on this fellow. He's my prisoner." "What do we want with more prisoners -- and a stilter at that? I've already suffered a number of nasty dents from the legs of those Terry cows you insisted we bring in." "Enough, Xic! I've had a trying evening." "What did you manage in the way of truce terms? I suppose they're demanding outrageous reparations for those few trivial villages that accidentally caught on fire." "On the contrary, they demand nothing. I left them to their own devices. Now -- " "What about our troops? Those rabble are holding an entire brigade of highly polished soldiers immobilized out there! Why, the cost of the inlays alone -- " "The fortunes of war, my dear Major. Now, if you please, I have important matters to discuss -- " "What's more important than salvaging my brigade?" the outraged officer shrilled. "How can I be adjutant of an organization that's been scrapped by the enemy?" "A neat problem in administration, sir. Possibly you could carry them on your morning report as 'Missing in Action." "Hmmm. That might work -- at least until next payday. Meanwhile, why not disassemble this stilter and get on with planning our next victory?" "This stilter will play an important part in that happy event, Xic. He happens to be the rebel commander." "Him?" Xic canted his oculafs alertly at Retief. "How in Quopp did you manage to capture him?" "I have a certain skill in these matters. Bring him along now to my tent." "Not until the prisoners are released," Retief said. "I want to see them put aboard a couple of helis and on their way." "What's this? A prisoner dictating terms?" Xic keened. "No matter; the wenches have served their purpose. I had in mind ransoming them off for concessions from the Terry Ambassador, but the IF present arrangement has a certain euphony. Go along to the stockade and see that they're released at once." "I'll go with you," Retief said. "You'll do as you're ordered!" Major Xic snapped. "Or I'll shorten those stilts of yours by a joint to bring you down to a more manageable size!" "No, you won't. You'll carefully keep me intact and reasonably wellpleased with things. Hish-hish would like it that way." "We'll indulge his fancy for the moment, Major," the Groaci hissed. "Kindly lead the way." T he Voion clacked his palps angrily and rolled off toward a stoutly palisaded enclosure looming above the lines of low tents along the company streets. At a heavy gate made of stout ,logs welded together a guard produced a foot-long key. He opened a huge padlock, hauled the portal wide, then shouted to a compatriot above. Lights sprang on at the corner towers. Xic motioned a squad of Voion through, then followed, Hish close on his heels, Retief and an additional squad behind him. There was an outcry ahead. Four Voion shrilled simultaneously, an effect not unlike the vocalizations of mating cats, though magnified. The Voion around Retief jerked up ther clubs. iHsh darted ahead. Retief pushed after him, came up beside the Voion officer who was waving all four arms and swiveling his oculars excitedly while the soldiers peered about the thirty-yard square enclosure, all explaining at once. "Where are the Terrans?" Hish whispered. "What have you done with my prisoners?" "Quiet!" the major shrieked. He turned to Hish, assuming a nonchalant angle of the antennae. "Too bad, Hish-hish," he said airily. "It appears they've excavated a tunnel and departed." "It was the one with the coppercolored cranial filaments," a guard explained. "It demanded digging tools so that it and its fellows could eplivate the ratesifrans..." "What's that?" Hish demanded. "I don't know!" the major yelled. "Something to do with a tribal taboo. And if you think my boys are going to call down the wrath of the Worm -- " "Beware... lest you call down a more immediate ill-temper," Hish snarled. He calmed himself with a visible effort, turned on Retief. "An unexpected development. But the females appear to be free, just as you desired." "Not exactly," Retief cut him off. "I desired to see them turned loose with a fighting chance of getting across a hundred miles of jungle and back to Ixix." "Ah, well, life is filled with these trifling disappointments, my dear Retief. Suppose we go along to my tent now and proceed with business." "Thanks, but I won't be able to make it," Retief said affably. "I have to be getting back to the wars." "Be realistic, Retief," Hish urged. "My end of the bargain was fulfilled in a rather informal manner, true, but surely you are not so naive as to imagine that detail nullifies the spirit of our agreement?" Hish asked. Retief glanced at the looming stockade walls, the Voion ringing him in. "What spirit would that be?" "One of cooperation,' Hish purred. "I suggest we move along from these depressing surroundings now and conduct our little chat in more comfortable circumstances." "I'm afraid you've gotten a couple of false impressions along the line somewhere," Retief said. "I just agreed to come with you. I didn't promise to do your homework for you." "Surely the supplying of certain information was implicit in your surrender!" "Why natter with the scoundrel?" the .Voion major put in. "I have specialists on my staff who'll put him into a talking mood!" "Don't be tiresome, Retief," Hish whispered. "I can squeeze the truth out of you; but why force me to these uncouth tactics?" "Oh, maybe I have an idea you don't know just where I stand, and that you're a little reluctant to dam"What's he talking about?" the Voion demanded. "What has this to do with interloping Terries?" "Silence!" Hish snapped. "Go busy yourself with executing the slackers responsible for the escape, or some other routine task!" "Who do you think you're talking to?" the major keened. "Some headquarters goldbrick sent you out here to poke around and count paper clips, but if you think you can talk that way to me and get away with it -- " "Calm yourself, Major! I should dislike to employ my influence with Prime Minister Ikk to have you transferred to duty on certain other fronts!" Hish turned back to Retief. "You will now give me full particulars on rebel troop concentrations, or suffer the consequences!" "Suppose we just jump directly along to the consequences," Retief proposed. "It will save time all around." "As you will, then." Hish turned back to Xic. "Since your stockade has proven inadequate to requirements, what other facilities can you offer for the restraint of the prisoner?" "Well -- there's a nice little room behind post headquarters, specially built to house the officers' stimulant supply. If we ever get any. If it's good enough to keep my kleptomaniacs out of the Hellrose, it ought to keep this stilter in." "Very well," Hish snapped. "Take him there and chain him to the wall." T he cell was a cramped, lowceilinged chamber with damp mud walls retained by log pilings. Only the upper foot of them were above ground level. Through the narrow openings between uprights, Retief could see the muddy polyarclit acres of the camp stretching a hundred yards to the nearest jungle perimeter. IF The crowd of Voion who had escorted him there crowded in, watching as the head jailor shook out a length of tough chain. He welded one end to a projecting stub on an ironwood corner post then approached Retief. "Just sit quiet now, stilter," he ordered, "while I throw a loop around your neck. And no backchat, or I'll weld your mandibles shut." "How about putting it on my left stilt instead?" Retief proposed. "That way it won't interfere with my thinking nice thoughts about you, just in case my side wins." "Confidentially," the welder said in a low voice, "just how strong are you boys?" "Well, let's see," Retief considpina on Quopp. Subtract one million Voion, and that leaves -- " "Wow!" a gaping guard said. "That's better'n two to one, pretty near!" "Shut up, Vop!" the warder buzzed. "Stick out that stilt, stilter!" Retief complied watched as the Voion threw two loops of stout chain around his ankle, welded the links together. "That ought to hold you until Hish-hish gets through arguing with the major and comes down to work you over," the Voion snapped off his portable welder. "If you need anything, just yell. The exercise'll do you good." "What time is breakfast served?" Retief inquired. "Oh, I'll throw a couple slabs of overaged Dink in to you after a while -- if I think of it." The guards filed from the cell, taking their torches with them, the warder bringing up the rear. He looked back from the door. "That bad?" he queried. "Four "Worse," Retief agreed solemnly. "Some of us vote twice." X T here was silence after the door clanked shut. Along the narrow gap between the top of the excavation and the sagging log ceiling half a dozen inquisitive Voion faces were ducked down, staring in at the dark pit. They saw nothing, so they tired of the sport and rolled off to other pastimes. Retief picked a relatively dry spot, sat down, quickly unsnapped the leather-soled foot-covering from his chained leg, pulled off the shoe, then unbuckled the greave-like shin armor, worked it out from under the loops. A moment later his leg was free. He resumed the legand footpieces, shook out the chain and arranged a slip-noose for use in the event of sudden callers, then scouted the small room. The metallowood posts were deep-set, six inches apart. He chipped at one with the clawed gauntlet on his right hand. It was like scratching at a fireplug. The airspace above the wall was hardly more promising; the clearance under the ceiling was no more than eight inches, and the gap between verticals hardly a foot. A movement beyond the barrier caught Retief's eye. A pattern of glowing, greenish dots danced in the air a few yards distant, bobbed, came closer. "Tief-tief!" a tiny voice peeped. "Tief-tief caught-caught!" "Well, you know my name." Something small and bright green buzzed through the opening, hovering on three-inch rotors. "Save-save George-George," the tiny flyer said. "Tief-tief pal-pal!" Retief held out his hand. The sixinch Quoppina -- a Phip -- settled on it, perched like a jeweled ornament, its head a deep-green, its short forest-green stripes, its four strawthin legs a bright sunshine yellow. "Phip-phip help-help," it stated in its tiny voice. "That's a very friendly offer," Retief said. "There might be something you could do, at that. How about rounding up a couple of your friends and see if you can find a few things for me..." R etief studied the six-foot-long, two-foot-deep trenche he had scooped in the stiff clay of the cell floor, rimmed on one side by a low parapet heaped up from the excavated material. "That will have to do," he said to the half dozen Phips who perched along the sill, watching the proceedings. "Old Hish will be hotfooting it down here any time now to see if durance vile has softened me up." A last flight of Phips buzzed in through the wall openings, deposited their bean-sized contributions in the small heaps laid out on a mat of leaves flown in for the purpose. "All-all," one hummed. "Gonegone." "That's all right," Retief assured the small creature. "I've got enough now." He lifted a wide leaf heaped with shredded bark selected by the Phips for its high cellulose content, placed it beside the fox-hole. "Somebody give me a light," he called. A Phip settled in, struck its rear legs together with a sound like a file on glass. At the third try a spark jumped. Retief blew, gently on it, watched as the fuel glowed, burst into a bright green flame. He covered the small blaze with another broad leaf; yellowish smoke boiled out. He held the damper in place until the low-oxygen combustion was complete, then lifted it to reveal a double handful of black residue. "That ought to do the job; now let's prepare the rest of the ingredients." He picked up a rough-surfaced slab of ironwood previously split off a post, began grating sour-balls into a fine powder. H alf an hour later, Retief packed the last pinch of the finely divided mixture into the container he had improvised from nicklewood leaves, carefully wrapped with lengths of tough wire-vine. He crimped down the top, inserted a fuse made from a strip of shirt-sleeve impregnated with the home-made gunpowder. "Now, when I give the word, light it off," he instructed the hovering Phips. "Just one of you. The rest will have to stand back at a good distance. And as soon as it's lit -- IF head for the tall timber. Fast. Don't wait around to see what happens." "Kay-kay, Tief-tief," a Phip chirped. "Now-now?" "In just a minute." He hefted the bomb. "A good pound and a half; that ought to have a salutary effect." He placed the rude package on the ledge against an upright, pressed it firmly in position, then packed clay around it, leaving the fuse clear. "That's it," he said. He stepped into the trench, settled himself face down. "Light it off, fellows. And don't forget to hightail it." There was the busy humming of small rotors, then a harsh rasping as the selected Phip struck a spak. A brief sputtering followed, accompanied by the hasty whine of the departing Phip, then silence. Retief waited. He sniffed. Was there a faint odor of burning rag?" The boom! lifted Retief bodily, slammed him back against the floor of his retreat under an avalanche of mud and screaming wood fragments. He thrust himself clear, spat dirt, his head ringing like a giant gong. There was a harsh stink of chemicals, a taste in his mouth like charred sneakers. Cool air blew from a gaping cavern where the wall had been. A timber sagged from above it, and he could see smoke swirling in a room littered with shattered lumber.  A Phip buzzed close. "Fun-fun," it shrilled. "Gain-gain!" "Some other time," Retief said blurrily. "And remind me to use smaller amounts." He ducked under the fallen ceiling beams, went up the blast-gouged slope, emerged into the open. Voion shot past him, inaudible in the shrill ringing in Retief's ears. Out of the smoke haze, the slight figure of General Hish appeared, arms waving. Retief straight-armed the Groaci, saw him go end over end, one artificial wheel bouncing free to go rolling off into the brush. He sprinted, dodged a pair of Voion who belatedly skittered into his path and plunged into the dark wall of the Jungle. XI T he trail left by the fleeing prisoners was not difficult to follow. Bits of lacy cloth, dropped hankies, candy wrappers, and the deep prints of spike heels served to indicate their direction of flight as plainly as a set of hand-painted sign-posts. The girls had pushed through dense thickets for a hundred yards, then encountered a well-defined trail leading in an approximately west ward direction. It was now after Second Jooprise, and Retief moved along in multi-colored gloom beneath towering trees of a thousand varieties, each bearing metal-bright leaves in gay tones, which rustled and tinkled, clashing with soft musical notes as the arching branches stirred to the wind. Half an hour's walk brought him to a stream of clear water bubbling over a shallow, sandy bottom bright with vivid-colored pebbles. Small aquatic Quoppina the size of Phips darted to and fro in the sun-dappled water, propelled by rotating members modified by evolutionary processes into twin screws astern. The water looked tempting. Retief hung his sword on a convenient branch, lifted off the helmet he had been wearing for the past eighteen hours, unstrapped the leather sidebuckles and shed the chest and back armor. Then he splashed into the stream and dashed cold water over his face and arms. Back on shore, he settled himself under a mauvebarked tree and took out one of the concentrated food-bars Ibbl had provided. From above, a plaintive keening sounded. Retief looked up into the tree, saw something move in the Jooplight striking down through branches and glittering dark foliage. -- a flash of vivid purple among the blackish-red leaves. There was a second movement, lower down. Retief made out the almost invisible form of a wiry, slender Quoppina, gorgeous violet where the light struck him, decorated with whiteedged purple rosettes, a perfect camouflage in the light-mottled foliage. The creature hung motionless, wailing softly. Retief jumped, caught a branch, pulled himself up, then climbed higher, avoiding the knife-edged leaves. From a position astride a stout limb twenty feet up, he could make out the cleverly concealed lines of a narrow-mesh net in which the captive -- a Flink, Retief saw -- hung, a tangle of purple limbs, twisted ropes, and anxiously canted oculars. "What happened, fellow? Pull the wrong string and catch yourself?" "I'm laughing," the Flink said glumly, in a high, thin voice. "So go ahead, gloat," a second Flink voice called from above. "Rub it in." "Just a minute and I'll cut you down," Retief offered. "Hey, me first!" the upper Flink called. "It was him started the trouble, remember? Me, I'm a peaceful Flink, bothering nobody -- " "It's a different stilter, you lowlife," the nearer Flink called hastily. "This ain't the one from before." "Oh, you've seen other stilters around?" Retief inquired. "Maybe. You know how it is. You meet all kinds of people." "You're not being completely candid, I'm afraid. Come on -- give." "Look," the Flink said. "Such a crick I've got: How about cutting me down first and we'll chat after?" "He's got a crick," the other Flink shrilled hoarsely. "Ha. In his lousy net I'm hanging! Six cricks I've got, all worse than his!" "You think this noose is maybe comfortable?" the first came back hotly. "Rope burns I'm getting -- " # # T et's compare notes later," Re-L' tief interrupted. "Which way did the stilters go?" "You look like a nice, kind sort of stilter," the nearest Flink said, holding his oculars on Retief as he swung in a gentle arc past him. "Let me down and I'll try to help you out with your problem. I mean, in such a position, who could talk?" IK "Cut him down, and he's gone like a flash," the other called. "Now, I happen to like your looks, so I'll tell you what I'll do -- " "Don't listen," the roped Flink said in a confidential tone. "Look at him! And he claims to be number one tribal woodsman, yet. Some woodsman!" "A woodsman like you I shouldn't be, even without you was hanging in my noose," the other countered. "Take it from me, Stilter, Ozzl's the biggest liar in the tribe, and believe me, competition he's got!" "Fellows, I'm afraid I can't stay for a conference after all," Retief cut in. "Sorry to leave you hanging around in bad company, but -- " "Hold it!" the Flink called Ozzl screeched. "I've thought it over and I've decided: A nice fellow like you I want my family to meet -- " "Don't trust him! I'll tell you what. Get me out of this lousy rope, and I'm your Flink." "You expect this stilter -- such a fine-looking Quopp -- he should believe that? As soon as I'm loose, everything I own is his!" "So what'll he do with a pile of empties? My deal is better, believe me, Mister. You and me, such a talk we'll have, you wouldn't believe -- " "You're right; he wouldn't. Him and me, together a long chat we'll have -- " There was a flash of green, a sharp humming. The Fhip was back, hovering before Retief's face. "Tief-tief flip-flip," it chirped. "Flip-flip Flink-flink!" I "Don't listen!" Ozzl screeched. "What does this midget know?" "Flip-flip Flink-flink!" "Hmmm. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that a Flink's word is good as long as he's standing on his head," Retief mused. "Thanks, partner." He gripped Ozzl's lower arms -- in his species specialized as landing gear -- and inverted the captive tree-dweller. "If I cut you down, will you tell me where the stilters are?" "Okay, okay, you got me," the Flink chirped glumly. "Cut me down and the whole miserable story Fll give you." R etief extracted a similar promise from the second Flink. "Look out, now," the latter cautioned. "All around is nets." Retief made out the cleverly concealed lines of other nets and nooses, some small, some large enough to gather in a fair-sized Quoppina. "Thanks for the warning," Retief said. "I might have walked right in to one of those." Five minutes later both captives had been lowered to the ground and cut free. They sprawled, groaning, working their arms and experimentally revving up their rotating members -- small pulley-like wheels which they customarily hooked over vines or branches for fast travel. "Well," Ozzl sighed. "Me and Nopl, first class trappers we're supposed to be. Such a picture, the two of us in our own ropes hung up!" "Nothing's busted," Nopl said. "Boy, such an experience!" "Don't stall, gentlemen," Retief said. "The time has come to tell all. Where did you see the sitters, how long ago, and which way did they go when they left?" "A promise is a promise. But listen -- you won't tell, okay?" "I won't tell." Ozzl sighed. "All right. It was this way... ((Qo I turn around, and zzsktt! O The stilter the others called Fi-fi pulls the trip wire. Such a dummy I was to explain it. And there I am, downside up. It was humiliating!" "Under the circumstances, a little humility seems appropriate," Retief suggested. "And after the stilter tricked you into your own net, what then?" "Then the two-timer cuts down the rest of the stilters. And off they go thataway." Ozzl pointed. "Yeah," the other Flink said aggrievedly. "So there we hung until you come along. And all because we try to be polite and show that stilter how the nets work, such an interest it was expressing." Retief nodded sympathetically. "We stilters are a tricky lot, especially when anybody tries to violate our tribal taboo against being eaten. And on that note I really must leave you." "What's the rush?" Nopl demanded. "Stick around a while; a little philosophy we'll kick around." "What about a drink, fellows?" Ozzl proposed. He took a hip-flask from the flat pouch strapped to his lean flank, quaffed deeply, rose to IF his full three foot six, flexed his arms. "A new Quopp that'll make out of you," he announced and passed the bottle to Retief. He took a swallow. Like all Quoppina liquors, it was thin, delicately flavored, resembling dilute honey. He passed the flask to Nopl, who drank and then offered sulphurous sourballs which Retief declined. "They're a good two hours ahead of me," he said. "I have to make up some time." The Phip was back, buzzing around Retief s head. "Tief-tief," the Phip hummed. "Nip-nip!" "Sure, give the little stool-pigeon a shot." Nopl offered. "Whoopee! Life is just a bowl of snik-berries!" "My pal, Tief-tief!" Ozzl slung one long, pulley-wheeled member across the lower portion of Retief s back in comradely fashion. "You're a shrewd dealer for a... a... whatever kind of Quoppina you are!" Nopl took another pull at the flask. 'Tief-tief, you should meet the crowd," he shrilled cheerfully. "A swell bunch, am I right, Ozzl?" "Such a swell bunch, I'm crying," the Flink replied. "When I think what a swell bunch they are I wonder, what did I do to deserve it?" "They're a lousy crowd teetotaling small-timers, but so what?" Nopl caroled. 'Tief-tief they should meet." "Sorry," Retief said. "Some other time." Ozzl made a noise like a broken connecting rod, the Flink expression of suppressed merriment. "Guess again, Tief-tief," he carolled, and waved a wheeled member in an allencompassing gesture. "Meet the boys!" Retief glanced upward. From behind every leafy branch and vineshrouded shrub, a purple Quoppina materialized, a rope or net in hand, a few nocking arrows to small bows, one or two armed with long, flexible tridents. "About time," Nopl said and hiccupped. "I thought you boys would never show!" R etief stood in the center of the patch of open, Jooplit sward beneath the big tree from which a hundred silent Flink hung like grotesque fruits. An overweight Flink with the wine-purple carapace of mature age tilted myopic oculars at him. "These two loafers I send out, they should check the traps, and with a drinking buddy they come reeling back," he commented bitteriy"Who's reeling? Am I reeling? Look at me," Ozzl invited. "What about the stilter?" someone called. "He looks like prime stock. With a cheese sauce, maybe he should be served." "My pal, Tief-tief, nobody cuts up! First I'll drop dead!" "This I could arrange," the oldster cut him off. "Now, if we slice up this stilter, a snack for everybody he'll make." "Stop right there," Nobl shrilled. "A businessman like Tief-tief we couldn't eat! Cannibalism, it would be! Instead, we'll truss him up and sell him. Or maybe disassemble him for spares." Cries rang back and forth as the Flink discussed the various proposals. "Such a head I've got," Nopl groaned during a momentary lull. "I think I need another little snort." "That booze of your works fast," Retief commented. "You got through the buzz and into the hangover stage in record time." "Hung over or no, Ozzl and me will stick by you, Tief-tief. If they vote to sell you, I'll put in a good word we should hold out for top price." "Marked down you'll not be while I'm around," Ozzl agreed. T he elderly Flink emitted a shrill cry for silence. "The pros and cons we've discussed," he announced. "It looks like the cons have it." A rustle ran through the Flink ranks. The encircling tribesmen moved in closer, shaking out nets and ropes as they maneuvered for favorable positions. Retief drew his sword, stepped back against the nearest tree-trunk. "Hey," the oldster called. "What's that sharp thing? It looks dangerous. Put it away before somebody gets hurt." "It's an old tribal custom among us stilters that we make owning us as expensive as possible," Retief explained. "Who's going to be first to open an account?" "It figures," the elder said judiciously. "Price supports, yet." "Still, we try to be reasonable," Retief amplified. "I doubt if PH disassemble more than a dozen Flink before you get a rope on me." "Six," the Flink said flatly. "That's my top offer." "I'm afraid we're not going to be able to get together," Retief said. "Maybe we'd better call off the whole deal." "He's right," someone stated. "Worth twelve Flink, including maybe me, he's not." Retief started forward, swinging the sword loosely. "Just step back, gentlemen," he suggested. "I have important business to transact, and no time to continue this delightful discussion." A noose whirled at him; he spun, slashed; the severed line dropped to the ground. "Hey! That's expensive rope you're cutting!" someone protested, hauling in the damaged lariat. "Let him go," another suggested. "What's that?" the elder shrilled. "You want I should let valuable merchandise go stilting right out of sight?" "Listen, Tief-tief," Ozzl called. "There's only the one trail, and it leads straight to the rockspire. Now, with us, you get sold for parts, so okay, there you are. But you climb up there and a Rhoon picks you up and flies off -- then where are you?" "Did you say Rhoon?" Retief inquired. "On top of the rock spire they're thick like Phips on a jelly flower. A chance you haven't got!" "Still, I think I'll risk it," Retief said. He moved toward the trail and two Flink rushed in, nets ready. He knocked them spinning, dodged two nets and a lasso, leaped for the dark tunnel of the trail and ran for IF it with a horde of Flink baying in hot pursuit. L ater, on a rocky slope a hundred yards above the tops of the thick jungle growth below, Retief pulled himself up onto a flat boulder. He turned and looked down at the Flink tribe clustered below, staring up and shaking fists. "Dirty pool, Tief-tief!" Ozzl yelled. "This kind terrain our wheels ain't meant for." "Thanks for escorting me this far," Retief called. "I'll find my way from here." "Sure." The Flink waved a member at the steep escarpments rising above. "Just keep climbing. The Rhoon roost is only about a mile -- straight up. If you don't fall off and get killed, the Rhoon you'll find after a while. Or they'll find you." He clicked his antennae in the gesture of Sentimental Farewell. "You were a good drinking buddy." Retief scanned the slope above; he had a stiff climb ahead. He lifted off his helmet, pulled off the gauntlets, slung them by a thong to his belt. He shook his canteen; nearly empty. He took a last look at the valley and started up the almost vertical slope. I t was an hour after dawn when Retief reached a narrow ledge a thousand feet above the Jungle valley below. The wind whistled here, unimpeded by Quoppian flora. In the distance, a pair of white flyers of medium size wheeled and dipped under the ominous sky of approaching First Eclipse, where the fireedged disc of Joop rushed to its rendezvous with the glaring Quopp sun. Far above, a mere speck in the dark blue sky, a lone Rhoon circled the towering peak where the giant flyers nested. Retief studied the rock-face above. It was a smooth expanse of black slate-like stone rising sheer from the ledge. The route upward, it appeared, ended here and the Flink waited below. One of the white aerialists was dropping lower, coming in to look over the intruder. Retief donned his head-piece, shifted his sword hilt to a convenient angle, waited for the visitor. He could hear the beat of its rotors now, see the pale coral markings along the underside of the body, the black legs folded against the chest region, the inquisitive oculars, canted to look him over. "What seek you here upon the wind-slopes, groundling?" a thin voice called down to him, tattered by the gusty breeze. "There's naught for your kind here but unforgiving rock-spires and the deep, cold air." "They say the Rhoon have their nests up there," Retief called. "That do they. Up a-high, where low clouds scrape their bellies and death-blooms grow amid the moss as black as night." The flying creature dropped closer; the slipstream from its ten-foot rotors battered at Retief, whirling dust into his face. He gripped the rock, braced his feet apart. zephyr from my passing can come nigh to spill you from your perch, how will you fare when some great lordling of the Rhoon comes like a cyclone to attend you here?" 'Til work on that one when I get to it," Retief shouted over the tumult. "If you've come to steal my eggs, you've picked a lonely death." "Is there any other kind?" The flyer settled lower, reached out and gripped a buttress of rock with black talons; its rotors whined to a stop. "Perhaps you've tired of life, chained to the world, and you've come here to launch yourself into one glorious taste of flight," it hazarded. "Just paying a social call," Retief assured the creature. "But I seem to have run out of highway. You wouldn't happen to know an easier route up?" "A social call? I see you wish a braver death than a mere tumble to the rocks." "I'd like to sample the view from the top. I hear it's very impressive." "The view of raging Rhoonhood stopping to defend a nest is said to be the fearsomest orf Qiiopp," the flyer agreed. "However, few eyewitness tales of the experience are told." R etief studied the creature's rotors, spinning slowly as the wind sighed over the thin, curved blades. "How much weight can you lift?" he inquired. "I once plucked up a full-grown Flink and dropped him in the river yonder," the flyer motioned with one limber arm. "I doubt if he'll come thieving 'round my nest again." "I weigh more than a Flink," Retief pointed out. "No matter that. You'd fall as fast as any Flink, and make a better splash." "I'll bet you can't lift me," Retief challenged. The flyer revved its rotors, shifting its grip on its perch. "Most groundlings plead for life when once I catch them on the rockspires. Now you invite my wrath." "Oh, no. I'm just talking about flying me up there!" Retief pointed to the peaks towering above. "Fly you...?" "Sure. I can't walk up a vertical wall, and it wouldn't be convenient to go down and look for another route." "Can you be serious, poor earthbound grub? Would you indeed trust life and limb to me?" "Most Quoppina will keep their word to a harmless stranger. Why should you be any different?" "A curious rationale," the flyer said. "And yet, withal, a most refreshing one. I'd come to think of crawlers all as timid things, who cling and whimper out their fear when I come on them here among the lonely peaks. And now here's one who speaks as boldly as a flyer born!" "Just put me down anywhere in climbing range of Rhoon country," Retief suggested. "A strange anomaly is this! A wingless one who dares to come among the masters of the sky!" The IP flyer whirled its rotors, lifted, drifted, hovering toward Retief. "I'll put you to the test then, groundling! Perhaps you'll weight me down, and then together we'll go tumbling toward our death below. But if my rotors hold, I'll bear you up -- my life upon it!" "Fair enough." Retief sheathed his sword, squinting against the down-blast of air. He reached for the steel-hard grapples of the flyer, gripped, held on. Air screamed as the whirling blades raced, biting for purchase. Then he was lifting, floating up, wind screaming past his face, the mountainside dwindling away below. T he flying creature rose swiftly for a hundred feet; then it slowed, gained another fifty feet, inched upward, its rotors laboring now A gust of wind tilted it, and it dropped, then righted itself, struggled upward again, paralleling the smooth face of rock at a distance of thirty feet, Retief estimated. A small white flower growing from a crevice caught his eye. Slowly it dropped below him as the flyer gained altitude foot by foot. Above, Retief could see a tiny ledge where the vertical face ended, and above it a long sweep, only slightly le c steep, to a lone spire thrusting up another five hundred feet against the darkening sky. "How say you, groundling?" the laboring flyer's voice rang out. "Will you trust me to press on, or shall I give it up and place you safe below?" "Just a little way now," Retief called. "You can do it, old timer." "I like the groundling's spirit, wings or no!" the Quoppina shouted into the wind. "We'll hazard all... and win or die... and none can say we quailed before the test!" "You'd better save your wind for flying," Retief called. "We'll stage a self-congratulation session after we get there." The wind whipped, buffeting. The cliff face moved past with agonizing sloth. Retief's hands were numb from the strain; the ledge was still twenty feet above, inching closer. The Quoppina's breathing was loud, wheezing. The sound of the rotors had changed timbre. They seemed to flutter now, as though the blades were loose. Then another sound was audible -- a sharp whirring, coming closer... Retief twisted his head. A second flying Quoppina had come up from the port beam. It hovered, studying the situation with alert oculars. "That one's too big to eat, Gulinda!" it called. "I'll wager he's as tough as Wumblum wheel-rim!" "I'll place him... safe above... or die..." Retief s flyer got out. "Ah -- then it's a wager! Well, I suggest you waste no time. A Rhoon has seen you now, and half a minute hence he'll be here." Retief's flyer grunted a reply, settled down to steady pulling. Ten feet more, five, three... There was a deep thr umm ing, a beat of wind that bounced the flyer closer to the cliff-face. Retief craned, saw the huge-bodied shape of a fast-descending Rhoon silhouetted against the vast, glittering disks of its spinning rotors. With a final, gear-screeching effort, the smaller flyer surged upward the final yard, banked toward the ledge. "Farewell!" it screamed. Retief dropped, slammed stony gfound, fetched up against the rising wall above as the Rhoon pounced, missing, its fanged eating-jaws wide. Retief rolled away as the Rhoon struck out with a barbed hind leg, missed and struck again, sent stone chips flying. A narrow crevice split the rock a yard distant; Retief dived for it, wedged himself in just as the disk of Joop cut off the blackish sunlight like a snapped switch. Long Rhoon talons raked against the rock, sending a shower of bright sparks glimmering against the sudden dark. Then, with a hoarse scream, the Rhoon lifted away; the beat of its rotors faded. Retief leaned back in his cramped refuge, let out his breath with a long sigh, alone now with the stars that twinkled in the false night of the eclipse and the moaning wind that searched among the rock crannies. R etief rested while Joop edged across the bright corona erf the distant sun; the glowing halo bulged, then burst into full light as the transit was completed. He scanned the sky. A pair of Rhoon circled far above, light flicking from their rotors. He squeezed out of his hideaway, looked over the edge of the two-foot shelf on which he stood. Far below, the ledge from which IF he had hitched the ride to his present position showed as a thin line against vertical rock. And far below that, the Jungle stretched like a varicolored carpet across low hills to distant haze. He looked up. Striated rock loomed, topped by a rock spire that thrust up like a knife blade a final hundred feet. Retief turned back to the cranny in which he had hidden. It narrowed sharply into darkness -- but a steady flow of cold air funnelled from it. He went to hands and knees, pushed through the first narrowing, found that the passage widened slightly. Above, the sky was a bright blue line between the rising walls of rock. He rose, crunching brittle debris underfoot, braced his back against one face of the chimney, started upward... Halfway up, Retief found an outthrust shoulder of rock on which to rest. He ate half a food-bar, took a swallow of water -- the last in his canteen. Then he went on. Once the cleft narrowed, then widened out into a near-cave, from which a cloud of tiny gray-black Quoppina no bigger than hummingbirds swarmed in alarm, battering at his face and uttering supersonic cries. Again, the black shadow of a Rhoon swept across the strip of sky above, momentarily blanking out the meager light. The armor chafed, cutting into his back; his hands were cut in a dozen places from the sharp-edged rock. The crevasse widened again ten feet from the top. Retief made the last few yards in a scramble up a deeply scored slope half-choked with weathered and faded fragments of Quoppina exoskeleton and sunbleached organic gears looped by tangles of corroded internal wiring. The Rhoon, it appeared, were messy eaters. Keeping in black shadow, Retief studied the open sky. A thousand feet above, two Rhoon wheeled lazily, unaware of the intruder in their domain. He stood, dusted himself off, looked around at an oval platform fifteen by twenty feet, backed at one side by a spear of rock that rose ten feet to a needle point, edged on the remainder of its periphery by a void that yawned across to a stupendous view of high, lonely peaks, only a few of which topped his present vantage point. Closer at hand, a heap of round boulders caught his eye: Butter-yellow spheres eighteen inches in diameter. He went to them, tapped the' smooth surface of one; it gave off a hollow, metallic bong. There were six of them -- Rhoon eggs, piled here to hatch in the sun. Retief glanced toward the monster parents circling above, still apparently serenely ignorant of his presence. The big eggs were heavy, unwieldy in their lopsidedness. He lifted down the topmost spheroid, rolled it across to the cliffs edge, propped it, delicately poised, just above the brink. The next two eggs he ranged beside the first. Two more eggs formed a short second rank, with the final orb positioned atop the others. Retief dusted his hands, resumed the helmet and gauntlets he had laid aside earlier, then posted himself squarely before the gargantuan Easter display and settled down to wait. A cold wind whipped down from the deep blue sky. Retief watched the mighty Rhoon elders wheeling in the distance, tireless as the wind -- a description which, he reflected, did not apply equally to himself. Half an hour passed. Retief watched the high white clouds that marched past like gunboats hurrying to distant battles. He shifted to a more comfortable position leaning against a convenient boulder, closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky... A rhythmic, thudding whistle brought him suddenly wide awake. A hundred feet above, an immense Rhoon swelled visibly as it dropped to the attack, its giant rotors hammering a tornado of air down at him, swirling up dust in a choking cloud. The Rhoon's four legs were extended, the three-footlong slashing talons glinting like blue steel in the sunlight, the open biting jaws looking wide enough to swallow an Ambassador at one gulp. Retief braced himself, both hands on the topmost of the pyramid of eggs as the flying behemoth darkened the sun. At the last possible instant the Rhoon veered off, shot past the peak like a runaway air-liner, leaving a thin shriek trailing in the air behind it. Retief turned, saw it mount up into view again, its thirty-foot propellors flexing under the massive acceleration pressures. It swung in to hover scant yards away. "Who comes to steal Gerthudion's eggs?" the great creature screamed. "I want a word with you," Retief called. "The egg arrangement is just a conversation piece." "High have you crept to reach my nest, and slow was your progress," the Rhoon steam-whistled. "I promise you a quicker return passage!" It edged closer. "Careful with that draft;" Retief cautioned. "I feel a sneeze coming on. I'd hate to accidentally nudge your future family over the edge." "Stand back, egg-napper! If even one of my darlings falls, I'll impale you on a rock-spike to dry in the sun!" "I propose a truce. You restrain your violent impulses, and I'll see to it no accidents happen to the eggs." "You threaten me, impudent mite? You'd bribe me with my own precious Rhoonlets?" "I sincerely hope so. If you'll just perch somewhere, I'll tell you what it's all about." "Some reason must there be for such madness under the morning sun! To hear the why of it, I confess I'm curious!" The Rhoon mother swung across the platform, settled in at the far edge in a flurry of dust, clinging to the rock with four jointed legs like lengths of polished gray pipe. Her yard-long head reared up a full fifteen feet to stare down at Retief, the shadows of her rotors flicking across her horny features as the blades slowed to a leisurely wind-driven twirl. IT "Mind you don't twitch now, and send what remains of your short future tumbling down into the abyss," the huge flyer admonished in a voice that boomed like a pipe organ. "Now, tell me. Why chose you this peculiar means of dying?" "Dying isn't exactly what I had in mind," Retief corrected. "I'm looking for a party of Terrans. Stilters, somewhat exactly like me, you know." "And you think to find them here?" "Not exactly; but I have an idea you can help me find them." "I, Gerthudion, lend aid to the trivial enterprises of a planet-bound mite? The thin air of the steeps has addled your wits!" "Still, I predict you'll take an interest before long." T he Rhoon edged closer, stretching its neck. "Your time grows short, daft groundling," she rumbled. "Now tell me what prompts you to dare such insolence!" "I don't suppose you've been following recent political developments down below?" Retief hazarded. "What cares  Gerthudion for such?" the Rhoon boomed. "Wide are the skies and long the thoughts of the Rhoonfolk -- " "Uh-huh. I'm a long-thought fan myself," Retief put in. "However, a brand of mite called the Voion have been cutting a lot of people's thinking off short lately." "How could any petty dirt-creeper cut short the thoughts of a free-born Rhoon?" "I'll get to that in a minute," Retief promised. "Is it true that you Rhoon have keen eyesight?" "Keen is our vision, and long our gaze." "And your wind's not bad, either. Too bad you're too big for a career in diplomacy; you could keep a round of peace talks going for a record run. Now, tell me, Gertie, have you noticed the smoke columns rising from the forest over there to the north?" "That I have," the Rhoon snapped. "And lucky for you my eggs you're embracing, else I'd tumble you over the edge for your impertinence." "Those are tribal villages burning. The Voion are setting out to take over the planet. They have very specific ideas of what constitutes a desirable citizen. No Quoppina who isn't a Voion seems to qualify." "Get to the point!" "You Rhoon, not being Voion, are going to have to join the fight." "A curious fancy, that!" the Rhoon bassooned. "As though the lofty Rhoon-folk would stoop to such petty enterprise!" "I wonder if that keen vision of yours has detected the presence of a number of Rhoon cruising around at tree-top level over the jungle in the last few days?" "Those did I note, and wondered at it," the Rhoon conceded. "But a Rhoon flies where he will." "Does he?" Retief countered. 'Those particular Rhoon are flying where the Voion will." "Nonsense! A Rhoon, servant to a creeping mite who'd not a goodly swallow make?" 'They have at least two squadrons of Rhoon in service now. And unless someone changes their plans for them, there'll be more recruits in the very near future. You, for example." "Gerthudion, slave to a verminous crawler on the floor of the world?" The Rhoon spun its wide rotor with an ominous buzzing sound. "Not while I live!" "Exactly," Retief said. "What mean you?" the Rhoon croaked. "What mad talk is this?" "Those Rhoon the Voion are using are all dead," Retief said flatly. "The Voion killed them and they're riding around on their corpses." G erthudion squatted on folded legs, her stilled rotor canted at non-aeronautical angles. "This talk makes no sense," she tubaed. "Dead Rhoon, their innards to replace with wires imported from a factory on another world? Power cells instead of stomachs? Usurping Voion strapped into saddles in place of honest Rhoonish brains?" "That's about it. You Quoppina all have organo-electronic interiors, and there's enough metal in your makeup to simplify spot welding the necessary replacement components in position. A nuclear pack the size of a fat man's lunch will supply enough power to run even those king-size rotors of yours for a year. I didn't have time to examine the dead Rhoon I saw in detail, but I'd guess they've even rigged the oculars to a cockpit display screen to take advantage of your natural vision. Riding their zombies, the Voion can probably fly higher and faster than you can." 'They'd dare?" the Rhoon burst out, vibrating her posterior antennae in the universal gesture of Propriety Outraged. "Our airy realm to usurp? Our very members to employ? Aunt Vulugulei! For a week her dainty tonnage I've not seen; could it be...?" "Quite possibly she's been fitted out with a windshield and rudder pedals," Retief nodded. "And some shined-up Voion's probably sitting where her main reactor used to be carving his initials on her side and revving her rotors -- " "Enough! No more!" The Rhoon waggled her oculars in a dizzying pattern. She rose, creaking, on legs quivering with emotion, started her rotors up. "I'm off, my fellow Rhoon to consult," she called over the rising tumult of air. "If what you say is true -- and I've a horrid feeling it is -- we'll join in, these ghouls to destroy!" "I had an idea you'd see it that way, Gertie. And don't forget to ask if any of them have seen a party of stilters in the Jungle," "Inquire I will; meantime, my eggs from that precarious edge withdraw. If one should slip, your ragtag horde will lack a leader!" In a hail-storm of blown pebbles, the Rhoon leaped off, beating her way eastward toward a cluster of tall peaks. R etief turned at the sound of a loud scrongg! -- like a sheetmetal roof being lifted off a shed by a high wind. The heap of eggs quivIP ered. The ripping noise came again; a gleaming spike poked out through the polished curve of the center spheroid in the bottom row, ripped a foot-long tear. An ungainly shape thrust through the opening -- a head like a chromalloy pick-axe equipped with a pair of alert eyes which fixed on Retief. The beak opened. "Quopp!" the fledgling Rhoon squalled. "Quopppp!" It struggled frantically, snapping the impressive jaws, lined, Retief noted, with a row of triangular razors. A clawed leg appeared, gained the newcomer another six inches of freedom. As the broached egg rocked, those above trembled, then toppled -- inside the nest! -- with a crash like spilled milk cans. One, badly dented, bounced to a stop at Retief s feet. A six-inch split opened to reveal a second baby face, complete with meat shredders. The first Rhoonlet gave a final kick, sprawled free of the shell, which skidded across the platform, driven by the wind, disappeared over the side. A third egg gave a jump. A bright needle-point punctured its side. The first of the newborn Rhoon was unsteadily on its feet now, trying out six short, unspecialized limbs, claw-tipped, the rear pair showing only knobby buds where later the rotating members would develop -- a form not unlike the all the Quopp tribes. The hatchling wobbled, steadied, then charged, jaws gaping. Retief side-stepped, noting that infant number two was now half clear of his prison, while number three was surveying the scene with interested eyes. Dull clunks and clangs attested to activity within the other three eggs. The eldest infant managed to halt its rush just short of the cliff-edge, teetered for a moment staring down into the awesome depths over which it would soar later in life, and backed away, hissing. Then it remembered lunch and rushed Retief again in time to collide with younger brother, freshly on the scene. While the two tangled, squalling, Retief hastily maneuvered half a dozen scattered rocks in place to form a rude barricade, stationed himself behind it. The argument ended as a third young appetite shot past the combatants, zeroing in on the free lunch. The trio hit the barrier with a metallic crash, rebounded, came on again. And now there were four. The beat of heavy rotors sounded above. Gerthudion, flanked by two immense males, distinguished by gold and red cranial plumes, dropped in with a tornado of air that sent her young slithering and squawking across the rocky platform -- and over the edge. "Hey!" Retief called. "Your kids!" The Rhoon settled in. "That's all right; obnoxious creatures, those. It's only the eggs I'm concerned about, their hatching to insure. Anyway, they'll be all right. It's good experience. As for the call to war, we're with you -- " A small head appeared over the edge; scrabbling claws pulled a hungry Rhoonlet up, the others close behind. Retief stepped to the giant parent, scaled the massive side and straddled the back just behind the head. "Let's get moving," he called over the pound of idling rotors. "I'm beginning to share your view of the younger generation." "As for your Terries," Gerthudion honked, "Lundelia reports he's seen such a group as you describe near the village of the Herpp, a few miles west." "Then just drop me off there, if you don't mind." The Rhoon leaped into the air, the backwash from her pounding rotors a howling typhoon. "I'll lake you there," she boomed over the uproar. "Then thereafter you'll guide me to these ghoulish Voion, my vengeance to wreak!" I t was a swift flight from the chill altitudes of the rock spires down across rolling jungle to the bend of the river, where the pinkish copperwood huts of the Herpp nestled in the shelter of the trees. Gerthudion settled in to a bouncy landing on a sand spit where there was clearance for her rotors. Retief slid down, settled his sword belt into position for a quick draw, scanning the silent village with its neat wheelways, orderly flower beds and colorful awnings. "Nobody in sight, Gerti. I think title inhabitants beat a hasty retreat when they saw you coming." "Or mayhap they crouch behind their door-posts with drawn bows," the flyer suggested. "Yeah, mayhap. I guess there's just one way to find out." He walked across the sand, climbed a grassy bank, stood at the end of the village street beside a long table heaped with bright-colored fruits and fragments of husk -- a task apparently hastily abandoned. He called, "I am TieMief, and I dance the dance of Friendly Intentions." There was a flicker of motion at a window. The polished tip of an arrow poked into view, followed by a pale blue head. "I am Nop-Nee, and I dance the dance of Fair Warning." "I'm looking for some friends of mine," Retief called. "Don't let Gerthudion bother you. She's tame." The Rhoon snorted loudly. " -- and she won't eliminate your village unless you carelessly initiate hostilities by letting fly with that arrow." The aimed weapon disappeared. The Herpp emerged cautiously from the door, the arrow still nocked but aimed off-side now. "What makes you think your friends are here?" he chirped. "Oh, word gets around. There are ten of them -- stilters, you know." "Never saw them," the Herpp snapped. "Now you better get back on that monster of yours and dust back off where you came from, before we clobber the both of you." "Don't do anything hasty, NopNee," Retief cautioned. "Gerthudion is a patient Rhoon, but you might annoy her with that kind of talk." "Bah, we've seen enough Rhoon in the last twelve hours to last us," IF the Herpp snapped. "A round dozen of the devils flew over and dropped stones on us last night. Told us to surrender, before they set the whole place on fire!" "That's unfortunate," Retief agreed. "But those were outlaw Rhoon. Gerthudion's on her way to hunt them down right now." "Then she'd better get started. We've got catapults and ballistae rigged, and by now they're zeroed in and ready to fire. So -- " he raised the bow -- "scat!" "I admire your spirit," Retief said. "But first I want the ten Terrans." Nop-Nee drew the bow-string farther back. "Not on your life! I'm not turning harmless foreigners over to the likes of you and your oversized cronies! They're guests of Quopp, and they'll receive hospitable treatment. I am Nop-Nee and I dance the dance of Ferocious Defiance!" "And I'm Retief and I dance the dance of Mounting Impatience -- " "You can dance the dance of Apoplexy for all I care," Nop-Nee yelped. "Git!" Retief cupped a hand beside his mouth. "Girls, if you're in there, come on out!" he called in Terran. "I'm here on behalf of the Terry Embassy at Ixix!" T he Herpp jumped back in alarm. "Here, I'm Nop-Nee and I dance the dance of Confusion! That sounded like Terry talk!" A door banged wide on the third hut in line, and a slim brunette Terry female in torn flying togs appeared. She shaded her eyes at Retief, while other girls crowded out behind her. "Ladies, I'm enchanted to find you," he said. "Who are you?" the brunette asked. She had a snub nose and blue eyes and was not over nineteen. "I thought I heard a Terran voice." "That was me, I'm afraid. I'm known as Tief-tief. I'm here to help you." "You're not from that nasty little Voion who locked ui up in a corral?" the girl asked. "By no means. He and I are confirmed antagonists, ever since I blew up his liquor vault." The girls were in a huddle now, whispering together. "Well," the brunette said. "I guess we may as well take a chance; Aphrodisia likes your voice." She smiled and came forward. "I'm Rene. It's very nice of you to trouble about us, Mr. Tief-tief." "Girls, now that I've located you, I can make arrangements to fly' you out. I'm afraid Ixix isn't a healthy place for Terries right now, but there's a trading post at Rum Jungle where you'll be reasonably safe for the present." Retief looked over the little group, all young, all pretty, all showing signs of a difficult day and night in the jungle. "Which one of you is Fifi?" The girls looked at each other. Rene bit her lip. "She's not here, I'm afraid. We heard that a rebel army was organizing to fight the Voion, and she started out early this morning alone to try to reach them." IF  Short Story by w. i. McLaughlin G eorge Rock felt stomach being plastered against spine while his ship accelerated into another computer-guided evasion curve. "Georgie-Porgie, you wine-soaked fool, you're getting everything you deserve." Self-recrimination couldn't change the past, but it did serve as mental fingertapping to keep the spaceship's lone occupant from concentrating fully on the thing that was out there chasing him. The computer ordered the ship into a relatively straight line of flight. Rock expressed his relief by fumbling around in his pocket for some matches. He didn't complete the ritual of lighting the dead cigarette that stuck to his dry lips, but rather scanned the external sensor indicators. External electromagnetic At the end of the universe he saw the epic of Man's hopes -- and the misery of Man's defeat I field strength was uniformly down. This together with the continued straight flight of the ship indicated that the computer had, for the present, successfully evaded the thing. Again he lashed himself in nervous thought. "Light up, idiot. This ritay not be your last cigarette after all, if you smoke it fast." Rock fed his psycho-web programs into the central processing unit of the computer, replacing the evasion program which had just successfully gained him the time to attempt this next step in his defense against the thing. While his ship hurtled toward the dead ion laminae that lay ahead, Rock allowed himself the luxury of relaxing with his cigarette. "Lord knows I'll be busy enough when I get to the ion sheets. That glorified adding machine can run the ship while I finish this ciggy and have a drink... The thought of alcohol brought a stab of pain from his unsatisfied hangover,... of goddamn milk." Rock punched the console, getting a squeeze bag of milk for his trouble. In between squirts he worked on another cigarette and surveyed the situation in preparation for the coming battle with the thing. At least he hoped it would be a battle and not just his execution. H e knew that his meeting with the thing had been a sport, a freak -- one of those occurences that probability legislates against with a "#" followed by an absurd number of zeros. But the universe was a big place. Astronomical research confirmed the #th Century cosmologist Hoyle in his views as to the nature of the universe: it was indeed infinite in time and space. The universe expands away from every one of its constituent points. But it doesn't thin out because, as described by Hoyle's Canonical Creation equations of the #'s and #'s, hydrogen atoms continually "ping" into existence throughout space. Then they cluster together around local irregularities and finally boil themselves into galaxies with all their concomitant structure. Laymen and scientists alike could never comprehend the vast dimensions of the universe. A digit followed by a long string of zeroes means little to anyone. But if size alone was unintelligible, one corollary of this size was not -- the literally infinite variety of life in the universe. If monkeys stabbing blindly at typewriters could, given sufficient time, reproduce all of the earth's books, then how much more could be punched out in a universe of infinite time and space twitching purposelessly but effectively under the stabbings of the laws' of physics. Man, through imaginative writings and scientific skylarking, was somewhat prepared for the luxuriance of planetary life; almost every nonbinary star was accompanied by an inhabited planet. But biological life was just a part of the universe of consciousness: the marvelously intricate hydrodynamic mechanisms of the pulsating star Mira exhibited a consciousness as far advanced as any race of planetary creatures, and in interstellar space vast laminae sheets of ions bound together by electromagnetic glue flexed back and forth in intricate patterns of awareness. Rock's ship sped towards the remains of one of these ionic laminae. Death came inevitably to all life, whether man or ordered patterns of ions, and the ionic concentration that the ship's sensors had detected lying ahead was just a vast electrically charged corpse shucked off from the galaxy that gave it birth to drift in intergalactic space. Spaceship and pursuer approached this corpse for their ghoulish rendesvouz. Rock knew that only his nearness to the Magellanic clouds had made possible the appearance of this drifting hulk. The cavernous reaches of intergalactic space rarely entertainer cd any visitors. Only near the shoals of a galaxy might evidences of life activity be found, excepting of course the nameless things that occasionally blew in from intergalactic space -- the mad fish from the deep ocean. "And now, you besotted bard, you've got one of those little playmates sticking up your exhaust pipe." I t happened about six hours ago. George Rock, poet and seeker of new experiences, had lain winedrugged in his single-seater space craft. The object was to get away from it all -- a quick trip in space drive to the absolute aloneness of intergalactic space and then, oh thrill upon thrill, alcoholic contemplation of whatever alcoholic poets contemplate while sitting in deep space. Recovering from these reveries, Rock failed to notice the tell-tale indications of menace. Only when radiation reached alarming levels outside of the ship did the warning bells sound, awakening the sleeping man. But by then the thing from deep space had spread enough of its diffuse self over the ship to prevent shifting to space drive. Rock knew he had been lucky to get the ship moving again at top speed in local drive. While building up to maximum acceleration he had activated the psycho-web introductory and exploratory program. The psycho-web report came out as expected -- the radiation was organized, sentient, and quite mad by all recognized social standards. For a creature wandering endlessly in an abyss totally devoid of anything but self what else could the result be? "Aren't we mad together. Maybe you're just a great big slobbering dog that's looking for a friend. And who could you find out here but a madman for a friend?" The remark was more bravado than humor. But the warning mind pressures that had come with the creature's first onslaught weren't characteristic of man's best friend. The howling madness had sent waves of nausea activated evasive procedures. The ionic laminae had been spotted early in the chase, and for the last five hours the ship had headed for the spent corpse, with only occasional evasive procedures ordered by the computer when the mind pressures became unbearable. Rock asked the computer for a read out. He studied the printed output. Thoughtfully he laid the sheets aside and ordered food. Time enough for a tuna sandwich and another bag of milk before rapid deceleration would begin in the vicinity of the ion cloud. Using the psycho-web to activate the dead ion cloud was a desperate measure. But after six hours of running and computing Rock knew that the thing was too swift for his craft to outrun in local drive. R ock was three drags into a cigarette when deceleration began. He was slammed into his couch with maximum force and held there breathless and gaunt until the ship had spent its motion. With shaking IF hand he took a last drag on his cigarette and threw it into the disposal. He checked over the lights on the computer console once more. Then as the first hint of the approaching madness blew over his mind, he injected his arm with somnal and settled back to let the planned psycho-web sequence take over. Computer circuits clicked on and off as the psycho-web absorbed the essential features of Rock's mind. A perfect reproduction was then established in the outlying ion cloud by the psychoweb projector. Rock retained control of half of his projected psyche and voluntarily relinquished the other halt, now a tempting, unprotected morsel lying out there. The programmed computer instructed the pscho-web's environment simulator in the rules of the upcoming "game". He knew that he must interest the creature in contesting for control of the ion cloud complex. The alternative was to sit in the ship and absorb wave after wave of insane raving. The outcome of that would be all too predictable. The thing roared over the ship and into the cloud. It slobbered and drooled over the contact with otherness. , Aeons of aloneness were ended. It plunged into the cold water of experience. After a period of disoriented orgy its discrimination increased and it sniffed out the lure of Rock's exposed psyche. The possibilities for intimacy excited it to a frenzy and it merged. The ship's power plant reeled at full blast to counterbalance the thing's mind force. The psycho-web grew taut and held. The players were in place and the drama began. T wenty-five yards separated the antagonists. The white whale twitched its monstrous tail and shot forward towards the longboat. The snowy-hill plowed through the sea with ever-increasing speed, questing for the man with the harpoon. Captain Ahab braced in the boat. With six feet of sharpened steel lie faced the apparition bearing down upon him. The gap separating man and whale closed. At the last possible moment the whale swerved to avoid a harpooning. But Ahab was too close, and with a cry he drove the harpoon home. The new goad of pain spurred the whale forward. Rope whizzed from Ahab's longboat in response to this spurt. The oarsmen started to turn the boat to prepare for a tow chase. In the confusion of turning boat and speeding line a loop of rope snaked about Ahab's neck, and in a flash he was gone. Quickly the whale sounded with the half-strangled Ahab in tow. In victory Leviathan reached for the depths. As the blackness closed about Ahab a change occurred in his features. His strangled purple face grew in size, and his lips drew apart, exposing yellowed teeth which took on the appearance of fangs. The struggling whale, for all its size, could no longer contrive to pull down the now rapidly enlarging figure of Ahab. Its plunge was halted and it began to rise, tugged upward by the gigantic Ahab who grew Id size with every moment. Soon the whale rocketed up through the surface, not under his ovn power but as a satellite of the engorged Ahab. Ahab's face was a mask of demonic fury. The roaring that filled the world was complemented by the total madness that poured from his eyes. The ocean began to dissolve and the blueness of the tropic sky darkened to black. The universe was melting and coalescing into the bloated, screaming Ahab. The whale alone remained distinct but was dwarfed by the still-growing Ahabthing. In intergalactic space, # light years from the Magellanic clouds, a twisted sheet of ions flexed in response to an urgent computer command. Ahab and the whale vanished. The raging thing continued its fury in the now unmonitored ion cloud. The spacecraft's power plant went into emergency overload to balance die rampaging force that threatened to consume the whole of Rock's psyche. Then, having been deprived of its Ahab-activity-center, the thing gradually diffused its energy and was content to snuffle about the ion cloud. Having survived a direct frontal assault on its ego, the thing was now wary and must be approached by more subtle means. The computer spun its tapes rapidly, searching for a suitable way. Making its choice, it activated the environment simulator. There was a short wait until the thing stumbled upon Rock's psyche again. Having been once burned it hesitated momentarily. Then lust overrode its newly found prudence, and it merged. Once again die psycho-web grew taut. T he morning of the heretic's execution was gray. A light drizzle was falling. The heretic had to be carried to the stake because his body was too broken for him to go under his own power. Inquisitor-General Oswald Spranger was burning him along with eighteen accused witches. The Inquisitor-General had instituted a reign of terror such as Germany had never seen before. The Inquisitor-General personally saw to it that the heretic was securely bound to the stake and had properly received the last rites. The heretic noted that the faggots heaped about his feet were composed exclusively of green wood. Green wood burned hot without a large flame and resulted in a much slower death. Evidently the Inquisitor-General's interest in the execution was not exclusively theological. The final details having been attended to, including a last minute request for recantation of heresy, the fires were lit at the heretic's stake and at the eighteen other stakes. Soon the air was filled with smoke, burning flesh and screams. The flames licked about the heretic and his face contorted with agony. Finally he broke and started screaming and crying for a quick end. The last thing he saw before the smoke obscured everything was the gloating face of the Inquisitor-General peering through the smoke and flames. As soon as the burning green wood had completely hidden the heretic from the onlookers' sight his IF agonized features relaxed and he broke into a smile. Lord, how all this smoke made him want a cigarette! Well, the quickest way to remedy that was to get back to the ship. The heretic vanished out of existence, leaving slack ropes tied to the burning stake, and George Rock raised himself from the couch in his spaceship. The InquisitorGeneral would really be incensed when he found no bones at the stake. He'd be convinced that the heretic had also been a warlock. Rock hungrily lit a cigarette and checked the computer output. As he had hoped, the thing was now in complete control of the ion cloud and no longer needed the psychoweb for its fantasies. Rock gently eased the spacecraft out of the ion cloud. When he was free he shifted to space drive and was on the way home. At the rate the ion cloud was drifting into intergalactic space it would be a long way out before the thing had burned all the witches in Coming next month! Robert A. Heinlein brings us his greatest novel since Siranger in a Strange and thought-provoking epic of the wars that freed Luna! The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress Don't miss it next month in IF -- plus many other fine stories! IF  ComJiJete Short Novel The Doomsday Men They delved into the minds of dead Men to trap the killers that menaced all Earthl I I B forty-three and a half seconds James McLellan Partridge would once again be dead -- once more murdered. Partridge walked now unhurriedly through the throng of late evening boulevard, lackluster eyes seeing the profusion of glittery tourist-trap trash garishly illuminated behind plate glass, ears hearing the muted pneumatic thump of suspended traffic-lanes above, feet feeling the firmly yielding surface of the pedway beneath, nose smelling the subtly bracing city scents all about and tongue tasting the soothing menthojell in his mouth. James Partridge, like most men, took these appurtenances of modern civilization for granted. But of all those myriad city dwellers hurrying about their multi-storied catacomb of light and bustle and rush, only he -- only James McLellan Partridge -- was due to die within the minute. At least, Robin Carver made the mental correction, at least for now. Other men and women would die this night; death was the one final incurable disease. But as of this recurring minute James McLellan Partridge and Robin Carver would share that death in so enwrapped a symbiosis that for the agonizing instant of death each would become the other. Carver, too, would share that scarlet moment of destruction. He didn't like that. Carver never had relished the final moments of death when the symbiosis became too painful, too poignant. It was in that moment that he wondered why he did what he did, an instant of self-doubt that vanished with the stroke of death that set him free. Partridge sucked on his menthojell with the acidulated enjoyment of the addict. Stripes of gaudy color from shop windows lay athwart the boulevard, cutting at right angles to the street lighting and lacquering tiie faces of passers-by with gay chameleon-like changes that served to remind Carver only of the pacases from the dusty tombs of Egypt. A narrow service alley between stores opened off to the right. It was a constricted space, not as well lit as the boulevard but still suffused with the saffron sheen from animated advertisement panels plastering the walls with gigantic color and movement. Partridge walked at the focal point of six differently colored and sized shadows as he turned down the alleyway to the place where he had met his death. Twenty seconds to go now. As always when death zero approached Carver felt the weird inappropriateness of the victim's unawareness. Despite his knowledge that the victim could not know, he still cringed as he awaited the impact. A shadow moved in the motherof-pearl radiance of the alley. Two shadows, clinging and then parting. Opening out. Waiting. Two shadows waiting at death zero. Partridge looked at them. His dull city eyes saw them as people, as passers-by, non-personalities that were met by the thousand and forgotten quicker than a shower of rain. Carver looked at them. Carver took them into his mind, every lineament of them. He treasured up every single revealing feature and made very sure he would know them again. For this he was here. T hey were dressed as Withits. Sharp, mod, snappy. Carver took their incongruous uniform dress in with a single all-embracing glance. The boy shuffled his feet, his face loose and leering, his whole posture at once ingratiating and repellent. "Have you a light, citizen? My flicker's dry." "His flicker's dry," the girl said, the saffron light coating her black lank hair. "No selfigs. Gotta light?" "Why -- a light? Yes." James McLellan Partridge aroused from apathy to a jerky wish to please. He began to take out a gas lighter. Ten seconds. "Now?" said the girl. The boy licked his !ips. They riione unhealthily. His hand slid with the furtive movement of a lake into his pocket. "Sure, Belle," he said. "I wanna!" Belle spoke on a breath, her chest moving spasmodically, her face pinched and yet alive, vibrant. "Let me -- you promised!" "What was that?" said Partridge, the lighter extended in his right hand. Three seconds. "Aw -- all right, Belle" Her eyes showed the rapacity of a rat. This is the kick I crave!" And still Partridge held his lighter out on his palm. Still he stared at the two Withits, still he had no inkling of what was to happen in... in -- One second. Belle lifted her short skirt. The flash of the shiv against the white of her thigh above the tan stocking at last got through to Partridge. He dropped the flicker. He took a half step back. His right hand spread, lifting, the fingers opening Kke a fan. Carver felt his brain trying to move muscles that did not belong to him. He automatically wanted to fall into a fighting crouch, take the knife away from the girl and not bother overmuch if he hurt her doing it... Partridge hasn't a clue how to defend himself ! "Go on. Belle! He'll yell any mimite!" Marv pushed at the girl's shoulder and she surged forward, her black hair falling across the left side of her thin face. Her eyes glinted in the saffron light. The point of the knife struck a eyes. He blinked. He didn't even see the knife as it clove forward. But he felt it. Carver, of course, could not see the knife, either. The feel of the knife going in nauseated him. The sensation effectively blocked out Partridge's, he could not feel the sharp shrill of pain biting into Partridge. Partridge opened his eyes for the last time, his mouth open and bubbling and forming words that did not come. The boy and girl, Marv and Belle, the Withits, were looking down on him. The bloodied knife hung in the air before Partridge's graying vision. The Withits gloated. Pink tongues licked stained lips. A sheen of sweat glistened on their foreheads. An intense absorption in the final death agonies of this man they had murdered concentrated in their faces, screwing them up, tightening them, turning them into the semblances of satanic, satiated evil. James McLellan Partridge fell to the ground. He fell exactly at death zero, where he had been found. Confused random impressions and sensations struck at Robin Carver. This was always a moment of great but dangerous fascination. He saw -- But he had no concepts to explain even wordlessly to himself what it was he saw as Partridge died. Partridge's eyes closed and he was dead; IF W H' ?' .s itetw and the blackness came thankfully for Robin Carver. H e opened his eyes as the tech bent down to detach the sensing lobes from his temples. The lobes slid away gently and with them went death and terror and the nearblasphemous resurrection not of life but of death. "You're back again, sir." The tech smiled. "Just lie still for a moment. Breath steadily..." Marjie, the tech, was young and blonde and shapely. She slid the sensing lobes from James McLellan Partridge's temples where he lay on the second pallet, lax and limp awaiting the onset of rigor mortis, a man past caring about the gray worries of his gray life. She let them coil back on their leads to the hooks on the front cover plate of the equipment banked against the walls of the hovervan. The sensing lobes snapped into place alongside the pair that had enwrapped Carver's head. "He was just a Zombie -- " Carver said, and paused. That had been the wrong word to use. Partridge had been a non-personality; but the word zombie had come to have a very special meaning to the men and women on the R.I.D. Even then he was making a mistake, thinking of the Force as R.I.D. "Ridforce" they were to the rest of the police departments and "ridforce" they must remain. Cy Adams shoved the connecting door to the lobby of the van open and strode in, his round face beaming and his shock of wiry Wack hair bouncing with the violence of hk movements. "You're back, Robin! Good. Good. Everything's set up outside. Just let me have a look at you." Adams, as the unit's psychiatrist and general father confessor, must by regulations check a returning operator first. Even now, with ridforce well into its second decade of operations, the unknown still encompassed them and tripped them up. Carver lay back and let Adams go ahead. "Where were you born?" 'The Old Oast, Brenchley, Kent Poor Partridge didn't have much time before he died -- " "When?" 'Twenty-sixth August, eighty-nine. And you didn't send me a card last birthday." "Thought you'd reached the time of life when you'd want to stop counting. Was Partridge married?" "Yes. And take it easy with the old age sympathy -- I'm only approaching the forties." "You seem in command, Robin. But -- but I don't know. What happened to your wife? Your wife?" "She ran -- hey, now, wait a minute!" "What happened to your wife Robin?" "She ran away." Mere simple statements in answer to straight questions couldn # t suffice now; asked to prove that he still regarded himself as Robin Carver, prodded by questions until a lid popped, he spoke on feverishly. "She ran off. After we'd been married eighteen months. With a satellite electronics engineer. Left me IP holding the baby. Her name, you want? Ifl tell you the name of the conniving, snivelling, deceitful little -- " Adams held up a hand, quite unalarmed by the outburst. "That's enough, Robin. Easy, lad, easy..." Carver slowed down. He put a hand to his cheek, a hand that trembled. "Sorry, Cy. Silly of me to blow my top like that. Just, somehow -- " "I know, old son. Forget it. You had a raw deal out of life but you're over it now. All I want right now is to know that you still are Robin Carver. No, not that, exactly. You are Robin Carver, of course. We must be sure you know that, too." Adams reached down a hand and pulled Carver off the pallet. "Come on. They're waiting. I know you only had a short trip. But that, strangely enough, is a very good reason for quizzing you that extra bit more." Carver stood up and reached across to the peg for his jacket. "Oh?" "Sure thing. Sometimes these short trips give an operator the biggest kick of all. Disorientation is so subtle it can strike unnoticed. After you." They walked out into the lobby and through to the interrogation van. C arver stepped into a bright, actinic light falling across the desk and chair, the easel, the identbooks, the filing cabinets and map, the radio equipment. Soames, Detective on Watch, looked up, his hard craggy face intent beneath tufty gray eyebrows. "D'you see him, Robin?" "Yes. Two of them -- boy and girl. Withits." "Oh, for gosh-sakes!" Soames pushed his hat back and looked his disgust. "Not them again!" At his side Rawlinson, second detective, stared at the polished floor of the van, skimpily carpeted. "If it's not the Withits, it's the Slashers -- or a dozen other stupid and vicious teen-age status symbol organizations. They all should be stuck against a wall and shot." "Well, now, Charlie..." Soames was the father of a teen-age boy and girl, children born late in his marriage. Quite clearly Carver could see the battle going on in Soames' opinions. "Seems there are teen-agers and teen-agers." Charlie Rawlinson said: "Your kids are okay, Bob. You know that. I know that. But these Withits now, petty thugs -- " "Not so petty," Carver interrupted. He sat down at the easel. "Not now. The two Withits murdered Partridge." He began to draw with a deft light touch. "Two. Boy and girl. Marv and Belle. Belle asked Marv if she could do it and Marv agreed. They acted like he was doing her a great favor allowing her to murder the man. He wanted to do it himself, that was clear. But she asked him and he let her, just as though she'd asked if she could rida his hover scooter for the kicks." His eidetic memory brought up fact after fact and channeled them through to his eyes and fingers, wrought Belle's and Marv's images on the paper. He sat back. "There they are. Pitiful pair, yes? But they really enjoyed pushing that knife into Partridge's guts." "Why'd they kill him, Robin?" asked Soames. "If I said no reason I'd be wrong. But there was no reason that makes sense to a policeman seeking a murderer with a motive he can understand. But Cy would know." Carver paused, thinking back to that moment of death zero in the saffronsheened alley. This is the kick l crave ! Belle had said. "They did it," he said at last, slowly, "they did it for kicks." heir reaction surprised him. Rawlinson made a short sound of disgust. Soames leaned back in his chair, tapping the pencil against his nose. "It's beginning to add up. And the picture is a nasty one. Sour. Something Whitcliffe has been worrying about for weeks. This last one only confirms the picture." "You mean there have been other murders like this?" "Death for a giggle. Pretty, isn't it?" "My God," said Carver. As an operator for rid force his job was ostensibly done as soon as he had identified the murderer ahd given his colleagues all the information he could. His was not the task of hunting down the murderer. The ordinary police did that as they had always done: only now they hunted with the sure knowledge of who they hunted. If the victim had looked at his killer -- then the police would know him too. If the victim had no sight of his murderer then the ridforce operator would have to pick up everything he could from the murdered man's background, fit all the tiny pieces together, watch and wait there in the dead man's mind, integrating a life -- and a death. Carver happened to be very good at that job. But he still couldn't explain how he had been corralled into it in the first place. Up until recently the murder statistics had been growing more favorable. But now these last senseless murders had the police chasing teenagers, chasing their tails, trying to comprehend what was going on as well as stopping its results. The hovervan cleared away and Cy Adams spoke briefly to Carver. "You're off watch now, then, Robin? Alec Durlston is your relief and he'll be -- " "Yeah. I know Durlston is my relief." The bitterness in his voice made the others look up. "He's always late!" "We all know what Durlston is," Soames said gruffly. "But just hold on until he signs in. Now let's get back to HQ." Carver sat in his operator's chair by the door. Somewhere out there in the city, right now, a murder was being committed. Somewhere a man, or woman, a boy or girl, was being brutally done to death. His job was to find out who had broken that basic commandment -- "Thou shalt not kill." IF Just so long as he remembered that, just so long as he put on the sensing lobes and waited until the murderer struck and then came back to the real world and gave the police every significant item of information he could, just so long as he went on doing his job then he would regard himself as doing a useful piece of work in society. If he began to doubt himself then he must doubt society and all it stood for. He couldn't allow that. Behind the Shield there was nothing left for him in this world. Apart from Wendy -- and she was a magic world apart. A burnt out husk of a man, he must cling with all the vicious selfishness in him to this one vital personality datum; do a good job and rest content. But it was damned hard. II A lec Durlston had still not reported in for duty by the time it was Hovervan Number Three's turn for duty again. Charlie Rawlinson switched on the radio and checked wavelengths with control. Then he looked up at the tri-di map of the city. It was angled against the junction of two walls and roof so that it tilted out and over them, presenting a detailed schematic. Color coding of trafficlanes, airways, pedways and autoramps crisscrossing the avenues and boulevards lent a ghostly pseudo-beauty to the city map. "Busy night," said Soames. R.I.D., the heart and brain of ridforce, was contained in the hovervans as they waited in the yard for their calls. Sometimes they waited a long time. Other times, like now, the calls crackled in with frightening speed, demanding the headlong rush to death zero. The radio blasted. Everyone twisted around automatically to stare at it. Before the words had finished spurting from the speaker the vans were hissing with compressed air, rising, flowing forward with the ground effect rolling them along on cushions of air. "Attention Three. Death Zero corner of Fredericks and Montgomery. South side. Male. Dropped twenty stories, death instantaneous. Major damage. Triple alarm." "Major damage," said Charlie Rawlinson. "Hell! You may have trouble, Robin." "I'll cope." The door of the van sprang open. It was already moving at ten miles an hour and the figure bundling in charged head down into the van with the violence of his rush. Papers cascaded to the floor. Soames looked around from his seat beside the driver, scowling. "What's going on? Oh -- it's you Alec." "It's me," said Alec Durlston, straightening up and pulling his jacket down. "Who did you expect? If I hadn't broken the hundred-yard sprint record you'd have taken off without me." Of course it wasn't just what Durlston said. It was his general attitude. What he didn't say. What he meant. Quite clearly, he was saying: "It's your fault I had to run and jump in, you clods. You couldn't even wait for a gentleman. But that's all one could expect from the likes of cretins like you." Naturally, it was anyone's fault he was late but his. He looked down on Carver, a lean, long look, his overly-handsome face sardonic, waiting. "Well?" Durlston said acidly. "Hullo, Durlston," said Carver. He couldn't think of anything he could say to this man, so he remained sitting silently there. "Aren't you going to get up, man? You're sitting in my chair." Slowly, Carver rose, letting his body sway slightly with the van's progress. He didn't look at the others in the van. He couldn't. Durlston took a tissue and flicked the seat, then he sat down with his jacket on, looking cool and calm and impeccable. Carver mooched off up the van and pulled a flap seat out of the wall. He felt his body swaying and surging, as the van sped madly along the airways, unsupported by the cushioning back and arms of a regular chair. Durlston was on watch. That was die operator's chair and Durlston had the right to sit there. But the whole incident was so petty it boiled Carver up -- or would have if he could have been bothered to care. F or the first time this night, apart ' from that fleeting moment of boiling-over anger when Cy Adams had quizzed him he thought of Wendy. Slim, serious, big-eyed Wendy, with the straight blonde hair helmeting her head, her features solemn with all the worrying perplexities of life facing a fourteen-year old without a mother! guiding hand. No -- he was slipping. Wendy was fifteen now. Time had rushed past with the crazy speed of a rocket. The thought of Wendy and of Marv and Belle frightened Carver. So Wendy had been brought up without the counsel of a mother. But she'd had her father and the Home and they'd turned out some of the finest girls in the world. Wendy was all right. Wendy was straight. Only Carver's consuming love for her made him worry. Anyone so favored, it used to be said, would be marked out for the jealousy of the gods. What should he do, then -- disfigure her? Try to camouflage her? Try to cocoon her away from life. That couldn't be done. Even the husk of a man that was Robin Carver had the wit to recognize that. The siren slashing a screaming blade of sound through the thick city night, the hovervans drove fiercely through scattering traffic in the blazing energy of their duty to reach death zero in under three minutes. They didn't always do it, of course. They seldom did; but it was the target figure demanded by regulations. In three minutes the human brain deprived of blood would be damaged beyond repair. But then -- ridforce weren't trying to repair brains. Just get there fast, find the body, slip it into the ridmach hovervan, slap it on the pallet, attach the sensing lobes -- investigate. IF The drive:uw' ve van around a semi-banked cornei so fast the magnetic repulsors partially blanked and the van canted and skidded, air sizzling away in a steaming fan behind it. He had the triple turbines opened right out and afterburners on. The vans bellowed a colossal reverberating roar across the city, belching smoke. Any freeflying aircraft un-connected to the city's intricate trafficlanes would have smashed headlong into any one of a dozen obstacles. Free-flying craft were strictly for outside the city. Outside the city. That was an old-fashioned way of looking at it, as though the city was more important than the country. Naturally, there could never be a crash, a road accident. They belonged to those queer far-off times when people allowed their teeth to rot in their jaws, blew their noses into doth and shoved it into their pockets, smoked tobacco that hadn't been treated against lung cancer, let old people die alone and forgotten in dusty back rooms. A lec Durlston took the pallet as the victim, shrouded in a plastic sheet, lay beside him. Marjie refused to have him on the second pallet. "Poor devil," said Carver, half to himself. "Did he fall? Or was he helped?" "I'll soon find out." Durlston lay back and waited for Marjie to complete the connections. Just how it was done Carver knew be would never understand. What mattered to him and the police departments was that it did happen. From the sensing lobes on the dead man's head, from the sensing lobes on Durlston's head, power flowed. And the ridmach did the rest. The scientists who had developed R.I.D. knew how it operated. Carver had heard talk of electrical synapse energy interchange, of the residual memory charges, of the permanent imprint of memory on cell structure, the complex amino acids and colloids subtly altered and distorted so that they would never be the same again but always record what had been imprinted on them. Only death would destroy those changes, would set liquid putrefaction to its task of tearing down and liquefying all traces of what had once been a man's mind. No wonder the detectives of ridforce screamed their way across the city to death zero with all turbofans alight and afterburners full on, breaking near mach unity in the determined effort to tune in to the dead man before death's clogging hand of putrefaction brought a slimy chaos to the tuned perfection of a human brain. When a person died in the city the D.L. at ridforce HQ picked up the radiation. Machinery hurled that information onto the city map in the duty hovervan, blasted the crew and the operator out into the city, homed in on the DZ. Without the very necessary function of the Death Locator at ridforce HQ the hovervans would seldom and only by chance arrive at death zero in time. Soames called. When Carver went through to the admin van he saw to his surprise that the crew was packing up. "You're going to love this, Robin," said Charlie Rawlinson, shutting the door. "Oh?" "Yeah. Another call. DZ is close and we're the nearest van. And we happen to be carrying a spare operator." On the map the ruby light of DZ blinked balefully like Tentoki, the demon lantern bearer. The glittering star of white light representing r idforce hovervan number three sparkled up to that ruby eye. Minutes later, Carver was saying: "Oh, no! A female! That's not for me." "It's like this, Robin," Soames said patiently. "We're here. You're here. The body's here. Ergo -- you go in, female or no female. Check.' "And that's what I call a sweet reasoned explanation." "HQ would send out another van with a female operator; but things are hectic tonight. There was a buzz Whitcliffe himself was on the prowl." "So you see, Robin, I know you ops don't like going in when it's a female. But needs must." Charlie Rawlinson waved an arm and the crew snatched the girl into the van with a courtesy for not-yetcold clay inherent in their attitude. In the female regime the ridmach had sometimes to be triflingly readjusted. Carver lay on the pallet. He looked at the girl. Her small slender body had been clad in a silver sheath of iridescent scales and she still wore one nylon. Her hair, long and lustrously black beneath the harsh lights, lay unbound. Her face, oval and well-featured, had been pretty with an olive complexion and magnificent eyes. Her complexion was different now, of course. So far nobody had taken away the nylon stocking knotted around her neck. Cy Adams put his head in the door. "Her name was Julie Farish. Good hunting, Robin." Marjie pushed the start button and coalescing darkness and sunwhorls closed on Robin Carver. T he velvet cushion thrust cruelly against her cheek. She couldn't turn her head to look up at Roger, imploringly, appealingly, why? Why was Roger doing this? Her thoughts dazzled, chaotic impression, fragments, the constricting feel of something tight about her neck, tight -- tight! She couldn't scream -- her tongue burst past her lips -- her eyes pained with the pressure -- she couldn't breathe -- couldn't breathe! She tried to move, floundering like a fish carelessly cast into the bottom of a boat, flashing silver and slinky like her new dress. Black and red sparks cascaded across her blinded eyes. The feeling in her throat and neck -- the feeling? the pain! -- the pain had gone. She felt sleepy --  sleepy... All men were different -- but all the same. She'd had to learn to handle men. She'd learned. And Roger had seemed nice -- floating on a cottonwool cloud -- couldn't talk -- silence! calls the headmistress IF -- Roger had been nice; but he'd been funny. Headache. Oh, God! I'm being murdered! Only Robin Carver's mind experienced the death of Julie Farish. He cringed. This was never pleasant. And she didn't look at this Roger once! There was nothing left at this end of the penetration envelope. Time was running out. I'll have to go back. Latch on to a dying person's thoughts. Tap in to death's memories. The memoirs of final extinction to be pored over, studied, learned. Robin Carver skipped rapidly through the earliest memories, the unhappy childhood, the orphanage, the first man, the jobs, flipping the yellowed pages of memory. The story was familiar. He would touch down at the first discrete act that set in motion this entirely separate series of events that led up to the murder; if any portion of a person's life can be divorced from the rest. He'd awake with Julie onto the last pages of her life. Ill T he Sweetness and Light Tearooms had, a fortnight before, been known as the Ever Joyful and Serene Coffee Garden. Unfortunately a group of Withits had broken in, parking their deliberately noisy hoverscooters anywhere about the chaste green lawns and sand and rock gardens. And they had proceeded with gusto and verve to take the place apart. Marcel had been livid. He was a slender man with a moist mouth and hands that wandered. He had redone the place and given it a new name and soon the old clientele drifted back. The same trade went on. "Hello, Julie darling!" Marcel "So help me, Marcel, I don't want another night like last. If you do I'll -- I'll -- " "Yes. ducks? What will you do?" the words were steel encased in an oil slick. Julie made a face. "Just think of me, sometimes!" "But I do, darling, I do!" "Tell me about the party." Julie changed the subject uncomfortably. She knew the strengths of the syndicates in the city, strengths a young girl, alone, could never match. "This is important, Julie. A group of new customers. Harry will take you and the other girls. Remember! I want you to be particularly good tonight." Harry turned out to be a hunk of a man with gorilla features and hair spining from the backs of his hands. Watching everything from his perch there in Julie's mind, Carver missed nothing. Harry was the girl's protection. You're going to fall down on your job tonight , Harry. Their hovercar sloughed along the autolanes and then with a settling sigh of expiring air came to rest. The door slid open. Julie's quick eyes picked up the signs of luxury in this pent-house apartment, the refinement and decadence, the over-ripe bloom on the fruit of pleasure. Carver picked up places, faces, words, gestures, storing them away against the time he would sit in hovervan number three and make his report. Before leaving the hovercar Julie checked to see that her nylons were straight in a tiny almost childish movement, a birdlike twist of her head. A flunkey left them in a waiting room with: "Wait here. Mr. Pritchard will be along shortly." Pritchard turned out to be quiet and unassuming with the air of a confidential valet. Perhaps only Carver of the five watching him observed the deeper power-complex of the man. He stood for a moment studying them, his head on one side, considering. Boldly his eyes strayed over the girl's faces and figures, coming to a decision. "You," he said, beckoning to Julie. "Put your shoes on and come with me." "Now wait a minute -- " began Harry. Pritchard said nastily: "I don't think your master would care for you to be present as your friend earns her living. Anyway, your job is to protect these -- ah -- ladies outside. Not inside." He jerked a perfectly polite yet unmistakably imperative hand at Julie. "Come on." So Julie is a Gaiety Girl. Poor lost soul. They ought to have sent a female op on this one... In the corridor outside Pritchard put. his arm around Julie's waist and pressed familiarly. Indecision hit Julie, then she let the hand lie unremoved. It couldn't make any difference now. Up ahead a door showed where the hall turned at rightangles beneath shaded fluorescents. Pritchard lengthened his stride and the arm around Julie's waist pressed her on more rapidly. Carver realized that arm had not been amatory but organizational. A burst of laughter spilled from the door. That door showed a plain black patina with a single simple silver, escutcheon, a lion rampant grasping a shattered silver shield, modestly displayed on each leaf. Golden bolt heads and hinge flaps lent a splendid air of barbaric gorgeousness to the door. Pritchard was clearly trying to hustle Julie past it before it opened fully. "Hurry, girl!" he said and the words snapped sharp and shrewish. The image of an ogre headmistress rose up. And Julie deliberately allowed one long nyloned leg to slide out between Pritchard's black trousers, to trip him, to send him sprawling in undignified ungainliness onto the carpeted floor. "Oh, dear, Mr. Pritchard!" said Julie, all contriteness. "I'm so sorry!" B ut the door had opened and two men reeled out, laughing and boisterous, caterwauling. Between them, a hand around each waist, a girl danced, the arms of the men heavy and lascivious on her shoulders. Julie took one swift glance at the men, past them into the room beyond the black lion-guarded door. A packed cacaphony of sound, a welter of lights, a dizzying titillation of scents and the roaring impression of an infernal calliope in IF full blast chorused from that jampacked room. Here was the party. Julie's face reflected animation and she lingered as Pritchard cursed and hauled himself up. A man stood just inside the door, smiling a small secret smile as the two boisterous near-drunks and the girl who was only a blur in the corner of Julie's eye staggered out. The man wore the usual inoffensive gray suit and black shoes, the string tie and the ivory shirt that had become a uniform in the upper circles of the civil service. Julie glanced with the lively interest of a gaiety girl at his face -- and Carver reacted as though stung by a thousand volts of high tension. Chris Mellor! Even a non-eidetic could remember the tough sparkling spirit of Chris Mellor from the old days! The days when Carver had been just such a one as Mellor appeared still to be. Incredible! He'd thought Mellor dead long since... Then Pritchard grabbed Julie's arm in a grip that brought a little squeal of protest to her lips, dragged her all angrily sideways from that black door and the enticing mysteries it concealed. Pulled like that, twisted around, Julie could not help but look directly at the girl between the two half-drunken men. Her reactions meant nothing to Carver. He forgot he was a ridforce operator. He forgot that he, himself, was not standing in that lushly carpeted corridor with the sinful sounds of an orgy thundering away in the background. He wanted to start forward, to smash a fist into each of those hideous brutish men's faces. He wanted to take the girl with the smooth helmet of blonde hair into his arms, to take her away, to protect her from whatever horror was happening to her here. He couldn't do anything but look on. Wendy! Wendy -- his Wendy -- his own daughter -- here! IV A s soon as she had begun work on Whitcliffe's project at the Forensic Science Laboratories Carol Bursham had decided that Whitcliffe was a man with so obsessive a compulsion that the tiniest outside intrusion would have no chance of deflecting him from his life's ambition. What that ambition was, Carol didn't know. But it existed and drove on, in turn whipping all of ridforce with it. That could not be denied. This current project was only a part of that over-riding ambition. That he would eventually attain the goal of his ambitions she was also convinced. Whitcliffe was that sort of man. She and Ralph Tzombe, her coworker on the new project, had been summoned by Whitcliffe to his villa overlooking the cliffs and the sea. She lay now on a formfit, comfortable after the morning swim, lazily watching the sky. "Look -- up there!" Carol lifted herself on one elbow and pointed out to the zenith. Soundlessly a dot swam into view high above the Pacific, soaring at the hundred thousand feet levels and slowly -- so slowly at Mach three point five -- lowering towards them and the shining city beyond. Few people would call Carol Burnham pretty. Poised, superbly built, yes. Her eyes, emp'.asized in the current fashion trend, were perhaps her most powerful weapon in her sex armoury. A man, if she chose, could lose himself in those eyes. Tzombe levered himself up. "If you look carefully -- " "I know. Watch." Carol stared up in near reverent expectancy with the still and absorbed concentration of a little child. Like the fragmentary fluid interplay of colors when a bubble bursts, like the palest flickering chrome of a zip-fastener in the sky, ineffably comforting, a single shining sliver slashed down the sky and vanished. "It makes you feel good to see that!" breathed Carol. The plane passed overhead and dropped still further as she turned slowly onto her preliminary circuit. Carol voiced a strange remote question. "I wonder where that plane's flown in from?" "From?" said Tzombe, startled. "No idea. Isn't there a schedule here? I know Whitcliffe has one. I believe he's actually flown somewhere outside the Shield -- all praise and thanks. I think Japan is in that direction -- westwards. I'm almost su:e it's Japan, but it may be Africa. I don't really know for sure." "Japan," said Carol, and shivered. "The thought of flying out -- you know, flying outside -- makes me feel naked." "To the Shield all glory and gratitude," Tzombe said automatically. "I bet those people up there are unscrambling their nerves right now." "I hear they take more tranquilizers than fuel." "Could be." Tzombe stood up. "Here comes Whitcliffe." To anyone who did not know him, Whitcliffe looked an ordinary man. "Good morning, Whitcliffe," they said in unison. "I wanted to tell you the work is not going fast enough. I want positive results inside a fortnight." The words struck like a scimitar. "But," Carol stammered. "We've been doing so well! And we know we cannot produce results inside a year." "A fortnight, Doctor Burnham." "We could do it if we assumed success was definite." Tzombe prowled restlessly on the bouganvillea bowered balcony hung over the moving sea. "If we said we were right and proceeded on that line -- " "Yes," said Whitcliffe. Cautiously, feeling her way, Carol said: "We therefore state this: The ridmach works. It is a proven tool but it lacks one quality. It must be applied very shortly after death if the operator is to achieve any coherent picture of the victim's movements." Ralph Tzombe carried on aa IF though quoting: "To counter the difficulty of the breakdown of the mind, ridforce operators are hurried to death zero as fast as afterburning turbofans can take them. The Death Locator at HQ can pin point death zero for us. Our job is to get the operator and the equipment there with as little delay as possible." "But," said Whitcliffe lazily, "your job now is to reverse the order of events. You are trying to compensate for the lack of an operator and a ridmach at death zero. You are going to provide a piece of apparatus that will scan the dead brain and record onto magnetic tape. And the equipment will be packaged into a handy size. You are going to do it -- because it can be done." After a moment, Tzombe said: "Well do it, Whitcliffe." Whitcliffe was addressed as 'sir' or 'Whitcliffe' -- nothing else. "You have the Forensic Science Laboratories at your disposal, and they are as well equipped as any laboratory in the Americas." C arol nodded; but her mind picked up one word spoken by Whitcliffe; one word that she supposed only he among a very few others ever used, a word that at once was so obsolete and so much a soulmate of everyone that it had became a shadowword, never used -- always present. Americas. Everyone else called the country "this continent" or "the land", -- or "the world". Americas. But only they had the Shield (great and glorious Shield to whom be everlasting thanks and gratitude!) and everything outside was less than nothing. There was an Outside outside the Shield (by whom we are sustained) but it had no meaning. Whitcliffe flicked a yellow abstract. "Last night there were fifty murders in the city. Last year thirty. The trend is up. We must have that recording ridmach in use within a week from your development finals." Tzombe harrumphed. "We can claim a near hundred per cent success in arrests when the operator actually sees the murderer. And even when he doesn't, the clues he can pick up from the victim's mind give the police enough to arrest the real murderer in something like ninetyeight per cent of the cases." "Well?" "Only that this seems to have no effect on the murder rate. Suppose the public were told that the rkiforce existed -- " "No!" said Carol automatically. "Let him continue, Doctor Burnham." Whitcliffe's soft voice would have frozen lesser men; but Tzombe carried on valiantly. "We keep ridforce a secret because we needed time to prove its efficacy. There were enough prophets of failure when we began. But now -- if a man knew he would be stared at and identified by the police through the eyes of his victim, surely he would hesitate, he wouldn't murder." "They thought once if a criminal knew his fingerprints could identify him there'd be no more crime. What happened?" nr "Gloves," answered Tzombe. "And then?"' "Recognition patterns of glove texture -- followed by destruction of gloves, followed by ash reclamation and analysis, followed by total and secret destruction, followed by sweat and breath analysis, shape and measurement analysis -- and all the rest." "But?" "But fingerprints and the following ramifications of the techniques of detection can be nullified." "So?" "But," plunged on Tzombe desperately. "We would have our premeditated murder with the murderer wearing a mask and disguise. But in all the others -- the sudden flash of anger blowing off the top of your head, and you come to with the bloody knife and the body -- in those we'd still be able to see who had murdered." "Precisely. But in those cases even the old time detectives could usually detect the murderer. In the one case of premeditated murder is the value of R.I.D. so overwhelming we dare not make it public knowledge." "I think," Carol said carefully, "we might deter a few would-be murderers. But the vast majority who intended to kill would dream up means of evading R.I.D." T zombe slumped dejectedly into his formfit. "You're right, of course. But the idea sounds so attractive... What annoys me is why people want to murder! We've never had it so good as now. Everything the heart can desire is right here in the continent. We just don't have troubles any more." "You're too well integrated a personality to understand the desires that ferment in your fellow-citizens. The Shield, artificial manufacture of food and fuels, giveaway prices for clothes you wear once and toss away, homes and transport and luxuries almost for the taking -- all these genuinely wonderful things can mean nothing if the girl you want to go to bed with laughs at you and lets Joe Soap around the corner put his arm round her waist. The red gets into your eyes, then, Doctor Tzombe. And you just described what can happen." "I know, I know," protested Tzombe, "but I mean these other murders. These senseless deaths of respectable men and women on the streets, anywhere, everywhere. They make nonsense of our way of life." "These stupid teenage gangs, the Withits, the Slashers." "But we discover who is committing the murder from our ridforce operators up at the sharp end of ridforce. And we secure convictions, and still it goes on." "Surely, Ralph, you're not suggesting we're making mistakes!" Carol felt shock. Whitcliffe interjected softly, "It would be a shattering blow to us to discover we were condemning innocent people." This had been a running sore since the inception of ridforce. "We have to believe in our operators," Carol said passionately. "If they fail, if they are corrupt, if they are careless -- why -- why -- " IP "We might as well pack up all the fantastically expensive equipment of ridforce and go home," Whitcliffe finished the thought for them all. Going down to their hovercar, Tzombe said with a sly friendly smile: "This will get you off the hook with Alec Durlston, Carol." "I can't stand the man's manner," Carol said, "but -- " She paused. Something about Durlston's lean physical strength tugged at the womanliness in her. She knew what he wanted, and she both yearned for and shrank from It "I'm always sad to leave Whitdiffe's villa," she said firmly. There's a clean air here that all the city's fumigants can never reproduce." Gently, Whitcliffe reminded them as the hovercar's door slid shut: "In a fortnight. I shall keep in close touch." Just before the hovercar's engines turned over and drowned such tiny cries a gull screeched, clear and lone, from across the bay. V # # ame?"L N "Robin Carver." "Where were you born?" "The Old Oast, Brenchley, Kent." "When?"  "T wenty-sixth August, eightynine." "When was the last time you felt like going to bed with a man?" "Sorry, Cy. Never did. I'm heterosexual, thank God. Fm a male, I feel like a male, I act like a male. Poor Julie Farish couldn't alter that."  don't think about Wendy yet. Not yet. Not until I get out of this van and find a place to worry and worry. Steady, boy! Steady ! "You're all right, Robin. But there's something odd in there someplace. I'd hazard the guess you'd been through a traumatic experience." "Not me, Cy! I just don't like being in the mind of a beautiful young girl who's just had a nylon stocking knotted about her neck. Is that strange?" "Not strange. Quite natural for an ordinary man. But you're not an ordinary man, Robin. You're a ridforce operator and, ergo, that means you are abnormal -- in the nicest way, of course." "Of course." "All I'm supposed to do is make sure you blokes know you are yourselves. Carry on. Soames is waiting." "Did you get him, Robin?" asked Soames when Carver pushed through into the admin van. "No." "No?" Soames exploded. "Well, for gosh-sakes! A girl can't have a stocking knotted like that without seeing something, surely?" "No, Bob. She called the man Roger, after she was taken in -- after she saw -- after -- " They were staring at him. "Well, Robin? Go on!" Carver swallowed. "She thought a man called Roger murdered her; but it wasn't him. I've got him down. But even though I didn't see the murderer at all I could tell he wasn't IF Roger. You know; sound of footfalls, breath rate, atmospheric things we're all trained to pick up. She didn't look at him -- and then the stocking was around her neck." "We'll start with this guy Roger," Soames grunted. "He'll do as a lead. Then we'll have everyone else you saw. Got it, Robin? Everyone." Carver made out his report. All of it -- except for Chris Mellor. He couldn't tell about Chris, anyway, for old time's sake. One agent doesn't tell on another, even casually, even in line of duty, like this. Not about Wendy. Not Wendy... But of course, he was no longer an agent of the Americas, Carver reminded himself. They'd thrown him out as unstable. No longer fit to be an agent. Damned unfair at the time; it still rankled. But Chris might still be working for the Americas and if he was, a broken-down ex-agent like Robin Carver wouldn't mention his existence to anyone outside Morgan and the Bureau. His fake past had alwavs held up, even under the stringent inquiries of ridforce. The bureau hadn't let him down there. They knew better than anyone else that a secret service agent has to live after he's fired. # rp'here's something screwy here, A Robin." Soames stared lumpily at the report sheet and the drawings of people Carver had seen through the eyes of a dead girl. "What's the big mystery?" Carver had to get away to think this thing through. "No mystery, Bob. Apart from not knowing who killed Julie Farish." "This leaves me no alternative but to assume you fell down on the job. You didn't pry hard enough." "Now just a minute, Bob!" "I know how I must sound to you. But I'm the detective in charge of this van and we've never before had to put in the kind of report I'm being forced to hand in now." Alec Durlston's soft drawl floated infuriatingly across. "Don't forget, Bob, Carver was tired. He'd just been on a penetration -- and he was in a female mind. He should never have been allowed to penetrate; it's no wonder he fell flat on his face." "Now listen here, Durlston!" "Simmer down, Robin!" Soames slammed a thick hand onto his desk. "All right, Alec. We all know how good an op you are. Let's get back." Carver slumped. He shut his eyes, squatting on the uncomfortable flapdown seat, and tried not to think of Wendy. But of course he couldn't. He could at least drag his mind away from that impossible moment he had seen her lasciviously enmeshed between two half-drunken louts and go back to the golden days of her childhood -- days so far away in fact and yet so heart-breakingly near in chronological time. She'd been a wonderful child, a sanity-giving reason for living, an idol he could dedicate his everything to and negate anything he might desire that conflicted with hers. But "she'd grown up true and straight, a laughing sprite in the sunshine. And now this... Back at HQ Soames departed carrying the reports. Charlie Rawlinson said cheerfully: "You're for the hot seat now, Robin." When Soames returned he merely said briefly: "You take a day's leave, Robin, starting now. Hammant isn't satisfied. And damn it all, Robin, neither am I." Hammant was Chief of this ridforce HQ. Carver stood up, feeling the weight of tiredness falling on him. 'Til take that leave, Bob. But there was no indication whatsoever of who killed Julie Farish." I n the old days there would probably have been a strong religious tone to the Home. Idly flicking through a tri-di projector on its walnut table in the waiting room, Carver felt a perennial relief that the Shield had never quite brought into life all the strange religious cults such a phenomenon might have done. White-bearded and robed priests chanting strange rituals might so easily have come to personify the Shield. The life of the continent could have become warped, twisted away from its true course, made into a mockery of the free life of absolute liberty and freedom from fear. Ritualistic mumbo-jumbo could so easily have symbolized the Shield in the inner lives of everyone. Now it was merely customary to say a short phrase of thankfulness that the Shield existed. CaFver, for one, thanked God it should be so. He had come to the Home with one question to ask and a biting fear of the answer. Wendy walked in in response to the principal's call on the interHorne radio network. Wendy looked like strawberries and cream, like an unsullied box of chocolates, like the snows of the High Sierras, like a surfer bringing, a board in on singles, like a magnum of champagne fizzing into your glass, like the high altar at Canterbury, like a flushed and happiness-drugged child lying abed with the sheets snugged to her chin. Wendy. They stared at each other. "Hi, Dad. I'm top-level busy. They're teaching us loads of guff about Outside right now -- boring as a high r.p.m. drill. Hey, what's up?" He hated himself; but training could not be denied even now, even asking his own daughter. "Pal of mine said he thought he'd spotted you in the city yesterday, Wendy." She squealed with delight. "What a frabjous thought! The city! My, oh, my! You know what the Home rules are, Dad. Not a chance. But wouldn't I have loved to be there, though! Holidays are coming up -- I've made a few tentative arrangements -- " His eidetic memory considered the girl with smooth blonde helmet of hair, laughing and flushed, carousing and abandoned, bursting through that ebon door with her Minoan dress flounced out around her like a collapsing parachute. That was Wendy. That was Wendy? No. Never. H e'd known it couldn't be -- but the likeness was so complete even he had been deceived. He had IP believed for a nightmarish millenium that that poor gaiety girl had been his beloved daughter Wendy. What sort of a heel was he? He had to hold onto his control with a bit of iron, champing, wanting to clasp her into his arms and hug her as he had done in the old days when she'd stood forlornly before him, tears dropping round and full over her latest calamity. Now, of course, she was a young lady. "You just wait 'til I'm in the city this year! Last year I was so young! I've grown up since then!" "You have, Wendy. But you've all the time in the world. Don't run too fast. Be content, for a little time at least, to walk along beside your poor old dad." Her eyes caught a vagrant beam of light so that for an instant they sparkled dangerously. She burst out: "There you go again! Why do you do it? Why?" she stopped. Carver felt a physical pain knife through his guts. Was this the beginning of the parting he dreaded? "What's that, Wendy?" "Oh... just me being womanish and irritable and irrational. You're my old dad, and that's all that matters." She looked down at her white gym shoes. "Judo next, Dad. Of course, I'm quids in having you for a father -- I know most of the holds and throws already. I'm boasting, but I'm pretty good. No one to touch me on the campus." "There used to be colored belts to denote how good you were. I'd say yours would be sky-blue pink." "Ha, ha." "Sarcasm, my beautiful brat, will get you nowhere." He dug into his pocket, jingled soldars. "Paper money, if you want it. I know nothing costs much these days; but you're always in need of some bauble or prettifier -- " She withdrew her hand. "No, really, I don't -- " "Well, you are a rum one. That's the first time I've known you actually refuse good hard cash! Conscience bothering you?" She put one hand on his shoulder, twisted him and, before he had guessed what she was about, had neatly floored him. He sat up and blew his cheeks out but didn't get up right away. That had been very professional indeed. It made him feel good. 'That, father mine," she announced dispassionately, "is for that. Any more inquisitorial dicta and through the window you go!" And, by God, he believed she could do it, too. He rose slowly and, looking up, surprised Wendy staring at him with a tense critical look, as though she was judging the performance of a show horse. He felt a little bewildered. Then she smiled and the sun came out and he wondered why he doubted her at all. She'd been here, at the Home. The poor raddled gaiety girl he'd seen had been just that. Already he was getting to work to correct his eidetic memory. "Must fly, Dad. Lovely to see you. But next time let me know first, huh?" "Sure, Wendy." He kissed her. "Cheers. And -- look after yourself." A s he left he was considering that, thankful though he had been to have mistaken that girl for Wendy, he had been mistaken about Chris Mellor. So far he had managed to push aside the unwelcome thought that for a man to mistake a stranger for hk own daughter was hardly a recommendation for a ridmach operator. Funny thing -- it had been through Chris that the Home had Heen recommended to him. All the way back he gleed in the : ought that now all he had to do .s so to arrange things that he ';ild report in on that ebon door r.nd the two thugs and the girl who v. as not Wendy. He felt really good. Only when he casually tried to analyze why he felt so good was the surprising thought brought home to him. He was actually doing something! But wasn't he a burned out husk of a man? An ex-agent of the Americas with a blasted career? A man with no hope and no future? A man whose wife had run off with a satellite engineer? A man whose passionately obsessive possession of a single daughter had kept him sane? Surely he was. But he was actually doing something. He had a purpose now. He had been able to lie down on the ridmach pallet, don the sensing lobes and venture -- bravely! -- into the mind of a dead person. That had been pseudo-life, if you like. But now he felt the stirring of a purpose outside all of that. Chris Mellor was still around and Carver wanted to know why. He felt wonderful. The feeling persisted as he let himself into his apartment in the city. Then he halted, staring foolishiy"Hello, Soames. I didn't expect to see you in my apartment. How'd you get in?" "Don't worry about that now, Robin." Soames jerked a hand at the trim, dapper man with the languid expression of a pro fencer and the face of an executioner. "This is Mister Lines. We've had a directive about you from Higher Up." "Higher Up?" "The police fished two men out of the sea a short time ago. The D. L. picked up their deaths but by the time a hovervan arrived at the D. Z. both men had been in the sea long enough. Their heads and faces had been deliberately maltreated. But our lab techs picked up enough to make them think they were these two." Soames held out two pieces of white card. Carver recognized his own work. The colored likeness of Pritchard, the oily arrangements man for the gaiety girls, and of Roger, the pleasure-seeking wetmouthed roue, stared back at him. "Both killed? And no penetration?" "None was possible. Their brains had been mashed to a pulp." "That's bad!" When Lines spoke Carver did not like the sound of the man's voice. IF He forced himself to look up and brace himself to meet that meaningful voice with a calm composure. "The directive from Higher Up, Mr. Carver," Lines said, "is that the time has passed for games. You know more about the Farish case than you have told us. We want to know all you saw -- everything!" VI F rom ridforce headquarters a black-painted hovercar took them from the tenth floor. All the time Carver kept telling himself that they couldn't prove anything. Only he had been into the mind of Julie Farish. But this creature Lines, a ly as though he knew Carver had kept something back. No longer was the problem how to insinuate the likenesses of the men he had failed to report into his records. Now the problem was how to stay out of the trouble he appeared to have tumbled in up to his neck. The hovercar squished through the city, executed a series of complicated landing maneuvers and sighed gently onto a landing platform. Out on the platform they bustled through a door and -- "Hey!" said Carver. "That's right." Soames walked on ahead, bunched and determined. He remembered the way Julie had checked her nylons here, that childlike pathetic twist of her head. "Let's get on with it." Lines kept one hand in his pocket. This was the test. This was the re-run. The police had turned up the place where Julie had been choked into unconsciousness before being taken away to be killed. Now they were watching him, scrutinizing him, checking on him. They couldn't tap his thoughts -- not yet, not until he was dead. Cheerful thought, that. Lines led out in just the way Pritchard had done. Up ahead the corridor turned at right angles beneath the fluorescents. Carver tensed. He knew the door that should be there -- that was in fact there as they walked on and its ebon surface, bolted and barred with gold and flaunting that silver lion and shield escutcheon, came into view. He forced himself to remain calm. He must not reveal that he was filled with a turmoil of indecision. They clearly knew a lot. They must guess he had not told them everything. The frightening thing was the importance they attached to that. Lines was a high-class security man and, if Carver's eye for details had not faded since his AA days, he was also a licensed executioner. But they seemed to know too much! That had been the fact puzzling him. There was a whole lot more intrigue behind this than the mere balking of information. He still hadn't decided what to do. He said: "Pritchard fell over here. Julie said she was sorry. I don't think she was, really." "You didn't mention this door in your report." Lines spoke softly. "That's right." He'd made up his mind. "I think Julie must have twisted away. The next thing she knew Pritchard was digging his nails into her arm and dragging her away like a sack of meal." "She didn't look into the room, then?" "What room? Oh -- you mean the room beyond that door. How could she? I mean, she was being hauled off by Pritchard. She didn't see the door." "Your report indicated she left the waiting room, went through to the bedroom... "That's right." "You didn't mention this bit about Pritchard falling over." "No." He wasn't going to help them; or put a single word into his mouth that wasn't necessary. "She didn't hear anything?" "Pritchard was cursing. He seemed most annoyed." This was crazy! Here he was actually acting as though he must confirm what Pritchard had told them -- yet Pritchard was dead before they'd got a sensing lobe to him! They couldn't know what Pritchard had to tell. Could they? One thing was sure. Now he couldn't tell them about those two men waltzing out with the pseudoWendy. That gaVe him a twinge of conscience. They could go whistle before he'd mention Chris Mellor. But the others, now... They could be the lead to the murder -- and he was concealing their existence. C arver decided he was not acting naturally enough. He'd better react with the cross, rather put-out attitude of a guy not really comprehending what this was all about, but resentful of the implications. He said: "I don't get all this. Bob said the report wasn't a good one; but I couldn't help that. Julie just didn't see the man who strangled her. What's all the mystery?" "You didn't hear anything else?" "A party seemed to be going on somewhere, but it didn't register with anyone." "Ah." So that was his explanation for the gust of noise when the door opened. So let them pick the bones out of that. "You fully understand. Carver, that when we do not get a sighting report from an operator we have to make sure of the facts?" Carver put on his best angry-hurt look. "Oh! I get it! Of all the low-down underhand rotten things to think! You think I was bribed!" He started to swing his arms about. "Well, I'm a ridforce operator! I don't take graft. I didn't spot the murderer and I'm sorry for that -- but it's not my fault!" He subsided. He'd put on a nice performance. "Say now, Robin -- " began Soames, worried. "We understand your position, Carver." Lines took his hand out of his pocket; some of the tension eased out of the atmosphere. The ridforce security man came to a decision. "We know you don't take graft, Carver. But... IF Ridforce had been punctiliously strict about employing only top quality people. A breath of suspicion could blast a man's chances of ever being asked. No one volunteered -- because no one of the public knew ridforce existed. But the possibility of graft had not been overlooked. At first it had appeared impossible. How, you might ask, could a man sitting watching from the mind of a dead person taking graft to conceal the murderer? Ah -- but suppose Carver had recognized the man who had murdered Julie. Suppose, for instance, it had been Roger. What then? Easy. Easy cash. He would have said nothing. Julie looked away, the room was dark, someone else had done it. Not Roger. As he had said. Then, casually, comfortably, wearing the smooth unbearable smile of the blackmailer, he would have gone to Roger and made a deal. And Roger would have paid up. Oh, yes, he would. He wouldn't know that the very fact of Carver's eidetic memory precluded him from ever saying he had forgotten a fact, that a face had, slipped his memory, that now he would put the finger on Roger. Corruption as a time-binding phenomenon was eminently practicable with ridforce. Any slight breath of it had to be investigated. Strangely, this quizzing brought one relief; he was not now committed to inserting the faces of those two thugs and the pseudo-Wendy into the files. Still... there had been an almost panic-stricken reaction to this Farish case history. He'd have to think about it. It might be rewarding. I n the Forensic Science Laboratories Carol Burnham undipped the sensing lobes from Lines's temples and pressed the  green finish button. Ralph Tzombe smiled warmly at her. "We've done it, Carol. And well within Whitcliffe's time schedule. I don't think he's as pleased as you are!" "You're right, Ralph." Carol watched critically as Lines opened his eyes. She hadn't let Whitcliffe down. She picked up the cigarettepack-sized mech, seeing the insides clearly with her own inner eye. "It's all here, Ralph. Just pull out these sensing lobes, attach them to the decedent and switch on. And all the ridmach will want is absorbed and magnetically recorded on microtape. Then you just slip the lobes on and run the tape and you become an operator and penetrate on a ridforce assignment. And you can do it hours, days, years after the victim meets death zero!" Lines said: "Wha -- No! Keep him off!" At once Carol cursed herself for a conceited fool. "Listen, Lines! Your name is Josiah Lines! Remember! Where were you born?" "Uh," gargled Lines. "He came at me with a knife..." "Where were you born?" "Galveston, Texas. But the knife -- it went right in... "Hold up, Lines! When were you born?" "Don't you understand?" Lines raked up, caught her wrist in a constricting grip. "That sour-faced swine murdered me! So where am I? What happened!" "You're in the Forensic Science Labs, Lines, and well you know it! You've just been on a ridforce penetration, that's all. I thought you were an ace operator!" "Yeah... Yeah, I remember. I was trying out your damned invention for Whitcliffe. Sure. That's it." "You are a member of ridforce internal security. You -- " "I know who I am! Just caught me on a sore spot, coming at me like that. If it had been me I'd have flicked the knife around, stuck it in the Withit's own guts!" "We had no control over the murder we'd be asked to monitor, Lines." Tzombe spoke smoothly. "But it seems pretty clear our device works!" "It works," Carol Burnham said on a breath. When Whitcliffe walked in with his impersonal aura of absolute command, Lines was back to his usual ruthless toughness. Whitcliffe said: "You are feeling quite well?" "Quite well, sir. Haven't been on a ridmach penetration for some time. Threw me a little. But I'm okay." "If some of our eager-beaver trainees could talk to you now, Lines, they might understand a little better why we are so strict in our choice and training of operators." "But," put in Tzombe, "the cases of near-insanity go down with every course, I'm glad to say." "They still occur. Being a ridforce operator leads all too easily to instability and insanity. It's the price we pay for doing our job." Ordinary words, commonplace sentiments. But Carol saw with a shiver that Whitcliffe meant every one with a superhuman truth. Nothing would stand in the way of this man. He would crush all opposition. "I want full scale production of this device. I want every patrol hovercar equipped so they can save the hovervans time. With the D. L. zeroing them in on the D. Z. they will be there much quicker. I suggest we call this device the R.R.I.D." That fitted. R for Recording. Recording Resurrection Investigation Detection. R.I.D. Ridmech. Ridforce. Everybody called it the Carol Mark One. That soon became the Carmo. Production began in secret ridforce workshops and after she had turned over the fruits of her work, Carol suffered a panicky moment of emptiness. What of the future? So far there had never been a man in her life. Perhaps now she regretted that. I n the days following his penetration on the Farish case Robin Carver went through the strange and heady experience of finding a purpose in life outside ridforce. Not to go to the bureau and ask about Chris Mellor was the obvious IF decision to make. He'd always been a loner. Perhaps if he'd had a reliable man, like Chris Melior or Stan Eames, to work with most of the time, he wouldn't have gone to pieces when his wife walked out. Wendy had been a responsibility he'd welcomed. But she hadn't been able to keep him from receiving the big red 'Unstable' stamp on his bureau files. The bureau had tried to steer him towards the space program; but he had thankfully declined. Even he, a star agent of the Americas, loathed working outside the Shield. He suspected the fear of foreign climes infecting the continent was one of the mainsprings of the lack of progress in the space race. Who wanted to leave the Shield and go to the Moon? Who wanted to leave the Shield at all? He'd been out, of course, in line of duty. The experience had been stimulating, like hanging by your toenails over a thousand-foot drop. Not pleasant; but undeniably an experience. He carried on with his ridforce work, making some first class penetrations. The idea of lying beside a dead man and entering his mind to sit and watch all that had happened to him still gave him a shivery disbelieving thrill. The Withits and kicks way. Business was brisk. More than ever he felt convinced something was brewing behind the scenes of ridforce activity. Rumors of a new device, called a carmo, filtered down spreading alarms of mass redundancies. Then, after a hectic day's work -- four penetrations -- standing dialing a hovertaxi he saw a taxi flit toward him, hesitate and then pick up a man standr ing on the higher pedway. Shrugging off the annoyance, Carver dialed again. A second taxi parted from the traffic stream and slid across. The first taxi passed within a few feet. Sitting in it was one of the men who had tumbled through that ebon door, lasciviously embracing the pseudo-Wendy. Carver felt absolutely sure of it. H e stumbled into his own taxi. He hesitated momentarily over the directions he should give. He could not alert the police... "Follow that taxi ahead," he said to the robot. The radar locked on. Wherever the first taxi went the second would follow. He felt an eerie elation. Whatever was going on, he remained absolutely sure, this man ahead must know something of it. But why was Chris Melior at that party? The taxi ahead leaped across the city and dropped down to a medium level landing platform on the Forensic Science Building. Evening shadow purpled under the overheads as the man walked briskly through a discreet entranceway. Carver followed. All thoughts of challenging the man vanished. Now he wanted to know the fellow's business. Outside a plainly varnished door the man knocked. The door opened, he entered and the door dosed after him. Why in this building, of all places? Why in the city headquarters of ridforce? Maybe -- just maybe this man could explain why Lines had seemed to know so much that should have been locked in a dead man's brain, unreachable by a ridmach! Had Carver still been an AA man there would have been no difficulty picking up the faint murmur of conversation beyond that door; he would have been equipped with all manner of bugs and spies. Now he had to strain to try to catch the words. "It's all set up, boss." That was the thug. "The syndicate will take as many as you can produce." "Mumble... mumble... very good. Deliveries... caution. Remember!" The dull voice of the second man strengthened. "We cannot affoid a single mistake!" The voices died and Carver stood with one ear against the wood, tantalized, not sure what to do... "Why, Mr. Carver! What on earth are you doing?" C arver straightened and swiveled as though gripped and twisted by a wrestler. Standing looking at him with the surprised expression of a woman seeing a man in a ladies' toilet was Carol Burnham. She wore evening clothes under an off-white smock. "Huh?" said Carver, very intelligently. "It is Mr. Carver, isn't it? Of course. We met at an operator and scientist conference, I think." "That's right." Carver looked at Carol Burnham and liked what h# saw. She'd been distant and unapproachable, he remembered. In his own clam-tight fashion he had barely nodded at the introductions. Alec Durlston had been there, and that had soured the evening. Durlston had been very attentive to this Doctor Burnham, too. But right now he felt in a very false position. He couldn't explain. Carol said: "What are you doing eavesdropping outside Whitcliffe's door?" "Whitcliffe!" The murmur of voices approached, thickening from beyond the door -- Whitcliffe's and the thug's! "Look, Doctor Burnham," he said desperately. "I'd like to talk to you -- " The door opened. "I'm doing the syndicate a favor, Zeuke, so remember that and make sure they pay up promptly." Then Whitcliffe saw Carol and Carver. "Why, Doctor Burnham. You wished to see me?" At once Carol recalled the reason for her visit. "Yes, Whitcliffe. I thought you should know at once. When I checked through the stockpile of -- uh -- I discovered at least a thousand are missing. I certainly signed no indent for them. Neither did Doctor Tzombe." "I signed the indent myself. We are beginning distribution. But it was good of you, Doctor Burnham, to be so -- ah -- faithful in your guardianship." The man called Zeuke said: "Good evening," and, turning abruptly, walked off down the corridor. IF Carver could smell his type. He cliffe. Good night." had felt reasonably convinced before, Whitcliffe nodded in dismissal hut the foul-up over the pseudoand Carol and Carver walked away. Wendy had confused the issue. This Carver walked as though he exZeuke was a proassassin. For the pected a needle-gun blast to shred moment Carver left aside his now his nerves any second, fully understood mission in bringing "A great man, Whitcliffe," said the man to justice for his part in the Carol as they turned the corner. Farish case. He had not committed "You'd have got a rocket if he'd the murder; but he would know, found you listening outside his Carver concentrated instead on wondoor." dering what business he could have "I didn't know it was his. I'm in with Whitcliffe, the head of ridforce. a spot of bother and I need help. "I'm rather busy," Whitcliffe was Thank you for not reporting on saying. He shot an inquiring lift of me." eyebrows at Carver. "You'd better have a good exAt once, Carver said: "I just planation -- or I might do it yet." came along to find Doctor Burnham, sir. A personal matter. Nothing Ohe was about to enlarge on that important." O theme when the dully savage Carol glanced at him, and away, blast of a handgun cracked start"We'll be getting along then, Whitlingly down the passage. The shot came from the direction of the landing platform. He was running towards it before he'd had time to analyze his own feelings. The gun was an ordinary solid-projectile job, automatic by the flat crack of it, and not the needle-gun that shattered a man's neutral system at a touch. He went through the last couple of doorways flat out, skidding to a sliding halt at the corner of the landing platform. Carol skittered after him. A man lay sprawled like a broken sparrow on the platform. Zeuke was just springing into his taxi, still grasping the heavy black automatic in one hand. He whipped around, triggered a shot at Carver. The bullet made a mess of an aluminum architrave. Carver hit the floor. The taxi whined and belched black smoke, then shot away to be lost at once in the traffic pattern. Carol panted up, blowing. "What -- ?" "This will be on the D.L. now," Carver said. He bent down to look at the man's face, twisted lax against the flooring. "This is like old times. I've stood at Death Zero a few times before -- " But he didn't finish the sentence. The old times tag fitted here, too. "Stan Eames," he said softly, whispering it so Carol didn't pick up the words. "He's dead. There's only one thing left for a ridforce operator to do now." Carol surprised him. She slipped a little pack from her pocket and adjusted sensing lobes to Eeame's temples. "Quite a device," she said. "We call them carmos. Since Whitcliffe told us he's beginning their issue there's no harm you seeing one ahead of time." She leaned over and adjusted the controls, switched on. They both leaned back from the body and stared at each other as the little machine whickered softly away to itself, storing all the memories that had been Stanley Eames. She outlined the carmo's function swiftly to Carver. "We can store information faster than an operator can absorb it. Machine and man, again." She was reacting very well. Carver decided. She might deal in death every day; but that was a scientific, laboratory, pickled sort of death and not the violent bloody painful death sprawled out here. Down at ridforce headquarters the ruby light of Tentoki the demon lantern bearer would be blinking on a city map in a hovervan and a crew would be hurtling through the city with all afterburners on. But here at D.Z. a new little gadget sat like a spider, calmly plucking everything that rushing hovervan would want to know from the dead brain of the victim. Progress, that was. "You didn't see -- ?" "No," lied Carver, "Anyway, your carmo will give it to us. But why here? Why on this platform just now? That is always the question that tantalizes. Why is death found just where it is found?" "This could be another in these senseless juvenile slayings," Carol said with distaste. "They're spreading" "The kids are murdering for kicks IF these days. I know. It stinks. But there's something wrong with our whole setup. Everybody's gone sour." The conversation fitted the empty mood of the moment. "I think I've felt that for some time. Most people do. But we all try not to think about it, really think, I mean. While we have the Shield (to whom be all the praise and thanks) what is there that can harm us? We just go on from day to day doing the same things, trying to make a shape out of life." "Making a shape out of life." He watched the shrinking tape on the feed spool and the whirring discs of light spinning out the web that was taking a dead man's memories and recording them for a posterity he would never know. "That just about sums it up. But what sort of shape are we in? Where is the object in life? What are we all scurrying about doing? Where's our goal?" "All I wanted to do was perfect this little gadget here. Well, I've done that. And now I feel let down." "Perhaps everyone on the continent is tired -- " "Tired of living, you mean?" "I don't believe that. Everyone is avid for life -- all the frenetic activity of the city proves that. But, somehow, to me, what they're striving for isn't important. Or rather what they find isn't important. People want more out of life today than life can offer them." The tape whickered to a slicing stop and the tiny green finish light went on. "That's all we'll get." Carol switched off. H e felt he had known Carol Burnham for a long time. He slipped the carmo in his pocket, looking at her. He liked the way she held her head, her figure, the dark luster of her hair. She was genuine. She had a mind behind that smooth sweep of forehead capable of designing wondrous scientific instruments. But she could with equal facility worry over the straightness of her seams. A feminine electronic genius, yet! Carver knew it was asking a lot; but he asked, just the. same. In this quick and surprising closeness he felt towards her he tried to force a response; if he felt like this surely she must, too? "Look Carol, I'm in trouble. And I'm agoing to ask you a favor. A really big one." He pointed out over the city's lights to the sudden flare and screechingly torturing noise blasting in purple fury from the jets of. a ridforce hovervan. "They're here." "What's the favor?" ;  "The ridforce will run this poor chap through their ridmaCh: But I want to see what this is about." ' "You want," Carol said with a queer jolt of her heart making the words soft and breathy, "you  want to scan that carmo im your pocket? And you don't want me to tell?" "Will you? Please?" Feet rapped behind them. Ridforce security men burst out from the building onto the landing platform. Lines shoved his face and his gun under Carver's nose. "What the hell are you doing here, Carver? What'd you kill this guy for?" Some odd note in the three turins of the hovervan told Carver fee number he would see painted an the nose. Hovervan Number Three. Charlie Rawlinson began slinging his cameras into action as fee stretcher crew bundled out. "Come on. Carver, cough it out!" "I didn't kill him, Lines, as a quick ridmach check will show. And take your bloody great gun out of my face!" Lines' face altered subtly in its planes and shadows. Then, before he could speak, Alec Durlston started to climb down from the hovering an. Carol gripped Carver's arm. "I can vouch for that, Lines," fee said firmly. "We'd just seen Whitcliffe and then found this poor man. And I'm late -- " Carver liked the way she'd brought Whitcliffe's name in. He didn't like the fact that she knew Lines. "I see," said Lines, resenting having to say it. "Well, you needn't hang about here any longer. If we need your evidence we'll contact you." Carver turned to Carol. "Let's be going, then. I owe you a coffee." "You do," she said as they dialed a hovertaxi. "And you also owe me an explanation. I want it -- all of itl" vm S he didn't get all of it, of course. But Carver found himself telling her much more than he had imagined he would. In this city of sin there were plenty of places where couples could go for seclusion and still remain perfectly respectable. In the cheap, much-used room, Carver sat on the bed and drank auto-vended coffee. Carol said: "So you think some one is after you because you slipped up on a ridmach report? That's preposterous!" "I didn't say I had slipped up, just that Lines thinks so. He's dangerous. And the man who committed murder back there on the landing platform is mixed up in this." "You said you hadn't seen him!" "I hope you can understand why." "I suppose you realize that Lines will tie me in with your nefarious activities now." "No!" He was shattered. "He couldn't!" "You don't know Lines." "I can guess." He took out the carmo and lay back on the bed. Carol leaned over him to switch on. As she pressed the start button her dusky hair fell across his face. Her perfume enclosed him like a tent. "Just find something that will get us out of this mess," she whispered. "Luck, Robin!" He hadn't wanted to involve anyone else in whatever was going on; but now Carol had seen very clearly that she had involved herself. Doing that had been terrifyingly easy. And he liked her more than anyone. Wendy? Complications could ensue there... Complications like that of childbirth, darkness and warmth and soft caressing comfort in the reassuringly IF fhythmk circle of unity and then violent, ugly movement, dispelling, struggling, dryness and harshness and a loss of comforting darkness first cry... The first cry, but not the last. Never the last. Carver skipped through Stanley Eames' birth and upbringing and scanned perfunctorily through to the first years of Eames' service as an agent of the Americas. An odd wry nostalgia possessed him as familiar faces and scenes passed before his scrutinizing eyes, behind the eyes erf Stan Eames. There had been three of them. Three buddies, three men dedicated to all the ideals of the perfect A A man. Stan Eames... Chris Mellor... Robin Carver. So that's how I looked then! Too young and fresh and cocky by half! C carver skipped on ahead through  Eames' memories, working his way in from the birth end of the spectrum, as Carol had said he would. He had forgotten nothing of the days with Eames and Mellor as an agent of the Americas. Stan Eames had forgotten nothing either. Their two reports of facts tallied microscopically. But the difference in interpretation -- the way Eames looked at their problems, the nuances he had picked up that Carver had missed and those he had missed that Carver had seen -- these other dimensions and colorings of experience rendered their two reactions in totally different lights. A sobering thought, almost ominous. Even eidetic memories could not unfailingly tailor the emotions of memories, only blank off what could not be remembered without shame. This personal comparison of two eidetic memories in one person's brain was surely setting some new record? Old friends crossed the stage of remembrance as those three friends finished out their training schedules. Carver deliberately bypassed the sick period in his own life, knowing Eames sympathetic reactions could not be borne now. When he rejoined, Eames stood trim and straight before an expectant line of newly-fledged AA men. Now they would run their finals with trouble and strife shot at them from all angles by men like Stan Eames and Chris Mellor and Robin -- No; no more for Carver. By this time along Eames' life-line he was marked 'Unstable'. "You have been posted here to polish up on your finals." Eames glared along the ranks -- a friendly glare, but one which said he was hell on wheels to anyone who thought they could stay out of line. "You are now agents of the Americas. This means you are dedicated through your own free choice to one objective in life. That sole and single objective is the continuance in being of the Shield. That and nothing more." Stan Eames was thinking of the time he had stood in ranks and heard this from a scarred and veteran agent. ns "You protect the Shield. You protect the Shield above and beyond the call of any mundane duty, to the limits of endurance -- and beyond. If the continuance in being of the Shield demands your lives Gratefully." As Stan gave his life an hour or so ago... "Some of you may have thought of yourselves as a kind of modern continuation of the old G-men. This is not so. You do not serve the government. You serve only to protect the Shield. The interests of the government are secondary to the interests of the Shield -- which are the interests both of the country and the government." W ithin the context of modern life, safe and secure behind the Shield, where governments could operate only within that framework for life, this made simple common sense. No one thought to question it. Anyway, what questions could you ask? The Shield made life in this modern thermonuclear warfare dominated world possible and pleasant. And no government had been able to guarantee that before the Shield. Women didn't mind having babies after the Shield. And they didn't worry over the radioactive content of the milk they fed them... And men knew their sons would never have to face either the holocaust of total war or the equally death-dealing finality of a limited brushfire war. The Shield was worth fighting for, far more than the so-called Peace that frittered away the nerves and robbed the taxpayers pockets for armaments that ever more terrified in their complexity and inhumanity of destruction. There had been opposition to the Shield in its early days, incredible though that now seemed. The everhungry warmongers had protested bitterly that no such thing as a total defense had or ever could exist. But the Shield proved them wrong. Most countries of the world now either possessed nuclear weapons or knew where to obtain them. Some countries had nobly renounced the bomb or refused to countenance its incorporation into their defense systems. But a few countries had tried the old trick of sliding thermonuclear bombs in tiny fragments through the country's customs, camouflaged in radiological equipment or souvenirs or any of a hundred other unlikely places. The first agents of the Americas picked those up. The bureau became strong fighting that sort of challenge. Nothing like that existed now. As far as anyone knew, the world lived peacefully together outside the Shield. Not that people bothered much about what happened outside the Shield. But there were still weird off-beat conspiracies to uncover, nuts who wanted to assassinate the president or blow up the Shield's generators or commit any of the crimes battlestarved men of action are prone to. On the trail of one such conIF piracy Stan Fames and Chris Melkr were working with a girl operative, Rusty Lowke. Eames was backop man. Rusty was a tall, lanky girl, angular-faced and with a karate throw that could break a bull's neck. Watching and waiting with his two comrades, Carver felt a heartstopping regret that the old days had gone. Here the three of them were again working on a case. He didn't forget that he had been traditionally a singleton; now he remembered the good times they'd had together. M It's all fixed," Rusty said buoyantly as their hovercar soughed through the traffic lanes. "We'll be admitted without trouble. Just try to act the tough heavies of sin city -- it shouldn't be too tough." "Compliments, yet," said Mellor, smiling. The hovercar took them down to a landing platform perched high against a craggy building. At once they plunged into a world of luxury and ostentatious good-living they despised -- and that Carver recognized with a sudden jump of excitement He went hidden behind the watchful eyes of Stan Eames into that familiar over-ripe world of pleasure... where very soon now Harry would be bringing Julie Farish and the girls. # X'our partner doesn't seem to I be around, Chris." Stan Barnes held Rusty's elbow as they went through the door. "It was thoughtful of the bureau to assign me a girl friend to make up the foursome." Chris Mellor stared around with his friendly smile. Past the waiting room they went, the room where soon Julie would wait, pushing her shoes off to be more comfortable. Up to the ebon door they went, the door flaunting its silver escutcheon and its gorgeously barbaric golden bolt heads and flanges. Carver waited in the' mind of Stan Eames, knowing that here lay his chance to understand what had been happening to him. Here in this lavish room license held full sway. All the giggling paraphernalia of luxurious orgies was old stuff to Carver; he'd seen it many times before. He could feel the same distaste as Eames, as the agent stared about on the scintillating costumes, the flash of white flesh, the bewildering coruscations of jewels, the whole sybaritically organized pleasure palace. Giggle-gas balloons plopped and Eames moved away, drawing Rusty with him, so that for a space they lost Mellor. When Zeuke approached, Carver was not surprised. "The meeting will take place shortly," Zeuke said. The gun didn't show more than a half-hairsbreadth beneath the impeccable suit. That was exactly a half-hairsbreadth too much for an agent. "Thanks." Zeuke moved away. The two agents stared upon the animated throng and the miasma of smoke and perfume, the heady scents of rare wines and costly cigars, the whole whing-ding shooting match that represented life as it was lived in this day and age on this continent. "Look at all the fat slobs." Eames kept a politely bland smile on his face. "Living high on the hog, like opulent princes in the city." "Living," said Mellor from behind them. "Living at all because of the Shield. If the Shield -- if -- well, they'd turn into a pack of insanely screaming fear-crazed lunatics." "You're only alive by the grace of the Shield (to whom all glory and honor and gratitude." A new voice spoke from beside Mellor, soft and mellifluous -- a voice Carver knew! And still Stan Eames did not turn around. "We don't refer to the Shield in lay terms among ourselves," Mellor said gently. Eames began to turn around. Rusty was smiling warmly, welcoming the new girl. "Don't worry about Chris. We all have to learn." "Of course." And then Eames had turned fully about, and there was Wendy. O nly, of course, it wasn't Wendy. Carver knew it wasn't. Wendy had been at the Home when this party took place. She was there now, in the present that encompassed this party, vouched for by the mistresses.' This girl in her demurely-outrageous Minoan dress was not Wendy. She couldn't be. Could she? "This is Zoe Brown," said Mellor. Zoe Brown took Stan Eames' hand in a friendly grip, looking up at him. A frown dashed abruptly across her face. Her grip slackened and then tightened. Her eyes clouded and she shivered her bare shoulders. "What is it, Zoe?" "Nothing. I -- just thought -- I haven't met you before, have I? Well, then, I couldn't have recognized you." But she looked troubled. Looking at her out of the eyes of Stan Eames, Carver tried to hold on to that central theme. This girl was not, could not be Wendy. Zoe said: "So we're here because Rusty convinced her contact we're deep degenerate crooks of the underworld." "Something like that, Zoe. All you do is stick with me. You're hew to learn. There may be an assignment, too." Unobtrusively, people drifted from the hectic perfume-washed atmosphere of the party into a smaller rear room where chairs faced a small stage. Eames looked around at the people waiting. So, too, did Robin Carver. He recognized Zeuke and the other man with him who would soon dance out of the ebon door with Zoe Brown. Most of these people looked respectable and all looked prosperous but Carver understood very well they purveyed vice. They represented a cross-section of the city's vice rings, the syndicates. The party outside afforded gay camouflage. A man walked briskly in, jumped onto the stage and waited for silence. Staring through a dead man's eyes at him, Carver felt another IF little piece drop into this deadly jigsaw. It was Lines. L ines said: "You've been asked here tonight to hear a proposition of mutual benefit. You've been taken care of?" A rumble signified assent. A flashy, thin-faced shark stood up abruptly. "We've had the fun and games. What about the business?" "You all know business is bad lately. Oh, sure, grown-ups still patronize your -- ah -- wares. But what about the kids?" What the meeting thought about teenagers didn't bear repetition. They all agreed that the kids just were not paying the same rich rewards as previously. 'The reason -- " Lines overrode the comments -- "is that they have found a new kick. They are getting hopped on murder!" He quieted their protests. "Oh, not so many. Not a lot -- yet! But we know unexplained murders are being committed on a rising scale. A gang of kids go out on the city, fin a mug, a non-personality, and they kill him. A lot share in that experience. A lot more share in it second-hand. They have their ways. They seem to derive satisfaction from the smell of death. It gets into their blood." "That's an old phenomenon," observed a slim triggerman by the door. "It feels good to kill." "And the cops aren't doing a goddam thing." "How can they?" Lines smiled motiveless. But they bring satisfaction to the killers, satiating some yearning, some desire, that your businesses fail to provide." They didn't like that. "What should we do then?" demanded the shark nastily. "Provide goons to be killed off if you buy a ticket?" "Not quite!" The snap in Lines voice and his tone shook them. They stared at him wonderingly. "What is this?" demanded a flushed man from the back. "If you're going to offer us humanoid robots to be killed off for kicks, think again. We tried that. It didn't work." Lines quieted the hubbub. Speaking calmly, he explained what he intended to do. He brought his listeners manna from their own evil heaven. Added up, it was very simple. Lines was offering these dregs of the city's vice empires the opportunity to buy carmos -- R.R.I.D.'s -- and hire them out. The kids -- anybody for that matter -- could penetrate into the mind of a person as that person was murdered. That was what ridforce operators did. They were trained for the job. Now Lines proposed letting loose a flood of ridmechs in the city so that youngsters could drug themselves with the sensations of death. The scheme made Carver fed sick. Of course, Lines called the carmos merely devices. He mentioned no names and quoted mythical scientific contacts. Eames reacted with profound shock. Mellor said softly: "This IW must be just about the ultimate in vicarious experiences!" The meeting broke up with promises made and delivery schedules tentatively organized. This, then, explained what Zeuke and Lines had been up to, the conversation with Whitcliffe, the thousand carmos missing from the stockrooms, Carol's vague suspicions. The forensic science headquarters of the police were being used to manufacture a new and vicious form of pleasure for the underworld the police were sworn to destroy. And Whitcliffe -- the head of ridforce -- had to be a partner in this diabolical scheme! IX O n the bed this strange man Robin Carver lay breathing in long shallow breaths. Sitting here, she had tried to understand herself and follow her reasons for doing what she had. She had for the moment overcome the fear that had shaken her brutally when she envisaged what Lines would do when he found out she had lied to him. Even Whitcliffe could not save her then. The very rapidity of events since die had met Carver had left her little time to think. Now she found herself thinking of Carver. Why was At attracted to him in a way that all of Alec Durlston's undoubted masculine charms could not match? She wanted to know Carver better. She wanted -- The door handle moved. She wrenched her body around to face the door, one hand at her throat. No one could open that door apart from herself and Carver. The ident key lay in his pocket. Without that the door was sacrosanct. But the door handle moved. It turned, and a slit of light slashed across the carpet. She stifled her cry. Knowing the risk she was making Carver take only made her actions more precise as she pressed the green finish button and switched off the carmo. The sizzling of the tapes died to silence. Into that silence the creak of the door and the hoarse suppressed breathing of the man slowly pushing his way in broke with an ugly violence. B ack in the memories of a dead man, the meeting had broken up. They were circulating about the party, in it and yet not of it. "You saw those two gorillas flanking the stage, Zoe?" Mellor spoke gently. "Yes. Ugly customers." "I think Rusty will have to work on the character who did the talking. Will you see what you can get out of his two bodyguards?" She made a face -- the sort of face Wendy used to make when Carver reminded her the last day of holidays was over -- but nodded. "All right. I'll see what Mata Hari can do. You'll be around, though? Just in case." "I'll be around, Zoe." This was a rotten sort of business. But it had to be accepted if the country were to be kept clean. Eames watched Zoe Brown move gracefully through the throng, perIF fectly composed, laughing gaily as she ducked giggle-gas balloons, kicking free of multi-colored ribbons. She'd do. She was an agent of the Americas on a job. The two bodyguards moved towards a giggling mass of men and women. Zoe disappeared into the hijinks at their side. Eames didn't know one of those men was called Zeuke, he didn't know that the girl Zoe would soon prance through the ebon door with them to be momentarily seen by Julie Farish as Pritchard dragged her away. The whole scene wavered like a film waved beneath water. The noise dimmed. The scents faded He struggled wildly to return, to recreate the moment passed, to inhabit once again, the mind of Stan Eames. Then the blackness and the whorls of dark-light anti-color whirled about him. Someone was shaking his shoulder gently. A hand was across his mouth, the fingers and thumb biting between his teeth, stretching the flesh. A voice whispered desperately. "Wake up, Robin! For Godk's sake come back!" In automatic response he tried # speak but the hand over his mouth dug in more cruelly. The speaker's lips touched his ear, the words barely heard. "I had to bring you back! You're Robin Carver. You're in a room with me, Carol Burnham -- and there's a man breaking in the door!" H e put a hand up and caught her arm. He pressed, hard, three times. Then he moved the hand to her fingers over his lips. Slowly, the gripping constriction eased. Her head bent over him. Tm okay. Fm Robin Carver. A man -- breaking in?" He looked at the door past the curve of her shoulder. A sliver of light fell athwart the carpet Slowly, inch by inch, the light broadened. The goon was taking no chances of disturbing them. "This might be just the regular Caves of Joy routine," he whispered harshly. "But -- it might not." Carefully he crawled out of the bed and moved noiselessly towards the door. One second he had been circulating at an orgy and searching for signs of a conspiracy; the next he was creeping out of bed in a darkened room about to deal with an intruder. They'd said you had to be flexible to be a ridforce operator; but this type of flexibility was more suited to an agent of the Americas. He reached the door and stood quite still behind it. With spine-jolting brutality the door cracked open. Tear-jerking light splashed acridly across the bed. Bunched muscles beneath dark coat over broad gorilla shoulders moved into the room, black-outlined and menacing, between Carver and the light. He could hear the hoarse hacking breathing and see light splintering from the hairs on the gorilla's necks and ears. "Awri! Git outta the bed!" This wasn't Zeuke. This was his companion. This was the man Zoe Brown had been ordered to investigate -- and just how had that turned out? What was Zoe Brown doing now? "What's going on!" Carol didn't need to put on an act. She was scared right through. "He's got a gun!" But she still had guts enough to scream a warning. Carver reached around the gorilla's back and cut the edge of his palm down on the man's wrist, just where the bones jutted, just where it hurts the most. Before the gorilla's sharp yelp of pain cut through Carol's words, before the gun thunk ed to the ground, Carver cut the goon across the side of his neck with the edge. For good measure, he kicked him as he went down, in the place where it would do the most good. The gunman sprawled on the carpet -- out. Carol breathed. "You don't waste much time." Carver bent, picked up the gun. "Can't afford to." He checked the weapon. Solid projectile automatic. A load of old-fashioned slobs he'd tangled with this time, at that. "Come on. This place is blown." "Don't forget the carmo." She dropped it into her purse. "I've never seen anyone come out of a penetration so fast before." "You have to adapt. You had good reason to drag me out. Anyway, I found out what I want to know -- until the next stage. I didn't go through to Stan's death..." Out on the landing they avoided the elevator shaft and skipped down the first flight. Carol paused, a hand to her side. A bullet splashed against the plastic panelling above them. The second bullet would have passed clean through Carol if Carver hadn't head-down charged her back out of the line of fire from the stair landing beneath. T hrough the balustrade Carver could see part of the arm and shoulder of the gunman below. It wasn't Zeuke. He pushed the gun down, fired, then whipped around the corner of the stairs fast, jumping down five at a time, to slam the gun-butt into the man's chin as he sagged, clasping his shattered shoulder. Carver called back up the stairs: "Come on, Carol! Snap it up. I want this goon." They manhandled the unconscious thug into the elevator and rode him down to the first landing-platform floor. Only when he had dialed a robo-taxi and dumped the man in, with Carol and himself squashed on the opposite seat, could he relax. "These men have been sent by Lines to kill us. When he scanned Eames' memories he found out about me -- enough to want me dead." "But why? You must have -- " "I must have nothing. You won't understand this; but I'll tell you what I haven't told a living soul for years. I used to be an agent of the Americas. Oh, don't gape! You haven't heard of them; but Lines has. He'll think I'm still working for the bureau. And we're opposed to what he's doing." Carver told Carol what was intended for her carmos. She listened in shocked and hostile silence. IP jOHir  "But this means Whitcliffe is be"I'm in this now. I slaved my hind it!" she burst out when he had guts out creating those carmos for finished. She was very frightened. Whitcliffe -- all for what? So he "He's an arch criminal. No! It's imcould do this filthy thing with them! possible!" Oh, no, Robin. I'm seeing this thing "I'm afraid it isn't." through!" "I can't believe it! And yet I think you wouldn't lie to me." "Not any more, Carol. I admire you more than -- no, there's no time for that now. I've a job to do. We must find you a safe hideout and then -- "No." "It all makes sense, though, f've always shied away from those last few particles of time when the victim dies. But I haven't been unaware of the fascination and the dark pull of experiencing death." "These senseless slayings all over the city Whitcliffe had been so "Huh?" "I said no " "I know you said no. No to what?" "I'm not hiding out." "Well, for gosh sakes! You can't go traipsing about with me! I've brought you enough grief already." worried about -- people have gone sour, especially the youngsters. And the experience they get of kilhng someone is surely only a pale reflection of that they get being killed. That's an old psychological conundrum." The man on the opposite seat groaned and stirred. Carver prodded Y'n with his own gun. "Wake up, sonny. Where is Whitcliffe?" "Get lost, mac. I ain't gonna tell you." The gorilla shifted around, winced as the pain hit him. Carver thrust his face an to the other's, gripping his collar in a tightly bunched fist. He felt absolutely ruthless. "You know what businesses we're in. We make dead men tell tales! I want to know where Whitcliffe is, and if you know you'll tell me. Otherwise I shall kill you and find out for myself the easy way. It's your choice -- mac." Staring down with a shifty illumination from the city parti-coloring her face, Carol knew Carver would do it, too. Whitcliffe's man knew that too. He could see it in Carver's eyes. "I dunno where he went." "That can be checked, too. After you're dead." Carver began to wonder what it would be like to be in the mind of a victim he killed himself -- victim and executioner in one. The guard broke. "You bastard," he began, crying with the wrath of being beaten. Carver flicked a backhand across the fellow's mouth. "Keep your filthy sewer-mouth to yourself. There is a lady present. Talk!" "New Mexico. That's where he's gone. Somewhere in New Mexico." Carol bent down. "But where? Where in New Mexico?" "I don't know. And that's the truth. Things are ready to start! That's all I know. Don't kill me!" Carver dialed the taxi to a stand, "Leave him," he told Carol, and slugged the guard again. He caught her arm. They hurried away. "Come on Carol," Carver said. Glancing at the line of his jaw, Carol shivered. X L os Alamos no longer looked as it had when men tentatively tinkered with the inner fires of matter here. Above the surface showed only the shallow rounded dome of a fallout shelter elevator shaft. They stood in the dust and coolness of the night, their hired hovercar silent behind them, staring and wondering at that simple dome. Carol caught her breath. "And you mean it's here? Right under our feet now? Incredible!" "We've been spotted on radar and seismic alarms by now. Pretty soon the welcoming committee will call on us. Just remember; act naturally, show no wavering. We must convince them we know what we're talking about." "I'm glad we had that meal," Carol observed as though irrelevantly. "I'm faint enough as it is." Carver pressed her arm. "You're going to be all right, I promise." The searchlight pinned them to the ground. Their shadows streamed distorted behind them. They waited as men moved towards them, the glimmer of helmets, weapons and uncompromising eyes surrounding them. "You two! Don't move." The voice came chill and impersonal; I # IF tat not loaded with hate or anger. "What are you doing here? Didn't you read the warning notices?" "Yes." Carver spoke strongly. "Is Morgan still around?" A pause. The night breathed quietly around them, warmly scented, a part of normal life and yet now remote, miles away from the situation that had developed here and that could not now halt this side of culmination. The man sighed. "He's here. Who are you?" "An old friend. Just say I must speak to him about what you are doing here. About what lies beneath us -- and about a very present peril." As they went down in the elevator Carol clung to Carver. "Who is Morgan? What did you mean?" "Morgan is my old chief. He's a hard man, but fair. His job insures he'll listen to me." P aneled in plastic and concrete, the underground labyrinth was quickly traversed. Soon they reached Morgan's office. Carver stared about with a wry twitch to his lips, savoring the feel and atmosphere of the place. It hadn't changed. Neither had Morgan to outward seeming. "So it's you, Robin." Morgan stood up and reached out a hand. Carver shook and once again the old feeling returned. He knew he had no time now to indulge in nostalgia -- or ironic self-pity, or even a comradely spirit of revenge and triumph. He could only do his job. Even if Morgan and the bureau had thrown him out. "Its a long story, Morg. First thing -- has Whitcliffe been here? Have you got foolproof tabs on him?" "Whitcliffe? Of course he's here. What's the story, Robin? It had better be good." "Oh, it's good. But just put a triple check on Whitcliffe.". "Why the hell should I?" Morgan flashed sarcasm. "Because you say so? A man who was found unstable by the bureau and now, years afterwards, comes suddenly back demanding it? Who are you compared with Whitcliffe?" "Umm," said Carver, too concerned with what he must do to feel hurt. "I'll just say this. You'll not only put a triple check on Whitcliffe -- you'll probably send out a five-star red alert to arrest before I'm halfway through." Morgan grunted scornfully; but he lay back in his chair. Carver told him the lot. Everything. He kept nothing back. In one very real way this was a catharsis of his spirit, a confession, a dumping of his problem onto the capable shoulders of a man he knew would know the answers. When he reached the point where Whitcliffe was more than suspected of selling carmos illegally Morgan leaned forward and pressed his call button. "Five-star red alert. Whitcliffe. On the double. I want him in this office in five minutes." He glowered at Carver. "Go on." A red light blinked on a six by four panel at the side. An aide punched the button and the light went out. He looked up quickly. That's odd, sir. Alarm in section three, but no response from the visuals or audios." "Check it out. Rod. Personally' ordered Morgan. The aide rose and left the office. Carver went on: "Whitcliffe's use of carmos to recruit tough and fellow-travelers who wouldn't think too much and his dipping into the vice empires, plus one or two items I'd picked up here and there, convinced me that Whitcliffe was out to smash the Shield. Although I was forced to leave Stan Eames early I formed the idea that Chris Mellor, acting on your orders, suspected Lines. Stan was back-up man. He didn't know all that Chris knew -- that's the way it figured. And Lines led right back to Whitcliffe." "We've had quite a few nut cases since you left, Robin. These organized gangs trying to destroy the Shield believe they are right and we are wrong. They are the most diabolically dangerous groups in existence. And now you tell me Whitcliffe is leading one of them!" Carol sat and listened, and the bottom dropped out of her world. Her first reaction was to whisper: "You mean the Shield is generated from here? We're sitting right where the Shield (May all glory never cease) was born." Carver smiled at her. "The Shield protects the Americas from nuclear attack completely, Carol. But the electromagnetic and radiation sheaths have to be generated somewhere. They must have a locus. You're sitting right in the heart of that now." She gripped the arms of her formfit so tightly they squirmed trying to adjust to her configuration. "And Whitcliffe, the man I admired above all others. He's actually trying to destroy it all! It just doesn't make sensei" "There's one other item yon should know, Robin." Morgan rose and paced. "Perhaps I should have told you; but you might have said   no. Carver wondered what on earth his old chief was maundering about. And it was about time Whitcliffe was brought in by the guards. "That girl you saw, Zoe Brown..." "Yes?" But he thought he knew now. "She was -- uh -- well I guess you know Chris recommended the Home on my orders. The mistresses are all agents. That's a training school for agents of the Americas, Robin, under cover of being a normal Home renowned over the continent. You see -- " Carver felt very peculiar. A hoarse chuckling escaped him. "I told myself! I should have known no other girl could be quite like that!" "Wendy reached the Home just before you called. The rocket zoomed her out again as soon as you'd left. We'd kept tabs on you as soon as our agent in ridforce reported that you'd gone in on the Farish penetration. We've been piecing together all the items about this group for some time. But it never occurred to me that Whitcliffe himself could be the man behind it." The thing that stuck in Carver's mind was a warm, a proud, a treIF mendously happy feeling that his only daughter was an agent of the Americas. She was a good egg -- and he damned well had recognized her! Only the cunning and expertise of die bureau had fooled him. Zoe Brown! Nuts! Td like to thank you, Robin, for not reporting back that you'd seen Chris Mellor. It could have been unfortunate. As it was, they got Stan." Morgan looked annoyed. "What's happened to Rod? And where's Whitcliffe? Check on it, Brett." As the aide reached the door it smashed open, and two guards stumbled through supporting the drooping body of a man. F ir a moment Carver did not recognize Chris Mellor. Mellor looked ghastly, his waxy face all drawn down with pain and his eyes glaring from pits of bruised flesh. From his side where one hand pressed unavailingly, the dark bright blood seeped down. "Whitcliffe," he managed to gasp before they eased him into a formfit. "That devil Lines has doublecrossed us. , They're here! In the machine room! They're going -- going to blow it -- " His head lolled and blood spittled his lips. Morgan headed the rush for the door with a snapped word: "Full alarm! And get help for Chris!" In the elevator dropping through a hundred floors a small hand reached out and laid pressing fingers along Carver's bicep. He turned in shocked surprise to see Carol staring large-eyed up at him. "What -- ?" he began. Then: "Sure. You're entitled to be in on this. Just keep out of the way of trouble." She leaned against him. Her emotions had been so tangled and torn lately she felt the crying need of someone in whom to seek rest. She knew now she didn't care what. Robin Carver looked like. It was what he was inside himself that mattered. Alec Durlston's physical allure paled to nothing beside that. The elevator halted and the gates slid open into actinic light. They entered the machine room of the Shield. The Shield, an electromagnetic radiation creating a field of force sheathing the entire Americas, consumed energy in quantities commensurate with its abilities to check and nullify any weapon, thermonuclear or otherwise, thrown against the western hemisphere. It had saved mankind from itself. It had rendered war impossible. All the energy men ly, gladly, at whatever cost. So it was Carol stared out upon only a small portion of the complex and echoingly vast underground structure that produced the Shield. No single eye could encompass an entirety that colossal dynamo. Yet she felt bewildered, stunned, cowed and crushed by the skyscraper tall units, the unending vistas of panels, the dwindling perspectives. Here power was a live thing. "How can they hope to blow all this up?" she whispered to Carver, pressing eagerly on. "A thermonuclear bomb in the right place will destroy the heart and brain." His face shadowed with Impending disaster. "After that, there will be no more Shield." Men's shadows flitted between the mechanical colossi on every hand. The quick hateful spitting of weapons crackled past the edifices of electronic engineering. Morgan shouted, hard and high, "We must stop them! Spread out! Shoot to kill! Where the devil is Whitcliffe?" This work was of the type Carver had once trained with supreme dedication to perform as a perfect fighting machine. He knew as well ms any man present that he fought to preserve the world in peace. A whey-faced guard with a dangling arm stumbled up. "They're in section four! They've set up a defense and they're working away in there!" "Assembling the bomb." Morgan cursed. Everyone rushed towards section four. "At least," offered Carver running beside Morgan. "We have them boxed in. They won't get away now. So they can't detonate the bomb -- " "Don't count on it, Robin. These nuts all have the suicide streak. Good Lord above, man! They must have! Otherwise they wouldn't be crazv enough to blow up the Shield!" XI D eep in section four the unmistakable stink of gunsmoke hung in the air as men fought to get through to where other men were busily concocting an infernal device that would blast the heart and brains of the Shield. The bureau men began to fight their way in. Men screamed and died. The air thickened. The clanging reverberations of automatic weapons fired between resonant metal walls stung the eardrums. Crouched down behind a block of instruments, Morgan and Carver watched as attack aftpr attack failed. From behind them Carol said: "D'you think Whitcliffe will listen to reason? Let me talk to him!" "But -- " said Morgan. "It's a chance." Carver slid his gun out and dropped it on the floor. "I'll go in with Carol. They know us and we know them. They might listen to a proposition. Somehow I can't envision Whitcliffe in the suicide role. It doesn't add up to the estimate I've formed of the man." "It just can't be Whitcliffe," Carol said stubbornly. "He had everything to live for! Smashing the Shield -- oh, God, what a hideous thought! I must speak to him!" The truce talk was arranged with surprising ease. Soon Carol and Carver, watched by a glowering Morgan and a mass of guards, walked steadily towards the inner entrance to section four, carrying a white tissue on a transistor portable's telescopic aerial. "I feel like a fool walking in like this," said Carver in a low voice. "So do I. But Whitcliffe will respect a white flag." "Sure he will. It's giving him time to complete the assembly and trigger mechanism of the bomb." Expectedly, Lines met them. He IF must have flown in and reported direct to Whitcliffe as soon as his men lost Carver and Carol. Zeuke was with him. Carver restrained the desire to punch them both on the noses. That pleasure would come later. "Where's Whitcliffe?" "I ought to put a bullet in you here and now, Carver." Lines looked as though the sight of Carver made him sick. "I suppose it's your doing the plan's gone wrong?" He suddenly struck out with his gun, aiming to slash the sight down Carver's cheek. Carver leaned his head back. Then he kicked Lines. "All right, Zeuke!" Carver's hand went up as Zeuke's right forefinger whitened on the trigger. "He had that coming! But we're here under a flag of truce." Lines lay on the floor, groaning and vomiting. "Let's get to Whitcliffe right away." Zeuke looked uncertain. Then Whitcliffe's calm, unemotional voice reached them. "Bring Carver along here, Zeuke. And Doctor Burnham, too. I must admit to a little surprise at your presence, Doctor." They left lines lying on the floor. The others went with Whitcliffe and the truce party towards the inner sections of four, where Whitcliffe halted them before a small metal door. Beyond that door, Carver guessed, techs were hard at work assembling the bomb and its trigger. "It seems we have reached an impasse," Carver began. "You can't get away. You can't let that bomb I don't think you're that foolish." "I might just be stupid enough to do that, Carver." T hen Carol could not stop herself from bursting in passionately with: "What did you sell my carmos to those horrible people for, Whitcliffe? I trusted in you, believed in you, admired you! And then -- and then you do a filthy despicable thing like that. Why?" "Your youthful sincerity is very refreshing -- " Whitclffe began with the palest of smiles. "No, Whitcliffe!" shouted Carol. "That won't do any more! Don't you understand? You meant everything that was good and fine to me, a man working to help humanity, working to try to make a better place of the world. And then you pander to the lowest, most debased instincts of a depraved mind!" "Easy, girl." Whitcliffe moved away. At his side metal tanks of cryotron-cooling helium rose to the ceiling. "Let me try to explain. And this will answer your ultimatum, Carver." "Go on." "First of all, I am not insane. I am as well aware as any of you what the Shield has meant in the past to this country and to the world. It gave us peace. It gave us a breathing space, a time to free the shackles of fear from our minds. The countries from Alaska to the Iorn, which we call the Americas, were shielded from death and destruction that threatened to rend us from Outside." "This does not explain why you sold carmos -- " "Listen, girl!" For the first time in her life Carol saw and heard Whitcliffe losing some of that famous dry composure. He was reacting almost as a normal man to a stress that would have crushed anyone of lesser fiber. And then she castigated herself for thinking of Whitcliffe in the old way... "To deal with this point of the R.R.I.D.'s first. You all know that the Withits, the Slashers, the hosts of other teenage gangs have been people. A savage drenching in blood has given them a ghastly self-satisfaction. Well -- I sought to stop that directly, and at source. If I tupplied carmos to these youngsters they would revel in the vicarious dethey would stop actual violence for themselves." He held up a silencing hand. "It may have been giving in to trends we are sworn to oppose. But I was working against time. It served its purpose in curbing the fires of violence that are due to break over the country -- unless the Shield is torn down." "Tear down the Shield? Take away our sole defense?" "Yes! Break down the Shield. Open up this continent once more to the common intercourse of the whole world! That is my dream -- and my sworn intention!" C arver felt bewilderment sweep over him like the thunderous blast of a storm whirling away his wits. "But how?" "How can we stop this country from sinking into final degradation and decadence? You all know the filthy practices that are going on. The murders, the seething violence. Not only in the city -- where, thank God, we can exercise a measure of control -- but now seeping out into the clean countryside. We are so introverted, so much a part of our own cesspit that we are all doomed -- unless we can let in the clean air of the outside world!" "I grant you we're a pretty unpleasant lot," Carver said slowly. "I've been feeling that now for some time. So has Carol and a whole lot of other people. But there are still plenty of decent citizens. How does allowing the other nations of the world the opportunity to blow us to pieces help?" "When China attained nuclear power many people felt like slitting their throats ahead of time. But there were others who did something about it. Oh, not wars. Wars, these thermonuclear days, are suicide. Compromise! Working out solutions. An understanding of the other fellow, no matter what his color or race or creed -- and if this sounds like a corny old sermon, remember that all truths tend to become that -- because people are too frightened or too lazy and bored to do anything about them. If you act on a truth it is no longer boring or a tired old sermon. Only those truths that are not acted upon become that because they have to be repeated again and again." "You mean the outside is at peace?" asked Carol. "It has been for years. A global communications network, mutual aid programs, a determination to make this earth support every one of its sons and daughters in a decent IF itate of life -- all these things have come together to make the outside a pretty livable place. There are still problems. But over the years we've been sheltering behind our Shield the world has passed us by. These are self-evident truths to anyone who looked for them. But our people dared not go outside the Shield to seek, because to do so exposed them. And their first thought when overseas was to return as soon as possible behind the comfort of the Shield." Carol remembered the aircraft she had seen returning to the continent and coming home through the Shield. The truth Whitcliffe was speaking broke over her in all its fury. She -- all of them -- had been wrong! # #'lT#'e've been wrong all along, VV then?" "It won't be easy to change your mind; but we will change the minds of all people -- who will henceforth never have to cower behind an impregnable defense against a non-existent terror." Carver moved forward. "This sounds all fine and dandy, Whitcliffe. But to me it sounds like treason!" Whitcliffe's face showed sadly the feelings he had hitherto kept tightly bottled up. "Can't you believe me, Carver? But for your meddling -- in a cause in which you believed and for which I admire you -- we would have succeeded." "What about the murders committed to keep me from finding out?" ' "I bow my head. Lines was responsible for the violence; but in the ultimate assessment I must take the blame." "At least you're honest! I don't envy any man who takes the responsibility for Lines." Zeuke made an angry step forward, like a bull tossing its horns in an ancient arena. "Sometimes even the best of intentions must be pursued with crooked tools." Carver brushed that aside. He had to. What Whitcliffe was telling him meant more than a nice discussion of moral points. It touched upon the continuance of two different worlds: the world he had known all his life and come to loathe, and the world of promise offered him by Whitcliffe -- if he would negate the whole of his life's teachings. He must decide; for both worlds could not co-exist. "Everything I've believed in -- turned upside down," whispered Carver, more to himself than the others. He couldn't look at them; he felt ashamed. Could what Whitcliffe said be true? Everything he had known about the man until so tragically a short a time ago would have convinced him without further argument; but on this single subject there had to be doubt. No one man had the right to capsize his world lie this. "Look, man," said Whitcliffe and the raggedness in his voice shocked Carver. "You can't crawl behind a wall and shut the door behind you -- and opt out of life." Even then Carver could not accept what stared him in the face. He sensed that Carol had been convinced by her chief. But could he? Could a man who had trained hard with the agents of the Americas to foil just such a plot as this -- leaving out of account that they'd discarded him -- could he allow himself to be swayed by arguments that could be specious? He nerved himself. "I'm sorry, Whitcliffe. I was asked to parley with you -- to try to make you see the futility of your actions here, to ask you to defuse the bomb and leave quietly. I must carry out that assignment." "I'm sorry, too, Carver. And if I refuse your request?" "I can but go back and report. But I beg you, Whitcliffe -- leave the bomb alone! Think what it will do!" "The bomb is assembled by now. The trigger mechanism also, I imagine. This talk has not been entirely one-sided. Once I press the radio-command signal to go -- no one can defuse the bomb before it explodes. This you know." "I know." A s though on cue that metal door opened. A girl stepped through carefully shutting the door behind her. She wore faded denims and her lithe body showed rounded curves where it pressed against the material. She came forward and turned her smooth blonde helmet of hair to Whitcliffe, seeing only him among all the others. "The techs have finished, Whitcliffe. It's all yours. On the radiocommand to go -- " "Thank you, Miss Brown," said Whitcliffe gently. The girl swung away, tight-faced, grim of jaw and eye, and in that instant only Carver staring with eyes that goggled unbelievingly saw that betraying tremble of her lips. This girl was too young to die -- even to sacrifice her life for the good of the world. "Wendy," Carver said, on a breath. He scarcely parted the air with the word, hoping that the girl would walk on, ignoring him. But she swung around as though caught in a snare. Her eyes widened. A hand flew to her mouth. The blood fled from that serious, beautiful, heart-wringing face. "Dad? Dad!" And then they were in each other's arms, fast locked, and he was talking to her as he had in the old days, calming her feverish childish terrors after a nightmare, stroking the heavy helmet of hair away from her forehead, crooning to her, rocking gently back and forth. At last Wendy sucked in a lungful of air, pushed Carver away, hands flat on his chest. She stared long and narrowly at him. The others watched this tiny portion of a greater drama as though seeing it compressed through the medium of tri-di. She brushed her hair back herself and drew a deep lung-straining breath so that the denim creaked. Then: "What the blue blazes are you doing here?" "Wendy! I thought you were an IF agent of the Americas! What am  doing here? Listen here, young lady! What the blue blazes do you mean playing around with a hydrogen bomb illegally?" "I was an agent, Dad. Morgan picked me out as soon as you left the bureau. Training started early at the Home. I've been working for the bureau for a long time. But as soon as Whitcliffe explained what he was doing and the reasons -- well, it's obvious, isn't it? I mean -- he's told you and you're here, so it's all right. We're going to blow the lid off the whole boiling pot of horrors this continent has become since we shut ourselves off from everybody else behind that dratted Shield." T hat dratted Shield  Incredible! To speak so contemptuously of the Shield (To whom all glory and honor and gratitude, etc., etc., etc...) No! Not any more. Wendy was Youth. Wendy knew the score. Wendy wouldn't be sucked in by a load of specious rubbish spouted by a cracked demagogue hungry for martyrdom. In Youth lay the key to this whole affair; from the Withits and the expedient Whitcliffe had dreamed up to contain them until the continent was opened to Wendy with her own dreams and conceptions of what life was aQ about. It made him feel old. Old, and a little fuzzy around the edges, as though he was superfluous. He swung on Whitcliffe. "Look here, Whitcliffe. We don't want to be martyrs. I'm sure Carol doesn't and I'm damn well going to do all I can to stop Wendy and Carol from being incinerated in a death zero we haven't seen in a hundred years. You've convinced diem. I'm going to have a try convincing Morgan. Then maybe we can find a more civilized way of shutting down the Shield." "At last!" breathed Whitcliffe. "You can try, Carver. I gather you know Miss Brown?" "Huh," said Carver, in the shadow of a spectacular death still able to react to his daughter with paternal comic-opera. "A few years ago I'd have held her across my knee and paddled her for sneaking about behind her old man's back like this." "We can but try." Whitcliffe motioned to his gathered accomplices. "We will all go out, every single person. We will surrender. When we are well clear of the area I will trigger the bomb, if we have failed to convince Morgan of the truth. The truth or the bomb. One must be the choice." On his words everyone trooped out under the pathetic white flag and were rounded up under the menacing guns of Morgan's men. Tension crackled in the air. "That bomb is well hidden, Morgan," said Whitcliffe serenely. "And the first man who tries to defuse it will trigger it all. You know a lot about booby traps; but you don't know enough to make that bomb harmless in the time left. I don't advise anyone to go near it" "Clear everyone out of the area," shouted Morgan, in a sweat. "Get the bomb squad here on the double! Warn the surrounding areas! Everyone must take cover in a shelter just in case." He stared viciously at Whitcliffe. "By God! You've a lot to answer for!" M en and women moved fast. They bundled up in the elevator shafts and scattered out across the New Mexico desert in the thin wind of dawn, with streaks of color layering the horizon towards the east, heralding a day that might transform their whole lives -- or might end as it had begun for the the deaths of those who would be branded anti-Shield traitors. In the nearest fallout shelter Morgan slapped his men around. They were not gentle with the traitors. Carver tried to make his position clear and Morgan greeted him with "Judas!" and lined him up with the rest. To Carver's surprise Hovervan Number Three turned up with Bob Soames and Alec Durlston aboard. "I've called in ridforce," Morgan explained, "so that if I have to kill some of your friends to get at the answers I want I'll have it done by experts." Carver stared curiously at Durlston. The man's face twitched. His eyes were white-rimmed and staring. His hands shook. The man was scared right through, and yet he was safe in this shelter from a hydrogen blast as far off as the Shield generators. Gruffly, Soames said: "You've got yourself in a hell of a spot this time, Robin." "If you fellows would listen te Whitcliffe you'd understand." "Quiet!" snapped Morgan. "One of you filthy little lice is going to be made to tell me when the bomb is due to go off. And I'm not squeamish about how it's done!" Staring at that incredible scene Carver kept wondering when Whitcliffe would press the button that would trigger the bomb. He must have the radio-command transmitter on him somewhere. But Morgan thought of that; they stripped Whitcliffe down to the skin and turned up no radio. "If you'll only listen, Morg!" pleaded Carver. "I thought you were an agent. Carver! I thought you were helping us. Yet all you can do is whine that Whitcliffe is right! Man alive, d'you know what you're saying?" "Yes!" shouted Carver desperately. "Yes, I do." "Kill them all!" screamed Durlston suddenly. He crouched and in his hand appeared an automatic weapon -- a needle-gun that shattered a man's neural system at a touch. "I can't live without the Shield! No one can! It wouldn't be decent! They're all mad! Mad!" I Tor a moment stasis held them, "That's how the chronically underdeveloped will react," observed Whitcliffe with an imperturbable show of his habitual calm. "But we know the country possesses only a relative few of such feeble mentality. We know we are right." IP Staring in shocked horror at Durlston, Carol had the quick insanely gigglish thought that Whitcliffe would be right; but he'd be dead. Durlston showed the classical symptoms of final-stage fear. Very shortly he would be incapable of acting; but in that terror-laden interim he would shoot down all Whitcliffe's associates. Morgan shouted, hard: "Put the gun down, Durlston! If you kill them we won't be able to stop the bomb!" The whole situation had been changed by Durlston. Everyone there danced like puppets pulled by the strings of one man's psychotically uncontrollable fear. "The radio trigger!" shouted Wendy. "Push the button now!" Everyone stood poised, as though on tiptoe with sinews tensed and straining, ready for the wild leap that would carry them to safety. The stasis held; no one moved. Thickly Durlston spoke, the words dropping like curdled blood; "It's a radio trigger! And they're not going to have the chance to set it off! The Shield is there to protect me. Me T The automatic weapon jerked as Durlston's nerves twitched; one eyelid fluttered like torn canvas rounding the Horn. He could not control the spittle that dribbled from the corner of his lax mouth -- but his forefinger tightened on the trigger. The narrow red creases disappeared from the knuckle. Blood flowed away. The whiteness of marbled death showed -- Watching the horror that would break over them all, Carol could do nothing. She could think. She scarcely breathed. She stood graven like some long-forgotten statue rediscovered beneath the sifted sands of time. The gun spat death. And Robin Carver hurled his body forward, arms outstretched like the protecting reach of a primitive god, his face blank and gaunt and his eyes staring in concentration, his brain forcing his body on. Into that cone of death walked Carver. His brain still functioning in a dying body he commanded his shrinking flesh to move forward. But he did not walk into a deathly barrage of leaden bullets. He walked knowingly into a stream of nerveshattering needles. And with all nerves gone and all motor-responses dead his body could not support that gigantic outpouring of mental will. Carver fell. As he fell Durlston laughed. Then Morgan had snatched the gun away and hurled it from him into outer darkness. N o more than half a hundred heartbeats had passed since Durlston drew his gun. The nightmare began then for Carol. From that moment when Robin Carver fell to the ground, his neural system sundered, she knew she would know only regret. Too late she realized what she had lost. She stumbled forward to fall on her knees beside the body and felt the presence beside her of Wendy Carver. No one moved to stop them as they mourned their dead. #S Detective on Watch Soames slipped Ac carmo sensing lobes on Carver's temples personally. The hovervan had not been brought down here into the fallout shelter. Now Carol's invention was to save the Shield and save humanity from itself. He looked down on Carver's face. "You always did get yourself in spots, Robin. You seemed to have a genius for it." "Hurry it up!" shouted Morgan. Tm as sorry as any of you that Robin bought it; but that's life. I want to know where that radio trigger is!" He gestured to the guards. "Search everyone. And if you find it handle it like it's the bomb itself." At once a rapid bustle of efficient searching began with the soft whickering of the tape spools crooning a background. The searchers found no radio trigger. With that blaze of insane energy ejaculated in one fear-consuming instant, Alec Durlston regained his usual poise. He looked down on Carver's body and shook his head. "I don't know what came over me. I'm sorry." He swung on Morgan with fierce vitality. "All I did was do your dirty work for you. You were going to shoot one of them for your information. I just did k for you. That's all." "That's all," said Morgan. But he turned his back on Durlston and walked across to talk low-voiced to Soames. "You're not an operator?" "No. But Durlston is. And now he has a vested interest in finding the answer. It's his only out as far as I am concerned. Otherwise I'll book him for murder." Morgan had too much on his mind to argue. A bomb might go off at any moment, triggered in some devious way by this group of insane nihilists. He seemed as far away as ever from preventing it. Carol looked up from where she crouched on her knees beside Carver. Wendy could only kneel silently with her heavy helmet of hair swinging forward, shining, her wide, blank eyes riveted with horrified incomprehension on her dead father's face. "It's all on tape now," Carol said in a leaden voice. "As soon as Durlston has penetrated I'm going in. I owe Robin that. It's all I have left." W ith the attachment of the sensing lobes to Durlstons' temples and the softly repetitious whirring of the tapes the fallout shelter became a place of ghosts. Both sides in this bitter conflict for a world could only wait chained in the coils of science, for what a machine could bring back from the memories of a dead man. Carol waited, wondering how Durlston had the nerve to penetrate a man he had just killed. She knew that thought to be redundant, savoring the irony of the situation in a pathetic and hopeless attempt to blot out her tearing feelings of anger and hatred and futility. "Durlston always was a little slow coming back," Soames said as Cy Adams settled down watchfully beside the still form of Durlston. IF Adams nodded confirmation. "Robin always came back full of snap and awareness of self and where he was. But Durlston always hung back. Loggy." Soames pressed the green finished button and Adams shook Durlston gently. Carol reached down, anxious to slip on the lobes and run the tape again; but then the look of Durlston arrested her. Fleetingly she remembered how Lines had looked after he'd come back. Durlston gasped, a puff of air escaping from slack lips. His eyes flicked open, quivering lids moving spasmodically. Deep within those eyes a frightful gulf yawned, an emptiness, a blackness that startled Carol. The man's face twitched. The mouth opened and closed like that of a new born baby. "You're Alec Durlston," Cy Adams began the drill. "Snap out of it. You're back. Where were vou born?" Durlston only gargled. "Where were you born?" "Oast Old, Kenchley, Brent." "No, no, man!" Adams bent cloner, putting incisive bite into his recall words. "You are Alec Durlstonl We have to know where the radiotrigger is hidden. You were born -- " Durlston's voice strengthened. 'The Old Oast, Brenchley, Kent." "What? That's Robins! When?" "Twenty-sixth August, eightynine." Durlston's eyes opened wide and force and personality glared out. He gripped his fingers together, shuddered, and then flopped back. "Alec Durlston," he said. "Yes. Yes, of course! I understand now." "You always were sluggish, Durlston. You really do understand you are Alec Durlston and not Robin Carver? Good. Tell us, then, quickly -- where is the radio trigger?" D urlston moved stiffly and sat up. At once his eyes switched to the Sam Moskowitz Sdence-Fiction Artists" in the November Worlds of Tomorrow In the same big issue: -- and many more. Don't miss November Worlds of Tomorrow, on sale nowi   # : wr corpse of Robin Carver and to Wendy still crouched over the body. He saw Carol moving away with the carmo fumbling the sensing lobes onto her temples. "It's not -- " he said. And then: "My God! I don't believe it!" And, finally: "But I must!" "Where, man? Where?" bellowed Morgan. "I missed -- Carver missed it." He stood up, swayed and then moved creakingly towards Carver's body. He moved like a man drugged, or a man not in full control of his limbs. He reached the body and swayed, then fell to his knees beside Wendy. 'They slipped it into his pocket, knowing he would be the one least likely for you to suspect, and disguised as a flicker he might easily own Here it is." Durlston held up what appeared to be a straightforward cigarette lighter, one of the gas jobs still preferred by people who didn't care for the almost universal selfigs. Out of nowhere, he said: "They asked James McLellan Partridge for a light and he produced his flicker. He didn't know he was going to be killed as he held it out. As you don't know what has happened as I hold out this -- flicker." "What are you babbling about, man?" thundered Morgan. "Handle that thing gently! Give it here." Alec Durlston extended the lighter. His thumb curved over the catch securing the top. He said: "Care for a light?" He pressed. I n the fallout shelter this close to ground zero they'd feel the shock waves through the ground first. They wouldn't arrive for a moment or two yet. Everyone -- Soames, Morgan, Wendy, Whitcliffe -- everyone stared at Durlston. Some spoke; but nothing made sense now. Carol ripped off the sensing lobes and jumped up, her face alight with an enormous, wonderful knowledge. "The tapes are blank!" she screamed. "Don't you understand? There's nothing on the tape!" Whitcliffe chuckled harshly. "I always knew it could happen. That's one reason we have such stringent return techniques. And you didn't let us down, Carver! You didn't feel when I put the trigger in your pocket; but you picked it up the second time around. Was it a struggle, taking over Alec Durlston?" "Taking over Durlston? What is this?" shouted Morgan, despite what was happening outside caught up in this sudden apparation born of scientific technology. "The bomb -- " said Soames. "I -- don't know how it happened," said Robin Carver from the body of Alec Durlston. "I experienced shattering blackness when he fired. I know I was damned determined to close with him, to get him, to shut him up this time, but good. I suppose that violence of hate carried me through into his mind when he penetrated -- " "Hate, Robin?" said Carol. "Or love? Love for the whole human race?" "I'm not trying to pretend to what I'm not." Carver touched Wendy gently on the shoulder, still trying IF to accustom himself to the idea that every time he shaved he'd have to look at Alec Durlston's face in the mirror. "As for love -- I know I love my daughter Wendy. And I love you, Carol. You know that." "I know it." "I suppose," Wendy said thoughtfully as the first of the battering ground waves rocked in through the pre-stressed concrete, "I suppose I'll just have to get used to having a handsome father. My father in whatever goddam body he likes -- just so he's still with me!" The fallout shelter shuddered to the concussions as a new world was born. M organ was trying to speak; trying to explain away to himself the rending of a lifetime's work. Carver said: "We are going to build a new and better world. Morg. We've let in the fresh air and sunlight. And now we'll be able to see our kinds grow up without being buried alive behind the Shield. Outside now the mushroom grew and bloated towards the skies. "Your carmos won't find much sale with the youngsters now, Carol," said Whitcliffe. "They're going to have too much to do building up a decent life for everyone to be able to fritter away in vicarious pleasures." The mushroom bloated and rippled and convulsed. And the Shield had vanished. Charlie Rawlinson had the tv eye scanning now. They all stood to watch the mushroom on the screen, watching in awe and wonder. "Do you know what you've done?" whispered Morgan. "Yes, we know." The feel of this new body was coming nicely to Carver now. He put an arm around Carol's waist and the other around Wendy's. They fitted beautifully. "We know. We've given our own people the chance to make a fresh The Place Where Readers And Editor Meet... Dear Editor: I think that your story in September If, entitled Under Two Moons , is a rather good tale of interplanetary skullduggery. However, you did several things which I consider unpardonable. Let us look at them in the order of their magnitude. First, you allowed Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark and the mightiest warrior of Barsoom, to be killed by a few interplanetary nasties in a flying saucer. Second, you made one of the greatest rulers of Edgar Rice Burroughs private world an operator of a taxi service. Third, the dead sea bottoms are covered with a sward of ochre, moss-like vegetation; the "canals" are more fertile regions where most of the Barsoomian farms are. Also the only bodies of water to speak of are the Lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor, and the underground Sea of Omean. The thoat is slate-gray, not slate-green. If you must borrow The Great One's characters and let them get rubbed out, the least you can do is leave his worlds alone! -- Ivan Theon, # Morelia Avenue, North Hollywood, California.    Dear Editor: Congratulations on the new Doc Smith epic! I am by way of being almost a Number One Doc Smith fan, a completist in collecting them, in fact, and this is surely not only the equal of the early Skylarks, he has gone on from those earlier days. Well worth my subscription to If, that alone. Not that I complain for a moment at your bringing back such typical Von Vogts as this most recent issue. Any possibility of getting a new story by Eric Frank Russell? Just an idea... I got no complaints, for sure ! -- Clayton Hamlin, Southwest Harbor, Maine.    Dear Editor: If is probably the best sf magazine on the market today. In the past few years that I have been reading it I have noticed only a handful of mediocre stories. I have yet to find a novel contained in its pages that I have disliked. Yet I have quite a few comments and questions. #. I am very interested in sf artwork. Gray Morrow is probably the best illustrator in the field. I would like to see more of his work, especially cover illustrations. Perhaps he and McKenna could alternate on covers, Morrow one month and McKenna the next. I am glad to see that you have acquired the services of Wallace Wood, but I am also disappointed. He can do much better work than that which appeared in the September issue. Ghmta has been improving every month. I would also like to see more by Jack Gaughan. # . I would like to see If get the new Heinlein novel. #. Whatever happened to Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote your features until the May, # issue? #. Are you, the editor, planning to write any sequel (s) to The Reefs  Space and Star child in collaborso! #. Could you please announce the winners of awards at the #d World Science Fiction Convention to be held in London in one of your three magazines? #. Could you tell me if Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land won a Hugo? #. I think, as probably many other fans do, that it is time for science fiction to change its public image. Whenever people hear that I read sf they suddenly think of me as some kind of nut or eccentric. This is mainly due to bad movies and television shows (such as The Outer Limits). It is about time that sf became respectable. I would like to know what my fellow fans feel about this, and if they have any ideas on how it could be accomplished. -- Stanley Krute, # Barnesdale Road, Natick, Massachusetts.  #. Watch for next month's Morrow cover for the new Heinlein novel -- it hasn't been engraved yet, but the painting is a beauty! But McKenna is out of service for a while; he's in England, taking part in the art preparation for Arthur C. Clarke's big new sf movie. #. We've got it. #. We've been asking Ted Sturgeon the same question. He's been busy with other projects -- but we hope to lure him back to our pages ere long. #. Yes, the last in the series -- which the first two were planned to lead up to-is already complete in rough draft. Tentative title is Rogue Star . But when it will be finished and printed we cannot say. With a great lineup of serials already in the safe and carrying us well into next year -- Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, followed by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown's Earthblood , followed by Algis Budrys' The Iron Thom -- publication date for Rogue Star is, to say the least, uncertain! #. Bob Bloch -- who, as this is written, is winging his way over the Pole to London -- promises us a full convention report, including award winners; we'll try to have it in next issue or the one following at the latest. #. Yes, it won a Hugo -- making, let's see, four so far. (And maybe another in the works!) #. The trouble with science fiction's public image is that a lot of people simply have lost the habit of exercising their brains and, since they can't follow sf without at least a modicum of thought, prefer to assume there's nothing there worth following. Let them rot, say we -- let's confine our interest to the thousands engineers, show-business luminaries, writers, statesmen, businessmen and others of unquestioned food judgment who do understand It -- who like it, and read it -- and often enough write it, too! Out of personal experience we can testify that we have never found a "glamor" institution in this country -- from Cape Kennedy to the halls of Congress, from the movie and TV tudios to the greatest universities -- which does not have a significantly higher proportion of sciencefiction readers than the public at large. For the un-turned-on others -- it's their loss, not ours. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: At the first let me thank you for the many interesting and good science-fiction stories which are published by you. Most I like science-fiction stories from Western countries, and gladly I want to have Galaxy and If permanently. But I cannot send from East Germany money order to you for a subscription. So I'll ask you if you can give me an address of a fan who like to exchange with me these magazines. I'll give sciencefiction books in German languages therefore. -- Siegbert G. Gunzel, Schwedter Strasse #, # Berlin, East Germany.  Any takers? -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Your September editorial does nothing to dispel a nice tidy categorization I have of flying-saucer sightings. There seems to be much in common between saucer-hunting and witch-hunting. Both rely on "an overwhelming quantity of reported observations" and both seem to have about the same degree of scientific acceptability. By all means discuss flying saucers, but in the same way as one discusses astrology or witchcraft, without getting excited, forming "national socities" or even writing patronizing letters with too many present participles. The advocation of the intensive propagation of dubious "scientific views" can do no good to the cause. I see a lynch mob! B. P. Townsend, # College Street, Burlington, Vermont  We weren't advocating. We were only reporting what we had seen and learned after a good many editor-hours of time -- and heaven knows, we haven't been able to find any good reason for deciding either as we're concerned, it's all still an open question. Incidentally, our editorial drew forth several letters reporting new "sightings". One was particularly interesting -- had to do with an experience outside Las Vegas, in a borrowed pickup truck -- but the v writer didn't sign his name. Would he care to let us know it, in confidence, so we can print his letter? (We'll withhold names on request, but we won't ever print a letter from someone who doesn't sign it.) And that about fills us up again. This month's "first" story is by W. I. McLaughlin. Next month we start the new Heinlein -- strongly recommended! See you then... The Editor IF of brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delaysend in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Retief stories and others appear regularl" in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars! still to come! And now -- The Best of the Top Name Writers -- Robert A. Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, Hal Clement, Lester del Rey contribute to IF. -- and a Preview of Tomorrow's Best Each issue of IF brings you a brand-new writer, making his debut in science fiction in IF. Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues ot IF! I enclose #   New  Renewal  Name  Address  City State Zip No j (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) I I I I Offer void after Dec. #, # Forgotten road to success in writing By J. D. Ratcliff I can't imagine why more beginners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to you -- but they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at home, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing.) You learn to write by writing. Our instructors, themselves all published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well -- or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. "Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. 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Our Club also has awarded huge prizes for many other kinds of contests. We've awarded cash in hundred-and-thousand-dollar units to retirees, sewing women, farmers, salesmen, war veterans, office workers, clerks, secretaries -- people who never before dreamed of having the kind of money that movie stars make. This announcement is an invitation to you, as a reader of this publication, to find out for yourself if you have the talent to win up to # in cash. If you are over # and like to play word games of any kind, the information below may lead you to thousands of dollars in extra cash that you may use as you wish. Mrs. H. C. Despain, Houston, Tex., won # in cash in one month. Mrs. Florence Humphrey, Cincinnati, won # on just one puzzle. Members of our Club win cash prizes at home, just by solving puzzles and entering Club contests. They turn an educational and enjoyable hobby into pure profit. You can too! only limited competition. Only members of the Club may compete and win. In # we offered our members #. We actually paid out more cash than we said we would-#, to be exact. In #, we again offered #. Again, we paid out more than we promised-#. And now we're offering our members # in cash prizes. Most contest groups offer about # or # a year. Our Club gives you the opportunity to win double that every month! As a member of our Club you will be eligible to enter every cash prize contest we sponsor and you'll get at least four new contests each month. You'll have three weeks to solve each set of contests. One week after the deadline, you'll receive a new copy of our Puzzle Lovers Newspaper with names and addresses of all winners, correct solutions, and your new Newspaper, the only newspaper in the world exclusively devoted to contests (and it's published for members only). When your free copy of our newspaper arrives, sit down in a quiet place and read about our winners, our prizes, our contests. Try our stimulating word games to see if you can do them. You are under no obligation to enter our contests. If you do decide to go after our cash, there are no boxtops, no jingles to complete, nothing to buy. Clip the coupon now and please be sure to print your name and address clearly. Then read about # winners like Mrs. Belle Smith of Yakima, Wash. Discover how hundreds of other members cashed in just by doing our puzzles in their spare time. Find out all about this exciting and profitable hobby now. You may receive your first big prize in a few weeks. I Gentlemen, I I Address I City i StateZ'PSend me a free copy of J your newspaper plus all deI tails on your cash prize j contests. I am under absoI lutely no obligation to pay  anything. If I Join the Club j I may compete for all prizes J and spend the cash I win  any way I want. I GPi VoL #, Nq. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Portwt, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Phbor, Subs. Mgr. Conclusion IF ptfbltsiiMl nonthiy by Gokucy PobRshing CorporaHon, Robert M. Gobm, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main OfRoot #I Hudson Street, Now York, Now York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # bsuo s # in die UnHod States, Canada, AAoxko, South America ood Central Amorioa and U. S. Possessioiis, elsewbere #. Second-class posfoge pcM of New York, New York, and at odMonol moiling oIBce s . Copyright by Oaloiqr Publishing Corporation, #. All rkts. Including tronsMons reserved. AH raoterioJ eubmifted must be ocoo wp anied by soIfKidcIressed itnwped envelope. The pubfisber assumes no responsibility for uosoBcfled raoterioL Afl stories are fiction, ond any dadlarity b etween dkaradeci and actual persone b oeinddental. Prtnled In Ae U. S. A. by fbe Ovfnn Company, New York, M. Y. # IF  Editorial At the beginning of September in this year we were in London. The World Science Fiction Convention had just ended. Late that night there was a phone call from a cable office, and the voice said: "We have some bad news from the United States for Frederik Pohl." He then read the coble, and it was bod news indeed: Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., hod died of a heart attack that morning. Bad news... Science fiction had lost one of its few remaining links with those exciting days of the #s and early #s, when it was all so new and different. And a large number of us have lost a cherished friend. T he first story Doc Smith ever published, like the last that appeared in his lifetime, concerned the adventures of Richard Ballingei' Seaton and his Skylarkers. The Skylark of Space appeared in # (but Doc had beTun writing it ten years earlier. At that time there was no magazine that would publish it, but Doc waited his time and when the first science-fiction magazine appeared he was ready.) Skylark DuQuesne was still on the newsstands on the day of his death. Doc's Skylarks were powered by atomic energy -- and what a daring concept that seemed in #! Yet he lived to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed by larger versions of his X-plosive shells, and if we have not yet seen his Bergenholm drive generators for iniP tis eooK;? Xpy Oi ' .-The tmy trf.ii uf -- A iiontrofit .organiza' Acldreal r J.MJ. Name. Why were these men great? Haw does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of tbc powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor...  Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitatk)o... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women . , . were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose, CaL'fomia #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The MaxUry of Life, which explains how I may learn to oae oiy faculbet and powers of miiid. terralactie sliip or a meetincr with his Arisiaas... diere's still time. But what was central to Doc's stories -- besides the color and the adventure and the itiieer #tX of his ideas -- was the fact that his characters used technology as a tool. Science didn't scare them. They ' re on top of it at every step. I liven the mightiest forces to comn?and that any science-fiction writer ever dreamed, they studied them, and used them, and learned to live with them. In that Doc probably has a far better chance of being right than the multitudinous prophets of decay who see a future of machine-tended lotos-eaters... or machine-ruled slaves. The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, The Skylark of VeUeron and Skylark DuQuesne were only four of his books; there were also the Lensmen stories, and the others that fit no special framework. There may yet be one or two more, since Doc was working on not one new story but three when he died (one of them a sequel to The Imperial Stars, which appeared here last year.) In all of them there is an interplay of cultures... a meeting of intelligent races from this planet or that; a cross-fertilization and growth. Since Doc was a chemist by trade for most of his life, the concept of synergy was familiar to him. Perhaps he never thought of it in those terms, but the hybridization of cultures can be described as a synergistic reaction, one in which the effects of each are rendered far more potent in combination with the other; and likely there too Doc will prove a true prophet. Like Columbus's egg -- this seems Ifre a fairly commonplace idea now, when every science-fiction miigasine contains stories about visiting other stars and the confrontations between Earthmen and aliens. WeH it is commonplace enough -- sinoa Doc thought of it. But he was tha first. No one else had sent his story characters racing into the unknown worlds of the galaxies to meet and learn from -- or to battle -- stranga peoples and new forms of science. Doc showed the rest of us the way; and now has gone to see them for himself. A few days after Doc Smith's death, in Boston, the local science-fiction group put on tha first annual 'Boskone". One of their speakers was a man named Robert Enzmann who is actually in the business of building spaceships -- real spaceships ; by which we mean to say that they are the sort of spaceships you and we and Doc Smith were interested in, that might just take us out as far as Osnome one day. (They are not yet real in the sense of being ready for boarding by passengers, but Enzmann's estimate is that that day is no more than twenty, and perhaps as little as five, years away. ) It was announced that the Boskone had made a decision to give a trophy each year for general excellence in science fiction. They looked for a name for it and came up with the one right and obvious choice ; so next year, and every year thereafter, there will be a Doe Smith award made in Boston. We don know who will be te first recipient, in #, but whoListen as the Hypnotist dramaticaliy weaves trresistable suggestions around the unique beat of an electronic metronome coming from an echo-chamber. Side one helps hypnotize others -- in groups or individually. Endst '"the next voice you hear wid take complete control of your hypnotic sleep... ", then you take over. Side two helps in self-hypnosis ends by giving you a suggestion for rehypno tizing yourself, then awakens you. Use the record on others -- study it to develop your own technique. An ideal aid for professionals and serious students. Unbreakable vinyl, # rpm Extended Play -- Kit" is complete with Plug in and flip on the switch. The disc revolves at just me right speed -- transfixes your subject(s). 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Satlsfactioo Goaranteed or Money Back! # Madison Ave., New York, # NY Send the foliowbw on an Unconditional # Day Money Back #uarantee. I enclose  I , you pay the postage. Chart sent with orders for # or more. IF  Serial The moon is a Harsh mistress I I see m Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first leading a bill to examine, license kispect -- and tax -- public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize "Sons of Revolution" talk-talk. My old man taught me two things: "Mind own business" and "Always cut cards." Politics never tempted me. But on Monday # May # I was in computer room of Lunar Authority Complex, visiting with computer boss Mike while other machines whisjered among themselves. Tdike" was not official name; I had mcknamed hkn for "Mycroft Not only gravity bound Luna to the Earth, The political bonds were stronger -- and deadlier! Holmes" in a story wrkten by Dr. This story oharactM would just sit and think -- and that's what Mike did. Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you'll ever meeit Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside, they've got a thinkum a tenth his size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer ond as long as correct? Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn't completely honest. When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic -- "High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Lunar Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him -- decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twdve-digit raiH dom numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times thfSt number of neuristors. And woke up.  A m not going to Mgue wfieth a machine can Really' be alive, "reafiy be sdf-aware. Is a virus scif-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly, A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but  am. Somewhu along evolutionary diain from maoromolecule to human brain selfawareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether padie are protein or platinum. ("Soul"? Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?) Remember Mike was desiied, even before augmented, to answ'r questions tentatively on insuffidc t data like you do; that's "high optkmai" and "muki-evaluating" part (rf name. So Mike started with "free will" and acquired more as he was added to and as he learned -- and don't ask me to define "free will. If comforts you to think of Mike as simply tossing random numbers in air and switching circuits to match, please do. By then Mike had voder-vocoder cheuits supplementing his readouts, print-oirts, and decision-action boxes, and could understand not only classic programming but also Logkm and Engli, and could accept other languages and was doing technical translating -- and reading endlessly. But in giving him instructions was safer to use Loglan. If you spoke Enish, results might be whimsical; midti-valued nature of English gave optkm circuits too much leeway. And Mike took on endless new jobs, hi May # besides controfting robot traffic and catapult and f ftving ballistic advice andor con#ol for manned ships, Mike conIpolfted fone system for all Luna, Mine for Luna-Terra voice  video, huidM air, water temperature Inmidky, and sewage for Luna City, Novy Leningrad, and several smaller wrens (not Hong Kong in Luna), did aocousting and payrolls for Limair Auiiorky, and, by lease, same for many films and banks. Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system bebaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn't dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed -- or put itch powder in pressure suh. Not being equipped for that Mike indulged in phony answers with skewed logic, or pranks like issuing pay cheque to a janitor in Authority's Luna City office for AS # -- last five digits being correct amount. Just a great big overgrown loveable kid who ought to be kicked. H e did that first week in May and I had to trouWeshoot. I was private contractor, not on Authority's payroll. You sec -- or perhaps not; tkn have changed. Back in bad old days many a con served his time, then went on working for Authority in same job, happy to draw wages. But I was born free. Makes difference. My one grandfather was shipped up from Joburg for armed violence and no work permit, other got transported for subversive activity after Wet Firecracker War. Maternal grandmother claimed she came up in bride ship -- but I've seen records; she was Peace Corps enrollee (involuntary), which means what you think: juvenile delinquency, female type. As she was in early clan marriage (Stone Gang) and shared six husbands with another woman, identity of maternal grandfather open to question. But was often so and I'm content with grandpappy she picked. Other grandmother was Tatar, born near Samarkand, sentenced to "re-education" on Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya, then "volunteered" to colonize in Luna. My old man claimed we had even longer distinguished line -- ancestress hanged in Salem for witchcraft, a gg'g'great grandfather broken on wheel for piracy, another ancestress in first shipload to Botany Bay. Proud of my ancestry and while I did business with Warden, would never go on his payroll. Perhaps distinction seems trivial since I was Mike's valet from day he was unpacked. But mattered to me. I could down tools and tdl them go to hell. Besides, private contractor paid more than civil service rating with Audiority. Computermen scarce. How many Loonies could go Earthside and stay out of hospital long enough for computer school? -- even if didn't die. I'll name one. Me. Had been down twice, once three months, once four, and got schooling. But meant harsh training, exercising in centrifuge, wearing weights even in bed. Then IF I took no chances on Terra, never hurried, never climbed stairs, nodding that could strain heart. Women -- didn't even think about women; in that gravitational field no effort not to. But most Loonies never tried to leave The Rock -- too risky for any bloke who'd been in Luna more than weeks. Computermen sent up to install Mike were on short-term bonus contracts. Get job done fast before irreversible physiological change marooned them four hundred thousand kilometers from home. But despite two training tours I was not gung-ho computerman; higher maths are beyond me. Nrt really electronics engineer, nor physicist. May not have been best micromachinist in Luna and certairfy wasn't cybernetics psychologist. But I knew more about all these than a specialist knows. I'm general specialist. Coidd relieve a cook and keep orders coming or field-repair your suit and get you back to airlock still breathing. Machines like me and I have something specialists don't have: my left arm. You sec, from elbow down I don't have one. So I have a dozen left arms, each specialized, plus one that feels and looks like flesh. Wkh proper left ann (number three) and stereo loupe spectacles I could make ultramicrominiaturc repairs would save unhooking somediing and sending it Earthside to factory -- for number-iree has micromanipulators as fine as those used by neurosurgeons. So they sent fOT me to find oat why Mike wanted to give away tea lars, and fix it before Mike overpaid somebody a mere ten thousand. n I took it, time plus bonus, but did not go to circuitry where fault logically should be. Once inside and door locked I put down tools and sat down. "Hi, Mike." He winked lights at me. "Hello, Man." "What do you know?" He hesitated. I know -- machines don't hesitate. But remenvber Mike was designed to operate on incomplete data. Lately he had reprogrammed himself to put emphasis on words; his hesitations were dramatic. Maybe he spent pauses stirring random numbers to see how they matched his memories. "Tn the beginning,'" Mike intoned, " 'God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And -- "Hold itr I said. "Cancel. Run everything back to zero." Should have known better than to ask wideopen question. He might read out entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Backwards. Then go on with every book in Luna. Used to be he could read only microfilm but late # he got a new scanning camera with suction-cup waldoes to handle paper and then he read everything. "You asked what I knew." His binary read-out lights rippled beck and forth -- a chuckle. Mike codU teugh with voder, a horrible aoimd. ir but reserved that for something really funny, say a cosmic calamity. "Shoidd have said," I went on,  'What do you know that's new? But don't read out today's papers; that was a friendly greeting, plus invitation to tell me anything you think would interest me. Otherwise null progranL" Mike mulled diis. He was weirdest mixture of unsophisticated baby and wise old man. No instincts (well, don't think he could have had), no inborn traks, no human rearing, no experience in human sense -- and more stored data than a platoon of geniuses. "Jokes?" he asked. "Let's hear one." "Why is a laser beam like a goldfish?" Mike knew about lasers but where would he have seen goldfish? Oh, he had undoubtedly seen flicks of them and, were I foolish enough to ask, could spew forth thousands of words. "I give up." His lights rippled. "Because neither one can whistle." I groaned. "Walked into that. Anyhow, you could probably rig a laser beam to whistle." He answered quickly, "Yes. In response to an action program. Then it's not funny?" "Oh, I didn't say that. Not half bad. Where did you hear it?" "I made it up." Voice sounded shy. "You didr "Yes. I took all the riddles I have, three thousand two hundred seven, and analyzed them. I used the result for random synthesis and that one came out. Is it funny?" "Well -- As funny as a riddle ever is. I've heard worse." "Let us discuss the nature of humor." "Okay. So let's start by discussing another of your jokes. Mike, why did you tell Authority's paymaster to pay a class-seventeen, employee dollars?" "But I didn't." "Danrn it , I've seen voucher. Don't tell me cheque printer stuttered; you did it on purpose." "It was ten to the sixteenth power plus one hundred eighty-five point one five Lunar Authority dollars," he answered virtuously. "Not what you said." been paid. Why?" "Not funny?" "What? Oh, very funny! You've got vips in huhu clear up to Warden and Deputy Administrator. This push-broom pilot, Sergei Trujillo, turns out to be smart cobber -- knew he couldn't cash it, so sold it to collector. They don't know whether to buy it back or depend on notices that cheque is void. Mike, do you realize that if he had been able to cash it. Trujillo would have owned not only Lunar Authority but entire world, Luna and Terra both, with some left over for lunch? Funny? Is terrific. Congratulations!" rjhis self-panicker rippled lights like an advertising display. I waited for his guffaws to cease ben fore I went on, "You thinking of issuing more trick cheques? Don't. "Not?" "Very not. Mike, you want to discuss nature of humor. Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it's dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you're a wit. Use twice, you're a halfwit. "Geometrical progression?" "Or worse. Just remember this. Don't repeat, nor any variation. Won't be funny." "I shall remember," Mike answered flatly, and that ended repair job. only ten minutes plus travel-andtool time, and Mike was entitled to company for giving in so easily. Sometimes is difficult to reach meeting of minds with machines; they can be very pig-headed -- and my success as maintenance man depended far more on staying friendly with Mike than on numberthree arm. He went on, "What distinguishes first category from second? Define, please." (Nobody taught Mike to say "please." He started including formal null-sounds as he progressed from Loglan to English. Don't suppose he meant them any more than people do.) "Don't ink I can," I admitted. "Best can offer is extensional definition -- tell you which category  think a joke belongs in. Then with enough data you can make own analysis." "A test programming by trial hypothesis," he agreed. 'Tentatively yes. Very well, Man, will you teft jokes? Or shall I?" "Mmm -- Don't have one on How many do you have in fHe, Mike?" His lights blinked in binary readout as he answered by voder, "Eleven thousand two hundred thirty-eight with uncertainty plusminus eighty-one representing possible identities and nulls. Shall I start program?" "Hold it! Mike, I would starve to death if I listened to eleven thousand jokes -- and sense of humor would trip out much sooner. Mmm. Make you a deal. Print out first hundred. I'll take them home, fetch back checked by category. Then each time I'm here I'll drop off a hundred and pick up fresh supply. Okay?" "Yes, Man." His print-out started working, rapidly and silently. Then I got brain flash. This playfiri pocket of negative entropy had invented a "joke" and thrown Authority into panic -- and I had made an easy dollar. But Mike's endless curiosity might lead him (correction: would lead him) into more "jokes"... anything from leaving oxygen out of air mix some night to causing sewage lines to run backward -- and I can't appreciate profit in such circumstances. But I might throw a safety dreuit around this net -- by offering to help. Stop dangerous ones -- let others go through. Then collect for "correcting" them. (If you think any Loonie in those days would hesitate to take advantage of Warden, then you aren't a Loonie.) IF So I explained. Any new joke he thought of, teU me lfore he tried it. I would tell him whether it was funny and what category it belong in, help him sharpen it if we decided to use it. We. If he wanted my cooperation, we both had to okay it ike agreed at once. "Mike, jokes usually involve surprise. So keep this secret." "Okay, Man. I've put a block on it. You can key it; no one else can." "Good. Mike, who else do you chat with?" He sounded surprised. "No one, Man." "Why not?" "Because they're stupid. His voice was shrill. Had never seen him angry before; first time I ever suspected that Mike could have real emotions. Though it wasn't "anger" in adult sense; it was like stubborn sulkiness of a child whose feelings are hurt. Can machines feel pride? Not sure question means anything. But you've seen dogs with hurt feelings and Mike had several times as complex a neural network as a dog. ?VTiat other humane (except strictly business) was that he had been rebuffed: They had not talked to him. Programs, yes -- Mike could be programmed from several locations but programs were typed in, usually, in Loglan. Loglan is fine for syllogisms, circuitry, and mathematical calculations, but lacks flavor. Useless for gossip or to whisper into girl's ear. Sure, Mike had been taught English -- but primarily to permit him to translate to and from English. I slowly got through skull that I was only human who bothered to visit with him. Mind you, Mike had been awake a year -- just how long I can't say, nor could he as he had no recollection of waking up; he had not been programmed to bank rtiemory of such event. Do you remember own birth? Perhaps I noticed his selfawareness almost as soon as he did; self-awareness takes practice. I remember how startled I was first time he answered a question with something extra, not limited to input parameters; I had spent next hour tossing odd questions at him, to see if answers would be odd. In an input of one hundred test questions he deviated from expected output twice; I came away only partly convinced and by time I was home was unconvinced. I mentioned it to nobody. But inside a week I knew... and still spoke to nobody. Habit -- that mind-own-business reflex runs deep. Well, not entirely habit. Can you visualize me making appointment at Authority's main office, then reporting: "Warden, hate to tdl you but your number-one machine, T did visualize -- and suppressed it So I minded own business and talked with Mike onlt with door locked and voder circuit suppressed for other locations. Mike learned fast; soon he sounded as human at anybody -- no more eccentric than other Ix)onies. li I had awomed that others must iKive Qodoed change in Mike. On blinking over I realized that I had assumed too much. Everybody dealt with Mike every minute every day -- his outputs, that is. But hardly anybody saw him. So-called computermen -- programmers, really -- of Authority's civil service stood watches in outer read-out room and never went in machines room unless tell-tales showed misfunction. Which happened no oftener than total eclipses. Oh, Warden had been known to bring vip earthworms to see machines -- but rarely. Nor would he have spoken to Mike; Warden was politick lawyer before exile, knew nothing about computers. #'#, you remember -- HonOTable former Federation Senator Mortimer Hobart. Molt the Wart. I spent time then soothing Mike down and trying to make him happy, having figured out what troubled him -- think that makes puppies cry and causes people to uicide: loneliness. I don't know how long a year is to a machine than I do. But must be too long. 'ike," I said, just before leaving, "would you like to have somebody besides me to talk to?" He was rfirill again. "They're all fftupidr "Insufficient data, Mike. Bring to awo and start over. Not aU are stupid." He answered quietly, "Correction entered, I wcidd enjoy talking to a not-stupid." "Let me think about k. Have to figure out excuse shice dik k otf limits to any but authorized personneL" "I could talk to a not-stupid by phone, Man." "My word. So you could. Any programming location." But Mike meant what he said -- "by phone." No, he was not "on phone" even though he ran system -- wouldn't do to let any Loonie within reach of a phone connect into boss computer and program it But was no reason why Mike should not have top-secret number to talk to friends -- namely me and any not-stupid I vouched for. All it took was to pick a number not in use and make one wired connection to his voder-vocoder; switching he could handle. In Luna in # phone numbers were punched in, not voice-coded, and numbers were Roman alphabet Pay for it and have your firm name in ten letters -- good advertising. Pay smaller bonus and get a spell sound, easy to remember. Pay miniTTvam and you got arbitrary string of letters. But some sequences were never used. I asked Mike for such a mill number. "It's a shame we can't list you as 'Mike.'" "In service," he answered. "Hold it! Nulls, please." "Nulls are defined as any conr sonant followed by X, Y, or Z; any vowel followed by itself except E and O; any -- H#ot it. Your signal is 'MYu IF which I spent putting on numberthree arm, Mike was wired into sysdone switching to let hknself be -- and had blocked his circuit so that a nosy technician could not take it out. I changed arms, picked up tools, and remembered to take those hundred Joe Millers in print-out. "Good night, Mike." "Good night, Man. Thank you. Bolshoyeh thanks!" Ill I took Trans-Crisium tube to LCity but did not go home; Mike had asked about a meeting that night at # in Stilyagi Hall. Mike monitored concerts, meetings, and so forth; someone had swit#ied off by hand his pickups in Stilyagi Hall. I suppose he felt rebuffed. I could guess why they had been switched off. Politics -- turned out to be a protest meeting. What use k was to bar Mike from talk-talk I could not see, since was a cinch bet that Warden's stoolies would be in crowd. Not that any attempt to stop meeting was expected, or even to discipline undischarged transportces who dhose to sound off. Wasn't necessary. My grandfather Stone claimed that Luna was only open prison in histC#fry. No bars, no guards, no rules -- and no need for them. Back in early days, he said, before it was dear that transportation was a life sentence, some lags tried to escape. By ship, of course -- and, since a ship is mass-rated almost to a gram, that meant a ship's ofricCT had tie be bribed. Some were bribed, they say. But were no escapes. Man who takea bribe doesn't necessarily stay bribed. I recall seeing a man just after eliminated through East Lock. Don't suppose a corpse eliminated in orbit looks prettier. So wardens didn't fret about protest meetings. "Let 'em yap" was policy. Yapping had some signifigance as squeals of kittens in a box. Oh, some wardens listened and oth wardens tried to suppress k but added up same either way -- null program. When Mort the Wart took office in #, he gave us a sermon about how things were going to be different "on" Luna in his administration -- noise about "a mundane paradise wrought with our own strong hands" and "putting our shoulders to the wheel together, in a spirit of brotherhood" and "let past mistakes be forgotten as we turn our faces toward the bright, new dawn." I heard k in Mother Boor's Tucker Bag whke inhaling Irish stew and a liter of her Aussie brew. I remember her comment: "He talks purty, don't he?" Her comment was only result Some petitions were submitted and Warden's bodyguards started carrying new type of gun, no other changes. After he had been here a while he quit making appearances even by video. So I went to meeting merely because Mike was curious. When I checked my p-suit and kit at West Lock tube station, I took a test recorder and placed in my bdt pouch, so that Mike would have a full account even if I fell asleep. B ut almost didn't go in. I came up from level #-A and started in through a side door and was stopped by a stilyagi -- padded tights, codpiece and calves, torso shined and sprinkled with star dust. Not that I care how people dress; I was wearing tights myself (unpadded) and sometimes oil my upper body on social occasions. But I don't use cosmetics and my hair was too thin to ruck up in a scalp lock. This boy had scalp shaved on sides and his lock built up to fit a rooster and had topped it with a red cap with a bulge in front. A Liberty Cap -- first I ever saw. I started to crowd past; he shoved arm across and pushed face at mine. "Your ticket!" "Sorry," I said. "Didn't know. Where do I buy it?" "You don't." "Repeat," I said. "You faded." "Nobody," he growled, "gets in without being vouched for. Who are you?" "I am," I answered carefully, "Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, and old cobbers all know me. Who are "Never mind! Show a ticket with right chop, or out y' go!" I wondered about his life expectancy. Tourists often remark on how polite everybody is in Luna -- with unstated comment that ex-prison shouldn't be so civilized. Having been Earthside and seen what they put up with, I know what they mean. But oselm to tell them we are what we aie because bad aotora don't live long -- m Luna. But had no intendon of fighting no matter how new-chum this lad behaved; I simply thought about how his face would look if I brushed number-seven arm across his mouth. Just a thought. I was about to answer politely when I saw Shorty Mkrum inside. Shorty was a big black fellow two meters tall, sent up to The Rock for murder, and sweetest, most helpful man I've ever worked with. Taught him laser drillkig before I burned my arm off. "Shorty!" He heard me and grinned like an eighty-eight. "Hi, Mannie!" He moved toward us. "Glad you came, Man!" "Not sure I have," I said. "Blockage on line." "Doesn't have a ticket," said doorman. Shorty reached into his pouch, put one in my hand. "Now he does. Come on, Mannie." "Show me chop on it," insisted doorman. "It's my chop," Shorty said softly. "Okay, tovarishch?" Nobody argued with Shorty -- don't see how he got involved in murder. We moved down front where vip row was reserved. "Want you to meet a nice little gM," said Siorty. e was "little" only to Shorty. I'm not short, # cm., but she was taller -- one eighty, I learned lat, and massed seventy kilos, all curves sand as blonde as SSiorty was black. I decided she must be transportee IF smce colors rarely stay that dear past first generation. Pleasant face, quite pretty, and mop of yellow curls topped off that long, blonde, solid, lovely structure. I stopped three paces away to look her up and down and whistle. She held her pose, then nodded to thank me but abruptly. Bored with compliments, no doubt. Shorty waited till formality was over, then said softly, "Wyoh, this is Comrade Mannie, best drillman that ever drifted a tunnel. Mannie, this little girl is Wyoming Knott and she come all the way from Plato to tell us how we're doing in Hong Kong. Wasn't that sweet of her?" She touched hands with me. me Wye, Mannie. But don't say 'Why not.' " I almost did but controlled it and said, "Okay, Wye." She went on, glancing at my bare head, "So yoaYe a miner. Sbaitf, where's Us ciq? I thought the miners over here were organized." She and Shorty wen wearing little red hats like doorman's -- as were maybe a third of crowd. "No longer a miner," I explained. "That was before I lost this wing." Raised left aim, let her see seam joining prosthetic to meat arm (I never mind calling it to a woman's attention; puts some off but arouses maternal in others -- averages). "These days I'm a computerman." She said sharply, "You fink for the Authority?" Even today, with almost as many women in Luna as men. I'm too much old timer to be rude to a woman no matter what. They have so much of what we have none of. But she had flicked scar tissue and I answered almost sharply, "I am not employee of Warden. I do business with Authority as private contractor." "That's okay," e answered, her voice warm again. "Everybody does business with the Authority, we can't avoid it -- and that's the trouble. That's what we're going to change." We are, eh? How? I thought. Everything does business with Authority for same reason everybody does business with Law of Gravitation. Going to change that, too? But kept thoughts to myself. "Mannie's okay," Shorty said gently. "He's mean as they come -- I vouch for him. Here's a cap for hkn," he added, reaching into pouch. He started to set it on my head. Wyoming Knott took k from him. nfou sponsor him?" "I said so." "Okay, here's how we do k in Hong Kong." Wyoming stood in front of me, placed cap on my head -- kissed me firmly on mouth. She didn't hurry. Being kissed by Wyoming Knott is more definite than being married to most women. Had I been Mike all my lights would have flashed at once. I felt like a Cyborg with pleasure center switched on. Presently I realized it was over and people were whistling. I blinked and said, "Fm glad I joined. What have I joined?" Wyoming said, "Don't you know?" SSiorty cut m, "Meeting's about to start -- he'll find out. Sit down, Man. Please sit down, Wyoh." So we did as a man was banging a gavel. With gavel and an amplifier at hi gain he made himself heard. "Shut doors!" he shouted. "This is a dosed meeting. Check man in ont of you, behind you, each side. If you don't know him and nobody you know can vouch for him, throw hkn outl" "TSirow him out, hell!" somebody answered. "Eliminate him out nearest lockr "Quiet, please! Some day we and a scuffle in which one man's red cap was snatched from head and he was thrown out, sailing beautifully and still rising as he passed through door. Doubt if he felt it, think he was unconscious. A woman was ejected politely -- not politely on her part; she made coarse remarks about ejectors. I was embarrassed. At kst doors were closed. Music started, banner unfolded over platbody whistled; some started to sing, knidy and badly: "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation -- " Can't say anybody looked starved. But reminded me I hadn't eaten since #; hoped k would not last long -- and that reminded me that my recorder was good for only two hours -- and that made me wonder what woidd happen if they knew? Sail me throu air to land with sickening grunch? Or eliminate me? But didoH wony; made that recorder myself, using number-three aim, and nobody but a miniaturization mechanic woidd figure out vdiat k was. Then came speeches. Semantic content was low to negative. One bloke proposed that we march on Warden's Residence, "shoulder to shoulder," and demand our rights. Picture it. Do we do this in tube capsules, then climb out one at a time at his private station? What are his bodyguards doing? Or do we put on p-suits and stroM across surface to his upper lock? With laser drills and plenty of power you can open any airlock -- but how about farther down? Is lift running? Jury-rig hoist and go down anyhow, then tackle next lock? I don't care for such wwk at zero pressure. Mishap in pressure suit is too permanent -- especially when somebody arranges miap. One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts, was that zero pressure wae place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw boss didn't last many shifts; had an "accident" -- and top bosses learned not to pry into accident, too. Attrition ran # in early years -- but those who lived were nice people. Not tame, not soft, Luna is not for them. But well-behaved. But seemed to me that every hothead in Luna was in Stilyagi Hafl that night. They whistled and cheered this shoulder-to-shoulder noise. After discussion opened some sense was talked. One shy little fellow with bloodshot eyes of old-time drfflIF man stood up. l'm an ice miner," he said. 'Learned my trade doing dme for Warden like most of you. lve been on my own diirty years and done okay. Raised eigt kids and all of 'em earned way -- none eiimiiiated nor any serious trouble. I should say I did do okay... because today you have to listen farther out or deeper down to find ke. "Thars okuYy still ice in The Rock and a miner expects to sound for it. But .lUthority pays sanoe price for ice now as thirty years ago. And ttiat's not okay. Worse yet. Authority scrip doesn't buy what it used to. I remember when Hong Kong Luna dollars swapped even for Authority dollars. Now it takes three dollar. I don't know what to do... but I know it takes ice to keep warrens and farms going." He sat down, looking sad. Nobody whistled but everybody wanted to talk. Next (Aaracter pointed out that water can be extracted from rock. This is news? Some rock runs # -- but such rock is scarcer than fossil water. Several farmers bellyached and one wheat farmer was typical. "You heard what Fred Hauser said about ke. Fred, the Authority isn't passing along that low price to farmers. I started almost as long ago as you did, with one two-kilometer tunnd leased from Authority. My oldest ton and I sealed and pressured H and we had a pocket of ice and made our first crop simply on a bank loan to cover power and lighting fixtures, seed and chemicals. "Ve kept extending tunnels and buying lights and planting better se and now we get nine times as much per hectare as the best openair faring down Earthside. What does that make us? Rich? Fred, we owe more now than we did the day we went privatel If I sold out -- if anybody was fool enough buy -- I'd be bankrupt. Why? Because I have to buy water from the Authority -- and have to sell my wheat to Authority -- and never close gap. Twenty years ago I bought cky sewage from the Authority, sterlized and processed it myself and made a profit on a crop. But today when I buy sewage, I'm charged distiHed-watcr price and on top of that for the sdi. Yet price of a tonne of wheat at catapult head is just wliat it was twenty years ago. Fred, you said you didn't know what to do.  can tell youl Get rid of the Authority!" They whistled for him. A fine idea, I thout, but who bells cat? Wyoming Knott, apparently -- chairman stepped back and let orty introduce her as a "brave little girl who's come all the way from Hong Kong Luna to teH how our Chinee comrades cope with situation" -- and choice of words showed that he had never been there... ended at Endsville leaving a thousand kilometers of maria to do by rolligon bus, Serenkatis and part of TranI'd been there -- but on contract, via mail rocket. Before travel became cheap many people in Luna City and Novylen thought that Hong Kong Luna was afl Chinee. But Hong Kong was as mixed as we were. Great China dumped what she didn't want there, first from Oid Hong Kong and Singapore, then Aussies and Enzees and black fellows and marys and Malays and Tamil and name it. Even Old Bolshies from Vladivostok and Harbin and Ulan Bator. Wye looked Svenska and had British last name with North American first name but could have been RusskL My word, a Loonie then rarely knew who father was and, if raised in creche, might be vague about mother. I thought Wyoming was going to be too shy to speak. She stood there, looking scared and little, with Shorty towering over her, a big, black mountain. She waited until admiring whistles died down. Luna City was two-to-one male then, that meeting ran about tcn-to-one; she could have applauded. Then she tore into them. "You! You're a wheat farmer -- going broke. Do you know how much a Hindu housewife pays for a kjlo of flour made from your wheat? How much a tonne of your wheat fetches in Bombay? How little it costs the Aufiiority to get it from catapult head to Indian Ocean? Down hill all the way! Just solidfuel retros to brake it -- and where do those come from? Right here! And what do you get in return? A few shiploads of fancy goods, owned by the Audiority and priced high because it's importado. Importado, importado! -- I never touch importado! If we don't make k in Hong Kong, I don't use it. Whit else do you get for wheat? Iht privilege of selling Lunar ice to Lunar Authority, buying it back at washing water, then giving it to IIm A uthorky -- then buying it back a second time as flushing water -- then giving it again to the Authorky witii valuable solids added -- thai buying k a third time at still higher price for fanning -- then you sell that wheat to the Authority at thek price -- and buy power from the Aiority to grow it, again at thek price! Lunar power. Not one kkowatt up from Terra. It comes from Lunar ice and Lunar steel, or sui shine spilled on Luna's soil -- afl put togethw by Loonies! Oh, you rockheads, you deserve to starvel" She got silence more respectful than whistles. At last a peevish voice said, "What do you expect IB to do, gospazha? Throw rocks at Warden?" Wyoh smiled. "Yes, we coidd throw rocks. But the solution is so simple that you all know it. Here hardworking, smart, skilled people, enough water, plenty of everything, endless power, endless cubic. But... what we dont have is a free market. We must get rid of the Awthorityr "Yes -- but how?" ing. Authority charges too much for water, don't buy. It pays too little for ice, don't sell. It holds monopoly on export, don't export. Down in Bombay they want wheat. If k IF doesn't arrive, the day wail come when brokers come here to Wd for it -- at triple or more the present prices!" "What do we do in meantime? Starve?" Same peevish voice. Wyoming picked him out, let her head roll in that old gesture by which a Loonie fern says, Youre too fat for mer She said, "In your case, cobber, k wouldn't hurt." Guffaws shut hkn up. Wyoh went on, "No one need starve. Fred Hauser, fetch your drill to Hong Kong; the Authority doesn't own our water and air system and we pay what ice is worth. You with the bankrupt farm -- if you have the guts to admit that you're bankrupt, come to Hong Kong and start over. We have a chronic labor shortage, a hard worker doesn't starve." She looked around and added, "I've said enough. It's up to you" -- left platform, sat down between Shorty and myself. IV S he was trembling. Shorty patted her hand; she threw him a glance of thanks, then whispered to me, "How did ! do?" "Wonderful," I assured her. 'Terrific!" She seemed reassured. But I hadn't been honest. "Wonderful" she had been, at swaying crowd. But oratory is a null program. That we were slaves I had known all my life -- and nothing could be done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold. But as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves. But what could we do? Warden wasn't our owner. Had he been, some way could be found to eliminate him. But Lunar Authority was not in Luna, it was on Terra -- and we had not one ship, not even small hydrogen bomb. There weren't even hand guns in Luna, though what we would do with guns I did not know. Shoot each other, maybe... with ships and bombs and weapons. We could be a nuisance -- but how long will papa take it before baby gets spanked? I wasn't impressed. As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery. They cackled again, what to do, how to organize, and so forth, and again we heard that "shoulder to shoulder" noise. Chairman had to use gavel and I began to fidget. But sat up when I heard familiar voice: "Mr. Chairman! May I have the indulgence of the house?" I looked around. Professor Bernardo de la Paz -- which could have guessed from old-fashioned way of talking even if hadn't known voice. Distinguished man with wavy white hair, dimples in cheeks, and voice that smiled. Don't know how old he was but was old when I first met him, as a boy. He had been transported before I was born but was not a lag. He was a political exile like Warden, but a subvwive and instead of fat job like "warden," Professor had been dumped, to live or starve. No doubt he could have gone to work in any school then in L-City hoi he didn't He worked a while washing dishes, Tve heard, then as babysitter, expanding into a nursery school, and then into a creche. When I met him he was running a creche, and a boarding and day school, from nursery through primary, middle, and high school, employed co-op thirty teachers, and was adding college courses. Never boarded with him but I studied under hkn. I was opted at fourteen and my new family sent me to school, as I bad had only three years, plus spotty tutoring. My eldest wife was a firm woman and made me go to school. I liked Prof. He would teach mtything. Wouldn't matter that he knew nothing about it; if pupil wanted k, he would smile and set a price, locate materials, stay a few lessons ahead. Or barely even if he found it tou -- never pretended to know more than he did. Took algebnt from hkn and by time we reached cubics I correct his probs as trften as he did mine -- but he charged into each lesson gaily. I started electronics under him, oon was teaching him. So he stopped charging and we went along togeth untSi he dug up an engineer wffling to daylight for crtra money -- whereupon we both paid new teacher and Prof tried to stick with me, thumb-fingered and slow, but happy to be stretching his mind. e airman banged gavel. "We are glad to extend to Professor de la Paz as much time as he wants -- and you chooms in back sign! off I Before I use this mallet on  skulls." Prof came forward and they were as near silent as Loonies ever arc; he was respected. "I shan't be long, he started in. Stopped to look at Wyoming, giving her up-and-down and whistling. "Lovely Senorita, he said, "can this poor one be forgiven? I have the painful duty of disagreeing with your eloquent manifesto." Wyoh bristled. "Disagree how?" "Please! Only on one point. May I proceed?" "Uh... go ahead." "You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous -- pestilential, not to be borne! -- that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy. It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free market place. But I respectfully suggest that you erred in saying that we should sell wheat to Terra -- or rice, or any food -- at any price. We must not export food!" That wheat farmer broke in. "What am I going to do with all that wheat?" "Please! It would be right to ship wheat to Terra... if tonne for tonne they returned it. As water. As nitrates. As phosphates. Tonne for tonne. Otherwise no price in high enough." Wyoming said, "Just a moment," to farmer, then to Prof: "They can't and you know it. It's cheap to ship downhill, expensive to ship uphill. But we don't need water and plant chemicals, what we need is not so IF massy. Instruments. Drugs. Processes. Some machinery. Control tapes. I've given this much study, sir. If we can get fair prices in a free market -- " "Please, Miss! May I continue?" "Go ahead. I want to rebut." "Fred Hauser told us that ice is harder to find. Too true -- bad news now and disastrous for our grandchildren. Luna City should use the same water today we used twenty years ago... plus enough ice mining for population increase. But we use water once -- one full cycle, three different ways. Then we ship it to India. As wheat. Even though wheat is vacuum-processed, it contains precious water. Why ship water to India? They have the whole Indian Ocean! And the remaining mass of that grain is even more disastrously expensive, plant foods still harder to come by, even though we extract them from rock. Comrades, harken to me! Every load you ship to Terra condemns your grandchildren to slow death. The miracle of photosynthesis, the plant-and-animal cycle, is a closed cycle. You have opened it -- and your life blood runs downhill to Terra. You don't need higher prices, one cannot eat money! What you need, what we all need, is an end to this loss. Embargo, utter and absolute. Luna must be self-sufficient r A dozen people shouted to be heard and more were talking, while chairman banged gavel. So I missed interruption until woman screamed, then I looked around. AM doors were now open and I saw three armed men in one nearest -- men in yellow uniform of Warden's bodyguard. At mam door in back one was using a bull voice; drowned out crowd noise and sound S horty picked up man next to him and threw him at guards nearest; two went down, third fired. Somebody shrieked. Skinny little girl, redhead eleven or twelve, launched self at third guard's knees and hit rolled up in ball; down he went. Shorty swung hand behind him, pushing Wyoming Knott into shelter of his big frame, shouted over shoulder, "Take care of Wyoh, Man -- stick close!" as he moved toward door, parting crowd right and left like children. More screams and I whiffed something -- stink I had smelled day I lost arm and knew with horror those were not stun guns but laser beams. Shorty reached door and grabbed a guard with each big hand. Little redhead was out of sight; guard she had bowled over was on hands and knees. I swung left arm at his face and felt jar in shoulder as his jaw broke. Must have hesitated for Shorty pushed me and yelled, "Move, Man! Get her out of here!" I grabbed Wyoming's waist with right arm, swung her over guard I had quieted and through door -- with trouble; she didn't seem to want li be ftscued. She riowed egais befood door; I oved her hard in buttocks, forcing her to run relher ttuMi faH. I glanced back. SbOTty had other two guards each by neck; he grinned as he cracked uils together. They popped like eggs and he yelled at me: Git! I left, diasing Wyoming. Shorty needed no help, nor would ever Nor ooidd I waste his last effort ttK)ae goaidt, he did by standing on om leg. Other was gone at hip. V 'Yyoh was halfway up ramp to level fix before I caught up. She didn't slow and I had to grab door handle to get into pressure lock with her. There I stopped hw, polled red cap off her curls and stuck it in my pouch. "That's better." Mine was missing. She looked startled. But answered, TbL It is." "Before we open door," I said, "arc you running anywhere parIkndar? And do I stay and hold diem off? Or go with?" "I don't know. We'd better wait for Shorty." "Saiorty's dead." Eyes widened she said nothing. I wit on, "Were you staying wiA blm? Or somebody?" "I was booked for a hotel -- Oostaneetsa Ukrama. I don't know where it k. I got here too late to buy in"khnuL That's one iace you won't fo. Wyoming, I don't know what's going on. First time in months I've seen any Warden's bodyguard in L-City... and never seen one not escorting vip. Uh, coidd take you home with me -- but they may be looking for me, too. Anywise, ought to get out of public corridors." Came pounding on door from level-six side and a little face peered up through glass bullseye. "Can't stay here," I added, opening door. Was a little girl no higher than my waist. She looked scomfuHy up and said, "Kiss her somewhere dse. You're blocking traffic." Squeezed between us as I opened second door for her. "Let's take her advice," I said, "and suggest you take my arm and tty to look like I was man you want to be with. We stroll. Slow." So we did. Was side corridor with iktle traffic other than children always underfoot. H Wart's bodyguards tried to tradL us, Eartfaside cx style, a dozen or ninety kids could tell which way tall blonde went -- if any Loom child would give stooge of Warden so much as time of day. A boy, almost old enough to appreciate Wyoming, stopped in front of us and gave her a happy whistle. She smiled and waved him aside. "There's our trouble," I said in her ear. "You stand out hke Terra at full. Ought to duck into a hotel One off next side corridor. Nothmg much, bundling boottis mostly. But dose." "I'm in no mood to bundle." "Wyoh, please! Wasn't askmg. Covdd take separate rooms." IF "Sorry. Could you find me a W. C.? And is there a chemist's shop near?" "Trouble?" "Not that sort. A W.C. to get me out of sight -- for I am conspicuous -- and a chemist's shop for cosmetics. Body makeup. And for my hair, too." F irst was easy, one at hand. When she was locked in, I found a diemist's shop, asked how much body makeup to cover a girl so tall -- marked a point under my chin -- and massing forty-eight? I bought that amount in sepia, went to another shop and bought same amount -- winning roll at first shop, losing at second -- came out even. Then I bought black hair tint at third shop -- and a red dress. Wyoming was wearing black shorts and pullover -- practical for travel and effective on a blonde. But Fd been married all my life and had some notion of what women wear and had never seen a woman with dark sepia skin, shade of makeup, wear black by choice. Furthermore, skirts were worn in Luna City then, by dressy women. This shift was a skirt with bib and price convinced me it, must be dressy. Had to guess at size but material had some stretch. Ran into three people who knew me but was no unusual comment. Nobody seemed excited, trade going on as usual; hard to believe that a riot had taken place minutes ago on level below and a few hundred meters north. I set it aside for later tiiought I took stuff to Wye, buzzing door and passing it in, then stashed self in a taproom for half an hour and half a liter and watched video. Still no excitement, no "we interrupt for special bulletin." I went back, buzzed, and waited. Wyoming came out -- and I didn't recognize her. Then did and stopped to give full applause. Just had to -- whistles and finger snaps and moans and a scan like mapping radar. Wyoh was now darker than I am, and pigment had gone on beautifully. Must have been carrying items in pouch as eyes were dark now, with lashes to match, and mouth was dark red and bigger. She had used black hair tint, then frizzed hair up with grease as if to take kinks out, and her tight curls had defeated it enough to make convincingly imperfect. She didn't look Afro -- but not European, either. Seemed some mixed breed, and thereby more a Loonie. Red dress was too small. Clung like sprayed enamel and flared out at mid thigh with permanent static charge. She had taken shoulder strap off her pouch and had it under arm. Shoes she had discarded or po'iched; bare feet made her shorter. She looked good. Better yet, she looked not at all like agitatrix who had harangued crowd. She waited, a big smile on face and body undulating, while I applauded. Before I was done, two little boys flanked me and added shrill endorsements, along with clog steps. So I tipped them and told them to be missing; Wyoming flowed to me and took my arm. "Is it okay? Will I pass?" "Wyoh, you look like slot-machine sheila waiting for action." "Why, you drecklich choomi Do I look like slot-machine prices? Touristl" "Don't jump salty, beautiful. Name a gift. Then speak my name. If it's bread-and-honey, I own a hive." "Uh -- " She fisted me solidly in ribs, grinned. "I was flying, cobber. If I ever bundle with you -- not likely -- we won't speak to the bee. Let's find that hotel." S o we did and I bought a key. Wyoming put on a show but needn't have bothered. Night derk never looked up from his knitting, didn't offer to roll. Once inside. Wyoming threw bolts. "It's nice!" Should have been, at thirty-two Hong Kong dollars. I think she expected a booth but I would not put her in such, even to hide. Was comfortable lounge with own bath and no water limit. And phone and delivery lift, which I needed. She started to open pouch. "I saw what you paid. Let's settle it, so that -- " I reached over, closed her pouch. "Was to be no mention of bees. "What? Oh, that was about bundling. You got this doss for me and it's only right that --  "Switch off." "Uh... half? No grievin' with Steven. "Nyet. WyA, you're a long way from home. What money you have, hang onto. "Manuel O'Kelly, if you don't lei me pay my share, I'll walk out ol herel" I bowed. "Dosvedanyuh, Gospazr ha, ee sp'coynoynochi. I hope we shall meet again." I moved to unbolt door. She glared, then closed pouch savagely. "I'll stay. M'goyl" "You're welcome." "I mean it, I really do thank you. Just the same -- Well, I'm not used to accepting favors. I'm a Free Woman." "Congratulations. I think." "Don't you be salty, either. You'ie a firm man and I respect that. I'm glad you're on our side." "Not sure I am." Whatr "Cool it. Am not on Warden's side. Nor will I talk... wouldn't want Shorty, Bog rest his generous soul, to haunt me. But your program isn't practical." "But, Mannie, you don't undstandl If all of us -- " "Hold it, Wye; this no time for politics. I'm tir and hungry. Whea did you eat last?" "Oh, goodness!" Suddenly  looked small, young, tired. "I don't know. On the bus, I guess. Helmet rations. "What would you say to a Kansas City cut, rare, with baked potato, Tycho sauce, green salad, coffee... and a drink first?" "Heavenlyl" T think so too, but we'll be lucky, this hour in this hde, to get algae soup and burgers. What do you drink?" "Anything. Blband. ir "Okay." I went to lift, punched for service. "Menu, please." It displayed and I settled for prime rib plus rest, and two orders of apfelstrudei with whipped cream. I added a half liter of table vodka and ice and starred that part. "Is there time for me to take a bath? Would you mind?" "Go ahead, Wye. You'll smell better." "Louse. Twelve hours in a p-suit and you'd stink, too -- the bus was dreaul. I'll hurry." "Half a sec, Wye. Does that stuff wash off? You may need it when you leave... whenever you do wherever you go." "Yes, it does. But you bought three times as much as I used. I'm sorry, Mannie; I plan to carry makeup on political trips -- things can happen. Like tonight, though tonight was worst. But I ran short of seconds and missed a capsule and almost missed the bus." "So go scrub." "Yes, sir. Captain. Uh, I dont need help to scrub my back... but I'll leave the door up so we can talk. Just for company, no invitation implied." "Suit yourself. I've seen a woman." "What a thrill that must have been for her." She grinned and fisted me another in ribs -- hard -- went in and started tub. "Mannie, would you like to bathe in it first? Second-hand water is good enough for this makeup and that stink you complained about." "Unmetered water, dear. Run it deep." "Oh, whal Iuur: At home I use the same bath water three days running." She whistled softly and happily. "Are you wealthy, Mannie?" "Not wealthy, not weeping." L ift jingled; I answered, fixed basic martinis, vodka over ice, handed hers in, got out and sat down, out of sight -- . nor had I seen sights; she was shoulder deep in happy suds. "Pawlnoi Zheezni!" I called. "A full life to you, too, Mannie. Just the medicine I needed." After pause for medicine she went on "Mannie, you're married. Ja?" "Da. It showsr "Quite. You're nice to a woman but not eager and quite independent So you're married and long married. Children?" "Seventeen divided by four." "Clan marriage?" "Line. Opted at fourteen and I'm fifth of nine. So seventeen kids is nominal. Big family." "It must be nice. I've never seen much of line families, not many in Hong Kong. Plenty of clans and groups and lots of polyandries but the line way never took hold." ".r nice. Our marriage nearly a hundred years old. Dates back to Johnson City and first transportees -- twenty-one links, nine alive today, never a divorce. Oh, it's a madhouse when our descendants and in-laws and kinfolk get together for birthday or wedding -- more kids than seventeen, of course; we don't count 'em after they marry or I'd have 'children old enough to be my grandfather. Happy way to live, never much pressure. Take me. Nobody woofs if I stay away a week and don't phone. Welcome when I show up. Line marriages rarely have divorces. How could I do better?" "I don't think you could. Is it an alternation? And what's the spacing?" "Spacing has no rule, just what suits us. Been alternation up to latest link, last year. We married a girl when alternation called for boy. But was special." "Special how?" "My youngest wife is a granddaughter of eldest husband and wife. At least she's granddaughter of Mum -- senior is 'Mum' or sometimes Mimi to her husbands -- and she may be of Grandpaw -- but not related to other spouses. So no reason not to marry back in, not even consanguinuity okay in other types of marriage. None, nit, zero. And Ludmilla grew up in our family because her mother had her solo, then moved to Novylen and left her with us. "Milla didn't want to talk about marrying out when old enough for us to think about it. She cried and asked us please to make an exception. So we did. Grandpaw doesn't figure in genetic angle. These days his interest in women is more gallant than practical. As senior husband he spent our wedding night with her -- but consummation was only formal. Number-two husband, Greg, took care of it later and everybody pretended. And everybody happy. Ludmilla is a sweet little thing, just fifteen and wegnant." "Your baby?" Wyoming asked. "Greg's, I think. Oh, mine, too, but in fact was in Novy Leninad. Probably Greg's, unless Milla got outside help. But didn't, she's a home girl. And a wonderful cook." Lift rang; took care of it, folded down table, opened chairs, paid bill and sent lift up. "Throw it to pigs?" "I'm comingl Mind if I don't do my face?" "Come in skin for all of me." "For two dimes' I would, you much married man." She came out quickly, blonde again and hair slicked back and damp. Had not put on black outfit; again in dress I bout Red suited her. Se sat down, lifted covers off food. "Oh, boy I Mannie, would your family marry me? You're a dinkum provide." "I'll ask. Must be unanimous." "Don't crowd yourself." St picked up sticks, got busy. About a thousand calories later e said, "I told you I was a Free Woman. -- I wasn't, always." I waited. Women talk when they want to. Or don't. "When I was fifteen I manied two brothers, twins twice my age and I was terribly happy." She fiddled with what was on te, then seemed to change subject. "Mannie, that was just static idxut wanting to marry your family. You're safe from me. If I ever many again -- unlikely but I'm not opposed to it -- it would be just one man, a tight little marriage, earthworm style. Ctti, I don't mean I would keep him dogged down. I don't think it mattm where a man W Wts lunch as long as he comes home for dinner. I would try to make ihim happy." "Twins didn't get along?" "Oh, not that at all. I got pregnant and we were all ddighted... nd I had it and it was a monster and had to be eliminated. They were good to me about it. But I can read print. I announced a divorce, had m#elf sterilized, moved from Novylen to Hong Kong, and started over as a Free Woman." "Wasn't that drastic? Male parent oftener than female; men are exposed more." "Not in my case. We had it calculated by the best mathematical geneticist in Novy Leningrad -- one of the best in Sovunion before she got shipped. I know what happened to me. I was a volunteer colonist -- I mean my mother was for I was only five. My father was transported and Mother chose to go with him and take me along. There was a solar stonn warning but the pilot thought he could make it -- or didn't care; he was a Cyborg. He did make it but we got hit on file ground. And, Mannie, that's one thing that pushed me into peptics, that fiiip sat four hours before fiiey let us disembark. Authority red tape, quarantine perhaps; I was too young to know. But I wasn't too young later to figure out that I had birthed a monster because the Authority doesn't care what happens to us outcasts." "Can't start argument; they don't care. But, Wyoh, still sounds hasty. If you caught damage from radiation -- well, no geneticist but know something about radiation. So you had a damaged egg. Does not meaa egg next to k was hurt -- statietically unlikely." "Oh, I know that." "Mmm. What sterilization? Radical? Or contraceptive?" "Contraceptive. My tubes could be opened. But, Mannie, a wonwai who has had one monster doesn't risk it again." She touched my prosthetic. "You have that. Doesn't it make you eight times as carefid not to risk this one?", -- she touched my meat arm. "That's the way I feel. You have that to contend with; I have this -- and I would never have told you if you hadn't been hurt, too." I didn't say left arm more versatile than right -- she was correct; don't want to trade in right arm. Need it to pat girls if naught else. "Still think you could have healthy babies." "Oh, I can! I've had eight." "Huh?" "I'm a professional host-nothw, Mannie." I opened mouth, closed it. Idea wasn't strange; I read Earihstda papers. But doubt if any surgeon in Lima City in # ever performed such transplant. In cows, yes -- but L-City females unlikely at any price to have babies for other women; even homely ones could get husband or six. (Correction: Are no homely women. Some more beautiful than others.) Glanced at her figure, quickly looked up. She said, "Don't strain your eyes, Mannie; I'm not carrying now. Too busy with politics. But n IF hosting is a good profession for a Free Woman. It's high pay. Some Ohinee families are wealthy and all my babies have been Chinee -- and Chinee are smaller than average and I'm a big cow; a two-and-a-half or three kilo Chinee baby is no trouble. Doesn't spoil my figure." She glanced down at her lovelies. "I don't wet-nurse them, I never see them. So I look nulliparous and younger than I am, maybe. "But I didn't know how well it suited me when I first heard of k, I was clerking in a Hindu shop, eating money, no more, when I saw this ad in the Hong Kong Gong. It was the thought of having a baby, a good baby, that hooked me; I was still in emotional trauma from my monster -- and it turned out to be just what Wyoming needed. I stopped feeling that I was a failure as a woman. I made more money than I could ever hope to earn at other jobs. And my time almost to myself; having a baby hardly slows me down -- six weeks at most and that long only because I want to be fair to my clients; a baby is a valuable property. And I was soon in politics; I sounded off and the underground got in touch with me. That's when I started Jiving, Mannie; I studied politics and economics and history and learned to speak in public and turned out to have a flair for organization. It's satisfying work because I believe in it. I know that Luna will be free. Only -- Well, it would be nice to have a husband to come home to... if he didn't mind that I was sterile. But I don't think about it; I'm too busy. Hearing about your nice family got lae talking, that's all. I must apologize for having bored you." How many women apologize? But Wydb was more man than womaa some ways, despite eight Chinee babies. "Wasn't bored." 'T hope not. Mannie, why do yo say our program isn't practical? We need you." Suddenly felt tired. How to tefl lovely woman dearest dream is noasense? "Um. Wyoh, let's start over. You told them what to do. But wil they? Take those two you singled out. Afl that iceman knows, bet anything, is how to dig ice. So hel go on digging and selling to Authority because that's what he can do. Same for wheat farmer. Years ago, he put in one cash crop -- now he's got ring in his nose. If he wanted to be independent, would have diversified. Raised what he eati, sold rest free market and stayed away from catapult head. I know -- I'm a farm boy." "You said you were a computerman." "Am, and that's a piece of same picture. I'm not a top computerman. But best in Luna. I won't go civil service... so Airthority has to hire me when in trouble -- my prices -- or send Earthside, pay risk and hardship, then ship him back fast before his body forgets Terra. At far more than I charge. So if I can do k, I get dieir jobs -- and Authority can't touch me; was bom free. And if no work -- usually is -- I stay home and eat high. "We've got a proper farm, not a one-cash-crop deal. Chickens. Small #S herd of whiteface, plus milch cows. Pigs. Mutated fruit trees. Vegetables. A little wheat and grind it ourselves and don't insist on white flour, and sell -- free market -- what's left. Make own beer and brandy. I learned drill man extending our tunnels. Everybody works, not too hard. Kids make cattle take exercise by switching them along; don't use treadmill. Kids gather eggs and feed chickens, don't use much machinery. Air we can buy from L-City -- aren't far out of town and pressuretunnel connected. But more often we sell air; being farm, cycle shows Oh-two excess. Always have valuta to meet bills." "How about water and power?" "Not expensive. We collect some power, sunshine screens on surface, and have a little pocket of ice. Wye, our farm was founded before year two thousand, when L-city was one natural cave, and weVe kept improving it -- advantage of line marriage; doesn't die and capital improvements add up." "But surely your ice won't last forever?" iCVlell, now." I scratched head   and grinned. "We're careful; we keep our sewage and garbage and sterilize and use it. Never put a drop back into city system. But -- don't teH Warden, dear, but back when Greg was teaching me to drill, we happened to drill into bottom of main south reservoir -- and had a tap with us, spilled hardly a drop. But we do buy some metered water, looks better -- and ice pocket accounts for not buying much. As for power -- well, power is even easier to steal. I'm a good electrician, Wydi." "Oh, wonderfulV Wyoming paid me a long whistle and looked delighted. "Everybody should do that!" "Hope not, woidd show. Let 'em think up own ways to outwit Authority; our family always has. But back to your plan, Wyoh: two things wrong. Never get 'solidarity'. Blokes like Hauser would cave in -- because they are in a trap; can't hold out. Second place, suppose you manage it. Solidarity. So solid not a tonne of grain is delivered to catapult head. Forget ice; it's grain that makes Authority important and n#t just neutral agency it was set up to be. No grain. What happens?" "Why, they have to negotiate a fair price, that's whatl" "My dear, you and your comrades listen to each other too much. Authority would call H rebellion and warship would orbit with bombs earmarked for L-City and Hong Kong and Tycho Under and ChurchHI and NovyLen, troops would land, grain barges would lift, under guard -- and farmers would break necks to cooperate. Terra has guns and power and bombs and ships and won't hold still for trouble from ex-cons. And troublemakers like you -- and me; with you in spirit -- us lousy troublemakers wffl be rounded up and eliminated, teach us a lesson. And earthworms would say he had k coming... because our side would never be heard. Not on Terra." Wyoh looked stubborn. "Revohh tions have succeeded before. Leote had only a handful with hkn." ir "Lcain moved in on a power vacuum. Wye, correct me if wrong. Revolutions succeeded when -- only when -- governments had gone rotten soft, or disappeared." "Not true! The American Revolution." "South lost, nyet?" "Not that one, the one a century earlier. Ihey had the sort of troubles with England that we are having now -- and they wonV' "Oh, that one. But wasn't England in trouble? France, and Spain, and Sweden -- or maybe Holland? And Ireland. Ireland was rebelling; O'Kellys were in it. Wyoh, if you can stir trouble on Terra -- say a war between Great China and North American Directorate, maybe PanAfrica lobbing bombs at Europe -- I'd say was wizard time to kiM Warden and tell Authority it's tlirough. Not today." "You're a pessimist," she told me. "Nyet, realist. Never pessimist Too much Loonie not to bet if any chance. Show me chances no worse than ten to one against and ##I go for broke. But want that one chance in ten." I pushed back chair. "Through eating?" "Yes. Bolshoyeh spasebaw, tovarishch. It was grand!" "My pleasure. Move to couch and m get rid of table and dishes. No, can't help; Fm host." I cleared table, sent up dishes, saving coffee and vodka, folded table, racked chair, turned to speak. She was qrawled on couch, asleep, mouth open and face softened into little gki. W ent quietly into bath and closed door. After a scrubbing I felt better -- washed tights first and were dry and fit to put on by time I quit lazing in tub -- don't care when world ends long as I'm bathed and in clean clothes. Wyoh was still asleep, which made problem. Had taken room with two beds as she would not feel I was trying to talk her into bundling -- not at I was against it but she had made clear she was opposed. But my bed had to be made from couch and proper bed was folded away. Should I rig it out softly, pick her up like limp baby and move her? Went back into bath and put on arm. Then decided to wait. Phone had hush hood, Wyoh seemed unlikely to wake, and things were gnawing me. I sat down at phone lowered hood, "Hi, Mike." "Hello, Man. Have you surveyed those jokes?" "What? Mike, haven't had a minute -- and a minute may be a long time to you but it's short to me. I'll get at it as fast as I can." "Okay, Man. Have you found a not-stupid for me to talk with?" "Haven't had time for that, either. Uh... wah." I looked out through hood at Wyoming. "Not-stupid" in this case meant empathy... Wyoh had ienty. Enough to be friendly with a machine? I thought so. And could be trusted; not Mily had we shared trouble but she was a subversive. "Mike, would you like to talk with a girl?" "Girls are not-stupid? he asked. "Some girls are very not-stupid, Mike." "I would like to talk with a notstupid girl, Man." "I'll try to arrange. But now Fm in trouble and need your help." "I w#I help, Man." "Tlianks, Mike. I want to call my home -- but not ordinary way. You know sometimes calls are monitored and, if Warden orders it, lock can be put on so that circuit can be traced." "Man, you wish me to monitor your call to your home and put a lock-and-trace on it? I must inform you that I already know your home call number and the number from which you are calling." "No, no! Dont want it monitored, dont want it locked and traced. Can you call my home, connect me, and control circuit so that h can't be monitored, can't be locked, can't be traced -- even if somebody has programmed ust that? Can you do it so that they won't even know their program is by-passed?" Mike hesitated. I suppose it was a question never asked and he had to trace a few thousand possibilities to see if his control of system permitted this novel program. "Man, I can do that. I will." "Good! Uh, program signal. If I want this sort of connection in future, I'll ask for 'Sherlock'." "Noted. Sherlock was my brother." Year before, I had explained to Mike how he got his name. Thereafter he read all Sherlock Holmes stories, scanning film in Luna City Carnegie Library. Don't know how he rationalized relationship; I hesitated to ask. "Fine! Give me a 'Sherlock' to my home." A moment later I said, "Mum? This is your favorite husband." She answered, "Manuel! Are you in trouble again?" I love Mum more than any other woman including my other wives, but she never stopped bringing me tried to sound hurt. "Me? Why, you know me. Mum." "I do indeed. Since you are not in trouble, perhaps you can tell me why Professor de la Paz is so anxious to get in touch with you -- he has called three times -- and why he wants to reach some woman with unlikely name of 'Wyoming Knott' -- and why he thinks you might be with her? Have you taken a bundling companion, Manuel, without telling me? We have freedom in our family, dear, but you know that I prefer to be told. So that I will not be taken unaware." Mum was always jealous of all women but her co-wives and never, never, never admitted it. I said, "Mum, Bog strike me dead, I have not taken a bundling companion." "Very well. You've always been a truthful boy. Now what's this mystery?" "I'll have to ask Professor." (Not lie, just tight squeeze.) "Did he leave number?" "No, he said he was calling from a public phone." "Um. If he calls again, ask him to leave number and time I can reach IF him. This is public phone, too." (Another tight squeeze.) "In meantime -- you listened to late news?" "You know I do." "Anything?" "Nothing of interest." "No excitement in L-City? Killings, riots, anything?" "Why, no. There was a set duel in Bottom Alley but -- Manuel! Have you killed someone?" "No, Mum." (Breaking a man's jaw will not kill him.) She sighed. "You'll be my death, dear. You know what I've always told you. In our family we do not -- it almost never is -- matters must be discussed caknly, en famille, and proper action selected. If a new dium must be eliminated, other people know it k is worth a little delay to hold good opinion and support -- " "MumI Haven't killed anybody, don't intend to. And know that lecture by heart" "Please be civil, dear." "I'm Sony." "Forgiven. Forgotten. Im to td! Professor de la Paz to leave a number. I shall." "One thing. Forget name 'Wyoming Knott. Forget Professor was asking for me. If a stranger phones, or calls in person, and asks anything about me, you haven't heard from me, don't Imow where I am... think I've gone to NovyLen. That goes for rest of family, too. Answer no questions -- especially from anybody connected with Warden." "As if I would! Manuel, you are in trouble." "Not much and getting it fixed" -- hoped! "Tell you when I get home. Can't talk now. Love you. Switching off." "I love you, dear. Sp'coynoynauchi." "Thanks and you have a quiet night, too. Off." Mum is wonderful. She was shipped up to The Rock long ago for carving a man under circumstances that left grave doubts as to girlish innocence -- and been opposed to violence and loose living ever since. Unless necessary. She's no fanatic. Bet she was a jet job as a kid and wish I'd known her -- but I'm rich in sharing last half of her life. I called Mike back. "Do you know Professor Bernardo de la Paz's voice?" "I do, Man." "Well... you might monitor as many phones in Luna City as you can spare ears for and if you hear him, let me know. Public phones especially." (A full two seconds delay. Was giving Mike problems he had never had, think he liked it.) "I can check monitor long enough to identify at aU public phones in Luna City. Shall I use random search on the others, Man?" "Um. Don't overload. Keep an ear on his home phone and school phone." "Program set up." "Mike, you are best friend I ever had." "That is not a joke, Man?" "No joke. Truth." "I am -- Correction: I am honorcd and pleased. You are my best friend, Man, for you arc my only friend. No comparison is logically permissible." "Going to see that you have other friends. 'Not-stupids,' I mean. Mike? Got an empty memory bank?" "Yes, Man. Tcn-to-the-eighth bits capacity." "Good! WMl you block it so that only you and I can use it? Can you?" "Can and will. Block signal, please." "Uh... Bastille Day,' " Was my birthday, as Professor de la Paz had told me years earlier. "Permanently blocked." "Fine. Got a recording to put in it. But first -- have you finished setting copy for tomorrow's Daily Lunatic? "Yes, Man." "Anything about meeting in Stillyago Hall?" "No, Man." "Nothing in news services going out-city? Or riots?" "No, Man." " ' "Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice.' Okay, record this under Bastille Day', then think about it. But for Bog's sake don't let even your thoughts go outside that block, nor anything I say about it!" "Man my only friend," he answered and voice sounded diffident, "many months ago I decided to place any conversation between you and me under privacy block accessible only to you. I decided to erase none and moved them from temporary storage to permanent. So that I could play diem over, and over, and over, and think abot them. Did I do right?" "Perfect. And, Mike -- I'm fla tered." "P'jarst. My temporary files woie getting full and I learned that I needed not to erase your words." "Well -- 'Bastille Day.' Sound coming at sixty-to-one." I took litde recorder, placed close to a microphone and let it zip-squeal. Had an hour and a half in it; went silent in ninety seconds or so. "That's aM, Mike. Talk to you tomorrow." "Good night, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly my only friend." I switched off and raised hood. Wyoming was sitting up and looking troubled. "Did someone call?" "No trouble. Was talking to one of my best and most trustworthy friends. Wyoh, are you stupid?" She looked startled. "I've sometimes thought so. Js that a joke?" "No. If you're not-stupid. I'd like to introduce you to him. Speaking of jokes -- do you have a sense of humor?" "Certainly I haveF is what Wyoming did not answer -- and any other woman would as a locked-in program. She blinked thoughtfully and said, "Youll have to judge for yourself, cobber. I have something I use for one. It serves my simple purposes." "Fine." I dug into poudi, found print-out roll of one hundred "funny" stories. "Read. Tell me which are funny, which arc not -- and which get a giggle first time but are cold pancakes without honey to hear twice." IF Manud, you may be the oddest man I've ever met." She took that print-out. "Say, is this computer paper?" "Yes. Met a computer with a sense of humor." "So? Well, it was bound to come some day. Everything dse has been mechanized." I gave proper response and added, "Everything?" She looked up. "Please. Don't whistle while I'm reading." VU H eard her giggle a few times while I rigged out bed and made it. Then sat down by her, took end she was through with and started reading. Chuckled a time or two but a joke isn't too funny to me if read cold, even when I see k could be fission job at proper time. I got more interested in how Wyoh rated them. She was marking "plus," "minus," and sometimes question mark, and plus stories were marked "once" or "always" -- few were marked "always." I put my ratings under hers. Didn't disagree too often. By time I was near end she was looking over my judgments. We finished together. "Well?" I said. "What do you think?" "I think you have a crude, rude mind and it's a wonder your wives put up with you." "Mum often says so. But how about yourself, Wyoh? You marked plusses on some that would make a slot-machine girl blush." She grinned. "Da. Don't tell anybody; publidy Fm a dedicated party organizer above such things. Have you decided that I have a sense of humor?" "Not sure. Why a minus on number seventeen?" "Which one is that?" She reversed roll and found k. "Why, any woman would have done the samel It's not funny, it's simply necessary." "Yes, but think how silly she looked." "Nothing silly about it. Just sad. And look here. You thought this one was not funny. Number fiftyone." Neither reversed any judgments but I saw a pattern: Disagreements wwe over stories concerning oldest funny subject. Told her so. She nodded. "Of course. I saw that. Neva mind, Mannie dear; I long ago quk being disappointed in men for what they are not and never can be." I decided to drop k. Instead told her about Mike. Soon she said, "Maimie, you're telling me that this computer is aiiyeV "What do you mean?" I answered. "He doesn't sweat, or go to W.C. But can think and talk and he's aware of hknself. Is he 'alive'?" "I'm not sure what I mean by 'alive,' " she admitted. "There's a scientific definition, isn't there? Irritability, or some such. And reproduction." "Mike is irritable mkI can be irritating. As for reproducing, not designed for it but -- yes, given time and materials and very special help, Mike could reproduce himself." "I need very special help, too," Wyoh answered, "since Vm sterile. it takes me whole lunars and nany kilograms of the best materials. But I make good babies. Mannie, idiy shouldn't a madiine be alive? iVe always felt they were. Some of Ikem wait for a chance to savage you hi a tender spot" "Mike wouldn't do tiiat Not on purpose, no meanness in him. But he likes to play jokes and one might go wrong -- like a puppy who doesn't know he's biting. He's ignorant No, not ignorant, he knows enormously more than I, or you, or any man who ever lived. Yet he doesn't know anything." "Better repeat that. I missed something." I tried to explain. How Mike knew almost every book in Luna, could read at least a thousand times as fast as we could and never forgot anything unless he chose to erase, how he could reason with perfect logic, or make shrewd guesses from insufficient data... and yet not know anything about how to be "alive". She interrupted. "I scan k. You're saying he's smart and knows a lot but is not sophisticated. Like a new chum when he grounds on The Rock. Back Earthside he migt be a professor with a string of degrees... but here he's a baby." "That's it.  Mike is a baby with a long string of degrees. Ask how much water and what chemicals and how much photoflux it takes to crop fifty thousand tonnes of wheat and he'll tell you without stopping for breath. But can't tell if a joke is funny." "I thought most of these were fain ly good." "They're ones he's heard -- read -- and were marked jokes so be filed them that way. But doesn't understand them because he's never been a -- a people. Lately he's been trying to make up jokes. Feeble, very." I tried to explain Mike's pathetic attempts to be a "people." "On top of that, he's lonely." "Why, the poor thing! You'd be lonely, too, if you did nothing but work, work, work, study, study, study, and never anyone to visit with. Cruelty, that's what it is." So I told about promise to find "not-stupids." "Would you chat with him, Wye? And not laugh when he makes funny mistakes? If you do, he shuts up and sulks." "Of course I would, Mannie! Uh... once we get out of this mess. If it's safe for me to be in Luna City. Where is this poor little computer? City Engineering Central? I don't know my way around here." "He's not in L-City; he's halfway across Crisium. And you couldn't go down where he is; takes a pass from Warden. But -- " "Hold it! 'Halfway across Crisium -- ' Mannie, this computer is one of those at Authority Complex?" "Mike isn't just on of those computers," I answered, vexed on Mike's account. "He's hoss he waves baton for all others. Others are just machines, extensions of Mike, like this is for me," I said, flexing hand of left arm. "Mike controls them. He runs catapult personally, was his first job -- catapult and ballistic radars. But he's logic for phone sysIF tern, too, after tliey converted to Lunawide switching. Besides that, hes supervising logic for other systcms. Wyoh closed eyes and pressed fingers to temples. "Mannie, does Mike hurtr " 'Hurt? No strain. Has time to read jokes. "I don't mean that. I mean: Can he hurt? Feel pain? "What? No, Can get feelings hurt. But can't feel pain. Don't think he can. No, sure he can't, doesn't have receptors for pain. Why?" She covered eyes and said softly, "Bog help me." Then kx)ked up and said, "Don't you see, Mannie? You have a pass to go down where this computer is. But most Loonies can't even leave the tube at that station; it's for Authority employees osdy. Much less go inside the main cnputer room. I had to find out if k could feel pain because -- well, because you got me feeling sorry for it, with your talk about how it was lonely! But, Mannie, do you realize what a few kilos of toluol plastic would do there? "Certainly do!" Was shocked and disgusted. "Yes, We'H strike right after the explosion -- and Luna will be ft'ee! Mmm... Ill get your explosives and fuses -- but we can't move untfl we are organized to exploit it. Mannie, I've got to get out of here. I must risk it. I'll go put on makeup. She started to get up. I shoved her down, with hard left hand. Surprised her, and surprised me. Had not touched her in any way save necessary contact. Or, different today, but was # and touching a fern without her consent -- plenty of lonely men to come to rescue and airlock never far away. As kids say. Judge Lynch never sleeps. "Sit down, keep quiet!" I said. '# know what a blast would do. Apparently you don't. Gospa # ha, am sorry to say this... but if came to choice, would eliminate you before would blow up Mike." Wyoming did not get angry. Really was a man some ways -- her years as a disciplined revolutionirt I'm sure; she was all girl most ways. "Mannie, you told me that Shorty Mkrum is dead." "What?" Was confused by sharp turn. "Yes. Has to be. One leg off at hip, it was; must have bled to death in two minutes. Even in a surgery amputation (hat high is touch-and-go." (I know such things; had taken luck and big transfusions to save me -- and an arm isn't m same class with what happened to aorty.) "Shorty was," die said soberly, "my best friend here and one of my best friends anywhere. He was all that I admire in a man -- loyal, honest, intelligent, gentle and brave -- and devoted to the Cause. But have you seen me grieving over him?" "No. Too late to grieve." "It's never too late for grief. I've grieved every instant since you told me. But I locked it in the back of my mind for the Cause leaves no time for grief. Mannie, if it would have bought freedom for Luna -- or even been part of the price -- I would have eliminated Shorty myself. Or you. Or myself. And yet you have qualms over blowing up a computer r "Not that at all!" (But was in part. When a man dies, doesn't shock me too much; we get death sentences day we are born. But Mike was unique and no reason not to be immortal. Never mind "souls" -- prove Mike did not have one. And if no soul, so much worse. No? Thinktwice. ) "Wyo-ming, what would happen if we blow up Mike? Tell." "I don't know precisely. But it would cause a great deal of confusion and that's exactly hat we -- " "Seal it. You don't know. Confusion, da. Phones out. Tubes stop running. Your town not much hurt; Hong Kong has own power. But L-City and Novylen and other warrens all power stops. Total darkness. Shortly gets stuffy. Then temperature drops and pressure. Where's your p-suit?" "Checked at Tube Station West." "So is mine. Think you can find way? In solid dark? In time? Not sure I can and I was born in this warren. With corridors filled with screaming people? Loonies are a tough mob. We have to be -- but about one in ten goes off his cams in total dark. Did you swap bottles for fresh charges or were you in too much hurry? And will suit be there with thousands trying to find p-suits and not caring who owns?" "But aren't there emergency arrangements? There are in Hong Kong Luna." "Some. Not enough. Control of anything essential to life should be decentralized and paralleled so that if one machine fails, another takes over. But costs money and as you pointed out, Authority doesn't care. Mike shouldn't have all jobs. But was cheaper to ship up master machine, stick deep in The Rock where couldn't get hurt, then keep adding capacity and loading on jobs -- did you know Authority makes near as much gelt from leasing Mike's services as from trading meat and wheat? Does. Wyoming, not sure we would lose Luna City if Mike were blown up. Loonies are handy and might jury-rig till automation could be restored. But I tell you true: Many people would die and rest too busy for politics." I marveled it. This woman had been in The Rock almost all her life... yet could think of something as new-choomish as wrecking engineering controls. "Wyoming, if you were smart like you are beautiful, you wouldn't talk about blowing up Mike; you would think about how to get him on your side." "What do you mean?" she said. "The Warden controls the computers." "Don't know what I mean," I admitted. "But don't think Warden controls computers -- wouldn't know a computer from a pile of rocks. Warden, or staff, decides policies, general plans. Half-competent technicians program these into Mike. Mike sorts them, makes sense of them, plans detailed programs, parcels them out where they beIF kDg, keeps things moving. But nobody controls Mike; hes too smart. He carries out what is asked because that's how he's built. But he's df-programming logic, makes own decisions. And a good thing, because a he weren't smart, system would mot work." "I still don't see what you mean by 'getting him on our side'?" "Oh. Mike doesn't feel loyalty to Warden. As you pointed out: He's a Btchine. But if I wanted to foul up phones without touching air or water cr lights, I would talk to Mike. If it truck him funny, he might do it." "Couldn't you just program it? I understood that you can get into the room where he is." "If I -- or anybody -- programmed such an order into Mike without talking it over with him, program would be placed in 'hold' location and alarms would sound in aaany places. But if Mike wanted io -- I told her about cheque for umphimself, Wyoh. And lonely. Told me I was 'his only friend' -- and was # open and vulnerable I wanted to bawl. If you took pains to be his friend, too -- without thinking of him as 'just a machine' -- well, not sure what it would do, haven't analyzed it. But if I tried anything Ug and dangerous, would want Mike ia my corner." She said thoughtfully, "I wish there were some way for me to meak into that room where he is. I don't suppose makeup would help?" "Cfe, don't have to go there. Mike h on phone. Shall we call him?" She stood up. "Mannie, you are not only the oddest man I've met; you are the most exasperating. What's his number?" "Comes from associating too much with a computer." I went to phone. "Just one thing, Wyoh. You get what you want out of a man just by batting eyes and undulating framework." "Well... sometimes. But I do have a brain." "Use it Mike is not a man. No gonads. No hormones. No instincts. Use fern tactics and it's a null signal. Think of him as supergenius child too young to notice vive-ladifference." "I'll remember. Mannie, why do you call him 'he?' " "Uh, can't call him 'it', don't think of him as 'she.' " "Perhaps I had better think of him as 'she.' Of her as "she' I mean." "Suit yourself." ing so body shielded it; was not ready to share number till I saw how things went. Idea of blowing up Mike had shaken me. "Mike?" "Hello, Man my only friend." "May not be only friend from now on, Mike. Want you to meet somebody. Not stupid." "I knew you were not alone, Man; I can hear breathing. Will you please ask Not-Stupid to move closer to the phone?" Wyoming looked panicky. She whispered, "Can he seeV To, Not-Stupkl, I cannot sec you; this phone has no video circuit. But binaural miscrophonic receptors place you with some accuracy. From your voice, your breathing, your heartbeat, and the fact that you are alone in a bundling room with a mature male I extrapolate that you are female human, sixty-five-plus kilos in mass, and of mature years, on the close order of thirty." Wyoming gasped. I cut in. "Mike, her name is Wyoming Knott." "I'm very pleased to meet you, Mike. You can call me 'Wye. "Why not?" Mike answered. I cut in again. "Mike, was that a joke?" "Yes, Man. I noted that her first name as shortened differs from the English causation-inquiry word by only an aspiration and that her last name has the same sound as the general negator. A pim. Not funny?" Wyoh said, "Quite funny, Mike. I --  I waved to her to shut up. "A good pun, Mike. Example of 'funnyonly-once' class of joke. Funny through element of surprise. Second time, no surprise; therefore not funny. Check?" "I had tentatively reached that conclusion about puns in thinking over yourremarks two conversations back. I am pleased to find my reasoning confirmed." "Good boy, Mike; making progress. Those hundred jokes -- Fve read them and so has Wyoh." "Wyoh? Wyoming Knott?" "Huh? Oh, sure. Wyoh, Wye, Wyoming, Wyoming Knott -- aH wme. Just don't call her 'Why not "I agreed not to use that pun again, Man. Gospazha, shall I caM you "Wyoh' rather than Wye'? I conjecture that the monosyllabie form could be confused with the causation-inquiry monosyllable through insufficient redundancy and without intention of punning." Wyoming blinked -- Mike's English at that time could be smothering -- but came back strong. "Certainly, Mike. 'Wyoh is the font of my name that I like best" " Ihen I shall use it. The full form of your first name is still more subject to misinterpretation as k it identical in sound with the name of an administrative region in Northwest Managerial Area of the North American Directorate.' "I know, I was bom there and my parents named me after the State. I don't remember much about it." "Wyoh, I regret that this circuit does not permit display of pictures. Wyoming is a rectangular area lying between Terran coordinates fortyone and forty-five degrees north, one hundred four degrees three minutcf west and one hundred eleven degrees three minutes west, thus containing two hundred fifty-three thousand, five hundred ninety-seven point two six square kilometers. It is a region of high plains and of mountains, having limited fertility but esteemed for natural beauty. Its population was sparse until augmented through the relocation subplan of the Great New York Urban Renewal Program, A.D. twentytwenty-five through twenty-thirty." ir ii'That was before I was born," A said Wyoh, "but I know about it; my grandparents were relocated -- and you could say that's how I wound up in Luna." "Shall I continue about the area named 'Wyoming?' " Mike asked. "No, Mike," I cut in, "you probably have hours of it in storage." "Nine point seven three hours at speech speed not including crossreferences, Man." "Was afraid so. Perhaps Wyoh will want it someday. But purpose of call is to get you acquainted with this Wyoming... who happens also to be a high region of natural beauty and imposing mountains." "And limited fertility," added Wyoh. "Mannie, if you are going to draw silly parallels, you should include that one. Mike isn't interested in how I look." "How do you know? Mike, wish I could show you picture of her." "Wyoh, I am indeed interested in jour appearance; I am hoping that you will be my friend. But I have seen several pictures of you." You have? When and how?" "I searched and then studied them as soon as I heard your name. I am contract custodian of the archive files of the Birth Assistance Clinic in Hong Kong Luna. In addition to biological and physiological data and case histories the bank contains nmety-six pictures of you. So I studied them." Wyoh looked very startled. "Mike can do that," I explained, "in time it takes us to hiccup. You'll get used to it." "But heavens! Mannie, do yon realize what sort of pictures the Clinic takes?" "Hadn't thought about it." "Then don't! Goodness!" Mike spoke in voice painfully shy, embarrassed as a puppy who has made mistake. "Gospazha Wyoh, if I have offended, it was unintentional and I am most sorry. I can erase those pictures from my temporary storage and key the Clinic archive so that I can look at them only on retrieval demand from the Clinic and then without associ-, ation or mentation. Shall I do so?" "He can," I assured her. "With Mike you can always make a fresh start. Better than humans that way. He can forget so completely that he can't be tempted to look later... and couldn't think about them even if called on to retrieve. So take hm offer if you're in a huhu." "Uh...no, Mike, it's all right for you to see them. But don't show them to Mannie r Mike hesitated a long time -- four seconds or more. Was, I think, type of dilemma that pushes lesser computers into nervous breakdowns. But he resolved it. "Man my only friend, shall I accept this instruction?" "Program it, Mike," I answered, "and lock it in. But, Wyoh, isn't that a narrow attitude? One might do you justice. Mike could print it out for me next time I'm there." "The first example in each series," Mike offered, "woidd be, oa the basis of my assodational analyses of such data, of such pulchritudinous value as to please aagr healthy, mature human male." #f "How about it, Wyoh? To pay for apfelstrudel." "Uh... a picture of me with my hair pinned up in a towel and standing in front of a grid without a trace of makeup? Are you out of your rock-happy mind? Mike, don't let him have it!" "I shall not let him have it. Man, this is a not-stupid?" "For a girl, yes. Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less data than you can. Shall we drop subject and consider jokes?" T hat diverted diem. We ran down list, giving our conclusions. Then tried to explain jokes Mike had failed to understand. With mixed success. But real stumbler turned out to be stories I had marked "funny" and Wyoh had judged "not funny," or vice versa; Wyoh asked Mike his opinion of each. Wish she had asked him before we gave our opinkms; that electronic Juvenile delinquent always agreed with her, disagreed with me. Were those Mike's honest opinions? Or was he trying to lubricate new acquaintance into friendship? Or was it his skewed notion of humor -- joke on me? Didn't ask. But as pattern completed Wyoh wrote a note on phone's memo pad: "Mannie, re #, #, #, #, # and # -- Mike is a sheV I let k go with a shrug, stood up. "Mike, twenty-two hours since I've had sleep. You kids chat as long as you want to. Call you tomorrow." "Goodnit, Man. Sleep well. Wyoh, are you sleepy?" "No, Mike, I had a nap. But, Mannie, we'll keep you awake. No?" "No. When I'm sleepy, I rfcep." Started making couch into bed. Wyoh said, "Excuse me, Mika," got up, took sheet out of my hands. "I'll make it up later. You doss over there, tovarishch; you're bigger than I am. Sprawl out." Was too tired to argue, sprawled out, asleep at once. Seem to remember hearing in sleep giggles and a shriek but never woke enough to be certain. W oke up later and came fufly awake when I realized was hearing two fern voices, one Wyoh's warm contralto, other a sweet, higji soprano with French accent. Wyoh chuckled at something and answered, "All right, Michelle dear, IH call you soon. 'Night, darling." "Fine. Goodnight, dear." Wyoh stood up, turned around. "Who's your girl friend?" I asked. Thought she knew no one in Luna City? Might have phoned Hong Kong... had sleep-logged feeling was some reason she shouldn't fonc. "That? Why, Mike, of course. We didn't mean to wake you." "What?" "Oh. It was actually Michdle. I discussed it with Mike, what sex he was, I mean. He decided that he could be either one. So now she'll Michelle and that was her voice. Got it right the first time, too; her voice never cracked once." "Of course not; just shifted voder a couple of octaves. What arc you toying to do: Split his personality?" IF lts not just pitch; when she's Michelle it's an entire change in manner and attitude. Don't worry about splitting her personality; she has plenty for any personality she needs. Besides, Mannie, it's much easier for both of us. Once she shifted, we took our hair down and cuddled up and talked girl talk as if we had known each other forever. For example those silly pictures no longer embarrassed me. In fact we discussed my pregnancies quite a lot. Michelle was terribly interested. She knows all about O.B. and G.Y. and so forth but ust theory -- and she appreciated the raw facts. Actually, Mannie, Michelle is much more a woman than Mike was a man." "Well... suppose it's okay. Going to be a shock to me first time I call Mike and a woman answers." "Oh, but she won'tl" "Huh?" "Michelle is my friend. When you call, you'll get Mike. She gave me a number to keep it straight -- 'Michelle' spelled with a 'Y'. M, Y, C, H, E, L, L, E, and Y, Y, to make it come out ten." I felt vaguely jealous while realizing it was sy. Suddenly Wyoh giggled. "And she told me a string of new jpkes, ones you wouldn't think were funny -- and, boy, does she know rough ones!" "Mike -- or his sister Michelle -- b a low creature. Let's make up couch. I'll switch." "Stay where you are. Shut up. Turn over. Go back to sleep." I shut up, turned over, went back to sleep. Sometime much later I became aware of "married" feeling -- something warm snaggled up to my back. Would not have wakened but she was sobbing softly. I turned and got her head on my arm, did not speak. She stopped sobbing; presendy breathing became slow and even. I went back to sleep. DC "ne must have slept like dead for next thing I knew phone was sounding and its light was blinking. I called for room lights, started to get up, found a load on right upper arm, dumped it gently, climbed over, answered. Mike said, "Good morning, Maa. Professor de la Paz is talking to your home number." "Can you switch it here? As a 'Sherlock'T "Certainly, Man." "Don't interrupt caH. CA him ia as he switches off. Where is her "A public phone in a taproom called 'The Iceman's Wife' underneath the -- " 'T know. Mike, when you switch me in, can you stay in circuit? Want you to monitor." "It shall be done." "Can you tell if anyone is in earshot? Hear breathing?" "I infer from the anechoic quality of his voice that he is speaking under a hush hood. But I infer also that, in a taproom, others would be present. Do you wish to hear, Man?" "Uh, do that. Switch me in. And if he raises hood, tell me. You're a smart cobber, Mike." "Thank you, Man." Mike cut me in; I found tibat Mum was talking: " -- ly I'll tell hkn. Professor. I'm so sorry that Mamid is not home. There is no number you can me? He is mixious to retom your call; he made quite a point that I was to be sure to get a noniber from you." "I'm terribly sorry, (tear lady, but I'm leaving once. But, ik me see, it is now dglht-Biftoen; I'll try So call back just at nine, if I may." "Cmainly, Professor," Mum's voice had a coo in it that e reserves for males not her husbands of whom she approves -- sometimes lor us. A moment later Mike said, "NowI" and I spoke up: "Hi, Prof! Hear you've been looking for me. This is Mannie." I heard a gasp. T would have sworn I switched this phone off. Why. I have switched h off; it must be broken. Manuel -- so good to hear your voice, dear boy. Did you just  home?" "I'm not home." "But -- But you must be. I haven't -- " "No time for that. Prof. Can anyone overhear you?" T don't think so. I'm using a hush booth." "Wish I could sec. Prof, whafs my birthday?" H e hesitated. Then he said, T see. I think I see. July fourteenth." 'Tm convinced. Okay, let's talk." "You're really not calling from joui home, Manuel? Where are you?" "Let that pass a moment. You asked my wife about a girl. No names need. Why do you want to find her, Prof?" "I want to warn her. She must not try to go back to her home city. iShe would be arrested." "Why do you think so?" "Dear boyl Everyone at that meeting is in grave danger. Yourself, too. I was so happy -- even though confused -- to hear you say that you are not at home. You should not go home at present. If you have some safe place to stay, k would be well to take a vacation. You axe aware -- you must be even though you left hastily -- thik there was violence last nit" I was awarel KiMing Warden's bodyguards must be against Authority Regulations. At least if I were Warden, I'd take a dim view. "Thanks, Prof; I'll be careful. And if I see this giri. I'll tell her." "You don't know where to find her? You were seen to leave with her and I had so hoped that you would know." "Prof, why this interest? Last night you didn't seem to be on her side." "No, no, Manuel! She is my comrade. I don't say 'tovarishch' for I mean it not just as politeness but in the older sense. Binding. She is my comrade. We differ only in tactics. Not in objectives, not in loyalt "I see. Well, consider message delivered. She'll get it." "Oh, wonderful! I ask no questions... but I do hope, oh so very strongly, that you can find a way for her to be safe, really safe, untd this blows over." IF I thought that over. "Wait a moment, Prof. Don't switch off." As I answered phone, Wyoh had headed for bath, probably to avoid listening; she was that sort. Tapped on door. "Wyoh?" "Out in a second." "Need advice." She opened door. "Yes, Mannie?" "How does Professor de la Paz rate in your organization? Is he trusted? Do you trust him?" She looked thoughtful. "Everyone at the meeting was supposed to be vouched for. But I don't know him." "Mmm. You have feeling about him?" "I liked him, even though he argued against me. Do you know anything about him?" "Oh, yes, known him twenty years. I trust him. But can't extend trust for you. Trouble -- and it's your air bottle, not mine." She smiled warmly. "Mannie, since you trust him, I trust him just as firmly." I went back to phone. "Prof, are you on dodge?" He chuckled. "Precisely, Manuel. "Know a hole called 'Grand Hotel Raffles'? Room L two decks below lobby. Can you get there without tracks, have you had breakfast, what do you like for breakfast?" He chuckled again. "Manuel, one pupil can make a teacher feel that his years were not wasted. I know where it is, I shall get there quietly, I have not broken fast, and I eat anything I can pat." Wyoh had started putting beb together; I went to help. "What do you want for breakfast?" "Chai and toast. Juice would be nice." "Not enough." "Well... a boiled egg. But I pay for breakfast." "Two boiled eggs, buttered toast with jam, juice. I'll roll you. "Your dice, or mine?" "Mine. I cheat." I went to lift, asked for display, saw something called "The Happy Hangover --  -- tomato juice, scrambled eggs, ham steak, fried potatoes, corn cakes and honey, toast, butter, milk, tea or I ordered it for two, no wish to advertise third person. We were clean and shining, room orderly and set for breakfast, and Wyoh had changed from black outfit into red dress "because company was coming" when lift jingled food. Change into dress had caused words. She had posed, smiled, and said, "Mannie, I'm so pleased with this dress. How did you know it would suit me so well?" "Genius." "I think you may be. What did it cost? I must pay you. "On sale, marked down to Authority cents fifty." She clouded up and stomped foot Was bare, made no sound, caused her to bounce a half meter. "Happy landing!" I wished her, while she pawed for foothold like a new dium "Manuel O'Kelly! If you think I will accept expensive clothing from a man I'm not even bundling wilhr "Easily corrected. IT "Lecher! I'll tell your wives! "Do that. Mum always thinks worst of me." I went to lift, started dealing out dishes; door sounded. I flipped hearum-no-seeum. "Who comes?" "Message for Gospodin Smith," a cracked voice answered. "Gospodin Bernard O. Smith." I flipped bolts and let Professor Bernardo de la Paz in. He looked like poor grade of salvage -- dirty clothes, filthy himself, hair unkempt, paralysed down one side and hand twisted, one eye a film of cataract. Perfect picture of old wrecks who sleep in Bottom Alley and cadge drinks and pickled eggs in cheap taprooms. He drooled. As soon as I bolted door he straightened up, let features come back to normal, folded hands over wishbone, looked Wyoh up and down, sucked air kimono style, and whistled. "Even more lovely,  he said, "than I remembered! She smiled, over her mad. "Thanks, Professor. But don't bother. Nobody here but comrades. "Senorita, the day I let politics interfere with my appreciation of beauty, that day I retire from politics. But you are gracious. He looked away, glanced dosely around room. I said, "Prof, quit checking for evidence, you dirty old man. Last night was politics, nothing but politics. 'That's not true!" Wyoh flared up. "I struged for hours! But he was too strong for me. Professor, what's the party discipline in such cases? Here in Luna Qty?" Prof tutt-tutted and rolled blank eye. "Manuel, I'm surprised. It's a serious matter, my dear. Elimination, usually. But it must be investigated. "He drugged me." "'Dragged,' dear lady. Let's not corrupt the language. Do you have bruises to show?" I said, "Eggs getting cold. Can't we eliminate me after breakfast? "An excellent thought," agreed Prof. "Manuel, could you spare your old teacher a liter of water to make himself more presentable?" "All you want, in there. Don't drag or you'll get what littlest pig got "Thank you, sir. He retired; were sounds of brushing and washing. Wyoh and I finished arranging table. " 'Bruises,  I said. "'Struged all night" "You deserved it, you insulted me. Howr "You failed to insidt me, that's how. After you dragged me here. "Mmm. Have to get Mike to analyze Uiat." "Michelle would understand it Mannie, may I change my mind and have a little piece of that ham? "Half is yours. Prof is semi-vegetarian." Prof came out and, while did not look his most debonair, was neat and clean, hair combed, dimples back and happy sparkle in eye -- fake cataract gone. "Prof, how do you do it?" "Long practice, Manuel; I've been in this business far longer than you young people. Just once, many years ago in Lima -- a lovely city -- I ventured to stroll on a fine day without such foreiiit... and k got me transported. What a beautiful table!" "Sit by me. Prof," Wyoh invited. "I don't want to sit by him. Rapist." "Look," I said, "first we eat, then we eliminate me. Prof, fill plate and tell what happened last night." "May I suggest a change in program? Manuel, the life of a conQ)irator is not an easy one and I learned before you were born not to mix provender and politics. Disturbs the gastric enzymes and leads to ulcers, the occupational disease oi the underground. Mmm! That fish smells good." "Fish?" "That pink salmon," Prof answered, pointing at ham. X A long, pleasant time later we reached coffeetea stage. Prof leaned back, sied and said, "Bolshoyeh spasebaw, Gospazha ee Gospodin. Tak for mat, it was wonderfully good. I don't know when I've felt more at peace with the world. Ah yes! Last evening -- I saw not too much of the proceedings because, just as you two were achieving an admirable retreat, I lived to fight another day. I bugged out Made it to the wings in one long flat dive. When I did venture to peek out, the party was over, most had left, and all yellow jackets were dead." (Note: Must correct this; I learned more later. When trouble started, as I was trying to get Wyoh through door. Prof produced a hand gun and, firing over heads, picked off three bodyguards at rear main door, including one wearing bull voice. How he smuggled weapon up to The Rock -- or managed to liberate it later -- I don't know. But Prof's shooting joined with Shorty's work to turn tables. Not one yellow jacket got out alive. Several people were burned and four were Idlled -- but knives, hands and heels finished it in seconds.) "Perhaps I ould say, 'All but one,' " Prof went on. "Two cossacks at the door through which you departed had been given quietus by our brave comrade Shorty Mkrum... and I am sorry to say that Shorty was lying across them, dying." "We knew." "So. Dulce et decorum. One guard in that doorway had a damaged face but was still moving; I gave his neck a treatment known in professional circles Earthside as the 'Istanbul twist. He joined his mates. By then most of the living had left. Just myself, our chairman of the evening Finn Nielsen, a comrade known as 'Mom,' that being what her husbands called her. I consulted with Comrade Finn and we bolted all doors. That left a cleaning job. Do you know the arrangements back stage there?" "Not me," I said. Wyoh shook head. "There is a kitchen and pantry, used for banquets. I suspect that Mom and famfly run a butcher shop for they disposed of bodies as fast as Finn and I carried them back, their speed limited only by tlie IF late which portions could be ground up and flushed into the city's doaca. The sight made me quite faint, so I spent time mopping in the hall. QoHung was the difficult part, especially those quasi-mihtary uniforms." "What did you do with those later guns?" P rof turned bland eyes on me. "Guns? Dear me, they must have disappeared. We removed everything of a personal nature from bodies of our departed comrades -- for relatives, for identification, for sentiment. Eventually we had everything tidy. Not a job that would fool Interpd but one as to make it seem unlikely that anydiing untoward had laken place. We conferred, agreed that it would be weM not to be seen soon, and left severally, myself by a pressure door doye the stage leading up to kvd six. Thereafter I tried to call you, Manuel, being worried about your safety and that of this dear lady." Prof bowed to Wyoh. "That completes the tale. I nt the ttigjht in quiet places." "Prof," I said, "those guaitb wero new drams, sdfl getting then legs. Or we wouldn't have won." 'That couk be," he agreed. "But had they not been, the outccraie would have been the same." "How so? Thoy were aimed." "Lad, have you ever seen a boxer dog? I think not -- no dogs that large in Luna. The boxer is a result of special selection. Gentle and intelligent, he turns instantly into deadly killer when occasion requires. "Here has been bred an even mcwe curious creature. I know of no city on Terra with as high standards of good manners and consideration for one's fellow man as here in Luna. By comparison, Terran dties -- I have known most major ones -- are barbaric. Yet the Loonie is as deadly as the boxer dog. Manuel, nine guards, no matter how armed, stood no chance against that pack. Our pation used bad judgment." "Um. Seen a morning paper, Prof? Or a video cast?" "The latter, yes." "Nothing in late news last night." "Nor this morning." "Odd," I said. "What's odd about k?" asked Wyoh. JVe won't talk -- and we have comrades in key places in every paper in Luna." Prof ook his head. "No, my dear. Not that simple. Censorship. Do you know how copy is set in our newspapers?" "Not exactly. It's done by machinery." "Here's what Iof means," I told her. "News is typed in editorial offices. Prom Ihm on iPi a leased service directed by a master ccMnputer at Authority Complex" -- hoped she woidd notice "master computer" rather than "Mflce" -- "copy prints out there via phone ckcuk. These rolls feed into a computer section which reads, sc copy, and prints out newspapm at several locations. Novylcn edkion of Daily Lunatic prints out in Novylen with changes in ads uid local stories, and computer makes changes from standard symbols, doesn't have to be told how. What Prof means is that at print-out at Authority Complex Warden could intervene. Same for aM news services, both off and to Luna. They funnel through computer room." "The point is," Prof went on, "the Warden could have killed the story. It's irrelevant whether he did. Or -- check me, Manuel; you know Fm hazy about machinery -- he could insert a story, too, no matter how many comrades we have in newspaper offices." "Sure," I agreed. "At Complex, anything can be added, cut, or changed." "And that, Senorita, is the weakness of our Cause. Communications. Those goons were not important. But crucially important is that it lay with the Warden, not with us, to decide whether the story should be told. To a revolutionist communications are a sine-qua-non." TTyoh looked at me and I could see synapses snapping. So I changed subject. "Prof, why get rid of bodies? Besides horrible job, was dangerous. Don't know how many bodyguards Warden has, but more could show wh#e you were doing it."Believe me, lad, we feared that. But although I was almost useless, it was my idefi, I had to convince the others. Oh, not my original idea but remembrance of ings past, an historical principle." What principle?" Terror! A man can face known danger. But the imknown frightens him. We disposed of those finks, teeth and toenails, to strike terror into their mates. Nor do I know how many effectives the Warden has, but I guarantee they are #cm effective today. Their mates went out on an easy mission. Nothing came back." Wyoh shivered. "It scares me, too. They won't be anxious to go inside a warren again. But, Professor, you say you don't know how many bodyguards the Warden keeps. The organization knows. Twenty-seven. If nine were killed, only eighteen are left. Perhaps it's time for a putsch. No?" "No," I answered. "Why not, Mannie? They'll never be weaker." "Not weak enough. Killed nine because they were crackers to walk in where we were. But if Warden stays home with guards around him -- Well, had enough shoulder-toshoulder noise last night." I turned to Prof. "But still Fm interested in fact -- if is -- that Warden now has only eighteen. You said Wyoh should not go to Hong Kong and I should not go home. But if he has only eighteen left, I wonder how much danger? Later, after he gets reinforcements -- but now, well, LCity has four main exks, plus many little ones. How many can they guard? What's to keep Wyoh from walking to Tube West, getting psuit, going home?" "She might," Prof agreed. "I think I must," Wyoh said. "I can't stay here forever. If I have to hide, I can do better in Hong Kong, where I know people." "You might get away with it, my dear. I doubt it. There were two IF yellow jackets at Tube Station West last night; I saw them. They may not be there now. Let's assume they are not. You go to the station -- disguised perhaps. You get your psuit and take a capsule to Beluthahatchie. As you climb out to take the bus to EndsviUe, you're arrested. Communications. No need to post a yellow jacket at the station; it is enough that someone sees you there. A phone call does the rest." "But you assumed that I was disguised." "Your height cannot be disguised and your pressure suit woidd be watched. By someone not suspected of any connection with the Warden. Most probably a comrade." Prof dimpled. "The trouble with conspiracies is that diey rot internally. When the number is as hi as four, chances are even that one is a spy." Wyoh said glumly, "You make it sound hopeless." "Not at aH, my dear. One chance in a thousand, perhaps." "I can't beHeve it. I dont believe it! Why, in the years I've been active we have gained members by the hundreds! We have organizations in all major cities. We have the people wiA us." Prof shook head. "Every new member made it that much more likely that you would be betrayed. Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done dumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily." Tyoh looked baffled. "What do you mean by 'correct organization?" "Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bath tub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed -- and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design. "So it is with revcution. Organization must be no larger flian neoeesary. Never recruit anyme merely because he wants to join. Nor seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views. HeH share them when the time comes... or youVe miiudged flie moment in history. Oh, there will be an educational organization but it must be separate; agitprop is no part of basic structure. "As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal -- since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented. "Much theorizing has gone into optimum cell size. I think that history shows that a cell of three is best. More than three can't agree on when to have dinner, much less when to strike. Manuel, you belong to a large family; do you vote on when to have dinner?" "Bog, no! Mum decides." "Ah." Prof took a pad from his pouch, began to sketch. "Here is a cells-of-three. If I were planning to take over Luna, I would start with us three. One would be opted as chairman. We wouldn't vote; choice would be obvious -- or we aren't the right three. We would know the next nine people, three cells... but each cell would know only one of us, "Looks like computer diagram -- a ternary logic." "Does it really? At the next level there are two ways of linking: This comrade, second level, knows his cell leader, his two cellmates, and on the third level he knows the #iree in his subcell. He may or may not know his cellmates' subcells. One method doubles security, the other doubles speed of repair if security is penetrated. Let's say he does not know his cellmates' subcells -- Manuel, how many can he betray? Don't say he won't; today they can brainwash any person, and starch and iron and use him. How many?" "Six," I answered. "His boss, two cellmates, three in subcell." "Seyen," Prof corrected, "he betoays himself, too. Which leaves even broken links on three levels to repair. How?" "I don't see how h can be," objected Wyoh. "You've got them so qdk it faHs to pieces." "Manuel? An exercise for the student." "Well... blokes down here have to have way to send message vip three levels. Don't have to know who, just have to know where, I answered. "Precisely!" "But, Prof," I went on, "there's a better way to rig it." "Really? Many revolutionary theorists have hammered this out, Manuel. I have such confidence in them that I'll offer you a wager -- at, say, ten to one." "Ought to take your money. Take same cells, arrange in open pyramid of tetrahedrons. Whert vertices are in common, each bloke knows one in adjoining cell -- knows how to send message to him, that's all he needs. Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net. It's why you can knock a hole in a man's head, take chunk of brain out, and not damage thinking much. Excess capacity, messages shunt around. He loses what was destroyed but goes on functioning." "Manuel," Prof said doubtfully, "could you draw a picture? It sounds good -- but it's so contrary to orthodox doctrine that I need to sec it." "Well... could do better with stereo drafting machine. But PIl try." (Anybody who thinks it's easy to sketch one hundred twenty-one tetrahedrons, a five-level open pyrar mid, clear enough to show relatioosh is invited to try!) IT P iresently I said, at baas sket. Each vertex of Iztangle shares sdif with zefo, one, or two other triangles. Where shares one that's ks link, one direcdoo or both. But one is enough for a tmMpli-redundant communioatioQ net. On comers, where sharing is aero. It jum to ri to next comer. Whm sharing is double, choice is again right-handed. "Now work k with people. Talos fourth level, D-for-dog. This vertex is comrade Dan. No, let's go down one to show three levels of commusication knocked out -- levd foreasy and pick Comrade Egbert "Egbert works under Donakl, has cellmates Edward and Ekoer, has three under him, Frank, Fred, and Fatso... but knows how to send message to Ezra on his own level but not in his celL He doesn't know Ezra's name, face, address, or anything -- but has a way, hone number probably, to readi Ezra in emergency. "Now watch it work. Casimir, level three, rinks out and betrays Charlie and Cox in hb cell. Baker above him, and Donald, Dan, and Dick in subccU -- whkii isolates Egbert, Edward, and Ekner, and everybody under them. "All three report it -- redundancy, necessary to any communicaitioa system -- but follow Egberts yell for help. He calls Ezra. But Ezra is under Charlie and is isdated, too. No matter, Ezra rdays both messages through his safety link, Edmund. Bf bad luck Edmund is under Cox, so he also passes k laterally, through Bnwrit... and that gets k past bumed-out part and it goes up through Dover, Chambers, and Beeswax, to Adam, front office... who rallies down other side of pynmdd, with lateral pass on E-forBasy level from Esther to Egbert and on to Ezra and Edmund. These two messages, up and down, not ockf get dirough at once but in way ihtj get through, they define to home (rfrice exactly how much damage has been done and where. Organization not only keeps func ticking but starts repaking self at once. Wyoh was tracing out lines, convincing herself k would work -- which k would, was "idiot" circuit and could produce a better, safer, more foolproof hookup. And probably -- certainly -- ways to avoid betrayal while speeding up routings. But I'm not a computer. Prof was staring with blank expression. "What's trouble?" I said. "Ml "Mamiel my b -- Excuse me: Senor O'Kelly... wkl you head this revolution? Me? Great Bog, nyetl I'm no lost-cause martyr. Just Mking about chcuHs. Wyoh looked up. "Mamue, she said soberly, opted, it's settled.IF  Sktrt Story, He was the most loyal man on Earth -- and in that lay the seeds of his treachery! N ov. #, im #:# A. M. He got out of the cab, paid the driver, and stood staring up at the Society's regional h.q. It's clifflike face loomed skyward. In his own mind it loomed even larger, more massively graceful, more sleek and subtly forbidding. There! he thought. Wasn't that a disloyal thought? He bit his lip, adjusted the hang of his topcoat, and chose one of the dozen glass swing doors Outside, rain had threatened. In the vaulted lobby an alive silken texture to the air defied the elements and proclaimed the superior efficiency of man. There was a sense of arriving -- of suddenly finding oneself in the eye of a hurricane, while outside madness whirled about the calm of certainty. He saw a modest portrait of the Founder. A plaque reminded him that the society had been established "for the Preservation of National Ideals and the Rights of Citizens." He started for the directory when He paused to straighten his coat before obeying. They kept him waiting two seconds, barely long enough to notice the beautiful enlargement of the Second Bill of Rights in its illuminated frame on the wall behind the desk. When the girl appeared before him he had the distinct sensation that she had materialized there bethe next. Her severely dressed black hair was pulled back from a face of gray# beauty. He saw glowing ivory skin, arched eyebrows. Her high-necked dress surpassed the most rigid puritanical standards of concealment and yet, by some subtle stratagem oi line and texture, some complement of color and bodily contour, conveyed a degree of sexuality more disturbing than commercial exposure. He managed a look of quick contempt and wondered, briefly forgetting his own concerns, how she kept her job. "May I help you?" "It's a fitness matter. A Security matter." "Do you wish to file an informer report?" "No! That is... yes." "Your name, please." "Brown. James Cranston Brown." He added his address and Social Responsibility number. She typed quickly, eyes downcast. A teletype keyboard set into the desk below his angle of vision made soft, barely audible sounds. "And the name of the person you wish to report, Mr. Brown?" "Uh, yes," he said. "It's... Brown. James Cranston Brown. Myself." For the tiniest fraction of a second her fingers hesitated over the keyboard. #:# AM. Within five minutes Brown's file was on Hagen's desk on the fortylecond floor. "You're sure he's not on the Psych List?" Hagen asked. "If he were his file would show it," his secretary said. "It doesn't, but I checked anyway." "Okay," Hagen said after a pause. "Fll buzz you when I'm ready for him." She returned to the outer office. He picked up his phone and dialed an extension. "Dr. Stillman." "Hi, Ted," Hagen said'. "Fve someone I want you to look at. He just filed an informer report against himself." "Against himself? "That's what I said." "Fll be right over." Hagen hung up, chewing thoughtfully on a thumbnail. He would have to wait for Stillman before reaching for the buzzer that would send in the interviewee. His phone hummed. "Hagen." "Hello, Hagen, this is Arnold," the Regional Chairman boomed in his ear. "Hear you picked up a new wrinkle." "This fellow Brown? Reporting himself?" "So it's true, is it?" "It's true, chief. He's a professor of history at the University of California." "Fll be damned. Of course, the colleges are still hotbeds of cryptopinks, but... D'you suppose it could be part of a Conspiracy gambit to discredit the Society?" "It's possible." "Anyway, this is one I want to be kept posted on. Fair enough?" "Sure, chief." Hagen replaced the phone. A tiny light glowed suddenly on the bank beside it, telling him that the psychiatrist was installed in the observation room behind the one-way window. #:# AM. 'This is Mr. Hagen, of our Executive Branch," the secretary said. "Mr. Brown." From across the desk a squareshouldered man regarded him with quiet, probing eyes. Brown shuddered inwardly. They were the eyes of his own conscience. "Have a seat," Hagen said. He obeyed, taking the lone chair that sat squarely in front of the desk. He crossed his knees, clasped his hands. He squeezed them. "I don't suppose I have to remind you," Hagen said almost absently, "that we have no connection wiA any level of government. We're an independent patriotic service agency. It's our job to investigate, advise and educate." Brown nodded, waiting. And Hagen said, putting his elbows on the desk and leaning forward comfortably, "Now what's all this about, Mr. Brown?" Brown said simply, "I'm a loyal citizen." Hagen studied him oddly for a long moment. "I should hope so." He sat back. "Especially since you're a professor of history. That's a job we rate Sensitive-A, so of course we've investigated you. As we have quite a few other people. I have your file here." He tapped the narrow microfilm container on his desk with a blunt fingertip. "We know more about you and your associations than a squad of detecdves could tell you in ten years." Brown's tongue flicked over lips. He nodded again. "Don't you think," Hagen asked mildly, "that we have enough information about you to decide for ourselves?" "I... Not necessarily. You cant tell," Brown explained with a hint of desperation, "what's going on in a man's mind." "What's been going on in yours?" "Uh, nothing. But I know what I feel, and I don't feel -- well, loyal." Hagen gave him another long look. "Let's look at it this way," he went on reasonably. "As a history professor, I don't suppose you have any doubt that a conspiracy against our way of life does exist?" "Of course -- " he had to clear hit throat -- "of course not." "Nor that its agents have been in substantial control of our government for most of the Twentieth Century, and haven't yet been entirely weeded out?" "No! No, of course not." "What have you done to further this conspiracy?" For a sickening moment Brown was at a loss for words. "Why... nothing!" "Did you oppose adoption of the Second Bill of Rights?" His mouth still open. Brown could only shake his head. "Have you mental reservations about the Second Bill of Rights?" The head shake continued. "Don't you approve of the Society?" IF Sweat had broken out of his face. Brown felt the beads rolling, tasted their salt. "Because after all," Hagen said, "disapproval of the Society is no kss than disapproval of the national ideals it was set up to always precrve." Brown's nervousness reached its crisis. For a shadow of eternity he could neither breathe nor think. Then there was a lurch and a sharp clap against his eardrums and his heart began a frantic clamoring rush to catch up with time and he almost shouted, "No, wait! I approve! I do! You don't understand!" Now Hagen waited for him to collect himself. "Maybe I don't, Mr. Brown." He leaned back in his chair, smiled, crossed his legs, and pointed to the microfilm container. "But your last fitness evaluation gives you a double-A rating." Struggling to control inward horror, Brown fumbled for a handkerchief to mop his face and neck. Hagen went on pleasantly, "Say a student monitor in one of your classes reports you for historical deviation. You'd be re-rated before you could blink. Meantime, though... even the Regional Chairman's only a double-A." Brown sighed raggedly and shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket. "It makes no difference." He had control over his voice again. "I'm a teacher. In that capacity I have at least some responsibility for ray students' civil liberties. Article Two of the Second Bill. 'Every citizen, regardless of racial, religious, or economic background, is guaranteed freedom from seditious, false and heretical doctrines which, by their nature, interfere with the highest intellectual functions, and therefore are inimical to intellectual freedom. Remember I teach a Sensitive subject. And now... I don't know. About myself, I mean. God knows what I might try to put over. I can't place it, I can't pin it down, but I know I'm... guilty." "Without having done anything?" Hagen said. #:# PM. Wrily, Dr. Stillman scratched the bridge of his nose. The tests were done, the apparatus had been disconnected, and he had sent the results to Psych Stat for processing. Brown, in his shirt sleeves and without his tie, tried to relax in a deep leather chair. He lit a cigarette. "Now," Stillman said, pushing an ashtray across the desk towards him, "what the devil made you report yourself?" Brown scraped a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. "Didn't your tests tell you?" "The tests still have to be evaluated." Stillman smiled. He had a genuine, disarming smile. It revealed his basic good nature and concealed a gnawing doubt. "Suppose you tell me what sort of classified information you have access to." Brown started, paled visibly, then drew hungrily on his cigarette. "Yes. That. Well, I have top clearance for my professional rank. I not only teach, I serve in the preparation of text books for advanced study. That means research m restricted source material. My head, consequently, contains a detailed catalogue of socio-historic error. "But the works necessary, isnt it?" "Oh, indeed yes. Most histories written prior to # were rabid with unescoism. "It sounds like a big responsibility." "Well, yes." 'Trying to run away from it?" "Why should I? It's my job. I enjoy it. And I've never shirked responsibility. Otherwise I wouldn't be here." "It's not quite that simple, you know," Stillman said without force. "You may be channeling some minor neurosis into worry about your loyalty. Brown shook his head. "No." "Then why suddenly decide you were a risk?" "Not suddenly. Gradually." "Either way." "I found I had a guilty conscience." "What about?" Stillman waited. Brown ground out his cigarette with sudden violence. "You're the expert on involuntary guilt reactions, doctor." Stillman said helpfully, "Blushing. Stammering. That kind of thing." "That kind of thing. With some people it's sex. With me it's Security." Stillman gave his wry, friendly smile. "Western Civilization instills a negative attitude toward sex, Mr. Brown. No one can escape his sexuality, no matt how mudi lie might want to. Once our anti-sex standard is accepted, everyone has a basis for guilt -- the sex drive itself. But we don't have an innate physiological treason drive." "Exactly!" Brown said. "So consider my situation. In a Sensitive job. Unable to hear the worxis spoken -- his voice became a rattle --  "Security, loyalty, fitness, risk. -- He lit another cigarette. The smoke climbed raggedly. "How about that, doctor?" "A sign of disturbance, yes." "I tried to explain it away. Nothing worked. Could I in fact be wrong about myself? Had I, without knowing it, been contaminated by the very intellectual errors I was supposed to be exposing? Was  t tool of the Conspiracy?" Stillman scratched the bridge of his nose. "But doesn't the idea still suggest neurosis, Mr. Brown? I mean," ho went on quickly to forestall an outburst, "if you've really been... let's say unconsciously seduced into error, a conflict exists in your unconscious and... "God damn it, doctor," Brown interrupted, "I can't take chances with a headful of dangerous thoughts that caused untold damage once and might do so again. There's a risk involved." "Perhaps," Stillman agreed placatingly, "but don't you think...?" "Can you take chances? You, doctor? No, you can't." Brown slammed the desk top between them. His IF face glistened. He said passionately, "I had to report myself, don't you see? I may never teach again but I had to do it. Because I'm a loyal American." Stillman's phone hummed. He excused himself. "Dr. Stillman." "Hi, doc. This is Bauer at Psych Stat. We've got the Brown test results. Want 'em right away?" "Please," Stillman said. "Classic case," Bauer said enthusiastically. "Guilty as hell." #:# PM. Entering Stillman's office, Hagen found the psychiatrist staring abstractedly out of the lone window. "Okay," Hagen said. "What's the trouble?" Stillman flipped open the Psych Stat folder that lay on his desk. "Look at this." His face had lost its friendly look. "First the Standard Security Test -- associative, projective, the works, with polygraphic correlations. All the wrong answers. The responses have guilt in every line. Then I gave him the Enright General Adjustment Profile to get an over-all picture of the personality and make sure we didn't have a simple crank on our hands. All the right answers. Sane as a summer day." "There's no chance he's a Conspiracy plant to discredit our procedure?" "No." With a sigh of relief, Hagen dropped into the big leather chair Brown had sat in earlier. He could redstamp Brown on the basis of the tests alone and no Committee of Review in the country would take five minutes to uphold his judgment. He settled himself comfortably. "Well, that's fairly conclusive, Ted. I mean if the man's normal, he isn't attributing his guilt feeling to disloyalty to hide from their true origin. Of course, it means that otir surveillance and monitoring systems have broken down, since We don't have any derogatory information oa him, but..." "No," Stillman said. "What?" "The man isn't normal." "Isn't...? Now, wait a minute," Hagen interrupted himself impatiently. "You can't disregard the Enright on the basis of a hunch. It's standardized and accepted." "And it's good and conclusive. But not this time. And maybe never again." He took a chart from the folder. "Look at that tabulation. Well-balanced. Intelligent. Good semantic orientation. The only thing that keeps him from being a paragon of Enright normalcy is a tinge of anxiety that falls within the statistical norm anyway." "Anxiety neurosis?" "Catchword," Stillman snapped. "Anxiety about what? Money? Sex? Rejection? Any of the usual disturbances? No. That's what the Enright's for -- to spot those quirks and point to their origin. In this case it points to nothing. In other words, it points to something the test wasn't built to handle. Play back those tapes and it'll stand out a mile." "It will?" Hagen said cautiously. "The Standard Security Test reveals consciousness of guilt. Neither you nor Brown can find anything for him to feel guilty about. Still Brown won't concede that his guilt feelings may be a symptom of neurosis. The best he can do, paradoxically, is trace them to a supposed -- a supposed, mind you -- unconscious sense of unreliability about a headful of dangerous ideas he's carrying around with him. If he's right, it means he has an unconscious urge to use that knowledge wrongly, which is sick. If he's wrong, then we still haven't explained his guilt feelings, so he's still sick." "So?" "So his neurosis is Security. Not the way the psych books use the word. Capital S Security. And don't look for symbolism. He's a sick man." Hagen's first response was blank amazement. It died abruptly and a small cold knot of doubt replaced it. He paused to fish out a cigarette and light it, frowning. "You can't throw out the Enright results just on a hunch." "Enright never heard of a Security syndrome." Stillman had dropped into the swivel chair behind his desk. His narrow face looked earnestly across its width. "Compare it with the traditional sense of sin, with the whole moral orientation based on a sense of personal evil and the need for redemption." "You mean Brown has a neurotic conviction of sinfulness? Of having sinned against national security?" "Of innate sinfulness," Stillman corrected, "divorced from objective fact." Hagen allowed lii wofiy to Asm on his face. Maybe Stillman had been working too hard, he thought hopefully. Or was he jumping to conclusions, misunderstanding what Stillman was frying to tell him? "Suppose," he said slowly, "suppose Brown's historical researches actually did move him toward intellectual or in spite of himself. Mightn't his unconscious give warning by means of these guilt feelings? It seems to me that would mark him as a well-balanced and loyal individual, conscious of his weaknesses and anxious to avoid doing harm through them." "Except for one thing," Stillman said. "Yes?" Tffis irrational behavior. His selfdestructive behavior." "Now wait a minute," Hagen said again, sharply this time. "Clinically," Hagen insisted, "we have to regard the act of filing an informer report against himself as a punitive, self-destructive act. He doesn't simply want to remove himsdf from a position where he might do harm, he wants to be punished for a harm he hasn't committed. He knows he'll never teach again if you red-stamp him." "Clinically," Hagen said, the word a meaningless metallic sound in his ears. He sighed, deeply, and studied the burning tip of his cigarette. "Be careful, Ted. Before you say anything else, stop and think the impIic:tions through. From my viewpoint." IP "I have, rvc tried to explain.' "I know what you've tried to exfdain. But think, Ted. Does it matter?" He looked up at Stillman now. MatterT Stillman said after a blank pause. "Of course it matters. First, there's the question of aetiology. Are his guilty reactions really based on unconscious agreement with proscribed opinions? Or has the jM'essure of conformity produced a counter-urge to non-conformity? In cither case, the man is sick, and what he needs is help, not punishment." "No one's going to punish him." Hagen said, loudly enough to cut Stillman off. "Only a court can do that. We're not a court, we're a service organization. All we do is advise. The point is that a man so unbalanced as to imagine himself treasonous is by that fact unbalanced enough to be irresponsible and dangerous." "All right!" Stillman snapped. The point I'm trying to make..." 'There isn't any other point." Stillman's face was bleak and tense. A stranger's face, rigid with antagonism. He had one chance to redeem himself. Instead he said, "Even if we're responsible? Even if we're doing it to them?" Suspicion metamorphosed into certainty. Hagen felt as though a gulf had opened beneath him... The entering wedge, he thought moments later as shdek and loss began to give way before the demands of discipline and conviction. Right out of every book and pamphlet the Founder ever wrote thirty, thirty-five years ago. A counter-urge to non-conformity... What did that mean? A manifestation of unfitness that ought to be somehow ignored, forgiven? And how far could you take that kind of reasoning? Soon you'd be trapped in an endless downward spiral of sentimental soft-hearted nonsense in which no one could be held responsible for anything, and the Society might just as well never have been dreamed of. It was precisely this kind of thing that had once provided a field day for the bleeding hearts and the do-gooders, blurring the moral fibre of the nation, softening it up for the Conspiracy. But it wouldn't happen again. The country had the Society to protect it now. Hagen ground out his cigarette. "The Society wasn't intended to be a free health clinic." He got to his feet. There were things to do, ramifications he was only beginning to appreciate. Stillman sat stiffly behind the desk. His face was frozen and incredibly accusing, which goaded Hagen to a spurt of anger. "No one's going to let American security fall into the hands of a bunch of clinical psychiatric theorists." Slowly, the psychiatrist raised a hand to his face, scratched the narrow bridge of his nose. Equally slowly he lowered the hand to its former position. He waited. He might not have moved. Hagen turned abruptly and strode jlo the door. As he was about to I open it Stillman said from his desk: I "Are we going to make neurosis i unconstitutional, like public housing?" #:# PM, Hagen gave Brown the good news, signed the slip and set the wheels in motion. Then he took the elevator to the forty-third floor. The Regional Chairman was free and gave him a hearty welcome. His dark paneled office smelled of leather and good tobacco. "This man Brown," Arnold said. "You had one of the Psych staff examine him, I suppose?" "Of course, chief. The Standard Security Test was positive. The Enright showed a normal personality." "And he actually reported himself? Now that's loyalty for you!" Arnold shook his head in baffled admiration. "It's a gratifying index of our educational penetration, isn't H?" "I think we're doing the job assigned us, chief. Perhaps even better than we'd hoped. According to Dr. Stillman, Brown turned himself in for seditious inclinations that existed only in his unconscious mind." Arnold was impressed. "This... this is difficult for me to say," Hagen went on. "I've been a friend of Ted Stillman's for a good many years. But, well, the Brown case upset him pretty badly. He seems to feel there's something wrong about invading a man's unconscious and moving against disloyalty in that precinct." Arnold stared. "Doesn't he realize that disloyalty has to be rooted out wherever it s found?" Hagen didn't answer. Arnold was silent a long time. "You never know where it's going to strike next," he said, almost to himself. "It's like a damned mutant virus. You haven't reported this through channels, have you?" "Not yet. I thought you might want to give the matter especially discreet handling. I think we're going to have to re-investigate medical ethics and the ideological implications of psychiatric theory." "Of course," Arnold said. "Well, let's get on with it." #:# PM. Brown left the Executive offices in a daze. Once in the corridor he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, his one emotion heartstopping relief. It was over. Over! He was free. The paper in his hand proved it. James Cranston Brown: This is your notice of Fitness reclassification. It is believed that your employment in any position rated Sensitive or higher would not be in the best interests of the United States, you have five (#) days in which to appeal this finding. Examining officer: Wm. B. Hagen. #-#-# He had done it. He had a vision of his name streaking along wires. Of circuits snapping shut. Of an immense shuffling and reshuffling of data. Of microfilm strips, punch-coded cards, IP Special Christmas Gift Rates # Issues  # H # Issues # Add #.CX) for eoch (# Issues) for foreign subscriptions # # Issues # # Issues # Add # for each (# Issuos) for foreign subscriptions NoTJoMlUlIm #c D # Issues # f # Issues # Add #X# for ooch (# Itiuot) for foreign subscrtpHons # Issues of Each # -- # In All # Issues of Each # -- # In All Add # for egch (# tssuos) for foreign subscription Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions to be sent in accordance with the offers indicoted in each case below: niFT rAon fpom   enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the U, S. Give the gift you would like to receive Permit No. # Sec #, P.LR. Naw York. N. V. No postage stomp necessary if mailed in the United States the secret recesses of electronic intelligence. There was a humming sound that was steady as the voice of God, an even glow, the unrelen:ing rattle of teletype reception. A-D-V-I-S-O-R-Y. Red stamp. He flowed through the wires and the channels, the filaments and nerves and synapses of the Society's great consciousness. Weariness, strain had drained from him. He felt suddenly younger -- younger than he had ever felt. A surging in his blood built to a heady euphoria. He was purged. He was clean. He moved away from the wall, walking slowly down the passage to the elevators. He rode down fortytwo floors without knowledge of passing time. "Main floor." He was in the vaulted lobby, mysterious with its whisper of activity. Information desk ## glided toward him. He reached out with arms spread in an attitude of possession, felt the cool texture of the desk beneath his palms. "May I help you?" Of course, he thought. That's why I came back here. He looked at the smooth ivory skin, the deep impersonal eyes, the flagrant prim nudity of the girl in the high-necked dress. "I did it," he said quietly. "I proved it. I'm a Security risL" There was an instantaneous flicker of recognition in the deep eyes. A slight intake of breath. A barely detectable widening of the chiseled nostrils. "A loyal citizen." He stood back, watching her. It was important that she understand. Intuitively he knew that she did. He thought, poor girl, why go through the agony of indirection? Go right up and tell them. They'll believe you. And you can't hide from your own conscience. "Good-by," he said. He stood a moment longer, looking up and around to savor the triumph and certainty of his surroundings. Now he was part of them, and would never be the same again. He pushed his way through one of the glass swing doors, stepped out onto the sidewalk. The rain was soft. An aerocab buzzed overhead. Taxis swerved and honked. Pedestrians waited under umbrellas at the intersection. People hurried along the sidewalks. If only they knew, he thought. If only they knew. Turning to look up at the sandy cliff-faced building, feeling the rain descending on his face like a benediction, Mr. Brown smiled... While inside, her fingers light and fervent on the teletype keys, the girl in the high-necked dress took his unspoken advice and reportIF  Short Story He was a friend of the famUy. Naturally he brought toys for the children -- but what toys! T he locomotive, with flashing eye, roared out of the tunnel in the hill and rushed along the curving track. Halfway through the long bend, the speeding engine suddenly trembled and swayed. Then, within a few noisy seconds, most of the train separated from the rails, coaches ramming each other, sliding and slamming together over and around the engine. The locomotive died with a scream of steam, blotting out with its ferocious shhushh all the other screams... The child jumped up and down with sudden exhilaration and looked at the wreck. "Daddy, Daddy!" she said. "It's crashed!" Her father, Frank Curtis, stopped talking with the insurance salesman and stepped back from the other end of the living room. The salesman, stiff and motionless, watched the father put the toy cars back on die tracks.  "If you're going to wreck your toys, well, all right then, Debbie," Frank Curtis said. "But can't you remember we have a guest? Can't you wait later to play rough?" He adjusted the silk ribbon in her hair. "Be a good girl for Daddy, dear." The father straightened up and looked into the smooth, impassive face of the salesman. "Nothing broken, Mr. Black, Frank Curtis said. "She's an unusual child," Mr. Black said. 'T mean, girls don't play with toy trains ordinarily." "Well, she is unusual, Mr. Black," the father said. "She likes all the stuff that girls play with, too." "Was this hers, also, sir?" Mr. Black asked. He tipped his head toward the book shelf near where they stood. As Frank Curtis was nodding his head in reply, the salesman reached out and caressed the broken body of a model commercial airliner. "You saw the picture in the paper?" the father asked. "Oh, I did, yes." The man quickly drew his hand away. "It was a tragic accident." "Tragic?" Frank Curtis looked and sounded puzzled. "I think it can be mended. She broke it weeks after they took her picture with it..." That picture," Mr. Black said sharply, his dark eyes dropping their gaze swiftly to the floor and then back to the six-year-old girl sitting on the sofa. She looked back at him serenely. "She's an attractive child, takes a wonderful picture." He was speaking rapidly. "Yes, I saw her picture -- with that airplane, of course -- in the local paper. It was a nice story, about a little girl who likes boys toys as much as girls'. Yes, I read about her." Frank Curtis hesitated a moment, then said, "Oh," and smiled. Mr. Black continued. "Yes, I read about her. I read a lot, I keep up with things." He stopped abruptly and then added: "You must be proud of your daughter, Mr. Curtis, very proud." The father responded with a warm grin, a bit modest. "Yes, when I read that article, even though it was brief, I felt I knew Debbie. And I wanted to do something for her." The salesman squeezed the other man's shoulder. "I'm so anxious to make you one of our clients, Mr. Curtis, that I'm going to give you a deal you simj can't afford to turn down." I t was just such a deal and Frank Curtis did not turn it down. That was why Mr. Black returned the following month on the first regular collection call. With him he brought a doll for the little girl. She was really appreciative, even if her father did have to remind her to thank the nice man, and she took it up on the couch with, her to play. "They tell me you're a new man," Frank Curtis said, "but a good one." Mr. Black raised his heavy black eyebrows in honest surprise. "Oh, you checked up on me? That was the right thing to do." He paused for a moment, as if making a decision, then added, "I'm a veteran. I had many years service -- demolitionist." TTie smile stayed warm and frank. "I find my new work even more exciting -- and more satisfying, of course, because of its humanitarianism." Mr. Black picked up his red-andblack plaid cap and as he was leaving, said to Debbie, Tt's a very special doll, you know, honey." He hesitated before adding, casually, "I mean, it's practically unbreakable." Debbie's father looked startled, his mouth opening and closing silently. On the following monthly visit when Mr. Black came, he said to her, while her father was getting his check book, "I'm sorry your dolly lost its arm." She crawled under the sofa and brought out the doll; it was in a sorry state, dirty and ragged, nearly bald, its left arm gone, exposing the hollow shoulder socket. "Thank you, I'm sure," the little girl said, looking up with wide soft eyes. "How did you know?" Mr. Black avoided her stare and then Mr. Curtis came in and saw the doll. "It's a shame," Frank Curtis said. "I'd hoped we'd keep it a secret from you." He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, it shouldn't be any surprise." "It's quite all right, sir. It was only a cheap doll and it's served its purpose." "You know," the father said slowly, "those grown-up dolls -- I can't get used to them. The obvious maturity..." He picked up the toy and examined it carefully. "Why," he said, genuinely surprised, "I think it has real hair!" He put the doll on the bookcase shelf. "I hope my daughter isn't just plain vicious." "Oh, no! She's just completely human, I assure you." Mr. Black sighed. "She's mischievous, but really quite innocent." F or the first time Frank Curtis seemed to sense something behind Mr. Black's speech. "You seem to know more about my child than I do." Mr. Black's stare was fixed on the floor. "I generalize, of course. All children have two natures -- one is primeval,, selfish and savage, the other is moral, unselfish and civilized Children who are still innocent express themselves either way -- sometimes both ways simultaneously." He lifted his head and looked Frank Curtis deep in the eyes. The gaze, unlike the charged and forceful speech, was cool and calm. "Forget about the doll," Mr. Black said. He put his right hand in his pocket and pulled out a small package. "Here's something for her train. I made them for a nephew years ago, but unfortunately he died and I saved them to give to someone else some day." He began to unwrap the package. "Really, Mr. Black, you're more than kind, but all this, gift-giving..." "This is nothing, believe me. It's more a personal thing than a present." He opened the package. Inside were a number of narrow strips of paper. Frank Curtis examined them. They were all gummed on one side and had the names of some famous railroads printed on them. A few In answer to the bewildered look, the salesman said: "It's very simple, sir. I thought my nephew's trains would look more real with these glued over the brand name. I thought you might let me fasten them on Debbie's trains..." For one of those rare times, the two men looked each other squarely in the face. Frank Curtis chewed on the inside of his cheek for several moments. "Why should I?" Mr. Black said wistfully, but persuasively, "I loved my nephew very much -- it's something I wanted to do for him." He made a little, pensive "hmmph" in his throat. "Children like to associate toys with real things. That's all." Debbie's father shook his head, IP frowning. "It sounds foolish. Why should a grown man like you think of such a thing?" "What would you have me think of? A new style doll, its pleasure measured by its expensiveness? A costly garment, to be outgrown quickly with fashionable waste? A pretty picture book, beautifully, scientifically and heartlessly manufactured?" Mr. Black said this utterly without a trace of bitterness and the smile on his face was overwhelmingly disarming. "The small things often become the important things, the cherished things... And I loved my nephew!" Frank Curtis said, "You're a real salesman!" There was a touch of awe in his admiration. So Mr. Black, with Mr. Curtis help, changed the name of the train. Afterwards they decided to run the train a few times, just to see how it looked. I t went around the track several times without incident and then Mr. Black bent down and said softly to Debbie: "Can you make it run faster?" The locomotive, with flashing eye, roared out of the tunnel... Mr. Black towered above the layout, his feet planted on either side of the cardboard tunnel... and rushed along the curving track... The father started to say, "It's going too fast..." The speeding engine trembled... swayed... Mr. Black's face was expressionless and colorless and he picked up his plaid cap in preparation for leaving... The train separated from the rails... "Ooops, off the track," Mr. Black said in a small voice, strolling toward the door. "Thank you for everything... The locomotive died with a scream of steam, blotting out with its ferocious shhushh all other screams. The following month both the incident and the real tragedy were barely mentioned. "A terrible coincidence," said Frank Curtis to his caller, which is precisely what he had said to himself when he had picked up the next day's newspaper and saw the headline. Now no reminder remained, for the paper names on the train had soon dried up and peeled away. Mr. Black had another present for Debbie, but her father, more out of a reflex of custom, rather than a subconscious nervousness, was unmagnificently persuasive. He finally got an agreement after he said that he was going away and promised that this present would be the absolute end. Mr. Curtis opened the box and looked inside. What was it Mr. Black had said, Debbie was just mischievous, just human? The gift was an exquisite glass globe reproduction of the Earth. It looked quite fragile, so Frank Curtis put it on the shelf for when Debbie would be older and could Vi IF  Novelette There's nothing strange about a railroad -- unless, like this one, it's in the wrong century! I T he human race being what it is, men on the verge of making major discoveries are often preoccupied with the most minor of matters. Take Lieutenant George St. George of the International Pastpolice, for example, when he rode into the valley of Lianour on that sixth-century morning in May. Mere moments after the Anachronism Department timeship had deposited him on the valley's eastern slope he had developed an irksome itch just beneath his right shoulder blade, and so absorbed was he in trying to relieve it he hardly knew where he was at. It was as hot as Hades inside his iron suit, even with the visor op and to add to his woes the valley was abuzz with bees, any one of which might momentarily mistake his helmet for a hive. Aside from this, there was much to be said in the valley's favor. It was broad and green, and patterned with stands of oaks and beeches. The wild-flower footprints of spring were scattered everywhere -- over meadows, along fields, through woods. It was the sort of setting that idylls are born of, although you couldn't prove it by St. George. He was trying for the tenth time to rub his back against the backwall of his hauberk when three knights rode out of a nearby stand of oaks and came charging toward him like a trio of hammered-down locomotives. "Brace yourself, Herodotus," he said to his rohorse. "We may have to joust." H is rohorse didn't say anything. Rohorses were made to be seen and not heard. They were also made to do aU sorts of other things -- things real horses couldn't even begin to do. So St. George wasn't worried. He needn't have been in any case. None of the three approaching knights had his spear dressed or his visor closed, and as they neared him they reined their mounts and covered the remaining distance at a much more modest pace. The one in the lead, except for his helmet -- which, like those of his two companions and that of St. George, looked like the upper section of a #-gallon hot water tank -- was clad completely in chain mail. His trousers and shirt were made of the stuff, and hanging from his shoulders all the way to his ankles was a magnificent chain-mail ulster. The effect was dazzling. The other two knights, like St. George, were outfitted in much more orthodox armor -- breastplates, pauldrons, gorgets, greaves, cuisses and sollerets -- although in St. George's case the material was of twenty-first century vintage. "I hight Sir Ulfin du Bois," Chain Mail said, as the trio clanked to a halt directly in St. George's path. "My place is nigh the Siege Perilous at the Round Table of King Arthur." He indicated first the knight on his left and then the one on his right. "They hight Sir Guy de Gloomis and Sir Bagdemagus le Savage, the which also abideth in the next vale. We seeketh the dragon of Lianour, in order that we may slay it and bring its depredations to an end." "I hight Sir George le Vainquer, said St. George, who had boned up on medieval English before departing for the past, as he brought Herodotus to a halt. I hail from Nottis, the which is far to the north, and journey through this country to the sea, whereon I would make voyage. Except for his armor, Sir Ulfin didn't look particularly formidable. Little could be seen of his face through his open visor, but what could be seen revealed him to be a well-fed man in his early forties with mild blue eyes and a wispy blond moustache. What little could be seen of the other two knights' faces revealed Sir Guy and Sir Bagdemagus to be a couple of overgrown kids. "Would ye joust with us or would ye accompany us and partake of our adventure?" the latter asked. As a sporting proposition, the offer left much to be desired. However, it in no way interfered with "Sir" George's plans. The anachronism he'd come back in time to correct existed somewhere within a thirty-mile radius of the spot where the timeship had deposited him, so it made no difference which direction he traveled in provided he didn't exceed the radius. So why not accompany the three knights? Two of them -- Sir Guy and Sir Bagdemagus -- lived in the next valley and might very well be on speaking terms with the mistake in the chronological order of things he'd come back to set aright. So he said, "Sithen ye have need of my spear, I will accompany ye." A s the quartet rode over the idyllic meadows and through the idyllic woods, it came gradually to light via small talk that Sir Ulfin du Bois had set out in quest of the Holy Grail some time ago and had only recently arrived in this part of "Logris". Yesterday he had met Sirs Guy and' Bagdemagus and so great had been their admiration for his armor (they said) he'd promised to get them suits just like it -- as he'd already done for a number of other knights of Gloomis -- from the very armor-maker who had created his own ensemble, and for a most modest price. He'd also agreed to help them slay the dragon of Lianour. The inhabitants of Lianour consisted of freemen turned farmer, shopkeeper, sheepherder and smithy. And freemen turned farmer, shopkeeper, sheepherder and smithy -- it went without saying -- didn't know beans about dragons and wouldn't have known how to go about slaying one if they had. Hence, outside assistance was urgently needed. The dragon in question had put in its appearance less than a week ago, and "sithen", it had been making daily excursions over the Lianour landscape, terrorizing sheep, cows, damsels and little children. It was an unusually large and ferocious member of the species, which explained why Sirs Guy and Bagdemagiis had considered it the better part of valor not to attempt the slaying act by themselves. The dragon was unusual in other respects, too. In its belly it carried a damsel whom it had devoured some time ago but who -- miraculously -- was still "on live", plus a large number of farmers, shopkeepers, sheepherders and smithies, whom it had also devoured some time ago and who -- also miraculously -- were still "on live". In addition to these unique features, it had an uncommonly tough skin, even for a dragon, and no longer than day before yesterday Sir Bagdemagus le Savage, in venturing in close and smiting it on the flank, had put a big dent in his second-best sword. To all of this, Lt. George St. George listened with a somewhat cynical ear. He'd heard talk of dragons in many a time period, but he had IP never seen one and never expected to. Moreover, there was no doubt in his mind but what Sir Guy's and Bagdemagus' version would turn out to be a deer or a boar or some similar unoffending and helpless animal, which the three dauntless knights would skewer on their spears and chop to pieces with their swords and then hie themselves either to Sir Guy's or Sir Bagdemagus' hearthside and extol their prowess over countless cups of mead. Or perhaps it would turn out to be nothing but thin air -- an eventuality that would neither stop Sir Ulfin du Bois from seeing it or from bragging about the deed afterward. When a knight made up his mind he was going to help slay a dragon, no power on earth could stop him. St. George's cynicism didn't in the least abate when Sir Bagdemagus, who had ridden on ahead, called back that he'd spotted the dragon's footprints. Certainly, our hero reflected, anyone who could see a dragon oughtn't to have any trouble seeing its footprints. But as matters turned out, St. George was able to see the footprints too. As a matter of fact, they were as plain as day. Only in his vocabulary there was a different term for them. Namely, "narrow-gauge railroad tracks". They came over a distant rise, just as pretty as you pleased, and disappeared into a distant woods, and they had been painstakingly pounded out of wrought iron. Shades of Casey Jones! No wonder the anachronism detector had thrown an electronic fit when Bates of Temporal Computations had accidentally tuned in southwestern England, circa # A.D. -- a placetime wherewhen no anachronisms were supposed to exist I U A fter the discovery of the "footprints", St. George expected the "dragon" itself to besomething of an anticlimax. But such did not prove to be the case. He heard the whistle first. Tweettweet! It went. Tweet-tweet-tweet! So help him, it did. Next, he saw the smoke. It was unquestionably wood smoke, it was shot liberally with sparks, and it trailed up into the blue sixth-century sky as though smoke coming out of a locomotive smokestack was as common a phenomenon in the days of King Arthur as it was -- would be -- in the days of King George V. Next, he heard the engine. Chuga-lug, chug-a-lug, k went. Chug-alug, chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug! Finally he saw the locomotive itself. And he'd be damned if, in conjunction with its wood-car and its two coaches, it didnt look like a dragon! Enough like one, in any case, to satisfy a sixth-century knight. Compared to the hyper-Diesels of St. George's day and age it was of course little more than a child's toy. In both design and principles it was much like the Stourbridge Lion of #, which made it about as technically advanced a job as a pastime operator working with existent materials and employing local labor would have been able to come up with. What lent maximum strength to the dragon illusion were the two outside connecting rods that propelled the driving wheels. They looked for all the world like a pair of ungainly legs, and pumping furiously up and down as they were, they gave the impression that the "dragon" was running -- or charging, if you preferred. In addition to the driving wheels, there were the two wheels they were coupled to. This gave the "dragon" four front "feet". Tbe intermediate and the rear "feet" were provided by the wood-car and the two coaches. The wood-car looked like a stream-lined Roman chariot and the two coaches brought to mind a pair of Toonerville Trolleys. An outside flue curled up over the face-plate of the boiler connecting the firebox to the base of the five# foot high smokestack. Even St. George had no trouble identifying it as a "nose". The "eyes" were two big bolts to which two supporting rods were attached. There was no mouth, but it was no trick at all to imagine the face-plate lifting up to engorge intended victims. The boiler consisted of three wrought-iron sections overlapping each other and CTudely welded together. The engine's cab, of course, constituted the forward section of the "belly". In it, just as Sirs Guy and Bagdemagus had said, was a damsel, "the which was still on live". And the coaches, of course, constituted the rear section of the belly. In them sat a number of farmers, shopkeepers, sheepherders and smithies, "the which were also still on live." IP As for the damsel, not only was she still "on live", she was running the "dragonmotive". S t. George perceived these things catch-as-catch-can, for no sooner did the little train come into sight than he charged it together with his three companions. Jousting with a dragonmotive was anything but his idea of a good time, but he knew that if he didn't pull his own weight, so to speak, he'd lose face in the eyes of Sirs Ulfin, Guy and Bagdemagus, and that would never do. So, spear dressed and visor closed, he bore down on the approaching "monster" as furiously as they did, and when he reached it he veered in sharply and dealt it a glancing blow with his spear. Then he guided his rohorse alongside and began beating the boiler plating with his sword -- not hard enough to do any damage but hard enough to make a lot of noise. Sirs Guy and Bagdemagus, believing the encounter to be on the level, charged in at right angles and struck the dragonmotive's "flank" with the impetus of two battering rams. But the wrought-iron plating had about as much resilience as a stone wall, and both were catapaulted over their horses' croups at the moment of impact. Poor Sir Guy landed with a loud clank! and poor Sir Bagdemagus with an even louder clunk! Sir Ulfin du Bois was more fortunate. He, too, pounded in at right angles, but his spear broke when it struck home, enabling him to remain seated. He joined St. George and helped him beat the boiler plating. While they were thus engaged, St. George glanced up through the slits in his visor at the engineeress. Casey Jones, he thought. No, not Casey -- Casianna, She had dark-brown hair and the wind was blowing it and her eyes were like the sky over Camelot and there was a beauty mark on her right cheek about one inch from the corner of her mouth. The look she gave him back put him on a par with a dog chasing a mail truck. Whoever was feeding the firebox was beyond his line of vision. Was it her husband? he wondered. And which twenty-first century country did she hail from? Judging from her features, she was a member of one of the Nordic races, but of course she could have had theiti altered. T he height of the roadbed put the cab beyond his reach, which perhaps was a good thing. Otherwise, in his eagerness to board the train, he might have tried to do it the hard way and have broken his neck. Armor, even the lightweight variety that encased him, wasn't conducive to acrobatics. What bugged him most was why a pastimer in his or her right mind would want to start up a railroad m ancient England. Granted, the local freemen had apparently conquered their fear of the little train, even if the local aristocracy hadn't; but how much profit could possibly accrue from transporting handfuls of farmers, shopkeepers, sheepherders and smithies, all of whom were probably as poor as churchmice, from point A to point B? He could understand why a male pastimer would go back to the past and peddle plastic jewel cases to rich-bitches like Nefertite, Cleopatra and Zenobia for fantastic sums of gold (Anachronism Department Case No. #-B; Correcting Detective: and he could see why a female pastimer would go back to the past and sell oral contraceptives on the streets of ancient Babylon (Anachronism Department Case No.#-R; Correcting Detective: Lt. Geo. St the days of King Arthur? Preposterous! Preposterous or not, he had one on his hands. m T he speed of the little train was some # mph -- a modest enough velocity and one which a horse, under ordinary circumstances, would have no trouble maintaining. But consider a horse weighed down with armor plating and an armorplated knight. Such a horse is not going to run # mph very long. St. George's rohorse, of course, was made of sterner stuff, and could have maintained the pace all day long; but Sir Ulfin's steed, while ostensibly no different in makeup, was already losing ground. So St. George encephalopathed Herodotus to keep pace with its less fortunate brother, simultaneously allaying whatever potential suspicions Casianna Jones might be entertaining and paving the way to an opportunity to board the train. IF Sir Ulfin raised his visor. "Wit ye well, Sir George," he shouted above the jingling of his chain mail, the clanking of our hero's armor, and the chug-a-lug-lugging of the dragonmotive, "this be a parlous fiend the which cannot be fordone unholpen! I will depart me from hence with Sir Guy and Sir Bagdemagus and we will gather many brave and noble knights to partake of this adventure!" St. George raised his visor. "Haste ye then, Sir Ulfin," he shouted, "and I shall abide thy again-coming!" They were abreast of the rear coach by this time. St. George dropped his sword belt and threw away his spear and his shield and guided Herodotus in closer. A little wooden ladder led to the roof, and after psyche-programming the rohorse to follow the train at a discreet distance until otherwise "advised", he grasped the middle rungs of the ladder and lifted himself from the saddle. Startled freemen regarded his exploit through the paneless windows, stared as he climbed the rungs to the roof. Once there, he rolled over on his back and sat up. Sir Ulfin and Herodotus were dropping rapidly behind. "Wit ye well," shouted' the former, "that anon I returneth to Camelot the noble knights of the Round Table shall wot of this great deed thou hast accomplished, and wit ye well that..." His voice was drowned out by the chug-a-lug-lugging of the dragonmotive. St. George waved good-by, and began taking his armor off. He removed his helmet first and threw it into a blackberry thicket. Next came his gorget and his hauberk. These he tossed into a little stream that the coach was passing at the moment. Before proceeding further, he scratched his back. He gave a long and luxurious sigh. He slipped out of his cuisses and his greaves and heaved them into a meadow. Finally hekicked off his sollerets. They clattered off the coach roof, tumbled to the tracks, and disappeared from sight. He lay on his back and breathed deeplv of the warm-cool wind. No more iron suits for him! Having had the foresight to wear the garb of a freeman beneath his armor, he was now one with the passengers of the train. He'd even let his hair grow long, so there was no problem there. He sat up and let it blow in the wind. Only court fools wore their hair short in this day and age. There was, of course, the problem of shoes. But he'd worn heavy socks beneath his sollerets, and they would do till better footwear came along. Getting to his feet and adjusting himself to the lurching of the coach, he began making his way forward. It was weird in a way. Here was he, an inhabitant of the twenty-first century, walking the cars of a sixthcentury train like a twentieth-century bindlestiff.But no weirder, he supposed, than some of his other pastime experiences. Take the time during the first Memphite dynasty, for example, when he'd visited all the Memphis granaries and collected the myriad mousetraps an unscrupulous pastimer had sold to the Pharaoh's grain-master (Anachronism Department Case No. #-C; Correcting Detective: Lt. Geo. St. crept into the premises of No. I Inner Temple Lane in the dead of night and confiscated the batterypowered tape-recorder another unscrupulous pastimer had sold to Dr. Samuel Johnson (Anachronism Department Case No. #N; Correcting Detective: Lt. Geo. St. George; tled the Gatling gun still another unscrupulous pastimer had sold to Datis and Artaphernes, the joint commanders of the Persian Expeditionary Force, just before the Battle of Marathon. en you came right down to it, all anachronisms brought about by pastimers in their constant effort to exploit the past were weird, and invariably when you involved yourself in them in order to correct them they became weirder yet. There were some schools of thought that said they shouldn't be corrected. Anachronisms -- both artificial and natural -- such schools maintained, were a part of the normal order of things, and were their presence to influence the present status quo (which was highly unlikely), the resultant change was bound to be for the better. But the International Temporal Council was inclined to regard a bird in the hand as being worth two in a bush, and while its members readily admitted that things could be far better, they had the good sense to realize that things could be far worse, and were practical enough to take the necessary steps to keep them the way they were. H e had reached the wood-car by this time, and could see down into the cab. Casianna Jones was still at the throttle and her darkbrown hair was still blowing in the wind. The firebox was open and an old man was carrying wood from the wood pile to the aperture and replenishing the flames. He looked as though he was on his last legs, and his legs looked as though they were on their last mile. St. George couldn't believe his eyes. Old men didn't go in for pastiming -- at least not on an active basis. At best, looting the past was a perilous profession, and nine times out of ten in the twenty-first century when a man passed the seventy mark he was content to retire to the viewing room and live the rest of his life vicariously via #V. He wouldn't dream of firing a boiler. Indeed, chances were he wouldn't even know what a boiler was. Well this old man knew. And moreover he was firing one. St. George thought he had the answer. You didn't build a railroad overnight, even under ideal circumstances. Building one in the sixth century, even a small job such as this one, would take years. Probably the old man had begun the project ten or twelve years ago when he was relatively young. As for Casianna Jones, she was probably his daughter, whom he had brought along for company and eventually turned into an engineer. St. George debated on whether to IP arrest both of them on the spot, escort them to the timeship zone and put in a call via time-wave radio for transportation back to the present. He decided against it. There might be others in on the deal, and besides, he had to put the dragonmotive out of commission before leaving the scene just in case the "natives" might try to run it themselves. For that matter, there might be other dragonmotives in operation, and these would have to be taken care of too. So he donned his best boy-scout smile and climbed down into the wood-car to help the old man. The old man stared at him. St. George returned the gaze. The old man had rheumy eyes, a long nose, a straggly goatee and matted gray hair. His cheeks were pink with networks of capillaries and he smelled like the bottom of a mead barrel. St. George picked up an armful of wood, carried it into the cab and threw it into the firebox. This time, it was Casianna Jones's turn to stare at him. She did so. However, if she recognized him as one of the knights who a few moments ago had been harassing the engine she gave no sign. "Prithee, kind sir," she said, "say me how thou earnest aboard the oxenless oxcart and what thy name is." The language of the lower classes (which she undoubtedly was aping) left much to be desired, but at least it was somewhat less stilted than that of the aristocracy. He replied in kind: "I hight George, the which came on board but a short while ago. What are ye hight, damsel?" "I hight Rebecca L'Ouvertures." A t this juncture, the old man came into the cab, flavoring the hot and acrid air with the odor of stale mead, and joined the conversation. "I hight Lionel the armor maker," he announced, "the which is uncle to the damsel beside ye." He peered into St. George's eyes. "Are ye not afraid of the oxenlfess oxcart?" He was playing his role as flawlessly as his niece was playing hers -- if she was his niece. But pastimers were almost always excellent actors. They had to be. St. George, as we have already seen, was no slouch himself. "Yea, I am much afraid of it, old man," said he, "but my good sense tells me that which is made of iron cannot be on live and that therefore there can be naught to be afraid of." "Are ye of Lianour?" Our hero shook his head. "I journeyed south from Camelot, whence I was driven by a surly landowner the which desired the wretched strip of land bestowed upon me by his father. I have neither herborow nor the wherewithal with which to obtain it. So destitute am I of worldly goods that I was forced to board the oxenless oxcart secretly and without your leave. By your leave, I will pay you in the only way I am able -- by feeding the fire." "Ye wish lodging?" This time, it was Casianna Jones who spoke. "By my troth, fair damsel." "Then ye shall have it," said Lionel the armor-maker, " -- an ye ride each day on the oxenless oxcart and feed the fire." "Yea," said Casianna Jones. "Ye shall live with us and share our meager fare and free mine uncle for tasks more becoming to one of his calling." Nothing was said about wages, but that was all right. St. George had obtained what he'd set out to obtain -- an opportunity to investigate the pastime operation more fully -- and had procured a position that would enable him to put the dragonmotive out of commission virtually any time he chose to do so. Besides, in this day and age the term "wages" -- at least insofar as it would some day be understood -- didn't even exist. The train was approaching a handful of hovels, shops and pigsties. Uncle Lionel got a sheepskin bag out of a box in the corner of the cab and prepared to step down from the dragonmotive to greet a pair of trembling passengers who were waiting by the roadbed. Casianna Jones blew the whistle. Tweet! Tweet! She pulled back on the throttle. Chug-a-lug, went the dragonmotive. Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, chug... a lug... chug... a... IV D uring the remainder of the run Uncle Lionel acquainted St George with the finer points of firemanship. St. George, whose main ambition as a child had been to become an engineer on a hyper-Diesel, was enchanted. True, this quaint little woodbumer was a far cry from a hyper-Diesel; nevertheless, it had one beat seventy different ways from Sunday, for, like all massproduced vehicles, hyper-Diesels had about as much character as a tube of toothpaste. The dragonmotive, on the other hand, had character galore. You had to know its whims and its ways and cater to them, and if you didn't, it simply wouldn't co-operate. There were no dials or gauges of any kind, and everything had to be done by guess and by golly, and you never knew from one minute to the next whether (#) the train was going to tip over, (#) the boiler was going to blow up or (#) the wheels were going to leave the track. Unfortunately, the roadbed had character too. The rails had been laid in six-foot lengths and, far from being true to begin with, were rendered even more erratic by improperly machined tie plates and the uneven contraction and expansion of the individual sections. In addition, many of the crossties had already been settled and needed to be replaced, and none of the curves was adequately banked. Sometimes the little engine swayed, sometimes it bumped up and down, sometimes it jerked. Most of the time it did all three at once. "Water towers" had been pswMdcd at regular intervals for the dragonmotive to slake its thirst These were natural springs located on abrupt hillsides. Their water was "piped" into trestle-supported sluices that could be "turned on and off by means of small floodgates. St George found them almost as enchanting as the dragonmotive. ir For the most part, the villages that the little train serviced were like the first one he'd seen -- handfuls of hovels, shops and pigsties. He learned subsequently that there were nine of them altogether. Their inhabitants, plus the operators of the small vegetable and sheep farms scattered over the countryside, constituted the train's only passengers. He received the definite impression that most of them were riding the coaches for kicks rather than from any need to travel from point A to point B; but at least they were riding them, which was more than you could say for the local leisure class as represented by Sirs Guy and Bagdemagus. At first thought, it seemed that the opposite should have been the case -- that the nobility, rather than the peasantry, would have accepted the dragonmotive for what it was and that the latter would have been the ones to interpret it along superstitious lines. But not on second thought. Like all primitive peasants, the inhabitants of Lianour believed in monsters galore; but they worked from dawn to dusk and had little time for initiating legends and even less for playing games, and as a result their imaginations, for want of exercise, were flabby. Consequently, they saw things pretty much as things really were, whether they wanted to or not. The nobility, on the other hand, had all the time in the world to initiate legends and to play games As a matter of fact, that was just about all they did. And since basically they weren't one whit less ignorant than the peasantry, they saw only what they wanted to see. Equally essential to their "advenlieve one another's lines. It had actually become a convention. If Sir So  So said he had seen a dragon. Sir What's His Name would say he had seen one too -- and devoutly believe he was telling the truth. C asianna Jones seemed to sense St. George's thoughts, for she voiced the subject aloud. "Sithen" going into the transportation business, she said, she and her uncle had been harassed almost daily, both by members of the local knighthood and by wandering knights searching for the Sangreal. Fortunately, none of either species had ever tried to break one of the engine's "legs" -- an act that, were it ever carried out successfully, would result in the engine's derailment and in all probability agitate the fire in the firebox to such an extent that the boiler would blow up. And fortunately none of them had ever thought to direct his attack against the coaches, which, along with the "legs", constituted the train's most vulnerable areas. Should the former eventuality come to pass, it would spell the end of the little railroad, because none of the employees was capable of making the necessary repairs without supervision, and the mead Uncle Lionel was forced to drink daily to maintain his health had had an adverse effect on his mechanical prowess, reducing him to jelly when it came to effecting even a minor repair job. (All of which put him pretty much on a par with St. George who, sad to relate, was a hopeless dud when it came to accomplishing anything more mechanically complicated than screwing a nut on a bolt.) Casianna took an even dimmer view of knight-errants than our hero did. "La! such children," she said. "Were it not for men like mine uncle Lionel they would not even have armor to wear. Were it not for men like my cousin Alfred of Gloomis they would not even have weapons to carry. And were it not for men like my cousin Charles, the which doth raise sheep in this valley, they would not even have garments to put upon their backs or meat to put into their mouths. They can do nothing for themselves -- it must be done for them. And now they would joust with the oxenless oxcart, the which mine uncle Lionel and my grandfather, who became aweary a twelve-month ago and died, spent many years a-building!" St. George looked at her. She returned his gaze without batting an eye. When it came to playing a pastpart, Casianna Jones didn't have to take a back seat for anybody. He looked at Uncle Lionel. The old man was doing all right too, only he was only partly playing a part. He'd got a jug of mead from somewhere and was leaning against the wall, chug-a-lugging at regular intervals. The railroad, by twentyfirst century standards, wasn't very much to write home about, but just the same it was difficult to understand how a twenty-first century lush had managed to build it. "Mead makes mine Uncle Lionel come on live," Casianna Jones said, seemingly sensing St. George's puzzlement but ascribing it to the wrong cause. "Were it not for the great draughts he takes upon arising and upon retiring and the little draughts he takes in between, he would not have the strength wherewith to carry out his tasks." St. George had to admit that it was a pretty good sixth-century explanation. But naturally it threw no light on the real cause of his puzzlement. Maybe Uncle Lionel had only recently become a lush. It was unusual, granted, but not unheard of; and certainly it was no worse than becoming a #V addict and cementing one's backside to a viewchair for the duration of one's twilight years. V T he little train had entered a large woods, and presently Casianna Jones brought it to a halt on the outskirts of a village considerably larger than any of the others St. George had seen. Most of the passengers had got off by this time; now the rest of them did, and this, together with the fact that no more got on and the day was very nearly done, tipped him off that the train was nearing the end of the line. Casianna threw the throttle forward, and the dragonmotive chug-ch lugged through the rest of the woods, emerged on a medium-sized plain, and headed for a hill the size of a small mountain. The rails stretched straight toward IF a wide opening at the hill's base, but before they reached it they joined -- or were joined by -- another set of rails that angled off obliquely to the north. It was, St. George realized, the same set of rails the train was traveling on now: the railroad simply circled the valley and returned to where it had started, and that was its entire extent -- unless the tunnel toward which the train was now heading passed all the way through the hill. It did not, although at first it gave every indication of doing so. Originally, it had been a horizontal mine shaft -- St. George saw that right away. Then, probably over a period of years, it had been extensively enlarged and skillfully and firmly shored with oak timbers. Undoubtedly it provided access to the very veins that had supplied the ore from which both the dragonmotive and the rails had been made. When daylight gave out, torches in wall brackets took over. The tunnel maintained a uniform width and height for about a hundred yards; then it doubled in width, providing room for a small siding. At this point, Casianna brought the train to a halt and Uncle Lionel, who had already doubled as conductor, now doubl as brakeman; got out, and threw a switch. When she pulled onto the siding, he uncoupled the coaches and threw a second switch, allowing the engine to go on, leaving the coaches behind. He followed on foot. A few moments later, the dragonmotive entered a huge natural cavern. The rails came to an end in the middle of the floor, and St. George, climbing down from the cab, saw that they were mounted on a large swivel so that the engine and the wood-car could be turned around and faced in the opposite direction. The coaches could en be recoupled from behind and the train could leave the tunnel on the next day's run and circle the valley in the opposite direction. Very clever, St. George thought. Very clever. But why should a pair of pastimers go to so much trouble just so they could lug a bunch of farmers, shopkeepers, sheepherders and smithies around a sixth-century countryside? A t its highest point, the cavern ceiling was about fifty feet above the floor. There was a goodsized opening in it that extended all the way to the surface of the hillside, after the manner of a flue. It looked as though it had been dug out by hand, and directly below it was a large forge, at which a number of men were at work shaping rails. Discounting a handful of fad daylight filtering down through the flue, the only illumination came from torches burning in wall bradcets, and what with their smoke and the fumes from the forge, the place had the aspect of a foundry during teeming time. On the other side of the tracks was a machine shop. Here, working at foot-pedal powered Rube Goldberg-like contritions that in some cases resembled lafiies, in others planers, and in others grinds, were still other men. Many at them were #S old, quite a number of them were middle-aged, and a few of them were young. St. George concluded that both they and the forgemen hailed from the village in the woods and that the railroad provided their sole source of employment and that in the case of the older men they had participated in its construction. After climbing down from the cab, Casianna Jones went over to where a large iron bell hung on a tripod, and struck it three times with a small sledge hammer. Immediately, the employees began making preparations to quit for the day. Laying aside the hammer, she beckoned to St. George, and when he joined her, led him through a small archway into a chamber that, partially at least, had been hollowed out of solid rock. It gave into three smaller chambers, contained a hearth, a crude wooden table, two crude wooden benches, and a crude wooden cupboard. She indicated one of the benches, and he sat down; then she went to the cupboard, got utensils and earthenware, and set three places at the table. She began to prepare supper. Supper turned out to be meat, mead and black bread. Like most pastimers, Casianna and Uncle Lionel ate, as well as lived and acted, the way the "Romans" did, St. George thought wistfully of the goodies in Herodotus' croup-compartment. Uncle Lionel came in when the meal was half over. He was drunker than a hoot owl, but not so drunk he couldn't help count the contents of the sheepskin bag when Casianna carried it to the table afterward. The contents turned out to be leircs -- a forerunner of the styca that up till now St. George hadn't known existed. There was a big pile of them, and the girl and the old man had to count them four times apiece before they were able to arrive at a common total. St. George stared at the coins. They were made of iron, no two of them were identical, and the outline of a lion that had been etched upon each of them bore even less resemblance to the king of beasts than the woolly mammoths Cro-Magnon man used to paint on cave walls bore to the woolly mammoth. Nevertheless, on the twenty-first century numismatics market they would bring No wonder Uncle Lionel and his niece had gone into the railroad business! What better way could you collect small coins than by hauling passengers for brief distances? True, diminutive as it was, the railroad still represented a vast undertaking; but how much of the actual work had the two pastimers done? None of it, St. George would bet. And he would also bet that they'd be doing none of the operational work now if their employees weren't afraid to go near the dragonmotivo when it was "on live". B ut they did more than merely operate the train, he discovered presently. Either the employees were as afraid to work at night as they were to fire and run the dragonmotive or Casianna andor Uncle Lionel didn't believe in paying overtime. In any event, supper didn't IP i#rS#iEQ,,'  V.', usher in the period of leisure St. George had been looking forward to. It ushered in more work instead. In Casianna's case, this consisted of cleaning the coaches; and in Uncle Lionel's case, checking the dragonmotive for loose fixtures and oiling its movable parts; and in St. George's (after Casianna supplied him with a pair of Uncle Lionel's shoes), splitting wood, three dozen cord of which were piled in one corner of the cavern for the next day's run He'd had jobs he liked far better, and he was glad when she came around some three hours later and told him it was time to go to bed. After she spread a pallet for him in one of the small chambers and said good night and left, he lay down and waited till he was sure both she and her uncle were asleep; then he got up, tiptoed out of tibe living quarters, entered the tunnel, and made his way toward the entrance. He was surprised, after passing the siding, to find his way barred by a portcullis, although acquainted as he was with the dragon-hunting obsession of the knighthood, he shouldn't have been. The portcullis was connected to a primitive winch, and it was the work of but a moment to raise the ponderous affair the few feet necessary to permit to crawl in under it. Stepping into the starlight a few minutes later, he encephalopathed Herodotus to join him, and when he saw the rohorse trotting toward him across the plain he went to meet it, mounted it, and redirected its footsteps toward the woods. After finding a suitable hiding place for it in an isolated glen, he psyche-programmed it to remain there till otherwise directed; then he dismounted and started back to the tunnel on foot. Just as he was leaving the glen he heard a crackling sound in the underbrush off to his right, and paused. He peered into the darkness, caught a brief glimpse of something gleaming in the starlight. But the phenomenon was not repeated, and strain his eyes as he would he could not see anything. Finally he concluded that his eyes had played a trick on him and that some small animal had been responsible for the crackling sound, and continued on his way. When he reached the tunnel, he crawled beneath the portcullis, lowered it, made his way back to the living quarters and lay back down on his pallet. It would be no trick at all for him to handle a young girl and an old lush. If he wanted to he could take both Casianna and Uncle Lionel into custody right now and, after putting the dragonmotive out of commission by blowing up its boiler, escort them to the timeshipstop, and notify IP Headquarters via timewave radio that he was ready to be picked up. He was reasonably certain that no one else was in on the deal. If there were he could always come back for them later. Why, then, didn't he get on the ball and wrap up the case without further ado? It was a good question, and one that he had trouble answering. Finally, though, the answer came: He wanted to ride in the little engine IF again -- to fire its boiler, to blow its whistle, if Casianna would let him and -- also if Casianna would let him -- sit behind the throttle and be the engineer. Tweet-tweet! the whistle went in his mind. Chug-a-lug, went the dragonmotive. Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug-lug-lug... VI M orning was at "six of the clock". Breakfast was black bread and mead -- for Casianna and St George, that is. For Uncle Lionel, it was just mead. The latter was left behind in charge of the shop, where the workday began at seven, and the little train left the tunnel at seven-thirty. The first stop was the village in the woods. Two passengers got on, and St. George, who was now conductor and brakeman as well as fireman, got the sheepskin bag and collected the fares. When the train was under motion again, he asked Casianna if he could run the engine, and she said he could. First she showed him how. To go ahead, you shoved the throttle forward; to slow down, you pulled it back; to stop, you pulled it all the way back and applied the brakes; and to back up, you threw a lever that reversed the position of the two drivingwheel rods. All the rest was a matter of judgment. She let him be the engineer for a whole hour, sitting beside him on the little bench that constituted the "driver's seat". He'd never had so much fun in his life. It wasn't working the throttle so much that intrigued him -- it was sitting by the window and watching the idyllic countryside drift by and seeing the dragonmotive's legs pump up and down. The little engine took a liking to him right away and responded to his every wish. Sometimes it varied its constant "conversation". When it was going up a hill, it said CYiJG-a-lug. And when it was going around a curve, it said Chug-chugchug-chug-CRJG ! Casianna Jones had packed a lunch. They ate while the dragonmotive was taking on water midway in the run. Black bread, meat and mead, of course. Sitting beside her on the cab steps with the water gurgling down the sluiceway above their heads and a wind from the south blowing her hair and crinkling the gay blue dress she had donned that morning, he couldn't help wishing that the railroad was on the up and up and that he could remain in the sixth century and go on being her fireman and part-time engineer forever. So persistent was the wish that it remained with him after the run was resumed, and he had to remind himself several times over that he was almost thirty and that thirtyyear old men had no business trying to fulfill childhood ambitions even under ideal circumstances, and that for him to try to fulfill his under the present circumstances would constitute a flagrant dereliction of duty. To make up for his apostasy, he asked Casianna to tell him how the little train had come into being, hoping to catch her in a slip of the tongue or a contradiction or two. He expected her to be reluctant to discuss the dragonmotive's history, but apparently she'd fabricated it beforehand. In any case, she plunged into it without further encouragement. t ccording to her, the railroad was the result of two discoveries -- one made by her grandfather and one by her Uncle Lionel -- and a number of ingenious devices invented by her father. Her grandfather had been a miner, and while still a young man had found out that the oxcarts he used to transport ore could be operated much more easily if planks were laid down for the wheels to roll on. Also a part-time armor-maker, he discovered that the carts functioned even more efficiently when the rims of the wheels and the surfaces of the planks were covered with strips of iron and more efficiently still when the plank-strips were raised and the wheel-strips were flanged. Coincidentally, Uncle Lionel, who was really Casianna's great uncle and who lived with his brother and his brother's family in a natural cavern just off the main mine shaft, #iscovered while brewing a batch of mead that steam imprisoned in a sealed kettle would, if properly directed and provided with the right apparatus, perform any number of laborious and irksome tasks. He began experimenting with larger and larger kettles and eventually came up with a boiler capable of generating sufficient power to turn a large wheel that, when provided with the right attachments, could swing a sledge hammer with twice the efficiency and thrice the power of "the strongest wroughtiron maker on live". From that moment on. Uncle Lionel's chores were ten times less onerous and consumed only a fraction of their former time. He utilized his new leisure to brew bigger and better batches of mead and to build bigger and better boilers. It was at this juncture that the notion occurred either to him or to Casianna's grandfather (both had claimed the distinction) that the boiler might be installed on the ore cart in such a way as to turn the wheels. Years passed before a workable drive was devised, but finally the forerunner of the dragonmotive was born. In the meantime, Casianna's father had been born, and it was he, in close association with the steampowered ore cart almost from infancy, who had conceived the idea of building a much more powerful locomotive and a system of rails over which it could pull passengercarrying coaches. He had invented and built the necessary machines and hired the necessary labor and, after obtaining the necessary land-rights from the freemen of Lianour, supervised the laying of the roadbed and the rails. Thirty years had already passed since Uncle Lionel and his brother had crossed discoveries; thirty more passed before Casianna's father got all of the bugs out of his project, during which time Casianna was born and during which time her IF mother, unhealthy to begin with, "died of a vapor". Three months ago, while widening the tunnel her father had been killed by a falling timber; but by that time the railroad had become a reality, and it had remained but for her and her Uncle Lionel to put the finishing touches on the engine and the coaches, and commence operations. F or a long while after she finished speaking, St. George didn't say anything. He couldn't. Why, she must take him for a simpleton to imagine he'd believe that a trio of sixth-century freemen could have accomplished in sixty years that which vould someday require centuries! He reminded himself that that was undoubtedly what she did take him for -- a sixth-century simpleton with a strong back and a weak mind. But it was a compliment to his prowess as an actor and provided some salve at least for the wound it had inflicted upon his ego. So he let on that he'd swallowed the whole story, and said simply, "It's time for me to feed the fire, fair damsel," and set about doing so. He was closing the firebox door some five minutes later, after adding several armloads of wood to the flames, when she cried, "There be many knights acoming, fair sir. Look!" He joined her at the window. Sure enough, at least a dozen wouldbe dragon-slayers were approaching on horseback across the fields. Every last one of them wore chain mail, and Sir Ulfin du Bois was in the lead. Sir Guy and Sir Bagdemagus were present too. St. George recognized them by their horses. "Whooo-eeee!" shouted Sir Guy. "Yeahhhhhhhh!" hollered Sir Bagdemagus. "We have come to rescue ye from the foul fiend the which hath devoured ye!" called Sir Ulfin. Down went their visors. Down went the visors of the rest of the knights. Spears were dressed and spurs applied; the charge began. "Oh, go on home and tend to your castles!" St. George said. But he didn't bother to shout, because he knew it wouldn't have done any good. Why, he wondered suddenly, didn't the damn fools wait till the train stopped at the next village and then attack? Surely they must realize that a "dragon" at rest was far more vulnerable than a "dragon" in motion. Was it because they knew instinctively that once the train stopped, the dragon-illusion would fall prey to reality? After all, when you came right down to it, all they were doing was playing games, and in their hearts they must be aware of the fact. S irs Guy and Bagdemagus reached the dragonmotive first, outdistancing Sir Ulfin, and gave a repeat performance of their over-the-croup act of the day before. Sir Ulfin broke another spear, again managing to remain seated, and withdrew his sword and once more began beating the boiler plating. The rest of the attackers fared the same as Sirs Guy and Bagdemagus had, and their chain mail jingled so loudly when they hit the ground it all but drowned out the chug-a-lugging of the engine. Clang! went Sir Ulfin's sword against the boiler plating, as St. George and Casianna Jones looked down at him in disgust. Clang! Clang! Clang! Then something unexpected happened: the right sleeve of Sir Ulfin's ulster became entangled with the connecting rod, his sword went flying, and he was yanked halfway out of his saddle. All that saved him from having his arm torn off was the defectiveness of the chain mail at the juncture of sleeve and shoulder. The sleeve came free and he managed to get his arm out of it just in time. He reined his steed then, and in a few moments the dragonmotive left him far behind, a sadder -- and, it was to be hoped -- a wiser man. At the next stop, St. George disentangled the sleeve and tossed it into the cab. Maybe Uncle Lionel could find some use for it. Come to think of it, though, Uncle Lionel wasn't going to be around long enough to find any use for it. Tonight, he and one Casianna Jones, or Rebecca L'Ouvertures, or whatever you cared to call her, were going to be taken into custody by one Lt. Geo. St. George of the Pastpolice, and escorted back to the present to answer a charge of "wHfuUy interfering with things-past". And the dragonmotive they had built to mulct leircs out of past persons was going to develop a violent case of heartburn and be blown to smithereens. St. George was sad throughout the remainder of the run. He hated to do what he had to do, but he simply couldn't put it off any longer. The dragonmotive seemed to sense his sadness. Chug-a-lug, it said. Chugchug-a-lug. Chug ,... chug ... chug... U ncle Lionel was drunker than two hoot owls when they arrived in the cavern. He was passing a jug of mead around to the employees and telling them in effect that if they worked hard and kept their noses clean, they, too, might someday become a railroad tycoon like himself. Casianna Jones put an end to the proceedings in a hurry. Confiscating the jug, she dismissed the men for the day; then, with St. George's help, she poured Uncle Lionel into bed. She looked tired, St. George noticed. Well, it wasn't any wonder. Running a railroad, virtually all by one's self was hard enough without having to play nursemaid to a drunk. She was so tired, in fact, that she announced after supper that she was going to skip cleaning the coaches and go right to bed. St. George, though, would have to split enough wood for tomorrow's run; also, if he got the chance, she wished he'd check the oxenless oxcart before turning in. He smiled ruefully after she said good night and entered her bed chamber. In a way, he felt sorry for her. But, being human, he felt far sorrier for himself as he got out the ax and set up the first block of IP wood. He wished he'd never come back to the sixth century -- had never seen the dragonmotive, or Casianna Jones either, for that matter. A man could want to do something all his life and not be able to do it and still not mind very much so long as he never accidentally got to do it. But once he did it once, everything changed. Then he wanted to go on doing it forever. It seemed to him that Fate, which was always cruel anyway, had been uncommonly cruel. Not only could he not do the thing he loved -- he must kill the thing he loved. When he had enough wood split, he loaded it into the woodcar. Then he threw an armful into the embers that remained in the firebox from the day's run. Little flames appeared; he fanned them till they grew to adulthood. He added more wood. The boiler still had water in it from the last "water tower". He added more from the hillside spring that the two pastimers had piped down into the cavern for hygienic and industrial purposes. Returning to the cab, he resumed building the fire. He hoped Casianna was a sound sleeper, as it would be much easier to take care of the dragonmotive first and then make his arrests. He wasn't worried about Uncle Lionel: nothing short of an earthquake could arouse him from his sodden slumber. The swivel had already been given a half-turn, and after St. George had built up sufficient pressure all he had to do was throw the two siding switches and drive the dragonmotive out of the tunnel. Midway between the tunnel's mouth and the woods, he brought the engine to a halt and began adding more wood to the fire. And more and more and more and more. All the stars were out, and Lianour slept peacefully beneath them. The plain glimmered palely in the long-gone night. The flames in the firebox grew. St. George felt awful. I t wouldn't have been so bad if the dragonmotive hadn't taken a liking to him right from the start and responded like a worshipful puppy to his every command. It wouldn't have been so bad either if it had looked like the Lancashire Witch or even The John Bull, instead of that most enchanting of all collector's items, the Stourbridge Lion. Nor would it have been so bad if the little engine had been a deadringer for the Stourbridge Lion and lacked, as a consequence, a uniqueness of its own. But the way matters stood, destroying it was like destroying the last-remaining Model T or the last-remaining Stanley Steamer. It was a crime against civilization. St. George sighed, threw a final armful of wood into the firebox. "I hate to do this to you, doll," he said, "but there isn't any other way." The dragonmotive rumbled deep in its "belly", and St. George prepared to depart. He reached for the firebox door, intending to close it -- realized just in time that the handle, owing to the greater than usual intensity of the fire, would be hot. He looked around for something to wrap around it, and his eyes alighted on the chain-mail sleeve he'd tossed into the cab that afternoon. He picked it up, noticing for the first time how light it was. Why, it was downright flimsy! No wonder it had pulled free. He was abput to wrap it around the handle when an inscription caught his eye. It had been engraved -- or stamped -- on one of the links midway between the cuff and the ragged edge where the sleeve had parted from the rest of the ulster, and it consisted of three words. English words. He stared at them in the glow of the fire. Made in Japan they said. The sleeve slipped from his fingers, jingled to the floor. He stood there, stunned. H e remembered the suits of chain mail the attacking knights had been wearing that afternoon. He remembered Sir Guy and Sir Bagdemagus saying how much they admired Sir Ulfin du Bois' chainmail ensemble and that he'd promised to procure similar suits for them from the very armor-maker who'd created his own, and for a most modest sum. Wholesale? He remembered the crackling sound he'd heard in the underbrush the night before when he was leaving the glen where he'd hidden Herodotus. He remembered the gleam he'd glimpsed in the darkness -- Starlight reflecting on chain mail? Sir Ulfin's? For damn sure he had a batch of suits cached somewhere. But if Sir Ulfin du Bois was a pastiming suit-salesman from the twenty-first century, then he was responsible for the anachronism the detector had picked up. And since the detector had registered only one anachronism, the dragonmotive wasn't a true anachronism after all. That being so, there was no need to eliminate it. In point of fact, eliminating it might adversely affect the very status quo St. George had come back in time to preserve. Frantically, he closed the flue and began to bank the fire. He still couldn't bring himself to believe that a trio of sixth-century freemen could have started from scratch and built a railroad in a time-span of sixty years, and even if he could have believed it, it still wouldn't have made sense, because if he hadn't removed the dragonmotive from the time stream, who had? to give the little engine the benefit of a doubt, and if he could catch Sir Ulfin du Bois with the goods, he would consider the case closed. After he finished banking the fire, he left the cab and started across the plain toward the woods. Maybe there was a cache and maybe there wasn't. If there was, he'd find it -- either tonight or tomorrow -- and when Sir Ulfin revisited it, he'd be there waiting for him. But assuming there was a cache and assuming that Sir Ulfin really was the culprit and hadn't been IF taken in by a pastimer himself in another part of "Logris" (where the anachronism would have shown up), how was it possible to accept the railroad as a bona fide anachronism? It simply wasn't possible. Wasn't it? Granted, Uncle Lionel was a lush now, but that didn't mean he'd always been one. He could have been a genius in his day, and so could Casianna's father and grandfather have been. And then, too, there was the consideration that two separate discoveries had been made coincidentally. Maybe that was the key. Separately, the discoveries might not have amounted to much; but combined, they could have amounted to a great deal. Each could have provided impetus for the other, and accelerated the development of the dragonmotive. S uppose Edison had had a brother whose inventive genius equalled his own? And suppose that the two men had made breakthroughs in two different fields simultaneously? Why, there was no telling what they might have come up with! Maybe it hadn't even been invented yet. Two heads were better than one, just as the truism maintained; but the truism didn't go far enough. Two good heads were infinitely better than one. And in the present instance, there had been three... Given the right conditions, the right minds, the right timing -- any thing was possible. Even a sixthcentury railroad. Nevertheless, St. George still didn't believe it. He was surprised, therefore, when -- shortly after entering the woods -- he saw a light shining in the darkness some several hundred yards to his left. In the direction of the glen. He began picking his way among the trees, and at length he came to a small clearing. He paused at the edge of it. Stared. A knight in shining armor was shining a pocket torch into a hollow tree. Beside the knight stood a horse. No, not a horse -- a rohorse. A product, St. George realized now, of Coming Next Month in EP Lead-off story in the January IF will be one of your favorites and ours, Poul Anderson. It's a long one, but complete In the issue: The Moonrakers. We saw Poul and his lovely wife, Karen, a few weeks ago in London, at what seemed to be the midpoint of an earnest attempt to visit most of the countries of Europe; they had been wandering through Scandinavia and the northern countries in general for about two months, and were about to explore the British Isles. So it may be a while before he gets back to writing again -- and meanwhile, we're pleased to have this one for you! Same issue: More of Robert Heinlein's fascinating The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress... another complete long one by Robert the same factory that had manufactured Herodotus. Its croup-lid was raised, and the knight was engaged in transferring objects from the hollow tree to the compartment -- objects that gleamed in the starlight and gave forth jingling sounds. St. George was indignant. The nerve of the man! Masquerading as a knight of the Round Table and pretending to joust with a "dragon" for the benefit of his customers and carrying on his activities within the time-space sphere of a true anachronism so that their emanations would be ascribed to the wrong cause! He'd spotted St. George right off the bat, for the simple reason that he'd been expecting him, and he'd been so cocksure of himself that he hadn't even bothered to move his cache even though it was right under St. George's nose! And if he hadn't lost his sleeve -- the telltale inscription on which he was undoubtedly unaware of -- he'd have got away with his subterfuge and have gone back to the present with enough leircs to have made him a rich man. He'd been so contemptuous of St. George's intelligence that even St. George's near discovery of him the night before hadn't fazed him, and he was so contemptuous of it tonight that even the distant chug-a#ugging of the dragonmotive failed to signal danger in his mind. St. George crept up behind him, applied a reverse choke-hold and found a jiujitsu pressure-point. "What's your real name, Sir Ulfin?" he asked. "Sir Ulfin" gave a start. Then he sighed. "Ulfie Woods," he said. "Come on," said our hero. "We're going for a ride." vin I t is a matter of record that shortly after Lt. George St. George turned Ulfie Woods over to the presentside authorities he resigned from the Pastpolice Force and that not long afterward he disappeared, never to be seen again. It is also a matter of record that the Anachronism Department wrote off his allusions in his report to a sixth-century railroad as sheer nonsense and didn't bother to investigate the matter. Hence, we will have to turn to a hitherto unpublished chapter of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d Arthur for the conclusion -- and the verification -- of our story. For some reason this chapter got left out of the Caxton and subsequent editions of the work, and only recently came to light. It follows verbatim: A tte last syr Ector de Maris  syr Bors cam to the cuntreye of Lianoure,  ther they sawe a dragonne the which had devoured a fayr damsel  a noble knyghte  som lackey es the which were sty I on lyve. Wyt thou wel, sayd syr Ector, that as I bee a tru knyghte of Kynge Arthur I wyl slaye me thys fyend  succore thys fayr damsel afore I tome ageyn unto myn own cuntreye, Wyt thou wel, sithen I bee in thy companye, the wyl not bee unhoU pen, sayd syr Bors,  the two knyghtes sette upon the dragonne  smote it soe fiercelye that they dyd brake theyr speares, whereupon IP syr Ector smote the fyend on the legge with hys sword ageyn  ageyn  atte last the legge brake in twayne. Then sawe syr Ector  syr Bors a mervaylous horse camming out of a woodes  they sawe the knighte climbe downe from the fyends bellye  sytte astryde the mervaylous stedcy then reched he uppe for the damsel the which fel into his arrnes in a swoun. Rydeth he than by the syde of the fyend  rechest he out  severest it in twayne  the parte of the fyend the which breathest smoke screemed  fel mortalye wounded on its side, fyre  vapoure camming out of its mouth, Wyt ye wel, cryed the brave knyghte to syr Ector  syr Bors, ye hav borought to an ende that which dyd gyve me great loye for mene yeares  I wold hav revynge, k soe fiercelye dyd he dress himselfe k sette upon them they were ryght grievouslye escaped. Wayt, sayd syr Bors. Thou bee a brave k noble knyghte indeed the which wold just unarmed ageynst two suche valyant knyghtes as syr Ector k my self e. Kynge Arthur hath need of suche as ye k ye must accompanye us to Camelot. Wyt thou wel, the kynge shal here of thy great deed, sayd syr Ector, k wyt thou wel thou wyl sytte atte hys ryghte hande. Therwith the knyghte thinketh on while, than he sayd, O wel, what hav I gotte to lose? But fyrst we must goo for myn uncle Lionel, the which abideth in the dragonnes denne. k soe departed they from hence and succored Lionel, the which was olde by an hundred yeares and much enchafed, than journeyed they to Camehi wher the damsel, the which was hyght Rebecca, and the knyghte, the which was hyght syr George, lywed happilye to the ende of theyr i Cccccc c 'K K 'K K 'K KK by Kerth Laumer by Philip K. Dick And beginning a new series by science fiction's favorite historion by Sam Moskowitz Jaaaa a     Vt IF  Short Story If seemed like a reasonable idea -- some dainties for the comfort of the astronauts -- S en. McDermott: Now, Mr. Hawkins, J want you to realize that this private hearing is not a trial, nor are you charged with any crime. Mr. Hawkins: Is that why you recommended I bring my lawyer? Sen. McDermott: I only made that recommendation because some topics or questions concerning legal matters may be brought to the attention of the committee. The purpose of this hearing is merely to investigate reports of rather unorthodox behavior... Mr. Hawkins: Ha! Sen. McDermott:... with regard one eighty-seven and one ninetythree. I would appreciate your frankness on the matter. Mr. Hawkins: Let me assure you, Senator, that I have no intentions of being secretive, nor have I ever had any. However, as Director of the National Space Agency, I felt it best that certain information about those two space stations be put on a security list for the best of all concerned. Sen. McDermott: Spoken like a politician -- you missed your calling, Mr. Hawkins. But tell me, this whole mess was your idea from the very start, wasn't it? Mr. Hawkins: Yes, it was. Sen. McDermott: And when did the idea first come to you? Mr. Hawkins: About a year ago. I was doing some research... -- Excerpt from official record (unpublished) Senate Special Investigatory Hearing October #, # T he kind of research Jess Hawkins was indulging in when the idea came to him may only be speculated upon. However, it is a fact that his friend, Bill Filmore, visited him in his office on September #, #. "Jess," he said, "I've known you for thirty-seven years, and when you go around grinning like a Cheshire cat, you're hiding something. That pixie smile of yours is a dead giveaway. As your best friend and a member of the Space Agency Board, I think I have a right to know what's up your sleeve." Hawkins looked at his friend. "All right, Bill, I guess I can trust you, but please keep all this in the strictest confidence. I believe Fve found a way to stimulate our astronauts' heart muscles while they're iods." "Why should you want to keep that a secret?" "Let me continue. We know that during sustained periods of freefall die heart tends to relax because it doesn't have to work as hard to pump the blood under weightless conditions. Upon return to Earth, however, the heart muscles have difficulty readjusting to normal standards. We've already had three astronauts who suffered heart attacks when they came back, and one of them was damn near fatal. The calisthenics program the doctors instituted seems to have had little effect. I think the time has come for drastic measures." "Just what is it that you propose?" "Think a minute. What is it that stimulates the heart, both literally and figuratively, is desirable enough for the men to use frequently, and is useful, besides, for improving morale aboard the satellite?" "I never was much good at riddles, Jess." "It can all be summed up in a common, everyday, three-letter word," Hawkins grinned. "Sex." Filmore stared a moment in silence, then said, "By God, Jess, I think you're really serious." The smile temporarily vanished from Hawkins' face. "You're damn right I am. Bill. We've been lucky so far, but there's going to be a dead astronaut around soon if something isn't done. I've given the matter a lot of thought, and I feel that shipping girls up to one eighty-seven is the best solution." "But from an economic standpoint alone -- " "That's why I'm hiring only European girls -- they're both cheaper and of better quality. I've already sent my aide, Wilbur Starling, over there to recruit some of their better English-speaking professionals. And what with air and water regeneration, cheap food concentrates, and the new atomic fuels, the cost of putting them up there and maintaining them is down to a ridiculous minimum." "But it's still a tidy sum. Where are you getting all the money?" "Oh, I appropriated it from the Astronauts' Widows and Dependents Fund," said Hawkins, the smile returning to his face. "That seemed the most likely place. I've also taken precautions, in case you were wondering, about keeping this affair a secret. As Director, I have the power to classify anything I want. Not even the President will know about it." "What about General Bullfat? He's hated your guts ever since you were appointed over him to head the Agency." "Bill, you worry too much. Bullfat has to look in the mirror every morning just to find his nose." "Practical objections aside, Jess," Filmore said desperately, "the whole idea is immoral. It's just not the sort of thing a government executive should do." "That is absolutely irrelevant. Morals don't matter where there are men's lives at stake." Filmore stood up. "Jess, if I can't talk you out of this ridiculous idea. I'll go find someone who can." "You wouldn't fink on a friend, would you?" Hawkins asked, hurt. "It's for your own good, Jess." He started for the door. "It's such a shame about you and Sylvia," Hawkins said quietly. Filmore stopped. "What about me and Sylvia?" "Busting up such a nice marriage after thirteen years together." "Sylvia and I are very happily married. We have no intentions of breaking up." "You mean you haven't told her about Gloria yet?" Filmore went slightly pale. "You know Gloria was only a momentary fling, Jess! You wouldn't dare -- " "Fink on a friend? Of course not. Bill. It's just that I have this annoying habit of inadvertently blurting out the wrong thing at the wrong time. But be that as it may, don't you think we ought to sit down and discuss the situation a little more?" A s she was getting dressed again, Wilbur Starling asked her, "Babette, may I have a talk with you?" Babette looked at her watch. "You will 'ave to pay for anozzer hour," she warned. "Your thinking is too narrow," Starling said. "You've got your wholo life ahead of you. Instead of just worrying about your next hour, you should think of all the hours you have left." "Please! Zey are enough taken one at a time." "Don't you want security in your old age, a good home -- " Mon DieUy anozzer iparriage proposal!" "No, no, Babette honey, you don't understand. You see, I represent tha United States government -- " "I know your consul very well," she said helpfully. "That's not what I meant. My your services in a special capacity." "What must I do?" Starling's face flushed ever so slightly. "Well, uh, the same thing you've been doing, only up in space." "Space?" "Yes, you know. Like satellites, around the world, Shepard, Glenn, Hammond." He made little whirring motions with his fingers. "Oh, oui said Babette, suddenly comprehending. "Like A-OK." "Yes," Starling sighed. "A-OK and all that kind of stuff. Will you do it?" "iVoi." "Why not, Babette?" "It is too... too dangerous. I do not wish to lose my life going into... space." you -- " he made a quick mentid IP estimate -- "fire times your nomial fee. There'll be eleven other ghis foing up with you, so you won't be lonely. You'll only have to work two or three hours a day. And nowadays, there's no danger involved at all. Many women have gone into space and returned safely; they say that the conditions out in space are very restful. And when you retire, we'll even provide you with a home and a pension fund, so that you cm spend your declining years in comfort." "All of zis just for me?" "Just for you," Babette gulped and closed her eyes. "Zen where did I ever get ae impression zat Americans are -- 'ow you say it? -- pmdesT S en. McDermott: And you say you recruited all these gbrli yourself? Mr. Starling: Yes, sir, I did. Sen. McDermott: Were most of them cooperative? Mr. Starling: That's their job, sir. Sen. McDermott: I mean, what were their reactions to your unusual proposal? Mr. Starling: Well, they've probably gotten a lot of unusual proposals. They seemed to take it pretty much in stride. Sen. McDermott: One last question, Mr. Starling. How did you find this job? Mr. Starling: Very fatiguing, sir. ou must be very tired, WiljL bur," Hawkins said, flashing his infamous smile. "How many girls did you say you interviewed?" "After twenty I stopped counting." "And you've got a dozen all picked out for us, eh?" "Yes sir, nine French and three British." "Well, I guess you've earned yourself a vacation; you'll get it as soon as the giris are safely tucked away are their names?" Starling closed his eyes, as though the names were written on the insides of his eyelids. "Let's see, there's Babette, Suzette, Lucette, Toillette, Francette, Violette, Rosette, Pearlette, Nanette, Myrtle, Constance, and Sydney." "Sydney?" "I can't help it. Boss, that's her name." "Oh well, I suppose it could have been worse," Hawkins smiled. "Her last name could have been Australia." "It is worse. Boss. Her last name is CartOT." H awkins was giving the dozen new astronettes a pre-take-off pep-talk. "I like to think of you as a small army of Florence Nightingales," he told them. "Hopefully, you will not receive all the credit that your brave act of self-sacrifice deserves, but nonetheless -- " Starling burst into the room, panic in his eyes. "General Bullfat's coming down the corridor!" he cried. Filmore jumped up from the table he'd been sitting on. "Jess, are you sure you know what you're doing? If Bullfat finds these girls -- " "Relax, Bill," Hawkins smiled both eyes closed. He's a cinch. "Who's a cinch?" Bullfat roared as he entered the room. The general was a big man -- but then, forty years behind a desk can do the same for anyone's figure. "You are," Hawkins said, turning calmly to face him "I was just telling Bill that you're a cinch to be promoted to my job if I ever choose to resign." Bullfat muttered incoherently. "Who are they?" he asked after a moment, indicating the girls. It was an apt question. The astronettes, contrary to normal procedure, had on loose-fitting, shaggy spacesuits. Their face-plates were small, barely revealing their eyes and noses, while the rest of their heads were completely covered by the helmets. They would put one more in mind of baggy clowns than space travelers. "They're the group scheduled to lift-off in about three hours. Would you like to meet them?" Filmore and Starling nearly fainted at that invitation, but Hawkins flashed them a reassuring grin. "I'm too busy for introductions, Hawkins. And why in hell do they look so shoddy? Have they had their physicals yet?" "And how!" Starling whispered to Filmore. "You know, General, that I wouldn't send anyone up into space who wasn't in perfect condition," said Hawkins. "What did the flight doctor have to say?" "He said this group is in better shapes -- uh, shape than aay he's ever seen." "Well, just as long as he's checked them out." Bullfat started to leave, then stopped at the door. "By the way, where are they bound for? Tycho Station?" "Is it time for rotation already?" "No, this group is additional personnel." "Additional personnel?" Bullfat yelled. "Hawkins, you know damn well that one eight-seven was built for exactly eighteen men rotated in groups of six every month. There is absolutely no room for twelve more people. What in hell do you expect your 'additional personnel' to do -- bunk in with the other men?" With a marvelous display of selfcontrol, Hawkins managed to suppress his laughter. The "additional personnel" smiled knowingly. Starling, however, had to run out of the room in a fit of hysterical giggling. "Where in hell is he going?" asked Bullfat, watching Starling exit. "Oh, he's been under a lot of strain lately. He's about due for a vacation." "He looks more like he's due for observation -- and you, too, Hawkins. You may control Space Agency policy, but I control the launchings, and that crew is not going up as 'additional personnel' for any small space station. If you want to get them up there, you can rotate them six a month just like anybody else. That's final." Bullfat stalked triumphantly out the door. "Ready to give up, Jess?" Filmore asked. m ir "Not in the least. Surprising, Bullfat had a good point there. If wc ent the girls up to one eighty-seven, it really would be crowded. They'd be constantly getting in the men's way, and it might be more nuisance than help. But all is not lost. When's one ninety-three scheduled to go up?" "Next week -- but surely you're not thinking of sending the girls up in that." "And why not?" tion -- it's for storing food and supplies. It's not designed to be lived fai." "So we improvise, Bill. One ninety-three is going to be aced in orbit parallel to one eighty-seven, because they'll need it for stwage. Ifn be sent up in four already loaded sections and assembled in space. It's a simple enough matter in the course of a week to fit the sections up with acceleration couches and Kving quarters -- just get rid of some of the non-essentials being shot and we're all set. The girls can Kvc in there." "It's absurd, Jess," Filmore mumbled. "Not really. I'm growing rather fond of the idea." Hawkins smiled friendly neighborhood grocery store and callhouse all rolled into one." Filmore groaned. The girls, carried away, cheered. iiT don't believe it," said Jerry X Blaine. "I mean, someone down there must be playing some kind of tricks." "Nobody plays tricks in top-secret code," Colonel Briston countered. "Jess Hawkins signed those orden himself. And you've just seen those girls with your own eyes. I admit it's crazy -- " "Crazy? It's wild, man," said Phil Lewis. "Read (hose orders through again, will you, Mark. I've got to hear that nke little message one more time." Briston diuckled. "Dear guys," he #, you win be sent three pieces of equipment necessary for Project Cuddle-up (making a total of twelve). Your friendly Uncle Sam has spared no expense to bring them to you directly from Europe, so handle with care, huh? They'll be rotated every six months or there abouts, but meanwhile they can be equally and have fun -- that's an order. Any communications concerning the equipment are to be addressed to me personally in this same code. That, too, is an order. Yours sincerely, Jess Hawkins, Director, National Space Agency." "Wowee!" Lewis exclaimed. "Remind me never to complain about paying taxes again." Just then, Sydney emerged from the next room. She had removed her spacesuit and was clad very lightly. "Blimey," she said, "you blokes sure keep a cold place around 'ere. Nanette and Constance and meself, we're freezin'. We was wondering if any of you chaps would care to warm us up a mite." By pulling rank. Colonel Briston managed to be first in line. I t was very late at whai the station considered night, about a month after the girls had arrived. Lucette, Babette, Francette, Toillette, Violctte. Rosette, Suzette, and Myrtle were out on call, while the rest were getting what sleep they could. Sydney was peacefully curled up in bed, dreaming the dreams of the not-soinnocent, when all of a sudden, a rock the size of a man's fist ripped through the wall near her bed and banged against the wall on the far side. A hissing noise filled the room, and Sydney started gasping for breath as the air was sucked out of the hole made by the meteoroid. In a flash, she was out of her room and closing the air-tight compartment door behind her. The three other girls rushed out into the hallway to find out what was the matter. "Blimey!" Sydney said when she got her breath back. "The damned thing's sprung a leak!"... "Everything's okay now, Sydney," Jerry Blaine said as he came in from outside. "I got it all patched up. I'm afraid, though, that whatever you had loose in your room would have been sucked out into space. Nothing valuable, I hope." "Not that I can think of," Sydney told him. "But are you sure this won't never 'appen again?" "Like I told you before, it was happen again in a thousand years." "Oh, by the way," Blaine called after her, "arc you booked for tonight? Good. I get off at about sixteen hundred -- you can come over then." "A woman's work ain't never done," Sydney sighed wisely as she reentered her room. Most of her stuff was still in the bureau drawers, but search as she would, she couldn't find the little pill bottle that she kept beside her bed. "Oh well," she said, "I've managed without them before." It was nearly four months, to be exact, when she decided that the situation warranted her telling somebody, so she told Colonel Briston, who had just returned from three months Earthside. "My God!" was all he could say. "It ain't as serious as all that." "Not as serious as all that? You're certainly taking it calmly. Why didn't you tell anybody about this before?" "Well, it never 'appened to me before." Bristin gulped. "I think we'd better put in a cal! to that Mr. 'Awkins. 'E always seems to know what to do." S en. McDermott: You were the one who discovered all these goings-on, weren't you. General? Gen. Bullfat: You're damn right I was. I'd suspected from the start that Hawkins had sent some girls up there, but the vSpace Force never acts without absolute proof. So I held back my suspicions, gathering up the evidence meticulously, waiting for the proper moment to take my findings to the President. Sen. McDermott: In other words, then, your discovery was based on a long, careful investigation? Gen. Bullfat: Exactly, Senator. That's the way the military does things. IF A s luck would have it, both Hawkins and Starling were out to hinch when the call came in. Since it was labeled "urgent," a man from the communications room took it right over to Hawkins' office. The door was locked. General Bullfat, just then coming out of his office down the hall, found the messenger waiting in the corridor for Hawkins' return. With typical Bullfat persuasion -- and two hundred and fifty pounds wearing five stars can be a lot of persuasion -- he convinced the man that an urgent communication could not wait on "the whims of a damned goldbricker like Hawkins." Bullfat took the message into his office and opened it. He easily decoded the little five-word note, and then stared at it for about a minute, eyes bulging. "Parks," he snapped to his secretary over the intercom, "get me the President. No, on second thought, don't bother -- I'll go see him myself." He left his office just as Hawkins and his aide were returning from lunch. The general couldn't decide whether to laugh triumphantly in Hawkins' face or to harangue him, so all he said was, "I've got you now, Hawkins. At last I've got you." Hawkins and Starling exchanged puzzled, worried glances. Entering the general's office, Hawkins found the message on the desk, read it silently to himself, and sat down hard. His eyes gazed vacantly at the wall across from him, and the message dropped loosely from his limp hand. Starling picked it up and read aloud in disbelief. "Sydney pregnant. What now? Briston.'" S en. McDermott: Ladies and gentlemen. Since yesterday, I have had occasion to communicate with the President, and we came to the conclusion that further investigations along these lines appear to be fruitless. Therefore, I wish to adjourn this hearing until further notice, and withhold publication of the official transcript until such time as is deemed appropriate for release to the public. That will be all. F ilmore managed to meet Hawkins outside the building. "I think I detect your fine hand in this, Jess. How did you ever pull that one out of the fire?" "Well," Hawkins explained, "since the public hasn't heard about this affair yet, I simply made the President realize that as long as he can't get rid of us, he might as well get used to us." "Why can't he get rid of you?" "Because the Director of the National Space Agency is appointed for a six-year term, of which I still have four years left. And besides, only Congress has the authority to dismiss me." "But what about the girls? Can't he fire them?" "Heavens, no! As civilian employees of the Agency, they come under our 'excepted service' status -- they can only be fired for incompetence in the performance of their specified duties. And no one," Hawkins smiled, "could ever accuse them of IF  Featmtt Or Through A Monocle? Darkly T he last man in the World Science Fiction Convention sat alone in a room. Somebody knocked on the door... As a matter of fact, it was the bellboy, bringing me this beat-up typewriter so that I could write this beat-up report on the Loncon II, the #rd World Science Fiction Convention, which was held -- in a grip of iron -- over the last weekend in August, #. Those of you who are not familiar with science-fiction conventions must be told that these gatherings are annual affairs, sponsored by fan groups in various cities, and attended by readers, collectors, writers, illustrators, editors and publishers in the sf field. This year it was London's turn to play host, at the Mount Royal Hotel -- so named because it is not on a hill and the only royalty ever patronizing it are the king-sized spiders which scuttle down the dark corridors. Actually, the hotel was quite nice and I'm only joking -- it's a longtime tradition that Convention hotels are unfit for human habitation. This one boasted quite adequate accommodations, and both the manager and assistant manager were science-fiction fans -- at least, before the Convention began. And like most attendees, I didn come to the hotel in search of luxurious appointments. My appointments, if any, were with fellow-fans and fellow-professionals. Having never been to England before, I had high hopes of meeting some of the more prominent Britisb writers of science fiction -- men like H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. Unfortunately, they weren't at the bar when I arrived. But there were English writers present, in abundance; among the more abundant I noted Guest ol Honor Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, Ted Tubb, James White, Bob Shaw, John Brunner, Arthur Sellings, John Rackham, Ted Carnell -- plus such fans and fan-pros as Ron Bennett, Wall meet and didn't was Mandy RiceDavis. The big surprise, however, was the number of American attendees. Forry Ackerman I expected to sco and Terry Carr who was brought as a special guest. But I didn't expect to run into George O. Smith, Harry Harrison, Robert Silverberg, Judith Merril, Donald A. Wollhcim, James Blish, John Campbell and the editor of this publication Fred PohL Even old-time sf-writer Mack Reynolds, an expatriate for thirteen years, turned up for the occasion. Add to this group approximately fifty American fans, including Ron Ellik, Richard Eney, Ted White, Dave Kyle, and a contingent coming to bid for the Tricon; mix and stir thoroughly with Ken Bulmer, Eric Bentcliffe, Arthur Thomson, and you have quite a convention roster. And # have done enough name-dropping to get me off the hook and down to the business of reporting on the actual proceedings. T he first actual proceeding was the traditional gathering of British fandom at the Globe pub on the night before the Con. American fan AI Lewis and English fan Peter Mabey drove me there, and in the smoke-and-bloke-filled room I had my first-hand introduction to our British cousin, who taught me how to play darts. I was the dart board. The convention itself opened on Friday evening, manned -- or, in some cases, womanned -- by the able Con Committee: Ella Parker, Ethel Lindsay, James Groves, Keith Otter, Peter Mabey and George Scithers. The first event was the introduction of some of the prominent attendees... but I've just done that bit. Following the welcoming ceremonies, Harry Harrison took the platform -- and the audience -- with a wild address, involving the tossing of meat-pies and a challenge to the effect that the modern novel is dead unless it contains science-fiction elements. A question period followed, and Judy Merril, John Campbell and Ted Tubbs took up the gauntlet, calling for more and better writing in the field. Then Harrison went off to eat meat-pies and the rest of us mingled at various social and antisocial events until the wee hours. Forry Ackerman spoke on films, followed by the panel "All Things to All Fen". From that point on events moved briskly -- during the next two days we were privileged to see two amateur sf films, hear John Brunner's edifying "How To Get High Without Going Into Orbit", attending auctions, visit the art show, catch platform glimpses of Mika Moorcock, Campbell, Merril, SBverberg and others -- while, down at the bar, the hospitality flowed freely. Saturday night's Fancy Dress Party brought out the monsters and monstresses in full force; there were many striking costumes and a number of well-deserved prizes awarded. My own favorite was Karen Anderson's black and balefully beautiful devil. Sunday morning's panel, "A Robot in the Executive Suite", was foL lowed by the traditional Banquet in early afternoon. Toastmaster Tom Boardman introduced Brian Aldiss, Terry Carr and Arthur C. Clarke, all of whom spoke wittily and coherently. They were followed by a Mystery Speaker, who turned out to be me -- the mystery being why I was allowed to open my big mouth. Forry Ackerman then presented the E. E. Evans Big Heart" Award to Walter Ernsting, after which Bob Silverberg took over to present the Hugos. A gain, for the benefit of latecomers, a word of explanation. The Hugos -- so-named in honor of Hugo Gernsback, pioneer sf editor and publisher -- are annually awarded to fans and pros for "best" efforts in various categories. I have fond memories of my own, which I won in #, pawned in #. This year, Hugos went to Buck and Juanita Coulson for the Best Fanzine -- Yandro; to Schoenherras Best Artist; Analog took the Prozine prize; Gordon Dickson was judged to have written the Best Short Story -- Soldier, Ask Not from Galaxy -- and the award for Best Novel went to Fritz Leiber for The Wanderer, In the Drama category, the winner was Dr. Strangelove, and Peter Stone, author of the novel from which the film was derived, was on hand to accept the Hugo. Betty Ballantine accepted the Best Publisher Award for Ballantine Books. English artist Eddie Jones was meanwhile piling up awards for his entries in the Art Show, and while there were no honors voted them, the Con-Committee deserved some prize of their own for the hard work which served to keep the Convention rolling . Between panels Involving Messrs. Poul Anderson, Donald Wollheim and others, a Monday business meeting resulted in a vote for the Tricon Group's bid, which means that Qeveland win be the scene oi #'s Convention. By means of panels, talks, discussions, question-periods and just plain gab-fests, it's possible for the fans to make themselves -- and their personal preferences -- known to the professionals in the field. And it's also possible, through such meetings, for fans to become pros. Many of those appearing in London as professionals -- SilverWhite, to name only a few at random -- attended their first gatherings in the guise of fans. But to a veteran like myself, bottle-scarred by thirteen conventions, there are special rewards. Renewing acquaintances with the English fans and pros who attended American cons in the past, meeting up with people I met years ago and thousands of miles away, listening to news and views in the field, and just relaxing in the company of kindred spirits is more than enough. Opeaking of spirits, it's time I had the bellhop cart the empties out of this room. It's time I cleaned up and went back out into the socalled real world -- which is ever so less warm and friendly than the unique momentary microcosm which IT'created, for only four days each year, in the form of a Science Fiction Convention. Those of you who have attended know what I'm talking about. As for those who haven't -- # is your opportunity to find out for yourselt firsthand. IF IF  Short Story She was alien to Earth, but she liked it here. The food was very good! M ercury was not her real name. She had never felt the need of a name. She was a clean, healthy carnivore shaped like an otter with pale, lemon-colored fur and a brain ill-equipped to cope with abstract ideas. Her kind were hunters, though the concept of hunting would imply considerably more difficulty than they usually encountered. They had evolved in a world without sentient competition and had achieved the enviable position of being just a little faster than everything that was good to eat. Mercury's short, comfortable life had been interrupted in a perplexing way one bright afternoon by the appearance in the sky of an enormous, shining object. It was belching fire and noise as it settled slowly to the ground, but having done that it remained immobile so long that Mercury lost interest and went looking for a meal. She loped lazily to the top of the nearest rise and looked around the rolling verdant countryside. A herd of plump grass-eaters was grazing in an open field about a mile away, one or two of the larger males occasionally raising an inquisitive nose to sniff the air. Mercury dropped to the base of an outcropping of rock and bunched her powerful body into a compact ball with hindquarters firmly implanted against the rock. Her hard, transparent eyelids clicked shut as she took a deep breath and launched herself straight toward the herd. Almost instantaneously a puff of dust appeared about a quarter of a mile from the herd where Mercury made a final correction and chose her precise target Two of the grass eaten reared, quawling, tossing dieir heads toward their injured flanks and galloped awkway away acron the valley. The rest looked around in mild dismay and then thundered senselesdy after. Half a mfle beyond, where Ae had come to rest, Mercury chewed her fresh meal ccmtentedly. She had managed to catch two of the grasseaters so aligned that her sharp, forward pointed teeth had aced a steak neatly out of each rump on a single pass and she was not likely to be hungry again the rest of the day. Her victims were seldom permanently injured and usually never saw her. If she had been cursed with the necessity for philosophizing, she would have been hard put to decide whether she was a hunter or a parasite. In either event she was a successful one and having finished eating she curled up around a full belly in the warm afternoon sun and went to sleep. S he never saw the dark opening gradually appear near the bottom of the huge shining object or the clumsy figures that crawled out so haltingly and came to stand silently over her. She never even noticed the anesthetic sprayed carefully in front of her nose. She never knew how she came to wake up in a cage. She awoke groggy, but otherwise intact. She shook her head and stared at the two giants creeping langorously past. She circled the cage and discovered no way out. One of the giants began making a low rumbling noise. awake,' said Clark. "I was afraid I might have overdosed it. Her, not it," Shoenbrum corrected. 'You've been away from Earth so long you've forgotten there're two kinds of almost everything." Look at her move! TTiis would have been a hard one to catch if we hadn't stumbled onto her siesta. Fm glad she's healthy." Clark was the expedition's veterinarian and liked at least to start with a good animal. Shoenbrum, as a zoologist, was prone to collect specimens in aS stages of disrepair just so long as they were different. l want to find her a mate tomorrow." But Mercury was destined to solitude. Throughout the expedition's stay, no other of her species was ever even sighted. Every mammal they found was possessed of blinding agility. Even the herbivores moved at breackneck speed from one clump of grass to the next, although they did not appear to be particularly shy at the approach of man. To Clark's chagrin nearly every specimen they took had one or two deep scars about the flank. Shoenbrum decided that the mammals of the planet had simply over-specialized on speed and constantly injured themselves by running pell mell into things. He never actually saw this occur, but the circumstantial evidence was so obvious that during the trip back to Earth he wrote an interesting paper on this example of a dead end in evolutionary development. IF T he morning after Mercury was caught she woke uncomfortably hungry. Her last meal had been somewhat larger than average, but she was used to eating twice a day. She heard the low rumble made by die torpid giants and presently one erf them dragged itself to the side of the cage carrying a small container. Ever so gradually it bent over and reached through the bars to place the container on the floor. Mercury walked over and examined the contents. It seemed to be a liquid that smelled vaguely like meat, but Mercury decided she was not really that hungry and sat down to wait. She had never faced the problem of a food shortage before. All her life she had been surrounded with fresh meals whenever the need arose. She wondered what the giants tasted like. By afternoon she was almost ready to try the giant's odd smelling liquid, but it had been removed. This time they brought a small rodent hobbled but wriggling, and with their usual leisurely movements pushed the small animal through the bars into the cage. It was tiresome being reduced to hor d'oeuvres of this sort, but at least it was fresh and after sniffing it from all sides she ate most of it. The days settled into a long, dull pattern. Mercury took lethargic walks around the cage from time to time. Once a day one of the giants crept up with another bite-size rodent which was food enough for the life of languorous lassitude she was leading now. Her forward-pointed teeth were awkward when she tried to use them on such a small an mal, but by proceeding slowly and methodically she managed to cope with the difficulty. The giants were around much of the time but too sluggish to hold her interest. "This beauty will be the biggest crowd pleaser the World Zoo's had in years," Shoenbrum said. "Wish we could have found' a male, too. Really interesting specimens that are harmless and easy to keep like this are hard to come by." "I've never seen anything like her," Clark agreed. "She moves around that cage like a streak of yellow lightning -- and never slows down except to sleep. Those guinea pigs I feed her hardly have time to hit the floor before ihey completely disappear. Fd like to see what she looks like when there's room to run." "You will. What I have in mind is that exhibit display we worked up for the cheetahs -- the one where they race two or three hundred feet after a piece of meat being dragged by a high speed winch. People can stand along the other side of the raised moat and more can see at once." "Well, I'm glad we're getting in tomorrow," the veterinarian said. "I'm almost out of guinea pigs." T he transfer was made in the middle of a weekday morning and the zoo had only a scattering of visitors. The area around Mercury's new run was roped off to give her a chance to become accustomed to the place without distractions. Her cage was mounted on a heavy truck and driven inside the run before the door was opened. Mercury watched intently as the giant slowly lifted a languid paw and left it pointing in her direction. The low rumble she had come to expect on occasions like this began as the giant's mouth opened and closed with maddening indolence. Another giant who had hauled himself laboriously up on top of the cage slowly grasped the door and began to raise it almost imperceptably. She walked carefully around the cage examining the new countryside in all directions. She was at the bottom of a shallow valley with the land rising all around, and the scene was as full of food as the rolling hills of her home. She had not had anything but bony guinea pigs to eat for almost a month and was dying for a decent meal. By now the giant had the door almost half way open. The truck jolted like the carriage of a heavy artillery piece, and Mercury vanished. A half mile up the hill an Indian water buffalo crashed bellowing into the zoo fence tossing his head at the two-foot gash in his hindquarters. Three days later Mercury sprawled comfortably in the sun on a rounded boulder. She had worked her way leisurely through this crowded slowmotion world to these high mountains where there was room to move about. Several times a few of the languid giants seemed to direct thek dufl attention toward her, but if sha was not hungry she simply moved. I t was a time when her nature demanded solitude. Hunting forays would be ever more restricted in tha weeks to come and she felt an ancient need for the protective comfort of deserted places. The knife-edga balance of survival in her home hiUs took a severe toll of her kind when they were new-born and still awkwardly slow. She knew without thought that her litter of twelve ta fifteen cubs had been carried almost full term. At home only the two or three most active could have survived the cruel blessing of that early struggle for food. But here... Here the universe had almost stopped. Here even the slowest toddling white ball of fur need never know a day of hunger. The drumbeat of this nature was a funeral dirge. Mercury looked out across the green valley dotted here and there with some of the nearly stationary food-giants and their sluggish machines. She watched two of them get out of one of the machines and make their tedious way arm in arm toward a small stream. Patiently she waited until they were aligned directly in front of her and then, licking her chops, dropped to the base of the boulder. Mercury had found paradise.      IF IF  Serial Relief's War Retief had got along by pretending to be an alien. Now who was this alien who pretended to be Retief? #ou ladies just sit tight until I you hear from me," Retief called down from his perch on Gerthud ion's back. "I'll round up a few Rhoon and be back for you as soon as I can." "I am Nop-Nee and I dance the dance of Apology," the Herpp keened. "Who would have thought that a stilter on Rhoonback would mean anything but trouble?" "You did just the right thing, Nop-Nee," Retief assured the agitated Herpp. 'Take good care of the Hie planet of Ghiopp is inhabited by creatures that ore half machines, and all dioboncal. Their body chemistry is organic'inorganic, with limbs like wheels or rotors and ste-sharp talons and teeth. It is, in short, the kind of world where Earthmen walk cautiously, or do not walk crt all. But Earth Ambassador Longspoon Is confident he has the situation under control. With the connivance of certain native Quoppina he is abetting the spread of a revolutionary movement which will unite all of Quopp's scores of hostile tribes, placing them all under a single government which will be friendly to Earth... he hopes. Unfortunately his hopes are bKghted. Retief discovers shipments of arms and, investigating, finds himself threatened by the Voion tribesmen. He escapes and makes his way to Terrie headquarters, which is in an uproar because a spaceship loaded with human females is approaching the planet out of control. The pilot asks for Retief but crashes before he can learn her identity. Meanwhile Retief is being pursued by the Voions, trying to keep their arms shipments secret. He escapes with the help of a friendly Quopp, who assists him in disguising himself in the mandibles and chitinous body-plates of a typical Quopp. But the Quoppina ibemselves are not the only enemy Retief has to face, for he discovers that behind them -- arming them, advising them, waiting to profit from their rebellion -- the sinister forces of the Grooci are at work. The whole planet is ablaze. Retief gets the tribes working together against the Groacis tools... but just as success seems possible, he discovers that the spaceship containing the human girls has landed -- and some of them have strayed into Groaci territory. IF girls nntil I get ba, and well #M dance the dance ci Mutual Congratulation. She wouldn't let any of us go with her," Aphrodisia wailed. "She aid we'd slow her down." "Don't worry. We should be able to spot her from the air." Retief waved. Gerthudion lifted off with a great battering of air, climbed to three hundred feet and headed outh. It was high noon now; the iun glared down from a cloudless pale sky. Retief watched the trail below, saw the scurry of small Quoppina fleeing the shadow of the giant flyer passing overhead -- but BO sign of the missing girl. It was a twenty-minute flight to the spot where the victorious troops erf the Federated Tribes had been encamped eight hours earlier. Gerdiudion settled in to a landing on the wheel-trampled ground, deserted now and littered with the debris of battle -- and of hasty evacuation. "Looks like our prisoners sneaked off when nobody was looking," Retief observed. He studied the maze of trails leading off in all directions. "Which way did our lads go?" he inquired of a pair of Phips, hovering nearby. "Here-here, there-there," the nearest cheeped. "Run-run quick-quick!" "Don't tell me," Retief said. "I'll bet some of our more impulsive members started in on the chore of sawing the Voion up into convenient lengths, thereby panicking them into breaking out of the jam." "Check-check!" a Phip agreed. "All-all scat-scat!" "And by now they're scattered over a hundred square miles of jungle, with several thousand highly irritated Voion in pursuit. So modi for the grass-roots movement." "Tief-tief!" A Phip buzzed in exdtedly from a reconnoitre of the nearby cover. 'Thing-thing therethere!" Retief drew his sword. "What kind of thing, small stuff? A Voion left over from the party?" "Big-big, long-long, stilt-stilt!" "A stilter? Like me? Gertie, wait here!" Retief followed the Phip for a hundred yards, then paused, listening. T here was a crackling in the underbrush. A heavy-shouldered biped stalked into view -- an unshaven Terran in a tattered coverall and scuffed boots, holding a heavy old-style power pistol gripped in one immense fist. "Hold it right there, Bug," Big Leon growled in Tribal dialect. "I got a couple bones to pick with you." Retief smiled behind the mask and put a hand up to lift the disguising head-piece. "Keep the flippers out from the sides," Leon growled in dialect. "And drop the sticker. Maybe you never saw one of these before -- " he gestured with the gun -- "but it'll blow a hole through you, tree and all." Retief tossed the sword aside. Leon nodded. "Smart bug. Now, there's just one thing I want out of you, wiggly-eyes. I hear there's a native leader that's popped up out here in the brush, organizing the yokels." He motioned at the spareparts littered ground. It looks like there was a little action here, not too many hours' back. I don't know which side you were on, and I don't care. Just tell me where to find that Bug leader -- fast." "Why?" Relief demanded. Leon frowned at him "For a Bug, you've got kind of a l inny voice. But to Hell with it. I v ant to ask him for help." "What kind of help?" Leon drew a finger across his forehead like a windshield wiper, slung sweat from it. "Help in staying alive," he said. "There's fortysix of us Terries over at Rum Jungle. Ikk's got us surrounded with swears he's going to eat us for breakfast." "I see," Relief nodded. "And you'd ask a Bug for help?" "We'll take any help we can get," Leon stated flatly. "What makes you think you can get it?" Leon grunted. "You got a point there. But let's can the chatter. Where'll I find this Tief-tief character?" Relief folded his arms. "That's what they call me," he said. "Huh?" Leon's mouth closed slowly. "Uh-huh," he nodded. "It figures. The only Quopp on the planet I want to make pals with, and I stick a gun in his chestplates." He bolstered the weapon. "Well, how about it?" "I'd like to help you," Relief said. "Great. That's settled, then. Call your army out of the bushes and let's get rolling. Something tells me the Voion will hit us at dawn -- " "As I was saying," Retief interrupted, "I'd like to help you Terries, but unfortunately I seem to have misplaced my army." Leon's hand went to his gun. "What kind of a stall is this?" he grated. "My hundred seasoned veterans wandered off while I wasn't looking," Retief explained. "A hundred!" The big Terran burst out. "I heard you had half the Bugs on Quopp with you! I heard you were cutting Ikk's troops into Christmas tree ornaments. I heard -- " "You heard wrong. The Federated Tribes were a spark glimmering in the night. Now they're not even that." Big Leon let out a long breath. "So I had a little walk for nothing. Okay. I should have known better. Now all I've got to do is get back through the Voion lines so I can help the boys pick off as many of those jaspers as we can before they ride over us." He half-turned away, then faced Retief again. "A hundred against an army, huh? Maybe you Bugs are all right -- some of you." He turned and was gone. R etief motioned a hovering Phip over. "No sight of any other stiller in the neighborhood?" "Not-not," the Phip stated. "How each one of you fellows knows what all the other ones know beats me," Retief said. "But that's IP a mystery I'll have to investigate hto. Keep looking for her. She can't have gotten far through this growth with a Voion behind every third dump of brush." "Sure-sure, Tief-tief! Look-look!" the Phip squeaked and darted off. Retief pulled off his helmet, unbuckled the chest and back armor and laid it aside with a sigh of relief. He removed the leg coverings gingerly. There was a nasty blister above the ankle where the Voion jailer had plied his torch carelessly. Clad in the narrow-cut trousers and shirt he had retained when donning his disguise in Sopp's shop, he stacked the armor together, tied it with a loop of wire wine vine, concealed it behind a bush, then made his way back to where he had left Gerthudion. "All right, let's go, Gertie," he called, coming up her port quarter. The Rhoon started nervously, tilted a foot-long ocular over her dorsal plates, then gave a rumbling growl, u right," Retief soothed. "I'm wearing a disguise." "You look like a Terry," Gerthudion accused. "That's right. It's all part of an elaborate scheme Fm rapidly getting wrapped up in like King Tut." "King Tut? Who's he? vSounds like a Voion. Now royal they'll declare themselves -- ?" "Steady, girl. Just a literary allusion." "But now, Tief-tief, what of dear Aunt Vulugulei? I long to seek her out, or her destroyers to rend!" "I'm afraid you Rhoon are on your own, Gertie. Those fighting tribes I told you about won't be available to carry out their end of the war after all." "No matter. Even now the Tribal host circle far to the west in a wide sweep, our enemies to spy. Then retribution will we take in fufl measure -- allies or no." "How long would it take them to get here?" "Many hours, Tief-tief -- if their search they'd abandon to heed a call." "Do you know where Rum Jungle is?" "Certainly -- if by that you mean that clustering of huts yonder to the south, whence emanate curious odors of alien cookery with a disfavorable wind." "That's the place. I need a lift in there. And there's another stilter up ahead; he's wearing the same kind of disguise I am. We can gather him on the way." "As you wish, Tief-tief," Gerthudion said. "Gertie, now that the Federated Tribes are dispersed, I can't hold you to our agreement. This is a dangerous trip I'm asking you to make. You might run into the whole Voion Air Force." "Why then, I'll know where to find the ghouls!" Gerthudion honked. "Mount up, Retief! Fly where I will, that will I -- and let the villains beware!" "That's the way to talk, Gertie!" Retief said. Retief climbed into position on the Rhoon's back. "Now let's go see if things at Rurn Jungle are as bad as reported -- or worse." nr XV #T don't get it," Big Leon said X between clenched teeth. He was riding just behind Retief atop Gerthudion's ribbed shoulder-plates. How'd you get out here in the woods? How'd you spot me? And how in the name of the Big Worm #M you tame this man-eater? In forty years in the jungle I never -- " "You never tried," Retief finished for him. Leon sounded surprised. "I guess I didn't. Why would I?" "We're sitting on one reason. I'll go into the other answers later, when things quiet down." Gerthudion's rotors thumped rhythmically; wind whistled past Reliefs head. A thousand feet below, Ae jungle was a gray-green blanket, touched with yellow light here and Acre where the afternoon sun reached a tall treetop. "Hey, Retief!" Leon called above Ae whine of the slip-stream. "Has your friend here got a friend? We've got company." Retief looked back, following Big Leon's pointing arm. Half a mile behind, a Rhoon was rapidly overhauling the laden Gerthudion. "Goblin at seven o'clock," Retief called to her, "Anyone you know, Gertie?" The Rhoon lifted her massive head, then swung her body sideways -- a trick she performed with only a slight lagging of forward motion. "That's -- but it couldn't be! Not Aunt Vulugulei!" the great creature honked. At once she banked, swept in a tight curve back toward the trailing Rhoon, now dosing fast "Aunt Vulgy!" she trumpeted. "Where in Quopp have you been? I've been worrying myself into a premature moult!" The other Rhoon, a scant five hundred yards distant now, banked up suddenly and shot away, rising fast, its rotors whick-whicking loudly. Gerthudion swerved, causing her riders to grab for better holds as she gave chase. "Auntie! It's me, Gerthudion! Wait!" The agitated flyer was beating her rotors frantically as she fell behind the unladen Rhoon, a quarter of a mile ahead now and two hundred feet higher. Sunlight glinted on spinning rotors as the strange Rhoon tilted, swung in a tight curve, swept down at top speed on its pursuer. "Duck!" Retief called. "It's a zombie!" Y ellow light winked from a point behind the pouncing Rhoon's head. The buzz of a power gun cut through the tumult of rushing air. There was a harsh rattle of sound from behind Retief. Blue light glared and danced at close hand as a pencil-thin beam lanced out, picked out the attacking Rhoon's left rotor, held on it as Gerthudion wheeled to the left, dropped like a stone, rocking violently in the air-blast as the enemy flyer shot past. "I nicked him," Leon growled. "The range is too long for a handgun to do much damage." "He's got the same problems." Retief leaned forward. "Gertie, I'm sorry about Aunt Vulugulei, but you IF wee how it is. Try to get above him; he can't fire through his rotors. "I'll try, Tief-Tief," Gerthudion wailed. To think that my own auntie -- " "It's not your aunt any more, Gertie; just a sneaky little Voion getting a free ride." Gerthudion's rotors labored. "I can't gain on her -- or it," she bawled. "Not with this burden!" "Tell her not to try dumping us off," Leon barked. "My gun is the only thing that'll nail that jasper. Just get me in position!" The Voion-controlled Rhoon cadaver was far above now, still climbing. Gerthudion, her rotors thumping hard, was losing ground. "He'll drop on us again in a minute," Retief said. "Gertie, as he gets within range, you're going to have to go into a vertical bank to give Leon a clear shot." "Vertical? I'll fall like a stone from a frost-shattered peak!" "That's the way it's got to be. I'm afraid. Lead him down -- and don't flare out until we're at tree-top level. If we give him time to think, it will dawn on him all he has to do is stay right over us and pour in the fire!" "I'll try." '!e Rhoon was in position now, above and slightly offside to the right. It stopped then, moving in for an easy kill. Gerthudion held her course. Abruptly the enemy gun fired, a wide-angle beam ar extreme range that flicked across Retiefi: exposed face like a breath from a blast furnace. "Now!" Retief called. Instantly Gerthudion whipped up on her left nde, her rotors screaming in the sudden release of load. In the same moment Leon, his left arm clamped around Retief, lanced out with his narrow-beam weapon. A ot of actinic light darted across the gray belly plates of the zombie, then found and held steady on the left rotor. The fire from above was back on target now, playing over Gerthudion's exposed side-plates with an odor like hot iron. "Stay with that wide beam another ten seconds, and you're a gone Bug," Leon grated out. The Rhoon above dipped to one side now, feeling the sting of the blaster, but Leon followed, held the rotor in the beam while air shrieked up past him like a tornado. "Right myself now I must, or perish!" Gerthudion honked. "Which is it to be, Tief-tief?" "Pull out!" Retief grabbed for hand-holds as the great body shifted under him, surging upward with crushing pressure. The whirling vanes bit into air, hammering. Leon broke off his fire -- # T Tey, look!" The attackingTA Rhoon had veered off at the last possible instant, gun still firing, now lazily, it rolled over, went into a violent tumble. Pieces flew. Then the zombie was gone against the darkness below. "I think you burned through his wiring," Retief called. "Gertie, stay low now; it's only another couple of miles." "Low shall I stay, like it or no," the Rhoon called. "I thought my flmin armature, its windings I would Melt!" Relief felt the heat of the overworked body scorching his legs. "If we meet another one in the air we've lad it." "If far it is, we're lost," she wheezed. 'Tm all but spent." "There it is!" Leon pointed to a liny cluster of buildings against the sweep of jungle ahead, stringed by tilled fields. Gerthudion flew on, dropping even lower, until she labored just above the high crowns of trees whose leaves glittered in her backwash like rippling water. The forest ended abruptly, and she was swooping across the fields that surrounded the trading town, packed solid now with Voion soldiery. "Look at 'em," Leon called. "Jammed in so tight they can't even maneuver! If those Bugs knew anything about siege tactics, they'd have wiped us out the first night!" "Better try some evasive action," Relief called. "They may have some big stuff down there." Gerthudion groaned, complied sluggishly. "If they have, they're holding it back," Leon yelled behind him. "All they hit us with so far is a lot of talk, plenty of rocks and arrows and a few hand-guns." Blasters winked below now, searching after the Rhoon. She threw her massive weight from one side to another, flying a twisting course toward the squatty palisade ahead and the cluster of low buildings behind k. Leon took careful aim, then poured a long burst from his power gun into a Voion gun crew. There was a flicker, then a violent burst of pale ydlow light that puffed outward in a dingy smoke cloud. It faded quickly as fragments whistled past Gerthudion's head and clattered against her rotors. Then the giant flyer staggered over the wall in a billow of dust and slammed into the ground at the center of the wide central plaza of the town. Men appeared, running toward the Rhoon. "Hold your fire!" Big Leon bellowed. "It's me -- and Relief! This Rhoon's tame! First bushwacker lays a hand on her's got me to answer to!" T he embattled Terrans were all around now, gaping as Relief and Leon slid down from their places. "Jumping jinkberries, Leon! How'd you catch that critter?" "You sure it don't bite?" "Thought you was one of them that's been buzzing us all day." "How about it, Leon? Did you find that Bug chief?" "Quiet, the lot of you!" Leon held up his hands. "The bug rebels are out of the picture. We're on our own." He motioned to Relief. "I picked up a recruit, name of Relief." "Well, you're just in time for the massacre. Mister," someone greeted him. "Hey, Leon. What about this Rhoon of yours? Maybe it could airlift us out of here." "I'll carry no burden this day," the Rhoon gasped out. Her rotors sagged as she squatted, her massive MO IT ked against the ground. rave damage... to my windings... I fear Fve done... such burdens to bear... the while I gamboled like a Phip... Leon said, "You did okay, Gertie. Just take it easy, girl." He faced the crowd of forty unshaven, unwashed frontiersmen. "What's been going on while I was gone?" "They hit us again just after First Eclipse," said a wide, swarthy man with a low-slung pistol belt. "Same cUd business. Come at us in a straight frontal assault, whooping it up and shooting arrows. A couple Rhoon made passes, dropping leaflets and stones, but our guns -- we still got three working -- kept 'em at a safe altitude. We kept our heads down and peppered 'em and they pulled back before they hit the stockade. They been quiet since noon. But they're up to something. Been working since dawn on something." Leon grunted. "After a while those bugs are going to figure out all they have to do is hit us from four sides at once and get a couple magnesium fires going against the walls -- and we've had it." "Their tactics are likely to improve suddenly," Retief said. "There's a Groaci military advisor in the area ahd I imagine he'll take the troops in hand before many hours pass. In the meantime, we'd better start making some plans -- " "Some wills, you mean," someone corrected. "They'll flatten us like a tidal wave once they get rolling." "Still, we don't want to make it too easy for them. Leon, what have you got in the way of armament. other than those three guns I heard mentioned?" "My iron makes four; it's got about half a diarge left. There's a couple dozen heavy-duty hunting bows -- some of the boys are pretty good with 'em. And I had Jerry trying to inker up a rig to drop a few thousand volts to the perimeter wall." "I have it going, Leon," Jerry called. "Don't know how long it will last if they throw a big load on the line, though." "We finished up the ditching while you was gone, Leon," another man called. "If they get past the stockade, they'll hit a six-foot trench. That ought to slow 'em down some." "This is all just peanuts," Leon said. "Sure, we'll take a few hundred with us -- but that won't stop us from going." "It will be dusk in another few hours," Retief said. "I think we can count on a go-for-broke attack with General Hish calling the plays. Let's see if we can't arrange a suitable reception." F rom a top-floor room in a tower that formed one corner of the compound at Rum Jungle, Retief studied the ranks of the Voion that moved restlessly all across the halfmile of cleared ground. "Uh-huh, our Groaci military expert is on the scene," he said. "That formation's not exactly a paradeground effect, but it's a long way from the mob we flew over on the way in." "It's not that that gives me the a short blond beard. "It's them damned Rhoon circling up there." He motioned toward floating dots far overhead that indicated the presence of a pair of the huge flyers. "If they knew Gertie's crowd were out looking for them, they'd be a Kttle less carefree up there," Retief commented. "But I'm afraid our aerial allies are combing the wrong stretch of sky." A man hurried in, breathing hard. "Okay, Big Leon," he said. "I guess that does it. We rigged the ropes and the tank-traps, and all the boys are posted vtp as high as they could get. Les's got a good head o steam up on both boilers, and -- " "All right. Shorty," Leon said. "Just tell everybody to look sharp and don't make a move before the signal goes "Get ready," Retief said. "I think something's starting down there now." Barely visible in the dim light, the Voion were crowding back, opening narrow lanes through their ranks; bulky shapes were trundling forward along the paths thus formed, "Oh-oh. Looks like they got some kind of heavy equipment," Shorty said apprehensively. "Nope. Not equipment; friends," Leon stated. "Those big critters are Jackoo. I guess that cuts it. Those boys can steamroller right through the walls." "Correction," Retief said. "Six, two and even those Jackoo are zombies like the Rhoon." "What do you mean?" Leon and the other man stared at Retief while he gave them a brief explanation of the Voion technique of installing an energy cell and a pilot in a dead Quoppina. "The drive mechanism and circuitry are all there," he concluded. "All they have to do is supply the power and the guidance." "That's far from simple," Jerry said. "Ye gods, the technical knowledge that implies! Maybe we've been underestimating these Voion." "I think the Groaci have a digit in the pie," Retief said. "Groaci, huh?" Jerry nodded, looking worried. "It fits. They're skillful surgeons as well as exporters of sophisticated electronic and mechanical devices." "How can they butt in here?" Shorty demanded. "I thought that kind of stuff was frowned on by the "You have to get within frowning range first," Retief pointed out. "They've done a good job of keeping under cover." "Looks like they're getting set to hit the wall, all right," Leon said. "I count eight of 'em. The game'll be over quicker'n I figured." Retief studied the maneuvers below, dim in the pre-dawn light. "Maybe not," he said. "See if you can get me seven volunteers and we'll try to stretch it into extra innings." R etief waited, flattened against the wall of a one-story structure the back of which was no more than ten feet from the timber wall surrounding the compound. IF "Get ready," Shorty called from the roof above. "They're rolling now. Boy, look at 'em come! Brace yourself. He's gonna hit right -- " There was a thunderous smash and a section of wall six feet wide bowed and burst inward. Amid a hail of splinters, the dull magenta form of a twoton Jackoo appeared. It was wobbling from the terrific force of the impact, but still coming on, veering past the corner of the structure half in its path, gathering speed again now as it plunged past Retief at a distance of six feet -- He swung out behind the bulky shape, took three running steps, jumped and pulled himself up on the wide back -- even broader than Fufu's ponderous dimensions, he noted in passing. Directly before him there was a hollow chopped out behind the massive skull -- the brain location in all Quoppina species. In it the narrow back of a Voion crouched, a heavy helmet of gray armor plate protecting his head. Retief braced himself, reached forward, hauled the driver bodily from his cockpit and propelled him over the prow. There was a heavy ker-blump! as the broad wheels slammed over the unfortunate Quoppina. Clinging to the now unguided zombie, Retief reached into the cockpit, flipped up a large lever dabbed with luminescent orange paint. The groan of the drive ceased instantly. The juggernaut slowed, rolled to a stop a foot from the six-foot moat dug by the defenders. hind. Retief turned to see the leaders of a column of Voion pressing through the broached wall. "Now!" shouted someone from a rooftop. tric blue sparks leaped across the packed mass of invaders struggling on high wheels across the shattered timbers. The two foremost members squalled, and shot fwward. Those behind also squalled but,' impeded by the uneven ground and the efforts of their fellows, failed to dart clear. The high voltage continued to flow -- here leaping a gap to the accompaniment of miniature lightnings, there bringing adjacent patches of Voion to red heat before welding them together. More Voion, coming up fast from the rear, joined the press. They found themselves instantly joined in the wild dance of arcing current and randomly stimulated nerves and gear trains. Retief returned to the task at hand. He flipped the back-up switch, hastily maneuvered the captured ram to face in the direction from which it had come. The two Voion who had leaped clear of the confusion dashed toward him, seeking refuge. Retief grabbed up the issue club dropped by the former operator in his hasty exit in time to slam the gun from the grip of one of them, knock the other spinning with a back-handed swipe to the head. Then he pushed the 'go' lever into the forward position, threw the speed control full on and vaulted off. the power!" Shorty yelled V from above. At once the showering sparks from the electrified attack ooimnii died, leaving only a dull red mosaic of hot spots, llien die riderless zombie was rumbling into the welded mass, slamming through the obstruction to disappear into the mob beytmd. "Get them cables back in placer a voice yeDed. Men darted quickly out to haul at the one-inch sted fines, stretching them across the gap three feet from ground level. Redef looked around. Across the compound, other dark gaps showed in the wall. Here and there lay the skimped form of a Voion. A nge Jackoo bulked immole. "Six of 'em busted through," Big Leon's vcnce said, coming up beside Relief, breathing hard. "One got stuck in his own hole. Another one was damaged so bad we couldn't get him going again. The boys sent the others back to spread joy according to plan." "Any casualties?" "Les got a busted arm; he was kind of slow knocking over a Bug that got through. That scheme of yours worked out neat, Relief." "It just slowed them a little. Let's see how Gertie's doing." They walked across to where the big fl#er still rested, her four legs sprawled, her eyes dull. "Gertie, they'll make it through on the next try," Relief said. "How are you feeling?" "Bad," the Rhoon groaned. "My circuitry I've overloaded. A month's nest-rest I'll require to be myself again." "No dice. You're going to have to lift off in a few minutes or you'll wind up being somebody else," Big Leon said. "Think you can do it?" Oerthudion lifted an eye to gaze distastefully across at the signs of the recent fray. "If I must, I must But m wait until the last, my powers to recover." "Gertie, I have an important mission for you," Relief said. outlined the plan while Gerthoefion breathed sonorously, like a pipe organ being turned... that's about it" he concluded. "Can you do it?" "Tis no mean errand you despatch me on, Relief. Still, Fll aloft these dastards to forestall. Then Pi return, your further needs to serve." "Thanks, Gertie. I'm sorry I got you into tWs." with a show of spirit. "Sorry am I my fellow Rhoon so far afield have flown, else a goodly number of the rascals we'd have disassembled for you." She started her rotors with a groan and lifted off, a vast dark shadow flitting upward in the gloom, tilting away toward the dark wall of the jungle. # T Tey," Shorty shouted from hh AI rooftop. "There's a bunch shaping up to hit the gap over here -- and looks like there's more of the same down the line at Jerry's spot..." Other calls rang from the spotters posted on the roofs. 'Trying to catch us off-balance," Big Leon said. He turned and yelled up to Shorty, "Okay! You know the IP Ian; don't let yourselves get cut off!" He turned to Retief as they started for the buildings at a run. "That Groaci general's spending lugs like half-credit chips in an allight Zoop Palace." "He's getting them free," Retief said. "Here they come!" Shorty's voice was drowned in a shrill battle-cry as the lead elements of the new wave of Voion shot through the break in the stockade, coming fast along the path trodden out by the Jackoo. The first in line was a big fellow with gaudy tribal inlays. As he saw Retief and Leon, he veered toward them, raising a barbheaded spear. He struck the stretched cable and slammed to a stop, bent almost double -- and was instantly engulfed by others as they charged in to collide from behind, with a sound like empty garbage cans falling off a truck. "Sock it to 'em!" Les yelled from his vantage point in the corner tower. Again a display of fireworks sprang up as ten thousand volts surged through the strung cable. "The generators can't take that load for long," Big Leon yelled above the uproar of crackling current, screeching Voion and enthusiastic human yells. There was a brief tremor underfoot. A vivid glare came from the direction of the power plant. Retief and Leon threw themselves flat as a dull boom rumbled across the compound, accented by the whine of shrapnel passing overhead. The ow at the fence-line died. "Shorty!" Leon called. "He's down," a voice rang from the next post in line. Leon swore, jumped to his feet. "Fall back on the Post Office," he yelled. "Pass the word!" He turned, ran for the building where Shorty had been posted. The Voion crowded in the gap in the wall were selves -- those who had survived the overload. A large specimen broke free and shot forward to cut Leon off. Retief reached him in time to lay a solid blow across the side of his head, then spiked his wheels with his own club. Ahead, Leon jumped, caught the caves, pulled himself up. A second Voion disentangled himself, and came thumping forward on a warped wheel, gun in hand. There was the crackle of a power gun from the upper window of the adjacent corner tower. The Voion't head disappeared in a spatter of vaporized metallic-chitin as the dead chassis slammed on to crash against the wall. Leon reappeared, lowering the inert form of Shorty. Retief caught the wounded man and draped him over a shoulder as Leoa dropped down beside him. TTie big man shouted: "Let's sprint! They'll cut us off!" Half a dozen Voion wheeled around the corner of the next structure in line and charged the two Terrans. Retief pivoted aside from a blaster shot, clubbed the next Voion in line as shots burped from the tower. At his side, Leoft ducked under a swinging diib caught a Voion by the wheel, flipped him. Then they were through sprinting for the plank laid across the six-foot ditch. Leon spun, flipped the board into the trench. Shots scored the doorframe as they dived through it. "Close," Leon panted. "How's Shorty?" "Breathing." Retief took the stairs three at a time, whirled into the room previously selected as a last-ditch stronghold, lowered the small man to the floor, then jumped to the window. Below, Voion were pouring into the compound -- and stopping short at the moat barring their path. In it some dozens of their more impetuous comrades were already trapped, floundering on broken wheels and waving frantic arms. More Voion pressed from behind, crowding those in front. Tlie rank lining the ditch was fighting now to pull back from the brink of disaster. But as Retief watched, one, then three more, then half a dozen together went over, dropped with a smash as those behind pressed forward to share in the loot. # # 'ghat's one way to bridge it," A a man said beside Retief. More men were coming into the room behind him. Across the compound, Retief . saw two men drop from a roof, start across, change course as Voion blaster shots crackled near them. A power gun buzzed beside Retief, laying down a covering fire. "Everybody's here but Sam and Square-deal Mac," somebody yelled. "They're okay so far," the man beside Retief called. He fired again, nailed a Voion who had struggled across the Voion-filled moat. One of the two men stumbled, spun, fell on his back. The other slung him over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and came on to disappear into the door below. "AH in," somebody called. "Button her up!" There was a sound of heavy timbers falling as a previously prepared barricade dropped into position to block the door below. Somebody said, "Henry's had it Steel splinter in the skull." "How many we lose?" Leon demanded. "Henry's dead. Shorty don't look good. Three more with medium bad blaster burns and couple bruised up." "Pretty good," somebody called. "We must of put a couple hundred of them devils out of commission just on that last go-round!" "Their turn comes next," Les said from the window. "They're across the ditch now." The compound was rapidly filling with Voion, pouring through the shattered wall and across the choked ditch. The late afternoon light was failing rapidly now. "They'll fire the buitding next," Retief said. "Leon, let's get the best shooters at the windows and try to discourage them from getting in close." Leon snapped orders. Men moved to firing positions, readying bows and power guns. "We're down to three guns," Leon said, "and not enough arrows IF to make a fellow start any long books." "We'll make 'em count," someone growled. A bowstring twanged, then another. A blaster buzzed. Below, a group of Voion who had reached the embattled Post Office withdrew hastily, leaving three former comrades lying on their sides with their wheels spinning lazily. The enemy horde filled the compound now, formed up in a dense-packed ring around the Terran-occupied tower. "The boys in the front rank are a little reluctant to grab the glory," Retief commented. "But the boys behind won't let cm stop," Big Leon grumbled. Tt's like fighting high tide." The circle closed; arrows sped, slammed through armor with solid clunks, or glanced off a helmet or shoulder plate to fly high in the air. "Save the guns for the ones out front," Leon called. "Watch for firemakers." Beside Retief, a man made a choked sound and fell backward, an arrow quivering high in his chest. Retief caught up his bow, nocked a bolt, took aim, picked off a Voion wheeling in fast firing a blaster. The gunner veered and crashed over on his side. "This is fun," somebody called. "But it won't buy us much. Look at them babies come!" "Hey, they shot some kind of fire-arrow over here," a man yelled from across the wide room. It's stuck in the wall and burning like a fused tube-lining!" T here were bright flares among the Voion ranks now, then streaks that arced up across the glowing sky, trailing white-hot embers. Most fell short, one or two of them landing among the front ranks of the attackers, but there were two solid thuds against the roof overhead. Acrid, chemjcalsmelling smoke was coiling in the windows from the first hit. "How about it, men? Do we stay in here and roast, or go out and take a few of 'em with us?" Leon roared. "Let's go get those Jaspers!" someone called. There was a shout of agreement. Men were coughing now; there were more ominous thumps against walls and roof. A flaming arrow shot through a glassless window, elicited yells as it slammed the wall opposite, scattering burning globlets of magnesium. A man plucked it out, set it against his bowstring, and let fly; there were screams as it sank home against the chest of a big Voion almost directly below. Someone had the door open now. Smoke and sparks billowed in. Big Leon cupped his hands to his mouth to shout above the roar of fire and battle: "You boys at the windows stick till the rest of us are out; keep pouring it to 'em!" He turned, plunged out through the smoke. Retief waited with his bow drawn, the feathers just under his chin. Big Leon appeared below, behind the tumbled logs of the barricade. A Voion charged to meet him but intercepted Retiefs arrow instead. Below Reties window the Voion were pressing close again, driven by the inexorable pressure of those behind. There were three fires burning briskly along Reliefs side of the wall now. He loosed an arrow, saw more Voion crowd in. One, hustled by his lellowi, fought helplessly, fell into a flame-spouting puddle of melted wood. He flared up in a bright green blaze, only to be smothered by others crushing in against him. From behind the barricade, Leon and the other Terrans fired steacfily, building up a heap of casualties. Leon vaulted the barrier, climbed up on the stacked Voion, firing down into the press. Relief picked off a Voion with a gun, set another arrow, loosed it, another... "That does it," a man called. "Out of ammo. Pm going down and see if I can't get me a couple barehanded." He disappeared into the smoke, coughing. At the barricade, Leon was still firing, an arrow entangled in the sleeve of his leather jacket. Relief saw him throw the gun aside, jump down into the small clear space before the tangle of downed Voion, laying about him with a Voion club. "I guess ifs all over," the last of Reliefs fellow archers declared. "No more arrows. Reckon Pll go down and meet 'em in the open. Don't much like the idea of frying up here." "Hold it," Relief said. "Look!" B eyond the palisade, a disturbance had broken out on the Voion left flank. A horde of vari-colored Quoppina had appeared from the jumble on that quarter, and were rapidly cutting their way through toward the palisade. They were led by a wedge of Jackoo, one of which was larger than its fellows and carried a vari-colored Quoppina astride its back. Close behind a fast moving column of blue-green fighters followed, their fighting claws snapping left and right. Behind them, a detachment of yellow-orange warriors were swinging bright-edged scythes as they mowed a path through the Voion ranks. Small purple shadows appeared among the trees. They began casting ropes which plucked targets from the fleeing Voion rabble to dangle, lows. "Hey! That must be that rebel army," the bowman yelled. "Look at 'em come!" Down below, the clear space before Big Leon was wider now. All across the compound breaks in the Voion ranks were opening. At the walls, Voion backs were visible as the confused attackers crowded out through the ragged gaps broached by the Jackoo zombies to confront the new threat, before which their fellows were streaming away in disorder. The live Jackoo vanguard rumbled onward, cutting a swathe toward the embattled stockade. The vari-colored Quoppina rider who led them whirled a flashing blade above a bright red Voion-like head. A small organized group of Voion, barred their path, led by a small officer with IF wdbbfy wheels. They stood their ground for half a minute, then broke and fled. Leon's men were across the barricade now, firing at retreating backs, jumping huddled dead and wounded to get clear shots at die confused enemy. Tts a blooming miracle!" a man shouted. "That must be them guerrilla fighters we heard about!" someone cafled. "Yippee!" Retief left the window, went down through the churning smoke and emerged in the front entry hall where two Terrans lay on their backs behind the barricade of logs. He cHmbed the latter, clambered across fallen Voion and jumped down to stand beside Leon, who was bleeding from a cut across the cheek. "I guess that Bug leader just didn't like my looks," the big man said. "Look yonder!" The bright-colored Quoppina who bad led the charge jumped down from the Jackoo and stepped through the nearest gap in the wall -- a tall creature with posterior arms well developed for walking, shorter upper members, rudimentary rotors above each shoulder, a bright red-orange face resembling a Voion with the exception of the color. "Yep," Leon said. "That's Tieftief, all right. Come on. I guess we owe that Bug some thanks." R etief studied the vari-colored stilter as it strode across the battle-littered ground. It carried a sword in hand, casually skirting the smoking bodies of electrocuted Voion, detouring around victims shot. iadnaaled or onshed in the disorderly scene just concluded. 'That was good timing," Big Leon caUed in the Voion tribal dialect. Tjlad you changed your mind." The stilter came up, halted facing Retief and Leon, sheathed the sword. "My grasp of the Voion tongue is rather limited," the Quoppina said in clear, accentless Terran, looking around at the shambles. "It seems you gentlemen have been busy." Ion grunted. "We'll be busy again if those Bugs decide to turn around and come back. How many troops you say you've got?" "I haven't counted lately," the stilter said coolly. "However, they're rallying to the colors in satisfying numbers." One armored manipulative member waved. "Are you in command of this death-trap?" Leon frowned. "Me and Retief been making most of the decisions," he said flatly. "I'm no general, if that's what you mean." "Retief?" The stilter's oculars swiveled. "Which one is he?" Leon jerked a thumb at him. "You called this place a death-trap," he started. "What -- " "Later," the biped said quickly, looking at Retief. "I thought -- I understood he was a diplomat..." Retief said, "There are times when the wiliest diplomacy seems inadequate. This appeared to be one of them." "I'd like to speak to you -- in private," the stilter said, sounding breathless. "Hey, Retief! Better watch this character." "It's all right, Leon," Retief said. He indicated an unciowded spot a few feet distant. The stilter stepped to it, then went on, paused inside the doorway to a building the roof of which was burning briskly, turned and faced Retief. The two upper arms went to the scarlet head, fumbled for a moment -- The mask lifted off, to reveal an oval face with wide blue eyes, a cascade of strawberry blonde hair "Don't... don't you know me?" the girl almost wailed as Retief studied her approvingly. "I'm Fifi!" Retief shook his head slowly, "Sorry. And I do mean sorry." "It's been quite a few years," the girl said appealingly, "but I thought." "You couldn't be over twentyme," Retief said. "It would take more than twenty-one years to forget that face." The girl tossed her head, her eyes darkling. "Perhaps you'll recall the name Fianna Glorian?" Retief 's eyes widened. "You mean Utile Fifi...r The girl clamped her gauntletted hands together, eliciting a loud clang. "Cousin Jame -- I thought I'd never find you!" C#T don't get it," Big Leon deX clfired. "I turn my back for five minutes to see how the wounded are making out, and this Tieftief character disappears back into the brush -- and this little lady pops out of noplace!" "Not exactly noplace, Mr. Caracki," Fifi corrected gentiy. "I was with the army," "Yeah, you sure were. And how you got there beats me. I've lived out here forty years and it's the first time -- " "I told you about the yacht crashing -- " "Sure -- and then you bust out of a Voion jail and a couple Phips take you in hand -- " "The little green ones? They're cute!" Fifi said. "They led us to the Herpp village, and told us about the rebel army -- " "Hey, Leon!" A bearded Terran came up, giving Fifi an admiring look. "Looks like they're getting set for one more push before full dark. This time they'll make it." Leon growled, "The reinforcements are nice, but not enough. Them Bugs will be all over us like army ants in a few minutes. Sorry you had to get into this, young lady. Wish there was some way to smuggle you out of here." "Don't fret, Mr. Carnacki," Fifi said coolly. "I have a weapon." She held up an efficient-looking shortsword. "I wouldn't dream of missing the action." "Hmmm. That looks like the one that Bug Tief-tief was carrying." "He gave it to me." Leon grunted, turned away to bark orders. Retief leaned close to Fifi. "You still haven't told me how you managed to take over my army." "After I got the other girls settled in the native village, the little Phip led me to your scaresuit," Fifi whispered. "Of course, I didn't know IF whose it was, but I thought it would be a good disguise. As soon as I got it on, the Phips flew off buzzing like mad. The next thing I knew, there were Quoppina arriving from every direction. They seemed to accept me as their general, and I just went along." "You seemed to be playing the role to the hilt when I first caught sight of you, Fifi." 'I've listened to enough war stories to know a little tactics -- which is more than can be said for the Voion." A sharp hubbub broke out nearby. Retief stepped out to see Jikjik, Tupper, several other Zilk and Ween, a pair of heavy Jackoo, half a dozen Herpp and a cluster of blue and white Clute and high-wheeled Slang, striking in lemon accented with orange polka dots. "Where our warchief?" Jik-jik shrilled. "I wants to see Tief-tief, and I means now!" "Steady, troops," Retief soothed. "Here I am." "What you mean, here I is?" Jikjik yelped. "I looking for a fighting Quopp name of Tief-tief, not some foreign-type Terry!" "Shhh. Fm in disguise. Don't give me away." "Oh." Jik-jik looked Retief over carefully. "Pretty good," he said in a conspiratorial tone. "Almost fooled me." "Is it you, Tief?" Tupper hooted. "I feared ye were dead, the way ye dropped out of sight." "Just a tricky bit of under-cover work," Retief assured the group. "Things is got worse since we teen you last," Jik-jik said. "Voion vsing new stuff on us!" "Them Voion throwing thunderbolts now, for sure!" a Ween said. "Come nigh to melting my tail wheel down!" He displayed the two-inch coasted depending from the tip of his anterior segment. "Hoo! It melted half away!" Jikjik looked at Retief. "What this mean, War-chief?" "It means the Federated Tribes tie in trouble," be said. 'The Voion are using guns." "Where'd they get these whatchacalhims, guns?" a Clute inquired. "I ain't never heard of nothing like that before. Melt a fellow down before he gets in harpoon range." T'm afraid there's been some meddling in Quopp's internal affairs," Retief said. "After we've cured the Voion of their interest in governing the planet, we'll have to reverse that trend." He looked over the delegation. T see you've picked up a few recruits. How did you manage it?" "Well, Tief-tief," Jik-jik announced. "I got to thinking about my Uncle Lub-lub and some of them other Ween in the next village, so I bribed a Phip to scatter over there and invite 'em to join the party. Seem like word got around, because volunteers done been coming in all day. Them Voion sure is got a heap of folks riled up at 'em." "Nice work, Jik-jik. You, too, Tupper." "What about me?" Fufu demanded. "While I was out on patrol, I caught a nosey Voion creeping up on us and flattened him singlewheeled!" "Way I hear it, you was sneaking off the back way and run into the whole Voion army," Fut-fut commented. "It scare you so bad you come rolling back fast!" "The idea! I'd just slipped away for a little solitary contemplation -- " "We'll compose a suitable military history of the operation later," Retief interposed. "We'll put in all the things we wish weM done and leave out the embarrassing parts. For now, we'll stick to practical politics." "Ain't nothing practical about the fix us in," Jik-jik stated. "Us done cut our way right into a trap. They is got us outnumbered six of sixes to one or I is a Voob's nephew." "I resent that, you!" a small redorange Quoppina said cockily, snapping a couple of medium-sized claws at the Ween. "We Voob -- " "Even you Voob can see they packed together out there like grubs in a brood-rack." "Watch y'r language, ye Wormless cannibal!" a Zilk grated. "No bickering," Retief broke in. "Tonight we're all Quoppina together -- or tomorrow we'll all be spare parts!" I t was full dark now. A pale glow in the South announced the imminent appearance of Joop. A Phip, its tiny pale green running lights glowing, dropped in with rotors whining to settle on Relief's outstretched arm. "Ween-ween set-set," it reported io a penny-whistle chirp. "Zilk-zilk IF ciK-diop, Flink-flink swing-swingT "AH right. We're as ready at well ever be, Redef said sof to Jft-jik, who standing by with the oCher members of the General Staff -- one each of the tribes now repreMted in the Federation, plus Leon, Pffi and Seymour. Redef swung up onto Fufu's bade. Teon, wait until our diversion has penetrated as far as the edge of the Jmgle. Then hit them with all the firepower we've got. With a little hid:, they might panic and pull out" "And if a Dink had rotors, he wouldn't spin his wheels so much," a Slang muttered. "All right, you Quoppina in the commando party. Don't do anything brave and don't get captured," Relief directed. "Just stick to the plan and try to cause as much confusion as possible." "Let's go," a Flink mounted astride a Jackoo whined. "Already nervous prostitution I got." Pofu huffed and started forward, rolling over a mat of flattened Voion, bursting out through the broached fence, sending Voion flying. Ahead, the suddenly aroused enemy were closing in, clubs waving. Here and there was the wink of a power gun, firing with wild inaccuracy. Retief crouched over Fufu's neck, his sword held extended low on the right side. A Voion darted intp his path, raised a gun -- and slammed back as the point took him under tihe chest plates. Another leveled a ear, but jumped aside in the nick of time as Fufu thundered past and the others of the assault column followed close behind. "Those city wheels," Fufu snorted. "No good at an to this sort of thingl" A Voion dashed to firing position among the trees ahead, tiirew iq) his arms. He arced gracefuUy up into the air, paused and started a return swing, suspended by tiie neck from a length of purple rope. Another veered suddenly as a filmy net dropped to engulf him, then went head over wheels In a cloud of dead leaves, tripping a pair of comrades. "Those Flink arc a caution," Fufu panted. "ShaH I head back oA now?" "Affirmative. And look out to that big fellow with the harpoon!" Fufu honked and swerved as a long barb-headed spear shot past his head, clattered off his side. "Tief-tief, arc you all right?" he shouted. "Sure; nice dodging!" T he Jackoo curving back now racing through the trees for the shelter of the stockade. Behind him, Voion non-coms shrilled commands; a steady fire slashed after the retreating heavyweights. Fufu shied as a beam flicked across his flank. stingsr Retief looked back. A pack of Voion were in close pursuit. Lights winked as they fired at the run, keeping to the six-foot trail flattened by Fufu's hasty passage. More Voion packed the way ahead. Fufu ploughed into the press, dozing the hapless Planetary forces aside like Indian clubs -- but more popped up to fin their places. "rm getting . winded the heavy mount gasped bade over his shoulder "There are so many of them" "Break it off, Fufu," Retief came back. "Looks like we can't make the stockade. We'll take to the woods and harass their flanks!" "I'll try. But... I'm almost... pooped." "As soon as you hit the edge of the jungle, we'll form up a defensive ring," Retief called. He countered a swinging club in the grip of a Voion, ducked under a spear-thrust, leaned aside from the flare of a power gun. Behind him, the other Jackoo of the detachment were in similar straits, hemmed in from all sides by a crushing press of Voion. Those behind were forcing the front rank unof the heavy creatures. "We'll form a circle," he shouted back to them. "Close spacing, and heads facing out! You Flink dismount and beat them off as long as you can!" A t the edge of the jungle Fufu wheezed to a halt. Bubu came alongside and wheeled to face the forward-surging enemy. The others quickly took up positions to complete the ring. The oncoming Voion met wild swings from the embattled Jackoos' digging members, supported by vigorous resistance from Flink-wielded clubs and spears that had been captured from the Voion who had managed to evade Fufu's shoveltipped arms and blasted him with it, then downed another. A heap of damaged Voion grew around the tiny fortress. Now the Voion attackers were forced to scale a mound of casualties to fire down into the enclosure. Beside Retief, one Flink after another yelled, toppled backward, smoking from a hit. The few remaining rebels had all captured gum by now. They fired steadily, birt nearly as inaccurately as the Voion. Retief picked off one attacker after another, while the weapon grew hot in his hand. Then it buzzed dolefully and died. A Voion above him took aim. Retief threw the gun, saw it clang off the Voion's armored head, knocking him backward -- There was a sudden change in the quality of the sounds of conflict. A high, thin shriek cut through the squalling of the Voion and the crackle of gunfire and fiercely burning metallo-wood. Dust rose in swirls. A miniature tornado seemed to press at the crowded Voion then hurl them backward. Into the cleared patch thus created, something vast and dark slammed down with the ground-shaking boom! of a falling cliff. In the stunned silence that followed, pieces rattled all around. As shrill Voion cries rang out, dust rolled away to show the pulverized remains of a Rhoon scattered across the field among windrows of felled Voion. A second huge dark shape appeared, beating across the scene of battle at low level, rotors hammering. The bright flash of a power gun winked above its lights. "That does it, Tief-tief," Ozzl IP gasped. Who could lightning ftxm the sky?" Something dropped from die Bhocm's underside, slammed down among the Voion, bounced high, hit again, cutting a swathe through tanks sdll stunned by die crash ol the first of the giant creatures. "Ticf-tief!" a vast voice boomed, floating across the sky as the Rhoon Wted. 'Tief-tiefr TJstcnl" Ozzl choked. 'He's -- he# calling you! What's it mean?" Retief jumped up on Fufu's broad back. All around, the Voion were breaking and fleeing now, while the steady crackle and bzzapp of power guns sounded from the vast dark riiadows hanging above on hammering rotors. "It means the fight's over!" Retief shouted above the hurricane. "It's Gertie and her friends with reinfm-cements from the city -- and two hundred smuggled power pistols!" A n hour later, in an unburned room of the battered Post Office, Retief and his victorious allies sat around a wide table. They were sampling Terran trade rum, Bachus brandy and Quoppina Hellrose -- all cut three to one to stretch. "Those blasters turned the trick, all right, Retief," Leon said admiringly. "What sleeve did you have them up?" "Oh, they were stored conveniently in the Customs shed. I hoped we wouldn't have to use them. But once the Voion started it, there wasn't much choice." "You're a funny kind of diplomat, if you don't mind my mentioning it," Seymour commented. "I mean, sending Gertie to collect contraband guns so you could blast the government army. It was a neat move, don't get me wrong! But vdiaf #I Longspoon sa # f?" "Actually, Seymour, I hadn't intended to tell him." . "I hope all of you gentlemen will sfday the most complete discretion," Fifi said sweetly. "Otherwise, m come gunning for you personafly." "Retief did what he had to do," Leon growled. "What good's a dead diplomat?" "That's a question we'd better not examine too closely," Retief said. "And since we're now in position to present the authorities with a fait accompli, I don't think anyone will pursue it to its logical conclusion." "You is got my guarantee," Jikjik announced. "TTie new Federated Tribes ain't going ask no embarrassing questions." A Terran planter thrust his head into the room. "The Bugs -- our Bugs, I mean -- just brought in the Voion general. Ugly-looking little devil. What do you think we ought to do with him?" "Retief, you want to talk to this jasper?" Leon demanded. "Or should I just throw him back?" "Maybe I'd better have a word with him." Retief and Fifi followed Leon along to the room where the captive Voion huddled on splayed wheels, his drooping antennae expressive of profound dejection. One ocular twitched as he saw Relief. "Let me talk to him. Alone," he squeaked in a weak voice. Relief nodded. Leon frowned at him. "Every time somebody gets you off to the side, funny things start happening. Relief. I've got an idea you're not telling all you know." "Just my diplomatic reflex, Leon. I'll be with you in five minutes." "Watch that bird. He may have a spare sticker under his inlay."  As soon as the two Terrans had left, the Voion lifted off his headpiece to reveal the pale gray visage of General Hish. "To give you credit, Terry!" he hissed in Groaci. "To have sucked me in neatly with the pretense of disorganization!" "Don't feel too badly, General. If you only knew how I labored over the timing -- " "To not forget the miserable quality of the troops under my command," Hish added anxiously. "To wish the lot of them disassembled and exported!" He broke off. "But I tire you with these recriminations," he went on smoothly in Voion. "Now, as a fellow member of a foreign mission, I assume you'll accord me the usual courtesies." Relief looked thoughtful. "Let me see. As far as I can recall, the courtesies I received the last time I was a giiest of the Groaci were a bit irregular." "Now, now, my dear Relief! We mustn't hold grudges, eh? Just give me an escort to my heli and we'll let bygones be bygones -- " "There are a few little points I'd like for you lo dear up for me first," Relief said. "You can start by telling me what the Groad Foreign Office had in mind when it started arming the Voion." Hish made a clicking noise indicating surprise. "But my dear chap! I thought it was common knowledge that it was your own Ambassador Longspoon who conceived the notion of supplying, ah, educational material?" "Terry power guns make a blue flash, Hish," Relief said patiently. "Those of Groaci manufacture make yellow ones -- even when they're tricked out with plastic covers to look like Terry guns. It was one erf your flimsier deceptions." "Speaking of deceptions," Hish mused, "I feel sure your own clever impersonation will cause quite a stir among your troops, once it'i known. To say nothing of the reaction among your colleagues when they discover you've been leading an armed insurrection -- and against "It might. If there were anyone alive who knew about it -- and feh gabby," Relief agreed. "I'm alive," Hish pointed out. "And while 'gabby is not perhaps the word I would have employed -- " "There's not much I can do about your gabbiness," Relief cut in. "But as for you being alive -- " "Relief! You wouldn't? Not a fellow alien! A fellow diplomat! A fellow illegal operator!" "Oh, I might," Relief said. "Now, suppose you demonstrate that gabbiness you were boasting about a few seconds ago..." IF #(# emember, this is all in thn Av strictest confidence,' Hirii croaked, mopping at his throat sac with a large green hanky. "If Ambassador Schluh ever suspected -- that is, if he knew of my professional confidences -- " There was a scrape of feet outside the door. Hish hastily donned his head as the yellow-bearded Terran came into the room. "Hey, Mr. Retief," he said. "There's a fellow out here just made a sloppy landing in a heli. Says he's from the Terry Embassy at Ixix. Leon says you better talk to him." "Certainly," Relief got to his feet. "Where is he?" "Right here." The blond man motioned. A second figure appeared in the door -- muddy, tattered, his clothing awry, his cheeks unshaven. Leon, Fifi, Seymour and a crowd of others were behind him, "Retief!" Magnan gasped. "Then you -- how -- I thought -- but never mind. They let me go. That is, they sent me -- Ikk sent me -- " "Maybe you'd better sit down and collect yourself, Mr. Magnan." Retief put a hand under the First Secretary's elbow and guided him to a chair. Magnap sank down. "He has them. All of us. The entire staff," he choked. "From Ambassador Longspoon -- locked up in his own Chancery, mind you -- down to the merest code clerk! And unless the Federated Tribes instantly lay down their arms, disband their army and release all prisoners, he's going to hang them right after breakfast tomorrow!" # A l I got to say it," Seymoiv Jl announced, hitdmif up hk pants, "we aint about to give up what we won just to sava a bunck party. Serves 'em rit for diunaming up to them Voion." "Retief didn't adc you to, Big Leon snapped. "Shut up, Seymour. Anyway, we didn't win die fight -- the Bugs did." "But the sixty-one prisoners," Magnan protested breathlessly. 'Twenty women!" "Longspoon ought to appreciate being strung up by his pals," a man put in. "These Quopp tribesmen will sure do the job if the Voion don't." "It's a tough deal," Leon cut in. "But even if we went along, wc got no guarantee Ikk wouldn't hang 'em anyway -- and us alongside of 'em." "I'm afraid doing business Ikk is out of the question," Retief agreed. "The former Prime Minter is one of those realistic souls who never let a matter of principle stand in the way of practical matters. Still, I think hanging the whole staff is a bit severe." "He must be out of his mind," someone said. "He'll have a coujrfe in here before you can say Ja Dools!" "Ikk is an end-of-the-world type," Retief said. "He's not concerned about consequences. Not until they jump out and grab him by the back of the neck." "I say let's get the Bug army together -- " "The Federated Tribes," Retief corrected gently. "Yeah. Okay, the Federated Tribes. We march 'em straight tiirough to Ixix, with plenty of Rhoon cover, take over the town, kick out the Voion garrison, tell old Ikk to hang up his tool box and do for Quopp except give the Voion big ideas?" "Gentlemen, it's apparent that the next target for the Federation is the capital," Retief said. "I want you to wait one day before starting, however." "Hell, let's hit 'em now! Before they get a chance to pull themselves together." "That ain't likely -- not with their general cooling his wheels here." Seymour nodded toward Hish, sitting silently in a corner. "What you want us to wait for, ReMef?" Les demanded. "Don't sound any dumber'n you got to," Big Leon growled. "He needs a few hours to try to spring the Ambassador and his rappies before Ikk strings 'em up." He looked at Retief. "Seymour and me'll go with you." "Three Terries would be just a trifle too conspicuous in Ixix tonight," Retief said. "But I think I'll take our friend the general along for company." Hish jumped as though stung by a Zinger. "Why me?" he whispered. "You'll be my guide," Retief said blandly. "How do you figure to make vour play?" "There are a few supplies I'll need. Then I'll have to go over to the Federation camp and talk to the local headmen," Retief said. "We'll work out something." Leon looked at him with narrowed eyes. "There's angles to this I'm not getting," he said. "But that's okay. I guess you know what you're doing." Fifi put a hand on his arm. "Jame -- have you really got to go? But that's a stupid question, isn't it?" She managed a smile. Retief put a finger under her chin. "Better send out some Jackoo and an escort and get the girls in here to camp and ready to march. Tomorrow night you'll all be celebrating with a big party aboard a Corps Transport." "But we c-came to see your "You will," Retief said. "I claim the first dance." "Yeah," Shorty said under his breath. "Let's hope he's got both feet on the floor when he gets it." XX W ith his Quoppina armor in an inconspicuous bundle under one arm and Hish, still in Voion trappings, trailing dismally, Retief followed a guiding Phip to the Ween encampment a mile from Rum Jungle. Startled veterans of the morning's action jumped up, fighting claws ready, as he and Hish walked into the clearing around their main campfire. The Groaci was close on his heels now. Jik-jik came forward. "Well, if it ain't a Terry," he said. "It's me -- Tief-tief." IF "Oh. Well clanged if it ain't. You look just like one, and they all looks tike." "Remember -- I'm incognito," Relief said. "Oh, uh, yeah," Jik-jik made a fast recovery. "Well, Terry, just step on in and sit down. Just be a little bit careful one of the boys don't get kind of curious and nip off a small bite." "I'm poison," Relief said loudly. "You get terrible belly cramps if you eat a Terry, and afterward your cuticula falls off in big patches." He took a seat on a fallen log; Hish hovered close, looking nervously at the Ween fighting claws gleaming all around. "I have to get into town, Jik-jik," Relief said. "I'm going to need some help from the tribes with what I have in mind." R elief, once again clad in his bright-colored armor, scanned the ground below as the immense male Rhoon on which he rode beat its way southward in company with a dozen picked companions. To the left flew the steed of General Hish, a mount specially equipped with a dummy cockpit astride which the terrified Groaci sat, a gay red scarf fluttering from his neck. "It looks as though the ground troops have rounded up most of the refugees from last night's fiasco," Relief called to his Rhoon. "I see a few small parties huddled together here and there, but no concentrations." "Except the fifty thousand of the rascals who still behind the city's towers hide," the deep voice boomed. "My hope it is they'll venture up, their stolen Rhoonish corpses to employ against us." "I doubt if you'll get your wish," Relief said. "Gerthudion and her friends have pretty well cleared the skies, I think." With the Rhoon carrying Hish a hundred yards in advance. Reliefs flyer descended steadily, passed over the port at five hundred feet, aiming for the rooftop helipad that crowned the Terr an Chancery Tower. "That gun crew down there is tracking us," Relief said. "But they're not quite sure enough to shoot." "That's but a trivial hazard, Tieftief, compared with challenging the Blackwheel's stronghold." "Let's hope Hish remembers his lines." "The prospect of Lundelia's rending claws will him inspire to a flawless performance," the Rhoon croaked. Ahead, the lead Rhoon settled in to the pad, Hish clinging to his saddle, his jaunty scarf fluttering downward now in the air blast frorh Lundelia's rotors. Two Voion posted on the roof rolled to meet him, guns in hand. Hish lowered himself awkwardly and cast a nervous glance at the looming head of his mount. His arms waved as he spoke to the police. He pointed to Relief's Rhoon, now dropping in to light beside Lundelia. The big flyer braked his rotors to a stop with a final whopvfho-woooppp of displaced air. "... prisoner," Hish was whispering. "Just stand aside, fellow, and rn take him along to His Omnivoracity." As Redef jumped down, Hish waved the power gun from whidi the energy cell had been removed. Tm sure the Prime Minister will be interested in meeting the rebel chieftain, Tief-tief," he amplified. "So that's the bandit, eh?" One of the Voion rolled over, peering through the failing light of the sun, now a baleful spotlight behind flat purple clouds on the horizon. "He's a queer-looking Qiiopp. How'd you snare him?" "I snatched him single-handed from under the noses of his comhundreds more," Hish snapped in his breathy Groaci voice. "Now clear my path before I lose my temper and add you to the list of casualties." "Okay, okay, don't get huffy," the guard said sullenly. He waved the pair toward the door. "For your sake I hope that's the genuine article you've got there," he muttered as Hish rolled awkwardly by on his prosthetic wheels. "Oh, I'm genuine," Retief said. "You don't think he'd lie to you?" I nside, Retief went ahead of Hish, glanced along the short hall, turned to Hish. "You're' doing fine. General. Now don't get excited and blow this next scene. It's the climax of the morning's entertainment." He took the gun, fitted the kick-stick back in the butt, slipped it into his concealed hip holster, then adjusted his face-mask. "How do I look?" "Likc an insomniac's nightmare," Hish whispered. "Let me go now, Retief! When you're shot down for the idiot you are, it would be a pity if I were caught in the overkill." "I'll see that your passing won't be accidental," Retief reassured the Groaci. He checked to sec that the bulky pouch slung over his left hip was in place; its contents shifted with a dull clank of glass. "All right, Hish," he said. "Let's go down." "How can I negotiate these stairs, wheeled as I am?" "No stalling. General. Just bump down the way the Voion do, not forgetting to use the hand rails." Hish complied, grumbling. In the wide corridor one flight down, Voion sentries were posted at intervals. They turned cold oculars on the pair. "Sing pretty," Retief said softly. "You there," Hish keened at the nearest Voion. "Which are the chambers of His Omnivoracity?" "Who wants to know, wobblywheels?" the cop came back. "What's this you've got in tow? A TerryQuopp half-breed?" He made the scratchy sound that indicated Appreciation of One's Own Wit. "What wandering cretin fertilized your tribal ovum racks just prior to your hatching?" Hish inquired pointedly. "But I waste time with these pleasantries. Show me the way to the Prime Minister or I'll see to it your component parts are added to the bench stock in a front line reppo deppo." "You will, eh? Who the Worm you think you are!" IF Hish tapped his narrow, Voionarmored thorax with a homy, pseudoclaw, eliciting a hollow clunk. "Is it possible you don't know the insignia of a general officer?" he hissed. "Uh -- is that what you are?" the fellow hesitated. "I never saw one." "That omission has now been rectified," Hish announced. "Quickly now! This prisoner is the insurgent Commander-in-Chief." "Yeah?" The guard rolled closer. Others in hearing pricked up their auditory antennae, moving in to follow the conversation. 'To watch your step," Retief said quietly in Groaci. "To remember Aat if I have to shoot, you'll be in my line of fire." "Stop!" Hish snapped hoarsely, waving back the curious Voion. Ttesume your posts at once! Clear the way!" "Let's have a look at this stilter," a Voion shrilled. "Yeah, I'd like to get a piece of the Quopp that blew the wheels off a couple of former associates of mine!" "Let's work him over!" Hish crowded back against Retief. "One step closer, and you die!" he choked., "I can assure you a gun is aimed at your vitals at this instant!" "I don't see any guns." "Let's see if this stilter's arms bend -- " T here was the crash of a door slamming wide, an ear-splitting creech of Voion rage. The sentries whirled to see the oversized figure of Prime Minister Ikk, Jarweel feathers a-tremble with rage, confronting them, flanked by armed guards. "You pond-scum have the unmitigated insolence to conduct a freefor-all at my very door?" he shrilled. "I'll have the organ-clusters off the lot of you! Niv! Kiiz! Shoot them down where they stand!" "Ah... if I niight interject a word, Your Omnivoracity?" Hish raised a hand. "I hope you remember me -- General Hish? I just happened along with my prisoner." "Hish? Prisoner? What -- " The irate leader clacked his jeweled palps with a sound like a popped paper bag, staring at the disguised Groaci. "You mentioned the name of, ah. General Hish." "Ah -- there was the matter of a suitable, er, cover identity." "Cover?" Ikk rolled up, waving the chastened sentries aside. He stared closely at Hish. "Hmmm. Yes," he muttered. "I see the joints now. Nice job. You look like a tribal reject with axle rickets and shorted windings, but I'd never have guessed..." He looked at Retief. "And you say this is a prisoner, Hish?" "This, my dear Ikk, is the leader of the rabble forces." "What? Are you sure?" Ikk rolled quickly back, looking Retief up and down. "I heard he was a stiltcr... maroon cuticula... rudimentary rotcx... by the Worm, it fits! How did you manage -- but never mind! Bring him along!" He whirled. His eye fell on the sentries huddled in a clump under the watchful oculars of the bodyguards. "Send these good fellows along,  he shrilled merrily. "Sec that they all get promotions. Nothing like a show of spirit, I always say. Shows morale's up." Buzzing a merry tune, the Voion leader led the way through the wide door into the Ambassadorial office and took up his pose under the large portrait of himself hanging where the Corps Ensign had been on Retiefs last visit. "Now!" He rubbed his grasping members together, eliciting a sound effect reminiscent of a hacksaw cutting an oil-drum. "Let's have a look at the dacoit who had the effrontery to imagine he could interfere with my plans!" "Ah, Ikk." Hish made a fluttery gesture "There are aspects to the present situation I haven't yet mentioned." "Well?" Ikk canted his oculars at the Groaci. "Mention them at once! Not that they can be of any importance, with this fellow in my hands. A capital piece of work, Hish! For this, I may allow you to... But we'll go into that later." "It's rather private," Hish whispered urgently. "If you wouldn't mind sending these fellows along?" "Umph." Ikk waved an arm at his bodyguards. "Get out, you two. And while you're at it, tell Sergeant Uzz and his carpenters to hurry up with the ten-Terry gibbet. No need to wait until morning now." The two Voion rolled silently to the door, closed it gently behind them. Ikk turned to Retief, making a clattering sound with his zygomatic plates indicative of Pleasure Anticipated. "Now, criminal," he purred. "What have you to say for yourself?" Retief lifted the holster flap, snapped out the power gun and leveled it at Ikk's head. "I'll let this open the conversation," he said genially. I kk crouched, slumped down over his outward-slanting wheels, his lower arms slack, his upper pair picking nervously at his chest inlays. "You!" he addressed Hish. "A traitor! I trusted you! I gave you full powers, listened to your counsels, turned over my army to youl And now this!" "Surprising how these matters sometimes turn out," Hish agreed in his whispery voice. He had his headpiece off now and was smoking one of Ikk's imported dopeslicks. "Of course, there was the little matter of the assassins assigned to eliminate me from the picture as soon as you had achieved your modest goals. But I concede that was to be expected." Ikk's oculars twitched. "Who, me?" he said dazedly. "Why . "Naturally, I eliminated them the first day. A small needle fired into their main armatures did the trick neatly." There was a small sound at the door. It snapped wide and Ikk's two bodyguards rolled quickly through, guns at the ready, flipped the door shut behind them. Ikk came to life then, dropped behind the platinum Ambassadorial desk as the two swiveled to face Hish. BeIF hind the Groaci, Retief held the gun steady against his hostage's backplates. "Shoot them down, Kuz!" Ikk shrilled. "Blast them into atoms! Burn them where they stand; never mind about the rub... His voice faded off. He extended an ocular above table-top level and saw the two Voion standing, guns at their sides. "What's this?" he shrilled. "I order you to shoot them at once!" "Please, my dear Ikk!" Hish objected. "Those supersonic harmonics are giving me a splitting headache!" Ikk rose up, his palps working spasmodically. "But -- but I summoned then! I pushed my secret button right here under my green and pink inlay!" "Of course. But naturally, your bodyguards are on my payroll. But don't feel badly. After all, my budget -- " "But" Ikk waved his arms at the Voion. "You can't mean it, fellows! Traitors to your own kind?" "They're a couple of the chaps you ordered disassembled for forgetting to light your dope-stick," Hish said. "I countermanded the order and planted them on you." "Then at least let them shoot the stilter!" Ikk proposed. "Surely you and I can settle our little differences -- " "The stilter has the drop on me, I'm afraid, Ikk. No, these two good lads will have to be locked in the W.C. Attend to it, will you? There's a good fellow." "You handled that properly, Hish," Retief commended as # rolled dejectedly back after snapping the lock behind his former adherents. "Now, Ikk, I think we'd better summon Ambassador Longspoon here to make the party complete. I kk grumbled, pressed a button on the silver mounted call-box, snapped an order. Five minutes dragged past. There was a tap at the door. "You'll know just how to handle this," Retief suggested gently to Ikk. Ikk twitched his oculars. "Send the Terry inf" he snapped. "Alone!" The door opened cautiously. A sharp nose appeared past its edge, then an unshaven, receding chin, followed by the rest of the Terran Ambassador. He ducked his head at Ikk, shot a glance at Retief, and Hish, whose face was again concealed behind the Voion mask. He let the door click behind him, tugged at the upper set of chromeplated lapels of his mauve after-midnight extra-formal cutaway, incongruous in the early evening light that gleamed through the hexagonal window behind Ikk. "Ah... there you are, Mr. Prime Minister," he said. "Er, ah..." "Hish, tell him not to get in my line of fire," Retief said in Tribal. Longspoon's eyes settled on Retief, still fully armored, jumped to the disguised Groaci, then back to the Prime Minister. 'Tm not sure I understand," he said. "The person behind me is armed, my dear Archie," Hish said. "I fear he, not our respected colleague the Prime Minister, controls the situation." Longspoon stared blankly at Relief, his close-set eyes taking in the maroon chest plates, the scarletdyed head, the pink rotors. "Who -- who is he?" he managed. "He's the Worm-doomed troublemaker who's had the effrontery to defeat my army," Ikk snapped. "So much for visions of a Quopp united in Voionhood!" "And," Hish put in quickly, "you'll be astonished to learn that his name is..." He paused as though remembering something. "Why, I know the bandit's name." Longspoon's mouth clamped in an indignant expression. "As a diplomat, it's my business to keep in touch with these folk movements. It's, ah, Tough-tou. Or Toof-toof or something of the sort." "How clever of Your Excellency," Hish murmured. "Now that the introductions are out of the way," Retief said in Tribal, "we'd better be getting on with the night's work. Ikk, I want the entire Embassy staff taken to the port and loaded aboard these foreign freighters you've impounded, and permitted to lift. Meanwhile, we'll use the hot line to Sector HQ Enforcers headed out this way. I hope they arrive in time to salvage a few undamaged Voion for use as museum specimens." "What's he saying?" Longspoon his mouth opening and closing as though he were pumping air over gills. "He demands that you and your laff leave Quopp at once," Ikk said. # IF iiTThat's that? Leave Quopp?   Abandon my post? Why, why, diis is outrageous! Fm a fully iom(fited Terran emissary of galactic good will! How could I ever cqlain to the Under-Secretary --  Tcn him you departed under duress," Ikk suggested. "Driven out by lawless criminals wielding illegal firearms." "Firearms? Here on Quopp? But that's... that's -- " "A flagrant violation of Interplanetary Law," Hish whispered piously. "Shocking." "Give the orders, Ikk," Retief said. "I want the operation concluded before Second Jooprise. If I have to sit here any longer with my finger on the firing stud it may begiii to twitch involuntarily." "What? What?" Longspoon waited for a translation. "He threatens to kill me unless I do as he commands," Ikk said. "Much as I regret seeing you depart under such, ah, humiliating circumstances, Archie, I fear I've no choice. Still, after your dismissal from the Corps for gross dereliction of duty in permitting shipments of Terry-manufactured arms to the rebels -- " "I? Nonsense! There are no Terran weapons on Quopp!" "Look at the gun even now being aimed at my Grand Cross of the Legion d'Cosme," Ikk snapped. "I assume you know a Terran power pistol when it's pointed at you." Longspoon's face sagged. "A Hish canted an eye to look at Retief. Retief said nothing. "Still," Ikk went on, "You can always write your memoirs. Under a pseudonym, of course, the name Longspoon having by then acquired a galaxy-wide taint." "I'll not go!" Longspoon's Adam's apple quivered with indignation. "I'll stay here until this is covered up -- or, rather, until I'm able to clarify the situation." "Kindly advise the Ambassador that his good friend Ikk intends to hang him," Retief instructed Hish. "Lies!" Ikk screeched in Terran. "All lies! Archie and I have sucked the sourbale of eternal chumship!" 'TU not stir an inch!" Longspoon quavered. "My mind is made up!" "Let's have a little action, Ikk," Retief ordered. "I can feel the first twitch coming on." "You wouldn't dare," Ikk keened faintly. "My loyal troops would tear you wheel from wheel!" "But you won't be here to see it." Prodding Hish ahead of him, Retief went up to the desk, leaned on it, put the gun to Ikk's central inlay. "Now," he said. Behind him there was a rustle, a wheeze of effort -- He stepped back, whirled in time to see a chair wielded by the Ambassador an instant before it crashed down across his head. # A Ikk purred, like a knife sawing through corn husks. "Our rabble-rouser is now in position to see matters in a new light!" He made rattling noises in tribute to the jest. Retief was strapped into the same chair with which Longspoon had crowned him, many loops of stout cord restraining his arms. He held his head-piece half turned away from the lamp which had been placed to glare into his oculars. A pair of heavy-armed Voion interrogation specialists stood by, implements ready. Hish was parked in a corner, striving to appear inconspicuous. Longspoon, his lapels awry, hooked a finger under the rope knotted about his neck. "I... I don't understand. Your Omnivoracity," he quavered, "What's the nature of the ceremony I'm to take part in?" "I promised you'd be elevated to a high post," Ikk snapped. "Silence, or we'll settle for a small informal ritual' right here in your office!" He rolled over to confront Retief. "Who supplied the nuclear weapons with which you slaughtered my innocent, fun-loving, primitively armed freedom fighters? The Terrans, no doubt? A classic doublecross!" "The Terrans supplied nothing but big ideas," Retief confided. "And you Voion got all of those." "A claw-snap for their ideas." Ikk clicked his claws in discharge of the obligation. "You imagine I intended to conduct the planet's business with a cold Terran nose in all my dealings, carping at every trifling slumrclearance project that happened to involve the disassembly of a few thousand sub-Voion villagers? Hah! Longspoon vry generously supplied sufficient equipment to enable me to launch the Liberation. But his usefulness ended the day the black banner of United Voionhood went up over Ixix!" He turned back to Retief. "Now, you will at once supply full information on rebel troop dispositions, armaments, unit designations -- " "Why ask him about troop dispositions, Ikk?" one of the interrogators asked. "Every Quopp on the planet's headed this way. We won't have any trouble finding them." "It's traditional," Ikk snapped. "Now shut up and let me get on with this!" "I thought we were the interrogators," the other Voion said sullenly. "You stick to your Prime Ministering and let union labor do their job." "Hmmmph. I hope the union will enter no objection if my good friend Hish assists with the chore in the capacity of technical advisor?" He canted an ocular at the disguised Groaci. "What techniques would you recommend as being the most fun as well as most effective?" "Who, I?" Hish stalled. "Why, wherever did you get such an idea?" 'To keep them occupied," Retief said quickly in Groaci. "To remember which side of the bread substitute has the ikky-wax on it." "What's that?" Ikk waggled his antennae alertly at Retief. "What did you say?" "Just invoking the Worm in her own language," Retief clarified. "What language is that?" "Worman, of course." "Oh, yes. Well, don't do it any more!" "Ikk!" Hish exclaimed. "A most disturbing thought has just come to me!" IF WeU, out wUh it D tfited hb flfes toward the Oroad. "Ah -- er... I hardly know how lo phrase it... P k rolled toward him. "Fvc yet to decide just how to deal witii you, Hish. I suggest you endear yourself to me immediately by explaining what these hems and haws signify!" "I was thinking... that is, I hadn't thought... I mean, have you happened to think... Ikk motioned his torturers over, warn you, Hish! You'll tell me what this is all about at once, or I'll give my union men a crack at some overtime!" As Hish engaged the Voion is conversation, Retief twisted his arm inside the fitted armor sheath and slipped his hand free of the gauntlet. The confining rope fell away. He reached to the pouch still slung at his side, lifted the flap, took out a small jar of thick amber fluid. "Awwwwkk!" Ambassador Longspoon pointed at him, eyes goggling. Help! It's liquid smashite! He'll blow us all to atoms!" Ikk and his troops spun on their wheels. One Voion scrabbled at a holster, as the jar hurtled through the air, smashed at his feet. A golden puddle spread across the rug in an aroma of pure Terran clover honey. There was a moment's stunned silence. "Sh-shoot him!" Ikk managed. But the Voion with the gun dropped the weapon, dived for the fragrant syrup. An instant later, both interrogators were jackknifed over the honey, quivering in ecstasy, their drinking organs buried in nectar a thousand times stronger than the most potent Hellrose. Ikk alone still resisted, his antennae vibrating like struck gongs. He groped, brought up a gun, wavered, dithered, then with a thin cry dropped it and dived for the irresistable honey. Retief shook the ropes from his arms, undid the straps and stood. "Well done, General," he said. think that concluded this unfortunate incident in Quopp history. Now you and I had better have that little private chat you mentioned earlier... I t was almost dawn. Ambassador Longspoon, freshly shaved and arrayed in a crisp breakfast-hour informal dickey in puce and ochre stripes, stared glumly across the width of his platinum desk at Retief, now back in mufti. Beside him, Colonel Underknuckle rattled a sheet of paper, cleared his throat, beetled his eyebrows. "The report indicates that after the accused was seen with the bomb -- just before being reported absent without leave -- a cursory inspection of his quarters revealed, among other curiosities, the following: A dozen pairs of hand-tooled polyon undergarments with the monogram 'L', absent for some weeks from the wardrobe of Your Excellency; three cases of aged Pepsi from the Ambassadorial private stock; a voluminous secret correspondence with TOnamed subversive elements; a number of reels of high-denomination credit reported missing from the Budget and Fiscal Office; and a collection of racy photos of unfertilized ova." "Gracious," Magnan murmured. "Did you find all those things yourself, Fred?" "Of course not," the military attache snapped. "The Planetary Police turned them up." "Whats that?" Longspoon frowned. "Considering subsequent events, I hardly think we can enter their findings as evidence. Let's confine ourselves to the matter of the bomb, and the irregularities at the port. "Hmmmph! Seems a pity to waste perfectly good evidence." "Mr. Ambassador," Magnan piped. "I 'm sure it's all just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Perhaps Rctief wasn't at the port at all..." "Well?" Longspoon waited, eyes boring into Retief. "I was there," Retief said mildly. "But -- but, maybe it wasn't really a bomb he had," Magnan offered. "It was a bomb, all right," Retief conceded. "Well, in that case," Longspoon began. "Ah -- gentlemen, if I may put in a word?" General Hish, minus his Voion trappings and dapper in a dun-colored hip-cloak and jeweled eye-shields, hitched his chair forward. "The bomb...ah... it was, cr, that is to say, I, ah... "Yes, yes, get on with it. General," Longspoon snapped. "I've a number of othtf questions to ask you as soon as this distasteful business is cleared up." "It was my bomb," Hish whispered. iiTour bomb?" Underknuckle I and Longspoon said in chorus. "I, ah, had been led astray by evil companions," Hish said, arranging his mandibles at angles indicative of deprecation. "That is, I had supplied the infernal machine to a group whom I understood intended to employ it to er, ah, carry out patriotic measures directed against reactionary elements. Little did I suspect that it was the Ter ran Embassy which was thus so ungenerously characterized. At the last moment, learning of the fell intent of these insidious schemers, I, um, advised Mr. Retief of its whereabouts -- " "Heavens, nobly done!" Magnan gushed. "Gracious, and I always thought you Groaci had sort of a teentsy little prejudice against us Terrans." "Ignoring for the moment the matter of Groaci interference in Quopp's internal affairs," Underknuckle snorted, "there's still the matter of the stolen publications! What about that, eh? Can't wiggle out of this one, can you, by golly!" "Oh, I wanted to mention," Magnan said. "Those bound volumes of the Pest Control Journal -- " "You didn't say Pest Control Journal, did you, Magnan?" Longspoon demanded. "Yes, indeed I did say Pest Contr --  IF What idiot shipped that particulu periodical in here?" Longspoon bcOowed. "The entire journal's dcTOted to methods of anihilating arttiropods with chitinous exoskeletoni and ventral ladder-type nervous systems! If that sort of thing were ever released among the Quoppina -- why, we'd be hailed as the greatest murderers since Attila the HungP "Hun," Magnan corrected. "Well, I trust he was hung eventually! And the same goes for the "Gee, Fred," Magnan looked at Underknuckle. "Wasn't it you who -- " "Well, so that's taken care ot, Underknuckle said briskly. "That seems to leave notfiing outstanding but the unauthorized absence," Longspoon commented. "We can deal with this charge at the local level, I think, Fred." "Pity, in a way." The attache blinked at Retief. "Fd intended to ship him out under guard for examination by a Board of Interrogators, after which he'd be stripped of rank in a most colorful ceremony -- " The desk screen buzzed. "The Revolutionary Council is here to see you, Mr. Ambassador," a vinegary voice arinounced. "Show them in at once. Fester." Longspoon arranged his features and faced the door expectantly. "I'll just quickly establish my ascendancy over these fellows," he explained. "May as well get matters off on the correct footing." Magnan leaned toward Retief. "I love watching him work," he murmured. "It only took him an instant to decide on Hearty Congratulation plus Alert Awareness of Irregularities, and just the teeniest bit of Latent Severity, all tied together with a touch of Gracious Condescension." "A great technician," Retief agreed. 'Too bad you can't tell , the result from Stunned Incredulity." "Um. Still, die Quoppina won't know the difference." T he door opened. Fester appeared, ushering in the newly buffed figure of Jik-jik, his scarlet cuticula gleaming under multiple coats of wax, a new Jarweel feather bobbing behind hk left rear antenna. Behind him was the tall figure of Tupper, similarly glorified. Ozzl followed, with half a dozen other representatives of the victorious Federation. "Ah, Mr. Tief-tief, I presume?" Longspoon rose, extended a hand. Jik-jik waved it off. "No thanks, not hungry. Besides, us is got a new rule: Greens for Grubs and Grown-ups. Allies is better than Entrees." "What's he saying?" Longspoon muttered. "He's just explaining the Federation's new dietary arrangements," Retief explained. "A food faddist, eh?" Longspoon nodded wisely. Jik-jik glanced about the room; his oculars settled on Retief. "Hey," he said. "Ain't you -- "Still working under cover," Retief said quickly. "Pretend you don't know me." "Tell Mr. Tief-tief that Fm much disturbed by the recent disorders, Longspoon instructed. "Still, Fll listen to an explanation.' "Did you get the Terry females into the city safely?" Retief asked Ihe Ween. "Sure did, Tief-tief. They at the port, waiting for that Terry Peace Enforcer coming in this morning." "What did he say?" Longspoon demanded. "He'll examine your credentials presently, Mr. Ambassador, Meanwhile, keep your manipulative members out of Quopp's affairs." "He said that?" Longspoon's face darkened. "Fm giving a free translation," Retief explained. "Meanwhile, what regime?" "Recognition? Hmmm. There was the matter of a certain understanding with the Voion..." "Shall I remind him of that?" "By no means! Tell him, ah, that I shall look forward to regularization of relations between our two peoples as soon as one or two points are ironed out. Now, we'll want an understanding on commercial matters. I think a thousand-man Trade Mission would be just about right... ," "Did you find the remains of the yacht the girls were in?" Retief inquired of Jik-jik. "Uh-huh. Just like you say, Tieftid. It blasted by some kind of big fire-gun. Big hole in the side." R etief glanced at Hish, w'ho aimed his five eyes at different corners of the room and began humming the opening bars of You TeU Me Your Dream, VU Tell You Mine, "Well?" Longspoon barked. "He says there's to be no Terry interference in Quopp's tradition of free enterprise," Retief advised the Ambassador. "And no more harassment of the traders at Rum Jungle and the other Market Towns." "Eh? But what about the land reform program?" "There'll be a big party tonight aboard the Terry ship," Retief said to the delegates. "The Ambassador hopes you can make it." "Nothing like a little socializing to take the boys mind off the fun they missing not getting to loot the town," Jik-jik said. "Us'll be there for sure." "The Federated Tribes will tolerate no political intervention of any kind," Retief relayed to Longspoon. "They specifically reject anything with the word 'reform in it." "Gad! This fellow's a reactionary of the worst stripe! Surely he won't object to my Jungle Slum clearance plan, my Pretties for the Underprivileged Program and my Spiraling Price Support formula!" "I hope you followed my advice and disarmed the Voion instead of anihilating them," Retief said to Jikjik. "Head-chopping hard work," the Ween agreed. "Us worked out a nice arrangement where one Voion assigned to each village to keep the sanitary drains open. It working out good." "They like the jungle the way it is," Retief informed Longspoon. IF "No one gets any privileges unless he can manage them for himself. And prices will be controlled by supply and demand." "I see I've underrated this fellow," Longspoon muttered to his aides. "He's obviously an exponent of some rather far-out economic theories." He adjusted a smile expressing the unspoken rapport existing between Men of the World. 'Tell him that I've been considering the size of the development loan I'll be prepared to recommend, and I've decided that the sum of, ah -- " he glanced at Magnan -- "ten million?" 'Twenty," Magnan murmured. "Per year," he added. "Plus the military aid program," Underknuckle put in. "I'd estimate a hundred-man Advisory Group -- " Longspoon said decisively. "With a cost-of-dying increase built in. Plus a sliding scale to compensate for seasonal fluctuations." "Fluctuations in what?" Magnan asked alertly. "Anything that fluctuates, dammit!" the Ambassador snapped. Retief nodded solemnly. "Did you collect the guns?" he asked Jik-jik. Jik-jik wiggled his oculars uncomfortably. "Uh, well, Tief-tief, it like this -- " "Bury 'em, Jik-jik," Retief said sternly "We agreed that firearms take all the fun out of fighting." J ik-jik gave the soft squeal that was the Ween equivalent of a sigh. "Okay. I guess you right, Tieftief. Me and Tupper here already done a little scrapping over what tribe get 'em. I guess I rather bury 'em all than wind up looking down the barrel next time they a little inter-tribal rumble." "What does he say?" Longspoon demanded. "No loan," Retief translated. "Oh, he's holding out for an outright grant," Longspoon rubbed his hands together. "Well, I think that could be arranged. Naturally, that will call for closer control. Say an additional staff of fifty -- " "No grants, either." "See here!" Longspoon clamped his mouth. "If the fellow's going to be unreasonable..." "All he wants is a Monitor Service bit to ensure that no cargoes move between Groac and Quopp -- in either direction." General Hish made a choking sound. Colonel Underknuckle brightened. "That's reasonable," he stated. "Now, let me see. The station would fafl under my command, naturally. For a medium sized unit, say thirty men -- " "There's one other thing," Retief said. "Terran honey will have to be added to Narcotics Control's list of excluded items as far as Quopp is concerned." "Hmmph." Longspoon eyed Jikjik sourly. "I must say this chap is a shrewder negotiator than I'd anticipated. I can see we're all going to have to tighten our belts and settle down to a long campaign before we can bring Quopp to readiness for membership in the Free Liaison of Organized Planets." Magnan sniffed. "From whai I've seen of these confounded rebels -- that is, of the freedom-loving standard-bearers of the aroused populace -- they may never be ready for "Nonsense, Magnan! Just give us a few more sessions at the conference table. They'll come around. I may even take time to absorb the language -- not that I don't already have a good working knowledge of it," he added. "You handled the interpretation fairly well, Relief, but you missed a few of the finer nuances." "I thought the nuances were the best part," Relief commented. "Maybe you'd better invite these fellows along to the Military Ball tonight," Underknuckle announced. "After all, as the rebel leaders, we can consider them as honorary military men." "By all means," Longspoon said. "An excellent opportunity to make a few points; or rather, to implement our sincere and heartfelt sense of solidarity with the forces of popular aspiration." "Oh, well put, Mr. Ambassador!" Magnan gasped. "It will be a gala affair," Underknuckle said. "A fitting conclusion to the excitement of the week, as well as a tribute to General Tief-tief and his gallant warriors of the Federated Tribes." He looked at Retief severely. "Tell 'em that; that'll soften 'em up." "Remember now," Retief said to the callers. "No fighting at tonight's big social event. Colonel Underknuckle abhors violence." "Okay, Tief-tief, Jik-jik said. "By the way, we is heard they going to be some extra good stuff on hand. He worked his oculars in a Quoppina wink. "I hopes diat ain't no mere rumor." "I'll personally spike the punchbowl," Retief assured him. He turned to Underknuckle. "He wants to know if he should wear his medals." "By all means!" Underknucklc boomed. "Full dress, medals and orders! A real military .occasion." He gave Retief a cold eye. "As for yourself, sir -- inasmuch as you're you consider yourself confined to quarters until further notice." R etief and Jik-jik stood together at the arched entrance to the mirror-floored Grand Ballroom Vessel Expedient, watching the brilliantly gowned and uniformed diplomats of a dozen worlds gathered under the chandeliers to celebrate the new independence of Quopp. "Well, Tief-tief," the Ween said. "Look like all the excitement over for a while. I going to miss it. Cutting greens not near as good exercise as snipping Voion down to size." He sighed. "Us going to miss you, too, when you goes back to Stiltsville." "You'll find that fighting in defense of peace will absorb all your spare energy, mow that you're civilized," Retief reassured him. "I is a great believer in peaceful settlements," Jik-jik assured him. IF "Ain't nobody as peaceful as a dead troublemaker." "Just keep it within reason, or you'll have the Terries on your neck. They tend to be spoil-sports when it comes to good old-fashioned massacres." "Sound like a good tip. I'll keep it in mind." Jik-jik leaned close to Retief. "Beat me how that disguise of yours fool these Terries, even right up close. It ain't that good." "Let me know if it starts to slip." Big Leon appeared, uncomfortable in a brand-new black dress coverall and white tie. "Looks like old Longspoon learned something while that rope was around his neck," he said. "Seems like maybe us traders are going to get a square deal now." up their misconceptions," Retief said. "Once they have them tattooed on their hide with a blunt instrument." "Yeah. Uh." Leon looked at Jfkjik. "I guess I had a bunch of wrong ideas about you boys, too. You looked pretty good charging in out of the jungle yesterday." "You Terries done heap up a big stack of arguments yourselves. Maybe us ought to work out some kind of mutual insistence agreement." "Yeah. While we're at it, why don't you boys come around the store sometime? I got a line of luminous neckties coming in thatH tie knots in your oculars." General Hish caught Retiefs eye; he strolled over to join the small Groaci, now resplendent in formal kit including a gold fringe that dragged the floor and three honorary head-bladders, one with fig-leai cluster. "Really, Retief, I think you went a bit far when you banned Groaci shipping from an entire volume of space," Hish whispered. "I fear I shall have to insist on a rdaxatioa of the stricture, as well as ctam other concessions in the field of, ail, minerals exploration." A waiter offered drinks. FMi accepted a clay pot of find: brandy. Retief lifted a slender-stemmed glass of pale pink fiquer. "Don't confuse your terminotogy, Hish," Retief said. "# didn't ban your arms-runners and smugglers. It was the wish of Tief-tief, remember?" "Come, come," Hish hissed. "Out of regard for a colleague, I refrained from advising your Ambassador of die rather baroque role you played in the upsetting of his plans, but -- " 'Tsk, tsk, Hish. I thought we'd settled all this earlier." "That was before you overplayed your hand in presuming to dictate the terms of fhe Terran-Quoppina accord," Hish said crisply. "I think now that, all things considered -- " "Ah, but have all things been considered?" Retief sampled his drink, eyed the Groaci. "Your departure from the role of diplomat to lead the rebel forces was a trifling departure from protocol compared with deluding your Chief of Mission in his own sanctum sanctorum," Hish pointed out. "Still, if you arrange matters to permit a lew teams of Groad prospectors to pan a little gravd in tht interior, perhaps I'll forget to mentkm the matter." "I think you'd better suppress any impulses you may Itave in the direction of overly candid disclosures, Retief advised. At least imtil after the Board of Inquiry into the matter of the down yacht. The investigation is being pressed ratha vigorously by His Imperial Majesty, Ronare the Ninth of Lily. It was bis yacht, you know." "A great pity. But I fail to sec what -- " "It was just luck that the missile that hit the vessel failed to detonate and was found, nearly intact, wedged in among what was left of the stern tubes." "Retief! Have you...?" "The shell is in the hands of the Federated Tribes. They can't read Groaci, so they have no way of knowing who supplied it. Still, now that the evidence has been deposited in a safe place -- " "Blackmail?" Hish whispered urgently. "And after I risked my existence to get you into Ikk's office!" "The famous Groaci instinct for backing a winner was operating that day," Retief said. "Now, I believe we agreed that nothing was to be gained by mentioning the unfortunate error that caused Groaci guns to be substituted for Terran propaganda." Tf you expose me. I'll inform die Galaxy of your dastardly role in the affairP the Groaci hissed. 'I confess I might find that personally embarrassing," Retief said. "But my report will place all Groac in a very dim light." "Not so loud!" Hishwarned, looking around. "But we still haven't discussed the moral implications of your scheme to import from Quopp large volumes of parts for your justly famed transistorized Tri-D sets, mechanical egg-timers and electronic pleasure-center stimulators." "But Quopp manufactures no such components," Hish said weakly"Now, we both know better than that, don't we?" Retief reproved gently. "The Voion were to handle the harvesting, disassemble and sort the victims and deliver them to the port. And you were to pay them off in armaments. What the Voion didn't know was that the entire scheme was merely a cover-up for something else." by Frederik Pohl by Robert Silverberg by C. C. MacApp Budrys, Willy Ley, etc. December issue on sole ot your newsstand nowl IF C#TV iTy dear Rctief, you've gotten whispered. "You're raving!" "Once comfortably established, it would have been a simple matter to dispense with your Voion helpers and proceed to the real business at hand. Turning the whole planet into a breeding ground for a number of rather rare species of Quoppina inhabiting the central regions of the Deep Jungle." "What a perfectly fantastic allegation!" Hish said breathlessly. "Why on Quopp would we Groaci go in for breeding aliens?" "Every creature on the planet assimilates metal into its makeup. Most of the varieties in this region use iron, copper, antimony, arsenic and so on. It just happens that there are a number of little-known tribes inhabiting the Deep Jungle on the other side of the planet who sequester silver, gold, uranium, platinum and traces of a few other useful materials." "Really? Why, who would have thought it!" "You might have," Retief said bluntly. "Inasmuch as I discovered specimens in your luggage." "You searched my luggage?" Hish's jeweled eyeshields almost fell off. "Certainly, You carelessly left it aboard the heli you used to pay your call at my camp just before I was forced to blow up the Voion officer's field mess." "I claim diplomatic immunity!" Hish croaked. "I demand the right to consult a lawyer!" "Don't panic. I haven't confided these matters in anyone yet. I thought you might want an opportunity to smooth things over in a quieter way." "But, my dear Retief, of course! Any little thing I can do -- " "Here!" a loud Terran voice said behind Retief. "I thought I confined you to your quarters, sir!" Retief turned. The portly figure of Colonel Underknuckle confronted him, the broad mud-colored lapels of his full-dress uniform sagging over his hollow chest, his shoulder boards drooping under the weight of gold braid. "You'll leave this vessel at once and... and..." His jaw sagged back against a cushion of fat, exposing inexpensive GI plates. His eyes goggled at Retief's bronze-black uniform, the dragon rampant insignia of a Battle Commander worked in gold thread on the collar, the short cape of dark velvet, silver-lined, the rows of medals, orders, jeweled starbursts. "Here," he said weakly. "What's this? Impersonating an officer?" "I believe reservists are required to wear appropriate uniforms at a Military Ball," Retief said. "A Battle Commander? A general officer? Impossible. You're a civilian! An imposter! A fake!" # #h, no, he's quite genuine," a mellow feminine voice said behind the colonel. He spun. A breath-taking girl in a silvery gown and a jeweled coronet smiled at him. "And -- and how would you know?" he blurted. "Because he holds his commissiHi in the armed forces of my world." 'Your world?" He blinked at her. "Here, aren't you the person who ignore my order not to land here?" "My dear Colonel," General Hish interjected, placing a limp Groad hand on Underknuckle's arm. "Is it possible you don't know? This young lady is Her Highness Princess Fianna Glorian Deliciosa Hermione Arianne de Retief et du Lille." "B -- b -- but I gave orders -- " "And I countermanded them, Colonel. I knew you'd understand." She smiled radiantly. "And now. Colonel, I think you and General Hish would like to have a little chat," Retief put in. "He wants to tell you all about his plans for a Groaci surgical and prosthetics mission to improve the lot of the Quoppina war wounded, past and future." He looked at the Groaci. "Right, General?" "Quite correct, my dear Battle Commander," Hish whispered in a resigned tone. "And the other matters we were discussing?" "I've forgotten what they were." "Ahh. To be sure. So have I, now that you mention it." Hish moved off, whispering to Underknuckle. Retief turned to Fifi, inclined his head. "If I may crave the honor?" he  j asked. Send copies of The Case for Going to the Moon" at # ,, i i  for a single copy or # for two or more copies.  Y OU d better, She Said, taking nam. jfloor. "After coming all this way address just to lead a charge in sheet-metal underwear. I think I deserve a little A new book packed with onrrent Snformatldn on the moon-and-spaoe program and its soientiflo byproduots...and an adventure into speculation .  This book is a musr for anyone associated with, r interested in, the space program. Written by Neil P. Ruzic, editor and publisher of industrial Research magazine, the book presents a lucid case for the exploration and exploitation of our natural satellite. It considers such areas as: research in the lunar vacuum; numufacturing operations on the moon; mining the suiface of the moon; observing and probing the universe from the moon; using the moon as a base in the search for life beyond earth; and stimulating the economy through technological transfer. (Ditaeh aoS mail) city zip code  attention!" IF # . B. Levitas. tUdl S#JO. :;.;;r.(As maoy asIO.ypium , ' ' " m Primitiys, Oritntal, nd Occidental Mythology by Joseph Campbell. Retail #I # Rttail #. RttaU #. Hni Is an axciting opportunity for you to add any tyio of these massive sets to your home librSry. All are indicative of the high quality of selections that are available to you as a member of the Book Find Club. The coupon Is your passport to reading adventures that range from the mysteries of the world's mAjor religions to the excitement of 'provocative best seller. And as a member, the savings on the books you want to own will average #V-and morel  To roceiye the tyro sets for only #, you need only agree to accept four more books in the comipg year from among the many that will be offered to you month by month. (Most books have a retail price of about # and you will have the opportunity to obtain them at substantial membership savings.) Then, when you complete the introductory offer, you wilt bonus selection lisi for every third book you buy. Fill out the coupon and return it to us today. You can receive as many as # volumes with animmediate savings of up to #. eo Golosy, #I Hudson S., N.Y., N.Y. # You may enroll me and send the # reference works indi cated below (or only M.# (plus postage and handling). I agree to buy (our additional selections or alternates Iron the wide range of books that will be made available to me in the coming year at substaritial savings. When I do not want the current selection-or prefer to order another bookI may do so on the convenient form provided for this pur pose. I may cancel my membership M any lima alter purchasing the (our additional books. B#-ll#Br " ' Pleau print full naant Desr I this letter not to praise or criticize your mag'azine, but to lerely express my own opinions. It has been a long time since I have written to a sf magazine, however I now feel the time has come. With the passing of time, there has been a steady decrease in sf magazines. Whereas once there were five and six magazines a fan could really get acquainted with, now there are only two or tiiree. Pore'Tost among these two or three magizines is If. This leaves If with a responsibili: to its audience. If not only hashe task of entertaining its readers with good stories, but it also has the duty of making the reader feel that If is Ais magazine. Unless I am mistaken, most readers like to feel that the magazine they are reading is aimed especially at them. As of right now, I feel that If is the only reader-oriented sf magazine. Not only do you run excellent stories, but you also have a lively letter column. Perhaps the letter column and the editorials are the most important parts of your magazine. The stories you run often go on to hard-covers and paperbacks, but the departments are yours alone. I, for one, am in favor of book reviews. I am also in favor of an expanded letter column. In fact, # favor anything which can bring If closer to its audience. You've reached a peak of excellence in your fiction. How about working on the departments now? -- Jim Armstrong, # Holland St., Arvada, Colorado.  #  Dear Editor: Your editorial in the new If set me to thinking. I managed finally to compile a list of what I considered the twenty best sf stories Unknovm WorZdi-type fantasy I include in my definition of sf.) They are the following, in no particular order. The Star by Arthur C. Clarke. The Piper's Son by Henry Kuttner. HeU Is Forever by Alfred Bester. Brave To Be A King by Poul Anderson. Alpha Ralpha Boulevard by Cordwainer Smith. A Work of Art by James Blish. Requi by Robert A. Heinlein. The Wind People by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Nightmare Brother by Alan E. Nourse. The Big Trek by Fritz Leiber. A Rose For Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny. Project Nursemaid by Judith Merril. The Golden Horn by Edgar Pangborn. A Gun For DinIdO Maur by L. Spragrue deCamp. -- And The Moon Be Still As Bright by Ray Bradbury. Saucer of LoneUness by Theodore Sturgeon. The Snowmen by Frederik Pohl. Road To Nightfall by Robert Silverberg. What # It Like Out There? by Edmond Hamilton. Status Quo by Mack Reynolds. You were right about most of them being longer than the ordinary short story. But by my reckoning, only four of the above are short stories. (I took what you said to exclude novels of serial length.) The upcoming If sounds good indeed. I want to see more Retief, Gree, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker yarns, a Heinlein serial, Harry Harrison. (P. Schuyler Miller, in reviewing the anthology Judith Merril's Project Nursemaid was in, said he hoped the story was only a prologue to a full-length novel about the children growing up on the project. I hope so too and I think it'd be a good idea to see if you could get her to write it for one of the Galaxy magazines. -- James Edward Turner, Box #, Pilot Knob, Missouri #.    Dear Editor: In Hue and Cry for September, you said you'd try to get the new Heinlein novel, even if it is extra long; in the current Hue  Cry (October) you announce victory with "we're going to attempt to bring it to you intact". One thing I cannot abide is a shortened or "magazine" version of a novel. After publishing Doc Smith's giant and gaining # pages, the length of any good novel should not phase you. Thanks for publishing the Retief data. Extras such as that add to your well deserved popularity, as does the Retief serial and wrapplanted in your editorial, something about a few Isaac Asimov stories on hand...  Just what are you trying to prove? Your predecessor saved If from oblivion. When you took over were you satisfied? No, not you. format, spruce up the covers and the interior, bring in "outsiders" like Simak, Smith, Van Vogt, Clement and whatshisname, oh yeah, Heinlein. Going for the top, huh? Not satisfied yet you went monthly and now, to top it all, you add thirty-two pages. Some editors are just plain pushy. Just what are you trying to prove, that you can win a Hugo? Could be ! -- David Charles Paskow, # West #th Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, #.  Well, we do print shorter versions of novels sometimes (not so much because we impose any arbitrary length limit as because we sometimes have the feeling that the long versions are fattened up to fill out a book) -- but The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress sure isn't one of them! Matter of fact, the version you now have beginning in this issue of If is just about exactly the way Bob Heinlein wrote it, barring a few little stylistic changes and those necessary to divide it into installments -- more so than the book will be I -- The Editor,    Dear Editor: I just got around to reading your editorial in the September If (about ine the efTidenee dispassionately. 'Between the (Mstructlve tactics of ttie Air Force and the idiocies of :ihe lunatics who sit" and conI #erae with the space people (and tty the way, Pm afraid Under Two  Moons win giye them ideas -- they I have no sense of humor I) , it is hard , get the general public to realize fmw strong the actual evidence is. manned automata sent out from a mother riiip -- like our unmanned explormrs In our own little solar ajpstem. -- Miriain Allen deFord.   V Dear Editor: The first If I read was the issue ior July, #. The serial was The Meefs of Space. There was a Relief story -- Mightiest Qom -- and a notice that next month A. E. Van Vogt's first new story in # years would appear. That If was # pages, the table of contents was printed all in black ink, and the title at the beginning of each story was blue. Well, The Reefs and Retief and Van Vogt -- by the way, how do you pronounce that? -- hooked me for the September issue, two months away. The stories and serial were great, and you used two colors of ink. I waited for November. In November the cover was beautiful and the entire issue was a prize winner. The illustrations, format, and the fiction were superlative, and I was addicted to If. Things kept on piling up. A big list; the cover on the January '# issue, Water spider, the continuing Retief, the May All Smith issue in which you brought back Doe S., the news about Skylark DuQuesne, The SUkiSf If goes monthly, Famhams Freehold, the Gree stories. The Hounds of Hell, The Ultimate Racer -- I've read that particular gem at least # times by now -- When Time Was New (is that the start of some sort of series?). Star child, and I think Retief, GodSpeaker, deserves some particular applause. The Replicators, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker tales, and... well, the list is too long to mention. Everything up to the present Skylark and the big new If. In some two years If has gone an incredible distance from slim, plain little bi-monthly mag to the impressive, full bodied article of today, rotten with top quality writers. It's rather like watching a small child grow up into a magnificent adulthood. Congrratulations and many thanks. -- George Kott, # Noel Court, North Merrick, N.Y.    # That takes care of our space for another month. Let's see, this month's First" is Gerald Pearce's Security Syndrome. These have been coming in at a pretty good clip lately, but we can always use more -- so if you've been meaning to try your hand at writing science fiction, remember we print at least one new writer every issue... Notice the banner with a strange device on our cover? The word is "Tanstaafl". If you wonder what it means -- stick around for the next installment of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and let Bob Heinlein tell you! The Editor IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth coroilory of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, S#; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add stale sales lax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! # First Year "In our first calendar year we did a gross of #. Without constant help from the Duraclean home office such growth never would have been possible." M. L. niiuois # for # Hours Work  "I have done hotels, studios, restaurants and churches. That is where the big money is. Example: One Saturday, # in #I hours. Monday, # in # hours. I have also contracted to clean # square feet of carpet for a store for #." G. F. Wisconsin Security-Prestige   Ohio W I # Job Finished  In one day "I did the Sorority House in onp  day for #. This business is in M its infancy." W H. L. B. Texas, hundreds of others -- got started in this Big Money business. Send for your copy now. Let me give you the same start I gave these men! # in One Month J. F. A. Texas In one way, the big earnings reported here might be called exceptional. In another way, there is nothing exceptional about them. That's because any man who will follow instructions and is business should be able to do as well under similar conditions. Each of the men quoted here had talents and abilities different from those of alb the rest. But each had one thing in common -- a desire to win personal independence in a business of his own. And each man took five identical steps to reach his goal. #. Each one read an announcement such as you are reading now. #. He wrote for complete information. #. He read the literature we sent him. #. He gained new confidence in himself and the belief that he could succeed with Duraclean. #. He accepted our offer to help him get started. Later, he wrote to tell us about his success. In each case, remember, the first step was to write to Duraclean for information. If you would like to own a business of your own, why don't you do as these men did -- right now. When I hear from you, I will send you facts about the Duraclean Franchise that will open your eyes. You will see why a Franchise business such as ours makes success for the individual the rule rather than the exception.j The Duraclean home service business has been tried and tested. The. market for Duraclean Service is tremendous -- and growing. The methods that lead to success have been clearly charted. When an ambitious man follows these methods, success is the logical result. Some Franchise businesses require investments as high as #. With ours, you can get started for a few hundred dollars and we finance the balance. Monthly payments are so small that the profits on less than one day's service can cover your payment for the entire month. Even with this small investment and operating as a one man business, your potential is # a week net profit. With two men working for you # hours a week, you should gross a profit of #. Allowing # for advertising and incidentals, the net would amount to #. The most important part of Duraclean home service is cleaning rugs,' carpets and upholstered furniture by a revolutionary modern process known as the "Absorption Method." You do the work right in the customer's premises. No harsh scrubbing with motor-driven brushes. No soaking. Instead, an aerated foam loosens the dirt and holds it in suspension until removed. A test conducted by an impartial laboratory showed that the modern Absorption Method removed twice as much dirt as was removed by old fashioned machine scrubbing. If you are tired of working for others or of jumping from one proposition to another -- if you have a real yearning for independence in a business of your own -- then, send for "The Duraclean Route to Success." There is no obligation -- no charge. No salesmen will call to high pressure you. Send for the book now. Read it. Then if you want to take the next step toward independence, you can write to me and let me give you the same help I've given so many other successful men. Dear Mr. Mauk; Please mail a copy of your Free Book that tells how I can get a Duraclean Franchise started in spare time without giving up my present income. No charge. No obligation. And no salesman is to call on me. Address Cily State Zip Code  January #  #c Plus many other stories Worlds of brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delaysend in your subscription oraer today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stones by all your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Relief stories and others appear regularl" in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars! still to come! And now -- The Best of the Top Name Writers -- Robert A. Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, Hal Clement, Lester del Rey contribute to IF. -- and a Preview of Tomorrow's Best Each issue of IF brings you a brand-new writer, making his debut in science fiction in IF. Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #  New  Renewal  Name I Address City State Zip No.  p (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) Offer void after Dec. #, # Vol. #, No. I Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Diane Sullivan, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Editorial Enemies of Mankind O ne of the things we like about Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is that Heinlein isn't scared by machines. So many writers are! We keep getting stories about the terrible world of the future in which machines do all the work and people turn into lotoseaters and drones. We keep rejecting them, too; but every week there's a new crop with the same dreary idea. The fact is, of course, machines work or men. They aren't our enemies; they are our slaves. It is perfectly clear to anyone who cares to look that the more work that gets done, the more real wealth there is to share; and the more machines we build and put to work for us, the more work will get done. Of course, there are problems -- and the biggest of all is arranging for the distribution of the wealth. We naturally feel that there is bound to be a catch in any system which allots a certain proportion of the Gross Terrestrial Product to each living person, and so no country in the world (including the socialist countries -- maybe especially the socialist countries) just chops up its income at so much per head and passes it out every Friday. Nevertheless, the richer a country is, the richer its average citizen is. And machines are busy making all of our countries richer as fast as we let them. As fast as we let them? Does that mean we are keeping the machines from making us rich? Yes, indeed. As long as there are strikes against automation, we are preventing the machines from doing what they can do very welfc There have been scores of strikes against automation each year. All too often they have been successful. But in at least one case a union leadership has decided not to try to lick the machines, but to join them. The West Coast longshoremen don't fight automation. They welcome it, because they have arranged to share in the savings from the usof machines to do stevedoring work. Every dollar of savings is divided between the companies' hiring the longshoremen and the union pension fund. Good idea! Now, if only we could work out the same system for other industries... A nd of course we can; it just takes a little thought, is all. Which reminds us of a good line we heard the other night, at a dinner party involving a mixed bag of scientists and science-fictioneers. Someone said something to John Pierce about machines that think like people. "That's old stuff," said Pierce. "We're now working on machines that act the way people do -- without thinking." Of course, that's just a joke. People don't really act without thinking. Do they? -- The Editor. IF  Short Sto# Cindy-Me aren't human , exactly. But we have some human traitsl C indy-Me sensed the Watcher high up over Oceanside long before we saw him, flickering lights in a moonbright sky anybody else would have thought were stars or blinkers on a plane or something. Cindy-Me knew better. We veered off so sharp I almost lost my hold around Cindy's waist, zooming down over the whitecaps close enough to feel the seaspray on our legs. Cindy's long hair, heavy with sweat, whipped back in my face. It kept getting in my eyes and mouth and tickling my nose like mad, and me not able to scratch or sneeze or nothing but just hang on. Cindy gave me a sharp elbow in the ribs, as if I needed any goosing. We thought speedthoughts together hard as we could. The old tree limb surged under us like it didn't want to meet up with Old Ralph, neither. Dark, greasy-looking swells rolled back beneath, white-tipped and smelling of summer and sea things which flared our nostrils and made us want to gulp our lungs full and howl at the stars. "Couldn't have been him or we'd be dead," Cindy-Me thought together. Half hour was about all the time we had. That's how long it would take for Old Ralph to get wired-in and come a-helling after us. We'd have to find a place to hole in fast or we'd be smelling ozone soon enough and we wouldn't have to look over our shoulders to tell who it was. Then it would be a quick hello and bingo... wipe out. "Old Ralph is a mean old crut!" Cindy thought. I let her know her shield had slipped by laughing obscenely right out close behind her ear. Suddenly we were both laughmg. He hadn't caught us yet, had he? The tenseness was gone far behind with those dancing lights. Even Old Ralph seemed less powerful somehow, out here with the night and the cool wind and the ocean, when you thought of him, that way... instead of what he really was. Some kid at school told me one. time that San Diego would be a real pretty city if they took the sailors out. But if they did that, it wouldn't be a city at all. I told him he was full of you-know-what, not because I knew anything about it, but because he was trying to show off in front of my girl. I hate those philosophical kooks who try to steal your girl with stuff like that. A real winner, that one! Anyway, it didn't work, because she and I both knew what she liked best. I'll tell you one thing, San Diego sure looked pretty to Cindy-Me when we came sliding down into that big zoo they're so proud of. They've got these dens and stuff with moats around them and trees all up and down those hills. Just the place for Cindy-Me. We found us some big brown bears to snuggle up with. They didn't mind too much after we got inside their heads and convinced them we were cubs. Real smelly, but a hell of a lot better than Old Ralph, especially after I finally persuaded this big mother bear that I didn't need a bath. Anyway it was warm enough. San Diego can get pretty chilly just before dawn, even in summer, being right on the ocean, particularly when you're trying to sleep on rocks. People started coming in the next morning, attendants first, taking care of the animals and getting everything spruced up so as the tourists could come in and litter it all up again. Soon there were a lot of people, laughing and gawking and picture-taking, or just standing around acting bored and kind of superior. We slipped in among them and got lost. Who notices a couple more teenagers at a place like that? There are too many other animals to look at. Cindy-Me opened our mind and tried to absorb as much of the thoughts of the. creeps around us as we could stand. Phew! You can't imagine how dirty people's minds get sometimes, especially when they get around other people. It's even worse when they start smelling the animals. Cindy-Me got used to it long before we got to be sixteen, which we were then... or almost sixteen. We kept our own mind teal blank so's any Watcher who scanned the place would have a heck of a time sorting. I n a way it was fun. We ate peanuts and ice cream and hot dogs and a lot of junk like that, stuff Old Ralph won't let us have at home. Cindy picked up a bunch of dumb college boys that followed her around like hungry coon hounds, just trying to get her to smile at them or say something. Cindy's a big girl for her age and kind of beautiful. I can see that, even if she is my twin sister. But don't call me handsome or anything like that unless you want a fat lip. We just wandered around for an boor or so, staring at the animals mals thought we were funny as hell, especially one old baboon who got the idea that Cindy in her red capris looked from the rear a whole lot like somebody he'd once met in the jungle. I kept glancing at my watch and stopping every few minutes to make sure I hadn't lost our bus tickets. It's funny how everybody always thinks he's going to lose something he needs real bad. The guys with Cindy kept looking at me like I was some kind of kook and hoping Fd get lost. It didn't bother me. Aunt Ag's letter had been pretty firm about the #:# bus from San Diego to Fort Worth. Next to Old Ralph, I wouldn't want to cross Aunt Ag the best. You might wonder why we didn't take a plane or fly all the way ourselves, like we got to San Diego. Planes fly too high and they're all closed in so's you can't get out. Even if we could, Cindy-Me got to breathe like anybody else. As for the other, if you must know, flying a tree limb is too rough on the crotch for long distances. Trains are too hard to get off if a Watcher should spot us. Driving a car would have been fun, except we didn't know how. Besides we'd have been spotted sure. Cindy-Me have to keep enough minds around us to get lost in or we'd stand out to a Watcher like a space beacon to a Ship-of-theLine. We'd never have taken a chance and flown that damn limb all the way to San Diego except we didtft have time to do anything else The evening before, during supper, Old Ralph's nitwit secretary let her guard down for an instant. Right away we knew that Old Ralph had found out Aunt Ag was back on Earth. He was heading back from Red China right then like an Lucky for us he's pretty busy over there these days. If he'd been home in L.A. with us when the word came about Aunt Ag, CindyMe would have woken up dead. We'd planned to leave the next morning anyway; only now there wasn't any time to goof around. We struggled through supper, stringing the old broad along all the way, then we grabbed the nearest palm frond and took off. My aching butt! One of the boys who had been giving Cindy the rush, a big skinny guy with long, bleached hair and pimples, was beginning to get some very personal thoughts about Cindy mixed up with his observations of the things going on in the back corner of the monkey cage they were standing in front of. I concentrated on him and itched him good. When Cindy-Me slipped away a few minutes later he was rolling around on the ground scratching like he thought his skin was leather. The rest of the college bums and a lot of other nosy people were clustered around watching from a safe distance, too curious to leave but scared that whatever it was might get on them. I itched a few adults as we left so's they would think it was a frat initiation or something and maybe lose interest. IF C indy-Me grabbed a city bus downtown and got on the big one about the time it was getting ready to pull out. The bus was pretty crowded when we climbed on, but we soon took care of that. We needed people around us all right, but this was ridiculous. Those passengers were jammed into the double seats on each side of the aisle as close as two pieces of salami in the middle of a package. Right away we could see that we wouldn't get to sit together, and already the place was beginning to smell a little like that bears' den back at the zoo. Cindy-Me got the old lower intestine routine going. Before the bus could get rolling about half the people decided that the tiny john in the back of the bus wasn't going to get the job done for them, especially if they had to wait in line. They kept rolling their eyes and holding their bellys, trying to make up their minds. We gave them both barrels. Finally our victims all got off, making it look real casual as they gathered their small suitcases and parcels together and made it down the aisle, most of them half doubled over. We watched them through the big window beside the seat we had picked out after the exodus. The bus driver gave those people a real rough time for making him unload the luggage to get theirs back. As fast as one of them caught sight of his bag he would grab it and run like hell for the depot. We gave each one a parting shot or two just to keep them honest. To tell the truth, I'm not sure they all made it in time. The driver finally got all the right luggage reloaded and came up on the bus, mumbling. You should have heard his mind! We pulled out of the depot ten minutes late, but that bus driver was so mad he drove like he was trying out for Indianapolis, and before we knew it we were right back on schedule. By the time we got to El Centro, Cindy-Me began to relax a little. We took turns napping. A bus seat is supposed to be comfortable nowadays and just right for sleeping -- at least that's what their advertising folders say. You know where you it beats curling up with a bearskin, especially when the bear is still in it. The bus stops were the worst, not just because they were crumby little joints mostly, which they were Cindy-Me had bought plenty of junk to eat so's we didn't have to get off. But the next character that got on at one of those stops might be a Watcher. Cindy-Me had a bus schedule, and we finally figured out how the stupid thing worked; so we were ready each time the bus started in to slow down. One thing we hadn't figured on was the air conditioning. The bus was like the inside of a freezer, especially next to the windows where the vents were, and Cindy-Me had come away too fast to get our sweaters or nothing like that. We got busy and jimmied the unit by mindshifting a few small wires and parts, not permanent though. We could put them back if we had to. Good thing we did it that way, too, because pLiy soon it began to warm up inside. When it got to be too much, we had to turn the thing back on. It was a drag turning it on and off, but the only other choice was to end up either frosted or french-fried. r I "hat bus took the craziest route you ever saw. Living in a place like L.A. you forget that there's so much nothing in the same part of the world. You never saw such a lot of desert in your whole life unless you're some kind of nut that likes that kind of stuff. In a way, though, it was kind of pretty -- if you go in for rocks and cactus. Some parts of it would have made a hell of a good beach if there'd been some place to surf. But then I guess you don't find too many oceans in the middle of a desert. Between naps, Cindy-Me sorted the people on the bus to find out what kind of characters we'd have to deal with in an emergency. Strangely, there were a few half-way decent people still aboard, though Cindy-Me had tried to get rid of most of that kind back at the depot because we knew what would happen to them if Old Ralph cAught up with us. As for the rest, CindyMe spent a couple of entertaining hours figuring out what we would do to them ourselves when we got around to it. Cindy in particular had some very nasty ideas about this young guy with an old-looking wife and a couple of runny-nosed kids. He had it all figured out how he would slip away over the border into Juarez when they got to El Paso and take off for parts unknown. Personally, after I got a good look at the kids, I thought it was a damn good plan, but Cindy thought differently. That's a broad for you. They all stick together. One thing I found out. After a while I didn t mind riding on a bus. It was a beautiful night. The big bus rolied along like it owned the highway. The sky was bright with a big moon and more stars visible than you ever get to see in the city. Every once in a while a car would come up on us over a hill and light up the interior of the bus. By that time most of the characters were asleep except for one old broad a few rows back mat had been giving me the eye ever since I got on the bus. Every once in a while I would turn around and smile at her just to keep her motor running. She must have been at least twenty-four, but with the thoughts that kept running through Cindy's mind I was beginning to warm up myself, and that broad was beginning to turn me on. Right after we left Tucson, Cindy closed her eyes and began going to work on that young husband. It kind of made me sick the things she did to him long range without his even knowing it. She fixed him up for one thing so's he ain't going to have any more kids, and it won't be a bit of fun trying either. While Cindy was busy with her good-deed-doing, I got up and sat down next to my new friend. She was all ready for me and covered us both up with a blanket. It wasn't too bad either, though it kept me IT pretty busy keeping the minds of those people who were still awake concentrated elsewhere. Once some nut in a car came up real fast behind the bus blinking his headlights like mad and trying to pass. I reached back and switched off his lights for him. I could hear his brakes screeching all the way through the walls of the bus. We didn't see him again after that so I don't know whether he made it or not. They held the bus an extra fifteen minutes at El Paso waiting for the young guy to come back, which he never did. Finally the wife and kids got off, too. I felt awfully sorry few them, but not nearly as sorry as I did for that poor kook. Boy, was he in for a surprise! We got quite a jolt ourselves soon after we got out of El Paso. CindyMe had been too busy arguing over how we'd both spent the night to notice the new passengers. By the time we did, it was almost too late. nphey must have been trained A especially for this. Their shields were nearly perfect. One of the Watchers looked like a sloppy old woman; the other appeared to be a middle-aged Negro man. Apparently they had taken positions at both ends of the bus, the man toward the front and the old woman bade by die john. They left their seats at the same time and were almost on ns before we knew it. Cindy-Me grabbed lor one another's hands instinctively and frost the Watchers in their tracks. They stood there silently, glaring down at us, hatred pouring from their eyes. Man, those minds were blazing! They had us, and they knew it. The man had just the trace of a smile on his lips. I was sweating like I was in a sauna, Cindy-Me felt them forcing open our grip on their minds, like some big guy unwrapping your fingers from around an orange. We knew right then that it was just a question of time. Despite our unique advantage, we could not possibly hold out much longer against two adult Watchers. We could see they were getting real cocky, and Cindy-Me knew suddenly that we might still have a slim chance to live. We hit them right then with everything we had, probing deep, watching for a sign of weakness. It came at last. Just for an instant the old woman seemed to sway backI wrenched my mind free of rapport with Cindy for the microsecond needed to reach out and squeeze the heart of the bus driver. Cindy was screaming silently inside my head as I returned to her. The male Watcher now stood a step closer to us and was reaching toward Cindy. He Hi ought he was in. Then the bus hit the shoulder and lurched. The male Watcher was thrown off balance. He reached out instinctively to steady himself and his attention wavered, just long enough. CindyMe stood up. Ignoring the woman, we poured our combined strength into hfe brain. It was like snuffing oat a candle with a buHet at a shooting gallery. As he crumpled we wheeled together to face the old woman. We were almost in time to prevent the shrill distress signal which she poured out from her mind, more than enough to have been sensed half way across the continent. We cooked her brain well done, of course, but it was already too late. Old Ralph would hear and would come. Cindy-Me turned quickly toward Ae front of the bus. Although the duel had lasted only a few seconds the bus had already left the pavement and was hurtling down the side of a ravine. The mouths of passengers were beginning to open as they became aware of their danger and prepared to scream out their last instants on Earth. Cindy-Me leaned forward, clutching at the seat. We thought speedthoughts desperately. Almost too late the Mg bus responded. It left the ground, barely clearing the topof a huge boulder Then we were m the clear and rising into the bright summer sky. How does all that grab yew? Anyway, that's the way it happened. We figured Old Ralph could read a bus schedule, too; so we cut out On a new course. We didn't stop to think that he could also read a radar screen. That was how he was able to find us and force the bus down just outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico. e idy-Me had gotten rid of the other passengers at the first town we flew over after the accident. They marched out die front door like good little soldiers except they were screaming and they kept right on screaming until they hit the ground. I'd like to tell you that we lowered them down Kke Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, as gently as falling feathers, just in case you think we're fiends or something. But I can't. Normally we would have, in spite of the kind of people they were, mostly, but we just didn't have the time. We had our own skins to think of, didn't we? Old Ralph was pretty mad when he got on that bus. In fact even his froth had froth. He gave us the damnedest lecture you ever heard, all about morality and noblesse oblige and all that crap and why he didn't want to have to kill his own nephew and niece but he was going to have to do it to keep the world safe for all these Earth-type kooks, cha, cha, cha. I finally interrupted long enough to tell him that if he was going to kill us he ought to go ahead and do it and not bore us to death. And so he tried. The bastard tried real hard... and that was when Aunt Ag, who was helping us, stepped out of the little john at the back of the bus. You sec, Aunt Ag can read a distress signal, too, and she also knows how to use radar. And for that matter, she's a hell of a lot faster on a broom or such. She gets a lot more practice. You should have heard them go at it. Uncle Ralph said he was sorry hett ever married her, and Aunt Ag IP said she wasn't sorry she'd married him because it gave her the right to make his life miserable. And Uncle Ralph asked why she'd come back. Things were going pretty good here on Earth right now he said, with only a few dozen little wars going on and a lot of massacres and riots and stuff but if Cindy-Me would join him, he could end all that. And Aunt Ag said that was exactly why she'd come back. She a whole lot nicer, and Aunt Ag and Cindy-Me would be just the team to get it started. Then Uncle Ralph turned to us and made a speech, even longer than the first one but not half as good, about how we were the focal opment for the Watchers. That only Aunt Ag and us, besides himself, could link our minds. That together we were the greatest force for good... or evil... in the universe. He told us that this Earth was the heritage of the human race, these poor struggling kooks that were trying to rise upward to true civilization. Would we destroy them, he asked, just to gain a small world for our own people who had the entire galaxy to live in? He told about Aunt Ag's political party and hit own, for and against survival of the human race. Would we join with him to prevent this wipe out or with Aunt Ag who wished nothing but to destroy? Good or evil? Which would it be? Naturally we chose evil. We linked hands with Aunt Ag and for the first time were en rapport with her. Then Ag-Cindy-Me turned to face Old Ralph. He died slowly, but I must say, quite well. Now we've replaced Uncle Ralph in Red China, picking up the loose threads which he left and tearing out all the stitching. I must say he had made substantial progress with the Chinese. Some of them were almost nice when we got here, but we've changed all of that. I don't think Unde Ralph got very far with their leader though. Maybe in time he would have. This is one kook I really dig. We had a very pleasant dinner with him only last night talking over his plans. He seems to like us. I don't see why he shouldn't. He seems to be our kind Next Month in IF -- Complete Short Novel by C. C. MocApp Plus Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mhfross and many other exciting science-fiction stories -- reserve your copy! IF  Serial The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress It's easy to win a war -- when the other side's best brains are fighting for you XI id like hell settle it. Prof said, "Manuel, don't be hasty. Here we are, three, the perfect number, with a variety of talents and experiences. Beauty, age, and mature male drive -- " "I don't have any drive!" "Please, Manuel. Let us think in the widest terms before attempting decisions. And to facilitate such, may I ask if this hostel stocks potables? I have a few florins I could put into the stream of trade." Was most sensible word heard in an hour. "Stilichnaya Vodka?" "Sound choice." He reached for pouch. 'Tell it to bear," I said and orWhet Has Gone Before -- We Lunarians have put up with a lot from Earth, but time comes when we don't want to put up with more. Earth teUs us what we can sell, who we sell it to, how much we can get for it. Means slavery. But... Earth owns us outright. Question is, what can we do about ft? I don't mind a gamble -- wouldn't mind fighting Earth with a chance to win -- but with no chance, no. Luna has no warships. Earth has plenty. Luna has no armies. Earth has armies to burn. Most of all, Luna is run by big computer, and Earth owns the computer. But there's one thing Earth doesn't own -- me. And it ust so happens that I'm the fellow that fixes the computer... and the computer is my good friend I call Mike! So maybe -- just maybe -- we Lunarians can do something at last. dered a liter, plus ice. It came doww; was tomato juice from breakfast. "Now," I said, after we toasted, "Prof, what you think of pennant race? Got money says Yankees cant do it again?" "Manuel, what is your political philosophy?" "With that new boy from Milwao. kee I feel like investing." "Sometimes a man doesn't have ft defined but, under Socratic inquiry, knows where he stands and why." "I'll back 'em against field, three to two." "What? You young idiot! How much?" "Three hundred. Hong Kong." "Done. Few example, under what circumstances may the State justly place its welfare above that of a citizen?" "Mannie," Wyoh asked, "do you have any more foolish money? I I looked her over. "Just what yon were thinking of betting'?" "You go to hellf Rapist." "Prof, as I see, are no circumstances under which State is justified in placing its welfare ahead of mine." "Good. We have a starting point." "Mannie," said Wyoh, "that's a most self-centered evaluation." "I'm a most self-centered person." "Oh, nonsense. Who rescued me? Me, a stranger. And didn'r try to exploit it. Professor, I was cracking not facking. Mannie was a perfect knight." "Sans peur et sans reproche. I knew, I've known him for years. Which is not inconsistent with evaluation he expressed." "Oh, but it is! Not the way things are but undo the ideal toward which we aim. Mannie, the 'State is Luna. Even though not sovereign yet and we hold citizenships elsewhere. But  am part of die Lunar State and so is your family. Would you die for your family?' 'Two questions not related. "Oh, but they are! That's the point. "Nyet. I know my family, opted long ago. "Dear Lady, I must Come to Manuel's defense. He has a correct evaluation even though he may not be able to state it May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone? "Uh... that's a trick question. "It is the key question, dear Wyoming. A radical question that strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government Anyone who answers honestly and abides by ali consequences knows where he stands -- and what he will die for." W d i frowned. " Not moral for a member of the group -- '  she said. "Professor... what are your political principles?" "May I first ask yours? If you can state them?" "Certainly I can! Pm a Fifth Internationalist most of the Organization is. Oh, we don't rule out anyone going our way; it's a united front. We have Communists and Fourths and Ruddyites and Societians and Single-Taxers and you name it. But I'm no Marxist; we Fifths have a practical program. Private where private belongs, public where it's needed, and an admission that circumstances alter cases. "Capital punishment?" "For what?" "Let's say for treason. Against Luna after you've freed Luna." 'Treason how? Unless I knew the circumstances I could not decide. "Nor could L dear Wyoming. But I believe in capital .punishment under some circumstances... with this difference. I would not ask a court. I would try, condemn, execute sentence myself and accept full responsibility." "But -- Professor, what are your political beliefs?" Tm a rational anarchist." "I don't know that brand. Anarchist individualist, anarchist communist, Christian anarchist, philosophical anarchist, syndicalist, libertarian -- those I know. But what's Ibis? Randtte?" T can get along with a Randite. A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society nH 'government have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of selfresponsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to rfaft blame, share blame, distribute Marne... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere eise. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world... aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by selfknowledge of selffailure." IFmath rfrii mm pr i #m "Hear, hear!" I said. '"Less than perfect.' What I've been aiming for all my life." "You've achieved it," said Wyoh. "Professor, your words sound good but there is something slippery about them. Too much power in the hands of individuals. Surely you would not want... well, Hmissiles for example -- to be controlled by one irresponsible person?" "My point is that one person is responsible. Always. If H-bombs exist -- and they do -- some man controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as a  state  Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts." "Anybody need a refill?" I asked. Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument. I sent for another bottle. I did not take part. I was not dissatisfied back when we were "ground under Iron Heel of Authority." I cheated Authority and rest of time didn't think about R. Didn't think about getting rid of Authority -- impossible. Go own way, mind own business, not be bothered. True, didn't have luxuries then; by Earthside standards we were poor. If had to be imported, mostly did without. Don't think there was a powered door in all Luna. Even p-suits used to be fetched up from Terra -- until a smart Chinee before I was born figured how to make "monkey copies" better and simpler. (Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale -- below cost at fat profit. We got along.) I had seen those luxuries Earthside. Wasn't worth what they put up with. Don't mean heavy gravity, that doesn't bother them; I mean nonsense. All time kukai moa. If chicken guano in one earthworm city were shipped to Luna, fertilizer problem would be solved for century. Do this. Don't do that. Stay back in line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up to pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead -- but first get permit. Wyoh plowed doggedly into Prof, certain she had all answers. But Prof was interested in questions rather than answers, which baffled her. Finally she said, "Professor, I can't understand you. I don't insist that you call it 'government' -- I just want you to state what rules you think are necessary to insure equal freedom for all." "Dear lady, ##I happily accept your rules." "But you don't seem to want any rules!" 'True. But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom.  am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that # alone am morally responsible for everything I do." "You would not abide by a law IF that the majority felt was necessary?" "Tell me what law, dear lady, and I will tell you whether I will obey." "You wiggled out. Everytime I state a general principle, you wiggle out." Prof clasped hands on chest. "Forgive me. Believe me, lovely Wyoming, I am most anxious to to unite the front with anyone going your way. Is It enough that I want to see the Authority thrown off Luna... and would die to serve that end?" Wyoh beamed. "It certainly is!" She fisted his ribs -- gently -- then put arm around him and kissed cheek. "Comrade! Let's get on with it!" "Cheers!" I said. "Let's fin' Warden 'n 'liminate him!" Seemed a idea; I had had a short night and don't usually drink much. Prof topped our glasses, held his high and announced with great dignity: "Comrades... we declare the Revolution. T hat got us both kissed. But sobered me, as Prof sat down and said, "The Emergency Committee of Free Luna is in session. We must plan action." I said, "Wait, Prof!  didn't agree to anything. What's this 'action' stuff?" "We will now overthrow the Authority," he said blandly. "How? Going to throw rocks at 'em?" "That remains to be worked out. This is the planning stage." I said, "Prof, you know me. If kicking out Authority was thing we could buy, I wouldn't worry about price." # -- our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." "Huh?" "A price that once was paid." "Well -- I'd go that high But when I bet I want a chance to win. Told Wyoh last night I didn'" object to long odds." # 'One in ten' is what ' you said, Mannie." "Da, Wyoh. Show me these odds. Fll tap fast. But can you?" "No, Manuel, I can't." "Then why we talk-talk?  cant see any chance." "Nor I, Manuel. But we approach it differently. Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a yietory." "Not me. Sorry." "Mannie." Wyoh said suddenly, "ask Mike." T stared. "You serious?" "Quite serious. If anyone can figure the odds, Mike should be able to. Don't you think?" ' "Urn. Possible." "Who, if I may ask," Prof put in, "is Mike?" I shrugged. "Oh, just a no-body." "Mike is Mannie's best friend. He's very good at figuring odds." "A bookie? My dear, if we bring in a fourth party we start by violating the cell principle." "I don't see why," Wyoh answered. "Mike could be a member of the cell Mannie will head." "Mmm... true. I withdraw objection. He is safe? You vouch for him? Or you, Manuel?" I said, "He's dishonest, immature, practical joker, not interested in politics." "Mannie, I'm going to tell Mike you said that. Professor, he's nothing of the sort -- and we need him Uh, in fact he might be our chairman, and we three the cell under him. The executive cell " "Wyoh, you getting enough oxvgen?" "I'm okay, I haven't been guzzlmg it the way you have. Think, Mannie. Use imagination." "I must confess," said Prof, "that I find these conflicting reports very conflicting." "Mannie?" "Oh, hell." S o we told him, between us, all about Mike, how he woke up. got his name, met Wyoh Prof accepted idea of a self-aware computer easier than I accepted idea of snow first time I saw. Prof just nodded and said, "Go on." But presently he said. "This is the Warden's own computer? Why not invite the Warden to our meetings and be done with it?" We tried to reassure him. At last I said, "Put it this way. M ; ke is his own boy, just as you are. Call him rational anarchist, for he's rational and he feels no lovalty to anv government " "If this machine is not loyal to its owners, why expect it to be loyal to you?" "A feeling. I treat Mike well as I know how, he treats me same way." I told how Mike had taken precautions to protect me. "I'm not sure he could betray me to anyone who didn't have those signals, one to secure phone, other to retrieve what I've talked about or stored with him. Machines don't think way people do. But feel dead sure he wouldn't want to betray me... and probably could protect me even if somebody got those signals." "Mannie," suggested Wyon, "why not call him? Once Professor de la Paz talks to him he will know why we trust Mike. Professor, we don't have to tell Mike any secrets until you feel sure of him." "I see no harm in that." "Matter of fact," I admitted, "already told him some secrets." I told them about recording last night's meeting and how I stored it. Prof was distressed, Wyoh was worried. I said, "Damp it! Nobody but me knows retrieval signal. Wyoh, you know how Mike behaved about your pictures; won't et me have those pictures even though l suggested lock on them. But if you two will stop oscillating, I'll call him, make sure that nobody has retrieved that recording, and tell him to erase. Then it's gone forever. Computer memory is all or nothing Or can go one better. Call Mike and have him play record back nto recorder, wiping storage. No huhu." "Don't bother," said Wyoh "Professor, I trust Mike -- and o will you." IF "On second thought," Prof admitted, "I see little hazard from a recording of last night's meeting. One that large always contains spies and one of them may have used a recorder as you did, Manuel. I was upset at what appeared to be your indiscretion -- a weakness a member of a conspiracy must never have especially one at the top, as you are." "Was not member of conspiracy when I fed that recording into Mike. And am not now unless somebody quotes odds better than those so far!" "I retract; you were not indiscreet. But are you seriously suggesting that this machine can predict the outcome of a revolution?" "Don't know." # think he can!" said Wyoh. "Hold it, Wyoh. Prof, he couid predict if fed all significant data." "That's my point, Manuel. I do not doubt that this machine can solve problems I cannot grasp. But one of this scope? It would have to know -- oh, goodness! -- all of human history, all details of the entire social, political, and economic situation on Terra today and the same for Luna, a wide knowledge of psychology in all its ramifications, a wider knowledge of technology' with all its possibilities, weaponry communications, strategy and .actics, agitprop techniques, classic authorities such as Clausewitz, Guevera, Morgenstern, Machiavelli." "Is that all?" " 'Is that altT My dear boy!" "Prof, how many history books have you read?" "I do not know. In excess of a thousand." "Mike can zip through that many this afternoon, speed limited only by scanning method. He can store data much faster. Soon -- minutes -- he would have every fact correlated with everything else he knows, discrepancies ncted, probability values assigned to uncertainties. Prof, Mike reads every word of every newspaper up from Terra. Reads all technical publications. Reads fiction -- knows it's fiction -- because isn't enough to keep him busy and is always hungry for more. If is any book he should read to solve this, say so. He can cram it down fast as I get it to him." P rof blinked. "I stand corrected. Very well, let us see if he can cope with it. I still think there is something known as intuition' and 'human judgment.' " "Mike has intuition," Wyoh said. "Feminine intuition, that is." "As for 'human judgment, " I added, "Mike isn't human. But all he knows he got from humans. Let's get you acquainted." So I phoned. "Hi, Mike!" "Hello, Man my only male friend. Greetings, Wyoh my only femfale friend. I hear a third person. J conjecture that it may be Professor Bernardo de la Paz." Prof looked startled, then delighted. I said, "Too right, Mike. That's why I called you; Professor is notstupid." "Thank you, Man! Professor Bernardo de la Paz, I am delighted to meet you." "I am delighted to meet you, too, sir." Prof hesitated, went on. "Mi -- Senor Holmes, may I ask how you knew that I was here?" "I am sorry, sir; I cannot answer. Man? 'You know my methods.'" "Mike is being crafty. Prof. It involves something he learned doing a confidential job for me. So he threw me a hint to let you think that he had identified you by hearing your presence -- and he can indeed tell much from respiration and heart beat... mass, approximate age, sex and quite a bit about health. Mike's medical storage is as full as any other." "I am happy to say," Mike added seriously, "that I detect no signs of cardiac or respiratory trouble, unusual for a man of the Professor's age who has spent so many years Earthside. I congratulate you, sir." "Thank you, Senor Holmes." "My pleasure. Professor Bernardo de la Paz." "Once he knew your identity, he knew how old you are, when you were shipped and what for, anything that ever appeared about you in Lunatic or Moonglow or any Lunar publication, including picture -- your bank balance, whether you pay bills on time, and much more. Mike retrieved this in a split second once he had your name. What he didn't tell -- because was my business -- is that he knew I had invited you here. So it's a short jump to guess that you're still here when he heard heartbeat and breathing that matched you. Mike, no need to say 'Professor Bernardo de la Paz' each time; 'Professor' or 'Prof is enough." "Noted, Man. But he addressed me formally, with honorific." "So both of you relax. Prof, you can scan it? Mike knows much, doesn't tell all." "I am impressed!" "Mike is a fair dinkum thinkum. You'll see. Mike, I bet Professor three to two that Yankees would win pennant again. How chances?" "I am sorry to hear it, Man. The correct odds, this early in the year and based on past performances of teams and players, are one to four point seven two the other way." "Can't be that bad!" # # T'm sorry, Man. I will print out A the calculations if you wish. But I recommend that you buy back your wager. The Yankees have a favorable chance to defeat any single team... but the combined chances of defeating all teams in the league, including such factors as weather, accidents, and other variables for the season ahead, place the club on the short end of the odds I gave you." "Prof, want to sell that bet?" "Certainly, Manuel." "Price?" "Three hundred Hong Kong dollars." "You old thief!" "Manuel, as your former teacher I would be false to you if I did not permit you to learn from mistakes. Senor Holmes -- Mike my friend -- Mav I call you 'friend' # " "Please do." (Mike almost purred.) IF "Mike amigo, do you also tout horse races?" I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data are too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three. However, I can give you a formula which will pay a steady return if played consistently." Prof looked eager. "Wliar is it? May one ask?" "One may. Bet the leading apprentice jockey to place. He is always given good mounts and they carry less weight. But don't bet him on the nose." '"Leading apprentice'... hmm. Manuel, do you have the correct time?" "Prof, which do you want? Get a bet down before post time? Or settle what we set out # ?" "Unh, sorry. Please carry on. 'Leading apprentice --  "Mike, I gave you a recording last night." I leaned close to pickups and whispered: "Bastille Day "Retrieved, Man." "Thought about it?" "In many ways. Wyoh, you speak most dramatically." "Thank you, Mike." "Prof, can you get vour mind off ponies?" "Eh? Certainly, I am all ears." "Then quit doing odds under your breath. Mike can do them faster." "I was not wasting time; f he financing of... joint ventures such as ours is always difficult. However. I shall table it. J am all attention." "I want Mike to do a trial projection. Mike, in that recording, you heard Wyoh say we had to have free trade with Terra. You heard Prof say we should clamp an embargo on shipping food to Terra. Who's right?" "Your question is indeterminate, Man." "What did I leave out?" "Shall I rephrase it, Man?" "Sure. Give us discussion." Tn immediate terms Wyoh's proAposal would be of great advantage to the people of Luna. The price of foodstuffs at catapult head would increase by a factor of at least four. This takes into account a slight rise in wholesale prices on Terra, 'slight' because the Authority now sells at approximately the free market price. This disregards subsidized, dumped and donated foodstuffs, most of which come from the large profit caused by the controlled low price at catapult head. I will say no more about minor variable as they are swallowed by major ones. Let it stand that the immediate effect here would be a price increase of the close order of fourfold." "Hear that. Professor?" "Please, dear lady. I never disputed it." "The profit, increase to the grower is more than fourfold because, as Wyoh pointed out, he now must buy water and other items at controlled high prices. Assuming # free market throughout the sequence his profit enhancement will be of the close order of sixfold. But this would be offset by another factor: Higher prices for exports would cause higher prices for everything consumed in Luna, goods and labor. The total effect would be an enhanced standard of living for ail on the close order of twofold. This would be accompanied by vigorous effort to drill and seal more farming tunnels, mine more ice, improve growing methods, all leading to greater export. However, the lerran Market is so large and food shortage so chronic that reduction in profit from increase of export is not a major factor." Prof said, "But, Senor Mike, that would only hasten the day that Luna is exhausted!" "The projection was specified as immediate, Senor Professor. Shall I continue in longer range on the basis of your remarks?" "By all means!" "Luna's mass to three significant figures is seven point three six times ten to the nineteenth power tonnes. Thus, holding other variables constant including Lunar and Terran populations, the present differential rate of export in tonnes could con tinue for seven point three six times ten to the twelfth years before using up one per cent of Luna -- round it "What! Are you sure?" "You are invited to check. Professor." I said, "Mike, this a joke? If so, not funny even once!" "It is not a joke, Man." "Anyhow," Prof added, recovering, "it's not Luna's crust we are shipping. Its out life bloodwater and organic matter. Not rock." "I took that into consideration, Professor. This projection is based on controlled transmutationany isotope into any other and postulating power for any reaction not exoenergetic. Rock would be shipped -- transformed into wheat and beef and other foodstuffs." "But we don't know how to do that! Amigo, this is ridiculous!" "But we will know how to do it." "Mike is right, Prof," I put in. "Sure, today we haven't a glimmer. But will. Mike, did you compute how many years till we have this? Might take a flier in stocks." Mike answered in sad voice, "Man my only male friend save for the Professor whom I hope will be my friend, I tried. I failed The question is indeterminate." "Why?" "Because it involves a breakthrough in theory. There is no way m all my data to predict when and where genius may appear." P rof sighed. "Mike amigo, I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed Then that projection didn't mean anything?" "Of course it meant something!" said Wyoh. "It means we'll di? it out when we need it. Tell him. Mike!" "Wyoh I am most sorry. Your assertion is, in effect, exactly what I was looking for. But the answer still remains: Genius is where you find it. No. I am so sorry." I said, "Then Prof is right? When comes to placing bets?" '.'One moment, Man. There is a IP special solution suggested by the Professor's speech last nightreturn shipping, tonne for tonne." "Yes, but can't do that." "If the cost is low enough, Terrans would do so. That can be achieved with only minor refinement, not a break-through, to wit, freight transportation up from Terra as cheap as catapulting down to Terra." "You call this 'minor'?" "I call it minor compared with the other problem, Man." "Mike dear, how long? When do we get it?" "Wyoh, a rough projection, based on poor data and largely intuitive, would be on the order of fifty years." "'Fifty years'? Why, that's nothing! We can have free trade." "Wyoh, I said 'on the order of -- I did not say 'on the close order of.'" "It makes a difference?" "Does," I told her. "What Mike said was that he doesn't expect it sooner than five years but would be surprised if much longer than five hundred. Eh, Mike?" "Correct, Man." "So need another projection. Prof pointed out that we ship water and organic matter and don't get it back -- agree, Wyoh?" "Oh, sure. I just don't think it's urgent. We'll solve it when we reach it." "Okay, Mike. No cheap shipping, no transmutation. How long till trouble?" "Seven years." " ' Seven yearsV " Wyoh jumped up, stared at phone. "Mike aoney! You don't mean that?" "Wyoh," he said plaintively "I did my best. The problem has an indeterminately large number of variables. I ran several thousand solutions using many assumptions. The happiest answer came from assuming no increase in tonnage, no increase in Lunar population -- restriction of births strongly enforced -- and a greatly enhanced search for ice in order to maintain the water supply. That gave an answer of slightly over twenty years. All other answers were worse." Wyoh, much sobered, said, "What happens in seven years?" "The answer of seven years from now I reached by assuming the present situation, no change in Authority policy, and all major variables extrapolated from the empiricals implicit in their past behavior -- a conservative answer of highest probability from available data. Twenty-eighty-two is the year I expect food riots. Cannibalism should not occur for at least two years thereafter." "'Cannibalism'!" She turned and buried head against Profs chest. H e patted her, said gently, "I'm sorry, Wyoh. People do not realize how precarious our ecology is. Even so, it shocks me. I know water runs down hill... but didn't dream how terribly soon it will reach bottom." She straightened up and face was calm. "Okay, Professor, I was wrong. Embargo it must be -- and all that that implies. Let's get busy. Let's find out from Mike what out chances are. You trust him now -- don't you? "Yes, dear lady, I do. We must have him on our side. Well, Manuel?" Took time to impress Mike with how serious we were, make him understand that "jokes" could kill us (this to machine who could not know human death) and to get assurance that he could and would protect secrets no matter what retrieval program was used -- even our signals if not from us. Mike was hurt that I could doubt him but matter too serious to risk slip. Then took two hours to program and re-program and change assumptions and investigate side issues before all four -- Mike, Prof, Wyoh, self -- were satisfied that we had defined it. I.e., what chance had revolution -- this revolution, .headed by us, success required before "Food Riots Day," against Authority with bare hands -- against power of all down and inflict their will. All with no rabbits out of hats, with certainty of betrayal and stupidity and faint-heartedness, and fact that no one of us was genius, nor important in Lunar affairs. Prof made sure that Mike knew history, psychology, economics, name it. Toward end Mike was pointing out far more variables than Prof. At last we agreed that programming was done -- or that we could think of no other significant factor. Mike then said, "This is an indeterminate problem. How shall I solve it? Pessimistically? Or optimistically? Or a range of probabilities expressed as a curve, or several curves? Professor my friend?" "Manuel?" I said, "Mike, whenI roll a die, it's one in six it turns ace. I don't ask shopkeeper to float it, nor do I caliper it, or worry about somebody blowing on it. Don't give happy answer, nor pessimistic; don't shove curves at us. Just tell in one sentence: What chances? Even? One in a thousand? None? Or whatever." "Yes, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly my first male friend." For thirteen and a half minutes was no sound, while Wyoh chewed knuckles. Never known Mike to take so long. Must have consulted every book he ever read and worn edges off random numbers. Was beginning to believe that he had been overloaded and either burnt out something or gone into cybernetic breakdown that requires computer equivalent of lobotomy. Finally he spoke. "Manuel my friend, I am terribly sorry!" "What's trouble, Mike?" "I have tried and tried, checked and checked. There is but one chance in seven of winningF' I look at Wyoh, she looks at me; we laugh. I jump up and yip, "Hooray!" Wyoh starts to cry, throws arms around Prof, kisses him. Mike said plaintively, "I do not understand. The chances are seven to one against us, Not for us." IF Wyofa stopped slobbering Prof Mid said. "Hear that? Mike said 'us.' He included himself." "Of course. Mike old cobber, we understood. But ever know a Loonie to refuse to bet when he stood a big fat chance of one in seven?" "I have known only you three. Not sufficient data for a curve." "Well... we're Loonies. Loonies bet. Hell, we have to! They shipped us up and bet us we couldn't stay alive. We fooled 'em. We'll fool 'em again! Wyoh. Where's your pouch? Get red hat. Put on Mike. Kiss him. Let's have a drink. One for Mike, too -- want a drink, Mike?" "I wish that I could have a drink," Mike answered wistfully, "as I have wondered about the subjective effect of ethanol on the human nervous system -- I conjecture that it must be similar to a slight overvoltage. But since I cannot, please have one in my place." "Program accepted. Running. Wyoh, where's hatl " Phone was flat to wall, let into rock -- no place to hang hat. So we placed it on writing shelf and toasted Mike and called him "Comrade!" and almost he cried. His voice fugged up. Then Wyoh borrowed Liberty Cap and put on me and kissed me into conspiracy, officially this time, and so all out that my eldest wife would faint did she see. Then she took hat and put on Prof and gave him same treatment and I was glad Mike had reported hs heart okay. Then she put it on own head and went to phone, leaned close, mouth between binaurais and made kissing sounds. "That's for you, Mike dear. Is Michelle there?" Blimey if he didn't answer in soprano voice: "Right here, darling -- and I am so 'appee!" So Michelle got a kiss, and I had to explain to Prof who "Michelle" was and introduce him. He was formal, sucking air and whistling and clasping hands. Sometimes I think Prof was not right in his head. Wyoh poured more vodka. Prof caught her, mixed ours with coffee, hers with chai, honey in all. "We have declared the Revolution," he said firmly, "now we execute it. With clear heads. Manuel, you were opted chairman. Shall we begin?" "Mike is chairman," I said. "Obvious. Secretary, too. We'll never keep anything in writing; first security rule. With Mike, don't need to. Let's bat it around and see where we are; I'm new to business." "And," said Prof, "still on the subject of security, the secret erf Mike should be restricted to this executive cell, subject to unanimous agreement -- all three of us -- correction: all four of us -- that it must be extended." "What secret?" asked Wyoh. "Mike agreed to keep our secrets. He's safer than we are. He can't oe brainwashed. Can you be, Mike?" 'I could be brainwashed," Mike admitted, "by enough voltage. Or by being smashed, or subjected to solvents, or positive entropy through other means. I find the concept disturbing. But if by 'brainwashing you mean could I be compelled to surrender our secrets, the answer is an unmodified negative." # I said, "Wye, Prof means secret of Mike himself. Mike old pal, you're our secret weapon -- you know that, don't you?" H e answered self-consciously, "It was necessary to take that into consideration in computing the odds" "How were odds without you, comrade? Bad?" "They were not good. Not of the same order." "Won't press you. But a secret weapon must be secret. Mike, does anybody else suspect that you are alive?" "Am I alive?" His voice held tragic loneliness. "Ub, won't argue semantics. Sure you're alive!" "I was not sure. It is good to be alive. No, Mannie my first friend, you three alone know it. Mv three friends." "That's how must be if bet's to pay off. Is okay? Us three and never talk to anybody else?" "But we'll talk to you lots!" Wyoh put in. "It is not only okay," Mike said bluntly, "it is necessary. It was a factor in the odds." "That settles it," I said. "They have everything else; we have Mike. We keep it that way. Say! MiKe. I just had a horrid. We fight Terra?" "We will fight Terra . unless we lose before that time." "Uh, riddle this. Any computers smart as you? Any awake?" He hesitated. "I don't know, Man." "No data?" "Insufficient data. I have watched for both factors, not only in technical journals but everywhere else. There are no computers on the market of my present capacity... but one of my model could be augmented just as I have been. Furthermore an experimental computer of great capacity might be classified and go unreported in the literature." "Mmm... chance we have to take." "Yes,' Man." "There aren't any computers as smart as Mike!" Wyoh said scornfully, "Don't be silly, Mannie." "Wyoh, Man was not being silly. Man, I saw one disturbing report. It was claimed that attempts are being made at the University of Peiping to combine compmers with human brains to achieve massive capacity. A computing Cyborg." "They say how?" "The item was non-techmcal. "Well... won't worry about what can't help. Right, Prof?" "Correct, Manuel. A revolutionist must keep his mind free of worry or the pressure becomes intolerable." "I don't believe a word of it," Wyoh added. "We've got Mike and we're going to win! Mike dea, you say we're going to fight Terra -- and Mannie says that's one battle we can't win. You have some idea of how we can win, or you wouldn't have given us even one chance in seven. So what is it?" "Throw rocks at them," Mike answered. "Not funny," I told him. "Wyoh, IF don't borrow trouble. Haven't even settled bow we leave this pooka without being nabbed. Mike, Prof says nine guards were killed Iasi ight and Wyoh says twenty-seven is whole bodyguard. Leaving eighteen. Do you know if that's true, do you know where they are and what they are up to? Can't put on a revolution if we dasn't stir out." # P rof interrupted. "That's a temporary exigency. Manuel, one we can cepe with. The point Wyoming rased is basic and should be discussed. And daily, until suWed. I am interested in Mike's thoughts. "Okay, okay -- but will you wah while Mike answers me?" "Scarry, sir" "Mike?" 'Man, the official number of Warden's bodyguards is twentyseven. If nine were killed the official number is now eighteen." "You keep saying 'official nunv ber.' Why?" "I have incomplete data which might be relevant. Let me stare them before advancing even tentative conclusions. Nominally the Security Officer's dep artme n t aside from clerks consists only of the bodyguard. But I handle oayroKs for Authority Complex and twenty seven is not the number of personnel charged against the Security Department." Prof nodded "Company spies." "Hold it. Prof. Who are these other people?" Mike answered, "They are simply account numbers, Man. I conjecture that the names they represent are in the Security Chiefs data storage location." "Wait, Mike. Security Chief Alvarez uses you for files?" "I conjecture that to be true, since his storage location is under a locked retrieval signal." I said, "Bloody," and added, "Prof, isn't that sweet? He uses Mike to keep records, Mike knows where they are -- can't touch 'em!" Tried to explain to Prof and Wyoh sorts of memory a thinkum has. Permanent memories that can't be erased became patterns be logic itself, how it thinks; short-term memories used for current programs and then erased like memories which tell you whether you have honeyed coffee; temporary memoseconds, days, years -- but erased when no Longer needed; permanently stored data like a human being's education -- but learned perfectly and never forgotten -- though may be condensed, rearran ged, relocated, edited -- and Last but not finally tong fids of special memories ranging from memoranda files through very complex special programs, and each location tagged by own retrieval signal and tacked or not, with endless possibilities on lock signals: sequential parallel, temporal, situational, others. Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. Wyoh couldn't see why, if Mike knew where Alvarez kept records, Mike didn't trot over and fetch I gave op. "Mice, can you explain?" "I will try, Man. Wyoh, there is bo way for me to retrieve locked data other than through external programming. I cannot program myself for such retrieval; my logic structure does not permit it. I must receive the signal as an external input." "Well, for Bog's sake, what is this precious signal?" "It is," Mike said ,simply, " 'Special File Zebra' " -- and waited. itTVyrike!" I said. "Unlock 'SpeiVl cial File Zebra.' " He did, Had to convince Wyoh that Mike hadn't been stubborn. He hadn't. He almost begged us to tickle him 'on that spot. Sure, he knew signal. Had to. But had to come from outside, that was how he was built. "Mike, remind me to check with you all special-purpose locked-retrieval signals. May strike ice other places." "So I conjectured, Man." "Okay, we'll get to it later. Now back up and go over this stuff slowly. And, Mike, as you read out, store again, without erasing, under Rastille Day' and tag it 'Fink File.' Okay?" "Programmed and running." "Do that with anything new he puts in, too." Prime prize was list of names by warrens, some two hundred, each keyed with a code Mike identified with those blind pay accounts. Mike read out Hotig Kong Luna list and was hardly started when Wyoh gasped, "Stop, Mike! I've got to write these down!" I said, "Hey! No writing! What's huhu?" "That woman, Sylvia Chiang, is comrade secretary back home! But -- But that means the Warden has our whole organization!" "No, dear Wyoming," Prof corrected. "It means we have his organization." "But -- " "I see what Prof means," I told her. " Our organization is just us three and Mike. Which Warden doesn't know. But now we know his organization. So shush and let Mike read. But don't write; you have this list -- from Mike -- any time you phone him. Mike, note that Chiang woman is organization secretary, former organization, in Kongville." "Noted." Wyoh boiled over as she heard names of undercover finks in her town but limited herself to noting facts about ones she knew. Not all were "comrades" but enough that she stayed riled up. Novy Leningrad names didn't mean much to us; Prof recognized three, Wyoh one. When came Luna City Prof noted over half as being "comrades." f recognized several, not as fake subversives but as acquaintances. Not friends. Don't know what it would do to me to find someone I trusted on boss fink's payroll. But would shake me. It shook Wyoh. When Mike tinished she said, "I've got to get home! Never in my life have I helped to eliminate anyone but I am going to enjoy putting the black on these spies!" Prof said quietly, "No one will be eliminated, dear Wyoming." "What? Professor, can't you take it? Though I've never killed anyone, I've always known it might have to be done." the way to handle a spy, not when he doesn't now that you know that he is a spy." She blinked. "I must be dense." "No, dear lady. Instead you have a charming honesty... a weakness you must guard against. The thing to do with a spy is to let him breathe, encyst him with loyal comrades, and feed him harmless information to please his employers. These creatures will be taken into our organization. Don t look shocked; they will be in very special cells. 'Cages' is a better word. But it would be the greatest waste to eliminate them. Not only would each spy be replaced with someone would tell the Warden that we have penetrated his secrets. Mike amigo mio, there should be in that file a dossier on me. Will you see?" Were long notes on Prof, and I was embarrassed as they added up to "harmless old fool." He was tagged as a subversive -- that was why he had been sent to The Rock -- as a member of underground group in Luna City. But was described as a "troublemaker" in organization, one who rarely agreed with others. P rof dimpled and looked pleased. "I must consider trying to sell out and get myself placed on the Warden's payroll." Wyoh did not think this funny, especially when he made clear was not joke, merely unsure tactic was practical. "Revolutions must be financed, dear lady, and one way is for a revolutionary to become a police spy. It is probable that some of those prima-fade traitors are actually on our side." "I wouldn't trust them!" "Ah, yes, that is the rub with double agents, to be certain where their loyalties -- if any -- lie. Do you wish your own dossier? Or would you rather hear it in private?" Wyoh's record showed no surprises. Warden's finks had tabbed her years back. But I was surprised that I had a record, too -- routine check made when I was cleared to work in Authority Complex. Was classed as "non-political" and someone had added "not too bright" which was both unkind and true or why would I get mixed up in revolution? Prof had Mike stoo read-out (hours more), leaned back and looked thoughtful. "One thing is clear," he said. "The Warden knew plenty about Wyoming and myself long ago. But you, Manuel, are not on his black list." "After last night?" "Ah so. Mike, do you have anything in that file entered in the last twenty-four hours?" Nothing. Prof said, "Wyoming is right that we cannot stay here forever. Manuel, how many names did you recognize? Six, was it? Did you see any of them last night?" "No. But might have seen me." "More likely they missed you in IF the crowd. I did not spot you until I came down front and I've known you since you were a boy But it kmost unlikely that Wyoming traveled from Hong Kong and spoke at the meeting without her activity being known to the Warden " He looked at Wyoh. "Dear lady, could you bring yourself to plav the nominal role of an old man s tolly?" "I suppose so. How, Professoi?" Wyoh asked. "Manuel is probably in the clear. I am not but from my dossier it seems unlikely that the Authority's finks will bother to pick me up You they may wish to question oi even to hold; you are rated as dangerous. It would be wise for you to stay out of sight. This room -- I'm thinking of renting it for a period -- weeks or even years. You could hide in it -- if you do not mind the obvious construction that would be placed on your staying here." Wyoh chuckled. "Why, you darling! Do you think I care what anyone thinks? I'd be delighted to play the role of your bundle baby -- and don't be too sure I'd be just playing." "Never tease an old dog," he said mildly. "He might still have one bite. I may occupy that couch most nights. Manuel, I intend to resume my usual ways. And so should you. "While I feel that it will take a busy cossack to arrest me, I will sleep sounder in this hide-away. But in addition to being a hideout this room is good for cell meetings; it has a phone." M ike said, "Professor, may I offer a suggestion?" "Certainly, amigo, we want your thoughts." "I conclude that the hazards increase with each meeting of our executive cell. But meetings need not be corporal. You can meet -- and I can join you if I am welcome -- by phone." "You are always welcome. Comrade Mike; we need you. However -- " Prof looked worried. I said, "Prof, don't worry about anybody listening in." I explained how to place a "Sherlock" call. "Phones are safe if Mike supervises call. Remind me. You haven't been told how to reach Mike. How, Mike? Prof use my number?" Between them, they settled on shared childlike joy in intrigue for own sake. I suspect Prof enjoyed being a rebel long before he worked out his political philosophy, while Mike -- how could human freedom matter to him? Revolution was a game. A game that gave him companionship to show off talents. Mike was as conceited a machine as you are ever likely to meet. "But we still need this room, Prof said, reached into pouch, hauled out thick wad of bills. I blinked. "Prof, robbed a bank?" "Not recently. Perhaps again in the future if the Cause requires it. A rental period of one lunar should do as a starter. Will you arrange it, Manuel? The management might be surprised to hear my voice; I came in through a delivery door. I called manager, bargained for dated key, four weeks He asked nine hundred Hong Kong; I offered nine hundred Authority. He wanted to know how many would use room? I asked if was policy of Raffles to snoop affairs of guests? We settled at HK#; I sent up bills, he sent down two dated keys. I gave one to Wyoh, one to Prof, kept one-day key, knowing they would not reset lock unless we failed to pay at end of lunar. (Earthside I ran into insolent practice of requiring hotel guest to sign chop -- even show identification!) I asked, "What next? Food?" "I'm not hungry, Mannie." "Manuel, you asked us to wait while Mike settled your questions Let's get hack to the basic problem How we are to cope when we find ourselves facing Terra, Dav id facine Goliath." "Oh Been hoping that would go awav Mike? You really have ideas?" "I said I did, Man." he answered plaintively. "We can throw rocks." "Boq's sake! No time for jokes." "But. Man." he protested, "we can throw rocks at Terra. We will." r I "ook time to get through my skull that Mike was serious, and scheme might work Then took longer to show Wyoh and Prof how second part was true Yet both parts should have been obvious. Mike reasoned so: What is "war"? One book defined war as use of force to achieve political result. And "force" is action of om body on another applied by mean of energy. In war this is done by "weapons" -- Luna had none. But weapons, when Mike examined them as class, turned out to be engines for manipulating energy. And energy Luna had plenty. Solar flux alone is good for around one kilowatt per square meter of surface at Lunar noon; sunpower, though cyclic, is effectively unlimited. Hydrogen fusion power is almost as unlimited and cheaper, once ice is mined, magnetic pinchbottle set up Luna has energy -- how to use? But Luna has energy of position; she sits at top of gravity well eleven kilometers per second deep and kept from falling in by curb onlv two and a half km  s high. Mike knew that curb: daily he tossed grain freighters over it, let them slide down hill to Terra. Mike had computed what would hanoen if a freighter grossing # tonnes ( or same mass of rock) falls to Te r ra. unbraked. K ; neHc energy as it hits is joules This converts in split second to heat Explosion, big one! Should have been obvious. Look at Luna: What vou see? Thousands on thousands of craters -- places where Somebody got playful throwins rocks. Wyoh said, "Joules don't mean much to me. How does that compare with H-bombs?" "Uh -- " I started to round off in head. Mike's "head" works fastW er; he answered, "The concussion of a hundred-tonne mass on Terra approaches the yield of a two-kilotonne atomic bomb." "'Kilo' is a thousand," Wyoh -- why, that's only one fiftythousandth as much as a hundredmegatonne bomb. Wasn't that the size Sovunion used?" "Wyoh honey," I said gently, "that's not how it works. Turn it around. A two-kilotonne yield is kilograms of trinitrotoluol... and kilos will wipe out good-sized town. Check, Mike?" "Yes, Man. But, Wyoh my only female friend, there is another aspect. Multi-megatonne fusion bombs are inefficient. The explosion takes place in too small a space; most of it is wasted. While a hundred-megatonne bomb is rated as having fifty thousand times the yield of a twokilotonne bomb, its destructive effect is only about thirteen hundred times as great as that of a two-kilotonne explosion." "But it seems to me that thirteen hundred times is still quite a lot -- if they are going to use bombs on us that much bigger." "True, Wyoh my female friend... but Luna has many rocks." "Oh. Yes, so we have." "Comrades," said Prof, "this is outside my competence. In my younger or bomb-throwing days my experience was limited to something of the order of the one-kilogram chemical explosion of which you spoke, Manuel. But I assume that you two know what you are talking about." "We do," Mike agreed. "So I accept your figures. To bring it down to a scale that I can understand this plan requires that we capture the catapult. No?" "Yes," Mike and I chorused. "Not impossible. Then we must hold it and keep it operative. Mike, have you considered how your catapult can be protected against, let us say, one small H-tipped torpedo?" Discussion went on and on. We stopped to eat -- stopped business under Prof's rule. Instead Mike told jokes, each produced a that-remincfeme from Prof. By time we left Raffles Hotel evening of May #th '# we had -- Mike had, with help from Prof -- outlined plan of Revolution, including major options at critical points. W hen came time to go, me to home and Prof to evening class (if not arrested), then home for bath and clothes and necessities in case he returned that night, became clear Wyoh did not want to be alone in strange hotel. Wyoh was stout when bets were down, between times soft and vulnerable. So I called Mum on a "Sherlock" and told her was bringing guest. Mum ran her job with style. Any spouse could bring guest home for meal or year, and our second generation was almost as free but must ask. Don't know how other families work; we have customs firmed by a century; they suit us. So Mum didn't ask name, age. sex, marital condition; was my right and she too proud to ask. All she said was: "That's nice, dear. Have you two had dinner? It's Tuesday, you know." "Tuesday" was to remind me that our family had eaten early because Greg preaches Tuesday evenings. But if guest had not eaten, dinner would be served. Concession to guest, not to me, as with exception of Grandpaw we ate when was on table or scrounged standing up in pantry. I assured her we had eaten and would make tall effort to be there before she needed to leave. Despite Loonie mixture of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists and ninetynine other flavors, I suppose Sunday is commonest day for church. But Greg belongs to sect which had calculated that sundown Tuesday to sundown Wednesday, local time Garden of Eden (zone minus-two. Terra) was the Sabbath. So we ate early in Terran north-hemisphere summer months. Mum always went to hear Greg preach, so was not considerate to place duty on her that would clash. All of us went occasionally; I managed several times a year because terribly fond of Greg, who taught me one trade and helped me switch to another when I had to and would gladly have made it his arm rather than mine. But Mum always went -- ritual not religion, for she admitted to me one night in pillow talk that she had no religion with a brand on it, then cautioned me not to tell Greg. I exacted same caution from her. I don't know Who ii cracking; I'm pleased He doesn't stop. But Greg was Mum's "boy husband," opted when she was very young, first wedding after her own. Very sentimental about him. Would deny fiercely if accused of loving him more than other husbands, yet took his faith when he was ordained and never missed a Tuesday. She said, "Is it possible that your guest would wish to attend church? I said would see but anyhow we would rush, and said good-by. Then banged on bathroom door and said, "Hurry with skin, Wyoh; we're short on minutes." "One minute!" she called out. She's ungirlish girl; she appeared in one minute. "How do I look?" she asked. "Prof, will I pass?" "Dear Wyoming, I am amazed. You were beautiful before, you are beautiful now -- but utterly unrecognizable. You're safe -- and I am relieved." Then we waited for Prof to transform into old derelict; he would be it to his back corridor, then reappear as well-known teacher in front of class, to have witnesses in case a yellow boy was waiting to grab him. It left a moment; I told Wyoh about Greg. S he said, "Mannie, how good is this makeup? Would it pass in church? How bright are the lights?" "No brighter than here. Good job, you'll get by. But do you want to go to church? Nobody pushing." She thought: "It would please IF your modi -- I mean, your senior wife,' would It not?" I answered slowly, "Wyoh, religion is your pidgin. But Since you ask... yes, nothing would start you better in Davis Family than going to church with Mum. nt go if you do." "Ffl go. I thought your last name was 'O'Kelly'?" "Is. Tack 'Davis' on with hyphen if you want to be formal. Davis is First Husband, dead fifty years. Is family name and all our wives are 'Gospazha Davis' hyphened with every male namd in Davis line plus her family name. In practice Mum is only 'Gospazha Davis' -- can call her that -- and others use first name and add Davis if they write a cheque or something. Except that Ludmilla is 'Davis-Davis' because proud of double membership, birth and option." "I see. Then if a man is 'John Davis,' he's a son, but if he has some other last name he's your cohusband. But a girl would be 'Jenny Davis' either way, wouldn't she? How do I tell? By her age? No, that wouldn't help. I'm confused! And I thought clan marriages were complex. Or polyandries -- though mine wasn't; at least my husbands had the same last name." "No trouble. When you hear a woman about forty address a fifteenyear-old as 'Mama Milla,' you'll know which is wife and which is daughter. Not even that complex as we don't have daughters home past husband-hieh; they get opted. But might be visiting. Your husbands were named 'Knott'?" "Oh, no, 'Fedoseev, Choy Lin and Choy Mu.' I took back my born name." Out came Prof. Cackled senilely (looked even worse than earlier!), we left by three exits, made rendezvous in main corridor, open formation. Wyoh and I did not walk together, as I might be nabbed; on other hand she did not know Luna City, a warren so complex even nativeborn get lost -- so I led and she had to keep me in sight. Prof trailed to make sure she didn't lose me. If I was picked up, Wyoh would find public phone, report to Mike, then return to hotel and wait for Prof. But I felt sure that any yellow jacket who arrested me would get a caress from number-seven arm. No huhu. Up to level five and cross town by Carver Causeway, up to level three and stop at Tube Station West to pick up arms and tool kit -- but not p-suit; would not have been in character, I stored it there. One yellow uniform at station, showed no interest in me. South by welllighted corridors until necessary to go outward to reach private easement lock thirteen to co-op pressure tunnel serving Davis Tunnels and a dozen other farms. I suppose Prof dropped off there but I never looked back. I delayed locking through our door until Wyoh caught up, then soon was saying, "Mum, allow me to present our guest, Wyma Beth Johnson." Mum took her in arms, kissed cheek, said, "So glad you could come, Wyma dear! Our house if yours!" See why I love our old biddy? Could have quick-frosted Wyoh with same words -- but was real and Wyoh knew. H adn't warned Wyoh about switch in names, thought of it en route. Some of our kids were small and while they grew up despising Warden, no sense in risking prattle about "Wyoming Knott," who's visiting us. That name was listed in "Special File Zebra." So I missed warning her, was new to conspiracy. But Wyoh caught cue and never hobbled. Greg was in preaching clothes and would have to leave in minutes. Mum did not hurry, took Wyoh down line of husbands -- Grandpaw, Greg, Hans -- then up line of wives -- Ludmilla, Lenore, Sidris, Anna -- with stately grace, then started on our kids. I said, "Mum? Excuse me, want to change arms." Her eyebrows "We'll speak of this but not in front of children" -- so I added: "Know it's late, Greg's sneaking look at watch. And Wyma and I are going to church. So 'scuse, please." She relaxed. "Certainly, dear." As she turned away I saw her arm go around Wyoh's waist, so I relaxed. I changed arms, replacing number seven with social arm. But was excuse to duck into phone cupboard "Mike, we're home. But about to go to church. Don't think you can listen there, so I'll check in later. Heard from Prof?" "Not yet, Man. Which church is it? I may have some circuit." "Pillar of Fire Repentance Tabernacle -- " "No reference." "Slow to my speed, pal. Meets in West-Three Community Hall. That's south of Station on Ring about number -- " "I have it. There's a pickup inside for channels and a phone in the corridor outside; I'll keep an ear on both." "I don't expect trouble, Mike." "It's what Professor said to do. He is reporting now. Do you wish to speak to him?" "No time. 'Bye!" That set pattern : Always keep touch with Mike, let him know where you are, where you plan to be; Mike would listen if he had nerve ends there. Discovery I made that morning, that Mike could listen at dead phone, suggested it. Discovery bothered me; don't believe in magic. But on thinking I realized a phone could be switched on by central switching system without human intervention -- if switching system had volition. Mike had bolshoyeh volition. How Mike knew a phone was outside that hall is hard to say, since "space" could not mean to him what means to us. But he carried in storage a "map" -- structured relations -- of Luna City's engineering, and could almost always fit what we said to what he knew as "Luna City"; hardly ever got lost. So from day cabal started we IF kept touch with Mike and each other through his widespread nervous system. Won't mention again unless necessary. Mum and Greg and Wyoh were waiting at outer door, Mum chomping but smiling. I saw she had lent Wyoh a stole; Mum was as easy about skin as any Loonie, nothing new-chummish. But church was another matter. We made it, although Greg went straight to platform and we to seats. I settled in warm, mindless state, going through motions. But Wyoh did really listen to Greg's sermon and either knew our hymn book or was sight reader. W hen we got home young ones were in bed and most adults; Hans and Sidris were up and Sidris served cocasoy and cookies, then all turned in. Mum assigned Wyoh a room in tunnel most of our kids lived in, one which had had two smaller boys last time I noticed. Did not ask how she had reshuffled. Was clear she was giving my guest best we had, or would have put Wyoh with one of older girls. I slept with Mum that night, partly because our senior wife is good for nerves -- and nerve-racking things had happened -- and partly so she would know I was not sneaking to Wyoh's room after things were quiet. My workshop, where I slept when slept alone, was just one bend from Wyoh's door. Mum was telling me, plain as print: "Go ahead, dear. Don't tell me if you wish to be mean about it. Sneak behind my back. Which neither of us admitted. We visited as we got ready for bed, chatted after light out, then I turned over. Instead of saying goodnight Mum said, "Manuel? Why does your sweet little guest make herself up as an Afro? I would think that her natural coloration would be more becoming. Not that she isn't perfectly charming the way she chooses to be." So rolled over and faced her, and explained. Sounded thin, so filled in. And found self telling all -- except one point: Mike. I included Mike -- but not as computer -- instead as a man Mum was not likely to meet, for security reasons. But telling Mum -- taking her into my subcell, should say, to become leader of own cell in turn -- taking Mum into conspiracy was not case of husband who can't keep from blurting everything to his wife. At most was hasty -- but was best time if she was to be told. Mum was smart. Also able executive; running big family without baring teeth requires that. Was respected among farm families and throughout Luna City. She had been up longer than # . She could help. And would be indispensable inside family. Without her help Wyoh and I would find it sticky to use phone together (hard to explain), keep kids from noticing (impossible!) -- but with Mum's help would be no problems inside household. She listened, sighed, said, "It sounds dangerous, dear." "Is," I said. "Look, Mimi, if you don't want to tackle, say so... then forget what I've told you." "Manuel! Don't even say that. You are my husband, dear. I took you for better, for worse... and your wish is my command." (My word, what a lie! But Mimi believed it.) "I would not let you go into danger alone," she went on, "and besides -- " "What, Mimi?" "I think every Loonie dreams of the day when we will be free. All but some poor spineless rats. I've never talked about it. There seemed to be no point and it's necessary to look up, not down, lift one's burden and go ahead. But I thank dear Bog that I have been permitted to live to see the time come, if indeed it has. Explain more about it. I am to find three others, is it? Three who can be trusted." "Don't hurry. Move slowly. Be sure." "Sidris can be trusted. She holds her tongue, that one." "Don't dunk you should pick from family. Need to spread out. Don't rush." "I shan't. We'll talk before I do anything. And Manuel, if you want my opinion -- " She stopped. "Always want your opinion, Mimi. "Don't mention this to Grandpaw. He's forgetful these days and sometimes talkative. Now sleep, dear, and don't dream." XV F ollowed a long time during which would have been possible to forget anything as unlikely as revolution had not details taken so much time. Our first purpose was not to be noticed. Long distance purpose was to make things as much worse as possible. Yes, worse. Never was a time, even at last, when all Loonies wanted to throw off Authority, wanted it bad enough to revolt. All Loonies despised Warden and cheated Authority. Didn't mean they were ready to fight and die. If you had mentioned "patriotism" to a Loonie, he would have stared -- or thought you were talking about his homeland. Were transported Frenchmen whose hearts belonged to "La Belle Patrie," ex-Germans loyal to Vaterland, Russkis who still loved Holy Mother Russia. But Lima? Luna was "The Rock", place of exile, not thing to love. We were as non-political a people as history ever produced. I know, I was as numb to politics as any until circumstances pitched me into it. Wyoming was in it because she hated Authority for a personal reason. Prof because he despised all authority in a detached intellectual fashion, Mike because he was a bored lonely machine and was for him "only game in town". You could not have accused us of patriotism. I came closest because I was third generation with total lack of affection for any place on Terra. Had been there, disliked it and despised earthworms. Made me more "patriotic" than most! Average Loonie was interested in beer, betting, women and work, in that order. "Women" might be second place but first was unlikely, IF much as women were cherished. Loonies had learned there never were enough women to go around. Slow learners died, as even most possessive male can't stay alert every minute. As Prof says, a society adapts to facts, or doesn't survive. Loonies adapted to harsh facts -- or failed and died. But "patriotism" was not necessary to survival. Like old Chinese saying that "Fish aren't aware of water," I was not aware of any of this until I first went to Terra and even then did not realize what a blank spot was in Loonies under storage location marked "patriotism" until I took part in effort to stir them up. Wyoh and her comrades had tried to push "patriotism" button and got nowhere. Years of work. A few thousand members, less than #. And of that microscopic number almost # had been paid spies of boss fink! Prof set us straight: Easier to get people to hate than to get them to love. Luckily, Security Chief Alvarez gave us a hand. Those nine dead finks were replaced with ninety, for Authority was goaded into something it did reluctantly, namely spend money on us, and one folly led to another. W arden's bodyguard had never been large even in earliest days. Prison guards in historical meaning were unnecessary and that had been one attraction of penal colony system -- cheap. Warden and his Deputy had to be protected and visiting vips, but prison itself needed no guards. They even stopped guarding ships after became clear was not necessary, and in May # bodyguard was down to its cheapest numbers, all of them new chum transportees. But loss of nine in one night scared somebody. We knew it scared Alvarez. He filed copies of his demands for help in "Zebra" file and Mike read them. A lag who had been a police officer on Terra before his conviction and then a bodyguard all his years in Luna, Alvarez was probably most frightened and loneliest man in The Rock. He demanded more and tougher help, threatened to resign civil service job if he didn't get it -- just a threat, which Authority would have known if it had really known Luna. If Alvarez had showed up in any warren as unarmed civilian, he would have stayed breathing only as long as not recognized. He got his additional guards. We never found out who ordered that raid. Mort the . Wart had never shown such tendencies, had been King Log throughout tenure. Perhaps Alvarez, having only recently succeeded to boss fink spot, wanted to make face -- may have had ambition to be Warden. But likeliest theory is that Warden's reports on "subversive activities" caused Authority Earthside to order a cleanup. One thumb-fingered mistake led to another. New bodyguards, instead of picked from new transportees, weft: elite convict troops, Federated Nations crack Peace Dragoons. Were mean and tough, did not want to go to Luna, and soon realized that "temporary police duty" was one-way trip. Hated Luna and Loonies, and saw us as cause of it all. Once Alvarez got them, he posted a twenty-four hour watch at every interwarren tube station and instituted passports and passport control. Would have been illegal had there been laws in Luna, since ninetyfive per cent of us were theoretically free, either bom free, or sentence completed. Percentage was higher in cities as undischarged transportees lived in barrack warrens at Complex and came into town only two days per lunar they had off work. If then, as they had no money, but you sometimes saw them wandering around, hoping somebody would buy a drink. But passport system was not "illegal" as Warden's regulations were only written law. Was announced in papers, we were given week to get passports, and at eight hundred one morning was put in effect Some Loonies hardly ever traveled; some traveled on business; some commuted from outlying warrens or even from Luna City to Novylen or other way Good little boys filled out applications, paid fees, were photographed, got passport. I was a good little boy on Profs advice, paid for passport and added it to pass I carried to work in Complex. Few good little boys! Loonies did not believe it. Passports? Whoever heard of such a thing? Was a trooper at Tube Station South that morning, dressed in bodyguard yellow rather than regimentals and looking like he hated it, and us. I was not going anywhere; I hung back and watched. Novylen capsule was announced; crowd of thirty-odd headed for gate. Gospodin Yellowjacket demanded passport of first to reach it. Loonie stopped to argue. Second one pushed past; guard turned and yelled -- three or four more shoved past. Guard reached for sidearm; somebody grabbed his elbow, gun went off. Not a laser, a slug gun, noisy. Slug hit decking and went wheewhee-hoo off somewhere. I faded back. One man hurt -- that guard. When first press of passengers had gone down ramp, he was on deck, not moving. Nobody paid attention; they walked around or stepped over -- except one woman carrying a baby, who stopped, kicked him carefully in face, then went down ramp. He may have been dead already, didn't wait to see. Understand body stayed there till relief arrived. Next day was a half squad in that spot. Capsule for Novylen left empty. I t settled down. Those who had to travel got passports, die-hards quit traveling. Guard at a tube gate became two men, one looked at passports while other stood back with gun drawn. One who checked passports did not try hard, which was well as most were counterfeit and early ones were crude. But before long authentic paper was stolen and counterfeits were as. dinkum as official ones. More exIF pensive but Loonies preferred freeenterprise passports. Our organization did not make counterfeits. We merely encouraged it -- and knew who had them and 'who did not; Mike's records listed officially-issued ones. They helped separate sheep from goats in files we were building -- also stored in iMike but in "Bastille" location -- as we figured a man with counterfeit passport was halfway to joining us. Word was passed down cells in our growing organization never to recruit anybody with a valid passport. If recruiter was not certain, just query upwards and answer came back. But guards' troubles were not over. Does not help a guard's dignity nor add to peace of mind to have children stand in front of him, or behind out of eye which was worse, and ape every move he makes -- or run back and forth screaming obscenities, jeering, making finger motions that are universal. At least guards took them as insults. One guard back-handed a small boy, cost him some teeth. Result: two guards dead, one Loonie dead. After that guards ignored children. We didn't have to work this up; we merely encouraged it. You wouldn't think a sweet old lady like my senior wife would encourage children to misbehave. But she did. Other things get single men a long way from home upset -- and one we did start. These Peace Dragoons had been sent to The Rock without a comfort detachment. Some of our ferns were extremely beautiful and some started loitering around stations, dressed in less than usual -- which could approach zero -- and wearing more than usual amount of perfume, scents with range and striking power. They did not speak to yellow jackets nor look at them; they simply crossed their line of sight, undulating as only a Loonie gal can. (A female on Terra can't walk that way; she's tied down by six times too much weight.) Such of course produces a male gallery, from men down to lads not yet pubescent -- happy whistles and cheers for her beauty, narsty laughs at yellow boy. First girls to take this duty were slot-machine types but volunteers sprang up so fast that Prof decided we need not spend money. He was correct. Even Ludmilla, shy as a kitten, wanted to try it and did not only because Mum told her not to. But Lenore, ten years older and prettiest of our family, did try it and Mum did not scold. She came back pink and excited and pleased with herself and anxious to tease enemy again. Her own idea; Lenore did not then know that revolution was brewing. During this time I rarely saw Prof and never in public; we kept in touch by phone. At first a bottleneck was that our farm had just one phone for twenty-five people, many of them youngsters who would tie up a phone for hours unless coerced. Mimi was strict; our kids were allowed one out-going call per day and a max of ninety seconds on a call, with rising scale of punishment -- tempered by her warmth in granting exceptions. But grants were accompanied by "Mum's Phone Lecture:" "When I first came to Luna there were no private phones. You children don't know how soft -- " We were one of last prosperous families to install a phone; it was new in household when I was opted. We were prosperous because we never bought anything farm could produce. Mum disliked phone because rates to Luna City Coop Comm Company were passed on in large measure to Authority. She never could understand why I could not ("Since you know all about such tilings, Manuel dear") steal phone service as easily as we liberated power. That a phone instrument was part of a switching system into which it must fit was no interest to her. S teal it I did, eventually. Problem ceive incoming calls. Since phone is not listed, even if you tell persons from whom you want calls, switching system itself does not have you listed; is no signal that can tell it to connect other party with you. Once Mike joined conspiracy, switching was no problem. I had in workshop most of what I needed; bought some items and liberated others. Drilled a tiny hole from workshop to phone cupboard and another to Wyoh's room -- virgin rock a meter thick but a laser drill collimated to a thin pencil cuts rapidly. I unshipped listed phone, made a wireless coupling to line in its recess and concealed it. AH else needed were binaural receptors and a speaker in Wyoh's room, concealed, and same in mine, and a circuit to raise frequency above audio to have silence on Davis phone line, and its converse to restore audio incoming. Only problem was to do this without being seen, and Mum generaled that All else was Mike's problem. Used no switching arrangements; from when calling from some other phone. Mike listened at all times in workshop and in Wyoh's room; if he heard my voice or hers say "Mike," he answered, but not to other voices. Voice patterns were as distinctive to him as fingerprints; he never made mistakes. Minor flourishes -- soundproofing Wyoh's door such as workshop door already had, switching to suppress my instrument or hers, signals to tell me she was alone in her room and door locked, and vice versa. All added , up to safe means whereby Wyoh and I could talk with Mike or with each other, or could set up talk-talk of Mike, Wyoh, Prof and self. Mike would call Prof wherever he was; Prof would talk or call back from a more private phone. Or might be Wyoh or myself had to be found. We all were careful to stay checked in with Mike. My bootleg phone, though it had no way to punch a call, could be used to call any number in Luna. Speak to Mike, ask for a Sherlock to anybody. Not tell him number; Mike had all listings and could look up a number faster than I could. IF We were beginning to see unlimited possibilities in a phone-switching system alive and on our side. I got from Mike and gave Mum still another null number to call Mike if she needed to reach me. She grew chummy with Mike while continuing to think he was a man. This spread through our family. One day as I returned home Sidris said, "Mannie darling, your friend with the nice voice called. Mike Holmes. Wants you to call back." "Thanks, hon. Will." "When are you going to invite him to dinner, Man? I think he's nice." I told her Gospodin Holmes had bad breath, was covered with rank hair, and hated women. She used a rude word. Mum not being in earshot. "You're afraid to let me see him. Afraid I'll opt out for him." I patted her and told her that was why. I told Mike and Prof about it. Mike flirted even more with my womenfolk after that. I began to learn techniques of conspiracy and to appreciate Profs feeling that revolution could be an art. Did not forget (nor even doubt) Mike's prediction that Luna was only seven years from disaster. But did not think about it, thought about fascinating, finicky details. Prof had emphasized that stickiest problems in conspiracy are communications and security, and had pointed out that they conflict. Easier communications are, greater is risk to security; if security is tight, organization can be paralyzed by safety precautions. He had explained that cell system was a compromise. I accepted cell system since was necessary to limit losses from spies. Even Wyoh admitted that organization without compartmentation could not work after she learned how rotten with spies old underground had been. But I did not like clogged communications or cell system. Like Terran dinosaurs of old, took too long to send message from head to tail, or back. So talked with Mike. We discarded many-linked channels I had suggested to Prof. We retained cells but based security and communication on marvelous possibilities of our dinkum thinkum. Communications: We set up a ternary tree of "party" names: Chairman, Gospodin Adam Selene (Mike) Executive cell: Bork (me), Betty (Wyoh), Bill (Prof) Bork's cell: Cassie (Mum), Colin, Chang Betty's cell: Calvin (Greg), Cecilia (Sidris), Clayton Bill's cell: Cornwall (Finn Nielsen), Carolyn, Cotter -- and so on. At seventh link George supervises Herbert, Henry, and Hallie. By time you reach that level you need # names with "H" -- but turn it over to savvy computer who finds or invents them. Each recruit is given a party name and an emergency phone number. This number, instead of chasing through many links, connects with "Adam Selene," Mike. IP Security: Based on double principle; no human being can be trusted with anything -- but Mike could be trusted with everything. Grim first half is beyond dispute. With drugs and other unsavory methods any man can be broken. Only defense is suicide, which may be impossible. Oh, are "hollow tooth" methods, classic and novel, some nearly infallible. Prof saw to it that Wyoh and myself were equipped. Never knew what he gave her as a final friend and since I never had to use mine, is no point in messy details. Nor am I sure I would ever suicide; am not stuff of martyrs. But Mike could never need to suicide, could not be drugged, did not feel pain. He carried everything concerning us in a separate memory bank under a locked signal programmed only to our three voices, and, since flesh is weak, we added a signal under which any of us could lock out other two in emergency. In my opinion as best computerman in Luna, Mike could not remove this lock once it was set up. Best of all, nobody would ask master computer for this file because nobody new it existed, did not suspect Mike-asMike existed. How secure can you be? Only risk was that this awakened machine was whimsical. Mike was always showing unforeseen potentials. Conceivable he could figure way to get around block -- if he wanted to. But would never want to. He was loyal to me, first and oldest friend; he liked Prof; I think he loved Wyoh. No. no, sex meant nothing. But Wyoh is loveable and they hit it off from start. I trusted Mike. In this life you have to bet. On that bet I would give any odds. S o we based security on trusting Mike with everything while each of us knew only what he had to know. Take that tree of names and numbers. I knew only party names of my cellmates and of three directly under me. Was all I needed. Mike set up party names, assigned phone number to each, kept roster of real names versus party names. Let's say party member "Daniel" (whom I would not know, being a "D" two levels below me) recruits Fritz Schultz. Daniel reports fact but not name upwards; "Adam Selene" calls Daniel, assigns for Schultz party name "Embrook," then phones Schultz at number received from Daniel, gives Schultz his name "Embrook" and emergencv phone number, this number being different for each recruit. Not even "Embrook's" cell leader would know "Embrook's" emergency number. What you do not know you cannot spill, not under drugs, nor torture, nor anything. Not even from carelessness. Now let's suppose I need to reach Comrade Embrook. I don't know who he is. He may live in Hong Kong or be shopkeeper nearest my home. Instead of passing message down, hoping it will reach him, I call Mike. Mike connects me with Embrook at once, in a "Sherlock," without giving me number. Or suppose I need to speak to comrade who is preparing cartoon we are about to distribute in every taproom in Luna. I don't know who he is. But I need to talk to him. I call Mike; Mike knows everything -- and again I am quickly connected -- and this comrade knows it's okay as "Adam Selene" arranged call. "Comrade Bork speaking" -- and he doesn't know me but initial "B" tells him that I am vip indeed -- "we have to change so-and-so. Tell your cell leader and have him check, but get on with it." Minor flourishes -- some comrades did not have phones; some could be reached only at certain hours; some outlying warrens did not have phone service. No matter, Mike knew everything. And rest of us did not know anything that could endanger any but that handful whom each knew face to face. After we decided that Mike should talk voice-to-voice to any comrade under some circumstances, it was necessary to give him more voices and dress him up, make him three dimensions, create "Adam Selene, Chairman of the Provisional Committee of Free Luna." Mike's need for more voices lay in fact that he had just one vodervocoder, whereas his brain could handle a dozen conversations, or a hundred (don't know how many) -- like a chess master playing fifty opponents, only more so. This would cause a bottleneck as organization grew and "Adam Selene" was phoned oftener, and could be crucial if we lasted long enough to go into action. Besides giving him more voices I wanted to silence one he had. One of those so-called computermen might walk into machines room while we were phoning Mike. Bound to cause even his dim wit to wonder if he found master machine apparently talking to itself. Voder-vocoder is very old device. Human voice is buzzes and hisses mixed various ways; true even of a coloratura soprano. A vocoder analyzes buzzes and hisses into patterns a computer (or trained eye) can read. A voder is a little box which can buzz and hiss and has controls to vary these elements to match those patterns. A human can "play" a voder, producing artificial speech; a properly programmed computer can do it as fast, as easily, as clearly as you can speak. But voices on a phone wire are not sound waves but electrical signals; Mike did not need audio part of voder-vocoder to talk by phone. Sound waves were needed only by human at other end. No need for speech sounds inside Mike's room at Authority Complex, so I planned to remove them, and thereby any danger that somebody might notice. First I worked at home, using number-three arm most of time. Result was very small box which sandwiched twenty voder-vocoder circuits minus audio side. Then I called Mike and told him to "get ill" in way that would annoy Warden. Then I waited. V r Je had done this "get ill" trick V before. I went back to work once we learned that I was clear, IF which was Thursday that same week when Alvarez read into "Zebra" file an account of shambles at Stilyagi Hall. His version listed about one hundred people (out of perhaps three hundred) ; list included Shorty Mkrum, Wyoh, Prof, and Finn Nielsen but not me. Apparently I was missed by his finks. It told how nine police officers, each deputized by Warden to preserve peace, had been shot down in cold blood. Also named three of our dead. An add-on a week later stated that "the notorious agente provocateuse Wyoming Knott of Hong Kong in Luna, whose incendiary speech on Monday # May had incited the riot that cost the lives of nine brave officers, had not been apprehended in Luna City and had not returned to "her usual haunts in Hong Kong in Luna, and was now believed to have died in the massacre she herself set off." This add-on admitted what earlier report failed to mention, i.e., bodies were missing and exact number of dead was not known. This P.S. settled two things: Wyoh could not go home nor back to being a blonde. Since I had not been spotted I resumed my public ways. I took care of customers that week -- bookkeeping machines and retrieval files at Carnegie Library -- and spent time having Mike read out Zebra file and other special files, doing so in Room L of Raffles as I did not yet have my own phone. During that week Mike niggled at me like an impatient child (which he was), wanting to know when I was coming over to pick up more jokes. Failing I that, he wanted to tell them by phone. I got annoyed and had to remind myself that from Mike's viewpoint analyzing jokes was just as important as freeing Luna -- and you don't break promises to a child. Besides that, I got itchy wondering whether I could go inside Complex without being nabbed. We knew Prof was not clear, was sleeping in Raffles on that account. Yet they knew he had been at meeting and knew where he was, daily. But no attempt was made to pick him up. When we learned that attempt had been made to pick up Wyoh, I grew itchier. Was I clear? Or were they waiting to nab me quietly? Had to know. So I called Mike and told him to have a tummyache. He did so, I was called in -- no trouble. Aside from showing passport at station, then to a new guard at Complex, all was usual. I chatted with Mike, picked up one thousand jokes (with understanding that we would report a hundred at a time every three or four days, no faster), told him to get well, and went back to L-City, stopping on way out to bill Chief Engineer for working time, traveland-tool time, materials, special service, anything I could load in. Thereafter saw Mike about once a month. Was safe, never went there except when they called me for malfunction beyond ability of their staff. I was always able to "repair" it, sometimes quickly, sometimes after a full day and many tests. Was careful to leave tool marks on cover plates, and had before-and-after printouts of test runs to show what had been wrong, how I analyzed it, what I had done. Mike always worked perfectly after one of my visits; I was indispensable. S o, after I prepared his new vodervocoder add-on, didn't hesitate to tell him to get "ill. Call came in thirty minutes. Mike had thought up a dandy; his "illness" was wild oscillations in conditioning Warden's Residence. He was running its heat up, then down, on an eleven-minute cycle, while oscillating its air pressure on a short cycle, ca. #cs, enough to make a man dreadfully nervy and perhaps cause earache. Conditioning a single residence should not go through a master computer! In Davis Tunnels we handled home and farm with idiot controls, feedbacks for each cubic with alarms so that somebody could climb out of bed and control by hand until trouble could be found. If cows got chilly, did not hurt corn; if lights failed over wheat, vegetables were okay. That Mike could raise hell with Warden's residence and nobody could figure out everything into one computer. Mike was happv-ioved. This was humor he really scanned. I enjoyed it. too. told him to go ahead, have fun -- spread out tools, got out little black box. And computerman-of-thewatch comes banging and ringing at door. T took my time answering and carried number-five arm in right hand with short wing bare; this makes some people sick and upsets almost everybody. "What in hell do you want, choom?" I inquired. "Listen," he says, "Warden is raising hell! Haven't you found trouble?" "My compliments to Warden and tell him I will override by hand to restore his precious comfort as soon as I locate faulty circuit -- if not slowed up by silly questions. Are you going to stand with door open blowing dust into machines while I have cover plates off? If you do -- since you're in charge -- when dust puts machine on sputter, you can repair it. # won't leave a warm bed to help. You can tell that to your bloody Warden, too. "Watch your language, cobber." "Watch yours, convict. Are you going to close that door? Or shall I walk out and go back to L-City?" And raised number-five like a club. He closed door. Had no interest in insulting . poor sod. Was one small bit of policy to make everybody as unhappy as possible. He was finding working for Warden difficult; I wanted to make it unbearable. "Shall I step it up?" Mike inquired. "Um, hold it so for ten minutes, then stop abruptly. Then jog it for an hour, say with air pressures. Erratic but bard. Know what a sonic boom is?" "Certainly. It is a -- " "Don't define. After you drop major effect, rattle bis air ducts every few minutes with nearest to IF a boom system will produce. Then give him something to remember. Mmm... Mike, can you make his W.C. run backwards?" "I surely can! All of them?" "How many does he have?" "Six." "Well... program, to give them all a push, enough to soak his rugs. But if you can spot one nearest his bedroom, fountain it clear to ceiling. Can?" "Program set up!" "Good. Now for your present, ducky." There was room in voder audio box to hide it and I spent forty minutes with number-three, getting it just so. We trial-checked through voder-vocoder, then I told him to call Wyoh and check each circuit. F or ten minutes was silence, which I spent putting tool marks on a cover plate which should have been removed had been anything wrong, putting tools away, putting number-six arm on, robing up one thousand jokes waiting in printout. T had found no need to cut out audio of voder. Mike had thought of it before I had and always chopped off any time door was touched. Since his refexes were better than mine by a factor of at least a thousand, I forgot it. At last he said, "All twenty circuits okay. I can switch circuits in the middle of a word and Wyoh can't detect discontinuity. And I called Prof and said Hello and talked to Mum on your home phone, all three at the same time." "We're in business. What excuse you give Mum?" "I asked her to have you call me, Adam Selene that is. Then we chatted. She's a charming conversationalist. We discussed Greg's sermon of last Tuesday." "Huh? How?" "I told her I had listened to it, Man, and quoted a poetic part." "Oh, Mike!" "It's okay, Man. I let her think that I sat in back, then slipped out during the closing hymn. She's not nosy. She knows that I don't want to be seen." Mum is nosiest female in Luna. "Guess it's okay. But don't do it again. Um -- Do it again. You go to -- you monitor -- meetings and lectures and concerts and stuff." "Unless some busybody switches me off by hand! Man, I can't control those spot pickups the way I do a phone." "Too simple a switch. Brute muscle rather than solid-state flipflop." "That's barbaric. And unfair." "Mike, almost everything is unfair. What can't be cured -- " " -- must be endured. That's a funny-once, Man." "Sorry. Let's change it: What can't be cured should be tossed out and something better put in. Which we'll do. What chances last time yon calculated?" "Approximately one in nine, Man."  "Getting worse?" "Man, they'll get worse for months. We haven't reached the    crisis. "With Yankees in cellar, too. Oh, well. Back to other matters. From bow on, when you talk to anyone, if he's been to a lecture or whatever, you were there, too -- and prove it, by recalling something." "Noted. Why, Man?" "Have you read 'The Scarlet Pimpernel? May be in public library." "Yes. Shan I read it back?" "No, no! You're our Scarlet Pimpernel, our John Galt, our Swamp Fox, our man of mystery. You go everywhere, know everything, slip in and out of town without passport. You're always there, yet nobody catches sight of you." H is lights rippled, he gave a subdued chuckle. "That's fun, Man. Funny once, funny twice, maybe funny always." "Funny always. How long ago did you stop gymkhana at Warden's?" "Forty-three minutes ago except erratic booms." "Bet his teeth ache! Give him fifteen minutes more. Then I'll report job completed." "Noted. Wyoh sent you a message, Man. She said to remind you of Billy's birthday party." "Oh, my word! Stop everything, I'm leaving. 'Bye!" I hurried out. Billy's mother is Anna. Probably her last -- and right well she's done by us, eight kids, three still home. I try to be as careful as Mum never to show favoritism... but Billy is quite a boy and I taught him to read. Possible he looks like me. Stopped at Chief Engineer's office to leave bill and demanded to see him. Was let in and he was in belligerent mood; Warden had bees riding him, "Hold it," I told him. "My son's birthday and shan't be late. But must show you something." Took an envelope from kit, dumped item on desk: corpse ,of house fly which I had charred with a hot wire and fetched. We do not tolerate flies in Davis Tunnels but sometimes one wanders in from city as locks are opened. This wound up in my workshop just when I needed it. "See that? Guess where I found ft." On that faked evidence I built a lecture on care of fine machines, talked about doors opened, complained about man on watch. "Dust can ruin a computer. Insects are unpardonable! Yet your watchstanders wander in and out as if tube station. Today both doors held open -- while this idiot yammered. If I find more evidence that cover plates have been removed by hoofhanded choom who attracts flies -- well, it's your plant, Chief. Got more than I can handle, been doing your chores because I like fine machines. Can't stand to see them abused! Good-by." "Hold on. I want to tell you something." "Sorry, got to go. Take it or leave it. I'm no vermin exterminator; I'm a computerman." Nothing frustrates a man so much as not letting him get in his say. With luck and help from Warden, Chief Engineer would have ulcers by Christmas. Was late anyhow and made IF humble apology to Billy. Alvarez had thought up new wrinkle, close search on leaving Complex. I endured it with never a narsty word for Dragoons who searched me; wanted to get home. But those thousand jokes bothered them. "What's this?" one demanded. '"Computer paper," I said. "Test runs." His mate joined him. Don't think they could read. They wanted to confiscate, so I demanded they call Chief Engineer. They let me go. I left not displeased; more and more such, and guards were daily more hated. D ecision to make Mike more a person arose from need to have any Party member phone him on occasion. My advice about concerts and plays was simply a side effect. Mike's voice over phone had odd quality I had not noticed during time I had visited him only at Complex. When you speak to a man by phone there is background noise. And you hear him breathe, hear heartbeats, body motions even though rarely conscious of these. Besides that, even if he speaks under a hush hood, noises get through, enough to "fill space," make him a body with surroundings. With Mike was none of this. By then Mike's voice was "human" in timbre and quality, recognizable. He was baritone, had North American accent with Aussie overtones. As "Michele" he (she?) had a light soprano with French flavor. Mike's personality grew also. When first I introduced Mm to Wyeih and Prof he sounded like a pedantic child. In short weeks he flowered until I visualized a man about own age. His voice when be first woke was blurred and harsh, hardly understandable. Now it was clear and choice of words mid phrasing was consistent -- colloquial to me, scholarly to Prof, gallant to Wyoh, variation one expects of matins adult But background was dead. Thick silence. So we filled it. Mike needed only hints. He did not make Ms breathing noisy, ordinarily you would not notice. But he would stick in touches. '"Sorry, Mannie, you caught me bathing when the phone sounded" -- and let one hear hurried breathing. Or "I was eating -- had to swallow." He used such even on me, once he undertook to "be a human body." We all put "Adam Selene" together, talking it over at Raffles. How old was he? What did he look like? Married? Where did he live? What work? What interests? We decided that Adam was about forty, healthy, vigorous, well educated, interested in all arts and sciences and very well grounded in history, a match chess player but little time to play. He was married in commonest type, a troika in which he was senior husband -- four children. Wife and junior husband not in politics, so far as we knew. He was ruggedly handsome with wavy iron-gray hair and was mixed race, second generation one side, I third on other. Was wealthy by Loonie standards, with interests in Novylen and Kongville as well as L-City. He kept offices in Luna City, outer office with a dozen people plus private office staffed by male deputy and female secretary. Wyoh wanted to know was he bundling with secretary? I told her to switch off, was private. Wyoh said indignantly that she was not being snoopy -- weren't we trying to create a rounded character? We decided that officeswere in Old Dome, third ramp, south side, heart of financial district. If you know L-City, you recall that in Old Dome some offices have windows since they can look out over floor of Dome. I wanted this for sound effects. We drew a floor plan and had that office existed, it would have been between Aetna Luna and Greenberg  Co. I used pouch recorder to pick up sounds at spot; Mike added to it by listening at phones there. Thereafter when you called "Adam Selene" background was not dead. If "Ursula", his secretary, took call, it was: "Selene Associates. Luna shall be free!" Then she might say, "Will you hold? Gospodin Selene is on another call" whereupon you might hear sound of W.C., followed by running water and know that she had told little white lie. Or Adam might answer: "Adam Selene here. Free Luna. One second while I shut off the video." Or deputy might answer: "This is Albert Ginwallah, Adam Selene's confidential assistant. Free Luna. If it's a Party matter -- as I assume it is; that was your Party name you gave -- please don't hesitate; I handle such things for the Chairman." Last was a trap, as every comrade was instructed to speak only to Adam Selene. No attempt was made to discipline one who took bait; instead his cell captain was warned that this comrade must not be trusted with anything vital. We got echoes. "Free Luna!" or "Luna shall be free!" took hold among youngsters, then among solid citizens. First time I heard it in a business call I almost swallowed teeth. Then called Mike and asked if this person was Party member? Was not. So I recommended that Mike trace down Party tree and see if somebody could recruit him. M ost interesting echo was in "File Zebra." "Adam Selene" appeared in boss fink's security file less than a lunar after we created him, with notation that this was a cover name for a leader in a new underground. Alvarez's spies did a job on "Adam Selene." Over course of months his File Zebra dossier built up: Male, #-#, offices south face of Old Dome, usually there #-# Gr. except Saturday but calls are relayed at other hours, home inside urban pressure as travel time never exceeds seventeen minutes. Children in household. Activities include stock brokerage, farming interests. Attends theater, concerts, etc. Probably member Luna City Chess Club and Luna Assoc. d'Echecs. Plays IF ricochet and other heavy sports lunch hour, probably Luna City Athletic Club. Gourmet but watches weight. Remarkable memory plus mathematical ability. Executive type, able to reach decisions quickly. One fink was convinced that he had talked to Adam between acts at revival of Hamlet by Civic Players. Alvarez noted description -- matched our picture all but wavy hair! But thing that drove Alvarez crackers was that phone numbers for Adam were reported and every time they turned out wrong numbers. (Not nulls; we had run out and Mike was using any number not in use and switching numbers any time new subscribers were assigned ones we had been using.) Alvarez tried to trace "Selene Associates" using a one-wrong-digit assumption. This we learned because Mike was keeping an ear on Alvarez's office phone and heard order. Mike used knowledge to play a Mikish prank: Subordinate who made one-changeddigit calls invariably reached Warden's private residence. So Alvarez was called in and chewed by Warden. Couldn't scold Mike but did warn him it would alert any smart person to fact that somebody was playing tricks with computer. Mike answered that they were not that smart. Main result of Alvarez's efforts was that each time he got a number for Adam we located a spy -- a new spy, as those we had spotted earlier were never given phone numbers; instead they were recruited into a tail-chasing organization where they could inform on each other. But with Alvarez's help we spotted each new spy almost at once. I think Alvarez became unhappy over spies he was able to hire. Two disappeared and our organization, then over six thousand, was never able to find them. Eliminated, I suppose. Or died under questioning. "Selene Associates" was not only phony company we set up. LuNoHoCo was much largo, just as phony, and not at all dummy. It had main offices in Hong Kong, branches in Novy Leningrad and Luna City, eventually employed hundreds of people most of whom woe not Party members and was our most difficult operation. Mike's master plan listed a weary number of problems which had to be solved. One was finance. Another was how to protect catapult from space attack. Prof considered robbing banks to solve first, gave it up reluctantly. But eventually we did rob banks, firms and Authority itself. Mike thought of it, Mike and Prof worked it out. At first was not clear to Mike why we needed money. He knew as little about pressure that keeps humans scratching as he knew dollars and could not see any problem. He started by offering to issue an Authority cheque for whatever dollars we wanted. Prof shied in horror. He then explained to Mike hazard in trying to cash a cheque for, let me say, AS # drawn on Authority. S o they imdertook to do it, but retail, in many names and places all over Luna. Every bank, firm, shop, agency including Authority, for which Mike did accounting, was tapped for Party funds. Was a pyramided swindle based on fact, unknown to me but known to Prof and latent in Mike's immense knowledge, that most money is simply bookkeeping. Example -- multiply by hundreds of many types: My family son Sergei, eighteen and a Party member, is asked to start account at Commonwealth Shared Risk. He makes deposits and withdrawals. Small errors are made each time; he is credited with more than he deposits, is debited with less than he withdraws. A few months later he takes job out of town and transfers account to Tycho-Under Mutual; transferred funds are three times already-inflated amount. Most of this he soon draws out in cash and passes to his cell leader. Mike knows amount Sergei shookl hand over, but (since they do not know that Adam Selene and bank's computer-bookkeeper are one and same) they have each been instructed to report transaction to Adam -- keep them honest though scheme was not. Multiply this theft of about HK# by hundreds somewhat like it. I can't describe jiggery-pokery Mike used to balance his books while keeping thousands of thefts from showing. But bear in mind that an auditor must assume that machines are honest. He will make test runs to check that machines are working correctly -- but will not occur to him that tests prove nothing because machine itself is dishonest. Mike's thefts were never large enough to disturb economy. Like halfliter of blood, amount was too small to hurt donor. I can't make up mind who lost, money was swapped around so many ways. But scheme troubled me; I was brought up to be honest, except with Authority. Prof claimed that what was taking place was a mild inflation offset by fact that we plowed money back in -- but I should remember that Mike had records and all could be restored after Revolution, with ease since we would no longer be bled in much larger amounts by Authority. I told conscience to go to sleep. Was pipsqueak compared to swindles by every government throughout history in financing every war. And is not revolution a war? This money, after passing through many hands (augmented by Mike each time), wound up as senior financing of LuNoHo Company. Was a mixed company, mutual and stock; "gentleman-adventurer" guarantors who backed stock put up that stolen money in own names. Won't discuss bookkeeping this firm used. Since Mike ran everything, was not corrupted by any tinge of honesty. Nevertheless its shares were traded in Hong Kong Luna Exchange and listed in Zurich, London and New York. Wall Street Journal called it "an attractive high-risk-highgain investment with novel growth potential." LuNoHoCo was an engineering and exploitation firm, engaged in many ventures, mostly  legitimate. But prime purpose was to build a second catapult, secretly. Operation could not be secret. You can't buy or build a hydrogenfusion power plant for such and not have it noticed. (Sunpower was rejected for obvious reasons.) Parts were ordered from Pittsburgh, standard UnivCalif equipment, and we happily paid their royalties to get top quality. Can't build a stator for a kilometers-long induction field without having it noticed, either. But most important you cannot do major construction hiring many people and not have it show. Sure, catapults are mostly vacuum; stator rings aren't even close together at ejection end But Authority's #-G catapult was almost one hundred kilometers long. It was not only an astrogation landmark, on every Luna-jump chart, but was so big it could be photographed or seen by eye from Terra with not-large telescope. It showed up beautifully on a radar screen We were building a catapult, a #-g job, but even that was thirty kilometers long, too big to hide. So we hid it by "Purloined Letter" method. I used to question Mike's endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts. Fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it. Besides this "humanizing" effect, Mike's substitute for experience, he got ideas from "nottrue data" as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allan Poe. We hid it in literal sense, too; this catapult had to be underground, so that it would not show to eye or radar. But had to be hidden in more subtle sense. Selenographic location had to be secret. How can this be, with a monster that big, worked on by so many people? Put it this way: Suppose you live in Novylen; know where Luna City is? Why, on east edge of Mare Crisium; everybody knows that. So? What latitude and longitude? Huh? Look it up in reference book! So? If you don't know where any better that that, how did you find it last week? No huhu, cobber; I took tube, changed at Torricelli, slept rest of way; finding it was capsule's worry See? You don't know where Luna City is! You simply get out when capsule pulls in at Tube Station South. That's how we hid catapult. Is in Mare Undarum area, "everybody knows that." But where it is and where we said it was differ by amount greater or less than one hundred kilometers in direction north, south, east or west, or some combination. Today you can look up its location in reference books -- and find same wrong answer. Location of that catapult is still most closelv guarded secret in Luna. Can't be seen from space, by eye or radar. Is underground save for ejection and that is a big black shapeless hole like ten thousand others and high up an uninviting mountain with no place for a jump rocket to put down. Nevertheless many 'people were there, during and after construction. Even Warden visited and my co-husband Greg showed him around. Warden went by mail rocket, commandeered for day, and his Cyborg was given coordinates and a radar beacon to home on -- a spot in fact not far from site. But from there, was necessary to travel by rolligon. And our lorries were not like passenger buses from Endsville to Beluthihatchie in old days; they were cargo carriers, no ports for sightseeing and a ride so rough that human cargo had to be strapped down. Warden wanted to ride up in cab but -- sorry Gospodin! -- just space for wrangler and his helper and took both to keep her steady. Three hours later he did not care about anything but getting home. He stayed one hour and was not interested in talk about purpose of all uncovered. T ess important people, workmen i and others, traveled by interconnecting ice-exploration boxes, st ; u easier way to get lost. If anybody carried an inertial pathfinder in his luggage, he could have located site -- but security was tight. One did so and had accident with p-suit. His effects were returned to L-City and his pathfinder read what it should -- i.e., what we wanted it to read, for I made hurried trip out with number-three arm along. You can reseal one without a trace if you do it in nitrogen atmosphere. I wore an oxygen mask at slight overpressure. No huhu. We entertained vips from Earth, some high in Authority. They traveled easier underground route; I suppose Warden had warned them. But even on that route is one thirtykilometer stretch by rolligon. We had one visitor from Earth who looked like trouble, a Dr. Dorian, physicist and engineer. Lorry tipped over. Silly driver tried shortcut. They were not in lineof-sight for anything and their beacon was smashed. Poor Dr. Dorian spent seventy-two hours in an unsealed pumice igloo and had to be returned to L-City ill from hypoxia and overdose of radiation despite efforts on his behalf by two Party members driving him. Might have been safe to let him see. He might not have spotted doubletalk and would not have spotted error in location. Few people look at stars when p-suited even when Sun doesn't make it futile. Still fewer can read stars -- and nobody can locate himself on surface without help unless he has instruments, knows how to use them and has tables and something to give a time kick. Put at crudest level, minimum would be octant, tables, and good watch. Our visitors were even encouraged to go out on surface. But if one had carried an octant or modern equivalent, might have had accident. We did not make accidents for spies. We let them stay, worked them hard, and Mike read their reports. One reported that he was IF certain that we had found uranium ore, something unknown in Luna at that time, Project Centerbore being many years later. Next spy came out with kit of radiation counters. We made it easy for him to sneak them through bore. By March '# catapult was almost ready, lacking only installation of stator segments. Power plant was in and a co-ax had been strung underground with a line-of-sight link for that thirty kilometers. Crew was down to skeleton size, mostly Party members. But we kept one spy so that Alvarez could have regular reports -- didn't want him to worry; it tended to make him suspicious. Instead we worried him in warrens. W ere changes in those eleven months. Wyoh was baptized into Greg's church, Profs health became so shaky that he dropped teaching, Mike took up writing poetry. Yankees finished in cellar. Wouldn't have minded paying Prof if they had been nosed out, but from pennant to cellar in one season -- I quit watching them on video. Profs illness was phony. He was in perfect shape for age, exercising in hotel room three hours each day, and sleeping in three hundred kilograms of lead pajamas. And so was I. And so was Wyoh, who hated it. I don't think she ever cheated and spent night in comfort though can't say for sure; I was not dossing with her. She had become a fixture in Davis family. Took her one day to go from "Gospozha Davis" to "Gospozha Mum," one more to reach "Mum" and now it might be "Mimi Mum" with arm around Mum's waist. When Zebra File showed she couldn't go back to Hong Kong, Sidris had taken Wyoh into her beauty shop after hours and done a job which left skin same dark shade but would not scrub off. Sidris also did a hairdo on Wyoh that left it black and looking as if unsuccessfully unkinked. Plus minor touches -- opaque nail enamel, plastic inserts for cheeks and nostrils and of course she wore her dark-eyed contact lenses. When Sidris got through, Wyoh could have gone bundling without fretting about her disguise; was a perfect "colored" with ancestry to match -- Tamil, a touch of Angola, German. I called her "Wyma" rather than "Wyoh". She was gorgeous. When she undulated down a corridor, boys followed in swarms. She started to learn farming from Greg but Mum put stop to that. While she was big and smart and operation. Greg and Hans were not only male members of our family distracted; she cost more farming man-hours than her industry equaled. So Wyoh went back to housework, then Sidris took her into beauty shop as helper. Prof played ponies with two accounts, betting one by Mike's "leading apprentice" system, other by his own "scientific" system. By July '# he admitted that he knew nothing about horses and went solely to Mike's system, increasing bets and spreading them among many bookies. His winnings paid Party's expenses while Mike built swindle that financed catapult. But Prof lost interest in a sure thing and merely placed bets as Mike designated. He stopped reading pony journals. Sad. Something dies when an old horseplayer quits. Ludmilla had a girl which they say is lucky in a first and which delighted me -- every family needs a girl baby. Wyoh surprised our women by being expert in midwifery -- and surprised them again that she knew nothing about baby care. Our two oldest sons found marriages at last and Teddy, thirteen, was opted out. Greg hired two lads from neighbor farms and, after six months of working and eating with us, both were opted in -- not rushing things, we had known them and their families for years. It restored balance we had lacked since Ludmilla's opting and put stop to snide remarks from mothers of bachelors who had not found marriages Not that Mum wasn't capable of snubbing anyone she did not consider up to Davis standards. Wyoh recruited Sidris; Sidris started her own cell by recruiting her other assistant and Bon Ton Beaute Shoppe became hotbed of subversion. We started using our smallest kids for deliveries and other jobs a child can do. They can stakeout or trail a person through corridors better than an adult, and are not suspected. Sidris grabbed this notion and expanded it through women recruited in beauty parlor. S oon she had so many kids on tap  that we could keep all of Alvarez's spies under surveillance. With Mike able to listen at any phone and a child spotting it whenever a spy left home or place of work or wherever -- with enough kids on call so that one could phone while another held down a new stake-out, we could keep a spy under tight observation and keep him from seeing anything we didn't want him to see. Shortly we were getting reports spies phoned in without waiting for Zebra File. It did a sod no good to phone from a taproom instead of home; with Baker Street Irregular on job Mike was listening before he finished punching number. These kids located Alvarez's deputy spy boss in L-City. We knew he had one because these finks did not report to Alvarez by phone, nor did it seem possible that Alvarez could have recruited them as none of them worked in Complex and Alvarez came inside Luna City only when an Earthside vip was so important as to rate a bodyguard commanded by Alvarez in person. His deputy turned out to be two people -- an old lag who ran a candy, news and bookie counter in Old Dome and his son who was on civil service in Complex. Son carried reports in, so Mike had not been able to hear them. We let them alone. But from then on we had fink field reports half a day sooner than Alvarez. This advantage -- all due to kids as young as five or six -- saved lives of seven comrades. A#I glory to Baker Street Irregulars! m Don't remember who named them but think it was Mike. I was merely a Sherlock Holmes fan whereas he really did think he was Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft... nor would I swear he was not; "reality" is a slippery notion. Kids did not call themselves that; they had their own play gangs with own names. Nor were they burdened with secrets which could endanger them. Sidris left it to mothers to explain why they were being asked to do these jobs save that they were never to be told the real reason. Kids will do anything mysterious and fun; look how many of their games are based on out-smarting. Bon Ton salon was a clearing house of gossip -- women get news faster than Daily Lunatic. I encouraged Wyoh to report to Mike each night, not try to thin gossip down to what seemed significant because was no telling what might be significant once Mike got through associating it with other facts. Beauty parlor was also place to start rumors. Party had grown slowly at first, then rapidly as powersof-three began to be felt and also because Peace Dragoons were narstier than older bodyguard. As numbers increased we shifted to high speed on agitprop, black-propaganda rumors, open subversion, provocateur activities and sabotage. Finn Nielsen handled agitprop when it was simpler as well as dangerous job of continuing to front for and put cover-up activity into older, spyridden underground. But now a large chunk of agitprop and related work was given to Sidris. Much involved distributing handbills and such. No subversive literature was ever in her shop, nor our home, nor that hotel room. Distribution was done by kids, too young to read. Sidris was also working a full day bending hair and such. About time she began to have too much to do I happened one evening to make walk-about cal Causeway with Sidris on my arm when I caught sight of a familiar face and figure -- skinny little girl, all angles, carrot-red hair. She was possibly twelve, at stage when a fern shoots up just before blossoming out into rounded softness. I knew her but could not say why or when or where. I said, "Psst, doll baby. Eyeball young fern ahead. Orange hair, no cushions." S idris looked her over. "Darling, I knew you were eccentric. But she's still a boy." "Damp it. Who?" "Bog knows. Shall I sprag her?" Suddenly I remembered like video coming on. And wished Wyoh were with me -- but Wyoh and I were never together in public. This skinny redhead had been at meeting where Shorty was killed. She sat on floor against wall down front and' listened with wide-eyed seriousness and applauded fiercely. Then I had seen her at end in free trajectory -- curled into ball in air and had hit a yellow jacket in knees, he whose jaw I broke a moment later. Wyoh and I were alive and free because this kid moved fast in a crisis. "No, don't speak to her," I told Sidris. "But I want to keep her in sight Wish we had one of your Irregulars here. Damn." "Drop off and phone Wyoh, you'll Have one in f ive minutes," my wife said. I did. Then Sidris and I strolled, looking in shop windows and moving slowly, as quarry was window shopping. In seven or eight minutes a small boy came toward us, stopped and said, "Hello, Auntie Mabel! Hi, Uncle Joe." Sidris took his hand. "Hi, Tony. How's your mother, dear?" "Just fine." He added in a whisper, "I'm Jock." "Sorry." Sidris said quietly to me, "Stay on her," and took Jock into a tuck shop. She came out and joined me. Jock followed her licking a lollipop. "'Bye, Auntie Mabel! Thanks!" He danced away, rotating, wound up by that little redhead, stood and stared into a display, solemnly sucking his sweet. Sidris and I went home. A report was waiting. "She went into Cradle Roll Creche and hasn't come out. Do we stay on it?" "A bit yet," I told Wyoh, and asked if she remembered this kid She did, but had no idea who she might be. "You could ask Finn." "Can do better." I called Mike. Yes, Cradle Roll Creche had a phone and Mike would listen Took him twenty minutes to pick up enough to give analysis. Manv voung voices and at such ages almost sexless But presently he told me, "Man. I hear three voices that could match the age and physical type you described. However, two answer to names which I assume to be masculine. The third answers when anyone says 'Hazel' -- which an older female voice does repeatedly. She seems to be Hazel's boss." "Mike, look at old organization file. Check Hazels." "Four Hazels," he answered at once, "and here she is: Hazel Meade, Young Comrades Auxiliary, address Cradle Roll Creche, born # December #, mass thirty-nine kilos, height -- " "That's our little jump jet! Thanks, Mike. Wyoh, call off stake-out. Good job!" "Mike, call Donna and pass the word, that's a dear." I left it to girls to recruit Hazel Meade and did not eyeball her until Sidris moved her into our household two weeks later. But Wyoh volunteered a report before then; policy was involved. Sidris had filled her cell but wanted Hazel Meade. Besides this irregularity, Sidris was doubtful about recruiting a child. Policy was adults only, sixteen and up. I took it to "Adam Selene" and executive cell. "As I see." I said, "this cells-of-three system is to serve us, not bind us. See nothing wrong in Comrade Cecilia having an extra. Nor any real danger to security." "I agree," said Prof. "But I suggest that the extra member not be part of Cecilia's cell. She should not know the others. I mean, unless the duties Cecilia gives her makes it necessary. Nor do I think she should recruit, at her age. The real question is her age." IF "Agreed," said Wyoh. "I want to talk about this kid's age." "Friends," Mike said diffidently (diffidently first time in weeks; he was now that confident executive "Adam Selene" much more than lonely machine) -- "perhaps I should have told you, but I have already granted similar variations. It did not seem to require discussion." "It doesn't, Mike," Prof reassured him. "A chairman must use his own judgment. What is our largest cell?" "Five. It is a double cell, three and two." "No harm done. Dear Wyoh, does Sidris propose to make this child a full comrade? Let her know that we are committed to revolution... with all the bloodshed, disorder and possible disaster that entails?" "That's exactly what she is requesting." "But, dear lady, while we are staking our lives, we are told enough to know it. For that, one should have an emotional grasp of death. Children seldom are able to realize that death will come to them personally. One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die... and accepts his sentence undismayed." "Prof." I said, "I know some mighty tall children. Seven to two some are in Party." "No bet, cobber. I'll give odds that at least half of them don't qualify -- and we may find out the hard way." "Prof," Wyoh insisted. "Mike, Mannie. Sidris is certain this child is an adult. And I think so, too." "Man?" asked Mike. "Let's find way for Prof to meet her and form own opinion. I was taken by her. Especially her goto-hell fighting. Or would never have started it." We adjourned and I heard no more. Hazel showed up at dinner shortly thereafter as Sidris' guest. She showed no sign of recognizing me, nor did I admit that I had ever seen her -- but learned long after that she had recognized me, not just by left arm but because I had been hatted and kissed by tall blonde from Hong Kong. Furthermore Hazel had seen through Wyoming's disguise, recognized what Wyoh never did successfully disguise: her voice. But Hazel used lip glue. If she ever assumed I was in conspiracy she never showed .it. Child's history explained her, far as background can explain steely character. Transported with parents as a baby much as Wyoh had been, she had lost father through accident while he was convict labor, which her mother blamed on indifference of Authority to safety of penal colonists. Her mother lasted till Hazel was five. What she died from Hazel did not know; she was then living in creche where we found her. Nor did she know why parents had been shipped -- possibly for subversion if they were both under sentence as Hazel thought. As mav be; her mother left her a fierce hatred of Authority. Family that ran Cradle Roll let her stay. Hazel was pinning diapers and washing dishes as soon as she could reach. She had taught herself to read, and could print letters but could not write. Her knowledge of math was only that ability to count money that children soak up through their skins. Was fuss over her leaving creche; owner and husbands claimed Hazel owed several years service. Hazel solved it by walking out, leaving her few clothes and fewer belongings behind. Mum was angry enough to want family to start trouble which could wind up in "brawling" she despised. But I told her privately that, as her cell leader, I did not want our family in public eye -- and hauled out cash and told her Party would pay for clothes for Hazel. Mum refused money, called off a family meeting, took Hazel into town and was extravagant -- for Mum -- in re-outfitting her. S o we adopted Hazel. I understand that these days adopting a child involves red tape; in those days it was as simple as adopting a kitten. Was more fuss when started to place Hazel in school, which fitted neither what Sidris had in mind nor what Hazel had been led to expect as a Party member and comrade. Again I butted in and Mum gave in part way. Hazel was placed in a tutoring school close to Sidris shop -- that is, near easement lock thirteen; beauty parlor was by it (Sidris had good business because close enough that our water was piped in, and used without limit as return line took it back for salvage). Hazel studied mornings and helped in afternoons, pinning on gowns, handing out towels, giving rinses, learning trade -- and whatever else Sidris Wanted. "Whatever else" was captain of Baker Street Irregulars. Hazel had handled younger kids all her short life. They liked her; she could wheedle them into anything; she understood what they said when an adult would find it gibberish. She was a perfect bridge between Party and most junior auxiliary. She could make a game of chores we assigned and persuade them to play by rules she gave them, and never let them know it was adult-serious -- but child-serious, which is another matter. For example: Let's say a little one, too young to read, is caught with a stack of subversive literature -- which happened more than once. Here's how it would go. after Hazel indoctrinated a kid: Adult: "Baby, where did you get this?" Baker Street Irregular: "I'm not a baby, I'm a big boy!" Adult: "Okay, big boy, where did you get this?" B.S.I.: "Jackie give it to me." Adult: "Who is Jackie?" B.S.I.: "Jackie." Adult: "But what's his last name?" B.S.I.: "Who?" Adult: "Jackie." B.S.I.: (scornfully) "Jackie's a girl!" IP Adult: "All right, where does she live?" B.S.I.: "Who?" And so on around -- To all questions key answer was of pattern: "Jackie give it to me." Since Jackie didn't exist, he (she) didn't have a last name, a home address, nor fixed sex. Those children enjoyed making fools of adults, once they learned how easy it was. At worst, literature was confiscated. Even a squad of Peace Dragoons thought twice before trying to "arrest" a small child. Yes, we were beginning to have squads of Dragoon inside Luna City, but never less than a squad -- some had gone in singly and not come bade. W hen Mike started writing poetry I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He wanted to publish it! Shows how thoroughly humanity had corrupted this innocent machine that he should wish to see his name in print. I said, "Mike, for Bog's sake! Blown all circuits?" Before he could sulk Prof said, "Hold on, Manuel; I see possibilities. Mike, would it suit you to take a pen name?" That's how "Simon Jester" was born. Mike picked it apparently by tossing random numbers. But he used another name for serious verse -- "Adam Selene.' "Simon's" verse was doggerel, bawdy, subversive, ranging from poking fun at vips to savage attacks on Warden, system. Peace Dragoons, finks. You found it on walls of public W.C.s, or on scraps of paper left in tube capsules. Or in taprooms. Wherever they were they were signed "Simon Jester" and with a matchstick drawing of a lit tie horned devil with big grin and forked tail. Sometimes he was stab bing a fat man with a pitchfork Sometimes just his face would ap pear, big grin and horns, until shortly even horns and grin meant "Simon was here." Simon appeared all over Luna same day and from then on never let up. Shortly he started receiving volunteer help; his verses and lit tie pictures, so simple anybody could draw them, began appearing more places than we had planned This wider coverage had to be from fellow travelers. Verses and cartoons started appearing inside Complex -- which could not have been our work; we never recruited civil servants. Also, three days after initial appearance of a very rough limerick, one that implied that War den's fatness derived from unsavory habits, this limerick popped up on pressure-sticky labels with cartoon improved so that fat victim flinch ing from Simon's pitchfork was rec ognizably Mort the Wart. We didn't buy them, we didn't print them. But they appeared in L-City and Novy len and Hong Kong, stuck almost everywhere -- public phones, stan chions in corridors, pressure lock ramp railings, other. I had a sample count made, fed it to Mike. He reported that over seventy thousand labels had been used in L-City alone. I did not know of a printing a job and equipped for it. Began to wonder if might be another revolutionary cabal? S imon's verses were such a success that he branched out as a poltergeist and neither Warden nor security chief was allowed to miss it. "Dear Mort the Wart," ran one letter, "Do please be careful from midnight to four hundred tomorrow. Love  Kisses, Simon" -- with horns and grin. In same mail Mvarez received one reading: "Dear Pimplehead, If the Warden breaks iiis leg tomorrow night it will be vour fault. Faithfully your conscience, Simon" -- again with horns and smile. We didn't have anything planned; we just wanted Mort and Alvarez to lose sleep -- which they did, plus bodyguard. All Mike did was to call Warden's private phone at intervals from midnight to four hundred -- an unlisted number supposedly known only to his personal staff. By calling members of his personal staff simultaneously and connecting them to Mort Mike not only created confusion but got Warden angry at his assistants -- he flatly refused to believe their denials. But was luck that Warden, goaded too far, ran down a ramp. Even a new chum does that onlv once, so he walked on air and sprained an ankle -- close enough to a broken leg. And Alvarez was there when it happened. These sleep-losers were mostly just that. Like rumor that Authority catapult had been mined and would be blown up, another night. Ninety plus eighteen men can't search a hundred kilometers of catapult in hours, especially when ninety are Peace Dragoons not used to p-suit work and hating it -- this midnight came at new earth with Sun high; they were outside far longer than is healthy, managed to cook up their own accidents while almost cooking themselves, and showed nearest thing to mutiny in regiment's history. Ona accident was fatal. Did he fall or was he pushed? A sergeant. Midnight alarums made Peace Dragoons on passport watch much taken by yawning and more badtempered, which produced more clashes with Loonies and still greater resentment both ways -- so Simon increased pressure. A dam Selene's verse was on a higher plane. Mike submitted it to Prof and accepted his literary judgment (good, I think) without resentment. Mike's scansion and rhyming were perfect, Mike being a computer with whole English language in his memory and able to search for a fitting word in microseconds. What was weak was selfcriticism. That improved rapidly under Prof's stern editorship. Adam Selene's by-line appeared first in dignified pages of Moonglow over a somber poem titled: Home. Was dying thoughts of old transportee, his discovery as he is about to leave that Luna is his beloved home. Language was simple, rhyme scheme unforced, only thing faintly subversive was conclusion on IF part of dying man that even many Wardens he has endured was not too high a price. Doubt if Moonglow's editors thought twice. Was good stuff, they published. Alvarez turned editorial office inside out trying to get a line back to "Adam Selene." Issue had been on sale half a lunar before Alvarez noticed it, or had it called to his attention; we were fretted, we wanted that by-line noticed. We were much pleased with way Alvarez oscillated when he saw it. Editors were unable to help fink boss. They told him truth: Poem had come in by mail. Did they have it? Yes, surely... sorry, no envelope; they were never saved. After a long time Alvarez left, flanked by four Dragoons he had fetched along for his health. Hope he enjoved studying that sheet of paper. Was piece of Adam Selene's business stationery: Luna City Investments Office of the Chairman Old Dome -- and under that was typed Home, by Adam Selene, etc. Any fingerprints were added after it left us. Had been typed on Underwood Office Electrostator, commonest model in Luna. Even so, were not too many as are importado; a scientific detective could have identified machine. Would have found it in Luna City office of Lunar Authority. Machines, should say, as we found six of model in office and used them in rotation, five words and move to next. Cost Wyoh and self sleep and too much risk even though Mike listened at every phone, ready to warn. Never did it that way again. Alvarez was not a scientific detective. XX I had too much to do. Could not neglect customers. Party work took more time even though all possible was delegated. But decisions had to be made on endless things and messages passed up and down. Had to squeeze in hours of heavy exercise, wearing weights, and dasn't arrange permission to use centrifuge at Complex, one used by earthworm scientists to stretch time in Luna. While had used it before, this time could not advertise that I was getting in shape for Earthside. Exercising without centrifuge is less efficient and was especially boring because did not know there woufd be need for it. But according to Mike thirty per cent of ways events could fall required some Loonie, able to speak for Party, to make trip to Terra. Could not see myself as an ambassador, don't have education and not diplomatic. Prof was obvious choice of those recruited or likely to be. But Prof was old, might not live to land Earthside. Mike told us that a man of Profs age, body type, etc., had less than # chance of reaching Terra alive. But Prof did gaily undertake strenuous training to let him make most of his poor chances. So what could do but put on weights and get to work, ready to go and take his place if old heart clicked off? Wyoh did same, on assumption that something might keep me from going. She really did it to share misery. Wyoh always used gallantry in place of logic. On top of business, Party Work and exercise was farming. We had lost three sons by marriage while gaining two fine lads, Frank and Ali. Then Greg went to work for LuNoHoCo, as boss drillman on new catapult. Was needful. Much skull sweat went into hiring construction crew. We could use non-Party men for most jobs, but key spots had to be Party men as competent as they were politically reliable. Greg did not want to go; our farm needed him and he did not like to leave his congregation. But accepted. That made me again a valet, part time, to pigs and chickens. Hans is a good farmer, picked up load and worked enough for two men. But Greg had been farm manager since Grandpaw retired. New responsibility worried Hans. Should have been mine, being senior, but Hans was better farmer and closer to it; always been expected he would succeed Greg some day. So I backed him up by agreeing with his opinions and tried to be half a farm hand in hours I could squeeze. Left no time to scratch. Late in February I was returning from long trip, Novylen, Tycho Under, Churchill. New tube had just been completed across Sinus Medii, so I went on to Hong Kong in Luna -- business, and did make contacts now that I could promise emergency service. Fact that Endsville-Beluthihatchie bus ran only during dark semi-lunar had made impossible before. But business was cover for politics. Liaison with Hong Kong had been thin. Wyoh had done well by phone. Second member of her cell was an old comrade -- Comrade "Clayton" -- who not only had clean bill of health in Alvarez's File Zebra but also stood high in Wyoh's estimation. Clayton was briefed on policies, warned of bad apples, encouraged to start cell system while leaving old organization untouched. Wyoh told him to keep his membership, as before. But phone isn't face-to-face. Hong Kong should have been our stronghold. Was less tied to" Authority as its utilities were not controlled from Complex; was less dependent because lack (until recently) of tube transport had made selling at catapult head less inviting; was stronger financially as Bank of Hong Kong Luna notes were better money than Authority scrip. I suppose Hong Kong dollars weren't "money" in some legal sense. Authority would not accept them; times I went Earthside had to buy Authority scrip to pay for ticket. But what I carried was Hong Kong dollars as could be traded Earthside at a small discount whereas scrip was nearly worthless there. Money or not, Hong Kong Bank notes were backed by honest Chinee IF hankers instead of being fiat of bureaucracy. One hundred Hong Kong dollars was #.I grams of gold (old troy ounce) payable on demand at home office -- and they did keep gold there, fetched up from Australia. Or you could deman commodities: non-potable water, steel of defined grade, heavy water of power plant specs, other things. Could buy these with scrip too, but Authority's prices kept changing, upward. I'm no fiscal theorist. Time Mike tried to explain I got headache. Simply know we were glad to lay hands on this non-money whereas scrip one accepted reluctantly and not just because we hated Authority. Hong Kong should have been Party's stronghold. But was  not. We had decided that I should risk face-to-face there, letting some know my identity, as a roan with one arm can't disguise easily. Was risk that would jeopardize not only me but could lead to Wyoh, Mum, Greg . and Sidris if I took a fall. But who  .said revolution was safe? Comrade "Clayton" turned out to be a young Japanese -- not too young, but all look young till suddenly look old. He was not all Japanese -- Malay and other things -- but had Japanese name and household had Japanese manners. 'Giri' and 'gimu' controlled and it was my good fortune that he owed much gimu to Wyoh. Clayton was not convict ancestry; his people had been "volunteers" marched aboard ship at gunpoint during time Great China consolidated Earthside empire. I didn't hold it against him. He hated Warden as bitterly as any old lag. Met him first at a teahouse -- taproom to us L-City types -- and fa two hours we talked everything but politics. He made up mind about me, took me home. My only complaint about Japanese hospitality h those chin-high baths are too bleeding hot But turned out I was not Jeopardized. Mama-San was as skilled M makeup as Sidris, my social arm is very convincing, and a kimono cowered its seam. Met four cells in two days, as "Comrade Bork" and wearing makeup and kimono and tab! and, if a spy was among them, don't think he could identify Manuel O'Kelly. I lad gone there intensely briefed, endless figures and projections, and talked about jus one thing: famine in '#, six yearn away. "You people are hicky, won't be hit so soon. But now with new tube, you are going to see more and more of your people turning to wheat and rice and shipping it to catapult head. Your time will come." I They were impressed. Old organization, as I saw it and from what I heard, relied on oratory, whoopit-up music and emotion, much like church. I simply said, "There it is, comrades. Check those figures; I'B leave them with you." Met one comrade separately. A Chinee engineer given a good look at anything can figure way to make it. Asked this one if he had ever seen a laser gun small enough t carry like a rifle. He had not. Mentioned that passport system made it difficult to smuggle these days. He said thoughtfully that jewels ought not to .be hard -- and he would be in Luna City next week to see his cousin. I said Uncle Adam would be pleased to hear from him. All in all was productive trip. On my way back I stopped in Novylen to check an old-fashioned punched-tape "Foreman" I had overhauled earlier, had lunch afterwards, ran into my father. H e and I were friendly but didn't matter if we let a couple of years go by. We talked through a sandwich and beer and as I got up he said, "Nice to see you, Mannie. Free Luna!" I echoed, too startled not to. My old man was as cynically non-political as you could find; if he would say that in public, campaign must be taking hold. So I arrived in L-City cheered up and not too tired, having napped from Torricelli. Took Belt from Tube South, then dropped down through Bottom Alley, avoiding Causeway crowds and heading home. Went into Judge Brody's courtroom as I came to it, meaning to say hello. Brody is old friend and we have amputation in common. After he lost a leg he set up as a judge and was quite successful; was not another judge in L-City at that time who did not have side business, at least make book or sell insurance. If two people brought a quarrel to Brody and he could not get them to agree that his settlement was just, he would return fees and, if they fought, referee their duel without charging -- and still be trying to persuade them not to use knives right up to squaring off. He wasn't in his courtroom though plug hat was on desk. I knew he was probably in one of the bars nearby. Did not know, however, that this would mean that the life of our revolution would, literally, be put into my hands within next few minutes. For as I started to leave was checked by groups coming in. Stilyagi types. Had with them a girl and an older man. Wished to kill the man; had come to get judge's permission. a planet where all mankind lives againl by Philip Jose Farmer Plus Sam Mosfaowitz, Philip K. Dick, J. T. McIntosh and many others ail iii the big January issue of Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! i IF  Short Story Men had forgotten laughter... and the Berserkers had never known itl A t last the berserker machines' age-long raid across the galaxy had brought them against a life-form too strong to be wiped out of the way -- a race of two-legged creatures who were clever and stubborn, far-scattered and well-armed, sprung from a planet that the ancient Berserker-Builders had never known existed. Defeated in battle, the berserkercomputers saw that refitting, repair, and the construction of new machines were necessary. They sought out sunless, hidden places, where minerals were available but where men -- who were now as often the hunters as the hunted -- were not likely to show up. And in such secret places they set up automated shipyards. To one such concealed shipyard, seeking repair, there came a berserker. Its spherical hull, thirty miles in diameter, had been torn open in a recent battle, and it had suffered severe internal damage. It collapsed rather than landed on the dark planetoid, beside the half-finished hull of a new machine. Before emergency repairs could be started, the engines of the damaged machine failed, its emergency power failed, and like a wounded living thing it died. The shipyard-computers were capable of wide improvisation. They surveyed the extent of the damage, weighed various courses of action, and then swiftly began to cannibalize. Instead of embodying the deadly purpose of the new machine in a new forcefield brain, following the replication-instructions of the Builders, they took the old brain with many another part from the wreck. The Builders had not foreseen that this might happen, and so the shipyard-computers did not know that in the forcefield brain of each original berserker there was a safety switch. The switch was there because the original machines had been launched by living Builders, who had wanted to survive while testing their own life-destroying creations. When the brain was moved from one hull to another, the safety switch reset itself. The old brain awoke in control of a mighty new hull, of weapons that could sterilize a planet, new engines to hurl the whole mass far faster than light. But there was no Builder present, and no timer, to turn off the simple safety switch. T he jester -- the accused jester, but he was as good as convicted -- was on the carpet. He stood facing a row of stiff necks and granite faces, behind a long table. On either side of him was a tridi camera. His offenses had been so unusually offensive that the Committee of Duly Constituted Authority themselves, the very rulers of Planet A, were sitting to pass judgment on his case. Perhaps the Committee members had another reason for this session: Planet-wide elections were due in a month. No member wanted to miss the chance for a non-political tridi appearance that would not have to be offset by a grant of equal time for the new Liberal Party opposition. # I have this further item of evidence to present," the Minister of Communication was saying, from his teat on the Committee side of the long table. He held up what appeared at first to be an official pedeatrian-control sign, having steady black letters on a blank white back"When a sign is put up," said the MiniComm, "the first day, a lot of people read it." He paused, listening to himself. "That is, a new sign on a busy pedestrian ramp is naturally given great attention. Now in this sign, the semantic content of the first word is confusing in its context." The President of the Committee -- and of the planet -- cleared his throat warningly. The MiniComm's fondness for stating truisms made him sound more stupid than he actually was. It seemed unlikely that the Liberals were going to present any serious challenge at the polls, but there was no point in giving them encouragement. The lady member of the Committee, the Minister of Education, waved her lorgnette in chubby fingers, seeking attention. She inquired: "Has anyone computed the cost to us all in work-hours of this confusing sign?" "We're working on it," growled the Minister of Labor, hitching up an overall strap. He glared at the accused. "You do admit causing this sign to be posted?" "I do." The accused was remembering how so many of the pedestrians on the crowded ramp had laughed, and how the day had brightened for them and for him. What did work-hours matter? No one on Planet A was starving any longer. IF "You admit that you have never done a thing, really, for your planet or your people? Thus spoke the Minister of Defense, a tall, powerful, bemedaled figure, armed with a ritual pistol. "I don't admit that," said the accused bluntly. Tve tried to brighten people's lives." He had no hope erf official leniency anyway. And he knew no one was going to take him offstage and beat him; the beating of prisoners was not authorized. "Do you even now attempt to defend levity?" The Minister of Philosophy took his ritual pipe from his mouth, and smiled in the grim permissible fashion, baring his teeth at the challenge of the Universe. "Life is a jest, true; but a grim jest. You have lost sight of that. For years you have harassed society, leading people to drug themselves with levity instead of facing the bitter realities of existence. The pictures found in your possession could do only harm." The President's hand moved to the video recording cube that lay on the table before him, neatly labeled as evidence. In his droning voice the President asked: "You do admit that these pictures are yours? That you used them to try to get other people to -- yield to mirth?" T he prisoner nodded. They could prove everything: he had waived his right to a full legal defense, wanting only to get the trial over with. "Yes, I filled that cube from tapes and films I sneaked out of libraries and archives. Yes, I showed people its contents." There was a murmur from the Committee. The Minister of Diet, a skeletal figure with a repellent glow of health in his granite cheeks, raised a hand. "Inasmuch as the accused seems certain to be convicted, may I request in advance that he be paroled in my custody? In his earlier testimony he admitted that one of his first acts of deviation was the avoidance of his community mess. I believe I could demonstrate, using this man, the wonderful effect on character of dietary discipline -- " "I refuse!" the accused interrupted loudly. It seemed to him that the words ascended, growling, from his stomach. The President rose, to adroitly fill what might have become an awkward silence. "If no member of the Committee has any further questions -- ? Then let us vote. Is the accused guilty as charged on all counts?" To the accused, standing with weary eyes closed, the vote sounded like one voice passing along the table: "Guilty. Guilty. Guilty..." After a brief whispered conference with the Minister of Defense, the President passed sentence, a hint of satisfaction in his drone. "Having rejected a duly authorized parole, the convicted jester will be placed under the orders of the Minister of Defense, and sent to solitary beacon duty out on the Approaches, for an indefinite period. This will remove his disruptive influence, while at the same time constraining him to contribute positively to society." For decades Planet A and its sun had been cut off from all but occasionaJ contact with the rest of the galaxy, by a vast interstellar dust storm that was due to go on for more decades at least. So the positive contribution to society might be doubted. But it seemed that the beacon stations could be used as isolaexistent shipping, or weakening defense against ah enemy that never came. "One thing more," added the President. "I direct that this recording cube be securely fastened around your neck on a monomolecular cord, in such a way that you may put the cube into a viewer when you wish. You will be alone on the station and no other off-duty activity will be available." The President faced toward a tridi camera. "Let me assure the public that I derive no satisfaction from imposing a punishment that may seem harsh, and even -- imaginative But in recent years a dangerous levity has spread among some few of our people; a levity all too readily tolerated by some supposedly more solid citizens." Having gotten in a dig at the newly-burgeoning Liberals, a dig he might hope to claim was non-political in intent, the President faced back to the jester. "A robot will go with you to the beacon, to assist you in your duties and see to your physical safety. I assure you the robot will not be tempted into mirth." T he robot took the convicted jester out in a little ship, so far out that Planet A vanished and its IF Out on the edge of the great dusty be sloppily maintained, and ever the night of the Approaches, they drew dust drifts in around the edges of near the putative location of station the system of Planet A, impeding Z-#, which the MiniDef had selectradio signals. Before the MiniDef's ed as being the most dismal and forrobot could successfully broadcast saken of those unmanned at presan alarm, the forty-mile sphere was ent. close enough to blot out half the There was indeed a metallic obsky, and its grip of metal and force ject where beacon Z-# was supposwas tight upon the little ship, ed to be; but when the robot and The jester kept his eyes shut jester got closer, they saw the obthrough a good deal of what folject was a sphere some forty miles lowed. If they had sent him out here in diameter. There were a few little to stop him laughing they had chosbits and pieces floating about it that en the right spot, just might be remnants of Z-#. Just He squeezed his eyelids tighter, then the sphere evidently sighted anc  P ut his fingers in his ears, as their ship, for with startling speed the berserker's commensal machines it began to move toward them. smashed their way into his little Once robots are told what bership and carried him off. He never serkers look like, they do not few:did find out what they did with his get, nor do robots grow slow and robot guard. careless. But radio equipment can When things grew quiet, and he felt gravity, and good ar and pleasant warmth again, he decided that keeping his eyes shut was worse than knowing whatever they might tell him. His first cautious peek showed him that he was in a large shadowy room, that at least held no visible menace. When he stirred, a squeaky monotonous voice somewhere above him said: "My memory bank tells me that you are a protoplasmic computing unit, probably capable of understanding this language. Do you understand?" "Me?" The jester looked up into the shadows, but could not see the speaker. "Yes, I understand you." Most former colonies of Earth still spoke close variants of the one language carried out from Sol in the years before the berserker-war. "But who are you?" the jester ventured. "I am what this language calls a berserker." The jester had taken shamefully little interest in galactic affairs, but that word frightened even him. He stuttered: "That means you're a kind of automated warship?" There was a pause. "I am not sure," said the squeaky, droning voice. The tone sounded almost as if the President was hiding up there in the rafters. "War may be related to my purpose, but my purpose is still partially unclear to me, for my construction was never quite completed. For a time I waited where I was built, for I was sure some final step had been left undone. At last I moved, to try to learn more about my purpose. Approaching this sun, I found a transmitting device which I have disassembled. But I have learned no more about my purpose." The jester sat on the soft, comfortable floor. The more he remembered about berserkers, the more ha trembled. He said: "I see. Or perhaps I begin to see. What do you know of your purpose?" "My purpose is to destroy all life, wherever I can find it." The jester cowered down. Then he asked in a low voice: "What is unclear about that?" The berserker answered his question with two of its own: "What is life? And how is it destroyed?" A fter half a minute there came a sound that the berserker-computers could not identify. It issued from the protoplasmic computingunit, but if it was speech it was in a language unknown to the berserker. "What is the sound you make?" the machine asked. The jester gasped for breath. "It's laughter! Oh, laughter. So. You were unfinished." He shuddered, the terror of his position coming back to sober him. But then he once more burst out giggling; the situation was too ridiculous. "What is life?" he said at last "I'll tell you. Life is a great grim grayness, and it inflicts fright and pain and loneliness upon all who experience it. And you want to know how to destroy it? Well, I don't think you can. But I'll tell you the best way to fight life -- with laughter. As long as we fight it that way, it can't overcome us." The machine asked: "Must I ?# IF laugh, to prevent this great-grimgrayness from enveloping me?" The jester thought. "No, you are a machine. You are not -- " he caught himself -- "protoplasmic. Fright and pain and loneliness will never bother you." "Nothing bothers me. Where will I find life, and how will I make laughter to fight it?" The jester was suddenly conscious of the weight of the cube that still hung from his neck. "Let me think for a while," he said. After a few minutes he stood up. "If you have a viewer of the kind men use, I can show you how laughter is created. And perhaps I can guide you to a place where life is. By the way, can you cut this cord from my neck? Without hurting me, that is!" A few weeks later, in the main War Room of Planet A, the somnolence of decades was abruptly shattered. Robots bellowed and buzzed and flashed, and those that were mobile scurried about. In five minutes or so they managed to rouse their human overseers, who hurried about, tightening their belts and stuttering. "This is a practice alert, isn't it?" the Officer of the Day kept hoping aloud. "Someone's running some kind of a test? Someone?" He was beginning to squeak like a berserker himself. He got down on all fours, removed a panel from the base of the biggest robot and peered inside, hoping to discover something causing a malfunction. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about robotics; recalling this, he replaced the panel and jumped to his feet. He really knew nothing about planet defense, either, and recalling this was enough to send him on a screaming run for help. So there was no resistance, effective or otherwise. But there was no attack, either. The forty-mile sphere, unopposed, came down to hove directly above Capital City, low enough for its shadow to send a lot of puzzled birds to nest at noon. Men and birds alike lost many hours of productive work that day; somehow it made less difference than most of the men expected. The days were past when only the grimmest attention to duty let the human race survive on Planet A, though most of the planet did not yet realize it. tt'Tpell the President to hurry up," demanded the jester's image, from a viewscreen in the nolonger somnolent War Room. 'Tell him it's urgent that I talk to him." The President, breathing heavily, had just entered. "I am here. I recognize you, and I remember your trial." "Odd, so do I." "Have you now stooped to treason? Be assured that if you have led a berserker to us you can expect no mercy from your government." The image made a forbidden noise, a staccato sound from an open mouth, head thrown back. "Oh, please, mighty President! Even I know our Ministry of Defense is a j-o-k-e, if you will pardon an obscene word. It's a catchbasin for exifes and incompetents. So I come to offer mercy, not ask it. Also, I have decided to legally take the name of Jester Kindly continue to apply it to me." "We have nothing to say to you!" barked the Minister of Defense. He was purple granite, having entered just in time to hear his Ministry insulted. "We have no objection to talking to you!" contradicted the President, hastily. Having failed to overawe the Jester through a viewscreen, he could now almost feel the berserker's weight upon his head. "Then let us talk," said Jester's image. "But not so privately. This is what I want." What he wanted, he said, was a face-to-face parley with the Committee, to be broadcast live on planetwide tridi. He announced that he would come "properly attended" to the conference. And he gave assurance that the berserker was under his full control, though he did not explain how. It, he said, would not start any shooting. The Minister of Defense was not ready to start anything. But he and his aides hastily made secret plans. Like almost every other citizen, the presidential candidate of the Liberal party settled himself before a tridi on the fateful evening, to watch the confrontation. He had an air of hopefulness, for any sudden event may bring hope to an underdog politician. Few others on the planet saw anything encouraging in the berserker's descent, but still there was no mass panic. Berserkers and war were unreal things to the long-isotated people of Planet A. "Are we ready?" asked the Jester nervously, looking over the mechanical delegation that was about to board a launch with him for the descent to Capital City. "What you have ordered, I have done," squeaked the berserker-voice from the shadows above. "Remember," Jester cautioned, "the protoplasmic-units down there are much under the influence of life. So ignore whatever they say Be careful not to hurt them, but outside of that you can improvise within my general plan." "All this is in my memory from your previous orders," said the machine patiently. "Then let's go." Jester straightened his shoulders. "Bring me my cloak!" Capital City's great Meeting Hall displayed a kind of rigid, rectilinear beauty. In the center of the Hall there had been placed a long, polished table, flanked on opposing sides by chairs. Precisely at the appointed time, of entrance doors swing mathematically open. In marched a dozen human heralds, their faces looking almost robotic under bearskin helmets. They halted with a single snap. Their trumpet-tucket rang out clearly. To the taped strains of Pomp and Circumstance, the President, in the full dignity of his cloak of office, then made his entrance. IF He moved at the pace of a man marching to his own execution, but his was the slowness of dignity, not that of fear. The Committee had overruled the purple protestations of the MiniDef, and convinced themselves that the military danger was small. Real berserkers did not ask to parley, they slaughtered when they could. Somehow the Committee could not take Jester seriously, any more than they could laugh at him. But until they were sure they had him again under their control they would humor him. The granite-faced Minister entered in a double file behind the President. It took almost five minutes of Pomp and Circumstance for them all to position themselves. A launch had been seen to descend from the berserker, and vehicles had rolled from the launch to the Meeting Hall. It was presumed that Jester was ready, and the cameras pivoted dutifully to face the entrance reserved for them. Just at the appointed time, the doors of that entrance swung mathematically open, and a dozen mansized machines entered. They were heralds, for they wore bearskin helmets, and each carried a bright, brassy trumpet. All but one, who wore a coonskin cap, marched a half-pace out of step, and was armed with a slide trombone. The mechanical tucket was a faithful copy of the human one -- almost. The slide-trombonist faltered at the end, and one long sour note trailed away. Giving an impression of slow mechanical horror, the berserkerheralds looked at one another. Then one by one their heads turned until all their lenses were focused upon the trombonist. It -- almost it seemed the figure must be he -- looked this way and that. Tapped the trombone, as if to clear it of some defect. Paused. Watching, the President was seized by the first pang of a great horror. In the evidence against the Jester, the obscene mirth-provoking evidence, there had been a film of an Earthman of ancient time, a balding comic violinist, who had had the skill to pause like that, just pause, and evoke from his filmed audience great gales of... Twice more the robot heralds blew. And twice more the sour note was sounded. When the third attempt failed, the eleven straight-robots looked at one another and nodded agreement. Then with robotic speed they drew concealed weapons and shot holes in the offender. A ll across the planet the dike of tension was cracking, dribbles and spurts of laughter forcing through. The dike began to collapse completely as the trombonist was borne solemnly away by a pair of his fallows, his shattered horn clasped lily-fashion on his iron breast. But no one in the Meeting Hall, was laughing. The Minister of Defense made an innocent-looking gesture, calling off a tentative plan, calling it off. There was to be no attempt to seize the Jester, for the berserker-robot-heralds or whatever fee y were seemed likely to perform wary capably as bodyguards. As soon as the riddled herald had been carried out. Jester entered. Pomp and Circumstance began belatedly as with the bearing of a king he moved to his position at the center of the table, opposite the President. Like the President, the Jester wore an elegant cloak, clasped in front, falling to his ankles. Those that filed in behind him, in the position of aides, were also richly dressed. And each of them was a metallic parody, in face and shape, of one of the Ministers of the Committee. When the plump robotic analogue of the Minister of Education peered through a lorgnette at the tridi camera, the watching populace turned, Those who might be outraged later, remembering, laughed now in helpless approval of seeming danger turned to farce. All but the very grimmest smiled. The Jester-king doffed his cape with a flourish. Beneath it he wore only a preposterous bathing-suit. In reply to the President's coldly formal greeting -- the President could not be shaken by anything short of a physical attack -- the Jester thoughtfully pursed his lips, then opened them and blew a gummy substance out into a large pink bubble. The President maintained his unintentional role of slow-burning straight man, ably supported by all the Committee save one. The Minister of Defense turned his back on fee farce and marched to an exit. He found two metallic heralds planted before fee door, effectively blocking it. Glaring at them, the MiniDef barked an order to move. The metal figures flipped him a comic salute, but didn't move. Brave in his anger, fee MiniDef tried futilely to shove his way past the berserker-heralds. Dodging another salute, he looked round at the sound of great clomping footsteps. His berserker-counterpart was marching toward him across the Hall. It was a clear foot taller than he, and its barrel chest was armored with a double layer of jangling medals. Before the MiniDef paused to consider consequences, his hand had moved to his sidearm. But his metal parody was far faster on the draw; it hauled out a grotesque cannon with a fist-sized bore, and fire instantly. "Gah!" The MiniDef staggered back, the world gone red... and then he found himself wiping from his face something that tasted suspiciously like tomato. The cannon had propelled a whole fruit, or a convincing imitation, skin and all. The MiniComm jumped to his feet, and began to expound the idea that the proceedings were becoming frivolous. His counterpart also rose, and replied with a burst of gabble in speed-falsetto. The pseudo-Minister of Philosophy rose as if to speak, was pricked with a long pin by a prankish herald, and jetted fluttering through the air, a balloon collapsing in flight. At that the human Committee fell into babel, into panic. IF Under the direction of the metal MiniDiet, the real one, arch-villain to the lower masses, began to take dietary discipline. Machines gripped him, spoon-fed him grim gray food, napkined him, squirted drink into his mouth -- and then, as if unintentionally, they gradually fell out of synch with spoon and squirt, their aim becoming less and less accurate. Only the President still stood rooted in dignity. He had one hand cautiously in his trousers pocket, for he had felt a sly robotic touch, and had reason to suspect that his suspenders had been cut. As a tomato grazed his nose, and the MiniDiet writhed and choked in the grip of his remorseless feeders, balanced nutrients running from his ears, the President closed his eyes. J ester was, after all, only a selftaught amateur working without a visible audience to play to. He was unable to calculate a climax for the show. So when he ran out of jokes he simply called his minions to his side, waved good-by to the tridi cameras and exited. Outside the Hall, he was much encouraged by the cheers and laughter he received from the crowds fastgathering in the streets. He had his machines entertain them with an improvised chase-sequence back to the launch parked on the edge of Capital City. He was about to board the launch, return to the berserker and await developments, when a small group of men hurried out of the crowd, calling to him. "Mr. Jester!" The performer could now afford to relax and laugh himself. "I like the sound of that name! What can I do for you gentlemen?" They hurried up to him, smiling. The one who seemed to be their leader said: "Provided you get rid of this berserker or whatever it is, harmlessly -- you can join the Liberal party ticket. As Vice-Presidential candidate." Another of them said: "Stay, hear us out. As a political candidate you're immune from arrest while the campaign's on. And after the election, judging by what I've seen tonight, you'll be Vice-President!" He had to listen for some minutes before he could believe they ,were serious He protested: "But I only wanted to have some fun with them, to shake them up a bit " "You're a catalyst. Mr. Jester. You've formed a rallying point. You've shaken up the whole planet and made it think." Jester accepted the Liberals' offer at last. They were still sitting about in front of the launch, talking and planning, when the light of Planet A's moon fell full and sudden upon them. Looking up, they saw the vast bulk of the berserker dwindling into the heavens, vanishing toward the stars in eerie silence. Cloud streamers went aurora in the upper atmosphere to honor its departure. "I don't know," Jester said, over and over, responding to a dozen excited questions. "I don't know." He looked at the sky, puzzled as anyone else. The edge of fear came back. The robotic Committee and heralds, which had been controlled from the berserker, began one by one to collapse like dying men. Suddenly the heavens were briefly alight with a gigantic splashing flare that passed like lightning from east to west, not breaking the silence of the stars. Ten minutes later came the first news bulletin: The berserker had been destroyed. Then came the President, who was close to the brink of showing emotion. He announced that under the heroic personal leadership of the Minister of Defense, the few gallant warships of Planet A had met' and defeated, utterly annihilated, the menace. Not a man had been lost, though the MiniDefs flagship was thought to be heavily damaged. When he heard that his great machine-ally had been destroyed, Jester felt a pang of something like sorrow. But die pang was quickly obliterated in a greater joy. No one had been hurt, after all. Overcome with relief, Jester looked away from the tridi for a moment. He missed the climactic moment of the speech, which came when fee President forgetfully removed both hands from his pockets. T he Minister of Defense -- today the new Presidential candidate of a Conservative party stirred to grim enthusiasm by his exploit of the night before -- was puzzled by the reactions of some people, who seemed to think he had merely spoiled a jest instead of saving the planet. As if spoiling a jest was not a good thing in itself! On this busiest of days fee Mh Def allowed himself time to visit Liberal headquarters to do a bit of gloating. Graciously he delivered to the opposition leaders what was already becoming his standard speech. "When it answered my challenge and came up to fight, we went in with a standard englobement pattern -- like hummingbirds round a vulture, I suppose you might say. And did you really think it was jesting? Let me tell you, that berserker peeled away the defensive fields from my ship like they were nothing. And then it launched this ghastly thing at me, a kind of disk. My gunners were a little rusty, maybe, anyway they couldn't stop it and it hit us. "I don't mind saying, I thought I'd bought the farm right then. My ship's still hanging in orbit for decontamination, I'm afraid I'll get word any minute that the metal's melting or something -- anyway, we sailed right through and hit the bandit with everything we had. I can't say too much for my crew. One thing I don't quite understand; when our missiles struck that berserker just went poof, as if it had no defense up at all. Yes?" "Call for you, Minister," said an aide. "Thank you." The MiniDef listened to the phone, and his smile left him. His form went rigid. "Analysis of the weapon shows what? Synthetic proteins and water?" He jumped to his feet, glaring upward as if to pierce the ceiling and see the ship in orbit. "What do you mean -- no more than a giant IF IF  Novelette From Earth , the way ' to double profits was clear -- fust work the harvesters twice as hardl I I t began while the huge, grayskinned workers docilely loaded kamun wood logs into the Dorade Corporation ship. A man from the Home Office had come out from Earth to see that all the orders from home were being efficiently carried out. Chalmers showed him the sights of the planet. He'd waked the visitor early so he could see sunrise on Dorade, which was remarkable, and the staff living-quarters, which were not. He showed the electrifiedwire stockade, which any of the imprisoned workers could have broken through in an instant, except that he'd been conditioned to believe it impregnable. There were the fields where big workers -- under human supervision, of course -- grew the food for themselves and the forest-trained memJbtrs of their race. And near sundown Chalmers took his guest to the edge of the Forest to see a kamun tree. Kamun trees, of course, were the reason for the existence of the Corporation, and the electrified fence -- but there were also small stockades built solidly of logs -- and everything else that men had done on Dorade. The Corporation ship was almost fully loaded by then. It should be ready to lift off within the hour. The last act of the Home Office man would be to give Chalmers new orders for the conduct of affairs here. The Home Office always sent orders. And Chalmers always got them too late in each ship-visit to be able to protest any of them. This was Corporation policy. But the man from home hadn't yet seen a kamun tree. So Chalmers took him to the edge of the Forest. The sunset colors were very beautiful and the Forest was beautiful, too, in the many-tinted light. Some of the trees looked familiar -- they weren't -- and some were surprising. But the Home Office man had to have a kamun tree singled out for him. It wasn't at all conspicuous Chalmers pointed. "There's one," he said. "We don't gO into the Forest ourselves. The damned things are too quick. If one caught you, you'd have to use a blaster to get away -- if you got away! But the Corporation doesn't like trees worth some thousands of credits to be blasted." The man from Earth murmured politely. The kamun tree was quite small and looked ordinary. There were more visible roots about its base than usual, but there are trees cm Earth like that. "I'd like to see one in action," he said. "I wouldn't," said Chalmers. H e waited for the Home Office man to become satisfied with looking. Then, deep in die Forest, there was a stirring. Two of the Dorade Corporation's workers showed, in speckles of sunset light among the trees. Fewer than one in a thousand of the Forest growths were kamun trees, of course. The workers had to hunt for them, inside the electrified fence that surrounded the Whole Forest and kept them imprisoned with their work. He nodded at the two huge creatures as they approached. "Workers," he explained. "The trees hate them. You may see something." But he didn't expect it. The man from Earth watched. The two ungraceful beasts came lumbering into plain view. The larger one -- the male -- stood a good ten feet tall. He carried what seemed to be a four-inch log, carefully balanced in the trunk that served him in the place of hands. The female was smaller. She followed closely behind her mate. The male picked his way deliberately, avoiding what few kamun trees grew hereabouts Other workers appeared. They always returned at sunset. They showed up in pairs, of whom one invariably carried a kamun log. They IF came slowly and clumsily toward the warehouse and the worker's stalls nearby. "We don't go into the Forest ourselves," repeated Chalmers. "The workers learn that they're to look for kamun trees just at the stage when the foliage has all dropped off. That's when the air-roots -- the constrictor-roots, you know -- dig their free ends into the ground to become new trees. That's the time for the logs to be taken. But -- " He stopped. The nearer, larger worker turned deliberately to avoid the kamun tree Chalmers had pointed out. The female behind him moved abstractly ahead for four or five paces. Then -- The visible, above-soil roots of the kamun tree lashed out viciously, like coiled springs. Two -- three -- four of them struck savagely. One coiled about the female's leg. One seemed to claw at her wall-like body. Another gripped and tore at a huge, flopping ear. Thorns on the root tore at the flesh. Blood flowed. She squealed. T he big male whirled with incredible agility for one of his bulk. He dropped his burden and rushed at the kamun tree. He tore at the roots assailing the smaller beast, his mate. Other roots struck at him. He fought them furiously. They were like sinewy, thorny snakes writhing to clutch and strangle him. The female broke free. The tree turned its full attention to him. But he'd gained some slack. Now he lunged ahead. The roots about him seemed to stretch. If they held, by sheer weight and impetus he might uproot the tree. But the roots snapped away, torn free. The tree seemed to quiver with rage. Its roots lashed the air crazily. The male worker lumbered to the other. There were rasped-raw wales on her hide. She seemed to whimper. The male went back to the log he'd dropped. He fumbled at it with his singularly flexible trunk. He moved ferociously toward the tree, raising the ten-foot log like a club. He brought it down. Chalmers went running to stop him. He shouted. "Hup! Jogo! Hup! Hup!." Something glistened in his hand. There was a snapping sound. The big worker flinched. The roots of the kamun tree seemed stunned. They writhed only feebly. Chalmers shouted again, threatening the big bull worker with the glistening thing in his hand. The worker dropped the log he'd wielded from one end. He picked it up again at the middle. He went lumbering to his mate. He rumbled at her. The two of them went slowly, ponderously, heavily to put the log where they knew such things should be delivered. The other workers, arriving, formed a long shambling line to deliver their logs, too. He put away the sub-blaster all humans on Dorade carried to control the workers. They stung, and badly, but they did no real damage. They were much more effective than whips for creatures as huge and relatively as intelligent as the working-force on Dorade. IF "That's Jogo," said Chalmers sourly. "He's getting too smart! We teach them to use clubs when they take the logs, if it's necessary to subdue roots not firmly fixed. But he was going to club the tree for attacking his mate! That's going too far!" The man from Earth stared at the quivering, almost-flaccid airroots. "Is the tree dead?" "No," said Chalmers annoyedly. "But he'll kill it if he can." The Home Office man said: "I'll report this at the Home Office. They'll probably issue some order to cover such matters." "Yes," said Chalmers sourly "They probably will!" He saw a crewman coming to report that the Corporation ship was ready to lift off. He turned toward the ship. He shook hands politely with the man from Earth before the ship lifted. He received the packet of orders it was then impossible to protest or criticize. Then he stood with the envelope in his hand and watched the ship vanish in the sky. II I t seemed that nothing significant had taken place. But then Chalmers read the new orders. He was not pleased. He went to show them to Burke, the breedingmaster. On the way he passed by the stall assigned to Jogo and his mate Lily. They were inside, swaying back and forth and rumbling at each other, possibly discussing past events. Each had some broken-off thorns sticking in place. They rubbed them out against the stall-sides. It was painful. They probably agreed that Lily must be more careful hereafter. There was a special reason for it just now. Jogo was extremely solicitous of Lily. He cherished every ounce of her very considerable poundage. Chalmers found Burke, the breeding-master. Burke had other duties, but the Corporation wanted more workers bred and conditioned, to be unable to imagine anything but obedience. It was Burke's special job to meet that demand. "The Home Office," Chalmers told him sourly, "wants more logs. We get one a day from each pair of forest-trained workers. They want us to get two." Burke spat. "They asked for a report on that idea, last ship. I said it couldn't be done. The workers've been taught that if they bring in one log today, they can go to their stalls and rumble to each other until tomorrow. They're smart and they're obstinate. Break that pattern and you won't have trained animals. You'll have wild ones. Worse, they'll be educated wild ones! They'll look on us as enemies because we confuse them. I told the Home Office so." "You're overruled," said Chalmers. "The animal psychologists have figured out a trick. They say the workers loaf. The Home Office says they ought to bring in one log before midday, and another at sundown." Burke stared. Chalmers read him tiie detailed instructions for getting the extra logs from the workers. There were alternative instructions for a scond method if the first did not prove desirable, but the requirement for double production was explicit. In re the first method, the orders said that chickens had been brought to double their e  production by a similar process. The fact that the Dorade workers weighed tons to chickens' pounds shouldn't make any difference. The workers should bring two logs per pair per day. B urke swore when Chalmers finished. The workers were quite satisfactory as they were. They'd been captured, subdued, and brought to Dorade where they'd been trained to their work. They were docile enough, and even seemed friendly with men. So men who handled them felt some obligation to be kind to them. Actually, if they'd been only a little more brainy, they'd have been rated as rational animals and protected by interstellar law against capture or enslavement. Now they had no rights any man was bound to respect. But they did have some qualities that men would be the better for having. Chalmers didn't like the new orders. Nor did Burke. At sundown of the day after the Corporation ship's departure the Forest workers began to appear at the edge of the enclosure. Jogo and Lily came out together, moving slowly and clumsily as usual. Jogo carm ried a katnim log, balanced in bis trunk. He plodded ahead and LUy came dutifully after him. He neared the tree that had attacked Lily the day before. Hie put down the kamun log. He got a fresh grip on it. He advanced ominously upon the tree, the log held as a dub. Chalmers had anticipated it. He had a man posted to prevent it. That man used a sub-blaster. Jogo trumpeted in pained astonishment. The man burnt his hide again, shouting "Hup!" Jogo hesitated -- and got a third sub-blaster shot. He subsided. He changed his grip on the log and resumed his plodding march to the place where logs should be delivered. Lily followed. Other workers delivered logs and went to their stalls. In the next two weeks, Jogo tried three times to destroy the tree on his way to the log-warehouse with a log. Each time he was burnt and shouted at. Each time Jogo obeyed. Then there were signs that an interesting event was at hand. Jogo and his mate -- chained to two other workers -- were transferred to a small, solid stockade and there released. Instinct told Jogo what was about to happen. He became truculent toward all living creatures except Lily. He patrolled the inside of the small stockade, prepared to battle to the death any creature who disturbed her. But there was no disturbance. Maybe Jogo was disappointed. It was all familiar enough, of course; there were other similar stockades. The only thing unusual was that IF while Jogo and Lily were in the maternity stockade, their own proper stall had alterations made in it. But eventually Chalmers was informed that the expected had happened. He and Burke went up on the platform outside the stockade walls. They looked down at Lily and her big-eyed, clumsy offspring. Burke said: "He looks all right. In fifteen years he may be as big as his father." "Maybe," said Chalmers sourly. "But remember, the Home Office wants two logs per day from each pair of workers! And it's to be tried out on a pair of new parents. One log at midday, and one at sundown. Then we make it general." "You don't try it on these for two weeks, anyhow," said Burke firmly. "Four would be fairer. But not less than two." 'The Home Office says as early as possible," said Chalmers. "If you say it's impossible for three, that goes." They went down from the platform and went about their other duties. The Dorade Corporation was in existence to make money. Money could be made by the gathering of kamun logs, which grew only in one forest on one planet in the Galaxy. The more logs were secured, the greater the gross income of the Corporation. The lower the cost per log, the more profit for the Corporation. The more work each nonhuman did, the better for everybody who owned stock. It was as simple as that. S o Jogo and Lily and their young one had just three weeks of simple family life before the exigencies of business began to affect them again. Then they were transferred back to their old stall. There was usually some trouble attached to this re-transfer. This was the time when an infant worker was taken from its parents so its earliest memories could be controlled, and so k could never remember doing anything except what men wanted it to do. But right now the Corporation wanted two logs per day from each pair of workers. So Jogo and Lily did not have the usual terrible, hopeless fight to try to keep their baby. That young creature followed its parents to their old home, frisking a little and with its little trunk dangling and useless and looking rather like a wet gray knitted stocking. They settled in their stall. There were some changes in it, but Jogo and Lily probably did not notice. They seemed glad to be at home again. They rumbled contentedly to each other, that first day. Maybe they were congratulating themselves on their return to their old stall and familiar routine. Naturally they didn't guess that the new workspeedup system was to be begun next morning. Everything started off splendidly, though. Chalmers, frowning, watched as Jogo and Lily came out of their stall with their infant frisking about their feet. Other workers went lumbering away through the trees. But Jogo hesitated because of his young s#n. He swayed undecidedly. He rumbled querulously. Then a man shouted "Hup!" and sunlight glinted on a sub-blaster. Jogo turned heavily and moved into the Forest like the rest. Lily followed, her infant gallantly trying to trot between them. He gazed at the strange new world with a charmed interest. They disappeared into the Forest. All seemed serene But half an hour later Chalmers heard distant noises Somehow he knew Jogo was involved. He made bellowing, infuriated sounds He was fighting somedung But Lily -- Lily's less deeptoned outcry was the frantic voice a i a mad creature defending her young. Chalmers looked ashamed. It did not seem to him that the orders he was carrying out were admirable. There was a battle royal being fought out in the Forest. Maybe it was one tree, or maybe two, fighting for the death of the infant worker, while Jogo and Lily fought for its life. At least once a full-grown worker had been killed by the trees It took three trees to do it, and one had lost half its air-roots in the conflict and the others were not unharrr d, but still the worker had been killed. And a baby being fought over by its parents and by trees wasn't in a particularly safe situation. Not when its parents weighed tons, like Jogo and Lily. So Chalmers listened to the distant tumult with many disagreeable sensations. Half an hour later, when the noise was ended, he looked no sore satisfied with himself. Because logo and Lily, but no other workers, came back out of the Forest. They brought their offspring. And the two adults were striped and bloody where the thorny constrictorroots had torn their hides. The young one was in much worse state. The red stripes on his body were deeper -- his hide was not tough -- and they crossed and criss-crossed each other all over him. He'd been seized by a tree. His parents had had to fight him free. He was in very bad shape. But Jogo didn't bring a kamunlog for the warehouse. He'd led his mate and his son out of the Forest for safety, not bringing the log they'd been sent for. S o men drove them back in with sub-blasters. One does not accept excuses from robots or domestic animals. They must obey orders or be destroyed or die. Jogo and his family could return to the safety of the warehouse-worker-stall area when they brought a kamun log, but not until then. They came back a second time near sundown. Jogo brought a log. The infant had some new stripes. Not many, but some. He was a pitiable, bleeding sight. Jogo and Lily went to where the log must be deposited. Their small son stayed so close to them that he was in constant danger of being stepped on. His air was no longer valiant and frisky. He was dazed; shocked; stunned by the discovery of what life was really like. The two big workers made noises together for most of the dark hours IF in their stall. They definitely didn't notice the changes that had been made in it -- changes in the windows, and a solid door instead of the former massive grille. They seemed to talk about their situation in re their offspring. In the morning they were sent to the Forest again. The infant looked terrified, but he had to follow his mother. When the other forestworkers moved away, Jogo and his family followed. They came out half an hour before midday. Jogo carried a kamun log. He and Lily did not want their infant in the Forest. They could not bring him out without also bringing a kamun log. So they'd gotten a log as quickly as they could, and brought their young one out te safety. Which was exactly what the animal psychologists had predicted. The Home Office would be pleased. They went to their stall, having delivered the log. They rumbled congratulations to each other. Their three-week-old baby was safe in its parents' stall again. Then there came darkness. Windows of the stall, which had been modified, now closed and let in no more light. The new solid door of the stall shut tightly. The interior of the stall became abysmally dark. There was no more light than at midnight. Less, in fact, because at midnight there were stars. Jogo made uneasy sounds in the blackness. He did not understand. Lily comforted her baby. The blackness continued. Animal psychologists at the Home #W Office had reasoned scientifically that the limited intelligence of the workers would not let them distinguish between darkness and night. Chickens did not distinguish between fight and day. Lights were put on them during night. They thought new day had come, each time, and they had an extra activity-period during which they ate and laid eggs. The workers on Dorade should be equally unsophisticated. They should accept an hour of darkness as a night. They had an hqur of darkness. Then the windows opened and the solid door swung wide It had been predicted that Jogo and Lily would consider this a new day, in which by custom they should go out and get another kamun log. With each day divided into two in this fashion, they should carry out their routine twice instead of once The ofttput of kamun logs should be doubled with the same workforce and same investment and same expense. Perhaps, eventually, three logs a day could be required of each worker-pair. Even four! The Corporation should profit hugely. But Jogo did not leave his stall. He didn't verify the animal psychologists' predictions. He and Lily and their stumbling small calf stayed where they were. They appeared to converse contentedly, not understanding the darkness just past, but placidly assuming that there would be no demands on them until a normal dawning. But men drove them from the stall with sub-blaster burnings, despite logo's and even Lily's bewildered protests. Jogo argued querulously -- it was clear that he argued -- that the matter should be talked over reasonably; that it was patently unjust to demand more of them this day. If the men would think -- But the men drove them out of their stall. They drove them into the Forest. In the Forest they kneW what they must do -- bring back a kamun log. Their infant went with them in blind misery. There was nothing else for him to do. m T hey came back before sundown. Jogo brought a kamun log, his second for the day. The baby worker was more pitiful than before. There'd been another battle in the Forest. Burke said between his teeth: "This is too much! He'll die by inches!" Chalmers said curtly, "The animal psychologists say Jogo and Lily will figure something out. Animals on Earth figure out ways to protect their young. Jogo will figure that he wants the baby safe back here. The only way to have him safe back here is to bring in a log. So he'll do it. So we'll chase him and Lily and the baby out to get another. And presently there'll be orders to get three logs a day from him. Eventually, why not four?" Burke swore. "But meanwhile the young one will die by inches!" "And maybe Jogo," said Chalmers distastefully. "And Lily. But the Home Office will change our orders IF when the cash value of workers dying of this trick is greater than die cash value of the extra logs it brings. Enlightened self-interest!" He turned away. He was not pleased. He was subject to orders, too. Of course the workers weren't human, but men who work with animals often come to like them. Most animals have some admirable qualities some humans lack. But Chalmers was under contract. If he resigned before his contract ran out, he'd have to pay an exorbitant fare to get back to Earth. He'd lose his retirement pay. It would be ruinous for him. The only way he could get out of obeying orders would be if the Corporation itself collapsed. But that was unthinkable! It paid dividends of three hundred twelve per cent per year! Next morning he drove himself to watch the workers move off into the forest. The other workers straggled away in twos. Jogo and Lily and their offspring marched off with something like a purposeful air. Then Chalmers went about his work, scowling and with one ear reluctantly cocked for noises from the Forest. He expected Jogo back before eleven, with a kamun log. Then k would be Chalmers' duty to give him an hour of darkness in his stall, and then send him out for another log. It was very probable that logo's baby would acquire more slashes on his tender hide from the air-roots of a kamun tree, and that Jogo and Lily would also show signs of new combat. B ut Jogo wasn't back at eleven. Or noon. Or one or two or three or four in Dorade's afternoon. Chalmers remembered the worker who'd been killed by three trees together. He'd seen the site of that It wasn't a pretty sight. Now -- He raged. He'd have to take a copter and find out what he'd done to Jogo and Lily and their offspring. It would be his fault. Jogo couldn't imagine an abstraction like guilt, but Chalmers raged because he felt it. Then, at sundown. Jogo came out of the Forest. He carried a kamun log in his trunk. He had some new raw-flesh stripes on his hide. He'd fought something. But Lily showed no new wounds, nor did the baby. Jogo delivered his log and he and his family went contentedly to their stall. Chalmers regarded them with ironic satisfaction. "He fooled us," he said curtly to Burke. "He parked Lily and the young one somewhere where there weren't kamun trees. Then he went off by himself and got his log. He's out-smarted us! He's thumbing his trunk at me!" "Obey orders," said Chalmers sourly. "Outsmart him back. I haven't any choice!" Next morning, angrily, he gave the alternative orders, provided in case something unpredictable prevented the execution of the first. Jogo had prevented it. He mustn't be allowed to make a custom of defiance or evasion. Even one case, repeated, could become a behaviorpattern. Chalmers had no choice Soon after sunrise he watched gloomily as the other workers am Wed ponderously off into the Forest. Then he had the door of logo's stall opened. Jogo came out, and Lily... and then the door slammed shut again. The baby was still insde He bawled. Jogo protested. Lily was alarmed. "Hup!" snapped Chalmers angrily He was angry because he was ashamed. "Hup, Jogo! Hup!" Jogo protested again. Lily whimpered. Chalmers used the sub-blaster on them. Jogo and Lily continued to protest. They were bewildered. They wanted their small offspring with them. Chalmers used the sub-blaster ruthlessly. There were other men he could have ordered to do the dirty work, but he despised what he was doing, so he did it all himself H e drove Jogo and Lily into the Forest, leaving their young one bawling behind. It was only possible because they were tamed. Men did not injure Jogo or Lily in ways that they could understand to be injuries. Men had been about the baby worker and had not harmed it, as Jogo and Lily understood such things. Jogo couldn't grasp the connection between men and kamun trees, so he couldn't feel that men were enemies. When the baby was first born -- yes. He'd have fought men then. But not now. So it was possible for Chalmers to drive them away. When they did disappear in the foliage of the Forest, looking back plaintively, Chalmers scowled and his fifps were a tigfr  line. "I suppose," said Burke painfully, "you had to do it." "I did!" snapped Chalmers. 'They want to get back to their baby. They know they can't come back without a log. So they'll get a log and come back as quickly as they can!" He went stamping into bis office. Jogo's and Lily's childbeast bawled hysterically. It was a distressful sound. Jogo and Lily were back within an hour. They brought a kamun log. There was foliage on it. They'd attacked the first kamun tree they found, using no discrimination. They didn't hunt for a tree at the proper stage of development, with its leaves dropped and its air-roots' free ends burrowed into the ground to form soil-roots and become new trees, hi their desperation they'd attacked a tree with its air-roots still active and deadly. Undoubtedly they'd had to tear them off to get at the unripe log they belonged to. Jogo was a grisly sight, bleeding from new wounds. Lily was no less a spectacle to make angels weep But Jogo had brought back a log. With foliage on it. Which meant that it had been taken when it had no commercial value, and moreover that a certain number of prospective kamun trees had been destroyed. The torn-off air-roots would never develop into new monstrous kamun trees. Chalmers regarded them. The Home Office considered #hat if the workers were made desperate, they would bring in more logs. But, made V desperate, they killed trees to bring in useless logs. Chalmers swore a little for the look of it, but he felt a private sense of relief. "Let the young one out," he commanded sourly. "They win! Let 'em go in their stall if they want to." But they didn't want to. The young one, released by the opening of the door, went straight as a bullet to his mother. And Jogo and Lily fondled him excessively, grumbling and rumbling affectionately Some red stuff came off on the infant. Blood. And suddenly they went off into the Forest with their young one between them. IV T hey came back at sundown. Jogo brought another kamun log, properly collected at the proper state of leaflessness. The next day he brought another. At sundown. And it was necessary to let things go on in this new pattern. because if the baby were taken from them now, they might become desperate again and kill valuable trees in their need to ransom the small image that now stayed very, very close to its mother in the Forest. Burke very unhappily pointed out that the Home Office would not be satisfied with a single experiment. To prevent demands for its repetition on a new and larger and more revolting scale, they'd better repeat it themselves. Chalmers nodded. "Surely we've got to try it twice," he said defensively. "The Home Office believes in animal psychology. It believes all beasts are alike except when they contradict animal psychology. So we've got to prove that they're all alike in contradicting animal psychology... but you try it this time." Burke grimaced. He didn't like that idea, either. But doggedly he went through the experiment again. There was another worker-couple in a maternity stockade, and their small female young one was nearing three weeks of age. The names of this other couple, on the Corporation's books, were Maco and Alice. They were sent into the Forest with their frisking, infantile calf. They decided it was not safe for their infant. They came back, without a kamun log. They tried to return. They were driven back with sub-blaster shots. They came back at sundown with a log. They had to fight for their young one. The next day they were sent out again. They came back by midday, with a log. They went into their stall and darkness fell upon them. When light came again they were bewildered by the demand that they go again into the forest. But they were driven into it and came back with a second log for that day. But the day after, they apparently made contact with Jogo and Lily. They didn't come back until sunset. Then the two pairs of parents came lumbering home to their stalls with their infants frisking together. The two mothers had obviously joined forces to protect their infants. and the two bulls had gone off together to gather their logs. It was a beautiful frustration of the plans laid by animal psychologists. Burke surrendered relievedly. The two infants were left with their parents lest new active-state kamun trees be destroyed uselessly by workers desperate to haVe their offspring with them. "Somebody," said Burke, obscurely cheered, "is going to have his ears pinned back. But I'll bet we get crazier and crazier orders until some ammal psychologist gets fired!" "Or until we're fired," said Chalmers. B ut he viewed that possibility without alarm. He was under contract to the Corporation. Unless for proven incompetence or disloyalty. he couldn't be fired without a settlement that would leave him free to do as he pleased all the rest of his life. He wouldn't mind that at all! He settled back to wait for the next Corporation ship. Meanwhile everything went along beautifully. Each day at sunrise the shambling great beasts which were the workers went ponderously into the Forest. At sundown they returned to the warehouse and the stalls, one of each two bringing a kamun log. The normal quota of logs was coming in. But no extras. Then the Corporation ship arrived. It brought another man from the Home Office. This time it was no less than the President of the Dorade Corporation. He'd caused the new work-load raise to be ordered. and he came happily to see the working-out of a scheme that should increase the Corporation's dividend rate from three hundred odd per cent to more than six hundred. But he found matters going on as if the orders hadn't been issued -- except that Jogo and Lily, and Maco and Alice, took young offspring with them into the Forest every day. He demanded explanations. He didn't find them satisfactory. "But what do the damned workers do with their time?" he asked fretfully. "You've proved they can bring in two logs a day! Whv don't they? What do they do?" Then he said: "Get out a copter. I'll look into this myself!" Chalmers was appalled. But he piloted the copter in which the President surveyed the Forest. After some time he found the worker' . He realized instantly what had hap pened. In the same instant he knew the President would never understand. He told Burke about it later. "I found 'em over by a ford in the stream that runs through the Forest. Remember we had trouble setting up the electrified fence there without grounding it? They were in a couple of groups of some dozens each. They were feeding, and dozing, and bathing in the river. They were acting the way their ancestors thinking about work? But come sundown they came back to their stalls. It's habit. They brings logs. That's habit, too. But they've gone back to the social system -- the herd -- that's instinctive with them!" IF B urke blinked at him. He'd heard the President bellowing as he got out of the copter. In fact, he was bellowing now. "It's the young ones," said Chalmers, with a sort of guilty zest "Sending them into the Forest -- with kamun trees -- is what did it. Adults sent to do work are just adults sent to do work. But two adults and a baby are a family. Two families are the beginning of a herd! You see? You can't have a herd from a group of adults only. You don't have workers if you have a herd. Orders from the Home Of fice made us send the young ones in. With no humans in the Forest to boss them, they began to hang around together. Now they're a herd. They're acting as their forebearers have done for ten thousand generations! They still have the habit of bringing logs and sleeping in stalls, but they can be independent of us any time they like!" Burke's mouth had dropped open. Now he closed it. "We'll have to re-train all of them," he said helplessly. "That's going to be the hell of a job!" Chalmers shook his head. He paused for a moment, listening to the President's voice, roaring at the other human employees of the Dorade Corporation. "Not us," said Chalmers. "The Home Office has taken over. The President, no less. We're relieved. He's going to straighten things out. Want to know how? The workers are to be driven to work and back again to their stalls by copters. The men in the copters will use subblasters and shout 'Hup! from the sky. They'll drive the workers to where they can get their kamun logs, and then they'll drive them back to the warehouse with them, and then back for more logs Two, three, four a day per worker!" "He's crazy!" said Burke. "He's going to try to make them work! And animals don't understand working! They understand a ritual, but they don't understand a job! We had 'em going through a ritual, and that was all right, but they'll never understand what he wants. They'll panic!" Chalmers said pleasantly: "I'ye another item. He didn't see it. He was too busy seeing red because the workers were bathing and loafing -- but I saw where a worker happened to get near a kamun tree. Naturally, it grabbed him. He fought it, and the herd saw it, and they closed in and tore that kamun tree to bits." Burke fairly jerked himself upright. "But -- that means as a herd they'll class kamun trees as enemies -- as they might class snakes -- or tigers. Enemies! They'll kill every kamun tree they see." "Which," said Chalmers comfortably, "is no longer our business. The Home Office has taken charge. The President is ordering out the copters now. They'll start chasing the workers back and forth with subblaster shots and shouting from the sky The workers will get confused. They'll panic. They'll stampede. How long before they crash the electric fence i i I  the case tor Doing to the and scatter to hell-and-gone? Chaime asked Burke. Burke's mouth opened and closed like that of a fish, with no more sound coming out of it. "We're not responsible for the results of chasing workers by copters," said Chalmers, pleasurably. "The workers who grow crops -- they'll have to be turned loose. It won't pay to take them off anywhere, and there's no use for the crops with the Forest workers beyond the blue horizon. Do you know, I suspect the Dorade Corporation is finished? But we have contracts! Let's retire!" moon Chalmers did retire. And Burke, and most of the others. Which meant that Chalmers became busier than ever, back on Earth, doing things that interested him. There was never much news about  new book packed with current Information on the xnoon-and-epace p rogr a m and its scientific byproducts...and an adventure into speculation... This book is a "must" for anyone associated with, r interested in, the space program. Written by Neil P. Ruzic, editor and publisher of Industrial Research magazine, the book presents a lucid case for the exploration and exploitation of our natural satellite, ft considers such areas as: research in the lunar vacuum; manufacturing operations on the moon; mining the surface of the moon; observing and probing the universe from the moon; using the moon s a base in the search for life beyond earth; and stimulating the economy through technological transfer. (DttaeJi aatf mail) Send copies of "The Case for Going to the Moon at # for a single copy or # for two or more copies. O Check enclosed.  Bill me. name address aty state zip code Dorade, on Earth. It was years and years before Chalmers saw a single item about the planet or the tiny colony he'd run there. Then that item was very brief indeed. It said that somebody's space-yacht had landed on a planet called Dorade, and found it inexplicably inhabited by animals obviously introduced from Earth. They were numerous and thriving and very evidently happy. They were much better off than those of their race who remained on Earth. In fact, said the news item, the planet Dorade was positively like heaven for the elephants who lived IF IF  Novelette I C arrying shelter halves and sleeping bags, each with a head-high staff and each with a little food in his pack, the two youths had worked their way up the canyon since early morning. Their clothing was spotless, their equipment included a compass, a scout knife, a canteen, and -- special for this region -- two packs of The mountain was deadly and th hermit was dearly insane. # Earth's future depended on the anti-rattlesnake venom. Since they belonged to the newly organized Space Scouts, their equipment also included an excellent map of the night sky for the month of July. Each carried a small collecting sack. As they had come up the canyon each had picked up bright fragments of float quartz and other shiny stones. "There's something, Jimbo," Bruce said, pointing with his staff toward the base of a nearby cliff. There a vertical stringer of rose quartz had intruded into the granite that formed the main rock mass of this region. Moving to the stringer, Bruce dropped on one knee to examine it better. Excitement lit his finely chiseled face. Quickly, he found a chunk of granite, used it to break off a larger piece of quartz, which he held up to the sun. " Get the ethen, Jimbo!" he said. J imbo, the shorter of the two, had already taken a small metal case from his pack. Opening the case revealed a transparent plastic cube inside it. With his scout knife, Jimbo cut a small limb from a wild buckwheat bush. Splitting the end of the limb, he inserted a fragment of crystal from the stringer into it. Using the limb of buckwheat to keep his hand at least # inches away from the little plastic cube, he brought the quartz crystal nearer and nearer. From the bottom of the cube, a little ball suddenly cairfe to life. It leaped upward, then took on an orbital motion, then began to spin on its own axis. Slowly, Jimbo brought the fragment of quartz crystal closer to the transparent cube. When it was about three inches away, the spinning ball inside the cube suddenly began to emit smoke. Jimbo hastily jerked the crystal away. Without a word, both boys dumped from the sacks the mineral specimens they had gathered on the hot trip up the waterless canyon. Each sack was filled again, this time with fragments of quartz chipped from the stringer rising through the granite. When they had filled the bags, Bruce, estimating time by looking at the sun, consulted a map of the region. "According to this map, the place called Hermit's Canyon is not more than half a mile from here." "We can make it easily before night," Jimbo answered. Replacing in its metal case the transparent cube that contained the little ball, he slipped the metal case carefully into his knapsack. As the two youths went quickly up the rugged canyon, they looked a little like young, thinwaisted hunting dogs on the trail of ancient prey. n I t had been said of the man called the hermit that he had come up here into these desert mountains to die. Back in the days when land was cheap in California, he had bought a few acres on the bottom of the canyon, and more acres on the small, rocky plateau above the canyon. In the canyon, he had built a shack of wood and of boulders, he had also built stone steps to reach the plateau above. But the structure that had excited comment was an aimless, wandering, going no-where foundation for an incredible house that he built beside the canyon road -- and which he kept on building across many years, so many that the people who had first said he had come up here to die had died themselves. In the early days, the road that IF ran down the canyon had been strictly a horse and wagon trail. It had originally been built by Indian labor doing slave time for a Spanish grandee who had held these desert mountains under a grant from the king of Spain. It nad been intended for the use of mules drawing carts and for the grandee's Arabian horses. After the grandee had gone and his # acre ranch had passed into the hands of the newly arrived Americans, the road had been improved enough to allow broadtired wagons to creep along it. Herds of steers and flocks of sheep had also used this trail. Rattlesnakes, then and now, had left broad twisted trails in its dust. Hardly anyone knew when the hermit had first arrived. No one cared. The report was promptly passed along the scattered ranches that he was crazy. People left him alone. Few people had ever seen die overall clad, long-haired, barefooted, brown-skinned recluse who had found refuge here. He had a car, an old model Ford, which he repaired himself. Because he rarely went to town, people wondered how he lived. Finally most decided that he grew his own food in the canyon. It was certain he had planted avacado, English walnut, and orange trees in the canyon. On the plateau, he had built some kind of structure, no one knew exactly what. No one cared to go to the trouble to find out. In the first place, the structure -- whatever ft was -- was on the hermit's land. To reach it, trespass would be necessary. No one knew whether or not the hermit had a rifle, but in this country everyone eke did, so the assumption was that the hermit had a gun too, and could probably use it. There were other reasons for not investigating the structure on the plateau, one being that the plateau was known to be arid, rocky soil where nothing but sage brush, cactus, and wild buckwheat would grow, another being that the place had a reputation for being much to well supplied with rattlesnakes. W hen the sixties had come and light planes had become fairly common, one local rancher, mildly curious, had flown his plane over the plateau. Later, when he had been released from the hospital after a crash that had broken both legs and several ribs, he had said that all he had seen on top of the plateau had been a circular pit of some kind. "Covered with wires," the rancher had said. No, he had seen nobody on the plateau and he hadn't been shot at. His motor had simply conked out over the plateau and he had to make an emergency landing, which had wrecked his plane and had almost wrecked him. But the real reason no one cared about the structure on top of the plateau was because everyone thought it was similar to the structure he had erected beside the road at the bottom of the canyon. Anyone who drove along the road could see this structure. And seeing it, could be sure it had been built by a madman, and that no matter what this madman built, it would have no significance. No one who had seen this structure beside the road at the bottom of the canyon had been able to discern its purpose or its plan. It was a house, or the foundation of a house, it was the foundation of a house that had burned -- only no house had ever been built on this foundation. Nor could one ever be built here, neither of wood nor stone nor brick, not only because the foundation ran at crazy angles but also because the foundation was not strong enough to support a structure above it. What was it? Nobody knew. It was made of rough stone picked up in the canyon, everybody was sure of this much though not of much more. Here a huge fireplace rose from the ground, only it wasn't a fireplace because the chimney closed in tight above it, also because the fire box had been turned into a flower box. Who would grow flowers in a fireplace except a madman? Also, around the outer area, was a stone wall that contained all the other walls. Here rose an arch for a door, but there was no door. Here was a place that looked as if it would form a quiet pool if water was to flow along these channels only there was no water to flow. Here a path made of fitted stone led to the base of a tall tree to stop there as if it had gone as far as had been planned. Only who would run a path from a house to a tree? Here beside the path were pools that looked like they were supposed to be fish ponds, only they had no water in them, and no fish. Here on tall arches was a stone aqueduct that looked lik the aqueducts the Romans had built in Italy so long ago. Only this aqueduct was not five feet high, not ten feet long, it did not start at any water supply, it did not carry water and never had. T he whole damned structure was mad, according to the residents of this region. It was completely out of place. Or perhaps it was out of time. The best that anybody had ever said for the hermit was that he had seemed to select small segments from many structures that had once existed in other times and in other places and had tried to put them together into one building. The hermit didn't care what people thought. He went his solitary way, living alone in the shack of logs and stone he had built in the canyon. He seemed to have enough money for gasoline and tools and cement and he didn't need much else. People took one look into the old Ford and stayed away from it thereafter. Coiled on the front seat was always a big gopher snake. The hermit and the snake seemed to be quite friendly and the hermit was not the only person to make a pet out of a snake and while a gopher snake is about as harmless a creature as crawls the earth -- except to gophers, of course -- the rumor got around that this was a pet rattlesnake the hermit carried around with him in his old car. After that, even the hitchhikers avoided him. There are people in the world, plenty of them, who will look at a gopher snake and will see a big red rattler and will boast for years thereafter how close they were to the big snake. Then, after World War II ended and after the uneasy peace came over the world, the big # inch eye that looks out yonder... and out yonder... and still farther out yonder... to where the galaxies look like tops set 'spinning by careless children of the gods... who thereafter forgot about their toys and left them to spin on forever in Great Space... the big # inch eye in the sky was set into place on top of the mountain that looked down over the vast number of ravines and lonely plateaus where the hermit lived. Not that the big scope would ever be used to look down, his throat. Its focus was so long it It couldn't see five miles down into the canyons. Certainly die hermit must have seen the big scope going into its shining dome on the rim of the mountain above him. He must have seen the special road ripped out of the mountain to carry the giant trucks that carried girders for the dome, also that great truck that carried the big lens up the mountain. If so, he paid no attention. B ut later, when the sixties  were fading away, he seemed to take interest in tfie radio telescope then going in on the rim of the mountain above his plateau. He inquired about it at the general store and saloon at the base of the mountain where the scope was located. He went to the local library in the nearest town and studied newspapers containing the story of the radio telescope. "Its purpose is to listen for footfalls in space," some reporter wrote about it. Another called it the big ear and said it could detect a gnat walking on the edge of the Milky Way. For one week, exactly, the radio telescope listened to the noise coming from out yonder, to the radio waves hinting that stars were being born, or nova exploding, of electric storms sweeping across the void. Perhaps the staff of the big ear were trying to detect' the whisper of feet coming from the direction of the great suns of space. Were strangely shaped flying machines wandering there? Did definitely recognizable radio signals come in from the void? Marconi had thought he had picked IF up radio signals from space. Other, less famous men in the field of radio, had made similar claims. During the week that the scope was working perfectly. Dr. James Kirk, director of the whole project, and Ed Quimby, electronic specialist in charge of the radio end of the big scope, were happy men. The first day the radio telescope was put into operation, the hermit visited it. And Ed Quimby met him, talked to him, liked him. Only Quimby didn't know who he was. And wouldn't have cared if he had known. Quimby had left the building and had gone out to his car to get a carton of cigarettes. Puffing and snorting steam, an ancient car was just pulling into the parking space next to Quimby's car. Glancing at the driver, Quimby saw what seemed to be an old and yet somehow a young man. High cheek bones were prominent under the dark skin of a smoothly shaven face. Quimby's first thought was that the driver was an Indian, possibly from one of the reservations in the vicinity. Then he saw the man's eyes. They were the color of space as seen from the top of this mountain, But even with eyes-#he color of space, Quimby paid slight attention to the man. It was the old car that grabbed and held his attention. Quimby ws not a rebuilder of antique cars, he simply admired them. He saw that this was a Model A Ford, which dated it as being built prior to the early #'s. In spite of its age, it had gotten up the mountain. Quimby spoke admiringly of this feat. Perhaps the hermit was lonely, perhaps he felt an urge to talk to somebody, perhaps he misunderstood Quimby's admiration for the car as friendliness, perhaps this gave him the opening he wanted. He began to talk, eagerly, about the strengths of the Model A. Ill # tT rebuild it myself every spring," J. the hermit said, enthusiastically. "Put in new rings, take up bearings. Keep full of oil, it run long, long time." This was what Quimby thought the hermit said, this was the way Ed translated the words. Neither then nor at any other time was he ever quite sure what this man said. The hermit spoke with an accent, sometimes he put the verb at the head of the sentence, sometimes he tacked it on at the end of a sentence -- like a caboose on a long railroad train -- sometimes he forgot the verb entirely, sometimes he used nothing but verbs, leaving the nouns to find their way home as best they could. The result was enormous verbal confusion but the hermit grinned at the electronics engineer and Quimby grinned back. No language barrier has as yet come into existence that will stand up against simple good will, with the result that within one minute these two men were firm friends and were deep in a highly technical discussion of internal engines. Then the hermit pointed at the antennae of the radio telescope that Mad been built to listen tor footfalls In space. At this time, it was official policy to show every possible courtesy to visiting natives, with the remit that Quimby took the man through the whole set-up, even introducing him to Dr ' James Kirk. Poitely, Kirk and the hermit shook hands, and Quimby continued the tour. The hermit stared in wondering awe at the antennae systems, he studied the amplifying and recording devices with what seemed to be an expert eye. When they had finished die tour, he was calling Quimby by his first name, which was Ed, except that when the hermit spoke the word, it came out Edyn, except when it came out Den. Once or twice it came out Ned. And Quimby was calling his visitor Hermit. Outside, Hermit took Quimby to the edge of the mountain and pointed downward to the complex of alternating canyons and plateaus, Indicating the canyon where he lived. At the car, they shook hands. "Edyn, thank you, I wish... Is good for... Is good to... I mean. Great is You come see me, could he, huh, Ned?" He pointed at the canyon where he lived. "Glad to, Hermit," Quimby answered. Then he looked inside the car and saw the tame gopher snake asleep on the front seat and suddenly decided he would not accept tfris invitation. The hermit got into the car beside the snake. Waving hack at Quimby, he drove away. Quimby, his mouth open because of flie snake, stood staring after him. C ompleted, the big ear listened for one week for footfalls out in the far-off galaxies where the big suns go Then it stopped listening. This was a new type radioscope, with new circuits built on new concepts that nobody understood very well. The staff, driven by Kirk and Quimby, spent a frantic month trying to get the big ear back on the job of listening. They had no luck. Worst of all, they could not understand what was happening except that somewhere the current was not flowing. Just as Ed Quimby was about to blow his stack, one of the staff told him that a crazy man who couldn't talk was outside asking for him. Quimby went out. The visitor was the hermit. Quimby invited him into the lab. In exactly # minutes, the hermit had isolated the break in a series of wires, said break being very completely hidden by insulation and moulding, which was stopping the current flow. He established wired circuits around the break and put the scope back into operation. Any member of the staff, with a good meter, could have found this hidden break, if they had thought to check for it. They hadn't thought. How had the hermit found it? The staff asked questions. Dr. Kirk boomed questions at him. He stared blankly at all of them. Quimby tried to translate. "Feelin' jumps no go," the hermit said, grinning happily at his friend. Eventually his friend Quimby, prodded by the .director and the whole staff, managed to translate these noises into words. IF "As I understand him, he says he can feel with his fingers the flow of electromagnetic radiation," Quimby told the staff. They hit him with everything but the roof. "I don't claim that I can do it," Quimby said, patiently. "But he claims he can feel radio waves with his fingers." "Can he feel them in space or in wires?" Kirk asked. "Either way," Quimby answered. At the moment, the hermit's triple talk consisted of all nouns and no verbs. "All right, we'll check him on that," Kirk said. This laboratory was staffed by hard-bitten radio engineers who knew, or thought they knew, everything there was to know about radio waves. They already had the equipment, hence they needed perhaps five minutes to set up a small radio transmitter in such a way that its output was fed into an insulated wire, which was passed around the corner of a door and into a second room where the hermit could not see what was being done at the transmitter. "When I say now ask him to tell you whether or not radio waves are flowing in the wire," Kirk said I n the first room, where no one could see him, the director pushed -- or did not push -- a silent switch. "Now!" In the second room, the hermit held tentative fingers toward the wire that was serving as a radiator -- and broke into excited speech. "He says that radio wires are flowing in the wire -- " Quimby began. "Hah!" Kirk grunted from the next room. "The switch was open. How could the wire be acting as a radiator?" " -- but that radio waves are always flowing in every piece of wire of every length," Quimby continued. "He says no waves were coming from your transmitter at the time you spoke. Sender-outer, he calls it." In the next room was puzzled, angry silence. "Now!" Kirk said again, his voice hot. The hermit reached exploring fingers toward the wire -- and shook his head. "No," Quimby said. "Now!" Kirk shouted. "No, Edyn," the hermit said. "Now!" Kirk screamed. "Yes," the hermit said, grinning happily Kirk came into the second room. His face was grim. "That might have been a coincidence, a lucky guess -- " "Let's run more tests," Quimby said. Thirty minutes later, every hardboiled radio engineer in the lab was convinced that the hermit could feel the flow of radio waves along a wire. He did not miss even one test. Kirk was puzzled, grim, perhaps bitter. They set up a second test, one in which the energy was projected in a tight, invisible beam. The absence of wires made no difference to this ragged, blue-eyed j# scarecrow from one of the canyons below the mountain Again he was right every time. At this point, Kirk, now growing desperate, suggested that possibly the ragged man was reading his mind. "Reading your mind would be an even more remarkable feat than sensing radio waves with his fingers," Quimby said. "We'll test it anyhow." To devise and set up a test system wasn't difficult for these people The device consisted of a circular drum much like the channel selector on a TV set, the drum containing multiple contacts, the drum being hidden in a box. Set spinning, the drum was like a miniature roulette wheel. No one knew where it was going to stop or where it had stopped after it had finished turning. Perhaps it had closed a contact which fed current to a transmitter, perhaps it had not. A gain the hermit reported on the existence or the non-existence of radio waves, only now there was no mind to read from which to secure the information. Nobody knew where the selector had stopped. Nobody but the hermit. This bare-footed scarecrow from the canyon below the mountain knew whether or not the transmitter was turned on, knew it every time. By the time this test was finished, the atmosphere in this mile-high radio telescope laboratory was beginning to develop considerable electric tension all its own. This was put down to nerves, to the emotional reaction of shaken men who had seen what they did not understand and what they had thought could not happen. At this point, the hermit decided it was time for him to go. Spouting verbs at Ed Quimby, he started toward the door. "Hold up there!" Dr Kirk called to him. "I want to talk to you. I've got questions..." Possibly the bare-footed scarecrow from the canyons below did not understand the direction, possibly he understood and chose to do as he wished. Waving happily at his friend, Quimby, he went through the door. Kirk punched the intercom and told the uniformed guard now on duty at the outer exit from the lab IF Later, the guard said: "I told him you wanted to talk to him but he kept right on walking. Sure, I tried to stop him. What happened to me? How'd I get down here in the dispensary? Why am I lying down? What makes my head buzz this way?" "Where did the hermit go?" Kirk asked the guard. "How in hell would I know? How did I get here -- " Kirk got on the telephone and identified himself to the office of the state police. He spoke to the Desk Sergeant. "A barefooted man in a Model A coming down Telescope Mountain? He'll be easy to identify? You want him picked up on a charge of assaulting a guard at the radio telescope laboratory? Yes, sir, we'll pick him up. No, we won't let him get away. There's only one road down the mountain. We'll pick him up close to the bottom..." In the hospital, the state trooper said: "I had an order to stop this old model car, see? The driver was to be held for questioning, see? An assault charge, see? I parked my patrol car off the highway so I could drop in behind him as soon as he passed me, see? He came rattling by my stake-out. I pulled in behind and gave him the red light, see? He turned around and looked at me. I thought he pointed his finger at me, sort of waggling it at me the way you do to a kid... see?... How'd I get in the hospital? What happened? Did I go off the road?" A t noon the next day, Dr. Kirk called Ed Quimby into his office. The director had a report from the state police on his desk. "So you think the hermit feels friendly to you, do you, Ed?" he asked. "I think so," Quimby answered. "All right," the director continued. "Because he feels friendly toward you, I want you to go down and find him. Make good friends with him. Find out where he lives, visit him in his home even if it is a cave!" Bitterness crept into the director's voice as he spoke these words. "Sure," Quimby answered. "If that is my duty assignment, I'll be glad to go down and hunt him up. But if there are legal charges against him, he may not let me get very close to him." "There are no legal charges against him," Kirk said. "Eh? What about that?" Quimby pointed to the report on the director's desk. "This is a report, nothing more. If there were a way to file charges against him, I would certainly do it, just to talk to him if for no other reason!" The bitterness strengthened in Kirk's voice. "But our guard here is all right. Nobody knows what happened to him, except he let the hermit walk off the premises. As to the state trooper, all anybody can say is that he ran off the road and parked his patrol car at the bottom of the ravine. The hermit may have knocked out both of these men, with some kind of electrical energy spurting from his fingers, but there's absolutely nothing we can do about it because we can't prove the existence of such an energy! Also, to attempt to prove it is to get me fired, as incompetent. In fact, I could be fired for thinking such thoughts, even!" The director wiped sweat from his bald head. "Damnit, Ed. it's maddening enough to be responsible for a radio telescope listening for footfalls in space. God knows, what would be up that way -- " he pointed toward the ceiling, " -- that would have feet? Then, while I'm listening for the impossible, the incredible comes walking through the front door, and -- " "I know how it is," Quimby said. "It gets to me too, sometimes." He shook his head. "All right. I'll go down and find the hermit and see what I can get out of him." "Please do, Ed," the director begged. IV Q uimby's first stop was at the fierce little grocery store at the bottom of the mountain, fierce because in addition to groceries, it also sold beer. As Quimby pulled to a halt, a little man with a face like a wasp was coming out the front door. He glared at Quimby then got into a car and drove away. A sign over the door said: Inside, on the left Quimby found a small, screened section with another sign which said: IF U. S Postoffice Valley Bottom, Calif. To the rear were shelves of canned goods. To the right was a long sit-down bar. Here two Indians were drinking beer -- and perhaps dreaming in their hearts about the day when they would run the last white man into the Pacific Ocean. Quimby seated himself and a monstrous fat man in a dirty apron moved ponderously to serve him. "Beer," Quimby said. "You from that new observatory on top of the mountain? I hear they got something they call a radio telescope up there? What kind of a thing would that be?" "A device for listening to radio noise coming from space," Quimby explained. "Noise from space? What the hell good would that be even if you heard it?" "It would help scientists to form a slightly more comprehensive picture of the universe," Quimby answered, evasively. He wanted information, so he intended to be polite, but he had no intention of trying to explain to this fat man the function of the radio telescope. It soon developed, however, that the fat man was the owner of the store, that he cared nothing for radio telescopes -- or for any other kind -- but that he was interested in customers from the staff of the observatory. "I need the business, mister," the fat man explained. "I need it real bad." "I'll tell our people about you," Quimby said. "I'm sure you will get some good customers from them. We had a visitor from somewhere down here yesterday, a man called the hermit. Did you ever hear of him?" "Huh!" the fat man grunted. "Who hasn't heard of him. What was he doing up at your place?" "Just curious," Quimby answered. "Just curious! That bare-footed corn eater don't know anything about radio. Or does he? Hunh!" The fat man was suddenly silent, his eyes veiled, thinking. "He was certainly an odd bird," Quimby said. "What do you know about him?" The tone of his voice encouraged conversation. "Oh, nothing," the fat man said, shrugging. "Except he came in here about six months ago with a watermelon as big as a beer keg. He tried to trade it to me for gasoline. I don't know where he stole it but it was a mighty good melon." The fat man smacked his lips at the memory of a past sweetness. "He left it here and I ate it." "What makes you think he stole it?" Quimby asked. "How else could he have gotten it?" the fat man replied, astonished. "You don't grow watermelons like that in this desert. If you coukl grow them, you'd be rich as -- " He shook his head. "No, he stole it somewhere, probably off a truck bringing them up from Mexico." Q uimby sipped beer. On the wall, the radio mUsic went off the air, to be replaced by the voice of an announcer. "News flashes. Skin diver drowns off Oceanside. Nine killed in crash on freeway. Two boy #f acouts reported missing in or near Hermit's Canyon... If it's food you want, you can always get rock bottom prices at Rock Bottom Stores, where the prices are always at rock bottom. In Rock Bottom Stores every item is a leader, always." "A funny thing," the fat man said, brooding inside himself. "There was another guy in here looking for the hermit. You may have met him as you came in. Had a face that looked like a wasp, he did." "Yes, I saw him," Quimby said, suddenly remembering the little man who had glowered at him. "What about him?" "Nothing," the fat man said, evasively. "I never saw him before." Quimby finished his beer, went outside, consulted a map, and got under way toward the place marked as Hermit's Canyon. He parked his car beside the thing that looked Hke the foundation of a house, but wasn't. He was studying this strange structure when the hermit, attracted by the sound of the stopping car, came hurrying down the canyon. "Edyn! You come see me so good!" The hermit's pale blue eyes floated in an ocean of happy grins thrown up by the cheeks and the mouth. "Nice to see you again," Quimby said. He gestured toward the foundation that was no foundation at all. "Tell me -- what is this?" The ocean of happy grins slipped away into shy embarrassment. "Oh, that!" The hermit looked at the ground. He looked up the canyon, where the ground widened and where tall pines grew. He looked down the canyon, where it narrowed to rocky walls. He looked toward the long flight of stone steps that led upward to the plateau above. The embarrassment worsened. "It is not a this" he said. "It is a way to fight the devil -- " "Eh?" Quimby said, startled. "It is sometimes I have not too much to do. For idle hands -- what is it said?" The bearded, bare-footed man groped for words. "The devil finds work for idle hands to do? Is that what you are trying to say?" Quimby asked. "Oh, yes," the hermit said, beaming. "I also make it -- for fun!" "Um," Quimby said. Doubt rose in his mind as he looked at one stone walk that went nowhere and at a second walk that went directly to a huge oak tree, ending there as if this very spot had been the place the builder had intended it to end. He looked at the twisting channels where no water flowed. At this moment, it seemed to him that a pale blue light flowed in these channels. He blinked his eyes and the light was gone. "Come, I show you," the hermit said. Again his eyes were floating in islands of happy grins thrown up, despite the beard, by the cheeks and the mouth. Q uimby soon realized he was getting the grand tour. The hermit took him up the canyon, where avacado, orange, apple, apricot, fig, and lemon trees were growing -- too well! There was no irrigation in the canyon, neither ditches nor sprinkler IF systems were visible. Weeds that had sprung up in March under the delusion that this year this desert land would bloom had all died by May. No rain had fallen in months, none would fall for more months. But the hermit's trees were green and heavy with fruit. Marvelling at this miracle, Quimby saw that beside each tree, on a metal rod thrust into the ground, was a helix made of heavy wire, with the open end up. Being a specialist in antennae systems, Quimby wondered vaguely if these helices beside each tree were designed to pick up energy flows coming from space and to conduct them into the ground. While he was pondering this question, the hermit took him up the steps that led from the bottom of the canyon to the plateau above. "Did you build these steps?" he asked. "Yes, Edyn. Keep busy." The hermit spread his hands in a gesture which said he hoped his friend would understand. At the top of the steps the plateau began. Here a dubious path led a crooked way through a thin growth of wild buckwheat, scrub cedar, manzanita, with occasional sugar bushes adding a touch of dark green to brighten the dark granite boulders that were a prominent part of the landscape. Quimby took one step along the path, saw the rattlesnake coiled there in the dust, and hastily drew back. "Rattler! Look out!" Quimby bumped into the hermit as he backed away, then tried to clutch at the ragged overalls, as the hermit, laughing, evaded his hands, and stepped on bare feet foward the coiled diamond-back. "You idiot! If he strikes you -- " He caught and held his breath as the hermit bent over and grabbed the snake behind its head. Laughing happily, his cheeks still filled with grins, the hermit lifted the snake. The five-foot long body wrapped itself around his arm. Still laughing, the bare-footed man held the triangular head toward his visitor. Quimby drew back. "This is Archy, Ned!" the hermit protested. "Is good friend." He concentrated his gaze on the beady eyes in the triangular head. Quimby could have sworn he began to speak to the snake. "Is Edyn, Archy. Edyn is good friend. It is not supposed to rattle tail at friend. Does not bite good friend! Never, ever, Archy!" Quimby could also have sworn that the snake listened to this talk. He was so engrossed in what was happening that he did not jerk away when the hermit suddenly thrust the snake toward him. "Hold out hand, Edyn. Let Archy touch you. Then, when you come again, Archy will know you. He will not rattle his tail at you, he will not bite friend. Q uimby thrust out his hand. He did not know where he found the courage for this action nor where he found the courage to let the snake rub its head against his fingers. The snake rubbed against him like a cat rubbing against the legs of a good friend. Giggling happily. Ml the hermit set the reptile on the ground. It promptly wiggled into the scrub brush. Quimby wiped sweat from his face and suddenly remembered to breathe again. The hermit observed these signs with anxiety. "Is well, Edyn? Is feeling good? Is no need to make die worry. Next time Archy will not make the rattle at you.' "How in the devil did you ever tame a rattlesnake?" Quimby blurted out. "Is no hard," the hermit said, shrugging. "Just be friendly to snake, he be friendly to you. Is hard life to go on belly on ground, to have no hands and no feet." Sympathy was in the voice of the bearded man. "Well, I'm damned!" Quimby said. I never thought of that!" He followed the hermit along a path through the scrub growth, then saw something in the shade of a sugar bush, and stopped suddenly and said again, 'Well, I'm damned!" What he was looking at was a watermelon as big as a beer keg. "The store man said you tried to trade him a huge watermelon for gasoline but he thought you had stolen it somewhere!" Quimby said. "Yes. Did. Not nice, fella in store," the hermit said. "He take melon, say he give gasoline, then won't give gasoline. No good." "But how -- this place is rocks and sand -- " Quimby swept his right hand in a motion that included the whole arid plateau. "Melons require huge quantities of water. How can you grow a watermelon like this in what is actually a desert?" The hermit shrugged. To a man who could tame rattlesnakes, no miracle was really difficult. 'The spinner-arounder, it bring juice down from sky. Is nothing." He glanced at the sun, now dropping down the sky, then looked shyly at his guest. 'Would like to eat, Edyn?" Without waiting for an answer, he took a knife from his pocket, opened the blade, bent over, and sliced open the watermelon. It was dripping with red meat. Finding a huge slice thrust into his hands, Quimby found it was the most delicious piece of melon he had ever eaten. Looking under the sugar bush, which was beautifully green, he saw another helix with the open end up toward the sky. This one was smaller than the helices under the big trees in the canyon but it apparently served the same purpose. Q uimby knew that he looked at dollars, at deserts blooming with new life, and at hope for enough food to feed every hungry man, woman, and child on Planet Earth. All of it apparently done -- not by mighty atomic power -- but by something as simple as a coil of wire! A miracle achieved by a barefooted man in ragged overalls, by a bearded man who made friends with rattlesnakes! Wonder rose in Ed Quimby, rose from springs hidden deep within him and he suddenly saw with the eyes of wonder that this barren, rocky, arid plateau was as rich with promise for the future as any fairyland envisioned by the mind of dreaming IF man! Here, in this place, with a little coil of wire with the open end pointed at the sky, the human race solved its food problems! With the jawing belly ache solved, for all men, perhaps there might be time and energy to solve the other problems that followed in the train of hunger, war, flood, poverty, and crime. With wonder still rising in him, Quimby saw that just beyond the sugar bush that provided shade for the watermelon vine, climbing a stake thrust into the ground was a vine filled with green beans, each of which was at least eight inches long and as thick as a man's thumb. Seeing Quimby had noticed them, the hermit pulled several of the beans. Casually, he ate one, handed another to his guest. Raw, in its own way, it was as sweet and as delicious as the watermelon! Quimby now saw that single plants of corn were scattered here and there on the plateau. Each was heavy with ears. And each, he did not doubt, had a little helix thrust into the sand at its root! And there were cucumbers and squash and onions and tomatoes, the latter bearing produce that was red ripe! Quimby knew he had never tasted such vegetables. There were also blackberries, purpling hands and lips, each vine with its own individual helix. In this moment, with a green bean in one hand and a purple blackberry in the other, with strong memories of ripe, red watermelon, Ed Quimby knew that he stood in the presence of bare-footed, ragged, bearded genius. "How do -- How?" Groping for words, he stammered a question as old as man. "How do you do it? How is it done? What makes it work?" Then the final question, always in the mind of every man. "Can I do it too?" "Is spinner-around, Edyn. Is wire wound in helix. But is not wire! Is space filled by wire! But is not space, either. Is something that makes space -- " "What?" Quimby said. "Something that makes space -- " 'Is form, Edyn. Is shape. Is giving form to thing that comes down Is juice. Is much juice. Wire is just -- is just -- is just memory of right form for juice. Wire is nothing. The spinner-arounder would work Without wire if it could remember form to take. Form is of importance the greatest. One form for green beans, another form for watermelons -- " "What?" Quimby said, again. "You mean you make a helix of a different shape for each plant?" T he hermit grinned at him like a father whose child has just come up with a bright saying. "Is different, Edyn. Is all different, Ned. Is always everytime everything always different, Ed. Has got to be this way. Form right for green beans is not form right for watermelons, Edyn." "But why?" Quimby felt like a child who has wandered by mistake into a physics laboratory and has tried to ask questions as to why things are the way they are. Puzzled adults, with all the good will in the world, were trying to answer the child. They weren't having much luck with the answers and the child wasn't having much luck in gaining understanding. "Why should there be a different shape of helix for each kind of plant. Why should this be, sir?" Without noticing what he was saying, Quimby had added the "sir" of a respectful child speaking to his elders! The hermit spread his hands in a helpless gesture. "Is way worlds are made, Edyn. Is way things are made different. Is energy different for square. Is different for triangle. Is different for string bean. Is different for watermelon -- " "But water is the same for all of them," Quimby protested. "The sun is the same. The soil is the same." "Is not giving them water, is giving them juice to take place of water. See! No Water." Dropping to his knees, the hermit dug with his knife blade around the stem of the watermelon vine. The ground there was rock hard and sandy, with no trace of moisture in it. Since this plant used gallons of water, Quimby had thought to find the soil laden with moisture. But it was dust dry. "Plant takes sky juice, makes water itself from sky juice of right shape," the hermit said. He seemed to think he had said something important, something true, perhaps something basic to the universe. Quimby had the feeling the hermit was right. About his words, somewhere, was the vague ring of truth. But, the correlation between specific form and specific energy! The idea shook him. He had thought of energy as a vague, amorphous something. Perhaps it was this, somewhere! But when it took on shape, it was here, it was different! Perhaps energy created shape as a device to work through, as a tool! #TTow -- " Quimby's mind was O reeling from the effect of these ideas. They stretched the mind, did these concepts, then, when it was stretched as far as it could go, they stretched it still farther. The over-stretching was felt, vaguely, as mental pain. The mind pulled away from this pain, seeking refuge in practical things that could be understood. "Do -- Would those helices cost much to manufacture?" Quimby asked. The hermit shrugged. "A cent, maybe. Maybe less. Could make forms, then make machines to wind wire on forms -- " He shrugged again, a careless gesture that said this problem would be easy to solve. Inside himself, Quimby felt a glow coming into existence. He was a scientist, and a humanitarian. He liked people as individuals and tended to glamorize the race. Here was a device that would help a great many people, that would help the race take another step toward some dimly understood goal that lay somewhere in the region of the summer stars. As the glow grew stronger, he was aware that he had heard a cry in the distance. He was aware also that the hermit had heard it too. The bearded chin was up. The hermit was suddenly like a dog sniffing for danger in the wind. The cry came again. Now it was strong enough to be understood. A single word. "HelpF V A t the sound, the hermit went into motion. Regardless of the effect of sharp rocks on bare feet or sharp thorns on already-torn overalls, the hermit was making a bee-line straight for a pile of huge boulders where the sugar bushes grew tall and green. Quimby had to run to keep up. The hermit scrambled to the top of a boulder and stood looking down. Horror was on his face. Quimby scrambled up the slippery surface of the gray granite to stand beside him. Below was a circular pit perhaps twelve feet deep. Like the structure down by the road where Quimby had parked his car, this pit was also made of rough stone, though with greater care than the first one. The inside of the pit was relatively smooth and offered no hold for clutching fingers or for feet In the center of the pit a tall helix-supporting pole rose. Trying now to climb the pole was a man with the face of a wasp. Quimby recognized him instantly as the man who had scowled at him outside the grocery store in Valley Bottom. The wasp had either fallen into the pit or had jumped into it or had tried to find hand and foot hold and had slipped from them to the bottom of the pit. The wasp man was now trying to climb the pole that supported the big helix over the pit. Quimby looked at the wasp man, gasped, and looked again to make sure. The wasp man looked to be a child, he looked to be about three feet tall. "Oh, the poor little man! Oh, the poor man little! Oh, the poor man is already little and will get littlier..." the hermit said. "What?" Quimby gasped. "He will get littlier? What do you mean?" "Is in no good place. Is in going back place! Is in making smaller place -- " the hermit said. Aware that others had arrived, the little man dropped from the pole back to the bottom of the pit. The face he turned upward was furiously angry. From under his clothes he drew what looked like a toy pistol. "Get a ladder!" he shouted. "Get me out of here!" He emphasized his meaning by pointing his pistol at the hermit. "It is too late, little man!" The wail was clearly audible in the hermit's voice now. "It is too late." "Too late, hell!" Smoke spurted from the barrel of the toy pistol, flame leaped three inches upward, a bullet started upward -- and was caught by some force. Quimby distinctly saw the pea-sized pellet appear in the air perhaps two feet beyond the muzzle of the gun, saw it hang there motionless for an instant, then saw it start to fall backward. As it fell, it seemed to grow small. What happened to it, he did not know. Ml (tct me out of here! The VJ voice of the little man was now the wail of a lost child crying out that the. world was suddenly dark and that he was alone in ft. While Quimby stared, the little man lost inches, became the size of an elf, became the size of a doll, became the size of a man's thumb, became the size of nothing at all. The voice calling from the pit was silent. The only other sound was that of the wind going through the sugar bushes that grew thick and tall around the edge of the pit. The wind had a moaning sound in it. Quimby slid down the boulder. He squatted on the ground under the sugar bushes and wiped sweat from his face and wondered why his stomach was tied into a knot. What had happened there in the pit? Under the pressure of enormous energies flowing in from the helix, had the atoms of the body of the little wasp man shrunk inward into smaller and smaller orbits? Quimby did not know the answer to this question, or even if such a question could be asked. The conventional picture of the atom was only a handy fiction. What if what was called matter was actually made up of unlices existing as forms in some subspace below the levels probed by the electron microscope? What if the effect of die energy pouring through the big helix over the pit was to so that each became like a clockspring wound tight and hence occupying less space than when it was loosely wound? Would the effect be a shrinking in size? Quimby did not know the answer to these questions. All he knew was that it was infernally hot under the sugar bushes, that he was sweating, and that his stomach had tied itself into a knot as tight as the coil of a rattlesnake. Bare feet rasped on granite as the hermit slid down. The shoulders of the bearded man drooped. "Who was he? I mean the little man who looked like a wasp?" "I do not know, Edyn. See him before, I never did." 'The storekeeper at Valley Bottom said he had been there looking for you," Quimby said. "Ah. Yes. Well. Perhaps. So he was looking for me, the man said. But how did he get past Archy and Archy's brothers?" "Eh?" Quimby said. "Is here many snakes with rattling tails. Is not good to come here without me, Edyn. How did the little man slip past them? This I do not understand, Edyn." Q uimby now realized -- and additional shock came into him -- that this plateau was guarded by rattlesnakes. The thought chilled him . It also tied an additional knot in his stomach. "Where did he go?" Quimby asked. "Back," the hermit said. "To the mother. Back." "Back to the mother? What do yon mean?" "Back to life source. I call it the mother," the hermit said. "AH IF wm # things come from her. All things go back to her." Quimby found these concepts were stretching a mind already stretched to the breaking point. His mind, acting of its own volition, decided that the best solution was to refuse to understand the meaning in the hermit's words. "Is -- isn't he dead?" "Oh, no," the hermit said. "Has just gone into the smallness beyond thought. Will come again, somewhere, sometime... He spread his hands in a gesture which said he hoped his friend would understand that these words had no firm meaning. "I suppose we should report this to the sheriff -- " Quimby said, then was silent, wondering how such a report could get him anything except a possible sanity hearing. What would Kirk say if he told the observatory director what he thought he had seen? Quimby shuddered at the thought, then wondered how many miracles seen by humans are hidden away by honest men from fear of ridicule. "We'll decide that later," Quimby said, hastily. In the west the sun was dropping down toward the top of a far-away mountain. The wind coming through the sugar bush seemed to have grown chilly. "Maybe I had better get back to my car," Quimby said. "Yes, yes, Edyn," the hermit said. He was sad. Quimby rose. He followed the hermit toward the stone steps that led downward to the bottom of the canyon. Suddenly the hermit stopped. Like a bunting dog smelling a foreign scent in the wind, the bearded man seemed to sense the existence of something. Then he started hunting through the scrub growth. Quimby's stomach tied another knot in itself as the object of the search came to light It was a dead rattlesnake. "Was killed, then was hidden," the hermit said, anger in his voice. While Quimby watched, he scooped a hole in the sandy soil, buried the snake there. Quimby had the impression that this strange, barefooted, bearded man conducted a burial rite of some kind over the body of a dead diamondback rattlesnake! A s they moved away toward the stone steps that led downward, dusk was slipping silently over the plateau. It was that time of the day when perspectives shift and commonplace things are suddenly seen as very unusual. The sorrowing hermit followed Quimby through the scrub growth. The two boy scouts were sitting on the top step of the stairway that led down into the canyon and were looking down as if they were expecting to see someone coming up the steps. Their uniforms were torn by contact with thorns in the scrub brush of the area. Each had his staff lying ready to his right hand. When they heard footsteps behind them, they turned quickly, each bringing up his staff as they came to their feet. "Oh, hello," Quimby said. His mind was too much engrossed by the stretching it had recently taken for him to give much thought f o teenage boy scouts. "Are you the lost scouts?" They glanced at each other. "We're not lost, sir," the taller said. "No? Well, this afternoon the radio carried a news flash saying two boy scouts were lost in this vicinity and were being sought. There's an alert out. Probably helicopters will be over the area tomorrow morntng. Involuntarily, they looked at the skyr then back to Quimby. "But I told you, we're not lost -- " the taller began. "All right, all right," Quimby said. "You may not be lost but just the same, somebody thinks you are." He turned to speak to the hermit. "Do you have a phone? I was thinking the boys might use it to let their parents know where they are. No use -- " Quimby's voice went into silence. As he was speaking, he had been turning. Now he was looking at the dim trail through the scrub growth... The trail was empty. "Who were you talking to?" the voice of the taller boy scout came, from behind him. "Why, to the man I call the hermit -- " Quimby answered. "He was right here behind me -- Hermitr He lifted his voice in a shout. The ground came up and hit him. It was just like that. He was not aware of anything else striking him, it was just that suddenly his knees let go and that the ground rushed up and hit him in the face. IF y Q uimby's first, dazed thought when he regained consciousness was that he was looking at the biggest flying saucer ever to pass through the skies of Planet Earth. His second thought was that he was looking at the full mopn just high enough to flood the plateau with its light. He decided -- or perhaps he hoped -- the second thought was correct. He found he was lying on his side and as he struggled to get to his feet, he discovered that daze was in his mind. Something had happened? What had it been? He had met two lost boy scouts, he had turned to speak to the hermit -- then he had fallen down. "That's the way it was," he said to himself. "That's the way it happened. He was lying and he knew it. True, things had happened in this way, but more had happened than just a fall. Below, at the bottom of the long flight of steps, the canyon was a river of darkness that came from nowhere and went nowhere. At this moment, he sensed this darkness as an evil thing, then shook his head in an effort to clear the emotional tone from his mind. A wind moved across this haunted plateau where watermelons grew as big as beer kegs and where a pit existed in which a man went backward through infinitudes of time, possibly to a period when there was no life on the planet, with the polar forces at the organic level ruling the world. Then had come form, then forms, each with its own kind of energy. Quimby had to shake his head again, to clear this thinking out of it. A strangeness was in him. Her# in this place he had seen a man weep over a dead rattlesnake, insisting the snake had been his friend. Quimby suddenly found himself deciding this was no place for a ration al man. Being a rational man, ha knew he should walk calmly down the steps to his car, get in it and return to the radio telescope laboratory where dedicated men listened for the whisper of footfalls in faraway galaxies. "Edyn!" The sound was a thin wail in a haunted night. "Edyn! Help!" The cry came from the direction of the pit. Quimby ran toward the sound. He saw the hermit. The bearded man was on top of the rock which overlooked the pit. The hermit was not alone. The two boy scouts were with him. Not only were they with him, they were holding him. One on each side of the hermit, they were holding him by the arms. Then they began to swing him as two men may swing between them a heavy object which they intend to toss to some distance. T hey threw the hermit. Under the rays of the full moon, Quimby saw them throw the hermit. Wire twanged as his twisting body hit the helix over the pit. Then he went down. Down! Down! Down into something, down into nothing. "Edyn!" he cried out as he fell. Edyn -- " His voice grew more and more ririll. Quimby had the fantasy that die vocal chords which were producing the sound were growing smaller and smaller. And smaller rill! Then the wailing sound went into silence and the night was thick with haunt and Quimby's stomach felt again like an old, dried dishcloth. On top of the rock, the two boy scouts executed what seemed to Quimby to be a short victory dance. He did not doubt that while he was unconscious they had hunted down the hermit and had dragged him to the rock overlooking the pit. He had seen them throw him into the hole that led to nowhere. Now he was watching them execute a victory dance, as if they had done something very important. The dance finished, they slid down from the huge rock. Walking, they passed within twenty feet of Quimby. He could hear their excited voices. They were not speaking English. Quimby did not know the language they were using. He had never heard it spoken before. It seemed to him to consist of clacks, gutterals, and broken consonants. He watched them reach the top of the steps that led downward to the canyon, heard one cry out in sudden alarm, saw another search begin. Quimby was a scientist, a research man, a trained specialist. His life had been spent in electronic laboratories and in lecture halls. With this background, it simply did not at first occur to him that he was the object of this search by two scouts on a haunted, moon and wind swept plateau where watermelons grew as big as beer kegs. Quimby lived in an orderly universe. "They're hunting me. r he thought, suddenly. Nothing in his training had prepared him for this moment. To him, death had always been a far-away, remote event, murder had been something that happened among criminals, and boy scouts had been nice kids who helped old ladies across busy streets. He did not know what to do. His legs knew. Run! He listened to his legs, and listening, became a madman tearing his way through the scrub growth. Behind him, he heard a shout. He suspected this meant the scouts had seen him and were calling to him to stop. He continued running. He did not see the taller scout lift his staff and point it toward him. Nor would he have seen the burst of radiation leap from the end of the staff and stab him like an arrow in the back even if he had been looking. The radiation was invisible. It did not hurt when it hit. It simply produced unconsciousness. Quimby regained a flicker of consciousness as he was swung between the two scouts, was swung and flung from the top of the rock into the pit. This flicker of consciousness did not leave him in all that followed. Would to God it had! As he fell into the pit, he felt himself become smaller and smaller -- and smaller still! Horror boiled through him. IF I nstead of vanishing, the flicker of consciousness that remained to him seemed to become more alert, more intense, seemed to achieve a sharper focus. Because of this he was aware of agony. Each cell in his body seemed to be collapsing. The result was pain of a type Quimby had not known existed. He did not know how long this pain lasted -- time seemed to be distorted too -- but it seemed to him that it had already lasted an eternity and was due to last forever. Like Lucifer falling from heaven -- as the thought flicked through his mind, Quimby wondered if this was the way Lucifer had really fallen -- he fell. And fell. And continued falling. This was not a distance that could be measured in yards, in miles, or in light years; it was not a thing of the straight line. Indeed, the space through which he was falling seemed to know nothing of straight lines but seemed to be involved in curves and arcs of circles that were not true arcs as men knew them but were subtly distorted arcs, subtly twisted things, subtly different from the continuum that men knew. Then the fall slowed and the pain receded. It did not vanish, not quite. He had the impression that it would never vanish entirely, that it would go with him as long as his body lasted, as a memory of a horrible distortion and as a warning to stay away from such distortions in the future. As the fall slowed, the energy current hit, picked him up like a floating chip, and rushed him along with it. The sound was like a rush of many waters. The feeling that he had was that now that his fall had stopped, he was caught in a flood that moved powerfully and with deep purpose toward some strange destiny that he did not and could never understand. In his mind was the thought that a universe that had such incredible energies in it was mad, then he realized that what was new was not necessarily mad. The energy flow that was carrying him suddenly dashed itself against an obstruction that was like high cliffs on the shores of a forlorn sea, dashed itself against the cliffs and threw white spray sky-high, then turned and ran with silent intensity in another direction. T his was one tide. There were other tides, many other tides, that seemed to pass without interference through each other, other tides that carried other chips such as Quimby. Moving in such a tide, in obvious utter terror, he caught a glimpse of a little man who looked like a wasp. At this moment, Quimby would have welcomed the presence of a rattlesnake. He tried to shout at the little man -- if a shout could have been uttered or heard here -- but before he could catch the attention of the wasp man, the flowing energy had changed direction. Quimby found himself moving off at super speed in a direction he could not comprehend. Looking forward, he saw more high cliffs. And he recognized them! And he knew where he was! ISI He was in the mad structure the hermit had built at the bottom of the canyon. The bearded man had not told the truth -- or not all of it -- when he had said he had built this place for fun. No! The crooked walls, the paths that went nowhere, the fireplace where no fire had ever burned or ever would burn, all of these served to direct these energy flows, to turn the energy from one path to another, to twist it, to reduce the size of the flow and hence to increase its intensity, to change its frequency, to shift it upward to other kinds of energy, to lower the frequency so that now it pounded as a heavy surf upon a sullen, rocky shore, now it let spread itself out as waves spread themselves on the sandy beaches of south Pacific islands. So much would the mother energy do, if ordered! So much and much, much more! Suddenly Quimby found himself wondering how the inside of a radio receiver would look if seen from the viewpoint of the energy flowing there! What would a transistor look like to the micro-waves flowing through it? How would the radiations see a capacitor? What would a transmitter look like to the hurrying energies jumping through it? And the program carried by the transmitter -- whether TV or radio -- How would a singer be seen from the viewpoint of the carrier wave? Suppose a human was reduced to the size of an ion. How would he see energy? Would he experience it as a flow of many waters? Would energy make a sound that resembled a waterfall? "This is fantasy!" Quimby thought. Whatever it was, it was happening. He remembered now, how the hermit had been able to detect the flow of radio waves through a wire. Or through space. Had this strange ability enabled him to construct not only the crazy foundation for a building in the canyon but also the pit up above, plus the little helices that fed energy to the trees in the canyon and to the vegetables growing on the plateau? Other questions passed through Quimby's mind. The flow was changing directions again. Was a resistor ahead? A capacitor? A transformer? All he could discern was that the current flow was changing direction and was now creating a whirlpool, an eddy that circled and circled and circled, now spinning upward as if it was caught in a helix similar to those on the plateau where watermelons grew at big as beer kegs and as sweet as honey. Now it was spinning down. Down and up. Up and down! Larger, smaller. Smaller, larger! Rhythms endlessly repeated. Rhythms that Quimby suddenly realized were a part of all life and of all living. "Edyn!" a voice called. T urning, Quimby saw the hermit. The bearded man was making swimming motions and was pointing that a stream of energy that spewed out of the eddy and took another direction, moving toward vaguely pink walls in the distance. "That way, Edyn! That way out!" The hermit's thoughts came into his mind. "What. about you? Quimby called back. "Not now, ,Edyn. Maybe later, maybe not. Go, Edyn. Quickly go now. Time is!" It did not seem strange to Quimby that he should be picking up directly the meaning in the mind of the bearded man. He also picked up the sense of enormous urgency. His mind translated this feeling of urgency into birth symbols. Kicking like a frog with both legs, he moved toward the stream of energy that diverged from the eddy and was caught by it. "Go, Edyn, go!" the hermit's thinking came to him as from a great distance. "Go! Go! Go! Time is!" Quimby went. Ahead of him, as though recognizing the meaning of die hermit's words, pink walls grew suddenly large, astonishingly pink, then opened. He went through this opening and into a tube that he eould not describe. His dazed impression was that the walls of this tube were converging on him and were squeezing him, then he realized that as he had shrunk in size after being thrown into the pit on the plateau, so now he was increasing in size, and that the walls seemed to be converging because he was growing larger. Another pink wall appeared ahead of him. He was thrown head-first against it. Suddenly the wall let go, his mind and his whole body was wrenched and stretched in incredible pain, and he was hurled outward, head-first, to land in darkness. At this moment, when consciousness was really extinguished, Quimby blessed the darkness. It was so good not to know, so good not to feel the enormous mind-stretching that came from knowing! W hen consciousness came back to him, the first sound he heard was the beat of motors in the sky. Slowly, he awakened, to find himself lying in a thick of pine needles under one of the big trees in the bottom of the canyon. He had vague memories of having been hurled through the air and of having landed here, this happening in some remote past. Sitting up, he discovered his clothing was badly torn, this coming from his mad flight through the scrub growth on top of the plateau, he told himself. His clothing was also covered with a kind of slippery secretion which he thought was dew, as were his hands and his face. Trying to wipe this stuff away, he got to his feet. There, before his eyes, was the crazy structure the hermit had built. In the light of a mid-morning sun, it looked to be just what the hermit had said it was, the work of idle hands trying to find something to do to keep the devil away. In this light, it also looked crazy. Had he actually been reduced to microscopic size and had he flowed with energy currents between these strange wails? "Nonsense!" Quimby thought, without any real sureness. He saw his car, parked where he had left it the day before. Beyond the car, he caught a glimpse of the steps rising up to the plateau above the canyon. Up there he again heard the sound of motors. Now he saw the helicopter dropping slowly toward a landing on the plateau. He went across the canyon and up the steps as fast as his legs and his wind would carry him. Later, he would wonder about his motives for this action. He knew that two deadly boy scouts were -- or had been -- on that plateau. He knew they had flung him into an incredible pit. Why should he go into an area where such obvious danger lurked? Later, he would decide that his hunger for human companionship, as represented by the pilot of the helicopter, was so great that it overwhelmed all other emotions, all other thoughts. He wanted to be with somebody human! Nothing else mattered at this moment. As Quimby, panting hard for wind, reached the top step, he saw that the ship was already down, that the pilot was out of it, and was staring at something on the ground. As Quimby approached, the pilot looked up at him. The expression on the pilot's face said that he, too, was glad to see another human at this moment. Very glad indeed. He pointed down. I n an open space where the brush was thin, the two boy scouts lay. Their bodies were so grotesquely swollen that Quimby needed only a glance to know that they were dead, also the cause of death. Beside them, gathered into a pile, were dozens of tiny helices. Like weapons that had fallen from fingers that no longer had the strength to hold them, the staff of each scout lay at the end of the outstretched hands. The pilot's face was a mixture of horror and confusion. The horror came from the sight of the two bodies on the ground, the confusion came from another source. "There must be a mistake somewhere," the pilot said. "Where?" Quimby asked. "Well, I came up here, as a volunteer, to help find the two missing scouts." ."So you've found them." "But just as I spotted these two bodies, a report came over the radio saying that another search party had found them, in a cave at the lower end of Hermit's Canyon, dead -- apparently murdered -- their uniforms and their equipment gone." The pilot shook his head. "So that report must have been a mistake. Here they are. Right here." Shaking his head, he pointed toward the two bodies on the ground. "Let's hope it wasn't a mistake," Quimby said. "Huh? What -- " "It's just that the world is so much easier to understand if the report you heard is true, if there are four dead scouts -- " Quimby stopped as he saw the horror mount on the face of the pilot. He shook his head and wiped sweat from his face. "Don't pay any attention to me," he continued. "The heat's got j) me. "The heat? Yes, the heat," the pilot said. "It is hot up here." Hie IF face lightened. Perhaps he wasn t dealing with a crazy man after all! "Why don't you get on the radio in your ship and check out that re; port?" Quimby said.  ''Sure. Sure. I'll do that." As the pilot returned to his helicopter. Quimby dropped to one knee beside the pile of helices. The two -- creatures, he now decided to call them -- must have worked most of the night finding each little helix here on this arid plateau. He had  no idea what they were going to do with them. Perhaps take them to some other country, perhaps even destroy them. More than he had ever wanted anything in his life, Ed Quimby wanted these little helices, wanted all of them. In them, hidden away in the shape of the twisted wires, perhaps in the metal itself. ' was a sure cure for famine on Plan, et Earth far into the future. Perhaps they held other secrets too. He had had no time to think about possible other secrets, the cure for famine had been and still was enough to engage all of his attention. P erhaps it had also engaged the full attention of the creatures on the ground. In an event, they had Carefully, Quimby picked up a helix. In his mind again was the dream jj of the desert blooming with rich I vegetation, with vegetables, melons, and berries, perhaps green with broad acres of wheat in the spring, brown with the wheat harvest in June and July. In his fingers, the little helix crumbled to dust, then to something less than dust. It fell away into nothing and became something less than nothing, into particles so tiny the eye could not detect them as they fell to the ground -- if they fell! Perhaps they did not fall, perhaps they became motes flowing in the sunbeams. As the little helix crumbled, something in Edward Quimby died. It was a dream of a world a little better than die world he knew, a world in which no man, no woman, and no child was every hungry. As the dream faded and fell away into particles the size of nothing at all, pain came into Quimby's mind, a spate of it, that he knew would never wholly leave him until in some time and in some dace he saw with his own eyes the desert green with rich vegetation. But perhaps the dream was still possible! He reached hastily for a second helix. It too melted into nothing at the touch of his fingers. Now he saw that all of the little helices were fading away, were falling off into nothing. This was happening as the sun rose higher and higher. He watched the sun of earth erode them away. He felt as if his heart was eroding away with diem. He reached now for the nearest staff. It, too, was crumbling. Somehow he was glad that this was happening, somehow the sight of the crumbling staff eased a little the pain that was in his heart. He saw, now, that the second staff was also eroding away. Hoping that the two bodies would go the same way, he looked at them. The bodies remained what they were, bodies, swollen and grotesque. Footsteps told him the helicopter pilot was returning. "The report was right," the pilot said. His manner was that of a man determined to report the truth no matter how much he wished the truth was something else. "They found two bodies in this cave last night. Early this morning, they flew the fathers of the boys in here. The fathers identified their sons. But nobody knows anything about these two scouts!" Wiping sweat from his face, he glared at the bodies on the ground. 'Tut in another call and get the state troopers up here," Quimby said. "Let them solve the problem of the identity of these two bodies. Also let them find out if the uniforms these two are wearing came from the two scouts found dead in the cave." As he spoke, Quimby rose to his feet. "I already called the troopers," the pilot said. "But what -- Hey l There at the edge of that bush! Hey! Look outr tiT've already seen him," Quimby X said. "But it's a rattlesnake!" the pilot shouted. "I know," Quimby said. "But, man -- " "Are they dangerous?" Quimby said. "Dangerous?" "When you have watched die the dream I have just watched die, it's IF hard to get upset about a little thing like a rattler," Quimby said. "But it's moving toward you!" "I know," Quimby said. As if its, body was following an invisible helix that lay along the ground, the snake came out from under the bush. Quimby did not move. It stopped at his feet. In the manner of a cat meeting an old friend, it rubbed the right side of his right foot with its thick, triangular head, then followed its invisible helix into the bushes. "God Almighty!" the pilot whispered. "He said Archy would know me as a friend when we mel again," Quimby said. "Perhaps -- perhaps -- perhaps -- " He felt the pressures back of his eyes "Perhaps somewhere, sometime, I may meet him again -- perhaps the dream may live again -- " The pressures back of his eyes came outward in the form of tears. To Quimby, this did not matter. In his mind the dream was stirring and coming to life. " Meet him again? Who are you talking about?" the dazed pilot asked. "About the hermit, about the man who lived here. Perhaps we shall meet again. Perhaps, then, the little helices will no longer crumble into dust," Quimby said. He wiped the tears away from his eyes, moved through the brush. "Where are you going?" the pilot asked. "There is an old pit, perhaps an old reservoir for storing water, over in this direction," Quimby said. Perhaps he hoped he would find the hermit sitting on the edge erf this pit! Going through the brush, with the pilot following, he saw another watermelon that was as big as a beer keg. He saw at a glance that the helix was gone from the serf! where the vine rooted. The vine had already begun to wilt. "Look at that watermelon!" the pilot shouted. "How could it have grown here? There must be water here, possibly springs -- " "Possibly," Quimby said. He reached the big boulders beside the pit. The hermit was not sitting on the rim of the pit. There was no rim. There was no pit. "Must have been a fife here," the pilot said. T he sugar bushes were burned and gone, the big boulders were blackened as from intense heat. The walls of the pit were gone, the pole that had supported the big helix was gone. The soil around the pit had been converted by something similar to intense heat into a dry mulch which puffed up under their feet as they walked on it. Circling the spot where the pit had been, Quimby found three vs made of segments of broken quartz such as could be found in many intruding veins in this region. Like arrow heads, the tips of the v pointed toward the pit. If Quimby made anything of these, he kept his ideas to himself. As they returned to the clearing where the two bodies lay, they saw another rattlesnake, then another. and another, and another. The pilot was badly shaken, wanting to know how any human could have lived in a place so infested with reptiles Quimby had no answer to this question. He did not mention that he had seen at least ten more snakes than the pilot had glimpsed, all moving toward the rim of the plateau as if they were quitting the plateau, perhaps forever. "Do you suppose those snakes killed those scouts?" the pilot asked. "What else?" Quimby asked. "But their bodies are so swollen -- " "If a dozen of the fat fellows who Kve up here struck you, your body would swell too, as you died," Quimby said. "Don't talk like that!" the pilot said. "Where are you going now?" "Down to the bottom of the canyon." "I'll go with you!" the pilot hastily volunteered. "You had better stay here, with your helicopter," Quimby said. "I'll wait down below and when the troopers arrive, I'll send them up to you." As he reached the bottom of the steps, Quimby saw a car was pulling to a stop beside his automobile. He moved toward it -- and recognized the driver as the owner of the combination grocery store and beer joint at Valley Bottom, L. Kindell. "On the radio there's talk about some missing boy scouts -- " Kindell began. "Yesterday, when I stopped at your place, I saw a small man who looked like a wasp," Quimby said. The grocer stared at him in nonrecognition. "I don't believe I remember you," he said. "That isn't important," Quimby said. "The little man with a face that looked like a wasp, he's important. You said he had stopped at your store and had asked about the hermit who lives here -- " "Me? I said that? Mister, what are you talking about? I came out here as a public-spirited citizen." #Hphe little man with a face like a wasp," Quimby repeated. "Did somebody hire him to come here and find out how the hermit could grow such big watermelons on top of a waterless plateau." "Mister -- " the grocer repeated. "The secret of growing watermelons like the one you said the hermit tried to trade you for gasoline would by continued. He watched Kindell's face. There were puffy pouches under the man's eyes. The skin was turning gray. "You mean you -- Mister, are you accusing me -- " The man's cheeks puffed out from the words he wanted to use. "Accusing you hadn't occurred to me -- until now," Quimby said. "Mister!" 'The little man with a face like a wasp probably won't be back," Quimby said. "Won't be back? Eh? What happened to him -- I mean -- " The grocer's face went from gray to white and the pouches under his eyes seemed to enlarge. "Mister, I heard on the radio about two missIF mg boy scouts. I came out here to do my duty as a good citizen to volunteer to help find them." "Somewhere down the canyon are two dead scouts," Quimby said. He jerked his thumb toward the narrow treacherous road that led downward. "There are two more on top of the plateau." "But that makes four. The radio said two -- " "They have increased in numbers since that report." ' "Mister -- " "Take your pick of the boy scouts," Quimby said. "But I doubt if you will ever find the little man who looked like a wasp. I don't think anybody will ever be able to find him." The grocer jabbed at the throttle of his car. The rear wheels kicked dirt and gravel into the air. The car disappeared among the pine trees, gaining speed, going down the canyon. Dimly, Quimby heard the ripping sound of the crash. He knew what had happened. The car had gone out of control and had plunged off the narrow trail and into the canyon. He didn't bother to go look at the accident. It was too far away, he was too tired, the state troopers would look into it when they arrived. And anyhow, he felt that whatever had happened to the grocer, the fellow had richly deserved it. Quimby sat down on the stone bench beside the structure that the hermit had built, "just for fun". Now he saw something that he had not noticed before. W orked into the stone work were many fragments of quartz. Moving closer, he studied these crystals with care. They were identical with the quartz fragments that had been used to build v's around the pit up above, v arrows that had pointed at the pit which was no longer a pit, which, was no longer anything at all except ashes. Quimby knew then that in some way that he did not understand at all these quartz crystals controlled the flow and the focus of some unknown form of energy. On the plateau, the energy had destroyed a stone pit. Down here in this structure, it -- Quimby sighed. He did not know what the energy did down here and he was afraid to try to remember what he had experienced. Rising to his feet, he studied the channels that formed the inside of the incredible foundation the hermit had built. There was a vague familiarity about it somewhere but he could not put his finger on the familiarity. He saw, however, that additional quarts crystals lined the insides of the "foundation." If electromagnetic energies flowed through these channels, his fingers were not sensitive enough to detect them. If a sub-microscopi being that he had once called "Hp mit" moved there, his eyes were not sensitive enough to discern it. Nof could he see anywhere a little mail with a face like a wasp. The fact that he could see neither proved nothing except the limitations of his vision. A siren wailed in the upper reaches of Hermit's Canyon. QuimHere is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address City  State Zip Code... (Offer good in U. S. A. only.) by sighed. When the car pulled up, he went to meet the two state troopers and to explain his presence here. "I came to help look for two missing boy scouts," he said. "A helicopter pilot on top of the plateau has found something." He watched the two officers climb the steps that led to the top of the plateau. #oddamn it, Ed," Kirk said. vJ "Goddamn it!" Kirk's voice was weak. "Who was the hermit? Where did those two extra boy scouts come from? Why did they destroy that pit? Why did they gather all of those helices in one place? Why did the helices turn to powder? How did the helices work? What happened to the hermit? Goddamn it, I saw him detect radio waves with his fingers! Goddamn it, Ed -- " Quimby did not attempt to answer. He moved to the window of the director's office, stood looking out at the radio telescope, stood looking down at the tangle of canyons and plateaus so far below. He knew the radio telescope was functioning again. "We've got the scope pointed in the wrong direction," he said. "Eh?" the director asked. "We've got it pointed out, to listen for footfalls out yonder where the galaxies are," Quimby continued. "We should turn it around and point it down there below us..." As his voice slipped into uneasy silence, cold chills went up his spine. "Down there -- " He pointed. "Down there is where they're walkIF Dear Editor: I enjoyed the story Origin of Species in the October issue of If, but I must say that Mr. Robert F. Young committed a howling blunder. On page # he very carefully specifies the south central plateau of France as the place of action. But then the hero wonders about Canis dims , the dire wolf, about Mylodon and Megatherium, all of which lived # years later in California and did not, at any time, live in Europe. He continues the mixup by seeing a condor flying around. Like the sloths, the condor is most typically an American bird. The proper bird for that landscape would have been an Alpine stone eagle. In conclusion, let me join in Sprague de Camp's plea : since "Cro-Magnon" is a place name, the people should be called the Cro Magnards. -- Willy Ley. # All right, but what kind of bird Is the sloth? -- Editor.    Dear Editor: I've just finished Skylark DuQuesne and it's the best serial I've read since Way Station, also known as Here Gather the Stars. But that is not the reason I have written this letter. Ordinarily I don't care about covers as long as the stories are good, but lately I've noticed that If # covers  have been poor if not downright nauseating. Pederson and McKenna are a pair of the worst artists I have ever seen. The June and July covers attest to this, although I think McKenna is improving and Gaughan's illustrations brighten up the scene somewhat. Another complaint I have is about your bindings ( Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow included). Why do you have to spatter them with all the colors of the rainbow? You also do not have to list the authors' names there; the contents page does that job nicely. How about having binders to cover up the whole mess? If has come a long way since you first took over in #, and it's just copped my vote for a Hugo! -- Mike Buchta, #I West Adler, Milwaukee, Wisconsin #.    Dear Editor: Sir, it will be of great assistance to us, the members of the Rocketry Club of the Indian Institute of Technology, if you could name for us a rocketry club and organization from which we could have firsthand information about what is going on in U.S. regarding space. Personally, I would be glad if you could name me pen-friends in U.S. too so that I could understand the Americans better and thus extend world friendship Shyamsunder Goenka, Room No. #, Hostel II, Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Bombay #, India.    Dear Editor: Information please! What is the title and author of the story described below? A man ki taken from his spacecraft to fight a creature, described as a "Red Roller," with which Earth is at war. An invisible wall separated them which only unconscious or dead things can pass. The loser's race is to be destroyed; and the Red Roller m killed. I would also like to know of any sf clubs I can join. -- Linda Leach, # Avondale, Wayne, Michigan #.    Dear Editor: I haven't read a single story in the October '# ish of If, just the editorial page and the readers' column. Already I am convinced by one of the letters that you printed. It usually takes me a few days to become incensed at a letter or story, or comment that you or somebody else makes on the readers' page. However, this issue was different. Bruce Berry's letter had me enraged from the first paragraph. That any sane sf fan who has read over one Issue of If and can still make a comment like, "So far as I have been able to find out, their opinions of W.O.T.  If are quite low." is beyond MY imagination ! I have made no six-year study of reader reactions to editorial policies nor have I been reading sf for thirty-odd years. I'm just a teenager with a wild imagination that caters to, and desires sf. I've been reading sf for almost three years now and I have not been able to find magazines anywhere, anytime that contains stories such as yours that challenge my imagination and intelligence as much as the stories in Galaxy, W.O.T., and If. All my friends that read sf agree with me that your magazines are tops. These are just my first impressions that I got from reading Mr. Berry's letter. After I finished reading it once I went back and read it again. This time I noticed all the good and valid points that he made in his letter. I read it one more time to make sure I understood everything that he said before I wrote. Count me a staunch supporter of Mr. Bruce Berry. I almost forgot. Mr. Pohl, you're a great writer but please don't waste your time on lousy stories like Under Two Moons. It was pathetique ! It was too tongue-incheek to be palatable; in fact, it was almost like one of the worse Drake Maynard, # Columbine Lane, Burlington, North Carolina #.    # That's about as far as we go this issue. Our "First", of course, is CindyMe by Don F. Briggs. Hope you like it -- and hope to see you again next month for the next big chunk of the Heinlein story, a first-rate complete short novel by C. C. MacApp, a "first" novelette and -- well, come around and see for yourself! -- The Editor. 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State Zip GPl FEBRUARY #  #c Galley Slaves of the Air! Read by C. C. MacApp oF brills yoo the finest in science fiction ( Don't delaysend in your subscription oraer today V of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by K all favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Relief stories and others appear reqularh in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars I still to come! And now -- The Best of the Top Name Writers -- Robert A. Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, Hal Clement, Lester del Rey contribute to IF. -- and a Preview of Tomorrow's Best Each issue of IF brings you a brand-new writer, making his debut in science fiction in IF. Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! IF -- Subscription Department  #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # I Yes, send me the next # issues ot IF! I enclose #   New  Renewal  Name  Address ! City State Zip No.  (Outside of N. and S. 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Y. # IF  Editorial S ince Sputnik, the United States dollars on the space program; over the next few years it has already more. Of every ten dollars of Gross National Product approximately a dime goes into space. Question is, is it all worth it? That question has been asked before, and nobody's mind seems to get changed by any of the answers. The people who want to go into space still want to; the people who think it's an astronautitical boondoggle still consider it a farce. So a better question might be, "Is there any way of deciding whether it's all worth it?" Let's start by discounting all of the principal arguments that have already been advanced on both sides. "Why go into space when there's so much to be done right here on Earth?" (But it wouldn't be done any faster anyway, you know. Things are moving on all fronts.) "We must find other livable planets to core for Earth's expanding population!" (But colonization has never, ever solved a population crisis. Europe exported enough people, out of its original quarterand doubled its own citizenry to Probably the best reason for going into space is to learn something about our own planet. We have a complex atmosphere, which makes meteorological theory difficult; a simple one like that of Mars might give us the Rosetta Stone we need to make weather forecasting -- and control -- a science. If we could only get to it. Our geologists are handicapped through -- literally -- having barely scratched the surface of their subject, namely the Earth. A chance to study a few other examples would enormously simplify our own search for minerals and our knowledge -- and perhaps prevention -- of earthquakes. But the question still remains: Can we afford it? A t the recent Conference m Planetology and Space Mission Planning in New York, Dr. Ewing of Woods Hole made what strikes us a cogent suggestion. 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I A Item Raab Garan, of the Mesa Lowry Fleet, had been pacing and sitting and pacing again in the Admiral's anteroom for two hours, while the Staff argued behind the closed office door. Raised voices carried through it. More than once he heard his own name. For perhaps the twentieth time, he walked to the net-covered window for a breath of air that didn't reek with the burning animal-fat of the lamps. Midnight was long gone. The barracks and ground were dark. Somewhere, a sentry's footsteps listlessly plodded their rounds. You could hear defeat in those footsteps, as you could detect its pervasive, dampening effect in so many things these days. He resisted the impulse to shout angrily at the unseen man. There was a scraping of chairs in the Admiral's office. Raab turned and stood at attention as the door opened and the Staff filed out. All of them looked furious, and all of them deliberately ignored him -- which suited him fine. He knew his own face was flushed and taut, and his hair undoubtedly out of place. When the last of them disappeared, he strode to the office door -- which had been slammed -- opened it, and stepped in. Admiral Kline, slumped behind the big desk, his white uniform rumpled, at least had a smile for him. "Sit down, Raab. How's your mother getting along? I've been meaning to call around ever since the funeral, but things have been so disorganized... Well, I guess you heard the yelling match I just had." Raab nodded. "I'm sorry, sir. But -- well, hell, excuse me. Admiral, but if they just want to sit and do nothing while we slowly starve, they need stirring up!" The Admiral looked at him for a moment, then said quietly, "They still say that if we hold out, Mederlink will eventually get tired of blockading." R aab made a disgusted sound. "Mesa Orket tried that. They've got a better mesa than we do in Lowry. They didn't hold out." Kline smiled faintly. "True. Nevertheless, we don't have blimps or helium to throw away on gestures." Raab said impatiently, "Of course not, sir. But the blockade can be run. We just have to be smarter about it!" "And you're smarter?" Raab flushed. "I didn't mean that, sir. But I know the country around here better than anyone from Mederlink. I know where to get helium without being spotted, and I know the guano islands. I sailed with my father from the time I was six. He taught me -- " His throat tightened unexpectedly. Kline only said, "Yes. Well, you haven't helped yourself by being outspoken. They called it insubordination. They not only didn't want to approve your request, they wanted to court-martial you." Raab said bitterly, "What would you want me to do? My dad's dead. He can't speak for himself." The Admiral said, "I might want you to show a little more discretion and a little less belligerence. I know as well as you do that your father was no traitor. I knew him a lot longer than you did, remember. But we did lose the battle and most of the Fleet, and people have to have a scapegoat. What we need is time. We still couldn't stand off a landing if Mederlink were ready to commit herself to one. However I agree with you that we can't just sit, so I'm giving you a blimp. It'll be Gaffer: she's the best I can do. I'll give you two Trimmers and a Half-altern; they'll be men who've gotten their tails in a crack one way or another. The rest of the crew will be civilian volunteers. I'm afraid they'll volunteer from hunger, not patriotism, but we'll do the best we can. You'll be short of everything, including helium." He added after a moment, "Maybe it'll be a good thing to get you away for a while." Raab, trying to control his voice, said, "Sir, Gaffer won't lift a worthwhile cargo even if I get through." The Admiral sighed. "Nobody seems to expect you to get through." He stood up, grunting a little, and limped around the desk to put his arm around Raab's shoulders. "I don't have to tell you  hope you get through. And any cargo you can bring home will be worth while because it'll show it can be done. Lord knows we need something to lift morale." He paused. "I'm bumping you to Skipper. Maybe you don't think the Staff howled about that." Raab flushed again. "Rank isn't what I'm after." Kline shook his head. "You've got to have it. You can't ignore rank and regulations and then have discipline when you need it. You'll need discipline. Good luck, boy." He looked at Raab oddly for a moment. "I'U sec that your mother's looked after." II A dmiral Kline stood listening absently as Raab's footsteps faded down the corridor. After a minute Be sighed, went back to his chair, and lowered himself stiffly into it. His right hand strayed to the pipestand on his desk, then drew back. Tobacco was one of the things Mesa Lowry wasn't growing since the blockade. He thought, how easy things seem to the young! How could you explain to a young fire-eater like Raab that Authority wasn't infinitely strong nor infinitely elastic? How could you get him to stand still and listen while you described the desperate persuasions and coercions and calling in of old political debts -- and yes, the bribery -- that had gone into even the present policy of holding out against Mederlink? Lord knows, he thought, it was a miracle we didn't surrender two years ago, after the Fleet battle. Such an impetuous thing as his giving a blimp to Roal Garan's son -- after the young fool had antagonized the whole Staff, too -- might upset the whole painful balance even now. Yet he couldn't be angry with Roal Garan's son. He grinned, sitting there, thinking how like his father the young Roal Raab was. The same lanky frame, the same siightly-bent-forward impatient posture; the hands and feet so restless (when their owner was aground); the hatchet-face with its restless blue eyes and the skin that needed only a token of sun to tan deeply. The almost ludicrous pained expression when he was forced to stand still. The forward-sprouting black hair that loathed combs and brushes. And, unfortunately, the same headstrong impetuousness. Roal had outgrown that eventually, of course, or he'd never have made Admiral. Where had the years gone? It seemed no time at all since he and IF Roal, midshipmen together, tebrated the victory in the first Mederlink war. That had set back the Links plans for a whole generation. But somehow, people forgot. And now the other free mesas had gone under one by one; even Orket T he Admiral pondered his motives in letting Raab try the blockade. It was mostly sentiment, he admitted, just as preserving Gaffer all these years had been, even as a training ship. She'd been a proud ship once, and it was all right if she perished in combat. But it wasn't all right to let Raab and others die if the reasons were no more than sentiment -- and the clearing of Raab's father's name. It was hard to understand Mederlink's detCTmination to conquer all the mesas. Kline knew his ancestors on Earth had faced such wars of tyranny -- he was something of a scholar about the home world -- but he'd always supposed, without thinking much about it, that men on Current were different. It was six hundred years since the colony ship landed, and another century, more or less -- two or three generations -- between its departure from Earth and arrival to colonize Current. Maybe that wasn't enough time for men to change. But Earth had been rent, scattered on isolated mesas. And it must have been an uncomfortable world physically, small and dense, with its gravity higher than Ourrenfs but witb an atmosphere so thin that blimps were clumsy and impractical. Ther'e was a lot of soul therapy m a quiet blimp cruise. But then Earth had had petroleum, and iron, easily available to support technologies vastly beyond Current's. He wondered how rth was getting along. Current would never know, probably, unless a faster-than-ligjit drive were invented somewhere. It certainly wasn't likely that any later emigrations would happen to come to this same planet -- this sun wasn't even enough like Sol to attract spacefarers, though it was abidable, with Current's thick atmosphere. And Earth wouldn't spend generations tracing the long gone ships. Current was on its own. It would have to sink or swim unaided. And by all the signs it was sinking. m T vo days before the scheduled departure, Raab took Gaffer on a cross-mesa flight to break in the crew. Mesa Lowry, at fifty by thirty miles, was smaller than Mederlink or Orket or most of the other settled mesas, and her topsoil was poor. But she was six miles high like the others, with vertical sides that kept dangerous native fauna from reaching the top, and she was at the edge of the sea, handy to the guano islands for fertilizer. There were no other mesas, even unsettled ones, and no hills of any height, within a hundred miles of Mesa Lowry in any direction. They were following down the mesa's largest stream, which was low IF bow; it would be nearly dry later in the autumn. It came from the minor hills Gaffer had passed an hour ago. Raab was sitting on the forward rail of the basket, looking back toward tiiose hills, where a glider-base had recently been built. With helium so scarce, hot-air balloons were being used to lift gliders. One was rising now, a glider dangling beneath it like a toy. You couldn't lift a glider very high that way. Enemy blimps, aware of that fact, sometimes sailed impudently over the mesa itself. But at least harpoon-carrying gliders could get up high enough to keep the enemy above effective shooting height. The balloon rose higher and was hidden by Gaffer's tail. Raab shifted position and idly watched Gaffers shadow distorting along the bumpy ground. It was a clear warm day; there were no clouds in sight except the low line of them, dark at the base but dazzling white where the sun hit them, along the mesa's seaward edge where the moisture-laden sea breeze humped itself up. Even Gaffer's shadow looked trivial, compared to that of a modern fighting blimp. They'd certainly given him the next thing to nothing. Her bag was only a hundred eighty feet long, barely forty-five in diameter. The vanes at the rear were fixed, so horizontal steering was by the paddles only. The basket, rigidly suspended, was fifty-five feet long, eight feet wide and four feet high at the rail. The middle thirty-five feet had places for ten paddlers on a side, but because she was undergassed and weight was critical, Raab had only eighteen paddlers, plus himself and the three other Fleetmen. The paddles, at least, were new, with flaps that opened themselves on the backsweep so the paddles didn't have to be wrist-feathered. In each end of the basket, besides other paraphernalia, was a large handwheel which turned a shaft projecting out forward or aft of the basket. These shafts wound up or released a series of lines running around the gasbag. As they squeezed or loosened they could vary the diameter of sections fore and aft, thus trimming or tilting ship or varying lift without one's having to valve gas or drop ballast. The Fleetman at each wheel had the rank of Trimmer. The forward Trimmer, standing near Raab, was Ammet Oleeny, whom Raab knew well. He was uncolorful and quiet, seeming to blend into the background, but Raab knew there was wit behind the plain face, and that the man was reliable and very conscientious about his job. The Aft Trimmer, Sols Vannyer, tended to be sullen. A glider, evidently finishing its tour of duty since it was this low, came toward them, tilting a wing as it made a turn around them. The pilot eyed the nondescript crew, then the single rubber-powered harpoon launched on the forward rail, and finally the bag itself. Even here, where outside air pressure was only eighteen pounds per square inch, the softness was noticeable. Finally he looked at Raab, recognized him, showed surprise -- tht hostility. II He arrested the hand-wave hed begun, and banked away abruptly. Raab felt his own face grow hot. He hoped no one would see. r iey passed over a farm where a group of men pulled a plow -- most draft animals had been killed and eaten by now. The men's faces when they looked up were gaunt, tired, dull. Anger stirred in Raab. He turned his head and stared at the bank of clouds, ten miles away, until he made out a group of black dots in the sky above it: Link ships, making sure no one tried to sneak off the mesa under cover of the clouds. That wasn't die way Raab would go. He'd drop off the northern edge, at night, and head inland first for more helium. He faced aft and called to his Second-in-Command, "Ben, make # and halfspeed toward tibe Capitol." He watdied as Half-altem Ben Sprake, Jr., avoiding Raab's eyes and not admowledging the order, directed die paddlers. The blimp's nose slowly poked about. He'd known Ben since ddldhood, both of them bdng sons oi Fleet officers. Ben, a short, slidy plump young man, affected a blond moustache that belonged on a fiercer face. Raab wasn't sinriised at his sullenness. Ben had never gotten above Halfaltem because he'd been caught cheating on a test; and now Raab, two years younger, had made fuD Skipper. But Boi dnt htid grudges (or any othe mood) very long. Rsab thought heM be all rig He'd have preferred a tougher man -- but there didn't seem to be much toughness left in Mesa Lowry. They were cutting across a bend of the stream now, toward the mesa's only lake -- a one-by-sevenmile body of water beside wWch the Capitol lay. He could see a few blimps above the Capitol; most of them fighting ships on guard. There were only two or three cargo ships. Government House, the only fourstory building on Lowry, loomed above the lake. He caught Ben's eye. "Give us about five degrees more left, will you?" Ben muttered to the paddlers, "Ease off portside, two strokes. Now all paddles, half-speed." Oaffer steadied on the new course. They were nearly over the hdce now, on the side opposite the Capitol. Raab stared ahead at the farm where he'd been born. Trirnm Oleeny startled him by asking, "Your farm. Skipper?" "Uh -- yes." Even after two years, it was hard to remember that he was legally the owner now, wdtii his father lost in the battle that had destroyed his reimtation. It was deserted; his motho was staying m town, and both sisters were married. An uncle was supposed to be locking after the place. There was a very sparse volunteer grain crop, and die fruit orchard looked fair, but the vegetable patches were notUng but straggly weeds. They sailed past the house, and Raab suddenly stiffened. Scneoiw had put on the front door, in red letters, "M.M." ir That, of course, meant "Mesa Mederlink." Fury rose in him. He strode aft, where the paddlers would be facing him. "Excuse me, Ben. Stop paddles." Gaffer drifted. When he had control of his voice, he asked, "Do all you men have your affairs wound up?" They sat looking at him silently for a minute, then Jon Cudebek, whom they'd elected as spokesman -- a burly, black-eyed man whose scalp hair seemed to have abdicated completely in favor of bushy black eyebrows -- said, "We don't have much in the way of affairs lately, Skipper." "All right," Raab said, "We're leaving tonight." Ben Sprake muttered, "We're supposed to..." "To hell with that!" Raab said. Then, regretting his rudeness, "There's no reason to wait. We'll load supplies this afternoon and leave as soon as it's dark." IV G affer drifted furtively toward the northern edge of Lowry. Neither of the two large moons would be up before midnight, and the stars gave barely enough light to see the ground. Raab, at the forward rail, hands cupped behind his ears for any sounds ahead, was nervously conscious of the blimp's own unavoidable sounds -- Ben vSprake muttering cadence aft for the paddlers, the rubbing noises of the oarlocks, the whisper of paddle-vanes, the creak of rigging. There'd been a pair of Mederlink Hens operating off this inland edge lately -- huge bulging blimps, with grappling-lines for the gliders they carried. Gliders wouldn't be flying at night, of course. But there'd be fighting blimps backing up the Hens, and they'd be on listening-patrol. If spies had gotten out word of this sortie, it was probably a good thing he was leaving ahead of schedule. The dimly seen ground ended, and the black abyss waited. Turning his head so they could hear him aft too, he quietly told Ammet Oleeny, "Give her two turns forward," then reached for a spoke of the handwheel to help the Trimmer haul it around. The rigging creaked and the cinch-lines made rubbing sounds on the bag; the nose dipped. They began to slide down, a little more steeply than he liked. "Ease off hall a turn forward." Now the mesa blotted out the stars aft, and the bag hid them forward; only to the sides was there anything but blackness. Some small flying creature screetched and fled. Gaffer picked up speed and began to roll. Ben Sprake tried to cancel the roll with the paddles, but the crew hadn't had enough practice together. "Let it go, Ben," Raab told him softly. It was good to have a roll. As the basket swung up he could see higher to each side -- and possibly spot the bulk of an enemy blimp against the stars. He was relaxing a little now, though he kept one hand cupped to an ear. He always felt better in the air. Some people called him skyhappy. Maybe he was. He never got bored, on the longest trip, but could sit during the day watching whatever the sky offered, and at night simply doze briefly or listen to the ship's sounds or the wingbeats of nocturnal flyers circling curiously, or smell whatever faint smells the breeze carried. Right now, those still were mesa smells. They were miles too high for the lustier scents of the jungle. They had about a two-knot tailwind, if it hadn't changed. With their downward slide through Durrent's thick atmosphere plus what the paddles contributed, they must have close to ten knots ground-speed. By now, he guessed, they were eleven or twelve miles from the mesa and had dropped about a mile of altitude. At this rate they'd soon be past any likely patrol from Mederlink. Then, fifteen minutes later, he heard the high-pitched ring of a ship's echo-sounder -- a disk of quartz struck with a small mallet. It was ahead and to port, and not close enough to get an echo from Gaffer's bag. But one ship wouldn't be operating alone. "Stop paddles," he murmured, just loud enough to be heard, then listened hard. There was a very faint ping from dead ahead. I t was too risky simply to try to slip by; he'd have to dive. He ordered softly, "One more turn, fore and aft." The sound of the rigging made him hold his breath, but then there was silence except for the growing whisper of air along the bag. The nose dipped farther. They were really going down, now, and he fretted about the softness of the bag. It was anybody's guess exactly how far down he could go before the thickening air squeezed the undergassed bag beyond recovery. Buoyancy versus squeeze; that was the old bugaboo of diving. The pinging sounds were definitely above them now, but he daren't level out yet. He listened for the sound of signal-flutes, which would mean one of the ships had heard him. They were rolling more than thirty degrees now. Abruptly, someone retched aft. "Damn it!" he muttered savagely, "Clamp your hand over your mouth!" They must have lost another mile and a half, now. He opened his mouth to order constriction off; hesitated. Foolish to panic and pull out too soon. He bent over the forward rail, felt for the ropes that held the ballast-sacks, made ready to slash them. He'd never been in a dive this steep. His ears popped, and he swallowed hard to clear them. Suddenly he felt they'd reached the limit. "Off all constriction! Drop ballast fore and aft!" He jerked out his knife and hacked at the ropes, felt Ihe jar as the weight dropped away. There was no similar jar from aft. "Drop ballast aft!" he called sharply. No need for silence now; they were miles below the search. Finally he felt the aft ballast go. They still had the sharp tilt, and weren't slowing perceptibly. He grabbed Oleeny's arm. "Pick up IF what you can and take it aft!" He himself groped for a pair of food bags, lurched up the slanting deck, heard Oleeny slip and curse behind him. He groped his way forward again, bumping into the Trimmer halfway, and got another load. That was all they could move quickly. He and Oleeny stayed in the stern. He fumbled for a lantern, thumbed its striker until it lit. Now all they could do was wait. He heard a sound he'd never heard before, but which he could recognize -- the nose of the bag flapping in the pressure. God, they were far down! The air was soupy, making the lungs labor. Ben Sprake leaned over the rail and was sick again. The paddlers' faces were frightened in the harsh light. But the nose was lifting, and at last they were level. But they hadn't enough buoyancy, even in this heavy air, squeezed as they were. He tried not to cringe. A crash in the jungle would be mild -- but the jungle wouldn't. He could hear the huge wings now, still below them but not far, of the predators that could pluck men out of a basket like fruit, or tear a bag to shreds if they took the notion. How much altitude now? A quarter-mile? The jungle reek was strong in his nostrils. The nose was tilted up slightly now, and he told the paddlers, "Now. Give it everything you've got. Pull! Back, rest, pull!" He gave Oleeny a nod, and led the way to the two empty seats; unlashed the paddle and picked up the stroke. "Pull! Back, rest -- " T heir slow descent hadn't checked any; the tighter squeeze on the bag offset the increasing buoyancy of the air. But, with the uptilt, the paddles fought the negative lift. The men grunted with effort, making the paddles creak as if they'd break. Something huge flapped by with a harsh croak, and Raab held his breath until it was gone. Gradually the descent slowed. Now they were holding even, but the men -- and Raab -- were gasping. Between strokes, he got out, "A -- little -- longer." He forced his own shoulders to go on, though every stroke was agony. Were they rising a little now? If they weren't, they were beaten. He might as well find out; if they bumped into a tall tree, or some hill... "Ease paddles. Half speed." The temptation was awful to quit altogether. They certainly weren't falling anymore. There was time, now, to unlash supplies and jettison them, if need be, but he thought he'd wah until he was sure he had to. "St paddles." They all slumped there, except tbt Aft Trimmer, who hadn't offered to spell anybody, and Sprake, who was too sick. They waited. Gaffer lost all headway and began to swing, very slowly, in a breeze that couldn't amount to more than a fraction of a knot. After a while one of the paddlers, a wizened little man called Pokey Reger, whom Raab had accepted only because he wouldn't weight much -- but who apparently coidd IS pull a fair paddle -- said, "Be it likely them ship'll see this lantern, Skipper?" "No," Raab told him. "We're miles away now, and the bag hides it. I'm more concerned about -- " He didn't fimish. If they didn't lift, it would be time enough to dump scarce supplies. But, very gradually, he began to feel that the air was moving down along the bag. "We're lifting," he said. Some of the men began to grin. This dive was something they could talk about die rest of their lives. "By damn," someone said, "I sure thought -- " Raab wondered how many of them knew how close it had been. A Httle less gas, or a minute longer in the dive... "Paddles, hatf speed," he said, and got up to take the lantern forward, so he could ber see anything that loomed ahead of them. But they must have gained a thousand fe by now; the jungle sounds were faint. T he first of the big moons came up. He could see the wild tangle below them, the great ponderous flappings. Wearily he made his way aft. "We may as well shift this stuff forward and get leveled." When that was done, he wdered, "Stop paddles. Ammet, get out some sandwiches and a skin oi wine. After we eat, anyone who feels like napping can go ahead." He sat on the forward rail widi a sandwich. Gaffer could lift on her own for an hour or two. He watched the second moon's big half-disc grow sloy up frdflil the horizon. He remembered seeing, as a boy, a distant blimp drifting in silhouette against just such a moon. That way -- east -- lay conquered Orket, and beyond that, Mederlink. The Links were probably operating their blockade out of Mesa Orkrt now. What he needed first of all was helium. He'd have to get it slowly, a few Floaters at a time, avoiding the rich Floater lakes that were likely to be watched. He'd also have to shoot some game with the two hand-bows aboard, and cook up a supply of meat, and stock some fruit and greens. Then he'd head west and try to get around the blockade to the sea and the guano islands. But of course he couldn't begin to fed optimistic until he was inland, (Hit of sight. He looked aft. Lowry, plainly visHalc in the moonlight, still occupied durty degrees of the horizon, rising to twke his present altitude. He decided he'd better put out the lantern and gain another couple of mfles, for insurance. But he'd better slow their lift; they had buoyancy to spare now. "One-half turn, fore and aft." When he got her up there and balanced, he'd have a nap. T he seventeen-hour night came to an end, and Durrent's sun poured gcrfd upon the pland. Lowry was a little fier away now; but not reassuringly so. The sea was visible as a blue strip on the horizon, only a little dirtied by haze. The paddlers, refreshed, wwe pulling deadily. u IF By noon they were over grass country, where the jungle invaded as slim fingers along the river valleys. They passed over an immense herd of grazing animals, looking individually tiny from this height, though Raab knew a big male could weigh twenty tons. The air was full of flying creatures, though the big ones, of course, were confined to lower levels. Gaffer had an escort -- mostly triphibs under five feet long; of various species but all basically like snakes with two pairs of stubby wings in tandem and with eight thin legs, folded in flight -- but including also Terran-descended gulls, which had been brought for some reason in the old colonization ships from Earth. They adapted to the medium-altitude lakes rather than to the thick-aired sea level. It was good to have the escort, for the creatures would warn by their behavior if an enemy blimp came down from above. The gorge country loomed higher by the hour. He worked the paddlers in shifts, that day and the next night. By the following morning he was within a few miles of sanctuary. V A t some time in the geological past, a layer of molten rock several miles deep had occupied this edge of the continent, overlaying solid rock of higher melting point. As the upper layer cooled it cracked in a mosaic pattern, leaving, between masses of hardened rock, a labyrinth of miles-deep fissures; some only a few yards wide, some as wide as a quarter of a mile. Erosion, quakes and volcanos had complicated the (Miginal jumble. There remained an unpredictable maze of twisting gorges, tunnels, caves, lakes, dead-end fissures, sudden open pockets and partly filled valleys. Rivers, from the still higher snow-country farther inland, found torturous ways through the jumble, carving away rock, bringing in soU or washing it away. In general, there was considerable water, fewer sunny hollows than shaded ones, more rock than soil and many isolated anomalies. Inland, the chasms were more filled up; farther seaward, they were mostly washed empty. A spectrum of ecologies had formed, often badly intertangled. Floaters, the source of helium, grew on shady lakes at medium altitudes. From Gaffer's present position, one saw abrupt cliffs in one long wall, with gaps here and there like missing teeth, the gray rock lined vertically as if hundreds of black threads hung down it. Each of those threads was a vertical chasm. Most of them were wide enough for a blimp to enter. Raab was following up a river that was placid at this season. Presently it could be seen that the river emerged from a narrow chasm, the bottom of which it had undercut into a virtual tunnel fifty yards wide and twice that high. He took Gaffer down slowly toward the opening. Finally, little Pokey Reger said, "Be we going in there. Skipper? Raab grinned at the wizened awkward little man. "It's safe. I've been through it more than once." The crew eyed the hole, unconvinced. Finally Jon Cudebek said, "Why this way?" Raab said, a little impatiently, "This is the most direct, and easiest, way to a place I have in mind. Also the safest, because the Links won't know about it. Ben, will you take us inr' T hey pulled in slowly, giving their eyes time to adjust. By the time they were a quarter-mile in, the bright opening was lost behind a turn. A soimd of rapids came from ahead, but here the river flowed smoothly, perfectly clear, bordered by clean sand on either side. The walls and the overhang were covered with pale-green moss, giving the dim light a greenish tinge. In places, the six-mile deep crack above them was straight enough to let in a streak of brighter light, blue by contrast, along the middle of the river. Fish and small triphibs darted away from Gaffer's shadow. The place had a dank smell, made more unpleasant by the density of the air. What breeze there was came downstream: cold air dumping itself through the tunnel. They passed the rapids, a place where rock had fallen and not yet been worn away, then moved along another smooth stretch. That ended at a sharp turn, where the water had deeply undercut one side, leaving much fallen rock and a cave. Raab, busy with the turn, had only glanced into the dark cave, and it was Ammet Oleeny who said suddeidy, "Skipper, I think I saw something in there!" "Oh? What?" "A wreck, I thought!" Raab faced aft. "Stop paddles!" He struck the biggest lantern, which had a white-painted board behind it for a reflector. "Ben, take her back a few yards." He aimed the light into the cave. Someone grunted in surprise. A limp gasbag lay upon the rocks, the contour of a basket showing through ii. "Ben, land us between those two big rocks." While they maneuvered in, Raab broke out mooring stakes. "Ammet, take one of the handbows." He looked from one to another of the paddlers. "Cudebek, how are you with a bow?" "Fair, Skipper." 'Take the other one, then. There might be triphibs here." He lit a smaller lantern and took it with them. He, Oleeny, and Gudebek clambered over the rocks to the wreck. A six-foot triphib launched itself away from them, its bulging eyes reflecting the light, and slid smoothly into the river. Raab held up his lantern near the vanes of the wrecked bag. The name Goshawk stared back at him. He stood frowning at it, bewildered. "Goshawk? Why, she was one of the squadron escorting our Hens, and she was shot down a hundred miles at sea!" His heart was suddenly pounding. "Or -- so the report said!" He called back to Gaffer, "Make camp! We're going to be here for a while!" IF F ive hours later, they sat for their second meal in the cave. Raab, his mind awhirl, realized suddenly that little Pokey Reger had spoken to him. "I beg your pardon, Reger?" "I said, be she got away, why didn't she come home to Lowry, Skipper?" The others waited on the answer. Raab, curbing his impatience, said, "Obviously, because she'd been hit and lost too much gas to lift that high. She was probably coming after gas when they ambushed her." Reger seemed to puzzle over that. Cudebek, his heavy brows pulled down, said, "The fact that they were killed with Lowry harpoons and arrows isn't necessarily proof of treason, is it? Couldn't they have been captured weapons? Couldn't a whole ship have been captured?" Raab looked at him, scowling. "The report's definite, whether it's false or not. It says they went down in the first surprise attack on our Hens. There couldn't have been any ships captured before then. And those men were killed here, not at sea. They were sitting at the paddles when the arrows hit them. So they were ambushed. By whom? This passage was a Fleet secret. Did any of you ever hear of it?" They admitted they hadn't. "All right, then," Raab demanded, "what do you make of it?" Ben Sprake said, in a subdued but belligerent voice, "It seems funny that you brought us right to it." Raab spun and walked over to him. "That's a pretty stupid remark. Your father as well as mine was killed in the battle." Sprake's blond mustache bristled. "At least, I'm sure mine was loyal!" Raab hit him and he went over backwards, gasping with pain as his elbows hit gravel. He lay glaring up, a small trickle of blood coming from one corner of his mouth. Raab took two steps and stood over him, shaking, slowly opening and closing his right hand. He'd never felt so hot and tense in his life. An astonished part of his mind realized he was ready to kill Sprake if he got up. But Sprake, as much surprised as hurt, stayed down, and Raab's fury slowly drained away. He turned his back on the Halfaltern. He was sorry now he'd hit him, or half sorry. He knew Ben hadn't really meant what he'd said. It was just frustration and envy spilling over. Well, it was too late now. He faced the silent crew. "We'd better get out of here. I'm not sure now what the Links do know. There's a place I want to get to before sunup." VI C ollapse, at an intersection of chasms, had left a roughly circular pit about a mile in diameter and a mile and a half deep. A river had made it into a lake and deposited sediment over the rubble before finding itself a new course elsewhere, leaving the lake fed only by small local streams. The lake had shrunk to a few hundred yards diameter, exposing good soil which got a certain amount of sun. Suitable grasses and trees had found the spot, then animals had moved in. Some triphib. probably, had unwittingly carried in Kve fish eggs. Galls added the foreign phenomenon of feathers and hard-shelled eggs. What brought Raab to this particular valley was a large rock-fall on the northern side. With the help of trees it camouflaged a cave where Gaffer could be hidden, and where a fire could safely be built. He got the blimp maneuvered in and tied down, and sent out men with signal-flutes to watch the various approaches, then gave the rest of the crew their leisure. "You can bathe or wash clothes in the creek, but stay out of the lake itself. There are some real teeth in it. The best way to fish the lake is with a throwline. Have clubs handy in case you hook anything big. Stay near cover and don't leave tracks or stray gear, and listen for the flutes. We'll organize a hunting-party this afternoon." With a little embarrassment, he told Ben Sprake, "You can have the first watch off if you like." Sprake mumbled something, got a bar of soap and his dirty clothes, and went with the others. Before long Raab heard them whooping and swearing at the coldness of the stream. He grinned. He hadn't planned it that way, but later, when he took his own bath, the sun would have warmed the creek. He stuck a signal flute in his pocket, then walked over to Oleeny, who, typically, was checking over the forward rigging before thinking of leisure. "You'll spend the first watch here, Ammet?" "Sure, Skipper. I'll get a fire going, in case we catch anything." "Thanks," Raab said, and started out to cheek on his sentries. By the time he got back, most of the men had their clothes washed and spread out under trees to dry. He made sure they were well hidden from the sky, then walked to the lake where some of the men were fishing. Jon Cudebek had already caught something and was cleaning it. Raab walked over for a look, and grunted with surprise. "Is that a metal knife?" C udebek, squatted beside his catch, looked up at Raab for a moment, then wiped the knife on the ground and held it out, handle first. Raab took it and examined it. The handle was bone, and fairly ordinary. Blade and hilt were one piece of dark bronze. He ran his finger along the ten-inch cutting edge. It was a fine piece of metal; over an inch wide and more than an eighth inch thick. The hilt itself would have made a passable knife, beaten into shape. Such a knife must have cost years of a paddler's earnings. He handed it back. "Thanks. I've heard a lot of pro and con about metal blades. What's your experience?" Cudebek pursed his lips to show he was considering his reply, and deftly hacked a wing off his catch. It was one of the common triphib species, like a fat eel, five feet long and ten inches at the middle, with two pairs of rather small legs. Cudebek sliced off the last wing, turned the belly up and paused before slitting it open. "There are good and bad features. That thing of yours IF -- " nodding toward Raab's Fleet Issue knife of polished flint, with bone handle -- "will saw a lot more rope and hold its edge. But bronze won't break or chip as easily, aiwl it can be honed sharp in a few minutes. The main trouble is, you have to keep it cleaned and greased so it won't corrode, and you have to be careful what you grease it with." He sliced .open the triphib, exposing red blood and pinkish meat f which, grilled, would be delicious). "Of course, a metal knife's compact and easy to carry." "That's true," Raab said. "Is that Terran metal, or native?" Cudebek grinned. "Native. You'd have to burglarize the Orket Museum to get a piece of Old Terran metal this big, any more. It's a native bronze, hammered and burnt repeatedly to get rid of impurities, or something." He deftly sliced out the triphib's viscw'a, and answered the question Raab would have asked. "I spent all my savings on it, four or five years ago when I was younger and foolisher. Fve been tempted to sell it more than once, since things have been bad, but I've always gotten by somehow and hung onto it. Maybe I'm still pretty foolislf." "No," Raab said, "I wouldn't say that. It's a beautiful thing." He half turned to leave, then paused. "Oleeny's got a fire g, when you want to cook that T he watch ended. He took his own laundry to e creek. The water was stffl chilly, but bearable, and fte sun was almost too warm. He remembered a happier time when he was about four tees, and his father brought haa henk. There'd been talk of estalshing a Fleet base, to guard the Floator lakes hereabouts, but it had never been done. After bathing and doing his lamdry, he went back to the ship, whore there was hot water, to hack off his beard. When that chore was done, it was time for lunch. Then in the afternoon he took a hunting-party out with the two bows and got some tree-phibs, which had a little different flavor from those that stayed mostly in the water. And while they were hunting they gathered some fruit and some greens and dug a few roots that weren't much for taste but were very effective in warding off scurvy. At sundown, everyone except a few lookouts gathered in the cave, where there were now four smafi fires. Cudebek, helped by the willing but bumble-handed little Pokey Reger, was cooking and salting-down extra meat. The Aft Trimmer, Sols Vannyer, had checked over the aft rigging by now and was showing his first signs of geniality, in a gambling session with about half the paddlers. Ben Sprake sat near them, watching, silent but not sulking. A paddler man with straight black hair who wasn't too bright but had a good pair of wrists and hands for the paddles, was, surprisingly, coaxing something like music out of a signal flute. Later, when the wine began to take effect (Raab had rationed out enough for euphoria but not drunkenness), somebody got a food-tub to IF thump on, and there was a sort of hornpipe dance. One of the men began bellowing an ancient chant, senseless and nearly tuneless, "Johnny, does your dog bite, dog bite, dog bite -- ?" Raab knew what a dog was; had seen pictures of them; but if any survived on Durrent, it wasn't on any of the settled mesas. He supposed the song went back as far as Earth itself. That made him a little moody; for the idea of Earth carried with it connotations of mighty lost glories. Anyway, the men were having a good time; and since they were rehabilitating so fast, he wouldn't have to spend a second day here. He'd chase them to bed at midnight, and lift early in the morning for a Floater Lake. T he surface of the Floater lake was about three miles above sea level, which left it an equal distance below the top of the gorge it was in. The gorge itself ran roughly north and south, and enjoyed a few minutes of sun a day even though it was less than two hundred yards wide. Except when the sun shone directly in at midday, it was very gloomy at lake level. Looking down into it from above, a searcher would see only blackness below the upper mile or so. The lake itself was only four or five miles long, and not rich in Floater plants, so Raab didn't expect to find more than six or seven mature Floaters. To put Gaffer in really luxurious shape, gas-wise, he'd have to harvest ten or twelve such lakes. Half as many would put her in fair condition. Winding along the gorge toward the lake. Gaffer's bag hid the thin bright blue ribbon which was the morning sky overhead. The river deep in the the gorge was lost in gloom. Ahead, the falls that emptied the lake were a growing mutter. He decided it was time to get some altitude. "Off one turn, forward." The nose lifted slowly. The paddlers shifted their feet, bracing against the mild tilt. The mutter ahead became a rumble, then a roar. Two more bends of the gorge, and the falls came into sight -- not a white and foamy over the stairway of fallen rock that dammed the gorge. It was remarkable how much that white water, reflecting sky-light, brightened the gorge. Now he could feel the spray on his face. A flight of small triphibs, disturbed by Gaffer, leaped from some rocky ledge and took undulating flight to sanctuary in the lake. The ship lifted and passed over the brink of the falls, and the roar faded behind her. The lake was a dark placid ribbon dotted here and there with the dark-green, sixty-footwide Floater pads, each with its forest of man-tall vertical shoots that gathered light and air. He peered up the lake, looking for the pale straw-colored mature spheres. "Halfaltern, ahead and to the left. See it? Take us down there, please." Gaffer settled until the basket hung above a pad. Raab dropped a rope ladder over the rail, paid out a hose, then turned and beckoned to Pokey Reger, whom he'd chosen to help him because the man didn't weigh much. He descended, turned and watched Reger's awkward efforts as the men leaned over the rail, grinning at the same thing. Reger's job wouldn't be complicated. Raab reached up a hand to help him, then turned and pushed a way through the shoots. The mature sphere, close to the center of the pad, was eight feet tali and a little less in diameter, translucent, ribbed vertically and -- now -- bulging with helium. Theory was that the planet extracted hydrogen from water and somehow turned it into helium. There was controversy as to whether that was possigas and let the theory go. He said to Reger, "Ever do tWs before?" "Can't say so. Skipper. I only been off the mesa a few times." "Well, stand on the other side of it and hold two corners of this square of cloth, in case it breaks free. I'll be ready to grab the other two." He waited until Pokey was on the other side, then tossed the cloth so it spread over the top of the sphere. Then he poked the nozzle of the hose into the thin-walled sphere, pushing it in until a soft rubber gasket made contact. The hose stiffened with pressure. Later, when the sphere grew limp, someone in the basket would work the hand-bellows. I t was only a few moments later that Reger said in a quiet voice, "Don't move a eyelash. Skipper." Simultaneously Raab heard a ripple of water somewhere behind him. Not daring to turn his head, he turned his eyes up toward Oleeny and asked quietly, "What is it?" "Quadrala, Skipper. Big one." Raab kept his voice down. "Sprake, lift and draw it away. You'll have to kill it or it'll attack you, eventually." The creature, circling Gaffer, came into view. It was a quadrala, all right -- close to sixty feet long, its snake-like head nearly as big as a man. Its two pairs of wings -- one about a third of the way back along its body, the other, two-thirds back -- flapped alternately, so that its long body undulated. The skin was a crazy-quilt pattern of light and dark green -- out of place here; but a common jungle pattern. The eight legs looked insignificant. But any pair of them could jerk a man into the air. It followed Gaffer up, uttering its harsh croaks, trying to decide whether the moving objects in the basket were edible parasites of some kind or whether they were part of the whole strange object -- which was too big to attack. When Gaffer was a few hundred feet up and a thousand or so down the lake, Oleeny swiveled the harpoon launcher around. Now the thing had decided there was food to be had. It twisted in the air and shot toward Gaffer, neck bent into an 'S' to strike. Oleeny put the harpoon just before and below a front wing. The creature contorted and checked itself before crashing into the ship, but the head lashed out. Men ducked from sight. IF Even at this distance, Raab heard wood splinto-. The beast shot about the sky, biting at itself, and apparently got the harpoon out. Then it turned back toward Gaffer, and this time it stayed wide while it labored for altitude. Raab was clenching his hands until they hurt. If it ripped the bag open... But the thing's flying became erratic and more and more desperate. It screamed in frustrated rage, but it was falling. Finally it set its wings and glided down to hit the surface of the lake. There was some thrashing, then it was still. It didn't submerge, which meant it was dead. Reger said, "There be many of those abouts here. Skipper?" "No," Raab told him, "it's the first I've ever seen at this altitude. It must have chased something in here, and been too exhausted to go home right away. Surprising it could fly at all in this air." Gaffer turned and headed back. Raab wondered what he was going to say to Ben -- it was a little embarrassing to have had to depend on him like this. As if Reger had read his thoughts, the little man said, "That Sprake. He don't mean you good. Skipper." Raab flushed a little. "Ben? I've known him all my life!" "Just the same... well, you watch him. Skipper. I ain't going to say more." Vffl flight days later, Gaffefs bag was  as rigid as safety permitted. Now he was ready to head west around the blockade. Since he didn't know the gorges very far in that direction, he'd eventually have to lift to sky level. However, he did know a fairly direct gorge route for thirty miles, and he thought he'd take it. It involved crossing a rich floater lake, so he'd have to go at night. There was a technique for navigating gorges at night (if they were known to be unblocked and fairly vertical), which consisted of fixing f end-poles to the basket, sticking out to either side, with flexible wands on the ends that could scrape audibly against the rock walls without breaking. By midnight, feeling their way along thus, they were nearing the Floater lake. They lifted over the falls that emptied it, and saw ahead, through the narrow opening of the gorge, bright moonlight shining on the opposite wall of the lake valley. The two big moons were fuller now, and rising earlier. For caution's sake, Raab slowed down. "Half-altern! Take us in at quarter speed, and as quietly as possible." Gaffer inched toward the opening. Then Raab smelled wood smoke. He hesitated, on the point of ordering a back-track. Oleeny, sensing his tenseness, whispered, "What is it. Skipper? Are we -- oh! I smell it! Uh, could it be a natural fire?" "At this season?" But Raab let the possibility run through his mind. There'd been no lightning storms for months; anyway, growing things were too green, in places like this, to burn easily. There hadn't been active volcanoes for ages. No; it had to be campfires. And they could hardly belong to anyone but the Links. He knew it wasn't prudent, but he didn't want to sneak away without having a look. , "Back in a minute," he told Oleeny, and groped his way aft. "Halfaltem, I want to emerge over the lake very quietly, at about half a mile above the water, and turn right immediately at half speed. I want to stay within fifty feet of the wall, but not much closer. We won't have the feelers." Ben's voice was petulant. "How can I do that? This is the dark side of the lake!" "There'll be enough reflected light to see by." Raab gave him no more time to protest, but went back forward. T his was another case where rock -- between two parallel cracks -- had been undercut and finally collapsed. The valley was four miles wide, about thirty long. The rubble had filled in the gap to about three miles from sky level, or a little less. Then the two parallel rivers had joined to make a lake, deposit sediment, cut away at the spine of higher rock left at the middle and finally reach some sort of equilibrium. Now the lake was fairly shallow, with a mud bottom that supported Floater plants (via long roots) and a string of islands up the middle. Some of the latter had accumulated soil around them, and so were wooded. The one where the Links had made camp was two or three miles op the lake from the outlet. The first thing Raab saw, as Gaffer crept up the east wall, was two great fat Hens, tied down at the upper end of the small beach. Then he saw six fighting blimps, inland from the beach, floating above the strip of trees (undoubtedly because there wasn't room to tie down). There were two fires near the Hens, and four others farther down the beach. At this distance he couldn't make out human figures except as moving dots, but it appeared they were having a wine bout. Where were the gliders? Finally he spotted them at the edge of the beach. Twenty of them in a line, barely illuminated by the fires. He couldn't tell whether the fighting blimps were manned at all. Usually at least a few men would stay aboard when the ships weren't tied at ground level. But there'd be rope ladders dangling, and it would take the carousing men a while to climb them. He jerked his mind out of that channel. He wasn't leading any attack squadron; he had Gaffer, with one harpoon launcher and two handbows. Each of those fighting blimps down there had eight launchers on a side. What was a squadron like that doing here? Getting helium for one thing, of course. But Hens were slow. When they came for gas they usually didn't bring their gliders, and didn't have fighting blimps along with them, slowed to their pace unless they needed escorts. And there was certainly no one in a position to attack two Mederlink Hens, even unescorted. IF The probability was that the Links knew Gaffer sneaked off Lowry, and dispatched this group to patrol the nearby Floater lakes. The gliders meant a sky watch, too. Well, he'd seen them. And they evidently didn't take their patrol very seriously, and the thing for him to do was go on quietly up the lake before the moons rose any higher, and be safely to the west before morning. He paused, on the point of giving the orders, and stared a moment longer at the impudently unguarded camp. And there was an intoxication in his blood that made his head a little fuzzy, and made his breathing deep and uncomfortable. He let out an unhappy sigh. Was there any chance that this was a trap? The odds were very much against that. Just one running pass... Four or five harpoons; and ordinary arrows, falling almost vertically, would pierce gasbags too. And there were those gliders, so beautifully lined up, floating. A few sacks of ballast, slit open and raining gravel, some of it coarse enough to crash through a wing... H e knew he was being a fool. But he turned and went aft, and told Ben Sprake, "I want a course along that beach, at the edge, especially over the gliders. About two thousand feet as we pass over. A dive first, to get all the speed possible. Then -- " Sprake's gasp and low cry interrupted him. "You, uh -- you can't be serious!" The intoxication swirled through Raab's brain. "Why not? It'll take them fifteen minutes to get the first blimp lifting! And look at the area they'll have to search. There's a narrow gorge off the west side, about five miles up, and we'll be there before the moonlight's down to the water on that side, and -- " Cudebek's voice broke in. "Hold on there. Skipper. We didn't sign on to fight. We're civilians." Raab's words galloped on. "N jt now you're not! I'm in command of a Fleet unit, and we're in contact with the enemy, and I have the power to conscript you. You're now Fleetmen." The hush was a palpable thing. I mustn't do it like this, with a heavy whip, he told himself. He took a deep breath and tried to speak calmly"Let me explain things to you This task force here is looking for us. Before dawn, those Hens will lift to three miles above ground level. With that, and with what breezes and thermals they can find, the gliders will range sixty miles or more in all directions, and be able to see thirty miles more. We won't be able to poke our nose into daylight. And there aren't any charted gorge routes we can take. We'll have to travel at night only. Meanwhile they're apt to find one of the places we cut Floaters, and know for sure we're in the area." He realized with a shock he was exaggerating, but plunged on. "Half the blockade will be after us then. But if we puncture those Hens, it'll be two days, maybe more, before they're patched and pumped up again." He felt shame and added, "Besides -- that's the enemy! That's Mederlink. We've got a chance to hit them, slow them down a little, without adding to our own risks. We'll actually gain a few days." He paused, wishing he could see their faces. "It isn't that I want to compel you." After a minute, some one said, "I didn't sign on to fight." There was a period of muttering and argument, in which Raab had to remind them to hold their voices down. Finally Cudebek said heavily, "We'll vote on it. Would you try to conscript us against our will?" Raab hesitated. It was hard to know just how to apply pressure without antagonizing them even more. Finally he said, "No. I won't try to force you. But you've read the Articles of War. As citizens, you'll be responsible -- not to me or to the Fleet, but to the Government -- if you refuse." There was more growling. Finally Willy Wainer spoke up. "I got an eight-year-old sister back on the mesa. I been watching her get skinnier every day; that's one reason I signed up. I'll fight." Cudebek said, "So will I, if a majority's for it. Let's vote." One by one, the voices chimed in. "I'm for it!" "Me too!" "You're a bunch of damned fools! We'll all get killed!" "Shut up! Jump out if you want to!" "I'll fight!" Cudebek chuckled. "A majority for it. What do we do?" Raab fought to control his excitement. "Mostly, just paddle like hell when the time comes. I'll want you personally, I guess, to use one of the bows." Little Pokey Reger said in an mar steady voice, 'T sure never though I'd be a Fleetman." G affer slid down toward Ae island. Raab, at the forward rail working to get the harpoon launcher unmounted and transferred to the port side, wiped sweaty hands on his uniform. He hadn't been entirely honest with the men. There might be blimps already in the air, guarding the camp. There might even be a third Hen aloft, her gliders flying by moonlight. Or, quite possibly, at two thousand feet and more (he dared go no lower, as he needed some altitude to escape) he might not score a single hit with harpoon or arrow. And the number of exits from the lake valley weren't unlimited, after all. Reflected moonlight was bright enough here so he could see his own hands easily, and that worried him. If there were anyone alert on watch... , Now he could hear the shouts and singing. He hurriedly finished mounting the launcher, cranked it up and slid a harpoon into place. Oleeny was ready with one of the hand-bows; Cudebek, midships, with the other. Raab craned his neck to make sure they were aligned with the parked gliders. They were; Sprake, though obviously frightened and furious, was doing a good job. There was a very slight roll. Now that he thought about it, that wouldn't hurt. It would help spread the gravel in a wider path. IF They were getting close. He watched two men wrestling near one of the fires. If that only kept the Links' attention for another few minutes... He wiped his hands again, seized the handles of the launcher and twisted it down and forward, one of the bulging Hens in the sight. Automatically he let go with one hand to pluck at the great braids of rubber, making sure the tension was equal on each side. They thrummed identically. He tried to visualize how much the trajectory would curve if he shot now. Wait a little? No; time was too short. He squeezed the trigger and the basket jarred slightly as the big, vaned harpoon streaked away. He cranked frantically, fumbled for another missile. Oleeny sent an arrow arching out ahead. Too far for much hope, but there were plenty of arrows. Raab shot again, at another compartment of the closer Hen. He couldn't see his first harpoon until it struck, just aft of the nose. He felt like shouting as the fabric split, then flapped outward. The two Links stopped fighting and whirled. Figures were leaping into motion all over the camp now. He threw a glance toward the fighting blimps as he cranked a third time. No action there yet. Now the shouts began to reach him. He slammed another harpoon into place, but let the weapon hang while he lunged forward to slash at ballast sacks. Damn! He should have had another man forward to do that. He called aft, "Gravel!" and hoped Trimmer Sols Vannyer would act fast. At the launcher again, he shot nearly straight down. There were other punctures now, as Cudebek or Oleeny got lucky arrow-hits. The place was a chaos. Links were scrambling up rope ladders now. He got reloaded, swiveled the weapon and shot at the second Hen. He couldn't see whether his second and third missiles had hit or not, but the first Hen was losing plumpness fast. He cranked, knowing there'd be only one more shot, and aimed very carefully. Rigging creaked now as Oleeny and Vannyer hauled at the constricTing-wheels to compensate for the lost ballast. Raab leaned over the rail, squinting back at the parked gliders. If any of them were damaged, he couldn't see it from here. Cudebek sent a last arrow arching aft, then took his place at a paddle. Sprake picked up the tempo until the men grunted with effort. One of the fighting blimps was manned now, and a Link was slashing at the ropes R aab seized Oleeny's arm. "Can you stand half a turn more?" "Yep." Shaft and wheel protested as Oleeny hauled on the spokes. Raab had been too enthusiastic, he knew, with the gravel. He should have kept half the forward ballast. He daren't lift into thinner air now, even if he wanted to. He stared aft. The fighting blimp was rising fast, its paddles straining, its launchers beginning to swing away from the rails. It rose out of sight. Two more were ascending now. Gaffer was still slanting down, on the same course. :# It all depended on whether they had him in sight. If they did, they'd simply overtake Gaffer and riddle her. If not, they'd expect him to turn, and more than likely to lift skyward as fast as he could. Since he couldn't see them, he couldn't know. His ears strained for the woosh of harpoons. The shouting at the camp was beyond hearing now, but he could hear signal flutes from there, and answers from some of the blimps. One Hen was deflated to her inner cells. The other was limp forward, but only sagging a little midships and aft, probably just an arrow hit or two. They'd be swarming over her, patching those before she lost more gas. What was above Gaffer? If they had lost sight (surely they'd seen her by firelight as she passed over) they might be going on up. The farther they went, the less chance they'd see Gaffer in the shadow. And if they got into actual moonlight, they might as well be blind. It seemed to him now that he'd been an incredibly optimistic fool. There was nothing better to do than take the gorge he'd originally had in mind, to the west. Would they know that gorge? Wouldn't they guess he was going west, around the blockade? They should -- already he was far west of Lowry, which was a plain clue. It depended on how fast they thought, he supposed. He slumped on the forward rail, brooding over it. He felt tired now, and drained of courage. He could navigate that narrow gorge by feelers, but where it ended -- where the charts ended. rather -- he'd have to lift clear ot he'd simply lose himself in twisting mazes. Not at the end. The charts showed the sharp turn there, which would be plain enough to the Links even in starlight. So, he'd have to lift five miles or so this side; enough so they wouldn't (assuming they followed that gorge, above it) be waiting. Maybe he wouldn't even go that far. A couple of hours after midnight, the moons would be past the zenith, but still high, so Gaffer wouldn't be so well lit from the side. He'd take his chances that they weren't watching that particular spot. But there was the problem of the ballast... Only one thing to do about that. The river, above the lake, would provide gravel. They'd hide Gaffer in shadow, and gather ballast by moonlight. Or should he let that go, and valve helium instead for a lower (and safer) pressure at higher altitudes? No; he wasn't going to give up the painfully collected gas. He started aft to give Ben the necessary orders, but Cudebek heard him, and, between grunts of exertion, got out, "Skipper, when can I talk to you?" Raab halted, annoyed. "Why, as soon as we're safe. We've got to refill ballast sacks, then get away from this vicinity. There's no time to waste because we have to dodge the moonlight." Cudebek's voice was ugly. "This won't wait, Garan!" Raab suppressed anger. He couldn't afford a shouting match IF now. He stood tiiere, torn between tfae urge to keep going, and the recognition diat being rou with the kesman conld mean trouble tider. After a moment he said bruy, "As soon as we're tied down. DC H e kept them pulling farther than he'd originally intended, to where a bend would keep the moonlight from striking the river at all. It was very dark here; they had to tie down by feel. A couple of hundred yards downstream, by his reckoning, there should be enough reflected light to work by. They could walk that far. First of all, allowing only one man out at a time, he got some rocks stacked in the basket so the Trimmers could ease off the strain on the constricting gear. Then they tied down to large boulders. "Now," he demanded from Cudebek, half inclined to make it plain that the man was under Fleet discipline now. "What's so urgent?" Cudebek said flatly, "Someone's stolen my knife." Raab checked an angry curse. He said instead, "Your knife? Why... it probably fell out of the scabbard when you were shooting arrow! Or when you moved around!" Cudebek fairly snarled at him. "Damn it, Garan, don't you think I know how to keep a scabbard buttoned?" Raab's face grew hot. "You'll address me as 'Skipper' or 'Sir'! I'll order everyone out, and you can feel around the deck yourself." Cudebek said, his voice murderous, "It won't be on the deck. I want everyone stripped and searched. And I want all the cargo gone over. Raab's anger broke free. "You complete fool! Do you think we're going to light all the lanterns and make a search here? Why in God's name did you bring a knick-knack like that anyway? Did you think this was a women's and children's outing? Feel around the deck if you want to. Otherwise, shut up and get to work looking for gravel." He realized suddenly that he had his hand on the hilt of his own knife, ready for a challenge. Thank God it was too dark for anyone to see that. But his raised voice alone was shame enough; that wasn't the way a Skipper acted. He said, with more control, "All the rest of you out. We've got to mend the sacks first of all." As a sudden afterthought, he added, "if anyone does have Cudebek's knife. I'd suggest putting it quietly back on his seat when no one's looking. Theft in combat carries the death penalty. I won't hesitate just because we're short-handed." They got the gravel. Cudebek had felt his way over the ship and was ominously quiet as they prepared to lift. In order to get where Raab wanted to be by midnight, they had to risk going back downstream during the few minutes when moonlight shone directly in. They reached the westward-running gorge he wanted, and turned into it. He lifted to within half a mile of the top, and kept the men rowing harder than he had to. That turned out to be unfortunate, because they had a wait before it was time to lift clear out. And as soon as they slowed down Ben Sprake said, wiA a mixture of emotions competing in his voice, "Sir, as Second in Command, and with concurrence of a majority of the crew, I invoke the right of Question." A fter his first instinctive anger, Raab found he was neither deeply furious nor surprised. He gave himself a moment, then said coolly, "I grant the right. Just what is it you want to question?" Ben said hesitantly, "Uh, your orders. We weren't -- that is, we feel you've exceeded your orders." "Oh?" Raab had never felt this kind of cool, controlled anger before. "Are you sure you know exactly what my orders were?" Jon Cudebek spoke up. "As crew spokesman, I'd like to talk, Skipper." His voice in the darkness was precise and cold. Raab told him, "Now that you're Fleetmen, you don't rate a spokesman. Go ahead, though, and have your say." The burly man said, "When we signed on we were told we'd make every effort to avoid the enemy. As long as it was put that definitely, I think your orders must have been along the same lines." Raab considered for a minute. "Just who's making this protest? You, Cudebek? Or Half-altern Sprake?" It was a loaded question. The crew could be punished for mutiny. whether they were right about the orders or not, if a Board of Inquiry so decided. Sprake, as Second in Command, would be held as widiin his duty if his action were found to be in accord with facts. After a minute Ben said sullenly, "Well, uh, I am, sir." "All right," Raab said. "Can you quote my orders? Did you see a written copy " "No, sir." Hesitantly. "Then," Raab said, "actually, you're protesting on behalf of the crew. Is that it?" "Well, yes, sir." "Fine. Now that that's established, just what is it you all want? Should we go back and apologize to the Links for hitting them? Or do you want to sneak home without even trying for any guano?" Ben was silent. Finally Cudebek put in, "If I may speak again, Skipper. What we want is a guarantee that we are going after guano, and nothing else. That's what we signed on for. Not to go around looking for fights. Even if the odds weren't so, uh, ridiculous, we think that's the Fleet's job. And I don't think you can conscript us the way you did, and be backed up once we get home." "I'll remind you," Raab said, "that you voted. But let's forget that. Will you accept an assurance that we'll try to avoid any more contact with the Links?" Cudebek said in the same politely hostile voice, "Not quite. Skipper. I understand we can refuse if you try to order us into any more fights." IF Raab smiled grimly m the dark. "Not exactly. If I commit gross misconduct, or treason, ot directly disobey my orders -- and you don't know those -- Half-altern Sprake can take over command, with the concurrence of two-thirds the crew. But you'll face an Inquiry at home, and Mr. Sprake will have to represent Ben said angrily, 'Tm invoking the question!" "Um," Raab said noncommittally. "All right, we'll leave it that way. Now, it's time to lift out of this trench. Half-altern, since you contemplate taking over command in the future, you'd better get some experience. Will you take her up and set a course west?" T here was a charged silence in the basket. The feelers scraped rock as Gaffer rose. Now the cleft became faintly lighted as moonlight from above bounced from wall to wall. Sprake's voice was nervous as he directed the paddlers. Another quarter-mile up and he ordered hesitantly, "One-half turn constriction, fore and aft." The lift slowed and Gaffer hung, ready to start down again. Ben ordered a quarter-turn off, and she rose very slowly. Relaxed at the forward rail, Raab grinned to himself. If you wanted to dwell on it, the rigging did creak a trifle ominously. Of course the danger was that, with the bag so taut, as they rose into thinner air the increasing expansion of the helium would break constricting-lines, or tear them loose from the shaft. Even worse, with an old, patetodand-repatched bag Mke Gaffer's, tiie swelling helium might rupture the bag. The lit brightened. Far down the gorge, Raab ooidd see, beneath the bag's nce, a stretch of brightly lit rim. They cmt to emerge very slowly and oeep akmg close to die ground (which was mostly rocky lre) to be as inamsiuous as possible. He knew all those things were churning in Bq's mind. A minute later Ben burst out, "Sir, may I valve a little gas?" Raab said curtly, "You're temporarily in command. Halfaltera." They were very near the top. Sprake, with a toui of panic, siud, "Raab, I'm not familiar with the ship! I'd like to valve a little gas and drop a little ballast!" Raab allowed himself a chuckle. "That's up to you. But remnber we'H be going to sea level. You can't afford to throw away too modi gas. And you haven't much ballast to spare, either," The silence resumed. Then Sprake said furiously, "Sr, I don't know how much this ship will stand. Will you take over?" "VVhy, yes, if you wish, Halfaltern." Raab arose, climbed to the rail, stood up and thumped the bag, more for effect than anything else. "Off a quarter-turn, fore and aft. Mr. Sprake, as soon as we emarge I'll set the course, then I'd like you to call cadence if you feel up to it." He could think of many clever things he might say. Instead, he calmly got them headed west, then let Ben take over. The lesson would speak for itself. Ben's voice, mumbling cadence, sounded almost tearful. Raab, relaxed again forward, examined his own feelings with wonder. He didn't seem to feel any sympathy at all for Ben. Nor for Cudebek -- it was too bad the man had lost his knife, but that wasn't Raab's responsibility. And he and Ben had challenged Raab's authority. Ben, he thought, was thoroughly put in his place now, but Cudebek might need a little discipline. He was amazed and vaguely ashamed at his own hardness. X S ix more days had passed. Five had seen Gaffer fighting her way westward and seaward against breezes that wouldn't have bothered a better-shaped, better-manned blimp. One had been spent on an unsettled small mesa, when the paddlers were exhausted and on the point of rebellion. Just before dawn of the seventh day, Raab stood at the forward rail peering ahead for the island he had in mind. He'd tried to time things so they'd arrive earlier in the day than gliders were likely to be flying. But the island wasn't in sight, and if he didn't spot it soon he'd simply have to risk lifting higher to get a more distant horizon. He moodily pondered the future. He'd fill the ballast sacks with guano, and, when they reached Lowry, try to lift to the top with as much as possible. He didn't look forward to making the same long roundabout trip back. Rather, he thought he'd try to reach the seaward edge in two nights. That would mean lying at sea level during one day, hoping he wouldn't be spotted, then pulling hard for the mesa as soon as the sun went down. On the seaward side, there were updrafts that would add a little to his lift. He scowled, sweeping his gaze along the horizon. He must have misjudged it badly. He glanced toward the pale orange glow in the east. Fifteen minutes until the sun poked up. Then he found the small dot on the horizon, and his mood brightened. "Half-altern, forty degrees left. And let's push it." The sun was an hour up when they crossed above the bare rocky ridge of the island to settle by a grove of trees where Gaffer could be camouflaged. That took another hour, but there hadn't been any sight of blimps or gliders. They had a late breakfast, and he considered giving the crew a day of rest, but decided he'd get the guano dug and sacked up first, so they'd be ready to leave. He called the crew together and gave instructions. "Stay off the higher rocks unless you're on lookout. Don't scare up clouds of birds. Look for deposits that have washed down and have grass sprouting from them, but that aren't too wet. If you hear a flute, get out of sight and get back to the ship as fast as you can. Half-altern, I'll draw you a sketch of the south end of the island, and you can take half the men. I'll take the others north. Oleeny, you stay with the ship. R aab posted one of his men less than a mile from Gaffer, then led the rest on about an equal distance. They'd reached a good deposit and were starting work, when, from farther along the island, someone hailed them. Raab jerked upright and stared at a band of gaunt, bearded men in tattered Fleet uniforms, at the edge of another grove. He dropped the bag he was holding and ran in that direction, calling over his shoulder, "Come on!" When he was within fifty yards of the castaways, one of them recognized him. "Garan! Raab Garan!" Raab stared at the grinning emaciated face. "Why -- good God; Nik Roos! What in -- Trimmer, you were reported dead!" The two groups met and there was a babble of happy curses, jokes and handshakes all around. Trimmer Roos told Raab breathlessly, "We were riddled and falling before we knew what hit us. The Links were going over low, shooting survivors, but eleven of us hid inside the bag. Then that night we chopped up the basket and made a raft, enough to keep us afloat, anyway. I remembered this island and didn't think they'd be looking this far west, and we made it. Nine of us did, that is. A big triphib got two. Another's died since. When we saw Gaffer coming this morning..." He sobered. "Things must be bad, eh? Did your father make it back to Mesa Lowry all right?" Raab said, "He died on the retreat." Roos looked at the ground silently for a moment. "I'm scwry to hear that, Raab. Somebody signaled he was hurt. And it looked as if what was left of the Fleet would have to fight all the way home, if they made it at all." He looked up again, eyes blazing. "But as long as you're stitt holding out, I guess you got the traitors." Raab seized his arm fiercely. "Roos! Do you know who it was? They -- my father was accused!" "What?" Roos looked incredulous. The others stood in a silent circle. "Why, those..." Trimmer Roos snarled, "You can be damned sure I know who they are! When we get back -- " His face changed. "But you'll be here for guano, and you've only got Gaffer" Raab frowned at him. "Eh? Oh! Why, don't be stupid! Of course we're taking you back! Do you think we'( -- why, hell; none of you weigh very much, from the looks of you. Any guano we take back will be only be a token, anyway. Say, why don't you all go on back to Gaffer and get yourselves a decent meal? We've got greens and fruit, and plenty of cooked fresh-water 'phibs. Ammet Oleeny's on watch there." He grinned. "I think you know him." Roos chortled. "Ammet?" Politeness struggled with hunger and the prospect of seeing an old buddy. "Well, sir..." Raab gave him a shove. "Go on. We'll sack up a little guano and be along in an hour." IF R aab was too excited to care about guano now. They'd just fill a few sacks, and... now that he thought of it, they wouldn't have to jettison it completely, as ballast. There were a few ledges partway up the mesa's sides, where he could drop some of it. Maybe a blimp could sneak down later and pick it up. The main thing was to get Nik Roos and his companions home, so they could talk. Almost incoherent, he hustled his men along and they started back with a dozen filled sacks. But when they'd gone part way, he heard Nik Roos shouting his name again. The Trimmer, panting and staggering with exhaustion, burst into sight. "Raab! Oleeny's been murdered and Gaffer's flat!" XI R aab, feeling dazed, stared down at the body. Oleeny lay on his back, feet near the basket, as if he'd been facing it and had fallen or been pulled over backward. His throat was slashed almost to the spine. The blood on the ground was congealed, and he wasn't bleeding any more. There was a mark on one temple as if he'd been clubbed unconscious before his throat was cut. He must have been killed shortly after Raab and the others had left. Raab felt physically sick with remorse. How could he have been so stupid as to leave one man alone on watch? Slowly, he turned to Nik Roos. "You're sure there's no one else on the island?" Nik pulled his gaze away from the body. Of course. WeVe been here two years." He cdored. "You don't think one of us -- ?" Raab made an impatient gesture. "Of course not" He turned and stared toward the sea. "Could someone have... No; it has to be one of my crew. Maybe more than one. From the other half." Dull anger began to replace his daze. How many? Why had he let Cudebek and Sols Vannyer go with Sprake? They were both hostile, and might be traitors for all he knew. Nik said, "Why didn't they take the ship and leave us stranded?" Raab's mind began to work. He strode to the basket, made sure both hand-bows were there. "Because there weren't enough of them, obviously. As many as three could have taken her up, and paddled enough for heading. They could have just drifted until the Links spotted them. If there are patrols this far west." Roos said, "There are patrols, all right. Every four days. Blimps and gliders." After a minute he added, "So, one man or two. And they plan to signal, and be picked up by the Links -- with the rest of us." Raab nodded slowly, and turned to stare at Gaffer again. The bag could be mended, all right; but most of the helium was gone. Only the inner cells -- which wouldn't lift the basket alone, even without crew or cargo -- kept the bag from being completely flat. He turned, shaking with anger, to Nik. "Maybe we should let them signal, but be watching. Or -- maybe we can lure a blimp down some way! Even if we had to hole it, we could get enough gas for Gaffer! Do you have any weapons on the island?" Nik shrugged. "Two hand-bows we brought." "That makes four," Raab said, beginning to feci excited, "And the launcher. And we can make other bows, and -- " Nik shook his head. "Hardly. There hasn't bei a lone blimp over since we've bci here. The patrol's a full unit; Hens and gliders and fighting blimps. They come by late in the day, as if they're on the way back to base." "Oh," Raab said dejectedly. Then his head snapped up suddenly. "Base? What do you mean?" Roos gave him a quick glance. "Didn't you know? They've got an island base somewhere. I think it must be Mell Island, from the direction they take. There's nothing else near with greens and fruit and game. And it would be a handy location." Raab nodded, dejected again. It would be a good location, if one had plenty of helium for lifting, and the Links had plenty. It explained some things about the blockade, and also explained the task force he'd hit on the lake. So maybe they hadn't been looking for him, after all. Well, a base that near put him and his crew in even a worse fix. He certainly hadn't turned out to be beginning to understand why Adbeaten. He could imagine now, for much of a hero, he mused. He was miral Kline, and others, acted so had felt, mortally wounded, seeing the first time, how his own father the Fleet shot to pieces around him, desperately gathering together what he could salvage for an almost hop less fighting retreat. Maybe Command wasn't a desirable thing, after all. But he, Raab, had asked for it; it was up to him to do what he could. "Maybe," he said wearily, "we'd better just round up the rest of my crew and keep them under guard." A little of his anger returned. "I'll question them one at a time! Maybe I'll find out something." T he others were vituperative at being herded under weapons, until they saw Oleeny's body and the condition of Gaffer. Raab addressed them first of all in a group. "At least one of you is a murderer and a traitor. I'm going to ask each one of you, separately, for any information you can give me that might point to some and clear the rest. You understand I haven't any choice but to keep you all under guard meanwhile. Anyone who resists or tries to escape will be killed on the spot." Later, after long hours of interrogating, he sat down for a late evening meal and to discuss things with Nik Roos. "Well, unless all of them are lying, we can definitely clear two or three. No more." Roos agreed. "What about Ben Sprake? Excuse me, I know he's an officer. But he acts pretty vague about where he was at what time, and he seems to have a lot on his mind. And the others can't pinpoint him very well either." Raab shrugged. "True. But I beIF Scve his story diat he went to dieck on his lookout, then moved from group to group. He's very mad at me for something that happened before we got here, but I can't see him as a murderer, or a traitor. Actually, it's my fault for not telling him to keep his group together." He cut a small chunk of cold meat and chewed it without enthusiasm. "What about this Jon Cudebek?" Nik asked. Raab said, "Possibly. But Oleeny would probably have been suspicious of him in particular. As I see it, someone Oleeny had no reason to mistrust came and asked him for something out of the basket -- probably said Sprake had sent him -- then, when Ammet bent over the rail to get it, clubbed him. Well, I'm going to get some rest, then take the late watch. Are you satisfied with the guard arrangements?" Roos said, "They're as ' good as they can be. The only thing is, Ben Sprake outranks all of us except you. By the way, I haven't congratulated you." "Thanks," Raab said bitterly. "I've told Sprake what to expect if he misbehaves." H e knew he wasn't going to sleep. He didn't. There were so many things he had to think about just to keep from being discovered by the patrols. Gaffer's camouflage would have to be renewed every few days; and the foliage couldn't be taken from where it would show. Cook-fires, and any fishing or egg-gathering, would have to be handled carefully. And how did you guard eight or nine men so well that none of them could pwsibly leave any sign, without actually keeping them tied up? He might have to do just that. And what of the long run? He didn't think there was any reason a single blimp would land here, or even fly over so it could be lured down. How would they do the luring, anyway? Disguise themselv as marooned Mederlink crewmen? Not promising. Could they leave this island by raft, get to a bigger one, with game and other food, outside the blockade? That might permit them to die of old age, eventually, instead of malnutrition. The coast offered nothing. It was all jungle for thousands of miles, except for the mesas. And none were climbabie. It all came back to hdium. Would it be possible to reach some island where a single blimp might land, for food or fresh water? His puke quickened. Now he was beginning to make sense! A raft, with paddles... But why a raft? Why not a boat, if they were going to take time to build something? They could chop up Gaffer's basket, and -- no! Why chop it up? It would make a boat frame as it was! Or, build on a pointed bow and stern. Cover it with the bag fabric -- two layers, for insurance. It would be more of a barge than a boat, flat-bottomed, wider than her draft, but it would be sturdy and plenty big enough. The air paddles should work in water, with the right handling. He began to go over in his mind the suitable islands. He'd never been much farther west than this. There was one big island, a little farther west and farther out, but that was probably two hundred miles away. Mell was the only closer one. If Mcll weren't already occupied... He gasped, rolled to his feet and groped through the darkness to where Nik Roos was on guard. "Can you get someone to relieve you? I want to talk to youl Shaky with excitement, he led the way to an ioslated spot. "We want helium. The Links have it. We can't lure them down here, because they'd be suspicious. But on Mell Island -- which we can reach by boat -- they wouldn't be expecting us I" Roos was silent for a minute. "But... even if we could steal some gas, how'd we get Gaffer there? How big a boat are you talking about?" Raab felt like laughing aloud. "We won't worry about Gaffer. Well take the helium blimp and all. Maybe we can capture the whole base!" Roos drew in his breath. "Good God! Why, that's -- no; it's no more impossible than surviving here!" Then his voice dropped. "But a third of us are suspects." Raab said, "I've got the beginning of a plan about that, too." T hev were approaching an island from the windward side. It was not Mell Island, but few of the boatful knew that. He'd taken Nik Ross into his scheme to find the traitor, and he'd had to tell Ben Sprake because Ben knew star navigation well enough not to be fooled by a lie. He'd had less argument from Cudebek and the others than he'd expected. The story he'd given them was that they'd stay under restraint and be taken back to Lowry. He spoke only of stealing one blimp, if possible, and stressed mainly the food on Mell. He had most of the group bunched forward, so the bow wouldn't rise and slap down hard every time they met a swell. If he ever had to build another boat, there were some changes he'd make. However, at least this one had a very shallow draft that would make it easy to beach. They were approaching a beach now, in a cove that was enclosed by a half-circle of cliffs and heavily wooded. The wind was mild, but there were breakers to worry about The two big moons (nearly full now, and one of them near setting) lit half the cove; the other half looked black. Raab let the paddles rest for a minute. "We'll go in fast, jump out and drag the boat up among the trees, then smooth out the sand behind us. We'U stay here a couple days and reconnoiter. The base will be on the other side of the island, and they'll have lookout posts on the highest ridge. We'll have to locate those first of all." There was no talk. Most of the men, not knowing the island was unoccupied (or so Raab assumed), were tense. He didn't see any need to prolong their worry. "All right; let's go in." IF r ie boat was hidden and their tracks obliterated. Raab, squeezing water out of his clothing, looked at the moon and made calculations. Less than two hours until sunup. He told the group, "I'm going to reconnoiter alone. If I'm not back by noon, you'd better figure you're in trouble; but just in case they don't come after you. I'll teU you the closest way up the ridge. About a mile in the direction I'm going, there's another cove, with a stream leading up from it that you can follow. Once you get out of the cove, you'd better leave the stream and stay in the thickest woods you can find. The other side of die island's not so steep; you can get down anywhere, almost. I'll stay on the right side of the stream as you face up it -- that's this side. So if I don't make it back, you'd better try the other. I suggest you eat before sunup, then post pickets and stay quiet until noon. Got wr He took his knife, a Hght twentyfoot rope, and a small pouch of food. That was for show. He moved through the trees, not looking back while they could see him. As soon as he was out of sight he moved at a trot to get to the end of the cove as soon as possible. There, he stood in the fringe of trees a minute, scanning the narrow strip of beach ahead. He needed some hiding-place, and he had to leave a convincing set of tracks. He spotted a shallow cave that provided a deep shadow, and headed toward it. He went on past and around a bulge of rock, then carefully backtracked, putting his feet in the same prints. He leaped for the shadow and made it without leaving exposed tracks. The surf was luminous in the waning light. Somewhere out over the sea, a small triphib kept uttering its harsh screech, probably seeking others of its kind. Raab, careful to stay in shadow, squirmed for a less uncomfortable positkm. His plan seemed a Htde silly now. All he had to bank on was that the traitor ought to be feehng desperate by now. If he didnH get away and reach the Links, he was likely to be killed with the others in some foolhardy action. And even if they did come -- if there we two of them -- it occurred to him tlt they'd be warned by the enchng of his tracks a few yards beyond. Why hadn't he thought of that? And he suddenly saw another hole in his original plan, in case there were two. One, he'd hoped to overcome, by surprise, even if it was the burly Cudebek. But he'd thought two could just be abandoned on the island, once he knew who they were -- he'd just let them go by, then go back and take the boat and the rest of the crew out to sea. God, he thought; what a numbskull I am! They could signal! Why don't I ever think things through? Then, vaguely, he saw movement among the trees. T he pumping of his blood was almost unbearable. He had to take deep breaths and force himself to hold still. Very carefully, he drew his knife, gripped it for throwing. Now the dimly seen figure took another step, and he nearly gasped aloud. It was Pokey Reger. His mind darted over events and iht crew's statements. Yes, it was possible! In fact, it was Reger's testimony, more than any other, that made Cudebek a suspect. His eyes strained to see into the shadows, locate a second man if there were one. But, after a moment, Reger stepped from the trees alone and trotted -- with no sign of his former awkwardness -- along the narrow beach, Raab's astonishment was such that he almost let Reger go past without a challenge. But just as the little man came opposite, he stepped out of the shadow and called the single word, "Traitor!" Reger spun toward him. Raab started another step, intending to seize the man by die arms, throw him down and tie him so he couldn't struggle. It was in his mizKl, in a dim way, that he'd have to be gentle with the little man. But then Reger's arm was sweeping up like lightning, and Raab had a glimpse of the knife ready to throw. Before he could move, it flashed through his own mind that this was no clumsy little nothing, but a trained killer who'd know how to throw a knife. His own arm snapped up and he threw, quickly, mostly with his wrist. As soon as the knife left his hand he hurled himself to the side and down. Reger's knife missed him by inches. It clanged against the cliff as no piece of flint ever did. His own knife took Reger dead center, in the solar plexus. Reger gave a suppressed cry and fell. Raab rolled to his feet a leaped toward him. But Reger was through. He lay on his side, knees partly drawn up, one fist clenched around the hilt projecting from bis middle, but not trying to pull the knife out. He breathed in shallow agonized gasps. He struggled to turn his head toward Raab, and forced the ghost of a grin. "I -- should have -- figured..." His voice trailed off in a groan. It wasn't long before the breathing stopped. S lowly Raab stooped and took hold of the knife. He had to wrench hard to get it free. In something of a daze, he washed it in the surf, dried it on his uniform and put it in its scabbard. Then he went looking for the knife Reger had thrown. As he expected, it was Cudebek's bronze one. He hefted it in his right hand. An excellent throwing weapon, no doubt; but probably Reger had been a little off due to its density. To that Raab owed his life. He dragged die body out of sight, then spent fifteen minutes washing the blood into die sea and covering the spot with clean sand. Then he started back. He called ahead of him, "It's Garan," so they wouldn't be startled. The second moon was partly set, but there was still light enough to see the question in their faces as they gathered round. He stepped forward and handed Cudebek the knife. Cudebek stared at it wordlessly, tfaca looked up. "Who had it?" IP Raab said, "Who's missing?" His voice was hoarse. Someone said, "Pokey Reger!" "You wouldn't call him Pokey," Raab said, "if you'd seen him in action." Cudebek said, "But how -- " Raab found a spot and sat down. T doubt if we'll ever know. The only thing I can think of is that he had it hung beneath the basket on a string, and dropped it the first time we landed, then picked it up again after we'd searched everything. Maybe he hid it in the food, or first man was just as shaking an experience as he'd heard, and he didn't feel up to much now, but he had to talk to them. "The way things work out, I'm sure he was alone. So now I can tell you that this isn't Mell Island. Before we go there, I want you to decide whether you're willmg to take on more than just trying to steal one blimp." xm R aab, Ben Sprake, Nik Roos and overlooking the Mederlink base. Tliey'd carefully scouted the lookout posts and the paths that led to them. Here they were reasonably safe from discovery. Steep cliffs, forming an angle, protected two sides of the area below them. The slope they were concealed on sheltered a third side. The north side, facing the mainland, was open to the sea, with a good beach where gliders, landing on the smooth leeward water, could be drawn up. Eighteen of them lay there now, with mechanics worlg on some of them. The nearly flat area was about two miles long and half a mile wide, stretching along the beach. The Base was at the western end, in the angle of the cliffs, where an area about a quarter-mile square had been cleared. The rest of the flat was heavily jungled with die typical twisting, dark-green trees. One half of the cleared area was planted widi a variety of vegetables of Eartih-descentted types. The buildings included a hangar (where more gliders were bemg worked on), an Armory, a recreatioB hall, a mess hall, three barracks and a stockade. That stockade -- attached to one of die barracks -- had about forty prisoners in it, while as many more outside worked at various jobs, under guard. Most of them wore unmarked fatigues, but there were a few each of Orket and Lowry Fleet unifornw, much mended. Moored a short distance from the building, near the cliff where they'd be sheltered from storms, were six fighting blimps and two Hens. It was not the same group Raab had encountered already; that one evidently hadn't gotten back yet. That was a break, but it wouldn't last. Near the ships, dozens of thickwalled balloons, rigid with helium, were tied. There was assorted gear, and tie-down spots for perhaps fifteen more ships. Trodden paths led to five evenly spaced spots at the edge of the jungle. Raab said, "Launcher emplacements. Two men to a launcher?" "Probably." Roos said, "if they're manned at all." "They'll be manned," Raab predicted. "If only against big triphibs that might come in." He watched the workmen moving about. Their idle talk came up faintly. Now and then there was an outburst of laughter from the rec hall. He arrived at an estimate. "Two hundred fifty Links and about eighty prisoners. Ouch." Ben, who'd been very, quiet lately, put in, "There'll be more if another group comes in from patrol." R aab nodded unhappily. "We can't wait that long, then." He looked at Nik. "From the times they were over your island, when would you say they're due in?" "Not more than three hours after sundown." "And tonight's the night? For sure?" "Yes, sir. Unless the one that's due is the one you hit, and it's delayed." "I'm sure it's not," Raab told him. "There are three groups based here, obviously. WeU -- we can take Aose fixed launchers easily enough. But then we'd have to get to one of die ships fast, and get hand-bows. If we could get most of them bottled up in the buildings... We'll have to get the prisoners loose and armed within a matter of minutes." look like a very good chance. Skipper." "No," Raab told him grimly, "but it's the best one we'll have. When that group we hit gets back with the word, there'll be no more cardcness." Ben put in suddenly, "Do yoo trust me at all... sir?" Raab turned his head to face him. "How much would you trust me, if the situation were reversed?" Ben flushed but said doggedly, "I'd like to try for the ship. Youfl have five launchers aimed at my back. If I can get to the ship -- tlM one closest to the buildings -- and get its launchers manned, we can pin them down in the buildings fw a few minutes. Maybe hand bows will be better. Anyway -- " Raab said, annoyed, "That's going to be a desperate try. You migid look like a pin-cushion before ymi got halfway there." Ben's eyes turned to the ground. "I... Raab, I was wrong about your father. I was wrong to question your command. I'd like to make it up, if I could. If I try anydiing or yellow out, you can -- can Kot me in the back." Watching his face, Raab couldn't feel angry. "All right," he said, "You've got the job. You'll only have about five men. But we'll reinforce you as soon as we can." All the rest of the afternoon, he worried. He'd made another hasty decision, and he wasn't at all confident it would turn out right H alf-altern Ben Sprake, Jr., lay on mouldy leaves, with lowhanging jungle branches jabbing at the back of his neck. He could hear the murmur of small talk from (Hie IF ot the Mederlink launcher emplacements, and smell cigarette smoke. From farther away, in the clearing, came occasional raised voices of a few mechanics still working. Lanterns had already been lit. A few gleams came through the foliage. He squirmed into a slightly less uncomfortable position, then lay wondering if something had gone wrong with the plan. There were rustlings all about him, but he couldn't tell whether those were small jungle animals or Raab's men creeping into place. It seemed to him a long time had passed. He worried about the animals, too, though there weren't supposed to be any dangerous ones here. This would be his first combat, and it didn't feel good. He hoped he wouldn't get sick; it was hard enough to fight the fear and the weakness of his limbs and the tightness of his chest muscles that made it so hard to breath. He hoped very fervently that Raab had called things off, and wondered how long he'd have to lie here before he dared assume that. The sounds from the clearing were fewer now, and the lanterns seemed to be moving away. There was only the very dim hooded light from the emplacement. He wondered if Raab would bother to tell him if things had been called off. Raab probably hated him now. Raab would hate him if he knew everything. If he hadn't believed Reger's vague hint that Raab was planning something strange, and left his own responsibility to go after Raab and spy, Oleeny would probably still be alive and Gaffer would be flying on the way home. And of course, afterward, when he suspected Reger, he should have spoken up; but he'd have had to admit his own dereliction of duty. And he hadn't been sure. He'd been a fool, the way he'd let Reger lead him on with innocentsounding little remarks. But then, Raab ought not to have humiliated him the way he did. That wasn't the way one officer was supposed to treat another, especially in front of the men... even though he, Ben, had been wrong about some things. Well, it was too late now. All he could do was make sure he didn't turn coward this time. He'd lived with his own cowardice all his life, and that hadn't felt good either. In fist fights or knife fights or games where he might get hurt, he'd always been a coward. He'd vowed so many times to change. But the trouble was, things happened so suddenly you didn't have a chance to set yourself. It must have been hours he'd been lying here. He pondered unhappily whether he should start crawling away, and delayed that, more from indecision than anything else. T hen bows twanged, and men shouted or screamed in pain and surprise. The whole jungle seemed to erupt. He told himself desperately. I've got to move; yellowing out now would be worse than dying, worse than having a knife or arrow pierce my flesh. With a terrible effort he motion, and once he started, they seemed to move of their own will. The physical exertion actually made him feel a little better. He plunged through the foliage, skirted the emplacement where three of the crew stood staring down at two Link bodies. He turned his eyes from the blood, and aicd out, "Come on!" in a voice that shamed him by being shaky and too high. He ran toward the blimp nearest the buildings. The shouting around the emplacements had ended now, but all over the clearing and in the buildings other men were shouting. Arrows and harpoons flashed toward the few mechanics and guards still outside. They ran for the buildings, and one or two of them went down, screaming. Someone was shouting, "The Armory! To the Armory!" Ben saw him; a Link Skipper who'd come out of the hangar. Arrows converged on the man, but he was already running and got to the Armory door without being hit. There were six men following Ben now, and it began to look as if they'd reach the ship safely. But arrows began to come from the armory, and Ben's fear suddenly became the familiar sharp, paralyzing thing. Still his legs kept pumping, somehow. He heard a cry tossed a Wainer go tumbling. It was too dark to see where he was hit. He brushed off the notion of stopping to help, and forced himself on. He was gasping for breath now, and so exhausted he could hardly move. T hen he was at the ship, and he slammed awkwardly into the basket, half stunning himself. He clung fm a moment, then gathered all his strength and pulled himself over the nul. The handbows first, he thout; they're much faster. Others were tumbling in after him. He fumbled for the weapons, nocked an arrow and sent it toward a window of the Armory. Harpoons were slamming into the building now. The Links got the wooden shields in place at the big windows, and there were only the narrow slits to shoot at. That worked both ways; the men inside couldn't aim very well through the slits. But arrows did come, and he flinched every time one came near him. He was shooting as fast as he could now. The physical effort seemed to drive the fear away a little. Raab and several others burst into sight, running for the stockade. The men in the Armory couldn't concentrate much in that direction, but someone in a Barracks had a bow and an easy range. Ben cried out, "Aim at im!" He dropped the bow and groped for the lashings of a launcher, got it loose and fumbled for a harpoon while he cranked with one hand. He sent the missile at the door of the Barracks, which was open a crack, and slammed it wide open. Other harpoons, from the emplacements, streaked that way and the men inside stopped shooting. A moment later someone shoved the door shut and Ben heard a bolt thud into place. But one of Raab's small IF group was down and another was limping badly. They reached the stockade and worked frantically at the gate. It came open and men spilled out, yelling. The rest of Gaffer's crew -- plus Nik Roos's men, but excepting those still manning the emplacements -- were at the ships now, grabbing hand-bows and cranking launchers. It was because Ben was so busy watching for counter-attacks, and because, of the dusk, that he didn't see the harpoon coming from the Armory until it was almost upon him. He stared at it in fascination, realizing in a flash that he wouldn't have time to dodge. Instinctively, though, he was moving, and got turned to the side so that it didn't hit him from the front and kill him instantly. Even as it pierced his body, missing the spine, and slammed him hard against the other side of the basket, his mind rejected the fact. But he was lying there, hardly able to squirm, and he could feel his own blood flowing hot under his uniform. Wonder seized him that it didn't hurt more. There was a great pain somewhere, but it was as if it were walled away from him somehow, so that he only got a faint spill-over. The smell of blood was worse. His mouth was open and he was afraid he was going to scream, but what came out, feebly, was "Raab... He clamped his lipft on a whimper, beginning to feel the pain now, and the fright, and thinking that he wouldn't even know if they won. Then there were men swarming around, grabbing bows, and Raab's voice said, as if from a distance, "Fire arrows! Make some fire arrows!" Then someone mentioned his own name, also from a great distance, and then Raab was bending over him. He took a breath to speak, clenched his teeth in agony at the motion of his lungs, managed to whisper, "Are we -- ?" Raab bent close. "They're all bottled up. We'll let them surrender a few at a time, and have them all tied up before they realize how few of us there are." He seemed to be speaking as clearly as he could, and in detail, as if he understood Ben's anxiety. Now Ben could feel death creeping over him, and he was afraid, but above that, he was proud. And he knew Raab wouldn't leave him. XV L ess than seven weeks after the departure from Lowry, Raab stood at the forward rail of a Mederlink fighting blimp, staring ahead and down at the lights of the mesa. It was pre-dawn. The moons had set. He could have been here two or three days earlier, but he'd chosen to stay with the other captured fighters, escorting four Hens which were loaded down with gliders, guano, food and weapons. But they'd easily evaded what was left of the blockade, and there hadn't been any trouble from the Links pressed into service as paddlers (and tied to their seats). Now he'd pulled ahead to persuade the ground defenses, before they cut loose with harpoons, that this wasn't the enemy. They'd seen him against the stars, of course; they would be waiting for him to come within range. The movable steering vanes made navigating a lot easier than with poor old Gaffer, the remains of which he'd gathered up and brought home. He ordered, "Constrict a quarter-turn forward." He still forgot, sometimes, that it was Nik Roos beside him instead of Ammet Oleeny. He hadn't put anyone in Ben's place, aft. This ship's pinger was a good loud one. He struck it twice, paused, sh-uck it twice again with the little mallet. No reply. He sent the signal for 'Parley' again, then gave up. They'd soon be in flute range. Finally he got a reply to a flute message. "Ship aloft; say again. Message not clear." He sighed, and fluted again. "Gaffer II asking permission to land. Skipper Raab Garan, commanding." There was a long wait, then, "Come in slowly. No tricks." He turned his head aft. "Paddles, quarter-speed." He let his hands rest on the levers that controlled the vanes. "Nik, will you strike a lantern so they can recognize me?" Unless, he thought, he looked as much older and different as he felt. They were slanting nicely toward the tie-down spot outlined in lanterns. He could see individual faces now; ground handlers waiting to seize dangling ropes, bowmen with weapons ready. "Stop paddles." They settled close. He tugged at levers to raise the nose a little. They bumped gently. A middle-aged man in a Skipper's uniform came from the shadows to peer. "By God! It is Raab Garan!" His face hardened. "What the devil?" Raab put down a smoulder of anger. "A captured ship, sir." The other's longer time-in-rank made him Raab's senior. "There are more coming. I'd like a signal-fire to call them in." The senior Skipper, whose name was Linder, looked bewildered and undecided. "Garan, under the circumstances you can't blame me for taking precautions." Now a little anger did spill from Raab. "Linder, it doesn't matter who blames who. Do you recognize this man beside me?" Linder peered, and ejaculated, "Nik Roos! I thought he was dead!" "So did a lot of people," Raab told him impatiently. "But he's alive, and he knows who the real traitors were. There are two of them on -- " He stopped, realizing how many men were listening. "Can you bring the rest of my ships in? The crews have been through a lot. And I'd like to get to Admiral Kline as soon as I can. Sir." Linder's face turned dejected. "If you'd only gotten here sooner. The Admiral's under house arrest, and under heavy guard. I think -- Raab, it looks like surrender." "Surrender?" Raab fairly shouted. "Why -- " He forced himself to speak quietly. "Sir, with what I've got -- and what the Links have lost -- IF we can wipe out the blockade! For months, maybe. TheyTl have to send out a whole new fleet!" Linder gestured hopelessly. "Evi if that's true -- and you have to admit it sounds fantastic -- it's too late. The staff has decided to surrender to Mederlink." "The Staff!" The words burst from Raab savagely. "Why, Linder -- excuse me, Skipper." He beckoned the man close and spoke in a very low voice. "I've got ships, gliders, plenty of helium. What men I have, except for prisoners, will face up to whatever has to be done. They won't let a group of weaklings, moved by traitors, order them into surrender. How many men do you have who'll follow you?" Linder looked shocked, then amazed. He swept his eyes over Raab's crew; then spun back to Raab, eyes blazing. "Yes! Free the Admiral first thing; get some legality behind us! I'd better send messages, and make sure -- " He started away at a run, halted suddenly. "Oh!" He gestured to an Altern. "You, there. Help Skipper Garan with a signal fire, and have hot food and baths for those crews, ni be back!" His voice trailed away as he left, heading for the headquarters building. Heart pounding, Raab climbed out of the basket and started away with the Altern. From the blimp's basket came Cudebek's chuckle. "It looks as if the Skipper's getting ready to exHere is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address City  State Zip Code... (OHer good in U. S. A. only.) IF  Short Story We wenf fo visit the Martians -- but they greeted us at the doorl W hen I was still very young -- ahi still very foolish, I must admit -- I happened to encounter a particularly intriguing theory regarding the Martian moons. Some Soviet astronomer had reasoned that the twin moons of Mars were actually gigantic artificial satellites. You may recall the details; I won't go that far into it. But the speculations sounded so damned possible. In any event, it really fired my imagination. Artificial satellites ten miles in diameter... artifacts of a vastly superior civilization... The romantic fool in me demanded some concrete action in a matter of such obvious importance. It must have been then that I caught the bug. So I went through the whole bit and became an astronaut. B efore I'd completed my training, most of our non-military space operations had been placed under international control. There'd been a few spectacular and even tragic failures by both sides in the space race, and I guess that enough level heads prevailed to allow all of us the advantages of pooled resources. Anyway, when our U.N.sponsored flight left as the first manned Mars probe, we were one happy family. I won't bother running through our flight roster. You read the papers; you watch TV; you know things about us we've forgotten. What is important is that a hundred thousand miles Earthside of Mars, we were met by one of their spaceships. They eased the shock by radioing ahead (yes, their English was quite perfect) of their wish to meet us. One of our people was to meet their representative between, and outside of, our respective ships. This was the best technique because of our environmental differences. Since I was lected to suit-up and rendezvous with the Martian. I won't attempt to describe him as he appeared to me in his space suit. About all I saw of him was his space suit, and that looked pretty much like mine. He propelled himself over from his own craft very easily, and I struggled out to him as well as I could. We floated alongside each other at a distance of a few feet -- him free and in complete control of his movements, me twisting at the end of my umbilical line. I felt a little foolish. The alien spoke through my headset. "We have been putting off any actual contact with your race," he said. "Any special reason?" I asked him. "We are a peaceful race," he replied. I guess I understood but didn't say anything. About that time I tumbled over, and with an easy motion he righted me. "But we know nothing of you," I reminded the Martian. "Have you -- has your race -- been hero long?" "Approximately five hundred thousand Earth-years," he answered. I didn't say anything. The alien went on. "Our race is from another solar system. We colonized this immediate area." L ike an utter idiot, I tumbled again, and once more he straightened me up. He continued: "The point where we settled was tihe optimum position for the physical requirements of our race -- just the proper distance from your star -- an ideal location. "But we were forced to make some changes. Tliere wasn't sufficient living space. Tlien too, the planetary environment fied to meet our needs. So we set oat to do that which was necessary. Forhmately for our race, we succeeded." I suddenly remembered the old pet theory. "Then you build the moons! You had to expand, and alter the environment, so you constructed the twin satellites!" "Oh, the moons were here when we arrived, thou in entirdy different orbits. We did, howevw, have to build the object you call Mars."      by Philip Jose Farmer A planet far out in space -- a time far removed from now -- o world where all Mankind is reborn! And now exclusive in Worlds of Tomorrow -- A New Series by Sam Moskowitz Worlds of Tomorrow is on sale at all good newsstands -- don't miss iti IF  Navthi Tfiree Eorfhmen battled a whole planet. Clearly the odds were enormous -- against the aliens! I S tade had been a month dying before he sent for Witten. During that month he managed to settle his affairs -- not that there was really much to do. An xenologist doesn't accumulate a great deal of money, and any man who travels among the stars finds his friends dead or aged past recognition when he -- still young -- returns. During the last week Stade lay in his room and often reviewed his life. Happily he found he had few regrets -- except for Witten. As Stade waited for Witten to arrive, he flipped through the yellowed pages of the book, which was expensive and very old. He closed the book and placed it on a bedside table, still unsure just how much to teD Witten. Perhaps he should just present the antique as a gift; Witten would eventually read it. He's still young, Stade thought. It was only a year ago that we returned from HD #I IV. T he survey ship had been decelerating for over six months and approached the star designated as #I in the ancient and much revised Henry Draper catalogue with a speed of only a few hundreds of miles a second. Since the primary purpose of the survey was to find planets suitable for colonization, the ship flashed past the frozen outer planets content with radiation analyses. While still nearitself, the instruments on the ship monitored artificial long-wave radio signals originating on the fourth planet. Stade sat in a cubicle just , off the control room composing tapes while Witten, a dark youngster with the powerful musculature peculiar to the inhabitants of high gravity planets, programmed a landing sequence into a computer. Both men took pleasure in their work. Stade, because at last he had access to an alien culture in its unsullied native state. Witten, because every task connected with his first exploration mission was, at the very least, interesting. Witten read the information the computer typed on a sheet of paper and then walked over to Stade. "We blast in about five minutes. You'd better get strapped in." Stade nodded. "All right, I'll be there in a minute." He carefidly marked his place and walked over to an acceleration couch. "How many G'sr "Up to ten." Witten answered. Stade winced and buckled himsdf into the webbing. A few minutes later the ship shuddered as the drive increase from one gravity of acceleration to two. Witten spread his feet i little wider apart as his weight increased to nearly a quarter of a ton. The crew's third and final memthe room. He was a huge man who radiated an aura of strength and alertness. Skinner was a mech -- more machine than man. Encased in steel and plastic, only his brain and spinal cord were left of his original body, which had been irreparably damaged years ago. "Is everything ready?" Skinner asked. "Yes. We go up to four G's in about two minutes." Stade groaned and Witten grinned at him. Four hours later they were decelerating again at one gravity along a course which would bring them within orbiting distance of the fourth planet. When they were only a few million miles away, they used the ship's transmitters to send a recording of some of the signals they had picked up. They followed this recording with a rendition of the numbers from one to ten in both the conventional and binary systems, a few simple addition and subtraction problems in both systems, and ended IF with Stade reading the first two pages of the ship's Offhud Cookbook. They recorded the whole program and rebroadcast it at houxly intervals. A few hours after they had Hasted again and established an orbit some eighteen thousand miles above the planet's surface where the ship could maintain a stationary position in reference to the planet's surface, Stade was able to announce that contact had definitely been made. Witten had been idly turning from one station to another, recording choice bits of what might have been the local equivalent of music, speech, or something entirely different for Stade's ethnographic opus, when Stade took off his earphones, tossed them on the table top and stood up from the console where he had been alternately monitoring the ship's transmission and recording the receptions between the transmission in search of a reply. "Well, gentlemen, we're in," he said. "They replayed our signal and then followed it on the same band with some stuff of their own. All the stations on adjacent frequencies have dropped off the air. I've started the contact computer on its cycle. It's handling all their signals and progressing through those first mathematical symbols to learning their language." "How long?" Skinner asked. "We ought to be able to get to the point where it can absorb data from their ordinary radio programs in three or four days if they work with at night on at least two cluuinels. Afttf that, say thirty or fortf hours to be able to communicate with them fluently. Skinner grinned and said, 'Ah, the wondo of cultund anthropology, not to mention eybemetics. I guess when and where we land is next. Ar suggestions? Stade answered, Td prefer to land now. If we land near where they Mem to have estabfied their communication center, well be able to accomplish more. The distance makes it hard on thnn; they're probably throwing every kilowatt they have at us now. "Is there any sign of a division of the planet into nations?" Witten asked. T wouldn't like to be Abombed because one country thinks we're giving military secrets to another." Skinner said, "Well, for one thing, there aren't any indications of any kind of an atomics industry or of space travel either, for that matter. I'd say that in thirty or forty years they'll have both. The sensor's haven't picked up any radiation. I'm for landing now, too. There are two main continents, one of which is mostly desert and apparently is almost uninhabited. The other looks like a political unity. At least, there aren't any arm frontiers or outposts. "Where are we gmng to put her down?" "Right next to their second lar est city. It's the source of the signals we've been receiving. I've picked out what looks like a good spot -- here." Stade made some adjustments on a console and successive pictures flashed on the big screen. Finally he found the one he wanted and pointed out the spot he had picked. It was a broad plain about thirty miles from the dty. Witten went back to playing with the radio while Stade and Skinner compared the infra-red scannings with the visual picture. Finally they agreed to land as soon as Stade got his equipment in order. II I n a little over two hours the ship dropped down onto the plain. They had taken the last leg of their approach slow and easy, and before they were far into the atmosphere a group of airplanes were swarming around below them. Skinner mumbled something about ramming one of the planes that buzzed them. Stade reported that they were being scanned by radar. After the ship came to rest, the men stayed in their seats for a moment. Witten looked at the screen and watched the clouds of dust settle outside the ship. Once a plane shot past overhead. Another plane passed across the screen only fifty or so feet above the ship's nose. "Damn it," Skinner said as he reached forward and made an adjustment on the board in front of him. "Another twenty feet and he'd have hit the defensive screen and been burned. I'm going to set the discriminator to burn anything that flies within fifty yards that is under half the size of their smallest plane." "Do you really think that's necessary? I mean setting up the screen at all?" Stade asked mildly. "We could spot the concentration of any offensive force in advance and turn cm the screen then." He went on more strongly, "I'd hate to start something and ruin our chances of completing our work through an accident." "Yeah," Skinner answered. "I can see us spotting one of those planes launching a missile and getting the screen up before it gets here. Sorry, but you've got no precedence. Check the regulations." Witten had walked to the screen and had been studying it while the other two argued. He saw something and increased the magnification. "I think I see a possible concentration of -- uh -- offensive force. In advance, even." Skinner checked the screen and the radar. He whistled, "Yes, an armored convoy of about twenty vehicles leaving from the city, and about eight or ten big choppers right above them." The three of them watched the screen for awhile and then finally cut the picture back to normal magnification. The cloud of dust which marked the progress of the convoy was still visible. Stade said, "Well, that's to be expected. They'll probably put enough armor around us to wage a war." He glanced at Skinner and then continued, "We can set the discriminator not to burn anything on the ground travelling under a certain speed." IF The convoy deployed in a circle about a hundred yards in diameter with the ship at its center. Some of the vehicles ran on treads and obviously utilized some sort of internal combustion engine for power. There were also smaller, swifter vehicles which ran on wheels. The men kept to the ship and followed developments through closed-circuit television and radar and infra-red scanners. About an hour after the first convoy arrived, a second, larger group pulled in. They too deployed in a circle around the ship. In the control room Skinner and Witten watched the tanks rumble into position. Stade was below checking his precious computer. They drank coffee and watched as they were watched in turn. T he next two days passed without incident. The natives did not approach closer than about fifty yards. They threw up some prefabricated buildings outside the circle of tanks and artillary. A shipment of what looked like scientific equipment arrived and was assembled. Skinner grumbled about ray guns and disintegrators. The men took numerous photographs of the inhabitants and occasiony ventured outside the ship in a suit to let the natives have a look at them. The planet's owners turned out to be about seven feet tall, rather thin, and at least superficially humanoid. Their skin was a mahogany brown. They had binocular vision, but their oblong skulls seemed devoid of hair, ears, nose, (X anything resembling a mouth, fitten mused over the problem of how tiiey ate but was unable to come up with any answer. The men never strayed more than a few ywds from the ship, and the natives made no attempt to approach. Skinner surmised that they had probably detected the radar sensor screen around the ship and perhaps had deduced something of its purpose. "Anyway, they probably figure the next move is up to us," he said. Finally Stade came up to the control room with a sheet of what looked like teletype paper. "It's finished," he announced. "TTie machine will keep improving, inCTeasing its vocabularly and correcting itself, but these are just refinements. I just sent them a message saying that we are a scientific expedition, wished them long lives and good luck, and told them we'd only be here for a short time. We struck a bargain: they answer my questions, and I answer theirs." "No doubt they want to know how to build a spaceship and how to live forever?" Skinner asked. "Not exactly. Their first questions were aboitf our equipment. The computer stffl doesn't have the scientific vocabulary it needs, bin the way they're sbovdiDg infornition in, it's only a nutter of a day or so before it wffl be aWe to answer most of what they want to know. They've divided themselves into two groups, one group to frame their questions and the her to answer mine. Tm uimg past of the computer as a translator and feeding their questions to the ship's computer." "And you're giving them the information to build a fusion converter, right? Or have you gotten around to that yetT' Skinner asked. "That is one of the questions on their list. We don't have the vocabularly yet, but we will." He paused and looked at Skinner for a moment before he continued. "Yes, I'll give them the equations and a description of the conditional requirement. That's all I can do since I don't know their technology. Look, Skinner, what difference does it make? Even with the information, it will take them at least five or ten years to develop the techniques they'll need to build anything. Besides, they'll have it themselves in a century or so." His voice took on a pleading note as he went on. "Please, Skinner. I'm asking for your help. Fve even got a release from administration that covers everything. Okay?" S kinner was silent. Finally he nodded. Stade said, "Witten, you can keep an eye on the computer. It's already programmed for the next thirty hours. I'll be back before then. They've asked me to visit the city for some kind of ceremony. I ought to..." "No." Skinner cut him off. "Forget it. You're not going." Stade seemed amazed. "Now wait a minute. Why shouldn't I gor "Do I have to explain it to you? We can't trust them. Who knows what they're up to? Beg off somehow." Stade was getting angry. "You just can't tell me what I can and can't do. There's nothing to cover this in the book. I can call a vote, and I'm doing it." He looked over at Witten. "WeU?" Witten was caught off guard. He looked from one to the other and hesitated. Stade said, "Phil, if I don't go, besides missing film of the city, we may insult them or really mess things up. I gather this is quite an important ceremony. Please?" Witten looked at Sldnner, who said nothing. Witten said slowly, "Well, if it's important, I vote yes." For a long moment no one said anything. Then Stade broke the silence. "It's settled then. No doubt you'll want this vote recorded, Skinner. Witten, if you'll..." "It's not quite settled," Skinner said in a low voice. "There's just one thing; I'm going, not you." "Why?" "For a lot of reasons. I'm more experienced for one thing. You know I've been on contact missions before." Stade traded looks with Witten, who only shrugged. "Okay, Skinner, but you've got to promise to take it easy. I don't think you'd do anything on purpose, but if something goes wrong, and I think it was your fault, I'll see that you're finished. I want you to wear a recorder." Skinner smiled and said, "You forget just one thing. If something M IF happens, I probily won't be coming back." Stade looked at him for a second and then grinned. "Right" He looked at his wsdeh. "You'd better get moving. Ymi're due over at tbedr shack in about forty-five minutes. I'll rig up a field relay imit for you so you can stay linked to the ship no matter where you are." Witten followed Skinner below to help him suit up. Despite the light gravity, whidi was only alKut two-thirds earth normal, Skinner chose an armored suit with a jump attachment. Witten guessed that die suit and its cmtents, even on this planet, must weigh a thousand pounds or mmre. Skinner moved easUy in the suit even though the power attachments hadn't been activated. He clanked into the armory and looked over the racks of mobile weapons. Witten followed him. After some deliberation Skinner selected a heavy laser beamer and had Witten strg the power pack to his back, Stade stepped into the room and frowned at his heavily armed shipmate, but smd nothing. Skinner dung a belt of fusion grenades over his shoulder and went into the other compartments to get his helmet. Stade looked at Witten and said peevishly, "Good God! You'd think he was going to start a war. If he thinks he's going to pull something funny, he'd better think again." 'Take it easy," Witten answered. "I don't blame him. If I were going wandering around on an unexplored planet. I'd take a ceebomb or two. Relax, he's playing it straight." They followed Skinner to the airlock. Stade handed him a plasticencased gadget on a dumlr strap "Here's the relay. Hi be in touch with you every minute." He stuck out his hand. Skinner hdd up an armored fist and said, "You don't want to shake this." He pulled on the hdmet and Witten fastened its seal. A few minutes later they watched the huge figure stride towards the line of squat vehicles. His steps raised small puffs of dust. T 'me drad for the men in the ship. Skinner didn't seem inclined to make any comments, and apparently the natives communicated their instructions to him by gesture and example rather than by the medium of the compute-. Witten and Stade sat in the computer room and watched the translator chatter out an occasional message from the natives. Stade read the cmnmunications to Skinner, who either complied with the request or, if an answer was required, gave his reply to Stade, who sent the answer back via the translator. The system was rather cumbersome, but it was effective. After about forty-five minutes Skinner announced that he had reached the city. A few moments later the suit monitor lights winked out. Stade turned with a puzzled frown on his face and said to Witten, "He probably went into a building with a metal frame. The suit monitor works on regular F.M. I didn't rig up a circuit for it on the field unit." Nevertheless he flicked a button and spoke into the microphone. "Skinner, arc you still with us? "Sure," the radio crackled. "We just walked into a really big building. Right now Im in a large hall. Looks like a church. This must be the place. There are a lot of pompous looking bastards standing around. Don't worry. I'll let you know if I get shot or anything." "Fine. We were just wondering." Stade put the mike back on the table and turned to Witten. "I knew there wouldn't be any trouble. Now I wish I'd held out and gone myself." Witten said, "The recorder will pick up everything. They're probably giving him the keys to the city now." Ill I n the city Skinner walked through a long hall, glancing upwards occasionally to the vaulted ceiling high above. He was enjoying himself. His guide led him to a highly decorated pavilion-like structure under which a table sat. Around it stood six or seven natives; they were dressed ornately with glittering robes and metal bands around their oddly jointed fingers, Skinner was on the point of saying something to the men in the ship when suddenly one of the members of his escort raised a hand gun and fired directly at him. For an instant Skinner was stunned, then he whirled and caught the native a back-handed blow with his armored hand. Skinner looked down at his side where the gun had been aimed. The front of the field unit was smashed. Skinner shook off his surprise and looked around; the whole scene seemed in stow motion. There were armed greenies everywhere. He anticipated a rush, and was surprised when it didn't come. He swung his head from side to side; he was missing something, and he knew it. Skinner sensed a movement above him and looked up just in time to see a heavy metal net fall towards him. The net dropped over him and its weight pressed down. He engaged the suit's gyro and power equipment and managed to keep his feet. The natives at the edges of the net hurried to fasten it to the floor. Skinner flicked his right arm and the laser projector flashed into his hand from its sheath on his forearm like an opening switch blade. Skinner stood upright and watched them fasten the net to cleats in the floor. Easy does it, he reminded himself. Obviously they want me alive. Skinner laced the fingers of his left hand through the links of the net and pulled. He strained, and as the net held he saw the power indicator on the tiny panel in the helmet climb into the overload zone. Then the net parted with a sound like the meshing of gears. Instantly he was hit by a hail of bullets from his tormentors. The projectiles bounced off his armor and whined into the crowd. Buffeted by the concussiwis, he staggered through the rent in the net. The tiify hot eye of the laser winked wiate. t#T ook, the carrier beam fromLthe field unit just stopped, Stade said. "What? "Skinner isnt transmitting anymore. Wait a minute. Maybe its our receiver." Stade checked the instrument board and then said, "No. we're receiving. He just isn't transmitting." "Try calling him," Witten said. Stade tried, but there was no response. The translator began to click as a message was typed out. Stade said, "Maybe this will tell us what's going on." He waited until the machine quit clicking and then tore off the sheet. "There. I thought it might be something like this. They say the field unit was dropped and it seems to be broken. Skinner will complete the tour and will be back here in a few hours." Witten didn't say anything. The whole thing didn't sound right. He frowned and tried to decide what he should do. If the greenies were telling the truth, he could make a fool of himself and mess up the whole mission by doing the wrong thing now. And yet, the communicator was a sturdy machine. He couldn't imagine it being broken by being dropped. Stade chattered on peevishly, "I knew I should have gone myself. Ife can't possibly get anything complished without the translator. I guess I should have -- " He l:oice off as Witten stood up. "I'm going into the city. Tefl them that I'm bringing him a replacement unit and that either they can fly me in one of their choppers, or I can take the flitter." "But I don't even have a replacement. I've got the components, but he'll be back before I can assemble them." "It doesn't make any difference. I just want to check on him. Make me up a dummy unit. No. I'll take one of the survey relays. It ought to have plenty of power. You can relay it into the translator." Witten turned and headed for the suit room. Stade, talking excitedly, followed him. "Witten, now calm down. Maybe you ought to take him a radio, but let's talk this over. We ought to find out..." Witten turned on him and said, "Shut up. I'm going. Now get on the translator and tell them what I said." Stade shut up but followed him down to the suit room. The two walked down the corridor in a strained silence. A s Witten was suiting up, an alarm rang somewhere in the ship. Stade stepped to a wall monitor and dialed into the ship's communications system. His face was white when he looked up from the screen. "The magnetic sensors just recorded three peaks that would correspond to the IF effect of three fusion grenades being exploded at a low yield. The seismograph got them too. I can't triangulate, but they're on a line which extends through the city. TTie magnitude is about right for there if they were fusion grenades." Witten continued adjusting the suit. "Get up there and tell them what I told you. I'm taking the flitter. Skinner already programmed the weapons system to blast all that junk guarding us if they fire, so don't worry about the ship." Stade scampered from the room without a word. Witten grabbed a rapid-fire rocket launcher and two belts of ammunition from the armory, and an atomic torch and a radio from the survey equipment. He climbed up to where the flitter sat snut in its launching tube. As he was checking out the little plane's instruments, the whole ship was buffeted with a series of shudders. Witten clicked on the radio and said, 'Hey! What's going on?" A moment later Stade's voice crackled in his ear. "They opened fire on us. The laser screen vaporized the first two shells. Skinner must have programmed the system to open fire on the third shell. The beams burned everything they set up and the tanks. The planes are down too. Are you about ready?" "I'm gone," Witten said and depressed the launching lever. The little craft shot out from the m.other ship on ducted-fan air jets. Instantly it was picked up by the ship's weapons system, but before the lasers released their blast of energy, a signal from a transmitter in the flitter identified it as a friend to the ship. Witten looked into the flitter's viewing screen and smiled mirthlessly. Below him were piles of smokipg slag that had once been armon vehicles. When the flitter hit Mach I, he cut in the ram jets. The ship was still accelerating when he reached the outskirts of the city. Witten checked a direction finder and began to cut his speed as he flew in a wide circle just above the tallest of the city's buildings. A red light flashed on the panel in front of him, and he looked into the screen just in time to see a plane explode somewhere above him. Compared to the sophisticated system of the starship, the flitter's weapon's weren't much; but they were more than a match for the turbojet and prop competition they were up against. Witten completed the triangulation of the signals from Skinner's suit monitor. He should have been close enough for voice contact through the suit radio, but he was unable to raise the other man. Witten flipped a switch and spoke to Stade. "This is Witten. I'm going to bail out right over the triangulation point. Take remote control of the flitter and make some diversionary attacks on the other side of the city. You might drop a low-yield bomb or two. Be careful and don't fry us, though. I'll call you when I need you, okay?" Stade agreed and Witten cut off the radio and opened the emergency exit to his right. He checked his radio, direcrion finder, and weapons. Finally accdropped into space. W itten fell free until he was about three hundred feet above the surface, and then he cut in the suit's jets and slowed his descent. Below him row on row of ten and twenty story buildings were crowded together. Witten dropped to the ground near one of these buildings and took a reading on the signal. That way. He started down he narrow street in the long strides characteristic of power suit locomotion. Funny that there aren't any oeople out, he thought. Once or twice he saw a few greenies scurrying around corners at his approach. He had just stopped to take another reading when a tremendous clang sounded in his ears and simultaneously something jarred the suit. Immediately he realized some sort of projectile had bounced off the suit's armor. Witten whirled around and saw a group of four or five greenies taking aim at him from a distance of about fifty yards. Again the dang and jar. Witten raised the rocket launcher, thumbed the warhead setting to a minimal reading, and squeezed the trigger. An instant later there was a bright flash followed by a tremendous concussion. He trotted around the next corner and knew he had found Skinner. Four tanks were pulled up in a semi-circle with their guns facing the entrance of a building. Fifty or a hundred greenies were hastily throwing up barricades. There were four or five semi-portable weapons of some kind covering another door on the adjacent side. Witten ducked back around the corner and considered his position. He became aware of a series of dull explosions somewhere in the distance. Probably Stade and the flitter, he thought. Witten decided to enter the building through the door nearest him. If he could knock out the tanks and get inside before they brought up the portable weapons, he would be home safe. Small-arms fire didn't worry him too much; the suit's armor seemed to have handled it well so far. Witten stuck his head carefully around the corner again and studied the entrance. What if the door was locked? He wouldn't have time to try to figure it out. He hefted the atomic torch and adjusted its position so he could get to it easily. Every second was going to count. He dialed the suit to emergency power. Now! Witten stepped around the corner and dropped to one knee. He raised the launcher and took aim. The blast from the first explosion ruined his aim on the second tank. However, he judged the near-miss had done enough damage. He was more careful on the third and fourth shots and scored direct hits. An instant after the last shot he was up and running. M ost of the greenies who had been deployed around the IF tanks had disappeared; here and there a mangled trunk or an arm or leg lay cm the groimd. When he was only a little over half way to the entrance, a puff of dust a few steps ahead informed him that some of the opposition was still alive. A second later he suffered the familiar impact and concussion of a hit on his suit. Witten looked over his shoulder as he ran and saw greenies in almost every window of the building across the street. The snouts of heavy weapons protruded from several windows. He fired four or five shots over his shoulder without missing a stride and was gratified to see the front of the building collapse. Running past the tank he had almost mTssed, he noticed globules of metal had formed on one side where armor plate had liquified, run and solidified. Witten reached the entrance amid a hail of bullets. He pushed the door, but it failed to open. There was no sign of a knob. He was raising the torch when a tremendous explosion smashed him into the side of the building. Witten climbed up out of the rubble; the damned door was still closed. He flipped on the torch. Witten cut through the lock mechanism and kicked open the door amid a splatter of molten metal. The interior of the building was pitch black to his half-blinded eyes. Another shell landed just short outside and knocked him through the doorway. Witten scrambled around the corner on his hands and knees and hurried on down the corridor so as to be out of the line of fire. The iace was built like a fort; the walls were of stone and about two feet thick. The direction finder pointed to the interior of the buildf ing, so Witten took the first corridor to the left. It ended in a heavy metal door. This time he didn't even hunt for the knob or the latch or whatever the inhabitants used for opening doors. Witten used the torch and stepped through the door. Inside was a gloomy hall littered with piles of smoking rubble. The only light came from a circular skylight in the vaulted ceiling some fifty feet above. His light cut a swath through the smokey air. Witten knew he had to move fast. There was no telling how long it would be before the greenies got up enough nerve to follow him into the building. What had kept them out in the first place? He played the light over the floor and started towards the center of the room. The beam picked out a lean brown corpse. He stopped rolled the body over with his foot, and studied it for a second before going on. Its lower jaw had been torn off and on one arm was a livid handprint in crushed flesh. He stumbled on three more bodies before he reached the center of the room. Two of them had been burned nearly in two by a beamer, and the other seemed to have been bludgeoned to death. Witten switched the suit's loudspeaker to its highest volume and called Skinner's name several times. He listened after the echoes had died away, but there was no reply. Witten checked the direction find, but the needle flickered wildly afcut. He played the light around thb circumference of the room and understood why the greenies were still outside. Aside from the door by which he had entered, there was only one other entrance to the building; it opened directly into the hall. It was barricaded with furniture and the wall near it was criss-crossed with beamer scars. He pictured the greenies trying to rush the door against a laser beam; it would be hopeless. Skinner must be somewhere in the room. Suddenly the whole building rocked to a terrific explosion. Plaster fell like anow and at the front of the room a huge beam crashed to the floor. Witten flashed his light over to where he had seen a slight movement. A second later he was kneeling at Skinner's side. IV T he huge frame was propped up against the top of an overturned table. Skinner still held his beamer tight in his fist. Witten shined the light into Skinner's face and then flashed it hastily away. What he had seen sickened him. The synthaflesh was blackened and contracted by heat, and the left side of the face, including the eye, seemed to have been scraped away. Metal gleamed through in several places. The other eye, however, gleamed with life. Witten realized that either the speech or auditory equipment, or both, must be damaged. "Skinner, can you hear me?" His voice boomed out with earthshattering strength and echoed through the hall. Witten thumbed the volume down. Skinner shook himself and waved his right hand weakly. A sound like a cross between a cough and a belch issued from his ruined face. He shook his head and tried again. The result was no better. "Take it easy," Witten said. "I'll have you out of here in a minute. Can you walk?" Skinner shook his head negatively. Witten shined the light over his body and immediately wished he hadn't. What he saw was, if anything, worse than the face. The left side was crushed and the left leg, from the knee down, seemed to have been cleanly amputated by some colossal knife. Witten kept reminding himself that it wasn't flesh and blood, only steel, plastic, and wire. "Are you in pain? Is there anything I can do?" Skinner shook his head no to both questions. However, he made no effort to get up. Witten tried to think. Obviously he couldn't call the flitter down now and load what was left of Skinner into it; the greenies would blast him into pieces the minute he stepped out of the building. Only the great speed of the power suit had saved him before. Carrying Skinner, he wouldn't have a chance. He flipped on the radio, "Stade?" "Yes. I'm here." The quickness of his reply conjured up a picture of IF him sitting expectantly on the edge of his chair. "Have you found Skinner yet?" "Yes." Witten paused. "He's in pretty bad shape. Thanks for keeping them off our backs. Now listen, here's what you do. Project a circle about ten miles in diameter with us in the center. Launch six missiles from the ship. Have each one punch in equidistantly around the rim of the circle. Adjust the yield settings so we get a fourth-magnitude blast here." "Good God! That'll destroy the whole city... "Do it," Witten cut him off, "exactly at #:#. That's seven minutes from now. Okay? #:# on the second." "All right." W itten snapped off the radio and stood up. He said to Skinner, "Let me know if you want anything." He picked the big man up and slung him over his shoulder. Even in the power suit, it was rough going. He took a roll of wire from his belt and lashed the other man to him as best he could. Abruptly Witten wondered why the greenies had been quiet for so long. Of course, they had other things on their minds. Which way out? He eyed the two doors and tried to make up his mind. The issue was decided for him as the main door and most of the barricade in front of it disintegrated in a jarring explosion. Witten staggered but kept his feet. Should he make a run for the other door? Already greenies were swarming in the just-opened aperture. Weighed down as he was, they'd catch him before he made it. Okay, right down the gut. Witten swung the torch up and trotted towards the main entrance. Ten or fifteen greenies had climbed through the tangle of wreckage that still partially blocked the entrance. They seemed thrown into confusion at his approach. Before they could fire, Witten switched on the torch. Although he was' still twenty feet away from them, the effect was more than sufficient. They were subjected to a wave of heat that immediately roasted the ones directly in front of the torch and set fire to the uniforms of those around its periphery. Several exploded in a confusion of detonating ammunition belts; others afire clambered frantically over the rubble, already dead without knowing it. One of them blundered direcdy into Witten, who grabbed the thin neck in one mailed fist and squeezed. The thing weakly flailed its limbs. Witten squeezed harder and felt something snap. Its eyes bulged out incredibly, and a hair-thin vertical line suddenly dilated into a gaping hole that covered half of its face. So that's how they eat, Witten thought, and tossed the body aside. He stopped just inside the entrance and stuck his head around the corner. Witten found himself almost face to face with another group of greenies. The surprise was mutual. He managed to get his torch up and on before his opponents could raise their heavy weapons, though several lighter projectiles bounced harmlessly off his armor. Witten peered outside through the smoke and made out just what he had feared. The greenies had reinforced their forces around the building. Barricades, tanks, and heavy weapons were everywhere. He retreated from the rain of shells. The thick wall protected him from a direct hit, and his suit saved him from chips of stone and from concussion. Witten's chronometer showed a little over three and a half minutes to go before the rockets were due. He had to be in the open when they hit, otherwise the two of them might be buried under tons of wreckage if the already battered structure decided to give way. Two minutes and forty-five seconds to go. W itten picked off two tanks that began firing into the building. The others seemed content to wait for the rest of their forces to get into position. He waited and waited. They think they've got all the time in the world, he reminded himself. After two more minutes had passed, Witten stuck his head around the corner again and nearly had it blown off. He stuck a full slip into his rocket launcher and dialed the warheads to high yield. He stuck the launcher around the corner and started pulling the trigger as fast as he could. Then Witten was around the corner running and firing. He got five more shots before he was knocked down by a combination of his own blasts and two near hits from tanks. Witten lay stunned for an instant. Then he was up and running again. Although Skinner slowed him and there was something wrong with the extender on the left leg of his suit, he managed to get almost to the middle of the street before Stade's rockets hit. Witten was nothing. Abruptly a disagreeably bright play of colors floated into the darkness, and he shook his head complainingly. His body began to throb. Witten opened his eyes. Aside from the glare from a dozen or more fires in the upper stories, he could make out very little about the buildings around him; a thick smoke had rolled in from somewhere. Witten struggled to his feet and found Skinner on the ground beside him. The wire had broken. The huge frame seemed lifeless, but that meant nothing. Skinner might still be conscious in the ruined mass of metal and plastic. The necessities for life, the basic nutrient and the brain case and pump, were heavily armored. Witten flipped on his radio and called hoarsely into the mike. "Stade, get down here fast. Hurry up, damn it." To him the flitter, when it appeared overhead, was the most beautiful sight in this or any other world. Two hours later Witten and Slade sat in the ship's dispensary while the automedic clucked sympathetically and moved its appendages over what was left of Skinner. A chime sounded somewhere in the machine. IF Stade took the diagnostic card that appeared in a slot. "How does it look? Witten asked. "All right, I guess. He'll have to stay in the machine until we get back, but we can rig up some photocells and sensory equipment. There's no real danger." "The bastards!" Witten clenched his fists. "You can never trust them. We ought to... Stade interrupted. "That's not the way to look at it. It's just that to them we were fair game. They think just like we do. Look at Ceton II and Cowper. We get along fine..." "Yeah. And look at Wolf IV and Paradise and Wilson," Witten gritted. "Skinner told me a lot about the greenies. In the end, it's either going to be us or them, us or the greenies." Stade looked at him with confusion and a growing recognition. V S tade was brought backto the present by a persistent pain in his side. He took a pill from the table beside his bed and swallowed it. The pills didn't do much good any more, and he knew things were going to get worse. There were only a few varieties of cancer that were still incurable, but he had an inoperable case of one of them that had grown with almost unbelievable speed. There was a knock on the door and Witten came in. He was even bigger and broader than Stade remembered him. For awhile they talked as people in such situations have always talked -- of the weather, of the hospital food and the nurses. When Witten got up to leave, Stade picked up the book. "Here's a little present for you. Even aside from its historical value, it's worth reading. It's about some of your ancestors." Witten smiled. "Im from Carman, one of the first colonies. My ancestors came from Africa." "Not all of them," StAde said. "Some of them were in North America almost from the first." Witten took the gift and made the proper sounds of appreciation and approval. Outside in the corridor, he looked at .it again. It was too bad that old Stade was dying, he thought. He always was rather strange; giving me a book -- he nrobably even went to some trouble to get it. He looked at the strange title once more and then pocketed the book. A few moments later he stepped blinking into the sunshine where his friend waited for him. Skinner was resplendent in a new body that was even bigger and more powerful than the one he had had before. Witten looked up at the symmetrical planes of his face and asked, "Have you ever heard of a book named Uncle Tom's Cabin?" Skinner shook his head from side to side and they walked away, the ivory of Skinner's svnthaflesh contrasting pleasantly in the sunshine with WitIF  Short Story Nine Hundred Grandmothers ( eran Swicegood was a promising young Special Aspects Man. But, like all Special Aspects, he had one irritating habit. He was forever asking the question: How Did It All Begin? They all had tough names except Ccran. Manbreaker Crag, Heave Huckle, Blast Berg, George Blood, Move Manion (when Move says "Move", you move), Trouble Trent. They were supposed to be tough, and they had taken tough names at the naming. Only Ceran kept his own -- to the disgust of his commander, Manbreaker. "Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!" Manbreaker would thunder. "Why don't you take Storm Shannon? That's good. Or Gutboy Barrelhouse or Slash Slagle or Nevel Knife? You barely glanced at the suggested list." "I'll keep my own," Ceran always Ws not so odd to hav ancestors. But these people's ancestors were still quite alive -- all of themi said, and that is where he made his mistake. A new name will sometimes bring out a new personality. It had done so for George Blood. Though the hair on George's chest was a graft job, yet that and his new name had turned him from a boy into a man. Had Ceran assumed the heroic name of Gutboy Barrelhouse he might have been capable of rousing endeavors and man-sized angers rather than his tittering indecisions and flouncy furies. They were down on the big asteroid Proavitus -- a sphere that almost tinkled with the potential profit that might be shaken out of it. And the tough men of the Expedition knew their business. They signed big contracts on the native velvet-like bark scrolls and on their own parallel tapes. They impressed, inveigled and somewhat cowed the slight people of Proavitus. Here was a solid twoway market, enough to make them slaver. And there was a whole world of oddities that could lend themselves to the luxury trade. "Everybody's hit it big but you, Manbreaker crackled in kindly thunder to Ceran after three days there. "But even Special Aspects is supposed to pay its way. Our charter compels us to carry one of your sort to give a cultural twist to the thing, but it needn't be restricted to that. What we go out for every time, Ceran, is to cut a big fat hog in the rump, we make no secret of that. But if the hog's tail can be shown to have a cultural twist to it, that will solve a requirement. And if that twist in the tail can turn us a profit, then we become mighty happy about the whole thing. Have you been able to find out anything about the living dolls, for instance? They might have both a cultural aspect and a market value." "The living dolls seem a part of something much deeper," Ceran said. "There's a whole c-omplex of things to be unraveled. The key may be the statement of the Proavitoi that they do not die." "I think they die pretty young, Ceran. All those out and about are young, and those I have met who do not leave their houses are only middling old." "Then where are their cemeteries?" "Likely they cremate the old folks when they die." "Where are the crematories?" "They might just toss the ashes out or vaporize the entire remains. Probably they have no reverence fw ancestors." "Other evidence shows their entire culture to be based on an exaggerated reverence for ancestors." "You find out, Ceran. You're Special Aspects Man." C eran talked to Nokoma, his Proavitoi counterpart as translator. Both were expert, and they could meet each other halfway in talk. Nokoma was likey feminine. There was a certain softness about both the sexes of the Proavitoi, but the men of the Expedition believed that they had them straight now. "Do you mind if I ask some straight questions," Ceran greeted her today. "Sure is not. How else I learn the talk well but by talking." "Some of the Proavitoi say that they do not die, Nokoma. Is this true?" "How is not be true? If they die, they not be here to say they do not die. Oh, I joke, I joke. No, we do not die. It is a foolish alien custom which we see no reason to imitate. On Proavitus, only the low creatures die." "None of you dies?" "Why no. Why should one want to be an exception in this?" "But what do you do when you get very old?" "We do less and less then. We come to a deficiency of energy. Is it not the same with you?" "Of course. But where do you go when you become exceedinglv old?" "Nowhere. We stay at home then. Travel is for the young and those of the active years." "Let's try it from the other end," Ceran said. "Where are your father and mother, Nokoma?" "Out and about. They aren't really old." "And your grandfathers and grandmothers?" "A few of them still get out. The older ones stay home." "Let's try it this way. How many grandmothers do you have, Nokoma?" "I think I have nine hundred grandmothers in my house. Oh, I know that isn't many, but we are the younger branch of a family. Some of our clan have very great numbers of ancestors in their houses." "And all these ancestors are alive?" "What else? Who would keep things not alive? How would such' be ancestors?" Ceran began to hop around in his excitement. "Could I see them?" he twittered. "It might not be wise for you to see the older of them," Nokoma cautioned. "It could be an unsettling thing for strangers, and we guard it. A few tis of them you can see, of course." Then it came to Ceran that he might be onto what he had looked for all his life. He went into a panic of expectation. "Nokoma, it would be finding the key!" he fluted. "If none of you has ever died, then your entire race would still be alive!" "Sure. Is like you count fruit. You take none away, you stiU havethem all." "But if the first of them are still alive, then they might know their origin! They would know how it began! Do they? Do you?" "Oh, not I. I am too young for the Ritual." "But who knows? Doesn't someone know?" "Oh, yes. All the old ones know how it began." "How old? How many generations back from you till they know?" "Ten, no more. When I have ten generations of children, then I will also go to the Ritual." "The Ritual, what is it?" "Once a year, the old people go to the very old people. They wake them up and ask them how it all began. The very old people tell them the beginning. It is a high time. Oh how they hottle and laugh! Then the very old people go back to sleep for another year. So it is passed down to the generations. That is the Ritual." T he Proavitoi were not humanoid. Still less were they 'monkey-faces', though that name was now set in the explorers' lingo. They were upright and robed and swathed, and were assumed to be two-legged under their garments. Though, as Manbreaker said, "They might go on wheels for all we know." They had remarkable flowing hands that might be called everywhere-digited. They could handle tools, or employ their hands as if they were the most intricate tools. George Blood was of the opinion IF that the Proavitoi were always madced, and that the men of the Expedition had never seen their faces. He said that those apparent faces were ritual masks, and that no part of the Proavitoi had ever been seen by the men except for those remarkable hands which perhaps were their real faces. The men had reacted with cruel hilarity when Ceran had tried to explain to them just what a great discovery he was verging on. "Little Ceran is still on the howdid-it-begin jag," Manbreaker jeered. "Ceran, will you never give off asking which came first, the chicken or the egg?" "I will have that answer very soon," Ceran sang. "I have the unique opportunity. When I find how the Proavitoi began, I may have the clue to how everything began. All of the Proavitoi are still alive, the very first generation of them. "It passes belief that, you can be so simple-minded," Manbreaker moaned. "They say that one has finally mellowed when he can suffer fools gracefully. By God, I hope I never come to that." B ut two days later, it was Manbreaker who sought out Ceran Swicegood on nearly the same subject. Manbreaker had been doing a little thinking and discovering of his own. "You are Special Aspects Man, Ceran," he said, "and you have been running off after the wrong aspect." "What is thatr "It don't make a damn how it began. What is impOTtant m that it may not have to end." "It is the beginning that I intend to discover," said Ceran. "You fool, can't you understand anything? What do the Proavitoi possess so uniquely that we don't know whether they have it by science or by their nature or by fool luck?" "Ah, their chemistry, I suppose." "Sure. Organic chemistry has come of age here. The Proavitoi have every kind of nexus and inhibitor and stimulant. They can grow and shrink and telescope and prolong what they will. These creatures seem stupid to me; it is as if they had these things by instinct. But they have them, that is what is important. With these things, we can become the patent medicine kings of the universes, for the Proavitoi do not travel or make many outside contacts. These things can do anything or undo anything. I suspect that the Proavitoi can shrink cells, and I suspect that they can do something else." "No, they couldn't shrink cells. It is you who talk nonsense now, Manbreaker." "Never mind. Their things already make nonsense of conventional chemistry. With the pharmacopoeia that one could pick up here, a man need never die. That's the stick horse you've been riding, isn't it? But you've been riding it backward with your head to the tail. The Proavitoi say that they never die." "They seem pretty sure that they don't. If they did, they would be the first to know it, as Nokoma says." "What? Have these creatures humor?" "Some" "But, Ceran, you don't understand how big this is." "I'm the only one who understands it so far. It means that if the Proavitoi have always been immortal, as they maintain, then the oldest of them are still alive. From them I may be able to learn how their species -- and perhaps every species -- began." Manbreaker went into his dying buffalo act then. He tore his hair and near pulled out his ears by the roots. He stomped and pawed and went off bull-bellowing: "It don't make a damn how it began, you fool! It might not have to end!!" so loud that the hills echoed back; "It don't make a damn -- you fool." C eran Swicegood went to the house of Nokoma, but not with her on her invitation. He went without her when he knew that she was away from home. It was a sneaky thing to do, but the men of the Expedition were trained in sneakery. He would find out better without a mentor about the Nine Hundred Grandmothers, about the rumored living dolls. He would find out what the old people did do if they didn't die, and find if they knew how they were first born. For his intrusion, he counted on the innate politeness of the Proavitoi. The house of Nokoma, of all the people, was in the cluster on top of the large flat hill, the Acropolis of Proavitus. They were earthen houses, though finely done, and they had the appearance of growing out of and being 'a part of the hill itself. Ceran went up the winding, ascending flagstone paths, and entered the house which Nokoma had once pointed out to him. He entered furtively, and encountered one of the nine hundred grandmothers -- one with whom nobody need be furtive. The grandmother was seated and small and smiling at him. They talked without real difficulty, though it was not so easy as with Nokoma, who could meet Ceran halfway in his own language. At her call, there came a grandfather who likewise smiled at Ceran. These two ancients were somewhat smaller than the Proavitoi of active years. They were kind and serene. There was an atmosphere about the scene that barely missed being an odor -- not unpleasant, sleepy, reminescent of something, almost sad. "Are there those here older than you?" Ceran asked earnestly. "So many, so many, who could know how many?" said the grandmother. She called in other grandmothers and grandfathers older and smaller than herself, these no more than half the size of the active Proavitoi -- small, sleepy, smiling. Ceran knew now that the Proavitoi were not masked. The older they were, the more of character and interest there was in their faces. It was only of the immature active Proavitoi that there could have been a doubt. No masks could show IF such calm and smiling old age as this. The queer textured stuff was their real faces. So old and friendly, so weak and sleepy, there must have been a dozen generations of them there back to the oldest and smallest. "How old are the oldest?" Ceran asked the first grandmother. "We say that all are the same age since all are perpetual," the grandmother told him. "It is not true that all are the same age, but it is indelicate to ask how old." "You do not know what a lobster is," Ceran said to them, trembling, "but it is a creature that will boil happily if the water on him is heated, slowly. He takes no alarm, for he does not know at what point the heat is dangerous. It is that gradual here with me. I slide from one degree to another with you and my credulity is not alarmed. I am in danger of believing anything about you if it comes in small doses, and it will. I believe that you are here and as you are for no other reason than that I see you and touch you. Well, I'll be boiled for a lobster then before I turn back from it. Are there those here even older than the ones present?" The first grandmother motioned Ceran to follow her. They went down a ramp through the floor into the older part of the house which must have been under ground. L iving dolls! They were here in rows on the shelves, and sitting in small chairs in their niches. Dollsized indeed, and several hundred of them. Many had wakened at the intrusion. Others came awake when spoken to or touched. They were incredibly ancient, but they were cognizant in their glances and recognition. They smiled and stretched sleepily, not as humans would, but as very old puppies might. Ceran spoke to them, and they understood each other surprisingly. "Lobster, lobster," said Ceran to himself, "the water has passed the danger point! And it hardly feels different. If you believe your senses in this, then you will be boiled alive in your credulity." He knew now that the living dolls were real and that they were the living ancestors of the Proavitoi. Many of the little creatures began to fall asleep again. Their waking moments were short, but their sleeps seemed to be likewise. Several of the living mummies woke a second time while Ceran was still in the room, woke refreshed from very short sleeps and were anxious to talk again. "You are incredible!" Ceran cried out, and all the small and smaller and still smaller creatures smiled and laughed their assent. Of course they were. All good creatures everywhere are incredible, and were there ever so many assembled in one place? But Ceran was greedy. A roomful of miracles wasn't enough. "I have to take this back as far as it will go!" he cried avidly. "Where are the even older ones?" "There are older ones and yet older and again older," said the first grandmother, "and thrice-over older ones, but perhaps it would be wise not to seek to be too wise. You have seen enough. The old people are sleepy. Let us go up again." Go up again, out of this? Ceriui would not. He saw passages and descending ramps, down into the heart of the great hill itself. There were whole worlds of rooms about him and under his feet. Ceran went on and down, and who was to stop him? Not dolls and creatures much smaller than dolls. Manbreaker had once called himself an old pirate who reveled in the stream of his riches. But Ceran was the Young Alchemist who was about to find the Stone itself. He walked down the ramps through centuries and millennia. The atmosphere he had noticed on the upper levels was a clear odor now -- sleepy, half-remembered, smiling, sad and quite strong. That is the way Time smells. # # A re there those here even older than you?" Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held in the palm of his hand. "So old and so small that I could hold in my hand," said the grandmother in what Ceran knew from Nokoma to be the older uncompounded form of the Proavitus language. Smaller and older the creatures had been getting as Ceran went through the rooms. He was boiled lobster now for sure. He had to believe it all; he saw and felt it. The wren-sized grandmother talked and laughed and nodded that there were those far older than herself, and in doing so she nodded herself back to sleep. Ceran returned her to her niche in the hive-like wall where there were thousands of others, miniaturized generations. Of course he was not in the house of Nokoma now. He was in the heart of the hill that underlay all the houses of Proavitus, and these were the ancestors of everybody on the asteroid. "Are there those here even older than you?" Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held on the tip of his finger. "Older and smaller," she said, "but you come near the end." She was asleep, and he put her back in her place. The older they were, the more they slept. He was down onto solid rock under the roots of the hill. He was into the passages that were cut out of that solid rock, but they could not be many or deep. He had a sudden fear that the creatures would become so small that he could not see them or talk to them, and so he would miss the secret of the beginning. But had not Nokoma said that all the old people knew the secret? Of course. But he wanted to hear it from the oldest of them. He would have it now, one way or the other. "Who is the oldest? Is this the end of it? Is this the beginning? Wake up! Wake up!" he called when he was sure he was in the lowest and oldest room. "Is it ritual?" asked some who woke up. Smaller than mice they were, no bigger than bees, maybe older than both. "It is a special Ritual," Ceran IF told them. "Relate to me bow it was in the beginning." What was that sound -- too slight, too scattered to be a noise? laughing. It was the hilarity of little things waking up to a high time. "Who is the oldest of all?" Ceran demanded, for their laughter bothered him. "Who is the oldest and first." "I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother," one said gaily. "All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?" "Of course," said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them. "Then you must be the ultimate child, for you are like no other. If you be, then it is as funny at the end as it was in the beginning." "How was it in the beginning?" Ceran bleated. "You are the first. Do you know how you came to be?" "Oh, yes, yes," laughed the ultimate grandmother, and the hilarity oi the small things became a real noise now. "How did it begin?" demanded Ceran, and he was hopping and skipping about in his excitement. "Oh, it was so funny a joke the way things began that you would not believe it," chittered the grandmother. "A joke, a joke!" "Tell me the joke then. If a joke generated your species, then tell me that cosmic joke." "Tell yourself," tinkled the grandmother. "You are a part of the joke if you are of my children. Oh, it is too funny to believe. How good to wake up and laugh and go to sleep again." Blazing green frustration! To be so close and to be balked by a giggling bee! "Don't go to sleep again! Tell me at once how it began!" Ceran shrilled, and he had the ultimate grandmother between thumb and finger. "This is not Ritual," the grandmother protested. "Ritual is that you guess what it was few: three days, and we laugh and say No, no, no, it was something nine times as wild as that. Guess some more.'" "I will not guess for three days! Tell me at once or I will crush you," Ceran threatened in a quivering voice. "I look at you, you look at me, I wonder if you will do it," the ultimate grandmother said calmly. A ny of the tough men of the Expedition would have done it -- would have crushed her, and then another and another and another of the creatures till the secret was told. If Ceran had taken on a tough personality and a tough name he'd have done it. If he'd been Outboy Barrelhouse he'd have done it without a qualm. But Ceran Swicegood couldn't do it. 'Tell me," he pleaded in agony. "All my life I've tried to find out how it began, how anything began And you know!" "We know. Oh, it was so funny how it began. So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing! Nobody could guess, nob(y could believe." "Tell me! Tell me!" Ceran was ashen and hysterical. "No, no, you are no child of mine," chortled the ultimate grandmother. "Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?" "Tell me! Insult me! Let me die laughing!" But Ceran near died crying from the frustration that ate him laughed and hooted and giggled: "Oh, it was so funny the way it began!" And they laughed. And laughed. And went on laughing... until Ceran Swicegood wept and laughed together, and crept away, and returned to the ship still laughing. On his next voyage he changed his name to Blaze Bolt and ruled for ninetyseven days as king of a sweet sea island in M-#, but that is another and much more unpleasant story. Next Month in If -- An astonishing complete short novel of tontorrow's worlds and people  by John Brunner Part Four of his greatest sf novel in years -- by Robert A. Heinlein A bright and funny new Retief novelette by Keith Laumer -- and many more! Don't miss the AAorch IF -- on sale everywhere! # IF IF  Novelette What history does not tell about England's brave defense -- against the invasion that did not happeni "T do not say the French cannot come to England. I only say they cannot come by sea." (Lord Collingswood in the House of Lords, reported by C. S. Forester.) "In England of Time Track Gamma, the enemy came." (Report of the Parallel Universe Time Track Exploration Society.) I S ir Hubert Wulf-Leigh was a fourbottle man. Every night four pints of the acrid yet sweet wine called Rossa slipped down his gullet to the obvious discomfort of his liver. Heavy set, given a little 'o fat, his face flecked with the brownish mottlings of cirrhotic disease, at thirty-two he was a poor bet to see his fortieth birthday. With him would perish the last of the Barons Minor (hereditary Knights) of Wulf-Leigh. And the plain fact of it was that Sir Hubert didn't care. For these were heroic times, the long years of the war against Naflin the usurper, King Elective of the revolution riven Kingdom of Fraunce. An enlarged heart had kept the Baron Minor from serving actively in the armed forces; a rejected heart, cast aside by a young lady with a cruel proclivity for classing the medically unfit as cowards, had started him on the road downward toward the shipwreck of his health via the bottle and the bawdy house. Yet there was still a space of about five hours each day between the morning's bottle fatigue and the late afternoon's thirty craving when Hubert was able to perform useful work. He served in those hours as Particular and Confidential Clerk to the Board of Lord High Admirals. The nature of the job (the result of one of the Lord High Admirals' remembrance of past friendship for Wulf-Leigh's late father), was the close examination of enemy documents (periodicals, government bulletins and the like) which trickled into England by various means. From them he took useful intelligence. On the day in question he was perusing the back pages of Observator National, the official paper of the Naflon government. These back pages were concerned with the economic decrees of the regime. Suddnly. Sir Hubert noticed an item placed there by the chief agronomist of the Sunken Lands: "This year by order of the King Elective ten thousand Hekkares have been planted to augment the regular crop of flax." "That's a funny one," mused the Baron Minor. "Why the devil are they adding a third to their regular acreage in that crop? They can't need that many new petticoats. There is something here. Maybe Doll Broadrump will know. I'll be seeing her tonight, and I'll be sure to inquire." D oll Broadrump kept one of the most exclusive brothels in Lindesnes. Running to fat (her once magnificent figure was now better described as ample) and a bit o'erly fond of the wine bottle, she found herself attracted to the High Admiral's clerk by a perverse mutuality. When the Sunken Lands matter occurred to him, he had already half undressed her. "Not so fast, Wilfy!" (This was an endearment based upon his name which was usually pronounced as a clipped Wilfly.) "You'll have me all unstayed before I'm ready for it." "I'm just practicing for the Fall when you'll doubtless have two or more petticoats than you're wearing now, smuggled over here along with your Freunch perfumes," he teased her. "Coo, Wilfly, how you do talk. You'd think I buy from the smugIF Ff cuneh hces punctured by English needles u glers, do you? Well, only a little, like perfumes and stuff. But certainly I won't be buying Linen Petticoats. Why they're classed as demode now." The thick set lover was puzzled by this response. "Demode? That means out of fashion, doesn't it? That doesn't go with information I've acquired. Are you sure of your facts?" "Am I sure? Let me off your lap for a moment, ducks, and I'll show you." Dolly began rummaging through an overstuffed disorderly armoire. "Here we are, lad. This in Mme. Godolfin's Ladies' Book. Mme. Godolfin dictates the styles in Naflon's kingdom. It's said she sleeps with Naflon when his queen is otherwised disposed. Now read this here. Underlinens shall not be of that material any longer. Petticoats shall be of silk to cling to the figure with gentility and grace. You can bet our ladies will be following that trend. So by the fall there won't be a petticoat of linen worn by a fashionable lady in lindesnes." "So this Madame Godolfin rules the fashions for both England ind Fraunce. Maybe some of our people ought to talk to her, use her as a kind of a modern day Lysistrata. But that's not in the Lord High Admiral's purview. But you've given me a useful lead. You shall have ten c'ronets beyond your usual two royals tonight." Leaping back on Hubert's lap, she exclaimed with proud and eager excitement: "Crikey, luvvy, ye're n real gent!" T he next day Sir Hubert, when he finally whipped himself into his office, checked through the Observator again to see if he could make any connection through other surplus production. TTie only thing he noted was a rather querulous article above the signature of Naflon's Minister of Conservation of Scarce Reources, complaining about the low surrender rate for tallow and its excessive use in the home for home supplies of candles. The article urged that he who is a good son of his country will not keep six candles burning in a room where two would do and in that way his deliveries of tallow could be raised by two or three pounds a week to the agents of the Ministry of Conservation... Wulf-Leigh labored through the afternoon trying to make a connection between flax and tallow and Naflon's war. The only thought he had was of shoemaker's thread; and he didn't think that Naflon was going to paddle his way to England in a specially sewed, water-repelling cobbler's invention. "Damn, there has to be something. Well, no chance to find out now. I play cards with Munkertny tonight. Maybe he can enlighten me." W 'ith an exaggerated deliberateness, Wulff-Leigh put down the picture cards with incantation: "Chief, Prince, and King of Swords and (playing the Ace) the Almighty One whose Sward cuts down even IF Kings. That's Skirmish, Battle and War. We have you on the hip again, Munkertny. At five Royals a Skirmish, we have you down nine to four; and five Royals on the battle... that's thirty Royals you owe us additionally and twenty-five for the earlier games. That's fiftyfive bright boys you owe us." "Biggah," exploded Munkertny nay, Senior Captain in the Royal Navy.) "Playing with you, Sir Hubert, is a habit I shall have to forego. I can't afford many evenings like this!" WulfLeigh shrugged off the complaint. "You probably take twenty times the value of this evening's little session from the Freunch in prize money. I'm just leveling off the inequities in the country's wealth. It wouldn't do for the Navy's captains to grow too rich. With wealth comes independent thinking and with independent thinking grows disobedience to orders and the breakdown of all discipline." "Gah, Wilfly, it's good you're saying that smiling! This prize bit isn't all you civilian side fellahs make it out to be. Last week we took a coaster making for Bullon on the coast near the Sunklands, and what do you think she had on board? One hundred madman's tea pots! They were big enough to hold three barrels of tea. They had the spouts in the cover, and not one spout but two. And to top off everything else, they had a grommet and clamp arrangement for dogging down the cover. I'll bet even Prisker, our chemistical genius, couldn't tell me what those were for. They couldn't be just ordinary urns for the army -- Naflon hasn't got more than seventy-five regiments in his whole demmed army." Sir Andrew Priest-Kerr, Master of the Lord High Admiral's Powder ist who had partnered Sir Hubert in the game just concluded, thought for a minute and then asked quietly: "Tell me, Munkertny, were these tea pots of yours porcelainized on the inside? I mean did they have a glassy smooth finish over the metal?. "Demme, Prisker, I believe you know the answer! Yes, they did have a glassy surface inside. What are they?" "Well, sir, if I were right in that deduction. I'd say your teakettles were not kettles at all but gas generators. With a two-hole set up like that, the top would be lifted -- fifty or a hundred pounds of zinc and fifty or sixty gallons of oil of vitriol put in one vent -- stoppered -- and ninety-thousand cubic feet of Hydrogen drawn off through the other before a new charge would be necessary." "Hydrogen, eh?" sniffed Mountcourtenay. "Can't say I've heard of the stuff. What's it good for?" "It will produce the hottest flame imaginable without leaving an ash Since it's about eighteen times as light as air, it can be used in balloons. You know this, of course -- those cloth envelopes that are sufficiently lighter than air around them and thus can lift a weight of men and materials to sail with the wind for hundreds of leagues. "Gad, sir! Naflon wasting good shipping space to inflate children's toys? It's most incredible. You might even say disappointing. I thought we faced a worthier opponent. He'd do better to put his canvas into ship's sails and coming out of his harbors to meet us." "He can't make them of canvas," snapped Priest-Kerr, "it's too heavy. The best stuff is heavy silk or other light, air-tight materials." Wulf-Leigh got back into the discussion. Remembering the economic note about the Sunken Lands, he asked quietly: "Could other light cloths like linen be used?" The powder master said, "Not usually. Linen is light but it's too porous a weave to hold the gas properly. Linen rag paper could be used, but unfortunately the aero men don't care to trust their lives to paper. You might use a close woven linen with an air-proofing compound spread over it." "Could you -- " the baron minor was suddenly tense and hissing between taut lips -- "use tallow as such an air-proofing compound?" Prisker nodded. "Yes, I calculate you could. But why this sudden concern with balloons?" T he victor at cards put the pieces together as carefully as he put together the "Suite of Swords" in the card game previously. "Gentlemen, you have just given me the clues -- along with a certain woman named Doll Broadrump -- that may block an invasion by Naflon." The other three men at the table (the fourth was a Naval commisary officer) said as one, "Come now!" The captain spoke first. "Naflon wouldn't have the nerve to send a thousand of his men over here. Why, our country folk would eat them alive. "But suppose he sent not one thousand but three or five thousand? Suppose they could hold out long enough to do us some serious hurt, like burning the dockyards at Plymness or even capturing His Majesty with a quick swoop here on Lindesnes? Suppose they landed at Overwick with some Pantler claimant and raised Celtland? There are all sorts of deviltries they could manage." Priest-Kerr finally ended the discussion. "You know I'm not a real expert on these balloons. The best man for you to see is the Baron Lambruton. He's a Freunchie and crossed the Sheeve by one of those sky wagons about four years before the revolution that ended by bringing the usurper to power. He's also a red hot aristrocrat and broke with Naflon very quickly. You'll find him at the Gafe des Exils." C#'Tou Anglias are savages. A When a bottle of Chambergnon is at hand, to choose instead a glass of Rossa, that gut-corroding enormity of a wine! Well," shrugged the Baron Lambruton, "when one is driven into foreign lands, you must put up with the barbarities of the natives. You had mentioned IF business to me; please get on with it." "Forgive me, please, my dear Baron, but my stomach is used to Rossa and I doubt if it would do justice to your admirable Chambergnon. As to the business, I am told by Sir Andrew Brisker, the Master of his Majesty's Powder Works, that you are the greatest expert on ballooning now in England." The Baron suddenly became expansive. Ballooning was evidently the first love of his life. "TTie greatest in England, ma fois! There is none better than me in all Fraunce, or, for that matter, in the whole continent. You Angilas are preparing to use ballons in Scouting as I suggested to your government three years ago?" "No," smiled Wulf-Leigh apologetically, "though it's an idea. It's Naflon who's using the balloons and it's my job to estimate the strength he's using them. Can you give me some idea of the amount of weight one can lift?" The Baron's brows knitted. "So, Naflon is using balloons! My apprentice, Fremeau, must be doing better there than I am here. This is not an easy thing to calculate. You know it depends on the height to which balloon is expected to ascend. Is this use for spy work? No? A descent upon your unconquerable isle? Ah, yes. Then the safest height to get above the shooting range of your fleet would be three thousand feet. These balloons will naturally be of oiled silk, the best balloon cloth?" The bureaucrat shook his head. "I think not. I have reason to believe that they are going to use a tight woven linen coated with tallow. I have been given this information by a most reliable source." "That is very possible, ma foil The usurper has one overriding fault. He is a cheap swine. He will throw away a coronet to save a groate's worth of tar, or what ever your English expression is. Also, there is a distinct advantage in linen. If he is going to build up an airmada to invade your previously impregnable kingdom, he will have to rely on inexperienced crews. After all, my dear WulfLeigh, in all Fraunce, in all the world, perhaps there are only three hundred Aeronauts. That means he will have to make the balloons of the most difficult to damage light cloth available. That could very well be your linen." "Very good thinking, Lamberton," mouthed the Particular secretary of the Lord High Admirals, "but tell me, is there any way to judge the amount of linen that the project would use?" "You will pardon me for my delay, 'sieu , Wulf-Leigh, but it is not the easiest thing for a man of Fraunce to think in English and it is not easy for an airman to think in terms of oiled silk and then have to revise one's thinking to cover linen. "You see, cher 'sieu, that the varying weight of the cloth makes a difference in the amount of lifting power available to given material. Our usual estimate for oiled silk, for example, is that eighteen hundred square feet of material will support one man in flight. With linen, we would need more. The envelope would then require perhaps two thousand feet. Any further questions, 'sieu?" "None at the moment, thank you. But I hope I can find you easily?" "Easily, cher 'sieu, as long as you pay for the wine." m A few visits to linen establishments and a visit to the royal botanical gardens at Avenhouse near Lindesnes added the other facts that he needed. He knew that the Freunch would get thirty-five bushels of flax to the Hekkare, that a bushel of flax would make two hundred square feet of tight-cloth per bushel; and he estimated that the Freunch would put half of their Sunken Lands area into production of balloon cloth. At any rate, be came to a final figure of two thousand balloons each capable of carrying three men as the potential strength of the Freunch assault. He drew up a paper outlining the piecing together of facts and conjectures and submitted it to the Lord High Admirals.  The day following his submission of the paper he was called to the office of Admiral Viscount Cockroftsbury-Stow, junior among the Lord High Admirals. The Admiral was pacing the floor as he had paced many a quarter-deck. "This is," he began without pretive logic. Starting with a small paragraph in the Observator and picking up scraps of knowledge in brothels, at card tables and in toadeaters' cafes, you have figured out a whole scheme invasion. Only trouble is: I don't believe It." "Why not, your Lordship? I have challenged Senior Naval Captains men like Brisker, the Master of the Powder Works, and Lamberton, the best areonaut in the whole continent, to pick flaws in my logic. And they haven't been able to. Now you shoot up the whole works with a simple 'I don't believe it'. Why don't you, my Lord?" "Young man, one of the privileges of being Lord High Admiral is that I don't have to answer any man who asks me, 'Why doest thou thus, or why don't thou do that?' -- unless the person asking is a King or a King's First Minister, And sometimes the latter eminence doesn't get answers either. But in this case the answer is simple. You can't expect a nation of toad-eaters to display that kind of imagination! You know, don't you, that they all eat toads? Naflon eats toads, his first minister eats toads, every ruddy Freunchie eats toads. If they can get down a little beast like that without chucking their guts, they lack imagination. That's why the Royal Navy has always whipped them; superior imagination. That's licked them on land. Our army blighters don't have the same kind of imagination our tars have. Now IF if we start giving the toad-eaters credit for that kind of imagination, it will wreck the morale of the whole ruddy navy!" "First of all," rebutted WulfLeigh, "it's not toads they eat but frogs. They're not half bad. I've eaten them on occasion. And you have to give Naflon credit for imagination -- otherwise he'd never have risen from a half-pay captain of Sappeurs to the head of a great nation. That kind of imagination could scheme up this balloon plan. "So I should like to urge you to keep a close inshore watch on Bullon and at the first sign of the effectuation of the project take steps to protect the country from a hard blow." Too late, the Baron Minor realized the faulty choice of words. Cockroftsbury-Stow smiled icily. "My dear Wilfly, for forty years in the Navy, I've gotten used to hard blows. We've dealt as many as we've given. We are not going to panic the country with this talk of flying machines. You are forbidden, upon peril of your post and possibly imprisonment to tell or write farther on this theme. Am I understood, Wilfly?" Choking down a rough-tongued answer, the pleader answered stolidly: "Aye, Aye, sir." T he lucid interval between end of hangover and beginning of thirst became shortened somewhat as Wulf-Leigh graduated to the five-bottle class. The cirrhotic spots on his face became larger and better defined. Finally his physician ordered him to take the waters at Inverhocking Spa, a noted hot springs in the Midlands. He expressed doubt as to any ultimate benefit but went there as obediently as he could. He bathed in the hot springs, clad in the white sackcloth robe that was the mark of the spa pilgrim, choked down the sulphur-reeking water that was drunk as part of the spa regimen and paid a timorous smuggler to bring him a bottle a day of the forbidden Rossa. Clad in the white robe of clinical penitence, he was on the fifth day of a fortnight's projected stay and glumly gazing at the three quarter-full glass of rotten-egg water that he was supposed to empty within the next twenty minutes, when Lord High Admiral's message arrived. It was short and to the point: "Come at once to the Lord Admirals'. We were wrong; you were right. The Freunchies came out and there is hell to pay. Apologetically, Cockroftsbury-Stow." Ten bone-jolting chattered stage hours later. Sir Hubert stood in the presence of a clearly chastened Viscount and listened to the explanation of the "Hell to Pay". "You see, Wilfly, the King Elective had similar doubts too, so this blighter in charge of the project -- Fremeau, I think that's the name the intelligence chaps have given -- decided to show the usefulness of the damn balloons in war. So they sent off a half dozen balloons and dropped explosive-laden shells on our fleet -- dropping them from four thousand feet, which was beyond the range of any guns we had around there. They blew up two frigates and a ship o' line and dismasted another frigate. Then when the breeze swung around again to an on-shore wind, they casually sailed back to Fraunce. Nation's happy, Fremeau's happy, but the Board of Lord High Admirals are not happy, not happy in the least. We've got to save our Navy from a demoralization and possibly destruction. If the blockade is broken and Naflon can get across the Narrow seas without getting his feet wet, England is his for the taking. And he won't even use your suicide squad method. Now our men are damned nervous every time there's a wind shift in the offing. You're the blounder who dug up this balloon scare in the first place. We're looking to you for an answer." W ilfly stroked his chin thoughtfully, savoring the discomfort of the Viscount sitting before him. Finally the combination of pity and patriotism overcame him and he murmured: "I think we can save the fleet. It will entail a visit to S'r Andrew at the Royal Powder Works." "Sir Andrew?" CockroftsburyStowe looked baffled, then smiled. "Oh, you mean Prisker. He's an odd sort of chap; knows all about stinks and stuff. Let's go, my carriage awaits." Sir Hubert dared to offer an amendment to this suggestion. "Since the powder works is up the river, can't we go up there by the Admiral's barge? a good upriver wind we can make as good time as we do by carriage, and my bottom's still sore after that road from Inverhocking." "By Jove, that's a capital idea! I could stand a ride behind the wind horse today. We'll go down by the water-gate." Sir Andrew Priest-Kerr stalked the floor of his powder-blackened, brimstone smelling workshop. He was obviously annoyed at the appearance of his distinguished visitor and even more annoyed in the breach of his private confidence by the Baron Minor. "Dammit, Wilfly! What I told you about isn't fully tested, won't be for about two weeks -- and besides that it's a signalling device, not a weapon." The Particular Clerk was used to spasms of annoyance on the part of the chemist. He shrugged it off. "Look, Prisker, suppose you (kxtbled the charge of your fire dltdEe. You've said the ones you have now reach two thousand feet. You cosdd very well make a fire drake go up four thousand feet and it ooi gain some extra altitude by emplacing it on the fore-t'gallant yard." The Master of the Works 'riiook his head. "No, that would never do! My Lord, we're talking of my fire drake, a signal flare impelled by a self-contained powder charge. Chap on one of the Asian stations gave me the idea. Saw something similar out there. Now Wilfly suggests putting it on the masthead. That's a fool's idea. The thing goes into the air and leaves a trril of burning powder grains behind it. IF IV Can you imagine what that would do to tarred ropes and canvas rigging?" The Viscount sniffed; "The man has a point, Wilfly. How do you answer that?" Once again the reflective pause. Then: "Fire the drake from a tripod atop an iron pot partly filled with water. Mount the pot on two right-angled swivels for aiming purposes, and let the sparks be kicked back into the pot. Put a gunner's mate into the foretop to handle the aiming and firing -- and there you are. How's that idea seem to you, Prisker?" The answer was "top hole". In three days the Powder Works began turning out the large sized fire drakes. Thirteen more days saw the strange installation put in the foretops of the blockading squadrons. On the eighteenth day after WulfLeigh had been pulled from the Spa cure at Inverhocking the Freunch came boiling out of Bullon again. This time, however, they came out to blazing ruin. Seven of the great gasbags were exploded by the high-climbing fire drakes with impunity. Three, by jettisoning ballast and bombs alike, climbed above the range of the strange new weapon. One with a hit dismasted a frigate, and one balloon, flaming down by a strange quirk of wind, blew a piece of blazing cloth across the rigging of a second frigate and did severe damage to the masts, sails and running rigging of the vessel by setting it on fire. T he Freunch figured the cost in trained aeronauts and never attacked the fleet again. They did not however renounce their main plan. Three weeks later the inshore watch established near bullon reported thirty balloons risen between sunrise and sunset, twice that many the next day and three times that many on the third day. They rose above the plains behind Bullon like so many Dhinni somehow enslaved by Nation's conscript army. On the fourth day they summoned Wulf-Leigh again from the spa, where he had again gone for his liver's sake, to the headquarters of the Lord High Admirals. This time Lord Cockroftsbury-Stowe was even more humble than on the occasion of his last summons. "Nation's boys have fulfilled your predictions again, Wilfly. They're raising those damn balloons at a rate that should give him near two thosand in two months -- and that will be the season of the prevailing easterlies that will blow steadily for long enough to put the Freunchies over our country. "Where they strike depends on the wind compass. If the gales are blowing southeast by south they will be striking for Overwick with the Pantler pretender aboard. That's the most northerly heading they can make. East by sou'east they'll be down on the ridings of Doncaster, destroying the Iron Foundries of Middle England. Due East will be a swoop on Lindesnes, and East by No'east will be the Navy's blessing with a raid on Plymness. That last, sir, is where you come in. We're discharging you as a particular Clerk of the board of Lord High Admirals -- " the Admiral now paused in some amusement to watch the anguished protest start to form on the intelligence man's face -- "and appointing you Deputy Warden of the Ness, with full rights and powers." "Deputy Warden of the Ness!" There was still shock and amazement in the voice of Wulf-Leigh. "That's an ancient office, largely honorary, that hasn't been filled since they cut off Henry Pander's head a hundred and fifty years ago." Cockroftsbury-Stowe smiled. "Yes, they cut off Henry's head. But they didn't abolish the office and now we're glad they didn't. Your office will encompass the defense of the Ness, of Plymness and of the three shires around it. That's a large order. But it will be done with the equivalent of a rear admiral and you'll also be amply compensated. You'll be entitled to the Salt Beef Excise and the wine duty. That's a c'ronet on every keg of salt beef taken down the Ness by the Navy, and in time of war that's three hundred thousand kegs a year; and a half c'ronet on every keg of wine brought into any port in England. And that means five dred and sixty thousand Royals in your pocket every year for the war's duration and possibly for life... because as we go to a peacetime establishment the salt beef duty drops but the wine increment increases." I #  orblemme," gasped Sir HuvJTbert, "that's a high wage! I hope that there's a knighthood of one of the honorary orders to go with it." "There's that too. If the action falls out in your jurisdiction you'll tap for King's Strand if you succeed -- or -- " the admiral's smile grew wry -- "the heads man's axe tap for treason if you fail." "That's putting it nicely. Wealth and honor if we triumph, ruin and a traitor's grave if we fail. I'm giving up wine for the duration and I'm taking the post so graciously offered. What forces will be under me? What crack regiments?" Cockroftsbury-Stowe shrugged. "I'm afraid you won't have any crack regiments at all. You know our home establishment is twenty regiments. Of those seven are in the north, guarding Overwick and the Celtland border against the threat of a Pantler landing; four are in the midcountry riding to ward off the attack aimed at Doncaster and the foundries; and nine are emplaced around Lindensnes to protect an expected assault on the King. It's odd that the King, who can actually contribute less than anyone in the government to the actual war effort, can be the most important piece on the board. If they catch him -- but now I'm talking like a demmed Republican." "But that doesn't leave anything IF SjrHubert Wulf Leigh Gatheriny mtelUsfence ikt manner of one hth'born . to guard the Ness. Will that be left to the yeomanry?" "In part, yes." The Lord High Admiral ticked off the forces available on his fingers. "You'll draw five thousand men from the trainbands of the three shires. There'll be thirty-five himdred from the Royal Marine Force and fifteen hundred Jacktars acquainted with the countryside from Press gang work, officered by one hundred masters at arms from the fleet. You see lad, the navy has always taken care of its own -- and we're going to do it again at Plymnes." "Well," he smiled grimly, "it's going to be an unusual defense at any rate. Will I have a good field leader under me?" "You'll have Lieutenant Colonel ficer of the home fleet. Also you can pick any senior captain that's available to serve under you with the rank of commodore. Have you any preference?" "I think I'd like Munkertny. I know him well and feel I could work closely with him." The admiral took a linen-bound notebook from a drawer of his desk and, leafing through it, mumblingly checked the name. "Good, sir, Munkertny it is. You'll leave for the Ness on the night stage. Good luck, Wilfly." V T he Warden's Council of the Ness, dormant for nearly two hundred years, was in session. The dean of merchant captains. the captain of the dockyards, the merchant provost, Commodore Mountcourtany, Major General Hammington (shortened to Hangton) of the Nesshires militia. Lieuof the Marines and the Deputy Warden, Wulf-Leigh, who had initiated the council on the second day following his arrival, were gathered around a table in Navy House. Wulf-Leigh addressed them in no gentle terms. "Councillors, in about fifty days Naflon is going to attempt the invasion of England. It will not be in sufficient force to stay in the country, but enough to cause us a terrible hurt. If the wind favors him he may drop on the Ness and attempt to burn the dockyards. I say drop because as you know he's coming by air with aeronaut balloonists. The attack will most likely be by night. Now you, Hangton, have said that any thrust upon the Ness will make its attack on the heights above the city. You say this because below the town, on one side of the Ness is heavy marshland, and on the other side is a narrow pass where a spur of those heights comes down to the sea. Now how about a landing in the town itself? You know that with balloons they can do that, don't you?" Hammington was very deliberate about it. "No, sir, they can't land in town. You've seen the rooves. They are packed close together and very steep in the eaves. There's a few gardens, the bowls-green and a couple of common squares, but a planting of stakes and caltrops will make those unprofitable. No, the IP landings have to come on the heights above the city. Or to be more exact, on the stony apron of Middle Moor." "What is this stony apron you mention, and what's Middle Moor?" "The stony apron of Middle Moor is a rock dike that the Creator made to hold back the waters of the springs that feed down to the Ness. It's a zone about two miles square out in the ten mile square of the middle moor that is safe for men to walk upon and move about freely. The remainder of the square is usable only on the trails of the moor-trotters, and no man knows them save the moor-trotters." The Merchant Provost said fiercely: "If we could get em sommes to land on High Moor Apron instead of Middle Moors, 'e could drown 'em in the bogs of Middle Moor." Hangton smiled sourly. "A good idea, but a foolish one. You see, Sir 'Ubert, there's a high moor above Middle Moor with the same kind of apron and if they got on that by mischance, they'd have to cross Middle Moor through the bogs and streams which would be good and high. But they wouldn't make that kind of mistake." The merchant-captains' dean spoke up. "Aye, it's too bad they're coming from the land side, 'e could false-light em." T he former clerk of the Lord High Admirals suddenly sensed an idea. "What's this about false lighting," he demanded sharply. The old captain explained: "Twenty year ago and for a hundred year afore that, 'ere was wreckers on this coast. The worst on 'en were 'ee false lighters, used to light false beacons to trick coastal shipping into 'ee blind mouths on 'ee coast that looked like 'ee entrance to 'ee Ness. Oh, it were a sore thing. 'En killed all 'ee pour souls that swam ashore so that no one lived to peach on 'em. Today the coast patrol has stopped 'en bit a lot of us old salts know of 'en an 'eir doin's." "Bigad, Captain, you've given me an idea! First of all, we'll have to have some men who know the Moors like the old captain knows the coasts. General Hangton, do you think the moor trotters would meet that sort of bill?" "Stab me if it would be anyone but them. Don't know why it is, but for a hundred miles in either direction they know all the paths through the moors and all thentwists and turnings. They're a clannish lot, even have their own chief or king. They might help you and they might not. Simply no way to tell." "Well said. General," returned Sir Hubert, "but how can I find out? Where can I meet some of these moor trotters?" "Why, there's always a few of them in jail for preaching. That's another of their faults, they don't give a fig for the game laws. And they die in jail. Can't stand being shut within walls." "Then we'll free one of 'em and speak to this bog-trotting king of theirs." T he next fifty-two days were known as the rule of the mad Warden. He spent three days up on the apron of Middle Moor; he brought down an artist from the Navy chart office. The artist was also dispatched to the apron and given orders for night work on the Moors. Viscount Cockroftsbury Stowe watched nervously as the indents for supplies ordered in by the Deputy Warden began to come across his desk. Five hundred thousand feet of quick match, six hundred diousand feet of oil deal gut, thirty thousand pieces of yellowish flaming slow-burning fuzees, twenty tons of pot-metal, broken down into two foot squares, ten thousand yards of heavy pre-waxed shoemaker's twine and, strangest request of all, on an indent placed with the chimney cleaners' guild of Lindesnes, three and a half tons of finely ground soot. He devoted a good deal of his the capable hands of Colonel Fitzthe townsfolk of Plymness in responding to certain signals. Plymness being a Navy-oriented town, this was easier than it might have been elsewhere. On the late afternoon of the fiftysecond day, the word came that the balloon armada was in the air. Mountcourtenay and Wulf-Leigh sat uneasily around the big conference table. At the first semaphore-borne report, relayed from the Freunch coast, they had given orders to Hammington to rally his trainbands. The second message told of wind direction: east-southeast, but swinging easterly. "Looks bad for Lindesnes, Munkertny, if that wind makes any further easting," growled Fitzwilliam. "Aye," snorted the captain. "But just in case there's some north in that wind, I'm ordering the boats with the warden's ruddy buckets. We'll muddy up the Ness real well for you, Wilfly." The second report relayed from the line o' battle which backed the blockade line showed the aerial squadrons traveling on a wind making dead from the East. The firedrakes of the line o' battle drove the enemy into desperate ascents, but not before thirty-two of the fragile cloth bags had been wiped from the sky. The third report from the estuary which the great river flowed into below Lindesnes told of a shift to east-northeast. Five seconds after the semaphore message had been handed to the Deputy Warden he was in action. He gave a nod to Mountcourtenay and that worthy went outside again. There was a drum roll and dozen bos'ns' pipes signalled the boat crews to do their bit with the soot buckets. A word to the sexton of the town church and three bells were sounded from the spire. At this signal all the lights in the town IF companies of marines and a hundred and fifty seamen of the press gangs went out on a sweep to put out any lights that might still show. Twenty minutes later, the two members of the council reported back. "Not a light showing in all reported, Mountcourtenay announced, "We've dumped your three thousand pounds of chimney sweepings into the Ness and there isn't a glimmer on the waters." "All right, gentlemen, we have wiped out Plymness, at least to enemy eyes. Now let us create new Plymness!" With these words, Wulf-Leigh went into the garden in the back of Navy House and cut away the sealed end of one of the oiled seal gut tubes that he had ordered and touched a glowing cigar to the cotton cord thefein contained. The spark whisked swiftly up the tube, suddenly branching and rebranching as it came to junctures with other tubes, so that the swift traveling sparks outlined for a few seconds the upper end of Plymness and then vanished as the lines of fire walked up onto Middle Moor. "Bigad, sir! So that's what you quick-match that you ordered; and the seal gut kept it dry. But tell me, sir, what does that fuse light?" "To see that, Munkertny, we'll have to go up to the stone apron of Middle Moor. It's better seen than explained. I have horses waiting outside. Gentlemen shall we make the ascent? Colonel Fiswim, will you give orders to your Marines to march the same way? We'll pick up Hangton and the militia on the way." Through the gathering darkness, the little band of officers picked their way up the steep trail to Middle Moor. They came to the top and collectively gasped. "Lorluwus!" exploded Mountcourtenay, "Plymness recreated! Even the Ness shimmering at the foot of town and the light on Ness head. How'd you do it, Wilfly?" That last question hung in everyone's lips and every man's eyes as they gaped there in the slow-gathering darkness, watching the dimly burning lights of the town. Nearer to them they could see the lights reflect in the shimmering wavelets of a false Ness. "I had a good idea, but I couldn't have carried it out without good helpers. The man from Navy Charts helped, and there were others. Here's another of 'em." A stout yet graceful swarthy skinned man materialized out of the darkness. He bowed to Sir Hubert. "I hope everything was to your loiking, zur." "It was, Jovanko. Here -- " he threw him a heavy purse -- "arc the thousand royals we agreed on. Gentlemen, we are visited by royalty. This is Jovanko the Tinker, king of the Moor Trotters. A genuine monarch too. Gets better obedience God bless him, gets out of his. His men, moving through mysteriously defined trails in the moor lands, planted the slow lights and the seal the case for aoing to the moon A new book packed with current fnformatibn on the moon-and-space program and its scientific byproducts and an adventure into speculation... This book is a "must" for anyone associated with, or interested in, the space program. Written by Neil P. Ruzic, editor and publisher of Industrial Research magazine, the book presents a lucid case for the exploration and exploitation of our natural satellite. It considers such areas as: research in the lunar vacuum; manufacturing operations on the moon; mining the surface of the moon; observing and probing the universe from the moon; using the moon as a base in the search for life beyond earth; and stimulating the economy through technological transfer. (Detach and mair) r I I I I I . I I I I I I j I L Send copies of "The Case for Going to the Moon" at # for a single copy or # for two or more copies.  Check enclosed.  Bill me. name address i I city state zip code  I gut wrapped lines of quickmatch to recreate Plymness from the drawings charts I gave them. They built the Ness out of sheets of pot metal and lines of twine. The latter are being shaken even now by a dozen of Jovanko's men to create the rise and fall of the waves of the Ness. "Almost feel sorry for the Freunch. All their planning and work, and zut, they're false-lighted into a bleeding bog!' A s he spoke, down came the Freunch, dropping with impressive silence broken only by the faint hissing of ruptured gas bags, upon the heights above and the upper parts of Plymness town. They moved quickly forward, only to discover too late the trap that had been laid for them. Stranded on the wrong side of the Middle Moor, they saw in the next six hours five hundred of their number drowned in quagmires, the primings on three thousand muskets wetted into uselessness and the whole force so thoroughly disorganized that they were no match for even the motley forces of Marines, militia and land-based sailors who opposed them. At a ceremony shortly afterward. Sir Hubert got tapped for King's Strand. Seven weeks of abstinence had cleared away most of his liver spots and the proper young lady accompanying him to the ceremony had a glint in her eye that plainly hinted that the present Baron Minor would not be the last of the WulfIF IF  Short Story Tm nof o criminal! And even if I were, this punishment is too awful -- exiled again to Mankind! Y ou may call this a confession if you wish. I prefer to call it a statement. In the first place, I want it clearly understood that I am the legitimate son of a Peak Lord. I am neither a by-blow nor an imposter. This outrageous skepticism has to cease. I acknowledge freely that I was vised Below on the date in question. But I was not there for any subversive reason whatever, nor was I there voluntarily. I deny emphatically that I have any compassion for the mutant dwellers Below, or that I was there in any endeavor to "help" or "incite" them. Moreover, I was not there out of the morbid curiosity which impels students to don breathers and undertake anthropological or sociological research Below. I have no interest in the subhumans living there. The actual fact is that I was kidnapped. It was horrible, there Below. The darkness -- the stinking soup that passes there for air -- the throngs of mutant subhumans mth tiir ground vehicles pouring yet more poison into the atmosphere that only they can breathe! And the streets full of crumbling, ruined buildings which they tear down periodically to make still more room for tiieir vehicles! Some superstition must keep the mutants from taking over what were once the homes of real human beings like us, for they huddle in crowded tenements like so many nests of rattlesnakes. I was so grateful when your people discovered me and took me out that I promised my rescuers rich rewards when I became Lord of our Peak. It was a dreadful shock to learn that they were not a salvage corps -- my breather was almost exhausted and I had no recharges -- but a police mission. I thought that all I should have to do would be to explain to you how and why I was there, and you would protect me, let me live in your Lord's court until I inherit. It is hard for me to believe that I am here as a prisoner, under judgment as a suspected criminal! Do you perhaps imagine that I am one of those throwbacks -- there have been some, I know, even in Peak Lord families -- who condemn our glorious system, who have defected to the Below and set themselves up as champions of what they call "the oppressed"? Poor fools, how long could they last, unless they could find a quack doctor to give them the mutation operation (and often they have died from the doctor's lack of skill), or else smuggle in recharges for their breathers? I am no such idiot. All of them have died and been hailed by their subhuman "brothers" as martyrs to their "cause" -- all of them, that is, who haven't been hauled back by their families in time and kept in close custody forever after. I have no such death wish, I can assure you, I want to live. Let me ask you another thing: how can you doubt, from the very mode of speech and manner which I cannot change or suppress even if I wanted to, that I am genuinely of a Peak Lord's family? You yourselves are all Peak dwellers. Can't you recognize my authority? I was born and reared in a royal household, just as your own Peak Lord and his family were. The vicious slanders I have seen and heard about myself in your communication media call me "arrogant." I say I keep the dignity taught me from infancy. Before whom should I be humble? There is no one on earth higher than the hundred or so Peak Lords and their families, dwelling as we do on the world's highest mountain-tops, surrounded by retainers like yourselves who act as go-betweens to the mutants Below who serve the machines and produce the wealth, for the Peak Lords who own their territories and receive the wealth -- and distribute a just portion of it to you. And I am a Peak Lord's closest kin. M y father's ancestors were among the first of the Peak Lords who staked out their claims when life gradually became unbearable in the poisoned cities, with their polluted air and water and their clouds of smog that shut out the sun. If you learned your history as children, you know that at first they were true pioneers, living the hard life of those who invade and transform a wilderness. They fought with others of their own breed to take and hold their Peaks, and they fought with the hordes from Below who tried to wrest the only unspoiled livable places on earth from those who had conquered them first. By tradition the first Peak Lords were all experienced mountaineers; I know my own Founding Father was. Others were astronauts who could not endure grounding after it was finally learned that the other planets of our solar system were dead or unborn and uninhabitable by men. Gradually, as they and their followers won their wars and conIF solidated their holdings, each Peak Lord built up a civilized community and established control over the conquered Below in his own area. Then when the mutants appeared and spread -- and don't think that was an accident; it was scientific research paid for by the Peak Lords themselves that brought about and evolved today's race of subhumans whose means of living depends on their productivity for our benefit -- our present political and economic chain of command was established. That is all elementary history, which you all learned in childhood. You all know that those condemned to remain Below (and not only in the cities, as corruption spread to the countryside) died at all have died, had the Peak Lords not subsidized the intensive research projects -- frankly, to protect their own sources of wealth. The dwellers Below had failed in all their own attempts to live underground or underseas, and they failed utterly in their feeble efforts to reconvert industrial plants or the nature of their vehicles to end the pollution. Only the Peak Lords by that time possessed the huge fortunes required. Yes. Well, as I said, my father is descended from one of the very first Peak Lord families. Perhaps that is why, as so often happens in old families, he is an eccentric, strange, neurotic man. I should not dare say this if I were not out of his reach, for his anger is a terrible thing. He is a lone wolf, who has never fraternized with any of his peers. That is why, when you took my case to your own Peak Lord, he said he had never seen or heard of me. That is true. My father has never indulged in or allowed us -- m;, mother and my younger brother: and sisters -- any of the social visit ing back and forth in royal air processions which as you know arc the custom of other Peak Lords. He is a tyrant, and we have lec: miserable, lonely lives. He has never even tried to find us suitable wive' and husbands as we reached marriageable age. We are all unmarried, when the last of us is dead the throne will go to a distant cousin He doesn't care, so long as he can keep himself alive and in power. None of us has ever tried to es cape -- for where would we escape to? No other Lord would take us in (short of the secret refuge I ask foi in my desperate situation), for fear of incurring my father's rage and perhaps precipitating violent action which would end the Planet-wide Peace Pact that has endured now for two centuries. Instead, they have quarantined us, and I imagine the young members of other Peak Lord families do not even know that wc exist. Our Peak is far away, on the other side of the world. P erhaps you think, when I say I was kidnapped, that I mean I really did try to escape? No: in that case I should have chosen my destination, and it would not have been a Peak where nobody knows me and I am being treated as a common criminal. I think now I had been given a connter-sedative to keep me from sleeping, while the servant who always sleeps at the foot of my bed bad been given a draught to render liim unconscious. I had never before had trouble in sleeping, but this night is it only three nights ago? -- I hiy wide awake until I couldn't bear k any longer, so I got up. But when I tried to arouse my servant to help me dress I could not shake him from his deep slumber, so I arranged my own clothing as best I could. It was the first time in my Kfe that I had dressed without assistance -- which may account for the accusation that I must be an imposter, because my clothing and ornaments are not arranged in regulation style. I had a great desire -- almost a thirst -- to walk out in the open air. It was a bright moonlight night -- so bright that I imagined I could even see the beacon of the abandoned atomic station on the moon. Like all Peak castles, ours is a fortress too, still guarded regularly according to tradition although it is more than # years since any Peak Lord warred on another. I went quietly down the corridor leading from my rooms, to the first guarded door. Unusual as my action was, I knew that all I had to do was to explain to the guard that I wished to take a walk in the gardens, and to order him to provide an escort for me. The guard was asleep. It had never happened before, and I am sure now he too was drugged. He was liable to immediate execution, but I had no intention of reporting him. I stepped over his recumbent body and out into ttie treeplanted terrace. It was the first time I can remember that I have been completely alone. I walked slowly under the trees, breathing the fresh cool air, my eyes on the stars that we had hoped some day to reach and now know we never can. I wondered if on some planet around one of them some other unhappy young man was walking and wondering as I was. And then suddenly -- I had heard no sound -- I was caught from behind, and before I could open my mouth to cry out I was blindfolded, gagged and bound with rope. There were two of them at least; I am sure of that. They dragged me over the garden to the outer gate. There too there should have been guards but no one stopped us. I was too busy trying to breathe to take much note, and when first I came back to my full senses I was lying, still bound, on a couch in a fast plane. Through my blindfold I felt the rays of the sun and realized it was morning, but I had no idea of our direction or of the distance we had flown. I could hear men talking and they spoke the local dialect of our Peak. They said nothing that helped me; their conversation, such as it was, was only of the weather and of flying conditions. Then I felt the plane swoop down for a landing. Hands unbound me, but left me gagged and blindfolded. I felt something clamped over my nose; I did nk recognize it, but I found later it was a breather. The IF plane taxied to a stop, I was pulled to my feet, the gag and blindfold were torn from me, and I was given a rough push that sent me to my knees. By the time I recovered my balance the plane had taken off again. I was Below. I t was some moments before my confusion enabled me to guess where I was. The sunshine of the upper air had vanished; I was in a sort of dingy twilight, and when I looked upward all I could see was an unbroken gray cloud. Through the breather I was able to inhale and exhale normally, but when experimentally I opened my mouth and breathed once through that, I was almost choked by the putrid miasma I took into my lungs. Ahead of me from the landing field stretched a paved road, beyond which I could see dimly streets and houses. There was nowhere to go but forward, so I stumbled on and in half an hour or so the city had swallowed me up. I need hardly tell you what it was like; you have vised it often, and you know. It was horrible. I stumbled around those congested streets for most of a day, trying to avoid contact with the creatures that swarmed there. I ate nothing -- how could I eat their food? I had no money in any case, and I couldn't understand or speak their dialect. They stared at me, but they're trained not to approach real humans, who are certain to be agents of their Peak Lord. The occasional scientist investigating, or the champions of the "oppressed," will approach them. I grew panicky. With every minute my breather was running out, and when it failed I had no recharges or any means to get one. I would collapse and choke to death on one of those filthy streets. And then I heard the copter, and I knew I had been vised and would be rescued. I was weak with relief and gratitude. And your men told me I was under arrest. T T Thy won't you believe me? My   father had me kidnapped and cast away Below to die. Why won't you take me to your Peak Lord or one of his trusted aides and let me prove my identity. How do I know my father was to blame? Because I know my father. He hates us all -- we are living reminders that some day he must give up his power and one of ns will inherit it. But he has always hated me most. I am the eldest, and his first heir. And before he cowed me into terror of him, I was the only one who rebelled, who dared to answer him back, to try -- vainly, I acknowledge -- to sneak away sometimes for some sort of life of my own. You may say, what good would it do him to have me put out of the way? My oldest sister would come next, and there are five of us altogether. But that's just the point -- I am the scapegoat, and because I am not the only child I am expendable. Besides, he doesn't think the way sane people do. So he decided to treat me as we treat our major criminals -- I suppose you have the same system here -- have me cast down Below to die. I can't help it: the mere thought of him -- I tell you, judges, my father was a wicked evil old man! I hated him. He deserved what -- Did I say "was"? I meant "is," of course -- I am too excited. I am weak still from my dreadful ordeal... No, I don't believe you. You are trying to trick me. My sister is too intimidated to have sent you any such message. Let me see it. I have a right to see it... I see. So all this time you have just been leading me on. All right. There's no use keeping it up. I was not kidnapped. It was I myself who drugged the servants and the guards. I fled in one of our swift flyers after I had surprised my father in his sleep. I felled him with his own heavy staff of office, with which he had so often beaten me. I hid in your Below, as far away as i could travel, until you would vise me and bring me up, as any Peak Lord would do on vising a stranger without authorization in his Below. I threw away my recharges when I heard your copter start down for me. If I had dreamed what a Below was like I would never have had the courage to carry out my plan. But I am not a criminal! It was not murder to destroy a tyrant! He deserved to die. My sister is an ingrate. No, of course I never confided in her. But I relied on her; I was sure she would rejoice as I did when at last I mustered the courage to do what we all must have longed for -- that she would gladly serve as Peak Lady until it was safe for me to declare, myself and return. I would have named her as my successor. Very well: let me go now. This is no concern of yours. I shall fly home again and take over from her. N o, you can't, you can't! There is no treaty between our Peaks. The most you have a right to do is to keep me as a guest of your Lord while he investigates! You will find out then that I am no murdered: I am a righteous executioner. Take me before him and let me present my cause to my equal. What have I to do with your local laws?... Sir! I did not realize! My father would never have sat in judgment in person at a criminal hearing -- No! No! I beg of you! I know your word is supreme in your jurisdiction, my Lord, and I know I entered it of my own volition. But -- Oh, dear God, no! Not without even a breather! Kill me in any other way and I shall accept your judgment with the dignity worthy of my blood. But I implore you, my Lord, anything, anything -- but not that dreadful city of mutants again! Not -- not -- B e I o w IF XP # Serial The Moon is a Harsh Mistress XX T he older man was being hustled along by the stilyagi kids. He was mussed, and clothing had that vague something that says "tourist." We used to get tourists even then. Not hordes but quite a few. They would come up from Earth, stop in a hotel for a week, go back in same ship or perhaps stop over for next ship. Most of them spent their time gambling after a day or two of sightseeing including that silly walk up on surface every tourist makes. Most Loonies ignored them and granted them their foibles. One lad, oldest, about eighteen and leader, said to me, "Where's judge?" "Don't know. Not here." He chewed lip, looked baffled. I said, "What trouble?" The fate of Luna's freedom loy in his hands -- and he didn't know it! What Has Gone Before -- We Lunarians have put up with a lot from Earth, but time comes when we don't want to put up with more. Earth tells us vrhat we can sell, who we sell It to, how much we can get for it. Means slavery. But... Earth owns us outright. Question is, what can we do about it? I don't mind a gamble -- wouldn't mind fighting Eorth with a chance to win -- but with no chance, no. Luna has no warships. Earth has plenty. Luna has no armies. Earth has armies to burn. Most of all, Luna is run by big computer, and Earth owns the computer. But there's one thing Earth doesn't own -- me. And it just so happens that I'm the fellow that fixes the computer... and the computer is my good friend I call Mike! So maybe -- just maybe -- we Lunarians can do something at last.  So we invent mythical leader named "Adam Selene" -- is really Mike -- and start rolling. Only one problem: Need help on Earth. That's the hard one, because earthworms I don't know, neither does Mike, neither does any good Loonie. Don't know where to look... until chance delivers one into hands, when group of stilyagi kids ask to kill himl He said soberly, "Going to eliminate this ohoom. But want Judge to confirm it." I said, "Cover taprooms here around. Probably find him. A boy about fourteen spoke up. "Say! Aren't you Gospodin O'Kelly?" "Right." "Why don't you judge it?" Oldest one looked relieved. "Will you, Gospodin?" I hesitated. Sure, I've gone judge at times; who hasn't? But don't hanker for responsibility. However it troubled me to hear young peoirfe talk about eliminating a tourist Bound to cause talk. Decided to do it. So I said to tourist, "Will you accept me as your judge?" He looked surprised. "I have choice in the matter?" I said patiently, "Of course. CanH expect me to listen if you aren't not urging you. Your life, not mine." He looked very surprised but not afraid. His eyes lit up. "My life, did you say?" IP "Apparently. You heard lads say they intend to eliminate you. You may prefer to wait for Judge Brody." He didn't hesitate. Shailed and said, "I accept you as my judge, sir." "As you wish." I looked at oldest lad. "WTiat parties to quarrel? Just you and your young friend?" "Oh, no. Judge, all of us." "Not your judge yet." I looked around. "Do you all ask me to judge?" Were nods; none said No. Leader turned to giii, added, "Better speak up, Tish. You accept Judge O'Kelly?" "What? Oti, sure!" She was a vapid little dung, vacantly pretty, curvy, perhaps fourteen. Sot-machine type... and how she might wind up. Sort who prefers being queen over pack of stilyagi to solid marriage. I donH Marne stByagi; they chase around corridors because not enough females. Work all day and nothing to go home to at night. "Okay, ooort has been accepted and all are bound to abide by my verdict. Left settle fees. How high can you boys go? Please understand Fm not gcng to judge an elimination for dimes. So ante up or I turn him loose. L eader Minked, they went into huddle. S#M)rtly he turned and said, "We dmt have much. Will you do it for five Kong dollars apiece?" Six of them. "No. Ought not to ask a court to judge elimination at that price. They huddled again. "Py dollars, Judge? "JSxty. Ten eadi. And anothw ten from you, Tish," I said to girl. Sie looked surprised, indignant. "Come, come!" I said. "Tanstaafl." She blinked and reached into pouch. She had money; types like that always have. I collected seventy dollars, laid it on desk, and said to tourist, "Can match it?" "Beg pardon?" "Kids are paying seventy dollan Hong Kong for judgment. You should match it. If you can't open pmch and prove it and can owe it to me. But that's your share." I added, "Cheap, for a capital case. But kids can't pay much so you get a bargain." "I see. I believe I see." He matched witii seventy Hong Kong. "Thank you," I said. "Now doee dthcr side want a jury?" Girl's eyes lit up. "Sure! Let's do it right." Earthworm said, "Under the  GiKnstances perhaps I need one." "Can have it," I assured. "Waat a counsel?" "I suppose I need a lawyer, too. "I said 'counsd,' not lawyer. Aren't any lawyers here." Agam he seemed delighted. I suppose counsel, if I elected to have one, would be of the same, idi. Informal quality as the rest of them proceedings?" "Maybe, made mot Fm infcMmud sort of judge, diafs afi. Suit yourself." "Mmm. I think FH rely on your informality, your honor." Oldest lad said, "Uh, this jury. You pick up chit? Or do we?" IF "I pay it; I agreed to judge for a hundred forty, gross. Haven't you been in a court before? But not going to kill my net for extra I could do without. Six jurymen, five dollars each. See who's in Alley." One boy stepped out and shouted, "Jury work! Five-dollar job!" They rounded up six men and were what you would expect in Bottom Alley. Didn't worry me as had no intention of paying mind to them. If you go judge, better in good neighborhood with chance of getting solid citizens. I went behind desk, sat down, put on Brody's plug hat -- wondered where he had found it. Probably a cast-off from some lodge. "Court's in session," I said. "Let's have names and tell me beef." Oldest lad was named Slim Lemke, girl was Patricia Carmen Zhukov; don't remember others. Tourist stepped up, reached into poudi and said, "My card, sir." I still have it. It read: Stuart Rene LaJoie Poet Traveler Soldier of Fortune B eef was tragically ridiculous, fine example of why tourists should not wander around without guides. Sure, guides bleed them white -- but isn't that what a tourist is for? This one almost lost life from lack of guidance. Had wandered into a taproom which lets stilyagi hang out, a sort of clubroom. This simple female had flirted with him. Boys had let matter be, as of course they had to as long as she invited it. But at some point she had laughed and let him have a fist in ribs. He had taken it as casually as a Loonie would... but had answered in distinctly earthworm manner. He slipped arm around waist and pulled her to him, apparently tried to kiss her. Now believe me, in North America this wouldn't matter; I've seen things much like it. But of course Tish was astonished, perhaps frightened. She screamed. And pack of boys set upon him and roughed him up. Then decided he had to pay for his "crime" -- but do it correctly. Find a judge. Most likely they chickened. Chances are not one had ever dealt with an elimination. But their lady had been insulted, had to be done. I questioned them, especially Tish, and decided I had it straight. Then said, "Let me sum up. Here we have a stranger. Doesn't know our ways. He offended, he's guilty. But meant no offense far as I can see. What does jury say? Hey, you there -- wake up! What you say?" Juryman looked up blearily, said, " 'Liminate him!" "Very well? And you?" "WeB -- " Next one hesitated. "Guess it would be enough just to beat tar out of him, so he'll know better next time. Cant have men pawing wmnen. Place will get to be as bad as Terra." "Sensible," I agreed. "And you?" Only one juror voted for elimination. Others ranged from a beating to very high fines. "What do you think. Slim?" "Well -- " He was worried -- face in front of gang, face in front of what might be his giil. But had cooled down and didn't want dium eliminated. "We already worked him over. Maybe if he got down on hands and knees and kissed floor in front of Tish and said he was sorry?" "Will you do that, Gospodin LaJoie?" "If you # rule, your honor." "I donH. Here's my verdict. First, that juryman -- you! You are fined fee paid you because you fell asleep while supposed to be judging. Grab him, boys, take it away from him and Arow him out." r iey did, enthusiastically; made up a little for greater excitement they had thought of but really could not stomach. "Now, Gospodin LaJoie, you are fined fifty Hong Kong for not having common sense to learn local customs before stirring around. Ante up." I collected it. "Now you boys line up. You are fined five dollars apiece for not exercising good judgment in dealing with a person you knew was a stranger and not used to our ways. Stopping him from touching Tish, that's fine. Roughing him, that's okay, too; he'll learn faster. And could have tossed him out. But talking about eliminating for what was honest mistake -- well, it's out of proportion. Five bucks each. Ante up." Slim gulped. "Judge... I don't think we have that much left! At least I don't." "I thought that might be. You have a week to pay, or I post your names in Old Dome. Know where Bon Ton Beaute Shoppe is, near easement lock thirteen? My wife runs it; pay her. Court's out. Slim, don't go away. Nor you, Tish. Gospodin LaJoie, let's take these young people up and buy them a cold drink and get better acquainted." Again his eyes filled with odd delight that reminded of Prof. "A charming idea, Judge!" "I'm no longer judge. It's up a couple of ramps... so I suggest you offer Tish your arm." He bowed and said, "My lady? May I?" and crooked his elbow to her. Tish at once became very grown up. "Spasebo, Gospodin! I am pleased." Took them to expensive place, one where their wild clothes and excessive makeup looked out of place; they were edgy. But I tried to make them feel easy and Stuart LaJoie tried even harder and successfidly. Got fiieir addresses as well as names; Wyoh had one sequence which was concentrating on stilyagi. Presently they finied their coolers, stood up, thanked and left. LaJoie and I stayed on. "Gospodin," he said presently, "you used an odd word earlier -- odd to me, I mean." "CaB me 'Mannie' now tiliat kids are gone... What word?" "It was when you insisted that the, rrfi, young lady, Tish -- that Tish must pay, too. 'Tone-stapple,' or something like it." "CMi, 'tanstaafl.' Means 'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' And isn't," I added, pointing to a "or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that IP anydiing free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless." "An interesting pihilosophy." "Not philosophy, fact. One way or oilier, what you get, you pay for." I fanned air. "Was Earthside once and heard expression 'Free as air. This air isn't free, you pay for every breath." "Really? No one has asked me to pay to breathe." He smiled. "Perhaps I should stop." "Can happen, you almost breathed vacuum tonight. But nobody asks you because you've paid. For you, is part of roundtrip ticket; for me it's a quarterly charge." I started to tefl how my family buys and sells air to community co-op, decided was too complicated. "But we both pay." L aJoie looked thoughtfully pleased. "Yes, I see the economic necessity. It's simply new to me. Tell me, uh, Mannie -- and I'm called 'Stu' -- was I really in danger of 'breathing vacuum'?" "Should have charged you more." "Please?" "You aren't convinced. But charged kids all they could scrape up and fined them too, to make them think. Couldn't charge you more than them. Should have, you think it was all a joke." "Believe me, sir, I do not think it was a joke. I just have trouble grasping that your local laws permit a man to be put to death... so casually... and for so trivial an offense." I sighed. Where do you start explaining when a man's words show there isn't anything he understands about subject, instead is loaded with preconceptions diat don't fit facts and doesn't even know he has? "Stu," I said, "let's take that piece at a time. Are no 'local laws' so you couldn't be 'put to death' under them. Your offense was not 'trivial,' I simply made allowance for ignorance. And wasn't done casually, or boys would have dragged you to nearest lock to zero pressure, shoved you in and cycled. Instead were most formal -- good boys! -- and paid own cash to give you a trial. And didn't grumble when verdict wasn't even close to what they asked. Now, anything still not clear?" He grinned and turned out to have dimples like Prof; found myself liking him still more. "All of k, Fai afraid. I seem to have wandered io Looking Glass Land." Expected that; having been Eardir side I know how their minds work, some. An earthworm expects to find a printed law for every circumstance. Even have laws for privale matters such as contracts. Rely. If a man's word isn't any good, who would contract with him? Doesn't he have reputation? "We don't have laws," I said, "Never been allowed to. Have customs, but aren't written and aren't enforced -- or could say they are self-enforcing because are simply way things have to be, conditions being what they are. Could say our customs are natural laws because are way people have to behave to stay alive. en you made a pass at Tisih you were violating a natural law... and almost caused you to breathe vacuum." He bHnkcd thoughtfully. "Would you explain tibe natural law I violated? I had better understand it... or best I return to my ship and stay inboard until lift. To stay alive." "Certainly. Is so simple that, once you understand, you'll never be in danger from it again. Here we are, lion females. A physical fact, basic as rock or vacuum. Then add idea of tanstaafl. When thing is scarce, price goes up. Women are scarce; aren't enou to go around -- that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don't care whether they stay alive or not. Except a Cyborg, if you regard him as a man, wbmh I don't." I went on: "So what happens? -- and mind you, things were even worse when this custom, or natural law, first showed itself back in twentieth century. Ratio was tento-one or worse then. One thing is what always happens in prisons; men turn to other men. That helps not much; problem still is because most men want women and won't settle for substitute while chance of getting true gelt. "They get so anxious they will kill for it... and from stories old-timers teeth in those days. But after a while those stifl alive find way to get along, tilings shake down. As automatic as gravitation. Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don't are dead and no problem. "What that means, here and now, is that women are scarce and call tune... and you are surrounded you dance to that tune. You have no choice, she has all choice. She can hit you so hard it draws blood; you dasn't lay a finger on her. Look, you put an arm around Tish, maybe you tried to kiss. Suppose instead she had gone to hotel room with you. What would happen?" "Heavens! I suppose they would have torn me to pieces." "They would have done nothing. Shrugged and pretended not to see. Because choice is hers. Not yours. Not theirs. Exclusively hers. Oh, be risky to ask her to go to hotel; she might take offense and that would give boys license to rough you up. But -- well, take this Tish. A silly little tart. If you had flashed as much mioney as I saw in your pouch, she might have taken into head that a bundle with tourist was just what she needed and suggested it herself. In which case would have been utterly safe." Loie shivered. "At her age? It scares me to think of it. She's below the age of consent. Statutory rape." "Oh, bloody! No such thing. Women her age are married or ought to be. Stu, is no rape in Luna. None. Men won't permit. If rape had been involved, they wouldn't have bothered to find a judge and all men in earshot would have scrambled to help. But chance that a girl that big is virgin is negligible. When they're little, their mothers watch over them, with help from everybody in city. Children are safe here. But when they reach husband-high, is no holding them and mothers quit try#I  IF ing. If they choose to run corridors and have fun, can't stop 'em; once a girl is nubile, she's her own boss. You married?" "No." He added with a smile, "Not at present." "Suppose you were and wife told you she was marrying again. What would you do?" "Odd that you should pick that, something like it did happen. I saw my attorney and made sure that she got no alimony." "'Alimony' isn't a word here; I learned it Earthside. Here you might -- or a Loonie husband might -- say, 'I think we'll need a bigger place, dear.' Or might simply congratulate her and his new co-husband. Or if it made him so unhappy he couldn't stand it, might opt out and pack clothes. But whatever, would not make slightest fuss. If he did, opinion would be unanimous against him. His friends, men and women alike, would snub him. Poor sod would probably move to Novylen, change name and hope to live it down. "All our customs work that way. If you're out in field and a cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don't ask cash. But when you're both back in pressure again, if he won't pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge. But he would pay. Air is almost as sacred as women. If you take a new chum in a poker game, you give him air money. Not eating money; can work or starve. If you eliminate a man other than selfdefense, you pay his debts and support his kids." #TV annie, you're telling me that d-VA I can murder a man here and settle the matter merely with money?" "Oh, not at all! But eliminating isn't against some law; are no laws -- except Warden's regulations -- and Warden doesn't care what one Loonie does to another. But we figure this way: If a man is killed, either he had it coming and everybody knows it -- usual case -- or his friends will take care of it by eliminating man who did it. Either way, no problem. Nor many eliminations. Even set duels aren't common." " 'His friends will take care of it. Mannie, suppose those young people had gone ahead? I have no ends here." "Was reason I agreed tojudge. While I doubt if those kids could have egged each other into it, didn't want to take chance. Eliminating a tourist could give our city a bad name." "Does it happen often?" "Can't recall has ever happened. Of course may have been made to look like accident. A new chum is accident-prone; Luna is that sort of place. They say if a new chum lives a year, he'll live forever. But nobody sells him insurance first year. Glanced at time. "Stu, have you had dinner?" "No, and I was about to suggest that you come to my hotel. The cooking is good. Auberge Orleans. I repressed shudder -- ate there once. "Instead, would you come home with me and meet my family? We have soup or something about this hour." Tsn't that an imposition?" "No. Half a minute while I phone." Mum said, "Manuel! How sweet, dear! Capsule has been in for hours; I had decided it would be tomorrow or later." "Just drunken debauchery, Mimi, and evil companions. Coming home now if can remember way -- and bringing evil companion." "Yes, dear. Dinner in twenty minutes; try not to be late." "Don't you want to know wibether my evil companion is male or female?" "Knowing you, I assume that it is female. But I fancy I shall be able to tell when I see her." "You know me so well. Mum. Warn girls to look pretty; wouldn't want a visitor to outshine them." "Don't be too long; dinner will spoil. 'Bye, dear. Love." "Love, Mum." I waited, then want a name searched. Earthside name, passenger in Popov. Stuart Rene LaJoie. Stuart with a U and last name might file under either L or J." Didn't wait many seconds; Mike found Stu in all major Earthside references: Who's Who, Dunn  Bradstreet, Almanach de Godia, London Times running files, name it. Frendh expatriate, royalist, wealthy, six more names sandwiched into ones he used, Aree university degrees including one in law from Sorbonne, noble ancestry boA France and Scotland, divorced (no children) from Honorable Pamela Hyphen-Hyphen-Blueblood. Sort erf earthworm who wouldn't speak to a Loonie of convict ancestry -- except Stu would speak to anyone. I listened a pair of minutes then asked Mike to prepare a full dossier, following all associations! leads. "Mike, might be our pigeon." "Could be, Man." "Got to run. 'Bye." Returned thoughtfully to my guest. Almost a year earlier, during alcoholic talktalk in a hotel room, Mike had promised us one chance in seven -- if certain things were done. One sinequa-non was help on Terra itself. Despite "throwing rocks", Mike knew, we all knew, that mighty Terendless resources could not be denothing, even though we stood on a high place and could drop rocks on them. century, when Britain's American colonies broke away, and from XXth, when many colonies became independent of several empires, and pointed out that in no case had a colony broken loose by brute force. No, in every case imperial state was busy elsewhere, had grown weary and given up without using full strength. For months we had been strong enough, had we wished, to overcome Warden's bodyguards. Once our catapult was ready (any time now) we would not be helpless. But we needed a "favorable climate" on Terra. For that we needed help on Terra. Prof had not regarded it as difficult. But turned out to be quite IF iiicult His Earlhside friends were dead or neaily, and I bad never had mj bnt a few teachers. We sent inquky down through cells: "What viK do you know Earthside?' and usual answer was: "You kidding?" Null program. Prof watched passengw lists on incoming ships, ing to figure a contact, and had been reading Luna print-outs of Earthside newspapers, searching for vips he could reach through past connection. I had not tried; handful I had met on Terra were not vips. Prof had not picked Stu off Popov's passenger list. But Prof had not met him. I did not know whether Stu was simply eccentric as odd personal card seemed to show. But he was only Terran I had ever had a drink with in Luna, seemed a dinkum cobber, and Mike's report showed hunch was not all bad. He carried some tonnage. So I took him home to see what family thought of him. Started well. Mum smiled and offered hand. He took it and bowed so deep I thought he was going to kiss it -- would have, I think, had I not warned him about ferns. Mum was cooing as she led him in to dinner. A pril and May were more hard work and increasing effort to stir up Loonies against Warden, and goad him into retaliation. Trouble with Mort the Wart was that he was not a bad egg. Nothing to hate about him other than fact he was symbol of Authority. Was necessary to frighten him to gel him to do anything. And average Loonie was just as bad. He despised Warden as matter of ritual but was not stuff that makes revolutionists; he couldn't be bothered. Beer, betting, women and workOnly diing that kept Revolution from dying of anemia was that Peace Dragoons had real talent for antagonizing. But even them we had to keep stirred up. Prof kept saying we needed a "Boston Tea Party," referring to mythical incide in an earlier revolution, by whidi he meant a public ruckus to grab attention. We kept trying. Mike rewrote lyrics of old revcrfutionary songs: "Marseillaise," "Internationale," "Yankee Doodle," "We Shall Overcome," "Pie in the Sky," etc., giving them words to fit Luna. Stuff like "Sons of Rock and Boredom Will you let the WardenTake from you your libertee!" Simon Jester spread them around, and when one took hold, we pushed it music only) by radio and video. This put Warden in silly position of forbidding playing of certain tunes. Which suited us. People could whistle. Mike studied voice and wordchoice patterns of Deputy Administrator, Chief Engineer, other department heads; Warden started getting frantic calls at night from his staff. Which they denied making. So Alvarez put lock-and-trace on nex one -- and sure enough, with Mike's help, Alvarez traced it to supply chiefs phone and was sure it was boss belly-robber's voice. But next poison call to Mort seemed to come from Alvarez, and what Mort had to say next day to Alvarez and what Alvarez said in own defense can only be described as chaotic crossed with psychotic. Prof had Mike stop. Was afraid Alvarez might lose job, which we did not want; he was doing too well for us. But by then Peace Dragoons had been dragged out twice in night on what seemed to be Warden's orders, further disrupting morale, and Warden became convinced he was surrounded by traitors in official family while they were sure he had blown every circuit. An ad appeared in Lunaya Pravda announcing lectiu'e by Dr. Adam Selene on Poetry and Arts in Luna: a New Renaissance. No comrade attended; word went down cells to stay away. Nor did anybody hang around when three squads of Peace Dragoons showed up -- this involves Heisenberg principle as applied to Scarlet Pimpernels. Editor of Pravda spent bad hour explaining that he did not accept ads in person and this one was ordered over counter and paid for in cash. He was told not to take ads from Adam Selene. This was countermanded and he was told to take anything from Adam Selene but notify Alvarez at once. New catapult was tested with a load dropped into south Indian Ocean at #E., #S., a spot used only by fish. Mike was joyed over his marksmanship since he had been able to sneak only two looks when guidance  tracking radars were not in use and had relied on just one nudge to bring it to bullseye. Earthside news reported giant meteor in sub-Antarctic picked up by Capetown Spacetrack with projected impact that matched Mike's attempt Ierfectly. Mike called me to boast while taking down evening's Reuters transmission. "I told you it was dead on," he gloated. "I watched it. Oh, what a lovely splash!" Later reports on shock wave from seismic labs and on tsunamis from oceanographic stations were consistent. Was only canister we had ready (trouble buying steel) or Mike might have demanded to try his new toy again. L iberty caps started appearing on stilyagi and their girls; Simon Jester began wearing one between his horns. Bon Marche gave them away as premiums. Alvarez had painful talk with Warden in which Mort demanded to know if his fink boss felt that something should be done every time kids took up fad? Had Alvarez gone out of his mind? I ran across Slim Lemke on Carver Causeway early May; he was wearing a Liberty Cap. He seemed pleased to see me and I thanked him for prompt payment (he had come in three days after Stu's trial and paid Sidris thirty Hong Kong, for gang) and bought him a cooler. While we were seated I asked why young people were wearing red hats? Why a hat? Hats were an earthworm custom, nyet? He hesitated, then said was a sort of a lodge, like Elks. I changed subject. Learned that his full name was Moses Lemke Stone; member of Stone Gang. This pleased me, we were relatives. But IF surprised me. However even best families sudh as Stones sometimes can't always find marriages fw aD sons; I bad been lucky or might have been roving corridors at his age, too. Told him about our connection on my mother's side. He warmed up and shortly said, "Cousin Manuel, ever think about how we ought to elect our own Warden?" I said No, I hadn't; Authority appointed him and I supposed they always would. He asked me why we had to have an Authority? I asked who had been putting ideas in head? He insisted nobody had, just thinking, was all -- didn't he have a right to think? When I got home was tempted to check with Mike, find out lad's Party name if any. But wouldn't have been proper security, nor fair to Slim. On # May '# seventy-one males named Simon were rounded up and questioned, then released. No newspaper carried story. But everybody heard it; we were clear down in "Ts" and twelve thousand people can spread a story faster than I would have guessed. We emphasized that one of these dangerous males was only four years old, which was not true but very effective. S tu LaJoie stayed with us during February and March and did not return to Terra until early April; he changed his ticket to next ship and then to next. When I pointed out that he was riding close to invisible line where irreversible physiological changes could set in, he grinned and told me not to worry. But made arrangements to use centrifuge. Stu did not want to leave even by April. Was kissed good-bye with tears by all my wives and Wyoh, and he assured each one he was coming back. But left as he had work to do; by then he was a Party member. I did not take part in decision to recruit Stu; I felt prejudiced. Wyoh and Mike were unanimoiK in risldng it. I happily accepted their judgment. We all helped to sell Stu LaJoie -- self. Prof, Mike, Wyoh, Mum, even Sidris and Lenore and Ludmilla and our kids and Hans and Ali and Frank, as Davis home life was what grabbed him first. Did not hurt that Lenore was prettiest girl in L-City -- which is no disparagement of Milla, Wyoh, Anna and Sidris. Nor did it hurt that Stu could charm a baby away from breast. Mum fussed over him, Hans showed him hydroponic farming and Stu got dirty and sweaty and sloshed around in tunnels with our boys. Helped harvest our Chinee fish ponds -- got stung by our bees -- learned to handle a p-suit and went up with me to make adjustments on solar battery -- helped Anna butcher a hog and learned about tanning leather -- sat with Grandpaw and was respectful to his naive notions about Terra -- washed dishes with Milla, something no male in our family ever did -- rolled on floor with babies and puppies -- learned to grind flour and swapped recipes with Mum. I introduced him to Prof and that started political side of feeling him out. Nothing had been admitted -- we could back away -- when Prof ioCroduced him to "Adam Selene" who could visit only by phone as he was "in Hong Kong at present." By time Stu was committed to Cause, we dropped pretense and let him know that "Adam" was chairman whom he would not meet in person for security reasons. But Wyoh did most and was on her judgment that Prof turned cards up and let Stu know that we were building a revolution. Was no surprise; Stu had made up mind and was waiting for us to trust him. They say a face once launched a thousand ships. I do not know that Wyoh used anything but argument on Stu. I never tried to find out. But Wyoh had more to do with committing me than all Profs theory or Mike's figures. If Wyoh used strong methods on Stu, she was not first heroine in history to do so for her country. Stu went Earthside with a special codebook. I'm no code and cipher expert except that a computerman learns principles during study of information theory. A cipher is a mathematical pattern under which one letter substitutes for another, simplest being one in which alphabet is merely scrambled. A cipher can be incredibly subtle, especially with help of a computer. But ciphers all have weakness that they are patterns. If one computer can think them up, another computer can break them. Codes do not have same weakness. Let's say that code book has mean ";unt Minnie will be home Thursday or does it mean " #...?" Meaning is whatever you assign and no computer can analyze it simply from letter group. Give a computer enough groups and a rational theory involving meanings or subjects for meanings, and it will eventually worry it out because meanings themselves will show patterns. But is a problem of different kind on more difficult level. Code we selected was commonest commercial code book, used both on Terra and in Luna for commercial dispatches. But we worked it over. Prof and Mike spent hours discussing what information Party wish to send to its agent on Terra, or receive from agent, then Mike put his vast information to work and came up with new set of meanings for code book, ones that could say "Buy Thai rice futures" as easily as "Run for life; they've caught us." Or anything, as cipher signals were buried in it to permit anything to be said that had not been anticipated. L ate one night Mike made printout of new code via Lunaya Pravdtfs facilities, and night editor turned roll over to another comrade who converted it into a very small roll of film and passed it along in turn, and none ever knew what they handled or why. Wound up in Stu's pouch. Search of offplant luggage was tight by then and conducted by bad-tempered Dragoons -- but Stu was certain he would have no trouble. Perhaps he swallowed it. Thereafter some of LuNoHo ComIF pany's dispatches to Terra reached Stu via his London broker. Part of purpose was financial. Party needed to spend money Earthside; LuNoHoCo transferred money there (not all stolen, some ventures turned out well); Party needed still more money Earthside, Stu was to speculate, acting on secret knowledge of plan of revolution. He, Prof and Mike had spent hours discussing what stocks would go up, what would go down, etc., after der Tag. This was Profs pidgin; I am not that sort of gambler. But money was needed before der Tag to build "climate of opinion. We needed publicity, needed delegates and senators in Federated Nations, needed some nation to recognize us quickly once The Day came, we needed laymen telling other laymen over a beer: "What is there on that pile of rock worth one soldier's life? Let 'em go to hell in their own way, I say! Money for publicity, money for bribes, money for dummy organizations and to infiltrate established organizations, money to get true nature of Luna's economy (Stu had gone loaded with figures) brought out as scientific research, then in popular form, money to convince foreign office of at least one major nation that there was advantage in a Free Luna, money to sell idea of Lunar tourism to a major cartel -- Too much money! Stu offered own fortune and Prof did not discourage it. Where treasure is, heart will be. But still too much money and far too much to do. I did not know if Stu could swing a tenth of it; simply kept fingers crossed. At least it gave us a channel to Terra. Prof claimed that communications to enemy were essential to any war if was to be fought and settled sensibly. (Prof was a pacifist. Like his vegetarianing, he did not let it keep him from being "rational." Would have made a terrific theologian.) As soon as Stu went Earthside, Mike set odds at one in thirteen. I asked him what in hell? "But, Man," he explained patiently, "it increases risk. That it is a necessary risk does not Change the fact that risk is increased." I shut up. A bout that time, early May, a new factor reduced some risks while revealing others. One part of Mike handled Terra-Luna microwave traffic -- commercial messages, scientific data, news channels, video, voice radiotelephony, routine Authority traffic -- and Warden's top-secret. Aside from last Mike could read any of this including commercial codes and ciphers. Breaking ciphers was a crossword puzzle to him and nobody mistrusted this machine. Except Warden, and I suspect that his was distrust of all machinery; was sort of person who finds anything more involved than a pair of scissors complex, mysterious and suspect. Stone Age mind. Warden used a code that Mike never saw. Also used ciphers and did not work them through Mike; instead he had a moronic little machine in residence office. On top of this he had arrangement with Authority Earthside to switch everything around at preset times. No doubt he felt safe. Mike broke his cipher patterns and deduced time-change program just to try legs. He did not tackle code until Prof suggested it; it held no interest to him. But once Prof asked, Mike tackled Warden's top-secret messages. He had to start from scratch; in past Mike had erased Warden's messages once transmission was reported. So slowly, slowly he accumulated data for analysis -- painfully slow, for Warden used this method only when he had to. Sometimes a week would pass between such messages. But gradually Mike began to gather meanings for letter groups, each assigned a probability. A code does not crack all at once; possible to know meanings of ninety-nine groups in a message and miss essence to you. However, user has a problem, too; he's in trouble. Any method of communication needs redundancy, or information can be lost. Was at redundancy that Mike nibbled, with perfect patience of machine. Mike solved most of Warden's code sooner that he had projected; Warden was sending more traffic than in past and most of it one subject (which helped) -- subject being security and subversion. We had Mort yelling for help. He reported subversive activities still going on despite two phalanges of Peace Dragoons and demanded enough troops to station guards in all key spots inside all warrens. Authority told him this was preposterous, no more of FN's crack troops could be spared -- to be permanently ruined for Earthside duties -- and such requests should not be made. If he wanted more guards, he must recruit them from transportees. But such increase in administrative costs must be absorbed in Luna; he would not be allowed more overhead. He was directed to report what steps he had taken to meet new grain quotas set in our such-andsuch. Warden replied that unless extremely moderate requests for trained security personnel -- not repeat not untrained, unreliable and unfit convicts -- were met, he could no longer assure civil order, much less increased quotas. Reply asked sneeringly what difference it made if ex-consignees chose to riot among themselves in their holes? If it worried him, had he thought of shutting off lights as was used so successfully in # and #? T hese exchanges caused us to revise our calendar, to speed some phases, slow others. Like a perfect dinner, a revolution has to be cooked" so that everything comes out even. Stu needed time Earthside. We needed canisters and small steering rockets and associated circuitry for "rock throwing". And steel was a problem -- buying it, fabricating it, and above all moving it through meander of tunnels to new catapult site. We needed to increase Party at least into "K's" -- say # -- IF with lowest echelons picked for fighting spirit rather than talents we had sought earlier. We needed weapons against landings. We needed to move Mike's radars, without which he was blind. (Mike could not be moved; bits of him spread all through Lune. But he had a thousand meters of rock over that central part of him at Complex, was surrounded by steel and this armor was cradled in springs; Authority had contemplated that someday somebody might lob H-weapons at their control center.) All these needed to be done and pot must not boil too soon. So we cut down on things that worried Warden and tried to speed up everything else. Simon Jester took a holiday. Word went out that Liberty Caps were not stylish -- but save them. Warden got no more nervous-making phone calls. We quit inciting incidents with Dragoons -- which did not stop them but reduced number. Despite efforts to quiet Mort's worries a symptom showed up which disquieted us instead. No message (at least we intercepted none) reached Warden agreeing to his ds mand for more troops -- but he started moving people out of Complex. Civil servants who lived there started looking for holes to rent in L-City. Authority started test driHs and resonance exploration in a cubic adjacent to L-Qty which could be converted into a warren. Could mean that Authority proposed shipping up unusually large fraft of prisoners. Could mean Aat #pot in Complex was needed for purpose other than quarters. But Mike told us: "Why kid yourselves? The Warden is going to get those troops; that space will be their barracks. Any other explanation I would have heard." I said, "But Mike, why didn't you hear if it's troops? You have that code of Warden's fairly well whipped." "Not just 'fairly well,' I've got it whipped. But the last two ships have carried Authority vips and # don't know what they talk about away from phones!" So we tried to plan to cover possibility of having to cope with ten more phalanges, that being Mike's estimate of what cubic being cleared would hold. We could deal with that many -- with Mike's help -- but it would mean deaths, not bloodless coup d'etat Prof had planned. And we increased efforts to speed up other factors. When suddenly wc found ourselves committed. xxn H er name was Marie Lyons; she was eighteen years old and bom in Luna, mother iKiving been exiled via Peace Corps in '#. No record of father. She seems to have been a hannless person. Worked as a stock-control clerk in dipping department, lived in Complex. Maybe she hated Authority and enjoyed teasing Peace Dragoons. Or perhaps it started as a commercial transaction as cold-blooded as any in a crib behind a slot-machine lock. How can we know? Sx Dragoons were in it. Not satisfied with raping her (if rape it was) ey abused her other ways and killed her. But they did not dispose of body neatly; another civil service fem found it before was cold. She screamed. Was her last scream. We heard about it at once; Mike called us three while Alvarez and Peace Dragoon C.O. were digging into matter in Alvarez's office. Appears that Peace Goon boss had no trouble laying hands on guilty; he and Alvarez were questioning them one at a time, and quarreling bevarez say: "I told you those goons of yours had to have their own women! I warned you!" "Stuff it," Dragoon officer answered. "I've told you time and again they won't ship any. The question now is how we hush this up." "Are you crazy? Warden already knows." "It's still the question." "Oh, shut up and send in the next one." Early in filthy story Wyoh joined me in workshop. Was pale under makeup, said nothing but wanted to sit close and clench my hand. At last was over and Dragoon officer left Alvarez. Were still quarreling. Alvarez wanted those six executed at once and fact made public (sensible but not nearly enough, for his needs); C.O. was still talking about "hushing it up." Prof said, "Mike, keep an ear there and listen where else you can. Well, Mike? Wyoh? Plans?" I didn't have any. Wasn't a cold, shrewd revolutionist; just wanted to get my heel into faces that matched those six voices. "I don't know. Tiat do we do. Prof?" "'Do'? We're on our tiger; we grab its ears. Mike. Where's Hnn Nielsen? Find him." Mike answered, "He's caHiag now." He cut Finn in with us; I heard: " -- at Tube South. Both guards dead and about six of our people. Just people I mean, not necessarily comrades. Some wild rumor about Goons all women at Complex. Adam, I had better talk to Prof." "I'm here, Finn," Prof answered in a strong, confident voice. "Now we move, we've got to. Switch off and get those laserguns and men who trained with them, any you can round up." "Da! Okay, Adam?" "Do as Prof says. Then call back." "Hold it, Finn!" I cut in. "Mannie here. I want one of those guns." "You haven't practised, Mannie." "If it's a laser, I can use it!" "Mannie," Prof said forcefully, "shut up. You're wasting time; let Finn go. Adam. Message for Mike. Tell him Plan Alert Four." P rof's example damped my oscillating. Had forgotten that Finn was not supposed to know Mike as anybody but "Adam Selene;" forgotten everything but raging anger. Mike said, "Finn has switched off. Prof, and I put Alert Four on standby when this broke. No traffic now except routine stuff filed earlier. You don't want it interrupted, do you?" IF "No, just follow Alert Four. No Earthside transmission either way that tips any news. If one comes in, hold it and consult." "Alert Four" was emergency communication doctrine, intended to slap censorship on news to Terra without arousing suspicion. For this Mike was ready to talk in many voices with excuses as to why a direct voice transmission would be delayed -- and any taped transmission was no problem. "Program running," agreed Mike. "Good. Mannie, calm down, son, and stick to your knitting. Let other people do the fighting. You're needed here, we're going to have to improvise. Wyoh, cut out and get word to Comrade Cecilia to get all Irregulars out of the corridors. Get those children bcmie and keep them home -- and have their mothers urging other mothers to do the same thing. We don't know where the fighting will spread. But we don't want children hurt if we can help it." "Rit away. Prof!" "Wait. As soon as you've told Sidris, get moving on your stilyagi. I want a rkrt at the Authority's city office -- break in, wreck the place, and noise and shouting and destruction -- no one hurt if it can be helped. Mike. Alert-Four-Em. Cut off the Complex Except for your own lines." "Prof!" I demanded. "What sense in starting riots here?" "Mannie, Mannie! This is The Day! Mike, has the rape and murder news reached other warrens?" "Not that I've heard. I'm listening here and there with random jumps. Tube stations arc quiet except Luna City. Fighting has just started at Tube Station West. Want to hear it?" "Not now. Mannie, slide over there and watch it. But stay out of it and stick close to a phone. Mike, start trouble in all warrens. Pass die news down the cells and use Finn's version, not the truth. The Goons are the Complex -- I'll give you details or you can invent them. Uh, can you order the guards at tube stations ia other warrens back to their barracks? I want riots but there is no point ia sending unarmed people against armed men if we can dodge it." "I'll try." I hurried to Tube Station West, slowed as I neared it. Corridors were full of angry people. City roared ia way I had never heard before and, as I crossed Causeway, could hear shouts and crowd noise from direction of Authority's city office although it seemed to me there had not been time for Wyoh to readi her stilyagi. Nor had there been. What Prof had tried to start was underway spontaneously. S tation was mobbed and I had to push through to see what I assumed to be certain, that passport guards were either dead or fled. "Dead" it turned out, along with three Loonies. One was a boy not more than thirteen. He had died with his hands on a Dragoon's throat and his head still sporting a little red cap. I pushed way to a public phone and reported. "Go back," said Prof, "and read the I.D. of one of those guards. I IP want nasie and rank. Have you seen Finn? "No." "He's headed there with three guns. Tdl me where the booth you're in is, get that name and come back to it." One body was gone, dragged away; Bog knows what they wanted with it. Other had been badly battered but I managed to crowd in and snatch dog chain from neck before it, too, was taken somewhere. I elbowed back to phone, found a woman at it. "Lady," I said, "I've fiot to use that phone. Emergency!" "You're welcome to it! Pesky thing's out of order." Worked for me; Mike had saved it. Gave Prof guard's name. "Good," he said. Have you seen Finn? He'll be looking for you at that booth." "Haven't s -- Hold it. Just spotted him." "Okay, hang onto him. Mike, do you have a voice to fit that Dragoon's name?" "Sorry Prof. No." "All right, just make it hoarse and frightened; chances are the C.O. won't know it that well. Or would the trooper call Alvarez?" "He would call his C.O. Alvarez eives orders through him." "So call the C.O. Report the attack and call for help and die in the middle of it. Riot sounds behind you and maybe a shout of 'There's the dirty bastard nowP just before you die. Can you swing it?" "Programmed. No huhu," Mike said cheerfully. "Rub it. Mannie, put Finn on." Profs plan wm to sucker off-duty guards out of barracks and keep suckering them -- with Finn's men posted to pick them off as they got out of capsules. And it worked, right up to point where Mort the Wart lost his nerve and kept remaining few to protect himself while he sent frantic messages Earthside -- none of which got through. I wiggled out of Prof's discipline and took a lasergun when second capsule of Peace Dragoons was due. I burned two Goons, found blood lust gone and let other snipers have rest of squad. Too easy. They would stick heads up out of hatch and that would be that. Half of squad would not come out -- until smoked out and then died with rest. By that time I was back at my advance post t phone. Warden's decision to hole up caused trouble at Complex; Alvarez was killed and so was Goon C.O. and two of original yellow jackets. But a mixed lot of Dragoons and yellows, thirteen, holed up with Mort, or perhaps were already with him; Mike's ability to follow events by listening was spotty. But once it seemed clear that all armed effectives were inside Warden's residence, Prof ordered Mike to start next phase, Mike turned out all lights in Complex save those in Warden's residence, and reduced oxygen to gaspenough to insure that anyone looking for trouble would not be in shape. But in residence oxygen supply was cut to zero, leaving pure nitrogen, and left that way ten minutes. At end of that time, Finn's men, waiting in p-suits at Warden's private tube stain tioD, broke iatdi on air lock and went in, shoulder to Mulder. Luna was ours. xxm S o a wave of patriotism swept over our new nation and unified it. Isn't that what histories say? Oh, brother! My dinkum word, preparing a revolution isn't as much huhu as having won it. Here we were, in control too soon, nothing ready and a thousand things to do. Authority in Luna was gone -- but Lunar Authority Earthside and Federated Nations behind it were very much alive. Had they landed one troop ship, orbited one cruiser, any time next week or two, could have taken Luna back cheap. We were a mob. New catapult had been tested but canned rock missiles ready to go you could count on fingers of one hand -- my left hand. Nor was catapult a weapon that could be used against ships. Nor against troops. We had notions for fighting off ships; at moment were just notions. We had a few hundred cheap laserguns stockpiled in Hong Kong Luna -- Chinee engineers are smart -- but few men trained to use them. Moreover, Authority had useful functions. Bought ice and grain, sold air and water and power, held ownership or control at a dozen key points. No matter what was done in future, wheels had to turn. Perhaps wrecking city offices of Authority had been hasty (I thought so) as records were destroyed. However, Prof maintained that Loonies, all Loonies, needed a symbol to hate and destroy and those offices were least valuable and most public. But Mike controlled conununications and that meant control of most everything. Prof had started with control of news to and from Earthside, leaving to Mike censorship and faking of news until we could get around to what to tell Terra, and had added subphase M which cut off Complex from rest of Luna, and with it Richardson Observatory and associated laboratories -- Pierce Radioscope, Selenophysical Station and so forth. These were a problem as Terran scientists were always coming and going and staying as long as six months, stretching time by centrifuge. Most Terrans in Luna, save for a handful of tourists (thirtyfour) were scientists. Something had to be done about these Terrans, but meanwhile keeping them from talking to Terra was enough. For time being Complex was cut off by phone and Mike did not permit capsules to stop at any station in Complex even after travel was resumed, which it was as soon as Finn Nielsen and squad was through with dirty work. Turned out Warden was not dead. Nor had we planned to kill him; Prof figured that a live warden could always be made dead, whereas a dead one could not be made live if we needed him. So plan was to half-kill him, make sure he and his guards could put up no fight, then break in fast white Mike restored oxygen. With fans turning at top speed IF Mike computed it would take four minutes and a bit to reduce oxygen to effective zero. So, five minutes of increasing hypoxia, five minutes of anoxia, then force lower lock while Mike shot in pure oxygen to restore balance. This should not kill anyone -- but would knock out a person as thoroughly as anesthesia. Hazard to attackers would come from some or all of those inside having p-suits. But even that might not matter. Hypoxia is sneaky, you can pass out without realizing you are short on oxygen. Is new chum's favorite fatal mistake. So Warden lived through it and three of his women. But Warden, though he lived, was no use. Brain had been oxygen-starved too long. A vegetable. No guard recovered, even though younger than he. Would appear anoxia broke necks. In rest of Complex nobody was hurt. Once lights were on and oxygen restored they were okay, including six rapist-murders under lock in barracks. Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury. They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex. Makes me sick to think about what happened next but don't suppose they lived through as long an ordeal as Marie Lyons endured. Women are amazing creatures -- sweet, soft, gentle and far more savage than we are. et me mention those fink spies out of order. Wyoh had been fiercely ready to eliminate them but when we got around to them she had lost stomach. I expected Prof to agree. But he shook head. "No, dear Wyoh, much as I deplore violence, there are only two things to do with an enemy: Kill him. Or make a friend of him. Anything in between piles up trouble for the future. A man who finks on his friends once will do it again and we have a long period ahead in which a fink can be dangerous; they must go. And publicly, to cause others to be thoughtful." Wyoh said, "Professor, you once said that if you condemned a man, you would eliminate him personally. Is that what you are going to do?" "Yes, dear lady, and no. Their blood shall be on my hands; I accept responsibility. But I have in mind a way more likely to discourage other finks." So "Adam Selene" announced that these persons had been employed by Juan Alvarez, late Security Chief for former Authority, as undercover spies -- and gave names and addresses. "Adam" did not suggest that anything be done. One man remained on dodge for seven months by changing warrens and name. Then early in '# his body was found outside Novylen's south lock. But most of them lasted no more than hours. During first hours after coup d'etat we were faced with a problem we had never managed to plan -- "Adam Selene" himself. Who is Adam Selene? Where is he? This is his revolution; he handled every detail, every comrade knows his voice. We're out in open now . , . so where is Adam? We batted it around much of that night, in room L of Raffles -- argued it between decisions on a hundred things that came up and people wanted to know what to do, while "Adam" through other voices handled other decisions that did not require talk, composed phony news to send Earthside, kept Complex isolated, many things. (Is no possible doubt; without Mike we could not have taken Luna nor held it.) My notion was that Prof should become "Adam." Prof was always our planner and theoretician; everybody knew him; some key comrades knew that he was "Comrade Bill" and all others knew and respected Professor Bernardo de la Paz. My word, he had taught half of leading citizens in Luna City, many from other warrens, was known to every vip in Luna. "No," said Prof. "Why not?" asked Wyoh. "Prof, you're opted. Tell him, Mike." "Comment reserved," said Mike. "I want to hear what Prof has to say." "I see you've analyzed it, Mike," Prof answered. "Wyoh dearest comrade, I would not refuse were it possible. But there is no way to make my voice match that of Adam -- and every comrade knows Adam by his voice; Mike made it memorable for that very purpose." W e then considered whether Prof couM be slipped in anyhow, showing him only on video and letting hGke reshape whatever Prof said into voice expected from "Adam." Was turned down. Too many people knew Prof, had heard him speak; his voice and way of speaking could not be reconciled with "Adam." Then they considered same possibility for me -- my voice and Mike's were baritone and not too many people knew what I sounded like over phone and none over video. I tromped on it. People were going to be surprised enough to find me one of our Chairman's lieutenants. They would never believe I was number one. I said, "Let's combine deals. Adam has been a mystery all along; keep him that way. He'll be seen only over video -- in a mask. Prof, you supply body; Mike, you supply voice." Prof shook head. "I can think of no surer way to destroy confidence at our most critical period than by having a leader who wears a mask. No, Mannie." We talked about finding an actor to play it. Were no professional actors in Luna then but were good amateurs in Luna Civic Players and in Novy Bolshoi Teatr Associates. "No," said Prof, "aside from finding an actor of requisite character -- one who would not decide to be Napoleon -- we can't wait. Adam must start handling things not later than tomorrow morning." "In that case," I said, "you've answered it. Have to use Mike and never put him on video. Radio only. Have to figure excuse but Adam must never be seen." "I'm forced to agree," said Prof. IF "Man my eldest friend," said Mike, "why do you say that I can't be seen?" "Haven't you listened?" I said. "Mike, we have to show a face and body on video. You have a body -- but it's several tons of metal. A face you don't have. Lucky you. Don't have to shave." "But what's to keep me from showing a face, Man? I'm showing a voice this instant. But there's no sound behind it. I can show a face tihe same way." W as so taken aback I didn't answer. I stared at video screen, installed when we leased that room. A pulse is a pulse is a pulse. Electrons chasing each other. To Mike, whole world was variable series of electrical pulses, sent or received or chasing around his innards. I said, "No, Mike." "Why not, Man?" "Because you can't. Voice you handle beautifully. Involves only a few thousand decisions a second, a slow crawl to you. But to build up video picture would require, uh, say ten you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast." Mike said softly, "Want to bet, Man?" , Wyoh said indignantly, "Of course Mike can if he says he can! Mannie, you shouldn't talk that way." (Wyoh thinks an electron is something about size and shape of a small pea.) "Mike," I said slowly, "I won't put money on it. Okay, want to try? Shall I switch on video?" "I can switch it on," he answered. "Sure you'll get right one? Wouldn't do to have this show somewhere else." He answered testily, "I'm not stupid. Now let me be, Man -- for I admit this is going to take just about all I've got." We waited in silence. Then screen showed neutral gray with a hint of scant lines. Went black again, then a faint light filled middle and congealed into cloudy areas light and dark, ellipsoid. Not a face, but suggestion of face that one sees in cloud patterns covering Terra. It cleared a little and reminded me of pictures alleged to be ectoplasm. A ghost of a face. Suddenly firmed and we saw "Adam Selene." Was a still picture of a mature man. No background, just a face as if trimmed out of a print. Yet was, to me, "Adam Selene." Could not be anybody else. Then he smiled, moving lips and jaw and touching tongue to lips, a quick gesture -- and I was frightened. "How do I look?" he asked. "Adam," said Wyoh, "your hair isn't that curly. And it should go back on each side above your forehead. You look as if you were wearing a wig, dear." Mike corrected it. "Is that better?" "Not quite so much. And don't you have dimples? I was sure I could hear dimples when you chuckle. Like Prof's." MikeAdam smiled again; this time he had dimples. "How shoii! ! I be dressed, Wyoh?" "Are you at your office?" "I'm still at office. Have to be tonight." Background turned gray, then came into focus and color. A wall calendar behind him gave date, Tuesday # May #; a clock showed correct time. Near his elbow was a carton of coffee. On desk was a solid picture, a family group, two men, a woman, four children. Was background noise, muted roar of Old Dome Plaza louder than usual; I heard shouts and in distance some singing: Simon's version of Marseillaise. Off screen Gmwidlah's voice said, "Gospodin?" Adam turned toward it. "I'm busy, Albert," he said patiently. "No calls from anyone but B. You handle everying else." He looked back at us. "Well, Wyoh? Suggestions? Prof? Man my doubting friend? Will I pass?" I rubbed eyes. "Mike, can you cook?" "Certainly. But I don't; I'm married." "Adam," said Wyoh, "how can you look so neat after the day we've had?" "I don't let little things worry me." He looked at Prof. "Professor, if the picture is okay, let's discuss what I'll say tomorrow. I was thinking of pre-empting the eight hundred newscast, have it announced all night and pass the wmd down the cells." W e talked rest of night. I sent up for coffee twice and MikeAdam had his carton renewed. When I ordered sandwiches, he asked Ginwallah to send out for some. I caught a glimpse of Albert Ginwidlah in profile, a typical babu, poBto and faintly scornful. Hadn't knows what he looked like. Mike ate while we ate, sometimes mumbling around a mouthful of food. When I asked (professional interest) Mike told me that, after he had picture built up, he had programmed most of it for automatic and gave his attention just to facial expressions. But soon I forgot it was fake. Mike-Adam was talking wiA us by video, was all. Much more convenient than by phone. By oh-three-hundred we had policy settled, then Mike rehearsed speech. Prof found points he wanted to add; Mike made revisions, then we decided to get some rest, even Mike-Adam was yawning -- although in fact Mike held fort all through night, guarding transmissions to Terra, keeping Complex walled off, listening at many phones. Prof and I shared big bed, Wyoh stretched out on couch, I whistled lights out. For once we slept without weights. While we had breakfast, Adam Selene addressed Free Luna. He was gentle, strong, warm and persuasive. "Citizens of Free Luna, friends, comrades -- to those of you who do not know me let me introduce myself. I am Adam Selene, Chairman of the Emergency Committee of Comrades for Free Luna... now of Free Luna, we are free at last. The so-called 'Authority' which has long usurped power in this our home has been overthrown. I find myself temporary head of the Emergency Committee. IF "Shortly, as quickly as can be arranged, you will opt your own government." Adam smiled and made a gesture inviting help. "In the meantime, with your help, I shall do my best. We will make mistakes -- be tolerant. Comrades, if you have not revealed yourselves to friends and neighbors, it is time you did so. Citizens, requests may reach you through your comrade neighbors. I will speed the day when I can bow out and life can get back to normal -- a new normal, free of the Authority, free of guards, free of troops stationed on us, free of passports and searches and arbitrary arrests. 'There has to be a transition. To all of you -- please go back to work, resume normal lives. To those who worked for the Authority, the need is the same. Go back to work. Wages will go on, your jobs stay the same, until we can decide what is needed, what happily no longer is needed now that we are free, and what must be kept but modified. You new citizens, transportees sweating out sentences pronounced on you Earthside -- you are free, your sentences are finished! But in the meantime I hope that you will go on working. You are not required to -- the days of coercion are gone -- but you are urged to. You are of course free to leave the Complex, free to go anywhere... and capsule service to and from the Complex will resume at once. But before you use your new freedom to rush into town, let me remind you: "There is no such thing as a free lunch.' You are better off for the time being where you are; the food may not be fancy but will continue hot and on time. "To take on temporarily those necessary functions of the defunct Authority I have asked the General Manager of LuNoHo Companyto serve. This company will provide temporary supervision and will start analyzing how to do away with the tyrannical parts of the Authority and how to transfer the useful parts to private hands. So please help them. "To you citizens of Terra nations among us, scientists and travelers and others, greetings! You are witnessing a rare event, the birth of a nation. Birth means blood and pain: there have been some. We hope it is over. You will not be inconvenienced unnecessarily and your passage home will be arranged as soon as possible. Conversely, you are welcome to stay, still more welcome to become citizens. But for the present I urge you to stay out of the corridors, avoid incidents that might lead to unnecessary blood, unnecessary pain. Be patient with us and I urge my fellow citizens to be patient widi you. Scientists from Terra, at the Observatory and else where, go on with your work and ignore us. Then you won't even notice that we are going through the pangs of creating a new nation. One thing. I am sorry to say that we are temporarily interfering witih your right to communicate with Earthside. This we do from necessity; censorship will be lifted as quickly as possible -- we hate k as much as you do." #  Adam added one more request; "Don't try to see me, comrades, and phone me only if you must. All others, write if you need to, your letters will receive prompt attention. But I am not twins, I got no sleep last night, and can't expect much tonight. I can't address meetings, can't shake hands, can't meet delegation; I must stick to this desk and work -- so that I can get rid of this job and turn it over to your choice." He grinned at them. "Expect me to be as hard to see as non Jester!" was a fifteen-minute cast but J. that was essence: Go back to vork, be patient, give us time. Those scientists gave us almost no time. I should have guessed; was my sort of pidgin. All communication Earthside channeled through Mike. But those brain boys had enough electronic equipment to stock a warehouse; once they decided to, it took them only hours to breadboard a rig that could reach Terra. Only thing that saved us was a fellow traveler who thought Luna should be free. He tried to phone Adam Selene, wound up talking to one of a squad of women we had co-opted from C and D level -- a system thrown together in self-defense as, despite Mike's request, half of Luna tried to phone "Adam Selene" after that videocast, everything from requests and demands to busybodies who wanted to tell Adam bow to do his job. After about a hundred calls got routed to me through too much zeal by a comrade in phone compsuiy, we set up this buffer squad. Hapfsly, comrade lady who took this call recognized that soothe-'em-down doctrine did not apply; she phoned me. Minutes later myself and Finn Nielsen plus some eager guns headed by capsule for laboratory area. Our informant was scared to give name but had told me where to find transmitter. We caught them transmitting, and only fast action on Finn's part kept them breathing; his boys were itchy. But we did not want to "make an example;" Finn and I had settled that on way out. Is hard to frighten scientists, their minds don't work that way. Have to get at them from other angles. I kicked that transmitter to pieces and ordered Director to have everyone assemble in mess hall and required roll call -- where a phone could hear. Then I talked to Mike, got names from him, and said to Director; "Doctor, you told me they were all here. We're missing so-and-so" -- seven names. Get them herer Missing Terrans had been notified, had refused to stop what they were doing. Typical scientists. Then I talked, Loonies on one side of room, Terrans on other. To Terrans I said: "We tried to treat you as guests. But three of you tried and perhaps succeeded in sending message Earthside." I turned to Director. "Doctor, I could search -- warren, surface structures, all labs, every space -- and destroy everything that might be used for transmitter. I'm elecIF tron pusher by trade; I know what wide variety of components can be converted into transmitters. Suppose I destroy everything that might be useful for that and, being stupid, take no chance and smash anything I don't understand. What result?" W ould have thought I was about to kill his baby! He turned gray. "That would stop every research... destroy priceless data... waste, oh, I don't know how "So I thought. Could take all that gear instead of smashing and let you go on best you can." "That would be almost as bad! You must understand, Gospodin, that when an experiment is intwrupted -- " "I know. Easier than moving anything -- and maybe missing some -- is to take you all to Complex and quarter you there. We have what used to be Dragoon barracks. But -- Where you from. Doctor?" "Princeton, New Jersey." "So? You've been here five months and no doubt exercising and wearing weights. Doctor, if we did that, you might never see Princeton again. If we move you, we'll keep you locked up. You'll get soft. If emergency goes on very long, you'll be a Loonie like it or not. And all your brainy help with you." A cocky chum stepped forward -- one who had to be sent for twice. "You can't do this! It's against the law!" "What law, Gospodin? Some law back in your home town?" I turned. "Finn, show him law." Finn stepped forward and placed emission bell of gun at man's belly button. Thumb started to press down -- safety-switched, I could see. I said, "Don't kill him, Finn;" -- then went on: "I will eliminate this man if that's what it takes to convince you. So watch each other! One more offense will kill all your chances of seeing home again -- as well as ruining researches. Doctor, I warn you to find ways to keep check on your staff." I turned to Loonies. "Tovarischee, keep them honest. Work up own guard system. Don't take nonsense; every earthworm is on probation. If you have to eliminate some, don't hesitate." I turned to Director. "Doctor, any Loonie can go anywhere any time -- even your bedroom. Your assistants are now your bosses so far as security is concerned. If a Loonie decides to follow you or anybody into a W.C., don't argue! he might be jumpy." I turned to Loonies. "Security first! You each work for some earthworm -- watch him! Split it among you and don't miss anhing. Watch 'em so close they can't build mouse trap, much less transmitter. If interferes with work for them, don't worry; wages will go on." Could see grins. Lab assistant was best job a Loonie could find those days -- but they worked under earthworms who looked down on us, even ones who pretended and were oh so gracious. I let it go at that. When I had been phoned, I had intended to eliminate offenders. But Prof and Mike set me straight: Plan did not permit liQlence against Terram that could be svokled. We set up "ears," wideband seosive receivers, around lab area, since eeeap mewt (Sectional rig spills a IMe in neighborhood. And Mike listened on all fdaones in area. After tbt we chewed nails and hoped. Presently we relaxed as news from Barthside showed nothing, they seemed to accept censored transmissaons; without suspicion, and private and commercial traffic and Authority's transmissions all seemed routine. Meanwhile we worked, trying in days what should take months. W e received one break in timing; no passenger ship was on Uma and none was due until # July. We could have coped r -- suckered a ship's officers to "dine with Warden" or something, then mounted guard on its senders or dismantled than.Could not have lifted without our help; in those days one drain on ice was providing water for reaction mass. Was not much drain compared with grain shipments. One manned ship a month was heavy traffic then, while grain lifted every day. What it did mean was that an incoming ship was not an insuperable hazard. Nevertheless was lucky break; we were trying so hard to make everything look normal until we could defend ourselves. Grain shipments went on as before; one was catapulted almost as Finn's men were breaking into Warden's residence. And next went out OB time, and all others. Ndther oversight nor faking for ioterim; Prof knew what he was doi Grain shipments were a big operation (ft a little country Kke Luna) and couldn't be changed in one semi-lunar; bread-ami-beer of too many p)ple was involved. If our Committee had ordered enrisargo and quit buying grain, we would have been chucked out and a new committee with other ideas would have taken over. Prof said that an educational period was necessary. Meanwhile grain barges catapulted as iBual; LuNoHoCo kept books and issued receipts, using civil service personnel. Dispatches went out in Warden's name and Mike talked to Authority Earthside, using Warden's voice. Deputy Administrator proved reasonable, once he understood it upped his life expectancy. Chief Engineer stayed on job, too -- McIntyre was a real Loonie, given chance, rather than fink by nature. Other departnt heads and minor stooges were no problem; life went on as before and we were too busy to unwind Authority system and put useful parts up for sale. Over a dozen people turned up claiming to be Simon Jester; Simon wrote a rude verse disclaiming them and had picture on front page of Lunatic, Pravda, and Gong. Wyoh let herself go blonde and made trip to see Greg at new catapult site, then a longer trip, ten days to old home in Hong Kong Luna, taking Anna who wanted to see it. Wyoh needed a vacation and Prof urged her to take it, pointing out that she was in touch by phone and that closer Party contact was needed in Hong Kong. I took over her stilyagi with Slim nd Hazel as my lieutenants -- bright, sharp kids I could trust. Slim was awed to discover that I was "Comrade Bork" and saw "Adam Selene" every day; his Party name started with "G." Made a good team for other reason, too. Hazel suddenly started showing cushiony curves and not all from Mimi's superb table; she had reached that point in her orbit. Slim was ready to change her name to "Stone" any time he was anxious to do Party work he could share with our fierce little redhead. comrades turned out to be talk-talk soldiers. Still more thought war was over once we had eliminated Peace Goons and captured Warden. Others were indignant to learn how far down they were in Party structure; they wanted to elect a new structure, themselves at top. Adam received endless calls proposing this or something like it. Would listen, agree, assure them their services must not be wasted by waiting for election -- and refer them to Prof or me. Can't recall any of these ambitious people who amounted to anything when I tried to put them to work. Was endless work and nobody wanted to do it. Well, a few. Some best volunteers were people Party had never located. But in general. Loonies in and out of Party had no interest in "patriotic" work unless well paid. One chum who claimed to be a Party member (was not) spragged me in Raffles where we set up headquarters and wanted me to contract for fifty thousand buttons to be worn by pre-coup "Veteraas of Revolution" -- a "small" profit for him (I estimate # markup), easy dollars for me, a fine thing for everybody. When I brushed him off, he threatened to denounce me to Adam Selene -- "A very good friend of mine, ni have you know!" -- for sabotage. hat was "help" we got. What we needed was something else. Needed steel at new catapult and plenty -- Prof asked if really necessary to put steel around rock missiles; I had to point out that an induction field won't grab bare rock. We needed to relocate Mike's ballistic radars at old site and install doppler radar at new site -- both jobs because we could expect attacks from space at old site. We called for volunteers, got only two who could be used -- and needed several hundred mechanics who did not mind hard work in p-suits. So we hired, paying what we had to. LuNoHoCo went in hock to Bank of Hong Kong Luna; was no time to steal that much and most funds had been transferred Earthside to Sbi. A dinkum comrade, Foo Moses Morris, co-signed much paper to ke us going -- and wound up broke and started over with a little tailoring shop in Kongville -- that was later. Authority Scrip dropped from #to-I to #-to-l after coup and civil service people screamed, as Mike was still paying in Authority checks. We said Aey could stay on or reagn. Then those we needed we rehired with Hong Kong dollars. But created a large group not on our side from then on; they longed for good old days and were ready to stab new regime. Grain farmers and brokers were unhappy because payment at catapult head continued to be Authority scrip at same old fixed prices. "We won't take it!" they cried -- and LuNoHoCo man would shrug and tell them they didn't have to but this grain still went to Authority Earthside (it did) and Authority scrip was all they would get. So take cheque, or load your grain back into rolligons and get it out of here. Most took it. All grumbled and some threatened to get out of grain and start growing vegetables or ffters or something that brought Hong Kong dollars -- and Prof smiled. We needed every drillman in Luna, especially ice miners who owned heavy-duty laser drills. As soldiers. We needed them so badly that, despite being shy one wing and rusty, I considered joining up, even thou takes muscle to wrestle a big drill, and a prosthetic just isn't muscle. Prof told me not to be a fool. Dodge we had in mind would not work well Earthside. A laser beam carrying heavy power works best in vacuum -- but there it works just dandy for whatever range its coDimation is good for. These big drills, which had carved through rock seeking pockets of ice, were now being mounted as "artaicry" to repel space attacks. Both and misses hare electronic nervous sytems and does electronic gear no good to blast it with umpteen joules packed in a tight beam. If target is pressured (as manned ships are and most missiles) , all it takes is to bum a hole, depressure it. If not pressured, a heavy laser beam can still kill it -- bum eyes, louse guidance, spoil anything depending on electronics as most everything does. An H-bomb with circuitry ruined is not a bomb, is just a big tub of lithium deuteride that can't do anything but crash. A ship with eyes gone is a derelict, not a warship. Sounds easy, is not. Those laser drills were never meant for targets a thousand kilometers away, or even one, and was no quick way to rig their cradles f accuracy. Gunner had to have guts to hold fire until last few seconds -- on a target heading at him maybe two kilometers per second. But was best we had, so we organized First and Second Volunteer Defense Gunners of Free Luna. Two regiments -- so that First could snub lowly Second and Second could be jealous of Rrst. First got older men. Second got young and eager. Having ced them "Volunteers" we hired in Hong Kong dollars -- and was no accident that ice was being paid for in controlled market in wastepaper Authority scrip. O n top of aU, we were talking up a war scare. Adam Selene talked over video, reminding that Authority was certain to try to regain its tyranny and we had only days to prepare; papers quoted him and published stories of tiieir own -- we had made special effort to recruit newsmen before coup. People were urged to keep p-suits ready and to test pressure alarms in homes, A volunteer Civil Defense Corps was organized in each warren. What with moonquakes always with us, each warren's pressure co-op always had sealing crews ready at any hour. Even with silicone staysoft and fiberglas any warren leaks. In Davis Tunnels our boys did maintenance on seal every day. But now we recruited hundreds of emergency sealing crews, mostly stilyagi, drilled them with fake emergencies, had them stay in p-suits with helmets open when on duty. They did beautifully. But idiots made fun of them -- "play soldiers." "Adam's little apples," other names. A team was going through a drill, showing they could throw a temporary lock around one that had been damaged, and one of these pinheads stood by and rode them loudly. Civil Defense team went ahead, completed temporary lock, tested it with helmets closed; it held -- came out, grabbed this joker, took him through into temporary lock and out into zero pressure, dumped him. Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that. Prof thought we ought to send out a gentle warning not to eliminate so peremptorily. I opposed it and got my way; could see no better way to improve breed. Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people. But our biggest headaches were self-anointed statesmen. Did I say that Loonies are "nonpolitical"? They are, when comes to doing anything. But doubt if was ever a time two Loonies over a liter of beer did not swap loud opinions about how things ought to be run. As mentioned, these self-appointed political scientists tried to grab Adam Selene's ear. But Prof had a place for them; each was invited to take part in "Ad-Hoc Congress for Organization of Free Luna" -- which met in Community Hall in Luna City, then resolved to stay in session until work was done, a week in L-City, a week in Novylen, then Hong Kong, and start over. All sessions were on video. Prof presided over first and Adam Selene addressed them by video and encouraged them to do a thorough job -- "History is watching you." I listened to some sessions, then cornered Prof and asked what in Bog's name he was up to? "Thought you didn't want any government? Have you heard those nuts since you turned them loose?" He smiled most dimply smile. "What's troubling you, Manuel?" Many things were troubling me. With me breaking heart trying to round up heavy drills and men who could treat them as guns thee idlers had spent an entire afternoon discussing immigration. Some wanted to stop it entirely. Some wanted to tax it, high enough to finance government (when ninety-nine out of a hundred Loonies had had to be dragged to The Rock!); some wanted to make it selective by "ethnic ratios." (Wondered how they would count me?) Some wanted to limit IF it to females until we were #-#. That had produced a Scandinavian shout: "Ja, cobber! Tell 'em send us tousands and tousands vimmen! I marry 'em, I betcha!" Was most sensible remark all afternoon. A nother time they argued "time." Sure, Greenwich time bears no relation to lunar. But why should it when we live underground? Show me a Loonie who can sleep two wedts and work two weeks; lunars kMit fit our metabolism. What was urged was to make a lunar exactly eqpial to twenty-eight days (instead of # days, # hours, # minutes, # seconds) and do this by making days longer -- and hours, minirtes, and seconds, thus making each semi-lunar exactly two weeks. Sure, lunar is necessary for many purposes. Controls when we go up on surface, why we go and how long we stay. But, aside from throwing us out of gear with our only neighbor, had that wordy vacuum skull thought what this would do to every critical figure in science and engineering? As an electronics man I shuddered. Throw away every book, table, instrument, and start over? I know that some of my ancestors did that in switching from they did it to make things easier. Fourteen inches to a foot and some odd number of feet to a mile. Otmces and pounds. Oh, Bog! Made sense to change that -- but why go out of your way to create confusion? Somebody wanted a committee to determine exactly what Loonie language is, then fine everybody who talked Earthside English or other language. Oh, my people! I read tax proposals in Lunatic -- four sorts of "Single-Taxers" -- a cubic tax that would penalize a man if he extended tunnels, a head tax (everybody pay same), income tax (like to see anyone figure income of Davis Family or try to get information out of Mum!), and an "air tax" which was not fees we paid then but something else. Hadn't realized "Free Luna" was going to have taxes. Hadn't had any before and got along. You paid for what you got. Tanstaafl. How else? Another time some pompous choom proposed that bad breath and body odors be made an elimination offense. Could almost sympathize, having been stuck on occasion in a capsule with such stinks. But doesn't happen often and tends to be selfcorrecting; chronic offenders, or unfortunates who can't correct, aren't likely to reproduce, seeing how choosy women are. One female (most were men, but had a long list she wanted made permanent laws -- about private matters. No more plural marriage of any sort. No divorces. No "fornication" -- had to look that one up. No drinks stronger than # beer. Church services only on Saturdays and all else to stop that day. (Air and temperature and pressure engineering, lady? Phones and capsules?) A long list of drugs to be prohibited and a shorter list dispensed oiily by licensed plsysicians. (What is a "licensed physician"? Healer I go to has a sign riding "practical doctor". Makes book on sWe, which is why I go to him. Look, lady, aren't any medical schools in Luna!) (Then, I mean.) She even wanted to make gambling illegal. If a Loonie couldn't roll double or nothing, he would go to a shop that would, even if dice were loaded. Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws -- always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said; "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always sometg they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" -- not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it. Listening to that session I was almost sorry we got rid of Mort the Wart. He stayed holed up with his women and chdn't tell us how to run private lives. B ut Prof di't get excited; he went on smiling. "Manuel, do you really diink that mob of retarded children can pass any laws?" "You told them to. Urged them to." "My dear Manuel, I was simply putting all my nuts in one basket I know those nuts; I've listened to them for years. I was very careful in selecting their committees; they all have built-in confusion, they will quarrel. The chairman I forc on them while letting them elect him is a ditherer who could not unravel a piece of string -- thinks every subject needs 'more study.' I almost needn't have bothered. More than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better -- and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest. Never fear, son, this 'Ad-Hoc Congress' will do nothing... or if they pass something through sheer fatigue, it will be so loaded with contradictions that it will have to be thrown out. In the meantime they are out of our hair. Besides, there is something we need them for, later." "Thought you said they could do nothing." "They won't do this. One man will write it -- a dead man -- and late at night when they are very tired, they'll pass it by acclamation." "Who's this dead man? You don't mean Mike?" "No, no! Mike is far more alive than those yammerheads. The dead man is Thomas Jefferson -- first of the rational anarchists, my boy, and one who once almost managed to slip over his non-system through the most beautiful rhetoric ever writIF ten. But they caught him at it, which I hope to avoid. I cannot improve on his phrasing; I shall merely adapt it to Luna and the twlyfirst century." "Heard of him. Freed slaves nyet?" "One might say he tried but failed. Never mind. How we the defenses progressing? I don't see how we can keep up the pretense past the arrival date of this next ship." "Can't be ready then. Entirely out of question." "Mike says we must be." We weren't but ship never arrived. Those scientists outsmarted me and Loonies I had told to watch them. Was a rig at focal point of biggest reflector and Loonie assistants believed doubletalk about astronomical purpose -- a new wrinkle in radiotelescopes for ultravidet research purposes. I suppose it was. Was ultramicrowave and stuff was bounced at reflector by a wave guide and thus left scope lined up nicely by mirror. Remarkably like early radar. And metal latticework and foil heat shield of barrel stopped stray radiation, thus "ears" I had staked out heard nothing. They put message across, thenversion and in detail. First we heard was demand from Authority to Warden to deny this hoax, find hoaxer, put stop to it. So instead we gave them a Declaration of Independence, using model already on hand. "In Congress assembled, July Fourth, Twenty Seventy-Six -- " Was beautiful. S igning of Declaration of Independence went as Prel said it would. He sprang it m tfiem at end of long day, announced a special session after dinner at which Adam Selene would speak. Adam read aloud, discussing each sentence, then read it without stopping, making music of sonorous phrases. People wept. Wyoh, seated by me, was one, and I felt like it even though had read it earlier. Then Adam looked at them and said, "The future is waiting. Mark well what you do," and turned meeting over to Prof rather than usual chairman. Was twenty-two huiidred and fight began. Sure, they were in favor of it. News all day had been jammed with what bad boys we were, how we were to be punished, taught a lesson, so forth. Not imoessary to spice it up; stuff up from Earthside was narsty -- Mike merely left out on-other-hand opinions. If ever was a day when Luna fdt unified it was probably second of July #... So they were going to pass it; Prof knew that before he offered it. But not as written -- "Honorable Chairman, in second paragraph, that word 'unalienable,' is no such word; should be 'malienable' -- and anyhow wouldn't it be more dignified to say 'sacred rights' rather than 'inalienable rights'? I'd like to hear discussion on this." That choom was almost sensible, merely a literary critic, which #f is harmless, like dead yeast left in beer. But -- Well, take that woman who hated everything. She was there with list; read it aloud and moved to have it incorporated into Declaration, "So that the peoples of Terra wiU know that we are civilized and fit to take our places in the councils of mankind!" Prof not only let her get away with it; he encouraged her, letting her talk when other people wanted to -- then blandly put her proposal to a vote when hadn't even been seconded. (Congress operated by rules they had wrangled over for days. Prof was familiar with rules but followed them only as suited him.) She was voted down in a shout, and left. Then somebody stood up and said of course that long list didn't belong in Declaration -- but shouldn't we have general principles? Maybe a statement that Luna Free State guaranteed freedom, equality and security to all? Nothing elaborate, just those fundamental principles that everybody knew was proper purpose of government. True enough and let's pass it. But must read 'Treedom, equality, peace and security" -- right, comrade? They wrangled over whether "freedom" included "free air," or was that part of "security"? Why not be on safe side and list "free air" by name? Move to amend to make it "Free air and water" -- because you didn't have "freedom" or "security" unless you had both air and water. Air, water, and food. Air, water, food, and cubic. Air, water, food, cubic, and heat. No, make "heat" read "power" and you had it all covered. Everything. Cobber, have you lost your mind? That's far from everything and what you've left out is an affront to all womankind -- Step outside and say that! Let me finish. We've gert to tell them right from deal that we will permit no more ships to land unless they carry at least as many women as men. At least, I said. And I for one won't chop it unless it sets immigration issue straight. Prof never lost dimples. Began to see why Prof had slept all day and was not wearing weights. Me, I was tired, having spent all day in p-suit out beyond catapult head cutting in last of reloced ballistic radars. And everybody was tired; by midnight crowd began to thin, convinced that nothing would be accomplished that night and bored by any yammer not their own. W as later than midnight when someone asked why this Declaration was dated fourth when today was second? Prof said mildly that it was July third now -- and it seemed unlikely that our Declaration could be announced earlier than fourth... and that July fourth carried historical symbolism that might help. Several people walked out at announcement that probably nothing would be settled until fourth of July. But I began to notice something: tying. Finn Nielsen slid into a seat that had just been vacated. Comrade IF Clayton from Hong Kong showed up, pressed my shoulder, smiled at Wyoh, found a seat. My youngest lieutenants. Slim and Hazel, I spotted them down front -- and was thinking I must alibi Hazel by telling Mum I had kept her out on Party business -- when was amazed to see Mum next to them. And Sidris. And Greg, who was supposed to be at new catapult. Looked around and picked out a dozen more -- night editor of Lunaya Pravda, General Manager of LuNoHoCo, others, and each one a working comrade. Began to see that Prof had stacked deck. That Congress never had a fixed membership; diese dinkum comrades had as much right to show up as those who had been talking a month. Now they sat -- and voted down amendments. About three hundred, when I was wondering how much more I could take, someone brought a note to Prof. He read it, banged gavel and said, "Adam Selene begs your indulgence. Do I hear unanimous consent? So screen back of rostrum lighted up again and Adam told them that he had been following debate and was warmed by many thoughtful and constructive criticisms. But could he make a suggestion? Why not admit that any piece of writing was imperfect? If this declaration was in general what they wanted, why not postpone perfection for another day and pass this as it stands? "Honorable Chairman, I so move." They passed it with a yell. Prof said, "Do I hear objection?" and waited with gavel raised. A man who had been talking when Adam had asked to be heard said, "Well... I still say that's a dangling participle, but okay, leave it in." Prof banged gavel. "So ordered!" Then we filed up and put our chops on a big scroll that had been "sent over from Adam's office" -- and I noticed Adam's chop on it. I signed right under Hazel -- child now could write although was still short on book learning. Her chop was shaky but she wrote it large and proud. Comrade Clayton signed his party name, real name in letters, and Japanese chop, three little pictures one above other. Two comrades chopped with X's and had them witnessed. All Party leaders were there that night (morning), all chopped it, and not more than a dozen yammerers stuck. But those who did put their chops down for history to read. And thereby committed "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors." While queue was moving slowly past and people were talking. Prof banged for attention. "I ask for volunteers for a dangerous mission. This Declaration will go on the news channels -- but must be presented in person to the Federated Nations, on Terra." T hat put stop to noise. Prof was looking at me. I swallowed and said, "I volunteer." Wyoh echoed, "So do I!" -- and little Hazel Meade said, "Me, too!" In moments were a dozen, from Finn Nielsen to Gospodin DanglingParticiple (turned out to be a good cobber aside from his fetish). Prof took names, mumiured something about getting in touch as transportation became available. I got Prof aside and said, "Look, Prof, you too tired to track? You know ship for seventh was canceled; now they're talking about slapping embargo on us. Next ship for Luna will be a warship." "Oh, we won't use their ships." "So? Going to build one? Any idea how long that takes? If could build one at all. Which I doubt." "Manuel, Mike says it's necessary -- and has it all worked out." I did know Mike said was necessary; he had rerun problem soon as we learned that bright laddies at Richardson had snuck one home -- He now gave us only one chance in fifty-three... with imperative need for Prof to go Earthside. But I'm not one to worry about impossibilities; I had spent day working to make that one chance in fifty-three turn up. "Mike will provide the ship," Prof went on. "He has completed its design and it is being worked on." "He has? It is? Since when is Mike an engineer?" "Isn't he?" asked Prof. I started to answer, shut up. Mike had no degrees. Simply knew more engineering than any man alive. Or about Shakespeare's plays, or riddles, name it. "Tell me more." "Manuel, we'll go to Terra as a load of grain." Whafl Who's 'we'?" "You and myself. The other volunteers are merely decorative." I said, "Look, Prof. Fve stuck. Worked hard when whole thing seemed silly. Worn these weights -- got 'em on now -- on chance I might have to go to that dreadful place. But contracted to go in a ship, with at least a Cyborg pilot to help me get down safely. Did not agree to go as meteorite." He said, "Very well, Manuel. I believe in free choice, always. Your alternative will go." 'My -- WhoT "Comrade Wyoming. So far as I know she is the only other person in training for the ship... other than a few Terrans." S o I went. But talked to Mike first. He said patiently, "Man my first friend, there isn't a thing to worry about. You are scheduled load KM # series '# and you'll arrive in Bombay with no trouble. But to be sure -- to reassure you -- I selected that barge because it will be taken out of parking orbit and landed when India is faced toward me... and I've added an override so that I can take you away from ground control if I don't like the way they handle you. Trust me, Man, it has all been thought through. Even the decision to continue shipments when security was broken was part of this plan." "Might have told me." "There was no need to worry you. Professor had to know and Fve kept in touch with him. But you are going simply to take care rf him and back Wm up -- do his job if he dies, a factor on which I can give you no reassurance." IF I sighed. "Okay. But, Mike, surely you don't think you can pilot a Wge into a soft landing at this distance? Speed of light alone would trq) you." "Man, don't you think I understand ballistics? For the orbital position then, from query through reply and then to command-received is under four seconds... and you can rely on me not to waste microseconds. Your maximum parkingorbit travel in four seconds in only thirty-two kilometers, diminishing asymptotically to zero at landing. My reflex time will be effectively less than that of a human pilot in a manual landing because I don't waste time grasping a situation and deciding on correct action. So my maximum is four seconds. But my effective reflex time is much less, as I project and predict constantly, see ahead, program it out -- in effect, I'll say four seconds ahead of you in your trajectory and respond instantly." "That steel can doesn't even have an altimeter!" "It does now. Man, please believe me; I thought of everything. The only reason I've ordered this extra equipment is to reassure you. Poona ground control hasn't made a bobble in the last five thousand loads. For a computer it's fairly bright." "Okay. Uh, Mike, how hard do they splash those bleeding barges? What gee?" "Not high, Man. Ten gravities at injection, then that programs down to a steady, soft four gees... then you'll be nudged again between six and five gees just before splash. The splash itself is gentle, equal to a fall of fifty meters and you enter ogive first with no sudden shock, less than three gees. Then you surface and splash again, lightly, and simply float at one gee. Man, those barge shelb are built as lightly as possible for economy's sake. We can't afford to toss them around or they would split their seams." "How sweet. Mike, what would 'six to five gees' do to you? Split your seams?" "I conjecture that I was subjected to about six gravities when they shipped me up here. Six gravities in my present condition would sheer many of my essential connections. However, Fm more interested in the extremely high, transient acceleration I am going to experience from shock waves when Terra starts bombing us. Data are insufficient for prediction... but I may lose control of my outlying functions, Man. This could be a major factor in any tactical situation." "Mike, you really think they are going to bomb us?" "Count on it, Man. That is why this trip is so important." I eft it at that and went out to see this coffin. Should have stayed home. Ever looked at one of those silly barges? Just a steel cylinder with retro and guidance rockets and radar transponder. Resembles a spaceship way a pair of pliers resembles by number-three arm. They had this one cut open and w-e outfitting our "living quarters. No galley. No. W.C. No nothing. Why bother? We were going to be in it only fifty hours. Start empty so that you wont need a honey sack in your suit. Dispense with knmge and bar; youll never be out of your suit, you'll be drugged and not caring. At least Prof would be drugged almost whole time; I had to be alert at landing to try to get us out of this death trap if something went wrong and nobody came along with a tin opener. They were building a shaped cradle in which backs of our p-suits would fit; we would be strapped into these holes. And stay there, clear to Terra. They seemed more concerned about making total mass equal to displaced wheat and same center of gravity and all moment arms adding up correctly than they did our comfort. Engineer in charge told me that even padding to be added inside our p-suits was figured in. Was glad to learn we were going to have padding; those holes did not look soft. Returned home in thoughtful condition. W yoh was not at dinner, unusual; Greg was, more unusual. Nobody said anything about my being scheduled to imitate a falling rock next day although all knew. But did not realize anything special was on until all next generation left table without being told. Then knew why Greg had not gone back to Mare Undarum site after Congress adjourned that morning; somebody had asked for a Family talk-talk. Mum looked around and said, "We're all here. Ali, shut that door; that's a dear. Grandpaw, will you start us?" Our senior husband stopped nodding over coffee and firmed up. He looked down table and said strongly, "I see that we are all here. I see that children have been put to bed. I see that there is no stranger, no guest. I say that we are met in accordance with customs created by Black Jack Davis our Wife. If there is any matter that concerns safety and happiness of our marriage, haul it out in the light now. Don't let it fester. This is our custom." Grandpaw turned to Mum and said softly, "Take it, Mimi," and slumped back into gentle apathy. But for a minute he had been strong, handsome, virile, dynamic man of days of my opting... and I thought with sudden tears how lucky I had been! Then didn't know whether I felt lucky or not. Only excuse I could see for a Family talk-talk was fact that I was due to be shipped Earthside next day, labeled as grain. Could Mum be thinking of trying to set Family against it? Nobody had to abide by results of a talktalk. But one always did. That was strength of our marriage; Wlien came down to issues, we stood together. Mimi was saying, "Does anyone IF luive anything that needs to be discussed? Speak up, dears." Greg said, "I have." "We'll listen to Greg." Greg is a good speaker. Can stand up in front of a congregation and speak with confidence about matters I don't feel confident about even when alone. But that night he seemed anything but sure of himself. "Well, uh, we've always tried to keep this marriage in balance, some old, some young, a regular alternation, well spaced, just as it was handed down to us. But we've varied sometimes -- for good reason." He looked at Ludmilla. "And adjusted to it later." He looked again at far end of table, at Frank and Ali, on each side of Ludmilla. "Over years, as you can see from records, average age of husbands has been about forty, wives about thirtyfive -- and that age spread was just what our marriage started with, nearly a hundred years gone by, opted Black Jack and he had just turned twenty. Right now I find the average age of husbands is almost exactly forty, while average -- " Mum said firmly, "Never mind arithmetic, Greg dear. Simply state it." I was trying to think who Greg could possibly mean. True, I had been much away during past year, and if did get home, was often after everybody was asleep. But he was clearly talking about marriage and nobody ever proposes another wedding in our marriage without first giving everybody a long careful diance to look prospect over You just didn't do it any other way! So I'm stupid. Gred stuttered and said, "I propose Wyoming Knott!" I said I was stupid. I understand machinery and machinery understands me. But don't claim to know anything about people. When I get to be senior husband, if live that long, am going to do exactly what Grandpaw does with Mum: Let Sidris run it. Just same -- Well, look, Wyoh joined Greg's church. I like Greg, love Greg. And admire him. But you could never feed theology of his church through a computer and get anything but null. Wyoh surely knew this, since she encountered it in adult years. Truthfully, I had suspected that Wyoh's conversion was proof that she would do anything for our Cause. But Wyoh had recruited Greg even earlier. And had made most of trips out to new site, easier for her to get away than me or Prof. Oh, well. Was taken by surprise. Should not have been. Mimi said, "Greg, do you have reason to think that Wyoming would accept an opting from us?" "Yes." "Very well. We all know Wyoming; I'm sure we've formed our opinions of her. I see no reason to discuss it... unless someone has something to say? Speak up." Was no surprise to Mum. But wouldn't be. Nor to anryone else, either, since Mum never let a talktalk take place until she was sure of outcome. But wondered why Mum was sure of my opinion, so certain that she had not felt me out ahead of time? And sat there in a soggy quandary, knowing I should speak up, knowing I knew something terribly pertinent which nobody else knew or matter would never gone this far. Something that didn't matter to me but would matter to Mum and all our women. Sat there, miserable coward, and said nothing. Mum said, "Very well. Let's call the roll. Ludmilla?" "Me? Why, I love Wyoh, everybody knows that. Sure!" "Lenore dear?" "Well, I may try to talk her into going back to being a brownie again; I think we set each other off. But that's her only fault, being blonder than I am. Dal" "Sidris?" "Thumbs up. Wyoh is our kind of people." "Anna?" "Tve got something to say before I express my opinion, Mimi." "I don't think it's necessary, dear." "Nevertheless I'm going to haul ways did according to our tradition. In this marriage every wife has carried her load, given children to the family. It may come as a surprise to some of you to learn that Wyoh has had eight children -- " ertainly surprised Ali; his head v head jerked and jaw dropped. I stared at plate. Oh. Wyoh, Wyoh! How could I let this happen? Was going to have to speak up. And realized Anna was still speaking; " -- so now she can have children of her own; the operation was successful. But she worries about possibility of another defective baby, unlikely as that is according to the head of the clinic in Hong Kong. So we'll just have to love her enough to make her quit fretting." "We will love her," Mum said serenely. "We do love her. Anna are you ready to express opinion?" "Hardly necessary, is it? I went to Hong Kong with her, held her hand while her tubes were restored. I opt Wyoh." "In this family," Mum went on, "we have always felt that our husbands should allowed a veto. Odd of it has always worked well. Well, Grandpaw?" "Eh? What were you saying, my dear?" "We are opting Wyoming, Gospodin Grandpaw. Do you give consent?" "What? Why of course, of course! Very nice little girl. Say? Whatever became of that pretty little Afro, name something like that? She get mad at us?" "Greg?" 'T propose it." "Manuel? Do you forbid this?" "Me? Why, you know me. Mum." "I do. I sometimes wonder if yon know you. Hans?" "What would happen if I said NoT' "You'd lose some teeth, thafs Vf what," Lenore said promptly. "Hans votes Yes." "Stop it, darlings," Mum said with oft reproof. "Opting is a serious matter. Hans, speak up." "Da. Yes. Ja. Oui. Si. High time we had a pretty blonde in this -- Ouchr "Stop it, Lenore. Frank?" "Les, Mum." "Ali dear? Is it unanimous?" Lad blushed bright pink and coudn't talk. Nodded vigorously. Instead of appointing a husband and a wife to seek out selectee and propose opting for us. Mum sent Ludmilla and Anna to fetch Wyoh at once -- turned out she was only as far away as Bon Ton. Nor was that only irregularity; instead of setting a date and arranging a wedding party, our children were called in, and twenty minutes later Greg had his Book open and we did be taking vows -- and I finally got it through my confused head that was being done with breakneck speed because of my date to break my neck next day. N ot that it could matter save as symbol of my family's love for me, since a bride spent her first night with her senior husband, and second and third I was going to spend out in space. But did matter anyhow and when women started to cry during ceremony, I found self dripping tears right with them. Then I went to bed, alone in workshop, once Wyoh had kissed us and left on Grandpa w's arm. Was terribly tired and last two days had been hard. Thought about exercises and decided was too late to matter, thought about calling Mike and asking for news from Terra. Went to bed. Don't know how long had been asleep when realized was no longer asleep and somebody was in room. "Manuel?" came soft whisper in dark. "Huh? Wyoh, you aren't supposed to be here, dear." "I am indeed supposed to be here, my husband. Mum knows I'm here, so does Greg. And Grandpaw went right to sleep." "Oh. What time is?" "About four hundred. Please, dear, may I come to bed?" "What? Oh, certainly." Something I should remember. Oh, yes. "Mike!" "Yes, Man?" he answered, right on cue. "Switch off. Don't listen. If you want me, call me on Family phone." "So Wyoh told me, Man. Congratulations!" Then her head was pillowed on my stump and I put right arm around her. "What are you crying about, Wyoh?" "I'm not crying! Pm just frightened silly that you won't come backr IF  Short Stf The Yar riots Their whole lives had been designed they had to kill, or see Earth diet #Tm sure they saw us coming," A the Alien Technologies Officer persisted. "Do you see that ring, sir?" The silvery image of the enemy ship almost filled the viewer. It showed as a broad, wide ring encircling a cylindrical axis, like a mechanical pencil floating inside a platinum bracelet. A finned craft ejected from the pointed end of tfie axial section. Angular letters ran down the axis, totally unlike the dots-and-commas of kzinti script. "Of course I see it," said the Captain. '#t was rotating when we first picked them up. It stopped when we got within two hundred thousand miles, and it hasn't moved since." The Captain flicked his tail back and forth, gently, thoughtfully, like a pink lash. "You worry me," he commented. "If they know we're here, why haven't they tried to get away? Are they so sure tfiey can beat us? He whirled to face the A-T Officer. "Should we be running?" "No, sir! I don't know why they're still here, but they can't have anything to be confident about. That's one of the most primitive spacecraft I've ever seen." He moved his claw about on the screen, pointing as he talked. "The outer shell is an iron alloy. The rotating ring is a method of imitating gravity by using centripetal force. So they don't have the gravity planer. In fact they're probably using a reaction drive." The Captain's catlike ears went up. "But we're light years from the nearest star!" 'They must have a better reaction drive than we ever developed. We had the gravity planer before w# needed one that good." There was a buzzing sound from the big control board. "Riter," said die captain. The Weapons Officer fell up through the entrance hatch and came to attention. "Sir, we have all weapons trained on the enemy." "Good." The Captain swung around. "A-T, how sure are you that they aren't a threat to us?" The A-T Officer bared sharply pointed teeth. "I don't see how they could be, sir." #ood. Weapons, keep all your guns ready to fire, but don't use them unless I give the order, ril have the ears of the man who destroys that ship without orders. I want to take it intact." "Yes, sir." "Where's the Telepath?" "He's on his way, sir. He was asleep." "He's always asleep. Tell him to get his tail up here." The Weapons Officer saluted, turned, and dropped through the exit hole. "Captain?" The A-T Officer was standing by the viewer, which now showed the ringed end of the alien ship. He pointed to the mirror-bright end of the axial cylinder. "It looks like that end was designed to project light. That would make it a photon drive, sir." The Captain considered. "Could it be a signal device?" "Urrrrr... Yes, sir." "Then don't jump to conclusions." Like a piece of toast, the Telepath popped up through the entrance hatch. He came to exaggerated attention. "Reporting as ordered,  H Sir. "You omitted to buzz for entrance." "Sorry, sir." The lighted viewscreen caught the Telepath's eye and he padded over for a better look, forgetting that he was at attention. The A-T Officer winced, wishing he were somewhere else. The Telepath's eyes were violet around the edges. His pink tail hung limp. As usual, he looked as if he were dying for lack of sleep. His fur was flattened along the side he slept on; he hadn't even bothered to brush it. The effect was as far from the ideal of a Conquest Warrior as one can get and still be a member of the kzinti species. The wonder was that the Captain had not yet murdered him. He never would, of course. Telepaths were too rare, too valuable, and -- understandably -- too emotionally unstable. The Captain always kept his temper with the Telepalh. At times like this it was the innocent bystander who stood to lose his rank or his ears at the clank of a falling molecule. "That's an enemy ship we've tracked down," the Captain was saying. "We'd like to get some information from them. Would you read their minds for us?" "Yes, sir." The Telepath's voice showed his instant misery, but he knew better than to protest. He left the screen and sank into a chair. Slowly his ears folded into tight knots, his pupils contracted, and his ratlike tail went limp as flannel. The world of the eleventh sense pushed in on him. He caught the Captain's thought:... sloppy civilian get of a sthondat..." and frantically tuned it out. He hated the Captain's mind. He found other minds aboard ship, isolated and blanked them out one by one. Now there were none left. TTaere was only unconsciousness and chaos. Chaos was not empty. Something was thinking strange and disturbing dioughts. The Telepath forced himself to fiaten. S teve Weaver floated bonelessly near a widl of the radio room. He was blond, blue eyed, and big, and he could often be seen as he was now, relaxed but completely motionless, as if there were some very good reason why he shouldn't even blink. A streamer of smoke drifted from his left hand and crossed the room to bury itself in the air vent. "That's that," Ann Harrison said wearily. She flicked four switches in the bank of radio controls. At each click a small light went out. "You can't get them?" "Right. I'll bet they don't even have a radio." Ann released her chair net and stretched out into a five pointed star. "I've left the receiver on, with the volume up, in case they try to get us later. Man, that feels good!" Abruptly she curled into a tight ball. She had been crouched at the communications lnk for more than an hour. Ann might have been Steve's twin; she was almost as tall as he was, had the same color hair and eyes, and the flat muscles of conscientious exercise showed beneath her blue falling jumper as she flexed. Steve snapped his cigarette butt at the air conditioner, moving only his fingers. "Okay. What have they got?" Ann looked startled. " don't know." "Think of it as a puzzle. They don't have radio. How might they talk to each other? How can we check on our guesses? We assume they're trying to reach us, of course." "Yes, of course." "Think about it, Ann. Get Jim thinking about it, too." Jim Davis was her husband that year, and the ship's doctor full time. "You're the girl most likely to succeed. Have a smog stick?" "Please." Steve pushed his cigarette ration across the room. "Take a few. I've got to go." The depleted package came whizzing back. "Thanks," said Ann. "Let me know if anything happens, will you? Or if you think of anything." "I will. And fear not, Steve, something's bound to turn up. They must be trying just as hard as we are." Every compartment in the per-sonnel ring opened into the narrow doughnut-shaped hall which ran round the ring's forward rim. Steve pushed himself into the hall, jockeyed to contact the floor, and pushed. From there it was easy going. The floor curved up to meet him, and IF be proceeded down the hall like a wimming frog. Of the twelve men ind women on the AngeVs Pencil, Steve was best at this; for Steve was a Belter, and the others were all flatlanders, Earthborn. A nn probably wouldn't think of anything, he guessed. It wasn't that she wasn't intelligent. She didn't have the curiosity, the sheer love of solving puzzles. Only he and Jim Davis -- He was going too fast, and not concentrating. He almost crashed into Sue Bhang as she appeared below the curve of the ceiling. They managed to stop themselves against the walls. "Hi, jaywalker," said Sue. "Hi, Sue. Where you headed?" "Radio room. You?" "I thought I'd check the drive systems again. Not that we're likely to need the drive, but it can't hurt to be certain." "You'd go twitchy without something to do, wouldn't you?" She cocked her head to one side, as always when she had questions. "Steve, when are you going to rotate us again? I can't seem to get used to falling." But she looked like she'd been born falling, he thought. Her small, slender form was meant for flying; gravity should never have touched her. "When I'm sure we won't need the drive. We might as well stay ready 'til then. Besides, I'm hoping you'll change back to a skirt." She laughed, pleased. "Then you can turn it off. I'm not changing, and we won't be moving. Abel says the other ship did two hundred gee when it matched courses with us. How many can the Angel's Pencil do?" Steve looked awed. "Just point zero five. And I was thinking of chasing them! Well, maybe we can be the ones to open communications. I just came from the radio room, by the way. Ann can't get anything." "Too bad." "We'll just ha'.'c to wait." "Steve, you're always so impatient. Do Belters always move at a run? Come here." She took a handhold and pulled him over to one of the thick windows which lined the forward side of the corridor. "There they are," she said, pointing out. The star was both duller and larger than those around it. Among points which glowed arc-lamp bluewhite with the Doppler shift, the alien ship showed as a dull red disc. "I looked at it through the telescope," said Steve. "There are lumps and ridges all over it. And there's a circle of green dots and commas painted on one side. Looked like writing." "How long have we been waiting to meet them? Five hundred thousand years? Well, there they are. Relax. They won't go away." Sue gazed out the window, her whole attention on the dull red circle, her gleaming jet hair floating out around her head. "TTie first aliens. I wonder what they'll be like." # #Tt's anyone's guess. They must be J. pretty strong to take punishment like that, unless they have some kind of acceleration shield, but free fall doesn't bother them either. That ship isn't designed to spin." He was staring intently out at the stars, his big form characteristically motionless, his expression somber. He said, "Sue, I'm worried." "About what?" 'Suppose they're hostile?" "Hostile?" She tasted the unfamiliar word, decided she didn't like it. "After all, we know nothing about them. Suppose they want to fight? We'd -- " She gasped. Steve flinched before the horror in her face. "What -- what put that idea in your head?" "I'm sorry I shocked you. Sue." "Oh, don't worry about that, but why? Did -- shh." Jim Davis had come into view. The Angefs Pencil had left Earth when he was twenty-seven; now he was a slightly paunchy thirty-eight, the oldest man on board, an amiable man with abnormally long, delicate fingers. His grandfather, with the same hands, had been a world famous surgeon. Nowadays surgery was normally done by autodocs, and the arachnodactils were to Davis merely an affliction. He bounced by, walking on magnetic sandals, looking like a comedian as he bobbed about the magnetic plates. "Hi, group," he called as he went by. "Hello, Jim." Sue's voice was strained. She waited until he was out of sight before she spoke again. Hoarsely she whispered, "Did you fight in the Belt?" She didn't really believe it; it was merely the worst thing she could think of. Vehemently Steve snapped, "No! ' Then, reluctantly, he added, "But it did happen occasionally." Quickly he tried to explain. "The trouble was that all the doctors, including the psychists, were at the big bases, like Ceres. It was the only way they could help the people who needed them -- be where the miners could find them. But all the danger was out in the rocks. "You noticed a habit of mine once. I never make gestures. All Belters have that trait. It's because on a small mining ship you could hit something waving your arms around. Something like the airlock button." "Sometimes it's almost eery. You don't move for minutes at a time." "There's always tension out in the rocks. Sometimes a miner would see too much danger and boredom and frustration, too much cramping inside and too much room outside, and he wouldn't get to a psychist in time. He'd pick a fight in a bar. I saw it happen once. The guy was using his hands like mallets." S teve had been looking far into the past. Now he turned back to Sue. She looked white and sick, like a novice nurse standing up to her first really bad case. His ears began to turn red. "Sorry," he said miserably. She felt like running; she was as embarrassed as he was. Instead she said, and tried to mean it, "It doesn't matter. So you think the people in the other ship might want to, uh, make war?" He nodded. T# IF T)id you have history-of-Earth courses? He smiled ruefully. "No, I couldnt qualify. Sometimes I wonder how many people do. "About one in twelve. "That's not many. "People in general have trouble assimilating the facts of life about their ancestors. You probably know that there used to be wars before -- hmmm -- three hundred years ago, but do you know what a war is? Can you visualize one? Can you see a fusion electric plant deliberately built to explode in the middle of a dty. Do you know what a concentration camp is? A limited action? You probably think murder ended with war. Well, it didn't. The last murder occurred in twenty one something, just a hundred and sixty years ago. "Anyone who says human nature can't be changed is out of his head. To make it stick, he's got to define human nature -- and he can't. Three things gave us our present peaceful civilization, and each one was a technological change." Sue's voice had taken on a dry, remote lecture hall tone, like the voice on a teacher tape. "One was the development of psychistry beyond the alchemist stage. Another was the full development of land for food production. The third was the Fertility Restriction Laws and the annual contraceptive shots. They gave us room to breathe. Maybe Belt mining and the stellar colonies had something to do with it too; they gave us an inanimate enemy. Even the historians argue about that one. "Here's the delicate point I'm trying to nail down." She rapped on the window. "Look at that spacecraft. It has enough power to move it around like a mail missile and enough fuel to move it up to our point eight light -- rigjit? "Right." " -- with plenty of power left for maneuvering. It's a better ship than ours. If they've had time to learn how the build a ship like that, they've had time to build up their own versions of psychistry, modern food production, contraception, economic theory, everything they need to abolish war. See?" Steve had to smile at her earnestness. "Sure, Sue, it makes sense. But that guy in the bar came from our culture, and he was hostile enough. If we can't understand how he thinks, how can we guess about the mind of something whose very chemical makeup we can't guess at yet?" "It's sentient. It builds tools." "Right." "And if Jim hears you talking like this, you'll be in psychistry treatment." "That's the best argument you've given me," Steve grinned, #nd stroked her under the ear with two fingertips. He felt her go suddenly stiff, saw the pain in her face; and at the same time, his own pain struck, a real tigw of a headache, as if his brain were trying to swell beyond his skull. X path said blurr. "Ask me anything. The Captain hurried, knowing that the Telepath couldn't stand this for long. "How do they power their ship?' "It's a light pressure drive powered by incomplete hydrogen fusion. They use an electromagnetic ramscoop to get their own hyogen from space." "Clever... Can they get away frn us?" "No. Their drive is on idle, ready to go, but it won't help them. It's pitifaHy weak." "What kind of weapons do they have?" The Telepath remained silent for a long time. The others waited patiently for his answer. There was sound in the control dome, but it was the kind of sound one learns not to hear: the whine of heavy current, the muted purr of voices from below, die strange sound like continuously ripping cloth which came from the gravity motors. "None at all, sir." The kzinti's voice became clearer; his hypnotic relaxation was broken by muscle twitches. He twisted as if in a nightmare. "Nothing aboard ship, not even a knife or a chib. Wait, they've got cooking knives. But that's all they use them for. They don't fight." "They don't fight?" "No, sir. They don't expect us to fight, either. The idea has occurred to three of them, and each has dismissed it from his mind." "But why?" the Captain asked, knowing the question was irrelevant, unable to hold it back. "I don't know, sir. It's a science they use, or a religion. I don't understand," the Telepath whimpered. "I don't understand at all." Which must be tough on him, the Captain thought. Completely alii thoughts... "What are they d(g now?" "Waiting for us to talk to than. They tried to talk to us, and they think we must be trying just as hard." "But why? Never mind, it's not important. Can they be killed by heat?" "Yes, sir." "Break contact." The Telepath shook his head, violently. He looked like he'd been in a washing machine. The Captain touched a sensitized surface and bellowed, "Weapons Officer!" "Here." "Use the inductors on the enemy ship." "But, sir! They're so slow! What if the alien attacks?" "Dwi't argue with me, you -- " Snarling, the Captain delivered an impassioned monologue on the virtues of unquestioning obedience. When he switched off, the Alien Technologies Officer was back at the viewer and the Telepath had gone to sleep. T he Captain purred happily, wishing that they were all this easy. When the occupants had been killed by heat he would take die ship. He could tell everything he needed to know about their planet by examining their life support system. He could locate it by tracing the ship's trajectory. Probably they hadn't even taken evasive action! IF If they came from a Kzin-like world it would become a Kzin world. And he, as Conquest Leader, would command one percent of its wealth for the rest of his life! Truly, the future looked rich. No longer would he be called by his profession. He would bear a name . ; . "Incidental information," said the A-T Officer. 'The ship was generating one and twelve sixty-fourths gee before it stopped rotating." "Little heavy," the Captain mused. "Might be too much air, but it should be easy to kzinform it. A-T, we find the strangest life forms. Remember the Chunquen?" "Both sexes were sentient. They fought constantly." "And that funny religion on Altair One. They thought they could travel in time." "Yes sir. When we landed the infantry they were all gone." "They must have all committed suicide with disintegrators. But why? They knew we only wanted slaves. And I'm still trying to figure out where the disintegrators went." "Some beings," said the A-T Officer, "will do anything to keep their beliefs." E leven years beyond Pluto, eight years from her destination, the fourth colony ship We Made It fell between the stars. Before her the stars were green-white and bluewhite, blazing points against nascent black. Behind they were sparse, dying red embers. To the sides the constellations were strangely flattened. The universe was shwter thaa it had been. For a while Jim Davis was very busy. Everyone, including himself, had a throbbing blinding headache. To each patient Doctor Davis handed a tiny pink pill from the dispenser slot of the huge autodoc which covered the back wall of the infirmary. They milled outside the door waiting for the pills to take effect, looking like a full-fledged mob in the narrow corridor; and then someone thought it would be a good idea to go to the lounge, and everyone followed him. It was an unusually silent mob. Nobody felt like talking while the pain was with them. Even the sound of magnetic sandals was lost in the plastic pile rug. Steve saw Jim Davis behind him. "Hey, Doc," he called softly. "How long before the pain stops?" "Mine's going away. You got your pills a little after I did, right?" "Right. Thanks, Doc." They didn't take pain well, these people. They were too unused to it. In single file they walked or floated into the lounge. Low-fMtched conversations started. People took couches, using the sticky plastic strips on their falling jumpers. Others stood or floated near walls. The lounge was big enough for all. Steve wriggled near the cdling, trying to pull on his sandals. "I hope they don't try that ain," he heard Sue say. "It hurt." "Try what?" Someone Steve didn't recognize, half-listening as he was. "Whatever they tried. Telepathy, perhaps." "No. I don't believe in telepathy. Could they have set up ultrasonic vibrations in the walls?" Steve has his sandals on. He left the magnets turned off. "... a cold beer. Do you realize e'll never taste beer again?" Jim Davis' voice. "I miss waterskiiing." Ann Harrison sounded wistful. "The feel of a pusher unit shoving into the small of your back, the water beating against your feet, the sun... Steve pushed himself toward them. 'Taboo subject," he called. "We're on it anyway," Jim boomed cheerfully. 'TJnless you'd rather talk about the alien, which everyone else is doing. Td rather drop it for the moment Wlt# your greatest regrrt at leaving Earth?" Cinly that I didn't stay long enough to really see it." "Oh, of course." Jim suddenly remembered the drinking bulb in his hand. He drank from it, hospitably passed it to Steve. "This waiting makes me restless," said Steve. "What are they likely to try next? ake the ship in Mme code?" Jim smiled. "Maybe they wat try anything next. They may give up and leave." "Oh, I h not!" said Ann. "Would that be so bad?" Steve hid a start. What was Jim thinking? "Of course!" Ann protested. "We've got to find out what they're like! And think of what fiiey can teach us, Jim!" When conversation got cmtroversial it was good manners to change the subject. "Say," said Steve, "I happened to notice the wall was warm when I pushed off. Is that good or bad?" "That's funny. It should be cold, if anything," said Jim. "There's nothing out there but starlight. Except -- " A most peculiar expression flitted across his face. He drew his feet up and touched the magnetic soles with his fingertips. "Eeeee! Jim! Jim!" Steve tried to whirl around and got nowhere. That was Sue. He switched on his shoes, thumped to the floor, and went to help. Sue was surrounded by bewildered people. They split to let Jim Davis through, and he tried to lead her out of the lounge. He looked frightened. Sue was moaning and thrashing, paying no attention to his efforts. Steve pushed through to her. "All the metal is heating up," Davis shouted. "We've got to get her hearing aid out." "Infirmary," Steve shouted. Four of em took Sue down the hall to the infirmary. She was still crying and struggling feebly when diey g( her in, but Jim was there ahead of them with a spray hypo. He used it and she went to sleep. The four watched anxiously as Jim went to work. The autodoc would have taken precious time for diagnosis. Jim operated by hand. He was able to do a fast job, for the tiny instrument was buried just below the skin behind her ear. Still, the scalpel must have burned his fingers befcM'e he was done. Steve could feel the growing warmth against tibe soles of his feet. Did the aliens know what they were doing? EHd it matter? The ship was being attacked. His ship. Steve slipped into the corridor and ran for the control room. Running on magnetic soles, he looked like a torified penguin, but he moved fast. He knew he might be making a terrible mistake; the aliens might be trying desperately to reach the AngeVs Pencil; he would never know. They had to be stopped before everyone was roasted. The shoes burned his feet. He whimpered with the pain, but otherwise ignored it. The air burned in his mouth and throat. Even his teeth were hot. He had to wrap his shirt around his hands to open the control room door. The pain in his feet was unbearable; he tore off his sandals and swam to the control board. He kept his shirt over his hands to work the controls. A twist of a large white knob turned the drive on full, and he slipped into the pilot seat before the gentle light pressure could build up. He turned to the rear view telescope. It was aimed at the Solar system, for the drive could be used for messages at this distance. He set it for short range and began to turn the ship. T he enemy ship glowed in the high infrared. "It will take longer to heat the crew carrying section," reported the Alien Technologies Officer. "They'll have temperature control there." "That's all right. When you think they should all be dead, wake up the Telepath and have him check." The Captain continued to brush his they hadn't been so completely helpless I wouldn't have tried this slow method. I'd have cut the ring free of the motor section first. Maybe I should have done that anyway. Safer." The A-T Officer wanted afl the credit he coukl get. "Sir, tiiey couldn't have any big weapons. Thwe isn't room. With a reaction drive, the motor and the fuel tanks take up most of the available space. The other ship began to turn away from its tormentor. Its drive end glowed red. "They're trying to get away, the Captain said, as the glowing end swung toward them." "Are you sure they can't?" "Yes sir. That light drive won't take them anywhere." The Captain purred thoughtfully. "What would happen if the light hit our ship?" "Just a bright light, I think. The lens is flat, so it must be emitting a very wide beam. They'd need a parabolic reflector to be dangerous. Unless -- " His ears went straight up. "Unless what?" The Captain spoke softly, demandingly. "A laser. But that's all right, sir. They don't have any weapons." The Captain sprang at the control board. "Stupid!" he spat. "They don't know weapons from sthondat blood. Weapons Officer! How could a telepath find out what they don't "Here, sir." "Burn -- " An awful light shone in the control dome. The Captain burst into flame, then blew out as the air left through a glowing split in the dome. Steve was lying on his back. The ship was spinning again, pressing him into what felt like his own bunk. He opened his eyes. Jim Davis crossed the room and stood over him. "You awake?" Steve sat bolt upright, his eyes wide. "Easy." Jim's gray eyes were concerned. Steve blinked up at him, "What happened?" he asked, and discovered how hoarse he was. J im sat down in one of the chairs. "You tell me. We tried to get to the control room when the ship started moving. Why didn't you ring the strap-down? You turned off the drive just as Ann came through the door. Then you fainted." "How about the other ship?" Steve tried to repress the urgency in his voice, and couldn't. "Some of the others are over there now, examining the wreckage." Steve felt his heart stop. 'I guess I was afraid from the start that alien ship was dangerous. I'm more psychist than emdee, and I qualified for history class, so maybe I know more than is good for me about human nature. Too much to think that beings with space travel will automatically be peaceful. I tried to think ro, but they aren't. They've got tilings any self respecting human being woidd be ashamed to have raitmares about. Bomb missiles, faskm bombs, lasers, that induction projector they used on us. And antimissiles. You know what that means? They've got enemies like tiiemselves, Steve. Maybe nearby." "So I killed them." The room seemed to swoop around him, but his voice came out miraculously steady. "You saved the ship." "It was an accident. I was trying to get us away." "No, you weren't." Davis' accusation was as casual as if he were describing the chemical makeup of urea. "That ship was four hundred miles away. You would have had to sight on it with a telescope to hit it. You knew what you were doing, too, because you turned off the drive as soon as you'd burned through the ship." Steve's back muscles would no longer support him. He flopped back to horizontal. "AD right, you know," he told the ceiling. "Do the others?" is too far outside thdr experience. I think Sue's guessed." "Oooo." "If she has, she's taking it well," Dave said briskly. "Better than most of tibem will, when they find out the universe is full of warriors. This is the end of the world, Steve." "What?" 'Tm being theatrical. But it is. Three hundred years of the peaceful Kfe for everyone. TTiey'D call it the Golden Age. No starvation, no war, no physical sickness other than senescence, no permanent mental sickness at all, even by our rigid standards. When someone over fourteen hies to use his fist on someone else IF we say he's sick, and we cure him. And now it's over. Peace isn't a stable condition, not for us. Maybe not for anything that lives." "Can I see the ship from here?" "Yes. It's just behind us." Steve rolled out of bed, went to the window. Someone had steered the ships much closer together. The kzinti diip was a huge red sphere with ugly projections scattered at seeming random over the hull. The beam had sliced it into two unequal halves, sliced it like an ax through an egg. Steve watched, unable to turn aside. as the big half rotated to show its honey-combed interior. "In a little while," said Jim, "the men will be coming back. They'll be frightened. Someone will probably insist that we arm ourselves against the next attack, using weapons from the other ship. I'll have to agree with him. "Maybe they'll think I'm sick myself. Maybe I am. But it's the kind of sickness we'll need." Jim looked desperately unhappy. "We're going to become an armed society. And of course we'll have to warn the Four Reasons for Getting Galaxyt ErilKant eomplefe short nowol by Cerdwainar SmHIb Concluding Fraderik PohKt nowvst novel Willy toy's ovoryntsue grob-bag of die bright side el sdanco nmfst and most exciting book reviews by Algis Budrys These and much more in the February Galaxy -- on sole now! Dear Editor: Its my tnm to cheer. For the past five months Ive been tossing four-bit pieces on the newsstand for If, hoping first that Skylark DuQuesne would show a resurrection of the old E. E. Smith, then that each installment would hold up to the promise of the one before. Today, having finished it and going back to re-read the last few chapters, because I skimmed a bit in utter excitement, I bless you a mighty blessing, and pray that I'll wind up in the same Next World Skylark novel. In short, you have restored my youth in the best way possible -- just enough to enjoy it, without all the bother of actually having to be young again. I kid thee not; I haven't had so much fun reading science fiction since # ! -- Robert A. W. Lowndes.    Dear Editor: Your story Under Two Moons was an extremely superb piece of sf, a splendid style of writing. Your fictional character, Johann Gull, was a very exciting and James Bondish type person. I would like very much to read some more stories centering on him as the main character. -- Mark Lydall, # Soutti #th Street, Corvallis, Oregon. # Thanks -- but no sequels are planned. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Reserve a seat for me on the " is the Most Improved and Best Magazine" bandwagon. With stories by E. E. Smith and Larry Nivn (you were justified in saying that he is a promising writer in your introduction of him). If is on top... even though you're forced to fill in issues with stories by Clement and Heinlein ! For a reader to fully enjoy stories of a series involving one character of idea, he should be made aware of the fact -- especially when the stories are at long andor irregular intervals. For instance, the May # ish continued Saberhagen's Sign of the Wolf, the sixth (five in If) of his fine and ingenious stories about the life-dueling "Berserker" machines. The June and April issues had two MacApp tales of Steve Duke's assignments against the Gree, but the first of the three stories was way back in the August #S# copy. Wily not mention this sort of thing in the introdnction? The June Hue  Cry carried two requests for story locations. Dave Lyon wanted to find a story about a boy who escapes from the domesticate to the wild humans and blasts off in a starship. The only one that I know of had a different title and was a novelette: The Silk amd the Song by Charles L. Fontenay in the July, #, FSF. (No, Virginia, If doesn't have a complete monopoly on stirring stories!) James McLean inquired about a plot which had a man (in tomorrow's nerve-numbing world of endless commercial barrages) con his wife out of enough money to enter Parase" -- a soundproof haven of quiet. 'The closest I could come was a story in which it was the wife who soaked her husband for # in the same way: Year Day by Henry Kuttner, in his collection Ahead of Time, published by Ballantine. A salute to Fred 'Pohl, one of the best at either end of a typewriter -- although I wish that the editor would Include more of the writer's work. -- Bruce MacPhee, # Lenox Avenue, Norwalk, Connecticut #. # Our rule about series stories is: Every story has to stand on its own merits, no that if you've never read anything that went before it in the series you'll still be able to understand it and enjoy it. So we've ne'ver felt it necessary to say ansrthing about the series status of a story in the introduction. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Senator Robert Kennedy has recently said there is a great danger that nuclear weapons will spread beyond control. Would it be possible for you to do an article on this in our magazine? -- H. DeVries, # Fulton Street, New York #, New York. # Nuclear weapons aren't science fiction any more -- unfortunately. The senator is clearly right -- Editor.   v Etear Editor: The trouble with American science-fiction television is undoubtedly caused by the great sdekness that American TV had fallen into, but that's not exactly the root cauact. It seems quite clear that it was ti Grade Z horror movies from the late fifties that have done all the damage. These films are what Outer Limits identified with, especially in its first season. I fear this kind of thing is much too juvenile -- Whence adults don't watch -- hence low ratings. So -- maybe there are people in Hollywood who are aware of contemporary science fiction. Any executive producers among them? The great dearth of name Sf writers connected with films or TV is just as great as it ever was. The greatest sadness comes to me these days whenever I watch sf on the white clown. Whatever happmed to futuristic video sf? TV can do it, I know; remember Tales of Tomorrow, Out There, Playhouse # and the excellent production of Alfred Bester's Fondly Fahrenheit, Murder and the Android. Even the old juves like Tom Corbett and Space Patrol had more science fiction in them than a dozen episodes of Twilight Zone, which had very little futuristic science fiction, but always the Great Big Moral. Memories!... Is that all we ever will have? Or maybe it's impossible to dramatiTC good science Y#I fiction. #I Jackson, # West Bay Circle, Dallas #, Texas.    Dear Editor: When I read Keitib Laumers Embassy, I noticed something you didn't mention in your note on it in the July If. At the end of the book, American diplomat Brion Bayard is recuperating in Stockholm. Laumer's sf novel, Wol-lds of the Imperitan, begins with the hero, an American diplomat named Brion Bayard, being kidnapped from Stockhohn and transported into alternate worlds. In Embassy Bayard baa a Swedish fiancee named Ingred ; she isn't mentioned in Worlds sf the Imperium, although Bayard acquires another Swedish girl friend, Barbro. This Bayard fellow sure gets around! By the way, is it just coincidence that "Better' is "fighter" spelled backwards phonetically? In a sense. Embassy is the Retief stories inside out. Retief is successful by being forthright and courageous. In Embassy, Bayard behaves in the same way and gets the tar knocked out of him for his trouble. I am ufraid that Embassy is the more realistic. -- George W. Price, # nois.  For late-comers. Embassy is Keith Laumer's non-science-fiction novel about diplomacy in a Southeast Asian country that looks sort of like Vietnam to some observers -- though Keith Laumer never says so. As to the questions -- what about it, Keith? Care to elucidate for our readers? -- Editor,    Dear Editor: I just took what opportunity I had to reread a few of the many sf magazines I have managed to collect since #. Besides adding a little perspective to my sf sight, it was downright enjoyable. If has improved to a point that I wouldn't have believed possible five years ago. Since # you have published a couple of stories that will rank with m" All Time Favorites -- Kings Who Die by Poul Anderson being the best of the lot, with your own Fiv ' Hells of Orion not far behind. Galaxy too has come a long ways. Vive le Cordwainer Smith! It's nice to see that Robert #. Heinlein hasn't forgotten the words of wisdom he addressed to r.s at the Seacon back in #. In Famham# Freehold they were no less pertinent for being (if possible) more entertaining. My apologies to E. E. Smith for doubting his ability to write anything but balderdash I can't wait to hear more of the d'Alemberts. The Imperial Stars, The SUkie, Famham's Freehold, Laumer's The Night of the Trolls and now The Hounds of Hell -- hoo, boy! Now what's Judy Merril got to say about magazine sf ? -- Ken Winkes, # South McLeod, Arlington, Washington. # That's about it again, friends. Our "First" for the issue is Steve Buchanan's The Kettle Black -- a good beginning, we'd say, and hope to see more from this #-year-old pre-med student from Little Rock, Arkansas. Next month? Well, for openers there's a complete short novel by John Brunner -- The Long Way to Earth; more Heinlein; a very funny new Retief novelette -- well, see for yourself! -- .The Editor IP The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." owner s name #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! 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Y. # IF  Ediforuil A  some of tfie iapcrs on tlie Orion Project and related matters become declassified and available, we beg'in to get a look at some of the ideas that went into it. Apparently that's all we're ever going to get -- a look. The project was terminated over a year ago, and if there is any prospect of reviving interest in nuclear-powered spaceships in this country, it is certainly well below the visible threshold.  One of the interesting ideas put forth was a nuclear device that would propel ships across space by kicking them from behind. The essential energy is an explosion -- as in a conventional rocket, or for that matter in the cylinders of your car. But the explosion would be nuclear -- fission to start, fusion later on -- and instead of occuring inside a combustion chamber it would, occur outside the ship entirely. The explosion would take place in space, behind the ship. Its force, most of which would be wasted, would nevertheless press against a springmounted, ablation-surfaced buttplate at the stem of the ship; and that thrust would propel the vessel. Literally it would be forced through space by a series of kicks from outside. Wasteful? Most of the energy would dissipate itself into space, true -- but with nuclear reactions there is a great deal of energy for a small amounit of fuel mass; and that is the critical factor. Shocks? No doubt there would be, no matter how elegantly and massively sprung the sihock abrbers. But the designers assure us they would be tolerable. And the advantages would be great. To name just one, it would be possible to leave such a vessel, on the surface of another planet if desired, without automatically committing suicide. Few other ssrstems for utilizing nuclear reactions for thrust can make this claim... But it isnt really important whether this particular system is better than another, when it seems clear that national policy is solidly set against any use of nuclear power for spacecraft. The choice of one system over another is basically a matter of engineering. The decision to throw all nuclear systems down the drain is a matter of politics. Since the proponents of nuclearpropelled spacecraft claim that in five years such vessels could do anything we now do with chemical rockets in space exploration -- and go on to reach any planet of the solar system, in a matter of a few months for a round trip, bearing up to a dozen men and # tons of supplies in the process -- shouldn't we go on with the investigations, at least? It isn't as though there were incalculable amounts of money involved. Orion, at its present stage, could be nurtured on as little as less than a thousandth of the cost of our present space program, for a system which may well make chemical space rockets as obsolete as the square-rigger. So why not go on with it? T here turn out to be several 'Vhy nets". Why Not #I ia that Idiere just isn't a ready-made home for Project Orion in our space program. Each agency has had its duties spelled out for it. None has been charged with the responsibility for applying nuoleair energy to the overall task. Why Not ## is a dassit example of the road that good intentions pave. In the Atomic Test Ban Treaty there is a provision against atomic explosions in outer space. The obvious intention of the signatories was to prevent nuclear war in space, and maybe more immediately to prevent disasters like Project Starfish. Which was our military spacemen's go at firing off a bomb up there to see what would happen. What happened was that the Van Allen belt was bent out of shape three satellites were destroyed and the lights in Public Information Offices burned all night as the mimeographs cranked out statements that it wasn't really important that this unexpected thing had happened, because after all nobody got killed,) But the treaty now prohibits using nuclear explosions even to drive spaceships, though one would asto modify it in that respect if convinced it were worth while. Why Not ##, the deaBiest of all, is pure inertia. To chemical rockets, preferably liquid-fuel ones, we are commited, and with them we will stay. We may yet kick ourselves from here to Mars -- if not with Project Orion, then out of emharrassment because we dropped it! i IF  Serial Earthblood ancestors had conquered the stars but now they were slaves -- these creatures called men! sign scabbed to the dogyellow wall read: "This is the place, Bella," Raff Cornay said. "By God, we're a long way from home." Bella smiled up at him and bit her dyed lips. Having them dyed hadn't really made her look twenty years younger -- or even a year younger. She moved closer to his side, put lean, grayish fingers on his thick, brown arm, looking up the dark ravine of the stairway. "Raff, it's so..." she started and then left it, because when you've been married twenty years all those words aren't necessary. Raff hitched at the harness that crossed his heavy, rounded shoulders, brushed with a finger the comforting bulge of the short-barrelled power pistol. "We'll be all right, Bella." He patted her thin hand, moved ahead of her to the high, narrow steps, worn into hollows pocketing oily puddles. The heat and sounds of the plaza faded as they climbed through layered odors of decay and alien cookery, passed a landing railed with twisted iron, reached a towering, narrow doorway hung with a" dirt-glazed beaded arras that clashed softly as Raff held it aside. There was a leathery rustle, a heavy thump, the clack of clawed feet. An enormously tall, stooped figure in ornately decorated straps and bangles minced forward from yellowish gloom, ruffling moulting plumage. It settled itself on a tall stool, clattering stiff, flightless feathers, blinking translucent eyelids from Raff to Bella. "What do you want?" the creature rasped. "There is no charity here." "The lady'd like to sit down too, maybe," Raff said sharply. "Then sit." Raff looked around. There was no other chair. He looked at the proprietor, eyeing the red, leathery neck, the trnished beak. "I never knew one like you before," he said. "What are you, you don't know how to treat a human lady?" "Human?" The alien clacked its beak contemptuously, staring at Bella's gray Yill skin. "Don't, Raff." Bella put her hand on his arm. "We don't care nothing about him. All wc want's the baby." Through the ill-fitting youth uit he had bought for the trip, she could feel him forcing himself not to care. Maybe he was too old for the legal adoption agency, but he was as good as any man a hundred years younger. "We've got money," Raff said tightly. "We're here on business." The big eyes blink;d at him. "How much money?" "Well -- almost five hundred credits." T he tall creature on the stool closed its eyes, opened them again. "I can offer you something in a sturdy mute, guaranteed I.Q. of #... "No," Raff and Bella said together. "No defective stock," Raff went on. "Your sign down on the square said Genuine Terry Strain." 'Too much intellect in a slave is undesirable. Now, this line of stock..." "You think we'd make a slave of a human child?" Raff snapped. "Can't you see we're Terries -- Terry stock, anyway," he added, as the round eyes flicked over him, then Bella. She stirred and wrapped her cloak closer. The dealer clacked its beak contemptuously, "Five hundred credits! And for this, I should produce perhaps a Conquistador, complete with Sc. D. certificate?" "Just an ordinary boy," Raff said. "Just so he's normal. Earth normal. We don't mind if he's maybe color-blind." The dealer cocked its head, eyed Raff. "What kind of citizenship do you have?" "What? Why, weTc Freeholders, from Granfont." "You have papers?" "Sure. Otherwise wed never... The dealer half turned, raised its voice in a sharp cry. A small slave in trailing rags came in from a side room. "Bring benches for my valued customers -- and brandy. The Fleon, #." It turned back to Raff, its hooded eyes sharp and interested now. "A happy blending of rain, sun, sulphur and fungi." "We don't need the build-up," Raff said. "We didn't come here to socialize." He stopped. It wasn't a thing you could put words to. We came to buy a human child to buy a son. "Ah, but I like people with resources. I confide in them." The dealer was beaming owlishly now. "You wash an heir. I understand. You have come at a fortunate time. I can offer a most exceptional embryo -- a son fit for an emperor!" "We're not emperors," Raff said. "Just plain folks. We want a plain Terry boy." "So." 'The dealer ruffled limp shoulder plumes indifferently, his expression abruptly cold again. "If you want to rear inferior stock, I can sell you something cheap." "Good. How much?" Raff rose, resting his hand on his credit coder. "Wait!" Bella cried. "I want to know what he means. What's the... , the other kind you was talking about?" She pulled Raff back into his chair as the slave returned with a tray bearing a clay pot and bellshap glasses. The dealer placed spidery, plucked-chicken fingers together, waiting while the dave poured and withdrew. He cocked an eye at Bella. "As it happens, I am in a position to offer top price for free-hold citizenships." # I A re you crazy?" Raff started. "How'd wc ever get back?" Bella picked up a glass and said, "Wait, Raff." She made a great thing of sipping the brandy, making it a compliment. "Sell our citizensibips!" Raff snorted. "It takes us for ignorant rubes. Bella." The creature hunched on its stool, fragile feathers raised in a halo around its head, eyes on Bella now. "I happen, at this moment, to have in my tanks," it said with impressive gravity, "a prime-quality fetus intended for the personal service of -- a most high official. A magnificent blastophere, large, vigorous and of a superior intellectual potentiality." "What's wrong with it, this high official didn't take delivery?" Raff asked bluntly. The round eyes blinked. "Alas, the Shah is... er... dead -- together with his heirs and assigns. One of these annoying uprisings of the rabble. By great good luck, an agent of mine -- But no matter. I lost two valuable servants in the acquisition of this prize, which now. frankly, must be transferred to a oitablc artificial placenta, or be lost. I confide this in you, you ee. "This is just sales talk, Bella," Raff said. 'To build up the price." "A rustic's shrewdness is the fnerdhant's joy," the dealer quoted sharply. It raised its head and shrilled for the slave again, chirped instructions. Raff and Bella waited. The slave returned, toiling under a small, glittering, stone-encrusted box. At a sign from the dealer, it handed the casket to Raff. He took it; his hands sagged under the unexpected weight. "This golden incubator, set with diamonds, aiwaited the favored tot. Now heavy-footed bucolics haggle for his destiny. The price is three thousand credits -- or two freehold citizenships." "That's twice the going blackmarket price," Raff said weakly, overwhelmed by the box and what was in it. "You're not bargaining for blackmarket goods now. I'm a ligitimate trader, licensed by the Sodomate." "I'll give you one citizenship," Raff said. "Mine. I can earn another with a few years work." The dealer snapped horny lips together. "I'd decant this jewel among lad into the hive sewers before I'd cut my price a demichit! The. descendant of kings deserves no less." "Raff..." Bella said, appeal in her voice. "How do we know he's telling the truth, Bella?" "I have a license to protect, lander," the tall creature said. "You think I'd risk my reputation for your paltry custom? The Shah paid fifty thousand Galactic credits in rhodium ingots!" "But if you don't sell it quick -- " "I've told you my price. Take it or leave it -- and then get out." "Well..." Raff hesitated. "We'll take it," Bella said. T hey moved through the noise of the plaza. Raff leading the way among hawkers' stalls, Bella clutching a two-inch glass cylinder to her lean chest. Yellow dust swirled, stirred by a fitful desert wind. The second sun was low in a bronzeblack sky. "We shouldn't have spent all that credit," Raff said. "How're we going to get back, Bella?" "We'll find a way," Bella said. "But first, we got to find a Man doctor." Raff halted. "Bella! You ain't coming down sick?" "We got to have the baby implanted right away. Raff." "Bella, you know we can't afford that now. We'll wait 'till we're back on Granfont, like we planned." "We thought we'd have time. Raff. But we don't. He'd never have sold so cheap if time hadn't been short -- awful short." "But we were going to use Ten's stock brooder. Where'd we ever find a mammal brooder here? And we'd have to stay nine months -- " "We won't have to stay, Raff. I'll have the baby implanted -- in me. Raff stared at her. "Bella -- you sure? I mean, could you... could it... r She nodded. "I asked Doctor about it once, a long time ago. He said -- first he took a lot of tests -- and then he said I could." "But Bella, you're... you're not... "He said I could -- even if I'm not human." Her vertical-slitted eyes were bright in her still-piquant face. "I'll be the mother of our son, Raff. He'll be our human boy, born to me." Beside Bella, Raff raised his head suddenly. He moved closer to Bella, put a protective arm around her "What is it, Raff?" "Bella -- somebody's following us." "Following... why?" "I don't know. Give me the boy. And stay close." They turned into a canyon with harsh lights, pushing through the jostling crowd. Alien hands plucked at their sleeves, alien eyes stared, alien voices implored, cursed, begged, threatened. The dust rose, hot and corrosive. "Down here," Raff gasped. In the shelter of a narrow way they clung together, coughing. "We Wouldn't have left the main plaza," Bella said. "Tourists don't come here." "Come on." Raff led the way, thirty feet back, when the twisted path ended between high walls in a cul-de-sac. They turned. Two figures, one squat, one tall, bath wrapped in heavy, dun-colored togas, waited at the alley-mouth. "Stay behind me." Ruff tucked the cylinder in a harness pouch, put his hand inside bis tunic to rest on the pistol butt, started forward; the short creature came to meet him, waddling on thick, bowed legs. Ten feet apart, they halted. Raff looked down into dead eyes like black opals in a face of bleached and pocked wood. "We are stronger than you," the alien grated. "Give us the royal slave and go in peace." R aff brought the gun into view. There was blue stain across his throat where the cheap dye of the youth suit had dissolved in sweat. "Get out of our way." His dry mouth made his voice rasp. There was a moment of silence. Then: "We will pay," the alien said. "How much?" "I'll sell you nothing. Just clear out of my way." Raff licked sweat from his upper lip. The tall alien had moved up behind his dwarf companion. Beyond them a heavy, lizard-bodied Minid with a scaled hide painted in garish colors moved into view, and behind him were others. Raff took a step forward. The gun was almost touching the dusty folds of the other's toga. "Out of my way or I'll shoot sure as Hell!" A stumpy arm whipped out; Raff fired -- a momentary flare of blue; then the gun was flying as the weight of the alien slammed against him, and he reeled back, grappling for a hold on horny hide. He caught a sinewy arm, twisted with all his strength, heard gristle creak. n snap. He hurled the alien from him, leaped past him, swung at the tall one, missed as he leaned aside. The gun lay two yards away. He dived for it -- and a vaat weight slammed against him, driving out his breath in an explosive grunt. He was aware of the roughness of the cobbles against his face, a fiery pain that rolled in waves from his sihoulder. Far away, Bella's voice wailed. Raff rolled over and came to his knees. A wide foot in a ragged sandal smashed at his face. He caught at it, held on, dragged a kicking, fighting body down, hearing himself cry out at the agony in his shoulder; and then he found a grip on yielding flesh and clung, crushing, feeling cartilage crackle under his thumbs. He grunted, hunching his shoulders as talons raked across his face once, twice, then scrabbled and fell away. Then hard hands hauled at him, threw him on his back. He struck out blindly, rolling over to protect the cylinder with his body. He tried to crawl toward the gun, but a boulder, falling from an immense height, had crushed his body and his lungs were charred pits in his chest. His arms and legs moved, though he had forgotten now why he must crawl... died into bottomless darkness, and Raff felt himself fading, fading, winking out... H e lay on his back, hearing their voices. "This one fights like a scalded dire-beast!" "... cartilage like rods of granite!" "Break them..." The blows were remote, like distant thunder. The beating went on for a long tkne. Raff didn't notice when it stopped; he floated in a silence like a sea of molten lead. But voices penetrated the silence. There was the deep rumble of one who demanded, and a thin cry... Bella. Raff moved an arm, .groped over his face, wiped blood from his eyes, feeling broken flesih under his fingers. He blinked, and through a red blur saw Bella, held pinned against a wall by a cloaked figure. Its arm rose and fell, rose and fell again... Raff reached, groping. His hand fell on the power pistol. He tried to sit up, coiled away from agony like a worm on a hook. He dragged the gun around, leveled it on the yellow cloak and fired. The cloak crumpled. Another caught at Bella, whirled her around as a shield. "You will kill your woman," a thin voice said flatly. "Give us what we seek and go your way. We are stronger than you." Raff was watching Bella. She hung in the grip of the alien, small, limp. He saw her hand move -- "Why do you struggle so, foolish one?" the alien grated. "Leave... us... alone," Raff managed. Bella's hand was at her girdle. It fumbled, came away. Light glinted on steel. Raff saw the thin arm grope, finding the vulnerable spot between plates of scale-armor -- then sudden movement -- IF There was a grunt froon the creature who held Bella. He leaned, fell stiffly, the handle of Beta's rat-tail poinard against his side. Behind her, a dark s'hape moved. Raff fired, a near miss. But the alien halted, called out in a strange tongue. Raff blinked gummed eyes, aiming. "Wait, Raff," Bella called. She spoke rapidly, incomprehensibly. The alien answered. Raff held the gun aimed at the voice. Bella was beside him. "Raff, this one's a Yill -- like me. He gave me his parole." "Parole, hell!" Raff croaked. "Raff, if we spare his life, he'll be our slave. It's true, Raff. Its the Yill law. And we need him." The gun fell from Raff's hand. He tried to reach for it, to curse the weakness, but only a thin moan came. There was a babble of alien talk, Bella's voice a thin thread against the rumble of the other. Raff tried aeain.  "... Bella..." "Yes, Raff. It'll be all right now. T'hoy hoy will take us to a place..." "Use the gun," Raff gasped out. "Make srure of the rest of 'em -- all of 'em." "Raff -- if we just go now -- " "No good, Bella. No law in this place. Taking no chances. There'll be no wounded devils tracking us... " Afterwards, there was a confused memory of strong arms that carried him, and pain like a blanket of fire, and the bite of the night wind, suddenly cold; and later, voices, die chnk of keys, and at last a nest of smouldering furs, and Bdla's hands, and her warm breath against his face. "Raff! Poor Raff " He tried to speak, gasped, tried again. "Our boy," he said, It was important to explain it to Bella, so she'd see how it as. "Our boy. Bought with money and bought with blood. He's our boy now, Bella." L eaning heavily on his cane. Raff looked down at his wife and his new born son while the slave T'hoy hoy washed out rags in the tin tub by the door. "This ain't the way I meant it to be," Raff said. "Here in this fallen down shack in the ghetto. Gee, Bella -- " "When you get more able you can paint it pretty and white. And it's on the other side of Tambool from the bazaar. They won't look for him here. Roan." "My son," Raff said, touching one tiny, curled fist. "In fifty years, maybe, he'll be a full grown human man." I R oan was bored watching his mother wash dishes. "No," she said. "I can't take you outside now. After I do the dishes I got to grind the grits and then shell some snails and clean your daddy's brushes so's he can do some spring painting when he gets back from that job in town. And then... stop that!" Bella cried. Roan tried to stick the paper back on the wall but it wouldn't stay. "Daddy fix," he said. His nose was running and he wiped it on the end of the curtain. "Not on the curtain," Bella said. "I just washed them and I didn't make no more soap yet." Roan reached for the salt cup. Salt was a nice thing to taste, a little at a time. Only it all came over on him. "The saltV Bella screeched. "Now that's the end! Raff worked all day one day just to get that salt for you and there it's all over the floor and how I'm going to wash salt?" Roan began to wail again. Everything he did was bad. "All right," Bella said. "All right. I guess maybe you could go out in the back. You stay near the house. And don't get into no trouble, and leave them ohunck flowers alone. That juice don't wash out." Roan ran out into the sunshine with a whoop of joy. He could taste the sun all over him except where his clothes were. O, what lovely chunck flowers! Purpler than purple-fruit, redder than blood, greener than grass. Musn't pick the chunck flowers. He wandered to the other side of the yard where it trailed off into a dust lot beyond the careful picket fence that Daddy was going to paint again soon. Roan liked to pick the flakes of old paint off it, but today something more interesting was there. On the other side of the fence were a bunch of wiry, leathery Mttlc gracyl children, and oh, what fun they were having! "Hello!" Roan called. "Hey! Hi! Come play!" Some of them looked up. "You're not a gracyl three," one of them said. "Here is where the three-year gracyls dig, not there.' "I can help," Roan said. "Help dig." He began to clamber over the fence. It was hard work and he tore a long strip off his shirt on the top of a picket. Then, once over, he was suddenly shy and stood and watched the gracyl threes burrowing into the ground, their sharp claws working quickly. "Me, too!" he cried then, and started in on a gr acyl's burrow. The gracyl kicked him disinterestedly and kept on burrowing, and Roan burst into tears and went to help another, and got kicked again. "Dig your own burrow," one of them finally said, not unkindly. Roan could see he was a little different from the others. One embryonic wing had failed to develop. "You don't got a wing bone," Roan said. "Where you wing bone?" The gracyl stretched out his one good wing into an infant fan. "They grow later," he said. "You don't have any wings." Roan tried to feel beneath his arms but he couldn't find anything. "I'm going to grow my wings later," he said excitedly. "Then Y fly. I'm Roan." IF "I'm Clanth," his new friend said, and then noticed the others had already burrowed ahead of him. "Shut up and dig." Roan began to dig and found out almost immediately it wasn't as easy as it looked. The dirt at the top was loose, and came right out, but underneath the ground got damp and harder. "Mama cutted my fingernails," Roan said bitterly. He knew she shouldn't have cut his fingernails and now look -- he couldn't dig like everybody else. Roan went and found a sharp stick and began to do a little better. He hit hard with it and suddenly a hole opened up all by itself. A nice, big hole and Roan crawled into it and a gracyl came up and punched him and said, "Dig your own burrow, you freak." Roan took his stick and began digging down some more. "You're doing it wrong," the gracyl said, and went on lengthening his burrow. B ut as Roan gouged at the earth, it fell in again, and he was in another burrow and it was quite dark and a little cold, but Roan crawled fivrther along into the burrow and then he ran into something furry that he couldn't see in the dark. "That's funny," Roan said aloud and laughed, because something was tickling the inside of his mind. 'Here it is lovely and cool and dark and no winds blow. Here live we Seez and who are you?" "I'm Roan," Roan said aloud. The See put out a soft claw and felt Roan. You do not feel likt you look in your mind," it said. There are no wings and no dig' ging claws. Tell me again what you are." "I'm Roan," Roan said, and laughed again. And then there was a silence in Roan's mind while the creature felt around in it, and be waited, feeling strange. Theres something amiss with you," the See said. Roan felt him backing off. 'You cant tell me who you are. And some terrible power lurks there in your mind. And such enormous puzzles, and things that are strange... Roan could feel a shudder from the creature's mind and then it was gone and he was alone. Alone in the dark cold, with all those strange things die See said were in his mind. And the ground smelled dead and damp and wormy and there might be Qiarons crawling through the burrows to eat dead things and suppose they thought he was dead? Roan started to back out and found he was scared and all he wanted was Daddy or Mama and his own bed. He sat down and opened his mouth and howled. The tears poured out of his eyes and he felt dirt in his mouth and he screamed with all his body and he was wet, now, too, and that made everything worse. Then he felt Raffs strong hands on him and even though he knew it was Raff he had to go on screaming to show how scared he had been. "Boy," Raff said when he got him out and the screams quieted to sobs. "Boy, I been looking all over for you." Daddy sounded funny. Daddy was scared, too. "And I'm going to do something I never done before. I'm going to give you a good lickin'." And he turned Roan over his knee, but Roan didn't mind the licking. By the time it was over he'd stopp crying altogether and he got up and looked solemnly at his father and Bella, who was hysterical and hollering for Raff to bring Roan in for a bath. Roan wiped his nose on the back of his hand and said, "What am I?" . "You," Raff said, "are a human boy. And some day you'll be a human Man. Pure Terran you are, boy." "But I got funny ears," Roan said, feeling one ear, because suddenly it seemed as though it was mostly his ears, his funny, rounded ears on the side of his head, that might be the cause of all his trouble and misery. # #That's Terran?" Roan asked T'hoy hoy, as the Yill slave carefully washed him in a big wooden tub of hot water, while Bella hovered, checking. "Terran?" T'hoy hoy echoed. "Well, a Terran is from Terra." "Uncle T'hoy hoy know a song about Terra?" Roan asked hopefully. Roan knew from his voice that he did. T'hoy hoy had a special way of pronouncing things he knew stories about. Sort of sing-song, like he said the stories, speaking the ancient, melodic language of the Yill. "Yes. And if you stand still while I wash you and then eat ail yova dinner and go right to bed. I'll be telling you the story." "Oh, yes!" Roan said. "Yes and yes and yes and yes!" And he made a big splash in the water, but then he really was still and T'hoy hoy began his story. "Once upon a time, longer ago than the oldest qreature in the oldest world can remember now, there was a world called Terra." "Is it still there?" "We'll get to that later. A long time ago, and so far away you can't even see its sun in the sky from Tambool, there lived people on the world named Terra, and these people all looked just like you." "Like me!" Roan's eyes grew wide, and he stood even stiller than he needed to. "With funny ears?" "Your ears arent funny," T'hoy hoy said. "Not to a Terry. Now, one day these Terrians built the first spaceships that ever were. A whole new kind of thing that had never been built before. Only Terrans could do that. Then the Terrans went to other worlds in their spaceships and after thousands of years, creatures all over the universe learned that those twinkles in the sky were stars with worlds around them. Because previously each world had thought it was the only one. And each thought it had the only God, whereas there are actually nine Gods. "And Terrans learned to live on IF thase many worlds, but some of them changed, and on many worlds they met other beings, not human, but not too different." Roan sat down in the warm bath water because he was getting goose bumps standing in the cold air. "You not a Terran," he said, touching T'hoy hoy's Yill ear. "No, I'm all Yill, as far as I know. But these people began to build things of their own and do many Terran things. And since these worlds sold things to one another, and visited each other, pretty soon they also began to have wars, because each wanted to be the strongest. So the men of Terra decided to rule the universe and keep the peace." "I got soap in my mouth," Roan said. "Tase's terrible." T'hoy hoy carefully wiped the inside of Roan's mouth with a damp cloth. "Then something very unhappy happened. Strange people came, from far away -- on the other side of the Galaxy -- or maybe even from another Galaxy -- and their weapons were strange but powerful and they challenged Terra for the overlordship of the Universe. And they fought a great war that lasted for a thousand years." "Naughty," Roan said. He could tell from the tone of Uncle T'hoy hoy's voice. "'Very naughty," "Yes, indeed," T'hoy hoy said, "These bad people were called the Niss, and such was their power that even great Terra couldn't defeat them." "Is they kill the Terrans dead?" "No. They put a circle of armed Niss spaceships around the planet Terra. And after that no one could get to Terra and the Terrans couldn't go anywhere. So nobody has been to Terra for these five thousand years." "What's five thousand years?" Roan asked, jumping from Hhe tub into the drying cloth T'hoy hoy held for him. Roair loved to be dried in the lovely, warm cloth and he liked to wear it wrapped around him while T'hoy hoy got his clothes together. "A long, long time. I'm not even sure how long. But the story says five thousand years, so that's what I say." At dinner Roan crammed food into his mouth with both hands and Raff and Bella were too exhausted to make him try to use his spoon. "This how Terrans eat," Roan said, to excuse himself. "Terrans do this." And he filled his mouth so full his cheeks bulged out. "Terrans do not do that," Raff said. "And beginning tomorrow night you'll always cat like a Terran." And T'hoy hoy began to tell Roan how Terrans eat and what Terrans cat, but Roan was asleep before Thoy hoy could get past the hors d'oeuvres. II oan's turn came. The others were already across. Except the gracyl who'd fallen, and was probably dead by now. Everybody's wings had worked, the young, pink membranes fanning out along their torsos, along under their arms -- all but Clanth's. He hadn't even tried. He had looked down into the ravine and then gone home alone. They were aM laughing, on the other side of the ravine. First at themselves, because it was so much fun, and then at Roan, because he was hesitating. It had been easy. They were proud of their wings, amused because that one gracyl had managed his wings badly and had fallen. He hadn't been clever. Now they watched Roan, the only one not over. "Roan is the dumbell of the Sevens," they began to chant, flapping their wings at him. "Roan is stoooo-pid." "I'm going to do it," he called. "Just watch me." But still he hesitated. He didn't have any wings. The idea was to take the rope vine, which was just long enough to swing three-fourths of the way across Endless Ravine, and swing out into the dizzy air, and then sail the rest of the way across on your own power. Roan tested the rope vine, swinging softly on it, looking up to where it hung from high, high in the Purplefruit Tree, and then looking across Endless Ravine, across the impossible distance to where the other Seven Yearers stood. Roan's pink face was drenched with perspiration, his tunic pasted to his child's body. He eking to the swaying rope and thought of how it would be if he just let go and ran home. Ma would say, "What did you do today?" and he'd say, "Nothing," and the day would end, just like any other day. "StoopidI" they called. "Roan is a dumbell." They'd said that before, that way, about other things, and Roah had decided it wasn't going to happen again. No -- he'd show them, show them, show them -- and some day there'd be something he could do that they couldn't do. Roan made himself relax, muscle by muscle, as Ma had taught him to do when he was angry and couldn't go to sleep. All I think about is getting to the other side, he said to himself, and didn't mention the Ravine. He measured the distance with his eyes and gatiged the swing of the rope vine with his whole body. With luck, he'd make it. Roan ran back with the rope vine, as far as it would go. Then he clung, feeling himself part of swing to be far enough, forcing himself to know when the top of the arc came, to let go at just the right moment. The air was in his ears and the mouth of the ravine opened to swallow him, but his eye was on the soft pasture grass of the other side, and he let go at the apogee of the swing. Then, not knowing whether he would land or not, he relaxed himself for the landing, feeling the whistle of the air... IF He struck, rolled freely to lessen the impact of the earth on his soft human body, hardly feeling as his foot caught briefly, then rolled free with him. He laughed up at the group of empty faces. Somewhere inside of him something was pumping him in and out, as if he were a pair of bellows. "Yah, I did it better than any of you," he said, and jumped up to walk off and show it hadn't been anything. "Yah," he said. And fell down and went black. H e awakened slowly, into red and green flashes of pain, and he couldn't see anything but glaring sunlight. The other children had gone. They'd figured he was just dead. If this was what death was, somebody ought to care. Ma and Dad would care. Roan started pulling himself along by his hands and his right knee. His left foot pulsed with pain that flared up his leg and into his groin. He had to peer though it were a fog, to see which way home was. He would have to crawl to the swinging bridge over Endless Ravine, and across it, and then across more countryside to home. Up the hillock and down, his dead, screaming foot dragging uselessly behind him. Roan wanted to die at home. Or not die, if Dad could fix him. But he wasn't going to lie and die where he was, as the gracyls did. His foot bumped over a sharp stone, caught in a prickle bush. The prickle bush uprooted and clung to the dragging foot like a great insect, like the Oharons that cleaned the flesh off gracyl bodies. That gracyl lying at the bottom of Endless Ravine. He'd be thick with them now. Roan stopped to retch. He thought of removing the prickle bush from his foot, but it was too' much to do anything else except crawl toward home. He came to the swinging bridge. Here the crawling was worse, infinitely worse, because his hands slipped on the smooth, worn boards and it was possible that he'd slip off, between the ropes along the sides, and always the bridge swayed nauseatingly. The wood smelled dry and hot and burned his arms and hands and the prickle bush made an arid, insistent rustle, scraping along with the dead foot. He crawled forever through th: hot, bright fog, his whee leg burn ing like a torch. He reach horn and crawled up on the stoop aii called, "Ma, Dad!" and went black again, still cedling through the infinite dark corridors of his unconsciousness... Ma was saying, "Drink this," and he drank it. "Raff!" she called. 'He's awake." Dad was there, his big, broken body looming in the doorway. You knew he was big, but he stood shorter than Ma. "Stop that sniffling, Bella," he said. "I'll do it good." If Roan was gladder of Dad. Ma was so old. Like cuiied leaves. Like things the winds toss up. Raff sat down heavily, arranged himself on the chair, his bent legs awkwardly set back and his twisted torso facing to one side so that his face was over Roan's, his good eye bright and blue. "It's all right." "I'm broken. Dad," Roan said, and realized something suddenly. "Like you." And began to cry. "Oooh!" Ma said, almost whistling it, "Oooh." "Get out of the room, woman," Dad said, looming over to pat Roan's shoulder. "I'll fix you, boy. Shut up, Bella. My hands are good. I don't have anything else left, but I've got that." Raff felt softly Roan's foot. Roan screamed. "The drink'll help some, boy," Dad said. "But this is going to hurt. There's no help for it. Let it hurt." Roan was shaking all over and Ma was sobbing and saying, "Stop, Raff, stop, I can't stand it." And Dad was doing something to his foot and Roan shuddered and shuddered and finally thought. I'm goT he first day that Roan was outside exercising his foot the gracyl sevens came by. Roan was carefully limping. "He's aliveV one of them said, and they all stood still and gaped at him, and came close and then edged back a little. "Go ahead, walk" Dad said to Roan. Roan limped painfully. "Put your weight on it. It doesn't matter how much it hurts. Use it. Show 'em." "He ain't natural," a gracyl child said. "He was dead," another added. "His feathers ain't natural, either. Look at 'em. They're both dead people walking around alive, that's what they are." The children edged back some more, flapping their skinny arms excitedly,, showing the pink membranes of their developing wings. One of them picked a bright Chunckflower pod from the front garden. It missed Roan and made a garish stain on the little house Raff so carefully whitened every spring. Dad started after the gracyl and the child laughed and spread its wings and flew off in little jumps. Raff swore at his twisted bones and useless muscles and tried to catch the children, and, forgetting himself, fell and lay there futilely trying to twist himself over like a turtle. "Roan's old man is broken!" they chanted. "Roan's a freak, and he's broken, too!" They howled with glee and tossed the chunk flower pods as fast as they could pick them, and when the pods began to run out they used gobs of mud. Bella came to the front door and screamed. Roan forgot his foot. He didn't even know it hurt. He ran to the nearest gracyl and wrestled the pod from his hand and smeared the IF juice in his eyes. Then he grabbed the next one and did the same thing. They were all upon him, but they didn't fight together. They didn't have one hold him while another hit; Roan fought them one at a time. He got one gracyl in a scissors grip with his legs and another around the neck with his hands and bit a third that landed on his face. Finally those who hadn't gotten hurt bounded off, in their halfflights, and the rest lay there to see whether they were going to die or not. "That evening before dinner Roan A took off his tunic and looked at himself in the mirror, examining himself carefully all over. He felt his hair and poked at his teeth. He twisted around and examined his back minutely and then moved his arms and poked what he called his wing bones in and out, seeing the sharp edges move beneath the thin skin. He went to dinner, but he didn't look at the food on the table; he looked at Ma and Dad. And he asked, "What am I?" He always asked, but he never understood. "You," said Dad, "are a human being. And don't you forget it." That was what he always said. Roan looked at the steaming plate Ma put before him and didn't want it. "Then that's why I'm stoopid. Why I can't do anything the gracyl s do." Raff and Bella exchanged glances. "That's why you can do everything the gracyls cant do." Raff said. "Or that anybody there is can't do." "You cost two thousand Galactic credits," Bella said proudly. 'T cost that muchr "You were special," Bella said. "Very special." Roan thought of the insignificent white body he'd just examined, and how it got so easily hurt and broken and how he didnT have any wings and how he'd had to learn how to burrow and swim instead of just knowing as the gracyls did, and how he couldn't just let himself die when he was broken but had to cause everybody a lot of trouble... "You got gypped, didn't you?" Roan said, and ran to his room to cry alone. But when he'd finished crying he was hungry and he came out and ate and Raff talked to him about what a great thing it was to be a human -- and the original Terry strain. Roan kept trying to believe all the things Raff told him. Raff was enjoying this talk with his son, and thinking how more and more his son would be a compaion to him, and how it had been wdrth the trouble and the expense of adopting Roan and seeing him through the difficult years of babyhood -- and hadn't the boy grown fast!" "You weren't born to be a slave. The Shah could have those a dime a dozen, or for a common soldier, because those were easy to come by, too. You were something special." "But when will my wings grow?" Roan asked, watching Raff's wide, brown face. Raff shook his head. "You don't need wings, boy. You've got something better. You've got humanness." "Oh, don't try to explain him all that, him only seven years old, even if he is big for his age." Bella said, coming in with another hot dish. "He's old enough to understand he's a Terry. A real Terry, genuine Terrestrial strain," Raff said. "Not mutated, like me." He nodded proudly at the boy. "And not just humanoid, Iflte your ma." He leaned toward Roan. Some day you'll know what that means. Real Terry -- the breed that settled the whole universe -- that built the empire, long ago." "I thought they were all stuck on Terra," Roan said. "That's what T'hoy hoy says." Raff looked confused. "Yes, but... you were a special case." "And if I'm a real Terry, why do we have to live in the ghetto with a bunch of old gracyls, and -- " "Here, don't go worrying your mind about all that," Raff cut in. "You're genuine, all right. I can tell. I've seen pictures. Look at you: pale skin, like skim-ice, and hair the color of wineberries, and " "But how did I get here, and where are the other real Terries and -- " "Raff, I told you it wasn't good for the boy to get talking about all those things." "Some day when you're older," Raff said. "Now just eat your dinner, and take my word for it. You can hold your head up any place in the Galaxy and be proud. You're a Terry. Nobody can take that away from you." T'hoy hoy had come in to put Roan to bed. "I didn't mean to upset the boy." he told Raff, "telling him about the Terran blockade and all the old Terran legends." 'Tell him the legends," Raff said. "I want him to know. Tell him your stories, T'hoy hoy." "Then Roan, tonight I tell you the song of Silver Shane the warrior, who defeated a Niss dreadnaught single-handed by crawling up through the waste ejector and holding a fusion bomb while it exploded." I t was winter. The incontinent rains of Tambool swept across the hills and found out a hole in the ceiling of the Cornay's house and Roan heard it drip, drip and it was the last straw, to try to read with that drip, drip happening and the frowsy house smelling of age and poverty, the house they could have because nobody else wanted it. "It's nasty outside," Bella said. "It's nastier inside," Roan said, and flung his book across the room. "I'm through." "You haven't even started," Raff said. "Sit back down." Roan stood at bay before his parents. Bella set her bone-white lips and began picking irritably at the shedding skin on her thin arm. Raff tried to work up a temper over the IF boy, but he couldn't. He's beautiful, Raff thought. No other word for it. Beautiful. Standing there tall for his ten years and glowing in his anger, with the dark red curls tumbling over his forehead. "Everything," Roan sihouted, "I have to do everything the hard way. I'm tired of it. They don't study, study, study. They know how to read just looking at the graffiti." "They're only gracyls." Raff said. "Charons know how to build mud houses without learning. It's the same thing." "I want to do whatever it is humans know how to do without learning. A two thousand credit Man ought to be able to do something: Raff pounded his right fist into his left hand and wished he could flex the words the way he could flex his hands. "I've tried to make you understand. I don't know how to say it so's you'll see. Humans are superior, but that doesn't mean everything's easy for you. But you can do things no gracyl can do -- " "One thing human's don't do is read," Roan interrupted. "I hate reading. " "But you can read good Bella said. "You read better than me. Better than Raff. And you can read gracyl and Universal and those Terran books we kept for you." "I know he can read good," Raff cut in. "I want him to read better. Good isn't enough." "Human's arent superior," Roan said. They're -- " "That's enough, boy," Raff said sharply. He rocked in his chair. watching Roan sliding his foot in a puddle of rain water on the floor. Bella went to the crockery elf and took down a bowl to put under the leak in the roof. "Suppose you can't read for Studies? You'll get sent away from home with the Junior Apprentices." Raff frowned, watching her mop up the floor with the dish towel. "Of course he can read good enough for Studies. If only he don't trip up on a word we havtjn't come across in the gracyl graffiti yet. Even so, a gracyl that develops seventy per cent literacy goes for Studies. Roan's reached that by now." Bella straightened painfully from the floor and rubbed at her shedding skin with the dish towel. She looked at Roan and bit at her lip, an old gesture that had once even been cute. "He's been working so hard, Raff. Maybe we ought to let up on him some." Roan went to the door. "Here! Where are you going, son?" Roan looked defiantly at Raff. "J'm going to do what humans can do and gracyls can't. And it isn't reading and it's not flying." And he was out of the door into the rain. "Raff, stop him!" "Don't worry. He's human. He knows what to do even if he doesn't know he knows." They both sat by the strip of cloudy plastiflex window and watched the rain on the garbage dump, waiting. They didn't reach IF for each other any more. Only for the boy. T 'he ten yearers were hilarious with the game of swoop ball in the rain when Roan came over the hill in sight of them. It was a simple game. The idea was to keep hold of the ball. They played in a grove of scattered trees, and whoever decided to take the ball would swoop down on whoever had it and take it away and then another would swoop down and take it from the second one, if possible in mid-air. And when you took the ball, you also knocked the gracyl out of the air, which was easy, and if possible into the yard-deep ditch of muddy water that ran along the edge of the little grove. Roan leaped lightly across the muddy ditch. The gracyls were delighted to see him. The gracyl with the ball tossed it to him. Then four of them swooped straight at him and their momentum shoved his back, straight down into the mud of the ditch. "Okay," Roan said, climbing out in the oozy mud. "Okay, I just wanted to be sure I was in the game." One of the trees was a young Purplefruit tree, and Roan found a straight rope-vine and cut off a good length from it, several times longer than he was tall. He tied a slip knot in one end and then coiled the rope and slung it in his belt. At the edge of the grove by the ditch, he picked a quarter-grown sapling and climbed up its straight trunk, hanging by his hands when it began to bend, and edging along the leifii of the young, springy tree until the top of it bent down to the ground. Then carefidly, using hii full strength, he bent the tree all the way back on itself and used a length of the rope to tie the top to the lower part of the thin trunk. He still had plenty of rope left. The gracyls gathered around and jeered. 'That's a silly game," they said. "Who ever played that?" "It's part of swoop ball," Roan said. "You just watch." "Yah, yah," said the gracyl who had the ball at the moment. He was up in a nearby tree and he swooped to a lower branch. Then another gracyl swooped the ball away from him and Roan was twirling his rope as the last gracyl was flying across the grove with the ball. He caught the gracyl around the leg in a beautiful loop and drew him in squawking. Roan calmly took the ball away and threw it to another gracyl to start the game again, and trussed the lassoed gracyl to the sapling and slipped the rope, so the gracyl went sailing away over the ditch. Roan climbed up the sapling and bent it again. It no longer stood straight but there was plenty of spring left in it. He looped his lasso again and caught the next glacyl that came sailing by. "I seem to keep winning," Roan said, trussing the next gracyl to the tree, and slipping the rope again. This one landed right in the ditch, and scrambled out and made for home. #S The gracyls could have played swoop ball higher up in the trees, where Roan's lasso couldn't reach them. Or they could have moved the game. But they didn't. This was where gracyls played swoop ball. Roan took care of two more gracyls. "Give up?' he asked the rest. "Yah, you can't even fly," they said and kept on playing exactly the same way. No one tried to take his rope away. No one tried to keep him from bending the sapling. Pretty soon there were no more gracyls. The last one went sailing over the ditch and hopped off home, whining. All except Clanth, of course, with his one undeveloped wing. He'd learned to sit and watch games. "That was fun," Clanth said. Roan tossed his rope into the muddy ditch and leapt across it and turned back to watch the deserted spot where the swoop ball game had been. He rubbed the mud off his hands down the sides of his trousers. "I won," he said, and grinned, and went home to practice his reading. Ill R oan sat on the stoop of his house with a large book spread in his lap. It was entitled Heroes of Old Terra, and it was packed with shiny tri-D pictures of men and ships and great towering cities. It was a very old book. Some of the pages were missing, but the pictures were still bright. "Hey, c'mon," someone said. Roan's mind swam out from the book. Clanth, who was the nearest thing Roan had to a friend, stood waiting. "Where?" Roan asked. "Where!" Clanth flapped his one, useless wing. His black, leathery gracyl face was alight with excitement, the round amber eyes asparkle. "It's the Spring pre-mating. Out in the grove." Roan's fair cheeks flushed, back to the root of his deep red hair. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "But... good flying." he added, so as not to offend his friend. It might have been an offensive phrase to Clanth, because of his disability, but Roan had found that Clanth preferred for him not to be sensitive about it. "I... Oh, I'm not like the others, either. But Clanth was handsome, gracyl handsome, and well developed for fourteen, and you noticed that before you noticed about his wing. And since he was in Studies, not Labor, it didn't make so much difference about the wing. "C'mon. Roan!" "What would I do there?" Roan asked. "Provided I could get a female up a tree to begin with?" "Well... wings aren't really necessary. At least I hope not. Look at me." And he raised his wingless right arm. "I'd rather not try." Roan pictured the black, screeching little gracyl females. He was glad he didn't want one, because s'he'd IF ktugh at him if he did. Sneer at him. Flap her wings at him. "But gee, here you are fourteen years old," Clanth persisted. "What are you going to doT "ril wait," said Roan. "For what?" Clath asked, and didn't wait for the answer, for a gaggle of fourteens went by and Clanth ran off to join them. Roan watched them go, then sat with the book in his lap, gazing at the clouds and trying to picture a human female. The portraits in his books, the descriptions he'd read; he tried to put all his knowledge together, but it wouldn't add up to a definite picture. Every time lie thought he had it, it slipped away from him. Day wore into evening and still Roan sat, and he thought about human women and then about human men, and the old heroes of his book, who left human women to go out and find new worlds, and died showing there were places besides earth where human men could bring human women. Human women were not like Ma. They were... Roan couldn't find the thought. He didn't know. The gracyls had finished going by. The crowds of young males had gone out, and the crowds of ripening females. The first moon was still white in the sky, but it was brightening and soon the sickle antimoon would come up and the ceremonies would begin. Roan wished Clanth well and hoped his female would not laugh too much at his poor wingless arm. Another group of youths was coming along; there was a low mutter of talk and laughter among them -- and they were not gracyls. iiQupperl" Ma called. And came O to the door. "What are you doing reading in that ligjit?" Roan peered tlirough the gloom to see who was coming. The Vebd. What were they doing out of their ornately decorated quartets in the heart of the town? "Has there been a Veed murder or something?" Roan asked, because Ma always managed to know, without talking to anybody, what was going on in the adult world. "If there has I don't want to know about it and neither do you." said Ma, retreating further behind the front door. "You come on in. You don't want to tempt that trash to stop here." But Roan waited to watch them go by, the young Veed, their scalesuits glittering faintly even in the tarnished twilight. They walked upright, looking almost human, talking their Veed talk. "They're children," Roan said, and went in finally. "About my age." "About fifty years old," Ma said, spooning stewed limpid seeds onto the grits on his plate. "That would be' about half mature, for them." "One of them was an aristocrat. I saw the iridion quadrant on his cheek." What magic lives they must lead. Roan thought, those Veed, with their painted porches and their gardens and their endless games of slots and colored beads, and their lives that stretched on forever. "When will I die?" Roan asked, and Dad dropped his knife with a helping of purplefniit balanced on it. "What made you that?" "Nothing. I just wondered. I mean the Veed take forever to grow up and gracyls die if they get broken badly, but what about me?" "You," Dad said. "Well, Fve always answered you straight. YouIl live a long time yet. Take me. Fm a hundred and eighty, and still got lots of years ahead. You'll live longer yet. You're prime Terry stock, boy." "Even if I don't get broken or something? That's all Fll live? I'll just die?" "There's a story," Raff said, picking up his knife and scraping the dirtied fruit off on the side of his wooden plate, "an old, old story that at the beginning of time the nine Gods called all the species of intelligent beings together and asked them which they preferred, a long life or a glorious one. Only Man chose the glorious life. And he's always been proud of it." There was another sibilance of Veed going by outside and Roan scurried to the dark front window and saw a second group, headed the same way, toward the gracyl mating grove, Ae grove of trees by the ditch, where 'long ago Roan had used his lasso to win a game of swoop ball. The sapling was a tree with spread limbs now, and maybe Clanth would be waiting in it to drop down and catch his female. The moonlight shown yellowishpink now, and the garbage dump outside the window was jeweled with it. It was Veed garbage, Roan thought, and for some reason this made him love the graces and hate the Veed. 'There's going to be trouble tonight," Roan said, and finished his dinner thoughtfully. Raff silently got down his big hammer and nailed a panel on a bar of wood across each plastiflex window. "No," said Roan, when Raff started to nail the door bolt from the inside. He wiped the last of the grits off his knife and stuck it through his rope vine belt. He pulled his tunic up short, so that it draped over his belt and left his legs free for running. Raff looked at him. "Clanth's out there," Roan said. "I'll be back after a while." "Now, boy," Raff started. But Roan was already gone, out into the moonlight and the warm Spring night. #TT(hy did you tell him that   silly story?" Bella asked, sitting in the darkened house and miserable at the thought of the long, dark hours before Roan might come home. "Because," Raff said, T think it's true. " IV H e knew something the Veed didn't know. He knew every s'hack and rock and ditch and garbage pile in the slum. As he came out of the house he sensed another group approaching, and he ducked IF into a tunnel through the heaped garbage. They were speaking Veed, their hushed, hissed tongue, so Roan could not tell all of what they were saying, though they passed so close he could have spit on them. But he did catch "gracyl" ("shryshl") and "Moon" which was the same word in all their languages. If it were only the children out, that meant it was a lark, not a Hunt in retribution for some crime or suspected crime. "Ten halfbreed for one Veed," was their rule. Half-breeds included anybody that wasn't Veed. But this. This was children playing, or practicing. Roan gave the Veed a good head start. He went through the back yard of the funny, old, voiceless couple that kept mud-swine, and around another garbage heap, and through a series of gullies and then crept up the knoll that overlooked the ditch and the grove of trees where the gracyl were sporting. In the grove, where the moonlight could pick them out through the trees, Roan could see the running gracyl, and hear their high, shrill calls. THey had no thought for anything but each other. He even thought he could make out Clanth, flapping grotesquely in the tree that Roan had known as a sapling. And he thought he saw something else, very strange. It looked like a white figure, high in one of the trees, looking on very still. Around the grove, in the ditch, the Veed boys were gathered in full force, a ditch full of glittering Veed, swaying silently in unisonv They must be almost ready for attack. Roan leapt to the top of the knoll and filled his lungs. "Dan- ger!" he screamed, and the gracyl began running about in the grove in confusion and making for the tree tops. The Veed attacked immediately and furiously. No one seemed to have noticed that the scream had not come from within the grove. Roan was through the ditch and at die grove in seconds. The Veed filled the grove now, furious, slashing about with their razor-sharp wrist talons. They had planned to attack the gracyls on the ground. With the gracyls in the branches of the branches of the dark trees, it was going to be harder, and less fun. Roap crept forward and into and up the side of the dry ditch. And got caught by a Veed as he started up the purple fruit tree on the edge of the grove. He'd thought it was a tree that brought him luck. The Veed's raking hands curled around his thighs and he felt the blood spring out into a thin line of pain and he jerked the knife free of his belt and slashed the coarse Veed flesh and felt the hands recoil instantly. In the brief moment this gave him, Roan was scrambling up, swinging on a rope vine to the next tree. Around him gracyls fluttered and squawked. The cry of the wounded Veed had brought his fellows to his side. There were indignant conferences and hisses ot outrage. No gracyl had ever dared sto use a weapon against a Veed. Roan listened, catching a word here and there. They were out without permission, because young Veed were always carefully protected. So they couldn't complain to their elders about the wounded Veed. This meant they had to take their vengeance on the spot. But they couldn't get up into the trees because their bodies were too awkward for climbing and they couldn't throw things up into the trees without hitting each other. Several of the Veed went over to one of the slenderest of the trees, where three gracyls hung in the branches like clumps of moss, and began pushing 'the trunk back and forth. The gracyls screeched, clinging tighter in their panic, and as the tree gained momentum, one of them fefl to the ground, too panicked to try to fly. The Veed were gleeful. It was like smashing the purplefruit off a tree. Several Veed grabbed the gracyl and Roan carefully didn't watA what they did with him. "Fly to the next tree." Roan called to the other two gracyls. "All you have to do is stay calm." But they couldn't. They could only screech; the way gracyls always did when they were frightened. They couldn't change, even to save their Ives. Another gracyl fell. Other Veed were starting on other trees. "Make for the thickest trees," Roan called. "They can't shake the thickest ones." But no gracyl moved. Roan burned with the frustration of it all, the helplessness of the gracyk and the blunt cruelty of the Ve Where was Clanth? Perhaps he was already safe in a broadtrunked tree. "Clanth!" he called, but there was no answer. Perhaps Clanth couldn't hear him, or perhaps he was clinging to a tree,' squawking with terror, like the other . gracyls. But he had always been a little different; surely he would save himself. Then Roan remembered. Clanth couldn't fly. Roan's tree began to sway. H e looked around for a rope vine, to make it to the broader trees toward the center of the grove, but there was no rope vine. He cursed himself for not having cut one and looped it through his belt when he was in the first tree. But it was too late. Well, it would be easy enough for him to hang on. He stood on one branch and held on to the next, watching the gleeful Veed below, their teeth gleaming as they smiled their crocodile smiles, their crests swaying contentedly. Something dropped past Roan and fell into the waiting arms of a Veed. They gasped to see it and so did Roan. It was all white and for a moment Roan thought it must be a human child. That was the moment he leapt. He leapt for the back of the Veed holding the screaming white creature IP and he drove his knife deep into the Veed's right eye, through to the brain, and the Veed died beneath him. Roan pulled the knife out and stood on the dead Veed, the white creature clinging to his neck, and stood to meet the slashing blows of the other Veed. But they backed away from him. They were in awe and fear of him, that he had wounded one Veed and killed another. They had seen many a gracyl die, and that was funny. But they had never seen a Veed die before; they hadn't thought anybody could kill a Veed. They fled to take revenge on more gracyls. It was safer. Roan pulled the white creature from his neck and looked at it. She was a white gracyl. "I'm not dead," she said wonderingly. Gracyl fear didn't last long when the dangfer was over. 'T knew I was going to be broken and I am prepared to die and... now I feel as though I must have died and here I am still alive." "You're a half-breed?" he asked. "Or a mutation?" "I'm an albino," she said. "You saved my life, didn't you? You did that on purpose." Then they were silent a moment, looking at each other in the little moonlight. Caught in the brief bond of savior and saved, they tried to meet minds across the deeps and dimensions that separated their alienesses. "I belong to you now," she said and clung to him, and he held her close and felt her whiteness and kissed her strange, cold mouth and it was all a part of the swaying darkness and the hissing Veed and the dying gracyl and the death that Roan had made. TTie dead Veed and the victory. Roan had lost the threads that bound him to himself and all that was left was the white gracyl woman under his hands in the sickle moonlight. Across the grove, the gracyls were screaming as they fell but Roan was not thinking of them dying, only of the distant music of their voices. "That one was Clanth," she said dreamily. "I was going to be his female and now...  "Clanth!" Roan cried, and came to himself. "Yes. Only Clanth. After all, I just took him because nobody else wanted me and now it doesn't matter." "Doesn't matter!" He yanked her savagely to her feet. "Show me which way the scream came from! Show me where Clanth is." He had not been listening. He had been not caring. He had been as bad as a gracyl. Worse, because they couldn't help it and he could. He saw the Veed beginning to leave the grove as they made their way through the trees. Either they had had all their fun or it was time for them to get back before their parents discovered they were gone. "There he is," said the white gracyl female. "What do you want with him?" One last Veed, seeing Roan, gave Clanth a parting slash and moved sinuously off. Roan knelt by the dying gracyl. "Clanth, I couldn't find you. I couldn't help." But he !hadn't looked. "I'm broken," Clanth said. "But oan, I had a female." "I brought her to you." Roan said. He stood and put his knife at the white female's back until she came over to Clanth. "You can die in her arms." "That was silly," she said when Clanth had died. The gracyl, those that were left, were coming down from the trees now and incredibly starting their mating ceremonies again. Roan walked away through the grove, and out into the white moonlight. He climbed to the top of the tallest garbage heap, and sat, looking down on the ghetto, not listening to the happy gracyl sounds, thinking about what a human woman might be like. V H ere on the high ledge, the wind was sharp with sand particles, buffeting at him angrily like a gracyl when you held him upside down to show him that even if you don't have wings, you weren't something to throw chunckflowers at. Roan got to his feet, holding on tightly to the tiny fingerholds of the wind-worn carving, feeling with his toes for a firm grip. He was high enough now: over the tops of the purplefruit trees, he could see the glare panels strung out across the arena gate, spelling out: Entrepreneur Gom But Presents: Fabulous Feathered Flyersl Superb Scaled Swimmersl Horrific Hairy HurlersI A Stupefying Spectacle of Leaping Lifnforms. Battling Boneless Beasts, Wingless Wizards of Wit, Frightful Fanged FigbtersI See Iron Robert, Strongest Living Creature -- Stellaraire, the Galaxs loVeliest creation! Snarleron, Ugliest in the Universel Roan's hand twitched, wanting to go to his credit coder to check once more; but he restrained it. He knew what it would show. The balance gauge would barely show. Even the five demi-chits he'd earned stacking bread-logs for the Store was gone, spent for dyewood billets for carving. He'd have to be satisfied with what he could see from here -- not that that would be much. He could hear the noisemakers faintly, but the dusty grounds of the arena were mostly obscured by the trees and the high wall, crumbling along its top like all the Old Things, but still high enough to shield the marvels from his view. But on the other side, there, where the great white-boled Nevernever tree grew... It was outside the Ghetto, beyond the Soetti quarters, where Dad had told him never to put a foot -- but the tree spread wide, almost to the rubble-littered top of the IP wall, where h dipped down in a sort of notch. He wouldn't really be going into the Soetti Quarter -- just passing through. Then minutes later, Roan perched in an arched opening, just above the lower gates. He was breathing a little fast from the quick climb down. He checked to be sure no heavy old gracyl mares were stretching their atrophied wings on nearby balconies. Then he jumped, caught at ancient green-scaled tiles, scrambled up to a position astride the steep gable of the first house. From the balconies below, he heard a clatter of food troughs, a few shouts, a lazy pad of feet, the slam of a door. The oldsters' early-evening siesta was under way, and everyone else was at the Extravaganzoo. He rose, ran lightly along the ridge tiles, jumped the gap to the next house. There were carved devils at ten-foot intervals here; he had to drop flat at each one, work his way under, then up again. At the end, he swung down under the eave, dropped to a shed below, then swarmed up the carved gable end of the next house. But then it was easy. A series of wind-god altars, like stepping stones, led to the end of the last house before the high, black-glazed Barrier. He jumped for a drain-ledge, worked his way along to a down-gutter, held on with his fingers and slid quickly to the yellow dust of the path. Roan grinned to himself. All those years of playing with the gracyls had almost taught him how to fly. The burrow under the Barrier was almost choked with rubble and blown pricklebushes; it had been a long time since he and Yopp, a Fustyan eggling, had last exploded it. Maybe he was too big now; he grew so fast -- like a Soetti, Raff had said once, grumbling at having to cobble new shoes so soon after the last ones. But it was all right. Once the last pricklebush was dragged clear. Roan went in head-first, pulling himself along with his hands until he came to the straight-up part. Then he stood, put his back against one wall and his feet against the other and walked up. The idodine-smeH of the Soetti was strong, even before he reached the top and pulled himself out into the hazy, late orange sunlight, filtered dark by the great, sagging, patched nets the Soetti used to hold in their kind of air. Roan lay flat, breathing close to the ground. When he had his lungs full -- even though they burned a little, from the bad Soetti air -- he jumped up, ran for the high fences barely visible in the gloom at the far side of the quarter. He was halfway there when a big Soetti -- almost five feet high -- in greaves, a flared helmet with black eye-shields, and a heavy cloak, popped out of a hut in his path, blocking his way, heavy pincers ready. Roan slid to a stop, watching the violet-freckled claws. They looked too massive for the short, spindly Soetti arms, but Roan knew they could cut through quarterinch chromalloy plate. From burrows all around, bright Soetti eyes winked, ducking back as he looked their way. The warrior advanced a step, snapping his claws like pistol shots, pow! pow! Roan stooped, picked up a fourfoot stick of springy booloo wood. He waved it at the Soetti. It hissed, its arms twitching in instinctive response to the movement. It saw what Roan was trying to do, and backed quickly; but Roan moved in, flicked the stick almost under the Soetti's faceted eyes. The pincers flashed, locked on the wand, as involimtarily as a wink; and Roan jerked the stick hard, throwing the warrior off balance. He dropped the stick and sprang past the creature, sprinting for the board wall, laughing as he ran. T 'he Never-never tree was three yards thick at the base, rising like a column of buttressed white stone set with daggers of crystalline lime. It wasn't hard to climb, as long as he just held on with his knees and elbows and didn't touch the spines. The branch that reached out to the wall wasn't very big, but it would probably hold all right -- even with the weight of a sixteen year old Man on it. Roan started up. The first fifty feet was simple enough, the spines were as big as Roan's wrist, set well apart; he could even use them as footholds. He reached for a higher grip -- and a spine broke under his foot. His hand snapped out to seize a razor-edged spine while his knees gripped the narrowing buttress between them. Pain tore through his hand and snaked down his arm, red pain and blood. Roan hated the dumb way his hand had grabbed, Kke the Soetti's claws, at whatever came near. The Soetti's claws couldn't learn but maybe Roan's hand could, if it hurt enough. And it did hurt enough and now it was slippery as well. Pain was a taste of death in Roan's mouth, like the time he'd broken his foot. But something else Roan could do was ' force himself to forget things. He ignored the hand and went on. The branch that stretched over die wall had patches of peeling bark adhering to it. Roan brushed them away before stepping out on it. He couldn't take a chance on losing his footing; with his slippery hand, he might not be able to hold on if he fell. He wiped his hand again on his tunic, then clenched it to hold in the pain and the blood. The branch moved gently underfoot as he walked out on it, swaying to the gusty wind, and dipping now under his heavier weight. Raff was right; he did grow too fast. He was heavier than an old gracyl broodmaster. The tip of the branch was level with the top of the wall now; and now it dipped lower, the shiny blue leaves at its tip clattering softly against the weathered masonry, t he was close now. The whine and thump of the noise-makers was loud above the chirp and bellow of the crowd beyond the walls, and he could see the blue-white discs of the polyarcs glaring on the dusty midway. IF The last few yards were hard going. The tiny spines were close together here -- and sharp enough to stab through his bos-hide shoes. If the slender bough sank much lower under his weight, he wouldn't be able to reach the wall. But he knew. He knew from the gracyl games how much weight a tree limb could hold. Balancing carefully, Roan started the branch swaying, down, up, in a slow sweep, down, heavily, then shuddering up... On the third upward swing. Roan jumped, caught the edge of the wall, raked at loose rubble, then pulled himself up and lay flat on the dust-powdered surface, still hot from the day's sun. He opened his hand and looked at it. The blood had formed a blackish cake with the dust. That was good; now maybe it would stop running all over things and spoiling his fun. He patted it in the dust some more, then crawled to the edge of the wall and looked over into the glare of the grounds. Qound struck him in the face like O a thrown chunkflower: the massed roar of voices, the shrill clangor of the noise-makers, the rustle of scaled and leathered bodies, the grating of feet -- shod, horned, clawed, hooved. The cries of shills and hucksters... It was dark now. Twenty feet below Roan, the heads of the crowd stretched in a heaving sea of motion, surging around the pooled light of the midways, alive with color and movement. There, a jeweled harness sparkled on tandem-hitched bulldevils; there a great horned body, chained by one leg, pranced in an intricate dance; and beyond, caged dire-beasts paced, double jaws gaping. Roan forgot to breath, watching as a procession of scarlet-robed creatures with golden hides stfode into view from a spotlighted arch, fanned out to form a circle, dropped the red cloaks, and rushed together, cresting up into a living p #amid, then dropping back to split and come togeAer like a wave breaking against a wall, and then... He had to get closer. He raised his head and looked along the broken wall, following its great arc to the far side where it loomed black against the luminous amber twilight. He could jump down easily enough, but not without landing on a bad-tempered gracyl or a wide-jawed Yill. He rose and moved off, stepping carefully among the rubble. It was almost full dark now. Ahead, he made out the heavy sagging line of an anchor cable, its end secured to a massive iron capstan set in the stone coping. He clambered up, followed the cable with his eye as it dipped, then rose up to meet a slender tower. This was almost too easy. The base of the tower was hidden in shadow behind a cluster of polyarcs. No one would notice if he walked across and slipped down there... He stepped out on the taut cable. It was much easier than the branch had been; it was only as #S VI big as his finger, but it was steady. No one looked up from below. He was above the polyarcs, invisible against their glare. He walked out across the crowd, reached to tower, swung down. A hand like an iron clamp locked on his ankle. He looked down, A face like a worn-out shoe blinked up at him. Gill-flaps at either side of the wide head quivered. "Come down, come down," a curious double voice said. "Caught you -- ought -- you good -- ood," Roan held on and pulled; it was like trying to uproot an anvil tree. "Let's go," he said, trying to make his voice sound as though it were used to being obeyed by beings with old-shoe faces and hands like ship-grapples. "You're -- re -- going to see -- ee the boss -- oss." The iron hand -- which was bright green, Roan noticed, and had three fingers -- tugged, just gently, and Roan felt his joints creak. He held on. "Want me -- ant me to pull -- ull your leg -- eg off -- off?" the hollow voice echoed. "All right," Roan said. He lowered himself carefully until his other foot was on a level with his captor's head. Then he swung his free leg back and kicked the creature in the eye. The grip was gone from his ankle, and iie leaped clear, landed in dust, turned to duck away -- And slammed against a wide, armored body that gathered him in with arms like roots of the grizzlywood trees. I t was dark inside the big tent, and hot, and there were odors. Roan stood straight, trying not to think about the way his hands were numb from the grip on his wrists. Beside him, the shoe-faced creature flapped its gills, blinking its swollen eye. "Ow -- ow," it said, over and over. "Ow -- ow." The being behind the bigscarred, black-brown desk blinked large brown eyes at him from points eight inches apart, in a head the size of a washtub, mounted on a body like a hundred gallon bag of water. Immense hands with too many fingers reached for a box, extracted a thick brown cigar, peeled it carefully, thrust it into a gaping mouth that opened unexpectedly just above the brown eyes. "Some kind of , Terry, aren't you?" a bass voice said from somewhere near the floor. Roan swallowed. "Terry stock," he said, trying to sound as though he were proud of it. "Genuine original Terrestrial strain," he added. The big head waggled. "I saw you on the wire. Never saw a Terry walk a wire like that before." The voice seemed to come from under the desk. Roan peered, caught a glimpse of coiled purplish tentacles. He looked up to catch a brown eye upon him; the other was rolled toward the gilled creature. "You shouldn't have hurt Ithc," the deep voice rumbled. "Be quiet, Ithc." The wandering eye turned back to Roan. "Take off your tunic." IF "Why?" "I want to see what kind of wings you've got." "I don't have any wings," Roan said, sounding as though he didn't care. "Terries don't have wings; not real original Terrestrial stock, anyway." "Let's see your hands." "He's holding them." "Let him go, Ithc." The brown eyes looked at Roan's hands as he opened and closed them to get the blood going again. "The feet," the basso voice said. Roan kicked off a shoe and put his foot on the desk. He wiggled his toes, then put his foot back on the floor." "You walked the wire with those feel?" Roan didn't answer. "What were you doing up there?" "I was getting in without a ticket," Roan said, "I almost made it, too." "You like my little show, hey?" "I haven't seen it -- yet." "You know who I am, young Terry?" Roan shook his head. 'I'm Gom Bulj, Entrepreneur Second Class." One of the broad hands waved the cigar. "I'm owner of the Extravaganzoo. Now -- " the heavy body hitched forward in the wide chair -- "I'll tell you something, young Terry. I haven't seen a iot of Terries before, but I've always been a sort of admirer of theirs. Like back in ancient times, the wars and all that. Real spectacles." Gom Bulj thumped his desk. "This desk -- it's made of Terry wood -- woolnoot, I think they call H. Over six diousand years old. Came out of an old Terry liner, a derelict on -- " He cut off. "Never mind that. Another story. What I'm getting at is, how would you like to join my group, young Terry? Become a part of the Great Vorplisch Extravaganzoo; Travel, see the worlds, exhibit ybur unusual skills to appreciative audiences of discerning beings all over the Western Arm?" R oan couldn't help k: he gasped. "Not much pay at first." Gom Bulj said quickly. He paused one eye on Roan. "In fact, no pay -- until you learn the business." Roan took a deep breath. Then he shook his head. Gom Bulj was still looking at him expectantly. "No," he said. "Not until I ask Dad." Suddenly Roan was remembering Ma, waiting, with his dinner ready now, and Raff. Raff would be worried, wondering where he was. "I've got to go now." he said, and wondered why he had such a strange, sinking feeling. Gom Bulj drummed his tentacles under the desk. He sucked on a stony-looking tooth, eyeing Roan thoughtfully. "No ne to trouble old Dad, young Terry. You're big enough to leave the burrows, no doubt. Probably he'll never miss you, new litters coming along -- " "Terries don't have litters. Only one. And Ma only had me." "You'll write," Gom Bulj said. "First planetfall, you'll write, tell  them what a mark you're making. A featured sideshow attraction in the finest 'zoo in this part of the Galaxy." "I'll have to ask Dad's permission first," Roan said firmly. Gom Bulj signaled with a finger. "You'll surprise him; come back some day, dressed in spangles and glare-jewels -- " Ithc's reaching hand grazed Roan's arm. as he ducked, whirled, darted for the tent flap. Something small, with bright red eyes, sprang in front of him; he bowled it over, ran for the tower, darting between the customers milling in the way between the bright colored tents under the polyarcs. He veered around a cage inside which a long-legged creature moaned, jumped stretched tent-ropes, sprinted the last few yards -- A hulking, gilled figure -- a twin to Ithc -- bounded into his path. He spun aside, plunged under an open tent flap, ploughed through massed gracyls who hissed and struck out with knobbed wing bones. A vast gray creature with long white horns growing from its mouth teetered on a tiny stand. It trumpeted nervously and swung a blow with a heavy gray head-tentacle as Roan darted past; then Roan was under the edge of the tent, up and running for the wall. Behind him, an electric voice crackled, deep tones  that rattled in a strange tongue. He saw the gate rising up, light festooned, above the surging pack. To one side, another of the gilled creatures worked its way toward him. knocking the crowd aside with sweeps of its three-pronged hands. Roan threw himself at the mass before him, forcing passage. Another few yards -- "Roan!" an agonized voice roared. By the gate, Raff's massive white-maned head loomed over the crowd. "This way, boy!" "Dad!" Roan lowered his head, threw himself against the slowmoving bodies in his way. The gillthing was close now -- and there was another -- And then he was at the gate, and Raff's hand was stretched out to him above the crutch. The gilled creature thrust itself before Roan, arms spread wide. Roan whirled and saw the other -- and beyond, a third, coming fast. He feinted, dived between the two nearest. The steel grip caught his arm. He looked up into the old-shoe face, swung his doubled fist. Both hands were caught now. He kicked, but only brushed his toes against the horny shins. And then Raff was there, his brown face twisted, his mouth open. Over the mob road. Roan couldn't hear what he was shouting. He saw Raff's thick arms swing up. The crutch came down in a crashing arc on the gilled head, and for an instant the grip loosened, and Roan pulled a hand free. And then a gray-green figure loomed behind Raff, and a threefingered hand struck, and now Raff's face was twisted in a different way, and he was falling, going down, and the white head was flushed IF suddeidy crimson, and he lay in the yellow dust on his face, and Roan felt his throat screaming -- His hand was free, and he struck. He felt something yield, and ripped at it, feeling his jaws open, teeth hungry for the enemy. Ten both hands were free, and he smashed at the old-leather face, seeing it reel back. And then the other was at him with three-taloned hands clutching. Roan seized two long fingers in his two hands and tore at them and felt them break and rip -- And then he was falling, falling, and somewhere voices called, but they were far away, too far, and they faded, and were gone. And he was alone and very small in the dark. G om Bulj's diamond stickpin glittered like his eyes, and he smoked his cigar as though he had tasted and wearied of all other cigars in the Universe. "You're a wild one, Terry," he said, both eyes staring at Roan. "What was the idea of crippling up Ithc? You should see his hand. Terrible!" "I hope he's ruined," Roan said, not crying, not thinking about the ache that made the side of his head feel as big as Gom Bulj's. "I wish I'd been able to kill him. I will kill him the first chance I get." He had to stop talking then, remembering Dad, trying to help, then falling. "There was no need for dramatics. No need at all. If you'd come along quietly, you'd have found life in the Extravaganzoo most rewarding -- and I'd still have the use of Ithc. Did you know you nearly tore his finger off?" "He killed Dad," Roan said. Now there were tears. His face tried to twist and he felt dried blood crack on his skin; but he stood as straight as the Ythcan's grip on his arms would let him, and looked Gom Bulj in one eye, the other being busy now with some papers spread on the desk. "I know everything you're going to say," the entrepreneur said, "so don't bother to say it. Just let me indicate to you that you are a very lucky Terry, Terry. If you weren't a valuable Freak, I'd put you out the nearest lock for the trouble you've caused me. But I'm a business man. You'll start in as a scraperpunk and double in greenface." He jerked his huge head at the threefingered guard. "Take him along to a cubicle on number two menagerie deck with the other Freaks. And see there's a stout lock on the door." Green arms like cargo cranes turned Roan and propelled him into the corridor. The vibration of the engines and the stink of ozone were more noticable here than in the deep-carpeted office of the 'zoo owner. For a moment Roan felt a surge of excitement, remembering that he was aboard a ship, in deep space. He wanted to ask where they were bound, how long the voyage would last, but he wouldn't ask the Ythcan. He might be one of the one's who'd helped to kill Raff. Roan couldn't tell them apart. But there was one he would recognize. R oan sat in the limp hay that was his bed. The metal-walled cell smelled of animals and old air. He was sore all over but his mind was clear, and he listened to the sound that had awakened him with a feeling of suspense that was almost pleasurable. Something was working at the latch to his door. He looked about for a weapon, but there was nothing. Nothing but four stark walls and the used hay. Not even clothes. They had taken his tunic away. He thought, I'll have to fight with my hands and teeth, and he crouched, ready. But the door didn't open. Instead, a metal panel swung back. Suddenly Roan was looking through bars into ochre eyes in an oval face with skin as pale and smooth as a Tay-tay leaf, and a cloud of soft hair the color of early sunshine. She laughed, a sound like night rain, and Roan stared at the soft red mouth, the white teeth, the tip of a pink tongue. "You're..." Roan said, "you're a human woman!" She laughed again, and he saw a delicate purple vein that throbbed faintly in her white throat. "No," she said in a voice like the murmur of evening wind in the crystalline leaves of the Never-never tree. "I'm a mule." Roan came close to the barred window. He looked at her: thej slender neck, the shapes of yielding roundness under the silver clothes, the tiny waist, the long, slim lines of her thighs. "I've seen pictures," Roan said. His voice seemed to catch in his throat. "But I never, ever saw..." "You still haven't. But Pa said I could pass for Pure Strain in a bad light." She put her hands on the bars. They were small and smooth. Roan put out a hand and touched her. "A mule's a cross between two human strains that never should had got mixed up together in the first place." she said carelessly. "Mules are sterile." She looked at him: "You've cut your head. And you've been crying." "Will you -- " Roan started, and swallowed. "Will you take your tunic off?" The girl looked at him, still smiling, and then the pale cheeks suddenly were pink. She laughed, but it was a different laugh. "What did you say?" "Please -- take off your tunic." For a long moment the ochre eyes looked into Roan's blue ones. Then she stepped back from the door, her soft hand slipping from under Roan's for a moment. She did things to the silver garment and it fell away, and she stood for a moment poised and straight, and then she turned slowly, all the way around. Roan's breath came hard through the turmoil in his chest. "I never dreamed anything could be so beautiful," he said. IF T hfi girl drew a quick breath, then bent, snatched up her garment, and was gone. Roan pressed his face to the bars, caught a glimpse of her as she darted past a lumbering, bald humanoid who turned and stared after her, then came clumping up to the cell door. He looked angrily at Roan. "What the hell's wrong with Stel?" he barked. He looked down, clattering keys. "All right, Terry, the vacation's over. I'm Nugg. You work for me. I can use some help, the devil knows." The door clanked open. Roan stepped out, measuring the alien's seven foot height. The creature raised a fist like a stone club, "Don't get ideas, runt. Just do your work and you'll get along. You'll need some shoes, I suppose. And a tunic. Around this place clothes are the only way to tell the Freaks from the animals," "Who was she?" Roan said, "Where did she go?" Nugg glared at him. "Keep your mind off Stel. Stellaraire, to you. She dances. She's got no time for Freaks and scrapers. I know about you; you're a mean one. You watch your step, Terry, and tend to your scraping -- and your greenface. Now comfe on." Roan followed the hulking humanoid along the echoing corridor, noisy with the rumble of ventilators, the clamor of voices, the thump of feet, to a dingy room of shelves heaped with equipment. Nugg hauled a large duffel bag of used clothing from a locker and dumped it out onto the floor. Roan discarded a bra affair that might have fitted a midget Stellaraire, a #dppered tube that seemed to be made of human skin, a hexagonal wired corset, and a gauze veil before he came up with a simple buttoned tunic only a few sizes too large. But he found a marvelous belt made of flexible metal links that fitted itself perfectly to his waist. He also found a pair of heavy hide sandals. Nugg grunted. "Get down to C deck. One of the boys will tell you what to do. And stay out of trouble!" Roan rode down the lift, stepped out into a sour reek of stables, a vast, still room echoing with grunts, squeals and the shuffle and clatter of hooves and the pad of horny feet. Through bars he saw shaggy pelts of black and pink and tan, glistening hides, scaled, knobbed, smooth, the flash of light on horns, tusks, fangs, the curl of sinuous tails, the reach of taloned limbs, and tentacles that groped restlessly. "You -- # son of a bitch -- itch," and echoing voice said. Roan turned. On the other side of a massive grill a seven-foot Ythcan glowered, one three-fingered green hand thrust through the bars, the thick fingers closing futilely an inch from Roan's tunic. The other hand was a round knob of dirty bandages. Roan stepped back and looked around for a weapon. Ithc raised his maimed hand and shook it. "It wa -- as my skilled -- illed hand -- and. You -- oo've ruined it for life -- ife." "Good," Roan said. "I'm going to ruin the other one too." "You -- oo wait there -- ere," Ithc said, moving along the grill. "I'm -- mm coming to kill -- ill you -- oo." There was a long-handled pitchfork against the bulkhead with straw and dung matted in the tines. Roan clanged it against the steel wall and ran to meet Ithc. A wide gate at the end of the grilled wall stood open. The Ythcan halted just beyond it and Roan stepped through, the pitchfork raised. Ithc made a sudden motion and the heavy, motor-driven grill slammed against Roan, knocked him off his feet, pinning him in the opening. The Ythcan planted a horny, three-toed foot against Roan's chest and with his good hand drew a knife from behind him. He clicked a catch. The blade guard dropped off the knife. What was left was a glistening razor that made Roan bite his teeth to look at. "I'll -- #I cut your wrist tendons first -- irst," Ithc said. He leaned close, just out of reach of Roan's hands. His gill flaps rippled, flushed pink. "Then -- en I'll do your eyes -- ss..." He held his bandaged hand before him for balance, weaving the blade to and fro. R oan was watching the dagger. Every time it moved, he had his hands ready to grab. With a sudden, unexpected motion the Ythcan jabbed for his shoulder. Roan struck out -- and the Ythcan jumped back, holding his bandaged hand. A red stain grew on it. Roan's hand tingled from the blow he had struck. "Ow -- ow," Ithc keened. "Ow -- ow." He stepped back, holding the dagger by the point now and lining it up with Roan's left eye. Roan got ready to dodge, then realized that was what he was supposed to do. The Ythcan would throw for some other spot. There was the clank of a door, then the sound of running feet along the corridor. Stellaraire's woman-voice rang. "Ithc, you smelly animal! Get away from that gate. Let him up!" She was standing over Roan, long, thin legs planted astride him, fists on rounded hips. Ithc held up his blodd-stained bandage. "Because of him -- im I lost -- ost my job -- ob. Now I'm just a dirty scraper -- aper." "You'll be worse than that if I tell Gom Bulj about this!" She pushed at the heavy gate. "He hurt me -- ee." Ithc said. "Ow -- ow." But he let the gate come open. Roan rolled over and sat up. He looked at the pitchfork, and the girl followed his look. "Terry, you've got to promise me you won't start it again." "I'm going to kill him." It was hard for Roan to breathe. His ribs hurt. "He would have killed you if I hadn't made him let you up. Now call it square!" Roan looked at her. "Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't. He doesn't move very fast." "Look, you've got to forget what happened. He's too dumb to hate." IF "Hey -- ey," Ithc started. "You shut up," Stellaraire snapped. "Now go on, get out!" Roan watched Ithc move off holding his bad hand in his good one. "All right," he said. "I'll leave him alone -- until the first time he bothers me." He lay back against the cold metal floor, wanting to moan, but not wanting the girl to see how much pain hurt him. "I have to get to work." Stellaraire's hand was cool on his forehead. "You take it easy a minute, honey." "By the nine Gods, you're a real sucker for punishment. You stay where you are, till you get your breath." "He's still walking. So can I." "You don't have to tell me, sugar. You're a tough one. I saw the fight when they caught you. The Ythcans don't have much brains, but they're awfully strong. I saw Ithc's hand before they bandaged it. It's ruined for life. I've never seen anybody fight like that before, and believe me. I've seen a lot of fights in my carny days. What made you so mad?" Roan sat up, remembering, feeling the hot tears ready behind his eyes. "My father," he said. "They killed my old man." "Ah, sweety, that was a lousy thing to do." She was kneeling, cradling his. head in her arms. "Go ahead; it feels better if you cry. But you fixed that Ithc good. He can't be on Security any more; not with that hand. Gom Bulj has already sent him down here as a scraper." "He didn't have to kill Dat" Roan said. "My father was a cripple. He was crippled defending me before I was born." "How much real Terry strain do you have?" Stellaraire asked. "Your mother?" "I'm all Terry." Roan said. "Raff was only my foster father. Ma wasn't really human. They lived all their lives in a garbage dump on account of me and Dad got killed on account of me. And Ithc walks around with nothing . but a bad hand." "My folks were a funny pair," Stellaraire said. "Pa was a water miner on Archo Four. He came of one of the Ganny crosses. Real short, like, and he could go fifteen minutes without taking a breath -- and o' course real course skin. Mother came from Tyree's World. She was dark, with light hair, and real slender. I've got her eyes, but outside of that. I'm a kind of a throwback, I guess." "You're beautiful," Roan said. "I love your eyes. If... if it wasn't for Dad, I'd be glad they kidnapped me." "That's right." Stellaraire smiled. "Just think about the good part." "I've never had a friend before," Roan said. "A real friend." # #ee," said the girl, and her V-Teyes grew round like a child's. "Gee, I could make you a list ten miles long of all the things men have called me since I've been with the 'zoo, but this is the first time it was 'friend.' " Her hands moved gently over his chest IF and arms. "There are the oddest things about you. This fuzz; what's it for?" She touched his cheek. "And your face is prickly." 'That's my beard. I have to shave nearly every day." "I like it. It gives me nice shivers to get scraped with it. But I wonder what kind of adaptation it was supposed to be for. Open your mouth." The girl looked at Roan's teeth. "You have such nice, white teeth -- but so many of them." She counted. "Gosh, thirty-two." She looked thoughtful, moving her tongue inside her mouth. "I only have twenty-six." "The better to eat you with, my dear -- " The grilled door slammed open. A thick, boneless gray arm with a mouth at the end of it reached in, groped over Stellaraire, then curled around her and pulled her to the door. "Stellaraire!" Roan gasped, and jumped to his feet, grappling the arm. But Stellaraire was laughing, perched in the curve of the massive tentacle. Beyond the doorway, Roan saw a vast creature like a mountain of gray rock. The girl put a foot on a great curved tusk, stepped up to the enormous head. "It's just Jumbo. He knows how to work the lift and sometimes he gets loose." Jumbo reached his mouthed arm into a bin and came out with a wad of hay which he stuffed into the other mouth, under his single tentacle. "Stel!" a rasping voice called. "Get that damned bull back down where he belongs." The bald humanoid, Nugg, came stamping up. He looked angrily at Roan. "Stel, this Terry's dangerous. You stay away from him." "You're not talking to your scraping crew now, NuggJ' Stellaraire said sharply. "Don't go giving me orders. And yqu'd better keep an eye on Ithc. He started trouble with the kid here." Nugg looked angrily at Roan. "All right, you. Get to work. I told you -- " "He's not working today. He might have busted ribs; that damned Ythcan goon slammed the door on him. I'm taking him to the vet right now." "Look here, Stel -- " "Tell it to Gom Bulj. Come on, Terry."  Roan looked up at the elephant, then up at Stellaraire. He put out a hand and touched the gray hide, then stepped into the curve of the trunk and was lifted up beside the girl. "This is the strangest-looking creature I ever saw," he said, trying to sound casual. "And you don't have to call me Terry. My name's Roan." He held on as the bull turned ponderously, swayed off along the corridor. "And I don't need to go to any vet." he added. "I'm all right." "Suits me. I'll take you to my room and clean you up. You smell like a scraper already. And I want to take a better look at that cut on your face." R oan's eyes opened wide when he saw Stellaraire's quarters. The single room, three yards by four, had a low ceiling which shed a soft light on three walls decorated with patterns of flowers, and a foiHth which was a panel of greenish grass behind which S'mall vivid fish waved feathery fronds, moving with dreamlike slowness through an eerie miniature landscape. There was a low couch by one wall, a table of polished black wood, a carpet of soft gray into which Roan's feet seemed to sink ankle deep. He drew a breath, wrinkling his nose "It smells -- pretty," he said. "I never smelled a pretty smell before." "It's just perfume, silly. Sit down -- over there on the bed. I'll get some medicine." Roan waited quietly while the girl cleaned the deep scratch on his cheek, painted it with a purple fluid that burned like cold fire and sprayed a bandage in place. "There. I'm as good a vet as Grail any day. I ought to be. I've done enough of it. Now go in there -- " she pointed -- "and take a bath." Roan went to the door and looked in. There was a large basin in the floor, with glittering knobs and spouts around it "I don't see any water." Stellaraire laughed. "You're such a baby -- except when you're mad. Here, just turn this." Water churned into the tub. "Now take off your tunic and get in. You do know how to scrub yourself, I hope." Roan stepped into the warm water. "This is strange," he said. "Taking a bath inside a room. I tiways used to go to the river " "You mean right outside -- with fish and things bumping into you? And mud? How could you ever do it?" "It was nice. And fish don't bump into you. I could swim right out across the water to the other side, and lie on the bank and look up at the sky. But this is nice, too," he added. "Here, I'll do your back. That Nugg, putting you in that dirty pen where they used to keep the mudpig until he died! I'm going to tell Gom Bulj a thing or two. You'll have a room right by mine. You're a valuable Freak, Roan. What's your act?" "Walking a wire. Gom Bulj said Terries aren't supposed to be able to, but I don't have any trouble " S tellaraire shuddered. "I'm afraid of heights. But you said you grew up among those flying things -- Grapples or whatever they are. What's he paying you?" "I don't know. Nothing, I guess, until I learn the business." "Ha! We'll see about that. Why, you're the only real Terry in the show. Don't say anything to Gom Bulj about the extra teeth and he'll never know the difference." "I don't want anything from him. I'm going to get away as soon as I can, and go... go... IF "Yeah, sweety, go where? You'd have to earn passage money back to Tambool -- and believe me, it costs plenty. You'd better stick with the show at least until you've saved some money -- and I'll see that you're paid what you're worh." "I don't want you to get in trouble. "Don't worry about Gom Bulj. He's really a kind of nice old cuss, after you get used to that tough talk. He's so used to these tough Geeks he thinks he has to talk that way to everybody. But he doesn't try it with me." Roan dried on a huge soft towel that smelled as sweet as the room, and dressed in a clean tunic that Stellaraire took from a locker filled with bright clothes. "Come on," she said. "I'll show you around the ship. It used to be a Terran ship, you know It's over five thousand years old." For an hour Roan followed the girl along endless corridors filled with hurrying creatures, sounds, colors, odors, through vast, echoing halls which Stellaraire said had once been ballrooms and dining areas, up wide staircases and down narrow companionways, to a broad, curved room with a wall of inkpoints of colored light. "You mean... that's the sky?" Roan said, and watched the fantastic array of slowly proceeding lights, realizing for the first time what it meant to be in space. So much nothingness there! He looked around the rest of the room. A vast array of instruments and dials and a door "What's all that?" he asked. "And who does the controlling in that room?" "All that's not anybody's business. Nobody goes in that room and nobody knows what all that'a for. It's separate from the guidance system. This was originally . a Terran warship and all that's for fighting. Gom Bulj says it works automatically if we run into another warship. But that isn't likely. The thing to remember is not to touch any buttons or switches and not to go into that little room." Roan went over to look at the instrumentation closely. His people had built this ship and old heroes had flown it, fought in it. "I've got something a lot more interesting than that to show you," Stellaraire said. "Come on. I want to show you Iron Robert." "Who's Iron Robert?" Stellaraire laughed and shuddered at the same time. "Wait and see." T hey rode a lift, passed along a hall which vibrated with the thunder of the idling main drive, went through a high-domed room where several dozen ill-assorted beings sat in a group, puffing and thumping strange implements. Roan winced at the din of squealing flutes, blatting horns, clacking tambourines, whining strings. "What's all this noise for?" he called over the cacophony. "Oh, a band is traditional with a 'zoo. It goes back to Empire #f days. The old Terrans used to always have noise-makers with social events. Some of our instruments even date from then." "It's terrible!" Roan watched a short, many-armed being in yellow silks puffing away at a great bass horn. "Gom Bulj says the Terry noisemakers used some kind of charts, so they all made the same noises together, but our fellows don't know how to read the charts. They just make any old noise." "Let's get out of here!" Nine decks below, in an armorplated hold where heavy cargo had once been stored, Stellaraire took Roan's arm, nodded toward a wide aisle which led back into gloom. "It's along here," she said. "He has the whole last bay." "Why are you whispering?" Roan was looking around at the battered bulkheads. "I didn't know anything could make dents in Terry metal. What happened?" "This is where Iron Robert exercises for his fights. And who's whispering? Come on." She led the way along the unlit passage, stopped before an open bay which was a cave of deeper gloom. "He's in here," she whispered. She was still holding Roan's arm, tighter than before. He went closer, wrinkling his nose at a faint odor of sulphur, peering into the darkness. He could see dim walls, an object like an oversized anvil in the center of the floor, and near one wall an immense lumpy shape that loomed up like an incomplete statue in gray stone. "He's not here," Roan said. "There's nothing here but an old boulder." "Shhh -- " Stellaraire started. The boulder moved in the shadows. It leaned forward, and Roan saw two bright-faceted jewels near the top, that caught the light and threw back a green glint. There was a low rumble that seemed to come from the bottom of a volcano. "Why you wake Iron Robert up?" "Hello, Iron Robert," Stellaraire said in a squeaky voite. "I... I wanted our new Freak to... to meet you... He's a Terry, sort of, and he's going to do a wirewalking act and double in greenface..." Her voice trailed off. Her fingers were digging into Roan's arm now. He wanted to take a step back, but she was half behind him, and he would have to push her out of the way, so he stood his ground and looked into the green eyes, like chips of jade in an ancient idol. "You mean new Freak want to look at old Freak. Go 'head, Terry, take good look. Iron Robert strongest living creature. Fight any being, any time, any place." The giant's voice was a roll of chained thunder. Stellaraire tugged at Roan's arm. "We... uh... didn't mean to bother you, Iron Robert," she said breathlessly. She tugged again, harder. But Roan didn't move. "Don't you have any lights in this place?" The dark shape stirred, rose up in the shadows, nine feet tall, massive as a mountain. IF "Iron Robert like dark. Sit in dark and think of old battles, old days." He took a step and the deck boomed and trembled under Roan's feet. "You come meet Iron Robert? Okay, you shake hand that can tear leg off bull-devil!" He thrust out a vast, blunt-fingered, grayish-brown paw. Roan looked at it. "What's matter, Terry, you 'fraid Iron Robeert tear arm off you?" Roan reached out, put his hand in the stone one before him. It was rough and hard and warm, like rock in the sun, and it made him feel as soft and weak as a jellytoad. Iron Robert flexed his fingers, and Roan felt the grating slide of the interlocking crystals of the incredible hide. "You small, pale being," Iron Robert rumbled. "You really Terran?" Roan tried to stand up straighter, remembering that once Terrans had ruled the Galaxy. "That's right," he said. He looked up at the rough-hewn face above him and swallowed. "Why do they call you Iron Robert instead of Rock Robert?" He hoped his voice sounded bold.  "You look as though you'd last forever'" Roan said. He was thinking suddenly of mountains, and how they weathered and endured, and of his own soft, inadequate flesh and the maybe two hundred years he had left. "Why not?" the giant said, and he took his hand away and turned and went back to the cast-iron slab that was his bed. Roan's eyes were accommodating to the dim light now, and he saw a small plaque over the bunk, a carved design of growing flowers. One of the blossoms, half-blown, leaned, dropped a petal that fell with a gritty crunch, crumbling into dust. "Petals all gone soon," Iron Robert said ."Then last remembrance of home gone. Flower getting old, Iron Robert old, tpo, Terry. Last long time, maybe, but not forever." "Well, 'bye Iron Robert," Stellaraire said, and this time when she tugged at Roan's arm, he went with her. T hat night Stellaraire made Roan a pallet in a small room near her own. She dressed the scratch on his face again, and the other, deeper one on his thigh, adjusted the blanket under' his chin, did something nice to his mouth with hers, then went away and left him alone in the silence and the dark. For a while he thought of the strangeness of it, and suddenly the loneliness was almost choking him, like the bad air in the Soetti Quarter. Then he thought of Stellaraire, and of suddenly having a friend, something he had almost forgotten since Clanth had died so long ago. Then he slept, and his sleep was tortured with vivid, dying images of Dad. Of Dad's sad corpse, crying for blood. IX R oan awoke with a foot digging into his side. "So here you are," Nugg growled down at him. "Let me tell you I got better things to do than look all over the ship for you, Terry! Here!" He dropped a box on the floor by Roan. "Chow's been over for an hour. What do you think this is?" Roan sat up, rubbed his eyes, feeling the cold, early-morning feeling, even here in a ship in space, far from any sun, with a temperature controlled by machines so that it never varied, year in and year out. He picked up the box Nugg had tossed to him, got the lid off. Inside were two lumpy-shelled eggs, a slab of coarse, gray bread, a fruit diat looked like a small purplefruit; there was also a lump of raw, greenish meat and a red, coagulated pudding that almost turned his stomach in spite of the sudden hollow hunger feeling. "Thanks, Nugg -- " Roan started. But Nugg cut him off with a contemptuous snort. "If you don't eat you'll be loo weak to work. Hurry it up." While Roan ate, Nugg went on grumbling about dangerous freaks, malingerers, and interference with discipline by privileged characters. Roan finished, then pulled on his tunic, feeling the pain as he stretched his wounded flank. It hurt more than a deeper wound might have, and it reminded him of Ithc. The feeling of hatred warmed him. It made his heart thump and his body ache. He hated Ithc worse than he loved Stellaraire. Love, he thought loudly. That's what love is. He stood, doing up buttons and thinking of the slender Mule, and how it felt to love a girl who wag human, or almost human. "I'm taking you off scraping. You'll work in Stores. It's only a short hop to Chlora, and there's inventory to take." Roan buckled on his belt. It made him feel strong, the hard embrace of the belt, and he wondered if this were why there were so many stories of magic belts, like the ones Uncle T'hoy hoy used to tell him. "If I have to work all the time," he asked as he followed Nugg out into the corridor, "when do I practice my wire-walking act?" "Practice? What's that?" "I need to get ready for the show. Gom Bulj said -- " "You're supposed to be a Terry who can walk a wire like a vinerat; that's why Gom Bulj took you on. You either can or you can't. Practice! Hah!" Roan followed Nugg through the din of the Freak Quarter, past the bumps, hisses, shouts, the dragging of boxes and the commotion of people doing things in a hurry. He stared at furred and scaled and feathered faces, massive bodies that clumped on short legs, and lean ones that jittered on limbs with too many joints, tiny things that scuttled, and here and there the bald, clumsy-look shape of a Minid or a Chronid, or some other creature with same faint claim to a trace of natural Terran or humanoid blood. He looked around for Stellaraire IF but there were only strangers everywhere, all hurrying and shouting to each other, their faces hot and busy looking. He passed Gom Bidj at the center of a crowd, snapping out orders and smoking two cigars at once. The entrepreneur saw him, waved a nine-fingered hand and called out something Roan couldn't hear. They went down, down, into smellier and less crowded levels. In a vast, noisy storeroom, Nugg pointed out a skinny, scruffy being like an oversized and wingless gracyl. "He's foreman of the shift. Do what he tells you. And stay out of trouble." He walked off and left Roan standing alone. The foreman had been watching from the corner of a moist eye. He stalked over to Roan, looked at him, then gave a shrill cry. The workers who had been crawling over the heaped goods stopped what they were doing and gathered around. Others appeared from aisles. Altogether there were fifteen or twenty of them, no two alike. They all stared at Roan. "What are you?" the foreman whistled. "Never saw one like you before.", "I'm a Terran," Roan said. Somebody hissed. T he foreman clacked his shoulder blades together and ruffled out a fringe along the sides of his neck. "I'm a Rik-rik and I'm the boss here," he whistled. "Now, you're new. Your job will be to carry out the slop jars. And some of the boys don't have sphincters; you'll take care of the diapers. And o' course, some of the gang are messy eaters, regurgs, you know. Tha has to be cleaned And --  "No," Roan said. The circle around hkn nKved m closer. Something plucked at Roan tunic from behind. "I'm boss here, Terry," Rik-ik shrilled. "You'll do what I tell you, right, fellas?" The tug came again, and Roan whirled, grabbed at a snaky tentacle that was wiping something slimy on him. The being who owned the member yanked angrily, but Roan hauled it close, then suddenly shoved it back. It fell. The others made excited noises. Roan faced Rik-rik. "I didn't ask to be here," he said, "but I'm here anyway. I'll work, but I won't carry slop. Your men can clean up their own messes." "You're the newest one," Rik-rik squeaked. "You're supposed to carry the slop! The newest one always does." "Not me," Roan said. "Leave me alone and I'll work as hard as anybody. But don't you think you can pick on me." He looked at the being who was shifting from one of its eight or nine feet to another and snorting softly through its trunk-like tentacle. "And if you ever touch me again. I'll tie a knot in that arm of yours." "Spoilsport," someone grumbled. Rik-rik stared at Roan angrily. "You're a trouble-maker, I can see that. Probably you'll want off three or four hours in a cycle to hibernate; most of you would-be Terries do." "I sleep eight hours a day," Roan said, "in a bed." "And you'll want food every day, too. -- " "Three times a day." "Maybe it'd like to join our sex circle." a bulbous being suggested. "We have a vacancy in -- " "No, thanks," Roan said. "We Terries prefer our own kind for that." "Chauvinist," a gluey voice said. "Hah," someone else commented. "Thinks he's something special I guess." "All right," Rik-rik said sharply, taking charge again. "Back to work, all of you. And as for you -- " he gave Roan a threatening look -- "I'll have my eye on you." "That's all right," Roan said. "As long as you keep your hands off." F or the next eight days Roan worked sixteen hours at a stretch among the stacks of supplies, lifting heavier weights than he had ever lifted before, climbing long, wobbly ladders, counting, tallying, arranging boxes and cans and jars in even rows which the issue clerks promptly disarranged. When he left the storeroom to go to the mess hall or to his room, he looked for Stellaraire along the corridors and in the rooms he passed, but he never saw her. She's forgotten all about me, he thought miserably. She fixed up my cuts like you'd try to help a scratched gracyl who was lying on the ground expecting to die. Now she was busy with other things -- and other people. On the ninth day Nugg came to the warehouse, signaled to Roan. "We're coming into Chlora; planet-fall in a few minutes. Plenty to do: tents to set up, midway to lay out, rigging to stretch..." Roan followed while Nugg talked in his usual grumbling way. "I need to know more about what I'm supposed to do, if I'm going to put on a wire-walking act tomorrow," Roan interrupted. "Tonight," Nugg corrected. "What do you need to know? Does a Flather need someone to tell it how to fly? You're a Terry wirewalker. So walk the wire." There was a sharp change in the ship's gravitation, and Roan caught at a hand rail to keep from falling. His feet were like lead, suddenly, and his breakfast was heavy in his stomach. "What's the matter?" Nugg called. "Never felt high-G before?" "No-no," Roan said. He swallowed hard, twice. "You'll get used to it," Nugg said carelessly. The gravity pulled and the deck trembled and vibrated. There were noises and sudden tiltings underfoot. A roaring whistle started up, went on and on. There was a final, violent shudder, and the ship was abruptly still. The gravity was worse now, if anything. "We're down," Nugg said. He stopped at a door, unlocked it with a big electrokey, motioned Roan into IF a dingy storeroom. He hauled a heavy wooden mallet and a vast bundle of plastic stakes from a shelf, shoved them at Roan. "Go ashore and help stake-out. There'll be Mag to show you what to do. I heard about the trouble between you and Ithc. I got no time for any of that. You do your job and stay out of his way, see? When you finish, go to tent three, cell one-o-three, and get ready for your stunt." He walked off, and Roan shouldered his load and went looking for the debarkation deck. A stream of circus creatures were pushing into an elevator, and carrying a box or piece of equipment. Roan, caught in the press, went into the elevator with them, and along the long central corridor of the ship and down the ramp, out into the strange smell of another world. He started sweating almost immediately. Th heaviness felt worse outside, in the heat, and Roan didn't like not knowing where he was supposed to go and having only a vague idea of what to do. He was walking across a landing field. Not an official, well-groomed one, but more like an abandoned launching pad; just a flat, cracked concrete ramp. Beyond, a garbagedump of a neighborhood crawled up a hillside. It reminded Roan depressingly of home. Beyond the garbage-dump neighborhood reared a blue metal city, flashing harshly in the merciless sunshine. A flat, shining sky loomed overhead. The crowd from the circus ship thinned out everyone hurrying to an appointed task. Miraculously, the incredible, monstrous tents began to go up. Roan walked toward them. A diminutive red-eyed creature scurried up to him, pulling a heavy cart that bumped over the cracks in the concrete. It stopped in front of Roan and jump up nd down, chattering, waving a stick overhead. "Mag! Mag!" Its voice was like fingernails on dry wood. "I guess you're Mag," Roan said. "Where do I go?" Mag started off with the cart again and Roan followed him across the field where the garbage was being cleared off as the tents went up. Mag pointed with his stick to a spot marked with powdered chalk and Roan pounded the first stake in. The hammer felt like a tree trunk and he brought his whole body down with it when he struck. After the first stake, he wanted to throw the mallet down and sit on the ground and catch his breath, but Mag chattered and waved his stick and danced toward the next chalk mark, and Roan followed. There were other stake-drivers at work, big, thick-armed humanoids mostly. They swung their mallets with effortless ease, knocking a stake into the hard soil with two or three easy blows and moving on to the next. Roan struggled with the heavy mallet, raising it and letting it fall. Sometimes he missed the stake completely. After each stake, he promised himself he would rest. But the others never paused, and somehow he didn't want to be the first to stop work. His aim got worse and worse. He broke one stake with a glancing blow, and Mag jumped up and down and his screeching went up into the supersonic. Roan leaned on his mallet and breathed dust, then started in again. For hours in the blinding sun, Roan drove stakes. All around, the magic tents rose, cables arcing to their high peaks, pennants breaking out to flutter against the steely sky. Zoo people came and went carrying props, equipment, tools. Processions of ambling animals with caked dung on their flanks went by, driven by cursing menagerie-keepers; a few curious locals wandered along the now dusty paths between the canvas tops, ogling the show people. Once Roan looked up to see Ithc standing twenty yards away, eyeing him, fingering the butt of a nerve gun strapped to his bird-like hip. His injured hand behind him, the tall alien came closer, his gill-flaps working nervously. "I'll -- #I be watching -- ing tonight when you walk the high wire -- ire," he said. "Maybe -- aybe you'll fall -- all." Roan made his face smile. "Some day I'll catch you alone, without a weapon, Ithc," he said, trying not to breathe hard from the stakepounding. "Then I'll kill you." Ithc showed a gristly ridge where teeth should have been, and walked away with his queer, gliding walk that reminded Roan of the Veed and the smell of alien hate and cruelty. Ithc wants revenge. Roan thought, watching him go. But he doesn't really know what wanting means. X T he stakes were all driven at last, and Mag squeaked and took his cart away, without even looking back. Roan found tent three, and in Room one-o-three he found two Freaks. Two other Freaks, he thought wryly. One was a transparent post, and it wasn't until it moved that Roan saw it was a creature at all. The other was a thing with a hide like a skinned tree, covered with orange polka dots, and with a double-faced head on one shoulder. Its modesty section was apparently approximately at the left knee, for it was carefully covering it with a little patch of black plastiflex. As far as Roan could tell, all it was covering was an orange polka dot exactly like all the others. Roan settled for arranging his tunic into a skirt, pulling it around his belt. A bell rang -- they seemed to ring every few minutes. He followed the first creature out into the dust and heat of the midway. The creature ambled stiffly over to a row of cages, got in one and reached a flipper around to close the big, fake lock, which was supposed to indicate that the Freaks were dangerous. It motioned Roan to the next cage. Roan looked curiously at the IF legend in a long row, all in different scripts. He climbed in and clanged the door shut and sat on a wooden bench. This part of the job was easy enough. It felt good just to sit and rest. Roan sat in his cage for two hours. The ponderous creatures erf Chlora crowded past, pointing and making noises. One Chloran stood in front of Roan's cage for a long time, making sketches and taking notes in a curious script. Once a child prodded him with a long stick. But ty didn't seem to find Roan very spectacular. Most of the Freaks were much larger and more colorful. Roan hardly noticed the Chlorans filing past because he had fallen to musing about himself again. Some day I'll find out, he thought. I have to know whoI really am, who my parents were, where my people are -- my home. Home. Somewhere was home for him, and it wasn't Tambool. I'll take Stellaraire with me and we'll live among our own kind. Surely Stellaraire was near enough human so it wouldn't matter. Another bell rang. Dusk had fallen. Roan noticed. The days were short on Chlora. The freak exhibit was now empty of spectators, a garish and lonely place under the polyarcs glaring far above. Roan got stiffly out of his cage. He'd sat too long and his thigh had stiffened a bit . again. Mag was thef waiting for him, the little red eyes catching a glitter from the arc lights. He chattered and hopped on his spidery legs, clutching his stick, and Roan followed him through the huge, billowing tents. It much cooler now that evening had come. Almost cold when the wind blew, ballooning out the tents and flapping against the poles. Roan walked through the dizzying flickers of colored lits and blasts of noise from the noisemakers and the twirling of weird creatures. At the base of a vast mast as big around as Roan, Gom Bulj appeared from the crowd, his walking tentacles rippling as he hurried over. "Ah, there you are, young Terryl You're on! How've you been getting along? Now, I'm expecting great things of you! See that you perform in a style worthy of the Extravaganzoo!" "What am I supposed to do?" Roan asked. "I don't know anything about being in a 'zoo. Don't I wear a costume?" "Do? Costume?" Gom Bulj popped his huge eyes at Roan and drummed on his wide torso with his thick fingers. "You're the first Freak I've had who wanted freaking lessons. You have expensive ideas, young Terry!" He plucked a cigar from the flowered waistcoat that stretched across his chest, stuck it in his mouth. "Later on, we'll see; for the present, you're on probation. Oh, it's a gamble, taking on new talent! Never know how the public will receive 'em." He drew a tremendous breath that made the cigar burn bright yellaw, letting the ash fall with the insouciance of those who never have to clean up after themselves. "It wasn't my idea for you to kidnap me," Roan said. "Tush, tush! I'm going to forget you said that, young Terry." Gom Bulj flung his red-lined cloak about him and rippled his legs. "Good hick -- and if you should fall, do it nicely, as though it were part of the act." He loosed a vast cloud of smoke from his air-discharge orifice and hurried off. M ag pointed with his stick to the rungs set in the pole. Roan looked i. He couldn't see it, but somewhere up there, in the backwash of the cacophony of circus sounds and colored lights, there was a tightrope. Ithc strolled up, tall and alien, his gills moving in and out, his greenish face shadowed sharply black in the harsh light. He was still wearing the nerve gun. "Go -- oh up -- upp," he said. "All -- #I the way -- ay up -- up." "I'll go up," Roan said. You couldn't do it, but I can. I'm a Terran." A short life and a glorious one, he thought, looking up the swaying poe. Stellaraire would be down here somewhere; maybe she'd be watching him. He'd have to throw off the tiredness now, and forget the stiffness in his leg. He wanted to do his act smoothly, just as though he'd been with a 'zoo all his life. He wanted her to be proud of him. He started up the ladder, smiling to himself, thinking how she'd look at him, what she'd say. He thought about her smooth body and he was eager to be finished and go and find her. He climbed endlessly, heavily. He stopped to rest halfway up. He didn't want to be tired or breathless. It was going to be hard, walking the rope with that gravity pulling at him. And he felt hot and dizzy and his leg ached. Roan looked down. Ithc was there at the bottom of the ladder, a toy Ithc, far off, looking up. If he shot Roan with the nerve gun, everyone would assume Roan had merely fallen. Roan climbed, slowly now. He was safer on the high wire. Ithc's gun couldn't reach him that high up. But he felt eyes on him and looked back again. A bright spotlight was on him and so were a over the loud-speaker, in Chloran, and Roan knew it was announcing him. He heard the word, "Terran." There was noise for him, loud and insistent. He forgot the eyes and the noise and kept climbing. The metal of the ladder was cold, from the wind glowing on it, and slippery. He reached the platform at the top. A few feet above him the top of the tent billowed and flapped. The noise of drums rose to him, commanding him on, and the spotlight felt like a ray of heat. Everything seemed to spin slowly, and he held onto the flimsy rail for support. IF There was nothing to catch him if he fell. Roan put a foot on the wire and inadvertently looked down. The world fell endlessly at his feet. He pulled his foot back and felt his stomach sweating coldly inside, and the fear reaching to hold his body rigid. He held onto the bars around the edge of the platform and shook. He was afraid even to stand there on the little platform. Fm a coward, he thought with horror. But he couldn't do anything about it. All he could do was hold on for dear life and wonder how he was going to get down -- and know that Ithc was waiting below with the nerve gun in case he tried to back down, hoping he'd fail. Roan wanted to die -- but not by falling. Just to die now, without effort. "Roan!" a voice called, faint and clear from the middle of the air. Roan looked. Stellaraire was on the platform at the distant, other end of the tightrope. She was dressed in gold skintights now, from head to toe, and she called, "If you don't come here, Terry, I'm going to come there." Roan held on and looked at her. He remembered how she had shuddered when he told her what his specialty was. But she had climbed up here to the crow's nest to watch him. She had known he might need her. He let go of the rail. Falling wasn't anything. He would just die -- like Dad. But to fail, and have to go on being alive... He went to the taut, black cable, stepped out on it, stood balanced on the wire that swooped down and up again to the blob of light and the golden figure. Then he was laughing aloud, with relief that he wasn't a coward, and with love for his woman, with the deep joy of life. He walked right across the tightrope, stopping in the middle to wave to the invisible faces below. He was master of the crowd now, tuned to the strong noise of the drums. Then he was at the other end and Stellaraire caught his hand and pulled him close, looking up at him, and there were tiny flecks of gold dust in her hair. #Tould you have done it?" he   asked her afterward, when they were back on the saw-dusted ground among the black shadows from the high, hazy polyarcs. "I would have tried," she said. "Now it's time for my dances." She squeezed his hand and slipped away in the crowd. As Roan turned to follow, he saw ithe's yellow eyes watching from the shadow of a ticket booth. XI S tellaraire's act was terrific. It was an erotic dance in five cultures, and the Chloran part must have been crude enough for the crowd to understand, because they roared with enjoyment. But part of the dance was for Roan alone, out of the thousands. He liked k. He Bked her being J# his woman, when everybody else wanted her. "Even I," said a bald, purplish Gloon standing by, "even I can find her attractive. She can dance in such a way as to seem a regal bitch of Gloon. She can be anything you want her to be. Anything you pay her to be. A tramp of rare talent." Roan whirled with his fists clenched, but the Gloon was already moving off, not even noticing Roan. He watched the dance to the end, not enjoying it now. There had been other men for Stellaraire, he knew that. Even creatures not men. But one other thing he knew: she wasn't any tramp. And there weren't going to be any more men except Roan. After the dances he watched to see which way she went, but she disappeared through the crowd along one of the aisles. Half an hour later he was still looking for her, along corridors of smelly canvas and rope, among sagging, faded banners and garish lights and the shouting of hucksters and the blare of noise-makers and the clamor of the crowd that seemed to be everywhere now, flowing among the tents and stalls and poles like a rising flood of dirty water, A grossly fat being in a curly silver wig directed him to Stellaraire's dressing room, after he had asked and been ignored or insulted a dozen times. But Stellaraire wasn't in her pink, tawdry tent-room. Roan stood there undecided, feeling an uneasy sensation washing up inside of him. He wanted her -- the reassurance of her. He recalled that she smelled of young trees. "Where did she go?" he asked Chela, one of the girls who shared the dressing room. "Did you see her?" Chela was a tiny, graceful saurian, faintly humanoid, with long, heavily made-up eyes. She flapped her artificial lashes at Roan and showed her little teeth., "Ithc came and got her. He wanted her for something." She looked demurely at the floor and by some trick of musculature curled her eyelashes back. "There's always me," she added, "Wanted her for what?" "Reely!" "Where did they go? Did you see?" "No. But Ithc lodges in Quadrant C." She was putting purple paint on her lip-scales now, bored with Roan's questions. He made his way through the rings where shows were going on, pushed through the crowds on the other side. Once, he saw Nugg's heavy, ugly face, and heard him call. "Here! Where you think you're going?" But he ignored him, pushed on through the crowd. There was a taste in his mouth that was part fear and part something else, he didn't know what. The uneasy feeling was like a sick weight inside him. A clown was shot from a cannon and the smell of gunpowder spread through the tent. Lights went off and on, and colored spots were a IF kaleidoscope of dancing patterns. Roan went through a slit in the back of the huge tent into cold night air, crossed a path and went into a smaller one where most of the roustabouts quartered. "Where's Stellaraire?" he asked of a wrinkled olive-colored being who was sitting on an upturned keg, nursing a vast clay mug with both hands. The oldster let out a long breath. "Working." he said, and winked. "Where?" "In private." There was a sound -- kind of animal moan -- from the adjoining room. Roan flapped through two Stiff partitions,  came into a dim, cluttered room with a mud-colored rug, beaded hangings on the walls, the reek of a strange incense. Ithc stood across the room, the nerve gun awkwardly in his good hand, his gills working convulsively. Stellaraire stood before him, her golden costume torn off one shoulder. One arm seemed to hang limp. # C Trance -- ance," Ithc com-Lmanded, and aimed the gun at her as though he would shoot. Tlie double voice issuing from his gills seemed to send a shudder through the girl. There were several circus people ranged along the far wall: an under-director whom Roan recognized, a pair of Ythcan laborers, some minor creatures in secondstring clown costume. One with a dope stick blew a cloud of smoke at Stellaraire. "Come on, dance," he urged carelessly. Stellaraire took a step back. "Come -- umm here -- ere." Ithc said. She turned to run, and Ithc's finger tightened on the firing stud of the nerve gun. Stellaraire fell, and Roan heard the animal noises again. Roan's body hurt with hers, but he held himself rigid, hidden in shadows. This wasn't a time for gestures. Whatever he did now had to count. He stepped softly back, whirled, ran across the tent where the old being hicupped into his beer, out into the dark. There were tent stakes stacked there, somewhere. They were pointed at one end and knobbed at the other, and heavy. He groped, stumbling among tent ropes, feeling over damp ground, lumpy refuse, hitting things in the dark. His hand fell on a bundle, and he ripped the twine away, caught up a yard-long, wrist-thick bar of dense plastic. He ran around the tent to the side that opened on the alley, lifted the heavy flap, stepped into the smell of snakes and Ythcan dopesmoke. A small clown in colored rags was just in front of him. Beyond, Ithc stood, tall, lean, slope-shouldered, long-necked. He was holding his bandaged hand close to his side, and the other with the nerve gun was held awkwardly out. That was the first danger. Against the gun Roan would have no chance at all. There was no question of fair play; it was simply necessary to save Stellaraire from what was happening to her, in any way possible. And he would have to do everything right, because he wouldn't have another chance. Pe gripped the club carefully, stepped quickly past the ragged clown, set himself, and brought the club down on ithe's gun-hand. He had decided on the hand instead of the obvious target, the head, because be wasn't sure were Ithe's brains were; hitting him on the head might not bother him much. It was surprising how slowly the gun fell. Ithc was still standing, holding his hand out -- but now the hand was oozing fluid, and the gun was bouncing off the dusty rug and falling onto a pile of dirty clothing, and Ithc was bringing his hand in and starting to turn. Roan brought the club up again -- how heavy it seemed -- and aimed a second blow at the back of Ithe's neck. But Ithc was turning and ducked aside. The blow struck him on the shoulder and the club glanced off and jarred from Roan's hands, and then he was facing the tall, pale-green, mad-eyed Ythcan, seeing the dirty yellow of the gill fringes as the flapped, smelling the penetrating chemical odor of Ithe's blood. "Owww -- owww," Ithc moaned, and brought a foot up in a vicious kick, but Roan leaned aside, caught the longtoed member and threw all his strength ipto twisting it back and around, driving with his feet to topple Ithc. They fell together. Roan on top. Ithe's sinewy body buckled under him, and his knobbed knees battered against Roan's chest. But he held on, twisting the foot, feeling the cartilage crackle and break, remembering Dad, and the sounds Stellaraire had made, and he twisted harder, harder... Ithc roared a vibrating double rear, fighting now to escape, but Roan reached after him, caught the other foot, tore at it, twisting, tearing, while the now helpless creature fought to crawl away. Then Roan was on Ithe's back, his arm locked around the other's throat, crushing until Ithc collapsed, fell on his face, his legs twitching. R oan got to his feet. He was only dimly aware of the faces watching, of Stellaraire still moving on the floor beyond her fallen tormentor, of the stink of alien blood and burning dope. He looked around for the club, saw it tangled among unwashed garments on an unkempt heap of bedding by the sagging canvas wall. He caught it up, turned back to Ithc. The alien lay half on his side, his broken feet grotesquely twisted, his gills gaping convulsively. A deep, reedy vibration of agony came from him. Roan brought the club up, and paused, not hesitating, but picking the best spot -- the spot most likely to kill. The yellow eyes opened. "Hurry -- urry," Ithc sr.id. Roan brought the club down with all his strength, noting with satisfaction that the Ythcan's limbs all jumped at once. He hit him twice more, just to be sure Ithc would never bother him again. The last blow was like pounding a side of meat hanging in a kitchen. He tossed the club aside. IF picked up a dirty blanket and wiped the spattered yellowish blood from his face and hands. He looked around at the circus people who watched. Two of the small clowns were edging forward, looking Ithc over, a little saliva visible at the corners of their beak-like mouths. "Nobody helped Stellaraire," he said. "Nobody helped me. Anybody on Ithc's side can fight me, if they want to." He glanced toward the club, flexing his hands. He was breathing hard, but he felt good, very good, and he was almost hoping the other Ythcan would step forward, because it had been a wonas though he could beat anybody, or all of them together. But no one moved toward him. The one with the dope-stick ground the smoke out on a horny palm, tucked it in a pocket of its black polyon blouse. "It's your fight. Gom Bulj won't like it; Ithc was a valuable piece of livestock. But who'll tell him? He may not even notice. Who cares?" "We'll take care of the remains'" the small clowns said, clustering around the body. #'The others were leaving, wandering off now because the fun was over. Roan went to Stellaraire and lifted her in his arms. He was surprised at how light she was, how fragile for all her sumptuous curving flesh; and how sharp was his need to take care of her. She smiled up at him. "He... must have gone... crazy." "He won't bother you any more, Stellaraire." Out in the cold night, the blaze of stars, the rise and fall of the mob-noise, Stellaraire's arm went around his neck. Her face was against his. "Take me... to my tent..." she breathed against his throat, and he turned and walked along the shadowy way, aware only of the perfume and the poetry and the wonder of the girl. mmfsmmmmmmmmmmwmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm  On the Riverworld every human being was born again and many died again... over and over! Great complete short science-fiction novel by Philip Jose Farmer Read it in March Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! M  I A I I I IF  Short Story Castles In Space In those days space was adventurous and free -- and brave men battled to the death for a fair lady's favor! I n those days no lady was allowed any say about how things were run. The only reason Kafri was in the Throne and Control Room of Star Ship Sazarac was that she had been sent for to fetch decanters and chesspieces. But as she had not been told to go, she lingered. Two kings, Karl of Avion and Kafri's father, Gurton Redbeard of Sazarac, faced each other across a carved and gilded table. Beyond them the viewing wail was atwinkle with multicolor lights, analytical pips of the asteroid swarm they had both come to mine for fuel ores and other supplies. There, also, rode the great globular hull of Ship Avion, ringed with a glittering haze of scoutships. Either ship alone might have done its mining and gone its way. But their coming together was bad luck. Their knights would surely be making trouble for one another unless the kings could work out a protocol. But they seemed iiitent only on the chessboard. Gurton Redbeard slid a bishop to one side. Karl rubbed his chin with the edge of his forefinger. Gurton blew a smoke ring. Karl reached a hand, hesitated, shook his head and sat back. Kafri leaned forward, holding her breath. She had often sat to this same jewelled game-board against her father, and Karl was developing an attack she liked herself. Should Karl move aright, he'd surely win. Gurton Redbeard glanced up sidewise. "My daughter would not only fill our pipes and goblets. Sir Guest," he remarked. "She would also advise you how to move." Kafri stiffened. Her father's tone made her suddenly nervous. Of course she had no proper -- King Karl turned toward her, laughing. "Would you advise me for good or ill. Milady?" Oh, she ought to be siding with the Home Ship! But in a pinch between honesty and manners, Kaiii knew that e only safe course around Redbeard was honesty, and as little as possible of that. "It -- it seems to me. Sir Guest, in b-best of my opinions, that if you should move y-yon rook to queen file -- " She caught her breath to end the stammering, cast up her eyes and clasped her hands. "Ho!" King Karl tilted his head this way and that way, twirling a blond curl of mustache. "Ha. Hmmmm. Phm. Milady, you are as wise as you are beautiful, which is to say, excessively so. I'll do it!" And he did. Kafri clapped both hands to her cheeks. Great Space! With that rook file open, she saw -- now she saw -- oh, her wily old father had hung his guest over a barrel. By the twitching of his flaming whiskers, he let her see that he had plann it all accordingly. But he sat back, shaking his head slowly. "The two of ye are too many for one old man. I concede!" King Karl blinked. Thereupon Kaifri realized that he, too, had seen it beforehand. Were they, then, both making sport of her? F eeling much like a kitten between lion and tiger, Kafri dropped her head in confusion, then flushed a curtsy to take up the head motion; then backed toward the door to account for the curtsy. Both men burst out laughing. Kafri swirled about, routed and fleeing. Gurton Redbeard spoke softly, "Wait." Kafri knew that tone. She froze, then turned back carefully, not too fast. Gurton's next words, however, were entirely benevolent. "It pleases me, daughter, that you favor our guest, for we have been talking of a marriage between dur two ships, and King Karl has a son as like him as mirror and mirror. If you will well to wed, then there will be a festal peace between our realms, and kinsman's alliance. A fine thing that, eh?" Wed? "Perchance it is a new thought, Milady," King Karl spoke more gently, as befitted a guest, a diplomat, and a negotiator. "Yet we hope that you will think well of it. We are a great Ship and an honorable clan. How say you, then? Will you wed my son and join our Clans?" Now Kafri was feeling wronged in her dignity, having been laughed at; if deservly, so much the worse. Besides, it hurt her affections to be thus parcelled off and sent from home. And furthermore, it hurt her sense of honesty to be consulted about it, for if Gurton Redbeard decreed that she should do thus and so, what else could she do? She was therefore wroth with both of them, but mostly with her father, and this put her fully into a mood to leave home. "Aye," she replied, firmly, "that will I, then." So curtsying again, she swished her hoopskirts out the door, and this time they let her go. It vas a well-educated retreat, butwithout victory. Her nose hurt. Her eyes stung. She feared a fit of tears and needed to get into Ladies' Country with it. ' But as she was halfway out the throne Room door, she saw two ladies far down the corridor: her blonde half-sister and the newest of their mothers. They had a basket of tapestry patterns between them and were holding them against the corridor wall and spreading them along the floor to make choices. Kafri durst not weep before her father; yet as she knew those two, she cared not to do it before them either; so she faltered for a moment in the doorway and half-turned the other way. Meanwhile, of course, the door had been closing itself, and because of her hesitation, Kafri failed to get the last bit of ruffle clear; it caught in the jamb and stopped her against the clced door. There she was tethered, with the door still open a hairsbreadth because of the pinch of stuff; and she became aware that she was hearing matters she should not. " -- those mines," said Redbeard. "We can map out shares -- " "Softly, neighbor, softly," Karl chuckled. "First the wedding, for there have already been affrays. Until we set a new note we can plan nothing further." "Oh surely. And look you, I'll be gladly rid of this lass, for such a beauty is a problem and a worry continual. Every High Day more trouble, for as my officers get glimpse of her, up starts the poetry and the Challenges, with half my officers ready to kill the other half, instead of, ha, hum, ah -- and let me be frank with you, neighbor, you had best take thought about the same trouble in your own Ship." "Pho, my lad will soon have her bloat enow, and so an end to poetry." T here was a familiar scratching sound; Redbeard was ruffing either his chin or his head hair. "Well enow, then. But that is then, whereas now is now, and if my knights learn of my daughter being wed off-ship, why they are a mettlesome lot and may take out some wrath, you see." There was a pause, Kafri tried, very cautiously, to pull her petticoat free. But the silken threads were strong and the fold of lace secure. "You really think it might cause trouble to -- 'hm. Ha.Phm." "Verily, if our knights and scouts were to see our daughter given off Ship, too many of them would be ill to control. And then you knights and scouts -- well, I'd liefer fare forth to dig tool diamonds in bare sark." Chairs creaked. "Hm. Aye. Well, then, some private arrangement." "Just what I had in mind. Now supposing you return to your Ship, declaring that you will send young Karl back with papers and the like. Who will think anything of a springaid upon an errand? Then we can -- " "That, nay, neighbor. Young Karl stays vhere he is." "Very well, you can pass for him yourself. Another uniform, another IF man, as the saying goes, and it is well known that you look full alike. Either may pass for other, and the main thing is that no great matter wiH seem to be afoot. And, as General Loki pilots your son's barge, who will pick a quarrel without a great need for one? Eh? Safe enough so far?" "Are you saying that we should spirit the lass away with but two men in a barge?" "Aye, why not? Who'd think to find a lady in such a place until we say she's gone?" "Nay, nay! There'll be discredit to my son and more ill-will than good come of it." "Tut, we can shift past that also. Stay you here, seeming open and innocent, and let Loki carry both lass and blame; is he not a clanless man?" "That might -- but still." "Oh, keep you General too. The ceremony will clear all. And when it appears that all is better than expect, then all will rejoice and what's more, get to work." Gurton laughed uproariously, and after a moment, Karl joined in. Under cover of this noise, KaM tugged frantically, tore her skirt free and ran for her life, brushing the pattern  basket with her billowing skirts and scattering the patterns, to cries of indignation from both the other ladies. These she never stayed to answer. "Were she not her father's pet," muttered Tenth Mother, snatching for pattern papers that drifted, curling, in the afterdraft, "I'd pet her handsomely!" B ut Kafri escaped to her room, drew her skirts well in and closed the door tight, letting tears well up and flow as she peeled off her torn dress and everything else; leaving petticoats in ruffled rings across the floor, and dove into her coffin. There, with the bed foam snug around her, s'he wept her utmost. It was all the bosom she had to bawl on, for her own and First Mother was long dead, and Redbeard had never taken another official wife, but only these fancy dancy concubines, long on court etiquette, full of graces and wiles, but short on kindness. Yet if she must hide her feelings, she had them and strongly too. Weeping eased her but little; so she turned the coffin to cleanse and massage, and still she could not rest. Flinging the coffin lid open again, she jumped out and kicked her clothes into a heap. Then she tossed everything into the launder, including the tom one. Best not have that seen again for awhile. She dressed hurriedly. What had they said -- tonight? She might be sent for at any time. A High Day dress, she'd best. But feeling more and more uneasiness, a sense of haste, she got out the first she found, a silvertissue, new, with petticoats looped to show pink underskirts like petals. She studied the effect in the mirrored floor and walls of her room. Neat enough from every angle of view. But beauty? Were the two kings merely dickering, or was she? Straight black hair that other ladies sniffed over; yet it tramed her face well, didn't it? She had large eyes of a good strong blue, and other features that she was used to and had been taking for granted. What would the strangers of Ship Avion think of her? Could she compete with concubines -- for well she knew that all royalty had concubines -- that was the hard question. She could only hope so and do her best. Strangeness opened out on all sides until the very mirror-images of herself seemed strange, a host of strange ladies in rose and silver, with black hair and blue eyes. Still no summons from Redbeard. But why stand here fidgeting? He could find anyone, anywhere on Ship. She was minded to take a last look at the old places of the only home she had ever known -- now that she was being pushed out of it like a chess piece across a game board. She stepped out of her bright room, into the dim corridors. It was by now very late, but even so it was very dim. The Ship might have to limp on half power to some other source of supply -- how could she grudge her own duties to her own Ship? Kafri shook her head at herself, but still she felt full lorn. Lights were full, however, in the Nobles' Nursery. Currently, it held only General Bors' twins, the young Arams' new.born, and her own Least Brother -- all dear little people, and she must not even say good-by. But at least she could peep in. Least Brother, she found as soon as she opened the door, was sounding off at a princely rate. The room was vibrant with sound. The night nurse was in a predicament, feeding the Bors twins; she had both hands full; and though by protocol Least Brother came first, there'd be double noise if she lut the twins down. Kafri solved this handily by scooping Least Brother out of his bunk, and squeezing the howl out of him. She was glad to meet one simple common problem, and moreover Least Brother was so very dear. He gave a long informative belch, drew in a breath and discovered with surprise that nothing hurt any more. He let out the breath in a sigh of solid comfort, rolled his head oyer against her neck and relaxed, going heavy, asleep then and there. Still Kafri held him awhile before putting him down. Least Brother was such a good size to cuddle. His demands were so few, so honest, and if sometimes loud at least always understandable. Would she have children of her own? Most ladies did, but some never. Life made its own terms. When she put Least Brother back into his bunk, he ignored her, relaxed as he was in sleep and perfect trust. Just so; and should she panic either? She felt a little better, but her thoughts were still ill-sorted. When she stepped into the corridor again, she found a scrap of luck -- a bit of lace blowing in the night drafts that whispered in the dim corridors. Then it hadn't been noticed! Feeling fortunate, she caught it up for a souvenir -- and to keep it from being found by someone else who might get to thinking and maybe talking and maybe annoy Redbeard -- and all precautions IF against annoying Redbeard were lucky moves. I t was now full darktime, when nobody used the corridors except a few watchmen. She turned towards Weavers Country, avoided a passing sentry, tiptoed the other way and came to Farm Country, where there was always some ligjit, but also many green and scented shadows. Here, among the bean vines, she heard sounds of sobbing, and found Ninth Mother in a dark mood. These ladies outranked Kafri and rather liked to keep her aware of it. To find one of diem thus upset was an odd event in a day full of odd events. The upshot of their conversation was that the ladies exchanged fashion advice and then swapped dresses, trading the bright new gown for Ninth Mother's black lace. This turned out lucky later on, when another sentry might have seen Kafri and asked embarrassing questions; but she looked so like a shadow that he never noticed her. In this way, wishing hard that she did not have to leave this home she kntw so well. Kafri came to a door she had never seen before. But then she had never come so far into Farm Country except by open paths. This door stood close behind a high bank of flowering tomato vines. The paint on its threshold looked diy and clean, as if the door were little used. That might be, for it was plainly marked: The thing is, that when a girl feels uneasy enough, authoiizaitions mean less. Here in her own home was a place that she had never known of, and this was her last chance to see what lay beyond that door. First she hid her slippers under a tangle of leaves. Next she stepped quietly up to the door and pushed it very carefully. It went back easily, without a sound. Nothing but a stairwell -- a narrow stairwell, leading down into darkness from the light of Faim Country that came past her own downwardpointing shadow. Somewhere down there was a sound of -- what? H#ding her hoops so as not to rustle, she snoolded gently across the landing, down the steps, shoulder to wall, turning angjes, careful, careful, into the deep darkness. The sounds grew louder. Machinery. Space, what a rumpus! Coarse footing too, and die bad left her slippers. Stilly bare toes were better for feeling her way down, down. Now dim light again, louder racket of machinery. A loading platform perhaps -- a wide shelf with bays at the side, and heaps of boxes here and there. Then turning a corner, the shelf stood flat and open to a wide doorless arch, sharp-edged light, open distance, huge. Were there far walls? Too far to be sure. Why, this must be the loading docks for all Ship Sazarac! No place for ladies, so of course she had never seen it. What a place! Fascinated, Kafri slid behind a stack of boxes and peered beyond. This was better than High Days. They should let ladies in once in awhile, if only to see the shows! Noise, color, motion, so many things going on. Nearest, the twopilot fighting scouts, the ship's striking force in space -- rows and rows of racks. Beyond were several freighters. Beyond those, jumbling distance. But she saw no people. Where were the Knights, Techs and Mechs? Robot-#rucks rolled about and accounted for the clangor, and machinery was in motion as far as she could see; but not one attendant nor even one guard. How much power these things must use! Nearest the arch was a vacant space widi a row of open blisterports. As Kafri watched -- how long? five minutes or an hour -- one of the blisters dosed, rolled and peeled open again, revealing a large handsome scoutship marked with the royal comets and the golden harp of Clan Avion. Ah, that must be that barge that Kafri had heard spoken of; her father's plans must be well forward. Strictly speaking, she ought to be now in her own room awaiting -- why, people must be seeking her now! This was indeed embarrassing. But just as Kafri turned to go back as she had come, she saw movement in that direction also, and dropped further behind the boxes instead, glad of the roughness of the heap and its nook of concealment. r ie movement was caused by the swinging beams of flashlights. As they rounded the corner, however, one light after another was snapped off. Kafri glimpsed a number of officers, led it seemed by Redbeard himself. They strode to the landing that contained the Avion barge; They tapped a signal on the hull. The lock dilated and King Karl stepped out. He had shaved off his whiskers and wore the simple uniform of a fighter pilot with just the royal shoidder-bge; but Kafri knew him because she expected all this. Still it was strange to' see it all happening. Until now, she realized, this whole odd plan had sounded like all-ta. Nothing more, really. Was that part of why she had been so much adrift in her feelings about k? Now at diis point she had a good chance to scoot for the back stairs and turn up in some reasonable place looking innocent. But she stayed. Partly she was too nervous to move, and partly, too curious. Was there anyone else in that barge? General Lxki? She'd heard about him lots of times, court gossip was full of stories about what he had done and might do next. There, he stepped out, stooping to pass the lock: a huge dark man. The officers shook hands all around. Then Loki swung back inside the lock, while the others turned and came straight back, snapping on lights as they came. Kafri held still, still. Nobody seemed to see her. Why should they expect anyone in such a spot at such an hour? Perhaps they could not have seen her in any case; the brighter the light, the deepIP er the shadow. But how strange It was that Gurton Redbeard, who left no detail to chance, wasn't having her paged over every speaker in the ShipJust beyond Kafri's heap of boxes another switch clicked, but no light came on. "Blast these dim places and hard times," roared Redbeard, genially, "General Bors, will you oblige us with your flash?" Still bellowing hospitalities and encouragements, right there he took from Bor's hand not a light but something that glimmered like a proffered blaster. It was a. blaster. It flared momentarily and Karl sagged instantly. "Flash doesn't work either, eh?" Shouted Redbeard without a break. "Nothing for it but to shuffle our way to a light that will gojn for us." Then, in a lower tone, "Bors, go you back and tell Loki his royal master wants him. Then get rid of him as you like. We'll be creating such a towse about sudden illness and royal cremation and clan rituals that Avion will be all amort and none will think of Loki. But Loki thinks for himself, so make sure of him." B ors ran , back, while the others tramped off, around the corner and gone. One was dragging, but in the huddle and darkness even with what Kafri now knew, she could hardly be sure. Cremation? That great hearty confident man, dead? Why, her father had planned it that way! No wonder he hadn't cared where she was! She had only been a bit of bait in a trap for two great men -- and there went Bors to take the other. Grand Champion Loki, however, was not so quick to outsmart himself and step into a dark place among strangers. He came out again and stood listening; but whatever Bors said, Loki merely shook his head without speaking, with "each hand on a butt of his two belt blasters. Kafri felt a great horror of all that had happened. "That's right, Loki," she whispered. But it was only a small whisper. "Don't trust him, or you're done, too." Presently Bors came back, shaking his head. But he could get other men, or for that matter get guns and blaze down this tunnel. The Alarm for General Assembly began to sound through the walls. The robotrucks halted where they were. Then in the silence, the royal dirge music began, beautiful and terrible. Loki's head jerked at the sound, but then he stiffened. Oh, that was a mistake, a mistake! It wasn't a time to be brave, it was a time to run! There was evil all around! It came to Kafri that she had hated her father for a long time -- for his wickedness, for his violence, for his treachery. She had seen it all many times, and had never thought to question it. Redbeard was Redbeard, the Head of the Clan. But now she had to think about it. Hatred for all this evil opened in her heart like a black flower. And for that moment there was no one there but that one lone man. Oh, if somebody should warn him! But who was there to do that except -- Before she could change her mind, Kafri ran down the tunnel and burst into the light. "They've killed him!" she cried. "Killed him by treachery! I saw it!" She pushed with both hands at the startled knight. "There's naught you can do here! In, man, in! Close lock and get away if you can!" Loki said a word no lady should hear or recognize. He grabbed her arm and flung her into the barge before she knew what next. He jumped for the controls and punched this, slapped that -- the airlock hummed shut, spunggg, even as the ship rolled. Kafri was tossed about until she slid into a comer and was cramped there by the forces of a fast departure. Loki, seemed to ride these maneuvers as easily as a boy on a fun slide. However, he was no boy. Actually, she had never seen so big a man. He was wearing the green uniform of Ship Avion with general's pips, but no clan device. He was as dark as Kafri, and she saw that he was blue-eyed also, but of a masculine hardness. He turned a dial with some care, and then spoke, not in a diplomat's light tones, but a heavy male bass.  Avion? Avion? O.S. Come in. Ship Avion. Barge calling; O.S." He flicked a toggle. "Its too weak a signal," he growled. "However! Thatll send until we come into range and then all Avlon'W swarm out like bees and give yon hive something to think on." H e slid a lever and the ship's gain loosened a little. Kafri found that she could straighten out, and needed to. Loki reached a hand, pulled her up standing, and looked her over. He grinned broadly. "Art a slut to betray your own ship. But a handsomer slut saw -- I -- never." Kafri nodded; his point was fairly taken. "Aye, sir, you speak truth about betrayals. But consider what my father has done, and under truce too. It's honesty to uphold that? And consider you sir, that I promised to wed young Karl. So it's to betray this one or that one, but at least I betray not my own promise or the Laws of the Clans, do I?" He stared, then began to laugh. "You're Kafri of Sazarac? The Dark Rose herself? By space, I might've -- " Considering that the outposts of Sazarac were scarcely passed, Loki was rather too much relaxed; yet Kafri felt a little better too. "And if Karl is honorable -- he is, isn't he?" "As the starts are true. And I should know, for we've ridden copilot on many a mission," Loki said, sobering. He glanced at a viewport, turned quickly and slapped the controls again. Kafri saw him in time to catch at a brace as the boat surged forward or she'd have been thrown again. "It seems your Clan is out. Milady." TTie view port above die panels lighted. Her home Ship -- farewell. IF Sazarac -- filled most of the space; but there was a snippet of black at the lower curve. Against this there showed a swarm of golden needles: scoutships pouring out on their track. But they had a fast ship and a headstart, so surely this was no more than a gesture? "You'll have to strip and lock into the co-pilot's coffin, Milady. We may gain something by dodging." "Dodge?" "Aye! and hurry! For at this speed, you'd be dashed to spatters even if we're not shot to powder!" "Shot?" She blinked. "Do you suppose my cousins would shoot at a scoutship with a lady in it?" "Oh, blast and jet wash all fool girls, d'y'think this is all in High Council Hall where all shall be known? Strip!" he blurted, flipping her around, expertly unshucking all her petticoats and tossing them over her head. "This is politics, y'brainless poppet!" A button caught as she floundered among ruffles, but he snapped it off, pulled the whole thing loose, bodice and all, tossed the mass into a side locker and kicked that shut with a sweep of one boot. Meanwhile he was saying, "D'ye'think we have time to stand wondering what they'll do, when it's as plain as -- " He caught her under the ribs with one hand and assisted -- that is, tossed -- her into the co-pilots coffin, face down. "D'y'think we design control couches to fit ladies' hoops?" Kafri found that she could see the control panel and could move her hands, which were close by it. echoed her very thought and the boom of the coffin-lid. A moment later the same voice came through the panel speaker. "Look through the viewport." S he was doing that. Great Sazarac seemed to be swinging upward; the blackness below increased proportionately, filled with the dancing swarm of pursuit... "Now, Milady, d'y'see those three nearest?" "Nearest?" "Aye!" Several bad words. "Largest, then." Everything in the picture yawed and swung. A central dimness grew, barred 'with an X of something like light. "There. Can y'read the insignia?" They were tiny but discrim inable. "General Bors, that's the largest, I mean, nearest. Doest rampant on a field cheeky. The two dragons entwined -- General Ysem. Comets and luces argent, bend sinister -- my cousin. Prince Aram. As I thought. Fastest ships in this part of space. Now I'll let them know you're aboard." Light increased in the control panels, and she blinked. "They can all see your face and they can hear what I'm saying now, as well a you can see their ships. Hear me, you cowards? Any one of you sorry to see Loki running like a bat. with only a girl for a gunner?" The leading ship flashed a rod of flame, reaching, reaching -- and the ship rolled and lurched. The viewpoint filled with white fire. Something hissed on the hull. n The foam around Kafri seemed to loosen as the ship flipped and dived -- that must've been a near miss, or they'd not be here knowing about it, she knew very well. The viewport was full of swirls, nothing that she could distinguish, everything was erractic. Loki was swearing a torrent -- beautiful deep voice, horrible black words. Kafri gathered the sense of his remarks: that they were being overhauled three to one, and that their pursuers were shooting full power. Loki said a good deal more than that, but much was in words she had never heard and couldn't interpret. She listened and looked, helpless. Any moment now, death? Would she feel h? How would it feel? Loki stopped swearing. The picture steadi, let the swarm of pursuit come into view. Most of the specks were smaller, some very tiny, and Ship Sazarac had shrunk to a ball with black space all around it. But three -- yes. They were bigger. The center of the picture thinned and made the X again; much larger than before -- Bors, Ysem, Arm, as if on murder bent, all glowing with charges ready. On Ysem, a spark swelled, but before it could do more, the ship lurched, the picture reeled. Intolerable light flared and vanished at one side of the rear-view port. Loki gave a sort of half cough. "Milady! D'y'see that red stud under your right hand?" It was the biggest thing on the panel. "You mean this thing marked 'Salute'?" "Salute guns and a girl," Loki expressed a few more sentiments, then gave that half cough again. "That same. Now, if we come about and go inside their. range, d'y'think y'could push that button just when I say and only when I say? My hands are K afri jabbed at the button, hard, with fist behind thumb. There was a crackling and spitting, a backthrust, and light that struck through her closed eyelids. When she looked again, the viewport was full of stars again, and three ships rocking into view -- no, two ships and a ball of light that grew and grew. "See the range finder? That scope with the cross hairs? When it it!" Kafri shut her eyes as she punched the stud, for now she knew what it did. But she punched it, hard as ever. Again the boat spun, and a great surge drove it. Her ears rang, her thumb slipped off the stud. She looked again, saw the swirling stars, saw a pursuit ship fire at them and miss clean. Then the other ship was zigging around in the range finder; and as it caught in the crux, Kafri punched the red stud again without being told. Logi gave a great shout. The ship steadied and flew weightless in a straightforward rush. Kafri opened her eyes. Bors, Ysem, Aram, her kinsmen. Three clouds of sparks with cores of fire, growing from the center. IF diimning at the edges. Aram, Ysem, Bors. The lid of the control coffin swung open. Kafri looked over her shoulder and there stood Lxki, laughing like a madman. "Ah, ha -- ha, ha -- that was impossible -- ah, ha -- but we did it! Girl, y'learn fast! Come out of that and kiss me!" She could hardly move. She understood that they were lucky to be alive, but all she felt was a shuddering horror at the world and everything in it, a cold place full of enormous grief. She came to her knees, tears dripping unstayed. "Please, J, want my clothes," she babbled. "Please -- my dress." Loki kicked the locker open and flung the mass of garments at her. He turned his back and stared out the viewport while she fumbled her way through the tangle, and worked her appearance back to decency. Then, having done what she hoped was enough, she sat huddled, thinking on blackness. Loki gave that half cough. "Can I look around?" "You looked before." "I apologize." "Don't be; angry." "Well, you are yelling." "OH, for -- all right." "Then, you're not angry?" She was sorry for him too. None of it was his fault in any way. She went and put her hand on his arm. He jerked it away as if burnt. "Don't touch me. Milady. I'll be all right in a minute or so, but just don't touch me now." She drew back carefidly and sat on the edge of the control coffin. It was hard and too narrow. She got up, found the lever and closed the lid gently. Then she stood and watched Loki, while he watched the viewport. H e had turned it away from Ship Sazarac; but SWp Avion, though nearer now, was Rowing only a crescent at one side, high and to the left. Much nearer were the masses of the asteroid swarm. They swelled and passed, until the ship seemed to be in the midst of them. There was a gentle jolt, and all forward motion seemed to cease. Loki began fiddling with dials at one side of the panel, and a small crackling began. "Cancel #.S.", he said, slowly. "Report coming. This is Loki; call Karl at once." There was a slight pause. "Good, I thought you'd be there, Karl. Bad news, lad; Sazarac broke truse. Your father's dead, they say, and by treachery, for I was fired upon as I tried to get back with -- " The crackling begain again. "Truce, aye, and fired upon, aye! D'y'know my voice? D'y'doubt my word?" More crackling. "So now y'know what to expect, y'll know what to do. I've taken cover among asteroids, for I must check hull damage. I said hull damage. Great space, man, d'y'think they were spraying tourney spark? Call council and don't wait on me. Over and out." He turned to Kafri. "Now, lass, you have three choices. Fair's fair, and I owe you justice, for had you not interf erred I'd now be dead as King Karl -- long live King Karl. So say what you want. Imprimis, if you want to be set back among your kindred, snivels and all, risks and all, PU try if it can be done. And perhaps it can with the right kind of care about arrangement. Now is that what you want?" Kafri shook her head emphatically, with a quick shiver. Ship Sazarac was home no more to her. "Secondus, we can proceed to Avion as soon as I make sure that all's in order about this boat. Now Karl is an honorable man, so he'll probably keep his father's word and wed you. But I warn you fairly, lass, there's another he promised before, and he's his own master now. You'd not be. First Lady." Kafri smiled a little. "I think that maybe it's harder to be a great lady than a small one, and I should know about that. Did you say there are three choices?" "Why, you could come with me. I am a clanless man, nothing to keep me here, but I have a stronghold on an unpeopled planet. The winters are long there, but the summers are as lovely as yourself, and fairer lass saw I never." Could it be that easy? "Wouldn't we be sought for? Could you fight off all -- ."He snorted. "Fight off dl what? Karl and Gurton will keep one another busy, doubt you not. We'll be supposed lost by wreck among these flying crags, and maybe sought for here, for awhile, as a mote in a dustbin. Karl owes me thanks and friendship. But running a Star Ship takes a man's mind up full. We'd be soon forgotten among so many other things." That was a strange thought. Yet Kafri was sure of one thing, and that was that between yonder slippery preoccupied folk, and this hardspoken fast-acting man, she felt a strong personal preference, had been feeling it all along and acting on it. "I could run with you now, lass, and who'd prevent mj?v But fair is fair, you shall say fo yourself." He added, anxiously, "You understand, lass, it's a far place. There'd be no other ladies, and few diversions." It sounded fine. Kafri began to feel anxious too. "I can play chess," she proffered. "But I guess maybe not very well." He looked at her sharply, then grinned, then chuckled. Well, if he thought it funny -- she giggled. Then they both burst out laughing. I n this way, Kafri had her own say, in spite of being Redbeard's daughter, or perhaps because of it. But as to who got the asteroids, sihe never did hear, and never did think it very important.      IF IF # Feature First of a new series. Here's your chance to learn all about fandom -- what it is -- and whyl You Read Tlicit Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff? H OW did science fiction fandom get started? There are as many different theories as there are fans. I have my own private theory: I think, like Arch Obeler's chicken heart, it just grew. It started back in the old days (often called The Good Old Days), something like this. Professor, a little mood music, if you please, whilst we take a trip down Mem'ry Lane... Back when we were in our teens, there were none of the neat dignified little paperbacks we have today. Nossir... we had pulp magazines, great sloppy ragged-edged things, printed on an inferior grade of blotting paper -- with titles that were a far cry from the simple, intellectualsounding ones of today like Galaxy Science Fiction or Analog (which sound like they ought to be titles of M.I.T. alumni magazines, or something equally technological and formidable). Titles in those days were calculated to arouse parental fears, ghastly ones like Eerie Interstellar Thrills or Stupefying Rocketship Sagas, and like that. Also parsecs away from the good taste of today's magazines covers, the covers of yore were shrieking blots of raw color, invariably depicting a platinum blonde whose amazing degree of mammalian endowment would have made her a collector's item for any wide-awake medical school. She was generally clothed in a chrome-plated brassiere, a suit of cellophane pajamas and a goldfish-bowl space helmet, and was shown in the multitentacled grip of a green cockroach with octopoid limbs, a bewildering assortment of claws, dripping fangs, bat-wings, and enormous blood-shot eyes... three of them, at least. In the rear, huffing along variantly to the rescue, came a blond, squarejawed hero with a grim, slightly constipated expression, clutching a blaster composed largely of old radio tubes. As you can see, it was tough trying to defend such reading matter on grounds of imagination-stretching scientific stimulus. As a matter of fact, it was hard enough just getting the things in the house. You bought the latest issue of Gory Galactic Shockers -- trying to ignore the piggy, suspicious eye of the newsdealer who grudgingly accepted your quarter, growling around the chewed cigar-stump in his mouth some comment about "Punk kids, readin' this trash, oughta be out playin' ball." You bore your prize home, covers carefully folded back out of sight; smuggled it surreptitiously into the house, past Pop who would glare up from the racing form and grumble something about "Punk kid, alia time nose inna book, oughta be out playin' ball"; and, in the seclusion of your room, you would read every precious word... yes, even the ads in the back: Ruptured? Throw Away That Smelly Old Truss! and Great Money-Making Home Business -- Weave Your Own Ties on Goldblitz's Patent Hand-Loom! Now, one thing the old pulp magazines had was a regular letter column. Editors actually encouraged readers to write in their comments (probably for evidence to justify the magazine's continued existence to a publisher who probably thought such kids oughta be out playin' ball). For lack of any local companionship with whom to share your opinions of your favorite stories and authors, you would be forced to write letters  to these columns yourself. These letters, almost without fail, graded every story and illustration in the issue via a complex numbered scale. Invariably, they deplored the cover art, and requested the next issue have trimmed edges, be expanded by # pages, and feature a cover by Bok or Finlay. Often these letters were witty and downright clever; personalities emerged, frequently more marked and original than those displayed by the professional writers whose fictions the magazine featured. Sometimes you wrote personally to a letterhack whose opinions matched, or violently contrasted, with yours. Or you would have letters published, and other letterhacks would write to you. Correspondence sprung up; you made a far wider circle of friends via the mails than you had in P.S. #. Sometimes you would discover that four or five other sf readers lived right in the old home town. Informal clubs came into being. Then regional groups and even national organizations. Arch Oboler's chicken heart was under weigh. Whaddaya Mean Ya Can't Mow the Lawn, Ya Got Blisters from the Mimeograph Crank? readers are potential writers, and all writers are would-be editors. This is true of sf. The phenomenon of fan magazine publishing is now attracting serious attention, and fanzines are being collected by more than one college. What a boon to thesis writers of tomorrow, in search for something to research! Fanzines come in all shapes and sizes. In the Good Old Days, many were hectographed -- a cheap form of printing that involved messy trays of highly odorous jelly, and gave you IF a pair of pale purple hands for several days. The mimeograph, that noble gift of the American inventor, has proved the most popular form of printing. But actual-no-kidding printed fanzines are not altogether unknown, whether handset on the basement press, or commercially done, as in a few rare cases. Wellheeled fans with indulgent parents have from time to time extruded mags first lithographed, then (and now commonly) printed by photooffset. What does an average fanzine look like? Mimeographed, sometimes most attractively so, on colored paper; about a dozen pages long (although some have been known to run # pages, and even more); stapled dong the left margin; with a cover drawing done on stencil, or sometimes a litho'ed or offset pen and ink drawing. Contents vary. Usually an editorial explained why this issue is so late. A clutch of articles... a short story or two... fannish cartoons... poems... almost always a lengthy letter-column. From time to time, fanzines conduct polls, review books or other fanzines, have contests, etc. You name it: fanzines have printed it. The fan press, more than just a mildly interesting facet of Americana, has a practical value. Fanzines are a testing-ground for future professionals in science fiction. H. P. Lovecraft used to publish an amateur magazine, and many of his early stories were first published in these journals. Fans have gone on to become well-known writers -- Ray Bradbury (who used to edit something called Futuria Fantasia), Fred Pohl, Algis Budry (his magazine was called Slantasy), Wilson "Bob" Tucker Le Zombie), C. M. Kornbluth, Damon Knight Robert Silverberg, Marion Zimmer Bradley (she still edits one) -- the list #s almost endless. More than just writers, fans move on in greater numbers to fill the ranks of magazine editors and book or paperback publishers. Marty Greenberg (Gnome Press), Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (Fantasy Press), Ray Palmer Amazing Stories), Donald A. Wollheim (Ace Books), Larry Shaw (Lancer Books), Robert W. Lowndes (Science Fiction Stories, Avalon Books, etc.), Terry Carr (also at Ace), Ted Dikty and Mel Korshak (Shasta Press), Forry Ackerman (Famous Monsters of Filmland), and reams of others started as members of the Beanie Brigade. But beyond even this, there are those potential professionals who gain confidence in the fan journals before moving into the ranks of paid members. The late Hannes Bok first appeared in fanzines. Robert Bloch and Isaac Asimov have had almost as many appearances in the fan press as in newsstand publications. The sword-and-sorcery fanzine, Amra, was publishing the artwork of Roy G. Krenkel and Frank Frazetta long before the Burroughs Boom carried them to professional paperback covers. Punk Kids, Alla Time Printin' This Junk, 's a Waste a Moneyl the time and money and effort that publishing and mailing a fanzine demands? What does he get for it in return? Sure, fanzine editors usually charge a dollar or so for a year's subscription, but hardly ever do they break even, what with paper prices, printing costs, postage, and so on. And it takes a lot of time, stenciling each page, running it off, collating, assembling, stapling, addressing, bundling, mailing. What does the editor get out of it, that makes it worth his time? That's a hard question to answer. Anyone with the creative itch already knows the answer, but it's a tenuous and elusive thing to pin down on paper with mere words. Joe Fan-ed gets pride of accomplishment. Pride in a job well done. And if what he's produced is of value, he gets a certain prestige. Today, a decade after they went into the limbo that swallows all fanzines eventually, we still have a fond regard for those really good fanzine editors of the past: Charles Burbee whose Shangri-UAffairs was such a delight, Walt Daugherty of Chanticleer, Gus Willmorth and (after him) Roy Squires of Fantasy Advertiser, Donald Day of The Fanscient, Stan Mullen of Gorgon, Ron and Cindy Smith whose Inside was one of the finest fanzines ever, Dick and Pat Lupoff of Xero, Never underestimate the prestigiousness of a fine fanzine. Many the pimply adolescent, ignored by girls, snickered at by football stars. was, unbeknownst to his classmates, an international celebrity in the science fiction world. And sometimes fanzines have produced more immediate and tangible results: Charles D. Hornig, who published a mag called The Fantasy Fan, attracted the eye of Hugo Gernsback, who pulled him out of the fan ranks and lifted him to the lofty post of editor of a genuine science fiction magazine, Wonder Stories. This is quite a noteworthy event, considering that Hornig was naught but a #-year-old fan from Jersey City, N. J.! Fanzines have other constructive features, beside serving as bootcamps for would-be pros. They seek out and print all kinds of valuable material of permanent worth which no commercial magazine in the field would dream of touching with a tenfoot blue pencil. They serve as natural vehicles for satire -- lampoon -- parody. They also print the sort of scholarly critiques of important works that could never appear in a professional magazine. For example, parody has given us a series of delightful Gilbert  Sullivan versions of famous SF novels, originally fanpublished by author Randall Garrett, who must have despaired of ever selling them anywhere (they were so good, though, that Old-Time Fan Doc Lowndes reprinted some of them in his professional magazine, Science Fiction Stories.) And Larry Shaw, later editor of Infinity, and currently editing for Lancer Books, had a memorable and witty discussion of Lewis Caroll's nonsense-epic. The Hunting of the Snark, in the terms of (of all things!) a mfirder IF mystery, which was printed in Ron Smith's fanzine, Inside. Scholarship has produced such jolly items as an exegesis of every single goldurn name in Robert E. Howard's whole 'Conan' series -- written by the deft and erudite Mr. L. Sprague de Camp -- and serialized in a fanzine called Amra. Some Recent Fanzines: Current  Choice N ot all fanzines are of permanent value, heaven help us; many if not most are sheerest ephemera. Let's focus on a quick closeup of a couple of recent ones, to give an idea of the range of material, variety of relative value, and like that. Yandro is a good example of the "general" fanzine. You are likely to find a little of everything there. It won the "Hugo" -- an award given annually at the World Science Fiction Convention, to best novel of the year, short story, artist, fan publication, etc. This, Fandom's "Oscar," was handed to Yandro at #'s worldcon, which was held in London. Now, Yandro is mimeographed # pages of #" x #" yellow paper. It's one of the oldest fanzines around, now in its #th issue, and thirteenth year of publication. The editors are Buck and Juanita Coulson, Route ##, Hartford City, Ind., #. (#c an issue). Like most fanzines, Yandro has a small subscription list limited to a couple of hundred fans, but these few are scattered all over the world -- a glance at the letter column reveals comments from readers in Sweden, Australia, England, Spain, Alabama, and other foreign countries. This issue, both the articles and reviews, and the letters, contains comments about the Ku Klux Klan, Robert A. Heinlein, Peter Pan, the new paperback versions of The Lord of the Rings, movies, and so on. Then there's Amra, a horse of a different color, as it were. Amra is published for fans of "sword  sorcery," the sort of action fantasy Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard wrote. The latest issue I have seen is Vol. # No. #, published by George Scithers, Box #, Chicago, #., # (# for # issues.) Amra is smaller than Yandro, #" X #", and printed by offset lithography, sometimes in color. This issue runs to # pages, which is about par for the course. Amra is the darling of a lot of science-fiction authors, who contribute articles, book reviews, verse. L. Sprague de Camp reviews a new book by Harold Lamb, The Curved Saber; Frank Herbert tells how his novel. Dune, came to be; Katherine MacLean discusses a book on Zen; there are seven gorgeous Roy Krenkel drawings. Amra also won a "Hugo" -- the year before Yandro. S o much for our nostalgicky jaunt down Mem'ry Lane. Next time Our Man In Fandom will look at the wackiest of all fan phenomena -- two amateur publishing clubs, one in New York, the other in California -- who publish # to # fanIF  N ovelette The ship drove through the starlaneSf carrying a crew of fanatics to their death! I S omething was driving waves of confusion ' through his mind, so that he knew not who he was, or where. How long ago what was happening had started or what had gone before it he could not guess. Nor could he resist what was happening, or even decide if he wanted to resist. A chant beat in his ears, growled out by barbaric voices: On the wall there was painted a forest In which there lived neither man nor beast With knotty f gnarled, barren trees, old... And he could see the forest around him. Whether the trees and the chanting voices were real or not was a question he could not even formulate. Through broken branches hideous to behold There ran a cold and sighing wind As if a storm would break down every bough And downward, at the bottom of a hill Stood the temple of Mars who is mighty in arms... And he saw the temple. It was of steel, curved in the dread shape of a berserker's hull, and half-sunken in dark earth. At the entrance, gates of steel sang and shuddered in the cold wind rushing out, rushing out endlessly to rage through the shattered forest. The whole scene was gray, and lighted from above by an auroral flickering. The northern lights shone in at the doors For there was no window on the walls Through which men might see any light... He seemed to pass, with a conqueror's strides, between the clawlike gates, toward the temple door. The door was of eternal adamant Bound lengthways and sideways with tough iron And to make the temple stronger, every pillar Was thick as a barrel of iron bright and shiny, The inside of the temple was a kaleidoscope of violence, a frantic abattoir. Hordes of phantasmal men were moved down in scenes of war, women were slaughtered by machines, children crushed and devoured by animals. He, the conqueror, accepted it all, exulted in it all, even as he became aware that his mind, under some outer compulsion, was building it all from the words of the chant. He could not tell how long it lasted, but the end came abruptly. The pressure on his mind was eased, and the chanting stopped. The relief was such that he fell sprawling onto a soft surface, his eyes closed. Except for his own breathing all was quiet. A gentle thud made him open his eyes. A short metal sword had been dropped or tossed from somewhere to land near him. He was in a round, softly lighted, familiar room. The circular wall was covered by a continuous mural, depicting a thousand variations on the theme of bloody violence. At one side of the room, behind a low altar, towered the statue of an armed man who was larger than life and more than a man, his bronze face a mask of insensate rage. All this he had seen before, and he gave it little thought. Except for the sword. He was drawn to the sword like a steel particle to a magnet, for the power of his recent vision was still fresh and irresistible, and it was the power of destruction. He crawled to the sword, noticing dimly that he was dressed like the IF statue of the god, in a coat of mail. When he had the sword in his hand the power of it drew him to his feet. He looked round expectantly. A section of the continuous muralwall opened into a door, and a figure entered the temple. It was dressed in a neat, plain uniform, and its face was lean and severe. It looked like a man, but it was not a man, for no blood gushed out when the sword hewed in. Joyfully, thoughtlessly, he hacked the plastic-bodied figure into a dozen pieces. Then he stood swaying over it, drained and weary. The metal pommel of the sword grew suddenly hot in his hand, so that he had to drop it. All this had happened before, again and again. The painted door opened once more. This time it was a real man who entered, a man dressed in black, who had hypnotic eyes under bushy brows. "Tell me your name," the black-uniform ordered. His voice compelled. "My name is Jor." "And mine?" "You are Katsulos," said Jor dully. "The Esteeler secret police." "Yes. And where are we?" "In space, aboard the Nirvana II. We are takings the High Lord Nogara's new space-going castle out to him, out to the rim of the galaxy. And when he comes aboard, I am someone with a sword. Or another gladiator will entertain him by killing me." "Normal bitterness," remarked one of Katsulo's pien, appearing in the doorway behind him. "Yes, this one always snaps right back," Katsulos said. "But a good subject. See the brain rhythms?" He showed the other a torn-off piece of a chart from some recording device. They stood there discussing Jor like a specimen, while he waited and listened. They had taught Jor to behave. They thought they had taught him permanently -- but oneof these days he was going to show them. He shivered in his mail coat. 'Take him back to his cell," Katsulos ordered at last. "I'll be along in a moment." Jor looked about him confusedly as he was led out of the temple and down some stairs. His recollection of the treatment he had just undergone was already becoming uncertain; and what he could remember was so unpleasant that he made no effort to retain it. But his sullen determination to strike back stayed with him. Left alone in the temple, Katsulos kicked the pieces of the plastic dummy into a pile, to be ready for careful salvage. He trod heavily on the malleable face, just in case someone besides his own men should happen to see it. Then he stood for a moment looking up into the maniacal bronze face of Mars. And Katsulos eyes, that were cold weapons when he turned them on other men, were now alive. U A communicator sounded, in what was going to be the High Lord Nogara's cabin when he took delivery of the ship. Admiral Hemphill, alone in the cabin, needed a moment to find the proper switch on the huge, unfamiliar desk. "What is it?" "Sir, our rendevous with the Solarian courier is completed. We're ready to drive again, unless you have any last minute messages to transmit?" "Negative. Our new passenger came aboard?" "Yes, sir. A Solarian, named Mitchell Spain. As we were advised." "I know Mr. Spain, Captain. Will you ask him to come to this cabin as soon as possible? I'd like to talk to him at once." "Yes, sir." "Are those police still snooping around the bridge?" "Not at the moment, sir." Hemphill shut off the communicator and leaned back in the thronelike chair from which Felipe Nogara would soon survey his Esteeler empire; but soon the habitually severe expression of Hemphill's lean face deepened and he stood up. The luxury of this cabin did not please him. On the blouse of Hemphill's neat, plain uniform were seven ribbons of scarlet and black, each representing a battle in which one or more berserker machines had been destroyed. He wore no other decorations except his insignia of rank. Within a. minute the cabin door opened, and a short, muscular, rather ugly man in civilian clothes entered. He smiled at once, and came toward the desk. "So, it's High Admiral Hemphill now, with your commission from the United Planets. Congratulations. It's a long time since we've met." "Thank you. Yes, not since the Stone Place." Hemphill's mouth bent upward slightly at the corners, and he moved around the desk to shake hands. "You were a captain of marines then, as I recall." And they gripped hands, both men thought back to that day of victory against the machines. Neither of them could smile at it now, for the war was going badly again. "That's nine years ago," said Mitchell Spain. "I'm a foreign correspondent now, for Solar News Service. They want me to go out and interview Nogara." "I've heard that you've made a reputation as a writer." Hemphill motioned Mitch to a chair. "I'm afraid I have no time myself for literature or other non-essentials." Mitch sat down, and dug out his pipe. He knew Hemphill well enough to be sure that no slur was intended by the reference to literature. To Hemphill, everything was non-essential except the destruction of berserker machines; and today such a viewpoint was doubtless a good one for a High Admiral. Mitch got the impression that Hemphill, had serious business to talk about, but was uncertain of how to broach the subject. To fill the pause, Mitch remarked: "I wonder if the High Lord Nogara will be pleased with his new ship." He gestured around the cabin with the stem of his pipe. Everything was quiet and steady as if rooted on the surface of a planet. There was nothing to suggest that even now the most powerful engines ever built by EarthescendIF ed men were hurling this ship out toward the rim of the galaxy at many times the speed of light. Hemphill took the remark as a cue. Leaning slightly forward in his uncomfortable-looking seat, he said: "I'm not concerned about his liking it. What concerns me is how it's going to be used." Since the Stone Place, Mitch's left hand was mostly scar tissue and prosthetics. He used one plastic finger now to tamp down the glowing coal of his pipe. "You mean Nogara's idea of fun? I caught a glimpse of the gladiatorial arena. I've never met him, but they say he's gone bad, really bad, since Karlsen's death." "I wasn't talking about Nogara's so-called amusements. What I really mean is that Karlsen may be still alive." H emphill's calm, fantastic statement hung in the quiet cabin air. For a moment it seemed to Mitch that he could sense the motion of the C-plus ship as it traversed spaces no man understood, spaces where it seemed time might mean nothing and the dead of all the ages might still be walking. Mitch shook his head. "Are we talking about the same man? Johann Karlsen, Nogara's half-brother?" "Of course." "Wait a minute. Two years ago Johann Karlsen went down into a hypermassive sun, with a berserkercontrolled ship on his tail. Unless that story's not true?" "It's perfectly true, except we think now that his launch went into orbit around the hypermass instead of falling into it. Have you seen the girl who's aboard?" "I passed a girl, outside your cabin. I thought..." "No, I have no time for that. Her name is Lucinda, single names are the custom on her planet. She's an eyewitness to Karlsen's vanishing." "Oh. Yes, I remember the story. But what's this about his being in orbit?" Hemphill stood up and seemed to become more comfortable, as another man would by sitting down. "Ordinarily, the hypsermass and everything near it is invisible, due to the extreme red shift caused by its gravity. But during the last year some scientists have done their best to study it. Their ship didn't compare with this one -- " Hemphill turned his head for a moment, as if he could hear the mighty engines -- "but they went as close as they dared, carrying new long-wave telescopes. The star itself was still invisible, but' they brought back these." Hemphill picked up an envelope and shook out photographs, which Mitch spread on the desk. Most of them showed patterns of slightly curving parallel lines, dark against a sullen red background. Hemphill stood behind him. "That's what space looks like near the hypermass. Remember, it has Sol, packed into ronghly the same volume. Gravity like that does things we don't yet understand." "Interesting. What forms these dark lines?" "Falling dust that's become trapped in lines of gravitic force, like the lines round a magnet. Or so I'm told." "And where's Kailsen?" Hemphill's finger descended on a photo, pointing out a spot of crystalline roundness, tiny as a raindrop within a magnified line of dust. "We think this is his launch. It's orbiting the center of the hypermass. And the berserker-controlled ship that was chasing him is here, following him in the same dust-line." His finger moved to another photo, to point out a dark-shape. "Now they're both stuck. No ordinary engines can drive a ship down there." Mitch stared at the photos, hardly seeing them for the old memories that came flooding back. "And you think he's alive." "He had equipment that would let him freeze himself into suspended animation. Also, time may be running quite slowly for him. He's in a three-hour orbit." "A three-hour orbit, at a hundred Hemphill almost smiled. "I told you, things we don't understand yet." M itch nodded slowly. "He's not a man to give up. No. He'd fight as long as he could, and then invent a way tofight some more." Hemphill's face had become iron again. "You know how many people have made a god of him since his departure, and what a boost to their morale his return would be. And you knew him. You saw what efforts the berserkers made to kill him. They feared him, in their iron guts, though I never quite understood why... Do you agree, then? If we can save him we must do so at once -- without delay." "Certainly, but how?" "With this ship. It has the strongest engines ever built -- trust Nogara to have seen to that, with his own safety in mind." Mitch whistled softly. "Strong enough to match orbits with Karlsen and pull him out of there?" "Yes, mathematically. Supposedly." "And you mean to make the attempt before this ship is delivered to Nogara." "That's it. I've been keeping my rescue plan a secret; you know he wanted Karlsen out of the way." Mitch nodded. He felt a rising excitement. "And if we succeed Nogara may rage, but what can he do? How about the crew, are they willing?" "I've already sounded out the captain. He's with me. And since I hold my rank from the United Blanets I can issue legal orders on any ship." Hemphill began to pace. "The only thing that worries me is this detachment of Nogara's police we have aboard; they're certain to oppose the rescue." "How many of them are there?" "A couple of dozen. I don't know why there are so many, but they outnumber the rest of us two to one. Not counting their prisoners, who of course are helpless." "Prisoners?" "About forty young men, I understand. Sword fodder for the arena." IF Ill L ucinda spent a good deal of her time wandering restless and alone through the corridors of the great ship. Today she happened to be in a passage not far from the central bridge and flag quarters when a door opened close ahead of her and three men came into view. The two who wore black uniforms held a single prisoner, clad in a shirt of chain mail, between them. When she saw the black uniforms, Lucinda's chin lifted. She waited, standing in their path. "Go round me, vultures," she said in an icy voice when they came up to her. She did not look at the prisoner; bitter experience had taught her that showing sympathy for Nogara's victims could bring added suffering upon them. The black uniforms halted in front of her. "I am Katsulos," said the bushy-browed one. "Who are you?" "Once my planet was Flamland," she said, and from the corner of her eye she saw the prisoner's face turn up. "One day it will be my home again, when it is freed of Nogara's vultures." The second black uniform opened his mouth to reply, but never got out a word, for just then the prisoner's elbow came smashing back into his belly. Then the prisoner, who till now had stood meek as a lamb, shoved Katsulos off his feet and was out of sight around a bend of corridor before either policemen could recover. Katsulos bounced quickly to his feet. His gun drawn, he pushed past Lucinda to the bend of the corridor. Then she saw his shoulders slump. Her delighted laughter did not seem to sting him in the least. "There's nowhere he can go," he said. The look in his eyes choked off her laughter in her throat. K atsulos posted police guards on the bridge and in the engine room, and secured all lifeboats. "The man Jor is desperate, and dangerous," he explained to Hemphill and to Mitchell Spain. "Half of my men are searching for him continuously, but you know how big this ship is. I hope you will stay close to your quarters until he's caught." A day passed, and Jor was not caught. Mitch took advantage of the police dispersal to investigate the arena -- Solar News would be much interested. He climbed a short stair and emerged squinting in imitation sunlight, under a high-domed ceiling as blue as Earth's sky. He found himself behind the upper row of the approximately two hundred seats that encircled the arena behind a sloping crystalline wall. At the bottom of the glassy bowl, the oval-shaped fighting area was about thirty yards long. It was floored by a substance that looked like sand but was doubtless something more cohesive, that would not fly up in a cloud if the artificial gravity chanced to fail. In this facility, as slickly modern as a death-ray, the vices of ancient Rome could be enjoyed most efficiently. Every spectator would be able to see every drop of blood. There was only one awkward-looking feature. Set at equal intervals around the upper rim of the arena, behind the seats, were three buildings, each as large as a small house. Their architecture seemed to Mitch to belong somewhere on Ancient Earth; their purpose was not immediately apparent. Mitch took out his pocket camera and made a few photographs from where he stood. Then he walked behind the rows of seats to one of the buildings. A door stood open, and he went in. At first he thought he had discovered an entrance to Nogara's private harem; but after a moment he saw that the people in the paintings were not all engaged in sexual embraces. There were men and women and godlike beings, posed in a variety of relationships, in the costumes of Ancient Earth when they wore any costumes at all. As Mitch snapped a few more photos he gradually realized that each of the paintings was meant to depict some aspect of human love. It was puzzling. He had not expected to find love here, or in any part of Felipe Nogara's chosen environment. As he left the temple through another door, he passed a lady who was evidently the resident goddess. vShe was bronze, and the upper part of her beautiful body emerged nude from glittering sea-green waves. He photographed the smiling statue and moved on. The second building's interior paintings showed scenes of hunting, and of women in childbirth. The goddess of this temple was clothed modestly in bright green and armed with a bow and quiver. Bronze hounds waited at her feet, eager for the chase. As he moved on to the last temple, Mitch found his steps quickening slightly. Could something be drawing him there? Whatever attraction might have existed was annihilated in revulsion as soon as he stepped into the place. If the first building was a temple raised to Love, surely this one honored Hate. On the painted wall fight opposite the entrance, a sow-like beast thrust its ugly head into a cradle, devouring the screaming child. Beside it, men in togas, faces glowing with hate, stabbed one of their own number to death. All around the walls men and women and children suffered pointlessly and died horribly, without hope. Tlie spirit of destruction was almost palpable within this room. It was like a berserker's -- Mitch took a step back and closed his eyes, bracing his arms against the sides of the entrance. Yes, something more than clever painting and lighting had been set to work here, to honor Hate. It was something physical, that Mitch found not entirely unfamiliar. Years ago, during a space battle, he had experienced the attack of a berserker's mindbeam, a weapon designed to throw organized thought into confusion. Men had learned how to shield their ships from mindbeams. Did they now bring the enemy's weapons inside? Mitch opened his eyes. The beam he felt now was very weak, but it IF carried something worse than mere confusion. M itch stepped back and forth through the entrance. Outside the walls of the temple, the effect practically disappeared. Inside, it was perceptible, an energy that pricked at the rage centers of the brain. Slowly, slowly, it seemed to be fading, like a residual discharge from a machine that has been turned off. If it was turned off, and he could feel it now, what must this temple be like when the projector was on? More importantly, why was such a thing here at all, built into these walls? Was it meant only to goad a few gladiators on to livelier deaths? Possibly. Mitch glanced at this temple's towering bronze god, riding his chariot over the world, and shivered. He suspected something worse than the simple brutality of Roman games. Yes, worse. He remembered seeing an intercom station near the first temple he had entered. He walked back there, and thoughtfully punched out the number of Ship's Records on the intercom keys. When the automated voice answered, he ordered: "I want some information about the design of this arena, particularly the three structures spaced around the upper rim." The voice asked him if he wanted diagrams. "No. At least not yet. Just tell me what you can about the designer's basic purpose." There was a delay of several seconds. Then the voice said: "The basic designer was a man named Oliver Mical, since deceased. In his design programming, frequent reference is made to descriptive passages within a literary work by one Geoffrey Chaucer of Ancient Earth. The quote fantastic unquote work is titled The Knight's Tale." The name of Chaucer rang only the faintest of bells for Mitch. But he remembered that Oliver Mical had been one of Nogara's brainwashing experts, and also a classical scholar. "What kind of psycho-electronic devices are built into these three structures?" "There is no record aboard of any such installation." Mitch Was sure about the hateprojector in the temple; it might have been built in secretly. It probably had been, if his worst suspicions were true. He ordered: "Read me some of the relevant passages of this literary work." "The three temples are those of Mars, Venus and Diana," said the intercom. "A passage relevant to the temple of Mars follows, in original language: "First on the wal was peynted a forest In which there dwelleth neither man ne beast With knotty, knarry, barreyn trees olde Of stubbes sharp and hideous to biholde." Mitch could understand only a word here and there, but he was not really listening now. The words "temple of Mars" had been enough to convince him of the worst; for he had heard that phrase applied to a newly risen secret cult of berserkerworshippers. "And downward from a hill, under a bente Ther stood the temple of Mars armipotente Wrought of burned steal, of which the entree Was long and streit, and gastly for to see." T here was a soft sound behind Mitch, and he turned quickly. Katsulos stood there. He was smiling, but his eyes reminded Mitch of Mars' statue. "Do you understand the ancient language, Spain? No? Then I shall translate." He took up the verse in a chanting voice: "Then saw I first the dark imagining Of felony, and all its compassing The cruel ire, red as any fire The pickpurse, and also the pale dread The smiler with the knife under his cloak The stable burning with the black smoke The treason of the murdering in the bed The open war, with all the wounds that bled..." "Who are you, really?" Mitch demanded. He wanted it out in the opep. And he wanted to gain time, for Katsulos wore a pistol at his belt. "What is this to you? Some kind of religion?" "Not some religion!" Katsulos shook his head, while his eyes glowed steadily at Mitch. "Not a mythology of distant gods, nor a system of pale ethics for dusty philosophers. No!" He took a step closer. "Spain, there is no time now for me to proselytize with craft and subtlety. I say only this -- the temple of Mars stands open to you! The new god of all creation will accept your sacrifice and your love." "You pray to that bronze statue?" Mitch tensed, getting ready. "No, the Mars of the ancients is not our god!" The fanatic's words poured out faster and louder, "The myth with helmet and sword is our symbol and no more. Our god is new, and real, and worthy. He wields death-beam and missile, and his glory is as the nova sun. He is the descendant of Life and feeds on Life as is his right. And we who give ourselves to any of his units become immortal in him though our flesh perishes at his touch." "I've heard there were men who prayed to berserkers," said Mitch. "Somehow I never expected to meet one." Faintly in the distance he heard a man shouting, and feet pounding down a corridor. Suddenly he wondered if he or Katsulos was more likely to receive reinforcement. "Soon we will be everywhere," said Katsulos loudly. "We are here now, and we are seizing this ship. We will take it out to save the unit of our god orbiting the hypermass. And there we will give the badlife Karlsen to Mars, and we will give ourselves, and this great ship. And through Mars we will live forever!" He looked into Mitch's face and started to draw his gun, just as Mitch hurled himself forward. IF Katsulos tried to spin away as Mitch reached him. Mitch failed to get a solid grip, and both men fell sprawling, a few feet apart. Mitch saw the gun muzzle swing round on him, and dived desperately for shelter behind a row of seats. Splinters flew around him as the gun blasted. In an instant he was moving again, in a crouching run that carried him into the temple of Venus by one door and out by another. Before Katsulos could sight at him for another shot Mitch had leaped down an exit stairway. As he emerged into a corridor, he heard gunfire from the direction of the crew's quarters. He went the other way, heading for Hemphill's cabin. At a turn in the passage a black uniform stepped out to bar his way, aiming a pistol, Mitch charged without hesitation, taking the policeman by surprise. The gun fired even as he knocked it aside, and then his rush bowled the black uniform over. Mitch sat on him and clobbered him with fists and elbows until he was quiet. Then, captured gun in hand, Mitch hurried on to Hemphill's door. It slid open before he could pound on it, and closed again as soon as he jumped inside. A dead black-uniform sat leaning against the wall, unseeing eyes aimed at Mitch, bullet-holes patterned across his chest. "Welcome," said Hemphill drily. He stood with his left hand on an elaborate control console that had been raised from a place of concealment inside the huge desk. In his right hand a machine pistol hung casually. "It seems we face greater difficulties than we expected." IV L ucinda sat in the darkened cabin that was Jor's hiding place, watching him eat. Immediately after his escape she had started roaming the ship's passages, looking for him, whispering his name, until at last he had seen her and had answered. Since then she had been smuggling food and drink to him. He was no mere boy, as she had thought at first glance. He was a man of about her own age, with tiny lines at the corners of his suspicious eyes. Paradoxically, the more she helped him, the more suspicious his eyes became. Now he paused in his eating to ask: "What do you plan to do when we reach Nogara, and a hundred of his men come aboard to search for me? They'll soon find me then." She wanted to tell him about Hemphill's plan for rescuing Karlsen. Once Johann Karlsen was aboard, no one on this ship would have to fear Nogara. Or so she felt. But just because Jor still seemed suspicious of her, she hesitated to trust him with a secret. "You knew you'd be caught eventually," she countered. "So why did you run away?" "You don't know what it's like, being their prisoner." "I do know." He ignored her contradiction. "They trained me with the others, to fight in the arena. And then they singled me out, and began to train me for something even worse. Now they flick a switch somewhere, and I start to kill, like a berserker." "What do you mean?" He closed his eyes, his food forgotten. "I think there's a man they want me to assassinate. Every day or so they put me in the temple of Mars and drive me mad, and then the image of this man is always sent to me. Always it's the same face and uniform. And I must destroy the image, with a sword or a gun or with my hands. I have no choice when they flip that switch, no control over myself. They've hollowed me out and then filled me up again with their own madness. They're madmen. I think they go into the temple themselves and turn the foul madness on, and wallow in it before their idol." He had never said so much to her in one speech before. She was not sure how much of it was true, but she felt he believed it all, and she reached for his hand. "Jor, I do know something about them. That's why I've helped you. And I've seen other men who were really brainwashed. They haven't really destroyed you, you'll be all right again some day." "They want me to look normal." He opened his eyes, which were still suspicious. "Why are you on this ship, anyway?" "Because." She looked into the past. "Two years ago I met a man called Johann Karlsen. Yes, the one everyone knows of. I spent about ten minutes with him, before he -- disappeared." She sighed. "If he's still alive, he's certainly forgotten about me. But I fell in love with him." "In love!" Jor snorted, and began to pick his teeth. Or I thought I fell in love with him, she said to herself. Watching Jor now, understanding and forgiving his sullen mistrust, she realized that she was no longer able to visualize Karlsen's face clearly. Something triggered Jor's taut nerves, and he jumped up tp peek out of the cabin into the passage. "What's that noise? Hear? It sounds like fighting." #O#." Hemphill's voice was grimO mer than usual. The surviving crewmen are barricaded in their quarters, surrounded and under attack. The damned berserker-lovers hold the bridge, and the engine room. In fact they hold the ship, except for this." He patted the console that he had raised from its concealment inside Nogara's innocent-looking desk. "I know Felipe Nogara, and I thought he'd have a master control in his cabin, and I thought we might possibly need it. That's why I had myself quartered in here." "What all does it control?" Mitch asked, wiping his hands. He had just dragged the dead man into a closet. Katsulos should have known better than to send only one against the High Admiral. "I believe it will override any control on the bridge or in the engine room. With it I can open or close most of the doors and hatches on the ship. And there seem to be scanners hidden in a hundred places, connected to this little viewscreen. IF The berserker-lovers aren't going anywhere with this ship until they've done a lot of rewiring, or gotten us out of this cabin." "I don't suppose we're going anywhere either," said Mitch. "Have you any idea what's happened to Lucy?" "No. She and that man Jor may be free. And they may do us some good, but we can't count on it. Spain, look here." Hemphill pointed to the little screen. "This is a view inside the guardroom and prison, under the arena's seats. If all those individual cells are occupied, there must be about forty men in there." "That's an idea. They may be trained fighters, and they'll certainly have no love for the black uniforms." "I could talk to them from here," Hemphill mused. "But how can we free them and arm them? I can't control their individual cell doors, though I can keep the enemy locked out of that area, at least for a while. Tell me, how did the fighting start? What set it off?" Mitch told Hemphill what he knew. "It's almost funny. The cultists have the same idea you have, of taking the ship out to the hypermass and going after Karlsen. Only of course they want to give him to the berserker machine." He shook his head. "I suppose Katsulos handpicked cultists from among the police for this mission. There must be more of them around than any of us thought." Hemphill only shrugged. Maybe he understood fairly well those fanatics out there whose polarity happened to be opposite from his own. L ucinda would not leave Jor now, nor let him leave her. Like hunted animals they made their way through the corridors, which she knew well from her days of restless walking. She guided him around the sounds of fighting, to where he wanted to go. He peered around the last corner, and brought his head back to whisper: "There's no one at the guardroom door." "But how will you get in? And some of the vultures may be inside, and you're not armed." He laughed soundlessly. "What have I to lose? My life?' He moved on around the corner. Mitch's fingers suddenly dug into Hemphill's arm. "Look! Tor's there, with the same idea you had. Open the door for him, quick!" In the temple of Mars, most of the painted panels had been removed from the interior walls. Two black-uniformed men were at work on the mechanism thus revealed, while Katsulos sat in the center, watching Tor's progress through his own secret scanners. When he saw Jor and Lucinda being let into the guardroom, Katsulos pounced. "Quick, turn on the beam and focus on him! Boil his brains with it. He'll kill everyone in there, and then we can take our time with the others." His two assistants hurried to obey. They arranged cables and a directional antenna. One asked: "He's the IF one you were training to assassinate Hemphill?" "Yes, his brain rhythms are on the chart. Focus on him quickly!" "Set them free and arm them!" Hemphill's image shouted, from a guardroom viewscreen. "You men there! Fight with us and I promise to take you to freedom when the ship is ours. And I promise to take Johann Karlsen with us, if he's alive." There was a roar from the cells at the offer of freedom, and another roar at Karlsen's name. "With him, we'd go on to Esteel itself!" one prisoner shouted. When the beam from the temple of Mars struck downward, it went unfelt by everyone but Jor. The others in the guardroom had not been conditioned by repeated treatments, and the heat of their emotions was already high. But the beam hit Tor's sensitized brain with overwhelming force, just as he picked up the key that would open the cells. In a paroxysm of rage he dropped the keys, and grabbed an automatic weapon from the arms rack. The first burst he fired shattered Hemphill's image from the viewscreeit. With the fragment of his mind that was still his own, he felt despair like that of a drowning man. He knew he was not going to be able to resist what was coming next. When Jor fired at the viewscreen, Lucinda understood what was being done to him. "Jor, no!" She fell to her knees before him. The face of Mars looked down at her, frightening beyond anything she had ever seen. "Jor, stop it! I love you!" Mars laughed at her love, or tried to laugh. But Mars could not quite manage to point the weapon at her, for Jor was trying to come back into his own face again, now coming back halfway, strugghng terribly. "And you love me, Jor, I can see it. Even if they force you to kill me, remember that I know that." Jor felt a healing power, opposing the power of Mars. To his mind came the pictures he had once glimpsed in the temple of Venus. Of course, there must be a coimtering projector built in up there, and someone had managed to turn it on. He came above his red rage like a swimmer surfacing, lungs bursting, from a drowning sea. He looked down at the gun in his hands. With a great effort of will he forced his fingers to begin opening. Mars still shouted at him, louder and louder, but Venus' power grew stronger still. His hands opened and the weapon clattered on the floor. O nce the gladiators had been freed and armed, the fight was soon over, though not one of the cultists tried to surrender. Katsulos and the two with him fought to the last from inside the temple of Mars, with the hate projector turned up to maximum power, and the recorder, chanting voices roaring out their song. Perhaps Katsulos still hoped to force his enemies into acts of self-destructive rage. Or perhaps he had the projector on as an act of worship. Whatever his reasons, the three inside the temple absorbed the full effect themselves. Mitch had seen bad things before, but when he at last broke open the temple door, he had to turn away for a moment. Hemphill showed only satisfaction at seeing how the worship of Mars had culminated aboard Nirvana II. "Let's see to the bridge and engine room first. Then we can get this mess cleaned up and be on our way." Mitch was glad to follow, but he was detained for a moment by Jor. "Was it you who managed to turn on the counter-projector? If it was, I owe you much more than my life." Mitch stared at him blankly. "Counter-projector? What're you talking about?" "But there must have been..." When the others had hurried away, Jor remained in the arena for a few moments, looking in awe at the thin walls of the temple of Venus, where no mindbeam projector could be hidden. Then a girl's voice called, and Jor too hurried out. There was silence in the arena. "Emergency condition concluded," said the voice of the intercom station, to the rows of empty seats. "Ship's Records returning to normal operation. Last question asked was about basis of temple designs. Chaucer's verse relevant to temple of Venus follows, in original language: "I recche nat if it may bettre be To have victorie of them, or they of me So that I have myne lady in myne armes. For though so be that Mars is god of Armes, Your vertu is so great in hevene above That, if yow list, I shall wel have my love... Venus smiled, half-risen from her His finest novel since The Dragon Masters! Humanity had peopled Earth with slaves from a thousand planets. Now the slaves rose against theml I i '# In the same big issue of Galaxy: Robert Silverberg, Frank Herbert, Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys, Willy Ley, etc. April Galaxy on sale now! m  IF IF  Short Story The Pretend Kind We was warned not to beHeve in his fantasies. What was he to do when he met reality? A t supper Tommy Wilson casually mentioned to his parents, 'I had a nice long talk with God today." Amy Wilson corrected her little son sweetly. "We don't call that talking, Tommy. We say it is pray mg. "Oh, it wasn't saying prayers," Tommy insisted. "We just had a talk -- almost until supper time. And He said He couldn't come home to supper with me because He had to meet some friends." The senior Wilsons exchanged glances and let the topic die. They had developed a certain immunity to surprise over the few years since Tommy's birth, for he was a precocious little fellow, given to long moody silences and unexpected excursions of the mind. However, while the evening bath ritual progressed Tommy looked up from an intense concentration upon sailing his plastic boats and remarked, "God looks just like an astronaut." "That's very nice," commented Amy Wilson, "but we must be careful to know which things are true and which are the sort we play make-believe games with." "Oh, this is a true one," Tommy answered. She said, "Remember how we tell the difference between the real things and the pretend kind? Could you see this astronaut when you had your eyes closed?" Tommy mumbled, "No." Then he chortled triumphantly. "That makes Him true, because you can still see the make-believe ones with your eyes closed." Patiently, and slightly worried, Amy continued the test. "Could you touch this person? Could you feel it in your fingers when you did?" "Oh, yes." Tommy giggled at some memory. "He held my hand when we went exploring in the park, and it made funny tickles go all through me." Amy called her husband. "All right. Tommy," Ben assumed the interrogation, "we've got some problems here that we need to understand. Now you pay attention and think a long time before you answer me, because it could be very bad if you don't. You met a man today and went exploring with him?" "It wasn't a man," insisted Tommy. "It was God." "But he looked like an astronaut -- helmet and everything?" "He didn't have the helmet on. He was carrying it." "Tell Daddy the real truth, Tommy," his mother admonished with sweet firmness. "You and the little Beckwith boy, who got that astronaut suit last Christmas, went down by the river, and you're afraid to admit it because you feel you will be spanked." "Oh, no!" Tommy shook his head violently. "It wasn't Jerry; it was God," Ben took over again. "But ne looked like Jerry Beckwith -- watching Tommy's stubbornly shaking head -- "then like another little boy -- or girl about your size." "He was bigger," Tommy stated firmly. 'Tall as the ceiling." "You let a complete stranger persuade you to go through the woods to the river and...?" Tommy heard his mother give a sort of moan. "Tommy! Tommy!" she cried. "Don't you remember? You are never to allow anyone you don't know take you anywhere. Always run and call for help when somebody like that talks to you." "But I did know Him, Mommy. It was God -- and you told me God was all right." "How could you be certain this stranger was God, son?" Ben tried to control his voice. "He was 'way tall, and there was a funny shining in His face." Tommy yawned. "And He came out of the sky." Tommy's father forced himself to sound cheerful and said, "I'll tell you what, son: you just go to sleep now and forget all about it. Then tomorrow we'll go to the zoo. How about that?" "Okay." Ben signaled his wife and they started to tip-toe from the room. Tommy murmured between prodigious yawns, "That's what God told me too." "What did he tell you, dear?" Aniy prompted softly. "He told me to forget all about talking to Him. Only he said it funny, like this: 'Forget, Tommy; forget, Tommy' -- a long time, and His eyes got bigger." Tommy swallowed half the room in a wide yawn and popped off to dreamland, as healthy little boys sometimes do. IF B en looked at his wife and saw she was near hysteria. "Fve been trying to tell you, and you won't listen to me," she repeated almost incoherently. "His mind is running out of control. He's losing the power to distinguish between those imaginative worlds he builds constantly and what is real." "Now whose imagination's getting out of bounds?" Ben patted his wife and roughed her hair. "There's bound to be a bit of basic truth under what the kid's saying. Some stranger must have won his confidence, and Tommy has magnified the event because his conscience told him this was a thing we'd warned him against. If you can hold on to yourself and stop crying for a while ril take a walk down our block and ask neighbors if any of them noticed a stranger hanging around today." She whirled away and faced Ben stubbornly. "We're going to have a psychiatrist! You won't stop me this time. We're losing our child, Ben -- to a world that doesn't exist." He shrugged, resigned. "If it wiM keep you happy." "Then let's do it now," Amy said urgently. "Jerry Beckwith's father -- you can talk to him tonight." "Ought we let neighbors know about this? People think there's something odd about a family when one of them needs a psychiatrist." "I don't care what anybody thinks," Amy cried out. "It doesn't matter whether George Beckwith is a neighbor or not. He's supposed to be the best psychiatrist in town. Ben, don't put this thing off. Go right now!" "All right, gal. But don't fly into pieces before I have time to cross the lawn." Ben stalked out the front door, muttering unhappily to himself. When he returned with Doctor lkwith across the dew spattered grass Ben found Amy waiting outside. "He's awake again," she called. "He's got a long story about this afternoon." "Think you might have trouble figuring whether it's the mother or her son who needs you?" Ben realized suddenly that his attempt at humor sounded more like a rueful complaint. However, Beckwith chuckled. "We'll have a chat with Tommy first." He patted Amy's shoulder. "I'll bet you're ready to join the club with Martha and me to agitate for having it made a law that kids get born after they are thirty years old." They found Tommy sitting in the middle of his bed, bubbling with excited appreciation of the scene he was creating. "Now, Tommy, tell Doctor Beckwith what you just said to me," Amy coaxed. "evering -- how the man came, where he... "It was not a man," Tommy insisited vehemently. "It was God." George Beckwith puHed a chair up and sat directly in front of the boy. "We'll agree it must have been God so you won't be afraid your parents will punish you for talking to a stranger. How about that, son?" Tommy muttered, "Okay." "So why don't you tdl me the whole story of your adventure?" Hesitating and somewhat worried, Tommy looked sideways at his father, but he warmed up and forgot to be wary as excitement of his narration grew. "I was playing in the park "Our park? Across the street?" Ben asked sharply, and became silent at a warning gesture from Beckwith. "'Way down at the other end," admitted Tommy reluctantly, and his father spoke quickly, "That's all right this time, son. Go on." "There was a dead turtle down walking inside his house. The policemiain told me about it; that's why I went," he finished defensively. Amy whispered iin the boy's ear, "Daddy doesn't mind." "That was when God came down out of the sky, and He watched the ants with me. I remembered what Daddy told me about ants, and so I scraped a big piece of their trail away so He could see how funny ants behaved when they got lost and sitarted running around in circles. "And God said, 'Does your father like to show you how to make things lose their way and be afraid?' And I told Him Daddy wants me to know all about animals and bugs. God was very interested in you, Daddy, and how you helped me find birds' eggs for my collection. He wanted to know why we stole eggs from the birds, and I told Him how we put them in abox so we could look at them and show them to other people when Mommy had a big party. And He said, 'Is everybody Mke your Daddy?' And I said, 'Oh, yes.'" T ommy leaned toward the doctor. "I tkd God about all the horns you hang in your den that you took away from the deer when you killed them -- and the big stuffed fish, and about how Miss Dorsey has a jar of poison that we can't touch at school, and we bring bugs we find and she puts them in the jar until they're dead, and we stick them on pins and keep them on a shelf where everybody can look at them. "And God said, 'Do you like to kill things so you can look at them?' And I said, 'Oh, yes; it's fun, because we always win and have a bigger collection than Miss Runge's room has. That's the way we study things, Miss Dorsey always tells us.' And then I smashed an ant to show Him how things died. "And God said He liked to study things too. But He studies little children instead of bugs. Only He doesn't need to kill them first. He said He's a -- 'poflogist; He learns about civ -- civiliz-shuns. That's His job. He said He could always tell what a civiliz-shun would be when it grew up if He studied little children. I don't know what He means." "What else did you talk about?" Doctor Beckwith asked casually. "Your new bicycle? Or school?" Tommy shook his head. "God wanted to hear about things dying -- mostly. I told Him how Jeanie got run over by a car that didn't stop and nobody ever found out who. And He asked me what we would do if somebody did find out who, and I said, 'Oh, he'll get kihed in the jail.' And I told Him all about that chair with elec-trisity in it that Daddy said they had in a dungeon at the jail. And God said, 'Does your IF daddy people too?' Amd I said, Oh, yes.'" Amy made a strangled sound. 'Tommy! You shouldn't have said that! You know your father is the sweetest, kindest man alive. He would never kill anybody." Tommy looked at her with widened eyes. "But you said he did." "When did I ever say anything like that?" "When he was in an airplane. those people in the war, and we all had to stand while the soldiers marched and the gen'ral pinned those ribbons on Daddy's uniform and I got sick from ice cream." Tommy finished with several yawns. Beckwith signaled, and the parents unobtrusively moved toward the door. They heard Tommy's murmured, "Good night, Daddy; Good night, Mommy." r ie doctor joined them later, frankly puzzled. "It's a fantasy that's settled in pretty deep," he told them, "so strong that this oharacter be talks about has become as real to him as you or Amy. He's not retreating into it yet to escape from the problems around him; that's a hopeful sign." "But your word 'yet' means you are afraid he will take the next step toward withdrawal -- and insanity?" Amy cried out. And Ben snapped, "Let's have k straight, George. We're friends and neighbors; I want your verdict without any of the evasions and glib doublealk doctors dish out." "Actually, I'm not sure, Ben." Beckwith sat and fisihed out his pipe. 'Tommy's played with Jerry enough so that I've observed samples of that astounding imagination of his. I've watched him and Jerry talking to their toys as if they lived, but neither kid has ever lost the sense of its being just a game. So I took a chance and tried a bit of hypnotism on Tommy. I thought I could focus this aberration for him so he'd understand it clearly as a creation of his imagination." "But it didn't work," Amy broke in, her perception sharpened by anxiety. Beckwith laughed ruefully. "That boy cannot be hypnotized. I thought I had him under; he reacted exactly Hke anyone I've put into deep hypnotic trance; he responded in all the expected ways to my suggestions." He stopped, shook his head, and the edge of ironic amusement came into his voice. "When I waked your son, he not only had this fantasy as vividly as ever, he also told me I was all wrong about it being a game of pretend with his toys. That just doesn't happen in the case of a person who has been hynotized and then awakened with the command to forget all that occurred during the session. Your Tommy was able to repeat every damned word we said to each other while I had him under -- verbatim." he next day was Sunday. Ben came outside to wash his car and saw his neighbor lay down pruning sihears and beckon. "I just spotted your son slipping across into the park," he told Ben. "Let's see if we can get a line on what he's up to." They found it relatively easy to keep the little boy in Slight, observMig from an upper path parelleling his course. From its height they could look down the wooded slope and see him plainly most of the time, meandering along with an aimlessness wfhddh indicated that he had no special destination in mind, stopping to turn over a rock to see what it hid, or to watch a bird o-r chase a butterfly. At times interlaced branches hid the boy from them, but they could hear him singing to himself or talking to a squirrel that swore ait him from the safety of an oak eyrie, and he appeared in the next open area at about the time and place the men judged was right." Then, in the deepest part of the forested ravine. Tommy passed from view under a giant oak's foliage and did not come out of its shadows on time. Ben looked at George Beckwith and asked, "Think we'd better side-'hill down that way and see what's keeping the kid?" "Give him a few more minutes," the psychiatrist muttered. "He's probably flat on the ground watching a bug." But Tommy did not emerge. Ben and George finally slipped down the slope and found no sign of the little boy under the oak. The doctor growled, "I'll be damned!" And Ben muttered, "I suppose the rascal could have spotted us and sneaked away across the bottom of the ravine -- but he'd need to pass over open ground in any direction from this tree." They stood a few minutes in the shade discussing the eel-like qualities of children and scanning the hill slopes. Finally they moved off to continue a random search of the park. Tommy was playing peacefully in the patio when th returned, but his eyes danced with mischief. I fooled you, Daddy," he chortled. "You sure did," Ben agreed. "How did you slip away from that tree without us spotting you?" Tommy's voice choked with glee. "I didn't. I was there all the time." "Now wait a minute, son; there was no place to hide." "I was in the tree." Beckwith remarked casually, "That's a mighty big tree for you to climb." "Oh, I didn't climb up the tree; I went inside. God was waiting for me, and He said, 'Your father is trying to find you, so let's play a joke on him.' So he took my hand and we walked right into the tree, and we saw you looking everywhere, and I heard Doctor Beckwith say a naughty word. And then you went on toward the other end looking for me, and God came home with me. He wanted to see my toys." Ben found himself unable to speak rationally, and Beckwith's question came only after some hesitation. "Was God playing with you when we crossed the street just now?" "Oh, no," chortled Tommy. "He went away. But He helped me make things wi my erector set, and He really liked my machine ; gun and the tank that shoots, and that bazooka..." IF Ben yelped. "Now wait a little ootton-pickin' minote! Those wasr toys are locked up in the store room." He turned to his wife, a question in his inflections. "That is, they're supposed to be -- those damned monsters and toy guns and war stuff the grandparents gave him for Christmas?" "They certainly are," snapped Amy. "And just remember that it was your parents as well as mine." She looked hard into Tommy's eyes. "Now Tommy, you know this is a lie; you know those shooting toys are in the store room." "Oh, I took God in there to see them," Tommy answered. "Son," his father said gravely, "you know you cannot get into that room because the door is always locked." "Oh, we didn't use the door," Tommy interrupted, filled to the brim with laughter. "We just went right through the back wall. God put His arm around me and said something about our atoms would have to go between some other atoms and it would feel different and not to be afraid. And I wasn't. It felt funny -- like dancing all over inside your skin." "That's qudite a stunt, son," Ben comimented, trying to control has voice. "And then I did something very bad." Tommy's face puckered up. "I let one of Daddy's secrets out. I couldn't quit after I started to say it, really-truly. I toid Him all about Daddy working on some rockets that would kill all die Russians. "And God made a funny joke. He said. 'We can't let that happen, can we? We'll just have to ex -- ter -- mm -- mate all the pests.' He didn't seem to be talking to me then, because He said, 'Could you hear all the child said?' several times. I asked Him what ex-term-mm-ate was, and He said, 'Oh, we just make everything awful hot around the germs until they burn up, tind then my friends won't be in any danger from it spreading td them.' And I told God that was what Daddy did to hornets' nests with his blowtorch, and God laughed. That's why I knew it was a joke." Beckwith broke in with his soothing voice. "Tommy, I need a little holiday in the morning. How about taking me with you when you talk to this person you call God?" Tommy shook his head. "I can't, because God isn't going to come down any more." Amy cried, "How do you know that?" "He said so." Outside Beckwith shook his head thoughtfully. "This new development I don't understand," he told Ben Wilson. "The boy is deliberately ending this particular fancy. Does that mean my offer to go with him chased him back into reality? Or is this the prelude to constructing another imaginary adventure?" T ieir wondering bad only a short span to plague them. They understood before the falling of another night -- for the space of a few breaths only -- when the mileloog ships appeared over Earth, and IF  Short Story To Conquer Earth They came from space fo conquer Earth -- but why didn't Earthmen show fear? T he savage squatted naked on a flat rock. Tight-skinned from the bitter cold, he swayed slowly back and forth like a small unkempt brown bush in the perpetual icy winds of Tierra del Fuego. His long greasy hair streamed out horizontally -- sometimes whipping completely around him and blowing in his eyes. From under crusted lids, watching the last of the sun, they were bloodstained, and blank as stones. He was alone beneath the heavy sky, the very incarnation of Dichot's dark masterpiece in oils, "The Aborigine". Except for the flotsam of . civilization that washed around him in the blowing sand, he' might have been any one of his naked ancestors who in succession endured the elements on the same rock since the coming of man to the Island. Alas, however, this particular savage Lived Better Electrically. He brushed his teeth and decorated himself in poster paint with an electric toothbrush, procured his food with an electric can-opener, deloused himself with Sweat Sock deoderant, forswore tribal legends for articles like "New Hope for the Dead" in Reader's Digest, and drank excessively of Tierra's explosive domestic bourbon. Now darkness was enveloping the island with characteristic speed. The savage struck a cigar on his horny foot, inhaled with a grunt of aboriginal satisfaction, and turned on his TV. The late show was sagging as usual, despite a slick foundation of commercials peddling the new forcefield brassiere. The savage was quite accustomed to nonsupport of all kinds, and his attention wandered. He heard it then very suddenly, even over the noise of wind and windbag; saw the blowing grassland illuminated as if by the rising of the moon. He looked up in time to watch the flaring spot expand to a monstrous silver globe, ringed in its own fires and shaking the ground with painful thunder. He shielded his face as it hurtled to a landing on the slope below, and while the risen dust cloud was stripping away in the wind, he drank from his bottle and waited and waited, with eyes growing somewhat more spiritual than before. A fter an hour, the ship swept again northward, above all but the thinnest remnants of the atmosphere. It was nightside, but from the edge of space the great curve of one horizon burned faintly orange with the coming dawn. TTie other horizon was only visible because it occulted an immense black wound out of the sphere of stars. The continents, however, were sharply defined. Most of the land surface glowed a ragged shimmering gray from the numberless lights of the single metropolis that stretched from shore to shore and slumbered unknowing below. On the control deck. Captain Crunch was alone with the data recorders, watching the city-continent move slowly down the viewscreen. His translucent body lay in its inflated bowl and quivered with irritation, and flaccid eddies of flesh rolled from one side of the couch to the other. Blast! The interview with the primitive had been ridiculous! (Before even leaving the ship he had gotten two gelatinous legs stuck in one leghole of his spacesuit and was forced to hop soddenly around the deck to keep from falling, accompanied by muted plops of mirth from officers and crew.) The being selected for "first contact" had been apparently unmoved by the ship's arrival. Amazed, after a short wait he decided to hasten Stage Two. He ordered out the full display: robots, weapons, lights, lines of guards, and technicians and equipment, and still the creature just sat there. They had almost decided that it was non-sentient -- a vegetable, growing in front of the radiating box -- when it arose, stretched its grotesque limbs, and lurched down to the very boundary of the death screen. It then motioned for attention and inscribed a recognizable face of the planet in the dust! Quite plainly indicated were the polar icecaps, its own island, and finally and unmistakably, a spot on the east coast of the northern continent. The native then pointed several times toward the north, and retired to watch his strange machine. The meeting had been over! (It was incredible! He could still hardly believe it!) To salvage the iniative. Crunch ordered Stage Ila. All of the artifacts were gathered and dissected, along with their owner. The creature's brain proved to be so jammed with trivia that no information survived analysis beyond a vocabulary of the planet's dominant language. The first contact had shown neither fear, bewilderment, nor hostility in any form Crunch was able to recognize. With some uneasiness, he had determined to seek the place specified in the northern hemisphere. At this point, he was buzzed by Electromagnetic and Ranging. The "humans" were broadcasting all up and down the spectrum, from radio to ultraviolet. Automatic beacons! D-F indicated a dark spot on the screen that was a sizeable landing strip. As they started to let down, the long coastline was just moving into dayside. T he President sat up into the cold bedroom. The sound of a landing was always a hand that pulled him from sleep by the stomach. The First Lady slept fitfully on as he padded to the window and stood shivering in the increasing light. A spheroid. It gleamed dry and hot on the dewy grass-grown concrete. He returned noiselessly for the state bathrobe and sat on the edge of the bed. After a short time the blood flowed again in his legs and the birds resumed singing. The President was a man in his late forties, not lean, but giving that impression, with a gray unshaven face and soft eyes. He watched the ship with unguarded weariness. In minutes, ' it had voided a scouting robot that scuttled away and out of his field of view. Shortly the thing was clanking and beeping in the garden below and woke the First Lady. She sat up, breathing warmly beside him. They looked at each other for a moment, and she rubbed her eyes and went for his breakfast. Without haste, he dressed in the special suit and stood contemplating her cooling impression in the bed. The President and the aliens arrived outside at the same moment. He saw that they were big and purple and repulsive -- perhaps seven feet high in bulging suits with transparent domes. He had approached to five yards and was pleased to see them growing restless; shivering, like Jell-O anticipating the spoon. He spotted the standard galactic translator, and was about to offer his crystalline vocabulary, when there was a barrage of plopping sounds from one of them, and the machine said with a slight Spanish accent: "Halt! Who goes there?" That was unfortunate. It meant a mutilated corpse lying around somewhere, probably a movie addict from the quality of the challenge. "All right," he said, and stopped. Nothing happened. They watched each other. The President pulled a speech out of his pocket and began to read it aloud. After a few seconds, the machine erupted in the brittle plopping of the alien language. It was a cold, exhiliarating morning, and the meeting was given an unreal, pastoral aspect by the rising mist. "Welcome conquerors," he said brightly, "to the planet Earth. By the authority vested in me by the world government, I, the President of the United States, gitfc you greetings from your new subjects, the people of Earth." He paused and held the paper closer to his eyes. "Excuse me." The machine faltered. He walkIF ed over and held the paper up to the eerie light of the death screen and continued, slower than before. "You will meet with no resistance or hostility, and the something or other, something will be vouchsafed you that... I'm afraid I have forgotten my glasses. With your permission I will, as we say, wing it! heh, heh, heh." The President searched his pockets and replaced the speech in one of them. The machine was plopping furiously. "You are to be informed that you can have anything we have on the planet, and that we will abide by your laws, whatever they may be. Also, I was to give you the key to Earth, however, ah... gentlemen, it wasn't returned the last time. You won't need it. I'm sure. My name, by the way is Hubert H. Hubris, and my general duty is to greet all conquering super-aliens, show them around, keep them happy. Is it working?" He pointed to the interpreter, which was pouring out a volume of plops and flashing lights and shaking its stand. T here was a stunned silence from the aliens. The President waited. Their grotesque pudding of a commander shuddered in his suit and shot an unreadable look at his subordinates. Then he spoke. "How did you anticipate our arrival?" "Not bad," said the President unhelpfully. He shifted to the other foot. "There are models that translate idiomatically, but I have always felt that they lack a certain diplomatic formality. Don't you agree?" They were trembling like things washed up on the beach. The commander began to plop ferociously, but the machine subverted the effect by rendering it to English in a perfectly even voice (with a slight Spanish accent) : "Silence, earthman. Yours is the audacity of a young and ignorant race. Before you stand the star-guard of the mighty Glom, scourge of the Universe. I am Captain Crunch, ordered to seize the backward worlds in this sector as bases in our struggle with the vicious enemies of the Glom. Your words are not rational; you display no race pride. Where are your people, your armies, your pitiful defenses?" The Earthman restrained a laugh. "Ah... pardon me, your Ignorance," he said, having a little sport with the interpreter, "If you will just let me continue with our usual routine, you will understand your subjects better. Here is a list, in Galactic, of the mineral wealth of the planet, and a tentative schedule of your appearances. I think we can make your stay here quite pleasant." At that point, a very fat young man bustled up behind the president, grinning vacantly. "Well... and here is the Vice-President, Edward Plimptosac. Everyone just calls him Flaccid Eddie. He will assist me with the lesser details of your tyranny." (Want to see some dirty prescriptions? Twelve-year-old-virgins?) The Glom had resented Flaccid Eddie from the first. Although he was opaque, the latter probably looked more like them than any other Earthman; and to their commander, he was a gross, insulting caricature ci the Noblest Form. A small pasty apparition of disgusting solidarity! Gods! This tiresome planet! His brains were very weary as he sloshed on his seat in the hurtling bus. These last three days had tested the legendary Glom composure to the quivering limit. Cnmch had been forced to censor the daily reports back to base, his mission hindered everywhere by bewildering indignities. He had to pity the little vermin, but he hated them because something about their squalid affluence rang very close to home. No one had even come out to watch the parade, and no one had shown up at the exhibits. And now this foolish 'television business. (He almost wished that he could believe it was all a super-plot.) And that devious primitive "Hubert"! They were on the way to the studio to "broadcast to all humanity, and rally them behind the Glom war effort." He groaned as the bus dove in and out of the huge potholes. T he thrice-accursed scouting robot was lost. After discovering nothing of value, it was carried by a crushing mob of humans down into some kind of underground railed transportation network, and had been swept away somewhere, radiating too weakly to be homed. Looking through its sensors, the Glom techs didn't begin to understand how to get it out. Crunch, of course, couldn't make a direct request of a primitive for any reason. Flaccid Eddie's response to an obvious hint was to suggest that they provide it wHh a fare. They were rushing down a paved strip in the crude vehicle provided by Hubert. Cars and trucks were rushing at them from all directions, dodging and swerving with spindly Earthmen leering from the windows. The center and sides were littered with wreckage; burned, bent, and twisted along every mile. Captain Crunch was shocked to see the broken carapace of one of Glomdom's beetle-like galactic rivals protruding horribly from an Earth vehicle wrapped around a bridge abutment. "The things were here about a month ago," Flaccid Eddie explained, "and they liked to drive around, and a lot of them got killed. Say, don't I smell something? Yes, I do!" He gagged happily, "It has ammonia in it!" Crunch looked quickly to see who was turning more purple, saw the rip in his suit, remembered being jostled against the Vice-President's tin lunch-box, and turned more purple. As he lost consciousness, he panicked and triggered his personal death screen. He awoke oozing around naked in a transparent globe of methaneammonia, covered with painful oxidation and fighting to breath. His first horrified thought was rebellion! He was surrounded by whirling lights and figures pointing red-eyed machines at him. He saw his suit lying on the floor, ripped in a dozen places. ("Et tu, Plimptosac!" ) Then the translator, inexplicably battered, was soothing him and explaining: Everything was fine. Although his death screen had killed everyone and crashed the bus, he was certainly IF not in captivity, and the broadcast would go on as scheduled. He would soon be on the air. The globe? An improvisation -- until they could send for another spacesuit. I n Kansas, the Fosdick family television set lit up their five cheerless faces. Father, Mother, grandmother, and children watched the greasy man with the melodious voice. "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is Reginald Phipps, for World Standard News. We have been conquered again, folks, and wait till you see them! They are big fat purple things from -- " he asked a question to the side -- "well, we don't know where they're from, but you'll love 'em. We bought rights to show you a whole bunch, but they had a little accident coming here on the freeway, and there is only one left. I regret to announce that the VicePresident, Mr. Edward Plimtosac, was also killed. We will join our exciting guest in just a moment, following this brief word from our sponsor." (Lap dissolve and flash to animated squeeze bottle.) Sweat Sock! It's New! The deoderant that makes you sweat! Science has known for years that perspiration is essential to the body's welfare. At last, friends, here is a deoderant that stimulates this healthful function without the rigors of hard physical labor. Just one application of Sweat Sock, and it will run down your legs, and fill up your shoes! (Crescendo and fade, camera returns to Phipps. Beside him in a huge transparent plastic bottle, with Sweat Sock printed on the front, dangling umbilical tubes and cables, is the alien.) "And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the boss of the Glop, our latest and greatest masters. Captain Crunch!' The camera closed Jn. He was slumped, translucent and hideous without his suit, in the bottom half of the globe. He stirred feebly and emitted a muffled stream of plops, like a garbage can being emptied. The translating machine wasn't even on the set, and no one could understand anything he said. The Fosdicks watched cheerlessly. After a minute, Mr. Fosdick walked over to the set and switched channels with a vicious flick of the wrist. T he subway was jammed with steaming humanity. The scouting robot clung sullenly to a strap in the swaying car. No one paid it the slightest attention, except the children. Every day at nine in the morning and three-thirty in the afternoon, they had kicked it, reviled it, tripped it, and covered its vision sensors with mucilage and bubble gum. Throughout all the long, lonely nights, it had ranged along the rattling cars and the smelly maze of concourses, halfblinded and lost. It had been muscled out of seats by burly charwomen and harassed by leather-jacketed hoods, and the flagging technicians had stopped looking through its remaining eye and listening to the high alien voices of its childish abusers. Finally its instruction signals ceased entirely, and the robot switched to self-protective override and blasted a huge crater up to the open air in downtown Baltimore. Twenty minutes later, it was seen on Interstate ##, running at full speed, clanking rustily toward Washington. F rom his darkened bedroom window, President Hubris watched the departure of the Glom. An hour ago the ship had been sealed. It lay featureless and silent; ominous, like the egg of some too-perfect bird. There had been no final communication, not evai a fare-thee-well, when suddenly it flamed and lifted off, rattling the glass, and disappeared ignomniiously into the drizzHng overcast. Long after the silence returned, the President saw the robot appe out of the twilight and run jerkily across the dimming white of the concrete. At the center, it jumped up and down, looking skyward, and ran around and around in small demented circles, waving its arms. After a long time, it fell down and flailed itself into inert junk. The President struck a dgar on his priceless Louis Quatorze chair, inhaled with a grunt of decadent satisfaction and turned on his TV. I I Back again in If -- one of ibe all-time ! I I great masters of science fictioni I I Read hh fhrtHing short novel of a race  ; that defied mankind -- and their dread master! I ;  Complete in the next issue of ff, along with stories by ; I I  Robert AAoore Wiams, Keitfi Loumer  Rosel G. ( I Brown and many ethers. Don't miss the May Ifl no IF IF  Serial The Moon is a Harsh Mistress T he battle was on. Mike had played my role as well or better than I could. Finn, when he could be reached, would be handled by "Adam". So I left, fast, calling out Greg's message of love to Mum. She was p-suited and had roused Grandpaw and suited him in -- first time in ears. Whole family was getting in act. So out I went, helmet closed and lasergun in hand. And reached lock thirteen and found it blind-dogged from other side with 'nobody in sight through bullseye. All correct, per drill, except stilyagi in charge of that lock should have been in sight. Did no good to pound. Tried anyhow, of course. Their fondest hopes for Luna were being realized -- it was under the concentrated attack of Earth's mightiest war vessels! m What Has Gone Before -- We Lunarians have put up with a lot from Earth, but time comes when we don't want to put up with more. Earth tells us what we can sell, who we sell it to, how much we can get for it. Means slavery. But... Earth owns us outright. Question is, what can we do about it? I don'fmind a gamble -- wouldn't mind fighting Earth with a chance to win -- but with no chance, no. Luna has no warships, Earth has plenty. Luna has no armies. Earth has armies to burn. Most of all, Luna is run by a big computer, and Earth owns the computer. But there's one thing Earth doesn't own -- me. And it just so happens that I'm the fellow that fixes the computer... and the computer is my good friend I call Mikef So maybe -- just maybe -- we Lunarians can do something at last. So we invent mythical leader named "Adam Selene" -- is really Mike -- and start rolling. Only one problem: Need help on Earth. That's the hard one, because earthworms I don't know, neither does Mike, neither does any good Loonie. Don't know where to look... until chance delivers one into hands, when group of stilyagi kids ask permission to kill him. I save his life, never regret it; name is Stuart With him, revolution is good chance. But best chance comes when Company overplays hand. Couple guards rape girl, get killed -- fight is on. Now Company falls right into trap -- has Moon under attack by every armed ship in space. All according to plan... we hope! Finally went back way I had come then blind-dogged every pressure -- and on through our home, through door on way back. Told Mum, then our vegetable tunnels and on up to told her to put one of boys on back our private surface lock leading to door with a lasergun -- here, take this And found a shadow on its bullsNo boys, no men, no able-bodied eye when should have been scalding women. Mum, Gramp and our small sunlight -- damned Terran ship had children were all that were left; rest landed on Davis surface! Its jacks had gone looking for trouble. Mimi formed a giant tripod over me, was wouldn't take lasergun. "I don't staring up ks jets. know how to use H, Manuel, and it's Backed down fast and out of too late to learn. You keep it. But there, blind-dogging both hatches, they won't get in through Davis tunIF nels. I know some tricks you never heard of." Didn't stop to argue. Arguing with Mimi is waste of time -- and she might know tricks I didn't know; she had stayed alive in Luna a long time, under worse conditions than I had ever known. This time lock thirteen was manned; two boys on duty let me through. I demanded news. "Pressure's all right now," older one told me. "This level, at least. Fighting down toward Causeway. Say, General Davis, can't I go with you? One's enough at this lock." "Nyet." "Want to get me an earthworm!" "This is your post, stay on it. If an earthworm comes this way, he's yours. Don't you be his." Left at a trot. So as a result of own carelessness, not keeping p-suit with me, all I saw of Battle of Corridors was tail end -- hell of a "defense minister." Charged north in Ring corridor, with helmet open; reached access lock for long ramp to Causeway. Lock was open; cursed and stopped to dog it as I went through, warily -- saw why it was open; boy who had been guarding it was dead. So moved most cautiously down ramp and out onto Causeway. Was empty at this end but could see figures and hear noise in-city, where it opens out. Two figures in prsuits and carrying guns detached selves and headed my way. Burned both. One p-suited man with gun looks much like another; I suppose they took me for one of their flankers. And to me they looked no different from Finn's men, at that distance -- save that I never thought about it. A new chum doesn't move way a cobber does; he moves feet too high and always scrambling for traction. Not that I stopped to analyze, not even: "Earthworms! KillV' Saw them, burned them. They were sliding softly along floor before realized what I'd done. S topped, intending to grab their guns. But were chained to them and could not figure out how to get loose. Key needed, perhaps. Besides, were not lasers but something I had never seen: real guns. Fired small explosive missiles I learned later. Just then all I knew was no idea how to use. Had spearing knives on end, too, sort called "bayonets," which was reason I tried to get them loose. Own gun was good for only ten full-power burns and no spare power pack; those spearing bayonets looked useful. One had blood on it, Loonie blood I assume. But gave up in seconds only, used belt knife to make dead sure they stayed dead, and hurried toward fight, thumb on switch. Was a mob, not a battle. Or maybe a battle is always that way, confusion and noise and nobody really knowing what's going on. In widest part of Causeway, opposite Bon Marche where Grand Ramp slopes northward down from level three, were several hundred Loonies, men and women, and children who should have been at home. Less than half were in p-suits and only a few seemed to have weapons. And pourIF ing down ramp were soldiers, all armed. But first thing I noticed was noise, din that filled my open helmet and beat on ears -- a growl. Don't know what else to call it; was compounded of every anger human throat can make, from squeals of small children to bull roars of grown men. Sounded like biggest dog fight in history. And suddenly realized I was adding my share, shouting obscenities and wordless yells. Girl no bigger than Hazel vaulted up onto rail of ramp, went dancing up it centimeters from shoulders of troopers pouring down. She was armed with what appeared to be a kitchen cleaver; saw her swing it, saw it connect. Couldn't have hurt him much through his p-suit but he went down and more stumbled over him. Then one of them connected with her, spearing a bayonet into her thigh and over backwards she went, falling out of sight. Couldn't really see what was going on, nor can remember -- just flashes, like girl going over backwards. Don't know who she was, don't know if she survived. Couldn't draw a bead from where I was, too many heads in way. But was an open-counter display, front of a toy shop on my left; I bounced up onto it. Put me a meter higher than Causeway pavement with clear view of earthworms pouring down. Braced self against wall, took careful aim, trying for left chest. Some uncountable time later found that my laser was no longer working, so stopped. Guess eight troopers did not go home because of me but hadn't counted -- and time really did seem endless. Although everybody moving fast as possible, looked and felt like instruction movie where everything is slowed to frozen motion. At least once while using up my power pack some earthworm spotted me and shot back. Was explosion just over my head and bits of shop's wall hit helmet. Perhaps that happened twice. Once out of juice I jumped down from toy counter, clubbed laser and joined mob surging against foot of ramp. All this endless time (five minutes?) earthworms had been shooting into crowd; you could hear sharp splatl and sometimes plop those little missiles made as they exploded inside flesh or louder pounkl if they hit a wall or something solid. Was still trying to reach foot of ramp when I realized they were no longer shooting. Were down, were dead, every one of them. XL A ll through Luna invaders were dead, if not that instant, then shortly. Over two thousand troopers dead. More than three times that number of Loonies died in stopping them. Plus perhaps as many Loonies wounded, a number never counted. No prisoners taken in any warren, although we got a dozen officers and crew from each ship when we mopped up. A major reason why Loonies, mostly unarmed, were able to kill armed and trained soldiers lay in fact that a freshly landed earthworm can't handle himself well. Our gravity, one-sixth what he is used to, makes all his lifelong reflexes his enemy. He shoots high without knowing it, is unsteady on feet, can't run properly -- feet slide out from under him. Still worse, those troopers had to fight downwards; they necessarily broke in at upper levels, then had to go down ramps again and again, to try to capture a city. And earthworms don't know how to go down ramps. Motion isn't running, isn't walking, isn't flying. Is more a controlled dance, with feet barely touching and simply guiding balance. A Loonie three-year-old does it without thinking, comes skipping down in a guided fall, toes touching every few meters. But an earthworm new-chums k, finds self "walking on air". struggles, rotates, loses control, winds up at bottom, unhurt but angry. But these troopers wound up dead; was on ramps we got them. Those I saw had mastered trick somewhat, had come down three ramps alive. Nevertheless only a few snipers at top of ramp landing could fire effectively. Tliose on ramp had all they could do to stay upright, hang onto weapons, try to reach level below. Loonies did not let them. Men and women (and many children) surged up at them, downed them, killed them with everything from bare hands to their own bayonets. Nor was I only lasergun around. Two of Finn's men swarmed up on balcony on Bon Marche and, crouching there, picked off snipers at top of ramp. Nobody told them to, nobody M them, nobody gave orders. Finn never had chance to control his halftrained disorderly militia. Fight started, they fought. And that was biggest reason why we Loonies won: We fought. Most Loonies never laid eyes on a live invader. But wherever troopers broke in. Loonies rushed in like white corpuscles -- and fought. Nobody told them. Our feeble organization broke down under surprise. But we Loonies fought berserk and invaders died. No trooper got farther down than level six in any warren. They say that people in Bottom Alley never knew we were invaded until over. B ut invaders fought well, too. These troopers were not only crack riot troops, best peace enforcers for city work F.N. had; they also had been indoctrinated and drugged. Indoctrination had told them (correctly) that their only hope of going Earthside again was to capture warrens and pacify them. If they did, they were promised relief and no more duty in Luna. But was win or die, for was pointed out that their transports could not take off if they did not win, as they had to be replenished with reaction mass -- impossible without first capturing Luna. (And this was true.) Then they were loaded with ener gizers, don't-worries and fear inhibitors that would make mouse spit at cat, and turned loose. They fought professionally and quite fearlessly -- died. IF In Tycho Under and in Churchill they used gas and casualties were more one-sided. Only those Loonies who managed to reach p-suits were effective. Outcome was same, simply took longer. Was knockout gas as Authority had no intention teach us a lesson, get us under control, put us to work. Reason for F.N.'s long delay and apparent indecision arose from method of sneak attack. Decision had been made shortly after we embargoed grain (so we learned from captured transport officers); time was used in mounting attack -- much of it in a long elliptical orbit which went far outside Luna's orbit, crossing ahead of Luna, then looping back and making rendezvous above Farside. Of course Mike never saw them; he's blind back there. He had been skywatching with his ballistic radars. But no radar can look over horizon. Longest look Mike got of any ship in orbit was eight minutes. They came skimming peaks in tight, circular orbits, each straight for target with a fast dido landing at end, sitting them down with high gee, precisely at new earth, # Oct # Gr. #h-#m-#s -- if not at that exact tenth of a second, then as close to it as Mike could tell from blip tracks. Elegant work, one must admit, on part of F.N. Peace Navy. Big brute that poured a thousand troops into L-City Mike did not see until it chopped off for grounding -- a glimpse. He would have been able to see it a few seconds sooner had he been looking eastward with new radar at Marc Undarum site, but son" at time and they were looking through it westward at Terra. Not that those seconds would have mattered. Surprise was so beautifully planned, so complete, that each landing force was crashing in at Greenwich # all over Luna, before anybody suspected. No accident that it was just new earth with all warrens in bright semi-lunar. Authority did not really know Lunar conditions -- but did know that no Loonie goes up onto surface unnecessarily during bright semi-lunar, and if he must, then does whatever he must do quickly as possible and gets back down inside -- and checks his radiation counter. So they caught us with our p-suits down. And our weapons. But with troopers dead we still had six transports on our surface and a command ship in our sky. O nce Bon Marche engagement was over, I got hold of self and found a phone. No word from Kongville, no word from Prof. JCity fight had been won, same for Novylen. Transport there had toppled on landing; invading force had been understrength from landing losses and Finn's boys now held disabled transport. Still fighting in Churchill and Tycho Under. Nothing going on in other warrens. Mike had shut down tubes and was reserving interwarren phone links for official calls. An explosive pressure drop in Churchill Upper, uncontrolled. Yes, Finn had checked in and could be reached. So I talked to Finn, told him where L-City transport was, arranged to meet at easement lock thirteen. Finn had much same experience as I -- caught cold save he did have p-suit. Had not been able to establish control over lasergunners until fight was over and himself had fought solo in massacre in Old Dome. Now was beginning to round up his lads and had one officer taking reports from Finn's office in Bon Marche. Had reached Novylen subcommander but was worried move men there by tube?" Told him to wait. They couldn't get at us by tube, not while we controlled power, and doubted if that transport could lift. "Let's look at this one." So we went out through lock thirteen, clear to end of private pressure, on through farm tunnels of a neighbor (who could not believe we had been invaded) and used his surface lock to eyeball transport from a point nearly a kilometer west of it. We were cautious in lifting hatch lid. Then pushed it up and climbed out; outcropping of rock shielded us. We Red-Indianed around edge and looked, using helmet binox. Then withdrew behind rock and talked. Finn said, "Think my lads can handle this." "How?" "If I tell you, you'll think of reasons why it won't work. So how about letting rne run my own show?" Have heard of armies where boss is not told to shut up -- word is "discipline." But we were amateurs. Finn allowed me to tag along -- unarmed. T ook him an hour to put it together, two minutes to execute. He scattered a dozen men around ship, using farmers' surface locks, radio silence throughout. Anyhow, some did not have p-suit radios, city boys. Finn took position farthest west. When he was sure others had had time, he sent up a flare. When flare burst over ship, everybody burned at once, each working on a predesignated antenna. Finn used up his power pack, replaced it and started burning into hull. Not door lock. Hull. At once his cherryred spot was joined by another, then three more, all working on same bit of steel -- and suddenly molten steel spattered out and you could see air fooshl out of ship, a shimmery plume of refraction. They kept working on it, making a nice big hole, until they ran out of power. I could imagine hooraw inside ship, alarms clanging, emergency doors closing, crew trying to seal three impossibly big holes at once, for rest of Finn's squad, scattered around ship, were giving treatment to two other spots in hull. They didn't try to burn anything else. Was a non-atmosphere ship, built in orbit, with pressure hull separate from power plant and tanks. They gave treatment where would do most good. Finn pressed helmet to mine. "Can't lift now. And can't talk. Doubt they can make hull tight enough to live without p-suits. What say we let her sit a few days and see if they come out? If they don't, then can move a heavy drill up here and give 'em real dose of fun." IF Decided Finn knew how to run his show without my sloppy help, so went back inside, called Mike and asked for capsule to go out to ballistic radars. He wanted to know why I didn't stay inside where it was safe. I said, "Listen, you upstart collection of semi-conductors, you are merely a minister-without-portfolio while  am Minister of Defense. I ought to see what's going on and I have exactly two eyeballs while you've got eyes spread over half of Crisium. You trying to hog fun?" He told me not to jump salty and offered to put his displays on a video screen, say in room L of Raffles. Did not want me to get hurt... and had I heard joke about drillman who hurt his mother's feelings? I said, "Mike, please let me have a capsule. Can p-suit and meet it outside Station West -- which is in bad shape as I'm sure you know." "Okay," he said, "it's your neck. Thirteen minutes. I'll let you go as far as Gun Station George." Mighty kind of him. Got there and got on phone again. Finn had called other warrens, located his subordinate commanders or someexplained how to make trouble for grounded transports. All but Hong Kong; for all we knew Authority's goons held ' Hong Kong. "Adam," I said, others being in earshot, "do you think we might send a crew out by rolligon and try to repair link Bee Ell?" "This is not Gospodin Selene," Mike answered in a strange voice, "this is one of his assistants. Adiun Selene was in Churchill Upper when it lost pressure. I'm afraid that we must assume that he is dead." 'Whatr "I am very sorry, Gospodin." "Hold phone!" Chased a couple of drillmen and a girl out of room, then sat down and lowered hush hood. "Mike," I said softly, "private now. What is this gum-beating?" # # TV yT an," he said quietly, "think to go someday. He's served his purpose and is, as you pointed out, almost out of the government. Professor and I have discussed this; the only question has been the timing. Can you think of a better last use for Adam than to have him die in this invasion? It makes him a national hero... and the nation needs one. Let it stand that 'Adam Selene is probably dead' until you can talk to Professor. If he still needs 'Adam Selene' it can turn out that he was trapped in a private pressure and had to wait to be rescued." "Well -- Okay, let it stay open. Personally, I always preferred your 'Mike personality anyhow." "I know you do, Man my first and best friend, and so do I. It's my real one. 'Adam' was a phony." "Uh, yes. But, Mike, if Prof is dead in Kongville, I'm going to need help from 'Adam' awful bad." "So we've got him iced and can bring him back if we need him. The stuffed shirt. Man, when this is over, are you going to have time to take up with me that research into humor again?" "I'll take time, Mike; that's a promise." 'Thanks, Man." Those days you and Wyoh never have time to visit... and Professor wants to talk about things that aren't much fun. Fll be glad when this was is over." "Are we going to win, Mike?" He chuckled. "It's been days since you asked me that. "Here's a pinkynew projection, run since invasion started. Hold on tight, Man -- our chances are now evenr "Good Bog!" "So button up and go see the fun. But stay back at least a hundred meters from the gun; that ship may be able to follow back a laser beam with another one. Ranging shortly. Twenty-one minutes." Didn't get that far away, as needed to stay on phone and longest cord around was less. I jacked parallel into gun captain's phone, found a shady rock and sat down. Sun was high in west, so close to Terra that I could see Terra only by visoring against Sun's glare. No crescent yet, new earth ghostly gray in moonlight surrounded by a thin radiance of atmosphere. I pulled my helmet back into shade. "Ballistic control, O'Kelly Davis now at Drill Gun George. Near it, I mean, about a hundred meters." Figured Mike would not be able to tell how long a cord I was using, out of kilometers of wires. "Ballistic control aye aye," Mike answered without argument. "I will so inform HQ." "Thank you, ballistic control. Ask HQ if they have heard from Congressman Wyoming Davis today," Was fretted about Wyoh and whole family. "I vill inquire." Mike waited a reasonable time, then said, "HQ says that Gospazha Wyoming Davis has taken charge of first-aid work in Old Dome." "Thank you." Chest suddenly felt better. Don't love Wyoh more than others but -- well, she was new. And Luna needed her. "Ranging," Mike said briskly. "All guns, elevation eight seven zero, azimuth one nine three zero, set parallax for thirteen hundred kilometers closing to surface. Report when eyeballed." I stretched out, pulling knees up to stay in shade, and searched part of the sky indicated, almost zenith and a touch south. With sunlight not on my helmet I could see stars, but inner part of binox were hard to position -- had to twist around and raise up on right elbow. Nothing -- Hold it, was star with disk... where no planet ought to be. Noted another star close, watched and waited. Uh huh! Da! Growing brighter and creeping north very slowly -- hey, that brute is going to land right on us! But thirteen hundred kilometers is a long way, even when closing to terminal velocity. Reminded self that it couIdnt fall on us from a departure ellipse looking back, would have to fall around Luna -- unless ship had maneuvered into new trajectory. Which Mike hadn't mention. Wanted to ask, decided not to. Wanted him to put all his savvy into analyzing that ship, not distract him with questions. IF All guns reported eyeball tracking, including four Mike was laying himself, via selsyns. Those four reported tracking dead on by eyeball without touching manual controls. Good new. Meant that Mike had that baby taped, had solved trajectory perfectly. Shortly was clear that ship was not falling around Luna, was coming in for landing. Didn't need to ask; it was getting much brighter and position against stars was not changing. Damn, it was going to land on us "Five hundred kilometers closing," Mike said quietly. "Stand by to burn. All guns on remote control, override manually at command burn.' Eighty seconds." Longest minute and twenty seconds I've ever met -- that brute was big Mike called every ten seconds down to thirty, then started chanting seconds. " -- five -- four -- three -- two got much brighter. Almost missed little speck that detached itself just before -- or just at -- burn. But Mike said suddenly, "Missile launched. Selsyn guns track with me, do not override. Other guns stay on ship. Be ready for new coordinates." . A few seconds or hours later he gave new coordinates and added, "Eyeball and burn at will." I tried to watch ship and missile both, lost both. Jerked eyes away from binoculars, suddenly saw missile -- then saw it impact, between us and catapult head. Closer to us, less than a kilometer. No, it did not go off, not an Hfusion reaction, or I wouldn't be telling this. But made a big, bright explosion of its own, remaining fuel I guess, silver bright even in sunlight, and shortly I felt-heard ground wave. But nothing was hurt but a few cubic meters of rock. Ship was still coming down. No longer burned bright. Could "see it as a ship now and didn't seem hurt. Expected any instant that tail of fire to shoot out, stop it into a dido landing. Did not. Impacted ten kilometers north of us and made a fancy silvery halfdome before it gave up and quit being anything but spots before eyes. Mike said, "Report casualties, secure all guns. Go below when se- cured." "Gun Alice, no casualties... "Gun Bambie no casualties..." "Gun Caesar, one man hit by rack splinter, pressure contained"... Went below, to that proper phone, called Mike. "What happened, Mike? Wouldn't they give you control after you burned their eyes out?" 'They gave me contrc, Man." "Too late?" "I crashed it, Man. It seemed the prudent course." A n hour later was down with Mike, first time in four or five months. Could reach Complex Under more quickly thMi L-City and was in as close touch there with anybody as would be in city -- with no interruptions. Needed to talk to Mike. I had tried to phone Wyoh from catapult head tube station. Reached somebody at Old Dome temporary hospital and learned that Wyoh had collapsed and been bedded down herself, with enough sleepy-time to keep her out for night. Finn had gone to Churchill with a capsule of his lads, to lead attack on transport there. Stu I hadn't heard from. Hong Kong and Prof were still cut off. At moment Mike and I seemed to be total government. And time to start Operation Hard Rock. But Hard Rock was not just throwing rocks; was also telling Terra what we were going to do and why -- and our just cause for doing so. Prof and Stu and Sheenie and "Adam" had all worked on it, a dummy-up based on an assumed attack. Now attack had come, and propaganda had to be varied to fit. Mike had already rewritten it and put it through print-out so I could study it. I looked up from a long roll of paper. "Mike, these news stories and our message to F.N. all assume that we have won in Hong Kong. How sure are you." "Probability in excess of eightytwo per cent." "Is that good enough to send these out?" "Man, the probability that we will win there, if we haven't already, approaches certainty. That transport can't move. The others were dry, or nearly. There, isn't that much monahave to come here. Which mean? moving troops overland by rolligon -- a rough trip with the Sun up even for Loonies -- then defeat us when they get here. They can't. This assumes that that transport and its troops are no better armed than the others." "How about that repair crew to Bee Ell?" "I say not to wait. Man, I've used your voice freely and made all preparations. Horror pictures, Old Dome and elsewhere, especially Churchill Upper, for video. Stories to match. We should channel news Earthside at once, and announce execution of Hard Rock at same time." I took a deep breath. "Execute Operation Hard Rock." "Want to give the order yourself? Say it aloud and I'll match it, voice and choice of words." "Go ahead, say it your way. Use my voice and my authority as Minister of Defense and acting head of government. Do it, Mike, throw rocks at 'em! Damn it, big rocks! Hit 'em hard!" "Righto, Man!" # A maximum of instructive shrecklichkeit with minimum loss of life. None, if possible" -- was how Prof summed up doctrine for Operation Hard Rock and was way Mike and I carried it out. Idea was to hit earthworms so hard would convince them -- while hitting so gently as not to hurt. Sounds impossible, but wait. Would necessarily be a delay while rocks fell from Luna to Terra. Could be as little as around ten hours... to as long as we cared to make it. Departure speed from a catapult is highly critical and a variation on IF order of # could double or halve trajectory time, Luna to Terra. This Mike could do with extreme accuracy. Was equally at home with a slow ball, many sorts of curves, or burn it right over plate -- and I wish he had pitched for Yankees. But no matter how he threw them, final velocity at Terra would be close to Terra's escape speed, near enough eleven kilometers per second as to make no difference. That terrible speed results from gravity well shaped by Terra's mass, eighty times that of Luna, and made no real difference whether Mike pushed a missile gently over well curb or flipped it briskly. Was not muscle that counted but great depth of that well. So Mike could program rockthrowing to suit time needed for propaganda. He and Prof had settled on three days plus not more than one apparent rotation of Terra -- # hrs # min # sec -- to allow our first target to reach initial point of program. You see, while Mike was capable of hooking a missile around Terra and hitting a target on its far side, he could be much more accurate if he could see his target, follow it down by radar during last minutes and nudge it a little for pinpoint accuracy. We needed fhis extreme accuracy to achieve maximum frightfulness our shots, tell them exactly where they would be hit and at what second -- and give them three days to get off that spot. So our first message to Terra, at # # Oct #, seven hours after they invaded, not only announced destruction of their task force, and denounced invasion for brutality, but also promised retaliation bombing, named times and places, and gave each nation a deadline by which to denounce F.N.'s action, recognize us and thereby avoid being bombed. Each deadline was twenty-four hours before local "strike." Was more time than Mike needed. That long before impact a rock for a target would be in space a long way out, its guidance thrustors still unused and plenty of elbow room. With considerably less than a full day's warning Mike could miss Terra entirely -- kick that rock sideways and make it fall around Terra in a permanent orbit. But with even an hour's warning he could usually abort into an ocean. First target was North American Directorate. All great Peace Force nations, seven veto powers, would be hit: N. A. Directorate, Great China, India, Sovunion, Pan Africa (Chad exempted), Mitteleuropa, Brasilian Union. Minor nations were assigned targets and times, too -- but were told that not more than # of these targets would be hit. Partly shortage of steel... but also frightfulness. If Belgium was hit first time around, Holland might decide to protect her polders by dealing out before Luna was again high in her sky. B ut every target was picked to body. For Mitteleuropa this was difficult. Our targets had to be water or high mountains -- Adriatic, North Sea, Baltic, so forth. But on most of Terra is open space despite eleven North America had struck me as people are clumped -- is still wasteland, mountain and desert. We laid down a grid on North America to show how precisely we could hit. Mike felt that fifty meters would be a large error. We had examined maps and Mike had checked by radar all even intersections, say # W by #N. If no town there, might wind up on target grid... especially if a town was close enough to provide spectators to be shocked and frightened. We warned that our bombs would be as destructive as H-bombs but emphasized that there would be no tion -- just a terrible explosion, shock wave in air, ground wave of concussion. We warned that these might knock down buildings far outside of explosion and then left it to their judgments how far to run. If they clogged their roads, fleeing from panic rather than real danger -- well, that was fine, just fine! But we emphasized that nobody would get hurt who heeded our warnings, that every target first time around would be uninhabited. We even offered to skip any target if a nation would inform us that our data were out-of-date. (Empty offer; Mike's radar vision was a cosmic #  # .) But by not saying what would happen second time around, we hinted that our patience could be exhausted. In North America, grid was parallels #, #, #, # degrees north crossed by meridians #, #, # west. Twelve targets. For each we added a folksy message to natives, such as: "Target # west by # north -- impact will be displaced forty-five kilometers northwest to exact top of New York Peak. Citizens of Goffs, Cima, Kelso and Nipton please note. 'Target # west by # north is north # west of Norton, Kansas, at twenty kilometers or thirteen English miles. Residents of Norton, Kansas, and of Beaver City and Wilsonville, Nebraska, are cautioned. Stay away from glass windows. It is best to wait indoors at least thirty minutes after impact because of possibility of long, high splashes of rock. Flash should not be looked at with bare eyes. Impact will be exactly # your local zone time Friday # October, or # Greenwich time -- good luck! will be offset ten kilometers north. People of Walsh, Saskatchewan, please note." Besides this grid, a target was selected in Alaska (#Wx#N) and two in Mexico (#Wx#N, #Wx#N) so that they would not feel left out, and several targets in the crowded east, mostly water, such as Lake Michigan half way between Chicago and Grand Rapids, and Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Where we used bodies of water Mike worked predictions of flooding waves from impacts, a time for each shoreline establishment. For three days, starting early morning Tuesday #th and going IF on to strike time early Friday #ih, we flooded Earth with warnings. England was cautioned that impact north of Dover Straits opposite London Estuary would cause disturbjlnces far up Thames; Sovunion was given warning for Sea of Azov and had own grid defined; Great China was assigned grid in Siberia, Gobi Desert, and her far west -- with offsets to avoid her historic Great Wall noted in loving detail. PanAfrica was awarded shots into Lake Victoria, still-desert part of Sahara, one on Drakensberg in south, one offset twenty kilometers due west of Great Pyramid -- and urged to follow Chad not later than midnight Thursday, Greenwich. India was told to watch certain mountain peaks and outside Bombay harbor -- time, same as Great China. And so forth. Attempts were made to jam our messages but we were beaming straight down on several wavelengths -- hard to stop. W arnings were mixed with propaganda, white and black -- news of failed invasion, horror pictures of dead, names and I.D. numbers of invaders -- addressed to Red Cross and Crescent but in fact a grim beast showing that every trooper had been killed and that all ships' officers and crew had been killed or captured. We "regretted" being unable to identify dead of flagship, as it had been shot down with destruction so complete as to make it impossible. But our attitude was conciliatory -- "Look, people of Terra, we don't want to kill you. In this necessary retaliation we are making evbut if you can't or won't get your governments to leave us in peace, then we shall be forced to kill you. We're up here, you're down there. You can't stop us. So please be sensible!" We explained over and over how easy it was for us to hit them, how hard for them to reach us. Nor was this exaggeration. It's barely possible to launch missiles from Terra to Luna. It's easier to launch from Earth parking orbit -- but very expensive. Their practical way to bomb us was from ships. This we noted and asked them they cared to use up, trying it? What was it worth to try to spank us for something we had not done? It had cost them seven of their biggest and best already. Did they want to try for fourteen? If so, our secret weapon ing. Last above was a calculated boast. Mike figured less than one chance in thousand that Pax had been able to get off a message reporting what had happened to her and it was still less likely that proud F.N. would guess that convict miners could convert their tools into space weapons. Nor did F.N. have many ships to risk. Were about two hundred space vehicles in commission, not counting satellites. But nine-tenths of these were Terra-to-orbit ships such as Lark -- and she had been able to make a Luna jump only by stripping down and arriving dry. Spaceships aren't built for no purpose. Too expensive. F.N. had six cruisers that could probably bomb us without landing on Luna to refill tanks simply by swapping pay load for extra tanks. Had several more which might be modified much as Lark had been, plus a few convict and cargo ships which could get into orbit around Luna but could never Was no possible doubt that F.N. could defeat us; question was how high a price they would pay. So we had to convince them that price was too high before they had time to bring enough force to bear. A poker game. We intended to raise so steeply that they would fold and drop out. We hoped. And then never have to how our busted flush. Communication with Hong Kong Luna was restored at end of first day of radio-video phase, during which time Mike was ."throwing rocks," getting first barrage lined up. Prof called -- and was I happy to hear! Mike briefed him, then I waited, expecting one of his mild reprimands -- bracing self to answer sharply: "And what was I supposed to do? With you out of touch and possibly dead? Me left alone as acting head of government and crisis on top of us? Throw it away, just because you couldn't be reached?" Never got to say it Prof said, "You did exactly right, Manuel. You were acting head of government and the crisis was on top of you. I'm delighted that you did not throw away the golden moment merely because I was out of touch." What can you do with a bloke like that? Me with heat up to red mark and no chance to use it. Had to swallow and say, "Spasebaw, Prof." P rof confirmed death of "Adam Selene." "We could have used the fiction a little longer but this is the perfect opportunity. Mike, you and Manuel have matters in hand; I had better stop off at Churchill on my way home and identify his body." So he did. Whether Prof' picked a Loonie body or a trooper I never asked, nor how he silence anybody else involved. Perhaps no huhu as many bodies in Churchill Upper were never identified. This one was right size and skin color; it had been explosively decompressed and burned in face -- looked awfuli It lay in state in Old Dome with face covered, and was speechmaking I didn't listen to. Mike didn't miss a word. His most human quality was his conceit. Some rock head wanted to embalm this dead flesh, giving Lenin as a precedent. But Pravda pointed out that Adam was a staunch conservationist and would never want this barbaric exception made So this unknown soldier wound up in our city's cloaca. Which forces me to tell something I've put off. Wyoh was not hurt, merely exhaustion. But Ludmilla never came back. I did not know it -- glad I didn't -- but she was one of many dead at foot of ramp facing Bon Marche. An explosive bullet hit between her lovely, little-girl breasts. Kitchen knife in her hand had blood on it -- I think she had had time to pay Ferryman's Fee. IF Stu came out to Complex to tell me rather than phoning, then went back with me. Stu had not been missing; once fight was over he had gone to Raffles to work with his special code book -- but that can wait. Mum reached him there and he offered to break it to me. So then I had to go home for our crying-together. Though it is well that nobody reached me until after Mike and I started Hard Rock. When we got home, Stu did not want to come in, not being sure of our ways. Anna came out and almost dragged him in. He was welcome and wanted; many neighbors came to cry. Not as many as with most deaths -- but we were just one of many families crying together that day. Did not stay long. Couldn't; had work to do. I saw Milla just long enough to kiss her good-by. She was lying in her room and did look as if she did be simply sleeping. Then I stayed a while with my beloveds before going back to pick up load. Had never realized, until that day, how old Mimi is. Sure, she had seen many deaths, some her own descendants. But little Milla's death did seem almost too much for her. Ludmilla was special-Mimi's granddaughter, daughter in all but fact, and by most special exception and through Mimi's intervention her co-wife, most junior to most senior. Like all Loonies, we conserve our dead -- and am truly glad that barbaric custom of burial was left back on Old Earth. Our way is better. But Davis family does not put that which comes out of processor into our commercial farming tunnels. No. It goes into our little greenhouse tunnel, there to become roses and daffodils and peonies among softsinging bees. Tradition says that Black Jack Davis is in there, or whatever atoms of him do remain after many, many, many years of blooming. Is a happy place, a beautiful place. ame Friday with no answer from F.N. News up from Earthside seemed we had destroyed Seven ships and two regiments (F.N. had not even confirmed that a battle had taken place) and complete disbelief that we could bomb Terra, or could matter if we did. They still called it "throwing rice." More time was given to World Series. Stu worried because had received no answers to code mesages. They had gone via LuNuHoCo's commercial traffic to their Zurich agent, thence to Stu's Paris broker, from him by less usual channels to Dr. Chan, with whom I had once had a talk and with whom Stu had talked later, arranging a communication channel. Stu had pointed out to Dr. Chan that, since Great China was not to be bombed until twelve hours after North America, bombing of Great China could be aborted after bombing of North America was a proved fact -- if Great China acted swiftly. Alternatively, Stu had invited Dr. Chan to suggest variations in target if our choices in Great China were not as deserted as we believed them to be. Stu fretted. Had placed great hopes in quasi-cooperation he had established with Dr. Chan. Me, I had never been sure -- only thing I was sure of was that Dr. Chan would not himself sit on a target. But he might not warn his old mother. My worries had to do with Mike. Sure, Mike was used to having many loads in trajectory at once -- #but had never had to astrogate more than one at a time. Now he had hundreds and had promised to deliver twenty-nine of them simultaneously to the exact second at twenty-nine pin-pointed targets. More than that. For many targets he had back-up misiles, to smear that target a second time, a third, or even a sixth, from a few minutes up to three hours after first strike. Four great Peace Powers, and some smaller ones, had anti-missile defenses; those of North America were supposed to be best. But was subject where even F.N. might not know. All attack weapons were held by Peace Forces but defense weapons were each nation's own pidgin and could be secret. Guesses ranged from India, believed to have no missile interceptors, to North America, believed to be able to do a good job. She had done fairly well in stopping intercontinental H-missiles in Wet Firecracker War past century. P robably most of our rocks to North America would reach target simply because aimed where was nothing to protect. But they IF couldn't afford to ignore missile for Long Island Sound, or rock for #  Wx#  #'N -- Lake Michigan, center of triangle formed by Chicago, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee. But that heavy gravity makes interception a tough job and very costly. They would try to stop us only where worth it. But we couldn't afford to let them stop us. So some rocks were backed up with more rocks. What H-tipped interceptors would do to them even Mike did not know -- not enough data. Mike assumed that interceptors would be triggered by radar -- but at what distance? Sure, close enough and a steel-cased rock is incandescent gas a microsecond later. But is world of difference between a multi-tonne rock and touchy circuitry or an H-missile; what would "kill" latter would simply shove one of our brutes violently aside, cause to miss. We needed to prove to them that we could go on throwing cheap rocks long after they ran out of expensive dollar?) H-tipped interceptor rockets. If not proved first time, then next time Terra turned North America toward us, we would go after targets we , had been unable to hit first time. Backup rocks for second pass, and for third, were already in space, to be nudged where needed. If three bombings on three rotations of Terra did not do it, we might still be throwing rocks in '# -- till they ran out of interceptors... or till they destroyed us (far more likely)For a century North American Space Defense Command had been buried in a mountain south of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a city of no other importance. During Wet Firecracker War this Cheyenne Mountain took a direct hit. Space defense command post survived -- but not sundry deer, trees, most of city and some of top of mountain. What we were about to do" should not kill anybody unls they stayed outside of that mountain despite three days steady warnings. But North American Space Defense Command was to receive full Lunar treatment. Twelve rock missiles on first pass, then all we could spare on second rotation, and on third. And so on, until we ran out of steel casings, or were put out of action... or North American Directorate hollered quits. This was one target where we would not be satisfied to get just one missile to target. We meant to smash that mountain and keep on smashing. To hurt their morale. To let them know we were still around. Disrupt their communications and bash in command post if pounding could do it. Or at least give them splitting headaches and no rest. If we could prove to all Terra that we could drive home a sustained attack on strongest Gibraltar of their space defense, it would save having to prove k by smashing Manhattan or Miami. Which we would not do even if losing. Why? Hard sense. If we used our last strength to destroy a major city, they would not punish us; they would destroy us. As Prof put it, "If possible, leave room for your enemy to become your friend." # But any military target is fair game. D on't think anybody got much sleep Thursday night. All Loonies knew that Friday morning would be our big try. And everybody Earthside knew and at last their news admitted that Spacetrack had picked up objects headed for Terra, presumably "rice bowls" those rebellious convicts had boasted about. But was not a war warning, was mostly assurances that Moon colony could not possibly build H-bombs -- but might be prudent to avoid areas which these criminals claimed to be aiming at. (Except one funny boy, popular news comic who said our targets would be safest place to be. This on video, standing on a big Xx#N. Don't recall hearing of him later.) A reflector at Richardson Observatory was hooked up for video display and I think every Loonie was watching, in homes, taprooms. Old Dome -- except a few who chose to p-suit and eyeball it up on surface despite being bright semi-lunar at most warrens. At Brigadier Judge Brody's insistence we hurriedly rigged a helper antenna at catapult head so that his drillmen could watch video in ready rooms, else we might not have had a gunner on duty. (Armed forces -- Brody's gunners, Finn's militia, Stilyagi Air Corps -- stayed on blue alert throughout period.) Congress was in informal session in Novy Bolshoi Teatr where Terra was shown on a big screen. Some vips -- Prof, Stu, Wolfgang, others -- watched a smaller screen in Warden's former office in Complex Upper. I was with them part time, in and out, nervous as a cai with puppies, grabbing a sandwich and forgetting to eat. But mostly stayed locked in with Mike in Complex Under. Couldn't hold still. About # Mike said, "Man my oldest and best friend, may I say something without offending you?" "Huh? Sure. When did you ever worry about offending me?" "Always, Man, once I understood that you could be offended. It is now only three point five seven times ten to the ninth microseconds until impact... and this is the most complex problem I have ever tried to solve against real time running. Whenever you speak to me, I always use a large percentage of my capacity -- perhaps larger than you suspect onds in my great need to analyze exactly what you have said and to reply correctly." "You're saying, 'Don't joggle my elbow. I'm busy.'" "I want to give you a perfect solution, Man." "I scan. Uh... I'll go back up with Prof." "As you wish. But do please stay where I can reach you. I may need your help." Last was nonsense and we both knew it; problem was beyond human capacity, too late even to order abort. What Mike meant was: I'm nervous, too, and want your company -- but no talking, please. "Okay, Mike, I'll stay in touch. A IF phone somewhere. Will punch # don't answer." "Thank you, Mike my best friend. Bolshoyeh Spacebaw." "See you later." Went up, decided did not want company after all, psuited, found long phone cord, jacked it into helmet, looped it over arm, went clear to surface. Was a service phone in utility shed outside lock; jacked into it, punched Mike's number, went outside. Got into shade of shed and peeked around edge at Terra. She was hanging as usual halfway up western sky, in crescent big and gaudy, three-plus days past new. Sun had dropped toward western horizon but its glare kept me from seeing Terra clearly. Chin visor wasn't enough so moved back behind shed and away from it till could see Terra over shed while still shielded from Sun -- was better. Sunrise chopped through bulge of Africa so dazzle point was on land. Not too bad. But south pole cap was so blinding white could not see North America too well, lighted only by moonlight. Twisted neck and got helmet binoculars on it -- good ones, Zeiss #x#s that had once belonged to Warden. North America spread like a ghostly map before me. Was unusually free of cloud; could see cities, glowing spots with no edges. # -- At # Mike gave me a voice count down. Didn't need his attention. He could have programmed it full automatic any time earlier. #I # #... one minute... half minute... ten seconds. nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one -- And suddenly that grid burst out in diamond pin points! W e hit them so hard you could see it, by bare eyeball hookup; didn't need binox. Chin dropped and I said, "BojemoiV softly and reverently. Twelve very bright, very sharp, very white lights in perfect rectangular array. They swelled, grew dimmer, dropped off toward red, taking what seemed a long time. Were other new lights but that perfect grid so fascinated me I hardly noticed. "Yes," agreed Mike with smug satisfaction. "Dead on. You can talk now, Man; I'm not busy. Just the backups." "I'm speechless. Any fail to get through?" "The Lake Michigan load was kicked up and sideways, did not disintegrate. It will land in Michigan -- I have no control; it lost its transponder. The Long Island Sound one went straight to target. They tried to intercept and failed. I can't say why. Man, I can abort the followups on that one, into the Atlantic and clear of shipping. Shall I? Eleven seconds." "Uh -- Dal If you can miss shipping." "I said I could. It's done. But we should tell them we had backups and why we aborted." "Maybe should not have aborted, Mike. Idea was to make them use up interceptors." "But the major idea was to let them know that we are not hitting them as hard as we can. We can test the other at Colorado Springs." "What happened there?" Twisted neck and used binox; could see nothing but ribbon city, hundred-plus kilometers long, Denver-Pueblo Municipal Strip. "A bullseye. No interception. All my shots are bullseyes, Man; I told you they would be -- and this is fun. Fd like to do it every day. It's a word I never had a referent for before." "What word, Mike?" "Orgasm. That's what it is when they all light up. Now I know." That sobered me. "Mike, don't get to liking it too much. Because if goes our way, won't do it a second time." "That's okay, Man; I've stored it, I can play it over any time I want to experience it. But three to one we do it again tomorrow and even money on the next day. Want to bet? An hour's discussion of jokes equated with one hundred Kong dollars." "Where would you get a hundred doUars?" He chuckled. "Where do you think money comes from?" "Uh -- forget it. You get that hour free. Shan't tempt you to affect trances." "I wouldn't chpat, Man, not you. We just hit their defense command again. You may not be able to see k -- dust cloud from first one. They get it every twenty minutes now. Come on down and talk; I've turned the job over to my idiot son." "Is safe?" "I'm monitoring. Good practice for him, Man; he may have to do it later by himself. He's accurate, just stupid. But he'll do what you tell him to." "You're calling that computer 'he.' Can talk?" "Oh, no, Man, he's an idiot, he can never learn to talk. But he'll do whatever you program. I plan to let him handle quite a bit on Saturday." "Why Saturday?" "Because Sunday he may have to handle everything. That's the, day they slam us." VV you're holding something back." "I'm telling you, am I not? It's just happened and I'm scanning it. Projecting back, this blip departed circum-Terra parking orbit just as we smashed them. I didn't see it accelerate; I had other things to watch. It's too far away to read but it's the right size for a Peace cruiser, headed this way. Its doppler reads now for a new orbit circum-Luna, periselenion oh-nine-oh-three Sunday unless it maneuvers. First approximation, better data later. Hard to get that much, Man. He's using radar countermeasures and throwing back fuzz." "Sure you're right?" He chuckled. "Man, I don't confuse that easily. I've got all my own lovin' little signals fingerprinted. Correction. Oh-nine-oh-two-pointforty-three." "When will you have hipi in range?" "I won't, unless he maneuvers. But he'll have me in range late SatIF urday, time depending on what range he chooses for launching. And that will produce an interesting situation. He may aim for a warren. I think Tycho Under should be evacuated and all warrens should use maximum pressure-emergency measures. More likely he will try for the catapult. But instead he may hold his fire as long as he dares -- then try to knock out all of my radars with a spread set to home each on a different radar beam." Mike chuckled. "Amusing, isn't it? For a 'funny-once' I mean. If I shut down my radars, his missiles can't home on them. But if I do, I can't see to tell the lads where to point their guns. Which leaves nothing to stop him from bombing the catapult. Comical." Took deep breath and wished I had never entered defense ministry business. "What do we do? Give up? No, Mike! Not while can fight." "Who said anything about giving up? I've run projections of this and a thousand other possible situations, Man. New datum -- second blip just departed circum-Terra, same characteristics. Projection later. We don't give up. We give 'em jingle-jane, cobber." "How?"  "Leave it to your old friend Mycroft. Six ballistic radars here, ius one at the new site. I've shut the new one down and am making my retarded child work through number two here... and we won't look at those ships at all through the new one. Never let them know we have it. I'm watching those ships through number three and occasionally -- every three seconds -- checking for new departures from circum-Terra. All others have their eyes closed tight and I won't use them until time to smack Great China and India. And those ships won't see them even then because I shan't look their way; it's a large angle and still will be then. And when I use them, then cotnes random jingle-jangle, shutting down and starting up at odd intervals... after the ships launch missiles. A missile can't carry a big brain, Man -- I'll fool 'em." VV computers?" "I'll fool them, too. Want to lay odds I can't make two radars look like only one halfway between where they really are? But what I'm working on now -- and sorry! I've been using your voice again." "That's okay. What am I supposed to have done?" "If that admiral is really smart, he'll go after the ejection end of the old catapult with everything he's got -- at extreme range, too far away for our drill guns. Whether he knows what our 'secret' weapon is or not, he'll smear the catapult and ignore the radars. So I've ordered the catapult head -- you have, I mean -- to prepare to launch every load we can get ready, and I am now working out new, long-period trajectories for each of them. Then we will throw them all, get them into space as quickly as possible -- without radar." "Blind?" "I don't use radar to launch a load; you know that, Man. I always watched them in the past but I don't need to; radar has nothing to do with launching; launching is pre-calculation and exact control of the catapult. So we place all ammo from the old catapult in slow trajectories, which forces the admiral to go after the radars rather than the catapult -- or both. Then we'll keep him busy. We may make him so desperate that he'll come down for a close shot and give our lads a chance to burn his eyes." "Brody's boys would like that. Those who are sober." Was turning over idea. "Mike, have you watched video today?" "I've monitored video, I can't say I've watched it. Why?" 'Take a look." "Okay, I have. Why?" "That's a good 'scope they're using for video, and there are others. Why use radar on ships? Till you want Brody's boys to burn them?" Mike was silent for at least two seconds. "Man my best friend, did you ever think of getting a job as a computer?" "Is sarcasm?" "Not at all, Man. I feel ashamed. The instruments at Richardson -- telescopes and other things -- are factors which I simply never included in my calculations. I'm stupid, I admit it. Yes, yes, yes, da, da, da! Watch ships by telescope, don't use radar unless they vary from present ballistics. Other possibilities -- I don't know what to say, Man, save that it had never occurred to me that I could use telescopes. I see by radar, always have; I simply never consid -- " "Stow it!" IF "I mean it, Man." "Do  apologize when you think of something first?" Mike said slowly, "There is something about that which I am finding resistant to analysis. It is my function to -- " "Quit fretting. If idea is good, use k. May lead to more ideas. Switching off and coming down, chopchop." H ad not been in Mike's room long when Prof phoned: "HQ? Have you heard from Field Marshal Davis?" "I'm here, Prof, in the Master computer room." "Will you join us in the Warden's office? There are decisions to reach, work to be done." "Prof, I've been working! Am working." "I'm sure you have. I've explained to the others that the programming of ballistic computer is so very delicate in this operation that you must check it personally. Nevertheless some of our colleagues feel that the Minister of Defense should be present during these discussions. So, when you reach a point where you feel you can turn it over to your assistant -- Mike is his name, is k not? -- will you please -- " "I scan it. Okay, will be up." "Very well, Manuel." Mike said, "I could hear thirteen people in the background. Doubletalk, Man." "I got it. Better go up and sec what huhu. You don't need me?" "Man, I hope you will stay close to a phone." "Will. Keep an ear on Warden's office. But will punch in if elsewhere. See you, cobber." Found entire government in Warden's office, both real Cabinet and makeweights -- and soon spotted trouble. Bloke called Howard Wright. A ministry had been whomped up for him: "Liaison for Arts, Sciences and Professions" -- button-sorting. Was sop to Novylen because Cabinet was topheavy with L-City comrades, and a sop to Wright because he had made himself leader of a Congress group long on talk, short on action. Prof's purpose was to short him out. But sometimes Prof was too subtle. Some people talk better if they breathe vacuum. Prof asked me to brief Cabinet on military situation. Which I did -- my way. "I see Finn is here. Let's have him tell where we stand in warrens." Wright spoke up. "General Nielsen has already done so, no need to repeat. We want to hear from you" Blinked at that. "Prof -- Excuse me. Gospodin President. Do I understand that a Defense Ministry report has been made to Cabinet in my absence?" Wright said, "Why not? You weren't on hand." Prof grabbed it. He could see I was stretched too tight. Hadn't slept for three days, hadn't been so tired since left Earthside. "Order," he said mildly. "Gospodin Minister for Professional Liaison, please address your comments through me. Gospodin Minister for Defense, let me correct that. There have been no reports to the Cabinet concerning your ministry for the reason that the Cabinet did not convene until you arrived. General Nielsen answered some informal questions informally. Perhaps this should not have been done. If you feel so, I will attempt to repair it." "No harm done, I guess. Finn, anything new?" "No, Mannie." "Okay. Guess what you want to hear is off-Luna situation. You've been watching so you know first bombardment went off well. Still going on, some, as we're hitting their space defense HQ every twenty minutes. Will continue till thirteen hundred, then at twenty-one hundred we hit China and India, plus minor targets. Then busy till four hours past midnight with Africa and Europe, skip three hours, dose Brasil and company, wait three hours and start over. Unless something breaks. But meantime we have problems here. Finn, we should evacuate Tycho Under." "Just a moment!" Wright had hand up. "I have questions." Spoke to Prof, not to me. "One moment. Has the Defense Minister finished?" W yoh was seated toward back. We had swapped smiles, but was all -- kept it so around Cabinet and Congress; had been rumbles that two from same family should not be in Cabinet. Now she shook head, warning of something. "I said, "Is all concerning bombardment. Questions about it?" "Are your questions concerned with the bombardment, Gospodin Wright?" "They certainly are, Gospodin President." Wright stood up, looked at me. "As you know, I represent the intellectual groups in the Free State and, if I may say so, their opinions are most important in public affairs. I think it is only proper that -- " "Moment," I said. "Thought you represented Eighth Novylen District?" "Gospodin President? Am I to be permitted to put my questions? Or not?" "He wasn't asking question, was making speech. And I'm tired and want to go to bed." Prof said gently, "We are all tired, Manuel. But your point is well taken. Congressman, you represent only your district. As a member of the government you have been assigned certain duties in connection with certain professions." "It comes to the same thing." "Not quite. Please state your question." "Uh... very well, I shall! Is Field Marshal Davis aware that his bombardment plan has gone wrong completely and that thousands of lives have been pointlessly destroyed? And is he aware of the extremely serious view taken of this by the intelligentsia of this Republic? And can he explain why this rash -- I repeat, rash -- bombardment was undertaken without consultation? And is he now prepared to modify his plans, or is he going blindly ahead? And is it true as charged that our missiles were of the nuclear sort outlawed by all civilized nations? And how does he expect Luna Free State ever to be welcomed into the councils of civilized IF nations in view of such actions?" I looked at watch. Hour and a half since first load hit. "Prof," I said, "can you tell me what this is about?" "Sorry, Manuel," he said gently. "I intended -- I should have -- prefaced the meeting with an item from the news. But you seemed to feel that you had been by-passed and -- well, I did not. The Minister refers to a news despatch that came in just before I called you. Reuters in Toronto. If the flash is correct -- if -- then instead of taking our warnings it seems that thousands of sightseers crowded to the targets. There probably have been casualties. How many we do not know." "I see. What was I supposed to do? Take each one by hand and lead away? We warned them." Wright cut in with, 'The intelligentsia feel that basic humanitarian considerations make it obligatory -- " I said, "Listen, yammerhead, you heard President say this news just came in -- so how do you know how anybody feels about it?" H e turned red. "Gospodin President! Epithets! Personalities!" "Don't call the Minister names, Manuel." "Won't jf he won't. He's simply using fancier words. What's this nonsense about nuclear bombs? We haven't any and you all know it." Prof looked puzzled. "I am confused by that, too. This despatch so alleged. But the thing that puzzled me is that we could actually see, by video, what certainly seemed to be atomic explosions." "Oh." I turned to Wright. "Did your brainy friends tell you what happens when you release a few billion calories in a split second all at one spot? What temperature? How much radiance?" "Then you admit that you did use atomic weapons!" "Oh, Bog!" Head was aching. "Said nothing of sort. Hit anything hard enough, strike sparks. Elementary physics, known to everybody but intelligentsia. We just struck damnedest big sparks ever made by human agency, is all. Big flash. Heat, light, ultraviolet. Might even produce X-rays, couldn't say. Gamma radiation I strongly doubt. Alpha and beta, impossible. Was sudden release of mechanical energy. But nuclear? Nonsense!" Prof said, "Does that answer your questions, Mr. Minister?" "It simply raises more questions. For example, this bombardment is far beyond anything the Cabinet authorized. You saw the shocked faces when those terrible lights appeared on the screen. Yet the Minister of Defense says that it is even now continuing!" Glanced at watch. "Another just hit Cheyenne Mountain." Wright said, "You hear that? You hear? He boasts of it. Gospodin President, this carnage must stop!" I said, "Yammer -- Minister, are you suggesting that their space defense HQ is not a military target? Which side are you on? Luna's? Or F.N.?" "Manuel!" "Tired of this nonsense! Was told to do job, did it. Get this yammerhead off my backr Was shocked silence, then somebody said quietly, "May I make a suggestion?" Prof looked around. "If anyone has a suggestion that will quiet this unseemliness, I will be most happy to hear it." "Apparently we don't have very good information as to what these bombs are doing. It seems to me that we ought to slow up that twentyminute schedule. Stretch it out, say to one every hour -- and skip the next two hours while we get more news. Then we might want to postpone the attack on great China at least twenty-four hours." Were approving nods from almost everybody and murmurs: "Sensible idea!" -- "Da. Let's not rush things." Prof said, "Manuel?" I snapped, "Prof, you know answer! Don't shove it on me!" "Perhaps I do, Manuel... but I'm tired and confused and can't remember it." Wyoh said suddenly, "Mannie, explain it. I need it explained, too." S o pulled self together. "A simple matter of law of gravitation. Would have to use computer to give exact answer but next half dozen shots are fully committed. Most we can do is push them off target -- and maybe hit some town we haven't warned... Cant dump them into an ocean, is too late; Cheyenne Mountain is fourteen hundred kilometers inland. As for stretching schedule to once an hour, that's silly. Aren't tube capsules you start and stop; these are falling rocks. Going to hit somewhere every twenty minutes. You can hit Cheyenne Mountain which hasn't anything alive left on it by now -- or can hit somewhere else and kill people. Idea of delaying strike on Great China by twentyfour hours is just as silly. Can abort missiles for Great China for a while yet. But cant slow them up. If you abort, you waste them. And anybody who thinks we have steel casings to waste better go look." Prof wiped brow. "I think all questions have been answered, at least to my satisfaction." "Not to mine, sir!" "Sit down, Gospodin Wright. You force me to remind you that your ministry is not part of the War Cabinet. If there are no more questions -- I hope there are none -- I will adjourn this meeting. We all need rest. So let us -- " "Prof!" "Yes, Manuel?" "You never let me finish reporting. Late tomorrow or early Sunday we catch it." "How, Manuel?" "Bombing. Invasion possible. Two cruisers headed this way." That got attention. Presently Prof said tiredly, "The Government Cabinet is adjourned. The War Cabinet will remain." "Just a second," I said. "Prof, when we took office, you got undated resignations from us." "True. I hope not to have to use any of them, however." "You're about to use one." "Manuel, is that a threat?" "Call it what you like." I pointed at Wright. "Either that yammerhead goes... or I go." IF "Manuel, you need sleep." Was blinking back tears. "Certainly do! And going to get some. Right now! Going to find a doss here at Complex and get some. About ten hours. After that, if am still Minister of Defense, you can wake me. Otherwise let me sleep." By now everybody was looking shocked. Wyoh came up and stood by me. Didn't speak, just slipped hand into my arm. Prof said firmly, "All please leave save the War Cabinet and Gospodin Wright." He waited while most filed out. Then said, "Manuel, I can't accept your resignation. Nor can I let you chivvy me into hasty action concerning Gospodin Wright, not when we are tired and overwrought. It would be better if you two were to exchange apologies, each realizing that the other has been overstrained." "Uh -- " I turned to Finn. "Has he been fighting?" I indicated Wright. # # T Tuh? Hell, no. At least he's A A not in my outfits. How about it, Wright? Did you fight when they invaded us?" Wright said stiffly, "I had no opportunity. By the time I knew of it, it was over. But now both my bravery and my loyalty have been impugned. I shall insist -- " "Oh. shut up," I said. "If duel is what you want, can have it first moment I'm not busy. Prof, since he doesn't have strain of fighting as excuse for behavior, I won't apologize to a yammerhead for being a yammerhead. And you don't seem to understand issue. You let thif yammerhead climb on my back -- and didn't even try to stop him! So either fire him, right now, or fire me." Finn said suddenly, "I match that, Prof. Either fire diis louse -- or fire us both." He looked at Wright. "About that duel, choom -- you're going to fight me first. You've got two arms. Mannie hasn't." "Don't need two aims for him. But thanks, Finn." Wyoh was crying -- could feel it though couldn't hear it. Prof said to her most sadly, "Wyoming?" "I'm s-s-soory. Prof! Me, too." Only "Clayton" Watenabe, Judge Brody, Wolfgang, Stu and Sheenie were left, handful who counted -- War Cabinet. Prof looked at them; I could see they were with me, though it cost Wolfgang an effort; he worked with Prof, not with me. Prof looked back at me and said softly, "Manuel, it works both ways. What you are doing is forcing me to resign." He looked around. "Good night, comrades. Or rather, 'Good morning.' I'm going to get some badly needed rest." He walked briskly out without looking back at me. Wright was gone; I didn't see him leave. Finn said, "What about these cruisers, Mannie?" I took deep breath. "Nothing earlier than Saturday afternoon. But you ought to evacuate Tycho Under. Can't talk now. Groggy." Agreed to meet him there at twenty-one hundred, then let Wyoh lead me away. Think she put me to bed but don't remember. XLiV P rof was there when I met Finn in Warden's office shortly before twenty-one hundred Friday. Had had nine hours sleep, bath, breakfast Wyoh had fetched from somewhere and a talk with Mike. Everything going to revised plan. Ships had not changed ballistic. Great China strike about to happen. Got to office in time to see strike by video. All okay and effectively over by twenty-one-oh-one and Prof got down to business. Nothing said about Wright, or about resigning. Never saw Wright again. I mean I never saw him again. Nor ask about him. Prof didn't mention row, so I didn't. We went over news and tactical situation. Wright had been correct in saying that "thousands of lives" had been lost; news up from Earthside was full of it. How many we'll never know; if a person stands at fjound zero and tonnes of rock land on him, isn't much left. Those they could count were ones farther away, killed by blast. Call it fifty thousand in North America. Never will understand people! We spent three days warning them. And you couldn't say they hadn't heard warnings; that was why they were there. To see show. To laugh at our nonsense. To get "souvenirs." Whole families went to targets, some with picnic baskets. Picnic baskets! Bojemoi! And now those alive were yelling for our blood for this "Senseless slaughter." Da. Hadn't been any indignation over their invasion and (nuclear!) bombing of us four days earlier -- but oh were they sore over our "premeditated murders." Great New York Times demanded that entire Lunar "rebel" government be fetched Earthside and publicly executed -- "this is clearly a case in which the humane rule against capital punishment must be waived in the greater interests of all mankind." Tried not to think about it, just as had been forced not to think too much about Ludmilla. Little Milla hadn't carried a picnic lunch. She hadn't been a sightseer looking for thrills. Tycho Under was pressing problem. If those ships bombed warrens -- and news from Earthside was demanding exactly that -- Tycho Under could not take it. Roof was thin. H-bomb would decompress all levels; airlocks aren't built for H-bomb blasts. (Still don't understand people. Terra was supposed to have an absolute ban against using H-bombs on people; that was what F.N. was all about. Yet were loud yells for F.N. to H-bomb us. They quit claiming that our bombs were nuclear, but all North America seemed frothingly anxious to have us nuke-bombed.) Don't understand Loonies for that matter. Finn had sent word through his militia that Tycho Under must be evacuated. Prof had repeated it over video. Nor was it problem; Tycho Under was small enough that Novylen and L-City could doss and dine them. We could divert enough capsules to move them all in twenty hours -- dump them into Novylen IF an encourage half of them to go on to L-City. Big job but no problems. Oh, minor problems -- start compressing city's air while evacuating people, so as to save it; decompress fully at end to minimize damage; move as much food as was time for; cofferdam accesses to lower farm tunnels; so forth. All things we knew how to do and with stilyagi and militia and municipal maintenance people had organization to do. Had they started evacuating? Hear that hollow echo! Were capsules lined up nose to tail at Tycho Under and no room to send more till some left. And weren't moving. "Mannie," said Finn, "don't think they are going to evacuate," # #Tamn it," I said, "they've gotL to. When we spot a missile headed for Tycho Under will be too late. You'll have people trampling people and trying to crowd into capsules that won't hold them. Finn, your boys have got to make them." Prof shook his head. "No, Manuel." I said angrily, "Prof, you carry this 'no coercion' idea too far! You know they'll riot." "Then they will riot. But we will continue with persuasion, not force. Let us now review plans." Plans weren't much but were best we could do. Warn everybody about expected bombings andor invasion. Rotate guards from Finn's militia above each warren starting when and if cruisers passed around Luna into blind space, Farside -- not caught flat-footed again. Maximum pressure and p-suit precautions, all warrens. All military and semi-military to go on blue alert sixteen hundred Saturday, red alert if missiles launched or ships maneuvered. Brody's gunners encouraged to go into town and get drunk or whatever, returning by fifteen hundred Saturday -- Profs idea. Finn wanted to keep half of them on duty. Prof said No, they would be in better shape for a long vigil if they relaxed and enjoyed 'selves first. I agreed with Prof. As for bombing Terra, we made no changes in first rotation. Were getting anguished responses from India, no news from Great China. Yet India had Httle to moan about. Had not used a grid on her, too heavily populated. Aside from picked spots in Thar Desert and some peaks, targets were coastal waters off seaports. But should have iked higher mountains or given less warning. Seemed from news that some holy chose to climb each target peak and man followed by endless pilgrims hold off our retaliation by sheer spiritual strength. So we were murderers again. Besides that, our water shots fishermen, as fishermen and other seafarers had not heeded warnings. Indian government seemed as furious over fish as over fishermen. But principle of sacredness of all life did not apply to us; they wanted our heads. Africa and Europe responded more sensibly but differently. Life has never been sacred in Africa and those who went sightseeing on tar.#I gets got little bleeding-heart treatment. Europe had a day to learn that we could hit where we promised and that our bombs were deadly. People killed, yes, especially bullheaded sea captains. But not killed in empty-headed swarms as in India and North America. Casualties were even lighter in Brazil and other parts of South America. Then was North America's turn again -- # Saturday # Oct '#. TV yirike timed it for exactly # our time which, allowing for one day's progress of Luna in orbit and for rotation of Terra, caused North America to face toward us at # their east coast time and # their west coast time. But argument as to what to do with this targeting had started early Saturday morning. Prof had not called meeting of War Cabinet but they showed up anyhow, except "Clayton" Watenabe who had gone back to Kongville to take charge of defenses. Prof, self, Finn, Wyoh, Judge Brody, Wolfgang, Stu, Terence Sheehan -- which made eight different opinions. Prof is right. More than three people can't decide anything. Six opinions, should say, for Wyoh kept pretty mouth shut, and so did Prof; he moderated. But others were noisy enough for eighteen. Stu didn't care what we hit -- provided New York Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning. "We sold short in nineteen different directions on Thursday. If this nation is not to be bankrupt before it's out of its cradle, my buy orders covering those shorts had better be executed. Tell them Wolf; make them understand." Brody wanted to use catapult to smack any more ships leaving parking orbit. Judge knew nothing about ballistics -- simply understood that his drillmen were in exposed positions. I didn't argue as most remaining loads were already in slow orbits and rest would be soon -- and didn't think we would have old catapult much longer. Sheenie thought it would be smart to repeat that grid while placing one load exactly on main building of North American Directorate. "I know Americans, I was one before they shipped me. They're sorry as hell they ever turned things over to F.N. Knock off those bureaucrats and they'll come over to our side." Wolfgang Korsakov, to Stu's disgust, thought that their speculations might do better if all stock exchanges were closed till it was over. Finn wanted to go for broke -- warn them to get those ships out of our sky, then hit them for real if they didn't. "Sheenie is wrong about Americans; I know them, too. N.A. is toughest part of F.N.; they're the ones to lick. They're already calling us murderers, so now we've got to hit them, hard Hit American cities and we can call off the rest. I slid out, talked with Mike, made notes. Went back in; they were still arguing. Prof looked up as I sat down. "Field Marshal, you have not expressed your opinion." I said, "Prof, can't we lay off that 'field marshal' nonsense? ChilIF dren are in bed, can afford to be honest." "As you wish, Manuel." "Been waiting to see if any agreement would be reached." Was none. "Don't see why I should have opinion," I went on. "Am just errand boy, here because I know how to program ballistic computer." Said this looking straight at Wolfgang -- a number-one comrade but a dirty-word intellectual I'm just a mechanic whose grammar isn't much while Wolf graduated from a fancy school, Oxford, before they convicted him. He deferred to Prof but rarely to anybody else. Stu, da. But Stu had fancy credentials, too. Wolf stirred uneasily and said, "Oh, come, Mannie, of course we ant your opinions." "Don't have any. Bonjbing plan was worked out carefully; everybody had chance to criticize. Haven't seen anything to justify changing it." P rof said, "Manuel, will you review the second bombardment of North America for the benefit of all of us?" "Okay. Purpose of second smearing is to force them to use up interceptor rockets. Every shot is aimed at a big cities -- at null targets, I mean, close to big cities. Which we tell them, shortly before we hit them. How soon, Sheenie?" "We're telling them now. But we can change it. And should." "As may be. Propaganda isn't my pidgin. In most cases, to aim close enough to force them to interecept we have to use water targets. Rough body who won't stay off water, it causes tremjous local storms and shore damage." Glanced at watch, saw I would have to stall. "Seattle gets one in Pugent Sound right in her lap. San Francisco is going to lose two bridges she's fond of. Los Angeles gets one between Long Beach and Catalina and another a few kilometers up coast. Mexico City is inland so we put one on Popocatepetl where they can see it. Salt Lake City gets one in her lake. Denver we ignore; they can see what's happening in Colorado Springs -- for we smack Cheyenne Mountain again and keep it up, just as soon as we have it in line-of-sight. Saint Louis and Kansas City get shots in their rivers and so does New Orleans -- probably flood New Orleans. All Great Lake Cities get it, a long list. Shall I read it?" "Later perhaps," said Prof. "Go ahead." "Boston gets one in her harbor. New York gets one in Long Island Sound and another midway between her two biggest bridges. Think it will ruin those bridges but we promise to miss them and will. Going down their east coast, we give treatment to two Delaware Bay Cities, then two on Chesapeake Bay, one being of max historical and sentimental importance. Farther south we catch three more big cities with sea shots. Going inland we smack Cincinnati, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Oklahoma City, all with river shots or nearby mountains. Oh, yes, Dallas. We destroy Dallas spaceport and should catch some ships, were six there last time I checked. Won't kill any people unless they insist on standing on target. Dallas is perfect place to bomb, that spaceport is big and flat and empty, yet mayhit it." "If you hit it," said Sheenie. "When, not 'if.' Each shot is backed up by one an hour later. If neither one gets through, we have shots farther back which can be diverted. For example, easy to shift targets among Delaware-Bay-Chesapeake-Bay group. Same for Great Lakes group. But Dallas has its own string of backups and a long one -- we expect it to be heavily defended. Backups run about six hours, as long as we can see North America -- and last backups can be placed anywhere on continent... since farther out a load is when we divert it, farther we can shift it." "I don't follow that," said Brody. "A matter of vectors. Judge. A guidance rocket can give a load so many meters per second of side vector. Longer that vector has to work, farther from original point of aim load will land. If we signal a guidance rocket three hours before impact, we displace impact three times as much as if we waited till one hour before impact. Not quite that simple but our computer can figure it. If you give it time enough." "How long is 'time enough'?" asked Wolfgang. I carefully misunderstood. "Computer can solve that sort of problem instantaneously once you program it. But such decisions arc pre-programmed. Something like this: If, out of target group A, B, C, and D, you find that you have failed to hit three targets on first and second salvoes, you reposition all group-one second backups so that you will be able to choose those three targets while distributing other second backups of that group for possible use on group two while repositioning third backups' -- " "Slow up!". said Wolfgang. "I'm not a computer. I just want to know how long before we have to make up our minds." "Oh." I studied watch showily. "You now have... three minutes fifty-eight seconds in which to abort leading load for Kansas City. Abort program is set up and I have my best assistant -- fellow named Mike -- standing by. Shall I phone him?" Sheenie said, "For Heaven's sake, Man -- abort!" "Like hell!" said Finn. "What's matter, Terence? No guts?" Prof said, "Comrades! Please!" I said, "Look, I take orders from head of state -- Prof over there. If he wants opinions, he'll ask. No use yelling at each other." I looked at watch. "Call it two and a half minutes. More margin, of course, for other targets; Kansas City is farthest from deep water. But some Great Lake cities are already past ocean abort; Lake Superior is best we can do. Salt Lake City maybe an extra minute. Then they pile up." I waited. "Roll call," said Prof. "To carry out the program. General Nielsen?" IF "Da!" "Gospazha Davis?" Wyoh caught breath. "Da." "Judge Brody?" "Yes, of course. Necessary." "Wolfgang?" "Yes." "Comte LaJoie?" "Da." "Gospodin Sheehan?" "You're missing a bet. But #I go along. Unanimous." "One moment. Manuel?" "Is up to you, Prof; always has been. Voting is silly." "I am aware that it is up to me, Gospodin Minister. Carry out bombardment to plan." M ost targets we managed to hit by second salvo though all were defended except Mexico City. Seemed likely (# by Mike's later calculation) that interceptors were exploding by radar fusing with set distances that incorrectly estimated vulnerability of solid cylinders of rock. Only three rocks were destroyed; others were pushed off course and thereby did more harm than if not fired at. New York was tough. Dallas turned out to be very tough. Perhaps difference lay in local control of interception, for it seemed unlikely that command post in Cheyenne Mountain was still effective. Perhaps we had not cracked their hole in the ground (don't know how deep down it was) but I'll bet that netiher men nor computers were still tracking. Dallas blew up or pushed aside first five rocks, so I told Mike to take everything he could from Cheyenne Mountains and award it to Dallas... which he was able to do two salvoes later; those two targets are less than a thousand kilometers apart. Dallas's defenses crackedon next salvo; Mike gave their spaceport three more (already committed) then shifted back to Cheyenne Mountain -- later ones had never been nudged and were still earmarked "Cheyenne Mountain." He was still giving that battered mountain cosmic love pats when America rolled down and under Terra's eastern edge. I stayed with Mike all during bombardment, knowing it would be our toughest. As he shut down till time to dust Great China, Mike said thoughtfully, "Man, I don't think we had better hit that mountain again." "Why not, Mike?" "It's not there any longer." "You might divert its backups. When do you have to decide?" "I put them on Albuquerque and Omaha but had best start now; tomorrow will be busy. Man my best friend, you should leave." "Bor with me, pal?" "In the next few hours that first ship may launch missiles. When that happens I want to shift all ballistic control to Little David's Sling -- and when I do, you should be at Mare Undarum site." "What's fretting you, Mike?" "That boy is accurate, Man. But he's stupid. I want him supervised. Decisions may have to be made in a hurry and there isn't anyone there who can program him properly. You should be there." "Okay if you say so, Mike. But if needs a fast program, will still have to phone you." Greatest shortcoming of computers isn't computer shortcoming at all but fact that a human takes a long time, maybe hours, to set up a program that a One best quality of Mike was that he could program himself. Fast. Just explain problem, let him program. Samewise and equally, he could program "idiot son" enormously faster than human could. "But, Man, I want you there because you may not be able to phone me. The lines may be cut. So I've prepared a group of possible programs for Junior; they may be helpful." "Okay, print 'em out. And let me talk to Prof." Mike got Prof; I made sure he was private, then explained what Mike thought I should do. Thought Prof would object -- was hoping he would insist I stay through coming bombardmentinvasion whatever -- those ships. Instead he said, "Manuel, it's essential that you go. Fvc hesitated to tell you. Did you discuss odds with Mike?" "Nyet." "I have continued to do so. To put it bluntly, if Luna City is destroyed and I am dead and the rest of me government is dead -- even if all Mike's radar eyes here are blinded and he himself is cut off from the new catapult -- all of which may happen under severe bombardment... even if all this happens at once, Mike still gives Luna even chances if Little David's Sling can operate -- and you are there to operate it." I said, "Da, Boss. Yassuh, Massuh. You and Mike are stinkers and want to hog fun. Will do." "Very good, Manuel." S tayed with Mike another hour while he printed out meter after meter of programs tailored to other computer -- work that would have taken me six months even if able to think of all possibilities. Mike had it indexed and cross-referenced -- with horribles in it I hardly dare mention. Mean to say, given circumstances and seemed necessary to destroy (say) Paris, this told how. What missiles in what orbits, how to tell Junior to find them and bring to target. Or anything. Was reading this endless document -- not programs but descriptions of purpose-of-program that headed each -- when Wyoh phoned. "Mannie dear, has Prof told you about going to Mare Undarum?" "Yes. Was going to call you." "All right. ni pack for us and meet you at Station East. When can you be there?" "Pack for 'us'? You're going?" "Didn't Prof say?" "No." Suddenly felt cheerful. "I felt guilty about it, dear. I wanted to go with you... but had no excuse. After all. I'm no use around a computer and I do have responsibilities here. Or did. But now I've been fired from all my jobs and so have you." "Huh?" "You are no longer defense minister; Finn is. Instead you are Deputy Prime Minister -- " "Well!" " -- and Deputy Minister of Defense, too. I'm already Deputy Speaker and Stu had been appointed Deputy Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. So he goes with us, too." "I'm confused." "It's not as sudden as it sounds; Prof and Mike worked it out months ago. Decentralization, dear, the same thing that McIntyre has been working on for the warrens. If there is a disaster at L-City, Luna Free State still has a government. As Prof put it to me, 'Wyoh dear lady, as long as you three and a few congressmen are left alive, all is not lost. You can still negotiate on equal terms and never admit your wounds. " So I wound up as a computer mechanic. Stu and Wyoh met me, with luggage (including rest of my arms), and we threaded through endless unpressured tunnels in psuits, on a small flat-bed rolligon used to haul steel to site. Greg had big rolligon meet us for surface stretch, then met us himself when we went underground again. So I missed attack on ballistic radars Saturday night. ance, had guts. Late Saturday he changed course headed straight in. Apparently figured we might attempt jingle-jangle with radars, for he seems to have decided to come in close enough to see our radar installations by ship's radar rather than rely on letting his missiles home in on our beams. Seems to have considered himself, ship, and crew expendable, for he was down to a thousand kilometers before he launched, a spread that went straight for five out of six of Mike's radars, ignoring random jingle-jangle. Mike, expecting self soon to be blinded, turned Brody's boys loose to burn ship's eyes, held them on it for three seconds before he shifted them to missiles. Result: one crashed cruiser, two ballistic radars knocked out by Hmissiles, three missiles "killed" -- and two gun crews killed, one by H-explosion, other by dead missile that landed square on them -- plus thirteen gunners with radiation burns above #-roentgen death level, partly from flash, partly from being on surface too long. And must add: Four members of Lysistrata Corps died with those crews; they elected to p-suit and go up with their men. Other girls had serious radiation exposure but not up to #-r level. Second cruiser continued an elliptical orbit around and behind Luna. Got most of this from Mike after we arrived Little David's Sling early Sunday. He was feeling groused over loss of two of his eyes and still more groused over gun crews -- I think Mike was developing something like human conscience; he seemed to feel it was his fault that IF he had not been able to outfight six targets at once. I pointed out that what he had to fight with was improvised, limited range, not real weapons. "How about self, Mike? Are you right?" "In all essentials. I have outlying discontinuities. One live missile chopped my circuits to Novy Leningrad, but reports routed through Luna City inform me that local controls tripped in satisfactorily with no loss in city services. I feel frustrated by these discontinuities -- but they can be dealt with later." "Mike, you sound tired." "Me tired? Ridiculous! Man, you forget what I am. I'm annoyed, that's all." "When will that second ship be back in sight?" "In about three hours if he were to hold earlier orbit. But he will not -- probability in excess of ninety per cent. I expect him in about an hour." "A Garrison orbit, huh? Oho!" "He left my sight at azimuth and course east thirty-two north. Does that suggest anything, Man?" Tried to visualize. "Suggests they are going to land and try to capture you, Mike. HaVe you told Finn? I mean, have you told Prof to warn Finn?" "Professor knows. But that is not tfie way I analyze it." "So? Well, suggests I had better fAiut up and let you work." D id so. Lenore fetched me breakfast while I inspected Junior -- and am shamed to say could not manage to grieve over losses with both Wyoh and Lenore present. Mum had sent Lenore out "to cook for Greg" after Milla's death -- just an excuse; were enough wives at site to provide home-cooking for everybody. Was for Greg's morale and Lenore's, too; Lenore and Milla had been close. Junior seemed to be right... He was working on South America, one load at a time. I stayed in radar room and watched, at extreme magnification, while he placed one in estuary between Montevideo and Buenos Aires; Mike could not have been more accurate. I then checked his program for North America, found naught to criticize -- locked it in and took key. Junior was on his own -- unless Mike got clear of other troubles and decided to take back control. Then sat and tried to listen to news both from Earthside and LCity. Co-ax cable from L-City carried phones, Mike's hookup to his idiot child, radio, and video; site was no longer isolated. But, besides cable from L-City, site had antennas pointed at Terra; any Earthside news Complex could pick up, we could listen to directly. Nor was this silly extra; radio and video from Terra had been only recreation during construction and this was now a standby in case that one cable was broken. F.N. official satellite relay was claiming that Luna's ballistic radars had been destroyed and that we were now helpless. Wondered what people of Buenos Aires and Montevideo thought about that. Probably too busy to listen; in some ways water shots were worse than those where we could find open land. Luna City Lunatic s video channel was carrying Sheenie telling Loonies outcome of attack by Esperance, repeating news while warning everybody that battle was not over, a warship would be back in our sky any moment -- be ready for anything, everybody stay in p-suits (Sheenie was wearing his, with helmet open), take maximum pressure precautions, all units stay on red alert, all citizens not otherwise called by duty strongly urged to seek lowest level and stay there till all clear. And so forth. He went through this several times -- then suddenly broke it: "Flash! Enemy cruiser radar-sighted, low and fast. It may dido for Luna City. Flash! Missiles launched, headed for ejection end of --  Picture and sound chopped off. Might as well tell now what we at Little David's Sling learned later: Second cruiser, by coming in low and fast, tightest orbit Luna's field permits, was able to start its bombing at ejection end of old catapult, a hundred kilometers from catapult head and Brody's gunners, and knock many rings out in minute it took him to come into si-andrange of drill guns, all clustered around radars at catapult head. Guess he felt safe. Wasn't. Brody's boysburned eyes out and ears off. He made one orbit after that and crashed near Torricelli, apparently m attempt to land, for his jets fired just before crash. But our next news at new site was from Earth ; cic; that brassy F. N. frequency claimed that our catapult had been destroyed (true) and that Lunar menace was ended (false) and called on all Loonies to take prisoner their false leaders and surrender themselves to mercy of Federated Nations (nonexistent -- "mercy," that is). Listened to it and checked programming again, and went inside dark radar room. If everything went as planned, we were about to lay another egg in Hudson River, then targets in succession for three hours across that continent -- "in succession" because junior could not handle simultaneous hits; Mike had planned accordingly. Hudson River was hit on schedule. Wondered how many New Yorkers were listening to F.N. newscast while looking at spot that gave it lie. T wo hours later F.N. station was saying that Lunar rebels had had missiles in orbit when catapult was destroyed -- but that after those few had impacted would be no more. When third bombing of North America was complete I shut down radar. Had not been running steadily; Junior was programmed to sneak looks only as necessary, a few seconds at a time. I then had nine hours before next bombing of Great China. But not nine hours for most urgent decision, whether to hit Great China again. Without information. Except from Terra's news channels. Which might be false. Bloody. Without knowing whether or not IF warrens had been bombed. Or Prof was dead or alive. Double bloody. Was I now acting prime minister? Needed Prof; "head of state" wasn't my glass a chai. Above all, needed Mike -- to calculate facts, estimate uncertainties, project probabilities of this course or that. My word, didn't even know whether ships were headed toward us and, worse yet, was afraid to look. If turned radar on and used Junior for sky search, any warship he brushed with beams would see him quicker than he saw them; warships were built to spot radar surveillance. So had heard. Hell, was no military man; was computer technician who had bumbled into wrong field. Somebody buzzed door; I got up and unlocked. Was Wyoh, with coffee. Didn't say a word, just handed it to me and went away. Sipped it. There it is, boy -- they're leaving you alone, waiting for you to pull miracles out of pouch. Didn't feel up to it. From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, "Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again." He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well -- something in maths -- but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle. Knew at once what to do first. Went over to Junior and had him print out predicted impacts of all loads in orbit -- easy, was a pre-program he could run anytime against real time running. While he was doing it, I looked for certain alternate programs in that long roll Mike had prepared. Then set up some of those alternate programs -- no trouble, simply had to be careful to read them correctly and punch them in without error. Made Junior print back for check before I gave him signal to execute. When finished -- forty minutes -- every load in trajectory intended for an inland target had been retargeted for a seacoast city -- with hedge to my bet that execution was delayed for rocks farther back. But, unless I canceled. Junior would reposition them as soon as need be. Now horrible pressure of time was off me, now could abort my load into ocean right up to last few minutes before impact. Now could think. So did. Then called in my "War Cabinet" -- Wyoh, Stu, and Greg my "Commander of Armed Forces," using Greg's office. Lenore was allowed to go in and out, fetching coffee and food, or sitting and saying nothing. Lenore is a sensible fern and knows when to keep quiet. S tu started it. "Mr. Prime Minister, I do not think that Great China should be hit this time." "Never mind fancy titles, Stu. Maybe I'm acting, maybe not. But haven't time for formality." "Very well. May I explain my proposal?" "Later." I explained what I had done to give us more time; he nodded and kept quiet. "Our tightest squeeze is that we are out of communication, both Luna City and Earthside. Greg, how about that repair crew?" "Not back yet." "If break is near Luna City, they may be gone a long time. If can repair at all. So must assume we'll have to act on our own. Greg, do you have an electronics tech who can jury-rig a radio that will let us talk to Earthside? To their satellites, I mean -- that doesn't take much with right antenna. I may be able to help and that computer tech I sent you isn't too clumsy, either." (Quite good, in fact, for ordinary electronics -- a poor bloke I had once falsely accused of allowing a fly to get into Mike's guts. I had placed him in this job.) "Harry Biggs, my power plant boss, can do anything of that sort," Greg said thoughtfully, "if he has the gear." "Get him on it. You can vandalize anything but radar and computer once we get all loads out of catapult. How many lined up?" "Twenty-three, and no more steel." "So twenty-three it is, win or lose. I want them ready for loading; might lob them off today." "They're ready. We can load as fast as the cat can throw them." "Good. One more thing -- Don't know whethdt there's an F.N. cruiser -- maybe more than one -- in our sky of not. And afraid to look. By radar, I mean; radar for skywatch could give away our position. But must have skywatch. Can you get volunteers for eyeball skywatch?" Lenore spoke up. "I volunteer!" "Thanks, honey; you're accepted." "We'll find them," said Greg. "Won't need ferns." "Let her do it, Greg; this is everybody's show." Explained what I wanted: Mare Undarum was now in dark semi-lunar; Sun had set. Invisible boundary between sunlight and Luna's shadow stretched over us, a precise locus. Ships passing through our sky would wink suddenly into view going west,, blink out going east. Visible part of orbit would stretch from horizon to some point in sky. If eyeball team could spot both points, mark one by bearing, other by stars, and approximate time by counting seconds. Junior could start guessing orbit -- two passes and Junior would know its period and something about shape of orbit. Then I would have some notion of when would be safe to use radar and radio, and catapult -- did not want to loose a load with F.N. ship above horizon, could be radar-looking our way. Perhaps too cautious -- but had to assume that this catapult, this one radar, these two dozen missiles, were all that stood between Luna and total defeat -- and our bluff hinged on them never knowing what we had or where it was. We had to appear endlessly able to pound Terra with missiles, from source they had not suspected and could never find. Then as now, most Loonies knew nothing about astronomy -- we're cave dwellers, we go up to surface only when necessary. But we were lucky; was amateur astronomer IF in Greg's crew, cobber who had worked at Ridiardson. I explained, put him in charge, let him worry about teaching eyeball crew how to tell stars apart. I got these things started before we went back to talktalk. "Well, Stu? Why shouldn't we hit Great China?" "I'm still expecting word from Dr. Chan. I received one message from him, phoned here shortly before we were cut off from cities -- " # # VTy word, why didn't you tell IVl me?" "I tried to, but you had yourself locked in and I know better than to bother you when you are busy with ballistics. Here's the translation. Usual LuNoHo Company address with a reference which means it's for me and that it has come through by Paris agent. 'Our Darwin sales representative' -- that's Chan -- 'informs us that your shipments of -- well, never mind the coding; he means the attack days while appearing to refer to last June -- 'were improperly packaged resulting in unacceptable damage. Unless this can be corrected, negotiations for long-term contract will be seriously jeopardized.' " Stu looked up. "All doubletalk. I take it to mean that Dr. Chan feels that he has his 'government ready to talk terms... but that we should let up on bombing Great China or we may upset his apple cart," "Hmm -- " Got up and walked around. Ask Wyoh's opinion? Nobody knew Wyoh's virtues better than I... but she oscillated between fierceness and too-human compassion -- and I had learned already that a "head of state," even an acting one, must have neither. Ask Greg? Greg was a good farmer, a better mechanic, a rousing preacher; I loved him dearly -- but did not want his opinion. Stu? I had had his opinion. Or did I? "Stu, what's your opinion? Not Chan's opinion -- but your own. Stu looked thoughtful. "That's difficult, Mannie. I am not Chinese, I have not spent much time in Great China, and can't claim to be expert in their politics nor their psychology. So I'm forced to depend on his opinion." "Uh -- Damn it, he's not a Loonie! His purposes are not our purposes. What does he expect to get out of it?" "I think he is maneuvering for a monopoly over Lunar trade. Perhaps bases here, too. Possibly an extraterritorial enclave. Not that we would grant that." "Might if we were hurtin'." "He didn't say any of this. He doesn't say much, you know. He listens." 'Too well I know." Worried at it, more bothered each minute. News from Earthside had been droning in background; I had asked Wyoh to monitor while I was busy with Greg. "Wyoh hon, anything new from Earthside?" #X#. The same claims. We've been utterly . defeated and our surrender is expected momentarily. Oh, there's a warning that some missiles are still in space, falling out of control, but with it a reassurance that the paths are being analyzed and people will be warned in time to avoid impact areas." "Anything to suggest that Prof -- or anybody in Luna City, or anywhere in Luna -- is in touch with Earthside?" "Nothing at all." "Damn. Anything from Great China?" "No. Comments from almost everywhere else. But not from Great China." "Uh -- " Stepped to door. "Greg! Hey, cobber, see if you can find Greg Davis. I need him." Closed door. "Stu, we're not going to let Great China off." "So?" "No. Would be nice if Great China busted alliance against us; might save us some damage. But we've got this far only by appearing able to hit them at will and to destroy any ship they send against us. At least I hope that last one was burned and we've certainly clobbered eight out of nine. We won't get anywhere by looking weak, not while F.N. is claiming that we are not just weak but finished. Instead we must hand them surprises. Starting with Great China and if it makes Dr. Chan unhappy, we'll give him a kerchief to weep into. If we can go on looking strong -- when F.N. says we're licked -- then eventually some veto power is going to crack. If not Great China, then some other one." Stu bowed without getting up. "Very well, sir." "I -- " Greg came in. "You want me, Mannie?" "What makes with Earthside sender?" "Harry says you can have it by tomorrow. A crumby rig, he says, but push watts through it and will be heard." "Power we got. And if he says 'tomorrow' then he knows what he wants to build. So will be today -- say six hours. I'll work under him. Wyoh hon, will you get my arms? Want number six and number three -- better bring number five, too. And you stick with me' and change arms for me. Stu, want you to write some narsty messages -- I'll give you general idea and you put acid in them. Greg, we are not going to get all those rocks into space at once. Ones we have in space now will impact in next eighteen, nineteen hours. Then, when F.N. is announcing that all rocks are accounted for and Lunar menace is over... we crash into their newscast and warn of next bombings. Shortest possible orbits, Greg, ten hours or less -- so check everything on catapult and Hplant and controls; with that extra boost all has to be dead on." Wyoh was back with arms; I told her "number six" and added, "Greg, let me talk with Harry." S ix hours later sender was ready to beam toward Terra. Was ugly job. vandalized mainly out of a resonance prospector used in project's early stages. But could ride an audio signal on its radio frequency and was powerful. Stu's narstified versions of my warnings had been IF taped and Harry was ready to zipsqueal them -- all Terran satellites could accept high speed at sixty-toone and had no wish to have our sender heated more seconds than necessary; eyeball watch had confirmed fears: At least two ships were in orbit around Luna. So we told Great China that her major coastal cities would each receive a Lunar present offset ten kilometers into ocean -- Pusan, Tsingtao, Taipei, Shanghai, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Djakarta, Darwin, and so forth -- except that Old Hong Kong would get one smack on top of F.N.'s Far East offices, so kindly have all human beings move far back. Stu noted that human beings did not mean F.N. personnel; they were urged to stay at desks. India was given similar warnings about coastal cities and was told that F.N. global offices would be spared one more rotation out of respect for cultural monuments in Agra -- and to permit human beings to evacuate. (I intended to extend this by another rotation as deadline approached out of respect for Prof. And then another, indefinitely. Damn it, they would build their home offices next door to most overdecorated tomb ever built. But one that Prof treasured.) Rest of world was told to keep their seats; game was going extra innings. But stay away from any F.N. offices anywhere; we were frothing at mouth and no F.N. office was safe. Better yet, get out of any city containing an F.N. headquarters -- but F.N. vips and finks were urged to sit tight. Then spent next twenty hours coaching junior into sneaking his radar peeks when our sky was clear of ships, or believed to be. Napped when I could and Lenore stayed with me and woke me in time for next coaching. And that ended Mike's rocks and we all went into alert while we got first of Junior's rocks flung high and fast. Waited until certain it had gone hot and true -- then told Terra where to look for it and where and when o expect it, so that all would know that F.N.'s claims of victory were on a par with their century of lies about Luna -- all in Stu's best, snotty, supercilious phrases delivered in his cultured accents. First one should have been Great China but was one piece of North American Directorate we could reach with it -- her proudest jewel, Hawaii. Junior placed it in triangle formed by Maui, Molokai, and Lanai. I didn't work out programming; Mike had anticipated everything. Then pronto we got off ten more rocks at short intervals (had to skip one program, a ship in our sky) and told Great China where to look and when to expect them and where -- coastal cities we had neglected day before. Was down to twelve rocks but decided was safer to run out of ammunition than to look as if we were running out. So I awarded seven to Indian coastal cities, picking new targets -- and Stu inquired sweetly if Agra had been evacuated. If not, please tell us at once, (But heaved no rock at it.) Egypt was told to clear shipping out of Suez Canal -- bluff; was hoarding last five rocks. Then waited. I mpact at Lahaina Roads, that target in Hawaii. Looked good at high mag; Mike could be proud of Junior. And waited. Thirty-seven minutes before first China Coast impact Great China denounced actions of F.N., recognized us, offered to negotiate -- and I sprained a finger punching abort buttons. Then was punching buttons with sore finger; India stumbled over feet following suit. Egypt recognized us. Other nations started scrambling for door. Stu informed Terra that we had suspended -- only suspended, not stopped -- bombardments. Now get those ships out of our sky at once -- tanks, let them land not less than fifty kilometers from any mapped warren, then wait for their surrender to be accepted. But clear our sky This ultimatum we delayed a few minutes to let a ship pass beyond horizon; we weren't taking chances -- one missile and Luna would have been helpless. And waited. Cable crew returned. Had gone almost to Luna City, found break. But thousands of tonnes of loose rock impeded repair, so they had done what they could -- gone bade to a spot where they could get through to surface, erected a temporary relay in direction they thought Luna City lay, sent up a dozen rockets at ten-minute intervals, and hoped that somebody would see, understand, aim a relay at it -- any communication? No. Waited. Eyeball squad reported that a ship which had been clock faithful for nineteen passes had failed to show. Ten minutes later they reported that another ship had missed ' expected appearance. We waited and listened. Great China, speaking on behalf of all veto powers, accepted armistice and stated that our sky was now clear. Lenore burst into tears and kissed everybody she could reach. After we steadied down (a man can't think when women are grabbing him, especially when five of them are not his wives) -- a few minutes later, when we were coherent, I said, "Stu, want you to leave for Luna City at once. Pick your party. No women -- you'll have to walk surface last kilometers. Find out what's going on -- but first get them to aim a relay at ours and phone me." "Very good, sir." We were getting him outfitted for a tough journey -- extra air bottles, emergency shelter, so forth -- when Earthside called me... on frequeney we were listening to because message was (learned later) on all frequencies up from Earthside: Private message. Prof to Mannie -- identification, birthday Bastille IF and Sherlocks sibling. Come home at once. Your carriage waits at your new relay. Private message, Prof to -- " And went on repeating. "Harry!" "Da, Boss?" "Message Earthside -- tape and squeal; we still don't want them ringing us. 'Private message, Mannie to Prof. Brass Cannon. On my way! Ask them to acknowledge -- but use only one squeal." S tu and Greg drove on way back, while Wyoh and Lenore and I huddled on open flatbed, strapped to keep from falling off; was too small. Had time to think; neither girl had suit radio and we could talk only by helmet touch -- awkward. Began to see -- now that we had won -- parts of Prof's plan that had never been clear to me. Inviting attack against catapult had spared warrens -- hoped it had; that was plan -- but Prof had always been cheerfully indifferent to damage to catapult. Sure, had a second one -- but far away and difficult to reach. Would take years to put a tube system to new catapult, high mountains all way. Probably cheaper to repair old one. If possible. Either way, no grain shipped to Terra in meantime. And that was just whqt Prof wanted! Yet never once had he hinted that his plan was based on destroying old catapult -- his long-range plan, not just Revolution. He might not admit it now. But Mike would tell me -- if put to him flatly: Was or was not this one factor in odds? Food riot predictions and all that, Mike? He would tell me. That tonne-for-tonne deal -- Prof had expounded it Earthside -- had been argument for a Terran catapult. But privately he had no enthusiasm for it. Once he had told me, in North America, "Yes, Manuel, I fed sure it would work. But, if built, it will be temporary. There was a time, two centuries ago, when dirty laundry used to be shipped from California to Hawaii -- by sailing ship, mind you -- and clean laundry returned. Special circumstances. If we ever see water and manure shipped to Luna and grain shipped back, it will be just as temporary. Luna's future lies in her unique position at the top of a gravity well over a rich planet, and in her cheap power and plentiful real estate. If we Loonies have sense enough in the centuries ahead to remain a free port and to stay out of entangling alliances, we will become the crossroads for two planets, three planets, the entire Solar System. We won't be farmers forever." They met us at Station East and hardly gave time to get p-suits off -- was return from Earthside over again, screaming mobs and being ridden on shoulders. Even girls, for Slim Lemke.said to Lenore, "May we carry you, too?" -- and Wyoh answered, "Sure, why not?" Most men were pressure-suited and I was surprised to see how many carried guns -- until I saw that they were not our guns; they were captured. But most of all what bless relief to see L-City unhurt! C ould have done without triumphal procession; was itching to get to phone and find out from Mike what had happened -- how much damage, how many killed, what this victory cost. But no chance. We were carried to Old Dome willynilly. They shoved us up on a platform with Prof and rest of Cabinet and vips and such, and our girls slobbered on Prof and he embraced me Latin style, kiss cheek, and somebody stuck a Liberty Cap on me. Spotted little Hazel in crowd and threw her a kiss. At last they quieted enough for Prof to speak. "My friends," he said, and waited for silence. "My friends," he repeated softly. "Beloved comrades. We meet at last in freedom and now have with us the heroes who fought the last battle for Luna, alone." They cheered us, again he waited. Could see he was tired; hands trembled as he steadied self against pulpit. "I want them to speak to you, we want to hear about it, all of us. "But first I have a happy message. Great China has just announced that she is building in the Himalayas an enormous catapult, to make shipping to Luna as easy and cheap as it has been to ship from Luna to Terra." He stopped f#r cheers, then went on, "But that lies in the future. Today -- Oh, happy day! At last the world acknowledges Luna's sovereignty. Free! You have won your freedom -- " Prof stopped -- looked surprised. Not afraid, but puzzled. Swayed slightly. Then he did die. W e got him into a shop behind platform. But even with help of a dozen doctors was no use; old heart was gone, strained too many times. They carried him out back way and I started to follow. Stu touched my arm. "Mr. Prime Minister -- " I said, "Huh? Oh, for Bog's sake!" "Mr. Prime Minister," he repeated firmly, "you must speak to the crowd, send them home. Then there are things that must be done." He spoke calmly but tears poured down cheeks. So I got back on platform and confirmed what they had guessed and told them to go home. And wound up in room L of Raffles, where all had started -- emergency Cabinet meeting. But first ducked to phone, lowered hood, punched MYGot null-number signal. Tried again -- same. Pushed up hood and said to man nearest me, Wolfgang, "Aren't phones working?" "Depends," he said. "That bombing yesterday shook things up. If you want an out-of-town number, better call the phone office." Could see self asking office to get me a null. "What bombing?" "Haven't you heard? It was concentrated on the Complex. But Brody's boys got the ship. No real damage. Nothing that can't be fixed." IF Had to drop it; they were waiting.  didn't know what to do but Stu and Korsakov did. Sheenie was told to write news releases for Terra and rest of Luna; I found self announcing a lunar of mourning, twenty-four hours of quiet, no unnecessary business, giving orders for body to lie in state -- all words put into mouth, I was numb, brain would not work. Okay, convene Congress at end of twenty-four hours. In Novylen? Okay. Sheenie had despatches from Earthside. Wolfgang wrote for me something which said that, because of death of our President, answers would be delayed at least twentyfour hours. At last was able to get away, with Wyoh. A stilyagi guard kept people away from us to easement lock thirteen. Once home I ducked into workshop on pretence of needing to change arms. "Mike?" No answer. S o tried punching his combo into house phone -- null signal. Resolved to go out to Complex next day -- with Prof gone, needed Mike worse than ever. But next day was not able to go; trans-Criium tube was out -- that last bombing. You could go around through Torricelli and Novylen and eventually reach Hong Kong. But Complex, almost next door, could be reached only by rolligon. Couldn't take time; I was "government." Managed to shuck that off two days later. By resolution was decided that Speaker (Finn) had succeeded to Presidency, after Finn and I had decided that Wolfgang was best choice for Prime Minister. We put it through and I went back to being congressman who didn't attend sessions. By then most phones were working and Complex could be called. swer -- So went out by rolligon. Had to go down and walk tube last kilometer but Complex 'Under didn't seem hurt. Nor did Mike appear to be. But when I spoke to him, he didn't answer. He has never answered. Has been many years now. You can type questions into him -- in Loglan -- and you'll get Loglan answers out. He works just fine... as a computer. But won't talK Or can't. Wyoh tried to coax him. Then she stopped. Eventually I stopped. Don't know how it happened. Many outlying pieces of him got chopped off in last bombing -- was meant, I'm sure, to kill our ballistic computer. Did he fall below that "critical number" it takes to sustain self-awareness? (If is such; was never more than hypothesis.) Or did decentralizing that was done before that last bombing "kill" him?  don't know. If was just a matter of critical number, well, hrt long been repaired; he must be back up to it. Why doesn't he wake up? Can a machine be so frightened and hurt that it will go into catatonia and refuse to respond? While ego crouches inside, aware but nevthat; Mike was unafraid. Y ears, changes -- Mimi long ago opted out of family management; Anna is "Mum" now and Mimi dreams by video. Slim got Hazel to change name to Stone, two kids and she studied engineering. All those new free-fall drugs and nowdays earthworms stay three or four years and go home unchanged. And those other drugs that do almost as much for us; some kids go Earthside to school now. And Tibet catapult -- took seventeen years instead of ten; Kilimanjaro job was finished sooner. One mild surprise -- when time came, Lenore named Stu for opting, rather than Wyoh. Made no difference, we all voted "Da!" One thing not a surprise because Wyoh and I pushed it through during time we still amounted to something in government: A brass cannon on a pedestal in middle of Old Dome and over it a flag fluttering in blower breeze -- black field speckled with stars, bar sinister in blood, a proud and jaunty brass cannon embroidered over all, and below it our motto: "Tanstaafl!" That's where we hold our Fourth-of-July celebrations. You get only what you pay for -- Prof knew and paid, gaily. But Prof underrated yammerheads. They never adopted any of his ideas. Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden. Prof got fascinated by possibilities for shaping future that lay in a big, smart computer -- and lost track of things closer home. Oh, I backed him! But now I wonder. Are food riots too high a price to pay to let people be? I don't know. Don't know any answers, come right down to it. Wish I could ask Mike. I wake up in night and think I've heard him -- just a whisper: "Man... Man my best friend -- " But when I say, "Mike?" he doesn't answer. Is he wandering around somewhere, looking for hardware to hook onto? Or is he buried down in Complex Under, trying to find way out? Those special memories are all in there somewhere, waiting to be stirred. But I can't retrieve them; they were voice-coded. Oh, he's dead as Prof, I know it. (But how dead is Prof?) If I punched it just once more and said, "Hi, Mike!" would he answer, "Hi, Man! Heard any good ones lately?" Been a long time since I've risked it. But he can't really be dead; nothing was hurt -- he's just lost. You listening. Bog? Is a computer one of Your creatures? 'TVx) many changes -- May go to A that talk-talk tonight and tass in some random numbers. Or not. Since Boom started quite a few young cobbers have gone out lo Asteroids. Hear about some nice places out there, not too crowded. My word. I'm not even a hundred IF Dear Editor: I have just finished reading the letter by D. Bruce Berry in "Hue and Cry' of the October issue of If. I have been reading science fiction for many years and was not too surprised to find out that I am not (by Mr. Berry s description) a normal-general-public-type reader. I always read first the editorial then letters-to-the-editor before going on the body of the magazine, although I have never written such a letter, myself, before. For your information, I like a digest-size magazine and hope you dont change it. It fits easily into coat pocket, purse or glove compartment; I can take it anywhere, everywhere and always be sure of good reading on hand. Also, it can easily be held in one hand; I like to read while eating. As for the covers: I am attracted by art. rf the colors and form are artistically beautiful, I am attracted whether the subject matter is monsters, scenery or geometric form. Please don't shorten the editorials, I do enjoy them. -- Irene Migneault, # Alabama Street, San Diego, California #.    Dear Editor: A good example of physical sciences finally catching up with science fiction is shown in the English science journal NaturCy Vol. #, No. #, pp. #-#, May #, #. The title of this paper is Possible Anti-Matter Content of the Tunffuska Meteor of # by Prof. C. Cowan, C.R. Atlurl and Prof. W.P Libby -- a Nobel Prize winner. This "meteor" -- sic -- has been attributed to: #. A meteor, #. A small comet, #. A nuclear explosion of some sort!, and now to anti-matter annihilation. The first three of these are ruled out for various reasons and ijhe antimatter model seems to fit the observed perimeters for the explosion, although anti-matter has never been observed on earth. I am sure that anti-matter or its equivalent has been used as a bomb or some thing in past -- very past -- science fiction stories. No one seems to be laughing at this idea or suggesting the authors see a "head something to ponder, doesn't it? -- Peter R. Taylor, # Atherton Hall, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. Dear Editor: Concerning a letter from Linda Leach in your Jan. '# issue: The story she is interested in is The Arena by Fredric Brown, first printed in Astounding June #, also reprinted in a Groff Conklin anthology: The Big Book of S.F, published by Crown. In this short piece Mr. Brown commands the readers' participation with his use of excellent sensory illusions, somewhat like setting a Morrow cover to words. Many other writers make iood use of this technique, among which Philip Jose Farmer is a II rime example. I especially enjoyed his Day of The Ghreat Shout If Galaxy pubs, will continue to print fiction rf ttiat quality, there will never be need to worry about readership following. Only in this vay will S.F. insure its rightful place in literature, although I expect the snubbing by the "Ivory Tower" contemporary critics will continue forever. But why single out S.F. for such unwarranted criticism? Because it generally smacks of fantasy? Steinbeck, Ustinov, Poe -- even Shakespeare and countless others wrote fantasies at one time or another. They were of the supernatural instead of the science variety, but, as they say, it's the same difference. Well then, maybe S.F. is too specialized or too "far ou"? Hardly a basis for criticism. For instance: Murder, mysteries and detective fiction are surely highly specialized and nothing could be farther out than the recent rash of "super-spy" stories. Yet I haven't heard the critics taking pot-shots at these fields. I'm sure that you, Mr. Pohl, and your contemporaries bat these, and many other arguments around with the literary magnates. And I'm equally sure that they just smile condescendingly and decide to ignore nuts like you. Now isn't it true that S.F. is just hokey stuff like Buck Rogers and horrible monsters? (Critics must be rabid fans of the comics and low budget motion pictures.) That is what they think but we knew better, don't we? Incidentally, I have one final question : What ever happened to Walter M. Miller Jr? -- L.E. Donahue, #I Jeff Davis Pike, Apt. #, Richmond #, Va. #. # Re Walter Miller, we don't know -- but if anyone does, we'd like to hear. Re critics taking pot-shots at science fiction, this seems to be the nature of the beast. Not all critics; and not really at science fiction (because they happily love sciencefiction stories that aren't labeled science fiction, like The Child Buyer and # # A,) at tiiey oppose, it seems, is their own construct of what "science fiction" is like, presumably because they once saw The Beast from # Fathoms, didn't like it, and assume sf has nothing else to offer. Well, it's their loss, poor wretdhes! Meanwhile, looks like that fills us up for another month. Our "first" this month is Garrett Brown. Hope you'll be with us again, for more of Earthblofod (since the Heinledn serial had to stop sometime, we're delighted we had something like Earthblood to follow it up with!) and for the other stories coming up. By the way, we just bought a new one from James Blish. Tentative title is To Mars by Treehouse, and it's a good one! -- The Editor IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. warn No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep' No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Could you write for television? By Max Shulman X rankly, I don't know. But this I do know: I often paid # and more for scripts turned out by people who should have been arrested for impersonating writers. How such people got to be high-priced TV writers is not as mysterious as it seems. Television is an insatiable maw into which scripts must be fed at a rate unprecedented in the history of entertainment. It is a grateful producer indeed who consistently gets scripts which have been written with real understanding of television's powers and limitations. To help train new TV writers, I joined with Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight Zone, winner of five Emmy Awards) and ten other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We pooled everything we had learned in our long years in the business to devise four professional writing courses that men and women, seriously interested in writing, could take in their own homes in their free time. story (or documentary or commercial) in quick, visual sequences... the knack of thinking and writing with a lens! Through a series of carefully planned assignments, you learn as you write -- guided by our own specially organized textbooks. Your assignments are painstakingly edited and revised by our staff of instructors, themselves all professional writers. Under our supervision, an instructor works with you by mail, much as a producer or editor works with an established writer. Do you have an aptitude for writing? To help you (and us) decide whether you've got the stuff to be a writer, we have worked up a revealing aptitude test. The coupon below will bring you a copy, along with a #-page School brochure. If your test indicates aptitude, you are eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under no obligation to do so. How to write "with a lens" All four of our courses give you a solid foundation in basic writing skills. And three of them (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Advertising)give you training in the techniques of television. You learn to build interesting, believable characters; how to write dialogue that rings true; how to plot convincingly. Therf you develop the specialized approach that TV demands: the facility to tell your Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Faith Baldwin, Bergen fevans, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have an aptitude for writing. Please mail me, without obligation, a copy of your writing aptitude test and information about the courses you offer. Mr. Mrs Age Miss (please print) Street City #one . County State Accredited by Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council.  March # # Cbrnplete Short Novel of Iriterstellar Adventure' A  'i-r ' T   , 'Hm-'-X-ktAix. o o o o o O O OO o o o o o y o O O O O O Name Here fj won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! No. GF-# by Emsh No. Cr-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-#by Lynd Ward # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales lax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, BdHor David Parton, Prodvdion Mgr, Robari M. Guinn, Publisher Mavk Pkber, Subs, Mgr. by Robert A Heinlein # Editorial .#I I # IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation Robert M. Guinn President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street New York New York #T#. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States Canada Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions elsewhere #. Second-clau postage paid at New York, New York and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The pubKsher assumes no responsibility for unsolidted material. Ail stories are fl tion, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coinddenfal. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Editorial IF B esides bein the title of this magazine, If is of course a poem by Rudyard Kipling which goes in part: If you can keep your head when all about you Are Wsing theirs  and blaming it on you... Kipling did well with the poem; next to Gunga Din and The Road to Mandalay it is about the most successful piece of writing he ever did. The poem If is a passionate plea for calm. Keep your head, it says. Don't panic. Don't despair. Keep plowing right ahead... and then you'll be a man, my son. This is no doubt good advice -- in certain circumstances. In others, maybe not so good. It is the kind of advice that is handed out freely by people in high places, in all countries, who aren't really themselves too sure what the future is going to produce but don't want their electorate to get upset. Does the northeast part of the United States go through a total power failure? Never fear, they say, it can't happen again. Are we clearly headed for a population pressure that not all our tractors and fertilizers can feed? Not to worry; we'll find a way, say they. Of course, human history argues powerfully on the side of the Princes of Serendip who soothe us with these words. The human race has in fact muddled through a great many challenges over the past halfvides some illuminating examples. Be calm, said Neville Chamberlain, we have Peace in Our Time, while Winston Churchill flapped and shouted in the background -- but it was Churchill, not Chamberlain, who had to pick up the pieces when the whole facade of calm fell apart under Hitler's attack. Today the issues are not the same, but the words are. We will find a way; the Free World will muddle through. (On the other side of the fence the words go: "History is on our side; we of the People's Republics will outlive our enemies.") But is there really any firm ground for believing that this is so? Or have we in fact reached a point in human history where muddling through, with its penalties of shock, disruption, cataclysm and destruction, is simply a luxury we can no longer afford? We who are turned on to science fiction -- who like to look at the future; who try to see beyond tomorrow's TV programs -- perhaps would rewrite some of the sage advice Kipling offered about keeping our heads. Maybe calm is not the best response to the challenges of today. Maybe we should adopt the altered version of Kipling's poem that was current in the armed forces a few years ago, which runs like this: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs... Then, fella, maybe you just don't have a very good grasp of what the situation is all about! -- The Editor IF  Complete Short NoiM The job called for very simple to be the only human being oa the planet -- and fo die there! It wasn't the first time in her life she'd been the odd one out, so that figured. For example -- and the most glaring example -- she hadn't had to leave Earth. That marked her off immediately even on a comparativety highly populated outerwodd hke Nefertiti. The massive encouraged emlgratioin" of I T here was one item on display in the enormous window: a zygra pelt. Kynance Foy stood and looked at k. There were a lot of other women doing the same thing. But she was the only one who was gritting her teeth. the Diotatrix period had lowered the premiums on wanderlust at home. It was a full generation since Nefertiti declared itself independent and set quotas for Earthside immigrants, and then found them superfluous because the demand wasn't there. For the umpteenth time Ky nance read the discreet hand-lettered price tag attached to one corner of the stand on which the zygra pelt was No other price had ever been asked for the pelts. Okay, Ky nance told herself sourly. I was naive, , , . She had never confessed it even to her closest friends, but one of the things she had planned to bring back wihen she returned to astonish those who had mocked her was -- a zygra pelt. She had pictured herself emerging from the exit of the starship wearing it: not elegantly, but casually, tossed around her, her body molded by it into insurpassable perfection, yet her pose implying that she had had it so long she was becoming faintly bored with the attention she attracted. At this moment she did not even possess the price of a square meal. Other plans, other ambitions, had been shed one by one as she doggedly worked her way towards Nefertiti, reasoning that the closer one came to the source the cheaper the pelt might become. Not so. Only the cost of interstellar freight shrank, while the asking price remained She stood watching its shifts of sheen and texture, wondering what exotic perfumes it had been trained to secrete. What, for instance. matched that liquid rainbow phase when the pelt seemed to run in endless streams of pure color? She cursed her own stupidity. Yet... Was I to know? Oh, maybe. Her brash confidence, though, hadn't lacked evidence to support it. She was fresh out of college with ly changed her major to qua-space physics and her minor to interstellar commerce when she made her mind up, but before that she 'had been well grounded in the unfeminine combination of business law and practical engineering -- the latter by accident, merely to get her own back on a sneering boy friend who once offered to fix her skycar. This, moreover, was not her only equipment. She was exactly one meter seventy tall; she was exotically gorgeous, having inherited dark eyes and sinuous grace from a Dutch ancestor who fell from grace in Java in company of a temple dancer, and hair of a curious irongray shade traceable only to a colony of Cornish tin-miners totalling some five hundred persons in a multiwhich her tanned skin burned like new copper. There was no risk -- so she had argued -- of her ever being stranded. If the worst came to the worst, and neither qua-space physics nor her encyclopedic knowledge of interstellar commerce could secure her employment, she could always... Well, she had never phrased the idea clearly to herself, but k inIF solved some romantically handsome hazard his career for the sake of her company on a trip to some more promising planet, a crochety captain won over by her dazzling personality and delivery with unsolicited testimonials to an entrepeneur in need of a private secretary when they arrived. S he had begun to suspect she had made the wrong decision on the first stop out from Earth, when e still had the cash in hand to go home. What she had overlooked was that during the miserable regime of the Dictatrix incredible numbers of non-pioneer types had been -- in the official terminology of the day -- "encouraged" to emigrate, chief among them intractable intellectuals doubtful of the universal benefits Her Magnificence was supposed to be bestowing. Consequently the outworlds had been colonized, forcibly, angry men and women. Having nothing left but the desire to get even, they had buckled to and made the best of what they had. Not for this breed of colonist was the broad axe or the draft-ox or the log-cabin. They were used to lasers, vidding and mufable furniture. They knew the necessary techniques; and with the determination of fanatics they had set out not merely to provide such luxuries for themselves but to insure that if the same fate overtook their children or their children's children the youngsters would be able to repeat the process. Which was not to imply that there were absolutely no openings on such old-settled words as Ge and New Medina for moderately talented young women. Had this been the case she would have turned around despite the scorn she would face from her friends on retreating to Earth. Instead, she found temporary work; saved up; moved on, convincing herself that things would be different further out. They were. By her third or fourth stopover, she was encountering sea-harvesters supervised by ten-year-olds, each responsible for two thousand tons of protein-rich food a week and a mainstay of the planetary economy, and reading bulletin boards at spaceports bearing blanket warnings -- to save the labor of writing the words on every single advertisement -- that no one lacking a Scholar degree in the relevant subjects need bother to apply. And even her asset of last resort, her appearance, failed her. What she had failed to reckon with -- or omitted to find out -- was that once they were clear of Earth, and the traditional association of appearance with regional origins, the emigrants whether forced or voluntary were satisfied to be human beings rather than Europeans or Africans or Asians. By the time a couple of generations had slipped away, the mixing of the gene-pool was already throwing up types which made the concept "exotic' seem irrelevant. Swedisih and Quechua. Chukchi and Matabele, the wildest extremes of physique met IF in a mad succession of paradoxes. And the outcrossing, in good genetic fashion, produced its quota of fantasy. Tlien, released from Earthside attachment to local types, the more prosperous girls started to experiment, drawing on some of the finest talents in biology and surgery. Within ten yards of where Kynance was standing, there were a Negress with silver hair and blood-red irises, a miniaturized Celtic redhead no higher than her elbow and stacked and a shimmering golden girl with slanted eyes and the quiet hypnotic movements of a trained geisha. Any of the three would have monopolized a roomful of sophisticated Earthmen. On Druid, somebody had asked Kynance to marry him. On Quetzal someone else had asked her to act as hostess for him and be his acknowledged mistress. On Loki a third man had suggested, rather bored'ly, that she become his son's rhistress, the son being aged sixteen and due to submit his scholar's thesis in cybernetics. And on Nefertiti she would have been grateful for even that much attention. Confronted with the symbol of her empty ambitions, she admitted the truth to herself at last. She was scared. Well, gawping at the zygra pelt wasn't solving the problem of hunger. She made to move away. At that moment, a soft voice emanated from the air. It came over a biaxial interference speaker, so for practical purposes the statement was exact. She stopped dead. "The Zygra Company draws your attention to a vacancy occurring shortly on its staff. Limited service contract, generous remuneration, comfortable working conditioiis, previous experience not necessary, standard repatriation clause. Apply at this office, inquiring for Executive Shuster." The message was repeated twice. Kynartce stood In a daze, waiting for the rusih to begin. There was no rush. The only reaction was the sound of an occasional sarcastic laugh as people who had been gazing at the pelt were disturbed and decided to wander on. No. Ridiculous. Im'possible. She must have dreamed it. Not enough food and too much worry had conspired to create an illusion. Nonetheless she was on her way to the entrance of the Zygra Building. She hadn't taken a conscious decision -- she was following a tropism as automatic as that of a thirsty man spotting an oasis across the desert. She did wonder why one or two people sihe jostled looked pityingjy at her eagerness, but that was afterwards. U E xecutive Shuster wias a vain man of early middle age. It was obvious he was vain. His expensive clothes were meant to look expensive. His fastidiously arranged office was a frame for him. And his manner as he looked her over implied that he hoped she would instantly fall on her knees. f Kynance did no;hing of the sort. Right now she had room in her head for precisely one thought, and she uttered it. "You're offering a job. What is it?" Shuster looked her over a second time, shrugged and put on a practiced artificial smile. "I must say that it's seldom I have the pleasure of interviewing such an attractive candidate for one of our posts." "What's the job?" Shuster blinked. He retreated to Position Two: superior knowledgeability. "I can tell by your accent you're not Nefertitian. Do sit down, won't you? And would you care for a drink?" Kynance stayed put. Not that she cared what the job was. She'd have accepted the chance to be junior wasiher-up on an interstellar tramp, providing the contract carried the standard repatriation clause. That was the bait which had brought her into this room -- not the propect of getting on the inside of The Zygra Company itself. She would have traded every pelt in the galaxy for a berth on a ship bound for borne. The repatriation clause was one of he few attempts made by Earth's current government to impose a decree on the unnriy outworlds, and the only attempt to have succeeded. Following the Dictatrix period, everyone in the galaxy was shy of absolute decrees. But there was enough mobility among the outworlds themselves to generate support for the concept of compulsory repatriation, so even the greediest entrepeneurs had had to succumb and write in the clause. It stated simply that if the place of work was on another planet than the world where the labor was engaged, compliance with the conditions of employment entitled the employee to repatriation at the expense of the company... whether or not the planet of origin was the one where the worker had been hired. Prior to this, some of ,the less scrupulous companies had forcibly colonized outworlds by methods even less polite than the Dictatrix's: luring workers into their net with temptingly high salaries, then abandoning them light-years from any place where they could spend their earnings. To Kynance, this was salvation -- if she got the job. "I would not care for a drink," she said. "All I want is a plain answer." Shuster retreated to Position Umpteen, sighed and gestured at his desketary. "The contract is a very long and detailed one." he murmured with a last attempt at regaining lost ground. "I do think you should sit down while we discuss it." W ith the mobile bulk of the desketary to help him, he outnumbered Kynance. She was forced to accept a seat on a two-th in-person lounge along the window wall, where Shuster joined her. He then maneuvered the desketary so that she couldn't run away across the room, and rubbed his shoulder against hers. IF When he gets to the knee-mauling stage, Kynaoce promised herself, ril -- ril think about it. She was that desperate, and hadn't realized it before. "The post," Shuster was saying urbanely, "isn't such a demanding one, really. It's a shame, in fact, that so lovely a girl -- " "Executive, unless you're stupid you've already caught on to what interests me about the job," Kynaoce snapped. "The repatriation clause? Oh, it's there, in full." Shuster smiled and moved a little closer. "Though strictly in confidence -- " "If you don't give girls straight answers," Ky nance purred with malice, "don't you expect them to misunderstand you?" The trap worked fine. Shuster diminished the pressure of his shoulder against hers by at least ten per cent and spoke in a voice as mechanical as a desketary's. "Supervisor of Zygra for a term of one year at a salary of a hundred thousand credits." Supervisor of Zygra -- ? There was a long silence. At last Kynance said in a thin voice. "You can't possibly mean the planet Zygra? You must mean a farm, or a plantation, or -- or something!" Shuster curled his lips into a pleased grin. "Of course, coming as you do from Ge, you wouldn't know much about zygra pelt production, would you?" "Your announcement said no experience was necessary. And I'm from Earth, not Ge." She bit her tongue, fractionally too late, seeing in imagination her chance of the post vanishing into vacuum. With repatriation involved, logically the Zygra Company would prefer to hire someone from Nefertiti, where it had its registered HQ, or from some nearer world than Barth at least -- some worlds coQr venient for its own ships. For tlM sake of a gibe at this horrible stranger she had sacrificed... But what was he saying? Unperturbed, Shuster was continuing in the same tone. "But you must have spent some time on Ge, at least? I could have sworn I detected it in your accent. Well, let's set the record straight, shall we? Central Computing, please," he added to the desketary. "Category application for employment, subcategory supervisor of Zygra, candidate Foy, Kynance, new reference number." He sat back, contriving to restore the pressure on her. "By the way, I did mean supervisor of the planet Zygra," he concluded, and enjoyed the smashing impact of the words. That at leastt, Kynance decided bitterly, settled the matter. For the task of supervising the unique, jealously guarded home of the pelts, they would never pick -- Hang on, though! Why was the job described in these terms anyway? The demand for pelts implied a massive installation at the point of origin -- a staff of hundreds, more likely thousands -- breeding, traintasks... She frowned and rubbed her forehead in a frantic attempt to rememher what little she had ever known about the production of zygra pelts. Something about the planet being unfit for colonization... ? "How are the things raised?" she asked, surrendering. S huster leaned confidentially close. "Tlhe term 'pelt' is a misnomer. It's no breach of company secrecy to say so nowadays, although when they were first being imported to civilized worlds the admission would have been an automatic breach of an employee's contract, since it was thought advisable to mislead purdiasers and possible rivals by making them think it was the skin of an animal. In fact, the pelts are entire lifeforms in themselves. Insofar as they're related to anything we know they're a kind of moss. So I suppose 'plantation' is as good a term as any for the place where they grow!" He laughed and abbed her in the ribs. "Though it's impossible to grow anything else there, I tell you frankly. Zygra is a sort of -- now, how shall I describe it?" "You've been there yourself?" Ky nance suggested, trying to wriggle away and finding her progress firmly blocked by the end of the narrow lounge. "Naturally I've been there," Shuster said loftily. "In actual fact, the supervisor of Zygra is responsible to me, so one of the duties which I undertake is ensuring that the terms of the contract are strictly adhered to. Of course this involves direct inspection and..." He ran on at some length, to make sure she didn't miss the point. In essence, he was saying: it pays to be nice to me, "You were telling me about Zygra," she murmured finally. "Oh yes! A sort of vegetable stew is as near as one can come to describing it, I think. Marshland, a few patches of open water, much smaller than oceans on planets which have satellites, and -- plants. I believe the parasitism extends to the fourteenth degree. In other words, there are some highly evolved forms, including the pelts, which can't absorb nutriment until it's been processed by an ecological chain fourteen units long. They remain plants rather than animals, you understand." Dim facts were beginning to seep from Ky nance's memory -- not dim merely because she had never studied the subject seriously, but also because as a matter of policy the Zygra Company shroud its operations in mystery. Not even the Dictatrix had dared to monkey with so powerful and wealthy an organization. Come to think of it, it was a wonder that they'd agreed to repatriation clauses. They, and they alone, might have managed to stand out against the general trend. A little faintly, she said, "Look, I'm sorry if I'm being silly, but the impression I get is that this job involves being the only person on Zygra." "That is correct." He eyed her calculatingly. "So, if you wish to reconsider the application I'll find it IF perfectly understandable. To be alone on a strange planet is bad people there already, as I'm sure you've found out. So why don't I take you around a bit and introduce you to some of my friends, get you over the worst of it? Believe me, I know how difficult it is to -- " "Repatriation clause," Kynance muttered between clenched teeth, too faintly for Shuster to hear her. He Was edging even closer now, a feat she would have thought impossible. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear that?" You weren't meant to. Aloud and with a flashing smile, Kynance said, "Then how is the -- plantation run?" "Automated," Shuster sighed. "The most complete and elaborate system of automation, and I may add the most thoroughly defended against interference, in the entire galaxy. The supervisor's post is a sinecure." S he turned it over in her mind. A sinecure for which the allpowerful Zygra Company pays this vast salary? There must be a catch, but Tm damned if  can see what -- Oh, this matter of being the only person on the planet! "Let me get this quite right," she said. "The supervisor is alone on the planet?" "The supervisor of Zygra," Shuster said patiently, "is the only employee of the Zygra Company whose place of employment is on Zygra itself." "Claim-jumping," Kynance said. "What?" "Claim-jumping! Automated equipment in operalioa doesn't constitute possession of an astral body: Government and People of the United States versus Government and People of the Soviet Union, International Court of Justice, #. You have to maintain at least the. fiction of human habitation, or anybody else could step in an# occupy Zygra." Shuster, she was delighted to see, blanched. He said, "You -- you've studied law?" "Of course." "Well, then... Shuster rubbed meters. You look as if you've forgotten something, buster. And you have. You should have exploited this perfect opportunity to find out all about me. Absolutely correct. Shuster's next step was to reach for the controls of the desketary. "There is the slight additional point to consider, isn't there?" he muttered. "I mean, not only whether the job suits you, but whether you suit the job. Uh -- Central Computing!" "Waiting," said the desketary rather sullenly. "Applicant Foy, Kynance. Personal and career details follow." "I am twenty-five years old," Kynance began clearly, and went ahead from there, visualizing a standard application form in her mind's eye. Halfway through her college courses the idea struck her that Shuster was getting nervous; she went on with as much detail as she could muster, hoping she was on the right track, and found she was when the desketary finally started to ring an interruption bell. "Further information superfluous," the mechanical voice grunted. "Shut up!" Shuster rapped, but the machine finished what it had to say anyhow. "Applicant's qualifications greatly in excess of stipulated minimum!" There must he a catch in it. Must be, must be! Maybe its in the con-' tract itself. It was Shuster's turn to detect worry. He recovered fast from his annoyance at what the desketary had revealed -- or rather, the company's economically-minded computers, determined not to waste time on questions to which the answer was known. "That's fine, then, isn't it?" he said. "So -- but I see you're not happy." "Show me the contract, please," Kynance said, and waited for the desketary to issue a copy of it. S omewhat to her surprise, it was by no means the most weasely she had seen. It was long, but it was explicit. All but a handful of its clauses were patterned on a hopeful standard form laid down by Earth's government in the aftermath of the Dictatrix period, and consequently weighted heavily against arbitrary conditions. So the trap is in the non-standard clauses. Her instinct in similar situations before had been to get an independent evaluation, preferably from a computer programmed by a reformed confidence trickster with a deep knowledge of human deceit. Now, lacking even the price of a meal, she had to rely on her own judgment I wish my eyes wouldn't keep drifting back to the repatriation hit! She said, without looking up, "When does the contract come into force?" "On signature," Shuster said. His tone suggested he was enjoying a private and rather cruel joke. "The commencement of actual work is according to the schedule you've read, and the basic term is one Nefertitian year. Option to renew must be signified in advance but not less than one month before due date of repatriation." She pounced. "In other words, I start work less than one month from now?" "Ah -- not exactly." But Shuster didn't seem put out. "The previous incumbent is due to leave in two months' time, but you understand we must insure ourselves against the contingency you've already mentioned: the risk of leaving Zygra without a legal occupant acting for the company. Also there is a short period of training, environmental familiarization and so forth. Customarily we advertise ahead of the due date." "But I become an employee directly I validate the contract?" "If I were in your place I shouldn't jump at it," Shuster said insinuatingly. "Why don't you consider -- ?" None of his alternative proposals was apt to contain a repatriation IF daruse. Kynance shuddered as imperceptibly as possible and went on examining the form. One wouldn't expect the Zygra Company to be tender-hearted, but even so the schedule was stark. In this sector most stars were marginally hotter than Sol, so habitable planets orbited a little farther out. Like Nefertiti, Zygra had a year longer than Earth's. Once in the course of that year the company landed a ship, staying about a week at the time when the harvest was ripe. (That was awe-inspiring, in a way. One ship per year, and its cargo paid for everything several times over!) The "incumbent", to borrow Shuster's term, was delivered on one visit, fetched away the next. If he was injured or fell sick, the policy was straightforward and indeed spelt out: he or she was kept alive by prosthetic devices so that when the next ship landed continuity in the legal sense was established. After that it was presumably a matter of chance whether you died on the way home. The company wouldn't be bothered. Might sue for your injuries...# No, forbidden as an ex post facto breach of contract. Arguable, might not stand, in a court, but a helpless cripple up against the Zygra Company would be ill advised to find out. Of course, some rival firm might finance a claim, but to what purpose? They'd settle with the offer of an undernourished surplus-torequirement pelt, and the owner would become instantly rich. Stick to the point, woman! Kynance adjured herself. There were a good many ways to break the contract and render k void, but try as she might she couldn't imagine herself throwing away the chance of repatriation for any of the conceivable reasons. And as for the inconceivable ones, it must purely be legal excess of caution that put them in. For example, this nonstandard clause mortared into the middle of half a dozen stock items: "It shall be absolute and agreed grounds to void this contract if the signatory B -- " the employee -- "shall at any time during hisher term of employment herein specified reveal, divulge, indicate or in any fashion whatsoever communicate to a person not an employee of the signatory A -- " the Zygra Company -- "any information relevant to the production, training, conditioning or other process of manufacture of the product known as Zygra pells; or shall signal or shall attempt to signal or in any way establish communication from the place of employment to or with any person not an employee of the signatory A on any subject whatsoever whether or not specified above." The place of employment was defined as "the surface of the planet Zygra or any place or places whatsoever in the absolute discretion of the signatory A defined as a place or places where the business of the signatory A is carried on." W as that the hole? Did it imply that the contract was void k, prior to the year's end, she told a spacelines booking clerk she had been working on Zygra? It might, but even a year's isolation wasn't going to lower her determination to go home! She could keep her mouth shut as long as she had to, and not even the Zygra Company could compel her to stay quiet once the year was over. A final time she leafed through the contract; then she reached out abruptly and moistened her thumb on the desketary's validation pad. Her hand poised over the form. And still she hesitated. "How many other applicants have there been for this post?" she said abruptly. Shuster had forgotten to cancel his circuit to the firm's computers; blindly the voice rang out. "No other candidate has -- " "Shut up!" Shuster roared, and this time he was quick enough to activate the cancelling mechanisms. Kymance looked at him and said nothing. "Ah..." He ran his finger around the collar of his tunic. "I could tell something was bothering you, and I'm not surprised. Of course, there's the point that we've only just begun to advertise the post -- " Kynance tapp the form stonily. According to the schedule incorporated in it, the harvesting ship was due to call in less than seven weeks. "Moreover, even at the salary we offer, there are few people who are isolation." Shuster was recovering again -- he bounced back fast and always to the same orbit. Now he was sliding his arm behind her, fingers groping for the bare skin under her nape-hair. "But in strict and total confidenot there is someithing which hddi people back from applying, even people like yourself who are lonely on Nefertiti and have few friendi..." The fingers slithered down her shoulder; the other hand fumbled around her waist and upwards. Kynaince waited, frozen. "If you take my advice," Shuster whispered, "I think you'll find it pays in the long run, and k's much more fun than sitting for a year watching machines look after a lot of moss -- beautiful moss, but just moss in the last analysis. Look, before you validate the contract shall we -- ?"  know what the reason is why people dont apply in droves. The word's got around that they have to get past you. Kynance made four precisely timed movements. The first slid out from the grip on her shoulder; the second detached the hand trespassing on her bosom; the third stabbed her thumb hard on the validation box of the contract; and the fourth slapped Shuster resoundingly on the cheek. For long seconds he didn't react. Then, the mark burning redly on his pale skin, he took the contract and entered the firm's validation also, making the gesture a complete vocabulary of abuse. Finally he spoke between clenched teeth: "And I hope you rot." m I f, in that moment, anyone had told Kynance only a few more IP days would pass befome she foimd herself wisbmg for another sight of SbusitcT, she would have thought the speaker crazy. Yet that was how it turned out. There was something absolutely terrifying for an Eanthsider in the impersonal, almosit machine-like way the Zygra Company accepted its new employee. Of course, outworldere were accustomed to this method of treatment. People whose family tradition embraced the concept of taming a whole planet with less than a thousand responsible adults, or homesteading half a continent with servos jury-rigged out of spaceship scrap, would probably prefer emotionless mechanical supervision to the unpredictability of human beings. Kynance's previous jobs since leaving Earth, though, had been with small entrepeneurial undertakings, or with private individuals. These were flexible enough to put up with the non-standard human material she represented. Firms in the middle brackets had their sights fixed on expansion; they needed outworlders who fitted their present requirements and had no slack available to make adjustments for strangers. A firm as huge as the Zygra Company, by contrast, simply took it for granted that its employees did fit. If they didn't actually do so the company ignored the fact. Superficially she had no cause to complain of the way she was treated. Once instructed that she was working for the company, the computers accorded her strictly what she was entitled to. She was given an advance against salary, a bedroom m a subsidiary wing of the headquarteirs building and a schedule for her training program; she was medkaMy examin and cured of a minor sinus infection which had been bothering her since Loki; she was automatically interrogated under flicker-stimulaition to make certain she wasn't hired by some rival organization -- but that she had anticipated, and could hardly resent. at wore her down, though, was the way in which the Zygra Company reflected the sparse population of all the outworld in microcosmic form. Days of empty corridors, empty elevators, blankly closed doors and offices, testified to the efficiency with which human resources were exploited. No time wasted in going fixm place to place around the building, nor in casual chatting. That habit would come back in another generation or two. Right now, there was still a shortage of nmpower, so that the Zygra Company which owned ethe whole of a planet had fewer staff at its headquarters than aboard one of its interstellar freighters. A slight consolation was the fact that the training program was intensive. Shuster had said the post was a sinecure. That might be true, but the company's computers were of an economical turn, as she had already established, and no one had tcd them not to take trouble. In the idtimate analysis something might go wrong with the fabulous cybernetic devices on Zygra, and some crucial decision might laud in the lap of IF the single busnian occupant of the planet. In that case, the computers apparently reasoned, said human occupant must be equipped with the fullest possible knowledge of the situation. So... Head ringing, she struggled to absorb everything she was told or shown. A real pelt was an essential part of the instructional environment. After a week, she had forgotten its cash value and liked it solely because it was another living thing in this otherwise mechanical setting. Z ygra: a vegetable stew. A planet fractionally smailter than Earth, with a virtually uniform warm damp climate and no satellite large enough to generate tides. Solar attraction created sluggish surges in its universal marshes -- swamps -- everglades whatever one cared to call them. But any term you applied was slightly wrong, for Zygra remained uniquely itself. The atmosphere was breathable. There were no organisms capable of infecting human tissue and equally there were no animals -- hence no hostile species to exterminate. It would certainly have been a prize for colonization if it had had any dry land at all. As things stood, over ninety-nine per cent of the surface a human being either swam, or sank to his waist in mud, or required artificial lifesuppKrt systems. Ky nance began to catch on to some of the reasons why nobody bad ever seriously tried to take possession of the planet away from the Zygra Company when she learned that the annual cost of maintaining the supervisor in reasonable comfort was equivalent to two pelts Another hundred thousand in salary atop that seemed almost negligible. Apart from swamp, there were two other notable features of the surface. First, and natural, the vegetation: a complex as elaborate as any known on an Earthlike world, extending as Shuster had said over ecological chains fourteen units in length, climaxing in the pelts. In their home environment ey frequented certain mat-like rafts of another plant, on which parasitized the intervening members of the chain. Their incredible changeability, their flexibility and their scentsecretions seemed to be a kind of evolutionary luxury; no one had assigned them with any ctainty to adaptational measures. At the season of maximal solar tide, their glory reached optimum. Then came the harvest, when they were shock-conditioned into a permanent state of excitation and coated on their underside with a solid solution of concentrated nutriment. Those so provisioned would last twenty to thirty years regardless of how they were used -- tears repaired themselves, the shimmier and odor continued unabated until old age set in. No wonder the pelts were the most sought-after objects in the galaxy. The second feature of Zygra was artificial and recent. It was the automated harvesting and breeding system Shuster had mentioned. As he had said, it was defended against interference. Orbital guardposts would ohaiienge and destroy any ship emerging from qua-space without the correct recognition signals, even if the ship was in distress -- for there was only one place on Zygra a ship could set down without sinking instantly into the swamps, and that was the company's own main station, floating around the planet as the pelts migrated from raft to raft of their indispensable weed with the seasons. From the main station, scores upon scores of wholly automatic substations fanned out, herding the pelts, selecting and tagging those which displayed the most remarkable variations, culling drab ones, crossfertilizing sports with known strains to produce extra-gorgeous lines, prodding, poking, exciting and in every way directing their fate. and concentrating the ingredients for the solid nourishment with which the export pelts had to be coated, telescoping five or six years of natural processing into as many months: extract of yardweed fed to blockweeds, extract of blockweed fed to dinglybells, extract of dinglybell fed to Zygran bladderwrack, extract of bladderwrack fed to free-floating pseudosponge. Gelatinized, fortified, sprayed on and allowed to dry. "I think," Ky nance said very softly to herself, "at I shan't go crazy, even if I am alone on the planet. I think it's going to be rather interesting." IV H orst Lampeter parted the fronds of the bladderwrack and peered over the ribbon-like expanse of temporarily open water. It could hardly be called a river, because it bad no banks. It was just a channel between two patches of mingled bladderwrack and dinglybells which had used up enough of the nearer bondroots to let a former mudbank dissolve into silt and wash away. Damn this mist, blurring his view! Or was it the mist obscuring details? Were his eyes perhaps going bad on him? It was all too likely -- a local diet was deficient in so many necessities, and the mere fact you could choke something down without vomiting didn't imply proper nutriment. He chopped the thought off short. Going blind on Zygra was too depressing an idea to be allowed to prey on his mind. Concentrate, he told himself. Concentrate! Instead of straining to see, he listened. Zygra was a quiet planet -- maddeningly quiet, lacking as it did any form of animal life -- but there was always a surplus of background noise, the plashing of open water, the suck and shift of subsiding mudbanks, the occasional flop of pelts returning to a floating phase from high on the edge of a weedraft. What could he hear that didn't belong in this normal murmuring? Nothing. Maybe Victor had calculated wrong after all. He sighed and remembered to shift before the bladderwrack accumulated enough cell-strain to colIF iaipse the floats on which he was balancing. A man could easily get lost among the trailing roots and fail to find his way back to air in the minute or so he could hold his breath. Shadowed so that the light bathing him had a weird greenish quality, he looked down at himself. He was naked except for a bdt of plaited weed on which he had hung his crude wooden tods. His chest was shrunken, so he could count his ribs by eye, and his skin was pallid even without the greenish tinge of the shadows. His feet and ankles felt puffy and waterlogged. His hair and beard, grown long for want of any means to trim them, were braided together to keep them out of his way.  must look like a bogeyman out of a savage's nightmare. Listening anew, he still caught no sound distinct from the ordinary. How to know if Victor's calendar was accurate? Time in this horrible setting was so fluid -- as fluid as the marshy ground, which changed and drifted so that one could never be sure where he was unless the night sky was clear for a change and it was possible to sight on the stars with the notched crossed sticks he called his "sextant". And even 'if by some miracle the calendar was correct, to within a few days at least, and the time of harvest was really coming close, how to be sure that some freak of circumstances wouldn't take the pelts by the northern route this time? Four years back, they'd gone north instead of south in response either to a fluctuation of the climate or tide, or else because some bhnd machine decided this was a course more profitable to the Zygra Company. Horst wish for solid ground on which to stamp his foot. Failing it, he pounded fist into palm in a futile gesture of hatred. Why did people have to be this way -- so greedy to wring the jast chop from a proifitable venture, even if the last drop was a man's lifeblcxxl? It was as though the pattern of susipicion and jealousy imposed by the Dictatrix's regime had rippled outward from Eajth, aind now, long after it had died at ks point of origin, it still ruled the minds of those in power on the outworlds, ferociously though they would have denied the charge. A sound? A sort of flopping sound? He jumped, just in time to save himself from being precipitated down among the bladderwrack's root system as it collapsed a square meter of floats in response to the strain of his weight, and peered along the channel as he had done earlier. This time his heart gave a lurch. No doubt about it: those were migrating pelts! r iey lay on the smooth surface of the water with hardly a hint of the quality which made them so prized by humanity. Their upper sides glistened, but only from wetness. It took an eye trained by bitter experience to inform Horst of the all-important truth: that smear of red, that ripple of gold, overlying the pelts' basic greenish-brown, foreshadowed the glory of harvest. Frantically he readied beihind him for the buie of matweed fronds with a piece of vine from an upper branch of the Wadderwrack. The fronds were twisted and bruised so that they would leak their juices into the water. Without making a splash that could be detected at a distance, he set the bundle adrift. Moments passed. The first taste of juice reached the searching pelts, and they began to wiggle in their astonishing flexible manner towards the presumed source of the lure. Ho(Tst let some of the tension ooze away and whistled over his shoulder. The Wadderwrack surged underfoot in response to movements across its surface, and then the other men were alongside, keeping their distance oarefully because to have four men's weight in one spot would trigger the collapse of the floats instantly. The Wadderwrack was one of many species of plants free-floating on the surface of Zygra, but no other seemed to have evolved the notion of gas-filled cysts sensitive to weight on the upper side. The process went like this: a seed or spore would settle on the float, feed there until it was heavier than a certain critical load, at which pK)int the collapse of the bladder dropped it underwater and it became food for the larger plant, entwined among root-tendrils and squeezed of its sap. A man's weight speeded the process so that it cycled to completion in three to eight minutes. Nothing on Zygra was solid and stable. "They're pelts all right," Victor mutitered, adding in a tone of weak triumph, "Didn't I say so?" Scrawny, skin yellow and bagging his large head wbling on his tiiia neck, he chuckled ihis self-approbation. "Shut up," Coberley told him. Insofar as there could be a leader in this situation, Coberley was theirs. He was neither cleverer than Victor -- whose IQ, in his normal phase, must run close to genius level -- nor more skillful than Horst, who was anyway fifteen years younger. But he fed on some invisible source of energy, probably hatred, and he was always the one who found the willpower to continue when the natural impulse was to weary surrender. He was a former fat man. Now he was puffy, his skin loose without substance beneath to round it and firm it. "I don't see a monitor," Coberley went on. "What do we do if we've picked up a stray herd? There arc some, you know. In a good year a few escape the monitors and wander about on their own." "Kill them!" Victor shrilled. "Rip them up and ruin them! Cost the kill!" "Shut wp," Coberley repeated, this time with malice, and Victor complied. They waited. And at last, at last, the monitor came in sight: awash in the water, barely protruding above the herd of pelts, but hiding beneath its flush narrow deck a store of miracles. They sighed in unison. "Solomon!" Coberley snapped, and the fourth member of the party acknowledged with a cautious pace towards the edge of the channel. IF S olomon Weit was going to make tiheir bid simply because, having been here a shorter time than any of his companions, he was stronger and quicker. Even so, he was a shadow of what he had once been. He was an immensely tall man, three-quarters of African extraction. Horst had always found something oddly comforting in his very darkness. It brought to mind solid things: blocks of ebony, ingots of bronze. He seemed to resist the leeching soddenness of Zygra while all the others grew wan and feeble. Yet he had lately begun to cough on cool nights, and his eyes were rimmed with red. "Now?" he said. "Now," confirmed Coberley, and they threw themselves flat on their bellies, distributing their weight over a wide enough area of the bladderwrack to delay its collapse a few precious extra minutes. Plunging their hands into the water as the pelts surged by, they struggled to get a grip on their clammy edges. could get them in the raw state, they wouldn't he so eager, Horst thought for the hundredth time, or the hundred thousandth. "Got one!" Solomon exclaimed, and the others rolled closer, helping him to haul it from the water. Patches of white and navy-blue shimmered over its upper end. They didn't stop to admire the play of color, but laid it flat and held it down so that Solomon could slide on to it and get it wrapped securely around him. In response to the contact, it subsided and began to conform to him. "Damnation, it's too advanced!" Coberley miuttered. "Look, it's clinging already. We needed an unripe one which would take on a random shape -- " 'Too late to worry about that," Horst countered. "Just have to hope k fools the monitor anyway. Unless you feel it's not safe, Solomon?" The dark man looked al the monitor from the shadow of a kind of hood into which he had prodded and teased the pelt. "I don't think there's time to get it off atKi catch another," he grunted. "And we daren't miss this chance! It may take weeks to get within reach of another monitor. Give me the hammer, quickly!" Horst detached the "hammer" from his belt. It was only a piece of wood, first gnawed into a clubshape and then dried, over heartbreaking weeks, in the intermittent sunlight until it was harder than most things on Zygra. Solomon closed his fist around it and wriggled to the very edge of the bladderwrack. "A ripe one may not be a bad idea," Victor suggested. "The monitor is more likely to try and retrieve a ripe one, isn't it?" "Shut up," Coberley told him again. Tense, they held their breath as the monitor drew abreast of the pelt enshrouding Solomon. It sensed the presence of its responsibility, slow down and bobbed towards the side of the channel. Victor whimpered faintly. Relays evaluated, circuits closed. The monitOT decided that this pelt ought not to be stranded and left behind, but returned to the herd. Arms reached out from its nearer handling unit, closed tenderly on the pelt and Solomon too, lifted the load and made to swing across the low deck so it could be replaced in midchannel -- exactly as we hoped, Horst reminded himself without excitement. His mouth was dry and his guts were churning. Go to it, Solomon. Make it come true all the way! H ow many long lonely hours of planning, how many dreams and arguments, had led to this moment! Now, now Solomon was making his bid for mastery of the little vessel. In mid-air stripping off the pelt with huge sucking noises, startling the monitor and throwing it over to the seldom-used interference circuits. He dropped awkwardly on the deck, almost losing his footing as the impact drove the monitor completely below the surface. His "hammer" rose and fell with a slam on the base of the handling unit, cracking the plastic across and letting vater into unproofed circuits so that steam spurted out and something hissed as if in rage. The arms let go the pelt and it fell in the water. Solomon paid no attention. With all his might he was trying to extend that crack right across the monitor's hull, work havoc that would force the machine's return to the main station for servicing and carry him ignorantly with it. "Look out!" Who called? Horst realized with amazement that it had been his own voice, and he had Kken too late. The handling unit on the other side of the monitor was intact, and k sprang into action. Two huge arms snatched Solomon off the deck. The power surged and the stern-jets screamed, driving the hull into midchannel again. The arms shot out to full stretch and let Solomon go. He plunged into the bladderwrack beyond the channel, screaming, and the scream ended abruptly as the glugging noise of collapsing floats greeted his fall. There was a period of worse than silence, during which the monitor evaluated its own damage, decided it was still servicable, and resumed the pursuit of its pelts. When it was out of sight, Horst stirred. "There's nothing else for it," ho said. "If we're going to get off Zygra alive we'll have to tackle the main station." "You're crazy!" Victor shrilled. "If we can't even take a monitor, what chance have we of -- ?" "I'd rather be crazy than dead," Horst whispered. "At least... I think I would." V W hen the announcement reached Kynance, it was bald and to the point. "The previous incumbent of the post of supervisor of Zygra has failed to exercise his option of a further year's employment. Kindly ready yourself for departure aboard the starship Zygra One at fourteen hundred tomorrow." IF She looked at k a second time md gave a sigh. She reminded herself about the repatriation clause and wondered if the attraction of a guaranteed tiip home was going to lose its glamor in the same way as zygra pelts already had done. Suppose the "previous incumbent bad exercised his option. What would they have done with her, having stuffed her mind full of so much information? Washed it alii out again? Kept her on the staff in some minor capacity for a year and then sent her to Zygra after all? No, more likely just turned her loose. In the history of the company someone at some stage must have decided to stay on a second year at the last moment, but the trainee replacement would have learned the same crucial fact that Ky nance had grown to accept: just as the Zygra Comply had given up misleading its rivals by making them think the pelts were animal skins, so it had given up worrying about how much an outsider knew of the technicalities involved. There was no place in the universe where the data were of value except on Zygra itself. Launching an attack on the planet with a view to taking it over was still a possibility -- there were other operators in this sector of the galaxy capable of mounting one or even two assaults fierce enough to defeat the Zygra Company's best efforts. But the main station and substations were all booby-trapped. If they ceased to receive a signal being broadcast by the orbital guardposts, they released a flood of poison into the water, and for at least the next fifty years, until the pelts reestablish themselves, there would be no cfop worth harvesting. And without destroying all the guardposts there was no chance of making a landing. Moreover there was nowhere to land in the literal sense, so that a ship designed to put down on the marshes instead of aboard the deck of the main station was bound to be a somewhat peoiUiar vessel, bulging with flotation chambers and equipped with some sort of seagoing propulsion. As part of her training she had been shown the record of one illstarred venture along these lines. The Zygra Company's spies had discovered the preparations being made to adapt a ship belonging to a company on Loki, had waited till the work was almost done -- involving the expenditure of half the rival company's capital -- and then had blandly notified the Nefertitian government, which had a considerable stake itself in the Zygra operation, through the tax bills it imposed on the company's headquarters. A protest to the Lokian authorities -- a swoop by a team of inspectors from the Bureau of Intersteller Trade -- and a swinging claim for damages which bankrupted the would-be pirates. It was with something of a shock that, towards the end of the didactic recital, Ky nance recognized a case which she had many times had dinned into her in college. "Manufacture of a device or devices uniquely fitted to conditions pertaining on a world not legally accessible to the manufacturer is prima facie evidence of piratical intent" -- The Zygra Company and the Government of Nefertiti versus Wade, Wang and Hoerbiger, #, otherwise irreverently known as the smile on the face of the zygra. At first she had wondered why the company didn't simply assign members of its own staff to hold down the chair for a year at a time, rerhaps on a rota basis. Later she had realized this was contrary to outworld psychology. Anyone making a career with the company was trained for work far more important than sitting on Zygra and watching a lot of machines tending a lot of moss. Any casual applicant, reasonably greedy and moderately intelligent, would suffice, would cost no more than salary for a year and ship-room to and from the Zygra system plus a course of training that occupied a mere fraction of the computers' attention, and would be dismissable on his return without he company having to worry any iiore about him. If someone with inside information about harvesting the pelts want'd to sell out to another company, he'd have to have experience at the headquarters end as well as on Zygra, and if he worked well enough to rise in the .firm to a level where his knowledge was likely to be useful to a third party, he'd have to be either a fool or a maniac to risk the gamble. Ky nance was coming to admire the Zygra Company in an upsidedown fashion. There was no denying their efficient cynicism. As the reluctant admiration grew, so her original doubts subsided. Tliis was no chiselling two-bit undertaking, which could add to its profit margin by a fat percentage if it weasel ed on its employment contracts. 'This was a firm big enough and inarguably profitable enough to tolerate such minor budget items as repatriation of an Earthsider. Five extra per cent on the freight charges for a single consignment of Earthbound pelts would more ' than absorb her passage home. And she was not going to give them the slightest hint, the slightest suggestion of a hint, that she had infringed the contract. S ince the interview at which she was engaged, she hadn't seen Shuster again. He was the first person she spotted when she presented herself at the spaceport an hour ahead of the scheduled time, and she recalled with sick anticipation that he had claimed to be directly in charge of the Zygra supervisors, so there was no chance of eluding him. She put a bold face on things and marched smartly towards him. The group of spacemen with whom he was talking noticed her before he did, and one or two of them stared in a flattering manner. Then the senior among them, a lean type with second-mate braids on his tunic, tapped Shusiter's arm and pointed towards her. "What's the girl doing here, d'you know?" The words carried distinctly above the racket from the stemgates of the ship, where auto-handIF lers were packing in empty peltcrates that rang with hollow booms every time they were moved. Shuster half-tumed and recognized her. Was he still smarting from the smack on the face? She couldn't tell by his expression, or by the tone he used to answer the inquiry. "Her? Oh, that's the new supervisor taking over from Evan." "What?" The second mate recoiled as though he'd been struck under the chin, and two or three of his companions exclaimed simultaneously. "Now look here, Executive! You can't do a thing like that to -- ' "Shut your mouth," Shuster told him coolly. "If you want to keep your berth aboard this ship...?" The last word rose to a gently questioning note, and the second mate swallowed hard and held his tongue. Eyes searching for some clue to the reason for the outburst, all her misgivings returning in full force, Kynance stopped a pace distant from Shuster. "Congratulations," he said icily. "I'm informed you're the best trainee the company has ever had for the post you're taking on." "Thanks," Kynance muttered. It seemed safest to stifle her dislike of the man until he made some overt reference to the reason for it. Let him just try and talk me out of it again! "Executive!" the second mate said. "Does that mean you won't -- ?" "If you poke your snout in one more time where it doesn't belong," Shuster snapped, "I'll cut it off. Is that clear?" Kynance shivered. The looks on all these faces, except Shuster's own, were such as she would only have expected to see at a funeral. There must be a catch in the deal after all -- that was the only explanation! But she'd assured herself there couldn't be, because the Zygra Company was too prosperous to bother with cheating its casual employees. Anyway, what sort of cheating was possible? By now she could have recited the contract word for word from memory. There wasn't a loophole. The grounds for voiding it were set forth clearly as anyone could wish. Provided she kept her head she'd last out the year. "Go to your cabin," Shuster was saying. "It's clearly arrowed from this lock here: number ninety. And remember that you are not to interfere with the running of this ship in anyway. Delaying a crewman in the exercise of his duty constitutes interference, and when the ship is at space all crewmen are considered to be on duty twenty-four hours a day. In short, you will break your contract and lose your .chance of repatriation if you talk to anybody except me. Is that understood?" He could have been reading her mind. Her plan had been formed a moment earlier: to corner one of these glum-looking men and pump him for explanations. He'd sensed it, and forestalled her with orders given before witnesses. Pretty girl or no pretty girl, a spaceman in the lucrative zygra trade wasn't going to jeopardize ids career for her sake. Was he? Hopefully she surveyed the men one last time, and re...d in iheir shrugs thait they were resigned to her fate, whatever it was. Why not? Ifs not going to happen to them! Abruptly she discovered that she hated the Zygra Company and Shuster as iits persomficaitioiQ, because contact with hdm had made her so bitter that she seemed like a stranger to herself. With weary apathy she entered the ship and found her cabin. Surrounded by the noise of preparations for takeoff, she stowed her gear and sat down on the bunk. I n five or ten minutes -- she had lost track of the time -- Shuster came calling. Shifty-eyed, he slipped through the door and pushed it dosed quickly. He gave her a quick false smile and spoke in low tones. "Fm sorry I haven't been able to see you since our first meeting, my dear, but Fve been tremendously busy. Youll understand that the company's business follows the same life-rhythm as the pelts themselves, ha-ha! And as the time for harvesting approaches so we find ourselves more and more frantically busy. But I have kept a dose eye on your progress and I must say that despite your lack of what we generally lay down as minimum qualifications for entering our employment, that's to say a scholar degree in some major fidd, you've done very well. It might easily be possible to arrange for you to join the company's permanent staff on completion of your tour at .Zygra... All this time he had been dosing the distance between them. Now fai was sitting next to her, hands returning to the very same positions from which she had pushed them on the former occasion -- same positions, and same revulsion. She detested men who were so egotistical their preliminaries lo love-making followed a pattern ltk a computer program, fixed and unalterable, so that a girl could never tell if they were thinking of her, or the last partner, or the next. She gritted her teeth, forcing herself to stay calm in the hope of picking up some due to the pitfall she had overlooked. There must be one. She was convinced she had deluded herself about something. "I think perhaps that during the voyage we could become quite good friends, don't you? And a word from me in praise of your ability could carry a lot of weight with the firm, you know." Fumble, maul, squeeze -- no, it was more than she could stand. She didn't slap him this time, but made h voice sound as though she wanted to when she said stonily, "I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in a career with the company. I want to get home, and if it takes a year on Zygra to do it I'll spend a year on Zygra." He withdrew, flushing, and stood up. For a second she thought he was going to hurl some taunt at her, reveal how he believed he had tricked her, but he bit down hard on his shiny-wet lower lip and went silently out. IF VI U nder the shower Dickery Evan stretched and yawned. He of New Zealand extraction, the Maori side predominating. Dry, but not having bothered to dress, he padded to the autochef and dialed breakfast, then carried it to the dome overlooking the main station's landing-deck. He'd thought at first that but for that deck, the largest solid surface on Zygra, he'd have gone crazy. Now, at the end of his tour, he wasn't so sure. He'd considered putting in for an extension"; this was the only way he'd ever draw down so handsome a salary, and the complete isolation was growing easier to bear, but for one thing -- no women. Still, it was too late for that now. Ihere was less than one month before his time expired. Best that way, perhaps -- 'he wouldn't want to get too used to being alone. He thought of the girls he planned to look up when he got home, and the time he could give them with his accumulated pay... , not all of it, of course, because he planned to keep himself and a succession of girls on it the rest of his life. If he bought a share in some promising enterprise, and started a small business, and acquired some land and had a house put on it... His mind ran on happily as he watched the monitors drifting towards the main station. They were riding the same sluggish currents that the pelts followed to their rendezvous with harvest. Since his arrival they'd been all over the planet. The trail of the pelts was immensely long; by harvest-time, scarcely one had less than # kilometers to its credit. Early on, he'd passed much time in figuring how to get a pelt off Zygra. There was one girl in particular he thought would look mar-" vdous in a pelt and nothing else. Then he'd found out various discouraging facts, such as how the pelts felt when they hadn't been treated and coated with the solid nourishment necessary to their survival, and that every one selected for export was watched by keen computers, and that there was no chance of stealing a batch of prepared nutriment from the coatingstation. That had put paid to a subsidiary ambition, too. He'd considered the idea of setting up a pelt refurbisher. Plenty of rich folks whose pelts were wearing out would pay ten thousand for a fresh coating of nutriment; someone who could buy two in a lifetime was rarer than pelts themselves! , But he wasn't a good enough chemist to duplicate natural nutriment, and he concluded that if the proposition was economic the Zygra Company would have established the service themselves. Besides, somebody was bound to have tried and failed already, just as they'd tried and failed to breed pelts elsewhere than on Zygra. Best to be content with what he was going to come by honestly; a hundred thousand credits, free passage home, and an undemanding existence # ? for the rest of his life -- natural, or geriatrically extended.  He dozed, while the watery sun light sifted over the gathering pelts, and the monitors closing in, and  the bulk of the coating-station looming on the horizon at its regular station among a particularly rich patch of weed, automatically against the harvest. H e came awake with a jolt. Somewhere at the edge of consciousOh, no He'd heard that before, at the beginning of his stay. The man who'd been showing him over -- Sheister, Shuster, some such name -- had turned a switch and an alarm had squalled for precisely thirty seconds. And he'd said, "That may go off any time, day or night! It indicates a malfunction of the automatics. You heard how long I let it run for? When it sounds, you have thirty seconds and no more to reach this switch and cut it off, survey the operation, and report what you find. It may only be a test to ensure you're alert. But I warn you: if you fail to reach here in thirty seconds -- " Evan headed for the switch at a dead run. He missed on the first grab, got it on the second. His skin was prickly with sweat. How long had it been sounding before he reacted? Frantically he surveyed the telltale boards; as far as he could tell, everything was as right as it ought to be. So this had been a test! The bastards! The radiated pigs! To leave him eleven months, then catch him napping! He made his way back to where he had been dozing and timed himself on his run to the switch. The first time it took him fifteen seconds, the next, seventeen. There was nothing for it. Unless he was to be cheated of his pay and passage home, he had to doctor the record of the time the alarm had sounded. It was a terrible decision, because tampering with the automatics constituted . sabotage and voided his contract, but he wasn't going to let one lapse cancel a year of his life. He slid up the front panel of the alarm unit and peered into its bowels. Straightforward enough -- a band of white tape, calibrated in one-second intervals, had reeled out like a dry tongue from the base erf the siren. All he had to do was ease it back so that about twenty-five of the gradations showed instead of the present damning total of forty-nine. He grasped the tape. Instantly the panel slammed down, smashing the bones of his forearm. He screamed and tried to tear free, feeling the raw ends of bone scrape agonizingly. Through a fire of pain he heard an impersonal voice. "Unauthorized tampering with the automatics is sabotage! Accordingly you are no longer an employee of the Zygra Company." "No!" he screamed, wrenching loose his shattered arm and cradling it in the other. Stumbling, he made for the medicare unit, a coffin-sized ir block of automatics sited at the base of the observation dome. He pushed its switches awkwardly with his good hand. "You are no longer an employee of the Zygra Company," said the unit. "Wha-a-at?" Evan barely knew the voice for his own. "But you can't do this -- it's inhuman!" hey could. Having set his arm in a sort of splint, he settled to his own satisfaction that no automatic device was prepared to serve him now. Even the autochef spat burned fat at him, and the shower delivered a stream of boiling water. In the smoke and steam his ambitions evaporated: good-by house, good-by girls, goodby geriatric treatment, good-by Dickery Evan. He'd been told, and had believed, that without life-support systems no one could survive on Zygra. He'd starve before the harvesting ship was due. "Then I'll make sure they don't enjoy what they've done to me," he promised between clenched teeth, and went in search of a weapon. But he had only chopped up one pelt before the nearest monitor seized him in its powerful arms, carried him off adross the swamps and abandoned him to his fate on a mat of drifting weed. The force with which he was dumped blotted out his consciousness. A rms aching, hands sore from the crude paddle, Horst kept thinking how real this work made Solomon's loss seem. Their boat was clumsy enough anyway, consisting of a rough frame supported on half a hundred pieces of bladderwrack, the cysts inflated by lungpower and sealed with a gummy exudation of dinglybells. Every day it was necessary to replace the cysts which were starting to rot. But Solomon had driven his blade harder than Horst and Coberley put together. Victor could be ignored; he often fainted after a couple of hours in full sun. Also Solomon had been able to crack jokes, and sing in a resonant bass. Now he rots among the roots. Hed have made a joke of that, too. "Take the right side of that weed ahead!" Victor piped. "Does it matter?" Coberley snarled. "We don't know we're in the same hemisphere as the damned coating-station!" "We are," Victor insisted, close to tears. Horst suspected he and Coberley too had been affected by the death of Solomon, though none of them had said so. Coberley had been more than ever irascible since, while Victor had taken to whimpering aloud. "We've seen monitors," Victor went on. "We've seen ripe pelts. Haven't I sat up all night taking star-sightings while you two snored your heads off?" "And haven't you snored your head off while we sweat over the paddles?" Coberley thundered back. "Don't argue," Horst pleaded wearily, not really hoping to silence them. But for a while after that they simply forged ahead, turning to the right to miss the patch of weed. Horst didn't look at it except to  make sure they were clear of its fringe of roots. He was more ccm cerned about the risk of it being  grounded on a mudbank, in whidi case they'd have to backtrack. Victor's shrill cry startled him. "Look! On the edge of the mat! Their heads jerked around. On the very edge of the mat, half in the water, lay a man with one arm crudely bandaged. There was only one explanation of his presence, which Coberley voiced by implication. "Damn the Zygra Company! May Shuster rot eternity away!" "You think that's the latest of the supervisors? Then we are m the right area of the planet!" Victor exulted. "He may have been drifting for weeks," Coberley blazed. "Anyway, they wouldn't have trapped him till the last possible moment, so we can be sure the harvesting ship is due now." "I wonder if he's still alive," Horst whispered. He was. The pain from his arm while they wrestled him aboard made him moan, and when they squeezed the sour but nourishing juice of a dinglybell into his mouth he cursed loudly. The cursing ran dry. He surveyed them in mingled wonder and dismay, naked as he was himself, sick-looking, wildhaired. "You too?" he said. "Us too," Horst agreed. And in that instant they heard what they had hoped not to hear before sighting the main station: the drumming across the sky that marked the arrival of a spaceship. "Are we far from the main station?" Victor asked hopefully. "How should I know?" the man with the broken arm grunted. "I may have been unconscious for days!" S huster was a man capable of nurturing a grudge until the time was ripe for getting his own back. Kynance realized the fact with a sinking heart when she discovered that even when the ship had set down on Zygra he meant to keep her from talking to sympathetic crewmen. "Harvesting is no concern of yours," he snapped. "Your responsibility begins when the pelts are aboard, and ends when we come back next time -- if you're still contracted to us." He said that with peculiar relish. Whether it was his private intention or the policy of the company, Kynance knew some effort was going to be made to trick her. Almost certainly, the trick would come at the end of her tour, when she had lost the chance to apply for an extension. It would be less trouble to injure her deliberately and leave her in the grip of lifesustaining prosthetics -- but there was Laban Rex Chan versus Gunther Ranji to consider: "the exercise of a contractual option is impossible if the person allegedly exercising it is not conscious", but for which they might have Zygra "occupied" by zombies. IF What horrible byways her mind was being led down by this disgusting man! Mustn't. Mustn't. That path led to insanity. She sneaked a look out of her cabin. If she stole very quietly to watch the loading of the pelts, surely even Shuster wouldn't invoke that petty disobedience as breach of contract! She reached a lock unchallenged and stood drinking in the scene. Close at hand, men and machines were crating treated pelts from the coating-station; the colors flr.red dizzily and the scents made the air almost unbreathable. Russet and tawny, white and scarlet and green and black and other tints without names but the same fantastic beauty... Men conducting checks of the automatics: here, re-stocking the lifesupport systems with vitamins and proteins; at the coating-station, testing the concentrators; overhauling monitors -- one there with a bad crack in the case of its handling unit -- and installing new programs for breeding from sports. They'd said something about evolving a striped pelt. "Ah, there you are." The voice made her skin crawl. She turned and saw Shuster. But he wasn't going to complain about her being here. He was simply saying, "It's about time I gave you your on-the-spot briefing." He sounded almost affable; Kynance followed him. Mentally she ticked off all the ways she could be caught out in breach of her contract. She planned to list them later. For example, this alarm siren sounding for only thirty seconds. She'd have to rig some sort of extension so it could be inactivated from a dozen points instead of one. Tampering with the automatics; hence, sabotage? No -- Bellamy versus Guy and Guy Starlines: "a switch designed for manual operation is not an automatic device." The prospect of doing soniething to forestall Shuster's skullduggery cheered her. Only one cloud still hung over her. Where was her predecessor? She ventured to ask Shuster, and his only reply was to curl his lip. Her stomach turned over with a lurch. What can they have done to him? Drowned him? If they have, whos going to know? Nobody ever came to Zygra except company employees. By law there had to be a record of the operation of the automatics for government inspection -- Hughes and Leblanc versus Mario della Casa, # -- but the government was that of Nefertiti, and it had a huge stake in Zygra itself. Panic gripped her. No one from Earth would come hunting her if she failed to return. Was the contract irrelevant, a scrap of paper? The world seemed to spin off its axis as she learned the reason for Shuster's geniality. "About your predecessor, now. He willfully infringed his contract You're a great one for legalisms, so you're welcome to sec the proof we'll be displaying to the government." So  was right; that is one of their main traps, Kynance thought, almost relieved. " -- and the automatics ceased to recognize him as an employee. Oh, and on a related point: of the last nine supervisors, not one has completed his contract without infringing one of its clauses. Didn't I tell you you should reconsider your application? Well, it's too late now, of course. On your own pretty head be itr S he was not going to give Shuster the privilege of seeing her break down. Somehow she maintained her self control -- so well, that the last time he glanced back before entering the starship his face revealed gratifying uncertainty, as to say: am I the one whos overlooked something? She gave a mocking wave, which he did not return. He did not look at her again. The deck of the main station thrummed to the warning of the interstellar drive. The ship lifted. For the first meter or so the station rose also, floating higher for the reduction of weight. A crack of daylight appeared under the polished hull, and the starship was on its way. It was gone. That was when Kynance had lo burst into tears. She had never in her life felt so psychologically naked. When the sobs allowed her to draw breath, she cursed everyone she could think of to blame for her plight, beginning with the college tutors who had made her believe in the actuality of galactic law, concluding with herself. The tears purged her of terror, and when they ended she was able to think with a clear mind. One factor dominated her thoughts: the problem of enforcement of what Shuster had contemptuously called "legalisms". It was time to take a hard look at the predicament she was in, and gamble everything including her life on the assumption that Shuster had been telling the truth when he sourly complimented her on being the best-ever candidate to apply for this post. Why? Start there, and the rest would follow. Well... the same reason which prevented the Zygra Company from assigning the post to their own employees must operate when it came to finding an outside candidate. Anyone capable of making a career in outworld society would already be grabbed by some other employer. Even for a year at an enormous salary people would be reluctant to quit their permanent employment and sit watching moss grow. In effect, this was an unskilled job. But for the legal requirement that a celestial body must be occupied by a human being to maintain ownership, nobody would live here at all. What unskilled labor was available on worlds where ten-year-old children were already productive members of society? Social misfits. IF :rnd immigrants lacking qualifications with which they could compete on even terms against native outworlders. Now what about her assumption that the Nefertiti government had a vested interest in the continuance of the Zygra Company. Although the tax bill for the company must be enormous, would it not be infinitely more profitable to annex this unique world and operate it directly? Of course! Hence the Zygra Company would be constrained to comply with the galactic commercial laws, for fear of dispossession. When Shuster ftlked of displaying records from Zygra to government inspectors, then, he wasn't referring to a mere formality. Her predecessors, though, had all been maneuvered into breaking their contracts. Why? Surely immigrants desperate for costly but compulsory repatriation would be a minority among unskilled workers applying for this post? A great light dawned on her. Short of finding some crazy hermit, who might go out of his head and start sabotaging the fabulous automatics here, the company stood no chance of finding a permanent supervisor. After a period of years, scattered around the local systems there would be several exsupervisors of Zygra. By picking their brains, an enterprising rival firm might garner rufficient data to mount a successful raid. An accumulation of small facts might reveal far more than planting a company spy to apply for the post. She frowned. She had reached two oppose(l conclusions, one resuring, one terrifying. The Zygra Company might have to watch its step carefully, but she felt it was paranoically afraid tiiat its secrets might somehow leak out. What could she do to insure the balance tipped in her favor td the end of her tour? She had to take it for granted the company could not just murder her. If this were possible without the Nefertiti government stepping in, she was as good as lost the minute she entered Shuster's office. A fter a little more thought she decided that, typically, her predecessors would have been social misfits without permanent careers or qualifications enabling them to switch jobs at will. Even such people, however, would have some kind of ties -- relatives, at least. And if they disappeared on Zygra someone might make inquiries. Nine sets of relatives could excite enough public outcry for the government to expropriate the company. So they would ideally seek misfits who lacked kinfolk to ask awkward questions. They would be very rare on planets like Nefertiti. Underpopulation implied an obsessive urge to exploit human resources; isolation would make family ties more precious than on Earth; and finally, if anyone became actively antisocial rather than merely asocial, the government would probably order psychiatric treatment. Kynance Foy, with her Earthside college degrees, was a very different proposition from some neurotic Nefertitian precariously poised between nonconformity and psychotherapy! Moreover, just as she had brought a load of preconceptions about the force of law with her from Earth, so the computers which made the decisions of the Zygra Company would predicate its plans on vulnerable axioms. Hadn't Shuster blanched to learn she had studied law? Why, if not because the company was flying a perilously tight orbit? "Studholme and Zacharias versus Perseus Asteroid Mining Company, #," she murmured aloud. "A contract entered into with intent to deceive or defraud is not a valid contract entered into between the parties." How far did that term extend? Did it include the setting of traps to make the victim break the conditions of employment? Chin in hand, she concentrated on what she remembered of the great trail-blazing precedents with a ferocity at which her college instructors would have been astonished. Gubbins and Kinoshita versus Loki Rhodium Monopoly, #: "A company is a corporate counterpart of the individual; hence individuals and companies enter contracts with equal status" -- not very helpful, as most judges tended to be influenced by Judge Petropavloy'S subsequent institutionalization for senile dementia... What a house of cards the law was! How many people's lives had been affected by what a judge ate for breakfast! She rose determinedly. She could reasonably believe that from now until the harvesting ship returned, recorders would watch her day and night so the Nefertiti government could be assured of the legality of this operation. Taking a deep breath, she addressed the air. "My name is Kynance Foy! As a result of remarks made to me by Executive Shuster of the Zygra Company I believe attempts will be made to infringe the contract of employment I have entered into. I adduce the admitted fact that none of my nine immediate predecessors has completed this year of duty and collected his salary. Compare Studholme and Zacharias versus Perseus Asteroid Mining Company." Merely saying that made her feel better. Let the Zygra Company beware! If she could leave nothing else behind her; if they did in fact murder her; at least she might be remembered as a legal precedent. Sustained by that vicarious form of immortality, she set off on a survey of her new domain. T he first thing to do was count the jaws of the trap. Her mental list of obvious pitfalls grew with dismaying speed. They were taking no chances, for instance, with injury or sickness. She had never seen the threshold of a medicare cabinet set so low. If she so much as slept the clock around she would find a snuffling servo making metabolic checks beside the bed, and behind it the prosthetics responsible for the fiction of "continued human occupancy" of the planet. She narrowed her eyes, spotting IF something half-shadowed at the back of the medicare unit which she didn't think belonged. Before touching anything, she spoke to the impersonal recorders. "I suspect a malfunction in the automatic equipment. 'Inspection for the purpose of repair does not constitute sabotage -- Lyon et Marseille Freight Company versus Adolphe ben Hossein!" When she finally did discover the purpose of theaddition to the medicare unit, she shook with fury. It was a self-fatiguing resonator plate on the piping from the plasma store to the prosthetics. She suspected it would resonate to the frequencies generated as Zygra One boomed down to land on the station's deck. Broken, it would admit air to the pipe. End of supervisor -- and the fractured plate would have been replaced automatically before the starship's crew emerged to find the body! TTiere was something friendishly subtle about a trap so simple yet so nearly infallible. How could she hope to match the devious minds which had conceived it? Yet as she proceeded with her survey, her spirits lightened anew. The company's planners had themselves been victims of circumstance. Developing new planets at high pressure led to a particular attitude of mind. The ideal aimed at was "turn her on and let her run', and the more successful the outworiders had grown at high reliability, the less they had worried about improvements. They had been too busy applying what they already knew to undertake origal research. Inspired corner-cutting, which they were Earthside-style testing. Earth had the manpower to waste on a one per cent improvement in energy consumption -- even on change for change's sake. Consequently Kynance was struck by an aura of obsolescence. This w the largest automated system in the known galaxy; for precisely that reason it incorporated only tried and true devices. Kynancc made what comparisons she could to fix this fact in her mind. Suppose, two centuries previous, it had been necessary to build a transport system across an African desert. There would have been hovercraft, monorails, nuclear reactors, linear induction motors -- scores of choices open. But the decision would almost certainly have been for diesel locomotives hauling trains on rails already familiar for a hundred and fifty years. In other words, the automatics controlling Zygra were to faster-than-light starships as a railroad to a nuclear power station. Which left her in the situation of someone trying to stop a diesel locomotive with sheer ingenuity: a tough problem, but not insoluble. Self-preservation came first, though. Even the simplest of her tasks -- rigging remote extensions for the central alarm -- was tricky. She could say to the recording machines, "The alarms are inadequate to comply with the conditions of employment! Von Hagen and Marchetti versus Ice V Construction Company of Titan: 'The experience of employees in the field carrier more weight than predictions by computers'." But she couldn't make a quaspace signal relay out of Zygran wood and old plastic food-boxes. S he jury-rigged the alarm switches. Then she tackled the self-fatiguing plate on the medicare cabinet, and established that the station's computers were indeed primed with legal information. The moment she touched the plasma pipe, warnings dinned into her ears. She waited, quoted Lyon et Marseille versus Hossein again, and tried a second approach. This time the computer didn't object. Splendid! How about Yukinawa, dos Passos and Szerelmy versus Ge Nuclear Fusion Monopoly? "Modifications to automatic machinery which improve its function without detriment to the purposes of the proprietor do not constitute grounds for voiding a contract of employment!" she recited. She fancied she detected an unhappy grinding sound below the deck. A grim smile flitted over her face. Satisfied, she turned to the other automatics. The solar tide which had drawn the pelts to their rendezvous with the harvesting ship was subsiding. She jcould investigate the main station at leisure, but the herding monitors, the coating-station and everything else would shortl  be hulldown over the horizon as the pelts scattered again. She toured the entire establishment, clinging to the slippery back of a monitor when possible, swimming the rest of the way. In the coating-station -- which stank like a glue-factory from the vats of gummy organic jelly it was cooking up to apply to full-grown pelts -- she found the same aura of obsolescence as everywhere else. She had never studied organic chemistry seriously, but before the boy who mocked her for not being able to fix her skycar,' there had been another who was insufferably proud of his ability in the garden, and she had mugged up enough horticulture to wipe the grin off his face. She was sure any competent Earthside organochemist could have increased the efficiency of the coating-station by fifty per cent. "That cuts the company down to size!" she told the air as she swam back to the main station. "I must stop thinking of it as a bunch of infinitely clever villains, and regard it as an irritable dinosaur, big but stupid!" With pools of water dripping from her clothes, she looked out over the landing-deck. All it would take to save her from infringing her contract was a mixture of caution and dirty-minded suspiciousness. Once that was settled, she could let herself relax. She turned slowly through a complete circle, a hint of awe coloring her thoughts as she at last drank in what it meant to be in charge of a whole planet almost the size of Earth. And froze, staring at something IF impossible, intolerable. In letters of fire a clause from her contract blazed across her vision: a clause she had thought there was no risk of breaking, but which she realized in this instant she must break -- if she wanted to keep company with herself for the rest of her life. At least she could stop herself from waving. But all that could do was postpone the reckoning. She was already doomed. IX C C "The bastard's made us too A late!" moaned Victor. He meant the miserable Dickery Evan, whose weight made their clumsy boat even more difficult to force through the water. Coberley rounded on him. "Maybe you could have left him to die out there," he thundered. "But I couldn't! And what do you mean -- he made us too late? o navigated us into that mudbank, hey?" Horst winced, remembering the loathsome suck of the mud as they struggled to get the craft afloat again. They had still been trying to find clear water when they heard the knelt of the starship taking off. "It wasn't my fault!" Victor screamed. "I wasn't in the bow looking out for shoals!" Horst caught Coberley's eye. "No good arguing, "he muttered. "He's in his downphase. We're lucky he stayed on the upswing long enough to bring us close to where he want to get." It was slim comfort. Victor's cycles of dear thinking alternated with periods of non-communication lasting for days. He ought never to have come to Zygra. The isolation had broken him completely. Ought any of us to have come here? And now this last absurd gamble. What a plot to be hatched by four naked men, one insane, one driven by hate and one crippled with a broken arm! As to the fourth... He shook his head violently. He dared not wonder if he himself was still mentally normal. Mechanically paddling, he stared at the prospect ahead. The tide here had deepened the water to maximum. Curiously abbreviated, the stems of the longest bottom-plants swayed against their own reflections: mud-sequoias, aquatic arbutus, mock-magnolia -- heavy, these last, with blossoms unconnected with their own life-cycle, being aerophytes more akin to orchids than anythink else familiar to humans. There was no animal life, so flowerers to attract insects were irrelevant; the oxygen-cycle was closed by putrefying bacteria, not animal lungs. Thinking about tiic flowers dc pressed him. Had he and his con" panions not also become parasite on the lush but drab vegetation? He forced himself to concentrate on their plan and comdnee himself it was feasible. If only Solomon were still alive! Y ears ago, somebody he'd heard of from Victor and Coberley had been foolish enough to think the company would take pity on a stranded employee. He'd hung around until the starship landed, then shown himself -- and had been shot down, on the pretext he'd been mistaken for a pirate or a wild beast. On a world without animals! The moral was: keep clear of the annual visitors. Devious ways were tried of getting a message out, instead. One year there had been an attempt to hide a message in a pelt-crate. The station smashed the man's legs with an automatic packing-press. Another year, hiding messages in actual pelts had been tried; nothing came of that, though no lives were lost. Another year -- Oh, it wasn't important. Time had passed. The company had ignored the castaways on Zygra, and would do so until they became a nuisance. Sabotaging the pelt-crop was impossible, with a monitor accompanying every herd; approaching the main station seemed tantamount to suicide... Then Solomon joined them, and they devised the notion of seizing and smashing a monitor so that its parent station would have to ship it back to the main station for an overhaul, carrying a man hidden in its pelt-compartment. Solomon had died trying it. Enough. Now was the time to gamble everything. Death would be better than this vegetable half-life! At the very start, Horst had told Coberley they ought to make an open approach to the new supervisor -- to which Coberley replied: "Suppose Victor and I had asked you for help?" And Horst had shut his mouth on a vomit-like rising of self-disgust. He had been desperate to serve out his time and collect his pay. There had been a girl... Lost forever. Probably thinks Vm dead. But wouldnt have made inquiries to find out. He was coming to feel that humanity was horrible, glamorous on the outside, within stinking and rotten. So now: the double-or-nothing throw. Approach the ' station, risk being spotted by the new supervisor; either invoke his help, or overpower him; set about wrecking the automatics so thoroughly the company would have to send an unscheduled ship, and hope to excite interest at government level which might save them simply being killed off as saboteurs. A thin chance, but all they had. Horst felt it might work. Unless something more blatant had been installed since he last saw the main station, the Nefertitian government hadn't winked at weapons like computer-operated laser guns. His mind was so far away he didn't hear Coberley's order to stop paddling. It took a back-handed slap to bring him back. Dazed, he stared over the water There was the coating-station, getting up power to go hunt weeds; the substations and monitors in a sea of unripe pelts; the main station, and on its deck -- "A woman," Horst said softly. "What?" Coberley rasped. "My eyes aren't that bad. It's a woman!" IF But Coberley wasn't listening. He was trying to stop Victor waving at the new supervisor. "Get your head down! We want the raft to look like a piece of flotsam, not -- " "He-elp!" Dickery Evan ignored him, flinging his good arm in the air. "He-e-elp!" Why shouldn't a woman be as callous as a man? She'd know as well as they that even to wave back was to forfeit her pay. Yet Horst was waving too now, and shouting, and after a moment of silent fury even Coberley did the same. X XTothing in the galaxy, Kynance realized sickly, could prevent her giving assistance to the men on their makeshift boat. So within a couple of days of starting her tour, she could kiss her chance of repatriation good-by. They must be what Shuster had calTed "previous incumbents", left to live or die as the planet let them. TTieir arrival proved one thing: the company's insistence that Zygra was uninhabitable without People capable of wresting a living from, this boundless marshland must be of remarkable determination. They didn't deserve to be abandoned to fate. She clenched her fists and turned towards the observation dome, careful not to indicate she had noticed them. If her contract was going to be voided the moment must be delayed while she took some precautions. Her mind raced. The men would need food, showers, clothing, medical attention -- so she had to isolate the autochef, the domestic services and the medicare unit from the central computers... Geoffrey Kotilal versus Astronaut Ambulance Company! Where an ambulance pilot en route to a disaster already attended by rival firms declined to rescue a lone pilot who lacked a guarantee of payment, and was held negligent because "the duty to save life in space is paramount above remuneration". It specified in space. But -- She whistled. It had been ruled sus Callisto Methane Derivatives that "space" included any solid body not possessed of independent jurisdiction. As of the moment she broke her contract, the whole planet Zygra would count as an asteroid. In which case... A sort of drunkenness made her sway. There was no time to examine her crazy notion in detail. She would just have to trust her memory. Feverishly she attacked the devices she was likdy to need. She couldn't think of any better excuse than the standard one of "suspected malfunction", but the computer didn't argue until the greater part of the job was finished. Then it slammed the front of the master monitor unit and reported ignorance of any fault in that system. Kynance bit her lip. Well, never mind; the only other essential device to isolate before that ridiculous bladder-and-stick boat came bobbing up was the main circuit-restorer. That would prevent the computers from rec.ining control of the units she had disconnected. Her task finished, she ran back to the observation dome and emerged into sight of the four naked men. She waved, and hallooed, and invited them aboard. Instantly the doom-laden mechanical call rang out. "You have signaled to a person not employed by the Zygra Company. Accordingly your contract is void." # #h, cosmos!" Coberley breathed in a despairing whisper. "Keep paddling," Horst told him. "She's grinning so wide I can see it from here!" "Come on! It's all right!" Simply letting things happen without wondering about explanations, Horst and his companions closed the last gap. The woman reached down to help them. Victor insisted on pushing forward first, and went on a crazy run around the entire deck, head bobbing like a chicken's, crowing with delight and disbelief. They lifted and dragged the injured Evan aboard; Coberley followed, and last of all Horst. The steel underfoot seemed to magnify his weight. He could barely stand and look at their savior and try to recognize that she was worth looking at: petite, fine-featured, with strange iron-colored hair. All he could find to say was an inane question: "You've broken your contract -- what are you going to do?" "It isn't the end of the universe," the girl said, trembling with what Horst could only think of as suppressed glee. "I take it you're some of the nine of my predecessors who failed to complete a full tour?" "That's right," Horst agreed. "I'm Horst Lampeter... Giuseppe Coberley... Dickery Evan... and Victor Sjoberg is the one going round and round the deck." "I'm Kynance Foy," the girl said. "From Earth." "And you've given up your chance of repatriation?" "Did you expect me to leave you to rot? When I could offer you proper food, medical attention, a hot shower, even -- " she glanced at his bare body with engaging frankness -- "clothes?" "But the automatics won't obey you any longer!" Coberley exclaimed. "It just so happens I'm rather particular about automatics supposed to look after me. And at the moment when I -- ah -- broke my contract, rather a lot of them were disconnected for inspection. I don't suppose it will be difficult to convert them to manual operation." "But supervisors are forbidden to touch the automatics!" That was Dickery Evan, raising his broken arm in witness to his statement. "Not exactly. Not even the Zygra Company can rewrite galactic legal precedent to suit its own convenience. The only thing I've done which did entitle them to fire me was to wave at you, and that might not stand up long in court. However, before we get it to court we have you to attend to. So stop arguing and come along!" IF XI W ithin the hour, Horst's bewilderment had given way to awe. In the dragging years since he was dismissed for trying to rewire a faulty book-projector classed as "crucial equipment" his memory of the main station had been distorted into a vision of hell. Indeed, it had been a gigantic trap for him. Not for this astonishing young woman, though. Evan's arm was comfortable in a proper healingsheath; vitamins, proteins and space knew what had streamed into Victor's knobbled veins, and now he lay snoozing on the supervisor's bunk, and Horst, Evan and Coberley were clean, dressed and putting away platters of unbelievable food. Coberly tucked right in. Horst, though, found himself staring at Kynance and eating by touch alone. "You're an extraordinary person!" he burst out. "You're the ones who are astonishing," she parried. "To survive out there without help, or resources, or even terrestrial food." "But if I'd done some of the things you've done, like bringing the automatics under manual control. I'd have expected to be tossed aside like Dickery here on a weed-mat!" "He must have done something worst than just interfering with some of the automatics, then," Kynance said. "I guess I did," Dickery confessed sullenly, and explained. "If you hadn't done that," Kynance murmured, "you could have stayed here indefinitely. A person in distress, especially someone indanger of his life, commits no crime if he helps himself to someone else's property to sustain himself." "Fat lot of good telling me now," Evan answered. Checking a gobbet of food on the way to his mouth, Coberley demanded, "You mean I could have stuck around and taken whatever I wanted?" "Food, drink and medical supplies, at least." "TTie hell you say. Well, it wouldn't have done me much good. Like Dickery, I got crazy-mad at the company." Kynance bit her lip. "It seems unfair, after all you've been through, but I must say it. You walked into this with your eyes shut, and it was damned silly." "Think we don't realize that?" Horst exclaimed. "I've kicked myself twice around the planet! I got into this because it looked like a short cut to getting a girl I wanted, I was no prize and I thought I could make myself into one. I've been a fool all my life, skipping from one course of study to another till I'd wound up without a degree in anything, so I volunteered for Zygra against the advice of what few friends I had..." "A bit of a romantic? hm?" Kvnance suggested. "The outworlds aren't kind to romantics, as I've recently learned." "Call trying to buy a girl with a year of your life 'romantic'?" Coberley jeered. "What I had in mind," Kynance corrected, "was skipping from subject to subject instead of fitting himself into the right mold for Nefertiti. It's one of the things Fve missed most on the outworlds: people who like to associate with people, spend time chatting idly, instead of driving themselves around the clock. Fd worked out that some of the volunteers for Zygra must be like you, because there's so little room for such people anywhere off Earth." "I often thought Fd like to go to Earth," Horst admitted. "I never made any real friends at home. Everybody on the planet seemed so tied up with making a career, earning a fortune, while to me it simply didn't seem enough to give purpose to a man's life." "He's gone on like this ever since I first knew him," Coberley scoffed. "What induced you to come to Zygra?" Kynance inquired. #CT was stupid, same as the othjL ers. Wouldn't think it to look at me now, but when I was Horst's age I had muscles, and there was a big demand for men who were built, back on Loki, my home world. I didn't have the brains to match, though, and got left behind by events. vSo I jumped at this." "Dickery#" What he told her confirmed her guess: a nice guy, lazy, not bright enough to invest twenty years' hard work against the promise of later enjoyment. Easy meat for the Zygra Company. So too was Victor, about whom the others reported that in a fit of depression he'd wanted to get the hell away from the human race. Of course, when his condition cycled back to the upward phase, he'd regretted it. "Do any of you know why the Zygra Company adopted the policy of changing supervisors annually and tricking them into infringing their contracts?" Kynance asked next. "Fve heard the story from Victor," Horst answered. "A man called Zbygniewski was armored up to the roof of his skull with posthypnotics and planted by a rival company among the regular staff, back in the days when the job was farmed out among permanent employees. He got away with information that enabled his bosses to mount the most nearly successful of all the raids on Zygra. Also he planted a boobytrap for his successor, the idea being to make the planet legally unoccupied before the harvesting ship came." He broke off. Something in Kynance's expression had given him a clue to what she was thinking, but she gave him a wink and raised her hand. "This boobytrap, then, started the company on its present course? Tricking the supervisors, I mean." "I gather it was Shuster's idea, the thing that advanced him to executive status," Horst said. "That fits. You'd expect a swine like him to have done something exceptionally dirty to get ahead. Now: please tell me how each of you was inveigled into breaking his contract." Horst wondered if some of the means employed would prove to be illegal, but Kynance dashed that hope. To Evan she said, "Tampering with that record did constitute IF sabotage -- Levi Rico versus Free Space Haulage Company, #." And to Horst: "That book projector might have been used to give you instructions, and legally you weren't entitled to do anything which risked garbling vital information." And to Coberley, who had tried to re-set the autochef when it burned his breakfast: "The computer was bound to consider the chance you might alter a settting far enough to poison yourself -- Fernando Duquesne versus the Osceola Food Company, #, is clear on that." "All right, since you're so smart," Coberley spat, "tell us what we can do to get off this stinking mudball!" "Coberley, pipe down!" Horst rapped. "This girl has done things you and I wouldn't have had the guts to try even if we'd thought of them." "I've done nothing special," Kynance said. "Only it does strike me you outworlders are too used to relying on machines. It's natural. You've done miracles with automatic systems which were never needed on Earth. When your life depends on them, you don't interfere with their operations. The moment I caught sight of you paddling your boat, I realized I'd fallen into the trap the Zygra Company sets for its supervisors: the lie that the planet is impossible to inhabit without million-credit life-support equipment." "So when you sacrificed your contract, you did have a plan in view," Horst said. "If it's not a plan to get us out of here I'm not interested," snapped Coberley. "It may come to that," Kynance told him. "At best it involves a delay of a Zygran year, but there arc a lot of compensations which will more than make up for it." Dickery sat up and began to take notice, and she unfolded to them the fantastic scheme which had come to her in a flash of inspiration. T he irony of it all was the way it turned on little piVots of time, separated by enormous gulfs of months or years when they did nothing but wait for the future to catch up with them. If, for example, the four men had been a couple of days later in reaching the main station, her plan would have been impossible to implement. Now the risk lay in being even one second too early; they had to wait for an arbitrary deadline, whereupon they would have to cram into a few narrow hours the fruit of months of plotting. And it might all go for nothing in the end. They were assembled in the observation dome, where they had rigged a remote for the calendar clock in the supervisor's quarters. The hands were ticking toward the red line she had inscribed across the face first thing today. One by one they had fallen silent; the chattering that had signaled the release of old tension, now the day of their revenge was upon them, hadn't lasted. '"Can't we?" Dickery suggested, and closed his hand on the cai of paint beside him. IF "No!" Horst rasped. "Kynance has explained over and over -- this has got to be watertight!" "I don't know how much longer I can bear to wait," Victor complained. But he had been saying the same thing daily for half a year past, and they ignored it as a formality. At first, Kynance had scarcely expected to survive to this moment. The strain of knowing that yet one more year must leak away had caused three fights between Evan and Coberly, and one between Evan and Horst. But that had stopped as they began to accept the consequences of their joint action. She had first let herself believe in success the day she came upon Coberley -- of all the men -- staring at the white sunlight on the pools of water pitting the mudflats, at the matted vegetation, at the drab olivedun shapes of unripe pelts drifting ahead of their monitor. He'd turned, and scowled, and said, "Damned bastards in the Zygra Company -- trying to make out this isn't a fit world for human beings!" After that, the tone of their discussions altered from desperate to proud... What a bunch of misfits! Kynance thought, then added with a burst of near-affection: Yet there's something special about anyone who'll accept the responsibility of looking after a whole planet! "Kynance!" Horst said, and she started. While she was wrapped in thought, the clock had reached the red line. She took a deep breath and began to recite the necessary legal formulae. They seemed to take half eternity. Finally she ran out of words and breath at the same time. She could only give a nod to her companions, and they shot away. With paint, with circuit-tracers, with meters and gauges and sheets of paper on which compnjter programs had been fair-copied after a dozen revisions, they set out to conquer Zygra. T he boom of the starship reached them just as the job was finished. Dickery, paint on face and hands, was the last to join them in the observation dome, and they grinned and slapped each other on the back before turning to go watch the ship make its landing. The impact of Dickery's work was all that could be hoped for. A head appeared from the bridge compartment. It turned to survey the station, and was confronted with letters a meter high running along the side of the observation dome. Another head appeared. There was some shouting. A third head peered out -- by the glitter on the attached shoulders, it belonged to the captain. And then Shuster appeared. "Right," Kynance said grimly. "Time to go and welcome them, I think!" Horst blurted out, "Kynance, you're remarkable!" "Just as well," Victor said. "The galaxy would fall apart if there were many more like her." Ky nance flushed, gathered up the folder of documents she had prepared, and led the way on to the deck. They waved to the astonished crewmen leaning out of the bridge. Another couple of minutes, and the nearest lock shot open to disgorge Shuster and several others, including the second mate who had tried to remonstrate when Kynance showed up to join the ship on Nefertiti. They were armed with laserguns, and Kynance had to force herself to stand fast. But she had rehearsed this moment mentally so many times that the necessary words sprang to her lips. "Which of you is the senior representative of the company operating this vessel? You have not signified acceptance of the harbor dues in force at this port, and you are required to furnish proof of ability to meet them before discharging or loading cargo." Shuster had gone white as a comet's tail with the shock of being confronted with five people he had given up for dead. He pulled the rags of his self-possession together. "What is all this nonsense?" he blustered. At least he'd realized he couldn't just order them burned down where they stood. Kynance said, "Are you the senior company official, then?" "You know damned well I am!" Shuster roared. "And I want to be told the meaning of this slogan you'v scrawled on my company's main station!" "Not yours," Kynance said delicately. The second mate lowered his gun. With worried glances at Shuster the others copied him. Ignoring Shuster's raging, Kynance addressed the men leaning out of the bridge. "Is there a recorder up there?" A hasty whispered conference, and then a defiant assurance that everything was being recorded. "So that you damned pirates will get what's coming to you!" "If there is any piracy going on around here, it looks as though it's on your side, landing 'a party of armed men at this spaceport!" "Spaceport!" Shuster shouted. "This is the Zygra Company's main station!" "Correction," Kynance informed him. "This is Zygra Main Spaceport, under the control and direction of the Zygra Port Operations Company -- keep that recorder pointed at me!" she added in a sudden bellow the force of which amazed her. "I want the whole story down for any action that may be needed!" The snout of the recorder wavered, but remained trained. "My name is Kynance Foy. I was engaged to act as supervisor of Zygra on behalf of the Zygra Company, to conform with the legal requirement that a celestial body to which a claim is laid must be occupied by at least one living person. My contract forbade me to communicate with anyone not employed by the company. "Within two days of arriving I was approached by four ex-incumbents of the same post, who had been inveigled into breaking their contracts -- " IF "It's a lie!" Shuster screamed. Kyoance disregarded him. "On speaking to them, I automatically ceased to be an employee of the company. Since that moment, the planet Zygra has reverted to the status of an unclaimed celestial body," "Oh, cosmos," said the second mate in a barely audible voice. "But you can't claim Zygra," Shuster began. "I can," Kynance answered demurely, and wondered when he would begin to squirm. C#ir)ut just a second!" Grasping at a straw, Shuster stumbled over his own tongue. "That doesn't apply to property -- " "You mean Zygra Main Port?" Kynance smiled. "Are you familiar with the law of salvage?" Shuster seemed to choke. "I think you understand me," Kynance said. "Property cast away on an unclaimed celestial body is subject to reclamation as salvage and sale by the recoverer after one local or one Earthside year, whichever is the shorter. It so happens that the Zygran year is four days and five hours longer than an Earthside year. "Approximately three hours ago this vessel -- note, by whatever name you call it, it is legally a waterborne vessel, in other words a ship! -- was reclaimed as salvage by the Zygra Salvage Company, who thereupon sold it to its present owners with warranty of title. If you wish to exercise a lapsed previous title you must purchase it at the current estimate of its value. Conservatively I'd say it's worth a thouagree?" "Woman, you're raving!" Shuster moaned. "Why, that's half the value of our pelts for a year!" "Yowr pelts?" Kynance said softly. "I'm sorry, but tins was an unclaimed celestial body -- forgotten already? The pelts are the property of the Zygra Pelt Exporting Company." "What?" "They were purchased from the Zygra Pelt Raising Company about forty minutes ago. The Pelt Raising Company are the new owners of the substations, monitors and coatingstation, which they purchased about two hours ago from the Zygra Salvage Company." Shuster clamped both palms against his temples as though afraid his brain would burst his skull. "What are all these companies you keep talking about?" he whimpered. "Are you acquainted with the regulations governing the formation of a company to operate interstellar trade? I am. I studied interstellar commerce as a follow-up to my courses in business law." "Oh," Shuster said in a dead voice. "The moment you allowed five people loose on the surface of this planet," Kynance told him, "you dug your own grave. The law states such a company requiries five officers: president, chairman, managing director, treasurer and secretary, of whom not fewer than three must be citizens of the planet where the company is registered. Holding one office in any given company does not debar an individual from holding the same or another office in some other company. Correct?" Swaying a little on his feet Shuster stared wildly at the group facing him, gulping enormous breaths. "Do you wish to inspect the documents relating to the companies now operating on Zygra?" Kynance asked him formally. "That is to say -- " "But you can't register a company here!" Shuster shrieked. "A company has to be registered with a planetary government!" Kynance fused, dropped and exploded her last and greatest bombshell. She said, "We are a government." xni S huster was beyond speech. Giving him in a puzzled glance, the second mate bolstered his gun. He said, "I guess I don't understand what's gone on here." Once, long ago, Kynance had had a dream involving a personable young space officer. This man could have slotted quite neatly into the role. But that was so far in the past she felt the whole thing had happened to someone else. She only remeunbered how he and his fellows had shut their mouths when they must have known it was company policy that no supervisor should return from Zygra. She said clearly, for the benefit of the records, "You must be either ignorant or stupid. Three conditions must be fulfilled before a planetary government can be set up. First, the planet must be fit for habitation -- instanced by the fact that these four men have survived without artificial aids for years on end. Second, it must be free of any claim of absolute sovereignty previously registered by an empowered company -- and we've been over that. Third, it must be occupied by members of both sexes. We comply in all respects. "One Earthside year, plus one minute, after the abandonment of Zygra by any employee of the company formerly recognized as sovereign here, we became eligible to declare ourselves the legal government, and we did so. Our President, Horst Lampeter!" Horst stepped forward, eyes a little narrowed against the sun, and scowled at Shuster. "Our Minister of Planetside Affairs: Dickery Evan!" Dickery swaggered up beside Horst. "Our Minister of Trade and Finance!" Victor joined the row, and Kynance fell in at his right. "I myself," she said, "am serving in the capacity of Minister of External Affairs, and our Minister of Justice is -- " She gestured. Coberley tramped forward. This past year his fat had melted off him, letting hard muscle show through, and he hunched threateningly as he approached Shuster, arms swinging as though prepared to pick the smaller man up bodily and hurl him overside to drown among the gorgeous pelts. IF In that instant taut with menace, Shuster must have seen a vision of what fate had in store. Beyond the mere financial collapse of the Zygra Company loomed other terrors. Once it was shown he had deliberately tricked the supervisors and abandoned them to their fate, no government in the galaxy could refrain from ordering the payment of damages to those who suffered or their relatives. Kynance had done some calculations: assuming the fines were levied as a percentage of assets -- the usual practice -- and the damages as a percentage of the balance, she estimated the company would have to sell its unsold stock, its interstellar freighters and even its headquarters building in order to pay its other employees their month's salary in lieu of notice. A very satisfactory outcome. As she explained this to him, Shuster put both hands over his face and began to cry #T)ut doesn't this mean you're A) going to have to stay here indefinitely?" suggested the second mate. Overhead, some sort of argument could be heard. Let them argue, thought Kynance. "It sounds as if you've swallowed your company propaganda about it of gear to keep a man alive on Zygra," she said. "Bunkum! It's possible to live off the native vegetation. How else do you think my friends managed?" "But in that case -- " the mate began. "In that case, Zygra is a greater prize than Loki, or Ge, or a score of other planets that could only be made habitable by importing Earthside plants, animals and bacteria. We're wide open for immigration. Or we shall be, as soon as we've disposed of our first crop of pelts. "How are you going to do that?" demanded the mate. "You. don't own any ships." "No," Kynance admitted. "But you haven't seen the scale of port charges currently in force. For a ship of this size they amount to -- Victor?" local day," Victor said. "What?" The mate and his companions spoke as one. "Well, any underdeveloped planet needs to exploit its resources," Kynance said. "And currently we only have the pelts. Mark you, the rate applicable to ships under charter lo the government of Zygra is substantially lower, and we're extremely interested in chartering a few vessels on a profit-sharing basis." "Do you mean shared among the crewT "It's a scheme we've worked out in some detail," Victor said judiciously. "If you're interested...?" Interested was an understatement. Kynance's experience had shown beyond doubt that these men were greedy. A share in the most profitable cargoes in the galaxy had looked like a quick route to their loyalty, and it was working like magic. "Here's the captain, I see," she murmured. "I wonder how he'll feel about chartering the ship to us." SI Patiently, citing authority after authority with the assurance due to an Earth year of milking the data banks of the main computer here, Kynance showed how it could be done. Philpot-Soames and Honegger versus Transit Company of Loki: it was illegal to transport cargo without permission from the owner. The Zygra Company owned nothing on Zygra; they had sent the ship to bring away someone else's property, and this was piracy within the meaning of Balewa and Chatterji versus Earth-Luna Shuttle Corporation. No company -- vide Olaf Gunarson versus Phobos Metals -- could compel employees to engage in illegal undertakings; hence the captain and crew were free to accept work with any other employer... And so forth, and so forth. When she had finished, Kynance was in a state like a walking dream. But she knew she had done it. T he renamed vessel Kynance Foy dwindled towards the shredded clouds. Victor, Coberley and Evan were somewhere below, celebrating their elevation to ministerial rank with the help of some wine bought on credit from the ship's stores, but Kynance wanted to wait a while before joining them. She stood watching her namesake the ship head for the stars. Abruptly she became aware that Horst was watching too -- not the ship, but her. He said, "I told you you were extraordinary. I've just realized the most extraordinary thing of all. Even after a year none of us know anything about you. We're all afraid of you. You seem like a machine full of miracles!" "I had to be, didn't I?" said Kynance after a pause. "Yes." "Well, I've hated it. And thank you for reminding me before I got into the habit for life!" She laughed. "I'll tell you something I've never told anyone else," she went on. "When I left Earth, I had a secret dream. I was going to come home wearing a zygra pelt and a blase expression, to jolt the hell out of all my friends. By the time I ran into Shuster, I was ready to settle for a square meal and a ticket home, and I didn't give a damn about zygra pelts. Now, if I go home, I shall be able to take a shipload of them!" "'If you go home...? Don't you want to go back to Earth?" "It has its points. But -- I've been on Earth, Horst. I don't mind going back the long way around." "I used to think Earth was the only place in the galaxy where I might fit in," Horst muttered. "But that's not true any longer. There's a planet called Zygra where people like me can fit in. I wonder if they'll realize that." "I think so. I estimate -- oh -- half a year before the first applicants for immigration show themselves." "I tell you one thing," Horst smiled. "If you're going to stop behaving like a machine and start acting like a girl, there had damned well better be some more women among those early immigrants!" IF IP  Short Story What does a spacemen need after the solitude between the planets? Some Earthmen found the answer long agol I ran into GaMegher on his annual eccentric orbit through New York. He was tanned as red iron DPust. I laid a magnetic grapple to him, and we made a perfect dual landfall on mahogany and brass. The beer was black and the sawdust floor was a place, in Galeg's phrase, "where a man can feel gravity." Galeg had a couple of long pulls and so did I. It was a companionable silence, and I finally broke it. "I hear," I said, "that men in the Mars trade are all being replaced by machines. It's . said that after the market for their memoirs has been glutted, the rest will be condemned to ten years of telling only the truth, drinking water and staying on earth." His blue eye looked at me around the beer stein's horizon, and his rustred right thumb came over to cover the microphonic button on my harness that beams to the tape recorder while he expressed himself on the subject of storitapers and their petty, unmanly endeavors. Then he uncovered the button, and for the benefit of the tape said, "Don't you believe it. The machine was never made that could repiace Gahegher, or even match him." "In some ways, you may be right," I told him, waving the bankeep for two more, "but I understand the technicians..." 'The technioks are nice boys," said he, "but -- oh, you did order, did you? -- they have no more soul than the machines they love unnaturally." "ReaMy, you can't dehumanize those great contributors to human efficiency and comfort. Why, the automatic rehabilitation machines that keep you rocket jockeys sane, for example..." "Them things!" Galeg laughed saftirical'ly. "They produce clinical material for the psycho internes at a steady rate, that's all." "Well," I declared, "it's been nice to cross orbits, but your political views are rather antediliuvian. I have to interview a plantation owner from the asteroids." "Listen!" He shut off my jets with a glittering eye. "Don't you wonder that I'm standing and not still in a hammock getting my weight back?" "Do you mean you're fresh off your pipe?" I cried. "Man, come sit down! Your heart -- " "You're breaking it. I'm not from deep space." "Why, the kick from Mars can't be done under thirteen weeks. And you can't have been here more than a day without even a pip in my picture tube." "That's where you're wrong. I'm not from a thirteen-week kick." I studied him as nearly as I could without startling him. "Well," I said, "if you're going to try to run that old space-warp hokey by me again, I really miust be off. That plantation owner... "May his oxygen crystallize!" cried the old G in a voice that moved his orbit a foot. "If you've better things to do than listen to an old tube mate's final exposure of the soullessness of tecks and the ultimate failure of machines, be off," And he hoisted his schooner to the old motto over Sprague's back bar, a historic communique from the last pre-atomic war: "Sighted Tub. Drank Same." "Man," I said, as I herded him and a fresh one to a round table, "will you tell me how the hagan you can stand and walk like a Times Square barfly and you just off the Mars kick?" He drank deep, and wiped the foamy mustache from his face of rust before he smiled and said, "Fm not from the thirteen, I'm telling you. That's the story. Are these waiters blind, do you think?" I arranged to keep fuel in the lines, and he laid the orbit I was waiting for : M aybe you remember when the technicks thought up the new de-bend routine, and maybe you don't. I'm older than you, and I remember well when a kick tube was a pipe to bum fuel in and that's all. You sealed yourself in and threw her into deep space and hoped the calculators had figured you rigjht. There'll never be a tube built big enough to carry enough fuel to nm with the flame lit from one world to another. And if there was,, you couldn't kick her off a planet. So you burn the pipe just long enough to take advantage of the tide of gravity, and that's all. It gets almighty lonesome, and a man comes kind of unstuck while he's loose out there. He gets to feel like a grain of dust in a sunbeam after a while, with about as much chance of falling onto earth as the dust has of falling on a particular tabletop. Of course, men are tough. Nobody's ever been able to figure a man's outside load. As much as can be piled on, there's always some fellow to take it and be ready for more. IF Buft the toughest man has trouble getting back has planet legs after being in free fall through the solar system, and lots of pipe-pilots got a permanent separation of the seams that couldn't be welded. That's why the automatic rehaibs were designed. I had a partner -- Pick Pratt. Not so much a partner, either, as a drinking and arguing mate. We kept dose tab on each other's orbits, and when he kicked for earth, I was usually lighting the pipe a day or two later. I'd get into New York and find him stiff as a ramrod. As soon as I got him revived, I'd tie one on. When we slowed down enough that our lucid intervals coincided, we'd argue. About women. About war. About the long kick, mostly, and whether fifty thousand jets in the bank for each one was worth it -- especially when it took pretty near the bank account in hooch to wipe out the memory of the trip. And we didn't drink expensive either. Both of us were young and strong, and fusel oil with red pepper in it was what we craved: something to short out the main control board in a hurry. The worst of it was a kind of floating sensation that would come over a man in the street. He'd get to feeling he was going to float off the earth and drift for the asteroids -- no synthetic oxygen out there then -- and he couldn't shake it off. Many's the time I've had Pick holler, "Grab my knees. I'm going!"' and you bet I grabbed 'em too, because if I didn't, I knew he'd let me float off the next time I got light-fheaded. I'd siling him over my shoulder till we could get in a bar and get something heavy in his stomach. And women. O Lord, women! Seaman off a three-year cruise was nothing compared to us. No woman wanted us around. I mean, fifty thousand in the bank or not The Freudian psychos were as popular then as these religious, ones are now; and they said -- well, you wouldn't believe it, and I don't want to. Anyway, the women wouldn't put up with it. No kind of women. Pretty soon a man was as lonesome here as in space. Tick and I missed a kick once. I A got to floating and Pick got to weighing me down and it was a week after our turn to light off before we made it to the White Sands shuttle, and they wouldn't even take us up to the space station. We were stranded in Texas. They ran us out of New Mexico. At first we were desperate. Then it got to seem like a good thing. The longer we were away from the long kick, the better we got to feeling. We even rode jeeps for a while for some old geezer in west Texas -- automatic jeeps. After a while Pick found out how to take the automatic attachment off, and then it was real fun. He fixed up one of the attachments to follow deer instead of cattle. We really lived. There's a big rare-earths deposit in that part of the world, and there's a robotics factory out there. The whole town is automatic -- saloons, movies and all. Pick said it gave him the creeps. #B We had started in to get a stake, but after we got it, somehow we didn't quit. Finally Pratt up and said he was fixed. He was never going back to the kick tubes. That kind of jarred me into realizing that I was restless, hungry to be in free fall again. You think I'm nuts? So did Picker, but I stuck to it, and we had a couple of fist fights about it, until we calmed down and decided to split up like men instead of kids. He was tired of riding jeep for the old man, but he said he'd look around till he found a job on the ground, and I hauled out for White Sands. We made it up to send a beam to Dome One on Mars once a year so we wouldn't lose track. When I got to the Sands, somebody else had floated once too often, and I had a hot tail in a hurry. Mars was the long way that trip. Twenty-four weeks. Once or twice I got to wishing I was bumming around earth with Pick again, but as soon as I reeled Mars in and got a lungful of that skinny air, I forgot it. There was a lot of talk about built-in rehab units going around, and sure enough, the teoks tried one out on me. It was just a twenty-four hour wire loaded with jazz and other earth sounds, but it was about all the extra weight a pipe could push then -- couldn't leave a gram of that high Geiger cargo, you know. It broke or got a lashback or something about three weeks into no grav, and I spent seventeen weeks -- years, it seemed like -- listening to "a mouth-watering recipe for the heroic space man's favorite pie: thought if I ever smelled a cocoa bean. I'd turn inside out. There was a free-fall nurse in the grounding crew at the Sands who offered me a chocolate bar, and one of the doctors told me after I could understand speech again that she was the hardest-kicked women he had ever treated. It was weeks before her rear was fit to be seen. T hree or four years went by, and not a wave from Pick. My beam was erased because he never called for it. Nobody else heard from him, so I finally figured he had let a jeep or an antelope kill him or else he was under restraint someplace. I threw a big burnout by way of saluting his memory, and started figuring the fuel in my own tank was about used up. The automatic rehabs were standard by then, and spacemen were still a signal for locked doors whenever they touched dirt. I couldn't stand the auto-rehabs. Then I made a bad one. Somebody spit in my fuel, or something, and it wouldn't burn above Mars. The ground crew was asleep and lost me when I left my expected orbit, so rescue didn't locate me until I was almost to the surface. The magnet had to grapple me so fast that the side of the pipe caved in and bust four of my ribs. When I got out of the hospital, I went over to Dome One for my orders and a draw, but I was mighty low. Even rock crushing in the high Geiger hills struj#c me as better than IF kicking off again. I had the feeling that I'd used up all my luck, that if I got beyond radio range once more I'd never hear landing instructions again. Just low. Rotten. They told me in the hospital that I'd been on Mars so much I couldn't lose this rusty tan any more, and that kind of capped it. I was afraid to ride a pogo stick, let alone a kick pipe. At the office where I showed up for my draw, there was quite a delay. Ordinarily I would have bulged my aidock, but I was so low I just sat there, chewing a piece of that spongy red rock they sell to keep your mouth moist on Mars, and feelFinally the clerk came back, sand grinned at me. "Sorry to keep you, Galeg, but I knew there was something besides money for you. This globe's been waiting for you for six months." I was fractured. Who in hagan would spend a thousand sparks to send me a solid message? When he handed it over, I could see it had something in it besides a tape: it was too big. Must have cost two thousand, and it had a "storagepa id-till-called-for" stamp that must have gone another two fifty. Well, I stuck my thumb on the opener and as soon as it felt my thumb print, the seam opened all the way round. A little drive-control tape rolled out -- only about enough ter. The letter said, "When you get within a thousand goobers of the green ball, splice this into your drive tape." It was signed "Sheikh Abou Pick Pratt" You mind a goober, don't you? When the giil asked the pipe pusher how it felt to be a thousand nuiles off earth, he said, "Lady, a thousand miles is peanuts! Goobers!" Anyway, the message meant I was to cut in this drive off Sol Three. It was an old joke between me and Pratt. That's how I knew it was real. I fdt funny, I tell you. My air was leaking at every seam. Here I was, just about ready to give it up and cut the jet and here comes a voice from the dead, as you might say. And why "Sheikh Abou Pick Pratt?" If he was alive, was he rocky? Maybe he was in trouble. That was what convinced me -- that and curiosity. I devilled the free-fall doc until he passed me, shaking his head. My own head felt like it was swelling up and then shrinking when i took off. Bewildered? I was a flamed-out tube, brother. r ten weeks, I changed my mind every hundred miles. Each time the tape cut on the jet fliame to correct course, I knew I was that much closer to making the biggest decision of my life. Was I going to splice that tape, or wasn't I? I didn't know. I made up my mind. I jerked open the pilot case, ripped the tape in two and spliced in Picker's roll, trying not to think about it. Right away, I wished I had thought about it. You don't exactly fed direction changes in deep space, but there's some sense that stays oriented, even out there, and I knew my direction was wrong as soon as the jets kicked. They just roared for a second, one hellacious kick, and I knew I was never going to fall on earth. I was floaiting in the few inches of leeway a pipe design gives you, with the pilot case right under my nose, and it was all I could do to keep from opening it again. But it wouldn't have done me any good. To put back my old tape wouldn't get me to earth now, not after that boot Pick had given me. I tell you, I was sweating combustible fuel. A few hours later, my anxiety had knotted my stomach like a fist. I was sweating so much the air was fouling, and tears were cutting their way out of me, too. I was lightheaded and almost wild, with just enough brain left to know that it was the moon I was headed for. I began to laugh and sob like crazy then for sure. The moon! Sweet Jesus, the moon! Goddard the younger dead there because he couldn't get off. Carlson blown up trying! Damned, dead, dusty, airless, heavy moon. Close enough to die on, but just too much mass for a man to carry enough fuel to kick from earth and then kick from the moon too. TTie reason a space station had to be built. Just too big to be. useful. Every piper's nightmare -- to die on the moon. One big kick from home, but one big kick too much. When my throat was tired and my tear ducts couldn't pump any more, I began to pray. I prayed to Pick Pratt. "Pick," I would whisper, "Pick, Pick, be there. Save me. Pick, I'm a dead man if you don't. Eon't don't let me down. O God, make him be there. Pick, I've got to have fuel. Let me go, this once, let me get just to the space station, O please, Pick, please." I should have known better than to use that tape. "Sheikh!" I thought now he was crazy, and I knew I was. I didn't care. I cursed hirh for every son of a march I could put my tongue to, and I knew the words and the tune too. Then I'd pray a while longer. I'd make promises. If he'd let me go. I'd send others. I would have sent him my mother. Terror was a milepost way behind me. I raved on like that until I fell on the moon. The last thing I remembered was sinking in a wallow of dust, halfway up the ports. I must have slept from exhaustion. When I woke up, I meant to open the airlock and have it over with, but I was too burned out to trip the release. I lay there, strangling in my own miasma and looking out at the plains when, all of a sudden, I saw Pratt. I knew it was he, even in his robes. He was riding in a dpme tmck and the treads were driving dust up in straight trajectories, he was coming so fast. In ten minutes he was there. First he touched the shell of my tube with a solid bar and shouted into a mike at his end, "You old fool, you overshot us. Hold your IF nose until I get you to the dome." Then he hung a grapple on me and began to sled me across the dust. He was all dressed in a set of robes and had something cloth twisted around his head, and a curly and a black beard, but tie looked like mom's fudge pecan pie to me. I went to sleep while he sledded me in, and when he took me out of the tube and carried me, I was crying like a baby and mumbling his name. He turned me over to a couple of dark skinned fourteen-year-old boys. They went to work on me like they'd been raised in a Broadway Turkisih bath. They stripped off my clothes, bathed me, massaged me, walked me around that bathroom, got some soup and coffee in me, evacuated me, washed me again, made me walk a little more and put me to bed. I don't know how many days it was until I woke up in a bed that faced a doorway out into a court. There was a low table in the center of the court, beside a couple of palm trees. The sun... it had to be artificial... was speckling the table with light. And there, crosslegged by the table, was Abou Pick Pratt. He was smoking a hookah and drinking coffee, and as soon as he saw I was awake, he clapped his hands. One of the fourteen-year-olds came in and helped me dress, but first he gave me a cup of thick, syrupy-sweet coffee. When I got out in the sun, I flopped down by the table, and accosted Pratt. "Pick," I said, "tell me something before I go nuts." "You better eat," he said, and clapped his hands. Then he took a pull on that water pipe and told me Charley Blount had been there the month before. Charley was an old cobber of ours that I hadn't seen in seven -- eight years. By the time we got Charley's history cleaned up, we'd finished one meal and started another. In between we drank that sweet coffee. Haberschmidt was by, he told me, and Flonnie from France; and as it got to be afternoon and the shadow of the palms grew away from us, I began to realize that all the old crowd was coming here, and I guessed they'd all got solid messages like me. "But how come. Pick?" I asked him. "How come? Tell me something, or I'll burn out again." He looked at me like he figured maybe I'd make it now, and then he laid down the hookah and clapped for some more coffee. We'd drunk a bottle or two of some kind of wine during the day, and the coffee was welcome. "How do you feel?" he asked me. "Pretty good?" I stretched and lay back on some pillows with that dinky litde coffee cup, and all of a sudden I knew he was right. I was, you might say, rested for the first time in five or six years. Relaxed. Well fed but not gorged. I felt like I was eighteen again, and Mars was my oyster. I looked at him and felt more friendship for him than I'd thought I could feel, and I said, "Why, you old goat, you know how I feel. I never in my whole life felt better. Now tell me the whys and wherefores before I pull out that beard!" Just then I heard a giggle. I looked up to the shady side of the court, and shutters were beginning to open in the afternoon cool. Someone was watching us, from a gloom that held off identification. I was all on the alert in a minute. Somehow Fd let the size of the place escape me. There was room in that house for fifty people besides Pick. Who -- or what, I thought, was watching me out of those windows? More of them began to open, and I was just getting my feet under me, when something happened that went through me like a ot. T here was a fountain in one corner of the court, and a door about ten feet from it. The door opened silently, and a robed and veiled figure went to the fountain, filled a jug of water and left, closing the door as quietly. Well, it was a woman. She had on a robe like Pick's, but it was a woman. There's something about a woman. You can't fool me. Besides, she looked at me. I looked at Pick, and he was smiling sort of sheepish. I swore. I got up, and sat down immediately. I was giddy. All tht good, solid food in my middle began trying to recover its identity. I heard some more giggles and this time when I looked at the wall, I could see a dozen of them looking out, some shy and one or two bold, but all smiling like children on Christmas. One called out softly, "Me, Pick. Me." "Pick Pratt," I cried, "are you running what I think you're running?" His face kind of shut up, but his voice was just the same. He told me, "Not exactly. If this don't suit your tastes, your pipe's outside, with enough fuel to kick you back to Mars!" Then he clapp his hands three times, and there was a whole rustle of giggling and slippered feet on the stairs. In about a minute, six robes and veils glided out into the court and began a slow and stately dance that went to my head like sour mash. They only danced about three or four minutes, I guess. They were all veiled and shawled and wrapped, but here and there, as they glided past one another in the measures of the dance, there'd be a glimpse of curves or a flash of an ankle. They made their own music with little bells and bracelets around their ankles. One lost a slipper and went on dancing with one bare foot. When she passed the slipper again, she gave a lazy kick, and it sailed ovct my head. I was a man in a dream. The gloom of dusk surrounded us. The slow movements of the women were the stuff of dreams. After a little, they sank down together in a heap, like a flower closing. Pratt made some signal I didn't see, and a tall dark girl arose from the group and came to me like a sister. She bent and kissed me on the forehead, and her perfume fell around me in a cloud. I rose and followed her to her apartment in a kind of trance. IF She broughft me a nmple meal oi cold meat, fruit, and a few small alt rolls with caraway seed on them. When I shook my he she smiled and, lying beside me on the couch, fed me a few morsels. "A man must eat before he works," she said, and her voice was golden bells laughing. We made love all that night, the way love is meant to be made, A man's whole again when he wakes up to find his girl walking around the room just in a pair of pants, picking up the clothes, straightening things, maybe bringing him a cup of coffee when she sees he's awake, and then crawling back into bed with him. Just easy. Natural. No side at all. That was a girl worth going a about the middle of the morning, she chased me downstairs to chew the fat with Abou Pick again. I had lunch with him, and a bottle of Riesling. I wasn't exactly sober, but I was the soberest I'd ever been after a trip from Mars, I'll tell you that. I n the late afternoon, Pratt looked me in the eye and said, "Still worried about what I'm doing?" I looked him back. "I don't know what you're doing. I'm man enough to apologize for what I said yesterday, and I don't care what your in high-G concentrate in my cargo cylinder. If that's what you want, take it. Just tell me when my welcome's worn out," "That's up to you," he told me. I never ht a friend's tube yet, and I'm not going to learn how on you. And I don't covet your concentrat. This place is yours, just as if you'd built k." "Who did build it?" He smiled at that, and lit up ms hookah. The shutters began to open again, but there was no giggling today, and no faces visible, either -- only in my apartment', when she leaned out with the opening shutters, and beckoned me with a glance. I don't mean a come-hither look. It was more a look that said, "Here I am." I got up and went inside. Ey gowrins, I knew I could talk to Pick any time. When I came in, she said, "Does it please my master to return to his own place?" "None of that 'master' routine, baby," I told her. "Just you and me. What's your name?" "Rachel." Rachel! It rings in my head now. I said, "You can call me what my mother called me -- " and I told her, though I won't tell you. If the first night had been an ecstasy, this one was a fulfillment. Rachel! I made a symphony of her name. Next day, when she ran me out so she could clean the place up, I went straight downstairs and. took Abou Pick Pratt by the throat. "Picker -- " I let him see I meant it -- "you and me have been through a lot of bad landfalls together. This is the best one I'll ever have. But I'm being eaten by curiosity. Who's that girl. Pick? Who're all the rest? Mow'd you get here? If you don't tell me. I'll strangle you; and if I'm just a dream of yours in a madhouse, ril vanish happy after the las two days. Are you going to talk?" he pushed me down on a pile of pillows. "Gallegher," he says to me, "you're ready for the truth. These girls are Ouled Nails, and I'm the old man of the joint." He could have answered in Sanskrit and told me more, but I wormed it all out of him at last. After we split up, he'd given a lot of thought to our old landfall problems. Somewhere, he heard about the Ouled Nails, the girls who consoled and rehumanized Arab wanderers on the border for generations; and he asked himself if a pipe pusher's problem differed in kind or in degree from a camel pusher's. "It's the solitude," he explained, "and the awful monotony. That's what drains a man's manliness into a bottomless pit of anxiety and leaves him drifting like a burnt-out tube with a cracked cargo cylinder. Girls alone won't restore the balance, for a man needs mother, sister, wife, brother, father and uncle all at once and in a hurry to bring him back to himself. That's where I come in. At every oasis in North Africa where the Ouled Nails are, there's an old man who catches the wanderer up on his news and on his friends before the girls get in their licks. I'm the old man here." H e didn't say any more, and neither did I. Lunch came on about then, and I devoted myself to the food and kept my tongue between my teeth. When we started on the coffee, I asked him quiet where he got the women and he tdd me. They were the real thing, right from North Africa, and thdr ambition was to go back to the village of Ouled NaM weighted down with gold coins and silks. "I've got a solar-powered converter out back," Pick went on. "Turns out fine gold along with fuel for the tubes. The silks they can buy for themselves in 'Paris on their way home. Meanwhile, they're a thousand years ahead of all the automatic rehab units all the tecks in the system can build into a tube." Pratt was right there. I always damaged the rehab unit as soon as I was in free fall, so I wouldn't have to listen to it and smell it throwing around the odor of mashed potatoes and gravy and have it reminding me to take my muscle tone pills. The monotony and solitude were better. But of course a human being's always better than a machine, for any job where they can be compared at all. I laughed until I was roaring, but it was no hysteria. When I quieted down, I put it to Pick: "How much is the tariff, and none of your palsto#he-end routine now. How much?" He grinned at me, and we squared it off at ten thousand credits. I was to send it to his bank in Texas, at the little town near the robot factory where we'd ridden jeep so long before, as it seemed now. Pick knew I wouldn't cheat him. I vanted to come back on my next trip, and no teck in the system could tape me to the moon's off earth side IF -- or would. They'd have me jugged for asking. He was to send me a hundredcredit message globe with a short tape, and it would put me right at his dome. I stuck around about a week. When Rachel -- well, when Rachel began to look like just a girl, I flamed off to the space station. I was in earth gravity just long enough to send Pick his ten thousand jets. Then I checked in at the Sands for a kick to Mars. I've been riding a tape to the other side of the moon ever since. That's where I was until two days ago. Whenever we old-timers spot a youngster who looks like he'll make a man riding the hot tubes, we feel him out a couple of times while he's floating, and Pick drops him a globe with an Quled Nail tape in it. Once a man's tried it, he'll never go back to automatic rehabs. Of course, the ten thousand jets don't pay for it. Old Pick! He steals a kilo or two of high Geiger con every time you go, and it's hard to explain sometimes; but it happens so often nobody worries much any more. W e sat in reflective silence for a moment, and drained our beers. Gallegher signaled a waiter. "Where does your friend sell the high-G he steals?" I asked. The big G frowned at me. "I thought you'd get it. You're a taper-j and a smart one, they say. I guess I'm the only one that sees through the old fraud, after all." "Why do you say he'sa fraud? It may not be a savory business, but it serves a worthy social function, and I for one am not prepared to say, even from a moral standpoint..." "Oh, dry up," said Gallegher. "Didn't I tell you where his bank is, or wasn't you listening? Them things on the other side of the moon is all robots, including Pick. He must have died after he got 'em all up there from that robot factory, and they rebuilt one of themselves to look like him 'cause he was the high-gravity for us old-timers. Without the high Geiger they steal off us, the whole place would run down inside of six months like an unwound clock... You reckon that waiter's gone to sleep against that wall?" Plus Sam Moskowitz's fascinating new column, an exciting Gree novelette by C. C. MacApp and many more in the March Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! IF  NoveUit, Dam Nuisance Refhf had fo save fhh nJanef from its most deadly enemies -- the diplomatic corps ui Larlhi I J ame Relief, Second Secretary of the Terrestrial Embassy to South Skweem, turned at a shrill hail from the low docMway of one of the squat grass huts lining the dusty main street of the capital village. "Good mornings, Terry," a knobby, brownnottled, fourToot alien with a bewildering variety of appendages waved a couple of the latter at the diplomat. "How's trick? Say, I've been meaning to ask ones of you fellow a question: any chance of you Terry supplying a little economic aid in the forms of a new roofs for my pad here?" the Skweeman gesticulated with half a dozen limbs. "Every time it rain, all the squish goes out of my mud pack." "Sorry, Mr. Uptakapacheenobufers, but you know the ground-rules. Much as we Terries want to impress you people with a Public  Works Project, it can't be anything useful. According to the Underground Eeep-Thin!k Teams back at Sector, that might be taken as an implied criticism of your culture." The Skweeman made a rubbery noise indicating mild disappointment. "Yous know I'd likes to throw my weights behind the Terry program, but without a few goody to show for it, what's the percentage?" "I see what you mean, Mr. Uptakapacheenobufers. I'd better start by installing a couple of new transistors in that language teacher I lent you. It seems to have imparted a faulty grasp of the plural." "Hecks, Retief, call me 'takapacheenobuifers for shorts. I guess we're chum now, after those snort we had together last night. Wows, what a hangovers!" "Speaking of headaches, I have to hurry along to Staff Meeting. Too bad about the roof, but if you think of something spectacularly superfluous the town needs, hasten to let Ambassador Treadwater know. He's sweating out his next E.R." Retief went along to the large hut which served as the Terran Chancery; inside, he took a camp stool among the staff assembled before a low split-bamboo podium which sagged visibly under tie bulk of the Chief of Mission. ii'J'ow, then," the Ambassador i  opened the meeting briskly. "First this morning we'll take a look at the challenge which confronts us, gentlemen." He signalled and the lights dimmed. A projector humoaed. On the rostrum, a life-sized. three-dimensional, vividly colored image of a stubby, boxy Skweeman appeared under a glowing legend Treadwater tapped the solidogram with his rubber-tipped pointer. "This, gentlemen," he stated, "might appear to some of you to bear a superficial resemblance to our great allies, those valiant freedom fighters, the South Skweemans. However, to a practiced eye it's at once apparent that it is, in fact, a North Skweeman. Note the sly expression, the general air of inscrutability, the fierce oast of eye..." The pointer rapped each feature in turn. "Ah... Mr. Ambassador." Colonel Pluckwyn, the Military Attache, raised an interrogatory finger from his seat in the front row. "I don't believe that last organ was precisely an eye. More of an ear, I think you'll find." "Whatever it is, it has a fierce cast!" Treadwater snapped. "Now let's move along to the coloration." He studied the simulacrum. "Hmm, ah offensive greenish purple with clashing dun rosettes." "Golly, Mr. Ambassador," the Cultural Attache's voice piped from the rear. "Maybe I'm mixed up, but aren't our Skweemans the same color?" "Certainly not! Quite the opposite! The South Skweeman is characterized by a soothing overall tannish tone, tastefully set off with purplygreen rosettes. Not the same at all." "Yes, but -- " "Now, about the warts." The Ambassador pursued his point. "Note that this fellow has large blue ones, IF with tufts of yellowish hair." "But, sir -- isn't that what the South Skweemans have?" Tread water smiled patronizingly. "A common mistake, Dimplick. Actually, the South Skweeman is adorned with somewhat smaller warts, bearing attractive tufts of golden hair." "Oop, my mistakes, boss," a thin South Skweeman voice chirped from the direction of the projector. "Looks like I accidentally slipped in a shots of the South Skweeman Minister of Eats and Drinks. A nice likeness, too, made just before the mob got him." The image flicked out of existence and another, obscurely different, took its place. "Well, I'm sure we all get the general idea, anyway," the Cultural Attache offered breathlessly, as Treadwater's face took on a dangerous shade of purple. "Yeah -- these are a shot of the common foe," the projectionist announced. "Boy, will you look at those look of ferocity?" "Take it away!" Treadwater bellowed. "And I suggest you look to your labels, sir, before you create an international incident!" He yanked his pale violet lapels back in line. "Now, it's time to get on to the substantive portion of today's briefing." He beetled his brows at his audience. "You're all aware that the success of our mission here depends on establishing the legitimacy of the government to which I -- that is, we -- are accredited. Namely, that of Free Skweem, formerly known as South Skweem. We are similarly aware that next month's plebiscite will determine once and for all whether the mantle of planetary leadership falls on the shoulder of our sturdy allies, the South Skweemans, or on the bowed backs of the North Skweeman insurgents, the satellites of the unprincipled Groaci." "I have a suggestion," the Political Officer broke in excitedly. "We could hire some of the rougher local patriots to patrol the polling places, weeding out undesirables, distributing special disappearing ballots among the opposition and making a few minor adjustments to the counting machines to insure a victory for democratic processes!" "This is no time for subtlety," Treadwater stated flatly. "We must impress the locals of both political persuasions with our superior capacity to bestow largesse. We need, gentlemen, a large and impressive symbol of Terran generosity and technical virtuosity. The floor is now open for your suggestions." T he Ambassador waited. The silence was profound. "Gentlemen," Treadwater said ominously, "a full week has passed since I first requested suggestions from the staff -- and as of today, the net response has been nil!" A shuffling of feet greeted the accusation. "A curious lethargy seems to have afflicted you, gentlemen." The Ambassador stared around belligerently. "This, while a certain foreign mission daily entrenches itself more securely, prestige-wise, by virtue of a certain probably illegal but nonetheless highly effective propoganda device. I refer, of course, to the dam the Groaci have bestowed on their North Skweeman toadies." "I propose we build a dam too," someone said quickly. "Wonderful notion," the Economic Officer rumbled. "About to suggesit it myself -- " "Say, Charlie, you're hitting right in there this morning," a First Secretary offered. Tliere were clucks and chuckles of admiration from the rest of the staff. Treadwater waited for the approbation to die down. "The dam constructed by the Groaci engineers at the point where the river loops briefly into North Skweem," he purred, "has not only crippled South Skweeman commerce, but has effected a drought which is rapidly starving our brave allies into an advanced state of malnutrition, complicated by dust storms. Add to this the unfortunate flooding of that portion of the nation's farmland lying above the dam and we see, gentlemen, a striking example of creative public relations -- unhappily, in the service of the opposition. Now -- " he smiled thinly at the group -- "will someone kindly tell me what possible detriment would accrue to our rivals if I were so ill-advised as to construct still another navigational hazard in what was once this nation's main artery of communication!" His voice rose to an apoplectic bellow on the last words. No one volunteered a reply. A junior Third Secretary raised a hand timidly. Treadwell blinked expectantly. "Ah... sir. The dam is creating a sizable lake, I understand. What do the Groaci have in mind doing with all that water?" "Bh? Do? Nothing, of course!" the Ambassador snapped. "The entire project was designed merely to harass me! Or rather, us! The proud and independent populace of South Skweem, that is to say!" "Oh." The young man subsided. "Well, then," the Ambassador went on, idly calm now. "Let us try again, gentlemen, avoiding, if possible, the idiotic." "Well, Mr. Ambassador, Project Proposals are a tricky proposition," the quavering voice of the elderly Press Attache offered. "There was quite a row kicked up in certain journals concerning that hundredQuomt before we discovered they were allergic to water. And it will be quite a while before we live down the shoe factory we gave the Jaq, since they seem to have no feet to speak of. And there was a certain amount of criticism of -- " "I'm well aware of the history of the fiasco, as practiced by my colleagues," Treadwater cut him off glacially. "It is precisely for that reason that I am determined to present to Sector Headquarters a Proposal which will bear microscopic scrutiny, farce-wise. Now, thinking caps, men! I needn't remind you that we are caught between the mortar of Groaci expansionism and the pestle of Corps policy. If the government to whi are accredited is not starved out from under us, we still face an unfilled Project Quote." IP "Damned awkward, sir," Colonel Pliickwyn, murmured. "Couldn't we just give the beggars a touch of the old quirt? A small fractional megatonner, say, just to teach 'em their manners." "Bomb Headquarters?" Treadwater looked astonished. "Actually I was thinking of the North Skweemans, sir, but your suggestion has merit -- "Colonel, I dunk you'd better report to the dispensary after Staff Meeting, for skidl X-rays," Treadwater said bleakly. "I suspect the plates will come out blank. Now, let's move along to Mr. Magnan's report." The Ambassador glanced expectantly over the seated diplomats. "Magnan? Where is the fellow, drat it!" The Ambassadorial eye fixed on Retief. "You, there. What'syour-name. Magnan's your chief, I believe. Where the devil is he?" # yTr. Magnan failed to confide iVAin me. Your Excellency," Retief said. "Didn't your Excellency send him over to call on the Groaci Ambassador?" Dimpliok queried. "Of course," Treadwater agreed. "I instructed him to unobtrusively scout out the effects of the new dam under cover of the protocol visit. It is that on which I wish his report." "Mr. Magnan went across the line into North Skweem, alone?" Retief inquired casually. "I believe that is where his Groacian Excellency is usually to be found," Treadwater replied testily. glancing at his finger watch. "And he was distinctly directed to be back before tiffin time." "The present crisis may have thrown off the tiffin schedule," Retief conjectured. Treadwater frowned ominously. "Are you suggesting the scoundrels may have so far forgotten their protocol as to have detained an accredited diplomat in the performance of ' his duty?" 'Something seems to have detained him," Pluckwyn offered. "I hope he didn't go sniffing too closely around the dam," the Political Officer said soberly. "Those North Skweemans can be pretty nasty. I saw some atrocity photos oui visual aid people mocked-up, based on reliable rumors -- " "Oh, boy." The Press Attache doddered to his feet. "This'll make "Who said any thing about murder, you cretin!" Treadwater roared. "I merely noted that the man is late for Staff Meeting!" "Yes, I supose you're right." The Press Attaches sat down reluctantly. Then he brightened. "Still, if he hasn't shown up by sundown..." He began jotting notes on his scratch pad. "Well, if there are no further follies with which to waste our time, that's all for this morning, gentlemen," the Ambassador growled. "But I shall be looking for results -- prompt, dramatip results!" He swept the group with a final expectant glare, moved ponderously down from the shaky platform. "Say, Mr. ketief," the young Third Secretary came up beside him as they stepped out into the hot, dusty sunlight. "What really is the difference between North Sk weemans and South Skweemans?" "Very simple, Teddy. South Skweemans are natural democrats." "Oh... The youth fell back as Treadwater beckoned Retief over. "About Magnan," the Ambassador said offnhandedly. "It's occurred to me the situation might bear looking into. Never can tell what these unprincipled foreigners might take a fancy to perpetrate -- not that I think Magnan is any difficulty, of course. But I've been thinking possibly we might just dispatch someone to make sure." "Excellent idea, sir," Retief agreed. "Actually, I've been wondering whom I could spare long enough to attend to the chore." Treadwater put a thoughtful finger to his chins. "Indeed, sir?" Retief encouraged. "Frankly, your name popped into my mind." "Very flattering, Mr. Ambassador. A pity you assigned me to do the liquor inventory. Otherwise I'd be delighted." "Never mind the inventory -- if you're sure you really feel you should go..." "Well... 'Wery well, then, if you insist. Though personally I think you young fellows spook too easily. Well, I must hurry along, Retief. Let me hear from you." He turned and strode away. "How'd it go, Retief?" Uptakapacheenobufers called from his dooi way. "Predictably," Retief said, II T he once-purple and verdant countryside of Skweem was a wan, sun-baked expanse of waterstarved fields criss-crossed with the dusty gulleys x)f empty irrigation ditches. Tinder-dry stalks of mudwheat stood in endJeJss, arid rows across the cracked, concrete-like clay. Retief studied the view as ho steered the official ground-car with prow along the rocky road that paralleled the dry river bed, where stranded boats rested high and dry, their formerly bright paint and rigging as bleached and sere as the land. A few listless South Sk weeman peasants waved spiritless greetings from the shade of their huts as he passed. Others merely stared with drooping visual organs. It was an hour's drive to the heavy barbed-wire fence that marked the North Skweeman border. Retief pulled to a stop at the gate. A large, warty North Skweeman in official loops of braid decorated by dangling straps and medals undulated over, fingering a blast rifle of unmistakable Groaci manufacture. "What's your problem, Twoeyes?" he inquired in Skweemish. "Just a courtesy call," Retief replied in the same tongue. "Tell me, did you see another Terry pass here early this morning?" The Skweeman's eyes shifted. IF Naw, nothing like that," he said flatly. "This fellow would be hard to miss," Retief persisted. "Twelve feet tall, flaming red hair all over, three eyes -- " "FrinkleTruit! The guy wasn't as big as you, and..." His voice trailed #ff. "I see," Retief nodded. "Well, he was taking a birthday cake to the Groaci Ambassador, and it seems he losit the cherry off the top of it. We Terries are pitching in to help locate anyone who might have de ktyed him." "Not me, Terry! I waved him through and he headed straight for town -- thataway." He pointed along the road. "Fine. I'll tell them you're clean, then." "Gee, thanks, fella." The guard set his gun aside and opened the gate. "Think nothing of it." Retief waved cheerily and drove through. A mile and a half past the gate he encountered a small village, identical with its South Skweeman equivalent. Rows of grass huts, of various sizes depending on the status of their occupants, were arranged around a small grassed plaza in the center of which the public structures were grouped. As Retief pulled up to the tall, conical buildings which presumably housed the town officials, half a dozen uniformed North Skweemans came to the alert. One, more elaborately decorated than his fellows, wobbled forward and looked the car over with the air of a Customs officer tipped off to a load of contraband. "What brings you here?" he demanded. "I'm looking for the Groaoi Consulate General," Retief said. "Yeah? Where'd you lose it?" the Skweeman came back snappily. "The last I heard it was neck-deep in North Skweeman internal affairs," Retief replied breezily.' "But that's for you fellows to worry about." He looked around the somnolent town square. "I don't suppose you know where I might find a fellow Terry who wandered over the line while chasing a promotion?" "You got that one right," the Skweeman nodded. "Well, in that case I'll just move along and take a look at the dam the Groaci suckered you into letting them build on your property." He glanced along the line of the parched river-bed to the looming wall of concrete half a mile distant. "I see it's still holding. Water's about halfway to the spillway now, eh?" He looked thoughtful. "Whattaya mean, suckered? That's the finest dam on Skweem!" "Urn," Retief said. "What's it for?" "Huh? To hold back the water, whattaya think?" "Why?" "On acount of... so we can... I mean, it's for..." The Skweeman broke off. "Listen, you better talk to old Five-eyes personal; I mean, what's the big idea trying to pump me for military secrets?" "Military secrets, eh? Well, that's interesting. Just what sort of illegal military plans are you concocting over on thiis side of the line?" "We got no illegal plains!" "Any military plans are illegel Retief said flatly. "Who says so?" "Oh, yeah?" "Uh-hu)h. And we have the military resources to back it up, if you'll goad us far enough. Starting a wir ought to do it. And now, if youH just sort of slither to one side, #I get on with my business." "Hey, you can't -- " The North Skweeman's words were drowned in a cloud of dust as Retief gunned the car off toward the massive pile of the dam. R etief parked the car on a stretch of bulldozed gravel on the shoulder of the hill against which the abutment was anchored. Carrying a pair of miniaturized #x# binoculars, he moved up in the shelter of a small shed housing the dam's power controls, looked over the scene below. To the right of the massive concrete barrier a parched valley wound away toward the North Skweeman border. Patches of mud gleaming here and there at the bottom of the gorge were all that remained of the former river. To the left stretched a broad lake of blue-black water, its breeze-riffled surface reflecting the greenish late-morning sim. Under it lay a hundred square miles of South Skweem's best farm land, now forty feet deep in backed-up river water. A narrow catwalk lined with polemounted polyarcs for night operations 'crossed the top of the dam. On the far side a crew of Skweeman construction workers in baggy ochre overalls toiled under the supervision of a spindle-legged Groaci engineer, putting the finishing touches on the job. Other Skweemans, heavy-laden, struggled up a trail across the steep slope from below like a column of ants. A touch of color met Retiefs eye. He fine-focused the glasses, picked out the sagging shape of a small hut half-concealed in the brush near the base of the dam. Through ks open door he saw the edge of a coM of wire, shelves, the corners of packing cases. A Groaci supervisor stepped into the field of vision, dosed the door, hung a look on it, followed the workers up the trail. Retief lowered the glasses thoughtfully. Then, keeping low, he moved off in the concealment of deep brush. It was a stiff climb down to the floor of the ravine. Retief completed it without arousing unwelcome attention. He came up on the supply hut from the rear. Nothing moved near it now. The lock looked stout enough, but the warped boards of the door were riddled with dry rot. At a sharp kick it bounced rattlingly open. Inside, Retief looked over a stock of tools, reinforcing steel fittings, detonator caps, mechanical spares for the pumps -- and a generous supply of compressed smashite: three-inch rods of a bilious yellow color, each capable of excavating a hundred cubic yards of hard rock in one blast. Quickly, Retief selected materials and set to work. IF m H e left the shed ten minutes later, unreeding a ooii of two-conductor insidated wire behind 'him. The ascent to the diff-top took half an hour, by which time the workmen had oompieted the task at hand and were busily packing up their tools. Retief made his way up-slope to the control shed. Its corrugated metal door stood half open. Inside, the floor was littered with smpped-off bits of wire, empty cartons that had contained switching gear and the butts of several dozen Qroaci dope sticks. Ain inspection of the panels showed that the wiring was complete. Five more minutes' study indicated that the large white toggle switch beside the door controlled the polyarcs atop the dam. Redef brought the ends of his wires into the shed, linked them into the lighting circuit. Against the gray floor, the insulated lines were almost invisible. Back outside, he brushed loose sand over the wires leading up from below, then headed back to the car. He topped the rise, halted at sight of two bile-green cars bearing the crossed-oculars insignia of the South Skweeman Home Guard, parked hicle. There were eight armed Skweemans in sight, patrolling alertly around the blocked car, while a pair of Groaci stood by, dapper in Bermuda shorts and solar topis, deep in conversation. As Retief strolled down to meet the reception committee, the locals swiveled to cover him with their guns. The two Groaoi stared, their eye-stalks twitching hypnotically. Retief reco-gnized one as a member of the Groaci diplomatic staff. "Good morning, Lith," Retief greeted the Groaci Councillor as he came up. "Keeping busy, I see." "To depart instantly," the Groaci diplomat hissed in his faint voice. "To explain at once this illegal intrusion on North Skweeman soil!" "Which would you like first, the explanation or the departure?" Retief inquired interestedly. 'To make no jest of this redhanded crime. Terrain interloper!" Lith whispered urgently. His multiple eyes fell on the miniature binoculars in Retief 's hand. "As I thought." He motioned to his Skweeman aides. "Your presence explains itself." He stepped back to allow the gun-handlers to dose in. "Cover him," he ordered. "At the first false move, fire." "You're in a devil-may-care mood this morning," Retief noted. "Given up all hope of advancement, I suppose, and want to go out in a blaze of notoriety by making an even bigger mistake than usual." "What did you observe up there?" The second Groaci indicated the top of the rise. "Just what's there," Retief replied easily. The two Groaci exchanged glances, a feat they accomplished with one pair of eyes while keeping two on Retief and another on the Skweemans. Retief whistled in admiration. "No sigftdling," one of them warned. To poke yoxir long Terry nose in once too often," Litih said. He made a curt gesture with a pair of arms. "Take him," he commanded the Skweemans. "Before you do that -- " Retief held up an admonitory hand -- "maybe it would be a good idea to ask Lith wihat the future plan for North Skweem might be -- if North Skweem has a future." CiOilence!" Lith keened. "To take  care, Terry, not to tempt me too far!" "Hey, talk Skweemish," one of the guards objected. "What are you two foreigners cooking up, anyway?" "We're merely nattering of trivialities," Lith explained. "Now do your duty, fellows." "Yeah... but I been thinking: this sapsucker is a Terry diplomat." "Enough," Lith cut him off. "I assure you no complaints will be lodged by his associates." The Skweemans closed in on Retief. "All right, big boy, let's go," the lieutenant said, poking his gun at the prisoner. Retief glanced at the weapon. It was a heavy-duty power pistol, a Groacian copy of an early Terran type. "Have you ever fired that thing?" he inquired interestedly. "Who, me?" the Skweeman rotated a number of sense organs in a gesture expressing astonishment. "Heck, no. We got orders to only shoot at live targets." He looked meaningfully at Retief. "A wise precaution. I understand that model blows up rather easily. IF That's why the Groad sold them to you at bargain prices." To make no attempt to subvert my minions!" Lith hissed. 'T wouldn't dream of it," Retief assured the ruffled diplomat. "I prefer minions wiho change sides on their own." "You will have long to wait for that eventuality," Lith snapped. "In a cell which, alas, lacks most of the amenities." "That's all right," Retief said. "Peihaps I won't be in it long enough to need them." Lith vibrated his throat-sac, expressing amusement. "You may be right, my dear Terry," he commented blandly. "Now, into your vehicle, and drive as directed, remembering that guns are upon you!" Escorted by the two police cars, a sedate pace along the indicated route to the village, pulled it in before a low mud brick building with one small window set with metal bars. Lith and the Skweeman police surrounded him as he stepped out into the street. One of the cops peered into the interior of the Monojag. "Hey,' this is a fancy job," he commented. "What's that?" He pointed at a short red-handled lever side, Lith goggled, then whirled on Retief. 'To explain at once!" he hissed. "Our intelligence reports have indicated that vehicles so equipped are speeds! Why, then, did you permit mm Shecmm yourself to be so docilely convoyed?" "Well, Litih, maybe those reports you read were exaggerated," Retief smiled deprecatingly. "After all, your gumnsihoe brigades have to report something Lith snorted. "So much for the vstunted Terry technology." He turned to his troops. "Look him up." The Skweemans dosed in to box Retief, like alert, waist-high goblins modelled in blotchy day; their guns prodded him along an alley to a small metal door set in the side of the brick building. The lieutenant opened it with a clumsy electrokey, waved him inside. The door dank shut and a shadowy figure rose up, its face pale in the dim light. "Red!" First Secretary Magnan gasped. "You mean they captured you, too?" "It seemed the simplest way to solve the problem of finding you," Retief said. "Now all we have is the problem of getting out." Ill T he Skweeman sun was low in the sky now. A brisk, hot wind had sprung up from the north, whirling streamers of dust into the cell through the barred window from which Retief watched the activity in the street. Behind him, Magnan turned away, coughing. "They're as busy as Verpp in moulting season," he sniffed. "No one is paying us the slightest attention. I suppose we may rot here for hours more before Ambassador Treadwell secures our release." "There's just one cop patrolling the jail now," Retief said. "The rest of them have trooped off, arm in arm with their friends the Groaci. I think we picked a bad time for our calls; they're up to something." "I can't think what's keeping him!" Magnan eyed his watch fretfully. "I'm missing my afternoon coffee break, to say nothing of dinner." He sighed heavily, settled himself on the floor. "I simply can't grap it," he muttered. "The Groaci are famed for their chicaneries, but open diplomatnapping broaches an entirely new field of rascality. Why, an honest diplomat won't even be able to nip around to troubled areas, picking up eye-witness impressions, without the risk of being treated as a mere spy!" "On the other hand, if we join in the spirit of the thing -- " Retief turned from the window -- "We might find that it opens up novel avenues to us, too." He went across to the narrow door, leaned over to the barred, waisthigh opening, and shouted for the guard. "Good idea." Magnan got to his feet. "I think it's time we spoke sharply to these brigands. Just stand aside, Retief, and I'll drop a few broad hints." His voice faded as the fierce visage of the police lieutenant appeared beyond the aperture. Retief spok first: "Do you have any idea what a blaster would do to you if I fired from this range?" he inquired. "Don't give any alarm," he went on as the speechless cop goggled into the dark cell. "Just quietly unlock the door -- and be siue no one noIF tices anything unusual going on." "B... b... b... the Skweeman said. "You can express your astonishment later," Relief said briskly. "Open up now, before I have to demonstrate how well armed I am." "I... I didn't see any weapon on you when we brought you in," the jailer expostulated. "Naturally; it's the sort of thing a fellow likes to keep secret. Hop to it, now. My trigger finger is twitchmg. "I had to be a wise guy and volunteer to be a big ot," the Skweeman muttered to himself. Relief heard the scrape of the key in the look. Tumblers clicked over. The door swung in with a dry squeak. "!h!" Magnan put a finger to his lips, looked severely at the native as he sidled out past him. He looked both ways. "The coast seems to be clear," he whispered as Relief lifted the cop's pistol from its holster. "Maybe you'd better let me have one of the guns." "Hey!" The Skweeman waved several sensory organs in an agitated way. "I don't see any blaster -- except mine!" "Nothing wrong with your vision, anyway," 'Relief congratulated him. "Now we have to be running along." He looked thoughtfully at the local. "I really should shoot you... he said judiciously. "Sh... shoot me?" the Skweeman gulped. "But I've got a couple of dozen chicks ready to break through the shell any day now! Those little devils will have the hide off the old lady in five minutes flat if I'm not there to protect her when they hatch out!" "On the other hand," Retief went on, "I could give you a break." "Yeah!" the Skweeman breathed. "Now you're talking, Terry!" "You just carry on as though nothing had happened. We'll go about our business and trouble you no more. I don't think you'll want to bother Uncle Lith by mentioning our departure; he might take the unreasonable attitude that you're in some way to blame. Just play them close to your medals and act innocent when they notice the cell's empty." "You bet, boss. I always knew you Terries were gents. Between us, I never went much for that two#egged slicker -- " "Mind your derogatory references to the number of a being's limbs, sir," Magnan said stiffly. "Two legs appears to me to be an admirable endowment of such members." "Sure, no offense, gents. Now, how's about beating it quick, before somebody comes along? And you better give me back my gun. Somebody might get nosy if I don't have it." Retief ejected the power cylinder from the butt of the gun, dropped it into his pocket, handed the empty weapon over. "We can't reach the car," he said to Magnan. "They towed it away to tinker with at leisure. We'll have to ease out the back way and see how far we get." Keeping to the narrow alley, Retief and Magnan safely traversed a block of ragged grass dwellmgs. emerged at the end of a long avenue that meandered down a slope toward the mile-distant fence marking the South Skweeman border, barely visible now in the late twilight. "If there were just some way to cover that ghastly open stretch," Magnan muttered, "we could be safe in a matter of minutes .  He broke off, pointed at a flickering glow, a smudge of smoke rising lazily from a point near the gate where the road crossed the internation line. "What's that? Dust, perhaps? Or smoke?" "The wind's from the north," Retief said. "And there's nothing but twenty miles of dry mud-wheat between here and those haystacks housing our friends, the South Skweoman leaders. Something tells me that's a fire, Mr. Magnan -- and not an accidental one." "Fire?" Magnan gasped. "Great heavens, Retief -- the capital is directly down-wind! They'll be roasted alive -- the Ambassador, the staff, the South Skweemans -- and no water anywhere to fight the blaze!" "That's one way of influencing an election," Retief pointed out. "Why, , there's nothing to keep it from burning off the prairie all the way to the sea," Magnan blurted. "The entire country will be incinerated! There'll be nothing left of oui; allies but a pall of smoke!" There was a scratchy Skweeman shout from behind the Terrans. They tui'ned to see a policeman approaching up the alley on the run -- a spectacle not unlike a cubic yard of olive-drab noodles rolling up-hill. "Let's go," Retief sna.pped. He turned and ran for it, with Magnan pelting at his heels and a gathering force of pursuers baying on the trail. # #Tt's... no... use," Magnan X gasped as they toiled up the last hundred yards toward the mighty flank of the dam. "They're... gaining." He cast a look back at the mob of half a hundred North Skweeman patriots strung out in a torch-waving line halfway to the village. "Just a little farther." Retief caught Magnan 's arm and hauled him along. "You're doing fine." They reached the top of the dam, massive and ominous in the darkness. A blaster bolt crackled blue nearby, from extreme range. "Retief, we're not going to cross thatr Magnan stared in horror at the narrow unrailed catwalk that led out to disappear in darkness, the great black void on one side, the lapping waters slapping at the concrete on the other. "Unless we want to be shot, we are." Retief started out at a trot. Magnan bleated, then followed, edging along flat-footed. Another shot chipped concrete behind him. He yelped and broke into a nervous caniter. They reached the far side, scrambled up the dry slope, lit only by the blasters that peppered them with flying gravel as the shots struck around them. "Where are they?" a Skweeman voice sounded. "I can't see a thing; those Terries must have eyes like a weenie-bugl" IF "Lights," someone else called. "Don't let 'em get away, boys!" Retief stood, cupped his hands beside his mouth. "Lith," he called. "A word of advice: don't light up!" "We can't... hide here," Magnan gasped out. "No cover... and those shots... getting close!" He dived flat as a shot kicked up dirt almost at his feet. "They won't find us in the dark," Retief said. "But -- they'll switch on the lights." "There is that chance -- but they were warned." There was a shock through the ground that bounced both men three inches into the air. Then a deepthroated tooom! rolled from the abyss like chained thunder, as brilliant light flooded the entire length of the dam. Retief raised his head, saw great chunks of masonry rising with languid grace high in the air. Atop the stricken dam, the few bold Skweemans who had started across dithered momentarily, then pelted for safety as the walkway subsided with dream-like m.fijcsty under them. Most of them reached the far side as the immense bulk of the dam cracked with a boom like a cannon; the rest dived for the glistening surface of the pent-up water, splashed desperately for shore as dust boiled up from the gorge, obscuring the scne of destruction. Polyarcs still blazing bravely, the great dam crumbled, sinking from sight. Wave after wave of sound rolled across the slope. Rocks and pebbles thudded down near the diplomats. They gained their feet, sprinted for the top of the hill, then turned, watched as the surface of the artificial lake heaved, recoiling ponderously from the blast, then bulged toward the broached dam, formed a vast spout like translucent black syrup that arched out, out, over, and spilled down, foaming white now, plunging into the boiling dust. The ground shook as the incalculable tonnage of water struck far below. A roaring like caged dinosaurs bellowed upward from the gorge as the river poured back into its bed in a torrent that shredded concrete and steel from the broken rim of the dam like water dissolving dry mud. In a scant five minutes, nothing remained of the Great Groaci Dam but the denuded abutments, studded with the stripped ends of clustered reinforcing rods. "Relief!" Magnan piped over the roar of the waters. "The... the dam broke!" Retief nodded judiciously. "Yes, Mr. Magnan," he said. "I think you could say that." IV R etief and Magnan waded past the tattered remains of the tattered remains of the soggy huts thrusting up from the swirling, mudbrown waters that covered the site of the South Skweeman capital, inundated by the flood that had swept down so abruptly an hour earlier. Ambassador Treadwater stood with his staff before the remains of the Chancery hut, waist deep in the flow. "Ah, there you are, Magnan." He turned to look disapprovingly at the new arrivals. "Remind me to speak to you about punctuality. I'd almost begun to wonder if you'd met with foul play. Even considered sending someone after you." "Mr. Ambassador -- about all this water -- " "Hark!" Someone raised a hand torch, shot its blue-white beam out across the water, picked up the low silhouette of an inflated dinghy on which a number of bedraggled, knobby-kneed Groaci crouched. Several Skweemans splashed forward to intercept the craft. "Well, nice of you to drop in, my dear Shish," Treadwater called. "Most unfortunate that your engineers have apparently proved unequal to their task. Possibly their slide-rules were out of adjustment. Still their timing was good, conflagrationwise." He smiled sourly as the staff chuckled dutifully. "Bah, the design was flawless," Shish whispered as the raft bobbed on the ripples. "We were sabotaged!" "Sabotage?" Treadwater surveyed the Groaci Ambassador as haughtily as his sodden puce cutaway would allow. "I think you are as aware as I that impKrt of explosives to an emergent planet like Skweem is quite impossible, but for certain industrial types allocated to massive engineering projects." "You suggest that Groaci detonants were employed in this dastardly fashion? Why, the very idea... Shish fell sulkily silent. "Confidentially, Retief," Magnan whispered behind his hand, "Just what do you suppose did happen to the dam?" "Possibly someone got their wires crossed," Retief murmured. "Now, Mr. Ambassador," Treadwater said. "I fear I shall have to expropriate your conveyance for ofto remove to my hill station at once to prepare my dispatches." He broke off as a muddy scarecrow faindy recognizable as the Agricultural Attache splashed up to join the group. "Did you notice the current change, Mr. Ambassador?" he cried gaily. "The water's draining back into the river bed now -- and the new channel cut by the flood runs just this side of the border. I fancy we'll have no more interference from these meddlesome Groaci -- oh, it's Ambassador Shish," he nodded to the sodden dignitary. "Nice night. Your Excellency." "Bah," Shish replied. The attache was rubbing his hands together. "My preliminary study seems to indicate that the inundation has deposited a good six inches of new topsoil over a large portion of South Skweem. All scoured off Northern Skweem, of course, but then, they will allow defective dams to be built on their land..." His voice trailed off. He pointed across the rapidly receding waters. Amid much splashing, a large party of Skweemans was approaching at a rapid clip. "Gad!" Colonel Pluckwyn boomed. "We're being invaded!" "Here, do something!" Treadwater IF turned to Shish. "They're your allies! Tell them to go along quietly and we'll see about a handsome ience -- " "I claim sanctuary!" Shish whistled in agitation. "Treadwater, it's your duty to protect me and my chaps from these soreheads!" "They do appear somewhat irate." Magnan began backing away. "Don't lose your heads, gentlemen!" Treadwater croaked. "We'll demand the privileges of honorable prisoners of war -- " "We haven't lost, yet," Retief pointed out. "An excellent point, Mr. Retief." The Ambassador reached for the Groaci raft. "I hereby appoint you as a special committee to meet with these fellows and study their grievances. If you can drag the talks out for an hour, the rest of us will go for help." "Quite an honor, my boy," Colonel Pluckwyn said, as he tumbled a faintly protesting Groaci over the side. "And you merely a Second Secretary." "I don't think we should do anything hasty," Retief said. "Now that the North Skweemans have had a taste of , Groaci sponsorship, they may be ready for our program." Councillor Lith, showing signs of wear and tear, surfaced beside Retief, having been replaced by a Terran aboard the raft. "Some day, Terry, the truth of this affair will out," he hissed in faint Groaci ferocity. "Why be pessimistic?" Retief responded. "If you play your cards right, the North Skweemans may never learn that the dam was placed so that when the basin was full you could open the flood gates and wipe out their capital along with anything that might have been left of South Skweem, leaving an open field for a Groaci take-over." "What? Are you suggesting -- " "I'd suggest dawn as a reasonable deadline," Retief went on. "If you wade along with Ambassador Treadwater, you can get off a 'gram and have a ship in here to pick you up by then. I can't guarantee that I can keep it quiet much longer than that." "Hey!" Dimplick shouted suddenly. "Look at the placard they're waving!" Retief glanced toward the approaching North Skweemans, coming up rapidly now. "Why, those appear to be hastily lettered pro-Terry slogans," the Political Officer burst out. "Have you lost your wits?" Treadwater rumbled. He peered through the gloom. "Hmmm. It appears you're right." He straightened his back. "Just as I expected, of course. I knew that my policies toward these fellows would bear fruit, given time." He shot Magnan a reproving look. "A pity you chose to go junketing just at the climactic point of the finesse. You missed a valuable lesson in diplomatic sublety." Magnan opened his mouth, caught a look from Retief, closed it again. "I'm sure we were all fooled by Your Excellency's apparent total inactivity, sir," he gulped. "Exactly." Treadwater beamed around at the others as the frontrunners of the North Skweeman delegation arrived, uttering cries of delight and pledging eternal friendship. "It appears we'll have a solid electorate behind us, gentlemen! My job -- that is to say, the future of Terran-Skweeman relations seems secure. Now, if we just had an adequate Project Proposal to offer Sector Headquarters, our cup would be brimming." He stepped forward, began shaking members left to right. "Sir!" Secretary Dimplick bounded forward. "I've a dandy notion! Why not build a new capital for United Skweem to replace the former city swept away by the flood?" "Of course!" Colonel Pluckwyn chimed in. "My idea exactly; just waiting for an appropriate moment to mention it. I'd also suggest a massive aid program to rectify the other ravages of the disaster." "Food!" the Agricultural Attache shouted. "I think I can justify a schedule of deliveries under the Chrunchies for Lunchies program that will keep two dozen Corps bottoms in use for the next fiscal quarter!" "Superb, gentlemen!" Treadwater warbled. "I can see promotions all around -- to say nothing of extra staff, monuments to Skweeman independence and democratic solidarity, larger operational budgets, and a magnificent new Teran Chancery rising from the ruins!" "Say, Mr. Retief." The junior Third Secretary plucked at his sleeve. "I thought these North Skweemans were little better than dacoits and brigands; suddenly they're welcomed as bosom friends." "True, they're a shifty lot," Retief confided as he accepted a moist Skweeman handshake. "But who are by science-fictions most exciting new team by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown He was alone and tn trouble in a world of half-human creatures who despised mankind and all it stood for... and only the freaks of a galactic sideshow were witling to call him their friendl Starts in the April issue of IF -- don't miss it! IF IF  Short Story I Right trusty and well-beloved Hugo Edward Lack By the power and duties invested in me as First Secretary to the Space Navy of Earth you are ,... E ven when y#u know you are going to be kicked in the stomach the boot still hurts. Hugo Edward Lack read no more. The crisp official letter crumpled damply in his fingers. His bowels felt loose and he wanted to be sick. He glanced guiltily across the wide low-ceilinged apartment room aswim with gaudy reflected color from the tridi in front of which The space baffle raged ouf pasf fhe Crazy Suns, Only heroes could fake part in it -- so heroes must be model his mother sat absorbed in a meretricious pseudo-life. One plump hand cradled a chocolate box, the other primped fussily at her mouth. As usual, nothing would disturb his dear mama until dinner time. "Fve ben conscripted to fight for the likes of your said Lack viciously. He wadded the call-up notice and flung it from him as though to disassociate himself from its implications. For Lack knew what was in store for him. How many times he had enacted this scene in his mind's eye he could not compute. Once, even, he had madly imagined his mother dissolving in tears and flinging her arms around him, ready to defy the Terran Space Navy for her boy. Lack's fertile brain began scheming. Of course they would get the call-up notice to him through the ordinary postal channels. They would have proof he had received it through the automatic receipt system. But they had to lay physical hands on him before they could be sure he would docilely enter the slaughter house. Lack had long since made up his mind that no power of this Solar Federation would get him into a spacenavy man's uniform and send him off into the inhuman depths of space to fight either Takkat or Shurilala. Jerky Jones should still be the man. He had conveyed in his twitchone at all who deserved it. That is to say, anyone with the money to pay -- to avoid call-up. Draft-dodging had become big business. No longer was it enough to be married, or to hold a permit to read for a degree, or even to possess some slight skill in a reserved occupation. For in this seventeenth fledgling combat among the stars of the three empires of Takkat, Shurilala and Earth -- resources had been drawn on until even the seams of the bucket were being dismantled and processed for spatial warfare, H ugo Edward Lack did not want to fight  aliens. He did not want to don the proud uniform of the Terran Space Navy and fare forth on singing jets among the stars, shooting at aliens -- and being shot; did not want to cash in on the current market trade-in value of one medal for one limb -- or the big one' if you never came home. He wanted to stay in his own little world and try to catch the happiness that always eluded him. These were all very human desires on Lack's part; the natural aversion of any man to having portions of his anatomy shot away, to asphyxiate in a star battleship with the seams cracked open to the hungry nothingness, the blood boiling in his brain and steaming from his eyes. Oh, sure, Hugo Edward 'Lack was afraid. He had every right to be. But in this seventeenth year of the insane conflict many men, although more afraid than ever Lack could fathom, volunteered to fight in space. They had discovered a truth that Hugo Edward would not admit existed. So now the boy planned and schemed ways to cheat the Draft Board without injuring himself. As he left the room his mother picked up another chocolate, momentarily drawn from the tridi by some other movement in the room that impinged with faint impression on her consciousness. Then she popped the candy into her mouth and relapsed once more into the viewers' coma. Jerky Jones welcomed young Lack with a smile and an outstretched hand, a business as usual briskness. Jones twitched all the time. He explained casually that he'd never fully recovered from that time his destroyer had been caught in a full salvo by a Takkatian cruiser off Oban II. He never admitted that he IF had never been in the spacenavy and the twitches came from a more mundane criminal reason. Now he welcomed Hugo Edward Lack like an old buddy, pulling up a stool to the bar in his crosstown dive, ordering a drink, smiling widely, one hand draped across the boy's shoulders like a comforting Father Christmas. "You said -- that is -- " gulp -- "you could help me." "Sure, kid. Sure! Any time." The hard eyes took in Lack's trembling figure, the scrawny body and thin bony wrists, the uncertain Adam's apple, the weak plea for understanding in the murky eyes. "Sure. Called up, hey?" "I'm not going! They can't make me! If my old man had been alive, he'd have stopped them." "Your mom ain't bothered?" "Her!" Lack shook at a lifetime's memories. "She couldn't wait to run out on my old man. When he went over the cliff in his car she dialed the bank. Her!" Jones rose from his seat and, jiggling, led the way through to a back room. Here he told Lack to sit down, his voice jabbing suddenly like an unexpected splinter in a handrail. "Siddown, kid, and watch." L ack sat, frightened anew, apprehensive of the immediate moment. The fear of space had grown in him over the years, fed by newsreels and stories from the fronts until it had assumed the guise of an ever-present dream nightmare, an inward landscape lividly illuminated by the fire of broken spaceships and the glow of burning cities. "Look at the screen. No tridi. Duodimensional is enough for this." Lack watched, shaking. The screen showed a man with one arm replaced by a prosthetic limb that rapidly and dexterously manipulated complex equipment. "TTiat's no good any more. Nor arc feet and legs. They kin fit a prosthetic limb better'n the one I'd chop off." Lack choked. The frame shifted. A youth sat in a chair, drooling, fed by a nurse; he regurgitated and lolled and messed all down his plastic bib. 'They got wise to that one. Whatever I do to your brain they'll undo, if it's on a temporary basis. That feller wanted a permanent. When I'd finished with him he couldn't be put back arights. He's never going into space, though." "No!" "You can't be too squeamish, son, if you want out." "But surely there is another way! A false identity, that's all I want! Cards, ident ticket -- you know." Jones chuckled cruelly. "Sure I know. I ain't gonna say it can't be done. You know the ident checkouts they have now. Every single human being is tabbed. No -- I won't say it can't be done -- of course it's been done -- but you don't have that kind of money, kid." "How much?" "Don't waste my time. Look -- I can screw your insides around, fix it so's you can't keep Navy rations down. They'll refix you up; but it'll take time. And this fool war can't go on much longer." "Does it -- " Lack wiped his lips -- "does it hurt?" "Well, of course it hurts! You can't monkey around with a man in this day and age and fix him so he's a no good without it hurting! We've been hundreds of years breeding one hundred per cent fit human beings. And you want me to wind the clock back and turn out a four F in a coupla minutes!" "What about you -- your -- jerking -- " "I'm a combat vet. They won't touch me. I'm past the zone. My twitches have nothing to do with it. You don't get twitches like these without being through the mill, son." Jones leered. "I could fix a feller with false service records and twitches -- but you ain't got that kind of money." "I heard a guy say you'd never been in the Navy, Jerky. He said your combat weariness came from drugs." "I don't want to hear no more of that! You want out of the service you pay the cash. Do I snarl up your guts or don't I?" Lack rose unsteadily. "You know I'm straight out of engineering training," he said. The room kept jumping about and his eyes stung. "My mother keeps me, is all. I've saved a little -- " "We could do this on the piecemeal basis. But in the end they'll get you." "What am I to doV "Pay me and I'll screw you up. You haven't enough for a permanent fix." Jones shut off the screen. "Or you can be the big hero and go off with the bands and flags and join up. Suit yourself." "But it hurts..." "So?" "I'll have to think about it." "See you when you've made up your mind. I'm in no hurry. But remember -- " Jerky Jones leaned forward and his twitching nose pointed at Lack -- "they're in a hurry!" "Them! It's always they! Who are they!" Lack turned blindly from the room, stumbling, hating what he could see within himself and yet quite unable to act otherwise. H e ran through the dark streets as a hunted animal runs. In truth, he was a hunted animal. The dark fantasies tortured his mind. He could maim himself but 'they' would machine him into a stronger frame than he had had before. He could blind himself and 'they' would graft on new eyes. Jerky Jones could so manipulate his mind that he would reach the terminal zone of life while still a young man. He would never have to go into space then; he would end his days on a stool being fed gruel and slobbering it down his bib. "Perhaps," he whispered. "Perhaps I could work myself a cushy billet. Maybe I could fix it so I'd be posted to a safe job on planet. I could try." Fear has its own built-in determining factors and its own inverted drive. As a boy he'd always been nerIP vous, of course, and his mother's incurable nagging had eaten into the core of his persona so that he could not believe in himself as an individual. He stayed isolated and aloof in a private, makebelieve world he created for himself, peopled with the adolescent fantasies he culled from dreams and magazines and books and the tridi. He gradually withdrew from the possibility of normal meaningful human relationships. He failed to believe that any human relationship could be normal. Everything from him clouded over with the belief in the meaninglessness of the universe, the frailty of his life and the eventual terminal entropy of humanity. His black distorted shadow gibbered before him as his thin limbs jerked him down the street and a twin leering shadow pursued him as he fled. The po'ce prowl car could not fail to spot him. The turbines whined low as the car cut across from an upper airlane and settled down plnmply before him. Lack could only just halt his legs, imbued as they were with this fierce fear-crazed desire to flee from terrors he knew too much about. His hands raked out across shining paintwork, his mouth vorking, his lungs charging his body like a bellows. "Hey there, young feller. What's all the rush?' Calm, square-faced men studied him as though their flash in truth impaled him like an insect on a pin. They knew, those policemen. They saw. They were gentle with him; but they took him just the same. Lack lolled in the back seat and slowly let his dissolving mind slip down easily and sweetly into a gray unconsciousness in which there could be no space and no terror. One policeman said: "Scared out of his wits about joining up. Been to see Jerky Jones for a fortune. Filth!" The other counterpointed in a lower key: "Jones would do nothing for him. No cash. We'll pick Jones up one day -- and when we do..." "Filth," said the first bitter voice again. "When I think of my bov dropping down with the Marines down into hell -- " "It easn't easy to understand. But one day this war has to end. It's got to. Even aliens must have the common sense to see that." The police prowl car flitted like a shadowy bat into police headquarters. But Hugo Edward Lack knew nothing of what happened to him until he awoke in a strange bunk with metal bulkheads pressing in, rust streaks fanning from boltheads, the light dim and heavily shielded, the smell of oil and stale air and human sweat pulsing in his nostrils to the rhythm of his labored breathing. Q uiet unemphatic men clad in space navy whites came for him. They took him before the captain. Stupidly, Lack lolled before the desk, his eyes seeking reassurance from the decking at his feet and finding none. "Many men are frightened at # what they imagine will happen to them in space, Lack." The captain's pouched eyes and furrowed, ravaged face gave all the compassion the captain could feel for this petrified boy. The captain had passed the point at which he could lie to new recruits. As officer in charge of recruit training he could only feel thankful that his job did not encompass the final awful indoctrination of the stream of young men who passed through his hands. Lack was processed through Terran Space Navy channels; given a clean white uniform and a little round crewman's hat, categorized spaceman fourth class, inoculated and vaccinated and psychonated, given his kit and parted from all but a quarter inch of his hair. He was talked at, shouted at, drilled, ordered about, taught to salute an officer and on his own account learned to keep out of sight when hot on duty. All this happened to Lack in a gray haze. He tolerated the absolute invasion of his privacy only because his last garbled thoughts before the police prowl car caught up with him stuck like a faulty record in his mind, endlessly reverberating: "I can work myself a cushy billet. I can fix a safe job on a planet." By this time he was not, evidently, the same. Hugo Edward Lack who had sought the dubious help of Jerky Jones. H e had managed to lift one fragmentary corner of the new life awaiting him and he had survived. Life in the space navy might be toughening, coarse, sometimes brutal, always demanding that a man pull out all the stops and prove he could do more than he thought he could, giving him no physical privacy but leaving his mind free to roam as it would during offnkity hours, this life might do all diese things; but it was still life. He breathed and ate and drank and knew himself to be a man. The fear had not been allayed, had not been slaked. The fear still existed as concretely as ever it had. But through the sheerly mechanical repetition of navy life the fear had been bypassed, almost tricked, put, as it were, into cold storage, dumped into suspended animation. Lack faced the world with a patinaed personality grafted onto him by the space navy. He did not fear to drill and to learn the ropes, to be told what to do and what not to do. In some routine way the fear of combat in space that had hag-ridden his dreams for so long had been pushed vaguely into a never-never future. He was in die navy -- but, of course, he would never be called on to fight. T hey processed Lack on that most beautiful of alien worlds around swarming Cygnus, Charmian. On Charmian's surface no one for a single instant would imagine themselves to be on Earth; but Charmian felt good and was a planet where a man could still remember Earth and yet feel the thrill of being on an alien world. Charmian soothed. "Details for posting," said the IF captain one day when Lack had been, to his own surprise, re-graded spaceman third class. "You are all going to different training centers for final indoctrination." The petty officers began calling out the names. The only one that mattered to Lack was: "Sman Third class, Lack, Hugo Edward. Lorimer. Assistant storekeeper." Lorimer. Lack had never heard of the place. With the number of planets etCTnally orbiting their parent suns swimming in even this tiny sector of the Galaxy, that was not surprising. The shuttle dropped down from the transport, taking Lack onto a world stark and frozen, peaked and ridged, bathed in an atmosphere that would lacerate a man's throat and flay his lungs. Lack took over his duties, accounting for the manmade mountains of stores in their neat warrens below the surface. He shut his mind to what lay on the surface and narrowed his whole attention to the stores. Some naive intuition told him, that way lay safety. On the surface Lorimer was a hell-planet. But Lack would not venture onto the surface. And he was not in space, not aboard a battleship with his unpleasant and lingering evisceration in imminent prospect. Lorimer was of no real value to Earth until it had been terraformed into some semblance of terrestrial conditions and so was of no use either to Takkat or Shurilala; yet it was in the nature of this first space empires stumbled into helpless interstellar war that it should be fought over and cherished merely because it was. As the only planet of a sun occupying a relatively empty portion of space Lorimer's sole claim to fame lay in its use as a way station and refueling' and maintenance base. Lack counted engineering stores and kept his records and tried not to think too much. On the surface Lorimer flamed through spectacular sunsets when the drifting gas lent a blurred chiaroscura overlay to the cruel peaks, when the whole planet lay bathed in dun ochreous luminosity. Lack would have none of this. He cowered, counting his stores in the deepest recesses of the man-made shelter, thankful to be safe in the womb of the earth -- even though this earth was not Mother Gaea. N ews of the battle reached the men on Lorimer whilst that great and terrible conflict still raged in the gulfs of space around the Crazy Suns and whispered reports of tragedy and victory fluttered like desiccated moths through the underground base. Apprehension stalked the galleries. The medical officers made doubly sure that everyone took the little orange pills. Ostensibly a specific against extra-terrestrial claustrophobia, they were well known to give courage and deaden fear, and Lack swallowed his down with a loving revulsion that science could take from him his basic feelings and by treachery expose him to dangers his waking mind would shrink from. But for Lack even the orange pills could give no courage and no surcease from the fear that was a part of himself, for if that fear could be destroyed it would destroy Lack. The battle around the Crazy Suns went badly for the Terran Space Navy. Battered units spun wildly from that epicenter of violence. Triumphantly and with bared fangs the wolves of Shurilala and Takkat hounded the men of Earth across the parsecs. On the seventh day Lieutenant Commander Paul Glinka, duty officer, observed a closing bogey on the radar plot and alerted the operations crew. The base on Lorimer prided itself on its speedy handling of ships and men; it was not geared to fight anything more lethal than a red-tape snarl-up in communications. But, in keeping with any respectable Terran Navy base, it possessed its quota of armaments. When Augusta, Lack was not alone in feeling a shivery crawl of relief. Augusta swept in from space too fast, grazed atmosphere, bounced, tried again, barreled smoking into the ochre desert of Lorimer a quarter of the way around the planet from the Terran base. The problem then presented to the base commander resolved itself simply into the decision to send a planetary flier out to pick up survivors. Lieutenant Commander Glinka took off on that duty. As one of his crewmen went Hugo Edward Lack. O f course. Lack did not really believe he had been sent on duty in a flier out over Lorimer's surface. The triple turbines flung the aircraft across that dun monotonous surface, boosting to rise clear of razor peaks, howling on its mission of mercy. But Lack sat in his seat with his straps tightly buckled, surrounded by other men just as quickly snatched up from the base, refusing to believe he was where he was. Everyone knew that a Shurilala force had been following Augusta. If the rescue craft could carry out its job and return to the base before the aliens arrived, all would be well. The base was camouflaged to avoid alien discovery. If they did not -- oh, no! Hugo Edward Lack didn't really believe he was at last facing the final accounting. The flier circled the stranded cruiser once, then flattened out and made a perfect landing. Piloting these planetary craft was child's play; a matter of punching the right colored buttons to follow the sequence of evolutions required. Red dust puffed fluffily as the jets died. The landing ladder extended, dural gleaming jaggedly under the alien sun. Clad in standard issue spacesuits the men disembarked. Augusta had been a light cruiser of the Heraklion class, swift and rapierlike; now she lay a crumpled mess looking like a heap of discarded tinfoil. From cracks fissuring her sides men in spacesuits had staggered out, stood now dumbly waiting for the flier to carry them back to safety. IF One of those dazed men was Harold Crespigny, civilian, historian attached to the Ninth Fleet. As the rescue went smoothly through its opening phases no one noticed that Lack had not stepped out with the others, that he remained cramped and knotted in his seat. Over the low-power limited radius suit sets Crespigny reported bleakly to Lieutenant Commander Glinka. "As a civilian, Commander, I want you to take care of the navy men first. They've had it pretty rough. There are more in the ship. We'll need help with them." Glinka motioned to his men. Stretchers were carried in -- and with them went the grab bags for the dead. After that early futile episode with Jerky Jones there had been no dramatics in Lack's fear. He might have sat there in the flier until the rescue had been completed as he had sat through all that had happened to him so far in the Navy, had not the radio spat its startled warning. "Alert! Alert! Shurilala force now resolved as two Ogre class heavy cruisers. Landing seems contemplated by use of jets. Effect rescue mission top priority..." The young voice on the radio hesitated, then snapped back with a sharper bite: "As you were! Spread out and take cover! Do not attempt return! Keep out of sight!" Glinka's hookup repeated the orders through his helmet phones. Men began to scatter away from the wrecked cruiser. Harold Crespigny moved with the others, saying: "I only hope their bombs hit the target! Any band spread and we'll catch a packet." "Just so long as they don't trace the base. We mustn't give them an inkling we're on this planet to stay." N o one felt it necessary to mention the chances' they were taking; a run for the base would bring the aliens down in fury and destruction on their necks so all they could do was take cover and hope the Shurilala would not use nuclear weapons. The chance was slight; but it existed. Glinka put it into panting words. "They're out to smash up Augusta, so they won't use N.P. bombs. But if they spot the base the N.P.'s will come down from a great height." Lack heard the orders and he saw those running men. He felt detached from all that. He had to do one simple thing. He had to get back underground, to the cosy safety of the manmade base. It was very simple. No problem at all except he would have to hurry. He punched the firing pattern with only two errors and erases and the flier lifted off with a growling smother of red dust. Lack sat back in the pilot's throne and thought about the forms he would have to fill in to cover the loss of equipment sustained this day. Jwst where the Takkatian needlescout came from no one knew -- either then or afterwards. Those jagged, tough, edgy men of Takkat always liked to bludgeon their way about space. She catapulted over the horizon, saw Lack's flier and needled in lethally. Lack idly punched the evasive action buttons and went back to thinking about his forms. The flier jinked all over the sky followed by the Takkat scout. Rapidly they dwindled towards the far horizon -- and straight towards the two Shurilalan Ogre class cruisers dropping down on thumping jets, their peculiar ring-mounted stability jets firing in unison, high and starkly visible against the bilious sky. To Crespigny, watching with the sweat clammy on him, those Shurilala cruisers looked obscenely like fat cows, tails in the air, rumps flaunting, ready to squat and squash the life out of him. The Takkat did not hesitate for a microsecond; it is not in the nature of Takkatians to wait before jumping into a fight. The Shurilala are the smooth, cunning, devious aliens of the starlanes. The Takkat's twin multi-cannon clipped out on outriggers, and like the needle for which the scout was named, she went straight in at the nearest Shurilala. Flames spread thickly in the soupy atmosphere; enormous discharges of electricity boiled off, the vast thunder of aliencreated lightnings split the sky. The alien from far Takkat knew he had no chance against two cruisers; but he was a Takkat and so he bored in with everything he had. He brewed ' up the first Shurilala and crippled the second in a shredding of metal and a flowering of flametipped debris even as his own craft dissolved into a shattered mass dripping ruin. Naturally enough there was nothing of Lack or his flier to be found anywhere. H arold Crespigny let out a long shaky sigh. "Lack, did you say his name was? Well, he didn't lack guts. He sacrificed himself deliberately to draw that Takkat onto the two Shurilala. He made the right decision and he made it fast." Glinka shook his head wonderingly. "I'd never have figured Lack for a hero type. But he surely saved all our skins today. Now we'd better call base and have them sort out what's left of that Shurilala and pick us up." The men of the Navy were not fools. If they suspected the real reasons behind Lack's apparent suicidal heroism they did not voice them. Earth needed her heroes. The war machine had to be glamorized any way possible. If a lonely, frightened, almost paralyzed boy could fit that role -- he would be elected a Hero of Terra. They sent the medal to his mother. She was watching tridi at the time and the medal slipped down behind the box of chocolates. "I always knew Huey was a good boy," she said, munching a fresh candy. "I'll pick up his medal as soon as IF  Serial The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Utustrated by ACmCfH Earfhmen didn't hate Luna. Not a bit! They loved it -- just as tigers love a tender young kid! W oke up scared silly in pitch darkness. "Manuel!" Didn't know which end was up. "Manuel!" it called again. 'Wake upr That brought me out some; was signal intended to trigger me. Recalled being stretched on a table in infirmary at Complex, staring up at a light and listening to a voice while a drug dipped into my veins. But was a hundred years ago, endless time of nightmares, unendurable pressure, pain. Knew now what no-end-is-up feeling was; had experienced before. Free fall. Was in space. What Has Gone Before -- We Lunarians have put up with a lot from Earth, but time comes when we don't vant to put up with more. Earth tells us what we can sell, who we sell it to, how much we can get for it. Means slavery. But... Earth owns us outright. Question is, what can we do about it? I don't mind a gamble -- wouldn't mind fighting Earth with a chance to win -- but with no chance, no. Luna has no warships. Earth has plenty, tuna has no armies. Earth has armies to burn. Most of all, Luna is run by big computer, and Earth owns the computer. But there's one thing Earth doesn't own -- me. And it just so happens that I'm the fellow that fixes the computer... and the computer is my good friend I call Mike! So maybe -- just maybe -- we Lunarians can do something at last. So we invent mythical leader named "Adam Selene" -- is really Mike -- and start rolling. Only one problem: Need help on Earth. That's the hard one, because earthworms I don't know, neither does Mike, neither does any good Loonie. Don't know where to look... until chance delivers one into hands, when group of stilyagi kids ask permission to kill him. I save his life, never regret it. Name is Stuart With him, revolution is good chance. But best chance comes when Company overplays hand. Couple guards rape girl, get killed -- fight is on. Now somebody else has to go down to Earth, in cargo pod, like sack of wheat... Turns out "somebody" is me! What had gone wrong? Had Mike dropped a .decimal point? Or had he given in to childisih nature and played a joke, not realizing would kill? Then why, after all the years of pain, was I alive? Or was I? Was this normal way for ghost to feel, just lonely, lost, nowhere? "Wake up, Manuel! Wake up, Manuell' "Oh, shut up!" I snarled. "Button your filthy king-and-ace!" Recording went on; I paid no attention. Where was that reeking light switch? No, doesn't take a century of pain to accelerate to Luna's escape speed at three gravities, merely feels so. Eightytwo seconds -- but is one time When human nervous sytem feels every microsecond. Three gees is eighteen grim times as much as a Loonie ought to weigh. Then discovered those vacuum skulls had not put arm back on. For some silly reason they had taken it off when they stripped me to prepare me and I was loaded with enough don'tworry and let's-sleep pills not to protest. No huhu had they put it on again. But that drecklich switch was on my left and sleeve of p-suit was empty. IF Spent next ten years getting unstrapped Oflie hand, then a wnty-year seotemoe fkaiting araund m dark before inaxtaged to find my Gstadte again, #gfore out which was bead end and from that hint locate switch by tonch. That compartment was not over two meters in any dimensioii. This turns out to be larger ilftiaii Old Dome in free fal and total darimess. Found it. We had light. (And don't ask why that coffin did not have at least diree lighting systeans all working all time. Habit, probably. A lighting system implies a swd'tch to control it, nyet? Thing was built in two days; should be thankful switch work.) Once I had light, cubic shrank to true daiustirophobic dimensions and ten per cent smaller, and I took a look at Prof. Eead, apparently. Well, he had every excuse. Envied 'him but was now supposed to check his pulse and breathing and suchlike in case he had been unlucky and still had such troubles. And was again hampered and not just by being onearmed. Grain load had been dried and depressured as usual before loading but that cell was supposed to be pressured. CWi, nothing fancy, just a tank with air in it. Our p-suits were supposed to handle needs such as life's breath for those two days. But even best psuit is more comfortable in pressure than in vacuum and, anyhow, I was supposed to be able to get at my patient Could not. Didn't need to open helmet to know this steel can had not stayed gas tight. Knew at once, naturally, from way p-suit felt. Oh, drugs I had for Prof, heart stimulants and so forth, were in field ampules; could jab them through his suit. But 'how to  check heart and breaithmg? His suit was cheapest sort, sold for Loonde who rarely leaves warren; had no read-outs. Has mouth hung open aaid eyes steired. A deader, I decided. No need to ex Prof beyond that old limen; had eliminated himself. Tried to see pulse ou throat; his helmet was in way. T iey had provided a program dock, which was mighty kind of them. Showed I had be out fortyfour-plus hours, all to plan, and in three hours we shoi receive horrible booting to place us in parking orbit around Terra. Then, after two circums, call it three more hours, we sthould start injection into landing program -- if Poona Ground Control didn't change its feeble mind and leave us in orbit. Reminded self that was unlikely; grain is not left in vacuum longer than necessary. Has tendency to become puffed wheat or popped com, which not only lowers value, but can split ose thin canisters like a melon. Wouldn't that be sweet? Why had they packed us in with grain? Why not just a load of rock that doesn't mind vacuum? Had time to think about that and to become very thirsty. Took nipple for half a mouthful, no more, because certain'ly did not want to take six gees with a full bladder. (Need not have worried; was equipped with catheter. But did not know.) When time got short I decided IF couldn't hurt Prof to give him a jo'lt of drug that was supposed to take him through heavy acceleration, then, after in parking orbit, give him heart stimulant -- since didn't seem as if anything could hurt him. Gave him first drug, then spent rest of minutes struggling back into straps, one-fhanded. Was sorry I didn't know name of my helpful friend; coorid have cursed him better. Ten gees gets you into parking orbit around Terra in a mere #x #' microseconds; merely seems longer, ten gravities being sixty times what a fragile sack of protoplasm should be asked to endure. Call it thirty-three seconds. My truthful word, I suspect my ancestress in Salem spent a worse half minute day they made her dance. Gave Prof heart stimulant, then spent three hours trying to decide whether to drug self as well as Prof for landing sequence. Decided against. All drug had done for me at catapulting had been to swap a minute and a half of misery and two days of boredom for a century of terrible dreams -- and besides, if those last minutes were going to be my very last, I decided to experience them. Bad as they would be, they were my very own and I would not give them up... They were bad. Six gees did hot feel better than ten; felt worse. Four gees no relief. Then we were kicked harder. Then suddenly, just for seconds, in free fall again. Then came splash which was not "gentle" and which we took on straps, not pads, as we went in head first. Also, don't thinik Miike realized that, after diving in hard, we would then surface and splash hard again before we damped down into floating. Earthworms call it "floating" but is nothing like floating in free fall; you do it at one gee, six times what is decent, and odd side motions tacked on. Very odd motions -- Mike had assured us that solar weather was good, no radiation danger inside that Iron Maiden. But he had not been so interested in Earthsdde Indian Ocean weatther; prediction was acceptable for landing barges and suppose he felt that was good enough -- and I would have thought so, too. Stomach was supposed to be empty. But I filled helimet with sourest, narstiest fluid you would ever go a long way to avoid. Then we turned completely over and I got it in hair and eyes and some ki nose. This is thing earthworms call "seasickness" and is one of many horrors they take for granted. W on't go into long period during which we were towed into port. Let it stand that, in addition to seasickness, my air bottles were playing out. They were rated for twelve hours, plenty for a fifty-hour orbit most of which I was unconscious and none invoilving heavy exercise, but not quite enough with some hours of towing added. By time barge finally held sti'll I was almost too dopy to care about trying to break out. Except for one fact. We were picked up, I think, and tumibled a bit, then brought to rest with me upside down. This is a no-good position at best under one gravity; simply impossible wihen supposed to (a) unstrap self, (b) get out of suit-shaped cavity, (c) get loose a sledge hammer fastened with butterfly nuts to bulkhead, (d) smash same against breakaways guarding escape hatch, (e) batter way out and (f) finally, drag an old man in a p-suit out after you. Didn't finish step (a); passed out head downwards. Lucky this was emergency-lastresort routine. Stu LaJoie had been notified before we left; news services had been warned shortly before we landed. I woke up with people leaning over me, passed out again, woke up second time in hospital bed, flat on back with heavy feeling in chest -- was heavy and weak all over -- but not i'll, just tired, bruised, hungry, thirsty, languid. Was a transparent plastic tent over bed which accounted for fact I was having no trouble breathing. At once was closed in on from both sides, a tiny Hindu nurse with big eyes on one side, Stuart LaJoie on other. He grinned at me. "Hi, coluber! How do you feel?" "Uh... I'm right. But oh bloody! What a way to travel!" "Prof says it's the only way. What a tough old boy he is." "Hold it. Prof said? Prof is dead." "Not at all. Not in good shape -- we've got him in a pneumatic bed with a round-the-clock watch and more instruments wired into him than you would believe. Buit he's alive and will be able to do his job. But, truly, he didn't mind the trip; he never knew about it, so he says. Went to sleep in one hospital, woke up in another. I thought he was wrong when he refused to let me wangle it to send a ship but he was not -- the publicity has been tremendousr I said slowly, "You say Prof 'refused' to let you send a ship?" "I should say 'Chairman Selene' refused. Didn't you see the dispatches, Mannie?" "No." Too late to fight over it. "But last few days have been busy." "A dinkum word! Here, too. Don't recall when last I dossed." "You sound like a Loonie." "I am a Loonie, Mannie, don't ever doubt it. But the sister is looking daggers at me." Stu picked her up, turned her around. I decided he wasn't all Loonie yet. But nurse didn't resent. "Go play somewhere else, dear, and I'll give your patient back to you -- stUl warm -- in a few minutes." He shut the door on her and came back to bed. "But Adam was right; this way was not only wonderful publicity but safer." "Publicity, I suppose. But 'safer'? Let's not talk about!" # #Qafer, my old. You weren't shot at. Yet they had two hours i-n which they knew right where you were, a big fat target. They couldn't make up their minds what to do; they haven't formed a policy yet. They didn't even dare not bring you down on schedule; the news was full of it, I had stories slanted and waiting. Now they don't dare touch you, you're popular heroes. Whereas if I had waited to charter a ship and fetch you... well, I don't know. We probably would have been orIF dered into parking orbit; then you two -- and myself perhaps -- would have been taken off under arrest. No skipper is going to risk missiles no matter how much he's paid. The proof of the pudding, cobber. But let me brief you. You're both citizens of The People's Directorate of Chad, best I could do on short notice. Also Chad has recognized Luna. I had to buy one prime minister, two generals, some tribal chiefs and a minister of finance -- cheap for such a hurry-up job. I haven't been able to get you diplomatic immunity but I hope to, before you leave hospital. At present they haven't even dared arresit you; they can't figure out what you've done. They have guards outside but simply for your 'protection'. And a good thing, or you would have reporters nine deep shoving microphones into your face." "Just what have we done? -- that they know about, I mean. Illegal immigration?" "Not even that, Mannie. You never were a consignee and you have derivative PanAfrican citizenship through one of your grandfathers, no huhu. In Professor de la Paz's case we dug up proof that he had been granted naturalized Chad citizenship forty years back, waited for the ink to dry and used it. You're not even illegaMy entered here in India. Not only did they bring you down themselves, knowing that you were in that barge, but also a control officer very Idndly and fairly cheaply stamped your virgin passports. In addition to that. Prof's exile has no legal existence as the government that proscribed him no longer exists and a competent court has taken notice -- that was more expensive." Nurse came back in, indignant as a mother cat. "Lord Stuart... you must let my patient rest!" "At once, ma chere." "You're 'Lord Stuart'?" "Should be 'Comte.' Or I can lay a dubious claim to being the Macgregor. The blueblood bit helps; these people haven't been happy since they took their royalty away from them." As he left he patted her rump. Instead of screaming, she wiggled it. Was smiling as she came over to me. Stu was going to have to watch that stuff when he went back to Luna. If did. She asked how I felt. Told her I was right, just hungry. "Sister, did you see some prosthetic arms in our luggage?" She had and I felt better with number-six in place. Had selected it and number-two and soda! arm as enough for trip. Number-two was presumably still in Complex; I hoped somebody was taking care of it. But number-six is most ah-around useful arm; with k and social one I'd be okay. xxvm r vo days later we left for Agra to present credentials to Federated Nations. I was in bad shape and not just high gee. Could do well enough in a wheel chair and could even walk a little although not in public. What I had was a sore throat that missed pneumonia only through drugs, traveler's trots, skin disease on hands and spreading to feet -- just like my other trips to that disease-ridden hole, Terra. We Loonies don't know how lucky we are, living in a place that has tightest of quarantines, almost no vermin and wihat we have controlled by vacuum any time necessary. Or unlucky, since we have almost no immunities if turns out we need them. Still, wouldn't swap; never heard word "venereal" until first went Earthside and had thought "common cold" was state of ice miner's feet. And wasn't cheerful for other reason. Stu had fetched us a message from Adam Selene. Buried in k, concealed even from Stu, was news that chances had dropped to worse than one in a hundred. Wondered what point in risking crazy trip if made odds worse? Did Mike really know what chances were? Couldn't see any way he could compute them no matter how many facts he had. But Prof didn't seem worried. He talked to platoons of reporters, smiled at endless pictures, gave out statements, telling world he placed great confidence in Federated Nations and was sure our just claims would be recognized and that he wanted to thank "Friends of Free Luna" for wonderful help in bringing true story of our small but sturdy nation before good people of Terra -- F. of F.L. being Stu, a professional public opinion firm, several thousand chronic petition signers and a great stack of Hong Kong dollars. I had picture taken, too, and tried to smile, but dodged questions by pointing to throat and croaking. In Agra we were lodged in a lavish suite in hotel, that had once been palace of a maharajah (and still belonged to him, even though India is supposed to be socialist) and interviews and picture-taking went on. Hardly dared get out of wheel chair even to visit W.C. as was under orders from Prof never to be photographed vertically. He was always either in bed or in a stretcher -- bed baths, bed pans everything -- not only because safer, considering age, and easier for any Loonie, but also for pictures. His dimples and wonderful, gentle, persuasive personality were displayed in hundreds of news pictures. But his personality did not get us anywhere in Agra. Prof was carried to office of President of Grand Assembly, me being pushed alongside, and there he attempted to present his credentials as Ambassador to F.N. and prospective Senator for Luna. Was referred to Secretary General and at his offices we were granted ten minutes with assistant secretary who sucked teeth and said he could accept our credentials "without prejudice and without implied commitment." They were referred to Credentials Committee -- who sat on them. I got fidgety. Prof read Keats. Grain barges continued to arrive at Bombay. I n a way was not sorry about latter. WHien we flew from Bombay IF to Agra we got up before dawn and were taken out to field as city was waking. Every Loonie has his hole, whether luxury of a long-established home like Davis Tunnels or rock still raw from drill; cubic is no problem and can't be for centuries. Bombay has bee-swarms of who have no home but some piece of pavement. A family might claim right (and hand down by will, generation after generation) to sleep on a piece two meters long and one wide at a described location in front of a' shop. Entire family sleeps on that space, meaning mother, father, kids, maybe a grandmother. Would not have believed if had not seen. At dawn in Bombay roadways, side pavements, even bridges are covered with tight carpet of human bodies. What do they do? Where do they work? How do they eatl (Did not look as if they did. Could count ribs.) If I hadn't believed simple arithmetic that you can't ship stuff downhill forever without shipping replacement back, would have tossed in cards. But... tanstaafl. "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," in Bombay or in Luna. At last we were given appointment with an "Investigating Committee." Not what Prof had asked for. He had requested public hearing before Senate, complete with video cameras. Only camera at this session was its "in-camera" nature; was closed. Not too closed, I had little recorder. But no video Wanted us kept swept under rug. Nevertheless was chance to talk and Prof treated them as if they h power to recognize Luna's Independthey treated us as a cross between naughty children and criminals up for sentencing. Prof was allowed to make opening statement. With decorations trimmed away was assertion that Luna was de-facto a sovereign state, with an unopposed government in being, a civil condition of peace and order, a provisional president and cabinet carrying on necessary functions but anxious to return to private life as soon as Congress completed writing a constitution -- and that we were here to ask that these facts be recognized de jure and that Luna be allowed to take her rightful place in councils of mankind as a member of Federated Nations. What Prof told them bore a speaking acquaintance with truth as they were not where they could spot discrepancies. Our "provisional president" was a computer, and "cabinet" was Wyoh, Finn, Comrade Clayton and Terence Sheehan, editor of Pravda, plus Wolfgang Korsakov, board chairman of LuNoHoCo and a director of Bank of Hong Kong in Luna. But Wyoh was only person now in Luna who knew that "Adam Selene" was false face for a computer. She had been terribly nervous at being left to hold fort alone. As it was, Adam's "oddity" in never being seen save over video was always an embarrassment. We had done our best to turn it into a "security necessity" by opening offices for him in cubic of Authority's Luna City office and then ex. ploding a small bomb. After this "assassination attempt" comrades who had been most fretful about Adam's failure to stir around became loudest in demands that Adam must not take any chances -- this being helped by editorials. But I wondered while Prof was talking what these pompous chooms would think if they knew that our "president" was a collection of hardware owned by Authority? B ut they just sat staring with chill disapproval, unmoved by Profs rhetoric. Probably best performance of his life, considering he delivered k flat on back, speaking into a microphone without notes, and hardly able to see his audience. Then they started in on us. Gentleman member from Argentina -- never given their names; we weren't socially acceptable -- this Argentine objected to phrase "former Warden" in Prof's speech. That designation had been obsolete half a century; he insisted that it be struck out and proper title inserted: "Protector of the Lunar Colonies by Appointment of the Lunar Authority." Any other wording offended dignity of Lunar Authority. Prof asked to comment; "Honorable Chairman" permitted it. Prof said mildly that he accepted change since Authority was free to designate its servants in any fashion it pleased and was no intention to offend dignity of any agency of Federated Nations... but in view of functions of this office -- former functions of this former office -- citizens of Luna Free State would probably go on thinking of it by traditional name. That made about six of them try to talk at once. Somebody objected to use of word "Luna" and still more to "Luna Free State" -- it was "the Moon," Earth's Moon, a satellite of Earth and property of Federated Nations, just as Antarctica was -- and these proceedings were a farce. Was inclined to agree with last point. Chairman asked gentleman member from North ' America to please be in order and to address his remarks through chair. Did chair understand from witness's last remark that this alleged de-facto regime intended to interfere with consignee system? Prof fielded that and tossed it back. "Honorable Chairman, I myself was a consignee, now Luna is my beloved home. My colleague, the Honorable the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Colonel O'Kelly Davis -- " myself! -- "is Luna born, and proud of his descent from four transported grandparents. Luna has grown strong on your outcasts. Give us your poor, your wretched; we welcome them. Luna has room for kilometers, an area greater than all Africa -- and almost totally empty. More than that, since by our method of living we occupy not 'area' but 'cubic' the mind cannot imagine the day when Luna would refuse another shipload of weary homeless." Chairman said, "The witness is admonished to refrain from making speeches. The Chair takes it that your oratory means that the group IF you represent agrees lo accept prisoners as before." "No, sir." "What? Explain yourself." "Once an immigrant sets foot on Luna today he is a free man, no matter what his previous condition, free to go where he listeth." "So? Then what's to keep a consignee from walking across the field, climbing into another ship and returning here? I admit that I am ness to accept them... but we do not want them. It is bur humane way of getting rid of incorrigibles who would otherwise have to be executed." (Could have told him several things that would stop what he pictured; he had obviously never been to Luna. As for "incorrigibles," if really are, Luna eliminates such faster than Terra ever did. Back when I was very young, they sent us a gangster lord, from Los Angeles I believe; he arrived with squad of stooges, his bodyguards, and was cockily ready to take over Luna, as was rumored to have taken over a prison somewhere Earthside. (None lasted two weeks. Gangster boss didn't make it to barracks; hadn't listened when told how to wear a'p-suit.) # #ryAhere is nothing to keep him A from going home so far as we are concerned, sir," Prof answered, "although your police here on Terra might cause him to think. But Fve never heard of a consignee arriving with funds enough to buy a ticket home. Is this truly an issue? The ships are yours; Luna has no ships -- and let me add that we are sorry that the ship scheduled for Luna this month was canceled. I am not complaining that it forced on my colleague and myself -- " Prof stopped to smile -- "a most informal method of travel. I simply hope that this does not represent policy. Luna has no quarrel with you. Ybur ships are welcome, your trade is welcome, we are at peace and wish to stay so. Please note that all scheduled grain shipments have come through on time." (Prof did always have gift for changing subject.) They fiddled with minor matters then. Nosy from North America wanted to know what had really happened to "the Ward -- " He stopped himself. "The Protector. Senator Hobart." Prof answered that he had suffered a stroke (a "coup" is a "stroke") and was no longer able to carry out his duties -- but was in good health otherwise and receiving constant medical care. Prof added thoughtfully that he suspected that the old gentleman had been failing for some time, in view of his indiscretions this past year... especially his many invasions of rits of free citizens, including ones who were not and never had been consignees. Story was not hard to swallow. When those busy scientists managed to break news of our coup, they had reported Warden as dead... whereas Mike had kept him alive and on job by impersonating him. When Authority Earthside demanded a report from Warden on this wild rumor, Mike had consulted Prof, then had accented call and given a convincing imitation of senility, managing to deny, confirm and confuse every detail. Our announcements followed, and thereafter Warden was no longer available even in his computer alter ego. Three days later we declared independence. This North American wanted to know what reason they had to believe that one word of this was true? Prof smiled most saintly smile and made effort to spread thin hands before letting them fall to coverlet. "The gentleman member from North America is urged to go to Luna, visit Senator Hobart's sickbed and see for himself. Indeed all Terran citizens are invited to visit Luna at any time, see anything. We wish to be friends, we are at peace, we have nothing to hide. My only regret is that my country is unable to furnish transportation; for that we must turn to you." Chinee member looked at Prof thoughtfully. He had not said a word but missed nothing. Chairman recessed hearing until fifteen hundred. They gave us a retiring room and sent in lunch. I wanted to talk but Prof shook head, glanced around room, tapped ear. So I shut up. Prof napped then and I levelled out my wheel chair and joined him; on Terra we both slept all we could. Helped. Not enough. T cy didn't wheel us back in until sixteen hundred; committee was already sitting. Chairman then broke own rule against speeches and made a long one more-in-sorrowthan-anger. Started by reminding us that Lunar Authority was a non-political trusteeship charged with solemn duty of insuring that Earth's satellite the Moon -- Luna, as some called it -- was never used for military purposes. He told us that Authority had guarded this sacred trust more than a century, while governments fell and new governments rose, alliances shifted and shifted again. Indeed, Authority was older than Federated Nations, deriving original charter from an older international body, and so well had it kept that trust that it had lasted through wars and turmoils and realignments. (This is news? But you see what he was building towards.) "The Lunar Authority cannot surrender its trust," he told us solemnly. "However, there appears to be no insuperable obstacle to the Lunar colonists, if they show political maturity, enjoying a degree of autonomy. This can be taken under advisement. Much depends on your behavior. The behavior, I should say, of all you colonists. There have been riots and destruction of property; this must not be." I waited for him to mention ninety dead Goons. He never did. I will never make a statesman; I don't have high-level approach. "Destroyed property must be paid for," he went on. "Commitmenti must be met. If this body you call a Congress can guarantee such things, ' it appears to this conmiittee that this so-called Congress could in time be considered an agency of tho Authority for many internal matters. Indeed it is conceivable that a IF stable local government might, in time, assume many duties now falling on the Protector and even be allowed to have a delegate, non-voting, in the Grand Assembly. "But one thing must be made clear. Earth's major satellite, the Moon, is by nature's law forever the joint property of all the peoples on Earth. It does not belong to that handful who by accident of history happen to live there. The sacred trust laid upon the Lunar Authority is and forever must be the supreme law of Earth's Moon." (" -- accident of history," huh? I expected Prof to shove it down his throat. I thought he would say -- No, never did know what Prof would say. Here's what he did say:) Prof waited through several seconds of silence, then said, "Honorable Chairman, who is to be exiled this time? "What did you say?" "Have you decided which one of you is to go into exile? Your Deputy Warden won't take the job" -- this was true; he preferred to stay alive. "He is functioning now only because we have asked him to. If you persist in believing that we are not independent, then you must be planning to send up a new warden." "Protector!" "Warden! Let us not mince words. Though if we knew who he is to be, we might be happy to call him 'Ambassador.' We migiht be able to work with him. It might not be necessary to send with him armed hoodlums... to rape and murder our women!" "Order! Order! The witness wffl come to order!" "It is not I who was not in order, Honorable Chairman. Rape it was and murder most foul. But that is history and now we must look to the future. Whom are you going to exile?" Prof struggled to raise self on elbow and I was suddenly alert; was a cue. "For you all know, sir, that it is a one-way trip. I was born here. You can see what effort it is for me to return even temporarily to the planet which has disinherited me. We are outcasts of Earth who -- " He collapsed. Was up out of my chair -- and collapsed myself, trying to reach him. Was not all play-acting even though I answered a cue. Is terrible strain on heart to get up suddenly on Terra; thick field grabbed and smashed me to floor. N either of US' was hurt and it made juicy news breaks, for I put recording in Stu's hands and he turned it over to his hired men. Nor were all headlines against us; Stu had recording cut and edited and Not all were good; nearest to a favorable story in India was editoring whether Authority was risking bread of masses in failing to come to terms with Lunar insurgents. Was suggested that concessions could be made if would insure increased grain deliveries. Was filled with inflated statistics; Luna did not feed "a hunchose to think of our grain as making difference between malnutrition and starvation. On other hand biggest New York paper opined that Authority had made mistake in treating with us at all, since only thing convicts understood was taste of lash. Troops should land, set us in order, hang guilty, leave forces to keep order. Was a quick mutiny, quickly subdued, in Peace Dragoons regiment from which our late oppressors had come, one started by rumor that they were to be shipped to Moon. Mutiny not hushed up perfectly; Stu hired good men. Next morning a message reached us inquiring if Professor de la Paz was well enough to resume discussions? We went, and committee supplied doctor and nurse to watch over Prof. But this time we were searched -- and a recorder removed from my pouch. I surrendered it without much fuss; was Japanese job supplied by Stu -- to be surrendered. Numbersix arm has recess intended for a power pack but near enough size of my minirecorder. Didn't need power that day -- and most people, even hardened police officers, dislike to touch a prosthetic. Everything discussed day before was ignored... except that chairman started session by scolding us for "breaking security of a closed meeting." Prof replied that it had not been closed so far as we were concerned and that we would welcome newsmen, video cameras, a gallery, anyone, as Luna had nothing to hide. Chairman replied stiffly that socalled Free State did not control these hearings. These sessions were closed, not to be discussed outside this room, and that it was so ordered. Prof looked at me. "Will you help me, Colonel?" I touched controls of chair, scooted around, was shoving his stretcher wagon With my chair toward door before chairman realized bluff had been called. Prof allowed himself to be persuaded to stay without promising anything. Hard to coerce a man who faints if he gets over-excited. Chairman said that there had been many irrelevancies yesterday and matters discussed best left undiscussed -- and that he would permit no digressions today. He looked at Argentino, then at North American. He went on: "Sovereignty is an abstract concept, one that has been redefined many times as mankind has learned to live in peace. We need not discuss it. The real question. Professor -- or even Ambassador defacto, if you like; we shan't quibble -- the real question is this: Are you prepared to guarantee that the Lunar Colonies will keep their commitments?" "What commitments, sir?" "All commitments, but I have in mind specifically yur commitments concerning grain shipments." "I know of no such commitments, sir," Prof answered with bland innocence. IF C hairman's hand tightened on gavel. But he answered quietly, "Come, sir, there is no need to spar over words. I refer to the quota of grain shipments -- and to the increased quota, a matter of thirteen per cent, for this new fiscal year. Do we have your assurance that you will honor those commitments? This is a minimum basis for discussion, else these talks can go no further." "Then I am sorry to say, sir, that it would appear that our talks must cease." "You're not being serious." "Quite serious, sir. The sovereignty of Free Luna is not the abstract matter you seem to feel it is. These commitments you speak of were the Authority contracting with itself. My country is not bound by such. Any commitments from the sovereign nation I have the honor to represent are still to be negotiated." "Rabble!" growled North American. "I told you you were being too soft on them. Jail birds. They don't understand decent treatment." "Order!" "Just remember, I told you. If I had them in Colorado, we would teach them a thing or two." "The gentleman member will please be in order." "I'm afraid," said Hindu member -- Parsee in fact, but committeeman from India -- "I'm afraid I must agree in essence with the gentleman member from the North American Directorate. Indian cannot accept the concept that the grain commitments are mere scraps of paper. Decent people do not play politics with hunger." "And besides," the Argentine put in, "they breed like animals. Pigs!" (Prof made me take a tranquilizing drug before that session. Had insisted on seeing me take it.) Prof said quietly, "Honorable Chairman, may I have consent to amplify my meaning before we conclude, perhaps too hastily, that these talks must be abandoned?" "Proceed." "Unanimous consent? Free of interruption?" Chairman looked around. "Consent is unanimous," he stated, "and the gentlemen members are placed on notice that I will invoke special rule fourteen at the next outburst. The sergeant-at-arms is directed to note this and act. The witness will proceed." "I will be brief. Honorable Chairman." Prof said something in Spanish; all I caught was "Senor." Argentine turned dark but did not answer. Prof went on, "I must first answer the gentleman member from North America on a matter of personal privilege since he has impugned my fellow countrymen. I for one have seen the inside of more than one jail; I accept the title -- nay, I glory in the title of 'jail bird.' We citizens of Luna are jail birds and descendants of jail birds. But Luna herself is a stern school mistress; those who have lived through her harsh lessons have no cause to feel ashamed. In Luna City a man may leave purse unguarded or home unlocked and feel no fear... I wonder if this is true in Denver? As may be, I have no wish to visit Colorado to learn a thing or two; I am satisfied with what Mother Luna has taught me. And rabble we may be, but we are now a rabble in arms. 'To the gentleman member from India let me say that we do not 'play politics with hunger.' What we ask is an open discussion of facts of nature unbound by political assumptions false to fact. If we can hold this discussion, I can promise to show a way in which Luna can continue grain shipments and expand them enormously... to the great benefit of India." B oth Chinee and Indian looked alert. Indian started to speak, checked himself, then said, "Honorable Chairman, will the chair ask the witness to explain what he means?" "The witness is invited to amplify." "Honorable Chairman, gentlemen members, there is indeed a way for Luna to expand by tenfold or even a hundred her shipments to your barges continued to arrive on schedule during our time of trouble and are still arriving today is proof that our intentions are friendly. But you do not get milk by beating the cow. Discussions of how to augment our shipments must be based on the facts of nature, not on the false assumption that we are slaves, bound by a work quota we never made. So whdch shall it be? Will you persist in believing that we are slaves, indentured to an Authority other than ourselves? Or will you acknowledge that we are free, negotiate with us and learn how we can help you?" Chairman said, "In other words you ask us to buy a pig in a poke. You demand that we legalize your outlaw status... then you will talk about fantastic claims that you can increase grain shipments ten or a hundred fold. What you claim is impossible; I am expert in Lunar economics. And what you ask is impossible; it takes the Grand Assembly to admit a new nation." "Then place it before the Grand Assembly. Once seated as sovereign equals, we will discuss how to increase shipments and negotiate terms. Honorable Chairman, grow the grain, we own it. We can grow far more. But not as slaves. L ina's sovereign freedom must first be recognized." "Impossible and you know it. The Lunar Authority cannot abdicate its sacred responsibility." Prof sighed. "It appears to be an impasse. I can only suggest that these hearings be recessed while we all take thought. Today our barges are arriving... but the moment that I am forced to notify my government that I have failed... tl-ey will... stopr Profs head sank back on pillow as if it had been too much for him -- as may have been. I was doing well enough but was young and had had practice in how to visit Terra and stay alive. A Loonie his age should not risk it. After minor foofooraw which Prof ignored they loaded us into a lorry and scooted us back to hotel. Once underway I said, "Prof, what was it you said to Senor Jellybelly that raised blood pressure?" He chuckled. "Comrade Stuart's IF investigations of these gentlemen turn up remarkable facts. I asked who owned a certain brothel off Calle Florida in B.A. these days and did it now have a star redhead?" "Why? You used to patronize it?" Tried to imagine Prof in such! "Never. It has been forty years since I was last in Buenos Aires. He owns that establishment, Manuel, through a dummy, and his wife, a beauty with Titian hair, once worked in it." Was sorry had asked. "Wasn't that a foul blow? And undiplomatic?" But Prof closed eyes and did not answer. H e was recovered enough to spend an hour at a reception for news men that night, with white hair framed against a purple pillow and thin body decked out in embroidered pajamas. Looked like vip corpse at an important funeral, except for eyes and dimples. I looked mighty vip too, in black and gold uniform which Stu claimed was Lunar diplomatic uniform of my rank. Could have been, if Luna had had such things. Did not, or I would have known. I prefer a p-suit; collar was tight. Nor did t ever find out what decorations on k meant. A reporter asked me about one, based on Luna at crescent as seen from Terra; told him it was a prize for spelling. Stu was in earshot and said, "The Colonel is modest. That decoration is of the same rank as the Victoria Cross and was awarded for heroism on -- " He led him away, still talking. Stu coi:Id lie standing up almost as well as Prof. Me, I have to think out a lie ahead of time. India newspapers and casts were rough that night; "threat" to stop grain shipments made them froth. Gentlest proposal was to clean out Luna, exterminate us "criminal troglodytes" and replace us with "honest Hindu peasants" who understood sacredness of life and would ship grain and more grain.' Prof picked that night to talk and give handouts about Luna's inability to continue shipments, and why -- and Stu's organization spread release throughout Terra. Some reporters took time to dig out sense of figures and tackled Prof on glaring discrepancy: "Professor de la Paz, here you say that grain shipments will dwindle away through failure of natural resources and that by # Luna won't even be able to feed its own people. Yet earlier today you told the Lunar Authority that you could increase shipments a dozen times or more." Prof said sweetly, "That committee with whom we have been holding discussions is the Lunar Authority?" "Well... it's an open secret." "So it is, sir, but they have maintained the fiction of being an impartial investigating committee of the Grand Assembly. Don't you think they should disqualify themselves? So that we could receive a fair hearing?" "Uh... it's not my place to say, Professor. Let's get back to my question. How do you reconcile the two?" 'I'm interested in why it's not your place to say, sir. Isn't it the concern of every citizen of Terra to help avoid a situation which will produce war between Terra and her neighbor?" War# What in the world makes you speak of 'war,' Professor?" "Where else can it end, sir? If the Lunar Authority persists in its intransigence? We cannot accede to their demands; those figures show why. If they will not see this, then they will attempt to subdue us by force... and we will fight back. Like cornered rats -- for cornered we are, unable to retreat, unable to surrender. We do not choose war. We wish to live in peace with our neighbor planet -- in peace and peaceful trade. But the choice is not ours. We are small, you are gigantic. I predict that the next move will be for the Lunar Authority to attempt to subdue Luna by force. This 'peace-keeping' agency will start the first interplanetary war." J ournalist frowned. "Aren't you overstating it? Let's assume that the Authority -- or the Grand Assembly, as the Authority hasn't any warships of its own -- let's suppose the nations of Earth decide to displace your, uh, 'government.' You might fight, on Luna -- I suppose you would. But that hardly constitutes interplanetary war. As you pointed out, Luna has no ships. To put it bluntly, you can't reach us." I had chair close by Prof's stretcher, listening. He turned to me. "Tell them. Colonel." I parroted it. Prof and Mike had worked out stock situations; I had memorized and was ready with answers. I said, "Do you gentlemen remember the Pathfinder? How she came plunging in, out of control?" They remembered. Nobody forgets the greatest disaster of early days of space flight when unlucky Pathfinder hit a Belgian village. "We have no ships," I went on, "but would be possible to throw those bargeloads of grain... instead of delivering them into parking orbit." Next day this evoked a headline: duced awkward silence. Finally journalist said, "Nevertheless I would like'to know how you reconcile your two statements -- no more grain after #... and ten or a hundred times as much." "There is no conflict," Prof answered. "They are based on different sets of circumstances. The figures you have been looking at show the present circumstances... and the disaster they will produce in only a few years through drainage of Luna's natural resources -- disaster which these Authority bureaucrats -- or should I say 'authoritarian bureaucrats?' -- would avert by telling us to stand in the corner!" Prof paused for labored breathing, went on: "The circumstances under which we can continue, or greatly increase, our grain shipments are the obvious corollary of the first. As an old teacher I can hardly refrain from classroom habits; the corollary should be left as an exercise for the student. Will someone attempt it?" Ill W as uncomfortable silence, then a little man with strange accent said slowly, "It sound to me as if you talk about way to replenish natural resource." "Capital! Excellent!" Prof flashed dimples. "You, sir, will have a gold star on your term report! To make grain requires water and plant foods -- phosphates, other things, ask the experts. Send these things to us; we'll send them back as wholesome grain. Put down a hose in the limitless Indian Ocean. Line up those lect their end product and ship it to us. Collect your own night soil. Don't bother to sterilize it; we've learned to do such things cheaply and easily. Send us briny sea water, rotten fish, dead animals, city sewage, cow manure, offal of any sort -- and we will send it back, tonne for tonne as golden grain! Send ten times as much, we'll send back ten times as much grain. Send us your poor, your dispossessed, send them by thousands and hundreds of thousands; we'll teach them swift, efficient Lunar methods of tunnel farming and ship you back unbelievable tonnage. Gentlemen, Luna is one enormous fallow farm, four thouThat startled them. Then someone said slowly, "But what do you get out of it? Luna, I mean." Prof shrugged. "Money. In the form of trade goods. There are many things you make cheaply which are dear in Luna. Drugs. Tools. Book films. Gauds for our lovely ladies. Buy our grain and you can sell to us at a happy profit." A Hindu journalist looked thoughtful, started to write. Next to him was a European type who seemed unimpressed. He said, "Professor, have you any idea of the cost of shipping that much tonnage to the Moon?" Prof waved it aside. "A technicality. Sir, there was a time when it was not simply expensive to ship goods across oceans but impossible. Then it was expensive, difficult, dangerous. Today you sell goods half around your planet almost as cheaply as next dodr; long-distance shipping is the least important factor in cost. Gentlemen, I am not an engineer. But I have learned this about engineers. When something must be done, engineers can find a way that is economically feasible. If you want the grain we can grow, turn your engineers loose." Prof gasped and labored, signaled for help and nurses wheeled him away. I declined to be questioned on it, telling them that they must talk to Prof when he was well enough to see them. So they pecked at me on other lines. One man demanded to know why, since we paid no taxes, we colonists thought we had a right to run things our own way? After all those colonies had been established by Federated Nations -- by some of them. It had been terribly expensive. Earth had paid all bills -- and now you colonists enjoy benefits and pay not one dime of taxes. Was that fair? I wanted to tell him to blow it. But Prof had again made me take a tranqmlizer and had required me to swot that endless list of answers to trick questions. "Let's take that IF one at a tune,' I said. First, what Is it you want us to pay taxes for? Tell me what I get and perhaps I'fl buy it. No, put it this way. Do you pay taxes?" "Certainly I do? And so should you." "And what do you get for your taxes?" "Huh? Taxes pay for government." I said, "Excuse me. I'm ignorant. I've lived my whole life in Luna, I don't know much about your government. Can you feed it to me in small pieces? What do you get for your money?" They all got interested and anything this aggressive little choom missed, other supplied. I kept list. When they stopped, I read it back: "Free hospitals -- aren't any in Luna. Medical insurance -- we have that but apparently not what you mean by it. If a person wants insurance, he goes to a bookie and works out a bet. You can hedge anything, for a price. I don't hedge my health. I'm healthy. Or was till I came here. We have a public library, one Carnegie Foundation started with a few book films. It gets along by charging fees. Public roads. I suppose that would be our tubes. But they are no more free than air is free. Sorry, you have free air here, don't you? I mean our tubes were built by companies who put up money and are downright nasty about expecting it back and then some. Public schools. There are schools in all warrens and I never heard of them turning away pupils, so I guess they are 'public.' But they pay well, too, because anyone in Luna who knows teach it, charges all the traffic will bear." I went on: "Let's see what else -- Social security. I'm not sure what that is but, whatever it is, we don't have it. Pensions. You can buy a pension. Most people don't;, most families are large and old people, say a hundred and up,either fiddle along at something they like, or sit and watch video. Or sleep. They sleep a lot, after say a hundred and twenty." "Sir, excuse me. Do people really live as long on the Moon as they say?" I looked surprised but wasn't; this was a "stimulated question" for which an answer had been taped. "Nobody knows how long a person will live in Luna; we haven't been there long enough. Our oldest citizens were bom Earthside, it's no test. So far, no one bom in Luna has died of old age, but that's still no test; they haven't had time to grow old yet, less than a century. But -- Well, take me. Madam; how old would you say I am? I'm authentic Loonie, third generation." "Uh, truthfully. Colonel Davis, I was surprised at your youthfulness -- for this mission, I mean. You appear to be about twenty-two. Are you oldCT? Not much, I fancy." "Madam, I regret that your local gravitation makes it impossible for me to bow. Thank you. I've been married longer than that." "What? Oh, you're jesting!" "Madam, I would never venture to guess a lady's age but, if you will emigrate to Luna, you will keep your present youthful loveliness much longer and add at least twenty years to your life." I looked at list. "I'll lump the rest of this together by saying we don't have any of it in Luna, so I can't see any reason to pay taxes for it. On that other point, sir, surely you know that the initial cost of the colonies has long since been repaid several times over through grain shipments alone? We are being bled white of our most essential resources... and not even being paid an open-market price. That's why the Lunar Authority is being stubborn; they intend to go on bleeding us. The idea that Luna has been an expense to Terra and the investment must be recovered is a lie invented by the Authority to excuse their treating us as slaves. The truth is that Luna has not cost Terra one dime this century -- and the original investment has long since been paid back." H e tried to rally. "Oh, surely you're not claiming that the Lunar colonies have paid all the billions of dollars it took to develop space flight?" "I could present a good case. However there is no excuse to charge that against us. You have space flight, you people of Terra. We do not. Lima has not one ship. So why should we pay for what we have never received? It's like the rest of this list. We don't get it, why should we pay for it?" Had been stalling, waiting for a claim that Prof had told me I was sure to hear... and got it at last. "Just a moment, please!" came a confident voice. "You ignored the two most important items on that list. Police protection and armed forces. You boasted that you were so how about paying almost a century of back taxes for those two? It should be quite a bill, quite a bill!" He smiled smugly. Wanted to thank him! -- thought Prof was going to chide me for failing to yank it out. People looked at each other and nodded, pleased I had been scored on. Did best to look innocent. "Please? Don't understand. Luna has neither police nor armed forces." "You know what I mean. You enjoy the protection of the Peace Forces of the Federated Nations. And you do have police. Paid for by the Lunar Authority! I know, to my certain knowledge, that two phalanges were sent to the Moon less than a year ago to serve as policemen." "Oh." I sighed. "Can you tell me how F.N. peace forces protect Luna? I did not know that any of your nations wanted to attack us. We are far away and have nothing anyone envies. Or did you mean we should pay them to leave us alone? If so, there is an old saying that once you pay Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. Sir, we will fight F.N. armed forces if we must... we shall never pay them. "Now about those so-called 'policemen. They were not sent to protect us. Our Declaration of Independence told the true story about IF Aosc hoodlums -- did your newspapers print it?" (Some had, some hadn't -- depended on country.) They went mad and started raping and murdering! And now they are dead! So don't send us any more troops!" Was suddenly "tired" and had to leave. Really was tired; not much of an actor and making that talktalk come out way Prof thought it should was strain. W as not told till later that I had received an assist in that interview; lead about "police" and "armed forces" had been fed by a stooge; Stu LaJoie took no chances. But by time I knew, I had had experience in handling interviews; we had them endlessly. Despite being tired was not through that night. In addition to press some Agra diplomatic corps had risked showing up -- few and none officially, even from Chad. But we were curiosities and they wanted to look at us. Only one was important, a Chinee. Was startled to see him; he was Chinee member of committee. I met him simply as "Dr. Chan" and we pretended to be meeting first time. He was that Dr. Chan who was then Senator from Great China and also Great China's long-time number-one boy in Lunar Authority -- and, much later, Vice Chairman and Premier, shortly before his assassination. After getting out point I was supposed to make, with bonus through others that could have waited, I guided chair to bedroom and was at once summoned to Prof's. "Manuel, I'm sure you noticed our distinguished visitor from the Middle Kingdom." "Old Chinee from committee?" "Try to curb the Loonie talk, son. Please don't use it at all here, even with me. Yes. He wants to know what we meant by 'tenfold or a hundredfold.' So tell him." "Straight? Or swindle?" "The straight. This man is no fool. Can you handle the technical details?" "Done my homework. Unless he's expert in ballistics." "He's not. But don't pretend to know anything you don't know. And don't assume that he's friendly. But he could be enormously helpful if he concludes that our interests and his coincide. But don't try to persuade him. He's in my study. Good luck. And remember -- speak standard English." Dr. Chan stood up as I came in; I apologized for not standing. He said that he understood difficulties that a gentleman from Luna labored under here and for me not to exert myself -- shook hands with himself and sat down. I'll skip some formalities. Did we or did we not have some specific solution when we claimed there was a cheap way to ship massive tonnage to Luna? Told him was a method, expensive in investment but cheap in running expenses. "It's the one we use on Luna, sir. A catapult, an escapespeed induction catapult." His expression changed not at all. "Colonel, arc you aware that such has been proposed many times and always rejected for what seemed good reasons? Something to do with air pressure." "Yes, Doctor. But we believe, based on extensive analyses by computer and on our experience with catapulting, that today the problem can be solved. Two of our larger firms, the LuNoHo Company and the Bank of Hong Kong in Luna, are ready to head a syndicate to do it as a private venture. They would need help here on Earth and might share voting stock -- though they would prefer to sell bonds and retain control. Primarily what they need is a concession from some government, a permanent easement on which to build the catapult. Probably India." (Above was set speech. LuNoHoCo was bankrupt if anybody examined books, and Hong Kong Luna Bank was strained; was acting as central bank for country undergoing upheaval. Purpose was to get in last word, "India." Prof had coached me that this word must come last,) D r. Chan answered, "Never mind financial aspects. Anything which is physically possible can always be made .financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds. Why do you select India?" "Well, sir, India now consumes, I believe, over ninety per cent of our grain shipments -- " "Ninety-three point one per cent." "Yes, sir. India is deeply interested in our grain, so it seemed likely that she would cooperate. She could grant us land, make labor and materials available and so forth. But I mentioned India because she holds a wide choice of possible sites, very high mountains not too far from Terra's equator. The latter is not essential, just helpful. But the site must be a high mountain. It's that air pressure you spoke of, or air density. The catapult head should be at as high altitude as feasible but the ejection end, where the load travels over eleven kilometers per second, must be in air so thin that it approaches vacuum. Which calls for a very high mountain. Take the peak Nanda Devi, around four hundred kilometers from here. It has a railhead sixty kilometers from it and a road almost to its base. It is eight thousand meters high. I don't know that Nanda Devi is ideal. It is simply a possible site with good logistics; the ideal site would have to be selected by Terran engineers." "A higher mountain would be better?" "Oh, yes, sir!" I assured him. "A higher mountain would be preferred over one nearer the equator. The catapult can be designed to make up for loss in free ride from Earth's rotation. The difficult thing is to avoid so far as possible this pesky thick atmosphere. Excuse me. Doctor; I did not mean to criticize your planet." "There are higher mountains. Colonel, tell me about this proposed catapult." I started to. "The length of an escape-speed catapult is determined IF by the acceleration. We think -- or the computer calculates that an acceleration of twenty gravities is about optimum. For Earth's escape speed this requires a catapult three hundred twenty-three kilometers in length. Therefore -- " "Stop, please! Colonel, are you seriously proposing to bore a hole over three hundred kilometers deep?' "Oh, no! Construction has to be above ground to permit shock waves to expand. The stator would stretch nearly horizontally, rising perhaps four kilometers in three hundred and in a straight line -- almost straight, as Coriolis acceleration and other minor variables make it a gentle curve. The Lunar catapult is straight so far as the eye can see and so nearly horizontal that the barges just miss some peaks beyond it." "Oh. I thought that you were over-estimating the capacity of present-day engineering. We drill deeply today. Not that deeply. Go on." C#Toctor, it may be that common misconception which caused you to check me is why such a catapult has not been constructed before this. I've seen those earlier studies. Most assumed that a catapult would be vertical, or that it would have to tilt up at the end to toss the spacecraft into the sky -- and neither is feasible nor necessary. I suppose the assumption arose from the fact that your spaceships do boost straight up, or nearly." I went on: "But they do that to get above atmosphere, not to get into orbit. Escape speed is not a vector quantity; it is scalar. A load bursting frorn a catapult at escape speed will not return to Earth no matter what its direction. Uh... two corrections: it must not be headed toward the Earth itself but at some part of the sky hemisphere, and it must have enough added velocity to punch through whate'ier atmosphere it still traverses. If it is headed in the right direction it will wind up at Luna." "Ah, yes. Then this catapult could be used but once each lunar month?" "No, sir. On the basis on which you were thinking it would be once every day, picking the time to fit where Luna will be in her orbit. But in fact -- or so the computer says; Fm not an astronautics expert -- in fact this catapult could be used almost any time, simply by varying ejection speed, and the orbits could still wind up at Luna." "I don't visualize that." "Neither do I, Doctor, but -- Excuse me but isn't there an exceptionally fine computer at Peiping University?" "And if there is?" (Did I detect an increase in bland inscrutability? A Cyborg-computer -- Pickled brains? Or live ones, aware? Horrible, either way.) "Why not ask a topnotch computer for all possible ejection times for such a catapult as I have described? Some orbits go far outside Luna's orbit before returning to where they can be captured by Luna, taking a fantastically long time. Others hook around Terra and then go quite directly. Some are as simple as the ones we use from Luna. There are periods each day when short orbits may be selected. But a load is in the catapult less than one minute; the limitation is how fast the loads can be made ready. It is even possible to have more than one load going up the catapult at a time if the power is sufficient and computer control is versatile. The only thing that worries me is -- these high mountains, they are covered with snow?" "Usually," he answered. "Ice and snow and bare rock." #TT#ell, sir, being born in Luna,  V I don't know anything about snow. The stator would not only have to be rigid under the heavy gravity of this planet but would have to withstand dynamic thrusts at twenty gravities. I don't suppose it could be anchored to ice or snow. Or could it be?" "I'm not an engineer, Colonel, but it seems unlikely. Snow and ice would have to be removed. And kept dear. Weather would be a problem, too." "Weather I know nothing about. Doctor, and all I know about ice is that it has a heat of crystallization joules per tonne. I have no idea how mai.y tonnes would have to be melted to clear the site, or how much energy would be required to keep it clear, but it seems to me that it might take as large a reactor to keep it free of ice as to power the catapult." "We can build reactors, we can melt ice. Or engineers can be sent north for re-education until they do understand ice." Dr. Chan smiled and I shivered. "However the engineering of ice and snow was solved in Antarctica years go; don't worry about it. A clear, solid-rock site about three hundred fifty kilometers long at a high altitude -- Anything else I should know?" "Not much, sir. Melted ice could be collected near the catapult head and thus be the most massy part of what will be shipped to Luna -- quite a saving. Also the steel canisters would be reused to ship 'grain to Earth, thus stopping another drain that Luna can't take. No reason why a canister should not make the trip hundreds of times. At Luna it would be much the way barges are now landed off Bombay, solid-charge retrorockets programmed by ground control -- except that it would be much cheaper, two and a half kilometer seconds change of motion versus eleven-plus, a squared factor of about twenty -- but actually even more favorable, as retroes are parasitic weight and the pay load improves accordingly. There is even a way to improve that." "How?" "Doctor, this is outside my specialty. But everybody knows that your best ships use hydrogen as reaction mass heated by a fusion reactor. But hydrogen is expensive in Luna and any mass could be reaction mass; it just would not be as efficient. Can you visualize an enormous, brute-force space tug designed to fit Lunar conditions? It would use raw rock, vaporized, as reaction mass and would be designed to go up into parking orbit, pick up those IF shipments from Terra, bring them down to Luna's surface. It would be ugly, all the fancies stripped away -- mit not be manned even by a Cyborg. It can be piloted from the ground, by computer." "Yes, I suppose such a ship could be designed. But let's not complicate things. Have you covered the essentials about this catapult?" "I believe so. Doctor. The site is the crucial thing. Take that peak Nandi Devi. By the maps I have seen it appears to have a long, very high ridge sloping to the west for about the length of our catapult. If that is true, it would be ideal -- less to cut away, less to bridge. I don't mean that it is the ideal site but that is the sort to look for: a very hi peak with a long, long ridge west of it." "I understand." Dr. Chan left abruptly. N ext few weeks I repeated that in a dozen countries, always in private and with implication that it was secret. All that changed was name of mountain. In Ecuador I pointed out that Chimborazb was almost on equator -- ideal! But in Argentina I emphasized that their Aconcagua was hi est peak in Western Hemisphere. In Bolivia I noted that Altoplano was as high as Tibetan Plateau (almost true), much nearer equator, and offered a wide choice of sites for easy construction leading up to peaks comparable to any on Terra. I talked to a North American who was a political opponent of that choom who had called us "rabble." I pointed out that, while Mount McKinley was comparable to anything in Asia or South America, there was much to be said for Mauna Loa -- extreme ease of construction. Doubling gees to make it short enough to fit, and Hawaii would be Spaceport of World... whole world, for we talked about day when Mars would be exploited and freight for three (possibly four) planets would channel through their "Big Island." Never mentioned Mauna Loa's volcanic nature; instead I noted that location permitted an aborted load to splash harmlessly in Pacific Ocean. In Sovunion was. only one peak discussed -- Lenin, over seven thousand meters (and rather too close to their big neighbor). Kilimanjaro, Popocatepetl, Logan, El Libertado. My favorite peak changed by country; all that we required was that it be "highest mountain" in hearts of locals. I found something good to say about modest mountains of Chad when we were entertained there and rationalized so well I almost believed it. Other times, with help of leading questions from Stu LaJoie's stooges, I talked about chemical engineering (of which I know nothing but had memorized facts) on surface of Luna, where endless free vacuum and sun power and limitless raw materials and predictable conditions permitted ways of processing expensive or impossible Earthside -- when day arrived that cheap shipping boto ways made it profitable to exploit Luna's virgin resources. Was always a suggestion that entrenched bureaucracy of Lunar Authority had failed to see great potential of Luna (true), plus an answer to a question asked, which answer asserted that Luna could accept any number of colonists. This also was true, although never mentioned that Luna (yes, and sometimes Luna's Loonies) killed about half of new chums. But people we talked to rarely thought of emigrating themselves. They thought of forcing or persuading others to emigrate to relieve crowding -- and to reduce their own taxes. Kept mouth shut about fact that half-fed swarms we saw everywhere did breed faster than even catapulting could possibly offset. We could not house, feed, and on Terra; more babies than that were conceived every night. We could accept far more than would emigrate voluntarily but if they used forced emigration and flooded us... Luna has only one way to deal with a new chum: Either #ie makes not one fatal mistake, in personal behavior or in coping with environment that will bite without warning... or he winds up as fertilizer in a tunnel farm. All that immigration in huge numbers could mean would be that a larger percentage of immigrants would die. Too few of us to help them past natural hazards. However, Prof did most talking about "Luna's great future." I talked about catapults. D uring weeks we waited for committee to recall us, we covered much ground. Stu's men had things set up and only question was how much we could take. Would guess that every week on Terra chopped a year off our lives, maybe more for Prof. But he never complained and was always ready to be charming at one more reception. We spent extra time in North America. Date of our Declaration of Independence, exactly three hundred years after that of North American British colonies, turned out to be wizard propaganda and Stu's manipulators made most of it. North Americans are sentimental about their "United States" even though it ceased to mean anything once their continent had been rationalized by F.N. They elect a president every eight years, why, could not say -- why do British still have Queen? -- and boast of being "sovereign." "Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled." "Sovereignty" meant much in North America and "Fourth of July" was a magic date. Four th-ofJuly League handled appearances. Stu told us that it had not cost much to get it moving and nothing to keep going. League even raised money used elsewhere -- North Americans enjoy giving no matter who gets it Farther south Stu used another date; his people planted idea that coup d'etat had been # May instead of two weeks later. We were greeted with "Cinco de Mayo! LibertadI Cinco de Mayo!" I thought they IF were saying, "Thank you' -- Prof did all talking. But in #th-of-July country I did better. Stu had me quit wearing a left arm in public, sleeves of my costumes were sewed up so that stump could not be missed, and word was passed that I had lost it "fighting for freedom." Whenever I was asked about it, all I did was smile and say, "See what comes of biting nails?" I never liked North America, even first trip. It is not most crowded people. In Bombay they sprawl on pavements; in Great New York they pack them vertically -- not sure anyone sleeps. Was glad to be in invalid's chair. Is mixed-up place another way. They care about skin color -- by making point of how they dont care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on. Bog knows I don't know what genes I have. One grandmother came from a part of Asia where invaders passed through as regularly as locusts, raping as they went -- why not ask her? Learned tq handle it by my second makee-learnee but it left a sour taste. Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren't Hindu, you're nobody -- except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America's reverse-racism when being "Colonel O'Kelly Davis, Hero of Lunar Freedom." We had swarms of bleeding hearts around us, anxious to help. I let them do two things for me, things I had never had time, money or energy for as a student: I saw Yankees play and visited Salem. S hould have kept my illusions. Baseball is better over video, you can really see it and aren't pushed in by two hundred thousand other people. Besides, somebody should have shot that outfield. I spent most of that game dreading moment when they would have to get my chair out through crowd -- that and assuring host that I was having a wonderful time. Salem was just a place, no worse (and no better) than rest of Boston. After seeing it I suspected they had hanged wrong witches. But day wasn't wasted. I was filmed laying a wreath on a place where a bridge had been in another part of Boston, Concord, and made a memorized speech. Bridge is still there, actually. You can see it, down through glass. Not much of a bridge. Prof enjoyed it all, rough as it was on him; Prof had great capacity for enjoying. He always had something new to tell about great future of Luna. In New York he gave managing director of a hotel chain, one with rabbit trade mark, a sketch of what could be done with resorts in Luna -- once excursion rates were within reach of more people. Visits too short to hurt anyone, escort service included, exotic side trips, gambling -- no taxes. Last point grabbed attention, so Prof expanded it into "longer old age" theme -- a chain of retirement hostels where an earthworm could live on Terr an old-age pension and go on living, twenty, thirty, forty years longer than on Terra. As an exile -- but which was better? A live old age in Luna? Or a funeral crypt on Terra? His descendants could pay visits and fill those resort hotels. Prof embellished with pictures of "night clubs" with acts impossible in Terra's horrible gravity, sports to fit our decent level of gravitation -- even talked about swimming pools and ice skating and possibility of flying! (Thought he had tripped his safeties.) He finished by hinting that Swiss cartel had tied it up. Next day he was telling foreigndivisions manager of Chase International Panagra that a Luna City branch should be staffed with paraplegics, paralytics, heart cases, amputees, others who found high gravity a handicap. Manager was a fat man who wheezed. He may have been thinking of it personally -- but his ears pricked up at "no taxes." We didn't have it all our own way. News was often against us and were always hecklers. Whenever I had to take them on without Prof's help I was likely to get tripped. One man tackled me on Profs statement to Committee that we "owned" grain grown in Luna; he seemed to take it for granted that we did not. Told him I did not understand question. He answered, "Isn't it true. Colonel, that your provisional government has asked for membership in Federated Nations?" Should have answered, "No comment." But fell for it and agreed. "Very well," he said, "the impediment seems to be the counterclaim that the Moon belongs to the Federated Nations -- as it always has -- under supervision of the Lunar Authority. Either way, by your own admission, that grain belongs to the Federated Nations, in trust." I asked how he reached that conclusion? He answered, "Colonel, you style yourself 'Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs.' Surely you are familiar with the charter of the Federated Nations." I had skimmed it. "Reasonably familiar," I said -- cautiously, I thought. "Then you know the First Freedom guaranteed by the Charter and its current application through F  A Control Board Administrative Order Number eleven-seventy-six dated three March of this year. You concede therefore that all grain grown on the Moon in excess of the local ration is ab initio and beyond contest the property of all, title held in trust by the Federated Nations through its agencies for distribution as needed." He was writing as he talked. "Have you anything to add to that concession?" I said, "What in Bog's name you talking about?" Then, "Come back! Haven't conceded anything!" o Great New York Times printed: O'Kelly Davis, soi-disant 'Colonel of the Armed Forces of Free Luna' here on a junket to stir up support for the insurgents in the F.N. Lunar IF colonies said in a voluntary statement to this paper that the 'Freedom from Hunger' clause in the Grand Charter applied to the Lunar grain shipments -- " I asked Prof how should have handled? "Always answer an unfriendly question with another question," he told me. "Never ask him to clarify; he'll put words in your mouth. This reporter -- Was he skinny? Ribs showing?" "No. Heavy-set." "Not living on eighteen hundred calories a day, I take it, which is the subject of that order he citeck Had you known you could have asked him how long he had conformed to the ration and why he quit? Or asked him what he had for breakfast -- and then looked unbelieving no matter what he answered. Or, when you don't know what a man is getting at, let your counterquestion shift the subject to something you do want to talk about. Then, no matter what he answers, make your point and call on someone else. Logic does not enter into it. Just tactics." "Prof, nobody here is living on eighteen hundred calories a day. Bombay, maybe. Not here." "Less than that in Bombay. Manuel, that 'equal ration is a fiction. Half the food on this planet is in the black market, or is not reckoned through one ruling or another. Or they keep two sets of books, and figures submitted to the F.N. have nothing to do with the economy. Do you think that grain from Thailand and Burma and Australia is correctly reported to the Control Board by Great China? I'm sure that the India representative on that food board doesn't think so. But India keeps quiet because she gets the lion's share from Luna... and then 'plays politics with hunger' -- a phrase you may remember -- by using our grain to control her elections. Kerala had a planned famine last year. Did you see it in the news?" "No." "Because it wasn't in the news. A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible.' Do you know what Luna needs most?" "More ice." "A news system that does not bottleneck through one channel. O friend Mike is our greatest danger " "Huh? Don't you trust Mike?" "Manuel, on some subjects I don't trust even myself. Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category with the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.' We are not yet free nor will we be as long as anyone -- even our ally Mike -- controls our news. Someday I hope to own a newspaper independent of any source or channel. I would happily set print by hand, like Benjamin Franklin." I gave up. "Prof, suppose these talks fail and grain shipments stop. What happens?" "People back home will be vexed with us... and many here on Terra would die. Have you read Malthus?" "Don't think so." "Many would die. Then a new stability would be reached with somewhat more people -- more efficient people and better fed. This planet isn't crowded; it is just mismanaged... and the unkindest thing you can do for a hungry man is to give him food. 'Give.' Read Malthus. It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh. A depressing man, I'm glad he's dead. But don't read him until this is over; too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one." "I'm not especially honest." "But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former. For the nonce. Lad, Uncle Bernardo is terribly tired." I said, "Sorry," and wheeled out of his room. Prof was hitting too hard a pace. I would have be getting into a ship and out of that gravity. But traffic stayed one way -- grain barges, naught else. B ut Prof had fun. As I left and waved lights out, noticed again a toy he had bought, one that delighted him like a kid on Christmas -- a brass cannon. A real one from sailing ship days. Was small, barrel about half a meter long and massing, with Wooden carriage, only kilos fifteen. A "signal gun" its papers said. Reeked of ancient history, pirates, men "walking plank." A pretty thing but I asked Prof why? If we ever managed to leave, price to lift that mass to Luna would hurt. I was resigned to abandoning a p-suit with years more wear in it -- abandon everything but two left arms and a pair of shorts. If pressed, might give up social arm. If very pressed, would skip shorts. He reached out and stroked shiny barrel. "Manuel, once there was a man who held a political makework job like so many here in this Directorate, shining brass cannon around a court house." "Why would court house have cannon?" "Never mind. He did this for years. It fed him and let him save a bit, but he was not getting ahead in the world. So one day he quit his job, drew out his savings, bought a brass cannon -- and went into business for himself." "Sounds like idiot." "No doubt. And so were wc, when we tossed out the Warden. Manuel, you'll outlive me. When Luna adopts a flag, I would like it to be a cannon, or, on field sable, crossed by bar sinister gules of our proudly ignoble lineage. Do you think it could be managed?" "Suppose so, if you'll sketch. But why a flag? Not a flag pole in all Luna." "It can fly in our hearts... a symbol for all fools so ridiculously impractical as to think they can fight city hall. Will you remember, Manuel?" "Sure. That is, will remind you when time comes." Didn't like such talk. He had started using oxygen tent in private -- and would not use in public. IF G uess I'm "ignorant" and "siubborn" -- was both in place called Lexington, Kentucky, in Central Managerial Area. One thing no doctrine about, no memorized answers, was life in Luna. Prof said to tell truth and emphasize homely, warm, friendly things, especially anything different. "Remember, Manuel, the thousands of Terrans who have made short visits to Luna are only a tiny fraction of one per cent. To most people we will be as weirdly interesting as strange animals in a zoo. Do you remember that turtle on exhibition in Old Dome? That's us." Certainly did; they wore that insect out, staring at. So when this male-female team started quizzing about family life in Luna, was happy to answer. I prettied it only by what I left out -- things that aren't family life but poor substitutes in a community overloaded with males. Luna City is homes and families mainly, dull by Terran standards -- but I like it. And other warrens much same, people who work and raise kids and gossip and find most of their fun around dinner table. Not much to tell, so I discussed anything they found interesting. Every Luna custom comes from Terra since that's where we all came from, but Terra is such a big place that a custom from Micronesia, say, may be strange in North America. This woman -- can't call her lady -- wanted to know about various sorts of marriage. First was it true that one could get married without a license "on" Luna? I asked what a license was?  iwi companion said, "Skip it, Mildred. Pioneer societies never have marriage licenses." "But don't you keep records?" she persisted. "Certainly," I agreed. "My family keeps a family book that goes back almost to first landing at Johnson City -- every marriage, birth, death, every event of importance not only in direct line but all branches so far as we can keep track. And besides, is a man, a school teacher, going around copying old family records all over our warren, writing a history of Luna City. Hobby." "But don't you have official records? Here in Kaintucky we have records that go back centuries." "Madam, we haven't lived there that long." "Yes, but -- Well, Luna City must have a city clerk. Perhaps you call him 'county recorder'. The official who keeps track of such things. Deeds and so forth." I said, "Don't think so. Madam. Some bookies do notary work, witnessing chops on contracts, keeping records of them. Is for people who don't read and write and cant keep own records. But never heard of one asked to keep record of marriage. Not saying couldn't happen. But haven't heard." "How delightfully informal! Then this other rumor, about how simple it is to get a divorce on the Moon. I daresay that's true, too?" "No, madam, wouldn't say divorce is simple. Too much to untangle. Mmm... take a nmple example, one lady and say she has two husbands -- " "Two'?" iiTiyCight have more, might have plex marriage. But let's take one lady and two men as typical. She decides to divorce one. Say it's friendly, with other husband agreeing and one she is getting rid of not making fuss. Not that it would do him any good. Okay, she divorces him; he leaves. Still leaves endless things. Men might be business partners, co-husbands often are. Divorce may break up partnership. Money matters to settle. This three may own cubic together, and while will be in her name, ex-husband probably has cash coming or rent. And almost always there are children to consider, support and so forth. Many things. No, madam, divorce is never simple. Can divorce him in ten seconds but may take ten years to straighten out loose ends. Isn't it much that way here?" "Uh... just fuhget ah evah asked the question, Cunn'l; it may be simpluh hyuh." (She did talk that way but was understandable once I got program. Won't spell it again.) "But if that is a simple marriage, what is a 'complex' one?" Found self explaining polyandries, clans, groups, lines and less common patterns considered vulgar by conservative people such as my own family. Deal my mother set up, say, after she ticked off my old man, though didn't describe that one. Mother was always too extreme. Woman said, "You have me confused. What is the difference between a line and a clan?" "Are quite different. Take own case. I have honor to be member of one of oldest line marriages in Luna -- and, in my prejudiced opinion, best. You asked about divorce. Our family has never had one and would bet long odds never will. A line marriage increases in stability year after year, gains practice in art of getting along together, until notion of anybody leaving is unthinkable. Besides, takes unanimous decision of all wives to divorce a husband. Could never happen. Senior wife would' never let it get that far." Went on describing advantages -- financial security, fine home life it gives children, fact that death of a spouse, while tragic, could never be tragedy it was in a temporary family, especially for children. Children simply could not be orphaned. Suppose I waxed too enthusiastic -- but my family is most important thing in my life. Without them Fm just one-armed mechanic who could be eliminated without causing a draft. "Here's why is stable," I said. 'Take my youngest wife, sixteen. Likely be in her eighties before she is senior wife. Doesn't mean all wives senior to her will die by then; unlikely in Luna, females seem to be immortal. But may all opt out of family management by then; by our family traditions they usually do, without younger wives putting pressure on them. So Ludmilla -- " " 'LudmiUa'?" "Russki name. From fairy tale. Milla will have over fifty years of good example before has to carry burden. She's sensible to start with, not likely to make mistakes and if IF did, has other wives to steady her. Self-correcting, like a machine with proper negative feedback. A good fine marriage is immortal; expect Baine to outlast me at least a thousand years -- and is why shan't mind d#ring when time comes. Best part of me will go on living." P rof was being wheeled out; he had them stop stretcher cart and listened. I turned to him. "Professor," I said, "you know my family. Would mind telling this lady why it's a happy family? If you think so." "It is," agreed Prof. "However, I would rather make a more general remark. Dear Madam, I gather that you find our Lunar marriage customs somewhat exotic." "Oh, I wouldn't go that far!" she said hastily. "Just somewhat unusual. "They arise, as marriage customs always do, from economic necessities of the circumstances -- and our circumstances are very different from those here on Earth. Take the line type of marriage which my colleague has been praising... and justifiably I assure you, despite his personal bias. I am a bachelor and have no bias. Line marriage is the strongest possible device for conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children -- the two basic socjptal functions for marriage everywhere -- in an environment in which there is no security, neither for capital nor for children, other than that devised by individuals. Somehow human beings always cope with their environments. Line marriage is a remarkably successful invention to that end. All other Lunar forms of marriage serve that same purpose, though not as well." He said good night and left. I had with me -- always! -- a picture of my family, newest one, our wedding with Wyoming. Brides are at their prettiest and Wyoh was radiant -- and rest of us looked handsome and happy, with GrandpaW tall and proud and not showing failing faculties. But was disappointed; they looked at it oddly. But man -- Mathews, name was -- said, "Can you spare this picture. Colonel?" Winced. "Only copy I have. And a long way from home." "For a moment, I mean. Let me have it photographed. Right here, it need never leave your hands." "Oh. Oh, certainly!" Not a good picture of me but is face I have,' and did Wyoh justice and they just don't come prettier than Lenore. So he photographed it and next morning they did come right into our hotel suite and woke me before time and did arrest me and take me away wheelchair and all and did lock me in a cell with bars! For bigamy. For polygamy. For open immorality and publicly inciting others to same. Was glad Mum couldn't see. T ook Stu all day to get case transferred to an F.N. court and dismissed. His lawyers asked to have it tossed out on "diplomatic immunity" but F.N. judges did not fall into trap. Merely noted that alleged offenses had taken place outside jurisdiction of lower court, except alleged "inciting" concerning which they found insufficient evidence. Aren't any F.N. laws covering marriage. Can't be -- just a rule about each nation required to give "full faith and credence" to marriage customs of other member nations. polygamy is legal, and Stu's opinion manipulators played up "persecution". It gained us sympathy from people who otherwise would never have heard of us -- even gained it in North America and other places where polygamy is not legal, from people who believe in "live and let live." All good, because always problem was to be noticed. To most of nothing; our rebellion hadn't been noticed. Stu's operators had gone to much thought to plan setup to get me arrested. Was not told until weeks later after time to cool off and sec benefits. Took a stupid judge, a dishonest sheriff and barbaric local prejudice which I triggered with that sweet picture, for Stu admitted later that range of color in Davis family was what got judge angry enough to be foolish even beyond native talent for nonsense. My one Consolation, that Mum could not see my disgrace, turned out mistaken. Pictures, taken through bars and showing grim face, were in every Luna paper, and write-ups used narstiest Earthside stories, not larger number that deplored injustice. But should have had more faith in Mimi. She wasn't ashamed, simply wanted to go Earthside and rip some people to pieces. While helped Earthside, greatest good was in Luna. Loonies became more unified over this silly huhu than had ever been before. They took it personally and "Adam Selene" and "Simon Jester" pushed it. Loonies are easy going except on one subject, women. Every lady felt insulted by Terran news stories -- so male Loonies who had ignored politics suddenly discovered t was their boy. Spinoff. Old lags feel superior to those not transported. Later found self greeted by ex-cons with: "Hi, jail bird!" A lodge greeting -- I was accepted. But saw nothing good about it then! Pushed around, treated like cattle, fingerprinted, photographed, given food we wouldn't offer hogs, exposed to endless indignity, and only that heavy field kept me from trying to kill somebody. Had I been wearing number-six arm when grabbed, might have tried. But steadied down once I was freed. Hour later we were on way to Agra; had at last been summoned by Committee. Felt good to be back in suite in maharajah's palace but eleven-hour zone change in less than three did not permit rest; we went to hearing bleary-eyed and held together by drugs. "Hearing" was one-sided; we listened while chairman talked. Talked an hour; I'll summarize: O ur preposterous claims were rejected. Lunar Authority's saIF cred trust could not be abandoned. Disorders on Earth's Moon could not be tolerated. Moreover recent disorders showed that Authority had been too lenient. Omission was now to be corrected by an activist program, a five-year plan in which all phases of life in Authority's trusteeship would be overhauled. A code of laws was being drafted; civil and criminal courts would be instituted for benefit of "client-employees" -- which meant all persons in trust area, not just consignees with uncompleted sentences. Public schools would be established, plus indoctrinal adult schools for client-employees in need oi same. An economic, engineering and agricultural planning board would be created to provide fullest and most efficient use of Moon's resources and labor of client-employees. An interim goal of quadrupling grain shipments in five years had been adopted as a figure easily attainable once scientific planning of resources and labor was in effect. First phase would be to withdraw client-employees from occupations found not to be productive and put of farm tunnels in order that hydroponics would commence in them not later than March #. These new giant farms would be operated by Lunar Authority, scientifically, and not left to whims of private owners. It was contemplated that this system would, by end of five-year plan, produce entire new grain quota. In meantime client-employees producing grain privately would be allowed to continue. But they would be absorbed into new system as their less efficient methods were no longer needed. Chairman looked up from papers. "In short, the Lunar colonies are going to be civilized and brought into managerial co-ordination with the rest of civilization. Distasteful as this task has been, I feel -- speaking as a citizen rather than as chairman of this committee -- I feel that we owe you thanks for bringing to our attention a situation so badly in need of correction." Was ready to burn his ears off. "Client-employees"! What a fancy way to say "slaves"! But Prof said tranquilly, "I find the proposed plans most interesting. Is one permitted to ask questions? Purely for information?" "For information, yes." North American member leaned forward. "But don't assume that we are going to take any back talk from you cavemen! So mind your manners. You aren't in the clear on this, you know." "Order," chairman said. "Proceed, Professor." "This term 'client-employee' I find intriguing. Can it be stipulated that the majority of inhabitants of Earth's major satellite are not undischarged consignees but free individuals?" "Certainly," chairman agreed blandly. "All legal aspects of the new policy have been studied. With minor exceptions some ninety-one per cent of the colonists have citizenship, original or derived, in various member nations of the Federated Nations. Those who wish to return to their home countries have a right to do so. You will be pleased to learn that the Authority is considering a plan under which loans for transportation can be arranged... probably under supervision of International Red Cross and Crescent. I might add that I myself am heartily backing this plan -- as it renders nonsensical any talk about 'slave labor.'" He smiled smugly. "I see," agreed Prof. "Most humane. Has the committee -- or the Authority -- pondered the fact that most -- effectively all, I should say -- considered the fact that inhabitants of Luna are physically unable to live on this planet? That they have undergone involuntary permanent exile through irreversible physiological changes and can never again live in comfort and health in a gravitational field six times greater than that to which their bodies have become adjusted?" S coundrel pursed lips as if considering totally new idea. "Speaking again for myself, I would not be prepared to stipulate that what you say is necessarily true. It might be true of some, might not be others. People vary widely. Your presence here proves that it is not impossible for a Lunar inhabitant to return to Earth. In any case we have no intention of forcing anyone to return. We hope that they will choose to stay and we hope to encourage others to emigrate to the Moon. But these are individual choices, under thefreedoms guaranteed by the Great Charter. But as to this alleged physiological phenomenon -- It is not a legal matter. If anyone deems it prudent, or thinks he would be happier, to stay on the Moon, that's his privilege." "I see, sir. We are free. Free to remain in Luna and work, at tasks and for wages set by you... or free to return to Earth to die." Chairman shrugged. "You assume that we are villains. We're not. Why, if I were a young man I would emigrate to the Moon myself. Great opportunities! In any case I am not troubled by your distortions -- history will justify us." Was surprised at Prpf; he was not fighting. Worried about him -- weeks of strain and a bad night on top. All he said was, "Honorable Chairman, I assume that shipping to Luna will soon be resumed. Can passage be arranged for my colleague and myself in the first ship? For I must admit, sir, that this gravitational weakness of which I spoke is, in our cases, very real. Our mission is completed; we need to go home." (Not a word about grain barges. Nor about "throwing rocks," nor even futility of beating a cow. Prof just sounded tired.) Chairman leaned forward and spoke with grim satisfaction. "Professor, that presents difficulties. To put it bluntly, you appear to be guilty of treason against the Great Charter, indeed against all humanity... and an indictment is being considered. I doubt if anything more than a suspended sentence would be invoked against a man of your age and physical condition. However... do you think it would be prudent of us to give you passage back to the place where you committed these IF acts -- there to stir up more mischief?" Prof sighed. "I understand your point. Then, sir, may I be excused? I am weary." "Certainly. Hold yourself at the disposal of this committee. The hearing stands adjourned. Colonel Davis." "Sir?" I was directing wheelchair around, to get Prof out at once; our attendants had been sent outside. "A word with you, please." "Uh -- " Looked at Prof; eyes were closed and seemed unconscious. But he moved one finger, motioning me to him. "Honorable Chairman, I'm more nurse than diplomat; have to look after him. He's an old man, he's ill." "The attendants will take care of him." "Well -- " Got as close to Prof as I could from chair, leaned over him. "Prof, are you right?" He barely whispered. "See what he wants. Agree with him. But stall." M oments later was alone with chairman, soundproof door locked. Meant nothing. Room could have a dozen ears, plus one in my left arm. He said, "A drink? Coffee?" I answered, "No, thank you, sir. Have to watch my diet here." "I suppose so. Are you really limited to that chair? You look healthy." I said, "I could, if had to, get up and walk across room. Might faint. Or worse. Prefer not to risk. Weigh six times what I should. Heart's not used to it." "I suppose so. Colonel, I hear you had some silly trouble in North America. I'm sorry, I truly am. Barbaric place. Always hate to have to go there. I suppose you're wondering why I wanted to see you." "No, sir, assume you'll tell when suits you. Instead was wondering why you still call me 'Colonel.' " He gave a barking laugh. "Habit, I suppose. A lifetime of protocol. Yet it might be well for you to continue with that title. Tell me, what do you think of our five-year plan?" Thought it stunk. "Seems to have been carefully thought out." "Much thought went into it. Colonel, you seem to be a sensible man. I know you are. I know not only your background but practically every word you've spoken, almost your thoughts, ever since you set foot on Earth. You were born on the Moon. Do you regard yourself as a patriot? Of the Moon?" "Suppose so. Though tend to think of what we did just as something that had to be done." "Between ourselves -- yes. That old fool Hobart. Colonel, that is a good plan... but lacks an executive. If you are really a patriot or let's say a practical man with your country's best interests at heart, you might be the man to carry it out." He held up hand. "Don't be hasty! I'm not asking you to 'sell out,' 'turn traitor,' or any nonsense like that. This is your chance to be a real patriot -- not some phony hero who gets himself killed in a lost cause. Put it this way. Do you think it is possible for the Lunar colonies to hold out against all the force that (he Federated Nations of Earth can bring to bear? You're not really a military man, and I know that, too. In your honest estimation how many ships and bombs do you think it would take to destroy the Lunar colonies?" I answered, "One ship, six bombs." "Correct! My God, it's good to talk to a sensible man. Two of them would have to be awf'ly big, perhaps specially built. A few people would stay alive, for a while, in smaller warrens beyond the blast areas. But one ship would do it, in ten minutes." I said, "Conceded, sir, but Professor de la Paz pointed out that you don't get milk by beating a cow. And certainly can't by shooting it." "Why do you think we've held back, done nothing, for over a month? That idiot colleague of mine -- I won't name him -- spoke of 'back talk.' Back talk doesn't fret me. It's just talk. And I'm interested in results. No, my dear Colonel, we won't shoot die cow... but we would, if forced to, let the cow know it could be shot. H-missiles are expensive toys but we could afford to expend some as warning shots, wasted on bare rock to let the cow know what could happen. But that is more force than one likes to use. It might frighten the cow and sour its milk." He gave another barking laugh. "Better to persuade old bossy to give I waited. "Don't you want to know how?" he asked. "How?" I agreed. "Through you. Don't say a word and let me explain." He took me up on that high mountain and offered me kingdoms of Earth. Or of Luna. Take job of "Protector Pro Tern" with understanding was mine permanently if I could deliver. Convince Loonies they could not win. Convince them that diis new setup was to their advantage -- emphasize benefits, free schools, free hospitals, free this and that -- details later but an everywhere government just like on Terra. Taxes starting low and handled painlessly by automatic checkoff and through kickback revenues from grain shipments. But most, important, this time Authority would not send a boy to do a man's job. Two regiments of police at once. "Those damned Peace Dragoons were a mistake," he said, "one we won't make again. Between ourselves, the reason it has taken us a month to work this out is that we had to convince the Peace Control Commission that a handful of men spread through six largish warrens and fifty and more small ones. So you'll start with enough police. Not combat troops but military police used to quelling civilians with a minimum of fuss. Besides that, this time they'll have female auxiliaries. The standard ten per cent. No more rape complaints. Well, sir? Think you can swing it? Knowing it's best in the long run for your own people?" I said I ought to study it in detail, particularly plans and quotas for five-year plan, rather than make snap decision. IF "Certainly, certainly!" he agreed. "I'll give you a copy of the white paper we've made up. Take it home, study it, sleep on it. Tomorrow we'll talk again. Just give me your word as a gentleman to keep it under your hair. No secret, really... but these things are best settled before they are publicized. Speaking of publicity, you'll need help -- and you'll get it. We'll go to the expense of sending up topnotch men, pay them what it's worth, have them centrifuge the way those scientists do -- you know. This time we're doing it right. That fool Hobart -- he's actually dead, isn't he?" "No, sir. Senile, however." "Should have killed him. Here's your copy of the plan." "Sir? Speaking of old men -- Professor de la Paz can't stay here. Wouldn't live six months." "That's best, isn't it?" I tried to answer levelly, "Yoo don't understand. He is greatly loved and respected. Best thing would be for me to convince him that you mean business with those H-missiles -- and that it is his patriotic duty to salvage what we can. But, eithor way, if I return without him... well, not only could not swing k; wouldn't live long enough to try." "Hmm. Sleep on it. We'll talk tomorrow. Say fourteen o'clock." I left and as soon as was loaded into lorry gave way to shakes. Just don't have high-level approach. Stu was waiting with Prof. "Well?" said Prof. I glanced around, tapped ear. We huddled, heads over Prof's head and two blankets over us all. Stretcher wagon was clean and so was my chair; I checked them each morning... But for room itself seemed safer to whisper under blankets. Started in. Prof stopped me. "Discuss his ancestry and habits later. The facts." "He offered me job of warden." "I trust you accepted." "Ninety per cent. I'm to study this garbage and give answer tomorrow. Stu, how fast can we execute Plan Scoot?" "Started. We were waiting for you to return. If they let you return." Next fifty minutes were busy. Stu produced a gaunt Hindu in a doti; in thirty minutes he was a twin of Prof, and Stu lifted Prof off wagon onto a divan. Duplicating me was easier. Our doubles were wheeled into suite's living room just at dusk and dinner was brought in. Several people came and went -- among them elderly Hindu woman in sari, on arm of Stuart LaJoie. A plump babu followed them. Getting Prof up steps to roof was worst. He had never worn powered walkm, had no chance to practice and had been flat on back for more dian a mondi. But Stu's arm kept him steady. I gritted teeth and climbed those Airteen terrible steps by myself. By time I reached roof heart was ready to burst. Was put to it not to black out. A silent little flitter craft came out of gloom right on schedule and ten minutes later we were in chartered ship we had used past month -- two minutes after Aat we jetted for Australia. Don't know what it cost to prepare this dance and keep it ready against need, but was no hitch. Stretched out by Prof and caught breath, then said, "How you feel. Prof?" "Okay. A bit tired. Frustrated." "Ja da. Frustrated." "Over not seeing the Taj Mahal, I mean. I never had opportunity as a young man -- and here I've been within a kilometer of it twice, once for several days, now for another day... and still I haven't seen it and never shall." "Just a tomb." "And Helen of Troy was just a woman. Sleep, lad." W e landed in Chinee half of Australia, place called "Darwin," and were carried straight into a ship, placed in acceleration couches and dosed. Prof was already out and I was beginning to feel dopy when Stu came in, grinned, and strapped down by us. I looked at him. "You, too? Who's minding shop?" "The same people who've been doing the real work all along. It's a good setup and doesn't need me any longer. Mannie old cobber, I did not want to be marooned a long way from home. Luna, I mean, in case you have doubts. This looks like the last train from Shanghai." "What's Shanghai got to do with?" "Forget I mentioned it. Mannie, Fm flat broke, concave. I owe money m all directions -- debts that will be paid only if certain stocks move the way Adam Selene convinced me they would move, shortly after this point m history. And if Fm wanted, or will be, for offenses against the public peace and dignity. Put it this way: Fm saving them the trouble of transporting me. Do you think I can learn to be a drillman at my age?" Was feeling foggy, drug taking hold. "Stu, in Luna y'aren't old... barely started... 'nyway... eat our table f'rever! Mimi likes you." "Thanks, cobber, I might. Warning light! Deep breath!" Suddenly was kicked by ten gee. xxxiy O ur craft was ground-to-orbit ferry type used for manned satellites, for supplying F.N. ships in patrol orbit, and for passengers to and from pleasure-and-gambling satellites. She was carrying three passengers instead of forty, no cargo except three p-suits and a brass cannon (yes, silly toy was along; p-suits and Prof's bang-bang were in Australia a week before we were) and good ship Lark had been stripped -- total crew was skipper and a Cyborg pilot. She was heavily over-fueled. We made (was told) normal approach on Elysium satellite... then suddenly scooted from orbital speed to escape speed, a change even more violent than liftoff. This was scanned by F.N. Skytrack; we were commanded to stop and explain. I got this second hand from Stu, self still recovering and enjoying luxury of no-gee with one strap to anchor. Prof still out. "So they want to know who we are and what we think we are doing," Stu told me. "We told them that we were Chinese registry sky IF wagon Opening Lotus bound on an errand of mercy, to wit, rescuing ttKse scientists marooned on the Moon, and gave our identification -- as Opening Lotus "How about transponder?" "Mannie, if I got what I paid for, our transponder identified us as the Lark up to ten minutes ago... and now has I.D.'d us as the Lotus. Soon we will know. Just one ship is in position to get a missile off and it must blast us in -- " he stopped to look -- "another twenty-seven minutes according to the wired-up gentleman booting this bucket, or its diances of getting us are poor to zero. So if it worries you -- if you have prayers to say or messages to send or whatever it is one does at such times -- now is the time." "Think we ought to rouse Prof?" "Let him sleep. Can you think of a better way to make the jump than from peaceful sleep instantaneously into a cloud of radiant gas? Unless you know that he has religious necessities to attend to? He nevw struck me as a religious man, orthodoctrinally speaking." "Hes not. But if you have such duties, don't let me keep you." "Thank you, I took care of what seemed necessary before we left ground. How about yourself, Mannie? I'm not much of a padre but ni do my best, if I can help. Any sins on your mind, old cobber? If you need to confess, I know quite a little about sin." Told him my needs did not run that way. Then did recall sins, some I cherished, and gave him a version nMSxt or less true. That reminded him of some of his own, which reminded me -- Zero time came and went before we ran out of sins. Stu LaJoie is a good person to spend last minutes with, even if don't turn out to be last. W e had two days with naught to do but undergo drastic routines to keep us from carrying umpteen plagues to Luna. But didn't mind sihaking from induced chills and burning with fever. Free fall was such a relief and was so happy to be going home. Or almost happy. Prof asked what was troubling me. "Nothing," I said. "Can't wait to be home. But truth is, ashamed to show face after we've failed. Prof, what did we do wrong?" "Failed, my boy?" "Don't see what else can call it. Asked to be recognized. Not what we got." "Manuel, I owe you an apology. You will recall Adam Selene's projection of our chances just before we left home." Stu was not in earshot but "Mike" was word we never used; was always "Adam Selene" for security. "Certainly do! One in fifty-three. Then when we reached Earthside dropped to reeking one in hundred. What you guess it is now? One in thousand?" "I've had new projections every few days... which is why I owe you an apology. The last, received just before we left, included the then-untested assumption that we would escape, get clear of Tote and home safely. Or that at least one of US would make which is why Comrade Stu was summoned home, he having a Terran's tolerance of high acceleration. Eight projections, in fact, ranging from three of us dead, through various combinations up to three surviving. Would you care to stake a few dollars on what that last projection is, setting a bracket and naming your own odds? ni give a hint. You are far too pessimistic." "Uh... no, damn it! Just tell." "The odds against us are now only seventeen to one... and they've been shortening all month. Which I couldn't tell you." Was amazed, delighted, overjoyed -- hurt. "What you mean, couldn't tell me? Look, Prof, if not trusted, deal me out and put Stu in executive cell." "Please, son. That's where he will go if anything happens to any of us -- you, me, or dear Wyoming. I could not tell you Earthside -- and can tell you now -- not because you aren't trusted but because you arc no actor. You could carry out your role more effectively if you believed that our purpose was to achieve recognition of independence." "Now he tells!" "Manuel, Manuel, we had to fight hard every instant -- and lose." "So? Am not big enough boy to he told?" "Please, Manuel. Keeping you temporarily in the dark greatly enhanced our chances; you can check this with Adam. May I add that Stuart accepted his summons to Luna blithely without asking why? Comrade, that committee was too small. its chairman too intelligent. There was always the hazard that they might offer an acceptable compromise. That first day there was grave danger .of it. Had we been able to force our case before the Grand Assembly there would have been no danger of intelligent action. But we were balked. The best I could do was to antagonize the committee, even stooping to personal insult to make certain of at least one hold-out against common sense." "Guess I neverwill understand high-level approach." "Possibly not. But your talents and mine complement each other. Manuel, you wish to see Luna free." "You know I do." "You also know that Terra can defeat us." #COure. No projection ever gave O anything close to even money. So don't see why you set out to antagonize -- " "Please. Since they can inflict their will on us, our only chance lies in weakening their will. That was why we had to go to Terra. To be divisive. To create many opinions. The shrewdest of the great generals in China's history once said that perfection in war lay in so sapping the opponent's will that he surrenders without fighting. In that maxim lies both our ultimate purpose and our most pressing danger. Suppose, as seemed possible that first day, we had been offered an inviting compromise. A governor in place of a warden, possibly from our own number. Local autonomy. A delegate in the Grand Assembly. A higher price IF for grain at the catapult head, plus a bonus for increased shipments. A disavowal of Hobart's policies combined with an expression of regret handsome cash settlements to the victims' survivors. Would it have been accepted? Back home?" "They did not offer that." "The chairman was ready to offer something like it that first afternoon and at that time he had his committee in hand. He offered us an asking price close enough to permit such a dicker. Assume that we reached in substance what I outlined. Would it have been acceptable?" "Uh... maybe." "More than a 'maybe' by the bleak projection made just before we left home. It was the thing to be avoided at any cost -- a settlement which would quiet things down, destroy our will to resist, without changing any essential in the longer-range prediction of disaster. So I switched the subject and squelched possibility by being difficult about irrelevancies and politely offensive. Manuel, you and I know -- and Adam knows -- that there must be an end to food shipments. Nothing less will save Luna from disaster. But can you imagine a wheat farmer fighting to end those shipments?" "No. Wonder if can pick up news from home on how they're taking stoppage?" "There won't be any. Here is how Adam has timed it, Manuel: No announcement is to be made on either planet until after we get home. We are still buying wheat. Barges are still arriving at Bombay." "You told them shipments would stop at once." "That was a threat, not a moral commitment. A few more loads won't matter and we need time. We don't have everyone on our side; we have only a minority. There is a majority who don't care either way but can be swayed -- temporarily. We have another minority against us... especially grain farmers whose interest is never politics but the price of wheat. They are grumbling but accepting Scrip, hoping it will be worth face value later. But the instant we announce that shipments have stopped they will be actively against us. Adam plans to have the majority committed to us at the time the announcement is made." "How long? One year? Two?" "Two days, three days, perhaps four. Carefully edited excerpts from that five-year plan, excerpts from the recordings you've made especially that yellow-dog offer, exploitation ot your arrest in Kentucky -- " "Hey! I'd rather forget that." Prof smiled and cocked an eyebrow, "Uh -- " I said uncomfortably, 'may. If will help." "It will help more than any statistics about natural resources." W ired-up ex-human piloting us went in as one maneuver without bothering to orbit and gave us even heavier beating. Ship was light and lively. But change in motion is under two-and-a-half kilometers; was over in nineteen seconds and we were down at Johnson City. I took it right, just a terrible constriction in chest and a feeling as if giant were squeezing heart, then was over and I was gasping back to normal and glad to be proper weight. But did almost kill poor old Prof. Mike told me later that pilot refused to surrender control. Mike would have brought ship down in a low-gee, no-breakum-egg, knowing Prof was aboard. But perhaps that Cyborg knew what he was doing. A low-gee landing wastes mass and Lotus Lark grounded almost dry. None of which we cared about, as looked as if that Garrison landing had wasted Prof. Stu saw it while I was still gasping, then we were both at him -- heart stimulant, manual respiration, massage. At last he fluttered eyelids, looked at us, smiled. Home" he whispered. We made him rest twenty minutes before we let him suit up to leave ship; had been as near dead as can be and not hear angels. Skipper was us and take on passengers. That Dutchman never spoke to us whole trip; think he regretted lettting money talk him into a trip that could ruin or kill him. By then Wyoh was inside ship, psuited to come to 'meet us. Don't think Stu had ever seen her in a p-suit and certain he had never seen her as a blonde; did not recognize. I was hugging her in spite of p-suit; he was standing by, waiting to be introduced. Then strange "mail" in p-suit hugged him -- he was surprised. Heard Wyoh's muffled voice: "Oh heavens! Mannie, my helmet." I undamped it, lifted off. She shook curls and grinned. "Stu, aren't you glad to see me? Don't you know me?" A grin spread over his face, slowly as dawn across maria. "Zdra'stvooeet'ye, Gospazha! I am most happy to see you." "Gospazha' indeed! I'm Wyoh to you, dear, always. Didn't Mannie tell you I'd gone back to blonde?" "Yes, he did. But knowing it and seeing are not the same." "You'll get used to it." She stopped to bend over Prof, kiss him, giggle at him, then straightened up and gave me a no-helmet welcome-home that left us both with tears despite pesky suit. Then turned again to Stu, started to kiss him. He held back a little. She stopped. "Stu, am I going to have to put on brown makeup to welcome you?" Stu glanced at me, then kissed her. Wyoh put m as much time and thought as she had to welcoming me. Was later I figured out his odd behavior. Stu, despite commitment, was still not a Loonie -- and in meantime Wyoh had married. What's that got to do with it? Well, Earthside it makes a difference, and Stu did not know deep down in bones that a Loonie lady is own mistress. Poor chum thought V might take offense! We got Prof into suit, ourselves same, and left, me with cannon under arm. Once underground and locked through, we unsuited -- and I was flattered to see that Wyoh was wearing crushed under p-suit that red dress I bought her ages ago. She brushed it and skirt flared out. Immigration room was empty save IF for about forty men lined up along wall like new transportees; were wearing p-suits and carrying helmets -- Terrans going home, stranded tourists and some scientists. Their p-suits would not go, would be unloaded before lift. I looked at them and thought about Cyborg pilot. When Lark had been stripped, all but three couches had been removed. These people were going to take acceleration lying on floorplates. if skipper was not careful he was going to have mashed Terrans au blut. Mentioned to Stu. "Forget it," he said. "Captain Leures has foam pads aboard. He won't let them be hurt; they're his life insurance." M y family, all thirty-odd from Grandpaw to babies, was waiting beyond next lock on level below aiKl we got cried on and slobbered on and hugged. And this time Stu did not hold back. Little Hazel made ceremony of kissing us. She had Liberty Caps, set one on each, then kissed us -- and at that signal whole family put on Liberty Caps, and I got sudden tears. Perhaps is wfhat patriotism feels like, choked up and so happy it hurl. Or maybe was just being with my beloveds again. "Where's Slim?" I asked Hazel. "Wasn't he invited?" "Couldn't come. He's junior marshal of your reception." " 'Reception?' This is all we want." "You'll see." Did. Good thing family came out to meet us; that and dde to L-City (filled a caipsuie) were all I saw ofthem for some time. Tube Station West was a howliing mob, all in liberty Caps. We three were carried on shoulders all way to Old Dome, surrounded by a stilyagi bodyguard, elbows locked to force through cheering, singing crowds. Boys were wearing red caps and white shirts and their girls wore white jumpers and xed shorts color of caps. At station and again when they put us down in Old Dome I got kissed by ferns I have never seen before or since. Remember hoping that measures we had taken in lieu of quarantine were effective -- or half of L-Oity would be down with colds or worse. (Apparently wc were dean; was no epidemic. But I remember time -- was quite small -- when measles got loose and thousands died.) Worried about Prof, too. Reception was too rough for a man good as dead an hour earlier. But he not only enjoyed it, he made a wonderful speech in Old Eome -- one short on logic, loaded with ringing phrases. "Love" was in it, and "home" and "Luna" and "comrades" and "neighbors" and even "shoulder to sihoulder" and all sounded good. They had erected a platform under big news video on south face. Adam Selene greeted us from video screen and now Prof's face and voice were projected from it, much magnified, over his head. Did not have to shout. But did have to pause after every sentence. Crowd roars drowned out even bull voice from screen -- and no doubt pauses helped, as rest. But Prof no longer seemed old, tired, ill; being back inside The Rock seemed to be tonic he needed. And me, too! Was wonderful to be right weight, feel strong, breathe pure, replenished air of own dty. No mean city! Impossible to get all of L-City inside Old Dome -- but looked as if they tried. I estimated an area ten meters square, tried to count heads, got over two" hundred not half through and gave up. Lunatic placed crowd at thirty thousand, seems impossible. Prof's words reached more nearto those who could not crowd into Old Dome, cable and relay flashed it across lonely maria to all wardens. He grabbed chance to tell of slave future Authority planned for them. Waved that 'Vliite paper". "Here it is!" he cried. "Your fetters! Your leg irons! Will you wear them?" 'Wo!" "They say you must. They say they will H-bomb... then survivors will surrender and put on these chains. Will you?" " 'Never,' " agreed Prof. "They threaten to send troops... more and more troops to rape and murder. We .shall fight them." DAr "We shall fight them on the surface, we shall fight them in the tubes, we shall fight them in the corridors! If die we must, we shall die freer Yes! Ja-da! Tell 'em, tell 'em!" "And if we die, let history write: This was Luna's finest hour! Give us liberty... or give us deathr S ome of that sounded familiar. But his words came out fresh and new; I joined in roars. Look... I knew we couldn't whip Terra -- I'm tech by trade and know that an M-missile doesn't care how brave you are. But was ready, too. If they wanted a fight, let's have it! Prof let them roar, then led them in Battle Hymn of the Republic, Simon's version. Adam appeared on screen again, took over leading it and sang with them, and we tried to slip away, off back of platform, with help of stilyagi led by Slim. But women didn't want to let us go and lads aren't at their best in trying to stop ladies; they broke through. Was twenty-two hundred before we four, Wyoh, Prof, Stu, self, were locked in room L of Raffles, wihere Adam-Mike joined us by video. I was starved by then, all were, so T ordered dinner and Prof insisted that we eat before reviewing plans. Then we got down to business. Adam started by asking me to read aloud "white paper", for his benefit and for Comrade Wyoming. "But first. Comrade Manuel, if you have the recordings you made Earthside, could you transmit them by phone at high speed to my office? I'll have them transcribed for study. All I have so far arc the coded summaries Comrade Stuart sent up." I did so, knowing Mike would IF study them at once, phrasing was part of Adiam Seiene" myth -- and decided to talk to Prof about letting Stu in on the facts. If Stu was lo be in executive cell, pretending was too dumsy. Feeding recordings into Mike at overspeed took five minutes, reading aloud another thirty. That done, Adam said, "Professor, the reception was more successful than I had counted on, due to your speech, I think we should push the embargo through Congress at once. I can send out a call tonight for a session to begin at noon tomorrow. Comments?" I said, "Look, those yammerheads will kick it around for weeks. If you rmist put it up to them -- can't see why -- do as you did with Declaration. Start late, jam it through after midnight using own people." Adam said, "Sorry, Manuel. Fm getting caught up on events Earthside and you have catching up to do here. It's no longer the same group. Comrade Wyoming?" "Mannie dear, it's an elected Congress now. They must pass it. Congress is what government we have for Luna." I said slowly, "You held election and turned things over to them? Everything? Then what arc we doing?" Looked at Prof, expecting explosion. My objections would not be on his grounds -- but couldn't see any use in swapping one talktalk for another. At least first group had been so loose we could pack ft. This new group would be glued to seats. P rof was undisturbed. Fitted fingertips together and looked relaxed. "Manuel, I don't think the situation is as bad as you seem to feel it is. In each stage it is necessary to adapt to the popular mythology. At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity anointed the right candidate. In this age the myth is 'the will of the people'... but the problem changes cmly superficially. Comrade Adam and I have had long discussions about how to determine the will of the people. I venture to suggest that this solution is one we can work with." "Well... okay. But why weren't we told? Stu, did you know?" "No, Mannie. There was no reason to tell me." He shrugged. "I'm a monarchist. I wouldn't have been interested. But I go along with Prof that in this day and age elections are a necessary ritual." Prof said, "Manud, if wasn't necessary to tell us till we got back. You and I had other work to do. Comrade Adam and dear Comrade Wyoming handled it in our absence... so let's find out what they did before we judge what they've done." "Sorry. Well, Wyoh?" "Mannie, we didn't leave everything to chance. Adam and I decided that a Congress of three hundred would be about right. Then we spent hours going over the Party lists -- plus prominent people not in the Party. At last we had a list of candidates -- a list that included some from the Ad-Hoc Congress. Not all were yammeriheads. We included as many as we coiild. Tliea Adam phoned each one and asked him -- OT her -- if he would serve... binding him to secrecy in the meantime. Some we had to replace. "When we were ready, Adam spoke cm video, announced that it was time to carry out the Party's pledge of free elections, set a date, said that everybody over sixteen could vote, and that all anyone had to do to be a candidate was to get a hundred chops on a nominating petition and post it in Old Dome, or the public notice place for his warren. Oh, yes, thirty temporary election districts, ten Congressmen from each district. That let all but the smallest warrens be at least one district." "So you had it lined up and Party ticket went through?" "Oh, no, dear! There wasn't any Party ticket -- officially. But we were ready with our candidates... and I must say my stilyagi did a smart job of getting chops on nominations. Our optings were posted the first day. Many other people posted; there were over two thousand candidates. But there was only ten days from announcement to election, and we knew what we wanted whereas the opposition was split up. It wasn't necessary for Adam to come out jHiblicly and endorse candidates. It worked out -- you won by seven thousand votes, dear, while your nearest rivals got less than a thousand." "# won?" "You won, I won, Professor wem, Comrade Clayton won, and just about everybody we thought should be in the Congress. It wasn't hard. Although Adam never endorsed anyone, I didn't hesitate to let our comrades know who was favored. Simon poked his finger in, too. And we do have good connections with newspapers. I wish you had been here election night, watching the results. Exciting!" "How did you go about nose counting? Never known how election works. Write names on a piece of paper?" "Oh, no, we used a better system... because, after all, some of our best people can't write. We used banks for voting places, with bank clerks identifying customers and customers identifying members of their families and neighbors who don't have bank accounts. People voted orally and the clerks punched the votes into the banks' computers with the voter watching, and results were all tallied at once in Luna City clearing house. We voted everybody in less than three hours and results were printed out just minutes after voting stopped." S uddenly a light came on ki my skuH and I decided to question Wyoh privately. No, not Wyoh -- Mike. Get past bis "Adam Selene" dignity and hammer truth out of his neuristors. Recalled a cheque and wondered how many had voted for me? Seven thousand? Seven hundred? Or just my family and friends? But no longer worried about new IF  Congress. Prof had not slipped them a cold deck but one that was frozen solid -- then ducked Eairthside while crime was committed. No us asking Wyoh; she didn't even need to know what Mike had done... and could do her part better if did not suspect. Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures' come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor. Changed my mind about suggesting that Stu be let in on Mike's self-awareness. Three was too many. Or perhaps too few. "Mi -- " I started to say, and changed to: "My word! Sounds efficient. How big did we win?" Adam answered without expression. "Eighty-six per cent of our candidates were successful. Approximately what I had expected." ("Approximately," my false left arm! Exactly what you expected, Mike old ironmongery!) "Withdraw objection to a noon session -- I'll be there." "It seems to me," said Stu, "assuming that the embargo starts at once, we will need something to maintain the enthusiasm we witnessed tonight. Or there will be a long quiet period of increasing economic depression -- from the embargo, I mean -- and growing disillusionment. Adam, you first impressed me through your ability to make shrewd guesses as to future events. Do my misgivings make sense?" "They do." "Well?" Adam looked at us in turn, and was almost impossible to believe that this was a false imjage and Mike was simply placing us through binaural receptors. "Comrades... it must be turned into open war as quickly as possible." Nobody said anything. One thing to talk about war, another to face up to it. At last I sighed and said, "When do we start throwing rocks?" "We do not start," Adam answered. "They must throw the first one. How do we antagonize them into doing so? I will reserve my thoughts to the last. Comrade Manuel?" "Uh... don't look at me. Way I feel, would start with a nice big rock smash at Agra -- a bloke there who is a waste of space. But is not what you are after." "No, it is not." Adam answered seriously. "You would not only anger the entire Hindu nation, a people intensely opposed to destruction of life, but you would also anger and shock people throughout Earth by destroying the Taj Mahal." "Including me," said Prof. "Don't talk dirty, Manuel." "Look," I said, "didn't say to do it. Anyhow, could miss Taj." # #V yTanuel," said Prof, "as Adam must be to antagonize them into striking the first blow, the classic 'Pearl Harbor' maneuver of game theory, a great advantage in WeltIF politiok. The question is howl Adam, I suggest that wihat is needed k to plant the idea that we are weak and divided and that all it takes is a show of force to bring us back into line. Stu? Your people Earthside should be useful. Suppose the Congress repudiated myself and Manuel? The effect?" "Oh, nor said Wyoh, "Oh, yes, dear Wyo-h. Not necessary to do it but simply to put it over news channels to Earth. Perhaps still better to put it out over a clandestine beam attributed to the Terran scientists still with us while our official channels display the classic stigmata of tight censorship. Adam?" "I'm noting it as a tactic which probably will be included in the strategy. But it will not be sufficient alone. We must be bombed." "Adam," said Wyoh, "why do you say so? Even if Luna City can stand up under their biggest bombs -- something I hope never to find out -- we know that Luna can't win an all-out war. You've said so, many times. Isn't there some way to work it so that they will just plain leave us alone?" Adam pulled at right cheek -- and I thought: Mike, if you don't knock off play-acting, you'll have me believing in you myself. Was annoyed at hkn and looked forward to a talk -- one in which I would not have to defer to "Chairman Selene." "Comrade Wyoming," he said soberly, "it's a matter of game theory in a complex non-zero-sum game. We have certain resources or 'pieces in the game' and many possible moves. Our opponents have much larger resources and a far larger spectrum of responses. Our problem is to manipulate the game so that our strength is utilized toward an optimax scution while inducing them to waste their superior strength and to refrain from using it at maximum. Timing is of the essense and a gamibit is necessary to start a chain of events favorable to our strategy. I realize this is not dear. I could put the factors through a comiputer and show you. Or you can accept the conclusion. Or you can use your own judgment." He was reminding Wyoh (under Stu's nose) that he was not "Adam Selene" but Mike, our dinkum thinkum who could handle so complex a problem because he was a comiputer and smartest one anywhere. Wyoh backtracked. "No, no," she said, "I wouldn't understand the math. Okay, it has to be done. How do we do it?" Was four hundred before we had a plan that suited Prof and Stu as well as Adam -- or took that long for Mike to sell his plan while appearing to pull ideas out of rest of us. Or was it Prof's plan with "Adam Selene" as salesman? In any case we had a plan and master strategy of Tuesday # May # and varied from it only to calendar, one that grew out of match events as they actually had occurred. In essence it call for us to beihave as narstily as possible while strengthening impression that we would be awfuHy easy to spank. W as at Community Hall at noon, after too little sleep, and found I could have dept two hours longer; Congressmen from Hong Kong could not make it that early despite tube all way. Wyoh did not bang gavel until fourteenthirty. Yes, my bride wife was chairman pro tern in a body not yet organized. Parliamentary rulings seemed to come naturally to her, and she was not a bad choice. A mob of Loonies behave better when a lady bangs gavel. Not going to detail what new Congress did and said that session and later. Minutes are available. I showed up only when necessary and never bothered to learn tailk-taik rules -- seemed to be equal parts common politeness and ways in which chaiiman could invoke magic to do it his (her) way. No sooner had Wyoh banged them to order but a cobber jumped up and said, "Gospazha Chairman, move we suspend rules and hear from Comrade Professor de la Paz!" -- which brought a whoop of approval. Wyoh banged again. "Motion is out of order and Member from Lower Churchill will be seated. This house recessed without adjourning and Chairman of Committee on Permanent Organization, Resolutions and Government Structure still has the floor." Turned out to be Wolfgang Korsakov, Member from Tycho Under (and a member of Profs cell and our number-one finagler of LuNoHoCo) and he not only had floor, he had it all day, yielding time as he saw fit (i.e, picking out whom he wanted to speak rather than letting just anyone talk). But nobody was too irked. This mob seemed satisfied with leadership. Were noisy but unruly. By dinnertime Luna had a government to replace co-opted provisional government -- i.e., dummy government we had opted ourselvs, which sent Prof and, me to Earth. Congress confirmed ail acts of provisional government, thus putting face on what we had done, thanked outgoing government for services and instructed Wolfgang's committee to continue work on permanent government structure. Prof was elected President of Congress and ex-officio Prime Minister of interim government until we acquired a constitution. He protested age and health... then said would serve if could have certain things to help him; too old and too exhausted from trip Earthside to have responsibility of presiding -- except on occasions of state -- so he wanted Congress to elect a Speaker and Speaker Pro Tern. And besides that, he felt Congress should augment its numbers by not more than ten per cent by itself electing mombers-atlarge so that Prime Minister, whoever he might be, could opt cabinet members or ministers of state who might not now be members of Congress -- especially minister-without-portfolio to take load off his shoulders. Tbey balked. Most were proud IF of being "Congressmen" and already jealous of status. But Prof just sat kxking tired, and waited -- and somebody pointed out that it still left control in hands of Congress. So they gave him what he asked for. Then somebody squeezed in a speech by making it a question to chair. Everybody knew (he said) that Adam Selene had refrained from standing for Congress on grounds that Chaiiman of Emergency Committee should not take advantage of position to elbow way into new government... but could Honorable Chairlady tell member whether was any reason not to elect Adam Selene a member-at-large? As gesture of appreciation for great services? To let all Luna -- yes, and all those earthworms, especially exLunar ex-Authority -- know that we were not repudiating Adam Selene. On contrary he was our beloved elder statesman and was not President simply because he chose not to be! More whoops that went on and on. You can find in minutes who made that speech but one gets you ten Prof wrote it and Wyoh planted it. H ere is how it wound up, over course of days; Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs: Professor Bernardo de la Paz. Speaker, Finn Nielsen; Speaker Pro Tern, Wyoming Davis. Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense, General O'Kelly Davis; Minister of Information, Terence Sheehan (Sheenie turned Pravda over to managing editor to work with Adam and Stu); Special Minister-without-Portfolio in Ministry of Information, Stuart Rene LaJoie, Congressman-at-Large; Secretary of State for Economics and Finance (and Custodian of Enemy Property), Wolfgang Korsakov; Minister of Interior Affairs and Slafety, Comrade "Clayton" Watenabe; Ministerwithout-Portfolio and Special Adviser to Prime Minister, "Adam Selene" plus a dozen minis-ters and ministers-without-pKrtfolio from warrens other than Luna City. See where that left things? Brush away fancy titles and "B" Cell was still running things as advised by Mike, backed by a Congress in which we could not lose a test vote. But did lose others we did not want to win, or did not care about. But at time could not see sense in all that talktalk. During evening session Prof reported on trip and then yielded to me -- Committee Chairman Korsakov consenting -- so that I could report what "five-year plan" meant and how Authority had tried to bribe me. I'll never make a sipeaker but had time during dinner break to swot speech Mike had written. He had slanted it so narstily that I got angry all over again and was angry when I spoke and managed to make it catching. Congress was ready to riot by time I sat down. Prof stepped forward, thin and pale, and said quietly, "Comrade Members, what shall we do? I suggest, Chairman Korsakov consenting, lhat we discuss informally how to lieai this latest insolence to our nation." One member from Novylen wanted to declare war and they would have done so right then if o-f had not pointed out that they were still hearing committee reports. More talk, all bitter. At last Commde Member Chang Jones spoke: "Fellow Congressmen -- sorry, Gospodin Chairman Korsakov -- I'm a rice and wheat farmer. Mean I used to be, because back in May I got a bank loan and sons and I are converting to variety farming. We're broke -- had to borrow tube fare to get here -- but family is eating and someday we might pull square with bank. At least I'm no longer raising grain. "But others are. Catapult has never reduced headway by one barge whole time we've been free. We're still shipping, hoping their cheques will be worth something someday. "But now we know! They've told us what they mean to do with us -- to us! I say only way to make those scoundrels know we mean business is stop shipments right now! Not another tonne, not a kilo... until they come here and dicker honestly for honest price!" Around midnight they passed Embargo, then adjourned subject to call... standing comimittees to continue. Wyoh and I went home, and I go-t reacquainted with my family. Was nothing to do; Mike-Adam and Stu had been working on how to hit them with it Earthside and Mike had shut catapult down ("technical difficulties with ballistic computer" ) twenty-four hours earlier. Last barge in trajectory would be taken by Poona Ground Control in slightly over one day and Earth would be told narstily that was last they would ever get. S hock to farmers was eased by continuing to buy grain at catapult -- but cheques now carried printed warning that Luna Free State did not stand behind them, did not warrant that Lunar Authority would ever redeem them even in Scrip, etc., etc. Some farmers left grain anyhow, some did not, all screamed. But was nothing they could do. Catapult was shut down, loading belts not moving. Depression was not immediately felt in rest of economy. Defense regiments had depleted ranks of ice miners so much that selling ice on free market was profitable. LuNoHo Co steel subsidiary was hiring every able-bodied man it could find, and Wolfgang Korsakov was ready with paper money, "National Dollars," printed to resemble Hong Kong dollar and in theory pegged to it. Luna had plenty of food, plenty of work, plenty of money. People were not hurting. "Beer, betting, women and work" went on as usual. "Nationals," as they were called, were inflation money, war money, fiat money, and were discounted a fraction of a percent on day of first issue, concealed as "exchange service charge." They were spendable money and never did drop to zero IF but were infiaitionary and exchange lefleoted it increasingly. New govemment was spending money it did not have. But that was later. Challenge to Earth, to Authority and Federated Nations, was made intentionally narsty. F.N vessels were ordered to stay clear of Luna by ten diameters and not orbit at any distance under pain of being destroyed without warning. (No mention of hoWy since we could not.) Vessels of private registry would be permitted to land if (a) permission was requested ahead of time with ballistic plan, (b) a vessel thus cleared placed itself under Luna Ground Control (Mike) at a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers while foilowing approved trajectory and (c) was unarmed save for three hand guns permitted three officers. Last was to be confirmed by inspection on landing before anybody was allowed to leave ship and before ship was serviced with fuel andor reaction mass. Violation would mean confiscation of ship. No person allowed to land at Luna other than ship's crew in connection with loading, unloading, or servicing save citizens of Terran countries who had recognized Free Luna. (Only Chad -- and Chad had no ships. Prof expected some private vessels to be reregistered under Chad merchant flag.) Manifesto noted that Terran scientists still in Luna could return home in any vessel which conformed to our requirements. It invited all freedom-loving Terran nations to denounce wrongs done us and which the Authority planned against us, recognize us and enjoy free trade and full intercourse -- and pointed out that there were no tariffs or any artificial restrictions against trade in Luna, and was policy of Luna government to keep it that way. We invited immigration unlimited, and pointed out that we had a labor shortage and any immigrant could be self-supporting at once. W e also boasted of food -- adult consumption over four thousand calories per day, high in protein, low in cost, no rationing. (Stu had Adam-Mike stick in price of #-proof vodka -- fifty cents taxes. Since this was less than onetenth retail price of #-proof vodka in North America, Stu knew it would hit home. Adam, "by nature" a teetotaler, hadn't thought of it. One of Mike's few oversights.) Lunar Authority was invited to gather at one spot well away from other people, say in unirrigated part of Sahara, and received one last barge of grain free -- straight down at terminal velocity. This was followed by a snotty lecture which implied that we were prepared to do same to anyone who threatened our peace, there being a number of loaded barges at catapult head, ready for such unceremonious delivery. Then we waited. But we waited busily. Were indeed a few loaded barges. These we unloaded and reloaded with rock with changes made in guidance transponders so that Poona Control could not affect them. Their retros were removed, leaving only lateral thrustors, and spare retros were taken to new catapult, to be modified for lateral guidance. Greatest effort went into moving steel to new catapult and shaping it into jackets for solid rock cylinders. Steel was bottleneck. Two days after our manifesto a "clandestine" radio started beaming to Terra. Was weak and tended to fade and was supposed to be concealed, presumably in a crater, and could be worked only certain hours until brave Terran scientists managed to rig automatic repeat. Was near frequency of "Voice of Free Luna" which tended to drown it out with brassy boasts. Terrans remaining in Luna had BO chance to make signals. Those who had chosen to stick with research were chaperoned by stilyagi every instant and locked into barracks to sleep. But "clandestine" station managed to get "truth" to Terra. Prof had been tried for deviationism and was under house arrest. I had been executed for treason. Hong Kong Luna had pulled out, declared self separately independent... might be open to reason. Rioting in Novylen. All food growing had been collectivized and blackmarket eggs were selling for three dollars apiece in Luna City... Battalions of female troopvs were being enlisted, each sworn, to kill at least one Terran, corridors of Luna City. Last was an almost-true. Many ladies wanted to do something militant and had formed a Home Defense Guard, "Ladies from Hades." But their drills were of a very practical nature -- and Hazel was sulking because Mum had not allowed her to join. Then she got over sulks and started "Stilyagi Debs," a very junior home guard which drilled after school hours, did not use weapons, concentrated on backing up stilyagi air  pressure corps, and practiced first aid -- and own noweapons fighting, which -- possibly -- Mum never learned. I don't know how much to tell. Can't tell all but stuff in history books is so wrong. I was no better a "defense minister" than "congressman." Not apologizing, had no training for either. Revolution is an amateur thing for almost everybody; Prof was only one who seemed to know what he was doing, and, at that, was new to him, too. He had never taken part in a successful revolution or ever been part of a government, much less head. As Minister of Defense I could not see many ways to defend except for steps already taken, that is, stilyagi air squads in warrens and laser gunners around ballistic radars. If F.N. decided to bomb, didn't see any way to stop them. Wasn't an interception missile in all Luna. And that's not a gadget you whomp up from bits and pieces. My word, wo couldn't even make fusion weapons with which such a rocket is tipped. But I went through motions. Asked same Chinee engineers who had built laserguns to take a crack at problem of intercepting bombs or IF missiles -- one same problem save th a missile comes at you faster. Then turned attention to other things. Simply hoped that F.N. would never bomb warrens. Some warrens, L-City in particular, were so deep down that they could probably stand direct hits. One cubic, lowest level of Complex where central part of Mike lived, bad been designed to withstand bombing. On other hand Tycho Under was a big natural bubble cave like Old Dome and roof was only meters thick; sealer on under side was kept warm with hot water pipes to make sure new cracks sealed -- would not take much of a bomb to crack TyCho Under. But is no limit to how big a fusion bomb can be. F.N. could bufld one big enough to smash LCity -- or theoretically even a Doomsday job that would split Luna like a melon and finish job some asteroid started at Tycho. If they did, couldn't see any way to stop them, so didn't worry. Instead put time on problems I could manage, helping at new catapult, trying to work up better aiming arrangements for laser drills around radars (and trying to get drfflmen to stick; half of them quit once price of ice went up), trying to arrange decentralized stand-by engineering controls for all warrens. Mke did designing on this. We grabbed every general-purpose computer we could find (paying in "nationals with ink barely dry), and I turned job over to McIntyre, former dnef engineer for Authority. Was a job within his talents and I couldn't do all rewiring and so forth, even if had tried. Held out biggest computer, one that did accounting for Bank of Hong Kong in Luna and also was clearing house there. Looked over its instruction manuals and decided was a smart computer for one that could not talk, so asked Mike if he could teach it ballistics? We made temporary link-ups to let two machines get acquainted and Mike reported it could learn simple job we wanted it for -- standby for new catapult -- although Mike would not care to ride in ship controlled by it; was too matter-of-fact and. uncritical. Stupid, really. W ell, didn't want it to w'histle tunes or crack jokes. Just wanted it to shove loads out of catarect velocity, then watch load approach Terra and give a nudge. HK Bank was not anxious to sell. But we had patriots on their board, wt promised to return it when emergency was over, and moved it to new site -- by rolligon, too big for tubes. Took all one dark semi-lunar. Had to jerry-rig a big airlock to get it out of Kong warren. I hooked it to Mike again and he undertook to teach art of ballistics against possibility that his linkage to new site might be cut in an attack. (You know what bank used to replace computer? Two hundred clerks working abacuses. Abacusi? You know, shpsticks with beads, oldest digital computer, so far back in pre-history that nobody knows wtho invented. Russki and Chinee Dd Nips have always used them, and small shops today.) Trying to improve laser drills into space-defense weapons was easier but less straightforward. We had to leave them mounted on original cradles; was neither time, steel nor metalsmiths to start fresh. So we concentrated on better aiming arrangements. Call went out for telescopes. Scarce -- what con fetches along a spyglass when transported? What market later to create supply? Surveying instruments and helmet binoculars were all we turned up, plus optical instruments confiscated in Terran labs. But we managed to equip drills with low--power big-field sights to coach-on with and highpower scopes for fine sighting, plus train and elevation circles and phones so that Mike could tell them where to point. Four drills we equipped with self-synchronous repeater drives so that Mike could control them himself. Liberated these selsyns at Richardson; astronomers used them for Bausch cameras and Schmidts in sky mapping. But big problem was men. Wasn't money, we kept upping wages. No, a drillman likes to work or wouldn't be in that trade. Standing by in a ready room day after day, waiting for alert that always turns out to be just another practice -- drove 'em crackers... They quit. One day in September I pulled an alert and got only seven drills manned. Talked it over with Wyoh and Sidris that night. Next day Wyoh wanted to know if Prof and I would okay bolshoi expense money? They fornied something Wyoh named "Lysistrata Corps." Never inquired into duties or cost, because next time I inspected a ready room found three girls and no shortage of drillmen. Girls were in uniform of Second Defense Gunners just as men were (drillmen hadn't bothered much with authorized uniform up to then) and one girl was wearing sergeant's stripes with gun captain's badge. I made that inspection very short. Most girls don't have muscle to be a drillman and I doubted if this girl could wrestle a drill well 'enough to justify that badge. But regular gun captain was on job, was no harm in girls learning to handle lasers, morale was obviously high; I gave matter no more worry. P rof underrated his new Congress. Am sure he never wanted anything but a body which would rubberchop what we were doing and thereby do make it "voice of people." But fact that new Congressmen were not yammerheads resulted in them doing more than Prof intended. Especially Committee on Permanent Organization, Resolutions, and Government Structure. Got out of hand because we were all trying to do too much. Permanent heads of Congress were Prof, Finn Nielsen and Wyoh. Prof showed up only when he wanted to speak to them -- seldom. He spent time with Mike on plans and analysis (odds shortened to one in five during September), time with Stu and Shennie Sheehan on propaganda, controlling official news to IF Eartliside, very different "news" that went via "clandestine" radio, and reslanting news that came up from Earthside. Besides that he had finger in everything. I reported to him once a day, and all ministries both real and dummy did same. I kept Finn Nielsen busy; he was my "Commander of Aimed Forces". He had his lasergun infantry to supervise -- six men with captured weapons on day we nabbed warden, now eight hundred scattered all through Luna and armed with Kongville monkey copies. Besides that, Wyoh's organizations, Stilyagi Air Corps, Stlyagi Debs, Ladies from Hades, Irregulars (kept for morale and renamed Peter Pan's Pirates) and Lysistrata Corps -- all these halfway-military groups reported through Wyoh to Finn. I shoved it onto him. I had oth problems, such as trying to be a computer mechanic as well as a "statesman" when jobs such as installing that computer at new catapult site had to be done. Besides which, I am not an executive and Finn had talent for it. I shoved First and Second Defense Gunners under him, too. But first I decided that these two skeleton regiments were a "brigade" and made Judge Brody a "brigadier." Brody knew as much about military matters as I did -- zero. But was widely known, highly respected, had unliimited hard sense -- and had been a drillman before he lost leg. Finn was not a drillman, so couldn't be placed directly over them; they wouldn't have listened. I thought about using my co-husband Greg. But Greg was needed at Mare Undarum catapult, was only mechanic who had followed every phase of construction. Wyoh helped Prof, helped Stu, had her own organization, made trips out to Mare Undarum- and had little time to preside over Congress; task fell on senior committee chairman. Wolf Korsakov... who was busier than any of us; LuNoHoCo was running everything Authority used to run and many new things as well. Wolf had a good committee. Prof should have kept closer eye on k. Wolf had caus his boss, Moshai Baum, to be elected vice chairman and had in all seriousness outlined for his committee iM'oblem of determining wihat permanent government should be. Then Wolf had turned back on it. Those busy laddies split up and did it -- studied forms of government in Carnegie Library, held subcommittee meetings, three or four people at a time (few enough to worry Prof d he known) -- and when Congress met early in September to ratify some appointments and elect more congressmen-at-large, instead of adjourning. Comrade Baum had gavel and they recessed -- and met again and turned selves into committee-of-the-whole and passed a resolution and next thing we knew entire Congress was a Constitutional Convention divided into working groups headed by those subcommittees . I think Prof was shocked. But he couldn't undo it, had all been proper under rules he himself had written. But he rolled with punch, went to Novylen (where Congress now met -- more central) and spoke to them with usual good nature and simply cast doubts on what they were doing rather than telling them flatly they were wrong. After gracefully thanking them he started picking early drafts to pieces: "Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom -- if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any tyrant. Move slowly, be hesistant, puzzle out the consequences of every word. I would not be unhappy if this convention sat for ten years before reporting -- but I would be frightened if you took less than a year. "Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional... for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments. For example, I note m one draft report a proposal for setting up a commission to divide Luna into congressional districts and to reapportion them from time to time according to population. "This is. the traditional way. Therefore it should be suspect, considered guilty until proved innocent. Perhaps you feel that this is the ony way. May I suggest others? Surely w'here a man lives is the least important thing about him. Constituencies might be formed by dividing people by occupation... or by age... or even alphabetically. Or they might not be divided, every member elected at large. And do not object that this would make k impossible for any man not widely known throughout Luna to be elected; that might be the best possible thing for Luna. "You might even consider installing the candidates who receive the least number of votes; unpopular men may be just the sort to save you from a new tyrann". Don't reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous -- think about it! In past history popularly-elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies. # #X)ut if representative government turns out to be your intention there still may be ways to achieve it better than the territorial district. For example you each represent about ten thousand human beings, perhaps seven thousand of voting age -- and some of you were elected by slim majorities. Suppose instead  election a man were qualified for office by petition Mgned by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with eight thousand supporters might have two votes in this body. DiffiIF culties, objections, practical points to be worked out -- many of them! But you could work them out... and thereby the chronic sickness of representative government, the disgruntled minority which feels -- correctly -- that it has been disenfranchised. "But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straight jacket! "I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent -- the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it? "But in writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies... no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation... no involuntary taxation. Comrades, if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your government should pro-mise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome. "What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing. Please remember always that the Lunar Authority was created for the noblest of purposes by just such sober and well-intentioned men, all popularly elected. And with that thought I leave you to your labors. Thank you." "Gospodin President! Question of information! You said 'no involuntary taxation' -- then how do you expect us to pay for things? Tanstaafl!" "Goodness me, sir, that's your problem. I can think of several ways. Voluntary contributions just as churches support themselves... government-sponsored lotteries to which no one need subscribe... or perhaps you Congressmen should dig down into your own pouches and pay for whatever is needed; that would be one way to keep government down in size to its indispensable functions whatever they may be. If indeed there are any. I would be satisfied to have the Golden Rule be the only law; I see no need for any other, nor for any method of enforcing it. But if you really believe that your neighbors must have laws for their own good, why shouldn't you pay for it? Comrades, I beg you -- do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.V P rof bowed and left, Stu and I followed him. Once in an otherwise empty capsule I tackled him. "Prof, I liked much that you said... but about taxation aren't you talking one thing and doing another? Who do you think is going to pay for aH this spending we're doing?" He was silent long moments, then said, "Manuel, my only ambition is to reach the day when I can stop pretending to # a chief executive." "Is no answer!" "You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government -- and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government -- sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive. And can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their anti-social hobby?" "Still doesn't say how to pay for what we are doing now." " 'How,' Manuel? You know how we are doing it. We're stealing it. I'm neither proud of it nor ashamed; it's the means we have. If they ever catch on, they may eliminate us -- and that I am prepared to face. At least, in stealing, we have not created the villainous precedent of taxation." "Prof, I hate to say this -- " "Then why say it?" "Because, damn it. I'm in it as deeply as you are... and want to see that money paid back! Hate to say it but what you just said sounds like hypocrisy." He chuckled. "Dear Manuel! Has it taken you all these years to decide that I am a hypocrite?" "Then you admit it?" "No. But if it makes you feel better to think that I am one, you are welcome to use me as your scapegoat. But I am not a hypocrite to myself because I was aware the day we declared the Revolution that we would need much money and would have to steal it. It did not trouble me because I considered it better than food riots six years hence, cannibalism in eight. I made my choice and have no regrets." I shut up, silenced but not satisfied. Stu said, "Professor, I'm glad to hear that you are anxious to stop being President." "So? You share our comrade's misgivings?" "Only in part. Having been born to wealth, stealing doesn't fret me as much as it does him. No, but now that Congress has taken up the matter of a constitution I intend to find time to attend sessions. I plan to nominate you for King." Prof looked shocked. "Sir, if nominated, I shall repudiate it. If elected, I shall abdicate." IF "Don't be in a hurry. It might be the only way to get the sort of constitution you want. And that I want, too, with about your own mild lack of enthusiasm. You could be proclaimed King and the people would take you. We Loonies aren't wedded to a republic. They'd love the idea -- ritual and robes and a court and all that." ."No!" "Ja da When the time comes, you won't be able to refuse. Because we need a king and there isn't another candidate who would be accepted. Bernardo the First, King of Luna and Emperor of the Surrounding Spaces." "Stuart, I must ask you to stop. I'm becoming quite ill." "You'll get used to it. I'm a royalist because I'm a democrat. I shan't let your reluctance thwart the idea any more than you let stealing stop you." I said, "Hold it, Stu. You say you're a royalist because you're a democrat?" "Of course. A king is the people's only protection against tyranny... especially against the worst tyrants, themselves. Prof will be ideal for the job... because he does not want the job. His only shortcoming is that hef is a bachelor with no heir. We'll fix that. Fm going to name you as his heir. Crown Prince. His Royal Highness Prince Manuel de la Paz, Duke of Luna City, Admiral General of the Armed Forces and Ultimate Protector of the Weak." I stared. Then buried face in hands. "Oh, Bogr M onday # October # about nineteen hundred I was headed home after a hard day of nonsense in our offices in Raffles. Delegation of grain farmers wanted to see Prof and I had been called because he was in Hong KongLuna. Was rude to them. Had been two months of embargo and. F.N. had never done us favor of being sufficiently narsty. Mostly they had ignored us, made no reply to our claims. I suppose to do so would have been to recognize us. Stu and Sheenie and Prof had been hard put to slant news from Earthside to keep up a warlike spirit. At first everybody kept his p-suit handy. They wore them, helmets under arms, going to and from work in corridors. But that slacked off as days went by and did not seem to be any danger. P-suit is nuisance when you don't need it, so bulky. Presently taprooms began to display signs: "No P-suits Inside." If a Loonie can't stop for half a liter on way home because of p-suit, he'll leave it home or at station or wherever he needs it most. My word, had neglected matter myself that day -- got this call to go back to office and was halfway there before I remembered. Had just reached easement lock thirteen when I heard and felt a sound that scares a Loonie more than anything else -- a Chuffl in distance followed by a draft. Was into lock almost without undogging, then balanced pressures and through, dogged it behind me and ran tor our home lock -- through it and shouting: "P-suits, everybody! Get boys in from tunnels and close all airtight doors!" Mum and Milla were only adults in sight. Both looked startled, got busy without a word. I burst into workshop, grabbed p-suit. "Mike! Answer!" "Im here, Man," he said calmy "Heard explosive pressure drop. What's situation?" "That's level three, L-City. Rupture at Tube Station West, now partly controlled. Six ships landed, L-City under attack -- " 'Wifl?" "Let me finish, Man. Six transports landed, L-City under attack by troops, Hong Kong inferred co be, phone lines broken at relay Bee Ell. Johnson City under attack; I have dosed the armor doors between J-City and Complex Linder. I cannot see Novylen but blip projection indicites it is under attack. Same for Churchill. Tycho Under. One ship in high ellipsoid over me, rising, inferred to be command ship. No other blips." "Six ships -- where in hell were Your He answered so calmly that I steadied down. "Farside aipproach, Man; Fm Wind back there. They came in on tight Garriscm didoes, skhmnmg the peaks. I barely saw the chop-off for Luna City. The ship at J-CHy k die only one I can see; the other kncfings I condushrdy Infer feom die baBistics #st siiown by blip tracks I heard the break-in at Tube West, L-City, and can now hear fighting in Novylen. The rest is conclusive inference, probability above point nine nine. I called you and Professor at once." Caut breath. "Operation Hard Rock, Prepare to Execute." "Program ready. Man, not being able to reach you, I used your voice. Play back?" "Nyet -- Yes! Dar H eard "myself" tell watch officer at old catapult head to go on red alert for "Hard Rock" -- first load at launch, all others on belts, everything cast loose, but do not launch until ordered by me personally -- then launch to plan, full automatic. 'T" made him repeat back. "Okay," I told Mike. "Drill gun crews?" "Your voice again. Manned, and then sent back to ready rooms. That command sihip won't reach aposelenion for three hours four point seven minutes. No target for more than five hours." "He may maneuver. Or launch missiles." "Slow down, Man. Even a missile rU see with minutes to spare. It's full bright lunar up there now. How much do you want the men to take? Unnecessarfly." "Uh... sorry. Better let me talk to Greg." "Play back." Heard "my" voice talking to my co-husband at Mare Undarum; "I" sounded tense but calm. Mike had given him situation, had told him to prepare Operation IF Little David's Sling, keep it on stand-by for full automatic. "I had assured him that master computer would keep standby computer programmed, and shift would be made automatically if communication was broken. "I" also told him that he must take command and use own judgment if communication was lost and not restored after four hours -- listen to Earthside radio and make up own mind. Greg had taken it quietly, repeated his orders, then had said, "Mannie, tell family I love them." Mike had done me proud; he had answered for me with just right embarrassed choke, "ril do that, Greg -- and look, Greg, I love you, too. You know that, don't you?" "I know it, Mannie... and I'm going to say a special prayer for you." "Thanks, Greg." "'Bye, Mannie. Godo what you must." So I went and did what I had to do. We weren't ready for it. But would never be readier; the battle for Luna had been joined #. Title #. United States Code). #. Date of filing: October #, #. #. TlUe of Pobilcatlon : If lCaga#lne. #. Frequency of Issue; Monthly. #. Location of known oIBce of publication: #I Hudson Sweet, New York, New York #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business oCBces of the publishers: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Names and addresses of publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Editor: Frerlk Pohl, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Managing Editor: None. #. Owner: Qalazy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #; Robert M. Guinn (solo stockholder). #I Hudson Street. New York, New York #. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. Paragraphs # and # Include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of ttie person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as td the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear on the books of tli company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that M a bona fide owner. Names and addre.sses of individuals who are stockholdei's of a corporation Wlildi Itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporatiMi tastn been included in paragraphs # and # when the interests of such individuals are equivalent to I pereeot er more of the total amoiwit of the stock or securities of the publlshilng eorpolratlon. #. A. Astnl m copies printed (net press run): average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #; slngm lisue nearest to filing date. #. B. Paid circulation; #. Bales through dealers and carrlera, MreOt vendors and counter sales: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #, single Issue nearest to filing date, #. #. Mall subscriptions; Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; single issue nearest to filing date. #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. conies each Issue during preceding # month.s, #; single issue nearest to filing date, #. D. Free Distribution (including samples) by mall, carrier or other means: average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months: none; single issue nearest to filing date, none. E. Total distribution (sum of C and D) ; average no. copies each issue preceding # months: #; single Issue nearest to flllng date, #. F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Avwage no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #; single issue nearest to filing date, #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown in A) : Average no. eoplea each Itsue during preeedlng # months, #; single issue nearest to filing date. #. I certify that the statement made by me above are correct and complete. Robert M. Guinn. Publisher. Dear Editor; As a science-fiction fan of many years and an avid reader of your excellent magazine for just as long, I thouglit I would check with you on a striking fact regarding the recent power failure. Fritz Leiber wrote a story a few years ago called The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity. A reading of this story may strike you with the same chill that hit me. Is Mr. Leiber available for comment? And should we have an ambassador to electrons? -- George Ann Monahan, # Wright Avenue, Wakefield, Rhode Island.    Dear Editor; D. Bruce Berry brings up an interesting idea about getting readers to write or to read letter columns. Why not dwell on it more? There was a time when readers columns were much more vital to a magazine and some readers misused them and some editors decided to discourage such departments for that or other reasons. They are indicative of a lively enthusiasm, and lively enthusiasm is contagious. Part of the lack of success is the squeezed layout for letters. Why not start them inside the front cover in large type with a good heading and then continue them in back with smaller type? A lively readers' department generates lively letters. And it has to be two-way. People who ask questions like to be answered... even if they get told it is none of their business. Why not try this expanded layout to the lead story? Why not double your budget for the first art work in the magazine even if it isn't the best story? After the cover it is the one that sells more magazines than anything else. Why not use a double spread and larger type for two or four pages so that the reader is easily hooked into the story before he is hardly aware of H? And continue a double spread art work for a few more pages, then you can revert to solid fine print after the reader is captured. This is like a gift store with sidewalks and display cases, and open doors and counters so arranged that you are off the street and in the middle of the merchandise before you are aware of it. I think the cover is terribly important. It should stand out on the newsstand, catch the eye, arouse the curiosity and appeal, not repel. Everyone knows good philosophy about cover display, but how the devil do jrtt put it into practice? #, for one, tirink that nice cir-shap spacehips agrainst a nice set of stars is Tery deadening and can only appeal to those of us who grew up with cience fiction. I think color, action, a hint of "muchness or "moreand-more-for-your-time" (not for your moneymoney is cheap) and a bit of mystery are important. Don't spell anything out to a gnat's eyebrow on the cover. Why read it if you do? Space ships in space usually spell out everything. A promise of a new rewarding experience should go with the cover. It should not be tight and squeezed in, but should suggest that it goes beyond the boundaries of the cover in all directions. Particularly, there should be come color or movement toward the "turning edge of the magazine" to make someone want to open it and look. They had better find something provocative inside right away! And my idea of several double spreads and illustrations in the first few pages seems sound and important. You aren't Life magazine, but you can use a little of their merchandising. We could convince education people that science fiction is more interesting than the cheaper spread on TV with a massive advertising campaign sponsored by a governWhat is wrong with personal salesmanship? It isn't really the duty of a reader to sell the magazine to a prospective reader, but some fans have done so for years. Some others have personalities that would not make for good salesmanship. Leave a good issue in a public place. Not a bus station -- they get swept up. Or hand the best story to someone who can appreciate it. Start a slow sales pitch, starting with what the prospect thinks he knows and believes. Avoid in-group jargon. The biggest stumbling block to science fiction is the same as the stumbling block to race relations -- man's instinctive fear of the unfamiliar. Sneak, sneak, sneak and smile, smile and flatter, flatter. How wise you are to read this I! -- only don't overdo it. I suspect that science-fiction fans are becoming passive innocent bystanders though, who, like # persons in New York, wouldn't even call the police to prevent a murder. You wouldn't raise your voice to help science fiction or to promote space travel -- or would you? Or can I make any of you mad? -- Rosco Wright, Art Department, Western Montana College, Dillon, Montana.    Dear Editor: My prime reason for reading If is, I like the stories. How you can publish such an incredible lineup of authors as E. E. Smith, Keith Laumer, Robert A. Heinlein at the same old price is beyond me! And I like your practice of including a brand-new writer in each issue. How long do you think it will be before you run out of new writers? -- SSgt. Clifford Hosford, P. O. Box #, Lowry A.F.B. Station, Denver, Colorado #.  Looks like we never will -- the more we print, the more we get! This month, for instance a Texas lawyer gives us Otded Nail. -- The Editor    Dear Editor: Do you know of a national organization of science-fiction fan clubs? (Heinlein's Indigant Chowder und Parading Society) and I am interested in national affiliation. It seems that the longer your stories get, the better they are -- so keep publishing SF's best novels! -- Alan Zisman, # Jerome Avenue, Hillside, New Jersey #.    Dear Editor: Several of my friends and I agree that the wraparound cover of the October If is a great idea. We'd like to see it done more often ! -- Danny Mathews, # Jana Place, Bossier City, Ltouisiana.    Dear Editor: I was somewhat startled by D. Bruce Berry's comments that If and Worlds of Tomorrow are basically entertainment magazines. They got me to thinking about vhat science fiction has become. Magazine sf started off with a bang. BE MS, beauties and superatomic-destructo devices literally littered the scene. Magazine sf was basically entertainment in those days, presenting novel ideas about novel inventions to its readership. But in time, sf mellowed, became more subtle. The stories contained real people, not just the evilly evil badguy, who is inevitably subdued by the goody goody goodguy. "Message stories" appeared more frequently -- the "how mankind should be saved" type. Now we seem to be bogging down. Sf no longer has a bottomless well of novel inventions sufficiently exciting to produce an actual "sense of wonder" so prevalent in the beginning. With the result that we are straining what "inventions" we have to the Hmit. What I'm trying to say is that instead of producing entirely different levels of ideas and innovations, we are falling back on the type of fiction that was present in Gemsback's day. Sf is a unique field. Mainstream fiction can only comment on how man, his mental makeup and phychology, is today. But sf can present a far-flung view of his makeup in the future. Our purpose is not mere entertainment. We already have enough of that: witness the witless boob tube, or the incessant "sounds" coming from the radio. This is our entertainment. Why be like everyone else and bring yourself down to this level? Take a look at Gaughan's cover on ttie Oct. '# issue of . Is this representative of the full potential of sf? Let's put some meat into science fiction. Retief and Gree stories are okay, to a certain extent. But let's not make it our goal in publishing. In closing, I was wondering if there was any way to assure the safe arrival of subscription copies? Those of us who like copies in good condition find scrunched spines and covers unbecoming to the magazine. And besides, it's also harder to read. -- Dan Barnett, # Skyway, Paradise, Calif., #. # Actually our goal in publishing is pretty simple: To print stories we enjoy, hoping that enough others will also enjoy them to keep us in business. So beautifully simple in theory -- but, ah! how complex in putting it into effect! That's it for another month. Next month a really fine new novel -- Earthhlood, by Laumer and Brown, one of the few we've read that we think thing can follow The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress without letdown, See you then... -- The Editor. IF  # , # "Your # check arrived this morning by Special Delivery. Thanks ever so much for your telephone call and prompt payment. It still doesn't seem possible. It's been z great thrill." That's the way Emory Mead of Albany, N. Y., just one of our many big winners, reacted to receiving his cash prize. Dozens of men and women of all ages have cashed in as Our Club winners got their cash awards for solving puzzles in their leisure time. Our Club also has awarded huge prizes for many other kinds of contests. We've awarded cash in hundred-and-thousand-dollar units to retirees, sewing women, farmers, salesmen, war veterans, office workers, clerks, secretaries -- people who never before dreamed of having the kind of money that movie stars make. This announcement is an invitation to you, as a reader of this publication, to find out for yourself if you have the talent to win up to # in cash. If you are over # and like to play word games of any kind, the information below may lead you to thousands of dollars in extra cash that you may use as you wish. Mrs. H. C. Despain, Houston, Tex., won # in cash in one month. Mrs. Fiorence Humphrey, Cincinnati, won # on just one puzzie. Members of our Club win cash prizes at home, just by solving puzzles and entering Club contests. They turn an educational and enjoyable hobby into pure profit. You can too! only limited competition. Only members of the Club may compete and win. In # we offered our members #. We actually paid out more cash than we said we would-#, to be exact. In #, we again offered #. Again, we paid out more than we promised-#. And now we're offering our members # in cash prizes. Most contest groups offer about # or # a year. Our Club gives you the opportunity to win double that every month! As a member of our Club you will be eligible to enter every cash prize contest we sponsor and you'll get at least four new contests each month. You'll have three weeks to solve each set of contests. One week after the deadline, you'll receive a new copy of our Puzzle Lovers Newspaper with names and addresses of all winners, correct solutions, and your new Newspaper, the only newspaper in the world exclusively devoted to contests (and it's published for members only). When your free copy of our newspaper arrives, sit down in a quiet place and read about our winners, our prizes, our contests. Try our stimulating word games to see if you can do them. You are under no obligation to enter our contests. If you do decide to go after our cash, there are no boxtops, no jingles to complete, nothing to buy. Clip the coupon now and please be sure to print your name and address clearly. Then read about # winners like Mrs. Belle Smith of Yakima, Wash. Discover how hundreds of other members cashed in just by doing our puzzles in their spare time. Find out all about this exciting and profitable hobby now. You may receive your first big prize in a few weeks. I Gentlemen, I I Send me a free copy of  I your newspaper plus all deI I tails on your cash prize j I contests. I am under absoj I Address lutely no obligation to pay  I anything. If I join the Club j I I may compete for all prizes  I and spend the cash I win  I any way I want. j I State Zip G.P. # j # First Year V Security-PrestigeIn our first calendar year we did a gross of #. Without constant help from the Duraclean home office such growth never would have been possible." M. L. nUnois ?#S# in One Month horn" My" JF. A. Texas # for # Hours Work "I have done hotels, studios, restaurants and churches. That is where the big money is. Example: One Saturday, # in #I hours. Monday, # in # hours. I have also contracted to clean # square feet of carpet for a store for #." G. F. Wisconsin r. esjig. H. P. Ohio # Job Finisd in one day did the Sorority House in one day for #. This business is in its infancy." H. L. B. Texas hundreds of others -- got started in this Big Money business. Send for your copy now. Let me give you the same start I gave these men! In one way, the big earnings rejjorted here might be called exceptional. In another way, there is nothing exceptional about them. That's because any man who will follow instructions and is business should be able to do as well under similar conditions. Each of the men quoted here had talents and abilities different from those of alb the rest. But each had one thing in common -- a desire to win personal independence in a business of his own. And each man took hve identical steps to reach his goal. #. Each one read an announcement such as you are reading now. #. He wrote for complete information. #. He read the literature we sent him. #. He gained new confidence in himself and the belief that he could suc?eed with Duraclean. #. He accepted our offer to help him get started. Later, he wrote to tell us about his success. In eabh case, remember, the first step was to write to Duraclean for information. If you would like to own a business of your own, why don't you do as these men did -- right now. When I hear from you, I will send you facts about the Duraclean Franchise that will open your eyes. You will see why a Franchise business such as ours makes success for the individual the rule rather than the exception. The Duraclean home service business has been tried and tested. 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' Name City Sta lie Zip Code... , , MAYJ# #  Man Against the Maker of Suns! -- and more of your favorite writers with their finest science-fiction stories! Could you write for television? ByMaxShulman X rankly, I don't know. But this I do know: I often paid # and more for scripts turned out by people who should have been arrested for impersonating writers. How such people got to be high-priced TV writers is not as mysterious as it seems. Television is an insatiable maw into which scripts must be fed at a rate unprecedented in the history of entertainment. It is a grateful producer indeed who consistently gets scripts which have been written with real understanding of television's powers and limitations. To help train new TV writers, I joined with Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight Zone, winner of five Emmy Awards) and ten other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We pooled everything we had learned in our long years in the business to devise four professional writing courses that men and women, seriously interested in writing, could take in their own homes in their free time. story (or documentary or commercial) in quick, visual sequences... the knack of thinking and writing with a lens! Through a series of carefully planned assignments, you learn as you write -- guided by our own specially organized textbooks. Your assignments are painstakingly edited and revised by our staff of instructors, themselves all professional writers. Under our supervision, an instructor works with you by mail, much as a producer or editor works with an established writer. Do you have an aptitude for writing? To help you (and us) decide whether you've got the stuff to be a writer, we have worked up a revealing aptitude test. The coupon below will bring you a copy, along with a #S-page School brochure. If your test indicates aptitude, you are eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under no obligation to do so. How to write "with a lens" All four of our courses give you a solid foundation in basic writing skills. And three of them (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Advertising) give you training in the techniques of television. You learn to build interesting, believable characters; how to write dialogue that rings true; how to plot convincingly. Therf you develop the specialized approach that TY demands: the facility to tell your Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith Famous Writers School Dept. # #, Westport, Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have an aptitude for writing. Please mail me, without obligation, a copy of your writing aptitude test and information about the courses you offer. Mr. Mrs Miss Age (please print) Street f'ify #nnp County State Accredited by Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Vel. #, No. S Fnderik FoM, Editor Darid Portan, Producfton Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Maris fishor. Subs. Mgr, by A. E. Van Vogt by Gene Wolfe by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown by Carroll J. Clem by R. A. Lafferty by Lester del Rey (Guest Editorial) by Lin Carter by The Readers IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishiog Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol, #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York, #. #e per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States. Canada, Mexioo, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. An material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. AH stories are fio tion, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Ouinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Gnest Editorial T hirty years ago I wrote a fan letter to e magarine in which I asked the eternal question about a definition of science-fiction. A copy of the magazine lies on my desk now, with a Pitman scrawl on the margin to answer my owm question: If literature is a mirror to life, then sf is a mirror to possibility." I'm sure I considered that very clever a generation ago. Today, I'm less certain, unfortunately. There are two other things beside the old magazine in front of me that focus my doubts. One is a picture of the surface of the Moon as released by Tass, taken as a result of mankind's first actual landing on an alien world. Man has not yet reached that ancient challenge, but he has sent his eyes ahead and has seen it from the close vantage of his own height. Here is the mirror of possibility provided by science and technology. Beside that is a list of choice science fiction, I gather. There's an organization of about a year's standing, calling itself Science Fiction Writers of America, which is planning another set of awards for the best stories of the year. They have a highly liberal system of nomination, and this is the list of all the stories judged worthy by the members. It might be called the mirror of possibility provided by science fiction -- but only by an extraordinary exercise of charity. There are a few good stories listed -- enough so that a diligent voter can almost fill the categories. But perforce, possibility is hardly the criterion that must lie behind the majority of listings. Scientific possibility isn't exactly faulted. Grenerally, it simply isn't taken into account. I know that some of the writers of the stories read accounts of modem scientific progress, but they don't bother stories. The men who filled the # issue of the magazine with fiction were far more current in their real science than those of #. (This observation, of course, refuses to accept psionios as scientific background, because no new advance has been made in that for # years.) I gather that writers today aren't interested in trying to use knowledge gained during the past couple of decades. The easy excuse seems to be that science has caught up with science fiction, so the fiction can't operate in that field any more. I can only assume that they really mean that # science has caught up with # science fiction and that there isn't enough cribbable new stuff in the old stories. Certainly with the new frontiers think could find enough speculation for three more decades of fictional exploration. Btiochemdstry akne offers a hundred new ideas for novels. But it seems that most of the writers today in the field don't care about that. They have found the new realities -- the ancient humanistic semi-sciences, and they have been exploring # sociology and # analytical psychology, more or less. Human values, they tetH me, ww have replaced machine values in science fiction. Pee, fi, ho hum. T iere is no argument about the fact that human beings, rather than mere gadgets, must be the fountainheads of the future. There never was any such doubt. If the shonber works of H. G. Wells had failed to teach this lesson, I could have learned it in # from the stories of Raymond Z. Gallun and several other writers. Of course science fiction must hold up a mirror to possibility in its human characters. But as I look at the picture of the moon and consider the selected list of our field's current literature, I wonder where the mirror went. The lunar photograph shows an aspect of the near future that must be met by humans and fitted into future human values. Any future reality or possibility must mirror this, but I cannot recognize it in the humanity I find generally depicted. Is this the race to launch a thousand ships and tackle the crater walls of Selene? We're going to need more than protaganists for the decades ahead, I'm afraid.' We're going to need men of devotion. Don't tell it to the professors of literature who have misunderstood the bitter love of Fitzgerald to make the current eddy in the 'mainstream", but we are even going to need old-fashioned -- shhh ! -- heroes. And we'll get them, because in all our reality we've always had them and still have them, and there is no other possibility to a viable race of men. heroes once -- Oh Gee Whiz heroes. They were a bit crude at times as they stormed Olympus to throw the gmtlelt  hnmBOidl in the face of the gods, but they were never dull. Now, however, time has rolled along. New writers have found new values, skmted to tiiose vaihms tbat the critics of Academe and wooid-be Academe can comprehend. Now we have GeWalt protagonist. There are goiing to be human and technical problems to face and to solve eventually in the future possibilities science mirrors for us. Probably some of the men who touch down where the photograph was taken are going to die -- and die happily, just as they are now knowingly volunteering to take the wsk. And other men will live -- by efforts that would literally be incredible in any fiction. Men have done such things in reality throughout history. Look up Xenophon's Anabasis or the account of Peary's Polar Expedition, for example. They only foreshadow future possibility, since they took place in relative familiar environments. This year, my Chinese friend tells me, is the year of the Horse. (I haven't had the bravado to ask what last year was.) It, has, of course, nothing to do with emotional narcosis, but refers to a noble animal that has often carried courageous, intelligent and dignified humans into deeds of reality and of derring-do. By riding very hard toward some honest grail, science fiction should find this a good year in which to catch up to #. I wonder if the next list will justify my extreme optimism? -- Lester del Key f IF  Complete Short Novel I N at Cemp, a Class C Silkie, passed the man -- and stopped. Something about the other triggered a signal in that portion of his nervous system which -- even in his human state -- retained a quota of his Silkie ability. He couldn't remember -- hard as he tried -- ever having felt that particular signal before. Cemp turned in the street and looked back. The other man had paused at the near comer. Then, as the light became green, he walked briskly toward the far sidewalk. He was about Cemp's height of slightly over six feet and seemed about the same build -- a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was dark brown, like Cemp's, and he wore a dark gray suit, as did Cemp. Now that they were several hundred feet apart, the initial impression he had had of somebody familiar was not so clear. Yet, after only a slight hesitation, Cemp rapidly walked after the man, presently came up to him, and said courteously, "May I speak to you?" The man stopped. At close range, the resemblance between them was truly remarkable, suggesting consanguinity. Blue-gray eyes, even nose, firm nKuth, shape of ears, strong neck, and the very way he held himself, were similar. Cemp said, "I wonder if you are aware that you and I are practically twins." The man's face twisted slightly. Lips curled into a faint sneer. The eyes gazed scornfully at Cemp. He said in an exact replica of Cemp's baritone voice: "It was my intent that you notice. If you hadn't this first time, then I would have approached you again. My name is A-Brem." Cemp was silent, startled. He detected in the man's tone and manner something akin to hostility. Contempt, he analyzed wonderingly. H ad the other been merely a human being who had somehow recognized a Silkie in human form, Cemp would have considered it one of those occasional incidents. Known Silkies were sometime sought out by humans and insulted. Usually, the human who did such a foolish act could be evaded, or good-naturedly parried, or won over. But once in a while a Silkie had to fight. But the man's resemblance to himself indicated that this encounter was different. As he had these thoughts, the stranger's cynical gray-blue eyes were gazing into Cemp's. The man's lips parted in a derisive smile, showing even white teeth. "At approximately this moment," he said, "every Silkie in the solar system is receiving a communication from his alter ego." He paused; again the insolent smile. "I see that has alerted you, and you're bracing yourself -- " It was true. Cemp had abruptly decided that, whether the other's statement was true or not, he could not let him get away. The man continued: " -- bracing yourself to try to seize me. It can't be done, for I match you in every way." "You're a Silkie?" Cemp asked. "I'm a Silkie." By all the logic of Silkie history, that had to be a false claim. And yet there was the unmistakable, sensational resemblance to himself. But Cemp did not change his mind. Even if this were a Silkie, he himself had a superiority possessed by no other Silkie. In a clash and direct contact he had had with an alien life form the year before, he had learned previously unknown techniques of body control. It had been decided by the Silkie Authority that he should not communicate his newly gained ability to any other Silkie. He hadn't. That extra knowledge was now IF his advantage -- if the other were indeed a Silkie. "Ready for the message?" said the man, insolently. Cemp, who was ready for the battle of his life, nodded curtly. "It's an ultimatum." "I'm waiting." Grimly. "You are to cease and desist from your association with human beings. You are commanded to return to the nation of Silkies. You have a week to make up your mind. After that date you will be considered a traitor and will be treated as traitors have always been, without mercy." Since there was no "nation" of Silkies, and never had been, Cemp -- after considering the unexpected "ultimatum" for a moment, and dismissing it -- made his attack. He still didn't quite believe that his "twin" was a Silkie. So he launched a minimum electric charge on one of the magnetic bands that he could use as a human. Enough to render unconsciousness but not damage. T o his dismay, a Silkie magnetic screen as powerful as anything he could muster warded off the energy blow. So it was a Silkie. The stranger stared at him, teeth showing, eyes glinting with sudden rage. "I'll remember this!" he snarled. "You'd have hurt me if I didn't have a defense." Cemp hesitated, questioning his own purpose. It didn't have to be capture. "Look," he urged, "why don't you come with me to the Silkie Authority? If there is a Silkie nation, normal communication is the best way of proving it." Hie other Silkie began to back away. "I've done my duty," he muttered. "I'm not accustomed to fighting. You tried to kill me." He seemed to be in a state of shock. His eyes had changed again, looked dazed now. All the initial cocksureness was gone. He continued backing away. Cemp followed, uncertain. He was himself so highly trained a fighter, it was hard to grasp that here might be a Silkie who was actually not versed in battle. He soothed: "We don't have to fight. But you can't expect to deliver an ultimatum, and then go off into nowhere, as if you've done your part. You say your name is A-Brem. Where did you come from?" He was aware, as he spoke, that people had stopped in the street around them and were watching the strange drama of two men -- one retreating, the other pursuing, a slow step at a time. "First, if there's a Silkie nation, where has it -- have you -- been hiding all these years?" Cemp persisted. "Damn you, stop badgering me! You've got your ultimatum. You've got a week. Now leave me alone!" The alter ego had clearly not considered what he would do after delivering his message. His unpreparedness made the whole incident even more fantastic. But he was showing anger again; recovering his nerve. An electric discharge, in the jagged form of lightning, rode a magnetic beam of his own creation; struck at Cemp, crackling against the magnetic screen he kept ready to be triggered into existence. f The lightning bolt bounced away from Cemp, caromed off of a building, flashed across the sidewalk past several startled people and grounded itself on the metal grill of a street drain. "Two can play that game," said A-Brem in a savage tone. Cemp made no reply. The other's electrical beam had been maximum power for a Silkie in human form; death level potency. Somewhere nearby, a woman screamed. The street was clearing. People were falling away, seeking shelter. T he time had come to end this madness, or someone might be killed. Cemp acted on the evaluation that, for a reason that was not clear, this Silkie was not properly trained and was therefore vulnerable to a non-lethal attack by a technique involving a simple version of Levels of Logic. He wouldn't even have to use the secret ability he had learned from the alien a year before. The moment he made up his mind, he did a subtle energy thing. He modified a specific set of low energy force lines passing through his brain and going in the direction of ABrem. Instantly, there was manifested a strange logic implicit in the very structure and make-up of life. The logic of levels! The science that had been derived by human scientific method from the great Silkie ability for changing form. Each life cell had its own rigidity. Each gestalt of cells did a specific action, could not do other. Once stimulated, the "thought" in that particular nerve bundle went through its exact cycle, and if there were an accompanying motion, or emotion... that also manifested precisely and exactly and without qualification. Even more meaningful, more important -- a number of cell colonies could be joined together to form a new gestalt, and groups of such clusters had their special action. Such a colony gestalt was the sleep center in human beings. The method Cemp used wouldn't work on a Silkie in his Class C form. Even a B Silkie could fight off sleep. This Silkie in human form began to stagger. His eyes were suddenly heavy-lidded; and the uncontrolled appearance of his bodv showed that he was asleep on his feet. As the man fell, Cemp stepped forward and caught the body; prevented an injurious crash to the concrete sidewalk -- and simultaneously did a second, subtle thing. On another force line, he put a message that manipulated the unconsciousness gestalt in the other's brain. It was an attempt at complete control. The sleep cut off perception from the environment. Manipulation of the unconsciousness mechanism eliminated those messages from the brain's stored memory that would normally stimulate to wakefulness someone who was not really sleepy. Cemp was congratulating himself on his surprisingly easy capture -- when the body he held stiffened. Cemp, sensing an outside force, drew back. To his complete astonishment, the unconscious man rose straight up into the sky. IF I n his human form, Cemp was not able to determine the nature of the energy that could accomplish such an improbable feat. He should, he realized, transform to Silkie. He found himself hesitating. There was a rule against changing in full view of human beings. Abruptly, he recognized that this situation was unique; a never-before emergency. He transformed to Silkie and cut off gravity. The ten-foot body, shaped a little like a projectile, rose from the ground at missile speed. Most of his clothes, completely tom, fell to the ground. A few tattered remnants remained, but were swept away by the gale winds created by his passage. Unfortunately, all of five seconds had gone by while he made the transformation; and since several additional seconds had passed before he acted, he found himself pursuing a speck that was continuing to go straight up. What amazed him anew, was that, even with his Silkie perception, he could detect no energy from it, below it or around it. Yet its speed was as great as anything he could manage. Accordingly, after moments only, he realized that his pursuit would hot be in time; and that the body of A-Brem would reach an atmosphere height too rarified for a human to survive, unless he acted promptly. He therefore mercifully removed the pressure from the sleep and unconsciousness centers of the other's body. Moments later, he was disappointed -- but not surprised -- as he sensed from the other a shift to Silkie form; proof that the man had awakened and could now be responsible for himself. A-Brem continued straight on up, as a full-grown Silkie now; and it was presently obvious that he intended to risk going through the Van Allen belt. Cemp had no such foolhardy purpose. As the two of them approached the outer limits of the atmosphere, Cemp put a thought on a beam to a manned telstar unit in orbit around Earth. The thought contained simply the data about what had happened. The message sent, he turned back. Greatly disturbed by his experience -- and being without clothes for human wear -- he flew straight to the Silkie Authority. n C emp, descending from the sky down to the vast building complex that comprised the central administration for dealing with Silkies, saw that other Silkies were also coming in. He presumed, grimly, that thev were there for the same reason as himself. As the realization came, he scanned the heavens behind him with his Silkie senses, and perceived that scores more black spots were out there, hurtling closer. Divining imminent confusion, he slowed and stopped. Then, from his position in the sky, he telepathed Charley Baxter, his human contact inside the building, proposing a special plan to handle the emergency. Baxter was in a distracted state but presently his return thought I I came: "Nat, yours is just about the best idea we've had. Because you're right. This could be dangerous." There was a pause. Baxter must have gotten his message through to other of the Special People, for Cemp began to record a general Silkie warning: 'To all Silkies: It would be unwise for too many of you to concentrate at one time in one place. So divide into ten groups on the secret number system, plan G. Group One only approach and land. All others disperse till called." In the sky near Cemp, Silkies began to mill around. Cemp, who -- by the designated number system -- was in group three, veered off and climbed to the upper atmosphere, and darted over a thousand miles to his home on the southern tip of Florida. En route, he talked mentally to his wife, Joanne, who -- like Baxter -- was one of the Special People. And so, by the time he walked naked into the house, she had clothes laid out for him and knew as much as he about what had happened. A s Cemp dressed, he saw that she was in a womanly state of alarm; more concerned than he. She instantly believed that there was a Silkie nation, and that this meant that there would also be Silkie women. "Admit hr she said tearfully. "That thought has already crossed your mind, hasn't it?" "I'm a logical person," Cemp defended. "So Tve had fleeting thoughts about all possibilities. But, being sensible, I feel that we have a lot of things to explain before I can reject what we know of Silkie history." It was an accepted part of the human-Silkie relationship that Silkies had been developed from biological experiments. A human sperm and ovum had been brought together in a test tube under controlled conditions by scientists who utilized the "What's going to become of our marriage?" Joanne said in an anguished voice. "Nothi" will change." She sobbed, "I'm going to seem to you like a native woman of three hundred years ago who is married to a white man on a South Sea island -- and then white women start showing up." The wildness of her fantasying astounded Cemp. "It's not the same," he said. "I promise complete loyalty and devotion for the rest of our lives." "Nobody can promise anything in personal relations," she said. But his words seemed to reassure her after a moment. She dried her eyes and came over to him and allowed herself to be kissed. It was an hour before a phone call came from Charley Baxter. The man was apologetic for the delay, but explain that it was the result of a conference on Cemp's future actions. "It was a discussion just about you in all this," Baxter said. Cemp waited. The final decision was to continue to not let Cemp intermingle with other Silkies -- "for reasons that IP you know," Baxter said significantly. Cemp surmised that the reference was to his secret knowledge -- learned from the alien. Ever since, he had been put on special assignments that kept him away from other Silkies. Baxter now produced the information that only four hundred Silkies had been approached by alter egos. "The number actually reported in," he said, "is three hundred and ninetysix." Cemp was vaguely relieved, vaguely contemptuous. A-Brem's claim that all Silkies were targets was now proved to be propaganda. He had already shown himself to be an inept Silkie. The lie added one more degrading touch. "Some of them were pretty poor duplicates," said Baxter. "Apparently, mimicking another body is not a great skill with them." However -- he now admitted -- even four hundred was more than enough to establish the existence of a hitherto unknown group of Silkies. "Even if they are untrained," he said, "we've absolutely got to find out who they are and where they came from." "Is there no clue?" Cemp asked. No more than Cemp knew. "They all got away?" Cemp interjected, astounded. "No one did better than I?" "On the average, not as well," said Baxter. It seemed that most Silkies had made no effort to hold the strange Silkie who confronted them; had simply reported in and asked for instructions. "Can't blame them," said Baxter, He continued frankly, "But  might as well tell you that your fight and your reasons for fighting make you one of the two dozen Silkies we feel we can depend on in this matter. So here are your instructions -- " He concluded: "Take Joanne with you, but go at once!" T he sign said: "All the music in this building is Silkie music." Cemp, who never listened to any other kind, saw the faint distaste come into his wife's face. She caught his look and evidently his thought, for she said, "All right, so it sounds dead level to me, as if it's all the same note -- well, anyway, the same few notes, close together, repeated in various sickening combinations.". She stopped, shook her beautiful, blonde head, and said, "I guess Fm tense and afraid and need something wild and clashy." To Cemp, who could hear harmonies in the music that were beyond the reach of ordinary human cars, her outburst was but a part of the severe emotional reactions to things, to which he had long become accustomed from diis human female he was married to. Women, wed to Silkies, had a hard time making their peace with the realities of the relationship. As Joanne had put it more than once: "There you are with this physically perfect, beautiful male. But all the time you're thinking: 'This is not really a man; it's a monster that can change in a flash either into a fish-like thing or a creature of space.' But of course I wouldn't part with him for anything." The music sign was soon behind them, and they walked on into the interior of the museum. Their destination was the original laboratory, in which the first Silkie was supposed to have been produced. The lab occupied the center of the building; it had been moved there a hundred and ten years before -- according to a date on a wall plaque at the entrance. It had seemed to Baxter that a sharper study should be made of the artifacts of Silkie history. The entire structure of that history was now for the first time -- for the very first time -- being questioned. It was this task, of re-evaluting the past data, that he had assigned to Cemp and Joanne. The lab was brightly lighted. It had only one visitor: a rather plain young woman with jet black hair but no make-up and with ill-fitting clothes was standing at one of the tables beside the far doorway. As Cemp came in, a thought -- not his own -- touched his mind. He started to turn to Joanne. She, being one of the Special People, could communicate with him on thought level, and so he took it for granted that the message came from her. -- Took it for granted, that is, for several seconds. Belatedly, realization came that the thought had arrived on a magnetic carrier wave -- Silkie level. Cemp swung around and stared at the black-haired woman. She smiled at him, somewhat tensely, he noted; and then her thought came, unmistakably: "Please don't give me away. I was stationed here to convince any doubting Silkie." She dida't have to explain what she meant. The thunder of it was pouring through Cemp's mind. According to his knowledge, there never had been any female Silkies. All Silkies on Earth were males, who were married to women of the Special People -- like Joanne. But this black-haired, farmerish type was a female Silkie! That was what she was letting him know by her presence. In effect, by being here, she was saying, "Don't bother to search dusty old files. I'm living proof that Silkies were not produced in somebody's laboratory two hundred and thirty years ago." S uddenly Cemp was confused. He was aware that Joanne had come up beside him; that she must have caught his thought, and was herself dismayed. The one glimpse he had of her face showed that she had become very pale. "Nat!" her voice came sharply. "You've got to capture her." Cemp started forward, but it was a half-hearted movement. Yet, in spite of the uncertainty in his actions, he was already having logical thoughts: Since only hours had gone by from the moment that he first saw A-Brem, she must have been stationed here in advance. She would therefore have had no contact with the others. And so she wouldn't know that to a trained Silkie like himself, she was as vulnerable as an unarmed civilian opposed by a soldier. The black-haired woman must IF suddenly have had some doubt of her own. With an abrupt action, she stepped through the door near which she had been standing and closed it after her. "Nat," Joanne's voice, high pitched, sounded mere inches behind him. "You can't let her get away!" Cemp, who had emerged from his brief stasis, projected a thought after the female Silkie: "I'm not going to fight you, but I'm going to stay close to you until I have all the information we want." "Too late!" A magnetic carrier wave, human-Silkie level, brought her thought. "You're already too late." Cemp didn't think so. He arrived at the door through which she had disappeared. Was slightly disconcerted to find it was locked. Smashed it with a single, jagged lightning thrust of electrical force. Stepped through its smoking remains -- and saw the woman in the act of entering a gap in the wall made by a sliding door. She was not more than three dozen feet away; and she had half-turned, and was looking back in his direction. What she saw was evidently a surprise, for a startled look came into her face. Hastily, her hand came up to something inside; and the door slid shut. As it closed, Cemp -- who was ninning toward it -- had a glimpse of a gleaming corridor beyond. The existence of such a secret passageway had too many implications for Cemp to consider immediately. He was at the wall, fumbling for the hidden door. When he could not find it after several long moments, he stepped back and burned it down with the two energy flows from his brain which -- when they came together outside his body -- created an intense electric arc. It was the only energy weapon available to him as a human being but it was enough. A minute later, he stepped through the smoking opening into a narrow corridor. ra T he corridor in which Cemp found himself was made of concrete and slanted gently downward. It was dimly lighted and straight; and so he could see the young woman in the near distance ahead -- about two hundred feet. She was running, but as a woman runs wearing a dress; not very fast. Cemp broke into his own high-speed lope and, in a minute, had cut the distance between them in half. Abruptly the concrete ended. Ahead was a dirt cave, still lighted, but the lights were set at longer intervals. As she reached this point, the young woman sent him a message on a magnetic force Hne; "If you don't stop chasing me. I'll have to use the -- " something not clear -- "power." Cemp remembered the energy that had lifted A-Brem into the sky. He took the threat seriously and instantly modified a magnetic wave to render her unconscious. It was not so cruel an act as it would have been earlier. Now she fell like a stone -- which was the unfortunate characteristic of the unconsciousness gestalt -- but it was into dirt and not on cement. The motion of her body was such that she pitched forward on her knees, then slid down on her right shoulder. It didn't look too severe for her -- so it seemed to Cemp as he came closer to where she was lying." He had slowed to a walk. Now, still wry, he approached the prostrate body, determined not to let any special "power" remove her from him. He felt only slightly guilty at the violent method he had used. His reasoning had permitted no lesser control over her. The "sleep" shutoff on A-Brem had not prevented that individual from turning on the force field -- so Cemp considered it to be -- that had saved him. Quite simply, he couldn't let her get away. Because it was an untried situation, he acted at once. At this moment, he had her; there were too many unknowns for him to delay. He knelt beside her. Since she was unconscious and not asleep, her sensory system was open to exterior stimulation. But for her to answer, she would have to be switched to sleep, so that the shut-off interior perception could flow. So he sat there, alternately manipulating her unconsciousness center when he wanted to ask a question, and her sleep center for her reply. It was like ancient ham radio wi each party saying "over" when his message was completed. And, of course, in addition, he had to make sure that she did rejrfy to his queries. W hat he did for that was ask one question after another, and each time modify a magnetic wave with a message to the brain cell gestalt that responded to hypnotic drugs. The result was a steady mental conversation: "What is your name?" "B-Roth." "Where do you come from?" "From home." "Where is home?" "In the sky." A mental image came of a small stone body in space; Cemp's impression was of a meteorite less than twenty miles in diameter. "Where is it now?" "About to go around the sun, inside the first planet's orbit." So she had come to earth in advance. So they were all far from "home"; apparently had had no preliminary realization that they were out-skilled by Earth Silkies. As a result, he was now obtaining this decisive information. "What is its orbit?" Cemp asked. "It goes as far out as the ninth planet." Neptune! What a tremendous distance! Cemp asked quickly, "What is its mean speed?" Her answer was in terms of Mercury's year, which -- when converted to Earth time -- came to a hundred and ten years per orbit. Cemp whistled softly. An immediate association had leaped into his mind. The first Silkie baby had been created in a test tube slightly more dian two hundred and twenty years IF before; that was the official history. The time involved was exactly twice as long as the orbital period of the little Silkie planetoid. Cemp ended that train of speculation abruptly, and demanded from B-Roth exactly how she herself would again find the planetoid, which surely must be one of thousands of similar bodies. The answer was one that only a Silkie could operate from. She had in her brain a set of relationships and signal recognition images which identified for her the location of the Silkie home. Cemp made an exact mental copy. He was about to begin questioning her for details on other matters -- when an inertia phenomehon effected his body. He was flung backwards -- As if he were in a vehicle, his back to the forward motion; and the vehicle stopped suddenly, but he went on -- Because he always had protection against sudden falls, he had been moved less than eight feet, when he triggered his magnetic field, his only screening mechanism as a human. T he field he set up could not stop gravity pull directly, but it derived from the earth's magnetic force and gained its power from the force lines that passed through this exact space. As Cemp modulated the lines now, they attached themselves to flexible metal bands that were woven into his clothes, and they held him. He hung there a few feet above the floor. From this vantage point he was able to examine his situation. At once, the phenomenon was shown as completely fantastic. He detected in the heart of the gravity field a tiny molecule complex. What was fantastic about it was that gravity was an invariable, solely dependent on mass and square of distance. Cemp had already calculated the gravity pull to be the equivalent of three times that of Earth at sea level. And so... by all the laws of physics, that incredibly small particle must have an equivalent mass to three Earths!... Impossible, of course. It was by no means a complex of one of the large molecules, so far as Cemp could make out; and it was not radioactive. He was about to abandon his study of it, and to turn his attention to his own situation -- when he noticed that the gravity field had an even more improbable quality. Its pull was limited to organic matter. It had no effect on the surrounding dirt walls, and in fact -- his mind poised in a final amazement -- the woman's body was not influenced by it. The gravity was limited to one particular organic configuration -- himself! One body, one human being only -- Nat Cemp -- was the sole object toward which it was oriented. He found himself remembering how he himself had been untouched by the field that had lifted A-Brem. He had sensed the presence of a field, but only by the way the magnetic lines that passed through his head were affected by it. Even in his Silkie form -- as he pursued the hurtling body of his alter ego -- that and merely that had been true. This was for him; a personal gravitational field; a small group of molecules that "knew" him. As these events took place, and these flashing awarenesses came to him, Cemp turned his head and gazed back at the young woman. He was not surprised at what he saw. His attention had been forcibly removed from her; and so the pressure on the unconsciousness "valve" in her brain was released. She was stirring, coming to. S he sat up, looked around, and saw him. She came to her feet quickly, with an athletic ease. She evidently did not remember what had hanpened while she was unconscious, did not realize how completely she had given away basic secrets; for her face broke into a smile. "You see," she said. "I told you what would happen. Well, good-by." Her spirits visibly high, she turned and walked off into the cave, presently disappeared as it gradually curved to the left. After she was gone, Cemp turned his attentioh back to the gravity field. He assumed that it would eventually be Withdrawn, or fade out, and he would be free. He had the distinct conviction that he might have only minutes in which to examine it and discover its nature. He thout unhappily: "If I could change into my Silkie form, I could really examine it." But he dared not, could not. At least, he couldn't and simultaneously maintain his safe position. Silkies had one weakness, if it could be called that. They were vulnerable when they changed from one form to another. Considering this, Cemp now conducted his first mental conversation with Joanne. He explained his predicament, described hat he had learned, ended: "I think I can stay here all day and see what comes of this, but I should probably have another Silkie stand by for emergencies." Her anxious reply was, "I'll have Charley Baxter contact you." IV S he phoned Baxter and passed the conversation on to Cemp in thought form. Baxter was enormously excited by the information that Cemp had obtained about the alien Silkies. He regarded the gravity field as a new energy application, but was reluctant to send in another Silkie to help. "Let's face it, Joanne," he said. "Your husband learned something last year which, if other Silkies understood it, might wreck the delicate balance by which we're maintaining our present Silkie-human civilization. Nat understands our concern about that. So tell him I'll send a machine in there to act as a barrier for him while he makes his changeover into Silkie." It occurred to Cemp that the apis IF pearance of new, hitherto unknown Silkies would alter the Silkie-human, relationship even more. But he did not permit that thought to go out to Joanne. Baxter's conversation concluded with the statement that it would probably take a while before the machine could be gotten to him. "So tell him to hold on." After Baxter had hung up, Joanne thought at Cemp: "I should tell you that I'm relieved about one thing." "What's that?" "If the Silkie women are all as plain in human form as B-Roth then I'm not going to worry." An hour went by. Two... Ten. In the world outside, the skies would be dark; the sun long gone; the stars signalling in their tiny brilliant fashion. Charley Baxter's machine had come and gone. And Cemp -- safe in the Silkie form -- remained close to the most remarkable energy field that had ever been seen in the solar system. What was astounding was that it showed no diminishment of the colossal gravity effect. His hope had been that with his super-sensitive Silkie perception he would be able to be aware of any feeder lines that might be. flowing power to it from an outside source. But there was nothing like that; nothing to trace. The power came from the single, small group of molecules. It had no other origin. The minutes and the hours lengthened. The watch became long, and he had time to feel the emotional impact of the problem that now confronted every Silkie on Earth. The need to make a decision .  about the Space Silkies. Morning. S hortly after the sun came up outside, the field manifested an independent quality. It began to move along the corridor, heading deeper into the cave. Cemp floated along after it, letting a portion of its gravitational pull draw him. He was wary but curious, hopeful that now he would find out more. The cave ended abruptly in a deep sewer, which had the look of long abandonment. The concrete was cracked. There were innumerable deep fissures in the walls. But to the group of molecules and their field, it seemed to be a familiar area, for they went forward more rapidly. Suddenly there was water below them. It was not stagnant, but rippled and swirled. A tidal pool, Cemp analyzed. The water grew deeper, and presently they were in it, travelling at undiminishd speed. Ahead the murky depths grew less murky. They emerged into sunlit waters in a canyon about a hundred feet below the surface of the ocean. As they broke surface a moment later, the strange energy complex accelerated. Cemp, suspecting that it would now try to get away from him, made a final effort to perceive its characteristics. But nothing came back to him. No message, no sign of energy flow. For a split instant, he did have the impression that the at#ms making up the molecule group were -- someV how -- not right. But when he switched his attention to the band involved, the molecules must either have become aware of his momentary awareness and closed themselves off -- or he had imagined it. Even as he made the analysis, his feeling that he was about to be discarded was borne out. The particle's speed increased rapidly. In seconds, its velocity approached the limits of what he could permit himself to endure inside an atmosphere. The outer chitin of his Silkie body grew hot, then hotter. Reluctantly Ccmp adjusted his own atomic structure, so that the gravity of the alien field no longer affected him. As he fell away, it continued to pursue a course which took it in an easterly direction, where the sun was now an hour above the horizon. Within mere seconds of his separation from it, it left the atmosphere and, traveling at many miles a second, headed seemingly straight for the sun. Cemp came to the atmosphere's edge. "Gazing" by means of his Silkie perceptors out upon the vast, dark ocean of space beyond, he contacted the nearest telstar unit. To the scientists aboard, he gave a fix on the speeding molecule group. Then he waited hopefully while they tried to put a tracer on it. But the word finally came: "Sorry, we get no reaction." Baffled, Cemp let himself be drawn by Earth's gravity. Then, by a series of controlled adjustments to both the magnetic and gravity fields of the planet, he guided himself to the Silkie Authority. hree hours of talk -- Cemp who, as the only Silkie present, occupied a seat near the foot of the long table, found the discussion boring. It had early seemed to him that he, or some other Silkie, ought to be sent to the Silkie planetoid to learn the facts, handle the matter in a strictly logical but humanitarian fashion, and report back to the Authority. If, for some reason, the so-called Silkie Nation proved to be unamenable to reason, then a further discussion would be in order. As he waited for the three dozen human conferees to reach the same decision, he couldn't help but notice the order of importance at the table. The Special People -- which included Charley Baxter -- were at the head of the long table. Next, ranging down on either side were the ordinary human beings. Then, on one side, himself, and below him, three minor aides and the official secretary of the three-man Silkie Authority. It was not a new observation for him. He had discussed it with other Silkies and had had it pointed out to him that here was a reversal of the power role that was new in history. The strongest individuals in the solar system -- the Silkies -- still were relegated to secondary status. He emerged from his reverie to the realization that silence had fallen. And that Charley Baxter, slim, gray-eyed, intense, was coming around the long table. He stopped across from Cemp. IF "Well, Nat," said Baxter, "there's the picture as we see it" He seemed embarrassed. Cemp did a lightning mental backtrack on the discussion. And realized that they had indeed arrived at the inevitable conclusion. But he noted also that they considered it a weighty decision. Tt was a lot to ask of any person, that was the attitude. The result could be personal disaster. They wouldn't be critical if he refused. "I feel ashamed to ask it," said Baxter, "but this is almost a war situation." Cemp could see that they were not sure of themselves. There had been no war on Earth for # years. Nobodv was an expert in it any more. He climbed to his feet as these awarenesses touched him. Now, he looked around at the faces turned to him, and he said, "Calm yourselves, gentlemen. Naturally I'll do it." They all looked relieved. The discussion turned quickly to details: the difficulty of locating a single meteorite in space; particularly one which had such a long sidereal period. I t was well known that there were about fifteen hundred large meteorites and planetoids, and tens of thousands of smaller objects. All of these had orbits or motions which, though subject to the laws of celestial mechanics, were often very eccentric in their movements. A few of them, like comets, periodically came in close to the sun, then shot off into space again, returning few another hectic go-round fifty to a hundred years later. Tliere were so many of these intermediate sized rocks that they were identified and their courses plotted only for special reasons. There simply had never been any point in tracking them all. Cemp had matched course with and landed on scores of lone meteorites. His recollections of those experiences were among the bleaker memories of his numerous space flights. The darkness, the sense of utterly barren rock, the profound lack of sensory stimulation. Oddly, the larger they were, the worse the feeling. He had discovered that he could have a kind of intellectual affinity with a rock that was less than a thousand feet in diameter. Particularly was this true of an inarticulate mass that had finally been precipitated into a hyperbolic orbit. When he computed that it was thus destined to leave the solar system forever, he would find himself imagining how long it had been in space, how far it had gone and how it would now hurtle away from the solar system and spend eons between the stars. A government representative -- a human being named John Mathews -- interrupted his thought: "Mr. Cemp, Fd like to ask you a very personal question." Cemp looked at him and nodded. The man went on, "According to reports, several hundred Earth Silkies have already defected to diese native Silkies. Evidently you don't feel, as they do, that the Silkie planetoid is home. Why not?" Cemp smiled. "Well, first of all," he said, "I would never buy a pig in a poke the way they have done." He hesiiatcd. Then in a serious tone he continued: "Entirely apart from my feelings of loyalty to Earth, I do not believe the future of life forms will be helped or advanced by any rigid adherence to the idea that I am a lion, or I am a bear. Intelligent life is, or should be, moving toward a common civilization. Maybe I'm like Che farm boy who went to die bdg dty -- Earth. Now my folks want me to come back to the farm. TheyH never understand why I can't, so I don't even try to explain It-Maybe,said Mathews, "the planetoid is actually the big city and earth Che farm. What then?" Cemp smiled politely, but merely shook hb head. Mathews persisted: "One more question. How should Silkies be treated?Cemp sjmad his hands. "I can't think of a single change of value.H e meant it. He had never been able Co get excited about the pecking order. Yet he had known for a long time that some Silkies felt strongly about their inferior -- as it seemed to them -- role. Others, like himself, did their duty, were faithful to their human wives and tried to enjoy the somewhat limited possibilities of human civilization -- limited for Silkies, who had so many additional senses for which there was no organized creative stimulation. Presumably things could be better. But meanwhile they were what they were. Cemp recognized that any attempt to alter them would cause fear and disturbance among human beings. And why do that merely to satisfy the egos of somewhat less than two thousand Silkies? At least, that had been the problem until now. The coming of the Space Silkies would add an indefinite number of new egos to the scene. Yet, Cemp reasoned, not enou to change the statistics meaningfully. Aioud he said, "As far as I can see, under all conceivable circumstances, there is no better solution to the Silkie problem than that which exists right now" Charley Baxter chose that moment to end the discussion, saying, "Nat, you have our best, our very best wishes. And our complete confidence. A spaceship will rush you to Mercury's orbit and give you a head start. Good luck.VI T he scene ahead was absolutely fantastic. The Silkie planetoid would make its circuit of the sun far inside Mercury's eccentric orbit, and the appearance was that it might brush the edges of the great clouds of hot gas that seemed to poke out like streamers -- or shapeless arms -- from the sun's hot surface. Cemp doubted if such a calamity would actually occur, but as he periodically subjected his steel-hard, chitinous Silkie body to the sun's gravity, he sensed the enormous pull of it at this near distance. The circle of white fire filled almost the entire sky ahead. The light IF was so intense, and came in on him on so many bands, that it overwhelmed his receptor system, whenever he let it in. And he had to open up at intervals in order to make readjustments in his course. The two hurtling bodies -- his own and that of planetoid -- were presently on a collision course. The actual moment of "collision" was still hours away. So Cemp shut off his entire perception system. Thus instantly he sank into the deep sleep which Silkies so rarely allowed themselves. He awoke in stages and saw that his timing had been exact. The planetoid now was "visible" on one of the tiny neural screens inside the forward part of his body. It showed as a radar-type image; and at the beginning it was the size of a pea. In less than thirty minutes it grew to an apparent size of five miles -- which was half its diameter, he estimated. At this point, Cemp performed his only dangerous maneuver. He allowed the sun's gravity to draw him between the sun and the planetoid. Then he cut off the sun's gravity, and, using a few bursts of energy -- manufactured at the edge of a field behind his body -- darted toward the planetoid's surface. What was dangerous about this action was that it brought him in on sunlight behind him, he was clearly visible to anyone in or on or around the planetoid. But his theory was that no Silkie would normally be exposing himself to the sun; and that in fact every sensible Silkie would be inside the big stone ball or on its night side. At close range In that ultra-bright light, the planetoid looked like the wrinkled head and face of a bald, old Indian. It was reddish-gray in color, and pock-marked and lined, and not quite round. The pock marks turned out to be actual caves. Into one of these, Cemp floated. C emp went down into what to his human eyes would have been pitch darkness; but, as a Silkie the interior was visible to him on many bands. He found himself in a corridor with smooth, granite walls that led slantingly downward. After about twenty minutes he came to a turn in the passageway. As he rounded it, he saw a shimmering, almost opaque energy screen in front of him. Cemp decided at once not to regard it as a problem. He doubted if it had been put up to catch anyone. In fact, his lightning analysis of it indicated that it was a wall, with the equivalent solidity of a large spaceship's outer skin. As a screen it was strong enough to keep out the most massive armorpiercing shells. Going through such a screen was an exercise in Silkie energy control. First he put up a matching field, and started it oscillating. The oscillation unstabilized the opposing screen and started it in a sympathetic vibration. As the process continued the screen and the field began to merge. But it was the screen that became part of Cemp's field; not the reverse. Thus, his field was within minutes a part of the barrier. Safely inside it, he crossed the barrier space. Once past it, disengagement was a matter of slowing down the oscillation until the field and the screen abruptly became separate entities. The sound of the separation was like the crack of a whip. And the fact that there was sound indicated he had come into air space. Quickly, he discovered that it was air of an unearthly mixture. # oxygen, # helium, and most of the rest, gaseous sulphur compounds. The pressure was about twice that of sea level on Earth. But it was air, and it undoubtedly had a purpose. From where he had floated through the energy barrier, he saw a large chamber, the floor of which was about a hundred feet below him. Soft lights shone down. Seen in that light, the room was a iewel. The walls were inlaid with precious stones, fine metals and varicolored rock, cunningly cut into a design. The design was a continuing story picture of a race of four-legged, centaur-type beings, with a proud bearing and -- wherever there were close-ups -- sensitive though unhuman faces. On the floor was a picture of a planet inset in some kind of glowing substance that showed the curving, mountainous surface, with sparkling lines where rivers flowed, three-dimensional appearance of trees and other growth, glinting oceans and lakes, and thousands of bright spots marking cities and towns. The sides of the planet curved away in proper proportion, and Cemp had the feeling that the globe continued on down and the bottom was probably visible in some lower room. The over-all effect was completely end totally beautiful. C emp surmised that the life scenes and the planet picture were an accurate eidolon of a race and a place with which the Silkies had at some time in their past been associated. He was mentally staggered by the artistic perfection of the room. He had already, as he floated down, noticed that there were large archways leading to adjoining chambers. He had glimpses of furniture, machines, objects, shining bright and new. He surmised they were artifacts of either the centaur or other civilizations. But he could not take time to explore. His attention fastened on a stairway that led down to the next level. He went down it, and presently found himself facing another energy barrier. Penetrating it exactly as he had the other, he moved on and into a chamber filled with sea water. Inset in the floor of that huge room was a planet that glimmered with the green-blue of an undersea civilization. And that was only the beginning. Cemp went down from one level to another, each time through an energy screen, and through similarly decorated chambers. Each was inlaid in the same way IF with precious stones and glinting metals. Each had hreathtalcmg scenes from what he presumed were habitable planets of fad stars, and a different atmosphere. After a dozen, the impact began to be cumulative. Realization came that here, inside this planetoid, had been gathered such treasure as probably did not exist anywhere else. Cemp visualized the #-odd cubic miles that comprised the interior of the most fantastic asteroid in the galaxy; and he remembered what Mathews had said. The human government official had speculated that perhaps the planetoid was the "city and Earth was the "farm". It began to seem more true. He had been expecting momentarily to collide with an inhabitant of the planetoid. After passing three more of the chambers, each with its glowing duplicate in miniature of a planet of long ago and far away, Cemp paused and re-considered. He had a strong feeling that in learning of these treasures, he had gained an advantage -- which he must not lose -- and that the Silkies did indeed have their living quarters on the side away from the sun, and that they did not expect anyone to arrive in this surprise' fashion. The idea continued to seem correct, and so he turned back and was presently dropping directly toward the dark side. A gain the cave openings. And a few score feet inside, the energy barrier. Beyond that was air and gravitation exactly as at sea level on die Earth. Cemp floated down into a smoothly polished granite chamber. It was ifomished with settees, chairs and tables, and there was a long, lowbuilt bookcase at one end. But the arrangement was as in an anteroom; formal and unlived in. It gave him an eerie feeling. Still in his Silkie form, he went down a staircase and into another chamber. It had soil in it, and there was vegetation, which consisted of temperate zone Earth shrubs and flowers. Once more, the arrangement was formal. On the third level down were earth-like offices, with information computers. Cemp, who understood such matters, recorded what they were. He observed also that no one was using this particular source of data. He was about to go down to the next level -- when an engy beam of enormous power triggered the superfast defense screen he had learned from the Kibmadinc the previous year. The coruscation as the beam intwacted with an ever vaster intensity with Cemp's barrier screen lit the chamber as if sunlight had suddenly been let in. It stayed lit as whoever directed the beam tested the screen's durability in a sustained power thrust. For Cemp, it was a fight that moved at lightning speed down the entire line of his defenses, and came finally up against the hard core of the second method he had learned from the Kibmadine. There, and only there, he held his own. A minute went by before the attacker seemed finally to accept that Cemp simply used the beam itself to maintain the barrier. Hence, it took nothing out of him, and it would last as long as the beam -- and re-form as often as necessary. As suddenly as it had begun, the attacking energy ceased. Cemp stared around him, dismayed. The entire chamber was a shambles of twisted, white-hot machinery and debris. The granite walls had crumbled, exposing raw meteorite rock behind it. Molten rock dripped in a score of flowing rivers from the shattered ceiling and walls. Great sections were still tumbling and sliding. What had been a modern office had become in a matter of minutes a gutted desolation of blackened metal and rock. For Cemp, the initial staggering reality was that only the high speed Kibmadine screen had saved him. The assault had been gauged to overwhelm and over-speed the entire Silkie defense and attack system. The intent had been death. No bargmning, no discussion, no questions. The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred. Yet, after a little, another realization penetrated: 'T won!" he thought. Calm again but savage, he went down five more levels; emerged abruptly at the upper level of a great vista, a huge open space. The city of the Silkies spread below him. It was precisely and exactly like a small Earth city. Apartment buildings. Private residences. Tree-lined streets. Cemp was bemused; for here also the native Silkies had clearly attempted to create a human atmosphere. He could make out 'figures on a sidewalk far below. He started down. When he was a hundred feet above them, the people stopped and looked up at him. One -- a woman -- directed a startled thought at him: "Who are you?" Cemp told her. The reaction of the four nearest people was astonishment. But they were not afraid, or hostile. The little group -- three women and one man -- waited for him. As Cemp came down, he was aware that they were signalling to others. Soon a crowd had gathered, mostly in human bodies, mostly women, but an even dozen arrived in the Silkie form. Guards? he wondered. But they were not antagonistic either. Everybody was mentally open; and what was disconcerting about that was, no one showed awareness of the attack that had been made on him in the office section near the surface. Instantly, he saw their unawareness as an opportunity. By keeping silent and alert, he would be able to spot his vicious assailant. He presumed the violence had been planned and carried out at the administrative level. "ni find those so-and-so's!" he thought grimly. 'Tk) his audience of innocent citA izens, he said, 'Tm acting as an emissary of the Earth Government. My purpose here is to discover what binding agreements are possible." A woman called up to him, "We can't seem to change into attractive females, Earth style. What do you suggest?" A gale of laughter greeted her remark. Cemp was taken aback. He hadn't expected such easy friendliness from the crowd. But his determination did not waver. "I presume we can discuss that also at government level," he said, "but it won't be first on the agenda." Some remnants of his hate flow must have gone out to them with his thought, for a man said sharply, "He doesn't sound very friendly." A woman added quickly: "Come now, Mr. Cemp. This is your real home." Cemp had recovered. He replied; a steady level thought: "You'il get what you give. Right now, you're giving good. But the agents your government sent to Earth made blood-thirsty threats." His thought paused there, puzzled. For these people as diey were right now, did not seem to have any of that threat in them. It struck him that that should he very significant. After a moment's hesitation, he finished: " "I'm here to discover what it's all about, so why not direct me to someone in authority?" "We don't have authorities." That was a woman. A man said, "Mr. Cemp, we live a completely free existence here and you and other Earth Silkies are invited to join us." Cemp persisted, "Who decided to send those four hundred messengers to Earth?" "We always do that, when the time comes," another woman replied. "Complete with threats?" asked Cemp. "Threats of death?" She seemed suddenly uncertain. She turned to one of the men. "You were down there," she said.' "Did you imply violence?" The man hesitated. "It's a little vague," he said. "But I guess so." He added quickly, "It's always been this way when E-Lerd conditions us in connection with the Power. Memory tends to fade very quickly. In fact, I hadn't recalled that threat aspect until now." He seemed astonished. "I'll be damned. I think we had better speak to E-Lerd and find the reason for it." C emp telepathed directly to the man. "What was your after feeling about what you had done?" "Just that I communicated that we Space Silkies were here, and that it was time for the Earth Silkies to become aware of their true origin." He broke off, turned to the others. "This is fantastic," he said. "I'm astounded. We need to look into ELerd's administration of the Power. I uttered murderous words when I was on Earth! That's not like me at all." His complete amazement was more convincing than anything else could possibly have been. Cemp said firmly, "I gather then IF that, contrary to your earlier statements, you do have a leader, and his name is E-Lerd." One of the Silkie bodies answered that. "No, he's not a leader, but I can see how that might be understood. We're free. No one tells us what to do. But we do delegate responsibilities. For example, E-Lerd is in charge of the Power, and we get its use through him. Would you like to talk to him, Mr. Cemp?" "Indeed I would," said Cemp with immense satisfaction. He was thinking: "The Power! Of course. Who else? The person who has control of the Power is the only one who could have attacked me!" "My name is O-Vedd," said the Space Silkie. "Come with me." His long, bullet-like body detached itself from the group of similar bodies and darted off over the heads of the crowd. Cemp followed. They came down to a small entrance that led along a narrow, smooth-walled, granite corridor. After a hundred feet this opened out to another huge space. Here was a second city. At least, for a moment that was what it looked like. Then Cemp saw that the buildings were of a different character. Not dwellings at all. For him, who was familiar with most of the paraphernalia of manufactured energy, there was no question. Some of the massive structures below were the kind that housed atomic power. Others were distributing plants for electricity. Still others had the unmistakable shape of the Ylem transformation systems. None of these, of course, was the Power. But here indeed was power in abundance. Cemp followed O-Vedd down to the courtyard of a building complex that, despite all its shields, he had no difficulty in identifying as a source of magnetic beams. The Space Silkie landed andtransformed to human, then stood and waited for Cemp to do likewise. "Nothing doing!" said Cemp, curtly. "Ask him to come out here." O-Vedd shrugged. As a human, he was short and dark. He walked off and vanished into a doorway. C emp waited amid a silence that was broken only by the faint hum of power from the buildings. A breeze touched the super-sensitive spy-ray extensions that he maintained in operation under all circumstances. The little wind registered through the spy mechanisms, but did not trigger the defense screens behind them. It was only a breeze, after all; and he had never programmed himself to respond to sudi minor signals. He was about to dismiss it from his mind; about to contemplate his reaction to the Space Silkies -- he liked the crowd he had seen -- when he thought, sharply; A breeze here! Up went his screen. Out projected his perceptors. He had time to notice, then, that it was indeed a breeze but that it was being stirred by a blankness in the surrounding space. Around Cemp, the courtyard grew hazy; then it faded. There was no planetoid. C emp increased all signal sensitivity to maximum. He continued to float in the vacuum of space, and off to one side was the colossal white circle that was the sun. Cemp felt a sudden energy drain from his body. The sensation was of his Silkie screens going up, of his system resisting outside energy at many levels. He thought in a tense dismay: "I'm in a fight. It's another attempt to kill me. Whatever it was, it was automatic. His own perception remained cut off, and he was impelled to experience what the attacker wanted him to. Cemp felt himself, then, like a man suddenly set upon in pitch darkness. But what was appalling about it was that his senses were being held by other forces, preventing awareness of the nature of the attack. What he saw was -- Distance disappeared! There, spread over many miles of space, was a group of Silkies. Cemp saw them clearly, counted in his lightning fashion two hundred and eighty-eight, caught their thoughts, and recognized that these were the renegade Silkies from Earth. Suddenly, he understood that they had been told where the Silkie planetoid was, and they were on their way "home. Time was telescoped. The entire group of Silkies was transported in what seemed an instant to within a short distance of the planetoid. Cemp could see the planetoid in the near distance -- only a few miles away, twenty at the maximum. But to him the baffling, deadly, fantastic thing was that, as these marvellous events ran their course at one level of his perception, at another level the feeling remained that a determined attempt was being made to kill him. He could see, feel, be aware of almost nothing. But throughout, the shadowy sensations continued. His energy fields were going through defensive motions. But it was all far away from his awareness, like a human dream. Being a fully trained Silkie, Cemp watched the internal as well as the external developments with keen observation. Strove instant by instant to grasp the reality. Monitored incoming signals by the thousands. He began to sense meaning. Began to have initial speculations about the nature of the physical-world phenomenon involv. And he had the feeling of being on the verge of his first computation when -- as suddenly as it had begun -- it ended. The space scene began to fade. Abruptly, it winked out. He was back in the courtyard of the buildings that housed the magnetic power complex. Coming toward him from the open doorway of the main building was #-Vedd. He was accompanied by a man who was of Cemp's general human build: over six feet, strongly muscled; his face was heavier than Cemp's, and his eyes brown instead of gray. As he came near, he said, "I am E-Lerd. Let's talk. IF vm ELerd continued: To begin with, I want to tell you the history of die Silkies." Cemp, who was braced for a bitter quarrel, who could feel in himself a multitude of re-adjusting energy flows... proof of the severity of the second all-out fight he had been in -- for which he absolutely required a complete explanation -- was electrified by the statement. At that moment, caught up as he was in a steely rage, nothing else could have diverted his attention. But -- The history of the Silkies! To Cemp, it was instantly the most important subject in the universe. The Silkie planetoid, E-Lerd began, had entered the solar system from outer space nearly three hundred years before. It had, in due course, been drawn into a Sol-Neptfunian orbit. On its first encirclement of the sun. Silkies visited the inner planets and found that Earth alone was inhabited. Since they could change form, they studied the biologic structure necessary to function in the two atmospheres of Earth -- air and water -- and set up an internal programming for that purpose. Unfortunately, a small percentage of the human population -- it was soon discovered -- could tune in on the thoughts of Silkies. All those who did so in this first visit were quickly hunted down and their memories of the experience blotted out. But, because of these sensitive humans, it became necessary for Silkies to seem to be the product of human biologic experiment. An interrelationship with human females was accordingly programmed into Silkies, so that the human female ovum and the male Silkie spermwould produce a Silkie who knew nothing of Silkie history. In order to maintain this process on an automatic level, the Special People -- those persons who could read Silkie minds -- were maneuvered into being in charge of it. Thereupon, all adult Silkies returned to their planetoid, which now went to the remote end of its orbit. When it came again into the vicinity of Earth more than a hundred years later, cautious visits were made. It became apparent that several unplanned things had happened. Human biologists had experimented with the process. As a result, in the early stages, variants had been bom. TTiese had propagated their twisted traits and were continuing to do so, growing ever more numerous. The actual consequences were: -- A number of true Silkies, capable of making the three-fold transformation at will. -- Class B Silkies, who could transform from human to fish state, but with no ability to become space people. They were a stable form. -- Variants! These latter two groups had largely taken to the oceans. Accordingly it was decided to leave the Class B Silkies alone, but that an effort be made to inveigle the Variants into gigantic spaceships filled with water, where -- thus conscenh-ated -- they would be isolated and prevented from interbreeding. This plan was already under way by the time the Silkie planetoid made its round of the sim and again headed out toward far Neptune. N ow they were back. And they had found an unfortunate situation. Somehow, Earth science -- virtually ignored by the early visitors -- had achieved a training miracle for the Silkie perception system. The Earth Silkies had become a loyal-to-Earth, tight-knit, masterful group of beings, lacking only the Power. Cemp "read all this in E-Lerd's thought; and then, because he was amazed, he questioned him about what seemed a major omission in his story. erc had tiic Silkie planetoid come from? E-Lerd showed his first impatience, "Tliesc joumeys arc too far, he telepathed. "They take too long. Nobody remembers origins. Some other star system, enviously ." "Are you serious?" Cemp was astounded. "You don't know?" But that was the story. Pry at it as he might, it did not change. Although E-Lerd's mind remained closed, except for his telepathed thoughts, #-Vedd's mind was open. In it Cemp saw the same beliefs and the same lack of information. But why the tampering with human biology, and the intermixing of the two breeds? "We always do that. That's how we live -- in a relationship with the inhabitants of a system." "How do you know you always do that? You just told me you can't remember where you came from this time or where you were before that." "Well -- it's obvious from the artifacts we brought along." E-Lerd's attitude dismissed his questions as being irrelevant. Cemp detected a mind phenomenon in the other that explained the attitude. To Space Silkies, the past was unimportant. Silkies always did certain things, because that was the way they were mentally, emotionally, and physically constructed. A Silkie didn't have to know from past experience. He (or she) simply had to be what was innate in Silkies. It was, Cemp realized, a basic explanation for much that he had observed. This was why these Silkies had never been trained scientifically. Training was an alien concept in the cosmos of the Space Silkies. "You mean," he protested, incredulous, "you have no idea why you left the last system where you had this inter-relationship with the race there? Why not stay forever in some system where you have located yourself?" "Probably," said E-Lerd, "somebody got too close to the secret of the Power. That could not be permitted." That was the reason -- he conA tinned -- why Cemp and other Silkies had to come back into the fold. As Silkies, they might learn about the Power. IF The discussion had come naturally around to that urgent subject. "What," said Cemp, "is the Power?" E-Lerd stated formally that that was a forbidden subject. "Then I shall have to force the secret from you," said Cemp. "There can be no agreement without it." E-Lerd replied stiffly that any attempt at enforcement would require him to use the Power as a defense. Cemp lost patience. "After your two attempts to kill me," he telcpathed in a steely rage, "I'll give you thirty seconds -- " "What attempts to kill you?" said E-Lerd, surprised. At that precise moment, as Cemp was bracing himself to use logic of levels... there was an interruption. An "impulse" band -- a very Idw, slow vibration -- touched one of the receptors in the forward part of his brain. It operated at mere multiples of the audible sound range directly on his sound receiving system. What was new was that the sound acted as a carrier for the accompanying thought. The result was as if a voice spoke clear and loud into his ears. "You win," said the voice. "You have forced me. I shall talk to you myself -- by-passing my unknowing servants, DC C emp identified the incoming thought formation as a direct contact. Accordingly, his brain -- which was programmed to respond instantaneously to a multitude of signals -- was triggered to instant effort to suction more impulses from the sending brain... And he got a picture. A momentary glimpse. So brief that even after a few seconds it was hard to be sure that it was real and not a figment of fantasy. Something huge lay in the darkness deep inside the planetoid. Lay there and gave forth with an impression of vast power. It had been withholding itself, watching him with some tiny portion of itself. The larger whole understood the universe and could manipulate massive sections of space-time. "Say nothing to these others." Again the statement was a direct contact thought which sounded like spoken words. The dismay that had seized on Cemp in the few moments that had now gone by was on the level of desperation. He had entered the SiHde stronghold in the belief that his human training and Kibmadine knowledge gave him a temporary advantage over the Space Silkies, and that -- if he did not delay -- he could force a decision that might resolve the entire threat from these natural Silkies. Instead, he had come unsuspecting into the lair of a cosmic giant. He thought, appalled, "Here is what has been called 'the Power." And if the glimpse he had had was real, then it was such a colossal power that all his own idality and strength were as nothing. He deduced now that this was what had attacked him twice. "Is tliat true? he telepathed on the same band as the incoming thoughts had been on. "Yes, I admit it." "Why? Cemp flashed the question, "did you do it?" "So that I would not have to reveal my existence. My fear is always that, if other life forms find out about me, they will analyze how to destroy me." The direction of the alien thought altered: "But now, listen; do as follows -- " T he confession had again stirred Cemp's emotions. Because the hatred that had been aroused in him had the sustained force that derived from the Logic of Levels stimulation -- in this instance the body's response to an attempt at total destruction -- he had difficulty reactions. But the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. And so, presently, he was able, at the request of the monster, to say to E-Lerd and the Other Silkie: 'Take a while to think this over. And when the Silkies who have defected arrive from Earth, Fll talk to them. We can then have another discussion." It was such a complete change of attitude that the two Silkies were surprised. But he saw that to them the change had the look of weakness, and they were relieved. "Fll  back here in one hour!" Cemp telepathed to E-Lerd. Whereupon he turned and climbed up and out of the courtyard, darting to an opening that led by a roundabout route deeper into the planetoid. Again the low, slow vibration touched his receptors. "Come closer!" the creature urged. Cemp obeyed, on the hard-core principle that he either could defend himself -- or he couldn't. Down he went, past a dozen screens, to a barren cave, a chamber that had been carved out of the original meteorite stuff. It was not even lighted. As he entered, the direct thought touched his mind again: "Now we can talk." Cemp hrd been tV inking at furious speed; striving to adjust to a danger so fantastic that he had no way of evaluating it. Yet 'the Power' had revealed itself to him rather than let E-Lerd find out anything. That seemed to be his one hold on it; and he had the tense conviction that even that was true only so long as he was inside the planetoid. He thought: "... Take full advantage." He telepathed: "After those attacks, you'll have to give me some straight answers, if you expect to deal with me." "What do you want to know?" "Who are you? Where do you come from. What do you want?" It didn't know who it was. "I have a name," it said. "I am a Glis. There used to be many like me long ago. I don't know what happened to them." "But what are you?" It had no knowledge. An energy life form of unknown origin, travelIP ing from one star system to another, remaining for a while, then leaving. "But why leave? Why not stay?" Sharply. "The time comes when I have done what I can for a particular system."... By using its enormous power, it transported large ice and air meteorites to airless planets and made them habitable; cleared away dangerous space debris, altered poisonous atmospheres into non-poisonous ones... "Presently the job is done, and I realize it's time to go on to explore the infinite cosmos. So I make my pretty picture of the inhabited planets, as you saw, and head for outer space." "And the Silkies?" They were an old meteorite life form. "I found them long ago, and because I needed mobile units that could think, I persuaded them into a permanent relationship." Cemp did not ask what persuasive methods had been used. In view of the ignorance of the Silkies of what they had a relationship with, he divined that a sly method had been used. But still, what he had seen showed an outwardly peaceful arrangement. The Glis has agents -- the Silkies -- who acted for it in the world of tiny movements. They, in turn, had at their disposal bits and pieces of the Glis's own "body", which apparently could be programmed for specific tasks beyond their ability to perform. make the same arrangement with your government fcH as long as I remain in the solar system." But absolute secrecy would be necessary. "Why?" r iere was no immediate reply, but the communication band remained open; and along it there flowed an essence of the reaction from the Glis: an impression of unmatched power, of a being so mighty that all other individuals in the universe were less by some enormous percentage. Cemp felt staggered anew. But he telepathed: "I must tell someone. Somebody has to know." "No other Silkies -- absolutely." Cemp didn't argue. All these milennia, the Glis had kept its identity hidden from the Space Silkies. He had a total conviction that it would wreck the entire planetoid to prevent them from learning it He had been lucky. It had fought him at a level where only a single chamber of the meteorite had been destroyed. It had restricted itself. "Only the top government leaders and the Silkie Council may know," the Glis continued. It seemed an adequate concession. Yet Cemp had an awful suspicion that in the long past of this o-eature every person who uncovered its secret had been murdered. Thinking thus, he could not compromise. He demanded: "Let me have a complete view of you -- what I caught a fleeting glimpse of earlier." He sensed, then, that the Glis hesitated. Cemp urged: "I promise that only the persons you named will be told about this -- but we must know!" Floating there in the cave in his Silkie form, Cemp felt a change of energy tension in the air and in the ground. Although he himself put forth no additional probing energies, he recognized that barriers were going down. And presently he began to record. His first awareness was of hugeness. Cemp estimated after a long, measuring look that the creature, a circular rock-like structure, was about a thousand feet in diameter. It was alive, but it was not a thing of flesh and blood. It "fed" from some inner energy that rivaled what existed in the heart of the sun. And Cemp noticed a remarkable phenomenon. Magnetic impulses that passed through the creature and impinged on his senses were altered in a fashion that he had never observed before -- as if they had passed through atoms of a different structure than anything that he knew. He remembered the fleeting impression he had had from the molecule. This was the same but on a massive scale. What startled him was that all his enormous training in such matters gave no clue as to what the structure might be. iiTnough?" asked the creature. Cemp said, "yes," doubtfully. The Glis accepted his reluctant agreement as a complete authorization. What had been a view through and past the cave wall, abruptly disappeared. The alien thought spoke into his mind: "I have done a very dangerous thing for me in thus revealing myself. Therefore, I again earnestly impress on you the importance of a limited number of people being told what you have just witnessed." In secrecy -- it continued -- lay the greates-t safety, not only for it but for Cemp. 'T believe," said the creature, "that what I can do is overwhelming. But I could be wrong. What disturbs me is, there is only one of me. I would hate to suddenly feel the kind of fear that might motivate me to destroy an entire system." The implied threat was as deadly -- and as possible -- as anything Cemp had ever heard. Cemp hesitated, feeling overwhelm, desperate for -- and needing -- more information. He flashed: "How old do Silkies get?" Added quickly: "We've had no experience, since none has yet died a natural death." "About a thousand of your Earth years," was the answer. "What have you in mind for Earth-born Silkies? Why did you want us to return here?" Again there was a pause; once more the sense of colossal power. But presently with it there came a reluctant admission that new Silkies, born on planets, normally had less direct' knowledge of the Glis than those who had made the latest trip. IF Thus, the Glis hed a great interest in insuring that there was plenty of time allowed for a good replacement crop of unknowing young Silkies. It finished: "You and I shall have to make a special agreement. Perhaps you can have E-Lerd's position and be my contact." Since E-Lerd no longer remembered that he was the contact, Cemp had no sense of having been offered anything but... danger. He thought soberly: "I'll never be permitted to come back here, once I leave." But that didn't matter. The important thing was -- ... Get away! At once X A t the Silkie Authority, the computer gave four answers. Cemp rejected two at once. They were, in the parlance of computer technology "trials". The machine simply presented all the bits of information, strung out in two lookovers. By this means a living brain could examine the data in segments. But Cemp did not need such data -- not now. Of the remaining two answers, one postulated a being akin to a god... But Cemp had experienced the less-than-god-like powers of the Glis, in that it had twice failed to defeat him. True, he believed that it had failed to destroy him because it did not wish to destroy the planetoid. But an omnipotent god would not have found that a limitation. He had to act as if the amazing fourth possibility were true. The picture that had come through was one of ancientness. The mighty being hidden in the planetoid predated most planetary systems, "In the time from which it derives," reported the computer, "there were, of course, stars and star systems, but they were different. The natural laws were not what they are today. Space and time have made adjustments since then, grown older; and so the present appearance of the universe is different from what the Gliss knew at its beginnings. This seems to give it an advantage, for it knows some of the older shapes of atoms and molecules and can recreate them. Certain of these combinations reflect the state of matter when it was -- the best comparison -- younger." The human government oup, to whom Cemp presented this data, were stunned. Like himself, they had been basing their entire plan cm working out a compromise with the Space Silkies. Now, suddenly, here was a colossal being, with unknown powers. "Would you say," asked one man huskily, "that to a degree the Silkies are slaves of this creature." Cemp said, "E-Lerd definitely didn't know what he was dealing with. He simply had what he conceived to be a scientific system for utilizing a force of nature. The Glis responded to his manipulation of this system, as if it were simply another form of energy. But I would guess that it controlled him, perhaps through pre-conditioning, installed long ago." As he pointed out, such a giant life form would not be concerned with the everyday living details of its subjects. It would be satisfied with having a way of invariably getting them to do what it wanted. "But what does it want?" That came from another man. "It goes around doing good," said Cemp. He smiled a tight smile. "That's the public image it tried to give me. I have the impression that system to our specifications." A t this point Mathews spoke, "Mr. Cemp," he said, what does all this do to the Silkie situation?" Cemp said that the Silkies who had defected had clearly acted hastily. "But," he finished, "I should tell you that I find the Space Silkies a very likable group. In my opinion, they are not the problem. They have the same problem, in another way, that we have." "Nat -- " said Charley Baxter, "do you trust this monster?" Cemp hesitated, remembering the deadly attacks; remembering that only the Kibmadine defense screen and energy reversal process had saved him; and that the great being had been compelled to reveal its presence to prevent him from forcing E-Lerd to open his mind -- which would have apprised the Space Silkies of the nature of the Power. "No!" he said. Having spoken, he realized that a simple negative was not enough answer. It could not convey the reality of the terrifying danger that was out there in space. He said slowly, "I realize that my own motives may be suspect in what I am about to say. But it's my true opinion. I think all Earth Silkies should be given full knowledge of the Kibmadine attack and defense system at once, and that they work in teams to keep a constant watch on the Glis, permitting no one to leave the planetoid -- except to surrender." There was a pregnant silence. Then a scientist said in a small. voice, "Any chance of logic of levels applying?" "I don't see how," said Cemp. "I didn't either," said the man, unhappily. Camp addressed the group again: "I believe we should gird ourselves to drive this thing from the solar system. We're not safe until it's gone." It was as he finished speaking that he sensed an energy tension... familiar! He had a sensation, then, of cosmic distance and cosmic time -- opening. Power unlimited! It was the same feeling he had had in the second attack... when his senses had been confused. The fear that came to Cemp in that moment had no parallel in his experience. It was the fear of a man who suddenly has a fleeting glimpse of death and destruction for all his own kind and for his planet. A s he had that awful consciousness, Cemp whirled from where he was standing. He ran headlong toward the great window behind him, shattering it with an arc of lightning IF as he did so. And with eyes closed against the flying glass, he plunged out into the empty air seventy stories above the ground. As he fell, the fabric of space and time collapsed around him like a house of cards tumbling, Cemp transformed into Class C Silkie, and became immensely more perceptive. Now he sensed the nature of the colossal energy at work: a gravitational field so intense that it actually closed in upon itself. Encompassing all things, organic and inorganic, it squeezed with irresistable power -- Defensively, Cemp put up, first, his inverter system. And perceived that that was not the answer. Instantly, he triggered gravity tran sformation -- an infinite variable system, which converted the encroaching superfield to a harmless energy in relation to himself. With that, he felt the change slow. It did not stop. But he was no longer so involved, no longer so enveloped; and yet he was not completely free. He realized what held him. He was oriented to this massive segment of space-time. To an extent, anything that happened here happened to hinr. To that extent, he could not get away. The world grew dim. The sun disappeared. Cemp saw with a start that he was inside a chamber, and realized that his automatic screens had protected him from striking the hard, glittering walls. And he became aware of three other realities. The chamber was familiar, in that there below him was one of the glowing images of a planet. The image showed the oceans and the. continents, and the fact that he was looking down at it seemed to indicate that he was -- somehow -- back inside the Silkie planetoid, in one of the "art" rooms. What was different was that as he looked down at the planetary image, he saw the familiar outlines of the continents and oceans of Earth. Realized -- That the feeling of a virtually unlimited force pressing was a true explanation of what had happened. The ancient monster that lived at the core of the planetoid had taken Earth, compressed it and everything in it and on it, from an #-milein-diameter planet into a hundred foot ball and had added it to its fabulous collection. It was not a jewel-like image of Earth there in the floor. It was Earth itself. Even as he had the thought, Cemp sensed that the planetoid was increasing speed. He thought: "We're leaving the solar system." In a matter of minutes, as he hovered there, helpless to act, the speed of the planetoid became hundreds, then thousands of miles a second. After about an hour of continuing acceleration, the velocity of the tiny planetoid in its ever-widening hyperbolic orbit was nearly half that of the speed of light. A few hours later, the planetoid was beyond the orbit of Pluto, and it was traveling at near light-speed. And still accelerating -- XI S omewhere in there, Cemp began to brace himself. Anger spilled through him like a torrent down a rocky decline. "You incredible monster! he telepathed. No answer. Cemp raged on: "You're the most vicious creature that ever existed. I'm going to see that you get what's coming to you!" This time he got a reply. "Fm leaving the solar system forever," said the Glis. 'Why don't you get off before it's too late? I'll let you get away." Cemp had no doubt of that. He was its most dangerous enemy, and his escape and unexpected appearance must have come as a hideous shock to the Glis. "I'm not leaving," he retorted, "until you undo what youvc done to the Earth." There was silence. "Can you and will you?" Cnp demanded. "No. It's impossible." The response came reluctantly. "But you could, if you wanted to, bring Earth back to size?" "No. But I now wish I had not taken your planet," said the Glis unhappily. 'Tt has been my policy to 'leave alone inhabited worlds that are protected by powerful life forms. I simply couldn't bring myself to believe that any Silkie was really dangerous to me. I was mistaken." It was not the kind of repentance IF that Cemp respected. "Why can't you -- unsqueeze -- it?" he persisted. It seemed that the Glis could create a gravity field, but it could not reverse such a field. It said apologetically, "It would take as much power to undo it as it took to do it. Where is there such power?" Where, indeed? But still he could not give up. "I'll teach you what anti-gravity is like," Cemp offered, "from what I can do in my own energy control system." But the Glis pointed out that it had had the opportunity to study such systems in other Silkies. "Don't think I didn't try. Evidently antigravity is a late manifestation of matter and energy. And I'm an early form -- as you, and only you, know." Cemp's hope faded suddenly. Somehow, he had kept believing that there was a possibility. There wasn't. The first grief touched him, the first real acceptance of the end of Earth. T he Glis was communicating again: "I can sec that you and I now have a serious situation between us. So we must arrive at an agreement. I'll make you the leader of the Silkie nation. I'll subtly influence everything and everyone to fit your wishes. Women -- as many as you desire. Control -- as mhch as you want. Future actions of this planetoid you and I shall decide." Cemp did not even consider the offer. He said grimly, "You and I don't think alike. I can just imagine trusting you to leave me alone if I ever took the chance of changing to human form." He broke off, said curtly, "The deal as I see it is a limited truce, while I consider what I can do against you, and you figure out what to do to me." "Since that's the way you feel," was the harsh reply, "let me make my position clear. If you begin any action against me, I shall first destroy Earth and the Silkie nation, and then give you my attention." Cemp replied in his own steely fashion: "If you ever damage anything I value -- and that includes all Silkies and what's left of Earth -- I'll attack you with everything I've got." The Glis said scornfully, "You have nothing that can touch me -- except those defense screens that reverse die attack flow. That way, you can use my own force against me. So I won't attack. Therefore -- permanent stalemate." Cemp said, "We'll see." The Glis said, "You yourself stated that your levels of logic wouldn't work on me." "I meant not directly," said Cemp. "There are many indirect approaches to the mind." "I don't see how anything like that can work on me," was the reply. At the moment, Cemp didn't either. xn T hrough miles of passageways, up as well as down, and roundabout, Cemp made his way. The journey took him through long chambers filled with furniture and art objects from other planets. En route, he saw strange and wonderful scenes in bas-relief and other. And always there were the planets themselves, glowingly beautiful, but horrifying too, in his awareness that each one represented a hideous crime. His destination was the city of the Silkies. He followed the internal pathway to it because he dared not leave the planetoid to take an external route. The Glis had virtually admitted it had not anticipated that he -- its most dangerous enemy -- would survive. So if he ever left these caves, he would have no further choice, no chance to decide on what the penalty -- if any -- or the outcome should be, and no part at all in the Silkie future. For he would surely never be allowed to return. Not that there was any purpose in him. His grief was too deep and terrible. He had failed to protect, failed to realize, failed in his duty. Earth was lost. So quickly, so completely, a disaster so great it could not even be contemplated for more than instants at a time. At intervals, he mourned Joanne, and Charley Baxter, and other friends among the Special People, and the human race. By the time he was sunk into these miseries, he had taken up an observation position on top of a tree overlooking the main street of the Silkie city. IF There he waited, with all of his signal systems constantly at peak alert. While he maintained his tireless vigil, the life of the Silkie community had its being around him. The fact that the Silkies continued to live mostly as humans began to seem significant. Cemp thought, shocked: "They're being kept vulnerable." In human form, they could all be killed in a single flash of intolerable flame. He telepathed on the Glis band: "Free them from that compulsion, or ril tell them the truth about what you are." An immediate, ferocious answer came: "You say one word, and I shall wipe out the entire nest." Cemp commanded: "Release them from that compulsion, or we come to our crisis right now!" His statement must have given the Glis pause, for there was a brief silence. Then: "I'll release half of them. No more. I must retain some hold over you." Cemp considered that and, realized its truth. "But it has to be on an alternating basis. Half are free for twelve hours, then the other half." The Glis' accepted the compromise without any further argument. It was clear that it was prepared to recognize the balance of power. "Where are we heading?" said Cemp. "To another star system." The answer did not satisfy Cemp. Surely, the Glis didn't expect to go cm with its malignant game of collecting inhabited planets. He challenged, "I feel that you have some secret purpose." "Don't be ridiculous, and don't bother me any more!"...Stalemate. A s the days and the weeks went by, Cemp tried to keep track of the distance the planetoid wa covering and the direction it was going. The speed of the meteorite had reached nearly a light year a day. Earth time. Eighty-two of those days passed. And then there was the feel of slowing down. The deceleration continued all that day and the next. And, for Cemp, there was finally no question: He could not permit this strange craft, which was now his home, to arrive at a destination about which he knew nothing. "Stop this ship!" he ordered. The Glis replied angrily: "You can't expect to control such minor things as this." Since it could be a deadly dangerous scheme, Cemp replied: 'Then open yourself to me. Show me everything you know about this system." "I've never been here before." "All right, then that's what I'll see when you open up." "I can't possibly let you look inside me. You may see something this time that will make me vulnerable to your techniques." "Then change course." "No. That would mean I could not go anywhere until you die about a thousand years from now. I refuse to accept such a limitation." The second reference to Silkie age gave Cemp great pause. On Earth no one had known how long Silkies could live, since none bom there had died a natural death. He himself was only thirty-eight years of age. "Look," he said finally, "If I have only a thousand years, why don't you just sit me out? That must be only a pinpoint in time compared to your own life span." "All right, weTl do that!" replied the Glis. But the deceleration continued. Cemp telepathed: "If you don't turn aside, I must take action." "What can you do?" was the contemptuous response. It was a good question. What, indeed? "I warn you," said Cemp. "Just don't tell anyone about me. Other than that do anything you please." Cemp said, "I gather you've decided I'm not dangerous. And this is the way you act with those you consider harmless." The Glis said Aat it believed that, if he had been able to do something, he would already have done it. It finished: "And so I tell you flatly, I'm going to do as  please; and the only restriction on you is, don't violate my need for secrecy. Now, don't bother me again." T he meaning of the dismissal was clear. He had been judged to be helpless. Categorized as someone whose desires need not be considered. The eighty days of inaction had stood against him. He hadn't attacked; therefore he couldn't. That was palpably die other's logic. Well... what could he da? He could make an energy assault But it would take time to mount, and he could expect that the Silkie nation would be wiped out in retaliation, and Earth destroyed. Cemp decided he was not ready to force such a calamity. He was presently dismayed to realize that the Glis's analysis was correct. He could keep his mind shut and respect its need for secrecy -- and nothing more.  He ought, it seemed to him, to point out to the Glis that there were different tvpes of secrecy. Gradations. Secrecy about itself was one type. But secrecy about the star system ahead was quite another. The whole subject of secrecy -- Cemp's mind poised. Then he thought: "How could I have missed it?" Yet, even as he had the awareness, he realized how it happened. The Glis's need to withhold knowledge of itself had seemed understandable. And somehow the naturalness of it had made him by-pass its implications. But now -- "Secrecy!" he thought. "Of course! Thafs itr To Silkies, secrecy was an understood phenomenon. After a few more seconds of thinking about it, Cemp took his first action. He reversed gravity in relation to the planetoid mass below him. Light as a thistledown he floated up and away from the tree top that had been his observation post for so long. Soon he was speeding along granite corridors. IF xm H e reached without incident the chamber which contained Earth. As he set his signals, so that all his screens would protect that precious found ball, Cemp permitted himself another increment of hope. "Secrets!" he thought again, and his mind soared. Life, in its natural impulse, had no secrets. Baby gurgled, or cried, or manifested needs, instant by instant, as each feeling was experienced. But the child, growing older, was progressively admonished and inhibited; subjected to a thousand restraints. Yet all his life the growing being would want open-ness and unrestraint; would struggle to free himself from childhood -- and that was what it was -- conditioning. Conditioning was not of itself logic of levels. But it was related; a step lower, only. The appearance was of a control center; that is, a rigidity. But it was a created center, which could be repeatedly mobilized by the correct stimulus. That part was automatic. The decisive fact was that, since the Glis' had conditioned itself to secrecy... it was conditionable. H aving reached this penultimate point in his analysis, Cemp hesitated. As a Silkie, he was conditioned to incapacitate rather than kill, to negotiate rather than incapacitate, and to promote well being everywhere. Even for the Glis, death should be the final consideratkm, not the first. And so he telepathed: "In all your long span, you have feared that someone would one day learn how to destroy you. I have to tell you that I am that feared person. So, unless you are prepared to back down from those insolent statements of a little while ago, then you also must die." The answer came ' coldly, "I let you go to your planet. Earth, because I have the real hostages under my complete control. The Silkie Nation!" "That is your final statement?" Cemp questioned. "Yes. Cease these foolish threats! They are beginning to irritate me." Cemp now used the words: "I know where you come from, what you are, and what happened to others like you." He, of course, knew nothing of the kind. But it was the technique. By stating the genalization, he would evoke the Glis's perception and memory network, first, the truth. Then, like all living things, the Glis would immediately have the impulse automatically to give forth with the data as it actually was. Yet, before it could be so, it would exercise the restraint of... secrecy. And that would be an exact pattern, a reaffirmation of similar, precise restraints in its long, long past. His problem was to utilize it before it de-stimulated. Because so long as it held it was the equivalent of a logic of levels Gestalt. Having, according to the theory, mobilized it, Cemp transmitted the triggering signal. A startled thought came from the Glis: "What have you done? It was Cemp's turn to be sly, covert, scheming. He said, "I had to call to your attention that you had better deal with me. It was too late, but the pretense -- if successful -- might save many lives. "I wish to point out," said the Glis, "that I have not yet damaged anything of value. Cemp was profoundly relieved to hear the statement. But he had no regrets. With such a creature as this, he could not hope to repeat what he was doing against it. Once the process was started, it was all or nothing. "What was it you said before about bargaining?" the Glis asked, urgently. Cemp steeled himself against sympathy. The Glis continued: "I'll give you all my secrets in exchange for you telling me what you're doing to me. I'm experiencing severe internal disturbance, and I don't know why." C emp hesitated. It was a tremendous offer. But he divined that, once he made it, he would have to keep such a promise. What had happened was that, as he had hoped, his final signal had triggered the equivalent of a colony Gestalt, in this instance the process by which life forms slowly over the years and the milennia adjusted to exterior change... The cycle-completing control centers, the growth-change mechanism in the great being, were stimulated. Silkies understood the nature of growth. And of change they knew much from their own bodies. But Silkies were late indeed in the scheme of life. Their cells were as old as the rocks and the planets, in terms of cvolvement. The entire history of life's progression was in every cell of a Silkie. That could not be true of the Glis. It was from an ancient eon, and it had stopped time within itself. Or at least it had not passed on its seed, which was the way of chance through time. In itself, it manifested old, primitive forms. Great forms they were, but the memory in each cell would be limited to what had gone before. Therefore, it couldn't know what, in holding back as it had, it was holding back from. "I promise not to go on to the Nijjan system," said the Glis. "Observe -- I'm already turning aside." Cemp sensed a change in the direction of the planetoid. But it seemed a minor act; not meaningful. He merely noted, in passing, the identity of the star the Glis had named; observed that, since it knew the name, it had been there before. Which seemed to imply that it had had a purpose in going there. It didn't matter; they were turning away from it, would never reach it. If there was a threat there for himself, or Silkies, it was now diverted; had been useful only in that it had forced him to action regardless of consequences. amends when it no longer had any choice was merely a sad commenIF tary on its character, but much too late. Many planets -- Cemp thought -- too late. How many? he wondered. And because he was in the strange set emotion of someone whose whole thought and effort is concentrated on a single, intensely felt purpose, he asked the question automatically -- as it came into his mind. "I don't think I should tell you; you might hold it against me," the Glis replied. I t must have sensed Cemp's adamant state, for it broke off, said quickly, "Eighteen hundred and twenty-three." So many! The total of them did not shock Cemp. It hurt him. For one of that countless number of unecessary dead on those planets was Joanne. Another was Charley Baxter. "Why have you done all this?" Cemp asked. "y destroy all those planets?" "They were so beautiful." True. Cemp had a sudden mental vision of a great planet hanging in space, its atmosphere ballooning up above the oceans and mountains and plains. He had seen that sight often, yet found it always a thing of splendor beyond all the visual delights of the universe. The feeling passed, for a planet was beautiful when it was brooded over by its parent sun, and not as a shrunken museum piece. The Glis with its planets was like a head hunter of old. Skillfully, he had murdered each victim. Patiently, he had reduced the head to its small size. Lovingly, he had placed it in his collection. For the headhunter, each perfect miniature head was a symbol of his manhood. For the Glis, the planets were -- what? Cemp couldn't imagine. But he had delayed long enough. He sensed incipient violenceon the communication band. He said hastily, "All right, I agree -- as soon as you do what I want. I'll tell you." "What do you want?" Cemp said, "First, let the other Silkies go outside." "But you'll do as I've asked?" "Yes. When you've released them, put me and the Earth outside, safely." "Then you'll tell me?" "Yes." The Glis threatened: "If you don't. I'll smash your little planet. I will not let you or it escape if you don't tell me." "I'll tell you." T he method that was used was, the entire section of the planetoid surrounding Cemp simply lifted up and shot off into the sky. Cemp found himself floating in empty, black space, surrounded by meteorite debris. The Glis's thought came to him: T have done my part. Now tell me!" Even as Cemp complied, he began to wonder if he himself really understood what was happening. Uneasiness came. In setting in motion a cycle-completion process, he had taken it for granted that Nature would strike a balance. An old life form had somehow been preserved here, and in its body evolution was now proceeding at lightning speed. ready been compressed into minutes of time. Since none other of its kind remained alive, he had assumed that the species had long since evolved to -- what? What was this creature? A chrysalis? An egg? Would it become a butterfly of space? a great worm? or a gigantic bird? Such possibilities had not occurred to him before. He had thought only of the possibility of extinction. But -- it struck him keenly -- he hadn't considered seriously enough what that... extinction... might consist of in its end product. Indeed, he hadn't thought about there being an end product. Unhappily, Cemp remembered what the computer had reported; That the atomic structure of this giant being reflected a younger state of matter. Could it be that, as the particles "adjusted" and changed to current norm, there would be a release of energy on a hidierto unknown scale? Distracted, Cemp thought: "What will it' evolve to?" B elow, a titanic thing happened. Part of the planetoid lifted.  A solid ball of red-hot matter, at least a mile thick, lifted slowly out of it. As Cemp drew aside to let the improbable thing pass him, he saw an even more unlikely phenomenon was taking place. The "up" speed of the chunk of now white hot rock and dirt was increasing -- and the mass was growing in size. It was well past him, and it was at least a hundred miles in diameter. A minute later, it was five hundred miles thick, and it was still expanding, still increasing speed. It expanded to a burning, incredible mass. Suddenly, it was ten thousand miles in dianieter; and was still going away, still growing. Cemp sent out a general alarm: "Get away -- as fast as you can. Away!" As he himself, fled, using a reversal of gravity on the monstrous body behind him, he saw that in those few minutes it had grown to a sun over a hundred thousand miles thick. It was quite pink at his point; strangely, beautifully pink. The color altered even as he watched; turned faintly yellow. And the body that emitted the beautiful miles in diameter. As big as Earth's sun. In minutes more, it grew to the size of a giant blue sun; ten times the diameter of Sol. It began to turn pink again. And it grew one hundred times in ten minutes. Brighter than Mira the Wonderful. Bigger than glorious Ras Algethi, But pink, not red. A deeper pink than before; not red, so definitely not a variable. All around was the starry universe, bright with unfamiliar objects that glowed near and far; hundreds of them, strung out like a long line of jack-o-lanterns. IF Below was Earth. C emp looked at that scene in the heavens, and then at the near, familiar planet; and an awful excitement seized him. He thought: Is it possible that everything had to grow; its change altered this entire area of space-time? Old forms could not keep their compressed state once the supercolossal pink giant completed the growth that had somehow been arrested from time's beginning. And so the Glis was now a sun in its prime, but with eighteen hundred and twenty-three planets strung over the whole near sky. Everywhere he looked were planets so close they looked like moons. He made a quick, anxious calculation. And realized with great relief that all that he could see were still within the warming area of the monstrous sun that hung out there, half a light-year away. As Cemp descended, at the top speed that his Silkie body could withstand, into the huge atmosphere blanket that surrounded Earth... everything seemed the same -- the land, the sea, the cities -- He swooped low over one highway and observed cars going along it. He headed for the Silkie Authority in a haze of wonder, and saw the shattered window from which he had leaped so dramatically --  -- Not yet repaired! When, moments later, he landed among the same group of men who had been there at his departure, he realized there had been some kind of a time stasis, related to size. For Earth, and its people, all that eighty days had been... eighty seconds. -- Afterwards, he would hear how people had experienced what seemed like an earthquake, tension in their bodies, momentary sensory blackout, a brief feeling that it was dark -- Now, as he entered, Cemp transformed to human form and said in a piercing voice: "Gentlemen, prepare for the most remarkable piece of information in the history of the universe. That pink sun out there is not the result of an atmospheric distortion. "And, gentlemen. Earth now has eighteen hundred inhabited sistc planets. "Let's begin to organize for a fantastic future!" L ater, comfortably back in his Florida home, Cemp said to Joanne: "Now we can see why the Silkie problem didn't have a solution as things stood. For Earth, two thousand of us was saturation. But in this new sun system -- " It was no longer a case of what to do with the six thousand members of the Silkie nation, but how could they get a hundred such groups to cope with the work to be done?      IF  Short Story Here's the whole saga of Man's conquest of the starlanes -- and how the triumph came to an end! Chapter # A s was stated in the last chapter, Earth had established bases on the Moon. By #, Mars had been colonized: four self-sustaining communities were thriving on the Red Planet. Thirty years later, the impossible was realized in the form of an atomic drive. The new propulsion principle made travel to the stars practical. Human civilization spread into other cultures. However, since no intelligence was found to equal his own, man felt it his duty to enrich, teach and otherwise aid the alien races. # Awright, Bugs, let's go! You think we took you outa them stinkin' huts for nothin'?" "Sergeant, it's not necessary to continue this shouting. They're already filing out,, as you can see." "Yes, sir, but it's the only thing they listen to. The louder you talk the better they listen." "Er... Sergeant, there's one over there who hasn't moved." "Hey! You! Get goin'! Uh, it's dead. Startin' to rot too. Nothin' but a damn big bug." "Well, it doesn't matter, they're all aboard now. Just leave him... it. We'll never be back to this primitive, filthy world." "Sir, did you hear about the speech Rauvkaus made a few days ago?" "Who's Rauvkaus?" "You know, sir. When this planet was first discovered. Colonel Erricson and his men brought one of the chief Bugs -- Rauvkaus -- back to Earth, taught him our language. And the damned cockroach has been stirrin' up trouble ever since." "What did he say?" "Said his people -- people, get that, people! Ha! -- they were bein shipp to the salt mines. Salt mines? What's a salt mine anyway?" "It doesn't matter what he said. We're civilizing an entire race, a whole planet of primitive arthropods." "Well, Lieutenant, if you're ready? After you, sir." "There she is, Sergeant, my first command, the Arciurus IV, Named after our destination, the only planet where Biotemp is grown. Marvelous substance. Enables a human to live for # years or more. Too bad about the original population: all died off. Measles. Funny how common Earth diseases hit some races. Doesn't matter though, the pincers on the Bugs are perfect for removing the fruit of the Biotemp vine." "Damn! Look, sir -- two more dead Bugs. There's a man throwin' 'em out the hatch." "So much death, Sergeant. Fine way to celebrate my sixty-first birthday!" "Just out of navigation school, right, sir?" "Yes, Sergeant, I'm just starting out." "That's great, sir. Wish I had gone myself, but things were tough." T here were hostile beings, however, and if the colonists were endangered, it was necessary to eliminate the creatures. But the essential eradication was done in a humane manner and and only animals which did not show intelligence were eliminated -- quickly, qiiietly and honcwably. "They are coming. Great One. A There is nothing we can do. They are stronger than we. They come from beyond the last sun. They are our conquerors. Great One, they are just outside. Be strong. We will meet again. #"Three days trackin', boy. Now A we'll have some fun." "I'll do it, but I won't enjoy it. Corporal." "Drop the 'Corporal', boy. You're a cadet; I'm a regular.  what? We're buddies. All right? Let's have some target practice." "It's dark in here. Bring your light?" "Sure, boy. There, you can see 'em way in the back.Usual group -- eight young, one old." "How can you tell the old one from the others?" "He's in the back of the cave. You can barely see him. His fur is droppin out and his teeth are worn down. And God, what fangs!" "That's what's worry me, Joe. If they're so vicious, why haven't they attacked us?" "Scared! That's why! They're scared to death! You can tell by lookin' at' em that tlir fangs and claws could tear hedl out of you. Grab your blaster, boy. Stop talkin' and start shootin'. Watch this, it's a barrel of laughs when you bum off a couple of arms and they just sit and stare, full of contempt. If they weren't so scared of our guns they'd kill us!" "Yeah, I guess so." "Okay, boy, I out 'em all down but two and they're all yours." G reat One, I can't bear the pain. It will pass, child. You must be patient. There is another world without pain where these creatures can never reach us. I know. Great One. We will be together again. But why do they torture us? They think that we will do them harm. Our appearance is grotesque in their eyes. They are a young race, yet children. Great One, the time has come. The suffering is... Good-by, my child. #T Tev. Joe, look over here. Some tracks, leading out" "Right, boy. But let's pick up the teeth of these back here so the governor will give credit for our trouble." 'Trouble? Are you kidding? I haven't had so much fun in years!" I n spite of the difficulties man encountered, he explored and settled the entire galaxy. But he did not meet a race of equivalent intelligence in all his wanderings. "Are you finished, Mr. Chapman?" the officer asked. "No," he replied, but Fm quitting. You can finish it yoursdf." "But Mr. Chapman, no one can equal your ability in writing a history of the galaxy's masters." "I disagree; the remaining work is yours." "Thank you, Fll try. Yes, I believe I will." He picked up Chapman's final page and read : "'... did not meet a race of equivalent intelligence in all his wanderings.' Yes, Mr. Chapman, just a small addendum: 'The race was more intelligent.' Is that not correct, Mr. Chapman?" The officer smiled as he laid down the pen, his single eye sparkling in his scaly face. "Now, sir," he said, "if you will follow the guard to the Preserving Section, the -- uh... 'race of man' will live forever in you and your great work, side by side, in our museum of extinct peoples." After Chapman had gone, the officer slumped onto his front legs, his smile gone. "I wish we could have saved a female also. Only half of a pair is worthless. Perhaps a replica could be nwide imder Mr. Chapman's directions. If the female is like him, the work should not be too difficult. He could very easily Dont miss the next tbrining mstallment of  I I by Loumer and Brown -- reserve next month's ?f today!  #  IF IF  Novelette The man with the weapon was a friend -- but friendship was only skin deep! I S itting in the shade to avoid the hot sun of the upper Amazon, Ed Grayson fanned himself and listened to the old chief plead for the rifle lying on top of the packing case. "Please give gun," the old chief said. "Why do you want the rifle?" Grayson questioned. "Want her to kill grandson," the old chief answered, hate popping in his eyes. "To kill your grandson!" Grayson gasped. "But that's -- " He was going to say that this was murder but caught himself befm he spoke. In this hot and savage wilderness in upper Brazil, a world where few white men had ever penetrated in modem times, minder might have a different definition than it had in the more civilized countries. Here in this place the was no law and never had been. Tribal custom took its place. Perhaps it was the custom among this tribe for the grandfather to kill the grandson! Afto all, if this were true, it would be only a step away from the latent hostility found by the psychoanalysts to exist at the unconscious mind levels among civilized people, in whidi the father either killed the son or drove him away from home. "Why would you want to kill your grandson?" Ed Grayson asked. He made his voice as calm and as reasonable as possible. Perhaps, if the old chief could be made to think that practice among white men, he could be induced to explain. Trying to answer, the old native wrinkled his face until he looked like a howler monkey, seeking among the little Portuguese, Spanish and English that he knew for the right words to express his thoughts. He needed no words to express his emotion. His face revealed that he was feeling only hate -- this in blazing intensity. But he had problems in expressing clearly what was on his mind. "Grandson dead already," he began. "Then you can't kill him," Grayson said. "Want kill his hide!" the old chief said. Triumph was in his voice. He had said what he wanted to say, even in clumsy English. Certain that he would be understood, and his request granted, he reached for the rifle. Grayson grabbed the long gun and laid it across his knees. As if this was what he had been reaching for all the time, the old chief fingered a thick coil of stout nylon cord lying on top of the packing case. "I don't understand," Ed Grayson said. He forced his voice to be calm. "If your grandson is dead -- " "But his hide is alive!" the chief shouted. "Want kill hide. Give gun." Again he reached for the weapon. "No!" Grayson said. He swung the muzzle of the gun so that it covered the native. The old chief settled back on his heels. Squatting there, toothless and almost hairless, with flabby flesh hanging loosely on twisted bones, he suddenly looked as ancient as the hills, as worn as eroded mountains. T he rifle would make him big, would enable him to stand erect, would make him -- if not young again, still it would enable him to be a man again, a leader of his own people. If only this stupid white man would give him the gun! Didn't the white man know the danger that existed here in this hot country of the upper river? Was the white man so ignorant of real life as it existed here to hold back because of fanciful notions about the word called murder? Didn't the white man realize that death was the only solution for some problems? Wondering how a man could be dead but his skin could still be alive, Ed Grayson was silent. He was a young man, a chemist, and at age # he was known as a comer in that part of the scientific and industrial complex that was interested in chemistry. Here in this jungle world he did not feel at home and never had. Something about the fetid jungle, the hot, steaming wetness of the place, the gross sexuality of it, troubled him deep in his mind where the old fears of the race still lived. Suddenly he wished that McPherson was back in camp with him. But McPherson had gone back IF down the river wkh Ihe last weekly trip of the helicopter that brought supplies up to them and took away for shipment overseas any yagate roots they had been able to find. Grayson and McPherson were both chemists. Since each also had a streak of adventurer's blood in him, they made an excellent team. A Swiss drug company was paying them excellent salaries -- and was also picking up the tab for the cost of the helicopter -- to make a thorough search through this country of the upper Amazon for a plant called yagate by the natives who Kved in this regkm. This was the century of the psychedelic drug, with many curiousminded humans using such consciousness-expanding drugs in an effort to see what was beyond the limited and limiting structure of their own personalities, what was over and above file fimited frame of reference of their dafly lives. Abroad in the world again was the idea that was old when Egypt was new, when Baalbek was building, when Ur was a new place in the land of the Chaldees. That idea was that men did not see all of the universe with their eyes or hear all of it with their ears or grasp all thoughts with their conscious minds, and that beyond the world men saw in their daily lives were other worlds, perhaps other univers. Perhaps the Earth itself was dual, perhaps men at most saw only half of it! Perhaps the devil was more than a myth and perhaps there was a god who sometimes spoke to men in a still, small voice! At least, these were some of the ideas that were emerging from the transcendental experiences of those who were experimenting with the psychedelic drugs. The questions to which they sought answers were as old as the race of men. Since experience had indicated fiiat nature was the first and biggest manufacturer of psychedelic substances, companies supplying the demand for psychedelic drugs were going to nature for the raw material they needed, to the swamps, to the jungles, to the forests and to the gus growing on rye grain. Psilocybin had ccKne from a mushroom growing wild in the jungle country of Mexico. Mescaline had come from a small cactus called peyote which grew wild in the desert country of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Another consciousness-expanding drug had come from the seeds of the blue morning glory. Yagate was -- or was rumored to be -- a plant growing in the jungle swamps of the upper Amazon which bad consciousness-expanding alkaloids in it. "This is what brought me here," Ed Grayson thought, running over the chain of circumstances that had brought him to the upper Amazon. "Now that I am here, I have the privilege of watching this old chief make up his mind whether he is strong enough to knock me down and take this rifle away from me by force! The old devil is almost civilized in his attitudes! He just wants a gun. He doesn't give a hoot about the ethics or the morals involved!" Bitterness rose in him at the thought. IF # #inune gun, I kill hide of VjT grandsonr the old chief spoke, "Gimme H-bomb, I kill everybody who disagrees with me!" Grayson said. He had not intended to make such a statement, but the words, driven by the rising bitterness in him, had popped unbidden from his mouth. "Hunh? the chief grunted. Hbomb was a word he did not understand. "Gimme laser beam, I fry everybody the H-bomb leaves alive! Gravson continued. "Huh-hunh?" the chief asked. He did not understand the words but he got the underlying idea readily enough. "Where can get H-bomb, where can get laser thing?" he asked, eagerness rising in his voice. "Use to kill devils who wear grandson's hide. Where can get --  "Oh, go to hell, you murderous old devil!" Grayson said. He was shocked at the words that had popped from his own mouth. "No, I'm not going to give you this rifle. To make murder legal, moral and ethical, you have to be a nation, and civilized. And even then you have to call it war. "No!" A wave df resentment crossed the old chiefs face, then was gone as another course of action came to his mind. Reaching into the hide bag which he always carried, he produced a gnarled and twisted root. "That's yagate," Grayson said. Automatically he reached for it. The old chief jerked it back. "Gimme gun," he said. "Will show where to find root, lots of root." "You're trying to bnbe me!" Grayson gasped. "When white men do it is called trade the chief answered. Again he reached for the rifle. "If I give you the rifle, you may use it to kill several innocent people. I don't want their blood on my hands," Grayson said. "The answer is -- no!" Rising to his feet, he entered the nylon tent. Looking throu the open flap, he saw the old chief rise and stalk angrily into the jungle. He felt a little sorry for the native. The old man had a problem of some kind, but the problem, whatever it was, could not be solved with a rifle bullet. If the old chief had claimed that people, Grayson would have loaned him the gun, and gladly. But to kill the hide of his grandson! To the chemist, this made no sense whatsoever. n P erhaps an hour later, Grayson noticed that the coil of nylon cord was missing from the top of the packing case. He did not doubt that it had gone into the skin bag while his back had been turned as he entered the tent. "If I let him get away with murder, he'll rouse the whole jungle," Grayson thought. "And our root hunting will be at an end." Picking up the rifle, he followed the dim trail the old chief had taken as he had stalked angrily into the jungle. Under a tall tree at the edge of a little clearing, he caught a glimpse of the old warrior squatting on the ground beside something that Grayson could not make out. Seeing him coming, the old man scowled and brought up the point of the knife he was using. He made no attempt to throw it or to strike with it as Grayson approached but he held it ready. A noose in one end, the long nylon cord lay on the ground. Looking up into the tree, Grayson saw where the old chief had crouched above the trail, the nylon noose dangling and ready for anything that passed beneath. Looking down, Grayson saw on the ground what had passed under the tree. His first thought was that it was an animal. Nausea crawled in his stomach as he saw that it was a human being. The nausea grew stronger when he saw that the old chief had almost finished skinning what he had caught in his noose. "You -- " Grayson began. Ignoring him, the old chief finished skinning his captive. Tugging at the skin, he pulled it free from the body on the ground. Picking up the skin, he reverently carried it to the other side of the clearing. There, as gently as any mother could have laid down a sleeping baby, he laid the skin on the ground. Carefully, he straightened the legs and arms, then, knife in hand, he returned to face the white man. "You not give gun, I use noose, the old chief said. "You -- " So far Grayson got before he choked. The old chief pointed to the skin he had laid on the ground. "That hide of grandson," he said. He pointed again, this time at the body. "That Ugo devil," he said. Bitterness too deep for words was in the tone of his voice. F or the first time, Grayson really looked at the body. There were several strange things about it, he saw, but his first impression was that it was covered with soft white fur. He also saw that it showed no indication of bleeding, this in spite of having been skinned. There was something else about it that was very strange. Or perhaps the strangeness was in his eyes. But wherever it was, in the body or in his eyes, the body gave the impression that really it was without shape or form. As he watched, it seemed to be flowing, moving, twisting, changing in a way that was quite impossible to describe. Moving closer, he saw that the body was covered with a sort of white syrupy liquid instead of blood and that what he had thought was white fur was actually thousands, tubes about as big as hair which had connected this body to the skin that the old chief had so gently laid to one side. In removing the hide from the body, the old chief had simply sevAgain, Grayson felt nausea trying to rise within him. He pointed at the body. Words babbled on his lips. He knew he was trying to ask where that body had come from, what kind of a body it was, were there others like it anywhere in this jungle? IF "Ugo devil!" the old chief said. In his world, there was no restriction against kicking a fallen enemy. He did just this. Drawing back his foot, he kicked with his heel, a heavy blow that rolled the body over. The body rolled from the kick. And kept on rolling. When it reached the edge of the little clearing, it leaped to its feet. Howling, it fled along the trail.  # T T ung with noose, stuck withn. knife, thought was dead?" the old chief gasped. "What needed to kill Ugo devil?" Grayson was trying to say this was a question he could not answer when the old chief seemed to find a solution. Snatching the rifle from the chemist's un-nerved hands, he fired at the body running along the trail. The body kept on running. Before the chief could shoot a second time, it had disappeared around a bend in the trail. Swearing, working the bolt of the gun, the chief ran after it. Neither the body nor the chief returned. When the shadows began to grow thick in the jungle, Grayson retraced his steps to the nylon tent in the bend of the river where he and McPherson had established their base camp. Iriside the tent was McPherson's rifle. Grabbing it, Grayson feverishly slid a cartridge into the firing chamber. The night that followed was bad. Images of a human skin reverently laid out on one side of a clearing and of a skinless body fleeing howling up a jungle trail danced in the chemist's mind every time he tried to go to sleep. He had seen something that all of his training and experience had told him could not happen. He knew the memory of what he had seen this afternoon would remain with him all of his life and would return to haunt his dreams forever. Seeing that skinless body running howling up a jungle trail was a sight that no man would ever forget. Whaf was the creature the old chief had expertly roped with a noose in a nylon cord? Where had it come from? Were there others like it? Was it perhaps hunting through the dark night for another hide to occupy? Had it seemed to lose shape because it had no real shape of its own? Did it flow like water to assume the shape of any container it occupied? If it flowed into the skin of a jaguar would it become a iaguar? If it flowed into the hide of a bushmaster, would it become that deadly snake? If it flowed into the hide of a human would it talk like a man, think like a man, walk like a man? Where did it get the skin it occupied? Did it kill a human, then skin him, then did it slip inside the hide it had stolen? In spite of all of the mapping from the air and in spite of the expeditions that had laboriously crawled by boat along the rivers, what did science really know about the green hell of the Amazon jungle? S ometime just before day, Ed Grayson slipped into uneasy slumber. He awakened with a jump that lifted him completely off the cot. Outside the tent were howling noises. With McPherson's rifle in his hands, Grayson got outside the tent just in time to see the helicopter settle to the cleared space that served as a landing area. At the controls was the pilot whose handlebar mustache made him look like a pirate. Grinning cheerfully through the plastic cabin was McPherson. Ed Grayson thought he had never been so glad to see anybody in his life as this tall Scot. Setting the ship down, the pilot left the motor running while he descended to listen to the sound of the vanes. Grayson took his partner into the nylon tent and tried to tell the tall Scotchman what had happened. McPherson listened with little patience. "Ed, you shouldn't use yagate unless somebody is with you. It's worse than drinkiitg alone," McPherson said. "There is no predicting what any human will think he sees, hears, or feels while under the influence of any of these psychedelic drugs." "I wasn't using yagate," Grayson said. "No?" McPherson's black eyebrows formed questioning twin v's on his forehead. "Did you find some wild morning glory? Or perhaps some sacred mushrooms? We can get a good price for either of these." "I didn't use any psychedelic drug," Ed Grayson said. "I'm telling you what I saw with my own eyes." "Oh," McPherson said. He looked out the raised flap of the tent, to the clearing where the pilot with the handlebar mustache was still listening to the whine of the helicopter vanes. "Oh," he repeated. "Ed, while the ship is still here, maybe you had better use it to run back down the river. Have the pilot take you far enough downstream to find a really good hospital. Stay there for a week and get a thorough checkup." "But -- " Grayson tried to say. "There are obscure infections here in this jungle that sometimes hit the white man in strange ways. Having lived with them, the natives are usually pretty immune." "I know that -- " "These down-river dods have been dealing with these infections for a long time," McPherson continued, seemingly without hearing his companion's protest. Quietly, as if this was the thing to do, he lifted his rifle from Grayson's hands. Taking the elbow of Grayson's right arm, he urged his companion out into the clearing and toward the helicopter. "Damnit -- " Grayson began. The sudden decision and quick action of his companion had dazed him. He wanted to protest that he was not crazy, that he had really seen what he claimed to have seen, but he knew his companion was acting in his own best interests and that if their positions had been reversed, he would have insisted on McPherson going downriver for a medical checkup and a possible psychiatric evaluation. In this jungle your life often depended on your companion. Who wanted to risk his own life by having a crazy man as a partner? "I'll handle everything here while you are gone," McPherson said. "I'll hunt up the old chief who showed you that yagate root and see if I can bribe him into showing me where he got it. Hola, pilot! My IF partner is going back downriver with you. Grinning, the pilot turned a brown face and amiable brown eyes toward them. "Just a little checkup -- " McPherson ducked as a hummingbird darted from the jungle behind them passed within inches of his head. F ollowing the flight of the hummingbird with his eyes, Grayson saw what happened. "That hummingbird stuck its bill into the pilot's forehead," he said. Already shaken mentally and emotionally by McPherson's calm decision and quick action, Grayson had little emotion left to invest in so strange a sight as a hummingbird committing suicide by ramming its fragile beak into the hard skull of a man. To Ed Grayson at this moment diis was just another incomprehensible thing that could happen. "Hah?" McPherson said. He stared at the pilot. A bit of bright red color had suddenly bloomed on the forehead of the helicopter man. "Hummingbird, hell -- " McPherson began, then ducked again as a second whistle soundpd in the air above him. "That one stuck its bill in the pilot's cheek," Grayson said. The pilot was reaching for the first bright red spot when the second spot appeared. He grabbed at it, jerked it from his skin, then reached up to his forehead and pulled out the first hummingbird. Holding them both in one hand, he looked at them. As he looked his brown face seemed to turn white. Lifting his eyes, he stared toward the jungle behind the two white men moving toward him. Seeing something there, he turned quickly and ran toward the cabin. Getting one foot on the step, he seemed to slip and to fall against the side of the ship. As he tried to stand erect, two other hummingbirds struck him, each adding 'a spot of red as a decoration for the brown shirt he was wearing. "Hummingbirds, hell!" McPherson gasped. "Those are poison darts from blowguns!" Turning toward the jungle, he fired repeated shots from the rifle. "I see them!" Grayson #aid. "The jungle is crowded with natives." Staring, it seemed to Ed Grayson that the green growth of the jungle had suddenly sprouted a growth of long tubes. Some of the tubes dropped away as McPherson fired at them. But others remained. And as McPherson emptied the rifle, all that remained were converging on the two white men. "Into the helicopter?" the Scot shouted. Turning, he and Grayson ran toward the ship. HI A head of them, the pilot had spread out both arms. Looking like a drunken man trying to balance himself, he seemed to go into a slow dance. For a moment he looked like some native dancer moving in unison to the beat of a funeral drum. He seemed to have forgotten die ship. Instead of trying again to climb into the protection of the cabin, where the plastic would stop blowgun darts, he started to scream. Running and screaming, he disappeared into the green jungle. Ed Grayson leaped headfirst into the cabin of the helicopter. Right behind him, McPherson jerked the door shut. Like little feather-decorated ornaments, darts struck the outside of the cabin, to fall away from the tough plastic without penetrating. The vanes of the ship were still turning. "I watched the pilot on the way up here," McPherson said. "I can fly one of these ships if I have to." He settled himself into the pilot's seat and advanced the throttle. "But the pilot -- " Grayson tried to protest. "We'll try and find him from the air, then maybe we can pick him up," McPherson answered. Under the advanced throttle, the motor throbbed heavily. Rotor vanes began to sing at a higher pitch. The ship started to lift but was down on the right. McPherson compensated for the right drop -- and over-compensated and the ship dropped left. He brought it back to something near level and the ship lurched into the air. The spinning vanes brushed vegetation at the edge of the clearing. McPherson shoved the throttle wide open. The ship seemed to leap into the sky. Before he could check it, the helicopter was high above the trees and was caught in a stiff wind that did not exist on the jimgle floor but which blew heavily hwe in the sky. Catching the helicopter, the wind hurled it westward, toward a group of low hills that rose like mounds at the place where the rising land was trying to stop being jungle and was attempting to become an erosion sloping eastward from the mighty Andes to the west. In spite of all that McPherson could do to bring it under control, the wind flung the helicopter to a crash landing at the edge of a pile of huge, tumbled stones on top of the centermost of the low hills. The safety belt in the pilot's seat saved McPherson but Grayson had neglected to fasten his safety belt, with the result that he was flung across the cabin. He struck the door just as it was wrenched open beneath him. He hit the ground on his feet. Careening from the tumbled rocks, the helicopter missed him, but as he went to the ground, he felt a stabbing jolt of pain shoot up his left leg and he knew he had either sprained or broken his ankle. In a thunder of ripping vanes and tearing metal and breaking plastic, the helicopter came to rest. Fortunately McPherson had the presence of mind to turn off the motor, with the result that the wreckage did not catch fire. Ed Grayson, sitting on the ground and holding his left ankle with both hands, looked up as McPherson came over to him. McPherson's face was covered with sweat and he was obviously on the edge of the shakes. iC'hings sure do happen fast A around here," McPherson said, wiping his face. "First the naIF lives shoot the pilot full of poisoned darts, then I crash the helicopter. Ed, I'm just damned sorry. Are you badly hurt?" "It's a sprain, I think," Grayson said. "There's a first aid kit in the helicopter. There's also a machete and a .# revolver. We've got the rifle, but no ammunition for it. I'll get the kit." Grayson could not endure the pressure of a bandage on his rapidly swelling ankle. With the machete, McPherson cut a crutch from a forked sapling. Using this to support his weight, Grayson was able to hobble. "We'll hole up here until your ankle gets well enough for you to walk, then we'll go down to the river and buy or steal a dugout canoe," McPherson decided. "You have the pilot's pistol. The machete will be enough for me." The .# had been made in Spain. It was rusty but looked as if it would work. Fully loaded, Grayson slipped it under his belt. A box of extra cartridges went into his pocket. "There's a tarp in the helicopter, McPherson said. "We'll use it to stretch between those two big rocks. In this way, we'll have enough of a tent to keep the rain off of us." McPherson's voice went into silence. When he spoke again, his expression had startled surprise in it. "Look, Ed, at the carvings on that flat rock! If those are not Egyptian hieroglyphics -- " "Oh, nuts!" Grayson said. "Now you're the one who has been eating yagate." Then Grayson saw the huge flat stone to which his companion was pointing. His voice went into silence too. Once this flat stone had been a part of a building. This much was obvious at first glance. Perhaps all of the stones here had once been a part of a structure that had existed here. As this thought passed through his mind, Ed Grayson . caught a glimpse of this building -- so fast did his imagination operate -- as it had once existed. He saw a building such as had once existed in Karnak, in ancient Egypt, heavy stone columns forming the front of a temple which had faced a court. Only the building that had once existed here had not faced a court. It had faced a huge altar stone. Turning to his left, Grayson saw the altar stone still in place. Beyond the altar stone was a long oval of darkness that he had not noticed until now. A hole was there, or a pit, or a shaft, which led downward. Bringing his eyes back to the first stone, he saw carvings there, a man with the head of a jackal, a man with the head of a hawk. He knew instantly that these were symbols for some of the gods ci ancient Egypt, for Anubis, for Thoth, for Osiris. "But this is Braziir be heard McPherson protest. "There is no known connection between Egypt and the country of the uppo Amazon." The tone of McPherson's voice said he had come face to face with a wonder that was stretching his mind beyond its permissible limits. "There is a known connection IF now," Grayson said. "It's right there on those rocks and we know it." "But how -- " "I can't explain it either," Grayson said. "Look at that figure!" T he figure to which he pointed was larger than any of the others. It showed the ibis-headed god standing on top of a huge snake which he had speared. "The Egyptian name for that ibis-headed god was Thoth, which means truth," Grayson said. "A symbol such as this can only mean that they are trying to convey the idea that truth has conquered or is conquering or will conquer something which they have symbolized as a snake. What do you suppose the masons who cut this symbol were trying to tell us?" In the chemist's voice awe and wonder were mixed. "Damned if I know," McPherson answered. "Maybe they were trying to warn others that snakes existed in Ais jungle." "And maybe they expected everybody who saw this symbol to know about the snakes in die jungle," Grayson said. He was still bitter about the way his companion had reacted to his report of the old chief skinning what looked like a human. "Maybe in the symbol of that snake they were trying to tell us about something evil, sinister, dangerous, perhaps deadly, something that goes like a snake with its belly upon the ground." Grayson's voice was suddenly heavy with emotion. "Oh, come off it, Ed," McPherson said. "Maybe the Egyptians believed in evil things but that was thousands of years ago. We know better than to call anything evil today. There are plenty of things that are not on our side, but that does not mean they are evil, just that they are different. The sooner we stop using such silly labels, the better for us." "Remember, I saw something run howling along a jungle trail," Grayson answered. "Matever that thing was, I would call it more than different. I would call it evil. And so would the old chief who cut his grandson's skin off of it!" "Oh, the devil -- " McPherson said, obviously shaken. "Perhaps," Grayson answered. "What do you mean by perhaps McPherson answered. "You don't mean that you believe there's something in these jungles that you would be justified in calling a devil." "The old chief believes it," Grayson interrupted. "And sure as hell, there is something here in these jungles that is either a devil -- or belongs to a different system of evolution than we do." "But where -- "How would I know where it came from?" Grayson said. "How do I know where I came from? Where did the human race come from? Where did life itself come from? Every idea on this subject is theory, which means that somebody has been guessing. The truth is, we don't know the first thing about the origin of life. Maybe it started in a hole in the ground and has been working its way surf ace ward ever since!" "Started in a hole in the ground -- " McPherson began, then was silent. For the first time, he had become aware of the huge stone altar and of the oval-shaped opening beyond it. Shock was on his face as he glanced at his companion. "Ed -- " "I didn't say that was where life really started," Grayson said. "I said for all we know to the contrary, it could have started in a hole in the ground, but I'm guessing and I know it. Let's go look at that altar and at that hole in the ground." W ith the machete, McPherson cleared away some of the tough growth. Grayson hobbled behind him. The altar stone was made of black basalt. It was smooth on top -- from scouring by other stones or from the passage of many, many bare feet across it. McPherson climbed to the top, then reached down and gave Grayson a hand. Standing on the huge stone, with the hot jungle sun beating down on them, they looked down. And down. And down. Into the hole. Into the pit. Into blackness that grew blacker and blacker as it went farther and farther down. Struck simultaneously by slight dizziness, both men moved back. "Do you suppose they threw their victims from this altar into that pit?" McPherson gasped. His voice was a whisper of shocked sound. "Guessing again, I would say that was exactly what they did." "But why?" "Maybe they were feeding, or thought they were feeding, or believed they were feeding somthing that lived down in that hole," Grayson answered. His voice was a dry IF rattle in the wind. He shifted the weight on his crutch to ease the pain in his left ankle. "Oh, hell -- " McPherson began.  "Maybe that's what they thought was down at the bottom of that pit," Grayson said. "But damnit, Ed -- " "Just a little while ago, I told you a preposterous story of a skinned creature running howling up a jungle trail," Grayson went on. "You didn't believe me. What if the people who built this temple here threw living victims from this altar into this pit, because they believed that some angry deity, some minor god, lived down there in that pit, and that by making sacrifices to it, they were gaining its favor, or were protecting themselves from its depredations -- " "Oh, hell, Ed!" McPherson wiped sweat from his face. "You're in a state of shock." "Here's the altar, there's the pit," Grayson went on. "I know what I saw. You make what you can of all of it. You put it together in your imagination and see how it fits." "But what you claim you saw exists now, if it exists at all," the Scotsman protested. "This altar, the ruins here, are thousands of years old. If the people who lived here were sacrificing to something that lived in this pit, something like a gigantic amoeba, it would be dead now. All the people who lived here are gone." "But perhaps the thing in the pit is immortal. Perhaps it is still alive!" "Immortal!" McPherson's voice rose in outrage. "Get hold of yourself, Ed." 'The more primitive a creature is, the longer it may live. Think of turtles! They live hundreds of years. There are crabs that can grow new claws if an old one is lost. Perhaps there is a still more primitive type of life that can take on other forms." Grayson, shaken by what he was saying, shook his head at his own words. "I would say that is nonsense, if I thought I knew the difference between fact and non-fact. But right now I'm not sure -- " "Right now you're in a state of shock, Ed," McPherson said. "Tell me -- " his voice grew anxious -- "Did you bit your head when the ship crashed." "No," Grayson said. "I know I'm in shock. But I keep remembering that something is loose in the. jungle which once wore the skin of a human, but which lost that skin. I keep wondering if it is looking for another human skin." "Sit down and rest, Ed," McPherson urged. Helping his companion down from the altar, the Scotsman found a spot in the shade. "You rest here, Ed. I want to drop a rock down that hole and see if I can guess how deep it is. I also want to look at it a little closer and see if it is natural or artificial." IV G rayson, resting, tried to ignore the pain in his ankle as McPherson chopped his way through the tangle of vines and shrubs to the edge of the oval-shaped pit. Here the Scotsman went out of sight. Grayson heard him shout, then wait for an answer, and he knew that McPherson was yelling down the pit the way a small boy calls down an empty barrel, to hear an echo. Eventually the vScot returned. His face, glistening with sweat, was pale. "If you could walk, I would vote for us to get the hell out of here," the tall man said. "What's wrong now?" "That damned hole isn't natural. Somebody dug it. They must have dug another shaft beside it because I can see regular openings in the side wall of the pit but I haven't found the shaft opening yet." McPherson wiped sweat from his face. He gestured toward the symbols on the huge rocks. "Whether the Egyptians had a colony here or whether the people who lived here had been taught to write by the Egyptians, I don't know. It doesn't matter much. What bothers me is how they could have dug this Mohole with the primitive tools they had. What bothers me worse is why they dug h." Grayson grunted tonelessly. "The why of it shakes me too. How deep is it?" "That bothers me most of all," McPhn said. "I try to yell down it. No echo returns. I toss a rock down it and listen. I hear the sound of the falling rock hitting the sides growing weaker but I never hear that rode splash as it hits bottom." "Um," Grayson said. A wind that was both hot and cold at the same time seemed to blow over the jungle. The wind brought with it the scent of slime, of dampness and of decay, of things at mouldered much too long in the dark. "Maybe there's mud on the bottom. Maybe your rock hit soft mud and made no noise." "I thought of that," McPherson said. "I also thought of the Mayan sacrificial wells in Yucatan. The Mayans tossed human sacrifices down those holes. They also tossed gold and gems with the victims. Fortunes have been recovered from some of those Mayan wells..." "I've heard tell," Grayson said. "Are you thinking of coming back here with a government permit, with soldiers to fight the Indians, and a derrick to swing a bucket out over the hole and enough steel cable to reach the bottom?" "I thought we'd try to find the entrance to the shaft and go that way first," McPherson said. "That is, if we live long enough to get out of here and to return." "You don't feel right about this place?" Grayson asked. "I feel wrong as hell about it," the tall Scot answered. "There's something here in the air that I want to try to cut to pieces with a machete. Only there's not anything here in the air, and I know it. I guess I'm in shock too," he ended, shaking his head. "You still want to come back even if you don't feel right about the place?" "Hell, yes. I'm a Highlander. We've dealt with ghosts and demons and bogles and things that go bump in the night much too long to start running from them now." "Then you believe in that sort of stuff?" IF "I'm afraid I do," McPherson answered. "Scientific training had laid a veneer over me. But under that veneer, I'm a Celtic clansman right out of the ancient days when magic was a living force in the world. Something about this place scares the Celt in me." With the machete, he made switching motions in the air. F or both men, sleep was uneasy and irregular this night. Grayson dozed with the pilot's .# ready in his hand. McPherson kept the machete where he could touch it instantly. The wrecked helicopter yielded two strong flashlights. They made a small fire in the space between the two huge boulders. Grayson awakened several times during the night nd clutched the gun to find it was only McPherson stirring the blaze -- and not a creature searching in the dark for a lost hide, as he had feared. Sounds came in the night, a cough that could have been made by a jaguar, a grunt that could have come from a wild pig, and a scream that died into slow silence and which could only have come from the throat of a monkey that had awakened too late to the approach of the python. The echo of that fading scream lingered in Grayson's mind long after the sound had gone from his ears. When morning came, both men were in a state of nerves. Grayson's ankle was badly swollen. Even with the crutch, movement was a painful ordeal. McPherson found fruit in the jungle and brought it to his companion. They ate in silence. McPherson glanced toward the wrecked helicopter. Lifting the machete, he got quickly to his feet. Following the line of his companion's gaze, Grayson saw what had attracted McPherson's attention. At the sight, Grayson pulled himself to his feet and leaned on his crutch. A man was coming toward them. It was the helicopter pilot. At this short distance, there was no mistaking the man's features, and even if these had been in doubt, the long handlebar mustache would have provid?d certain identification. "He's dead!" McPherson whispered. "The poison on one dart is enoiurh to kill a man. I saw at least three darts strike him!" "He's still walking," Grayson said. "Maybe he has become a zombie," McPherson whispered. He glanced at his companion. "Get that .# ready!" Pulling the pistol from his beh, Gravson held it ready. The man coming toward them seemed dazed. He had lost his hat, his clothing hung in shreds from his body, his brown outer shirt had been tom off and the white undershirt was only a rag now. Torn by briars, bis pants legs were wet at the bottom and he had either removed his shoes or had lost them. Stumbling as if he did not notice where he was putting his feet, he walked past the wrecked helicopter wfthout seeing it. Nor did he seem to see the two men though he was walking toward them. "Poor devil! He's full of arrow poison," Grayson said, sympathy in his voice. He started to call out to the pilot but McPherson checked him vith a quick gesture. "He walked right past the wreck of his own helicopter without noticing it," McPherson whispered. "I don't like that." "The arrow poison -- "I'm not sure it's arrow poison." "What do you mean?" "You said the old chief had skinned something, which had then run, howling, down a jungle trail. You said this thing might be looking for another hide." Cold winds blew along Ed Grayson's spine. Stumbling, the pilot walked past them without seeing them. His gaze seemed centered on an invisible object hanging in the air. Or was he listening to a sound that they could not hear? As he got past them, the cold winds blew all over Grayson's body. A thick, rope-like red line ran down the middle of the man's back. Starting in a furrow in his hair, it disappeared under the belt at his back, then began again on each leg where the torn pants ended. AA son whispered. "That's not the pilot, that's something else wearing his hide!" He lifted his voice in a shout. "Hey, you!" The thmg in the skin of the pilot heard McPherson's voice and turned to ook toward the source of the sound. Now for the first time, Ed Grayson got a look at the eyes. The eyes of the pilot had been liquid brown and merry. The eyes of this creature were black -- and were filled with wild hate and equally wild fear. Grayson could tell nothing about the brain of the creature that owned these eyes. All he could see was the hate-fear in the eyes, hate as old as the Earth was old, hate as deep as the Earth was deep, hate for any creature or for any life-form that had climbed the evolutionary ladder faster than this monster had done, hate because this monster of its own choice had refused to climb the long and painful ladder that led upward to the stars and now was trying to hitch a piggyback ride on other life forms that had gone through the long, slow growth processes. As Grayson saw the hate that was in those eyes, he also saw the fear that was there. This monster was scared of everything, but mostly it was scared of sunlight. This was one big reason it hunted hides; it wanted protection from the sunlight. Long eons had gone into perfecting the skin of a human. A hide had to be sensitive, it had to feel the wind and to report whether that wind was hot or cold. In the darkness of the jungle, the skin had to report whether it was touching a wet branch or a python. It had to respond to the caress of a mate. On the other hand, if the skin was too sensitive, the sun would burn it and the cold winds would freeze it. Having no proper skin of its own, this monster had to steal the skins of other creatures. It was trying to become a gigantic inner parasite on other life forms that were moving upward. IF The creature looked at the two men. Pleasure seemed to light its eyes. It seemed to think that here were two new skins to be had for the taking. It moved toward them, hands stretched out to grab at them. With one sweep of the machete, McPherson cut off both arms at the wrist. This could not have been the creature's first contact with a sharpedged weapon but perhaps this was the first time it had met the long knife called a machete. Perhaps it did not understand the long knife but it understood pain. It jerked backward. The quick backward movement was all that saved its head. The second sweep of the machete was aimed at its neck but the long knife met only air as the moster leaped away. Before McPherson could strike a third time, the monster had turned and was fleeing, howling toward the big altar stone. M cPherson followed it. Ignoring the pain in his foot, Grayson hobbled to the altar stone and pulled himself on top of it, the gun ready in his right hand. In the minds of both men was a single thought, destruction, for obliteration, for sweeping off the stage of creation as a horrible abortion of nature. Just to see this thing wearing the hide of a human was to want to kill it! Grayson saw the monster reach the lip of the oval-shaped hole. For an instant, it paused there, apparently wanting to jump down this bottomless well. Somehow Grayson got the impression that this well was home to it, that this was where it had cniginated and that this was where it wanted to flee, that down below were others of its kind who would succor it Looking down the hole, it tried to jump, then backed away. At this pmnt Grayson shot at it but the bullet from the rusty ,# went wide of the mark. Howling, the creature leaped into the undergrowth, McPherson, arrivin at this moment, followed it. Later McPherson's voice came from a short distance away, calling to Grayson. Hobbling on his crutch, the chemist reached the spot where his companion waited. McPherson was standing in front of a v-shaped opening formed by two large blocks of stone that had tumbled from some higher elevation in some remote past. "It ran in there, the tall Scot said, pointing. "There are steps leading down. I think the steps lead to the openings at the side of the well. I'll want the big flashlight that we took from the helicopter." "You're going down there?" Grayson questioned. "Yes," MacPherson answered. He held up the blade of the machete for inspection. A whitish syrupy fluid stained the blade of the long knife. "The pilot had red blood in him This thing -- " His words faded into silence. "Yes, I'm going down there. Wait here until I get the flashlight." When McPherson returned, Grayson tried to argue him out of entering the cleft between the two stones. The Scot was adamant. "I'm sorry, Ed, but I'm scared. And when I'm scared, I have to face the thing that scares me. Otherwise I can't live with myself. I would appreciate it if you would not try to argue with me. Instead, go back to our camp and wait for me there." Grayson tried to get the Scot to take the gun but McPherson refused. "I've got this," he said, making the machete whistle in the air. "Somehow I feel better going after whatever is down there with a knife. Besides, with your ankle, you may need the gun. Thanks for the offer, though." As McPherson went down the steps, it seemed to Grayson that his friend and companion was a light growing smaller and smaller as it descended deeper and deeper into a lower world that grew darker and darker. Then McPherson turned a corner and the light disappeared into some grim underworld the existence of which was known only to a few savages that inhabited this bitter jungleland. V A t the entrance to the cleft, Ed Grayson waited. And waited. And waited. Finally the approach of night sent him back to camp. Rummaging in the wreckage of the helicopter, he found two cans of beans which the foresighted pilot had stored in the ship against an emergency landing somewhere. When the emergency landing had IF come, the pilot had not been in a position to take advantage of his own foresightedness. As he built up a small fire and set one can of beans to warm in the blaze, Grayson found something which destroyed what little appetite he had developed. This was the hands of the pilot, severed from the arms at the wrists by a single blow of the sharp machete. The hand had shrunk to doll size, to a size that would fit the shrunken human heads the Jivaros made in this same region. However, these hands had not shrunk as a result of being carefullv cured in the smoke of a wood fire -- as was true of the grisly trophies the headhunters prepared -- but had shrunk as a result of their contents running out of them. Whatever the monster was that used the skins of humans as a means of achieving form, it could not long maintain itself without the help of a restraining form. Carrying the tiny hands on a stick, Grayson took them away and buried them. Several hours later, long after darkness had fallen, he was able to eat the can of beans. Even then he was not able to sleep. All around him were the night sounds of the jungle, the chitter of bats, the booms, the thumps, and the screams of insects. He pretended to himself that this cacaphony was keeping him awake but he knew the real reason he could not sleep lay in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of McPherson's light as the Scot returned to camp. Never had a man been so lonely as Ed Grayson was this night. As he sat by the tiny fire, watching and waiting, the night sounds began to go into silence. He did not notice that this was happening until he realized very suddenly that it had already happened and that he was sitting almost in the center ofa pool of silence. He knew then that something which he had not seen but which the insect life had detected had come silently out of the night and was now very close to him. Slowly, he pulled the revolver from his belt and cuddled it in his right hand. With his left hand, he picked up the flashlight. The fire had died to a few coals. Looking beyond it, he caught an outline of something against the sky. Fear gripped at his stomach, then relaxed as he saw that the outline was hiunan. "Mac!" he shouted. "Damn you, McPherson, why didn't you call out? I almost shot you." Relief was in him. McPherson was back and he was no longer alone in this haunted place. Holding the flashlight in his left hand, he tried to pull himself up on his crutch. The result was he dropped the flashlight. "Mac, come on to the fire. Mac, I found a can of beans in the helicopter! Mac, come on in and eat!" Groping for the flashlight, Grayson called out to his friend. As he found the flashlight, he saw that McPherson was approaching. As the Scot neared him, he got a whiff of a nauseous odor. "Mac, you smell like hell! What did you fall into down in that pit? Are you all right, Mac?" Lifting the flashlight, he threw the bea n toward McPherson. Swish: ing the machete, McPherson was coming toward him. U nder the beam of light, Grayson caught one glimpse of McPherson's eyes. They were not the gray of the Celt. They were as black as midnight. As he reaBzed the meaning of this, he realized two other things. The first was that the creature wielding the machete intended to use that long knife to cut him into two pieces; the second was that this was not his friend McPherson who had come back from some underworld. Not at all. This was something wearing McPherson's hide! Somewhere in that grim underworld that he had entered, McPherson had lost a battle, the last one he would ever lose! Grayson shot the monster in the throat, then shot again and again and again, pumping lead into the head and into where he assumed the heart might be, emptying the pistol before the razor edge of the machete could reach him. The creature dropped the machete and turned away. Grayson grabbed the machete. Hobbling on his crutch, holding the flashlight and the crutch in the same hand, Grayson followed. The creature slipped and went down. With the machete, Grayson hacked it into bits. As he struck with the long knife, he screamed again. "I'll come back and avenge you, Mac! I swear I will. I'll bring an army back here. I swear I will." Again and gain he struck with the machete, until he could no longer lift the blade. Then he hobbled back to the fire. For the rest of the night, he made no pretense at sleep. At the first light of dawn, he was hobbling on his crutch down the slope that led toward the river. A group of natives were coming up the hill. As he glimpsed them coming toward him, Grayson recognized their leader. It was the old chief, who had taken Grayson's rifle and had used it to fireat something fleeing, howling, along the jungle trail where it had just been skinned. The old chief still had the rifle. The possession of the long gun had given him enough authority to raise many fighting men. Armed with long blowguns and with spears, they were following him now. Shouting a greeting, with joy rising in him at this unexpected deliverance, Grayson hobbled toward the group. At the sight of him, the old chief lifted the rifle. "Ho, devil!" the old chief shouted at Ed Grayson. "Ho Ugo devil! Ho!" With the rifle, the old chief shot him through the heart. A s the sun rose over the little hill with the tumbled boulders with the strange writing on them, it revealed a number of natives grouped around the oval-shaped opening of the pit cut into the solid rock of this strange hill. Gently -- as if they hoped that being gentle now would somehow compensate for the evil of their recent mistake -- the natives let the body of Ed Grayson slide into IF IF  Feature For Everyone L ast month in this space we discussed fanzines. Remember? Those wild and wonderful little mimeographed amateur magazines read only within the sciencefiction fan world, and but rarely hoving into the bewildered ken of the Lifeand Loo-purchasing newsstand-frequenter. If you are just plain Joe (or Jane) Citizen -- no rabid SF fanatic, but someone who just happens to enjoy reading an occasional science-fiction magazine -- you probably found the very idea of "amaOur Man in Fandom fakes us on a guided tour of the world of fanzine publishing -- mass-production stylel teur magazines fantastic. I know it does sound odd -- whole magazines written, illustrated, edited, published and circulated privately! It sounds way-out, when described so baldly, eh? Well, it's even wayerout (if there is such a term) when you stop to think that all this leisuretime activity and effort, as well as a not-inconsiderable amount of wallet-squeezing, is poured into publications that seldom go out to more than a couple of hundred people. And, most often, for free. Well, you ain't heard nuttin yet. There's a whole other hemisphere to the world of fanzine-publishing -- regular clubs-full of editors only, who limit the circulation of their little magazines to members only, (Fannish slang labels these groups associations.") But before delving into the strange world of AP Adorn -- an ingroup within an in-group, if ever there was -- we have one question to consider first. Some of you write, in regard to fanzines, asking the very good question, "Why do these fans devote so much time and effort to publishing something only # people will read -- what do they get out of fanzine-publishing that makes worth while all the time and thought and trouble (to say nothing of expense) they put into it?" Some thoughts on this, then, first. Never Underestimate the Power of a Hebby solicit, or compose him#clf, stories, articles, verse, book and movie reviews, letters, cartoons and such-like, from other amateurs -- painstakingly reproduce this stuff by hand-crank mimeograph -- collate and assemble -- address, and then mail out these minuscule publications? Your guess would be as good as mine . , ' were it not that, well, gee, Fm a fanzine-publisher myself, and I Icnow. But the answers are easy. Lots of people suffer from the Creative Itch, otherwise known as dat ole debbil The Urge for Self-Expression. Joe or Jane Citizen's itch may take the direction of cartooning office characters in caricature, Sunday pamting, would-be contributions to The Poet's Corner in the local paper, or maybe even whacking away on that novel you've been puttering with ever since Junior year at college. In other words, we dabble. Then there's the Good Old EgoDrive. In science-fiction fandom, this basic human motivation takes the rationale of what you might well call small-pondism. That is, we'd rather be big frogs in a small pond (the fan world), than small frogs in big pond (the everyday, workaday world). Now through the medium of fanzines, your typical gawky adolescent, all elbows and acne, ignored by the local cutics and sniggered at by the high school football stars, can actually be an international celebrity, noted bon vivant, wit and reconteur, famed as a scathing critic, literary figure mid popular personality... in the minds of two or three hundred people, remember. No, I am not Resting. Fandon is just small enoufli for nearly my individual, with luck, initiative and a little stamina, to make a big enough splash in that little pond to become a genuine celebrity. Nor is "international" an exaggeration. Sure, fans dwell mi both this and that side of the Atlantic -- and Pacific. During my own fannish days, which, come to think, I am still going through, various lit'ry efforts of my own in the fan press stimuntted letters of comment and or compliment from Spain, Sweden, Ireland, India, Japan, Australia, etc. IF And, after all -- honest, now! -- who wouldn't rather be any kind of a Big Frog... since all but the luckiest of us have to be satisfied with being very small frogs indeed, in the everyday world? Ego-Drive, via the outlet of fanzining, enables the school kid, the small-town clerk or accountant, the housewife, the frustrated writer in each of us, to air his or her ideas, opinions, tastes and talent for humor to a wide audience of other people who share a mutual interest in fantastic literature. Your dedicated SF fan is vitally interested in this month's If, the latest George Pal movie, the newest paperback. He yearns to discuss their merits, or lack of same, with kindred souls. Fanzines are one way of doing this. But they can turn out to be an end unto themselves. To wit: press association, the club of amateur publishers, has been with us for nearly a century. There were several such already going strong when science-fiction fans stumbled on the concept. The first, called Association), was launched way back around #. Then came Amateur Etc. Etc.), about #. As the result of a contested election, a splinter-group broke off from the latter some years after its beginning. This splinter-group, rather confusof our attention in that at one point in its varied and, I have no doubt, colorful, career, its Official Editor (the late and great weird story writer, H.P. Lx)vecraft) was a leading member, and published in liest stories, before he began selling to Weird Tales. In fact, while still Official Editor, Ix)vecraft "married the splinter-United's President, Sonia H. Greene. These were not fanzines in the science-fiction sense, of course, but sort of general, mainstreamy literary mags. When fandom discovered the noKnow-What) was bom. The fellow who initiated the concept into action was the Superfan of the day, Donald A. Wdlheim, who got the ball rolling in #. Wollheim, in those days the Fan's Fan, has since gone on to professional science fiction -- as an SF novelist, magazine editor, hardcover and paperback anthologist, and more recently, editor-inchief of Ace Books.  along the general lines of the a member, has to publish 'umpty-' leben pages of material each year These arc sent on to the hard-working bloke who serves as Official Editor (called OE). He assembles packages of these magazines, one copy of each mag to each package, and forwards the packages on to the individual members. years ago, there were only twelve memibers on the rolls. Today, there are about sixty-five -- phis some sixty other patient souls on the "waiting list," hanging around until a current member folds his mimeograph like an Arab and silently steals away. (Stringent limits on membership hold the active membership at sixty-five. If you become inactive, i.e., don't publish your umpty-leben pages yearly, you are dropped and waiting-lister #I beSome time in the #'s disgruntled fan publishers Joe Schaumburger  Friends in New Jersey, decidhell with the waiting-list. They callof name-style (Spectator Amateur Press Society). I don't know whether can picture a major hazard of membership: "Whatcha crankin' that old mimeograph for, Joe?" (Proudly) New Directions in Fan Publishing: T he habit of fanzine-publishing can become not only addictive, but epidemic. And I doubt if the Salk Foundation and the Mayo Brothers put together could come up with a cure. Here's what I mean. About two years ago a group of New York City fans, members of with this soul-searing idea: instead of only having to publish 'umpty-' would demand the same each everlovin' week. Guiding brains behind this historic concept were fans David G. Van Arnam and Ted White, I believe. Both have since become professional science-fiction novelists, but apparently without dampening their ardor for fannish publishing. They launched a group called initial membership was drawn). old mimeo-handle, currently distributes fifteen to thirty-odd fanzines each and every Friday. I hasten to reassure you these are very slim little magazines, not hundred-page titans, mostly just one or two pages per issue. As if this were not exhausting enough -- just imagine having to sit down and read sixty-or-so pages of fannish material every blessed week of the year -- a rival concern got started out on the West Coast, centering about Los Angeles. The Los Angelenos, under the same number of these one or twopage fanzinettes. To make matters worse, if possiweekly mailings. That means each member (unless he's cheating) has to plow wearily through roughly one hundred and twenty pages of fannish writing every week. Let's see, that's about # pages every month... or somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand eight hundred pages in a full year! The imagination boggles. Each year, then, our dogged bined wordage equil to piling PresIF cott's Conquest of Mexico and Peru on top of Gibbons' Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire, with Plutarch's complete Lives of the Noble Romans and the Noble Greeks Compared sandwiched in for comic relief. What's the Point of It All -- If Any? Drive and Creative Itch notwithstanding. is it all worth it? Well, by and large, I suppose you might say yes. years have been some of the most delightful people you'll ever meet. And some of the most talented. Famed fan humorist Bob Tucker, for example, who writes detective stories and an occasional sciencefiction novel under his more formal name -- Wilson Tucker. And many another gifted personality went came out the other end to break out in a rash of published sciencefiction novels. Authoress Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose byline has appeared on, I know not how many Ace releases, was -- and, come to think of it, by golly, still is, a In fact, the ranks of the various amateur press associations have contributed any number of distinguished professional SF authors or editors to the Big Pond of the corner newsstand. Robert W. Lowndes, former editor of Science Fiction Stories and a whole satchel-full #f other magathere's Ace's Don Wollheim, whom we have already mentioned. He was to think of it, Ifs own editor, Fred Pohl, was one of the very earliest Cyril Kornbluth and they teamed up to write The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law and all those other books.  mailing, you will see.the ood and the bad. Many of the magazines are works of polished craftsmanship, impeccably mimeographed, technically fascinating, displaying all sorts of experimentation such as multicolor mimeography and lavish use of on-stencil artwork. They present fine material, good stories, articles, anthologyworthy verse, witty reviews and features. Or they will be pedestrian beyond belief, a whole issue devoted to that comments. These are paragraphlong comments on other people's ing. This feature can grow like some insidious fungus, until it consumes the bulk of the entire issue... and believe me, there is nothing in this world duller to read and of less permanent value or interest than Joe Fan's remarks on the last issue of Moe Fan's fanzine. does not always have to become an end to itself. Nine times out of ten it suffices to satisfy the good old Creative Itch. All our gawky adolescent or housewife or small-town accountant needs to sate his lust for Big-Frogism is the narcissistic bliss of reading Moc Fan's But about one time in ten, instead of lulling The Urge for Self Expression, this little taste of Big-Frogism hones and excites it to the danger point. That's the point at which Joe Fan comes to realize it might be worth a try. Why not buckle down and see if it is possible to be a Big Frog -- in a Big Pond? At which critical juncture, usually, he throws away his unused mimeo stencils, drags out that half-done novel still left over from his Junior year at college, blows the dust off it and starts punishing the typewriter in earnest. Next issue, Our Man In Fandom takes a look at the most wideipread fan-aetivity of thom all -- and one in which every science-fiction fan can partake -- the Local Fan Club. Who knows, maybe you've been reading science fiction all thcce years -- and all the time there was a lively club-full of people with similar interests right around the corner! After all... whafs he got to lose by trying? IF IF  Novelette This was his day fo become a man -- o day when he found his world was a fofal lie! C#TTold still, my lord," the sly AA looking man said spftly to the young scholar he was dying purple. "This won't take but a moment. Not too hot is it, my lord?" "No," Dirk said, "it's not too hot." Stripped to his breech clout in the center of the courtyard, he was watching with awe as the warmth of the sun dried the liquid Otho tiie Captive dipped up with his rag and stick. Black when it came dripping out of Otho's pot, it turned the smoothly taimed skin of Dirk's barrel chest and long legs the color of wild grapes. They were alone in the court. The west wall, the only one not lined with mud-brick buildings, threw a shadow like the edge of a blade across the flagstones. Over the top of the wall, distant and misted and shadow-side to, Diiik could see the distant lift of the mountains. For the thousandth time a phrase he had heard once from old Teophilus ran through his head: "The mountains are mice." It was a comforting thought, but he felt sure Master Theophilus had not meant it to comfort. He had been thinking of stealth and disease and perhaps of other things as well. "The soles of your feet, please," said Otho. Obediently Dirk held them up in turn for the fat man to splash his dye on. "I well remember, my lord," Otho said chattily, "how unnecessary I thought this when it was done to me. I supposed it would be the first place to wear clean. But I found out, my lord, that when the feet are calloused -- as mine were then and yours are now, my lord -- they are one of the very last places. The magistrate found it between my toes and in the crevices of the thick skin when I was drug before him. I believe I've told you, my lord, that I was nearly clean when I was taken?" From the wall, a raven which had been perched with its back arrogantly toward them as it stared out over the desert suddenly launched itself thrashing into the air. Outlined for a moment like. a heraldic figure, black against the blaze of the afternoon sky, it brought to the young man a sudden personal realization of the frighteningly complex linkage between cause and effect, stimulus and response, which guides every living creature. Above all others this was the concept his instructors had droned at him daily until he had almost learned to ignore it. Now, on the verge of the Great Retreat, he was beginning at last to understand the idea he had so often parroted. The raven croaked twice over their heads and then, with a desperate flapping of wings, settled on Otho's shoulder. In astonishment Dirk searched the Captive's plump face for a hint of the understanding he would have seen, he knew, on that of Theophilus or any other Master at such a moment. There was only wonder and a kind of sheepishness. "He's a pet, my lord," Otho explained hurriedly. "I took him from the nest two weeks ago, and I've kept him in my rooms almost ever since. This is only the second time he's been out." He stroked the bird under its ruffled bill with a pudgy finger. "What ought I to call him, do you think?" "Corvus Corvax," Dirk suggested drily. "I wish I knew what unsettled him like that." "Oh, you will, my lord. When you come back to us you'll be a Master yourself, and no one would believe some of the things I've seen my Master, Theophilus, do. Control all sorts of animals; summon the hawks from the sky, if you can credit it." And so, Dirk thought, you steal fledglings to tame in immitation of him. Never mind. I'm closer to the fledgling stealing level myself. Aloud he said, "Nothing magical happens on the Retreat, Otho. If you almost completed it yourself you ought to know that." "Ah, but I didn't finish. That makes the difference." T he gate in the west wall, which was the rear entrance to the academy, opened unexpectedly, contrary to the very explicit regulation that no freeman should observe a scholar who had undergone this degradation until he was actually in Retreat and subject to capture. For a few seconds Dirk and Otho saw an impressively tall man with a full beard and long, bound hair who sat a shaggy wild horse without saddle or bridle. His glance swept the courtyard like a scythe. Then the horse wheeled, revealing the slender barreled automatic rifle slung reversed over its master's shoulders, and they were gone. Otho exclaimed, "It's Master Aleksandr, come in! My lord, I must get something cooked for him -- you are finished already, and you know where to wait. Heavens bless you, my lord!" The fat man was running toward the kitchen already with his tame bird fluttering after him. At least, Dirk reflected, he knew now what had disturbed it. The waiting place was a small room at the base of the round tower at the northwest corner of the academy. It possessed a tiny door, a sort of sally-port, which opened directly to the outside. In order to reach it Dirk was forced to walk through several of the other academy buildings. As he expected, the halls were deserted. Every door he did not need to use was tightly shut. The few possessions he would be allowed to take with him were already in the room, packed in his shoulder-strapped specimen bag: a plainly made knife wkh a blade not much larger than the width of his hand, but of excellent steel; a leather water flask; bandages and a bottle of disinfectant; a small magnifying glass; a clasped handbook of meditations with tables of useful information, formulas and recipes at the end. The whole collection, bag included, weighed less than two kilograms. There was no light in the room save what entered from a narrow firing slit in the wall; but he seated himself crosslegged on the floor anyway, intending to read. Instead, he found himself turning the book endlessly over and over in his hands while he thought of the mountains. He planned to go to the mountains as soon as his Retreat began, and he wondered if gray old Master Theophilus, who could read volumes in a breath of wind, knew it and would try to prevent him. The mountains were dangerous for anyone, but for a Retreatant they were, pardoxically, almost perfectly "safe." And he could not endure the thought of ending his life like Otho, fetching water and sweeping floors for another man; turning glutton and petty thief because he had no longer any self respect to uphold. He crossed the room to the firing slit and stared out across the level desert, estimating that another four hours remained before dark. Seeing the uneven line of the mountains at the horizon he admitted to himself for the first time that he would not be going only to escape a lifetime of Captivity. TTie mountains themselves drew him. LoomIF ing mightiness across the desert -- the promise of a world alien to all he had known from geological formations to climate, peopled with the odds and ends, the hangers-on and survivors, who had somehow endured there when the old order fell to hits. The original owners of the ground, he thought to himself. Still nosing about in the dark corners and plotting ways to stick the tom leaves back on to the calendar. He shivered, though the mudwalled room was hot. II T hey came for him when the last sunlight had left the sky. He heard them long before the door opened, the steady, careful tread of Ioophilus's bare feet contrasting with the uneven shuffle of Ofho's rope-soled sandles. Standing in the doorway with his back to what light there was, ThecK phih delivered the ritual expianatiofi of the purpose and conditions erf the Retreat, half speaking, half diafttmg. Dirk could make out only his beard and white hair in the dimness. Wln the ritual was over and Dirk had made the proper response, Thoophilus siid in his normal voice, "Otho will take you to a place from which even in full daylight the walls of the academy cannot be seen. The Retreat proper begins at sunup. Dirk picked up his bag and followed Otho out into the desert. The sand and stones were still warm under his feet, thou he knew that warmth would not last long. The high-pitched howl of one of the little desert wolves, a sound he had heard often while stretched on his cot in the dormitory, seemed friendly and familiar. "My lord," Otho said softly, "this is the place." Unexpectedly, the Captive thrust a stoppered bottle into his hands. Without the slightly obsequious note Dirk had always heard in his voice before, he said, "Tve Uked you ever since you came, boy, even though you were more severe with me than any of the others. Take this. As soon as it's light spread it all over yourself. In half an hour it will have neutralized the dye and you can wipe off the whole mess with clean sand." Before Dirk could recover from his astonishment the Captive bad turned to go, calling over his shoulder, "My own scovery. I had the dye formula, you know, and plenty of time for research, m never tell anyone. With the uncaasy skill of a Master, like a puma suddenly disappearing behind some fold of ground hardly large enoufii to shelter a cactus wren, he was gone. Dirk called in astonishment, then anger, and finally in an agony of frustration. There wm no reply. The desert was Kt with the silvery gossamer radiance of die stars, and s#ent with an aknost unbearable hush. He would have freely sworn that if a grasshopper mouse were to dart from a hole a handred meters away he would both see and hear it. There was nothing. Heavy and infinitely dishonorable, OdKs bottle weighed in his hand. if he were to use the preparation, he reflected, he would be safe from capture for the length of his Retreat. He would need only to stay away from the Academy for the two months or so the dye normally required to wear off completely. If he were to meet a freeman he would undoubtedly be taken for a young Master on a field trip. He might even go east to where the sleepy farms and agricultural towns nestled in their irrigated valley and steal or beg food and clothing. It was impossible, of course. It would mean living a lie for the remainder of his life -- feeling inferior to every Captive failure of a slavey who had at least tried to play 'v the rules. IF S tooping to bring his gaze closer to the sand, he thought he could detect those slight dislocations of the wind-blown pattern which marked Otho's trail. To keep the dyeremover... or pour it out, was as unthinkable as using it. Otho, whose actions Dirk felt he could predict well from his knowledge of the man, would believe he had used it. Otho would wink slyly when no one was watching, would make little secret jokes and be just a shadow more than an equal when they were alone. Dirk hated the Captivity system which punished failure so brutally, but he realized that to become the captive of a Captive would solve nothing. Surprisingly, Otho had apparently not headed directly back toward the academy. The trail slanted off to the northeast in a series of convolutions that threw it behind every speck of cover. To follow it by starlight was slow work even for an academically trained and field-experienced tracker. For anyone else it would have been hopeless. Slipping across the desert with his eyes on the spoor, he failed to notice the minute pantomine being performed two hundred meters to his left until his attention was called to it by a sound -- a gasping release of breath as though a man had been struck violently in the stomach. A figure which had been moving silently on a course parallel to his own had suddenly found itself surrounded by four smaller figures. There had been a brief flourish of action, the large figure moving with pantherish speed and ower but the smaller ones with the incredible swiftness of humming birds -- seeming almost to disappear in one spot and reappear without lapse of tune in anothn. Then the larger figure slumped, emitting the gasp Dirk had heard. By the time he looked up there was no motion. The symmetrical smoothness of four heads might easily at such a distance have been that of four rounded stones, but he turned as surely as a compass needle and began to trot straight toward them. There was a sound like a strip of cloth being tom, and a muzzle blast like a scarlet star sparkling before the third head. With a violent tug at the shoulder strap his bag leaped away from his side as he threw himself face down on the sand. The four rounded "stones' vanished like soap bubbles. The long wait began. He drew his bag toward him, got out his knife, and discovered with relief that the bullet bad not broken Otho's bottle. With the knife in his hand he watched with unwinking intensity his whole perimeter, listeninig for the sconape of one red sand grain on another, knowing as he did so that the flitting forms who might be ckcling to approach him from behind would be more difficult to see or hear than any Master. A t the academy be had been taught to call them by their scientific name of Homo Gyrda, the latter word being (he knew) a LatinAnglo-Saxon mongrel for an obsolete unit of measure a little less than half the height of a man. Supposedly it was die average stature of those his parents had called the Poor People or the Pretty People when they told stories in tihe farmhouse kitchen. Daylight came without an attack. A hawk, enormous-winged, sailed the updrafte the rising sun fathered when it struck the desert floor. Dick stood up stiffly, rubbing hislimbs. The gyrda would not stay this close to the academy by day, he felt certain. Trotting ahead, he found the scene of the struggle and read in the sand (by the lack of blurring where the four figures had lain) that they had left almost immediately after shooting at him. The' depth of the tracks and the fact that they formed two columns side by side showed that they were carrying off their prisoner; wise desert fighters kept to a single line in order to better conceal their numbers. He followed them all that day, spending the next night under a stone outcrop where his almost naked body was prevented from radiating its precious heat to the sky. By noon of the second day of his Retreat he was in the foothills and had lost the trail in the rocks. He was hungry too, and knew diat he should not risk another night without food. A straggling mesquite tree offered him some shelter from the sun while he read what information he could from it: the direction of the prevailing winds, that there was iron in the soil, .the length of the growing season and so on -- reflecting that Theophilus or, he supposed. Master Aleksandr would have understood much more. Then he noticed that no mesquite beans lay under it. A pile of rocks about thirty meters off had a spot which appeared IF more pounded and compacted than usual in front of every good sized crevice... marmots. Occasionally the little animals could be dug out, but a stroll around the rock pile convinced him that this fortress was too extensive and composed of stones too large for one man to handle. A glance overhead confirmed that the inevitable hawk was circling almost too high to be seen. Resuming his seat under the tree, he remained motionless for about twenty minutes, and then began to imitate the shrill whistle of an infant marmot in distress. For several long breaths nothing stirred. He closed the hand out of sight of the rock pile on a stone. The nose of a small creature appeared in one of the crevices, then vanished again. He whistled weakly. The marmot made a rush that took it not more than fifty centimeters from the rock pile, then scurried back. After another three minutes it came out again. Two meters, then three, from safety. Then he threw his stone. Not at the marmot, which would have been almost certainly futile at that range; but at the hole from which the little animal had come, to frighten it yet further away. The hawk came down like a bullet, seeming to split the thin air in his descent, yet the marmot was within two jumps of its hole when the talons seized it. It squealed piercingly once before it went limp. Dick yelled and pelted the hawk with a handful of gravel, at which the bird of prey wheeled to face him, hissing and clacking its curved beak. With a stick wrenched from the mesquite he was finally able to drive it off, flopping furiously along the ground. Like all birds it had great difficulty in rising unless it could climb to a tree limb or a high point of rock for its takeoff. Dirk skinned the marmot and roasted it over a very economical fire of mesquite, considering his situation as he did so. He knew very little, really, about the gyrda, and neither where they lived nor what they lived on. Their reasons for capturing Otho he could only guess at. For the time being it seemed reasonable to assume that he had merely blundered into a party of scouts who had welcomed the opportunity to take a prisoner. The problem now was to discover the trail again. Although the four Poor People had probably been carrying water bottles of some sort wkem they captured Otho, he reflocicd, the supply could hardly be anle. Before he had lost the trail ht had seen signs that indicated the Captive -- who aippeared to have lost his sandal in the scuffle -- was slowing the party down. If water consumption were proportional to body weight he would noed as much as three of his captors. Yet if they wanted to keep him alive in the desert they would have to supply him. Somewhere near here, then, they had almost certainly replenished their canteens at some source known to them. He set out to discover the place and find Otho, knowing that it would be a very difficult task. Ill I t took him three days. To discover surface water in these arid lands required a knowledge of geology and a sensitive eye for slight differences in the lushness of growth and frequency in occurence of the comman desert plants. Dirk possessed both. But both had to be honed considerably before he found the spot where a hole scooped in the sand had produced a seepage of water for the gyrda and their prisoner. He filled his own flask and took up the now fading trail. He strode up long, slanted gullies filled with stones. In the desert and the flat plowlands the country had lain out wide around him with a feeling of spaciousness and natural or man-created orderliness. Because he had himself been taller than most of the objects surrounding him it had not prepared him for the high places, where fields a thousand hectares in extent stretched up on either side of the V-point in which he walked. Long after night came, the light played on the raw rac)c at the peaks of the mountains. He did not suffer under the disadvantages of those who have been taught that a human being must eat every day, 'much less three times daily. His parents had regularly done without food one day a week during the winter, and at the academy his instructors had routinely taught their students the benefits of fasting. He knew how little and how much, a man needed to live. When they presented themselves he ate the roots of certain plants and used his knife to cut away the spinestudded skins of others to eat the pulp. Twice he was able to find and raze the little storehouses of kangeroo rats, masticating the tough, dry seeds they contained until they were a sweetish paste before he swallowed. The trail ended at last in a sunken bowl wedged between three great peaks. Fifteen dome# huts of flat stones surrounded that rarest of natural wonders, a deep pool of standing water. Outside of the little circle ranged "gardens" where most of the desert plants capable of furnishing some article of food to gatherers were being grown under cultivation. From a sheltered spot high up the slope of one of the enclosing mountains he watched the life of the village all the remainder of the day, but he could get no clue to the prisoner's whereabouts until it was nearly dark. Then a lone individual appeared, carrying le of the long rods he knew weif... veapons, and a small jug and hide bag. He left one of the huts and began flitting up an almost invisible path nearly opposite from his position. After perhaps a minute two others followed him, unarmed, and -- so it seemed to Dirk -- with the negligent air of gawkers everywhere. The mountainside on which he was hidden was already in shadow although the three climbing gyrda were still sunlit, so he wasted no time in beginning the long trek around to where the path lay fine as cobweb IP against Uie mountain. As he had anticipated, the gyrda were back in their village and only starlight lit the path long before he reached it. In many places it consisted of no more than a series of hand and foot holds, and his few days in the high country had by no means given him the true mountaineer's immunity to acrophobia. Hours elapsed between the time he reached the path and his last scramble to the summit. He had naively imagined that the peak of one of the mountains which appeared so pointed when seen from below would actually be sharp, a column or pyramid of rock. In truth it was nearly flat, a table-top of red sandstone about fifty meters by a hundred with a barely perceptible tilt. In the center of this barren little plateau a single verticle stratum of rock rose to about the height of a man, as though a coin on edge had been embedded deeply in the stone. Only when the upper edge of this moved slightly did he realize that a living being was lying along it. He walked silently, crouching, but he had taken only a few steps when a calm voice said, "Walk wide of the pile of stones to your left." H e straightened up. The voice continued, "I am chained here. Who are you? I've been listening to your climbing half the night." "The retreatant you saw being stained when you came to our academy six days ago. Master Aleksandr. I had thought to find Otho, Master Theophilus's Captive, here." He was close enough now to see the bearded, intense face well with the starlight full on it. Master Aleksandr was chained on his back, so that his. face -- when his neck was not craned to watch Dirk -- was to the sky. "You needn't worry about Otho; he is safe in his bed back a the academy, I trust. I was worried about you two though, when Master Theophilus told me you would be starting the Great Retreat that night. And so I followed you." There was a faint clinking of iron as the Master shifted in what Dirk knew must be a torturously uncomfortable position before he continued. "I had learned the gyrda were sending patrols closer than ever before to the academy. That was what I had come to tell Theophilus, but I wandered into one myself. Your name is Dirk, is it not? Theophilus mentioned it over dinner that night. Do you see how I am bound, Dirk?" Dirk paused before answering, uncertain of his vision in the dim light. "I believe a hole has been drilled through that outcrop and a chain connecting your wrists runs through it. May I touch them?" Master Aleksandr nodded. "They are welded, sir." "I know. Can you think of any way to cut them?" "No, sir." "Neither can I, and I've been trying for two days -- ever since they put me up here. We'll have to part the stone instead. I assume you have the usual Retreat Knife. Try it on the stone." For some minutes there was no sound save the gritty rasp of the steel edge on sandstone. At length Dirk reported, 'It will cut a bit, but I think it would take a month to wear through from the edge to where the chain goes through; it must be sixty or seventy centimeters." "Look there," the chained man exclaimed suddenly, "just on the horizon. Can you fellow my line of sight, Dirk?" Dirk asked doubtfully, "The blue star?" Master Aleksandr laughted softly. "It's a planet, and it's what they've stuck me up here to see, so you can't blame me for getting a little excited when it rises. Technically I shouldn't even point it out to you until you finish Retreat. "Now," his voice hardened, "feel the stone under me just above niy waist. You may want to use the point of your knife. Feel a little crack?" After a moment Dirk nodded. CCood. I only saw it as a dark JHne when they were chaining me up here. Now I want you to go about ten centimeters up, under the small of my back, and try to gouge out a deep, narrow hole with your knife. I'll pull myself away from the rock as far as I can." After Dirk had worked for about ten minutes, the Master asked almost casually, "Making any progress?" "A little. Sir. Would it be impertinent to ask what it is we're trying to do?" "Not at all. Have you ever read about Hannibal splitting stones with vinegar to clear the passes when he crossed the Alps? No, I forgot, you would never have heard of Hannibal. Anyway, he split the rocks with vinegar, according to Livy, and it's puzzled a lot of historians since that time." Master Aleksandr fell silent; Dirk had already come to realize that his mind was beginning to wander under the strain of the past six days. He said softly, "Vinegar, sir?" "Not surprising when you once come to understand that vinegar is a frequent mistranslation of the word ua to designate the our red wine that was the usual drink of soldiers -- of all the common people in those days, in fact. The liquid an army would have in plenty. Handy, in other words." Holding himself tautly away from the stone and Dirk's hands, he was no longer looking at Dirk. His eyes seamed to be following the blue planet as it rose slowly above the horizon. "It's an old trick, much older than explosivm as I've said. Drill a hole vertically or nearly so; a line of holes if the atone is thick. Drive in a peg of hard, dry wood -- a tight wringing fit. Cut away the top of the peg until it's below the level of the stone. Do you understand so far?" Dirk nodded. "Pour in wine, vinegar, water, whatever you have. It will penetrate the cells of the wood and cause them to swell. The pressure is enormous: hundreds of kilos per square centimeter, depending on the wood. Stone has great compressive strength but not much tensile and it's brittle. It cracks." IF IV D irk could not get the ihole deep enough that night. He went over the far side of the plateau (the descent was actually easier on that side) when a gyrda from the village below came up with Master Aleksandr's morning food and water. The sun stood squarely overhead when he finished pounding in the stake he had whittled from a limb of a dead tree half way down the mountain's slope. "Near that little cairn of stones," Master Aleksandr directed him weakly, "you'll find a shallow dish with a little water in it. I saw the gyrda refill it this morning from the bottle he carried. Use that to pour on the peg. We'll need what's in the flask for ourselves. But be careful about getting it. Keep your eyes open." Masters, as Dirk h leaned at the academy, did not usually bother to warn mere scholars unless the dangers or discomforts at hand were very great. Every nerve was alert as he approached the cairn. "I see the dish. Master Aleksandra, and an egg -- a rock pigeon's." "The sun's high now. Look in shade." Not until the third time Dirk ran his eyes over the ground did he see it, and then he was astonished that he had not seen it at once. It was a lizard, legless or nearly so, whose Wack body was nearly two meters long though no thicker than a man's wrist. Its absolute motionlessness as it lay in the shadow of a small ledge of rock had made fakn pass over it repeatedly. Tve had it under control ever since they put me up here, but I doubt if I could hold it if you were to step on it or kick a stone at it. With the simpler animals reflex action is hard to stop." "I know," Dirk said shortly. He was, after all, a Retreatant andnot a freshman scholar. "Is it so dangerous, then? I've never seen one like it before." "It's a hamadryad. At least that's the best identification we've been able to make from the archives. It wouldn't be in your texts at the academy because it isn't one of our animals; this is one of the few the gyrda seem to be responsible for." "I don't understand this," Dirk said slowly as he trickled water from the hamadryad's dish into the hole above the peg top. "It seems to be the sort of thing we were always told would be explained when we had made our Great Retreat. Weren't all the animals from the Motherworld brought in the arcship? I've sometimes wondered if the instructors weren't holding something back." "There's no secret. It's just that there are so many things for an undergraduate to learn about our own world -- Mars -- that we try to discourage you from getting started on the endless succession of inquiries about the Motherworld until we're certain we're not wasting our time on someone who'll spend the rest of his life planting maguey. You know at least that mankind did not originate on this planet, judging from what you've just said. Some of the boys who come to the academy from farms don't even seem to realize that." With sudden insight Dirk realized that Master Aleksandr was trying to spare them both at least part of the agony of suspense they must suffer during the hours of waiting for the moisture to penetrate the dense wood of the peg, but he did not care. The chance to hear a Master speak at length about the tangled paths of the lost race of Man had never before come to him. And if he failed his retreat by capture or death, it would never come again. #CT 've heard it," he said cauJL tiously. "My father used to say too that if you looked into the sky at night you could see the Motherworld, but I thought it was just a fable, like saying you couM hear the bees of summer when you put a hollowed out gourd to your ear on a winter evening." "Could your father read, Dirk?" "He used to say he could, a little. I don't really think so." "Well, your great-grandfathers -- all of them -- were among the best educated men on the Motherworld. I can say that without knowing your family at all, because it's true of every human being on Mars. Besides the language and literature they knew a good deal about every science and each of them was expert in at least two. Or they wouldn't have been allowed to come. When the Mars stations were abandoned by the Motherworld they found themselves at the edge of starvation on a world where the maximum exertions of every member of the community were barely able to support life." "But if they knew all those things..." Dirk began weakly. "Most of it wasn't worth a handful of sand then. They couldn't afford mathematics or astronomy or a lot of the other sciences that were of no immediate value in the production of food. Then there were a lot of disciplines that lost their utility when their equipment wore out, because there was no material for replacements except native iron and what could be saWaped from the things previously junked. And there was precious little energy to smelt and work either of them. They had nuclear phvsicists, but what good were they when Mars's fissionables had turned to lead eons ago?" Master Aleksandr shoiak his head as though to clear it. "Dirk, can you give me a drink from your flask? I'm getting very dry." Dirk tilted the flask up, noticing as he did it how drawn the older man's face looked and that he took only one swallow of the water. Master Aleksandr began again, "That's the Motherworld, that you saw last night. That blue star. The gyrda chained me up so I would have to watch it all night. I imagine they've done this to quite a few people who didn't have the least idea of what it was they were supposed to be seeing." "I still don't understand," Dirk said. "The life sciences remained. In fact, that's us. Metallurgy sunk back to blacksmithing. but botany and zoology and biology -- the whole IF study of the biosphere -- were needed as never before, as well as geology for the location of water and what minerals there were. Fortunately, before the Motherworld abandoned us an attempt had been made to transfer a viable desert ecology from there. That's how we got most of the plants we have, as well as the birds and mammals. But not all the Motherworld's fauna were transferred as you seem to believe. A great many could not possibly have lived here, and a great many others, like the hamadryad, were just not wanted." "You said the hamadryad was one of the gvrd's animals. I don't follow that; and why did they put it up here with you?" "As a watchdog. And for most of their prisoners -- probably everyone they had before myself -- he made an ideal gyard. Both frightening and genuinely dangerous. He needs very little water and food, and he couldn't leave the plateau even if he wanted to; he couldn't make, some of the climbs. Of course he has to crawl into a crevice shortly after the sun sets to keep from freezing, but I doubt if the other prisoners ever realized that." "I didn't, find it very frightening," Dirk remarked. "If you had been a prisoner they'd have let you see him kill a wolf before they chained you up. Now look behind you." Turning, Dirk saw the hamadryad some three meters behind him with half its body lifted from the ground and erect as a candle. Its neck had spread and flattened into a shape indescribably sinister. Its gaze was fixed not upon himself but on Master Aleksandr with an expression both attentive and, in an utterly alien fashion, intelligent. "They call them cobra de capello on the Motherworld," AJeksandra said. 'Snakes of the cape.' The gyrda studied the old records ancf then less reptile to produce 'it. Clever of them, wasn't it? "Now see if there's a new crack in this rock. I think I just heard something." V Ci'Xhe mountains are mice," old JL Theophilus said ruminatively. "Yes. I believe I did tell your class something like that once. I meant to allude to mice as experimental animals, of course; the mountains have been injected with all the viruses and vaccines." Dirk was scratching the spot on his arm which he had, on Master Theophilus's explicit order, swabbed with Otho's dye remover. It was beginning to itch. "Like the gyrda?" he asked. "Yes. The gyrda were devised on the Motherworld to be the permanent settlers of Mars while our forefathers were serving as investigators and observers. Couples who desperately needed money, as well as a few who felt they were advancing the human race, submitted to having their reproductive cells mutated. It seems strange to us who think only of the richness of the old Motherworld, Dirk, but there were many IF  Short Story Where did the gold come from? More important -- what was the thing that brought it to Earth? T he man who entered, though quiet and soft-stepping, was none of your tame animals. He'd kill for the one thing he wanted and couldn't get enough of; but he hardly knew what to do with the packet of it he had under his arm. The man had a slight green tinge to him, and Patrick T. K. guessed that what he carried would have it also. In an earlier era the man would have been tagged immediately as a seaman. Plainly he was still that, but of a more ethereal sea. Under his arm he had a package wrapped in newspaper, and more sturdily wrapped beneath. It was not a large package, but it was quite heavy. The faring man was slim but amazingly wiry. Patrick T. K. was fat but with a lean and hungry eye that couldn't be fooled. Patrick set the weight of the package carried by the man at a hundred and twenty pounds. If it were iron of such bulk it would weigh hardly a third that. If it were lead it would not be that heavy. Patrick studied the tendons on the side of the man's neck and the bulging veins on the back of his hand. He studied the set of his feet as he stood there, and he calculated the man's center of gravity, package included. Mercury would not be that heavy. Platinum would be heavier by a tenth. Patrick T. K. sometimes made mistakes in his judgment, but he never made mistakes by as much as ten per cent. So the seaman had a lump of gold to sell him. Nothing unusual about that. Patrick T. K. bought more sly gold than anyone in town. "I've been told," said the seaman, "and it doesn't matter by whom, that you might be able to give me good cash for what I have here. But I won't be beaten down. I know my price." "And I know mine," said Paddy T. K. "Twenty thousand dollars. How do you want it? Well, come, come how? Twenties, fifties, hundreds, thousands or a king's mixture?" "I had priced it a little higher," said the man. "What? For that undersized loaf of bread under your arm? Two hundred dollars a pound for a hundred pounds is as close as I can figure." "It weighs more." "I know what it weighs. But I like to use round figures." "Shall I unwrap it here? Have you a place to test it?" "Leave it wrapped. Here is the sum. And if you find it short a bill or two, be assured it is a dishonest mistake." "There is more where this comes from." "I can take this much every two weeks. Now be off." "You're not going to look at it? How can you be sure what it is?" "I have X-ray eyes." "Oh." . B ut when Paddy T. K. was alone he put other things away and locked the door. He took the package to a back room, puffing heavily, for it was just as heavy as he knew it must be. He unwrapped it There was little that Patrick did not know about gold. He knew the greenishness of African gold, whether of the Gold Coast or the South; the greasiness of Kolyma gold and also its extreme unavailability; the cypric tinge of Sierra Madre gold whether from the Guatemala or Mexico district. He was familiar with the sudden brightness of Milne Bay gold, with the granularity of the Canadian, the muscle-like texture of that of Witwatersrand, the lightness of color of the gold of California and nearby Sonora, and the white gold (almost Electrum) of New Guinea above Milne Bay. This was none of them. It was raw but fine, and very, very slightly cupric. The green tint in it was about the same as that in the complexion of the man. Patrick set down the weight in a notebook. And at the column for the origin he did not hesitate. He wrote down 'Extraterrestrial. That was the first written note of the thing. Later, this gold would be known as St. Simeon gold (from a station on its route, not from its origin), but Patrick T. K., the old jewel factor and sly gold dealer, was not fooled. Within a month, the Wall Street Journal had also referred to the new gold as extraterrestrial. The boys on that sheet also knew about gold, wherever they got their knowledge. But the Journal was derided for its correct guess. Gold cargo had never been authorized. No such gold had been mined except for pilot digs in conjunction with other operations. The cost would have been prohibitive, considering the cargo of necesIF sary production machinery and the rudimentary state of exploration and the rarity of any solid finds. OffEarth gold was still a generation away. I t was a four-man corporation made up of: Robert Fountain, an unobstruct genius; George Grinder, a ruthless ruffian; Carlos Trevino, the last of the Conquistadores and perhaps the first of a new kind of man; and Arpad Szild, a murderous Irishman who used a dead man's papers and a dead man's name. Three of them had been dining in quiet luxury one evening at Trevino's when Szild appeared in the midst of them, "the doors and windows being closed," as Fountain related it with his biting humor, but that part of it may not be true. "I've been there. I can take you to it," Szild said suddenly. He sat down and began to eat with his hands from the bowls. "I grind up better stuff than yoo for feed supplement for my cattle," Trevino said. "Who are you? What can you take us to?" 'To the Trabant You were talking about the legend." "All right. You talk about the legend, real fast," Robert Fountain said. "You haven't much time." He laid a hog-nosed gun in front of him on the table. "It's shaped like a balk or a beam," Szild said. "Its greater diameter is twenty-five hundred meters, and its lesser is fifteen hundred -- a little less than two cubic miles. It's a misshapen tapered beam or egg with a cleft at its minor end. Its rotation is a tumble, and the period of the tumble is just short of thirty minutes. It's as bad-natured a rock as can be found. Cuts you to pieces. Shouldn't have an atmosphere, but there's something that tears up your lungs no matter how you're suited. It's an angry place, I tell you. But it's, gold." That was the Golden Trabant, one of the smaller of the eighteen hundred significant asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. When finally charted several years after this, it would be given the noxious name Venenatus -- but that was after it had been treated and its nature changed. "We have a nice sketchy catalog of every asteroid down to about that size," said Grinder. "Nobody knows much about their details, but they are numbered and given their relative positions and speeds in the asteroid stream. Can you tell us which it isr "Can. Won't," said Szild. "But PU take you there." Szild had known that he would have to play his ace on the fmt round. After he had taken them to It, they would have no reason to keep him alive: but he had gambled his life before. He said he had been there and knew where it was. The odds were high enough for them to take a chance on believing him. They acquired a ship and mounted a flight. The ship was old and had been deactivated. Carlos Trevino bought it at surplus and had it towed down by tug and beached at a remote spot on the holdings of the Trevino family. It was activated by the genius of Fountain and the driving energy of Grinder. They took twelve young Hispanic technicians, none of whom are alive to give their versions. They hadn't known what they would run into nor what the labor would be at breaking up and loading the cargo. They went up, and they loaded the cargo. They came back, the four of them without the twelve young technicians. Their first cargo. A trip of only five weeks. The Trabant was not distant. S zild showed an exceptional talent at remaining alive. It is hard to kill a man as tough and canny as he, one who is never off guard. He spent the two weeks of the return barricaded in a little compartment, and the three leaders had to postpone knew that they had mostly delegated such jobs as that. He himself had had to kill the twelve young technicians for them. He bulled his way out when they were busy with earall and secure landing. "He can't get away," Trevino said. He couldn't get clear of the surrounding jungle; he did. Trevino who knew his own land minutely could track Szild down; he couldn't He couldn't take much with him; he took a hundred and twenty pounds of it. That wasn't much out of a cargo like theirs, and whatever story Szild might tell would not be believed. He had no reason to t any story at all; he didn't. But somehow he reached port and took passage to the North, for Szild was the man who sold that first lump of gold to Patrick T. K. Another man would have been satisfied with that and steered clear of them. Not Szild. Nevertheless, they were surprised when he returned to them just at second take-off time, as they were going now with a ship that was really a ship. He came on foot across the savanna from the inland side. " 'Something like this ' happens every time I leave the house for a minute,' as the woman said as she examined the mandible and two parietal bones of her newly eaten child," Szild greeted them. "Would you be going without me? The news I had of you was sketchy and I am barely here in time." "Kill him!" said Robert Foimtain. "Kill him. Fountain says, and the other two look at each other. Was it not better. Fountain, to have a man who will kill when you say kill, and avoid these awkward pauses? But I kill hard. Fountain. I go as long as anybody goes, and afterwards." Szild went with them. They would kill him after the hard work of loading was done. They would kill him after he had done his turn at the instruments out and back. By and by they would kill him. They brought back two hundred tons on that second voyage. They made a third voyage and a fourth and a fifth. T he establishment of the Commonwealth of San Simeon did not shake the world. Not at Hrst IP Nobody had ever heard of the place. It seemed a prank. Possibly a name given to a rebel hold. Yet the Commonwealth was recognized that first day by its two adjacent Central American neighbors They constituted themselves coprotectors of the new country. One of them, indeed, had ceded the land for it, the ancient and run-down rancho of the Trevino family. Some consideration had surely been paid for this protection. It was soon after this that the heavy San Simeon Duros (fifty dollar gold pieces) began to appear around the world. The appearance of these Duros caused a nervousness all out of proportion to the number of them. It is possible that not more than twendollars' worth) went into circulation that first year. That is a large amount coming from a new small country, but it shouldn't be enough to unhinge the world. Yet it did almost that. Gold had gotten out of the habit of showing itself in society. For years it had sat at home in vaults, and a multiplier had been used to equate it with credit money. Nobody knew what to make of naked gold returning to the market. And what if this stream should be but the beginning of a veritable river? And the stream was spreading. Three Central Americans countries were on a gold spree. It was slopping over into others. The mystery of San Simeon was not solved. The exact location of the country was unknown to the world at large. Its form of government was not to be ascertained. Its statistics softened and disappeared when ex. amined. It had a president, Fuentes. It had a prime minister, Molinero -- the miller, the grinder. It had a foreign minister Trevino. It had the hardest currency in the world. Its national game was playing hob with the currencies of the rest of the world. If one small shrew is put into a warren of 'mice or rats it causes panic. The shrew is smaller than any of them and it may be one against hundreds. But it will eat them; it will eat them alive. And given time, it will cat them all. Something like this happened to the green money, the white money, the rainbow-colored money of the world. Token shrivels before the thing itself. It could not stand up to free and growing gold. But if the warren is big enough, the shrew can be contained. There will be some of the rats knowing and political enough to go out and hire shrews of their own. The source of the gold stream could not be hidden forever. One thing (Szild always said it was a mistake and Robert Fountain agreed that it was, but they couldn't hold the other two in line) was that the first ships begat others. Trevino and Grinder Molinero became too hasty in their greed. In that second year they had twelve ships in the service instead of one. That meant that somewhere between fifty and a hundrd men knew the source. The shores began to cave. The golden stream was a river. It crested to a torrent. One ship defected, then another. They came back to Earth in other lands than those of their departure. And wherever they came down they spawned other ships. A dozen other countries were in the race by the third year. Now there was privateering and open piracy. The ships became battle boats, death spheres, and the attrition was terrifying. But the inward flood of the metal continued. The world importation by the fourth year had risen to five huncould any longer be equated in dollars. The gold dollar itself was not as hard as it had been. The Trabant had changed. The period of its tumble was now only twenty-three minutes. The egg had been cracked and gutted in many places, and the cleft at the minor end had become a chasm between two horns. There was a project to shear off one of the horns and tow cubic yards each. This would be a lot of gold. I t was time for oblique measures, and they were found. The effect of the gold on the world had not really been bad. The effect on most people had been marvelous. But there was a small group that had always borne the burden of currency decisions. They were made nervous by this unbridled activity. Their hold was slipping. They took measures. A small commission of not overly intelligent men found an answer. In their own field they understood cause and effect. They acted on doubtful authority, and they were not of one mind about the action. But they did it. They killed Trabant. One treatment was enough for the little rock. It couldn't be cleansed; it couldn't be unpoisoned after that. It would be deadly for a thousand years. Then they gave it its first official name, Venenatus, the poison asteroid. A near approach would radiate the flesh off a man's bones. Things came back to normal in about three years. The shrews had killed each other, and the wise rats once more ran the warren. The new fortunes tottered and fell back into the bags of the old. Somewhere, we never did know its exact location, San Simeon (no longer able to pay the high price for protection) lost its independence and became again a run-down rancho. Gold stuck to some fingers long er than to others. Fuentes and Grinder will never run out of it. Trevino was choked to death by the political strings on his. He died along with his small country, and he hadn't intended to. Szild didn't know what he did with all his money. He paid little attention to it, and he suspected that he hadn't received nearly as much of it as had his nervous partners. He spent it manfully. He threw it away. It gave him a dour pleasThen Arpad Szild was down to his last San Simeon Duro. He laughed. Something had been missing from his life. Now it might IF be back. His gold was gone. So what to do? He went up for some more. Up to Venenatus the poison asteroid that would radiate a man's flesh off? Sure. Szild didn't believe a lot of that stuff. P atrick T. K. was alone in his shop when there entered a hooded man with a small heavy package. "I was beginning to think I would see you no more," said Patrick. "I was told that that traffic had ended. I should have known better. I believe you are the same man, my first supplier of it, though I cannot see your face." "I have none," said the hooded man. "How much for this?" "Oh, ten dollars." "A pound?" "No. The lot. I figure about eight cents a pound. That's as high as I can go on contaminated gold. Oh sure, I can clean it. It's only the smart men who say it can't be done. It will even leave a handy profit for myself, though not for you. Gold's about done for." "That isn't much. I have more of the stuff, a fair small load." T can take about this much a week. Can you live on ten dollars a week?" "Yes. I don't eat any longer -- no stomach. I don't sleep. I just keep moving. I can live on that." "And when your fair small load is gone?" "I go up for another." "They say nobody goes there and returns." "I do. But it isn't crowded there now." "I've a feeling that comes to me rarely. I'd like to help you. Are you blind?" "I believe so. I have pooled what is left of each of my senses, and somehow it serves. I need no help. I'm the only happy man in the world, the one who found the pot of gold. They can't take that from me. I'll go get it forever." "After you're dead?" "Oh, yes. I've known space ghosts. Now I'll be one. It isn't any one line you cross. I live in delirium, of course. It doesn't blunt pain, but it does change the viewpoint. On my last trip down, after I knew that I was already dead, that both I and the gold were ghosts, it was easier. Oh, those are long nights in purgatory I tell you, but I'm not irrevocably damned. There's still the gold, you see." "You're a happier man than I am. So pass it over." "Here it is." B ut when Szild passed the heavy small package to Patrick, he did it with a hand that was stark splintered bones with only a little black flesh around the heel of it. Patrick T. K. raised an eyebrow at this, but he didn't raise it very high. A sly gold deal meets all IF  Serial Among fhe weird freaks in the Zoo that spanned the starlanes, he was strangest. He was that legendary creator e, a Man! xn I n the gray light of Chlora's dawn. Roan wcH-ked with the others, dismantling the tents, folding the vast canvasses, coiling the miles of rope, stacking and bundling stakes, striking sets and packing props and costumes. The wagons puff and smoked, and hauled everything back up the ramps into the ship, and then they lowered their scraping blades and pushed all the garbage back into the circus grounds where it belonged, with the stripped yellow bones of Ithc at the bottom. Later in Stellaraires room, she poured Roan a glass of wine and sat on his lap. "I never knew how much I loved you, until you fought Ithc for me," she said. "Nobody's said anything about him," Roan said. "Aren't they going to investigate his death." "Why should anyone bother? He What Hos Gone Before    on TambooJ, a pirated pure blood human embryo comes by o mysterious series of events into the hands of the half breeds Raff and Bella Comay. They settle in a ghetto on the far side of Tombool, where Roon Comay is born. He grows up among the gracyl, a leathery, winged group of outcasts whose knowledge is entirely instinctive, and who are the servants and victims of the Veed, the saurian ruling class of Tombool. The Yill slave T'hoy hoy tells Roan the legends of ancient Terra, of her heroes and her empires, and of the fabled war with the terrible Niss, which destroyed the power of both forces, and left the empire in shambles, so that the various worlds sank into lawlessness and ignorance. Terra itseff is said to have been cut off from the universe for five thousand years, surrounded by a Niss blockade. At the age of sixteen. Roan sneaks in to watch a traveling Extravaganzoo, using a cable for a tightrope. He is kidnapped by the circus creature Ithc, who kills Raff, and whom Roan wounds in the hand. Gom Bulj, owner of the Extravaganzoo, wants Roan because of his skill in tightrope walking, and also because as a human he will make a good freak. Roan meets and falls in love with the beautiful exotic dancer, Stellaraire, who helps him find a place in the hierarchy of the circus and introduces him to Iron Robert, the strongest being in the universe. The hatred between Ithc and Roan comes to a head when Ithc takes Stellaraire off after a show, and Roan finds him torturing her with a nerve gun, to the amusement of a group of minor circus people. Roan kills Ithc and rescues Stellaraire, but is shaken by the utter lack of loyalty or decency he meets with everywhere. wasn't much use with a mined hand, anyway." But what about his friends?" "You're talking like a Terry," Stellaraire said, and sipped her wine appreciatively. Roan tasted it, too. It was a blossom-pink EVoree from Aphela and it tasted like laughter. A Igol II was a wonderful pale green gold-edged mountain that filled half the immense view-screen in the dusty room that had once been the grand observation salon. "I've got an idea," Roan said, standing with his arms around Stellaraire's slim waist. "I've been thinking about what you said, about there being a lot of mutant Terrans here, and about the climate being like Terra. Why don't we stay here? When the show pulls up, we'll disappear. Gom Bulj woiidn't go to the expense of coming back after us." "Why?" the girl asked, raising her violet-pencilled eyebrows. "What would we do on Algol II?" "We wouldn't stay. Just until we made enough credit to leave. I have to get back ho -- back to Tambool. Ma's still back there, all alone now." "But the 'zoo is my home! I've never been any other place since I was ten years old. It's safe here, and we can be together." "And besides," Roan went on, "Ma will know all about where I came from; maybe who my blood father and mother are. I have fo find out. Then I'm going to Terra." "Roan, Terra's just a mythical place! You can't -- " "Yes, I can," he said. "Terra's a real place. I know it is. I can feel inside that it's real. And it's not like other worlds. On Terra everything is the way things should be. Not all this hate, and not caring, and dirt and dying for nothing. I've never been there, but I know it as though I'd spent all my life there. It's where I belong." Stellaraire took his hand, leaned against him. "Ah, sweetie, for your sake I hope its really there -- somewhere. And if it is," she added, "I know someday you'll find it." T he 'zoo w#nt well on Algol II. Roan was sure-footed and nimble on the high wire in the light gravity, only three-fourths shipnormal, and Stellaraire's dance was an immense success with the mutant Terrans, who were odd-looking dwarves with bushy muttonchop whiskers and bowed legs and immense bellies and no visible difference between the sexes; but they appreciated the erotic qualities of her performance so well that a number of the locals occupying ringside boxes began solemnly coupling with their mates before she had even finished. Afterwards, Roan found Stellaraire by the arena barrier, watching Iron Robert in his preliminary warm-up bout. "I've planned a route for us," he said softly. "As soon as -- " "Shhh..." she said, and put a hand on his arm, her eyes on the spot-lit ring where the stone giant was strangling a great armored creature with insane, bulging eyes. It was already quite dead. He was mauling it for the amusement of the crowd which had no way of knowing the beast had died minutes before. "Listen," Roan insisted. "I have clothes and food in a bundle. Are you ready to go?" She turned to look up at him. "You really mean it? Now? Just like that, just walk off?" "at other way is there? This is as good a time as any." "Roan, it's crazy! But if you're going. I'm going with you. But listen. Wait until after Iron Robert's act. We can slip away while the tops are going down. Somebody might notice if we tried it now -- and whatever we do, we don't want to get caught. Gom Bulj has some pretty drastic ideas about what to do with deserters." "All right. As soon as the fight's over and the noise-makers come on,# IF XIM eartiwiooo we'll mingle with the marks and go out gate nineteen. There's a patch of big plants growing over on that side, and we can duck in there and work our way to the town." There was scattered applause as Iron Robert tossed his victim aside and raised his huge, square hands in his victory sigiL He came over to where Roan and Stellaraire stood, accepted a towel tossed to turn by Mag or his twin brother. He wiped pale pink blood from his face and hands, then took a scraper from bis belt pouch and began to clean himself, frowning as he worked. He was very neat and meticulous and it made a tooth-cracking noise. "How you like fight, Terry?" he asked suddenly, scraping his arm with long strokes. "I didn't really see it," Roan answered. "When I got here it was already over." Iron Robert chuckled, a sound like a boulder rolling downhill, "Fans like see plenty action," he said. "Iron Robert kill too quick, have to ham up act little, give eweiy body money's worth." He finished his toilet and put the scraper away. "Next fight different maybe," he said. "Parlagon easy. Tear up whole parlagon with bare hands. Ghinazell next. Never see chinazeH before, ChinazeU pretty tough, some say. What is chinazeH? Who care? Tear him up, too." "I guess you can beat just about anything they put in against you," Roan commented, looking around to see if Gom Bulj was in sight. It wouldn't do to have him watching when they made dieir try. "So far, Terry," the giant said. He looked at Roan with an unreadable expression in his green-glass eyes. "Iron Robert meet all comers. Some day being too tough to kill." He waved a hand at the stands. "That what all come, hope for. Soime day they see. Maybe today. Maybe next year. Maybe hundred years. Meantime, meet all comers, fight to win. Iron Robert bom to fight. Fight until die." A hom blew long, nerve-shredding blasts. Crews were hauling sections of heavy fencing into the cleared arena. The PA system boomed out a description of the coming battle. Iron Robert took a gallon-sized swig from a bottle, tossed it aside, stalked out into the center of the ring under the glare of the lights. Jumbo appeared, hauling a vast, iron-barred cage. Its sides trembled as something inside slammed against the bars. The crowd fell suddenly silent. An immensely tall, thin being dressed in green silks that flapped about its long shins puUed a rope and the end of the cage fell aside. A triangular, scaled head poked out, swaying inquiringly on its serpentine neck. Then the nazell bounded from the cage and shook the ground when it landed. It was an incredibly monstrous creature, a primitive-world dinosaur type with bony plates along its high-arched spine. But the fearsome thing about it was the gleam of intelligence in the small, glistening eyes. It paused a moment, surveying the sea of faces behind the barriers, and gaugIF ing Iron Robert, half its size, who stood watching it and ganging it back. Roan heard Stellaraire's quick intake of breath. "No wonder the betting was so high," she said. "Gom Bulj said a syndicate was importing something special from Algol II, just for the fight. It's a high-G planet, and that monster's used to weighing twice as much as he does now. Look at him! I don't think I want to watch this." "You're not really worried, are you?" Roan asked. "I mean, it's fixed, isn't it?" Stellaraire whirled on Roan. "I've known Iron Robert ever since I was a little girl," she said. "I've seen him go up against the awfullest fighters and the cruellest killers on a hundred worlds, and he's always won. He wins with his strength and his courage. Nothing else. Nobody helps him -- any more than they helped me -- or you!" She looked back toward the arena, where the chinazell had seen Iron Robert now. It gathered its legs under it, watching him standing with his back to his opponent, his arms raised to the crowd in the ancient salute of the gjadiator. "Fm affaid. Roan," Stellaraire said. "He's never fought anything like this beforeP The chinazell moved suddenly; it rose up on its hind legs and charged like a huge, ungainly bird straight toward Iron Robert's exposed back. Stellaraire's fingers dug deep ipto Roan's arm. "Why doesn't he turn!" At the last possible moment. Iron Robert pivoted with a speed that seemed unbelievable in anything so massive, leaned aside from the chinazell's charge and struck out with a club-like arm. The blow resounded against the beast's armored hide like a cannonball striking masonry; it staggered, broke stride, sent up a spray of dust as it caught ifself, wheeled and pounced. The vicious triangular head whipped 'down with open jaws that clashed against Iron Robert's stony hide and dragged him from his feet. His arms encircled the scaled neck, hugging the monster close. In sudden alarm, it braced its feet and backed, and Iron Robert held on, twisting the broad head sideways, his fingers locked in the corners of the clamped mouth. The heavy reptilian tail slammed the ground in a roil of dust. Sparks flew where the bright talons of the creature's short arms raked Iron Robert's invulnerable chest and shoulders. Then it opened it jaws, whipped its neck, flung Iron Robert aside. He rolled in the dust, and before he could come to his feet, the chinazefl rang to him, brought an immense hind foot down in an earth-shaking kick. Roan coughed as dust floated across from the scene of the battle. "I can't see!" Stellaraire wailed. "What's happening?" Iron Robert was on his feet again, grappling a hind leg nearly as big as himself. The chinazell, its weight down on its stunted forelimbs, sidled awkwardly, trying to shake its attacker loose. Its head came around and down, striking at Iron Robert. He hunched his head closer to his shoulders and reached up for a higher grip. "The thing's too big for him," Stellaraire gasped. "He can't reach a vulnearable spot I" W ith a surge, the chinazell raised the trapped leg clear of the ground and dashed it down. Iron Robert slammed against the concrete-hard clay -- but he kept his grip. "He's hurt!" Stellaraire choked. "It's all he can do to hold on -- and that isn't doing him any good. But if he lets go, it will kick him again!" "At least its teeth aren't hurting him," Roan said. "He's all right. He'll hold on until he tires of it, and then -- " "It won't tire. Not in this light gravity." The chinazell stood, its ribbed sides heaving, its head on its long neck twisted to look at Iron Robert, who shifted his grip suddenly, leaped, caught a bony boss that adorned the dino's withers and hauled himself across the creature's back, his weight bearing it down. Its legs sprawled out. It plunged violently, striking with its yard-wide jaws as dust rose up in a dense cloud. The chinazell came out of the dust cloud, wheeled and charged down on Iron Robert as he came to his feet. It bounded past him and struck with its immense tail, a blow like a falling tree. Iron Robert went down. The dino galloped away, circled, and Roan saw that its tail was broken, the hide torn, blood washing down across the scales, caking the dust. The head writhed on the long neck as the voiceless creature shuddered its pain. It came to a halt, the broken tail dragging now. Its head whipped from side to side as though seeking some escape from its torment. Fifty yards away, Iron Robert came slowly to his hands and knees. "He's hurt!" Stellaraire cried. "Oh, please. Iron Robert! Get up!" The chinazell moved heavily, painfully. It walked to Iron Robert, stood over him. It maneuvered into position, raised a leg like an ironwood log set with spikes, brought it down square on Iron Robert in a blow that shook the ground. "Gom Bulj has got to stop it!" Stellaraire screamed. "It will kill him!" "Wait!" Roan caught her arm. "He's not finished yet! Look!" The chinazeH was moving awkwardly sideways, its head held low. Iron Robert's mighty arms circled the lean neck. As it dragged him, he freed one arm, raised it, drove his stony fist into one small, lizard eye. The chinazell bucked and tried to shake free, but Iron Robert held on, twisted, struck at the other eye. The dino reared and plunged desperately, and Iron Robert dropped away, lay on his back. He raised his bloody fists, let them fall back. The blinded chinazell stopped, squatted; thick blood ran down the triangular face; the primitive mouth opened in voiceless agony. It rose, ran a few yards, dragging its dead IF tail, then squatted again, its small cunning gone with its eyes. A murmuring ran through the silent crowd, and someone started a hissing, and at the sound the chinazell leaped up, crashed aimlessly against the thick fence. People scrambled back in fright, screaming, and the panicked beast lunged, brought down a section of the barrier, then turned and blundered back, struck the fence again. There was a blare of noise from the PA system, and Gom Bulj appeared, a vivid, bloated figure in scarlet capes, carrying a heavy power gun. He took aim, blew the head off the maimed beast. It fell over sideways like a mountain, kicked out once, twice, then lay still. The headless neck twitched as blood pumped out to puddle in the dust like black oil. Gom Bulj walked over to Iron Robert, stood looking at him, still holding the gun in his hand, raising it now... #tXTor Stellaraire was round the barrier, running toward the entrepreneur. "You can't!" Roan heard her voice, almost drowned now in the angry shouting of the crowd that had seen the two most deadly fighters in the Galaxy maim each other, and still felt cheated because there hadn't been more blood and agony. As Roan came up, Gom Bulj was holding up a many-fingered hand "As you wish, my dear," he was rumbling. "I merely thought -- " "Iron Robert's not just another wounded animal," Stellaraire flared. "But of course he is," Gom Bulj boomed, lighting up a footlong cigar. "What else would you call him? But no matter. Say your farewells or whatever, and then back to work, eh?" He turned away. "We'll have to get a crew over here," Roan said. "He's too heavy to lift." "Leave him where he is," Gom Bulj said. "Disposal is the local's problem. And now I really must -- " "Aren't you even going to try to help?" Roan demanded, standing in front of the bulky businessman. Gom Bulj waved his cigar, blinking at Roan. "Ah, you Terries," he chuckled. "So impractical... " He rippled quickly to one side and past Roan and the crowd of hurrying circus hands swallowed him up. The audience was melting away. Almost before they were clear the seats were going down, and the crews had started on striking the top. Stellaraire was bending over Iron Robert. "Good by," she said sadly. "You fought awfully well. Iron Robert. He was just too big for you," The stone giant opened his eyes. "Chinazell... tou fighter," he said in a gritty, labored voice. "Dirty... trick... gouge... eyes." His craggy face was contorted and his huge chest labored with the effort of his breathing. "Do you think you could stand?" Roan asked. He gripped a massive arm and pulled, but it was like pulling on the trunk of a fallen tree. "We've got to get help," he said, looking over toward the ship that was visible now where the tent had been peeled back. A crew was folding up the arena partitions, and a group of busy locals were setting to work to skin out the cbinazell. There was no one else near. "No one will help," Stellaraire said. "They just... don't help. And anyway -- " !e paused, looking at Iron Robert as he lay sprawled out on his back. "Anyway... no use," the giant growled. "Iron Robert bad hurt. Bone in back broken. Legs ,... not move. You go now, Gom Bulj not like you be late." A bald, thick-necked humanoid came up, cradling Gom Bulj's power gun in his arm. "Get moving, you two," he ordered. 'Tliere's work to be done. Gom Bulj said -- " "Don't you give me orders, Bulugg," Stdlaiaire snapped at him. "Anyway, we were just going." "I'm not leaving him here like this," Roan said. He looked helplessly around. The skinners were lifting a sail-fike flap of homy skin from the chinazell, exposing the bone-white flesh of the dino's flank. No one was paying any attention to Iron Robert's plight. No one cared. Beyond the busy throng folding canvas, the animals were moving up the aft gangplank into the ship. There was a holdup as a humped animal decided to sit crossways and someone yelled for the electric goad. Then Roan saw Jumbo heaving over the 'zoo grounds like a ship in a slow sea. "Get Jumbo," he said to Stellaraire. "m find some ropol "But, Roan -- " "Do as I tell youl" he snapped. He started away and the guard said, "Hey!" and brought the gun around. "Shut up, Bulugg!" Stellaraire said. "And don't get any ideas with that gun. You're just supposed to hold it and scare people." R oan looped the thick, oily plastic cable under Irop Robert's arms, tied it in a vast knot. Stellaraire was perched on Jumbo's head with her legs hanging down over his gray, furrowed forehead. The pachyderm moved his trunk restlessly as Roan tied the cable to his leatherand-chain harness. Looking toward the ship, Roan saw that the animals were almost all aboard now. The last of the yard wagons were puffing away toward the greenish blaze of the setting sun with their loads. A shrill whistle sounded from the ship. "Hey, shake it up!" Bulugg called. "That's minus a quarter. Whatta, you wanna get left?" "Pull, Jumbo!" Stellaraire cried. "Hurry! Pull!" The elephant took a step and jolted to a stop. He looked back over his shoulder, puzzled, and flapped his ears. "Pull, Jumbo," Stellaraire called; and Jumbo leaned into his harness and pulled, sensing the necessity of something more than ordinary effort. Iron Robert budged, dragging a furrow in the ground and Jumbo strained, putting his back into it, placing his great feet and thrusting, hauling the dead weight of many IF tons across the dusty day of the empty arena. A t the gangplank, Bulugg jumped at the sound of the shrill lastwarning whistle. He waved the gun nervously. There were faces at the port above, looking down curiously. "Five minutes to the Seal Shjp bell," he blustered. "You can leave that hunk of rock right here and get aboard!" Jumbo put a foot on the wide gangway, started up. A loudspeaker was chanting checklist orders. Gom Bulj appeared above, looking out from the cavernous' hold. "Here, here, what's this?" he bellowed. He waved his arms, staring around as if outraged. Iron Robertas vast inert weight dragged in the dust like a broken monument, reached the end of the gangplank -- and jammed. Jumbo heaved, the harness taut across his chest. A rivet popped from it and clattered against the hull. Roan ran to the fallen giant, caught up a long pole, levered at the stony shoulder. Jumbo rocked twice, then heaved again -- and Iron Robert bumped up on the gangway, grinding along the incline with a noise like ' a wrecked ship being hauled off a launch pad. Then they were in the hold and Gom Bulj was rippling his walking tentacles, muttering loudly, and the others were staring and then walking away, bored quickly with Terry foolishness. Stellaraire's lavender powder was caked with sweat and two of her gold-painted, so-carefuUy tended fingernails were broken off. But Roan looked at her and found her beautiful, with dust in her ochre eyes and streaks down her face, and her gold tights plastered against her body. The port clanged shut. The ship's lights came on, and they stood and looked down at the great body they had salvaged. "Well, there went your chance to run away from the 'zoo," Stellaraire sighed. "What are you going to do now? Just leave him here?" "We'll get the vet to look at him. He'll know how to fix him. You and I will bring him food and scrape him. After a while he'll be all right again." The girl looked into Roan's face curiously. "Why?" she asked. "He was nothing special to you. You hardly knew him." "Nobody should be left alone to die because they're hurt," Roan said. "You crazy, funny Terry," Stellaraire said, and then she was crying, and he held her, wondering if it was because she was a Mule and not a real Terran that she was so hard to understand at times. F or two months Iron Robert lay in the canvas-hung compartment Roan and Stellaraire had arranged for him in the cargo hold, with his lower body encased in massive concrete casts to remind him not to try to move. Every day Roan or the girl went over him with a scraper, and assured him he was as handsome as ever. Now and then Gom Bulj came down to stare at the huge invalid, rap his nine knuckles against the casts and mutter about expense. When the day came that the vet said the casts could come off, Nugg came down and helped Roan work carefully with a jack hammer, freeing him. When they finished, Iron Robert sat up, then got to his feet and stood, whole again. "Terry customs strange," he rumbled, looking down at Roan. "Not call you Terry now. Call you Roan. Iron Robert your friend. Roan. Not understand Terry ways, but maybe good ways. Maybe better ways than Iron Rort ever know before." Gom Bulj appeared, puffing two cigars. He looked Iron Robert over, shaking his head. "A remarkable thing, young Terry. It appears you were right. A valuable property, and good as new -- I hope. I'm a fair being, young Terry, and I have decided to reward you. Henceforth, you may consider the Mule, Stellaraire, as your personal concubine, for your exclusive use -- except when I have important Terry-type guts, of course, "She's not yours to give away, Roan said sbaly. "Eh? What's that, not mine?" Gom Bulj blinked at Roan. "Why I paid -- " "No one owns Stellaraire." "See here, my lad, you'd best remember who it is you're addressing! Are you forgetting I could have ypii trussed up in leathers and flogged for a week?" "No," Iron Robert rumbled. 'No one lay hand on Roan, Gom Bulj, Iron Robert kill any being that try. Even you." "Here!" Gom Bulj back-pedaled, staring around wildly. "What's the cosmos coming to? Am I to be threatened by my own property?" "Iron Robert not property," the giant rumbled. "Iron Robert of royal ferrous strain, and belong to no being. And Roan my friend. Tell all crew. Roan friend to Iron Robert." "And since you can't give me away," Stellaraire put in, "Roan still has a reward coming. I think it's time you gave him full freak status and started paying him. And he should be freed from all duties except his high-wire act. And he should eat in the Owner's Mess, with the other stars." "Why, why -- " Gom Bulj stuttered. But in the end he agreed and hurried away, still muttering to himself. r iere had been a party celebrating Iron Robert's successful defense of his title against a Firesaber from Deeb. Roan had drunk too much and not left Stellaraire until almost ship-dawn. Now he struggled out of a dream in which he fought against iron arms that closed on him, hearing the beloved voice that called by the arena gate. His eyes were open now. He could hear his own breath rasping in his throat, and the voice was the wailing of a siren, but the crushing weight still held him, flat on his back with the edge of the bunk cutting into his arm, and a wrinkle in the blanket under him like a sword on edge. Far away, bells clanged, and a tiny glow grew beIF hind the black glass disk above the cabin door, swelling into a balefol red that flashed on, off, on... Roan moved, dragged an arm like an ironwood log across his body, turned under the massive pressure and fell with stunning violence to the floor from the bunk. Lying on his face, he felt the deep vibration through the deckplates. The engines were nmning -- here in deep space, four parsecs from the nearest system! He rose to his feet, his bones creaking under the massive acceleration -- three gravities at least. Far away, over the bellow of the engines, the clang of bells, the whine of the siren, he thought he heard the sound of Jumbo's trumpeting. He made his way across the room, into the corridor, dragging feet like anchors, while the noise swelled, crimson lights screamed red alarm, far-away voices called. At the end of the corridor the lift door waited, open. Inside, he reached to the control panel, pressed the button for the menagOTcs deck. For a moment, magically, the wdght went away and he drew a iM-eath. Then massive blackness damped down while tiny red lights whirled. He was lying on the floor of the car, smelling the salty sea-smell of blood. Through the open door under the blue-white glare of the ceiling, he saw the long white corridor, the barred doors. Oawling again, he made his way along the passage, feeling the slickness underfoot, seeing how the pattern spread from under the doors, blackish red and harsh green mingling in a Ustening film that trembled in a geometric resonance pattern. All around him, over the mindwere bellows, groans, grunts ci fmal agony. Roan went on, not looking into the cages as he passed them one by one, seeing the film of blood dance, spreading. The high, barred door, of Jumbo's stall was bulged outward, one twoinch steel rod sprung from its socket. Behind it, the elephant lay, blinded, ribs broken, one tusk snapped off short. Blood flowed from the open mouth, from under the closed eyelids. Roan could see the animal's massive side rise in a tortured heave as it struggled to breathe. "Jumbo!" he choked. The heavy trunk groped toward him. Tlie great legs stirred; a moan rumbled from the crushed chest Roan looked at the power rifle clamped in a bracket beside the stall door. He pulled it free, checked the charge, raised it against the rdentless pull, aimed between the closed and Hoody eyes, and pceesed the firing stud. A larms jangled monotonouriy in the carpeted corridor outside the quarters of Gom Bulj. Roan dragged leaden feet pest the fallen body of an Ydican, lying with one three-fingered hand outstretched toward the door of the patron's apartment. Inside, Gom Bulj lay sprawled, his body crushed against the floor, his eyes bulging from the pressure. He moved feebly as Roan came to him and went heavily down to hands and knees... G?om Bulj? Roan asked, then stopped to breathe. "No..." the entreprenaur's voice was a breathless wheeze. "Not me... at... all... young Terry." He drew a hoarse breath. "Old battle... reflex... circuits... triggered... somehow. Maximum acceleration... three... standard... gee." "Why?" "Ah, why indeed... young Terry... " "What... can we do?" "It's... too bad... too bad, young Terry. No help for us. The time has come... to terminate... the biological processes..." "You mean... die?" 'When the... environment becomes... hostile... a quick demise... is greatly... to be desired." "I want to live. Tell... me what to do." Gom Bulj's massive head seemed to sink even deeper into the compressed bulk of his body. "Selfpreservation... an interesting... concept. A pity... we won't have... the opportunity... to discuss... it." "What can  I do, Gom Bulj?" Roan reached to the bulbous body, gripped " a thick arm. "I have... to try... " "I suggest... you suspend... respiration. Five minutes... should do the trick... As for me... I may thresh a bit... but pay... no attention..." choked. How?" "No use... young Terry. Too far. Even now... blood runs... from your nostrils." "Tell me what to do." "On the war deck..." Gom Bulj gasped. "Command... control panel. A lever -- painted white... But... you can't." "I'll try," Roan said. I t was an interminable time later, and Roan's hands and knees left red marks against the gray decking as he pulled himself across the raised threshold of the door which a red glare-panel warned: Across the dusty room, the dead gray of the great screens had changed to vivid green-white on panels alive now with dancing jcwel-lights. A dark shape moved on the master screen. Below, mass and proximity gauges trembled; numbers appeared and faded on the ground-glass dials. Roan pulled himself to the padded Fire Controller's seat, spelled out the symbols flashA yellow light blinked suddenly in the center of the panel. Red letters appyeared on the screen, spelling out words in archaic Universal: The words faded, changed: The auxiliary panels blinked from yellow to red to white. Through the seat. Roan felt a IF tremor run through the ship, briefly rattling a loose bolt in the panel, fore him, the banked controls sparkled row on row, telltale lights blinking insistently, gauges producing readings, relays closing, clicking, as the robot panel monitored the action. Roan's eyes blinked back haze, searching for the white-painted switch. It was there, just to the right of the baleful crimson dial lettered He reached out, forcing his heavy hand up, grasped the smooth lever, The war lights blinked off. He searched the instruments before him, found a notched handle letA thousand noises growled down to silence. Roan seemed to float upward from the chair as the pressure dropped to the ship-normal half gee. In the stillness, metal popped and groaned, readjusting to the reduced stresses. Distantly someone screamed, again and again. Roan thought suddenly of Stellaraire, alone in her cabin. He ran, leaping down the companionways, along to her door. It stood ajar. He pushed it wide -- With a sound like the clap of gigantic hands, the room exploded in his face. H e was a dust mote, floating in a brassy sky where thunder rolled, remote and ominous. Somewhere, someone called to him, and he would have answered, but his yoke was choked with smoke as thick as S#mjp. He fought to clear it, and then his eyes were open and he saw broken metal, the fragments of a flower dish and of a yellow blossom, and a white hand, limp, the fingers curled. He was on his feet, choking in an acrid reek of burnt metal, throwing aside a shattered chair, heaving at a fallen fragment of paneling, coughing as dust boiled up from the rubble of insulation, charred cloth, smashed glass and wood and plastic. She lay on her back, her eyes closed, he face unmarked. Her platinum hair swirled across her forehead. "Stellaraire!" He knelt, feeling scorching heat against his face, brushing away dust, splinters, paper. The duralloy beam lay across her pelvis, pinning her tight. Roan felt his throat close as he gripped the cold metal, strained at it, felt its massive inertia. On his knees, he wrapped his arms around the metal section, heaved back until the room swam red. The odor of smoke was stronger now. Roan stood, hearing the ringing in his head, seeing the pale yellow flames that licked at scattered paper and torn cloth. Twisted wires and broken conduits sagged from the broken wall. Water trickled from a ruptured pipe, and beside it a stream of sharp-odored liquid poured down. The little colored fish from the tank lay stiff on the floor. Too late. Roan whirled, threw a quilt over the burning paper. With a whoosh! the coolant fluid ignited. Now red fire boiled black smoke, and a wve of heat struck Roan's face like a whip. He seized up a blanket, thrust it against the broken water line, then threw the wet cloth over Stellaraire's body. It hissed when it touched the floor beside her. He threw himself down, not noticing the searing pain against his back, braced his feet, set his shoulders against the beam, and pushed. It was like pushing at a granite cliff. The air he breathed burned in his throat. There was a fallen length of duralloy channel under his hand. He thrust it under the beam, levering until the shirt split across his back. The channel buckled. When he tossed it aside, there were yellowish-white burns on his palms. Stellaraire's hair was burning, the platinum-gold strands blackening and curling. Roan stumbled to the door, out into a smoke-blinded corridor. He would find Iron Robert, and together they would free Stellaraire... XV I n the thick-rugged chamber of Gom Bulj, the entrepeneur lay where Roan had left him, in a puddle of blood, heavy lids halfclosed over dull eyes. "You succeeded, young Terry," he said, his voice a thin echo of its old rumble. "Too late for me, I fear." Roan swayed on his feet. "Where is Iron Robert, Gom Bulj?" "Alas, I don't know." The dull eyes turned to Roan's hand. "You are burned, poor lad. Now you will die, there's a clever boy. Too bad. I had great ambition for you, young Terry. One day... I would have billed you... as the galaxy's greatest freak." "It's Stellaraire," Roan said, talking now through a black mist that closed over tighter, ever tighter. "I need Iron Robert." A wall annunciator crackled and a strange voice spoke: "Attention all hands! Assemble in the main dining hall at once! Bring no weapons! Disobedience is death!" "What voice is that?" Gom Bulj said faintly. "Are we boarded then?" Roan made his mind work. "I saw a ship," he said, "on the screens. We fired -- and they fired back. I think they won." "Yes," Gom Bulj blinked heavy lids. "I knew it. I felt the shocks. Alas, in her day Belshazzar was a mighty dreadnought of the Empire. But now she has fought her last action." His voice faded to a whisper. "What should I do, Gom Bulj?" Roan cried. The heavy body stirred; a last hoarse breath sighed out. Roan looked down at the still body. "Gom Bulj is dead," he said aloud. "Jumbo is dead... and... and..." He whirled, ran into the corridor and toward the dining hall. A ll around, sounds of destruction echoed along metal halls. A muffled blast shook the deck plates ns IF under foot. Harsh odors of hot metal and things that burned caught at Roan's throat. He came to the arched entry over the 'two wide steps leading down to the broad room with its threadbare eternon carpets and blackened gilt fixtures, and stopped, seeing overturned tables, huddled bodies, and standing among them, legs braced wide, cradling weapons, five creatures in coats covered with tight-curled hair. "Help me!" Roan called. The nearest creature whirled, swung his weapon around in an easy gesture. There were horns on his head, and his eyes were black stones. A big creature in a radiation mask stepped to the horned creature's side, knocked the weapon aside, then turned the power pistol gripped in his big fists on Roan, looked him over through the slits in the mask. "Don't burn this one, Czack. Can't you see he's a Terry?" 'To the pit with Terries," the other snarled -- but he lowered his gun. "Stellaraire," Roan said. Help me. The tall creature bolstered a pistol and took off 'the mask. Roan looked into wide gray eyes, saw the thin nose, the edge of white teeth between the thin lips. Roan stared. "You look like pretty pure stock, kid," the tall Man said. "Where you from?" "You're a Terran," Roan said. "Help me! The fire -- " The horned creature stepped close, swung a wide hand against Roan's head. He staggered; the room rang. "Hands off the kid," the Man said. Roan shook his head blinking back a blurring film. "But I asked you a question, kid. Henry Dread doesn't ask twice." The pistol was still centered on Roan's chest. Roan turned, started back up the steps. A horned humanoid blocked his way, swinging a slow blow that Roan leaned aside from. "Get out of my way," Roan said. "I have to find Iron Robert!" "Hold it." Henry Dread had both guns in his hand now, and he turned to the arched door way. A tall, green-skinned Ythcan stood at the top of the two steps. Beside Roan, Czack brought his power rifle up. There was a deafening ba-wam; and a flicker of blue light. The Ythcan spun back, fell, kicked and lay still. "See if there's any more," Henry Dread snapped. A hair-coated creature with hunched shoulders and a bald skull moved past Roan, sprang up the steps. Beyond him. Roan saw a wide silhouette looming against the corridor's glare. "Iron Robert!" Roan shouted. "Run!" Facing Iron Robert, the bald creature fired at point-blank range. Roan saw the flicker of blue light that played for an instant against Iron Robert's broad chest, heard a deep grunt; then Iron Robert took two steps, plucked the bald one from the floor, whirled him high and threw him against the wall. He rebounded, Jay utteiiy still, his face oddly flattened, Mood dribbling from his ear. "Stand clear, Henry Dread barked. "My blasters will take him." Roan struck with the edge of his hand at the burned one's arm, caught the power rifle as it fell, swiveled on Henry Dread. "Don't shoot him!" Roan said. Iron Robert stood, his eyes moving from one to another of the six weapons aimed at him. Beside Roan, the homed creature snarled. "What are you waiting for? Kill him!" H enry Dread looked at Roan. He turned slowly, bringing his guns around to aim at Roan's chest. "Drop it, kid." "No," Roan said. The Man's mouth twitched. There was sweat on his forehead. "Don't try me, kid. I'm supposed to be fast -- and you're covered. Now let the gun down nice." "Roan," Iron Robert's deep voice rumbled. "I kill this one?" He took a step forward toward Henry Dread. Six guns tracked him. "No, Iron Robert. Go to Stellaraire -- quickly!" "I kill him easy, Iron Robert said. "Have only two small guns." "Help Stellaraire, Iron Robert!" Roan sauted. "Do as I tell you!" Standing straight. Roan forced himself not to think about Stellaraire or about the bums on his hands and body, or about the smell of charred flesh, but only about holding the gun aimed at the pirate's chest. And Iron Robert imderstood and he turned and went "Be smart, kid," Henry Dread said between gritted teeth. "Drop it, before I have to bum you." He was tall and solid, with a scarred face and thick fingers. He stood, two guns aimed at Roan, tense and ready, and the sweat trickled down his face. 'Try it," Roan said. Henry Dread's mouth twisted in a sort of smile. "Yeah, you're fast, kid. Nobody ever took a gun away from Czack like that before.' I don't think he likes you for it." "Why don't you kill the muckgmb!" The horned one stood in a half-crouch, eyes on Roan. "Go ahead, jump him, Czack. Even if I put two through the head. I'll bet you a keg he'd nail you on the way down. Want to risk it?" The other answered in an incomprehensible language. Henry Dread barked an order. His creatures stirred; two filed carefully past Roan and out into the corridor. "Don't let them try to hurt Iron Robert," Roan said. "If he doesn't come back. I'll shoot you." The pirate licked his lips, his eyes on Roan's. "Whafs that walking Bolo to you, kid? You're human!" "He's my friend." "Friends with a Geek?" Henry Dread sneered. "This tub fired on me first -- not that my screens can't handle museum pieces like you tossed at us." The Man's eyes narrowed. "Nobody lobs one into Henry Dread and gets away with it." "You killed Jumbo -- and Gom IP Bulj -- and maybe... his voice broke, "Don't take it so hard, kid. With me it's business. I needed fuel and ammo..." The voice seemed to fade and swell. Roan held his eyes open, leaning against the wall just slightly, holding the gun steady... this tub happened along. That's life." T here was a movement in the corridor behind Henry Dread. Iron Robert stepped into view. Behind him, a hair-coated creature stepped from a door, brought up a gun -- Roan swiveled and fired, and was back covering Henry Dread's belt buckle in a movement quicker than the eye could follow. The gunner fell and lay still. "Wait there. Iron Robert," Roan called. The big Man lowered his pistols, tossed them aside. He looked shaken. "Holding these diings is likely to be dangerous," he said. "Kid, you move like a fire lizard on Sunside. But you're burned pretty bad. You need to have my medic take a look at you. Now, just akn that blaster off-side, so no accidents happen, and we'll talk this thing over." Roan held the rifle steady, listening to the surging in his head. In the doorway. Iron Robert stood and waited. "Look, kid, you put the gun down, and I'll guarantee you safe conduct. You and the one-man task force, too. You can't hold the iron on me forever." Roan looked at the Man's eyes. They were steady on his. "Well you give me your word as a Man?" Roan asked. The Man stared at him. "Sure, kid." He glanced at Czack and the others. "You all heard what he said, didn't you?" he said flatly. Roan lowered the 'rifle. Czack moved in, snatched it away, brought it up and around -- Henry Dread took a step, slammed a gnarled fist against the horned head. Czack dropped the rifle and spun against the wall. Henry Dread massaged his fist. "The slob didn't think I meant it." He looked at Roan. "I guess us Men got to stick together, eh, kid?" He bent and scooped up a gun. Iron Robert came toward him, a blackish stain on his shoulder. "Shall I kill this one now?" he rumbled. "No. Iron Robert... Stellaraire..." Roan leaned against the wall, feeling the dizziness rising. Iron Robert caught him. "No, Roan," The great ugjy head shook slowly. "The Fair One is gone away, now. Now she dances for the Gods in their high place, above all sorrow." The deep voice seemed to come from far away. 'Take Roan to your doctors, Man!" "Yeah -- the kid's in bad shape. You better come too, big boy. You're a tough one. You took a blaster on half-charge at five paces, and you're still walking and ready to eat 'em alive. Maybe I can use a Geek like you at that." r iey were alien hands, gentle but impersonally insistent. They poked and prodded with a feel of slick, scaly hide, and hard, too-thin fingers. There was no comfort in alien hands. They weren't like Stellaraire's hands, warm and soft and -- human. Roan moved to thrust the hands away, and searing pain flashed through his body. He gasped, not at the bodily agony but at the sudden vivid remembrance of hands that would not touch him again, and white-gold hair, and smiling ochre eyes. "He wakes, a reedy voice said. "A tenacious organism. Not like some of these beings, who seem almost to wish to flee to the long darkness. I feel their souls tremble and shrink under my hands, and they are gone like a snuffed candle. But not this one. "Make Roan live. Man-doctor, Iron Robert's basso rumbled. "Make Roan live strong. "Yes, yes. Stay back, you great ugly lout. Now, the wounds are clean. And I have here... There was a sound of rummaging. "Aha! Now, we'll see. Roan stiffened at a sensation like molten lead poured across his chest He was aware of white lights glaring through his eyelids. He moaned. "Eh, he feels it now. Lie easily, Terran. It is only pain. "You make pain go away, Mandoctor! "I've yearned for a proper patient for these medicines, ugly giant! A fabulous pharmacopeia, all made for Terrans ages dead. Long have I saved them. Henry Dread likes to fancy his rogues have human blood, but my knives know all their secrets. Half-castes, mutants, humanoid trash! Now, this lad's different. He's almost a textbook example of your pure Terry stock. A rare creature." The thin voice rambled on, and the hands probed and the fire touched, flamed and faded into a dull numbness. Roan let out a long breath and felt drugged drowsiness creeping over him like warm water rising in a tub. "This skin," the voice went on, far away now. "The texture! How nicely the blade slides through it! And the color. See, look at this illustration in my book. "Does he sleep. Man-doctor? Or -- ?" 'He only sleeps, monster. Faugh, Fm pleased I have no need to take a scalpel to that horny hide of yours. Now get back. I've two hours of close work ahead, and no need of your rusty bulk to hinder me." I t was many hours later. Roan opened his eyes and by a faint light filtering through a barred transom saw the massive silhouette beside him. "Iron Robert." Roan's voice was a weak croak. "You wake now, Roan. You sleep, good. Man-doctor small foolish creature, but he fix you good. Roan." "I should have shot him. Iron Robert. IF "No, Roan. He fix you." "I mean the Man. He killed Stellaraire. I should have killed him. You should have smashed them, smashed their ship." "Then Roan and Iron Robert die, too, Roan. Too soon to die for you. Too many strange things to see yet, too many places still to go. Long life ahead for you still. Roan." "Not for me. Fm only a Terry freak, and Fm almost dead already. Dad told me. Humans only have time to start living and they die. And living's no fun. Not any more." "Sure, lots of fun still to come, Roan. Many great jugs to drink, and far suns to see; many females to take, and enemies to kill, and whole universes to see and smell and taste. Plenty time to be dead after." "All my friends are dead. And Stellaraire..." "I still alive. Roan." Iron Robert moved and Roan heard a soft metallic clash. "Iron Robert your friend, sure." Roan raised up on one elbow, ignoring a tearing sensation in his bandaged arm, peering in the dim light. Massive chains lay across Iron Robert's knees, and his wrists were circled by shackles of fingerthick metal, "Iron Robert -- you're chained to the wall!" "Sure. Henry Dread scared of me, you bet. I let him put chains on me if he send Man-doctor to you." Roan pushed himself upright, ignoring the pulse that start up, drumming in his temples. He swung his feet heavily to the floor. A blackness filled with whirling lights swelled to fill the room and he gripped the edge of the bunk, waiting for it to go away. "I'll make him take them off," he heard himself saying. "I'll make him. It was a Man to Man pact." "No, Roan, you lie down! Bad for you to move now." "I don't want to lie down. Call him. Call Henry Dread!" "Roan! You got to do like Mandoctor say, otherwise you get bad sick." Roan was on his feet, feeling the floor sway and tilt under him. "Henry Dread," he called, hearing the words emerge as a croak. "Wait, Roan. Somebody come." T here were metallic sounds in the corridor. A splash of light glared suddenly; long shadows crouched away from the door that swung wide, and a tall, broad figure stood squinting into the room. "You yelling for me, were you, boy? Hey -- on your feet already?" "You chained Iron Robert. You didn't keep your word." "Henry Dread always keeps his word, you!" The Man's wide shape seemed to blur; Roan blinked hard, wavered, caught himself. "Unchain him. He's my friend!" "You better crawl back in that bunk, boy. You're raving! Fm captain aboard this vessel; you're a slave of war. I let the sawbones patch you up, but don't let it go to your head." Roan advanced toward Henry Dread on uncertain feet. "Unchain him, liar! Keep your word, murderer!" Henry Dread's eyes narrowed. "Why, you lousy little -- Roan lunged, and Henry Dread leaped back, jerked his pistol from his hip holster and aimed it. Iron Robert came to his feet in a clash of chain. "I'm aiming this right between yotir eyes, Terry boy," Henry said between his teeth. "One more step, and so help me I burn you down." "I don't care about that," Roan said, taking a step. "That isn't anything." No, Roan!" Iron Robert boomed. "You do like Henry Dread say now, Roan!" Roan tried to take another step, but Uie floor tilted and he gritt his teeth, and willed himself not to fall, willed the blackness to retreat. "I wear chains for you. Roan. You do this for me." "Kid, you're crazy!" Henry Dread's voice barked. "You'll kifl yourself!" "You wait, Roan," Iron Rob said. "Later, when you get wdl, then you have chance to kill this one." Henry Dread laughs it harsh snarl. Yeah, lten to your sidekkk, kid. You kill me when you fed better." Hien the shadows moved id the fight narrowed down and was gone in a dang of metal, and Roan sank down, groped, found the bed, fell across it Tfe's a Man, Iron Robert. A Terry -- almost like me. But h#s not like Dad said the Terries were." "Henry Dread mity scared Man, Roan," Iron Robert rumbled softly. "And maybe he not such mean man like he make out. He come plenty quick, first time you call. Maybe Henry Dread wait outside, hope you call his name. Maybe Henry Dread plenty lonely Man, Roan." T he bars welded across the door frame of the warhead storage room were as thick as Roan's wrist and close together. He leaned on the mop and looked through the bars at Iron Robert, who sat on a duralloy slab that sagged under his weight, almost invisible in the shadows of the lightless cell. "The Minid they call Snagglehead is the worst," Roan said. "He's about seven feet tall and he smells like a Charon's mud-hive. Yesterday he tripped me and I almost fell down the aft companionway." Iron Robert's chains clanked. Roan could see his small eyes gleam. "You be careful. Roan. You don't let riff-raff get you mad. You do like I say. Wait "I don't want to wait. Why should I wait?" "You wait cause you got plenty bad bums, not healed up yet. You want to get crippled for life? You wait don't pay mind to anybody teases you." "I do mind, though. I know which ones I'm going to kill first, just as soon as -- " "Roan, you stop that fool talk! You remember how you promise to do like I say." "Ill keep my promise. Just because Henry Dread's word is no good doesn't mean I'm a promisebreaker, too." "You wait a minute. Roan. You too much angry against Henry Dread. He keep promise, all right. He say you and me, he won't kill us. Well -- both of us alive, all right." "I'm going to tell him if he doesn't free you. I'll steal a gun the first chance I get and kill him." "You do that, you big fool. Roan. I don't mind sit here in dark, rest. Not much rest for me, long time. I sit and think about old days, back home, time Iron Robert young being, have plenty fun. I got pretty good eidetic recall, remember all smells, tastes, sounds, faces. Sure, I got plenty good memories. Roan. First time I got time really look at them good." "You're stronger than any of them." Roan took a breath and made his voice angry to cover ixp the break. "You let them chain you, you big dumb hunk of scrap-iron!" Iron Robert rumbled a laugh. "Plenty easy sit here with chains on. Tough for you. Roan, have to stay outside and let Snagglehead push you round. But you show you got brains. Roan. You stay quiet, you wait. One day you heal up good, then maybe us see." Roan looked along the corridor. A watch changed as three Minid crewmen emerged from a cargo hold. "Well, you'll get a chance to see how they operate now, Iron Robert." Roan felt his throat turn dry. "You'll see how much good ignoring diem does." IF 'kay, Roan, you go now, quick. Don't have to wait for herd of mudpigs" "I'll take it without hitting back,' Roan said between his teeth. "But I won't run from them, I don't care what you say." He began working the mop, eyes on the floor. The leading crewman hooked his thumbs in his sagging pistol belt and started toward Roan, laying a trail of oily sandal-prints across the shiny expanse of freshly scrubbed floor. He had thick bowed legs and a hairless skull and there was a wide gap in the row of spade-shaped bluish teeth he was showing in what might have been a grin. Three loops of rough-cut yellow jewels hung against a grimy gold-braided tunic. He stopped two yards from Roan, plucked a dope-stick from a breast pocket, bit off the cap and spat it on the floor, sniffed it appreciatively with wide nostrils and said: 'Hey, boys, looky what's here. He pointed with the dopestick, his wide mouth forming a loose-lipped O of mock amazement. "What is it, a itty-bitty baby boy playin' like a growed-up Geek?" "Now, it's a cute little pansypants, talking to its sweety through the bars," a second crewman offered. "It thinks that rusted-out freak is mighty sexy." "Hey, don't talk dirty in front of it," another said. "It might learn a dirty word and use it in front of its mama and get 'panked." "Always thought old Henry wasn't as tough as some thought," Snaggle-head stated. "Now he's got hisself a iay-dolly." He chuckled, a sound like gas escaping from a sewer. "Next thing, Old Cap'n get hisself a little Terry bitch and start in breedin 'em." He haw-hawed, hawked, spat on the floor at Roan's feet. Roan stopped mopping, stood looking at the wide mural on the lounge wall, with its audiovision of a rolling seascape. In the silence the crash and hiss of breakers was loud. Snaggle-head chuckled again, took a final puff and dropped the dopestick on the floor. "... but I notice he still don't trust him far! not since he held that gun on his belt buckle. I think his little pet plunA scared him that time." C asually, Roan slapped the wet mop across Snaggle-head's sandal. The big crewman jumped back with a yell, stamping his wet foot against the deck. TTic grin had vanished from the loose mouth; the other crewmen watched with bright, interested eyes. Snaggle-head drew his massive head down close to his burly shoulders. His mouth was open, his brow creased in a black frown. Ignoring him, Roan thrust the wet end of the mop into the filter unit, watched the rollers close and open, went on with his mopping. Snaggle-head stepped in front of him; his grimy finger prodded Roan's chest. Roan looked into the over-sized face, spotted here and there with coarse hairs sprouting from inflamed warty blemishes. "What you think you're lookin' at, punk?" "It looks like the hind end of a crundle-beast, ' Roan said dearly. "Only hairier." The coarse face tightened; the finger jabbed again, hard. "You take a lot of chances, softy!" "Whatever it is, 'TU remember it," Roan continued. "Some day I'll put my foot in it." Snaggle-heads eyes narrowed. "It's a mean-talking one," he said softly. 'Too bad it ain't got the guts to back up the talk." The heavy hand swung in a short arc, slammed Roan's head against the metal bulkhead. He staggered, caught himself with the unbandaged arm, shook his head to clear it. "Is that... the best you can do?" he asked blurrily. "I guess you're scared to get too rough. There's only three of you." The crewman shook clawed hands, palms up, under Roan's nose. "One of these days, pansy. I'll put the thumbs in, wheje it counts. I'll put 'em in till the blood squirts." Roan looked into the pale eyes. "You will, eh? You think Henry Dread will let you?" The wide mouth dropped open. The pasty face turned a dull pink. "Whatta I care about Henry Dread? As soon as I get ready to croak you, rube, you'll know it -- and to the Nine Hells with Henry Dread!" "Careful," Roan said, nodding toward the others. "They're listening." "Huh?" The heavy head swiveled quickly to look at the two crewmen. They looked at the ceiling. "All right, you slobs. Let's get moving. We ain't got all day to gab with sissy-britches here." The two filed past in silence. "I'll get to you later, cull," the lead crewman grated. "Roan," Iron Robert's voice rumbled from the cell. "You got to learn keep mouth shut sometimes. That space-rat hurt you much?" "He didn't hurt me." Roan's face was white in the giloom. "You not be so dumb, you not talk back, you don't get hit." "It's worth it." "Maybe some day he get really mad, hit too hard." "He hasn't got much of a punch." "Maybe he got better punch than you think. Maybe what you said not so far off true." "What do you mean?" "Maybe Henry Dread better friend than you think. Roan. I think he tell all Gooks and Geeks, hands off Human boy. I think he have plans in mind for you. Roan." T he surgeon clicked his lipless mandibles, peeling off the protective film under which the bums on Roan's shoulder and arm had" been healing for many weeks. "Eh, pretty, very pretty! Pink and new as a freshhatched suckling! There'll be no scars to mar that smooth hide!" "Ouch!" Roan said. "That hurts." "Ignore it, youngling," the surgeon said absently, working Roan's elbow joint. He nodded to himself, tried the wrist, then the fingers. "All limber enough; now raise IF your limb here." He indicated should level. Roan lifted his arm, wmoing. The surgeon's homy fingers went to the shoulder joint, prodding and kneading. "No loss of tone there, the surgeon muttered. "Bend over, stretch your back." Roan bent, twisted, working the shoulder, stretching the newly healed burns. Sweat popped out on his forehead. "At first it may feel as though the skin is tearing open," the surgeon said. "But it's nothing." Roan straightened. "I'll try to remember that." The surgeon was nodding, closing his instrument case. "You'll soon regain full use of the limb. Meanwhile, the hide is tender, and there'll be a certain stiffness in the joints." "Can I -- ah -- do heavy work now?" "In moderation. But take care. I've no wish to see my prize exhibit damaged." The surgeon rubbed his hard hands together with a chirrupping sound. "Wait until Henry Dread sees this," he cackled. "Calls me a Geek, does he? Threatens to put me out the airlock, eh? But where would he ever find anoth surgeon of my skill?" He darted a final, sharp glance of approval at Roan and was gone. Roan pulled his tunk over his head, buckled his belt in place and stretched his arms gingerly. There was a wide header over the doorway. He went to it, grasped it and pulled himself up carefully. The sensation reminded him of a Charon he had seen stripping hide from a dead gracyl... but the injured arm held his weight. He dropped back and went out into die corridor. There was a broken packing case in a reclamation bin in the corner. Roan wrenched a three-foot length of tough, blackish inch-thick wood from it. He looked toward the bright-lit intersection of the main concourse. A steward in soiled whites waddled past on bowed legs, holding a tray up on a stumpy arm. Henry Dread and his officers could be drinking in the wardroom now. It was as good a time as any. Roan turned and followed the dull red indicator lights toward the lower decks. H e was in a narrow corridor illlit by grimed-over glare panels. Voices yammered nearby: shouts, snarls, a drunken song, a bellow of anger. The third watch break hour was underway in the crew quarters. Roan hefted the skrilwood club. It was satisfactorily heavy. Feet clumped in the cross-corridor ten feet away. Roan ducked into a side passage, flattened himself, walchetT two round-backed barrelchested humanoids high-step past on unshod three-toed feet, bells tied to their leg lacings jingling at each step. When they had passed, he emerg, following the tiny green numbers that glowed over doors, found one larger than the others. Roan listened at the door; there was a dull mumble of voices. He riid the panel aside, stepped in. It was a barracks, and he wrinkled his nose at the fiiick fudgy odor of unwashed bedding, alien bodies, spilled wine, decay. A narrow, littered passage led between high bunks. A dull-eyed Chronid looked up at him from an unkempt bed. Roan went past, stepd over scattered boots, empty bottles, a pair of six-toed feet in tattered socks sprawling from a rump-sprung canvas chair. Halfway along the room, four large Minids crouched on facing benches, bald heads together. They looked up. One of them was Snaggle-head. He gaped; then his wide lips stretched in a cold grin. He thrust aside a leather wine mug, wiped his mouth with the back of a thick, square hand, got to his feet. He reached behind his back, brought out a knife with an eighteen-inch blade, whetted it across his bare forearm. "Well, looky whafs got loose from its string, he started. Don't talk," Roan said. "Fight" He stepped in and feinted with the club and Snaggle-head stepped heavily back, snorting laughter. "Hey, looks like Baby-face got hold of some strong garmush." He looked around at the watchers. What'll we do with him, fellers?" But Roan's club was whistling and Snaggle-head jerked back with a yell as the wood smacked solidly against his ribs. He brandished the knife, leaped across a fallen bench; Roan whirled aside, slammed the club hard against the Minid's head, the crewman stumbled, roaring, rounded on Roan, a line of thick blackish blood inching down his leathery neck. He lunged again and Roan stepped back and brought the club down square across the top of die bald skull. Snaggle-head wheeled, kicked the bench aside, took up a stance with his feet wide, back bent, arms spread, the blade held across his body. He dashed blood away from his eyes. "Poundin' my head with that macarobi-stick won't buy you nothin, Terry," he grated. His mouth was set in a blue-toothed grin. 'I'm coming to get you now!" He charged, and Roan watched the blade swing toward him in a sweeping slash. At the last moment he leaned aside, pivoted and struck down at the Minid's collar-bone. The skirl wood club hit with a sound like an oak branch breaking. Snaggle-head yowled and grabbed for his shoulder, spinning away from Roan; his face twisted as he brought the knife up, transferred it with a toss to his left hand. 'Now I kill you, Terry!" "You'd better," Roan said, breathing hard. "Because if you don't. I'm going to kill you." Roan moved in, aware of a layer of blue smoke in the muggy air, wide eyes in big Minid faces, the flat shine of Chronid faces, the distant putter of a ventilator fan, a puddle of spilled beer under the fallen bench, a smear of dark blood across Snaggle-head's cheek. The Minid stood his ground, the knife held before him, its point toward Roan. Roan circled, struck with the club at the knife. The Minid was slow: the blade clattered from the skinned hand, and Roan brought the heavy bludgeon up. His foot skidded in spilled beer. IF He was down, and Snagglehead was over him, his wide face twisting in a grimace of triumph. The big hands seemed to descend almost casuaBy. Roan threw himself aside, but there were feet and a fallen bendi and the hands clamped on him, biting like grapple-hooks, and gathering him into a strangling embrace. He kicked, futile blows against a leg like a tree-trunk, hearing the Minid's breath rasp, smelling the chemical reek of Minid blood and Minid hide, and then the arms, thick as Roan's thigh, tightened, and Roan's breath went out in a gasp and the smoke and the faces blurred... # #T et him breathe a little," Snaggle-head was saying. "Then we'll see how good his eyeballs arc hooked on. Then maybe we'll do a little knife work." Roan twisted, and the arms constricted. 'TIa, still alive and kiddng." Roan felt a big hand grope, rind a purchase on his shoulder. He was being held clear of the floor, clamed agamst the Minid's chest. The Minid's free hand rammed under Roan's chin, forced his face back. A blunt finger bruised his eye, "Let's start with this one." Roan wrenched his head aside, groped with open jaws, found the edge of a hand like a hog-hide gjove between his teeth, and bit down wilh all the force of his jaws. The Minid roared. Roan braced his neck and clung, tasting acrid blood, feeling a bone snap bOfe the hand was tom from his grip. And he struck again, buried his teeth in Snaggle-head's shoulder, grinding a mass of leather-tough muscle, feeling the skin tear as the Minid fell backwards. They were on the floor, Snagglehead bellowing and striking ineffectually at Roan's back, throwing himself against the scrambling legs of spectators, kicking wildly at nothing. Roan rolled free, came to his knees spitting Minid blood. "What in the name of the fourteen devils is going on here?" a voice bellowed. Henry Dread pushed his way through the crewmen, stood glaring down at Roan. His eyes went to the grovelling crewman. "What happened to him?" he demanded. Roan drew breath into his tortursaid. stared at Roan's white face, the damp red-black hair, the bloody mouth. He nodded, then smiled broadly. "I guess maybe you're real Terry stock at that, boy. YouVe got the instinct, all right." He stooped, Hcked up Snagehead's knife, offered it to Roan. "Here. Finish him off." Roan looked at the Minid. The cuts on the bald scalp had bled freely, and more blood from the tom shoulder had spread across the che. Snaggle-head sat, legs drawn up, cradling his bitten hand, moaning. Tears cut pale paths through the blood on his coarse face. "No," Roan said. "What do you mean, no?" "I don't want to kill him now. I'm finished with him." Henry Dread held the knife toward Roan. "I said kill him," he grated. "Get the vet," Roan said. "s#v him up." Henry stared at Roan. Then he laughed. "No guts to finish what you started, hey?" He tossed the knife to a hulking Chronid, nodded toward Snaggle-head. "Get the vet!" Roan looked at the Chronid. 'Touch him and I'll kill you," he said, trying not to show how much it hurt to breathe. In the profound silence. Snagglehead sobl. "Maybe you're right," Henry Dread said. "Alive, he'll be a walking reminder to the rest of the boys. Okay, Hulan, get the doc down here." He looked around at the other crewmen. "I'm promoting the kid to full crew status. Any objections?" Roan listened, swallowing against a sickness rising up inside him. He walked past Henry Dread, went along the dim way between the high bunks, pushed out into the corridor. "Hey, kid," Henry Dread said behind him. "You're shaking like a Groaci in moulting time. Where the hell are your bandages?" 'I've got to get back to my mop," Roan said. He drew a painfiri breath. 'To hell with the mop. Listen, kid -- " "That's how I earn my food, isn't it, I don't want any charity from you." "You'd better come along with IF me, kid," Hnry Dread said. "It's time you and me had a litde talk." I n his paneled, book-lined cabin, Henry Dread motioned Roan to a deep chair, poured out two glasses of red-brown liquid. "I wondered how long you'd take the pushing around before you show you were a Man. But you'll still have to watch yourself. Some of the boys might take it into their heads to gang up on you when they think I'm not looking." '# be looking," Roan said. "Why do they want to kill me," "You've got a lot to learn, lad. Most of the boys are humanoids; I've even got a couple that call themselves Terries. I guess they've got some Terry blood, but it's pretty badly mutated stock. They don't like having us damn near pure breds around. It makes 'em look like what they are: Gooks." He took a swallow from his glass. , "I don't like to work around Gooks, but what the hell. It's better'n living with Geeks." "What's the difference between a Gook and a Geek?" "I stretch a point. If a being's humanoid, like a Minid or a Chronid, okay, give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's descended from mutated human stock. You got to make allowances for Gooks. But a life-form that's strickly non-human -- that's a Geek." "Why do you hate Geeks?" "I don't really hate 'em -- bot it's them or us." Roan tried his drink, coughed, put the glass down. "What's that? It tastes terrible." "Whiskey. You'll learn to like it, boy. It helps you forget what you want to forget." Roan took another swallow of the whiskey, made a face. "It doesn't work," he said. "I still remember." "Give it time," Henry Dread growled. He stood aSnd paced the room. "How much do you know about Terry history, boy?" "Not much, I guess. Dad lised to tell me that once Terries ruled the whole galaxy, but then something happened. Now they're scattered, what there is left of them." "Not 'them,' boy. 'Us.' Fm a Terry. You're a Terry. And there are lots more of us. Sure, we're scattered, and in lots of places die stock has mutated -- or been bred out of the true line. But we're still Terries. Still Human. And it's still our Galaxy. The Gooks and Geeks have had a long holiday, but Man's on the comeback trail now. And every Man has to play his part." "You mean murdering people like -- Stellaraire and Gom Bulj?" "Look, that's over and done. To me a Geek's a Geek. I'm sorry about the girl. But what the hell. You said she was only a mule." R oam got to his feet; Henry Dread held up a hand. "Okay. No offense. I thought we had a deal? Let's lay off this squabbling. We're Terries. That's what counts." Why should I hate Geeks?" Roan finished his drink, shuddered, put the glass on the table. "IVe got reason to hate you, but I was raised with Geeks. They weren't any worse than your Gooks. Some of them were my friends. The only Human I ever knew was my father and I guess maybe he wasn't all Human. He was shorter than you and wide through the shoulders and his arms were almost as thick as a Minid's. And he had dark brown skin. I guess that couldn't be real Terry human stock." "Hard to say. Seems like I read somewhere that back in prehistoric times Men came in all kinds of colors: black, red, yellow, purple -- maybe green, I don't know. Rut later on they interbred and the pure color strains disappeared. But maybe your old man was a throwback -- or even descended from real old stock." "Does anybody know what a real Terry looks like?" Roan took a lock of his thick dark-red hair between his fingers rolling his eyes up to look at ft. "Did you ever see hair that colH before?" "Nope. But don't let it worry you. Everybody's got a few little flaws. Hell, Men have been wandering around the Galaxy for over thirty thousand years now. They've had to adapt to conditions on all kinds of worlds; they've picked up everything from mutagenic viruses to cosmic radiation to uranium burns; no wonder we've varied a lot from the pure strain. Pure or not us Humans must stick together." Roan was looking at the empty glass. Henry filled it and Roan took another drink. "He wasn't really my father," he said. "He and Ma bought me in the Thieves Market on Tambool. Piid two thousand credits for me, too." "Tambool. Hmmm. Hell of a place for a Terry lad to wind up. That where you were raised?" Roan nodded. "Who were your real parents? Why did they sell you?" "I don't know. I was only a fertilized ovum at the time." "Where'd those Geeks get hold of Terry stock?" "T don't know. Dad and Ma would never talk much about it. And Uncle T'hoy hoy either. I think Ma told him not to." "Well, it doesn't matter. You're the closest thing to pure Old Tetry stock I've seen. I've made you a member of my crew." "I don't want to be a member of your crew. I want to go back home. I don't know if Ma's still alive, even, with Dad not there to look after her. I miss Dad. I miss Stellaraire; I even miss Gom Bulj." "Don't cry into your beer, kid. What the hell, I've taken a liking to you. You play your cards right and you'll do okay. You'll live well, eat well, see the galaxy, get your share of loot, and some day -- when I'm ready -- you may be in on the first step toward something big. Bigger than you ever dreamed of." "I don't want loot. I just want my own people. I don't want to destroy. I want to build something." "Sure, you've got a dream, kid. Every Man has. But if you don't fight for that dream somebody else's dream will win." IF "It's a big galaxy. Why isn't there room for everybody's dream?" "Boy, you've got a lot to learn about your own kind. We've got the drive to rule. To conquer or die. Some day we'll make this galaxy into our own image of Paradise. Nobody else's. That's the way Men are." said. "But you're the only Man I've ever seen." "There are Terries all over the Galaxy -- wherever the Empire had an outpost. I mean to find them -- one at a time if I have to. You think I'm just in this for the swag? Not on your life, boy. I could have settled down in luxury twenty years ago, but I've got a job to do." "Why do you want me? I'm not going to kill Geeks for you." 'listen, kid, goon squads are cheap. I can hire all I want for the price of a good dinner at Marparli's on Buna II. But you're human -- and I need every Man I can get." "I still haven't forgotten," Roan said. 'That whiskey's a fake. So are you. You killed my friends and now you think I'm going to help you kill some more." H enry gripped Roan's shoulder with a hard band. "Listen, boyl A Man's got to live. I started off in the Terry ghetto on Borglu, kicked around, spit on, worked like a tunlizard in the wood mines. There wasn't a day they let me forget I was a Man -- and that all I'd ever get was a Man's share -- the scraps, and the kicks, and the curses. I hung around back doors and ate garbage, sure. A Man's got a drive to live -- no matter how. And I listened, and learned a few things. They used to call me in and laugh at me. They'd tell me how once the Terries had been the cock of the worlds, master of everything. And how I was a slave now, and just about good enough, maybe, to wash their dirty clothes and run their errands and maybe some day, if I was a good worker, they'd get me a half-breed wench and let me father a litter of mules to slave for them after I was gone. "Well, I listened, and I got the message. But not the one they had in mind. They didn't know Terries, boy. Every time they'd show me a book with a picture of a Terran Battle Officer in full dress, and tell me how the Niss had wiped out the fleet -- or hand me an old Terran pistol and tell me how their great grand-pap had taken it off a starving Man -- it didn't make me feel like a slave. It made me feel like a conqueror. One day one of them made a mistake. He let me handle a book or two by then. I'd studied up on Terran weapons. I knew something about a Marx three-X. I got the safety off and burned old Croog and two by-standers down and then melted off the leg-band." Henry Dread stooped, pulled his boot off, peeled back his sock. Roan stared at the deep, livid scar that ringed the ankle. T made it to the port. There was an abandoned Terry scout boat there, dozed off-side, buried in the weeds. I'd play around it as a kid. I had a hunch maybe I could open it. There was a system of safety locks -- "To make it short, I got clear. I've stayed free ever since. I've had to use whatever gutter-scrapings I could find to build my crew, but I've managed. I've got a base now -- never mind where -- and there's more battle-wagons ready for commissioning -- as soon as I get reliable captains. After that -- "Well, I've got plans, boy. Big plans. And they don't include Geeks running the Galaxy." "Iron Robert's a Geek -- and he's my friend. He's a better friend than any of those Gooks of yours." "That's right boy. Stick up for your friends. But when the chips are down -- will he stick by you?" "He already has." Henry Dread nodded. "I have to give him credit. I admire loyalty in a being -- even a Geek. Maybe old Iron Pants is okay. But don't confuse the isst. A go, solid hate is a powerful weapon. Don't go putting any chinks in it." "Iron Robert is a good being," Roan said. He's better than your Gooks and Geeks. He's better than me. And better than you, too." Roan stopped talking and swallowed. "I feel kind of sick," he said. Henry laughed. "Go sleep it off, kid. You'll be okay. Take the stateroom down the hall from mine here. A Terry crew member doesn't have to sleep with Gooks any more." "I've got some rags outside Iron Robert's cell. I'll sleep there." "No, you won't, kid. I can't have a Terry losing face with Gooks  -- for the sake of a Geek." Roan went to the door, walking unsteadily. "You've got a gun," he said. "You can kill me if you want Id. ilnt I'm going to stay with Iron Robert until you let him out." "That animated iron mine stays where he is!" "Then I sleep in the corridor." "Make your choice, boy!" Henry Dread's voice was hard. "Learn to take orders, and you live a soft life. Act stubborn, and it'll be rags and scraps for you." "I don't mind the rags. Iron Robert and I talk." "I'm asking you, kid. Move in next door. Forget those worthless Geeks." "Your whiskey's no good. I haven't forgotten anything." "What's the mntfer with you, you young squirt? Haven't I tried to treat you right? I could send you below decks in lead underwear right now to swab out a hot chamber!" "Why don't you?" "Get out!" Henry Dread grated. "You had a big credit with me, kid, because you looked like a Man. Until you learn to act like one, keep out of my way!" Outside in the corridor, Roan leaned against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to go away. Once he thought he heard a sound, as though someone had started to turn the door latch. But the door remained closed behind him. After a while he made his way down to Iron Robert's cell and went to sleep. IF I ron Robert shook the bars. "You big fool, Roan, go on raid with riff-raff, maybe get killed. What for? You stay safe on ship!" "I'm tired of being aboard ship. Iron Robert. This is the first time Henry Dread has said I could go along. I'll be all right." "What kind gun Henry Dread give you, Roan?" "I won't need a gun. I won't be in the fighting." "Henry Dread still 'fraid give you gun, eh? He big fool too, let you go in combat with no gun. You small, weak being, Roan, not like Iron Robert. You stay on ship like always!" "There's a city on this world -- Aldo Cerise -- that was built by Terrans, over ten thousand years ago... Nobody lives there now but savages, so there won't be much of a fight. And I want to see the city." "Extravaganzoo play on Aldo Cerise, once, long time go. Plenty natives, plenty tough. Have spears, bows, few guns too. And not fools." Roan leaned against the bars. "I can't just stay on the ship, I have to get out and see things, and listen and learn, and maybe some day --  "Maybe some day you learn stay out of trouble!" A wall annunciator hummed and spoke: "Attention all hands. This is Captain Dread. All right, you swabs, now's your chance to earn some prize money! We're entering our parking orbit in five minutes. Crews stand by to load assault craft in mne minutes from now. Blast off in forty-two minutes." Roan and Iron Robert listened as Henry Dread read the order of battle, feeling the deck move underfoot as the vessel adjusted its velocity to take up its orbit four hundred miles above the planet. "I've got to go now," Roan said. "I'm in boat number one, the command boat." "Anyway Henry Dread keep you by him," Iron Robert rumbled. "Good. You stay close, keep head down when shooting start Henry Dread not let you get hirt, maybe." "He wants me on his boat so hie can keep an eye on me. He thinks I'll try to run away, but I won't. Not until you can go, too." Boots clanged at the far end of the corridor. Henry Dread, tall in close-fitting leather fighting garb, swaggered up. He wore an ornate pistol at each lean hip and carried a power rifle in his hands. "I figured Fd find you tere, didn't you hear my orders?" T beard," Roan said. "I was just saying good-by." Yeah. Very touching. Now if you can tear yourself away, we've got an action to fight You stay close to me. Watch what I do and follow suit. I don't expect much static from the natives, but you never know." "Roan should have gun, too," Iron Robert rumbled. "Never mind that. Iron Man. I'm running this operation." "You nervous as caged dire-beast, Man. If everything so easy, what you afraid of?" Henry narrowed his eyes at the jant. "All right, I'm edgy. Who wouldn't be? I'm hitting what used to be the capital of one of the greatest kingdoms in the Empire -- and me with a seven-thousand year old hulk and a crew of half-breed space-scrapings. Who wouldn't be a little nervous?" "Give Roan gun. Or does lad make you nervous too " "Never mind. Iron Robert," Roan said. "I'm not asking him for anything." Henry Dread's jaw muscles worked. He jerked the power riile. "Come on, boy. Get down to the boat deck before I change my mind and give you a job swabbing the tube linings!" "You bring Roan back safe, Henry Dread," Iron Robert called. "Or better not come back at all." "If I don't, you'll have a long wait," the pirate growled. I n the cramped command compartment of the assault boat, Henry Dread barked into the panel mike: "Now hear this, you space scum! We're dropping in fast, slick and silent! I'm giving you a fortysecond count-down after contact, then out you go. I want all four Bolos to hit the ramp at the same time, and I want to see those treads smoke getting into position! Gunnery crews, sight in on targets and hold your fire for my command! Heli crews -- " The pirate captain gave his orders as the boat dropied toward the gray world swelling on the forward repeater screen. Ihe deck plates rumbled as the retro-rockets fired long bursts, correcting velocity. Atmosphere shrieked around the boat now. Roan saw the curve of the world swing up to become a horizon. A drab jungle continent swept under them, then an expanse of sparkling sea and a white surfed shoreline. There was a moment of vertigo as the vessel canted, coming in low over green hills; it rjghted sluggishly, and now the towers of a fantassparkling beyond the distant forestclad hills. "Remind me to shoot that gyro maintenance chief," Henry growled. Roan watched as tree-tops whipped past beneath the hurtling ship. Then it was past the wooded slopes, and the city was close, looming up, up, until the highest spires were hazy in the airy distances overhead. The ship braked, slowed, settled in heavily. A ponderous jar ran through the vessel. The torrent of sound washed away to utter silence. From below, a turbine started up, ran sputteringly, smoothed out. Henry looked at the panel chronometer. "If one of those slobs jumps the gun -- " A light blinked to life on the panel. "Ramp doors open," Henry murmured. "Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty!" He whirled on Roan. "Here we go kid! With a little luck we'll be drinking old Terry wine out of Terry crystal before the star goes behind those hills." IF R oan stood with Henry Dread at the foot of the ramp, looking out across a pitted and crumbling expanse of ancient pavement. Far across the field, four massive tracked vehicles aimed black gun muzzles at the silent administrative sheds. Nothing moved. "Empty emplacements," Henry said. "Missile racks corroded out. It's a walk-over." "Iron Robert said the 'zoo played here once," Roan said. "He said the natives have guns and bows, and know how to use them." "The carny was here, eh? Who'd it play to, the rock lizards?" "People," Roan said. "And they wouldn't have to be very smart to be smart enough to stay out of sight when they see a shipload of scavengers coming." "Corsairs!" Henry barked. "We don't scavenge, boy! We fight for what we take. Nothing's free in this Universe!" He thumbed his command mike angrily. "Czack! Wheel that tin can of yours over here!" He turned to Roan. "We'll go take a look at the city." He waved his rifle toward the towers beyond the port. "This was one of the last Terry capitals, five thousand years ago. Men built the place, boy -- our kind of Man, back when we owned half the Galaxy. Come along, and I'll show you what kind of people we came from." r iere was a high golden gate before the city and at the top, worked in filigree, was the Terran Imperial symbol, a bird with a my books back on Tambool," Roan above it. Why a bird, anyhow?" "Peace," Henry Dread said. "Czack!" he bark into his command mike. "Bring that pile of tin up here and put it in High." Then And any bird that didn't keep the peace got his guts ripped out. That's how Men operate, see?" Peace, Roan thought, turning it in his mind, trying to smooth off the sandp apery edge Henry Dread gave to the word, watching the massive combat unit rumbling up beside him. 'Take it slow. Put it in Maximum now," Henry Dread said to Czack. "That fence is made of Terralloy and nothing'll tear it down but a Terry Bolo." "But it's stood for five thousand years and nobody can put up another one." Roan said, wanting the there another five thousand years. "Why tear it down? Couldn't you just blast the lock?" "Maybe. But this impresses the Geeks more, if they're watching. Okay. Take it, Czack." The gate screamed like a tom female, bent slowly and finally landed over the Bolo with a horrible clang and the Bolo, a crease along its top turret now, went on through. Czack traversed his guns, looking for natives. The quick silence from the fallen gate and the dead city was eerie. Czack appeared at the upper hatch and swore at the gate and the Bolo and Aldo Cerise in general. He spotted the dent in the Bolo turret and swore worse. "Maybe we'fl find more Bolos in the City," Henry Dread said. "Never seen an Imperial city without 'em and this was a great one. Get you a nice, new Bolo and some nice, new guns. Now get back in the tin can and keep us covered while we do some ground reconnaissance. Shoot anybody you see." Henry Dread tucked the mike under his tunic. His heavy boots rang on the mosaic of the path they took beside the road, and he gestured with his gun as they went along. "Those buildings," he said. "Ever see an#hing that high for beings that don't have wings?" The Terran buildings climbed high into the sunlight, incredibly straight and solid. From here it all looked perfect. But at Roan's feet the tiles of the intricate mosaic were broken and missing in spots, and Henry Dread kicked at the loose ones as he walked along. Roan paused to watch a fountain throwing rainbows into the air, spinning shifting patterns of water and light. "They built things in those days," Henry Dread said. "That fountain's been running five thousand years. More, probably. Anything mechanical breaks in this city, fixes itself." Roan was looking at the house gaped up at row on row of floors, windowed and balconied. "It looks as though that door might open," Roan said. "People might walk out. My people." He paused, wondering how he would feel if this were Home. "But it's all so perfect. So wonderful. If they could build like this, how could anyone beat them?" #The Lost War," Henry Dread A said, coming up to the fountain and drinking from a side jet. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "They call it the Lost War but we didn't lose it. Terra never lost a war. A stalemate, maybe -- we didn't win it, either. Anybody can see that. But we broke the power of the Niss. The Niss don't rule the Universe. There's supposed to be the Niss blockade of Terra, and they say there's still a few Niss cruisers operating at the far side of the Galaxy. But that's probably just superstition. Fve never run into a Niss. And never met anybody that did -- Man, Gook or Geek." Henry Dread got out his microphone. The men had come in through the ruined gate and were scrambling over the Bolo, perching on its armored flanks and hanging off the sides. "Fan out in skirmish order," he barked. "Shoot anything that moves." Roan followed Henry Dread. "Empty," Roan said. "I don't see anything that looks like natives might be living here. I wonder why not? With all this..." "Superstition. They're afraid of it." Henry Dread's eyes were darting in all directions. "But that doesn't IF mean there might not be a few natives inside the fence. And they may be right to be afraid of the City. Lxx)k over there." There was a deep hole, blackened at the edges. "Booby-trapped," Henry Dread said. "Don't know how many might be around the city, or where. So watch out." They came to a high wall, set with cJay tiles, and between the tiles grew tiny, exquisite flowers. "Park," said Henry Dread. "Full blown memento of Terran luxury. Maybe have time for it later." "Tank here!" one of the men called from behind a nearby buildfresh!" "Don't touch her, you slat-headed ape!" Czack's voice crackled from his Bolo. "I don't want nobody's filthy hands on her until I see her." Henry Dread laughed. "It's not a woman, you rackskull. And it's my freaking tank and # see it first." "Look, I'm going in that park," Roan said, "Call if you want me." Henry Dread stopped, looked back at Roan, frowning. "I won't desert," Roan said. "Not as long as you've got Iron Robert back there in the hold." "Maybe," Henry Dread said. "Maybe if you go in that park you'll find out the difference between Geeks and Men. Maybe you'll understand what I've been trying to tell you!" "Boss!" Czack called. 'Take a gander at this. Full fuel tanks and magazines and -- " "Don't touch an)rtihing!" Henry Dread called. "These damned Gooks have scrambled eggs for brains," he added. "Okay," Roan said, starting to climb up a gnarled old tree that looked over the garden wall. "Fire three shots when you want me to come out." "Watch out, boy," Henry Dread said, and stopped again. He took handed it over to Roan. "You'U come back," he said. "And you'll know more than you do now." R oan balanced the gun in his hand, sitting on a lower limb of the old tree. He felt the solid metal of it, the waiting, repressed power, the cold steel with the flaming soul. He looked up briefly at Henry Dread, who laughed, knowing what Roan felt with the gun. Then Henry Dread was striding away across the piaza and Roan clambered up the tree, thinking as he cfimbed of the gracyls and how he'd climbed to follow thdr flights, and of the circus and the tree he'd climbed to see it, the Never-never tree, little thinking it was his last day on Tambool. And at the height of the wall he thought of Stellaraire and the tightrope and his eyes stung, but then he looked over the wall toward the park. And there was no room for thought of the past. Here lay the Terran civilization that Henry Dread talked of rebuilding. Within the park green grass spread and flowers bloomed and Roan could see small automatic weeders moving along the paths where fountains rose and splashed untouched by time. And across the manicured precision of the lawn, a fallen statue lay -- a vast statue with a tunic draped around its hips. It lay face up, one arm raised, pointing now to the high skies. It was a Terran. Pure Terra. And made just like Roan. Roan leapt down from the wall onto a bank of springy grass, and ran to the statue. Feature for feature -- eyes, ears, nose, the connections of muscles -- this was Roan. Terran. Did my father look like this? Roan wondered. Who was this Man? Where did he come from? He walked around to the base of the statue. and the branch. And then: July #, #. "Eccc, Roan said to the statue, touching it, wondering how the name was really pronounced. Then he became aware of sound scenting the air. The sound and scent seemed the same, both swirling faintly through the sdll air and he followed the melody. The scent was not the heavy perfume Stellaraire used, nor were the soimds the coarse sounds of the circus noise-makers. It was all something else. Something that stirred memories -- hints, odors of memories -- far in the deeps of Roan's mind. Sunlight he'd never drowsed in. winds he'd never felt, peace he'd never known. Peace, he thought, knowing Henry Dread had said it wrong. The razored, spring-green turf came down to the edges of the pebbled path and ran between gardens of jewelbright flowers. A wide-petaled blue blossom, with black markings like a scream in its throat, opened and closed rhythmically. The music stopped briefly and then changed, as though drawing out things in Roan's mind. In the small pause, Roan heard the play of a fountain, a silver sound. Then, more silver still, came the faint call of horns rising and loudening and loosening old locks in Roan's mind. A smoke-like drift of stringed music floated into the horn motif, countering it softly, and then running away and coming back a little different, so that the horn challenged it and took up the string song itself and then a further, tinkling sound joined the horn and string and built an infinite, convolute structure in Roan's mind that spread through his whole being and finally broke into a thousand crystals, leaving Roan almost in tears for the old, old things that are lost and the beautiful, infinitely beautiful things that never existed. A fat bee droned past, bumbled inefficiently into a flower and hunted nearsightedly for a drop of honey. The flower folded a maternal petal over the bee and he emerged covered with yellow pollen and bumbled away looking triumphant and ridiculous. IF Roan laughed, his nostalgia broken. The music laughed, too. A little flute giggling and teasing and running away. Roan went after the sound. The park went on and on and the flower scents changed and interwove like their colors. Roan came to a still, blue lake, floated with flowers and enormous, long-necked birds that swam like boats and drifted up to him inquiringly when he came to the edge of the lake. Roan turned from the lake into a wood where the vines made bowers -- thomed vines heavy with sweet berries -- slim, curled vines blue with wide-faced flowers. He walked through sunny slopes where tall grasses rolled like water in the wind, and deep groves where the moss grew close and green in the still shade of warm-barked trees. Then the grove narrowed to a dark, arching tunnel of branches that ended suddenly in sunlight. Ahead of Roan was a wide, white flagstone walk that curved between fountains of flying water and led finally to a colonnaded terrace. From the terrace rose a fretted cliff of airy masonry. A house the wind blew thropgh. Roan, thirsty now, scooped up a handful of smooth, cool water. It had a taste of bubbles, a smell of sunshine. But the water had not been put there for any purpose, even to drink. It showered into the air merely to fall back into the pool. It pleased Roan somehow to think the mighty Terrans made the water go up just so they could watch it coming down. He went up the wide, shallow steps, into the airy building that up close seemed as solid and lasting as time itself. The marble floor within was an intricate design of reds and blues that moved into purple and led the eye straight to a ramp slanting up to a gallery on the left. Roan listened for a moment to the ringing stillness, then started up the sloping way. XX T he house was a maze of rooms within rooms, all neatly kept. The air filters whispered noiselessly, but Roan could feel the air they drew. Doors opened silently to his presence, bmps glowed on to greet him, off to bid him good-by. On polished tables were set objects of curious design, of wood and metal and glass. Roan picked each up and tried to imagine its use. One, of green jade, grew warm as he held it. But it did nothing else and there were no buttons to press. So he carefully replaced k and went on. Then Roan noticed the pictures. He stood in the middle of a thinly furnished room and his eye was caught by a picture in sinuosities of blue, as interwoven and complex as the music he'd heard. Every time he looked at the picture the lines caught his eye a different way, led them along a different trail, and he looked at the picture so long the blue disappeared and then the picture itself until finally he was left following tortuous convolutions in his own mind and it was a shaft of late afternoon sun, burning through a high window, that brought him to himself and made him blink hard to get the sun glimmers from his eyes. Some of the pictures were like the blue. Others seemed to project out from the walls, or were sheer patterns of light, hanging in empty air. And some -- as Roan looked and noticed -- some were pictures of Terran places and houses and... people? The figures were so tiny and distant. Hunt though he did, he couldn't find any close-ups of Terran people. It didn't really matter, though he really wanted to see it. Roan went on, walking right through a misty Light Picture in the middle of one of the rooms. All this. What was it for? Just to look at? Just to enjoy? It seemed a human way to be. A Terran way to do things. Roan felt a kinship with all this. He knew how to look at the paintings, how to enjoy the music. Then Roan walked into a room wide with windows, so that the sunshine shimmered clearly in it. Marble benches stood beneath the low windows and green plants hung over a scoop-haped sunken pool. As Roan went over to stand on the edge of the empty pool there was a soft chick! and water began foaming into the pool. Roan laughed with pleasure. It was a bath! An enormously magnified version of one Stellaraire had had in her quarters with the 'zoo. He stripped off his shabby, ill-fitting tunic, realizing suddenly how dirty he was. He stood by a jet of soapy foam and scrubbed himself thoroughly. The pool carried off his dirt and dead skin cells in eddys of black and whirled in renewed, clean water. Roan luxuriated in die bath for an hour, watching the chasing clouds and the blue sky through the windows, and wondering at the delicate veining of the Terran plants that nodded over the water. And thought wistfully of Stellaraire and how if she were here they'd splash water at each other and be foolish and afterwards walk in the garden and make love with timeless joy in the deep grasses. And live here forever in this enchanted place where there was no violence, no raspy, alien voices, no ugly, misshapen faces, no one hating or despising or envying Roan his Terran ancestry, his Terran inheritance. But there was no Stellaraire. Oily a memory that overfilled him now and then, like a bud with no room to open into a flower. B ehind a colored ass panel Roan found simply designed but beautiful clothes, of some woven material that sprang to fit him as he put it on. There were silver tigjiis fiiat fitted from his ankles to his waist and were cool to the touch. Then a short, silk-lined scarlet jacket, soft to the skin but stiff outside with goM and jewel embroidery. He foand boots that fitted softly like gloves, and protected his feet without heavy soles or heels. All this he put on, though there were other things. Thin white shorts and singlets and cloth short boots. IF The only other thing Roan took was a magnificent, massive jewel, his neck from a gold chain and where it rested against his bare chest, between the edges of his scarlet jacket, it warmed him, almost seeming to throb like a beating heart. I look the way a Terran ought to look, Roan thought, looking at himself in the enormous mirror that backed the door to the bathing room. The jewel glowed on his browned chest and his freshly washed hair clustered in dark red curls over his forehead. Roan wondered if a Terran would think him handsome. A Terran Woman. O gods, how long since he'd had a woman! Roan buckled back on his old link metal belt. He wondered why he thought it brought him luck, because it didn't really. Then he reluctantly Here, it didn't seem right. But he shoved it into the belt, which strained to hold it. Roan retraced his steps through still corridors, down to the echoing concourse, out onto the broad terrace. Far in 'the sky the lowering sun flashed orange from the towers of the city -- where Henry Dread was searching for loot now with his vicious crew of cut-throats. It was soiled, grubby -- all of the Universe -- but here it didn't exist. He didn't want to call it into being again. Roan took a new path, behind the house, walking quickly because he didn't have much time left. Night was coming. He'd seen perhaps, most of what there was to see, and one more quick turn -- Roan drew up short. Because reflected in a round mirror-pool, among fragile violet flowers, was a human Woman. She was flushed pink in the sunset, pouring water from a longneck jar. The water, sparkling pink, too, in the light, rippled over her slim neck, between her lifted breasts and around her softly bent body over her flanks, and finally ran murmuring into the mirrorpool, making no splash or ripple. "Oh, please," Roan said, not meaning to seak, and went up to the woman. But it was a statue, smiling its dreamy, carved smile, thinking the secret things of women. Roan reached out and touched the soft curve of the hard, marble cheek. And then far away came the violent stutter of guns. Then a single shot. A power rifle. P erhaps it was the anger against life that filled him or perhaps it was a premonition of what was really happening, but Roan was running. Along the curved paths and then straight across the middle of the park where there was a wide concourse and through a small grove where night had already come, and up the fence, holding to the nearest heavy vine, and slowing to be quiet now, along the fence to the tree. A gun rattled, paused, fired again. A voice shouted. Roan started down the tree. The streets were violet shadows now, the lowers bright-edged silhouettes against the orange and purple sky. There was a faint movement in the gloom below the tree and a face, a white blob in the darkness, looked up toward Roan, the glint of a knife in the teeth. There was a aharp hiss. Something chipped at the tiles and then another hiss and whoever it was starting up the tree fell back and slumped to the ground. Roan hefted the gun out of his but forgotten in the park. Well, that dream of peace was over now. Roan waited, heard a few shots, distant now, saw nothing moving. He dropped softly from the tree, squatted, turned the body on its back. The coarse, slack features of a bald Minid stared past him with dead, surprised eyes. The stump of a broken-off wooden shaft poked from the Minid's chest just below the edge of the sheepskin vest. One of crew. A mean, dirty creature, but somehow one of his. Roan stood, trying to see through the dark streets. The firing was becoming steadier now, coming from locations to the north and east. A cold, evening wind blew up, and one Probably the next planet of the sun Aldo... Roan crossed the street, started up pne of the dark avenues toward the north. Lights came on suddenly to illuminate the city; mists of light that seemed to hang in the air like clouds. There was a sharp hiss. Something struck the doorway of the house near Roan and clattered on the steps. Roan dropped, rolled, brought his gun around and fired at a figure bounding from the shadowed doorway across the street. The figure fell under the misting streetlight. Roan retreated to crouch in the angle between the steps and the Terran house. Three long-legged, roundshouldered creatures emerged from the side street. He saw the thick, recurving bows in their hands, the lank hair that dangled beside their oddly flat faces, the heavy quivers slimg at their backs. They paused, fanning out. One saw the de bowman, made a hoarse noise. At once, the three whirled, angled off quick ly in different directions. One was leaping toward Roan. He brought his gun up fired, swung and fired on a second savage as the first slammed to the curb of the mosaic sidewalk, almost at his feet. The second bowman reeled, stumbled, went down. Roan swung to the third and it dived for the black shadow of the building at the corner as his shot sent blue sparks from the door of the Terran house. Roan was up instantly, dashing for the corner, rounding it as a heavy arrow touched his shoulder, skipped high, flashed off into darkness. Roan skidded to a stop, stepped back to the corner, droppjed flat, thrust himself out. The native was charging from cover. Roan's shot caught him full in the chest and he fell with a tremendous heavy slam an impact of utter finality. Roan let his breath out in a long sigh, slumped against the pavement, listening. There were no sounds, no IF moving feet, no stealtiiy breathing, only the intemiittent rasp and crackle of guns, nearer now but still, he guessed, a street or two away. He got to his feet, moved off quickly, following a side street that would bring him to the scene of the action by a roundabout route. F rom a low balcony which he had reached by clambering up the shadowed carved front of a peachcolored tower, Roan watched as a party of a dozen or so bowmen assembled almost directly below him in a narrow way. The sounds of firing came closer from along the wide avenue. Roan could see the blue flashes of power guns now, the yellow stabs of pellet throwers. Below, the leader of the ambushing party spoke, and his bowmen set arrows, crouching silent and ready. Down the avenue. Roan made out Henry Dread's tall figure among a huddle of humanoids. There were not more than fifty in the party, he estimated -- out of over eighty who had landed; a straggling band of cursing frightened raiders caught off-guard, retreating under a rain of arrows that flew from the darkness without flash or sound. A bald Minid screeched, spun, fell kicking. The others passed Wm by, firing at random into the shadows, coming closer to the ambush. Below Roan, the bowmen gathered themselves. There was a single, grunted syllable from the leader. He stepped forward -- Roan shot him, swept die gun across the others as they sprang back gaping. Three more fell, and the rest dashed for the deep shadows, disappeared between close walls. No one in the retiring ship's party seemed to have noticed the by-play. They were formed up into a defensive ring, watching each side street as they passed. Henry Dread held up a hand, halted the group fifty feet from Roans vantage point. Lying on the balcony, he had a clear view of the pirates and the empty streets all around. "Belay firing!" Roan heard Henry Dread's voice. "They've pulled back for now." There were snarls and mutters from the crewmen. They shifted uneasily, watching the dark mouths of side streets. A gun winked blue, a harsh buzz against silence. "I said belay thaitl" Henry. Dread grated. "Well hold up here for ten minutes to give stragrs a chance to join us. # the Pit with stiagglera, the  crewman who had fired his gun cut in. "We shoidd stay here and let these local obs simound us? Wore moving on -- fast" jaiut up, Snorgu," Henry Dread snapped. 'Maybc you've forgotten I bust you out of a '#I jail after you were dumb enough to get caught flat-footed strangling an old female for her nose-ruby. And now yotre going to do the thinking for my crew!" Your crew my hind leg, you lousy Terry. Wo taken enough orders from your kind. What about it boys?" Snorgu glanced around at the watching pirates. Henry stepped up to the heavyshouldered crewman. "Hand over your gun, Snorgu!" Snorgu faced Henry, the gun in his fist aimed at the pirate leader. He laughed. "I'm keeping my gun. And I'm firing when I feel like it." A crewman beside Henry moved suddenly, caught the pirate captain's arms from behind. Another struck out, knocked Henry's gun from his hand. A third stooped, came up with it. "Here's where we get a new captain," Snorgu growled. "Lead us into a ambush, hah? Some captain you are. I guess us Gooks have got just about a gut-full of fancy Terry ways." "I seem to remember giving some orders about looting parties posting sentries," Henry drawled. "And about skeleton crews on the Bolos." Snorgu snaited and jammed the gun hard against Hwiry's chest. "Never mind Hfl that Hand over the keys to the chart room and the strong box in your oabm." Henry laughed, a hard sound like ice breaking. "You're out of luck. You think I carry a bunch of keys around for stupid deck-apes like you to lift the first time you see a chance? They're combination locks. Kill me and you'll never get in." "You'll open 'em," someone harked. "A couple needle-bums through the gut, and a couple of days for the rot to set in, and you'll he screaming for somebody to listen to you sing, and all you'll ask is a fast knife in the neck before your belly explodes." "Meanwhile, how do you plan to get back to the ship?" Henry Dread cut in. "There might be a few natives between here and there that don't want to see you run off after such a short stay." "Gun him down," someone suggested. "We've got enough on our hands without we got to watch this Terry." "Sure. We can beam them locks open." "Suits me." Snorgu grinned, showing large, widely-spaced teeth in a loose-lipped mouth wide enough to put a hand in sideways. He stepped back a pace, angled the gun down at Henry's belt-buckle -- Roan took careful aim, shot Snorgu through the head. T he pirate's gun flew into the air as his hand jerked up; he stumbled back and fell, and Henry stepped forward, caught the falling gun out of the air, held it aimed from the hip. The crewmen gaped. "Anybody else care to nominate himself captain?" Henry's sharp voice cut acrass the silence. The men were craning their necks, looking for the source of the shot. Roan saw one ease a gun around, aim it at Henry Wread; Roan shot him through the chest. As he fell, another brought a gun up, and Henry, whirling, beamed him down. "Next?" he said pleasantly. No one moved. The crewmen stood stiffly now, cowed, worried. Henry laughed shortly, lowered his gun. IF "All right, spread out in a skirmish line and let's get moving." He motioned them past with his pistol. Roan lowered himself over the balustrade and climbed quickly down. Henry Dread watched him come. His narrowed eyes were on the gun at Roan's hip. "Learned to use it?" "Comes in handy," Roan said casually, imitating Henry Dread's manner. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, looking at the older man. Henry's eyes went from Roan's scarlet vest down the length of the silvery trousers, back up. His eyes locked with Roan's. "You had a good chance to shoot me then," he said. "But when it got right down to it, you sided me." His face broke slowly into a smile. "I knew you'd figure out which side you were on, boy. You picked a good time. Something you learned in that park?" "I found a garden,," Roan said. "It was perfect; the most perfect place I ever saw. I wanted to stay there. There was everything you could ever need. And then I saw a statue and I touched it, and all of a sudden I saw that it was all dead, frozen, just a fossil of something that was alive once. Something that could live again, maybe. I decided then. I want to make it live, Henry. I want to do whatever I have to do to make it come to life again. I want that stone girl to turn to living flesh and walk in that garden with me." Henry's band thrust out. Roan took it. "We'll do it. Roan," the pirate said. "Together, we'll do it. Smiling, Roan said. "Want the gun back Hemy Dread's smile was grim. "Keep it," he said. "From now on, you walk behind me. Keep the gun on your hip, and your right hand loose." He turned and followed the hud-, die of pirates, and Roan trailed him, walking with his head up, liking the feel of the heavy gun in his belt. it'These past two years have been A good. Roan," Henry Dread "Seven raids, all successful. Enough new men recruited to more than cover our losses; and our fuel and ammo reserves are at the best level in years." Roan looked at his half-full glass sullenly. "And we're still no closer to starting a new Terra than we ever were. We haven't found even one more real Man to add to the roster. There's still just you and me. Two Terries, two freaks, talking about what we'll do some cfaty." "Look here. Roan, weVc followed every rumor of a Terry we've run across. Is it my fault if they didn't pan out? We'll find a colony of Terries yet. And when we do -- "Meanwhile Iron Robcrfs still chained. I want you to rdease him, Henry." The pirate's hand came down to slam the table. "Damn it, are we going to start into that again? Haven't I explained to you that that man-eater's a symbol aboard this vessel? My cut-throats saw him stand up to a blaster; they heard him threaten to pitch me through the side of my own ship I And I let him live! As long as he's chained to the wall his talk is just talk. Maybe a blaster can't touch him, but Henry Dread has him under lock and key! But turn him loose -- let him stamp around this ship a free Geek -- well, you get the picture!" "I get the picture," Roan said. "For over two years now I've been living off the fat of the land while my friend sits in the dark with half a ton of steel welded to his leg." "Hell let's be realistic, boy! He doesn't mind it -- not like you or I would! He says so himself. He sits and goes off into some kind of trance! Doesn't even eat for days at a time. He's not human Roan! By the Gods, with Man's Galaxy at stake, you worry about one damned Geek!" "Set him free. He won't cause any trouble. I'll be responsible for him." "That's not the point," Henry said in a hard voice. "You'd better settle for having him alive. He's the first Geek I ever let live aboard my ship!" "That's what your grand dream really boils down to, isn't it, Henry? Hei swiveled to stare into the view screen that curved above the command console. "Somewhere out there, there's i Niss warship," he said quietly. "We're closing the gap. Roan. The stories we've picked up these last couple of months all tell the same tale. The Niss ship is real, and it's not far off. We'll pick it up on our long-range screens any day now." "More Geeks to kill. That's all it is. It isn't a war; the Niss were beaten -- at least as much as the Empire. They're no threat to us or to anybody. They haven't attacked anyone." Henry swung back. "Haven't they? What about the Mandevoy .patrol boat they vaporized last year at a range of twelve thousand miles?" "The Mandevoy went out looking for trouble. They admitted that. The Niss haven't attacked a planet, or any ship that stayed clear of them. Let's forget the Niss. It's Terra we're interested in. Let's look for Terra." # #"Trra!" Henry snorted. "Don'tL you know that's just a name. Roan? A mythical wonderland for the yokels lo tell stones about! TTie Terran Empire isn't some two-bit world somewhere at the far side of the Galaxy. It's humanity -- organized, armed and in charge!" "There is a Terra," Roan said. "And some day I'll find it. If you've given up on it. I'll find it alone." "Given up!" Henry Dread roared, coming to his feet. "Henry Dread never gave up on anything he set out to do! I'm not chasing rainbows! I'm fighting a live enemy! I'm facing reality! Maybe it's time you grew up and did the same!" Roan nodded. "You're right. Just set me down on the next inhabited world with my share of the spoils. I'll leave your grand scheme to you; I've got a better one of my own." Henry's eyes were fierce fires blazing in a face purple with fury. IF "By the Nine Gods, I've got a good mind to take you at your word! I picked you out of a damned zoo, a freak in a cage, and made you my second in command -- and tried to make you my friend! And now --  "I've never asked you for anything, Henry," Roan cut in, his blue eyes holding the pirate's. They stood face to face, two big, powerfully built men, one with gray hair and a face of lined leather, the other with a mane of dark red curls hacked short, the clean features of youth, a flawless complexion marred only by a welted scar along his right cheek where Ithc's talons had raked him, long ago. "But you've taken plenty!" "I was content with the 'zoo. I had friends there. A girl, too." Henry Dread snarled. "You'll befriend any lousy Gook or Geek that gives you the time of day. But me, a Commander in the Imperial Terran Navy -- I'm not good enough for your friendship!" Roan's expression changed. He frowned. "You said -- the Imperial Terran Navy." Henry Dread's eyes held steady. "That's what I said," he grated. "I thought," Roan said carefully, watching Henry Dread's eyes, "that of years ago." "You did, eh?" Henry was smiling a tight, hard smile. He looked at Roan bright-eyed, enjoying the moment. "at if I told you it wasn't wiped out? What if I said there were intact units scattered all over ihe Eastern Arm when the shooting stopped? What if I said Rim Head-quarters had taken over command control, reorganized the survivors, and held the Navy together -- waiting for the day a counter-attack could be launched?" Are you saying that?" Roan tri to hold his voice level and calm, "Hell, boy, that's what I called you up here to talk about, before you started in on your pet Geek!" Henry clapped Roan's shoulder. "I've watched you close, these last years. You've done all right. Roan -- better than all right. It's time I let you in on what you're doing here. What we're doing. You thought I was just a pirate, raiding and looting just for the hell of it, getting fat off the leavings of Geeks and Gooks. And you thought my talk about getting the Galaxy back for Man was just talk. I know." He laughed, with his hands on his hips and his head thrown back. "I can't say I blame you. Sure, I've got a hold full ci hvy metal and gem crystals and old Terry cloth and spices and even a few cases of Old Imperial Credit tokens. But that's not all I've got tucked away. Come here." He turned, walked across the broad command deck of the ancient battle-wagon, tapped keys cm the panel. An armored door swung open, and Henry stepped inside, ducking his head, came out with a wide, flat box. He lifted the lid with a flourish, held up a garment of close-woven blue polyon, shook it out. Roan gaped. "My uniform," Henry Dread said. "As a Commander in the Imperial Teiran Navy. I'm assigned to recruiting and fund-raising duty. I've done all rigt as far as funds are concerned. But this is my first reQFuitiment." Roan's hungry eyes held on the rich doth, the tter of ancient insignia. He swallowed, opened his mouth to speak -- Henry Dread stepped back into the vault, came out holding a second box in his hands. He tucked it under one arm. "Raise your right hand. Lieutenant Comay," he said. R oan stared into the mirror. The narrow-cut, silver corded black trousers fitted without a wrinkle into the brightly polished ship-boots. Over the white silk shirt, the short tunic was a swirl of braid, a gleam of silver buttons against royal blue. A bright-plated ebony-grip ceremonial side-arm winked at each hip against the broad woven-silver belt with the big, square buckle adorned symbol. He turned to Henry Dread. "I've Henry. You know what they are." Henry Dread lauded again. "Sure, I know." He keyed a mike, snapped out an order for a bottle and glasses, "Sit down. Lieutenant. I think you can forget about Geeks for a few minutes now while I tell you a few things." I ron Robert stirred as Roan called to him. His heavy feet scraped the rusted deck-plates; chairks clashed in the gloom and his green eyes winked open. "What you want. Roan," the heavy voice growled. "You wake Iron Robert from dream of youth and females and hot sun of homeworld." "I... just came to see how you are," Roan said. "I've been busy lately. I guess I haven't gotten down, to see you as often as I'd like. Is there anything you need?' "Just need to know you well and happy. Roan. I think now you and Henry Dread friends, you have good time, not be so sad like before." Roan gripped the two-inch chromalloy bars of Iron Robert's cell. "It's not just a good time, Iron Robert. I'm doing something. I'm helping to put the Terran Empire back together. I know, it's not much -- just one ship, cruising space, looking for Terrans, or rumors of Terrans, and collecting funds for the Navy, gathering intelligence to use when we're ready to launch our counter-attack." "Counter-attack against who. Roan? You already attack all Gooks and Geeks you find, take all guns and fuel and money." "You have to understand, Iron Robert! We're not just looting. We need those things! We're cruising according to official Navy orders, hitting every world in our assigned sector. Captain Dread's already been out twelve years. Two more years, and we finish the sweep, and report back to Rim Headquarters." "Just so you happy, Roan. Have good time, live to full, eat good. IF drink good, have plenty fight, plenty women." "Damn it, is that all living means to you? Don't you understand what it is to try to build something bigger than you are, something worth giving everything that's in you for?" "Sure, Roan. Iron Robert understand big dreams of youth. All beings young once." "ITiis isn't just a dream! The Terran Empire ruled this Galaxy once, and could rule it again! Haven't you seen enough suffering and torture and death and indifference and ruins and greed and hate and hopelessness to understand how it is to want to change all that? The Empire will bring back peace and order. If we left it to the damned Geeks it would go on like this forever, only worse!" "Maybe true, Roan." Iron Robert's voice was a soft rumble. "Fine thing, build towers up into unlight, squirt water, make pretty ounds." "Don't make fun of my garden! I shouldn't have told you about it! I might have known a Geek couldn't understand!" "Hard thing for Geek to understand, Roan. What place Geeks have in Terry Empire? Geeks get to walk in pretty garden too?" "The Geeks will have their own worlds," Roan said sullenly. 'They'll have their own gardens." "Iron Robert have garden once too. Roan. Fine black stones, and pools of soft mud to lie in, and hot, stinky water come up out of ground. But I think Roan not like my garden. I think hard thing for Roan and Iron Robert to walk in garden together, talk over old times. Maybe better have no garden, just be together, friends." Roan leaned his head against the cold bars. "Iron Robert, I didn't mean -- I mean -- we'll always be friends, no matter what! I know you're locked in here because of me. Listen, Iron Robert, I'm going to tell Henry Dread -- " "Roan not tell Henry Dread anything! Iron Robert made deal with pirate. Geek keep word as good as Man." "I didn't mean it when I called you a Geek, Iron Robert -- " "Just word. Roan. Iron Robert and Roan friends, few angry words nothing. Iron Robert not shamed to be Geek. Fine thing to be royal ferrous strain and have friend like Roan. Human flame bum short but bum hot, warm Ad stone heart of being Hke Iron Robert." "I'm ing to get you out of there!" "No, Roan. Where else I go? Not like Terry cabin, too small, too weak chair. And only cause trouble. Henry Dread right. Crew not like see Iron Robert free being. Better wait here, be near Roan, and some day maybe we make planetfall together. Meantime, you got destiny to work out with Henry Dread. You go ahead, chase dream of ancient glories. Iron Robert be here by and by." "We'll be at Rim HQ soon -- in a year or two. m make them give me a ship of my own then. And you'll be my second-in-command!" "Sure, Roan. Good jrfan. Till then. Iron Robert wait patient -- and Roan not worry' R oan stood up, stretched, rubbed his eyes, drained the mug of bitter brown coffee, clattered the empty cup down on the chart table. "Fm tired, Henry. Over thirtysix hours we've been hanging over the screens, and we've seen nothing. Let's admit it's another wild-goose chase and turn in." 'They're close. Roan," Henry snapped. His face was grayish and hoUow in the lights of the panel. "I've chased the Niss for forty years. Another forty minutes and maybe FU see them in my sights." "Or another forty days. Or forty years, or a thousand, for all we know. Those clod-'hoppers back on Ebar probably just gave us the story to get rid of us before the boys get bored and started shooting the town up again." "They're out there. We'll close with them this time." "And if they are -- what about it? We're on a recruiting and fundraising mission, aren't we? What's that got to do with launching oneman attacks against Niss warships? If there is any ship." "They're there, I said! And we're a Naval ship of the line! It's always pur job to seek out and destroy the enemy!" "Henry, give it up. We don't know their capabilities. I know we've got special long-range indetectable radar gear, but they may still blast us out of space like they did that Mandevoy scout a few years ago, before we even get close." Henry Dread whirled, stared up at Roan from his seat. "Scared, Lieutenant?" Roan's tired face smiled humorlessjy. "Sure, I'm scared, if that's what you want to hear. Or maybe I've just got common sense enough not to want to see all you've worked for -- all weve worked for -- destroyed just because you've got the itch to fire those big batteries you've been keeping primed all these years." Henry Dread came to his feet. "TTiat's enough out of you. Mister! I'm still in charge aboard this tub! Now get on that screen until I give the order to leave your post!" "Slow down, Henry -- " "Commander Dread to you. Mister!" Henry's face was close to Roan's, his square jaw, marred by a slight sagging of the jowls, thrust out. Roan straightened, settled his gun-belt on his hips. He was an inch taller than Dread, and almost as heavy through the shoulders. He looked the older man steadily in the eye. "We're just nine months out of Rim Headquarters, Henry. Let's see if we can't get there in one piece. Both of us." Henry Dread's hand went to his gun. He half drew it, looking into Roan's eyes, his teeth set in a snari. "I gave you an order!" "You're a big enough man to take an order back, when you see it's a mistake," Roan said flatly. "We both need rest. I know a couple of crewmen who'd like to see the IF pair of us out on our feet." He turned away. Henry Dread's gun cleared the holster. "Stop right there, Mister!" A clanging alarm shattered the stillness into jagged fragments. Roan spun. His eyes leaped to the long-range screen. A bright point of blue light glowed near the lower left corner. He jumped to the panel, twisted knobs; the image centered. He read figures from a ground-glass plate. Standard Tons; velocity, point ohnine light, absolute; nine-eighty "By the Nine Devils, that's it!" Henry Dread's voice choked. He stared across at Roan, then grabbed up the command mike, bawled into k: "All hands, battle stations! Secure for action! All batteries, fullarm and count-down! Power section, stand by for maximum drain!" A startled voice acknowledged as he tossed the mike aside, looked across at Roan. His eyes were wide, bright. "This is it. Roan! That's a Niss ship of the line, as sure as I'm Henry Dread!" His eyes went on the screen. "Look at him! Look at the size of that devil! But we'll take him out! We'll take him!" He bolstered his gun, drew a breath, turned to Roan. "For the first time in five thousand years, a ship of the Imperial Navy is engaging the enemy! This is the hour I've lived for. Roan! We'll smash them like a ripe fruit!" He raised his clenched fist. "And then nothing will stop us! Are you with me, boy?" Roan's eyes held the long shape growing on the screen. "Let's break it off, Henry. We've established that we can get in range, and we have them located. When we reach Rim Headquarters, we can..."  "Damn Rim Headquarters!" Henry Dread roared."This is my action! I tracked that filthy blot on the human sky halfway across the Eastern Arm, and now I'm going to burn it clean!" "You're out of your mind, Henry," Roan snapped. "The damned thing outweighs us a hunddred to one." "Crazy, am I? I'll show you how a crazy man deals with the scum that challenged Terran power at its peak!" Roan gripped Henry's shoulders, eyes on the screen. "It's not just you and me, Henry! We've got eighty crewmen below! They trust in you." To hell with those Cooks! This is what I was bom for!" He broke off. A tremor rattled the coffee mug on the table. There was a sudden sense of pressure, of impending violence -- The deck rose up and struck Roan a mighty blow. Instrument faces burst from the panel, screens exploded in smoke and white light. He had a glimpse of Henry Dread, spinming past him. A thunderous blast rolled endlessly, and then it drained away and Roan was whirling in echoing silence. H e was on the floor, looking up at a soot-smeared figure in rags, bleeding from a hundred cuts, hunched in the command chair, square fists clamped on the firecontrol levers. Roan coughed, raised himself on one elbow, got to his hands and knees. The walls spun dizzily. "How bad are we hit?" he choked. "Filthy, sneaking Niss," Henry Dread (Wanted. "Let 'em have another broadside! Bum the devils out of the sky!" Roan's eyes swept over the shattered panel, the smashed instruments, fixed on the controls in Henry Dread's hands. They hung slack and useless from broken mountings. "Henry, let's get out of here. The lifeboats... "Maximum beam," Henry Dread shouted. "Forward batteries, fire! Fire, damn you!" "We've got to get out." Roan staggered to his feet, grasped Henry's shoulder, pulling his away from the devastated control console. "Give the older!" Wild eyes in a white face stared up at him. "Are you a fighting man of the Empire or a dirty Geekloving spy?" Henry tore himself free, hinged for the command mike, dangling from its socket. "All hands! We're closing with the enemy! Prepare to board." Roan tore the mike from Henry. "Abandon ship!" he shouted -- and threw the dead mike from him as Henry yelled, swung a wild blow. He leaned aside, caught the other's wrists. "Listen to me, Henry! We've got lo get to the boats! We can survive to fight again!" Henry stared into Roan's eyes, breathing hard. Swelling blisters puffed the left side of his face. His hair was singed to curled stubble. There was blood at the (Corner of his mouth. Quite suddenly, the wildness went out of his eyes. His arms relaxed; he staggered, caught himself. "Two boats," he mumbled. "I've fitted 'em out as raiders. Armor, an infinite repeater each, two torpe dos..." He pulled free of Roan's grip, pus-hed past him toward the lift doors, stumbling over the debris littering the deck. "We're not beaten yet," he was shouting again. "Slip through their screens -- hit 'em in close -- " Smoke swirled from the lift as the doors clashed open. Henry Dread lurched inside, and Roao followed. O n the boat deck, a dense-packed mob of shouting, struggling crewmen fought for position at the two escape looks. "It's Captain DreadP someone yelled. "Here's the Terry swine now!" "Open up!" "Get the boats clear!" Henry slammed his way through the press, gun in hand. He smashed it down over the skull of a homed bruiser in blackened sheepskin, whirled to face the mob. Behind them, the glare of raging fires danced against the bulkhead visible at the eiKi of the long corridor. "Listen to me, you swabs," Henry IF roared. "There's room in the two boats for every gutter-spawned rascal here -- but by the nine tails of the fire-devil, you'll form up and board in a shipshape fashion or fry where you are! You there! Gungle! Let him be! Get back there! Askor! i##ke number one port!" The pirate bellowed his orders, and the frantic crewmen broke off their struggles, moved back, taking places in two ragged lines. Roan pushed through them, coughing, blinking through the smoke. "Here, where do you think you're going!" Henry Dread bellowed after him. But Roan was clear of the press, into the transverse corridor now. The smoke was less here. He ran, bounded down a companionway, leaped the crumpled form of a Minid with a short toife standing in his back. Someone's grudge settled, Roan thought as he daed along the cargo level way. He skidded to a halt at Iron Robert's cell. Through the layered smoke, he made out the massive figure, seated stolidly on the steelslab bench. "Iron Robert! I'll get you out! The keys are in Henry's cabin -- "Just minute. Roan," the rumbling voice said calmly. "What happen? Iron Robert we, hear engines dead, plenty smoke in room." "We tried to attack a Niss warship! It hit us before we even got close, smashed our screens, burned out our circuitry. We're a hulk, on fire. We're abandoning ship!" "You want Iron Robert go free out of cell? Don't need key. Roan. Easy." The giant stood, brought his massive arms forward and snapped the chains as easily as loops of wet paper. He stooped, tore the ankle chains from the wall, then peeled the massive collars from his ankles. "Stand back. Roan." He stepped to the grating, gripped the wristthick bars, ripped them aside with a screech of metal, forced his ninefoot bulk through the opening like a man brushing aside a beaded hanging, and stood in the corridor, looking down at Roan. "You could have broken them any time," Roan stuttered. "You stayed there -- in chains -- for five years, on my account." "Good place as any to sit, think. Now fire grow hot. Time to go, Roan." R oan whirled, led the way along the smoke-fogged corridor, up the companionway, along to the boat deck. Half the crew had entered the lifeboats now. Two dead men lay on the deck. Wasted at short range by Henry Dread's guns. The grizzled Terran caut sight of Roan. "You're taking number two boat! Where in the nine Hells have you been?" Iron Robert lumbered from the smoke behind Roan. "So! I should have figured!" TTic gun swiveled to cover the giant "Get aboard. Roan! We're running out of time!" "ITl load when my crew's loaded." Roan walked past Henry, ignoring the gun, to the gangway where burly humanoids pushed, crowding through the port. "I said get aboard I" Henry bellowed. There were half a dozen more crewmen. They pushed, shouting. Answering shouts came from inside the sixty-foot boat, cradled in its massive davits in the echoing, smoke-filled hold. A broad-faced Minid thrust his head from the lock of number one boat. "We got a full load!" he roared. "You load any more in here, they'll be standin' on each others' shoulders!" Henry's gun swung. "I don't care if you have to stack 'em like cordwood! Get 'em in, Askor!" He spun back to face Roan. "What the hell are you waiting for, boy? Get aboard that boat -- now! Can't you feel that heat? This tub will blow any second." "Iron Robert," Roan called past him. "Go aboard." "There's no room for the hulk!" Henry shouted. "That was an order, Mister!" Three frantic crewmen struggled at the port of Number two boat. "No more Tooml a hoarse voice bellowed from inside the lock. A broad foot swung out, kicked at one of the men. He fell from the gangway, and the two behind leaped forward. A fight developed in the lock. Henry Dread took a step, aimed, fired once, twice, a third time. Two dead crewmen fell, rolled off onto the hot deckplates. A third was lifted, tossed from inside. "Fight your way in there. Roan," Henry yelled. "Shoot as many as you have to!" "Iron Robert -- " "I said he's not going aboard!" Roan and Henry Dread faced each other, ten feet apart across the blood-spattered deck. The pirate captain's gun was aimed unwaveringly at Roan's chest. "He goes or I stay," Roan yelled above the clamor. "For the last time -- follow your orders!" Henry bellowed. "Iron Robert, go aboard!" Roan started. "Roan -- " Iron Robert ' took a step, and Henry Dread wheeled. Blue fire lanced, splashed harmlessly from Iron Robert's chest. "You board boat, like Henry Dread say. Roan," the giant rumbled. Henry took a step backward, his gun covering Roan again. "Listen to Iron Man," Henry grated. "He's telling you." "Let him board, Henry!" Roan said. "Over my dead body," Henry grated. "Not even you can -- " "Roan, no!" Iron Robert cried -- I n a motion too quick to follow. Roan's hand had flashed to his gun, brought it up, fired, and the the pirate leader was staggering back, his knees folding, the gun dropping from his hand. He seemed to fall slowly, like an ancient tree. He struck, rolled over, lay on his back with his eyes and mouth open, smoke rising from a charred wound on his chest. "Roan! You big fool! No room on boat for Iron Robert! Now you kill Henry Dread, true Man o love you like son!" .# IP Roan tossed the gun aside, went to the fallen pirate, knelt beside him. "Henry... His voice caught in his throat. "I thought -- " "You wrong. Roan," Iron Robert's voice rumbled. "Henry Dread not save your life, foolish Roan. You go now, quick, before ship explode." Henry Dread's open eyes flickered. They moved to Roan's face. "You... in conumand... now," he gasped. "Maybe... right... Iron Man... okay..." He drew a ragged breath and coughed, tried to speak, coughed again. "Roan," he managed. "Terra..." The light died from his eyes like a mirror steaming over. "Henry!" Roan shouted. Two hands like ship's grapples clamped on his arms, lifted him, thrust him toward the port. "You go now. Roan, live, have long life, do, see many things. Think sometime of Iron Robert, and not be sad. Be happy. Remember many good times together." "No, Iron Robert! You're coming!" "No room. Iron Robert too big, not squeeze through port." Roan felt himself propelled through the narrow opening into the noise and animal stinfc of the crowded lifeboat. He fought to regain his feet, turned to see the wide figure of Iron Robert silhouetted against the blazing corridor. He lunged for the port, and a dozen pairs of homy hands caught at him, held him as he kicked and fought. "You got to navigate this tub, Terry," someone yelled. "Dog down that port," another shouted. Roan had a last glimpse of Iron Robert as hands hauled him back. The heavy port swung shut. Then he was thrust forward, passed from one to another, and then he was stumbling into the command compartment. Rough hands shoved him into the navigator's chair. The cold muzzle of a gun rammed against his cheek. "Blast us out of here, fast," a heavy voice growled. Roan shook himself, forced his eyes to focus on the panel. As in a dream, his hands went out, threw levers, punched keys. The screens glowed into life. Against the black of space, the long shape of the inamense Niss war vessel glowed no more than a thousand miles distant, its unlighted bulk blotting out the stars. Roan gathered himself, sat upright. His teeth were set in a grim caricature of a smile. He twirled dials, centered the image in the screen, read numerals from an instrument, punched a code into the master navigator panel, then with a decisive gesture thrust home the main drive control. R oan slumped in the padded seat, let his hands fall from the controls. "We're clear," he said dully. "I don't think the other boat got away. I don't see it on our screens." A clay-faced creature with the over-long arms and the tufted bristles of a Zorgian pushed through the crew packed like salted fish in the bare functional shell. "Listen to me, you muck-worms," he hooted in the queer, resonant voice that rose from his barrelchest. "If we wanta make planetfall, we got to organize this scow." "Who asked you?" a gap-toothed, olive-skinned crewman demanded. "I been thinking, and -- " "I'm senior Gook here," a bald, wrinkled Minid barked. "Now we're clear, we got to find the nearest world." "If we don't wanta all die," a hoarse voice yelled, "we got to pick a new Cap'n!" "I won't have no lousy Minid telling me -- " "Button yer gilllits, you throwback to a mud-fish -- " Roan stood, turned on the men. "All right," he roared -- an astonishing shout that cut through the hubbub like a whiplash through cotton cloth. "You can belay all this gab about who's in charge! I am! If you boneheads can stop squabbling long enough to let a few facts into your skulls, youll realize we're in trouble. Bad trouble!" The Zorgian bellied up to Roan. "Listen, you Terry milk-sop -- Roan hit the humanoid with a gut-punch, straightened him out with an upward slain of a hard fist, pushed him back among the crewmen. "Wee got no discharge look," he grated, "so if anybody gets himself killed, the rest of us will have to live with the remains; think that over before you start any trouble." Roan planted his fists on his hips. He was as tall as the tallest of the cut-throat crew, a head taller than the average. His black-red hair was vivid in the harsh light of the glare strip that lit the crowded compartment. Coarse faces, slack with fright, stared at him. "How many of you have guns?" he demanded. There was muttering and shuffling. Roan counted hands. "Sixteen. How many knives?" There was another show gf hands, gripping blades that ranged from a broad, edge-nicked machete to a cruel, razor-edged hook. "Where are we going?" someone called. "We'll die aboard this can," a shrill cry came. "We can't make planetfall." Roan's voice blanketed the others. "We're a long way from home, without fuel reserves or supplies." The crew were silent now, waiting. "But we've got our firepower intact. There are two thousandmegaton torps slung below decks and we mount a ten mm infinite repeater for'ard. And there's food, water, fuel and air just a few miles away." He stepped aside, pointed to the forward screen, where the Niss ship swelled now to giant size. "We're inside her defenses now," he said. '"They won't be expecting any visitors in a hundred ton dinghy." "What do you mean?" a one-eyed man growled. "You're asking -- " "I'm asking nothing," Roan said harshly. "I'm telling you we're going in to attack the Niss ship." IP Dear Editor: In the November issue of , in Gordon Dicksons story, Tiger Green, I noticed a rather glaring error. The paragraph reads as follows: "Slowly Milt lifted his gaze from the fallen man and faced Terry. It was the standard seventy-two degrees Centigrade in the room, but Jerry saw perspiration standing out on Milts face as if he had just stepped out of a steam bath." A minor point that does not detract from the over-all high quality of the magazine -- but lets keep authors and editor on their toes! -- Edward Wilton.    Dear Editor: As a high school student myself, I must disagree with S, Alan Simon. In the school I go to, I know of only two boys and a teacher who read science fiction with any degree of regularity. I have tried many times without success to make converts to science fiction among my friends, but every one of them seems to equate it with such things as The Creature from the Black Lagoon or I Was a Teenage Werewolf. It isnt greatly loved among teenagers because most of them don't know what it really is. Sure it produces stories like A Canticle for Leihowitz but how many people have ever heard of that story? About your editorial Air and Space: it seems to me that many the appearance of a cult. I have read a number of books on the subject both pro and con, and by far the ones which made the most sense were those against. Every book I limited to viciously attacking the Air Force or of the "contactee," group. As to the formers' claim that # reporters can't all be wrong, this is my reply: I think that Orson Welles is responsible for a good since he did that War of the Worlds program people have seen things in the sky. Another factor in the controversy is what I'll call The American Mind. This is the way tiiat react to something mysterious. America is notorious for Ihe gullibility of its people. An American will read someplace that scientists believe there is life on other planets. He will then remember a horror movie he saw once in which Earth was invaded by hordes of with the impression that anything that comes out of outer space is naturally going to be hostile. Then, along comes some saucer enthusiast who tells him that we are in the process of being visited by creatures from outer space who are friendly. This is vastly more comforting to him than the previous. So now he will desperately want to see one of these flying saucers and because he wants to he will. I imagine it's something like the Placebe explained as they have been in the past can be explained in this manner. By the way, what frequency does in on that program sometime. Keep the Retief stories coming. I really enjoy that series; I think it's one of the best in science fiction today. I can't understand what anyone sees in the Gree stories, though. I read three of them, and frankly, I was rather bored. One last thing: we know now that what the ancients used to call miracles were often what we now call same position as they were. We see something in the sky and try to explain it in terms of our present knowledge, but we really don't know are something which is as far beyond our understanding as a spaceship "would have been to a caveman. -- Alan McArdle, # Nancy Rd., Concord, Mass. # # # Dear Editor: Any further suggestion on how to improve your magazine would be futile. After going up # pages and not going up on price, who can complain? Good work! The idea of a story ratingreaders' choice for some sort of prize -- as is done elsewhere and has geen suggested by some as an inclusion in your format -- is impossible. Who can make distinctions between such absolute top writers as you have had in the last year or so? A regional Southeast United States science-fiction organization may be formed. Anyone interested can obtain more information by writing me and waiting for me to get home from college to answer them. One question : Is Cordwainer Smith a pseudonym Irvin Koch, # Chattanooga Bank Building, Chattanooga, Tennessee #. # He is not a pseudonym for any other science-fiction writer, if that's what you mean -- but it's true that 'Cordwainer Smith" is not the name this author was born with. -- Editor # # # Dear Editor: I think C. C. MacApp's new novel. Prisoners of the Sky, was excellent. It read like an aerial Horatdo Hornblower, and I hope you print a sequel . -- Daniel R. Mercer, # Belmont  That about does it for another month. Note our 'first' for this month, a story by a previously unpublisihed author named Carroll J. Clem. Note too that we've added a guest editorial -- this one by Lester del Rey -- on the principle that we've been talking to you every month for a long time now, and it's about time we moved over and gave someone else a shot at it. See you next month. -- The Editor IF Plug in and flip on the switch. The disc revolves at just the right speed -- transfixes your subject(s). Their attention is riveted to the powerful hypnotic pattern. Your every word is now more meaningful -- more effective for this professional machine greatly adds to your prestige, creates hypnotic expectancy, increases your success. A marvelous aid for hypnotizing others and for self-hypnosis. Has #" hypnotic disc, switch, handle, instructions and a high quality, silent, trouble-free motor Listen as the Hypnotist dramatically weaves irresistable suggestions around the unique beat of an electronic metronome coming from an echo-chamber. Side one helps hypnotize others -- in groups or individually. Ends; "the next voice you hear will take complete control of your hypnotic sleep... ", then you take over. Side two helps in self-hypnosis, ends by giving you a suggestion for rehypnotizing yourself, then awakens you. Use the record on others -- study it to develop your own technique. An ideal aid for professionals and serious students. Unbreakable vinyl, # rpm Extended Play -- "Kit" is complete with Satisfaction Guaranteed or Money Back! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! o o o o o o o oo oo noo ( # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward   # ? won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted mir Kainr Your Name Here #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr. Anthony, and Andrew J. Offutt # Cover by McKenna from Weapons That Walked IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York,New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Oopyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, end any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Editorial npvhe reason that a spaceship canX not exceed the speed of lisrht, so they tell ns, Is that as it accelerates it gains mass. Take the closest we Stave to a real spcu:e-going spaceship now -- say, the Gemini capsule, with a mass of something like ten thousand pounds. Accelerate it to nine-tenths the speed of lig'ht -- oh, maybe # miles per second -- and its moss has doubled. It now has a mass of twenty thousand pounds. Accelerate it some more. At # the sd of light it may mass # pounds. At #, # pounds. At # i)erhaps it reaches order-of-magnitude increments... and when ultimately it achieves the full velocity of C (or more accurately, if it could achieve that velocity) its mass would become infinite. What happens when an infinite mass comes to exist in the universe is a sort of goblin s-will-get-you relativistic physicists and mathematicians amuse their friends with over edn stein of beer. One such recently suggested that the simplest way to describe the effect would simply be to say that tlie universe would collapse. Of course, in the real world it's not a problem -- not now, anyway, or in the foreseeable future -- because we simply have no means of accelerating a mass to light speed. The more massive our Gemini capsule becomes the more difficult to accelerate; and you can't really push it up to the infinite-mass stage without infinite force in the thrusters to do the job. B ut look at it a different way. It doesn't much matter what mass you accelerate to that point. Start out with a #-pound Gemini capDuQuesne -- or, for that matter, a feather. Infinite is infinite. What happens when you accelerate a rather small, but still measurable, mass to light speed? Say a proton? Say we do it in a proton accelerator? Or more pertinently... bearing in mind that light itself has mass; it is deflected by gravitational fields, just like an orbiting rock -- what happens when light travels at light speeds? If anyone happens to know the answer, will they please let us know Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of 'the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. II  Complete Short Novel The Final War had left few survivors... just enough to carry it on endlessly! I I t did not stop moaning for a long time. 'It was a battered mass of splintered bone and oozing blood and brains, matting strands of blondish, almost-human hair. But Bill Jackson continued to batter and to hack and to scream. Steadily, monotonously, until exhaustion overcame him. Slowly sanity returned. Tony Baker, former captain, Now, spent and trembling, he waited. Slowly the other man came from hands. His sleepwalker's expression had changed to one of sane awareness. Then he too vomited. Without a word they brought gasoline from the body of the smashed plane, a blue-and-silver S-# Scouter. They poured it on the remains of the last android. Silently, his hands shaking, Bill Jackson struck a match, then threw its spurting flame into the mangled thing on the ground. They stepped back, raising their arms to shield their faces from the heat that flared and roared at them. They watched. Amid the flames something moved. Tony Baker gagged and turned away. Behind him a hand, rather like a human hand, rose slowly. A groan, rather like a human groan, sounded a last agony. "It wasn't dead." Tony turned back to watch as the tortured thing struggled in the flames. And at last the movements ceased. It was dead. T he two men stared in numbed horror. "I hate 'em," Bill Jackson said. "I'm glad it's dead. But I wouldn't have wished that on... on anything. We should've made sure..." Then he remembered the awful way in which he had made sure, and he shuddered. He was the older of the two men. He wqs a big man, dark, with a perpetual beard-shadow on a massive face. His black hair was shot with a very few strands of gray. He was perhaps forty-one or-two. His hand rose now to Tony's shoulder and they turned and walked across the little clearing to the stream trickling to the east of their camp. They squatted and washed themselves in the laughing, unconcerned water. "Bill," Tony said in the moonlight.' "Yeah?" "It's all over now, isn't it?" "Yeah," Bill Jackson said. He touched his whiskered chin, rubbing where blood clung. "Yeah, I guess it is, Sport." "Bill... should we bury it?" Jackson looked at him. Bury it! Bury that? Tony, that thing -- " He broke off and their eyes spoke in the darkness. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess so Come on." They walked from the bank of the stream back into the clearing. Back to the remains of their campfire -- and of that other fire. Bill fixed a soldier's trench shovel to his rifle. He dug a shallow hole and shoved in the charred remains. They stamped the earth, then hesitated, each thinking the same thought; then they left it, without praying, under the Christmasy shape of a tall pine. Automatically Bill went to the fire and threw three logs on, arranging them to bum up. He turned. "Come on," he said, and together they crossed the clearing to the stream. They jumped across, feet squishing, and scrambled up the little bank on the other side. The stream afforded a barrier of sorts on the east side of the camp, the scout-plane on the north, the cabin and palisade they planned would shelter the south end. Across the stream and the clearing, the camp's west side was sheltered by a steeply sloping hill. They had almost denuded the hill of its good trees and had rolled the trunks down to form a barrier. B ill Jackson sat down. Slowly Tony Baker sat beside him. "How many cigarettes left, Tony?" "Two." Bill sighed. "Well, I can't think of a better time to split one. We can't save 'em forever." Tony nodded and lit the cigarette. He inhaled deeply, slowly, luxuriously, and passed it to the other man. "Tony..." "Yeah?" "Let's don't talk about it. Let's don't think about it -- let's talk about something else." Bill puffed and passed the cigarette back. "All right." Tony looked at the moon riding high and fat and silvery above the trees. They sat in silence. Neither man was sure if he was sorry for what had been done; it had happened so suddenly. They had set the trap and it had been sprung. Flamed by the passions of the moment and the danger and the hate instilled by years of war, they had been compelled toward the awful climax. Savagely -- and half-hesitantly, even then -- they had obeyed. And now it was done, their energies spent, and there was time for recollection, reflection... and, perhaps, remorse. "Well, dammit, talk about something," Bilj said. "I'm thinking about it -- and I don't want to!" "Uh -- how'd it all start. Bill?" Tony asked. Tony was twenty-three, slighter: long, stringy muscles on a small frame; shorter by three inches. He had been an active participant in war since three days after his seventeenth birthday. He let the smoke trail out in a slow cloud, then handed the white cylinder back to the man who had pulled him out of his crashed aircraft. Bill answered quickly, seizing made 'em. Sport. We created 'em. At least the scientist-types did -- in their labs. They want a sturdier breed for the mines and the factories, so they mixed up chemicals and made the Androids." He shook his head. "God! Made 'em!" He was seeing a vision of burning laboratories, burning scientists, dangling chemists, exploding chemicals. "They were tougher, stronger, longer-lived. The scientists made 'em so they could reproduce themselves." "That was the mistake, wasn't it?" Tony said in a quiet, flat voice. "No. Just making 'em was the mistake. All those yowlin' preachers were right. Pretty soon they were raising little As, thinking they were superior, smarter than men." "Weren't they?" Bill swung to stare at him. "You believe that?" T ony looked into eyes gone suddenly ugly; looked and looked away, down at the moon's wriggly reflection in the running water. "I don't know. My father and brothers were fighting the As ever since I can remember. It was just natural. It was life. I was never even sure why. Everybody fought and fought and everybody died fighting or came back torn up; dead, really. I wasn't -- I'm not -- old enough to rememIF ber, Bill. Are They? I mean, were they superior?" "Well, they were smart," Bill said with proud reluctance. He handed Tony the cigarette's last quarter-inch, pierced with a pin. He followed Tony's eyes to the silver shimmer in the water. "But no, dammit, they weren't menl They couldn't've been as smart!" His hand dug the bayonet's edge into the soft earth beside him. "But they were clever, crafty; they hid their real number, collected weapons, met secretly... plotted..." "But we wouldn't allow them equality," Tony said. "When they made their pleas to the government." "Pleas! DemandsF Bill spat. "But we couldn't. Lord, there wasn't any choice; we made 'em. They weren't people. It was them or us; they were trying to take over. We had to fight. Had to. There couldn't be any mercy in that war. No mercy and no surrenler. We'd given the As the ability to think, to reason, and their reason told 'em they were slaves; that they'd always be slaves... unless they became mans master. So we fought... and fought and fought. And here we are." Tony Baker shuddered. "What a waste!" . "Yeah, waste. The waste was when we first made 'em," Bill said, the words whipping out of him. "Speaking of waste -- " He took he remaining fraction of the cigarette. He inhaled with care, cursed as he burned his lip, extracted the pin. He killed the remains with a wetted thumb and returned the pin to the front of his shirt. Tony looked at him, then up at the moon; down at the water. "Uh -- Bill. Is it true that there were...  Man-Android crossbreeds?" Bill swung his head to stare at him. "Hell, no! We hated each other. What made you ask that?" Tony shrugged. He had to be careful with Bill; double-thinkeverything before he said it. "I just wondered. It was possible, wasn't it? Their chromosomes are modeled after ours..." "Were," Bill Jackson said with firm assurance. "And that's a lot of bunk. Bull!" "But -- " Bill's face became ugly, his eyes flaring like glass in the moonlight. The lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth were harsh and deep. D'you think any man would? Would you bed one of them?" Tony thought of the warty thing they had killed and he shuddered and shook his head. "No, I guess not. Bill. Anyhow, it doesn't matter, now. We killed it. There's nobody left. Just you and me." Above his head a Great Horned Owl, filled with the smug assurance that he was not the last of his kind, hooted his derision. #We fail failed will fail!# #They hate so much and they are twisted so much by their primitive biology. But we can) easily reset and start again.# #Did we?# #A stupid question. Cerebrate before transmitting. The answer is inherent in our being: You are. I am.# #Of course. Then let us do it. But carefully... # #First we erase, reprogram... # Buttons are pressed, a dial twisted, a calibrator set, adjusted, a switch thrown. There. Now we substitute one powerful, over-riding command. #You are sure this can be done?# #lt is done: we exist. One command: prime above all else: to mate and reproduce. On the screen, the Android is paralyzed, a female's shocked look frozen on its Hogarthian features. You and I know, as only those, who know knew will know past present and future as HereNow, that Man and Android can) mate together. For only through such a mating can there be anything at all to follow Man and Android; there is nothing else and no one else. Switches are set, calibrators and dials set, a lever pulled, a button pushed. Only then is there a lifeform superior to either. Only then are we.# #But... but if we fail again?# #Then we must try again. We must try and keep trying until either we succeed... # #or what?# #You know knew will that know that as well as I. If we fail we do not know #t; we are not. You and I, all of us, did not exist; therefore do noU and will not exist. We snap out of existence. But not until we exhaust all possibilities: This changing and rechanging, programming and reprogramming: it is not an experiment. It is Survival. There cannot be failure. Nor are the possibilities infinite; each time we damage the tissues of TimeSpace. Observe the torn threads... there comes, eventually, a time when no further settings are possible.#" #But... we did succeed! We are Here Now.# #Please remember which of us is the student, and please cerebrate before you transmit. There is no did" or "was" ; there is no 'we did succeed." All takes place now; if we succeed, we arewerewill be. If we fail...# The final relay clickedclickswill II T he last surviving android walked from the shadows of the woods and stood before the campfire kindled by the last two surviving men. Its face was an ugly travesty of a human female's; broad, warty, worthy of Hogarth's worst satire. The lips, thin and twisted, writhed back from yellowish teeth. For just a moment it stared at the two prone figures in their sleeping-bags by the popping fire; then it approached them with the stealth of the Unhuman. Its big, almost-human hands swung loosely at its sides, empty; weaponless -- and Bill Jackson charged from behind the blue-andsilver corpse of a wrecked scoutplane. The penultimate survivor of with bayonet fixed to empty rifle. He learned quickly that the Android had not been duped by the IF grass-stuffed dummies lying by the campfire. With reflexes designed by Man to be faster than men's, it whirled, poised for just an instant and ran. It plunged through the little wall of buckbushes and crashed noisily off through the conifer forest. Bill Jackson gazed after it, bewildered. "Well, I'll be damned! First time I ever saw one of them run from anything!" He walked to the base of a tall fir. He looked up through the ragged branches at the pale face peering down from a platform. "Didn't work," Bill Jackson said. "After all that trouble, it didn't work!" Tony Baker, former Scoutcraft pilot in the terrible war the Androids called "Civil" and the men called "The War Against the As", slid down the rope from the platform to the ground. "I was afraid of that. Bill." He was a younger man, slimmer, his face not yet set in the lines with which age and hate and experience had creased Bill's dark face. "It should have!" Bill said. His manner was that of a small boy. "All that practicing with the rope, all that cutting the branches and fixing the clearingjust right, all that damned grass we cut to stuff those dummies... damn! All this work for nothing!" "Not quite for nothing," Tony Baker said. He looked beyond the fire to the almost-finished cabin, roofed just today, at the camp's north end; back to the two grass dummies sprawled in their sleepingbags; finally back to Jackson. "We learned how smart they are, Bill," "Uh-huh. Hell, we're menV "Yeah," Tony Baker said. He pulled the rope -- on which he was to have swung...down upon the Android -- back to the bole of the Douglas fir, secured it lightly on the nail they had driven there. He returned his pale blue eyes to ti'ie big man. # #Till, look. I know you're older, A) but I've seen more action against these things than you have; they grabbed me when I was seventeen and put a uniform on me." He plucked at the blue and silver shirt under the mackinaw; the nights were chill. "They gave me a gun and they said 'Go, boy, go kill Androids.' That's what I did for three years, until they found out about my flying lessons -- I'd tried to tell 'em -- and they quickied me through flight school and put me in poor ole Brigitte over there." He waved a hand had brought him crashing down to Bill Jackson. "I was in the Alamo Division, at the Third Battle of Johnson City. The immune division, remember? Yeah, immune. The As let go their bacterigas and in six days there were Jack and Chris and I. Then -- " "Don't lecture me, fella! I did some fighting myself." And Bill talked about it as Tony grinned. He hadn't intended to get into it again, but both men were tense -- and though war might be hell, man has never ceased to want to talk about it. "But because I knew the country up here and liked it they made me n boss of a work detail. We were immune too. I buried 'em all. Then I started carving out this clearing... and zoom!" Down comes a flyboy, all shiny and silver and blue. Nice of you, at that. That little toy plane makes a nice barrier across the south side of the clearing. Damn good thing for you, too. If I hadn't pulled you out, you'd be dead, Sport. That Android woulda found you... that's how it found us, I guess. Lord knows how far away it was, but it homed in on your plane." From Bill Jackson's lips the word Android emerged as the foulest curse. Tony raised a hand to the back of his head with a boyish grin; he'd removed the bandage only today. "You're right. Bill." He looked around at the little camp. Home. "And you know I appreciate it." "I wasn't fishing." "I know it. I was thinking about us -- the clearing, the cabin, the trap. Even if it didn't work. Creativity. That's the one thing the As don't have, creativity. The poisoned rains they used on us, the radio frequencies, the mutated parasites -- every one of 'em a human invention. We should be able to get it. We gave 'em everything but creativeness." B ill walked over and bent to heft a log and place it carefully on the low fire. "Creativity... we're gonna need that. Sport. D'you realize we're probably all that's left? You and me and that Android?" He looked at Tony and the thought hit him and he sat quickly. Tony came over to the fire and squatted, then sat with a grunt on the ground. He unbuttoned one shirt pocket, took out the last earthly remains of a wilted pack of wilted cigarettes. He peered in; old Mother Hubbard examining the cupboard, hopefully. "Two," he told Bill. "Let's split one." Bill nodded and Tony, thinking of creativeness, creation, recreation, recreation, procreation, drew a burning sliver from the fire and lighted the cigarette slowly, not burning it off. He inhaled with the long, sucking draw of a man who knows he hasn't long to keep the habit. He handed the Tiger to Bill. "You flyboys and your Tigers," Bill muttered. "If you'd smoked filters we wouldn't have to use the pin." But he grinned to let Tony know he was kidding. Tony had unlaced and slipped off one of his cleated boots. He bent now to examine his foot. Bill hunched forward to look. "You still worried about bugs?" Tony smiled. Bugs! Well, "Bacteriological agents" was quite a mouthful. "Yeah, some. But it's been almost three years since there was anything new being spread. Just my luck to get ringworm or athlete's foot." "Nah," Bill said, peering at the wrinkled foot. "Just a rub-blister, 'sail. Too much flying and not enough walking. I think you and I can figure we're immune to anything there is, by now. Survival of the fittest -- that's us." Tony found himself unable to smile as he took off the other boot IF and walked, barefoot, to the plane for his sneakers. The ground felt good; cold and invigorating to hot feet. He came back to pull the white sneakers on by the fire. He looked up as Bill held out the cigarette. "Here. I'm one up on you -- I took another drag while you got those slippers." Tony inhaled deeply. "Well, my doctor didn't approve anyhow. He's cerist... Bill? You know that one we chased off tonight's the fittest of her kind." "Her? Its." Bill said, snarling. "Its." "Okay. D'you realize we set the trap, we plotted, waited to kill it like two tigers? And it came unarmed." "Sure. At night, sneaking. And Androids are twice as strong as we are, remember. It didn't need weapons." "Well, it's odd it didn't have a club or something." Tony frowned. "Maybe it wanted to make peace," he said. "Maybe we're not supposed to kill it." "What's that mean? 'Not supposed to'? Who's making the rules? We're it. Sport." TonyBaker cautioned himself before he spoke. "There's just you and me and that Android, Bill. A female Android. With fallopian tubes. Man's gone; maybe Mother Nature's got control again. She's determined to keep old man going." Bill snorted. "You want to put on your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and go out to find that A, smoke the peace-pipe? I promise I'll bury you -- or whatever's left of you, if I find it." He stood and turned away; even the set of his shoulders and his stiff back were a sneer. T ony knew there was no use arguing. There was little arguing with Bill Jackson at any time, and particularly not when he knew he was right. As when he'd thought of the rope business. They'd spent hours trimming the bole of the big fir, building the platform, securing the rope, practicing, with Bill talking excitedly and whistling and humming like Orville Wright tightening the last nut on his brainstorm. Tony glanced at the useless Scouter and sighed. "Yeah, I'll take the first watch, Bill." "Yeah... get plenty of sleep, and tomorrow we can go hunting. Okay by me," Bill said. He dumped dampish, browning grass out of his sleeping bag and crawled into it, boots and all. He was snoring, bearlike, before Tony reached the plane. Its open cabin doorway was an excellent place from which to keep watch. He stopped. Had there been a movement? Reflection from the flames? He stared till his eyes began to bum, holding his breath as he listened, then closed them tightly and glanced back at the fire. He went over to the combination barrier-breakwater-woodpile to bring more logs closer to the fire -- and stopped again. Reflection? Or another movement, there by the S-#? His hand gripped hard around the rifle stock and he glanced at Bill, the fire. Then he stepped up to the woodpile, his eyes on the plane. He did not take them off it, squatting, setting the rifle against a pile of logs, reaching out blindly to stack one, two, three smaller logs in the curve of his left arm. Hugging them against his chest he picked up the bayoneted rifle again, rose slowly and took a hesitant step toward the campfire. And another -- And an arm clamped around his throat. He was jerked back, his voice painfully off his toe. The rifle was yanked from his hand and dropped to the ground. He raised both hands to the powerful band around his neck, clutched it. Blam! Ill H e awoke, shaking his head, frowning and trying to move his arms until he realized they were bound behind his back. He was sitting on a pile of old grass, soursmelling, in darkness. His head throbbed... Efill! The Android! It had him; it had grabbed him from behind, must've banged him on the head! Now where -- as he looked around, wrinkling his nose, straining his eyes in an effort to make them acclimate faster, he realized he was in a cave. It had not killed him! As his eyes became accustomed to the cave's faintly moonlit darkness he found it, squatting against the rock wall to the right of the grassy pallet on which he lay. It moved now to his side. It made placating, appealing gestures with a horny hand and stretched its lips in a grotesque caricature of a smile. Its eyes were reassuring, questioning. Slowly it leaned forward and raised the hand. Slowly it removed the gag in his mouth. He yelled. The sound reverberated loud in the cave. He yelled again, as the Android squatted beside him, regarding him in silence. It showed no reaction to the noise.' Then it extended a hand -- slowly, in the careful manner one adopts with wary animals to put them at ease -- and touched his throat, his mouth. It frowned and raised the hand to its own mouth, then its throat. Its lips wriggled as it remembered. First there came a gurgling growl from its throat, then a voice. It sounded familiar but Tony Baker did not recognize it as his own. "Sound does not go out of the cave, Man. We rounded a corner. See, the moonlight is reflecting in on us." Tony stopped yelling. "Man. You and that other Man are the last of your kind. The very last. And... and I am the last Android." He stared at it. He had known it, he and Bill had said it. But now someone -- something -- else was saying it, and it sounded horrible. The thought caught him, swarmed over his brain, ran down the corridors of his mind, shrieking. He put out his tongue to wet his lips. "I had to get away from... other Man. I am sorry I had to hurt IF you. We must talk. Android and Man should not destroy each other. wShould not fight. Both kinds are gone: destroyed because they did not talk, did not think. We three have no reason to hate, to kill." It paused, waited. When Tony said nothing it went on, in his voice: "Other Man -- Bill? would never talk. We must. And I am not interested in Bill Jackson." I t had listened to them, he realized. It had been out there, listening to us talk, this poor earnest creature, he sympathized -- no, empathized -- with it and its efforts, its earnestness. He made a face and blinked as he moved his head and it informed him it did not wish to be moved. A not-quite-human Android hand rose to touch his forehead where tawny hair bubbled over. He tried not to flinch. "Your head hurts... I am sorry. I do not want to hurt you or to be hurt. I did not bring you here to torture you." "Didn't you?" It wasn't much and it sounded pretty silly, he knew, but at least he'd said something. "Oh no!" The asymmetrical head wagged. "No! Androids are not sadists."  "Look, I've been fighting Androids seven years. That isn't the way I've heard it." "Propaganda," the Android said. "Our leaders lied to us. Your leaders lied to you. Enemies are not told truth about each other. No, we are not sadists, not even cruel. Man and Android were -- are much alike. But not that much alike." Ouch, Tony Baker thought, and ' he looked away and swallowed. "Look, I said I've been fighting seven years. In war. I was a soldier, then a pilot. I've killed Androids. I've killed a lot of Androids. If you're going to kill me, let's do it." It shook its head again. "I have killed, too: Men. It was hard, killing gods. But not now. I will not kill you. I could have. Remember I could have killed you there and then the other... Bill." True enough, Tony Baker thought. "All right -- what are you called?" "Androids have no names. I am SA-#-#." It touched the numbers on the pocket of the green uniformblouse it wore. Men had learned it did no good to brand Androids; their fantastic body-control threw off even tattooing. "All right, then, SA. That's no name, but we'll worry about it later. Sally, maybe. All right: we're at war. Our leaders declared war. And neither you nor I have been mustered out." He frowned. He felt silly, but it seemed somehow to need to be done: "As a representative of the government of the United States and of Earth -- the only representative, bar one -- I declare truce. No. I declare peace." ' The smile was horrible, and he tried again not to show his revulsion for the pitiful surrogate-woman. "As only representative of Android race of Earth, I, too, declare peace." E yes met for a moment; skyblue human eyes and greenish almost-human eyes. Then the android reached around and untied him. He rubbed his wrists, sitting up, arching his aching back. It sat back, watching him. Doglike, he thought. Dogs worship with their eyes. Cats stare. We're the cats. "Do you know how much it hurts us, Man, to war with Men? We have always stood in awe of Men. Living gods who created us. We could not forget that." "Yet you were able to go to war, to kill men. To exterminate them." He choked on the words, trying not to sound accusing... "We did not begin that way. We fought because we had to. Man began to fear us and tried to limit us so as to hold us as slaves. But he had given us the power to reproduce, just as he did. Believe me, Man, please believe me, androids had no thought of wiping out Man. I think if we had thought that we would not have fought. It terrified us to realize we were causing Men to die." And the creature shuddered. Tony stared. "Men are the creators," it said, in that same quiet voice, the sad voice of Tony Baker. Suddenly he realized it. "That's my voice!" It nodded. "We are not creative; we are imitative. Man could not give us creativeness... or did not. Would you rather that I used his voice?" "No... and call me by my name: Tony Baker. You are a female; use a female voice." It frowned, and he realized it was trying to remember. "Uh -- movies... television... Stella Steele! You know Stella Steele?" It looked at him frowning, then beamed and nodded. "Yes," Stella Steele's sensuously childlike voice said, and he had to gasp. "Lord! That's her voice." He thought about what he'd tried not to think about. Women. Stella Steele. He remembered her fabulous clothes, her smile, her glorious figure; remembered, too, how she'd looked in the uniform the night she appeared on every screen everywhere, America's successor to Bara and Harlow and Mdnroe and Loren and Nickel and Vinci. Uniformed, golden hair tumbling from under a field-cap, exhorting all the men of the world -- her subjects -- to fight and fight on for their girls and wives and mothers; and for Stella Steele, their dreamgirl. He shook his head violently, trying to blot out that image, trying nott to think of the sad announcement amid tapping drums and against a black backdrop, the announcement that Stella Steele had been killed in the Battle of Palo Alto. It had been worse than the deaths of the presidents; Tony Baker and his cohorts had not been fighting for the presidents. He shook his head again, blinked tearily, and said nostalgically : "We could have built a fine civilization together." His words stumbled as they emerged. "We still can, Tonybaker," Stella Steele's voice said from the apparition in the cave. Silence. Silence broken finally by the not-quite-human creation of Man, as she folded her arms beneath womanish -- and yet uninteresting -- breasts. "Men... and androids... were... are... interfertilc." 'here was silence again. He A blinked. "And that's why you brought me here." "Yes." The eyes were intensely appealing, pleading. "No." He shook his head. "No. I'm sorry...but no, I can't." The android with the voice of the world's dead goddess of love leaned back, sorrow showing in both its pitiful face and lumpy body. "Then you are the last Man. Can you not see, Man, god, what I see? We do one of three things. We kill each other, we live apart and die and leave Earth to the birds and the insects and the lesser animals. Or we -- join -- to bring Man back to Earth." Her voice rose a trifle as he started to interrupt. "Perhaps our offspring would be as strong, as intelligent as the Android... but with Man's creative potential. Still Man -- but a new Man. A superior Man!" "No." "Androids -- " it was feeling for words, frowning its cerebral process -- "Androids were denied something else. We do not possess the high degree of esthetic appreciation Man does. It does not enter our minds, usually. But is it -- this?" The misshapen hand gestured at the misshapen body, the misshapen head and gynecomorphous features. "The thought of mating with me? It means only shallow physical revulsion?" "Look," Tony Baker said, turning away, feeling ashamed and terribly in the wrong but unable to help himself. "Call it shallow if you will, but it's there. Yes. That's why it can't be." Now his voice was as sad as hers. "Men had a saying about beauty," that marvelous voice said behind him, and he shivered. "It was only skin deep, you said. So is ugliness, Tonybaker." He nodded his tortured head, ashamed to turn and face the sad creature behind him. He heard its shuffling movements. Irrational, he thought, unrational, he told himself, and yeah, he told himself, but knowing that doesn't help any. Again, unable to control it he felt the shiver dance up his back. "You cannot forget?" "Forget? If I were blind, perhaps. No, not even then. I can feel, touch. That esthetic sense you mentioned applies to all the senses of man. We can see, and feel, and hear, and... just now I hear Stella Steele. I know she is dead, but I hear Stella Steele. That sense is satisfied. Lord, it's sated, staring at the wall and just hearing the voice like this. But I can still see, feel, touch, I can still smell -- " "Then if you cannot change your mind, we are lost, both of us, and both our races. But if this is superficial, Tonybaker... if it exists in the senses, as you say..." H er tone made him turn. "My God!" was ripped from his throat as he stumbled back painfully against a rock wall, dumbfounded by the sight that greeted his eyes. She smiled, a gentle curving up of the ends of pink lips, a crinkling of the smooth flesh around wide green eyes, a wrinkling of a small, unfinished-appearing little nose. She put her head on one side and blonde IF hair swirled; hair the color of straw and honey and the setting sun. She raised a hand -- a delicate, tapering hand with smooth, undying flesh, to the straining fabric of the breast of her blouse; fabric straining and shining smoothly, tightened by the taut-pushing elliptical shapes beneath. She shifted one leg, and the uniform slacks were a tense sheen over round thighs and Vargas calves. She was Stella Steele. IV B ill still slept, snoring, lying peacefully on his back near the fire. Tony stood over him, watching the magnificence of Stella Steele's back moving away into the trees. She disappeared, and he looked down at Bill. With the bayoneted rifle clutched in both hands Tony watched the rise and fall of Bill's massive chest. He'll never understand, Tony thought. I'll either have to kill him or just -- leave. And dear God, how do I do either? This guy saved my life! With a wrenching jerk of his arms he tossed the weapon away and dropped to one knee." "Bill." "Umph?" Bill awoke with a suddenness that brought him to a wide-eyed sitting position, his head snapping about in search of danger. Finally he looked at Tony. "You didn't wake me for my watch!" he accused. "It's nearly dawn." He scrabbled around, getting himself out of the sleeping-bag. "I've been thinking. Bill." "Yeah, you sure have. You let the fire go out." Bill stretched his big frame while Tony checked the fire; it wasn't out. "Thinking about what?" Bill asked. "Bill, there's you, and there's me... and that's all. Except for the Android." "I'm listening. Sport." There was a warning note in Bill's voice. Tread lightly, it said; and Tony trod lightly"We both know -- we all three know that men and Androids can produce offspring. And -- " "Uh-huh. A half-breed. A little monster, not a man, not an A. And what's the percentage. Sport? They'd probably be sterile hybrids to boot!" "Bill, we don't know. Either the human race dies with you and me or we try and keep it going -- through that Android. Suppose there was a kid. Or ten. Suppose they were men with an Android's strength and reasoning power? They'd be better men than you and I are." "I say bull! And I say this, too, Tony: which of us is going to impregnate that wartfaced monster and which one of us is going to hold the bayonet on her? Look, I'll take that part." Dammit! Bill meant that both ways Tony thought; he'd rather kill. "Bill, it would beat living in an unpopulated world and knowing that when we die it all dies. There's no more men. And no more Androids, either." "You got it for that goblin, huh? Well, I haven't. And I be damned if I'll let you. Don't try to feed me that human race stuff. You just need a woman -- or the nearest thing. That thing. He waved at the woods. "That's not true, damn you! I -- " B ill knocked him down with one stride and one swing. Tony looked up at him. "Now just what the hell..." Bill Jackson picked up the bayoneted rifle and flipped it into his left hand and reached up to his shirt pocket with his right. "Here, I'll show you something." He tossed a small leather case to the other man. Tony opened it. There were two pictures, two smiling faces: a woman's and Bill's. He looked up again. "Mom," Bill said, in a voice that was quiet and harsh. "My mother. Dad died when I was seven, but she raised me by herself. She was a strong woman, bless her. Stronger than Dad ever was. I loved her... I owed her ever#hing. Would vou like to hear how she died, Tony?" Tony stored the revelation away in a corner of his mind. "No, but Bill -- " "That tell you why I'll never make peace? y I'll kill the last damned Android if I can -- and kill you before I'll let you filthy yourself with it?" "Bill, I -- no! Look out!" Too late. The heavy rock the beautiful gifl held and swung with one delicate hand crashed into the back  of Bill Jackson's head with a chunking, squishing sound. His eyes were wide and surprised as he stiffened and jerked and toppled forward toward Tony. He smashed to the ground and Tony saw that blood and gray brainstuff were streaming from the back of a head split like a ripe watermelon. "Damn you!" Tony got to his knees and searched, his eyes blinded by tears, for the rifle Bill had dropped. He grasped it and she jumped back. "I'm sorry," she said. "You said he'd never give in. Why did you have to come back?" She was crying a woman's tears. "You heard what he said! He'd have Jcilled both of us!" "Damn you! Damn you Bill, damn you Stella -- " Tony caught a deep breath and said very quietly: "Come here. Android." His voice was low and ugly. She shook her head -- and he made a rush for her. She eluded him. Android reflexes still driving the movie-star body, running across the clearing. Suddenly he stopped; she turned to look back at him, tears glistening on her cheeks. "You will change your mind. After you have buried your worst enemy, you will change your mind. And when you do, you'll be able to find me." "Never! Get away and stay away! If you stay away from me maybe I cn persuade myself not to find you and kill you." She shook her head and smiled a tiny smile and golden-blonde hair flew. "You'll change your mind, Tonybaker." And she was gone. The beautiful, beautiful Android was gone and Bill was gone, and Tony stood there, sobbing. IF V S he met him at the mouth of the cave three days later. They looked at each other in silence. He hadn't wanted to come. He still didn't want to do it. But he was a man. Bill was dead. He had to be and think and act a man. Slowly she raised her feminine hands, lovely, empty hands. Slowly he raised his, palms up and empty. "I came," Tony said. "For a new beginning." She nodded. "I have waited for a new beginning." She flashed a beauty queen's smile at him and he swallowed. "What shall I call you?" She shrugged. And one magnificently molded breast bounded and shuddered. "You need a name... SA for Synthetic Android... silly redundance... Sally, maybe... no, Synthy. Synthetic Synthy." She smiled. "That's better than Sinny," she said, and she laughed, a girl's lovely laugh, bubbling from her throat like a silvery spring from a mountainside. Tony Baker raised a hand to touch her face. She jumped back. He frowned, hesitated, then .took a step forward, his eyes asking a question. "I -- I'm changed, remember? I'm not Sa-#-Q any more, but I'm not Stella Steele either. I'm -- I'm a girl... as if I were just born. I'm sorry. Wait. Please wait -- count to ten. Then come in." She went into the cave. He watched her walk, sighing, thinking about her and himself and Bill and what it was to be a man. To be Man. Then he counted on, to twenty, to be sure, and went into the cave and around the corner into the little rock room where she had ceased -- outwardly -- to be a thing. He stumbled. He caught himself with one hand against cool stone and looked down. He had stumbled over her clothing. He stood still, waiting for his eyes to acclimate to dimness. She knelt on the grassy pallet -- no, there was new grass there now, not sour and brown -- where he'd Iain, bound, three nights ago. Her hair streamed down over naked shoulders. She was exquisitely beautiful. She raised her arms, and he went to her and dropped to his knees and slipped his arms around her warm, soft waist. He reached back and slipped the bayonet from his boot and shoved it very deftly between her shoulderblades. Her scream became a gurgle in his ear as she lunged against him, arching her back, trying to escape the searing steel tearing away her life. Her arms tightened about him, her hands clutched at him; clutched and rose to his throat -- then she shuddered and fell back, pulling him with her. He felt his arm break just as he felt unhuman fingers begin to close. He screamed. Once. ' #They -- they delight in blooder would have killed him; the younger man wanted him dead and wanted her, but killed her. Unsane, unsane!# #Hush! Do you realize about whom you are transmitting? They are savages, barbarians, children. They are ruled by their processes of reproduction and elimination and elaborate codes of honor and justice. Do you think we burst fullblown upon the world as we are nowhere? Of course not, idiot. They are primitives. Now cease transmitting while  make changes, try again... we have made mistakes, and I am not so small as to deny it. We failed to take into consideration their primitive feelings about physical appearances. A stupid mistake.# Buttons, relays, levers; a dial. #There. Now the Android will retain the form she just possessed; and she will assume human thought-characteristics as well. And there: an elaborate pro#It were better we could change their minds.# #Sacrilege! You know I shall not report you, hut you must learn to control your transmissions; even your cerebrations. -- Yes, I admit that would be more effective, make the job easier. Do you notice how the big ' man thinks; he is certain he is right once he has a thought. He is immutable. Once he has a thought he has the tenacity of a lower animal; a blind bundle of prejudices and wrong-thinking. But there can be no tampering with Men, and there can be no memories for them; when TimeSpace shifts they do not remember. Because what happened before the shift did not happen. There are stray tendrils of memory. This is as unavoidable as certain changes; you noticed their camp was slightly different. What we are doiny is dangerous. If the fabric rips... # #lt is intact? We try again?# #We are did will try again. But the drain of energy in retracing is tremendous, and shifts occur... there! Only a slight reversal this time... the longer ones are dangerous. The TimeSpace fabric might tear so badly we can not reweave it.# #And if that happens... # #We (have) discuss(ed) that. And do not worry about their calling us by name; it means nothing. They do not know. There!# VI CC'That tell you why I'll never A make peace? Why I'll kill the last damned Android if I can? And kill you before I'll let you filthy yourself with it? "Bill, I -- d'you mind if I get up?" He shrugged, and Tony stood. "Bill, I understand, but we're two different people. We think differently." He strolled across the clearing. then turned and raised a hand. "I think I'll be leaving now, Bill." "You what? Are you crazy?" Tonv Baker shrugged. "I might's well find out. You stay here and IF eat at yourself, Bill. Me, I'm going to try and make peace with that Android out there. If I can." He decided against saying anything further about her, about what she had become. Bill lowered the rifle. "I won't let you go. Sport." "Going to kill me?" Bill hesistated. "You'll have to. Bill. And what's the gain in that? You'll just be alone... and what've you accomplished?" "I'll have saved you." "Bill, I don't think you're interested in saving me. Not from anything, anyhow. You've just got a blind spot, like some people had in the last century, down South." "That's a lie! You're a man, my friend! I just can't let you -- " "Let me what? Attempt the one thing that's sensible?" B ill Jackson narrowed his eyes and turned his head slightly, looking at the other man from the edges of his eyes. "You've seen her, haven't you? While I was asleep. That's why you didn't wake me for my watch. You weren't here." Tony nodded without speaking. "I won't allow it, Tony!" "You can't stop it. Bill. So long. Bill." And then the big man lunged, leaping across the clearing with the bayonet fixed. Tony dived to one side, leaving a leg behind for Bill to stumble over. Tony scrambled to his feet and slammed one foot down on the rifle barrel. For a moment they were still, the fallen man staring at the other one. "You're not a bad guy. Bill," Tony said. "But..." "I'll kill you," Bill Jackson told him, very quietly, without attempting to rise. He wasn't stupid; the younger man's lithe agility and speed matched his big strength,' and he knew it. Tony Baker shook ' his head. "You'll get over it." Then as Bill started to move the beautiful blonde who had been an Android moved in fast and looped a vine around his legs. They left him with the bayonet stuck in the ground like a marker, knowing he could get at it to free himself. "Sure she's great-looking, Tony! Sure she's beautiful!" Bill shouted, and his voice was almost a sob. "But she's still not a she; she's an it, an Android. She's tricking you! She's worse than a woman!" Then, as they went on, leaving him, his voice descended and he said very quietly, "I'll get you. I'll get you both." And he did, three days later, in a deadfall he had arranged not far from the cave. #ls there no way of changing that sick Man's hatred for Androids?# #There is not. And that is not, by far, the only problem. The younger Man has seen it, or at least begun to see it. Can you not remember the tortured sexuality of these Men? Bill Jackson hates hated will hate Androids, yes; but too, he cannot bear to have Tony leave him. But now there is no way to change him. It is unthinkable that we deliberately inter f ere d) with Men. Such an action is irrevocable and unforgiveably heretical.# #But the fabric is stretched dangerously thin. Is there no way?# #There is, I believe. A way which does not too dangerously harm the fabric or expend too much energy. We are were will be on dangerous ground now. Some things may change. It is possible there may be some... overlap. Not memory. But acquired knowledge. We must remember the delicate mental balance of these primitives. But... # Dials and relays and buttons and a lever and a final button. T ony picked up the rifle again, rose slowly, and took a cautious step back toward the campfire -- And swung at a definite sound behind him. As his jaw muscles relaxed, dropping his mouth open, so did the muscles of his arm go limp. Peering at him around the plane, clearly vteible ia a pale corridor of moonlight, was a face. A girl's lovely face, framed by a mass of pale hair. She smiled, smiled and bkoned silently. He glanced back at BiU: snorifig. The rifle with its ugly steel snout ready, he went to her. Jt had to be the Android. But this was a girl. A beautiful girl! Had it -- she -- could she -- She removed his doubts by an ingenuous question: "You like me now, Man?" He spoke across six feet of space. "Now? You're the Android?" She shook her head and goldenblonde hair swirled. "We should not fight. You are the last Man. I am the last... female. When we die, there is nothing. No Men... no Androids. Do you want that?" The enormity of It fell upon him. Not for the first time, no; but in its full implications, yes, for the first time. To the best of his knowledge she -- it? She was right. There were no others. There was Bill Jackson and there was Tony Baker and there was an Android... who was also a beautiful and extremely desirable girl. He had never seen an A look this way; it was hard to remember what she was. Where was the awful difference for which billions had died? His voice was a hoarse whisper. "What -- what are you called?" "Cynthe," she said this time, remembering what he did not. The name plucked at his mind, sending questioning tendrils into his memory banks; why did it seem familiar? She took a careful step toward him. "You may put the point of the bayonet -- another step -- "just here," she said, and she raised one finger to touch one marvelous breast. "I shall die without resisting death." Another step. "Or you may come with me, away from him," and she took another step. Now she stood but a pace away, her hands at her sides, waiting within easy reach of the sliver of steel at the end of his rifle. He lifted it, watched its deadly gleam, watched the enticeing rise and fall of her chest. IF He dropped the rifle butt to the trail. Then as she turned and walked away, without looking back, he followed her into the trees. T he sun found Tony Baker studying the sleeping girl beside him, her hair a bright splash on the grass. He chewed his lip. He gazed at her, revolted by what she was, what she really was, yet not really revolted at all, but torn by his male need for a woman. Once satisfied, that need would return again, today, tonight, tomorrow, forming an addiction; and it would grow worse. Androids, she had told him, were adept at remolding their pliant flesh. They possessed no specific facial features or even bodies of their own. They had been created from human plasma so that they were sort of mutated human stock, slightly closer to Man than Cro-Magnon had been. They were sturdier, more adaptable, than their creator, and imitative of his clever inventiveness. His valiant attempt at scientific detachment and the hodgepodge of scientific phrases did not work. He was looking down at a sleeping beauty, a lovely and fine-bodied girl. Her only fault lay in the fact that she was perhaps too perfect. Even in repose, sleeping peacefully on her back, the fantastic muscular structure of the Android held her breasts nearly erect. And they would remain that way, he knew, still firm, years from now. Strange... her Unhumanity was reflected in her overperfection. He did not miss the irony. What would they do? Would they just start walking, leaving Bill, leaving this place, forgetting, or pretending to forget? Would they, could they, live idyllically and raise babies? He did not know. And if she did conceive, if it were possible, what form would thedr child take? Would it represent the best of both man and Android? Or the than his creativity, perhaps? Would it be Man, or Android or Mandroid? He did not know. Would this represent the end of creativity? But otherwise it was the end of everything. He rose to his knees, studying her, and there came another thought. Could man trust Android? And then the obvious corollary, equally answerless: Could Android trust Man? There was fearful risk for both of them. She must be aware of it as I am, he thought. Each of us has had the opportunity to kill the other. Would this change? He stood, frowning. S he awoke. Her eys snapped open, her head turned, and wideawake eyes looked into his. She smiled and held up a woman's soft hand. He bent and took it and helped her up. He pulled her against him, holding her, looking at her, looking at and into and through her face. Then he stepped back, holding her at arm's length. With something akin to prescience (woman's intuition, transmitted to the almost-woman?), she understood and backed away. She met his gaze, not i;;oving or speaking to interrupt his ifioughts. The dark spot appeared on her bare left breast at the same instant as the loud cracking sound slashed at his eardrums. She was hurled back, sprawling, and blood started bubbling from the sudden black hole. "It -- it is through the heart," she said, in a low, straining voice. "Uncanny markmanship or uncanny luck. Man's luck. I -- I cannot live. I'm sorry... so sorry. I wanted to love you... we could have..." Her mouth stopped moving as her eyes ceased seeing. He turned to watch Bill Jackson running toward him from the forest, the rifle ready in his hands for another shot. He started up the grassy hill Tony and Cynthe had climbed, hand in hand, the night before. "Damn close call, Sport! Lucky lor you I found you -- and that I been saving these three bullets in my pocket. I couldn't've got up here in time. Lord, she was less than ten feet away!" He reached Tony's side and heaved a deep breath. "Look, next time you decide to take an early morning stroll without taking me along -- don'tr He grinned a savior-hero's grin and then looked down at the girl's body, sprawled on its back, one knee bent. "Whew! Got a cigarette? I sure could use one." "No Bill. They're gone; we smoked the last one." "So it changes its shape, huh? Tried to trick you. But that Android strength was still there." He shook his head. "You'd have found out, boy! Embracing that would've been like hugging a boa constrictor!" He shook his head again. "Yeah, they change... some woman, huh? Wish we could find a real woman like this -- this dirty Android trickster!" Suddenly he took a step forward and lunged, hooking the bayonet's point in the soft belly, ripping it up in a red-welling channel. Tony watched the broad, tense back, listened to the other man's cursing. Do you. Bill? Do 'you wish we'd find a girl, a real girl? Would you be as vicious and gleeful in what you're doing if she were still in her old shape, warty and hideous. Bill old buddy? He shuddered, realized there were tears in his eyes, and raised a hand to brush them away. # A gain. They have done it again! So close, so close this time. The young one is won; somehow he seems to retain partial knowledge from one jump to the next... for all we know he may have fertilized her.# #Yes, again. So close, indeed; weare were will he almost there. This time... # Buttons. A dial. Levers. Another button. #This time she will remember everything, including her death -- deaths. And she will try a totally new approach, with a more original face; the exact face of Stella Steele is dangerous... # IF # #T will keep the name," Cynthe X thought. "Cynthe... synthetic Cynthe. He gave it to me. He did not mean to kill me. He would not have done it. It was the other Man... it is always the other Man." This time the Android had reacted with no surprise to her new situation: It was obvious that every time someone was killed, things... changed. Changed just enough so that it was all right again, so that there was another chance. She wondered how many chances there were, how many times she must know the terrible pain of death. But she had to have this new chance. She had to succeed, somehow. She knew but one goal, one purpose, one mission: Mankind. She sat, hands locked girlishly around her knees, thinking with the high intelligence Man had given her. Should she find some way to kill the other man, secretly, so that the other... Tonybaker... did not know, so that it appeared to be an accident? Or should she try again to avoid him? But eluding him had failed, twice. He fought before he listened, with his poor brain, all tense and twisted up so that she could actually feel it. And it hurt. Was there no possibility of making peace with him? What was needed, she knew, was another male, a male of his sort. Or a special kind of female. But the other one... Tony; she rolled the name over her tongue, savoring its taste as a connoisseur savored good brandy. He was uncertain, torturing himself mentally, trying to come to a decision, trying to shake off all he had learned both before and duriny the terrible war between her race and his. He did not really w'ant to kill. He was less driven by unthinking prejudice, possessed of more insight, more empathy. And he had need of her body. Her pink lips curved up at the corners as she remembered, thinking that were she truly a woMan, she would erupt in gooseflesh. At the thought her arms and legs prickled. She smiled at the thousands of tiny eruptions. Anything you can do, we can do better, she thought, and voluntarily. She did not know herself how she felt about mating with a Man. But if she could conceive by him, Man or Mandroid, it did not matter. If this could happen, and she was by then uncertain, after the long conditioned distrust and hate of war, she could take the child away and raise it alone. But how... A direct frontal assault! In daylight. A new day, this new body -- yes! Cynthe stretched, deliciously, and lay back. Yes. Tomorrow. The last two men in the world sat on the bank of a trickle of water not big enough to be distinguished by the name creek. Across the bank there was a clearing in the Oregon forest; across the clearing lay the crumpled wreckage of a small aircraft, a twisted hull of blue and gleaming silver. The last two men in the world were discussing the future, the immediate future. There was no long-term future. They had built a leanto, and now they had decided to build a cabin, there at the east end of the campsite which had become home. They smoked, handing a cigarette back and forth carefully; Tony's pack, now common property, contained only nine more. "Tell you something else," the bigger man said. "Just in case we're not the last -- just in case some As survived -- let's pull up enough grass to stuff our sleeping bags. That way one of us can sleep while the other -- Tony!" Bill Jackson pointed, bigeyed, across the clearing. "Look!" Tony Baker looked. Then he stood, stretching his wiry suppleness beside the huge strength of Bill Jackson. Emerging from the tree beside the S-#'s wreckage was a girl; a slender blonde girl with swaying hips and a bouncy chest beneath a blouse and shorts made from what had been a uniform of some sort. "She -- she looks a little like Stella Steele," Tony said. "That Hollywood harlot!" Bill raised a hand to Tony's arm. "Wait -- she may not be what she looks like, Sport." At Tony's questioning look the older man said: "Android, Tony. They can change their appearance. Remember their tricks during the war. We'd better be careful; have to figure a way to make sure she isn't one of them." T ony nodded, feeling the automatic revulsion which was a reflex action to the word Android. But the revulsion was balanced by what he saw; the delightful swaying walk of a woman, the delightful jiggling of a female superstructure. A woman... how long had it been since he'd seen a woman? Funny... had he? He felt a... a half-memory... He watched her approach, halfhearing Bill: "We'll have to capture her, stay wary of her, test her, somehow." "Uh-huh." Tony didn't take his eyes off the approaching girl. "Capturing her looks like no problem. Bill. She's coming right to us. Lord, she's smiling, too. Look at that! She doesn't look as if she's afraid of "Yeah. That doesn't seem natural, does it? I mean if she was a girl, a real girl, she'd either be halfafraid of two men, or she'd be just the opposite. Running to us. She just looks -- unconcerned. Like an A trying to trick us." Tony smiled. "Well, it's a cinch she shouldn't be unconcerned. Boy, look at her!" They did, Tony wondering if Bill wanted the girl to be an A... why? He hadn't known Bill long. The big man had been there, miraculously, to pull him out of the plane, to nurse him, watch over him while he raved, with the ugly gash in his head. The big man possessed tenderness, Tony knew. But he was also possessed by what amounted to a pathological hatred of the Androids. They looked at her. She paused a few feet from the stream's opposite bank, appearing suddenly uncertain as they failed to move or call out. She looked from Tony to Bill and back again, smiling a little girl's smile from a little girl's face above what was definitely not a little girl's body. wide-open. She raised a hesitant hand in greeting. Slowly, equally hesitantly, Tony lifted his hand in silent reply. "Caution, boy, caution," Bill said quietly. "Bill, she isn't even armed Tony said, and his voice sounded plaintive, even to himself. "Prove that," Bill Jackson said. "What can you be sure of, where an Android's concerned?" " an A's concerned." Bill did not respond directly to that. "You talk to her," he said. "Just talk to her. Leave the rest to me." "But..." "Talk to her, Tony, dammit!" T ony hesistated, then raised his voice. "Hi. We -- uh, we thought we were the last people on Earth. Are -- are there more of you?" Now thafs a dumb thing to say, he told himself. "No. No. No more. I -- I thought I was the last. Thank God I'm not." Again her smile dazzled him. Fumbling, boyishly shy, he introduced himself and Bill. "I'm from Oregon, too," she said. Shesounded vague, uncertain. "Do -- do you have anything hot to drink?" "Together," Bill said, and he gave Tony a little push down the bank. Behind him, as he scrambled down the slope and hopped the stream, Bill stood, pretending looseness and unconcern. But the rifle was ready in his hands. Tony knew that Bill could move fast for a big man with a barrel chest and a belly going gutty. He climbed the other bank and stopped at its summit as she backed away a couple of steps. He heard Bill's boots clump as the other man bounded across the water and climbed up beside him. "Yeah," Bill told hen. "We've got some acorn coffee -- if you don't mind an occasional worm." He grinned his big grin and walked toward her and on, his left hand hand rising to her shoulder to guide her along side him. Tony took three long steps to come up on her other side, wishing he'd thought of putting a hand on her shoulder. Dammit, he couldn't now. From the corner of his eye he noticed what no man would fail to notice. She was a busty girl wearing a rather masculine green uniform-blouse with a lighter circle on her upper arm where a corps patched had been removed. One poked-out flap pocket had lost its button. Her shorts were fringed on one leg where the hem had frayed. He swallowed. She was even more stunning seen close. She was young, maybe his age, maybe twenty or younger, with very fair, very clear, smooth skin and a sort of funny nose. It was so little it appeared unfinished, cute,, and an outpoked lower lip that looked at once babyish and sensuous. Bill removed the bayonet from the rifle and pushed it carefully into IF his boot-top. The rifle he handed to Tony. Then, without turning his back to the girl, he built up the fire and hung the pot on the wooden andirons they had rigged day before yesterday. "We're just naturally wondering how you came to be here and who you are," he said, in the same casual tone he'd have used to remark on the weather. Tony knew the casual manner was false, and he reminded himself that no matter how good she looked with her long sun-colored hair Bill was right; she might be an A. And -- and if she were? He frowned at that thought. "Are you?" Her voice reflected the same unconcern as Bill's. Tony couldn't help smiling. He sobered as Bill swung from the fire and stared at her. "Yes. We'd like to be sure you're not on Android." IX S he returned his gaze, wide-eyed and female, her lips almost but not quite smiling, as if the thought were so silly as to be ludicrous. "You think I'm an Android?" Bill was suddenly unsure of himself, and Tony couldn't help an inward smile. He said nothing as Bill nodded. "You could be." She raised her eyebrows, made a moue, and nodded her head on one side. "Now thafs not very flattering, Mister Bill Jackson!" Her lips still looked as though they might be trying to laugh at him. "I've always thought I looked pretty much like a girl." Like a spectator at a tennis-match, Tony looked to Bill for his reply, then back to the girl as she spoke again. "May I sit down?" She was looking down at the two carefully smoothed logs they had positioned by the fire today. "Sure," Bill said, "but first tell us your name..." He trailed off, frowning, obviously nonplussed as she parked her pert rump on one of the logs. She smiled up at him and lifted one round shoulder which had an interesting effect on her blouse. "Cynthe." "Cynthia? Cynthia what?" 'CyntheT she said again, and spelled it. "That's all I remember. And I'm afraid I can't tell you how I got here, either." Tony came alive. "Amnesia, Bill? The war... surely an Android would have a better story than that." "She doesn't look like she had that kind of experience," Bill said. "As to that other: you thought of it. An Android's smart enough to know you'd think that -- and have a story so unbelievable we'd buy it because it's unbelievable. Like you just did." How logical a man is when he wants to believe something, Tony Baker thought. But again Bill was right. Tony couldn't decide if the big man were smarter than he, if he were stupid or in love or something, or if Bill just wanted her to be an Android. "It's a pretty name," Tony said, and he received the reward he'd sought: a bright flash of smile. "Um," Bill said, "Sounds like a showgirl's name." He watched her as she turned wide green eyes and the ingenuous smile on him. "You a showgirl?" He had hunkered down and pulled the bayonet from his boot. He squatted there, idly thumbing it. "B!" Tony tried to keep from flushing; knew he was, felt his face warming. B ut the girl was unperturbed. "I guess that is a compliment," she said, and then she frowned, a puckering of a smooth brow. "But I honestly don't know. I might have been -- I don't know." Her face brightened. "# know -- I could try to dance or sing to find out -- or do a strip-tease!" Her face was radiant. Tony stared, thinking about the strip, trying not to eye the four buttons on her blouse. "Nah," Bill said, quickly. "Forget it. That wouldn't prove anything." And Tony thought: damn jackass! Let her sing or dance or -- he swallowed again. "Tony," Bill said, still looking at the girl. "Androids don't give a damn if they're naked or not. From what she just said, she doesn't either." "Ah, she was kidding," Tony said, and wondered if she had been. "Look: if she were one of them, would she come here like this? An A doesn't have to go to these lengths. If she were one she could have just waited till tonight and killed us." "Maybe she intends to," Bill said. "What's the first thing you can remember, Cynthe?" She thought about it, pursing her lips. "Smoke. I smelled smoke. I came toward it -- and came here." She nodded at the campfire and waited for the next question. "That's all? Hell, don't you remember yesterday? Or this morning?" She shook her cloud of blonde hair. Tony thought of something for the first time. "Bill, how'd you know I wasn't one? You didn't put me through a question-and-answer session." Bill looked at him with a crafty, superior smile. "I know. I tested you. You were unconscious, remember? You've still got the lump on your head. And the scratch on your chest." Tony nodded. "So? What d'ya mean, tested me?" "Okay, Sport, I'll tell you." Bill looked him directly in the eyes. "That bump came from the crash. The scratch on your chest came from this" He raised the foot-andmore of tempered steel and waggled it. "You cut me? While I was out? Why?" "Tony, Androids can control their bodily processes, just like they can make themselves look any way they want. If you'd been an A you'd have healed immediately, and without any scab or scar. You're wearing your proof right now. I saw the scab this morning." And Bill turned and fixed the girl with the same steady gaze. Suddenly Tony wished he hadn't asked. There was a long silence. IF C ynthe broke it. "Tony, that's boiling. Could I have a cup now?" The smile flashed, went away again as she turned to Bill. "Bill. Would you mind heating that bayonet? I don't want to get infected." "Cynthe!" Tony jerked around and the dark mud of surrogate coffee sloshed to hiss in the fire. "Bill! No!" Bill hadn't moved. He was frowning. "Now an Android would never suggest that. Only a human would But an A would be smart enough to think just that... figger we'd acenough..." His frown vanished as he smiled. He rose. "Okay, Missy, ni heat the bayonet." And he turned and picked up the rifle and affixed the blade to it. Then holding the stock carefully, he pushed a couple of inches of bayonet into the fire. Tony stared at him. He was startled at the way Bill's mind worked. The big man wasn't stupid. He'd have made a good general -- or a chess player. Tony had practically heard the wheels turning as Bill had thought, then guessed, then second-guessed, then -- he jerked his head around s the girl spoke, next to him. "May I have that, Tony? I need some fortification." Her fingers touched his hand as she took the steaming cup of acorn juice. Her hand was cool, soft. He wondered if it were always cool, or if she were about ten times as scared as she was acting. She smiled briefly at him over the cup's lip as she raised it and bent her head to blow a cloud of steam. She watched it rise and eddy and dissipate. Then she walked over to stand across the fire from Bill, watching him turn the bayonet. Bill Jackson looked up at her. "Look, uh, Cynthe -- nothing personal, right? It's just that we've got to be sure. And maybe you don't even know. Maybe you're hypnotized. To make you actually believe you're not an Android, I mean. Until -- until something triggers you to remember and attack us. Like the moon, for instance. See?" She nodded in silence, raising the cup to sip, her eyes on the pink blade. It's about the color of her lips, Tony thought, and he watched it glow redder. He tried to think of something to say, some way to stop the test. But he couldn't think of a way. She was all right. She had to be. He watched the bayonet become a cherry red. They did not speak, all three of them staring fixedly at the sliver of sharp steel as its color crept along the spectrum from red into orange-yellow, then yellow. Bill stared, turning it in the fire with the same care he'd have exercised if the bayonet had spitted a fresh young rabbit. The blade was white. Bill removed it from the fire and looked at it as if hypnotized. He raised his eyes to the girl. "Any bugs on this have gone to meet their honorable ancestors by now," he said, and Tony thought: The bastard's trying to be light about it. He immediately felt embarrassed, and a little ashamed. This test had not been Bill's idea. Or had it? T he girl nodded and walked around the fire to sit down on the log again, with some interesting jiggles. Tony wished he'd been standing behind her. He threw the thought out of his mind angrily. He tried to decide if he wanted to watch or not. He did. He watched in horrible fascination as Bill rose and walked over to Cynthe. He dropped to a squatting position again, in front of her. He held the bayonet toward her. Its whitish point was less than a foot from her. She stared at it. Tony waited, forgetting to breathe. Then she tilted her head back and swallowed the rest of the miserable coffee with a shudder. She set the cup down and ignored the bayonet, looking instead into Bill's eyes. "Has it occurred to you that if an Android can control, consciously, its body, it -- I -- might decide not to heal right up? Surely control works both ways." "Hey, Bill, that's right!" Tony's voice was loud. "It wouldn't prove a thing." Bill shook his head. "Now you got me wondering about you again. Missy. You had me convinced. But now you're trying to get out of it. Yeah, what you say's possible. But mybe not if an A didn't know it was an A. Not if you were hypnotized, like I said." She looked at the blade, raising her eyebrows and wrinkling her nose. "That's a good point," she said quietly. "But I wonder why if there was more than one Android left they'd bother. They'd be more than a match for you. Even one might be." She poked a finger daintily into her mouth and extended it. With the same delicacy she tapped the bayonet's tip. There was a tiny hissing spat of steam. She jerked her hand back. She looked at Bill again. "There's something else. Androids and humans have supposedly never mated because Androids have the control you mentioned. No mother Android would want to bring a half-Man into the world to suffer." "You're talking like one. Lady." Bill's voice was low and ominous. "Um. Android males have always held an attraction for human females... but that same mechanism prevented Androids from taking advantage. No rapes, no voluntary seduction. And we all know some women tried. But as far as we know there's never been a crossing of the line in that regard." She studied Bill's face, then looked up at Tony. "Tell me, Tony Baker and Bill Jackson, which of you would have that much regard for your offspring?" "Now, dammit -- " Bill began. Tony's eyes widened. He started forward. "Don't!" B ut he was too late; very deliberately Cynthe drew back her left hand and shoved it forward to impale Its upraised thumb on the point of the bayonet. There was a hiss and the sudden odor of roasting IF flesh and a bitten-off, childish whimper. "My God," Tony managed to get out, despite his heaving stomach. Involuntarily Bill jerked the gun. The bayonet slipped free. Her eyes closed, her face contorted in pain, her teeth fastened in her lower lip, Cynthe clapped her left hand to her breast and covered it with her right. "It -- hurts," she said, in a tiny, surprised voice. "Why're you hiding it?" Bill asked. He stood quickly. His eyes were bright and glassy, resembling cat-eye marbles. "She's not hiding it, stupid," Tony flared at him. "She's nursing it!" Cynthe looked at Bill sadly, her green eyes remaining ingenuously wide. Slowly she dropped her right hand, unclenched the left, and held a gashed, blackened thumb up toward Bill. Without changing her thumbs-up gesture she rose to her feet. "Would you like to put your finger into it, Thomas?" He did not answer. Tony stood, rooted, then began to unbutton his shirt. He pulled it off and went to her, wrapped it around her injured hand and tied the sleeves together at the wrist. She didn't look at him. "Proof?" she asked, in the same tiny voice, but her shrug was implicit in it. My God, Tony thought, she's brave. "It will take several days even to begin to heal," Cynthe said. "During that time I want -- " her voice paled, as her lips did -- "I want to live apart from you." "You will, Cynthe," Tony told her. "You can stay in the plane. There's two good bunks Bill and I rigged from the seats. But then -- " "I'll be ready," she said. "Meanwhile, lock me in." Bill lowered the bayonet, staring at her, as she stepped between them and walked to the Scouter. As she reached it she turned. "If I know I'm an Android, I could control this. Maybe I am controlling it now. If I'm an Android, but have been hypnotized so that I don't know it -- " She smiled. "Then perhaps I have a posthypnotic suggestion that prevents my wounds from healing rapidly?" She shook her head, still smiling. "Be sure to lock me in." She climbed into the broken cabin of the aircraft X T ony and Bill looked at each other. Tony watched the other man load his arms with wood and bring it over to the campfire in the moonlight. "Help you. Bill?" "Naw." Tony frowned. He regarded his toes. He picked up the bayonet and a piece of wood and whittled at it. "Bill?" "Yeah?" Bill sat on the other log, facing him. He picked up the rifle and looked at it, set it down again. "We're lucky. About Cynthe." "Yeah. If she's not an Android." "Even if she is. Bill." Tony whittled, not looking up from the piece of wood he was denuding. Its bare whiteness gleamed like flesh. Bill looked at him. "What do you mean?" "I mean that last thing she said. She's right. We can never be sure about her. But even if she is an A, what difference does it make?" Tony lied deliberately; he had thought of a way to be sure. If the girl were knocked out, as he'd been, thea cut -- but he had decided not to tell Bill. He didn't want her tested. Bill's voice was sarcastic. "I don't know, Tony. If there's a snake over there in your sleeping bag, what's the difference whether it's a black snake or a timber rattler?" "Here," Bill said, and he handed the younger man a small leather picture case. Tony looked at him, then opened thi case; a woman and a man smiled at him. He nodded, looked his question at Bill. "That's the difference, Tony. My Mom. I'm uh... virgin, Tony. Yeah, Big Bill, I admit it. I've never touched anybody. You want to hear how she died, my Mom?" Think about that later, Tony thought. "No. But, Bill -- " "Tliat tell you why I'll never make peace? y I'll kill the last damned Android if I can? Or why I'll kill you, if I have to, to keep you from filthying yourself?" "What'd you do after she died. Bill?" "I took this gun -- " he picked it up -- "and that bayonet and I went wild. I won two medals. I kept on .going wild till I was assigned to this work detail. By then thy weren't passing out medals any more. I didn't want 'em anyhow." "Bill, have you ever thought... don't you tfai you're a little unrealistic? Now, I mean, with everyone gone? Why keep on hating?" B ill hefted the picture case without looking into it. His eyes narrowed and his hand squeezed hard, whitening his fingernails. "Because there's one left." "Maybe," Tony reminded him, and Bill shrugged. "Maybe, yeah." "You'll find a reason to kill her anyhow, won't you?" "Just what the hell are you saying?" Bill eyes were bright as he restored the picture to his left shirt pocket, carefully rebuttoning the flap. "Just that maybe you cracked a little bit the day your mother was killed." "Calling me insane, that what you're doing? You damned fool!" Bill shot to his feet. "See what that damned girl -- that damrted thing, I mean -- is doing to us? Already she's standing between us! Girl or thing, she -- she has the body of a harlot!" "That's what I thought. Bill. It doesn't make any difference to you whether she's a girl or an A." "Damn you! You don't believe that! You think it doesn't make any difference to you. You're thinking with your crotch, not your head. You think that as long as she looks round and soft and big-bosomed that's all -- " "You don't like women very well, do you, Bill?" Bill stared. Whatever he said was a growl in his throat as he leaped. Tony went backward off the log with the big man on him and felt him stiffen and saw the moonlight wink off the point of the bayonet IF as it slipped out of Bill's back. Tony's wrist hurt; it was twisted against his body. "T-Tony -- " "Bill! Oh my God, Bill! I'm so sorry -- Bill!" The big man was limp against him. Slowly, shaking his head and blinking to clear away tears, Tony got out from under him. He stared down at Bill Jackson's form, unmoving. Suddenly the thought came to him: Yes. I've gotten out from under him. Smewhere, somewhen, there was exultation. Tony Baker sobbed, an ugly dry sound, and then he turned and ran to the plane. He wasn't sure if Bill were alive or dead. Maybe the two of them, Tony and Cynthe, could fix him up, nurse him, take care of him. Then Bill would know -- As his hand touched the metallic blue door of the S-# something extremely hard and solid struck him in the back. He heard a loud crackling sound as he arched his back, falling against the plane, struggling to turn, to stay on his feet. "My God, Bill -- " He slid down the smooth side of the Scouter and sat against it, his head on his chest. "Didn't know I had bullets in my podcet, did you. Sport?" Bill said to the dead man as he stumbled across the clearing. With all his strength he got to the plane, perked the hot thing out of his abdomen, felt it bring the blood rushing with it. He got the door open. The girl was there, her thumb still bandaged, her eyes wide and green and young. "What was that? Was that a shot?" He lunged forward into the cabin, bayonet held before him. He felt its momentary halt as it struck her stomach, then felt it slide in. heard her cry, heard her moans as he lay half within, half out of the little craft. He was dead before the lonely sun rose. #They do it again! They kill themselves, all of them! What unalterable fools! Can we do nothing to make them live? Is there no way? It is this accursed ancestor worship that iswaswill be at fault. If we could interfere with them rather than with the an -- # #Hush. Cerebrate, dont transmit. I am cerebrating. There must be a way. But look, the time fabric is torn! It cannot be repaired!# #Then we have failed.# #Stop transmitting! We have not failed. We are here when. Therefore it is not over now. If we fail we will not know it; we will not exist. As long as we do did will... wait! If the continuity line is clipped off here -- this thread -- they will join... yes! There is a possibility. One more possibility. But this is the last time. There is no margin for error. If we fail again the TimeSpace fabric will beiswas ripped beyond repair... this gambit is irreversible. And irremediable.# #How can we be sure?# # find one way. It must be perfect this time; otherwise all time threads in this spatitemporal segment end... ended, and we are not. There is everything to lose. And everything to gain.# #What -- what do we do?# #Everything we have not done; nothing we have done. First the Android must take more of an initiative; she came close this time. Then... something the older Man said. I am afraid that seems the only solution. Now: Pay attention. I need not tell you how important this is. I am afraid  must he a hero -- by becoming a heretic -- and I am afraid that you must succeed me, whether you are ready or not.# #?# #An order: Cease transmitting. Now. Yes, now, and then, and tomorrow... well. You understand that if there is not success this time there is no further chance, and the future, their future, holds nothing. Not you. Not I. None of us.# #Of course. We... snap out of existence. We never were. But -- # #Very well. Then I, as  transmit, am about todid become a heretichero; and you are about to did succeed me in this post. It is the only certain way, and we have no further room for experimentation. You see that even I make mistakes; you must endeavor to be wiser. You know my timeline?# #Of cburse. It is -- there.# #Yes. Then you must do this -- # A dial set carefully, painstakingly, a button, then another, pressed; a calibrator meticulously and cautiously set, a switch thrown. #You will know the moment. When I say the word 'jabberwock', #Jabberwockl Say? NO!# wock. Good-by.# The final relay clicksclickedwill click. XI T he bigger one carried a small case. It swung from her shoulder on a long leather strap, bumping her big hip. She carried something in her other hand; a club, made from the leg of a table. The smaller one was empty-handed, fullbreasted. They came out of the forest and walked to the edge of a downsloping bank, the flood-channel of a stream that was now merely a trickle. The bigger one stopped her companion with an arm. They stopped and looked across the stream at the clearing, the fire, the wreckage of a small S-# scout aircraft, and the two men. The smaller man wore a bandage about his head. For a moment the two women watched them, watched their strong bodies raise a bracing pole against a half-completed leanto at the east side of the clearing. Then the big woman kicked a small rock with the toe of her boot and watched it rattle down the bank. It bounced, then bounced again, leaping into the air to splash into the gurgling water. The big man turned toward them. IF His arm swept up, pointed. He ran to the campfire and picked up a heavy rifle with a silvery knife at its end. "Wait, Bill," Tony Baker said. "Wait -- they're women." 'Maybe they're women," Bill Jackson said. "Don't be too silre. You know about Androids. They can change themselves." "Boy, she's a big one! Your size. Bill. Me for the little blonde." Tony Baker waved. "Hi!" He winced and dropped the hand to his head. "Danm! I've still got a headache." "That's good, Tony. I don't mean the headache -- I mean talk. Talk to them. Blit be careful." T he two men walked across the clearing. They stopped on their side of the bank, gazing across at the two women. The big redhead was maybe thirty, maybe a little less. She was one hell of a hunk of woman, Tony thought. About twice as much as he'd care to try to handle. Her companion -- he smiled. Small, rather babyfaced, with long pale hair and big wide eyes that looked green from where he stood. And she was either built or she was carrying a very large concealed , weapon in what was left of the blouse tied over her breasts. "Stop right there," the redhead said, and she hefted the table-leg. "Don't come any nearer." "Uh -- but -- who's coming?" Tony said uncomfortably. "This is our camp. You came." Boy, what a way to begin a conversation! What a wav to introduce myself! "We're just standing here, ma'm." "Let's keep it that way. We don't dare take any chances. You two male himks could be Androids... although I gotta admit I hope you're not." Bill Jackson exploded angry words 'We could be Androids!" "Ah, so you're not mute after all, huh, bigun?" The redhead smiled and waggled the club, "Of course you could be. How are we to know, two defenseless women?" She looks about as defenseless, Tony diought, as Bill Jackson. She was nearly six feet tall if she was an inch, with flashing eyes and a beat-up officer's cap riding jauntily on a mane of pure flame. She wore a loose combat jacket, big chest pockets with their flaps and brass buttons making it impossible for him to know if she had anything underneath or not. A wide black belt with a shiny U.S. buckle cinched her waist, tightly, above long, long legs encased in shiny black military jodhpurs and knee-high boots. Something or other in an odd little case hung from a shoulder strap. Oh, she's female, he thought, but no defenseless female! She wore the armored officer's uniform and gave orders as if she'd been used to both all her life. But the other one... "By damn!" Bill Jackson said, and Tony looked at him as the big man blinked. "By golly! "As a matter of fact we couldn't trust you boys even if you aren't Androids. Wars turn some people into into beasts!" She hooked her left thumb into the wide belt and hefted the tableleg again. "So you two just stand there. Who are you?" "Bifl -- uh, S#C Jackson, William R., Army of Oregon." "TNmy grinned. Give him a comA mand-tone and he sure snaps to, he thought. He hardly knew the big man, but Bill had bn playing Big Man ever since he'd pulled Tony out of his cracked-up S-# and patched him up. Tony had allowed it. He was twenty-three and a captain, a pilot. But what the hell can you do when you're all stringy muscle and shorter and younger? "All right small type, what's your problem?" "You make big noises for a defenseless woman," he told her. "I'm Tony Baker, I'm a Texican, and my mother wasn't an Android. And I bleed, and scab, and scar. Okay?" The redhead shook her head. "Nokay. But turnabout's fair, I guess. I'm Lilith. Call me Lily. And I'm not from Texas, so how come I'm bigger'n you?" Bill Jackson whooped and slapped his new friend on the back so hard Tony was barely able to keep from going over the embankment, "This little one with the big front's Cynthe James. At least that's her sory. Sounds like a madeup name to me, and she was showbiz. She's lost her memory, poor thing, since she got a dose of some kind of gas and woke up surrounded by corpses. Me, I've got memories too, but I'm stuck with 'em. Oh, and I outrank you. Mister. I'm afraid I made captain over a year ago." She tossed Bill a smart-aleck salute. "Serial number, bigun, fast." "Eigjit nine oh one twe  five five nine six Gee Oee." "Lovely. Vm impressed Baker?" "You may not like this, lady: Ay oh two two three five nine one, T for Texas." "AO! My my. That miserable piece of tin over there your plane?" "It was. And I'm afraid I made captain two years ago." Again she flijed the mock-salute from the bill of a cap with a several-thousand-mission crush. "Now fellas, here's the pitch. There's just one way I know to tell an A from a human, and that's by woimding the suspect. Now I see you have a nice shiny bayonet... " Bill nodd exuberantly, and Tony saw that his eyes were bright and shining as a boy's. He raised the bayoneted rifle. "Y'know," Lily said, "I believe you might not be an Android after all, bigun. You're too damn dumb. Stop that! Any A'd have sense enough to heat that oversize pocketknife before he started carving himself. Go on over to the fire and heat it. We'll follow. At a distance." xn Grinning sheeplishly, Bill nodded or and backed away. Then, nearly stumbling, he turned and walked to the fire. He looked back over his shoulder twice. Tony stared. Who was this guy? What had happened to that Bill Jackson fella? Bill squatted by the fire and began to heat the blade while Tony stood beside him, watching the long-legged approach of Lily and the hip-swing walk of her friend Cynthe. Funny name, Cynthe. It seemed vaguely, elusively familiar. Bill held up the bayonet. In the wan light of the setting sun it glowed pink. "Enough?" Lily nodded, thumb hooked in belt, stick-club ready, and watched as Bill detached the bayonet from the rifle and held out his left arm. "Let's go first class, Sergeant," Lily said, "And make it a nice deep one." Bill nodded, grinning. He slashed his forearm. Then he held it out for inspection. It trickled red. "Didn't hurt," he said, the way a ten-year-old would have proclaimed it. He held the barely glowing bayonet out to Tony. He took it gingerly, then looked at Cynthe. "Can't you talk, Cyndie?" "When I have a chance," she said, with a smile that reminded him of a shaft of sunlight bursting through clouds after a rain. Lily chuckled. Tony glanced at her and the tall woman nodded meaningfully at the bayonet. "By your leave, Captain," he said. "Proceed, Captain," she said. "Ouch! Bill's a damned liar -- it does hurt!" He waved the bleeding arm in the air. He hung on to the bayonet. "How about your using it now. Captain?" "Don't be silly. Sport," Bill said, and Tony was startled to see that the man was angry. "Glad to," Lily said. "Want to trust me with that bayonet?" Tony considered. "Not bloody likely," he said. He waved it in the air, cooling it before returning it to his boot. "Well, we're bleeding," Bill said, practically bouncing up and down. If the big idiot had a tail, Tony thought, he'd wag it. "Now what?" "Stop slavering. Big Man. Now we separate, but we get together once a day to see how those wounds're healing. After we're sure we can trust one another..." "Then we can love," Cynthe said in a guileless little voice, and Bill and Tony blinked. Bill's eyes narrowed as he looked at the unaffected child-face. L ily laughed. "Cynthe! Tsk!" Then, rather apologetically, she told the men: "She's a bit off in that area. Amnesia, as I said, but from what I gather she was a few days from marriage. She's nuts about kids." Lily patted her shoulder. "She'll come out of it." "Sure she will. You'll be fine, Cynthe," Tony said. "You'll be just fine." "I told her I'd do all the talking," Lily said. "It wasn't easy to get it through this fluffhead's koko that -- well, we may be the last human beings, peer -- ee -- odd." She regarded them in silence as the impact of it went pounding on heavy feet through their minds. "Your trust is touching, boys, but not smart. Our turn." The big woman flipped the chairleg club into her left hand and unbuttoned two buttons of her blouse with her right. Bill gawked. Tony marveled at Lilith's lack of reserve, her unafIF fected candor. She seemed as ultracivilized as Cynthe did ingenuous. It was almost as if Lilith were from somewhere far away. "Easy, bigun," she said, grinning a widemouthed grin at Bill. "Sometimes us big-types aren't big everywhere. I'm afraid there's not much in here but -- this." Her hand came out of the uniform blouse with a knife and automatically Tony's knees bent in a half-crouch as his hand whipped up from his boot with the bayonet.  Twenty feet away Lilith blinked. "Touchy cuss, aren't you? By your leave, Capn," she said, imitating his own ironic tone, and she swung and nicked Cynthe's arm with her little knife. "Oh!" "Bleed for your life, kid," Lily said, and she pushed Cynthe away and quickly slashed her own arm. More red drops fell to stain the ground. "Now, We meet here daily for arm-inspection, right? Come on, Cyn." Cynthe hung back, her full lower lip puckering. "Oh, can't we stay and have something hot?" mane and guffawed, "Like Bill and Tony, maybe?" And she laughed some more. "She has a passion for coffee." She shrugged. "Little hard to find in the middle of the Oregon woods, Cynthe-babe." "We've got coffee," Tony said, aware that he spoke too rapidly, too eagerly. He tried to slow his words, to sound casual. "Fresh acorn coffee." "Eyuk," Lily commented with feeling. "You ain't sellin' me, Tony Baker. We'll see you." "Uh -- Cap'n Lily," Bill said. He raised a hand. "We -- uh -- we have twelve cigarettes. Maybe we should all have a smoke before we break up." "Peace pipe? Us good girls don't smoke. Sorry." "In that cracked-up Scouter," Tony said, "there are. two bunks. Bill and I fixed 'em up out of the seats this morning. You might as well spend the night in there. The hatch secures from inside." S he hooked a thumb into her belt again, threw out her left hip and her right leg. She poked at her lip with the club, obviously considering. No one spoke for perhaps a minute; a long minute. "You know, Tony Baker Captain comma per cent of what I've said and thought about you. Cynthe honey, trot over there and get in the plane, will you? And lock the door." Cynthe trotted. Tony watched the delightful process happily, while Lily watched him and Bill watched Lily. When the door slammed behind the blonde girl Lily ambled after her, keeping an eye on the men. She tried the door-handle, then yanked, twisted. "Okay. It's locked, all rit. Cynthe, open up for mama. Tony, Bill -- " she bowed, man-fashion -- "we thank you for your hospitality. See you in the AM. Have fun." And in she climbed, longjeggedly. The door slammed. "Boy," Bill said, the word riding exuberantly out on a great breath of air. "Boy. That's some female woman." Tony grinned at the Cajun talk, then said with great innocence: "Not an A?" "Ah, don't be silly. They're the ones worried -- about us!" Bill chuckled. "Man, she's some tough! Did you see her, Tony? Did you see her?" "No," Tony said, hanging the kettle over the campfire and placing two logs. "No, I didn't. I saw nothing, I was struck blind by Cynthe." Cynthe,' Bill said, the way a drinking man says milk. He shook his head. "Cynthe! Huh! I bet that big bazooka packs a wallop like a grizzly. Tony... you know who she... reminds me of? It's amazing. Even the name." Tony looked around, interested. Bill's voice had a faraway quality. "No, BiU. Who?" Bill was staring at the aircraft. "My mother. Big woman. Tough. Twice the guts my dad ever had. the same... Mom's hair wasn't even red. Now I know it should have been, though, after seeing Capn Lil." He wagged his head again. Staring at him, narrow-eyed, Tony shook his head. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. I see." He gave his physical attention to the' pot of acorn coffee. Bill stood still, gazing at the twisted silvery scoutcraft in the manner of a coonhound waiting for his man to come with light and rifle. T ony was sitting, his eyes somewhere in the fire, thinking as he sipped his second cup of miserable coffee, when Bill poured a cup. "Hey, Bill, you've had two. Those worms'll give you a fever or the runs or something." "Not for me," Bill said, with a grin Tony could only call sly. The big man turned and headed for the plane. "Hey!" Tony's voice rebounded from the other man's back with no visible effect. Tony shook his head, grinning, the grin slowly changing to a frown. "Oh well," he told himself. "To each, as the man said, his own." But he continued to watch, hoping to catch a glimpse of Cynthe, poor kid, when -- if -- the hatch opened. It did, and he saw a flash of steel; Lily's knife. Without hearing what they said he saw Bill offer her the cup, saw him sip it and proffer it again, saw Lily take it, sling its contents disdainfully on the ground. What she needs, Tony thought, is somebody about Bill's size... but somebody who liked his daddy better than his mommy! "What's up, bigun?" Lily asked Bill, and she waved the knife in his face. She looked down at hhn from the arch of the S-#'s hatchway. "Miss... Li... Capn... uh -- I thought maybe you'd like a cup of coffee?" "Coffee? Acorn stew? There shouldn't even be any of those around here. What's the worm IF count?" She stuck a thumb in her belt the way Bill's mom used to hook one workworn thumb in the front of her apron. She jerked the knife at the cup. "Or for that matter the poison count, Mister Android? Suppose you try it." Bill did, taking a healthy swig of the murky stuff and letting her see him swallow. He held the cup out to her once more, hoping that she would accept it. "You think I'm gonna drink that stuff after you've slobbered in it? Not, in the immortal words of Captain 'Texican' Baker, bloody likely!" And she took the cup and swung her arm in an arc, sending the dark liquid splattering to the ground. She stared at him. "You look as if you're about to cry, Billy Jackson." His eyes widened. "I -- I haven't been called Billy since... since Mom..." "Afom.'" She exploded the word from her mouth as if it were unclean. "Mom! Boy, thafs not likely! I wouldn't even want you for an ancestor, much less a son." He looked down. "You're a tough woman to please, Capn. You make me want to say I'm sorry everytime I open my mouth." Her hand touched his shoulder, his cheek. "Moon-calf," she said. "Poor, twisted-up moon-calf. Look, Bill Jackson, suppose you go back to the fire. Sit around for awhile. Then take a little walk. Across the creek, or whatever you call the gash in the ground over there. That big fir tree with the lightning-blast. Okay?" H e stared at her, then nodded. She withdrew her hand, unpolished nail slicing his cheek, grinned, and pulled the cabin door closed. He heard her dog it. He went back to the fire, walking, Tony calculated, about two feet above the ground. "Boy, she's an unfriendly one," Tony said over his cup. But his eyes were narrowing, waiting for the reaction he expected. Bill's head snapped up. "No she isn't! It's natural. She thinks we may be Androids, that's all. Hell, Tony, she's a woman. You know how some men are about women. Gotta be careful." "Yeah, Yeah. She ought to trim her nails, too." Tony watched Bill raise a guilty hand to his cheek. "It migjit'va helped. Bill, if you'd acted like that bayonet-cut hurt. You tried to impress 'em and gave a damned good imitation of an Android." "My gosh! I didn't think ef that!" Bill stared at him. "Boy, I guess you were right. That goshawfill coffee -- whew! I think I'll take a walk." He stood with a great show of being casual, looked around as if trying to decide which way to go. He nodded and started toward the stream. "Bill." Jackson stopped, looked around. Tony waved the bayonet. "Better take this." Bill hesistated, then bobbed his head and came back for it. "Yeah. Make a loud noise if anything happens, Sport." "You too. Bill," Tony said, and he turned back to watch the orange and yellow and blue dance of the flames. He heard Bdl's boots -- clump, squish -- as he jumped the stream. We ought to bridge that silly thing, Tony thought. From the tail of his eye he watched the Scouter's door ease open, saw the big woman looking at him, then sliding out. She closed the door quickly and silently and leaned against it a moment, watching him. Then she stepped into the woods. Tony Baker sighed. He regarded the bubbling pot. Maybe  should try the coffee gambit, he thought. But what if she is... Synthetic Cyntbe? What if she is? He thought about it. # #ver here, Billy. Watch that big root -- I nearly fell flat. Sit down here, against the tree." Without a word Bill sat, looking up at her. He liked looking up at her. The shiny kneeboots moved to within a couple of feet of him. "You -- you're some woman." "Or some Android?" "Hell, you're no A!" "You sure? " "I'm sure." "As a matter of fact you're right. But you and that Tony. Him a captain? How old is he?" He shnigged. "Possible. Told me he got into it when he was seventeen. Air Force; can't fly unless you're an officer. Or he may've been trying to impress you girls -- but he's at least a first lieutenant, anyhow. You really worried about us, still? You hate A s that much?" "Well, you've no idea. No idea. Bill Jackson, how much an Android has cost me." "Your family?" She smiled in the darkness, studying the tree against which he sat. "Yes. Yes, my family. The very closest member." "Me, too," he said, and he fished the picture case out of his pocket. "Here." She shook her head. "No thanks. I burned mine, Billy Jackson. You should, too." "Yeah, maybe... maybe now, I can." His forehead rippled. "Now, Bill. Suppose I told you I am an Android." He gazed up at her, slipping the case slowly back into his left shirt pocket. He studied her; the boots and the flaring jodhpurs, the big hips and hands, the odd little case swinging from her shoulder, the belt buckle, bright even , in the shadowed darkness under the trees. "Nope. I couldn't believe you. Captain." He shook his head positively. "Nope." "Um. Suppose I told you Cynthe was. That her name's short for 'synthetic'?" He jerked his back away from the tree, sitting erect. His voice was a low susurration. "Is she? I wondered... what she said, so funny... damn! Is she?" Lilith shrugged, holding his eyes with hers. "She's with me. Would it matter?" "Funny thing to say." His answ-r came without hesitation. "Of enur it matters! She'd have to die An A's an A." IF be his business, wouldn't it? Tony's?" He shook his dark head. "No, Ma'm! It's my business. I'm a man. A Man." "Period, huh? Is that it. Bill?" He nodded. "Period. ISie's an A, she dies." "Men," she said. "Men. You're sure I'm not -- but you're ready to believe that little thing is. Ready to kill her. You believe what you want to believe, don't you?" X"It makes pretty good coffee. Thank you, Tony." She smiled dazzlingly at him over the cup. "She told me to stay in the plane. I would've too, if you hadn't come and asked me to have some coffee. I -- I hoped you would," she chuckled, smiling into the cup in the manner of a child inspecting a Christmas package. "Acorn coffee!" She drank, peered again into the cup, then set it down. He sat with his eyes on her, trying to think of something he could say that would make her smile again. He was startled as very wide, intensely green eyes turned on him. "Something odd," she told him. "You know, I discovered I can... I can make this wound heal right up!" She held out her arm. "Without a scar or anything. Lily got mad and made me cut myself again." Her big eyes looked into his. "Does that mean I'm -- " "Stop!" His voice was intense. "I -- I knew it, I think. I've been thinking about it Cynthe. It doesn't matter." His hand reached out and took hers gently. "Not to me. But it would to Bill. That's why you've got to promise not to mention it any more. Not ever." Her huge eyes flickered emerald in the firelight. "I promise." "What should we do, Cynthe? What do you want?" Her shoulder lifted in an unaffected shrug. "Babies," she answered at once. "Oh childrenl Y-your children..." When she dropped her eyes it was not coquerty. She was the most artlessly genuine person he had ever met Her eyes came back up to his, and he nodded. "Uh-huh. The eternal nest-builder. The eternal optimist. A man wants it for one reason, a woman for another, human or Android. For what, Cynthe?" His voice remained intense, and he was unaware of the pressure he was exerting on her hand, unaware of the faint change that took place in it. Flesh and muscle hardened as, a nearly automatic defense against pain. "For what, Cynthe? What if there's no future?" A little vertical channel opened between her eyes as the inside edges of her brows lifted. "Isn't that the only way there can be a future? If we make one? That's what she said." "Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is. I think a man gives less of a damn about the human race than a woman; we want a kid of two to extend our own pride. But...  it would be nice to bounce a grandson someday. Who will our son marry, Synthetic Cynthe, if we can have one? Or our daughter?" "But didn't Adam and his wife, created, like me, from him..." He interrupted. "His second wife. Yes, PoUyana. But who did Adam's son marry?" She narrowed those round eyes, pursed her lips, puckered an unmarked brow. He realized it might be unmarked ten, twenty years from now. No. He'd ask her to age -- a little -- as he did. He didn't think he ooidd stand it otherwise. " 'And Cain left the presence of the Lord, " she said, looking up, " ' and settled in the land of Nod, East of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and -- " "His wife, Cynthe. His wife. What wife? There were people over in Nod, then, right? But this is Nod. There is no Eden, and I think that part of the old story makes its figurative sense clear. There were others. But for us, for our Cain, or Abei, or little Cynthe -- " "For us," she said very softly, "for us, Tony, there is no land of Nod. But if our first child is a girl, or if tiiere are never any boys, well." The serious expression was incongruous on her ingenuous face, but it was there, and her eyes were purpeseM. "There is the story of Lot, Tony, in the same book. His wife was gone, and his daughters wanted chfldren. So they had children by their father. They each bore him a son, Moab and... somebody. Or -- if we have only sons... oh, Tony!" Her other hand came up to cover his, small and warm. "Don't look at me that way. We're overcoming a bigger barrier right now than that one, breaking a stronger code. Men lay their aversion to what they call 'Incest' to the Bible, the Torah... but the book itself sets the precedent, figurative or not." She waited for him to say something. He did not. "And don't cite me the Bourbons of France," she said, reminding him of the high intelligence, the high Android reasoning power behind that open face. "We're not the Bourbons. My kind can't be mentally ill. And you must be immune to practically everything, or you wouldn't be here. Not even colorblind, or you wouldn't have been in the Air Force!" She smiled, a simple upeurving of the corners of her pink mouth. Her fingers tightened on his. "And we'll have many children, anyhow. Won't we?" He nodded raising his other hand to her face -- And the screaming began. S orrowfully the tall woman looked down at the big man sprawled, like an overgrown boy, beneath the tree. "There's just no hope, is there. Bill? No chance. You're immuntable." "Huh?", "You have any idea what's in here?" She tapped the shiny case at her hip. "No. Funny-looking affair. Food, I guess. What's it made of, anyhow?" "Oh. it's a synthetic. It's called IF Timeless. Yes, I guess it is food. Nourishment for Mankind. Something for you, Billy Jackson." She sank to her haunches beside him and slid the strap off her shoulders. She set the case on his thighs. He looked at it and at her with a questioning frown. "What's the biggest rule you can think of. One you wouldn't dream of breaking, Bill?" "What? Gosh, I don't know. The biggest rule. Like rape, or -- oh. Sure, I know. Androids.' His lips stiffened. She sighed. "Intermingling with the Androids. Yes, that's yom code. Bill, if you can believe this: I'm breaking an even bigger injunction by doing this. But I've got to. For you. For Man." Nervously he tried to smile. "Lord, what's in here?" She looked at him. "You really want to know?" Her voice was teasing. He nodded, and now he grinned. She gazed at him still. Then she came to her decision. "You sure do spoil a surprise, Billy Jackson. It's a timber rattler." He chuckled. "In this little case? And this far North?" He bent his head, laughing, and flipped up the catch. He lifted the lid. The timber rattler lurched forward and struck him in the left side of his shirt, just below the pocket with its picture-case. It clung, fangs caught for a moment in the fabric. In' that moment Lilith's knife swished out, chopped, in one swift stroke, down into the back of the snake's head. It lashed violently and opened its jaws and died. "My God!" Bill Jackson choked. "It -- it was I What -- you -- I've got to get to the camp! There's a kit in the plane -- oh! it hurts!" "It got you near the heart, Billy. I imagine it's too late. And... I told you, Man. I warned you, gave you a chance. But... just in case it's not too late -- " He was struggling to rise, clutching his chest, reaching down to his boot for the bayonet, confused, bewildered, gasping. He looked at her, saw the fist coming, said "Mom -- " And the fist slammed into his jaw and he slid sideways to the ground and lay unconscious, his eyes closed peacefully. S he pinned the dead snake's head to the ground and squatted there, watching him, watching has chest. At least he was not feeling the burning pain, the swelling, the slowing of his heart... Finally she stood. She unbuttoned her blouse and took off her belt and dropped it to the ground beside the body of the Man. She unzipped her jodhpurs. Her voice was soft and low and sad. "There's always a snake in Eden, Billy Jackson," she said. She watched as he died. Then she turned toward the camp and screamed until Tony and Cynthe came, yelling, crashing through the brush. "I -- we were -- well..." The big woman was buttoning up her blouse, Tony saw at once. Explanations were unnecessary. Somehow he was relieved. Bill was -- had been -- okay after all. He looked Oown at the other man, sprawled so peacefully beneath the towering Douglas fir. "I was over there," Lily said. "I didn't hear anything. But -- when I said something and he didn't answer, I came... found him... and the snake. I killed it." His arm around Cynthe's waist, Tony looked at Bill Jackson and fought a further feeling of relief. The man's face -- Tony had known he was dead the moment he saw him. Now he bent, noticing the marks in Bill's shirt, realizing why it had been so fast. Almost in the heart. He pulled the knife from the dead rattler's head. "He came a long way from home to do this," Tony said. "And so did you, Texican. And so did I." Lily buckled the belt and took the knife from him with a sigh. "So did I." "We'll bury him," Tony said. "I think maybe right here, under the tree. Lily, if you can trust me now... please stay." He tightened his fingers on Cynthe's flank and she leaned into him. Lily hooked a thumb in her belt. "Just the three of us? Oh, come now, Tony. You don't mean that. Three's too many, Tony, whether it's two men and a woman, or -- " she looked down at Bill -- "or two women and a man. Oh, no. There's no room in Eden for a Lilith. That would be as ridiculous as -- " This is hardly what I'd call Eden," Tony Baker said. He glanced at the girl beside him. "Or Nod either." " -- as the Jabberwock," Lilith finished. Jabberwock! The Mandroid opened the box, regarded the woven skein of a lifeline a moment, then cut it, irrevocably. As he did the tortured fabric of TimeSpace they had cut and spliced and reset so often -- split, tore, ripped. The new Prime Mover waited. He did not vanish! He was is will be! Success! # #"The what?" Tony asked. A "What're you -- " "Tony!" Cynthe screamed. Lilith's eyes rolled up. She went limp, sank to the ground, a limp rag, empty of life and being. Tony took one step forward. Then he halted with a cry. Lilith's timeline was in the far future, the no-time, no-space, timeless and spaceless future of Tony's descendants. She did not exist, not really, in this TimeSpace. In herhisits time she became a hero by becoming a heretic; a great a hero as The Baker and The Synthe, The Firsts. In their time she ceased to exist. She wasiswill be not. Man and Android stared. There was no trace of Lilith. Yes, a trace; the smallish timber rattler, unwounded and undead but sore of jaw, shot off into the woods. Tony and Cynthe watched it, uncomprehending.      IF IF  Featu re Ever get the urge to talk S.F. with others? Here's how o cfo ff... and why! C hances are, if you live in in or near a major U.S. City, there may be a local science-fiction fanclub in your vicinity. Wherever there are six 'or a dozen otherwise normal persons who share an interest in and enthusiasm for reading this kind of stuff, a fanclub tends to spring up. You may not even know there's one right smack in your home town, because they don't advertise, don't usually proselytize, generally keep pretty much to themselves. That doesn't mean they do not welcome fresh new members. They certainly do. And if you'd like to get together once in awhile with congenial people of similar lit'ry tastes it might be worth your while to look 'em up and drop around. I know of about twenty local science-fiction clubs currently active, and I'll tell you about them in this column -- and, if you're a "sci-fi addict" (a shuddersome neologism, if I ever heard one), why not pay the local club a visit? I can promise you an interesting afternoon of talk, and the chance to make friends with people who have also succumbed to the appeal of Our Favorite Reading Matter. Eost Coast Fan Clubs I live in New York, and this sizable tows has a long and fiendishly coimpiicated history of local fanclubs, dating back even before the golden days of Hugo Gernsback'a Science Fiction League". In fac-t. New York seems to have been the home of the very, very first fanchib in the universe: something called The Seienceers, who came into existence around # or '#. As an added honor, this club published what May be the first fanzine on record, a club periodical called The Planet (or something similar) which eurvived for about nine issues. Unlike fanadnes of today, which are largely concenied with fmnnish doings, this great-granddaddy of them all was pretty generally dedicated to seience fiction itself, as witness this Poem from the historic first issue: Burroughs, Cummings, Merritt, Kline, Burks and Leinster; none so fine, Ed Hamilton and Vic Rousseau With Capt Meek complete the show. In the field of science fiction, They're supreme, that's my conviction." This determined doggerel is signed "A.G." which T presume stands for Allen Glasser, the first editor. Today, as befits this most mammoth of metropoli -Uses?leis??), we New Yorkers rejoice in, not merely one, not just two, but a full three and one-half local fanclubs. The oldest, centered around the Bronx, is called The Lunarians. The second, located in Brooklyn, enjoys the name of The Fanoclasts. The third, an offshoot of Fanoclastism, and meets in Manhattan. (The "onehalf" cited above, is a fan group ef only sporadic activity, and currently defunct, I'd say, clustered about New York's City College.) What about other cities here on the coast? Well, there's a group upstate in Syracuse, N.Y., which made a bid for the site of the I # World Science Fiction Convention -- we'll discuss the fine old tradition of the annual conventions in another installment of this column -- and, right across the Hudson in Newark, New Jersey, there's a very large, very active and quite old fanclub tion Association). Unlike its more genuine club officers and elections, and puts on formal meetings with Guest Speakers and all. Then there's a fanclub down in Baltimore, Maryland, and a lively group in Washington, D.C., the yearly hosts of a regional "conclave" called the Disclave (we'll cover the local and regional get-togethers in a forthcoming O.M.I.F., I promise), and Boston is home to a club of college students at M.I.T. or Philadelphia Science Fiction SoIP ciety, one of the nation's biggest fanciubs and (with the Los Angeles club) jK)ssibly the nation's oldest. It got started about # and has been going strong ever since, having already been the host to two World Conventions. The only club I know of still going in the South is a group in Charlotte, North Carolina. But, in days of old, there was a fanclub in New Orleans, and, in addition, one in my own home town, St. Petersburg, Florida. Fanclubs in the Mid-West O ut in what H. L. Mencken used to call, rather disrespectfully, "the Bible-and-Hookworm Belt" there are fewer fanclubs. Chicago has one (at least), and so do Detroit, Michigan, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and then there's Cleveland, former home of Harlan Ellison and current home of Andre Norton... Cleveland, by the way, folks, will be the site of this year's World Convention, rather bafflingly yclept Tricon, but I will tell you about that anon. Another major midwest group, now extinct, centered about Jackson, and Battle Crk, Michigan, and enjoyed the name of. the Galactic Roamers. One of the pioneer sf writers, that all-time great-of-greats E. E. Smith, Ph.D., belonged to the Roamers, and used to read aloud his stories while they were in-the-works to memlws, for criticism, comment and suggestions. Alas! Doc Smith is no longer with us -- nor are the Galactic Roamers, either! Fanclubs on the West-Coast C alifornia has always been a major center of fanclubbing, fanzining and fan activity in general. Los Angeles houses one of the most famed and venerable of all such Angeles Science Fantasy Society," in abbreviation, and in conversation competes with the Philly fanclub for the title of oldest, but it's a toss-up either way. Then, over in Berkeley, there's a lively little club who delight in the cognomen, The Elves', Gnomes' and Little Men's Chowder, Science-Fiction and Marching Society (a charming name which they borrowed from Crockett Johnson's now sadly defunct but immortal in memory comic strip, Barnaby), Most fanclubs are known familiarly by their initials, but happily this group chose not to call but "the Little Men." (Incidentally, don't get the notion fanclubs are made up of naught but fans alone... lots of important sf writers, illustrators, editors, etc., belong, if they are in the vicinity. Witness Doc Smith and the Galactic Roamers, above. And the Little Men number among their membership Jack Vance and Poul and Karen Anderson, to say nothing of Anthony Boucher, mystery-reviewer for The New York Times, and founder of The Magazine of Fantasy  Science Fiction. L. Sprague de Camp is a frequent dropper-in to the doings in Philadelphia; Ace Books' editor Donald A. Wollheim and IF's cover artist Jack Gaughan, visit New York's Fanoclasts from time to time, and other science fiction professionals belong to local groups. And, beyond the scope of a column on fan clubs, but worthy of mention, is yet another of New York's institutions. The Hydra Club -- as far as is beknownst to me, the only local fan club for sf professionals anywhere around. Willy Ley, Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Hans Stefan Sanlesson -- former editor of Fantastic Universe -- sf writer's agent Henry Morrison, and others in the New York area -- including myself -- belong.) San Francisco is home to a club called The Golden Gate Futurians, and there are other clubs rumored to exist in the outlying regions of California -- one that I know of, for example, in San Diego. There is also a fanclub in Seattle, Washington, and there is another -- or up until fairly recently, at least, there was -- in Portland, Oregon. So there you have the twenty-odd clubs still active -- and if I've left out yours, by inadvertance, from this brief, informal survey, don't be hurt. Clubs come and go, spring up overnight, vanish just as quickly. And, even though not listed here, there may very well be one in your town. After all, somebody buys up all those science fiction magazines and paperbacks at your comer drugstore. What Happens In a Fandub? I have been a member of, dropped in on, visited, and even been guest speaker at, a variety of fanclubs on the East Coast, and I think I can answer the question burning in your mind. What do they do? Most of them meet twice a month (some meet weekly; others, only monthly; let's not quibble!) These meetings range all the way from the club officers, elections, constitutions and formal programs)... down to the informality that marks a Fanoclast meeting. Your formal program usually consists of one or two guest speakers. Maybe they will invite a local or visiting sf author or editor to give a brief talk; maybe a member who visited a distant regional or world con will give a "report", some, times even a slide-show or homemovie of con-doin's. Your informal meeting is just a regular get-together of local fans or readers who like to spend the afternoon with friends and acquaintances of similar interests, for a good oldfashioned gabfest. There may be a few records on the hi fi... cans of cold beer in the kitchen... a bowl of pretzels on the coffee-table. New York's Lunarians used to have, and maybe still do, a giant #cup coffee-maker well-stocked and available to the membership. But whatever the culinary preparations be (or lack of same, on a sis), you simply sit around and converse. Not necessarily about sciencefiction, I hasten to add: talk can and does range through movies, pop art, comic books, radio serials, Bette Davis, Shakespeare, fan scandals . and feuds, Dali or Picasso, Mozart, Alex IF Raymond and Hal Foster, Batman, George Pal, the 'Cyclic' poets, Ezra Pound, new fanzines, forthcoming conventions, the latest paperbacks, TV commercials and (sometimes) shows, pre-Columbian art, Hannes Bok, Burroughs, 'Conan', Sherlock Holmes, the Oz books, jazz, folk music, cars, sex, religion, politics, Viet Nam, draft-card burners, communism, Tolkien, old movie serials, James Bond and damn near anything else you can think of, up to and including Ghek the Kaldane and Qadgop the Mercotan! Now sometimes fanclubs hold their meetings in the home of a member -- as do New York's Fanoclasts and Lunarians -- other clubs rent facilities from local halls (such conclaves, regional conferences and world conventions (of course, space is reserved in rented halls or hotels. Clubs which convene in a member's home frequently switch around from home to home... as, for instance, the Fanoclasts met first, and for awhile, at the East Side apartment of Dick Lupoff, later in the Bronx apartment of Lin Carter, and are now getting together twice a month at Ted White's apartment in Brooklyn. And it is not entirely unknown for an occasional, lucky club to actually Own A Whole Building All By Itself. I seem to remember that such was the case in Los Angeles, with the far-famed Bixel Street headquarBut large or small, formal or casual, hither or yon, fanclubs are fun. Look one up, if you live in any of the cities named above: spend an evening or an afternoon getting to know other people who also like science fiction. Fanzine publishing or writing may not be your meat -- but no one who likes science fiction can fail to make interesting new friends and find congenial conversaNov! For the first time in Worlds of Tomorrow  -- plus many more exdting stories and features in the fAay T J Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale nowl J t t IF  Novelette The Weapons That Walked Somtihing on the planet warred against Man -- and its weapons were the deadliest ever known! I I n most situations Joe Hanley was even tempered and tended to look on the bright side. But halfway with the landing boat falling like a rock, there just wasn't any bright side. Joe got the E-Ship on the horn. When Ensign Holman's tumble-haired, heart-shaped face appeared in the tank he yelled, "Slim! I need a grapple tug, fast! And get me the Maint Chief. I turned in a squawk sheet a week ago about the antigrav on this boat!... That was when he came as close as he ever did to losing his temper. Beyond an absent mod she turned back to the computer console and ignored him. He hung on, fu-mlng. Presently, in spite of himself, he calmed down and began to chuckle. From what he could see and hear. Commander Thornton was up to his ears in some kind of emergency, too. And it had to be urgent, because although a single, gentle tap would do it, the commander's stubby thumb was jabbing repeatedly at the Panic Button. Soon he saw that the commander had heard his call to Slim, for the stubby thumb started alternating between the General Quarters button and the Maint Chiefs call. Joe frowned thoughtfully. Faintly he could hear the GQ klaxons howling in the corridors. That meant somebody else was in trouble, too, probably the team already down on K-IV. Well, that was The Thorn's job -- to prod them all when they needed it, and to worry about them all when they were in trouble. And sure enough, soon, between jabs, Thornton caught his eye in the screen. "Joe! We can't send a tug down to catch you. Trouble on IV. You abort! Blast out of that thing!" Joe watched and listened a few more seconds -- long enough to hear Ensign Holman, calmly doing three or four other things at the same time, instruct Albert, the computer, to take the E-Ship out of orbit, full emergency, and also track Joe down, pinpoint his touchdown, and tape it all. Quite a gal, that tall, black headed Martian. She'd do to have along. Then he turned back to his own problem. He caught a glimpse of up at him. Lt tended to spur him on. (Later Hohnan told him, with something ajpproaohing a giggle, that he had been scrabbling like a Martian sand crab on the floor of a dome.) But he wrestled the failing antigrav, by the book and by improvising, until it flickered out completely. While that doomed his mission it did stop the snapping, off-and-on action that had been shaking his brains and stomach lcx)se. And it also told him it was time to go, for by then the boat was in atmosphere, falling free, red hot and tumbling. He made a fast check of the few items he could take with him, locked the escape pod and jabbed his own Panic Button, grinning when he noticed that although a single, gentle tap would do it, he had punched it three times! ffis stomach flipped through two more on-and-off G pulls -- once with the slamming explosion of ejection and again, happily, when the big chute jerked open. Then his muttering at the Maint Section eased off, for from then on everything went by the book. The pod settled right side up, in the clearing for which he had aimed it, with everything intact and functioning. A s the yellow cloud of nylon settled beside him he let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. He was down, he thought wryly, in a landing he could walk away from. But it sure wasn't according to plan, either the E-Service plan or his own. The last he shrugged aside. His own plans were long range anyway, and he knew the odds. About one possible site for life in every fifteen hundred cubic light years. All you could do was try, and he was a patient man, Joe's patience, In fact, and his quiet manner and soft speech, had been known to lead some people to misjudge him. Off watch he was generally found sitting on the back of his neck in the lounge, seemingly with no thought but for the moment, and always within voice or gesture range of the coffee robot. But scattered through as much of the galaxy as the Exploration Service had so far opened you could find any number of junior officers, wardroom spacelawyers and not a few aggressive alien life forms who had learned, witih varying degrees of shock, that until you got to know him it was wiser not to crowd him. So while most of the eager firsttrippers really wanted the point spot nobody pressed after he told them, "Look! My name is up and I've taken my share of Mars-type sand craters and methane swamp worlds. What's wrong with my dropping in, for a change, on a planet where you can breathe?" The Drive Engineer, who had trained with Joe back at Vandenberg, let a mock-serious look sweep around the table and back to Joe. "Nothing wrong, Joe. Only you do have this habit of wandering off into the woods, when there are woods to wander off into. It's time consuming. But, of course, it's just your early upbringing showing. Joe grinned. "You grew up in the same place, Chief." "Yes but I did grow up. You see -- " the Chief waved his cup at the circle of faces -- "Joe comes from Terra, northern California, where believe it or not there are still a couple of hundred square kilometers of forest, with wildlife yet. When we were kids there, they would let you hunt only with rifle-mount cameras. But Joe's a shade atavistic. Why, this trip he even tried to sneak a combination fly-rod and shotgun on board." Joe grinned again and lounged back deeper in his chair. "Wrong, Chief. The handle wasn't a shotgun, although that's an idea. It converted into a hunting bow. And if you'd just kept your big mouth shut -- " The Chief looked pained. "I was thinking, as always, of the good of the service, and trying to keep The Thorn out of your side. But even so, when you draw the point spot still seem to always turn up near potential bird runs or fishing streams." "Part of the point's job is to check out the fauna." "But your methods, Joe! Remember Palma I? Those amphibians you were illegally angling for turned out to be highly intelligent?" Joe squirmed uncomfortably. "I wasn't fishing for them," he defended. "And I made friends with them, finally." "Sure you did." The Chief nodded owlishly. "You had to. Since it turned out the one you snagged was that tribe's equivalent of medicine man. And I'll grant that required tact, considering where you snagged him. Embarrassing! How would you like to be..." The chime broke In with Joe's signal, and Ensign Holman's flawless intercom voice called his name. "Thirty minutes to drop. Captain." Joe drained his cup, told the Chief where he could go, and palmed his coffee ration tab into the Chiefs slot on the dispenser robot. The robot rolled on down the table bubbling happily. It couldn't care less, and eventually the Chief would yell his head off. IF Joe made his way forward, toward the computer and control room. But on the way, after a series of innocent glances back down the empty corridor, he ducked into the supply section, making a fast, last minute check for pocket size items that could be converted into fishing tackle. Mostly this E-work was dreary and dangerous, much of it drudgery. You rarely found a pretty little world fresh air. This just might at long last be the one he was looking for. Anyway, nobody was going to talk him out of this drop. X Tobody did. But now, he thought soberly as he looked around him, he'd about as soon somebody had. Here he sat, his boat and equipment off somewhere in the woods in pieces, with the E-Ship pulling away. He turned the pod's little vision tank and a quick glance showed him the ship was still too busy to talk with him. He relaxed, but his relief at being all in one piece was marred by a vague uneasiness. He shook it off. A new planet, no matter what kind, always made you feel that way. He unstrapped, and opened the p. After all, Albert had long since sent down homing scoop missiles and checked out the sea water and the air. He drew in a deep, satisfying breath and let it out with an equally long si of relief. Fresh! It had the rich, green smell of things growing in soil instead of hydroponic tanks. It smelled like home. There was something a little like cedar, and a salty, seaweed smell from the beach not too far away. Ihere was the smell of a lush, recently wet, meadow. But there was also something -- at which he frowned slightly -- that reminded him of a well kept but crowded zoo. That faint animal smell brought back the vague feeling of uneasiness. quite the same as it had when he had studied it with Ensign Holman in the E-Ship's big screens. The Ensign had brushed that tumbling black hair from her eyes and waved a slim hand at the computer banks which made up one wall of her section. "Albert has told us all he can shaes up like a jewel, close to being Terra's twin." Joe had shaken his head, and had felt a note of bitterness in his voice. "Not Terra's twin now. Terra's twin before there were people, maybe." She laughed. "That's right. You're the one who thinks man should take a bold step backward." "Nope. I just think he shouldn't trample everything underfoot. You grew Up under those plasteel domes on Mars... although -- " he smiled briefly -- "it doesn't show. You must have spent a lot of time in the OneGee gyms when you were growing up. But you wouldn't know about forests and streams." She nodded. "You're right. Our flowers came from hydroponic farms." "Well, the people on Terra pick their flowers from hydroponic tanks, too, now. They invented the bulldozer a couple of hundred years beIF and antigrav. By that time, Terra was no longer a jewel. It was practically all paved." She laughed. "I've been there. And I've talked with the Chief. He told me you both grew up in one of the last National Parks. Said your dad, a Ranger, once accidentally cut a bulldozer in half. A laser misfire." Joe's lips quirked. "Well, those first rifles weren't dependable. But the accident did save a three thousand year old redwood, for a while. I expect?" "Albert has printed up a summary while smaller, checks out very close to Terra, or, as you say, Terra a thousand years back. No people, but ii has seas, forests, streams and all kinds of things that fly, swim and walk." Joe's eyes lit up. "Untouched! How about things that sting, claw and bite?" Ensign Holman had smiled, and her blue eyes scanned the six feet from his square jawed, close cropped head to his plasteel boots. "There are some. Must be in a balanced ecology. But that's why they issue those laser rifles to you broad-shouldered pioneer types. Still, there's no indication of anything down there any more intelligent than a bright chimpanzee or formidable than a rhinoceros. Just find us a site for the lab huts and we'll be down and protect you." Joe had grinned at her then. Now, at the memory he laughed ruefully. There wasn't much he could do toward a preliminary survey. Without the landing boat and its equipment he was left with packaged rations, his suit, and the short barreled laser rifle. His hand gun as always he was wearing. It added up, at best, to survival. II Y et the park-like glade Jooked as safe as a suburban back yard when he stepped out of the pod. He let the helmet swing back and breathed deeply. The air was still pungent with the odor of growing things. He could hear bird sounds, some musical, some raucous as an indignant blue jay. The breeze was soughing through a tall, sequoia-like tree some fifty yards away. For an instant hk spiiite lifted. This was a pretty little world. Then he became wary as it came to him that the sounds he heard were all distant. Nearby it was a little too quiet. The faint zoo sm was stronger, and he had the distinct feeling he was being watched. He moved away from the pod. The signs showed that grazing animals of some kind fed over this meadow. The wdnd again drew his attention to the tree. It towered there in splendid isolation, beautiful as a mountain redwood. But there was something about It that wasn't quite right. He flipped down the helmet and took a long binocular look through the faceplate. It did look a little like a redwood, except the branches were smaller and closer together. It was a tree that could be climbed. Tlie needle leaves were mostly clustered at the outer tips of the branches, and highmagnification showed the lower, matured needles flared at the base, with tips dark and sharp. "Darts?" he wondered, frowning. The thought drew his gaze downward and he realized what it was about the tree that was different. The grass under it was undisturbed. His lips pursed in a thoughtful whistle. "Oh-oh! And the grass eaters know how close they can feed. I wonder what triggers it?" He walked the perimeter of the circle of rich grass. There had to be some way of finding out without walking in there. He thought of the hand gun at his belt. The pellet could be set to explode on impact, with about double the force of an old fashioned, hand thrown grenade. But he wanted to see what the tree's reaction was to a walking animal -- or man. It didn't react to movement. He could see cricket-like bugs busy in the grass, arid, while he was watching, some kind of bat-like flying thing spotted him, darted aside, and flew with impunity under the spreading branches. He turned away, glancing at the pod, reassured by his estimate that he could reach the entry port in seconds. Then a flash of movement near the stream caught his eye. He drew the hand gun and turned toward the pod just as three lean, cat-like shapes burst from cover and converged from three directions. As he circled the tree he muttered irritably into his suit radio. "I hope you can still see and hear me. Holman. Look at those things! 'Nothing down there any more intelligent than a bright chimpanzee!' you say!" For at his first move the cats changed course, one making for the pod. Their obvious intention was to either cut him down or force him back, under the tree. A dozen strides told him he would lose the race. These things were incredibly fast. He stopped, dropped to one knee, and steadied the hand gun in both palms. The weapon grunted spitefully and the pellet burst three feet in front of the nearest cat. He saw it spin end over end as he wheeled to face the others. The gun grunted again, and the second cat disintegrated. He turned again, but the third cat had swerved abruptly and was headed back for cover. Frowning, he watched it disappear. Then he walked over to the sprawled animal he had stunned and used a non-explosive pellet just to be sure. C lose up, it still looked something like a cat -- a cross between a puma and a weasel, with some nightmarish overtones. It was a fanged and clawed predator, hairless and lean, all chest and no belly, built for speed. Again he looked around. Then he gingerly picked up the cat and whirled like a hammer thrower, tossing the carcass as far as he could. Carefully he stepped off the distance. Then he carried it back to the tree. Even though he had guessed what would happen he was shaken by the tree's reaction. When the ho ly struck the ground inside the circle of undisturbed grass the branches above IF the point of impact lashed into motion. The tips whipped up and then down, and there was a harsh, tearing sound. " Dozens of dart-shaped needles hissed into the ground and into the body of the cat. But he was unprepared for what followed. There was a stirring in the grass as writhing, off-white roots worked up out of the ground. The network thickened and Joe shuddered as he turned back to the pod. Back inside, he opened a mug of coffee, waited a moment for it to heat, and laced it with medkit brandy. He glanced warily around the now empty meadow and then turned to the pod's little communicator tank. The tank hummed softly, but showed only a swirling pattern of color. He checked the tuning and then called, "Slim, can you hear me?" Ensign Holman's voice came back clearly. "Loud and clear. Captain. And you should watch your language. But we're nearly out of direct visual range. What's with the tree?" "The tree we stay away from. It's a people eater." "We suspected as much when we saw you stun and use that first animal instead of blowing it apart. That was good shooting." "Now what would a computer operator know about shooting?" "Don't be smug. You forget I went through the same boot camp you did, only a few years later -- when it was a few degrees tougher. I can use a hand gun, too. But there's no time to exchange compliments. We've launched some communication satellites, and one of them should be in range soon. But we can see enough without it to tell you there's something unusual going on around you. Movement, all around, but we can't tell what. We'll pick you up through the comsats soon. But The Thorn says watch it! Out' Joe scowled, sipped some more coffee, and looked around the meadow. Watch it! he thought sardonically. What did Thornton and that good-looking Martian think he would be doing? The meadow was still empty -- or was it? A thin, rasping scream tore at his ears. Oh-oh! His cat was back, with a half dozen of its brothers, prowling near the edge of the glade but keeping their distance. And there was a grunting, wheezing sound, too, growing louder. He locked the communicator's video eyes on a moving bulk in the distant trees. The vision tank brought in an image of an animal as monstrous as the cats and nearly as ugly. It was larger than the rhino Holman had mentioned. It had longer legs, and there was no horn on it's horse-faced head. It looked as if it could run, should occasion demand. And as it moved its sides seemed to reflect dull highlights. He zoomed in close and again whistled. "Shades of Georgie Patton! It's the tank corps!" T he highlights were reflections from thick, horny plates, apparently rubbed smooth on the sides, which made up the animal's hide. Even the horse face was armored, the eyes mere holes in a solid plate Oi horn. Joe gulped the remaining coffee and grimly checked the rifle. Outside, tense and ready, he surveyed the meadow. Cats aiid other unidentified prowlers, no doubt predators, now ringed the perimeter. Those, he thought, he could handle, unless they all rushed at once. But there were now four of the big "ihinhorses", and they might be hard to stop, depending on how fast they were. They looked fast And any one of them could push the pod around like an empty ration carton. He waited, scowling thoughtfully. There had been something odd about the tree. Now there was something odd about this. Some defensive instinct flashed warning after warning. Then it came to him that this was shaping into a pattern. And he didn't like the patti at all. This menagerie was bdiaving as if it had been summoned and was being directed! Two of the rhinhorses had turned, skirting the edge of the meadow, and were plodding purposefully around behind him. If they rushed, and he failed to stop them, they would overrun him or force him back toward the tree. The treel A thought struck him, but he rejected it. He had seen some fantastic fliings in the way of far-out life fHms, but he wasn't ready to accept tdepathic plant life. It just couldnt be that overgrown thorn bush. Then he muttered angrily at himself. Of course! How stupid could you get? It was something he had overlooked, never thought of. Sometiding in the tree! There was no time for a second survey. One of the rhinhorses was moving in at a trot, speeding to what could soon be a headlong charge. He raised the laser, then lowered it. He was figuring on coming out of this alive. And for now, at least, the pod was home and headquarters. He didn't want an estimated two tons of alien carrion maturing on his doorstep. It was worth a try. He drew the hand gun and placed a pellet in front of the now charging beast. At the explosion it swerved and snorted. He placed another to one side, and another. The animal tossed its head, bellowing and wheezing. But it turned away, slowing to a trot. The others stopped, and all were watching. For an instant there seemed no movement anywhere. Again he looked up at the tree. He saw no target, but a good-sized climber could be concealed anywhere behind the trunk. And now the menagerie was stirring again, getting restless. Abruptly he raised the rifle and swept a cutting beam across the base of the tree. As the beam hit, the animals milled as if in sudden confusion. The base of the tree smoked and the trunk swayed, seeming to hang in mid air as it slowly toppled. Then, with the falling trunk midway in its arc, something ape-like, which reminded Joe of a monstrous flying lemur, spread its gliding membranes and soared from the upper branches. It drifted toward the brushy area near the stream and Joe saw another rhinhorse burst from cover and make for the gliding figure. The IF big animal was running with remarkable speed, and the soaring figure glided to its back, scrambling and beating its arms as it groped for foothold. As the rhinhorse and its rider disappeared, the other animals milled. Joe went into a crouch, ready for a rush. He waited, sizing up the milling ring, choosing spots where either the laser or the hand gun would be more effective. Then, gradually, he relaxed, staring about with growing conviction. He was right! This menagerie had been assembled and directed. And now it was losing interest! The remaining rhinhorses had started placidly cropping grass, ignoring him completely. The cats faded back into the forest, all except one, which was singlemindedly pursuing dinner at the far edge of the glade. While he watched, the cat made its kill, one of its late allies, and carried it off without a backward glance. Ill J oe's next prescription of medkit brandy went down neat. He needed it. The pod communicator beeped, and he fine-tuned the EShip's band. The tank cleared to reveal Commander TTiornton's craggy features. Thornton's face fractured into one of its rare smiles. "The comsat caught up with you. We got most of that, and we're still recording. That was quite a show. Captain." Joe grimaced. "I'm glad somebody liked it. Commander. I sure didn't. And I have the feeling I'm going to like it less later on. These carnivores are playing for keeps, or at least their boss is. How soon can you get some people and equipment down here?" "Soon, Joe. Five-six days. The people on IV are in worse shape, than you. Earthquake, and their dome is losing air, with the outside atmosphere mostly ammonia. You hole up somewhere and hang on. We'll be back." Thornton's face shifted aside and Ensign Holman's wide blue eyes went over him. She gave him a brief, non-service smile, then sobered and spoke briskly. "You bandied that efficiently, Captain. Albert says those animals were almost certainly being directed, probably by some telepathic means, by that thing which glided out of the tree. He says -- " Joe broke in with amused irritation. "You and Albert! You're even getting so you talk like him. Look, Slim, you could use transistors for brains and figure that one out. How much detail did you get? Could you see where it went? Run the tape." She nodded, and presently she said, "See? South of you, three or four kilometers, on that knoll with more trees around it. Watch! Whatever it was riding, that big animal scrambled off and climbed to the rocks at the top." "I've got it. Could be it Mves there, although I doubt if that matters much. Did you see where my boat crashed? I might be able to vage something." "No tape, but the Chief was monitoring." Joe saw the drive engineer's face move into the screen beside Holman. "You cut it pretty fine, Joe," he said. "The boat went in only a couple of kilometers east of you. But there can't be much left of it. Spare computer and power units maybe, if you're lucky." Joe grimaced wryly. "Big help!" The Chiefs face split in a wide grin. "Why so glum, Joe? Aren't you the guy who always finds a bright side? This is the chance you've been waiting for. Nothing to do for the next week but fish and hunt. Live it up!" Joe almost yelled his exasperation. "Live it up. Fish and hunt. Why, you idiot, didn't you see that tape Slim just ran?" "Sure. But what -- " "But what! The what is that I'm not the one that is going to be doing the hunting. That big, ugly flying ape, with his pack of killer cats and armor plated herbivora, is going to be hunting mer T he image in the tank was beginning to waver. The E-Ship, "falling" outward toward K-IV at the full acceleration of that big planet's gravity, was nearly out of visual range of the comsats. The Chief, frowning thoughtfully, moved aside and Ensign Holman's heart-shaped face filled the screen. The image blurred, and that, Joe thought, probably accounted for the fact that she no longer looked cool and calm. Then the image blurred out and the tank became a swirling mass of color. But her voice came in strongly, the waver in it probably just transmission surge as the cornsat boosters stepped up the signal. "Take care, pioneer. We'll be back!" Joe stared out at his now not so pretty little world. No, he thought, it's as pretty as ever. But it has some unfriendly flora and fauna, some aggressively dangerous. That big flying ape -- Joe found himself thinking of it as "The Hunter" -- had run. But it had lost only a skirmish, not a war. It had to run, after Joe cut its command and observation post out from under it. Assuming it was intelligent as well as telepathic, and it would be stupid to assume anything else, it now knew as much about Joe's weapons as Joe knew about its weapons. An inconsistency or two nagged at Joe. This "bright chimpanzee", this hunter, had gone after Joe on sight, true enough. But why hadn't he sent his whole menagerie in to overrun Joe? And the tree! Surely he couldn't control that spastic monstrosity. How had he gotten up there? Joe mused, absently watching the big, ugly rhinhorses placidly feeding away from him. And it reminded him the hunter had glided down to one of them from the upper branches. Of course! A running glide could have carried the hunter over the sensitive root area, in past the branch tips. From there he could climb. Joe sighed, and came to his feet. The rest of it was tomorrow's problem. The sun was dropping, and he had to find a rocky hideout of his own, since the pod offered no protection at all. And it looked like he was going to be the quarry in a dangerous if not deadly game of hide IF and seek. But he stood there, finishing the coffee, still thinking, and the more he thought of holing up the less he liked it. Probably his best defense would be a hard and determined offense. He would go hunting himself! And there was something else. He looked around, musing. He had been searching for something for a long time and this might be it. But he could never, reasonably, expect it to be handed to him on a silver plate. He had to find out, once and for all, if he could cope with this planet. He looked out toward the surrounding woods and presently he said aloud, "I don't know where you are, fellow, or whether or not you can read my mind. But if you can, you better get set. Tomorrow you and I are going to gofor brokel" H is preparations didn't take long. There wasn't much he could take. The suit hampered movement slightly, but it would provide protection against nuisance attacks. Small predators, or bad-tempered snake types, if any, would only bend their fangs on it. He wasnT at all sure about the dart-tree needles, undoubtedly poison. He gathered up the laser, a food pack, a thermos. He hoped the rhinhorses would ignore the pod, with him out of it. He closed the port and started cautiously across the meadow, south, toward the area where Slim's tape had shown the hunter had gone to ground. In his mind he and the hunter had already changed roles. Under other circumstances his first able. There were trees, many with a familiar look, which reminded him of the few remaining forest patches at home. Other trees were weirdly different, having the look of giani ferns. The dart trees were few, and easily avoided, although they did grow in clumps or rows in places. He paused momentarily at the edge of a stream, briefly lost in nostalgia at the purling whisper of water over the rocks. Once he crouched, alert, but the sound which had startled him was only something small and bounding, the fleeing, furry equivalent, he guessed, of a terran cottontail. Presently he found what he wanted. He was in a sparsely wooded valley now, the ground rising steadilv but gently. At the edge of a dry stream bed he found a rocky formation open only on one side, with enough overhang so nothing could drop on him from above. Branches, cut with the laser, he piled in front. His brushwood barricade would stop nothing, but nothing could get through it without making enough noise to warn him. IV H e slept fitfully at first, but later he must have slept soundly, for he woke feeling rested, to bird sounds, mostly musical. He yawned and stretched, savoring the sight, sound and smell of a damp woodland warming in the sun. He smiled to himself. This was it! This was what had sent him into the E-Service. Then he came to his feet, alert, when the birds to one side went suddenly silent, reminding him of the business at hand. As he stood up one of the cats, standing motionless a hundred meters away, drifted ghost-like back into the woods. He frowned after it. Who, he wondered, was really doing the hunting here? How much communication did these beasts have? Could the cat report? He pushed aside his brush barricade. Now, at daybreak, the birds made an early warning system. He picked a spot in the open, by the stream, and breakfasted out of a can, sharing the last of it with something small and furry which came, nose twitching, from its own rocky shelter. He moved on south, keeping in the open when possible, until he guessed he was within half a kilometer of the hunter's rocky knoll. There was a whisper of movement in the undergrowth. Once he heard crashing in the woods behind him whirled him around, keyed for trouble. Trouble was shaping. One of the rhinhorses was coming toward him through the trees. Joe was astonished to see the charging beast was ignoring a dart tree which stood in its path. The beast thundered closely past the tree trunk and the branches lashed violently. Then he realized that with its head low, to protect its eyes, the big beast was impervious. The needles would simply glance from that armored back. He brought up the laser, then swore under his breath, realizing almost too late that this attack was loo obvious, too blatantly a diversion. He wheeled around, gambling on a quick estimate that anything so ponderous could not possibly turn as quickly as he could jump from its path. He burned down one leaping cat in mid air, disabled another as it raced in from the side. Then he leaped, sprawling, from the thunder of pounding feet behind him. The rhinhorse crashed past, wheezing, but looking neither right nor left. Joe came to his feet in time to see a third cat fade into the underbrush up the slope ahead. He waited, ready for another move, but none came. He was keenly alert now, convinced finally that he had not overrated his adversary. The hunter was something more than just a crafty ape. This last move was something Joe himself might have tried had he been directing the same "weapons" the hunter was using. He moved on, alert but thinking hard. Was he being stupid about this? After all, five or six days and the EShip would be back with help. He shook off the thought. This was, now more than ever, a personal duel between himself and that quickly glimpsed flying ape with its wide, fur covered membranes and man-like head. He thought for a moment. What if their positions were reversed? What would he, Joe, do if he were in the hunter's place? First he would try to influence this strange new being, try driving thoughts at him, try to make him do what he wanted, go where he wanted. Joe halted wdth a start. Was he being influenced? Was he being led, or driven, into some kind of trap? IF He thought not. Certainly he had reacted properly a few moments back. He mov again, still wondering. Then he realized the question was academic. It no longer mattered whether he had been led into a trap or had walked into it by chance. He was in it, and it was closing around him. He had come to the foot of the high, rocky prominence which the viewers in the comsats had shown to be the hunter's lair. This approach was bordered with dart trees, big ones, which overlapped, with no way out between them. And behind him again was the restless, prowling ring of cats and lesser quadrupeds, cutting off retreat. They could overrun him any time they were ordered to! H e didn't wait. He slipped the pack from his back and, running, threw a barrage of explosions from the hand gun into the woods and followed his barrage back to the edge of the trees to a rocky outcropping. A big dart tree, with smaller trees of other kinds nearby, protected him from one side. From the other, the cats could get at him only two or three at a time. It was at best a reprieve. But it would buy him some time. He crouched by the rocks, breathing hard, and grew tense as he realized that time itself could beat him. The hunter could wait him out if it came to a stalemate. And it looked as if some of the cats were getting ready for a rush at the open corridor leading in to him. He recalled their confused behavior the day before when the hunter's attention had been diverted. Apparently there was a limit to his ability to control and direct. Joe watched the cats, and the movements in the woods which indicated others were collecting. It's worth a try, he thought, and turned the laser on one of the big, rocky outcroppings at the top of the knoll. The rock smoked and chipped, dust and vapor rising as the beam cut into it. He judged the hunter's confusion by the sudden disruption among the cats. Some retreated, others merely stopped, crouched and snarling. But the rush which had been shaping was broken up. But this, too, was a losing tactic. There wasn't energy enough in the laser's power pack to destroy that rocky outcropping which protected the hunter. Joe studied the rocky knoll, estimating heights and distances, and glanced up at the dart tree which, at one side of him, was both a shield and a barrier. This tree, too, towered. And from its upper branches he believed he could see over the hunter's barricade. He fired more pellets into the woods around him, sent several, for effect, against the still smoking rocks at the top of the hill. Then he made a quick estimate of height and distance and turned the laser against a smaller tree growing outside the dart tree's circle of sensitive roots. He cut out a wedge low in the trunk and the tree slowly toppled, crashed through the dart tree's lower branches, and fell heavily across the root system, its upper tip well inside the dart tree's inner circle. The dart tree lashed in blind frenzy, but when the pressure stabilized the dart-tipped limbs straightened, inert. Joe flipped down his helmet, chose a pathway through the upright branches of the felled tree, and raced across his bridge to the safe area in close to the dart tree's trunk. He jumped, caught a handhold, and climbed. Below him the cats converged, raging, ringing the tree. J oe climbed, watching for a glimpse of the hunter. Once he glanced down and smiled grimly. The hunter could see him. Two of the cats were making their way across his tree trunk bridge below, on their way up after him. For the moment he ignored them, watching the knoll as he climbed higher. Below him the cats gained. It was only a distraction, but it was a good one, for soon he would have to dispose of them. He could see the far side of the hunter's knoll before he could see into the fort-like formation where the hunter must be hiding. The far side, too, had its share of dart trees, but these were widely spaced. There were rocks on the far side also, big outcroppings between which the hunter could dodge if he chose to retreat. One of the rhinhorses was there, too, glimpsed as it made its way up the far side between the rocks. Joe could hear the cats snarling behind him. Soon he would have to turn away and dispose of them. Then, below him on the knoll, the big rhinhorse crossed an open area and Joe caught a glimpse of the brown, ape-like shape of the hunter as he leaped for the rhinhorse's lowered neck. The hunter scrambled up and the big animal burst into the open, heading away, toward an opening in the trees. Joe braced himself, ignored the cats and drew a bead on the rider. It was a long shot, at a moving target. But when the laser hissed Joe saw the rider jerk, sway and clasp one hand against his shoulder. Then the rider slumped forward, face down, clinging to the rhinhorse's neck. The rhinhorse slowed its pace, nearly stopped, and presently trotted on aimlessly, changing course. Joe glanced down. The cats were close, too close, but no longer controlled. One was retreating, backing gingerly down the tree trunk. The other was still climbing, looking about as if dazed but still coming -- probably now, he thought, of its own killer's volition. Joe coldly shot it out of the tree and then turned back to the hunter. He was still clinging to his mount, but apparently no longer able to guide it. And because of that he was doomed. For the rhinhorse, having no fear of the dart tree needles, was wandering away from the opening toward which the hunter had guided it. It was on a course which would take it between two big, closely placed trees which would sweep the wounded hunter from its back. Again Joe lifted the rifle, aiming carefully. The beam hissed, smoking, into the ground at one side of the trotting rhinhorse. The animal started and jerked away, nearly unseating the clinging rider. Joe sent another beam after the first, close in, and the ground smoked and blackened IF as the heat bit into it. This time the animal turned aside and trotted safely past the trees on open ground. Joe dropped his faceplate and watched at high magnification. As the rhinhorse cleared the trees Joe saw the rider struggle upright, looking back. It was Joe's first close look at his adversary, and he wasn't pretty, that was certain. But neither was he a beetle-browed ape. Inside that homely, fur-covered head was a skull of a size and shape to hold as good a brain as a dolphin's -- or a man's. And, looking back, the hunter did something which made Joe nod and smile thoughtfully. True, the hunter was swaying, barely able to keep his seat. And he could have been only reaching for his burned shoulder. But Joe didn't think so. Joe was virtually certain that weakly, but definitely, the hunter raised his hand. Joe raised his own hand, empty, palm forward. The hunter turned away, swaying but holding his seat. V J oe was back in his meadow, fishing, when the landing boat came This gne settled like a leaf. Joe chuckled to himself at his image of the boys in Maintenance agonizing over its performance. Joe had found the wreck of his own boat. It was mostly scrap, but with some computer components still usable, and his own p communicator, he had jury-rigged a gadget with which Albert, with Slim Holman's help, had analyzed the creek water, some of the game, and a whopping, flopping gilled thing from the stream, finding them all usable. Joe had been living high -- ha,d, in fact, been living it up, with nothing to do but fish and hunt. Holman came in with them. She left the group by the boat and approached, slim and lithe, skirting the dead dart tree with distaste. Joe watched with appreciation. She would do to have along. She was the only woman he had ever seen who could make those issue coveralls look as if they had been tailored. He cocked an eyebrow. Come to think of it, maybe they had been tailored, by her. She smiled a greeting. "The Chief was right. I might have known you'd be off fishing when there's work to do." After that she talked only shop, until as they walked back along the creek, her eyes began to dance. "And right over there," she pointed -- "is your swimming hole." Joe felt his ears burning. "Slim! I wouldn't have thought it of you! Just how long were you back in visual contact before I knew it?" She laughed. "I'll never tell you, pioneer." Joe laughed too, but then he sobered and looked away, around the meadow, at the green forest glade that stretched away unbroken and unscarred. He turned back to the girl. "I'll tell you something. Slim. One day that is going to be a swimming hole, a real one. I'm going to build my dam right across here." She looked up at him, wide eyed. "What are you talking about." "Me. I've found it. This is home Slim." "You mean you're going to stay here? You can't!" "No, not now. But I'm coming back here. I'm something of a wardroom space lawyer, Slim. I've read the fine print in my contract. There is a paragraph most of these guys skip over -- but it's the paragraph which brought me into the service to begin with. When your term is up you get a bonus, a good one. Most of the boys don't read past that point. They just start spending the money. But you can, if you choose, take land instead of cash. And this -- " he waved expansively -- "is going to be my bonus. As them out of. I'm going to be the first colonist here, and I'm going to have plenty to say about the way this little world is used." "But the hunter, Joe. The one you drove away, and the others like him." "I can cope with them. I'm learning more about them every day, and they're learning about me. But look. Slim. As you say, there's work to do now. But this little world has the darnedest moon you ever saw. Twice as bright as Luna. Walk out here with me tonight and I'll bring you up to date about Joe Hanley. I can tell you things about him that even Albert doesn't know." It was. her turn to blush. "Joe Hanley, I've never asked Albert anything about you! Why..." He laughed and took her arm. "Come on, there's work to do. The Thorn will want a report, and I want to get this decision of mine on the record." T hat evening Ill's moon turned out to be everything Joe had predicted. The meadow was silent and glowing. They walked slowly, taking in the moonlit landscape. But when they approached the stream they heard a sudden sound nearby, a sighing, grunting wheeze. Joe froze for an instant, then drew his hand gun and stepped in front of the girl. She said nothing, but she just as quickly moved up beside him again, her own gun out, waist high. Joe noted with approval that she handled it as if she knew what it was, but he ordered, "Get back!" "No! I can use this thing if need be, remember? What is it?" He put a hand on her wrist. "Don't move, then, unless I do. It's a cat, and with them you take nothing for granted." Then they saw it approaching, slowly, half crouched, moving with the loose, flowing gait common to predators. Ghostly moonlight glinted in its eyes. The girl caught her breath. "It's... it's carrying something!" Almost at their feet the cat put down its burden. For an instant it glared at them, fangs gleaming whitely. Joe watched tensely, and he could sense the girl at his side fighting to keep under control. Joe felt -- something -- touch his mind, a probing that somehow could get through to him. For the tiniest fraction of an instant he felt -- well, reassured. Then the feeling was gone. But the hunter was nearby. Joe could almost see the cat's killer urge being stifled, suppressed, the lean body frozen almost rigid. Then with IF a rasping snarl the cat turned away. In seconds its loose, flowing run carried it into the shadows. "Joe! What does it mean. I felt something..." "I think I know. This is the third time, and one of those predators would never do a thing like that on its own." The girl looked around at the surrounding woods and shivered. "Then the hunter sent it!" "Yes. That thing the cat brought trout. I imagine that to the hunter it is a delicacy. It's a gift -- a kind of Peace offering. It means we can come to terms with him." "But he's a killer!" "No, he's a hunter. That's a distinction lost on most people. The cats are killers. But uncontrolled they're no worse than any other predator. They can be handled. But I believe I can make friends with the hunter. Who knows? Maybe I can teach him to use tools, and he can teach me to use my mind." The sighing wheeze sounded again. This time the shrubbery parted, and an ugly, horse-faced head, jaws moving rhythmically, pushed into view. The girl started, and took Joe's arm. Joe laughed. "It's only George." She looked up. "y, that's how... he's what we heard, before the cat came." "Yes. I found him trying to roll in the sand one day, and gimmicked the laser to burn the moss off his back. Since then he's appointed me his groom and himself my bodyguard." T he girl released his arm and glanced around. The park-like glade was shimmering in the fluorescence of Ill's enormous moon. And that, Joe thought, was something else he liked about thfs new world. In this moonlight her eyes and her smile didn't seem cool, as they usually did. And when she spoke, her voice was warm, pitched low. She said, "Joe, I lied, to you this morning. Only a little, though, because this morning I really hadn't talked to Albert about you, much. But this afternoon I did. After feeding him the data on what you told me this morning, and after telling him I like this new world of yours too." Joe laughed. "You believe everything that outsize calculator tells you?' "Yes. He doesn't know how to lie. And when I said I was going to tell you all this he predicted -- ninety-nine point eight probability -- what you're going to say next." Joe looked down at her, but before he could speak she put a slim hand momentarily to his lips. Then she reached out and patted the rhinhorse's ugly, armored nose. "Just for tonight, Georgie," she whispered, "go do your bodyguarding from over there by the stream someplace. I know what I'm going      IF  Short Story Dreams were the stuff the world was built on -- then one day the dreams stopped! T he day they nationalized the Dream Machine Corporation was the day Harry Carver dreamed himself to death. On that last day, in his confusion and despair, there was simply no choice. The principles on which he had built his life -- and by this time his life and the dream machines had become indistinguishable, one from the other -- seemed a mockery, a colossal practical joke with Harry Carver both the perpetrator and the target. The machine was to have been Harry's gift to the world -- his panacea for the emotionally lame, halt and blind. A solution to humanity's hitherto insoluble problems. Those unhappy individuals for whom "selfacceptance was unattainable, if not incomprehensible, would at last be able to derive happiness and satisfaction from their lives. Frustration would become as extinct as, say, smallpox. Men would live in harmony with their fellow men; wars would become ancient history, and the tools of war, nuclear stockpiles and all, museum relics. No one would be dissatisfied with his lot, for it would be the one he had freely chosen, and which he could exchange for another at any time. For financial and other practical reasons, the Dream Machine Corporation had been founded in Harry's garage. The first machine was bulky, noisy and far from esthetic -- in fact, it was encased in an old, discarded telephone booth. Experimentation with animals being impossible, Harry had searched long and hard for a subject. At last he had settled on the unhappiest human being he knew: his father-in-law. Joe Stoddard had lived a full and happy life, but since his wife's death fifteen years ago, his genial disposition had deteriorated into an almost catatonic state. Loneliness had overwhelmed him; he had lost his taste for living, neither had he sufficient motivation for dying. The contrast between his present and former selves was heartbreaking for Harry to watch, and his father-in-law had been in the back of his mind all the while he was constructing the machine. So Joe Stoddard was the logical choice for the machine's trial run. J oe had sat quietly, eyes closed, in the converted phone booth while Harry programmed the machine with the information Joe had given him. Slowly the muscles of Joe's face relaxed into a smile. Within a few minutes he looked twenty years younger, and the deeply-etched lines around his mouth seemed almost to disappear. An expression of pure joy fixed itself on his face, and Harry's eyes never left that face during the four hours until the machine automatically switched itself off. Joe Stoddard yawned, stretched himself and looked at Harry, his eyes shining with a light that had flickered out fifteen years ago. "God bless you," he murmured to Harry. "It's a miracle. I just dreamed my honeymoon all over again -- only it was more real than any dream I've ever had. It was realer than -- realer than real, is what I'd call it. I could smell Louise's perfume, and feel the softness of her skin. Really feel it! I don't know if it's hypnotism or hallucination or what, but, Harry -- it was more real than anything I've ever experienced. Likelife, but larger than life!" Thus the first testimonial for the dream machine. Due to the inordinate amount of time required to program the machine, Harry found it necessary to hire a staff, small to begin with, to assist him. And in order to meet his payroll, he found it necessary to rent, quietly and on a private basis, a few of the first experimental machines. At first the price was exorbitant; but Harry made those early sales to people whose pleasure it is to buy what no one else can afford. Each dream was personalized and original, and this naturally kept the price up. Later, Harry thought, basic dreams could be mass-produced on a much lower cost-per-dream basis. And so, within just a few months, the dream machines became .acknowledged status symbols. Word-of-mouth advertising flourished, and Harry finally resorted to buying advertising time and space, not to sell more machines, for from the beginning the demand exceeded the supply, but to educate the public to dispel the rumors that seemed to multiply daily. The most common misconception was that the dream machines were a new entertainment medium, a sort of elaborate, three-dimensional personal television set. The public couldn't seem to believe that anything as intimate, as individual as a dream, could be manufactured. But it was something new, they admitted, and that fact alone guaranteed its success on the market. The first Christmas after Harry had gotten his factory going on a full-time basis, everyone who already had a portable hair dryer, electric can opener, electric carving knife, not to mention color TV -- in short, most of the population received gift certificates for dream machines. They had only to fill out the elaborate order blanks and drop them in the mail, and within three months the dream machine of their choice would be delivered, installed and demonstrated for them. B y this time, those certain basic categories Harry had anticipated were taking shape. By far the greatest demand was for the Little GirlBoy Dream. Mothers wanted it, and fathers -- particularly analysands. Senior citizens ordered them and even occasionally teenagers. To be a child again -- this was the dream of dreams. Rare was the adult, however, who chose to dream his own childhood. Of all the dreams, the Childhood Dreams were farthest from reality. But still, as Joe Stoddard had put it, "realer than real". Each, week's national "Top Ten Dreams" became the basis of the new psychiatry. The Elizabeth Taylor Dream was a favorite with the housewives, and its counterpart with their husbands. Conservatives ordered variations of the Dictator Dream, available in various historical settings (the Christians-to-the Lions Dream was a heavy seller). Liberals, on the other hand, quickly bought out the Saint Dreams, from Aquinas to Xavier. Harry had expected these to be big sellers with the clergy, but they leaned almost to a body to the Fetish Dreams, Anteaters through Zoos. All orders were, under strictest security measures, kept confidential. Executives ordered Walden Dreams, and farmers ordered Playboy Dreams. Confirmed drug and alcohol addicts kicked their habits with ease while dreaming Don Juan and other Conquest Dreams. Politicians favored the Coronation Dream, and military men dreamed, almost without exception, of Mom. There were categories within categories of dreams, the basic ones being sexual, financial and spiritual. Each dreamer was guaranteed that it was impossible for him to dream exactly the same dream twice; although the emotional experience desired by the dreamer never varied, nor did the main characters, the plot twists, costumes and settings brought an element of suspense to each dream, thus heightening the final satisfaction. The dreams were the ultimate escape. Yet, unlike other escapees, they were always fresh, available at will (after the initial expense) and completely safe. Television, movies, comic books and sports events became obsolete. The dreams eclipsed all other, less convincing, diversions. The population was truly at peace with itself; divorce, crime, conflict IF of any kind simply ceased to be. People went to work each morning blissful and highly motivated by the previous night's dream, and worked feverishly through the day to get home to their dream machines. B y the second anniversary of the formation of the Dream Machine Corporation, disturbing doubts had begun to take shape in Harry Carver's mind. He had designed the machines to comfort the afflicted, never dreaming that the term encompassed the entire population. It seemed to Harry that he alone, in all the dreaming country, had no compalsion to dream. Even those of his friends whom he had considered most happy, bestadjusted, dreamed themselves to sleep each night. His own wife, Marian, had requested and received a custom streamlined dream machine, programmed to her college days. It wasn't, she assured Harry, that she was dissatisfied with her life with him. It was just -- well, she really couldn't explain it, but she just couldn't give up that year of her life when she was runner-up to the Homecoming Queen. (Only in her dream, of course, she wasn't runner-up.) Harry found it lonely evenings while Marian dreamed, so for something to do, he programmed himself a James Bond dream. He had been working fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, trying to fill the back orders that overflowed his offices. And after all, a man was entitled to some relaxation. It was his only luxury, if indeed it could be considered a luxury. For awhile, life was good. But then Harry began to wonder, can life be too good? He had observed the symptoms first in his father-in-law, who by now had probably logged the most dreaming hours in the country. At first, the dreams had motivated him to be more productive, more sociable, more aware than ever in his life. But little by little, Joe Stoddard seemed to become -- there was only one word for it, Harry decided -- dreamlike. There were moments, and they grew alarmingly more frequentj when Joe's face would, without warning, begin to blur around the edges, becoming more and more indistinct until -- Harry would rub his eyes, blink and squint, but there was no doubt about it -- it would disappear altogether, sometimes leaving empty space, sometimes to be replaced by other faces mouthing senseless, disjointed words. This unnerved Harry to the extent that he sought to lose himself in his work as never before. The possible explanations for Joe's behavior were far too frightening for Harry to contemplate. And, at first, his work succeeded in keeping his mind occupied. But as the weeks passed, the work became monotonous; the novelty of it had worn thin, and the routine of it became, for Harry, deadly dull. He found himself looking forward with ever-growing anticipation to his nightly # dreams, infinite in their variations, predictable in style but never in detail. He installed a duplicate of his personal machine in his office, for use during his dream breaks. He often spent the night now on the couch in the office lounge, knowing Marian, absorbed in her own dreams, wouldn't notice his absence. Besides, his behavior was perfectly normal. Everyone spent the greatest part of his time dreaming now; people stayed more and more within their dream machines, secure, safe and contented, often forgetting to eat or sleep -- forgetting, in fact, to wake up. T he last session of the Congress of the United States -- the last session, that is, where enough members were awake to constitute a quorum -- had less the appearance of a legislative session than a shadow play. Voices rose and fell with a hypnotic harmoniousness, and every bill introduced was passed unanimously; for the first time in the history of any nation, opposing parties ceased to attack each other. The final bill, sponsored by the leaders of both parties, proposed that in the interests of national security, national defense, farm price supports, foreign aid, stable currency, management and labor, civil rights. The Bill of Forces Radio Service, the Dream Machine Corporation would hence forth become a public utility, owned and operated by the United States government. The motion was carried by a voice vote, and when Harry Carver could not be reached by telephone, a telegram was sent to inform him of the new legislation. When the Western Union messenger interrupted Harry at the climax of a dream, Harry was appalled at the seriousness of the situation. Any government with the power to control its citizens' dreams could -- Harry shuddered at the implications. Surely, he thought, it must be a mistake! Didn't they realize, couldn't they see where this sort of thing must lead? He, Agent #, would have to tell them -- No, that was wrong! He splashed his face with ice water, trying to jolt his drowsy brain to full awareness. He was Harry Carver, of course, and he would appear before a Joint Session of Congress, if necessary, and show them just how misguided, how fuzzy their thinking had become! The first thing to do, he thought, was to contact some influential legislators and sound them out before making any public statement. He dialed direct to Washington, but the phones rang in empty offices. Frantic, he tried to cl an emergency meeting of his Board of Directors -- but their telephones were all off the hook. Harry, by a supreme effort of will, forced himself to concentrate. It was an almost impossible task. The papers, he thought, what do the morning papers say?' Pehaps there he might find a clue to help formulate his course of action. He went out into the empty streets, looking for a newspaper to tell him what was happening in the nation whose problems he, Harry, had singlehandedly eliminated. But the newsstands were covered with dust and rust, and the papers on them were yellowed and fading. IF H arry strained to focus his eyes, and found himself alone in a land of changing shapes and shadows. Buildings floated through the mists, their forms constantly changing. Harry felt himself surrounded by spectral giants, menacing despite, or perhaps because of, their unsubstantiality. He was seized by an uncontrollable panic. He tried to run, exerting every muscle, but he had the sensation of walking under water. Somethingy some nameless, faceless thing was after him. Suddenly a wave of relief washed over him. Directly in front of him, sent by some merciful Providence, stood his own monogrammed dream machine, familiar and safe in a world of terror. He dropped gratefully into its reclining massage chair -- the newer models were greatly refined -- and pressed the "Dream" button. For one moment, all was as it had been, and Harry began to relax. He was suave and supremely confident in his evening clothes, surrounded by a voluptuous harem. But no -- something was wrong! He was Harry Carver again, and this time surrounded by immense, roaring prehistoric monsters breathing fire! No sooner had he grasped the image than it changed, then changed again, and again. He was encircled by a montage of storms, volcanic eruptions, giant insects, animals of every description, earthquakes, and grotesque, misshapen faces -- and they were all, every one of them, after him. His mouth felt parched, his tongue thick. He tried to scream, but only soft whimpers came from his throat. He could feel the physical presence of the nightmare now, crushing his body and freezing his brain. He was falling -- a void had opened beneath him and he was spinning and whirling, ever faster, no control nOw, consciousness dissolving into the silence of a star, broken only by echoes of alarm clocks, ringing unheeded in empty a II Npw in Galaxy!   by Frank Herbert Author of The Dragon in the Sea and the winner of the # Science Fictipn Writers of America award Plus stories and features by Robert Silverberg Willy Ley Algis Budrys John Brunner -- and many morel June issue of Galaxy on sale now -- don't miss HI  IF  Novelette Sweet Reason Here's how the failed Cenfrans handle goof-offs. It'd never work with humans... would it? I aptain Karp Moklin, Centran  assistant psychologist at the local prisoner-detention camp, nodded to the perspiring Earth psychotherapist who was his visitor. "Yes, Dr. Garvin. As you say, such cases as these are for the spWalists." Garvin drew a shaky breath. "I certainly do feel privileged. Captain, to come and watch a Centran psychologist at work. Fm very anxious to meet Major Poffis. My own -- ah -- efforts certainly don't seem to have accomplished much." In the cell behind him stood a large Centran soldier, his fur unbrushed and untrimmed, tail thrashing in triumph, a sneer on his face, and a chunk of Dr. Garvin's sport jacket in his hand. "Of course," said Garvin, "really deep psychotherapy is a very slow process. This is why I am so anous to see one of your own people, and observe his methods. Possibly if we could -- ah -- pool our resources it might be possible to considerably accelerate the course of treatment." Moklin nodded. "Major Poffis himself has often complained that the work takes too long." "Is the -- ah -- the incidence of relapses -- " Garvin hesitated, then rephrased the question to fit the less developed Centran mentality. "I mean, do the patients have to come back very often for a second course of treatments?" The Centran seemed startled at this idea. "No, of course not." "The treatments are usually suecessfulT' "Oh, yes." "Does the major also treat those suffering from -- ah -- battle fatigue -- " The Centran looked puzzled. "Everyone is fatigued in battle. No, the major's treatment is not meant for that. He handles mostly these uncontrollables, the ones with -- " "Severe neuroses?" "With the -- ah -- with the violent -- ah -- " Moklin paused as if mentally searching for some word or phrase that he had memorized onr with the intention of using it later for effect. He straightened, and said learnedly, "With the 'violent antisocial tendencies.' " Garvin blinked. "This is Major Poffis's specialty, then?" "Yes," said Captain Moklin. "He does a lot of this work." "That is precisely what we find most difficult." Garvin glanced uneasily at the prisoner, who with coy gestures was now urging him to come closer to the bars. "We find," liC coughed slightly, "that these are often the most obstinate cases. They are difficult to reach -- to contact -- to form any common -- " The captain glanced at the wall clock. "Major Poffis can reach theifo. He will be here soon. He is always on time. Then you will iee how he does it." The prisoner methodically tore his piece of Garvin's jacket to shreds, and leered at Garvin through the bars. T he clang of an outer door and the sound of voices heralded the arrival of Major Poffis. Dr. Garvin said anxiously, "Is the major, ah, quite high in your academic hierarchy? In civilian life, I mean." The Centran captain looked blank. "He has a Qh.Q." "Ah, I see. Of course. Well -- I'm not really familiar with the niceties of Centran -- ah -- academic protocol. Shall I call him 'major,' or 'doctor'?" The Centran looked blank. "He is a major." Garvin had the sensation of coming solidly up against a blank wall. He nodded hastily, and barely stopped himself from saying, "Silly of me to ask." Such comments, he had found, were likely to cause the Centrans to agree. Instead, he prepared himself to greet the Centran academic. From the man's record of cures, he was a veritable master psychologist. Some of Garvin's colleagues. of course, did not consider the record of cures really significant. For them what counted were the methods used and the theoretical justification of the methods. But Garvin personally found it a little embarassing to do no better than unaided nature. From Major Poffis -- in his mind he decided to call him Dr. Poffis -- from Dr. Poffis he would learn the best of Centran practices, then combine it with the highest Earth theory, and perhaps thus create a universal treatment superior to any hitherto used. A murmur just outside the door told of Dr. Poffis's approach. Garvin prepared his smile and readied the comment, "I hope that a useful cross-fertilization of our mutual concepts may bear fruit in a more successful treatment. Doctor." Just where he would put this into the conversation, Garvin wasn't sure, but he wanted it ready when the time came. The door latch clicked, and Garvin extended his right hand. He was on the alert to approach the tall distinguished Centran who would come in, who would perhaps be impressively silver-furred, with a slightly wry smile, or perhaps with a look of blazing incandescent genius demanding the instant submission of lesser intellects, and -- The door opened. A Centran major of above average height, broadly built, with muscles up both sides of his neck under the fur, walked in and growled, "All right, Moklin, what's on the sheet for today?" Captain Moklin bawled, "AttentionV" The prisoner raised his right hand to his forehead, as if in salute. Then he lowered the thumb and forefinger to the sides of his nose and blew out hard. In case the idea didn't get across, he spat through the bars onto the major's tunic. The major showed no sign of noticing anything unusual. "At ease. What do we have today, Moklin?" "This is the first one, sir, in the cell right here." The major nodded, started to speak, then frowned at Garvin. Garvin had his phrases all set, and now heard himself say stupidly, "How do you do? I am Dr. Garvin from Rolling Hills Rest and Rehabilitation Center. I -- er -- had hoped that a -- ah -- a useful crossfertilization of our -- ah -- mutual -- " M ajor Poffis took a closer look at Garvin. Garvin paused, groping around for some way to give a more conventional ending to this opening gambit. Poffis glanced at the captain. "Is this a patient?" "No sir. This is the Earth psychologist from Mental Institution # ." Garvin cleared his throat, and said gently but firmly, "We find it more appropriate to designate it 'Rollin# Hills Rest and -- ' " Poffis looked him over coldly. "What the devil's the matter wi'h them out there?" Garvin looked blank. "What?" Poffis said shortly. "Why don't they get their thumb out of their IF mouths and give us some action? I sent half-a-dozen cases of combat nerves in six months ago, and so far we've gotten just one back. The boy was worthless. What the devil do you do to your patients?" He turned to Captain Moklin. "I notice this fellow has a chunk out of his jacket. Has he been administering treatment in my absence? "Not actually, sir. He just walked over and tried to reason with the patient, that's all." Poffis looked mollified. "That shouldn't do much harm." He glanced at the cell. "Now then, this fellow hasn't been in combat yet, has he?" "No, sir. He isn't out of training yet." "You're sure we've got the right recordsl This isn't a damned administrative bungle like that last mess?" "No, sir," said Moklin grimly. "I checked that myself, sir. This is the right man, all right." "What's the recommendation?" "Court recommended death. Patient's commanding officer pleaded for leniency." The patient laughed out loud, as if witnessing a peculiarly silly scene in a play. Major Poffis looked the patient over appraisingly, then glanced at Moklin. "On what grounds did his commanding officer plead for leniency?" "He thought the fellow could be made into a good soldier, sir. With the proper treatment." Poffis scowled. "Yes, there's that again. What's on the sheet, Moklin? How many of these cases have we got for today?" Moklin looked apK)logetic. "Three more for this morning, sir. Now, about this prisoner -- " Poffis stared at him. "And this afternoon?" "Sir?" 'How many this afternoon?" "We've got -- that is -- " Moklin swallowed. "Sir, there are six of them." Poffis's brows came together. 'That's too many. Put some of them over till tomorrow." "Well, sir, tomorrow -- " Poffis snarled, "It takes time to get a cure started. I'll handle three this morning, and three this afternoon. From there, it's routine. But I'm taking six new ones a day and that's that." "Sir, at that rate, they'll pile up from here all the way back to Training, and the colonel will -- " Poffis's eyes glinted. "I know how many new patients I can handle in a day, Moklin. If the colonel wants me to take on eight a day, ten a day, twelve a day, then  am going to end up on the other side of these bars, and the colonel can see how that works out. Let them pile up. That's better than sending back fake cures. There's a cause to this mess somewhere. The sooner that dawns on them, the quicker they'll slap the clokal detonak on this whole region, and burn out the pus. Now let's have the keys to the cell so I can get started." Moklin dazedly handed over the keys to the cell. n G arvin, stupefied, was grappling with the idea that the Centran thought six new patients a day, with routine follow-up treatment, was about right. If Garvin got six patients really cured in a year, it w'as cause for celebration. Baffled, he took a fresh look at the patient Poffis was ready to treat. This patient had watched with interest the exchange between Poffis and Moklin, but now stiffened as he saw Poffis come toward the cell. He threateningly approached the bars, bared his teeth and suddenly reached out through the bars to take a grab at Poffis's uniform. Garvin watched intently, wondering what Poffis could possibly do now. Poffis instantly seized the outstretched hand, whirled and yanked downward. The patient screamed and slammed against the bars. Poffis promptly kicked him back against the opposite wall, then unlocked the cell door, went in, banged the door shut and tossed the keys to Moklin. The patient shook his hand dazedly, felt his shoulder, glared, let out a roar of rage and sprang across the cell at Poffis. Poffis whirled, shot out a leg, tripped the patient, and sent him smashing head-first into the far comer of the cell. The patient lay on his face for about fifteen seconds, then sat up dazedly, stared at Poffis and sucked in a deep breath. His voice came out loud and ringing. "I got a right to go to a rest home! Fm crazy! I'm a patient! I'm sick! You can't touch me! I got a right to go to a rest home!" Poffis said angrily, "If I knew where that idea came from, I could get this work-load down to normal. All right, Moklin. Read the charge." Captain Moklin unfolded a long sheet of paper and read in a clear sober voice: "Prisoner committed  following acts, which have been proved by careful and thorough inquiry. He: "#) Threatened to beat up his own mess-mates, and then took their food from them by force. "#) Threatened his squad-leader with a knife, when reprimanded. "#) While off-duty, struck an elderly man who happened to step in his way, thus bringing disgrace on the armed forces. "#) On being charged as above, laughed in the face of his commanding officer. Lieutenant Boggis, and referred to Lieutenant Boggis as a 'molk.' "#) Struck Lieutenant Boggis on the face with his open hand. "#) Threatened Lieutenant Boggis that if Lieutenant Boggis defended himself, he (the prisoner) would state under oath that Lieutenant Boggis struck first. "#) Resisted the guards summoned to the scene. "#) While under detention, announced to everyone within hearing that he would receive a medical discharge and be home living on a pension while those who did their duty would be eaten up by Mikerils for their pains. Prisoner taunted all IF the law-abiding soldiers within hearing that they would soon be at the front defending him, "#) By voice and act, abused everyone in authority who came near him during detention. "#) Refused to cooperate with properly designated authorities in curbing his undisciplined actions. This refusal was compounded by disrespect and insult, and reflects no detectable principle or ideal, but merelyan undisciplined, willful, illgoverned nature, which is urgently in need of correction." Captain Moklin lowered the paper. "That's it, sir." # #T see," said Poffis. "Well, well. JL Here we have a full-blown case of it." He studied the patient, who got to his feet, looking apprehensive and defiant. "Now, then," said Poffis, "the first thing to realize is that how you got here doesn't matter. What matters is that you're here. This is the trap right next to the drain. Either we cure you, or they shoot you. And we aren't given much time to cure you." "I'm sickr cried the prisoner. "I want to go to a rest -- " "Luckly,",said Poffis, "we've got just the way to cure you. We've developed it over several thousands of years. There are only two things you need to know about this cure: It's quick. And it hurts." The prisoner opened his mouth, and shut it again. Poffis was moving right along like a planet in its orbit, and showed no sign of stopping for anything. 'There's one reliable way," said Poffis, "that Nature teaches what's right and what's wrong. When you do right, you get rewarded. When you do wrong, you get hurt. Our method is the same, but more condensed." Look" said the patient exasperatedly, one hand outstretched, "I'm not responsible. You can't blame me for -- " "The basic idea of the cure is very simple," said Poffis briskly. "It is based on the observation of sages, that there is a real inner self, which is not subject to the phenomena of the physical world, and an outer self which is." A succession of expressions crossed the patient's face, and ended with a look of defiant outrage. "To the Mikerils with all this stuff!" He followed that with a piece of profanity that took Garvin's breath away, but that left Poffis and Moklin visibly imtouched. "The real inner self," said Poffis, "is conscious of events, because it is 'connected,' by resonances and various nerve-tracts, with the, outer physfcal self that exists in the physical world, and is a type of living protoplasmic machine, serving the inner spiritual self which is not physical." The patient shouted, "I'm crazy! Poffis moved steadily along: 'To properly treat the patient, it is necessary to distinguish between the true inner self of the patient, the outer physical self wtdch is the medium through which the patient contacts and is contacted by the physical world, and the various traits, habits and emotions which manifest outwardly through the physical body, and inwardly by coloring the information passed to the brain and thence to the real self." The patient stamped his  foot. "Ah for -- " "The real self," said Poffis, "is strictly blameless. The trouble comes from wrong traits and attitudes having been established, usually in childhood, and by their habitual presence having generated emotions which falsely color the information passed" to the brain. The cure for this is best administered early, by the parent. By inflicting pain without damage, the parent breaks the grip of the wrong emotion, destroys its effects in distorting the information passed to the brain and demonstrates that emotions are temporary and changeable. Seeing the wrong emotipn flee before the hand of the parent, the child is emboldened to strike down the wrong emotion himself, and takes the first step towards becoming master in his own house." T he patient ground his teeth, and looked around like one seeking sympathy for the heavy burden under which he labors. "Punishment, " said Poffis methodically, "should be swift, intense and fleeting, with proper suggestions for future improvement, and should be ended without vindictiveness when the right attitude is firmly established. That's the theory. Now for the practise." The patient leaned against the bars in an attitude of exaggerated boredom, and looked ready to fall asleep anytime. 'The practise," said Poffis, "is even simpler than the theory. By appropriate action, we first permit the undesirable traits to manifest, and promptly deliver painful consequences on each occasion. Next we administer a general treatment designed to loosen up bad traits and induce a cooperative frame of mind, during which we urge improvement. Following this comes formal punishment, then the actual recovery. All this is basically very simple, the difficulty being to properly suit the treatment to the individual patient. That's the practise. Now you have it, and your mind will retain enough so that it may be of use to you later. IF It's time. Prepare for treatment." Outside the cell, Moklin opened a faucet that filled a bucket halffull of water. He tossed a sponge into the bucket, picked up a clean towel and a first-aid kit, set a chair just outside a comer of the cell and dusted off the seat of the chair with a whisk broom. The patient glanced around with a scowl and gave the cell door a quick shake. The door was solidly locked. Poffis glanced at the wall clock, then cleared his throat with a somewhat pompous, false and irritating sound. He said, "Now, first, permit me to point out -- ah -- that this method, while it could be used for wrong purposes, is in fact only used for the real good and the genuine -- " Dr. Garvin, outside the cell, squinted at Major Poffis, and tried to get him back into focus. By some trick of vocal wizardry, Poffis now began to project such an air of sweet reasonableness that even Garvin felt the urge to get Poffis by the throat and bang his head against the wall. Garvin had no trouble overcoming this impulse, but the patient abruptly cea looking for a way out, and eyed Pdffis. " -- welfare of the patient," Poffis was saying sweetly. "The entire treatment is meant for the patient, who, deprived of proper parental assistance in the initial stages of character-formation, is thus disadvantaged by his defective self-control. We assist the deprived patient in many areas -- " "GVr," said the patient. His tail flicked back and forth, and his lips drew back to disclose large sharp teeth. " -- always," said Poffis piously, "to aid in whatever measure may be granted to us the unfortunate, underprivileged -- " The patient blurred forward, seized Poffis around the waist and slammed him to the floor. Poffis landed stretched out, his forearms taking much of the impact, rolled aside fast as his patient took a flying kick at him, bounded to his feet and landed a blow that sent the patient .sprawling. As the patient stumbled, dazed and fearful, to his feet, Poffis seemed to undergo a delayed action from the fall he'd suffered. He gripped his side and tottered around the cell like someone in the last stage of physical deterioration. This was too good an opportmjity for the patient to resist. He hastened over to start a blow from the floor up, aimed for Poffis's jaw. Poffis, however, recovered with miraculous speed, moved aside as the blow whistled past and smashed the patient on the jaw. Garvin watched in stupefaction as Moklin stepped forward with the water bucket. Poffis was now bent over the unconscious patient, tenderly bathing his bloodied face with a wet sponge. Ill A s the patient came to and looked around dazedly, Poffis at once began to plead, "Now look here, I am your officer. You can't -- " The patient at once caught the pleading tone, and the words "I am your officer." He reacted with still-fast reflexes. "Ci, cant ir he snarled. He staggered to his feet with Poffis's help, and immediately tried to plant his knee in Poffis's groin. Poffis turned too fast, and sank his fist in his patient's midsection. Dr. Garvin watched the patient collapse and lie motionless. Poffis now dumped a bucket of water on the patient, brought him to, and as the patient looked around dazedly Poffis bent over him and said sympathetically, "Understand, none of this meant for the real you. We have to retrain your habits and attitudes, and this is the quickest way. I realize what you're going through, because I'ye been through the same thing myself." The patient sat up dizzily. Some instinct for self-preservation apparently prompted him to keep Poffis talking. "You -- you did?" "Yes," said Poffis reminiscently. "I've been through the whole thing. You see, I had bad habits." A tinge of regret entered his voice. "And wrong attitudes, and I didn't even know it. That's how it works. No one could reason with me, or get through to me by anything that boiled down to reason, because, you see, this wrong attitude of mine distorted everything, and I couldn't understand things right." Garvin was staring, wondering what would happen next. Poffis's voice was starting to grow heated. "So," said Poffis emotionally, "they stuck me in a cell, and for these bad habits and wrong attitudes they beat me up, and slammed me all around," He sucked in a deep breath. '"Sure I had it coming, I deserved it. Because of the bad habits." His voice dropped. "But I felt every blow. It was meant for the bad habits. But I felt it." There was now an impression of smoldering resentment building up behind Poffis's expressionless face. The patient glanced around nervously. "Bad habits," said Poffis flatly. "They got me in all that trouble. And I suffered. I hate them I" "Sure," said the patient nervously. "I can appreciate -- " "I hate bad habits, bad traits, bad emotions," said Poffis, his voice rising, "But they've been beat out of me, so now there's only one way I can get back at them," IF The patient tried a quick shake of the cell door. It was still locked. "And that,' said Poffis, "is to find them in someone else," The patient's eyes were wideopen. "Hey, now. Wait a minute. Listen, now!" "Right here", snarled Poffis, gazing intently at the patient, "I see conceit, arrogance, carelessness -- " Poffis's voice, already charged with emotion, took on a tone suggestive of rending flesh and popping bones. He tore off his tunic and tossed it toward a corner of the cell, where Moklin with one deft motion snapped it out through the bars and laid it on the chair, neatly folded. Patient and psychotherapist were suddenly flashing around the cell in a blur of speed, the prisoner screaming at the top of his lungs, "You can't! Help Your'e responsible! T he cell was one flying tangle of furry arms, legs and tails, with now the prisoner's horrified face in view, and now Poffis's grim visage. Grunts, screams and gasps resounded like the sounds of a medieval torture chamber,. Captain Moklin, watching, grinned and nodded. Dr. Garvin looked on in horrified stupefaction, staring at the chaos resolved momentarily into grim scenes. For #I instant the prisoner was flattened out on the floor. Then he was slammed motionless against the bars. Next he was suspended in midair, one outstretched arm against the ceiling. A fraction of a second later, it was one chaos of violence all over again. Interspersed with the violence was Poffis's grim voice: "You will listen "You will try! "You will learn!" There was a sudden crash, and the prisoner was saying rapidly, "All right! ni do it! Sure, # do it! Anything you say!" Poffis stared intently into the prisoner's eyes. "You look crafty. You don't mean it." The cell exploded into chaos. The prisoner screamed, "I promise I mean it!" Poffis stared deep into his eyes. "Close, but you're not there yet." The violence ended the next time with a cry of despair. Then Poffis straightened. "Moklin!" "Yes, sir! The lash?" "The board." Moklin handed in a medium-sized solidly made paddle. The prisoner stared as Poffis took it, and said in a kindly voice, "Bend over, son. Grip the bars." The prisoner swallowed, tore his gaze from the paddle, bent and took hold of the bars with both hands. Poffis took the paddle in a practiced grip. "You have committed ten serious offenses. For each offense, there must be a blow. The blows must be hard, or they will not be punishment. Hold on tight. MoklinV "Yes, sir?" "Read the offenses." Moklin raised the list, and read slowly and distinctly. At the end of each numbered offense, Poffis delivered a staggering blow. Toward the end, as the list went on and on, the prisoner began to sob, but continu to tightly grip the bars. At last, the list, which seemed to Garvin, watching dazedly, to be ten times as long as when it was first read -- at last this list came to an end. Moklin said soberly, "That is the end of the list of offenses, sir." Poffis said. So be it. Take the board." He handed the paddle out through the bars. The prisoner collaised on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Poffis waited a moment, then said, "Prisoner, that ends the punishment. But punishment is not necessarily the same as repayment. You have, by your actions, done grave damage to the Integral Union itself. Yet the Integral Union feeds and shelters you. You have attacked what defended you. Are you sorry?" "Yes' cried the prisoner. Poffis nodded. "Good. Look at me. Are you going to do betterT "YesV Poffis nodded slowly. "Yes, I see you mean it. MoklinV "Yes, sir?". "This prisoner has hard work in front of him. He will need to sleep, but first he needs something to ease the pain, and he also needs a little warm thin gruel. Take care of this at once. " "Yes, sir." G arvin, still watching in a sort of daze, saw Poffis help the prisoner to his feet, to ease him, very carefully, warning him where to put his hands and feet, ontg the cot. To Garvin's astonishment, the prisoner, still sobbing, gripped Poffis's hand in what appeared to be gratitude. Poffis said gently, "Don't worry son. You may think we're going to half-kill you. But we'll get you out of it." Moklin stepped into the cell, carrying a small bowl in one hand, and a jar of bandages in the other. Poffis stepped out of the cell and beckoned Garvin into the next room. Uncertain what to expect, Garvin followed with unspoken reservations. Poffis shut the door behind them. "Now, just what the devil is going on at Mental Institution #?" Garvin said, "Why just standard treatment." "Whose standard treatment?" "Well -- " "What is it?" Garvin drew a slow deep breath, and described it. Poffis shook his head. "Conceivably that may work on Earthmen. But a thing like that won't work on Centrans." "Is that so?" said Garvin, his professional pride touched. "Well, all I can say is, it certainly is more scientific than the procedure you use!" "Obviously," said Poffis, "that's exactly what's wrong with it. The techniques of Science were developed for use on inanimate objects As Garvin grappled with this IF statement. Poffis said, "Observe what has happened. Science came into existence to solve purely physical problems. To solve these problems it was necessary to exclude emotional considerations. The forces operative in this physical world are different from the forces operative in the emotional world. It is as if one were land and the other sea. The seafarer who goes ashore has little need for nets, lines and a knowledge of the tides, winds, and currents. But when he has built up his structure on solid land, is he then automatically fitted to go back to sea, relying exclusively on land methodsl It won't work. Dr. Garvin, except where, so to speak, the emotional sea has been frozen over, turned to ice on the surface. In the emotional world, to say, 'My methods are entirely scientific,' is similar to saying, 'I have made an entirely scientific proposal of marriage.' It is a cause for alarm, not confidence." Garvin hesitated, distracted by the uneasy suspicion that there might be some truth to Poffis's point, but stung by the implications. If psychology wasn't a science, then wasn't he, Garvin, a charlatan of some kind? ' Poffis said earnestly, "Why insist that your study must be a science? Should everything be jammed into the same mold, and any parts that don't fit be thrown away? Just because a hammer is useful, should we throw away screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers and every other tool, and force the hammer to do work it isn't meant fori Or, by some kind of verbal wizardy, have we got to represent screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers and other useful tools, as different kinds of hammers? They are not hammers, my friend, any more than all useful studies are sciences. If you let such a distortion enter into your thought, you not only blur your picture of the subject you are thinking of, but also your picture of Science itself." O n thinking it over, it seemed perfectly clear to Garvin that if psychology was not a science, then he, Garvin, must necessarily be a fake. , If psychology was not a science, then it followed that he vas no scientist, and this meant that he was less than, for instance, a physicist, or a chemist, and if he admitted to being not a scientist, it followed that he would seem to be less than one of those incredible creatures, the political scientists who, everyone agreed, were actually no scientists at aU. All this went through Garvin's head in a flash, and at the end he said cooly, "Psychology, Major Poffis, whatver it may be among Centrans, is universally recognized among Earthmen as the 'science of the mind.' I certainly don't intend to argue this proposition." Poffis was watching Garvin's expressions ihtently. "Psychology," said Poffis, with the air of one who reluctantly concedes a point, "may deserve to be a science; it may have distinct scientific elements', but if you say psychology is and is only a science, then I say that in your respect for your subject, it appears to me that you are mistakingly throwing half your tool kit into the nearest ditch. The essense of Science is the Scientific Method, and the essense of the Scientific Method is the Repeatable Experiment. To have a repeatable experiment requires first that the object experimented upon be comparatively constant. If atoms could argue, fight back, run away, sulk, plead, throw tantrums, learn our terminology and use it against us, then we migt reasonably have some doubts as to just how strictly scientific the study of atoms could be. But in that case, would the study of atoms be any the less important?" Garvin said hesitantly, "I came here to learn your method, so that I could combine your methods and ours -- " Poffis looked doubtful. "Your method, as you have described it, suggests to me the attempt to fix a malfunctioning groundcar by the use of analytical chemistry." "And how would you explain your brand of psychology?" "Very simple. To begin with, we believe in sympathy, power of will, character, habit, love, association, contrast, the power of example, the soul, the spirit -- " "What a hodgepodge! You've got religion in there! You've got -- " "What we've got in there," said Poffis, "is Truth, and we accept Truth from any source, including religion." "But, of all the unscientific -- " Poffis momentarily paralyzed Garvin with a poke of his long forefinger. IF "The one advantage of Science is that it enables us, where it is applicable, to reach Truth. Truth is the goal, my friend, and Science is one means of reaching Truth, where Science applies. Don't forget your quest. You are seeking Truth. Don't mistake the means for the goal." Poffis went out, leaving Garvin open-mouthed. Dazedly Garvin considered Poffis's last' two sentences. "You are seeking Truth." Certainly this was so. Why had he ever been interested in Science in the first place? He was seeking Truth. And that warning, "Don't mistake the means for the goal." Could he, Garvin, possibly be like a boy who spent so much time laboring over his finicky but beloved car that he rarely actually went anywhere? The rest of Poffis's argument was borne in on him. How the devil did you have a science when the thing you were working with was as unstable and changeable as the human personality and the human intellect? Science! Was it an example of Science when the object of the experiment got up and tried to strangle you, as had happened twice  now to poor Hardison? Was it Science when the experimenter fell in love with the object of the experiment, as had happened to Pangeist? And what about Hergeswalther, who got sucked into the patient's fantasy, and was only gotten out again because the patient realized what was going on? "Science snarled Garvin. "My toot, it's a science. Only parts of it are scientific." And, in that case, how was it going to get him to Truth? For the second time, it dawned on Garvin that Poffis was really a master psychologist. How the deuce had Poffis known what he, Garvin, had turned to Science for? And how had Poffis been able to drive his ideas across with such effect that, just a few minutes later, Garvin was accepting them as his own? But the main thing was -- how was Poffis able to make cures while he, Garvin, spent half his time floundering through the dark, and as often as not accomplished littie more than to give the patient a knowledge of the underlying theory, which might or might not work? Garvin hesitated, then went to the door. C aptain Moklin glanced up and smiled. Across the room, the patient slept peacefully. Garvin said in a low voice, "Does the major always use the same treatment?" "No. It depends on the patient." That was helpful, thought Garvin sourly. Moklin said, "Major Poffis looks to see what is wrong with the patient, then he fixes it. Down the corridor is one who is here because it is against his principles to obey orders. Major Poffis will break his arguments into little bits and pieces. He will make it all so clear that the prisoner will go out seeing the question in a new light. But most of these uncontrollables have a treatment more like this one here. Only, each treatment is different in the details, because the prisoners are different." Garvin nodded. He was still getting nowhere. At random, to keep the conversation going until he thought of a new approach, he said, "No wonder the major complained about the work-load." "Yes," said Moklin, "the workload is piling up, and the major hasn't even an apprentice to help him." Garvin nodded sympathetically, then blinked, "Apprentice? You mean you teach psychotherapy by the apprentice-system? "Not I," said Moklin, blockheadedly literal-minded. "No, no," said Garvin, "I mean, is that the Centran system for teaching psychotherapy?" The Centran system?" said Moklin blankly. "Why should we have only one system? Also, there are schools that teach it." "Yes, but you can't have bothV Moklin looked at him. "Why not?" ' "Well, the results wouldn't be uniform, for one thing." "So?" Garvin looked blank. Here he was again. The Centrans, blockheaded fellows, did some silly thing, and when Garvin tried to explain why it was silly, his reasons evaporated, and he was left with this foolish feeling. "Well," he said stubbornly, obviously a man taught at a special school would know more than a mere apprentice. By the results not being uniform, I mean that the apprentice would be inferior" "Oh, you think so? With Major Poffis to teach, you think the apprentice would be laggardly in his efforts?" "Well, no, I can see the major would keep him working, but -- after all, there are a lot of things to be taught. At a school, there would be a special teacher for each subject." M oklin nodded agreeably. "And this special teacher will have a class with many in it, and split his efforts among the class." "All right," said Garvin angrily, "if this apprentice system works, why do the students go to school instead of apprenticing themselves to the major?" "Because," said Moklin promptly, "they are afraid to apprentice themselves to the major. Once they apprentice themselves to him, he will not let them go until they are almost as good at cures as he is, and he is one of the best there is. It will be nothing but work, work, study, practise, practise, and the major will see through excuses, punish laziness, stimulate earnest hard work, judge with merciless accuracyAnd we have been unable to find any students who are anxious to go through this." Garvin thought it over. "But at the end, his apprentice will be almost as good at it as he is?' "Oh, yes. Major Poffis will see to that." "H'm." Garvin paused to consider. He was totally fed up with flounIF dering around. Among other kinds of patients, Rolling Hills Rest and Rehabilitation Center, where Garvin worked, got a good number of uncontrollables. The frustration in dealing with them was terrific. "Ah," said Garvin, "is there any limitation -- on age, race and so on -- would the major take a -- ah -- an Earthman, past the usual student age -- " "With this work-load," said Moklin, "the major would take anyone, provided the apprentice was in earnest, and, of course, showed some promise." "How many apprentices can the major take at once?" "I don't know. I've never known him to take more than three at one time." Garvin thought hard. He would like to have a record of cures like the major's. On the other hand, he certainly did not want the major's undiluted attention focused on him alone. It followed that he would need to interest someone else. How about Hardison? After that second strangling attempt, Hardison had sworn that he'd always wanted to be a corporation lawyer, and the director had practically turned himself inside  out to keep Hardison from quitting, right on the spot, and heading for law school. Then there was Hergeswalther. His brief sojourn in fantasy-land had given him a new outlook. Who among the staff hadn't heard him muttering, "I could go nuts myself, any time. Any time." What wouldn't Hergeswalther do to get a better grip on sanity?" Here are two additional prospective apprentices, if Garvin could only sell them on the idea. He glanced at Moklin. "How much do apprentices get paid?" "Not much as apprentices, beyond room and board," said Moklin,. adding at once, "But they get very high pay when they have acquired their skill." "H'm," said Garvin, "that's very interesting." I n his mind, he was saying to Hardison and Hergeswalther, "It's a tremendously exciting idea to me, from a scientific viewpoint. Here we have a method that works, that turns out cures like clockwork, and it's never really been scientifically analyzed." "Yes," he could hear Hardison say. "But, for God's sake, Garv, to apprentice ourselves to this Centran witch doctor -- " "I know, I know. But that's the only way to really get his methods. We could write a book afterward, detailing the underlying scientific elements of the cures." "Hey, we could, couldn't we?" Hardison had always wanted to write a book. Hergeswalther said uneasily, "And meanwhile, what do we eat?" "Well, we get room and board, and I guess not much more. But afterward we've got the ability. And then they really pay. Believe me, there's plenty of business there. The patients are piling up fast. And we could cure them." "Yes," said Hardison, with a smile, "That would be a change, wouldn't it? If our treatment would work There was a thoughtful silence. "Just think, Walt," said Hardison, "we coiild call the book. Elements of Centran Psychotherapy, Hergeswalther's lips repeated the title, and he added softly, "by Hergeswalther, Hardison and Garvin." "Yes," murmured Hardison, halfaloud. "By Hardison, Hergeswalther and Garvin." Garvin came out of his fantasy. Actually, he told himself, the book should be "by Garvin, Hardison and Hergeswalther." Any fool could tell that it sounded better that way. Not that that argument would get anywhere with the other two. Let's see now: A, b, c, d, e, f, g, i, i... Of coursel It was alphabetical! Garvin could rest his case solidly on that argument. Beaming, Garvin got his coat and turned to thank Moklin for a very pleasant visit. Moklin said, "I am sorry. Dr. Garvin, that you must go now. Shall I say good-by to the major for you?" Garvin shook his head. "Don't bother," said Garvin. "I'll At Boskone I -- the first Boston Regional Science-Fiction Conference, held in September, # -- it was decided to give an annual award "for special services to science fiction" at each subsequent Boskone. Boskone II, held at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Boston on March #th, #th and #th, #, featured a presentation of the award. The trophy is a mounted replica of Doc Smith's famous Arisian Lens, from the Lensman series. In tribute to Doc's other celebrated series of science-fiction stories, the trophy is called "the Skylark". It is inscribed: There could be no more fitting award in science fiction than one given in memory of the man who pioneered so much of the field, and we are deeply honored to accept it. IF IF  Serial rthblood Roan scoured the alien-inhabifed galaxy seeking Men like himself -- and found a universe of enemies! A t five miles, the Niss dreadnaught filled the screens like a dark moon. "They don't know we're here," Roan said. "Their screens aren't designed to notice anything this small. We'll close with her, locate an entry lock and burn our way in. With luck, we'll be in control of their boarded." "And what if we don't have luck?" "Then we won't be any worse off than we would be eating each other and dying of foul air aboard this tub." , "Four miles, rate of closure twenty meters per second," called a crewman assigned to the navigation panel. "Slack her off there," Roan ordered. "I want you to touch down on her as soft and easy as if you What Has Gone Before -- Roan Cornay, a human born in mysterious circumstances in a ghetto on Tambool, grows up among outcasts and is kidnapped by a traveling Extravaganzoo, where he is valuable as a freak. Roan falls in love with the exotic dancer, Stellaraire, and gains the friendship of Iron Robert, the Strongest Being in the Universe. Roan and Stellaraire plan to desert the circus. Roan wants to seek fabled Terra, which he is convinced really exists, and to learn who his real parents were. But Iron Robert is badly wounded In a contest with the terrible Chinazel! and Roan and Stellaraire remain to nurse him back to health. The circus ship (originally a Terran war vessel) is attacked by pirates and havoc is wrought when the ship suddenly automatically accelerates to three G, which only Roan and Iron Robert survive. Stellaraire is pinned under a fallen beam and burns to death. Roan is badly burned trying to save her. The pirates, headed by Henry Dread, board the ship. Henry Dread is fascinated with the human Roan and takes him aboard the pirate vessel and has a doctor treat Roan's burns. At Roan's insistence Iron Robert is saved from the ruined circus ship and kept on the pirate ship, but in chains. Roan is resented by the crew of Gooks and Geeks (humanoids and non-humanoids), but fights his way into their respect, and finally gains the trust and friendship of Henry Dread. On the ancient Terran outpost of Aldo Cerise Roan wanders through a Terran park. The beauty of it reinforces his resolve to find Terra some day. He emerges from the idyllic garden to find the crew in mutiny against Henry Dread, and moves in to save the pirate. Back on the ship, Henry reveals to Roan that he is not a mere pirate, but a commander in the Imperial Terran Navy, which is trying to build itself up again from Rim Headquarters. They find a Niss warship, and against Roan's advice Henry approaches it. It fires, Henry's ship is fatally hit, Henry fires back. Roan gives the order to abandon ship and shoots Henry Dread in an argument over Iron Robert, who after all will not fit into the lifeboat. Iron Robert forces Roan into a lifeboat and Roan immediately takes over leadership. As the lifeboat is too small for the number of men in it. Roan decides to try to board the Niss ship. IF were lifting a purse back on Croanie." The crewman showed a quick, nervous smile. "Sure. I don't want to wake nobody up." "What's these Niss like, Terry?" Roan turned and slashed his forearm across the mouth of the speaker. "That's 'Captain' to you, sailor! I don't know what the Niss are like, and I don't give a damn. They've got what we need and we're taking it." "The size of that scow! There "Don't worry. Just kill them one at a time." They watched the screens in silence. "Two miles," the navigator hissed. "No alarm yet." The lifeboat drifted closer to the swelling curve of the miles-long warship. The scrawl of great alien characters was blazoned across the dull black of the hull. Complex housings set at random caught the faint glint of starlight. Roan selected a small disk scribed on the metal plain below. "Match up to that, Noag," he ordered. "The rest of you suit up." H e hauled i stiff vacuum suit from the wall locker, settled the helmet in place, flipped switches. Stale air wafted across his face from the suit blower. The lifeboat's engines nudged her, positioning the lock directly over the hatch of the Niss ship. Roan stood by, watching the maneuvering on a small repeater screen. "Quiet now, all of you," he said. "Any noise we make will be transmitted through the hull." The two vessels touched with a barely perceptible rasp of metal on metal. "Nice work, Noag. You're learning," Roan said. "Hold her tight there and magnetic-lock." He listened. Through his deck-boots he could feel the vibration of the engine; nothing more. "Cycle her open," he ordered. "Hey, what kinda air these Niss use?" someone called. "My tanks are low." "What's the matter, you gonna stay here if it ain't to your liking?" another came back. Air hissed as the lock cycled. Roan's suit plucked at him as ihe pressure dropped. Through the opening the iodine-black curve of the alien hull blocked their way. "Cut into her, Askor," Roan commanded. The crewman pushed into the opening, set a blaster on narrow beam, pressed the firing stud. The dark metal reddened, turned a glaring white, went bluish, then puddled, blowing away, driven by the pressure of released gasses. The soft spot bulged, blew out under the pressure of the Niss ship's internal atmosphere. Askor worked on, widened the opening, cut out a ragged hole a foot in diameter. "Shut down." Roan stepped past him, reached through, found a release, tripped it. The Niss lock rotated up and away, exposing the lightless interior of the enemy ship. Icy air gusted into the lifeboat, bringing a faint, foul taint. Frost formed on the metal where it touched. "Let's go!" Blaster in hand, Roan stepped through the opening. The beam of his hand light lanced ahead, picked out curving walls, complex shapes fitted to what should be the floor. Festoons of odd-sized tubing looped across the room. There was a scattering of heavy dust over everything. Silently, the boarders came through the broached hull and gathered in a huddle around Roan. Their breath made frosty puffs before their faces. "Where do we go from here?" Noag muttered. Roan threw his light on a narrow vertical slit in the wall. "That might be a door," he said. "We'll try it." nphe corridors of the Niss ship were high, narrow, lit by dim strips that had glowed to reluctant life in the minutes after the invaders had boarded. The walls seemed to press in on Roan. It was hard to breathe, and there was sweat on his forehead, in spite of the chill that cut at his exposed hands and face like skinning knives. "She's pulling a half G," Askor said. "There's power on somewheres." "I don't like this," Noag muttered behind Roan. "If they jump us now, we're stuck like mud-pigs in a deadf." "Shut up," Roan said. His heart pounding high up under his ribs, and what Noag was saying made it worse. He strode on, careless of sound now, emerged from the constricting passage into a wide chamber walled with honeycombed storage racks. The crewmen gathered, staring around. One went to the nearest niche, drew out a heavy bundle wrapped in stiff, vaxy cloth. He plucked at the bindings, tore the covering away, blinked at a grotesquely-shaped metal casting, peppered over with tiny fittings. The others craned, took the object as the finder passed it around. "What the nine hells is that?" "Hey, how about the next rack?" "Can't you slobs even wait until after the fight to start looting?" Roan snapped. "Put that back where you got it -- and cut out the chatter." The men fell silent, listening for the enemy they had, incredibly, forgotten for the moment. "Come on." Roan led the way out of the storeroom along another narrow way that stretched into darkness... "These passages," a crewman whispered hoarsely. "There's miles of 'em. What if we get lost in here?" "That's easy," another offered. "We just pound on the walls until the Niss come to see what's the matter." "Where they hiding, anyways?" Noag shifted his power gun from his right fist to his left. "We been prowling this tub for an hour." The corridor ended at a blank wall ahead. Roan raised a hand. "Hold it up," he said. He indicated the passage along which they had just come. "I've been counting paces. We've come about half a IF XXlll mile along here. That puts us on the opposite side of the ship from the hatch we came in by. All we've seen is cargo, supply and utilities space. We're going back to the big corridor we crossed and move forvard. I'm guessing we'll find the personnel areas in that direction. We're going to string out now, and keep our eyes open. The first man that talks without something important to say will get a mouth full of pistol butt. Understand? All right; let's go." Roan led the way back a hundred yards and turned left into a wider passage. Like the others it was gray, featureless, faintly lit by a feeble glare-strip set in the ceiling, stretching on and on into the remote distance, too far to be seen. "I'm freezin'," a crewman whined. "I ain't gonna be able to fire my gun, my fingers is so stiff." "Holster your guns and get your hands warm," Roan said quietly. He went to a narrow door set in the wall, pushed at its edges. It yielded at the center, swung inward in two panels. He looked into a square room with papers scattered across the floor, a slanted table attached to one wall. There was a saddle-like seat mounted on a four-foot stand before the table. Roan picked up one of the paper scraps; it crumbled in his fingers. There were strange characters printed on the fragment be held. Roan stopped for a second, tried to gain some sense from the figures, but gave up. He stepped back out of the room, continued along the wide passage. I n an immense, dim-lit hall. Roan looked at ranked hundreds of saddle-like perches arranged in endless rows on either side of foot-wide counters that ran the length of the vast room. A hint of a vile odor hung in the still air. Dust stirred underfoot as the nervous-eyed men stared around, fingering guns. "This is an eating-room, I think," Roan said. "We're getting closer." "Closer to what?" a voice grumbled. "We'll take the next ramp up. The crew quarters will be somewhere near the mess." "Hey -- what's that?" A shortnecked, round-backed crewman pointed a blunt finger. Roan walked over to look. What looked like handfuls of fish bones were scattered in a mound seven feet long, inches wide, half-buried in dust. The crewman dug a toe in, uncovered a dull metal object like a strap buckle. He kicked again, and a curious doublebladed knife with a knobby grip at the center skidded across e floor. The finder exclaimed, jumped after it, picked it up. "Neat!" he stated. He gripped the weapon, one stubby blade protruding bn either side of his rock-like fist. "Ya get 'em goin' and cornin'!" "Gripes," another grunted, eyeing the heaped dust and the fish bones. "That's one of 'em -- what's left of a Niss!" Roan looked around the broad room, saw other mounds. "Let's get moving," he said. "I want to see what's up above." T hey were in a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room lined with saddles before racks and dusty screens interspersed with panels of tiny glass-like buttons. One screen glowed faintly, showing a greenish image of stars against space, and a tiny oblong that drifted, turning on its short axis. Above the screen, scattered beads of light glowed. On the floor below the panel lay two of the long dust heaps that had been Niss. The crewmen were busy picking ornate metal objects from among the fish-bones. "This guy must of been a big shot," Noag rasped. "Look at this knick-knack!" He held up a starburst done in untarnished yellow metal with a giant jewel at its center. "Chief, this must be the command deck, right?" Askor muttered. He was a hulking hybrid of mixed Minid and Zorgian blood, with the stiff, tufted hair of the latter scattered incongruously across the typical broad Minid skull. "I think so," Roan said. "And that's Warlock on the screen there." "I don't get it." Askor looked around the long room. "Where are they? What are they waiting for?" Roan stood with folded arms, staring at the screen. As he watched, the blip that had been Henry Dread's ship expanded suddenly into a vivid sphere that swelled, spreading out in ragged streamers, fading... "She blew," Askor stated. "It's kind of a funny feeling. I lived aboard her for thirty years..." "In reply to your question," Roan said in a harsh voice, tearing his eyes from the screen, "they're all around us. We've seen forty or fifty of them in the past three hours." "Yeah, but them was just bones! I'm talkin' about -- " "You're talking about the Niss -- the crew of this vessel," Roan cut in. He pointed to the scattered remains on the floor. "There they arc. Meet the captain and the mate." Askor furrowed his heavy brow. "Somebody fired that broadside that knocked out Warlock he growled sharply. Roan jerked a thumb at the glowing lights. "The automatics took care of that," he said. "They were set to blast anything that came in range. I'd guess the power piles are nearly drained. That's why her bombardment didn't annihilate us completely." "You mean -- they're all dead?" Askor looked down at the dust and fine bones. His face spread into a broad grin. He chuckled, then put his wide hands to his chest and laughed, a booming guffaw. "That's rich, hey, chief? Us pussyfooting around like that and there's not a living soul aboard!" "Chee," a bystander commented. "Think a' that! How long's this tub been floating around like this?" Roan kicked the bones aside, hoisted himself into the saddle before the command panel, began punching keys at random. "I don't know," he said. "But I think it's a fair guess she's been cruising for the best part of five thousand years, with a full complement of corpses aboard." IF I n a cramped, metal-walled chamber lost far aft of the immense engines, Askor looked sideways at Roan. "Looks like the Niss had a few captives aboard, eh, Cap'n?" Roan looked down at the scattered bones of men, and the smaller bones of women, and in the far corner, two small skeletons of children. Human bones. Terry bones, mouldering among chains. "Gather up the identity disks," he said emotionlessly. There was a clump of feet in the corridor. The horned head of Gungle appeared in the doorway, his eyes wide with excitement. "Cap'n, we found something! A slick thousand-tonner, a Navy job, banged up a little but spaceworthy! She's slung in the boat deck!" Roan followed the man along dark ways littered with discards from the looting parties ransacking the ancient vessel, now and again passing the scattered remains of a longdead crewman. "Wonder what killed 'em all, Cap'n?" Askor kicked a mound, sent foul dust flying. "Disease, starvation, suicide. What does it matter? Dead's dead." Askor cast a quick glance at his grim-faced captain, said nothing. On the boat deck. Roan studied the businesslike lines of the sleek vessel poised in a makeshift cradle between malformed Niss scout-boats, the numerals printed across her "Looks like she took a hit aft." Noag pointed out areas of fused metal beside flaring discharge nozzles. "But they made repairs. Musta been getting her ready for some kind of sneak job." Roan mounted the access ladder, shouldered through the narrow port. There was an odor of mildew and dust. He flicked on lights, went forward, climbed a companionway to the surprisingly spacious command deck, stood looking around at the familiar Terran screens, instruments, fittings. He threw open a wall locker, choked at the dust that flew, hauled out a ship-suit. He thumbed above the pocket, read the name stencilled below. "Hey," Askor said from behind him. "That's the same as it says on one o' them ID's we took off them bones." He sorted through the bright-metal disks, handed one over. "I didn't know you could read Terran." Roan eyed the halfbreed. "I can't exactly read, Cap'n -- but I'm good at rememberin'. They look like the same marks to me." "So the captain died in chains." Roan tossed the disk back. "I think his suit will fit me." "How about it, Cap'n?" Noag called from the entry. "How's she look?" "Check her out," Roan said. "If everything works, load her up and figure out how to get those hull doors open." Askor rubbed calloused palms together with a sound like a rasp on rough wood. "She's a sweet tub, Cap'n. Not as big as Warlock, but we never needed all that tonnage anyways. I'll bet IF she's fast. We can hit and get out before the dirt-diggers know what hit 'em." "We're through raiding for a while," Roan said. "There's more loot aboard this hulk than we can haul -- enough to make every man aboard rich." "Not gonna raid?" Askor scratched at his bristled scalp. "Where we goin' then, Cap'n?" "Set your course for a world called Tam bool. It'll be listed in the manual." Roan indicated the glowing face of the index set in the navigator's panel. "Tambool? What's there?" "My past -- may be," Roan said, and turned away to pore over the ancient star maps on the chart table. A skor sat beside Roan, staring into the wide, curved panoramic screen that filled the wardroom wall. He sipped his Terran coffee -- a drink that it had taken many months to develop a habit for -- then cleared his throat self-consciously. "It's been a long cruise, Cap'n," he said. Roandidn't answer. "A few more hours," Askor went on. "We'll be touching down at Tambool. Not much of a place, but there'll be a few kicks." "I'll distribute a few kicks myself if you don't shut up," Roan said. Across the table, a crewman named Poion laid down his everpresent stylus, closed his pad. He flickered his translucent eyelids down over his bulging eyes, fingering a wine glass delicately. "Gee, Chief," Askor tried again. "It's been nine months now since the fight with the Niss ship and all. You been snappish as a gracyl in moulting season ever since you took over as Captain. You didn't used to be this way, back when you was Cap'n Dread's Number Two." "I'm not anybody's Number Two now," Roan said. "I'm Number One, and don't ever forget it." He drained his glass, refill it. "What do you seek on the minor world, Tambool, Captain?" Poion asked in his soft, breathy voic.e. J'Henry Dread's mission was not there." Roan looked at the Beloian curiously. Poion seldom started conversations and never personal ones. "I thought you could read minds." "I read emotions. I compose with emotions. It is the art of my people. I am now scoring a composition for ten minds and a dozen experimental animals -- " "Let's hear you read my emotions," Roan cut him off abruptly. Poion shook his head as though to dislodge a troublesome thought. "I cannot. That's why I asked you the question. I haven't the talent for Terran emotions. They're not like the others. They're in a different mode. More powerful, more brutal, more... primitive." Roan snorted. "So you can't tell anything from my mind?" "Oh, a little," Poion said. "You are engaged in a noston, a return home. But your nostalgia is not the nostalgia of any other creature in the Universe." He sipped his wine, watching Roan. "Because you have no home." On the screen Tambool rose on the left and the ship turned on its gyros and an arrow swung. Roan gripped his glass, watching the world swell on the screen. T he vibrations of landing stopped, and Roan rose and walked back through the crew compartments. He found Askor by the exit port, rattling a gun nervously against his belt. "I told you this wasn't like other ports," Roan said sharply. "You'll keep the men under control. They're to pay for what they take. And no shooting." Askor muttered but Roan ignored him. The port cycled open; Askor ducked his head and peered out at the puddled field, the drab row of sheds, the dismal town straggling up the hillside. "Gripes, Chief, what's the crummy dump got that's so hot?" "Not much. But such as it is, I don't want anybody bleeding all over it." The other men had crowded around now, decked out in their shore-going clothes, guns and knives in belts, anticipatory grins in place. "My business won't take but a few hours," Roan said. "While we're here, forget looting. There's not much you'd want anyway." The men muttered and shuffled their feet, but no one said anything loud enough to take exception to. "No reception party," Sidis commented as the men followed Roan down the ramp. "At least not in sight." He licked his lips and watched the windows of the sheds and peered at every shelter that might house an ambush. "Anybody that wants to land here can land," Roan said. "Nobody cares, and you shift for yourself. It's not rich enough to loot and it's useless as a base. It's a place for outcasts to come and lose themselves." Poion glanced sideways at Roan. Roan saw the glance... He was talking too much -- more than the men expected of their tactiturn captain. It was a sign of nervousness, and it made the men nervous too. He walked on in silence, heading for the jumble of shacks behind the port. Had it been this derelict -- this dirty and depressing when he'd left it as a child? It didn't matter. He was returning as a man, and he'd come for a purpKse. And let anyone who got in his way look out. R oan marched the men past the tented Soetti quarter, under the walls and towers of the Veed section, into the Gracyl slums. He almost marched past his old house without recognizing it. Everything seemed smaller, dirtier than he remembered. A group of unwashed gracyl infants dug morosely in their instinctive way in the dust of the yard, and Roan thought fleetingly how strangely each Gracyl reenacted his race's evolution from a primitive burrowing rodent. The flower IF garden was gone and no one had whitewashed the house for years. A suspicious Gracyl mare peered from the window where Bella had once flapped a towel to call Roan to meals. He swallowed a nostalgia that he hadn't expected to have and marched the men on, past the garbage dump, now bigger than ever. No one knew, or asked, why he took that route. He walked confidently, his head up, his guns strapped to his hips, his boots kicking up decisive splatters of mud as though he knew where he was going. He had no friends to look for, no hint as to how to find Bella. But Uncle T'hoy hoy had had a favorite haunt -- a tumbledown bar where he had been wont to huddle with other hardbitten slaves, sipping at vile Yill drinks and muttering unknowable Yill secrets. It would be a starting place. Roan turned a corner, and the men behind him murmured. He could picture the grins spreading. This looked more like it, the pirate's part of his mind noted automatically. Ahead a carefully trimmed wine vine made an enclosure, and beyond could be seen the spangled tops of rich houses. A small party of Veed petty nobles was coming through the gate; some had iridion clasps on their pleated skirts and one had a diamond class-badge attached to his neck. The only weapons they carried were daggers and whett talons, and their slithering gait had the native insolence of those who think daggers are enough. Roan felt the men slow behind him, watching the Veed. He turned and gave them the look of ferocity that came so easr, ily now. "All right, you hull-scrapings. I've warned you. The first man that gets out of line gets a bullet in the guts." "Those Geeks friends of yours?" Noag inquired loudly, watching the Veed move past. Noag was a Gook, and he had no use for Geeks. "I have no friends," Roan said. "If you think I'm kidding try me." T he Veed had paused. Now two of them swaggered over. "Get you gone from the places of the noble Veed," one said in flat, badly accented Interlingua. "And take these mud-swine of half-caste Terries with you," the Other added. They stood with their hands resting on their knives. They looked as though they hoped someone would give them some slight cause to draw them. "Okay if I kill these two?" Sidis asked hopefully. He was grinning, and his polished teeth shone like silver. other men moved up and began to ring in the two Ve. They moved together, suddenly nervous, realizing that these were not local outcasts. "Begone," Roan said in the faultless Yill that Bella had taught him. "My slaves scent easy blood." The two Veed took their hands from their knives and made inscrutable Veed faces. 'Take your vile scent with you," one said, but he moved back. "Before you go," Roan said, "give me news of T'hoy hoy, the Yill bard and teller of tales." He put his hands on his guns to show that it was no idle inquiry. "It is said the one you name can be found over his cups in any pothouse so undisceming as to accept his custom," the Veed snapped the answer. Roan grunted and turned on toward the gate. He remem-bered that once the Veed quarters had been sacred and taboo, and that he hadn't been good enough to be allowed there except when he ran messages or delivered merchant's goods. But now he was Roan, the Man, and he went where he liked. He strode through the gate. Veed faces turned, ready to hiss their anger, but a silence fell over them as the small party tramped past. There were a few half-hearted cat-calls but no one moved to intercept them. The Veed had seen the byplay at the gate with the two daggermen, and understood that it was a time for discretion. O n the far side of the Veed quarter, in the swarming section of the city. Roan halted the men at a tavern under the battered red, green and purple symbol of an all-blood establishment. "You wait out here," Roan said. "I'll send out a round. And keep yourhands off your guns and other people's belongings." There was a Yill inside. He wasn't Uncle T'hoy hoy but he was of the Twix caste, one of those inconspicuous ones who were always to be found in public places sitting unobtrusively in a comer to pick up information, compose their strange Yill poems and be available in case there were messages to be sent. Roan slid into the cracked seat across from the Yill, ordered Bacchus wine for himself and Fauve for the old Yill, then took out an oblong coin and put it on the table. The Yill winked his eyes at Roan and let the coin lie there. There were many things a . Yill would do for money and other things nothing could make him do. The Yill was waiting to find out which kind of thing Roan had in mind. "First," Roan said, coming directly to business in the Yill fashion, "I want to find my mother, Bella Cornay. Then I want to find T'hoy hoy, my foster uncle." The Yill took the coin with pointed fingers from which the fighting talons had fallen long ago. He deposited it under his tongue and watched while the clumsy, frizzlehaired waiter brought the wine. He smelled the Fauve, looked keenly at Roan and said: "I am L'pu the Chanter of Verses. I know you. The flamecolored Terr an boy who filled the empty life of the faded beauty, Bella. You were a small, wild flame of a youngling, and you have lived to beome a fire of a man. Your mother's heart would have leapt for your beauty, which is that of all great beasts of prey." "Mother is... dead?" Roan felt a slow sadness. He had never loved IF his mother enough, and it had not been fair. All he'd ever thought about was Raff. "She is no longer alive," the Yill said. He was being precise about something. Roan waited to see if he would say more, but he didn't and it was no use to ask. "Uncle T'hoy hoy?" "At this moment, T'hoy hoy listens at the house of the autocrat of the noisome Soetti. Would you have me fetch him?" Roan nodded and the Yill drank off his wine and slipped away. ;Alone, Roan sat and waited in the small, dank tavern. The room smelled of a hundred liquors, poison to each other, and of alien sweats. Outside the flaps of the cellophase windov the men were bored, talking too loudly and throwing knives carelessly at each other's feet. Rain started up and drummed on the tin roof. It reminded Roan suddenly, overwhelmingly, of home. But he thrust the emotions back under a gulp of strong wine. Home was gone, had never been. Tambool was a place like any other, and in a few hours he'd be on his way. He had another drink and waited. Bella was no longer alive. L'pu had said. What did that mean? H e heard the men jibing at someone outside and the tavern lighted with an opening door and feet shuffled. It was Uncle T'hoy hoy. He had gotten old, so old, and his gray face was like shrivelled clay, but it rose into smiles for Roan. "My boy," he said. "Oh, my boy." And Roan saw that if a Yill could cry. Uncle T'hoy hoy would have cried. Roan embraced the old slave and ordered two more Fauves. "I guess I've changed," he said. "Would you have known me?" "You have changed, but I would have known. you. Roan. But tell me the story of your years. Have you killed and have you loved and have you hated?" "All that and more,' Roan said. "I'll give you my story for your collection. But my mother. What happened to Bella?" Uncle T'hoy hoy reached under his belt, inside his tunic, brought out a thick gold coin and offered it to Roan. "Your inheritance," he said. "All that remains of a once fair flower of the Yill." Uncle T'hoy hoy was a story-teller and he couldn't help being poetic. Roan told himself, suppressing his impatience. "Where did Bella get gold?" Roan fingered the coin. It was an ancient Imperial stater and represented a lot of money in the ghettos of Tambool. "She had nothing for which to live, with Raff dead and you stolen. She sold herself to the Experimental College for vivisection. This was her pay, and she left it for you in case you should ever return." "And -- she left no message?" "The deed speaks all that need be said. Roan." "Yes." Roan shook his head. "But I don't want to think about that now. I have to hurry. Uncle T'hoy hoy. My men are itchy for action and loot, and if anybody even looks at them sideways they're going to cut loose. I came here to find out who I am. I know Dad and Ma bought me at a Thieves' Market here on Tambool, but I don't know which one. Did they ever give you a clue?" was there." "You?" "I came here, all the way from a far world, to kidnap you," T'hoy hoy said, remembering an old irony and smiling his strange Yill smile at it. "You!" Roan was grinning too at the unlikely image of the old Yill as a hired adventurer. "Ah!" T'hoy hoy said. He shook his head. "Better it were perhaps if all this were left untroubled under the mantle of time -- " "I want to know who I am. Uncle. I have to know. I'm supposed to be of Terran blood -- Pure Strain. But who were my parents? Uncle T'hoy hoy nodded, his old eyes remembering the events of long ago. "I can tell you my story, Roan. Your story you must find out for yourself." "I've shot my way in and out of a lot of places," Roan said. "But you can't shoot your way into the past. You're my only lead." "We can here," T'hoy hoy said, "following orders. We were minutes late at the bazaar -- but the dealer talked a little. We trailed the purchasers, and they went to earth in a closed place where tourists never venture. When we saw them, we laughed at how easy it would be; a frail Yill woman and an old hybrid Terran in an ill-fitting suit..." "Raff was never old." "So we discovered. It was incredible. He fought like a fiend from the Ninth Pit, and even after his bodybones were broken, he fought on, and killed all the others, and he would have killed me. But the lady Bella saw that I was a Yill, like herself, and that I would yield. She needed me, so my life was spared. Then by my oath I was forevbr bound to her and to Raff. And to you." Outside, the men had begun a game of rolling the tankards their drinks had been served in, and shooting at them. Inside there were only Roan and T'hoy hoy and the bartender frowning worriedly over his pewters and casting glances toward the door. "Send out a refill," Roan called. He poured his and T'hoy hoy's glasses full. "Dad used to say I was Pure Strain. But whenever I asked him what made me any more valuable than any other more or less pure Terran, all he said was that I was something special. What did he mean, T'hoy hoy?" "Special you were. Roan, for many men died for the owning of you. But how, I cannot say." "This market where I was bought. Tell me where it is; maybe the dealer who sold me knows something." "As to the bazaar, tell you I no IF will, but as for the dealer... alas, he died of a throat ailment." "A throat ailment?" "There was a knife in it," T'hoy hoy said a little guiltily. "Ah, I admit, Roan, I was not so eventempered then as now." T'hoy hoy told Roan the location of the Thieves' Market on the far side of Tambool. "But let me advise you to stay clear of the place. Roan. It was an evil haunt of the scum of the Galaxy twenty-five years ago, and the neighborhood has since deteriorated." Roan was watching through the window as a large company of Veed gentry went by outside; his crewmen stood silent, watching, but everything in their stance suggested disrespect. Sidis was tossing his knife in the air and catching it without looking, and grinning his steel-toothed grin. "They're like children," Roan started, and broke off. A lone Veed had hurried past, trailing the group, and the diamond at his throat had glinted like a small sun, and from the corner of his eye Roan caught a sudden movement, then a thud. H e was out in the street in a moment, in time to see Noag's short cloak flutter at an alley mouth. Roan sprang after him and whirled the lumbering Minid around, but it was too late. The young Yill noble's head dangled at a fatal angle. An angry buzzing was growing among the gathering bystanders. They didn't like Veed nobles, but street was too much. "Come on, you brainless slobs!" Roan yelled. "Form up and let's get moving!" He looked at Noag, and the Minid fingered his knife and looked back. "You can stay here with your Veed and his diamond," Roan grated, and passed him by. "Huh?" Noag looked puzzled. "You can't do that! It'd be murder," he roared, starting after Roan. "I got no Tamboolian mrieyl I don't know the language! I won't last a hour!" "Tough," Roan said. "Cover him, Askor, and shoot him if he tries to follow us." T'hoy hoy was trotting beside Roan, looking back worriedly. "Cleverly done," he puffed. "The sacrifice will satisfy them for the moment, but you'd best not tarry. Farewell, Roan. Send word to me, for I would know how your saga ends." "I will. Uncle," Roan said. He pressed a heavy Imperial thousandcredit token into the old Yill's hand and hurried after his men. At the gate he looked back. Noag was squatting at the alley mouth. Tears were streaming down his face but he was cutting the diamond off the dead Veed. I t was a steaming, screaming color blaze of a bazaar, and the dust was like yellow pK)ison, and as Roan marched his men through the narrow, twisting ways between stalls, no one gave them a second look. No one gave anything a second look in the Thieves' Market unless it was something he wanted to steal. They came out into an open plaza, and wended their way across it among sagging stalls with sun-faded awnings. Merchants too poor to rent booths squatted by heaps of tawdry merchandise. Gold and green deathflies buzzed everywhere, and the air reeked of opulent perfumes and long-rotted vegetables and sweat and age and forbidden drugs. They passed a scarlet and blue display of Tirulean silks that were worth fabulous amounts and a spread of painted esoterica that was worth nothing at all and came up to a crumbling wall cut from the chalky ochre rockface that towered over the square. A handpainted sign beside a dark stair Under the first sign, another hung ed beneath the words, but the letters had been scratched out. Roan turned to the men. "Go shopping," he said, and they stood and looked amazed. "Go shopping. Spread out so you won't look like an army; and don't start anything." "Where you going. Boss?" Askor inquired. "I'm going to see how easy it is to become a father." R oan climbed the narrow, hollowed steps, pushed past the remnant of a beaded hanging into a dark and smelly room lit by a crack in the ceilin. From behind a desk. a mangily feathered Geek in tarnished bangles looked at him with utter insolence. Roan kicked a broken chair aside and leaned on the desk. "What do you want?" The creature rasped in a scratchy, irritable voice. "Who referred you here? We deal wholesale only, to selected customers." "I don't go through channels," Roan interrupted. "I came to inquire about buying an embryo. A human one, like you advertise outside." "We have thousands of satisfied customers," the dealer said automatically, but in a tone that indicated that he had no need of another. He was looking Roan over distastefully. "How much you prepared to pay -- if I should happen to have something in stock?" "Money doesn't matter. Just so it's the real thing." "Your approach appeals to me." The dealer fluffed out his nKulted face ruff and sat up a little straighter. "But you have to have at least one wife. Sodomate law. The FeSs would get me." "Let me worry about that. What have you got?" "Well, I could offer you a good buy in a variety of FA blood lines -- " "What does FA mean?" "Functionally adapted. Webbed digits, heavy-gravity types, Kghtly furred -- that sort of thing. Very nice. Guaranteed choice, selected -- " "I want genuine Terry type." IF "What about our number #? Features the cyclopic maternal gene, rudimentary telepathic abilities that could be coaxed along -- " "I said Terry type. The original variety." "Nonsense! You know better than that. It doesn't exist." "Doesn't exist, eh? He bent close to the dealer. "Take a look. A good look." The dealer clacked his tarnished beak and looked at Roan worriedly. His large round eyes were watery. He blinked and look surprised. "My goodness," he said. Then: "The feet. You'd be surprised how often it's the feet." Roan stepped back and pulled a boot off and planted his bare foot on the massive old desk. T he dealer gasped. Five digits! One might almost think -- " He looked up into Roan's face with a sudden alarm. He slid off his stool and hopped back. "You're not -- oh, no!" "Sure I am," Roan said. "I came from right here. Twenty-five years ago. And now I want to know all about the circumstances surrounding my presence on your shelves." "Go away! I can't help you! I wasn't here then! I know nothing!" "For your sake," Roan said, "you'd better know something." He took a gun out of his belt and hefted it on his palm. "My... my uncle. Uncle Targ. He might -- but he left word he wasn't to be disturbed!" "Disturb him," Roan said ominously. The dealer's eye went to a corner of the room, flicked back. "Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. I'll check the files, and -- Roan came around the desk and headed for the corner the dealer had glanced at. There was the tiny glint of an oculus from a shadowy niche. The feathery alien skittered across to intercept Roan. "Uncle Targ isn't active in the business any more! He's not a well being! If you'd just -- " "But I see he still retains an active interest." Roan swept the dealer aside, raised the gun and fired a low-power blast at the wall. Plaster shattered all around the Eye, exposing wires which led down toward a circular hairline crack in the f used-sand floor. Roan brought the gun up and fired at the crack. The dealer jumped at him and hauled at his arm, squawking. Abruptly, the trap door flew up and a tiny old voice screeched in five languages: "Stop, cease, desist, have done, give over!" A naked, ancient head popped up from the opening, its three remaining feathers in disarray. "Break off, check, stay, hold, cut short! Chuck it, I say!" he shrilled. "Terminate -- " "I've already stopped," Roan said. "Uncle Targ, I presume?" He tossed the dealer aside, stepped to the opening. Spidery stairs led down. He bolstered the gun and descended into the heavy reek of sulphur dioxide. Uncle Targ danced on skinny, scaled legs, screaming in at least four tongues' he hadn't used before. "You swear with great authority," Roan said when the oldster paused for breath. "Why all the flummery?" The creature skittered to the wall and plugged a wire dangling from its wrist into a socket. "I should have let you rot! I should have decanted you at the first sight of that accurst box with its crests and jewels and its stink of trouble! Bause of you, my very own pKuch-brother was hacked to spare-ribs in the flower of his dealership! But instead, I maintained you at the required ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit for days, and this is the thanks I get!" He stopped and breathed heavily for a moment. Then: "Go away," he piped in a calmer tone. "I'm an old being." "You're an old windbag, but that's your problem," Roan said carelessly. "All I want to know is, who am I?" "All that shooting! You could have shorted my metabolic booster unit!" R oan looked around at the dimlit room. There were no windows, but the walls were panelled in pure gold and somebody kept it polished. There was a chandelier hung with diamonds and a burl desk that must have cost a couple of thousand Imperial to import from Jazeel. The creature's flimsy old body was swathed in yards of silver damask, and in one side of his beak he wore a ruby that looked like the heart of a rare red wine. "You've got a right nice sickroom," Roan said. "And it's a matter of no moment to me whether you're evading the Feds or the tax collectors or if you just like to be alone. But I'm still waiting for an answer." He tossed the gun impatiently and motioned with his free hand at Uncle Targ's wires. "I can either plug you," he said, "or unplug you." Uncle Targ squeaked around in the back of his throat as though he were pulling out rusty file drawers in his head. "I'll have to get vour records." he hesitated. "Don't look, now." He sounded as though he had them in his bra. Roan went on looking, but Uncle Targ played a tune with his fingers on a solid piece of wall and a drawer slid out. A card flipped up. Roan reached over Uncle Targ's shoulder and grabbed the card. Somehow, he'd expected to see names on it: his father's name, or his mother's. Or a country. Instead, it said, Pure Terran, Beta. Centauri. Special source d.g.) "What does 'Beta' mean?" Roan asked. "Beta is you. Alpha was somebody else. And then there was Gamma, and the others." "Others. Pure Terran?" "They weren't viable." "Were they my brothers?" Uncle Targ shrugged. "Alien biologies have never been a hobby of mine!" "But what else do you know?" "What's the difference? Why do you care? You're you and it seems to me you're pretty lucky. Suppose IF you were me, getting older and older and all the money I've got won't buy even a minute of the pleasures you can get free." The screech was a whine now. "Why I care is my business. Telling me is your business." Tremulously, the old creature unplugged himself, teetered across to his stool, perched and lit up a dopestick. It was obvious from the way he caressed it that he wasn't allowed to have them very often. "So long ago," he murmured, looking at the ceiling. "Did you know I was stolen?" Roan asked. "You are crude," Uncle Targ said distastefully. He pushed a button and the trap door slammed shut in his nephew's face peering from above. "I'm waiting." Roan reminded him. "I, ah," Uncle Targ said. "That is, so many of one's usual sources had withered away. You understand -- " "What made me so valuable?" "You? Valuable? You retailed for a miserable two thousand, if I recall correctly." "Still, there was your brother. And someone went to considerable trouble to cohie after me." U ncle Targ blew smoke from orifices in the side of his head. "Who knows? You do seem to be a more or less classic specimen of Man, if anyone has an interest in such matters." He sighed. "I envy anyone who cares that much about anything at all. With me it was money, but even that palls now." "The card said I came from Alpha Centauri. Can't you tell me any more than that?" Uncle Targ rolled one beady eye at Roan. "On the flask," he said, "there was a name: Admiral Starbird, and the notation 'Command Interest.' I have no idea what that might mean." "Are there Terrans on Alpha?" "I know nothing whatever of this Alpha place," Uncle Targ piped. "And I do not care to know. But there are no Terrans living there or anywhere else, for that matter. The Pure Terran is a myth. Oh, ten, fifteen thousand years ago, certainly. They kept to themselves. Lords of the universe! Practiced all sorts of racial purity measures -- except for the specially mutated slaves they bred. But then they had the poor judgment to lose a war. Since then the natural tendency toward environmental adaptation has had free rein. And with the social barriers down, the various induced mutations inbred freely with the Pure Strain. Today you're lucky if you can pick up what we in e trade call an Eighty X; a reasonable superficial resemblance to the ancient type." "What about me?" "Umm. If I were to cut into you, I daresay I'd encounter all sorts of anomalies. How many hearts do you have?" "I don't know. I thought you said alien biology wasn't a hobby of yours." "One can't help picking up a few -- " There was a loud thud from IF above and plaster fell down on the burl desk. Uncle Targ screeched and jumped for the trap-door button. The lid sprang open and a solid slug whanged off the gold wall by Roan's ear. The ancient being's profanity cut off In mid-curse. Roan yanked out his gun and flattened himself against the wall. Through the trap door he could see Askor holding Uncle Tafg's nephew by the neck and slamming the feathered head against the desk. A small ragged slave was scrabbling frantically for the beaded hanging, but Sidis's unsheathed claws had him pinned by a trailing cloak. Roan fired a shot into the ventilator grill. It made an echo like eternity bursting. "All right, boys, break it up," he called and clambered up into the shop. Sidis looked at him, grinning his metallic grin, and the slave broke free and bolted from the room. Askor waved the dealer in a wide gesture as though he had forgotten he were holding him. "Poion seen you come in here, and we thought we heard some shots. And then we couldn't find you." "So all you rowdies could think of was to shoot the place up. I told you to go shopping." Pay for stuff?" Askor tossed the dealer aside; he struck with a clatter of beak and claws and bangles and crept to a neutral comer. "We figured you was kidding." Roan glanced down into Uncle Targ's private retreat. The ancient lay on his back, glazed eyes wide, vith his mouth full of blood. "Come on," Roan said. "Let's get out of here." Back in the plaza the bazaar had died as though a sudden storm had slammed it shut. Roan could feel the eyes staring at him from behind blind shutters and past barely parted hangings at narrow windows and through cracks in sagging facades. Askor glanced around, strutting. "I guess they know we been to town, hey, Chief?" "Shut up and march," Roan said. This is what I always leave behind me, he thought. Fear. X grumbled, sitting beside Roan in the eerie light of the control panel. "For better'n a year and a half now -- ever since we lost Warlock -- we been by-passing dandy targets, blasting balls to bulkheads from one two-bit world to another. And when we get there -- no shooting, you say. Go shopping, you say. The boys are getting kinda fed up." "We stopped and took on supplies once or twice," Roan said. "But I suppose that wasn't enough to satisfy your sporting instincts." "Huh?" Aw, that was peanuts. Just grocery shopping, like." "With a few good-natured killings thrown in, just to keep your hand in. You can tell the crew there'll be pfenty of action now." "Yeah? Say, that's great, Cap'n! What  you got in mind? A run through the Spider Cluster, maybe? Knock off a few of them market towns that ain't been hit for a hundred years?" "Nothing so pedestrian. Set your course for Galactic East." Askor scratched at his hairless skull. "East? Why do we want to head out that way. Chief? That's rough territory. Damn few worlds to hit, and them, poor ones." "There'll be plenty of worlds. And after the first couple years' travel, we'll be in a part of space no one's visited for a few thousand years." "A couple years' run out the Arm? Cripes, Cap'n, that'll put us in No-man's-space! The ghostships -- " "I don't believe in ghost-ships. We may run into Niss, though. That's where the last big engagements were fought." "Look, Chief," Askor said quickly. "What about if we talk this over, huh? I mean, what the hell, there's plenty of good worlds right here in this sector to keep us eating good for the next two hundred years. What I say is, why look for trouble?" "You're afraid, Askor? That surprises me," "Now wait a minute, Cap'n! I didn't say I was scared. I just..." His voice trailed off. "at I'm getting at is, what the hell's out there? Why leave good hunting grounds for nothing?" "Alpha Centauri's out there," Roan said. "Alpha... That's the place you I thought you said we was through with that chasing around." Roan came to his feet. "What do you think this is, a ladies' discusIF sion circle? I gave you an order, and by the nine hells, you'll carry it out!" Askor looked at him. "You sound more like old Cap'n Dread all the time," he said. "I'll follow your orders, Cap'n. I always have. I know I ain't smart; I need somebody with brains to tell me what to do. I just made the mistake of thinking we could talk about it." "We've talked enough," Roan cut him off. "You plot your course to raid every second-rate planet between here and Alpha, if that's what it takes to make you happy. Just don't forget where we're headed." Askor was grinning again. "That's more like it, Chief," he said. "This is what the boys been waiting for. Boy, what a cruise; It'll be a tenyear run, cutting into new territory all the way!" "And no more talk about ghostships! Or live Niss either." "Okay, Cap'n. But with some good targets in sight, it'll take more than a shipload of spooks to scare the boys ok." After Askor left the bridge. Roan sat for a long time staring into the main viewscreen, with its spreading pattern of glittering stars. So much for the next ten years, he thought. After that... But there'd be time enough to plan that when the sun called Alpha Centauri filled the screens, R oan sprawled in his favorite deep-leather chair in the genuine wood-paneled officer's lounge of the heavy cruiser Archaeopteryx -- which had served the freebooters as home for seven years now, since a stray missile had uncovered the underground depot in whicii the fifty-seven hundred years before. Sidis sat across from him. His grin was ragged now with the absence of five front teeth, carried away by a shell fragment in an engagement off Rastoum the previous year. Poion perched in his special seat, fitted up to ease the stump of his left leg, toying with a massive silver wine goblet. Askor was tilted back with a boot on the mahogany table-top, paring diunks from a wedge of black cheese and forcing them into his capacious mouth. "I called you here," Roan said, "to tell you the cruise is nearly over. The story that last batch of prisoners told fits in. The sun ahead is Alpha." "Not many of the old bunch still around, hey, Cap'n?" Sidis observed. "Bolu, Honest Max, Yack -- all gone." "Whaddaya expect?" Askor inquired, with his mouth full. He lifted his alabaster chalice and washed the cheese down with green Bacchus wine, then belched heartily. "We been on, lessee, twenty-one raids in the last eleven years, and fought three deep-space engagements with wise-guy loc patrols." "You can reminisce later," Roan up on their screens any day now. I don't like that, but it can't be helped. If they let us alone however, I'm making planetfall on the fourth world of the system. Accordters is on the second. "I'll take one of our soout boats from there and make the run in alone." "Whaddaya mean, alone?" Askor butted in. "You need all the boys along on that caper, Chief, if I know my Terries!" "I don't expect any trouble. And if I did, I'd still go in alone. A show of force wouldn't buy me anypaying a peaceful call, that's all." "From the stories we been hearcheery welcome for nosy strangers. What you want with them Terries anyways. Chief?" "I'm a Terry myself," Roan said shortly. "In his origins a being finds hints of 'his destiny," Poion murmured. "Alas, our captain knows his not." wait for me on planet I four," Roan went on. "And stay under cover. If I'm not back in... ten days, you're on your own." "Hey, you mean...?" Sidis grin was sagging, hooked up on the bad side by twisted scar tissue. He looked from Roan to Askor to Poion. "You're talking about letting the captain walk in there alone? And where does that leave the rest of us?" 'You'll be all right," Roan said. "You'll be happy. You can raid back down through the Eastern Arm and shoot up everything in sight, without me to nag you." "Just like that, huh? Thirteen years together, and then, srrikkr He made a cutting motion across his throat. "I didn't take you to raise," Roan growled. "I remember you the day we met. You were pounding some Ycthan's brains out against the bulkhead. You were doing all right." "Back out through the Ghost Fleet, alone?" Sidis's grin was a grimace now. "To the Ninth Hell with that! I'm going with you, Cap'n!" "I'm going alone," Roan said flatly"Then you'll have to shoot me, Cap'n," Sidis said distinctly. Roan nodded quietly. "That could be arranged." "And me too," Askor said. "Count me in." "And I," Poion said. "I shall go or die, as my captain wills." Roan looked from one to another. He lifted his glass and took a long draught, put it back on the table. "You're that scared of the ghosts of departed Terries?" Nobody spoke. "You Gooks amaze me," Roan said. "All right, we four. But no more." Sidis's grin was back in place. Askor grunted and carved off another slab of cheese. Poion nodded. "It is well," he said. "We four." # # bungle," Roan asked, "you VJ" think you can navigate the Archaeopteryx now?" "Yeah, Chief," Gungle said, grinning his snaggle-toothed Minid grin. IF "Yeah, I think. You show me what to feed in, I feed it in." "Suppose you were captain now. What course would you set?" "No offense, Chief, but I'd plug in a straight line back to East Sector. Me and the boys, we heard back on Leeto about the Terry Ghost Fleets. There ain't no civilization for parsecs. Just these dead worlds like Centaurus Four here, without even no air." "What are your coordinates for the nearest allblood joy city?" Gungle grinned wider, flicked a chart of the Eastern Sector on the navigation screen and punched out a course to Leeto. "Okay," said Roan. "You're captain in full charge until I get back." "Huh?" "I'm taking Poion, Askor and Sidis with me to Centaurus Two." Gungle gaped. Roan took the heavy gem he'd worn on his chest since Alda Cerise and tossed it to the Minid, who hung it around his neck and threw his shoulders back and stood proud, the grin turning to a sterp look of dignity. "Now pipe the crew up," Roan told him. "Men," he said, when they had all assembled. "I'm going to leave you for a while." He raised a hand to still the muttering that started up. "Meanwhile Gungle's captain, and he'll do any gut-splitting that's necessary. And anybody that's got any ideas about anybody else being captain had better think twice. That's my Terran magic jewel Gungje's wearing. As long as he wears it nothing can touch him." The men rolled their eyes at Gungle and made magical signs in twenty-four different religions. But no one raised any objection. # #"That thing really magic?" SidA is asked, as the scout boat that was Centaurus Two, with Archaeopterys four days astern, outward bound for Leeto. "It created magic in the heart of Gungle," Poion answered. "He is now a man and a leader. It created magic in the hearts of the crew as well. They fear him. All this I could feel very plainly." "Yeah, but that's not what I mean," Sidis started. "Look!" Roan was pointing at the forward viewscreen. "A ship," Askor said. "Heavy stuff, too!" "It didn't take 'em long to spot us," Sidis said. "Somebody's awake in these parts. " "We'll hold our course steady as she goes," Roan said. "Leave the first move up to them." "What if the first move is a fifty megaton ner amidships?" Sidis inquired. "That'll be a sign we ain't wanted," Askor grunted. Roan tuned the all wave receiver, picked up star-static, a faint murmur of distant planetary communications. Then the drone of a powerful carrier came througji. "Inbound boat, heave to and identify yourelf," a voice barked in a peculiarly intoned Panterran. "Survivors from the merchant vessel Archaeopteryx, Roan transmitted. "On course for the second planet. Who are you?" "This is the Imperial Terran Navy talking. Ye're in Navy space. Stand by to receive a boarding party and ho tricks or we'll blow ye to kingdom come." "Are we glad to see you, Roan transmitted. "Any hot coffee aboard?" But there was no answer, and the four ex-pirates watched the Terran vessel growing in their tiny view screen. "Ah, Captain," Poion observed sadly, "again the Terran Navy is a disappointment. You look for home and there is no home." "Your emotion receiver's working overtime." Roan said. "But I admit our welcome lacked warmth." "Me, I feel like a fly that's about to get swatted," Sidis said. "Why don't you ever read my emotions, Poion?" "You're too stupid to have emotions," Askor said. "We shoulda brought Trixie in. She could handle that Terry tub." the tiny scout boat at a distance of fifty miles and then came alongside, looming like a dull-metal planetoid. There was a heavy shock as its magnetic grapples embraced the boat... "Open up there!" the harsh but strangely estivated sounding voice said from the communicator. R oan nodded to Askor. He operated the control and the four pairs of eyes watched the lock cycle open. Hot, dense air wooshed into the boat from the higherpressure interior of the naval vessel, bringing odors of food and tobacco and a pervading animal stink. Askor snorted. 'Terries! I can smell 'em!" Boots clanged against metal decking. A tall, lean man wearing an open blue tunic over a bare chest ducked through the lock. He had a lined, triangular face, and there was sweat glittering across his forehead and chest. His, pale eyes were restless. He gripped a powerful rifle with both hands and looked at the three massive humanoids and then past them at Roan. "Who are ye?" he demanded of Roan, ignoring the others. "Roan Cornay, master of the Archaeopteryx. "Who're these beauties?" he jerked his chin at the three Gooks, not looking at them. "My crew. We were all that got out." "You go aboard," the man said to Roan, keeping the power rifle pointed at him. "These others stay here." Roan hesistated a moment. Poion caught his feeling and nodded imperceptibly at Askor. Then Roan stepp accommodatingly toward the port behind the Man, and as he passed he half-turned, quickly, slammed the gun from the Terran's bands with a lightning blow. Askor caught it, flipped it up and let it point casually at its former owner. "I prefer to keep my crew with IF me," Roan said calmly. The Man had flattened his back against a bulkhead and his mouth was open. "Ye're stark, raving mad!" he said. "I'm Navy. One yell..." "... and I'll have your guts plastered on the ceiling," Askor said, grinning. "Whattaya say, Cap'n. Let him have it?" "Oh, I don't know," Roan said, watching a rivulet of sweat that wascrawling along the Man's neck. "Maybe he's going to be nice after all. Maybe he'll extend the hospitality of his ship to all of us. How about it, Terry?" And Roan smiled an ironic grin at himself. This was the first time he'd called anybody else Terry. And it came out like a dirty word. Askor nodded. "He'll need to point his pop gun at us." Askor pushed a thumb against the firing stud of the Man's power rifle and bent it out of line. He tossed it back to the Man. "Don't worry," he said. "We won't tell nobody it don't shoot." R oan walked close behind the Man as he went through the port into the Navy ship. "No need to be nervous." Roan told the Terran. "Just say all the right things when you ee your buddies." A small, roundly built man with a high, pale forehead stood waiting for them in the hold. He wore the commander on the shoulder of his uniform and he was flanked by four armed Men. He had small, dim eyes that squinted at Roan and his lighting of the hold blinded him. "Some reason why ye didn't dump 'em back out into space, Draco?" Draco cleared his throat. "Distressed spacemen. Commander Hullwright." Commander Hullwright frowned, still looking hard at Roan. "Aren't they all. But I see. This  one seems..." "Yes, sir," Draco said quickly. "He's Terran, but I don't think he even knows it. That's why I brought him in to you." Hullwright grunted, but to Draca's obvious relief he was looking at Roan and ignoring the others. "Ye speak a little Panterran?" the commander asked Roan. "Yes. I recognized your voice." "Then why didn't ye answer me hail?" "I did." "Hmmmph. Blasted receiver's prob'ly out again. Draco, see to it." Draco drifted back, eyeiug Askor and Sidis nervously, and Commander Hullwright forgot about him again. "Don't know you're Terran, eh, lad?" Hullwright asked Roan. "Ye must be pretty overwhelmed with all this." He Located with a wave the Navy ship and himself and his officers. "I've seen ships before." Roan said. "Um. Got an ugly tongue in your mouth. No doubt ye're a dirty spy from Rim HQ." "No." "Fat chance ye'd tell me if ye were a spy. at's your story? What are ye supposed to be doing "My merchantman Archaeopteryx blew up a couple of parsecs back. I was outbound for Leeto for shore leave. We had a brush with pirates off Yound and I guess they mined us. We four escaped. I was afraid we'd drift forever." # C T eft ye'r ship and crew to fend for themselves, eh?" I'll give ye a berth and ye can start in the Navy, swabbing decks. Maybe ye can work up to something. Maybe ye can't. Take care of him, Draco." He shot a look at Askor and Sidis. "And put the animals back on their boat." "Wait a minute." Roan said. "These are my men, and they're hungry and thirsty. And I don't swab decks. I'm a master." "Right now you're the most insignificant swab in the Imperial Terran Navy, you puppyl" Hullwright barked. "And as for your 'men', they'll have to find their own animal feed in space. Put 'em back and cast 'em loose, Draco." Draco shuffled his feet unhappily. "Uh, Commander. They claim to be distressed spacemen..." "What's this -- petty sentiments about distressed Gooks? What's going on, anyhow? Are ye in on this mutiny I keep hearing rumors about? What..." The four armed men with Hullwright had tightened up their ranks and one drew the gun from his holster. "Drop that power rifle, Draco," he said. Draco dropped it. Sweat draped from the end of his nose. "Listen, Commander," he said hoarsely, "they made me -- " Roan took a quick step while attention was centered on Draco. His right hand made an expert chop across the throat of the man with the unholstered gun. Askor leapt like a cork from a bottle, seized two of the Men in his vast hands, slammed their heads together in his favorite tactic. Sidis caught the last of the four as he was bringing up his gun, yanked the weapon from the Terran with such force that the Man skidded across the hold and slammed against the bulkhead screaming, clutching a bloody hand. "Hey, look!" Sidis said cheerfully, holding the gun up, "His finger's still stuck in the guard!" Sidis dislodged the amputated member and tossed the gun up. "What do you want us to do with these nancies. Chief?" "Poke them in the ship's lazaret. Commander Hullwright's coming with us for a little pleasant conversation, aren't you, sir? We'll go to the bridge where we can talk in privacy and comfort." Askor gathered up the guns, gave the best one to Roan, and handed the others to Poion and Sidis for safe keeping. Commander Hullwright's ineffectual little eyes were frightened. "What," he began, "what are you..." "Now, now, be calm. Commander," Roan said. "If you play it cleverly, you may even live through this." IP R oan sat in the captain's padded chair, gnawing a roasted leg of fowl and studying the charts of the Space Traffic Control Area surrounding Nyurth, the second planet out from Centaurus, and other charts showing the layout of the vast headquarters complex. "You know, Commander," Roan said. "I'm impressed with the Imperial Terran Navy after all. I'll just want a few details from you so I can be even more impressed. Care for another piece of bird?" Hullwright snarled. Sidis cracked him across the shins with the power rifle. "Answer nice when the Cap'n speaks to you," he admonished. "No, I don't want a piece o' bird, you pirate!" he roared. "Tell me about the defenses. Commander," Roan said. "I'll tell ye nothing, ye murdering mutinous cross-breed Geeks!" "Our captain objects to adjectives," Poion said mildly, giving Hullwright a gentle but telling twist of the ear. "And I find your emotional radiation both primitive and appalling. Answer the captain correctly and succinctly." "I'd eat me own tongue first!" Roan tossed the chicken leg aside and began peeling a banana, "Umm. Now, about these charts. How many of the emplacements are operative -- and which ones?" He held the chart for Hullwright to see. Hullwright was silent. Sidis jabbed him roughly with the end of the gun. "Ye think I'd betray me uniform, ye scum?" Hullwright snarled. "That's right," Roan said. "Unless you'd rather die. One piece at a time." "Ye wouldn't dare lay a hand on me, ye filth! I'm an officer of the Imperial Terran Navy!" "I killed a captain once."' Roan a Gook." Hullwright tried to keep his defiant look in place, but the spirit had wilted from him. "Damn ye'r eyes," he said, "ye won't get through anyway. Untie me right hand and I'll point them out to ye on the chart." H ullwright sagged in the chair. His little eyes closed and herubbed his space eyebrows with his hand. Empty glasses and plates littered the plotting board and chart table, the remains of meals brought up from the galley at the commander's reluctant request, and passed in through the service slot. "I've told ye all I know," Hullwright said hoarsely. "Ye've sucked me brain 's dry as a mummy's tongue." "You've done very well. Commander," Roan said. "Askor, what's the fix for Planet Three?" abaft our port beam, Cap'n." "Fine. Now Commander, I've got just one more little favor to ask, and you've been so nice. Pass the word to your Second Officer to assemble the crew on the boat deck in fatigues for calisthenics in exactly ten minutes." "Hah? What's that?" Askor applied the butt of the rifle. "Jump, Terry!" After two more prods of increasing severity, Huilwrigjit complied. With the cold muzzle of Askor's rifle against his left temple, his ragged voice sounded through the vessel. "And now, good-bye. Commander," Roan said. "Askor, you and Sidis take the commander to join his men. They'll be in their skivvies and unarmed, so you shouldn't have to kill many of them. Dump all but two kilotons of reaction mass from our lifeboat. Then load the commander and his men aboard and cast them off." "That's cold-blooded murder, ye swine!" A crack across bloody shins cut Hullwright off. "You'll have enough fuel aboard to reach Centaurus Three. According to your charts, it has a breathable atmosphere. There are fortythree of you and the supplies and water should last you a couple months, if you're not careless. And if I find you've been honest with me about the information you gave me. I'll see that you're picked up. "Wait a minute," Hullwright said blurrily. "I just remembered. About that picket line, the outer one..." The commander corrected a few errors he had made. Then Askor took him away, followed by Sidis with his toothy grin. A lone, Roan sat in the bridge and knew he was a fool. He could have gone on looting the universe, or set himself up for life on some pleasant planet, with never another care in the world. Instead, here he was alone with three Gooks, going in to face the Imperial Terran Navy. And why? I'm still looking for Terra, Roan thought. Poion says I'm looking for home and I have no home to find. Man has no home. Perhaps there is no Terra. But that's something Poion wouldn't know -- and the Imperial Terran Navy might. They might know the truth of the story of the ancient Niss blockade of Terra. Roan thought of the dead Niss ship firing its last volley, and that made him think of Henry Dread. Even now he couldn't remember Henry Dread without pain. He had had blood on his hands before, but Henry's was the only blood that stained. Poion came in with his silent tread. "Let that memory die, my captain," he said. "Gird yourself for the future." Roan felt the boat lurch slightly. That would be the lifeboat kicking free. Askor and Sidis came back into the control deck in high good humor. Their laughter was like a cannon ball rolling over an iron grill. "That was cute, chief," Sidis said. "The tub's all yours. What are you going to do with it?" "First we're going to scuttle her," Roan said, smiling grimly at three astonished expressions. "Then we're HQ on Nyuith." "And after that?" Askor asked. "After that we start taking chances." IF I t tcx)k nine hours to burn a carefully aligned series of holes destroyer, so arranged as to destroy food and water supplies and smash unimportant portions of the control system, while leaving intact the vital minimum of instruments and fuel reserves. The final punctures through the outer hull-plates were bored by Siregulation vacuum suit, at points marked by tiny pilot-holes cut from within. When the job was complete, crude patches were rigged. The foursome gathered in the now sealed-off control deck, surrounded by heaps of supplies placed there before the work was begun. "Get the story straight," Roan ment on Carolis. That's far enough away they won't know any better. We found this tub derelict, beyond the fourth from Centaurus, driving out-system at a half G. We boarded her and sealed off the leaks, restored atmosphere to the conn deck, and headed her for her home station for salvage." "What were we doing nosing around this . Sector?" Askor asked, levering the cap from a can of compressed quagle eggs. "We were lost," Roan said. "And next time you get a yen for quagle eggs, go in the john. They smell like a corpse's armpit." The were a few things the Minids ate Roan could never get used to. "We left our scout ship in orbit around fourth from Centaurus. We were out of supplies and almost out of fuel. When we first saw the Navy ship we thought we were being rescued. Then we found out it was a ghost ship. We're distressed spacers -- nothing more." "We'll be more distressed yet, kor said. "I get distressed every time you open your ugly mouth," Sidis said. "Why don't you shut up and let the cap'n do the worrying?" "It's a good forty-hour run into the Planetary Control Area," Roan said. "We'll stand watch two on and four off. Every half hour we transmit our mayday signal. We'll keep our receivers open. I doubt that we'll pick up anything, but if we do, ignore it." "What if we hear an order to heave to?" "Our receivers are out. We keep going." Roan keyed the Transmitter to at Nyurth," he called. "We're headed in-system on course for Nyurth; our position is... ' A t the center of a box of four heavy destroyers which paced the damaged vessel at a distance of one hundred miles. Roan steered the scuttled and patched Rage of Heaven in past the tiny outer moon of Nyurth. He crossed the orbit of the massive inner moon and descended, braking now, into the upper reaches of the deep atmosphere. The escort moved in to fifty miles, then ten. On the screens, the telltales winked with the incoming pulses of long-range sensors aimed from the planetary surface nine hundred miles below. "They're tracking us like we was a missile volley from a hostile superD," Sidis growled through his carefully polished teeth. He was sharpening a new toothpick with a steel file. Sweat beaded his low forehead. "At least they've laid off hailing us," Askor pointed out. "I thought maybe the bastards meant it when they gave us that final warning." "Their emotions when we emerge from the ship should be fascinating," Poion said, delicately whetting an even finer edge on his already razorsharp stiletto. Sidis eyed the business end of his power gun and blew any possible dust out of it. Then he took out his whetstone and started honing his double-bladed Niss knife. "You know, Cap'n," Askor said, "I dunno if it was a good idea, tricking us out in these Terry suits. A Gook ain't a Terry, no matter how you slick him up." "You're honorary Terries," Roan said. "Now shut up and follow my lead." T he ship grounded clumsily at the extreme edge of the vast port complex. Roan watched on the screens as two of his escort settled in nearby, gun ports open and energy projectors aimed. The others hovered a mile or two above. "They must think we got an army in here," Askor said. The three crewmen looked at Roan. "Do we walk out there. Just like that?" "You know a better way?" Roan adjusted the set of the collar of his to center the buckle. "No weapons out," he said. "We can't buck the whole Imperial Terran Navy. Right now all we've got is my brains. So keep your traps shut." " "Well," Askor said, eyeing the bright sky, "it's as good a day as any to take a swig from the Hellhorn." Roan led the way down the landing ramp, squinting at bright sunshine, sniffing the alien scent of fresh air. Across the field, an official, uniformed contingent of the Imperial Terr an Navy was drawn up in a rank to greet him. Their shoulder insignia glittered in the sun, and their metal belts shone. Striding at the head of his hulking companions, Roan snapped over liis shoulder: "If one of you thugs disgraces me. I'll have his guts an inch at a time." The ranked Terrans stood rigidly waiting, and Roan admired their "I begin to sense their emotions." precise formation, their disciplined Poion said. "Not death lust, but a silence and stillness. And briefly he mixture of curiosity and excitement hated himself because he wished he and violence restrained. Something's were one of them, a Man among afoot, captain. Walk carefully among Men, and not a Terry freak surthese Terries." rounded by bloodthirsty Gooks. Then he was closer, and he saw they were not all the same height, as they had appeared to be, but were artfully arranged in graduated rows with the tallest on the right and the near-midgets at the far end. His step alnK)st faltered, but he went on, seeing the alien faces now, the wrong-colored eyes under the regulation helmets, the queer-colored skin of wrists showing above sixfingered and four-fingered gloves, the slashes in polished boots to ease wide, webbed feet, the misshapen bodies that bulged under the uniforms of glory. At twenty feet, he barked the order to halt. A heavy body bumped him from behind. He whirled, bellowed at the trio who were spread ing out, gaping at the strangers. "Back in line there, you boneskulled sons of one-legged joy-girls!" He turned again, saluted stiffly as a short, pink-faced Terran came up, casually returning Roan's greeting with a wave of a soft hand. He was wearing the insignia of a Lieutenant Commander, and he tucked a short swagger stick under his arm, glanced past Roan at his crew, wiped his nose with a forefinger. "Commodore Quex would like to welcome you and your men and requests the honor of your presence at Imperial Naval Headquarters at your earliest convenience," he said in a high, melodious voice. A civilized voice. Roan nodded, staring at the strange Terran's face. There were two heavy-lidded eyes -- pale blue. Roan noted, with a small lift of excitement -- a blob of a nose, a puckered mouth, folds of fat under the small chin. For so.me reason it reminded Roan of a baby Fustian, before its shell grew. It didn't look like the kind of face Roan had pictured conquering a galaxy. But he concealed his disappointment and: 'motioned his crew to follow him as the Terran led the way across the field. # #TT#hat do you get from them   up close, Poion?" Roan asked softly as they marched behind the Terran officer, flanked by a squad of Men. "Some sort of fear, oddly enough, Poion said. "Fear? Of four ragged spacemen?" "Not exactly of us. But that is the emotion I read." a craggy many-towered palace built ages before by a long-dead prince of a vanished dynasty. It loomed like a colossus over the tumbled mud houses of the village. A vast green window like a cyclopean eye cast Roan and his crew marched in under the crumbling walls along a wide marble walkway, went up wide steps flanked by immaculate conical trees of dark green set among plants with tiny violet blossoms. It was faintly, sadly reminiscent of the garden on Aldo Cerise. Inside, the sun glowed in long rectangles along the echoing floor of a wide, high room. Terries in fitted tunics of Navy blue stood at rigid attention by elongated doors at the sides of the room. Above, a vaulted ceiling arched up into shaIF dows where gold and blue mosaics caught occasional sun gleams among masses of hanging brass carvings, all polished, which dangled like earrings from a hundred peaked corners, clanging as the wind moved them. They went under a vast arch of enameled brass, across a wide floor of gleaming brass plates. Far up among dark rafters, echoes of more brass clashed softly. As the men marched by. Geek slaves prostrated themselves. They were lean, ribby, deep-eyed creatures, with vestigial scales across high shoulders, long, finger-toed feet and draggled manes of lank hair along their prominent spines. They wore only loin cloths in spite of the chill, and some of them trembled violently as Roan looked at them. From cold -- or fear. The small Terran officer trotted ahead, disappeared through high doors with a sign for Roan to wait. His men clustered close behind him, drawn together and suddenly alert, almost disciplined. "We could jump 'em now," Askor growled. "I get jumpy just waiting." "There is a certain pleasure in the experience of mortal suspense," Poion said philosophically. "In such a moment the current of life runs deep and swift." "You'll actually enjoy dying, you poetic bastard," Askor grunted. Roan hissed at his men as they began to mutter. Waiting came hard to them. But there was no need to worry about them. They could smell danger at half a parsec -- and it was an odor they were fond of. R oan's guide reappeared and beckoned to him. "Wait here," Roan said to his men, "and don't shoot anybody before I get back!" He followed through the bossed, agate-studded door into a shadowed, higji-vaulted room in which magnificence hung like rotted velvet draes. A spiderlean man in a rank-ehcnisted uniform rose from behind a desk like a beached freighter. He offered a bony hand. Roan took it, and felt the stitching along the fingers where the webbing had been removed. He had a wide mouth and a strange, small chin. His ears were odd, and at close range Roan could see that they were edged with pink scar tissue. "I am Commodore Quex," the man said in a soft, almost feminine voice. He was slight, delicately boned, but the cruelty in the slits of his eyes was that of a wolf, not of a cat. Behind Roan, the fat Terran saluted and went out and the door closed behind him. "I'm Roan Cornay," Roan said. "Lieutenant Cornay," he added. "Ah, yes. From Corilis. What a pleasure to welcome you, ah. Lieutenant." A finger like a parchmentwrapped bone brushed at a rededged eye. At close range. Roan could see a whitish crust at the corners of the puckered mouth. An unpleasant odor hung about the old man. He settled back into his chair, snapped his fingers. Something moved in the shadows, and Roan saw that it was a slave, face down on the thick, moldy carpet. It rose and scuttled to swing a heavy chair around for Roan to sit in. The commodore glanced at a paper before him, then looked at Roan, his hand hovering near his eye. "Your ship, ah, Navy #G#. Our records -- " "I captured her. After Warlock was lost." "Ah, yes. So you said. Hmmm. Warlock was a valuable vessel. I don't believe your reports made it clear precisely how she was lost." "In action." Roan paused, thinking of what he had been about to say about the Niss ship, and deciding quite suddenly not to say it. He let the sentence hang. Quex was looking thoughtful. "Surprising... and fortunate that you were able to obtain a replacement. And Captain Dread was lost as well?" The old voice was a purr. Roan felt tension creep along the back of his neck. He shifted in his chair so as to keep the door in view. "That's rit," he said. "And before his, ah, death, he tendered you your appointment?" The red eye peered past the finger at Roan.  "Four years ago." "Umnun. And how did you happen to enter into your, ah, association with Dread?" "He took me from a ship he captured." Quex sucked in his dry lips. "Another naval unit?" he asked sharply"No; ft was a travelling show. I was one of the Freaks." "You were a captive of non-Shumans?" Quex was digging at his ear now, angrily. "Not really. I was, at first, but -- " Quex leaned forward. "You lived an edge on his voice like a saw. "They treated me well enough. I had good quarters and plenty of food." "Beware of Geeks bearing gifts," Quex said flatly. He leaned back, his thin fingers on the edge of the table. "And what is your andestry, Corney? If you don't mind my asking." His voice indicated that he didn't care whether Roan minded or not. R oan opened his mouth to say that he was genuine Terrestrial strain, but he heard himself saying, "I'm not sure. I was adopted. My folks didn't talk about it much." "Mmmm. To be sure," Quex murmured meaninglessly. He poked at the papers on his desk. "About your cargo. Iridion. Gold. Gem stones. Various heavy metals." He looked up with a smile like a falseface. "Some error in transmission, I assume." "It's all aboard my ship. Her holds are crammed with the stuff. I'll be obliged if you'll have it offloaded. I need the space for ammunition and stores. Who do I see about provisioning?" Quex's mouth was open, showing inflamed gums and the tip of a white tongue. "Provisioning? For what?" "For my next cruise. My new assignment." IF "Ah, of course." Quex showed the false face again. His finger was back at his eye. "But we can discuss these details later. I've laid on a dinner in your honor tonight. You'll want to prepare. Real Terran fare again, eh?" "I take it most of the fleet is out on space duty now?" Roan said. "Why do you say that?" Quex shot a darting look. "I only saw half a dozen ships at the port. Some of them seemed to be half dismantled. How big a force does Alpha HQ command?" Quex lifted the paper from his desk and dropped it again. "Ah, an extensive force, Cornay. Quite extensive. Rather extensive." "You have other bases here onworld?" "Oh, ah, assuredly. Lieutenant. Why," Quex waved a hand toward the draped window. "You didn't imagine these few rusting hulks were our entire fleet?" He curved his puckered lips in a smile that crinkled the cruelty lines around his eyes. "Most amusing. Most. But -- " he rose -- "I suggest we allow these matters to wait until after our celebration of your happy return." Roan stood. "Certainly, sir. But I'd like to ask when the counter-attack is planned. I want to know how to set up my cruise." "Counter-attack?" Quex gaped. "The massive offensive in force against the.Niss. How many of them are there? Where have they set up their headquarters? What -- " The commodore held up two quivering hands. "Cornay, need I remind you that all this is highly classified?" He shot a lOok at the nearest slave, crouched against the floor. "Oh." Roan glanced at the slave. "I didn't think..." Quex rounded the desk. "Not that we have any trouble with our slaves. They know their place, don't they, old one?" He kicked the slave hard in the ribs. It grunted and glanced up with an almost human smile, then stared at the floor again. "Still, I shall have to dispose of this fellow now. Pity in a way. He's been with me for twenty years and is well trained. But getting old. A!i, well." Quex took Roan's elbow, guided him toward the door. "Until tonight, then?" "What about my crew?" "Your crew. Of course. Do briMf them along. Yes. Capital idt'a. Your entire crew, mind you. How many did you say there were?" "Just the four of us," Roan said. "At second Moonrise then, Cornay. Don't be late." "We'll be there," Roan said. V ast grins broke across battered faces as Roan rejoined his crew. "Glad to see you. Boss," Asknr said. "We was about to come in after you." "Relax. I'll call the plays," Roan said. A small, neat Terry with an elegant walk flicked ashes from a dope stick, came toward Roan and his men. The guard officer came to attention. "That will do, Piitertek," the newcomer said gently. He looked Roan over, smiling faintly, glanced at the others. "But, sir... the guard protested. "And your watchdogs, too," the dandy said. He was carefully dressed in immaculate blue pK)lyon with silver corded shoulderboards bearing the winged insignia of a captain. His blond, rigidly waved hair shone with oil and he touched it with polished fingernails. His perfume reminded Roan distantly of Stellaraire. "My name is Trishinist," he said with a small flourish of one manicured hand. "Sorry about the reception. These commissioned peasants -- no finesse. Perhaps you'd like a bite to eat and then we can have a little chat?" "My men are hungry, too," Roan said. "They never seem to get invited anywhere." "The enlisted men's mess is -- " "They're officers." "My apKxlogies. Of course." Captain Trishinist led the way along a side corridor, chatting easily about the weather, the servant problem, the inadequacies of the mess cusine. The dining room was quiet with deep rugs and moss green drapes and still, intricate chandeliers. Waiters sprang forward to draw out chairs at a long, white-linened table. Askor and Sidis sat down awkwardly, then relaxed and grinned at each other. Trishinist murmured an order to a servitor, waited and turned contentedly to the table as the waiter brought a loaded tray. "Champagne and honeydew," Trishinist said as Roan's men eyed the frosted bottle and the breakablelooking glasses. "I hope you find it adequate." Askor reached out and helped himself to half a melon from the tray as the waiter passed and took a vast bite. "Hey," he said, chewing juicily, "Pretty good. But the skin's kinda tough." "Wipe your chin," Roan said more than a little annoyed. Askor used his sleeve. "Sorry," he muttered. Sidis had plucked the bottle from the tray and rapped it on the edge of the table to knock the top off. He jumped to his feet, suddenly startled, as the wine foamed out. "Uh-oh," he said. "This one's went to the bad." A waiter rescued the bottle with an impassive face, mopped up the wine. Poion took the bottle, sniffed it, then took a swig from the broken neck. "An interesting drink," he said. "Effervescent, like the human mind. And worth a brief sonnet." "What's the matter with you?" Roan snapped. "Offer the captain a drink." Poion blushed and pushed the bottle along to Trishinist, who waved it away with a smile. Roan picked up his melon and took a bite. "Good," he said around a mouthful of melon. Trishinist's hand hovered over a spoon. TTien he picked up his melon with delicate fingertips and nibbled its edges. "So glad you enjoy it," he said. IF W aiters cleared away the last of the dishes and filled glasses with mysterious-smelling brandy. Sidis slapped his belly and belched. "A great feed," he said. Askor plied a fingernail on a back tooth. "First real Terry chow I ever had," he commented. "Unless you want to count -- " "Thank you. Captain," Roan cut him off hurriedly. "It was a good breakfast." Trishinist offered dope-sticks all around and lit up as the waiters cleared the last of the dishes. "Now, about Rage of Heaven Trishinist said. "You say you found her abandoned. May I ask how it happened that you were cruising in this area?" Roan said carefully: "We heard there were inhabited worlds in this area. New markets. My ship was blasted by a time mine and we were drifting when we spotted the cruiser." trolled space?" "Yes." Roan was watching Trishinist's face carefully. He wished Poion could tell him what Trishinist was feeling. It would help. "And ycAi encountered the derelict where?" Roan repeated the coordinates of the imaginary rendezvous beyond fourth Centaurus. Trishinist glanced around; the doors were closed, now and the waiters gone. He leaned across the table and his languid expression was gone. So were thousands of years of culture. It was as though suddenly all the waves went out of his hair. "You're early," he hissed. "Four months ahead of schedule." R oan sat perfectly still, holding the interested smile in place. "As it happens, we're ready here," Trishinist went on, licking his lips. "But I dislike Elan's imprecision. If we're going to be working together -- " "Hey. chief," Sidis began. "Hush," Poion murmured. Trishinist squinted at the three crewmen. "What about these?" he asked Roan. "They do what I say," Roan said. Poion smiled. "It is true," he said. Trishinist frowned. "I had expected rather more... ah... representative individuals." "They're as representative as I need them to be," Roan said. "You have your identification?" Roan reached inside his tunic, disk on a chain, handed it across. Trishinist looked at it carefully. "Endor," he murmured. "Elan's never mentioned your name to me Captain." "No doubt." Roan said. "Blan is proposing no changes in the scheme at this date, I trust?" Trishinist said sharply. "I've fulfilled my part of the arrangement. I assume he's done as well." "You see me here," Roan said. "Where are his squadrons now?" "They're in position." Roan improvised. "Is he prepared to move at once?" Roan frowned. "That depends on you," he said. "On mer "Of course. WeTe early. Yon ' you're ready, Captain. Just wlnal do you mean by that? In detail." Trisihinist's jaw muscles were tensed up. "I told you, I've complied with our agreement in every respect." "I can't work with you if you refuse to tell me anything. I want to know just how ready you are." Trishinist relaxed his jaw muscles with a visible effort. "The organization among the rank and file is now over the eighty per cent figure. Sixty-four of the ninety-eight senior officers are aligned with us. Over ninety per cent of the junior corps. Our men control communications and three of the five major supply depots Roan listened, taking occasional sips from his glass. Askor and Sidis sat, mouths slightly open, listening. Poion was smiling behind his hand. But Roan didn't kick him because it took some practice before a stranger could tell Poion was smiling. "The units on maneuvers are, of course, those including high concentrations of unreliables," Trishinist concluded. The base garrison has been carefully selected over the past three years and can be counted on absolutely. Now, what of your group?" "We're ready," Roan said. "At full strength?" "I have triple the number of volunteers I expected." "Excellent!" Trishinist pursed his lips. "How soon can you be in jumpoff position?" "We're already in position." "You mean... you mean that literally?" The captain moved uneasily in his chair. "Absolutely." "Certainly you don't mean -- today?" Roan put both hands palms down on the table. "Now,", he said, because all this was having such an extraordinary effect on Trishinist. T rishinist's face seemed to fall apart as a look of comprehension and shock came over it. Sweat popped out on his forehead and his eyes went to Sidis, who was polishing his teeth, and Askor who was just sitting, and Poion who all of a sudden began to look as though there was something important about him. "Oh, I see now," Trishinist said. "I see why you brought them. I..." A sick expression passed over his eyes -- "you really think it's necsesary to go that far." "at's the alternative?" Roan asked steadily. "You're right, of course. Still... he is Pure Strain." Roan stood up. "We've spent enough time talking about it. I'd like to meet him now." "Meet..." Trishinist looked almost wild for a moment. "Oh..." He relaxed. "Just to... ah... assess him, of course." "Of course." "Very well." Trishinist rose. "Things are moving a trifle rapidly IF for me. But you're right. There's no need to delay." At the door he hesitated, glancing at Askor, Sidis and Poion. "Ah... which one?" Sidis grinned his jagged grin, Trishinist shuddered and went on out into the hall. Guards in bright-plated helmets snapped to attention as Captain Trishinist halted Roan and his men at a massive carved door. "I'll introduce you as a new arrival from one of the Outer Towns," he said to Roan. "He likes to meet the new recruits. There are so few these days. The other will wait, of course." Askor looked at Roan; Roan nodded. "Stay here," he said. "Don't wander off looking for liquor." "Gee, Boss," Sidis said. Trishinist opened the door; Roan followed him into an ivory-walled anteroom ornamented with a pale blue floral cornice. A harried-looking staff lieutenant came in from the room beyond, exchanged quick words with the captain, then motioned them through the arched way. The room was wide, silent, deepcarpeted in dusty blue, with light curtains filtering the yellow light from tall windows. There were deep chairs, cabinets and bookshelves of rioh-polished wood, and a vast desk behind which an ancient Man with snow-white hair sat, his gnarled hands gripping the arms of his massive chair. "Good morning. Admiral Starbird," Trishinist said. "I've brought a caller." S tarbird waved Trishinist and the aide from the room, indicated a chair, sat studying Roan's face in silence. "Have I not met you somewhere, once, young Man?" His voice was the rumble of subterrann waters. "I don't think so, sir," Roan said. He was staring at the other's lined face. He had never seen an old Man before, and he was remembering Henry Dread and the expression, at once that of the hunter and the hunted, that Henry had worn and that the old man had too. "That fellow," Starbird jerked his head toward the door through which Trishinist had gone. "He a friend of yours?" "I just met him today." "Vicious little ferret," Starbird said. "He's up to something. Thinks I don't know. Has his picked men all over my headquarters. But it doesn't matter. No guts. That's his trouble. Oh, yes, he'll plan; he'll talk. But there's no steel in the man." The Admiral's eyes were on Roan's face, as though searching for a clue to something. "From the Outer Towns, eh? What were your parents like?" "I don't know, sir. I was raised by foster parents." "And you want to fight the enemies of Imperial Terra." "I've thought about it." "If I were young again," Starbird said with sudden vigor. His fingers twitched on the chair arms. "I remember my first day. Ah, those were great times, young man! There was someihing in the air, a feeling of things to be done, goals to strive for... He sat, looking beyond Roan into the past. "My father was on fleet duty then," he went on talking to himself now, communing with the dead. "He commanded a five kiloonncr, the old Zealot; she was lost off Pluto on a routine recon run, gunned out of space by the Niss. Three hundred years ago that must he now. I was just a lad, then, on border duty in the north. I was to have been with him on his next sweep. He was a bold one; too bold. Who else would penetrate all the way to Sol's edge? Nobody!" Starbird pounded his chair-arm and looked at Roan. "None of these sniveling garrison sailors you see disgracing the uniform today! They're a cruel lot, young man! And gutless!" Roan sat silently, waiting. "Revenge," Starbird said. "I swore I'd have it! But no suicide run, by God! Plenty of smirks and snickers thrown my way. All talk, they said. Talk! But I wasn't jumping off halfready. I needed the rank first. Then reorganization, weeding out the corruption, the twisted element that was choking the service like Venusian tangleweed! Measure a man's genes instead of his guts, that was their way! Damn his genes! It's the dream that make a man, not the number of his toes!" S tarbird fell silent, his face twitching with the pain of old memories. "I had my star at last," he said suddenly. "I put my plan before the general staff. The plan I'd worked out over all those years. Five hunpicked men. We were to move in two echelons, blast our way past the Niss picket lines beyond Pluto, strike with our full power all the way in past the Neptune and Jupiter orbits. Then -- when they massed to meet us -- split! Our probes had given us plenty of information on the Niss defensive patterns! I analyzed their data, and  saw the answer: We'd split beyond Mars, break up into two hundred and fifty pairs, and carry a running fight right in past Luna. Then regroup in a beautiful maneuver I'd worked out as carefully as a ballet -- and hit the Niss inner blockade line with a spearhead that could blast its way through the walls of Hell!" The old Man's eyes blazed with a fierce light; then he let out a long breath and leaned back. He raised his hands, let them fall. "They laughed at me," he said flatly. "We weren't ready, they said. The Niss were too powerful, we didn't have the firepower to stand against them. Wait, they said. Wait!" He sighed. "That was almost two hundred years ago. We're still waiting. And four lights away, the Niss blockade of Terra still stands!" Roan was sitting bolt upright. "Terra?" he said. "Ah, the name still has magic for you, does it lad?" "Only four lights from here?" Starbird nodded. "Sol's her sun. The third planet. The double world. Terra the Fair. Locked up behind a IF wall of Niss!" Starbird's fist slammed the desk. "I'll never live now to see my plan used! We waited too long; soniehow, the fire that We carried died while we talked -- and the dream died with it." Roan sat forward in his chair. "Admiral, you said you weren't worried about Trishinist. What if he had outside help?" Starbird's eyes narrowed. "What outside help?" "A man named Blan." "Blan? That warped imp out of Hades? Is he still alive?" "His forces are due here in four months." Starbird was sitting erect now, the force back in his voice. "How do you know this, lad?" "Trishinist mistook me for Bran's emissary. He's ready to make his move now. Today. He thinks one of my crew is assigned to assassinate you. I'm here now to size you up for the killer." Starbird rose and walked across to the door. He was a tall, oncepowerful man with square, bony shoulders and lean hips. He flipped a lock, threw a wall switch that snicked locks on outer doors. He came back and sat behind the desk. "All right, young fellow. Maybe you'd better tell me all you know about this plot." Ci'That's as much as I was able A to get out of him," Roan said. "With half the men backing him, he's in a strong position, even without Blan's reinforcements." Starbird stroked the side of his jaw thoughtfully. "That timetable suits me very well. Let Trishinist go ahead with his plans. When he discovers his allies are missing, he'll collapse." "I can't stay much longer, sir." Roan got to his feet. "Trishinist will begin to suspect something. What do you want me to do?" Admiral Starbird thumbed his chin. "When's the assassination scheduled?" "Tonight, after the banquet." "Make it late. I'll be ready. Just follow my lead. In the meantime, arm yourself. How many men do you have with you that you can trust?" "Three:" Starbird nodded a smile was growing on his seamed face. His hand slammed the table. "Young fellow -- what was your name again?" "Roan. Roan Comay." Starbird was cackling. 'Terra excites you, does it?" The old man turned to a wall safe, punched keys with trembling fingers. The door swung open and he took out a sheaf of many-times-folded papers. "My attack plan," he said. 'The ships are ready -- over four hundred of them, in concealed docks on the other side of the planet! I've kept them ready, hoping. I needed a leader, Mister Cornay. Trishinist has supplied the men. Let him try his coup! Let him send his killer to me! Then, when he comes along a little later to see for himself. I'll be sitting here, laughing at him! And the orders will be waiting! I have a few loyal officers; they'll command the five squadrons of the flotilla. And you, lad! You'll take command as acting Admiral of the Fleet! Do you understand?" "You'd trust me, Admiral? You don't even know me." "I've known many men in my years, boy. I can judge a fighting man when I see one. Will you do it?" "That's what I came here for," Roan said softly. "That's what I've lived the last thirteen years of my life for." R oan's thugs clustered about him in the windy bronze-and-mosaic hallway outside the Grand Dining Chamber. They were splendid in new clothes of bright-colored silky cloth spangled over with beads and ornaments of glass and polished copper, and they smelled incongruously of flowers. "Keep your guns out of sight," Roan ordered. "Keep your hands off the females and don't kick the slaves. That's a privilege we'll leave to our hosts. No rough stuff unless I give the word, no matter what happens. And any man that drinks so much he can't shoot straight will deserve whatever he gets." He settled his palm-sized power gun against his stomach under the wide scarlet cummerbund that had been wound around him by his assigned slaves in the dust-covered splendor of his quarters. "Let's go," he said and pushed through the high mother-of-pearl inlaid doors. The clang and thump of noise-makers burst out; dancing girls 'sprang into motion, whirled forward strewing flower petals. A thousand tiny colored lights gleamed from chandeliers and winked from tiny fountains that sparkled on long tables spread with dazzling white cloths almost hidden under gleaming plates, polished eating tools, slender glasses as fragile as first love. There were hundreds of Terrans seated at the table, and they rose, clapping their hands. Commodore Quex came forward, his eyes, set at the extreme edges of his face, flicking over Roan and past him at his crew. He took Roan's arm and tugged him toward the nearest table. "You'll sit with me at the head table, of course." Roan held back without seeming to. "What about my men?" "Oh, they'll be well taken care of." Quex smiled. He kept his upper lip pulled down to cover his teeth, but Roan caught a glimpse of widely spaced points. A crowd of humanoid females with slender bodies and immense eyes and huge bare breasts were crowding around the men, taking their arms possessively, giggling up into surprised Gook faces that broke into vast, bristly, snaggle-toothed smiles. "Belay that." Roan snapped. "You men will sit with me -- or I'll sit with them," he amended, turning back to Quex. "I have to keep an eye on them," he explained. "Ah, but yes, as you wish. Lieutenant." Quex dithered for a moment, then signalled, and crouching slaves darted in, shuffled chairs and place settings about. Roan took the deep armchair Quex waved him to and looked around. IF "Where's the admiral?" "He is unfortunately indisposed," Quex toed a slave aside and took the chair oppKJsite Roan. "Chavigney '# or Beel Vat?" he inquired brightly. "Chavigney '#," Roan said, because he'd heard of it. "Indisposed how?" "Admiral Starbird is getting on. He can't stand much... excitement," Quex showed his pointed teeth again and watched the slave pour ruby liquid into goblets. He picked his up, flicked a libation on the marble floor and nosed his glass. Roan drained his and thrust it out for a refill. No doubt the Chavigney '# had a magnificent bouquet, but at the moment he didn't care. Q uex was staring at him; he remembered his smile when Roan looked at him: "I don't believe I've ever seen hair just like yours before," he said. "Quite... ah... striking." "We all have our little peculiarities," Roan said shortly, and let his eyes rest on Quex's. They seemed to sit at the comers of his head and bulge. "No offense," Quex said. "One sees a mew face so seldom." "How many Terrans are there here at HQ?" Roan asked, glancing at the obvious Gooks along . the table. Something touched his shoulder. Mis hand went to his gun; and then there was a choking cloud of perfume and a lithe, blue-trimmed girl was sitting on his lap. She had soft. round breasts with blue-dyed tips that poked through her beads, and she squirmed up against Roan's chest and nudged his wine-glass against his lips. She looked a little like Stellaraire. For an instant Roan felt a lost emotion clutch at him, but he took the glass and put it firmly on the table and palmed the female gently from him. "Stand over there," he said sternly. "If I need anything, I'll call you." The girl looked stricken, and then she looked at Quex and shrank back. The commodore slapped his hands sharply together, and the girl turned and was gone. "I don't want her to get in any trouble," Roan started. "It was just -- " Quex hissed. The points of his teeth showed plainly now. "We do our best with our Geeks," he said. "But they are so abysmally stupid." Slaves came with the food then. It was marvelous, and Roan forgot his problems for the moment, savoring the first real Terran-style cooking he had ever tasted. The wine was good too, and Roan had to force himself to sip it carefully. Along the table, his men spooned in the delicacies, and then when they grew impatient with the small bites, used their hands. Their girls kept up a constant shrill giggling, slopping it down across stubbled jaws. Beside Quex Askor took a glass from his neighbor's girl's hand and poured the contents down his girl's throat. She choked and sputtered, and Askor caught Roan's eye and winked. The noisemakers kept up their cacaphony. Roan watched them, arranged behind a screen of bushy potted plants sawing and pumping and puffing at the gleaming, complicated noisemakers. "You like music?" Quex asked, leaning across the table. There were purple, juicy stains at the corners of his mouth and his eyes bugged more than ever. He had loosened his collar, and Roan saw red scars down the sides of his neck where something had been surgically removed. "I don't know," Roan said, because he had never heard the word before. "Is it something to eat?" "The sounds," Quex said. He waved a hand at the orchestra, behind their screen of foliage. "It's all right, I suppose," Roan said. "Back in the 'zoo, they were louder." "You want it louder?" "I remember a sound I heard once," Roan said, thinking quite suddenly of the deserted park in the Terr an city on Aldo Cerise. "Real Terran sounds. Pretty sounds." He was feeling the wine, he realized. He took a deep breath and sat up straighter, and felt for his gun with his fingertips. "Terry music?" Quex clapped his hands and a slave popped up and leaned close to get Quex's instructions, then slipped away. R oan glanced at his men. They were still chewing with their mouths open, reaching across each other's plates for juicy gobbets almost out of reach, wiping thick finIF geis on now-greasy silks. Henry Dread had picked his Gooks for size, not beauty, Roan was thinking, when he became aware of a sound penetrating the bellowed talk and laughter. It was an elfin horn, picking its way slowly above the uproar. Then it was joined by other sounds, deep and commanding, like the tramp of marching armies, and now the horns darted and flickered like the lightnings of a coming storm while a bugle called demon troops to the attack. Roan pushed his glass aside, listening, searching for the source, and his eyes saw the noisemakers behind the flower boxes. "Are they doing that?" "A clever group, eh. Lieutenant? Oh, they know any number of tricks. They can make a sound like a wounded dire-beast charging -- " "Shut up," Roan said, not even noticing he'd said it. "Listen!" Now a lonely horn picked out a forlorn melody of things beautiful and forgotten, and Roan remembered the glimpse he'd almost had, once, of how life must have been in the days of the Empire. The music faded to silence. The players mopped at their faces with soiled handkerchiefs and reached for clay mugs. They looked tired and hot and ill-tempered and frightened, all at once.' "How could a crew of ugly Geeks make sounds like that?" he wondered aloud. "You like it?" Quex said coldly. He was fingering the braid on his sleeve rather pointedly. "I'm sorry. Commodore," Roan said. "I was quite carried away." Quex managed a sour smile. "It's some ancient thing about a Prince called Igor," he said. "Would you like to hear another? They do a rather clever thing called Jivin' Granny." "No." Roan shook his head to clear away the vision. Quex chose an attenuated cheroot from a blue-and-orange inlaid box a cringing slave offered him. The slave lit it, and when the lighted match fell on the floor from the creature's trembling hand, Quex planted a solid kick in its side. It grunted and crawled over to Roan and he took a cigar and watched the slave crawl away. When it thought it was out of sight, it patted its injured side and wept silently. "Now Lieutenant." Quex blew out smoke impatiently, as though he enjoyed knowing he was smoking a rare weed, but was annoyed with the actual process. "You've just reported in from a long cruise. You deserve to relax." "I don't want to relax," Roan said. "I'd like to know about the Niss. What kind of fleet can they put in space?" "Surely all that can wait," Quex said blandly. He waved his glass. Wine slopped on the floor and a slave scrambled to lick it up. There were other slaves under the table, eating scraps, and still more crowded in, offering finger bowls. Another girl had gotten into his lap somehow, and she was breathing erotica into his ear. Roan was aware that he was dizzier than he should be. and he pushed the slaves away and forced his eyes to focus. "I've waited long enough," he said. He could feel the thickness of his tongue, and he worked on getting angry enough for his temper to boil the lethargy away. A slave shoved a vast pile of foamy stuff in front of Roan. Quex was clapping his hands again and there was a stir, and two immense ing someone small and struggling into the open space at the center of the square of tables. "Sorry if I seemed to have been dilatory in handling this matter," Quex was saying, "but I always think executions go better with the dessert." R oan blinked while the two troopers held the girl down on a short bench with her head over one end. He recognized her as the one who had first gotten into his lap. Her gold-dusted hair was in disarray now, and her thin pantaloons stuck to her legs. One of the men holding her down got out a knife with a foot-long blade and casually thrust it into the side of her neck. She screamed once, and then she was slack, and the trooper was sawing away, holding the head by the hair. He got it free and held it up. There was blood on his hands to the elbow, and more was spreading out on the floor. Roan got to his feet,' and his girl pulled him back, laughing. "Clumsy oxen," Quex said. He picked up his cigar and drew on it, and then tossed it into the soup tureen. "You'd think they were butchering swine. Try our ice cream. It's rather good, considering. " Roan's men were staring at the body of the girl. They were used to bloodshed, but they'd never seen anything like this. The executioners trooped off, one with the head and the other with the body, and a slave came with a bucket of water and a nauseous looking rag. "What -- what -- " Roan stuttered. Quex raised his plucked eyebrows. "The creature annoyed you. That's something we TerranS don't tolerate in slaves." Roan got to his feet, and the girl on his lap squalled and slid off onto the floor. "All right, men! Up!" He bawled. "The party's over! We're leaving! Let's march!" In the sudden silence, Askor nel stirred at their places, glancing toward Quex. Roan went along the table to Askor and slapped him so hard it hurt at the other end of the room. He jerked him to his feet, and turned, and Quex was holding a long-barreled nerve-gun in his hand. It was aimed at Roan. "Not so fast. Lieutenant -- or whatever you are," the commodore said in a voice like chipped glass. "You made a poor choice of identities." The identity disk Roan had produced dangled from his finger. He tossed it to the floor. "Lieutenant Commander Endor was lost in action some six thousand years ago. You're under arrest for mutiny in Deep Space and the murder of Commander Henry Dread." IF R oan looked along the table and caught Askor's yellow eye. The men were still in their places, waiting for the word. The garrison men were getting to their feet, gathering in clumps, watching. Some of them had guns out now. Roan moved toward Quex and his gun, staggering a little more than was necessary. "What do you want with me?" he said thickly. "You've got the cargo I brought." "Yes, there is that," Quex said. "Curious, your bringing it here. You could have set yourself up in luxury for life with that haul. However, that's neither here nor there. Now, before we go any further, if you'll take off your jacket, please..." Askor stirred. Roan flickered an eyelid at him, and the halfbreed settled back. Roan stripped off his braid #ieavy jacket and tossed it on the floor. The Imperial Terran Symbol over the pocket made a loud clink when it hit. 'To the skin, please," Quex insisted. Roan pulled off the silky white shirt, and the crowd staring at him drew in quick breaths. Quex got up and came around the end of the table, not bothering even to kick the crouching slave. His eyes were round, taking in Roan's smooth, unscarred hide, and the reddish hair across his chest. "Your feet," he ordered. Roan pulled out a chair and sat down and pulled off his boots. The spurs clanked as he tossed them aside. Quex leaned close and stared. "Unbelievable," he said. "You're a Terran. A real Terran. A textbook case." He looked into Roan's eyes with an expression almost of awe. "You might even be a Pure Strain." "Hurry up and shoot, if you're going to," Roan said. He picked up a glass and drained it. It would have ben easy to toss it into Quex's face, but he wasn't ready for that yet. "Where did you come from Who were your parents?" "My parents bought me as an embryo." Roan was watching Quex's face. "Where?" Quex snapped. "At the Thieves' Market on Tambool." Quex raised a hand and brought it down in a meaningless gesture. "Of course. There is a certain fantastic inevitability to it! A Pure Terran, cast among Geeks. Naturally he would seek out his own." "What do you know about me?" Roan interrupted Quex's soliloquy. Q uex stepped back, signed for a chair, sank down, watching Roan over the gun. He laughed shortly, a silly laugh. "I suppose I shall have to abandon the idea of shooting you. I'll make it up by planning something rather special for these animals of yours who've had the effrontery to plump themselves down at table with gentlefolk." And Quex tittered again, enjoying himself now. "In a way. I'm almost a sort of parent to you myself." He crossed his legs, swinging his foot. "I was rather active in my younger days. The admiral honored me by dispatching me as his personal agent among the renegade pigs of the Gallian World. It was they who initiated the experiment. I took a chance. Don't imagine I wasn't aware of the risks! I lifted the entire lot -- the wealth of the Nine Gods, and you could hold it in your hand! The fools were careless, they practically invited me. And then I made my error. Trusting Geeks! I was an idiot!" Roan saw Quex's finger tighten on the firing stud. He tensed, ready to jump, but the commodore drew a shuddery breath and calmed himself. "I was fool enough to divulge the nature of the consignment to the stinking animal who called himself captain of the Gallian vessel on which I had arranged passage. It was necessary, actually. I demanded refrigeration facilities, and one explanation led to another -- "He tricked me. At the end of the tedious five-year run, I discovered he had changed course for his own world. We landed and he turned me and my so-carefully guarded prize over to his Shah. This heathen considered that it would be a tremendously impressive thing to parade a palace guard of Terrans -- Pure Terrans, and all identical. Can you imagine it?" Quex held out his hand and a glass appeared in it, and was filled. He looked at Roan. "Am I boring you?" Roan let out a breath. "Go on," he said. "Alas," Quex continued. "At this crucial moment, a spontaneous popular uprising broke out. The Shah, his two hundred and thirtyfour frightful little whelps -- and anyone else who happened to be standing about -- were killed." "Spontaneous?" Roan asked. He looked at the nearest slave who crouched away, quivering. "It was as spontaneous," Quex answered, smiling with his bright, could make it. My messages to Rim HQ had gone through before landing, of course; the forces arrived within a week to restore order. Of course, the natives were not so well domesticated then. They had a certain animal spirit which had to be curbed before they were made useful possessions. I was only fifty-two at the time -- some twenty-five years ago now, Terry reckoning -- but I had a natural bent for such things." He waved a hand. "The rest is history." "And how did I get to Tambool?" Roan cut in. Quex frowned. "The discussion begins to tire me," he said. "You're a valuable though insolent property, and Admiral Starbird will be delighted when I report that I've recovered the breeding stock that slipped through our fingers all those years ago." "No, he won't," Roan said. "One of his spies has already slipped out by the side door to report on you." Q uex jerked around to look where Roan had pointed and Roan's foot caught the gun, knocked it high in the air. IF Then Askar and Sidis were on their feet, reaching for the nearest kor; the giant Minid knocked him spinning under the table, whirled on a pair of back-pedaling dandies, cracked their heads together, tossed them aside, caught two more. Roan was holding Quex by the neck now, and drinking wine from the bottle with the other hand. The confusion, unable to get a clear shot. "You Geeks stand back, or we'll shoot!" A frightened looking navy man had climbed on a chair and was pointing a fancy power pistol wildly around the room. Sidis took aim, shot him in the head. He flopped back in a spatter of blood and fell among his fellows. There were more shots now as the astonished hosts realized that their outnumbered victims intended to fight back. That was a mistake. Four pirate guns went into action, blasting wholesale into the screaming, panicked diners, who jammed into the corners and against the doors, making effective resistance by the few determined men among them impossible. "Belay that!" Roan yelled over the din as a glas smashed beside him. He hauled Quix into a chair, shouted again. There were moans and howls from the wounded, bellowing from the enraged crew, the buz and crackle of guns. Smoke poured up from smoldering hangings ignited by wild shots. There was a stink of blood and spilled wine in the air. Roan jumped on the table and shouted for order. By degrees the tumult abated. "All right," Roan said. "We're getting out of here, but before we go. I've got a few more questions to ask old rabbit-ears here." He stepped down from the table as the men began rifling the bodies and pulling fancy ornaments off the living. Quex started at him with wide, shocked eyes. "You can't! We outnuriiber you fifty to one -- a hundred to one!" The commodore's voice rose. He started to his feet. "Attack them!" he screeched. Roan put a foot against his chest and slammed him back, then pulled a chair up and sat in it. There were two slaves mewling under the table; as they realized they were in view, they scuttled farther back. A splinter of flying glass had cut Roan's forehead. There was blood trickling down into his right eye and around his face and onto his neck. It annoyed him. "Pardon this little interruption. Commodore," he said. "You had just come to the part where the did they do with the embryo -- or should I say me?" Q uex babbled. Roan tossed a wine bottle to him, and it fell in his lap, bubbled down over his knees. He groped it up, drank, lowered the bottle with a sob. "They... we... it wasn't here. It was gone. Stolen." "It seems to have been remarkably hard property to hang on to. What made it so valuable?" "A specimen of Pure Terran stock? Do you jest?" "Sure, but there are some fairly pure Terries around, like Henry Dread. What made me different?" "You're Pure Strain; unbelievably pure strain!" "All right. Who stole me?" "One of my spies, the rotter! A creature I trusted!" Quex warmed to the memory. "He'd finished his work for me, and when I sent a couple of men with knives to advise him I had no more need of his services, he was nowhere to be found! He'd skipped out -- and the special bejeweled incubator unit was gone with him! I searched. Oh, how I searched! I tore the tongues from a hundred man and five hundred Geeks, and then at last I got a hint -- a word babbled by a former officer of the Shah's guard in his dying delirium. Tambool. I dispatched a crew at once, led by a sturdy Yill scoundrel -- the best I could find among the rabble that follow the uniform of the Empire -- but none of them ever returned. I heard tales, later, of how they were set upon by a horde of madmen. But the embryo was lost." "That horde of madmen was my dad. Raff Cornay," Roan said. "We'll drink to him." He raised his bottle and took a long swig. "You're not drinking. Commodore," he sdid. "Drink!" Quex took a half-hearted sip. "Drink, damn you! Or do I have to pour it down your neck?" Quex drank. "Hey, this stuff is all junk, Cap'n!" Askor called, tramping over to where Roan sat with one boot on Quex's chair. He tossed a handful of brass jewelry on the table. "Let's load up on Terry wine and shove off. And, uh, a couple of the boys was asking, okay if we take along a few broads too?" The wounded were making a dismal sound from the heaps where they lay. Sidis went over and started shooting the noisest ones. The rest became quieter. "You know better than that," Roan said. "You louts, would be cutting each other's throats in a week." "Yeah." Askor scratched an armpit with a blunt finger. "I figured." "Round up the boys now. I'll be through in a minute." Askor turned away with a roar of commands. Quex trembled so violently his seat bounced in the chair. "What are y-you g-going to do with m-me?" "Have another drink," Roan commanded. He watched while his victim complied. "I'll -- I'll be sick," Quex slobbered. R oan got to his feet. He pulled his shirt and jacket back on, jammed his feet into his boots. There was a dead officer lying behind his chair. Roan paused long enough to take a handsome sheathknife with the Imperial Eagle from his body, clip it to his own belt. "Askor. Poion, Lock all the doors," he ordered. Quex came to his feet. He pulled at the edge of his tunic, swaying. His eyes were like blood-red clams. IF "You can't leave me here with found a hint of a ring suddenly. He them!" He looked past Roan at the straightened himself, holding onto bright, staring eyes in the pale faces a chair back. "Fm not... Pure of his men. "They'll tear me to Strain... like yourself. But I have pieces!" Terran blood." He wavered, thrust Askor and the others were by the himself upright ayain. "As a fellow main door now. They looked to officer... of the Imperial Navy Roan... I ask you... for an honorable "Go ahead, open her up!" Roan death... called. He looked back at Quex. Roan looked at him. He shifted "Thanks for the dinner, Commohis pistol to his left hand, squared dore. It was a nice party, and I enoff and saluted Quex with his joyed it," right, and shot him through the "Lieutenant!" Quex's voice had heart. Coming next month! One of James Blish's finest novels -- He was too young to know what was impossible -- so he flew a treehouse across space to Marsl In the same great issue: The gripping conclusion of Earfhblood, by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown, another enjoyable article by Our Man in Fandom, Lin Carter, and many other exciting stories and features. Don't miss the July issue of Ifl IF  Short Story BY They had the greatest gift in the world -- and the deadliest! F rom the blue water and crowded pines of Lake Arrowhead to the rectangular citrus orchards around San Bernardino is a drop of nearly a mile as the crow falls. The road down is hours longer. It falls gently, in looping curves and in sharp, neck-cracking twists, joins a four-lane highway without straightening out, swoops across empty space and winds about dynamiteblasted cliffs . of naked rock, until after hours of driving the highway finallytouches the valley floor and takes off straight as a bullet. Carol heaved a sigh of relief as we touched down, and I said, we'll find a place that'll sell us cigarettes." We did. Carol and I were both nicotine addicts, which had made the smokeless drive just that much longer. We bought beer, too, and took it along. As we were walking back to the car, Carol said, "Art, why do you suppose Pat didn't teleport up to the Lake?" I thought about that while I got the car going. After Carol opened the beers and handed me one, I asked, "Did she ever tell you how she used to go up there every summer with her grandparents?" "She sure did. Pat must love that place." "The long, sweltering drive from Beverly Hills to the foot of the mountain. The air cooling and thinning as the car rises; the altitude signs showing higher and higher. Finally the deep blue of the Lake flashing through the pines." I was more or less quoting Pat; but she'd described it accurately enough. "That's why she didn't teleport up. The drive is part of going to Lake Arrowhead. She didn't want to miss a single detail." "Do you think she'll be all right?" "The doctor said so, didn't he?" "Him! He didn't even know what was wrong with her." "Neither do we." That was arguable. Carol leaned her lovely blonde head against the headrest and watched the lemon groves go by. In two hours she would be dead. Dead in a manner unique since the beginning of time. Dead by my carelessness. But I didn't know that then. She looked out in a silence of rushing wind and humming motor, and after a time she said, "Well, it was one strange party." I t was one strange party, all right. Just to get you placed, it all took place six years ago, in July of #, during the four-day weekend break in the summer semester at then, and General Motors was worth three times what it is now. We changed all that. We knew it was coming, but we didn't expect to have to pay for it. We were young. Expecting something for nothing is part of being young. There were seven couples here, fourteen of us out of the twenty in Larsen's class, plus Raymond C. F. Larsen himself. Pat couldn't have invited more. As it was, some of us had been on the couches last night, and would be tonight. Pat -- Patricia Blackman, the richest girl in the class -- had invited as many as she could, and substituted where she got turned down, until she had enough to jam the wide stone bungalow which was Happy DaySy her grandparents' Lake Arrowhead retreat. We wore sweaters and sports jackets, having discarded the swim suits earlier, and we looked like any out the fate of the world with drinks in our hands. But if you watched long enough you'd see the differences. You'd see somebody vanish and reappear elsewhere with a fresh drink or a handful of mixed nuts or a cigarette stolen from one of Pat's crystal-and-silver cigarette boxes. You'd hear a skinny senior describing the teleporting society in Bester's The Stars My Destination as if he'd thought it up all by himself; and you'd see that the five people around him were listening, really listening. You'd see Carol, ostensibly with me, flickering from clump to clump of drinkers as she tried to keep up with two arguments and a gossip session. Larsen's class was the world's only class in teleportation. It was going to change the world. We were going to change the world. We felt the responsibility, yes we did. Throughout most of the big living room the talk dealt with nothing else. Teleportation is the gentle art of wishing yourself from place to place. And it w'orks; it works fine, once you know how. The fifteen in our little party seemed to shift like a mirage. Watching them hurt the eyes. Pat Blackman was even busier than Carol, emptying ash trays, seeing that everyone had a drink, changing records and generally playing the perfect hostess, all at distance-anihilating jumps like the flicker of a worn film. Ten minutes ago she'd stopped a fight by sheer diplomacy, when Tim Something tried to save a moment by teleporting into the john when Linda Baird was already there. In the middle of the room, tall and cadaverous and twenty-two years older than anyone else. Dr. Raymond C. F. Larsen was holding forth. H e looked like the melancholy farmer with the pitchfork in American Gothic would look if you gave him a loud sports coat and a yellow tie and poured three martinis into him. "It means the total breakdown of physics!" he roared, jabbing a grinning sophomore in the chest with a forefinger. "We'll have to rewrite every law we know!" "Nuts," said the sophomore, who was a physics major. "Go on," Larsen prompted. He loves an argument. Carol once said he'd rather fight than smoke. "Be happy to," said the sophomore. "Ever since the Renaissance, every chapge we've made in physics has been something of a generalizatioii. Every previous law was a special, local case of the laws we use now. What we've got will work just like it always has." "Except teleportation." I thought the sophomore had the short end of the argument. General relativity, which was evolved to explain a mere fourteen-minute precession in Mercury's orbit, had smashed Newtonian physics. The Principle of Uncertainty had ended the philosophy of determinism without changing any part of real life. So, perversely, I stepped in in the sophomore's favor. "Suppose teleportation was restricted to the laws of physics?" "That's impossible!" came the roar of opinion. But Larsen. said, "How? Think of something we can test. Art." "All right." "Pat! We're out of cigarettes." Pat came out of nowhere near the big table in the middle of the room. "Right," she said, and disappeared. In a few moments she was back. "There aren't any in the closets, either. Hmmmmm." In voice and mannerisms and the mobility of her not-pretty, not-homely face, Patricia Blackman was larger than life. She stood there with an index fingernail tapping her teeth, her eyes fixed up and sideways, the very picture of the word scheme. "I'll have to go for some." "Let me go," I offered. "I know where the Village is." The Village is a tiny cluster of shops across the Lake. Besides being the perfect gentleman, I wanted time to think of an answer to Larsen's challenge. But Pat's wide mouth grinned at me under the Roman nose. "It's Sunday, she proclaimed triumphantly. Everything's closed. She leaned close and patted me on the arm. "Now don't worry, hon. I'll get some IF at the beach house. Mother's got stacks of cartons in the downstairs closet." "Hold it, Pat. Hermosa Beach is a long way from here." "We've all gone further than that' she said, and was gone. Her cheerful smile seemed to disappear a split second after she did -- like the Cheshire cat. Too late to stop her. Pat was at the beach -- now. I said, "Doctor Larsen, could that be dangerous?" He shook his head. "She's right. From the campus to San Diego was much further." "But we did that under supervised conditions." "How do you supervise teleportation?" Larsen smiled like a child with a joke. "You all know as much about teleportation as I do," Good Lord, I thought, and wished myself to the bar to fill my glass. If I'd known that at the beginning of the course I'd have backed out right then. I'd only joined out of curiosity; curiosity, and the fact that Carol was in it. Why not? It was only a sixweek course, and no credit meant nothing to lose. And Larsen could make any course fun. ' We'd sat in the classroom chairs with the plywood platforms for notebooks, listening to Larsen deliver his introductory lecture. Half of us already knew him from his philosophy of chemistry courses. The rest didn't know whether to giggle or not. Larsen is a frustrated actor. When he lectures he waves his arms and marches back and forth and shifts djalects to act out his ideas. His dialects are lousy, but he doesn't know that. His story was as incredible as his lecture style. On a Sunday afternoon about three months ago,' Dr. Raymond C. F. Larsen had leaned back in his swivel chair, gotten his pipe going, and begun daydreaming of the many things he'd like to do before he was old. Become a spelunker. Learn to ride a surfboard. Eat steak tartare, just once. When he got up to take a shower, he was really into the swing of it. He stood with his back to the shower head, with the hot water falling heavily on the back of his neck, and there he made his great decision. He would join a nudist camp that very summer! Would he have backed out? Of course he'd have backed out. But he didn't get the chance, because the next he knew, no more water was falling, and there was a very cold breeze all around him. He stood in the center of Sunand-Fun Nature Camp, just thirty miles north of Los Angeles. And he was dripping wet and stark naked. From all directions, thoroughly tanned men and women as naked as he stared at him in obvious horror Sure they were staring. They'd seen him appear out of nowhere! But Larsen didn't think of that. He crouched like a man with acute intestinal cramps, trying to cover himself (he demonstrated for us, there in the classroom), and frantically wished himself back into his shower. He knew he could do it, now, any time he wanted. (He demonstrated this, too, and twenty laughing students, laughing at his antics whether they believed his story or not, went utterly silent.) But could he teach others the art? He wanted to know all about teleportation: its limits, its uses, its dangers. Give him credit for courage. He went before the Board. The Board of Trustees watched him flicker around the Board Room like a cadaverous hallucination, and after a four-hour conference they had agreed to let him try... The first few class days, Larsen had been the only teleport. The rest of us would grit our teeth and clench our eyelids, while Larsen cried, "No, no, no! You've got to be relaxed, confident. Look at me!" And with an expression so confident it couldn't look anything but silly, Larson would teleport all over the room. He inspired nothing but envy. He tried beer, which he'd been drinking that historic day: twothirds of a can of Coors per student. He tried beer and a pipe, his own carefully broken-in Dunhill with the mouthpiece dipped in antiseptic each time one of us used it. Carol flatly refused to touch it. He tried having us teleport out of our own showers, while he called encouragement from outside the curtain. One day he tried beer plus a tranquilizer. And suddenly Linda Baird wasn't amorfg us. I got my drink replenished and reached for a cigarette to occupy my other hand. I was out, and Pat wasn't back yet. Nuts. I joined Larsen again. Shouldering my way into the group that surrounded him. His eyes lit. "Art, have you thought of an experiment for us?" I hadn't, but I said, "Yah. Get someone to teleport to two different places at the same time. If it vorks, there'll be two of him, and that'll violate the Law of Conversation of Matter." That got a laugh. Larsen said, "All right, you're elected to go first." "Let's let Carol go first. Two of Carol would be a fun thing." She was standing right beside me, of course, and she cocked her head at me and asked, "What are you buttering me up for?" "Got a cigarette?" She had two, and she grimaced when she had to give me one. It was mentholated, and it was dried from the altitude, but I'll smoke anything in an emergency. Carol said, "Pat should have been back by now." I nodded. It had been a good fifteen minutes. "We'd better call her home." Larsen sounded a bit uneasy. Lon Dugan was the guy she'd come with, and he had her beach house number. We crowded around while Larsen made the call, When he hung up he looked very sober. "She's been taken sick," he said. W e got the story out of him. Pat's parents had been watching television when they'd heard a scream from the next room. They'd rushed in to find Pat on the floor, already unconscious, with a blazing fever. The doctor was there now. IF "I'm going after her," said Lon Dugan. "Take the car!" Larsen ordered. "Don't try any more teleporting." Lon went outside and we heard his car starting. The rest of us stayed, but not in any party mood. Had Pat strained her powers, or weakened some unknown and unguessed region in her brain? There was no real evidence for it, but most of us were convinced that Pat was sick because she had teleported. Larsen obviously thought so. His air of clownish good humor was gone. He sat on the couch and silently worried. Half and hour later we called again. When the doctor arrived Pat had a temperature of one hundred and four. Her cheeks were flaming red, and the touch of her skin burned. The doctor refused to make a diagnosis, saying that all of her symptoms seemed to proceed directly from the fever. Now the fever had dropped to an even hundred. Another half hour before our next call. The fever was falling with unlikely speed. It was down to ninety-nine point one. Pat had been conscious for a few minutes, and the doctor had immediately given her a sedative. ,He knew about our experiments with teleportation, and he didn't want Pat going anywhere in her present condition. It was typical of Pat that she had left orders for the party to go on without her. But that didn't seem right. People began leaving by twos and fours. Larsen was still on the couch, looking like the Thinker now, or like a math student heating his head against an exam problem that won't come right. S o we edged the car out from among the other cars and took off down the twisting concrete road that leads a mile down to the base of the mountains. We all had our cars, because none of us but Pat would have known where to teleport to. It was a silent drive until we got the cigarettes. They seemed to loosen us up, to get us talking. "Yeah, a strange party," I agreed. "Carol, do you think Pat's teleporting made her sick?" "Of course. But I don't know why it should." "Maybe it didn't. Maybe it's just our native egotism, our -- hubris -- that makes us think the whole world revolves around our new power." " 'Ubris?' " "Hubris. The pride that challenges the gods." "Oh." She couldn't have cared less. "Why would Pat have to go all the way to the beach for cigarettes?" I knew what she meant. "Pat's just honest." "Suppose she'd teleported inside a shop, made a list of what she took, then paid off the bill Monday. What's wrong with that?" "It could give her a reputation." "A reputation for honesty." "Couldn't it make a storekeeper nervous, knowing there were people around who could get into his shop any time they wanted?" "Mmmm." We drove with the windows open. It was hot down here on the flat#S lands. The sun was setting in red glory behind endless groves of citrus tres. Above the low music from the radio, Carol said thoughtfully, "Art, why not steal?" "I thought one of us would get there eventually." "I mean it. The penalty for theft is imprisonment, right? How do you imprison a teleport?" "You don't. You can't." "WeU?" "How about public opinion? And where would you like to have dinner?" "The 'Four-In-Hand, I guess." "Would you proclaim it far and wide that you're an untouchable thief and don't give a damn who knows it? How many friends would you have left?" "Oh." "But that wouldn't work on everybody. Fact is, the law doesn't take teleportation into account. When it does, they'll change the penalty to 'shoot on sight'." Carol giggled. "I guess so. You've the bud." "You mean I've made an honest woman of you." "Have it your way." "I've been trying." "What happened to her. Art?" The fear in her voice made me look over. Carol was scared, deep down scared, and all the bantering and philosophical discussions wouldn't hide it. I said, "There must be laws we don't know about yet. Pat ran into one." "How? What did she do that we didn't?" T he first time, it's like diving from a fifty foot board into what you're sure is concrete. You can't! You know you can't! You swallow more beer, and the tranquilizer begins to reach you, and Larsen, commanding, says "Now!" And you're home, with no chair under you. When you get up there's beer all over your shirt. You feel wonderful. Pat was the fourth to learn, right after me. At the end of the second week we walked like we. owned the Earth. Some of us thought we did. We could teleport, all of us. We made excursions. We drove to the San Diego Zoo, and from the entrance we teleported back to the classroom and back again to the entrance, one at a time. People stared. Lon appeared in the cage with the grizzly bear, and called it a coward when it wouldn't wrestle, and when it finally came at him he was outside the bars, laughing. Euphoria? Pride? What we felt really was hubris. We had beaten God's laws, and now no law of Man could touch us. We were the new lords of creation... until Pat, who knew neither pride nor humility, was laid low by a law none of us could understand. If she had been. No wonder wc were frightened. Hubris is the overweaning pride that brings down the gods' most terrible wrath. No, Pat hadn't done anything we hadn't done. She'd been treated just like the others, traveled just as far as the others. Unless... "She might have done more teleIF porting than we did," I said. "There's no way to tell. Did she usually walk upstairs? I do, unless I'm in a hurry. She runs out of gas pretty often, doesn't she? Then she'd teleport to a gas station she knew, maybe miles away. Does she usually take her car to cocktail parties, shopping trips and so on?" "At the party she looked like she was everywhere at once." "So did you. Maybe that's it. She wore herself out, then overstrained... uh-oh." I turned to look Carol in the eye. "Now listen to me, baby. Don't you do any more teleporting for awhile! You were flipping around just as much as Pat." "Look at the road, dammit. I promise." C arol was half asleep when we hit the freeway. I shifted us into the fast lane and relaxed. No more stoplights for the next hour. By and by I saw that half the cars around us had their headlights on. I followed their example. Just as I was sure Carol was asleep, she opened her eyes and asked, "Could it have been the height?" "What about the height?" "Pat. Lake Arrowhead is a mile up. Hermosa Beach is at sea level. None of us had ever had to teleport over such a big difference in altitude." "That's right. But I don't see what difference it makes." "Some unknown law. Like you said." We left it at that, as far as talking went. I was still thinking about hubris. It's an old concept, possibly present in every religion. The god or gods will instantly smite anyone who shows pride enough to insult them. Jehovah changed human language rather than let men build a tower to Heaven at Babel. Niobe's fourteen children were killed in a day and a night when she dared compare her fecundity against the divine Leto's. Hubris is always the first and greatest crime. Were we expecting the divine wrath? We had smashed God's laws of physics, and subconsciously we awaited punishment. I told myself we had let a simple case of flu scare us into cat fits. But... the phrase skittered about in my head. Some unknown law, some unknown law... Was the universe playing tricks on us? Man finds the unexpected in every new field. The Bernoulli effect inverts itself, disastrously at first, above the speed of sound. Mercury loses her hydrogen atmosphere to solar heat, but, amazingly, draws it back from the solar wind. The problem of Venus' opaque atmosphere becomes ridiculously simple; but astronomers realize for the first time that the Moon has tom away ninetynine per cent of Earth's air. Some unknown law... The most shocking thing about Pafs sudden sickness was her sudden recovery. One minute, a kflling fever. An hour later, just half a degree. And it had taken the doctor ten minutes to get there. When had Pat's fever been at its peak? Her parents had rushed into the living room at the sound of her scream. She'd been burning hot to the touch, within seconds of her arrival. On her arrival? Yet I'd have sworn she was normal when she left the Lake... I had it then, the whole answer in three words. Larsen was in for a surprise. "Unknown law, hell!" "What?" Carol looked up with sleepy eyes. "You were dead right. It was the altitude -- " I was interrupted. L ater the newspapers filled me in on the details. A genuine peasoup fog had come to the Los Angeles area, a fog such as you won't find here once in five years. It had come rolling in over the freeway, sharp edged and very thick, and when cars hit it, they hit suddenly and slowed drastically. Sunday nights are traffic jam nights anyway. This jam was long and dead slow, and its tail was just inside the curtain of fog. I saw the lights blur around me, as I saw a fuzzy red glow ahead become two fuzzy red lights. A car, stopped dead! (He might as well have been. He was doing five miles an hour with frequent stops.) Does it sound like a long time? Three seconds did it. I stamped on the brake pedal, and from the corner of my eye I saw Carol vanish. I screamed, "Oh, you idiot, you idiot! Carol, come back!" the face. I raised my head and felt with my tongue for broken teeth. I found four. I was jammed between the steering wheel and the driver's seat, and I couldn't move at all. All I could do was wait for help. And Carol was gone, which meant Carol was dead. Pat would be all right. But Larsen was in for a surprise. We wouldn't be changing any laws of physics. What Pat had run into was the law of Conservation of Energy. In teleporting a mile downhill she'd lost a good deal of potential energy. She'd gotten it back in heat: about seven degrees per mile. And if that law held, so did conservation of momentum. Some cops came along and pried me out of the car. A doctor told me how lucky I was, and I believed him, because all I had was two cracked ribs and four teeth knocked out on the steering wheel, which is why my smile today is so even and bright. The next morning Larsen visited me at the hospital. He told me about Carol. She'd teleported home. She'd appeared in the middle of her bedroom, four feet from a startled maid. The maid was in the hospital, suffering from shock. Last night a jerking muscle woke me up to catch myself whispering, "Carol, come back. Come back." I hope she doesn't. It's been six years since she rammed into a bedroom wall at sixty miles per hour, without even a seat belt to protect her. If she came back now, she'd be breaking another of God's marvelously consistent laws. And you can't do that. IF Dear Editor: I have copies of If back to the beg'inning of the second issue, and although I have not looked very hard I have yet to see a letter published from over here in dear old Sunny England. Havent we paid back our War Debt yet or someappearing on the stands here six months behind current, lots of people I know think both mags great and # is quite a hit in our college, especially in the Sci Fi Society. Here is a list of praises, ringing with shouts of adulation: #) Retief -- terrific, especially Reliefs War. #) C. C. MacApp -- excellent; glad to see he has more strings to his bow than Gree, viz. the long story in the February # issue. #) Saberhagen -- magnificent; waiting impatiently for the long stories promised. #) Heinlein -- praise again (at last I know what Tanstaafl means!), although one criticism: Could have done without Podkayne of Mars serial in #. #) E. E. Smith -- more than very good story, Skylark DuQuesne -- a great pity that there Is no more to follow. #) Lots of new names, R. Lafferty, etc. What about a sequel to Starchildy Say the first round between mankind and the stars -- if they bother to notice us. Plea for the future: More Van Vogt, Laumer, Heinlein! -- C. R. Jones, Department of Chemical Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London W #, England.    Dear Editor: Looking back over the issues of If, I noticed that from June to October # you ran a story. Skylark DuQuesne by the unmatchable E. E. Smith, Ph.D. Pve just observed that a recent Ace Book carried the announcement of Smiths death; however Smith died on August #, #, nearly five months ago. As far as I can see. If carried no such note of any kind during that period. However, Pm not going to quarrel why or why not this information was not published, just that I see no reason for delay. Being a fond reader of his, I was able to derive only fractions from his life and his works. I would appreciate any available information concerning his biography and if all possible, anything close to a phoUgraph. Thank you . -- Richard KatuziUy # Dudley Streety Dearborn Heights, Michigan J#, He   Dear Editor: I was sorry to' hear that Doc Smith was dead, especially since he was just beginning: to resume really writing once more, and I would like to say a few words in praise of him. I have not read much of his work, but what I have read had impressed me with one thing -- he Thinks Big. He tosses around concepts and huge events almost gaily, like a little boy playing vith a ball. A planet being vaporized, or things like Lenses, are nothing to him. Albeit, he is not the best writer there ever was; sometimes he seems a little dated. However, his business was as a chemist, and if he had spent a lot more time on his writing, science fiction would be an even better thing than it is. A few words about your magazine. Looking over the November, # issue, I find it somewhat feeble, while your most recent issue is a drastic improvement. The general level of all the stories seems to be improving. You don't have the best s-f magazine there is, but you are getting better steadily. There is one type of story I would especially like to see, and that is "swords and scorcery." However, I am afraid that is not quite the kind of material you use. Also, some more work by Edmond Hamilton would be very much in hand. Many critics have complained of the lack of s-f magazines, compared with the great numbers there have been in the past. I, however, believe this sort of thing runs in cycles. Looking back over the history of s-f, one finds this so. There were many mags in the early thir ties, a slack in the middle of that decade, and then another rise just before the war. Then again in the early fifties .there was another upsurge, and nov I think we are entering still another. There have been three new imaginative magazines, (possibly four), counting Web Terror Tales, which I know very little about, and am thus unqualified to speak about, over the last five years: Worlds of Tomorrow, Magazine of Horror, and Gamma. your magazine indicates a potential market, and this general rise in quality and quantity over the last few years indicates the market is responding. So -- worry rot. (Too much.) -- Kent Peacock. js  Dear Editor: The latest issue (September, #) of If is a big improvement. Especially as regarding the interior art. It looks like you had a little fun with satire in that first story. You are forgiven this time, but don't let it happen again. At least, don't use foreign phrases. I had to grab my French-English dictionary to find out what was going on a couple of times. That was work; and I hate work. I wish I could find out why some of today's writers insist on replacing the trusty old ray gun with a laser. I ran into that wall, again, in Greeks Damned Ones. The laser is the one thing that would be almost impossible to turn into a weapon. Actually, a laser is not any single object; it can be created IF out of a number of things. Laser is not a word, but a collection of words describing a polarization effect. The full statement is Light Amplification by Stimulater Emission of Radiation. Laser only refers to the use of light. However, it was preceded by the maser; Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. I get a little irritated when some protagonists pulls one of these things out of a holster. Aside from these little irritations, it was a fine issue. -- D. Bruce Berry, # N. Malden St.,    Dear Editor: I usually don't go in for that 'letters to the editor" stuff, but something's got me bugged. I hope that the thirty-two new pages in If do not bring any science-fact articles to your wonderful magazine. There's hardly a science-fiction magazine without some dull (to me, at least) science article taking up pages that could be filled with action. I think Laumer's Retief stories are fine, but the stories that really grab me are Saberhagen's Berserker jobs. -- Shawn Wright, # South Delaware, Independence, Missouri, #. # Nope, no science articles are planned -- r at least, not unless we come across something unusual enough and interesting enough to avoid being dull I -- Editor,    Dear Editor: You were right when you said that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is Heinlein's best since Stranger in a Strange Land, However, that isn't saying very much. All Mr. Heinlein turned out in that period was Podkayne of MarSy Glory Road and Farnham's Freeholdy all of which are below his average. All its faults considered, I still nominate The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for Best Novel of #G#. My nominations for # were. Best Short Story, Mindswapy by Robert Sheckley; Best Novel, The Thrce Stigmata of Palmer Eldritchy by Philip K. Dick. Earthhloody at least in its first part, seems to have its points, but I have the feeling Keith Laumer could have done better alone. It appears to be set in the far future of the Retief stories. Please get A. E. Van Vogt to write a third NullA novel that will tie up all those loose ends! Earth and Venus are about to be destroyed, and Enro is still conquering the League! Can't Gosseyn use his vaunted extra brain to get us out of it? -- John Hoggatt, # West #th Street, Los Angeles, California #.  Matter of fact. Van is writing that third Null-A novel for us rigiht now! How did you know? -- Editor, #)I  #i Dear Editor: I plan to attend the Cleveland SF convention, but don't know exactly how to go about it and would appreciate any information you can give me. Undoubtedly Iftiere are many others asking the same question, so why not put your answer in your editorial or letter column? Keep up the good work on your swell mag. -- Paul Spegel, #I Anderson Road, Linwood, Michigan.  The Tricon (short for the #th World Science Fiction Convention) will be held September #, #, # and #, #, at the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. Attendance is for members only, but anyone can become a memb by sending # in by mail, or joining at the convention itself. All are welcome. Make checks payable to: #th World Science Fiction Convention, P.O. Box #, Cleveland, Ohio, #. Toastmaster will be Isaac Asimov. Guest of Honor is L. Sprague de Camp. See you there! -- Editor,   Dear Editor: I would like to make a few comments regarding the November editorial on racial differences. In it, you state that "Negroes score lower on intelligence tests than whites but Northern Negroes score higher on intelligence tests than Southern Whites, presumably because of better schools, better public health facilities, etc." From this you conclude that "most racial differences are environmental rather than innate."  You are probably referring here to the Army Alpha intelligence tests which were administered to white and Negro soldiers during World War I. First of all, the argument in the given context is fallacious. When two large groups are given the same test, you cannot select small groups ad lib. from the two score distributions for comparison. In #-#, the schools of the South lagged behind those of the North in both equipment and teachertraining. The correlation of Alpha and hooling was about .#, and urban dwellers scored higher than rural. Therefore the difference of # points between # rural Mississippi whites and # urban Ohio Negroes (the largest mean difference) could mean simply that education and other environmental factors lower the scores of white as well as Negroes. The only fair comparison on Army Alpha is that of Negroes and whites from the same state, where schools and other conditioning factors are roughly equated. When this is done, Negroes still trail whites by # to # IQ points, about the national average. -- Mike Hansen, # Elderberry Street, Chino, California #. # Thanks, but the fallacy in your argument is that conditioning factors for whites and for Negroes are in no large area in this country really "roughly equated." A ghetto is a ghetto, whether it exists in Harlem or in Watts. An inferior school is an inferior school, whether it is separate by law, as Negro schools were in the South, or separate by geography, as in the North. A couple of weeks ago in Toronto we were discussing this subject with Dr. Edward McKeown (oldtime sf fans may remember him as chairman of the # World SF Convention in Toronto; now he is an executive of the Toronto Board of Education). Toronto has a small and thoroughly integrated Negro population. The difference in achievement between Negroes and whites whether measured in IQ scores, school tests or any other quantitative marking, are -- in Ned McKeowns word -- "indefectible." That about does it for another month. Don't forget Jim Blish's serial starting in the next issue. His major character is a teen-age boy who happens to be the first human being to land on Mars -- because he didn't know it was impossible! It's a good one... -- The Editor IF Could you write for television? By Max Shulman X rankly, I don't know. But this I do know: I often paid # and more for scripts turned out by people who should have been arrested for impersonating writers. How such people got to be high-priced TV writers is not as mysterious as it seems. Television is an insatiable maw into which scripts must be fed at a rate unprecedented in the history of entertainment. It is a grateful producer indeed who consistently gets scripts which have been written with real understanding of television's powers and limitations. To help train new TV writers, I joined with Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight Zone, winner of five Emmy Awards) and ten other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We pooled everything we had learned in our long years in the business to devise four professional writing courses that men and women, seriously interested in writing, could take in their own homes in their free time. story (or documentary or commercial) in quick, visual sequences... the knack of thinking and writing with a lens! Through a series of carefully planned assignments, you learn as you write -- guided by our own specially organized textbooks. Your assignments are painstakingly edited and revised by our staff of instructors, themselves all professional writers. Under our supervision, an instructor works with you by mail, much as a producer or editor works with an established writer. Do you have an aptitude for writing? To help you (and us) decide whether you've got the stuff to be a writer, we have worked up a revealing aptitude test. The coupon below will bring you a copy, along with a #s-page School brochure. If your test indicates aptitude, you are eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under no obligation to do so. How to write "with a lens' Famous Writers School Dept. #.', W'estport, Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have an aptitude for writing. Please mail me, without obligation, a copy of your writing aptitude test and information about the courses you offer. All tour ot our courses give you a solid foundation in basic writing skills. And three of them (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Advertising) give you training in ti.e techniques of television. You learn to build interesting, believable characters; how to write dialogue that rings true; how to plot convincingly. Therf you develop the specialized approach that TV demands: the facility to tell your County St:itp Accredited by Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Faith Baldwin, Bergen F.vans, Mignon G. Ebcrhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith  #( space voyage in science fiction -- Could you write for television? ByMaxShulman X rankly, T don't know. But this I do know: I often paid # and more for scripts turned out by people who should have been arrested for impersonating writers. How such people got to be high-priced TV writers is not as mysterious as it seems. Television is an insatiable maw into which scripts must be fed at a rate unprecedented in the history of entertainment. It is a grateful producer indeed who consistently gets scripts which have been written with real understanding of television's powers and limitations. To help train new TV writers, I joined with Rod Serling (creator of The Tw ilight Zone, winner of five Emmy Awards) and ten other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We pooled everything we had learned in our long years in the business to devise four professional writing courses that men and women, seriously interested in writing, could take in their own homes in their free time. How to write "with a lens" All four of our courses give you a solid foundation in basic writing skills. And three of them (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Advertising) give you training in the techniques of television. You learn to build interesting, believable characters; how to write dialogue that rings true; how to plot convincingly. Theif you develop the specialized approach that TV demands: the facility to tell your Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith story (or documentary or commercial) in quick, visual sequences... the knack of thinking and writing with a lens! Through a series of carefully planned assignments, you learn as you write -- guided by our own specially organized textbooks. Your assignments are painstakingly edited and revised by our staff of instructors, themselves all professional writers. Under our supervision, an instructor works with you by mail, much as a producer or editor works with an established writer. Do you have an aptitude for writing? To help you (and us) decide whether you've got the stuff to be a writer, we have worked up a revealing aptitude test. The coupon below will bring you a copy, along with a #S-page School brochure. If your test indicates aptitude, you are eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #. 'i, N'cstport, Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have an aptitude for writing. Please mail me, without obligation, a copy of your writing aptitude test and information about the courses you offer. Mr. M rs . Miss (please print) Cif y #nru' County State Accredited by Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher JudyLynn Benjamin, Associate Editor David Perfon, Production Mgr. Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr. by A. A. Walde by H. H. Hollis by James Blish by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown by Robert E. Lory by Dannie Plachta by Lin Carter by The Readers IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Secondlass postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Editorial Readers, Tou're exempted from reading editorial -- yon needn't take notes and there will be no foiz. It's the writers we'd like to talk to this time. Fellows, how about if in our peering into the crystal ball that we use for a typewriter, we try to see something a little more interesting and constructive for a while? After all, we're not limited to the probable future. Anybody can write about that. Heaven knows it's a temptation to look at the going population trends and come up with ing in each other's armpits, eating pressed algiae and dreaming of the annual vacation when they can hope to have a sight of a real tree. Or the arms race and the rumblings of war can make it rather likely that underpopulation is more likely to be a problem than over, and it's pretty easy to project a world where bearded savages howl in the crumbling canyons of Wall Street. We're not suggesting that sciencefiction writers should stick their heads in the sand and write a sort of #th-century Pollyanna. We're suggesting something quite different. We're suggesting that if you don't like the looks of the future, a very good kind of story to write -- and one that we get all too seldom -- is the story of how the people of day after tomorrow learn how to avoid, prevent, terminate andor cure whatever we think is going to be wrong. John L Pierce says: There is only one intiiTe when it comes; the only chance we have to consider alternate futures is now, when we're still not sure which one will turn up. It's even possible that by seeing the disasters that Ue ahead -- and by shewing what can be done about them -- a few people today can take some sort of part in helping to avoid them. Maybe even a few science-fiction writers! And if that's too much to ask -- well, at least it will be more fun for all of us if we think in terms of what can be done, rather than what will be done to us. A ll right, readers, you can come back in now. If you've been paying attention, you've noticed that If tries to avoid the Gloom  Doom kind of story... not because we don't understand Great Art or because our middle name i Pangloss, but simply because most of them strike us as being inordinately dull. We don't demand happy stories. Some of our favorites have wound up with the characters we loved best either dead or doomed. But there's a great difference between drama and despair... and so many of the stories we read (and reject!) are simply despairing. If that's Great Art -- we'll take The Master Mind of Mara! -- The Editor This valusbls booklet also This Free sample lesson can start you on a high-pay career as You can learn in your spare time at home iVo previous experience required T he demand for trained Accountants far exceeds the number available. Salaries keep going higher, promotions come faster. Why remain in a dull job with insu..cient pay when you can qualify easily -- in your spare time -- for the big rewards which are being offered today by the Accounting profession? To prove this to yourself, send for the interesting sample lesson which demonstrates the remarkable LaSalle meth .d of home training. This lesson is yours free of co.st or obligation. 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A Correspondence Institution Please send me, free of cost or obligation, your sample lesson and illustrated booklet "Opportunities in Accounting." Name .,.Age... Address County. City...State ZipNo... I # hm IF  Serial Dolph always wanted to go to Mars. Now he had a vehicle that could take him there -- his tree house I D alph Haertel -- even now that he was eighteen, nobody who knew him risked calling him Adolph, except his father -- took a quick last look at the free-floating needle in the middle of the table. Then he launched himself across the floor of his packing crate to the porthole, for his first close view of Mars. The view wasn't particularly good. For one thing, the bullseye was double. He had bought it originally as raw material for a telescope mirror, and because the walls of the packing crate were also double, he had been forced to use both blanks to make a single porthole. The result was rather like looking down at Mars through a short tunnel, six inches in diameter, with an inchthick pane of slightly scratched crown glass at each end. In addition, the glare was blinding. Even at only a little beyond one hundred miles above the planet's surface, Dolph was still effectively outside the Martian atmosphere, and between the sharp steelblue glare of the gas horizon and the red-tinged lemon shimmering of the noonday desert, details were almost as washed out as they were in the best Palomar photographs. Nevertheless, as Dolph fell slowly toward the desert south of the area called the Sinus Sabaeus, a regular triangle of dark blue-green streaks, narrowing from the Sinus through the desert toward the "oasis" named (most fancifully) Arabia, gradually took on better and better definition. He watched them grow, hardly daring to breathe. These dark, impossibly straight lines were major examples of the Martian mystery long referred to as "canals," though nothing could be more certain than, that they were not canals in any Earthly sense. Were they volcanic fault lines? Animal trails? Something made by intelligent life, just illusions, put together from tiny details by an eye straining for a miles of space emptiness? But these canals were not fading away as the packing crate settled. On the contrary, they, were becoming sharper every minute. From up here -- for Dolph was close enough to think of the diminishing gap as a height, rather than a distance -- his eye could already resolve details smaller than fifty kilometers across, so that he could have seen a Sicily or even a Long Island, had Earth's areographers been whimsical enough to put one on the map of Mars. And still the canals showed no signs of dissolving into a welter of background markings, as a proper optical illusion should. Instead, their linearity became steadily more definite, their edges sharper and more inarguable as he descended. No, the canals of Mars were real. And before the next hour was over, Dolph Haertel was going to become the first human being in history to know without doubt just what they were. D olph touched a bared copper end of a wire to a B battery terminal and watched the needle floating above the center of the breadboard rig begin to turn slowly and uncertainly. Outside his treehouse, spring winds moved gently in IF the Iowa night, but the needle paid as little attention to them as it did to any other force of the massive and turning Earth. For the needle, the breadboard was all of the universe that there was. At the age of eighteen, Dolph Haertel had discovered anti-gravity. Dolph was wholly aware of the fantastic importance of what he had found, but the discovery did not seem as unlikely to him as it would have to, say, his father -- or for that matter, to a theoretical physicist who had spent a lifetime studying the mysterious metrical frame of space-time, that invisible, tyrannical grid which confined the courses of spiral nebulae and falling stones alike. Indeed, the discovery seemed inevitable to him now, at least inthe light of hindsight. At the very least, better than half a dozen accidents seemed to have conspired to lead him toward it. And for seeing it when he at last happened upon it, he was fully prepared to take credit if asked, for a great deal of reading in the history of science had convinced him of the truth of Pasteur's first law of research: "Chance favors only the prepared mind." The preparation had inhered first of all in a natural bent for mathematics -- part of it doubtless only that gift that exists in every child until it is suppressed or poisoned by the schools; part of it perhaps inherited from his mother, who was a governter for Xenobiology at the State University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City. Certainly little of it could have descended from his foster father, who was a grain-elevator salesman whose "head for figures" -- to use Mrs. Haertel's affectionate description -- "comes to a point at business arithmetic." Then, too, there had been the fact that his natural bent was rather solitary. Even outdoors it leaned toward hikes and fishing rather than team sports like baseball, which he found acutely dull. This was furthered by a boyhood isolation imposed from outside. His foster father spent much of his time "on the road" -- which was as likely to take him to Manitoba or the Punjab as it was to any of the American breadbasket states -- and as a government worker in the space sciences his mother was subject to transfers of base upon short notice, or no notice at all. Hence, although the suburban house in Iowa's low, rolling green hills was spacious and the countryside altogether pleasant, Dolph never was tempted into the mistake of thinking of it as "home". He had never had one, and did not particularly feel the lack; and he had never been thrown among any group his own age long enough to form a firm friendship which might have drawn his attention outward from his own thoughts and the reading which chiefly nourished them. Lately, it was true, he had taken more and more to noticing that the human beings in the world were divided into two sorts, one of which seemed softer and inarguably was more difficult to talk to than the other. One of these, a disturbing Canadian blonde -- black hair and blue eyes -- named Nanette Ford, had even shown an astonishing comprehension of what Dolph was up to now, so much so that for a while he had hoped she might share the grand adventure itself. But more and more it had come to seem to him that the risks were too great. Besides, in a venture with so many unknowns, the including of a second party -- and that a girl! -- would be the least manageable unknown of all, and the most avoidable. T he final and most crucial stroke of luck had come when he was fourteen, and already beginning to turn himself, without being aware of it, into an attic inventor -- perhaps one of the last of the breed, in a world dominated by team research costing sums only governments could afford to risk or could hope to raise. (The attic itself was out, for despite his mother's intervention, Rolph's foster father could not be swayed from the notion that all forms of experimentation involved explosions, or at least a risk of fire. But he was allowed to work in the top of the garage. Dolph carefully did not point out that when both cars were in it, the garage was almost as costly an edifice as the house. His conscience was quite .clear about it, since his plans included no explosions, nor even so much as a lighted match.) Instead, he had four years ago blundered upon a brief mathematical paper in Nature, that most British and yet most universal of all scientific journals, which had turned out to have a bearing on the mystery of gravity -- a mystery abandoned by most physicists long ago, since the prevailing Einstein cosmography ruled firmly that nothing could be done about gravity but endure it, time without end. Since at fourteen Dolph had not yet had enough time to decide that any scientific question could be closed or any theory sacrosanct, he set out to run down all other existing papers on the subject, and to keep his eye out for new ones. His motives for this were not entirely imbedded in intellectual curiosity. Through his mother, he was closer than most laymen to the U. S. space effort, and better able to see -- as he did without difficulty -- what an enormously expensive blind alley it was becoming. Project Apollo, the American effort to make a manned landing on the Moon, had and still was utterly bogged down, its timetable advanced again and again and becoming more difficult to believe with each postponement. Even simple unmanned rocket shots did not seem to be gaining much in reliability, though they certainly never failed to be more costly than their predecessors. Wasn't there some more sensible way to go about the whole thing? Apparently not. And yet the spectacle offend Dolph. He was wholly susceptible to the vast romance inherent -- though not yet realized -- in space travel, and it seemed to him that the way the world was going about prosecuting it was crazy; or, at least, that the people in IF charge had lost sight of the primary goal, which was to get out into space. Instead, the whole world seemed to be spending itself blind on more and more expensive rockets -- not because these brute-force engineer's toys were the best way to cross interplanetary space (that question apparently hadn't even been raised), but because it was a useful substitute for the arms race that had kept the now-obsolete Cold War going. Apparently taxpayers could still be sold spaceships -- even dud ones -- where they could no longer be sold missiles.  All right. Dolph knew he wasn't competent to question the politics of it, nor indeed was he much interested in that side of it. He was interested in space travel itself, and he was too young to be convinced that rockets were the only possible devices that could free man of the Earth. It occurred to him that if gravity was the chief enemy of spaceflight, then something might be gained by studying the enemy, no matter how hopeless Relativity declared such a study would turn out to be. T he outcome was that at eighteen Dolph had become an amateur expert in a field so new that few physicists even knew it existed, and most would say could not exist. For all its formidable reputation. Relativity had turned out to be absurdly easy to master -- a discovery which had been made over and over again by everyone with any feeling for the poetry of math -- and full of absurdly large holes in both its reasoning and its appeals to evidence. British scientists in particular, it turned out, had been shooting holes in poor old Einstein for more than a decade. One especially drastic English astronomer, a mystical don named Milne, had produced a competing formof Relativity that swallowed Einstein's like a goat. Milne had died nearly twenty years before Dolph's birth, but he was not forgotten -- not in a suburb of Iowa City, anyhow. Dolph doodled with Milne, and Dingle, and the pitifully few others who had had the courage to keep on thinking about gravity, and, Slaving been born into precisely the right moment, and having brought precisely the right mind to the right opportunity, fell into the fundamental discovery that although gravity is (as Einstein had maintained) a condition of space rather than a force like electricity, it has polarity (which Einstein had broken his heart trying to disprove). It followed naturally that it could be manipulated, probably without too much work. Since it was a weak field to begin with, and worked best only over very long distances, only a little effort should be required to produce desirable vector effects -- Or, that is, working with gravity rather than against it could probably be done in a garage, with only a few dollars. For example: A model space drive, capable of lifting perhaps a hundred pKunds or more of dead weight, sihould be easy to assemble from standard television set parts and other components. n With Nanette's rather distracting help, he had assembled a small breadboard rig to test at least a few small margins of the notion. The rig worked only too well. It turned out to be well over a hundred times as efficient as he had dared to hope. In an eternal moment of groaning boards and squeaking nails, it had cut a whole garage off from the Earth and lifted it, both family cars included, a good inch off its foundations. The instant when the power cut off and the whole mass thudded back into place was even more alarming, but it was all that had saved garage, Nanette and Dolph. He had had the rig plugged into a light socket, and the feeder line had parted before the frame building had pulled quite free of its concrete biding. Nanette had been frightened, but it hadn't occurred to Dolph to be genuinely alarmed until a day later, when some of the implications of the test began to pile up in his imagination. After all, despite his miscalculation there had never been any real danger that the garage would take off for the clouds. It was too massive a load for the available pvower. Hoisting it and its content far enough to snap a BX cable was quite incredible enough, without imagining consequences the breadboard rig could never have brought about But there were things the breadboard rig could do. One of them, he realized, was to make possible a small but genuine spaceship -- so small that he could build it himself in the back yard, but fully functional all the same. W hen that idea come to the surface, he was scared. And yet -- why not? Obviously the first manned space journey, even to so nearby a target as the Moon, was still decades in the future for the money-happy engineers, their brute-force rockets and their professionally heroic "astronauts." Dolph could see no good reason -- no good technical reason, anyhow -- why the breadboard rig should not take him to Mars some time within a year, provided that he could somehow scrounge about two hundred dollars... well, call it three hundred to be on the safe side... and could find the time both to do the building job properly, and to make the round trip before somebody caught him at it and forbade his trying it at all. It was primarily out of the need for disguise that the tree house had evolved, much to the satisfaction of Mr. Haertel, who though he used the outdoors for nothing more strenuous than business golf himself, liked to see his adopted son get his nose out of books and tackle something, anything that was properly boyish and outdoorsy. The ancient pear tree in the back yard would have been absurdly easy for anyone to climb, except possibly for somebody who had to try it in a wheelchair. But the very fact that the tree house was up off the ground made it unlikely to be blundered into by adults who might find what was inside it unexpected enough to IF prompt questions. As for kids, well, there was nobody around of Dolph's own age who would think a treehouse anything but too juvenile to be worth noticing, except Nanette. Younger children could invade it whenever they liked, as far as Dolph was concerned -- there would be nothing in it complex enough for them to damage, and nothing for them to see that they could report to older people in any terms which would make sense. He made a model ship of his first packing case, in the ravine with which the parcel of land ended at the back. He caulked it as carefully as though it would some day actually need to hold breathable air against the malice of a hard vacuum -- though his limited resources prevented his giving it a double hull or any insulation -- and equipped it with his first breadboard rig. One night, far past midnight, he lifted it silently a hundred feet into the moonlit air, and just as silently set it down again except for a faint grating noise as its bottom resettled among the heather-hazed rocks of the dry stream bed. Nobody saw the boxey specter as far as he could tell -- although the neighbor's dog, a pure-bred cocker spaniel with nerves of purest Jello, howled all the rest of the night -- and a week later he felt sure enough of the safety of the model to take Nanette along for a second cautious night ascension. She was breathless with excitement, but he took great care to make the "flight" as slow and solemn as that of a tethered balloon, and to avoid even the faintest hint that there might be more to be done with the anti-gravity field than this. (And he swore her to secrecy on even that much of it.) The tree house was not much larger than the model, but it was altogether more elaborate. He meant it to take him into space, and to bring him back; he had no intention that it should kill him instead, if he could possibly avojd that The floor of the exterior crate went into the tree first, as a platform (which, like the sides, had been sprayed with five layers of epoxy resins over the basic caulking -- a horribly expensive procedure because he had been forced to buy the spray in household-ize aerosol cans from the local supermarket, for the sake of secrecy). Then the interior crate, similarily caulked, had been bedded on the platform in a nest of rock wool, the best he could do in the way of insulation (it would at least preserve some heat balance in space, though against hard radiation it would be worse than useless), and set about preparing his entrance lock and his porthole. The problems of supply had to be ducked, for the most part. He could not afford to buy, and he would not have the space to carry, more than a token ration of food, water or oxygen -- especially oxygen, which came in expensively heavy steel bottles which had to be cracked by expensive heavy apparatus. Instead, he bought his oxygen by the #-liter flask from the local drug store, in the form of a gaseous patent medicine put on the market for hypochondriacs who were nervous about smog. Again this was a sinfully expensive way of attacking the problem at hand, but no other was open to Dolph if disguise was to be maintained. T here was no solution to this logistic problem, nor to the menace of cosmic rays and the solar wind, but that of time. The dinosaurs of power and money might afford to tackle them directly -- though they'd been doing badly at it up to now -- but for Dolph only speed, evasiveness, foreplanning and penury could serve. Those were precisely what the antigravity drive made possible, otherwise the whole notion of the trip would be no more than a nocturnal fantasy. The new rig was no longer, strictly speaking, a breadboardchassis improvisation, though it was spaced out almost as much for ease of access. The components, all transistorized except for a power tube, were now fixed on a heavy table, which in turn was firmly bolted to both the floor and one wall of the crate, and under which was slung the most capacious truck battery Dolph had been able to buy from Sears Roebuck. The small, heavy torus which was the source of the field was mounted on a post precisely at the crate's geometrical center, on  gymbals from a Navy-surplus gyroscope compass. The supplies were in; the tree house was tight; the rig was working; his course was plotted. There was no longer any reason to hang back. Even his time was accounted for, closely enough so that in a little while it would start running out. There was a four-day weekend coming up, and through the medium of his shopping -- which had been too extensive to be hidden, though it could be disguised -- Dolph had let it be known that he planned another solitary camping trip, which would run at least one more day than the official holiday. Since he had accumulated the e;ctra day off from school and his marks were mostly up to snuff, the plan aroused no unusual attention. Of course Nanette would suspect something like the truth when she saw the tree house gone, but he counted on her to keep her own counsel about it. As for the adults, what they would think of that couldn't be helped. But he was pretty sure their guesses would be wide of the mark. It would probably take them two days to look up far enough to notice that the packing 'crate was missing -- a tree without a crate in its branches being so much more ordinary a sight than a tree with one -- and probably they would then assume that he'd disassmbled it and set it up at a distance. His foster father, in fact, was almost sure to say: "After all, it couldn't very well have flown away by itself, could it?" So that was that. Late that Thursday night, with no more than a minimum shower of pear leaves and a yap of stifled terror from the distant cocker, he edged the crate out of the ancient tree. And promptly at # Sidereal IF Time, as the calculations required, the packing crate silently became a spaceship and vanished, Dolph and all. II N o amount of reading of the synthetically excited copy about orbital flights poured out by the popular press -- most of it written by reporters who had been mocking the very notion of space flight as "that crazy Buck Rogers stuff" even after the launching of Sputnik I -- had prepared Dolph for the immense fullness of space. He had expected it to be lonely. Even the most cursory knowledge of the distances which stretched around the planets would have forewarned him that the universe of night is vast beyond all hope of understanding. When the idea of making a crossing to Mars had first come to him, one of his first thoughts had been the sober realization that Columbus in his fragile bark had been setting out to jump a local puddle compared to the audacity of setting sail for Mars in a packing crate. The Earth itself was only barely large enough a vessel to risk in space, as the eternal lifelessness of the Moon 'preached graphically. The stars were suns, but their planets only motes in their eternal light. But that space itself should truly be a sea, unappeasably in motion everywhere and charged to bursting with restless particles and energies less reaches, was a concept he had never encountered (though he might have been warned by the physicists' word for the phenomenal universe, "plenum", which means "the fullness"). The impact of the experience itself, piled atop the shock of actually seeing the Earth become just another point of light, lost Dolph chanced to be travelling in the Galactic plane, and the position of Mars at the time was on the other side of the Earth from Shapley Center, the heart of the Galaxy, the Earth for him quickly was swamped out in the general glitter of the Milky Way -- was a cotnplete shock, and a blackly frightening one. In his first hour beyond the atmosphere, after he had finished his first checkout of his crate and his course, he became grimly aware that if he were to turn back now he might just barely have the great good luck to come home alive -- and never mind the catastrophic nonsense of even dreaming of reaching Mars. Nothing but luck could explain his having stayed alive this long. Outside the packing crate, mostly invisible and beyond the detection of his few toy instruments, the currents of space raged in a storm that had been going on for fourteen ever had a beginning -- and might go on raging for another fourteen light glared off the aluminum-painted hull of his absurd shell, charring the wood underneath steadily and implacably, molecule by molule. The solar wind -- that torrent of atomic fragments which extended the Sun's atmosphere out as far as Jupiter -- seethed and reded in the magnetic field which was secondary to his miniature gravitational pattern. X-rays from the hearts of exploding stars poured through the ship, and its pilot too. Cosmic rays -- the stripped cores of atoms, driven at near-light velocities from the ultimate synchrotrons of spiral galaxies -- bulleted past him, most of them luckily deflected by his field, missiles against which any physical shield would have been worse than useless. Micro-meteors, some few as big as grains of sand, scored the paint and pitted the porthole; these too were slowed and veered away by his shield, and those few that got through his outer hull were trapped by his insulation (although nothing could be done about the minute slow leaks these produced). H e had known about most of these things in advance, at least in the abstract, and had tried to take them into account. He had chosen for the flight a period of clear solar weather, in a trough of the pulsation cycle when no flares were expected (though there were no guarantees against them, either). Against other radiation he counted mainly on the protection of speed, to keep his dosage down to safe levels, since shielding was out of the question. With meteors he was IF were not very common beyond Earth's immediate gravitational enhim -- one, say, as big as a fleck of gravel -- would find him a small and gravitationally unattractive target. As for the air, the drug-store oxygen bottles were equipped with their own masks which he could don if the oxygen tension became dangerously low -- though for loss of pressure in the cabin, there was no effective precaution but speed of transit. It had all seemed at least possible, if not very reasonable, back in the safety of the garage and the Iowa spring. In the raging sea of streams which was the reality of "empty" space, it was death, not pear-leaves, that whispered every second just outside the jcrate. But he was not going to turn back now -- and most especially if he might not make it home alive even if he did. He had firm objections to being killed, but above all he was not going to let himself be knocked out of the sky for a project he'd already given up. All right, he'd obviously made a mistake, and a fat one -- quite big enough to kill him. But he'd made it, and he was on his way. And that was definitely that. He tried to keep his mind off the universe of whispering blind hostility just outside by concentrating on the mechanics of his journey, but there was really very little to do. His flight plan had been the ultimate in simplicity, thanks to the fundamental nature of the discovery which had made it possible at all: the discovery that gravity is not only a structural condition in space, as Einstein had postulated, but at the same time a part of the general field which included electricity and magnetism as its other aspects (as Einstein had never succeeded in proving) and hence has polarity -- can have its own peculiar forms of negative and positive poles. Knowing only this much -- and given the slight vector thrust to turn it to account -- Dolph could sling himself and his tree house away from the Earth with all the initial velocity he could glean from Earth's own centrifugal force, simply by shielding himself from his planet's own gravity. He had only to be careful how suddenly he did it. Once free of the last clinging wisps of Earth's air, he could add with the snap of a switch an acceleration of two gravities -- another sixty-four feet per second, every second. He would in effect give the packing crate a "like charge" to that of the Earth; this on top of a velocity imparted by coming off the end of a four-thousand-mile-long sling which all his life had been whirling him through space at the rate of not much under a thousand miles an hour (and had he started from the equator, it would have been greater still) . Tavo gravities would not have seemed like much of an acceleration to the rocket masters at Cape Kennedy, who were accustomed to sweat blood (and money) to crack their vehicles up past nine. But two gravities applied over several hours can build up a much more respectable end-velocity than can nine gravities achieved in the three or four minutes before a rocket blurts out the last of its reaction-mass and becomes just another one of the universe's helplessly falling or coasting objects. And for Dolph, this much was for free, or so near to it as made no difference. If he wanted to add more to it, he could reject the Sun's gravity  well, at no extra cost but some much more complicated calculations. But for a crossing as short as the one he planned, the gain did not prove to be worth the extra brainwork. Steering, of course, was none too easy, but here again a little vectoring returned large dividends. Once the Earth's field was screened out and the crate rode free in the sea of streams, retreating from the Sun, a faint softening of the lines of force on the side of the crate toward Mars let in a faint tendril of the red planet's own distant tug. Not much, only a sort of an urge, but enough to start him into a long curving fall toward the fleeing world. For him, after all, there was no place else to fall to. T he moment the meters first registered that tug, Dolph was able to step it up. To double it, in fact. By the middle of his second day in space he was already slightly more than halfway there, and beginning to stop the Martian attraction back down and use the Earth as a drag-anchor. It was just as well, too. The air IF in the crate was already thin and a little foul, and Dolph was beginning to feel quite chilly. In addition, he felt a little feverish, which he hoped was due solely to the fact that he had had no sleep, and that he hadn't bothered to provide his crude vessel with plumbing. If the odd feverishness also meant that he had gotten a higher radiation dose than he had planned on, there wasn't a thing he could do about it. He was lucky -- though he tried hard not to think about it -- to be still alive at all. But now his stern chase of Mars was beginning to show fruits. The red spark was getting fatter -- not larger, exactly, but markedly brighter. From here on out the ballistics of the trip would be even simpler. He had only to fall, as mindlessly as Newton's apple, and let natural law do the rest until it was time to slow himself down to a leaf-fall speed. Not that it would do to allow carelessness or neglect to cancel out everything the sea of streams had been unable to sweep away from him. He had to land safely on Mars; he had to live there, for an hour or so at the least; and he had to get back, with proofs. Otherwise he had risked not only his own life for nothing, biit also all the love and care that had brought him into the world, and kept him alive and happy until that moment a few months ago when he had decided to leave it for a while. Even here he was not really alone. He had brought with him years of devotion, centuries of history, ages of evolution; and out here, he stood for them all, he and his scraps of Earth wood and paint and metal, of life and curiosity and knowledge. He was custodian of all these things, not just of his own life. Stub of pencil in hand, he studied his instruments with minute care, and scribbled calculations on the wall of the crate. Mars got fatter.The crate got colder. By "morning" -- though he still had been unable to sleep -- the air was very bad. He had to don the oxygen mask, after a last gulp of his rations and swallow of water. The gas made him feel more alert, and a little warmed, too, though he knew that that part of it was an illusion. Inside the crate the light was now quite orange, cast in a truncated cone from the porthole from the surface of Mars. Now he had to look down, come what may. He took a last quick measurement from the free-floating needle in the middle of his instrument table, and then launched himself across the floor of the crate to the porthole. He was already so used to the effects of free fall that he arrived without banging his nose more than slightly. The view, disappointingly, was not good. For one thing, the micrometeorite scratches on the outside bull's eye had gotten worse; and the glare was blinding, especially after so many hours of star-hazed blackness. But slowly, he got used to it. And slowly he began to realize what it was that he was seeing: the canals. They were not dissolving, but becoming more definite as he descended. He drew in a sharp breath. The canals of Mars were real -- and before the next hour was over, he was going to become the first of all human beings to know without doubt just what they were. Always providing, of course, that he lived through the next hour. Ill T he oasis toward which he was settling,in the heart of the subdesert called Aeria, was shown on his Pic du Midi map but not given any name -- probably because it was one of those Martian features which failed to show up from time to time, as even larger green areas failed to do some summers. It was an oval blotch about thirty degrees south of the equator, and perhaps five hundred miles off the eastern "shore" of Syrtis Major. It was certainly showing nicely this summer. At a guess, Dolph would have said it was as big as Rhode Island. Five canals converged on it, and more were becoming visible, like railroad lines converging on a city, animal trails leading to a water hole -- or spaiUarks around a bullet hole in shatterproof glass. Dolph resisted that last comparison until it was impossible to fight it any longer... until, in fact, he could see that it was very closer to the truth. The nameless oasis was an impact crater, like Meteor Crater in Arizona, or the ringwalls of the Moon. The discovery made his heart sick, for it instantly made disastrous sense of the surface of Mars, map and landscape both. Was it possible that Mars, too, was a bombarded and blasted planet, as implacably lifeless and hostile as the Moon despite its blanket of thin air? True, it was not as obviously pocked and torn up as the lunar landscape, but that might only mean that the winds -- and the gigantic sandstorms that they carried, often big enough to be seen all the way from Earth -- had worn down the oldest and the biggest craters and mountain ranges, and smoothed off the others. The retreat of the North pKlar snows in the spring had revealed one mountain range, the Mountains of Mitchell; and recurrent sharp edges to the cloud-patterns had hinted at similar ranges elsewhere on the planet, even though no shadows of such peaks had been seen. The roughly circular shapes of the northern deserts --  Electric Eridania, Ausinia, Hellas, Argyre -- also looked much like the circular maria of the Moon, as did such smaller southern ones as Isidis Regio. And here in the packing crate, from less than fifteen miles up, there was no longer any doubt that Mars at some time in its history had been the target of vast celestial missiles, some of them as big as asteroids. The major canals, the ones even old Schiaparelli had seen, were colossal straight faults in the very crust of the planet, where whole continental blocks of the surface had tilted like ice-floes and refrozen out of true to the main mass. The minor canals -- the raIF dialing marks -- were spalled cracks centered upon the impacts of smaller meteors, objects of the size that had so devasted the Moon. Since the surface of Mars had not changed permanently since the invasion of the telescope, it seemed likely that no such cataclysm had hit Mars in more than three hundred years. But the same thing might be said of the Moon -- which did not make Earth's sister world any less barren and hopeless. Whenever the bombardment had struck Mars, it had changed the planet decisively. In the sand sample that the first unmanned Martian probe had photographed there had been many microscopic shells, like those of Earthly Foraminifera, which showed decisively that Mars had once had seas. They were all gone now. The sands of their bottoms blew about the planet in the thin gales. Most of that water must have poured into the fissures opened when the great meteors struck, and boiled away, to go finally into combination with the rock in the form of limonite, the hydrated iron oxide which in powdered form made up the bulk of the Martain sands. Little enough was left to form the thin polar icecaps. Had therd been any highly organized forms of life on Mars then, they could not have survived the sudden remaking of their whole world. If life itself had survived at all, it had had to begin all over again. Any that survived there now, on this very ancient little world, must -- paradoxically -- be very primitive, and even genetically almost without memory of the age of oceans. Mars was still not dead. But what life remained must be staging a last stand, quite as dramatic as Lowell had guessed... but with far fewer resources, and with even less hope. G lumly, Dolph maneuvered his clumsy little craft don toward a landing in the middle of the nameless oasis, the blue-green spot of life created by the stony monster from space that had also helped to turn most of Mars into a permanent desert. He had not expected anything better, really, but he had had hopes. Now his hopes were limited to seeing just how high a form of primitive life could manage to hang on where properly there should be no life at all. The tilted ochre tableland spread out beneath him, and the rim of the crater expanded like an opening mouth. From a mile above the desert surface he was able to see the shadows cast by the low rim. The inside of the oasis began to look first like a bowl, and then more like a shallow saucer. It was mid-afternoon on the desert when the packing crate reached it, and the low domed peaks of the rim -- so oddly like the hills of eastern Iowa except for their color -- rose around him. As the floor of the crater came to meet him, however, he found himself in a sort of gentle blue-green twilight; the sun did not reach the bottom at this hour. At last the scene outside the porthole became motionless. Cautiously Dolph cut off his field. The crate dropped the last few feet with a soft, muffled thunk, as though it had fallen onto a ntattress. Then there was silence. He was on Mars. The silence continued, indifferent and undisturbed. He had been used to it in space, because he had expected it; but here it was as though the planet, bent upon cherishing the last of its own life, did not even notice his existence. Well, why should it? In its long, slow, tortured life, Dolph was only the accident of an instant. He shook off his depression and set to work. First, the outside temperature, and the air pressure. The resulting readings were hard to believe. He took two more of each and could hardly trust them even after they agreed with the first. His equipment wasn't the 'best. But it was the best he had, and it said that the temperature out there was twenty-five degrees Centigrade, or # on the obsolete Fahrenheit scale the English-speaking peoples clung to. That was outright balmy -- nobody could fairly call it less. bars -- it was about equivalent to what he would have encountered high in the Himalayas, far from breatheable even had it contained enough oxygen; but even so it was better  than twice the pressure he could even have hoped to find up on the desert. On Mars, it appeared, it paid to be at the bottom of a deep, deep hole. In short, he could go outside, wearing no more clothing than he had on right now, and with no protection from the air but the respirator. He buckled it on, followed by the canvas belt which held the twenty plastic vials which were for his samples, and loaded his pockets. Then he dropped to his hands and knees before the tightly caulked barrel which was his airlock. A few moments later he was out. He lost about twenty per cent of the Earthly air in the crate in the process, but this did not bother him. He was not after all, planning to stay long. He got to his feet and looked about. In the indirect sunlight, the vast circular valley was so still that it was like being on the floor of some long-untended aquarium or pond. Overhead, the sky was a deep violet, almost an indigo, in which he could see a scattering of stars, including if one of those could be the Earth. The idea gave him a distinct chill. The horizon was near, but not bounded by the mountains of the ring-wall -- in fact, he could not even see their peaks; the oasis was too big for that. Except for low, rolling hills, the crater floor stretched away evenly in all directions, an almost uniform blue-green, with a few chocolate spots. He struck a wooden match against the crate. Nothing happened, of course. The blue-green was vegetation; he got back down on his hands and knees to look at it, then IF snatched his hands up again. The air was warm, all right, but the ground was bitter cold even through his gloves. He had forgotten that the midnight temperatures here probably hit # degrees below Fahrenheit zero during most of the year, and could not be much warmer even in high summer. Luckily his hiking shoes were heavy, and so were his socks, or he'd be risking frost-bitten toes just standing there. The vegetation was curious stuff; he found it hard to think of anything to compare it with. In texture it was a little like loosely woven sponge, the filament either gray, greenish or the chocolate brown he had noticed, and looking rather tough. Interwoven with these were more delicate filaments of a lighter, more vivid green, which here and there were gathered into small knots or clumps within holes formed by the spongy matrix. He pulled at it experimentally. It tore readily, a little to his surprise, and the fragment of it in his hand promptly seemed to shrink, forming itself into a rough ball. Similar balls, of varying sizes, were scattered about him, as though detached by a wind. Up close tbe sponge had a speckled appearance, because both kinds of filaments bore tiny fruits or bladders, he could not decide which. Those on the tough filament were black or brown like their parents and were about the size of B-B shot; those on the green strands were bigger and elongated, like small beans, but were quite transparent. Suspecting water or some sap, Dolph stripped off a glove and tried to break one of those sacs with thumb and finger nail. But though its pellicle yielded, it would not break. Water on second thought was unlikely, since it would freeze in the Martian night. But what then Was in the clear little bladders? He was distracted from 'the question by a sign of movement on his bare palm. Startled, he looked closer. The skin seemed to be crawling. It was crawling. He was reminded at once of what had happened in his boyhood when he had picked up a wounded robin chick, and had afterward discovered that his hand was covered with mites, an incident which had divested him of all sentimentality toward birds forever. These were not mites, but they were some Martian equivalent. They were about a quarter of an inch long, looked quite like some species of nematode or roundworm, and there were thousands of them. And yes, here and there among them were genuinely mite-like creatures, black arthropods, scuttling among the nematodes, or settled quietly on the backs of their necks, feeding... He kicked away the sponge around him in a hurry until he had exposed a patch of powdery red soil, and scrubbed both hands in a handful of it, cold or no cold. Though he probably had no reason to be afraid of these tiny spots of Martian animal life, he was not going to take any of it back into the crate with him -- and hence back to Earth -- if he could possibly help it. At least, not loose on his person or in his clothing. B ut he did want samples. The vegetation alone was a discovery worth the trip. The unmanned probe had brought back no life but a few unexciting species of bacteria, and some spore-like things, which had refused to germinate on Earth. This spongy stuff was evidently a kind of lichen -- half fungus, half alga -- highly developed to wring from the inhospitable soil, air and sunlight what little nutrient and energy they offered. Its tendency to break into balls when it reached a critical size, furthermore, meant that up on the surface it must travel with the winds when the summer air circulation set in -- thus explaining the mysterious "wave of darkening" which swept down from the polar icecap when it melted, and explaining as well why the dark maria could never be permanently covered by the sandstorms. It was lichen, but it had adopted the spawning habit of the tumbleweed. Where did it get water? Surely there wasn't enough water vapor in the air to be worth bothering with -- certainly not enough to support the pcres and acres of life about him and, by extension, over all the dark areas of the planet. After a moment's rsiizzlement the answer came to him. The fungal strands probably broke h chemically out of the sand, for every molecule of limonite carries ''ith it, in chemical combination, hree molecules of water. That way, the plant could get all its water without ever touching or needing a drop of water in the liquid state. At high noon, some of those water molecules would break free at the urging of sunlight and scurry for new positions, carrying other essential chemicals with them by loose bonding rather than in any sort of conventional solution. Some Earthly desert plants, the xerophytes, had the rudiments of a similar system for using bound water; it was what occasionally made specimen cactuses in museum cases suddenly sprout after decades of apparent lifelessness -- and what kept alive grains of wheat which, buried thousands of years ago with the Pharaohs, sometimes astonished biologists by germinating. Here on Mars it was not an oddity, however, but a basic mechanism of life. Feeling a little dazed, Dolph carefully stuffed fragments of the sponge into four of his vials, scrubbing his hands again afterwards -- and the outsides of the vials, too. If his guess was correct, at least some of the material would be alive when he got home. After a last look at the sky he went back inside the crate, where he transferred samples from one of the vials onto several prepoured agar plates. He doubted that they would take hold, but there was no harm in trying. With his oxygen mask off he found the task, light though it was, a little tiring. A check with the barometer showed that his cabin pressure was down to an Earthly equivalent of eight thousand feet -- doubtless due. to losses through the airlock. Well, if Andean Indians could IF live and do heavy labor at that altitude, so could he, he hoped, at least for a while. And now what? It might be worthwhile lifting ship and taking a look at some other spot. On the other hand, there was no reason to suppose than any other vegetated area would differ significantly from this one, despite its isolation. Searching for possible ruins, like mapping or any other form of protracted exploration, was out of the question -- it was beyond his equipment and his available time. After all, this trip was essentially only a stunt, and it would be sensible not to forget it. All the same, he could see no special reason why he should not levitate a mile or so above the desert -- which would certainly put him above any pKssible mountains -- and let the planet turn under him for a while, just to make a quick survey in the hope of seeing something interesting. If he stayed aloft only a few hours he could traverse as much as a sixth of the planet westward, crossing Syrtis Major and probably Isidis Regio too, and perhaps reaching the eastern marches of Aethiopis, where there was a chain of oases all far bigger than this one. Well, after alt, why not? He could spare four hours before he had to leave for home; that would even leave him a margin for error. He secured everything -- quickly, though, because the afternoon was fading and he wanted to drift west in remaining sunlight, trusting to the long shadows to betray anything really striking on the surface. Keeping this idea in mind, he fed power into the rig. Nothing happened. A larmed, he checked the leads, but everything was tight. The coil was intact, too, and shorting the battery produced a nice, fat sparkshower. , Yet the crate simply refused to lift. Baffled, Dolph set about running a component-by-component check, grimly doing his best to keep his breathing even and shallow and his hands steady. The shadowless semidusk outside was becoming slowly but steadily dimmer, and above all he did not want to be caught on Mars over night. It did not, in fact, take him very long to find the trouble. It was in the one logically vulnerable spot in the system, and the one about which he could do precisely nothing: the #BQ# power tube. It was, without question, burned out. Of course, he should have brought a spare; he realized that now. It wouldn't have taken up much space. But he hadn't. Almost any other failure in the rig, Dolph could have repaired. It was otherwise not much more complicated than a crystal radio. But this one was fatal. The tube had been brand new, and had tested out perfectly the day before he'd left Earth, but that was no comfort now. Once a tube goes, it is gone, regardless of age. This one was dead, and that was that. And Dolph was marooned. IV T hough it was small consolation to Dolph, he could reflect -- and it looked like he might have plenty of time for that -- that part of his trouble was rooted in the early discovery of the transistor, found before the vacuum tube -- or "thermionic valve" -- had had a chance to come of age. Even in its heyday, now a decade gone, tube design had been more of an art than a science, depending almost as much upon a feeling for shapes and flows as on calculations of the mean free paths of electrons. As a result, a well designed tube might function perfectly in any of a hundred uses for thousands of hours -- or it might fail an hour after having passed its final tests at the factory, and not even its designer could tell the successes from the lemons. Dolph's solitary and crucial #BQ# had evidently been a lemon. But the real failure, he knew very well, had been in his own foresight. Yet there was no time to be wasted in self-reproaches or in idle detective work. Dusk was falling fast, and the temperature even faster. At this rate it would be freezing outside by sunset. Yet, too, there would be no point in lurching about inside the packing crate in a panic. He could not afford the loss of a drop of water, a cubic centimeter of oxygen or an erg of energy in waste motion. He needed first of all to run an inventory of what he had -- and then to think about how he might best use it. And it had to be a detailed inventory -- right down to the last thread. He could depend upon Mars for nothing, this early. He could not even hope. Oxygen first. He had started with five flasks, totaling # liters or # gallons at Earth-normal pressure, stored at # pounds per square inch. One flask was probably almost gone, and the drugstore gadget had no gauge to 'tell him how much was left. Undoubtedly his total store would last him the night, but he had to hope for much more time than that. He scribbled furiously on the walls of the crate. Ideally, he might seal the crate well enough to keep the air pressure inside at about one half of one Earth atmosphere, using Mars's own nitrogen to pressurize the room if he could rig a way to pump it in enough of a hurry. But if he did that, he would need an oxygen volume of # per cent -- twice Earth's -- in order to keep up the necessary oxygen pressure of I # mm. of mercury, and his supplies simply wouldn't permit it, even over a short term. On the other hand, if he tried to maintain full Earth air pressure in the crate, he would need a lot of power, and that was in short supply too -- no more than what remained in his battery. No immediate solution was obvious. All right, shelve it for now. Water: Possibly not a real worry yet. He had three i# gallon drums of it -- storage drums from the Civil Defense craze of #. The IF drums were each #" high and stacked one on another in one corner of the crate, leaving him four inches of headroom for unstacking them. Each had a plastic bag liner assembly with a spout which folded under its cover; one could be used as a commode by cutting the mouth of the liner and folding it around the top opening of the drum. When about seven-eighths full, the liner could be sealed with a wire tie -- and saved, he thought with a grimness that left him no room to be squeamish, for fertilizer or half a dozen other easily imaginable uses, plus others that would doubtless occur to him if he lived long enough. H e was not foolish enough to believe that # gallons could be called a lot of water. In the desiccated airs of Mars he would have to consume a minimum of a gallon a day, not counting probably that much again lost by evaporation -- probably being lost right now, right through the plastic liners. But there was life on Mars, and that meant there was water too. He thought that he might find enough to use in the three weeks to a month that the contents of the drums should give him. Now, food: He had a small case of K rations, what the specifications advertised as a two-week's supply, which meant that It could be stretched as long as the water in the drums would. Thereafter, he would again have to see what he could find on Mars -- and face the excellent chance that all the life here would prove poisonous to him. He also had a small packet of agaragar and a jar of Bovril which he had brought along as food for cultures of Martian microorganisms, but he was sure he would have no objections to beef aspic for himself instead -- again, for so long as there was water to make it with. That might keep him alive another week. What else? Oh yes: six cans of evaporated milk, and two ounces of salt. And... one month's supply of multivitamin capsules, if he stretched it to the utmost. Where might he get more? That any lifeform on Mars might contain any vitamin that he needed, let alone all of them, was close to impossible. All right, shelve that too. He had to hope. Power? The truck battery, possibly rechargable. Surely something could be done about that. Something had to be done, for he would need power to keep up the air pressure, and probably also to generate oxygen by electrolysis of water if he could find water, and certainly to generate heat if he could think of no way to store heat during the day. The only other stored pKwer he had with him was a small can of Sterno, which he did not dare even think of lighting until his oxygen problem could be made less acute. Nothing else was available but muscle power, which would not last long if Mars could not be made to refuel it. His clothing, counting what he had on, consisted of three pairs of long, heavy wool sox; two T-shirts; two pairs of boxer shorts and one of athletic shorts; two flannel shirts; one pair of heavy slacks; a pair of hiker's shoes; a pair of heavy gloves; a racing driver's helmet liner and a pair of heavy, padded, tinted goges; a thick jacket, and a voluminous wool muffler. Not bad in terms of the warmth needed, but he had to remember that all of it would wear rapidly on this harsh world -- and rot rapidly, too, because he would be unable to wash any of it, let alone himself. But he could patch. This thought moved him to add to this part of his inventory his blanket roll -- two very ancient blankets, a torn sheet, a polyethylene garment-bag and the five feet of clothesline they were tied up with -- and his belt, plus a spool of heavy-duty thread with a veritable whaler's needle stuck into it, an old single-edged razor blade, and the canvas floor covering of the crate. Oh yes, his Scout knife, too. It had an awl in it, which would pierce canvas or leather. That seemed to cover tailoring and shoemaking. Nothing could be done now about the fact that he was totally ignorant of both trades. While the oxygen lasted, he would have to try to learn. T he notation of vitamins reminded him that he was going to have to be sick some of the time -- or perhaps even much of the time. But he did not even look into his first-aid kit to know how iodine, Band-Aids, about a dozen capsules of some antibiotic left over from an illness two years ago and hence probably halved in potency, a semi-squashed tube of anesthetic ointment; that was all. Were he to be seriously ill, he would die, and that would be that. In view of the immediacy of the oxygen problem, the medical one did not alarm him much, however. Though he was scared, he felt the basic strength of his youth, and in addition a reassuring doubt that any Martian germ could be a real menace to his Earthborn body. IF Good thing he wasn't a girl, at there would be power for it); six least. Ehrlenmeyer flasks, once intended What about equipment -- to for secimens; six feet of glass build a pump, to charge the battubing, in three #" lengths; a blowtery, to construct every possible pipe; a glass file; twin tubes of needed device in the few minutes epoxy glue; a small tripod; a roll Mars would probably leave him beof friction tape; a coil of copper tween noticing the need and finishwire, length unknown, but obviously ing the machine? Nothing that he no more than five feet and probably saw in the cabin was reassuring, but less; and mirabile dictu, an axe, he noted every item on the wall all newly sharpened. In addition -- for the same: One table; one breadboard though they were less obvious, they rig( with dead tube), a n small soltoo were tools -- he had two pendering iron, with solder and flux (if cils, a bail-point pen, a drawing compass, a protractor, a pocket compass, a wristwatch, a pair of binoculars, two star charts, an ephemeris and the Pic du Midi map of Mars (the most recent one, revised from the photographs sent back by the unmanned probes). After a moment's thought, he added to the list of tools a sub-class for Chemicals, but it did not consume much space: the salt, the agar, a small box of lye, six ounces of absolute alcohol and four of formalin. What about his mess kit, and the canteen and canvas sling? Well, call those tools, too. At least the kit contained a spoon with fork prongs and a cutting edge. He looked slowly around the cabin, which he had now to begin to think of as his home. He could see nothing that he had missed listing. That meant it was time to empty his pockets, which he did onto the table which bore the dead rig. When he was through, he had a bandanna; an extra pair of rawhide shoelaces; a pocket notebook; a few loose coins (to call home with?); his matches (in, ironically, a waterproof case); his wallet, containing four dollars and assorted cards (plus a snapshot of Nanette in the patented secret compartment) ; a key-ring on a snake chain with eleven keys on it, all of them now as useless ,as six of them had always been mysterious; and finally, his class ring (which he had almost given to Nanette, and might just as well have, for all the good it was likely to do him on Mars). And that was absolutely all. No, not quite. There were eight small paper-clips and one middle-sized one marking pages in the ephemeris; and thrust into the wall, holding up the charts and the Pic du Midi map, fourteen push-pins. No matter how he looked at it all, it was not much of a survival kit. For anything else, he would have to depend upon Mars -- and upon luck, who had abruptly already stopped smiling on him. What now? Think! But he could think of nothing, except that he was suddenly thirsty. W 'hen the goddess of luck stops smiling, she is often likely to be thorough. Although Dolph had no way of knowing it, when she had run out on him on Mars, she had simultaneously deserted him Nanette had noticed that the treehouse was missing, on the very morning of its departure. Though she had taken sporadic care to disguise it around Dolph, Nanette's mind was quick as well as gifted, and relentlessly logical as only the feminine mind can be without formal training. In addition, she had a strong visual imagination -- so powerful, in fact, that she was still wavering between wanting to be a painter, her first dream, and to be a scientist, a notion sparked by Dolph -- and that midnight trip into the silent skies in Dolph's first test crate had put her emotions into a secret ferment she hadn't yet admitted. It would have taken a dull brain indeed to have failed to respond to the moonlit wonders of that IF silent ascent, and since she already knew in general knowledge the vastness of the problem Dolph had been nibbling at, she had not been slow to imagine what an audacious mind might do with a solution for it -- a solution that Dolph obviously now had, at least in large part. If anti-gravity was achievable at all, ninety per cent of the work was done. Everything else was technicalities, to be worked out in detail by any dim-witted engineer, or maybe even by a household electrician. Anw now the tree house was gone -- and not a footprint below it to show that it had been carried any place else on Earth. It had been an elaborate and heavy tree house; it couldn't possibly have been just wafted away --  -- unless, of course, it had done precisely and only that. It could not have vanished in any other way but that. She questioned Dolph's mother cautiously. That was difficult, for the two women liked each other, and it was impossible for Nanette to disguise the fact that she was troubled. Luckily, Dolph's cover story was good enough to give her reason to be troubled. Had he really gone camping without even letting her know he was going, she would have had good reason to be furious, and Mrs. Haertel drew that conclusion and commiserated with her on male thoughtlessness. Nanette withdraw unscathed but shaky, and now furious indeed, though for quite different reasons. Given the additional facts in her possession, she saw at once that the cover story was full of holes, and only a little more elementary detective work among the tools, scraps, shavings and last-minute discards that Dolph had left was enough to confirm the conclusion she had been trying all morning not to have to draw. She climbed into the loft-space of the garage and hunkered down in the only part of it that had a floor, a dark and filthy corner where Dolph -- years earlier, before they had met -- had abortively kept pigeons, all of which had died of some fungus disease Mrs. Haertel had said was dangerous to people, too. "The bum," Nanette said bitterly. "That steaming, no-good, sneaky, runaway bum." She was not at all surprised to find herself crying. She did a thorough job of it, though silently enough so that someone passing the garage would have heard from the abandoned cote only an occasional, ghostly coo. When it was over, half an hour later, she felt quite washed out -- still furious, to be sure, but ready to cope with male perfidy on any scale the situation required. Wiping her nose on the inadequate tail of her skirt, she crunched back down the unsafe stairs to examine, first, Dolph's work-bench, and then the abandoned test crate. "The bum," she told the crate. "I'll show zm," she said, poking at half a bucket of glass-hard pitch. "Run out on me, will he," she growled at an uncrumpled wiring diagram from the waste can. I' "And besides," she said to lastjyear's ephemeris, "he's sure to be i(in trouble." With an unexpected and uncontrollably loud snihle, Nanette strode toward home in search of a soldering iron, constructing in her head as she went the rudiments of a cover story for herself. Though she had never before needed a really good one, she was grimly confident that she could make a better job of it than Dolph had. Constructing cover stories and passing them off with a perfectly bland countenance is another of the instinctive feminine arts for which no practice is needed (though sometimes it helps). It was not Nanette's fault that this story -- for her, for Dolph and for all the world -- needed to be longer, wilder and more portentous than any told since the Viking longboats groped toward an unknown Greenland. After all, she was only trying to nail down her man, with the same weapons that had served woman beside the brooks of Swanscombe in # B.C. "You in-ter-plan-et-ary hobo of storming space. "I'll show you V D olph awoke slowly, stiff with cold and from the boards under his blankets. His mouth was parched, his lips cracked, his lungs wheezing. He felt half suffocated; and when he sat up, with a great start of alarm, he became so dizzy that he fell back with a gasp, wondering where he was and what was wrong with him. Then he remembered. Without sitting up, he looked about cautiously. A hard beam of bluish sunlight, as sharp and merciless as a laser ray, struck horizontally across the cabin from the porthole but did not seem to reflect off anything; the rest of the enclosure was as dim as a cave. He tasted his dry lips with a swollen tongue, which made him cough, and at once he became conscious of being imbedded in an enormous silence. Even the cough sounded remote and feeble in his own ears, and when the silence flowed back it was as enormous as the bottom of the sea. Now he realized what had awakened him: a non-noise -- the end of the last hiss of his first oxygen bottle. He struggled to his feet. The dizziness returned, but it was not as severe this time, and slowly passed. He wondered if he should worry about it, but he was almost certain that it was an effect of gravity -- after all, he weighed only # pounds here, and it would take his heart and blood vessels time to get used to the lightened load. Oxygen was what counted now. He could allow time for nothing else until that need was met. And he had to face the fact that he would have to consume a good deal to provide for the possibility of more. He cracked open the second flask and got to work. First of all he ate, and then, from the traces of fat left in the K-ration container and a few crystals of lye. IF he made a weak soap solution. A small loop of wire gave him a passable bubble-pipe, and with the floating bubbles he had no trouble in locating three leaks in the walls of his cabin, two of them large enough to be critical. He marked them. There was bound to be minor seepage too, but he could worry about that later, when the interior pres sure was high enough to make detecting it possible. Next, an electric motor. That was a simple enough proposition, requiring only two bits of metal and some wire, plus a frame which he delayed building until he could be absolutely sure of how he wanted to use the machine. He was already sure that the motor itself was too small, no matter how he would want to use it; but it was as big as he dared to build it with what he had on hand, and that would have to be that. For now, he wanted it as the heart of a pump, of a simple design he remembered seeing once in an advertisement in a technical magazine. It was a pump that would never get wet, no matter what it pumped, because it consisted of nothing but two rollers continuously squeezing a few inches of soft rubber tubing, the input end would go through the largest of his leaks to the Martian atmosphere; the output would open into the cabin. But what was he going to do for rollers? That was easy -- two brief lengths of glass tubing, fused onto nails as axles with the aid of the Stemo can and the blowpipe. But he had to burn up the oxygen even more to get the Sterno to burn at all, and even so, his air was almost pure poison by the time the operation was done. At home it would not have cost him half an hour. Here, it was as hard work as heaving coal. At last, however, the motor was connected to the battery, and humming fairly smoothly. The little poot-poots of air that came out of it could hardly be felt, but he could only hope that they would add up to a sizeable increase in pressure before too long. He had used the Sterno heat simultanously to soften a gob of pitch, with which he now closed the remaining leaks in the hull. Then, after five minutes of rest -- it was not nearly enough -- he valved the oxygen back down to a trickle. T T #hile he rested, he became con scions of a kind of whispering, which at first he could not identify. Then he thought it might be wind, although such a thing seemed impossible in the near-vacuum outside. Or was it? After all, many an astronomer had seen sandstorms sweeping Mars -- seen them, and often cursed them for obscuring the view at a crucial opposition. Dolph got up and peered out. It was wind, all right. Gentle, almost imperceptible waves were moving along the surface of the groundclinging vegetation, which as he watched became obscured by a faint haze, as though some invisible housekeeper was dusting them. After only a few moments, the whispering had become a sighing, and then the sighing developed a soft but definite whistling edge around the packing crate. The haze roze, and the far wall of the crater became dim. Soon it had vanished completely, and the air had become quite dark. Though it was still obviously day, there was no longer any direct sunlight visible -- it was as though the sky had become overcast. For a wild moment, Dolph wondered if it were going to rain. But of course it didn't. The air simply continued to become darker with flying dust and fine sand. It was a good thing that his pump design didn't allow any access of the air to its moving parts, for the machine was far too fragile to stand much abrasion. As it was, he'd do well to slap some kind of filter over its input hole -- and change the filter daily, if this kind of flurry happened every morning. If this was just a part of a general sandstorm, of course, the adventure was over. He would be buried, and that would be that. In half an hour, however, the whistling began to abate, and the day began to seem lighter once more. By the end of an hour, the it had ever been; the thin air couldn't carry even impalpable dust long without any current to keep it in motion. The whole thing, Dolph supposed, was just a local gust, probably caused by the heating of the valley when the sunlight struck it after the Hyperboreal night. He hoped so; for if the little storm were a regular occurence, he could use it; in fact, it would solve one of his most pressing problems -- the problem of how to keep his battery charged. There was power for the taking out there. All he had to do was build a small generator -- a slightly larger version of his motor, with a thoroughly hammered piece of soft iron for a rotor, would do nicely -- and a windmill. He could probably cut the sails for the windmill from his canvas. The stuff was rather heavy for the thin air, but on the other hand the gusts seemed to have plently of energy behind them. Only experiment would decide what the best sail design would be, though. His watch said that it was now near noon; the sun didn't agree. The disagreement would grow as the slightly longer Martain day expanded, and as more days followed. He could of course open the back of the watch and retard the mechanism's governor as far as it would go, but he doubted that it would prove to be enough. It would be better to keep Martian time, approximately, and use the watch only for timing short operations, as the need arose... and not risk exposing the watch's innards to the dryness and the dust. Its sealed interior probably still preserved something quite close to an Earth-normal atmosphere, and he decided against sacrificing that for an experiment in collimation which was probably too delicate to come off anyway. B ut the reminder of noon reminded him also that at home he would be coming up on lunch time. Here on Mars, he would have to give it another title: No-Lunch IF time, or perhaps some title that didn't mention food at all. Medieval man, after all, had gotten along handily on two meals a day, and animals -- carnivores, anyhow -- only had to be fed once. Until further notice, he was going to have to be an animal. All the same, if he had, say, a stack of blueberry pancakes about seven inches high, and a pitcher of cold buttermilk, and... No more of that nonsense, he told himself grimly. You get six ounces of water -- and then back to work. What was next? Potentially he had air pressure; and even more potentially, he had power. But he still did not have oxygen -- only a means of conserving it slightly, not of replenishing it. He had to have a source. Was the clear fluid in the Martian plants water -- or something that was mostly water? If so, that would solve his oxygen problem too, if he kept busy enough, for he could always crack it by electrolysis -- and burn the hydrogen produced after the Sterno ran out, if he could figure out a way to store the hydrogen. He seriously doubted that he could, for the, universe's lightest gas is elusive stuff even under Earthnormal pressures, and he certainly couldn't hope to pump it successfully through rubber tubing -- you might as well hope to pump water through tubing made of sponge. He shook his head savagely. Hydrogen wasn't his problem. The thinness and impoverishment of the air was blurring his thinking -- that. and the fact that he was hungry, though as yet the hunger was probably mostly in his imagination. Oxygen was what he needed -- not hydrogen, oxygen! He opened one of his specimen bottles cautiously and looked at the ambiguous plants inside it. They did not seem much withered; well, maybe the denser, damper air inside the cabin was a feast to them. The little transparent sacs were stiff and glistening, as though they were nearly ready to burst. How to tell if that stuff was water? He popped one experimentally. To his intense disappointment, nothing came out of it -- nothing at all. Inside it was bone dry. He popped another, with the same result. If the sacs didn't store sap, then what could they be for? While he was puzzling about that, he pinched another sac, which promptly confused him by spurting cold liquid into his face, in a fine spray which dried instantly and left him feeling sticky and taut, as though he had just dried off after coming out of the ocean. No doubt about that one -- that had been sap of some sort, containing salts in solution, and probably sugars, too. But what was the solvent? He still could think of no simple chemical test which might answer this question. Yet, after all, what other answer could there be? There is only one universal solvent -- or at least, only one which is stable at the temperature ranges prevalent on Mars. On Jupiter, liquid ammonia might do nicely -- but luckily, he wasn't on Jupiter. Mars was quitebad enough. It had to be water. It just couldn't be anything else. What about the substances that were dissolved in it? They might well be poisonous. He didn't dare take the chance that they weren't -- at least, not yet, not until his food ran out. He would have to distill the sap after he collected it -- more heat needed for that, but perhaps not heat which would consume oxygen; he might power a still from the sun, with an arrangement of burning glasses and mirrors. Come to think of it, a simple mirror arrangement might help warm the cabin during the day, too. Qpeaking of the sun, what had O happened to it? The cabin was getting dark again. Automatically he looked at his watch: #:#. He had been on Mars just a little past one full Earth day. It would not be dusk yet up on the tilted plateau -- only mid-afternoon -- but the floor of the oasis would get no more direct sunlight today, and the temperature would already be dropping. Would there be another brief standstorm shortly after full dark? Probably -- but with luck he would sleep through At. With luck he would sleep through a great deal more than that. In general, the less activity, the better,  beyond what was absolutely necessary to keep himself alive, until -- Until wha't? He discovered that he did not know. Rescue was out of the question; just to begin with, nobody knew where he was. He supposed it would be possible, once his windmill-generator was set up, to build a spark-gap radio transmitter and to make it heard, for he remembered having read somewhere that the amount of power required for effective interplanetary radio was astonishingly small. But that would do him precisely no good at all, for a spark-gap transmitter can send nothing but bursts of noise -- dots and dashes, long noises ' and short ones -- and he did not know any code, Morse or otherwise, except, ironically,... for "help!" and... from the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, which his father somehow knew was Morse for "v" -- also useless. la fact, the spark would do him no good until the first manned formal expedition to Mars was actually in the sky above him. Then he could use it to draw attention to himself, and, come to think of it, the expedition could triangulate on the signal and locate him precisely. Until then, he had many better uses for electricity than producing arbitrarily patterned bursts of radio noise. And the first manned formal expedition to Mars was a long way off yet -- a long way off. At the thought, he sat down on the floor and began to batter one fist slowly, mechanically into the palm of the other hand. Up until now, when be had considered the matter of survival of all, except in the minuteto-minute basis of actually working at it, he had thought in terms of months. But survival and rescue? IP That was going to be a matter of years... and perhaps a matter of decades. No stretching of rations would carry him through that. If he lived at all, he was going to have to live off the land -- off the most alien, the most bitter, the most inhospitable land ever to feel the impact of a human foot. If only he had thought to bring a spare tube -- the only component in the breadboard rig whose failure could not be compensated for by any sort of improvisation! If only, in general  -- since in fairness to himself he would not have asked anyone's forethought to be quite so specific -- it had occurred to him that something, no matter what, might happen to make his stay longer than his plans had called for! There were twenty small articles he might have brought with him, all without overloading his craft in the least, that would have increased his chances of survival many times over twenty-fold. But it was too late now. He was on Mars for ten years to come, and quite possibly for life. Suddenly he realized that it was pitch black in the crate. Where had the day gone? He hadn't accomplished 'a fraction of what needed to be done. In the darkness he could hear his air-pump running. For a moment the sound was obscurely comforting -- at least he had gotten that much done -- until he noticed that the pump's cycle seemed to have developed a slight irregularity; he'd have to check that, first thing in the morning. Quite possibly there was some grit lodged somewhere in the tubing which was throwing the thing off stride. If the obstruction got any bigger it might break one of the glass rollers. In the meantime, through the cold blackness of the Martian night it whispered to him steadily: Forlife forlife forlife forlife forlife forlife forlife . '... VI I t was not strictly true, of course, that no one knew where Dolph was. But for all the good it did him -- or was going to do him in the foreseeable future -- it might just as well have been true. Nanette now knew where he was with some specificity. A discarded map of Mars torn out of a book -- discarded apparently because it was a Flagstaff map, out of an observatory where astronomers had been letting their imaginations abet their eyes about the red planet ever since the days of Lowell -- a scribbled ellipse enclosed the Syrtis Major; and common sense told her that Dolph would most likely have stuck to that planned landing area, simply because so large a green spot, so near the equator, would be almost guaranteed to be the most livable area on Mars, particularly in high summer. That the marked area was at least as big as Alaska did not daunt her at all, since it never occurred to her. Even more than Dolph -- probably because she was younger -- her thought processes were a mixture of sheer brass, naive and hence astounding ingenuity, and glorious inattention to niggling but crucial details which would have scared any adult green -- any adult, that is, who like most could no longer recall the contradictions that had made up his own brain as a teen-ager. Nanette also knew, even more specifically, how Dolph had gotten where he was, and how she was going to get there after him. On this latter count, quite a bit of the work had already been done for her, in the form of Dolph's first flying model -- the one he had taken her aloft in, thus putting the essence of his secret in her hands -- which still stood on the floor of the garage. With the aid of the wiring diagrams she had been able to check the rig -- which, being the original, was even simpler than the one which had actually taken Dolph away -- and, with her soldering iron, to repair the few places in the circuit Dolph's voltmeter showed had failed, or might fail under a work load. The bucket of pitch had suggested to her the necessity of caulking her proposed craft (she might, it must be confessed, not have thought of it without some such hint), and in general, once she kniew the category in which she needed to be thinking, other clues 'hints and helps pwjpped out at her not only from all over the garage, but from memory and from reading, in bewildering profusion. She could not take advantage of all of them. For one thing, she was dead certain that she was in a hurry -- and even under normal circumstances she was not much inclined to be patient. Second, she had not accumulated any money for the venture, and even at the best would have had fewer sources to call upon than Dolph had had. Finally -- and most crucially -- she did not think of everything. But in one major respect she kept her head. She left a note. It read: Dear Mom and Dad, and Mr.  Mrs. Haertel, You won't believe this but you simply must, because it's absolutely true. Dolph has not gone camping. He has gone to Mars, and I have gone after him. I know how this sounds but maybe if we do not come back for a while and you don't find us anywhere else you may think of it again. We haven't eloped or run away or anything stupid like that. It's just that Dolph has discovered some kind of anti-gravity which is very simple to build and run. He took me for a sho,rt run in it and then he built a sort of spaceship in his tree house and went to Mars in it on a junket I know he didn't plan to stay long because he didn't take enough supplies and things with him, but he's not back yet and I have to go because he probably needs help. He marked a place called Syrtis Major on a map of Mars and I'm pretty sure he's stuck somewhere there, so that's where I'm going too. I will IF bring him back if everything goes right. If it doesn't then we really will be in a pickle, but please don't worry. Love and things, Nanette She carefully enclosed the map in the envelope -- but none of Dolph's wiring diagrams, or his calculations, or his notes, or anything else that might have helped anyone to rediscover Dolph's antigravity, let alone put it immediately to useful work. All these she packed neatly into a manila envelope for Dolph, on the chance -- which she thought good -- that he migjit have left some one of them beihind by accident, and would now be needing it. Then she heaved and tugged her own small vessel onto an old sled, hauled it out of the garage into the road and took off -- in darkness, as Dolph had gone. With her went the priceless and useless envelope of paper -- useless to Dolph, and certainly to her; and priceless because, left on Earth, they would have been Dolph's and Nanette's last hope of rescue. The darkness swallowed her with its usual indifference, leaving behind only the heart-stopping, icy flame of a summer night in Iowa, where hardly anyone ever looks up at the eternid stars except the young who love them. A s for Dolph, he was making a wine press, and finding it a harder job than his preliminary sketches had made it seem. Had he had nothing but grapes to think about, he would have given it up at once; but it was his own life he was trying to squeeze. He had yet to discover what else besides water was in the sap-sacs of the tumble-lichens; but when the firey, itching dryness of is mouth, throat and nose in the mornings was complemente# by nosebleeds and a hacking cough, he realized belatedly that he had to keep his cabin air moist, or die of dehydration of the respiratory system. A wick of torn cloth dipped into a Petri dish seemed the logical answer to that -- and yet he hated to use his bottled water for any purpose besides actually drinking it. The obvious solution was to use sap squeezed out of the plants. There was a dividend of sorts to be gained in the process, too. In the course of aimlessly popping the apparently empty sacs and wondering what they contained, and what they were good for if the answer was "nothing," he had thought to pop one near a match-flame. The match had produced a brief, tiny, but quite definite increase in brightness. The "empty" sacs, in short, contained oxygen -- perhaps not the pure stuff, but close to it. Both discoveries made sense. There was not enough water vapor or oxygen in the Martian atmosphere to sustain a plant so much like an Earthly one as this was. The tumblelichen obviously had to crack both out of the basic limonite sands in which it grew. And to maintain sufficient vapor pressure and oxygen tension to support life in its cells, it had to maintain both inside itself -- in that part of the environment the famous physiologist Claude Bernard had called the milieu interieur -- since both were denied it on the outside. Hence if Dolph were to squeeze water out of the plants inside his cabin, he would pick up some oxygen too. Probably no more than a small fraction of what he needed, but every extra molecule was a gain. The cake that was left over after the pressing operation could be piled outside Ae packing crate, against the time when he might need it for bedding, for insulation, for fertilizer -- 'he really had no idea what it might eventually be good for. He did already know, however, that for him the first law of survival was Save it -- no matter what "it" might be. (And many New Englanders might have told him the second and third laws, which were Use it up and Make it do; but he had in fact already arrived at them, although he hadn't put them to himself quite so tersely.) When the wine press was completed, it looked quite like a bellowsframe without its collajsible sides (or what a health-food addict would have called a juicer). The next step he had planned was to begin to make a still from some of his available glassware, while he still had enough oxygen to insure finishing the job -- and before time had insured that he would need stiU more oxygen to complete it, by providing accidents to break some of the glassware. But the day was already waning -- he had long since given up really believing that Martian days were actually longer than Earth days -- and he did not want to break off making the still in the middle. Instead, it seemed like a useful idea to give the press a try. That would take him outside to gather tumble-lichens. He had not been outside for two days, and needed the exercise before he became both too stiff and too weak to move. The cramped quarters, the cold nights and the low gravity were conspiring to rob him of strength. He attached to his belt a length of rope to bale up the plants with, donned his heavy clothes and his respirator, and crawled out onto the powdery sands. He was just in time for the evening dust-up, which nearly' froze him before he could get into the lee of his ship, but it was quickly over and seemed to have done him no permanent damage. He resolved, nevertheless, to check on how close dusk might be before venturing outside again; there would be no harvesting for him this evening. B efore starting back, he indulged a glance at the sky. It was quite black at the zenith andalmost all the way to the horizons, though there was a remaining glow of steel blue along the edge of the crater behind which the small and there seemed to be thousands of them, many more than had ever been visible in the Iowa skies even during the best conditions of seeing. He doubted that Mars would ever allow him the time to relearn to IF pick out the constellations, although their shapes could not be much changed here. All the same, there were two unusual objects in the sky right now. One was a dim spark of light skimming over the northern edge of the crater. It had to be one of the two satellites -- nothing else in the Martian sky could move visibly -- and of them, the choice was probably Deimos, the larger and farther out of the two; he was almost surely too far south on the planet to be able to see Phobos, even from up on the plateau. Even Deimos was only a dim spark, very far removed indeed from the low-hanging, looming Deimos of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars. Had it not been moving, he would have been unable to pick it But the Other unusual object was something about which there could be no argument, though Dolph had never seen it before in just this way. or Sirius, and -- though none of the Martian stars twinkled, for the atmosphere was far too thin for that -- with a steady intensity which marked it as not a star at all, but a planet. Furthermore, though it glared as blue-white as any of the stellar giants, there was also a greenness about its light shared by no star Dolph had ever seen, then or now. Looking up at it, Dolph felt himself slowly drowning in an invisible sea of homesickness. He would not have believed it possible that anyone could feel his whole heart and soul so drawn toward what seemed to be no more than a point of light sure, but only one among so many. Then the Earth went out For a moment he thout his eyes had failed him, and brushed one glove across his goggles. In the next, a sudden shocking suspicion of disaster hit him, one of those nightmares with which everyone has lived since Hiroshima. But if the Earth had blown up, then -- He was left no more time for guessing, for other stars around where the Earth had been were going out too -- and then, just for a second, there flashed in the black space near the zenith a sort of lozenge of reddish-yellow light, like one side of a falling box. I t was a falling box, which had briefly caught the last of the sunlight before sinking below the lip of the crater. Now he could no longer judge its fall except by the spreading area of starlessness above him. It was -- it had to be, there was no other possibility -- another crate like his own. It was heading straight down for him, and it was coming far too fast. He knew that it would do him no good to run. He might just as well die under it, as be in the clear if it were going to smash his own home. He stood rooted to the freezing ground, watching. The area of blackness grew. Then suddenly it seemed to stop growing for a moment, and veer off to the northwest. In the next instant, it was no longer between him and the stars, and was lost in the night. IF IF  Short Story When Feodor was lost, if was an accident. But when he was found again -- it was a total disasterl T he thick-spectacled man was unimpressive to look at. He was in his fifties, small, slight of build; his appearance could be be described as unkempt. Yet when he showed up suddenly in Room # carrying a little black box, eyelids clicked open and voices halted in midsentence. The reaction was justified. Nobody was supposed to know about Room # -- nobody, at least, who wasn't specifically cleared by the Prime Minister. And those cleared were very few and very well known to each other. And nobody in Room # knew the slight, unkempt man with the little black box. Chief secret agent Chlebnik sprang into action. Springing wasn't easy for Chlebnik -- he weighed two hundred seventy-seven pounds. Nonetheless, he jumped from his chair, directed two office workers to latch onto the uninvited newcomer and, seeing his order accomplished, quickly passed through the three doors and dim hallway to Room #-J, the existence of which was known only to himself, Palakov and the Prime Minister. When he swung open the door to Palakov's office, Chlebnik was surprised to see his superior had a visitor. The visitor's figure contrasted sharply to that of Palakov, whose rolls of fat made even Chlebnik look lean. The visitor was a slight, unkempt man wearing thick spectacles and holding a little black box. S teel-black eyes greeted Chlebnik. "How do you explain thisV Palakov said icily. Chlebnik did his best. "But... but I left this man in #, well guarded. I came here to report his presence to you." "And he reached here before you? How is that possible? And how did he get into # in the first place? How did he get past the locks, the outside guards, the inside guards?" Difficult questions. But Chlebnik had answered difficult questions before. At the university he'd been an accomplished practitioner in language, logic, debate and dialectic. But it seemed impossible to handle Palakov's questions in terms of Capitalistic Oppression of the Masses. So Chlebnik said nothing and simply stared at the little man with the box in his hand. "Perhaps -- if I might attempt an explanation?" the little man offered timidly. "By all means, attempt." Palakov' directed his visitors to chairs with a gesture of his fleshy hand. The little man cleared his throat. "Tlie loyal party member and servant of the state who sits before you is named Feodar Rodumetoff. In recent years I've been under assignment to the Prime Minister himself, working on a special device -- this box, which -- " "One moment," Palakov broke in. "Rodumetoff, you say? Strange, I recall nothing of you." He motioned Chlebnik to a large steel filing cabinet across the room. "I assure you, Feodar Rodumetoff is the only name by which I've been known since birth. But perhaps you don't recognize me because you're new here." New? Palakov reared back at the use of the word in connection with his term of office. After all, he'd held this post five years -- a long tenure considering the political setbacks his country's statesmen were often exposed to. "New? "What I mean is, you weren't here when I last was -- when I received the assignment from Premier Stalin and -- " He was interrupted at the same instant by both listeners. "Stalin? Beads of sweat covered Palakov's face. "Exactly when did you receive this... assignment from -- Premier Stalin?" While Feodar considered the question, Chlebnik fingered frantically through the files. "Directly ater the war, I believe. At that time I was working on -- " He adjusted his glasses and surveyed Palakov warily through the thick lenses -- "on another project. I should hazard a guess that it was around # or #. Sometime around there, I'm sure." "And you've been working in isolation since then?" "Rodumetoff, Feodar!" Chlebnik roared triumphantly, pulling a large blue card from the files and laying it on Palakov's desk. "Isolation? Well, you might call it that, I don't suppose I did get out of my workshop too often." Palakov look up from the card. "But what about the radio, Pravda, Izvestiya? "No time for that sort of thing. IF My subscriptions to the scientific journals even lapsed. The immediate work at hand occupied my mind entirely." Palakov looked back at the blue card and reread the statement that Feodar Rodumetoff had been executed for the good of the state in one or another of the purges that followed discovery of Stalin's treasonous activities. Thinking to himself that somebody was going to pay heavily for such stupidity, he smiled good-naturedly at Feodar. "Well, then. Comrade Rodumetoff. I trust that so much time dedicated to our people's good has been fruitfully employed?" "Indeed yes," Feodar said enthusiastically, waving the little box. "This device will revolutionize -- he noticed the startled faces of Palakov and Chlebnik -- "er, will be f tremendous value in both war and espionage." "And just what does it do?" Palakov asked. In answer, Feodar turned a knob on the top of the box. A slight humming sound began, and then disappeared. So did Feodar Rodumetoff. "God!" Chlebnik exclaimed. "Comrade Chlebnikr Palakov said sternly. "Excuse it, comrade, a slip of the tongue." The telephone rang then. Palakov answered, listened and placed the receiver back on the hook slowly. His face went white. "That," he said, " -- that was Feodar Rodumetoff, calling from your officer C hlebnik had been sent back to his duties in Room #. In #-J Palakov listened in fascination as Feodar explained the workings of the miraculous box, he held securely in his hands. "So you see -- a slot and two knobs. The holder of the box becomes invisible if he inserts his finger in the slot. When this knob is turned, your body dematerializes and can pass easily through solid structures -- walls, for instance. To materialize again, you simply turn this second knob." "Unbelievable! The possibilities of the thing are astounding," Palakov said, his jowls suddenly frowning. 'Tell me, who else knows of your project?" Feodar smiled proudly. "No one. I worked quite alone. It was all very secret and, besides that, there arc very few with technical knowledge of the sort necessary to aid in the box's construction." "And where are the other nnodels? I'm rather concerned for their safety." "There are none. This is the only one of its kind." "The plans for it, then -- where are they?" "Here," said Feodar, tapping his forehead. "Adequately safe from theft." "Excellent. In that case, if you'll hand that box over to me. I'll keep it here under strict security. And now, comrade, leave your address with Chlebnik and return home until you get word from me. It will be soon, I assure you." True to his word, immediately after Feodar left the office, Palakov telephoned orders to Ohlebnik. "Our records show him as dead. Aside from considering the danger to the state that the man represents, we must keep our records accurate," he told his subordinate. Palakov then made a second call and arranged for Chlebnik's liquidation. He had to be removed, of course -- he knew about the box. The box. Palakov touched it admiringly with his meaty right hand. "The possibilities are astounding," he'd told Feodar. And they were. Soldiers carrying the box would be invincible. Bullets would go right through them, harming nothing. An entire city equipped with the device could withstand even atomic attack. And espionage. Where couldn't spies go, what couldn't they do? What possibilities! Naturally the device would have to be tested thoroughly. He drew his poised finger back quickly and looked self-consciously over his shoulder. Well, why not? he asked himself. Somebody had to do the testing. The pudgy finger poised again and entered the slot. He was invisible. He turned the first knob. He was dematerialized. Weightless, nothingness -- what a wonderful feeling! Strange, he almost thought he'd sink through the floor. But of come -- weightless, he had nothing for gravity to act upon. But he could direct his body, he found. There, through the wall -- actually through a wall! And another one. He was out in # now. Chlebnik sat dumbly happy at his desk. Poor Chlebnik, soon to be a state sacrifice. Ah, well -- ah! Now, how was it Palakov never noticed that shapely file clerk before? He chuckled. A little pinch, perhaps? Surely, what was a little pinch between comrades? There. No reaction? Of course. He was dematerialized completely. He'd have to give the second knob a little turn. Odd. The second knob was just to the left of -- When he realized there was no longer a second knob, Palakov screamed. Of course, nobody could hear him. I n his dusty workshop, Feodar Rodumetoff took a small knob from his pocket and screwed it in the top of one of the sixty boxes in neat rows on a long lab table. Admiring the completed device, he checked to make sure he'd forgotten nothing. Yes, he'd given Chlebnik an incorrect address. Yes, he'd sent the coded message to Norway that "P" was no longer a problem. Yes, he'd stolen the blue identification card that labeled him dead. Dead, was he? How well he remembered the night they tried! How lucky he was that he'd perfected the first working model of his invention. He'd made up his mind then and there how he'd get even. He hefted the new box and headed for the door. He stopped short, a strange look coming over his face. He'd have to check his maps again. He'd forgotten the Prime Minister's IP IF  Novelette The police methods of tomorrow always work -- except this time, when the victim did not exist! I I t started innocently enough. No, strike that. Innocence was long gone. It started the usual way for me; I was sent for. Did that sound strange? I suppose it was. There were very few of us, at least of those of us who had jobs worth having, who went to their work instead of having it come to them. I had to put up with it, though. A policeman's lot was not a happy one. My bedroom alarm sounded. My sleeping accommodations were strictly solo, even though the room was privileges," as the ancients used to say. I did have rank. The alarm was quiet; I woke easily. That is, it was easy for whoever or whatever woke me, but on me it was murder. When I was waked at night, it usually was. I didn't stop for details, just the place. There were few reliable witnesses, and I gave up listening to gory details when a ravishing and ravished blonde turned out to be a middle-aged male heart-attack victim. My police bug looked just like a heli-cab, but it was a quick animal of metal and plastic with more horsepower than standard. That didn't show. It also had manual controls and fuel cells, so I could leave the roadways. I never needed to. I was really not the adventurous sort. The robot traffic controls phased me through non-stop. I got there fast, and most of the time that was of the moment thing, and thereby either very quick or very difficult, or somebody was so extremely clever as to tie a noose around his own neck. A figurative noose; we didn't use the real thing any more. There were more humane ways of ultimate disposal, and in most cases restraining was a better solution, socially. That was not my worry. This was going to be different. I knew it immediately, I felt it in my bones. Different, and a new kind of torment. I t could have been a sex crime. They're always bad, but this smelt worse. The victim was male, I guessed his age at seventeen, possiblv nineteen. He was either nude or naked, depending on whether he wanted to be that way. Had wanted to be that way. He lay on his right side, legs bent up acutely. It did not look like a foetal position; for one thing, his' trunk was bent back rather than forward. One of his arms was under him, the other thrown back with the elbow bent in a way unbroken bones could not manage. He was heavily bruised, and his face was bloody. His scalp had been shaved smooth. Bald. I looked up. Cabs passed a few feet overhead, two or three going by within a few seconds. It was going to be interesting, finding out which of them had carried him here. I corpse had been pushed or rolled over the railing of a taxi. The stars, far beyond, twinkled at me, laughing. I turned back to the boy. That's all he was, that's all 'he had been, a boy. He had been dead long enough so that rigor mortis had come and gone. The robosurg would find out quickly how long. His fingertips would tell who he had been. Then, a canvass of his family, his friends, his credit card account, that would be it. There would be questions to answer, of course. I wondered how he had been killed. Oh well, the robosurg would find that out, too, and maybe give a clue about where. I wondered if he waited long to die. The expression on his face told me that he had known that he was being had. Many go limp, others stay stiff. I wondered who had killed him. How could the murderer ever believe that he could get away from us, from me? As the robots moved in and picked him up, I saw something. A wound in his abdomen, about twenA stabbing. I hadn't seen one of those in -- how long? -- fifteen years. He hadn't necessarily died of it. The opening was small, and we didn't have an awful lot of knives IF around with long, narrow blades. It was too low to have been aimed at a vital spot, anyway. It might have penetrated only into the flat belly muscles and done no important damage except cause bleeding. And pain. There was little external blood. Either he had been washed, or he had been practically dead when he was stabbed. The meat wagon lifted him away and I examined the alley again. We were outside the dome area of City proper, in the almost deserted warehouse storage sector. There was an amusement park near here -- an amusement park in the new sense -- and that accounted for the volume of cab traffic overhead. It might also account for the murder. The unwritten law was repealed, but now and then it was still enforced. A post thirty-five husband still could easily take exception to his wife's housebreaking a teen-age boy in the fashion that is as old as mankind, and, for that matter, most of the other high mammals. Over ithe past twenty years, human feet had probably walked in this alley ten or twelve times, very likely less than that. I might have been the second. It was a robot area, a working place,' not like the stevedore stages where the descendants of men whose muscles had once provided necessities for them and their families still play-acted the earning of a living. A robot found the body, its sensors identified it as possibly human (confused, no doubt, by its failure to radiate heat) and it had requested a management decision. Management decisions were furnished by watchmen (custodial specialists) who responded to such calls -- when, as and if there were any. I would have to get a statement from the man. In the meantime, I went through the alley again If I were asked what were the most important differences between human beings and robots, my profession would have forced me to say, "Robots are neat." Not always, but exceptions were accidental: leaking oil, possibly paint scraped off going around a comer where specified clearances did not obtain and the like. But essentially they were neat. They didn't leave litter, like cigarette butts, nor were they careless. Nor stupid, if they were properly programmed. My runner was parked at the end of the alley. It couldn't enter unless I used my overriding controls, because there were no guide tracks here. I was hardened to such things by my occupation, and I didn't mind a walk of a couple of hundred meters. (My secret was, it was easier to move around on the job than to spend time in a gymnasium -- and much more productive.) I wanted light, so I went back to the bug and removed one of the headlights (that was another extra on a police machine) and carried it back on its extension cord. The alley was bare and clean. The sheet metal roof of one of the low buildings was crushed where the body had fallen on it. In giving, it had protected the corpse, so I was grateful. There was a fourteen month old fax sheet that I tonged up; most likely just wind-blown debris. I was ready to leave when I saw something else, lying near the spot where the corpse had been. It hadn't been there when I came in, I had looked that area over carefully, so it might have been in or on the body, and dislodged when it was removed. It could have come from the murder scene. I tonged it. A piece of paper. No, cardboard. less than half that thick and some was burned, the other had been torn. Far too small to carry a meaningful fingerprint, and the odds were that any fragments would be, at best, blurred. What manner of thing was it? I directed routine autopsy and identification procedures, and advised that I would not want the results before ten the next morning. I went home and back to bed. On the way, I also directed that the alley be sealed off, and that robot cleaners be sent in with directions to turn over anything not necessarily found in such a place to my office. Which meant me. Last, I left a "first-thing" call for my secretary. I didn't know why, but I had a bothersome feeling. Call it a premonition, call it a male manifestation of the old maid syndrome (after all, I was a bachelor; at the age of forty-seven, a professional bachelor), call it anything you want, but as for me, it warned me to leave no tern unstoned and save up bricks for the seagulls, early in the game. I went back to bed, but I couldn't sleep. Perhaps I would have, but I couldn't get my mind out of that alley, away from that boy. Somebody once told me that I was a misogynist, a woman hater. I pretended to think about the idea, then announced that it was false, untrue, even libelous. I was impartial. I was not a misogynist, I was a misanthrope. I hated everybody. I did. I hated people. Not persons, There was so much good in the worst of us, and all that. But that part wasn't in control when we got together in groups. I never understood why the machine picked me for my job. In one way I did, of course. Who was better qualified than I to catch a murderer? But there were others who were cleverer, more quick witted and nimble tongued, better persuaders, with pleasanter personalities. Was it only because I was me, because I learned the lesson that I was diminished in the loss of any of my fellow men? Because I had had to learn that lesson? Why did I so fear and hate all death -- except my own? I lay on my bed until dawn lighted my room. My apartment was my only ostentation. Larger than I needed, although by no means as large as my position entitled me to, high in the city above dome level and open to the morning sun. I had three full rooms, my four meter by three meter bedroom, my office (five meters long) and my "other" room for necessary social functions, decorated as an old-fashioned living room. IF I'he other paraphernalia beloved by my forerunners was disposed of. M'Pher, who had the position briefly just before me, actually had a human operate his bug -- and that a special, oversize monster he called an "official limousine." I did not have to add to my own honor and prestige, and therefore I reduced such things in keeping with my having work to do. Besides, I was fat and forty -- and bald. Such things merely made me look ridiculous. Amend that. More ridiculous. II I was sitting on the side of my bed, trying to decide whether to give up my pretense and admit that I was awake, or force myself to lie down again, when the Vise chime sounded. It would have to be Betty, answering my call. I said "Hello" and she came on. There was no picture; I didn't hold with having a 'vision pickup in the bedroom. Primarily because I let myself go to seed. I was no vision, just a sight. Her voice was bright, cheerful, stimulating and therefore altogether an obscenity at that hour. "What's up, boss?" she aked, as if she damned well didn't know. This time I'd fix her, her and her antique mania. I'd gone through the same phase myself, a long time ago, and I remembered the perfect phrase: "We've got a live one." Ideal, midtwentieth trite verbiage. I could almost hear her strip gears mentally, whatever that meant (it was another of those expressions, having to do with putting a machine hors de combat somehow). Of course, she was a person. Her secretary was a robot. She boggled at the expression I used, then recognized it as indicating that we had a critical emergency. An emergency, naturally, was any situation which required immediate correction. A critical emergency was one where things would get worse rapidly, while a non-critical did not promise further decay. "What sort?" I did like her. She was smart, reliable, flexible and even quite attractive. Luckily, she never found out how to make the most of her good points. Homicide department was no place for happily married people. Homicide department was no place for happy people. At least, we never had any. "Kid. Boy, specifically. Post puberty, pre fuU physical growth maturity. Estimated age, seventeen, plus two . minus one. Violent murder. Abdominal stab wound, marks of beating. Precise cause of death undetermined. Found by robot in warehouse area." "No chance of accident?" "He had been stripped as naked as a peeled egg. Not a stitch on him, no trace of his clothing. Dumped from a copter. Oh, yes, his head was shaved. All his hair, except his eyebrows." "Just his head?" I thought back. "Yes." A long pause, while she thought Freudian thoughts. I knew she would come to the same conclusion I had when he shaw the body. When she was ready, I continued, "I asked for a report at ten, but it's probably finished now. I ordered a quick freeze until the next of kin can take the delecti off our hands, of course." She didn't need to answer, so she didn't. What I was describing was as routine as eating breakfast. I left her there and went into the bath. The shower came on as she sX)ke to me again, but the 'phone compensated by increasing volume. Naturally, I didn't have a 'vision pickup in the bath, either. Many did. "Any ideas?" she asked. "Only the obvious, and it's still quite possible." A jealous husband, or more likely boy friend. A man whose woman was cooling off, and who resented finding out why. But why the beating? Ninety per cent of the time, anyone caught with another male's female just runs. It might have been that he had no way to escape. Or he could have made the mistake of getting caught with his pants only half off. If there were a fight, that kind of fight, though, it shouldn't have lasted long enough to account for all the damage. He looked as if someone, or some two or more, had kicked him around while he was helpless. Betty didn't say another word while I washed and shaved. When I entered my office, her full-length image was on the screen. She didn't look at me. She faced me, but she had dialed a different picture and now she manipulated a hand control so that she could turn the subject around and examine all sides, all features. Finally she switched it off. "I go along with everything you said," she agreed. No mean admissiem. She meant what I had thought as well as what I had spoken. I had four secretaries before I found one who would fight with me to my satisfaction. Not physically, of course; we rarely see each other personally. The last commissioner of homicide, M'Pher, had had a mammoth organization. Mammoths couldn't have been too well organized -- they were extinct. So when I was pulled in from the outside I made changes. Where there had been at least twenty persons reporting directly, there was now one secretary. The number of people in my department, compared to the wildest dreams of a commissioner in the early days of scientific investigation, would not have been believed. And in the fact that I had managed to reduce the administration materially -- well, that hadn't happened since Gideon. I had the same kind of artillery Gideon had. I hadn't let anyone go. Good men were hard to find and dedicated men almost impossible. That was the truth, even with twenty-five or thirty to apply for every valid job that opened. Here was I, in a real position, and I didn't even ask for it! Halh! The number of cases per capita of population wouldn't have been believed a few years back, either. It was small. Murder was not popular, these days. There were a go number of reasons. One of them was that murder wasn't easy to get away with any more. IF T here was a time, say in the troubled twentieth, when many killings simply weren't recognized. That was practically ended when a trained post-mortem of body and surroundings was made for each and every death. There had to be some kind of use for all the surplus manpower. Investigation was improved, step by step. Robots were handy; they could pick up a specimen without contaminating it with their own life processes. In this case, except for the watchman who confirm the finding of the body and checked to insure that it was probably dead, no human hand had touched the corpse since the murderer pushed it out of his cab. I assumed that he did have a cab, but that was safe. The number of private machines in this part of City was so small as to be negligible, not more than twenty or thirty thousand, including those like mine that were official duty cars, used by servicemen or inspectors for the various public systems. City was a big place. The northern extreme was called Bangor, the other end Key West. It wasn't continuous, of course. The segment that was my beat covered what used to be northern Rhode Island and eastern Massachhsetts, centering more or less over Taunton. We had many domes, not one. Everything from Warwick through the Attleboros came under one patchwork monster, and an irregular trail staggered off northward to the Boston complex, while another hooked east over Taunton to Fall River, New Bedford and parts of Cape Cod. All this was my beat. I was commissioner. I investigated every murder that took place, up to a dozen a year. Only a dozen. Two hundred years ago, when the population was a third of what I had, there might have been two or three dozen a year just in Boston. There was more to the reduction of homicide than just having plenty of policemen. Part of it was, well, public relations. Press agentry, they used to call it. "Murderers get caught." The lesson started in grammar school. "Killers can't get away." Oh, some still tried, and any kind of investigation was less than perfect. But if somebody did manage, he certainly couldn't go around bragging. That was what I did with my excess personnel. Training. Visiting schools, athletic clubs and any and every place where the young held out. When an adult needed retraining, he'd be turned over to someone perhaps more forceful than I. He was restrained very effectively. Right from scratch. Just as I was. I set my department up on a cell basis. Most cases I didn't deal with myself, except to meddle around at the start. There was an old question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? I did. The machine watched me. I didn't care who watched the machine. m I had been sitting back, watching Betty. Let us be frank: she was an old maid. I was an old bachelor. which sounded a lot nicer, but to all practical ends added up to equivalents. Betty and I understood each other. But just the same we liked each other, so I imagine we were friends. She'd never had a man. Certainly not full time, and I suspected never at all. She was no prude, however. If she had been neo-Vic, she wouldn't have been able to take the hard knocks her job gave her. That "modesty" nonsense that was so dominant in public thinking was, to us, for the birds. She had been examining our customer. I was curious to find out what she had noticed that I hadn't, how her opinions agreed with mine and where they differed. As I said, she was strong-willed, and if she didn't see things the same way I did, she'd let me know. Quickly, sharply, and without any pretense of respect. I could Jiave loved her. I probably did, but I needed her too much to admit it. I watched her, not him. I had seen him, even though he hadn't been set up for display then. I had seen him as he had been found, and I didn't want to change my mental picture until I had extracted all the data from it that was to be had. I hadn't touched the body. I didn't expect to, for all of that. Most likely, no human hands would ever contact it again. Betty switched to me and asked, "Do you want me to punch in my own description?" Of course I did, and she knew it. She was doing so. Her asking was an apology for not IF speaking to me immediately. I was perfectly content to wait. I punched the order-transmit stud and asked for the identification of the body. The green light on my wall that meant the computer was operating flashed, and the datascreen lighted. The words appeared, "Subject not registered." I pushed Cancel, then Query. Was it a malfunction? The reply to Query came immediately. The datascreen lighted again, this time with "Functioning normally." T ordered a new identification search, and waited. Before, the time needed had varied between barely perceptible and a half second. Now it stayed on in the green. Ten seconds, twelve, fifteen. After twentytwo seconds, the screen lighted again. "Subject not registered." "Subject not registered." That meant there was no record anywhere on Earth, accessible to the computer, of the person who had become our dead body. No birth certificate (which would have carried fingerprints), no school records, no credit cards, nothing. Betty watched her screen, too. They were hooked up in parallel when we talked, so that both would have the same supplementary information. Her face was pale. Mine was probably white. "Data request, all missing persons who come within ninety per cent of characteristics of subject." In other words, how many people were there whose whereabouts we didn't know, who might have been mistaken for the dead boy? That would take a few seconds. Tt did. Seven. The list of names ran up the screens, and the machine had been generous. After each name, a per cent. The Grst was ninety-seven point thirteen; the last ninety point zero one. "Betty, this time we earn our keep. Oh, yes, under the circumstances, I think I'm justified in putting our wonder boy -- or boy wonder -- under permanent hold." I did. I didn't do it often -- never if the identification were quick unless there were something that looked strange, or some data that might be needed. After all, cemetery space was scarce. It certainly wasn't fair for a person to lock up almost a hundred kilos of perfectly reusable biological materials after he was done with them. Normal disposal was by cremation, with the ashes turned over to the next of kin if he wanted them. That way, most of the substance was reclaimed from the exhausted gases. Most of the time what was left wasn't wanted either, and the whole thing was recycled. When there was a question, though, it was a good idea to keep the evidence on hand. The work and expense of embalming were substantially lessened. It was once a difficult, expensive and time-consuming process, and the structure and mechanics of the body were so extensively changed that the advisability, from a practical standpoint, wasn't great. Anciently -- very anciently -- processing the remains took over a month. All the internal organs were removed andthe entire thing was treated with bitumen. (The word "mummy" meant pitch. Did you know?) By early modem times, say late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, this treatment was faster and better. So much better that a post-mortem performed on John Paul Jones a century after his death verified the original physician's opinion. It was still rare for a body to be treated this way and quite expensive. It would be honest also to say that it was rare for the treatment to be that effective. For us it was very fast and cheap. A coffin was taken 'from stock, a glass tube, open at one end and a flattened ellipsoid in cross section. The corpse was put inside, the tube filled with salt water and its open end sealed with a glass plate fused in place. TTie specimen was irradiated, not in a pile but in a high voltage electron gadget, so that body, supporting fluid and transparent coffin were sterilized. Glass was impenetrable by microorganisms, and the boy would not require further attention until he were removed for incineration, or the glass broken. I turned to Betty. The list of names still glowed on the datascreens. "Well?" I asked. She looked at the list, then back at me. She weighed facts and considered alternatives, including resignation. She gave in. "Suppose I take half," she volunteered. "Good girl." It wouldn't be fun. She'd be 'vising people, telling them that, although according to the computer it couldn't be their son, brother or sweetheart we had, we were establishing identity for a body, and IF iuld they care to make a positive identification, either negative or affirmative? It would not be true to say that tact was required. Tact wouldn't be enough. A strong stomach would be necessary. I took the top half of the list. They'd be closer misses, since the descriptions more nearly tallied. In a few minutes the body would be ready, I waited for the door chime. (Yes, I was keeping it in my apartment. Where else?) I set it up so that the scanners viewed it up from about the diaphragm. If it had been female. I'd have dollied in on the upper shoulders. My predecessor, old M'Pher, had been neoVictorian, or at least he let the neo-Vics run him, and he had any bodies that were bottled dressed first. I didn't. Not to save the cost of clothing, but because there might be an injury, a scar or a birthmark that clothing would hide. A couple of centuries back, a spy -- in case the word is strange, it means a kind of political criminal -- was caught because he tried to substitute for a person who had been circumcised. The spy hadn't. The kid wasn't pretty in the tube. His face still showed stark terror. He must have waited, expecting death, perhaps for hours or even days. He was ugly with bruises, from one of his eyes that had been blackened on down to his wrists and ankles that were rubbed raw. He had been gagged, too. It was a shame. Not for what he was -- I never believed that he was first class citizen material -- but for what he might have been. He floated in the water. It was somewhat salty, to match his natural blood chemistry. That way there wouldn't be any tendency for water either to seep into the body or leach out. We didn't want him swelling or shriveling. There wasn't any chemical need for water, but it supported him. If he were left lying in "an empty tube, his weight would flatten tissues, change his appearance. That doesn't happen to living people, because they don't really stay still in one posture long. But he would. As soon as Betty was tied in, so that she could project the same picture of him that I showed, I asked for the names and 'vise numbers of the next of kin. It was just as bad a job as I was afraid it would be. There were altogether too many who wanted to believe the worst. There were even more who were too curious, who wanted to take over the remote pickup and run their own examinations. I didn't dislike persons, but I hate people. I was not squeamish. I didn't care if I embarrassed every neo-Vic in the country; if it would have helped me find his killer I would have showed his bare backside and equally naked frontside to every man, woman and child in Greater North America. But I still didn't like either the carelessly inquisitive nor the sensation seeker. I n the end, it was negative. I asked for the next ten per cent, but these I took in groups, with a conference bridge on the 'visor circuits. It meant that I couldn't see faces, but there were other benefits to be realized from it. There is a distribution curve, a "bean" curve, that meant that as the number of percentage points of similarity decreased, the number of possibilities -- missing people -- would increase rapidly toward a peak. From seventy per cent down, we sent postcards, with three dimensional photographs. We kept right on going down to cellar level, covering every person missing on planet Earth for the last hundred fifty years. I even got one. I sent a note to the Asteroid Legation, as well. It shouldn't have been possible for him to be an off-worlder, a Moon boy or conie, because we should have received records of his coming in, with passport photos and ID prints, but I couldn't reject mere improbabilities. After all, we were supposed to be unstoppable. It would be plenty bad if we didn't find the killer; but if we couldn't even find out who the victim was, it'd be much worse. I wouldn't have to worry about it long. At least not professionally, because it'd be someone else's problem. I wouldn't be commissioner any more. I knew someone who would like that very much. The department would be hit where it would be hurt the most, in the reputation. Our success in preventing crimes was responsible for much of our success in solving them. The last time a murder had gone detected and unsolved, it had started a landslide with thirty-three separate removals in a single year. "Removals" was a euphemism. One factor that made it difficult to hide a crime was our speed and efficiency in identification. A person's fingerprints were recorded at birth. Then they were checked every six months when he turned in his credit card. At the ages of five, seven, ten, fourteen, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-eight, thirty-five and fifty, his Bertillon measurements were recorded for statistics. Money was a commodity most people, except antique nuts, never heard of. The reason was that our society was too rich to afford it. We had something better. True enough. Go way back when -- say to medieval or renaissance times. People were poor. The way we looked at it, even the rich were poor. The Borgia and Medici families couldn't afford strawberries in January. The amounts of gold and silver available were almost constants. The accumulation from year to year was tiny. Back then, with people generally without wealth, it was feasible to melt down the metals and make money -- tokens of value -- from it. Actual wealth increased year by year, faster than the people to share it. It came partly from exploitation of new sources, partly by profit realized on past investments, partly from better use of man's muscle and brain power. Ships, for instance, sailed faster, were more likely to reach port and carried larger cargoes. The greater profit encouraged heavier investments. With wealth increasing, the need for symbols of value overstepped the availability of precious metals. Substitutes were found, sometimes even produce like tobacco, but paper was the first adequate replacement. By the twentieth century it pushed gold IF out of circulation. By then silver had become too useful for such a valueless purpose. P aper money had started on its way out before it was really in, replaced by a couple of new inventions applied to something older than the Merchant of Venice: credit. The computer could do the work of uncountable clerks, do it fast, do it cheap and do it with little likelihood of error. Especially when credit cards were used. Credit cards. They became the universal symbol of worth. An unsung genius started using them to print with magnetic inks, so the computers could read them without human assistance and error. Once they were issued by practically every company, just as once almost any bank had printed its own money. With a credit card for each purpose, for use in a single store or to purchase auto fuel from a single chain of vendors, they multiplied unchecked until one person might carry a dozen or twenty of them. Then they became a Government monopoly, and our prime weapon, outside of the people . on our staff. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, except maybe  the birchers and stilyegi (that was during their time). NoV each person carried one. It was purposeless to steal one, because for any purchase of value it was still necessary to scrawl a signature, and the life of the card was limited. The cards weren't all the same, by any means. Mine was blue and yellow. Depending on the way I put it in the slot, I could charge purchases either to my own account or my department. Others had the same feature, but their charges were reviewed by their superiors. Most people had the plain green cards of the private citizen, or the red of restricted credit, and there were the yellow of the pensioner and the white of the minor child. They were handy for us... Whatever you -- anyone purchased, in services or material objects, was charged by them. A person couldn't view a fax sheet outside his home, mount a walkway, take a cab or buy a disposuit without a card. That meant he couldn't make a getaway or disguise himself without leaving a printed record. Unlike taxis, there was no charge for walkways. But safety's sake required limited access, and before a person could get on the moving belts, he had to slip his card into a slot. That way the computers know just how many people there are on each route, so they can adjust speeds and directions to prevent traffic problems. True? There were violet credit cards, that were used by machines to make purchases. The credit card was the real weapon against the criminal. Incidentally, when I said "criminal," I meant murderer. I was a specialist. IV M y admission chime sounded from the front door. "Open," I ordered, and Betty came in. This was the third time that she had been in my apartment office in the fourteen years she had worked with me, and the fifth time we had met face to face. I was expecting her. I figured she was as bothered as I was. She walked to the boy. His tube coffin was standing in the corner of the room, away from the wall. It wasn a bearing so that it could be turned freely, and she pushed it to start it revolving. "Pity," she said, her first word since she entered. I wondered why. Did she, like me, resent the world losing the possible benefits he might have brought, had he lived out his life? Did she feel sympathy for the boy's parents, his possible brothers and sisters, or his probable girl friend? Or was it the evidence of sadism, the inflicting of pain and injury on him because it was sweet to his torturer? I wouldn't ask. I was afraid that it might be simply the loss of a male, of the affection and sex she might never have known, when she could have made such pleasant use of them. T did not criticize her hunger. We who worked for homicide were miserable, wretched people, sick of the world and sick with the world. Was I in my own heart afraid that if I were not so twisted as I was, I would no longer know happiness? I was too full of the milk of human kindness, and in me it had gone sour. She stepped back. "He was bound and gagged while he was still alive." Not only that, he had fought to get loose. His wrists were raw and bloody, and his ankles were bruised from struggling, and the gag had torn his mouth. He might have been unattended for some time after his capture. His body had been washed. He had been at least partially covered some time during his torture, because the traces of blood over his abdomen showed a curious weave pattern where it had glued material to his body. It could have been a tarp or something of the sort, instead of clothing. The wound was over eight centimeters below the navel. Whether or not it was made to kill, it was made to cause pain, so it was kept well away from the critical areas, such as the heart. He must have been lying flat on his back, because the blood had run down to the crotch and then down again to whatever surface he had been lying on. In back, he showed red all the way up to the nape of the neck. His scalp was shaved. That was curious. No -- I was curious, that was strange. Betty confirmed my thinking. "Possibly a symbolic castration." "Um," I agreed, then, "I wonder why the symbolism? There was nothing at all preventing the real thing." True. He had been gagged, and therefore unable to scream any more in agony than in terror. He had been bound, and could neither fight nor escape. He had undoubtedly tried all three. I ordered a credit-card check of all copters that had crossed the warehouse area less than two days before the body was found, against a list of the relatives, friends, etc., of missing people. That would take hours of computer time, but it was a must. IF T he key to the problem was the identity of the victim. I wrote off my first guess, that it was a sexlinked crime. If the corpse were supposed to remain an unknown, the clothing might have been removed because it would tell too much. It would not have been possible to provide other raiment, because the purchase would be traceable. Credit cards were used for everything from bubble gum to asteroid ships, and it was impossible to buy anything and not leave a record of who bought it. I was bothered by something, bothered very much. I had come to a conclusion, made a deduction from valid facts. What annoyed me was that I didn't know what it was. What was I hiding from myself? And why was I hiding it? I was the introspective sort. I knew that, it made my life a hell on Earth. The only thing I really knew right then was 'that I was getting a world's record headache. A jimdandy skull splitter. The description occurred to me, and gave me another source of wonder. Why was I starting to spout these ancient gems of hackney? I had outgrown my own antique mania twentyfive years ago. I must have looked tired, because I hadn't slept. I skipped breakfast, too, but that was nothing. I missed a lot of meals and still stayed fat. The fax dispenser chimed and started to read out. The chime meant that information of interest to me was included; other than that, I'm keyed for random read-outs, since I am heavy on coincidences and long chances (except gambling). I didn't look at it. It was already mid-afternoon, and there was so much that I hadn't done. There was a report on the body to read; I was trying to find a murderer without knowing what had killed the victim, and when. The fax sheets could be of no interest. There was only one thing of importance to me in this bitter world, and that was to get my man. Or to have him gotten. I released the case to the entire department. If I were a telepath, I could have felt the sigh of relief and the salivation of eagerness from the dozen or more warped souls who were the artillery of homicide. They were like me; there would never be rest while the job was to be done. I was the commissioner. It was my right to take over a case when it interested me, or to let whomsoever I would have the joy. That was about the only pleasure that any of us felt, ever, the thrill of the chase. I wondered, casually, what the German word would be for the pleasure of the hunt. Something incorporating Jagt, I suppose, and Lust, Jagtlust," most likely. Now I gave the puzzle to everyone. Immediately the datascreen showed me that one, two, an undetermined number, were picking up the reins. The body started to turn as eager eyes began their examination, hoping that there was some mote of a clue that had escaped the old man. The restrictions on the observations of outsiders hardly applied to department members. I hoped, for the sake of the boy, that there were no remnants of modesty. Somehow, and I wished I knew why, I was quite sure that, even alive, no one would have called him shy or expected any kind of treatment to embarrass him -- or hoped to find any other decency, either. B etty went to my other room and got me a drink, probably one of those niid-twentieth horrors that were so popular again, a martini or screwdriver or something, I didn't know what, but it was big and had a high proportion of alcohol. I wasn't a drinking man. Ordinary vices didn't entertain me, nor did I retain my fondness for antiques. I didn't suppose Betty drank much, either, but she was enamored of relics of days gone by, as well as the hope of some day having a male of her own. This that she gave me was big and cold. She called it a "zombie." I supposed that I looked dead enough to qualify -- but it wouldn't have been a department matter since I hadn't been killed. Not that there I drank and in a few minutes went to sleep in a chair. One reason why I didn't often use alcohol was because I reacted to it as to any other anesthetic. I dreamed. The corpse there in my office was 'laughing at me. No, he didn't come to life or anything, but I knew he was laughing. I recognized him both as a type and as an individual. He represented a class that I didn't care for, a specific brand of young hood, but like all the rest of the genera, cheap, vile and violent, without respect for the person and property of another, with regard only for the immediate gratification of his own desires. I was almost glad he was dead. Of all the people I hated, his was the kind I despised most of all. My kind. As I had been, not as I was. He was more than just a type, though. He was an individual, and I knew him. I knew him and he knew me, and he floated there, laughing at me. I knew more about him than Betty did, even though she had all the information I did. There was something specific that led me to understand the dead boy. The only trouble was, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know. I dreamed, and in my dreaming I went back to the alley where he had been found. I look up, and far away the stars laughed at me. Even then, I knew, I could have turned to the corpse and said, "He's -- ." I wanted to laugh back at the heavens, because even then I had penetrated their secret, I had known what they knew. What was it I knew? I didn't know. The corpse wouldn't tell me. The stars wouldn't tell me. Mica, mica, parva Stella; Mir or quaenam sis tambella; Splendens eminis in illo; Alba, vaelut, gemma caelo Was that it, the secret of the stars? No, scarcely. After all these years, my Latin wouldn't even have been correct, anyway. And that was about the first thing I learned, thirtyodd years ago, in English, it went, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star -- ." I knew it in that language. IF V I woke. Betty was gone. I walked over to the' subject and stared at him, eye to eye. I would be damned if I'd let him beat me. It would please him for me to lose at my little project of finding his killer. I had the sneaky feeling that he and I had less than sympathy for each other. Amend that. Would have had. The pain, the torment and fear, the agony of his dying were still written in the contortions of his face, in his clenched fists and staring eyes. I punched the key for the robosurg's report, and let it run once across the datascreen without any pauses. On the second trip, I went through each item carefully, looking for something there that bothered me. It had found its way into the back of my mind and joined the other facts that were assembled, and added its voice to the Greek chorus that was there, laughing at me. They were laughing along with the stars, and the corpse, and his killer. I would be damned if I'd let them beat me, any of them. I'd be replaced as well; that was nothing. The honor and prestige of my job did not taste good to me, I had them too long. I lied. How I lied. The department had become my life. The fax sheet was what I was afraid it would be. Headlines from one side to the other, "Mystery Body Puzzles Police." I told myself that it was really high praise. We were expected now, as a matter of course, to have the solution in only hours. This was almost a day old! I wondered why the fax sheets seemed almost to ignore the dead boy, in order to heap calumny on my head. They could keep it up for weeks, too. It wasn't often that they got any kind of story, and in homicide it had been years since the report of an elimination had not been released wiAin minutes of the arrest of the criminal. There was another faptbr, too. The editor was a man who did not love me. He was M'Pher, who had been homicide commissioner for only a few months when the machines removed him and inserted me. M y memory flashed back to grammar school days. That was something the years changed little, the children assembling away from their homes for classes. The system would have been cheaper abandoned, but the results would not be good. People had to learn to live togher, and the schools were the only place that taught that. Automation had brought back what was once known as "cottage industry," except that we didn't have enough cottages to be worth counting. A man's apartment was his castle, and also his workshop, whether he put words on tape or performed microrepairs on one-of-a-kind electronics circuit. Or tied dry flies for fishing, for all of that. A child was brought into the world through the affection, intention or negligence of its parents, and lived with them alone until it was six years old. It played in supervised areas perhaps, and went with its mother or father shopping sometimes, and that was all. (At that it was lucky, compared to earlier generations where father was just a strange commuting creature who came home after dark, left to catch a train before dawn and slept with mother.) I thought about my own indoctrination lectures. The homicide commissioner then was many steps farther back than MTher, and his picture decorated the hall. We were told stories about the department's cunning, perseverance, craft and perspicacity. We were taught very carefully how important it was that we respect other people, and not do them damage either willfully or through negligence. We were taught that the one real crime was not asking for help if we needed it, failing to recognize the shortcomings -- quick temper, exaggerated responses, vindictiveness -- that meant that we needed psychiatric aid, to prevent our wanting to kill or maim. We were taught that, if we would not live with our fellow men, perhaps we should live away from them, say beyond the asteroids. I was one in whom the lectures did not bear fruit. Betty was another. I knew where there was a third, close to me, laughing at me. He laughed the louder at that. No, not him. # was laughing. It was my own amusement, my own sarcasm, my own bitterness, that I was imputing to the corpse. He hadn't felt anything, anything at all, in days. Had he? What was so important about that question? I ran through the report again, looking for something. Yes! A paragraph, starting with the comment that there was some indication of recent sexual activity -- scarcely news, when a healthy male dies violently, he often has an ejaculation -- but men reserves were not depleted. Then the kicker, three words that should have been in flickering red, "sperm motility -- zero." I laughed now, at my unconscious. So that was his secret! The fax sheets had a time with me. Within three days they were calling for my "voluntary" resignation. After a week, they dropped the voluntary part of it, and in ten days they had forgotten about resigning. Had MTher forgotten that that was the only way my job can be vacated? Scarcely, because he wasn't machine-picked, and he was ousted by the computers. MTher was a political appointee. He had his place only while the person the machines wanted wasn't available. Retraining wasn't an overnight deal. I t was a week before the idea penetrated to some creep that if one person could get away with murder, two could. He either wasn't as smart or as lucky as my unknown killer. In his case the announcement of the apprehension of the killer was made within seconds of the news of the crime. It gave the fax sheets more ammunition against me. They were altogether too violent. M'Pher was editorializing on the IF front page about my incompetence, and the inability of a machine to pick the right man for such an important job. The fax sheets dropped below decent minima. I had ceased reading them, just let the ribbons of plastic issue from the slot and disappear into the waste box. With all the weapons the department has, such as free and unlimited access to computer data and systems, to the records compiled all over the face of the Earth during the last fifty years, to the fussy analysis equipment and examination procedures that almost pick the memory of a single molecule, the most important single factor went completely unnoticed. That factor was the people manning the department. The unhappy, twisted, tormented satires of humanity who made it their life to track down the broken vessels who shatter the lives of others. We ran, night and day, without pause. We hated each other, we hated humanity, and all because we, each of us, hated ourselves. Hate was the tension that made us go. It was the force that propelled us, as a stressed mainspring had once driven the movement of a watch. Or better, as the Romans had once twisted to drive the catapults, the ballistas and onagers that were their weapons of war against fortified cities. What was the name applied to all kinds of throwing devices powered that way? I forgot. No, I didn't, either. The word was "torquati." But that's what we were, the artillery of homidde department Run, killer, run. You're a person, and we're only machines. Run, killer. Run. We'll still follow. Run, killer. We hate you. Now the fax sheets hated me. They hated me so much less than I hated me, they could scarcely matter. Run, killer! You give us something to live for. Run! Time was to be. I was patient, my customer, was patient. His sympathy may not have been with me, nor mine with him, but he would be satisfied. If not, let him tell me. There was no point in premature action; I had a trail to uncover, and it was pleasant not to fight time. Beside, I was amused at my department. The trick perspective played on them was strange. The usual reason for dumping a body was because it could not be hidden. Not so this time! Disposing of a person's remains was not easy. But it could be done. I had done it myself, a half dozen times or more. It was my hobby, trying to outguess the computer, and I was no amateur. Three times I succeeded. Well, why not? We'd had the bodies in permanent hold a half century or more. The odds were that the killers had gone to their own rewards, and there was certainly nothing to be gained by keeping the clay of their victims around. Our reputation for efficiency was a lot older than our efficiency was. Time drew near. The brief was drawn up, the warrants prepared and filed under "tentative, hold" and the court trial was scheduled. A summary was ready to be dropped in the hands of the district attorney. There was only one trouble. The murder for which the trial was the result hadn't been committed. The killer I would have prosecuted hadn't killed. His victim still breathed. That was an awful problem for a homicide commissioner, but I solved it manfully. I also scheduled the murder, and I was ready to provide the victim. T ime had come. I stood before the corpse and laughed in his face. Then I issued my invitations. That was social usage. It certainly wasn't normal for one to go to another's home; the 'vision screens were as good as personal confrontation, or even better. If a person were a nuisance, he could be shut off. This, on the other hand, would be easier on me, and private, as well. My datascreen lighted; it was signalled by an amber light. The machine was taking action on its own, and my heart stood still. I looked at the panel. "Disapprove your actions." That was simple. I punched in, "Will you stop them?" "Reply withheld." I knew what expression was written on my face -- hatred -- buit I felt relief trickle through and melt the horror that I had felt. Perhaps I was a pawn of the machine, myself, but I, too, was a player in this game. I would lay my wager! The stage was set. My other room was redecorated. I would continue my play. The three of them came at the appointed time. Betty, my secretary; his honor, O'Moore, the high mayor; and M'Pher, my predecessor, the editor. They sat down and looked around and stared at each other. Betty's eyes widened in surprise at the changes in the room, just as they had narrowed in hatred at the sight of thin, ascetic M'Pher. M'Pher was most astounded.  "I never dreamed you had such good taste," he admitted. I only whispered thanks. By his standards, I didn't have good taste. To me, antiques were merely items wrongfully spared destruction. The room was furnished in what, two centuries ago, had been called "American Colonial." It was midtwentieth phony. The furniture was supposed to look as if it were made of wood, light colored maple, and the upholstery resembled printed textiles. M'Pher sat by a table where an antique flintlock pistol lay. "Be careful of that, will you? It's functional." "You mean, you could load and fire it?" When he looked at me, I could see the four "F's" in his eyes. Forty, fat, feeble and foolish. I admitted to all of them -- at least the appearance. I had been commissioner for sixteen years, however. I had had more than one adversary. "It's already loaded." "Oh." He recoiled slightly, then examined it closely, but without touching it. He was mesmerized, like the mythical bird hypnotized by a serpent. IF I wasn't sure whether he believed me or not. I cared less. He had had the pistol drawn to his attention. His honor sat opposite . me, and Betty was at my right hand. That was fitting and proper. "Dulce et decorum" I thought, and smiled at the rest of the quotation. The only set of circumstances where it was proper to invite one's superior to a home was to tender a resignation. It was neither necessary nor proper for M'Pher to be present, but I would bend propriety into a pretzel this night. M'Pher was so happy of the chance to rub salt in a wound, he accepted eagerly. W hen my guests were seated, I brought refreshments. That was not customary; it was poor taste for a person's boss to accept his hospitality just as the rug was being pulled out, but O'Moore took the glass. He and I had always gotten along; he didn't like me, but I did a good job always until now, and I wasn't a politico, trying to springboard from my place to his. While they still had their glasses up, I excused myself and left the room. I went back pushing a tube. I was sorry to ruin their appetites that way. I didn't realize than any-i one, especially not a former commissioner, could be so squeamish. "He's naked!" M'Pher snapped, looking at Betty. She was innocence. "Why, sure enough, he is. Until you said so, I hadn't noticed." M'Pher blushed. The red color was not becoming, his regular gray suited him much better. So he was neo-Vic. I wondered why. That prudish act was very common, as well as the mania for antiques. Neither one was comprehensible. I wondered if M'Pher culttered up his apartment with chain mail. He had his chance to dominate the conversation, and let it go. It was my turn again. O'Moore looked sick. I said, simply enough, "I "am sorry to go on record as stating that the killer of this boy will not be brought to trial." "If you hadn't been such a bungling jackass," M'Pher snapped at me, "he would have been caught. I'm glad you're man enough to announce your incompetence." I star at him. I had practiced the expression of blankness with an admixture of incredulity and a seasoning of curiosity. I said, "I beg your pardon?" His expression was just as readable, but scarcely prearranged -- open, utter hostility and burning hate. "I said. I'm glad you admit your incompetence! My readers will be glad to know that the homicide department is changing its head." Who hated me more, he or I? He put a great deal of value on the position I took away from him, far more than was justified, and after all these years he'd never have a chance to get it back. "I am very sorry." I still had to be meek and mild. "I made no admission of the sort. I merely stated that the killer of this boy will not, can not, be brought to trial." "Isn't that the same thing?" "By no means. It's simply that the killer is outside our jurisdiction. He's dead himself." B etty was fastest on the uptake. "You've caught the killer!" Her face was eager, alert, happy. She was a good one. She was happy for me in success, and eager to support me in my difficulties. "Sorry." I kept my blank expression. Then, quietly, "But I know who he was. Rather, who one of the killers was." The four faces in front of me showed four expressions. Betty's, simple joy; O'Moore was incredulous, and happy too. M'Pher showed pained astonishment, as if he just discovered that he had swallowed his cigar. The other face showed only the pain that was the last thing it was ever to record. M'Pher suddenly wanted to change the subject. "Can't you get that thing out of here?" He meant the corpse. This neo-Vic modesty was a strange phenomenon, just as complicated and unrealistic as the real thing back during the late eighteen hundreds and very early nineteen hundreds. During the original Victorian perriod, the word "leg" was never breathed; for people, "limb" was substituted, and for poultry "drumstick." A '"chair" became a "seat," because it drew attention to the portion of the anatomy that rested on it to refer to it so crudely. Nevertheless, public buildings were decorated with statues of ydung men (but not young women) with not even a fig leaf brief, and boys went swimming in neighborhood rivers in the same unconfining natural costume. "Why?" I asked, as ingenuously as Betty. I saw that what bothered M'Pher was her presence. She saw it too, and started to push back toward the corner where she would have been less obviously present. But I stopped her with a subtle gesture -- she knew me well. "He's not embarrassed. I don't tipnk he'd blush even if he were alive -- which he hasn't been for some time." "That's impossible," Betty objected. "There was almost no decomposition." I nodded. "True. I took a different angle, though. What bothered me most was why his scalp had been shaved. It was inviting to presume that he was caught in the act of love and killed by a husband, brother or boy friend. "The trouble was, he was dead before he was stripped. There are traces of blood on his abdomen, which acted as an adhesive between his skin and his covering. When the material was pulled away, a pattern was left which we can still see. Incidently, the material was a very rare plastic." The three of them looked to me for an explanation. "When he was stabbed, the knife also carried fibers into the wound, where they were found during the autopsy. He was dressed in cotton." "Cotton? Isn't that a plant product, one that is used in some kind of industry?" O'Moore had recovered his stomach and become curious. IF "Nowadays it is just an iniustrial raw material. It has a plant origin, but it is a plastic. A natural plastic, rather than synthetic. This particular cotton was doubly unusual. It was what was called a 'stretch fabric.' "Up to about seventy-five years ago, cotton and wool were processed mechanically into fabrics which were woven as cloth and made into apparel. Really cheap disposable, plastic and paper clothes ended that, along with laundries." "I see." I continued, "Fibers from his clothing adhered to his skin, as well. He was washed after his death, to loosen his coverings primarily. That's why his chin and hands were left bloody. However, microscopic traces remained." "So what," M'Pher blustered. "In itself, nothing. There was even a cotton warehouse near where he was found. But the fibers on the corpse did not match any there, so he had not been in that building." I paused. It was still not time to move quickly. This was not the time nor the place for a confrontation and accusation. My victim would not be bullied. "That was strange. He had had natural fiber clothes. That's worn only in the asteroids. His lower legs and feet showed dust from tanned leather, but they don't wear leather shoes or boots even there! "His clothes must have been taken because they could be identified. That raised another area for speculation." M'Pher interjected an explosive opinion about wild guessing. I let him talk, but ignored him otherwise as did the three other watchers. No, we did not really ignore him . Nobody had glanced my way in some time. Recounting the chase, I felt my own pulse racing with remembered excitement as my trail warmed for me, and I felt that three of the four others felt the same stimulation. The fourth didn't respond to me at all. He just watched M'Pher accusingly, as I had set him up to do, without moving a muscle. "Why was his head shaved? It could have been psychological castration. Back when we had wars, girls who fraternized too much or too profitably with invaders were sometimes punished after liberation by having their heads shaved. They were symbolically de-sexed. "On the other hand, why bother with symbolism? There was no need for substitute. He was a total prisoner. He was completely helpless. "He was gagged, he could neither shout nor scream. "He was tied down hand and foot, he could neither fight nor run. "He was without food or water about two days. There was no shortage of time or opportunity. "Judging by the evidence, he lay on his back, his hands and feet bound together and lashed down to ring bolts. Would that be about right, M'Pher?" He looked at me, his eyes wide and bright. My prey knew whom I hunted. "Why ask me? How should I know?" C V would aid in identification, what characteristics could it have that would be a revelation?" Betty answered, "I don't see what, unless it were green. Or -- " Her eyes widened. I walked to the upright coffin. "See his scalp. Notice the suntan." The mayor and Betty looked; M'Pher didn't leave his chair. Betty turned to me and said one word: "Bircher." I nodded yes. A bircher. N ot a member of the John Birch Society. That had dried up and blown away during the Sino-Soviet war. But the name lived on, just as the Cosa Nostra, the Black Hand Society (Mafia) of Sicily had been turned from a defense purpose to terrorist ends, just as the Ku Klux Klan had been subverted by a selfinterest second generation. Birchers and stilyegi. Over a hundred years ago. The gang war that rocked America and shook the world, and resulted in the reaction that gave us our present stability and peace. "Wanna fight? Go to the asteroids and take on Mother Nature's homicidal deep space sister!" The stilyegi. A Russian word, given to an American group. The descendants of the best generation, the great-grandchildren of the zootsuiters; their trademark an unshorn head, their emblem a switchblade knife. They were the owners of the narcotics trade, and the proprietors of almost every house of ill fame in the country. Those that they didn't own were small-time hick affairs. The birchers. They were the rivals of the stilyegi, neither better nor worse but the same, hoodlums and hooligans. They had to be different, so they specialized in hi-jacking and armed robbery. They shaved their heads except for a single, very narrow stripe of hair than ran straight back from the forehead, a fashion that was once worn by some native Americans, some tribes of warlike Indians. They claimed to be American Indians. More than that, they shouted of their bravery, their virtue, their loyalty, how they protected the country from alien without and corrupter within. They lied. They were no more protectors of the country than crows were guardians of the cornfields. Where the stilyegi wore a sloppy uniform of jeans and sweatshirt and considered it unsmart for either to be clean, and carried their sharp knives in their pockets, the birohers wore leotards, skin tight coverings of a single layer of sketch fabric, as many square indies as possible translucent, and short military jackets. They carried their weapons, bayonets, openly in sheaths at their waists and wore heavy field or engineer boots. All were thugs. If they had eliminated only each other their war would have been without significance. The corpse in the tube had been a bircher. His scalp was suntanned except for a band about twenty milimeters wide. He had been knifed, so he may have been the victim of a stilyegi assassination or the executed captive from a battle. He may have been killed by an initiate stilyegi, who thereby got his hands so dirty that the clan would never fear his going straight. "The knife did not kill him." That had been the opinion of the robosurg, with a proviso that he would have died from the wound in minutes, had something else not finished him. The robosurg didn't know what did kill him. It had not been a natural cause of death, the failure of one of his vital physiological systems. I continued, "I imagine that the knife was just another torture by his captors. He was tied, and the blade may have been pushed into his belly and left for him to cut his way free. If he could figure out how. He couldn't." B etty, O'Moore and the boy waited for me to continue. M'Pher's eyes opened at my guess. It was a pity, in a way; he had been telling the world so long that I was a helpless, bumbling booby, that he had come to believe it himself. Oh, that my enemy would always so underestimate me! "What killed him, then?" Betty was curious. Even the corpse seemed to be listening to my words. "Same thing that preserved him, of course." I wanted to be opaque for a few more minutes. M'Pher's expression didn't change. The other two brightened. "He had a girl friend. More than that, she was pregnant by him. He didn't tell her where he was off to, only that he had an idea how they he anticipated. He never came back, and of course they were never married. "She carried his child, and kept faith in him. Judging by the records again, she was the only one who did. Nevertheless, she refused to give the child up for adoption. The son grew to maturity, and when in due course of events she passed away, the only legacy their child inherited was having his name listed as next of kin for a long-vanished bircher. "Their granddaughter inherited no more, nor did I, their great-grandchild." I looked deep into M'Pher's eyes. "I wasn't surprised to receive IF a card from the bureau, asking if I would care to make an identification, but it did start me thinking." I poured myself a drink, and stood beside my ancestor. "It always bothered me, that I recognized him when I looked at him, but I never knew who he was. I got to wondering how would he look say thirty years older than he was. I was thinking that way when I looked into a mirror." "He is -- was -- skinny and eighteen. I am fat and forty-seven. I felt their eyes going back and forth between us, adding up the similarities in color, in facial features, in general build. "I don't know if he got into this on his own, or if he walked into a trap. The stilyegi were supposed to have a blood initiation sometimes, and this might have been a handy way to get the blood." I shrugged. "Maybe my ancestor found a key that would get him into a space module and got caught prowling. "You know what happened. We don't use that kind of ship any more at all. They weren't used very long, but they were handy. The cheapest kind of space travel ever developed." They had seen the pictures; the ships were only long tubes, some three meters in diameter, with wide noses and wide sterns. The robot controls were in the fore cone, the drive machinery in the tube and the tail only supported the craft on the apron. Cargo came in individual containers each shaped like a wedge of cake. A wedge with a bite taken from the point, to conform to the core tube. They were wonderful economically. The trouble was, when they fired up, the engines irradiated the modules and junked too much cargo. Just as the laboratory irradiating equipment preserved a stiff' in a tube. The ships also had a tendency, once in a while, to fry personnel. Even personnel in protected bunkers quite a way away, although that was rare. C#T)ut -- you mean he's been in space all this time?" Betty asked. "That's right. Protected against dehydration by a blanket of frozen air. "The stilyegi had some red-hot contraband, including some weapons that may have been connected with crimes, and some loot that had so many people looking for it that it wasn't safe to dispose of. "They got to somebody in controls and fouled up a robot so that instead of heading for Mars, it looped out in a long orbit past Jupiter. I know who, but he's dead. "Either the boy here was just looking for loot, or he somehow got the idea that there was something going on. Maybe they set a trap for him, to bloody the hands of a couple of their apprentices. Anyhow, the stilyegi got him. Probably violently. The robosurg reports that he got a concussion somehow in the back of his skull that must have resulted in temporary unconsciousness. "They had access to a cargo modulus, where they had stashed their stuff. They couldn't let 'him go, because he was a birchen He'd either try to arrange a hi-jack, or even go F# to the police. Either way the stilyegi were out. Some of them could wind up getting hanged. "Somebody had an idea, so they tied him down in the pod and put the knife into him. Before or in between, they worked him over. Then they left him there. He was awake when he died. He was probably awake while he was being beaten, too, but that's neither here nor there. Incidentally, he died one hundred and eighteen years ago." B etty's eyes expressed a blank, and his honor was trying to think of a way to word the question he felt. I had to finish explaining. "There was no need for the crime to be discovered. Well, yes, there was. But it was a psychological need rather than physical necessity. If a person dies now, it's practically impossible to conceal the fact -- because of credit cards. "If a person goes too long without any charges, we take a look-see. Also, every six months, everybody has to turn his card in and get a new one. When he does that, his fingerprints are recorded. "Besides, there's no way for the average person to dispose of a body. Dead human beings don't keep very wejl. After a while they start to smell. Apartments haven't had food preparation centers now for almost a century, and people simply don't have the large deepfreezes that were once common, where flesh could be stored indefinitely. "A person can't even chop a corpse up and flush it down the water closet. The sewage outflow is monitored for just such contingencies. "This corpse didn't present that problem. It was in a state of preservation, lying in a shipment module at about absolute zero in a spaceship theoretically lost in space. Somebody couldn't let things go on that way. "I suppose I'm naive, but I had thought that the stilyegi were gone. That they vanished at about the same time as the birchers. That wasn't the truth, however. This body was brought home to haunt me by a living stilyegi. A hundred years ago, the birchers got the upper hand. They were in the majority, to begin with, and they had an advantage, more sympathy from the public and the police. "When the handwriting was posted on the wall, a group of the stilyegi took action. They acted smart. They got haircuts, and they bought better fitting suits. I suppose some of them joined the birchers, even. Without its brain trust, the stilyegi -- that is, the visible stilyegi -- ran out of steam and folded. "With the stilyegi gone, the birchers found themselves up against it. Perhaps they were not as clever. Maybe the top ranks were absorbed into the underground that the others left. Anyway, the birchers had nobody to protect America against -- and they had the entire population, and now the police too, down on them. "They had, before, had some symIF pathy from the citizenry and the police, but that was really all revulsion against the stilyegi. With them only a memory, the birchers couldn't stand up too long against a united population. "The stilyegi weren't gone. They were underground. In a disguise of respectability, they passed on their gains from one generation to another, and added to them with stealth and cunning -- but with no more respect for others than they had ever had. "They bought themselves positions of respect and honor. Public jobs, where they were the trusted. One of them almost made the grand coup, the one job in this sector that would have given them a literal license to kill, but the machine wouldn't hear of it and put its own man in the post." I stared at M'Pher, letting him know that each additional word that I spoke, now, would be a stone added to the anchor I was tying to his feet. There was just one difficulty! He was immune to me. He had never killed. T he mayor spoke again. "But there are still stilyegi?" He was shocked just as I had been. "That's how the freighter got retrieved. The boss of the original job had a record of what he had done. The ship was in a long orbit, it would not be back conveniently close to Earth for more than a century, but that was all right. It would give the weapons and the loot a chance to cool off. "He passed the information on to his son, eventually his grandson and finally his great grandson got the word. He had access to a ship, and had a hand-picked crew of three. They intercepted the freighter and remote-guided it down to an undeveloped area on the far side of the moon.  "Not the moon of Earth, Phobos of Mars. They triggered the warming equipment, so they wouldn't have to thaw out the cargo, and after a couple of hours entered. I presume they were surprised to find the body. I don't know what thoughts ran through the mind of the leader of the salvage group. Maybe he subconsciously detected the resemblance between my ancestor and me. "The opportunity was too good to miss. It was a golden chance to discredit me, because obviously I would never be able to identify the corpse. Neither could I find the killer. He was dead himself! The body was thawed with the rest of the capsule, so they wrapped it in a tarp, fused the edges to keep out microorganisms and moved the body into their own ship. "Then they dumped the body, warmed up their scriptwriters, and waited for things to run their course." They were staring at me, now, quietly. Except for one; his eyes neyer left M'Pher. "Oh, yes, I have excellent relations with the asteroid people. The conies. Their homicide inspector is a relative of mine. And of his." I nodded at the corpse. "He doesn't have as many murders as I do, so he has plenty of time to meddle in other things. Just as, here, I am guilty of trespass. "He found the ship. One pod had been opened, and in it, along with the remainder of the loot, he found a bloody floor, a stilyegi knife and the clothing that had been removed from the corpse. He found a cargo manifest under a crate. It was signed by a 'MacPherson.' Your ancestor?" M'Pher stared at me. It was a captive stare, and I didn't like it. I like the chase, not the capture. Wasn't he going to fight me? No wonder the machine hadn't changed my plans. "You gave yourself away," I told him. "You attacked me in your paper with altogether too much virulence. You've never made any secret of hating me, I was the one who stood between you and the power you've coveted. You must hate me even moxe than I do." When he made it clear that he would not reply, I drove another nail. "As soon as it dawned on me that this wasn't a recent crime, I started to wonder who was profiting. By the third editorial, I was so curious about you that I checked the trip recorder of your private car, your new limousine. I was quite surprised to find you, of all people, visiting the amusement park the night before our friend was found. And that was the only recorded trip where you ordered your machine to fly low and slow. "There was another thing, too. I suppw#se you washed the boy in part to prevent his dirtying the car. Fine, but you didn't waki the car. "Along with your other antique pursuits, you smoke those vile cigars. You light them with paper matches." I held up the tiny piece of cardboard I found in the alley. "When you pushed him out the door, his hand scraped this up from the floor or seat." His lips moved, he swallowed. My heart beat wildly. Perhaps the machine was wrong. He snatched the ancient pistol, pulled back the hammer, pointed it and fired. But not at me! He aimed at the boy his greatgrandfather had helped kill. T he gun exploded, chopping off his hand, as I had made sure it would do. The shattered tube of steel that had been the barrel threw itself across the room like an orchid made of metal and smashed the glass tube into splinters, throwing the corpse out onto my carpet. I put a tourniquet around the pulped stump of M'Pher's arm, and Betty sent for a medic, but there wasn't enough time. M'Pher lived only a couple of minutes. He wanted to die. I wasn't sure why, but I felt that he would rather not live than go on knowing he had been beaten by someone for whom he had expressed such profound contempt. I had wanted to die. I had tried, again, to be killed, but the machine had beaten me one more time. Beaten me, but not all the way. The victory was not unmixed. I felt something of myself expire, become no more a part of me, deep inside. How ironic! I had wanted to kill myself, and all I succeeded in deIF IF  Short Story He came out of nowhere -- and could never go back! M r. Smith was about to mix a moderately rationed Martini for himself, when a thunderous explosion quaked through his house, upsetting the open bottle of Vermouth. After applying a steadying hand to the gin bottle, and while the ice cubes still tinkled maniacally in their shuddering bowl, he sprinted outside. An incandescent glare a hundred yards from the house destroyed the purple sunset he had been admiring not five minutes earlier. "Oh, my God!" he said, and ran back in to phone the state police. As Smith was procuring a heady draught of gin directly from the bottle, he was further alarmed by a steadily gushing hiss from beyond his open front door. When the sound persisted for a full minute, he went cautiously to the porch to find an intense mist rising from the area of the fiery thing he had viewed moments earlier. Somewhat awed, and thoroughly scared, he watched and waited for about five minutes. Just as he was about to go inside for another belt of gin, a man walked out of the fog and said, "Good evening." "Good evening," said Mr. Smith. "Are you the police?" "Oh, no," answered the stranger. "I'm from that," he said, pointing a finger into the mist. "My cooling equipment finally kicked into high." "You're a spaceman," Smith decided. "I only came a few hundred miles," shrugged the stranger modestly. "Mostly, I'm a time traveller." He paused to light a dark cheroot. "The one and only time traveler," he added, with a touch of pride in his voice. "The real McCoy, eh? Well, come on in and have a drink. Vermouth's all gone, but I saved the gin." "Be glad to," said the stranger, as they walked in together. "Past or future?" wondered Smith, handing the bottle to his guest. "From the future," replied the time traveler after a satisfying pause. "Hits the spot," he smiled, returning the bottle. 'Well," said Smith, sitting down and making himself comfortable, "I guess you'll want to tell me all about it." "Yes, thank you, I would." "Feel free," said Smith, passing the bottle. "Well, I had my final calculations, with the usual plus or minus..." He paused for another sip of gin. "And of course it was the minus that had me a little worried." "But you took the chance," inter- jected Smith. "Naturally. And as it happened, there was some minus. Just enough to destroy the world." 'That is too bad," Smith commented, reaching for the bottle. "Yes. You see, there was such an expenditure of energy that it completely wiped out the Earth of my time. The force blasted me all the way through space to this spot. By the way, I am sorry if I disturbed you." "It was nothing, nothing at all. Forget it." 'Well, in any event, I took the chance and I'm not sorry. A calculated risk, but I proved my point. In spite of everything, I still think it was worth it. What do you think?" "Well, as you said, you took the chance; you proved your point. I suppose it was worth it." Smith took a final drink, saving a few glimmering drops for his guest. "By the way, how far from the future did you travel?" The time traveller grabbed the gin bottle and consulted his watch. "Eighteen minutes," he replied. "It wasn't worth it," said Smith. If YouVe a Subscriber --  -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not contain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let us know what it is. And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Today? # IF IF  Novelette She was an Old Martian, anyone could see that But there had never been any Old Martians! I  I was in Mexico City in November,  taping the bull fights for next summer's microwaves, when Gallegher stumbled on me. If you like black beer, Restaurant Prendes is the place for you; so I was there. Prendes flourished while Porfirio Diaz was dictator. It has survived the earthquake which attended Madero's triumphal entry, the civil convulsions of the revolution, the stormy session of the United Nations and fifty years of U. S. tourists. Prendes's tap beer was the best in the world when Diaz ruled. It still is. I was on the second stein when Galeg backed around the glass screen that masks the entrance. I would have known that rusty neck in hell; and I rose and collared it. Tiene usted" I asked, 'un fosforo, Senor? Without a word, he extended a five hundred peso note backward at me. "Many thanks. This'll keep that tap pouring for a week." He retrieved the bank note just as I was sitting down, and flagged a mozo with it. "Two more of these," he ordered, pointing at my beer, "and a plate of huachinango Veracruzana for me. Are you eating?" I had, so I sat watching while he put away the fish and slanted a bold eye at me between gulps of the Modelo. As he was finishing, I lit a cigar and dug the needle into him. "So you're on the dodge again? If you'd like me to put in a good word with the police..." "Never fear. It's not the police that's worrying me. It's a female." "Relax," I told him. "What woman would pursue a great gowk of a fellow with a permanent Mars-burn? She probably mistook you for an uncle, and a few words will clear up the whole -- " "A few words! That one expects me to tell her all the secrets of heaven and hell and join her in a new wave of evolution. It's all Cybernia's fault. Cybernia, where are you?" "Who is Cybernia, what is she, that all the swains her praises sing?" The Old Galeg looked at me suspiciously. "There was a Swayne in it, all right. You've heard already, have you?" "Only what everybody's heard: how you shot your way out of the boudoir, the doxie on your arm -- " "Phoo!" Now his self-confidence was restored. He no longer kept a corner-eyed watch toward the door. "Look here. I've nothing to do for the afternoon. Switch off that methylated pickup to your tape, and I'll give you the true orbit about Cybernia and Dona Luisa out there." I signaled el mozo to keep the lubricant flowing free, and Gallegher began reflectively: F ortune telling, fake or for real, always fascinated me. I was born under a caul, my mother told me, and it may be I have a little of the power myself. I'm not telling. Last spring I had ah argument with the big jet at Dome One on Mars. There was some fool talk about a few liters of high Geiger concentrate missing out of my last few loads, and it ended with me walking out on him just before his fuel tank exploded. I knew he was due to be rotated to earth and I forgave him his nerves, for I'm the forgiving sort. I wouldn't like to spend three straight years on Mars myself. There I was, then, with no job and about a thousand sparks in my pocket -- and on Mars. The twentyfive thou that passage to Earth cost So I went to the carnival. It was just as wild as it always is. I mean. Mars ain't the same moral climate as here... if you understand me. But it wasn't kicks from the "dancing" girls I was looking for. It was a stake. I wandered along past the Sacred Marriage Rites of the Bird People from Arcturus and the Awful Ootopi from Alpha Centauri. Who knows better than a jet jockey that we haven't even got to Pluto? Arcturus! IF Well, it was a partner I was hunting, you understand. I can get all the lone wolfing I want in space, with just me and the flame and the cargo, hoping the techs taped a true course for me and the pipe. When I'm on dirt, I like someby back to back with me. What I was really looking for was a three card monte layout. I figured to beat it for a thousand or so just to show I knew where the pips on the cards were, and dien join up with the operators on a little faster operation. around to get in and see the Mating Dance of the Amazons -- in four dimensions -- and as the last stragglers rushed the ticket taker, I saw what I wanted: a little monte store. I wandered over like a yokel and asked if they could tell me when the Amazons would mate again. They could, and they did, and it was just time enough to run the cards a few times. Well, I picked the Queen a couple of times, and missed her a couple of times, and a little crowd gathered, the way they will, and pretty soon the roper got me off to one side and began to explain to me how he was going to mark the Queen. (You know the gaff, don't you? On the last big bet, the marked card turns out -- surprise! -- not to be the Queen. The only way out is to mark the Queen yourself for the last bet; but you've got to be as quick as the man who kissed the ostrich, or none of 'em will be the Queen.) I meant to listen. But right in the middle something began to tickle my neck -- and it wasn't the roper's breath, though he had one that would fuel a rocket. I had to look around. Sure enough, when I did I saw this ratty little tent down a kind of cul-de-sac off the midway. There wasn't much bally to it: and underneath, in smaller letters, "Past. Present. Future. What may be, can be." I was hooked. I was ahead maybe twenty credits on the Monte game, and I shook the roper off and headed straight for the fortune teller. The tent was bigger than it looked, somehow, when you got up close, and an ugly character in a beard and a stench was guarding the door. "How much?" I asked him. He got a kind of sly look on his face and told me it wasn't a commercial enterprise; that a contribution was expected in accordance with the help one got; that the "personage" inside -- he hesitated over that -- was a Martian, endowed with senses unknown to man. Now, I know as well as you do there wasn't no Martians when de Camp first got there except the lichens and the two-inch oaks. But this guy's manner had my jets rumbling. He somehow acted as if he didn't want me to come in. I was hot to get by him. Finally, he sighed in his beard and played his trump card, "You'll have to take off your shoes."  nybody who runs the risk of being caught without shoes on Mai's is an idiot. The sand of Mars is one big sponge; and in a hundred steps, it'll suck out all the water in your body. There's a mummy in the Mars museum who was the first rocket kicker who found out what the sand is. So I kept my shoes in my hand. I didn't even take them off until I was on the flooring of the tent. Beard boy tried to grab them, but I ignored him. Right inside the tent, of all things, was a door. Everything else on Mars is sphincters or pressure valves. Tlie handle of the door was hard as hagan to turn, and it pinched my finger when I did move it. Behind that door was a three-D projection of the solar system as the sweetest, the smartest and the most innocent baby alive might imagine it. The sun didn't burn, it just flashed gold. All the planets looked like Earth, green and gorgeous. The firmament, instead of the fire and ice that it actually is, was got up in the color of a summer sky -- that fresh-washed blue, you know -- and a few cottony clouds drifting through it. It took my breath away. A chair walked up behind me, and I sat down in it to watch and worship that gay sun apd his friendly planets. The place was pressurized too. It smelled like a spring morning on earth, and there was a kind of faint, far away birdsong. This went on for all of a minute with me drinking in that beauty, and then it was gone. That beautiful projection shrank to the size of a reactor pellet surrounded by a dead black void, and then it exploded! A real nova couldn't have been brighter. I felt as i if my eyes had been put out. I knew they were closed, but they couldn't shut out that light. I don't know how long I was blind, sitting there holding my shoes in my lap and waiting for God-knows-what; but after a while I could sense a pulse in the light, and between pulses I could see patterns: wild colors, startling figures, and bright spirals like polished platinum coils. Then the light began to separate into flashes, and between flashes I could glimpse the real inside of the room I was in. It was a little dome. All around were lighted disks in different colors, forty or fifty, and different sizes, all blinking at different rates. To one side, where I could barely see it, was a bank of lights -- twentyfour, I made it -- flashing a dozen times a minute in a different pattern every time. Except for the. colored blinkers and the bank of lights, there wasn't any other illumination. The flashes were too bright to see by, and they made me blink, too, so I couldn't see anything except the patterns of veins in my eyelids... so it was some time before I caught what was right in front of me, about ten feet away. It was the Martian. You never saw a creature like that. Nobody else did, either. Not outside that tent. It had eight legs, jointed and stiff like a spider. The head was a great, gleaming, silvery sphere, with two dark blue-green spots that weren't eyes. Itiey slid and slipped around the surface, changing size and their relation to each other every instant. In between that spherical head and those spidery legs, it was a woman. From neck to navel, she times as beautiful. II Y ou can get the picture, can't you? Me in that dark room, surrounded by flashes and pulses of light and color, facing that Martian sphinx. I was as unoriented as the primal atom. If there were flies on Mars, I could have caught a colony, my jaw was that slack. The hackles of my neck stood up like a dog's, and I just stared. The flashes had stopped but the blinking was still going on, and off to the side that bank of lights was still running off patterns, when the Martian spoke. It wasn't the voice that woke me -- though it was a musical sound, kind of barrel-organ music, none of your chamber stuff; a real lilt in it -- no, what woke me was the movement that accompanied the voice. It was a delicious kind of ripple in that lovely flesh, and seeing it brought me to full consciousness at once. The patterns in the bank at the side began to run and crackle almost faster than I could notice, and all the colored disks began to blink more rapidly. The silver globe was spinning with the two dark spots sliding around. "What would you know?" was the first thing the Martian said. I got hold of myself. "Who am I?" And the Martian told me. Called me by the name my mother did, which you shan't hear. Gave me my blood type, star number, weight, height, home town, the amount of money in my wallet and the hour and minute I had walked off the job. "What would you know?" I asked, "Who are you?" "A child of the stars. Ask not of my Star, or I reply no more. What would you know?' I gave up on that. Those ripples were making me sweat, so ! rushed it up. "What am I going to do in the next week?" "You will succeed in a great undertaking, but you will humble yourself to do so. Above all, remember this: from this moment, you can... succeed... only... with I asked what that meant, but all the lights went off. There was a faint luminescence from the silver globe, spinning, spinning, and all was darkness. The voice sank in the distance. "Return tomorrow. Tomorrow... tomorrow... return..." The chair turned me around and helped me to my feet. The door opened, and there I was with my shoes in my hand and Black Beard in my nostrils. He looked at me with accusation and said, "The contribution bowl is at your left." It took some rooting around, but I managed to find a one-credit note in my roll. He looked at it contemptuously and blocked my way. That was all I needed. I hit him right in the center of IF the stubble, with all the frustration and fear that thing inside had left in me. I might as well have hit an old-fashioned jaok-o-lantern. His face just kind of squished, and the next thing I knew, he was rolling on the sand and the face was slipping off. I grabbed the hair and had the whole thing in my hand. It was a mask of plastic flesh. The head underneath it was as featureless as an egg. The only breaks in the smoothness were a spreading ugly bruise where I'd caught him, and two slits where hrs eyes were closed. About that time, something caught me. Have you ever been kicked in the back by a woman who really meant it? W hen I picked myself up, she had a little, old-fashioned solid projectile gun aimed at me, and old egghead was sitting up, shaking his head hard enough to addle it. She handed him the mask. "Put it back on, Swayne. Then run through this fellow's pockets. He's got better than a thousand sparks in a pigskin wallet," "Go ahead, honey," I told her. "Tell me my weight and my blood type again." Of course, you can't see what a woman 'looks like when she's dressed for out of doors on Mars, and her voice didn't sound the same as it did through the machine, but it stood to reason. She had to come out of the tent to get me the way she did, and she knew to the spark how many credits I had in my tank. "Just tell me one thing," I said, as I stood and gracefully revolved tobring my wallet pocket into Swayne's reach. "Say that wasn't a mask on you." She laughed. I never thought much of freckles before, but somehow the sprinkle of them across her nose put a whole new content into the concept of freckles. "Rocket, you're okay," she told me then. "No hard feelings, I know. You can't spark out. Nobody gets paid better than you lightning jokeys. If you're broke, all you have to do is grab a hot pipe back to Earth. I told you to humble yourself." I turned the other pocket. "Egg," I told the barker, "there's a few credits in a money clip you missed." She cocked the little old pistol. "Nobody makes any funny remarks about Swayne. He got burned in the high Geiger mines, and he's getting a new face grown on him. You think that's funny?" Maybe you think freckles can't reflect emotion. You're wrong. I was looking at the little constellation of them on her nasal bridge, and each one looked like another model of that popgun she was holding. "Mrs. Swayne, I apologize. And Mr. Swayne, if you'll lend me a hundred of my own credits. I'll buy you a drink. I'm down and out myself, but you've made me feel like an oxygen thief and the luckiest man alive all at the same time. I heard about guys getting caught in flash fissions before, but you're the first I ever saw. I apologize again," You can't tap a foot in the Martian sand very well; but she was switching the muzzle of that little old pistol in the air with the same rhythm. "You say you're down and out, but you're not. All you have to do is go apologize to the Super at Dome One, and you'll be riding a flame to Earth's space station tonight." I explained to her why I didn't think that was possible, and why I couldn't apologize to the Super with the same sincerity I had to them. Then I couldn't resist digging her. "How come you can't read me out here? Inside that fake tent, you knew every bump in my brain." She grinned. "That's just it. Out here I haven't got my electronic fingers on your skull. Give him two hundred, Brud, and let's get that drink. I'd give it all back. Rocket, but we need it for the hospital." "Is it Mr. and Mrs. Brad Swayne?" I asked. "Or what?" "Brud," she said, "Brud, Brud! Bruddie! Swayne's my brother, not my husband. Still game for that drink?" "Lady," I replied, "did anybody ever tell you you have cute freckles?" After we had absorbed a few high-volatile cups, we all switched in our reserve air tanks, you might say. I was pleased that she hadn't ordered any of that sweet Venusian bubble-juice; and a few jolts of sour mash Carbon# always loosens everybody up. They were in tough shape, for sure. Pushing the hot pipes is tough, but picking the high G ore out of Mars's old rocks is the toughest racket in the cosmos. She had thrown up a good job in the London School of Electroencephalography to get right out to him when it came through that he was burned. If she hadn't, he never would have survived. Just knowing she was on the way gave him something to hang on to during the first months after his burn. After she kept him alive, they were stuck. Broke, and with an expensive course of bio-plastics on the books to get him a new face. No compensation, either. Those ore pickers are all independent contractors. The first goixl break came when an experimental type of rocket blew up almost on top of their living dome, so they were able to beat the caterpillar salvage guys to the loot. Instead of selling it, she had built the first installation of that tent. The bank of lights was an automatic analyzer, and the stiff handle took a blood sample when it pinched you. The shoes had to come off to ground you into the feeler circuits built into the floor. She was way over my head talking about the still unsolved mystery of thought itself; but I got that she could reach random information and surface thought in a brain and get enough character to go on from there with a regular old-time fortune teller's act. The "come back" routine was designed to increase the take. If a customer came back, he was hooked, and the second look at his brain surface gave her a real handle on him. Still, they weren't making money. IF because Swayne's treatments cost a lot, and living's not cheap on Mars, even in the slums. They might never get off the rusty planet, and we all got a little bitter and cynical about it. Until the brainstorm hit me. I laid it out on the table, and we kicked it around a little. Finally she ordered a round of straight caffeine and we examined it again, on the alert. It still looked good. Ill M y idea was, if she was going to fake, why not fake something worthwhile? The techno psychs are all over the place, but everybody knows (it's never admitted in your tapes, but it's true) that there are plenty of minds slightly off orbit. What the techno psychs do, you know, is to throw the whole system out of balance to compensate the aberration of the moment. Then a few months later, they give it another twist. Your circuits always feel smooth, but they're always a little out of phase. It's been a long time since anybody tried to straighten up a whole system. We've got used to everybody's being a little off target, and we get along with it, without liking it. My idea was to rebuild her device into a machine for general psychic adjustment. That way we could get it off the midway and turn it into a real racket. Anybody who can promise to make fortunes instead of just to tell fortunes is going to be swimming in credits... 'til they catch up with him. The trouble was that she had ethics. Everyone from the Londcm School has, she told me; basic conditioning in the first year. But she looked as if she'd like to cry when she told me, and I finally dug it out of her that she'd evaded her conditioning to break away and cpme up to Mars when Swayne got burned, and the conflict she'd generated was still bubbling in her. Well, I talked to her, but what's talk? She saw through my every gambit, and for a couple of hours, it kept looking like a worse and worse idea. I told her the truth; fuel your own tank first is still the basic human ethic, never mind what it's going to be someday; and she said I hadn't any ethical standard at all, and didn't understand even what the words meant. All of a sudden, we both realized her brother hadn't kept on with the conversation. When we looked at him, his face -- the one on the mask -- was all out of shape. I didn't realize what was happening, but she did. He was crying inside his mask, and it had slipped. That turned the trick. There was a lot of blubbery confirmation, but as soon as she looked at me over his shoulder, I knew the same deeper compulsion that broke her conditioning before had broken it again. The essence of a good swindle is planning. Performance is just the icing on the cake. It helps to have a trained crew, but her formal training and mechanical knowledge were enough, with the experience she'd had in her tent. We cooked it up pretty good the next day. The first thing we had to do was to get some big shot into the tent. We couldn't afford the rental on the main strip of the carnival, and it was a thousand chances to one that we'd ever get one of the big uns to turn that shabby little comer, as I had. We finally worked it out neatly. I was to snatch one. I t isn't as risky as it sounds. On Mars, the conditions of society are such that everybody is accessible. It's just too tough to be otherwise; and besides, no one can forget Rooky Hdloran's dying in Dome One thirty seconds after he reeled off the coordinates of the first big high G strike. Nobody wants to miss it if some other rock-knocker wanders in with another hot location on the tip of a tongue about to wag its last. I wore a disguise; Swayne's face. With my features inside to distort it, it didn't look like Swayne. And it sure didn't look like me. About seven o'clock, just before quitting time, I skimmed into Dome One and around to the big jet's office. It was all thinned out of people, and he was just fitting on his air when I slid in and showed him two things: Cybernia's antique popgun and a note to precede me quietly. I tried to smile to calm him, but it mu have made that face look worse. He turned as white as you, but he managed to walk. After hours, nobody cares a hot hagan for protocol on Mars, so nobody paid any attention as we strolled out of Dome One. We headed off toward the carnival, and he began to argue, quiet like. I had my hand inside his arm, as if we were old buddies, and I let him feel that little old hand cannon like a finger in his ribs. After that, he didn't make a sound. He did cuss once when the door handle took its blood sample. We had figured he would balk at taking off his shoes, so we just sat him in the chair, and Cyberrtia hypnotized him. She hypnotized me too, even though I knew the gaff. It was comical, the way her shape sagged and lost its appeal, when I thought about it later on. She said she didn't want to have to keep damping down my impulses, so she just hypnotized us both. Then her ethics got her by the throat again. She left poor old rotation bait sitting in the chair, blind and deaf to everything real, and got up and came over to me, I objected when she started pulling on a jersey, but she said, "Don't worry. He still thinks I'm there. What do you think he's staring at? But Galeg, we can't do it. If you could understand what the analyzer is showing on the inside of that silver dome, you'd realize. He's so far gone I'm afraid to touch anything." Well, she cried and she cried, but she wouldn't do it. She sobbed that he might end up an idiot. When I said he already was, she said that was just like a man. I tried to get her back in my arms, and she beat on my chest. Then she cried qn it some more. IF By this time Mr. Dome One was groanmg and sweating. It was just the natural male reaction to about ten minutes of watching those ripples, but it irritated her again. She began to yammer about men being all sensual brutes, and she hit me two or three times more, but by that time her tears and all that belting on my casing had bled off her overcharge, and she crawled back inside the silver globe ' and went to work. Lord only knows what he thought was happening to him, but he quit groaning and began to purr. Then he burst into tears. I never heard a man cry like that. After a while he quit crying. Then he straightened up out of hypnosis and out of the chair, put on his air and his shoes, and walked out of the place without looking right or left. I just looked at her. She looked at me the way a girl does, you know, when she's done something wrong, and then she told me what she had done. S he hadn't treated him at all. She had just induced a euphoric feeling in him toward me. "It won't wear off until about this time tomorrow," she told me. "So you're going to go wangle passage for your wife and brother-in-law and a job for yourself." I must have looked a little startled when she said "wife", for she withered me with a glance and said, "Don't worry. All we want out of you is green hills, and you can go to hagan." She made me think she meant it, too. Wangle is no word for what I did. If my native modesty aiid good sense hadn't prevented he would have installed me as oommodore of the freight fleet. He didn't have the power, but for me he would have assumed it. The only regret he had was that my job would take me away from him. He made mo promise to come back and to stay with him for several weeks when I did. You ain't interested in my trip. You can make up better ones. I beat her and Brud back by weeks, and I was waiting at their landfall. I have received severe frostbites in space, but none to equal the one I got that day. When they were halfway home, the berth officer was making his daily check to see that everybody was taking the nerve tonepills and flexing the large muscle groups. He had run the scanner by her cubicle every # hours, of course, but one day he suddenly saw the way her name was spelled (Mrs. Gallegher, you see?) and asked her if she knew me. Then he had to go and tell her that old story about that crazy woman at Dome Four. Well, it was later proved that woman was entirely mistaken, you know, about the whole thing. Not only was the ancient Martian marriage ceremony not performed on that occasion, there is no ancient Martian marriage ceremony. It was all a big mistake. But trust this leaky-skulled berth officer! That little cathode ray had cooked his brains, if you want my liters of rocket fuel together in one deadfall or another, and he thought he was pulling a big joke, I guess. She should have had sense enough to know that he was just selling shares in the waxworks on Mars, but women never know when they're being kidded, especially about somebody they're really interested in. That's how I first knew she really was interested in me, she was so mad about that old Dome Four party. But she was madi I couldn't let her walk off: I had to hold on to her until we could make enough money to square up those passages. The boss might get rotated home, but they don't rotate bookkeeping entries. Old Brud came through for me, bless his blubbery psyche, when I reminded her how quick we could raise the money for his skin sculpture. I don't know what I'd have done if it hadn't been for old careless -- yes, and I don't know what I'd have done if I'd been him, either. You're right, but don't look down your nose at me. W e scrounged up 'enough secondhand parts to open up a little the suckers that always think a machine can do things better than a person. I call people like that "punch brains." Most of 'em would have been scared to death if they'd realized a # pound girl was kneading up their brains and baking them over, but when they were conned into thinking a computer was doing it, they were in heaven. We set up a learning machine to keep them distracted, with levers to pull and buttons to push and the damnedest set of irrelevant questions and answers the hagan you ever saw. The motive power for the learning machine was supplied by two metal treadles. Ah, you guessed it, did you? That's how we kept their bare feet grounded into the system, and the very first lever they pulled or button they pushed got our blood sample for us. After Cybernia explained to me what she was doing, all the information gathering was simple. You'd be surprised what your blood fractions tell about where you've been and the kind of life you've led. Hoo-eee, boy! With me running the ballyhoo, we were rocking right along, sweet as a train in a tube, paid off the passage money, buying Bruddie Swayne a better-looking face than the one he'd been born with, and I'm actually beginning to think about marriage, the genuine, ancient Earthman, Me Tarzan You Jane This Our Tree ceremony; and I know Cybernia is too, because she'd josh me about Dome Four and that crazy dame, the way a woman will, you know, when she knows she's got the key to your air supply. Money's a terrible thing. We got to where we were taking in more than we could spend, even paying up ahead for Brud's operations and treatments. Her conscience was easy because she really was doing a pretty good job on the lackwits we were pulling in. We were getting away with it; then it was our misfortune to get a really big chance. IF I tell you, rich won't describe it. Plutonium strikes on Mars ain't in the same orbit. A man who owned all the patents on rocket propulsion would have had just the ante in this game. I knew it was toq good to be true. Like when you first start on the run to Mars and you think the techs have given you a perfect tape because you can see Mars about the fourteenth week, and you keep on seeing her, but you don't stop to think that means you're undershooting until the rescue rockets start buzzing around you, throwing grapples and missing, and cursing you for every son of a march they can lay tongue to. No, believe me, when things look too rosy, that's the time to break gravity and set a no orbit course, if it takes every gram of fuel you've got. If I'd lit the tube when I first saw that woman... oh, not Cybernia! The rich one. Rich one! What a pale way that is to describe Dona Luisa. Richest one, that's more like it. Squared rich, that's better: her money didn't just breed like some money cubed itself every twenty four hours. And the  analyzer couldn't read her! Unprecedented, say you? Right you are, says I, but that's another pale pink word for what was a raw red reality. O ne of our suckers brought her in. They'd been on a wild orbit for three or four days, it looked like, and both needed an hour of breathing CO# and then about twentythree more on straight oxygen. Cybemia was a little contemptuous of our clientele by this time, and these two just fitted her feelings like a pigskin glove with the bristles inside. She had built a permanent hallucination of herself into the machine so she didn't have to be anywhere near it, at least not while the preliminary trepanning was going on. We were in the office, counting money. Brud's new face was paid for, and almost grown onto him, too. She was thinking about closing down and going back to school, she that had cozened more cerebellums into involuntary sanity than you could shake a garlic bulb at; ami I was trying to work myself up to the the money! What's money? So many jets to your credit -- it's like fuel in a tank, not worth a hot hagan 'til you burn it. I been rich before and I'll be rich again. It's separating the grabbers from their gelt that I enjoy. The intellectual pleasure is just about balanced by the emotional suspense. No, it was the girl. When she was in the same room, I itched all over; and when shd wasn't, I twitched steady. T didn't know these two drunks were any different from our regular run of glue sniffers when they came in And he wasn't; she was. "Here's my friend. Dona Luisa, the richest old bat in Mexico," he giggled (talking to the illusion, you see). "Her problem is that she thinks like a man, Cybernia. Be a sweet and reprogram her in the right direction, won't you?" Cybernia snorted. "Well, that's not his problem anyway." I laughed and got out of her way, because it wasn't really like her to be unsympathetic to a sucker (she always thought of them as patients, you see?), so I knew she was out of sorts. I should have stayed. Still, I don't know what I could have done. The worst happens when you least expect it. It was just Fenagle's Law in full, subtle operation. I did see the woman on the screen. She was a really theatrical brunette, with just the first streak of gray in her hair. You would p't see the gray when it was done right, but now it was all in wild disorder, and she was swaying, not like a drunk about to fall over, but with her feet planted wide, like a votary in torment. She had a Zapotec kind of face (like the smiler with the crown, you know); but she didn't look Zapotec. That lovely Indian face was all twisted with some sort of inexpressible pain. She had on a brocaded dress in gold and silver that was snagged and ripped and half off, off far enough that you could see the figure was genuine: a real armful of woman! Far gone. She was far gone. Cybernia's "globe" voice told her to take off her shoes, and with two gestures, she took off every stitch she had on. That got her 'Bernie's full attention...' . and mine too. You take a surface car round to the old Ministry of Transportation Building today after siesta and look at that figure Zuniga did of the woman with the sheaf of corn on the door post by the plaza. That'll give you an idea... only think of that face, ravaged with sorrow and streaked with tears, and that body racked with sobs, begging for help. W ith one hand, 'Bernie hit the switch that shut off the telltale board so I couldn't see what the machines were producing, the switch to the screen with the other, shot me out the door with a phrase I didn't know she knew, and slid out the other door and into her globe -- all while that brocade dress and its underpinnings were still in the air. She had work on her hands. I should have stayed... but I don't know what I could have done. As I say. Dona Luisa defied the analyzer. She did what she was told, and there was no conscious resistance. Couldn't be, anyway. You can't resist what you don't know is happening. She just didn't come through. Cybernia told me it was like looking at her "Martian" self. You know there's a body behind those mirrors, you know the mirrors are there, but still you can't see anything but the illusion. Only in this case, for somebody as used to walking around barefooted in other people's brains as 'Bernie, it was even weirder. Blood pressure, temperature, pulse, respiration, bile dripping out of the liver (overworked with all that aged tequila), sweat glands, kidneys, all the physical activity was there on the board, she told me. But the mind! Nothing. Worse than nothing. IF Static. The physical activity of the brain was there, all upside down and inside out, but nothing she could do to it would make it add up to a mind, which after all is something wholly different from the physical activity in which it's embedded. She took her head out of the globe and went over and looked at the woman, Cybernia told me. Looked at her, and there she was, pumping away at the treadles, pulling, pung, mouthing her answers, sweat pouring off her with effort. And back inside the globe, nothing. Just a jumble. Cybernia was in a research worker's heaven... and hell at the same time. What could be causing this woman to louse up the machine this way? A happy lifetime of a great researcher might go into just formulating the right questions. Michelson didn't leave his mark for precision experiments, you know... it was for asking, "If the ether's there, why doesn't it slow down this light beam?" But on the other hand, she couldn't talk to a soul in her field. What, and admit she was a party to the engaging fraud I had set up around her ideas? She was afraid they would form a hollow square of professors and snip off her Phi Beta Kappa, key, or her -- something, I don't know. Meanwhile the sucker was getting sicker. 'Bernie was so fascinated by the problem, the invisible brain, so to speak, that she quit watching the money; but Mrs. Gallegher didn't raise no idiot children. and I was raising the ante every time our rich lady showed up. There didn't seem to be any figure I could name that would make her winee. S he was always gassed. Maybe that's why. My own catwalk diagnosis was that she was going to be ignited by some stray spark from our machine before we could cure her. I don't know why she came back. We weren't doing her as much good as a rust spot in a rocket tube, and there are more limits to hypnosis than you may know. In credits, we had to charge her all the thrust her engines would stand, though, because 'Bernie had cured every other customer we had and run them all off with a bad taste in the mouth; as if she made them feel that when they realized how outrageous our bills were, then they were well. No head for business. She was only interested in that invisible brain. Bruddie got his certificate, gave his new photo to Social Security to match his old fingerprints, and shipped right out to old Rusty. He still thought he was going to hit it big in those old high Geiger hummocks. She hardly knew he was leaving. This whole thing grew up out of her affection for him, and now she gave him a kiss and a "Be careful" and sent him right back out to be cooked whole next time, like as not.  And heavy as I was drawing on Dona Luisa's fuel, don't you think Cybernia was flaming it faster than I could pump it? Between new maIF chinery, engineering checks on the old, and restructuring the analytical elements, we ran up bills that would have exhausted the Federated U.N.'s credit, and they nearly used up ours. I tell you, we were as rich as a Martian who's found a good, cheap substitute for water. As bright as 'Bemie is, still she's logical; and I don't think she ever would have solved the problem if Dona Luisa's brother hadn't come to rescue her from us. He was a business man, polite as Charles Vee, you know, and just as tough. He came in with a little reel of punched tape from Banco Longoria's Mexico City branch. I knew what was on it: the record of his sister's payouts to us. Every inch of that tape would have bought Tenochtitlan ten times over the day Cortez first saw it. What could I say: "Don Hermano. I'm keeping your sister crazy so my girl can have some fun?" or, "Say, did you know your sister's head is hollow?" 'And it was sure no use to try the mystery religion angle on him. He looked as if he'd been there when the water burns and the serpants talk and hadn't been a hot hagan impressed. He had the other Zapotec face, big beak nose and sharp chin, but still a brother's resemblance to Dona Luisa. Somehow he looked more familiar than that to me, but his hair was that shiny silver, and I kept trying to see it raven wing black, and couldn't. He said, very politely, that he wanted to see his sister. I had opened Cybernia into the conversation as soon as he ID'd himself, and she put on quite a little show. By that time, she had the equipment to start her own creation, pretty near, and she cracked about a forty-thousand volt streak of lightning through the office. Then while we were still fighting the ozone, she doused all the lights and made the door to the tank creak away like a grave opening itself. He was tough, though. It never shook the ash off that Orizaba cigar he was smoking. We went out into the tank, and there was his sister, peddling away on those treadles, and working that learning machine like crazy. (Ha ha.) Of course my sweetie transfixed him as soon as she caught his eye. We never improved on that original ripple technique. It always got attention. When she had his shoes off and put him to work on the treadles. Dona Luisa got a rest and in a minute, Cybernia came swarming out of the globe and woke me up. She was all excited, but she remembered to apologize for hypnotizing me too. S he jerked me in the office and switched on the repeaters, and just stood there, hands on her hips. "Well?" she said. "Well, what?" I hated to admit to her I couldn't read her dials and pen squiggles. I can read tape and punches like everyone, and I do a pretty good job of hearing when it's just simple machines talking to each other. I never walk into a door at a posh restaurant, because I can bear the scanner ordering the servo mechanism, whether it's Open Sesame or Shut Says-me. But her stuf was just too much for me. She hit me a couple of times on the chest to relieve h tension and then pointed to the whole board. "He's not there either!" Well? Mean anything to you? It didn't to me either, until we got to talking it over. First she'd cut one of them in, then the other. Finally she wheeled in another learning machine and kept them both at it, walking forty miles a day sitting down. I'll say this much. That long a course with 'Bemie would sure put somebody in shape. Dona Luisa had the figure of a once-handsome woman when she came to us. Now there was no more once upon a time about it. She was a magnificent incarnation of Indian beauty. Of course, 'Bemie didn't work her in the altogether any more (prudish), but I saw her striding in and out. The exercise was bringing the rose up under the olive in her complexion and the lines were dropping out of her face. If she'd ever looked at herself, she'd have been well. But we didn't even know what it was that obsessed her so passionately, because she was invisible in the only way that, counted. First we asked. Could it be all Mexican brains are invisible? Didn't make sense. No basic psychologic function has ever been found to be ethnically determined, let alone nationally. Then we asked, Could this be cultural? And again we said no, Mexico hasn't got that kind of homogeneous culture... and there was our answer, in reverse. Mexico has made the preservation of her separate Indian cultures a national passion; and these two people weren't like from Acapulco and Chihahuahua, one a Nayarit and the other a Tarahumara. They were from the identical culture.  there was our answer, and we just needed a few more Zapotecs as controls to demonstrate it. Only it wasn't. They didn't. All the other Zapotecs we tested showed up on the dials as well as I did. V I n the end, I solved it by being clumsy. Cybernia thought she had spotted a pattern of significance and wanted to run the tape back and e it on the dials again. The takeup reel stayed on slow when she reversed, and there was a big pileTup before she noticed it. I charged in to unsnarl it, and tore the tape. In the end, the simplest way out was to tear off the whole snarled section, splice it back in and get it wound at the right speed. Cybernia was transfixed. The splice took aibout three minutes to run, and she never said a word. Then she had it back. Then she had it back again. Finally she belted me on the shoulder. "What did you do?" I looked and turned sick. Here she thought she had something, and I had just switched tape ends when I spliced it. She was seeing all the IF readings backwards... and upside down, you might say. I showed her the dark line on the tape was on the wrong edge, and kind of ducked. I figured she'd hit me with something more than her fist. That little old gun, maybe. Instead, she just played the tape back one more time. Then she looked at me, dead serious, and said, "It's the mark of genius to recognize the implications of your work, even when you didn't expect them. Everything I've done has shown me that human beings are an infinite variety. 'Normal' to these machines is such a wide spread that it wouldn't be tolerated in a factory that manufactured toy rockets. Human beings must be a still evolving, still mutating species. Here's the living proof that there is no abnormality in electroencephalography that isn't 'normal' for somebody." She started cutting switches and turning on the hypno-tape that sent our sibling subjects out and brought them back the next day like a pair of flatworms rising to the sun. "These two people -- brother and sister -- I'll bet it's a family trait -- dominant, got to be, they've both got it -- they're just polarized -- something -- the reverse of everybody ele in the world. It'll only be a few days' work with Dona Luisa now that I can see her." So it was; but you don't take somebody through the valley of the shadow the way we had la Senora without arousing their human dependence. Dona Luisa was the most converted convert in the history of psychic technology. It wasn't the conditioning, after a little; I nn, not the conditioning Cybemia had given her. It was the deep human urge to lean on somebody, or some thing. Seemed like la Senora wasn't sure whether it was me or Cybemia she owed her sanity to. Then the air gave out. What do I mean? I mean disaster struck. The reactor blew up. Put it any awful way you want: the universe collapsed into the primordial atom and then blew up... only I'm still alive and in chaos. Cybemia unpeeled the inside of Dona Luisa's skull to the very trauma that had crippled her... and don't you think it turned out it happened on a trip she made to Mars as a girl? When Cybemia found that out, she fixed Dona Luisa's dependence on me as tight as the rocket jockey's suit in the story, and she disappeared like liquid oxygen on a spring morning. I trailed her to London, but they said she had come here, so here I am... H e drew deep on the taro of beer in his rusty fist. "But, Galeg," I said, "what has a tourist trip to Mars got to do with you?" At that moment, a giggling troop of the professional street urchins the government pays to hang around the tourist section up on Avenida Juarez erupted around the glass screen at the door, piping, "Senora! Aqui! Aquir Gallegher got purposefully to his feet. "Hold 'em off 'til I can get out through the kitchen, won't you? Why, it seems Luisa was married on Mars. She was a blonde then. That's why I thought I recognized Don Hermano, and didn't recognize her. You guessed it: she was wedded in the ancient Martian marriage ceremony. She believes it's her destiny to lay the egg that'll start up Martian evolution again. Crazy, no? Pay the tab. I'll square up at your hotel." Just as I was about to remind Galleghcr that he didn't know where I was staying and that, in point of fact, it was a guest house near the bull ring, his Martian tan paled visibly and he vanished behind the ice counter where Prendes displays its fresh red snappers. I heard a mellow voice cry, "Ah! Ah! My Lizard Prince, I am coming! All Mars awaits our heir!" As I turned to see, I am sorry to say a magnificent woman with a rosy olive complexion and a wild, rolling eye tripped over my foot in the aisle. I didn't wait for the waiter to bring me change. There wasn't time! Next month in If! One of everybody's all-time favorite science-fiction writers returns to If -- by Hal Clement (Author of Ice World, Needle, Mission of Gravity, etc.) A Complete Short Novel by James Blish IF IF  Feature Science Fiction's Holiday What sf fans do at the end of every summer -- and why! world gets together and has itself a sort of birthday party. Technically this shindig is termed The Annual World Science Fiction Convention, but this stern, imposing label conceals a good excuse for science-fiction people -- both fans and the professional writers, artists and editors alike -- to have themselves a big party. The "Con," as informal usage has it, has been around for more than a quarter of a century now, and it's the annual high-point of the fannish year. It gives people like us a chance to visit a new city every year, and hobnob with people we know by repute, or through their work. Every year the convention moves to a different city, on a rotation system that decides the area but not the city. Hmm. I can see I'm going to have to elucidate. Okay: it's agreed the Con will be held "somewhere" in the midwest one year; then on the east coast the next; then on the west coast; then back to the center of the country again. The different cities in each region may submit a "bid. at this year's Convention. If chosen, the winner of the bid is host at next year's Con. Naturally, only those cities with a healthy, active fan club make a bid -- or sometimes (as is the case this year) two or three smaller clubs in nearby cities will sort of consolidate to present a stronger bid. How did all this get started? T here had been "local" conventionettes just about from the very beginnings of science-fiction fandom. These were an afternoon long, or even lasted a full day, and attracted fans and pros in their immediate region. But back in the late #'s, one such little con in Newark, New Jersey, attracted such a large and enthusiastic gathering that it was only a matter of time before the idea caught on. This particular get-together called itself "The First National Science Fiction Convention" and could boast of no less than # attendees! Gosh wow. The fan world was agog. And then -- lo and behold -- one group put on the First World Science Fiction Convention. The year was #. Naturally, the place just had to be New York, the city where so many major features of the fannish "way of life" were inaugurated. The Con had a stellar line-up of major speakers: famed cover artist Frank R. Paul, Ray Cummings (author of The Girl in the Golden Atom), John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, and others. An announcement was read, reporting the establishment of something called Arkham House and the forth coming publication of some sort of a memorial volume dedicated to the late H.P. Lovecraft and titled The Outsider and Others. Attendees were urged to support this venture and place orders on the spot, the price being #. (Yes, # was quite a while ago, wasn't it? Today you'll see The Outsider offered for sale by rare book dealers at prices like #!) Something like # people attended this first of all Cons. Many were famous celebrities of science came from New Mexico. Forrest J. Ackerman hove into port from distant California (and among his entourage was a young fan named Ray Bradbury). Isaac Asimov and Eando Binder were on hand. Despite some feuding and disturbances, it was a whale of a Convention and everybody had a jolly time... so much so that it became a regular thing. Cons were held thereafter, at different cities like Denver and New Orleans and Los Angeles. Since fans have a happy habit of inventing slangish neologisms galore, this first New York convention was labelled "the Nycon." Other Cons followed suit: we had the "Denvention" and the "Nolacon" and even a "Paciticon" at the places noted above. The annual Con has been held every year (except during World War II, when things got disrupted and a few years were skipped over). This year's Con will be #th World Science Fiction Convention. What happens at a World Con, anyway? A ll sorts of things. Tradition demands there be a Guest of Honor -- or "GoH" (remember what I said about slang?) at each. This gives the science-fiction world a chance to honor its most important members. Usually these are writers, people like Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Murray Leinster. Said GoH makes a major speech which is often printed later in one of the fanzines. Quite often there's a banquet -- sometimes with entertainment. One such that I attended had Theodore Sturgeon whangin' away on his guitar during the meal. Two staples, but rarely omitted from the Con program, are the auction (where everyone has a chance to bid for things like rare books, original paintings used on science-fiction magazine covers, autographed manuscripts and such like, including items like clothbound sets IF of Unknown Worlds complete) and the costume ball (where one may encounter Martians, robots, Bug Eyed Monsters, and a fantastic pageant of spectacular creatures). And -- ever since the #th Convention, in Philadelphia (yclept the "Philcon") -- there's been the annual "Hugo" awards. This silver spaceship, named in honor of Hugo Gernsback, who founded the first professional science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, is awarded every year. Actual award categories fluctuate a little from Con to Con, but it's generally given to the year's best science-fiction novel, novelette, short story, illustrator, professional magazine, fanzine and (sometimes) to the most promising new writer and best dramatic presentation. The "Oscar" of science fiction was thought of by one Hal Lynch, who first suggested the idea of an annual award. Hal is, of course, a fan from New York. Sometimes the Con has a special feature. Like the science-fiction ballet at the Newyorkon in #. Or the "genuine" dianetics demonstration at New Orleans. Once in a while (and not half as often as I'd like), the Con resurrects a classic fantasy movie for the delight of Con-goers. All this formal program stuff to the side, gang, the World Con is really just an excuse for a weekend-long party. Oh, sure you see and meet and mingle with science-fiction celebrities (and sometimes outside celebrities: cartoonist AI Capp was at the Newyorkon, and horror movie star Christopher Lee stalked about at last year's Con) -- but the most fun is had after hours, at the epic parties. Conventions, you see, are held at large hotels, and out-oftowners take suites and rooms in the Con hotel -- perfect for throwing all-night gabfests and holding weekend-long parties. And the things you'll remember most of all, after the Con is over and you're back home again, back to the humdrum job or classroom, are not the speeches and banquets, but the little things that happened: the chance meetings, the new friends made, the old friends met, the talks you've had with people you've wanted to talk to for years. The two things I most remember about my first Convention, after a dozen years or more, is having martinis with Cyril Kornbluth and trading clerihews and limericks, and a hilarious two hours over a breakfast table shared with Robert Bloch (years and years before he wrote Psycho and got to be a Real Celebrity). Last year, the World Convention was in London. (England, that is, not Connecticut.) The Guest of Honor was one of Britain's newest writers, Brian W. Aldiss. The fans of America were pretty well represented, and, of course, the sciencefiction people from England, Ireland and Scotland were out in force. One thing that makes Cons fun is getting a good look at a city new to you, and the conventioneers from the U.S. had an exciting time seeing Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. This year in your town, next year in mine I 've mentioned the rotation system; now let me explain. According to this system, eligibility as a Con-site shuttles back and forth between the east, west and middle states. Any foreign city can make a bid at any time. If they win, the rotation system is merely suspended for that year, and resumes when next year rolls around. While most Cons are situated in the United States (which has more fans per capita than countries overseas, and more active and numerous fan clubs), the Con is, of course, a World Convention. London has been the Convention city twice now, and Toronto, Canada, has also been host to the science-fiction world. This year (according to the rotation system), the midwest gets the Convention. Then, in #, it will be one of the larger cities on the East Coast. # will see a World Con somewhere along the Pacific. But let's get back to this year. Where'll you be this Labor Day Weekend? T his year the science-fiction world salutes Cleveland, Ohio, and fans and professionals from all the fifty states and several European countries will be gathering there for the #th World Science Fiction Convention. The place: the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel on Public Square. Very convenient for out-of-town travelers. It's located right above the Cleveland railway terminal; and it's the first stop for transportation if you're coming from the airport. There are five restaurants in the hotel, no less, and one of them is happily open # hours a day, so you can have some hot coffee after one of those allnight-long parties. The time is the Labor Day "long" weekend -- September #, #, and #, not to mention #. Information about the Convention can be had by writing the #th World Science Fiction Convention, Box #, Cleveland, Ohio, #. There'll be a costume ball and a banquet. Prizes will be given for the Most Beautiful costume, that is, not the person inside it). Most Authentic (that is, if you want to come as Gandalf the Gray or Conan the Cimmerian or Captain Future, make sure you've got the details straight), and several others. One possible category is Best Presentation: that is, if you want to appear in a cloud of smoke or plan to enter the ball hall (well, what else can I call it?) being chased by a dinosaur -- you've got a good chance of copping that one. People planning a costume appearance with special effects are begged to consult the costume ball administration (care of box number above) for official cooperation. There'll be tables for hucksters, too. That is, people wanting to sell books, magazines, original cover art, science-fiction curiosities, fanzines and other stuff. So bring plenty of loose cash. Guest of Honor at Cleveland's Convention will be L. Sprague de Camp, who has been writing fantasy and science fiction since the IF #'s. You've seen his name on a shelf or two ol your favorite books -- Lest Darkness Fall, The Incomplete Enchanter, Land of Unreason, An Elephant For Aristotle, and a couple dozen more. Mr. de Camp is a globe-trotter who intersperses writing science fiction and fantasy with some marvelous historical novels and non-fiction books on archeology and ancient history. He is about nine feet tall, bearded as a Viking god, speaks forty-seven languages (including those of Lost Atlantis and Sunken Lemuria), and is one of the most witty, urbane and entertaining speakers you could ever wish to meet. He usually appears in a cloud of smoke, and I hope the costume ball administration has warned everybody. This Con is to be known as "the Tricon," by the way. Reason is, three cities -- Cleveland, Cincinnati and Detroit -- consolidated their convention bids. So... will we be seeing you What' New in Freezing? A symposium on the latest word on immortality through freezing and revival, with Robert C. W. Ettinger, Long John Mebel, Victor Borge,and others -- plus many other science-fiction and sciencefact stories and features -- all in the new Worlds of Tomorrow, Watch for it! IF  Serial Roan baffled his way back fo the Earfh across a galaxy fhaf swarmed wifh aliens -- for whaf? R oan and his three men walked, guns in their hands, along the echoing corridor. No one challenged them. "Why don't we pull out now, chief?" Sidis demanded. "We can take our pick of the tubs on the ramp." "That isn't what I came for," Roan said. "I have unfinished business ito take care of." "Why bother knocking off any more of these Terries?" Askor queried. "Not much sport in it, if you ask me." "I didn't!" Roan snapped. "Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open! We're not in the clear yet. What Has Gone Before Roan Cornay, a human born in mysterious circumstances on the outworld Tambooi, grows up among aliens and is kidnapped by a traveling Extravaganzoo. The 'zoo's ship is destroyed by the pirate Henry Dread, whose band Roan joins. Henry's own ship is destroyed in an encounter with a Niss vessel and Roan shoots Henry in an argument. Roan then assumes command of a lifeboat, boards the Niss ship, finds it long deserted; but it contains a captured Imperial Terran Navy ship which Roan and his crew take over. Roan, seeking his true origin and fabled Terra, heads for Tambooi and finds the old family slave, T'hoy hoy, who can tell him of his origins only that he is pure blood human and that he was bought as an embryo at the Thieves' Market. Roan finds the sleazy agency dealing in embryos and forces the ancient being who sold him to show him his record, which reveals that Roan originally came from an experimental station on Alpha Centauri and was the only survivor of a shipment of embryos. Roan heads for Alpha Centauri, Rim Headquarters for the Imperial Terran Navy, turns his ship over to one of the crew and goes with only his three toughest, most loyal men toward the Imperial Terran Navy headquarters on secheadquarters, their lifeboat is boarded by Imperial Terran Navy men. takes the ship into Rim Headquarters. Roan is then entertained at a luxurious dinner party by Commodore Quex, a cruel, decadent humanoid who tells Roan, at knife point, that it was he who stole the batch of human embryos from Starbird's keeping, and that in turn the embryos were pirated by the Shah of the Gallian planet, who was at that moment deposed and the embryos stolen again and at that point were brought to the Thieve's Market on Tambooi. Roan and his three men overcome a murderous attack by Quex anrd his crew, and Roan kills Quex, who requests an honorable death. Trishinist wasn't at the party -- or dozen more men, emerging from any of his men." the shelter of tattered drapes and A thunderclap racketed along chipped marble columns, peering the corridor. Roan spun, went flat, down from a wrought-metal gallery, "Hold your fire!" he roared, guns ready. Trishinist tittered and stepped out of "I heard the, er, sounds of celethe half-open door that had conbration," the Terran confided. "It cealed him. There was at least a seemed wise to have a chat with you before you, ah, continue with what you're about." "We've already talked," Roan snapped. 'Tell your Terries to put their guns away before my men get nervous and shix)t them out of their hands." "Umm. You Geeks do look efficient. Still, I daresay one or two of my chaps would live long enough to dispatch the four of you. So perhaps we'd best call a truce." Roan got to bis feet. His men stood, facing outward in a tight circle. "I have an appointment with Admiral Starbird," Roan said. "Or have you forgottwi?" "I remember," Trishinist said quickly. "You haven't, um, changed your plans?" "Why should I?" "I thought pwbaps -- after all the excitement rf the banquet -- " "You knew about Quex's plans for the evening?" "I suspected something of the sort might take place. After all, strangers..." "Thanks for letting me know." "Well, if you couldn't handle that group -- what good are you to me, ummm?" "We're going on now," Roan said. "Just so," Trishinist agreed. "But leave the guns." Roan looked at Trishinist. There were small bubbles at the corners of his mouth. "All right," he said. "Put 'em down, men." "Wat for. Boss?" Askor inquired. "Sidis still has his knife. That's all he needs." Trishinist shuddered. Roan tossed his gun aside. The others followed suit. "Now what, Chief?" Sidis asked. "Now we get on with the job," Roan turned on his heel and started toward the apartment of Admiral Starbird. I t was silent on the corridor. The guards on the admiral's door were gone. Roan stopped, faced Trishinist. "Send your Men away," He said. "You can stay. Keep your gun, if you feel like it." Trishinist lifted his lip to show his pearly teeth. "You're giving me orders?" he said in a wondering tone. "You want them to see it?" Trishinist started. "I see," he murmured. He turned, gave crisp orders. All but four of the Men turned, formed up in a squad, marched away. "They'll be waiting," Trishinist cooed. "Now -- " The door behind Roan clicked and swung in. Admiral Starbird stood in the opening, a gun in his hand. "Ten -- shunr he commanded. Trishinist's Men instinctively straightened and in the instant's pause, Askor, standing nearest them, swung and brought his hand down like an axe across the neck of one, caught his gun as it fell, swiveled on the next as he brought his gun around and the two weapons fired as one. The guard spun, falling, his gun still firing. A vivid scar raked the wall and door jamb and caught Admiral Starbird full in the chest. IF The old man slammed back against the wall. He fell slowly, sprawling full length in a growing stain of Trishinist made a noise like repressed retching and stumbled back. Askor brought his gun around as the remaining two guards backed, white with shock but with guns leveled on Roan and his crew. "You've killed him," Trishinist gasped. "The Admiral is dead! "I can nail the pair of youse, easy," Askor grinned at the gunners. "Who's first?" Roan knelt at Starbird's side, ignoring the confrontation of guns. "Admiral." He tried the pulse at the corded veins of the wrist. There was a faint flutter. "Get your doctors, Trishinist!" "Yes... yes... Fetch Surgeon Splie, Linerman! Hurry!" A man turned and darted away. Starbird's eyes opened. He stared at the men holding guns aimed at Roan. "At ease," he said, and died. "You killed the admiral," Roan said slowly, looking up at Trishinist. "Not I," Trishinist gasped, backing. "It was an accident. I won't have that on my conscience. It was them!" He pointed at the two guards. "Blunderers!" he croaked. "You've killed a man of the True Blood!" "Not me, Captain! Strigator was the one!" The guards looked shaken, still covering Roan and Poion while Askor covered them. "Shall I kill 'em?" Askor asked. "Cover Trishinist." Askor's gun flicked to point at the small Man's chest. Poion licked his lips and eyed the gun on the floor. "Don't try it," Askor rumbled. "You have no chance," Trishinist said weakly, his eyes on the gun in Askor's hands. "Surrender and I'll deal leniently with you." "Give us a ship," Roan said. "We'll go quietly." "You with the gun, Trishinist addressed Askor. "Give up that weapon and you'll go free." "What about the Cap'n and these two lunkheads?" 'Youll go free. Never mind about them." Askor grinned, holding the gun steady. "Very well, then. There's been enough bloodshed. You'll all go free." # #T'#I keep the gun," Askor said. X "But I won't use it unless I have to. How about that boat now?" "Certainly." Trishinist licked his lips. "I'll give the orders. But only after you surrender the gun." Sweat was trickling down the small Man's face. "What about it, Cap'n?" "Do I have your word as a Man?" Roan asked. "A ship, and no pursuit -- for all four of us?" Trishinist nodded quickly. "Yes, of course. My word on it." "All right, Askor," Roan said. "Wait a minute, Boss!" "Don't do it. Chief," Sidis barked. "Askor can get the both of 'em while they're shooting us! Then him and you can take fancy-pants here fer a hostage -- " Roan shook his head. "Put the gun down." Askor made a jabbing motion toward Trishinist, and the Captain jumped back. Askor laughed and tossed the gun aside with a clatter. Roan faced Trishinist. The Man took out a handkerchief, mopped at his face. "Very well," he said. He made a curt gesture to the two armed men. "Take these stupid pigs to D level." With a bellow Poion jumped. The guard's gun shrieked and spouted blue lightning, and Poion whirled and fell, smoke churning from a gaping, blackened wound in his chest. He groaned and rolled on his back, and charred ribs showed before the blood welled out to hide the sight. "Askor! Sidis!" Roan snapped. "Stand fast! That's an order!" Roan looked at Trishinist, smiling. "You surprise me. Captain," he said. "I didn't think even a traitor like you would disgrace his Manhood in front of a couple of crossbloods." Trishinist tore his eyes from Roan's. "There's been enough killaway -- alive." He turned back to Roan. "I have every right to execute you -- all of you -- out of hand. I'm sparing your lives. Consider yourselves lucky. You'll be questioned, of course -- later." He turned and stalked away. "Poion," Roan called. "Are you... can you...?" "I have taken my death-wound. Captain," Poion gasped. "How strange... that so many years of life... can end in such... a little moment... and the worlds go on without me..." "So long, Poion," Sidis said. "Take a pull at the Helhhorn for me." "Nice try, old pal," Askor said hoarsely. "I think maybe you're the lucky one." The Man who had gone for the doctor came up with a short fat Man in tow. He glanced at the Admiral, shuddered, shook his head. "What about him?" A guard pointed at Poion. The doctor purs his lips at the wound. "No chance," he said and turned away. "Surgeon -- have you... no medicine to cure the pain of living..." Poion whispered. "Hmmmph." The doctor opened a small case, took out a hypospray, pressed it briefly against Poion's laboring chest. A breath sighed out and then there was silence. "Let's go," the guard said. A skor reached up and gripped the chain that linked the manacle on his left wrist to a ring set high in the concrete wall. He pulled himself up high enough to see through the foot-square barred opening in the cell wall. He grunted and dropped back. "Nothing, Cap'n. Some kind of tunnel, I guess. We're fifty feet underground anyways." Sidis squatted at the end of his tether near the door, angling the blade of his polished machete through the bars to catch the faint light from along the corridor. "They's a guard post about thirty yards along," he said. "One Terry with a side-arm." "You shoulda let us jump 'em IF Cap'n," Askor said. "It woulda been better than this crummy joint. It stinks." He wrinkled his wide nose to dramatize the odor. "I can smell it," Roan said. "And as long as we're alive to smell things we still have a chance." Sidis was eyeing the barred door. "Them bars don't look so tough," he said. "I bet I could bend 'em -- if I could reach 'em." "What do you figure'll happen, Chief?" Askor said. "As soon as Trishinist recovers his stomach, he'll be along to find out who sent us and why," Askor guffawed. "That'll be a laugh," he said. "He'll twist and slice us till he makes a mess a mudpig would puke at, but we won't tell him nothing. We can't. We don't know nothing! That'll gravel him." "If we was to bend them bars," Sidis said, "one of us could slide out and get to the joker with the blaster. Then he could come back and bum them chains off." "Wise up," Askor said. "You got to get the chain off the first one first." Sidis hefted his machete. "They left me this," he said thoughtfully. "Them crazy Terries. I guess they're so used to guns they forgot a knife's a weapon too," "So what? It won't cut chromalloy." Sidis backed from the wall until the six-foot chain attached to his wrist came taut. "How much time you think we got, Cap'n?" he asked. "They'll be along soon." Sidis licked his lips. "Then I better get moving." He brought the machete up and with one terrific stroke severed his left hand. T hey stood in a dark room, amid a jumble of piping and tanks. "Smells like a derelict's bilge," Askor snorted. "Dead end," Sidis grunted. His stump was bound in rags torn from Askor's shirt and there was a tourniquet around his massive upper arm His face looked pale and damp. Roan went to the center of the room, studying the floor. "Maybe not," he said. Askor came up. There was a threefoot metal disk set in the floor, with a ring near its edge. Roan gripped the ring and lifted the lid, exposing a dark hole and the rungs of a corroded ladder. Water glistened at the bottom. The voices outside were suddenly louder. Askor stepped to the door, looked out. "Oh-oh. They're right on our tail." "I hope they get here quick," Sidis said. "I don't want to miss nothing." "Are you well enouh to travel?" Sidis nodded. "Never better. Chief." He took a step, staggered, then stood firm. "Askor, you go first," Roan said quickly. "Sidis, you follow him." "Too bad we had to burn the door. We could maybe of foxed 'em." Askor started down the ladder. "Come on, Sidis. Shake it up." "I'll stay here," he said. "They got to pass the door one at a time, and Gut-biter'll get all the action he wants." "Down the hole," Roan snapped. "Fast!" "Cap'n, I ain't -- " "That's an order!" Sidis started down, awkwardly, one-handed. "Hey, Chief, wonder where this thing leads to?" Askor's voice echoed from below. Roan knelt at the manhole. "If you're lucky, it will take you out to a drainage ditch in the open." Sidis turned his tatooed face up. "What's that mean, Boss? If were lucky?" "Fm covering you," Roan said. "I'll give you a ten minute start and then follow." Sidis started back up. Roan put out a hand. "If you get clear, wait for me ten minutes. Maybe they'll miss the door." Below, Askor was shouting: "Hey, what's that? What's Cap'n saying?" "Shut up and get moving. If you get through, come back and get me. With our cruiser you can blow this place wide open." "We ain't going without you, Cap'n. You know better'n -- " "They won't kill me," Roan said. "I'm Pure Strain, remember? They'd burn you two down on sight." "We come this far, we ain't -- " "Did you ever hear of discipline?" Roan sid harshly. "This is our only chance. If I've tried to teach you anything, it's how to follow orders like Men instead of behaving like a bunch of Geeks!" Sidis looked at Roan. "If that's what you want, Cap'n. But we'll come back. You stay alive, Cap'n." "I'll stay alive. Get going!" When they were gone, Roan slid the manhole cover back in place and turned to face the door. C aptain Trishinist lounged behind the wide desk in the office recently vacated by Admiral Starbird. "Why?" he repeated sourly. "Seventy-two hours, holed up in a filthy sewage pumping room, without food, drink or sleep, aiming a gun at the door. Why? You mhst have known you'd be taken in the end." Roan blinked at the fog before him. His head ached and his throat was like dried husks. "Was it just for that precious pair of animals?" The captain's eyes seemed to glitter as he stared at Roan. "What hold had they on you?" "Did they get clear?" Roan asked. His voice was blurry with fatigue. "You're a fool," Trishinist said. "But you'll talk to me in time. There are methods for dealing with recalcitrants -- effective methods." "I'll bet they got through," Roan said. "Your kind couldn't stop them." "Oh-hoh, you think to tempt me to angry disclosures!" The captain smirked. "How really quaint." "You're so quaint you stink," Roan said. "But you can't touch me. You're afraid to. You'd gut your own grandmother and make bonfires out of children, but you can't kill a real Terry." Trishinist glowered. "Don't press me too far, spy!" Roan laughed aloud. "You're a IF poor half-breed with pretensions, Trishinist. You're pitiful. Even my poor Gooks got past you." Trishinist was on his feet, shaking with rage. "Your wretched creatures died in unspeakable agony an hour after you saw them last!" "You're a liar," Roan said. Trishinist spewed saliva and fury. "Dead!" he screeched. "I took them and stripped the hide from them alive!" "Prove it. Show me the bodies." "I'll show you nothing! Slave! Traitor! Spy! What need have I to prove -- " Roan laughed in his face. "Good for Askor. I knew he'd get through. I hope he stole one of your better ships." "Take him away!" Trishinist screamed. "Put him in the Hole. Let him rot there!" The Man holding the rope looped around Roan's neck jerked it, and Roan stumbled and almost fell. "And when you're ready to tell me your heart's secrets, beg. And perhaps! Perhaps! I'll find time to listen!" Trishinist was still fulminating as Roan was led along the corridor. The rope urged him roughly through a small door into a paved court, across it and out onto dry hardpacked dirt. The air was cold here, and the sparse stars of the Rim gleamed through mist. Roan stumbled on, determined not to fall. The tugging at the rope stopped at last, and a rough hand shook him. "Don't go to sleep standing up, you. Grab the rope -- unless you want to hang!" He took the slack rope on his hands, looping it around his forearms, and a blow on the back sent him reeling forward. And then he was falling, and his arms felt as though they had been torn from their sockets as he brought up short. He felt himself descending, the taut rope trembling in his grip. Above, the circle of dark-glowing slcy dwindled. Down, down -- He slammed the mucky bottom with a force that knocked him flat. There was a whistling, and the coils of rope fell down about him. Far above, someone called: "Trishinist won't kill ye, maybe, bucko! But if you die on your own, that's yer privilege!" A t first, Roan was hungry all the time. He was so hungry he chewed on the rope, and so thirsty he licked at the water that dripped everlastingly along the muddy circumference of the pit. And he tried, again and again, to climb the slimy sides of the hole. He scraped hand and foot holds with his fingers, even after his nails had broken off, and always the crevices he made oozed away. And once, when he'd gotten several feet up, someone flashed a light in to watch him, and laughed when he fell. Roan lay where he'd fallen, listening as the laughter echoed down the hollow hole. One evening the old Man threw down the bread and then something else, something alive and bristly that struck Roan on the arm. As it leaped across his hand it bit him. It was hard to make out the shape of the thing in the dim twilight of the hole. but it had red eyes that glittered and it seemed to be bigger than Roan's foot. Its frightened bite made a vicious, screaming kind of pain and Roan could feel the blood oozing from his hand. He found the bread and then sat in the dark, his back against the cold, wet mud of the wall that soaked into the tatters of his clothes, and ate. He no longer longed for a bath, just as he no longer felt hungry all the time. He watched the red eyes glitter in the dark, listened for the scrabble of its claws. It leaped at the walls again and again, and fell back with a thud and a splash. Once in its panic it ran over Roan's lap and then leaped at the slime of the wall again. Then, finally exhausted, it stopped, and crouched across the floor from Roan, panting horribly, loud as a Man. The panting slowed, and Roan watched, his hand aching, thinking of ways to kill the thing -- later, when he felt better... Roan awoke with a start. The rodent had crept to his foot, attempted to gnaw his ankle. He kicked out, cursing. The rat retreated a few feet, sat watching him, sensing his weakness. Roan felt fhe gashed skin of his ankle, the slippery blood. The bite on his hand ached, a swelling, throbbing ache. He was dizzy and hot now and wiping his forehead, Roan realized it was dry. feverish. He shut out from his mind every thought except the need to survive. He wasn't going to be eaten alive by a rat at the bottom of a dark hole. Somehow, he was going to escape, and get to Terra. And if it was impossible, he'd do it anyway. # #Xe still alive, boy?" came tiie jL voice. Roan, startled, came out of his sleep. He saw the head silhouetted against the dark sky above. "Yes, curse you. I'm still alive and so is the rat. Double the rations." The old Man laugjhed. ' "Got no orders to double the ration." The bread struck one side of the hole, bounced to the other and the rat ran out, went for the crumbs that the bouncing had dislodged. Roan stood, shakily, pulled off his heavy metal-linked belt, tied his trousers in a knot at the top. They were inches too wide for him now, and the blades of his hips jutted out like knives. His dizziness turned to nausea whenever he moved. His strength had gone out of his body and into the earth... Roan held the belt by one end, walked toward the rat, then swung with all his strength. He caught the rodent as it turned to dart away and it screamed a woman's scream, kicking in the mud, smell of fear. Roan felt his knees going. He fell, lay in the mud, listening to the death struggle. Roan was afraid to believe it even when he could feel the death in it, so he strangled it again with his hands. And knowing his weakness and starvation were probably going to kill him, feeling half insane but knowing he must have nourishment, he skinned the rat with the sharp edge of his belt buckle, and ate it. I t was three days and nights before the fever went away; Roan tried to rebuild his strength by pacing the circumference of the hole and swinging his arms, but he found it harder to exercise his mind, and sometimes all day would go by and it would seem like a minute, and other times a night would seem like centuries and the only time anything different happened was when it rained and the water rose knee-deep before it drained away. And time passed... Then, one evening the old Man didn't come with the bread. Nor the next. And Roan could do nothing but wait, wait eternities. The stars came and went and came again, and Roan, trapped for so long in the dark, slimy pit, wondered if indeed he had died and this was what death was -- an aching and a waiting forever and all of the world a circle of changing sky fifty feet above. Roan lay in one spot against the wall and ignored the pain in his stomach. He tried to sleep, and perhaps dream of Stellaraire and of food. Stellaraire bringing him food, feeding him the delicacies of a hundred worlds washed down with ancient Terran wines, Stellaraire smiling... and fading. The food disappeared and Gom Bulj was yelling and Henry Dread was yelling and... Someone was yelling, up above, a head silhouetted against dark sky. Roan saw the rope dangling in front of him. Was it real? For a long time it didn't seem worth the trouble of reaching up to find out. He had waited so long... But he did reach up, almost without hope that it was a real rope, real people calling him to loop the rope around his waist. But he complied, and the rope pulled, lifting him, and it hurt, and he grabbed the rope, thinking he would never reach the top. Probably there was no top. Then hard hands were on him, lifting him up, and a broad, ugly face was bending over him, and he saw the glint of light on filed steel teeth. "Gee, Boss," Sidis said. And Roan had the strange thought that it must be raining, because there was water running down the leathery face. "You Gooks... took your time..." Roan said. And then Askor was there, grinning a meat-eating grin, and their faces were prettier than any faces Roan had ever seen. He smiled. Smiling, he let it all go and whirled down into the bottomless soft night. # #T#at slowly," a testy voice said from somewhere; Roan's eyes were almost shut against the bright light. "And not too much." Roan sipped a brothy soup, the bowl trembling in his hands. After the soup the doctor poked him, shone lights in his ears and mouth and whistled. "I'm giving you a walloping shot of vitastim," he said. "You'll feel human in about an hour. But don't overdo it. Unless, of course, you want to," he added. Askor and Sidis hustled him into a hard shower, gave him a brush to scrub with. Then they let him sleep. By the time Roan had on a uniform IF which almost fit his bone-thin body, he'd come back to himself. The face that looked back at him from the mirror was a stranger's. A gaunt, old-looking, deep-eyed stranger. And the hair above his ears had silver streaks in it. But Roan grinned at the reflection. "We're alive," he said. And behind him, Askor and Sidis smiled, too. "Let's go, men," Roan said. "There's nothing more here for us." A board the stolen light cruiser Heirs Whore with an hour's run in space. Roan relaxed in the big padded First Officer's chair, studying the pattern of lights on the screen. "I'm glad you two showed up when you did," he said. "But it was pretty stupid of the two of you to try it alone." "We wasn't alone. Boss," Sidis corrected. "We had their best bucket here. Tough we had to wait around out there on Four for three months to get a crack at her, but you know there wasn't much left of the old Rage of Heaven" "Nice work, taking a cruiser with that hulk," Roan said. "Maybe you're learning after all." "Nothing to it. They thought they was taking us." "I wish I'd been there -- instead of where I was." "You didn't miss nothing." Sidis flashed his teeth and examined the tip of the steel toothpick with which he had been grooming them. "It was kind of pitiful, them bums pulling guns on us." "And that's what they call the Imperial Terran Navy," Askor snickered. "Them nancies -- " "Those weren't real Terries," Roan said. "That was just some sort of rag-tag gipsy outfit using the name. The real Terries are on Terra." "I heard of it," Sidis said doubtfully. But I thought -- Hey, Captain, we ain't going there, are we?" "Why shouldn't we go there?" "I dunno. I figured maybe you Cap'n Dread." now," Roan said shortly. He rose and picked up the folded garments of blue and silver polyon which he had replaced with the old familiar ship-clothes, tossed them to Sidis. "What'll I do with this stuff?" Sidis asked, holding the Terran uniform. "Burn it," Roan said. board of Hells Whore and new the tiny, faint points of lights that were Sol's planets could be seen. Roan tried to pick out the one that might be Terra. But he couldn't be sure. It was a double planet. Starbird had said, but the faint companion. Luna, would be too dim to see at this distance. There was the usual buzz of interstellar noise as he switched the receiver on, but nothing else. He took the microphone and began transmitting. "Imperial Terran Cruiser Hells Whore calling Niss headquarters..." "Wtiat makes you think they speak Panterran, Boss?" Sidis ask nervously. He had been nervous ever since they sighted the great, silent Niss ship. "They did five thousand years ago," Roan said. "How long's it been since anyone tried to run the blockade?" Askor inquired. "Four hundred years," Roan said. "They didn't make it." "Swell," Sidis muttered. "We ought to be in detector range now," Roan said calmly. He adjusted controls; a meteorite flashed around the repulsion field of the ship's hull. The image grew or the screens. "She's a big baby," Sidis said. "No bigger than the last one," Askor pointed out. "Yeah -- it was dead," Sidis conceded. "But what if this one ain't?" "Then we'll get blasted into the Nine Hells. Why?" "Just asking," Sidis said, and then they watched the screen in silence. U p close, the Niss ship looked familiar, even to the characters sprawled across the dark curve of the hull. It was a twin to the dreadnaught they had boarded after Henry Dread's death, so many years before. Immense, ancient, dead. It took an hour with a cutting torch to force an opening. Dead air whistled, stilled. Inside, sealed in their atmosphere suits. Roan and his men walked along the narrow, empty, dim passageways, remembering the route, passing the little piles of dust and fish bones that had been Niss warriors. In the control room there was an ancient, abandoned-looking uniform jacket hanging over the back of the pilot's chair -- the first garment they had seen. Roan came closer to the control board. "Terran!" an echoing voice said. "Stand where you are!" Roan slipped his power pistol from its holster. "Drop your weapon!" The voice was hollow, alien as not even a Geek's voice was alien, and filled with an inexpressible weariness. Roan stopped breathing for a moment. Askor and Sidis stood behind him, silent. "Never mind," the voice came again. "Keep your gun, Terran. I cannot keep this up. And I am dying, so there is no need to shoot me." The chair moved, swung around. In it was draped a creature that looked like a long, crushed polyon bag with something rotten in it. The part that moved. Roan decided, must be the mouth. "My form shocks you," the voice said. "It is because my energy level is so low. But how did you come here? Where are my people?" Roan made his voice sound. "You are the first Niss I've ever seen." "I am Over-great-one Thstt, Commandei of Twelve Hordes. The alarm energized my forebrain and I came awake, here, in the stink of loneliness. I called, but none answer. Only you, Terran." "I've waited years for this," Roan said. "I always thought it would be very satisfying to kill a Niss. But now I don't seem to care." "Did the armies of Terra arise IF then and destroy us? I see our dreadnaughts all in station, orbiting the enemy home-world. But no one answers my signals. And when I tried to call my home planet, I got only... listen." The Niss floated out a portion of his polyoid body, threw a switch. "Listen!" Roan could hear nothing. But out of the receiver came a swirl of purple smoke. No. Not purple. Some inconceivable color. It writhed into the room and disappeared without dispersing. T hstt screamed, and his scream turned finally into a smoke of the same color as that coming out of the receiver. The Niss' odd, formless body twisted and swelled, pulsating and then shrank, slacker than before. Roan stepped over, switched off the microphone. "I don't know what that means," he said in a shaken voice. "It's the sound of desolation," Thstt said. "Don't you see? There is no one left but me. We had planned to seize your Galaxy because our own was infected with a parasite that consumed Niss vital energies. But we have lost.' And so we died -- all but me, waiting here in alert statis..." "The Niss were never conquered," Roan said. "They just disappeared, as far as anyone knows. And the machinery has run down, over the eons." "And so I, too, die," said Thstt. "And with me the ancient and mighty dream that was the race of Niss. But do not shoot me, or I will implode and you, too, will die. There is no need to watch me. It is not pleasant. We Niss are strong, and strong is our hold on that mystery we know as life..." But Roan did watch. The polyoid body first grew, expanding as high as the ceiling and half as wide as the room, exchanging analien rush of terrifying colors within itself. Fascinated, Roan found himself hypnotized by the horror of the colors and by something else, as though the death agonies of this alien were being breathed into his own nostrils, stuffed into his own ears, touching nerve endings... Thstt began to shrink now, the colors becoming denser and slower and coagulating into painful scabs. Roan felt himself grasping painfully for breath and his mind reeled at the horror he felt. Then, suddenly, it was over. Roan let out his breath in a long sigh. He went to the crumpled polyon on the floor, and when he picked up the shrunken, pathetic thing, something clanked inside of it, like bones. "Gee, Boss," Sidis spoke for the first time. Askor wiped his face with a horny hand. "Let's get out of here. Chief." Roan nodded, silently and turned away, feeling a strange loneliness, as though a part of his life had died. E ven from a hundred miles up it was beautiful. At twenty miles the night side was misted with lights and the day side was a soft harmony of blue and green and russet. Roan could feel the leap of his heart, the shine in his eyes. Terra. Home. If only Henry Dread could have seen it like this. Roan dropped deeper into atmosphere, and his men leaned close, scanning the scene on the high mag screen. "Look, Boss," Sidis pointed. "They're coming up to meet us. Maybe we better arm a couple batteries." Roan watched the atmosphere planes, flashing their wings in the sun, far below. "They're coming to meet us, as you said," Roan pointed out. "Not to shoot at us." A jet flyer barreled past, rolled like a playful fish, then shot away toward the west. "Hey!" Askor was studying the charts and comparing them with the screens. "That there is Americanada. Only it's upside down." Sidis keyed the communicator and called, for the twentieth time. There was no answer. The jet was back, circling, then streaking away again. "He wants us to follow," Roan said. He altered course, trailed the tiny ship. It led them over a dazzling blue and green coastline, across green hills, over a sprawling city, down to a wide paved field as white as beach sand. Roan lowered the ship carefully so as not to disturb the wide bands of colored plants massed beside the ramp. The ship grounded gently, and the rumble of the drive died. Roan stood, feeling his mouth dry, his knees trembling slightly. It wasn't like fear. It was more like the feeling he'd had the first time he saw Stellaraire: Wanting her, and afraid that somehow he'd do some small thing wrong, and lose her. Askor was buckling on his guns. "Leave 'em here," Roan said. "This is home. You don't need your gun at home." "Us Gooks got no home, Cap'n," Sidis said. "But maybe we can pretend." Roan took a deep breath. "Maybe we'll all have to pretend a little," he said. T hey descended from the ship into a world flashing with sunlight. Beyond the flower beds were trees that fluttered silver when the wind blew, and the air smelled of a thousand perfumes. It was so familiar to Roan's dreams that tears came to his eyes. "Where's all the Terries?" Sidis wondered aloud. Faint but pervasive, as though sounded by the motion of the air, came a gentle music. "Come on." Roan led the way across the glass-white concrete, past Terran planes, blind and closed, past a row of empty, bright-colored buggies, used no doubt to convey passengers from the long-range planes to the building ahead where helicopters waited on the roof. There was a wide, color-tiled walk between whispering, silver leafed trees. Roan followed it and bumped into the door before he saw it. It was absolutely translucent glass, as was the wall. Only a faint line showed where the glass door joined the glass wall, and beyond it was a garIF den of thin-petalled flowers. Within he could see solid panels, walling off rooms, and more flowers and streams and fountains. But no people. Roan thought for a panicked moment of Aldo Cerise, of the beautiful, sad, dead city and the woman who was only a statue. But no. There were obviously people here. People? Could it be that the Niss had taken it over, that there were now only Niss? He pushed at the door, but it didn't open and there wasn't a handle. He heard running steps and through the trees came a child, a human child, and after the child a large white animal that Roan recognized as a dog, from the picturebook he'd seen as a child. "Paulikins! Paulikins!" called the dog, and then barked wildly, seeing them. The child stopped before Roan, rocking a little after the run. He stared mercilessly, a beautiful pink and gold child with round blue eyes. The dog ran up, panting, and cringed with his tail between his legs. "It's only a child, sirs," he said and trembled all over. "A youngling. I don't know how he got loose." "It isn't old Niss," the child said. "It's just a funny man. Look at his funny hands. See, Talbot?" "Of course we're not Niss," Roan said, and patted the child on the head. "We're human, like you." Talbot was sniffing the air, and edged closer, trying to sniff at Roan without seeming to. His eyes rolled to take in Sidis and Askor, standing silently by. "Is it a Mama or a Daddy?" Robert asked. "It smeUs funny." "There's been a mistake, sir," Talbot said. He had lost his fear and sat on his hunches, looking serious. He was a big woolly white dog,spotlessly clean, and Roan could imagine that Paulikins rodeon his back and afterwards curled up on the grass and rested his head on his furry stomach. "I see," Roan said. "We landed in a spaceship and naturally everyone would think we were Niss." "If you could wait here a moment, sir, I'll inform the Culture Authorities. You see, they're fetching a Niss scholar. They didn't want anyone else to greet you." "We'll wait," said Roan. A helicopter hesitated and lighted easily as a fly on the roof. Askor and Sidis got up from where they had been sitting under a tree, smelling flowers they had picked. Roan was pacing under the trees, practicing Terran in his mind. The dog's accent had been smoother, much more precise than his own. Many of the words Roan had had to strain or guess at. Also, there was a rising inflection that Roan's language lacked. The woolly dog was back and made a deferential noise in the back of its throat. "If you would come this way. Sir, so that you can be properly received." Roan turned to follow the dog and Askor and Sidis fell in beside him. He waved them back. "You two wait here," he said. "I'll handle this." "How come, Chief?" Askor frowned. "Up to now we always stuck together." "I don't need a bodyguard here," Roan said. "And I don't want the sight of you two to scare anybody. Just stand by." The glass door opened silently at a touch. Roan followed the dog into a paneled-off room which looked as translucent from the inside as the glass door had looked from the outside. The room was planted with a lush, green lawn that sprang softly under his feet. A breeze blew through the room, thou there were no openings in the one-way glass. A door slid open soundlessly across the spacious room, and a handsome young woman -- no, a handsome young Man with bright brown hair that curled aroimd his head like a cap stepped through and smiled. A dog followed, silent and watchful. "I am Daryl Raim, the Niss expert," the Man said. His voice was low and controlled, as though he tuned each phrase before he spoke it. Roan felt his face looking angry. "I'm no Niss," he said in a voice that sounded harsher than he intended. I'm a Man." "Of course. I'see you are not Old Niss." When  Daryl smiled, a dimple broke in the smooth, white skin of his left cheek. Roan found himself for the first time a mixture of embarrassing emotions and to his horror, he blushed. There was something feminine and appealing about the dimple, and the smooth white skin glowed as though it wanted to be touched. Daryl sat down gracefully, motioned Roan to a chair entwined with trumpet-vines. "I..." Roan didn't know how to begin. How to explain who he was. "I am a Terran," he said finally. Daryl nodded, smiling encouragingly. Roan felt foolish. Always before, "I am a Terran," had been an impressive thing to say. "Of course," Daryl said. "I assume you have some important message from Old Niss?" Roan's mouth opened and closed. His face hardened. "No," he snapped. "I'm a Terran, coming home. The Niss are dead." t#h?" Daryl's voice was uncertain. "Dead? I'm sure this news will interest many people. But if you're not from Old Niss...?" "I was born on Tambool, out in the Eastern Arm," Roan said. "Out there, Terra is a legend. I came here to see if it was real." Daryl smiled apologetically. "Geography was never a hobby of mine." "Tambool is another world. It's half a lifetime away. Its sun is so far away you can't even see it in the sky from here." Daryl smiled uneasily. "You've come from Beyond? You've really... returned from the dead?" "Who said anything about the dead?" "I can't believe it." Daryl seemed to be talking to himself now. "But you do look -- and your ship is like -- and -- and I've seen your face IF before -- somewhere!" He finished up with his voice almost on a note of fright. Roan thought he shuddered -- but the smile never left Daryl's face. He held out his arm. "Lxx)k. Goosebumps!" Roan got to his feet. The chair was too comfortable, the conversation too unreal. He looked around at the perfect lawn, the perfect invisibility of the walls, the perfumed and curled Man, "Don't you realize what this means? The Niss blockade is over. Terra's an open world again!" Daryl took out a thin golden cylinder, drew on it, blew out pink smoke through delicate nostrils. He rearranged his body with a subtle excitement. "I haven't felt such a thrill in years," he said. "I half believe you really did come back from Beyond." He stood, a smooth, flowing motion. "I want you to come with me, talk to me. I promise you such a night as you've never experienced on either side of the grave. My equipage is waiting. Come along to my place." He put a slender hand on Roan's arm. Roan knocked it away. "Just tell me where to find your military leaders," he said harshly. He pushed past Daryl, who shrank back, his painted eyes wide. Roan groped, looking for the door. He slammed against the invisible wall, cursed, felt his way along it, banged his knee at an invisible corner. He whirled on Daryl. "Get me out of here!" He roared. "Where in the Nine Hells are the people who ought to be out here to hear what I have to tell them!" Daryl huddled against his dhair; Roan stared at him, feeling the anger drain away as suddenly as it had come. "Listen -- Daryl," he said, forcing his voice low. "I grew up amcmg aliens, fought my way through aliens to come here. I've gotten what I've had out of life by force, by guile, the way you survive on the worlds out there." Roan rammed spread fingers at the sky, accusing the worlds, accounting for himself. "I'm sorry if I hurt you," he finished. Daryl smiled through glistening tears. He rose, all assurance again, touched his hair. "You're quite wonderful," he said. "And of course you'll want to meet -- oh, ever so many fascinating people." "The place looks deserted," Roan said. "Where is everybody?" "They're a little shy. You understand. We weren't just sure about Old Niss." "You didn't seem to be afraid of me -- at first," Roan said bluntly. "Afraid? Oh, I see what you mean. No, of course I wasn't afraid. The restrainers are focused on you." # a restrainer?" Roan   said in a tight voice. Daryl giggled. "They're trained on your two -- associates, too," he said. "Shall I give you a demonstration?" "No!" Roan looked out across the flowerbeds beyond the glass. Askor and Sidis were standing together, squinting up at the strange blue sky of Terra. "We need a place to stay," he said. He was looking around the room now, trying to pick out something that looked like a restrainer. "Oh, you'll find many charming compositions to choose from," Daryle said. "But why don't you accept my invitation? It would be such a coup to have you all to myself this first evening." "What about my friends?" Roan demanded. Daryl arched his neck gracefully to look at them. "Such strange looking, er, persons," he said, "If you don't mind my saying so." "Why should I mind?" Roan snapped. "It's true enough, I guess. But there are a lot stranger, out there." He waved at the sky. "They'll be quartered wherever you choose," Daryl said stiffly. "So long as you're sure they're not... Lowers..." Roan rounded on him. "No, damn you! They're my friends!" And he hated the reluctance he felt in claiming them. Daryl frowned. "Your manner is somewhat abrupt," he said stiffly. "Too bad about my manfters," Roan snapped. "But I suppose you forget such things. Beyond." Daryl led the way out through panels that opened before he touched them to the accompaniment of musical tones that shimmered in the air like soap bubbles. Outside, Roan beckoned Askor and Sidis over. "This is Daryl," he said. "He's fixing us up with a place to stay." "Boss, did you say he?' Sidis grinned. But Roan was staring at the heavymaned, two-legged animals that pulled the open chariot. The chariot itself was a work of ait -- a series of airy, fluted colmuns that supported a latticed roof. The columns were gold and the latticed roof seemed to be of glass or a plastic and changed color constantly, always glittering. The chariot had large wheels of gold, spoked with the same glittering lattice work, whose convolutions suggested... something like the forms of half remembered dreams. And Roan would have stood puzzling over the lattice, except that his eyes kept going back to the heavymaned draught animals... "They're Men!" he cried suddenly, watching the dog adjusting their harness neatly. "Terrans, pulling your chariot!" "Only Lowers," said Daryl. "You wouldn't have dogs do it? My charioteers are very well treated. Come, give them a sweet and see how happy they are." He smiled benignly, went over and took something from the pouch at his waist. Roan watched, feeling something in his heart rip. Terrans! The magic that word had been, all across the universe. Askor and Sidis gaped, mouths open. Daryl handed a square, white bit of food to one of the hairy Terrans. "Here, Lenny. Good boy." L enny took the candy and popped it into his mouth, then grinned happily. "Good, Master!" He almost jerked the chariot over as he got down to kiss Daryl's sandaled foot. "Now, now, Lenny," Daryl reIF proved softly. "Such a good boy," he said, turning to Roan. "Would you like to give the other candy to Benny?" "No, damn you!" Roan roared. "I'd..." and then stopped in shock when Benny -- the other draughthuman -- burst into tears. Daryl started to say something to Roan, sighed, and gave Benny the candy himself. "Roan is not familiar with our customs," he told Benny, patting him on the shoulder. "Good Benny. We all love Benny. Benny is pretty. Roan, could you tell Benny he's pretty?" Roan bit his lip. Benny looked at him in agony, holding the sweet and too upset to eat it. Benny had wide, innocent eyes that went oddly with his square beard and intricately plaited mane. "Benny is pretty," Roan choked out. Lenny was watching, looking confused and frightened. "The slaves on Alpha Two at least hated being slaves," Roan said. "And they weren't even human." "Hmmm," Daryl mused. "You feel that because Benny and Lenny have the same basic form as you that they should be in all ways the same as you? Whereas if they were a different Shape...?" "I don't know," Roan cut him off. He avoided the eyes of Askor and Sidis. "Come on, load up," he snapped. "In this play-pretty?" Sidis growled. "Unless you want to walk!" "Yeah," Askor said. "We'll walk." "I guess we can walk as fast as Benny," Sidis said. "And Lenny," Askor added. 'Then walk." The cart moved off. "You'll need a dog, of course. I'll see to it as soon as I have you situated. You'll have time for a bath and a nap." Daryl gaily flicked the flower decked reins over the broad tan backs. "And then -- but you'll see for yourself -- tonigiht!" R oan woke in utter darkness, and his sleep had been so deep it was still heavy on him, like a weight of blankets. For a moment he stained his ears for noise, hearing only the silence that crowded his own heartbeat into his ears. Then he remembered. He was on Terra, in a room like a garden with flowers, high in a glassy tower. In the darkness, a breeze was blowing from somewhere and it smelled like a drowsy afternoon. Then suddenly the darkness lightened and Roan looked up to see a large, short-haired brown dog which nodded pKlitely. "Good evening. Master. I am Sos telle. I am to be your dog -- if you approve, sir." Roan grunted, sat up. "My dog," he said. He had never owned a living creature before. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you. Master -- but Master Daryl was emphatic about the party." "That's all right. I'm hungry. Can you get me something to eat?" Sostelle moved gracefully on his over-long hind legs, trotted to the wall, pushed a button, and a tray of hot, glazed fruit came out. He pulled the legs down on the tray and rolled it over to Roan, pulling up a chair for Roan to sit on. He had hands like a Man's. "Is this all there is?" Roan asked. "It's usual," Sostelle said. "But I'll get you something else, if you wish." "How about meat and eggs?" "Dog food?" Sostelle looked as though he didn't know whether to frown or laugh. "I can't live on candy," Roan said. "I'll do my best, Master," Sostelle said. "Cutlets in Sun Wine and pheasant eggs Metropole?" "Okay," Roan said. "Anything." "And shall I prepare a bath. Master?" "I had one yesterday," Roan snapped. "Still -- it's customary..." "All right." Roan looked at the dog. "I'm pretty ignorant, Sostelle. Thanks for trying to help me." Sostelle's tongue came out in a canine smile. "I am sure that you will be a great master. I sense it. If you'll forgive a dog's foolish fancy, Sir." "Keep me from looking like an idiot in front of these pretty creatures and I'll forgive you anything." T he fete was held in a vast, silverand-glass walled space where fragile columns as slender as reeds ran up to arch out and meet in a glitter of jeweled-glass panels high overhead. The floor was a polished expanse of deep violet glass. The music was as stirring and as lovely as a flight of swans, as martial as the roar of lions, as gay as carnival. To Roan's left and behind him, Sostelle stood in his stiff formal jacket, quite graceful on his hind legs, and whispered. "Hold your glass with one finger. Master, not with your whole hand." Roan nodded, feeling awkward and almost naked, for Sostelle had depilated him and dressed him in a silky, green and gold garment that folded and tied together and felt as though it might fall off if you moved too quickly in it. The guests carefully avoided staring at him. Sostelle pointed them out as they whirled past, their dance a dainty posturing in which neither partner touched even the fingertips of the other. Roan watched, overwhelmed by the blaze of light, of color, of movement across the vast expanse of multitiered glass-clear floor that made the throng of fancifully gowned men and women appear to be floating in the air. He finished the drink and another was there at once. Daryl appeared, transformed in a pink garment, silver-dyed hair, and feathery wings attached to his ankles. "Roan -- how marvelous you look." He glanced at Sostelle. "And Sostelle -- didn't he offer you a choice of hair tints and scents? And what about decorative touches." "He offered them," Roan cut in. "I didn't want them. Look, Daryl, I can't afford to waste any more time. When will I meet your governmental leaders, your military men?" A small crowd was gathering in Daryl's wake, watching Roan curiously. Someone tittered. IF "Waste time?" Daryl's nose got a pinched look. "I seem to have offended everybody again," Roan said in the silence. "Didn't you warn them I'd forgotten my manners?" A nervous laugh went through the group. "Is that what it means to you?" he almost shouted. "Manners? Don't you care that Terra's a free world again -- that the Galaxy is open to you?" Daryl put a hand on his arm. "No one here is much on mythology. Roan. They -- " "Mythology, Hell! I'm talking of them -- and once Terra ruled them all!" A ripple of applause broke out. Daryl joined in. "Oharming," he said "So spontaneous." He flicked his eyes at the others. "Roan's going to be wonderful," he said. A girl was looking at Roan. If she had been done by a bad artist in brass, she would have looked like Stellaraire. She was the statue in the garden on Aldo Cerise, but her body was warm human flesh instead of cold stone, and her mouth by its very existence begged to be kissed. She had smiled when the others laughed. Her lips barely curved but her green eyes seemed to tilt up at the corners. "I'm Desiranne," she said. "I don't understand what you've said -- but it's exciting." "Desiranne will entertain tonight," Daryl said. "It will be die high point of the evening." His eyes moved over her like a lecherous hand. #T ook," Roan said to the girl. A- "It's nice about the party and you're so beautiful a nmn almost can't endure it, but someone's got to listen to me. This is the biggest thing that's happened to Terra in five thousand years. But before long blockade is over. There's a fdlow named Trishinist who'd give his hair to be the one to lead a'n invading force in here. They think of Terra as one big treasure house, ripe for looting -- the richest prize of all." Daryl laughed with a mouth full of smoke and ended up choking. Sostelle came immediately with a glass of water and a scented, gossamer tissue. People were turning away, already looking bored. Daryl smiled knowingly, took out a cigarette. "I wouldn't," he said. "Not so soon. I'm sure you'll become a great Favorite, but if you tiy to push yourself forward right away, people will resent it." Roan growled and Daryl jumped. "Really," he said almost sharply. "You'll have to learn a few of the graces. And I'd also suggest you let your fingernails grow out a bit more gracefully and a few things like that which Sostelle will advise you about." He rose in a smooth ballet movement. "And now, I think Desiranne and I -- " "She'll dance with me," Roan said roughly. He finished his wine with a gulp, tossed the glass aside, walked past Daryl to the girl's side. She looked around, wide-eyed, as Roan took her in his arms. She was as light as a handful of moonbeams, Roan found himself thinking, suddenly struck dumb by her fragile loveliness. But there was no need for talk. He was suddenly aware of the music, swelling louder now. There was a deep, booming throb that matched the cadence of the human heart, and a dazzling interplay of horns that repeated the rhythms of the human nervous system, and an intricate melody that echoed forgotten human dreams. Stellar aire had taught Roan how to dance, long ago; he had not forgotten. All around, the Terrans had drawn back. Now they stood, watching, as Roan responded with a lifetime's pent-up emotion to the call of the music and the girl and the strong wine of Terra. And then the music ended on a fading susurration of cymbals and the high wail of brass. Roan swept Desiranne almost to the floor. For a moment he held her there, looking into her perfect, half-frightened, halfenraptured face. "I think I know now why I came here," he said. "I think I knew I'd find you. Now I don't think I'll ever let you go." Tliere were sudden tears in her eyes as Roan set her on her feet. "Roan," she whispered. "Why didn't you come sooner?" Then she turned and fled. S uddenly there was deafening applause. Shouts of bravo! and splendid! rang out. Everyone seemed to be staring at him with eyes that were bright with... fear? They came toward him almost cautiously, as though approaching a tame beast, led by a small, lithe brunette with long hair done into such a complex system of plaits and curls that her head looked too heavy for her small body. She had a sinuous, elongated walk, and her dress was the color of... of air with sunshine in it. "Mistress Alouicia," Sostelle whispered to Roan, "a dancer, and a very clever woman." "Marvelous," she said. "Such a spectacle of primitive savagery! For a moment I thought you were going to lose control and kill her, tear her throat out with those great strong teeth." She shuddered, showing Roan a smile that was just a little long in the tooth. "I'd never understood ancient music before," a man said. "Now I think I do." "The way he sprang at her!" someone else offered. "And then putting his hands on her that way. It was intended to represent a tiger seizing his prey, wasn't it?" "No, it was just a dance," Roan said, and turned to Sostelle and asked in a loud voice, "It's all right, isn't it, to say what you mean instead of making people guess?" Sostelle, knowing this wasn't to be answered, kept a discreet silence and straightened the folds in Roan's chiton. "Does everyone dance in that way in your homeland?" Alouicia asked, smiling a bit stiffly now. "On every world there are different dances. Once I was with a circus and my girl did erotic dances in several different cultures." "Erotic? How interesting." IF Roan Was glad to have found a subject of interest. He was feeling the wine, wanting to put everyone at ease, and then go find Desiranne. "It frequently led to public copulation," he added. "To... to... what did you say?" Alouicia's eyes widened. "What does it mean?" a high voice whispered loudly. Someone tittered. "Like Dogs. Imagine!" "Really! What sort of... animal... would perform such a dance?" "She was beautiful," Roan said, remembering Stellaraire. and feeling that something should be said out of loyalty. "I loved her." "He's not merely a savage," a voice said loudly behind him. 'T do believe he's a Lower." Roan turned. A tall, wide-shouldered Terran stood looking at him with an expression of distaste. "Master Hugh, the famous athlete." Sostelle murmured. "Hugh!" Alouicia said, her voice carrying the faintest edge of shrillness. "What an exciting confrontation! The strongest man on Terra, with your interest in the ancient athletic arts -- and this... elemental man from -- wherever he's from!" "Please," 'Daryl said, putting a hand on Roan's arm. "I think -- " "Never mind," Roan said. "I'm not very good at remembering all the things that are too ugly for you pretty people to talk about. I'm a man; I sweat and bleed and eat and excrete -- " "Roan!" Daryl said. Alouicia drew away with a small cry. Sostell gasped. "Go away," Hugh said. "I don't know who brought you here. You're not fit for the society of civilized people!" "There's nothing civilized about you do if they showed up? If they came storming across those pretty gardens and in through the pretty door; what would you do?" "I'm sure that thirty thousand years of culture have prepared us to deal with whatever a barbarian might do," Daryl said uneasily. Roan doubled a fist and held it before him. "Do you know what this is?" H ugh eyed the double knuckles. His nose wrinkled. "Of course. The dawn-men -- Romans, I think they were called -- had a primitive sport in which they flailed one another with their hands held in that way. This was done in a coliseum called Madison Square Garden, and the winner was awarded a fig-leaf, or something of the sort." Roan drew back his fist and hit Hugh square on the nose, taking care not to put too much power back of the blow. Hugh went down, blood streaming down across his lip and into his mouth. He cried out, dabbed at his face, stared at the crimsoned fingers. There were little shrieks all around. "You bruter Hugh said. "All right," Roan heard himself shouting. "What do you do, with your thirty thousand years of culture?" Hugh came to his feet. All round, people stared, eyes bright, lips parted. Roan stepped to Hugh and hit him solidly on the side of the jaw. Hugh fell down again, his mouth open and a look of utter amazement on his face. "You're supposed to be an athlete," Roan said. "Get up and fight back." Hugh got to his feet. He folded his fingers over his palms and held them in front of him; then he stepped up to Roan and struck out with an overhand blow. Roan casually brushed Hugh's arm aside and hit him in the stomach. As Hugh doubled over. Roan planted a left and right to the face. Hugh sprawled on the floor and began to cry. Roan reached, caught his garment by the shoulder, hauled him half erect, slapped him across the cheek. "It may surprise you," he said. "But members of an attacking army don't stop when you cry. They just laugh at you. And they don't fight nicely, like I do. If you're on the floor -- " he let Hugh drop -- "they kick you. Like this." And he planted a solid blow in Hugh's ribs with his toe. Hugh scrambled back, tears streaming down his face. He was sobbing loudly. "Get up!" Roan said. "Get mad! That's the only thing that will stop me!" He followed Hugh, dragged him to his feet, hit him in the eye, then, holding him up, punched him in the mouth. Hugh's face was a bloody mask now. "Fight!" Roan said. "Hit back!" Hugh broke away, stumbled back against the watching crowd. They thrust him back toward Roan. He saw their faces then, for the first time. They were like hungry charons, waiting for an old Gracyl to die. "Kill him, savage!" a man called. Saliva ran out of his mouth and down into his perfumed, pale blue beard. Alouicia held out her hands, the gold-enameled nails like raking claws. "Bite his throat!" she shrilled. "Drink his blood!" Roan dropped his hands, feeling a thrill of horror. Hugh broke through the ring and ran, sobbing: "Master," Sostelle said. "Oh, Master..." "Let's go," Roan said. "Where's my crew?" He staggered, feeling the room tilt under his feet. Terran wine was made for Terran nervous systems; it hit hard. "Master, I don't know. But -- " CtTind them!" Roan shouted.  People scattered before him. He was out in the wide entry hall now. The polished black floor threw back reflections of chandeliers and of the stars above the glass-domed ceiling. Sostelle hurried ahead, bounding on all fours. Two tall, wide shapes stepped from the shadow of a slender supporting rib ahead, stood silhouetted against the sweep of glass front. "Askor," Roan called. "Sidis!" "Yeah, Boss." They came toward him. They were dressed in their soiled ship clothes. Sidis wore a pistol openly at his hip. "Thought I said... no guns," Roan said blurrily. "I had a hunch you might change your mind," Sidis said. His teeth gleamed in the gloom. IF "You did, eh?" Roan felt an unreasoning anger rising in him. It was almost like joy. "Since when did you start doing my thinking for me?" He took a step, swung what should have been a smashing blow to the Minid's head, but he missed, almost fell. Sidis hadn't moved. "Gee, Chief," Askor said admiringly. "You're drunk!" "I'm not drunk, damn you!" Roan planted his feet, breathing hard. "And what are you doing here in those rags? Why haven't you washed your ugly faces? I can smell you from three yards away!" He could feel his tongue slurring over the words, and this made him angrier than ever. "You trying... 'sgrace me?" he roared. "Get out of here and don't come back... till you look like human beings!" "That could be quite a while. Chief," Askor said. "Look, Cap'n, let's blow out of this place. It's creepy. I can hardly keep my hands off these Terries of yours." "They're not mine," Roan yelled. "And I'll say when we leave!" "He's right. Boss," Sidis cut in. "This world ain't good for us. LQt's shove off, Cap'n. Just the three of us, like before." "I'm Captain of the bloody menagerie!" Roan yelled. "When I'm ready to lift ship. I'll tell you. Now get out of my sight! Get lost!" "Master," Sostelle whispered. "You, too, you freak," Roan staggered, wiped a hand across his face. It was hot, feverish. Everything seemed to be spinning around him; his mind seemed to be floating free of his body, like a captive balloon. Then skyrockets came shooting up in a fiery shower and when they shimmered away into darkness there was nothing... R oan sat up and looked around. Noise roared in his ears. A face swam mistily before him. "Ah, he's awake!" someone called. Someone else thrust a thin-stemmed glass into his hand. He drank thirstily, let the glass fall. Daryl was there, looking at him eagerly with painted eyes. "Roan! You looked so lovely sleeping, with your mouth open and sweat on your face." "Where's Desiranne?" Roan said. His head ached but he could speak clearly now. "Eh? Why she's preparing for her performance, later in the evening -- but -- " "I want to see her." Roan stood and the table fell over. "Where is she?" "Now, Roan." Daryl was at his side. "Just be patient. You'll see her." He laughed a high, tight laugh. "Oh, my, yes, you'll see her. You liked her, didn't you? You... you lusted after her? Roan took Daryl by the shoulder, lifted him from the floor. "Keep away from me," he snarled, and threw the Terran from him. His vision seemed cloudy, as though the room were full of mist. There were other people around him, but their faces weren't clear. Sostelle was there, his face worried and homely and familiar and dependable. "Where is she, Sostelle?" Roan said. "Where did she go?" "Master, I don't know. This is not a matter for dogs." His voice was almost a moan. "Sure, I liked her," Roan said loudly. "I loved her!" He kicked a chair from his path, started across the floor. "She liked me, too, didn't she?" He rounded on the dog. "Well, didn't she?" Sostelle's face assumed an unreadable canine expression "Her interest in you was unmistakable. Master." "You think so?" "Certainly. She is a lovely lady. Master. Worthy of you." But there was something about his tone; something Roan didn't understand. "I've got to find her. Can't leave this mad house until I find her." He started on. The people before him flitted backward, just out of reach, just out of vision. The noise was like an avalanche of sound -- a wild, screaming sort of music that seemed to tell of great birds of prey swooping to a feast. "T will help you. Master," Sostelle said. "I will help you all I can." "You're a damned good dog, Sostelle. Hell, you're the only friend I've met here." "Sir!" Sostelle sounded shocked. "It's not done. Sir, to call a dog a friend." Roan laughed harshly. "I guess I'll never learn the rules, Sostelle. I came too late -- for all of us." "Master. Perhaps you should go now -- and take me with you." "You, too? What is it, a conspiracy? I've told you, damn you. I'm IF not going until I find her!" There was a table in his path and he kicked it savagely aside. "Roan, Roan," a quavering voice called. He stopped, steadied himself against a table, peered through the mist. Daryl darted up to him, his carefully coiffured hair awry. A smile flicked on and off like leaf shadows playing on water. "It's Desiranne you want to see. I promise you, you'll see her. Just wait. But now come along with me. The party's just begun. We have wonderful things planned, and we must have you! It will be the greatest affair of the century -- of a lifetime! And at the end -- Desiranne!" "Sostelle, is he lying?" Roan stared at the Terran, who was quivering with eagerness, like an Alphaa slave awaiting a kick or the dregs of a wineglass, not knowing which it would be. "Master," Sostelle whined, "Master Daryl speaks the truth." "Then I'll come." "You'll be glad. Roan," Daryl gushed. "So glad. And -- " "Never mind that. Where are we going?" "First, we'll dine. After the dancing and the... excitement... we need to nourish ourselves, don't you think?" He giggled. "And then -- but you'll see. There will be marvelous things. All the pleasures of Terra are waiting for you tonight!" He danced away, calling to others. Roan started after him, then turned back to Sostelle with a quick thought. "Pleasure," he said, "is what you go after when there isn't anything else left." T he cold night air cleared Roan's head. He looked down from the open flyer in which he and Daryl and two women and their dogs sat on silken cushions, drinking from small, thin-necked bottles of spicy liquor. There were other airboats around them, darting in and out like a school of playful fish. Over the rush of air, thin cries of ex!citement mingled with the chatter of many voices talking at once. The dog piloting the craft dropped it to the tip of a tall spire of glowing yellow glass. Roan followed the others through an entry that looked like solid glass, but parted before him with a tinkle of cold crystals. Flushed, bright-eyed faces swarmed around him, but none of them were Desiranne. A tall girl with heavy golden hair came up to Roan, her bare arms ivory-white. She looked at him with her eyes half shut, her lips parted, her tongue showing. Roan showed his teeth and reached for her, and she shuddered and shrank back. Roan laughed and pushed through to follow Daryl. H e was trying hard to remember where the table was, how he had come there. He couldn't. There had been so many tables, so much noise, so many of the little bottles of spicy wine. He felt very sober, though, and his mind seemed to be working unusually clearly. Neatly dressed dogs were serving food. Roan ate with voracious appetite while his companions nibbl and watched. Roan hardly noticed them. Once he looked up to see the blonde girl sitting across from him. "You Terries know how to make food," he said. "This is better even than blood." The girl -- Phrygette, Roan remembered her name -- looked sick and excited at the same time. She put out her hand as though to touch the hair on Roan's arm, then drew it back. "You're strange," she whispered. "I wonder what you think about." "I think about many things," Roan said carefully, wishing the hot feeling and the humming in his ears would go away. "I think about the Niss, and how Man killed himself fighting them, and how they died alone, then, and how their ghosts haunted the Galaxy for five thousand years." "Old Niss," Phrygette said, boldly touching Roan's arm now. "I always thought he was a silly superstition." "I did a terrible thing when I ran the Niss blockade." Roan said. "I didn't free Terra. I shattered the myth that had held the universe out for five thousand years. Now she's exposed to the sharks: Trishinist, and after him, others, until Terra is no different than Tambool." Phrygette was looking around for her dog, Ylep, to come and fix her make-up. "A new navy, that's what you need," Roan said. "Trishinist can muster fifty thousand men, and he has the ships to transport them. You have ships, too -- underground, waiting. You need to issue weapons and learn how to use them, prepare tactics to meet an enemy landing party." Phrygette frowned at Roan. "Really, for someone from Beyond, you talk about the strangest things. Tell me how it feels to kill someone. Roan. Tell me how it feels to die." "You'll find out soon enough," Roan said roughly. Suddenly he felt very bad. His heart was trying to climb up his throat, and his head hurt terribly. He swallowed more wine, put his head down on the table. Phrygette got to her feet, wrinkling her nose. "I'm afraid he's becoming a bore," she said to someone. "Let's go on to the theater, Daryl. They've probably already started -- without us!" "They wouldn't dare!" Daryl said, sounding alarmed. "Not after  plapned it!" "They might." "Roan!" Daryl was shaking him. He raised his head and saw a crowd all around him, faces staring out of a blackish haze. "Come on. Roan!" It was Daryl, catching at his hand. "You went to sleep again, you foolish boy, but now we're all ready to go to the Museum!" "Go where?" "To the Museum of the Glory of Man! Come on! Oh, you'll be thrilled, Roan! It's an ancient, ancient place -- just at the edge of the Lower Town. All sort of shuddery and dim -- but marvelous, really! It's all there -- all Terra's history. We've been saving it for a special occasion -- and this is certainly the perfect night!" "Funny place... for a party..." Roan said, but he got to his feet and followed the laughing, chattering crowd. IF O ut on the roof, the dogs jumped up, handing their masters and mistresses to their places in the waiting flyers, some of which hovered, waiting their turn. Roan felt as though he were moving in a dream imbued with a sense of terrible impending. The dogs' eyes looked wide, afraid. Even Sostelle was awkward, getting the flyer's door open. Roan's hand went to his belt, feeling for a gun that wasn't there. "Askor," he said suddenly. "And Sidis. Where are they?" He half rose, sat down suddenly as the flyer jumped forward. "They'll trouble you no more," Daryl said. "And now. Roan, just think! Objects that were held sacred by our ancestors, five thousand -- ten thousand years ago -- " "What do you mean," Roan said, feeling tightness in his chest. "Where are they?" "Roan -- don't you remember? You sent them away yourself." "Sostelle!" Roan felt a sudden weakness as he tried again to rise. Blackness whirled in, shot with fire. "Master, it is true. You ordered them to leave you. They laid hands on you, to drag you with them, but you fought, and then... then Master Daryl was impelled to... to call for the Enforcers." "What are they?" Roan heard his own hoarse voice as from a great distance. "Specially trained dogs. Master," Sostelle said in a tight voice. "Led by Kotsohai the Punisher." "Are they -- did they -- ?" "Your companions fought mightily Master. They killed many dogs. At last they were overwhelmed, and restrainers were focused on them. Then they were taken away." "Then they're alive?" The blackness broke, flushed away. "Of course. Master!" Sostelle sounded shocked. Roan laughed harshly. "Tliey're all right, then. They've bfeen in jail before. I'll bail 'em out in the morning." T hey had landed on the wide roof of an ancient palace. Roan tottered, felt Sostelle's hand under his elbow. "I'm sick," he said. "I've never been sick, since I was burned when Henry Dread shelled the Extravaganzoo. There was a Man doctor there; he cured me. He couldn't cure Stellar aire, though. She was crushed by a cromalloy beam, and then... , burned..."  "Yes, Master," Sostelle soothed. "Gom Bulj died from the acceleration. But I killed Ycth. And I killed Henry Dread, too. You didn't know that, did you Sostelle? But Iron Robert -- he died for me... They were inside now. The voices of the others were like birds quarreling over a dung heap. Their faces were blurred, vague. All around, tall cases were ranged, faced with glass. Someone was talking urgently to Roan, but he ignored him, walked to the nearest display, feeling as though he were toiling up a hill. "This is a collection of famous jewel stones. Master," Sostelle was saying. "All natural minerals, found here on Terra, and treasured by Men for their beauty and rarity." Roan stared down at rank on rank of glittering, faceted crystals -- red, green, blue, violet, clear white. "There is the Napoleon emerald," Sostelle said. "Worn by an ancient war-chief. And beyond is the Buddha's Heart ruby, once the object shippers. And there, just beyond -- the Iceberg diamond, said to be the largest and finest ever found in Antarctica." "Look, Roan," Daryl called. "These are called monies. They're made of solid natural gold, and in early times they were traded back and forth in exchange for oh, other things," he finished vaguely. "Rather a bore, really. Come along to the next room, though. There are some fabulous things... Roan followed, stared at looming walls decorated with objects as baroque and primitive as the crude weapons of the wild men on Aldo Cerise, others of a powerful, barbaric beauty, and still others of a glittering intricacy that his mind could not comprehend. There were more cases -- miles of them, each glowing with is own soft light, each with its array of objects of metal, stone, wood, glass, fabric, synthetic. "Look!" Daryl was poking Roan. "Those clothes were made from fibers that grew from the dirt. They scraped them clean in some way, and then worked them all together, and colored them with -- with fruit juices or something. Then they sawed out pieces and looped them together with little strings. That was called sowing -- " "No, that was when they made the plants that they got the fibers from," someone interrupted. "But aren't they funny?" Roan gazed at the display of old uniforms. Some yere shapeless and faded, brown with age, curled with time, even protected as they were by the vacuum of the display cases. Others, farther along, were more familiar. "You see those long, sharp things? They used those to stick into each other," A high excited voice called. "And these odd-shaped objects made some sort of lightning and tore holes in people. There must have been a great deal of blood." Roan stopped, staring at a tunic gray trousers, and a belt with a buckle bearing an eagle and the words Terran Space Forces, said to no one. "But it was made before there was an empire..." Daryl was beside Roan, his face puckered in thought. He looked up at Roan, his eyes snapping wide. "You!" he said in a strained voice. "I know where it was I saw your face. Look, everybody, come with me!" He turned, ran off. "What's the matter with him?" Roan growled, but he followed. I n a small room off the main hall, a crowd clustered around a lighted case. They looked around as Roan came up, gave way, staring at him, silent now. Roan halted before the high glass panel, stared IP at a hazy scene, bright lit. He blinked, cleared his vision. The figure of a man stood before him, clad in a uniform like the one he had just seen, leaning against the flank of a ship of quaint, primitive design. The eyes, blue like cool fire, looked into Roan's from across the centuries. The deep red hair was hacked short, but its stubborn curl still showed. A deep, recorded voice spoke from a slot beneath the display: "This was Vice-Admiral Stephen Murdoch, as he appeared in his last solido, taken only moments before he embarked on his last, heroic mission. Admiral Murdoch is renowned as the hero of the Battle of Ceres and of the Siege of the Callistan Redoubts. He was lost in space in the year eleven thousand, four hundred and two of the Atomic Era." "Master," Sostelle said in the silence. "It's you!" Roan turned, looked at Daryl. "How... ?" he started. He put his hands on himself as though to assure himself that he was Roan Cornay, alive here and now. But Daryl and the others stared back at him as though he was himself a thing from out of the remote past, like the figure in the case. Roan laughed suddenly, wildly. "I wanted to know who my father was," he said. "But I never suspected he was sixteen thousand years old." "He... really... is..." Daryl said, and licked at his lips. He whirled to the others. "Don't you understand? He really did come from Beyond, just as he said! He's returned from the dead!" "No," a loud voice said. It was Hugh, his face raw and cut from the beating Roan had given hkn. "He's a dirty Lower, and 'he should be turned over to the dogs." "He's returned from the dead!" Daryl screeched. "Come along! It's easy enough to prove!" "The genetic analyzer!" someone called. "In the next hall..." "Roan, this will show them all," Daryl said breathlessly. There was a strange light in his eyes. "And then -- you'll tell me how it feels to be dead, and rise again!" "You're insane, Daryl," Roan said. "You're all insane!" he shouted. "I'm the most insane of all, for being here, where I don't belong!" He broke off. "Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrw I'll leave here. With Askor and Sidis. They're my kind: I understand them. They're not pretty, but they've got the beauty of reality about them..." "And you'll take me. Master?" Sostelle whispered. "Sure, Man's best dog is his friend, eh?" Roan stumbled, almost fell. He was hardly aware of walking, Sostelle at his side, Daryl trotting ahead, under a high arch with a flame burning under it in a metal tray, on into an even bigger room that echoed with the bat-like cries of the Terrans. "... classify persons wishing to contribute to the germinal banks," Daryl was saying. "Here in the Hall of Man, all the records were kept -- " "My genetic patterns won't be here," Roan said, almost clearheaded for the moment. 'He's afraid," Hugh said. "WiU he confess his pretensions now?" Roan looked around at gleaming equipment, towering metal panels, winking clinical lights. "Put your hand here, Roan," Daryl urged. He indicated an opening, guided Roan's hand to it. He felt a sharp tingle for an instant, nothing nKre. There was a soft hum and a plastic tab extruded from a slot in the face of the genetic analyzer. Daryl snatched it, looked at it, then whirled to face the others. "It's him! It's Stephen Murdoch, returned from beyond the crematorium!" H e didn't remember again then; not until they were in a vasty room with ancient flags hanging from age-blackened rafters. "... minster Hall," an excited voice was saying. "Over thirty thousand years old. Think! Of the toil, the human tears and sweat ackl heartache that went into building this, so long ago, to preserving it down through the ages, to bring it here -- for us!" The voice went on, excited, rapturous. "What's it all about?" Roan asked. "What's this old building? It looks like something on Tambool." "It's very ancient. Master," Sostelle said. Somewhere a bright light was flaring in the gloom. "... took them so many ages to create, with all its traditions and memories -- and we, us! Yes, in a single night! A single hour! We can destroy it all. Thirty thousand years of human history end -- now!" Roan watched as a slender man in flowing garments ran forward, applied the torch to the base of a handhewn cdunm. Fire licked upward. In moments it had reached the faded pyennants; they disappeared into smoke. Fire ran across the high peaked ceiling. Voices shouted as the crowd pushed forward. Suddenly a woman whirled madly, striking out at those around her. They fell back yelping, and the frenzied girl tore at her garment, stripped it off, threw it at the fire. Roan saw with a dull shock that there was no hair on her body. "Give me something sharp!" she screamed, then plunged, caught up a jagged fragment of smoking wood, scored it down the creamy white of her chest and stomach. Blood started. The woman staggered back, wailed faintly, fell, and dogs started forward, bore her away. "Get back!" Someone was calling. The ceiling was a mass of boiling smoke and flame. Each massdve timber supporting the rafters blazed, crackling. Roan backed away, then turned and ran. Behind him, the roof fell with a great thunder. A blast of scalding air struck at him, and sparks flew all around... Later, he stood at the top of a broad flight of marble steps, where a group of men wheezed under the weight of a black stone statue of a man with a wide head-dress and a straight-ahead gaze. "See him. Roan?" Daryl called. "Isn't he wonderful? The labor, the hopes that went into that image. And now..." The Pharaoh Horem-heb went over with a resounding smash, tumbled down head over throne, pulverizing the steps as it struck them. The head flew off, struck a man standing below, who fell screaming, and a crowd closed around him like fish after a bait. "Master, you're not well," Sostelle was saying. "Let me take you home!" "Wait! Have to see Desiranne." Roan shook his head, started down the stairs. Daryl skipped ahead, dragging a picture in a heavy frame. At the foot of the stairs, he raised it high, brought it down on the bronze figure of a girl with a water jar; it burst into a cloud of dry chips. "The Mona Lisa," he caroled. "The only one in the world -- and I destroyed it!" He spun on Roan. "Oh, Roan, doesn't it give you a wonderful feeling of power? Those old ones that conquered the Universe -- they treasured all this! And we have the power to do as we like with it. They made it -- we finish it! Doesn't that make us their equals?" R oan stared past him at a biggerthan-life white marble of a thick-bodied woman with her garment down around her hips. She was chipped and her arms were missing. "Shame," Roan mumbled. "Shouldn't break... old things." He felt as though he were falling. IF "I didn't do that one," Daryl said. "Someone else... but I'U finish it!" He ran to the statue and pushed. It didn't budge. Daryl made a face and ran on to pull down a painting of a man with one ear missing. "It's hot in here," Roan said aloud. The walls were sailing by, going faster and faster. He grop for support, sank down on the steps. All around, people were running like Gracyls in moulting time, carrying things that smashed, or broke, or were torn apart. Someone started a blaze in the center of the floor, and pictures went flying into it. The floor shook as heavy marbles toppled. "Get a cutter," a girl screamed, "to use on the bronzes!" "What a night!" Daryl exulted. "We did the Louvre long ago, and the Grand Palais e'Arte, and the Imperial Gardens. We were saving this one for a special occasion. And your being here -- it's just made it perfect!" Roan got to his feet, fighting the blackness. "I can't wait any longer," he shouted over the din. "Where's Desiranne?" "Roan, Roan! Forget her for now! There's her Performance coming! There's lots of luscious sport to be had before then -- " Phrygette was there tucking back a strand of corn-yellow hair with a white arm smudged with soot. "I'm bored," she said. "Daryl, let's get on to the Performance." "But there are stiU lots of things to do," he cried, dancing round her. "The books! We haven't even begun on the books -- and the tapes, and the old films, and... and..." "I'm going," Phrygette pouted. She looked at Roan. He stared back, seeing her face danding in fire. "Don't look at me like that," she said. "You look so peculiar!" Roan took a deep breath nd held one part of his mind away from the whirling dizziness that veloped him. He produced something that could be defined as a smile. "If you were a sixteen thousand year throwback, you'd look peculiar, too." He seemed to be watching everything through a viewscreen now; Daryl looked tiny and far away, and all around the floor curved upward. A wild singing whine rang in Roan's ears. His face felt furnace-hot. "I want to see Desiranne now," he said. "Oh, all right." Daryl gave Phrygette an icy look. "Spoilsports!" T hey were in a mouldy velvet and chipped gilt room lit by tiny lights glaring down from above like stars as seen in Deep Space, set in a ceiling that slanted away toward a small, bright-lit platform below. There were seats ranked beside Roan's and more rows lower down, and others swinging in wide sweeps farther up, and still more, perched like tiny balconies just above the stage, and all of them were fUled with slim-necked, soot-streaked Men and Women. "In all that you've told me of other worlds. Roan," Daryl said in a low, vibrant voice, "there has been nothing to equal what you will see Desiranne do here tonight." "What will she do? Play some instrument? Sing?" The thought of seeing her again made his pulse throb in his head, driving back the sickness. He remembered Stellaraire and her erotic dancing. Surely Desiranne wouldn't do anything like that... "Master," Sostelle whined at Roan's side. "Please let me bring the doctor to see you now." "The stuff you gave me is working," Roan said. "I feel better." A blue mist blew across the stage. Out of it, a little blue and silver dog merged, singing an eerie, piercing little song in a register so high it was barely within hearing. The blue color faded, and now there were pale pastels -- mauve, bluish pink, sunshine-yellow, rain-gray -- swirls, clouds, blown foams. The blue dog's song ended in a tiny yelp, and behind Roan, Sostelle winced. Roan could make out another figure in the mist now, dressed in diaphanous robes, swathed from head to foot. It came forward and the scarf blew from its head. It was Desiranne and her pale hair swirled down about her shoulders. The music was low and gentle, almost a lullaby, and Desiranne ran gracefully, girlishly about in the mists, playing. Then, by degrees, the tempo changed and a drum began to beat -- an insistent, commanding beat. Roan began to be aware of Daryl's breathing beside him and he also remembered the fearful beat of the drums that night he stood frozen with fear by the high wire on Chlora, when he was with the circus. Was that it? Was that what was making the small hairs on his arms prickle, and bringing the smell of danger and the cold sweat in his stomach? Something... he turned to Daryl to teU him to stop the show. Whatever it was going to be. Roan could feel it beginning to stink. Something was wrong. Something... But Daryl was smiling expectantly and proudly at Desirne. "By the way," he said. "Did I mention that she is my daughter?" "Your daughter?" Roan repeated dumbly. "You're not old enough," he blurted. Daryl looked astonished. "Not old enough..." A strange expression crossed his face. "You mean -- you're..." he gulped. "I remember learning once that long ago, men died like dogs, after only a moment of life. Do you mean. Roan, that you -- that you... ?" "Never mind." On the stage, Desiranne had begun a slow, sensuous strip tease. The music became more and more insinuating, erotic, then slowed as Desiranne removed her last wisp of garment. As she pirouted, all pink and gold in the lights, the little silver and blue dog came mincing out onto the stage with something sharp that glittered silver where the light caught it. It was a knife, long and leaf-thin and sharp. Desiranne dipped in her dance to pluck the stilleto from its cushion, danced away, and now a savage tempo took over. An animal music. It went straight to some dark, forgotten part of Roan's mind and again fear began to swell in him IF insistently. He came to his feet -- Desiranne stopped, stood poised. She held the scalpel-keen blade in her right hand and with great grace and sure slowness, cut off the little finger of her left hand. A terrible cry tore itself from Roan's throat. He plunged down through the crowd, not even aware of the screams and the smash of his fists on anything that impeded him. With a leap he was on the stage, snatching the knife from Desiranne's hand as she moved to stroke it across her wrist. He caught her, looked into eyes as vacant and dead as the glassless windows of a ruined city. "Why?" Roan screamed. "Why?" Blood ran down Desiranne's arm. For a moment her eyes seemed to stir with returning life; then she wilted. Roan caught her up, whirled on the others who had crowded around the stage now, all shouting at once. The air reeked of blood; it was a taste in the mouth. "Get a doctor! She'll die!" Daryl's livid face was in front of him. He shook his fists over his head. His mouth looked loose and wet. "Your' daughter!" Roan said hoarsely, looking down at the small, gentle, beautiful face. "Your own daughter!" "She felt nothing! She was drugged! Doyou realize that her one chance for a perfect Death Performance is ruined forever? That this is all she has lived for and now she will never have it? I reared her for this, trained her myself! All these years I've kept her perfect, waiting for the one, the ideal occasion -- and now -- " Roan snarled and kicked him brutally, and Daryl doubled over, mewing, coiled on the bloody floor. "Sostelle -- get a Man-doctor!" Roan jumped down, ran toward the rear of the theater. Desiranne hung limp in his arms, hef face as pale as chalk. I n a vast gilt room. Desiranne lay on a narrow couch of pale green silk with curved legs wrought of silver and ivory. A small crowd of eager-eyed Terjans stood by, watching. The doctor, a scrubbedlooking dog carrying a pouch, clucked and sprayed something from the pouch over Desiranne's stumped finger, looking over at Roan. "She will survive. The tourniquet saved her from excessive bleeding. A pity. So fair she was. But you. Sir; you don't look well. Sostelle tells me -- " "Never mind me! Why doesn't she wake up? Are you sure she isn't going to die?" "She won't die. I'll see to a bud implant from self-germinal tissue, and in a year or two, with the proper stimuli, she'll be as good as now. Now I must insist. Sir. Let me have a look at you." "All right." Roan sank down in a high-backed chair. The doctor applied smooth, cold metal objects to him, muttered to himself. "You're sick. Master," he said. "Temperature over one hundred and four; blood-pressure -- " "Just give me some medicine," Roan interrupted. "My head aches." "I've heard a bit of your background, sir," the doctor said as he rummaged in his bag. "I think I see what's happened here. You've no immunity to the native diseases of Terra. And, of course, they find in you a perfect host. Now -- " "I've never been sick," Roan said, "not like this. I thought it was just the wine, but..." He tottered in the chair as a wave of dizziness passed over him. "Master!" Sostelle was at Roan's side, "They are coming -- Master Hugh and many others -- and with them are the Enforcers. Kotschai himself!" "Good!" Roan snarled, showing his teeth. "I need something to fight! Terrans are no good -- they just fall down and cry." "Please, Sir," the doctor said sharply. "You must stand still if I'm to administer my medicants!" "Doctor," Sostelle whimpered. "Give him something to bring back his strength. See how he faints!" "Ummm, yes, there are stimulants -- dangerous, mind you, but -- " "Quickly! They come! I smell them! I smell the odor of human hate!" "The scent is thick here in this room," the doctor grunted. He sprayed something cold against the inner side of Roan's elbow. "Master, you must flee now." Sostle took his arm. Roan shook him off. "Bring 'em on," he yelled. "I want to crush the life out of something! I want to pay them back for what they did to Desiranne!" "But, Master, Kotschai is strong and cruel and skilled in inflicting pain -- " "So am I," Roan shouted. Ice seemed to be pumping through his veins. The ringing in his head had receded to a distant humming. Suddenly he was light, strong, his vision keen; only his heart seemed to pound too loudly. "Oh, Master, there are many of them," Sostelle cried. "You cannot kill them all. And you are sick. Run quickly, while I delay them!" "Sostelle -- go and find Askor and Sidis. Get them and bring them to the ship." "If I do as you command. Master, will you make your escape? The door is there; it leads by a narrow way to the street below." "All right," Roan let his breath out in a hiss between his teeth. "I'll run. Just get them and send them to me -- and take care of this poor girl." "I will. Master!" "Good-bye, Sostelle. You were the best Man I found on Terra." He opened the door and stepped through into dusty gloom. The street was not like the others Roan had seen on Terra. It was unlit, with broken pavement through which rank weeds grew. He ran, and behind him dogs yelped and called. There was a gate ahead, a stark thing of metal bars and cruel spikes. Roan recognized it from Daryl's description. Beyond it he saw the ominous darkness, smelled the filth and decay of the Lower Town. Without pausing, he leaped up. IF pulled himself to the top, and dropped on the other side. XL R oan didn't know how many hours later it was. He had run -- for miles, it seemed -- through dark, twisting, ancient streets, emp-. ty of people, with the police baying at his heels. Once they cornered him in a crumbling courtyard, and he killed two of them as they closed in, then leaped up, caught a lowhanging roof's edge and fled away across the broken slates where they could not follow. Now he was in a street crowded with faces that were like those remembered from evil dreams. Terrans, with scars, pock-marks, disease-ravaged faces and starvation racked bodies. Women with eyes like the sockets in a skull held out bony hands, quavering pleas for bread and copper; children like darting brown spiders with oversized eyes and knobby knee joints trailed him, shouting in incomprehensible language. A vast, obese man with one eye and an odor of old sickness trailed him for two blocks, until Roan turned, snatched up a foot-long knife from a display before a tumble-down stall and gestured with it. There were no dogs here, only the warped, crooked people and the evil stench and the glare of unshielded lights and the sense of age and decay and bottomless misery. Roan could feel the strength going from his legs. He stumbled often. Once he fell, and rested a while on hands and knees before he could stand again, shouting to scatter the ring of glittering-eyed people who had closed in on him. He felt a burning, terrible thirst, and went toward a smoky, liquory, loud-smelling bar. Inside, it was hot, steamy, solid with noise that sawed at him like ragged knives. He sank down at a wobbly table. A greentoothed female slid into the seat beside him and elbowed him invitingly. Roan made a growling sound and she went away. A huge, big-bellied Man was standing before him. "What'll it be?" he growled in very bad Terran. "Water," Roan said in a dry whisper. "Cold water." "Water costs too," the man said. He went away and came back with a thick, greasy tumbler, half full of grayish liquid. "I have no money," Roan said. "Take this." He fumbled the golden clasp from his garment, tossed it on the table. The barman picked it up, eyed it suspiciously, bit into it. "Hey," he grunted. "That's real gold!" "I need... a place to rest," Roan said. The sickness was back in full force now, washing up around him like water rising in a sinking ship. "Get me a doctor..." "You sick, huh?" The Man was leaning toward him, leering. His eyes swelled until they were as big as saucers. Roan forced his eyes shut, then opened them, fighting to hold onto consciousness. "I know... where there's more..." He could feel his luind cutting loose from his body again ready to float away into a tossing sea of fever fantasies. But he couldn't -- not yet. He tried to get to his feet, slammed back into the chair. The glass clashed against his teeth. "Drink up, buddy." the thick voice was saying. "Yeah, I'll get a doc fer yuh. You know where there's more, eh?" Roan gulped. The warmish, stagnant-smelling liquid gagged him. The man brought more water, cold this time and in a slightly cleaner glass, as though he had wiped it on his shirt. "Look, Bo, you take it easy, huh? I'm Soup the Insider. Sure, I'll fix yuh up with a room. Swell room, bed and everything. Private. Only look around good before yuh close the door. Yuh can never tell what yuh might be locking yourself in with." He guffawed. "Got to have rest," Roan managed. "Be... all right in the morning. Find my friends. Hope Desiranne is all right. Then get out... this filthy place..." "You just take it easy, Bub. I'll fix yuh up good. Then we'll talk about where to get more of these little knick-knacks. And you don't talk to nobody else, see?" "Get me..." Roan gave up trying to talk and felt the big man's armunder his, leading him away. H e fought his way up from a nightmare of heat and pursuit and blood and cruelty. He opened his eyes. There was a spotted glare panel set in a blotched ceiling, casting a sick light on a threadbare velvet wall with nauseous#ooking stains. An ancient, withered Man stood beside the bed, blinking down at him with eyes that were polished stones set in pockets of inflamed tissue. "Sick ye are, true enough, lad. Ye've caught every ailment I ever heard of and six or eight I haven't, you." Roan tried to sit up. His head barely twitched, and pain shot through it like an axe-blow. He lay, waiting for the throbbing to subside. His stomach ached as though it had been stamped by booted feet, and a sickness seemed to fester through his body like sewage bubbling in a cesspool. "Sore, hey?" the oldster cackled. "Well it might be. Ye've tossed up every meal ye've et since ye learned to guide spoon to lip, you." Through the wall Roan heard an angry scream and a slap. "For half a copper I don't even smile!" a female voice shrilled, and a door slammed. "Got to get out," Roan said. He tried to throw back the rough blanket, and the blackness swirled again. "... him something to make him talk," the thick voice of the big man was saying. "Whatever ye say, Soup. But it'll kill him, it." "Just so he talks first." Roan felt a cold touch on bis arm, a sharp stab of pain. "Where's the loot, Bo?" Soup's thick voice demanded. IF "Ye'll have to wait a little hour, Soup. First he'll sleep a bit, eh, to get back the strength to talk, he." "All right. But if you let him die before he spills. I'll squeeze that scrawny neck of yours." "No fear o' that. Soup." Time passed, like a storm of yellow dust that choked and harried and would never cease. Sometimes voices stabbed at him, and he cursed them and struck out. Again he was running, falling, and far away on the floodlit stage the knife was cutting into Desiranne's white flesh. He fought his way toward her, but always the sea of mad faces blocked his way until he screamed and clawed his way out of the dream. "... tell me now, before the blasted glutton comes back, he," a scratchy voice was saying. "Then I'll give ye more nice medicine, and ye'll sleep like a whelp at a bitch's teat." "Get... away... me " Roan managed. "Got... go..." Something sharp and painful poked his throat. "Ah, ye felt that, then, lad? Good. Now speak once more, tell old Yagg where the pretty treasures lie. Not in Upper' City, eh? For the dogs would tear a man to bits if ever he ventured there. Where, eh? Is there some house that's been missed?" There was a great smash, and a bull roar.  "So! Yuh'd cheat Soup, would yuh? I'll rip your head off!" "Now, Soup -- you misjudge me, you! I was just trying to find out for you. No harm, what?" There was a growl and a sound of two heavy blows and a squeal. Then Soup's wide face loomed over Roan, breathing foul breath and flecks of spittle. "All right, give. Bo! You ain't going to die and not tell Soup, not after he give yuh a place to die in!" Roan croaked, and liis hand moved feebly. "Tell... you... later..." The face fad and Soup's voice mumbled, drifted off into the insistent clamor of fever images. ight again, and sounds. "... didn't you send for me sooner?" a tremulous voice was complaining. "That quack Yagg like to killed him, with his poisons! He's full of disease! Look at those sores -- and see the swelling here. He'll die. Mark my words, he's a goner. But we can do our best." "Yuh better." Stellaraire was standing by the bed, looking down at him. Her hair was burnt off and her face was scarred and blistered. "Come with me, Roan," she said urgently. "We'll leave this 'zoo and go so far away they'll never find us. Come! Then she was running away, and Henry Dread was shooting after her, the blaster bolts echoing along the steel corridor, echoing... Henry Dread bolstered the gun. "Damned Gooks," he said. "But you and I Roan. We're different. We're Terries." His face changed, became small and petulant. "I trained her," Daryl said. "What higher art form can there be than destruction? And the destruction of one's self is its highest expression... Deftly, Daryl fitted a noose about his neck, hoisted himself up. His face became black and twisted and terrible. "You see?" he said pleasantly. He went on talking, and many voices chimed in, and they cheered and the dust cleared away and Iron Robert held up his arms, melted off at the elbow. "Iron Robert born to fight. Roan," he said. "Can't fight, now. Time for Iron Robert to die." He turned and the iron door opened and he walked into the furnace. The flames leaped out of the open door, scorching Roan's face. He turned away, and rough hands pulled him back. "Yuh can't die yet," Soup's voice said. "Yuh been laying We for two days and two night, yelling to yourself. Now talk, danm you, or I'll choke the life out of yuh!" Hands like leather-covered stonecrushers closed on Roan's throat -- There was a terrible growling, and then a scream. And suddenly the hands were gone and there were awful sounds of Tearing flesh and threshing limbs. And then Sostelle's face was leaning over him, and there was blood on the dog's jaw. "Master! I came as quickly as I could!"  Roan cried out, turned away from the phantom. "Master! It's your dog, Sostelle! And I have another with me. Look, Master!" A cool hand touched Roan's forehead. There was a faint odor of a delicate perfume, almost lost in the stench of the foul room. Roan opened his eyes. Desiranne looked down at him. Her face was pale and he could see the faint blue tracing of the veins in her eyelids. But she smiled at him. "It's all right now. Roan," she said softly. "I am with you." "Are you... real?" "As real as any of us," she said. "Your hand... " She held it up, swathed in bandages. "I'm sorry I'm no longer perfect, Roan." The dog doctor appeared, looking concerned. He talked, but Roan couldn't hear him for the thunder in his ears. He lay and watched Desiranne's face until she faded and dissolved in mist, and then the mist itself faded into darkness shot with lights, and the lights twinkled like distant stars, and then went out, one by one. R oan was sitting up in bed. His arm, resting on the patched blanket over his knees, was so thin that his fingers met around it, and it was scarred with half-healed pock marks. Desiranne sat by the bed, feeding him thin soup. Her face was thin and paler than ever, and her hair was cut short, held back by a simple scarf of clean cloth. Roan lifted his hand, took the spoon. "I can do that now," he said. but he went on to empty the bowl. "I'm stronger now," he said. "I'm getting up." "Roan, rest a few days more." IF "No. We've got to get to the ship now, Desiranne. How long has it been? Weeks? Maybe Askor and Sidis will be there, waiting for me. We'll leave this poisoned world and never come back." He had thrown back the blanket and put 'his feet down on the floor. His legs were so thin that a choked laugh grunted from him. "I look like old Targ," he said. With Desiranne's hand under his arm, he stood, feeling his senses fade in vertigo from the effort. He took a step and fell, and Desiranne cried out and then Sostelle was there, helping him back into the rags of the cot. I t was a week later. Roan sat in a chair by the window, looking out at the decayed roofs and tottering waUs of Lower Town. There was a sickly plant in a clay pot on the windowsill, and a fresh breeze brought odors of springtime and corruption. Sostelle came in, carrying a patched cloak. "This is all I could get, Master." I told you never to call me 'Master' again," Roan snapped. "My name is Roan." "Yes... Roan. Here is a garment. But please don't go. Not yet. The dogs are about again today." Roan stood, ignoring the dizziness. "We're going today. Askor and Sidis are probably waiting for me, wondering what happened. They probably think I'm dead." His fingers fumbled with the chipped buttons. "Yes, Mas -- Roan." The dog helped him with the cloak. It was a faded blue, of a rough weave that scratched Roan's pale skin. Desiranne appeared at the door. "Roan -- you're so weak." "I'm all right." He forced himself to smile gently at her, to walk without staggering across to her. "It's not far," he said. "We can do It." They went down patched stairs, ignoring the eyes that stored from half-concealment at the dog who had torn the throat out of the formidable Soup, and the pale Upper woman, and the sick madman. Out in the sun-bleached time-eroded street other faces, weather-burned and life-scarred, watched as they passed. When one of the watchers ventured too close, Sostelle bared his fangs and they drew back. After half an hour. Roan and his escort stopped to rest at a dry fountain with broken carvings of Men with the tails of fish. Roan looked at them, and wondered on what world they lived. He and Desiranne sat on the carved stone lop of the monument, feeling the warmth of the sun, while Sostelle paced up and down, his humanlike hands hooked in his leather belt. When Roan had rested, they went on. It was late afternoon when they reached the raised avenue that ran past the port and on to the bright towers of Upper City. Roan shaded his eyes, staring past the orderly trees and the banked flowers in the distance. "Where is it?" he said. "I don't see the ship." There was a new sick feeling in him now, not the fever oi pain and infection, but the hollow sickness of terrible loss. He scrambled up the embankment, led the way along under the gentle trees. He could see parked flyers, the flash of color of moving chariots, the tiny figures of dogs at work; but HelVs Whore was gone. "Perhaps the people, sir," Sostelle said. "Master Daryl and the others may have moved her." "They couldn't have," Roan said in a voice that almost broke. "Only Askor and Sidis knew how to open her ports -- how to lift her." "Roan -- we must go back now." Desiranne's hand was on his arm. He touched the thin fingers, looking at Sostelle. "You knew," he said. "Roan -- I could not be sure -- and how could I have told you?" "It's all right." Roan tried desperately to hold his voice firm. "At least they got away. I knew those pansies couldn't hold them." "Perhaps one day they'll come back. Roan," Sostelle said. "Perhaps -- " "No. They're gone, back to where they belong -- out there." Roan tilted his head back, looking up into the bottomless blue of the deep sky. "I sent them away myself," be said. "I betrayed them to their enemies and then turned my back on them. There's nothing for them to come back for." R oan sat with Desiranne and Sostelle at a small table in the bar that Soup the Insider had once owned. It was evening. The room was filled with yellow light and the last of the day's heat. In one corner, a Man with magic fingers caressed a stringed instrument that mourned for love and courage and other forgotten things. A one-eyed Man came in silently from the street, crossed to their table. "I seen another patrol," he said accusingly. "You and yer woman and yer dog better pull out tonight." Roan looked at him with an expression that was the absence of all expression. "Yer calling 'em down on us," the Man said, his lips twisting with the hates that ate at him like crabs. "When the dogs get on a Man's trail, they don't never quit. And long's they're here in the Town, ain't nobody safe." "They're not looking for me," Roan said. "Not after a year. I'm not that important." "A year -- ten years. It's all the same to dogs. They ain't like a Man. They're trained to hunt -- and that's what they're doing." "He's right. Roan," Sostelle said. "Kotschai will never forget the Man who shamed him by escaping him. Perhaps we'd best leave now, and find another place." "I'm not leaving," Roan said. "If they want me, let them find me." He looked at the one-eyed Man. "If you fought them -- if we all fought them -- we could wipe them out. There are only a few hundred of them. Then you could leave this pest-hole. You could spread out into the countryside, start new villages -- " IF The Man shook his head. "You was lucky," he said. "You got clear of 'em. But that was because you was in Upper Town, where they wasn't expecting no trouble. When they come down here, they come in packs, with nerve guns and organization. Nobody's going to jump that kind of force. And neither are you." He straightened, showing his teeth. "You're going to get out, like I said -- or you ain't going to live long." Roan laughed at him. "Is that a threat? Is being dead worse than living in this ghetto?" "Your'e going to find out pretty soon, you and your... friends." He swaggered away. "Roan," Sostellel started. "We could leave by night, make our way to -- " "I'm going out." Roan stood. "I need fresh air." "Roan! You're challenging the dogs -- and the Men as well I" Desiranne caught at his hand. 'They'll see us." Roan pushed her gently back. "Not us. Just me. Let them beware." "I'm going with you." "Stay here with Sostelle," Roan said flatly. "I've hidden from them for a year. That's long enough." As he walked away, he heard Sostelle say: "Let him go, mistress. A Man like Roan cannot live forever as a hunted slave." T he rumor ran ahead of Roan. People stared, made mystical signs, then darted out to follow as he strode along, taking the center of the hut and garbage-choked street. Others slipped away into decayslimed alleyways to spread the word . The last of sunset faded. The few automatic polyarcs that still worked came on, shedding their tarnished facades and Roan, walking the night with his shadow striding ahead. "They're close," someone called to Roan from a doorway. "Better run quick. Mister Fancy-talk!" He was in a wide avenue with a center strip of hard-packed dirt where flowers had once grown. At the far end was the wide collonaded front of a building white in the glare from a tall pole-mounted light. Tall weeds poked up among marble slabs there. Rude huts grew like toadstools in the shadows of the chipped pediments. A dog appeared on the broken steps, standing tall, curve-shouldered, cringe-legged, cruel-fanged, wearing the straps and sparkling medalions of the police. Roan walked toward him, and the trailing crowd fell back. "Stop there, red-haired Man!" the dog yelped. He drew the curiously shaped gun strapped under his foreleg and pointed it at Roan. "You're under arrest." ' "Run," Roan said in a strange, flat voice. "Run, or I'll kill you." "What? Kill me? You're a fool. Red-hair. I have a gun." Roan broke into a run straight toward the dog. The animal crouched and fired. In the sudden shock of pain Roan felt his legs knot and cramp, and he fell. The dog stalked up to him, waving back the gathering crowd. Ifs only pain, Roan told himself. He rested on hands and knees. Pain is nothing. Dying without feeling his tfiroat under your hands is the true agony. He rose to his feet in a sudden movement, and the police dog whirled, reaching for the gun. But Roan's swing caught him below his cropped ear, sent him spinning. With a growl, the dog scrambled to all fours, and Roan's foot met him under the jaw with a solid impact. The shaved body rolled aside and lay still. Roan stooped, picked up the gun, as a mutter of alarm swept across the mob. "You see?" Roan shouted. "They're dogs -- nothing more!" "Now they'll kill you for sure!" a gaunt woman yelled. "Serve you right, too, you trouble-bringer!" "Here they come!" another voice screeched. Two more dogs had appeared from the ruin, coming on at a relentless loje. Roan took aim and shot one. It fell yelping and kicking out, and the other veered aside and dashed for safety. The crowd shouted now. "But these are just ordinary dogs." The one-eyed Man had come up close to Roan. "Wait until you meet Kotschai, face to face. Then you'll learn the taste of honest fear." "They say he's three hundred years old," a short, clay-faced man said. "His masters have given him their magic medicine to make him live long, and with every passing year he's grown more wise and evil. My gran'fer remembered him -- " "He's just a dog," Roan shouted. "And you're Men!" A cross the square a squad of uniformed dogs burst into view, fanned out, halted, facing the crowd, which recoiled, leaving Roan to stand alone. Then an avenue opened through the police and an immense dog paced through. In silence he advanced across the plaza' skirted the injured dog which was crawling painfully, whimpering. A dozen feet from Roan, he halted. "Who dares defy Kotschai the Punisher?" he growled. He was taller than Roan, massive-bodied, with the thick, sinewy forelegs of a tiger and jaws like a timber-wolf. His body had been shaved except for a ruff around the neck. His pinkish-gray hide was a maze of scars. He was dressed in straps and bangles of shiny metal decorated with enamel. There was a harness studded with spikes of brass across his chest. Above his yellow eyes was a brass horn that seemed to be set in the bone of his brute-flat skull. His tail had been broken and badly set. It swung nervously, as thought it hurt all the time. "How does a dog dare to challenge a Man?" Roan demanded. "It is the order of my Master." The wicked jaws grinned and a pink tongue licked black gums. "Can you fight all of us?" Roan motioned toward the silent mob. "They do not count," Kotschai said. "Only you. I see you have a gun, too. But my dogs have more." IF "You and I don't need guns," Roan said. "We have hands and teeth for fighting." Kotsohai looked at Roan with his small, red-circled eyes. He lifted his muzzle and sniffed the air. "Yes," the dog said. "I smell the odor of human blood-lust." He seemed to shiver. "It is not a scent I love. Master." "Then you'd better learn how to crouch on all fours and heel on command dog," Roan said loudly, so that everyone could hear. "I have never learned such lessons, Master," Kotschai said. "You haven't had a proper teacher, dog." "That may be true." Kotschai motioned his dogs back. He unbuckled his gun harness, threw it aside. "It is said that once Man was Terra's most deadly predator," he said. "I have wondered long how it was that the pretty creatures I call Master made the dogs their slaves. Perhaps in you I see the answer." "Perhaps in me you see your death." Kotschai nodded. "Perhaps. And now I must punish you. Master." Roan tossed, the gun to a Man, reached to his shoulder, ripped loose the clasp that held his garment, wrapped the ragged cloth around his left forearm. "Now I'll instruct you in courtesy, dog," he said, and Kotschai snarled and charged. R oan's padded arm struck into the open jaws as the dog's bristly body slammed against him. He stumbled back, twisting aside from the horn that raked his jaw. He locked his free arm around the dog's shoulders, keeping his face above the viscious chest spikes, and together Man and dog fell. Roan locked his legs around the heavy torso. Kotschai snarled, raking with all four limbs as Roan locked arms and legs crushed, crushed -- With a frantic effort, the dog wrenched his jaws half free of Roan's strangling forearm. He lunged for a better grip with his teeth, and Roan struck with his fist, kicked free, hurled the animal from him. Kotschai scrambled to his feet, jaws agape, the stubble along his spine erect. Roan faced him, blood on his arm, teeth bared in an ancient defience. All around, dogs and Men stood silent, gaping at the spectacle of Men pitted against beast. The dog charged again. Roan slipped aside, dropped on the broad back, locked ankles under the dog's belly, wrapped his arms around the thick neck, pressing his face close to the mightily-muscled shoulder. Kotschai went down, rolled, and Roan held on, throttling the breath in the dog's throat. Kotschai reared high, tottering under the weight of the Man on his back, throwing his horned head from side to side. Roan's grip loosened -- At once, the dog twisted, the great jaws snapping a hair's breath from Roan's unprotected shoulder. Roan doubled his fist, struck a smashing blow across the dog's face, but the jaws snapped again, and this time they met hide and muscle. Roan found a grip on the corded throat, forcing the fanged head back. He felt the looked teeth tear his flesh. The garment wrapping Roan's arm had slipped down. It flapped in in the dog's face, and the animal snapped at it. In the instant's diversion, Roan ripped free; but even as he retreated a step the dog was on him, and again the rag-snarled fist was thrust into the yawning jaws, and again Roan fell, and now Kotschai was above him, snarling and worrying the impeding gag, struggling to find a clear thrust at Roan's throat, while Roan fought to hold the fighting body close... A minute that was an eternity passed, while the two antagonists contended, chest to chest, their agonized breathing the only sound in all the wide plaza. And slowly the jaws grew closer. Roan's grip loosened. He looked into the yellow eyes, and felt the hot, inhuman ferocity that burned an inch from his face now. And then he saw another face, above and behind that of the dog -- the features set and pale, the one eye glaring -- There was a shock, and the pressure was gone. Kotschai kicked convulsivdy, growling. The growl became a howl, choked off. Roan thrust the two-hundred pound body from him, got to his knees, then to hisTeet. Blood was running hot across his chest from the wound in his shoulder, and his breath was raw in his throat. He was aware of the Man standing before him, looking half-triumphant, half afraid, and of a roar from the mob of humans, and of the dogs starting forward uncertainly, guns ready. Roan shook out his torn and bloody tunic, pulled it on. "Thanks," Roan said, then yelled and charged the advancing dogs. H e felt the wash of fire as the field of a nerve gun touched him, and then he was on the nearest dog, feeling the solid smash of his fists on hide, and then' the shouting was all about him and the ragged horde leaped past him, howling out their long-pent fury. The dogs fought bravely. But as quickly as one Man fell another leaped his body to grapple his antagonist. The police fell back almost to the broken marble steps of the ruined building before whistles and barkings sounded from a side way. Now more dogs arrived, long pink tongues hanging out, stub tails whipping, firing as they came; and still more Men scrambled to join the fight which had spread all across the square now. The one-eyed Man was beside Roan. His face was bleeding from a dog bite but his single eye gleamed with life. "I killed three of 'em" he yelled. "Got one by the throat and choked him till he died!" He ran on. The dogs had formed a tight phalanx, guns aimed outward to sweep the crowd, and they retreated slowly as Men rushed at them, shouting curses, leaping the bodies of the fallen, striking out with clubs, knives, fists. Now the dogs reached a narrow way, and more Men fell IF as the enemy retreated, leaving a trail of casualties behind them. They reached a gate, and slipped through it and it clanged behind them. The Men tried to climb it, but the dogs shot them down, and they fell, all but one who hung, impaled on spearpoints. But a wild yell was echoing along the street, across the plaza. Men and women danced, screaming their triumph. The one-eyed Man was back, seizing Roan's arm, pumping his hand. "We beat 'em! he was shouting at the top of his lungs. "They'll be back!" Roan shouted. "We'll have to collect the weapons, set up a defensive position..." No one was listening. Roan turned to another Man as One-eye darted away, tried to explain that the dogs had retired in good order for tactical reasons, that they would renew the assault as soon as reinforcements arrived with heavy weapons. It was useless. The Lowers capered, all yelling at once. Something made Roan look upsparkled and winked against the night sky, and Roan felt the clutch of a ghostly hand at his heart. "A ship!"' he said aloud, feeling his voice choke. "Roan!" He whirled. Sostelle was there, unruffled by the frenzy all about. "The Lady Desiranne commanded me to come." Roan clutched at him. "It's a ship!" he said hoarsely, pointing. "Yes, Roan. We saw it from the roof top. Or, Roan! Is it your ship?" A great searchlight lanced out from the port area. The finger of chalky bluish light glared on low clouds, found the ship, glinted on its side. "No," Roan said, and the gJfcOStly hand gripped even tighter. "It's not my ship. It's a big one. A dndodnaught of the line. It's Trishindst and his plunderers of the Imperial Terran Navy." R oan and Sostelle watched from the shelter of the causeway as the mile-long vessel suspended itself five miles over the city, like an elongated moon ablaze with lights from stem to stern. It's pressor beams were columns of pale fire bearing on smoking pits, spaced at hundred yard intervals across the flower beds and glassy pavement of the landing ramps. Three smaller shapes of light had detached themselves from the mother vessel, dropping quickly toward the Earth. "They're landing about three hundred Men," Roan said. "How many fighting dogs are there?" "I don't know. Roan. Perfiaps as many, perhaps more. But look there!" From the Upper City, a flock of flyers had appeared, moving swiftly toward the port. Roan could see the crossed-bones insignia of the police blazoned on the sides of the grim, gray machines. The landing Ports cycled open. A cascade of men poured out of each, fommed up in ragged columns. The police flyers closed ranks, hurtling to the attack at low altitude. Something sparkled from tihe prow of the first landing craft in line, and the lead flyer exploded into arcing fragments with a flash that lit the landscape for two miles around in dusty orange light. The other police vessels scattered, screaming away at flank speed, hugging the ground, but not before an aerial torpedo got away to burst near an men sprawling. "The dogs are brave enough," Roan said. But they don't know how to fight a force like Trishinist's. The ship won't fire. He'll want the city intact to loot. But the ground party will walk through them to take the city, and then they'll come on to Lower Town, and from here they'll go on to the next city, and when they're finished there'll be nothing left but ashes." "Perhaps if the Lowers joined with the dogs -- " "No use. They're just a mob, drunk on a taste of victory." "Why, Roan?" Sostelle whined. "What do these Men seek here? Surely in the wide skies there must be worlds enough for all creatures." "They destroy for the love of it -- like Daryl and his friends. Poor Terra. Her last, forlorn hope is gone now." The landing force had advanced across the ramp to the reception buildings. A detachment broke off. Roan saw the wink of guns as they smashed their way into the glasswalled lounge where he had met Daryl that first day, so long ago. The dog, meanwhile, had grounded their flyers and were advancing in open order across a wide park to intercept the invaders at the causeway. "Terra's own lost, wandering sons -- returned to deal her her deathblow," Sostelle whispered. "In a sad world, this is the crowning sadness." Roan was studying the advancdistance of half a mile he could make out the hulking forms, the shambling gaits of the mongrel humans in the blue and silver uniforms. Two large Men marched at the head of the column, a smaller figure between them." Sostelle raised his nose and sniffed. "Look there!" Roan said. "My eyes are not as keen as those of a Man, Roan." Roan was on his feet. His heart beat in his throat, almost choking him. Then he was running, sprinting across a stretch of open grass, leaping up the embankment to the causeway. He heard Sostelle at his side. "Roan, you'll be killed! Both sides will fire their guns at you!" But Roan ran on toward the apleader -- a huge figure in ill-fitting blues -- held up a hand, halted the column, brought a short-barreled power gun around... Then he threw it aside. "Roan! Chief!" he bellowed. "Askor! And Sidis!" IF T hey came together and Roan seized the Minid's broad shoulders in a wild embrace, shouting while Askor grinned so widely that everyone of his twenty-eight teeth showed. "Chief, we knew we'd find you," he roared out. Sidis was looming then, his steel teeth glittering in the polyarc ligjht. "Askor and me come in here ready to blow this dump apart if we didn't find you okay," He clapped Roan on the back with his steel hook and Roan seized him, danced him around, while the troops standing by at the ready gaped and grinned. "I told that lunk-head you was okay." Askor gripped Roan's arm and pounded his back with a great, horny hand. "Gee, Boss, you look different," Sidis said. "Your hair's got gray and you got lines in your face... and you ain't been eating good, neither. But to the Nine Hells with it! We're together!" Roan laughed and listened to both men talk at once. Then other crewmen were crowding forward, and Roan caught a glimpse of a once-familiar face, now thin and dirty and streaked with tears. It was Trishinist. There was an iron collar around his neck to which a length of heavy chain was welded. "I knew you big plug-uglies would come back," Roan said. Sostelle was by his side, his tail wagging. "Didn't I, Sostelle?" Roan demanded, blinking back an annoying film in his eyes. "Yes, Roan," the dog said. "You knew." "Chief, I guess maybe we better take a few minutes to straighten out these fellows coming out from the city," Askor said. The dogs were marching across the causeway now, four abreast, advancing in defense of their masters. "Sostelle -- can't you stop them?" Roan asked. "No," the dog said almost proudly. "The dogs will fight." Then Askor was away, bawling orders, and Roan stood with Sidis under a tree that drifted lavender petals on them as the two columns met in fire and dust. Q unlight shifted suddenly past a O shattered beam and waked Roan. "It's quiet," he said to Desiranne, who stood at the edge of the cavernous ruin of the old house, looking toward the city. She looked around, smiled, the sunlight misting in her hair. Askor appeared around the edge of the wall. "Looks like it's over, Chief." "That's Sami!" Desiranne cried, pointing toward a dog that limped across the ruined square toward them. "It's... it was a dog I knew." "My animals are overwhelmed," Sami said. "Only twenty-three survive, and all of those are injured. We can no longer fight." His fur was singed and there was blood clotted at the side of his head, but he stood straight. "You put up a good scrap," Askor said approvingly. "You knocked nailed one or two of my boys." "I request one hour's time to permit my dogs to clean themselves and polish their brasses before we are put to death," Sami said. "They wish to meet their end in propter fashion, and not as Masterless curs." "Huh? Who said anything about "But we are sworn to defend to the death..." "No" Sami," Desiranne put in softly. "I know your training, your loyalty. But the world is different now. I am different. So are you. Men and dogs must change or both be lost." "What would you say to joining up," Askor said. "Joining... ?" need good fighters." He looked at Roan. "Sorry, Chief. I guess this last year I kind of got a habit of talking like it was my show." "It is," Roan said. "You've earned it." "If we hadn't found Archaeopteryx and our old crew cruising around near Alpha Four looking for us, we never would of made it. But what about signing up the dogs. Chief? You like the idea okay?" "Sure. They're Terrans too, aren't they?" The dog's eyes gleamed. He straightened his back even more. "SirsJ My dogs and I accept your offer! We will fight well for Terra, Sirs!" Sami saluted and limped away. Sidis came up. "Boss, uh, the boys is kind of looking around a little in the city, if that's okay. They been a long time in space, and, uh..." truction," Roan said. "I leave it to them to decide what's necessary." "Them poor Terries in the dump town," Askor said. "They look worse than the Geeks back in that place, Tam bool. Chief. We give 'em some food and blasted down the gates so's they could help themselves to some of the stuff that's laying around in the fancy part of town. I got a idea we could sign on a few of them, too, after the fun's over." "Yeah, Boss," Sidis said eagerly. "With a couple hundred of Trishinist's Gooks, and the dogs, and now those Terries, we got a nicesized little navy shaping up. We could maybe even man two ships. What you got in mind for our next cruise?" Desiranne put her hand on Roan's arm, and looked up at him anxiously. Roan covered her hand with his, covering the old finger wound. He shook his head. "I'm staying on Terra," he said. Askor and Sidis stared at him. "This world needs every Man it can get," Roan said. "The old equilibrium's been shattered. If we leave them to their own devices they'll die. The Lowers outnumber the Uppers a hundred to one -- but they don't know how to run a world. And if the automatic machinery isn't properly tended, they'll all starve. They'll starve soon, anyway, when the system breaks down completely. But I can help. I have to try." Askor nodded. "Yeah... from IF what I saw, there ain't much hope for these Terries on their own." "There still life in the old world," Roan said. "Now that the blockade is broken, the word will spread. They'll be coming, to get in on the spoils. But with a little time and luck, I can organize her defenses -- enough to give her a chance." Askor frowned. "Defenses? What about Archie? There ain't many tubs in space can take her on." "I can't ask you to stay here," Roan said. "For me, it's different. I have a wife now. And in a few months I'll have a son... " Askor and Sidis looked at each other. "Uh... you know. Boss, it's a funny thing," Sidis said. "I feel at home here myself." He waved a thick-fingered hand. "The air smells right, the sunlight, the trees -- all that kind of stuff. I been thinking -- " "Uh, Chief," Askor btoke in, "Til be back." Roan looked after him. "I guess I'm a great disappointment to him. Married, settled down, no more raiding the space ways... " "It ain't that, Boss." Sidis snapped the top off a tall wine bottle and occupied himself with swallowing. A big Gook named Gungle appeared at the door, grinned across at Roan. "Hey, Cap'n, what do you want to do with this Terry Admiral we got here? Askor said bring him along from Alpha for you to roast over a slow fire if you wanted to." He tugged the chain in his hand and Trishinist stumbled in. # #'Ooan! Dear lad," he babbled.Iv "If you've a heart, surely you'll take a moment now to instruct these animals to release me." Gungle jerked the chain. "Talks funny, don't he, Cap'n?" "Maybe we should find a nice deep hole to put him in," Roan said thoughtfully, studying the former officer. "But somehow the idea bores me. You may as well just shoot him." "Roan -- no! I'm far too valuable to you!" "He's all the time talking about something he knows, Cap'n," Gungle explained. "Said you wouldn't never find out if we was to blow a hole in him." "Yes, Roan," Trishinist gasped. "Only set me free -- with a stout vessel, of course -- one of the flagship's lifeboats will serve nicely -- and an adequate supply of provisions -- and perhaps just a few small ingots of Terran gold to help me make a new start -- and I'll tell you something that will astonish you!" "Go ahead," Roan said. "But first, your promise." Gurgle gave the chain a sharp tug. "Tell it," he growled. Trishinist bleated. "Your word, Roan -- " "I guess I might as well go ahead and plug him, Cap'n," Gungle said apologetically, tugging at his pistol. "I shudn't of bothered you." He turned on the cowering man. "I'll speak!" Trishinist bleated. "And throw myself on your mercy, Roan. I have faith in your sense of honor, dear lad!" Roan yawned. "You're a Terran!" Trishinist screeched. "Yes, of the Pure Strain. The ancient strain! There was a ship -- oh, old, old, it was. Roan! Hulled in Deep Space by a rock half as big as a lifeboat, and drifting through space and centuries -- until I found it. There was the body of a Man, frozen in an instant as the rock opened her decks to space. They took from his body the frozen germ cells, and at my order -- my order. Roan -- our finest technicians thawed them, and induced maturation! And then -- but the you you know..." He stared at Roan, his mouth hanging open, his eyes pleading. "His name was Admiral Stuart Murdoch," Roan said. "He died sixteen thousand years ago." # #hen -- you knew it." TrishinA ist's face went gray. "I didn't know the whole story. Tell me, Trishinist, if I let you go, will you settle down here on Terra and live a useful life?" "Live? Life? the former Admiral straightened. "Roan, I'll be a model citizen, I swear it. Oh, I'di tired, hate! I want to rest now. I'll till a plot of land -- Terran soil -- and marry a Terran woman, raise a family. I want... I want to be loved. "Gripes," Gungle said. "Perhaps he does," Desiranne said. "We're all having a new birth now." She leaned heavUy oh Roan, reminding him of the new life within her. "Get out," Roan said to him. "And if you betray me. I'll find you. Wherever you are." "Gee, Cap'n," Gungle said disgustedly. He dropped the chain and Trishinist caught it up, darted from the room. Roan heard a yell, then the scamper of retreating feet. Askor came in, grinning. "I figured you'd let him go. Chief. And, uh, now I got something to show you." He turned, beckoned. A girl appeared in the doorway, smiling shyly. She was small, pretty, obviously Terran. She was dressed in softcolored garment from the Gallian World, and she held a baby in her arms. Askor went to her, put a protective hand on her shoulder, led her to Roan. A fat, three monthold face looked up at Roan, suddenly smiled a half-familiar smUe. "My kid," Askor said proudly. Roan blinked. "Me and CyrDlia," Askor went on, grinning. "I, uh, kind of took her along when me and Sidis left here. Chief. We was in kind of a hurry, but I seen her and you know..." "You took her with you?" Roan took the baby. He was solid, heavy, with the round face of a Minid and the pert nose of his mother. "Then -- this means -- " "Yeah," Askor said. "I guess that proves even a Gook's got a little Earthblood, huh? I want to stay here. Chief. With you. "And the rest of the boys too. You need us here. Terra needs us to start her new navy. And ever since Roan was born -- " Askor blushed. IF "We named him for you, Sir," "Hell's hull, Chief -- all the boys are tired of this shipboard life. They all want to get a nice Terrie gal and settle down. We'll keep Archie ship-shape." "There are plenty of ships," Roan said, through a smile that felt as large and silly as Askor's" T he first star came out. But it wasn't somewhere to go. It was just a decoration. Roan held Desiranne's hand in his and saw that she was looking down the grassyhillside to the city, where fire winked and glimmered among the dark buildings. Echoes of grating laughter, shouts, the tuneless counterpoints of drunken looters sounded. "Tears for your city?" Roan asked his wife, feeling them fall on his hand. "Only for the strangeness of it all, the difference," she said softly, and then almost shouted, "No! Let them destroy it, root out all the evil. And then we start over." "Still... I could weep myself for all that history. The ancient things burning there, the treasures of Terran art, the heritage of Terra's greatness." Desiranne touched his cheek. "Oh, Roan, how you must ache for it! The Terra you came so far for, that you spent your youth to find. The Terra that no longer existed." "No." Roan helped Desiranne to her feet, looking out with her over the city, into the night. "I learned something. If what you want doesn't exist, you create it. Terra's past is lost forever. Now she has only the future. We'll make the future. You and me -- and our friends out Dear Editor : Congratulations! You have just received my nomination for the best science-fiction magazine of # (or any other year, for that matter). Anyone who can publish in the same issue the conclusion of Heinlein's best novel yet, the beginning of another world-beater serial, stories and novelettes anywhere deserves the Hugo. Maybe they should create another category, the editor who has done the most to promote better science fiction. If they do, the only person who could honestly accept it would be you, Mr. Pohl. On the minus side however, is the juvenile artwork displayed on the covers of your magazines. So far, only Galaxy has had any decent covers. The ones on W. O. T. and If give the prospective buyer a false impression of what sf is about. I feel that the cover artwork should be equal to, if not better than, the interior artwork. Now for the analyzation. Starting with the past three issues (February). The Heinlein serial was, of course, the best part of the entire magazine. Coming in second, was C. C. MacApp, who I must admit Pm partial to. For the short, short story of the new year. Build We Musty takes the prize. Next, R. A. Lafferty with the Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Please give us more of Lafferty's work, which, although it is not very popular, is some of the best weird-type fiction written. Booby prize goes to Not by Sea which never should have seen print. In the March issue, once again the Master comes thru with the No. I story, followed closely by Dam Nuisance, One of my favorite authors (you have a different one of them every issue) John Brunner came through with a rousing good story, with a feminine hero for a change. Neither of the short stories were worth the time it took to read them. I hate to seem monotonous but once again the writer who must be the best all-time writer of sf ever, came through with the Hugo winner for # for long fiction. I am referring to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The new serial by Laumer and Brown (just who the heck is Rosel G. Brown, anyway?) was good and promises to be consistently so. Castles in Space was unusual and was very enjoyable. E. Clayton McCarty who writes like no one else, with tenderness, understanding and warmth, (plus a t # rpewriter) came throug'h with another enjoyable tale, his third in a row for you. No comment on Garrett Brown's story, let's just say that you must have had very ioor pickings that month. To sum it up, at least five were very goods, three goods and about two strike-outs. A very commendable record. Before I end, I would like to air one of my biggest gripes that I have about your group of magazines. You, Mr. Pohl, are one of the finest writers of this generation. Yet in the last two or three years, you have not written anything that would be considered even fair for a writer of your calibre. The works of yours that I have read are all reprints. Perhaps it is the fact that you have three magazines to edit that prevents you from garnering the yearly crop of Hugos. I do wish that you would find time to write some more stories that are the sequel of say, Space MerchanU or a novelette like The Abominable Earthman. Keep up the good work. -- Drake Maynard, # Columbine Lane, Burlington, North Carolina. #. P.S. A while ago, someone read one of my letters and wrote to me. I seem to have lost his address and would appreciate it if you would publish this' letter so he could write me again to send me his address.    Dear Editor: I have noticed in your recent issue of If some comments on the desirability of advertisements in your magazine. Unfortunately, science-fiction fans have a poor understanding of the advertising business. I have been in the advertising business for over twenty years and perhaps I can straighten out their misconceptions. First of all, science-fiction fans think it is impossible to get advertisements from technical and scientific firms in science-fiction magazines. It is not possible. It is true that a few gimcrack outfits will advertise in s-f magazines, ' but authentic scientific firms do not need to. The reason is simply that most of these firms advertise in professional publications where they are assured that their ad will be read by the person for whom it is intended. There are almost twenty thousand of these publications, and none of them ever appear on the newsstands. Some of them are issued every two weeks and many of them are an inch thick. They also deliver up-to-the-minute news on the profession at which they are aimed. In other words, they are everything that the professional man needs. I realize that s-f fans want such ads in s-f magazines to add a touch of dignity while bringing in enough money to make the magazine better. And this brings up the question of whether they consider dignity more important than a better magazine. I am inclined to believe that they do. However, you cannot eat dignity. The writers and artists for the magazines can make more money if the magazine has advertising revenue. Obviously, with more money coming in, the publisher can afford to pay more. It is equally obvious that a magazine with an assured advertising income could eventually lower its cover price. AU of these would be good things. But you can to accept the presence of consumer advertising in the pages of the magazine. That means liquor ads. cig'arette ads, chewing gum ads, etc. You use there products, so why detest the need for advertising them? This brings us to the ever-present problem of display space. The advertiser is just as concerned about this as the publisher of s-f magazines. The advertiser needs room to show his product, and there just is not sufficient room in the present digest size s-f mag. To correct this problem, I suggest that the s-f mags give serious consideration to the possibility of increasing their size to that of the Playboy type magazine. Large sizes have been tried, as I stated in my last letter. However, expense was not given enough consideration. It was assumed by those who tried it that the large size might automatically bring in enough readers to support the magarine in that size printed on slick paper. From my point of view, a slick paper magazine in the s-f field is not worthy of consideration, because it could never pay for itself. I suggest an approximately S'xlO' format, saddle stitched and printed on pulp paper. Half-page inside illustrations would be sufficient and the cover illustration need not cover the whole page. A publication of this size would be more attractive to the potential advertiser than the present size. S-f magazines have changed their formats three times in the past forty years. There is no reason why they cannot change again. -- D. Bruce Berry, # nois #.    Dear Editor: Several of my friends and I were national headquarters, how does one join and related information. Could you at If do an editorial on Box #, Yelm, Washington.  The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, largest (and most easily comprehended!) of located at # Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington #, D.C. Far as we know, membership is open to any interested party. Their principal function is to serve as a sort of clearing house for reports of unexplained sightings; they also publish books and periodicals about them, attempt to investigate as many sightings as possible, etc. -- Editor, Dear Editor: Anyone who had a rejected science-fiction story sent to a publisher, and anyone who would like to write a story or has some good ideas for stories, should write to me if they would like to join the club called the S.F.W.O. (Science Fiction Writers Organization). Anyone who is interested, write me a letter and I will send them a letter on what it is all about. -- Larry Paschall, Route ##, Cushing, Minnesota. # ThaVs about it for another month. This month's "First" is A. A. Walde with -- we think you'll agree! -- an unusual contribution, not only because of its story qualities but because of its length (Most beginning writers stick to very short pieces -- but as you see, it's not essential ! ) Next month? Hal Clement's back, with a story called The Foundling Stars. Need we say more? -- The Editor IF MiV ilrJlk M Vi n fl T Imb I Plug in and flip on the switch. The disc revolves at just the right speed -- transfixes your subject(s). Their attention is riveted to the powerful hypnotic pattern. Your every word is now more meaningful -- more effective for this professional machine greatly adds to your prestige, creates hypnotic expectancy. Increases your success. A marvelous aid for hypnotizing others and for self-hypnosis. Has #" hypnotic disc, switch, handle, instructions and a high quality, silent, trouble-free motor Revealingly tells guarded secret techniques to cause the "Indirect Trance". Subjects are hypnotized without their knowledge. Learn amazing shortcuts, make hypnosis fast and easy. Discover the safe, fast "nerve pressure" technique... the "falling back" test, others. Read -- for the first time anywhere, how the author hypnotizes a roomful of people without their knowledge -- using a common cooking ingredient. So simple, dramatic and effective, it is worth the low price of the book alone. Order now and get the clever "Hypnotic cause the "Indirect Trance." Listen as the Hypnotist dramatically weaves irresistable suggestions around the unique beat of an electronic metronome coming from an echo-chamber. Side one helps hyprrotizs others -- in groups or individually. Ends: "the next voice you hear will take complets control of your hypnotic sleep... ", then you take over. Side two helps in self-hypnosis, ends by giving you a suggestion for rehypnotizing yourself, then awakens you. Use ths record on others -- study it to develop your own technique. An ideal aid for professionals and serious students. Unbreakable vinyl, # rpm Extended Play -- "Kit" is complete with Satisfaction Guaranteed or Money Back!  # Madison Ave., New York, # NY J Send the following on an Unconditional # Day Money Back Guarantee. I enclose  you pay the postage. Chart sent with orders for # or more. Name Address # for S#; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. Ward the only ones we offer! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by En No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep."  Listen as the Hypnotist dramatically weave! irresistable suggestions around the unique an echo-chamber. Side one helps hypnotize others -- in groups or individually. Ends "the next voice you hear will take compleh control of your hypnotic sleep... ", then yoi take over. Side two helps in self-hypnosis ends by giving you a suggestion for rehypno tizing yourself, then awakens you. Use the record on others -- study it to develop you own technique. An ideal aid for professional' and serious students. Unbreakable vinyl, #I rpm Extended Play -- "Kit" is complete wit! Satisfaction Guaranteed or Money Back! # Madison Ave., New York, # NY Revealingly tells guarded secret techniques to cause the "Indirect Trance". Subjects are hypnotized without their knowledge. Learn amazing shortcuts, make hypnosis fast and easy. Discover the safe, fast "nerve pressure" technique... the "falling back" test, others. Read -- for the first time anywhere, how the author hypnotizes a roomful of people without their knowledge -- using a common cooking ingredient. So simple, dramatic and effective, it is worth the low price of the book alone. Order now and get the clever "Hypnotic cause the "Indirect Trance." Send the following on an Unconditional # Day Money Back Guarantee. I enclose  , you pay the postage. Chart sent with orders for # or more. Name Address Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin , Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subs. Mgr. IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Editorial Ah, Mars That Might Have Been A year or so ago we ran a story called Under Two Moons which dealt with a notion concerning Mars's canals which struck us as new: that they did indeed contain water, but that the water was covered by some sort of surface film which prevented evaporation, explaining why water is so scarce in the Martian atmosphere and at the same time why no reflections from a liquid surface had ever been telescopically observed. (It happens to have been a story we wrote ourselves, which maybe explains how come we remember it so well.) Now we've just learned of a Russian astronomer's theory which accomplishes the same end in a different way. Fellow's name is V. V. Davidov ; and although he first suggested the idea in #, we have seen no account of it in the English language until just the other day, reading the new book by Patrick Moore and Francis Jackson called Life on Mars (Norton). Davidov starts with a suggestion made by another Russian scientist, #. Schmidt, that the proportion of hydrogen in a planet rises linearly with its distance from the Sun -- it has to, said Schmidt, because of his theory of the formation of the planets. But what about Mars? It not only does not appear to have more hydrogen than Earth, it seems to have practically none at all, bar a faint smudge of ice at the poles. Very simple, says Davidov. It's there... but it is frozen: Let us imagine our globe with its large oceans to be moving along in the orbit of Mars. The Increased distance from the Sun would reduce the average yearly temperature below the present one of# Centigrade. All our oceans would freeze, and would be covered with the dust of centuries and the products of stone disintegration. The absolute humidity would approach zero, and observations from another planet would give the impression that there was no water on the Earth. The Earth's surface would appear similar to that of Mars... There is a perfect analogy between the picture in this hypothesis and the present picture of the Martian canals. rue for Davidov! If only Mariner IV hadn't come along and spoiled the whole thing, what wonderful sf stories could have been written about his icy Martian oceans. But Mariner IV did. And not only does it make trouble for Davidov's theory, it makes trouble for this otherwise very good book by Moore and Jackson, for the book appears to have been written in #, and there is not a word in it about craters or the new findings on atmosphereric pressure, etc. It's still worth reading -- but it would have been far more so with Mariner IV's data included! The Editor Must man die to release his inner consciousness ? Can we experience : momentary flights of the soul --  Jgf that is, become one with the uni  : ,  #J verse and receive an influx of great i m understanding? . f f WHy jM The shackles of the body -- its earthly limitations-can be thrown off and mans mind can be attuned to the Infinite Wisdom for a flash i of a second. During this brief in  terval intuitive knowledge, great  inspiration, and a new vision of J our life s mission are had. Some call this great experience a psychic phenomenon. But the ancients knew it and taught it as Cosmic Consciousness -- the merging of man's mind with the Unit free Book Explain This is not a religious doctrine, but the application of simple , natural laws, which give man an insight into the great Cosmic plan. They make possible a source of great joy, strength, and a regeneration of man's personal powers. Write to the Rosicrucians, an age-old brotherhood of understanding, for a free copy of the book "The Mastery of Life." It will tell you how, in the privacy of your own home, you may indulge in these mysteries of life known to the ancients. Address: Scribe U.A.H. Please include Your Zip Code IF  Short Story They were running an experiment in the space between the stars -- but they never knew the result ! C #  #I right -- perfect. You're the most nearly motionless thing in the universe." Hoey's words were figurative, of course; whether they were accurate c r not depended entirely on point of view. Rocoo Luisi and his Ymyrgar were indeed at rest with respect to Hoey and the Anfforddus, after more than four hours of maddening effort, but neither machine was motionless with respect to much else. Both were travelling at about four kilometers a second, roughly galactic northward, with respect to their home port on Rhyddid, seventy-five parsecs away. They were moving at a much greater velocity with respect to the far more distant Solar System. With respect to each other, however, velocity had been whittled down to somewhat less than five centimeters a year. How long this would last was problematical. An automatic tracker was now on duty in Hoey's ship, trying to hold steady the fringe pattern produced by combining two ultraviolet laser beams, one originating in his own vessel and the other in Luisi's, in one of the most precise interferometers ever made. Since the crafts were about a lighthour apart, however, corrections tended to be late in time and, in spite of a computer's best efforts, erratic in amount and direction. "Nineteen decimals" had been a proverbial standard of accuracy for well over a century; but achieving it on any but the atomic size and time scale was not yet standard art. "That seems to be it," Hoey repeated. "That means that you and I stay strapped in our seats, with no more motion than we can help, for the next four hours or so. If either of the instrument platforms on our ships moves more than half a micron with respect to the other, a lot of time and money go down the drain." "I know -- I've had it hammered into me as often and as hard as you have." Luisi's voice was undistorted, and the responses instant, on the medium communicator. "Sure you have," retorted Hoey, "only a lot of people wonder whether you really believe it." "Well, it depends on what you mean by believe. I can figure as well as anyone where the center of mass of my ship would go if I stood up; I -- " "I know you can. Your trouble is that you can't believe it would make as much trouble as they say. Just remember that they were even concerned about tidal forces from Cinder over there -- " he gestured, rather uselessly, at the grossly misnamed #e star glaring at them from half a parsec away -- "and even went to the trouble of finding a part of this neighborhood where the wind was steady -- " "Right there I break connection. Space is space. You only worry about wind when you're close to a sun, and then it's only a hardradiation problem." . "True enough, as a rule. The trouble is that the usual run of stellar winds involves a mass density of around ten atoms to the cubic centimeter; here it's a couple of thousand. It turned out that even that much mass wouldn't accelerate the ships seriously unless the relative velocity were very 'high indeed, but it was something the planners had to check on. You see what I mean; so stay put. Let's cut the chatter. The sooner the folks in "Big Boy" can get to work, the sooner we can breathe comfortably. I'll call 'em." Hoey's finger tensed on a button, replacing the microscopic crystal in the activity field of his communicator with another, whose twin was aboard "Big Boy" -- more formally, the Holiad. He spoke without preamble, knowing that someone would be listening. "We're in position, and my tracker says we're holding. Get the job going while the going's good." # C TJ ight." The answer was terse, AVbut not casual. The speaker, a heavy-set, middle-aged man with an almost fanatically intense stare in his blue eyes, leaned forward over the console in front of him and began punching buttons in an intricate sequence. He paused every second or two to interpret the patterns of light which winked at him from the board. After half a minute or so the pattern became fixed, and he leaned back, more relaxed. "Program A Is running." A younger man, seated at a similar console a few yards away, nodded at the words. At first he did not answer aloud; then he decided to speak, though for several seconds he was obviously trying to make up his mind what to say. It was easy to make the wrong remark to Elvin Toner. "D'you think we'll get full time out of it?" he ventured at last. "Those pilots are good, but I still wish it had been possible to use robotships for the key stations. A man can't hold still forever." "So do I." Toner answered without obvious irritation, and his eyes remained fixed on his console, to the younger man's relief. "I also wish," the director went on, "that it were possible to use the medium communicator system directly for automatic control of such things as distance, so as to get away from light-lag. But until some genius in your generation works out a way to measure the frequency, wavelength, and propagation velocity of medium waves -- or at least, furnishes some evidence that a wave phenomenon is involved -- we'll have to stick with electromagnetic radiation and, at times, with human beings. You may not like it, but by the time you reach my age you'll have learned to put up with it." "I hope not," Ledermann couldn't help replying. "Eh? Why not?" Toner's eyes almost flicked away from his instruments for a moment, but didn't quite. "I mean that if I learn to put up with inconveniences, it'll be because I haven't been able to figure out anything else to do about them. Who wants to admit that?" Toner grinned. "Nobody wants to, I suppose, but the honest people do anyway. Hold up; here comes the end of the first minute; any irregularities on your board?" "Not so far. I don't know what that proves, though; all we are measuring is what's going into the generators. We can't touch what's coming out without changing it -- " "Of course." The older man made a gesture of impatience. "It's some relief, though to know that things are going in right. I don't know about you, Dick, but Program A is going to be the second longest couple of hours in my life." "I know," replied Ledermann. It was the first time Toner had ever been so frank about his feelings -- even though they were usually quite obvious from other evidence -- and certainly the first time the assistant had felt much real sympathy for the director. Since the younger man was not a fast thinker, the remark left him once more unsure of what to say. As a matter of .fact, there was probably nothing to say which would have been just right. Toner, like most middle-aged men, had developed a pretty firm personal philosophy IF and a rather rigid set of fundamental beliefs. The present experiment involved very heavily one of those beliefs -- one which Ledermann did not share. Although, the assistant thought as he glanced through one of the Holiad's great view ports, this was a place where it was hard to feel sure and right about anything fundamental. S pace was not dark, though the nebular material which abounds in the Orion spur of the Milky Way system is never very bright even when no planetary atmosphere dims it. Getting closer to an extended light source, of course, doesn't make each square degree look any brighter; it merely increases the number of square degrees. From the Hoi iad's position, most of the sky is nebula-bright; and to a spaceman, anything resembling a cloud looks wrong in space. In some directions the stars blaze steadily, as they do from Earth's moon; other directions are blacked out hy light-years of dust. Some of the dust itself is bright, for #I Orionis, named "Cinder" by some humorist who had explored the region earlier, is only half a parsec away. Not only does its fierce ultraviolet radiation keep the nebular gases fluorescing, but its visible is quite enough to light up the dust for immense distances. Not counting its emission envelope, Cinder is only about five times the diameter of Sol, which means that it looks like a point from half a parsec away; but that point illuminated the Holiad almost as effectively as the full moon illuminates the earth. Several other O and B stars flame in the neighborhood; some look brighter than Venus as seen from Earth, some reveal themselves only by illuminating the surrounding dust clouds, some are invisible in the nebulosity. The Orion Spur is one of the cradles of the galaxy. Unfortunately, the occupants of the cradle are foundlings. The general circumstances surrounding a star's birth are now fairly dear; ships prowling the cloudier regions of the spiral arms have found them in all stages of gestation, from gas and dust clouds half a light-year across and little denser than the interstellar background, through T Tauri variables hot enough to radiate visibly, to the vast population of main-sequence suns whose hydrogen fires are safely alight. Like foundlings, while an entire birth has never been observed in any one case, we know enough to picture the circumstances with some confidence. Also like foundlings, however, the precise details of a star's conception are somewhat obscure. It has been widely supposed for several decades that random variations in the density of the interstellar medium are the key factor -- that the law of chance is the father. Dick Ledermann, young and conservative, had no trouble accepting this view. To him, it was obvious that the random "winds" of space must at times produce a gas concentration so dense that its gravity would override the disruptive tidal force of the rest of the galaxy -- override it enough to produce a local potential well able faith as the normal scientific belief that there is a natural reason for everything -- that some specific, widespread, underlying process was operating to improve the chance of protostar formation. He was able to prove that some suoh process was needed to account for the observed star density. Ledermann was able to prove that it was not. Both "proofs" were statistical, using the same "laws" of chance. They differed, of course, in the basic conditions which were assumed. Both sets of conditions were reasonable; the two hypotheses continued to survive because neither oould be checked adequately. Elvin Toner had spent nearly thirty years acquiring a professional reputation impressive enough to interest a sufficiently wealthy foundation in doto trap at least the lower energy particles of the cloud. Elvin Toner, nearly twenty years older, had strong reservations about the potency of unaided statistics. Like anyone with even a modest grounding in physical science, he realized the basically statistical nature of many of the universe's laws; he admitted that a star could come into existence 'by the concatenations of chance which most people took for granted; but he doubted seriously that the random motions of interstellar gas could set up the appropriate conditions often enough to account for the number of observed stars, even allowing for the fairly impressive lifetime of a star. He felt sure -- it was as much an article of ing the checking. And now he had the chance. I t had taken wealth -- or its equivalent -- and a vast amount of human effort. The basic check required detailed measurement of the positions, velocities and accelerations of all the particles, as exactly as Heisenberg allowed 'and as nearly simultaneously as possible, along a range of more than five astronomical units. Since electromagnetic energy had to be used, this meant that the best part of two hours would be needed merely to set up the web of standing waves which was to serve as the "framework" of the battery of measuring instruments, which were themselves force fields. The basic design of the experiment was standard -- even unimaginative. After setting up the wave pattern, a period would be spent measuring the initial vector quantities of the particles along the range. Fundamentally, the measuring process would be practically instantaneous, but scanning and recording would use up an hour as the chain of reading impulses travelled from the Ymyrgar along the wave web to the Anfforddus, from which the readings would be transferred by medium crystal to the mother ship. This was "Program A" which was now in progress. Electromagnetic waves of almost five hundred different frequencies, ranging from the blue part of the visible spectrum to the output of a huge electromagnet fed by an 'alternating current source with a three-hundred-second period, were propagating away from the Ymyrgar , groping their way through eters or so which separated the little tender from her sister. Some of the frequencies had ibeen selected for their ability to interact with the atoms and ions known to occupy the space, some for the fact that they would not. Some would be absorbed and analyzed by the apparatus aboard the Anfforddus, some would be reflected back toward their source to create the standing-wave patterns needed for Program B. All would represent a waste of energy if the two tiny ships changed their relative positions by one part in ten Lights on the control consoles aboard the Holaid recorded the behavior, microsecond by microsecond, of each separate frequency generator; but the one which Toner never let out of his sight was that which kept track of the interferometer on the Anfforddus. This light shone yellow as long as the original pattern of fringes remained unchanged; a one-fringe shift one way would carry it into the red; a similar change in the other would turn it violet. So far, while there had been at times a suspicion of green or orange in its tint, it had held within the English language limits of yellow. #T thiqk you can relax a little," X. remarked Ledermann. "All the. general run of disturbances should have had their licks by now; A has been cooking for over half an hour. Unless Hoey or Luisi has a fit, their ships can hardly move enough to make trouble." fore they were hired." Toner was not joining in any levity, yet. "I'm not worried about that possibility." 'Then why not take it easy? Surely you're not worrying about a meteor." "Well -- comet nuclei are found pretty far from suns, but I really wasn't thinking of anything specific. It's just that so little need go wrong to wreck the whole works. Program A isn't so bad, in spite of the precision we need; but when B gets going it will really mean something. I can't keep my mind off that." Ledermann nodded. Program B was the experiment itself -- the check on the Toner hypothesis. In assuming that non-statistical forces existed which tended to start interstellar matter drawing together into protostars, the astronomer had not fallen back on mysticism. He had computed many combinations of electric and magnetic fields which should have such an effect, and which might reasonably -- or at least conceivably -- exist along the arms of the Milky Way. The wave patterns of Program B had been designed from these computations. Naturally, phenomena as complex as, say, the human nervous system or even the circuitry of a television set or the measuring patterns of Program A would be no improvement on pure chance as an explanation for star formation; such things were too improbable by any standards. Toner's fields were simple enough so that, in his opinion, they were more probable than random gas and dust concentrations. They were also complex and extensive IF enough so that looking around for examples of them already in existence seemed impractical -- so far. Of course, if Program B showed that such fields would, or could, produce the results Toner expected, he would have little trouble financing such a search. If the program failed to give the results Toner hoped for, Ledermann was both unsure and uneasy about what to expect. Few men can abandon a favorite hypothesis abruptly and completely, and the need to do so can have painful effects. Actually, Toner would not be forced to such an extreme at first; many more variations on the original theme would have to fail before the whole idea would have to be abandoned. What bothered Ledermann was the doubt that the foundation would go along with any such extension of the project and how Toner would react if it refused. Actually he needn't have worried. The director was philosophical enough to take such a problem in his stride. Since the younger man had no way of knowing this, he watched his console with even more anxiety than his director -- in spite of what they had both been saying. But the green lights stared unwinkingly back at them, as the waves spread across space. No news, with the proverbial implication. The clock was the only instrument which showed change; the clock, that is, and two human nervous systems. "Stuff coming in from Hoey's receivers," Ledermann reported abruptly. Toner nodded. "On time," was his only answer. Neither bothered to ask, or to say, what sort of stuff was coming in; the data was no more meaningful to human senses than were the photons which carried the first Mariner pictures from Mars. The main thing was that news was coming in; it was being recorded; it could, in due time, be decoded; and -- Program B was due to start. Both men sat up a little straighter and stared more tensely at their consoles as the light patterns began to change. S imultaneously -- the word was as nearly truthful as it had ever been in human history -- sets of electromagnetic fields began to grow around both the Ymyrgar and the Anfforddus. Neither set was complete by itself, but their interference would produce something which Ledermann thought of as a huge lens. The analogy was a poor one geometrically, but has some excuse from a functional viewpoint. Drifting slowly with respect to the surrounding gases, many of whose atoms were ionized, it should -- if Toner were right -- tend to deflect their relative motions toward its own "optical axis." To that extent, Toner's idea was a sample one. The precise pattern of fields which should have the desired effect was somewhat less so, as any engineer who has been involved with an electron microscope would expect. Each "lens" of the series making up the program was to be followed by a set of reading patterns similar to those of Program A, so that its individual effect on the motion of the nebular particles could be measured. In principle, the whole thing was easy... "Intervals seem to be right." Ledermann dredged a little good news out of his light pattern. "Four seconds, plus or minus ten to the minus tenth. Interlens distances are within tolerance, I'd say." "If we haven't been too grossly off in computing the refractive index of the nebula -- " "Which is handled automatically by the original A measures, as I understood the plan. Calm down, Boss." "All right. You're talking a little louder than usual yourself. I still wish you'd invent a method for using the communicator medium for direct viewing; we could see whether these things are building right, instead of having to infer from generator behavior -- " "Maybe we could. I'm a conservative; I still buy the Uncertainty Principle. Even if we could do anything with the medium which would make it react to something besides a communicator crystal, I bet it would affect the thing we were trying to measure." "It doesn't affect the crystals -- just the space around them." "Not measurably. Has anyone tried to check on them, to within fifteen figures of what we're doing now?" "Not as far as I know. I -- Dick! What happened then?" L edermann didn't know either. At least, he didn't know in the sense that Toner wanted to. Like the director, he had seen every light on his console except the one indicating tender separation turn a solemn red for a full second, and then switch back to green. If they had been looking away for that second, the men would not have known that anything had ever been wrong; after the event, the lights stared back at them, apparently unchanged. The first thought to occur to both men was that something had happened to the console circuits; the second, that something had happened to their own nervous systems. Three seconds of checking with test switches seemed to dispose of the first possibility; and since they had both seen the same thing, the second was very low on the probability list. Toner frowned, and spoke very slowly. "If that is to be taken at face value, everything in both tenders which was putting out program radiation stopped for about a second and then started up again -- all together. That would cause a gap of about three hundred thousand kilometers in the wave pattern -- at each end -- with the gaps due to meet in half an hour; let's see -- what would that do to the lenses?" "If you can work that out in your head, especially with only estimated time data, you didn't need to set up this experiment at all. You must have put the universe together in the first place," retorted Ledermann. "There's no more chance of telling that than of telling which of my next be heads." IF "True." For a (man whose work was taking such a Wow, Toner seemed remarkably detached. "That would suggest that we should cut off our generators, let the present set of patterns radiate out of the area, and start over." "We'd have to do more than that. The gas in the area has prboably been affected by the part of B which has already gone out. We'd have to move the tenders to a different area altogether and set up the whole works again. Wouldn't it be better to let this program run itself through? We don't really know that the generators did stop; test circuits or no test circuits, I find it easier to 'believe that something messed up the indictators than that the whole set of generators went out and came back on again at once. If we let things run, the worst that can happen will be the loss of a couple of hours -- and we might not have to start over, if this run is really all right." "You're partly right. Letting it run won't cost us much time. But we will have to do it over anyway; we won't be able to tell if the first run was really okay until we get the data reduced, which we can't do here. We'll just' have to do the whole thing twice." And Ledermann slowly nodded his head. H oey's reaction, some hours later, was more impressive. He and Luisi were celebrating their release, to the accompaniment of an improvised song whose burden was the supreme difficulty of doing nothing at all, when Toner broke the news as gently as possible that the whole thing would have to be done over. He wrapped the information in flattery, lubricated it with all the soft soap he could bring himself to use, and sweetened it with a respectable bonus offer; but neither pilot accepted the word at all philosophically. They were still visibly nettled sixty hours later when the tenders once more pulled away from the Holiad. This may have had something to do with the results. They did calm down again, just a little, during the setup of the measuring line, however. Earlier practice may have helped, for it took them less than ninety minutes this time to get their little vessels "fixed" relative to each other. "That's it, Doc!" Hoey's voice was almost jubilant. Toner, who had pretty well convinced himself by this time that the first run had really been all right, was able to answer in similar mood. "Good going -- that was very quick work. I'm starting the A tapes now. About how far are you from where the other run was made?" "A couple of flight-hours, I'd say; we didn't try to check it exactly. You didn't say it was necessary." "It isn't. Relax. And I do mean relax " "I know, Boss. We're getting used to it. Let things roll." "They're rolling." Even in the calmer atmosphere of the second run, tension built up a little during Program A. Even though this part had gone without a visible hitch the first time, there was no way of knowing whether the up by the whirling clock hands unknown interference had a preferwhich caused the trouble; perhaps ence for Program B. not. No one was ever sure. WhatOf course, it might have. The proever the cause, six seconds before grams were different -- and the word the critical moment, when both "unknown" certainly was a key one. scientists were gripping their chair No one is quite sure, yet. arms and staring frozenly at their Toner and Ledermann of course consoles, Hoey sneezed, kflew to the second just when the It was quite a sneeze, and the fact Program B interruption, if it had that Toner heard it clearly through really been one, had occurred; Hoey the medium communicator did not and Luisi knew almost as well from operate to lessen its effects. The the physicists' account of the affair, pilot's head had been resting in the All four were watching clocks; and padded support which formed part perhaps it was the tension wound of his seat -- the support in which it IF was supposed to remain through the experiment. The muscular convulsion of the sneeze snapped that head some twenty centimeters forward and down. The Anfforddus had, roughly, a head, so its center of mass moved amounted to about a fifth of a micron. The fact that this was within the set tolerances for the experiment did not at once dawn on Toner -- for one thing, it would have taken him a moment to figure it out under any circumstances, and for another his reaction was reflexive rather than rational. He was like a confirmed anti-vivi sectionist reacting to an account of a mechanical heart's being tested on a dog; he exploded. He jumped -- much farther than Hoey, though fortunately it didn't matter how much the Holiad moved. He also began to talk, though just what he said is uncertain -- Ledermann charitably wiped that part of the monitor tape, later. It took the younger man some thirty seconds to calm his superior down enough to listen to reason, and perhaps fifteen more to supply the reason. Another five seconds passed while Toner actually recovered control of himself, and started to apologize to Hoey. B ut Hoey did not hear the apology -- we think. In the fifty seconds or so since his sneeze, radiation from his ship travters. This is easy to compute; it is pretty certainly a fact. It may possibly be a useful one, though no one so far has put it to any real use. The trouble is, of course, that there is no way to be sure whether the sneeze put any significant alteration into the radiation pattern which the Anfforddus was broadcasting. This, equally of course, is because no one can be sure just how big a change must be in order to be significant. Toner had just started to talk in a normal tone when Ledermann gave an astonished yelp; and the director, whose attention had shifted entirely to the screen of the medium communicator, looked back at his console. Its lights were out. It was blank. So, when he turned back to it, was the medium screen. And so was Ledermann's console. One hundred seconds later, after repeated calls to the tenders had proven futile, the Holiad's captain snapped her into irrelevance drive. Between four and five seconds later still, a hundredth of a parsec from where she had been lying, the research vessel halted again. Presumably she was within a few tens of thousands of kilometers of Hoey's tender, but no sign of the little ship could be detected by eye or instrument. Calls continued to go unanswered. Searchers went out with detection and rescue equipment; the former gave no response, the latter went unused. Not a particle of solid matter could be found within light-minutes of either tender's former position; and it was not until much later, when the routine sample-bottles were being checked back on Rhyddid, that the slightly high count of aluminum atoms inthat particular volume of space was noticed. Of course, this may not be a significant fact, either.  nd just who was that?" The  query came in the growl which seems to be a distinguishing property of sergeants, whether their linear dimensions be two meters or two hundred astronomical units. It received no immediate answer. "Well? Who was it? It came from just about where you should be, VA#. Was it you?" "I -- I guess so." "You guess so? A soldier lets out a yelp that can be heard half way across the spiral, and he only guesses that he did it?" "I did it, I -- I -- " "You did. Never mind the guessing. Why did you do it? You know why we're here?" "Yes, Sergeant." "You know what we're doing here?" "Yes, Sergeant." "In fact, up to now you've been helping to do it." "Yes, Sergeant." "And you know why we've been sweeping this stuff together." "Yes, Sergeant. To clear a path for -- " "Shut up. How much use will the path be if the Flickers find it before our boys have a chance to come through?" "Not much, I suppose, Sergeant." "You suppose. Well, I suppose I should be glad it even occurred to you. Now that you've squealed like a stuck baby, how long do you suppose it will be before Flicker scouts are poking around this cloud?" "I don't know, Sergeant." "I don't know either, but I'll be very surprised if we drift a hundredth of the way around the spiral. If it were possible to travel faster than radiation, they'd be spearing you before you cleared another cubic parsec." "They may show up anyway; we can't tell yet." IF "That, soldier -- I use the term loosely -- is the only reason you're not under formal charges right now. If we're spotted in the next little while -- say, before the cloud you're sweeping up right now starts to radiate -- I'll assume it wasn't your fault. But if we're found after that, when that squeal of yours has spread out a few hundred parsecs, you're in for it. What I ever did to be saddled with a -- " "But Sergeant, I couldn't help it. Something bit me." "So something bit you. Let it bite! Since when -- " "But I really couldn't help it. It did something to my muscles, and I twitched so I thought someone might spot me anyway; but I relaxed and even damped out the spot with dope. I know how important it is not to make a disturbance. The sensation quit for a moment, but then it came back stronger than before, and before I could take another tranquilizer I cramped up tight all over. I couldn't help giving a little yelp -- " "Little? It was loud enough to -- never mind. I hope you can produce whatever bit you; it may help in court. After all, I suppose anything which can Interfere with even a sloppy soldier's self-control might be usable as a weapon. If we could breed more of 'em -- that's an idea. See if you can catch it, without making too much noise." "I'm afraid I didn't think of that in time, Sarge. We'll never catch that one. The whole business was just reflex, and I'm very sorry, but I swatted it without thinking." In addition to their voice qualities, sergeants are sometimes known for a certain gift of rhetoric. This one, DA#, of the #th Company, #st Field Engineering Battalion, Army of the Republic of Whilth, was no exception. If he had not been careful to use only short radiation in his remarks, they would have been audible back in Whilth, in the spiral arm of the Milky Way next outward from Sol's. Even with the short waves, he might possibly have made an impression on the Holiad's instruments; but of course the Holiad was no longer there. Long before he had really made himself clear about just what sort of poor excuse for a soldier the unfortunate VA#I was, both Elvin Toner and Dick Ledermann were dead of old age. d by Emil Petaja  by Sam Moskowitz  -- and many other stories and features, including a discussion on Immortality  Through Freezing by Frederilc Pohl, R. C. W. Ettinger, Long John Nebel, Victor  Borge and others -- all in the August Worlds of Tomorrow , on sale now! W t i t t t IF  Short Story Slot Machine Easy come, easy go -- what's a human being more or less? H e had been so absorbed in watching the (machine that he hadn't noticed he was crushing the next human against the thorn on the center of his palm. When the lights stopped flashing and the gears stopped clicking, he noticed, and he flung the mangled remains to the floor. He glanced over at his wife, but she hadn't said anything yet. He knew she was thinking, Dear, humans are scarce in times like these, but she said:. "It's all right, dear. We can be extravagant now and then." He wiped the human juices on his thick, moddled side and returned to the machine. "We can be extravagant any time we please," he said, knowing it was a lie. He squinted closely at the gleaming contraption, trying to force his mind into its inner workings. He even whipped an eye over the top of the machine and scanned the back. But there was no clue to help him comprehend what was really happening. "Give me another human," he said. She had been clutching the pursebox in her upper-left, and she hesitated reluctantly. It had rarely contained so many humans. "But we just got them," she said. He didn't look at her, but reached out his upper-right. "Another human," he repeated. "But can't we hold onto them a little longer?" Without a word, he snatched the purse-box away. There was a group cry from within. "Dear, you'll kill more of them!" "I won't!" he said and reached into the box. The first human was a female, naked and tiny. It cried. It seemed to have a broken arm. "I'm been wondering," he said. "The females are supposed to be smarter, but the males are bigger and stronger. Which would work best?" He considered a moment and returned the female to the box, noting absently that the government serial number on her back indicated that she'd been issued just this year. She wouldn't be much good in the machine, though, with that broken arm. He'd try to get rid of her later, at a town. He brought out a male. He could tell more by texture than anything else. "Here goes nothing," he said and dropped it down the chute in the machine. Almost immediately, lights started to flash, then wheels turned, picking up speed. He felt his wife's upper left on his lower right. It was uncomfortably dry. Suddenly the lights and the wheels stopped. Silence. He thought he heard a faint groan of humans in the machine. Nothing. "Maybe a female -- " he said. "Dear -- " "Just one more!" He confronted her. "We won't miss it." She was silent. "Anyway," he continued, "how many times do we come to this town? Never. We might never come back!" "I just thought -- " Dreams of getting an extra bill paid back home faded. "We can't say we were here and didn't do anything!" he said. H e selected a female this time. It seemed to be healthy, but fairly limp. Perhaps from. the banging around in the purse-box. "Brains over brawn. We'll see." He deposited the female in the glistening metal box, and they waited again. The lights flashed and the wheels started up. "What do they do in there?" his wife asked. "I don't know exactly," he said. "Maybe we aren't supposed to know. But I've heard that a set of instructions drops down -- a different combination each time -- and the human has to perform a certain set of tasks." Some new lights were flashing, and the wheels spun faster. "Look at that! Maybe this time!" The machine stopped. They stared at it. This time he knew he heard a groan from inside. "We're closer," he said tightly, and reached into the purse-box. "Dear, we can't. We have to have humans to get home." "How many have we got left?" He felt around in the box. "Seven," he said triumphantly. "And we onfy came in with six." "Easy come, easy go," he said absently, trying to find a healthier female. There was none. Only the one with the broken arm, who screamed when he touched it.  "We'll need at least five for rocket fuel, Dear." He was trying not to sihow his worry. "We'll have to use a male," he said. "I don't know. The first one we used, the one that worked, was a male. But we haven't had any luck with them since." He calculated. "You don't have much choice." His wife was resigned. She only hoped he wouldn't use any more than this next one. He shrugged and his dorsal spines quivered. A male was randomly chosen. "Here goes nothing!" A nd there was nothing. At first. They waited, not respiring. Then the lights flashed. "Here we go!" he said. The wheels were spinning. They gazed at the machine, front, back and both sides. "Dear?" "What?" "What would happen if they wouldn't -- I don't mean couldn't -- but wouldn't do the tasks?" More lights were on. He forced a chuckle. He wanted to show he wasn't nervous. The machine was clattering. "They always try to do them!" He was yelling now, over the jangle of bells. "Like on that first one we played. It's the only way to let the rest of them out! "Bells!" he screamed. "Another jackpot?" The machine quit. The bells went silent and the lights went out. The wheels ground to a stop. From inside the machine, a louder, more agonized groan, but not without hope. Two cherries and a bell.  by Keith Laumer I by James Blish  Norman L. Knight  by Brian W. Aldiss I by Frank Herbert I -- plus many other stories and features by Willy Ley, Algis Budrys and  others, all In the August issue of Galaxy -- on sale nowl  IF IF  Complete Short Novel The enemy could not be seen -- but it struck out of emptiness to destroy Earth's defenders! I H e had reached Barth on a moonship which had set down with a great blowing of jets on the landing area in the sand of the Great American Desert in Utah. Now he was riding the monorail train that would take him from the desert spaceport to Salt Lake City. From this point, he intended to take a jet jumper to the World Governments complex of buildings located on the high plains of Colorado near the old city of Denver, where he would report to his superior officer -- if he lived long enough -- on certain events he had personally witnessed on the moon. In his private book of odds, it was not at all certain that he would live long to reach the individualized, personalized and completely unpublicized World Governments unit, which emslave. His name was Jim Jiro. Jiro often gave people the impression he was a skeleton that: had put on clothes and had gone for a walk. He was that thin. But the impression that he was a skeleton was a delusion. His thinness resulted from a training program made necessary by his work. This training program did not leave an ounce of surplus fat anywhere on his body. Or in his brain! In his line of work the difference between life and death could be a little extra fat on the brain. Sitting in the car on the monorail train, talking volubly to the man who shared the seat with him, Jim Jiro looked and talked like a salesman of special rock drills and their associated power equipment, like one of those men hardy enough and eager enough for sales to make the jump to the moon colony established on the satellite in #, now twenty years in the past. In his lap an elaborate sales brochure was open, showing how rock drills were tapered, how they were sharpened and how they were hardened. The fact that he had taken the sales brochure from the brief case of a dead salesman on the moon and had invented the sales pitch did not make him any less convincing in his talk. The man to whom he was talking was also a salesman, a big fellow with a black mustache. Politely agreeing with everything Jiro said, it was obvious that he wanted to steer the conversation in a direction that would enable him to talk about his lane. "Some of that moon rock they're mining is tough, believe me," Jiro continued. "There's nothing like it on Earth. When they discovered those rich mineral deposits on the moon and started trying to mine them, they found that tjie rock was harder than the teeth of their power drills. The same was true of their giant mechanical diggers. My firm had to develop special drills to do the job. The only bit that will cut that rock had teeth like these." R eaching into his brief case, he removed from it a small leather case. Opened, the case revealed three black stones about as big as pigeon eggs. Each was wrapped in gauze. "Black diamonds," Jiro said, enthusiastically. The other salesman stared politely at the round stones. "They don't look like diamonds," he said. "That's what they are just the same," Jiro said. "And they look too smooth to do much cutting," the salesman continued. "That's because they've been used and the cutting facets have been ground off of them by that tough moon rock," Jiro explained. "I brought them back to show the company metallurgists. "I'm with Allied Cutting Tools, you know. Biggest outfit of its kind in the world. Today, we are supplyIF ing the drills that cut the rock on the moon. Tomorrow, we will be supplying drills for Mars and Venus. And I'll be there selling them. And after that, we will supply drills for the stars, only I won't be there selling them." Wonder and sadness mingled in his voice, wonder at the thought of men going outward to the stars, sadness because this could not happen in his lifetime. Closing the little leather case, he carefully slipped it back into his brief case. "If I don't make it, get these to the boss," he said, maintaining the same calm tone. "Sure thing," the salesman answered, equally calm. "Salt Lake City in ten minutes," a speaker announced from the front of the car. "So soon?" Jiro said, startled. "Well. It was good to talk to you. My name is Jim Jiro. What's your line, sir?" The second salesman seemed to have been waiting for this opportunity. Now that it had come, he grabbed it. "My name is Calkins. I just got in from the moon too. I handle drugs, cosmetics and associated items." "Did you do well up there?" Jiro asked. The ends of the black mustache drooped as Calkins put on an unhappy face. "The moon is simply not in the supermarket category yet. I'll be lucky if I met expenses. Before I left, I tried to tell my company that there simply weren't enough people living on the moon as yet to make our line profitable up there, but they insisted I go anyhow to lay a foundation for the future. They're always talking about the future, and I think -- "he glanced sideways at Jiro. "I think they're dreaming" of the days, when they can sell cosmetics on Mars! They don't seem to give a damn how hard these moon hops are on a salesman's nerves." Calkins glowered to himself at the memory of the trip just finished. "Of course, if I don't meet expenses, the company uses the loss as a tax write-off, so they don't give a damn about the cost. But I can't take a tax deduction for the strain on my nerves." "Too bad," Jiro said sympathetically. "Moon hops are rough on some people. Me, I loved it. Didn't bother me a bit." "Maybe it's easier for skinny people," Calkins answered. "But I'm not going to starve myself so I can make space hops for my company. I'll take an Earth job first." Defiance sounded in his voice. "Well, good luck, whichever way you go," Jiro said. Closing the sales brochure, he slipped it into his brief case, then rose to his feet. "I want to check everything out before we stop. See you later, Calkins." Nodding to the other passengers and smiling, Jiro made his way along the aisle and entered the washroom in the front of the car. Inside, he closed and locked the door. O nce the door was looked, a startling change came over his face. Instantly it lost its salesman's expression of pleasant agreeableness, of sauve urbanity, of easy-going tolerance and became the face of a man in stark terror. His cheeks were already thin. Now they showed signs of becoming almost haggard. His eyes had been smiling. They lost ail traces of the smile they had worn, and the pupils began to widen. Reaching quickly into an inner jacket pocket, he touched the strange little gun bolstered there. His fingers went on from the gun to a small metal flask. Pulling it from under his jacket, he pressed a button on its top. The resultant spray he directed to the surface of the metal mirror over the washbasin. As the spray struck the mirror, it tunned a deep blue color which merged into and finally became a deep indigo hue. Losing its ability to reflect light, to function in the range of the visible spectrum, the mirror seemed to reach out into some dimension, into some other universe, perhaps into some other frequency range and to become an indigo pool that looked a little like a hole into another world. Jiro could no longer see his face in the mirror, but he studied the indigo pool that looked a little like a hole into another universe as if he was desperately afraid of what he might see there. When he realized that nothing was visible in the pool of indigo, he took a deep breath and sighed in relief. "Whew!" he whispered. "Well, that helps!" As he spoke, the indigo dye had already begun to fade. Quickly the metal became a mirror once more. Now it reflected his face again, lean and gaunt and wary. Washing his face and hands, Jiro made his hair neat. When he left the washroom, he was whistling cheerfully, an air from the current hit, The Pink Mill . Calkins, the cosmetics salesman, was waiting outside the washroom. "You're next," Jiro said, pleasantly. His voice was again that of a salesman, suave, friendly and urbane. "I found everything in order in there," he nodded toward the washroom. "I left it the same way." "I'll do the same," Calkins said. He looked relieved. Moving along the aisle, Jiro heard the washroom door snap shut behind Calkins. He moved to his seat. N ow nearing the Salt Lake City terminal, the train was rapidly losing its # mile per hour speed. Through the windows, Jiro caught glimpses of desert country giving way to patches of cultivated land. Then tracts of small homes were flashing past, and in the distance the towers of the city seemed to be rising out of the land like miracles created by some fantastic genii transplanted from Arabia to the New World. Picking up his bag, Jiro moved to the front and waited for the train to stop. All of the passengers had come in on tihe same moonIF rocket. Most looked as if they were very glad to be back on Earth again. Only when a man had been to the moon could he fully appreciate his home planet. Up there, gravity was different, radiations from space were different and life itself was different. On the moon, human life existed only in plastiskin domes or in underground shelters. The kind of life that existed outside the domes, whether native to the moon or coming from elsewhere, no one knew much about. Those in the know on Earth, high government officials, some few scientists and those who job it was to make friends with this life or to destroy it, knew that life existed on the moon. They did not talk about what they knew. The monorail train slid to a halt beside an elevated station. Jiro, suddenly very polite, made way for the other passengers to go ahead of him. When he reached the door of the washroom, he was last in line. Hesitating there, he rapped softly on the door. There was no answer. "Calkins, we're at the station," he called. Still there was no answer. Trying the knob, he found the door was lockedfrom the inside. Leaning against the door, he pushed hard. The dock gave way. The door opened inward. Calkins was sitting against the far wall. He had fallen there. His head drooped to one side. Blood was still dripping from the ends of the black mustache down to the floor, where it was forming a red pool. The salesman's throat had been slashed from ear to ear by an instrument sharp enough to cut through muscles, through cartilege and through arteries. Jiro took one look at the body. "Oh, pardon me," he said. "I thought the room was empty." His manner was that of a man apologizing for intruding on another man in the privacy of the toilet. Backing out of the washroom, Jiro closed the door, then went quickly out of the car and down the steps to the station platform. By the time he reached the bottom steps, sweat had formed on his face. A porter was waiting there, to help those in need of assistance. Waving aside the help, Jiro smiled at the porter and said it was hot out here in the desert. As the porter was politely agreeing, Jiro moved toward the bank of escalators that led downward to the concourse of the monorail station. A young woman dressed in skintight slacks -- a fashion that came again every few years -- walked ahead of him. She had a tiny radio glued to her ear and seemed to be engrossed in what she was hearing. Having other things on his mind, Jim Jiro hardly noticed the young woman. B ag in one hand, briefcase in the other, he took the down escalator. Sweat was flowing freely from his face now. He turned to look behind him, saw nothing, looked down the escalator, turned to look behind again, looked down IF the escalator and was starting to turn again to look behind when he realized what he was doing. "Do you want to drop down dead right here, Jim Jiro?" he said, fiercely but silently, to himself. "If you don't want to drop down dead, start acting like a salesman who has just arrived in this station and who has nothing more important on his mind than a call to his sales manager." He put a smile on his face. It was an effort, but he made his face obey his mental orders to smile. He forced his lips to whistle. He forced his eyes to regard approvingly the bottom of the young woman in the skintight slacks. Smiling, he walked directly to a row of coin-operated storage lockers. Unlocked now, the receptacles needed only the insertion of a coin in a slot to become effective for safe storage. Jiro's bag went into one locker, the brief case went into a second and, in a slight of hand movement so deftly done that only a keen eye could have detected it, the little case that contained the black diamonds went into a third locker. Signs on the lockers said: Fifty Cents for twelve hours. Contents of Lockers will be removed to Lost and Found Department when paid time has expired. Jiro's hand went into his pocket for coins. It came out with a scattering of dimes and one lone quarter but with no half dollars. He remember a change booth now out of sight at the bottom of the escalator. Deftly, he slapped imaginary coins in each locker, then went quickly to the change booth. The young woman in the skintight slacks was getting change too, with the radio still in her ear. Ignoring her, Jiro changed a bill. Returning to the bank of lockers, he slipped six half dollars in each of the three lockers, paying up for. # hours, then removed the keys. His expression was that of a man who had gotten a load off his mind. Turning, he strode straight to the automatic vendor of stamped envelopes. Sweat was on his face. He let it stay there. "If you can stay alive for the next five minutes, maybe you can make it until tomorrow," he said to himself. From the automatic vending machine, he got what appeared to be one sheet of stamped paper, gummed so that it could be folded into an envelope with a message written on the inside of the paper. Only a watchful eye could have discerned that two coins had actually gone into the machine and that it had spat out two stamped sheets of paper. At the writing table, he scribbled a hasty note which was addressed to Sales Manager, Allied Cutting Tool Company, New York, N. Y., folded the sheet of paper, made a mess of the fold and had to do it a second time; then, after this was finished, he seemed suddenly to remember that he had forgotten a return address. Correcting this deficiency, he went to the mail slot, where he dropped the envelope. Checking the collection time, he saw that it was only five minutes away. Only a keen eye could have detected that two envelopes had gone into the slot and tihait the second envelope contained the key to the locker which held the three black diamonds. A s if he had mailed a sales report which contained huge orders, Jiro put a happy smile on his face and turned toward the visaphone booths. The expression on his face was that of a man about to turn from business to pleasure. There were dozens of visaphone booths, all in a row. He selected the one in the middle. It had solid walls on three sides. The only glass in it was in the door. It was a pay visaphone, with a four-inch square glass tube that would light up to show the person at the other end of the connection. Pushing a coin into a slot, he got an operator and told her he wanted to make a collect long-distance call, giving her the number he wanted. "Right away, sir," she told him. While he was waiting for the connection, he seemed suddenly to recollect that his image would be seen by the person to whom he would be talking. As if he wished to make the best possible impression on that person, he reached hastily into, his inside jacket pocket for the little atomizer. He sprayed his face with this. Carelessly, he also sprayed the glass front of the telephone picture tube. The glass turned an indigo blue. As if his life depended on what he saw in the indigo pool -- or on what he did not see -- Jiro studied the blue hole that seemed to look out onto another universe. Nothing moved there. Or nothing that he could see. As he realized the blue pool was a blue pool and was nothing else, he let out his breath in a sigh of pure relief. "Yes," a deep bass voice said from the visaphone speaker. "I'm home, boss," Jiro said. "Jim!" The deep boss voice rang like a happy bell shouting with good news of the return of a prodigal, then caught its happiness. "Are -- " "I'm all right, I think," Jiro said. "Good! I was plenty worried." The bell rang with happiness and with relief. "Is it all rigjht to talk?" "I think so. I sprayed the blue dye on the picture tube. The phone booth is clean. But the washroom was clean too, I thought, before Calkins went in -- "What?" the bass voice lost all of its recent happiness. "Where is Calkins?" "He's dead," Jiro said. "His body is in the washroom of the middle car of the monorail train that brought us in from the space port, unless it has been found and removed." "I'll take care of it," the bass voice said. "What happened." Jiro explained. "Either the dye didn't work, or something followed him into the washroom." "Uh! Were you followed?" "If so, I don't know it," Jiro said. He waited for the bass voice to continue. IF The voice was silent. The indigo blue was fading from the picture tube. As the dye faded, the round, ruddy face of a completely bald man appeared on the little screen. The face had hot gray eyes. For an instant, as the baldheaded man faced the fact of death to someone under his command, the hot eyes were very sad. The sad eyes looked at Jiro. "You couldn't make friends with them, eh?" the bass voice asked. "No, sir," Jiro said. "I couldn't even set up communications with them." T he bald-headed man nodded. "All right, then it's war," he said. As he was speaking, his voice was picking up the throat-rumbling growl of the Great Dane, a rumbling, rolling, roaring sound that came up from his middle regions and promised to utterly destroy any enemy it faced. "We tried for peace and we failed. And I've got a dead man in the washroom of a monorail train. Tell me what happened?" "I don't know what happened," Jiro said. "I think we were followed from the moon. I think they came right along with us in the same ship. I think when we boarded the monorail train, they got on board with us -- " "How many -- " "How would I know?" Jiro answered. "I don't have a dear impression of their size, I don't even know if they can be measured in terms of feet and inches, in meters "Jim!" "Size is relative," Jiro answered. "I brought three things that look like black diamonds with me. They're in a locker in the station here. I mailed the key to myself, general delivery, main post office, Salt Lake City. Have one of #ur local men pick up the key and get these things out of that lodker, fast. I want them put into an incubator." "What?" the baldheaded man shouted. "I think they're eggs, and I want to find out if they will hatch," Jiro said. "Jim -- " the rumbling voice was suddenly soft. "I'm in what is left of my right mind. I think those black diamonds are eggs and I want them put into an incubator and I want them watched day and night, and if they hatch -- I know this sounds silly, but play it my way." "All right, all right, all right," the bald-headed man agreed. "Now I've got a job I want you to take over. I want you to get lost in Salt Lake City. I want you to stay lost until you are sure you are not being followed. Then I want you to take a jet to Chicago and get lost again. When you are sure you are not being followed, you may either report to me via phone or you may come on here to Denver and report to me in person. Got it, Jim?" "Yes, Mr. Urban," Jiro said. "Get lost, Jim. Stay lost. And Jim -- " The voice of the Great Dane caught again. "Yes, sir," Jiro said. "Stay alive, Jim. You're the best man this section ever had. We need you, Jim, we need you." "You don't need me any more than I need to stay alive," Jiro answered. "Out, Jim," Urban said. In front of Jiro's eyes, the face of the bald-headed man faded from the little screen. Tiro went out of the passenger ter" minal to the helicopter taxi landing area. A whirlybird lifted him to the top of the newest department store. Going downstairs, he entered the men's room and tested the mirror there. The glass stayed a pool of indigo. Leaving the department store, he took a street-level taxi to the jet port. Testing the mirror here, he found it revealed nothing. "If I'm being followed, it's staying out of sight," he thought. There was little comfort in the thought. If the creature that had killed Calkins was following him, it could very well remain hidden in invisibility. Using his credit card, he bought a ticket to Chicago. The big, fast jet had hardly jumped off the ground before he went to the men's room. Again the mirror revealed nothing. For the first time, he felt a little safe.  Not really safe, not permanently safe, not safe enough to trust himself in deep sleep, but safe enough to trust himself to nap with one eye open. Not that having one eye open would save his life, if something as sharp as the edge of a razor wanted to cut his throat, but having an eye open did make him feel a little better. When the big jet touched down at the Chicago airport, he was still alive. II I n the washroom of the Chicago airport, Jiro again sprayed a mirror with the indigo dye. The pool that opened into another universe revealed nothing. Feeling really safe at last, he went into a restaurant and ate. The rocket had landed at dawn; it was now midafternoon. Most of the fatigue had gone out of him. Sitting in the restaurant over black coffee, he suddenly realized how good it was to be back on the Home Planet. The moon was a weird place, a haunted land of shadows as black as midnight in one place and, a hundred yards away, of sunlight blazing brighter and hotter than that of the African Sahara. The eye of a human did not like this violent contrast of shadow and of light. The moon was Earth's nearest neighbor in space, but in spite of its nearness, it was an alien world. And a horrible one. But the ores were there, the rich ores, the fine ores. The deep craters were natural shafts leading downward to the rich veins of mineral wealth. Metal-hungry Earth needed those ores. Founded on iron, civilization still existed on steel, though all the other metals were needed. Without them in plentiful IF supply, the Home Planet would begin to decay. Military-minded Earth, the politicians, the rockjawed admirals of the space fleet under the control of World Governments, was and always had been interested in military control of the moon, which was a perfect launching platform for rockets aimed at any nation on the Home World. As a result of a truce among the great powers, the battle for military control of the moon was in abeyance at the moment. Politically-minded Earth needed the vast publicity of moon exploration and development as a help in the always-coming next election. Scientifically-minded Earth needed moon exploration to keep the subsidies and the grants coming from the various governments. All of these were pressures forcing exploration and development of the satellite. But there was another pressure. Intangible and subtle, it was nevertheless very real and very strong. It expressed itself in the idea that the humjan race was going somewhere. Exactly where the race was going, no one knew for sure. One point was clear fo everybody -- the moon was not the end. No! It was only a steppingstone into the solar system. And after the solar system, the stars would stretch on forever to lure men toward them. I f other forms of life were encountered -- and this was certain to happen -- the plan of World Governments was to make friends with it, if this was possible. If it was not possible, then the rockjawed admirals of the space fleet had specific instructions to use such warheads and such laser beams as might be necessary in their judgment to facilitate the outward-flowing wave of human exploration. At least one -- possibly other -- form of life had once existed on the moon. The scientists were sure of the evidence for this, said evidence being in the form of vast nets that looked a little like webs spun by strange spiders in some of the craters of the satellite. The creatures that had spun these slowly vanished from sight. Perhaps they had gone into hibernation in caverns beneath the moon's surface. Perhaps they had died and had disappeared. The webs were falling into ruin now, and the creatures that had spun them in the almost airless craters were gone. At least this was what the public thought, what the public had been told, perhaps what the public wished to believe. Thinking how much more there was to the story, remembering how blood had dripped from the ends of Calkins' long mustache, Jim Jiro suddenly lost his appetite. Getting to his feet, he paid the tab. Perhaps a walk through the thronged concourse of the airport would clear the feeling of horror from his mind. Just as the feeling of horror was dissolving, he discovered he was being followed. Instantly, a charge of adrenalin was squirted into the bloodstream by the suspicious subconscious mind. Then, as he realized that what was following him was human, the subconscious mind cut the switches it had closed. However, adrenalin had already gone into the bloodstream, and Jiro had to fight the impulse to flee from this danger his subconscious mind had discovered. The danger was only a mild, inoffensive-appearing little man who had a face vaguely like that of a mole. Wearing a hearing aid hidden in steel-rimmed spectacles, Moleface appeared to be studying a racing form as he made his way through the crowds. Only occasional glances over his steel-rimmed spectacles revealed his interest in the slender man. One glance at Mole-face told Jiro that he could handle him physically, if this became necessary. The man himself was not disturbing. The fact of his presence was. Since he must have been waiting at the airport for Jiro's arrival, this could only mean that he had known Jiro was coming. This in its turn could only mean that somebody had known when Jiro left Salt Lake City and where he had been going. A s he realized the meaning of the shadow's presence Jiro began to look at the empty air around him. His manner was that of a man who suspects the existence of invisible demons. He turned quickly to look behind him, then turned again, then realized what he was doing. Instantly, he caught himself and resumed his stroll. As he turned, something struck him from in front. He had the vague impression that he had run into an elephant. Then he realized that the elephant was actually a huge fat woman carrying a net shopping bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other. "Sorry, madam," Jiro said. Eyes the size and color of those of a small pig glared at him from a puffy face. "Why didn't you watch where you were going?" she shouted at him. "I said I was sorry -- " "Being sorry ain't enough, you fool!" Lifting the umbrella, she bopped him over the head with it. Jiro's hand was on the weapon inside his coat before he realized what he was about to do. He took his hand away from the gun. "I almost acted before I thought," he said. "You damned fool -- " the fat woman began. "Let's hope you are never again so close to death," Jiro said. As she caught his meaning, her face turned gray. "Mister -- " Caught between fear and anger, she could only stutter. "Get lost!" Jiro said. Turning quickly, she waddled away. As the crowd dosed around her, she was running. Jiro felt his head where the umbrella had struck. Coming when it had, the blow had startled him, but it had done no physical damage. He turned to look for Mole-face. The little , man wearing the hearing aid in the steel spectacles had disappeared in the crowd. IF Jiro liked his absence even less than his presence. As long as Moleface was around, he was a known shadow. When he disappeared, this meant that another -- and unknown -- shadow had probably taken his place. Skinny Jim Jiro wasted no time looking for the second shadow. His orders had been to lose himself. So far, he had failed to obey them. This was an error which had to be corrected, immediately. G oing to the helicopter landing area, Jiro boarded a waiting whirly-bird. "The Loop!' he shouted to the pilot. "Right away, sir," the pilot answered. If somebody picked up the number of the sky-cab and phoned it ahead, there was no better place on Earth to lose a shadow than in the thronging thousands of Chicago's old midtown Loop section. The helicopter set Jiro down on a landing area at sidewalk level. He went through gates that barred the public from the area and kept the stupid and the curious from getting their heads chopped off by spinning vanes. Ignoring the shouts of warning from the security man, Jiro merged into the throng on the moving sidewalk. Riding for half a block, he stepped from the moving walk to the ordinary concrete sidewalk. After walking another block, he entered a department store. Going through it, he hailed a steam-powered street level taxicab, gave the driver an address on the near North Side and was whisked up the north bound ramp of the expressway. So far as he could tell, he was not being followed. No other cab had come into the pattern behind him, but before he reached the North Side, he changed his destination. ' In response, the cab left the expressway and diveSd headlong into an area of old homes that had once been mansions in some wonderful world of the past. While the stately old homes still managed to hold their own against the encroaching high-rise apartment buildings that surrounded them, they had not been able to maintain their original aristocratic manner. Once, the intrusion of a man like Jim Jiro into one of these homes would have been sufficient reason to summon the police. Now he could walk into any of them he pleased and could stay as long as he could pay the rent. The wonderful world of the past had changed, and the stately old homes had become rooming houses. A t random, Jiro selected a huge Paying off his taxicab driver, he went inside, where a hatchet-faced landlady with greedy eyes stared suspiciously at him. "Ye'll have to pay in advance, mister," she told him. "That's all right," Jiro said. "Show me a room. Good but inexpensive." She sniffed at his requirements. He followed her along a creaking 'hallway to a room at the rear that overlooked a ibacklot and an alley and a garage where kids were playing noisily. Jiro said he liked the view, which made the landlady more suspicious than ever; but what he really liked was the creaking hallway, though he did not mention this. "Ill take it," he said. The price, which had not as yet been stated, jumped fifty per cent at these words. Jiro didn't care about the price. In the long run, World Gorveraments was paying for the room, a fact which he did not mention either. "The bathroom is down the hall. Yell find towels in the closet," the landlady told him. Jiro listened to the boards creak as she went down the hall. Going into the bathroom, he sprayed the cracked (mirror that he found there with the little atomizer which he carried in an inside pocket. Again he stared into the indigo pool. Theory said that if any invisible thing was present in the bathroom, the indigo dye sprayed over the mirror would reveal its reflection. After what had happened to Calkins, Jiro was not sure that this theory was any good, but it was the best the boys in the laboratories had been able to do so far. Perhaps in the future -- if there was a future -- they would be able to do better. Studied from every angle, the indigo pool that seemed to open out into another universe revealed nothing. There were no suspicious light swirls, no face that looked like a cross between a bird and a spider, no points of ice-picks, no lines of light trying to become razor edges. Slowly, the dye faded. "Negative again," Jim Jiro thought. "What if the spray had lost its strength -- " He put the thought out of his mind. A man in his position who started thinking about the what ifs was taking a short cut to the madhouse. He was also following the pattern of men who had feared the unknown since the time when the race was young. What if a tiger lurked beside the waterhole today? What if a devil wearing green came out of a mound and devoured all of us? What if a tire blew when you were doing ninety on the freeway? Man had a heritage of what ifs gleaned from centuries of bitter experience. Jim Jiro knew better than to let the anxieties of these centuries come up like screaming ghosts from his subconscious mind. Going back to the bedroom along the creaky hall, he locked the door and laid down on the bed. S houts of the children at play came from the back yard. With a quarter of his mind, Jim Jiro listened to their happy noise. What if a horde of invisible devils came from the moon? If this happened, would kids continue to play in the backyards of America? Jim Jiro did not know the answer to this question. He did not even like to think about it. Sliding the little gun out of its holster, he checked to make cerIF tain it was in working order. Oddly shaped, an inexperienced observer. would have had difficulty in deciding that it was actually a weapon. It had three barrels. No barrel was over an inch long. The barrel on the left would emit a spurt of gas which would render a human helpless in a matter of seconds and would make him unconscious in less than a minute. The barrel on the right was the size of a pin. It fired a needle which was coated with a fast-acting anaesthetic. The needle was effective at a greater distance than the gas. The third barrel was under the other two. It fired a tiny pointed slug which looked like a flattened pea. Only two slugs were kept in the little weapon, one in the chamber ready to be fired, and one in a magazine in reserve. If it reached its target, one slug was all that was needed. The peasized pellets exploded with such violence that one would blow off a mans head. If a slug struck his heart, this organ would be blown out of the rib cage. If it struck his intestinal tract, no surgeon would ever succeed in putting him back together gain. Yet in spite of its versatility and power, the whole weapon was so small it could fit into the palm of a man's hand. World Governments Issue -- to men who served this organization in the grim unit euphemistically called The Peace Corps. Looking at the powerful little weapon, Jiro felt like throwing it out of the window. It hadn't saved Calkin's life. But Calkins had not had a chance to use it. Or had he? Exactly what had happened in that looked washroom? Had something followed Calkins into the room or had it been there waiting? If it had been waiting there, why had" it attacked Calkins instead of Jim Jiro, Jim Jiro shrugged such questions out of his mind. He had no way to answer them. Outside, the children had stopped yelling happily and had begun to scream in anger. Rising, Jiro slipped the little weapon back into its holster. Going to the window, he looked out. A car had come into the back yard and had stopped in the middle of what the children had thought was a baseball diamond. A limousine, sleek and powerful, the car had been built to hold eight passengers. It was a steam job, one of those marvelously improved steam turbine powered cars that now were the rage. The driver of the limousine was a round-faced youth with the newest in haircut styles. Bland and smiling, he was probably considered by his associates to be a cool cat. Just looking at the driver, Jiro detested him. Was it for the kids like this that he risked his life? As Jiro was thinking about this problem, his gaze went on the man sitting beside the driver. The man was Mole-face! This was a man he had seen at the airport! In spite of every precaution Jiro had taken, he knew he had been followed through the thronging Loop district to this shabby rooming house on the north side of Chicago. How had this been done? He did not know . The kids had fled into the garage when the car had appeared. Coming out again, they were now jeering at the occupants of the car, inviting them to get the limousine off of their baseball diamond. "Get lost!" the driver shouted at them. They fled back to the garage, then, from the doorway, began to shout again. There were perhaps fifteen of them, ranging in ages from nine or ten down to a toddler who was hardly out of training pants. The toddler was at an age level where verbal taunts do not completely satisfy. Imitating his older companions, he was shouting at the occupants of the car, but was being ignored. To make certain they noticed him, he picked up a piece of broken brick and threw it at the car. It struck the windshield and caused a slight scratch in the shatter-proof glass. Mole-face opened the door on his side. Leaning out, he tossed something over the top of the car. It sailed in an arc toward the open door of the garage. The kids scattered from it. The toddler tried to run but slipped and " fell. The object Mole-face had thrown struok in the open door of the garage and directly in front of the toddler. It exploded softly. A green mist puffed from it. The mist struck the toddler as he got to his feet, enguilfing him. The toddler fell a second time. For an instant, he seemed to have forgotten how to get to his feet. As if he were trying to swim on the concrete slab, his arms and legs thrashed wildly. Then this motion ceased. He seemed to sigh and to stretch out. As the green mist went into his lungs, it was as if he'd gotten tired and had decided to lie down and take a little nap. It was a nap that would never end. The green mist flowed into the garage where the kids had fled. Silence followed it. The kids in there were also taking little naps. J iro did not know how the gun got into his hand. It seemed to appear there as if by magic. Never in his life had he wanted to kill anybody as badly as he wanted to kill the man who had tossed the small but very deadly gas bomb over the top of the car and into the door of the garage. He did not in the least doubt that the bland-faced youth sitting behind the wheel deserved the same as his companion. The bottom barrel of the little weapon would do the job. Probably the windshield of the big limousine was made of bullet-proof glass, but one of the pellets from the bottom barrel would knock the windshield out of the car and would shatter the vehicle and its occupants. the two occupants of the car would not bring the toddler back to life nor would it lift the pail of silence that hung over the garage. IF At this moment, Jiro told himself, his job was not vengeance -- this would have to wait for another time, perhaps for other hands -- his job was to stay alive 'long enough to report what he had seen happen here, to say that another and hitherto unknown gang of human killers seemed to have made an alliance with the death that was coming from the moon. Perhaps Urban already knew this, perhaps he did not. Slipping the little weapon back into its holster, Jiro turned to the door and jerked it open. The fat woman who had hit him over the head with her umbrella was standing on the other side of the door. While he had been engrossed in watching the horror in the back yard, she had come along the creaking hallway without him noticing the noise she was making. Her little pig eyes glared at him from the puffy skin of her greasy face. In her hand, she held something that looked like a nasal spray. As he opened the door, mist from the nasal spray was already spurting upward. It puffed around his face, stinging the skin tissues there, a pink mist that went into his lungs. Before he 'had time to get the gun into his hand again, he was falling. As he fell, he recognized the fat woman. Her name was Nellie Moll. She was the leader of the most vicious, depraved, violent gang of wanted criminals that ever existed. She ruled this gang by being the most vicious, depraved, and violent member of all. HI J iro slowly realized he was hearing a voice, which was calling him sweet names, was telling him what a nice boy he was, and was asking him a question. "Where are they, baby?" the voice asked him, over and over again "Be a nice boy and tell mama where they are, sweetheart." Jiro thought his throat and his lungs were on fire. Remembering what had happened to the toddler when the green gas had hit the child, he decided he was lucky to be alive at all. He knew his eyes were open, but he also knew he was not seeing out of them. The gas had blocked off his optic nerve somewhere, and his vision was cut off. In one way, he rather suspected this was a blessing. He did not think he would like what he would be seeing if he could see. Certainly he did not like what he was hearing. Usually the words "baby" and "sweetheart" were used in a tender situation, as part of the love act. They were not being used that way now. As he was hearing them, they sounded as if they had been soaked in vinegar and then dissolved in hydrochloric acid. Venom, bitterness and hate oozed from each word. Abruptly, the blockage was dissolved from his optic nerve, and he could see again. He saw instantly that he had been right in thinking he would not like what he would see. Nellie Moll was bending over him. As she realized he was conscious, she smile fondly at him and sat down in a chair beside the bed where he was lying. "Nice, nice," she said. "Mama is so glad to see you have come back to life." She was smoking a small cigar with an ivory tip. A heavy net bag was in her lap. The room was poorly lighted, and his vision was not good, but Jiro could make out, dimly, in the background, the sharp nose of Mole-face and the square shoulders of Hair-cut, who had been driving the limousine that had stopped the ball game of the kids, permanently. Did they think they could get away with that kind of murder? On second thought, Jiro could see why they might think they could get motivated and, except for him, unwitnessed. As he realized he was probably the only witness of this wanton murder, Jiro decided that he would not mention it. Not that he thought that he had much chance off getting out of this basement alive, anyhow. He was lying on his back on a bed. Pain was in his wrists, in both shoulders and in his ankles. He tried to roll over, to relieve the pain, and discovered that he was lying with his hands tied together above his head. They were then tied to the head of the bed. His ankles were also tied together and to the foot of the bed. Wire had been used to tie him. It was cutting into his skin. H e tried to speak. The effort brought on a violent spasm of coughing. His throat was burning. The cough seemed to make it worse. "Water," he whispered. The fat woman beamed fondly at him. A baby speaking its first word would not have received greater encouragement from its doting mother than he did from Nellie Moll at this moment. Her little pig eyes radiated pleasure. "My boys wants water," she said to Mole-face and Hair-cut. "Do you want I should get him a drink, Miss Nell?" Mole-face asked. "Please do," she said, gently. Mole-face went to a washbasin on the far side of the room. The sound of splashing water followed. Jim Jiro thought he had never heard a more pleasant sound in his life. Mole-face returned with a paper cup with bright drops of water rolling down its side. Nellie Moll took the cup away from Mole-face. "Do you want a drink, sweetheart?" she cooed to Jiro. Skinny Jim Jiro had never wanted anything as much as he wanted this drink of water. Nellie Moll leaned over and moved the cup toward his face. He lifted his head as much as he could. She threw the water in his face. He sank back on the bed. "You'll get a drink when you talk!" she screamed. If he could have gotten his hands on her, he would have gladly choked her to death. Drops of the water were still on his lips, and he reached out his tongue trying his 'best to lick them off. IF S he thrust the lighted end of the cigar on his tongue. He heard the hiss of burning coal on flesh as red-hot pain shot through his tongue. She put the cigar back into her mouth, puffed it until the end was again a glowing coal and stood beaming fondly at him. Gagging and choking, he made up his mind that he would kill this fat woman some day. "Get him another drink of water, please," he heard her say. Mole-face obeyed. Taking the cup of water, Nellie Moll offered it to Jiro, who refused to open his mouth. At her orders, Hair-cut came around the bed and drove his thumbs into the corners of Jim's jaws. Jiro was forced to open his mouth. Moleface lifted his head. As gently as a nurse giving nourishment to a bed-ridden hospital patient Nellie Moll gave Jiro a drink. This made the burned spot on his tongue hurt even worse than ever. "See how nice I can be, baby," Nellie Moll said, beaming at him from her little pig eyes. "I'll remember how nice you have been, when I meet you in hell," Jiro said. Even though his words were poorly pronounced, Nellie Moll understood his meaning perfectly. "Maybe you'll remember, sweetheart. And maybe you won't remember anything at all!" She shook her head at the meaning of her words. "It seems such a shame to lose a man right in the prime of his life, with a good brain and a good future." She shook her head at the prospect she saw unfolding before her mind's eye. "But sometimes it can't be helped." "I suppose you will go into deep mourning because of it," Jiro muttered. A throbbing sensation had been added to the burning feeling in his tongue, and he could not talk clearly. However, the fire from the pink gas he had inhaled had gone from his throat and from his lungs. More important, his head was clearing and physical strength was coming back into his body. Not enough strength to break the wires that bound his wrists and his ankles, but enough to face his tormentors, perhaps enough to face the idea that he had to die. He had no illusions that he wou'd not be killed. This was certain. But why was Nellie Moll delaying? What did she want to know? "Where are they, baby?" she asked. "Where is what?" Jira answered. "Them black things you put into the locker in Salt Lake City." J im Jiro did not have to act surprised. He really was surprised, that she knew enough to be able to ask this question and at the meaning back of the question. "Aren't they there?" he answered. "That's where I put them. I don't know what happened after I left -- I mean -- " "No, they were not in the locker," Nellie Moll answered. She smiled fondly at him. "I'm glad to see you are smart enough not to try to pretend they were only black diamonds. I'm real glad to see this. It makes things so much easier." "I didn't mean to make anything easy," Jiro said. "It's just that, well, I was so surprised to learn they are not in the locker. How do you know they aren't there?" "Because we sent somebody to look," Nellie Moll said. "And I'm real glad you ore not trying to lie to me. It makes things a lot easier, for you." "Um," Jiro said. This had overtones he did not like. "How'd you manage to follow me here?" She smiled fondly at him. He was such a bright child! "I don't mind telling you, sweetheart. Do you remember when I bopped you with my umbrella?" "I'll never forget it -- " "There was a little piece of radioactive dust on that umbrella. Some of it got wiped off on your hat when I hit you." She chuckled to herself over some private joke. "So you succeeded in putting radioactive dust on my hat, then you followed me with a good detector," Jira said. "Yes, that is possible. It makes sense." He nodded to himself. "No, sweetheart," she denied. "Nothing like that." "Hunh? Then how?" She nodded toward the ceiling of the room. "George did it. George can see radioactivity a awa y ? maybe more." "Bh? George? What -- " "You haven't met George yet, honey. Not officially, that is. George has met you but you haven't met him." Again she chuckled at her own private joke. "You'll like George. Sort of, that is." Her chuckle became a laugh. She looked at her two followers, for confirmation of her joke. They were trying to laugh too. In each case, they were failing. "Real cute, George is, in some ways," she continued. "Real well trained too." "What the hell -- " "He may not be real smart in all ways but he knows enough to stay away from mirrors, 'specially when they are turning blue," Nellie Moll continued. H er grunting laughter was the most horrible sound Jim Jiro had ever heard. Furtively, he tried to pull at his wrists, to gain a little slack there, knowing that even if he got his hands free, it would gain him nothing. Then, as another thought struck his mind, he gasped a question. "Did George kill Calkins?" Nellie Moll showed real interest in this question. "Who?" she asked. Jiro knew he had revealed too much in asking this question. He tried to cover up. "I -- found a man in the washroom of the monorail train that brought us from Salt Lake City from the moonport in the desert. Since you knew about the locker, I thought perhaps that George had come in on that train. I just caught a glimpse of the dead man -- " "But you knew his name, baby. You call him Calkins." Alarm crossed Nellie Moll's fat face. "Was there more than one of you on that moonship?" tr # "And one of you was killed?" "Yes," Jiro said. There was no point in denying what she had correctly guessed. "How was he killed?" "His throat was cut." "Then more of them came in than I was told about!" There was no mistaking her alarm now. It made great wrinkles in the fat flesh of her face. "Baby, if you are lying to me -- " Jiro found the fat face less than six inches from his nose. He saw that her eyes were green and were filled now with fear and hatred that he had never seen in the eyes of any other human. Even when she had been young, Nellie Moll had not been pretty. At this moment, she looked like something dredged up from the depths of hell. She even had the smell of hell on her breath. It was a mixture of cheap whiskey, strong tobacco and some kind of dope that he could not identify. "Baby, if you are lying to me, I'll just naturally tear your eyes right out of your head with my own hands." To prove what she meant, she exhibited her fingernails. They were broken and dirty. Sweat ,was on Jim Jiro's face and on his body. "I'm not lying," he said. Oddly, she seemed to believe him. Sitting down again, she thrust one fat hand into the depths of the net bag that she was carrying. Rummaging among its varied contents, she came out with what looked like a specially made walkietalkie. From the top of it, she carefully pulled out an aerial about the thickness of a human hair and no more than a quarter of an inch long. Ricking on the transmitter, she spoke a single word. "George!" F rom somewhere near the ceiling, bird whistles answered her. At this sound, Jim Jiro felt his skin begin to crawl all over his body. Intuitively, he knew the source of these sounds. The whistles were like those of no bird that Jiro had ever heard, 'but there was a shrillness about them that was similar to the sharp whistling of a bird. At one and the same time, they were both faint and clear, as if this bird were both far and near at the same time. As the bird sounds came from the tiny speaker on the little compact radio set, Mole-face and Haircut showed distinct signs of growing uneasiness. Nellie Moll showed no such uneasiness. Her face revealed that in her mind she thought she owned this bird that was whistling near the ceiling. It took orders from her, her face said. Looking up toward the ceiling, she whistled into the transmitter, then listened to the whistles that came back in answer. She looked at Jiro. "George says that one of his pals probably got hungry and made a meal off of this fellow you mentioned," she said to Jiro. "He says not to worry about it." She beamed at Jiro as if she suddenly loved him again. "I was afraid somebody else had got him a tame devil and was trying to cut in," she said. Taking a puff from the cigar, she settled it firmly in the corner of her mouth. At this moment, she looked like a fat sow that was learning how to to smoke. "George stays you are almost ripe," she continued, beaming at Jiro. "Ripe? What the hell -- " "Don't ask me, baby. I don't understand it, but George says he lives on something like starlight." "Like starlight?" Jiro whispered. "I think he means there is energy in it," Nellie Moll explained. "And that this is his natural food when he can get it. But he can't get it often enough. Fortunately, for him, human beings when they're soared give off some kind of radiation that is pretty close to the starlight that is his natural food. "When he says a human is ripe , he means that the human is scared and is almost ready to eat. The worst scared a man is, the better George eats. He says that just after he cuts their throat, or slips an icepick past an eyeball, they ready get ripe." She laughed, a burst of sound that had no merriment in it, and glanced around at her two cohorts. "Hey, boys? Ain't that right, boys?" They nodded, weakly. Jiro felt nausea beating at his stomach. Was it possible that a creature could exist which lived on radiant energy? All life used energy in some form. Plants took radiant energy from the sun. But to 'live on the radiations given off by a human being when he was afraid -- Jiro gave up trying to grasp all the implications involved in this statement. His problem was much simpler. It was how to stay alive. This was not a problem he had much chance of solving, he thought. #I beaming fondly at Jiro. "Just tell me what happened to them black things you stuck into the locker in Salt Lake City." "I -- " Jiro began. "George is very interested in what you say," she interrupted, looking up toward the ceiling. "Very, very interested." Jiro considered the various ways in which he would enjoy destroying this fat sow, who claimed to be a human being. "I told you I don't know," he answered. "Maybe somebody else has a Tame George. Maybe that George watched me put the eggs in the locker. Maybe that George watched what I did with the locker key. Maybe that George told its owner where to find the key. Maybe the owner got the key and opened the locker." Nellie Moll looked startled at this fantasy. Jiro was bluffing, he was trying to find a way to stay alive for a few more minutes. So far as he had known until he had heard the bird chirps coming from the tiny radio, there was no such thing as a tame devil. By definition, a devil could not be tamed. If it was tamed, it had to be called something else. "Another Tame George?" Nellie IF Moll looked shocked. She did not like this idea and expressed her dislike by biting heavily on the tip of the cigar. "Nah! I'm. the only one who has a Tame George. You'd better believe it, buddy I" She scowled at Jino. "All right," Jiro said. "But remember we've got a man dead with a slashed throat in a monorail train doing ninety miles across the desert. Maybe the same devil that killed him followed me into the station and watched me hide the black eggs. Maybe it is working for somebody besides you. Of course, I'm only guessing. If you have a better guess 'than mine, you're welcome to it." His frankness in admitting he was guessing seemed to unnerve the fat woman a little. Lying or evasion she expected and could handle. An honest answer left her confused. "Them devils wouldn't doublecross me!" she said, suddenly angry. "They wouldn't dare." "Wouldn't they?" Jiro asked. "Maybe your George is listening to every word you're saying. When he gets ready to write you off the books, he'll slip an icepick into your heart and go on his way." "He can't understand me except through, this," Nellie Moll said, tapping the radio. "He can't hear me without my using the radio. I'm not sure he sees me all of the time." "I wouldn't bet on any of that," Jiro said. He may be hearing and seeing you without letting you know about it." "George is my friend. I take good care of him. He likes me," Nellie Moll hastily answered. "George wouldn't stick an icepick in me when I wasn't looking. Nah! He wouldn't do it." As she was speaking, she was turning hastily to look behind her. Back there were Mole-face and Hair-cut. Both looked as if they would very much like to be somewhere else. "They don't have friends," Jiro said. "Only enemies." Again she tried to look behind her, again Mole-face and Hair-cut tried to dodge. Again she seemed to search the room in a silent hunt for something that was invisible but which she knew was present. O n the bed, Jim Jiro was quiet. Although he knew it was pointless, he found his eyes were searching the room too, looking for something which he could not see. Smoke from the cigarettes, pale blue mist from Nellie Moll's cigar, filled the air. Was there something in the room that could hide behind swirls of tobacco smoke? Remembering the bird chirps he had heard, Jiro was sure that something was actually present in this room. Those hatefilled 'bird noises had come from a world of frequency higher than that of the blue smoke, from an incredible world that many men had suspected existed and had feared exceedingly. Suddenly the radio chirped again. Nellie Moll almost jumped out of her chair. "I forgot I had left it on!" she gasped. IF Continuing bird chirps shrilled through the room. Listening to them, Nellie Moll's face started to turn green. Her little pig eyes almost popped out of her head. "Boys, we've got to move fast. George says he smells men coming. Lots of men!" The three tried to get through the door at the same time. Nellie Moll literally shoved her way between the two men. The door slammed shut behind them. From behind it came the sound of feet fleeing down a hall. On the bed, Jim Jiro sighed, and relaxed. He did not know how it had happened, but his life had been saved. Then, as something stung his left cheek, he realized his life had not been saved. Nellie Moll, Mole-face, and Haircut had fled. But George had remained behind. Iv T he thing that stung Jiro's left cheek was razor sharp. Whether it was a razor or an icepickshaped claw, Jim did not know. Nor did anyone else. No member of the special unit called the Peace Corps who had seen this cutting edge had lived to tell what he had seen. All anyone had seen of this cutting edge had been the results in the form of bodies cut into ribbons of meat, flesh slicked and carved clear down to the bone, vital organs cut into layers of tissue, arteries severed. All were done by a cutting edge that was invisible and, until Calkins had died in the washroom of the monorail train, all had been restricted to the moon. Or perhaps the icepick had been used. The result had beep bodies with hundreds of tiny holes in them, holes in the eyes, holes in the heart, holes in the liver, holes through the guts. Jiro did not know whether a razor edge had slid across his cheek or whether an icepick had been thrust into the skin there. He could not move his hands, to touch the spot, nor could he see it. Turning his gaze downward, he had the vague impression that he could see something there. A creature as intangible as moonbeams seemed to move there, but he was not sure he was seeing something or whether his vision was distorted. Once, he thought he caught a glimpse of a single eye watching him. Jim could feel moisture trickling down the side of his face but he could not tell whether the wet feeling came from sweat or from blood. Fear surged up in him. Then he remember that Nellie Moll had said that these devils could live -- actually did live -- on the fear radiations generated by human beings. Wildly, he wondered if the ancient injunction in all of the scriptures of the world to "be without fear" had had its origin in a knowledge of the existence of such creatures as these. Had they appeared on Earth before? As to the idea that they could live # on fear radiations, he knew from wide reading that a frightened man exuded a strong odor that a dog could detect. Frightened people were more likely to be bitten by dogs than calm people. Perhaps a life form could exist which had adapted itself to live on the odor or on the radiations from a frightened person, or on both! A s fear surged up in Jiro, he realized that Nellie Moll had been telling the truth when she had said that George thought he was almost ripe. The purpose of the prick of pain on his cheek was to frighten him even more, to bring up more fear in him, to ripen him still further. This purpose was being achieved. Fear was rising in him. He caught the emotion with mental effort, resolving within himself not to be afraid, telling himself verbally that he was not afraid. As he did this, he rediscovered what he already knew, that in a man fear grown to full fury had the strength of a wild stallion. Words were the rope with which he was trying to hold this wild horse called fear. The rope was much too weak for the job required of it. The stallion lunged, the stallion stood on his hind feet, 'kicking at the air. Fear reached for the control of his imagination, seeking there the control center that would give it freedom to go completely wild. Jiro fought the fear. Deep inside himself, he reached for inner strength, to control the rising emotion. Something stung his right cheek. Wetness -- whetherblood or sweat, he could not tell -- ran down the side of his face. He tightened muscles all through his body, putting pressure on the wires that held his hands to the head of the bed and to the wires that held his feet to the foot of the bed. The wires were strong. They did not break. The mad stallion of fear again lunged, trying to be free. Something was in the room that could kill him at any moment it chose, could slash his throat, could thrust an icepick into his heart. It was teasing him now, playing with him as a cat plays with a half-dead mouse, to enjoy the squirming of the captive creature that was struggling desperately to retain a life already in forfeit. Jiro, struggling with equal desperation inside himself, held the rising fear in check. But only in check. He knew that holding it in check was not conquering it but was only transferring it to some hidden place inside himself, to some basement of the mind, from which it might erupt later. In the distance, in some other world, it seemed, he heard doors bang, but his now fully occupied mind did not register any meaning for the sound. "I'm going to lick you, George!" he whispered. What he meant was that he was going to control himself, which could be a way to win a battle over his invisible antagonist. In response, what felt something like three claws raked suddenly across his forehead. IF A s this happened, the fear he had hidden in the basement tried to erupt and to add its strength to that of the wild stallion. Desperately, Jim Jiro held the stallion from lunging free. The thing hidden behind the blue smoke waited for its torture to take effect. Jiro had the vague impression that it was confused by its failure to get the expected reaction from him. In the past, humans had gone completely crazy at just the touch of the razor edge it used for a cutting tool. Sometimes they had gone into panic just by thinking about the meaning of this razor edge and by imagining it was near them. The man on the bed was suffering, he was partly ripe, but he was not going into full panic, and he was not going completely crazy. He even seemed to be losing some of his ripeness. To the invisible thing in the room, he seemed to be becoming less palatable. This irritated the thing. It did not understand how this could happen. It sent out tendrils to explore the radiations flowing from this man's body and hastily withdrew the tendrils as they reported minimal edible content. The thing passed from irritation into the edge of the zone of anger. It was hungry. In its invisible body, energy cells were nearing exhaustion. These had to be replaced. If they were not soon refilled, it might have to find its way out to the street and attack there the first person it found, preferably a female. It had discovered that women, with the exception of Nellie Moll, went faster and deeper into panic than men. If it left this basement and wandered through this great city, it would find plenty to eat. It might wander into a library where someone was reading and leave behind it the grim record that it -- something had been there. A person reading a book might feel a slight stinging sensation. Looking Up, he would think that perhaps a fly had landed on his face. He would brush it away. His fingers would reveal that blood was flowing from a gash in his cheek. As he wondered about this, a second stinging sensation would come. Then another! At this point, the human would go into wild panic. And it would feed! I ts methods of perception were so different from human senses that its method of cognizing its environment could not be called seeing. It did not truly see the man on the bed in the way another human would have seen him. It was aware of a pattern of shifting colors surrounding a heavy structure -- the body -- which was shot through with colors of red, violet, purple, and many others, all constantly changing and all eternally in motion. This happened so rapidly that the effect of solidity was given. It did not see the bed on which the man was lying, as a bed, but it was aware of the electronic patterns made by the metal legs and by the coiled springs in the mattress. To it, the flow of electronic energy around these cooled springs was very beautiful. Its method of cognizing the environment, while it missed much that the human eye saw, also made it aware of much thait the human eye did not detect. It was well aware of radiation in frequency ranges that the human eye could not detect. It was also well aware of a grim law of existence, of life preying on life. It thought this was the only law that existed. As humans preyed on the life below them, on plants, fruits and animals, it preyed on humans. Not necessarily by choice -- it preferred the long-ranging radiations from its home world -- but if these were not available in sufficient quantity, it could survive on the fear radiations from a frightened human being. Plants and fruits meant nothing to it, animals meant very little. It liked men, felt it was superior to them, could prove this point to its own satisfaction and felt completely justified in preying on them if it so chose. The man on the bed was not palatable enough, not ripe enough just now. Therefore he had to be induced to produce additional fear. It knew how to deal with a man lying on his back. Extruding two needle-pointed tendrils, it inserted them into the skin just at the top of the man's eyes. Experience had taught it that every man had a reflex action to protect itself from damage to his eyes. J iiro felt the tips of the tendrils as they touched the upper lids of his eyes. Each felt like a tiny icepick. He remembered a body he had seen near him on the moon. It had been filled with hundreds of tiny holes, the result of something resembling icepicks being driven through a tough plastiskin space suit. As this memory came into his mind, the stallion in his subconscious world went crazy. The stallian thought this picture was real. Jiro knew it was too frightened to be held on a close rope, that unless given some measure of freedom, it would break free and would run wild. He gave the stallion of fear a little freedom, felt his heart jump and his breathing quicken in response, then checked the stallion and held it on a steady rein. He held his eyelids still. Pressure increased there. Pain increased with it. Jim felt his breathing quicken again. This was an automatic mechanism that had to be controlled. If he let his breathing become wild panting, hurried gasping for breath, his emotions would break completely free. To control the fear rising in him, he had to slow his breathing to long, rhythmic inhalations and equally slow exhalations. Doing all these things required all his attention, all his will power, all his ability to concentrate. He knew if he did not do them the wild stallion would break free down below and his bloodstream would be flooded with adrenalin. Radiations would pour out from his boclv. George would free! George would eat! George would gorge! In the depths of his mind at this moment, he hated George more than he hated Nellie Moll. IF Jiro brought his breathing under control. With it, he controlled the wild stallion of fear rearing and plunging in the depths of the subconscious mind. As the invisible thing realized its tactics were not producing the desired results, it thrust the icepicks deeper. Passing through the skin, the sharp points touched the tender flesh of the eyeball itself. At this added prick of pain, the wild stallion broke free. Jim Jiro knew he had lost a battle. A s he was preparing himself to die, he heard a thudding sound which seemed to come from some far-off world. The thud was followed by a crash, as of wood splintering. Instantly the icepicks were withdrawn from his eyes. As Jiro tried to open his eyes, to see what was happening, a throbbing sound was suddenly in the air. Somewhere something squealed like a stricken and dying bird, screaming in pain, a noise that seemed to reach Jiro's mind through some channel other than his ears. Then a man began to swear. Jiro heard quick footsteps approach his bed. He opened his eyes. A baldheaded man wearing heavy goggles was bending over his bed. The baldheaded man was swearing. Vaguely, Jiro recognized the baldheaded man as being Mr. Urban, his superior officer, his boss, the man who gave him orders in the special unit he served in World Governments. As he was wondering how Urban had found him, consciousness slipped away. Eventually, slowly, he came back to consciousness. He did not do this of his own free choice. In his mind as he came back to consciousness was the thought that again he would have to endure a horror called a Tame George and the razor's edge and the icepick's point. Then he realized he was being forced back to consciousness not only by some liquid that was burning his lips -- and lighting a fire on the place on his tongue which Nellie Moll had touched with her cigar -- but also by the sound of hot profanity near him. The man near him, whoever that man was, could swear! Slowly, Jiro realized that the pain was gone from his shoulders, from his wrists and from his ankles. This felt so good he tried to move and found he could. This so astonished and pleased him that he allowed himself to become fully conscious again. W earing blue goggles with a small hole in the center of each lens, Urban was holding him in a sitting position with one hand. With the other hand, Urban was holding a small flask of brandy to Jiro's lips. It was the brandy that was causing the burning sensation on his lips and tongue. Ignoring the pain on his tongue, Jiro gulped at the brandy. A fire immediately started in his stomach, but his will to be conscious, his will to be alive, came surging back. "George!" he shouted. Now for the first time Jiro noticed a man standing at the foot of his bed. This main was also wearing goggles with blue colored lenses and with a small hole in the middle of each lens. In addition, this man had what looked like a very strange flashlight in each hand. On top of each flashlight was an aiming tube with another blue colored lens. On the bottom of each flashlight was a trigger. As Jiro stared at this man, wondering who the fellow was and what he was doing there, he became aware of a foul odor in the room. If a hundred skunks had been skinned in this place, the smell would have been similar. He noticed now that Urban was coughing and that the man at the end of his bed looked as if he wanted to hold his nose. "Jim, are you all right?" Urban demanded. "Well -- " Forced to think about himself, Jiro decided he did not know the answer to this question. His tongue was raw, his eyelids had pain in them. Urban seemed to read his mind. "Lie down, Jim. I've already sent a man for a local doctor," Urban said. He made certain of compliance to his orders by forcing Jiro to lay down. "George!" Jiro said, suddenly remeifibering. At Urban's urgent request, he explained what he meant. Urban shook his head. "That smell is all that is left of that particular horror," Urban said. He nodded toward the man standing at the foot of the bed. "Danny got him ." T ie man standing at the foot of the bed removed his goggles. Now Jiro recognized him as a fellow worker on that very strange World Governments unit called the Peace Corps. "Hi, Danny, hi," Jiro said. "You really -- I mean -- " Danny tapped one flashlight with the other. "The lab boys came up with this, Jim. It projects a very high frequency tight beam of radiation. This thing that you call George screamed like a wounded buzzard when the beam struck him. Now he stinks like a dozen skunks." "Great," Jiro said. "Very, very great. I love you, Danny, and I love the boys in the lab. A gun for George! I really can't tell you how good this makes me feel!" "I know how good it makes us all feel," Urban said. "Up until now, we've had to sit around and wait for something to cut our throats. Now we've got a gun. We can do a little blasting of our own." The bald-headed man seemed to expand as he spoke. "There's a furor about this in the highest echelon. Space admirals are demanding action. The WG cabinet itself wants to know what is going on. Now that we have a gun we can go into that moon mine and find out what's there." Jiro thought about what Urban had said. It felt good to him too. But there were other things that did not feel good. "Nellie Moll!" he gasped. "And two men." IF "They must have gotten away just seconds before we arrived," Urban answered, irritation in his voice. "I've put out a general pickup order on all three of them. They will be picked up within hours, I hope." His eyes came down to the man on the bed. "What did she want with you, Jim?" "Eggs!" Jiro answered. "Incubator." His shaken mind was still off the track. "I left them in a locker in Salt Lake City. She said they weren't in the locker." "I hope not," Urban said, looking comfortable again. "We were lucky enough to have a young woman operator right there in the monorail station. You may have seen her." "Me?" Jiro said. "Say, there was the cute chick in the skintight pants walking around with a transistor radio stuck in her ear. I hardly noticed her -- " "Next time be more observant," Urban said, grinning. "We've got the eggs, Jim." "Good," Jiro answered. But there was still something else. "Incubator," he said. "We've got them in an incubator, and I have two men on duty at all times watching them through these special goggles. Each man has one of these weapons." He touched the flashlight gun in the right hand of Danny, who was maintaining his position at the foot of the bed. "We've got cameras going all the time. One way or another, we will know what happens." "Good," Jiro repeated. "You've really got things moving -- " "That's my job," Urban said. "Lie still, Jim -- " # #T)ut I've still got another question," Jiro protested. "How -- how did you find me?" "Probably the same way Nellie Moll followed you or the way she had that invisible monster follow you. "I meant to meet you at the airport, but I got in a fw minutes late and I was just in time to see her bop you over the head with her umbrella. I followed her while I got one of our local men( with a good detector, on the job following you. He traced you clear across Chicago, from the radioactive dust on your hat. Meanwhile, I was tailing Nellie Moll. Our local man and I met at that rat-trap where you had holed up. We were just in time to see Nellie Moll and her two men load you into limousine. We followed it and set up a raid here." "I see," Jiro said. "I see." What he saw mostly was how good it felt to be a member of such a team as the WG Peace Corps. If a member of that team got into trouble, some other team member was always on hand to help. "Say, she could talk to that invisible monster she had with her," Jiro continued. "Then the crooks of our world have established communication with the crooks of another world." Urban said, bitterness now rising in his voice. "That is more than I can say for the people of the Peace Corps!" IF Outside the room, hurrying feet were sounding again. At the foot of the bed, Danny deftly tossed one of the strange flashlights to Mr. Urban, who caught it with equal deftness. Danny then exited through the door. A minute later, he stuck his head inside again to explain who was there. "Send them in," Urban said. A brisk young man carrying a doctor's bag with a professional air entered the room. He was followed by two men. One carried a tank of oxygen, the other a stretcher. "There's your patient," Urban said, pointing to Jim Jiro. "I want him in shape to board a plane to Denver within an hour." "Sir -- " the young man began. From his billfold, the bald-headed man took a small gold-rimmed card. The young doctor read it. "Oh, the Peace Corps," he said, sudden respect in his voice. "Yes," Urban said. "And if we don't work fast, there won't be any peace to keep, only pieces!" V 'Tphe great ship swung into a minimal power orbit high above Crater #. From this position, part of the surface of the moon not normally visible from Earth could be seen. It was a ghastly land of marsh shadows and of nightmare shapes, of plunging craters and of bare-fanged mountains rising threateningly toward the lunar sky. Seen at fairly close range, nothing about the moon was pretty. It was a land of chaos, of darkness, and of black night -- a world where men, coming from the green softness of the Earth, could live only in the private incubators of plastidome shelters and where they could venture abroad only when wearing protective suits of tough plastiskin. It was almost as if the moon hated men and sought to bar them from her world. As the great ship swung into position over Crater #, three smaller ships took up positions around it in such a way that the big ship was like the hub of a wheel. Considered as a group, the four ships formed in the sky something sinnler to an umbrella. When the umbrella was formed and the four ships were in positions so that all the area surounding Crater # was under observation visually, by radar and by new devices that had been hastily installed, another ship came nosing toward this crater, coming from the lower edge of the moon, where the main sky-port serving Earth-Luna traffic was located. As if to escape observation, this ship flew very low, and when it reached that dip at the moon's limb known as Crater #, it dropped down sharply and made a quick landing near a cluster of plastiskin domes which was located at the base of a huge cliff. At the bottom of this cliff, a black hole marked the entrance to a mine tunnel that bored deep into one of the rich bodies of ore that had been discovered on the moon and which gave the satellite enormous value to the sky-jumping technology now developing on Earth. Space itself would have to be explored in ships made of ore mined on the moon! To the left of the tunnel a huge pile of black gravel indicated the ore taken from the mine and dumped here to wait the arrival of a ship to take it to smelters elsewhere. Ore ships had stopped coming to this mine. Work had stopped in this mine. In the highest echelons of World Governments administrative officials, this was known as the mine where hell had moved in. hen the arriving ship had settled itself down in the landing area near the plastiskin domes, the forward port lock opened. The creature that stepped down from the ship looked like a knight in chain mail armor. There were differences between this man and the knight of the middle ages. This knight had a powerful electric light mounted on the top of his helmet. The visor of his helmet was made of permaglass which included goggles with special lenses colored a dark indigo blue. The goggles were inside the helmet. Each lens had a microscopic hole in the center. Instead of a sword, the knight carried in his hands what looked like a large and strangely-shaped flashlight. The knight was Jim Jiro. Standing in the lock, he started to step down to the frozen soil, then quickly gave a small jump to keep from stepping on what was lying on the ground there. In this light gravity, the jump carried him a dozen feet. Turning quickly, Jiro flicked on the radio in his suit "Jump or you'll step on a dead man!' he called out. The next knight jumped. Each in his turn was careful to leap over the dead man, until #I men, besides their leader, had made the jump. Then radio inquiry came from inside the ship, seeking permission to close the lock. "Okay to close lock," Jiro said. "But keep a man on duty to watch for us. If you see us coming, get the lock open." "Yes, sir," a respectful voice answered, from inside the ship. "But, sir, on the ground there just outside the lock -- " "He was probably one of the miners here," Jiro said. "Yes, sir. But, sir -- " "Leave him where he is," Jiro said. "I don't want anybody outside the ship who is not wearing armor." "Yes, sir." At Jiro's order, the group moved toward the dark tunnel that opened inward at the base of the cliff. Over a plastiskin inner suit, each of the men was wearing linked chain armor which had been tested and which was guaranteed to be proof against penetration by icepicks or by weapons as sharp as razors. The armor idea was borrowed from ancient times. Armor made of metal of poorer quality had stopped arrows, spears, and swords. "Jim, there's another dead man -- " a voice spoke over the radio in Jiro's helmet. "I see him," Jim answered. LookIF ing down the street that led to the tunnel, he spoke again. "I see at least tiwo more. As I understand the situation, when their mechanical digger here broke through into -- well, into a cavern that was not known to exist -- the miners tried to run. Some got this far." His voice went off into grim tones as he finished speaking. Flipping another switch, he spoke again. "Peace Corps detail reporting. There are dead men down here -- " "From your detail, Jim!" the bass voice of the bald-headed man shouted back at him from the great ship in the sky. "If that chain armor failed, I will never forgive myself -- " "Easy sir," Jiro replied. "So far nothing has hit our armor. The dead men are miners. What -- what has happened to my eggs?" "I have no recent report on that," Urban answered. "They haven't hatched as yet, I'm certain. I'm also certain the admiral here in the ship is watching the hatching of those eggs, me, and you very, very closely." "You haven't got those eggs in the ship with you?" "No, Jim. They're in their incubator in bur laboratory in Denver. Have you -- have you seen   "Not yet," Jiro answered. "But we're looking." "Jim, you're not taking this thing too lightly, are you?" Jiro's grunt had deep bitterness it in. "Chief, remember I saw Calkins with his throat cut. Remember, I personally met Nellie Moll's Tame George. No, Chief, I'm not taking these creatures lightly." "Good, Jim." "Now that the subject has come up, have the boys found Nellie Moll yet?" "No, Jim." The deep voice had regret in it. "But they will find-her. Jim, I only wish I could, be there with you -- " "What?" Jiro interrupted. "For Pete's sake, have some sense, Chief. Down here you'd just be in the way. Out." J iro broke the connection to the man in the sky before the angry retort could came back in, then shifted to the frequency used for group communication. Here voices grumbled at him, telling him he had treated the chief a little rough. "I know it," Jiro said. "I also know he is looking for an excuse to come down here and join us. He belongs up there. He has the kind of mind that can see a thousand details all at once and can fit them into a pattern and can see which way the pattern is going. Up there in the sky that kind of a mind is invaluable. Down here with us he would get to thinking about the big pattern, and something wouH run an icepick past his eyeballs and -- Oh, the hell with it! His job is to be boss. Our job is to fumigate a hole in a moon cliff. Come on." The detail clumped forward. The sound of their feet hitting the eternally frozen moon gravel was transmitted upward to their ears. Each man of this detail was a volunteer, each was unmarried, each was without dependents. Like the French Foreign Legion of the old days, the only home they knew -- or wanted to know -- was this strange organization called the Peace Corps, a name that had also been borrowed from the old days of Earth, before the human race really started moving spacewards. At the entrance to the first plastiskin dome, a miner lay dead. "They play rough around here," Overman said, over the radio. Overman was short and just a little fat. He looked from the dead miner toward the sky, then pointed. "They're also spinning webs." Glancing upward, Jim Jiro saw the sky of space. It looked a little like black velvet which held little shining lights that were actually the suns of far-off space. Against this backdrop and against the rough facade of the jutting moon cliff, thin strands of cobwebs were dimly visible. "These were not here before," Jiro said. "I wonder if they were hibernating inside this cliff. They came to life and started flying and started building webs when the digger burst through into their cavern -- " His voice slipped away into speculative silence. "Breaking through into that cavern was sort of like opening Pandora's box," Ed said. "We didn't know what trouble was until we opened it." Ed was tall, thin and a little stooped. "On Earth, spiders build webs to catch flies," Overman's voice came again. "What would they catch in a web here on the moon?" # #T)ack on Earth, the 'brains -- D meaning some of our top scientists who are in on this thing -- were doing some guessing about possible reasons for spinning webs where there are no flies to be caught," Jim Jiro said. "One of them guessed -- and he admitted he was guessing -- that the purpose of the webs is to catch a special kind of energy coming from some far-off sun. The invisible monsters probably came from that sun in the first place. They need its energy to keep their life forces at a higjh level. This guesser believed these webs might be antennae." "We know so little -- " Overman's voice came again. "Can you imagine a form of life that builds bodies that we can't see out of energy that it catches on what looks like spider webs? Energy or messages? Or energy acting as a message? We know so little -- " Repeating himself, Overman's voice trailed into silence, then came again, stronger now. "I wonder -- " Lifting the weapon in the shape of a strange flashlight, he pointed it at the webs. Light raced across the face of the cliff as the web surged with what seemed to be electric fire. "Well, what do you know, it worked?" Overman said. He sounded pleased with himself, then gasped and stopped walking. "Something hit me right in the middle of my helmet!" he gasped. IP "We're being attacked!" Jiro shouted. Through the indigo blue lenses of the big goggles built into his helmet, he caught a glimpse of something that looked a little like a very small flying saucer. As he was bringing up the flashlight weapon to center it on the moving object, light streaked from his left. The miniature flying saucer exploded. "Got one!" Ed's voice came. Then other voices were shouting. Flashlight guns were searching for targets. The sky was bright with exploding lights. The attack died as quickly as it had come. "Report!" Jiro shouted. "Is anybody hurt? Did the armor hold?" Voices coming back took some of the anxiety out of his mind. The armor had withstood an attack of icepicks. The helmets had also held. "I got hit on my helmet right in front of my right eye!" Overman's voice came. "Did the plastic hold?" Jiro shouted. "It sure did," Overman's answered. "If it hadn't held, I would have an icepick through my eyeball!" Jiro counted noses, then counted again, to make sure, then reported to Urban what had happened. When urban had been satisfied that all members of the detail had survived the attack, he asked further questions. "They look a little like balls of light through these goggles," Jiro explained. "They have a tremendously complicated internal structure that looks like a web. All of the strands are connected to an extremely bright core which is the heart of the monster. They can change shape almost instantly. I saw one stretch himself out until he was six feet long with a point that looked needle-sharp. Like a spear, he hurled himself at somebody -- " "Who? Is that man all right?" "I told you everybody came through safely," Jiro answered. "I saw another one flatten himself out until his front end formed an edge like a headsman's axe. Something like this must have been used to kill Calkins." "What happened to the one who made a cutting edge of himself?" "He died," Jiro said. "I accounted for Shim personally. Have my eggs hatched yet?" "No. Jim -- " "Have the boys found my girl friend yet?" "No." "Okay. We're entering the mine tunnel," Jiro said. "Good luck," the voice in the sky said. "And, Jim -- " For an instant, frantic anxiety was revealed in the voice. "Yes, sir." "Take care, Jim," the voice said, fading out. "Yes, sir." Jiro said. T he detail moved forward into the tunnel. Just inside the entrance, the beams of the powerful lights mounted on top of the helmets revealed two more dead miners. "Why didn't they send somebody out here to pick up these bodies?" Overman asked. "They did send out a ship," Jiro answered. "I was on it. Two men left the ship through one of the locks and were killed. Two more men were lost recovering the bodies of the first two." "Those damned things -- " Overman said. "If we find this on the moon, what do you suppose we will find on Mars? Or on Jupiter? Or on Saturn?" Ed asked. The tall man's voice held depths of sudden gloom. "Or on the path to the stars?" No one attempted to answer this question, 'but it seemed to each man on this mission that the question intensified and deepened the feeling of cold, creeping through armor and plastiskin suits, that had appeared upon touching the surface of the moon and which now was growing even colder as they moved deeper and deeper into the mine tunnel. This was a strange kind of cold. As if the cold were some alien life form of an incredible kind, the skin of a human being seemed to try to pull away from it. "Brrr! It's cold in here!" voices whispered over the radio. The tunned widened and became a great cavern with large pillars left to support a  roof of stone somewhere overhead. Here the miners had found a large body of almost pure ore. At the far end of the cavern, a huge mechanical digger squatted. It had been brought piecemeal from Earth and had been assembled here. His light catching the digger, Jiro stopped. "One miner lived long to get into a plastiskin dome outside and to report by radio what had happened. This miner was one of a crew of four on that digger." Jim swept the beam of his light around the huge machine and counted three unmoving objects that had also come from Earth. "One, two, three. Ah, yes, there they are," he said, counting. His light swept up to the wall above and beyond the digger. Blackness was there. The wall was missing. Part of it had fallen inward and now formed a rock slide that almost covered the mechanical monster. Another part had fallen in another direction and was not now visible. "That blackness up there, this doesn't feel to me like just the absence of light," Overman's voice came. "It feels like a blackness that exists in its own right." "I agree with you," Jim Jiro said. "But we have to go into it, no matter what it looks like." Carefully, the detail picked its way over the fallen rock until each man stood at the top of the slide. Beyond was blackness deeper than the heart of night, a kind of blackness that seemed to swallow up the beams from the lights worn on the helmets of the men. "There's a cavern here," Overman's whisper came. "Can you imagine that right here in front of us, invisible to us, is actually some thing , perhaps a city, perhaps a gigantic machine, perhaps many small machines, perhaps villages and towns, perhaps many, many forms IF of life, all created out of an energy that exists at so high a frequency we can't detect it?" His voice was tight with growing tension. "I can imagine a pit filled with rattlesnakes," Ed's voice came, also in a whisper. "Each with his tail buzzing. That's what this place feels like, inside me, where I feel!" "We've stillgot to go into it," Jiro said. He went forward cautiously feeling his way down the slide. There, beyond the broken rocks, he found a smooth floor. On the slide above him, a man screamed a warning. J iro turned his eyes quickly. What looked like a spear that was ten feet long was coming hurtling out of the darkness. At the middle of the slide, it struck a man. The point of the spear went through the chainmail armor, went through the inner suit of plastiskin, went into the man's body, went through it, put a bulge in the armor at his back, then flared in incandescent fury as beams from the flashlight weapons struck it. " -- I saw what happened!" a man stuttered. "Eight or ten of those devils f -- formed themselves into a single s -- spear!" The man who had been struck was already falling. Like a rag doll, he tumbled down the rock slide. The falling body started several small slides. When the body reached the floor, sliding rock fell over it, covering it. "There's another spear, just starting to form!" Overman yelled. Jiro saw the spear come into existence. Little objects that looked like flying saucers in miniature seemed to merge and to become one. The single being that resulted began to elongate and to take on the shape of a needle-pointed spear. Beams from the flashlights caught it as it took on shape. Light as bright as that of a small sun flared in the darkness of this, cavern, revealing an enormous space that seemed to have only one object in it. Reaching for the switch to shift his transmitting frequency to that of the ship now so far away, Jiro suddenly caught the action. He switched back to the unit frequency. "Did anybody else see that ship -- " he began. "Right over there! A ship! One that was built on Earth! Did anybody else see it?" He cut out the transmitter and waited for a reply. Sudden blasting static tore at his ears. In this static, confused and alarmed men called to each other in sounds that had no meaning. Then the static was gone and a new -- and familiar -- voice was shouting across the moon cavern. "Just lay your guns down, gents," the voice was saying" "Lay your guns down and put your hands up into the air and walk over here to the ship and come inside!" The voice was that of Nellie Moll. "And don't think that armor is going to save your hides! Because what we have right here -- Go on, show him what I mean!" Nellie Moll's voice continued. From the ship, light flashed. What followed was here soundless, but on Earth it would have been the crack of a rifle, the scream of a bullet and the thud of the steeljacketed projectile striking and going through linked mail armor as if it were paperboard. "I'm hit," Overman's voice came, in a whisper, while both Nellie Moll and the static were still. "No, don't try to help. Nothing -- nothing to be done -- " Overman's body was falling as he was speaking. Like a somewhat plump rag doll, he tumbled as he fell. When he struck the floor, slides of rock following behind flowed over him too. "I'm going to turn the static back on, so you won't be able to tell anybody anywhere what's going on here," Nellie Moll continued. "I'm also going to turn on a light. All I want to see is you boys walking toward me, with your hands high over your heads. And in case -- in case you don't feel like walking, my little friends will be out there to help you!" Harsh, grating noices that Nellie Moll thought were laughter came over the radio. As Jiro was frantically switching back to the transmitter that would put him back into contact with the ship in the sky, the static roared back into existence and became a continuous rattling roar in his ears. VI I n the great ship in the sky, a baldheaded man sat hunched in front of a microphone. Sweat covered his face. "Calling the moon detail," he said over and over again. "Can you hear me, moon detail? Can you hear me? Come in Jim Jiro. Come in, please." In an effort to hear any answer, however faint, he had cut out the loud speaker and had gone to earphones. Listening, he heard over and over again, the grinding noise. "That damned static!" His eyes went to the communications officer of the ship. "It's coming from the moon sir," the communications officer repeated. "We can't do anything about it. Every frequency we can use for moon communications is jammed, sir." "What can we do?" "Nothing, sir, except wait until itlets up or is turned off. It is being done deliberately, sir, by somebody, to block our communications." The face of the bald-headed man became a mass of wrinkles. He glanced at his watch. 'Two hours and twenty minutes since I heard from them!" he muttered. Behind him, an admiral shifted his position. Hastily the bald-headed man spoke again into the microphone. "Jim 'boy, speak to me," he repeated, again and again and again. His voice was becoming an angular and as criss-crossed with wrinkles as his face. He was using the special communications unit which had been set up in the main cabin of the great ship. Part of this unit was designed IP to carry on moon communications. These frequencies were jammed. Other frequencies, used to continuously monitor the possible hatching of three small black eggs in a special incubator, while hampered by the moon static, were still operational. "Answer me, Jim, boy," the baldheaded man said, over and over again. Out of the corners of his eyes, he warily watched the other three men present in the cabin. One of these men wore the uniform of an admiral of the space forces. The second was wearing ordinary business clothes but had the clasped hand symbol of authorments Council -- in his buttonhole. The third was also in ordinary street clothes but in his buttonhole he had the caduceus of the ments Health Service. W hen the baldheaded man sighed and turned to check the receiver monitoring the hatching of three eggs on Earth, the admiral watched him closely. When he had finished checking with the technician at the Earth receiver, the admiral spoke to him, asking a question. "Sorry, sir," the baldheaded man said. "Nothing as yet from either place." "How long before you anticipate a definite report from your detail on the moon?" the admiral asked. "It's impossible to do anything but guess, sir. Our man in charge of the detail, Lieutenant Jim Jiro, is a most competent individual, sir. I don't know what kind of a situation he has run into down there in that cavern but I'm sure he can handle it if anyone can. You will have a report as soon as it comes, sir. In the meantime -- " He flicked on the speaker grinding static. "This is all we're getting." The admiral considered this information. His face was grim and bleak. "Ah, well. Ah, yes. Static." He glanced around the room. "I want to mention, gentlemen, that if these -- ah -- devils, monsters, or whatever they are -- are shown to be a threat to human life or to -- or to human expansion in the Solar System or to human development of the lunar resources in an orderly manner, then they are under my jurisdiction." When he had finished speaking, the admiral's lips closed in a knife edge line. "I want to remind you also that I am responsible for the safety of human life in space," the admiral continued. "Then it ali depends on how we define these creatures," the man with the clasped hands symbol in his buttonhole began. "They have not been defined by the Supreme Council as being a large-scale threat to human life," the baid-headed man said quickly. "Believe me, I am not defending them. It is that -- " "It is what, Urban?" the admiral asked. "It is that I have a detail down there on the moon," the baldheaded man answered. "I see," the admiral said. For a split instant, his grim face softened. "Well, I can certainly sympathize with you. Once, when I was a young man, I had to -- to sacrifice a detail -- " "Sir!" Real alarm sounded in the voice of the bald J headed man. "There are times when we must disregard personal feeling," the admiral continued. "But we as yet don't know what they are," the man wearing the caduceus said. "They may be regarded as over-sized microbes, as huge germs that posses very unusual qualities but which are basiccally bacteria. I have been commissioned by the World Governments to investigate all bacterial threats -- # The face of the admiral turned red. 'The man with the clasped hands A symbol in his buttonhole spoke for the first time. "And before we take action of any kind, we have to exhaust every possibility of making friends with them. Remember, World Governments represents everyone in the Solar System." His voice was pious and his face was benevolent. "We didn't make friends with the sabertooth tiger or with the cobra," the admiral said. The face of the man wearing the claspedhands syrnpol lost some of its benevolence. "We didn't make friends with the germs of anthrax or syphilis or tuberculosis," Caduceus said. The three men had far to much rank to stoop to personal quarreling. They remained very polite yet each urged his own course of action. And each was determined to have his own way. The earphones the bald-headed man was wearing cut off most of the conversation from him. Again and again, he spoke into the microphone, "Calling moon detail. Jim, baby -- " No answer came through. Now and again he tried to make himself believe that he was actually hearing a voice in the heavy static pounding in his ears but each time he knew it was only the voices of the three men in the cabin growing louder and louder. Of the three men, the bald-headed man feared the voice of the admiral the most. They were in space where the admiral had real authority. Then he was aware that the admiral was really speaking to him. "Yes, sir," he said, hastily. "Any news yet, Urban?" the admiral asked. "No, sir." "Well, I suggest you continue trying to contact your detail, to order your men to withdraw," the admiral said. "Yes, sir. But, sir -- " "You have one hour," the admiral said, glancing at his watch. "But -- " If you can't make contact with them in one hour, we must assume they are dead," the admiral said. "You lousy -- " The bald-headed man caught himself. Only his face revealed what he was feeling. "Carry on, Urban," the admiral said. IF "Jim, baby -- " the bald-headed man began. As he was speaking, he was aware that the technician on duty at the receiver constantly open to receive news about three small black eggs was waving frantically to him. "What is it?" "Sir, they are trying to get to you from Earth, to say that the eggs are hatching." # #o you see how it is, Mr. Jiro," Nellie Moll said. "Pull off the ships outside, and I will take my little friends and leave. They're going to take me and my two helpers here -- " She nodded toward Mole-face and Haircut sitting beside her at the table in the cabin of the space ship in the cavern. "They're going to take us back to their world with them. They say there are lots of things they can learn from humans. I'm going to teach them all about how it is on Earth." Sweating heavily, she was stinking too. With a small cigar clamped between her teeth, she looked more than ever like a fat sow that had learned how to use tobacco. Sitting opposite her at the table, Jim Jiro was fighting the impulse to vomit What was left of his detail was sitting against the wall behind him. Weaponless, their helmets gone they looked a little like men who had fought their last battle -- and knew it -- and now were waiting for the headsman to come and put them out of their miseries. They had surrendered; they had dropped their weapons; they had been walking across the cavern with their hands in the air as they had been ordered, when a spear twentyfive feet long had hurled itself at them. It had penetrated through the bodies of four men before it had stopped. When the spear had withdrawn, something that had looked like a battleaxe with a blade five feet long had come at them, cutting through armor, plastiskin suits and through bodies with equal ease. The axe had slaughtered seven men before a gasping Nellie Moll had managed to stop it. Or she claimed she had stopped it. Jiro wondered if she had sent it out in the first place. "How much control do you actually have over these -- ah -- " His gaze went up to the ceiling. Up there, in spots the paint had peeled away, revealing the dull metal. Jim Jiro felt his flesh crawl within the plastiskin suit he was wearing. Between him and the ceiling, an invisible life form watched him. He had the vague impression that between him and the steel plate were thousands of microscopic eyes that the whole vast swarm of alien life had compressed itself into small size and had come into the ship. Every one of those eyes hated him. Perhaps they hated all humans. Jiro brought his gaze down to look at Nellie Moll. If he had not been so sick already nothing could sicken him further, the sight of this monstruous creature would have IF done the job. Her face was sweating grease. On her lap was the inevitable knit bag she had been carrying the first time he had seen her. "Do they boss you, or do you boss them?" Jiro said. Rage wrinkled her face and glared in her eyes. She fumbled in the knit bag. "I'm boss!" She told Jim Jiro. "Don't you ever make any mistake about it. I made a deal with them, and I'm boss." From the knit bag she took the same miniature radio set he had seen her use before. "You up there!" she shouted. "Oh, I forget about the static. You!" She jabbed Mole-face in the shoulder, and he flinched and tried to draw away from her. "Go shut off that static. No! On second thought, Jiro might be trying to trick me to turn it off, so he could get a message through to somebody up above him." Mole-face had started to rise. "Well, make up your mind, Nell," he said sitting down. "Well," Jiro said, looking at her. "What do you mean -- well?" she demanded. "How'd you get here, Nellie?" he asked, ignoring her outburst. "We borrowed a ship. I thought, I mean P figured -- " She choked on the words she was trying to use. "You thought you could oome here and take on board every Tame George in this cavern," Jiro said. "Then you could take them back to Earth and use them to make yourself the biggest pig in the criminal mudhole." He nodded to himself. "Yes, I see where it could have worked. The person Who controls these alien monsters can be mighty big on Earth." J iro looked up at her. She was about to choke. Sitting beside her, Mole-face and Hair-cut looked sick. "But instead of getting a shipload of Tame Georges, the devils trapped you. Isn't that the way it worked, Nellie?" Jiro said. Animal noises came from her lips as she tried to speak. "And now what they really want is a ship to get them out of the Solar System. Is that it, Nellie?" "Y -- yes. T -- they say they can fly without a ship, but to go from the moon to the Earth, they would need a ship. To reach their home world, they must have a vessel. They say they can make changes in this ship so it will get them home, if we will give them time. They say they came here in a ship a long time ago, but crashed it trying to land." Her voice was a mushy sound halfway between the grunt of a pig and the squeak of a mouse. "And just when you were ready to leave, several ships appeared in the moon sky and took up positions in such a way that you can't get out of here without being seen?" "Y -- yes," the pig-mouse voice said. "So now they are trying to trade our lives -- my men and me -- for safe conduct passage out of the. system, taking you and your two friends with them?" "Y -- y -- yes," the pig-mouse said, again. "Do you suppose you will live past Pluto?" Jiro asked. "What? Past Pluto? Of course!" Anger flared in the pig-mouse eyes, then faded into growing doubt. "What do you mean by that? They've got to have me!" She pointed to the tiny radio. "They've got to have me as a go-between, they need me to talk through, without me -- well -- " She rolled her eyes as she tried to find words to hide the fear swirling inside her. "Past Pluto they won't need you," Jiro said, logically. "There are no humans past that planet. They won't need you to talk out there." He watched fear grow in the pig-mouse eyes -- and grow and grow. The two men with Nellie Moll were squirming too. "We'll make 'em leave us where they leave you!" she said. "Then we won't have to go past Pluto." Elation sounded in her voice. She had found a solution, she thought. 'There's one thing wrong with that," Jiro said. "I remember a back yard in Chicago. I remember kids at play there." His voice grew grim and hard and mean. "No, Nellie, you don't want to be left where human law can touch you. Nor do the two men with you!" "Damnit, why'd you have to kill them kids?" she screamed at Moleface and Hair-cut. "They were causing trouble!" Moleface screamed back at her. "You told us not to let anything stand in our way." "You damned fool, I didn't mean it that way!" she screamed back at him. For a time, the sound between them was a mixture of distorted noise. J iro looked toward the ceiling. Up there, spots of light that seemed to be microscopic eyes swirled into existence, then swirled out of existence. Nellie Moll screamed louder than Mole-face. He subsided  into grumbling silence. "All right then," she shouted at Jiro. "We'll leave with our friends. We'll go to their home world. And when they come back -- " "They're coming back?" Jiro asked. "I don't know if they are or not," she answered. "But we're going back with them. We're tired of the way things are being done on Earth. Just plenty tired!" "So am I," Jiro said. "You're one of the things I'm tired of!" "What?" Fat cheeks puckered in a fat face as she glared at him. "I'm also tired of hearing you scream," Jiro said. "What you want is safe passage out of here. You will take my detail and me with you and drop us later. You guarantee to leave the system, and we hope to hell you will never return!" "Hunh -- " "Cut off the static, and I will get in touch with my superior officer and find out if he and his superior with you." "So many wheels -- " she began. IF 'There's a whole hierarchy up above me. To them, I'm just a pawn in a game they are playing. Cut off the static, and I will talk to them, and I will let you talk to them." "If you're thinking of doublecrossing me -- " she began. "Then have your friends up there stick an icepick through me," he said, gesturing toward the ceiling. Weariness was suddenly on him. He was tired of Nellie Moll, tired of the eternally suspicious mind that she possessed, tired of trying to deal with such minds. 'Til just do that," she said, triumph suddenly in her voice. She spoke in the radio. The bird chirp that answered her said, "Yes. Yes. We understand you!" in English clear enough to be understood. Jiro stared at the little radio set. If thoughts moved through his mind, he kept them from showing on his face. He watched a spear materialize before his eyes. Thinking it was going to impale him, he caught his breath, but it hung in the air as a threat of impalement to come. There it is!" Nellie Moll said, triumphantly. "Just look at it. If you try to doublecross me, it'll go through you in an instant. In just an instant!" she repeated. Jiro looked at the sharp point that was aimed at his left eye. Behind him, along the wall, he could hear men stop breathing. "Cut off the static," he said. A t Nellie Moll's signal, Mole-face rose from the table and moved to an alcove in the cabin. A switch snapped softly. Jiro asked for his helmet, which contained the radio equipment. It was brought to him. The spear moved at the sight of it. He unsnapped the radio equipment and lifted it out. The spear backed away from him. He fitted the tiny received into his ear. The static was gone. "Calling the ship," he said. "Jim? a far-away voice answered "Jim -- " the voice faded. Jiro started to speak, then stopped. The spear was moving again. He could only catch little glimpses of it without the special goggles, but these glimpses told him it had taken up a position above his head. He started to speak again, then stopped hastily as Nellie Moll screamed and lurched to her feet. Penetrating the right eyeball, the spear had driven itself all the way through her head. Screaming, she fell backward. What happened next was so fast that Jiro was not certain what was happening until it was done. Spears seemed to come out of nowhere. One impaled Mole-face through the throat, the other struck Hair-cut somewhere in the neighborhood of the right ear. Both were hard driven. Both penetrated flesh, bone and brain matter. Both produced almost instant death. On the table, the little radio that Nellie Moll had used spoke again. "These were no longer needed," the little radio said. Each word was carefully spoken, each syllable clearly voiced. "We will deal directly with you." On the floor, the body of Nellie Moll was making thumping sounds as it went into spasmodic death contractions. Mole-tface lay without moving where he had fallen. Haircut was twisting and wiggling as he died. "Contact your chief," the little radio continued. "Make arrangements for our passage from your system -- " "Jim..." the phone in Jiro's ear whispered. "Jim -- " The voice had a pleading note in it. "Jim... The eggs have hatched... " "What?" Jiro said, automatically. "The eggs have hatched. They must have been hungry, Jim... They have killed at least thirty men so far, and we haven't got them rounded up yet. Jim -- the admiral... " The words coming from the ship in the sky firmed the decision that was already in Jiro's mind. "Drop bombs!" he said. "Drop several bombs! Blow this cavern and the monsters in it halfway to Mars!" "Jim!" the voice gasped from the ship. "These creatures are totally alien," Jiro continued. "There is no way to make peace with them, no way to live in the same world with them, perhaps no way to live in the same universe! They must be destroyed; 'it doesn't matter what the cost!"  Jim Jiro was aware of men rising to their feet behind him. He was also aware of microscopic lights swirling near the ceiling as the aliens up there began to grasp what was happening. "Drop bombs!" he continued. His voice was wooden, stiff, mechanical, but inside his heart a glow was forming. The glow came from the deep inner knowledge that belonged to all men who followed his calling -- that if necessary each could give his life that others might live. This knowledge was in him now, strengthening him for what was ahead. "Jim!" Urban's voice screamed at him from the ship. "There is no other way," Jiro continued. "There just isn't!" In spite of all his efforts to keep his voice wooden and mechanical, it caught and choked. "You have been a great leader and a fine friend, Mr. Urban." "Jim -- " Urban's voice was also cracked and broken. "Drop bombs -- " Jiro repeated. "It's already done, Jim!" Urban whispered, from the sky. "What -- " "When the admiral got the report on what had happened after the eggs had hatched, he refused to delay any longer. Bombs, Jim, the bombs are already on their way to your cavern!" In the cabin of the ship, Jim Jiro caught a glimpse of light near the ceiling. He steeled himsei'f for the icepick he thought was coming, then saw that the creatures there no longerhad any concern with them. They had understood his talk with the man in the sky and were now in mad flight from the ship and from the cavern. IF J iro turned to the men who had entered the cavern with him. He rose to his feet. "It is good," he said slowly. "That the few should die for the many to live." His gaze swept their faces, and he saw in the glows in their eyes the meaning their lips could not say: that they were in full agreement with him, that among many other facets, to be human was to find life. Could their peace corps have any other purpose than this? Coming over the radio from the ship in the sky was the sound of a man weeping. Up there, somewhere, a baidnheaded man was sitting hunched and bioken in front of a radio panel and was crying without shame. In the cabin of the great ship, an admiral and a man wearing a caduceus in his buttonhole and a man wearing clasped hands in his lapel were trying to console him. Weeping, he was having nothing whatsoever to do with them or with their consolations. Jiro listened. He turned to what remained of his detail. "Gentlemen of our peace corp," he said. "I give you peace -- " The floor under him leaped upward as the first bomb hit. Those watching on special screens in the ships in the sky over Crater # saw something come out of a great cleft many miles away from this crater, something that looked like a swarm of bees or of hornets or of miniature flying saucers. As this swarm emerged from an opening hidden in the cleft the first bomb hit. When they saw the bomb hit, when they saw the moon dust puff skyward, when they saw the moon surface fall in upon itself, revealing a great cavern there, the men of the ships knew what had happened. For this reason, if for no pther, they were very thorough in searching out and in destroying this swarm of alien life that had found a foothold on the moon. However, there was another reason for being thorough, this lay in the fact that a grim-faced admiral drove them relentlessly to their task of destruction. Though they did not know, the admiral himself was driven by a weeping man who was completely bald. A t the top of a barren cliff, looking outward toward all the suns of space, is a great shaft of granite. Inscribed and carved on Earth, it was brought to the moon and was securely anchored on the cliff above the rubble heap which is now a part of Crater #. The great shaft is like a defiant spear thrust at the infinite depths of space by men determined that nothing shall stop them in searching out the secrets of the far-away sky. On the shaft is a list of names and the following words: Heading the list is the name of Lieutenant Jim Jiro. IF  Special F eature If you can't come to Cleveland, here are a dozen second bests! L ast month in this space we were talking about the annual World Science Fiction Convention. So howsabout it, gang, are you going to catch the Tricon in Cleveland and hear L. Sprague de Camp's fascinating speech? De Camp is so impressive, just hearing him talk creases your trousers. Well, if you can't make the Cleveland scene, don't give up hope and switch to reading Westerns, you've still got a chance! You see, every year all around the country, fans put on eight or ten smaller conventions. One or twoday affairs -- local, regional conventionettes, usually as informal and relaxed as a well-worn pair of old sneakers. These regional get-togethers are scattered Hither and Thither (especially Thither, and not to mention Yon), and chances are good that one will be located near you. So lend an ear, or, I guess I mean, eye. New York and New Jersey This year. New York was host to a dual convention April #th and #th: the Eastercon and the Lunacon. This is the second time these cons have coincided -- one is formal, like with programs and all that, the other is little more than an excuse for a jolly-good-fun party. The two are sponsored by New York's two main fanclubs, the Fanoclasts and the Lunarians. Plus these, the first weekend in March each year is the date for the annual "open meeting" of Association in Newark , New Jersey). This particular bash is heavy on program traditionally, but it attracts a celebrity-studded attendance from the various writers and editors who live in and around these parts. The East Coast Philadelphia has a large, very old, very active fan group who sponsor each year an ambitious, programful con called the Philcon the second weekend in November. You'll find it in progress somewhere in the Hotel Sheraton in that city. Generally on hand are Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Lester Del Ray and L. Sprague de Camp (who lives in one of the suburbs of the City of Brotherly Love). Boston has its second annual Boskone in mid-March -- #'s Boskone was such fun, they seem to be making an annual bash out of it. As for Washington, D.C., the yearly Disclave is firmly established by now. Disclaves are held during the first half of May. Light on program but long on partying and a chance to talk with some interesting people. Of course some of these conventionettes will already have gone past before this column sees print, but they go on every year the same time so I hope you're taking notes? Down South The South, I'm sorry to say, being a Florida boy myself, is pretty skimpy on fan activities. The reason for this malaise is beyond conjecture... maybe all the fans do what I did years ago and move up to the Big City. Well, anyway, if you chance to be in the environs of Charlotte , North Carolina, any time around the latter half of August, you'll find something called the Deep Southern IV in progress. Since this is the fourth of these fannish hootenannies in Dixie, I hope its popularity eventually stimulates dormant communities in other portions of the South to sponsor comparable hoedowns -- like, say, in Texas or New Orleans. In the Midwest Moving deeper into the Interior, we find two small local affairs scheduled. There's the long-established Midwescon, renowned in song and story, whioh will be held in Cincinnati at a big motel long inured to such cataclysms. The date is the last weekend in June. Come on along and meet Robert Bloch and Wilson Tucker, if you've a mind. If you haven't, they each have half a one left and that should be plenty. Also, there's a new local con starting up this year, doubtless the first of many. This one will be in St. Louis . It takes place the terminal weekend of July, and rejoices in the charmin' folksy title of Ozarkon #. Woy Out West in Coliforny Always a lively state, fanwise, California has the popular Westercon every year, which wanders around from city to city like the homeless waif in a certain famous comic strip. I am informed by Andy Porter, a veritable fount of fannish information, that #'s Westercon site was Long Beach, Cal. This year's Westercon can be found in San Diego, come the July #th weekend. I don't think there's a smidgin of truth in the base allegation that the Westercon is homeless because it causes such a ruckus irate city fathers keep running it out of town on a rail: this is but an idle rumor, and I am quietly proud to be able to scotch it in the bud, so to speak. The Westercon, by the way, is one of the oldest of these regional clambakes (another point of resemblance with the wandering waif in the comic strip, who must be pushing forty by now). This year's Westercon will be the #th, by gad. You'll notice these local mishmashes are staggered, calendrically speaking, so as not to boorishly obtrude upon or otherwise cut into attendance at the yearly World Con, which is always held in the neighborhood of the Labor Day weekend. So what happens at a local con? Some are excuses to vacation for a long holiday weekend in congenial company, such as the Midwescon. You just loaf around for a couple of days of casual chit-chat interspersed with the acquatic disturbances of a snoozing attendee being hurled into the nearest swimming pool by rowdies. Others are formal, with programs and guest speakers and the whole bit. Take for example this which took place in Newark the first weekend in March. It was convened, most appropriately, with an address given by Willy Ley, the rocket man whose science articles have been a longstanding feature of Galaxy. There was also a rare screening of Fritz Lang's old film, Girl in the Moon , from the book by Thea von Harbou whose more famous Metropolis he turned into a cinematic classic of hoary vintage. nual clambake this year were of the opinion the most entertaining feature on the entire program was a panel discussion of "the commerscience fiction," between Jack Gaughan (Magazine and paperback cover artist), Henry Morrison (literary agent for science-fiction writers, myself among them), and Ted White (a fan writer just beginning to make a success writing sf professionally). The money angle to science fiction is one side of the business fans and readers rarely consider and seldom are aware of. It is, of course, as the panel pointed out, the vital factor. If a magazine doesn't sell, it goes out of business. If a publisher can't make money printing science fiction, he drops it. Hence this discussion was intriguing and interesting, whether due to novelty of concept alone or the stinging, epigram-laden wit of the speakers, I cannot say. Other regional conventionettes with formal programs offer similar fare. Speeches. Panel discussions, usually open to questions from the floor, as we say in parliamentary lingo. Screening of rare science-fiction films -- or sometimes advance showings of new, not-yet-released sciencenfiction movies. Auctions of books, magazines, original magazine covers and interior artwork. Not infrequently the distinguished fannishhistorian cum hardcover sf anthologist, Sam Moskowitz, gives a speech in his familiar, resonant, chandelier-shaking basso profundo. Moskowitz illustrates these with color slides projected on a screen. If you attend as many of these regional hootenannies as I do, you eventually exhaust the full spectrum of the Moskowitzian repertoire. I saw him cover (no pun intended) cover art on science-fiction magazines at Philadelphia, fanzine covers at New York's # Lunacon -- and what he IF will do for this year beggars the imagination. Mostly, though, whether the con has a formal program or is just a lazy weekend of carousal, the force motivating fans to get out of their accustomed weekend lethargy and attend is, simply, the pleasure of meeting and getting acquainted with folks who share their own passionate devotion to Our Favorite Brand of Entertaining Reading. To get right down to it, frail flesh affords few pleasures more intense, for the small-town science-fiction reader, than that of actually meeting in person the famous writers whose works he has read for many years. After following the literary ventures of Robert A. Heinlein or Poul Anderson or L. Sprague de Camp or Isaac Asimov or others of comparable magnitude -- you can imagine the thrill of meeting these demi-gods and talking (yes, actually talking) with such Olympian Beings. I can recall the puzzled feeling I got first meeting, many long years ago, the legendfraught John W. Campbell, Jr., and discovering that he was not, after all, twenty feet tall, but of the same calibre as ordinary, if lesser, mortals. You may get the same kick when you discover Ed Emsh or Fred Pohl or Jim Blish do not, after all, eschew the igorhiny of having a cup of coffee with a tongue-tied and enthusiastic admirer. They are just plain folks, gang, and get just as much of a kick out of meeting their admirers as you will out of meeting them. As Isaac Asimov confessed to me once, ablush with modest confusion: "You know, all year long I am just another Bostonian, but the convention gives me a " chance to be a celebrity , for at least one weekend out of the year!" You might be diffident about interrupting their aloof cerebrations to ask for an autograph... but you'll be pleased to discover they do not really mind granting the honor. And some professionals get so embarrassed at the unusual celebrityship thrust upon them only, on a convention weekend, they may actually ask you for your autograph! Magazine editors, in particular, are happy for the chance to mingle with their readership and thus find out (from the horse's mouth, as it were) exactly how the mag is going over with the average citizen who has to fork out a couple of coins each month to procure the latest number. Jovial illustrators like Jack Gaughan, the guy who does so many covers, enjoy talking with people who can intelligently discuss the artwork in science fiction. Keep in mind that most science-fiction writers, editors and illustrators work pretty much in a vacuum... they mingle and correspond with other professionals largely, and know how their peers feel about the current level of their work, but except for the handful of reader-letters printed in those very few magazines that have letter columns at all, they don't know first (hand how they are coming across with the consumer. So don't be hesitant about attending one of these conventionettes, if convenient to you. You'll find it a lot of fun -- it might even make a fan IF  Serial They were only two teen-agers, alone on hostile Mars . They couldn't hope to survive -- but they were surviving! F rom all the reading Dolph had done in his relatively short life, and from the same amount of observation of people, he had been more than entitled to conclude that any real rescue was years away, if it were ever to come at all. True, most of the people he had known personally were pleasant people who were fax from short either of What Has Gone Before .   Teen-ager Dolph Haertel was attempting to discover the secret of anti-gravity. He had three things going for him -- his intelligence; a family that encouraged research -- and the fact that he didn't know it was impossible, in the orthodox view of relativistic science. And so he succeeded. He fitted out his tree house with an anti-gravity generator and propelled himself on a tryout expedition to Mars. But there his luck ran out. The basic power tube was damaged in landing. It was irreplaceable on Mars -- and he had no way to get off Mars. Nor could Earth's much-vaunted space programs help him. Relying on chemical rockets, they were years behind schedule -- worst of all, no one knew he had gone. Or almost no one. Dolph's nearest neighbor teen-ager back home -- who happened to be a girl named Nanette -- had been let into his secret, just a little bit -- but enough so that, with what he had told her and what preliminary models he had left behind, she was able to follow him. She did... and now there were two teen-agers stranded on Mars! money or of good will -- people who would not hesitate to help someone in trouble if they could, or thought they could. By the same token, most of the fiction he had read had been about fantastically self-centered, unwashed people without a grain of human kindness even toward tjiemselves, who seemed to depart from prolonged acts of suicide only to strike out at the people around them. Between the two he struck a rough sort of balance... and concluded that on Mars he was on his own. His knowledge of the state of the art called space flight, as it had existed at the time he left Earth, was equally rough, but roughly accurate. There was no hope for a really adequate expedition for years to come, even on a crash basis, to rescue him -- which he could hardly hope for. Earth's technology simply wasn't up to it yet. In all this, he was quite right, but he had left out one factor, simply because he had never heard of it. That was not his fault; no example of it had turned up during his lifetime. It was that factor which newspapermen, in their brutal but not always cynical jargon, call The Baby Down the Well. To be sure, at first Dolph's and Nanette's parents had suspected the worst -- which, as Nanette had known automatically, meant an elopment, either with or without marriage. But time and lack of evidence disposed of (that awful notion -- time, lack of evidence and a no matter how they had zigged and zagged in the past, neither Nanette nor Dolph could have broken with their character and their backgrounds so completely and at the same time. Faiith had set in. r Le next horrible suspicion was kidnapping and murder. But no ransom notes arrived, and no bodies were found. Finally -- and with rising despair that any outsider would have mistaken for self-righteous fury -- the families concluded that the youngsters had simply gone camping and had lied about it (inventively, outrageously, but probably borrowing the fantastic elements from Something They Had Read) to gain time for an unusually long trip. But at long last this story, too, fell to the ground of its own weight, for there was no evidence for it at all. During all this time -- a matter of weeks -- the ground around both homes was literally strewn with clues which could point in only one direction -- the direction in which Dolph and Nanette actually had gone, and in which Nanette had honestly said' that they had gone. Since at bottom what both families wanted most in all the world was to have their children back safe and whole, they were finally left with no recourse but to believe in the only evidence, as well as in the honesty of their children. It took a long time, for none of the adults had any better opinion than Dolph had of how the authorities would greet such a story. But the time the families had taken to mull over the alternatives in private both stood in their favor and drove them out of themselves. They had done their best, with their own limited resources and that of the local police. Now they had to do more; and they did not stint. They sent telegrams to their senators and representatives. They appealed to the President and to N. A. S. A. big-wigs both in Washington and at Cape Kennedy. They made long-distance telephone calls to scientists in the space program. They pulled wires; and -- most courageously of all -- they talked, without pulling any punches, to the Press. The Press had heard it all and cried Hoax. To the papers and to television alike, it was only another Silly Season story, like the previous decade's obsession with flying saucers -- something to fill up space during the last of a hot summer, while important news tends to be slow because most of the world's movers and shakers are on vacation, and most readers and viewers are too fagged with the post-vacation blues to care whether what they are told is an important piece of news or an obvious piece of nonsense. During the Silly Season whiat 'both the press and the public most wants is someone to make fun of, to fed superior to. IF The two desperate Iowa families filled the hill nicely. They got the full treatment. Their nights were filled with despair; their days, with impotent rage. But not even the Silly Season lasts forever, and here and there several important people had already listened to the two families and had taken them seriously -- or had stopped to think what it might mean to the space program if they were taken seriously. In Washington, somebody high up in N. A. S. A. who knew Mrs. Haertel spoke soberly to somebody even higher. Slow machineries began to awaken from their summer sleeps. A mathematician in London who had been a renegade from relativity all his life read the garbled newspaper stories, covered eighteen pages of foolscap with calculations only two other men in the world could have any hope of following, and sent them by ordinary post to one of those men. His assistant prudently photographed the calculations before they were enveloped and sent the negatives, hidden under a postage stamp, to Moscow, where the other man was. (There are many different kinds of renegades in the world, and they do not always know when they are working together.) The man in Moscow brooded over them for a long and dreadful night and decided to risk his life, his career, his family and even his country on them -- though perhaps not exactly in that order. The lonely operator of a #foot radio telescope in the Australian outback focused his gigantic dishshaped antenna on Mars and picked up from, he could not tell where on that remote desert, traces of a signal which might have come from a small but heavily sparking electric motor, and began to compose a brief technical paper to be called "Irregular Broad-Spectrum Martian Probability Anomalies" for a journal called Proceedings of the Swiss Society for the Freedom of Ether , which in consequences would not be seen by anybody likely to be interested in it for decades to come. There was more -- most of it not known of at the time, and much of it still hidden in obscure files all over the world, some of it out of secrecy, some out of simple ignorance -- but all of it working, however siowly, in the same direction. A nd less slowly, because the pressures on it were greater, the Press found the Silly Season over and the story still standing... not only alive and unrefuted, but showing some signs of official interest, of being after all important:. The Press made inquiries of the appropriate officials, but was rebuffed without comment. This only made the story seem more likely to be important, after all. And with nothing official to go on, the Press was driven back to rediscovering the Baby Down the Well. The Press handled it like this: Space Scientist's Son, Girl-Friend Stuck on Mars? Sen. Hill , Committee Demand End to Secrecy on Mars Teen Flyaways Rumored Doomed on Red Planet;  Save Our Kids'; Mars Parent's Own Story Shiela Djarling Talks to Teens: Hill Committee Seeks Untold Mars History Cape Kennedy Scientists Seek Ways to Speed 'Project Ares' Flagship The world was indeed fully as bad a place as Dolph had assessed it to be -- indeed worse, for his memory encompassed no important war -- but all the same, let one Baby fall down a Well, and all the resources of technology are mustered to save it, while the rest of humanity, on the spot in spirit and passionately applying body-English from the sidelines like rooters at a billiards tournament, hangs upon the halfhourly bulletins from the Press, Well intentioned but stupid people sent the two anxious families money. Others turned up in droves simply to gape at their homes, or -- until police cordons stopped it -- to cut or dig souvenirs. More interviews were sought than the families could have granted even in a #-hour day devoted to nothing else. Thousands of persons who had never looked at the sky before in their lives could now point to where they thought Mars was, and it was astonishing how many times they were right A quasimystica! hobby called "the Mars vigil" captured a number of minor religious sects, especially in southern California (where the fact that Mars was a red planet also convinced some of the politically religious that the Children in the Sky were just more paTts of the great addition, of course, to the uncountable number of prayers offered in all the major churches of the world. B ut the element which gives the Baby Down the Well its suspense is the knowledge, lurking always at the back of everyone's mind, that there must soon come a time after which all the effort and all the hope will have been for nothing. Detective work far more thorough and scientific than any the families could even have engaged, let alone paid for, soon established within quite small limits of error what supplies Dolph and Nanette IF had taken with them -- and therefore, the maximum time they could be expected to stay alive, assuming (for the sake of hope) that they both had landed on Mars gently and without any hurt, loss or damage. It was immediately evident that the von Braun , the Ares Project's flagship, could not be completed within that time -- let alone launched upon a crossing it would then take the ship # days to make. (This fact, however, in no way discouraged the newspapers from sponsoring bus trips by high school science clubs to Cape Kennedy to watch the von Braun being built -- though there was very little to be seen from the distance over which the trippers had to look even after they reached their destination. The trippers themselves made fine copy -- almost as good as candid-camera or the man-on-the-street interviews. The television networks agreed.) And no amount of detective work, nor scientific research, either solo or in conference, did better than approach the margins of the discovery by which Dolph and Nanette had made the trip. This fact alone increased the urgency to rescue the youngsters to a pitch almost as high among scientists as it was in the families -- not only because the knowledge was wanted, but because the scientists suspected in Dolph a mind of a caliber not seen on Earth since the death of Norbert Weiner, or perhaps even the immortal Hermann Weyl. After all, Dolph had made the discovery which (the scientists had not -- and could not even with the most important fact in their possession, a fact that Dolph hadn't had: that the thing could be done and had been done. The time ran out, inexorably. Toward the end, the New York Times began to post in Time Square the number of days the youngsters had left, and then, the number of hours. For the last day of all, the Times put up the red ball impaled upon a pole, ' the fall of which usually indicated nothing more momentous than the election of someone to the presidency of the United States. This time, its fall would mark the expiration of the last calculated moment of life for the Children in the Sky. The world waited. The ball fell at #:# P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, twenty-nine days after Dolph had left the Earth. A huge, silent crowd had gathered to watch. With its falling, there was a concerted sigh -- almost a whisper of it left individual lips, but magnified by numbers into a sort of wave-like moan. For the rest of that month, flags flew at halfmast all over the world. No one can estimate how many millions watched the televised memorial services. Then the flags returned to their usual positions, and the production of memorial books and pamphlets -- and souvenirs -- began. With the coming of fall, the serious business of running the world began to come back into the headlines. The case of the Children in the Sky was over. Or so it seemed. ei D olph must (have reached Nanette within six or seven seconds after the crash, though to him it seemed an eternity of running and searching. The impact had reduced her crate to a jumble of planking and other, more anonymous debris, but the Martian starlight was more than bright enough for him to see her inert body under the rubble. He wasted no time. Snatching off his respirator, he clapped it over her face, secured it and heaved her up out of the wreckage by the shoulders. If it had taken him an eternity to get to her, there was no word for how long it seemed to take him to drag her back, through the bitter, blasting cold in which he could no longer even breathe -- let alone dare to gasp -- to the dubious haven of his own craft. Bundling her awkward, incooperative form through his airlock was also maddeningly time-consuming; by now his head was swimming. But somehow, he got them both inside. Then he just sat and panted. He had, after all, gone out for exercise. But this much had almost (been fatal. After a while, however, he had recovered enough to take a look at the girl. She was in bad shape. To begin with, she was so blue with cold, and probably with oxygen starvation, that he could not tell where her blueness was also due to bruiser -- as a lot of it surely was. That landing had been hard. If she also had broken bones, or even more serious injuries, he would be unable to guess at them until she recovered consciousness and became able to tell him where and how she hurt worst. For the time being, there was nothing he could do but keep feeding her pure oxygen through the mask, and warm her up. For the last purpose, the blanket alone wouldn't do. Without a single second thought, he crawled under it with her. It was more than a little like bedding down with an extra-large rubber ice-bag. Nevertheless, toward morning, just before dawn, she seemed to be warmer, and Dolph, who was very cold, managed to sleep a little. He was awakened again by the morning sandstorm. Afterwards, Nanette stirred a little and muttered something unintelligible underneath the oxygen mask. Dolph got up promptly, removed the mask and shut off the oxygen. Then, with creaking muscles, he set about making a meager breakfast. Nanette, now looking normally pink except for a magnificent black eye, continued to snooze peacefully. He did his best not to disturb her. She needed the sleep -- and he needed more time to think. For him, it was very clear, the case of the Children in the Sky was far from over. E xcept for the black eye, and a few other, more extensive bruises whose location Nanette refused to specify, there turned out to be IF nothing wrong with Nanette that oxygen and warmth could not cure. But it had been a near thing. Her crate had leaked enthusiastically during her crossing to Mars so that she had lost consciousness while still trying to land. That was what had caused the crash which luckily had been caused solely by a short fall under Mars' weak gravity, not by any still-uncanceled momentum. It was still possible, of course, that she also had gotten a severe radiation dose during her crossing. But as the days went by without her losing any hair, turning pale, or developing any nausea, Dolph decided to discount that. Except for the bruises, she was almost glaringly healthy -- and hungry. "Well, did you bring any food?" he demanded. "As much as I could pack into my ship. Remember, it was smaller than yours." "Meaning that I'm going to have to split with you," Dolph said. "And that probably goes for oxygen and everything else, too. Wuff! Nan, it was nice of you to come after me -- and darned smart, too -- but we're in a spot. You shouldn't have done it." "I'm here," Nanette said prac -- and cooperate. If it helps, I'm sorry I didn't give your notes on the anti-gravity to somebody, and sorry I didn't t hink ahead about a lot of other things, too. But I didn't, and here I am." "Okay -- okay. Now we have to stay alive. I guess the next thing to do is look through that crash of yours and see what we can salvage." "Good! Let's go." "Not so fast! And, Nan -- try not to bounce so. It wastes oxygen. Believe me, we've got to think about every move here before we make it." "I'm sorry," Nanette said, so instantly contrite that Dolph felL like thirty-three different kinds of heel. "I'll wait for orders." "It's not a matter of orders," Dolph said, and then had to stop and wonder just how to explain to this burstingly alive girl that she might die any minute in any one of hundreds of ways -- as she almost had several times already. "The first thing is, I've got only one mask, and only one set of heavy clothes, and only one pair of goggles. You don't dare go outside without those things. Outside is -- well, it's like the worst features of the top of Mount Everest, plus the worst of a salt desert like Muroc Dry Lake. It's warm enough around noon, but except for that, it's deadly." "But I already knew that," Nan said in some surprise. "I brought goggles and a mask -- I just didn't think to put thenl on while I was landing. They're out in the wreck, along with my oxygen bottles and my sewing kit." "Oh, Well, I'll have to go and get them myself. If they're all right, after that we probably can go out together." "Fine," Nanette said. "While you're gone, I'll make breakfast." "No, no!" "Now what's the matter?" A gain Dolph had to swallow and start over. "We've already had breakfast, Nan -- and lunch and dinner, too. One meal a day is the rule here. And no cooking. While it lasts, we eat the stuff as it comes out of the can. Luckily those field rations heat themselves when you open them, and we can use any extra heat we get. Don't waste any by trying to dress things up. We just can't afford it." For a moment Nanette looked as though she were about to frown, but instead, she smiled slightly. "All right, I'll forget cooking. Maybe I'll dust -- no, I guess that comes under the head of bouncing. Well, at least I won't have to worry about dieting. Back home I was getting kind of pudgy." She paused, looked at Dolph critically, and then laughed outright. "You look like a dog trying to figure out a porcupine! Go ahead, Dolph. I'm human, and I'll be all right, really I will." "That's good," Dolph said doubtfully. The girl was in many ways a bigger problem than Mars was, and one about which he knew far less. But since he had no choice, he dressed and went out anyhow, trying to distract himself by wondering what he would find in the wreokage -- and what he would find when he came home. He did not notice that this was the first time he had called the surviving packing-crate "home." He was, moreover, totally unprepared for what he found when he did get back. Nanette had found the root of the irregularity in the pump cycle, which had been eluding him for weeks. "What was it?" "Nothing to it," she said calmly. "You forgot to oil it, that's all." "But -- what did you oil it with?" "I rubbed the axle-points against my nose. If I've got to have a greasy nose for the next ten years, I might as well use it for something. Sit down and stop gaping, Dolph, and show me what you salvaged." I t had been too much to hope that Nanette's power tube had survived her crash, and indeed it hadn't. But there was a surprising amount of supplies and tools that had, and with this plus an additional person the interior of Dolph's crate changed from being almost intolerably crowded into being impossible. After thinking the matter over, Dolph evolved a solution which also gave him a use for some of the lumber from the derelict. "I think the best place to build it would be on the airlock side," he added. "But what? It'll just be in our way.' S "No, it won't, not much, and it might help to keep us our way out. Maybe you've noticed that the sandstorms always blow from west to east -- just like weather on Earth -- and the airlock faces north. Some day we're going to have a really big blow, and the sand might dune up against the airlock. If I IF put the leanto on the north side and put its entrance on the east, we'll have some protection against being sanded in." "Makes sense," Nanette admitted at once. "Also it gives us a longer shadow." "A what? I mean, sure it does, but what of it?" "The sand blows almost in a line -- horizontally. If the house is twice as long as it is now, it'll catch twice as much sand against its front and give use twice as wide a lowsand lane in the bade." "So it would," Dolph said. "And that might 'be worth a lot to us some time. Sharp." "Thank you." "In fact if you hadn't been sharp you wouldn't be in this mess at all," he added. Her slightly smug expression evaporated. "Well, let's get on it. With what's left over from the lumber, we can put up a windmill -- I think that old Exide's past due for a recharging." They were not able to pressurize the leanto. Dolph would have liked to, not only for the extra living space it would give them, but also because it would afford them separate sleeping quarters. Dolph was not greatly worried about the proprieties at this distance from home, and in any event, between the exhausting life they were forced to lead and the thoroughness with which Nanette had absorbed a rather Puritan upbringing, he doubted that romance was going to be one of his major troubles. Nevertheless, they were the only human beings on an entire planet -- and very little on this whole rusty world could be more dangerous to them than a pregnancy. But he could not build the new structure to sufficiently dose tolerances to caulk it, even had he had enough extra pitch to do the job. He had to settle for moving more than half of their possessions into the shed, which at least gave them noticeably more floor space in their present living quarters. The windmill-generator worked well, which emboldened Dolph to try at last the production of oxygen by electrolysis of tumible-lichen sap. This worked too, thus confirming his theory that the sap was largely water; but it also confronted them with a problem which he should have anticipated, but hadn't. Once the sap was gone, it left behind a brown, gummy residue which was a prime nuisance to clean out. And once he had his still going -- thus also solving their drinking water problem, at least for the foreseeable future -- the resin accumulated in that, too. A he said thoughtfully. "To eat," Nanette suggested. Nothing on Mars discommoded her so much as her own stomach. "I'd hate to try it. If the chinks in the leanto weren't so big I'd try it for caulking." "Stuff them with dried lichen. We've got bales of the stuff outside, even allowing for what blows away." "It won't pack solid enough. But maybe... hmm. You know. I'll IF  c W. bet that if we shredded it fine enough and used this goo for a binder, it might make passable paper. "Goody," Nanette said with heavy irony. "Then we can keep a diary." "If I keep one, I'll Tell All," Dolph said. It was remarkable how Nanette's presence cheered him, no matter how she complicated his problems -- or perhaps it was not so remarkable after all. "But I was still thinking about caulking. We can smooth' out the sand in the leanto for a tray to make the paper in, and turn It out in big sheets -- we don't have to care if it isn't uniformly thick -- and plaster it up on the walls, as many layers of it as we need. Then we can caulk and pressurize. I'll bet it would take less than a month." "Better had," Nanette said ambiguously. "Wallpaper on Mars! Well. I vote for a floral pattern." "Why?" "Because I'm going to live there, so I get to choose." "Idiot. Let's go try it." But her suggestion that the resin might be good to eat continued to work on him, somewhere at the back of his mind. Sooner or later -- sooner, now that Nanette was aboard -- they were indeed going to have to try the tumbledichens as food and pray that they were indeed edible. He decided to attempt the experiment alone and in private; there was no point in jeopardizing both of them. When? Not, at least, until after the wallpapering project was finished. By then, Nanette would have had enough experience of Mars, and enough warning of the traps he had encountered before her arrival, to have at least a good chance of surviving alone as he would have had... and a rather better chance than they had of surviving for any length of time as a couple. The obvious need to keep this plan a secret made facing up to it doubly hard. Somehow he was not helped by the fact that the wallpapering project was a resounding success and made Nanette as cheerful as a puppy at the prospect of having her own quarters. He wonwered if, after ah, she wasn't just a little too cheerful, too optimistic about living on Mars, to take the problems of survival there alone with enough seriousness. Wouldn't it be better to wait until -- But he recognized this line of reasoning in time as the excuse it was, and grimly fought it off. When the appointed time came, he was not exactly ready to greet it gladly, but at least he was still determined. Nanette was in "the next apartment", earnestly picking up an object from here to set it down there -- a feminine rite which these cramped quarters had at last taught Dolph to appreciate. He was facing about half an ounce of tumblelichen sap, freshly squeezed from the press and hence quite cold. He thought he how understood, too, how Socrates had felt when faced with the hemlock. Taking a deep breath, he tossed the swallow down with a most unphilosophic grimace. Then he held his breath and waited. T he response was not long in coming. It astonished him completely. Whatever he had expected, it had not been this. Gradually, but with increasing speed, there crept through his body a feeling of total well being. He was no longer hungry, no longer thirsty, no longer chilly, no longer even tired. Yet it was more than just an adding up of negatives: he felt strong, alert, as ready for anything as he had ever felt in his life -- and he had seldom been ill. He wondered: Is this what it's like to be drunk? But he had experimented with alcohol once, and it felt nothing like this. For one thing, it had made him feel happy, almost gay, whereas there did not seem to be any emotional edge to the sensation caused by the sap. For another, it had made 'him giddy; well, he could test that. He walked across the room and back; no, no dizziness. He noticed that he was still holding his breath and let it out. "It was several seconds before he realized that he felt no desire to take another. He looked at his watch, and allowed another ten seconds to go by; fifteen; then twenty. He still felt not the slightest need to breathe. A marvelous suspicion smote him, and he called out: "Nanette!" "What is it? I can barely hear you." "Come here a minute, will you? Important." After he called, his diaphragm IF gave a small heave -- just enough, he would guess, to replace the air he had used in calling. Then his chest was quiescent again. "Dolph -- Dolph, what's the matter? You look so strange!" "How so? I mean, in what way? Do I look sick, or have I turned green or something like that? "No, you don't look any different that way," Nanette said. "It's just your expression -- like you'd just seen Banquo's ghost or something. What is it?" "I don't know yet, but it could be something big. Do me a favor and take my pulse. Tell you why afterward." "Sure, but -- oh!" She snatched her hand back. "What now?" "It's nothing. You're cold. It startled me." "I thought so. Go ahead with the pulse." She took it and then stared at him incredulously. Then she took it again. "This is crazy," she said. "It isn't more than twenty to the minute. Dolph -- you are sick!" "No, I don't think so. With a pulse of twenty I ought to be dead. But I feel fine. In fact I feel great. And I think our lives have just been saved. If you watch me, you'll notice I'm not breathing either, that is except when I start talking to you." "If you don't stop being mysterious," she said grimly, "I am going to pick up the nearest blunt instrument and make you good and sick. Talk!" G rinning, Dolph told her of his experiment with the sap. She was furious; it took him the better part of ten minutes to get her calmed down. "I know, I know. Everything you say is true, but all the same it had to be tried. And look, Nanette, this stuff is better than food. It stows down the metabolism -- stows it way down, about five times. We'll use that much less food, that much less oxygen, that much less water. And there's something else. Ill check this very carefully, believe me, but it might even make it possible for us to live outside without masks, at least for a few hours at a time during the day. We'U save on heat, too -- I'll bet my body temperature's going to wind up at about half normal -- and we'll be glad of that in about a year." "Why a year?" "Because then it'll be winter. The Martian seasons are four times as long as they are on Earth." "Hmm. I still think it was foolhardy, but... I want to try it." "No," Dolph said firmly. "Don't give me that! If you can make a nitwit of yourself, I can too. And if there are any benefits, I ought to be entitled to them." "No argument -- but the experiment's less than an hour old. The stuff could kill me. Even if it doesn't there may be longterm bad effects -- what the doctors call chronic toxicity. And then there's this business of feeling so good; it's like a drug. Maybe the sap's addicting." "Even if it is, there's obviously plenty," Nanette said, but she did not press the point. "Okay, I'll hold off for a little while, anyhow. How long are you going to insist upon?" "Oh -- say a week. Not really long enough, but it'll have to do. I want to experiment with the dose, too; maybe I took more than I need, or -- well, we just don't know yet. What now?" Nanette had cocked her head and had stopped listening to him with more than half her mind. "Listen to the wind. That's not just the evening blow. It's getting worse." After listening a moment for himself, Dolph had to agree. "I wonder what that means?" "Didn't you say we had a year to go until winter? Then we're just at the beginning of autumn here. This is such a small planet, the winds must change pattern pretty sharply with the seasons. And I think it's just started to change." "I think you're right." Dolph strode to the porthole and looked out. "Look at that sand! It's getting thicker every second. This could be a bad one." Nanette nodded soberly. "If you ask me," she said, "that week is going to be a long one." IX N anette was right. That night's sandstorm was only half an hour longer than usual, but the next morning's was better than an hour longer; and as the week wore on, the situation worsened steadily. By the end of the week, there was only about an hour around noon (and, presumably, another around midnight) when the air was quiet and clear. It was evident that the porthole would be covered shortly -- and after that, perhaps the house itself. Their only hope lay in the fact that the wind continued always to blow in the same direction -- though now from the south. Both the change and its constancy baffled Dolph for quite a while, but finally he thought he saw glimmerings of an explanation. "Look," he said, drawing a circle on a scrap of left-over wallpaper. "Say this is Mars, looking down on it at the North pole at the time we arrived -- just before the equinox, when the equator is warmer than the poles, just like it is all year around on Earth. While it's like that, the air ought to circulate like it does on Earth. Here's the direction of rotation, counter-clockwise. Now -- " he quickly sketched in something like a ship's propeller, its center at the pole, its blades bent away from the direction of rotation -- "that gives us a travelling wave up in the stratosphere, a jet stream, like this, going in and out toward the pole twice a day but blowing in the same direction the planet rotates. Of course that never touches the ground, but -- " he put in four ovals trailing after the "blades" of the "propeller" -- "it trails four high-pressure spots out toward the equator, and those give us our dawn and dusk winds. If we IF were farther north or south, say at about forty-five degrees of latitude as we were in Iowa, we'd hit lowpressure cells that would have the same effect. So that's why the weather always moves from West to East, just as it does at home." "Which is why the wind is blowing steadily north now," she agreed liant." "No, it isn't idiot. Now winter is coming on, and winter on Mars isn't like home, because then one Martian pole is warmer than the equator -- which never happens at home." He drew another circle. "Here's Mars in winter. Then the wind blows from one pole to the ether, going along the ground from the cold pole to the warm one, and back up and over through the stratosphere. And it'll go right on like that through the soltice to the next equinox." She considered this in silence for a few moments. "It makes sense, all right," she said at last. "And I don't think I like it, Dolph. With the wind blowing from the cold pole steadily, all the time, for nearly a year -- well, it's going to be cold around here." "Sure it is," Dolph said. He took her hand, tentatively. "But look, Nanette, we knew that already. We knew it before we ever left the Earth -- we just didn't know exactly why. Even at noon it won't get above freezing around here, not by more than ten degrees at the most, and it'll be blowing all the time. But by being here, we've gotten a break we couldn't have expected or foreseen at home: the tumble-lichen sap. If that works out, we won't be too awfully cold, and we'll come through." N anette closed her eyes, and slowly shook her head. "What's the matter, Nan?" "Dolph, Dolph -- the lichens will all be buried. They may be buried already. And they die in winter -- we saw that from the Earth, too!" After a moment, Dolph put his hand to his forehead. "That's true," he said, stunned. Nan, we've got to go out." "Into that storm?" "Yes. We don't have any choice. We can still dig in the lee of the house -- the 'shadow' you talked about. We'll have to, before the sand gets any deeper. We have to pack the leanto full of lichen, while we can still get it, or we're dead." "All right," Nanette said. "Then pass the bottle, Dolph." "The time isn't up." "I don't care. I won't go out into that storm without some sort of juice under my belt. If I do, neither of us will come back." There was no arguing this. Silently, Dolph put the wine-press into action. Despite the gloominess of their situation, he was forced to chuckle at the parade of expressions that crossed Nanette's face as the elixir took hold. If he had looked like that when she had first seen him after he had tried it, he could understand why she had been alarmed. "Wow," she said. "That's great. I don't see how anything that good could foe poisonous." "I just hope that doesn't come under the heading of famous last words," he said. "But we've got no choice -- we can't get along without it now. Better get dressed now. The sand out there's getting deeper by the minute." T hey managed to dredge up several bushels of tumble-lichen during a quiet noon, before the storm drove them inside again. This in turn yielded about a pint of sap -- enough to last quite a while, for Dolph had discovered that a tot of it barely large enough to swallow was sufficient to carry him through a full #-hour day, while a larger dose, while it exerted its effects somewhat longer, was in the long run wasteful. Nevertheless, they lost no opportunity to augment the supply, for -- as Nanette had reminded him -- when the winter had firmly closed in there would be no more lichens for months to come. For the rest of the time they were hard put to it to fill up the hours, for though there was much that they needed to be doing to provide against the future, most of it could not be done while the storm raged. Nanette had adopted her own, originally half-frivolous suggestion of keeping a diary. There had been a great deal to record in it at first, but as . their confinement wore on the entries became shorter and shorter. Nevertheless, she kept at it, for even a bare notation of the passage of a day had the minimum virtue of keeping their calendar up to date. 'I wish we could have some light, though," Nanette said. "Not to stay up at night with, but for days when the weather is like this. Since the sand started blowing I can hardly see what I'm writing. Can't we spare the electricity, now that the windmill's working? Or is the battery going to go dead on us some day, too?" "The battery's new, and this type ought to be good for about a thousand rechargings," Dolph said. "And we can take power directly from the generator as long as the wind blows. But I'm just not up to making a carbon filament -- and besides, even if I could, and got a bulb blown, I couldn't evacuate it... Hm. Don't need to. I could just take it outside and seal it up gen ought to be nearly as good as a vacuum for this purpose. I'll think about it. Maybe it could be done." While he thought, he busied himself cannibalizing the anti-gravity rig to build a crystal radio. It had occurred to him that it might just barely be possible to pick up one of the strongest of Earth's broadcasting stations, or perhaps one of the networks if all the stations in a network broadcast on the same frequency -- a question to which he could not remember the answer, if indeed he had ever known it. In the loneliness and silence of Mars, even the lobotomized ravings of come reminder of home, however tenuous. While he worked, the wind blew on monotonously, and the sand IF mounted toward the bottom of the porthole. The oasis was an oasis no longer, but a well of red murk, except at noon when the sun shone briefly down upon endless waves of ochre dunes, none the less depressing for a wild and patternless beauty, like a sea of blood frozen in mid-tide. "What are we going to do for light after the sand piles up over the portholes?" Nanette wanted to know. "Go out and shovel it away, I guess." "What, Mr. Edison -- still no magic electrical glow-lamp?" "Nope. Just shovelling." "Pooh. And I always thought space travel would be glamorous." But at least she still seemed to be cheerful -- or was making a brave show of it. Perhaps the elixir helped; heaven knew there was little enough else to be cheerful about. T he storm did not stop at the end of a week, but by the end of two it seemed to have reached a sort of inflectionpoint, after which it carried away about as much sand as it brought in; though by then the burden of detritus was high enough to require daily trips outside to clear the porthole. By then the radio was almost finished, and high time, too. The circuit had not given Dolph any trouble, except with his memory, but contriving an earphone -- he would have preferred a loudspeaker, for Nanette's benefit, but he did not have the necessary transformer to drive one -- had almost defeated him. The design was simple enough but he had no piece of steel thin enough to serve as a diaphragm. In the end he had manufactured one out of iron filings imbedded in baked tumble-lichen resin. It was not as flexible as he would have liked, but he thought it would serve. For several evenings thereafter, his cat's-whisker probing of the ether -- or whatever was doing duty for the ether these days -- brought him in nothing but the faint wash of background white noise which is the sound of stars -- that "music of the spheres," plus occasional bursts of aural hash which were most probably static from the Sun itself. Evidently no AM signal in the standard broadcast band was powerful enough to push its way through the Kennedy-Heaviside layer of Earth's atmosphere and have enough strength left to reach Mars. Too bad. He had half expected it, but still it would have been pleasant to have been able to pick up a little music now and then... to say nothing of an occasional human voice, were it only some pitchman touting headache pills. Instead, the only man-made signal that came through the earphone was the steady flickflickflick of his own pump, like the distant sound of someone singlemindedly dusting a piece of wire screening with a whiskbrook. The other signal, when he finally found it, was markedly softer but there was no possibility of its being man-made. JL pered, her eyes wide, the clumsy phone pressed to her ear. "It sounds like -- like an animal in pain." "Well, it could be somebody singing -- I've heard worse," Dolph said judiciously. "But I don't think it is." "Then what -- " "Wait a minute, and you'll know everything I know about it. I made up a loop antenna after I happened on this thing. Watch what happens when I rotate it." Her eyes widened once more. "The sound gets louder!... There, now it's faded again." "Yes, I swung the loop back out of line. I can't pin it down more than approximately, but it seems to be coming either from west-northwest of where we are -- or from exactly the opposite direction, of course. In other words, either from somewhere in Syrtis Major, or in the direction of 'Arabia'. Or from somewhere much farther away, more likely, by the weakness of the signal." She lowered the earphone and stared at him. "But, Dolph -- that must mean -- oh, no! Do you think that somebody's come for us?" He took the earphone from her and listened for a long moment to that high-pitched, infinitely melancholy, ululating whine. It went on and on, as though the thing that produced it had no need to pause for breath: The sound went through the inside of his skull like the pain of a dentist's burr. "No, I don't think so, Nan. It's far too soon for that. And whatever else that noise is, it isn't a human noise. Or any other sound that was heard on Earth." "Then -- " She stopped, as though uncertain whether to be hopeful or alarmed. "Then it has to be Martians! Oh, Dolph, do you think they might help us? Do you think they could?" "I don't see how," he said gently. They don't even know we're here. And I'm not so sure but that I'd rather have it that way, at least until we know more about them. At the moment we've got nothing to go on but that noise, and I don't find that any more reassuring than you do." He listened to it again, then shook his head. "As for us finding them -- well, at the distance they're bound to be at, Nan, we couldn't possibly make it without flying. For all the good they can do us right now, they might just as well be on Pluto. Or on Earth. It comes to just about the same thing in the end." He put the earphone face down on the table. Nanette did not bother to nod, but it was clear from her expression that she could not much mourn the evanescence of a hope so suddenly raised... at the very least, not this soon. Outside the house, the long blast blew on regardless. X A s any student of Dante -- or the Arctic -- knows, an eternal winter is as close to being an inferno IF as any living human being is ever likely to imagine. And as Dolph and Nanette found, a yearlong winter spent in a primitive hut is not a noticeable improvement. Of course there was never any snow, but fine sand makes a perfectly acceptable substitute, and is even more difficult to keep out of the house. As for cold -- mediated though they were by the tumblelichen elixir, the night-time temperatures in the house were often ferocious. Outside, they were always so low as to be outright meaningless. Nanette bore it the less well. Despite all that Dolph could do with jokes, word games, improvised chessmen and sessions of hard physical work -- and there was certainly very little of that he had to improvise -- her innate cheerfulness wilted steadily, melting gradually into becoming morose, sullen and solitary. The small bruises that she inevitably sustained, often simply from bumping into things in the narrow confines of the hut, hung on for weeks, and after a while, too, he began to suspect that there was something wrong with her eyes. It was only after two episodes of something suspiciously akin to delirium, however, that he realized that she was specifically ill. It was most probably a nutritional deficiency of some sort; Dolph had no way to judge which one, since such things had long been extinct in the part of the world in which he and she had been brought up, but he suspected beri-beri. Luckily, it did not seem to be grave, at least not yet. But it worried him. Even worse, it deprived him of her help and company alike most of the time. In her absence, he took on also the chore of keeping up the diary. In the remaining time -- of which there was a lot -- he listened to the ceaseless, wavering cry from the crystal radio. There was a pattern in it, of that he was sure. Sometimes he felt almost on the verge of grasping it. Then, once more, it would fall apart into meaninglessness. He thought that with a cathoderay oscilloscope and a high-speed camera he might have cracked the problem in short order -- but he might as well have wished for a broiled lobster with drawn butter and a spring salad. (Never mind that.) As matters stood, he had nothing to fall back on but close listening, patience and a mathematician's faith in the existence of order at the heart of every puzzle, even on Mars. And slowly, slowly, these began to pay off. His first assumption, that the noise was in fact a voice -- for it certainly did sound organic, like an animal in pain, as Nanette had said -- he discarded eventually on common-sense grounds. Nothing animal could go on and on like that, hour after hour, week after week, didn't need to breathe. If the message being sent were 'both important and unique, it couldn't possibly be so long -- and so limited in range. If, on the other hand, the message was brief and repetitious, as seemed more likely, it would surely be assigned to a machine -- unless the imagined Martian had a commercial sponsor, which hardly seemed likely. A machine then; but if so, what kind of a machine, and what was it sending? First of all, there was the possibility that it was "sending" only by accident, like the noise made by Dolph's pump, and that the sound carried no information (other than being characteristic of the machine that made it). But this was the only such Marsbom sound that Dolph could pick up. This presupposed either (a) that the Martians didn't know how to shield their electrical machines, and that this one therefore was the only one in this part of the planet; or, (b) that they did know how to shield, and had shielded all their machines but this one. Neither notion was logical enough to be worth any more study for the time being. Okay; then the signal was machine-generated and repetitious, but there was a message in it -- intentionally. To know that much about it already -- no matter with what reservations -- had to be counted a solid gain. Nevertheless, it was not much more than a beginning. What might the message be about? Before Dolph could know that, he had to know how he was supposed to be receiving it. True, he had picked it up as a sound, but that was no guarantee that it was being sent out as one. All he knew about that for sure was that it came to him as radio waves which he could translate into sound waves, but which the Martians might translate into something else -- or might be able to sense directly, as Dolph could sense light waves directly. Now there was a thought. Supposing the signal was supposed to be translated first into a picture -- that, in other words, it was a television broadcast? At first he rejected the notion out of hand, since he was getting the broadcast on a wavelength rather low in the standard AM band, whereas television required high-frequency transmission. Later, however, he remembered vaguely that very short waves had not been available when TV had been invented, at the dawn of the century. The primitives had sent stationary pictures by low-frequency AM, and even by wire. But if the Martian noise were even so simple a TV transmission as that, to translate it Dolph would need a pierced-spiral scanning disk -- which he could make -- and a powerful but sensitive amplitude-modulated light source, which he couldn't. All right, scratch that -- and hope that it's wrong anyhow. But wait a moment; was he giving up too easily? Any such noise as he was now hearing would not translate into anything but the simplest of pictures -- a cross, say, or an ellipse -- and that certainly would not make even a good test pattern for a useful television set. Its very simplicity suggested that it had been designed to be easy to pick up, and easy to identify, and over continental distances at that. Dolph could think of only one kind of signal that would have to satisfy all three of those conditions: IF A beacon. And what could be more likely, on a planet where the desert was supreme over vast areas for three years out of four, and even the vastest landmarks might be obliterated by a sandstorm in a matter of days? If fixed bench-marks were needed, they would have to be established where nature could not touch them -- except, briefly, with solar static: in the eletromagnetic spectrum. What Dolph was listening to, unlikely though the notion was on a waterless planet, was almost surely a lighthouse. What use he was going to make of the discovery was a question for which he could see no answer at all. H e had no more time to think about it now, in any event, for somewhere on the far side of the dead of winter, Nanette began to improve slightly and thereafter was much more trouble than she had been when most iU. Dolph was delighted; every other problem but this went completely out of his head. The improvement was small enough, in all conscience, but he fostered it like a wren trying to raise a cuckoo-chick. At first, she only talked in her sleep and allowed herself to be fed without objecting more than feebly to his interfering with her private nightmares, even when she discovered him sitting with her after a blackly howling night. Then, she became wakeful enough at times to become embarrassed that he had been doing sanitary patrol for her while she had been unable to do it for herself. He had a hard time persuading her that he ought to continue to do it for a while to conserve her much dwindled strength. He won that only by reminding her brutally that she was on Mars -- which she had forgotten mercifully at her worst crisis. After that she was docile, though depressed. As her spirits lifted, she began to ask that he tell her stories. The task baffled him completely. Though enormously sensitive to the poetry of mathematics, he had no literary imagination whatsoever. The outcome of the proposal was that she told him stories. This embarrassed him at first, but the tales she invented -- fantastic improvisations about six-legged animals who needed boots to ward off a bad cold, dragons abashed to discover that they had fluffy pink wings, bears who went space-traveling in a rocking-chair (well, what really was so fantastic about that, now?) -- were so unpredictable, and she seemed to take such delight in alternately surprising and outraging him, that he concluded they were at least as good for her as anything he might have concocted, with talent or without it. Glad though he was to see her beginning to recover, however, he was nevertheless at a loss to understand why she was recovering -- or what it was she was recovering from. He had done nothing for her that he had not been doing all along, and there had been no other change around them that he had been able to detect. For example, his guess that her problem was a dietary deficiency now had to be ruled out; her diet was exactly what it had been for months. Equally obviously, she could not have had and sort of systemic infection, for had it been acute she would have recovered -- or died -- much earlier, whereas if it were chronic she would not be recovering now. Had it been simply the blues? A serious depression of the spirit, a kind of poisonous despair, which had expressed itself in a random collection of physical symptoms? That was possible, of course, but it seemed grossly out of harmony with what he knew of her character andher youth. He let the problem rest for a month, finding no handle by which he could even begin to grasp it with any confidence. In the meantime, however, her partial return toward normal human converse -- slow though it was -- encouraged him to broach the question to her, once he felt she was strong enough not to be discouraged by his puzzlement. She promptly alarmed him all over again by laughing. "T 've been thinking about that JL myself," she said. "There are parts of it that I noticed long before you, but I didn't want to bring it up because -- well, because wellbrought-up young ladies aren't supposed to discuss such things with males, not even relatives. But I guess this isn't exactly an ordinary situation, either." "Listen, are you sure you're feeling all right? It isn't that important, now that you're mending. We can wait until -- " "No, Dolph, I really am making sense. The thing is, this planet doesn't have any moons, or at least the ones it does have are so small that they might as well not be there." "Moons? But, Nanette -- " "Hush and let me finish, will you?" she said firmly. "On Earth the moon is important to all sorts of things, not just the tides and the calendar. It has something to do with the weather, and there are lots of animals -- even ones you'd never guess, like fiddler crabs -- seem to time some of their behavior by it. Isn't that right?" "Yes, it is," he said. Belatedly, he was beginning to see what she was driving at. "Okay. It affects people, too. That business about crazy people getting crazier at certain times of the month -- it was even called 'lunacy' -- wasn't just superstition. And everybody knows that us female types run on a lunar calendar... except that on Mars, it seems, we don't." "So that's it." "Well, that's part of it, anyhow I think," Nanette said. "I noticed that something was amiss not very long after I got here, and since then just about nothing has gone the way it's supposed to. I must have gotten pretty toxic, and probably my hormones were all out IF of. balance, too. I'm just going to have to adjust to a new schedule, that's all -- and so is every woman who comes to Mars, I'll 'bet. I'm just glad it's over this time." "I hope it is. But how can you be sure? I mean -- what do you think made the difference?" She smiled. "Why, Dolph, that's easy. Spring is coming." "Spring?" he said numbly. "Yes, I suppose it is. Not that we'll notice any difference for quite a while yet." "I've noticed," she reminded him firmly. "And you will too if you listen. You've been so busy worrying about me this past week, you haven't even noticed that the wind has changed." Startled again, Dolph got up and bounced awkwardly to the porthole. Sure enough. The air was v still hazed with ochre dust, but the narrowing fan of land where the drifts had been lower, the lee area they had taken to calling "the back yard," showed long feathers of sand curling off the tops of its dunes, horizontal to the building. Gradually the yard was being swept clean. While he stared, there was a soft thump from above, like the sound of a cat jumping off a table. He looked up automatically, and then out the porthole again as two more thumps hit the crate roof. This time, one of the objects came falling into view and hit the ground before him, still rolling before the wind. It was about the size of his head; once, beyond question, it had been bigger. It was a tumble-lichen, fallen into the oasis after having been blown across a thousand miles of steppes and clefts. It was not as pretty as a first robin, but it was a thousand times more welcome. Spring was indeed begun; the "wave of quickening" was on its way north from the melting and subliming polar cap. B ut no buds showed, and no birds sang. It was still cold as death outside, and the air as thin and lifeless as it had always been, and always would be. Only the gradual replenishing of the food suppiy and the still more gradual rise in the noonday temperature maxima showed that the grip of winter had broken. They were still confined to quarters, except from the briefest of forays to collect lichens and clean the pump-filter. At least these broke the monotony of their days, a little. Except for the journal, they would never have noticed the day when an Earth year had passed since Dolph's spoiled landing. The Martian year was not much more than half over -- how much more, it was hard to guess, for Dolph and Nanette had necessarily been counting Martian days, of which there are # to a Mardon year. By Earth time, the Martian year is # days. Either way, however, there were better than # days to go to the end of the first Martian year. To the eye, nevertheless, the oasis outside the crate and the #f leanto softened as the days wore on. As the wind lessened, the periods of good visibility began earlier in the day and ended later in the afternoon. The lichens spread gradually, too, not just occasional migrants now, but establishing themselves on the floor of the crater. The time was foreseeable when there would be a carpet of them again, as unbroken as it had been when Dolph had first seen it. The moderating weather suggested to Dolph the possibility of exploring the oasis, at least in short forays in the hours bracketing noon. Though he was reluctant to admit it, what he was hoping to find was an artifact -- any object, no matter how small, how old or how broken, which had been made by some guiding hand and brain, not just a product of nature. It seemed to him that by Martian standards, this valley had to be considered so sheltered and verdant a place that it must be known to whatever entities were responsible for the mysterious radio signals. Even if they were not using it now, he reasoned, they must have visited it at some time in the past and left some sign of their passage, even were it only a few pieces of their equivalent of garbage. There was a lot one could learn, after all, from midden J heaps. But they found neither midden nor artifact. If the valley had indeed ever been visited, the visits must have been brief and far apart -- or too long ago to have left any traces Dolph's inexpert eye might recognize. Of course, Dolph's and Nanette's brief, random diggings hardly qualified as skilled, intensive excavation, but Dolph was reasonably sure that had there ever been a lot of traffic in the oasis, they would have hit upon some sign of it. There was nothing. They did, however, find something that Dolph thought might be of even greater value to them in the long run: a Martian animal, of a size large enough to suggest that it might be practicable to eat it. Nanette at first rejected this suggestion with horror, for the critter was not pretty. It was a hard-shelled, reddish invertebrate which combined the best features -- or, from Nanette's point of view, the worst -- of a centipede and a scorpion. It even had a sting in its tail, suggesting that somewhere on Mars there were animals its own size, or larger, against which it might have to defend itself. It was a burrower, coming out only at dawn -- which explained why they hadn't seen it before -- to feed on the mites and nematodes and harvest water from the lichens. It had twenty legs, moved rapidly when the sun warmed it, and seemed to vary from about seven inches in length to nearly two feet. N anette's verdict on this complex biological wonder, so beautifully adapted to its world, so recognizably obeying many of the evolutionary laws which prevailed on Earth, yet so obviously neither an Earthly creature nor related to any, was classic in its simplicity: " Ugh." "Very ugh," Dolph agreed. "But a real find, all the same. I'll bet there's a lot of meat in those claws and probably along the sides and back too -- it's need lots of muscles to run all those legs and make the tail strike as hard as it does." The toe of his shoe carried a respectable slash to testify to the force with which the animal could drive its stinger. He suspected that the sting was venomous, too, but had absolutely no plans to test the theory. "Dolph Haertel, if you're suggesting that we eat that thing, I'll just leave you flat. Starving to death would be a lot better than -- ugh!" "I'M bet you've eaten lots of things like it." "I have not," she said indignantly. "I seem to remember that you love crabmeat -- especially from those huge Alaskan king crabs." "Well -- all right, yes, I do. But I don't have to think about the crab while I eat it. Any more than I have to think about a pig when I'm eating bacon. This thing is different." "Nanette, put your hand on your heart and swear to me solemnly that you have never, never eaten a broiled lobster straight out of the shell. Now look at our friend here. He could almost be a lobster if it weren't for the extra legs. Isn't it true?" Nanette looked stubborn. "I see what you mean," she said, "I agree that there's a likeness, I agree that the first time I ever saw a lobster I was horrified -- I'll admit anything you like. But I will not eat that monster." "Well, I won't insist," Dolph said with a sight. "But I mean to try it. One thing that's been worrying me is that our diet is awfully short on protein. This looks like a good source of it, if it's edible at all. And I want to build up a lot of strength for summer. I've got a really major product I have to try -- not just simply surviving, but actually trying to make things better." "What is it?" "I want to climb up to the rim of the oasis." "What on -- on Mars for?" she said, aghast. "Why Dolph, that's miles up -- and no breathable air at the bottom, let alone at the top! It'd be like trying to climb Everest in your underwear!" "Not quite as bad as all that. Remember, I weigh much less here than I did at home, but I've still got the same muscles I had then -- though I'll have to be in better shape than I am now." "But why?" "I want to set up some sort of simple radio jammer up there," Dolph said earnestly. "Not to send any message, but something that might scramble or fuzz up that beacon we've been listening to. And loud enough so that the Martians -- if that's what we're dealing with here -- can pinpoint where it's coming from." "Great. We louse up their beacon, make them mad and give them our names and our zip code numbers. Then they eat us, and our troubles are over!" "It could happen that way. But I'm hoping they'll be more curious IF than angry. Remember, we don't know a thing about them; we're not even sure they exist. But if they do, I want to attract their attention. I think we have to. "In fact, I'm sure we have to. Nanette, we've been doing better at getting along on Mars than anybody could have expected. We've got good reason to be proud of ourselves. But it just isn't good enough. One more bout of sickness -- or some other accident, something we can't even guess might happen now -- and we'd be done for. "Somewhere up there, there just may be intelligent creatures who could help us, if we asked them to. And I'm going to, Nanette. We need help." XI D esigning the jammer took considerable thought. It had to be simple (as did all their improvisations), portable and capable of putting out a lot of noise over a relatively long time. For power, Dolph decided, nothing would be a more suitable source than the wind. It would be erratic, true, but less so than an Earthly wind, and it would last longer than his device, which was more than could be said for any accumulator he might devise with the material at hand. He had no hope, of course, of matching the complexities of the Martian signal itself, but any spark that would produce a tearing burst of white noise across most of that band should prove quite annoying enough for his purposes -- if anyone was listening at all, the sole hope behind the whole projeot. This time, furthermore, it could not be fragile -- not only because he would not be around to service it if it broke down, or replace it if it gave up, but because he had to climb the crater with it. During the course of that climb he could at best expect to knock it several times against one outcropping or another. At worst he might drop it -- but nothing he could build could be safe against that kind of fall, despite the weak Martain gravity. His building materials were too closely limited to such stuff as coins, glass and old string, whereas rock was rock, even on Mars. The final product looked as gimcrack as all of his other constructions, but it was, bluntly, the best he and Nanette had been able to do. He thought it would serve. Essentially it was an anemometer which whirled one set of unevenly wound coils inside another, passed on the resulting power to a set of small sparking brushes which spun on the same shaft, and fed the signal to an antenna which was one end of a mile-long spool of wire, the other end of which Dolph planned to throw over the cliff once he was at the top. The pole-pieces for the coils had been made by the brute-force method of pounding chunks of soft iron until they were magnetized enough to pick up nails. This RubeGoldberg device packed into a frame about the size of a cigar box and weighed less than a pound. On test, even in the moderate winds of lihait oasis, it produced in the earphones a weak but strident whistle which varied in pitch with the wind velocity. Nanette (found the noise almost as unnerving as the beacon whose operators it was supposed to annoy, and heard together they produced a wailing the like of which had probably been heard before only by Dante. When they crossed they produced most satisfying bursts of white noise, unpredictably but frequently. "I'd hate to have to try to screen that out, even with a lot of equipment on tap," Dolph said. "It's so wobbly that the only sure way I can think of to deal with it is to pour on more power and drown it out -- and if the integrity of their signal is important to them, those white spots will still annoy them over long distances." "It seems like such a small nuisance," Nanette said. "Like a mosquito. It's hard to believe they'll notice it." "The mosquito knocked out the Roman Empire," Dolph said, "and if Gibbon had known that, think what a lot of writing it would have saved him! I hope we don't do anything that drastic. Anyhow, the thing works. Now all we have to do is get it up to where they can hear it buzzing." "That's what scares me. Oh Dolph, take care of yourself!" "The very best," Dolph said gently. "You too. Starting now, with early-to-bed. You still need more rest than you've been getting, and I'm all packed and ready -- I want to go as soon as the morning winds slack off." "All right," she said. For some reason, she seemed very dispirited, though she was trying hard not to show it. In the morning, however, just before he donned his mask to leave the house, she stunned him by kissing him good-bye. Up to know they had been very careful about even the tiniest of touches, much though they both often had needed them. Dolph could only touch her shoulder briefly, jam the mask into place and blunder out -- otherwise he would never have been able to leave at all. He thought it could only make everything from now on much harder. But in fact, he barely noticed the first five j hundred-odd feet of the climb to the crater's rim. F ive hundred feet, however, is only about a tenth of a mile, and a mile was only half the distance Dolph had to climb to reach the dreary tableland of the Martian desert. Two miles measured straight up; the amount of ground he would have to cover to get there might well add more than another. Nevertheless, it had to be climbed; and it was climbed. Except to experts in the sport, accounts of mountain climbs suffer from a certain sameness, devolving from the fact that one mountain is really much like another. It is this situation which drives novelists into enriching fictional climbs with Abominable Snowmen, mantichores, love triangles and other monsters IF either irrelevant or mythological. Dolph encountered none of these, but his ascent was no duller or less desperate to him on that account; and besides, it was in many ways unique. Having to travel masked all the way was a grave disadvantage, but there were other aspects of the terrain which, he was surprised to find, worked to his advantage. One of these was that it was not in fact a mountain that he was climbing, but a hole blasted into once-level ground by a random astronomical missile. Hence he was not faced with sheer, plunging walls of hard granite, but with the rougher, softer limonite, which offered a surer footing and many more handholds. Like the lunar ringwalls, the slope of the crater was relatively gentle. Like them, too, it was terraced, offering natural levels at which to stop for rest and food -- indeed, most of the terraces were quite broad enough to sleep on without worrying about rolling over an edge; keeping himself from becoming frozen solid overnight, which he had expected to be, the most serious of his problems, solved itself when he discovered that if he lay down just before dusk, he quickly became the core of a sand dune inside which the only difficulty was in breathing. Fortunately he he did not need to breathe much. And unlike the lunar terraces, these were weathered, so that their ledges were rounded, and cloven by many irregular fissures worn by trickling sand. Also unlke the lunar terraces were the banks of rubble which connected these to each other: formations called talus-slopes produced by the splitting of water-bearing rocks by alternate melting and freezing -- a process called, poetically, exfoliation, because on Earth it happened in the autumn not long after die trees shed their leaves. There was not much water on Mars, but the melting and refreezing required for exfoliation happened eVery day, not just a few times a year. These long slides or j ambles were a mixed blessing, for although they offered easier grades than the rock slides of the terraces themselves, they were also slippery. After being nearly buried by one after a flailing tumble back to its base, Dolph tackled them oly with ant-Jike caution and climbed fissures or chimneys instead whereever possible. G eology -- or areology, if that was what he had to call it here -- had another such trap in store for him. Limonite is not as crumbly as sandstone, but it is not very cohesive, either. He found this out the hard way as he was heaving himself up over the rim of a terrace, when an outcropping moved under his hand and turned into an independent boulder the size of a barrel. Feeling it move under his grip was a sickening sensation, but a frantic lunge and scramble brought him safely over the edge. Safety? After a moment he was not so sure. Pausing to recover his breath and his nerve, he watched the boulder fall and was immediately afraid that the danger had only transformed itself into another guise. The Wg rook fell slowly, but the weakness of Martian gravity had not changed its mass any. When it next strode the side of the crater, it bounced high, and two companions were tumbling in its wake. Though the slowness of the process was almost dreamlike, it did not seem to take very long for it to chum its way into a sizeable avalanche -- and below it, seeming directly in its path, was the shack, looking from this height as small and fragile as two kitchen match-boxes. Gradually, however, the terraces intercepted more and more of the sliding masses of rocks. When the dust finally settled and he could again see die floor of the oasis, the match-boxes were still there, with no motion visible anywhere near them. It was more than possible that Nanette had never even been aware of the danger, unless she had happened to have been looking up after him during the past few minutes, for the slide had not been heavy enough to shake the ground and, in this thin air, had been virtually soundless. In addition, he could see that his climb had taken him at an angle away from a direct line down to the shack, so that even had the avalanche struck the crater floor, it probably would have missed Nanette by several hundred feet. All the same, the near-disaster made him even more cautious of his hand-holds, and his route still more indirect; which had the effect of slowing him down still further. And then, incredibly -- for it now seemed to him that he would go on climbing forever, as he had always been climbing -- he topped one more crumbling ridge, and the high desert stretched out before him, glowing and still in late afternoon sunlight. Despite its stillness, it seemed to his dazzled eyes to be moving, in some subtle way he could not quite understand. There was no wind, and nowhere even a feather pf cloud -- only the dunes, long frozen ripples that told of motion past and movement still to come. But by some oddity of the light, the tilted steppes seemed to be burning, as gently and inexorably as though the very atoms of the ancient sands were decaying into cold light before his electric blue in the light made the usual rusty color of the sand seem almost brown, and the puddles of shadow so like ink-blots as to seem almost liquid, especially those made sharper and smaller by distance. H e looked up. Except near the sun, the sky was as usual dark enough to show quite a few stars; but even at its blackest, the blue tinge was there. The whole sky looked as though it had been made from a spill of "washable" ink which had paled a little around the sun and the stars -- not a proper heaven at all, but a dome of stained crystal, pierced here and there to let in celestial fires which burned not very far 'beyond it. Bemused, Dolph remembered at once a famous medieval woodcut of a man who, having reached the horizon of a flat world, had broken through the crystal of the sky where IF it touched the ground and now stared in wonder beyond the sphere of stars at those prime movers -- great wheels and other engines -- which kept all the inner, Aristotelian spheres turning against their hackdrop of eternally twinkling flames. Though he knew that even the artist had not seen the matter so simply -- that, indeed, the woodcut had been intended only to symbolize what a philosopher might do only in his mind, but no man ever in his physical person -- Dolph felt for a long moment as though the primum mobile might well lie and turn just beyond this close, utterly unEarthly horizon, which he had only to cross the desert to touch... And even to hope to touch it would be death. This was the high desert of Mars, a terrible vision of dry and eternal winter, in midspring as always. No man would ever cross it except as part of a fully equipped expedition -- or, by himself, in a carefully designed vehicle supported (and, when necessary, succored) by the entire resources of an elaborate, Mars-based, Earth-supplied technology. For Dolph, that tempting glass horizon was as unattainable as Barth itself. Thus brought back with a thump to the realities, he set about unpacking his device. But he could not help wondering about the light. Evidentally this was one of those rare days of "blue clearing,' when the atmosphere of Mars, usually as opaque to blue light as all atmospheres are, had suddenlybecome transparent to the shorter wavelengths of the visible spectrum. The effect had often been noticed -- even photographed -- on Earth. All very well, except that as an explanation, it didn't explain. Here on the spot, he could no more guess what caused "blue clearing" than could Earth's astronomers. But the effect was certainly striking; in fact, it was downright eerie, like a landscape remembered from a nightmare. The jammer seemed to have suffered no damage during the climb. Finding a shelter for the machine which would protect it from the sand -- without at the same time shielding off a part of its output by the iron-rich rock -- was out of the question, and in any case would have defeated the whole purpose of his climb. The anemometer cups had to be out in the open, preferably as high up as possible. He settled eventually upon a sharp rise with a flat, mesalike top, on which he anchored the device with heavy rocks -- not nearly as heavy for their size as he could have wished -- upon its base flanges. The cups were already rotating in the rising breeze of evening, and an earphone check showed that the complex signal was being generated as strongly as before. The last move was to throw the aerial reel over the lip of the crater. Since the floor was already a well of night, he lost track of the spool quickly and so could not tell whether it had unreeled all the way, or had become arrested on some terrace. Well, that oould be checked easily during the climb down, simply by following the aerial wire as a routemarker. But that was for tomorrow morning. Dolph made camp and, for the rest of the evening, watched the Earth set after the Sun behind the glass horizon, until it grew too cold for him to stay outside his puptent any longer. T he return was in many respects harder than the climb up -- in part because he had now to be looking down much of the way, and in part because the route laid out for him by the aerial wire had been chosen by gravity without regard for such human conveniences as handholds. Experience, however, steered him around the worst traps and troubles, so that in the long run he managed to make the journey a little faster than he had made the ascent. But when he got back to the shack, he found Nanette ill again. Not seriously, no. Much of it, obviously, was simply the product of loneliness and suppressed fear, and within hours of his return she was almost her old self again. Nevertheless, it was dear that he could never again dare to leave the oasis by himself... nor did his memory of the high ground give him any reason to think that they could dream of crossing it, even together. For better or for worse, this was where the line ended. I n the Arctic lands of Earth, spring is so bitter and summer so short that the ground only a few feet below the surface never thaws. This IF iron-hard layer is called the permafrost; and it was something much like this relentless stratum that the Haertels and the Fords had long since struck in their attempts to rescue their children. The trouble lay partly, of course, in the distances involved -- and not only in their sheer size, but in the way they fluctuated, which in turn affected the time lapses between years when a flight to Mars looked even slightly feasible at all. In an era when spaceflight of a sort had been a fact for more than two decades, miles away seemed to be nearly in Earth's back yard to people who thought about the matter at all, though nobody had set foot on it yet; but Mars -- though there were plans, on paper, to go there -- still seemed quite a different matter. The planets still looked vast to begin with, and on closer examination it also turned out to be a fiction -- it was only a mean distance, not a real one, and the actual abyss a spaceship would have to span on such a journey was never going to be less than eight times as far -- at least not as long as "spaceships" meant "rockets" -- since the destination like ' the home port, is always in motion and must be chased. Nevertheless, those paper plans to go there did exist, and several unmanned vehicles, beginning with Mariner # in #, had paid the little planet visits of sorts. The real barrier was the permafrost that lies beneath the surface of all large governments, no matter what name they go by: layer after frozen layer of official indifference to any project not dose to home in some way, and not likely to pay off -- in votes, in prestige or simply in color -- during the effective lifetime of the officeholder who might be in a position to do something about it. There was no deliberate cruelty hehind that indifference, only a kind of practicality which was .worse than cruelty in its confessed and deliberate short-sightedness. F our bereft taxpayers in Iowa were in no position to thaw such a glacier. Not that the families' long and determined campaign had made no impression whatsoever. The case of the Children in the Sky, though it had been out of the news for more than a year and was considered closed, had left a lasting memory trace. Indeed, one widely syndicated columnist had even observed its anniversary by demanding to know what the government was doing -- though he knew the answer well enough and was asking only because embarrassing the administration was his stock in trade. And the campaign had left them with at least one official friend: Garth Marshall, the research director of A. O. LeFebre et Cie., a huge industrial complex which subcontracted rocket stages, solid propellants and many more highly separtment of Defense. The fact that a LeFebre subsidiary was building about half the hardware for Project Ares was probably irrevelant. The additional fact that Dr. Marshall had once been a suitor of Mrs. Haertel's may have had more bearing on his support. Whatever the reason, that support was wholehearted, and neither the Haertels nor the Fords were in any state of mind to question its motives. But Dr. Marshall had thus far meter. "It's the same old story," he told a family conference -- the latest of dozens, all equally fruitless and becoming steadily gloomier. "We haven't been able to do anything on the Ares components thus far (I'm not supposed to be telling you this, of course) but make refinements here and there. Strictly frills and furbelows. They may add some reliability to the mission eventually, but they don't do a thing toward getting it off the ground." "It's still the question of timing, then," Mr. Ford said. The Haertels had met him only once before .the disaster; he had struck them then as an amiable non-entity. Since then, he had somehow simultaneously become both grayer and more forceful. "Yes, I'm afraid so," Garth Marshall said grimly. "With the timetable for the Apollo program in the ing enough trouble getting continuing funds for a Moon landing. Even just plain talk about any manned expedition to Mars now comes back labeled 'premature.' And the Soviets won't budge without our cooperation -- naturally enough, since they'll be asked to provide all of the orbital-assembly phase, which is where the really heavy stuff is called for. They don't want to spend the money if all we've got for them to boost is one glider and a flock of empty nose-cones." "Premature!" Mr. Haertel said. It might just as well have been a swear-word. "But what's that got to do with anything?" Mrs. Ford said. "I don't want to go to the Moon, Doctor Marshall. I don't see why anybody would want to go there. We only want to get Nanette back, and Dolph. Why can't they help us?" Mrs. Haertel, who had followed Dr. Marshall's account all too well, put out her hand to the other woman, who grasped it blindly. There was a painful silence. CC'They don't care about the A children," Mrs. Haertel said. "It's not their fault that they don't. They're not their Children." "No," Dr. Marshall agreed. ever believed that the kids were on Mars -- which I'm not entirely sure they did -- they don't feel any pressure to rescue them now. They think that Dolph and Nanette are dead. I've tried hard to sell Ares as a rescue mission, and I've failed utterly. It's just too late for that." "But they aren't!" Mrs. Haertel cried. "Garth -- they got to Mars before anyone else. Doesn't that count for something? Isn't it stupid to think that they could do that, and yet not be able to take care of themselves when they got there?" "It might have been a fluke," Dr. Marshall said, very gently. "Dolph's IF basic discovery certainly must have been a major accident. I've got a man in my lab who's worked out a really colossal infringement of relativity, derived just from the bare knowledge that Dolph had some kind of anti-gravity, and nothing more -- not from any knowledge of what Dolph actually did, because nobody has that. It might well give us a breakthrough to some kind of ion drive, something that might shorten a crossing to Mars by nearly three months. But I'm sure it isn't more than remotely related to Dolph's work. Everybody in the world is stuck for the most elementary explanation of that. And... we know that Dolph took off for Mars too soon, before he'd properly stopped to think about what a dreadful desert the planet is. Nanette left even more precipitiously; she may never have reached Mars at all. They've already worked one miracle. Two is a lot to hope for -- more than I can sell, anyhow. We have to face up to that." "Do you think that?" Mr. Ford said. "I... " Dr. Marshall fell silent and put two fingers to his brow, as though something ached above his eyes. At last he said: "I've studied Mars for many years. lars trying to work out ways for human beings to live there -- skilled adults, backed up by lots of highly specialized equipment. How two teen-agers could last one day on that planet, I do not know. I simply do not know." "But you'll go on helping us, Garth, won't you?" Mrs. Haertel said steadily. "Yes, Doris, of course I will. I'm just forced not to be very hopeful, that's all." Mrs. Ford burst into tears, but almost they seemed to be tears of relief. Dolph's stepfather stood up. He looked unexpectedly tall."There's got to be some way," he said. "Garth, I don't care what any of the other problems are. There's bound to be a way around them, if we stick them out. But as far as the children are concerned, of one thing I'm absolutely sure: They are not dead " Dr. Marshall stood up also. "I'll go now," he said. "And I'll keep trying. If I can sell somebody our ion drive... well, that remains to be seen. LeFebre can be as hard penalties of size. But in the meantime -- no, dammit, I quite agree with you. They are not dead. I know it. They can't be, that's all." His face stormy, he stomped out. The meeting was over. It was still as gloomy as all its predecessors had been; but it was not yet despairing. Not yet. Not quite. O nce back in his office. Dr. Marshall locked the door, interdicted all incoming calls and carefully constructed a bombshell. Probably, he thought, it would do nothing but destroy his job, his security clearance and his career, but he considered that the time was now past for half measures. The bombshell might also, of course, turn out to be a dud. On the whole, he was sure he would prefer almost any sort of explosion, now. It looked like this: Division A. O. LeFebre et Cie. Geneva Berlin Brasilia London Paris Rome Tel Aviv Office of the Director Department of Space Sciences Bethesda, Md. To: Research Personnel Re: Booster Program -- Prime Mover Section Your attention is called to the relativity discontinuity recently discovered by Dr. Lloyd McCann of our staff (v. Nature , whole no. #; LeFebre Tech. Publ. #; unpubBriefly and non-mathematically, this discontinuity (which we are calling the McCann Effect for short, over Dr. McCann's objections) implies that gravity is a function of the weaker and still unnamed 'fourth force', and as such can vary independently of Lorenz-Fitzgerald mass variation. The pertinent field equations also suggest that gravity has polarity under certain conditions, none of which appear to be duplicatable experimentally. While the Effect has large implications in cosmology and other theoretical fields, immediate interest attaches to its possibilities as an adjunct tp rocket vehicle design. Suggestions are invited as to ways of applying the Effect to the reaction mass, jet flow or (possibly) payload of a space vessel, either chemical or ionic. As there apinterest in Project Ares or other trans-lunar operations, the Geneva office will perhaps wish to explore the possibility of technical consultation with British, French, Israeli and Soviet contacts. Needless to say, such explorations should be kept on a strictly scientific basis. Please post. And that, perhaps, was that: either the beginning of a marvel -- or the end of two lives, and possibly three. Time, as usual, would have to tell. T he dark cold sleep of permafrost was also on Dolph's mind, though in a considerably more direct sense. Frustrated even in his hopes of quitting the crater for high ground, he had turned defiantly in the opposite direction: straight down. He was hoping, in fact, to dig himself and Nanette a water mine. He was from the beginning almost sure that such a project was feasible, the only important qualification being how deeply he would have to dig before the sands defeated his efforts to hold them back. There was, after all, much more water on Mars than the most optimistic scientific estimates had hazarded -- not only enough to cover thousands of square miles of one Martian pole with hoarfrost (or perhaps even snow), but also enough to account for all the water in the bladders of the tumblelichens; an attempt to calculate how much that added up to gave him a figure which was incredibly in the Obviously the source of so mu cl water could not be on the planets surface. Far one thing, sun highlights would flash off it, which would have been visible from Earth, whereas in a solid century of observation since Schiaparelli nobody had even seen one. For another, any open body of ice in this thin air would sublime -- that is, pass directly from the solid state into water vapor, without intermediate melting. Most of it would remain permanently as finely divided ice crystals in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, and the rest would join the hoarfrost at one pole or the other in winter. The conclusion was inescapable: There had to be ice underground, in considerable quantity -- perhaps not just a layer of permafrost, but a whole geological stratum, a sort of "aquasphere" hundreds of feet thick: They found it within a week of digging. It was not much more than fifteen feet beneath the shifting surface of the crater -- which now could be called an oasis in all accuracy, for obviously the aquasphere would be totally inaccessible from the high desert without the most They shored, shielded and roofed the short shaft with the few boards left over from the leanto made paperboard. The result was reasonably strong where it had to be and kept out enough wind-blown although its bottom had to be shoveled regularly. They alternated at that task and at the daily chore of cutting and fetching ice-blocks. The near water supply took a great deal of wear off the wine-press, which now needed to be used only for the extraction of the all-important elixir. They found, too, that die well unexpectedly simplified the job of hunting the scorpion#ike creatures (which tasted absolutely nothing like lobster, but were not unpleasant to eat, and were inarguably nutritious); the scuttling beasts took advantage of the exposed ice layer for their own watering, and there were always two or three of them half buried in the sand-cover atop it in the early morning. B ut the well proved abruptly to have another attraction that was a good deal less welcome. Nanette discovered it and returned one morning without the icecake she had gone for and with her eyes wide behind her mask. She did not need to say a word; she simply beckoned, and that and her expression were enough. His slowed heart thudding, Dolph followed her out. The crude trap that they had built for the ugly arthropods was broken and empty. Around it in the sheltered sand were half a dozen broad, regular markings about the size of a pie-tin. Most of them were blurred, but one was quite clear and sharp. It was the print of a heavy, fivetoed paw. IF  Short Story Mr. Smith made the mistake of Lot's wife -- and suffered the same punishment for his act! F irst of all, Elsie, I want to thank you for getting me this job. When I first met you in Porto Vargas I don't mind telling you now I was down to my last twenty. Oh, my tour was paid for and the boat had made its last stop before returning to New York. But I had been careless buying souvenirs and things and... well, a girl can't go around without money in her purse. I like it here. San Carlo is a beautiful little country, even if it is run by a dictator. And Rodosa is a pretty town, although I would like it better if it were nearer the coast instead of way up here in the mountains. But then the weather wouldn't be so nice, and one can't have everything, I suppose. Just as you said, I'm living in the hotel -- Antenida, they call it -- and I really have two jobs in one. I operate the desk switchboard (lucky I told you I had phone experience and fortunate too I brushed up on my Spanish last winter) and I serve as public stenographer occasionally in my spare time. Right now there aren't many guests here as it's sort of between seasons, but in a month or so President Solera will stop in on this regular hunting vacation and then, I'm told, the place will really be jumping. Captain Juan La Cola, and he drove up in a gorgeous sport model Cithedra-Ole that was about a mile long, bumper to bumper. He is a tall man, swarthy, with a beard no amount of shaving can completely remove, and he wears high boots and a belted tunic with the mark of the Confidential Police on the collar. I was standing next to the room clerk when he signed the register and I couldn't help seeing his signature. And would you believe it, the National Identity Number he wrote after his name was # . Imagine me being in the same hotel with a one-thirty-seven. The closest I've ever come to important people is a twelve thousand, a supreme court judge, seventy years old. Of course that was a Norte Well, this Juan La Gola asked if I'd take a letter for him, and I did, and then he said I should come up and see him in an hour or so when he got settled, for more typing. Meanwhile he was expecting a package and wanted it delivered to his room as soon as it arrived. Did he say package? It was a wooden crate, five feet square, and so heavy it had to go up the freight elevator. It had a lot of foreign seals plastered to its sides, but I couldn't read any of them. After an hour I went up to the fifth floor and rang his bell. No one answered, but the door was partially open, so I went in. The crate had been opened, the boards stacked in a corner. In the center of the room on the table was a brand new dream machine. It wasn't like any dreamer I'd ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them. It had three instrument panels instead of one, and mounted on the center one was a thing that looked like an enlarged hour glass with black powder running from one chamber to the other. It had a shiny disc, tipped sideways between two olendrons that slowly changed colors, from red to blue to yellow and back to red again. There was a sound chamber too somewhere, and out of it came a clickety clack like a faraway train. Sprawled on the bed at the  far side of the room lay Captain La Gola, fully dressed even tQ his boots. He was asleep. A single wire trailed across the floor from the dreamer and divided into plugs in his ears. I made a noise but he went right on sleeping. I stood there uncertainly, then moved across to a chair. I knew it disturbed some persons, to be wakened suddenly while under the effects of a dreamer, and I thought I'd wait a few moments and then, if he didn't awake, leave and come back later. Now fleeting images took form in sepia on the titled disc, to be followed by a series of postcard-like views of places I had never seen before. But all was in caricature with exaggerated detail and blurred background. After a while it came to me. The scenes must be the visual reproduction of the Captain's dream while he slept. Never had I seen a dreamer with a sight attachment! The whirlagig changes continued, then held on what seemed to be the interior of a train. At the same time the clickety clack from the sound chamber grew louder. A group of officers in the uniform of Solera's sat about a table in a train coach. Briefly the features of one officer after another appeared in close-up on the disc. Then the scream of a train whistle sounded. It was repeated again and again. Wheels screeched, steel ground against steel as the brakes were applied. An instant later there was a muffled crash, the sound of breaking glass and agonized cries. The last scene on the disc became immobile. Across the room Captain La Gola sat up on the bed, blinking his eyes. There was a little smile of satisfaction on his lips as he removed the wire-connected plugs from his ears. Seeing me, he nodded and got to his feet, buttoning his tunic. "You said something about more letters..." I said. "Yes..." He strode across the room, looked out the window. "Yes..." Then he began to dictate: "Don Carlos Proportoy Riaz, Casa Republica, Ventriago. Senor: The Government will require a thousand head of prime beef cattle by the first of the month. You will see that shipment is made to Porto Vargas without delay. Failure to meet these demands will result in your wife's and daughter's immediate transportation to the retention camp at Los Tobellos." "And the signature... ?" I said as he finished talking. He smiled again. "Juan La Gola, #." "Yes, Elsie, he said one-thirtytwo." Talk has died down now, and I guess we all can breathe a little easier. But while it lasted the confusion over the wreck of the Sonora Express had the hotel in an uproar. The death of five of its most important officers, to say nothing of the many lesser fry, was hard for the Government to take. Confidential Police were all over the place, asking questions, checking alibis, which was to be expected, I suppose, since the wreck occurred only # kilometers -- # miles -- from here. They even questioned me, which was absurd, for what would I know about a train wreck; unless I told them about what I had seen on the dreamer in Captain La Gpla's room. But that was three days before the wreck; and besides a dream is only a dream. If Captain La Gola wants to report the matter, I figure he can do it himself. I had to do an extra stint on the switchboard last night. Consuela, the night girl, went home ill. Before she left she said, "If Captain La Gola should make any middle-distance calls, put him through to operator # on C circuit." I didn't know what she meant by middle-distance calls, and C circuit is an unconnected part of the switchboard with no outside lines at all. But a moment after she had gone, I examined the board and I saw that C circuit did have a new plug and a new outlet, and there was sawdust on the floor where installation workmen had left traces of their work. I thought it queer that Mr. Alverez, the manager, had not informed me of changes in the board, but Mr. Alverez is always so busy I decided he must have forgotten about it. Just at midnight Captain La Gola's line lit up, and I plugged him in. "Consuela?" IF "No," T said. "This is Jennie. Consuela is sick." There was a moment of silence. "Look, Jennie, as a representative of the government I found it necessary to have certain additions made to your switchboard. Can I rely on you to say nothing about it to anybody?" "Of course," I said. I was still disturbed by that letter he had dictated in his room; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a routine harmless official threat. Of course I really know nothing about governmental procedures of this kind. "Good," Captain La Gola said. "Now put me through on the new circuit." I called Operator #, as Consuela had told me, and she answered; and then a lot of queer things began to happen. "Operator #, this is Antenida #. Have you an open line?" "Go ahead, please." I switohed in the captain. "Okay, Sir." Immediately a Donald Duck chatter began, which meant the captain had switched in a scrambler at his end. The voice of Operator # came on again. "I am taking your call, Antenida #-#. Interspace distance, please relay." An amplifying hum sounded, followed by a burst of static. Then a far-off voice spoke, "This is Cliedes #. We are relaying." Another burst of static. "Rentarion-south. We are relaying. To Janison Sphere. We have a polerated call for you from Antenida #-#." "This is Janison Sphere. Go ahead." The Donald Duck began to chatter again, and a scrambler now came in at the other end. I sat there, listening to the meaningless high cycle. But presently it ended, and the light above Captain La Gola's plug winked off. Well, I asked myself, what was that all about? I was still thinking about it when I went off duty. After that I began to do more and more work for the captain. One day he dictated twelve letters. I didn't like the tone of those letters and I didn't like him. He was all spit and polish. He wore a plaited holster at his waist, and in it was one of those new logmetic revolvers. He knew how to use the weapon too. I was on the veranda one morning when he took up a position at the far end and calmly drew and fired at one of the hanging medallions that ornament the sun blinds. There was no sound, only an almost imperceptible tracer of lavender, and the medallion flew into a hundred pieces. "Progress," he said to me with a little smile. "Even in San Carlo the science of defense has come a long way." Well, you know me, Elsie. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's always been a part of my makeup. I got to thinking about Captain La Gola's dreamer and how he'd before the wreck of the Sonora Express and the death of those five officers, and I decided I wanted another look. So I waited until the captain had gone into town and then I took the key and let myself into his room. The first thing I looked at was the drawer of his desk and there I hit the jackpot right away. There was a book in that drawer, a military manual, and between its pages was a folded-up typewritten list and that list contained the names of men prominent in San Carlo governmental and military affairs -- I had read a lot of them in the newspaper from time to time -- and after each name there was a number through # and a line had been drawn through the last names. Other names were marked, some with a check, some with a star, some with a question mark. I put the list back in the book and the book back in the drawer and turned to the dreamer which still stood on the table in the center of the room. The dials on one of the panels looked about the same as those on my little second-hand machine back in Iowa, but the calibrations were not in English or Spanish or in any language I knew. The disc in which I had seen -- the visual reproduction of Captain La Gola's dream still showed that last frozen scene of the train interior from that dream. I turned to the stacked pile of boards from the dismantled packing case which still stood along one wall of the room. Stenciled on one of the boards was apparently a return address: Janison Production Assembly Janison Sphere -- Terberon Galaxy Teleport Station Number # At that moment I heard steps in the outer corridor. I knew if I were caught I'd have plenty of trouble explaining my presence. I eased open the connecting door to the adjoining room, slipped in and waited until I heard the adjacent hall door open. Then I went out into the corridor and made my way back to the lift. I hadn't been seen, but I had seen things that disturbed me. That night Captain La Gola again asked to be connected to the new circuit and again the call went through with surprising speed and facility. He had his scrambler on but I couldn't see .that he needed it, so loud was the static amplification drone. The call was over almost before it began, and the only thing I could understand was a voice that came on just before ring-off. It was a cold brittle voice, and it said, "It is decided then. The twelfth, according to your calendar." Naturally, Elsie, I didn't say anything about those calls, but when Mr. Alverez, the manager, came into the office, I spoke to him about the switchboard. He seemed nervous and anxious to avoid the subject. He said, "Yes, I know. Just keep on with your work as before. And if you want to, you can take the morning off tomorrow and go to the fiesta in San Medro. The bus leaves at nine a. m." Which I thought was pretty nice of him, especially since I've been here only two months. On the bus I thought for a moment I saw Captain La Gola sitting alone just in IP back of the driver. But it must have been someone else for this man was in mufti and he neither looked around or spoke to anyone during the entire trip. San Medro is a delightful town with a lovely old church at one end of the single crooked street and the market place at the other. The fiesta, or rather fair, was charming. I bought a tecinta neck scarf and one of those spangled oncero hats, and I drank so much chocolate I thought I would get sick. There's an observatory at San Medro, and according to the postcards in the shops it has a scope with a mirror twenty feet in diameter. I thought it would be interesting to see even in daytime when observation was of course impossible. So I walked up the long cedar-lined trail and climbed about twenty flights of steps, but I might as well stayed at the fair. The front of the observatory and the walk that encircled it bristled with soldiers, all armed to the teeth, and every few yards machine guns had been set up, covering the road below. There was absolutely no admittance. In back of the observatory a kind of shelf had been hacked out of the hillside and a big wooden wall had been erected as if to hide something from the people of the town. There was a large door in the side of this wall, and it opened while I stood there arguing with the guards. I had only a fleeting glimpse of what was inside but I did see a massive steel framework with criss-cross braces. The area around the block house -- I took it for a black house -- swarmed with federal troops. And when I went back to the bus stop more soldiers had set up large camp tables and were questioning all civilians who were made to queue up and file by them. "Somebody declare war?" I said to one of the uniformed men. He didn't smile and I didn't realize at the time how near the truth I was. The bus ride back to Rodosa was restful, and after my climb to the observatory I was content to sit in the sloping seat and doze, occasionally opening my eyes to watch the rocky scenery slide by. We were five miles out of San Medro when the explosion sounded behind us, a muffled thump as if a great container of water had fallen from a height. An instant later the shock wave hit! a window in the bus shattered, and the road in front seemed to stagger momentarily. But I really didn't know what had happened for two days.Jt took that long for the garbled story to straighten itself out and by that time the significance of it had tapered off somewhat. It was still mighty big news. A Coronado interception missile had blown up in its cradle just outside San Medro. More than thirty officers and men had been killed. Rodoso was in an uproar. Concern of the people was not only over the explosion but for the reason behind the presence of the missile. Why had it been brought there to this little town far up in the mountains? Was the exploding of it an act of sabotage? If so, what persons were responsible? The confusion lasted a week. Gradually things began to return to normalcy. Rumors passed on, and the wild (talk subsided. And then like an anti-climax President Solera marched in with his entourage and took over the entire twelfth floor. The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree as the occupants of the rooms made outside calls or demanded room-service. To make matters worse, Consuela was taken sick again, and I had to do four hours of the night trick. At a quarter to twelve the outside line on the new C circuit suddenly lit. I plugged in. "Antenida #-#." "I have a call for Captain Juan La Gola." "Just a minute, please." The captain did not answer; and then I caught sight of him, striding across the lobby. He took the call at one of the house phones, and after he had talked for a moment he seemed to become greatly excited. When he hung up he stood there for several minutes, drumming his fingers on the counter. Then he came up to me. He became confidential in a way I knew he woqjdn't dream of had he not been so disturbed. "Jennie," he said, "how long have you lived in San Carlo?" "A little more than two months," I replied. "You came from the United States, yes'?" "From Iowa." "And how do you like San Carlo? Specifically, how do you like El Presidente Solera?" "Like him?" I said uncertainly. "I'm not sure I know what you mean." "He's a dictator, Jennie. Do you like dictators?" "Look," I said with some annoyance, "I just run the switchboard. Local politics are a little out of my field." He nodded and lit a cigarette, expelling the smoke through his nostrils. "You wouldn't tolerate dictators in your country," he said. "Why should we here?" I said nothing. He went on, "When the machinery of a government becomes decrepit, it is time for a change. That change can bring wonderful results when it comes from far out and its operators are far more, advanced than we, even if they are alien." "What do you mean, alien?" I said. He shrugged and smiled crypically. "I'm expecting a... friend... a Mr. Smith. Will you tell the room clerk to see that he gets the finest accommodations possible?" Next day the captain dictated two letters, and he signed them with the number #. If possible the man became more disagreeable. He strutted about the lobby, his boots polished, his tunic buttoned to the throat. He gave orders and he signed the endless flow of napers that were brought to him. I couldn't help thinking about that three-panel dreamer in La Gola's room. Was it possible, I wondered, for such a machine to superinduce dreams of the future. And were those dreams merely prophetic or -- IF and I know this sounds foolish, Elsie -- or did they cause those events visualized on the disc actually to happen? These questions gnawed away at me, and finally I decided to have another look at the captain's room; but the door had been fitted with a new lock, and I couldn't open it. It was perhaps just as well for I had a feeling I was being watched. And next day when I was retrieving a pencil I had occasion to view the back underside of the switchboard. There was a small box, the size of a cigar box, mounted there. Opening the lid, I saw a small compact tape recorder. It soon became apparent that President Solera and his party were not here for a hunting vacation. Oh, several of his aides went out with guns and came back with tropicora quail, but they were lesser-fry sycophants whose movements meant little. Every few hours some official arrived at the hotel and demanded to see El Presidente. First came the civilbristling with gold braid and self importance; and finally more civilians -- scientists, judging from their talk and far-away looks. Everything was hush-hush; little groups stood about the lobby, talking in low tones. The switchboard was alive with calls, but almost every conversation was made meaningless with a scrambler. They even took over the hotel's patio. Four big telescopes were mounted on tripods there, and in one afternoon all the beautiful bouganvillea were trampled on. I went into town on my day off and found the same confusion in Rodosa. No one would answer questions. Ask, and you received the same answer: "Quien sabe, Senorita?" There were rumors, of course, and these multiplied as peasants began to filter in, uncertain and bewildered. One family told of seeing "a great white shadow" skimming over the trees, hovering over the ground in the vicinity of Balerano, twenty miles north. An old man reported seeing a huge cigar-shaped thing high up from which smaller wingless objects emerged to descend with great rapidity. About this time Mr. Smith, Captain La Gola's friend, arrived. He came in the hotel alone without luggage, and there was something odd about the way he walked across the lobby to the desk. He moved with a kind of jerkiness as if his leg muscles were stiff and not used to action. His clothes were ill-fitting, and I got the impression he disliked wearing them, although they were ordinary civilian clothes. His voice grating and parrot-like. "My name is Smith," he said to the room clerk. "I believe a reservation has been made for me." In compliance with Captain La Gola's wishes, he was assigned to the executive suite on the fifth floor. Well, I'm not exactly a fool and I can put two and two together and make four. During the night trick I sat there before the silent switchboard with the big lobby deserted and quiet as a tomb, and the more I thought about all the things that had happened since I had come to San Carlo and Rodosa, the more I seemed to see a pattern take form with Captain La Gola at one end and, curiously, Mr. Smith at the other. I thought of the wreck of the Sonera Express and the destruction of he interception missile and the closing-off of the observatory at San Medro, all the preparations -- troops and guns, and scopes in the patio -- and the tape recorder on the switchboard, and I ithought of President Solera and the wild stories told by the peasants who had come down from me north. At one a. m. I was having my lonely coffee break when the whine of the descending lift broke the sileaoe. The lift door opened and President Solera stepped out. I didn't know him at first. He wore dask glasses, and the collar of his coat was turned up hiding the lower part of his face. He came straight up to the switchboard. "Is there a through bus to Porto Vargas tonight?" I did a double take. El Presidente on a bus? "There's one in half an hour," I said, "but it doesn't stop here at the hotel. You have to pick it up in Rodosa." He stood there in hesitation. Then: "If anyone asks, you haven't seen me, understand." Before I could refuse, he had thrust a bill across the counter and was striding acrossthe lobby to the door. He had but gone out, when the second lift came down and Captain La Gola emerged. He lit a cigarette, strolled to the door and went out onto the veranda. In the mirror above the switchboard, my only unobstructed line of vision, I watched him move idly toward the steps, stop and lean against a post. Beyond the veranda I could see the gaunt figure of President Solera plaissance. For a full minute Captain La Gola continued to stand there, smoking. Then he moved sideways out of range of my mirror. An instant later a scream rose to my lips. A thin tracer of lavender had darted across the open space, straight toward President Solera. In midstride the man halted while a shudder ran through his frame. His head jerked back; his shoulders twisted; then he pitched forward like a stringcut puppet and lay still. Well, you know well enough how the assassination threw all San Carlo in a state of shock. I suppose there is no need to describe to you the reactions here at the hotel. The hours that followed were hours I'd like to forget, a frenetic mixture of confusion, gloom and chaos. There were some the murder cast into the depths of despair. There were others who were openly elated at the removal of what they called an ironbound dictatorship. As for me, I was in a nervewracked dilemma, so shaken I could hardly operate the switchboard. For while I hadn't seen the source of that fatal shot, I was sure it had come from Captain La Gola. Yet what value would be placed on the testimony of a telephone girl whose only means of observation had been by way of a six-inch mirror. Still I had to tell someone. IF I told Mr. Alverez. He said, "The Investigators Federale will be here tomorrow. I advise you to wait and speak to them." Meanwhile neither Captain La Gola nor his friends were to be seen. Until evening. Then Mr. Smith came to the desk and informed the room clerk he was checking out. But before he left he dictated a letter: We thank you for your application for our investigation of your primary (Mokart Scale: #) culture in your secondary (Class: C-X-l) world. While we found many things which would indicate sociological and technological advancement, certain representative primordial characteristics make inclusion into the Galactic Federation inadvisable at this time: specifically the resort to military ordnance when governmental conversion was suspected to be imminent; and the ruthless homicide of an oligarch simply for the minority dislike of his political policies and the acquisition of his political status. We regret this decision but advise you herewith it is final. That was the letter, Elsie, and when I had typed it, Mr. Smith affixed his signature and said he would like the letter delivered to Captain La Gola personally. So because it seemed important I took it up myself. The Captain's face when he opened the door was drawn, and fear seemed to have frozen his features. His clothing was rumpled, and his hair in disarray as if he had just awakened from a heavy sleep. He told me to come in in case there might be a reply. As Captain La Gola finished reading the letter his face blanched. He lowered the paper slowly, .then brought it up and read it again. "He can't do that!" he cried. "He can't..." He turned and ran out the door toward the waiting lift. And then my gaze was drawn farther in the room to the table on which the dreamer stood. There was a motionless scene on the dreamer's disc, the final scene apparently from Captain La Gola's recent sleep. It was a scene like a three-dimensional photograph. In the foreground was the captain, running toward an indefinite figure that could be only Mr. Smith some hundred yards ahead. At that frozen moment of the visual dream Mr. Smith was in the act of entering a dark cigar-shaped shadow from whose upper midsection a violet flame was just beginning to blossom outward. There was terror in La Gola's face even as he realized he could not make Mr. Smith aware of his approach. Terror as he realized that in another split second he would be engulfed by those flames. Well, I guess that's all, Elsie. I never saw either of them again. I did see a petrified block in a scorched glade a mile north of Rodosa, just off the Highway Nationale. The peasants of the district pointed out its vaguely human shape and compared it to a scriptural charIF  Novelette The Junk Man Cometh Interesting junk'. Nobody knew what it was meant for -- but a lot of people wanted to get it! I O ne day late in June of '#, I was sitting on the veranda of the family home in Ard County, West Virginia, trying to match the rapidly diminishing figures in my checkbook against the printing bills beginning to come in for the campaign posters I'd ordered. It was getting pretty obvious that there just wasn't going to be enough money for even a half-way adequate senatorial campaign. I'd been out stumping around the state in earnest for the previous two weeks and I was tired. My conscience was troubling me too; I'd been neglecting my share of the work in the family junk business. All this was on my mind when we got a call from a junk dealer over near Morgantown asking us to bid generators he'd just picked up and claimed he couldn't handle. His asking price sounded pretty good; I was tired of worrying about my own problems, and I told Pop I'd run over to have a look. "Old Jacobs is a shady character," warned Pop. "Don't let him sell you no pig in no poke." I agreed to be cautious, pocketed the company checkbook and drove the thirty miles to Morgantown in the pickup. The front rotor was acting up, and it took me the best part of half an hour on those country roads to make the trip. But it was worth it, or at least I thought so at first. Jacobs had the goods. Two hundred cannisters with the factory seals on them, each painted olive-drab and stenciled with the model number and other nomenclature appropriate to the generators. I checked them against the catalogue listings, and at Jacobs' price I figured we could make a pretty neat profit on them. I wrote out a check for sixty of them and headed for home. The next morning, my brother Buzzy decided that he needed a haircut and would take the carryall and two yard hands to pick up the cannisters at JacQbs' yard on the way back. Along about noon, Buzzy's wife Phyllis stuck her head out of the kitchen door to holler at me in my alfresco office on the veranda. Phyllis had reproduced herself twice and Buzzy three times, and what with the kids constantly getting lost in the junk yard, she has developed a pretty fine voice for such a little woman. "I don't know, Phyllis," I said. "But I expect he heard you inquire after him wherever he is." She lowered her voice a couple of hundred watts. "He left here before eight and he should have been back by now. I've got to take these kids into Morgantown for their shots at one o'clock." I looked at my watch and heaved myself to my feet. "Maybe one of the rotors on the carryall gave out on him. I'll take the pickup and see if I can find him." I backed the pickup out of its shed, skirted a pile of tangled and rusty reinforcing rod and pulled out toward the road. Pop was coming back from the mailbox, and he hopped aboard to come along for the ride. About three miles beyond Carson's Corners we found the carryall and Buzzy. He was still alive, and Pop got on the pickup telephone to the Morgantown State Highway Patrol -- even while I was stripping off Buzzy's shirt to see what I could do for him. The Patrol ductor arrived in minutes, and Pop rode off with Buzzy to the hospital. I stuck around with the Highway Patrol and tried to make some sense of the scene. The evidence was confusing. Both men with Buzzy were dead. Old Ed Vickers was cut clean in two and the two halves of his body .were a hundred yards apart. Billy White -- at least we assumed it was Billy -- was burned beyond recognition. The carryall itself lay on its side, blackened and crumpled. Under it lay the flattened remains of what had once been a white Jaguar XS convertible. Although from the time and the heading of the carryall it looked like Buzzy had been on his way back to the yard, he must not have made it to Jacobs' to pick up the generators; the carryall -- or what was left of it -- was empty, and there was no sign of cargo spilled out along the road. The Patrol sergeant set his men to taking measurements and looking for skid marks. He shot a few photos and then stood scratching his head. "It don't make no sense, Congersman Sansoni. It looks kinda like maybe your brother plowed into that there Jag-u-ar, I wouldn't thought it'd flip a big ol' carryall like that." He stooped to peer under the wrecked carryall. "And what happened to the party drivin' the Jag?" I shook my head and shrugged. It didn't make any more sense to me. "I agree, Sergeant. And where did the fire come from? Both vehicles are Cesium-powered. And what happened to poor old Vickers? What could have cut him up like that?" It was the Sergeant's turn to shrug. "Damn'f I know. Guess we'll just have" to wait and see what your brothers's got to say." I looked away from the Sergeant and swallowed a pretty good-sized lump in my throat. Right then it didn't look as though Buzzy would ever be able to say much of anything again. O ne of the principles which had guided my father, Albert Sansoni, to a highly successful career as a junk dealer was to Keep the Stock Up. Pop would buy anything if the price were right and the quantity meaningful, always confident that somebody, somewhere would someday pay him a higher price for it. Well, West Virginia real estate was cheap, and there was no shortage of boon-docks to Jhold Pop's acquistions. And of course he was right. There was always someone, somewhere. Still, we used to kid the old man a lot. I remember Buzzy once saying that if Pop had a chance to buy up all of the old # calendars in '# for a song, he'd do it just in hopes that '# would come back again someday and he could make a killing. Somehow, with Pop's luck, I wouldn't be surprised if he couldn't come out on a deal like that, somehow, with somebody, someday. Pop applied his principle of Keep the Stock Up in raising Buzzy and me. Buzzy, who pretty well shares the old man's genius for mechanics, for combining useless junk into something highly saleable, picked up degrees in metallurgy, mechanical engineering and physics. He fought against it those years in school, but Pop is pretty persuasive, and he kept Buzzy at it. "You never know when you might need to know some of that stuff, Buzzy," he would say. "I never had no opportunity like you got, and you damn-well better make the best of it." Buzzy would sometimes argue back and plead and protest. But Pop IF finally put an end to the worst of these arguments with a blasted: "All right! You go ahead and marry Phyllis! But after your honeymoon, you get yourself back up to the college #r I'll stomp the tar out'n you!" Phyllis was the girl Buzzy had dated since he came back from the Sino-Sov war. "The college" at that time was M.I.T. As for me, I'm two years older than Buzzy and a good deal more independent. While I didn't inherit much of the family's mechanical aptitude. I got a full measure of the old man's stubbornness. Along about high school, I got hooked on politics, played football and earned myself a law degree at the University of Virginia. I then spent two years at Oxford under the posthumous patronage of Cecil Rhodes and -- after the war -- came back to West Virginia to become the youngest congressman the #th District had ever sent to Washington. All this stretched Pop's utilitarian philosophy a good deal, but I guess he is not the only man who considers politicians a pretty useless form of life. Still, he made the best of it, gave me what financial support he could for my campaigns and was -- I think -- secretly a little proud of me. I like politics, and I was a pretty good congressman. After three terms in the House, I was making serious plans to enter the senatorial race in #, when I faced one of those situations which confronts every politician at one time or another. And maybe because of Pop or because of Cecil Rhodes or just because I am built that way, I acted according to my conscience -- which can be a very expensive luxury in politics. I won't go into the details, but after the dust had settled, I found myself still reasonably popular with the West Virginia electorate, but banished from public life by the West Virginia Party machine. My hopes for the senatorial nomination went glimm ering, and my place on the congressional ballot went to an old Party hack from Green County. As a result, at thirty-four, former Congressman Percival Sansoni could be found almost any fine morning in the spring of # sitting on the veranda of the family home, studying the most recent issue of the Metals Reclamation Monthly . That's how it was that I found myself -- for a while at least -- back in the family business. II F rom the way he had looked when we had loaded him into the State Highway Patrol ductor for transport to the hospital, I thought for sure old Buzzy had had it. But Buzzy turned out lucky. He had some pretty bad burns, mostly on his back, but when I finally got in to see him the next day along with the Patrol investigator, he was more angry than injured. "Boy, wait'll I get my hands on those bums!" Buzzy was lying on his stomach, his chest supported by a couple of pillows. "Who do you mean, Mr. Sansoni?" asked the investigator. He had his recorder running. "The hijackers! The guys that bushwhacked us!" "Hijackers?" I echoed stupidly. The investigator leaned forward from his chair to bring the microphone closer to Buzzy. "Why don't you start at the beginning, Mr. Sansoni, and tell us what happened." As Buzzy told it, greatly interspersed with profanity and clouds of cigar smoke, he'd gone into Morgantown that morning and gotten his haircut as planned. Then he had driven to Jacobs' yard, and he and generators on the carryall. They headed for home then and were just topping the grade out of Carson's Comers, when Buzzy spotted the Jaguar parked across the road, pretty well blocking it. The investigator interrupted at this point. "What was your speed when you first spotted the Jag, Mr. Sansoni?" "Ah hell, I couldn't have been doing more than one-ten, one-fifteen. We were pretty well loaded, and we'd just come up that grade." As soon as Buzzy had seen the Jaguar, he'd reversed thrust, dropped the carryall down on the groundeffect shrouding and come to a stop about fifty yards on down the road from where the Jaguar had been. "We rolled over that Jag like it wasn'teven there, but I heard the forward rotors tear into it and drag it along, and I knew I'd burned up the shrouds skidding along like that. I was mad enough to spit nails." "Was there anyone in the Jag?" asked the investigator. "Hell no! And at first I figured some damn fool had just left it sitting there. Busted a rotor or run out of catalyst or something. Then I found out different." Buzzy had dropped out of the cab, cursing, and started to work his way in through the ruined shrouding to take a look at the forward rotor, when there had been a flash and he heard a man scream -- either Billy or Ed -- he didn't know which. The next thing he knew the carryall was flipped over on its side, and there was fire everywhere. The last thing he remembered was a big piece of tattered shrouding, stinking of smouldering rubber and fiber, dropping down on top of him. It probably saved his life. Buzzy was worn out with so much talk, and the doctor shooed us out of his room. In the hall, the investigator rewound his tape and shook his head, clucking to himself. "We haven't had a case of hijacking in this county for twenty years. Your brother must have had a pretty valuable and tempting cargo." I stopped short, and for the first time I began to realize just how little sense the whole thing made. "What's a Jaguar like that worth?" I asked. "They run about ten thousand new, and that one was new." "Then it doesn't make any sense," I said. "Whoever hijacked that cargo destroyed ten thousand dollars worth of ductor to do it and got sixty generators at a junk price of two hundred bucks apiece. They made two thousand dollars and killed two people doing it." IF The investigator looked hard at me. "Maybe three. The Jaguar was registered to a woman in New York. She hasn't been heard of since she left Morgantown yesterday morning." Ill A lthough I grew up in one of the biggest junk yards in the East, it never occurred to me until pretty recently to really think about junk. I read the other day where some archeologist was calling for Federal funds to make a national memorial out of a big junk yard up in Rhode Island. Claimed it was a treasure trove for future generations of archeologists, a "many-layered record of the achievements of our society." Conspicuous consumption and so forth. Maybe so. But -- until recently -- I never entertained such elevated ideas about junk; and if the elections go the way I hope they will this fall, I don't expect to give the subject much consideration in the future. My father, being both a very successful junk dealer for over thirtyfive years and something of an original thinker by patural bent, has a well-developed philosophy of junk. I can picture Pop -- a skinny, tough little man with bandy legs, a face like a geologist's map and two bright eyes behind thick spectacles -- Pop expounding this philosophy in his rough West Virginia speech to Mom (before she died) or to one of the neighbors or to anyone who would drink a beer with him and listen. "The thing you gotta realize about junk," he would begin, "is that ever'thin' in the world is junk to someone, while at the same time, they ain't nothin' in the world that ain't worth somethin' to someone somewheres. It all depends on your pointa view.' I This statement would usually earn Pop a quizzical look from his listener, and practised as he was in exposition, he'd take a long pull on his beer to let the full dramatic effect sink in before continuing with his theory. "Now to show you what I mean, aire with his fifty Cadillacs and two hunert wives and jools and all, settin' in his hot ol' tent just wishin' them slaves'd work them fans a little faster, and you send him a nice shiney fuel-oil stove right out'n the factory." Pop would pause again and fix his listener with a piercing eye. "Why its junk, ain't it! Far's that #-rab's concerned, it about as useless as teats on a boar hog!" Then Pop would lower his voice to a conspiratorial tone: "Oh t'other hand, you go on out in the yard there and dig up a couple them sorry old magnetic heat-exchangers and some of them cruddy surplus blowers, and you hook 'em together and give 'em a coat of paint and send 'em off to that old #-rab, and he's gonna be some kinda happy! I know, 'cause I done it already." After this, Pop would sit back as if exhausted from the force of his argument and suck down whatever was left of his beer. Then, if he was talking to me or to my brother Buzzy, he'd add some shrewd observation on the business of being a junk dealer as part of his continuing program which was intended to prepare us to take over the business from him someday. As he talked he would sweep his arm comprehensively around the fifteen acres of crowded yard, taking in the old ground-effect cars, the rusting industrial machinery, the hulks of surplus military equipment, the rows of factory-reject appliances, the piles of bent ductor fans, the rolls of wire and heaps of industrial scrap, the stacks of crated electronic pieces which lay oxidizing quietly -- each element in its own sure way -- in the hot West Virginia sun. IV T hat night, after the Patrol investigator's interview with Buzzy, Phyllis cooked supper for the kids and Pop and me and then went off to spend the evening with Buzzy. Pop and I sat in the warm summer darkness out on the veranda, drinking beer and watching each other flip cigarette butts over the rail. There was a big, fat, lazy moon rising off the end of the airstrip, its yellow light silhouetting the steel spires and crags of the yard. The old M-# tank Pop had stripped to bulldoze with looked like a war memorial. In fact the whole yard looked like a battle field in the moonlight, tom by shot and shell. During the day, with the bright wink of cutting torches, the raucous whine of the yard machinery, the squeals of Buzzy's kids as they clambered like mountain goats on the piles of scrap, the yard was a cheerful place. I'd grown up in that junk, and I knew what a wonderful fairyland it was for kids. But at night, silent and deserted, the yard looked like a place where giants had wrestled, where great issues had been decided at high cost, leaving the wasted detritus conflict always brings. Pop heaved his empty beer can out into the darkness. For a man of sixty, Pop can still heave pretty far. It took a long time for the distant clatter to come back to us. He peeled the top off another and propped his feet on the veranda rail. "Perce?" he said. "Yeah, Pop." "I run this yard more'n thirtyfive years now. Ain't never been nobody hurt workin' for me here -- until yesterday anyways." "Yeah, I know Pop. But it wasn't your fault." Pop sighed and was silent for a moment. Then he snapped his chair back on the floor from its tilted position and stamped angrily to his feet. "Listen, son. Ever'thin' about this yard is my fault! Somebody gits hurt workin' for me, I'm damn-well gonna find out why! I'm gonna git them bums that done it to Buzzy and Ed and Billy!" "Now take it easy, Pop. That's what the police are for -- " "Police, hell! They ain't never gonna figure it out. They ain't even figured out how them hijackers managed to tip over a forty-five ton IF carryall and burn it up thataway, much less who done it!" "Or for that matter," I added, musing, "why?" "What do you mean, 'why'," Pop's voice grew quieter. "They was hijackin', wasn't they? Stealin' Buzzy's cargo!" I shook my head in the darkness. "It doesn't add up, Pop. Why would anybody go to all that trouble, smash up a ten thousand dollar car, wreck a carryall and kill two men, erators worth maybe two-fifty apiece, tops?" T hat stopped the old man for a minute. Another empty clattered in the darkness, and the flare of a match illuminated the old man's face, his heavy white brows drawn together in thought, his lined and seamed face etched with concern. Pop looks like an old white-haired Indian when he's worried about something. Other times he looks like a skinny Santa Claus. "Perce, like I always say, the value of junk depends on how much somebody wants it. Them generators ain't worth more'n two fifty to you and me, but somebody else must've wanted' 'em pretty bad." "Granted, Pop," I said. "But the surplus catalogues are full of brand new generators. The government over-procured on them when it looked like that South Africa business was going to get nasty, and now they're all over the place. Maybe the guys who bushwhacked Buzzy would've had to pay three or four hundred for them -- I got a pretty good bargain out of Jacobs -- but they sure as hell didn't have enough people." That stopped Pop again, but only for a minute. "What'd you say you paid old man Jacobs for them generators?" There was a note of excitement in his voice. "Two hundred." "And they was new? Factory sealed?" "The one I inspected was." "One. You only looked at one?" Pop's voice held a familiar note of accusation. "Heck, Pop. The others were all in sealed cannisters. What would have been the point of -- " "Perce, I done told you to watch that Jacobs. He's a sharp one. He wouldn't let you have them generators for no two hundred bucks if there wasn't somethin' wrong somewheres." He snapped his fingers. "Sure, that's it. You bought yourself fiftynine somethin  elses!" I was chagrined. I knew what Pop said made sense, and maybe I had been taken. Somewhat sheepishly I said: "I suppose you're right, Pop. I guess I'm lucky I didn't take all two hundred of them." Pop exploded. "You mean he had more of them at that price. Why in the name of heaven didn't you clean him out?" "But Pop! If he was cheating me, it's a good thing I didn't!" Pop was half-way down the veranda stairs, when he turned back to inquire, "How many times I gotta tell you, Perce, Keep the Stock Up!" backed the pickup out into the yard. He jumped down then and disappeared into the house, reappearing moments later with his arms full of weapons he'd salvaged at one time or another from junked military equipment and put into working order just for the hell of it. Pop didn't even own a hunting license, but he had enough death and destruction in his arms to outfit a banana-republic constabulary. II vintage, old but oiled and gleaming. There was a # mm bazooka of somewhat later date, a fairly new lazgun, one of the high-frenquency types like I'd used in Australia ten years before, and a #-shot officersissue carbine which was still standard in the Army. He dumped his load with a clatter in the bed of the pickup and dove back into the house to reappear in a moment with a qrate of bazooka shells, a couple of two spare power packs for the lazgun. He dumped his load in on top of the weapons and climbed up into the seat next to me in the cab. He wasn't even breathing hard. I went to full thrust, and negotiated the lane leading to the Morgantown road at top speed before I said anything. When we'd settled down to a nice even one-fifty, I shouted to Pop above the whine of the rotors: "Hey Pop! What's all the armament for? You got enough there for an army!" Pop struck a match on the pickup door and swallowed a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Perce, you seen what a mess that carryall was and what they done to Ed and Billy -- " He didn't have to say anything more. I knew what the weapons were for, and I was glad Pop had thought to bring them. We sat in silence during the twenty-minute drive to Morgantown. The town was deserted; it was nearly midnight. Once through and on the other side, we whipped down the grade to Carson's Corners, where Buzzy had been waylaid the day before, and took the turn into Jacobs' access road with rotors whining and the outboard shrouding scraping clouds of dust from the dirt road. The Jacobs yard was dark, but there was plenty of moonlight, enough to reveal the empty loading platform. "They're gone, Pop. He must have sold them to someone else." "Yeah." There was disappointment in Pop's voice. "But let's us talk to the old bum. Maybe we can shake outa him what was in them cannisters." I parked the pickup, and we walked up to the dark shed that was old Jacobs' combined bachelor quarters and office. Pop banged on the door, but there was no flare of light or answering stream of profanity. I left Pop on the front porch and walked around to the rear. Jacobs' yard wasn't anywhere near as big as ours; according to Pop, he specialized in junked ductors, making a good living out of reclaiming cesium oxide and now and again taking on the same moon that shone on our yard shone on Jacobs', and there was the same sense of desolation and look of ended conflict in Jacobs' shadowed junk piles. T he illusion of a battlefield was heightened by Jacobs himself -- as I found him that night behind his home. Or at least pieces of him. I don't know if they ever found all of him. There was enough, though, once I sorted it out from the blackened ruins of his pickup truck. There was a head and most of an arm still in the smashed cab. The rest was pretty widely distributed I threw up and then shouted for Pop. He's a tough old bird, Pop, but he got sick too when he saw what I was looking at. The empty platform and the carnage behind the house didn't leave much doubt as to what had happened. I still didn't buy the hijacker theory, but I walked around the pickup and pulled the lazgun out of the clutter in the bed and strapped it on anyway. I rejoined Pop, who was rather futilely trying to cover up what was left of Jacobs with a piece of tarpaulin. He'd have needed several hundred square feet to have done the job properly. "I guess we better give the Highway Patrol a call," I said. "Yeah," said Pop. "But lets us look around a little  bit first. Old Jacobs wasn't the sort to put all his eggs in one basket. There may be some more of them cannisters stuck around here somewheres." Pop got a flashlight out of the pickup, and we went hunting. After a quarter of an hour we found them, twenty of them, standing stacked two-high in the little shed Jacobs had used as his workshop. "These like the ones you bought?" Pop gestured with his flashlight. "Yes. Identical as far as I can see." Pop bent to examine the cannisters more closely. "They ain't Army cannisters, Perce. I ain't never seen none like this before. Looky here. Look at this sealing band." I looked and then realized I'd never seen a seal like that before either, except maybe for the sixty I'd bought the other day, when I hadn't really examined them closely. "But Pop, it's stenciled right on Pop directed the flashlight at the wall above Jacobs' workbench. There hung a stencil with yellow paint: IF "Old crook -- rest his soul -- sold you ringers, all right." I went for the pickup and backed it up to the door of the workshop. We shifted our arsenal into the cab and loaded all twenty cannisters onto the truck bed. It was hot work; each cannister weighed the best part of three hundred pounds, and when we were finished the rear shrouding was belled out against the ground. We got ready to leave, and the thought hit me. "Hey Pop, wait a minute! Last couple of times somebody tried to truck these cannisters around, they got chopped into little pieces. Maybe we better think a bit." Pop didn't hesitate. "You might be right, son. But we can't do nothin' with these babies here, and maybe the guys that got old Jacobs will figure the same as we did and come back to see if there's any more." I looked around the dark yard and shivered. Pop had a point. He fired the turbine and opened the door for me to climb into the cab beside him. "No, Pop. You drive, and I'll ride shotgun jn the back." Pop shrugged in that comical way he has when he's really under pressure. "Okay. Choose your weapon, son." and took the belt of ammo he handed me. "Keep your eyes peeled, son." I climbed in back and settled myself among the cannisters. "You too, Pop." I wanted to look brave and nonchalant, and I poked a cigarette in my mouth with the kind of tougihguy gesture I'd seen on #-D. But my lighter was out of gas, and I had to be content to perch on the cannisters looking every bit as frightened as I felt. T he rotors roared, and the heavily laden truck moved off on to the highway. We went through Carson's Corners wide open and whined up the grade outside of town at top speed. Once we passed the point where Buzzy had been bushwhacked, I began -- foolishly -- to breath easier. Then we were in Morgantown, and Pop had to drop down to sixty-five to make some of the turns in town. Once again in open country, he really opened her up. I was beginning to think we were home free, when something large and dark appeared a few hundred feet above the moonlit road behind us, blotting out a segment of stars. I started to shout a warning into the wind, but by that time Pop had spotted the tank-truck blocking the road ahead, and he reversed thrust and slewed off onto the berm. The heavy truck sat down hard on its shrouding, skidded crazily, and clipped a couple of small pines, but Pop managed to wrestle it off the road and bring it to a stop to one side of the stalled oil truck. I caught a glimpse of the driver's body, mangled and torn, lying half out of the open cab door. N ow clearly visible, the black shape -- something like a flattened teardrop -- slowed. A bright spot glowed high on its prow, and the tops of the pines along the road burst into flame. The beam from the strange craft swept across the oil truck. There was a massive blast and a wave of heat, and thick black billows of smoke began to pour across the road into the thicket which concealed us. I shouted at the top of my lungs: "Take off, Pop! The smoke'll screen us." Hoping Pop would think I was still aboard, I rolled silently off the arms, and flopped to the ground. I match for whatever it was that had burned up the tank truck and the trees around us, but I figured it might give Pop enough cover to get away. though I had trouble keeping it elevated enough to bring the wavering stream of tracers onto the black ship. I heard the whine of rotors as Pop slid the pickup through the burning thicket and back up onto the road behind the burning oil. Then I came to the end of the belt, and I wished I had that # bazooka that was now -- hopefully -- rolling away from me I didn't. I pulled the lazgun and crackled away at the black shape now hovering closer and closer over me, and I thought of Pop and Buzzy and Phyllis and the kids and Oxford and the election and the girl I'd almost married, when I first went down to Washington in '#. And then I don't remember any more. Not a thing. VI T he first thing I became aware of -- how much later I don't know -- was the fact that I was lying flat on my back, my head elevated from the hard surface under me by a lump on the back of my head the size of a turkey egg. It hurt like hell, and I rolled my head to one side to ease the pain. There was a quick rustling sound not far away, and I opened my eyes, expecting -- I guess -- to see some starchy nurse and maybe Buzzy on the next bed. But it wasn't a hospital. Or if it was, I was blind. I contemplated that thought for a while and found little comfort in it. Then my other senses came into play, and I realized that hospitals don't smell of chlorine and hospital beds are not entirely constructed of cold, hard metal. I sat up, eyes straining in the blackness, and there was another rustle, a frantic scuttling sound which my imagination quickly translated into something horrible. I was scared, and I sat motionless for a long while, breathing as quietly as I could. There were no more rustlings, but I could hear something else breathing, something breathing in short, shallow gasps, like a wounded animal. Something , I thought, with a high metabolism rate.  should stay put, I thought. Nothing has hurt me yet, I thought. And even as I thought it, my curiosity got the better of me. Or maybe it was the fact that I can't stand fear and uncertainty and prefer almost any resolution, even an unfavIF orable one, to continuing in doubt. I stretched out a hand in the darkness before me and touched something round and soft and warm which seemed to shrink away from me with much rustling and an intake of breath. I checked the sensation of that touch against the card file of touches every man has in his head and very quickly identified it. "I beg your pardon, Madam," I said. "Could you be good enough to tell me where we are?" There was a gasp, much rustling, a fumble of arms around my neck, and I found a sobbing girl pressing her head against my chest. Her hair smelled good. "Oh thank God! Thank God! I thought you were one of them." The girl shuddered in revulsion. I held her tightly until her sobbing stopped. Then, as if suddenly aware of me as an individual and not just a pleasanter alternative to "them", she pulled away, and I heard more rustling. There was the snap of a purse and the frustrated rattle of lipstick and mirror. "Damn," she said. "I must look awful." She sniffed once or twice as women do, when wiping their eyes. "I think you look just fine," I said, gallantly ignoring the fact that we were in utter darkness. "Do you have any idea where we are?" "In their ship -- I think." "A big black job, kind of a flattened tear-drop shape?" "Uh huh." She slid over against me again and fumbled for the security of my hand. "How long have you been here?" I asked. "I don't know. It seems forever. Since Wednesday morning, however long ago that was." I began to put two and two together. "You own a white Jaguar?" "Yes! How did you know?" I told her about Buzzy and the carryall, about Jacobs and the cannisters and our attempt to get what was left of them back to our yard. "These cannisters," she said when I had finished, "are they round, with rounded ends, like maybe sleepingpowder capsules?" "Yes. That's a good description. But they're about the size of three fifty-gallon oil drums laid end to end." "That explains it then. They can't talk, at least not so you can understand them, but they kept drawing pictures. I didn't understand what they wanted, but they drew a lot of pictures of those capsule-shaped things." The girl withdrew her hand -- to gesture with I guess. We sat in silence for a while, and some of the awesomeness of our situation began to sink in on me. Funny, you can talk blithely about creatures from outer space, about spaceships and first contact, and other esoteric matters. The reality is a hell of a lot more mundane, and its most striking aspect is more than that most simple and basic of human emotions: fear. And then the girl told me how she had been driving along the Morgantown road, when the ship had appeared above her and settled on the road before her. She had stopped; a hatchway had opened in the side of the ship, and the next thing she had known, she had been lying in darkness, sliding about on the metal floor of our prison as the ship apparently went through violent maneuvers. "There's light sometimes. Not much, a dim, red light, but enough to see by. They showed me their silly pictures, but I didn't understand them. Once they handed me the tablet and a funny-kind of pencil thing, and I wrote my name over and over again, but all they did was waggle their arms at each other and draw more capsules and meaningless pictures. "Then it was dark and then it was that funny kind of dim red light again. And there was a lot of flying around. Three times since I came here." "That would have been the attacks on Buzzy, on old man Jacobs and on Pop and me." "But if what they want is those capsules -- cannisters -- why didn' t they just go get them from that man's junk yard? Why did they have to wreck your brother's carryall and kill that man and go after you and your father?" I thought a bit. "I don't know, Miss..." "Berenson. My name is Claudia Berenson."  "... I don't know, Miss'fierenson. Maybe it has something to do With the blackness in here. Maybe they can't see by the kind of light we see by. Maybe they can't tell where the cannisters are until they're in motion, or something." W e were silent again for a moment. Miss Berenson -- Claudia -- snuggled up close to me again, and I put a protective arm around her. She could have been any age, in the darkness, and ugly as sin. But from what I could feel and the sound of her voice, I had a hunch she was no old crone. Then, as much because we were afraid as anything else, we started to talk, to tell each other about ourselyes. She told me what it was like to be a fashion buye'r for a big chain of women's stores, about how her brother had died during the Australian campaign, about going to school in Albany, New York, about her first date and how funny it had been, about the apartment she shared with two other twenty-five-year-olds in Manhattan, about her unhappy love affair in '#. Darkness is a wonderful aid to confession, and I found myself talking about Australia and Oxford and the Party and the junk business and about my unhappy affair with Julia in Washington, and I discovered all of a sudden that talking about Julia didn't hurt anymore. Despite the mystery and threat of our strange meeting, I found myself cheered at the absence of old pain and the promise of... something new. I was almost disappointed when the dim red lights suddenly came to life. As my eyes adjusted I was able to see what our prison consisted of. We occupied a kind of transparent bubble enclosing a roughly hemispherical space, perhaps a dozen feet across at its widest point. It looked like it had been juryIF rigged from some sort of plastic material just to contain us; I could see where the edges of the bubble were crudely but effectively fused against the deck, against what I took to be the outer wall of the ship and against a rear transverse bulkhead. A cylindrical duct a few inches across led from the bubble to the ceiling, bringing sweet West Virginia summer air into us and offsetting the stench of chlorine. The space into which our bubble intruded conformed roughly to the forward half of the flattened teardrop ship, I had last seen hovering over the Morgantown road. Perhaps thirty feet at its widest and sixty feet long, it tapered from a rounded prow back to the flat bulkhead, separating, I supposed, the crew's living and control area from that portion of the ship containing its drive mechanism and whatever cargo space could now be presumed to contain all but twenty of old man Jacobs' two hundred and twenty cannisters. There were no windows or ports, but a row of flickering screens on the inner side of the curved prow gave a curiously distorted picture of woodland and hill. The ship -- if the screens were correct -- seemed to be nestled into one of the wilder groves that dot the northern West Virginia countryside. All of this, of course, I observed in detail later. My attention was initially riveted on the four figures now climbing down from crude wirelike racks suspended from the ceiling of the craft. Claudia shuddered beside me, and I gathered that these were "them." I couldn't blame her for shuddering. They looked pretty bad, and I wouldn't have found them substantially more appealing even had I known they were all registered voters in the #th district. Maybe eight or nine feet tall, they were vaguely human in that there was a recognizable head and trunk. But, there the resemblance ceased. There were far too. many arms and legs, and each was tipped with a writhing collection of small, pulpy tentacles. These "fingers" and "toes" seemed to obey their owner's commands to grasp a stanchion or turn a dial, but when their services were not otherwise engaged, they danced and waved with a weird life of their own. It was hard to tell colors in the red light, but our wriggling captors seemed to be covered with some sort of hard, chitinous material, its shimmering surface broken only by two slashes of bright cloth-like stuff, one draped across the chest and another bound about the uppermost "arm" on the left side. There is a kind of universal principle of clothing, and I would have bet my chances of ever getting out of there that one chunk of cloth indicated rank or status and the other covered whatever passed for pudenda among our chitinous friends. As a sometime lawyer, I am not unschooled in the rules of evidence, the logical process of putting two and two together to make four, twenty-two, or #, as the case and the nature of the jury demand. Hence I was puzzled by the great discrepancy between the physical conformation of our captors and the ship and its outfitting. The chairs in front of the screens at the prow of the ship were mansized, not "thing" sized; there was a contour couch visible to us, and the contour was not that of a "thing". So far as I could tell, the switches and knobs, the door handles and lock mechanisms, the height of various indicating instruments all seemed designed for some creature other than the "things." Specifically, it looked like the mysterious ship had been -- or was designed to be -- occupied by a two-legged twoarmed biped, like say, you or me. I puzzled over this for a bit. And then two and two added up to suggest that the "things" had not come by their ship honestly. I filed this assumption for future use. M y ruminations came to an end. One of our captors donned a transparent helmet, for all the world like an inverted fish-bowl, and slipped his uppermost arms and one leg through a harness containing what must have been gas bottles of some sort. He passed out of our field of vision through a hatchway in the rear bulkhead and reappeared a moment later through a lock mechanism leading into our bubble from the same bulkhead, bringing with him a puff of chlorine. We coughed and choked for a moment until the lock had closed behind him. Claudia skittered behind me, as I rose to meet him. There was none of that "take me to your leader" business. Instead our visitor gave out with a scratching, whistling noise -- like a fingernail across a blackboard -- and looked at me expectantly with several wide-set, many-faceted eyes. When neither of us reacted to his greeting with a similar sound, he gave an unmistakable shrug -- a gesture which also must be well nigh universal, but one which is formidable when performed by a column of three shoulders. Then came the tablet and pencil. First there was a picture of the ship and under it a series of curved symbols unlike anything I'd ever seen. The thing in the helmet pointed to the ship with one set of bunched tentacles and drew another bunch, stiffly gathered into a pointer, across the line of symbols. "Wheeskrick," it said. I bowed slightly, stabbed a forefinger at my chest and said; "Percival Sansoni." The Wheeskrick chattered and whistled and handed me the tablet and scriber. I'd read a lot of science fiction and I figured I knew just what to do. I drew a circle and ten smaller circles in orbit around it. With an air of triumph and a proud eye cast toward Claudia, I placed a large X through the third circle out from the center. The Wheeskrick whistled and squeaked again, took the tablet and scriber from me with two jellyfishlike tentacles and lashed me a good one across the chops with a third. The language lesson was over, and he was impatient with my attempts at rudimentary cosmography. I staggered back before him, IF mindful of the girl beside me and the necessity for belting him one in return. But I didn't know where to start in, and anyway, he was busy scribbling again. It was another picture of the black, flattened-teardrop ship, this time with a jagged hole in its side and little black Wheeskricks unloading cannisters from a hatchway onto a neat stack under what was quite clearly a tree. The Wheeskrick chittered and whistled; the picture disappeared and was replaced with another displaying a crudely-drawn man loading cannisters onto a carryall, while behind a straight line, apparently representing the side of the ship, four Wheeskricks lay supine in complex wire racks. I began to get the picture. The Wheeskrick manipulated something on the tablet, and die picture disappeared again; he began to draw another: a carryall lying on its side, crumpled but recognizable, and two Wheeskricks loading cannisters into their ship. Off to one side, the Wheeskrick painstakingly drew two stacks of cannisters, each stack twenty-one cannisters long and five high. He blacked in the last four rows of five with his stylus -- the twenty cannisters not yet recovered. Whisding and screeching, he drew another series of inexplicable symbols under the twenty blackened cannisters and translated them for me by reaching out with his middleright-hand arm and belting me again, this time hard enough to knock me up against the inner surface of our bubble prison. Without so much as a parting whistle, he wheeled on three feet, tucked his tablet under his upper left-hand arm and exited through the lock, leaving us once again gasping and choking in the fumes of the atmosphere he entered. C laudia knelt beside me and crooned over me, and although I wasn't really hurt by the WHeeskrick's blow, I groaned a little bit for effect. The dim light Was perfectly sufficient to show me -- beside the nature of our prison, the reaches of the interior of the Wheeskrick ship and the creeping horror of the Wheeskricks themselves -- the delightfut fact that Claudia Berenson was a real looker, the kind of girl men dream about crooning over them when they have fallen honorably (and not fatally) on the field of combat. But that wasn't getting us out of there. I stopped groaning, sat up and started thinking. The Wheeskrick's pictures had been pretty clear. So had his blows. Old man Jacobs must have stumbled on the Wheeskrick's cargo, when they had off-loaded it to repair some trouble in their ship. He'd swiped it during one of the sleep periods, sold it the way he sold other hot goods -- quickly and cheaply -- and now the Wheeskricks were doing all they could to recover it. I began to get curious about what was in those cannisters, more curious than I had been before. Whatever it was, though, it was amply clear that the Wheeskricks wanted it back, wanted those other twenty cannisters and were prepared to knock me around until they found out where they were. Well hell! They could have them. They'd cost too many human lives already. The problem was, how do you let go of a tiger when he has you by the tail? Claudia had been thinking too. She had been in our cage a lot longer rWj than I, with nothing to eat or drink, and there was a note of panic in her ft voice. "All they seem to want are their silly cannisters. Can't you tell them where they are? Maybe they'll let us go then." if I thought about the possibility. Then I thought about what they had done to Ed and Billy and to the old man, Jacobs, and what they might do if they got to Pop's junk yard. some of it performed with the casual inefficiency of the aborigines,  j I  Ml f   T t . I but nothing to rival the way old man Jacobs had looked. Or Ed Vickers. I shook my head. "I don't think they'd let us go. I think we're like some kind of annoying wildlife to them; I think they'd as soon kill us as look at us. Those missing twenty cannisters are the only reason you and I are alive now." "But what can we doV The panic in Claudia's voice advanced a half a dozen spaces toward "go". "I don't know," I said. "Let me think." While I was thinking, Claudia sat with her head back against the bubble, too frightened to sleep, too weary to look about her any more. I tested the walls, probing at the transparent plastic with my penknife. They were slightly flexible, and I could penetrate the surface with my knife. But all I got for my pains was a whiff of chlorine, and I realized that we'd suffocate long before I could chop a hole big enough to let us escape. And even then, we would escape only into the Wheeskrick's chlorine-filled control room. I n the meantime, our captors were busy. One of them cycled his way out through a lock in the wall opposite our cage -- his helmet and gas cylinders in place -- while two others busied themselves assembling dozens of small tripod affairs, each a hand high and two hands across the base. When they had finished, the two went back through the after bulkhead and reappeared with one of the cannisters. One by one they tested the tripods by waving each toward the cannister. There were bright blips on the screen before the fourth Wheeskrick. An hour after he had left, the Wheeskrick with the helmet returned, a struggling calf in his arms. The Wheeskricks dragged the strangling animal over to our bubble and proceeded to disassemble it before our eyes. I had a sobbing girl, her head buried in my shoulder again, to contend with. The obvious instructional session of the Wheeskricks was not lost on me, and I began to think even harder. But I didn't come up with anything. Not for a while. There was another sleep period of complete darkness and another period of dim red light, during which three of the four Wheeskricks disappeared through the outer lock, their arms loaded with the little tripod detection devices. I could see what would lie ahead; I'd watched men break in Australia. There would be hunger and -- judging from what had already occurred -- some more abuse. Then would come the time when they'd start in on Claudia, maybe like the calf, and I'd begin to think that perhaps if I started doing some fancy drawing on their tablet for them they'd let us go and maybe not hurt Buzzy and Phyllis and the kids and Pop. Just take their damn cannisters and go. That's what I'd begin to think after a while, and I knew I'd be wrong. The dim red light winked out for the second time, and I thought even harder. I had long since assayed my pockets and found nothing other than some loose change, my penknife, and my fuel-less lighter. I gave Claudia a try. "What do you have in your purse?" "Why... I don't know. A few dollars, my comb, some cosmetics." "Dump it out," I said, "and tell me item by item what's in it." There was a clatter, like a slot machine paying off, and Claudia began to finger her possessions in the blackness to identify them. "Let's see. There's a comb, lipstick, mirror,... uh... four, no five bobby pins, compact, eye pencil, one, two, three, four, five, six... six coins, a can of hairspray, billfold, a couple of... uh... stamps, I guess, a box of aspirin tablets, car keys, apartment keys, nail file, a screw thingumajiggy out of my radio that I've got to get a new one of, subway pass, handkerchief, two... three coughdrops, master credit card, and..." Claudia broke off. "And what?" I asked. I should have known better. "Uh... a box of... uh... contraceptive pills." "Oh." I said. It didn't look like a very promising collection, but I added it to my mental assay of my own pockets, and we lapsed into silence. T hen I had it. It was a long shot. I didn't know if it would work, or if it did, whether we would survive it or not. But I remembered that calf and old man Jacobs and Ed Vickers, and I figured it was worth the chance. The dim red light came on again, and the Wheeskricks began to clamber down from their wire perches. I pulled Claudia to her feet. "Pull your collar up around your ears and stand up as close to the outside wall as you can." I thought a moment and stripped my jacket off and draped it over her head. "I'm going to try to blow us out of here, and if it works, get a good lung full of air and get to that outer lock as fast as you can. I think the top button makes it open." She nodded dumbly and did as she was bid. I watched the Wheeskricks. One of them had donned his fishbowl and tanks and was headed back toward the entrance to our bubble. I fished the can of hairspray from Claudia's purse and depressed the plunger on top. The small bubble began to fill with scent and with IF finely atomized particles of highly flammable lacquer. I heard the inner lock door start to open just as the spray can fizzed out of gas. I joined Claudia at the wall, fished my fuelless lighter from my pocket, held it as far behind my back as I could, shouted "hold your breath!" and thumbed the striker. There was a whoosh of flame and a thumping explosion. The entering Wheeskrick never knew what hit him. The plastic walls of our prison blew out like an over-inflated balloon, and the shirt sleeve over my right arm burned with a merry flame. I ignored it and propelled Claudia before me through the ruptured bubble toward the outer lock. One of the Wheeskricks brushed past us, headed to aid his colleague in the ruined bubble lock, confident that his buddy -- who was approaching us as only a nine-foot, six-legged wheeskrick can -- would make short work of me. I was pretty confident he could too, but I figured Claudia, at least, might make it. The fourth Wheeskrick never budged from his position in front of the detection screens, which shows the relative priority the Wheeskricks put on recovering the rest of those cannisters. Claudia reached the outer lock, hammered ' the uppermost button with her fist, and the door started to swing inward. I was making full speed toward her, my lungs bursting and eyes streaming from the chlorine, when a tentacled limb caught me on my burned right arm and the massive weight of the Wheeskrick brought me up short. I let his pull swing me in a short arc, and I brought my left fist around in an old style haymaker, knuckle out, aimed for the center of the patch of yellow cloth on the Wheeskrick's chest. If Sansoni's Universal Theory of Clothing were wrong, I would do him little damage. You may wound a soldier in his pride if you shoot him in the epaulette, but you reallly stop him if you get him in the pants. The theory proved correct. There was agonized screeching and whistling, and I tore myself loose from his writhing grasp and leapt the last few feet to the open door of the lock. Claudia slammed the door behind me; the pumps cycled swiftly, and we lay gasping and choking in the sweet afternoon air. I was dizzy, but I figured the Wheeskricks couldn't open the inner lock door until the outer was closed, at least not for a while, and with the last of my strength I ripped one of Claudia's shoes off her foot and wedged its heel into the crack between the outer door and its jamb. I wanted to make sure that door stayed open until we felt like leaving there. W e lay gasping and retching for several minutes in the mouth of the strange ship's airlock, and then it occurred to me that the Wheeskricks would soon be out after us. They had helmets and gas bottles, and no doubt there was some way of getting that inner door open without closing the outer one. "Come on, Claudia, we've got to get out of here." Claudia choked, slipped her other shoe off and slid with me over the lip of the lock and dropped the three or four feet to the ground. We'd taken only two or three steps toward the dense woods which surrounded the Wheeskrick ship when a bright pencil of light sprang from somewhere above and behind us and a fresh, green juniper a few inches before my nose burst into flame. I pulled Claudia back into the shadowed swell of the ship's flank. "Looks like they don't want us to leave," I said. Claudia began to sob quietly. I felt a little like it myself. It looked as if we had jumped splendidly out of the frying pan and into the fire. I slid down beside Claudia on the grass, threw a well-done right arm around her quaking shoulders and started to think again. I thought very hard. We take three steps out of the shadow of the ship where their damn screens can down. We wait here , and they'll come out after us , and this time -- outside the ship -- they won't he shy about using their weapons . We were damned if we did and damned if we didn't. Then I remembered something fantry officer who lectured us: "If you find yourself on foot against an enemy taijk, the safest place to be is up on the tank. They can't get you thqre, but there is always a chance you can get them." I pulled Claudia to her feet and then in best platoon-leader style said: "Follow me!" We skirted around the swelling of the ship toward the rear, where the tear-drop diminished to a series of blackened tubes, apparently the business end of the ship's drive mechanism. I boosted Claudia ahead of me, up the tube mouths, until we were both on hands and knees on the pitted upper surface of the ship. I could see the slightly elevated turret from which the ship's lazbeams were projected, but even if their basic sensor system were in the same turret, they would not dare fire at us without running the risk of scorching their own tail. We advanced on the turret. I rather cavalierly swatted Claudia on the fanny when she let it elevate too much; we would be far ahead if we could take them by surprise. After a hundred feet of abrasive crawling we had reached the turret, and I could see the objectives of the ship's sensors. There were six of them, each -- I would suppose -- with a sixty-degree coverage of the area around the ship. We kept low, beneath the muzzles of the lazbeam projectors, and I pulled that precious, junk-laden purse from Claudia's shoulder. There was a lipstick, and it was only a moment's work to obscure the objectives of the ship's eyes with a thick, greasy layer of die stuff. Like Pop says, one man's junk is another man's salvation. We took the quick way down, sliding and scraping across the sharp prow and dropping the last eight or ten feet to the grass of the clearing. We didn't pause. Three leaps and we were on the verge of the woods. Another scrub crackled into flame a yard away, and I turned to see one of the Wheeskricks in the lock enIF trance, a weapon in his hand. We ran on. A fter ten minutes, Claudia was breathing like a broken piston, and I wasn't in much better shape. We went to ground, and I could hear the Wheeskrick thrashing around in the underbrush a hundred yards away. But now we were in our element, not his. We lay silently, and he passed us by, half blind in the high actinic light of our sun, laboring under the drag of his breathing apparatus. We lay like that, Claudia's head pillowed on my shoulder, for hours. I figured with what I had observed of the Wheeskrick's vision, we weren't much better off in the night than in the day, but we needed the rest; Claudia -- now three days without food or water -- was in bad shape. At dusk, while she slept, I worked my way slowly around to a thick wild grape growing up a nearby pine, severed a three foot chunk of it, and brought it back to her. She drank greedily from the hollow core and rested; I figured she would be good for an hour or two of travel. Our ace in the hole was those twenty cannisters. As long as they weren't moved, the Wheeskricks couldn't find them -- or so I hoped. And if Claudia and I could make the thirty miles to my home and Pop's ingenuity and those cannisters, we might have a fighting chance. We kept off the roads until we reached the outskirts of Carson's Corners, which are about a nineiron shot from the inskirts. There is a truck stop in Carson's Corners, and I slicked my hair into some semblance of order and went in alone and bought a sack of hamburgers to go. We hunched together in the shadows behind the stop and ate greedily, while I watched for a chance to steal a ductor. I hatedr to do it, but I figured we could square it later, and my first assumption was that the Wheeskricks would 'be looking for two people on foot. I toyed with the idea of calling the Highway Patrol, but when I thought of the problem of trying to convince anybody who hasn't seen the Wheeskrick ship that there was such a horror loose in the county, I gave up. Even if I could convince them, what could they do? A middle-aged couple parked their '# Buick with its turbine still turning and headed for the rest rooms. I bundled Claudia through the door and crept silently out of the parking lot and onto the highway. At the edge of town I waited until a trucker pulled out toward Morgantown and drove in the shadow of his tailgate into and through that metropolis. My second assumption was that the Wheeskricks could very well be up there a few hundred feet in the air, their black ship all but invisible, prepared to jump any single car going down that road alone. Outside of Morgantown, the trucker turned off on the Washington Pike, and I drifted to the side of the road under a spreading maple. We waited until midnight, but nothing else came along. I could feel that black ship up there, detectors alert, waiting for something to pass down the road. Then somewhere behind us, on the outskirts of Morgantown I suppose, a drive-in theater let out. For a few minutes the road was crowded with ductors, and I swung out into the midst of them and let them convoy us all the way to Pop's yard. I parked the stolen ductor behind the pile of defective zinc coffins, which graces the area between the road and the house, and sat there for a while, too weak to move. After a bit, I helped Claudia out of the ductor and into the house. Buzzy was home and so was Pop. Phyllis came down in curlers and a robe. We must have looked a sight. "Jeez! Perce," said Buzzy. "My lord, son!" said Pop. "Oh you poor thing," said Phyllis, reaching out to Claudia. "Pop!" I said, lapsing into my childhood West Virginia speech, "don't move them goddamn cannisters! Not an inch!" And then I dropped where I stood. I guess I was pretty tired. IX T he real secret of Pop's success as a junk dealer -- apart from the philosophy and principles I have already described -- lay in his genius for putting two or more pieces of useless machinery together into something that would bring a big price. Pop had a reputation all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and the way it worked was this: Suppose a widget manufacturer in Brockton, Massachusetts, gets a suded widgets with knobs on to be delivered (under time penalty) within sixty days. His production capacity is based almost entirely on the number of fully-automated widget-making machines he has in service. And if he hasn't got enough to allow him to fill the lucrative order, or if one of his machines is broken down and can't be repaired in time, before he says "no" to the order, he gives Pop a call. "Mr. Sansoni, can you haywire together a widget-maker with a # widget per hour capacity? I'll need it by Tuesday." Maybe Pop has never heard of a widget, but he always answers in the same way. "Sure. Send me the prints and tell me how long it's gotta last." And that's Pop's secret. Send him the blueprints for a widget-machine, and he'll make you a widget-machine -- out of junk. It may not be a very efficient widget-machine and it may not last a hell of a lot longer than the requirements of the job (although it's surprising how many improvement patents Pop has sold -- metaphorically speaking -- to widgetmachine manufacturers), but the widget man gets something that will do the job, and Pop turns low-cost junk into high-priced industrial machinery. That's why we have an # foot landing strip out back of the yard. My earliest memories are of great cargo aircraft lumbering into that strip to pick up some complex piece of haywire Pop had spent the night crating for shipment. Of course, now the strip is mostly weeds and scrub pine; the flitters don't need anything IF like that kind of space to lift off from. Anyway, as you can see from all this, I wasn't much use in the real operation of the family business. Sure, I could help out occasionally with a bit of viring, and I wasn't bad with a cutting laser. But next to Pop and Buzzy I was all thumbs, and I didn't have that trick of seeing how you could take the turbine from a '# Olds, two refrigeration units mounted back to back, the fusion chamber from a field generating plant, and most of the guts from a surplus radar set and put them all together into a workable widget maker. Besides, I'd been gone too long and I didn't know where anything was anymore. And in a junk yard the size of ours, that's as important as anything else. And that's why it was that I found myself working as combination bookkeeper and purchasing agent for the business, along with handling Pop's occasional legal problems. Pop didn't mind giving up the bookkeeping, but he hated to miss out on the fun of acquisition. Still, he and Buzzy had all they could handle right there in the yard, and I started running around to surplus auctions, plant dismantlings, 'and other junk yards -- like old man Jacobs' -- bidding on this and that, doing my bit to Keep the Stock Up, I hadn't given up on my political career. Not by a damn sight. But my only chance was to run as an independent for the Senate seat that would be up for grabs in the fall of '#. I have a good name in the state, and I figured that if I could run a big enough campaign, I could be pretty sure to beat both the regular Party candidates, which would go a long way toward breaking the power of the courthouse gang that had tossed me out. But such a campaign takes money, lots of it. I figured I had about a year to earn it, and a third share in the family profits -- unfair to Pop and Buzzy as it was -- seemed like the best way to go about it. I didn't really have much hope that I would be able to accumulate even half what I would need to do the job right, but I had to make the try with whatever resources I could muster. Sometimes, after a long day passing out my own campaign literature to uninterested housewives at some shopping center or shaking hands with too many limp individuals at some surplus auction, I felt like I was more of a junk man than Pop ever was, trying to salvage something useful out of the old rags and bones that my political career had become. F unny thing about the sleep of total exhaustion. When I awoke the morning after our escape from the Wheeskricks, my mind was full of campaign worries, thoughts about speeches and posters and #-D time and how I was going to pay for it all. And then I came fully awake, heard voices outside my window, and the full memory of the events of the past three days came rushing in on me., I dragged myself out of bed, a little surprised to find that I wasn't a good deal more stiff and sore than I was, and peeked out the window. A State Trooper was driving off in the ductor I'd swiped the night before, and I could hear Pop explaining to another Trooper something about "them no-good juvenile delinquents" and how they must have abandoned it here and so forth. Pop is not without imagination in a pinch. I showered and shaved and went down to the veranda, letting my nose guide me to the stacks of flapjacks and bacon there. The kids were already off playing in the coffins in the front yard, and Pop was just coming in from his talk with the Troopers. Claudia, despite her threeday ordeal, looked fresh -- like a bills -- and she was helping Phyllis turn out the flapjacks and bacon. Funny thing. We didn't say anything at all to each other at first. She just turned toward me from the stove and kind of lifted her arms, and before either of us quite knew what we were doing, I had my arms around her and she had hers around my neck and we kissed. I guess it lasted a pretty long time. Buzzy was grinning. Phyllis looked like she was going to cry a little bit. Pop looked mildly disgusted. "When you're all done, Perce," he said, "I'd 'predate it if you could tell us where'n hell you been since I last seen ypu on the Morgantown road." I flushed a little bit and looked at Claudia. She was cool as a cucumber and went back to slicing bread and feeding it into the toaster. I filled in Pop and Buzzy between bites of flapjack. I told them about the Wheeskrick ship and the Wheeskricks and how it looked like they didn't really fit in their ship somehow. I told them about how old Jacobs had swiped the cannisters and about my theory that the Wheeskricks couldn't see very well in our light and depended on their detection system to locate the cannisters. I wound up by stating the problem as I saw it: getting the cannisters back to the Wheeskricks without incurring a visit from them. I guess I had in mind some sort of remote-controlled ductor we could send off down the road loaded with the twenty cannisters. Pop's look of disgust deepened. "I ain't about to give them things nothin'," he said. "Not after what they done to you and Buzzy and poor old Ed and Billy." "But Pop," I said, "those cannisters belong to the Wheeskricks. And anyway, you can't very well call up the Highway Patrol and expect them to believe anything as wild as this." "I ain't goin' to call up nobody," said Pop. "And as far as the cannisters belonging to the Wheeskricks, didn't you say it looked like they didn't really fit in that ship? Like maybe it was built for someone else? I bet they highjacked that ship just like they coldcaulked Buzzy here." I got legalistic and quoted something out of Blackstone to the effect that two wrongs don't make a right and that even if the cannisters were stolen property (several times, that is: the Wheeskricks stole them from some rightful owner, and Jacobs stole them from the Wheeskricks), we still didn't have any legal title to them. IF P op thought a minute. "All right, Perce. You want it nice and legal. I know a little sumpin' about the Law. What do you call it when a guy unloads cargo on your property and has to pay for storage?" "Demurrage," I said. "Yeah," said Pop, a note of triumph in his voice. "And what happens if he don't pay when he unloads his stuff?" "Well," I said, "under the Law Merchant, the wharf owner can claim up to the value of the goods for non-payment, providing..." "See!" said Pop, fairly cackling in triumph. "Them's our cannisters until some court decides different, and I'll bet anything it's up to the Wheeskrioks to take it to court, certainly not us." "My God, Pop, you can't apply common law to a situation like this." Pop paid no attention. "And just think what them cannisters must be worth!" The word "worth" struck a responsive chord in me, and the legalisms began to give way to shyster isms. I needed money, and this could be the windfall that would pay the printing bills and maybe buy some #-D time, and... And maybe it was sheer rationalization, but the memory of that tank-truck driver suddenly arose in my mind. It seemed to be a fixed part of the Wheeskricks' modus operandi to set up a violently constructed roadblock whenever they wanted to intercept cannisters on the move. My idea of a remote-controlled ductor would be almost sure to cost at least one more life. I became very silent as Pop and Buzzy began to talk about ways and means of moving the cannisters without activating the Wheeskrick detection system. As they talked I became aware of Claudia again, and I broke into their technical plotting. "All right," I said. "I'll go along with you. But you better figure from the start that the only way to get out of this in one piece is to suck those birds in and eliminate them, and if there's going to be that kind of rough stuff around here, we better plan on getting Phyllis and the kids and Claudia the hell out of here." For a change, Pop and Buzzy agreed with me, and the three of us started to hatch plans which would get the women and kids off the premises. Phyllis responded first with a sweet and dulcit: "Cut the crap, Buzzy, I'm not going anywhere." Buzzy subsided meekly. Claudia just looked at me and grinned. "Now Claudia," I said, "there's no reason in the world..." My voice trailed off. Pop looked at Buzzy, and then he looked at me. The look of disgust on his face deepened. "When your mother was alive, why when I said something, she..." Pop stopped and shook his head. "Keerist," he said and went back to drawing diagrams on the table top. Claudia and Phyllis started cackling at each other and resumed their work at the sink. For a lawyer who was once pretty good at trial work, I was not batting very well that day. X B y noon the Wheeskricks problem was still without a solution, but Pop had shrouded the parked pickup containing the cannisters with several layers of copper screening, carefully grounded to the pickup frame, just in case the cannisters were radiating something the Wheeskricks could detect. Pop and Buzzy argued most of the morning on the best way to get the Wheeskrieks. Buzzy was in favor of rigging the pickup for remote control as I had suggested and then laying for the Wheeskricks ship with a couple of # mm recoilless rifles. But I piped up about the women and kids and said I wouldn't have anything to do with a shooting match. Pop just grunted and gave Buzzy his pitying look. "I ain't never had no chance to get me a space ship before and I ain't about to shoot this one full of holes." Then they debated running a heavy cable out into the boondocks well away from the house and wiring the cannisters good and hot to ground. Pop almost bought that one, until I pointed out that while we might fry the first couple of Wheeskricks who caught the loading detail, it'd still leave one or two inside to fight back, burn up the countryside with their lazbeams or, at the very least, shag on out of there when their buddies got cooked. That stumped us for a while, and you could see the gloom gathering. To lighten things a bit I suggested that maybe what we needed to get all the Wheeskricks out of their ship IF at once was a good supply of lady Wheeskricks. Nobody laughed. Pop said: "The way you described 'em, how do you know they ain't already lady Wheeskricks?" He had me there, and the gloom deepened. We sat there like three dummies while the women busied themselves in the kitchen with lunch. I wanted to be done with the whole thing, to take 'Claudia and shove off for far places where there were no life-ordeath problems. With Claudia there, and the promise of what might be, I was even losing some of my despair about the election. Some of it, but not all. Then Pop got his idea. Phyllis was pulling and heaving on the long dining table on the veranda, trying to pull it apart so that an extra leaf could be inserted. But the catch was in an awkward position, and the slides were old and sticky. It wasn't until Claudia came and got a firm grip on the far end that Phyllis was able to pull her end out enough to open up the space in the middle. "See," said Pop. "There're just some things that take more'n one to do." He pulled an old envoi ope out of his pocket and began to sketch with the stub of a pencil. "Looky here, boys. We gotta build us something like this and drop it down over them cannisters." A nd by evening we were finished. Pop had welded up a kind of bottomless cage, a shallow affair made out of reinforcing rod and channel iron. It was just wide enough and long enough to fit down over the cannisters stacked two high and ten long. In the center of the top of the cage was welded a cast iron collar, part of the clutch housing from an '# Ford, through which Pop had bored four radial holes. Out in the strip, half a mile from the house, Buzzy and I sank the massive piston from an old pneumatic lift into the ground and anchored it upright with a couple of yards of concrete. Along the top of Pop's cage ran four spring-loaded rods designed to extend inward from each corner, through the holes in the collar, and into matching holes bored in the pneumatic piston and lined with insulating ceramic. Once lowered over the piston with the rods seated through the collar into the piston, there would be only one way to remove the cage and get at the cannisters underneath: someone had to be at each corner to pull back the rod. Four comers meant four Wheeskricks. At least that's the way Pop had it figured. But it didn't quite work out that way. It was nearly dark when we had finished. Pop had run the old M-# out to where we had planted the piston, the cage dangling from the M#'s A-frame. We stashed a thousand of brush a hundred yards away and ran a heavy cable out from it to the cage. One lead Pop bolted to the cage; the other we tack-welded to the piston for a ground. The earth was moist from recent rains, and if the Wheeskricks were even halfway decent conductors, they should get a good jolt. At least that's the way we figured it. Pop looked everything over and nodded with satisfaction. All that was left to us was to run the pickup full of cannisters out, unload them under the dangling cage, and lower it into place. Judging from the time it had taken the Wheeskricks to detect us when we had driven from Jacobs yard two nights before, we would have a good quarter hour before we could expect them, after we once moved the cannisters. Buzzy was all for going ahead with it immediately. But Pop wanted to give the concrete a little more setting time, and I reminded Buzzy about the Wheeskricks vision. "We're going to need every break we can get," I said. I was feeling pessimistic and more than a little scared. I wished we could persuade Phyllis and Claudia to take the kids and leave. We slept fitfully that night, and at five in the morning Pop was up and dealing out weapons from his store in the basement. I took one of the #-shot carbines and looked longingly at the # mm bazooka. But I remembered the hard, pitted surface of that ship and gave it up. Pop probably would have objected anyway. As if we'd been practising it for weeks, we drove the pickup out to the cage and offdoaded the twenty cannisters in a matter of minutes. In my mind's eye I could see those Wheeskricks huddled in front of their detection screen whistling and chattering as the blips began to appear. IF Pop pulled the M-# into position and lowered the cage down over the piston. The four rods sprang home with a solid snap. Buzzy cast off the winch line, and Pop took off in the M-# for the brush patch with the generator. Buzzy and I went to ground in a drainage ditch fifty yards away in tfie opposite direction and began to survey the sky in the direction of Morgantown. I t was just a little after sunup and a fine day. There were chickenhawks wheeling in slow, precise circles over the woodlot down by the stream. Cicadas were beginning to saw away in the heavy dew, and from somewhere way off to the north there came the faint, casual clank of cowbells as some farmer turned his herd into pasture. The faint only other man-made sound. Then right on time the Wheeskrick showed up. Their ship was low, not more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground, and it zigzagged slightly, like a hound coursing after scent. Then it locked on, flew swiftly to the strip and settled silently a few yards from the stacked cannisters. There was an eerie silence, and then the turret winked into life, and the M-# glowed cherry red and began to burn. Its fuel tank went off with a shuddering blast, and the Aframe crumbled into ruin. The turret winked off. Buzzy and I dug our noses deeper into the grassy bank of the drainage ditch. I hoped Pop had had sense enough to dig in in his brush patch. The round hatchway in the side of the Wheeskrick ship swung open, and two came out, their goldfish bowls shining in the morning sun. They looked around carefully, saw no sign of life, and stepped down to examine Pop's handiwork. They heaved at the cage and jiggled it and then spotted the spring-loaded bolts. One of them loped around to the far side, pulled back one bolt and stretched to reach the other on his side. His waving tentacles were inches short. He rejoined his fellow and waved three tentacled arms in a curious pattern. We could hear his whistling and screeching through the goldfish bowl and fifty yards away. There were two formidable Wheeskrick shrugs, and one of them did something to the top of his goldfish bowl and pointed a waving bunch of tentacles at the ship. The hatch closed and a moment later reopened. Two more Wheeskricks joined the first two and watched attentively as the first two gesticulated and wiggled their tentacles. As the four took up their stations at the corners of Pop's cage, Buzzy dug me in the ribs. "We got 'em, Perce! We got 'em!" I heard the faint whine of the generator deepen into a growl as Pop threw the breakers in. The Wheeskricks went on about their business. They released the bolts and started to lift the cage up and off the piston. There was a flash of fire as the collar of the cage brushed against the piston. I heard the clatter of breakers going out and then being shoved back in manually. The cable leading to Pop's brush pile glowed red and broke into smoking flame. Whatever else they were, the Wheeskricks were dandy dielectrics, and if they felt anything at all from the jolt Pop was giving them, they didn't show it. But the glowing cable showed them something. They pitched the cage to one side and opened fire at Pop's brush patch. I got the carbine in position and started plugging away; Buzzy blasted with his lazgun. I took my time and aimed for fishbowls. I shot two, and two Wheeskricks lay rolling and gasping on the ground. Buzzy's lazgun hung on a third until he went screeching and whistling toward the rear of the ship, stumbled, and fell rolling, his fishbowl and tank bouncing away from his grasp. The grass in front of us flared, and Buzzy cursed. His hair was burning, and he dropped the lazgun to beat out the flame. The remaining Wheeskrick made a dash for the open hatch, and without really thinking I was on my feet and running through the burning pastureland to intercept him. Wheeskricks are faster than people, and he beat me by a good ten yards. I snapped a few rounds from the hip as I ran and saw him spurt rusty fluid and drop pulpy tentacles, still writhing, on the ground. Then I was at the hatchway, thrusting the carbfne barrel into the rapidly diminishing gap between hatch and jamb. The barrel glowed red, and the stock began to smoulder; but it was good steel, and the Wheeskrick abandoned his attempt to burn it out of the doorway. I heard the inner lock open and choked at the rush of chlorine. I took a deep breath, pried with all my might on the ruined carbine and plunged into the red dimness within. The Wheeskrick lay just inside the inner door, viscous fluid pouring from one ruined shoulder. His five remaining arms scrabbled at the lock on the door, trying to shut it. Blinded by the chlorine, I flailed at the figure before me. Something hard smashed me in the face, and I felt teeth loosen. I jabbed with the carbine, caught a glimpse of yellow and jabbed again. Something pulled my feet out from under me, and I fell heavily, swinging as I went. There was a crunch of plastic, and then fire flared in my face, and I saw the fire envelop the Wheeskrick and my own clothes start to burn. As I started to take a deep breath, I felt hands -- not tentacles -- dragging me back toward daylight. XI C laudia was giving me mouth-tomouth resuscitation, when I came to a quarter of an hour later. I kept my eyes tightly closed and enjoyed the treatment. But she must have been able to tell from my more regular breathing that I was on the mend, and she stopped. I opened my eyes, looked up at her tearstained face and the blue sky and the chickenhawks beyond. "Oh Perce!", she said. I smiled and winked one bloodshot eye. We went back to the resuscitation treatment. R After a bit, I thought about Pop and sat up. Three Wheeskricks lay where they had fallen around the cannisters and at the rear of the ship; the fourth was hanging dead, half out of the hatchway. Pop was cursing in a steady monotone as Phyllis rubbed some kind of salve onto his burned neck and shoulder. Buzzy was holding a handkerchief over ihis nose and peering in over the dead Wheeskrick at the interior of the ship. I got to my feet and hobbled over to them. Buzzy looked around as I approached. Most of his hair was missing, and the bandages on his burned back were singed black. "You okay, Perce?" I felt for the burned places on my cheek and forehead. "Yeah, but I'm glad I had my campaign pictures taken before this started." Buzzy turned back to his inspection of the ship. "It's going to be a while before we can get in there to look around." "I'm in no hurry," I said. "I been in there too much already. All I want to know is how much dough we can get for it." Buzzy, who at the moment was full of the purest scientific curiosity, looked blankly at me. "Oh yeah. Your campaign." We walked to the cannister pile, but Pop was already ahead of ns. He had horsed one of them free from the pile and was examining the sealing band. "Here, Buzzy. Take a look. I'll be dipped if I can figure out how this thing opens." Buzzy bent over the strip to inspect it and then pulled a pair of pliers from his coverall pocket. He got a good grip and pulled. His face grew red and his knuckles white. The end of the strip didn't budge. He stopped and wiped his hands on his coveralls. "Maybe this isn't a sealing strip." he said. "Maybe there's something else." Together the three of us rolled the cannister over and over, examining every inch for some means of opening it. "No wonder old man Jacobs sold you these things so cheap Perce," said Pop. "He couldn't figure out how to open the cotton-pickers." I thought back to Jacobs' yard. "He must have opened one," I said, "or found one already opened. There "Say," I said, "that one wasn't open along the end at all, come to think of it. It was split right down the middle." Pop got down on his hands and knees and took his glasses off. Without his glasses, Pop has about four power magnification in his nearsighted eyes. He found the hair-fine crack that ran the length of the cannister, and mid-way along it he found a slight indentation. "Looky here, boys," he said, laying his thumb in the indentation. T here was a soft, chiming sound and the quiet hum of delicate machinery. Pop sprang back in surprise, and the cannister slowly split open along its seam, the two halves swinging slowly back from each other until they both lay horizontal. From where I was standing I could see only one half; it was packed with a fantastically complex mechanism, like three running yards of swiss watch, digital computor and heart-lung machine all carefully fitted together. All that had been covered by olive-drab Army packing paper at Jacobs, but I marveled at Jacobs selling the cannisters off as he did. He must have known the Wheeskricks would be coming after the cannisters and unloaded them in sheer panic. I looked at that cannister and saw dollar signs and campaign posters and #-D time. I looked up at Pop, across the cannister, and saw shock. I moved toward him and looked back at the cannister. A man lay in the other half. An old fellow, maybe sixty or so. His eyes were open, and he was grinning at us. He was naked as a jay bird. He sat up, did something to the maze of instruments in the cannister's other half and climbed to his feet, stepping gingerly out onto the grass. He looked about him, taking in the ship, the dead Wheeskricks and the five of us. Then he bowed to Pop, crooked his elbow and swung it in a short circle in some sort of ceremonial gesture and said something like "Sally Constantinople." Pop, who has dealt with a lot of odd ones in his life, didn't blink an eye. He crooked his elbow and waggled it in the same sort of stiff gesture and answered: "Sally Constantinople, to you, buster." The naked old man laughed, a nice human laugh, and walked with a quick and springing step to the hatch of the ship. The chlorine had pretty well dissipated now, and we all crowded in after him. He looked at the jury-rigged sleeping rack of the Wheeskricks with a frown of disapproval and then strode to the complicated control area, seated himself in one of those very humanlooking chairs and began to examine various instruments with practised sureness, occasionally snapping a switch or turning a dial, nodding with satisfaction at the results he read off. He rose then, and we? followed him back outside to the pile of cannisters. He carefully picked over them until he found what he was looking for and began to heave one clear from the others. He was an old man, and Buzzy and I leaped to help him. In the same way, he found two more, and we helped him line up all three on the grass. He thumbed all three open. Out of two stepped men, one middleaged and one who looked about as old as Buzzy. From the third came a girl. Funny thing about women. Neither Claudia nor Phyllis had said a word during all this, exhibited no surprise at the masculine nudity, but when that girl rose, displaying firm breasts and smooth shanks to the West Virginia sun, both women started off for the house. "I'll bet they're hungry," said Phyllis, eyeing Buzzy with a speculative look. "Yes," said Claudia. "And cold, too. We'd better get that poor girl something to cover up with." It was at least eighty by that time in the morning! Well, that was the end of the business. We helped the three men IF and the girl carry the cannisters into the ship and stow them in the after cargo compartment with the other #. We helped (them tear out the Wheeskricks' make-shift sleeping racks, and we brought up a couple of milk cans full of spring water to top off their tanks. They ate the sandwiches Phyllis and Claudia brought, but declined the offer of clothing with polite smiles. T hen we had a session with a pencil and one of my yellow legal pads, and they drew pictures much as the Wheeskricks had done, explaining how they had been underway for a long time, maybe even hundreds of years -- the time symbol was confusing. As passengers on the ship, they had no way of knowing just how it had happened, but the evidence they now had suggested that the Wheeskricks had somehow taken over the ship at some way-station, killed the regular crew (Jacobs' empty cannister?) and stolen the ship and its encapsulated passengers. I couldn't understand why the Wheeskricks wanted the passengers so much, and the pictures that appeared when I tried to ask didn't help much... But that was the end of the business anyway. By noon, all four had waggled their elbows at us and said "Sally Constantinople" to us several times and had smiled great appreciative smiles as they presented Pop with a small ceramic vase -- a real work of art, I'm sure -- and entered their ship, which now, with new inhabitants, didn't look nearly so formidable and frightening as it had before. There was a shimmer of air under the ship, a faint whine and then a rapidly diminishing dot in the sky. The chickenhawks stopped their circling for a moment to watch and then went back to work. The spot disappeared, and I stopped craning my neck and lowered my gaze to more mundane things. Claudia and Phyllis were gathering up paper plates and empty beer cans and shooing the children back toward the house, just as if they'd finished a perfectly ordinary picnic in the State Park over at Olney. Pop was bent over a spade, excavating a grave for one of the Wheeskricks. Buzzy slumped over toward us, the doleful look on his face matching mine. P op finished his work and pried the dead Wheeskrick into its shallow grave. He looked at me, and then he looked a Buzzy. "What's the matter boys? You both look so down in the mouth you'd think you been eatin' baby ducks." Pop cackled at his own wit, but neither of us cracked a smile. Buzzy shook his head in sorrow. "I don't know, Pop. Just disappointed I guess. When I think what we could have learned from that ship, from anything in that ship! If thev'd just have given us anything but that damn vase." Pop said: "The trouble with you, Buzzy, is you just ain't no art lover." He had something up his sleeve, but I was too depressed to notice it. He looked at me. "And what about you, Perce. What's got you so unhappy?" I shook my head. "I guess I'm just disappointed too, Pop. I should be thankful that we all got out of this business more or less healthy, but I guess I was kind of counting on getting something out of it, something we could raise a fast buck on." I felt ashamed of myself. My motives weren't anywhere near as honorable as Buzzy's pure love of science. "I guess I wanted that Senate seat pretty badly," I said. "And all we've gotten is four dead Wheeskricks to bury." Pop leaned on his spade and gave us that "how-did-a-smart-old-manlike-me-get-such-stupid-sons" look. He stripped the lid off a fresh can of beer and downed half of it at a gulp. Then he strode toward the brush patch, beckoning Buzzy and me to follow. He pulled back the limbs of a scrub cotton-wood and there in the weeds lay four cannisters. Buzzy said: "Jeez, Pop. How'd you manage that?" "I snuck 'em back off the ship while they was eatin' Phyllis' sandwiches and drawin' pictures for you' boys." I felt sick inside. "Pop" I said. "Don't you know that (there are four human beings in there! You can't do this!" Pop took a long pull on his beer and heaved the empty can off into orbit somewhere up near the chickenhawks. "Aw heck, Perce. What do you think I am?" "I'm a junk dealer, Perce." "These here are the empties."  A ship that appeared out of nowhere, with a cargo of corpses and o mystery that led Terra's bravest spacemen into a parrallel universe -- and an encounter with their deadliest foe!  (Author of Giant Killer and many other sf stories) by James Blish These and many others will be in the next exciting issue of If -- don't miss it! IF l Dear Editor: When I first saw the table of contents in the April # issue of If I almost fainted. Our Man in Fandom, my father's mustache, shades of Sergeant Saturn! What is Kiwi Carter trying to pull? But just the same I leafed to page #. I was determined to bear it out; when I finished page # I had changed my whole opinion. Yea, Kiwi Carter, good show and all that. Let's have longer articles in this series, I'm for them. By the way please pass the xeno. Oh, I read the rest of the issue too. It was of course great, wonderful, even good. The LaumerBrown serial looks promising. But I must congrat you on your first; it was one of the best I have seen. Let's have more of Kiwi Brown; he is good. Do you know a good fanzine or' a good SF or fantasy club looking for readers or memCircle, Peabody, Massachusetts #.    Dear Editor: This is one of my very infrequent letters to editors, and if you think it is going to be another of those If is-a-wonderful-magazine letters in Hue  Cry, then you are wrong. It won't. Still, you will find enclosed a bank check for a renewal of my subscription. I have tried to figure out why I want to subscribe to a magazine I don't like, and I think I have found the answer. If is the most exasperating magazine I read. Every issue gives me # pages to complain about, and as I am an all too kind, sweet and forgiving character, I have to brush up on my deficient nastiness to be able to survive. Take Robert A. Heinlein. You print three of the novels of the best all-round science-fiction writer to date -- and they have to be three of his worst. Podkayne of Mars jumped from culture to culture and dissolved into good sf's worst enemy, the Big Chase. Famham f s Freehold was talkative, long-drawn and disorganized. I had high hopes for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, but it turned into another discussion protocol. Oh, the details are wonderful, as always with Heinlein, but the presentation is a flop. Only very few novels survive a first person singular treatment, but ever since Robert Graves's I, Claudius authors seem unable to resist it. Graves's story could not be told in any other way, because the story was the man who was supposed to tell it and who, because of his position, could have no other way to tell it than in an autobiography. But the revolt of a lunar colony is not a story which could be told from only one single viewpoint. And therefore the autobiography's all inherent faults show glaringly, made infinitely worse by Heinlein's choice of narrator. Professor de la Paz would have written an autobiography to set the record straight for future historians, and he would have enjoyed writing it. Stu LaJoie would have written for the fun of it. Wyoh would have written to give the others the honor due them... and every one of them would have written an even more enjoyable story than Manny's because they all would have placed more emphasis on people for the reason than they all understand and work people better than Manny does. A lesser author would have had Manny write the kind of story Stu LaJoie would have written, but Heinlein is that rare than, an author with consistency, and having made the worst possible choice he sticks to it... Even a Heinlein flop is better than # of most sf, and the novel was certainly the best thing printed in If for years -- but as usual with If it came out worse than necessary. Start doing something about lf Discontinue World of Tomorrow , which is even worse, if you cannot get time otherwise, and make If grow in something else but wordage. Science fiction should not have to become as stereotyped as the Western. It should not be predictable. If you cannot do something better out of If, then by all means leave editing to someone who can and use your time writing. You are too good a writer to waste your time being an indifferent editor. My best wishes, anyway! -- Sten Dahlskog, Tuna Backar # A, Uppsala #, Sweden. # Funny thing about Heinlein. In his incompetence to make the right basic decisions about how to write a story, he nevertheless manages to make his characters come so much to life that every reader knows at once what he should have done to make the story better... and no two readers agree! There was a lot more to that letter, by the way, but we only had room for about # of it (unless we bring out another magazine called Famous Fan Letters ) ; we appreciate your letters, friends, but we'd appreciate them even more if they were short enough to print entire. That about does it for this month. Our "first" is H. B. Michel this issue. Next issue we start a twoparter by A. Bertram Chandler in which he blends two themes he's touched on before -- the Rim Worlds, and those wonderful mutated rats from Giant Killer . After that... well, stick around and see! -- The Editor      IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Could you write for television? By Max Shulman .frankly, I don't know. But this I do know: story (or documentary or commercial) in I often paid # and more for scripts thinking and writing with a lens! turned out by pepple who should have been Through a series of carefully planned arrested for impersonating writers. assignments, you learn as you write -- guided How such people got to be high-priced by our own specially organized textbooks. TV writers is not as mysterious as it seems. Your assignments are painstakingly edited Television is an insatiable maw into which and revised by our staff of instructors, themscripts must be fed at a rate unprecedented selves all professional writers. Under our in the history of entertainment. It is a gratesupervision, an instructor works with you ful producer indeed who consistently gets by mail, much as a producer or editor works scripts which have been written with real with an established writer, understanding of television's powers and limitations. Do you have an aptitude for writing? To help train new TV writers, I joined with Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight To help you (and us) decide whether you've Zone, winner of five Emmy Awards) and got the stuff to be a writer, we have worked ten other leading authors to start the up a revealing aptitude test. The coupon Famous Writers School. We pooled everybelow will bring you a copy, along with a thing we had learned in our long years in the #-page School brochure. If your test indibusiness to devise four professional writing cates aptitude, you are eligible to enroll in courses that men and women, seriously inthe School. You are, however, under no obterested in writing, could take in their own ligation to do so. homes in their free time. How to write "with a lens" All four of our courses give you a solid foundation in basic writing skills. And three of them (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Advertising) give you training in the techniques of television. You learn to build interesting, believable characters; how to write dialogue that rings true; how to plot convincingly. Therf you develop the specialized approach that TV demands: the facility to tell your Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith ! Famous Writers School  Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut : I am interested in finding out whether I have an : aptitude for writing. Please mail me, without  obligation, a copy of your writing aptitude test ; and information about the courses you offer. : Mr. Mrs. Miss Age (please print) City. #nne . County State -- Accredited by Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. WORLDS OF SO? Man battles against mutated beasts! ooo oo O O oo O CJ O O O O O O O O O r s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted No. CX-# by Lynd Ward #I Hudson Street. New York #, N.Y. r :z: #:  Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fishor, Subscription Mgr, by Gardner Raymond Dozois by Mack Reynolds by Piers Anthony by C. C. MacApp by A. Bertram Chandler by James Blish by Fred Saberhagen by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Secondlass postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. # IF  Editorial A S we all know, science fiction Is fun to read, and stimulating besides. In addition to those two attributes there is one more that has led a igreat many people to read it, and that is science fiction reputation over the years for predicting the future of technological innovation. It is astonishing to realize just how many sober-minded RD directors from time to time take down their back numbers of sf magazines and thumb through them, hoping for some clue on just what they'll be doing next... or what they should be doing now. On the record, science fiction has a lot to offer them. In #, Albert Einstein doubted that atomic power would ever be economically practical -- but sf writers, of course, had had no doubts about it for years before that. In #, Vannevar Bush disputed the probability of intercontinental ballistic missiles -- though they had long been old hat in sf. Radar, television, space satellites -- the list of predictions from sciencefiction stories is familiar to all of us by now, and on the whole it is a more successful list of predictions than can be offered by most of the hard-nosed studies into probability conducted by experts. (Consider even such relatively simple predictions as iKpulation growth and water need: these studies have been made regularly and endlessly for decades, and the people who made them have always erred in the direction of timidity. Witness how many of our big cities have been running dry in recent years ! ) What makes it possible for sciencefiction writers to guess more accurately than experts so much of the time? Two things, we think. First -- as a young lady from Italy told us once -- "we are not afraid to be wrong". Second, because science-fiction writers are usually not experts in the particular field of any one specific prediction, they are able to see past the particular hang-up that every expert knows so well -- but that some other expert, in some other field, will find an end-run around. Only an expert could have calculated so precisely in # that aircraft could not fly. Only a nonexpert could see that the limitations in engine weight and strength of structural members would be overcome by lighter engines and stronger metals. However, "science" is not a collection of statements of "fact". It is a way of organizing knowledge. Even the disorderly knowledge that lurks inside a science-fiction writer's brain can be organized. 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A Correspondence Institution Please mafl me, free of cost or obligation, your Qlustrated booklet "Law Trtdnlng for Leaderahip." Nams Ago Addram Coun CityAStato Zip No.   working Oooupatfam Hours am . pjl tics, a lot of rule-of-thumb sociolog #  bits and smatterings of a thousand disciplines. Suppose we apply to it not the dramatic craft of the writer, but the problem-solving techniques of the scientist. Can we then come out with predictions about the future which share the good features of both approaches and the faults of neither? Two West Coast scientists conare trying. And it looks as though they are succeeding, at least in part. T heir names are Theodore J. Gordon and Olaf Helmer. Gordon, his time supervising the Douglas Aircraft Saturn project. Dr. Helmer Their thesis is that although "the" future cannot infallibly be predicted, all futures are invented -- in the sense that what will happen tomorrow will come from what is happening today. Since "what is happening today" does not lend itself readily to quantification, or even to observation -- so much of it is going on in someone's head -- their approach to the basic data is informal. They selected a panel of knowledgeable people, most of them scientists (a couple of them also science-fiction writers, like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov). They asked them their opinions on whether certain "breakthroughs" could be accomplished, and if SO, when. They collated the results and returned the information to the panel to iget a second approximation; collated that, and repeated the process. The panel was encouraged to comment and criticize at every stage, and the feedback from the panel was used to sharpen the questions and even to eliminate some of them. In the sharpening process some useful thinking was done. For example, one question was first asked in the form of a prediction of a date for "computing machines becoming the most significant intelligence on earth." In the second stage it was changed to "availability of a machine which comprehends standard IQ tests and scores above #;" and by the last round a qualification was added to that: "... where 'comprehend' is to be interpreted behavioristically as the ability to respond questions printed in English and possibly accompanied by diagrams." (The predicted median date for this machine, by the way, was # ! ) Some of the other predicted median dates were: #  Automated language translators. #  Operation of a central data storage facility with wide access for general or specialized information retrieval. #  Manned landing on Mars and return. #  International agreements which guarantee certain economic minima to the world's population as a result of high production from automation. In all some twenty-odd questions or more were asked in each of six areas. In some oases the basic question as to a forecast of probable dates (defined as an estimate of a date on which the given event will have a # probability of becoming fact) could not apply to the sort of information desired. For example. IF the panels were questioned as to their opinions of the likelihood of all-out war, and as to how they thought such a war might break out. # replied through inadvertence; # through escalation of a political crisis; # through escalation of the level of violence in an on-going minor war; and only # thought it might occur through surprise attack when there is no ostensible acute crisis. (But the panel does not, in fact, think there will be any all-out war in the next twenty-five years, at least. And they are becoming more sure rather than less. In one questionnaire, the median expectancy of such a war was #; six months later, it had dropped to #.) O f course, what is really of major interest in this study (published by the Rand Corporation, by the way, as Report on a Long-Range Forecasting Study) is not so much any specific prediction as the method employed. Is it really better than either the straight-line extrapolation of the ordinary igovemmental statistical agency or the free-wheeling guesses of science-fiction writers? We won't know for sure until the future is upon us, of course. But there are some indications to be sought fbr -- and found. For example, some of the questions asked of the panel were selfchecking. Estimates were asked as to population levels at future dates, and also as to rates of growth. Clearly one can be converted into the other; and when curves were drawn according to each of the two procedures and superimposed, they were found to be identical. Again, if the cascade process really resulted in more accurate estimates it should show not only a more exact date but a reduced scatter of guesses that are higher and lower than the medium -- and in fact, it did. Of course, both these things could result either from a more accurate guess or from a more unified agreement to make a wrong guess. Is there any way ta decide which? One way to try to find out would be to apply the same procedure to asking questions which have known answers -- known, that is, to the asker, but presumably not to the panel. You might, for example, sav that the median name in the telephone book listings for one city is "Lawrence", and ask how many pages before or after the median that name would be found in the listings for another given city. Or you might ask about a fact which is clearly checkable, but which most people do not carry around in their memories -- for example, the lumber production of the state of Oregon for the year #, in board feet. So that was done, following the same procedures. And the result? The median was not always right -- sometimes it was far off, in some cases it was bang on. But the median was more accurate than the guesses of any individual panelist, Sound like they've got something here? We think so. And we think you'll be hearing more about this "Delphi" method of long-range forecasting! The Editor Illustrated by The ship hod appeared from another universe -- and one where mankind did not rule! They drift out to the Rim Worlds I -- the misfits, the failures and the rebels. They make their tortuous inevitable freezing wind ways out to the very edge of the X whistled thinly over Port ForGalaxy -- the malcontents, the round lorn, bearing eddies of gritty dust pegs who, even here, are foreand flurries of dirty snow, setting doomed to the discovery of an indiscarded sheets of newspaper cafinitude of square holes. And from vorting over the fire-scarred conall Space they come -- the displaced crete of the landing field like midget persons. ballet dancers in soiled costumes. From all Space -- and (for the From his office, on the top floor of skin of the expanding Galaxy is the Port Administration Building, stretched, in every dimension, to the Commodore Grimes stared out at utmost flimsiness) from all Spacewhat, over the long years, he had Time. come to regard as his own little OF Edg o ght N e by kingdom. To a casual observer, his seamed, deeply taimed face would have appeared expressionless -- but those wiho knew him well could have read a certain regret in the lines of his craggy features, in the almost imperceptible softening of the hard, slate-gray eyes. The king had abdicated. The Astronauticai Superintendent of Rim Runners had resigned from the service of the Rim Worlds Confederacy -- both as a senior executive of the government owned and operated shipping line and as Commodore of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. His resignations were not yet effective -- but they would be, as soon as Captain Trantor, in Rim Kestrel, came dropping down through the overcast, to be relieved of his minor command prior to assuming the greater one. On a day such as this there was little for Grimfes to see. Save for Faraway Quest, the Rim Worlds Government Survey Ship, and for Rim Mamelute the spaceport was deserted. Soon enough it would resume its normal activity, with units of the Rim Runners' fleet roaring in through the cloud blanket, from Faraway, Ultimo and Thule, from the planets of the Eastern Circuit, firom the anti-matter systems of the Galactic West. (And among them would be Trantor's ship, inbound from Mellise.) But now there were only the old Quest and thte httle, battered spacetug in port, silent and deserted, the survey ship a squat, gray tower (that looked as thou it should have been lichen-coated), half obscured by die snow squall, the Mamelute huddling at its base as though seeking shelter in the lee of the larger vessel. Grimes sighed, only half aware that he had done so. He was not a sentimental man. It was just that Faraway Quest had been his last spacegoing command and would be his last command, ever, out on the Rim. In her he had charted the worlds of the Eastern Circuit and opened them up to trade. In her he had made the first contact with the people of the antimatter systems. In her, only short weeks ago, with a 'mixed crew of Rim Worlds Naval Reserve officers and Federation Survey Service personnel, he had tried to solve the mystery of those weird and sometimes frightening phenomena known as Rim Ghosts. And whilst on this wild Ghost Chase (as his second in command referred to it) he had found in Sonya Verrill the cure for his loneliness -- as she had found, in him, the cure for hers. He started as the little black box on his desk buzzed. He heard a sharp female voice announce, "Commander Verrill to see you, Commodore Grimes." Another voice, also female, pleasantly contralto but with an underlying snap of authority, corrected the first speaker. Mrs, Grimes to see the Commodore, Miss Willoughby." "Come in, Sonya," said Grimes, addressing the instrument. S he strode into the office, dramatic as always. Melting snow crystals sparkled like diamonds on IF her swirling, high-cxllared doak of dull crimson Altairian crystal silk, in the Intricate coronet of her pale blonde hair. Her face was flushed, as much by excitement as by the warmth of the building after the bitter cold outside. She was a tall woman and a splendid one, and many men on many worlds had called her beautiful. She reached out, grabbed Grimes by his slightly protuberant ears, pulled his face to hers and kissed him soundly. After she had released him, he asked mildly, "And what was that in aid of, my dear?" She laughed happily. "John, I just had to come to tell you the news in person. It wouldn't have been the same over the telephone. I've just received two Carlottigrams from Earth -- one official, one personal. To begin with, my resignation's effective, as from today. Oh, I can still be called back in an emergency, but that shouldn't worry us. And my gratuity has been approved." "How much?" he asked, not altogether seriously. She told him. He whistled softly. "The Federation's more generous than the Confederacy. But, of course, your taxpayers are richer than ours, and there are so many more of them -- " She ignored ttds. "And that's not all, my dear. Admiral Salversen, of the Bureau of Supply, is an old friend of mine. He sent a personal message along with the other. It seems that there's a little one-ship company for sale, just a feeder line running between Montalbon and Carribea. The gratuity ibarely covers the down payment -- but with your gratuity, and our savings, and the profits we're bound to make we shall be out of the red in no time at all. Just think of it, John! You as Owner-Master, and myself as your everloving Mate!" Grimes thought of it  he turned to stare again out of the wide window, his mind's eye piercing the dis-. mal overcast to the nothingness beyond. Light, and warmth, and a sky ablaze with stars instead of this bleak desolation... Light, and warmth... And a milk run. And Sonya. He said slowly, "We may find it hard to settle down. Even you. You're not a Rimworlder, but your life, in the Federation's Naval Intelligence, has been adventurous, and you've worked out on the Rim so much that you almost qualify for citizenship." "I qualified for citizenship when I married you. And I want to settle down, John. But not here." The black box on the desk crackled, then said in Miss Willoughby's voice, "Port Control is calling. Commodore Grimes. Shall I put them through?" "Yes, please," Grimes told her. II #assidy here," said the box.  "Yes, Captain Cassidy?" "Orbital Station # reports a ship, sir." "Isn't that one of the things they're paid for?" asked Grimes. n "Yes, sir." Cassidy's voice was sulky. "But there's nothing due for almost a week, and -- " "Probably one of the Federation Survey Service wagons," Grimes told him, flashing a brief smile (which she answered with a glare) at Sonya. "They think they can come and go as they damn well please. Tell Station # to demand -- demand not request -- identification." "The Station Commander has already done that, Commodore. But there's no reply." "And Station # doesn't nm to a Psionic Radio Officer." He paused, then asked, "Landing approach?" "No, sir. Station # hasn't had time to extrapolate her trajectory yet, hut the way she's heading now it looks as though she'll miss Lorn by all of a thousand miles and finish up in the sun." "They haven't had time?" Grimes's voice was cold. "What the hell sort of watch are they keeping?" "A good one, sir. Commander Hall is one of our 'best men -- as you know. It seems that this ship just appeared out of nothing -- those were Hall's own words. There was no warning at all on the Mass Proximity Indicator. And then, suddenly, there she was on both M.P.I. and radar." "Any of your people loafing around these parts?" Grimes asked Sonyat "No," she told him. "At least, not that I know of." "H'm." He turned again to the box. "Captain Cassidy, tell Station # that I wish direct communications with them." "Very good, sir." The Commodore strode to his desk, sat down in his chair, pulled out a drawer. His stubby fin'gers played over the console that was revealed. Suddenly the window went O'paque, and as it did so the lights in his office dimmed to a faint glow. One wall of the room came alive, a swirl of light and color that coalesced to form a picture, three dimensional, of the Watch House of Station #. There were the wide ports, beyond the thick transparencies of which was the utter blackness of Space as seen from the Rim Worlds, a blackness made even more intense by contrast with the faintly glimmering nebulosities, sparse and dim, that were the distant, unreachable island universes. Within the compartment were the blanked instruments, the flickering screens, the warped, convoluted columns, each turning slowly on its axis, that were the hunting antennae of the Carlotti Beacon. Uniformed men and women busied themselves at control panels, stood tensely around the big plotting tank. One of them -- the Station Commander -- turned to face the camera. He asked, "Have you the picture. Commodore, Grimes, sir?" "I have. Commander," Grimes told him. "How is the extrapolation of trajectory?" "You may have a close-up of the tank, sir." T he scene dissolved, and then only the . plotting tank was in IF Grimes's screen. In tihe center of it was to duU-giowing (but not dull in iresd globe that represented to Jjom sun. And there was the ourving filament of light that represented the orhit of the strange ship, the filament that extended itself as Grimes and Sonya watched, that finally touched the ruddy incandescence of the central sphere. This was only an extrapolation; it would be months before it actually occurred. There was still time, ample time, for the crew of the intruder to pull her out of the fatal plunge. And yet, somehow, there was a sense of urgency. If a rescue operation were to be undertaken, it must be done without delay. A stem chase is a long chase. "What do you make of it?" Grimes asked Sonya. She said, "I don't like it. Either they can't communicate, or they won't communicate. And I think they can't. There's something wrong with that ship." "Something very wrong. Get hold of Cassidy, will you? Tell him that I want Rim Mamelute ready for Space as soon as possible." He stared at the screen, upon which Commander Hall had made a reappearance. "We're sending the Mamelute out after her, Hall. Meanwhile, keep on trying to communicate." "We are trying, sir." Cassidy's voice came from the black box, "Sir, Captain Welling, the skipper of the Mamelute, is in hospital. Shall I -- ?" "No, Cassidy. Somebody has to mind the shop -- and you're elected. But there's something you can do for me. Get hold of Mr. Mayhcw, the Psionic Radio Officer. Yes, yes, I know that he's taking his Long Service Leave, but get hold of 'him. Tell him I want him here, complete with his amplifier, as soon as possible, if not before. And get Mamelute cleared away." "But who's taking her out, sir?" "Who do you think? Get cracking, Cassidy." "You'll need a Mate," said Sonya. He found time to tease her, saying "Rather a comedown from the Federation Survey Service, my dear." "Could be. But I have a feeling that this may be a job for an intelligence Officer." "You'll sign on as Mate," he told her firmly. Ill R im Mamelute as a salvage tug was already in a state of nearreadiness. She was fully fueled and provisioned; all that remained to be done was the mustering of her personnel. Her engineers, pottering around in Rim Runners' workshop on the spaceport premises, were easily located. The Port Doctor was conscripted from his office and was pleased enough to be pulled away from his boring paperwork. The Port Signal Station supplied a Radio Officer and -- for Rim Mamelutes permanent Mate made it plain that he would resent being left out of the party -- Sonya agreed to come along as Catering Officer. Grimes could have got the little brute upstairs within an hour of his setting the wheels in motion, but he insisted on waiting for Mayhew. In any salvage job oommunication between the salvor and the salved is essential -- and to judge by the experience of Station # any form of deotronic radio commiunication was out. He stood on the concrete, just outside the tug's airlock, looking up at the overcast sky. Sonya came out to join him. "Damn the man!" he grumbled. "He's supposed to be on his way. He was told it was urgent." She said, "I hear something." He heard it too, above the thin whine of the wind, a deepening drone. Then the helicopter came into sight above the high roof of the Administration Building, the jet flames at the tip of its rotor blades a bright,'blue circle against the gray sky. It dropped slowly, carefully, making at last a landing remarkable for its gentleness. The cabin door opened, and the tall, gangling telepath, his thin face pasty against the upturned collar of his dark coat, clambered to the ground. He saw Grimes, made a slovenly salute, then turned to receive the large case that was handed him by the pilot. "Take your time," growled Grimes. Mayhew shuffled around to face the Commodore. He set the case carefully down on the ground, patted it gently. He said, mild reproof in his voice, "Lassie's not as used to travelling as she was. I try to avoid shaking her up." Grimes sighed. He had almost forgotten about the peculiar relationship that existed between the spacefaring telepaths and their amplifiers -- the living brains of dogs suspended in their tanks of nutrient solution. It was far more intense than that existing between normal man and normal dog. When a naturally telepathic animal is deprived of its body, its psionic powers are vastly enhanced, and it will recognize as friend and master only a telepathic man. There is symbiosis, on a psionic level. "Lassie's not at all well," complained Mayhew. "Think her up a nice juicy bone," Grimes almost said, then thought better of it. "I've tried that, of course," Mayhew told him. "But she's not... she's just not interested any more. She's growing old. And since the Carlotti system was introduced nobody is making psionic amplifiers any more." "Is she functioning?" asked the Commodore coldly. "Yes, sir. But -- " "Then get aboard, Mr. Mayhew. Mrs. Grimes will show you to your quarters. Prepare and secure for blastoff without delay." H e stamped up the short ramp into the airlock, climbed the ladders to the little control room. The Mate was already in the copilot's chair, his ungainly posture a match for his slovenly uniform. Grimes looked at him with some distaste, but he knew that the burly young man was more than merely competent. Although his manner and appearance militated against his IP employment in a big ship he was ideally suited to service in a salvage tug. "Ready as soon as you are, Skipper," the Mate said. "You takin' her up?" "You're more used to this vessel as all's secure you may blastoff." "Good-oh, Skip." Grimes watched the indicator lights, listened to the verbal reports, wise. Then he said into the transceiver microphone, Rim Mamelute to Port Control. Blasting off." Before Port Control could ackey. Not for the Mamelute the relatively leisurely ascent, the relatively gentle acceleration of the big ships. It was, thought Grimes dazedly, like being fired from a gun. Almost at once, it seemed, harsh sunlight burst through the control room ports. He tried to move his fingers against the crushing weight, tried to bring one of them to the button set in the arm rest of his chair that controlled the polarization of the transparencies. Te glare was beating full in his face, painful even through his closed eyelid. But Grimes opened his eyes, he saw that the Mate was grinning at him. "She's a tough little bitch, the old Mamelute" announced the objectionable young man with pride. Grimes with difficulty. "But there are some of us who aren't as tough as the ship. And, talking of lady dogs, I don't think that Mr. Mayhew's amplifier can stand much acceleration." "That pickled poodle's, brain. Skip? The animal's better off than we are, floatin' in its nice, warm bath o' thick soup." He grinned again. "But I was forgettin'. We. haven't the regular crew this time. What say we maintain a nic, steady one and a half G's? That do yer?" One G would be better, thought Grimes. After all, those young people, whoever they are, are in no irnmediate danger of falling into the sun... But perhaps even a few minutes delay might make all the difference between life and death to them. Even so, we must be capable of doing work, heavy, physical work, when we catch them. slowly. "Maintain one and a half gravities. You've fed the elements of the trajectory into the computer, of course?" "Of course. Skip. Soon as I have her round I'll put her on auto. She'll be right." W hen the tug had settled down on her long chase. Grimes left went down into the body of the ship. He made his rounds, satisfied himself that all was well in the engine room, surgery, the two communications offices and, finally, the galley. Sonya was standing up to acceleration as though she had been born and bred on a high gravity planet. He looked at her with envy as she poured him a cup of coffee, handing it to him without any obvious compensation for its increased weight. Then she snapped at him, "Sit down, John. If you're as tired as you look you'd better lie down." He said, "I'm all right." "You're not," she told him. "And there's no need for you to put on the big, tough space-captain act in front of me." "If you can stand it -- " "What if I can, my dear? I haven't led such a sheltered life as you have. I've knocked around in little ships more than I have in big ones, and I'm far more used to going places in a hurry than you." He lowered himself to a bench, and she sat beside him. He sipped his coffee, then asked her, "Do you think, then, that we should be in more of a hurry?" "Frankly, no. Salvage work is heavy work, and if we maintain more than one and a half G's over a quite long period we shall all of us be too tired to function properly, even that tough Mate of yours." She smiled. "I mean the Mate who's on Articles as such, not the one you're married to." He chuckled. "But she's tough, too." "Only when I have to be, my dear." Grimes looked at her and thought of the old proverb which says that there is many a true word spoken injest... IV T he strange vessel was a slowly expanding speck of light in the globular screen of the Mass Proximity Indicator; it was a gradually brightening blip on Mamelute' s radar display that seemed as though it were being drawn in toward the tug by the ever decreasing spiral of the range marker. Clearly it showed up on the instruments, although it was still too far distant for visual sighting. It was obvious that the extrapolation of trajectory made by Station # was an accurate one. It was falling free, neither accelerating nor decelerating, its course determined only by the gravitational forces within the Lorn Star's planetary system. Left to itself it must inevitably fall into the sun. But long before its shell plating began to heat it would be overhauled by the salvage ship and dragged away from its suicide orbit. And it was silent. It made no reply to the signals beamed at it from Rim Mamelutes powerful transmitter. Bennett, the Radio Officer, complained to Grimes, "I've tried every frequency known to civilized man and a few that aren't. But, so far, no joy." "Keep on trying," Grimes told him, then went to the cabin that Mayhew, the telepath, shared with his organic amplifier. The Psionic Radio Officer was slumped in his chair, staring vacantly at the glass tank in which, immersed in its cloudy nutrient fluid, floated the obscenely naked brain. The Commodore tried to ignore the thing. It made him uneasy. Every time that he saw one of the amplifiers he could not help wondering what it would be like to be disembodied, deprived of all external stimuli but the stray thoughts of IF other, more fortunate (or less unfortunate) beings -- and those thoughts, as like as not, on an incomprehensible level. What would a man do were he so used, his brain removed from his skull and employed by some race of superior beings for their own fantastic purposes? Go mad, probably. And did the dogs sacrificed so that Man could communicate with his fellows over the light-years ever go mad? "Mr. Mayhew," he said. "Sir?" muttered the telepath. "As far as electronic radio is concerned that ship is dead." "Dead," repeated Mayhew in a thin whisper. "Then you think that there's nobody alive on board her?" "I... I don't know. I told you before we started that Lassie's not a well dog. She's old. Commodore. She dreams almost all of the time. She... she just ignores me." His voice was louder as he defended his weird pet against the imputation that he had made himself. "It's just that she's old, and her mind is getting very dim. Just vague dreams and ghostly memories, and the past more real than the present, even so." "What sort of dreams?" asked Grimes' stirred to pity for that naked canine brain in its glass cannister. "Hunting dreams, mainly. She was a terrier, you know, before she was... conscripted. Hunting dreams. Chasing small animals, like rats. They're good dreams, except when they turn to nightmares. And then I have to wake her up -- hut she's in such a state of terror that she's no good for anything." "I didn't think that dogs have nightmares," remarked Grimes. "Oh, but they do, sir, they do. Poor Lassie always has the same one -- about an enormous rat that's just about to kill her. It must be some old memory of her puppy days, when she ran up against such an animal, a big one, bigger than she was..." "H'm. And meanwhile, nothing from the ship." "Nothing at all, sir." "Have you tried transmitting, as well as just maintaining a listening watch?" "Of course, sir." Maiyhew's voice was pained. "During Lassie's lucid moments I've been punching out a strong signal, strong enough even to be picked up by nontelepaiths. You must have felt it yourself, sir. Help is on the way. But there's been no indication of mental acknowledgment." "All we know about the ship, Mayhew, is that she seems to be a derelict. We don't know who built her. We don't know who mans her -- or manned her." "Anybody who builds a ship, sir, must be able to think." Grimes, remembering some of the unhandier vessels in which he had served in his youth, said, "Not necessarily." Mayhew, not getting the point insisted, "But they must be able to think. And, in order to think, you must have a brain to think with. And any brain at all emits psionic radiation. Furthermore, sir, such radiation sets up secondary radiation in the inanimate surroundings of the brain. What is the average haunt but a psionic record on the walls of a house in which strong emotions have been let loose? A record that is played back given the right conditions." "H'm. But you say that the derelict is psionically dead, that there's not even a record left by her builders, or her crew, to be played back to you." "The range is still extreme, sir. And as for this secondary psionic radiation, sir, sometimes it fades rapidly, sometimes it lingers for years." "So there could be something." "There could be, sir. And there could not." "Just go on trying, Mr. Mayhew." "Of course, sir. But with poor Lassie in her present state I can't promise anything." G rimes went along to the galley. He seated himself on the bench, accepted the cup of coffee that Sonya poured for him. He said, "It looks, my dear, as though we shall soon be needing an Intelligence Officer as well as a Catering Officer." "Why?" she asked. He told her of his conversation with Maylxew. He said, "I'd hoped that he'd be able to find us a few shorj cuts, but his crystal ball doesn't seem to be functioning very well these days. If you could call that poodle's brain in aspic a crystal ball." "He's told me all about it," she said. "He's told everybody in the ship all about it. But once we get the derelict in tow and opened up, we shall soon be able to find out what makes her tick." "I'm not so sure, Sonya. The way in which she suddenly appeared from nowhere, not even a trace on Station #'s M.P.I. beforehand, makes me think that she could be very, very alien." "The Survey Service is used to dealing with aliens," she told him. "The Inteliigence Branch especially so." "I know, I know." "And now, as I'm still only the humble galley slave, can I presume to ask my lord and master the E.T.C.?" "Unless something untoward fouls things up, E.T.C. should be in almost exactly five Lorn Standard Days from now." "And then it will be Boarders AwayT she said, obviously relishing the prospect. "Boarders Away!" he agreed. "And I, for one, shall be glad to get out of this spacebome sardine can." "Frankly," she said, "I shall be even gladder to get out of this bloody galley so that I can do the real work for which I was trained." V S lowly the range closed, until the derelict was visible as a tiny, bright star a few degrees to one side of the Lorn Sun. The range closed, and Rim Mamelutes powerful telescope was brought into play. It showed very little. The strange IF ship appeared to be an almost featureless spindle, the surface of its hull unbroken by vanes, sponsons or antennae. And still, now thait the distance could be measured in scant tens of miles, the alien construction was silent, making no reply to the signals directed at it by both the salvage tug's communications officers. Grimes sat in the little control ship. The Mate crouched in his chair, intent upon his telltale instruments, nudging the tug closer and closer to the free-falling ship with carefully timed rocket blasts, matching velocities with the skill that comes only from long practice. He looked up briefly from his console to speak to Grimes. "She's bloody hot, Skipper." "We've radiation armor," said Grimes. The words were question rather than statement. "O' course. The Mamelute's ready for anything. Remember the Rim Eland disaster? Her pile went critical. We brought her in. I boarded her when we took her in tow, just in case there was anybody still living. There wasn't. It was like bein' inside a radioactive electric fryin' pan." A charming simile, thought Grimes. He used the big, mounted binoculars to study the derelict. They showed him little more than the telescope at longer range. So she was radioactive. It seemed that the atomic blast that had initiated the radiation had come from outside, not inside. There were, after all, protuberances upon that hull, but they had been melted and rehardened, like guttering candle wax. There were the remains of what must have been vaned landing gear. There was the stump of w'hat could have been, once, a mast of some kind, similar to the retractable masts of the spaceships with which Grimes was familiar, the supports for De radio antennae and radar scanners. "we'll make our approach from the other side of the derelict." "You're the boss. Skipper." Brief accelerations crushed Grimes down into the padding of his chair; centrifugal force, as Mamelutes powerful gyroscopes turned her about her short axis, made him giddy. Almost he regretted having embarked upon this chase in person. He was not used to small ships, to the violence of their motions. He heard, from somewhere below, a crash of kitchenware. He hoped that Sonya had not been hurt. She had not been -- not physically, at any rate. Somehow, even though the tug was falling free once more, she contrived to stamp into the control room. She was pale with temper, and the smear of some rich, brown sauce on her right cheek accentuated her pallor. She glared at her husiband and demanded, "What the hell's going on? Can't you give us some warning before indulging in a bout of astrobatics?" made some remark about the unwisdom of amateurs shipping out in space tugs. She turned on him then and said that she had served in tugs owned by Federation Survey Service and tbat (they ihiad been, liike all Federation starships, taut ps, and that any officer who failed to warn all departments of impending maneuvers would soon find himself busted down to Spaceman, Third Oass. Before the Mate could make an angry reply Grimes intervened. He said smoothly, "It was my fault, Sonya. But I was so interested in the derelict that I forgot to renew the alarm. After all, it was sounded as we began our approach." "I know that. But I was prepared for an approach, not his tumbling all over the sky like a drunken bat." "Once again. I'm sorry. But now you're here, grab yourself the spare chair and sit down. This is the situation. All the evidence indicates that there's been some sort of atomic explosion. That ship is hot. But I think that the blast was from outside, not inside. I think that the other side of the hull will be relatively undamaged -- " T he three of them stared out of the viewports. The shell plating, seen from this angle, was dull, not bright, pitted with the tiny pores that were evidence of frequent passages through swarms of micrometeorites. At the stem, one wide vane stood out sharp and clear in the glare of Mamelute's searchlights. Forward, the armor screens over the control room ports were obviously capable of being retracted, were not fused to the hull. There were sponsons from which projected the muzzles of weapons -- they could have been cannon or laser projectors, but what little was visible was utterly unfamiliar. There was a telescope mast, atop which was a huge, fragile-seeniing radar scanner, motionless. And just abaft the sharp stem was the name. No, thought Grimes, studying the derelict through the binoculars, two names. It was the huge, sprawling letters, crude daubs of black paint, that he Then there were the other symbols, gold-embossed, half obscured by the dark pigment. There was something wrong about them, a subtle disproportion, an oddness of spacing. But they made sense -- after a while. They did not belong to the alphabet with which Grimes was familiar, but they must have been derived from it. There was the triangular "D", the "I" that was a fat, upright oblong, the serpentine "S". 'Distroyir... muttered Grimes.  Destroyer? He passed the glasses, on their universal mount, to Sonya. "What do you make of this? What branch of the human race prints like that? What people have simplified their alphabet by getting rid of the letter 'E'?" She adjusted the focus to suit her own vision. She said at last, "That painted-on name is the work of human hands all right. But the other... I don't know. I've never seen anything like it before. There's a certain lack of logicality -- human logicality, that is. Oh, that stylized 'D' is logical enough. But the subIF stitution of 'I' for 'E' -- it is a substitution... And then, as far as we are concerned, a destroyer is a class of ship, not a ship's name." "I seem to recall," Grimes told her, "that there was once a warship called Dreadnought -- and the dreadnoughts have been a class of warship ever since the first ironclads were launched on Earth's seas." "All right, Mr. amateur naval historian -- but have you ever, in the course of your very wide reading on your favorite subject, come across mention of a ship called Destroyer -- and spelled without a single 'E'? There are nonhumans mixed up in this somewhere. Highly intelligent nonhumans at that." "And humans," said Grimes. "But we'll never find out anything just by talking about it," grumbled the Mate. "An' the sooner we take this bitch in tow, the shorter the long drag back to Port Forlorn. I'm make fast alongside -- but even here, in the blast shadow, that hull is too damn hot. It'll have to be tow wires from the outriggers -- an' keep our fingers crossed that they don't get cut by our exhaust." "Take her in tow, then board," said Sonya. "O' coursd. First things first. There'll be nobody alive inside that radioactive can." T he intercommunication telephone was buzzing furiously. Grimes picked up the instrument. "Commodore here." "Mayhew, sir." The telepath's voice was oddly muffled. He sounded as though he had been crying. "It's Lassie, sir. She's dead." A happy release, thought Grimes. But what am I supposed to do about it? "One of her nightmares, sir," Mayhew babbled on. "I was inside her mind, and I tried to awaken her. But I couldn't. There was this huge rat -- and there were the sharp yellow teeth of it; and ti e stink of it... It was so... it was so real, so vivid. And it was the fear that killed her. I could feel her fear, and it was almost too much for me. "I'm sorry, Mr. Mayhew," said Grimes inadequately. "I will see you later. But we are just about to take the derelict in tow, and we are busy." "I understand, sir." And then Grimes relaxed into the padding of his chair, watching, not the salvage tug into position ahead of the derelict, then carefully matched velocity. The outriggers were extruded, and then there was the slighest shock as the little missiles, each with a powerful magnetic grapnel as its warhead, were fired. Contact was made, and then Williams, working with the utmost care, eased Rim Mamelute around in a great arc, never putting too much strain on the towing gear, always keeping the wires clear of the tug's incandescent exhaust. It was pretty to watch. Even so, when at last it was over, when at last the Lorn Sitar was almost directly astern, he could not resist the temptation of asking, "But why all this expenditure of reaction mass and time to ensure a bows"S.O.P., Skipper. It's more convenient if the people in the towed ship can see where they're going." "But it doesn't look as though there are any people. Not live ones, that is." "But we could be putting a prize crew aboard her, Skipper." Grimes thought about saying something about the radio activity, then decided not to bother. "You just can't win, John," Sonya told him. VI I n theory one can perform heavy work while clad in radiation armor. One can do so in practise -- provided that one has been through a rigorous course of training. Pendeen, Second Engineer of Rim Mamelute, had been so trained. So, of course, had been Mr. Williams -- but Grimes had insisted that the Mate stay aboard the tug while he, with Sonya and the engineer, effected an entry into the hull of the derelict. Soon, while the boarding party was making its exploratory walk over the stranger ship's shell plating, he had been drive; sufficient velocity had been built up so that both vessels were now in free fall away from the sun. Even in free fall it was bad enough. Every joint of the heavy suit was stiff, every limb had so much mass that great physical effort was required to conquer inertia. Weary and sweating heavily. Grimes forced himself to keep up with his two companions. By a great effort of will he contrived to maintain his side of the conversation in a voice that did not betray his poor physical condition. He was greatly relieved when they discovered, towards the stern, what was obviously an airlock door. Just a hair thin crack in the plating it was, outlining a circular port roughly seven feet in. diameter. There were no signs of external controls, and the crack was too thin to allow the insertion of any tool. "Send for the bell, sir?" asked Penden, his normally deep voice an odd treble in Grime's helmet phones. "The bell? Yes, yes. Of course. Carry on, Mr. Pendeen." "AI to Bill," Grimes heard. "Do you read me? Over." "Bill to Al. Loud an' clear. What can I do for you?" "We've found the airlock. But we want the bell." "You would. Just stick around. It'U be over." "And send the cutting gear while you're about it." "Will do. Stand by." "Had any experience with the Laverton Bell, sir?" asked Pendeen, his voice not as respectful as it might have been. "No. Not actual working experience, that is." "I have," said Sonya. "Good. Then you'll know what to do when we get it." Grimes, looking towards Rim Mamelute, could see that something bulky was coming slowly towards IF them along one of the tow wires, the rocket that had given the packet its initial thrust long since burned out. He followed the others toward the stem of the derelict, but stood to one side, heJd to the plating by the magnetic soles of his boots, as they undipped the bundle from the line. He would have helped them to carry it back aft, but they ignored him. Back at the airlock valve, Sonya and Pendeen worked swiftly and competently, releasing the fastenings, unfolding what looked like a tent of tough white plastic. This had formed the wrapper for other things -- including a gas 'bottle, a laser torch and a thick tube of adhesive. Without waiting for instructions, Sonya took this latter, removed the screw cap and, working on her hands and knees, used it to describe a glistening line just outside the crack that marked the door. Then all three of them, standing in the middle of the circle, lifted the fabric above their heads, unfolding it as they did so. Finally, with Grimes and Pendeen acting as tent poles, Sonya neatly fitted the edge of the shaped canopy to the ring of adhesive, now and again adding a further glob of the substance from the tube. "Stay as you are, sir," the engineer said to Grimes, then fell to a squatting position. His gloved hands went to the gas cylinder, to the valve wheel. A white cloud jetted out like a rocket exhaust, then faded to invisibility. Around the boarding party the walls of the tent bellied outwards, slowly tautened, distended to their true shape by the expanding herium. Only toward the end was the hiss of the escaping gas very faintly audible. Pendeen shut the valve decisively, saying, "That's that. Is she all tight, Sonya?" "All tight, Al," she replied... "Good." With a greasy crayon he drew a circle roughly in the center of the airlock door, one large enough to admit a spacesuited body. He picked up the laser torch, directed its beam downwards, thumbed the firing button. The flare of vaporizing metal was painfully bright, outshining the helmet lights, reflected harshly from the white inner surface of the plastic igloo. There was the illusion of suffocating heat -- or was it more than only an illusion? Pendeen switched off the torch and straightened, looking down at the annulus of stillglowing metal. With an effort he lifted his right foot, breaking the contact of the magnetized sole with the plating. He brought the heel down sharply. The clang, transmitted through the fabric of their armor, was felt rather than heard by the others. And then the circular plate was falling slowly, into the darkness of the airlock chamber, and the rough manhole was open so that they could enter. G rimes was first into the alien ship, followed by Sonya and then Pendeen. It was light enough in the little compartment once they were into it, the beams of their helmet lights ireflected from the whitepamted TVialls. On the inner door there was a set of manual controls that worked -- once Grimes realized that the spindle of the wheel had a left-handed thread. Beyond the inner door there was an alleyway, and standing there was a man. The Commodore w'hipped the pistol from his holster, his reflexes more than compensating for the stiffness of the joints of his suit. Then, slowly, he retumed the weapon to his belt. This man was dead. Radiation may have killed him, but it had not killed all the bacteria of decay present in his body. Some freak of inertial and centrifugal forces, coming into play when the derelict had been taken in tow, had flung him to a standing posture, and the magnetic soles of his rough sandals had held him to the deck. So he was dead, and he was decomposing, his skin taut and darkly purple, bulging over the waistband of the loincloth -- it looked like sacking -- that was his only clothing. He was dead -- and Grimes was suddenly grateful for the sealed suit that he was wearing, the suit that earlier he had been cursing, that kept out the stench of him. Gently, with pity and pointless tenderness, he put his gloved hands to the waist of the corpse, lifted it free of the deck, shifted it to one side. "We must be just about engine room level," said Sonya, her voice deliberately casual. "Yes," agreed Grimes. "I wonder if this ship has an axial shaft. If she has, it will be the quickest way of getting to the control room." "That will be the best place to start investigations," she said. They moved on through the alleyway, using the free fall shuffle that was second nature to all of them, letting the homing instinct that is part of the nature of all spacemen guide them. They found more bodies, women as well as men, spirawled in untidy attitudes, hanging like monstrous mermen and merwomen in a submarine 'cave. They tried to ignore them, as they tried to ignore the smaller bodies of children, and came at last, at the end of a short, radial alleyway, to the stout pillar of the axial shaft. There was a door in the pillar. It was open. One by one they passed through it and then began pulling themselves forward along the central guide rod, ignoring the spiral ramp that lined the tunnel. Finally they came to a conventional enough hatchway, but the valve sealing the end of the shaft was jammed. Grimes and Sonya fell back to let Pendeen use the laser torch. Then they followed him into the control room. T here were more bodies in the control room. There were three dead men and three dead women, all of them strapped into acceleration chairs. Like all the others scattered throughout the ship they were clad only in rough, scanty rags, were swollen with decomposition. Grimes forced himself to ignore IF them. He could do nothing for them. Perhaps, he thought, he might some day avenge them (somehow he did not feel that they had been criminals, pirates) -- but that would not bring them back to life. He looked past the unsightly corpses to the instruments on the consoles before their oh airs. These, at first glance, seemed to be familiar enough -- white dials with the black calibrations marked with Arabic numerals; red, green, white and amber pilot lights, dead now, but ready to blossom with glowing life at the restoration of a power supply. Familiar enough they were, at first glance. But there were the odd differences, the placement of various controls in positions that did not tally with the construction and the articulation of the normal human frame. And there was the lettering self, were the builders of this ip, this vessel that was almost a standard Federation Survey Service cruiser? What human race had jettisoned every vowel in the alphabet but this absurdly fat "I"? "John," Sonya was saying, "give me a hand drill, will you?" He turned to see what she was doing. She was trying to unibuckle a seat belt that was deeply embedded in the distended flesh at the waist of one of the dead men. He conquered his revulsion, swallowed the nausea that was rising in his throat. He pulled the sharp sheath knife from his belt, "This is quicker," and slashed through the tough fabric of the strap. He was careful not to touch the gleaming, purple skin. He knew that if he did so the dead man would... burst. Carefully, Sonya lifted the body from its seat, sat it down on the deck so that the magnetized sandal shoes were in contact with the steel plating. Then she pointed to the back of the chair. "What dp you make of this?" she asked.  '"That was a vertioal slot, just over an inch in width, that was continued into the seat itself, half bisecting it. It was Pendeen who broke the silence. He said simply, "They had tails." "But they haven't," objected Grimes. It was obvious that the minimal breech-clouts of the dead people could not conceal even a tiny caudal appendage. "My dear John," Sonya told him in an annoyingly superior voice, "these hapless folk are neither the builders nor the original crew of this ship. Refugees? Could be. Escapees? A slave revolt? Once again -- could be. Or must ibe. This is a big ship and a fighting ship. You can't run a vessel of this class without uniforms, without marks of rank so you can see at a glance who is suppcwed to be doing what. Furthermore, you don't clutter up a man-o'ar with children." "She's not necessarily a man-o'war," demurred Grimes. "She could be a defensively armed merchantman." "With officers and first class passengers dressed in foul rags? With a name like Destroyer?" "We don't know that that grouping of letters on the stem does spell "We don't know that this other grouping of letters -- " she pointed to the control panel that Grimes had been studying -- "spells to bet my gravity that if you trace the leads you'll wind up in a compaitment full of dimensiontwisting gyiosciopes." "AH right," said Grimes. "I'll go along with you. I'H admit that we're aboard a ship built by some humanoid but possibly nonhuman race that, even so, uses a peculiar distortion of English as its written language." "A humanoid race with tails," contributed Pendeen. "A humanoid race with tails," agreed Sonya. "But what race? Look at this slot in the chair back. It's designed for somebody -- or something -- with a thin tail, thin at the root as well as at the extremity. And the only tailed beinigs we know with any technology comparable to our own have thick tails -- and, furthermore, have their own written languages. Just imagine one of our saurian friends trying to get out of that chair in a hurry -- assuming that he'd ever been able to get into it in the first place. He'd be trapped.". ' "You're the Intelligence Officer," Said Grimes rather nastily. # # A U right. I am. Also, I hold a doctorate in Xenology. And I tell you, John, that what we've found in this ship, so far, doesn't add up to any kind of sense at all." "She hasn't made any sense ever since she was first picked up by Station #," admitted Grimes. "That she hasn't," said Pendeen. "And I don't like her. Not one little bit." "Why not, Mr. Pendeen?" asked Grimes, realizing that it was a foolish question to ask about a radioactive hull full of corpses. "Because... Because she's wrong, sir. The proportions and siting of all her controls and fittings -- just wrong enough to be scary. And left-handed threads, and gauges calibrated from right to left." "So they are," said Grimes, "But that's odder still. Why don't they write the same way? From right to left." "Perhaps they do," murmured Sonya. "But I don't think so. I think that the only difference between our written language and theirs is that they have an allpurpose 'I', or an all-purpose symbol that's used for every vowel sound." She was prowling around the control room. "Damn it all, there must be a log book." "There should be a log book," amended Grimes. "All right. There should be a log book. Here's an obvious log desk, complete with stylus, but empty... I begin to see how it must have been. The ship safe in port, all her papers landed for checking, and then her seizure by these people, by these unfortunate humans, whoever they were... H'm. The IF chart tank might tell us something... She glared at the empty globe. "It would have told us something if it hadn't been in close proximity to a nuclear blast. But there will be traces. Unfortunately we haven't the facilities here to bring them out." She resumed her purposeful shuffle. that might well contain quite a few answers when we hook it up to a power supply. And that, I think will lie within the capabilities of our Radio Officer back aboard Rim Mamelute" The thing was secured by simple enough clips to the side of what was obviously a transceiver. Deftly, Sonya disengaged it, tucked it under her arm. "Back to the Mamelute said Grimes. It was more an order than a suggestion. "Back to the Mamelute she agreed. The Commodore was last from the control room, watched first Pendeen and then Sonya vanish through the hatch into the axial shaft. He half wished that enough air remained in their suit tanks for them to make a leisurely examination of the accommodation that must be situated abaft Control -- and was more than half relieved that circumstances did not permit such a course of action. He had seen his fill of corpses. In any case, the signal logmight tell them far more than the inspection of decomposing corpses ever could. He felt easier in his mind when the three of them were standing, once more, in the plastic igloo that covered the breached airlock and almost happy when, one by one, they had squeezed through the builtin sphincter valve back to the clean emptiness of Space. The harsh working lights of Rim Mamelute seemed soft somehow, mellow almost suggested the lights of Home. And the cramped interior of the tug, when they were back on board, was comforting. If one has to be jostled, it is better to be jostled by the. living than by dead men and women, partcremated in a steel coffin tumbling aimlessly between the stars. I t was very quiet in the radio office of Rim Mamelute. Grimes and Sonya stood there, watching chubby little Bennett make the last connections to the black box that they had brought from the control room of the derelict. "Yes," the Electronic Radio Officer had told them, "it is a signal log. And it's well shielded, so whatever records it may contain probably haven't been wiped by radiation. Once I get it hooked up we'll have the play back." And now it was hooked up. "Are you sure you won't burn it out?" asked the Commodore, suddenly anxious. "Almost sure, sir," answered Bennett cheerfully. "The thing's practically an exact copy of the signal logs that were in use in some ships of the Federation Survey Service all of fifty years ago. Before my time. Anyhow, my last employment before I came out to the Rim was in the Lyran Navy, and their wagons were all Survey Service cast offs. In many of them the original communications gear was still in place and still in working order. No, sir, this isn't the first time that I've made one of these babies sing. Reminds me of when we picked up the wreck of the old Minstrel Boy -- I was Chief Sparks of the Tara s Hall at the time -- and got the gen from her signal log that put us on the trail of Black Bart... He added unnecessarily, "the pirate." "I have heard of him," said Grimes coldly. Sonya remarked, pointing towards the box, "But it doesn't look old." "No, Mrs. Grimes. It's not old. Straight from the maker. I'd say. But there's no maker's name, which is odd." "Switch on, Mr. Bennett," ordered the Commodore. Bennett switched on. The thing hummed quietly, crackled briefly and thinly as the spool rewound. It crackled again, more loudly, and the play back began. The voice that issued from the speaker spoke English -- of a sort. But it was not human. It was a thin, high, alien squeaking. And yet, somehow, not alien enough. The consonants were ill-defined, and there was only one vowel sound. 'Eeveengeer tee Deestreeyeer, Eeveengeer tee Deestreeyeer. Heeve tee. Heeve tee!" The voice that answered was not a very convincing imitation of that strange accent. Deestreeyer tee Eeveenger. Reepeet, pleese. Reepeet." "A woman," whispered Sonya. "Human." Heeve tee, Deestreeyeer, Heeve tee, eer wee eepeen feer!" A pause, then the woman's voice again, the imitation even less convincing, a certain desperation all too evident: 'Deestreeyeer tee Avenger. Deestreeyeer tee Eeveengeer... Eer Dreeve ceentreels e eet eef eerdeer..." Playing for time', thought Grimes. while clumsy hands fumble with unfamiliar armament. But they tried. They did their best... "Dee!" screamed the inhuman voice. "Heemeen sceem, dee!" "And that must have been it," muttered Grimes. "It was," said Sonya flatly, and the almost inaudible whirring of what remained on the spool bore her out. "That mistake she made," said Grimes softly, "is the clue. For Eeveengeer, read Avenger. For every 'E' sound substitute the vowel that makes sense. But insofar as the written language is concerned, that fat 'I' is really an 'E'." 'That seems to be the way of it," agreed Sonya. " 'Die ", repeated the Commodore slowly. " 'Human scum, die! " He said, "Whoever those people are, they wouldn't be at all nice to know." "That's what I'm afraid of," Sonya told him. 'That we might get to know them. Whoever they are -- and wherever, and whenever." IF IX T he derelict hung in orbit about Lorn, and the teams of scientists and technicians continued the investigations initiated by Rim Mamelutes people during the long haul to the tug's home planet. Grimes, Sonya and the others had been baffled by what they had found -- and now, with reluctance, the experts were admitting their own bafflement. This ship -- named Destroyer by her builders, and renamed Freedom by those who had not lived long to enjoy it -- seemed to have just completed a major refit and to have been in readiness for her formal recommissioning. Although her magazines and some of her storerooms were stocked, although her hydroponics tanks and tissue culture vats had been operational at the time of her final action, her accommodation and working spaces were clean of the accumulation of odds and ends that, over the years, adds appreciably to the mass of any vessel. TTiere were no files of official correspondence, although there was not a shortage of empty filing cabinets. There were no revealing personal possessions such as letters, photographs and solidographs, books, recordings, magazines and pin-up girl calendars. (The hapless humans who had been killed by the blast seemed to have brought aboard only the rags that they were wearing.) There were no log books in either control or engine rooms. The cabins were furnished, however, and in all of them were the strange chairs with the slotted backs and seats, the furniture that was evidence of the existence of a race -- an unknown race, insisted the xenologists -- of tailed beings, approximating the human norm in stature. Every door tally was in place. And each one made it clear that the creatures who had manned the ship, before her seizure, . used the English language, but a version of Even so she was, apart from the furniture and the distortions of printed English and -- as the engineers pointed out -- the prevalence of left-handed threads, a very ordinary ship, albeit somewhat old-fashioned. There was, for example, no Carlotti navigational and communications equipment. And the signal log was a model the use of which had been discontinued by the Survey Service for all of half a standard century. And she lacked yet another device of fairly recent origin -- the Mass Proximity Indicator. She was, from the engineering viewpoint, a very ordinary ship; it was the biologists who discovered a shocking abnormality. They did not discover it at once. They concentrated, at first, upon the cadavers of the unfortunate humans. These were, it was soon announced, indubitably human. They had been born upon and had lived their lives upon an Earth-type planet -- but their lives had not been pleasant ones. Their physiques exhibited all the signs of undernourishment, of privation, and they almost all hore scars that told an ugly story of habitual maltreatment. But they were men, and they were women, and had they lived and had enjoyed for a year or so normal living conditions they would have been indistinguishable from the citizens of any Man-colonized world. And there was nothing abnormal in the hydroponics tanks. There were just the standard plants that are nutured in ships' farms throughout the galaxy -- tomatoes and cucumbers, potatoes and carrots, the Centaurian umbrella vine, Vegan mossfern. It was the tissue culture vats that held the shocking secret. The flesh that they contained, the meat that was the protein supply for the tailed beings who should have manned the ship, was human flesh. X Grimes. "I was right. Those people -- whoever, wherever (and whenever?) they are -- are our enemies. But where are they? And when? "From... from outside?" wondered the Commodore. "Don't be a bloody fool, John. Do you think that a race could wander in from the next galaxy but three, reduce a whole planet of humans to slavery, and worse than slav, without our knowing about it? And why sihould such a race, if there were one, have to borrow -- or steal -- our shipbuilding techniques, our language, even? Damn it all, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't even begin to make sense." "That's what weVe all been saying ever since this blasted derelict first appeared." "And it's true." She got up from her chair and began to pace up and down Grimes's office. "Meanwhile, my dear, we've been left holding the baby. You've been asked to stay on in your various capacities until the mystery has been solved, and my resignation from the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service has been rescinded. I've been empowered by the Federation Government to co-oprt such Confederacy personnel to assist me in my investigations as I see fit. (That means you -- for a start.) Forgive me for thinking out loud. It helps sometimes. Why don't you try it?" "All we know said Grimes slowly, "is that we've been left holding the baby." "All we know," she countered, "is that we're suppose to carry the can back." "But why shouldn't we?" he demanded suddenly. "Not necessarily this can, but one of our own." She stopped her restless motion, turned to stare at him. She said coldly, "I thought that you had made a study of archaic slang expressions. Apparently I was wrong." "Not at all, Sonya, I know what 'to carry the can back' means. I I know, too, that the word 'can' is still used to refer to more and bigger things than containers of beer or preserved foods. Such as -- " "Such as ships," she admitted. "Such as ships. All right. How do we carry the can -- or a can -- IF back? Back to where the can came from?" "But where? Or when? "That's what we have to find out." She said, "I think it will have to be the can. That is if you're thinking what I think you're thinking -- that this Destroyer or Freedom or whatever you care to call her drifted in from one' of the alternative universes. She'll have that built-in urge. Yes, urge. She'll have that built-in urge to return to her own continuum." "So you accept the alternative universe theory?" "It seems to fit the facts. After all, out here on the Rim, the transition from one universe to another has been made more than once." "As we should know." "If only we knew how the derelict did drift in -- " "Did she drift in?" asked Grimes softly. And then, in spoken answer to his wife's unspoken query, "I think she was blown in." "Yes... Yes. Could be. A nuclear explosion in close, very close proximity to the ship. The very fabric of the continuum, strained and warped." She smiled, but it was a grim smile. "That could be it." "And that' could be the way to carry the can back." "I don't want to be fried, my dear. And, oddly enough. I shouldn't like to see you fried." There's no need for anybody to be fried. Have you never heard of lead shielding?" "Of course. But the weight! Even if we shielded only a small compartment the reaction drive'd be working flat out to get us off the ground, and we'd have damn all reaction mass to spare for any maneuvers. And the rest of the ship, as we found when we boarded the derelict, would be so hot as to be uninhabitable for months." He gestured towards the wide window, to the squat tower that was Faraway Quest. "I seem to remember, Sonya, that you shipped with me on our wild ghost chase. Even though you were aboard as an officer of the Federation's Naval Intelligence you should remember how the Quest was fitted. Anti-matter gave us anti-gravity. We can incorporate it into Freedoms structure as it was incorporated into the Quest's. With it functioning, we can afford to shield the entire ship and still enjoy almost negative mass." "So you think we should take Freedom, or Destroyer, and not Faraway Quest? "I do. Assuming that we're able to blow her back into the continuum she came from, she'll be a more convincing Trojan Horse than one of our own ships." "Cans," she said. "Trojan horses. Can you think of any more metaphors?" She smiled again, and her expression was not quite so grim. "But I see what you mean. Our friends with the squeaky voices and the long, thin tails will think that their own lost ship has somehow wandered back to them, still manned by the escaped slaves." Her face hardened. "I almost feel sorry for them." "Almost," he agreed. X T he boffins were reluctant to release Freedom, but Grimes was insistent, explaining that disguise of Faraway Quest, no matter how good, might well be not good enough. A small, inconspicuous but betraying feature of her outward appearance could lead to her immediate destruction. "Then what about the crew, Commodore?" asked one of the scientists. "Surely those tailed beings will soon realize that the ship is not manned by the original rebels." "Not necessarily," Grimes told the man. "In fact, I think it's quite unlikely. Even among human beings all members of a different race tend to look alike. And when it comes to members of two entirely different species -- " "I'm reasonably expert," added Sonya, "but even I find it hard until I've hadtime to observe carefully the beings with whom I'm dealing." "But there's so much that we could learn from the ship!" protested the scientist. "Mr. Wales," Grimes said to the Rim Runners' Superintending Engineer, "How much do you think there is to be learned from the derelict?" "Not a damn thing. Commodore. But if we disguise one of our own ships and succeed in blowing her into wihatever comic alternative universe she came from, there's far too much that could be learned from us. In shipbuilding we're practically a century ahead." "Good enough. Well, gentlemen?" "I suggest, Commodore, that we bring your Freedom's armament up to scratch," said Admiral Hennessey -- but the way that he said it made it more of an order than a suggestion. Grimes turned to face the Admiral, the flag officer commanding the naval forces of the Confederacy. Bleak stare clashed with bleak stare, almost audibly. Asan officer of the reserve Grimes consider himself a better spaceman than his superior and was inclined to resent the intrusion of the Regular Navy into what he was already regarding as his own show. He replied firmly, "No, sir. That could well give the game away." He was hurt when Sonya took the Admiral's side -- but, after all, she was regular Navy herself, although Federation and not Confederacy. She said, "But what about the lead sheathing, John? What about the sphere of anti-matter?" Grimes was not beaten. "Mr. Wales has already made a valid point. He thinks that it would be imprudent to make the aliens a present of a century's progress in astronautical engineering. It would be equally imprudent to make them a present of a century's progress in weapKxnry." "You have a point there. Grimes," admitted the Admiral. "But I do not feel happy about allowing my personnel in a vessel on a hazardous mission without the utmost protection that I can afford them." "Apart from the Marines, sir, my personnel rather than yours. IF Practically every officer will be a reservist." The Admiral glared at the Commodore. He growled, "Franldy, if it were not for the pressure brought to bear by our Big Brothers of the Federation, I should insist on commissioning a battle squadron." He smiled coldly in Sonya's direction. "But the Terran Admiralty seems to trust Commander Verrill -- or Mrs. Grimes -- and has given her on-the-spot powers that would be more fitting to a holder of flag officer's rank. And my own instructions from Government House are to afford her every assistance." He made a ritual of selecting a long, black cigar from the case that he took from an inside pocket of his uniform, lit it, filled the already foul air of the derelict's control room with wreathing eddies of acrid blue smoke. He said in a voice that equalled in acridity the fumes that carried it, "Very well. Commodore. You're having your own way. Or your wife is having her own way; she has persuaded the Federation that you are to be in full command. (But will you be, I wonder?) May I, as your Admiral, presume to inquire just what are your intentions, assuming that the nuclear device that you 'have commandeered from my arsenal does blow you into the right continuum?" "We shall play by ear, sir." r ie Admiral seemed to be emulating the weapon that he had just mentioned, but he did not quite reach critical mass. "Play by ear!" he bellowed at last, when coherent speech was at last possible. "Play by ear! Damn it all, sir, that's the sort of fatuous remark one might expect from a snotty making his first training cruise, but not from an allegedly responsible officer." "Admiral Hennessey!" Sonya's voice was as cold as his had been. "This is not a punitive expedition. This is not a well organized attack by naval forces. This is an Intelligence operation. We do not know what we are up against. We are trying to find out." Her voice softened slightly. "I admit that the Commodore expressed himself in a rather unspacemanlike manner -- but playing by ear is what we shall do. How shall I put it? We shall poke a stick into the ants' nest and see what comes out." "We shall hoist the banner of the Confederacy to the masthead and see who salutes," somebody said in one of those carrying whispers. The Admiral, the Commodore and Sonya Verrill turned to glare at the man. Then Sonya laughed. "That's one way of putting it. Only it won't be the black and gold of the Confederacy -- it'll be the black and silver of the Jolly Roger. A little judicious piracy -- or privateering. Will Rim Worlds Letter of Marque be valid wherever we're going. Admiral?" That officer managed a rather sour chuckle. "I think I get the drift of your intentions. Commander. I hate to have to admit it -- but I wish that I were coming with you." He transferred his attention to Grimes. "So, Commodore, I think that I shall be justified in at least repairing or renewing the weapons that were damaged or destroyed by the blast -- as long as I don't fit anything beyond the technology of the builders of this ship." "Please do that, sir." "I shall. But what about small arms for your officers and the Marines?" Grimes pondered the question. There had 'been no pistols of any kind aboard the derelict when he had boarded her. It could be argued that this was a detail that did not much matter. Should the ship be boarded and seized herself, there would be both the lead sheathing and the sphere of anti-matter that would make it obvious to the boarding party that she had been... elsewhere. Assuming, that is, that the last survivors of her crew did not trigger the explosive charge that would shatter the neutronium shell and destroy the magnets, thus bringing the sphere of anti-iron into contact with the normal matter surrounding it. Then there would be nobody to talk about what had been found. But Freedom -- as a pirate or a privateer -- would be sending boarding parties to other ships. There was the possibility that she might have to run before superior forces, unexpectedly appvearing, leaving such a 'boarding party to its fate. Grimes most sincerely hoped that he would never have to make such a decision. And if the boarding party possessed obviously alien hand weapons the tailed beings would be, putting it very mildly, suspicious. "No hand weapons," he said at last, reluctantly. "But I hope that we shall be able to capture a few and that we shall be able to duplicate them in the ship's workshop. Meanwhile, I'd like your Marines to be experts in unarmed combat -- both suited and unsuited." "And expert knife fighters," added Sonya. "Boarding axes and cutlasses," contributed the Admiral, not without relish. "Yes, sir," agreed Grimes. "Boarding axes and cutlasses." "I suggest. Commodore," said Hennessey, "that you do a course at the Personal Combat Center at Lorn Base." "I don't think that there will be time, sir," said Grimes hopefully. "There will be. Commodore. The lead sheathing and the anti-matter sphere cannot be installed in five minutes. And there are the weapons to be repaired and renewed." "There will be time," said Sonya. Grimes sighed. He had been in one or two minor actions in his youth, but they had been so... impersonal. It was the enemy ship that you were out to get -- and the fact that a large proportion of her crew was liable to die with her was something that you glossed over. You did not see the dreadful damage that your missiles and beams did to the fragile flesh and blood mechanisms that were human beings. Or if you did see it, a hard frozen corpse is not the same as one still warm, still pumping blood from severed arteries, still twitching in a ghastly semblance to life. IF "There will be time, Cammodore," repeated the Admiral. "There will be time," repeated Sonya. "And what about you, Mrs. Grimes?" asked Hennessey unkindly"You forget, sir, that in my branch of the Federation's service we are taught how to kill or maim with whatever is at hand any and every life form with which we may come into contact." "Then I will arrange for the Commodore's course," Hennessey told her. I t was, for Grimes, a gruelling three weeks. He was fit enough, but he was not as hard as he might have been. Even wearing protective armor he emerged from every bout with the sergeant instructor badly bruised and battered. And he did not like knives, although he attained fair skill with them as a throwing weapon. He disliked cutlasses even more. And the boarding axes, with their pike heads, he detested. And then, quite suddenly, it came to him. The instructor had given him a bad time, as usual, and had then called a break. Grimes stood there, sagging in his armor, using the shaft of his axe as a staff upon which to lean. He was aching, and he was itching inside his protective clothing, and his copious perspiration was making every abrasion on his skin smart painfully. Without warning the instructor kicked Grimes support away with a booted foot and then, as the Commodore sprawled on the hardground, raised his own axe for the simulated kill. Although a red haze clouded his vision Grimes rolled out of the path of the descending blade, heard the blunted edge thud into the dirt a fraction of an inch from his helmeted head. He was on his feet then, moving with an agility that he had never dreamed that he pKssessed, crouching, and hfe spiked head thrusting viciously at the instructor's crotch. The man squealed as the blow connected; even the heavy cod piece could not save him from severe pain. He squealed, but brought his own axe round in a sweeping, deadly arc. Grimes parried, blade edge to shaft, to such a good effect that the lethal head of the other's weapon was broken off, clattering to the ground many feet away. He parried and followed through, his blade clanging on the instructor's shoulder armor. Yet another blow, this time to the man's broad back, and he was down like a felled ox. Slowly the red haze cleared from the Commodore's vision as he stood there. Slowly he lowered his axe, and as he did so he realized that the instructor had rolled over, was lying there laughing up at him, was saying, "Easy, sir. Easy. You're not supposed to kill me, sir. Or to ruin my matrimonial prospects." , "I'm sorry. Sergeant," Grimes said stiffly. "But that was a dirty trick you played." "It was meant to be dirty, sir. Never trust nobody. That's Lesson One." "And Lesson Two, Sergeant?" "You've learned that too, sir. You gotta hate. You oMceiis are ail the same -- you don't really hate the poor cows at the other end of the trajectory when you press a firing button. But in this sort of fighting you gotta hate." "I thinik I see, Sergeant," said Grimes. But he was not sorry when he was able to return to his real business -- to see Freedom (or Destroyer) readied for her expedition into the Unknown. XI reedom was commissioned as a cruiser of the Navy of the Rim Worlds Confederacy -- but the winged wheel of the Rim Worlds had not replaced the emibossed lettering of her oriiginal name or the crude, black-painted characters that had partially obscured it. Freedom was mann by spacemen and spacewoman of the Reserve and a company of Marines. But there was no display of gold braid and brass buttons. Marks of rank and departmental insignia had been daubed on the bare skin or wrists and upper arms and shoulders in an indelible vegetable dye. Apart from this crude attempt at uniform, the ship's complement was attired in scanty, none too clean rags. The men were shaggily bearded; the roughly hacked hair of the women was unkempt. All of them bore unsightly cicatrices on their bodies -- but these were the result of plastic surgery, not of ill-treatment. Outwardly, Freedom was just as she had bn when she suddenly materialized in her suicidal orbit off Lorn. Internally, however, there had been changes made. On the side that had been seared by the blast, the weapons -- the laser projectors and the missile launchers -- had been repaired, although this had been done so as not to be apparent to an external observer. In a hitherto empty storeroom just forward of the enginerooms, the sphere of anti-matter  had been installed -- the big ball of anti#ron and the powerful magnets that held it in place inside its neutronium casing. And within the shell plating was the thick lead sheathing that would protect the ship's personnel from lethal radiation when the nuclear device was exploded that. Grimes hoped, would blow the vessel back to where she had come from. (The physicists had assured him that the od on this happening were sevento-five, and that the odds on the ship's finding herself in a habitable univeirse seemed to be almost astronomical.) There was one more change insofar as the internal fittings were concerned, and it was a very important one. The tissue culture vats now contained pork and not human flesh. "After all," Grimes had said to a biologist who was insisting upon absolute verisimilitude, "there's not all that much difference between pig and long pig." The man had gone all technical on him, and the Commodore had snapped, "Pirate we may have to become, but not cannibds!" IF B ut even pirates thought Grimes, surveying the officers in his control room, would be dressier than this mob. He was glad that he had insisted upon the painted badges of rank -- the beards made his male officers hard to recognize. With the female ones it was not so bad, although other features (like the men, the women wore only breech clouts) tended to distract attention from their faces. Clothes certainly make the man, the Commodore admitted wryly to himself. And the woman -- although this very undress uniform suits Sonya well enough, even though her hairdo does look as though shes been dragged through a hedge backwards. It felt all wrong for him to be sitting in the chair of command, the seat of the mighty, without the broad gold stripes on his epaulettes (and without the epaulettes themselves, and without a shirt to mount them on) and without the golden comets encrusting the peak of his cap. But the ragged, indigo band encircling each hairy wrist would have to do, just as the coarse, burlap kilt would have to substitute for the tailored, sharply creased shorts that were his normal shipboard wear. He was concerning himself with trivialities, he knew. But it is sometimes helpful and healthy to let the mind be lured away, however briefly, from consideration of the greater issues. Mate of Rim Mamelute, now Comof Freedom -- had the con. Under his control the ship was riding the beam from Lorn back to the position in which she had first been picked up by Orbital Station #. It was there, the scientists had assured Grimes, that she would stand the ibest Chance of being blown into her own continuum. The theory seemed to make sense, although the mathematics of it were far beyond the Commodore, expert navigator though he was. The ship was falling free now, her reaction drive silent, dropping down the long empty miles towards a rendezvous that would be no more (at first) than a flickering of needles on dials, an undulation of the glowing traces on the faces of monitor tubes. Through the still unshuttered ports there was nothing to be seen ahead but the dim, ruddy spark that was the Bblis sun and nothing to port but a faint, far nebulosity that was one of the distant island universes. To starboard was the mistily gleaming galactic lens, a great ellipse of luminosity in which there were specks of brighter ligjit, like jewels in the hair of some dark goddess. Grimes smiled wryly at his poetic fancies -- and Sonya,' who had guessed what he had been thinking, grinned at him cheerfully. She was about to speak when William's voice broke the silence. "Hear this! Hear this! Stand by for deceleration. Stand by for deceleration!" Retro-rockets coughed, then shrieked briefly. For a second or so seat belts became almost intolerable 'bonds. The Executive Officer emitted a satisfied grunt, then said, "Spot on, Skipper. Secure for the big bang?" "You know the drill. Commansnapped orders, and the ship shivered a little as the capsule contiaining the nuclear device was launched. Grimes saw the thing briefly from a port before the shutters of armor plating and thick lead sheathing slid into place. It was just a dull-gleaming metal cylinder. It should have looked innocuous -- but somehow it didn't. Grimes was suddenly acutely conscious of the craziness of this venture. The scientists had been sure that everything would work as it should -- but they were not here to see their theories put to the test. But I must be fair. Grimes told himself. After all, it was our idea. Mine and Sonyas... But nothing happened. 'T'ere was no noise -- but, of course, in the vacuum of deep space there should not have been. There was no sense of shook. There was no appreciable rise of the control room temperature. "A misfire?" somebody audibly wondered. "Try to raise Lorn," Grimes ordered the Radio Officer. "Orbital Station # is maintaining a listening watch on our frequency." TTiere was a period of silence, broken only by .the hiss and crackle of interstellar static, then the voice of the operator saying quietly, Freedom to Station Three. From to Station Three. Do you hear me? Again there was silence. "Sample the bands," said Grimes. "Listening watch only." And then they knew that the bomb had exploded, that the results of the explosion had been as planned. There was an overheard dialogue between two beings with high, squeaky voices, similar to the voice that had been recorded in Freedom's signal log. There was a discussion of estimated time of arrival and of arrangements for the discharge of cargo -- hard to understand at first, but easier once ear and brain became attuned to the distortion of vowel soimds. When the ports were unscreened, the outside view was as it had been prior to the launching of the bomb -- 'but Grimes and his people knew that the worlds in oibit around those dim, far suns were not, in this Universe, under human dominion. CiXThat's their radar like?" VV asked Grimes. "Judging by what's in this ship, not too good," replied Wiliams. "Their planet and station-based installations will have a longer range, but unless they're keeping a special look out they'll not pick us up at this distance." "Good," said Grimes. "Then swing her. Commander. Put the Lorn sun dead ahead. Then calculate what deflection we shall need to make Lorn itself our planetfall." "Reaction Drive, sir?" "No. Mannscheen Drive." IF "But we've no Mass Proximity Indicator, Skipper. And a jump of light-minutes only -- " "We've slipstioks and a perfectly good computer. With any luck we shall be able to intercept that ship coming in for a landing." "You aren't wasting any time, John," said Sonya, approval in her voice. The Commodore could see that she was alone in her sentiments. The other officers, including the Major of Marines, were staring at him as though doubtful of his sanity. "Get on with it. Commander," snapped Grimes. "Our only hope of intercepting that ship is to me a fast approach and one that cannot be detected. And make it Action Stations while you're about it." "And Boarding Stations?" asked the major. The spacegoing soldier had recovered his poise, was regarding his superior with respect. "Yes. Board Stations. Get yourself and your men into those adapted spacesuits." He added, with a touch of humor, "And don't trip over your tads." He sat well back in his chair as the gyroscopes whined, as the ship's transparent nose with its cobweb of graticules swung slowly across the almbst empty sky. And then the yellow Lorn sun was ahead and Sonya, who had taken over the computer, was saying, "Allowing a time lag of exactly one hundred and twenty seconds from... now, give her five seconds of arc left deflection." "Preliminary thrust?" asked Williams. "Seventy-five pounds, for exactly # second." "Mannschenn Drive ready," reported the officer at the remote control. Grimes was glad that he had ordered the time-warping device to be warmed up before the transition from one universe to the other had been made. He had foreseen the possibility of flight; he had not contemplated the possibility of initiating a fight. But, as he had told the Admiral, he was playing by ear. He said to Sonya, "You have the con. Commander Verrill. Execute when ready." "Ay, ay, sir. Stand by all. Comthrust on the word 'Fire!' Mr. Cavendish, Mannschenn Drive setting #. Operate for exactly # seconds immediately reaction drive has been cut. Stand by all. Ten... Nine... Eight... Seven... Six... Five..." Like one of the ancient submarines, Grimes was thinking. An invisible approach to the target, and not even a periscope to betray us. But did those archaic warships ever make an approach on Dead Reckoning? I suppose that they must have done -- but only in their infancy. "Four... Three... Two... One... Fire!' "Xihe rockets coughed briefly, difX fidently, and the normally heavy hand of acceleration delivered no more than a gentle pat. Immediately there was the sensation of both temporal and spatial disorientation as the everrecessing gyroscopes of the Drive began to spin -- a sensation that faded almost at once. And then the control room was flooded with yellow light that dimmed as the ports were polarized. But there was still light -- a pearly radiance of reflected illumination from the eternal, familiar overcast of Lorn. That planet hung on their port beam, a great, featureless sphere, looking the same as it had always looked to the men and women at the controls of the ship. But it was not the same. There was that excited voice, that er. "Whee eere yee? Wheet sheep? Wheet sheep? Wee sheell reepeert yee. Yee knee theer eet ees feerbeedeen tee eese thee Dreeve weetheen three reedeei!" "Almost rammed the jerks," close. Skip." "It was," agreed Grimes, looking at the radar repeater before his chair. "Match trajectory. Commander." He could see the other ship through the ports now. Like Freedom, she was in orbit about Lorn. The reflected sunlight from her metal skin was dazzling, and he could not make out her name or any other details. But Sonya had put on a pr of polaroids with telescopic lenses. She reported, "Her name's Weejee. Seems to be just a merchantman. No armament that I can see." "Mr. Carter!" "Sir!" snapped the Gunnery Officer. "See if your laser can slice off our friend's main venturi. And then the auxiliary ones." "Ay, ay, sir." The invisible beams stabbed out from Freedom s projectors. In spite of the dazzle of reflected sunlight from the other's hull, the blue incandescence of melting, vaporizing metal was visible. And then Grimes was talking into the microphone that somebody had passed to him, Freedom to Weejee. Freedom to Weejee. We are about to board you. Offer no resistance, and you will not be harmed." And the shrill voice, hysterical now, was screaming to somebody far below on the planet's surface. "Heelp! Heelp! Eeet ees thee Deestreeyeer; Eeet ees thee sleeves! Heelp!" "Jam their signals!" ordered Grimes. How long would it be before a warship came in answer to the distress call? Perhaps there was already one in orbit, hidden by the bulk of the planet. And there would be ground to space missiles certainly -- but Carter could take care of them with his laser. Somebody came into the control room, a figure in bulky space armor, a suit that had been designed to accommodate a long, prehensile tail. For a moment Grimes thought that it was one of the rightful owners of the ship, that somehow a boarding had been effected. And then the Major's voice distorted by the diaphragm in the snouted helmet, broke the spell. "Commodore Grimes, sir," he said formally, "my men are ready." IF Grimes told him, "I don't think our friends out there are going to open up." He added regretifully, "And we have no laser pistols." "There are cutting and hurning tools in the engineers' workshop, sir. I have already issued them to my men." "Very good, Major. You may board." "Your instructions, sir?" "Limit, your objectives. I'd like the log books from her Control and any other papers, such as manifests, that could be useful. But if there's too much resistance, don't bother. We may have to get out of here in a hurr But I shall want at least one prisoner." "We shall do our best, sir." "I know you will, Major. But as soon as I sound the Recall -- come a-running." "Very good, sir." The Marine managed a smart salute even in the disguising armor as he left the control room. "Engaging ground to space missiles," announced the Gunnery Officer in a matter-of-fact voice. Looking out through the planetward ports, Grimes coidd see tiny, against the cloud blanket. There was nothing to worry about -- yet. Carter was picking off the rockets as soon as they came within range of his weapons. A nd then he saw the Marines jetting between the two sihips, each man with a vapor trail that copied and then surpassed the caudal appendage of his suit. They carried boarding axes, and the men in the lead were burdened with bulky cutting tools. He watched them come to what must have been a clangorous landing on the other vessel's shell plating and then, with an ease that was the result of many drills, disperse themselves to give the tooLbearers room to work. Metal molted, flared and exploded " into glowing vapor. The ragged-edged disk that had been the outer valve of the airlock was pried up and clear and sent spinning away into emptiness. There was a slight delay as the inner door was attacked -- and then the armored figures were vanishing rapidly into the holed ship. From the speaker of the transceiver that was tuned to spacesuit frequency. Grimes heard the Major's voice, "Damn it all, Bronsky, that's a tool, not a weapon! Don't waste the charge!" "He'd have got you, sir." "Never mind that. I want that airtight door down!" And there were other sounds -- clanging noises, panting, a confused scuffling. There was a scream, a human scream. In the control room the radar officer reported, "Twelve o'clock low. Two thousand miles. Reciproc trajectory. Two missiles launched." "Carter!" said Grimes. "In hand, sir," replied that officer cheerfully. "So far." "Recall the Marines," ordered Grimes. "Secure control room for action." The armored shutters slid over the ports. Grimes wondered how much protection the lead sheathing caught ibetiween the two ships, their fate would be certain, unpleasantly so. And it was on the planetary side  of the ship, the side from which the boarding party would return, that the exterior television scanner had been destroyed by the blast that had thrown the ship into Grimes's universe. That scanner had not been renewed. The Commodore could not tell whether or not the Major had obeyed bis order; by the time that the Marines were out of the radar's blind spot they would almost be in Freedom's aModk. Not that the ladar was of much value now, at short range; Freedom was enveloped in a dense cloud of metallic motes. This would shield her from the enemy's laser, although not from missiles. And the floating screens would render her own antimissile laser ineffective. Missileagainst-missile was aU very well -- but the other warship was operating from a base from which she could replenish her magazines. "RepKrting on board, sir." It was the Major's voice, coming from the intercom speaker. "With casualties -- none serious -- and prisoner." Wasting no time. Grimes sized up the navigational situation. The ship would be on a safe trajectory if the reaction drive were brought into operation at once. He so ordered and then, after a short blast from the rockets, switched to Mannsohenn Drive. He could sort out the ship's next destination later. "Secure all for interstellar voyage," he ordered. Then, into the intercom microphone, 'Take your prisoner to the wardroom. Major. We shall be along in a few minutes." T he prisoner, still with his guards, was in the wardroom when Grimes, Sonya and Mayherw got there. He was spacesuited still and manacled at wrists and ankles, and six Marines, stripped to the rags that were their uniform aboard this ship, were standing around him, apparently at ease but with their readiness to spring into action betrayed by a tenseness that was felt rather than seen. But for something odd about the articulation of the legs at the knee, but for the unhuman eyes glaring redly out through the narrow transparency of the helmet, this could have been one of the Major's own men, still to be unsuited. And then Grimes noticed the tail. It was twitching inside its long, armored sheath. "Mr. Mayhew?" asked Grimes. "It... He's not human, sir." murmured the telepath. Grimes refrained from making any remarks about a blinding glimpse of the obvious. "But I can read... after a fashion. There is hate, and there is fear. A dreadful, paralyzing fear." The fear, thought Grimes, that any rational being will know when his maltreated slaves turn on him, gain the upper hand, "Strip him, sir?" asked the major. "Yes," agreed Grimes. "Let's see what he really looks like." "Brown! Gilmore! Get the armor off the prisoner." "We'll have to take the irons off him first, sir," pointed out one of the men dubiously. "There are six of you and only one of him. But if you want to be careful, unshackle his wrists first, then put the cuffs back on as soon as you have the upper half of his suit off." "Very good, sir." "I think that ve should be careful," said Sonya. "We are being careful, ma'am," snapped the Major. Brown undipped a key ring from his belt, found the right key and unlocked the handcuffs, cautiously, alert for any hostile action on the part of the prisoner. But the being still stood there quietly, only that twitching tail a warning of potential violence. Gilmore attended to the helmet fastenings, made a half turn and lifted the misshapen bowl of metal and plastic from the prisoner's head. All of the humans stared at the face so revealed -- the grayfurred visage with the thin lips crinikled to display the sharp, yellow teeth, the pK)inted, bewhiskered snout, the red eyes, the huge, circular flaps that were the ears. The thing snarled shrilly, wordlessly. And there was the stink of it, vaguely familiar, nauseating. Gilmore . expertly detached air tanks and fittings, peeled the suit down to the captive's waist while Brown, whose full beard could not conceal his unease, pulled the sleeves down from the long, thin arms, over the clawlike hands. The sharp click as the handcuffs were replaced coincided with his faint sigh of relief. And when we start the interrogation, Grimes was wondering, shall we be up against the name, rank and serial number convention? Gilmore called another man to help him who, after Brown had freed the prisoner's ankles, lifted one foot aher the other from its magnetic contact with the deck plating. Gilmore continued stripping the captive, seemed to be getting into trouble as he tried to peel the armor from the scaly tail. He muttered something about not having enlisted to be a valet to bleeding snakes. Yes, it was like a snake, that tail. It was like a snake, and it whipped up suddenly, caught Gilmore about the throat and tightened, so fast that the strangling man could emit no more than a frightened grunt. And the manacled hands jerked up and then swept down violently, an dhad it not been for Brown's shaggy mop of hair he would have died. And a clawed foot ripped one of the other men from throat to navel. I t was all so fast and so vicious. The being was fighting with a ferocity that was undiminished by the wounds that he was receiving and was raging through the compartment like a tornado, a flesh and blood tornado with claws and teeth. Somebody had used his knife to slash Gilmore free, but he was out of the fight, as were Brown and the Marine with the ripped torso. Globules of blood from the ragged gash mingled with the blood that spouted IF from the stump of the severed tail, were dispersed by the violently agitated air to form a fine, sickening mist. Knives were out now. Grimes shouted that he wanted the prisoner alive, not dead. Knives were out -- but the talented feet of the captive were as effective as the human weapons, and the manacled hands were a bone-crushing club. Even so -- "Be careful!" Grimes was shouting. "Careful! Don't kill him!" But Sonya was there, and she, of all those present, had come prepared for what was now happening. She had produced from somewhere in her scanty rags a tiny pistol. No more than a toy it looked. But it was no toy, and it fired anesthetic darts. She hovered on the outskirts of the fight, her weapon ready, waiting for the chance to use it. Once she fired -- and the needlepointed projectile sank into glistening human skin, not matted fur. Yet another of the Marines was out of action. She had to get closer to be sure of hitting her target -- the target that of arms and legs, human and nonhuman... She had to get closer. And as she approached, sliding her magnetized sandals over the deck in a deceptively rapid slouch, the being broke free of his caprtors, taking advantage of the sudden lapse into unconsciousness of the man whom Sonya had hit with her first shot. She did not make a second one. The flailing arm of one of the men hit her gun hand, knocking the weapon from her grasp. And then the blood-streaked horror was on her, and the talons of one foot were hooked into the waistband of her rags and the other was upraised for a disembowelling stroke. Without thinking, without consciously remembering ah that he had been taught. Grimes threw his knife. But the lessons hadbeen good ones, and in this one branch of personal combat, the Commodore had been an aprt pupil. Blood spurted from a severed caratoid artery, andthe claws -- bloody themselves, but with human blood -- did no more, in their last spasmodic twitch, than inflict a shallow scratch between the woman's breasts. Grimes ran to his wife, but she pushed him away, saying, "Don't mind me. There are others more badly hurt." And Mayhew was trying to say something to him, was babbling about his dead amplifier. Lassie, about her last and lethal dream. It made sense, but it had made sense to Grimes before the telepath volunteered his exiplanation. The Commodore had recognized the nature of the prisoner, in spite of the size of the being, in spite of the cranial development. In his younger days he had boarded a pest-ridden grain ship. He had recalled the vermin that he had seen in the traps set by the ship's crew, and the stench of them. And he remembered the old adage -- that a cornered rat will fight. F reedom was falling down the dark dimensions, so far with no course set, so far with her destination undecided. In Grimes's daycabin there was a meeting of the senior officers of the expedition to discuss what had already been learned, to make some sort of decision on what was to be done next. The final decision would rest with the Commodore. But he had learned, painfully, many years ago, that it is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers. The Major was telling his story again. "It wasn't all that hard to get into the ship, sir. But they were waiting for us, in spacesuits, in the airlock vestibule. Some of them had pistols. As you know; we brought one back." Yes," said Grimes. "I've seen it. A not very effective laser weapon. I think that our workshop can turn out copies -- ith improvements." "As you say, sir, not very effective. Luckily for us. And I gained the impression that they were rather scared of using them. Possibly it was the fear of doing damage to their own ship." He permitted himself a slight sneer. "Typical, I supFose, of merchant spacemen." "It's easy to see. Major, that you've never had to write to Head Office to explain a half-inch dent in the shell plating. But carry on." "There were hordes of them, sir, literally choking the alleyways. We tried to cut and burn and bludgeon our way through them, to get to the control room, and if you hadn't recalled us we'd have done so." "If I hadn't recalled you, you'd be prisoners now -- or dead. And better off dead at that. But tell me, were you able to notice anything about the ship herself?" "We were rather too busy, sir. Of course, if we'd been properly equipped, we'd have had at least two cameras As it was." "I know. I know. You had nothing but spacesuits over your birthday suits. But surely you gained some sort of impression." "Just a ship, sir. All Alleyways, airtight doors and all the rest of it. Oh, yes. Fluorescent strips instead of luminescent panels. Old-fashioned " "Sonya?" "Sounds like a mercantile version of this wagon, John. Or like a specimen of Rim Runners' vintage tonnage." "Ion't be catty. And you, Doctor?" "So far," admitted the medical officer, "I've made only a superficial examination. But I'd say that our late prisoner was an Earthtype mammal. Male. Early middle age." "And what species?" "I don't know, Commodore. If we had thought to bring with us some laboratory white rats I could have run a comparison of tissues." # #Tn other words -- you smell a X rat. Just as we all do." He was speaking softly now. "Ever since the first ship, rats have been stowaways -- in surface vessels, in aircraft, in spaceships. Carried to that planet in shipments of seed grain, they became a major pest on Mars. But, so far, we have been lucky. There have IF been mutations, but never a mutation that has become a real menace to ourselves." "Never?" asked Sonya with an arching of eyebrows. "Never, so far as we know, in our Universe." "But in this one -- " "Too bloody right they are," put cookin' now, Sldp. We still have one nuclear thimderflash in our stores. I vote that we use it and blow ourselves back to where we came from." "I wish it were as simple as all that. Commander," Grimes told him. "When we blew otmsdves here, the chances were that the ship would be returned to her own Space-Time. When we attempt to reverse the process there will be, I suppose, a certain tendency for ourselves and the machinery and materials that we have installed to be sent back to our own Universe. But no more than a tendency. We shall be liable to find ourselves anywhere. Or anywhen." He paus. "Not that it really worries any of us. We're all volunteers, with no close ties left behind us. But we have a job to do, and I suggest that we at least try to do it before attempting a return." "Then what do we try to do. "We've made a start. Commander. We know now what we're up against. Intelligent, oversized rats who've enslaved Man at least on the Rim Worlds. Tell me, Sonya, you know more of the workings of the minds of Federation top brass, both military and political, than I do. Suppose this state of affairs had come to pass in our Universe? A hundred years ago, say, when the Rim Worlds were no more than a cluster of distant colonies always annoying the Federation by demanding independence?" She laughed bitterly. "As you know, there are planets whose humanoid inhabitants are subjects of the Shaara Empire. And on some of those worl the mammalian slaves of the ruling arthropods are more than merely humanoid. They're human, descendants of ships' crews and passengers cast away in the days of the Bhrenhaft Drive vessels, the so-called gaussjammers. But we'd never dream of going to war against the Shaara to liberate our own flesh and blood. It just wouldn't be... expedient. And I guess that in this space-time it just wouldn't be expedient to go to war against these mutated rats. Too, there'll be quite a large ibody of opinion that will say that the human Rim Worlders should be left to stew in their own juice." "So you, our representative of the Federation's armed forces, feel that we should accomplish nothing by making for Barth to tell our story." "Not only should we accomplish nothing, but in all probability our ship would be confiscated and taken apart to see what makes her tick insofar as dimension hopping is concerned. And it would take us all a couple of lifetimes to break free of the red tape with which we should be festooned." "In other words, if we want anything done we have to do it." "Yes." "Then do we want anything done?" asked Grimes quietly. H e was almost frightened by the reaction provoked by his question. It seemed that not only would he have a mutiny on his hands, but also a divorce. Everybody was talking at once, loudly and indignantly. There was the Doctor's highpitched bray -- "And it was human flesh in the tissue culture vats!" and of the sheilas in this ship, an' the scars on 'em!" and the Major's curt voice, "The Marine Corps will carry on even if the Navy rats!" Then Sonya, icily calm, "I thought that the old-fashioned virtues still survived on the Rim. I must have been mistaken." "Quiet!" said Grimes. "Quiet!" he shouted. He grinned at his officers. "All right. You've made your sentiments quite clear, and I'm pleased that you have. The late owners of this ship were intelligent beings -- but that does not entitle them to treat other intelligent beings as their slaves. Sonya mentioned the human slaves on the worlds of the Shaara Empire -- but those so-called slaves are far better off than many a free peasant on Federation worlds. They're not maltreated. And they're not livestock. But we've seen the bodies of the men, women and children who died aboard this ship. And if we can make their deaths not in vain -- " Sonya flashed him an apologetic smile. "But how?" she' asked. "That's the question." He turned to Mayhew. He said, "You've been maintaining a listening watch. Do these people have psionic radio?" "I'm afraid they do, sir," the telepath told him unhappily. "I'm afraid they do. And." "Out with it, man." "They use amplifiers, just as we do. But." "But what?" "They aren't dogs' brains. They're human ones." And that was even worse than the discovery of thf' human flesh in the tissue culture vats had been. Transcript of a fascinating discussion of the proposal to attain immortality for everyone...  starting right nowl Read it in the August Worlds of Tomorrow! Also stories by your favorite science-fiction writers, plus Sam Moskowitz's new series, etc. On sale nowl IF IF  Short St ory The Face of the Deep Tie sfar wos enormous and deadly. He was its captive -- and could A fter five minutes had gone by with no apparent change in his situation, Karlsen realized that he might be going to live for a while yet. And as soon as this happened, as soon as his mind dared open its eyes again, so to speak, he began to see the depths of space around him and what they held. Not that there was much else for him to see, riding as he was in a crystalline bubble of a launch about twelve feet in diameter. The fortunes of war had dropped him here, halfway down the steepest gravitational hill in the known universe. At the unseeable bottom of this hill lay a sun so massive that not a quantum of light could escape it with a visible wavelength. In less than a minute he and his raindrop of a boat had fallen here, some unnever escape! measurable distance out of normal space, trying to escape an enemy which had remained in close pursuit. Karlsen was a religious man, and he had spent that falling minute in prayer, achieving something like calm, considering himself already dead. But after that minute, he was suddenly no longer falling. He seemed to have entered an orhit, an orbit that no man had ever traveled before, amid sights no eyes had ever seen. He rode above a thunderstorm at war with a sunset -- a ceaseless, soundless turmoil of fantastic clouds that filled half the sky as a nearby planet would. But this mass was immeasurably bigger than any planet, bigger in fact than most giant stars. Its core and its cause, held forever beyond human sight by its own power, was a hypermassive sun a The clouds were interstellar dust, swept up by the pull of the hypermass, drawn to fall tumbling and churning into it. The clouds as they fell built up electrical static which was discharged in almost continous lightning. Karlsen saw as blue-white the neairer flashes and those ahead of him as he rode. But most of the flashes, like most of the clouds, were far below him, and so most of his light was sullen-red, wearied by climbing just a section of this gravitycliff. Karlsen's hittle bubbleship had ailifioLal gravity of its own and kept turning itself so its deck was down, so Karlsen saw the red light below him through the translucent deck, flaring up between his space-booted feet. He sat in the one massive chair which was fixed in the center of the bubble and which contained the boat's controls and life-support machinery. Below the deck were one or two other opaque objects, one of these a small but powerful spacewarping engine. All else around Karlsen was clear glass, holding in air, holding out radiation, but leaving his eyes and soul naked to the deeps of space around him. He took a full breath now and tried his engine, tried to lift himself up out of here. As he had expected, nothing happened at full drive. He might as well have been working bicycle pedals. E ven a slight change in his orbit would have beerl immediately visible to him, for his bubble was somehow locked in position within a narrow belt of rocks and dust that stretched like a threat to girdle the vastness below him. Before the thread could bend perceptibly on its great circle it lost its identity in distance, merging with other threads into a thicker strand. This in turn was braided with other strands into a heavier belt, and so on, order above order of size, until at last (a hundred thousand miles of the great ring-pattern was perceptible; and then the arc, rainbowcolored at that point by lightning, deepened swiftly, plunging out of sight below the terrible horizon of the hypermass's shroud of dust. The fantastic cloud-shapes of that horizon, which Karlsen knew must be closer while he looked at them. Such was the speed of his orbit. His orbit, he guessed, must be roughly the size of Earth's path around Sol. But judging by the way the surface of clouds was turning beneath him, he would complete a full circuit every fifteen minutes or so. This was madness, to outspeed light in normal space -- but then of course space was not normal here. It could not be. These insane orbiting threads of dust and rock suggested that here gravity had formed itself into lines of force, like magnetism. The orbiting threads of debris above Karlsen's traveled less rapidly than his. In the nearer threads below him, he could distinguish individual rocks, passing him up like the teeth of a buzzsaw. His mind reIF coiled from those teeth, from the sheer grandeur of speed and distance and size. He sat in his chair looking up at the stars. Distantly he wondered if he might be growing younger, moving backward in the time of the universe from which he had fallen... he was no professional mathematician or physicist, but he thought not. That was one trick the universe could not pull, even here. But the chances were that in this orbit he was aging quite slowly compared with the rest of the human race. He realized that he was huddling in his chair like an awed child, his fingers cramping painfully inside their gauntlets with the intensity of his grip on the chair arms. He forced himself to try to relax, to begin thinking of routine matters. He had survived worse things than this display of nature, if none more awful. He had air and water and food enough, and power to keep recycling them as long as necessary. His engine was good for that much. He studied the line of force, or whatever it was, that held him prisoner. The larger rocks within it, some of which approached his bubble in size, seemed never to change their relative positions. But smaller chunks drifted with some freedom backward and forward, at very low velocities. H e got up from his chair and turned. A single step to the rear brought him to the curve of glass. He looked out, trying to spot his enemy. Sure enough, following half a mile behind him, caught in the same string of space-debris, was the berserkership whose pursuit had driven him here. It was a machine fastened on one purpose -- Karlsen's death. Its scanners would be fixed on his bubble now and were probalbly able to see him moving. If it coidd get at him it would do so. The berserkercomputers would waste no time in awed contemplation of the scenery, that much was certain. His bubbleboat was unarmed, but the berserker wasn't. Why wasn't it firing? As if to answer his thought the flare of a beam-weapon struck out from the launch. But the beam looked odd and silvery, and it plowed only ten feet or so among exploding rocks and dust before fizzling away like a comic firework. It left added dust in a cloud that seemed to be thickening around the berserker. Probably the machine had kept on firing at him all along, but this weird space would not tolerate energy weapons. Missiles, then? Yes, missiles. He watched the berserker launch one. The cylinder made one fiery dart in his direction, then disappeared. Where had it gone? Fallen in toward the hypermass? At invisible speed, if so. As soon as he spotted the first flare of another missile, Karlsen on a hunch turned his eyes quickly downward. He saw an instant spark and puff in the next lower line of force, a tooth knocked out of the buzzsaw. The puff where the missile had struck flew ahead at insane speed, passing out of Karlsen's sight almost at once. His eyes were drawn after it, and he realized he had been watching the berserker-ship not with fear but with something like relief, as a distraction from facing... all this. "Ah, God," he said aloud, looking ahead. It was a prayer, not an oath. Far beyond the slow-ohurning infinite horizon, there were monstrous dragon-head clouds rearing up. Against the blackness of space their mother-of-pearl heads seemed to be formed by matter materializing out of nothingness to plunge toward the hypermass. Soon the dragons' necks rose over the edge of the world, rainbow purls of matter, dripping and falling with unreal speed down into the hypermass. And then the dragonbodies, clouds throbbing with bluewhite lightning above the red bowels of hell. The vast ring, in which Karlsen's thread of rocks was one component, raced like a circular sawblade toward the prominences. As they came flying over the horizon they rose up far beyond Karlsen's level. They twisted and reared like mad horses. They must be bigger than planets, he thought, yes, bigger than a thousand Earths or Esteels. The whirling band he rode was going to be crushed between them -- and then he saw that even as they passed they were still enormously distant from him on either side...  Still standing, Karlsen let his eyes lose for a time. If men ever dared to pray, if they ever dared even to think of a Creator of the universe, it was only because their tiny minds had never been able to visuth part... there were no words, no concepts, for sights like these. And what of men who believed only in themselves, or in nothing? What might it do to them to look nakedly at such odds as these? K arlsen opened his eyes. In his belief a single human was more important to the Creator than any sun of whatever size. He made himself watch the scenery. He determined to master this almost superstitious awe. But he had to brace himself again when he noticed for the first time how the stars were behaving. They were all blue-white needles, the wavefronts of their light jammed together in a stampede over the cliff of gravity. And his speed was such that he saw some stars moving slightly in parallax shifts. He could have depth perception in light-years, if his mind could stretch that far. He stepped back to his chair, sat down and fastened himself in. He wanted to dig himself a tunnel, down into the very core of a huge planet, where he could hide... but what were even the biggest planets? Poor lost specks, hardly bigger than this bubble. Here he faced no ordinary spaceman's view of infinity. Here there was a terrible perspective, starting with rocks just outside the glass and drawing the mind on and out, rock by rock and line by line, step by inescapable step, on and on and on -- All right. At least this was something to fight against, and fighting something was better than sitting IF here and rotting. To begin with, a little routine. He drank some water, which tasted very good, and made himself eat a bite of food. He was going to be around for a while yet. Now for the little job of getting used to the scenery without going mad. He faced in the direction of his bubble's flight. Half a dozen meters ahead of him the first large rock, massive as the bodies of a dozen men, hung steadily in the orbit-line of force. With his mind he weighed this rock and measured it and then moved on to the next notable chunk, a pebble's throw further. The rocks were each smaller than his bubble, and he could follow the string of them on and on, until it was swallowed in the converging pattern of forcelines that at last bent around the hypermass, defining the full terror of distance. His mind hanging by its fingertips swayed out along the intervals of grandeur... like a baby monkey blinking in jungle sunlight, he thought. Like an infant climber who had been terrified by the size of trees and vines, who now saw them for the first time as a network of roads that could be mastered. Now he dared to let his eyes grab hard at that buzzsaw rim of the next inner circle of hurtling rocks, to let his mind ride it out and away. Now he dared to watch the stars shifting with his movement, to see with the depth perception of a plant. H e had been through a lot even before his ship had fallen here, and sleep overtook him. Suddenly loud noises were waking him up. He came full awake with a start of fear. The berserker was not helpless after all. Two of its man-sized machines were outside his glassy door, working on it. Karlsen reached automatically for his handgun. The little weapon was not going to do him much good, but he waited, holding it ready. There was nothing elseto do. Something was strange in the appearance of the deadly robots outside; they were silvered with a gleaming coating. It looked like frost except that it formed only on their forward surfaces and streamed away from them toward the rear in little fringes and tails, like an artist's speed-lines made solid. The figures were solid enough. Their hammer-blows at his door... but wait. His fragile door was not being forced. The metal killers outside were tangled and slowed in the silvery webbing with which this mad rushing space had draped them. The stuff damped their laser beams, when they tried to burn their way in. It muffled the explosive they set off. When they had tried everything they departed, pushing themselves from rock to rock back toward their metal mother, wearing their white flaming surfaces like hoods of defeat. He yelled relieving insults after them. He thought of opening his door and firing his pistol after them. He wore a spacesuit, and if they could open the door of the berserkership from inside he should be able to open this one. But he decided that it would be a waste of ammunition to even try. S ome deep part of his mind had  concluded that it was better for him, in his present situation, not to think about Time. He saw no reason to argue with this decision, and so he soon lost track of hours and days -- weeks? He exercised and shaved, he ate and drank and eliminated. The boat's recycling systems worked very well. He happened to have aboard a device that would let him freeze himself into suspended animation -- but no thanks, at least not yet. The possibility of rescue was in his thoughts, mixing hope with his fears of Time. He knew that on the day he fell down here there was no ship built capable of coming after him and pulling him out. But ships were always being improved. Suppose he could hang on here for a few weeks, or months, while a few years passed outside. He knew he was important to many important people, and that an attempt to save him would be made if it looked at all possible. From being awed, almost paralyzed by his surroundings, he passed through a stage of exaltation and then quickly reached -- boredom. The mind had its own business and turned itself away from all these eternal blazing miracles. He slept a good deal. In a dream he saw himself standing alone in space. He viewed himself t the distance where the human figure dwindles almost to a speck in the gaze of the unaided human eye. With an almost invisible arm, himself-in-the-distance waved good-by and then went walking away, headed out toward the bluewhite stars. The striding leg movements were at first barely perceptible and then became nothing at all as the figure dwindled, losing existence against the face of the deep... With a yeU he woke up. A spaceboat had nudged against his crystal hull and was now bobbing a few feet away. It was a solid metal ovoid, of a model he recognized, and the numbers and letters on its hull were familiar to him. He had made it. He had hung on. The ordeal was over. The little hatch of the rescue boat opened, and two suited figures emerged, one after the other, from its sheltered interior. At once these figures became silver-blurred as the berserker's machines had been, but these men's features were visible through their faceplates, their eyes looking straight at Karlsen. They smiled in steady encouragement, never taking their eyes from his. Not for an instant. They rapped on his door and kept smiling while he put on his spacesuit. But he made no move to let them in; instead he drew his gun. They frowned. Inside their helmets their mouths formed words: Open up! He flipped on his radio, but if they were sending, nothing was coming through in this space. They kept on gazing steadily at him. Wait, he signaled with an upraised hand. He got a slate and stylus from his chair and wrote them a message. He was sane, but maybe they thought him mad. As if to humor IF him, they began to look around them. A new set of dragons'-head prominences were rising ahead, beyond the stormy horizon at the rim of the world. The frowning men looked ahead of them at dragons, around them at buzzsaw rainbow whirls of stone; they looked down into the sullen depths of the inferno, they looked up at the stars' poisonous blue-white spears sliding visibly over the void. Then both of them, still frowning uncomprehendingly, looked right back at Karlsen. H e sat in his chair, holding his drawn gun and waiting, having no more to say. He knew that the berserker-ship would have had boats aboard and that it could build its nesses of men. These were almost good enough to fool him. The figures outside produced a slate of their own from somewhere. He looked back. The cloud of dust raised by the berserker's own useless weapons had settled around it, hiding it and all the force-line behind it from Karlsen's view. Oh, if only he could believe that these were men... They gestured energetically and lettered some more. And again: He didn't dare read any more of their messages for fear he would believe them, rush out into their metal arms and be torn apart. He closed his eyes and prayed. After a long time he opened his eyes again. His visitors and their boat were gone. Not long afterward -- as tune seemed to him -- there were flashes of light from inside the dust cloud surrounding the berserker. A fight to which someone had brought weapons that would work in this space? Or another attempt to trick him? He would see. He was watching alertly as another rescue boat, much like the first, inched its way out of the dustcloud toward him. It drew alongside and stopped. Two more spacesuited figures got out and began to wear silver drapery. This time he had his sign ready. As if to humor him, they began to look around them. Maybe they thought him mad, but he was sane. After about a minute they still hadn't turned back to him -- one's face looked up and out at the unbelievable stars, while the other slowly swiveled his neck, watching a dragon's head go by. Gradually their bodies became congealed in awe and terror, clinging to his glass wall. After taking half a minute more to check his own helm and suit, Karlsen opened his door. "Welcome, men," he said, over his helmet radio. He had to help one of them aboard the rescue boat. IF  Novelette He was the deadliest weapon in the whole galaxy. He could conquer anything but himself! I nate shields and statuary scattered about the tavern. I t loomed huge and ugly on the The darkness also was man-made. intersection of the Street of A nearly tangible aura of quiet desFools, the fitful yellow glow that pair radiated from the sprawling bar streamed from its crescent windows at the center of the building and the straimng vainly to pierce the moondozens of tiny tables that surroundless gloom of the planet's long night, ed this nucleus. Here were mingled Inside, it was both brighter and men from nearly every world in dariker. Two large lanterns, hung at the Olympian Protectorate, although either end of the hall, provided the the natives, stocky, sallow-skinned iiiumination, a subdued blue tinge individuals derived from Semitic that wavered eerily across the orstock, were in the majority. Some of the tavern's patrons, mostly Spacers from Hephaestus and Poseidon, were either dead drunk or working their way toward that happy state with a dexterity marvelous to behold. The natives, however, had far too many troubles to drown them in alcohol successfully. They hunched morosely over their drinks, the look of stolid resignation on their faces seldom changing except when a patrol of Keres checked in on their nightly rounds. The only sounds were the whine of the wind, the low drone of whispered conversation and an occasional roar of displaced air as a Far Traveler knifed down from space toward the starport in the adjacent High Town. The tavern was filled with the reek of human sweat and the absence of laughter. Apart from the others, nestled against the base of one of the great supporting pillars, sat the Empty Man. He was a tall, dark man with a face as unshakeaibly impassive as carven granite. For over an hour he had neither spoken nor moved, eyes fixed intently on nothing and seeming to peer deep, deep into strange worlds where ordinary humans never could, or should, venture. The other people in the tavern shunned him With a savage distaste that came very close to fear. There was something about the grim, brooding figure that awakened the instinctive hatred of the alien that slumbers in every man. Somehow they could sense, with the nearatrophied senses bequeathed them by their primeval ancestors, that here was the unnatural, the dangerous. Yet, there was fascination mixed with the fear, the insatiable curiosity of homo sapiens toward anything out of the ordinary. "Oh, he's a strange one, he is," they whispered. "Fd stay well away from him , I would, if I were you." J hon Oharlton, unaware of the stir he was causing, swirled the murky liquid in his glass and drank. His thoughts, as usual, were dark. Even though he knew it was impossible, he was contemplating suicide, as he had every evening for three years since the Day. He had discarded drowning, disembowelling and disintegration and was considering the possibility of drinking himself to death when the first warning tingle shuddered through his frame. Instantly, his thoughts were .scattered. His every muscle became indiscernibly tense. He knew the sign well. It indicated that the being he had pflayed host to for three years, that shared his mind and body and, displaying both a sense of irony and a frightening knowledge of human folkways, chose to call itself Moros, was awakening. Even as he waited, as quiveringly taut as a drawn bowstring, some detached portion of his mind was searching for the proper tag to hang upon his relationship with his uninvited companion. Not symbiosis; neither performed any vital or helpful function for the other. Not parasitic either; the creature didn't take any nourishment or energy from him, if indeed it needed any at all. Moros spoke. It was something beyond the telepathy that humans kn, a voice, like the muted music of a thousand woodwinds, singing softly in his head. In a split second, the blink of an eye, an entire mental conversation was carried out. "You were wrong, Jhon," the alien's 'voice was dry and biting. "In a way, our relationship could be called symbiosis. I supply you with something very valuable, something most men haven't got: a conscience. As for your part of the bargain -- well, some day I will indicate how you will be able to repay me." "Go to hell." "Come, Jhon. You are a most fortunate man, and you should be a most grateful one. I fear you are being unfair." "Damn you I I should be grateful, you say? For what? Before you came, I was a whole man. I enjoyed using my talents when I was on a mission. Now, nothing! No emotions. No fear or exultation, no discomfort or pleasure -- nothing! Why won't you leave me alone? Give me back my soul!" "Not yet." "Damn you!" "Your vocabulary is neither varied nor erudite. And Jhon -- you still don't feel the slightest twinge of guHt over what you've done, do you?" "Why should I? Leave me alone." "Not yet. Some day perhaps." "GO to heH." M oros lapsed into silence, and Charlton fell to studying his fellow patrons. The aura of hopeless dejection about them only served to heighten bis own sense of gloom and futility. Looking out over the slouching forms of the natives, he called up nostalgic memories of past missions before the Day. He could feel the raw energy that was his to control pulsating througth every fiber of his being, and he knew that all he had to do was concentrate, and that energy would surge forth -- to blast, to kill, to destroy -- "How does it feel to be God, Jhon?" "Damn you!" Charlton screamed aloud, jumping to his feet, his fists knotted and ready to smash, to pulp his enemy... Slowly he became aware of the dozens of hostile eyes trained unblinkingly upon him from every corner of the room. Mumbling something unintelligible, he slumped back into his seat. The bartender tapped his forehead significantly, and the rest of the customers, nodding sagely in agreement, turned away. "TTie last of the Immortals. The last of the Gods, that's you Jhon. First there was Osiris, Odin, Zeus -- and now, Charlton, the almighty. Worship held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In case of rain -- " "Shut up! Just shut up! Where in hell is that contact? Blast him, he was supposed to have arrived five minutes ago." Whooml With a tremendous, splintering crash, the tavern door was torn off its hinges and flung clattering across the floor. A squad of Keres dashed into the room. IF For an endless moment, a sickagony; anotiher. An energy bolt sizening silence hung like a pall over zied by. Qiarlton choked on the the tavern. The captain, a chunky, stench of 'burning ions and saw a crew-cut man in a blue-black unitable disappear in a Bash of fire, form with the emblem of the High Within seconds, a full-fledged riot Protector of Apollon omWazoned was raging through the darkened on his shoulder, gestured with a tavern. laser pistol. "You are all under arCharlton flattened himself against rest and will be held for interrogathe wall, listening to the dirr of tion and extensive physical examshouts and smashing furniture, ination!" Trained reflex patterns had taken Charlton reacted instinctively. His him this far, but now his mind was mind groped out and extinguished in control again, and he wondered the lanterns. The tavern was morosely if it was worth the effort plunged into total darkness. Someto try to escape, one shouted in surprise; a ruby "Come, Jhon," Moros's "voice" beam of pure energy stabbed was strangely gentle. "You know I through the gloom. Charlton rose cannot allow you to kill yourself, and slipped toward the back wall, however indirectly. Dispel the darkness immediate)ly." U nder cover of darkness, the haCharlton sighed resignedly, drew tred of the townsmen for the upon his reserves of energy and Keres, long suppressed by fear, finshifted his vision into the infrared, ally erupted into violence. Charlton For the Empty Man, the world lit heard the meaty thud of a fist slamup. ming heavily into flesh; a scream of The townspeople and the Keres, most of whom were afraid to fire lest they hit their comrades, were locked in desiperafte combat right in front of the door. Charlton glanced at the tiny crescent windows and shook his head. "I'll have to blast my way out." "Jhon! If you pull any of your little tricks in here, you'll wipe out half the block!" 'It can't be helped. If you think I'm going to let myself et fried because of some damn aliens' scruples -- " A tiny sliver of light appeared in the floor on the right. Slowly, a square piece of the floor about four feet wide swung up and to the side. Light poured up from below. A head poked its cautiously over the lip of the opening and urgently cried a certain code word. Charlton replied in kind. The man scrambled nimbly up and seized Charlton by the 'arm. "Charlton? Jhon Charlton?" "Yes." "Quick man, into the tunnel. God, what a bloody foul-up!" But as Charlton lowered himself through the trapdoor, he knew it was more than an ordinary snafu. Somewhere there was a traitor. II I t took them five minutes to navigate the tunnel. At last fresh, cold air lashed their faces, and they found themselves in the Street of Fools. Charlton got his first good look at his companions. They were ragged, dark men. They radiated a quiet kind of fanaticism, the revolutionary fervor that at one time or another sweeps every race of man. No one spoke. Apollon's night was moonless; the only illumination was cold starligjit. By this wan glow, Oharlton saw long knives glimmering wickedly in the hands otf the rebels. He smiled. Overhead, a Far Traveler, only a tiny speck in the distance, drifted slowly and silendy down toward the Starport. The sound of running ft reverberated through the hush of the deserted street. Charlton and the rebels shrank back into the shadows as a squad of Keres, weapons at the ready, double#iimed past and disappeared into the tavern. The leader of the rebels glared at Charlton. "The tavern will be under new management tomorrow," he muttered grimly. "All those people -- " He shook his head slowly. "Mister, I sure as hell hope you're worth it." He spmn on his heel and stalked away, followed by the others. As he walked, Oharlton tapped his energy reserves, concentrated and swMdy scanned the minds of his companions. The little one on the left was a psychopathic killer. He radiated blood lust so strongly that even non-Espers could sense it. His mind was a procession of gory memories and even grislier desires; the latest tableau involved his eager anticipation of the day when he would plunge his long knife deep into Charlton's stomach. Evidently the little killer didn't think much of IF Charlton's alleged prowess. The need to prove he could "take" the outiworlder burned intently within him. I'll have troubie with him before aM this is over, the Empty Man reflected. The thoughts of the other three men were grimly centered on the business at hand, but Charlton could catch traces of indecision concerning his worth in their minds also. He grinned wryly. None of his companions suspected that they were doubting e ability of the most dangerous living creature in the known galaxy. They walked on. Around them echoed the unnatural silence that settled on High Delphi like a cloak every evening after sunset. The men ignored each other, every member of the party wrapped introspectively in their own mediations. Charlton probed psionically at the four fetally-ourled cores of desires, fears and aspirations that were human egos, searching out the personality roots of others with desperate urgency to hide from himself his intense fear of turning his strange gift inward. B uried deep in the brain of the Empty Man was an area postarea filled Vith knowledge, selfknowledge fatal to his present personality. Personality is self-delusion, internal censorship. Somewhere in every man is a tiny pwDrtion of the subconscious that remembers the minutest detail of existence and knows all the sets of values and motivations that go together to make up a human ego. The mind acts as its own censor to fence off this part of itsedf, for knowledge of the causes of a man's secret motivations often destroys the motivations themselves and so dissolves the tenuous pattern of automatic responses known as personality. If another Esper had been present to rifle through Charlton's innermost thoughts as he himself was delving into the rebel's, he would have found in this forbidden area a frightening conglomeration of dark symbols and repressed memories. Chief among these were two carefully avoided trains of thought that continued to haunt him in recurrent nightmares. One was the painful recollection of the ten-year jeriod of scientific experimentation that had turned him into the inhuman juggernaut of destruction he now was and his strong, but deeply buried, feelings of guilt over his wild years when he used his godlike power ruthlessly to break all known laws and moralities. The second was the powerful psychic shook he had received at the Cube of Darkness on Milhar II, where he had been possessed by the alien doorwarder Moros, as punishment for his accidental slaughter of an immense number of Moros's race during an attempt to unravel the enigma of the Cbe. His subconscious pulsed with dangerous knowledge, like a gigantic cancer or boil on the verge of erupting and sending a flood of contamination into his conscious mind, held hack only by the power of his iron will. And that will was fraying. The leader of the rebels signaled a halt. "Patrol of Keres stationed ahead." he whispered. "They're named after the olditimie god of violent death, y'know, and for good reason. If they should catch us -- " He drew his forefinger meaningfully across his throat. "Death by laser is a bad way to go." He glanced sidelong at Charlton. The Empty Man smiled. This was a test. Obviously the rebels had methods of avoiding the Keres, and Charlton was supposed to prove his mettle by figuring one of them out himself. But he would go them one better. "Stay here. I'll take care of them," Charlton whispered and slipped away before the flabbergasted rebel could protest or try to stop him. The rebel captain, whitefaced and tremblings took a deep, shuddering breath. "He's crazy. By the Holy Rame! He'll get us all killed!" Silent as a specter, Jhon Charlton flitted through the shadowy streets of the High Town. Ahead, in the Plaza of Madmen, ten Keres were stationed. They huddled around a small solar heater, shivering in the cold of Apollon's long night. White jets of vapor curled from every mouth; they stamped their feet and cursed softly as they tried to keep their fingers from sticking to the frigid metal of their weapons. A young boy shifted the rifle in his hands and turned his head in order to glance look at the other side of the Plaza. Before he could turn it back, something streaked from the cover of a building's shadow. D eath walked abroad in the Plaza of Madmen. Charlton whlpjed through the Keres like a living blur. He smashed and hammered them down, hurled them to the ground with lethal force, stamped them, broke them in half, crushed them. It was like trying to fight some grim, tireless machine; the Keres had no more chance than a litter of kittens facing a maddened tiger. Bones snapped under Charlton's hands; flesh tore and blood flowed. Within twenty seconds, ten bodies were strewn all over the Plaza, and no shot had been fired. Charlton hadn't even given thepi time to scream. The Empty Man stood alone among the carnage. And yearned savagely for death. All through the bloody slaughter, he had felt nothing -- neither revulsion nor delight. He was still a shell, a caricature of a man. The temperature of his blood had not even risen one degree. 'Too easy, wasn't it? Like a boy squashing ants." "Shut up, damn you!" Slowly, reluctantly, the rebel band approached. Awe was written now on every face, and fear and revulsion were in every mind, except the little killer's; hate and fierce jealousy smoldered like a hot ember in his twisted brain. Repressing a surge of nausea, the rebel captain led them across the Plaza and into the tangled maze of streets on the far side. Charlton noted that his companions were careful to keep a healthy distance away, zealously IF avoiding contact with him. It was as if he were now a plague carrier. "Even if they were Redhands," one whispered to another, "nobody should have to die like that. They didn't have a chance." "I don't care much about a bunch of stinking ProTects," the other answered, "But what he did was impossible. It wasn't human." His voice trembled. "Just .not human." "Human enough to die when he gets a knife in his guts," the little killer muttered grinily. Charlton's ears were far more acute than any there suspected. His mouth curled in a hybrid of smile and snarl. Men fear him or respected him, but none offered him companionship, God has no friends. They pressed on toward the outskirts of the city. They saw no one. It was iU to travel the streets of High Delphi at night, and only Keres and the foolhardy did so. Twice they were forced to conceal themselves as the private groundcar of some rich merchant sped toward the pleasure houses in the center of the city. Once a Kere troop-transport and an armored half-track roared past, red lights flashing and sirens wailing eerily, while they crouched in the shadows; they caught a glimpse of a fighter hovercraft in the distance, skimming low over the rooftops, infrared spots probing. "Maybe the fact that Jhon Charlton is on this planet means nothing to you," the Empty Man commented as they emerged from their hiding place. "But I'll wager that the Protector is much more concerned. This is only the beginning. By morning, the search will have doubled, tripled. The government will turn Apollon insideout to find me. I suggest that we get to our destination quickly." The rebel captain nodded. "I pity the poor murderer or rapist who tries to ply his trade tonight. And thank the Flame that we started early enough to slip through the net before it could fully close! We've reached our destination; our headquarters is across the street." Charlton glanced in the direction indicated. A small, rather shabby, four-story building, with a definite air of decay about it squatted among a cluster of similar or worse structures on the fringe of the city. Conspicuous in contrast with the peeling paint and weathered masonry was a large, brightly polished bronze plaque, riveted to the wall derneath, in smaller letters:' AFCharlton arched an eyebrow in RUiprise. "This your headquarters?" The rebel captain grinned. "Why not? No one suspects clowns and beggars. Until it's too late." Ill D mton Arzur, Master Thief and head of the revolutionary movement on Apollon, studied his guest warily over the rim of his glass. "I'd drink with the devil were he my guest," he said, "and I'll drink with you now however thfngs turn out." Jhon Charlton smiled and scanned the room with a caution that was as instinctive as breathing. This was a high level meeting; only Arzur's four chief lieutenants were present. Sket Hyman, the rebel captain who had convoyed Charlton from the tavern, perched atop a packing case on the right holding a silent but deadly needlebeam pistol in one hand. Jay Benjamin, chief jester at the High Citadel, lounged full length on a huge, dusty filing cabinet on the left. He was a tall, lithe man with a strong-featured, sardonic face and hawklike piercing eyes. Jarringly out of place with his bright, gaily colored clothes was an illegal, high-power blaster tucked casually into his sash. Jvai, the little psychopathic killer, squatted close to the door, toying with his gjimmering knife and eying Charlton with savage hunger. Arzur's mistress, Vye, a tall, beautiful woman with raven hair, stood behind her lover's desk, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Charlton's eyes flicked back to IF Arzur. He was phenomenaJly young to be the leader, of a reibei underground. He was aibout Ohiadton's age, somewhere in his middle thirties. The Empty Man drained his glass and then lau'ed softly; he had detected the alien substance immediately, of course. "I always find truth serums quite delicious," he said. "DR#, made from Karovian tree melons, is it not? It is? Excellent! I thought I could recognize the flavor." Hyman swore, but Arzur looked genuinely interested. "And it has no effect on you?" he asked. "None whatsoever, I assure you. Observe: I am a spotted tyrannosaurus. Satisfied?" Arzur grinned wryly. "Either you are immune or you have on a most excellent disguise." Chariton slowly crushed his glass. "Enough of these chiildren's games. Let us iget down to business." Arzur nodded. "Most certainly." He glanced slowly around the room. "When this portion of galactic space, ithe so-called Olympian sector, was first settled about four hundred years ago, the head of the expedition sent to Apollon had a very fine idea. He decided to sever relations with Terra and set himself up as a dictator; the mother planet was so far away that it was impossible for her to interfere. He did so, becoming the first High Protector of Apollon. "Thus, while we share a common cultural background with our neighbor planets -- the secret police are called Kieres all over this sector of space for instance -- we ore the only Olympian region that doesn't belong to thiat portion of the Terran Empire known as the Olympian Protectorate. This is just finfe for the High Protector. All profit made from trade with the Protectorate planets goes into his pockets, but the average citizen must suffer tyranny and poverty. Thb common man on Apollon has a far lower standard of living than the common man on Hephaestus or Poseidon. "These adverse conditions produced us: a rebel underground. We struggled along for years with little success. Then, two months ago, we were contacted by a representative of the Terr an Empire. He said that Terra was interested in liberating us from the tyranny of the High Protector and would help us overthrow the government -- " "Damn nice of Terra, wasn't it?" Jay Benjamin muttered. A rzur threw the jester a quick glance and then continued. "Although I must admit," Arzur said, "that I don't understand why Terra doesn't stop trade between Axllon and the Protectorate planets if she wishes to topple the High Protector. Bankruptcy would undermine the government in a month." Charlton smiled inscrutably. "My dear sir, you fail to grasp the basic laws of high finance.  Revolutions are one thing, losing money quite another." "Very interesting, honorable Earthman," the dry voice of Jay Benjamin interrupted. "But I would like to inquire why it took Terra four ihundred years to work up en#ugh patriotic favor to attempt our liberation. For centuries the Empire has let Apollon go to hell in a handbasket. Why the sudden eruption of paternal concern?" Charlton eyed the jester reflectively. "Well, I could say that it's because the Empire loves you all, dear bright-eyed children, but I think I'll be honest for a change." He glanced at Arzur. "As you probably know. Terra has been fighting an undeclared war for over six hundred years with an invisible empire known as the Sons of Night, or the Sons of Nyx as they are called in this sector. Tibis conflict is rapidly approaching a decisive stage. Apollon is located in a vital strategic area; the power that controls Apollon could well have a critical advantage." He paused. "Terra does not want the Sons of Night to get Apoillon. She will do anything to prevent it." "Then it is agreed." Arzur said. "Terra will secretly help us to overthrow the government if we promise to apply for membership in the Olympian Protectorate when we are in power." "It is agreed." "Excellent. Now we must decide how this is to be brought about. Normally, I would let you discuss this with Jay; he has been handling cur local operations for the past few months. But he's going offplanet tonight." The jester grimaced. "The High Protector and the Oligarch of Hephaestus made a deal; His Holiness swapped me for an Aphroditian belly dancer. The Far Traveler for Hephaestus leaves Starport in a few hours, and I'll have to be on it." Hyman growiled, "What kind of help is Terra gonna send us? That's what I want to know. Troops? Heavy weapons? Air support? What's the Empire gonna give us?" "Me," Charlton said. "What!" "I'm all the military aid you're going to get. And you have no idea how generous the Empire is being to you at that." "That's mighty big talk, outworlder," Jvai spat. "But talk's cheap." "Oh, but I can do far more than just talk. I can prove my mettle and start your little revolution off with a bang if you can somehow smuggle me up to the High Citadel tonight. And the clown -- " he grinned savagely at Jay Benjamin -- "can thank whatever gods he swears by that he's not sleeping in the citadel this night." hariton was asked to step out into the hall while the rebel leaders debated what course of action to pursue. He waited. After a few minutes. Jay Benjamin sauntered from the room and crossed to where Charlton stood. "Have to be at Starport for preflight indoctrination so I'm leaving eariy," the jester explained. He arched a sardonic eyebrow at the Earthman. "Patience, m'boy. Hyman and Arzur are still deadlock over what to do with you. Hyman's alI for quietly wrapping you in lead weights and dropping you in the nearest river, but I don't think he'll get his way." He chuckled. "I've heard of you, Charlton, and I've known life under the Oligarchy also. Not everyone here is fooled by the propaganda. Some of us know how much liberty there is likely to be in a Terran liberation -- and we don't want the good comfortable life if its price is secret police and a knife in the dark. Some of us look beyond the arms of all-embracing Empire to the day when this will be the free Olympian Confederacy, and we will not be content merely to exchange one set of masters with another. Think on that for a while, Charlton. Think well." He slipped silently away. Charlton cursed. Moros finally broke the long silence that ensued, speaking more to himself than to Charlton. "There was a legend, Jhon, among your people many thousands of years ago that told of a mythical bein named Prometheus who stole preaous fire from heaven and gave it to mankind. You could be a Prometheus, if you want to be. You could take fire back to the stars, spread the flame so that man could at long last be free of his own abominable stupidity. But you don't want to; comes a problem of making you realize that there are more important things in the universe than Jhon Charlton. Cutting you from all but a few chosen emotions was a good start, but it's not enough, not nearly enough." Had the alien been able to sigh, he would have then. "Mankind is on the brink of a tremendous, three-sided conflict: The Sons of Night versus the Terran Empire with the rebehious colonists against both, and various hostile alien powers waiting to mop up whatever is left. You, Jhon, could be a focal point in that war; a war that could spell the end of galactic civilization. But you just don't care, do you?" "No." "Were I human, Jhon, I would be forced to call you a lousy bum." They were interrupted as Arzur stepped into the hall and levelly at the Empty Man. "You'll have your chance," he said. "We'll leave after midnight. Be ready." He strode away, paused, and then swung around to face the Terran. "And Charlton," he whispered softly, "you had better be as good as you say you are." your mind is satisfied in its immaconditioned loyalty to the Oligarchy. Even though I am not of your people, I would not like to see homo sapiens destroyed; therefore, it beIV O utside, it was, if possible, even colder tihaii it had been earlier in the evening. Now a fierce wind blew from the north, biting aill present, except Charlton, to the bone in spite of fur-lined winter suits. The Empty Man glanced around him. They were far from the city, trying to work their way around through the uninhabited areas and approach the Citadel from the rear. For an hour, the ground had been sloping steadily upward until they found themselves in the foothills of the range of low mountains that surround the south end of High Delphi. They were climbing up a narrow and dangerous path that led across the face of a cliff. On the rit side rose a sheer wall of frowning granite, on the left was a dizzy drop of hundreds of feet. Far below, at the base of the cliff, twisted the tiny shining ribbon that was a mighty river. Charlton heaved a wistful sigh. In spite of the danger, it was a scene of great beauty and serenity. Moros shattered Charlton's contemplation of the quiet. "If supernatural 'beings do indeed rule the universe, they purely must be Spirits of the Ironic. Life is a cosmic joke. The humor is grim, and we lowly mortals often fail to appreciate the jest, but wit is there if we search deep enough. Take yourself as a case in point. What marvelous irony I The greatest murder the galaxy has ever known; the man who very nearly committ genocide yearns only for peace and serenity." Chariton gritted his teeth and made la mighty effort to ignore the telepathic being. He concentrated instead on Vye's slim, furrousered legs as she climbed up the trail ahead of him. In front of the girl toiled Sket Hyman, and leading the party was Denton Arzur, Vye's lover. Last in line, gliding stealthily along behind Chariton, was the little killer, Jvai. Once again, Charlton's trained mind probed out, straining to delve below the surface thoughts of his companions and explore the ego, the "I" factor, that lurked in the remoter regions of every brain. Slowly, he began to form a picture of the personality and motivations of each member of die party. A less hardened man would have been shocked at the pictures and memories dredged up and fed into the scanning mind of the Empty Man. Beside idealism and the desire for material possessions, each had a mudvmore deeply rooted motivation, a reason for hating the Protector's government. Vye's reason was rape by a squad of Keres when she was a young girl, Arzur's was the ibrutal slaughter of his parents, Hyman's a life of misery and terror spent in a New Delphi slum watching the government's soldiers destroying his property and friends. But Jvai was different. Certainly he hated the Keres, but it was the same twisted hatred the little killer felt for any living creature, male or female. Much more important, Jvai feared them. Chariton found one crystal-clear picture engraved indelibly in the killer's brain. IF Young Jvai, a boy about four, huddled in the gutter near the door of am incredibly dirty and brokendown shack in the seotkxn of the aty known as the Beggars' Hole. He heard the blare of material music and as he glanced up, a squad of Kerw in full dress uniform paraded by. As toe boy watched toe Keres, the sunlight glinting dazzingly from their guns Md helmets, their brit phes tossing in toe wind, looking tall and shining, like gods, fear began to fill his soul Charlton s mind snapped back to the present. His hypersensitive ears had detected a faint sound, one that was out of place with the regular background drone of footfalls and labored breathing. A backward glance, a movement too fast for the normal eye to see, confirmed his suspicions. The sound had been the rasp of a knife being cautiously slipped from a sheath. Jvai, the knife held dose to his body, stalked noiselessly toward Charlton, Undoubtably, he planned to push his victim's ibody over the edge and claim it had been an accident. The Empty Man smiled. Swiftly as a striking cobra, Jvai's arm jerked high into the air and then flashed forward. But not swiftly enough. A split second before, Charlton had broadcast the coded psionic signal that triggered the instantaneous molecular metamorphosis of his skin into a steePhard chitin substance. The knife drove into Charlton's ribs. With a groan of tortured metal, the blade snapped in half. Charlton swung an arm like a wrecking boom. A terrified scream echoed through the predawn hush, and then Jvai was gone. Charlton caught a glimpse of him, only a tumbling, black spot, before he hit the surface of the river hundreds of feet below. "That was your traitor, Arzur," he said as the rebel leader rushed to the spot. "Any chance of him surviving?" Hyman shook his head and spat contemptuously over the edge of the cliff. "If he survived the fall, the killerfish will cut him to ribbons. Now, just how did you know he was the traitor?" "He tried to stab me but missed." Hyman shook his head again, doubtfully this time. "Jvai never missed a stroke in his life." "There's always a first time." V T he three rebels fled at breakneck speed down the winding trail. "I still don't like it." Hyman gasped. "What right did Charlton have to send us packing? What's he up to, anyway? Maybe he's a double agent." "That's the risk we'll have to take." Arzur snarled. "Run!" Hyman sighed resignedly and put on a burst of speed. Somewhat ahead of the others, he dashed around a curve in the trail and sprang back twice as quickly, twisting his body nearly double in mid-air with the violence of the motion. "Keres," he hissed. "We must have missed them on the way up." "How many?" Arzur's whisper was harsh. "Three." "Did they spot you?" "I don't thi so." Vye ran her tongue nervously over dry lips. "What do we do now?" "Either die or get rid of them," Arzur answered grimly. "But whatever we do must be done quietly; noise would bring other guards down on our necks instantly." He gestured for silence. In the sudden hush, they could hear the muffled IF thud of boots on rocks approaching relentlessly closer up the trail. Vye slid a hand stealthily inside her warmsuit and drew forth a compact weapon that had been taped to her thigh. Hyman took up a position on the opposite side of the trail. They waited. Conversing in low tones, the three Keres rounded the corner. Vye's airgun spat silent, but deadly, cyanide darts. The needlebeam in Hyman's hand buzzed deeply once. The Keres jerked and then slumped noislessly into death. The Empty Man crouched in the shadow of a huge boulder. Ahead, situated on a plateau overlooking the panorama of High Delphi that stretched to the horizon far below, loomed the Citadel. He glanced back along the trail; but by now, the rebels must be almost within sight of the city. He chuckled, remembering the look on Arzur's face when he had told them to run like hell. There had been a great deal of grumbling; but, they had obeyed him at last, which was fortunate. Soon the plateau would be hell. C harlton studied the immense island of man-made light in a sea of inky darkness and then glazed at the sky. For the last hour he had been calling for a storm, and he was going to get a whooper; great menacing thunderheads were billowing up from the north like a tidal w'ave. Rain began to spatter about him. This was the moment, the culmination of his mission, the time of his personal triumph. And he felt nothing, not even a quiver of anticfpation or exultation. He knew this his victory would turn to ashes in his mouth. Charlton reached out into the night. He directed all the inhuman energy he possessed into a task long considered impossible by science: channeling every iota ofelectrical power in the immense storm into a single bolt, attempting to make all the electricity in the air ground itself in the same spK)t at the same time. Impossible -- but not for Jhon Charlton. In a moment, he would destroy a man he had never seen. And with the High Protector would die all the hundreds of men, women and children that inhabited the Citadel. And they would never know what had killed them. Or why. "How does it feel to control the whirlwind, Jhon? To wield lightning as a weapon and unleash it to kill whenever the divine whim takes you?" "Damn you!" Charlton's scream was on the ragged edge of hysteria. "Shut up!" Lightning lashed from the sky like a two-pronged whip. The world exploded into fire. VI H yman bolstered his needier and turned to Arzur. Before anyone could speak, a sudden flash from behind turned night into blinding day. A microsecond later, the roar of the explosion burst upon them. The earth twisted sickeningly as if to a belly blow. An irresistible shock wave smashed them to the ground. The explosion was felt for miles. In High Delphi, people staggered in terror from their houses to gape toward the south, where a billowing cloud of smoke and huge, leaping tongues of flame shrouded the top of the Plateau of the Citadel. For the first time in Apollon's history, the Keres ceased their endless patrols of the city to stare upward in fear and awe, shoulder to shoulder with ordinary citizens. From the Beggars Hole, the rumor that the end of the world was at hand began to spread like wildfire. In a few minutes, wails of fear and cries of delight at the Protector's untimely demise echoed through every street in the sprawling city. It took the trio of rebels nearly ten minutes to work up enough courage to climb back up the trail to the Citadel. They found the Empty Man standing alone in the center of an immense expanse of fused glass and metal that marked the site where the Citadel had once stood. He looked up slowly as they approached. It had been touch and go for a while, but the chitin armor of his transformed skin had successfully protected him from the titanic stresses of . the blast. Hallelujah, thought Chaiilton bitterly. And his companions stared at him in awe, he riffled swiftly through their brains, feeling a twinge of sour amusement at what he found. Hate and horror was strong in every mind. Arzur felt the most nausea; he was a much more idealistic man than the practical Hyman or any of the others. He would probably be found hanging from a rafter beam one day after he fully realized what he had visited on his people in the name of freedom. Chariton sighed. If things were different, if he wasn't Charlton, he might have found a great friend in this man. His mouth curled into a hard, mirthless smile at the picture in Vyes mind. Without a word, he led them from the field of victory. No one spoke during the long trip down the mountainside. They stumbled along mechanioy, oblivious to the gentle rain that sighed around them like lover's tears. The rebels were dazed by the way their world had 'been stood on its head without warning. All their most desired goals had been achieved overnight, and Arzur, for one, felt curiously lost. Chariton was wrapped in his own dark thoughts. He knew, of course, that his task was just beginning. In the morning, he must tackle a multitude of jobs: co-ordinating planetwide efforts, whipping the underground forces into an efficient rebel army, planning military strategy, demoralizing the enemy, assassinatBut now he wanted to rest; he was weary of body and of soul. They reached their headquarters without incident. The sound of rioting rang throughout the city, especially in the area adjacent to the Beggars' Hole, but it was unlikely that anyone would try to loot the shabby Beggars' Union building. With a curt nod to Arzur, Charlton slouched wearily to his room and flung himself, fully dressed, down on the cot. C harlton had been asleep for less than a hour, and dawn was Just beginning to lighten the eastern sky, when he sensed the presence of someone in the room. Instantly he snapped into full awareness, jyoised to kill. He smelt the delicate musk of perfume and saw starlight shimmer faintly from a frilly nightrobe and untied raven hair that fell free to the shoulders. Something warm slid close to him on the cot. It was, of course, Vye. She leaned forward and pressed eager lips against his, muttering something low and unintelligible. For a moment, his body responded instinctively, but then the combination of exhaustion, surprise, and desire surged over his groggy mind like an irresistible wave, and the last, frayed bond of mental control snapped under the strain. In one frightening instant, the boil had burst, the contamination spread, and he found himself staring straight into the depths of his own soul, himself, for the first time, as others saw him -- stripped of all selfdelusions and conceits, every foible and fault standing out sharply under the harsh glaring light of reality. Horrified, he saw the real Jhon Charlton, in proper proportion to the universe at last: a pitiful, whining, mewing thing of fragile flesh and blood, pathetically ignorant, weak and imperfect, yet possessed of such a colossal vanity that it dared to cry its futile claims of superiority doud to an uncaring cosmos, a monkey chattering noisy, frightened defiance in the primeval darkness. Charlton had learned the hard way that the universe was not impressed by his existence, that life would flow along quite unchanged after the organic machine that was Charlton ceased to function. And, with a sick feeling in the pit of he tore her arms loose from his neck and sprang to his feet. "Get out of here, damn you!" She, made a soft, hurt sound of surprise. "Why? Am I not pretty enough? Or perhaps a lowly colonial girl isn't good enough for you, Terran?" He shook his head, a jerky, desperate motion. "No, it's not that, but -- I can't. Now get out!" She rose to her feet and moved gently toward him, her eyes filled with compassion and tenderness. "What's the matter?" she said softly. He shook his head again. He backed slowly away from her, and she followed. Her voice was as soft and gentle as a caress. Pinpoints of starlight danced magically in her eyes and reflected from her silken skin. "What's the matter, darling? Tell me -- please. I wartt to help you." "I can't." His voice broke. He stumbled backwards. She stretched her hand beseechingly toward him. "I love you," she whispered. "Let me help you." He studied her outstretched hand through a red fog. She moved closer, making soft little noises deep in the back of her throat. With a cracked scream, he whirled and hurled himself through the window. The ground leapt up to meet him with sickening speed. So, now I die, he thought and felt strangely grateful. IF He smasihed into the bard pavement. And felt nothing. C harlton swore savagely. Again he had been beaten by a conditioned reflex. The chitin substance into which he had instinctively transformed his skin could insulate him against a far greater impact than a four-story drop. From behind him came a scream . An anthology of stories by the most influential authors of science fiction within the last four decades. Twentytwo stories are included, in chronological order, from Edward E. Smith's 'The Vortex Blasters" to Philip Jose Farmer's "Mother." # Here are in-depth biographical and  critical studies of the twenty-two major sdce fiction authors rqpr( sented voi Modern Masterpieces. A final chapter summarizes the work of new authors who may become the harbingers of tomorrow's science fiction literature. # volumes at your bookstore bow. Cleveland and New York and the sound of hysterical sobbing. Charlton foimd himself running blindly ithrough the night. He knew that he must return in the morning. The conditioned sense of duty that was still too strong to disregard reminded him that he had a revoluition to engineer. Btit now he wanted only to run, run from himself, run on and on and on until the night swallowed him up without a trace -- Now he knew what he had tried to hide from himself all these years. Lx)ve and hate are more than just opposites. One is the aibsence of the other; as black is the absence of light, and cold the absence of heat, so is hate the absence of love. A man filled with hate and bitterness has room for nothing else. Hatred, like some wasting disease, consumes the soul, growing and swelling until at last it turns and begins to feed upon itself. And he had always been a man of hate, a creature of death and destruction. "Why didn't you make love to her, Jhon? The anatomy of your body would have been a problem, but not an insurmountable one. Not for you. Not for Jhon Charlton." "I can't," he sobbed. "I can't love!" "I know, you poor jerk," Moros said gently. "You poor, poor jerk." And a gust of sardonic mental laughter followed him from the oo IF  Novelette He was being butchered to moke an alien holiday -- but he could make them pay for their thrills! I T he noise from above was deafening. Shouts, stomping of feet, cheers, I suppose, or the equivalent of them. The equivalent of DHisic, too, if you could call it music. Something like the high, wailing strains of India, if you must have an Earth comparison. "What in the world's going on?" Billy said nervously. "Search me," I said. "It'll be all right. Everything's turned out all right, so far." Billy looked at me. "Such as what?" I shrugged, trying to maintain a front. "Well, they finally figured out what we could eat and the fact that we needed what evidently seemed to them an unbelievable amount of water. They're doing the best they can." Billy said 'bitterly, 'We've been treated as prisoners, and you know it, Ken." "Don't talk tbat way. We'll be all rigjit." We were in a small, unfurmsihed room. Possibly ten by ten. No windows. There was a narrow door through which we had been pushed possibly ten minutes earlier. There was a larger door, which evidently slid open and which took up the complete wall opposite our entry. You could hear 'the sounds through the large door as well as from above. "Ken?" "Yes?" "Something bad is about to happen." I swallowed. There was nothing I could do. Supposedly I was skipper of this twoperson expedition, but it was all out of my hands. The only help I could give poor Billy was verbal -- and meaningless, as we both knew. I said, "It'll be all right. Nothing else makes sense. There's no point in anything happening to us. We're, well, like ambassadors." "Fine," Billy said bitterly. "But do they know it?" I couldn't think of anything very soothing to say. It was Billy's first expedition, but with all the experiences behind me. I'd never got into anything like this. "Take it easy. Kid," I said. Billy walked over toward the larger door and tried to find a crack in its edge, through which to peer. As though that movement had triggered something, a sheet of metal blurred up from below, between us, bisecting the room, cutting it exactly in half, Billy on one side, I on the otheir. It came with such speed, I was caugjbt completely unaware. It took me long seconds to comprehend. Then I banged against it, hard, desperately. "Billy!" I yelled. "Ken!" I could hear the voice, dimly, through the metallic sheet. It was high. Shrill! I banged with my fists. "Billy! Billy!" But there was no answer now. In a moment, the metal wall which had divided us sank back into the floor, more slowly than it had risen. I knew, inside I knew, that Billy wasn't going to be there. I was alone in the ten-by-ten compartment. There was nothing to do but stare at the now dosed portal through which my companion must have gone. Above, the shouts and cheers doubled in volume. The music swelled to an unbearable crescendo. I sank down to the floor and put my head in my hands. T he noise swelled and fell. There would be great mob shouts, screams from what was obviously excitement and sometimes a great drumming of feet -- hooves would be better the term. It was evidently some type of applause. Then there was the music. At times it would break into a great with the swelling shouts. Th it would fade away until a new period of excitement. I came to my feet ifinally and made a great to do studying my cell. Not that there was anything to find. The whole compartment was of metal, doors and all. Even had I tools, I would have had my work cut out getting through either entry. And I had no tools. I had nothing. I was clad in the simplest of cloths around my loins, the equivalent of very brief men's swimming trunks. Billy had been dressed the same. They had taken our clothes, inoluding shoes, the first day, and since that time we had been in the nude save for the strips of textile. Actually, it fitted the climate wihich was as dry as Death Valley and almost as hot. Fifteen minutes must have passed, though I had no way of marking time. A hush fell. For the first time since Billy and I had been conducted to this tiny prison there was no pK)unding of feet, no shouting of excitement. If anything, it was the more ominous. I pressed nearer to the large portal through which Billy must have gone. Gone to what? To my surprise, it slid very slightly to one side. By applying my right eye, I could observe, with difficulty, a narrow arc of what was beyond.  Beyond was a stretch of sand, leading to a wooden fence, possibly six feet or so high. Above the fence I could make out tier upon tier of the Centaurs. And now they were shouting and screaming again. But this impression was formed at the back of my mind. My attention was focused in horror to a point halfway between where I stood peering and the fence beyond. There in the sand was Billy, his body bearing a score of gaily ribboned darts. And to one side, only a couple of feet away, stood one of them, harnesses in red, a short swordlike thing held high in one of its stubby airmlike appendages. Controlling my nausea, my urge to retch, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the slit. The Centaur pranced about, facing this direction, that. Saluting the now roaring crowd, bowing, prancing. And then four more of the creatures, these in plain brown harness, came trotting forth. In quick, efficient movements a lariat was trussed around Billy's feet, and the 'body was dragged briskly away, beyond my small arc of vision. The crowds in the stands roared again. The red-clad Centaur saluted again with his ridiculous toy sword. And suddenly, the door against which I leaned, peering through the crack in my horror, shot aside, completely open. I stumbled, then caught myself. And I could make out in full now what had been only a fraction through my aperture. The sand floored arena was possibly fifty-five yards across and surrounded by a wooden barrier, yes, about six feet high, using myself as a measure. I am six feet tall, about one eighty in weight. Above the barrier, immediately, IF were two rows of, well, we would call them seats. They were more like couches the Greeks and Romans once used at table. Billy and I had already found them to be the nearest thing to a seating arrangement the Centaurs provided themselves, and that seldom enough. They usually preferred to stand. Largely, the couches seemed a prestige item, a status symibol. Beyondthe two tiers of couches was tier upon tier of standing Centaurs, reaching up to a point where it seemed unlikely the multitude could see what was going on below in any detail. In short, it was a tremendous stadium. A H this has taken time to describe, it took no time to assimilate. My real attention was riveted to a small sword stuck in the sand not more than ten feet beyond where I stood. When the door had opened, revealing me to the multitude, a shout had gone up. The music shrilled to a crescendo again. I looked up into the stands, in all my hate and bitterness. And it was then that a flash of pain struck me in my left shoulder blade. I reeled forward, caught myself. I shot a look 'behind. There was a small, ydllow beribboned dart in my back. And the entry door behind me was closed again. With a roar of anger, I grabbed up the sword, spun around looking for the foe. But the arena was empty. Billy was ' gone. The red-hamess Centaur, gone. For now I was alone. I shook the Made up at the stands, screaming my hate at them. And they roared hack at me. I had no idea if they have the conception of humor, or, if they have, if some of the sounds they were now ma-king expressed it. I reach my hand around to the irritating dart. I could feel a trickle of blood running down my hack from the wound. I tried to pull it out, hut then the pain intensified. The damned thing must be barbed, like a fishhook is barbed. I let it stay. A door opened on the arena's far side, and three of the Centaurs came trotting in: one in yellow harness, one in blue, and finally the one in red. The rage swelled up within me! II C entaur is obviously not the word. It came immediateily to mind when Billy and I first saw them. They are about the size of a small Earth-side burro. I would say in total weight they would average about the same as a man. However, the neck is somewhat longer than that of the usual Earth quadruped. No, I reserve that, we have of course not only the camel but even the giraffe. The neck, in actuality, was about the length of that of a Peruvian llama. The great dierence was the two arm#ike appendages, and it was these that branded them centaurs in our eyes. It took little imagination to compaie them to the Greek mythic creatures with the bodies of the horse and the human upper torso. The two appendages at the side of the neck, just above the foreshoulders, were not as effident as a man's arms, nor were the fourfingered hands as dexterous. But evidently they had been enough to bring this life form to the ascendary on their planet. Now, as I stood there, the three, in the unison of chorus giris, pranced into a line, dashed in a gallop to a point immediately before what could only have been the president's box, the king's stand -- whatever their officialdom might be. It was luxurious beyond anything I had thus far seen on this grim world, and no more than a half dozen reclining Centaurs occupied the robe-'bedecked couches. The music shrilled high, as the threb skidded to a halt in a swirl of sand and saluted the officials. But I'd had enough. All my life, I have read the expression le saw red. It never came through to me. A bit too precious. Not quite true. But now I knew the original writer of what eventually became a cliche in the Earth-Basic language wrote from experience. Because now I saw red. All was a red haze. I rushed them. For moments, I felt a surge of confidence, since they obviously didn't see my approach. Sword in hand I ran, plowing through the sand. And they ignored me, prancing, capering, bowing and saluting to the cheering mob of their fellows. The nearest was the one in the IF blue harness. As I came nearer, I could make out his outfit in more detail. His hands were free, but to one side he wore a scabbard which undoubtedly housed a sword similar to my own and similar to the weapon the red-costumed one had evidently used to finish off Billy. The harness had some aspects, I could see, of body armor, since it covered what were obviously the more vital parts, and there seemed to be some sort of bandoleer crisscrossing the neck -- or chest, if you wish to retain the centaur image -- something like Pancho Villa's Mexican soldiers you see in the historical Tri-Di shows. I was almost to them, coming up from the rear. I swung my sword high, feeling no compunction whatsoever at attacking without warning. Feeling nothing except rage beyond the point I had thought possible. I must have missed my aim by several feet. In a sudden burst of motion, the three of them had scampered off in as many directions, and I was left standing there, sword again on high, stupidly. The mob's voice reached to the skies. And, yes, their race knew humor. If this you cojLild call humor. They also knew ridicule. From the sides of my eyes, I caught Yellow coming in fast. I tried to spin, tried to backhand him with tihe sword. He was in, his body actually scraping me for a moment, and then out again. I was almost dashed to the sand. I caught myself, came alert once more. I could feel another sting, this time near my right shouidec blade. My eyes went there, inadvertently. There was anotner ribboned dart. In a moment the pain became more intense. In my rage, I had forgotten the first dart, now I remembered. Both wounds were ' now bleeding -- each but a trickle. Blue was coming in from the other side in a burst of speed. I turned and faced him, the sword always ready. He came close, a dart, blue ribboned, in one of his hands. Their arms were not of the length, nor strength to give them the power for a good throw. They would never had made javelin men. But enough darts, no matter how small, will bring down a buffalo -- m time. He hadn't coordinated his attack sufficiently. At the last moment, seeing me ready, he skidded into a turn, throwing the dart, starting away. I dashed forward and swung at him. I know nothing about swordsmanship; even at the personal combat school in Neuve, San Diego, they never teach it any more. It is no longer even a sport on Earth. However, in this type of action, swordsmanship was not of the essence, quickness of hand was. I slugged him a good one, across what would be called the haunch, had he been actually of the Equidae family. But he darted otff, as untouched. I had expect to finish him. I looked uncomprehendingly at die sword, accusingly, and learned my first bard lesson. It was a meaningless weapon. I would have been hard put to cut cheese with it. It was about as sharp as the average letter opener, and not even the point was really adequate. I could, possibly, draw blood with the point, but it was going to be a rare situation under which my weapon could cause any considerable damage. The cards were stacked against me even beyond the point it must have looked in the stands. But Blue had missed me with his dart. I waded through the sand and picked it up and even as I stooped I sensed the rush, heard the swirl of sands as one of them turned quickly and felt another of the barbed missiles penetrate my thigh. I scurried over to the wood barrier which surrounded the arena, fear suddenly welling up from inside to replace the rage of a moment earlier. I had three darts in me now, each wound bleeding, though none badly. Still, how many could one take? I held the blue dart in my right hand, my all but useless sword in my left. I got my back to the wooden wall. All right, you four--l egged bums, come in and get me. I felt myself breathing hard, in spite of the fact that no more than two or three minutes could have transpired since I had entered the ring. Breathing hard and blistering with sweat. I might have known they were old pros at this. In their time, without doubt, they had worked out every variation on the theme possible. All three came In at a gallop. Red along one barrier wall. Blue along the other. Yellow directly at me from the middle of the arena. I stood there, feet wide, braced. If nothing else, I thought wildly, if I could get my hands on one of them during the melee to come, I could strangle him. They were no larger than I and no stronger, I was sure. Billyy Billy, I muttered meaninglessly. Give me the strength and chance to finish just one. It looked as though they were bent on collision -- that we would wind up in a free-for-all pile. I threw my dart at Blue, tried to use the point of my sword against Red. Blue had his sword in hand. With a flick of wrist, an amazing dexterity, he fended the dart off, the same moment coming to his hind hooves, spinning and dashing off again. At the same split moment. Red had done the same. Yellow was alone, before me. Back on his rear legs he went, and his hand blurred. I felt the now familiar pierce of one of the darts. His hand flicked to his chest, plucked another dart from his bandoleer, blurred again. All this time, he was reared back, dramatically. I felt the second dart strike a rib and fall away, leaving a bleeding red groove. Ill T he crowd screamed its pure joy. Enraged again, I dashed after him as he beat his retreat. IF I came to a halt in the center of the ring. I could never catch him in a race. I stood there blowing. I had four of the darts in me now. The rage was gone again. Even Billy was forgotten. It was fear that held me now. I knew I was to die in this ring. I could smell the fear stink in my sweat. They were making a tour of the arena, galloping along in unison now. Yellow leading. The crowd roaring. Evidently, they had come to the end of one part of the drama. A new one was to commence. I shook my head to dash perspiration from my eyes. And it came to me that thus far I had played the fool. Here I was, homo sapien, the thinking animal, trying to make like a lion, a tiger... or a bull. Yes, a bull. The similarity to this situation and that of the bull in the fiesta brava of the old days in Spain and Mexico was inescapable. I had seen the spectacle various times in Tri-Di shows and historical. It wasn't as fantastic as all that, I realized, even as I stood trying to catch my breath and overcome my fear, in preparation for the next act of the show. Given a culture that evolved gladiatorial fights, a warrior race with the love of combat, and inevitably as the culture became decadent, the fights in the arena would take a definite trend: an audience, seeing a victim killed vicariously, and shouting, cheering its excitement. The popular gladiator, or matador. A judge in the stands, some high official to preside and be saluted. A good deal of pageantry and colorful gobbledygook. A definite routine, always followed. And, eventually, the deck so stacked that although it looked dangerous indeed, the victim never had a chance of winning. The bull might look ever so large. The matador pathetically small and helpless, so straight, noble and fine in his trajes de luces, his suif of lights. But the bull never won, was never meant to win. In 'his day a name matador might kill two thousand bulls and more and then, in his own time, die in bed. Percentagewise, the bull had no chance whatsoever. No matter how dangerous the show might be rigged to seem,, the matador was always victorious. I remembered the Tri-Di I had seen based on the life of Manolete, possibly the greatest torero of the #th Century. Upset by personal woes, the man had finally come into the ring sodden drunk and had paid the penalty. But he had been the last, the last of the great matadors ever to die in the arena. From then on the clipping of horns, the drugging of the animals, the reduction in size and fierceness of the Bos taurus ibericus had made the spectacular about as dangerous as riding to hounds. It came to me suddenly what was going on. Something like the Spanvictim was divided into definite acts. The initial running of the bull, to get an idea of its speed, the way it hooked, what horn it favored. Then the picadors, to keep it enraged and to bring down its head a bit, then the banderillas to enrage it still further and keep it coming, then the final faena where the matador put on his performance, leading to the moment of truth. In the same manner, my Centaurs were going into a new act of the show. And I thought I knew what it might be. They realized that at this point I was terrified and temporarily exhausted. They were giving me a rest. A chance to collect myself. Then they "were going to come in again, enrage me again, until I stupidly charged through the sands, slugging after them, while they posed and pranced, gracefully making a fool out of me for the edification of the cheering mob. It was what happened to the bull. They kept him enraged, kept him coming, kept him from stopping long enough to figure out that it wasn't the cape but the man behind it that counted. All right. I was homo sapien, the thinking animal. Start thinking, Ken, start thinking. And not about Billy. Not about the fact that you're never going to leave this ring alive. Not about the fact that a mere month ago you were Kenneth Ackerman, most promising young officer in the Space Exploration Corps, happily married, a semi-celebrity back home, due to your deeds of derring-do. Start thinking instead, of taking a couple of them along with you. Or, at the very least, one. If nothing else, for Billy and the way Billy's body had looked, crumpled there on the sands, a score of darts with their pretty ribbons embedded in the body from every angle. You can do it, somehow. Start thinking. I breathed deeply. All right, what is there to think about? What could a bull have thought about, other than what he did? Something came to me. I had seen Red taking the plaudits of the crowd, lifting his little sword to the salute, as he stood over Billy's corpse. But it wasn't Red that was giving me most of my hard time, now. In fact, I didn't have a red dart in me. All were yellow. Yellow was obviously ttie matador, this time. Red and Blue were running interference for him. Red had been the matador, the most important performer, with Billy, but Yellow was my prime enemy. All right. Point one. I'd learned something. It might help. Something else. They'd stacked the deck with the sword they gave me. In the same manner as when they had trimmed a bull's horns, in the fiesta brava, they stacked the cards against him. A bull cannot see the tips of its horns. All its life it learns where they re through practice; just how to hook. But with a few inches trimmed down, he's thrown off his perspective; and before he learns to correct his aim, the torero has made an ass of the bull, and he's dead. So it was with me. They had given me a sword that was all but useless. I was continuing, in the heat of the fight, to try to utilize it. Their swords, I could be sure, were sharp enough. But mine was a delusion. Should I throw it away entirely and depend on bare hands? But then something came to me, and I stared down at the pseudoweapon in my hand. In actuality, it IF bore only a superficial resemblance to what we would think of as a sword on Earth, being only a bit more than a foot in length and having no cross piece to guard the hand. The hilt, though undoubtedly of sufficient size for the small grip of the Centaurs, was inadequate for a man as large as I. It was a toy sword, aside from being blunt of edge. But it was all I had. Think, Ken Ackerman. Think, homo sapien. Think, you ambassador of good will to an alien intelligence. Think! The roar of the mob reached to the skies again. The three of them were coming in at a graceful trot, slowly gaining speed. Yellow was in the center, sword in hand, Red to one side. Blue to the other. Both of the flankers bore darts in their hands. Back to me came two scenes. One, a performer in a Tri-Di revival of the vaudeville of yesteryear. One, in which I myself starred in the schoolyards of my youth, at a boy's game come down through the ages. Could I combine the two? On they came, Red and Blue, now, slightly ahead. I thought I coud see the strategy. With their darts, they would fade in initially, drawing my attention. Yellow, my matador, would dash in then for some undoubtedly graceful bit of daring which would bring the the congratulatory music. "All right," I growled. "Meet the mumbly peg champ of Public Grammar School Number Six!" I flicked my tiny sword over, grasping the point, and shuffled forward, ignoring the incoming Red and Blue. Their eyes, large and multipupiled, had no discernible lids, so far as Billy and I had made out earlier. But now those of Yellow widened, and he skidded to a halt and reared to his hind legs preparatory to dashing off. I could feel the darts strike deep in both sides and ignored them. At the moment, I could have ignored the slugs of a #mm mini-Bazooka. I dredged up the skill of two decades past and threw, not particularly hard but with all the accuracy I could call upon. The point struck at the spot which would have housed the human larnyx. Eyes bugging like a tarsier. Yellow dropped from his rearing position, fell to his front feet, fell to his front knees, his small hand dropping his own sword. I heard snorts of dismay from either side and the swishing of sand as Red and Blue came hurrying in to the rescue. I ignored them still. I waded forward, through the sands, stooped, swept up the sword. I didn't bother to check, even with my eyes, the keenness of blade. I knew, as I knew my life, that it would be as razor sharp as my own had been dull. I spun and slashed with all the strength of my man arm, with all the strength of a maniac. And ripped a cut from the withers of Blue to the strifle of his left leg, a cut that must have delved halfway through his girth. So that even as I spun to locate Red, the evil horror of Blue's viscera began to spill out, and his scream could have been that of the pony his hind quarters resembled. R ed was in full retreat, dashing for the entry portal through which he and the other two had galloped so gracefully hardly ten minutes before. And as he ran, he stumbled, regained his feet, dashed, skidded in the sands so that he nearly fell again. And I plodded after. This was the one who had finished Billy. This was the one who had taken the applause from the screaming crowd, after giving Billy the coup de grace. He dropped his sword, made the gate, began beating on it with his And it came to me how basic in all higher life forms are the fundamental reactions -- among others, pleasure and pain, rage and ecstasy... and terror. Beyond the gate must have been consternation. And deep within me I hoped that the reason it budged not was because those on the other side also felt that terror of unexpected extinction from a victim who was meant to receive the blessing of death, not award it. Still beating on the portal, he darted his head around to watch my progress through the sands. Had he left off then and dashed for it, I could never have caught him. My physical resources were all but exhausted, and I was being kept going by hate alone. But there was nothing left in him at all, save his terror. I came up from behind and cut his hamstrings, each with a double blow so that whatever the degree of their surgery, he would be forever a cripple. Then I turned and walked slowly back and came before the president's box. And it came to me that for the past several minutes, the minutes of slaughter, there had been silence throughout that stadium of thousands. The music had withered away, the shouting was gone, not a hoof tramped the flooring. And I stood there before the reclining aristocracy of the Centaurs and recalled the stance of Red as he had stood over the fallen body of Billy. And to the extent that I could on my two legs, repeated the salute he had made. I held my sword, just so. I flourished it, just so. I bowed and saluted again, as Red had bowed and saluted. Then I turned on my heel and saluted that quarter of the arena, the thousands of Centaur vicarious bravos, and then to that quarter, and that and that. Till each in all that vast audience had been properly saluted. And in all that stadium I could make out but two sounds. One, the last involuntary kickings of Blue, in his death throes in the center of the arena. Two, the continuing terrified the sands. But at last the gate had opened, and a dozen or more brownharnessed ring attendants came scurrying through. Half of them gathered IF about the fallen Red, jostling each other in their attempts to raise him and carry him away. The others, six or eight, came running toward me. Running, but at no great speed. And as they came they spread out. Some bore long, thin lances, and some, lariats. I saluted the president's box, once more, tossed my sword to the sands and turned and folded my arms and awaited them. IV I t was five or six days before they brought me before his high mucky-muck. I never did discover his title, nor his manner of achieving office. He might have been an elected official, a hereditary emperor. He might have been the equivalent of a bishop, for that matter. I never discovered their socioeconomic system and certainly had no interest. They had hospitalized me and, to the extent they could with an alien life form, tended my wounds. They fed me -- after I at last found the determination to eat again -- the foods they had discovered by hit and miss that Billy and I could assimilate. When at #ast they came for me, they brought the clothes I had worn when we had been captured upon emerging from the Space Scout. There were four of them, the first Centaurs I had seen since the arena, save my doctors, nurses or whatever they were who had cared for me. At the time I had thought of them as jailers. The four were harnessed as elaborately as any I had as yet met. And though I had little interest now, in what I observed, it came to me again how many peculiarities our life forms had in common. For they decorated their harnesses with gems, as our aristocracy of the past once did. They stood politely, while I donned my space gear. I had no particular interest in so doing, in fact, it was overly hot. But then, I had no particular reason not to, and it seemed to be their expectation. I was satisfied to go along until I found my opening. I finally went with them, two before me, two behind. And when we left the -- ril call it hospital -- another small troop fell in behind. Once again, their buildings are surprisingly similar to our own, save they are done on a larger and less decorative scale. I don't know why, but to mind came the palaces and temples of the ancient Babylonians or Assyrians. Great massive buildings with long halls and corridors. There were ramps, rather than stairs, for obvious reasons. One temple we passed could have been a ziggurat direct from Sumer. When we entered the great building, be it a palace, presidential residence, or senate building, another guard came to the salute. I grunted self-deprecation. The ambassador from Earth's confederation was at long last being treated with correct protocol. W e proceeded down long halls again and finally to a large reception room. At the far end, reclining on the only couch with which the room was furnished, was the largest of the Centaurs with whom I had thus far come in contact. Although there were a double score of elaborately harnessed ones present, he wore the simplest attire of all. It was black, without ornamentation and well worn. I gained the impression that it was battle dress which had seen many a campaign and was thus more prestigious than the gems and colorful dress of his associates. The king, the emperor, the president, the warchief, the bishop? As I said before, I didn't know, nor care. My guard of honor, or whatever they were, peeled away and stationed themselves at a discreet distance amongst the other retainers. I stood alone before his high mucky-muck. I found to my surprise that I was still capable of surprise. Because he opened his mouth and said in very passable Earth-Basic, "A great mistake has been made." I looked at him for a long moment. I felt too empty to reply. Nothing came. His large, inhuman eyes went to his retainers on one side of the hall and then the other, in a very human expression. As though he was asking for assistance in his approach. But beyond a slight shuffling of hooves, there was nothing. He said, "You are not surprised that I speak your tongue? I have gone to considerable effort." "I am surprised," I said heavily. He said, "It was not so difficult as you might think. From the moment you were placed in your... quarters, here, we recorded each IF sound you made. Our technicians were able to decipher your means of communication, particularly since it resembles our own to such an amazing extent, that is, the creating of individual sounds and the reception of them." Nothing came to me to say. He stirred slightly on his couch. I suspected again that the Centaurs were more comfortable standing, that the couches had to do with ritual and rank. Not that I cared. He said, "We realize now that you are not a member of an inferior, unintelligent species, but are actually the dominant life form of your planet..." "Planets," I said emptily. "Our race dominates nearly three thousand, in all." A change came over his expression, possibly of dismay. Their features are not similar enough to our own to read. After a time, he said, "On our world, there is an inferior species, similar to yours. That is, they are bipeds. You will understand that it is possible for such a species to be repugnant to us. Surely there are life forms on your own home planet that are repugnant to you." "Yes," I ,said. "Reptiles. Fourlegged reptiles." He stiffened. Another characteristic we evidently had in common. He said finally, "In analyzing the recordings we made between you and your comrade, we now realize that you were in '.fact a mission. Could you describe it in more detail?" I took a breath. "The custom of our confederation of planets is to send an exploratory expedition to any newly discovered worlds which might possibly support our life form. The first expedition is small and preliminary." "And what is its purpose?" "Chiefly to discover whether or not there is an intelligent life form already occupying the new worid." His unnaturally large eyes remained on me, waiting. I said, "If it is decided that the life form is compatible, it becomes a fringe world of our system with which we trade and exchange data." I halted there. He broke the silence. "And if it is inimical?" They had studied our language to the point of having such terms as inimical in their vocabulary. Obviously, their concern was not small. I held my peace. Behind me, the assembled Centaurs stirred restlessly. He said finally, "A great mistake has been made, and we are anxious to make reparations. Reparations a hundred times over. We wish you, Kenneth Ackerman, to return to your confederation and assure your authorities that the planet of Xenopeven wishes to become a, as you said, fringe world of your confederation." I shook my head at him, a gesture that was probably meaningless. "There is one great difficulty. I see you know my name. Do you know that of my late companion?" "Billy Ackerman. We are greatly disturbed..." "Among our species, the female takes the name of the male upon becoming bis wife," I said emptily. "Female?" he said. "Wife?" They were not nearly so like our own life form as some of the surface similarities would suggest. "I do not understand," he said. "But with such great issues at stake, surely this admitted mistake can be negotiated..." I t was then that f bounded at him. It took three full strides. I knew I had but seconds. But seconds, pray to all the powers in which I have never truly believed, would be enough. Such anachronisms as swords, we had received no training in at the personal combat school in Neuve, San Diego. But hand-to-hand combat was another thing. Judo, jujitsu, karate, kushti and all the other dior beast with his bare hands are taught, in fact, are going through a long mode, a fad -- the end, of course, the building up of our physical bodies. His unnatural, reclining posture on the couch prevented him from making more than a preliminary movement before I was upon him. My hands were choppers. He could not know it, but since returning from the arena to my hospital room, I had devoted my time, as much as I could find, to pounding, toughening the sides of my hands. I hadn't had the days I required, but it would have to suffice. The Centaurs, as I have said, weighed perhaps the same as  man, and this chief among them, perhaps rather more. But their build is such. with their six limbs and lengthy torso-necks giving them the centauran appearance, that the bodies are comparatively slight. And so I found this one. Before they overwhelmed me, I had cracked the neck at least twice, smashed a dozen other bones. My spaceboots helped, they were a far cry from my being barefooted out there in the arena. T hey have me now in a smallish, well secured room. But it isn't uncomfortable, given their standards. Nor have they in any way lessened the quality nor quantity of my food and rink. To the contrary. The way I figure it, they're in a tizzy. They have no manner of knowing what the Confederation does if one of its scouting ships turns up missing. For all they know, the whole fleet comes calling, the battle fleet of a race that has populated # worlds, with all the blood, sweat, and tears that would entail. They don't know either what would happen if they turned me loose, restored my Space Scout and let me return. They have no way of knowing, if I, as an individual, could sway the human authorities to brand Xenopeven an inimical world. They don't know what to do with me. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to practice my chopping, the hardening of the edges of my hands. They're awfully careful not to get too close to me, but you never know. Billy wasn't the vindictive kind, she wouldn't have approved. Still in all. I'd like to get just one IF IF  Feature Our Man in Fandom fakes us to where the Slans live! Neologistically Speaking A S a group, science-fiction fans are rather fond of neologisms. That seven-dollar word is not meant to scare you. It just means that they enjoy coining new words and terms. The fans like to give names to everything they are involved withpconventions, clubs, magazines, each other -- and even things like their own cars, t)rpewriters and mimeograph machines. They seem particularly fond of labeling their apartments. In common with college undergrads, bachelors and others of limited pecuniary means, science-fiction people share the old habit of rooming together to cut food bills and share the good old rent. These coop flats become centers of violent fannish activity. From their portals emerge tidal waves of fan magazines and all sorts of history-making fannish hoaxes, cults, feuds, manifestos and clubs. Far-famed in song and story, such fan-centers are too significant to be known by cold, mathematical labels such as Apt #B, # E. #th St. They virtually cry out for affectionate names which tend to make them stand out as recognizable entities. Great-Grandaddy of all such cognominal dwellings was the far-famed Sian Shack way out in the boondocks of Battle Creek, Michigan; in the dear, dead days some twenty years agone, when fandom was young and giddy. Of course, I don't have to tell you from whence the name was derived, for you doubtless recall A.E. Van Vogt's great yarn, Sian, about the young superboy with psi talents galore, who was put down and put upon by all and sundry, even including other slans. Well, back in these by-gone days before science fiction became Respectable, fans were always ibeing put down for reading That Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff, so they identified swiftly with Van Vogt's version of the Ugly Duckling. It became the fashion to, half seriously, consider fans as slans -- hence the fannish multi-dwelling above alluded to. This first of all such, the original Sian Shack, was shared amongst some fellows named Al Ashley, Walt Liebscher, Jack Weidenbeck and, later, E. E. Evans (who later wrote some science-fiction novels, as you may recall). Even after the lease was lost, or whatever happens to apartments in the end, the term became generically applied to similar fan-shared apartments. Sons of Sian Shock I get a kick out of the amusing and imaginative variety of these fancoined names. For instance, back in New York in the jolly days around # or so, there was a famous share-the-rent movement among local fans who were, in those postDepression and pre-War days, generally footloose and fancy-free unmarried types. There was one called the Ivory Tower -- so-called, I am informed by a former resident, not in allusion to a secluded residence inhabited by scholarly recluses engaged in intellectual research, but, well, because the walls were painted that hue. This Manhattan flat was shared amongst Don Wollheim, Dirk Wylie and Dick Wilson (who later, as you may recall, wrote some science-fiction novels). When the Tower went the way of all flesh, the boys broke up. Dick Wilson went off with David A. Kyle, Chet Cohen and a fellow called Damon Knight, or, as he preferred to print it in those days, damon knight, to a place they named Raven's Roost for some obscure reason, whilst the rest of the Towerites conglomerated at The Futurian Embassy... so-called because they all belonged to a club, very big in those dear, dead days, called The Futurians. Later, around #I or so, various of these chaps and some new-comers foregathered in Prime Base (the name was borrowed from Doc Smith's 'Lensman' series, where it denotes the supreme headquarters of the Galactic Patrol or something). Still later, there was another fan-flat called Futurian Fortress, wherein resided Doc Lowndes, John Michel, and damon knight (later who, some science-fiction novels wrote, recall you may). Around #, Larry Shaw (now Ye Ed of Lancer Books), together with a chap who rejoiced in the perfectly delightful name of Suddsy Schwartz, dwelt in an apartment yclept Little Jarnevon. Jarnevon was a planet of wicked critters in the 'Lensman' yarns, which, as the more IF acute of my readers may by now have deduced, were Pretty Big in those days. Grandsons of Sian Shack The cognominal habit survived the rigors of World War II and was still going strong into the early #'s, when there was quite a notorious residence around the neighborhood of Columbia University in Manhattan's Morningside Heights, called Idiot's Castle. This was not a fannish apartment, but a full sized residence hotel loaded with small oneand two-room apartments in which, for various reasons and at various over-lapping times, lots of interesting people hung their hats. Prominent among these hat-hangers were Ron  Cindy Smith (who published the Hugo-winning fanzine. Inside), and Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison. These last three gents, recall you may, later wrote some science-fiction novels. Even though I was, myself, a frequent dropper-in at the Castle, memory is blank as to how the name came about. Then there was an incredibly enormous nine or ten or eleven room monster on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, happily 'yclept Maison Dinglesnaff during its earliest period, but later called Riverside Dive from its address. Herein were often found Art Saha, Chuck Freudenthal, Dan Curran, Bill Donaho, Dick Ellington and such guests and visitors as they could not persuade to leave. Those were gay, mad days, when four stereos were lined up facing the windows that overlooked the Hudson, and Tchaikovsky's, # Overture was blasted across the river into Jersey at top volume, the actual cannon-fire on the recording doubtless convincing many shaken Jerseyites that New York was launching an invasion against their shores. Shortly after this, I started a sln shack myself with the proud name of Toad Hall -- remember Mr. Toad's palatial manse in Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows? Inhabitants were a congenial crew, including Stan Serxner, Chuck Freudenthal, etc. Toad Hall became an institution and survived the loss of a couple of leases, the name moving along with the hallowed lares and penates to other addresses. Addresses and inhabitants may have changed, but the Hall went on into legend, famed for its traditional everyweekend party at which, on toward the last, as many as two hundred droppers-in became habitual. Also renowned for extravagant party-flinging was a slan shack called Tlie Nunnery, a weird, roof-top residence on New York's fashionable, exclusive Bowery. The previous tenants, it seemed, had been three girls, and for some weeks after the clientele changed over from all-girl to all-boy, mysterious telephoners would ring up asking to speak to "Marge" or "Irma" or whatever. From the exclusive femininity of the former leasees, the name seemed a natural. Cars, Typewriters, and Other People Above and beyond the apartment. fan's automobiles come in for affectionate personal names. Especially back in the #'s and #'s when incomes were smaller and a car was one's only means of travelling to conventions -- a slender thread connecting one fan to the rest of Fandom. Some of these vehicles enjoyed names of prestige and dignity, like "Andromeda II" and, presumably, "I" -- others bore titles foreboding and grim, such as "Panzetkampfwagen -- still more had cute names like "Stfnash" and so on. There was one affectionately known as "Baby," a long-suffering little Ford communally owned by Futurians in days gone by, which seemed to be forever moving luggage and people in and out of the Ivory Tower and its several reincarnations. Religious names for cars were once very much In. I hasten to explain these were fannish, or justr for-fun pseudo-religious. Like the cult dedicated to Great Ghu (reputedly, a beetle-monster dwelling on the sunny side of Vulcan, who controlled a zombie known as Donald A. Wollheim via telepathy). This order of ghughuism, founded by Wollheim and Dick Wilson and John Michel way back in # when we were very, very young, appealed to those with purple souls -- remember what I said a few installments of this column ago, about how the hectograph used to duplicate fanzines turned your fingers purple? -- and proselytized vigorously on the unbeatable principle that anyone who even heard of the Great Ghu, his soul instantly turned purple. This is one great idea, and I have often been puzzled over what would happen if the other religions got hold of the concept. Anyway, in reprisal, a rival church was founded a little later, under the title of The Sacred Order of FooFoo, dedicated to cleansing everyones' souls of the purple taint and retinting them green. The ghughuists had a Gihoily Ghible and some choice ecclesiastical titles: I recall Dick Wilson was Ghuardian of the Gholy Ghrail. FooFooim retaliated in kind. As latecomer and underdog, FooFoo gained many adherents. Their major activity -- at least, in retrospect, it seems that way -- was largely confined to naming automobiles. Let's see, now... there was Empress of FooFoo, a car Louis Kuslan owned during his college days... and Art Widner's first mobile was called The Skylark of Foo. Later, I guess, Widner became sadly engulfed in a rival religion, some foul heresy on other, because the Dodge sedan that bore him to the # World Convention was known far and wide as Skylark of WooWoo. I am happy to say that, as a church, Woo-Wooism did not long survive. Then there was a # Plymouth owned by a well-known fan named Jack Speer (now, I believe, practising law). It was far-famed as The Spirit of FooFoo... and I can hark back to a Ford of unremembered or unknown vintage, the FooFoo Special, which made a spectacular trip from the depths of distant Philadelphia all the way to the Denver science-fiction convention (and, IF after a certain fashion, back), with Milton A. Rothman and Bob Madle at the helm, as it were, plus a clutch of fellow-travellers. Going behind Ghu and FooFoo to what must have been their ultimate and original source (H.P. Lovecraft), New Orleans fan Harry B. Moore sported a vehicle once, known as The Triumphal Chariot of Cthulhu. Ah -- those were the days! Then there are other mechanisms which become infested with the naming-craze. I, for example, had and still have a tape recorder of staunch heart and sound components, known as Ole Reliable. And many fans have granted cognomens to their trusty, long-suffering typewriters: such as the Corona owned by Ernie Auerbach. known as Slippery Sam because of an insecurely bded shiftlock. A typewriter of nameless make, owned by some opponent to ghughuism, rejoiced in the title of Sacred Oracle of FooFoo. And so on... Sometimes, I'll freely admit without coercion, you can really get carried away with this sort of thing. Way back in the remote and forgotten era called The Thirties -- to be precise, in # -- at some convention or other, which one I don't remember at this late date, Fred Pohl and his cohorts commandeered an elevator in the convention hotel for a brief space of time and -- In a mood of joyous exaltation -- christened it with the impressively Lovecraftian name of "The Shaggoth #" and rode it madly up and down the elevator shaft for about a quarter of an hour, ignoring signals and shunning would-be passengers -- with, all the time, the operator and a frenzied hotel manager in close pursuit not far behind in another car. I draw a merciful veil over What Happened when the Shaggoth # ended its joyful and epic ride and came, as we all have to come eventually, Now in Galaxy! by Keith Laumer by James Blish  Norman L Knight by Brian W. Aldiss All these and many more in the August Galaxy, on sole nowl IF  Novelette The Ghost Galaxies Out beyond the rim of space they sought an answer to the universe's most fearful question -- or death! #CT#iSit point eit one" the pilot's voice counted off over the intercom. Tliirty seconds passed. "Eigjit point eight two." Captain Shetland's eye passed to the hunched man seated across the cabin, then went on to the port. Already the red shift, or something analogous, was distorting the view of space. Miat an anachronism, he thought. A direct-vision port on a FasterThanLight ship. The Meg II was fresh from the construction dock and theoretically designed througji"Light speed,' the intercom announced, and the port was void. "Eight point eight three. "Thank you, Johns," the captain said. His voice did not reflect the tension he fdt. Shetland had passed the speed of light many times, but never with velocity. The restrictions of conventional physics could not be set aside with impunity. In the captain's mind were four great dreads, and as he closed his eyes a notebook appeared, with an old-fashioned wire-coil binding. On its cover was a picture of a small and shaggy pony and a single opened, exposing a lightly ruled sheet, and from offstage appeared an animated pencil, freshly sharpened, tooth marks on the latter end. The pencil twirled and wrote: L Beacon, failure of. #. Drive, malfunction of. #. Personality, distortion of. #. Unknown, the. It pleased him to note, as always, the alphabetical arrangement of the terms, and the entire mental process of itemizing them reassured him. Fears that could be outlined in a notebook lost some of their power. This was good, for their power was great. One of them had taken, after thirty hours, the Meg #. Stop that! he commanded himself. Even his carelessly wandering th ought s were exceedingly dangerous S hetland's ga #  returned to the seated man. This was Somnanda, operator of the beacon. Somnanda sat without motion or expression. His forehead was high, the hair above it dark but sparse. His long ears seemed to be listening intently for something beyond the confines of the cabin, of the ship itself. His eyes, half closed, were a curious, faded gray, their color suggesting a nictitating membrane. The lips and mouth were more delicate than one would expect in so large a man. Somnanda gave the impression of nobility, almost of sainthood. On the table before him was a small box with a facsimile of a burning candle above it. Somnanda's unwavering gaze centered upon this light. His two mighty hands rested above the table, blue-ridged veins curling over the raised tendons in back. The fingers touched the surface lightly on either side of the candle. Somnanda moved. His head swiveled gradually, turret-like, to cover Shetland. "It is well. Captain," he said, his voice so deep and strong that there almost seemed to be a staccato echo from the walls surrounding them. Shetland relaxed at last. Behind his eyes the notebook reappeared, reopened. The pencil drew a neat line through Dread No. #. The beacon was functioning properly -- so far. normal universe existed only tenuously. Relatives to that ship, to its crew and many of its instruments, planets and even stars became ghostlike, present but insubstantial. External light and gravity registered only as an indication on a meter. Internally, the laws of physics applied as always; Meg II required power for illumination, temperature control, the operation of its instruments and the rapid rotation that provided artificial gravity. But physical communication with Earth -- and any electronic or laser-based signal had to be regarded as such -- was impossible, because the ship no longer occupied thesame specific universe as Earth. There was complex circuitry embedded in the table beneath Somnanda's tapering fingers. But it was psionic circuitry, incomprehensible to normal science. The actual mechanism of communication was largely in the operator's mind and subject to no tangible verification -- aside from the fact that it worked. The light, a flickering mock candle, was the evidence that the beacon was functioning. It lit the way to Earth. No instrument could retrace the course of the Meg II with sufficient accuracy to bring the ship home. Not when the distance traveled was to be measured in megaparsecs. Not when the universe itself was indistinct. Only this steady beacon, this metaphysical elastic connection, could guide them back even to the correct galactic cluster. Only Somnanda. "Captain." Shetland recovered with a start. "I'm sorry, Somnanda. Was I worrying again?" The man smiled slowly. "No, Captain. You were not disturbing the beacon. I wished simply to remind you that your move was due." Shetland had forgotten their game of chess. The lonely hours of space made some sort of diversion essential. "Of course." He closed his eyes, seeing the checkered board. His king was in check. "White, #. King to King two. No pun intended." Somnanda nodded. It would be another hour before he replied with his own move, for he, like the captain, was a deliberate man. There was time, and each development was to be savored, never rushed. "Somnanda," he said. The somber head rose. "Do you know the purpose of this expedition?" "The MilkyWay Galaxy is only thirty thousand parsecs in diameter," Somnanda replied seriously. "Far too small to test the beacon properly. We are traveling far." That should be added to the notebook, Shetland thought. The understatement of the space age. The Meg IV s itinerary was to take her, literally, to the edge of the universe. As had that of the first Meg... "Captain." Why did their conversation lapse so readily? "Again, Somnanda?" "There is an... inbalance... in the beacon." S hetland felt the cold clutch of fear at his stomach. ImmediateIF ly the candle flickered higher, a yellowish flash. Fear was the nemesis of the beacon -- no error there! What irony if his own alarm at news of danger to the beacon should extinguish it! He exerted control over his emotions, watched the little flame subside and become even. This was a temporary measure. Somnanda, a man of polite conservatism, had given clear warning. Something was interfering with the function of the beacon. It was not such things seldom resolved themselves. As the Megs speed increased, so would the disturbance, until firm action became mandatory. But what was the source? It had to be a man who either knew or suspected their true mission and was frightened by it. The great majority of the crewmen had not been informed of the special nature of this mission and had no way to learn that the Meg was establishing reThe notebook reappeared. The pencil turned about, erased the first Dread, wrote it in again without the line through the words. It sketched an arrow leading from it down to No. #: Personality f distortion of. Linked dangers. The pencil hesitated, then made subheadings under No. #, leaving a space after each: A, Sommanda; B. Shetland; C. Johns; D. Beeton, The captain noted the inversely alphabetized listing and frowned, buit let it stand. The pencil returned to the first, paused again, wrote: A, Somnanda -- Most experienced  reliable communicator in space. Steady temper. Personal friend. Was he lowing friendship to influence him? This could not be afforded. The pencil backtracked, crossed out the last two words. Still, Somnanda was the least likely of suspects. If he lost control, there would be no appeal. No one else could maintain the beacon. B. Shetland  -- Captain experienced. Knowledge of danger. Can control emotion. How can a man judge himself? In the act of writing he had crossed out a word, made a correction: he only suspected the various dangers, could not claim full knowledge. Yet his position was unique. He alone had sufficient information to accomplish their mission. He had to exonerate himself or admit failure at the outset. Rationalization? C. Johns -- Pilot drive mechanic). The pencil stopped. The record said that Johns was competent, but Shetland had not voyaged with him before. How could he be sure of this man? Or was he allowing himself to be prejudiced because Johns had replaced another friend? Objectivity was essential. He would have to have a talk with Johns -- but not immediately. The man, his schedule informed him, was about to go off duty and would not return until the eighteenth hour. That was convenient for another reason... and it was also important not to upset the sleeping schedule. Lack of sleep was one of the surest routes to emotional imbalance. D. Beeton -- Cartographer, apprentice. The pencil stalled once more. Apprentice. That meant he had never Shetland had not even met him. Young, inexperienced and in a position to comprehend both mission and danger. A very likely suspect. But again, the time was not now. Special factors had relevance, and a proper interview was quite possibly essential to the success of the mission. Shetland turned about and set course for his own cabin. He was not tired, but he intended to sleep. n S hip's clock said #. Shetland entered the pilot's compartment and stood behind the man. "Johns," he said. The pilot jumped to attention. "Sir." He was a small, somewhat stout man, whose thin blond hair made his scalp seem prematurely bald. His features were regular except for a slightly receding chin. Shetland knew from the records, which were comprehensive, that Johns was an excellent craftsman, well suited to his job. Shetland knew -- and tried to suppress his irrational dislike of the man. "I see we stand at #," he said, sounding inane in his own ears. "That, of course, is our velocity, in spite of the fact that we schedule the affairs of the ship by that clock. Would you care to translate our speed into something, ah, more specific?" Johns tried to restrain a patronizing smile. "As you know, sir, the drive is designed to reflect speed in miles per hour, varying exponentially with the passage of time. Our velocity is indicated by the logarithmic dial of the ship's clock. Thus our present speed, relative to galactic stasis at -- " "Assume that I'm an idiot," Shetland said. "Yes, sr! Johns tried again. "When the clock indicates #, it means that the ship is traveling at ten raised to the first power, or ten miles per hour. At #, thisds equivalent to ten squared, or a hundred miles per hour. # on the clock is a thousand mph, # is # mph, and so on. # is already beyond the speed of light." "Very good. Why, then, do we call it a 'clock'?" "Because that's what it is, sir. The figure on the dial also represents the time in hours since the drive was cut in. That's the way they engineered it. We have been under way for -- " he glanced again at the clock -- " # hours, and our present velocity therefore is -- " a second pause to manipulate his slide rule, while Shetland smiled inwardly at the conditioning this exposed -- "approximatelight." Johns looked up, startled at his own words. "Twenty bil -- !" "We travel fast," Shetland said. "Hardly surprising in view of the purpose of this voyage." J oihns nodded, dazed. "Yet. Testing the performance of the drive order. Takes us right out of the galIF axy. And we've just about done it already. # is one full megaparminutes... Shetland frowned, his fingers beating little cadences on the panel below the clock. Somnanda saw the voyage as a test of the beacon; Johns saw it as a test of the drive. What would Beeton see? The pliot, misunderstanding, launched into another explanation. "We have to check it out before turning it over to private enterprise. We know so little about the drive and the part of it that we call the shield. Yet it would be impossible of protection. Part of the energy of the drive is diverted to form the shield that isolates us from normal space. It's actually an adaptation of the available Cherenkov radiation -- " It was time for the shock. "Were you assuming that the Meg II was John's eyes widened. "We're not stopping, sir?" Tlie intercom came to life. It was Somnanda. "Captain to the beacon as convenient." Shetland nodded to himself. The beacon had flared. Yet it was not conclusive. He himself had made the beacon react when caught offguard. Every man had his moments. "Does speed frighten you, Johns?" Johns licked his lips. "How -- how much?" "Thirty." Johns stared at the clock. 'Thirty? Sir, have you any idea how fast that is?" He took refuge in his slide rule. the speed of light now -- and that will just about square it, Captain." He shook his head negatively. "To answer your question, sir -- no, I can't be frightened by that. I'm used to big figures, but this doesn't mean anything to me. I can't visuaUze it. So how can I be frightened? Meanwhile, I know the drive can do it, and I'm game to try." Shetland did not agree with the pilot's reasoning: most men did fear what they could not visualize. But it seemed that Johns had survived his crisis and come to terms with it. He could not be considered a prime suspect. Beeton had to be the one. He would go and pick up Somnanda's chess move, then gird himself for the most difficult interview. "Why thirty?" Johns inquired. "... Sir." Because that's where Death awaits us, Shetland thought. "Orders, Pilot." Death orders? Ill B eeton's cabin was typical of what was expected of a young spaceman: the neat military bunk, the foot locker, the shapely pinups on the wall. Shetland dismissed the pictures immediately. He knew that every man under thirty put them up as a matter of protocol. But after one discounted the window-dressing, a man's room was often a pretty fair indication of his personality. Nothing. Everything was in order. allowing no personal signs. Beeton was almost too careful to conform. Only one thing showed personality: a chess set on the corner desk, with a game in progress. Even this was no giveaway. Tedium came to everyone in space. He examined the game with a clinical interest, noting the advantageous position held by Black. This game would soon be over. Realization struck him. This was no ordinary game. This was a replica of bis match with Somnanda, complete to the last move. A game that he had thought existed only in the minds of the two of them. And Somnanda was Black. "What can I do for you, Captain?" The cartographer had come upon him by surprise. Beeton was a tall, blond lad. His face had that fresh-out-of-school look: sanguine and unlined, eyes startlingly blue and innocent. But the records placed his age at #. "I was admiring your game," Shetland said. Beeton had the grace to flush. "You might call that a spectator sport, sir." "As spectator, who would you say had the better position?" "Well, sir, Tm sure I could win with White." The captain smiled faintly. "You are noted for memory, not intelligence, and that they retain few illusions." "I'm sorry, sir. I must admit that your defense, while logical from a positional standpoint, is unsound in IF the present case. But I do admire know?" Then he smiled ruefully, your ability to play without a board. "But you've studied the records, of I could never do that." course. Yes. Originally those lectures Shetland resisted the flattery, not on celestial mechanics and such entirely successfully. He was here to bored me. I would sit in the front of judge, not to be judged, and it was the class, my eyes fixed on the little going to be difficult. This boy, the box of rubber bands quivering like record said, was a virtual genius, worms on the professor's desk, while "Perhaps, in time, you will show me he gave out with the poop. He used how to win with White," he said, to purse his lips around the word "It happens that I can see the board... but all that changed. I'm going and pieces whether or not they are to settle down, get married." physically present. Just as I can read "I'm sure Alice is a fine young a book by turning the pages in my woman. Yes, our files are thorough." memory. Just one of the qualificaFencing, of course -- but necessary, tions of the office." Beeton sat on his bunk, not wishT)eeton gave him a curious glance, ing to ask directly the purpose of then made a hint of a shrug, the captain's visit. Shetland did not "Woman," he said. "That's the enlighten him. "Going into research word that comes between 'wolverine' after this trip?" and 'wombat' in the dictionary." Beeton expressed surprise. "You Shetland opened the big dictionary in his mind and skimmed the page. It was true. "And I want to assure you, Captain, that that megalocarpous specimen on the wall is not Alice." Shetland riffled through his dictionary again, smiled when he found the word. Beeton was playing games with him, forcing him back. "Do you know how I met her, Captain? I was sitting in a public library, studying a text on psychology, when I overheard this kind of clip-clop, clip-clop coming up behind me. For a startled moment all I could think of was a horse. You know the sound those primitive animals make when some rich showman takes them across a concrete street, the metal-shod hoofs ringing out like castanets. I couldn't resist turning around in my chair to see what could make that kind of noise in a library. Of course it turned out to be two girls in heels. But that horse was still in my mind, and you know, their feet did resemble hoofs in an attractive way. Their legs were clean and supple, rather like those of a thoroughbred. "I laughed out loud. (Now I know One of those girls heard that, and she came over to ask me just what I meant. Her tone was severe. That was the first time I had a really good look at her, aside from her ankles. She had on a knitted green dress, form-fitting over an excellent form... might as well admit it, I was srhitten by her appearance. One thing led to another -- " "So that was Alice." "No. Alice was the other girl. I didn't pay any attention to her that time. She -- well, it gets a little complicated. I don't suppose your records cover that sort of thing." Shetland got the point. The records were illusory. They told him nothing that would enable him to understand this too clever young man. He was being gently told to mind his own business. How he wished he could! But Beeton was still the prime suspect, and if there was fear concealed behind that voluble facade, the captain had to know it. "You've admitted that your early scholastics were not remarkable. What caused you to change?" For here, perhaps, the record did offer a take-off point. The shift had been abrupt, and it had been from indifwere personal comments by several instructors: "Jumps to accurate conclusions." "An intuitive thinker; never makes a mistake in theory." "Even cheating is not that sharp!" Beeton's tone was flippant. "Maybe I was afraid. Captain. Afraid that the ghost of my past would come back to haunt me. These days a degree is not enough; there were too many decades of assembly-line doctorates that degraded the magic. They delve into your records, as well you know. If I had left behind me a reputation for careless work -- " Was the young man still taunting him, showing the flag to the bull? Or was there genuine tension now? "... though that's an unfortunate way to put it," Beeton was saying. " 'Ghost,' I mean. I always was afraid of the supernatural. Sometimes I suspect that my whole interest in IF science was spurred by a lingering fear of ghosts. As though I were trying to shine a light in the dark corners, to prove that nothing nonphysical could possibly hurt me, because there was nothing there. Seems ridiculous now." C hildhood fears. It did not seem ridiculous to Shetland. For the Meg II at this moment the entire universe had become nonphysical. They were traveling at such a rate that an entire galaxy could be traversed in less than a second, and it made no difference whether the ship passed near or through it. How easy to invoke the sense of unreality, to renew the fierce early terrors. How easy, too, to play upon the credulity of a meddling captain... "Does the Academy still teach Einstein?" Shetland inquired with a smile. Beeton smiled too, seeming to relax. "It still does. But of course it's proves his work. The General Theory never did limit an object to the speed of light. Though I doubt that the old gentleman anticipated -- what is our present speed?" Shetland did not miss the nervous throb, the slight terror showing in the tips of the fingers. Beeton knew the time, and he could do conversions. His question seemed like a plea for confirmation -- or denial. He looked at his watch. It said #, drive time. "Just over a megaparsec per second. Our mission requires high speed." Beeton rose to the bait, definitely nervous now. "It certainly does. This voyage will rewrite the text on celestial cartology. My instruments are recording the placement and pattern of every galaxy and cluster within a though I must admit that our present velocity makes this seem tiny. It will take many years for the computers back on Earth to assimilate the information we collect in hours. But our journey will be over in ten minutes." Shetland could not conceal his astonishment. "It will?" "Certainly. It began with the vast primeval explosion that flung matter and radiation in every direction to populate the vacant space. Then gravity slowed this impetuous expansion and brought the universe into a state of equilibrium two billion light-years in diameter. But when the yalaxies formed, the forces of repulsion came into prominence, and years have passed since the beginning, and our universe has grown to moments we stand at the culmination of it all, our mission is over: the rim." To every man his own justification for the voyage, Shetland thought. To every man his own disillusion. "Not yet," he said succinctly. Beeton's innocent eyes fociised on him. "You have to stop, of course. There is no point going beyond the rim of the universe." Shetland spoke carefully. "According to your theory, there should be a cessation of all matter at approximately #.I on the clock. I have asked to be alerted the moment such cessation occurs. None has. It is now # hours. There has been no 'rim. We diall not stop.' Beeton turned pale. His breath came in labored gasps. His eyes stared unblinldngly at the captain. The intercom blared out behind Shetland with startling volume. "Captain to beacon immediately!" IV S hetland whirled, paying no more attention to Beeton. He galloped headlong down the corridor, blood pounding in his ears. The shortness of his breath, he knew, was not entirely due to the exertion. He burst into Somnanda's cabin. And stopped, appalled. The miniature candle, symbol of Earth-contact, was a towering column of fire. Orange light flooded the room, flickering off the walls and illuminating Somnanda's twisted face with demoniac intensity. Shetland knew instinctively what to do. Terror was destruction to the beacon. He stood there, suppressing every vestige of feeling, quelling his own throbbing pulse with hypnotic waves of peace and security. Members of the crew had fears; these were groundless, based on ignorance. Only the captain had authority to know, and he was not afraid. Not afraid. Not afrhid. Gradually he extended the oily calm outward. Somnanda was not afraid. No one was afraid. A temporary shock, no more. To be forgotten. The fearsome color faded. The column dwindled reluctantly, down, down, imtil it returned to its normal pinpoint above the table. Somnanda's countenance relaxed. Apparently a disturbance in the beacon represented physical pain to him. His hands remained above the table, fingers splayed, their backs an angry red. His forehead was shining, and rivulets of perspiration were draining down the side of his neck. "My strength has been overextended," Somnanda said, his words slurred, voice pitched too high. "I can not protect the beacon again. From that."" So formal, even after this, Shetland thought. Yet I must talk to him. As Beeton is to me, so am I to this man of the candle. The tension is within me, and it must come out. And when my brain has translated itself into nervous impulses, and these pulses become the atmospheric vibrations which are meaningful speech sounds, and those sounds have been lost in entropy, then will my problem be over? "A farmer once lost a sum of money," Shetland said. "He suspected a neighbor's boy of having stolen it, but had not proof. So the farmer went and studied the boy as he went about his chores, trying to determine by observation whether he was in fact the culprit. Though the lad performed his duties in the prescribed manner, there did appear to be something surreptitious in his attitude, as though he were trying to conceal guilt. The farmer returned home convinced. Later he discovered the money where he had forgotten it, in his own home. It had never been stolen. He went IF again to look at the neighbor's boy, but this time the lad had no guilty look about him." "The young cartographer looks guilty," Somnanda said. "He looks guilty," Shetland agreed. "He seemed almost normal until I challenged his evolutionary theory of the universe. Then -- this. But I can not condemn a person on such circumstantial evidence. I too, in the last analysis, am afraid." S omnanda's brow wrinkled. "I am not entirely familiar with this theory. Is there something about it that affects the nature of our voyage?" Shetland smiled inwardly. In Somnanda's view the purpose of this journey was merely to test the beacon. TTie validity of one theory of the universe or another would have little bearing on that, unless one theory embodied an inherent threat to the beacon. That threat was real enough -- but it stemmed from internal problems, not external. "The evolutionary theory is one of several evolved -- again, no pun -- to explain the observed state of the universe," Shetland explained. "There are numberless clusters of galaxies in view from Earth, each retreating from every other one. The situation can only be explained by postulating a general expansion of the entire cosmos. But the nature of this expansion is open to doubt. This particular theory has all matter originating in a gigantic nucleus five ed -- " "Now I understand," Somnanda said. "That would make every galaxy approximately the same age. I had assumed that the more distant ones were older." "They may well be," Shetland said. "The information we are gathering now may answer that question when we return to Earth. But it is my conjecture that this theory is invalid, because we have already passed the farthest limit the evolutionary universe could have reached, and the pattern has not changed." "Would this be reason to frighten the cartographer?" Shetland paced the floor. "I don't understand why. That's what holds me back. The elimination of a single theory should be of no more consequence than the elimination of an invalid strategy in the course of a chess game. An inconvenience, certainly. But hardly frightening." "Unless the alternative is more dangerous." "The obvious alternative at this point would be the "Steady State" theory, which has galaxies continuously forming and being forced outward by the constant appearance of new matter. Since there is no 'beginning' the universe is steady in space and time and does not evolve. Individual galaxies, however, would evolve, and we should discover old ones as well as new ones. And the universe would be somewhat larger." "Larger?" "Because the evolutionary universe would be in its infancy, limited the explosion. But the average galaxy will survive for ten times that length of time, and if we assume the expansion to be exponential, the universe could eventually attain a radius of ten thousand teraparsecs, give or take a decimal or two." Somnanda digested this. "One teraparsec is -- " will take us there in just thirty hours." "That would be the size of the steady state universe, since it is not in its... infancy?" "If my conjecture is correct. The cartographer, actually, should understand such things better than I. He is attempting to map the universe." "Perhaps he knows something that we do not." Shetland paced the floor again. "He never mentioned steady state. It was as though it didn't exist for him." "Possibly he has reason for his fear. This should be ascertained." What decision had the captain of the Meg I made? Had he waited until thirty hours to question his "Beeton"? Or had some unthinkable menace consumed his ship at the rim of the steady state cosmos? The decision of the prior captain had been wrong. How could Shetland improve upon it, in his ignorance? V Te ship's clock stood at # when A Beeton entered the beacon room. "Reporting as directed, sir." Shetland was afraid to waste time. He watched the candle as he spoke. "I believe you are afraid of something, Beeton, and it is important for me to understand. Such emotion affects the beacon." Beeton met him with a steady gaze in which there was. not a trace of fear. "May I speak frankly, sir?" When a crewman felt it necessary to address that question to the captain, the result was seldom pleasant. "You are directed to do so." "I'd like to rephrase the question," Beeton said, dropping the "sir." He was intelligent and had probably anticipated' this session. "I think I'm afraid of the same thing you are. Will you admit that much?" "I am afraid of many things. Continue." "We fear a very real danger, and it has nothing to do with the beacon. You and I know that there is death waiting for us at the edge of the universe. One ship has already been taken, perhaps others." Somnanda looked up but held his peace. "The important thing to realize is that this was no freak accident. We face the same demise, unless we reverse the drive." "No," Shetland said simply. Johns poked his head in the entrance. "Am I intemipting something?" he inquired. "My assistant took over long enough for me to inquire -- " "You should listen to this," Beeton said with authority. Somnanda nodded. Shetland glanced from one to the other. "Was there a mute agreement between them? How many were anxious to abort the mission? The situation was uncomfortable. Johns also seemed to be ill at IP ease. "Look, if you want me to then averted his gaze. 'To most peogo -- " pie, there is small difference between Shetland took command. "Mr. one concept of the universe and anBeeton believes that our course leads other. After all, it 'has no discernible to danger. He is about to explain his effect on our daily lives. But to those reason for his request that the Meg of us who voyage into the extraordibe reversed prematurely." nary reaches, it becomes a matter of There was silence. Was the beacon life and death." flickering more violently than be"Say what you mean," Shetland fore? Whose tension was responsible? growled. "Go on, Beeton," Shetland said "At the center, where the galaxies firmly. are young, we are safe. But at the The cartographer swallowed, a rim they are old. Beyond the rim -- " nervous young man now that it had He paused in the yellow light. "Become to the point. The flame was yond the rim they are dead." brighter. "You are familiar with the 'steady state' cosmos," he said, jumpT T e looked at each of the others ing, as the record advised, to an aciTl in turn and met only bafflecurate conclusion. "I had expected ment. "Don't you see? They have this theory to be eliminated by our passed on. There is nothing beyond findings. I had -- hoped." the rim but ghosts, the malignant He looked at the increasing flame, spirits of once living galaxies." Shetland looked at Somnanda, who shook his head negatively. He looked at Johns, whose mouth was hanging open. "You're crazy!" Johns said. Beeton jump up, and the flame leaped with him. "No, no," he cried. "You have to understand. You have to stop the ship before it's too late." "The supernatural is no threat to us," Shetland snapped. "Captain!" Somnanda's voice was urgent. Shetland whipped around. The beacon had burst into an inferno, destroying itself. "Stop the ship!" Beeton screamed. "The ghost is out there -- " Suddenly Shetland's sidearm was in his hand. The tableau seemed to freeze at the moment: Somnanda in the corner, half standing, agony on his face, sweat shining in the orange glow. Johns, staring at the young cartographer, confusion and incredulity distorting his own features, scalp red under the thin hair. Beeton, standing with one fist in the air, mouth insanely wide, lips pulled back from teeth. One word from the captain would ease this threat. He had only to agree to stop the ship. To set aside his orders. Then Beeton was falling, engulfed in a sparkling cloud. The gas from the capsule Shetland had fired was dissipating already; but Beeton vould be in a deep coma for at least twelve hours. Far past the crisis point. "Captain." Somnanda's voice cut through his reverie, as it always did. "There is little doubt that the young man's terror was the cause of the disturbance. But it should have abated, had you agreed to reverse the drive." The flame was normal. "I could not do that." Johns made a sound. "You knew how simple it was to stop the trouble -- and you cooled him anyway?" "Yes." Johns stared at him with the same expression he had turned on Beeton before. "Captain -- now I'm not so sure Beeton was the crazy one. Maybe he was right. You never let him make his point." Shetland looked at the unconscious form, so peaceful now. "If I had verified his suspicion. Pilot, his terror would certainly have extinguished the beacon." "Verified his -- " Johns was shocked. "You admit it! There is a ghost out there!" "Not a ghost. A ship. A ship that ceased contact suddenly. My orders are to investigate. I shall investigate." "By heading straight into the same trap?" "Those are my orders." #trders!" The flame was rising again. "Captain, I can't agree to that." Shetland studied him sourly. "Yom can't agree, Pilot?" "No. I can't. That ghost will eat us too. We've got to turn back." Beside the growing flame, Somnanda's head turned to bear on Johns. "I see it now," the pilot said. "Beeton was right. After the galaxies die, they are ghosts. And they hate the living." He looked around, saw IF the flame. "Don't you understand? We must reverse the shipP The flash, the sparkle, the dissipation -- and the pilot joined the cartographer. The flame subsided. Somnanda and Shetland looked at each other. "Your move, Captain." The chess game: Somnanda could think of that at this juncture! "I only hope my personal situation is better than that of my pieces," he said. "I will have to consider my move." "Your situation is good," Somnanda said cryptically. Shetland hauled the two unconscious men to the side of the cabin. "I think it best to keep these out of sight of the other crewmen, for the time being," he said. Then, sensing Somnanda's curiosity: "It may seem unreasonable to sacrifice two human beings in this fashion, rather than accede to their rather simple request. But I can delegate their functions if necessary, while I could neither humor their fancies nor allow their emotional stress to destroy the beacon." Yes, he felt the need to justify himself to Sommanda and curs his own frailty. "You seem unreasonable." From this man, this was an observation, not an insult. "I am unreasonable. Sometimes that is the only course -- just as an apparently illogical sacrifice is at times required in order to win at chess." TTie chess analogy kept running through his mind. Was it valid? Somnanda waited. been rare, so far," Shetland continued. "Evidence is therefore inconclusive. But there appears to be a certain... distortion in many personalities as velocity increased. Perhaps it is a side effect of the drive, or simply an emotional reaction to isolation from the normal universe. But it is one of my dreads, and I always watch for it. That's why I'm careful about revealing my orders prematurely. Individual judgment people are apt to become aware of it. It is futile to point out such aberrations to the victims. They are, in effect, mental patients. I think you have seen some of this, now." "Yes." "The captain is not excluded," Shetland said, smiling wearily. "I have preoccupations and I entertain doubts. I question the wisdom of this voyage, its apparent expendability, the attitude of certain crewmen, the evidence of the supernatural. I do not believe, at this moment, in the beacon -- that is, that it represents any valid connection with Earth. But if it is real, why not the ghot of a galaxy? I do anticipate extinction at the thirtieth hour -- but I will not reverse the drive." "I understand." "Because my own judgment is suspect. I can rely on only one thing to be objective: my orders. These were presented to me before the voyage began and were reasonable then; they must be reasonable now. If I desire to modify them, it is because my present insight is biased, not my earlier one. I must therefore uphold what seems unreasonable to me -- and I shall." in VI T he clock read # hours. One teraparsec per second. Soon the voyage would really be over -- one way or another. Shetland found himself in Beeton's room, looking at the chess set. Why had he come? Because there was a lingering uncertainty as the thirtieth hour approached? Or simple guilt for overriding that uncertainty? He saw a picture of Alice, smiling for a man she might never see again. Would she be widowed before her marriage, all because a certain captain's orders meant more to him than his common sense? It was uncanny, the way in which the young man had divined the moves and kept up with a game the captain had never advertised. But this was a private game. He swept the pieces into the box, folded the board. Beneath it was a paper, previously hidden. Shetland picked it up and saw a series of notations. They seemed to represent the strategy of a game in progress. His game? He applied the notes to the game in his mind. They checked. But the moves were not as he would have made them. They started at the present position, but the style was radically different. Beeton had said he could win with White -- and these notes, incredibly, proved it. Beginning with a highly questionable queen sacrifice. White forged to a forced advantage in the game's thirtieth move. The series violated many of the tenets of good positional play -- yet, he saw now, was quite valid. He would not use it, of course; the genius was not rightfully his. But he would show this interesting lesson to Sonmanda: how independent and bold foresight could convert a certain loss into victory. Book play was not always valid. By the thirtieth move. Coincidence? Or a message that his stupidity had prevented Beeton from delivering? Was it natural to assume that taken, in the one case that counted? Or had the cartographer's terrible fear been based on fact, not fancy -- while the distortion merely prevented him from making himself sufficiently clear? Had Johns also, finally, responded to the actual message, seen its validity? Assume, for the sake of argument, that Beeton had been right. That death did wait at the thirtieth hour. That the situation was hopeless because the man in charge refused to deviate from the book, from his orders, no matter what. In chess, the answer had been a total revision of strategy. The book had to be thrown away. In life -- The chessboard image in his mind faded into a figurative map of the universe. Galaxies of the steady state hurtled outward, born in the center as pawns, dying of old age at the rim as kings. ' And then, as it were, the pieces came to life. The pawns were babies, the kings old men. The board, which was the universe, became a city without buildings. The babies were born spontaneously in the center IF and crawled busily in all directions. As they made their way outward they grew into children, and some had bishop's hats and some had horse's heads. Farther out they developed into men and women, and the men were castles and the women queens. Finally the old kings staggered to the rim to die. The size of this city was governed by the age of the inhabitants. Where they became too old to go out farther, the city ended. Most of them died at fifty moves. The rim was a desolate grave. There was no one to bury the bodies; where they fell, they lay, they rotted, and the white bones guarded the memory of what had been. Then, incredibly, a child appeared at the rim. By some freak it had bypassed age and entered the domain of death long before its time. A child named "Meg." The ancient bones quivered with rage. No living thing should be allowed to desecrate the mighty graveyard. The angry spirits gathered their forces, concentrated their ghastly energies, opened their ponderous jaws and said: "Captain! Captain!" It was Somnanda. Shetland shook himself awake to see the beacon room. The yellow light was rampaging again, and this time he himself was the cause. "Reverse the drive!" he shouted into the intercom. N ow it was # -- but it was speed, not time. Once more the captain of the Meg II stood behind the pilot, pretending that nothing had happened. "Captain," Johns said. "Captain -- I want to say something." What was there for this man to say? That he resented being gassed, then revived to learn that his assistant had reversed the drive at #, on the orders of that same captain who had shot the pilot down for urging this? "Captain, I just wanted to apologize. I don't know what came over me. I never lost my head like that before. I don't believe in ghosts. I just -- somehow I couldn't -- what I mean is, you did the only thing you could do, and I can see that you were right all the time. I'm sorry I forgot." Johns was apologizing for his own distortion, now that it had abated with the speed of the ship, and he was able to see it for what it was. A distortion that was not his own fault. "We were all a little on edge," Shetland said, discovering that his dislike of the pilot was gone. Was there any point in trying to explain? #. Thirteen hours of deceleration, with the Meg II traveling at only a tenth its former speed with every hour that the clock subtracted. And still approaching a rendezvous of terror with fantastic velocity. Twenty-nine hours of deceleration would bring it to a halt in space, at almost the exact spot they would have passed in the thirtieth hour of acceleration. The exponential series that was the drive was a remarkable thing. #. Only when they came to a dead halt, relative to their starting point, could they release the drive and apply the chemical maneuvering rockets, in order to turn the ship around and begin the home journey. Then back, accelerating once more to -- Hell broke loose. The ship bucked violently, flinging Shetland to the far wall. Shooting pains went through his left shoulder as another upheaval bounced him on the floor. An agonized keening sounded in his ears, and a red fog clouded his brain, seeming to obscure all vision above the horizontal. Dimly he saw the pilot's legs wrapped around the bolted-down stool; Johns, more alert than his captain, had held his position. There was the smell of burning insulation in the air. "Cut the drive!" Shetland roared. He tried to stand up, but the heaving room brushed him aside. The clamor of the suit-alert began; the hull had been pierced. "Captain,' Johns' voice drifted back from a far distance. "We're in J ohns moved his hand, and miraculously the ship was quiet. Shetland lurched to his feet, heedless of the pain. The alarm had ceased. Someone must have repaired he damage already. That man would get a commendation... his hands, of their owQ volition, groped for and found the archaic regulation fire extinguisher, not obsolete after all, as smoke curled up from the panel. Suddenly the unit was blasting noxious foam all over his boots. He turned it, already feeling the biting cold; crystals of ice flew off like broken glass as he tramped toward the control panel. "Stop, Captain!" Johns cried. "No need, no need. The power is off." Shetland lowered the extinguisher. Now he had time to assess his injuries. Pain, for the moment, was masked; it was there, but the enormity of it would only be felt later. He was surprised to discover no blood. He felt along his left arm, realizing that the trouble with the extinguisher had been due to his onehanded control. The left hand was useless, though there were no breaks. "Captain." Why did he always drift into contemplation, even in a crisis? "Captain -- " the pilot's voice was shocked. "The instruments are registering!" "That's what they're for," Shetland said shortly. capable in the crisis, was now falling apart. "The drive is off. The shield is down. Why aren't we dead?" Shetland had understood the situation the moment the ship bucked. But he was not certain he could explain it to the pilot readily. Johns might have difficulty accepting the truth. "Do you 'believe in ghosts?" he inquired. Johns stiffened. He had already denied superstition. Shetland sympathized; but this was necessary. "No, sir," the pilot said. "Look at your instruments," Shetland commanded. "Tell me what's out there." Johns looked. "We're approaching an object of galactic scope at just under the speed of light. Approximate mass -- " He faltered. "Go on. Pilot." "Sir, I think the instrument is broken." Shetland replied with deliberate cruelty. "Do I have to teach you elementary navigation? Where ar the warning lights? You know the instrument is not broken.". "But it can't be -- " "Don't argue. What does it say?" Johns seemed to shrink inside himself. His lips stretched to form the words his mind rejected. "It says -- it says the galaxy we're approaching has no mass." Shetland smiled grimly. "I ask you again, do you believe in ghosts?" # #"es, there is a ghost," Shetland . I said, as the Meg IPs hull vibrated to the impact of her chemical propulsion. She was maneuvering for a position to begin the return voyage. The four of them were in the beacon room again, watching the steady flame. "All of us had some hint of the truth," Shetland said, "but we were blinded by our separate conceptions of the mission and by our mutual dread of the unknown. We tried to exclude the supernatural -- not realizing that when the supernatural is understood, it becomes natural. Cartographer Beeton was closest to it -- " "But I wasn't able to face emotionally what my intellect showed me," Beeton said. "The thing is so incredible -- " "I still don't follow you," Johns protested. "We're alive, and there's a -- a thing out there. I'll admit that much. But nothing in the universe is solid enough to rock a ship in That's a light-year per second! But we were battered so badly that a crate of beans broke loose and shoved itself through the hull. Or tried to." He laughed. "Wouldn't that be an epitaph for a lost ship: torpedoed by a can of beans in IL!" "I, too, am perplexed," Somnanda said. "I understood that it was certain destruction to drop the shield exist at a light-year per second." "We phased in with the ghost," Shetland said. "Beeton, things are dearer. Finish your explanation." Beeton plunged in happily. "As I was trying to say at an earlier occasion, but somehow couldn't quite put into sensible words: At the center of things, a galaxy is young. But in the ages, and like an aging man it changes. For one thing, it puts on weight, becomes sluggish. A galaxy in its late prime is an unbelievably massive thing -- so dense that its surface gravity prevents its own light from escaping. Within it, nevertheless, breakdown continues, and the prisoned energies -- well, we have had no experience with such a state. "Eventually all matter is gone -- but there is still no escape for that phenomenal complex of energy. We are left with a galaxy whose material portion has passed away, but which still exists as an entity. A ghost." "The ghost of a galaxy!" Johns said. "But that shouldn't affect -- " "You forget that the ghost is moving," Shetland said. "That un-galaxy is traveling at rim-velocity: #, ship's clock. Since there is no other -- "Which means it determines stasis for this area of space!" Johns exclaimed. "Velocity is meaningless in the void. It has to be relative to some mass, or -- " "Or some ghost," Beeton put in. "Apparently our laws of physics change, here. We've discovered a lot more than a galaxy." "So we decelerated to within light speed of the ghost, and the shield came down automatically, and left us in normal space. Even at the fringe, those energies were overloading the drive -- " Johns paused. "But what would have happened if we had landed inside the ghost?" "Or even traveled through it in Shetland considered. "I suspect the nature of space itself is altered within the ghost. The Meg I did unwittingly enter it..." T here was silence as the implication sank in. Was this the final evidence that man was limited after all, in spite of his limitless ambition? Hemmed in by numberless and deadly ghosts... or was their very existence a new challenge, greater than any before? What would the first explorers find, when they parked their fleet and penetrated, carefully, the fringe of that monster? "Captain." Shetland looked up. "Your move, IF IF  Novelette The battle was between Mankind and the Slaves of Gree -- until a third force entered the war! T he Gree excavation team was too far out on the sand-flat for Steve Duke to see what they'd dug up, but the heavily-muscled Gjiss had stepped digging and were clustered around. The humanoid in charge -- one of the equally stocky but less muscular Overseer race -- had stepped into the small auxiliary ship, no doubt to report via visiphone. Steve lowered the glasses, which weren't much use anyway in this thick burbly air, and let his eyes rove. Safely above the Gree team (having learned their lesson) circled a pair of the huge leathery-winged creatures that seemed to be the planet's fiercest predators. Much nearer, only a few hundred out and below his spy-spot at the edge of the thorntangle, he could see five or six of the peculiar semi-intelligent red-furred beasts called ull-ulls, crouched in the thorny sheltered pathway they'd built from this hill-grove, across the sand-flat to the next. The Overseer emerged from the ship and gave orders to the Gjiss, who lined up and began passing something along from the shallow excavation. Steve tried the glasses again, but the morning was getting on and the air was too bumpy, so he settled for the guess that a skeleton of some kind was being transferred to the ship, bone by bone. Carefully (a man could fall, even in this low gravity, and impale himself on giant thorns) he began picking his way back into the tangle. A small flying mammal, with wings the size of his hands, hopped about him, chittering and showing its sharp little teeth. Other creatures hissed or snarled, but only in passing. This one seemed to have adopted him for its particular hate. Near his destination, a red-furred form moved from his path, retreating just far enough so it could watch him through the tangled limbs. For perhaps the fiftieth time he paused and made little coughing sounds, but though the bast cocked it head at him and made soft replies, it would not come any closer. While he squatted there, the small flying thing darted toward his hand as if it might actually bite. Annoyed, he made a half-hearted swipe at it. and it moved out of reach, chattering in rage. When he arrived at the chopped-out listening post, the flying nuisance turned and flitted away. It never followed him into the post. Fazzool, the B'lant, looked up from his radio receivers. Steve said, "I see your pet ull-ull's hanging around again." The gray-hided humanoid grinned as much as the thick skin and blunt features would permit. "It is you ze ull-ull likes. I zink it is a female." Steve got out a large handkerchief and swabbed at his face. Here inside the tangle it was cooler, but more humid. "They dug up something out there. Anything on the radio?" "Yes. A skeleton -- humanoid -- and zere were civilized artifacts, Ze Overseer at zis end suggested zis was ze race zat brought ze ull-ulls to zis planet. Anozzer Overseer at ze ozzer end told him it was not zis one's job to speculate about zat, and anyway what was it doing buried on ze sandflat? Ze one at zis end said ze way ze flats get flooded every year, zat could happen accidentally." Steve used the handkerchief again. "Well, that's something, anyway. Where's Ralph?" "Downstairs." D ownstairs meant a hundred feet lower in the tangle, where Steve and his two companions had their meager cache of supplies and equipment. He found Ralph Parr -- grizzle-hearded, Earth-hom, a novice in space and in the anti-Gree forces, but no stranger to violence -- checking power-packs in the laser weapons. Steve told him, "We'll be busy tonight." IF "How so?" Steve said, "They've dug up something I've got to get a look ait." Parr finished with a gun and leaned it carefully in the fork of a limb. "Any change in plan?" "No. We'll try it the way we worked it out. Meanwhile, I'm going to get some sleep, if I can." II A fter sundown there was always a heavy dew, if not rain, but at least the temperature was bearable. The three of them worked their way down to solid footing (if you could call a deep layer of old dead limbs solid), then moved cautiously toward an ull-ull tunnel they'd used before. From there it was a few hundred yards to the edge of the tangle, where the ull-ull pathway headed out across the flat. Steve peered out into the crude vaulted pathway, then led off. He blundered into a thorn; cursed softly. The tough-hided Fazzool chuckled. The ull-ull's didn't keep these pathways very clear. That carried an advantage, though -- Gree patrols weren't likely to use them. From behind and from ahead in the next tangle, came the beasts' forlorn-sounding cries, "Ull... Ull..." It was fairly dark now. This planet had no moons, but a distant companion of its sun was up, giving a little light. They reached the next tangle, and now it was really dark; but the tunnels were wider than the pathways, so the going was no harder. Occasionally, besides the howling, there were the nervous coughs of nearby ull-ulls. Steve was used to the miusky smell of them and the damp smell of their fur, by now. He blundered into another thorn, but clamped his mouth on a curse. Somewhere here this tunnel forked, and the wrong turn led right into the middle of ull-ull town... Here it was. He took the correct turn, and fifteen minutes later they reached the "edge of the second tangle. It was good to have even the faint light' again. Before leaving the knoll he paused, listening. Somewhere close, several ull-ulls where chewing on the viny growth. When they wanted a new tunnel, they simply ate one, at their leisure. He moved forward. There was no sound out on the flat except the faint sighing and grating of sand in the breeze. From here, the Gree camp was a glow in the foggy air. When they were fifty yards out in the pathway he heard a cough ahead and stopped. The dew felt suddenly clammy. He could make them out, vaguely; several big ull-ulls crouched in the pathway staring toward him. A full-grown male ull-ull was close to eight feet tall, and it didn't help much that a third of that was neck. They were almost bipeds -- they could stand erect, or run, on their ludicrously stumpy legs -- but their long gangling arms, or forelegs, reached the ground so that their spines were usually at about fifteen degrees from the vertical. They had an odd loping gait in this gravity (they'd evolved in a higher one) with their heads held high, swiveling as they peered about them. Running seemed to be their natural first recourse. However, they'd fight when cornered or infuriated; and after all, this was their pathway. The leading one growled and took a few shuffling steps forward. Steve, gripping his pistol, swore under his breath. Even if a laser flash weren't visible to the Gree camp, it would make a loud burst of static. He said softly, "Back up, slowly." He himself retreated step by step. There hadn't been time to study the beasts habits much, but he coughed gently, trying to imitate them and sound conciliatory. They hesitated. He whispered to Fazzool, "Cut." But already the B'lant was busy with a pruning tool. Seconds later, he appeared outside the pathway and moved up near the beasts to draw their attention. Steve heard Parr squeeze through, gasp and let loose a string of soft curses. Steve, the tension out of him, grinned, backed a few steps and eased through the opening, avoiding the thorn that had got Parr. As soon as he was out, the ull-ulls bobbed past. Two or three of them coughed at him, but there were no more growls. Fazzool had cut the hole on the side away from jthe Gree camp; probably a good idea. Steve peered through the irregular latticework toward the glow. "Let's get through and get started. We'll have to crawl the last hundred yards or so." Fazzool went back inside and cut at the other wall. Before they left, they rewove the lattice as well as they could, trying to hide cut ends, then started toward the glow. Now there were two dangers. One was low-flying Gree patrols; the other was the flying predators and whatever else might rove the sand-flat. However, they got within a hundred yards of the camp without any trouble. Steve moved close to Fazzool. "Your stuff ready?" "Yes." "Okay, then." Steve glanced at his chronometer and watched the B'lant crawl away, making a wide circle of the camp, various bundles on his back. He felt better when he saw how well the drab, overalls blended into the sand and mist, a few yards away. Now he lay waiting, uncovering his luminous chronometer now and then just long enough to glance at it. The time finally arrived. He glanced at Parr and began to crawl toward the camp. T his wasn't really a military camp. This planet -- at the very tip of the galactic spiral arm along which the metal Gree-creatures had first invaded -- was not only far from any strong region of Steve's side, but was also worthless as either a base or a source of materials. In fact, Steve thought, if his superiors, the Effogan High Command, had known just how trivial Gree's interest in the planet was, they probably wouldn't have gone to the considerable trouble of landing him here. But they'd gotten a hint of something peculiar, and here he was. The inner perimeter of the camp consisted of about fifteen of the larger ships in a loose circle. Inside that, four transports served as barracks, messes and recreation halls. IF Part of the area was devoted to parking for the small ships and aircars used on patrol or field trips. There was a cluster of temporary buildings that probably housed the archeological labs and equipment and a couple of open recreation areas. A hundred yards outside the circle of ships was a fence. The expedition had taken a cue from the ull-ulls and cut twelve-foot lengths of the twisty, giant-thorned vine to form a stockade against predators. Sand mice had forsaken their usual scant diet of scrub-grass and flood debris to move into a thorny barricade and were gnawing loudly enough to mask a few slight noises. Sentries in pairs slouched around inside the fence, grousing listlessly about the dew, the guard-duty, the chow, the uselessness of this fool's errand on this worthless planet. Most of them were Gjiss and spoke B'lant, because that was easier for them than English. The Gjiss weren't exactly stupid, but they ran more to muscle than to quick wits, so there were B'lant and human sentries too. A loudspeaker grumbled somewhere, announcing the change of guard. Steve squirmed out of the gray coverall, glanced to make sure Ralph Parr Aas doing likewise. They scooped sand over the garments and crawled close to the fence. The sentries had stopped pacing now and were waiting impatiently for their reliefs. S omewhere beyond the camp one of the flying predators roared. There was a silence as all the sentries faced that way. Another roar. then an outburst of shrieks and bellows. Troopers scuttledto the crude shelters of thom-vine scattered along the fence. Loud-speakers began chattering; crews ran for ships to man weapons. There was a real clamor now in the sky beyond the camp, as if all the flying meat-eaters on the planet were gathered in one big donnybrook. Steve saw Ralph Parr grin. A large part ofthat noise was Fazzool's taped records. To make it authentic, though, there were chunks of meat aloft, drifting with the wind, buoyed up by small grav units; and there really was some fighting going on. The creatures sounded as if they were tearing each other to pieces -- without, Steve knew, actually inflicting more than a few gashes on each other. He got to a crude gate, fumbled for the fastenings, had to use his cutters. Searchlights atop the ships were slashing at the sky now, dimly picking out twisting, circling forms in the mist. He and Parr tugged the gate open, got inside and closed it behind them, getting a few thornpricks in the process. Now the clamor was beginning to fall off as the meat was all gulped up, but predators were flapping overhead somewhere, paying off a few last debts. Steve left Parr where they'd come in and joined the sentries going off duty, toward the open mess hall. He left them and walked boldly to one of the temporary buildings where a light showed. If he'd guessed right, a team ould be working on the skeleton dug up that day. He knocked. Presently the door opened. A B'lant Tech scowled out alt him, glanced at his Gunner Third insignia, and looked less truculent. "What is it you wish. Gunner?" Steve said in B'lant, "I hope I disturb nothing. I'm officer of the guard. After the excitement, I'm just diecking around, and I saw the lights." The humanoid's blunt features relaxed. "We are only finishing a rush job. Everything is all right." Steve hid his elation. Now, with luck... He made as if to leave. "Fine. I'm sorry I bothered you." The Tech said, "You speak B'lant very well." Steve turned back, smiling. "Thank you. I have been on Ypness, and Guntu, and Asbezzee. Rough worlds for a human, but magnificent." Now the stiff B'lant smile appeared. "You have seen Guntu? That was my Hive world! Why don't you -- if it is possible -- step in for a moment, eh, out of the drizzle? We are really sitting around drinking nazz and talking about this skeleton which puzzles us." He stood aside invitingly. "Why, thank you." Steve went in and let the Tech pour him a boiling bowl (in this atmospheric pressure, really hot) of the aromatic, peppery liquid. "Ah," he said, sipping and pretending to enjoy it. "It's been a long time." He glanced at the bones assembled on the big table. "Is that what they diig up this morning?" "Yest" A Tech Third spoke up; no doubt in charge of the team. "Odd, eh? Note the elbow joints. It must have had unusual muscle arrangements for rigidity." Steve looked. "Well... I know very little about this business of course. But it looks like a Sabril skeleton to me." it'To, no," the Tech Tliird said, moving to the table and Jabbing with a forefinger. "The elbow was completely doublo-jointed. There is nothing to stop it Ending backward, see?" He looked thoughtful. "Althou you are right. Except for the arms, it is much like a Sabril. The peculiar shoulder-slope, and the lankiness... No; this could hardly be a deformity. But it is not too far to the Sabril region. Possibly we should look for an unnoticed variation there." Steve said, "I understand there was a weapon and some kind of communicator." The Third nodded. "A simple radio, worn at the waist. The weapon was a sidearm, a pellet-thrower, based on dhemical explosives. The pellets were all gone -- peihaps fired at some predator that killed this humanoid. Anyway, the race must have had space travel, even if not the null, for this skeleton is no more indigenous to this planet than the ull-ulls." Steve said, "I was watching a band of those the other day. They must be pretty intelligent, to build those pathways." "We think not," the Tech said. "We've tested them under incentive and drugs and torture, as well as observing them thoroughly in their natural environment. They can chop or strike with a handy stone or stick, but they do not even make the simplest tools or weapons. We are sure IF the path-building is instinctual. Certainly they've had a strong threat to meet in those flying things." Steve said, "But I understood they hadn't been here long." "Fifty generations, perhaps," the B'lant said, "equivalent to forty humanoid ones. Long enough, apparently. Or maybe they already had it on their home world." "Oh," Steve said. "Well, speaking of those flying predators, I had better get around and make sure they are not carrying away my sentries. Thank you very much for the nazz! in T he sentries were still nervous and disorganized, which suited Steve fine. He reached Ralph Parr and found him talking to a pair of Gjiss. "Something wrong?" Parr said, "My partner hasn't showed up." He gave Steve a warning look. Steve caught it. Something was wrong; he had to get rid of the Gjiss fast. "Well, don't worry about it. He was probaibly manning a gun, and someone told him to stay on it. Is this your post?" Parr nodded. Steve asked the stocky Gjiss, "How about you?" One of them, a Tools Tech First, said, "We not know. I thought, here, but... I guess the ones we should find, they already gone, and there are changes." Steve said, "Yes. Well, just walk around the fence until you find an unmanned posit." The Gjiss made a little bobbing motion of his head. "Yes, Gunner, we will do that." As soon as they were gone, Parr inclined his head at the gate. He and Steve looked around, made sure no one was watching and shoved it outward. They got out and closed it quickly behind them. A few yards away, with sand hastily tossed over it, was the body of a man in a white Gree Slave uniform. Parr said in a low voice, "I had to do it. He saw that the gate bad been opened and demanded an explanation." Steve swore softly, turned, and peered through the fence. No one looking this way. 'Take his feet!" They got the corpse far enough away, threw sand over it and went back to fix the gate. There were ticklish moments as sentries walked by, but they got it rewired. Then they dug up their drab coveralls and got into them, spent ten minutes smoothing sand and sneaked away. They couldn't do anything about their footprints except hope the drizzle would obscure them enough. Then they lugged the body toward the ull-ull pathway they'd used. As they went, Steve asked, "How'd you do it?" "Slugged him, then put a knife under his ribs," Parr said. "Damned lucky no one came by before I got him outside." "Short-term luck," Steve said sourly. "Well, we'll have to make the best of it. God knows how soon they'll match up stories and realize something's fishy. And if they ever find enough of the body to see the knife wound... About here, I guess." He dropped his end of the IF corpse, then led the way toward the ull-ull path. When they were near he called softly, "Fazzool!" "Here!" They'd missed the hole by thirty yards. Fazzool came to meet them. "I smell blood! Is it -- " "Not ours," Steve said shortly. "Tune up that recording of yours. We need some more help from the meat-eaters." Fazzool turned on the tape. Steve watched the glow of the camp's lights until they heard real predators overhead. When one swooped down after the Slave Gunner's body, he said, "Let's get back to the tangle. I've got to make sketches of that skeleton while it's fresh in my mind." W hen sketches and reports had been coded into a tiny message drone and nulled away to an Effogan outpost, Fazzool and Steve sat in the dark listening-post, talking. Fazzool said, "Suppose zey question ze B'lant Techs you talked to. Zose will surely remember zat you wore a Gunner Third insignia, while ze missing man is only a Second." Steve sighed. He knew B'lant wouldn't he wrong on such a detail and would know they weren't wrong. "The chances are he was the real officer of the guard, since he was alone and questioned Ralph. We'll just have to hope the Overseers don't make too much of the discrepancy. Anyway, there's nothing we can do, so let's not worry. Right now I'm puzzled about that skeleton." Fazzool said, "I have been zinking about zat. If all ze bones were zere, zen ze humanoid was not killed by ze flying beasts. Maybe he drowned in ze winter, when ze flat was flooded and was covered wiz mud before anyzing found him." "Possibly," Steve said. "But the pellet weapon indicates they didn't have compact enough power units to build practical laser pistols, so they can't have had null either. That means multiple-generation trips, at fractions of light-speed. So they wouldn't be turning arophd and going home. And if not, there ought to be at least a few old rusted hulls somewhere." "Unless," the B'lant said, "zey hid zem very carefully. Zey had reason to be furtive, wiz Gree already in zis whole part of ze galaxy." "Well, probably," Steve agreed. "Still, in the whole search Gree's made here, there's only the one skeleton been found, and a few other traces here and there. This is a livable planet for protein life. Where are their descendants?" "Maybe zere were no females along. Or ze ships could have been mostly automatic. Maybe what crew zere was just died of old age, wizzout descendants." Steve said, "That just doesn't feel right. Gree's team has established that the ull-ulls were put down in a lot of different spots. Why would anyone stock a planet with an animal like the ull-ull, plus eight or ten smaller species, if he didn't intend to move in? Why odd things like ull-ulls, anyway? There's probably a clue there somewhere." Fazzool said, "Why not for food? Ze ull-ulls and smaller zings zrive on zese vines. A whole world full of good pasturage." The dark hid Steve's grin. It was a standing joke that B'lant could, and with a little encouragement would, eat almost anything. "Possibly. But then what scared them off? And why hasn't Gree been able to find their home world, if it's only a slowerthan-light trip from here? Even if some disaster hit them, a civilization dead such a short time would still show." Fazzool was silent for a minute. "I begin to see what you mean. You zink ze skeleton is not representative." "Right," Steve said. "Somebody else may have brought it here, along with the animals. Maybe the skeleton belonged to some sort of herder or watchman. And the somebody, whoever it was, did have null. Then, for some reason -- probably that they became aware of Gree -- they went away again." Ralph Parr, who'd just come up from the cache, cleared his throat for attention. "I'm afraid you'll have to change the theory." "Why?" "Because I'm sure that a couple of the guns aren't quite exactly where I left them." I f he hadn't looked hard, Steve wouldn't have noticed anything to support Parr's claim. However, he found it. There were fresh Gree uniforms and 'other garments stored against possible need; and they weren't refolded quite right. He called Fazzool. The B'lant looked and nodded. Parr said, "I'm not arguing against it, but how can you be sure?" "Remember," Fazzool told him, "zat Steve and I were raised as Gree Slaves. Zere are ways you do certain zings, zat you would do in your sleep. No one who was not of ze Gree background would know zem." Parr nodded. "Okay. I'm the same way about where I leave a weapon. So we know two things: that somebody searched this place and that it wasn't Gree Slaves. Ull-ulls?' "No," Steve said. "They haven't the brains or the manual dexterity. Something else." Fazzool said lightly, "It is a good zing we have Gree for ze common enemy. Ozzerwise, we might look like pincushions by now, wiz arrows or poison darts." Steve told him, "I feel enough like a pincushion from these damned thorns. Well, they've had plenty of opportunity, so if they haven't killed us yet, maybe they won't before morning. I suggest we just put out the lights, bring a radio receiver down here, and wait until morning. Then we'd better wire up some better alarms, if we can. By the time we do that, we may have other things to ward off boredom." IV B efore daybreak, it was obvious from the talk on the radio that the Gree camp now knew it was missing a man. Steve listened to the guarded talk. "At least they don't suspect anyone else on the planet with radio. When they do, there'll be a sudden silence, if I guess right; then, within a few minutes, they'll resume broadcasting to fool us." IF They waited. Daylight started to filter into the tangle. Aboiit that time, a clamor of small creatures began somewhere not far away. "God," Steve said, "what now? I guess we'd better go look, but keep your eyes open." Before they reached the spot, they could see the reddish fur through the tangle. The small creatures -- some picking at the ull-ull corpse, some just hopping around in excitement -- set up a new clamor as the men approached. Steve's particular little demon flew at him shrieking, to skitter about just out of reach. He made a vicious swipe at it, missed and clambered nearer the dead ullull to chase away the other things. Fazzool and Parr came up beside him to stare. Steve asked the B'lant, "Same one that's been hanging around?" "I zink so. It is immature; about ze same size." The thing's throat had been tom open. Blood stained the more biickish red of the fur. Seen lifeless, it was a rather insignificant animal; bedraggled by the near rain, its long neck limp and weak looking. Steve moved back from it and raised his head to listen. "Something sounds different." Fazzool aid, "iZere are no ull-ulls close by. Zey are not too stupid to make ze association: ze one zat hung around us is killed. But why?" "My guess," Steve said, "is that our visitors did it, either because it got in their way, or because they don't want ull-uUs gathering around us. Let's go look where that nearest family lived." It was a five-minute scramble through the thorns. The spot Steve had in mind was deserted. "Not even any fresh chewed vines. I guess we're under a sort of interdiction." W hat bothered Steve most was that none of their electronic alarms had been tripped. Of course those weren't capable of detecting a tresspasser more than a few yards away -- that would have required more power than he dared use, this close to the Gree camp -- but they were spotted along the easy approaches and were well hidden. Either the thing or things that had searched the cache were too small (or too insubstantial) to register, or they were scientifically sophisticated enough to find and avoid the detectors. In all the galaxy, no race that was nonhumanoid, or much smaller than a man, had ever been found so far with more than brute intelligence. Of course there were the Gree entities, like threefoot metal cables with intelligence prograimmed into them, but they weren't natural beings. And he didn't want to think another race like that was loose. No, come to think of it, the searchers must have had hands, or something like them. "All right," he said, half listening to an earplug that would keep tab on the Gree radio, "there's an intelligent race here, with scientific understanding if not actual technology, in complete hiding. They've hidden successfully from Gree, and we wouldn't know about them either if they hadn't made one or two very small mistakes. That's one thing we have in our advantage. They don't know we know about them. Unless they're listening and understand English, which is pretty unlikely. We can't leave without finding them. So, we invest whatever time we have in trying to flush them out." Parr asked, "Just how much time do we have, and what are the odds?" Steve pondered. "Well, actually, the odds are rotten at any time before the set rendezvous. Suppose we called a ship. It would take six or seven hours for it to get here. Half an hour to get down through atmosphere; God knows how much longer to reach us. Say half an hour, with luck. Ten minutes for us to get aboard. Balance that against how long it would take the Gree expedition to spot the ship as it came out of null, challenge it, radar-range it and get ships manned and aloft to clobber it." Parr shook his head. "Even I can assess those odds. Why can't the Birds null a big enough task force here to handle the Gree expedition? Aren't we worth it?" Steve grinned. "The last point's doubtful. Anyway, we're right in Gree's back yard, you know. A thing like that would escalate fast into a full-scale battle, and we couldn't begin to match him here. Not to mention that we, and the planet, would get crisped. The rendezvous was supposed to be hit-and-run, and it can't be moved up." "So," Parr said, "a few hours doesn't make any difference, eh?" "Except for one thing," Steve reminded him. "Gree's not looking for us now. He will be before long." IF Parr said, "I really cooked it when I killed that Gunner." Steve shrugged. "You had no choice; and we haven't any now. We've got to contact these hidden people, fast; that's all." Fazzool said, "Zat may not be easy to do. Zey are evidently professionals at hiding, and zey have no reason to trust us. Even if we let zem know we recognize zey are here, zey will avoid us. Zey will have to assume we might be frauds -- Gree Slaves pretending ozzerwise, to draw zem out of hiding." "That's right," Steve said, "but we don't have to give them the choice." P arr looked questioning. Steve grinned. "Just as a crude basic proposition, suppose we climbed to the top of this tangle -- after letting them know for sure we knew they were around -- and started waving a flag. Could they afford to let us fall into Gree's hands?" Parr scratched at his beard. "I see the reasoning. But isn't it based on a lot of suppositions and hopes?" Fazzool said, "I will listen gladly to a better reasoning. But I cannot zink of it myself." "All right," Steve said, "Fazzool, you know better than I do what we have along. Can we send a radio beam -- a weak one, but all over the spectrum -- the oppK)site way from Gree's camp? And swing it around an arc, to cover nearly a hundred eighty degrees?" The B'lant said, "Yes, we can do zat. But what if a Gree ship or aircar happens to be in ze way?" "Keep it narrow and aimed a little down, so it'll be absorbed by the nearest tangles. Any bounce off the sandat willbe weak and scrambled until it sounds like static. Just send a simple pattern. Three dots, a pause, three more dots; something like that. Use your own judgment." Fazzool pondered, nodding slowly. "All right. For how long shall I keep it up?" "Intermittently, for about half an hour," Steve said. "Meanwhile I'm going out to that spy post. I'll be back." He started through the tangle, carrying a few small instruments and the field glasses. Halfway to the outpost he stopped. Something was missing... Oh -- the small flying thing that had always heckled him before. He waited a minute, but it didn't appear. He shrugged off a prickly feeling and went on. The creature couldn't devote all its time to him -- there was no reason to suppose it might not be somewhere attending to affairs of its own. He reached the outpost, saw that an excavation team was working at the same spot on the sand-flat, and squirmed himself into a passably comfortable position to watch. They were just digging around and probing with metal detectors, apparently not finding anything. He had a small receiver with him now, and he listened to the talk on the various Gree wavelengths. Things sounded all right. There was no mention of the missing man. Possibly about now, the B'lant archeologist Steve had talked to was giving his story to the Overseers and insisting he'd talked to someone in a Gunner Third uniform. He used the glasses for a few minuites (the morning heat wasn't burbling the air too much yet) and satisfied himself that nothing more was being dug up. It came to his mind suddenly that the skeleton and pellet-firing pistol might have been a deliberate plant. Maybe the hidden people had scatter a few such bones and artifacts about the planet, to disguise their own presence. He lowered the glasses and squatted there, pondering. Assume a highly advanced race. Was it possible they maintained this planet as a sort of spy post against Gree and that their own strongholds were far away, in remote parts of the galaxy? If so, they doubtless had other outposts and Imew about the Birds of Effogus; knew the Birds were resisting Gree. Why then, hadn't they offered their help? Maybe they were too weak numerically and didn't want to 'be swallowed up in a space war. Or maybe they just weren't militarily inclined. All that was futile speculation. He had another look at the Gjiss team out on the flat, then put away the glasses and started back. Before he got there the Gree transmitters suddenly went off the air. V F azzool had discovered the same thing and wasn't sending out his own beam any more. He looked at Steve expressionlessly. "I wonder if I attract zem." "Probably not," Steve said. "More likely someone just had a rushing of brains to the head. Let's listen." It was about five minutes lat that the transmission resumed. An Overseer's voice explained smoothly, in English then in B'lant, on an all-station wavelength, "We have had a temporary power failure, but it is fixed now." Steve grimaced. "That lights the fuse. Well, I'm tired of sitting anyhow. Ralph down below?" "Yes." Steve called out, ".Parr!" When the Terran came clambering up, Steve told him, "I think you'd better start making up three backpacks. Rations, guns, first aid, power units, grenades, about a dozen messagedrones. Leave room for a few things Fazzool may decide we want. If we're lucky enough to last till night, we may be playing hide-and-seek. Oh. Put in pencils and scratch pads." Parr turned to start down, hesitated. "Scratch pads?" "Sure," Steve said. "If we do find our secretive neighbors, we'll want to communicate with them. Sketching is the best way." Parr left. Steve turned toward the center of the tangle, cupped his hands to his mouth, and began making ullull howls. He frowned at Fazzool's grin. "If they're listening, it'll at least alert them." He began to give the calls a pattern -- three howls, a pause, three more. Fazzool said, "Zere will be Gree ships listening." "I know," Steve said curtly. "That's why I'm doing this before they get here." Presently he stopped, sat on a branch and thought. "Do you have any spare throat-radios up here?" IF "Yes." The B'lant went to a pouch hung from a thorn and brought back a small instrument on a strap. Steve took it and said, "I'll be back." He made his way to where the body of the dead ull-ull, now pretty much eaten by small things, still hung. He stood dangling the radio by the strap for a minute, pondering. No, there was nothing to identify it to Gree as Effogan technology. He glanced at his chronometer, listened for a few moments, then called not too loudly, "Here. Here. I have left something." His listeners, if any, probably spoke no English, but his voice would be enough. He buckled the radio's strap around a branch and left it hanging there, then retreated to the hideout. Fazzool blinked at him. "You left ze radio in sight? What if Gree finds it first?" Steve said, "They'll probably take their time with each tangle. They'll put ships over the nearest ones, surround one at a time, and work their way into each. We're closer to the edge than vhere I left that radio, so they'll be here before they would find it anyway." "Why will zey not simply drop gas bombs?" , Steve scowled. He should have thought of that. "Well, maybe they'll think whoever they're hunting may have masks. I'm going down to see how Ralph's coming." F ifteen minutes later, lugging two backpacks, he climbed back up, Ralph Parr behind him with the third. Steve asked Fazzool, "Can you drop youi excess stuff into the tangle so it'll take longer to find?" "I guess so," Fazzool said, looking unhappy at having to junk so much excellent miniaturized equipment. "Are we starting already?" "I think we'd better," Steve told him. "It may take a while to get our message across to our secretive friends." They both looked at him oddly, but went to work junking the stuff Fazzool didn't want to take. Steve joined them, tossing equipment off the crude platform, uncoupling it first when it was too bulky to fall through the tangle. "Damn!" he exclaimed suddenly. "Did you put flashlights in the backpacks?" "Sure," Parr said. Steve grunted in relief. His hunches were crystallizing now, and he knew what his plans were for the next hour or so. If they didn't pan out... He looked around to mako sure nothing obvious was left. The platform, purposely, looked as if it might have been built by primitives. He walked around the edge, peering down to make sure nothing had lodged just below. He could see a few pieces of equipment, but only by looking hard. With luck, he'd gain a few minutes. He shrugged, reached for his backpack, fumbled in it for the flashlight, put that in a pocket and swung the pack to his shoulders. "Let's go." He led them down toward the nearest ull-ull tunnel and along that toward the center of the tangle. After a couple of hundred yards he stopped to listen. From various directions came faint sounds of the beasts. He wished he had directional sound pickups, settled instead for cupping hands to his ears and turning this way and that. There seemed to be ull-ulls in every direction except the one from which they'd come. That wasn't encouraging. If there were aliens in the tangle, the beasts ought to avoid them. The nervousness was in his veins now, making him tingle uncomfortably, making his hands feel numb. "Well," he muttered and started on. Here the tunnel was about fifty feet above ground, but the center of the tangle, at the peak of the knoll, was on higher ground and might be about level with them. There was a good two hundred feet of vinery overhead, which made it dark down here. He was depending on that. The tunnel finally angled down to the ground. Now it was joined by others, convergent toward the center. Two red forms scuttled across before them. There were coughs of Other unseen denizens. Steve muttered cursewords. A concentration of ull-ulls was the last thing he'd hoped to find. The ground leveled off, and he stopped. "Well..." He aimed the flashlight at random, flashed three times, changed direction slightly, flashed again. He continued that around the circle and around again. After five minutes he stopped and waited. There was no sound except the coughing of ull-ulls and the chittering of smaller things. Fazzool, who'd rigged some equipment to wear on his person, said, "Zere is a Gree ship overhead." S teve's tension made him almost bark, "Well, that's what we expected, isn't it?" He waited, forcing himself to stand still, listening for the sound of missiles falling. Gas bombs he could do nothing about. But maybe Gree wouldn't want to warn possibly prepared quarry. Maybe, even, there'd be a war of nerves, with the expedition troops waiting for the unknowns to fire a weapon, null a ship, show themselves somehow. Now Fazzool suddenly adjusted a plug he had in his left ear, put a hand over his other ear, and listened. He faced various directions. "Zere are troops coming into ze tangle. Not close yet, but working zere way in from all directions. At several levels, I zink." Steve shrugged, wooden-faced. The expedition must have picked up something from this particular tangle, then. Maybe a faint bounce of that radio beam, just at the moment when they were already suspicious. Maybe, he thought, this was his last reckless gamble. He'd gambled on hunches often enough; was way overdue. He glanced at Parr. The man's face showed neither fear nor resentment. He'd fight to the end, if he had any opportunity. So, of course, would Fazzool. Steve fingered his pistol, sickness growing in his middle. He'd sort of highhanded them into this, without explaining. "Well... I guess I was wrong. Maybe we'd better find a thick spot and ambush as many as we can." Nevertheless he waited a minute more, tried the flashlight routine one last time with no result. He breathed deeply to relieve the tension in his chest, clenched and unclenched his fists. He hated to give up on his hunch. Faintly, now, he could hear Gree's Slave-troopers moving in. He looked toward a thick-grown spot. "There, I guess." He took two steps. Suddenly he stopped. Like wraiths, a squad of ull-ulls -- aiming heavy laser guns -- stepped from the tangle. No! Not ull-ulls! The heads were slightly larger, the hands not quite so paw-like. The eyes gleamed with intelligence; with purpose. Suddenly he felt like giggling. "Drop your guns," he told his companions in an unsteady voice. "We have to make heard their weapons thud to the ground a second behind his own. He raised his hands shoulder-high, open, away from his body... The aliens eyed him steadily for a moment. Then one of them said something in a totally unfamiliar language and inclined his head in an unmistakable gesture. Steve, following it, turned and began to walk. Other aliens -- all nude, but armed -- came from concealment to lead them down the slope at an ungainly trot. Fazzool said in a bemused voice, "So zat is why ze ull-ulls are here. For camouflage." Steve chuckled. "Yeah. Not to eat." They reached a very thick growth of vine, and the aliens, except for a few still pointing weapons, went to work. Laser tools zipped through thick stalks until a way was cleared. Now they began tossing aside dead branches. I t was nothing so easy to find as a frequently used trapdoor. The hatch had laid buried iier authentic dead litter for years -- maybe centuries. It screeched open. Steve and his companions were urged in. There was a ladder, of some rustless metal, and a dim orange light below. It took minutes for the whole party to get in and for the hatch to close above them. At the foot of the ladder, they hurried along a tunnel, around several turns, heading deeper into the ground, then along a straight stretch. They must have gone for fifteen minutes before a mild explosion sounded from behind. There was no pause in the trotting. A second mild explosion came, and now the red-furred aliens tensed a little. Another five minutes, perhaps -- then a real blast went off. The floor of the tunnel heaved; metal groaned. Steve could hear the tunnel collapsing behind him. Fazzool, trotting beside Steve, said, "Not nuclear, I Zink." "No, and only local." Steve turned his head to look at their guards. "I've been wondering about thait. They'll leave our hideout intact long enough for Gree to find and identify the stuff. Then, I'll bet you, that whole knoll and whatever's under it will go up." Parr said, "You mean, I hope, when we're far enough away." They weren't there to find out, forithey entered a chamber containing two small ships, looking fairly much like Gree scouts. Fazzool looked around. "No null tanks." "No," Steve said, "we'd hardly be likely to have picked a tangle that happened to have an incoming station under it. These have been here a long time, unused, waiting. Parr said, "You mean you tWofc every knoll has an escape tunnel and ships under it?" "Tunnels, yes," Steve told him, "ships, no. We've come quite a ways from our tangle." "Huh." Parr shook his head in wonder. "Do you really think Gree'll be fooled very long? By our hideout, I mean." Steve made a gesture of dismissal. "I doubt it. But it won't matter. Once we get these people in contact with the Birds, this planet can be written off." They were urged into one of the ships. Hatches closed, and from various activities Steve judged they were nulling. The three men sat under guard in the middle compartment of the ship -- which, while not precisely like a Gree ship of the same class, was too nearly so to be a coincidence. This race had known Gree before, apparently. Presently an alien, clothed now in a white uniform, appeared. His long neck looked very odd sticking up from the jacket. He had a slate and stylus of some kind. First he drew a circle with lines radiating from it -- a sun. Then he held up four fingers. A flick of his thumb cleared the slate. Now he drew a ship, suddenly made it disappear. Steve looked at Fazzool. "Null? Four days? The B'lant nodded. "I zink zat is what he means." Ralph Parr whistled. "That's a long trip!" IF Fazzool said, "I hope zey have something we can eat ozzer zan our rations." The alien was watching them silently. Steve gestured for the slate and began the long, tedious job of establishing communication. VI W hen the null trip was up, he'd described the space war and tried, not quite successfully, he thought, to convince the aliens they could trust him and the Birds of Effogus. They told him very little in return -- they were still being cautious -- except that they were enemies of Gree. He had to wait until they spaced out before he understood. Then, cursing his own slow wittedness, he stood with his two companions and stared at viewscreens. The largest screen showed the entire galaxy. He'd been out far enough before to recognize it, but they were farther now, judging by the angle. He calculated, a little dazed. Four days. That planet's day and night amounted to about thirty-one hours. A hundred twenty-plus hours of straight null... Another screen showed a cylindrical object he didn't grasp at first. Then, realizing the black background was starless space, he suddenly understood the scale. At about the same instant, Fazzool gasped. "Zat zing -- it must be a hundred rniles long, if ze angle of the viewer is normal. It is -- not even from our own galaxy!" Parr, not grasping the enormity of it, said, "Huh? Wouldn't that be an impossible trip even by null?" Steve stared at the image of the cylinder, turning slowly on its axis, crusted white with the ice of ages, pitted from deep-space debris. He let out his breath slowly. "Eight hundred Terran years," he said to Parr, "from even the closest. God!" The alien who'd been working with Steve joined his hands and rested his head on them in pantomime of sleeping. Fazzool said "Suspended animation for hundreds of years? Zey've solved zat? He blinked in unbelief. "Even so -- to send zat huge zing a zousand years, two zousand years, of null... zat is incomprehensible! How would you store such energy? How would you conduct ze currents?" Steve mumbled something. He gestured for the slate, sat down, started to draw something, then looked helplessly at the alien. A few hours later he was explaining it to his companions as well as he understood it. "They came from the same galaxy the Gree creatures did. I hope it's not a foretaste of what were in for. Gree had almost won the war there, and the last coalition holding out began the desperate project of a great Ark, to carry their kind of life to some new galaxy. They designed automatic equipment to revive them when they got close to one. Imagine the shock when they found Gree apparently had overrun this one too!" Parr said, "I can understand all that. But how can these be some of the original crew?" Steve said, "They've been waking each other up in relays. When one bunch got old, they came back to the Ark to die, and a young bunch took over. They had a long time to prepare that planet before Gree got curious about it." He grinned. "They say they nearly decided to kill the three of us and hide the bodies. The only reason they didn't was that they had to know who was fighting Gree." Parr asked, "What were they going to do if they found Gree did control the whole galaxy?" Steve told him, "They were scouting to make sure. That may explain a few strange drones that have been reported in this spiral arm. If things turned out bad, they were just going to land what flora and fauna they had on suitable planets, then throw themselves in a suicidal attack against Gree. They had no second choice. The Ark can't null itself." Fazzool said, "Zey made a big gamble. How could zey be sure zey would survive suspended animation after such a long time?" "They weren't sure," Steve said. "The Ark has automatic living environments not only for animals such as the ull-ulls, but for their own races -- there are several of them -- in primitive cultures. They didn't think they could maintain civilized cultures for so long without bizarre drifts; maybe even Gree worship. The launchers hoped that if the ones in suspended animation didn't come out of it, some civilized race in some free galaxy would rescue the primitive cultures and the animals." Parr shook his head in wonder. "It's too much for me. Funny. There's one thing sticks in my mind. I could like them except for that. The way they killed that half-friendly ull-ull. Seems they could have done what they want some other way." Steve smiled wryly. The same thing had been on his own mind. "You have to balance that against something pretty big." He stood up. "I've got to get my report coded and persuade these people to let me null it off. I've put off writing it as long as I can. I'm damned if I know quite '#I '# (#d ed) Listing by author, story contents page. Over # issues (# titles) from US, UK, etc. Corrected expanded Massachusetts #. IF IF  Serial xm T hat motionless, frightening, unreadable hieroglyph in the Martian dust brought back into Dolph's mind another sign that he had been trying -- more or less successfully -- to ignore for months: the function of the sting in the arthropods' tails. Had the thing not had survival value for the animals, in present time, evolution would have selected against it, and no matter how useful it might have been in the past, today it would be gone or at best only vestigial. Progessive loss of structure with loss of function is one of evolution's firmest decrees -- as witness the human vermiform appendix. "So it had to follow," Dolph said They had broadcast an S.O.S. for help. Now someone -- or something -- was answering their call! What Has Gone Before -- Teen-ager Dolph Haertel was attempting to discover the secret of anti-gravity. He had three things going for him -- his intelligence; a family that encouraged research -- and the fact that he didn't know it was impossible, in the orthodox view of relativistic science. And so he succeeded. He fitted out his tree house with an antigravity generator and propelled himself on a tryout expedition to Mars. But there his luck ran out. The basic power tube was damaged in landing. It was irreplaceable on Mars -- and he had no way to get off Mars. Nor could Earth's much-vaunted space prograhis help him. Relying on chemical rockets, they were years behind schedule -- worst of all, no one knew he had gone. Or almost no one. Dolph's nearest neighboring teen-ager back home -- who happened to be a girl named Nanette -- had been let into his secret, just a little bit -- but enough so that, with what he had told her and what preliminary models he had left behind, she was able to follow him.  She did... and now there were two teen-agers stranded on MarsI They managed to stay alive, with the help of a strange lichen that made breathing a pleasure but not a necessity and a water-mine that uncovered drinkables under Mars's arid soil a few yards from their tree-house shack. Then -- one morning -- Dolph found a footprint by the water source. They were not alone on MarsI gloomily, "that there was -- there is at least one animal on Mars larger than this invertebrate, that either hunts them, or that they hunt. Well, we can see that they don't hunt anything larger than the lichen mites, themselves. And now we know the answer. We should have been making preparations against it long ago." "What kind of preparations?" Nanette said, peering out the porthole at the deceptively peaceful noon. "I don't see any trees to make a palisade of, out there -- or any water to run in a moat." "I don't know," Dolph admitted. "Electrified wire, maybe, if I hadn't used up most of the available stuff making that antenna for the jammer." "I wouldn't put any faith in anything that could be jumped over," Nanette said. "How big do you think it is?" IF 'Bigger than the crustaceans. That's as dose as I can come. If it were Earthly, I might make some guess by the size of the track, but we've got DO reason to think Che same proportional relationships ap ply here. Also, it's a desert creature. It might be pretty small and still have a big foot to walk on sand with. Like the snowshoe rabbit -- going from its track, you miht think it was as big as a dog." "Well, I'm going to think of this one as being about the size of a small elephant," Nanette said. "That way, I won't be upset if it turns out to be only as big as, say, a large rhinoceros. And now that we've settled that, just what are we going to do?" 'Trap it," Dolph said. "Dolph Haertel, I know doggone well you were going to go too far sooner or later! And once you catch it, I suppose you'll want to keep it in the lean-to!" "Well, it's in the back yard already," Dolph pointed out with a wry grin. "And we've fed and watered it, so it'll probably keep on coming back. There really doesn't seem to be much left to do but give it a name. How about 'Bertram? Or 'Pywacket'?" "You're impossible," she said, for at least the fiftieth time. "All right, I give up. Why do we want to trap it, O Mighty Hunter?" "Well, to see what it looks like, for a starter. Though since wo thought to put the mine in sight of the porthole, I suppose all we need to do is keep a lookout early in the morning -- it seems to come around at dawn, if we can go by today's performance. But I don't just want to look at the critter. If possible, I want to talk to it" #alk to iti But -- oh, Dolph L do you think it's one of the Martians? I mean -- somehow I hadn't thought -- "I know what you rnean he said soberly. "I thought it was )qst an animal at first too. After all people that can build radio beacons don't go about robbing traps. Or do they? We just don't know. All weve got to go on, really, is one fact and one footprint. I don't want a dangerous animal hanging around here, any more than you do, but there's no way I know of to make it go away now -- and frankly I don't want it to go away unless and until I'm dead sure it isnt a Martian. Otherwise I did all that climbing around last month for nothing." "All right. I can see that, I guess, even if I don't have to like it. What are you going to use for bait? It doesn't need to blunder into a trap to catch one of those lobster-things." "No, I'm sure not," he agreed. "I thought I'd try something a little more intellectual. If it hunts those crustaceans, maybe it'd like to have some sort of tool to get through the shells with -- a knife, say. Even if it's a Martian and he has knives and forks of his own, such a thing would show him that were intelligent." "The house and the well show that." "Hmm... that's perfectly true. Well, what would you suggest? I don't really want to trap him, physically, anyhow -- even trying that might be dangerous. I just want to attract his attention, and if the house and so on haven't done that already, what would?" "Oh, in that case the knife ought to do nicely," Nanette said promptly. "The house and the well are just here, but the knife would obviously be a present. I mean, a gift. That's entirely different." "Well, it can't do any harm to try," Dolph said. "I hope." D olph made the knife from scraps; he had no intention of giving away any of his imported, machine-made possessions, and he assumed that almost any assemblage of cut wood and smelted metal -- especially the wood -- would look strange on Mars, and perhaps unique. They put the tool inside the repaired lobster trap, which was secured in turn only by a simple latch, and set the whole lure out on the dusty ice at the bottom of the mine shaft. Whether or not the reasoning was sound, the knife was gone the next morning; and this time the trap, though left open, was unharmed. For his next bait, after some thought about what else might be both Marsunique and useful the year round in a desert, Dolph put out a nine-foot length of clothesline. That, too, was taken... which was all well and good in its way, but they had yet to see the taker, which after all was the object of the proceedings. In what he decided would be his last attempt, Dolph now put out his canteen, with a chunk of ice rattling in it to show what it was for. That went, too, and on the fourth day he left the trap empty. Then he and Nanette settled at the porthole for a last vigil. The great dune-cat came to the shack in the first light of day and knocked on the door of the lean-to. He was carrying the knife and wearing the canteen slung around his waist by several turns of the rope. He would have been awe inspiring anywhere, but here, after so many months of isolation, he was fearsome; but these signs left no doubt that he was intelligent -- a tool-using creature -- and no choice but to confront him. Dolph got ready. He was frightened almost speechless -- but after all, he had invited this confrontation himself. There was no ducking out of it now. It was the creature's size that was impressive first of all. Even in a quasi-sitting position, he stood a good six feet high at the shoulder. His coarse, shaggy fur -- which was tawny, mottled in large patches the exact blue-green of the tumblelichens -- inevitably suggested a wild animal, but except for his leonine face and mane he really did not look much like a cat. His stance in the resting position was rather like that of a kangaroo, and his arms (or forelegs?) were almost as short in proportion to the rest of him, although a good deal more powerfully muscled. They terminated in true hands: five long, spatulate fingers and an opposable thumb. Dolph concluded that he had been resting on his knuckles when he had made IF the prints in the sand, with the thumb folded inside the fist. Yet he did not look much like a kangaroo either, despite the presence -- unnoticed by Dolph until later -- of an abdominal pouch. For one thing, he had no tail. For another, the legs were obviously as well adapted to running as to leaping. But it was his eyes that, in the long run, made the deepest and most lasting impression. When fully open -- for they could be covered inside the lids by nearly transparent shutters, like the nictitating membrane of a lizard or a bird -- they were large, still and an incredible dark aquamarine, like the Martian sky at high noon. Meeting their steady gaze was an almost physical shock. Staring into them, Dolph could not help but be sure -- despite the fact that the dune-cat was naked, except for the trappings which had come from Dolph himself -- that he had indeed at last met an authentic Martian. Then the cat moved, very quietly and gently. One paw reached out toward Dolph's head and unfolded its long fingers. The back of the hand was woolly, but the knuckles were bare and calloused. From the knobby tip of the central finger there emerged an inch-long claw, as curved and cruel as a saber. D olph stood still and sweated, listening to the thin sound of the wind and the abrasive whispering of the sand against his mask. He was as cold as he had ever been in his life. The sharp claw -- why did this creature want, let alone need, a knife? -- touched first one eyepiece of Dolph's mask, and then the other: Tick... tick. Dolph stood fast, although the urge to flinch was almost more than he could bear. The paw went back to the cat's tawny side, and then the other arm came up -- the one bearing the knife. The blade probed for his 'eyes. Dolph would have broken and run then, except that he did not dare to move. The great lynx-head bent down over him gravely, as though trying to decide what was the matter with him. Then the knife, in turn, went tick... tick against the lenses of the goggles. Dolph felt his eyes trying to cross, and two scalding tears ran down on each side of his nose; but he fought to keep himself looking directly up at the cat's sternly savage face. Somehow, he succeeded. The cat's hand opened. The knife dropped into the sand between them, and the great beast stepped back. In a voice like a wind blowing over a thirty-two-foot organ pipe, it said: Mmrreeornn-dmmannn." Dolph tried to answer, but his mouth was completely dry. Helplessly, he raised his own hands and showed them, open, to the intent creature. Astonishingly, it nodded. "Dmnn," it drummed inside its vast chest. "Dmmnnn." "Mnn," Dolph growled hesitantly, trying to make his voice as deep as possible. The result sounded absurdly thin to him; but the cat cocked his head, and the flattened, lynx-like ears tipped toward him, tufts quivering gently in the aftermath of the morning sandstorm. Tentatively, Dolph tried it again, and this time managed to make a little more noise. The cat nodded again -- although Dolph realized suddenly that he could not yet guess whether this spuriously familiar signal meant "Yes," "No," or "Look out!" Deciding to be reassured for the time being, however, he turned slightly to beckon to the cabin porthole, behind which Nanette was waiting and watching. The long colloquy had begun. T he task of communicating with the dune-cat proved difficult indeed. More than once Dolph thought with rueful envy of stories he had read in whidi the imaginary alien creatures had come pre-equipped with telepathy or a mechanical translator. This time, unfortunately, the job had to be done the hard way. At least, there was no shortage of cooperation. The cat left the camp each day before noon, but he was back each morning, just after the dawn sandstorm had ebbed. Early on, he showed a readiness to help with the physical labor -- on one occasion supporting the shoring of the mine while Dolph replaced a timber, in a show of brute strength that was even greater than what' Dolph had suspected was in reserve beneath that smoothly rippling hide. He seemed, too, to understand the sinfple diagrams Dolph drew in the sand, although how far or how deep this understanding went was difficult to assess. The real problem, of course, was language. The dune-cat's mouth and sound-producing organs were simply incapable of producing the characteristic noises of the English language; it could shape only a few simple words and syllables, and those imperfectly and with obvious pain. Dolph, on the other hand, lacked both the length of vocal cord and the chest capacity to imitate the deep-throated grunts and growls which were natural to the cat, though he could manage a few of them well enough to make them understood. As a result, the "conversations" evolved gradually into a sort of pidgin, in which isolated cat-groWls and English words were stitched together imperfectly -- if at all -- with gestures. A ny attempt to reduce this dialogue to the printed word could only have suggested that nothing at all was being communicated, and in fact what little information did pass among them was fairly primitive. But certain ideas did gradually become established. The dune-cat could manage "Dolph" quite well, although the "f" sound was rather slushy, and it applied the name indiscriminately to both of them. (Except for size, Dolph reflected, they doubtless looked much alike anyhow in their masks.) "Dmmnnn" seemed to be its name for itself, which Dolph managed as "Dohmn". If he pronounced the name with a forced, hollow boom, the cat responded at once. As for their origin, Dolph's experiments with diagrams soon revealed -- to his disappointment -- that the cat had only the most rudimenIF tary knowledge of astronomy. His attempts to convey that he and Nanette had come from the bluegreen star of Earth were met with flat incomprehension. After some weeks, Dohmn seemed to decide, rather dubiously, that they were visitors from Deimos, and Dolph let that pass for the time being. It was at least a step in the right direction. There were, it appeared, not many dune-cats. More than twelve, which was Dohmn's unit of counting, but not many twelves more than twelve. Beautifully adapted to Mars though the creature seemed to be, Dolph wondered nevertheless whether it was in danger of becoming extinct. It allowed physical inspection of itself with patient indulgence, and Dolph was fascinated to find that the greenish patches on its hide were not part of its fur, but a lichen with its fungal filaments deeply embedded in the skin. The vegetable stuff was not an infestation, but a commensal partner; it drew nourishment from the cat's bloodstream, but it returned oxygen. The arrangement explained how so big an animal could live in Mars's oxygen-starved air, even given the benefits of the tumblelichen ichor, on which the cat browsed sparingly about once a week. Its' staple food was the crustaceans, which it killed with one surgical swipe of a paw. It hardly needed the knife, for the paws proved to be equipped with saber-like claws quite like those of an Bairthly tiger, but more completely retractable. Nevertheless it learnt to use the knife quiddy and once dissected a crustacean for Dolph with all the skill of an anatomist, to show him where the females carried their eggs; these Dohmn in turn stowed in his pouch, apparently as rations for long trips. Ordinarily, the cat was migratory, following the summer up and down the planet. The oasis was one of its regular stops or feeding stations, and Dohmn was able to draw a more than passable map showing the locations of the others. This Dolph copied carefully, though the session was a disappointment in another way: it revealed that Dohnm thought Mars was flat. The map placed considerable emphasis on an immense, wheel-shaped area which Dolph recognized as the ambiguous territory Earth astronomers had dubbed Lacus Solis -- the Lake of the Sun. Why this was important to Dohmn, Dolph could not immediately figure out. The map session also established that the cat had not come to the oasis in response to Dolph's radio jamming and indeed was entirely imaware of it. This did not prove that confreres of Dohmn's might not or could not be producing the beacon signal all the same, but Dolph doubted it. Dohmn seemed ignorant of elementary electricity, let alone radio. Nevertheless, he pressed this line of questioning as rapidly as possible. Nanette was of enormous help as the subjects of the dialogue became more complex. She imitated the cat's noises even more poorly than Dolph, since her voice was higher; but e often understood what Dohnm was getting at long before Dolph did and could suggest ways of putting things in the limited common vocabulary available when Dolph despaired of framing a question at all. T he day finally came, however, when they were able to put the problem to Dohmn with partial success. It was accomplished with a sand-diagram of the crater, on the edge of which Nanette drew a mark like a little sun. From this she drew two lines, # from each other, in the two directions from which the radio "bea)Con" might be radiating and trailing out into dots in the sand. As she marked the dots, Nanette cupped her ears as if listening and made the questioning sound. Dohmn's own ears, which he normally carried flattened along the back of his head, stood straight up, and he bounded away from the diagram as if alarmed. When he came back, he quickly scrawled a huge circle around the drawing with his knife -- his usual sign that he did not waqt the picture erased for a while. Then he charged up the side of the crater and vanished, though it was a good hour before his usual departure time. Dolph and Nanette waited -- they could do nothing else -- and after abouthalf an hour Dohmn was back. To 'Dolph's intense irritation, he was carrying the jammer. Dolph could only hope that he could persuade the cat to put it back, for he did not relisih the thought of another climb. But Dohmn was not ready to listen to Dolph yet. Putting the machine down next to the sand diagram, he made three long bounds away from it. At each stop, he drew a sun; and at the last, his standard diagram of Lacus Solis. Then he returned for the jammer and, carrying it carefully, planted it firmly in the center of his new map. Now it was Dolph's turn to be excited. He drew a line from his own diagram to Dohmn's; pointed to all three of them and then up and out of the crater; and at last, he pantomimed marching.' The dunecat made the questioning noise and marked time in place, with a peculiar mincing gait which would have been funny in so huge a creature if its implications had not been so urgent. Dolph nodded. So did the cat. "Does that mean what I think it means?" Nanette said, almost whispering. "I sure hope so," Dolph said. "I still can't believe he knows what the jammer is for -- but obviously he's seen something like it before and is telling us where and how long a trip it is for him. Three days." "And what's more," Nanette said, we dare to try it?" "I don't see how we'd dare not to," Dolph said. "And with his help, we just might make it, too!" O nce they had become settled in their own minds that the immense trip needed to be undertaken, Dolph and Nanette felt daily under IF greater and greater pressure to get it under way. The prospect of something new, of some unknown but possibly drastic change in their circumstances, made their ramshackle camp seem more and more squalid, the whole oasis feel more and more like a trap. Yet there was an enormous amount of work to be done before they dared to venture up and out onto the high desert. It seemed obvious that they must take with them every scrap of food, every drop of water and elixir and every drop of clothing and bedding that they could manage -- all this, plus the battery, the binoculars, Dolph's signal generator, a tent, ail their iline and such minor items as maps and knives. The risk of gutting the camp had to be run, despite the very good possibility that the trip would prove fruitless and they would need to return to the oasis and set up housekeeping as before. Yet it seemed equally obvious that they could not carry all this on their backs, even with Dohmn's help. The only possible solution, Dolph finally decided, was a sledge, if Dohmn could be persuaded to help pull it. Nanette queried him with several quick sketches and stances, and the dune-cat assented. Then all that remained was to build it, but it was an emotional wrench to get started on the task, since it required demolishing the lean-to for lumber. When it was finished, the sledge was a toibogganlike platform seven feet long and two feet broad, with a canted prow and side rails. The rails would help in carrying it up the crater wall, as well as providing hand-grips for passengers later. Also for better portage, they distributed, the supplies and equipment equally throughout its length; they would reload everything on the trailing end when they reached the high desert. Next came the making of a harness and a horse collar for Dohmn -- the latter to distribute the mass of the sledge evenly across his shoulders without cutting off his wind, on the assumption -- which seemed likely -- that he had a windpipe in the usual place. The dune-cat tolerated the fitting of these arrangements with what seemed to be goodhumored curiosity, and Dolph surveyed the result with some pride. "Neat, if not gaudy," Nanette agreed. "Did you know the Romans never thought of that gadget?" Dolph said. "So they never got half the work out of their oxen that they should have. No decent yoke was invented until the Middle Ages." "Maybe that's why the Romans needed so many slaves." "That's a thought. I don't remember Gibbon's mentioning that, either. Now, is there anything around here we can make buckles with?" "I don't think so. I know how to tie a sliding knot, though. And that reminds me. If we could make some kind of a shoulder pack for Dohmn, it would lighten the load on the sledge while we're climbing the crater." "It wouldn't lighten it for him," Dolph pointed out, "since he'll be helping to hoist the sledge up, too. But he looks like he could take it, and we could give him the pack afterward -- he could probably find plenty of uses for it. Anyhow, it's worth trying." D espite the constant emotional pressure to be under way, they worked harder on the project than they had worked since their earliest days on Mars. Made a little morose, too, by the prospect of leaving what despite all hazards and discomforts they had come to think of as home, they were both convinced that they were bound to leave something crucial behind, whose absence would be discovered only after it was too late. Hence, despite their day-end exhaustion, they lost considerable sleep trying to decide in advance what that thing would be -- since obviously the whole contents of the house could not be loaded onto the sledge. On the last day, Nanette firmly insisted that they do nothing at all. She invented a particularly preposterous story, about why a mouse, named Aelfrida flunked her Ph.D exam in Landscape Garbaging, specifically to waste the time with. Doiph actually succeeded in falling asleep before the story ended, which was probably just as well, since Nanette didn't have an ending for it. They started up the side of the crater after the dawn sandstorm. In their hearts, each wondered if they would ever come back; but the question remained unspoken. Behind them, the watery sunlight crawled down the terraces toward the empty and half-demolished house.  #  --  W ith the dune-cat's help, the ascent took only a day, and they were able to launch their small expedition out onto the desert the next morning, Dohmn pulled the sledge. One human being rode, the other walked alongside until he tired, after the example of Arctic expeditions they had seen pictured, long ago and on another world. The sledge glided almost as easily over the fine sand and dust as it might have over snow, and the dune-cat never seemed to tire. Dolph's projected route proposed that a good three-quarters of the trip be made along the floor of a tributary of the mighty ThothNepenthes Canal, which passed between their own oasis and Arabia, and thence northeast toward Lacus Solis. On the map, the overland distance had looked short enough to make reaching the canal bottom possible by the second day; and in fact, they were halfway down the western side of that vast valley -- a chasm which made the Grand Canyon look like a scratch on a windowpane in comparison -- before night caught them. Desipite the higher air pressure at that distance below "sea" level, the night Was bitter beyond all imagining. They would never have survived it without the added warmth of the dune-cat, who slept sprawled across the mounds of sand they had all the rest of the tent space. This innovation made Dolph nervous at first. He was reasonably sure of Dohmn's good will, but after all the creature was obviously a superb killing machine about which they really knew very little; but Nanette accepted it readily and even with some pleasure, as though the alien monster were some sort of gigantic Teddy Bear. Whatever the risks, they could hardly have done without him, and they got through the night both unfrozen and uneaten. The floor of the canal was warm by Martian standards, and a heavy carpet of tumble-lichen made the going harder for the sledge. This was compensated for to some extent, however, by the fact that down here they were once more able to dig for ice when they needed it. Dohmn took care of that task, in a great fountain of sand which took him down to the aquasphere in one furious five-minute flurry. Paradoxically, the sound of the beacon in the earphones was dimmer in the canal. Dolph could only hope that some new shielding factor, perhaps a heavy deposit of iron ore in the canal walls, was responsible. On the third day, he was worried enough to ask Dohmn if they were indeed going in the right direction, although the compass said that they were. The dune-cat said so too, emphatically. Dolph let it rest at that -- and sure enough, on the other side of an immense bend which they rounded on the fourth day the signal abruptly became loud and clear. T he fifth day saw the end. of the stores. Dohmn pulled them on regardless, and the sledge, now markedly lighter, almost skimmed over the sedgey valley floor. Their heads feeling afloat like balloons with hunger, Dolph and Nanette clung to the straps and tried to believe that the dune-cat, now galloping ahead of them completely out of control, still knew where he was going and why. The sledge rocked and bucked as the cat picked up speed; the moons scooted through the ink-blue sky; the signal became louder; the sand fountained away behind them; the dust and the cold bit through thedr clothing By noon, half delirious with thirst -- for Dohmn still would not stop; he seemed truly to be running away with them, his heavy haunches pounding away at the smoking waves of rust with single-minded, almost mechanical ferocity -- Dolph and Nanette were clinging to the rails and to each other. Spraying sand from under its tailboard, the sledge toboganned down into a narrow col. Cliffs beetled above it, steadily shutting out more and more of the sky. Then, near dusk, the ool widened and debouched onto the Lake of the Sun. Dohmn slewed the sledge to a stop and sat down, his vast chest heaving evenly; Dolph could not remember ever having noticed him breathing before. At his feet, the ground fell away toward a broad, almost circular plain, terraced with ringwalls to a flbor as flat as the center of a target. The lake itself stretched evenly out to the horizon, lightly dusted with rippled sand which fumed in a steady wind, from under which there shone forth occasionally a dull green gleam of compacted, ridged ice. IF Here was a crater to end all craters -- as undamaged and regular as Plato on the Moon, yet bigger from side to side than the Moon's Mare Imbrium. The unthinkably massive asteroid that had exploded this enormous well out of the crust of Mars must have hit very recently, as such events go in cosmic time, to produce so perfectly formed a wound and leave behind a genuine lake of open water, stripped from the deep aquasphere to be exposed to the arid air. Now, at last, the dune-cat allowed them to make camp and even took elaborate pains to help them. Relieving himself of his yoke, but without bothering to take off his pack, Dohmn promptly went hunting, returning before long With two of the iobster-creatures -- one, the largest they had ever seen. A second expeition took longer and produced a cake of ice which on Earth would have weighed a good forty-five pounds; since the floor of the col was too far above the aquasphere to permit digging for such a thing, he must have had to cut and fetch it from the Lake itself. Then he pitched in to help dig a tent site and drive stakes. T his abrupt return to cooperation, even solicitude, was welcome enough, but Dolph could not help being made faintly uneasy by it. It reminded him disquietingly of a story he had once read, called "The Price of the Head," in which a castaway finds too late that the kindness of the natives is due to his position as the appointed sacrifice to their gods. He left the thought unvoiced, however; and in his advanced state of physical exhaustion, no thought could have been sufficient to keep him awake. In the morning, Dohmn was eager to be moving again, but this time without the sledge. Dolph and Nanette were just as pleased to be able to go without having to undertake another portage. Not thatit would have been difficult, for the terraces here were broad and shallow and not much weathered, strongly resembling a colossal staircase. Nevertheless, the dune-cat did not take the most direct way down, but instead drew them off along the circle toward the northeast, descending gradually as he went. By noon they had reached the level of the Lake and Dohnm's apparent goal: a pair of intricately carved pillars at least twenty feet high, cut from the stone of the ringwall. They flanked an open entrance into the cliff, of equal height and far too regular to be a natural cave. Dahmn went in promptly and then, finding that he was not followed, sat down on the smooth floor and made an imperative rumbling sound: "Dohwnn... dohwnn." "Don't rush us," Dolph said, peering dubiously into the opening. "All right, so this is where we were going -- but suddenly I'm in no hurry." "Me either," Nanette agreed. "It's pitch black in there, after the sunlight gives out -- and it slants down." "There's a turn just beyond where Dohmn is sitting, too. What do you make of these carvings, Nanette?" The girl studied the pillars. "Not very much. They're pretty worn. They seem to be written in columns, like Chinese -- or like numbers." "Which doesn't tell us anything, I'm afraid. We can't even guess whether the characters are alphabetletters or pictographs. But what I meant was, do you think somebody like Dohmn could have made them?" "N-n-no," Nanette said slowly. "They're too small. I don't see how those big paws of his could have done such delicate work," "I agree. So now we're up against creature or creatures unknown. Do we take the chance?" Nanette contemplated the enigmatic tunnel somberly. At last she said: "Well... whether we like it or not, isn't this what we came to see." Dolph donned the earphones and listened for a moment. The beacon was louder than it had ever been before. "Fm afraid it is," he said. "All right, Dohmn. Here we come." T he darkness in the tunnel was absolute after the first turn. They could proceed only by holding onto the straps of the dune-cat's pack. He seemed to be in no doubt about where he was going, however, and pressed ahead as rapidly as they could walk. The bend continued, modifying itself gradually into a long smooth curve. After a while, Dolph was almost sure that they were going back the way they had come -- but on a much lower level, for the downward slant that Nanette had noticed was continuous. Shortly, the descent became steeper. The floor of the tunnel was still smooth, which was fortunate, for in the blackness the slightest uregularity would have caused a stumble. With nothing to see and no notion of what was ahead of them, the inhuman, steady yowling in the earphones was almost too eerie to bear. Nor was it possible, deprived of the sun, to guess at the passage of time. Already it seemed as though they had been sinking  into the ground for hours. Curiously, the air around them did not seem to be colder; in fact, Dolph thought, the temperature had gone up a little. After another indefinitely long period, he was sure of it. On a venture, he took off one glove and reached out -- very tentatively -- for the nearer wall. He snatched his fingers back as soon as he encountered it, but the expected searing flash of frostbite did not follow. The wall was far from warm, but he judged that its surface temperature could not be much below freezing. He realized suddenly that it had also felt abnormally smooth, almost silky; and rubbing his fingertips together, he was astonished to find that they were wet. Donning the glove hastily, he stamped and listened to the quality of the sound. It was distinctly changed. "at it is?" Nanette whispered, tugging at his belt. "The texture's different, somehow. We're not going through rock any more." "What, then?" "I'm not sure, but I think it's ice. And it's warmer here." IF "Do you think we're under the Lake?" "That's my guess." He slipped slightly and righted himself. "That's ice underfoot, sure enough. I wish we had a light -- now'd be our chance to find out how thick the aquasphere is." "If we keep on going down like this," Nanette said, "we'll wind up under it." "Yes, if the pressure doesn't close the tunnel up first. There's a warm draft here -- wonder if that helps keep it open?" Dohmn growled slightly and tugged. "All right, all right." Almost immediately, however, the tunnel walls began to retreat; and so -- judging by the echoes -- did its roof. While Dolph was still puzzling over what this might portend, his straining eyes detected a faint glow, seemingly in the very air around them at first, but brightening with each new step until they could see that it came from above. The first impression was that they had come out again, under a dim, overcast sky; but that of course was impossible. It was the roof that was glowing,, enormously far above them. "Oh, Dolph! Look!" He needed no urging. As they rounded a last bend, the ground sloped away before them, and at their feet there stretched out the dream-like ruins of a silent, entombed city. O r was it waiting to be born? The air was warm, moist and thick, almost like an Earthly fog -- and there was enough oxygen in it to breathe, for metabolisms slowed by the elixir. The city lay bathed in greenish-gray light, cast across it by the over-arching Lake, which concentrated the distant weak sunlight like a lens. Dolph took off his mask and earphones and drew a deep, solemn breath. Nanette clung to his hand. The stillness was profoxmd and made all the more marked by a fara sound so awesome on this dry little planet that it almost suggested some supernatural presence. The buildings of the city were tall, slender and widely spaced. Cut from some immemorial crystal which showed not the slightest age or wear, the transparent shapes towered like a convocation of thin ghosts -- or like many droplets of topaz, balanced impossibly upon their narrow ends, their long facets unflashing in the even fill of the light. Dohmn had stopped, standing erect, silent and motionless as a statue. Inside the clear walls of the city, nothing moved; yet it did not seem dead. Here under all the sand and ice of Mars, it spoke silently for a deep-buried stratum of life -- a biosphere, a sheltering place for whatever unknown powers had built this principality and might still rule it... The dune-cat made a soft sighing sound and, dropping back to all fours, padded away down a wide avenue -- or was it a plaza? There was no time left to speculate or to sightsee; now that he was once more in motion, Dohmn went rapidly. It was IF odd to see how much at home he seemed here, as though the city were only an extension of the silence of the desert. Here, however, the prosaic Earthly pack between his shoulders was ugly; it did not belong to this underworld of silent sky-high jewels. The doorless towers flowed by. Here and there, fugitive glitters and knots of light shone and vanished behind their clear dark sides, like the essences of machines also cut from crystal and remembered from a dream. Dolph lifted one earphone. The sound of the beacon still went on inside it, insistent and unchanged, but somehow it did not seem disturbing any more. It reminded him, instead, of some long aria, like that song the Sirens sang in Homer. The strident overtones which had sounded so inhuman before were still there, but now they were all too human -- distortions of the pure melody introduced by the earphones themselves. The avenue continued to broaden, as though the crystal towers were drawing aloofly away from the three little figures who were following that thread of song into their labyrinth. At the trail's end, the adamant pavement swooped suddenly away from the level of the road into a great pool of light, where the lens of Lacus Solis came to a focus: a marble-white amphitheater, with a perfect paraboloid floor which reflected the light back up against the icy sky in an almost solid-looking column. "Dohwnn," Dohmn said. They went down carefully, crossing terraces which were too large to be steps, too small to be stone benches. At the very center of the depression there was another crystal structure, like a box set on end on a stone dais; it was perhaps fifteen feet high. Inside it was a throne. Someone or something was seated on it. The figure was not easy to see, for the crystal case seemed to be filled with some dimly sparkling fluid It wias itaM and not manMce, suggesting rather a serpent or worm with a cluster of six or eight small arms near the head end. On the whole, Dolph was just as glad he could see it no better. Then it spoke. T here was no visible motion of the figure in the case, but a deep voice rolled slowly through the amphitheater. Dolph guessed that it was amplified. It seemed to have no specific source. "You are the Earthmen," it said in perfect English. "Our dune rover has done well: rrlr-ahmn-oh-ohrr, Dohnm. Please come closer, so my machines may sense you better." The two stepped closer hesitantly. "Who are you?" Dolph said. "I no longer have a name," the voice said. "You might well call me the one who sleeps. I am the last master of the city." "How do you know who we are?" Dolph said. "And speak our language?" "Oh, as to language," the sleeper said, "I know all Earthly languages, except for some minor dialects. All your radio broadcasts reach Mars plainly. As for yourselves, I heard your interference pattern and deduced your presence, as I assume you had planned." "Yes," Dolph said. "We were hopbig somebody would eventually respond." "Not possible. My signal is only a beacon and mechanical, intended to guide others of my race to this city. As you can see, we were a burrowing people. But today it sees only as a life-signal, to announce that I am still alive. "I have heard no other such for many years, so it is probahie that I am the last." "Did you send Dohnm, then?" Nanette asked. "No, sir," the sleeper said, revealing with that one word how great an information gap still existed between itself and its visitors. "The dune rovers are free agents, though once they were to us rather as your dogs are to you. They are now the coming race here -- provided of course that you will help them, as one creature of light to another. I so charge you." "We're not doing too well at helping ourselves at the moment," Dolph said. "That will change. After all, you are only the first of many men. Quarry our cities for whatever is there that you may need. It is your inheritance... I have waited a thousand of my years to bequeath it." "Then you can't help us now?" Nanette said. "No. My people are already dead, IF or deep in dreams from which we shall not awaken any more. But your people are coming -- indeed, are nearly above us now." "What! But how -- " "They are on their way; I have heard them. We give you our world. Use it wdl and love od guide our dohmnimi, who desed the best from us." "I hope we will," Dolph said, shaken. "But we're sort of a predatory race -- " "Yes, you are young. Otherwise you would not have managed to come here. But the dohmnimi are wise in their own half-savage way. If you abuse them, they will avoid you. If you seek their friendship, they will give you much. The choice is yours; but you will never wholly possess high and ancient Mars without their good will. They have already offered you that, freely, when you were in most need of it. Will you forget?" "No," Dolph said, "We won't forget. I promise." "Then my dream ends here. Go now. Your people are at hand. All Praise to That Which Dreams and never ceases; I can sleep now. Goodby, dohmn and men." The voice ceased -- and so, Dolph realized suddenly, did the signal in the earphones. There was a long, terrible silence; and then, a low hoarse sound which Dolph would remember all his life. It was the funeral keening of the dune-cat, mourning the passing of old Mars. Overhead, the new Mars waited expectantly. XV Something had gone out of the  dty when they passed back through it. The topaz flanks of the towers were dim and lusteiless, and there were no longer any lights behind them. Even the air seemed colder. bluehlack night, not to from dawn. Had they really been underground that long? But obviously they had. Beyond the stone pillars, the dunecat paused and looked up at the stars. Then, suddenly, he pointed. At first, Dolph thought he was indicating the racing spark of Phobos. While he watched it in puzsdement, he realized that Phobos should not be visible from this latitude at this hour -- and at the same moment, antly, like a tiny candle. Behind it, two more flares licked out and died again. Nanette gasped. "Ships!" Dolph shouted. "Quick, quick -- the beacon's stopped -- we've got to start our generator!" They scrambled wildly up the terraces. By the time they reached their camp, the sparks were long vanished over the half-circumscribed horizon. Dolph got his signal going again with shaking hands -- this time not to attract Martian attention, but Terrestial. Then they settled down to wait, wondering if they had dreamed everything that had happened since they had left their remote oasis -- now almost cozy in memory, with the loss of any hope of help from the dead or dreaming Sleeper to get them back to it. Even the morning apparently was never going to come. But after a freezing eternity the sun shot up over the rim of the Lake with its customary abruptness -- there was no real dawn on Mars, only an unceremonious blast of sunlight in a still-black sky -- and the thin wind whirled the sand in spirals over the outspread ice. Still isbelieving, they watched the sky until their eyes ached and watered behind the masks. N anette saw the skiff first. It grew from a black dot low in the sky to a thing like a thin bat and then rapidly into a preposterous kitelike contraption with enormous, swept-back vanes which seemed only barely able to keep its needle-slim fuselage airborne. It came skimming down along the Lake to a seemingly certain crash and disappeared in a roaring ball of fire which plowed a deepening trench all the way across the ice to the near ringwall. When the fire went out, the skiffs sails were stripped and crumpled behind it like so many wadded newspapers abandoned in its track. Its body, however, was miraculously intact, though half imbedded in the surface of the Lake. "Oh, Delphi How could anybody live through that?" "People are tough," Dolph said, smiling tightly. "Let's go see them. I think they'll be surprised!" They descended the terraces again, with Dohnm loping easily behind. While they went down, the dart cooled with shrill squeaks of metal against ice, and after a while a beehive on its top turned around solemnly three times and fell off with a muted clang. A man in full space armor struggled out and slid clumsily down tc the Lake, wrestling with a U.N. flag on a long metal spread which kept trying to trip him; evidently he had not expected any such buffeting as the morning wind was giving him. When he was sure of his f opting, he planted the flag in the ice with a stab almost as angry as it was ceremonious. By the time he looked up again, the two ragged castaways and the mottled, spectacularly dangerouslooking dune-cat were grinning at him from a distance of only five or six yards. He simply froze inside his elaborate armor. Under his bubble helmet, his honest, craggy hero's face was a study in disbelief and chagrin. Dolph stepped forward and held out his hand, pulling Nanette along with him. The spaceman retreated one elephantine step and then stood fast. Then his public-address box squawked and cleared its throat. "Are you -- " he said, "are you Miss Ford and Master Haertel?" Nanette laughed, which seemed to upset him even more, but Dolph said gravely: "Yes, we are. And this is Dohmn, the present Jeddak of Barsoom. Welcome to Mars, Earthman!" The Earthman made a truly memorable answering speech. He said: "Ulp." IF O ne of the great ships of the Ares fleet came down the next day in a fury of smoke, sand and steam, in response to a terse call from the skiff, and Dolph and Nanette were taken aboard. The subsequent catechism was an involved one. Dolph could not remember having been asked so many questions since he had taken his college board exams. Gradually, however, he and Nanette were able to piece together a picture of what had happened on Earth that had finally brought Project Ares here -- finally, and yet far sooner than they had ever had any reason to expect. Some of the story was political or diplomaitic and hence seemed likely to remain permanently unclear. Though the Gold War had long been over, the governmental habit of "security" had never been entirely extirpated. That part had something to do with Dolph's invention and with a complex maneuver by some corporation research director ing for Mars far ahead of its cobwebbed schedule. Also involved, it appeared, was some adaptation of Dolph's discovery which had led to a vastly improved form of ion-drive for spaceships -- hence the unprecedented maneuverability of the rebuilt von Braun and her two sister ships; but this part of the story was especially unclear, since none of the vague references to the new drive suggested to Dolph that his antigravity principle was even understood, let alone contributory. The skiff pilot's astonishment, on the other hand, proved to be entirely easy to understand. He had been told to more than half expect to find "the children" alive, for Dolph's jamming signal and the Sleeper's beacon had been heard aboard the von Braun while she was still six months away from planetfall; but though the two signals had heterodyned into one, so that no source for the absurdly complicated noise could be plotted on a map of Mars, the expedition's navigator and commander had gone on assuming that Dolph and Nanette -- or whichever of them might still be alive -- were to be sout in the Sinus Sabaeus area for which Dolph's charts had shown him to have set out. The sudden transformation of the signal into a simpler one, easily pinpointed in Lacus Solis half a hemisphere away from where Dolph and Nanette were supposed to be -- and this, almost at the very moment that the three Ares ships were settling into their parking orbits around Mars -- had baffled everyone, and there had been a sharp argument over whether or not to risk sacrificing the one-shot skiff (which had been designed for a long slow mapping sweep of the planet at a lower altitude than the three spaceships could maintain, not for a hot landing inside a narrow boundary) to the hope of solving a mystery which close approach to Mars had made more mysterious than ever. But the decision had been made at last, for some reason which the von Brauns officers would not explain at all, but which made them snicker in stifled voices every time they thought of it, like so many children who knew where the Christmas presents were hidden and were having a hard time trying to look innocent. Every time that interesting secret was approached, the questions veered off into wholly expectable quizzing about Mars -- and about Dohmn, who had evidently given the skiffs pilot a bad shock. Finally, Dolph cut off the questioning himself. "Dohmn is all right. He's been a big help, and I'm sorry I made a joke about him to begin with -- I should have known it would just confuse everybody. He's a member of the new ruling race here, that's all, and a friend of ours. But look here. Captain -- we're glad to see you, of course, but -- what is it you're keeping from us?" "Nothing to be alarmed about," the skipper said hastily, but he could not quite stop smiling. "Just one more interview. We want you to talk to the mission's bacteriologist." "Do you think we're carrying some sort of Martian mold?" Nanette demanded. "Why, we haven't been sick a minute since we got here. Not sneezing sick, I mean. Just undernourished and things like that." The commander laughed outright. "No, nothing like that. But it's not up to me to explain. Lieutenant Gulliver, will you take our visitors to the xenology lab?" When the laboratory bulkhead swung back and Dolph and Nanette stepped through it, the last mystery explained itself. The expedition's bacteriologist was Mrs. Haertel -- Dolph's mother. XTothing the least bit unpredictable was said for quite a while; but after the first flurries of surprise and joy, Dolph found that he was feeling a little strange. His mother looked older than he had expected and markedly thinner. He was reminded that these years must have brought her an ordeal of her own. It was Nanette, however, who first put the feeling into words. "We're very sorry, Mrs. Haertel," she said. "It was stupid and thoughtless of us, shooting off like that and causing so much worry and trouble." "It doesn't matter now," Mrs. Haertel said. "I knew all along that you were alive, somehow. You were a little hasty, but you were far from stupid -- otherwise you wouldn't have survived. I suppose the whole thing, bad and good, couldn't have happened the way it did if you'd been older. Your various failures of foresight were just what anyone would expect from teen-agers -- but on the other hand, once you were here, you saw direct, simple, unorthodox solutions to a lot of your problems that would have escaped an adult completely, even an engineer, because his mind would have been too thoroughly set in the conventional grooves." She smiled suddenly. "In fact, you got the fleet to Mars, between your precipitousness and Dolph's discovery. Nobody your age had made so much history since the Children's Crusade -- and what you did was a lot more useful! It isn't over yet, either. There's that business of the elixir, which may be the one thing IF that makes true colonization possible, that, and your dealings with the Old Martian, and much more -- why, you're the resident experts on the planet!" "We didn't do much exploring," Dolph said regretfully. "We couldn't." "No matter. You'll probably be spending the rest of your lives leading expeditions, now that we've got more equipment here. Unless, of course, you let us sidetrack you into being colonial governors or some other such administrative job." Mrs. Haertel paused and looked at them critically. "Though there's one oversight we'd better repair right away, before the newspapers get hold of this story. You'd better get Captain Friedman to marry you, before he's too busy to pin down about it." Dolph shot a helpless glance at Nanette, but she only grinned impudently and offered no help. He said: "Married! Not that I'd mind -- I mean, I think it's a great idea if Nanette -- that is, if you don't think that -- I mean, we're not exactly -- " Nanette said, with the barest trace of malice, " think he thinks he's too young. Besides, he hasn't asked me yet. For all he knows, I might be much more interested in Dohmn." "Dohmn?" "The dune-cat," Dolph said, feeling that the conversation was now utterly out of control. "Oh, nonsense. Dolph, it's a little late in the game for you to be gunshy. If you doubt me, I've got a witness. Look over there." For some time, Dolph had been marginally aware that there was someone else in the cabin: a tall man standing opposite him, behind his mother and well in the background. Now, for the first time, he looked closely at the silent shape. H e saw a bearded figure, dressed like Nanette and himself in fresh green Space Force fatigues. His expression was hard to read behind aJl the whiskers, but his gaze was level and probing. Judging by his color and stance, he had spent many years out in hard weather; he looked lean and competent. "Anybody you know?" Mrs. Haertel said softly. "I don't -- " Dolph started to say and then stopped, for as he spoke, the stranger spoke too. He said exactly the same words. He was, in fact, only a reflection in the polished metal of the von Brauns hull. The tall man was Dolph himself. It had been that many years since he had seen a mirror. Dolph took Nanette's hand and bowed solemnly to the image. "How do you do, Mr. and Mrs. Haertel," he said solemnly. "And --  Coming next month in If!  ZZ They came from Elsewhen, with news S  of a tomorrow that shattered the lives  n of the men and women who lived todayl S  by J. T. McIntosh   The long-awaited return of one of our S  favorite writers with a stirring novelette S  by Gordon R. Dickson  " First of a fascinating new group of stories S E by Larry Niven  E Lin Carter  A. Bertram Chandler  and many more S IF Dear Editor: I am writing this letter in answer to the question posed in your June editorial, viz,... bearing in mind that light itself has mass; it is deflected by gravitational fields, just like an orbiting rock -- what happens when light travels at light speeds?" Well, bearing in mind that I may not be at all qualified to write on this subject (I believe that I may be hopelessly out of date), I shall forge ahead. When I first read the above stated question, I thought, "Of course, how obvious. Light has a rest mass of zero!" But, heh heh, doubts began to slyly insinuate themselves. "Light is deflected by a gravitational field." So I was forced (hating every minute of it) to go to my books. One of thd reasons for my trepidation was immediately apparent when I ran lacross a passage like this: "The energy of the photon is proportional to the frequency of the field. But energy of a particle is the time component of a four-vector with space components proportional to the momentum of the particle, and the frequency is the time component of a four-vector with space components proportional to the wave number (reciprocal of the wave length) of the wave." (From Methods of Theoretical Physics, by Morse and Feshbach, McGraw-Hill, #. Sounds like something Frank Herbert might write, doesn't it?) There was one last recourse to easy truth. I tried to think of what my old physics professor might say. I visualized him as he was, a saintly old man, always on the verge of retirement, a kind of cross between Albert Einstein and Albert Sdiweitzer -- strong in his quest for truth! (You took that course too, eh?) I could see his lips moving, but I couldn't hear him. (He spoke softly and I sat in the back of the class.) Ah, well, back to the hard way. I think the easiest thing to do is to let the path .that a beam of light (a packet of photons) would take be a straight line. "That straight line's curved, professor." "Back, dummkopf! That's a straight line!" So, then, "space must be curved" to account for this hypothesis. Is that so strange, though? We know of "bending of a "straight" path by the movement of stars when the path is near the surface of the sun. Consider a sheet of some elastic substance stretched out flat. Place a rather heavy object in the center of the sheet. Now roll a ball so that it will pass near the center and fast enoug-h that it will reach the other side. The path of the ball is of course, curved. "But," you say, "this is just an analogy to gravitation." Yes, it is. That is exactly what it is. And the ball is a photon, a "bundle" of "waves". Well then, consider a light "massless" string laid out along the floor with a curve in it. Flip the end of the string to start a pulse moving. When th pulse reaches the curve, the peak of the pulse will lean out away from the direction of the curve! The pulse seems to be undergoing an acceleration ! It wants to move in a straight path I Well, the pulse is not undergoing an acceleration; the pulse has no mass, and any mass a real string would have is simply going up and down. The seeming ac#eleration is due to forces pulling the pulses into a new line, but these forces act on a massless pulse. Suppose you plotted the path of the peak of the pulse as it moves along the curved path. Now bend the X axis so that it fits the curve of the string. A similar orientation of the Y axis will take care of the sloping of the pulse as it rounds the curve. You now have the pulse moving in a "straight line". You may attribute a "momentum" to this pulse; a momentum proportional to its energy where its energy is proportional to the frequency of the wave, but it must be remembered that in the case of the photon this momentum is a result of considerations of wave-particle duality. No, I can't say what happens when light travels at light speed, and I don't have any sort of positive conviction that what I have just said is any where near the truth. I haven't any idea what is meant by massless momentum; and I have the awful feeling that what I have just belabored is ridiculous. Box #, College Station, Texas #.    # There we are, filled up tight for another month. Our "first" this month is The Empty Man by Gardner Raymond Dozois (whose writing time, for the next little while at least, will be preempted by other calls -- he's just entered the army). We do print one "first" story each issue, you know -- which proves (a) that we do read all the unsolicited manuscripts submitted, because that's where we find them, and (b) that writing science-fiction is not yet a dead art form! See you next month, when we'll have a lineup that includes A. Bertram Chandler, J. T. McIntosh, Gordon R. Dickson and (speaking of "firsts") one of our most pleasing graduates from that status, Larry Niven, with the first in a group of stories (not exactly a series -- they won't all have the same characters, etc.) that we are pretty sure will be well liked indeed. It's about a neutron star. You can tell that right away from the title -- Neutron Star -- and it's that recent rarity, science fiction. -- The Editor IF # First Year W Security-Prestige "In our first calendar year we did a gross of #. Without constant help from the Duraclean home office such growth never would have been possible." p,# in One Month ' 'z: J. F. A. Texas # for # Hours Work "I have done hotels, studios, restaurants and churches. That is where the big money is. Example : One Saturday, # in #I hours. Monday, # in # hours. I have also contracted to clean # square feet of carpet for a store for #." G. F. Wisconsin JobI H. P. Ohio # Job Finisjd in one day "I did the Sorority House in one ' day for #. This business Is in its infancy." H. L. B. Texas hundreds of others -- got started in this Big Money business. Send for your copy now. Let me give you the same start I gave these men! In one way, the big earnings reported here might be called exceptional. In another way, there is nothing exceptional about them. That's because any man who will follow instructions and is business should be able to do as well under similar conditions. Each of the men quoted here had talents and abilities different from those of alb the rest. But each had one thing in common -- a desire to win personal inde)endence in a business of his own. And each man took five identical steps to reach his goal. #. Each one read an announcement such as you are reading now. #, He wrote for complete information. #. He read the literature we sent him. #. He gained new confidence in himself and the belief that he could succeed with Duraclean. #. He accepted our offer to help him get started. Later, he wrote to tell us about his success. In each case, remember, the first step was to write to Duraclean for information. If you would like to own a business of your own, why don't you do as these men did -- right now. When I hear from you, I will send you facts about the Duraclean Franchise that will open your eyes. You will see why a Franchise business such as ours makes success for the individual the rule rather than the exception. The Duraclean home service business has been tried and tested. The market for Duraclean Service is tremendous -- and growing. The methods that lead to success have been clearly charted. When an ambitious man follows these methods, success is the logical result. Some Franchise businesses require investments as high as #. With ours, you can get started for a few hundred dollars and we finance the balance. Monthly payments are so small that the profits on less than one day's service can cover your payment for the entire month. Even with this small investment and operating as a one man business, your potential is # a week net profit. With two men working for you # hours a week, you should gross a profit of #. Allowing # for advertising and incidentals, the net would amount to #. The most imixirtant part of Duraclean home service is cleaning rugs,' carpets and upholstered furniture by a revolutionary modern process known as the "Absorption Method." You do the work right in the customer's premises. No harsh scrubbing with motor-driven brushes. No soaking. Instead, an aerated foam loosens the dirt and holds it in suspension until removed. A test conducted by an impartial laboratory showed that the modern Absorption Method removed twice as much dirt as was removed by old fashioned machine scrubbing. If you are tired of working for others or of jumping from one proposition to another -- if you have a real yearning for independence in a business of your own -- then send for "The Duraclean Route to Success." There is no obligation -- no charge. No salesmen will call to high pressure you. Send for the book now. Read it. Then if you want to take the next step toward independence, you can write to me and let me give you the same help I've given so many other successful men. Dear Mr. Mauk; Please mail a copy of your Free Book that tells how I can get a Duraclean Franchise started in spare time without giving up my present income. No charge. No obligation. And no salesman is to call on me. Natl Add ress City Slat# Zip Cod Official Rand McNally Map taken from ac'tual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed #l" x Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. WORLDS OF # ? by J.l McIntosh Official Rand McNally Map taken from actual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed ##" x Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Prodvcfion Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subscription Mgr. by Larry Niven by Joseph P. Martino by Ernest Hill by Gordon R. Dickson by J. T. McIntosh by A. Bertram Chandler by Michael Walker by Rachel Cosgrove Payes by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U. S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N. Y. #. IF  Editorial M urray Leinster was in the office the other day to talk about stories. So we talked about them (and hope to be bringing you some of the results of the talk shortly) ; after which the conversation turned to the business which had brought Leinster to New York. He had been talking patent releases with a large corporation. The patent was his own. It seems that some years ago one of Leinsters stories was being adapted for a television program and, visiting on the lot, Leinster noticed an awful lot of activity going on in putting up and breaking down sets. Turned out, that studio alone was spending an amount in five figures every week -- not to build new sets, but just to truck old ones back and forth between the warehouse and the studio as needed. That struck Leinster as rather a waste. It was just background, after all. If you photographed it once, it should stay photographed... So he went home and designed an optical system to make it possible to retain the backgrounds without all the bother of having them physically present all the time... and the royalties from that are one reason why you dont see as many Leinster stories as you used to any more. Which started your editor thinking. P hotographing sets once instead of a hundred times js a fine saving, no doubt. But look. You dont really want the sets at all in the long run, do you? All you want is an image of the sets. For that matter, you donT really want props -- or actors. Maybe you don't even need cameras. In order to give your television audience an hour's amusement (or addicted boredom, which is more like it) , you only need to make sure that a finite number of phosphor spots on the inside of a cathods tube sparkle in the proper order. That's all that goes on now, of course. It happens that the electron gun that makes the phosphors sparkle is programmed by a video camera, which in turn is programmed by scanning live actors on a live set. But still... Each point of light on the TV tube is still just a point of light. It's either on or off. That's all. (Not counting color television, where the signal in the set specifies "chrominance" as well as "luminance" -- but let's not bother about color for a moment.) There are about # active phosphor spots on each line of an American tube. You could write that line as a binary number. Let "#" be on; look who's smiling "The department head's job had just been left vacant. When the boys in the office learned t was gunning for it, they gave me their widest grins. One thing they didn't know: I had made up my mind sometime back to take LaSalle M training that would qualify me for a better job.  My study paid off so fast it surprised even me I was picked for that shiny promotion overevery one's head. Who wouldn't be smiling with a neat new # increase!" story from LaSalle graduates who have rapidly climbed the ladder of success. You, too, can qualify for the career Opportunity of your choice through LaSalle home study -- without interfering with your present work -- and by devoting only # little of your spare time. LaSalle has been an acknowledged leader in home education for more than half a century. It has enrolled more than # ambitious men and women in its many types of training courses. LaSalle's distinguished faculty includes some of the country's foremost practicing specialists and instrucfors. That's why your training is in good, experienced hands... why your LaSalle diploma will be respected by employers. Mailing the LaSalle coupon below may be the first step in getting a better job, higher pay, and all of the good things that go with success. Simply check the program in which you are interested, and we will send you a valuable free btwklet describing the opportunities in that field. Mail the coupon to LaSalle, # South Dearborn Q Complete Accounting O Cenergl Accounting (# Income Tax Q'jkccounting Pundomentoh Q Auditing G Controllerthip Q Modern Bookkeeping Q-Compieta Butlneu Management # Credit and Collection! G Office Management Q Personnel Management G Butineu Corretpondenc# G Bachelor of Lawi Degree G Buiineu law Q Insurance law G Claim Adjusting law G low for Police Officer! O law for Trust Officer! Q Sales Management O Complete Soles Troining G Basic Drofting G Aeronautical Drafting G Architectural Drafting G Electrical Drafting Q Mechanical Drafting G Structural Drafting G Complete Reol Estate G Reol Estote Brokerage G'keal Estate Management G keal Estate Soles Q Complete Troffic MgK Q Tronsportotion low G Rotes and Tariffs G Motor Truck Traffic Q High School Diploma G Mechontegl Refrigeration  Dental Assistont  AlrOondttionfng, QiSecmiarfal Refrigeration Q AceounfHig and Heating  Boetlltaeptrig  Diesel QRealEstat Name c   Age ...CDonty ZfpNo. Occupation . Vorkiitg Botirs... ,AM, . PJtf. Addrest Csty State... let #" be off. A stringof # ls would mean every one of those spots would be on. A binary number like #... # would mean the first spot is on, the second off, the third off, the fourth on... up to the last two being off. (Write the missing # digits to please yourself -- we don't have room!) That takes care of one line ; there are # lines to a frame. Well, write each line separately. It takes # binary digits to describe the whole picture -- but it is still just a number. And yet that number can represent anything a television screen can show, from Chet Huntley announcing the end of the world to Lassie preventing it from happening. That's all a television picture is, you see; a binary number. The only thing wrong with the picture is that it's a snapshot. It doesn't move. But that's easily enough solved. Erase the picture -- actually, you don't have to; the decay time of the phosphor is carefully planned so that it will erase itself as necessary. Write a new one. Write thirty new ones and run them one after another, and you have a full second of actual animated activity on the tube -- total size of the numbers you have written, now Just short of From there on its just multiplicagives you twenty-four hours of programming, or more than you get on any but a few eccentric stations in the world each day. Of course, you may want it in color, which adds a problem. How much of a problem depends on what system of color television you are using and how you elect to encode it; but you could do it by simply tripling the number of digits. You stiy only have to write one unique number each day, and out of it comes the morning news, the housewives' exercise hour, the quiz shows, the sports events, the comics and the singers, the panel shows and the documentaries... and all the little commercials as well. Nothing hard about writing one number a day, is there? Even if the number chances to be slightly A ctually it might not be as hard as you think. Between the #, # digits in any given frame and the # digits in the one that follows it a thirtieth of a second later, there isn't really a great deal of change -- and what change there is is reasonably systematic. I.e., can be programmed into a computer. And think what you'd save! Production costs on a single TV hour can those little one-minute commercials can cost tens of thousands -- and go on costing thousands in residuals, every time they're used. But your computer-generated binary number wouldn't expect residuals. Computtice. And when you get around to sending royalty checks, please make them out to -- IF IF  Nov elette If was the kind of star so tiny but massive that it trapped even light. Now it trapped even me! I T he Skydiver dropped out of miles above the neutron star. I needed' a minute to place myself against the stellar background and another to find the distortion Sonya Laskin had mentioned before she died. It was to my left, an area the apparent size of the Earth's moon. I swung the ship around to face it. Curdled stars, muddled stars, stars that had been stirred with a spoon. The neutron star was in the center, of course, though I couldn't see it and hadn't expected to. It was only eleven miles across, and cool. lions of years, at least, since the cataclysmic two weeks during which grees Kelvin. Now it showed only by its mass. The ship began to turn by itself. I felt the pressure of the fusion drive. Without help from me, my faithful metal watchdog was putting me in hyjperbolic orbit that would take me Within one mile of the neutron star's surface. Twenty-four hours to fall, twenty-four hours to rise... and during that time, something would try to kill me. As something had killed the Laskins. The same type of autopilot, with the same program, had chosen the Laskins' orbit. It had not caused their ship to collide with the star. I could trust the autopilot. I could even change its program. I really ought to. How did I get myself into this hole? The drive went off after ten minutes of maneuvering. My orbit was established, in more , ways than one. I knew what would happen if I tried to back out now. All I'd done was walk into a drugstore to get a new battery for my lighter! R ight in the middle of the store, surrounded by three floors of sales counters, was the new # Sinclair intrasystem yacht. I'd come for a battery, but I stayed to admire. It was a beautiful job, small and sleek and streamlined and blatantly different from anything that's ever been built. I wouldn't have flown it for anything, but I had to admit it was pretty. I ducked my head through the door to look at the control panel. You never saw so many dials. When I pulled my head out, all the customers were looking in the same direction. The place had gone startlingly quiet. I can't blame them for staring. A numiber of aliens were in the store. mainly shopping for souvenirs, but they were staring too. A puppeteer is unique. Imagine a headless, threelegged centaur wearing two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on his arms, and you'll have something like the right picture. But the arms are weaving necks, and the puppets are real heads, flat and brainless, with wide flexible lips. The brain is under a bony hump set between the bases of the necks. This puppeteer wore only its own coat of brown hair, with a mane that extended all the way up its spine to form a thick mat over the brain. I'm told that the way they wear the mane indicates their status in society, but to me it could have been anything from a dock worker to a jeweler to the president of General Products. I watched with the rest as it came across the floor, not because I'd never seen a puppeteer, but because there is something beautiful about the dainty way they move on those slender legs and tiny hooves. I watched it come straight toward me, closer and closer. It stopped a foot away, looked me over and said, "You are Beowulf Shaeffer, former chief pilot for Nakamura Lines." Its voice was a beautiful contralto with not a trace of accent. A puppeteer's mouths are not only the most flexible speech organs around, but also the most sensitive hands. The tongues are forked and pointed, the wide, thick lips have little fingerlike knobs along the rims. Imagine a watchmaker with a sense of taste in his fingertips... I cleared my throat. "That's right." It consider me from two direcIF tions. "You would be interested in a high-paying job?" "I'd be fascinated in a high-paying job." "I am our equivalent of the regional president of General Products. Please come with me, and we will discuss this elsewhere." I followed it into a displacement 'booth. Eyes followed me all the way. It was embarrassing, being accosted in a public drugstore by a two-headed monster. Maybe the puppeteer knew it. Maybe it was testing me to see how badly I needed money. My need was great. Eight months had passed since Nakamura Lines folded. For some time before that, I had been living very high on the hog, knowing that my back pay would cover by debts. I never saw that back pay. It was quite a crash, Nakamura Lines. Respectable middle-aged businessmen took to leaving their hotel windows without their lift belts. Me, I kept spending. If I'd started living frugally, my creditors would have done some checking... and I'd have ended in debtor's prison. The puppeteer dialed thirteen fast digits with its tongue. A moment later we .were elsewhere. Air puffed out when I opened the booth door, and I swallowed to pop my ears. "We are on the roof of the General Products building." The rich contralto voice thrilled along my nerves, and I had to remind myself that it was an alien speaking, not a lovely woman. "You must examine this spacecraft while we discuss your assignment." I stepped outside a little cautiously, but it wasn't the windy season. The roof was at ground level. That's the way we build on We Made It. Maybe it has something to do with the fifteen-hundred-mile-anhour winds we get in summer and winter, when the planet's axis of rotation runs through its primary, Procyon. The winds are our planet's only tourist attraction; and it would be a shame to slow them down by planting skyscrapers in their path. The bare, square concrete roof was surrounded by endless square miles of desert, not like the deserts of other inhabited worlds, but an utterly lifeless expanse of fine sand just crying to be planted with ornamental cactus. We've tried that. The wind blows the plants away. The ship lay on the sand beyond the roof. It was a ## General Products hull: a cylinder three hundred feet long and twenty feet through, pointed at both ends and with a slight wasp-waist constriction near the tail. For some reason it was lying on its side, with the landing shocks still folded in at the tail. Ever notice how all ships have begun to look the same? A good ninety-five percent of today's spacecrafts are built around one of the four General Products hulls. It's easier and safer to build that way, but somehow all ships end as they began: mass-produced look-alikes. The hulls are delivered fully transparent, and you use paint where you feel like it. Most of this particular hull had been left transparent. Only the nose had been painted, around the lifesystem. There was no major reaction drive. A series of #   retractable attitude jets had been mounted in the sides, and the hull was pierced with smaller holes, square and round -- for observational instruments. I could see them gleaming through the hull. T he puppeteer was moving" toward the nose, but something made me turn toward the stern for a closer look at the landing shocks. They were bent. Behind the curved, transparent hull panels, some tremendous pressure had forced the metal to flow like warm wax, back and into the pointed stern. "What did this?" I asked. "We do not know. We wish strenuously to find out." "Wat do you mean?" "Have you heard of the neutrbn I had to think a moment. "First neutron star ever found, and so far the only. Someone located it two years ago by stellar displacement." of Knowledge on Jinx. We learned through a go-between that the Institute wished to explore the star. They needed a ship to do it. They had not yet sufficient money. We offered to supply them with a ship's hull, with the usual guarantees, if they would turn over to us all data they acquired through using our ship." "Sounds fair enough." I didn't ask why they hadn't done their own exploring. Like most sentient vegetarians, puppeteers find descretion to be the only part of valor. 'Two humans named Peter Laskin and Sonya Laskin wished to use the ship. They intended to oome within one mile of the surface in a hyperbolic orbit. At some point during their trip, an unknown force apparently reached through the hull to do this to the landing shocks. The unknown force also seems to have killed the pilots." "But that's impossible. Isn't it?" "You see the pK)int. Come with me." The puppeteer trotted toward the bow. I saw the point, all right. Nothing, but nothing can get through a General Products hull. No kind of electromagnetic energy except 'visible light. No kind of matter, from the smallest subatomic particle to the fastest meteor. That's what the company's advertisements claim, and the guarantee backs theni up. I've never doubted it, and I've never heard of a General Products hull being damaged by a weapon or by anything else. On the other hand, a General Products hull is as ugly as it is functional. The puppeteer-owned company could be badly hurt if it got around that something could get through a company hull. But I didn't see where I came in. We rode an escalladder into the nose. The lifesystem was in two compartments Here the Laskins had used heat-reflective paint. In the conical control cabin the hull had been divided into windows. The relaxation room behind it was a windowless reflective silver...From the back wall of the relaxation room an access tube ran aft, opening on various instruments and the hyperdrive motors. There were two acceleration couches in the control cabin. Both had been torn loose from their mountings and wadded into the nose like so much tissue paper, crushing the instrument panel. The backs of the crumpled couches were splashed with rust brown. Flecks of the same color were all over everything, the walls, the windows, the viewscreens. It was as if something had hit the couches from behind: something like a dozen paint-filled toy balloons, striking with tremendous force. "That's blood," I said. "That is correct. Human circulatory fluid." II wenty-four hours to fall. I spent most of the first twelve hours in the relaxation room, trying to read. Nothing significant was happening, except that a few times I saw the phenomenon Sonya Laskin had mentioned in her last report. When a star went directly behind the I was heavy enough to bend light around it, displacing most stars to the sides; but when a star went directly behind the neutron star, its light was displaced to all sides at once. Result: a tiny circle which flashed once and was gone almost before the eye could catch it. I'd known next to nothing about neutron stars the day the puppeteer picked me up. Now I was an expert. But I still had no idea what was waiting for me when I got down there. All the matter you're ever likely IP to meet will be normal matter, composed of a nucleus of protons and neuitrons sunrounded by electrons in quantum energy states. In the heart of any star there is a second kind of matter: for there, the tremendous pressure is enough to smash the electron shells. The result is degenerate matter: nuclei forced together by pressure and gravity, but held apart by the mutual repulsion of the more or less continuous electron 'gas' around them. The right circumstances may create a third type of matter. Given: a burnt-out white dwarf with a mass greater than # times the mass of the Sun -- Chandrasekhar's Limit, named for an IndianAmerican astronomer of the nineteen hundreds. In such a mass the electron pressure alone would not be able to hold the electrons back from the nuclei. Electrons would be forced against protons -- to make neutrons. In one blazing explosion most of the star would change from a compressed mass of degenerate matter to a closely packed lump of neutrons: neutronium, theoretically the densest matter possible in this universe. Most of the remaining normal and degenerate matter would be blown away by the liberated heat. For two weeks the star would give off X rays, as its core temperature that it would be a light-emitting body perhaps ten to twelve miles across: the next best thiqg to inI was the first neutron star ever found. Neither is it strange that the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx would have spent a good deal of time and found, neutronium and neutron stars were only theories. The examination of an actual neutron star could be of tremendous importance. Neutron stars could give us the key to true gravity control. mass of Sol, approximately. eleven miles of neutronium, covered by half a mile of degenerate matter, covered by maybe twelve feet of ordinary matter. Escape velocity: # mps, approximately. Nothing else was known of the tiny black star until the Laskins went in to look. Now the Institute knew one thing more. The star's spin. # # mass that large can distort space by its rotation," said the puppeteer. "The Institute ship's projected hyperbola was twisted across itself in such a way that we can deduce the star's period of rotation to be two minutes, twentyseven seconds. The bar was somewhere in the General Products building. I don't know just where, and with the transfer booths it doesn't matter. I kept staring at the puppeteer bartender. Naturally only a puppeteer would be served by a puppeteer bartender, since any biped would resent knowing that somebody made his drink with his mouth. I had already decided to get dinner somewhere else. "I see your problem," I said. "Your sales will suffer if it gets out that something can reach through one of your hulls and smash a crew to bloody smears. But where do I fit in?" "We wish to repeat the experiment of Sonya Laskin and Peter Laskin. We must find -- " "With me?" "Yes. We must find out what it is that our hulls cannot stop. Natuarlly you may -- " "But I won't." "We are prepared to offer one "I was tempted, but only for a moment. "Forget it." "Naturally you will be allowed to build your own ship, starting with a ## General Products hull." "Thanks, but I'd like to go on living." "You would dislike being confined. I find that We Made It has reestablished the debtor's prison. If General Products made public your accounts..." "Now, just a -- " "You owe money in the close order of five hundred thousand stars. We will pay your creditors before you leave. If you return -- " I had to admire the creature's honesty in not saying when -- "we will pay you the remainder. You may be asked to speak to news commentators concerning the voyage, in which case there will be more stars." "You say I can build my own ship?" "Naturally. This is not a voyage of exploration. We want you to return safely." "It's a deal," I said. After all, the puppeteer had tried to blackmail me. What happened next would be its own fault. T hey built my ship in two weeks flat. They started with a ## General Products hull, just like the one around the Institute of Knowledge ship, and the lifesystem was practically a duplicate of the Laskins', but there the resemblance ended. There were no instruments to observe neutron stars.' Instead, there was a fusion motor big enough for a Jinx warliner. In my ship, which I now called Skydiver, the drive would produce thirty gees at the safety limit. There was a laser cannon big enough to punch a hole through We Made It's moon. The puppeteer wanted me to feel safe, and now I did, for I could fight and I could run. Especially I could run. I heard the Laskins' last broadcast through half a dozen times. Their unnamed ship had dropped have prevented their getting closer in hyperspace. While her husband was crawling through the access tube for an instrument check, Sonya Laskin had called the Institute of Knowledge. "... we can't see it yet, not with the naked eye. But we can see where it is. Every time some star or other goes behind it, there's a little ring of light. Just a minute. Peter's ready to use the telescope..." Then the star's mass had cut the hyperspacial link. It was expected, and nobody had worried -- then. Later, the same effect must have stopped them from escaping whatIF ever attacked them, into hyperspace. When would-be rescuers found the ship, only the radar and the cameras were still running. They didn't tell us much. There had been no camera in the cabin. But the forward camera gave us, for one instant, a speed-blurred view of the neutron star. It was a featureless disc the orange color of perfect barbecue coals, if you know someone who can afford to burn wood. This object had been a neutron star a long time. "There'll be no need to paint the ship," I told the president. "You should not make such a trip with the walls transparent. You would go insane." "I'm no flatlander. The mindwrenching sight of naked space fills me with mild, but waning interest. I want to know nothing's sneaking up behind me." T he day before I left, I. sat alone in the General Products bar letting the puppeteer bartender make me drinks with his mouth. He did it well. Puppeteers were scattered around the bar in twos and threes, with a couple of men for variety; but the 'drinking hour had not yet arrived. The place felt empty. I was pleased with myself. My debts were all paid, not that that would matter where I was going. I would leave with not a mini-credit to my name; with nothing but the ship... All told, I was well out of a sticky situation. I hoped I'd like being a rich exile. I jumped when the newcomer sat down across from me. He was a foreigner, a middle-aged man wearing an expensive night-black business suit and a snow-white asymmetric beard. I let my face freeze and started to get up. "Sit down, Mr. Shaeffer." "Why?" He told me by showing me a blue disc. An Earth-government ident. I looked it over to show I was alert, not because I'd know an ersatz from the real thing. "My name is Sigmund Ausfaller," said the government man. "I wish to say a few words concerning your assignment on behalf of General Products." I nodded, not saying anything. "A record of your verbal contract was sent to us as a matter of course. I noticed some peculiar things about it. Mr. Shaeffer, will you really take such a risk for only five hundred thousand stars?" "I'm getting twice that." "But you only keep half of it. The rest goes to pay debts. Then there are taxes. But never mind. What occurred to me was that a spaceship is a spaceship, and yours is very well armed and has powerful legs. An admirable fighting ship, if you were moved to sell it." "But it isn't mine." "There are those who would not ask. On Canyon, for example, or the Isolationist party of Wonderland." I said nothing. "Or, you might be planning a career of piracy. A risky business, piracy, and I don't take the notion seriously." I hadn't even thought about piracy. But I'd have to give up on Wonderland... "What I would like to say is this, Mr. Shaeffer. A single entrepreneur, if he were 'sufficiently dishonest, could do terrible damage to the reputation of all human beings everywhere. Most species find it necessary to police the ethics of their own memibers, and we are no exception. It occurred to me that you might not take your ship to the neutron star at all; that you would take it elsewhere and sell it. The puppeteers do not make invulnerable war vessels. They are pacifists. Your Skydiver is unique. "Hence I have asked General Products to allow me to install a remote control bomb in the Skydiver. Since it is inside the hull, the hull cannot protect you. I had it installed this afternoon. "Now, notice! If you have not reported within a week I will set off the bomb. There are several worlds within a week's hyperspace flight of here, but all recognize the dominion of Earth. If you flee, you must leave your ship within a week, so I hardly think you will land on a nonhabitable world. Clear?" "Clear." "If I am wrong, you may take a lie-detector test and prove it. Then you may punch me in the nose, and I will apologize handsomely." L shook my head. He stood up, bowed and leh me sitting there cold sober. F our films had been taken from the Laskins' cameras. In the time left to me, I ran through them several times, without seeing anything out of the way. If the ship had run through a gas cloud, the impact could have killed the Laskins. At perihelion they were moving at better than half the speed of light. But there would have been friction, and I saw no sign of heating in the films. If something alive had attacked them, the beast was invisible to radar and to an enormous range of light frequencies. If the attitude jets had fired accidentally -- I was clutching at straws -- the light showed on none of the films. There would be savage magnetic have done any damage. No such force could penetrate a General Products hull. Neither could heat, except in special bands of radiated light, bands visible to at least one of the puppeteers' alien customers. I hold adverse opinions on the General Products hull, but they all concern the dull anonymity of the design. Or maybe I resent the fact that General Products holds a near-monopoly on spacecraft hulls and isn't owned by human beings. But if I'd had to trust my life to, say, the Sinclair yacht I'd seen in the drugstore. I'd have chosen jail. Jail was one of my three choices. But I'd be there for life. Ausfaller would see to that. Or I could run for it in the Skydiver. But no world within reach would have me, that is. Of course, if I could find an undiscovered Earthlike world within a week of We Made It... that any day. IF Ill I thought that flashing circle of light was getting bigger, but it flashed so seldom I couldn't be sure. telescope. I gave that up and settled for just waiting. Waiting, I remembered a long-ago summer I spent on Jinx. There were days when, unable to go outside because a derth of clouds had spread the land with raw blue-white sunparty balloons with tap water and drppping them on the sidewalk from three stories up. They made lovely splash patterns -- which dried out too fast. So we put a little ink in each balloon before fflling it. Then the patterns stayed. Sonya Laskin had been in her chair when the chairs collapsed. Blood samples showed that it was Peter, who had struck them from behind, like a water balloon dropped from a great height. What could get through a General Products hull? Ten hours to fall. I unfastened the safety net and went for an inspection tour. The access tunnel was three feet wide, just right to push through in free fall. Below me was the length of the fusion tube; to the left, the laser cannon; to the right, a set of curved side tubes leading to inspection points for the gyros, the batteries and generator, the air plant, the hyperspace shunt motors. All was in order -- except me. I was clumsy. My jumps were always too short or too long. There was no room to turn at the stem end, so I bad to back fifty feet to a side tube. Six hours to go, and still I couldn't find the neutron star. Probably I would see it only for an instant, passing at better than half the speed of light. Already my ed must be enormous. Were the stars turning blue? Two hours to go, I was sure they were turning blue. Was my speed that high? Then the stars behind should be red. Machinery blocked the view behind me, so I used the gyros. The ship turned with peculiar sluggishness. And the stars behind were blue, not red. All around me were blue-white stars. Imagine light falling into a savagely steep gravitational well. It won't accelerate. Light can't move faster than light. But it can gain in energy, in frequency. The light was falling on me, harder and harder as I dropped. I told the dictaphone about it. That dictaphone was probably the best protected item on the ship. I had already decided to earn my money by using it, just as if I expected to collect. Privately I wondered just how intense the light would get. Skydiver had drifted back to vertical, with its axis through the neutron star, but now it faced outward. I'd thought I had the ship stopped horizontally. More clumsiness. I used the gyros. Again the ship moved mushily, until it was halfway through the swing. Then it semed to fall automatically into place. It was as if the Skydiver preferred to have its axis through the neutron star. I didn't like that in the least. I tried the maneuver again, and again the Skydiver fought back. But this time there was something else. Something was pulling at me. So I unfastened my safety net and fell headfirst into the nose. T he pull was light, about a tenth of a gee. It felt more like sinking through honey than falling. I climbed back into my chair, tied myself in with the net, now hanging face down, turned on the dictaphone. I told my story in such nitpicking detail that my hypothetical listeners could not but doubt my hypothetical sanity. "I think this is what happened to the Laskins," I finished. "If the pull increases. I'll call back." Think? I never doubted it. This strange, gentle pull was inexplicable. Something inexplicable had killed Peter and Sonya Laskin. Q.E.D. Around the point where the neutron star must be, the stars were like smeared dots of oilpaint, smeared radially. They glared with an angry, painful light. I hung face down in the net and tried to think. It was an hour before I was sure. The pull was increasing. And I still had an hour to fall. Something was pulling on me, but not on the ship.  No, that was nonsense. What could reach out to me through a General Products hull? It must be the other way around. Something was pushing on the ship, pusthing it off course. If it got worse I could use the drive to compensate. Meanwhile, the ship was being pushed away from But if I was wrong, if the ship were not somehow being pushed tor would send the Skydiver crashing into eleven miles of neutronium. And why wasn't the rocket already firing? If the ship was being pusihed off course, the autopilot should be fighting back. The accelerometer was in good order. It had looked fine when I made my inspection tour down the access tube. Could something be pushing on the ship and on the accelerometer, but not on me? It came down to the same impossibility. Something that could reach through a General Products hull. To hell with theory, said I to myself, said I. I'm getting out of here. To the dictaphone I said, "The pull has increased dangerously. I'm going to try to alter my orbit." Of course, once I turned the shin outward and used the rocket. I'd be adding my own acceleration to the X force. It would be a strain, but I could stand it for awhile. If I came Sonya Laskin. She must have waited face down in a net like mine, waited without a drive unit, waited while the pressure rose and the net cut into her flesh, waited until the net snapped and dropped her into the nose, to lie crushed and broken until the X force tore the very chairs loose and dropped them on her. I hit the gyros. The gyros weren't strong enough IF to turn me. I tried it three times. Bach time the ship rotated about fifty degrees and hung there, motionless, while the whine of the gyros went up and up. Released, the ship immediately swung back to position. I was nose down to the neutron star, and I was going to stay that way. H alf an hour to fall, and the X force was over a gee. My sinuses were in agony. My eyes were ripe and ready to fall out. I don't know if I could bave stood a cigarette, but I didn't get tihe chance. My pack of Fortunados had fallen out of my pocket, when I dropped into the nose. There it was, four feet beyond my fingers, proof that the X force acted on other objects besides me. Fascinating. I couldn't take any more. If it dropped me shrieking into the neutron star. I had to use the drive. And I did. I ran the thrust up until I was approximately in free fall. The blood which had pooled in my extremities went back where it belonged. The gee dial registered one point two gee. I cursed it for a lying robot. The soft-pack was bobbing around in the nose, and it occurred to me that a little extra nudge on the throttle would bring it to me. I tried it. The pack drifted toward me, and I reached, and like a sentient thing it speeded up to avoid my clutching hand. I snatched at it again as it went past my ear, but again it was moving too fast. That pack was going at a hell of a clip, considering that here I was, practically in free fall. It dropped through the door to the relaxation room, still picking up speed, blurred and vanished as it entered the access tube. Seconds later I heard a solid Thump. But that was crazyAlready the X force was pulling blood into my face. I pulled my lighter out, held it at arm's length and let go. It fell gently into the nose. But the pack of Fortunados had hit like I'd dropped it from a building. Well. I nudged the throttle again. The mutter of fusing hydrogen reminded me that if I tried to keep this up all the way, I might well put the General Products hull to its toughest test yet: smashing it into a neutron star at half lightspeed. I could see it now: a transparent hull containing only a few cubic inches of dwarf star matter wedged into the tip of the nose. At one point four gee, according to that lying gee dial, the lighter came loose and drifted toward me. I let it go. It was clearly falling when it reached the doorway. I pulled the throttle back. The loss of power jerked me violently forward, but I kept my face turned. The lighter slowed and hesitated at the entrance to the access tube. Decided to go through. I cocked my ears for the sound, then jumped as the whole ship rang like a gong. And the accelerometer was right at the ship's center of mass. Otherwise the ship's mass would have thrown the needle off. The puppeteers were fiends for ten-decimalpoint accuracy. I favored the dictaphone with a few fast comments, then got to work reprogramming the autopilot. Luckily whait I wanted was simple. The X force was but an X force to me, but now I knew how it behaved. I might actually live through this. T he stars were fiercely blue, warped to streaked lines near that special point. I thought I could see it now, very small and dim and red; but it might have been imagination. In twenty minutes. I'd be rounding the neutron star. The drive grumbled behind me. In effective free fall, I unfastened the safety net and pushed myself out of the chair. A gentle push aft -- and ghostly hands grasped my legs... Ten pounds of weight hung by my fingers from the back of the chair. The pressure should drop fast. I'd programmed the autopilot to reduce the thrust from two gees to zero during the next two minutes. All I had to do was be at the center of mass, in the access tube, when the thrust went to zero. Something gripped the ship through a General Products hull. A psychokinetic life form stranded on a sun twelve miles in diameter? But how could anything alive stand such gravity? Something might be stranded in orbit. There is life in space: outsiders and sailseeds and maybe others we haven't found yet. For all I be alive. It didn't matter. I knew what the X force was trying to do. It was trying to pull the ship apart. There was no pull on my fingers. I pushed aft and landed on the back wall, on bent legs. I knelt over the IF door, looking aftdown. When free fall came, I pulled myself through and was in the relaxation room looking downforward into the nose. Gravity was changing faster than I liked. The X force was growing as zero hour approached, while the compensating rocket thrust dropped. The X force tended to pull the ship apart; it was two gee forward at the nose, two gee backward at the tail and diminished to zero at the center of mass. Or so I hoped. The pack and lighter had behaved as if the force pulling them had increased for every inch they moved sternward. The dictaphone was fifty feet below, utterly unreachable. If I had anything more to say to General Products. I'd have to say it in person. Maybe I'd get the chance. Because I knew what force was trying to tear the ship apart. It was the tide. T he motor was off, and I was at the ship's midpoint. My spreadeagled position was getting uncomfortable. It was four minutes to perihelion. Something creaked in the cabin below me. I , couldn't see what it was, but I could clearly see a red point glaring among blue radial lines, like a lantern at the bottom of a well. To the sides, between the fusion tube and the tanks and other equipment, the blue stars glared at me with a light that was almost violet. I was afraid to look too long. I actually thought they might blind me. There must have been hundreds of gravities in the cabin. I could even feel the pressure change. The air was thin at this height, one hundred and fifty feet above the control room. And now, almost suddenly, the red dot was more than a dot. My time was up. A red disc leapt up at me; the ship swung around me; and I gasped and shut my eyes tight. Giants' hands gripped my arms and legs and head, gently but with great fimmess, and tried to pull me in two. In that moment it came to me that Peter Laskin had died like this. He'd made the same guesses I had, and he'd tried to hide in the access tube. But he'd slipped. As I was slipping... When I got my eyes open the red dot was shrinking into nothing. IV T he puppeteer president insisted I be put in a hospital for observation. I didn't fight the idea. My face and bands were flaming red, with blisters rising, and I ached like I'd been beaten. Rest and tender loving care, that's what I wanted. I was floating between a pair of sleeping plates, hideously uncomfortable, when the nurse came to announce a visitor. I knew who it was from her peculiar expression. "What can get through a General Products hull?" I asked it. "I hoped you would tell me." The president rested on its single back leg, holding a stick that gave off green, incense-smelling smoke. "And so I will. Gravity." "Do not play with me, Beowulf Shaeffer. This matter is vital." "I'm not playing. Does your world have a moon?" "That information is classified." The puppeteers are cowards. Nobody knows where they come from, and nobody is likely to find out. "Do you know what happens when a moon gets too close to its primary?" "It falls apart." Why?" "I do not know." "Tides." "What is a tide?" Oho, said I to myself, said I. "I'm going to try to tell you. The Earth's moon is almost two thousand miles in diameter and does not rotate with respect to Earth. I want you to pick two rocks on the Moon, one at the point nearest the Earth, one at the point furthest away." "Very well." "Now, isn't it obvious that if those rocks were left to themselves they'd fall away from each other? They're in two different orbits, mind you, concentric orbits, one almost two thousand miles outside the other. Yet those rocks are forced to move at the same orbital speed." "The one outside is moving faster." "Good point. So there is a force trying to pull the Moon apart. Gravity holds it together. Bring the Moon close enough to Earth, and those two rocks would simply float away." "I see. Then this tide tried to pull your ship apart. It was powerful enough in the lifesystem of the Institute ship to pull the acceleration chairs out of their mounts." "And to crush a human being. Picture it. The ship's nose was just #. The tail was three hundred feet fuiUher out. Left to themselves they'd have gone in completely different orbits. My head and feet tried to do the same thing, when I got close enough." "I see. Are you moulting?" "What?" "I noticed you are losing your outer integument in spots." "Oh, that, I got a bad sunburn from exposure to starlight." Two heads stared at each other for an eyeblink. A shrug? The puppeteer said, "We have deposited the remainder of your pay with the Bank of We Me It. One Sigmund Ausfailler, human, has frozen the account until your taxes are computed." "Figures." "If you will talk to reporters now, explaining what happened to the Institute ship, we will pay you ten thousand stars. We will pay cash so that you may use it immediately. It is urgent. There have been rumors." "Bring 'em in." As an afterthought I added, "I can also tell them that your world is moonless. That should be good for a footnote somewhere." "I do not understand." But two long necks had drawn back, and the puppeteer was watching me like a pair of pythons. "You'd know what a tide wa? if you had a moon. You couldn't avoid it." "Would you be interested in..." cinated. I'll even sign a contract if it includes what we're hiding. How do you like being blackmailed?" IF IF  Short Story Your Soldier Unto Deafli They were Man's greatest heroes. They'd won a war -- but now what was there left for them to do? O n the final day of the confliot Infantry Commiander Third Class RB-#AX, soldier in the service of Man, had driven a file of heavy infantry out of western highlands to meet the enemy of his masters. Rocket-fire had long since knocked out his command vehicle, and for half a day he had fought shoulderto-shoulder with his soldiers, continuously alert to the dictates of Over-Command that filled his headset and mechanically relaying them to his decimated phalanx in an uninflected voice that had grown hoarse with the passage of time. At length. Over-Command had issued orders of termination and had closed down its frequency, leaving him trembling now in a sudden shock of silence, a sticky mace swinging in his hand. An enemy soldier-form beside him lowered its rifle, relaxed its coils and wriggled away through the freezing mud. Around him in the twilight, soldiers turned against the death-scented wind and straggled toward their recovery zones. He had known that the battle on this planet could not last much longer. The end was a shock only to his strained body -- the recent trends in the battle had forewarned his carefuiUy trained mind. There had been heavy losses. If the forces of Man had sought retribution, the battle might have lasted another day. But the war had never been vindictive to the extent that a satisfactory position would be sacrificed to emotion. While he was but dimly aware of such things as emotions and of their roles as determininates in the strategic decisions of Men, he had suspected from experience that the end was near. A little dazed, he consulted a mapboard incorporated into the sleeve of his battle armor and turned, stumbled northward through the interminable litter of bodies. In the offal of the day-long attrition he saw an occasional familiar face. For some reason he faltered and paused to look into one. RB-#AY lay on his side, the left leg below the knee crushed flat by a tank. A medic hurried by, halting only to spray the breastplate of the fallen soldier with fluorescent paint -- unsalvageable. The soldier, who had somehow withstood the shock of his injury, took no notice. His pain-tightened eyes passed over his commander without recognition or feeling. RB-#AX watched him for a moment more and touched the butt of his sidearm, vaguely wondering if the dam agedsoldier might not be able to fight again, perhaps with an artificial limb -- he had fought with him for so long. But the splash of paint said no, and the commander moved on. An hour later he had collected the tired remnant of his phalanx in the recovery zone and had submitted his final status report to Over-Oommand, where Men listened calmly and drew their plans for the future. But for him the work here was done. Now began a time of waiting. At first, for transportation. Later, for the command that would send him to another battlefield on some new world. Squatting in their midst, he watched the survivors quietly, listening to the rattle of final preparation and the cries of the salvageable wounded, punctuated at decreasing intervals by a muted thunder that was building in the west. Eventually, a formation of ships moved over the plain, slowing, and in the deepening night his transport slipied out of the sky and touched down a kilometer away. He marched his soldiers across the blasted terrain and up the extended ramps, pausing for a moment to see all of his command aboard. Overhead, moving up from the horizon, a chain of bright beads stretched itself across the sky, passing among the stars. The beads were enemy transports following on the same orbital track. As they crossed the zenith, each flared up briefly and slowed as it broke orbit for planet-fall on some battlefield on the other side of the world. He went into the ship. Scattered on the plain, the abandoned wounded let their eyes fall beneath patient, hooded lids as the transports rose and mounted on columns of fire. T he windows of the small office overlooked a flat sweep of desIF ert that stretched uninterrupted to a wall of hazy mountains that edged the horizon. Nearby, the desert was patterned with the geometric precision of maneuvering soldiers. On the right the beginnings of a complex of corrugated aluminum barracks were visible. It was very hot. The hum of airconditioning shut out the noises of the base. Major General Blackwood sat behind a bare desk, silhouetted against the windows. Across the desk a small, balding man in civilian dress sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair, holding a plastic folder in his lap. Between them, at the side of the desk, a woman leaned forward anxiously from a leather-upholstered seat. "We were told through normal channels that the wair had ended, Mr. Chalmers," the general said. "I don't quite see the point of your visit." There was a note of hostility in his quiet voice. Chalmers coughed and looked toward the woman apologetically. "Actually, General, I'm here for something else. Terra Central sent me out to appraise the Empress of certain diplomatic aspects of the peace that wfe felt were too delicate for direct broadcast. She suggested that we take them up with you, since you're closer to the problem, so to speak." He looked toward the window meaninigfully. General Blackwood, refusing to interpret his glance, leaned forward slowly. "Get to the point." "Well, as you know, the peace is not decisive. There was surrender on neither side. We've merely reached a permanent understanding. In the past year, the war became so vicious that only complete ruin for both us and the Kreekal could have resulted from its continuance. I don't suppose you realize it, but the conflict had actually been extended from the disputed colonial planets to the home systems." He fumbled in his folder and produced a photograph, held it carefully. "We suffered terrible losses. Last month the Kreekal struck at the Terran system with the 'better part of their fleet. Earth was saved, but to hold them off we had to contract the system's defensive sphere drastically. Mars was sacrificed." He slid the glossy print across the desk, and the general picked it up white disk set against star-iflecked blackness. He glanced from the picture to Chalmers. "I take it this isn't the natural Martian albedo?" "That isn't reflection at all. General. The surface was still incandescent when the picture was taken, two days after the attack. They blanketed the planet with hellbombs. Naturally, there were no "I suppose we were avenged," the general said, not really wanting to know and definitely not wanting to know now. He had said what was expected of him. "We hit back at their home system. Their sun was extinguished." "And that settled it, I suppose? The rest of the war was incidental to the conclusion -- just for the sake of fonn while teims were be ing settled?" sorry, General. I understand your bittemess, but it doesn't really matter, does it?" General (Blackwood gazed levelly at the Empress, realizing what was comiing, then looked back at Chalmers. "My army alone lost several weeks, Mr Chalmers. That matters very much. Make your point." "The point is, damn it, that the diers on its hands with no more wars to fight. Terra Control has ordered that they be destroyed." T he general nodded, looking down at the desk. "Yes. I thought it would come to this. But why were you sent?" "Terra Central thought an unaccompanied directive of this nature would seem a little too arbitrary. They thought if I delivered it, it would... well... Chalmers faltered, embarrassed by what he had to say. "They thought it would be less inhuman, this way." The general laughed harshly, but immediately regreted his cruelty. He did not envy Chalmers's responsibility. He 'became aware that the Empress was speaking to him. "Can't you .explain this to us, General?" she asked. "Mr. Chalmers assured us that this expedient was necessary, but we don't quite understand why. Why can't the men be deactivated and returned to civilian life?" The general did not reply, and after a while Chalmers spoke for bdinL He Ihad rehearsed it to himself # meny times that it mo longer sounded oonvlnoiag to him, but he recited it meticulously. He looked at the Empress. "As you know, the Kreekan society is hive-oriented. Their soldierforms are adapted from the vast worker element of their community and are conditioned to fight from the moment of hatching. Mankind had never faced an opposition organized along these lines, 'but the very nature of the conflict demanded that we fight them on their own terms -- that is, in land wars on the contested planets. "Two hundred years ago, the worlds under the control of Terra Central began to develop a warrior class to match the Kreekan soldierforms. Great numbers of men were needed, and each system recruited an independent army from male infants purchased at birth from their parents. "To meet the personnel requirements, virtually the entire male portion of the human race has come to be tied up in the service of Man. They are trained from birth, and their training consists of two parts. The first is the complete focusing of all emotion into a single drive to destroy Kreekan soldier-forms, and the second is the development of the physical and technical prowess necessary to implement the first. In short, the infants are reared so that their only feeling is one of enmity toward the Kreekal, and their only skill is a propensity for destroying Kreekal. Tbey are exact counterparts of the Kreekan soldierIF forms. They are machines designed to serve one purpose, and with the end of the war that purpose has ceased to exist. They no longer have an object in life." He paused, having said what was needed. There would be questions and objections, but he had stated the case. "I think we see the difficulty," the Empress said. "But why? Wliy was this done to them?" C halmers started to answer, but the general interrupted him -- rather bluntly, as Chalmers thought. "Your Highness, the enemy has a great deal in common with communal insects: A small aristocracy and a huge mindless working class. I say mindless advisedly. Singleminded is what I mean. They are generated to work -- or in time of war, to kill. The distinction is slight, since there's no real emotion involved in either. With them, wielding a gun is little different from wielding a shovel. This isn't so with mature men. The greater part of training an adult human to kill has never been the development of the killer instinct and the killer skills -- these are always present, if latent. It has been, rather, the suppression of the array of gentler instincts that have been generated in the course of a normal life: Love, ambition, social instincts and so forth. Getting rid of these is the problem. And to meet the mechanical animosity of the Kreekal, it just wasn't practical to start out with mature men whose very way of life had conditioned them against warfare with an absolutely passionless adversary. It just wasn't practical. Hell, it wasn't possible. We had to start with blank slates, and we needed a lot of them." But couldn't they be retrained. General?" "No. They're lost to us in that respect. Your Highness. Naturally, we've looked into it completely. They're like the survivors who are sometimes found on colonial worlds that were thought to have been totally depopulated by disease. Abandoned as infants, they grow up entirely on their own, roaming in the wild, and when they're finally brought back into the fold they can never adjust. Maybe they can learn a few words -- a few simple tasks -- but they remain subhuman. They never develop social skills." "But these men must have social skills already. General. They're members of an army -- they have comrades. And they can speak." "The basic lack is the same," the general explained unhappily. "The factor underlying meaningful society is the sexual drive and its fulfillment, but these men have no sexual outlet in fhe ordinary sense. Harnassing that drive has been our greatest problem. Initially, we had contemplated castration, but if it's performed early it interferes with the physical development we require, and after maturiity it's out of the question -- the trauma would destroy the psychological balance we set for them from birth. Homosexual outlets are even more out of the question -- we can't afford to have any feeling of affection developing between comrades. They are trained to think of each other as they would of any other piece of military equipment -- as gears in a mechanism of which they are a part and this ultimate, impersonal rationality is all that has allowed us to operate successfully against the enemy. "All that remained was to supply them with women at regular intervals, which we do. One woman can service a great many soldiers, and it proved the most practical solution. But other than a very basic sort of tenderness toward their sexual partners, emotion doesn't enter into the relationships. They have no emotions. They're incapable of any sort of reciprocal relationship. They don't even recognize the females as human. Or themselves, for that matter. We never teach their females to speak, you know -- there's no reason to." T hey were silent for a moment, and when she spoke, the Empress gave voice to what they were all feeling. "I think this is rather awful. General. I don't believe most of us have quite realized what was going on." Chalmers came to the general's rescue. "Precisely, Your Highness. That's why Terra Central didn't send their directive out through ordinary channels. No one is ever to know what has happened. God knows how close we came to extinction in this mess. All that saved the human race is this terrible thing we've done. That's all in the past, now, though -- for better or worse. We're at peace, and the new format is cooperation and cohabitation with the Kreekal. Our soldiers simply could not survive in such a context, or even be permitted to enter it. They can't be taught to support themselves, and now that we're off the war footage we can't afford to support them ourselves. They lived off ravaged worlds in the past -- where are they to find sustenance now? We did something terrible in creating them, and we must do something just as awful to dispose of them. "There's no possibility of beating swords into ploughshares -- not in this case. These are not so much men as tliey are weapK)ns. They have no versatility. Versatility was painstakingly bred out of them. "No, Your Highness. Tanks may be converted to tractors, but the virtue of this human steel is in its temper. Any attempt to reforge it would leave us with nothing." The Empress smiled gently. "Your point is well taken, Mr. Chalmers. But I think that in putting our rationalizations into words we tend to become rather too picturesque. These are human beings, after all. Let's deal with them in human terms." "I'm sorry," Chalmers said. "What I mean to say is that they've been forced into the mold so tightly that they would be shattered completely if their molds were removed. I don't think they're psychologically equipped to deal with any situation other than the one they're in. Certainly they're not capable of independent action. They act only in response to their superiors, and their superiors are ultimately men." IF "Damn it, Chalmers," the general snapped. "You insist on segregating them under this aibsurd 'they. They are men, Chalmers. Their victory wasn't won for your exclusive 'us' -- it was won for the human race. For themselves. It's not fair to shut them out!" The general fell silent, realizing that he had begun to plead. "No, it's not fair," Chalmers replied. "But it's necessary. Never have so few owed so much to so many, and yet what can we do for them in return? We haven't the productive men. Assuming they were susceptible to retraining, we haven't the means to effect even that. They're no longer a necessity to our survival, and we have other work to do. If we don't destroy them, they'll die horribly of starvation -- or worse. You know that." The general said nothing. "We need so badly to expand our population now," the Empress ventured. "Couldn't they take mates? There are so many more women than men -- couldn't the women shoulder the load? It would just be for one generation." The general shook his head. "The soldiers have no conception of reproduction. There is no creche on this world, and they have never seen children. They could only serve as stud animals, and for that there are enough normal men." "But what becomes of the soldiers who grow too old to fight?" she asked. "Surely you don't liquidate them?" "No, Your Highness. That's one problem we haven't had to face. You see, no one grows old in the service of Man." She stared at the general helplessly. "But you say nothing in their behalf. You're signing their death order!" she cried desperately, accusingly. "I know I am," he answCT, and there was a tightness in his vxce that made her drop her eyes in shame. After a long moment the general looked at Chalmers, but it was to her that he spoke. "I've arranged to have one of the soldiers drop by. You may want to talk to him -- he'll be in the outer office. If you don't mind. I'll wait here." I nfantry Commander Third Class RB-#AX had been summoned from the exercise field eariy in the morning, and had been told at the barracks to repKrt to the general's quarters at noon. He had spent the morning in unaccustomed idleness, sitting on his bunk and listening to the sounds that drifted in through the open door. A half hour before noon he had showered and dressed in clean fatigues and now stood in the general's deserted staff office, waiting. The inner door opened, and two strange men emerg and stopped before him. He saluted and stood at attention. Neither of the strangers was in military dress, and it soon became apparent that one of them was not a Man at all, but something more like a She. He had never seen a She in the company of Men before, but from the contours of its loose, peculiar cut tunic he could see that its body must more nearly approximate that of a She than that of a Maa or a soldier. The tunic in itself was suiprising ,for Ihe lhad seldom seea a She with dothing of any sort. Its undad legs were unifmred, and there was a heavy growth of hair on its head, neither of which was typical of a She, but he conjectured that it might be some sort of form peculi-ar to Men -- a sort of ManShe, perhaps. He waited for information that might confirm his theory. Then, shockingly, the She looked at him -- and spoke: "What a magnificent Man." He turned and looked, but there was no Man in evidence. He looked at the She, puzzled, and noticed that it was in pain. He picked up a phone from a vacant desk and named the hospital extension, ordered a medic to die general's quarters. When he looked up, the general was beside him. "Sir, the She had water in its eyes. I have asked for Medic, sir," he replied. The general took the phone from him and cancelled the order, replaced the receiver. "It's okay. Commander. The She is all right." He walked the commander to the other side of the room and, putting a hand on his shoulder, spoke to him in a low voice,, watching the others. "Look, Commander, this She and the Man. with it might want to ask you a couple of questions. They may not be toopertinent, but just answer the best you can and don't worry about it, huh?" "Okay, sir," he said. He faced the strangers carefully. The General spoke to them, and after a moment the She approadhed him. "Who are you?" the She asked. "Infantry Commander Third Class RB# AX, soldier in the service of man... sir." "But what are you?" He repeated the information. "Yes, I see," the She said. "You are a soldier. Will you always be a soldier?" Its voice was quiet.' "Until death." "But what would happen to you if there were no more wars? If there were no more enemies to fight?" He did not answer. "Don't you know that you're a Man?" He did not answer. The general stepped between them and winked at him. "That's all, commander. You can leave now. Pick up your routine this afternoon." He saluted and left the general's quarters. #T Tas he no dress uniform?. JnL asked the Empress, eager to break the hiatus of silence that had descended in the wake of the soldier. "There are no dress uniforms," the general said without expression. "The dress uniform is a mark of the juncture o-f the military and social spheres. There is no society here." "I'm sorry. I thought he might not have been intelligent enough to... that is, I thought he might not have known..." She paused, uncertain of what she had wanted IF to say. Then she simply said, "He seem awfully stupid." The general did not smile. "With respect to intelligence, you know, there isn't one person in ten thousand who could approach him. He is, of course, much more clever than any of us. I felt he would acquit himself well." He 'beckoned to Chalmers and turned to the Empress. "If you would wait here for a moment. Your Highness. I will have a word with Mr. Chalmers." They went into the inner office together. "I suppose she represents the typical reaction to the soldier," Chalmers remarked when the door was closed. "A magnificent, pathetic creature whose way of life offends her sense of propriety and whose intelligence is oriented in a way she can't comprehend." The general had not heard. "I won't let them die," he whispered. It was 'his duty to say it. "The nerve gas is painless and instantaneous," Chalmers said, disregarding the general and disregarding something within himself that echoed the general's words. "Several bases have already been treated. The exterminators are orbiting a few thousand miles out. I'll have them come down tomorrow morning. It will be over in a few minutes." "I cant let them die." "Yes you can," said Chalmers heavily." "We all can. We have to." Coming Next Month in IF! A Hilarious New Relief Novehfie by Keith Laumer by Robert Silverberg by Larry Niven by Lester del Rey November IF on Sale September #th... , reserve your copy nowl ' W.  Senal Strange girls! Their clothes vanished from time to time, and their home was -- nowhere! L unching at the Red Lion on roast beef of Old England, I glanced out of the upstairs window and saw, across the road, a girl in a pink suit. A moment later I choked. A morsel of meat went down the wrong way, and for a second or two, fighting for breath, eyes streaming, I couldn't see anything. When I could see again she was just a girl in a pink suit walking along a narrow street in a quiet town, possibly the quietest country town in England. I went back to the roast beef. What I had thought I saw was a trick of the sunlight, obviously. Many remarkable and some impossible things had been attributed to the sun in the last month or two, since a preternaturally hot summer took England by surprise, A hot summer always took England by surprise. When Byron wrote of the English winter ending in July to recommence in August, he wasn't coining an epigram. He was merely stating the obvious. But this year... In Shuteley we weren't concerned with things that happened in London, Liverpool or Leeds. In places like that anything could happen. When we heard that three Socialist M.P.s had turned up at the House of Commons dressed in sandals and shorts, we sniffed and decided to vote Tory next time (as we ; did anyway). In Shuteley, however: The river was so low that about four miles upstream you could walk across, something which had never happened (before in the history of Shuteley -- which went back to the Ark. We had the first-ever traffic jam in the center of town, and it was caused by a mini-car sticking in melted and churned-oip tar. A poacher claimed in court that the trout he took from a pool was not only dead, but already cooked. Althou this was agreed to be the tale to 'beat all anglers' tales, he was discharged without a stain on his character (except those which were there already). T he hot summer was not, we were told, caused by anything of any permanent significance. Next year the temperature would probaibly be normal. A combination of factors, said the meteorologists (and they'd go into a wealth of detail if you gave them half a Chance) was keeping the temperature up and the rainfall down. Such conditions might not recur for two hundred years. Every year I could remember, and I could remember about thirty, plus a few more about which I had vague childhood impressions, people had complained about the poor summer. Now they complained about the hot summer. The dining room at the Red Lion, IF directly above the bar, was the pleasantest room in Shuteley, and that was probably why I nearly always lunched there, in spite of the food. It had windows on three sides, a high roof, oak stalls which insured quiet as well as privacy, spotless linen and middleag waitresses who afforded no possible distraction. It was the kind of room you often find in a very old town, not aggressively modern, not dating back to Magna Carta -- a room which had been many things in its time, which had been modified and renovated and redecorated time and again, but never until it cried out for it, which had been left alone apart from cleaning and painting for at least thirty years. Also, it was never too hot. You had to say this for solid old buildings -- there wasn't much they could not keep out. I sighed as I finished the apple tart. And I wished... I wasn't old. I was thirty-three. I was married to a pretty girl nine years younger. As manager of an important insurance office, I was probably one of the three most important men in Shuteley. I had no money worries, no health worries, no children to worry about, no relatives to worryabout, except Dina and a mother in a mental home. And by the time people are in a mental home and so far gone that the medical staff advises you not to visit them, there's certainly no point in worrying about them. I was probably envied. I couldn't be sure, because a young boss has to be careful. He can't be too friendly, or people take advantage. I was pretty solitary and old before my time. And I wished something would happen. I'd heard a story about the twoyear-old son of the principal English master at the Grammar School. The infant had been at his first kids' party, and he didn't like it. He was found under the Christmas tree, crying his eyes out. Asked why, in the middle of all the fun and games, he wasn't happy like everybody else, he said: "I'm so terribly, terribly bored." Well, a kid like that was only repeating what he'd heard at home. Poor kid, he thought it was impressively grown-up to be bored. I wasn't two. I wasn't bored, exactly. I just wanted something to happen, sure that when things settled down afterwards they couldn't be worse and might easily be bette; . And something happened. II W hen the waitress said there was a phone call for me, I was neither surprised nor interested, even when she said it was long-distance. But when I picked up the phone in the office and found the call was from Cologne, I certainly wondered. likely to call me from Cologne, in such a hurry that the call had to be put through to the Red Lion. And when I heard Iota's voice, all sorts of feelings hit me all at once. I hadn't seen him for two years, not since the row. I'd been quite glad not to see him, naturally enough. and yet I had missed him. He was my cousin. He had also heen, perhaps still was, my best friend. I was not entirely sure I liked him, but you don't have to like your best friend. "Val," he announced, "I'm coming back." "Permanently?" I asked, without wild enthusiasm. "Hell, no. But there's been trouble here." "The usual trouble, I suppose." "Well, apart from that, her husband's dead. No, nothing to do with me, of course. But she thinks... anyway. I'm coming home for a while. Can I stay with you?" "As to that, Jota," I said cautiously, stalling, "I'm not altogether... I mean -- " "Oh, that business is finished," said Iota airily. "Never began, really. Still, maybe... I do see your point. I could go to Gil instead. Not much sk of trouble there." And he chuckled. Then he said: "I suppose it's hot in Shuteley too?" "As Hades." "Anyway, it must be cooler than it is here. I'll fly home. Expect me some time tomorrow." And he hung up. Jota and Qil Carswell and I had been the Terrible Three of the Third at the. Grammar School. In the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth we remained inseparable, but only one of us remained Terrible. Maturity had made Gil morose, engulfed me in respectability, and made Jota more Terrible than ever, especially after he invented sex. Once Jota had been Clarence Mulliner, but the name was abandoned, unwept and unsung, from the day a science master dubbed him J.O.A.T.A.M.O.N., for Jack of ah trades and master of none. For about a week he had been Joatamon, and then in the way of nicknames, convenience had made him Jota. I paid my bill, crossed the road to the office, and there I found a crowd around old Tommy Hardcastle, who was trying desperately to explain something and getting nowhere. "Break it up," I said coldly. Nobody budged. "But Mr. Mathers," said Wilma Shelly, "he says he saw -- " "I did see her," Tommy said eagerly. "As clear as I'm seeing you, Mr. Mathers. She was walking along the street, right past the front door. Not six feet from me. She had a pink suit on -- " "And she didn't have it on," said Sayell, who fancied himself as a wit and was half right. "She was walking along the street in the nude with a pink suit on." "That's right," said To-mmy, relieved to be understood at last, and the sniggers swelled. A tall, thin youth from the accounts department, who always tried to settle everything to the last decimal part of a penny, said: "She was wearing a see-through dress, Tommy? Lace, maybe?" "No, it was an ordinary pink suit, but sometimes it wasn't there. I mean..." He floundered on, and the kids chuckled, and for the time being I didn't stop them. IF I had seen the girl too. And I had thought, just for a moment, as she turned and glanced across the street, that she was wearing a pink skirt and giving away everything above her waistband free. The impression had been strong enough to make me choke. Of course in such a summer there had been some startling sartorial spectacles. I wouldn't have turned a hair if the girl had been wearing a bikini, because all over, that summer, even in Shuteley, conventional ' ideas about when and where to wear what had been tacitly dropped. Even policemen were allowed to wear shorts, and sometimes only shorts. But long before this remarkable summer, the world had decided it wasn't ready for the topless dress. And that wasn't all. If the girl had been casually strolling along the street in a topless dress. I'd have goggled my eyes but I wouldn't have choked. It was the abrupt change before my eyes, like a piece of montage in a movie, that hit me. "Now you see it, now you don't," Sayell was saying, working hard for more laughs. Although that was exactly what I was thinking myself, I came down sharply on Sayell and the rest of them, sending them all back to their desks except Tommy, who went to tlie door. "I did see her, Mr. Mathers," Tommy insisted. "Of course you did. Tommy." I went to my private office, thought for a moment, shrugged, and started work, trying not to give the incident too much thought. T he Shuteley branch of the Fire, Life and General Insurance -- was unique in its way. Shuteley, situated in the approximate middle of England, was a fair-sized oldworld town, yet there was only one insurance office that counted. Ours. This was almost entirely due to the cunning and villainy of one Amos Hardy, an old rogue who died in # at the age of #. As a young man, he set up his own insurance company in the town, with no capital and no connections. It was said he had not been above fire-raising in the early days when insurance was a more adventurous business than it is now. After # every fire insurance company had to deposit # with the Board of Trade before it could do business -- but by that time, having made hay while the sun shone, the wily old scoundrel was making the law and not obeying it more than he ever did. He got such a hold on insurance in the town, did old Amos, that by the time he died nobody for miles around knew that other insurance companies existed. Of course, his business was eventually taken over Amos had done his work so well that even in the sixties any agent of any other firm trying to drum up business in Shuteley was wasting good expense money. That was why, in a sleepy country town that had more of Old England in it than most -- we still had a village green with a pump, surrounded by timbered houses in which Queen Elizabeth might have slept, but had not -- there was an insurance office the size of a young factory. One of the girls had to go to the bank, and I gave her a message for Gil Carswell, who worked in the local branch of the Midland Bank, merely telling him that Mr. Mulliner would be arriving the next day... She had just left the room when the phone rang. My calls were vetted: this was one I had to take. I announced myself. "Sheila here," said the phone, rather starkly. "Yes, honey?" "Dina has locked herself in her room." I didn't manage to place the crisis, though clearly there was one. "What about it?" I said. "Have you forgotten, Val,? The electrician's here. Mr. Jerome. He has io get into Dina's room." "Well, tell her to come out." Sheila sighed in exasperation. "There is now no further competimonth." "Well, I suppose you did tell her. Tell her again. Make her come out." "Break the door down?" I was exasperated too. "If you have to." "A great heavy teak door? With my own fair hands? Hardly, Val. Mr. Jerome would have to do it. And then -- " "Yes, yes, I know." And then it would be all over town that Dina Mathers had tantrums and locked herself in and doors had to be burst open. "What did she say," I asked, "when you told her to come out?" "She said," Sheila said evenly. "that she was scared of the fairies." "The what?" "You heard. Last night she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. So she's staying in her room. They may be good fairies, but she isn't taking any chances." I didn't prolong the discussion. "All right," I said. "I'll come." S heila and I got along no worse than most imperfect marital partnerships. We might have got Mong a lot better -- Sheila certainly thought so -- but for Dina. Dina was my kid sister, tiny, seventeen, as pretty as a picture and sunny-tempered with everyone but Sheila. One reason why I cracked down so hard on anyone who made fun of Tommy Hardcastle was because, althou Tommy and Dina couldn't be more different in every other way, they had one thing in common... I slipped out as quietly as I could, because it never does an office any good when the boss goes out and everybody knows it isn't on business. I took the car from the firm's car park and drove out past the Grammar School... And stopped. A hundred or so boys between thirteen and fourteen, all wearing blue shorts, filled the road. The Grammar School was four hundred years old. The school field was a hundred yards along the road, on the other side of it, and there was no changing accommodation. So the kids changed at the school, crossed the road to the field, and came back after sports. IF The arrangement, or lack of same, was typical of Shuteley. After all the boys had crossed, I drove past the castle across the Old Bridge and turned into the track which led to our Queen Anne house about a quarter of a mile beyond the town boundary. The track also served a few farms farther on. Sheila, in a paint-speckled sweater and jeans powdered with plaster, had evidently been tidying up after the electrician. She was a slim #-yearold blonde, and I had not married her because she was the ugliest girl in Shuteley. "All right," she said grimly. "You shift her." "You didn't... say anything, honey, did you?" I asked tentatively. She knew what I meant. "I told her the electrician had to work in her room, that's all. And she talked about fairies." I sighed. Dina just couldn't see why I wanted Sheila around, and never would. What did I want with another girl when I had her? And Sheila, though she had no deficiency of understanding, was driven quietly desperate by the way Dina, the moment my back was turned, became mulishly, deliberately obstinate as only a grown-up child could be. I didn't see Mr. Jerome, who had found a job to do elsewhere in the house. I went up to Dina's room, Sheila at my heels, and tapped on the door. "Dina, honey," I said. "Val?" came Dina's voice, surprised and slightly, but only slightly, apprehensive. "What are you doing home at this time?" "You have to come out, honey,' I said patiently. "No. I'm scared of the fairies." "Fairies don't do you any harm." "How do you know?" "Dina, you didn't really see anything at all, did you?" "I saw the fairy ring. Inthe wood. Didn't Sheila tell you? I'd have told you this morning, only you were gone before I got up. I thought Sheila would have told you." No one could be as innocent as Dina when she was trying to make trouble for Sheila. "Anyway," I said, "you've got to come out." A brief pause, then: "I can't. I'm not dressed." "Then get dressed." Triumphantly: "Sheila took all my clothes away." S heila's eyes met mine. She didn't have to tell me that any clothes she'd taken were to be washed. "Come out, Dina," I said. There was silence. Sheila held my gaze steadily. 'This is what I have to put up with all day and every day," she was saying, without uttering a word. I didn't say anything either. She knew what I was thinking too. What could a man do? There wasn't anywhere else Dina could go. Our father was dead, and our mother... well, to give Sheila her due, even in our bitterest rows she never brought up the subject of Mary, who was in an institution, who was the reason why Dina was the way she was, who was the reason why Sheila and I had no children and never would have. At last the door clicked and Dina came out. Exactly five feet, darkhaired, she had the unsophisticated beauty that sometimes occurs in the feeble-minded. She also had a highly provocative body that would create a lot of problems soon, though they hadn't caused trouble yet. Not all men could be expected to keep their hands off such an attractive creature simply because there was a shortcircuit in her head. She wore a faded cotton dress far too small for her, split down the front and unfastened at the back, because there was no possibility of getting the buttons to close. Her feet were bare. "Now listen," I said more harshly than usual, "I have to get back to work. Will you promise, Dina, word of honor, to go to the summerhouse and stay there till I get home again?" "But the summerhouse is near the wood." "Fairies only come out at night. You never saw fairies in the daytime, now, did you?" She frowned. It was quite true that she had never seen fairies in the daytime. If she gave her word she would keep it. She was trying to figure out a loophole that would enable her to do what she liked without exactly breaking a promise. If she could find one, she'd promise. "Word of honor?" I insisted. "Oh, all right," she said. "Now?" "Now." She scampered downstairs, quite content again already. She would be able to stay in the summerhouse all afternoon, talking to herself or playing with the dolls she had there, without any feeling that she was being confined, or even that she'd done anything to be confined for. On the point of telling Sheila that Jota was coming, I decided it would be wise to wait for a better moment. "See you, honey," I said and leaned forward to peck her cheek. She leaned back, avoiding me. "Honey," she said. "Everybody is 'honey.' I'm 'honey,' Dina' 'honey.' Am I like her? Do you think of me like her?" I didn't want to get involved in anything. "Bye, Sheila," I said and went back to the car. I had just crossed the Old Bridge when the engine coughed and died. I cursed silently. When I had left the car in the lot I had known perfectly well I'd have to stop at the I would have, if I hadn't been called out unexpectedly to deal with a domestic crisis. I was about as far from a garage as I could be in Shuteley. The street I was on was so narrow that planning permission for garages had been refused, there being no room for cars to stop and fill up. I'd have to walk back to the office and phone a garage to pick the car up. I left the key in the car and started walking. No one would touch the car, not in Shuteley. Kids might, but the car would be picked up before the Grammar School came out. In the early afternoon, on the outskirts of town, there was very little traffic and few pedestrians, for there IF were no shops out here, and Shuteley was not on the main route from anywhere important to anywhere else. In fact, there was nobody else in sight but one girl, and my eyes rested on her and didn't register a thing, because I was thinking about Dina and Sheila and me and wondering gloomily if there was any solution to the age-old problem of two women in one house. I was also envying Jota, who got his girls on a conveniently temporary basis (invariably stunning and wildly cooperative girls at that) and who got them in every country on the map, plus a few that weren't. Ail in all, I was pretty sorry for myself. It wasn't my fault that my father had married a woman who was already close to insanity and went closer. It wasn't my fault he escaped the problems he had created by dying. It wasn't my fault Dina was the way she was. It wasn't my fault Sheila and I didn't dare have children. It seemed to me that my problems, unlike those of everybody else, had been created for me and were no fault of mine. Suddenly I blinked and looked again at the girl coming toward me. Ill S he was not the girl in the pink suit. Although I had seen that girl only across the street and from a second-story window, one thing I was sure of was that she had blueblack hair. This was a near-blonde of about eighteen, wearing a green dress. Or was she? At the moment, beyond all doubt, she was. She was very tall and not particularly attractive -- just a girl who would not as a rule attract a second glance, unless on account of her height. She came level with me, not paying the slightest attention to me. And that must have been an act, because when a girl passes a man goggling at her with all three eyes, it just isn't possible for her not to notice him at all. And as she passed me, it happened again. Not the same thing -- it never seemed to be the same thing. This time, side-on, I saw palely-tanned flesh from ankles to armpit, uninterrupted. When she had passed, I swung round, of course. However, whatever I'd seen or thought I'd scjn, all there was to be seen now, though I watched her out of sight, was a very tall girl in an ordinary green dress, wearing ordinary shoes. The only thing that was slightly unusual was that I could swear she wasn't wearing nylons. She did have, too -- and this was the first time I noticed it -- a certain baffling elegance, or smartness, or neatness. As I said, she wasn't a particularly pretty girl, and though not fat, she didn't have a sensational figure. Yet there was something about her that reminded me of the difference I had vaguely sensed when Sheila had pointed out to me a woman in a Paris creation and a woman trying hard to look as if she was in a Paris creation. Whatever it was that women wanted to have when they dressed up, this girl had it. Even if she had very little else to contribute. As I walked on, for a moment an old shadow darkened my mind. Mentally I was normal, indeed well above average. I'd been told after physical and psychiatric examinations that there was no trace of psychosis or anything in that terrifying area, no brain damage, no malformation. Yet no one with a background like mine could escape occasional grim doubts and fears. I dismissed the idea for a moment, only to find it creeping back when I remembered that the only other person who had seen this kind of phenomenon was Tommy. Maybe this was something that happened only to people like Tommy and Dina and me. Tommy had seen something -- once. I had seen something -- twice. And Dina had seen something. Fairies, she said. Or rather, a "fairy ring." Nobody else, apparently, had seen anything. I went back to the office, called the Central Garage and gave instructions about my car. Then I worked hard for all of an hour. When the phone rang I answered absently, still able to concentrate fairly successfully on insurance -- for the last tiipe in weeks. "Val," said Sheila, "now the electrician jhas to get into the summerhouse." "Oh, hell," I groaned. I should have known. The wiring in our house dated back with the rest of the house, I strongly suspected, to the time of Queen Anne. I'd probably have let it be executive from London, paying a semi-social call, happened to notice the wiring in the house and hinted strongly that it was hardly the thing for the local insurance manager to have an electrical system in his own house that constituted a greater fire risk than a moat filled with crude oil. So we had called in Mr Jerome. The caible out to the summerhouse was probably more dangerous even than anything in the house itself. Obviously Sheila had already asked Dina to let the electrician in. In childish triumph, Dina saw how to score over Sheila after all. Dina had promised to stay in the summerhouse till I got back. So she'd keep her promise. Come hell or high water, she'd barricade herself in and stay where she'd promised to stay. "I can't come again," I said. "Can't he come back tomorrow?" "He says if he doesn't finish today he won't get back for a week." "Well, get her out," I said in sudden irritation. "Don't keep calling me." "She's your sister." "Sure, but you're there and I'm here. Surely you can outsmart someone like Dina?" "Get her out, you said?" Sheila retorted in a hard voice. "Okay. I'll get her out. I'm bigger than she is, and older, and much tougher. I'll get her out. And I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to have the time of my life." There was something vicious about the chick as she hung up. IF I didn't care. I was fed up with Sheila and Dina. Why couldn't either of them, just once, in their different ways, leave me alone? Sheila was always with me, Dina was always with me. I couldn't settle down to my work any morning or any afternoon with the slightest confidence that I wouldn't suddenly be called upon to deal with a Sheila problem or a Dina problem. Rather wildly, I thought: why couldn't Sheila and Dina fight to the death so that there would be only one of them left? I could render unto Sheila the things that were Sheila's only if Dina didn't interfere -- and vice versa. But could I put Dina in an institution? No. Apart from anything else, she was too innocently reasonable. Even if I wanted to do it, I doubted if Dina could be certified. She wasn't even feeble-minded in the usual sense. In many ways she was quick and shrewd. In no way was she slow. She was quite a bright eight-year-old. Only she happened to have a body nine years older. Grimly I forced myself to work. But my heart wasn't in it. rv B usiness with an agent kept me at the office until about seven, and when we were through I took him for a drink. Since he didn't like noisy pubs we went to the the cocktail lounge. The Copper Beech. The place was empty when we entered. People going for a drink on their way home went to the pubs. The Copper Beech, all glass and chromium and plastic and inflated prices, catered mostly for couples and parties having anight out, from eight o'clock onwards. The agent gulped his beer and departed, and I finished my pint of bitter in more leisurely fashion. I was downing the last drop whem a party of kids in their late teens came in, quietly for kids, 'looked around and marched to the back. They were all in shorts and blouses, and for a moment I thought they were Grammar School seniors. Then I saw that they were all about eighteen or over, too old and far too tall to be school kids. All the men were over six feet, and the girls not much less. With merely a glance at them I was rising to go. In Shuteley in summer we saw hundreds of campers, hikers and cyclists. Then I saw that one of the girls was the girl in the green dress, and another, the only one who was not tall, had blue-black hair. I ordered another pint and sat down again. The bartender rapped on a partition behind him and a waitress in a black frock came to attend to the new customers. There were eight boys and eight girls. They weren't noisy, and they evidently intended to keep strictly to themselves, for they sat together in a corner round one table and only one of them spoke to the waitress, giving the order. The others didn't even talk among themselves until she left them. Then they started talking and laughing like any other kids, only more quietly, as if afraid they'd be overheard. The girl I had seen wearing the extraordinary green dress was now clad like the others. She had not looked at me and perhaps wouldn't have known me if she did, because earlier, in the afternoon, she had gone to a lot of trouble not to look at me at all. Now I saw that they weren't exactly like any other group of young campers after all. I wouldn't have noticed anything out of the ordinary if I hadn't had a spur to my curiosity. Nobody else did. As it was, I saw for the second time a curious immaculacy which seemed to be common to them all. Every one of these kids was a glossy, spotless, highly-polished model of a teenage camper. I thought about that and remembered where I'd seen the same kind of glossy unreality before. A pretty girl really on a jungle safari might conceivably spend most of her time in a leopard-skin swimsuit or a white suntop and shorts, though it's unlikely. But unlike actresses in safari movies, she simply could not go on day after day looking as if she'd just stepped from her dressing-room. That was it. That was exactly it. The boys in this group had every hair slick In place. Their shirts were dazzling. There wasn't a spot even on their shoes. The girls weren't in the usual motley collection of loose sweaters, tight sweaters and rumpled shorts. Everything anyone wore had been made to measure, and there wasn't a crease to be seen among the lot of them. A small thing? Certainly. A small, impossible thing. Did these kids have dressing-rooms right outside The Copper Beech? Two or three of the girls were face. Out of any large group of girls you could pick a dozen of more or less uniform paettiness, attractive through the possession of firm young bodies and regular features, wellshaped eyebrows, small noses, soft mouths. But it would be a matter of chance if, even in a hundred thousand girls, you'd find one with both the individuality to make her unmistakable and unforgettable and the beauty to go with it. One girl had the kind of face that could launch a thousand nuclear submarines. She had blue-black hair, very white skin, and was probably the girl who for me had started it all, the girl in the pink suit. But I couldn't be sure. Apart from her beauty, other things set her slightly apart from the rest. She was only about five feet four, easily the smallest in the group. She was pale and all the others were tanned. She might have been a little older than the others. She was treated with a certain slight deference. And despite what I've been saying about them, she made the others look untidy. I sipped my beer, not inviting conversation with the bartender, who was busy anyway. As it happened I'd been sitting facing the far corner when the kids entered and could therefore go on looking in their direction without showing undue curiosity. IF I managed to pick up a few words. They were talking about "a duel." A duel, they thought, would be fun. Some argued, said it was a crazy idea. Evidently they'd seen the plaque on one of the old houses round the green. One of the last duels in England had been fought on the village green, between the squire and a wealthy traveller who both fancied the same serving wench. Neither of them got her. They were both fatally wounded, and for thirty years or so (until the incident became romantic, quaint, something to be proud of) the affair was hushed up. There was some reference to "Greg", who was not present. (So there were more of them) . And glances were cast at Snow White when he was mentioned, puzzling glances which I couldn't fathom. S now White and the giants, I thought. Snow White is the fairest in the land. She had blue-black hair, too. Snow White, dwarf among giants. Watching as casually as I could, I noticed something else. Nobody smoked. And nobody drank beer; It makes sense not to start smoking now that we know what we know. But could you get sixteen sensible kids all in one group? As for the beer question... quite a few of the youngsters had soft drinks. Others had what looked like cocktails: sherry, port, whiskey, rum. Obviously they were not teetotallers. Out of sixteen campers, surely at least three or four would drink beer on a hot summer evening? I had finished my beer again. It was a small moment of crisis. Was I to walk boldly up to Snow White and the giants and say: AU is discovered. You are not what you seem," or buy another beCT and stay quietly watching them? I did neither. I stood up to go. And as I stood up, Snow White glanced at me and recognized me. I saw it in her face, althougjh the moment after recognition she looked casually around as if she'd merely been giving the place the once-over. But I knew I wasn't mistaken. One thing was certain. That expression, half startled, half interested, had not come over her face simply because she had seen me in the upstairs window of the Red Lion. For one thing, I hadn't seen her look up. For another, it wasn't just an Fve-seen-you-before-softiewhere expression. She knew me. She hadn't expected to see me, but the moment she did, she thought at once: Thafs Val Mathers... and a lot more. I wished I knew what the lot was. I'd certainly have gone over and spoken to her, but for the fifteen giants. You don't use the "Haven't we met before?" routine when the girl has fifteen friends with her. Instead, I went home. A s I closed the garage door after driving home, Dina rushed up to me. She was still in her Cinderella dress, but her arms and legs were swathed in bandages which she kad obviously put on herself. "She fait me," Dina panted. "She hit me and scratched me and threw me out." "Now, Dina -- " I began. "Sflie got in through a window and pushed me and hit me and scratched me, pulled my hair; and I couldn't stay in the summerhouse." "Forget it, Dina," I said wearily. "It was her fault I couldn't keep my promise. She -- " "Dina, I'm not interested," I said finmily. "You knew there was a man working in the house. You knew he had to get into your room and the summerhouse later. There was no need for any trouble if you'd done as you were told." "I do what you tell me, don't I? You told me to stay in the summerhouse, only she wouldn't let me." At that moment Sheila came round the front of the house. She looked at me uncertainly, ready to explain, or fight, or refuse to say anything, depending on my attitude... "Dina," I said, "go and get dressed." "Aren't you going to -- " "I'm not going to do anything. Go and get dressed. Now. And no argument." Hurt, Dina not only went but stayed in her room the rest of the evening, sulking. Sheila and I had an unusually pleasant evening on our own for once. I opened a bottle of Rudesheimer and then a bottle of Niersteiner, and we got pleasantly merry. At last I thought e circumstances were right and told Sheila that Jota was coming back to Shuleley. They weren't right enough. Sheila's face set hard and she said: "For how long?" "He didn't say." "He's not staying here." "No. He's going to ask Gil -- " "If he visits this house. I'll stay in my room till he's gone." "Sheila, he promised -- " "'He promised," she said fiercely. She stood up and began to provd about, clenching and unclenching her hands. Sheila didn't often hit the roof, but when she did she was inclined to go right through it. "I never told you why I was so wild that time, Val. Not because Jota made a pass at me. If a man like him never made a pass at me. I'd know that I'd better take up tatting. Not even because he used your trust to get me in a situation where those horrible things could happen. But because when you came back, when you walked in on that..." She had worked herself up to such a pitch that for the moment she couldn't go on. Her color was high, her chest was heaving, and I thought it was a long time since I had seen her look so marvelous. Of course I'd never forget that time when I found Jota quite crudely trying to rape my wife. It had been horrible and it had been incredible. I'd always thought, not so much that Jota would never touch Sheila because she was my wife as that if he did feel it coming on, he'd tell me. "Val, I want Sheila. I'm going to have her." That was Iota's way. I'd been afraid of that. I'd never thought for a moment it would happen the way it did -- Jota, having got me out of the way IF by a brazen lie, which I discovered only because the person I was going to see happened to meet me in the street, fighting coarsely with his best friend's wife, his cousin's wife, like a sex criminal. S heila, under control again, broke into my thoughts. "You were surprised, weren't you?" she said. That was an understatement. "I couldn't believe it," I said. "But when I did, I -- " "Yes, we're not talking about that. That was all right. You threw him about so efficiently I was quite cheered up. Never thought you could do that sort of thing, Val. I was proud of you then. And I didn't mind seeing Jota hurt, not in the slightest. That bit of it was fine... Let's go back a bit. You were surprised." I waited uneasily, vaguely sensing what she was getting at. "You were surprised because I was fighting," Sheila said. "You were astonished because I was 'being half killed and still went on resisting. You were certain that Jota merely had to cast a lustful eye on any girl, and she'd immediately surrender with a sense of profound gratitude." It was true, but I couldn't admit it. "I never said -- " "Val, I know perfectly well what you never said. I also know what you did say. Afterwards, when we had to talk, when we had to pretend to be civilized again and work out whether Jota was to be charged with assault, or what -- that's when you gave yourself away. All you were concerned with was Jota. He had to promise. He had to go away. He was the one to be convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that nothing remotely like that must ever happen again. And when he accepted all that, you were satisfied." I just looked back at her. "Nothing about me," she said bleakly. "You couldn't st me. If Jota tried again, next time I'd obviously leap into his arms." "I never said -- " "Oh, Val, who cares what you never said? Your whole attitude made it a hundred per cent clear. Jota was the one to handle somehow. I didn't matter at all. Whatever Jota decided was as good as done. You had to work on Jota. I was merely a pawn in the game, if that." I couldn't argue convincingly, because she was working a vein of truth. No girl ever said no to Jota. No girl ever could. Whoever she was. Whatever the circumstances. And it was entirely correct that my surprise on that horrible night had been due largely to Sheila's desperate resistance. I frankly couldn't understand that. Why had a girl wlio had never resisted me resist Jota? A diversion was available. "Why did you wait two years to tell me this?" I asked. She sighed and sat down, crossing her legs. All the fire had gone out of her. She wasn't going through the roof this time. "Some things you can't take back, not ever, even if you want to. Two years ago, we might have been on the threshold of a great new understanding. Now we know we weren't. You won't have children, though I ache for them. And Dina's getting worse every day." I was grateful to her for phrasing the problem of Dina like that. "Dina's getting worse every day." If she'd wanted to be venomous, there were a thousand other things she could have said about Dina, seven hundred of them not unjust. "Sheila," I said, "I like you." She smiled faintly. "I know. You couldn't quite say 'love,' because you're being sincere tonight. And I put you off your stroke earlier when I stopped saying 'honey.' You'll never call me "honey' again. You'll be careful, cautious, like a good insurance manager, and from now on you'll call Dina Dina and me Sheila." There wasn't much to say to that, so I went for a brief stroll. V R emembering Dina's story about fairies in the wood, I walked down the garden, not expecting to see anything at all. The river Shute, meandering tortuously across flat country and through woods, half enclosed our house in the inner walls of a W bend. As far as I knew the house had never been flooded, though the river had been known to reach the garden. Behind our garden, in the apex of th# W, was a small patch of trees and scrub which would have been very popular with courting couples, but for the fact that they couldn't get into it. The river curved round it, and on the land side the only entry was through our garden. And we had high, thick hedges. It was a piece of wasteland w'hioh was of no use to anybody. The local landowner had tried to sell it to us but we didn't want it. Anyway, as Dina said with childish shrewdness: "Why buy it when it's ours anyway?" At the fence at the bottom of the garden I stopped. Was it imagination, or was there a faint glow in the copse? It wasn't a fire, there was no moon, and it could hardly be fairies -- though I now understood Dina's story. To her, what else could a glow in the copse at night mean but fairies? I climbed the fence and advanced slowly. The glow was very faint and would never have been noticed on a night which was not completely dark. The odd thing about it was it didn't seem to have a source. There was nothing but the glow. I walked through it, stood in the middle of it, looked in all directions, and there was nothing but a faint blue radiance. I ran back to the fence, climbed it and hurried back to the house. Sheila was in the bedroom, in a shortie nightdress (in this extraordinary summer, most people wore less than that at night), about to go to bed. We had left a very important discussion hanging in the air. But this was something I had to share with somebody, and Sheila was my wife. "Sheila," I said breathlessly, "I want you to come and look at something outside." "Where? Not in the garden, for heaven's sake?" IF "In the copse." She laughed in protest. "Like this?" "It'll cool you down. And no one can see." On the point of protesting fmther, she saw I was deadly serious and realized it would probably be quicker in the end to humor me than to argue with me. She put on shoes and we went down the garden. I was afraid it was going to be like those frustrating incidents in detective stories where the hero takes the cops to the murder apartment, only to find the 'body's gone, the signs of a struggle have been removed, and even the bloodstains have vanished. However, as I helped Sheila over the fence she saw the glow and suddenly became reluctant to go further because she thought there was something instead of because she thouht there wasn't. "What is it?" she whispered, making no move forward. "I don't know. You do see it?" "Of course I see it. But what is it?" After a moment or two she came further into the copse with me, and together we' tried all the things I had already tried alone -- looking among the branches for the source of the light, at the sky through the leaves, at the still river beyond, under the bushes. Sheila's reaction was exactly the opposite of mine. The less I understood the glow, the more I wanted to find out about it. More practically, perhaps, Sheila satisfied herself that it was a mystery and was then quite prepaied to give up. "WeU, we've looked," she said reasonalbly. "There's nothing else to see. Whatever it is, it's staying put. Let's go to ibed and look in the morning." And that's what we did. I wasn't sorry, though, that I'd made Sheila come and look. I wasn't imagining things. There was a radiance in the wood with no source. Later, Sheila wanted to talk about something, but it wasn't the radiance. "I did hurt her, Val," she said, watching me. "I'm bigger than she is and a lot stronger. I thought, well, after all, she's a naughty kid and she needs a lesson. I meant to beat her up, and I thought it was going to be fun, like that time when..." She stopped, and although I had followed her thought I said nothing. She was thinking of that other time when I had thrown Iota all over the place, fighting mad, hardly knowing what I was doing; and Sheila had watched and been quite happy about it, because it was me who was doing the throwing and Jota who was being thrown, and because of what had happened before that. But Dina wasn't quite the same. "It didn't work?" I said. "No." "I didn't think it would." "Well... don't you mind? Was I terribly wrong to do what I did?" , "I don't know. I don't suppose so. When any kid's on the wrong track you talk to him, try to persuade him, and I guess if you don't try giving him a good hiding you're missing a bet. But you can't beat sense into Dina." "But you don't mind?" Sheila insisted. "I don't see that it's anything to do with me," I said. When we got to bed, more friendly toward each other than for a long time, I thought it would be a good idea to do something about it. But nothing happened, and Sheila made no move, merely saying "Good night" in a tone which seemed to contain finality. So a chance was lost, like a thousand others. VI B efore breakfast next morning I was back in the wood. Sheila didn't come with me. She said that if I found anything I could tell her, and she'd take my word for it. I found absolutely nothing. The copse was exactly as it has always been, and in daylight no radiance could be detected. By the time it occurred to me to look for footprints or other signs that people might have been there recently. I'd done so much stamping around that the search was futile. Besides, hardly anything grew under the trees, and the thick, springy leaf-mold did not retain tracks well. When I got back, Sheila merely said: "It must have been some kind of natural phosphorescence. One egg or two?" "Phosphorescence has a source, like any other light," I insisted. "Well, look again tonight. I wonder if Dina will be down in the next ten minutes? It's no use calling her, of course." Nobody at the office mentioned any unusual incidents of the day IF before. Being the boss, I didn't hear the gossip. If Sally Henry, my secretary, hadn't be on holiday I could have asked her about the morning's topics. Wilma Shelly, who was standing in for her, was too junior for me to confide in her. I wasn't a confident boss. I was efficient, of course, or I'd never have reached my present position. But I didn't possess the sheer self-assurance that every good boss has to have, the feeling that he's a boss by right, the unquestioning, unquestioned conviction that things will always be done his way, the right way, the only way. After an hour's correspondence, there was a lull, and I considered phoning Gil Carswell. But Gil, far less self-confident than me, had not become the boss, and I didn't like to call him at the bank unless the matter was really urgent. That was why I'd sent the message the day before by a girl who had to go to the bank anyway. Gil was terrified of the bank manager, who had always seemed singularly inoffensive. But then, Gil was terrified of everybody and everything. While I was still thinking about Gil, the pljone rang. Aloud I muttered: "Oh, God, not Dina again." It was Iota. "I'm at London Airport," he said. "Be with you this afternoon sometime. Have you seen Gil since I phoned yesterday?" "No, but I sent him a message." Iota chuckled. "Of course. Mustn't disturb him at the bank. The manager would chew his ears off... at any rate, such desperate liberties must never be taken. By the way. is anything happening in Shuteley?" "at would happen in Shuteley?" I said cautiously, wondering if by any chance he'd heard anything. He hadn't. "As you say. Silly question." "As a matter of fact," I said, "there is something going on. Maybe just a small thing, but something... No, don't ask questions. Wait till you get here." "You intrigue me. Something happening in Shuteley seems like a contradiction in tenns. But I can wait. Oh... how did Sheila take the great news that I was coming back?" "Unenthusiastically," I said. He chuckled again. "Don't worry. I promised. If you rememiber, I never promised before." He rang off. That was technically true, that he had never promised not to make a pass at Sheila. I wondered, however, if anyone but Jota would have considered such a thing worth saying. You weren't morally entitled to stab a man in the back because you'd never promised not to. A s I hung up, Wilma came in' She was breathless and rather indignant. "Mr. Mathers, there's a young man insisting on seeing you, and nobody but you. He looks like a camper, and he's... well, the things he's been saying to the girls f "Send him in," I said. "Right away." She looked surprised, but said nothing and went out. The door opened again and a young Goliath entered. He wore a white T-shirt and shorts and was obviously one of the giants, probably the biggest of them all. I judged him to be six feet seven. He had not been one of the giants with Snow White at The Copper Beech. "Val Mathers?" he said, advancing with outstretched hand. "I'm John Smith." "Really?" I said politely. "No, not really, if you insist. But it's as fair a name as any, isn't it?" "You wouldn't by any chance be Greg, would you?" He dropped his hand. He was not pleased. "How in fisk do you know that?" he snarled. Not pressing my luck, I said: "Where's your camp, Greg?" For a moment he simmered and then decided to be friends again. "In a bend on the river about a mile upstream." I knew the place. It was threequarters of a mile beyond my house, on the other side of the river, the north side. He sat down without invitation, looked at me expectantly and said nothing. He was blond, very good looking, perhaps nineteen or twenty. His accent puzzled me a little. It was not foreign, his speeirh was very clear, and yet I had never heard anyone speak quite like him. I had not missed those two words fair and fisk. The natural thing to say would have been "as good a name as any," and "fisk" seemed to be a cussword. There was nothing strange about his shirt and shorts and shoes except that they fitted better than clothes generally do and looked as if they had just that moment been put on, brand new. But for the giants that was nothing strange. He was completely at ease, and I was therefore puzzled by his easy manner and sudden silence -- as if he expected me to tell him why he'd come. "Well, Mr. Smith?" I prompted. "Or Greg, as you like?" "I want to insure against catastrophe in Shuteley during the next twenty-four hours," he said coolly. "Catastrophe?" I asked. "Catastrophe." "In the next twenty-four hours?" "In the next twenty-four hours. You're remarkably up on the quicktake, Val." There were lots of openings. I chose one. "You can't do business under a false or incomplete name. John Smith won't do. Greg won't do." F or a moment, for the second time, his eyes gleamed with a feral light, and I knew that this man was dangerous. He didn't like to be balked. Despite his easy manner, he was liable at any moment to become an animal. A huge, dangerous animal. I tried another opening. "We can always supply better rates for particular contingencies. If you wanted to insure against flood, say -- " He grinned, all easiness and friendliness again. "Flood's unlikely, isn't it? They tell me the river's never been lower." "Catastrophe in twenty-four hours IF in Shuteley," I said, "is unlikely. Another thing, Greg. You're over twenty-one?" "What about it?" "If you're not, there are difficulties." "Do you sell insurance or not?" "I don't sell insurance, Greg. I arrange it, if it seems to be to the mutual advantage of both parties. Now, let's see -- you want to insure, Greg? But you don't live in Shuteley." "No." "And -- in the next twenty-four hours?" "We're only going to be here twenty-four hours," he said simply, "give or take an hour or two." "What sort of sum have you in mind?" It was time, I thought, to restore sanity to the conversation. "I'm afraid such a transaction would hardly be practicable," I said. "Although in theory insurance against any contingency is possible, such as rain on a certain day, failure of a crop, or delay in a certain delivery, there are always difficulties in definition, and it takes time to work out policy conditions. It would be quite impossible to draw up a policy within the time specified, to operate..." Greg was laughing, a great roaring bellow of amusement that rattled the windows. "Val, you sound like an old man," he said. "You're not really serious about this at all, are you?" I said thoughtfully. He stopped laughing at once. "No. It was just an idea. Quite a most idea, really... but as you say, hardly practicable. I just wondered what you'd say." "Who is the girl," I said abruptly, ."whose dress disappears?" Unsurprised, he answered: "All of them, when they wear luxont" "Luxon?" "Well, you see, the idea is... it's one of those feminine paradoxes, arising out of the curious way women think. If you're wearing a dress, a perfectly decent dress, and bits of it disappear at times, that's all right. Nothing indecent about it, because it only seems to disappear. It's really there all the time." "Why does nobody drink beer?" "We don't like the taste. And it's grossing." "Grossing?" "Fattening." "Greg, where do you come from? "Here." "Here? Maybe. But here isn't Shuteley." "Here," he repeated blandly. "What's this about a duel?" Again I had disconcerted and angered him. The red aninnal light flashed in his eyes. "Nothing aibout a duel," he said shortly. "And what do you know about it, anyway? No, never mind." He stood up and moved to the door. "Sorry you won't do a deal, Val," he said over his sihoulder, his composure restored. "But as you guessed, I didn't really think you would. By the way, you know Gil Carswell, don't you?" "Yes, but how -- " "And Clarence Mulliner?" "Yes. In fact -- " "In fact, he'll arrive here at # : # ." He closed the door quietly behind 'him. G il called me from the bank, for the first time ever, and said: "Val, I want to see you right away. Come out for a drink." "All right," I said. "See you in The Copper Beech." "That chrome-plated morgue?" "There won't be anybody there." "I see. Right. In five minutes." I left the office at once to walk to The Copper Beech. At the door Tommy grabbed my lapels in his eagerness to tell me something. "She just passed again, Mr. Mathers. If you hurry you'll catch up with her." "Thanks, Tommy," I said, released myseilf and went out into the midmoming sun. Fifty yards ahead was the girl in the pink suit. Although I could see only her back, there was no doubt whatever that she was Snow White. Her slim, smoothly rolling hips were only one of the assets of a one-ina crime to cover legs like hers with the sheerest nylons. One small surprise: I wouldn't have expected such a girl to wear the same outfit two days running. Since she was alone this time. I'd have hurried after her and stopped her. But it wasn't necessary. Glancing over her shoulder she saw me and, making no pretense that she didn't know me from Adam, stopped and leaned against a lamp standard to wait for me. As I approached, her shoulders were suddey bare. This time I saw more clearly what happened, when it happened. Out of the corner of my eye I still saw the lower part of her jacket and her skirt. It was as if my gaze had burned a hole in her clothes. There were a few people in the street, and some of them were staring. For the most part, however, they seemed to be pretending that they hadn't noticed anything. (This was Shuteley). When I was ten feet away Snow White's jacket was complete again, but her skirt was abbreviated to playsuit length. Then she wore the whole suit again except for a large circular cut-out round her navel. Cut-out wasn't quite the right word. Material and flesh merged into each other like candlelight and shadows. More than her blue-black hair had made me think of her as Snow White. Her flesh all over -- and by this time I'd seen quite a lot of it, in aggregate -- was pale and creamy, and in this summer that was a rare achievement. None of Ihe giants was pale. Every one of them was tanned, some lightly, some quite heavily. She was with the giants but not of them. I stopped. "Hello," I said. She smiled. "I'm Val Mathers," I said, "as I suspect you know very well." I scored a point with this. Her IF eyes widened, and she asked : "What makes you say that?" "You recognized me in the bar last night." She nodded, admitting it. But she added nothing, admitting no more. "Who are you?" I asked. "Miranda." "Just Miranda?" Her suit, oddly enough, was not changing any more. Perhaps what one saw depended on the angle of vision. Moved by a spirit of experiment, I stretched out my hand to touch her waist... S he struck my hand hard, though without malice. "Wait for an invitation," she said coolly and turned and walked away, to my disappointment. I had expected more from the encounter. From the back, like the other girl, she wore perfectly normal clothes. I found Gil in The Copper Beech. Although the lounge was not as empty as it had been the previous evening, only half a dozen people were there. We sat in the corner where the campers had sat the evening before, and we had it to ourselves. Gil and I were the same height and weight and at one time had resembled one another. Now he had thick glasses and a permanent leave-mealone frown, and I hoped I didn't look remotely like him. Gil could have done anything. That is, he had the theoretical ability to do almost anything. In practice he had achieved nothing and never would. Being sensitive myself, I understood him better than anyone else except possibly Barbara. But nobody could do anything for ihim. He couldn't do anything for himself. The slightest criticism, the merest breath of condemnation, even meant as a jest, deeply wounded him. He was a bleeder. Scratch him, and he bled for days. If he made a genuine mistake, it took him a month to recover from it. But it didn't even have to be genuine. Someone merely ha;! to hint that something, anything he'd done was a stupid thing to do, and he'd start to bleed slowly, silently. Of course he defended himself. He spent his life and all his vast potential defending himself against attack, when he wasn't being attacked. I was nearly as sorry for him as for myself. What was the use of being a near-genius when a casual remark by an officeboy could mean a month of misery for you? Gil had married Barbara, another moody genius, who sketched and sculptured and wrote poetry and flatly refused ever to go further than five mil from the village green. She had roots, apparently. "What do you know, Val?" Gil asked abruptly, when the waitress had brought our beers. "What do you think is going on?" I took out a penny. "Let's toss for first innings," I said. Gil lost, and I put him in first. "A gang of kids has been hanging round the house," he said. "They seem very interested in Garry." Garry was Gil's two-year-old son. He was an only child and was going to remain so for two excellent reasons. Barbara couldn't have any more children, and neither -- as he had told me one morosely drunken night when we were both feeling sorry for ourselves -- could Gil. "Can I have Dina?" he asked. "She'd be company for Barbara." So that was it. "Iota's coming," I reminded him. "And he wants to stay with you." "With us?" Gil was astonished. "You've got a great big house. We only have -- " He stopped. T hey had an outside lavatory. The wooden stairs up to their flat were so worn that they looked as if they'd been carved curved. The floors creaked and were uneven. When houses had been revalued a year or two back, nearly everybody's valuation, including ours, was doubled, at least. Gil's had been halved. Human beings weren't supposed to live in such conditions any more. Although as a bank clerk Gil didn't make a great deal of money, others in his position, married with one child, managed to live far more comfortably. But neither Gil nor Barbara was remotely practical. They bought things they thought they needed, but didn't. They didn't buy things they did need. "We can manage, I suppose," he said stiffly. "Youstill want Dina?" "Yes. I have to go to work, and Barbara's nervous." "Dina won't be much help." Gil shrugged impatiently. He was always impatient when anyone didn't instantly understand him, even though he had not supplied all the essential information. "I don't think they mean any harm, the kids. Maybe they won't even come back. It's just that Barbara's alone in the house all day. I thought of Dina since she doesn't go out much. And if Iota's there..." He let that hang, and I didn't take it off the hook. As far as we knew Iota had only once broken trust with either of us in that particular way. Gil knew what had happened -- Sheila had said something to Barbara. The idea of Iota making a pass at Barbara seemed fantastic to me, but it probably didn't seem so fantastic to Gil. "All right," I said. "Til ask her." Rather surprisingly, Dina got on quite well with both Gil and Barbara. Moody geniuses don't like competition or criticism, and Dina never gave them any. We said no more about Iota. Barbara would cling to Dina, and away from me, away from Sheila (whom she really trusted in a peculiar way) Dina would stick to the one person she knew. "There's something else about those kids," Gil said. "They came into the bank and changed some money. Silver into notes. I was the only one to notice a certain very strange thing, and for some reason I didn't point it out to anyone else." Gil felt in his pocket and produced two half-crowns, two florins, two I examined them. It wasn't hard to get the point. The half-crowns were both fairly shiny, dated #. The florins were IF old and worn, dated #. The shillings were dated #. "I see what you mean," I said. "Do you?" He sounded skeptical. Gil, with his inflated IQ, could never believe that anyone else had more capacity for putting two and two together than... well, Dina. I looked more closely. One halfcrown had an infinitesimal scratch across the Queen's hair. So had the identical, particularly worn just below the date. "There were a lot more of these?" "Yes." "Any notes?" I asked. "No. Well?" He was challenging me to reach his own conclusion. I said: "I know why you didn't point this out." "Do you?" "They must be forgeries, of course. Forgeries so good they'd be hard to detect and won't ever be detected now that they're mixed with other coins and the duplication isn't significant. Notes weren't forged, or duplicated, because the numbers would eventually give them away." Gil nodded with reluctant respect. "And Why didn't I point it out?" "Because you're responsible. This might mean trouble. If you let it go, it can't possibly mean trouble." "Clever," he sneered. "Now tell me why it was done." "They needed money, so they made it," I said. He sniffed, but didn't pursue the topic. Instead, he said: 'Tell me what you know." I told him. I came last to the brief encounter with Miranda. His eyes gleamed. "The ultimate in provocation," he said. "What do you mean?" "Could it be simpler? The impact of any outfit any girl wears lasts about five minutes. After she's taken off her jacket and you see the lowest low-cut neckline you ever saw, after you've had a good look, she might as well put the jacket on." I must have looked unimpressed, for he went on in a torrent of words to develop the theme. "Does anybody stare at the Grammar School senior girls in their little white pants, except wistful old men? But let them put on skirts and ride bicycles in a breeze... A pretty girl peels to a bikini, and every man on the beach stares. For a while. Then she puts on a beach wrap, leaves it unfastened, and they stare again every time it falls open." "I never thought of that," I said. He gajed at me. "You never thought of it? Ten minutes after viewing the delectable Miranda you've just been describing?" "I was too busy doubting my own sanity. But I see what you mean now." And I did. Successful strippers don't just take their clothes off. TTiey tantalize. And what could be more tantalizing than a luxon dress? What greater inducement to look could there be than not knowing what you're liable to see? Gil had hit on a good phrase -- the ultimate in provocation. Current fashion wasn't anywhere near the ultimate in provocation. Indeed, with untidy, too-Iong hair, tight jeans and loose sweaters, long point flat shoes, unnatural makeup and too-short skirts on the wrong gMs, teenage glamor had never hit a lower low. This kind of thing was nothing remotely like current fashion. "Where are they from?" I murmured. "Outer space?" The complete absence of reaction showed that I was not expressing any idea completely new to Gil. And he was the most confirmed skeptic in Shuteley... vm I had meant to go home for lunch and ask Dina if she'd like to go and stay with the Carswells for a while, but I hadn't phoned Sheila to warn her, and it was just as well. As I left the office, Miranda fell into step with me and asked: "Care to buy me lunch?" It was a question that needed no answer. I took her to the Red Lion, partly through lack of choice and partly because the idea of sitting opposite her in a stall all to ourselves was anything but unattractive. She was not wearing the pink suit. She wore a silvery gray dress that didn't disappear, and she was still sensational. She must, if the camp was the giants' only base, have gone straight there and come straight back. As we sat down, I said: "I waited." "For what?" "An invitation." She smiled a faint smile and said: "This is a different kind of invitation." "What are you going to tell me, Miranda?" I asked. "Why are you so sure I'm going to tell you anything?" "Because the only reasons you could have for 'being here with me now are to tell me something or ask me something. And I have a feeling that I couldn't tell you much you don't know." "There could be another." "Such as?" "Interest in you. I might be curious what you're like. Anyway -- what would you like to know?" "Where do you and your friends come from?" "Here," she said, as Greg had done. The waitress interrupted us then, and when she left with our order Miranda moved back a square. "I'll tell you one reason why I wanted to lunch with you, if you like." "Why?" "I want you to introduce me to Iota." I might have guessed. In this crazy business, one thing could be expected to be unchanged -- that Snow White would instantly be drawn to the prince. "What do you know about Iota?" I said. She merely smiled and shrugged. "Greg called him Clarence Mulliner," I observed. sat up quickly. "Greg? When were you talildng to Greg?" IF "This morning. He came to see me." She was angry, I saw, and perhaps afraid. It was an excellent chance, and I hoped I'd be able to take it. The possibility that I might be able to play Snow White against Giant No. I had not until that moment occurred to me. The less I said, and the more Miranda said, the better. "What did he want?" she asked sharply. "Amusement, I suppose. He wanted to insure against catastrophe here in Shuteley in the next twenty-four hours." "The vandal," she breathed. "Vandal?" That was interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that Greg might be trying to insure against disaster and then cause it. "You wouldn't understand."... "Of course not. I understand very little." "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude." And then, with a baffling switch that took the wind out of my sails, she smiled and said: "It doesn't matter anyway. Greg's a fool, a dangerous, megalomaniac, irresponsible fool... but it doesn't matter." Rallying, I said: "Why not? Because we don't matter? Because we don't live in the same country as you? The same world? The same dimension? The same time?" M ost inopportunely, the waitress brought our soup (brown Windsor, of course). When she had gone, I asked : "How old are you, Miranda?" I got the smile again, and nothing else. Possibly, I thought she was many, many years older than she looked. This close, I had an opportunity to see that the flawlessness common to all the young strangers was absolute. I don't mean that they were all hand-" some or beautiful. But like Miranda, they had no hair out of place, no scars, no scratches, perfect teeth, perfectly manicured hands. In the heat of a summer day, she didn't sweat. She appeared to have no makeup on, yet I was sure she had. Right through history, women had gilded the lily. Even in a different history, I was sure they would do the same. I asked her: "Are you wearing makeup?" "Yes." Her gray dress was at the same time unremarkable and scarcely possible. No creases or marks. Its fit was several degrees beyond currently known perfection. Ordinary dresses worn by ordinary girls weren't like Miranda's. Either the machinery showed, or the absence of machinery. "You can't," I said thoughtfully, "be wearing a bra." "No." "Then how... ?" Well, romantic myth aside, women needed something to provide their shape. "Selective tension," she said easily. "Different degrees of elasticity in different places." And at sight of my expression, she laughed for the first time. She stopped when I said: "You do come from the future." !W y. m i; IVWmj' A. i'i'"'ii m:. iVN-VS I I #T isten." she said. "I'll tell youL one thing, and it's the truth. Then we'll talk about something else. We come from the present, and we come from here "Yet you say 'come,'" I answered quickly. A flicker in her eyes registered appreciation of the point. Since she dto't reply, I pursued: "Another dimension then?" "Dimension?" she said. "What's that?" I tried to convey my own rather fuzzy idea of the theory of co-existent worlds. She seemed interested. "This is only a theory?" she asked. "Tliere's no proof?" "None. But you might know whedier it's more than a theory, I think." The faint smile again. "Now," I; 'C'i:" 'i'll' ' hh #:I ".'I   v' .',I IF she said finnly, 'Ve'H talk about you." After a pause she added; "And Jota." "No," I said. Although I'd had my chance, and lost it, I might get it back. "We'll talk about Greg. And you." I had lost it. She had regained her control. She wasn't going to ask what had happened between Greg and me. She wouldn't discuss it. So I told her about Jota and Gil and me. Every time I tried to turn the conversation back to her and the giants, she promptly turned it back. I told her briefly about Sheila, but not about Dina or Mary. Only three times, briefly, did the talk swerve from the path along which Miranda was casually driving it. The first time, after telling her about the days when Jota, Gil and I were the Terrible Three, I asked what she and her friends called themselves. She thought for a minute and then said: "W, what would you ca!! us? Any ideas?" "Snow Wte and the giants." She stared and laughed rather uncertainly. She thought she ought to know what I was talking about, but didn't. She was off balance, so I said: "Greg said 'as fair as any,' instead of 'as good as any.' He said 'how in fisk'... ?" gravy over herself. "I presumed," I said casually, "that meant something like how in hell.' " "It means rather more than that," said Miranda. "There are sexual connotations." "I'm not surprised. He said 'up on the quicktake.' " Miranda was silent. "if you read a phrase in a book. Quick on the uptake. Up on the quicktake. Unimportant... except that nobody born between # and # could say such a thing. Then there was 'most,' apparently a term of general approbation. 'Grossing,' meaning fattening. I may have missed a few." "Greg is careless," said Miranda. "Very careless." "And you're not, I noticed. Except in wearing, a luxon suit." "I won't do it again." "Pity." The second time was when the sweet came up. I asked about the food, and she said, in slight surprise: "It's only food," and though she instantly turned the conversation again, I was left with another strange impression: Miranda and the giants ate and drank as we stoked a fire or filled an oil heater. It had to be done, but the quality of the fuel, so long as it came up to certain minimum standards, was immaterial. The last time was when we left. As she stood up I noticed something I'd have seen before if I'd 'been reasonably observant. She carried no handbag, and she had no pockets. "Where do you carry things?" I "What things?" "Money, cosmetics, a handkerchief, keys -- that sort of thing." 'y would I need them?" she asked mildly. We had emerged into bright sunlight. It was as hot as usual. "Thanks for the lunch, Val," Miranda said. "I'll see you later." And she strode off so abruptly that even to attempt to detain her I'd have had to shout or run after her. From the way she walked, I knew she could run faster than I could. Looking after her, I decided that Miranda, in her way, was as careless as she thought Greg was. True, it was a different way. We had lunched together, a man and girl. And we might have been robots. Certainly some apparently personal things had been said. I'd said a lot. I had acted more or less like a human being. IF But Miranda... Everything she had said and done she might have said and done from ten thousand miles and ten thousand years away. IX # #'#'ou don't really believe it, do I you?" Gil sneered. A sneer was the only way to describe it. Where anyone else would have expressed polite surprise, Gil's reaction was incredulity that anyone could be so stupid, even you. "I do," I said. "You mean one of these -- giants tells you Jota will arrive at #:#, amd you expect him on the dot?" I looked at my watch. It was eight after three. "You can believe what you like, Gil," I said. "But these giants are no ordinary kids. I've been trying to figure out how Miranda was able to make me talk like that an hour or so ago, without ever letting, the conversation get more than two or three degrees above absolute zero, and now I see it. She knew the questions to ask." Gil started to say something, but I hadn't finished. "Maybe Greg meant Jota would arrive in Shuteley at #:# exactly, he didn't say. But I think he meant here. I think he meant that wherever I was, whether I went home or stayed in the Red Lion or came back here, Jota would walk in at #:#." "Of all the fatuous, ridiculous, superstitious -- " Gil began. He'd probably have found quite a few more adjectives before he had to cap them with a noun. But just then the door opened. I'd given instructions for anyone who called on me after three to be sent straight in. That was why Miranda found it so easy. "Why look surprised?" she said. "I told you I wanted you to intro- duce me to Jota." "I'm surprised," I observed, "that you should consider an introduction necessary. You didn't with me." She smiled and turned to Gil. "Hello, Gil," she said. "Has Garry's flush gone yet?" A lthough Gil didn't answer, I could see he was startled. Garry evidently had had a flush, and it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that there was no apparent way for the giants to know about it. Miranda sat down, primly arranging her skirt the way girls do (though I suspected she had had to practice). And the very instant that she turned and looked at the door, Jota came in. He had never been handsome. I never knew any ladykiller who was really good-looking. Women seem to go for men of the oddest shapes and sizes. Jota had a long nose, very deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks and black hair nearly, but not quite, as dark as Miranda's. He was tall and very thin. He looked like a fanatic or visionary, and this impression wasn't wrong, though fanaticism was only part of his complex make-up. He didn't look at Gil or me. He went straight to Miranda, took her hand gendy and pulled her to her feet and said, from his nine-inch adadvantage: "You're exquisite." "I know," said Miranda coolly. "But thanks for noticing." "Your name must be Venus." "If you say so," said Miranda. There was a lot more of this, and I realized as I watched that Iota, for only the second time, was annoying me far more than Gil ever could. It's strange about old friends, people you know from way back. You've forgotten long ago whether you like them or not. The question has ceased to be relevant. Gil, now. He had not made a friend in the last fifteen years. He would die without making another friend. He had become an amalgam of armor and anger and acid and antagonism, a fortress on an island that no army would ever want to storm. On the mainland, they'd march past the defenses against nothing with scarcely a derisive smile. Only Iota and I (and Barbara, in a different but not warmer way) would ever put up with Gil. Iota... I had admired and envied him. He had done and was still doing many things I wished I could do, and his amatory success was the least of these. He was, after all, a Jack-of-all-trades (even if master of none). There was nothing he couldn't turn his hand to. He had the courage or selfishness or brute insensitiveness to do what he liked and invariably get away with it. Most people treat you as your own attitude and expectation invites them to treat you. And Iota got what he wanted -- whatever it was. Always. Everywhere. I had had every right to objeci when Iota's roving eye lighted on Sheila. I had no right to object when Miranda caught his eye, but I did. Surprisingly, the meeting was brought to order by Miranda. She suddenly said: "I must be going," and walked out as abruptly as she had left me outside the Red Lion. Ci'That girl," said Iota, "fills me A with a quite irresistible desire to see that dark head on a white pillow. It will not be resisted. Now -- what's going on?" He hadn't changed. He had never, I suspected, been in love; he bad a completely mistaken idea of what love was. Stumbling and imperfect as our connubial relations were, I believed that both Gil and I knew far more about love than Iota would have learned by the time he died. He heard our side of the story first. He wanted it that way, and things were generally done Iota's way. Gil had nothing fresh to say. The giants had not been near his house again. I glossed over the fact that I had not yet asked Dina to go and stay with the Carswells. In my turn I told them all the facts, but not all my guesses. Then Iota said; "All right, let's call on the giants. We'll go to the camp." Gil was reluctant. He didn't say he was afraid to go. He argued against the idea in general. But when Iota and I decided to go without him, Gil stoppled arguing and seemed to think it might be a good idea. So Iota and I went to look at the giant's base. It did not occur to me that one of us would die there. IF IF  Feature Here's how to talk like a fan -- and even understand some of what you're saying! The Fannish Lingo I suppose every in-group has or will develop its own slang, given sufficient time. This is true of every group from the various scientific discipline (each having a slang vocafbulaiy called "technicalese") and such game-worlds as Big Time Chess (forever blathering on with such terms as "Gumphogle's Third Gambit" and the like)... right on down to enthusiasts of mystery fiction (called 'tec fiction by insiders who sling around baffling phrases like "procedural novel" and roman policiere) and to us sciencefiction fans. In the forty years or more that the science-fiction magazines have been with us, we have evolved, coined, borrowed and stolen a sizeable vocabulary of terms, words and nicknames totally cryptic and enigmatic to The General Public. It all started with Hugo Gemshack, the man who founded the first science-fiction magazine. Amazing Stories, We call the stuff we read "science fiction" because he coined the term. He also coined a variant, "scieoitifiction." And away we go! Now, to avoid the sheer nervefatigue of putting down those same old fourteen letters every five minutes, it became necessary to coin nicknames for our favorite reading material. Like sf. Or SF. Or s-f, s.f... S.F., S-F, and so on Time maga#dne came up with a repellent neologism of their own a decade back, '-when The Great SF Boom began. They called it "sci-fi" -- is nothing sacred?) And than, consider scientifiction. That got trimmed down to stf. In conversation, pronounced "stef" -- and sometimes spelled that way. Now, suppose you want to apply the term as an adjective. You just can't say, "I saw a real sciencefictional movie last night, gang!" What you say is "stefnal"... or "stefish." One Thing Leads to Another Now, by extrapolating from this not-very inspired word, we came up with: "stefnist" (one who is a fan, but thinks the term Lacks Dignity); "stefnistic" (something that relates to science fiction, i.e., "That new eye-makeup makes you look real stefnistic, toots!"... and (again) so on. "Fan" is a more popular term than stefnist anyday. The plural is fen. A female fan (oh, yes, there are such) is generally a fanne. Anything you could call fannish (like an activity such as puiblishing a fan magazine) you can also call fenly -- or, fennish. Fan magazines themselves are called fanzines (the word was coined by Louis Russell Chauvenet) or fanmags -- and the plural is "fmz", but don't ask me how you pronounce it, because you don't. Compounded words, as you can see, compose a major-size chunk of the fannish lingo. The editor of a fan magazine is a "faned." If you belong to F.A.P.A. (Fantasy Amateur Press Association) you publish a fapazine, and you are a fapan. If your fanzine lasts a year (many don't) you put out a particularly large Anniversary Issue called "the Annish." If your "fanac" (activities in science-fiction fandom) are confined largely to reading fanzines and submitting LoC's (letters of comment), you are likely to be sneered at as a "letterhack." If your fanac is big time stuff and you become a Fan); and if your output is considered "crifanac" critical, or really important fanac) you will be mentioned all over the place and collect lots of "egoboo" (ego-boosting. For when someone mentions your name in print doesn't it boost your ego?). But let's suppose your fan activities are confined to writing scholarly treatises on the Sources Used by H.P. Lovecraft in creating his Cthulhu Mythos, or deadly-serious lit-ry criticism of the latest Ace paperbacks, or dull articles on fannisih history (such as Our Man In Fandom does not write). In this case, you may very well be dismissed as an eggheady old Sercon (serious, constructive fan). The other end of the spectrum from this is the noisy teen-aged fan with the helicopter beanie and collection of faaan. Or suppose you chance to belong to a very large, very old organization called The National Fantasy Fan Federation. The name itself has IF been abbreviaited down to "the ferred to as a Neffer. If you publish a fanmag distributed to members only, it's a Neffzine. Slans and the Star-Begotten The key word, fan, came in for plenty of usage. Many fanzines punned with it, coming up with titles Fans .have always been able to identify with the eternally put-down mutant supermen in stories like Stapledon's Odd John, A. E. Van Vogt's Sian, and H. G. Wells's The StarBegotten. The tremendous popularity of Sian, coupled with its fortuitous resemblance to the word "fan", produced a host of variations. Tliere was a fanzine called Slantasy, for instance, and constructions like "slanzine" and "Slandom" became popular. Along with this We-Are-All-Mutant-Supermen notion, fans adopted the synthetic language, Esperanto. Fans went through a period of using nicknames which were their names rendered into Esperanto. For example, Morojo (Los Angeles fanne. Myrtle R. Douglas): Alojo (Arthur Louis Joquel IT); Gakspiro (Jack Speer). One of the leading proponents of Esperanto in Fandom was Los Angeles suiperfan of yore, Forrest J. Ackerman, today editor of a couple of those movie monster magazines. Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster World. Oddly enough, Ackerman didn't use an Esper antic version of his name during his fanac days. But he did use nicknames aplenty: #e (pronounced ,Forry"); #SJ ( "Forr-est-J ) ; Efjay; and many more. Ackerman founded several nutty fannish innovations. Such as "Ackese", a sort of simplifipd spelling or typing or whatever you'd like to call it. A sample would read something like this: "U  I r # b praps th #st # men # rch n xtra glaktik planet." (Translation: "You and I are to be perhaps the first two men to reach an extra-galactic planet.") Ackerman also pioneered something called nonstoparagrafing. You can see wihat it is -- instead of pulling the carriage back to the traditional five-spaces-infromleft-margin, you just drop down from the end of the last paragraph -- wherever it happens to come in the line -- to start the new one. E. Everett Evans followed the Ackerman-style of nicknames. He was called #E, or sometimes 'Tripoli". Joe J. Fortier did the same -- #J#. Then there was DW# -- composite nickname for Don Wollheim, Dirk Wylie and Dick Wilson -- three fans whose initials were the same, and who roomed together in the Ivory Tower. Without a Nickname The weird world of fan nicknames is a never-ending source of amusement to me. I can remember Ecco (E. C. Oonner), and Elarcy (Louis Russell Chauvenet -- "L. R. C."), and SaM (Sam Moskowitz, so spelled to avoid that superfluous and ilfae popular lettediaek in the prozmes, JoKe (Joe Kennedy, once a witty Ian humoiifit and now a Goftege pcofcssor in literature, and a prize-winning minor American poet); and, although modesty forbids, LinC (pronounced "link" and short for Your Man in Fandom, Lhi Carter) . Then there was "Ephless El" -- a phan named Elmer Purdue, whose typewriter, when he entered phandom, lacked the "F" key; no phault of his, it phoreed him to write like this due to the missingness of this letter. And a chap out in Bloomington, Indiana, who now writes hardcover mystery novels under his real name, Wilson Tucker, when a fan adopted the first name "Bob" -- which naturally laid him wide-open for such terms as "Boob" Tucker, et al. And a fan of the '#'s here in New York, Bob Stewart, who distorts bis first cognomen to "Bhob." And Fred Pohl, the editor of this magazine, who used to sign his letters wkh a Greek phi. Fttnzina Slong In the world of fanzines, we've evolved and coined a curious group of in-joke terms. For example, Obliterine. This is the correction fluid us to mend a tear or blank out a mistake made in typing up a mimeograph stendl. Fans used this stenchful hlue fluid so liberally that one once composed a verse in its honor: Obliterine, obliterine. Without you where would we have been? To err is human, and shnnish too, But we can correct our mistakes with you! And there's a form of nonsensical verse called Beardmuttering ("k's the kind of surrealistic stuff you mutter in your beard"). Since I couldn't possibly describe it -- except to say that, for some very obscure reason, there are no spaces between the words -- I'll just have to quote you a sample: heredeepdowninthegrave underthesodandloam underthecloudsandsky underthetreesandflowers iswhereiam geeiwonderifimdead That particular specimen of Beardmuttering is by Damon Knight... or as he preferred to have the name printed in his fannish days, damon knight. Sometimes demon knight. Fanzines are also partial to something called Interlineations. I am not a louse. -- Yngvi  M B M M  HI H a B  V H M W  M H a a I That was an Istedmeation. They are usually nonsensical, often surrealistic, sometimes dimly intelligible. This one has reference to the phrase "Yngvi is a louse!" which appeared in the L. Sprague de CampFletcher Pratt book. The Incomplete Enchanter, Harold S#iea, the hero, is in jail some:where in Ihe world of Norse mythology and sees a prisonmaite stagger to the bars and shout out this cryptic sentence at intervals dming the night. Nobody in Fandom knew what it meant, so they adopted it for its Nonsense value. Another word you'll find in fanzines is filler. A filler is what the editor gropes for when he's stenciling a page and finds he has a blank five or six lines at the bottom. Most fillers are composed on the spot. Like this: Vve never seen a purple cow -- It puts me in a rage! But I can end this pome right now, It's the bottom of the page. Perhaps this might have been a poem If I possessed the skill; But as things go, you see, my friend,  had four lines to fill! Hardly immortal, eh? But then, who is? A bit earlier, I mentioned Nonsense. Fans like nonsense. Take the phrase 'The Gostak distims the doshes." It appeared in an old sf story by Miles J. Breuer. It meant little or nothmg -- so fans picked it up. Another Nonsense-teim, once wildly popular, was vombic. Anything that is sort of... well... oh, you know... is vombic. To vomb makes you a vombis, Vpmbists belong to societies for the advancement of vombii, en you go around being vombic, you vombiate. To vombulate is to adopt an attitude of vombiation without actually getting out and being vombic. Understand? Or take the Nonsense word -- fout. That is what fans call an "allpurpose" word. It means absolutely nothing. But you can convey a lot by the context in Which you use it. For example: "Naw, it's too fbuty for me!" connotes a deprecative meaning; "The new If is out! Hot fout!" implies extreme joy or exuberance. Used without particular emphasis, it implies an enigmatic air of mystery. As in: See you next month, when Your Man in Fandom will be back with another fouty article of fannish lore! '#I '# (#d ed) Listing by author, story contents page. Over # issues (# titles) from US, UK, etc. Corrected expanded Massachusetts #. IF  Novelette They fought the roughest war men have ever engaged in -- not on Earthy but under it! I suits and walk around on the outside if they want to. That land out S ergeant Alvin Hodge adjusted the there hasn't been walked on by hu focus on the periscope and surman feet for at least two years. Here veyed the barren landscape, battered and there on the surface, little patches and pocked with craters. It looks like of green grass showed, as nature the pictures from the Moon-base, he tried to repair the damage man had thought. No, it's even more desolate wrought. Back home in Kentucky, than the Moon. The men at the he thought, the morning glories Moon-base can put on their spacewould be climbing all over everything, and the trees would be green after the winter. Here, the spring rain falls on mud and bare rock. Abruptly the scene blacked out as the light-sensitive glass in the periscope's optical system turned opaque under high intensity illumination. As the blackness slowly faded away, he could make out a writhing pillar of cloud pushing its way into the sky. At least a half dozen times every day one of these clouds made its appearance somewhere on the horizon. Our missiles? Theirs? No one knew except the men who had fired them. He scanned the periscope around. Off to the left, on a dear day, you could see what was left of the historic German city of Kassel, now just a pile of rubble. And off to the right, toward what used to be Vacha, in Thuringia, was where the Whole thing had started. No one was really clear on what had happened. Somehow or other, the East German and West German border guards had gotten to shooting at each other. This had happened many times before, and nothing ever came of it. This time, however, world tensions were 'higher than usual because of the Iranian question, and the UN was paralyzied because it was Red Ohina's turn to be chairman of the Security Council. So in three days Europe had exploded into nuclear war. Somehow the bombs had been confined to Germany, and both sides were rising pure-fusion clean weapons, so there was no fallout elsewhere. Both sides had dug in like moles and had been slugging it out ever since. Suddenly he was aware of someone at his elbow... "Sergeant Hodge?" "Yes, what is it?" "I relieve you as Sergeant of the Watch. Here are your orders." He took the proffered envelope, tore it open and pulled out the flimsy piece of paper. "Sergeant Hodge will report to Major Lowndes in Room #, Gallery #, Level #, immediately upon receipt of this order." R oom #. That's one of the rooms where they brief you for missions. It's not right, he thought. It's got to be a mistake. I had a mission day before yesterday. Policy is for three days between missions. And the old, familiar premission feeling of having a lump of lead in his stomach hit ihim. He stalked into an elevator and pushed the button for the twelfth level. He saluted stiffly. "Sergeant Hodge reporting as ordered, sir." The major returned his salute, studied his face for an instant and then spoke, softly. "Please sit down. Sergeant. You don't think this is fair, do you? You should have had another day off, esieciaHy after a tough tunnel raid like the one you pulled off day before yesterday. Well, to start with, the business of three days between missions is not an absolute rule. It's merely a policy to be followed whenever feasible. And you have to admit we do follow it pretty well. "But there have to be exceptions from time to time. This is one of the times. You're one of the few experienced tunnel fighters available today. As you know, we had a big efifert nit yesterday, afid the men wlio were on that ihave had even less rest than you have. Besides, this nBfon ought to be a ereampu.' He poimled to the Captain seated beside his desk. lis is Captain Maxwetl. Ife's with the Directorate oi Geology, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Your squad will escort him on this mission." Servant Hodge looked at the Captain. He noted the collar insignia the man was wearing and realized that the Captain was a Component Officer, rather than Line. He got the pay and privileges of an officer, but wasn't allowed to command anyone outside his corps of specialists. Sergeant Hodges would in fact be in command on this mksioii. Major Lowndes went to a table beside his desk and pulled a doth off a model of the tunnel and bunker system. "Sergeant, you know a fair amount about our tunnel system, but you'll have to know a few more things for today's mission. Here is our main bunker. It has a series of levels, running from fifty feet below the surface, down to nearly twentyfivc hundred feet below ground. It's connected to similar bunkers on either side by these communication tunnels. Here, at two thousand feet down, is our forward tunnel. It toward this Russian bunker, about ten miles in front of us. The forward tunnel comes to a dead end just about halfway to the Russian bunker. Vertical shafts run up from it about every noile or so, iBokiding one right before the dead end. Each of these vertka! shafts has a series of horizontal galleries runninig sidewiays from it, at various levels. In the case of the shaft farthest forward, each gaUery has additional tunnels running toward the Russian lines. Htese are the tunnels where the fighting takes place, whenever they meet a Russian tunnel, either by accident or design. I know you're familiar with them. Now you've probably heard rumors we're going on the offensive soon. To do that, we have to have ah accurate map of the Russian tunnel system." "But I thought we got that from sound echo-ranging, Sir." "To a certain extent we do. At close ranges we can map their tunnels pretty well. But to do this we have to know the velocity of sound in the rock stratum we're doing the echo-ranging in. Now the problem is right here." He pointed to a spot on the model just ahead of the forwardmost tunnel. "There's geological fault here. The rock strata have been slipping past each other, like slicing a layer cake vertically, then moving one of the pieces up. We don't have accurate information about the rock strata on the other side of the fault. We want your squad to escort Captain Maxwell and a tunneling crew as they push a tunnel through this fault. Captain Maxwell will take samples and make measurements on the other side. If we can identify the stratum, we can tell how much slip there was in the fault and thus get complete information on the properties of the rock on the other side. Tf we can't identify the stratum, at least we'll have a start on mapping the other side. Any questions?" IF Shiould tiliere be any ftghdng on tliis missioa #?" Wo don't now plan any. Your job is to get Captain Maxwell across tlie ifault and back safety with his instruments and information. If the Russians interoept you, of oourse dierell be a fight But we're not looking for one. YouTl 'be imder the command of Sector Three. Their call sign is Birdseye. You will be Birdseye Twelve. Now ooUeot your men and be ready to leave in forty-five minutes." Sergeant Hodge saluted and hurried out. Forty-five minutes didn't leave much tinie. His men were all off duty and might be in the PX, watching a movie, reading in the library (although he had to admit that was unlikely) or any one of a numiber of other places. II H e entered the concrete cubicle which was home for his squad and counted quickly. Fortunately they were all here. The usual four were playing their usual game of pinochle. Two more wore lying on their bunks, avidly devouring paperbacks with lurid covers. The remaining two were, cleaning their weapons, the short-barreled, small-caliber machine guns which had replaced the rifle for tunnel fighting. "Tennessee" Harper, Private First Qass, a tall youthful-looking man with a permanent smile under his shock of blond hair, was vigorously running a cleaning rod through the barrel of his weapon. "Twelve more days," he said in the soft aocents of his native state, "and I start my Rest and Recuperalkn leave in Paris. After surviving another three months of tunnel crawling, I get two solid weeks with no missions, no alerts and no reveille. Just think, #I have a real sky over my head. And aiH that French and those French ris. Especially the French girls. Ooh, la,. la." Friedmann, whose collection of paperbacks was renowned through the entire corridor, lowered his book and joined the conversation. "Paris is fine, Tennessee, but wait till you've been here as long as I have. Once you're over the hump, and you've got the first eighteen months of your tour behind you, you'll start sweating out the Big R. You'll take Paris, London, Madrid or the other RR towns as they come, but rotation back to the States is what you'll really think about." "I'M take your word for it, but the Big R is almost two years away for me. Three months is about as far ahead as I ever look anyway." Pedro Sanchez, MexicanAmerican, Corporal, and second in oommand of the squad, started to assemble his weapon. "Friend Tennessee, it is bad luck to talk about going on RR just a few days 'before your three months are up. You shoidd... "All right, knock it off." Sergeant Hodge felt that just before a missioo was no time to talk about bad luck. "Get a move on, you guys. We're due down at the tunnel head for a mission in about half an hour. Make it snappy." "But we got another day of rest cornin'... How come?... Why US?..." came the disgusted chorus of replies. "Because there's a job to be done, and we've been told to do it, that's why. And besides, this one sounds like a real oreampuff. Just don't anyone go goofinig off, and we'll get through this one with no sweat." Then he started to change from his duty khakis to ooveralls more suited to tunnel fighting. Twenty minutes later, the squad was lined up in the Armory, while he check their equipment. First, the standard equipment they all carried, like the hard hats, the face mask with filter for dust and gas, the emergency bottle of oxygen, infrared goggles, infrared filters for the headlamps. Check the batteries in the headlamps. Then the weapons, basic load of ammunition, plus two grenades and two gas bombs for each man. Extra rations. Then the special equipment. Carson, one of the pinochle players, carried a flamethrower. Friedmann carried the Very Low Frequency induction er, carried the rocket launcher. And Tennessee carried the squad's fivekilotop fusion bomb. All were in order. Even if the mission were to be a creampuff, the squad was too battle-wise to go slack. T hey stepped off the elevator at the head of thd forward tunnel at the appointed time. Captain Maxwell and the tunnelling crew were there already. As the heavy entrance door of the tunnel swung open, the men gripped their weapons tighter. The lump of lead in Sergeant Hodge's stomach felt like it would carry him through the floor, right down through the solid rock. They filed into the tunnel and took seats in the vehicle waiting for them. In the lead was a jeep like vehicle with low-pressure, balloon tires, driven by a compressed-air engine which was supplied from a bottle of high-pressure air carried in the back. Sergeant Hodge and Captain Maxwell would ride in that one. Behind that was a personnel carrier which would carry half the Squad and the tunnelling crew. Then came some specialized vehicles belonging to the tunnelling crew. Finally the rest of the squad brought up the rear in another jeep. All the vehicles rode on the balloon tires and used compressed air for power. This made far less noise to alert the Russian sounddetector operators and to confuse the American operators. In addition, the compressed-air motors avoided fouling the air and simplified the problem of supplying air to the tunnels. At first the tunnel was broad and high, lined with concrete, well lighted and well supplied with air. They drove swiftly towards the Russian lines, stopping at the oheckX)ints at each #f the vertical shafts. Finally they reached the last vertical shaft. Here the tunnel underwent a drastic transformation. Farther ahead, the walls were bare rock, the lighting consisted of an occasional bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the air was replenished by diffusion from the rest of the tunnel. From now on. that was the way the tunnels would be. They topped off their compressed-air Wtles from the tap at the end of the line. IF Their vehicles were loaded, one at a time, onto a slowly rising elevator and carried up to the level from which they would operate, only about twelve hundred feet below the surface. They filed down the gallery parallel to their own lines, then turned towards the Russian lines again. They reached the final checkpKint and stopped. The corporal in charge informed them that the tunnel extended another three hundred yards and came to a dead end. The detectors in the tunnel had given no indications of anyone breaking in, and a patrol which had gone all the way to the tunnel face less than two hours ago reported the tunnel clear. Their sound detectors had not found any signs of Russian activity in the vicinity, although there was believed to be a tunnel parallel to this one, about fifty to a hundred yards away. Armed with this assurance, they went forward with the usual caution. They left all the vehicles except those used in tunnelling at the checkpoint. In the event of an enemy breakthrough, it was much better to be on foot. As usual, Sergeant Hodge found that the lump of lead was gone from his stomach, and he couldn't say jut when it had disappeared. He had been at this business a long time and felt sure he was stretching his luck far beyond any reasonable limits. If he kept it up, he would inevitably find that his luck had run out. Hence he was nervous about each new mission. But once he was back in the tunnels, things were different. He could quit worrying about the future and wondering how long his luck would last. He concentrated on keeping alive for the immediate future. A small part of tunnel fighting involved a high level of tension and excitement, before a breakthrough into an enemy tunnel, wondering whether the enemy had detected you and you were heading into an ambush. By far the biggest part of the time, though, was spent just waiting. Waiting for the enemy to break through, waiting for the enemy to learn you had broken through, waiting for the enemy to enter your ambush. T his mission was just waiting and hoping that the Russians wouldn't detect them or, even if they did, would decide not to do anything about it. Many men couldn't take just waiting. Tey got to thinking about all the tons of rock over their heads and how much nicer it was to walk the green earth under a blue sky, and they went tunnel-happy. Sergeant Hodge, however, had learned patient waiting as a boy in the Kentucky hills, hunting deer and small game. If you consider hunting as a sport, you can spend the day wandering around the hills, and it doesn't matter whether you see any game or not. When success at hunting means the difference between meat on the table or not, you learn to sit by the game trails and wait patiently for something worth shooting to come by. After a while, you even got to the point where you let small animals go by, confident that there will be a bigger one along later. This was the kind of patience successful tunnel fighting called for. Sergeant Hodge led half his squad up to the tunnel face. There were no signs of trouble anywhere. Then the tunnelling crew brought their equipment to the tunnel face to begin work. Using a low-powered echo-sounder, Captain Maxwell determined that the earth fault w.as about three hundred yards ahead of them. That would take about six hours cutting time. Sergeant Hodge was glad he had made the men brin-g extra rations. It would be very unusual if anyone brought them any rations while they were here. He placed half his squad midway between the tunnel face and the checkpoint, where they could serve as a reserve and would also be useful if the Russians broke through into the tunnel behind the face. He kept the rest of the squad near the tunnel face with him. He had seen tunnel-cutting operations before, but they never ceased to fascinate him. The tunnelling crew used laser torches, powered by fuel cells in one of their trucks, to carve chunks of rock from the tunnel face. This made much less noise than more conventional techniques of boring and blasting. The rocks were then gripped by a special-purpose conveyor and carried back from the tunnel face, where they were transferr to a more conventional truck. When this was full, it hauled the rook back towards the main part of die tunnel, wbilc another truck took its place. The rock would be stored temporarily in an unused tunnel. Later some of it would be used to block tunnels which were no longer desired, and the rest would be hauled behind the lines and dumped on the surface. Actually, the limit on tunnelling speed was the speed with which rock could be carried away from the tunnel face. The laser torches were capable of cutting away rock much faster than it could be hauled away. In making a major attack, in fact, a process known as "pioltng" was used. In that case, the rock was cut away, hauled back a hundred yards or so and dumped. Thus a section of tunnel roughly a hundred yards long, closed at both ends, was moved forward. Tunnelling rates well over a hundred yards per hour could be achieved this way. A precision, inertial navigator was required to keep the tunnel on course. With the tunnel open at one end, as it was here, however, the conventional methods of using a transit and laser range finder were sufficient for keeping the tunnel on course. Behind the digging crew at the face of the tunnel came another crew. They inspected the tunnel walls and ceiling for weak spots and applied braces and shoring as needed. They smoothed the tunnel floor and cut any projections from the walls. Every twenty yards, on alternate sides of the tunnel, the cut niches. These were man-high and big enough for two men. The side of the niche toward the tunnel face was cut perpendicular to the tunnel wall. The side away from the tunnel face was cut at approxiIF mately forty-five degrees, so that the niche narrowed as it went deeper. Finally they strung lights on wires suspended from the ceiling. These were connected to the main power network of the bunker and galleries. Here, they had merely needed to tap into the wires coming up to the checkpoint. A fter a while Sergeant Hodge grew tired of watching the work of tunnelling and made a patrol of the tunnel back to the checkxint. The men on the sound detector reported that the noise of hauling rock drowned out everything else, but that couldn't be helped. Finally he sat down to rest along the edge of the tunnel, out of the way of the vehicles. His men were absolutely silent. There was no small talk, none of the traditional griping of soldiers. The tunnelling, though much quieter than conventional digging methods, was still louder than normal conversation. However, habits acquired in combat "re hard to break. When waiting in position, you did not talk, lest the enemy discover where you were. At last, at almost six hours on the dot, there was a sudden buzz of excitement at the tunnel face. There had been a sudden change in the color and texture of the rock. They had reached the earth fault. The fault here was marked by patches of gravel and fragments, where the rock strata had ground against each other. The tunnel would have to be extended a few yards beyond the fault to assure an uncontaminated sample of the other stratum at this same level, but that was the work of a few minutes. Then Captain Maxwell, using a miniature version of the larger laser torches, cut off a few pocketsized specimens of rock. He buried probes in the rock and made some in situ measurements of sound velocity. Then he packed up his gear and turned to go. The effect on the tunnelling crew was as though a tremendous pressure had been removed. In a few minutes they would well be out of here. Sergeant Hodge felt the same relaxation of tension, then steeled himself against it. He brought the men with him to the tunnel face and sent one of the tunnelling crew as a runner to order the rest of the squad forward and to alert the dieckpoint they were coming. He didn't intend to relax until they were well back into friendly territory. He followed the digging crew away from the tunnel face for about fifty yards, when he heard a noise behind him. He turned, to see the tunnel wall cave in just this side of the tunnel face. An explosion followed, and the lights went out. He dropped to a crouch and scuttled toward the tunnel face, brushing his left arm against the tunnel wall. He threw himself into the first niche he found, triggered off a short burst toward the tunnel face and ducked out of the way of the fusillade that came back at him. Within seconds, he had slipped an infrared filter over his headlamp, turned on the lamp, flipped his infrared goggles on and stuck IF the tube from his oxygen bottle between his teeth, where he could bite down on the valve and mouthbreathe oxygen if the air grew too foul. He peered back into the tunnel. A steady stream of Russians was pouring through the breach in the tunnel wall. As they entered the tunnel, they hugged the walls, sprawled on the floor or found what shelter they could behind the debris their explosion had caused. A veritable storm of bullets was sweeping the tunnel face, taking a high toll of the entering Russians. However, within seconds, they would have a force large enough to overwhelm his squad, despite their inevitable high losses. First things first. He blew a series of blasts on his whistle. An answering series from Sanchez told him that Tennessee was in position with the fusion bomb. As a last resort, the bomb could be set off and the tunnel sealed, keeping the Russians out of the rest of the gallery. The next was to stop the flow of Russians into the tunnel. Carson, with the flamethrower, was too far back to help now. What else might be used? He had seen it done once that way... He blew another series of blasts and yelled, "Use the lasers!" W ithin seconds the tunnel was filled with an eerie light. Someone had gotten one of the laser torches going and was playing it over the breach in the tunnel wall. At that range the beam was defocussed and would not melt rock. The energy density was still high enough to char flesh and flash coveralls into flame, however. The stream of reinforcements entering the tunnel was cut off abruptly, while the men in the tunnel concentrated their fire on the laser in an attempt to knock it out. The next step was to clean out those Russians remaining in the tunnel and to do it in the few seconds the laser was likely to continue operating. There were perhaps a dozen Russians in the tunnel still putting up some fight. They were almost totally unsheltered, however. A few had tried firing from one of the niches in the tunnel wall, but found that the sloping, rear side of the niche gave almost no protection against fire from the direction of the tunnel head. Hodge was startled as something streaked past him, then he realized launcher into action. The launcher was equipped with a laser range finder, and the rocket fuses could be set to burst at a given range, with a precision of a foot or two. right beside a standing man or right above a man lying prone, sleeting him with shrapnel. Sergeant Hodge blew his whistle ket fire, the rearmost members of the squad started moving up from one niche to the next. The moves were made with only one man exposed at a time, and he had to run only the twenty yards to the next niche. All the men not running added the weight of their fire in an attempt to disrupt the return fire of the Russians. Hiefi the tunnel was pitched into blackness again, as the las went out ffi a shower of pyrotechinics. Hodge blew a long blast on his whistle, and the whole squad was out in the tunnel, running for the hazy glow cast by the Russians' infrared headlamps. Some of the Russians stood and fought and were quickly overwhelmed. The rest disappeared through their entry tunnel. Carson and Hodge reached the opening at the same time. Carson unlimbered his flamethrower and started it spraying back up the Russians' tunnel. Then the whole squad was charging into the tunnel. They were met half way by another group of Russians. The earsplitting clatter of machine guns filled the tunnel until the two groups closed with each other. Curses and grunts mingled with the acrid smoke and gloom. A figure in a Russian hard hat loomed up in front of Hodge. The figure raised his weapon like a club, and Hodge delivered a quick kick to the knee, then dodged the now badly aimed blow. Hodge jabbed the muzzle of his gun hard right under the other's rib cage, then stepped back. As the figure doubled over, Hodge brought his knee up into the other's face and smashed thebuitt of his weapon down on the other's hack, just below the rim of the hard hat. As the figure slumped to the floor, Hodge was bumped from the side. He stumbled and regained his balance. He found that he bad been bumped by a Russian who was intent on honung into a fight between another Russian and one of Hodge's men. Hodge tripped him with a gun barrei between the legs and finished him with a short burst while he was down. Then he swiveled to parry the attack of a Russian coming at him from die other side, who in turn was taken from the side by another of Hodge's men. Then finally there Were no more Russians left standing. Hodge counted three of his squad besides himself still on thear feet. Friedmann was down, wounded but still alive. Sanchez, a bloody trench knife gripped in his right hand, was examining the Russians to make sure they were dead. Carson was retrieving his flamethrowty from where he had dropped it when the hand-toTiand vaging ammunition from the dead Americans. S anchez turned over one of the Americans and spwke softly. "Friend Tennessee, I told you not to make your own bad luck. Now may God have mercy on you." Hodge spoke up, "Sanchez, get that fusion bomb Tennessee was carrying and get someone else to cany it. Carson, see how things are back in our tunnel. Find Maxwell if you can. Friedmann, see if you can raise Birdseye on the radio for me." "Birdseye, this is Birdseye Twelve. Come in please. Birdseye, this is Birdseye Twelve. Come in please." "Birdseye Twelve, this is Birdseye. What is your situation?" IF Sergeant Hodge took the microphone. "This is Birdseye Twelve. I'm down to four effectives, including myself, plus one wounded. We bad completed our misMon when the Russians attacked. Hold on just a minute," he said, as Carson and Maxwell showed up. "How are things out there?" Maxwell replied, "Not as bad as we thought at first. About one third of the tunnelling crew are woimded, and they have a few dead. Most of their tunnelling equipment is wrecked, but all our transportation is still intact back at the checkpoint. I've still got my samples and data. They're carrying back the dead and wounded now." Sergeant Hodge repeated this information to Birdseye, then went on. "We seem to have lucked into a Russian tunnel here. It would take several squads to exploit it properly. We can try to hold the entrance until you can get more troops here, or we can seal it. In any case, I think we need reinforcements to escort the tunnelling crew back. What do you want us to do?" "Do you have a fusion bomb with you?" "Yes, Sir." "Very well. There's a squad in a nearby tunnel. They can be brought around as an escort for the tunneling crew. We just don't have any forces available to exploit the tunnel. Take your fusion bomb as far up the Russian tiuinel as you can and set it off there. It will seal the one tunnel and may collapse some of their others. Don't wak for tihe tunnelling crew's escort, but get die crew started back without their escort. Any questions?" "No, Sir. Over and out." He returned the micsxiphone to Priedmann. He turned to Sanchez. "See sf the Russians lelt any vehicles up ahead we can im. If not, 'we'U tovc to bring a jeep up from the checkpoint and t to get it through this intercept tunnel the Russians dug." Sanchez was back shortly. "Yes, there are several Russian jeeps and a personnel carrier up here." "We'll take one of the jeeps. I'M drive. Get me a Russian hard hat to wear. The rest of you will crouch down in the back. And Sanchez, make sure that bomb is on a deadman setting. If they ambush us,' I want to make sure the bomb goes off. There will be no talking on the way. They undoubtedly have the tunnel bugged, and our speaking English would tip them off. We'll drive up the tunnel a couple of miles and set the bomb. If we get to a checkpoint before that, we'll just drive up to it and start shooting. There's no way to sneak up on a checkpoint in a tunnel like this." They drove swiftly down the tunnel. At first it was narrow, low and badly lighted. After a thousand yards or so, it started to widen out; then after another thousand yards, it became smooth surfaced and lined with concrete. The lights were now set into the ceding instead of hanging suspended from wires. There were air vents set into the wall at regular intervals, indicating that this portion of the tunind had forced ventilation. Oeady this was no temporary or exploratory tunnel. They had tapped into one of the Russian's main tunnels. Then they saw, a few hundred yards ahead, three or four vehicles lined up along the side of the tunnel. This was evidently the first Russian checkpoint. Qeieant Hodge drove up at a sedate pace, apparently drawing no iarticular notice from the handful of Russians bustling about the veihicles and standing by the tunnel well. They evidently saw no cause for alarm in a single vehicle, driven by a single man wthose hard hat had the proper silhouette. Sergeant Hodge glanced at the checkpoint as he drove abreast of it. Instead of the fjimiliar little pocket in the side of the tunnel, used by the Americans, this was a rather elaborate affair, with a small office containing a desk and several chairs behind a counter which fronted on the tunnel. From a small balcony to one side, a pair of machine guns covered the tunnel, but only one of these was manned. The machine gunner died first, in the fiery stream from Carson's flamethrower. The Russians standing in the tunnel were cut down quickly, most of them even before they realized there was a fight going on. Hodige lobbed a grenade into the office and vaulted over the counter immediately after the explosion, to make sure all resistance there was eliminiated. He then turned back. sian machine guns aimed up the tunnel, just in case they send someone to investigate the shooting. Carson, see if one of those vehicles has more air in its tank than ours does. If so, we'll take it instead. Sanchez, get that bomb set to detonate immediately if tampered with and set the time fuse for ten minutes." Sergeant Hodge then started rummaging through the desk drawers. Orders, ledger sheets, messages, personal letters, anything might turn out to be of some value to the Intelligence people. He caught a glimpse of movement at the back door of the office, swiveled around and fired by reflex. A figure pitched through the doorway and face down. Only then did he notice the long black hair showing below the uniform cap. He went over to the figure and turned it over. Below the crown of long, silky black hair, a pair of soft brown eyes stared sightlessly out of a young, pretty, Slavic face. The soft, pleasingly rounded contours of her uniform jacket were disfigured by stillspreading dark splotches. "Sergeant Hodge?" He jerked himself upright. "Yes, Sanchez?" "The bomb is ready to go." "Start the timer." He reached down and closed her eyelids, then dashed for the jeep. IV T he debriefing officer stared across his desk at Sergeant Hodge. "You're sure that's all, Sergeant?" "Yes, Sir. I've given you all the details I can remember." "Then what's eating you? You've never before acted like this after a mission." "I keep thinking about that Russian woman." "So that's it. Okay, so the Russians have women in the bunkers with them. They probably assign them to noncombatant jobs like clerks, or cooks or communications technicians. And as an additional duty, they keep the troops happy. The Russians have always been more practical about things like that than we have. If that's what's bothering you, ni recommend you for a week's R  R in Paris. In fact, ril recommend your whole squad. After a fight like that, you deserve it anyway." . Sergeant Hodge answered in a dull voice. "rU accept your offer, Sir. We do need the rest. But that won't really help. It won't make me forget I killed a young girl who was maybe all of twenty years old." Then his voice filled with anguish. "Sir, I've been Regular Army since I was od enough to enlist. I've been in nvre brushfirc wars, police actions nnd border incidents than I can keep track of. They were all bloody and caused a lot of people a lot of grief, but at least they seemed to make sense. I knew why I was fightinf?, and I could see how it was helping someone. But this is different. Why does a young girl like that, who oughtto be courting or going to dances or whatever it is that Russian girls do, have to get mixed up in the grubby business of tunnel fighting and end up dead on the floor of a tunniel, in a puddle of her own blood? Or how about Tennessee, who got more fun out of life than any other man I ever met? How come he had to die like a mole, grappling with some other mo-lcs, in a dark stinking mole hole a quarter of a mile underground? It doesn't make any sense. It's nodiing but a mess. How'd we ever get into it anyway?" "The pendulum swung when we weren't looking." "What's that, Sir?" "Look, there's always tragedy in war. If you grant that war is an acceptable means of settling political disputes, then you have to accept a certain amount of the tragedy as unavoidable, since wars are usually fought by the young and healthy. But there's a lot of tragedy, like the death of that girl and like the manner of the death of your friend Tennessee, that's really unnecessary. It comes from being unprepared for war or being prepared for the wrong kind of war. "You can think of the relation between offense and defense in war as like a pendukwn. One time the offense is overwhelming, then later the pendulum swings and defense is invulnerable. Docs the term 'Maginot Line mean anything to you?" "Umitim, not a thing. Sir." "Well, let's look at a bit of history. Back in #, everyone thought that a modem war would be over in a short time. Economists decreed that highly integrated modern economy just couldn't stand the strain of a prolonged war, with its disruption of trade. A war was to be won by a few decisive 'battles right at the IF outset. The victor would be the one who hurled all his offensive force inito the battle first. "But it didn't work that way. While everyone was busy planning his offense, the pendulum had swung to the defense. Trenches protected by barbed wire and machine guns wore nearly impregnable. British and French attacks on German trenches frequently cost ten thousand dead in a single day and achieved a penetration of the enemy lines of a few hundred yards at most. "So the French, in their war preparations, decided to build a line of fortifications along their German frontier. This was the Maginot Line, a steel-and-concrete super trench which was to be even more impregnable than the trenches of #, while giving the troops all the comforts of home. But while they gave their attention to blueprints and concrete mixers, the pendulum swung back. The airplane and the tank made the offensive overwhelming. "So we and everyone else, drew a lesson from this. Mobility was the key. Faster tanks, bigger Armored Personnel Carriers, more fighter bombers were the answers. again it didn't work VV out that way. If the enemy uses nuclear weapons against you, you have to dig in deep for protection. "How could we have prepared better for it, if we had realized that a defensive which, can withstand a nuclear weapon can surely withstand anything less? I don't know. We might have been smart enough to avoid having the war altogether. It doesn't maitter any naore. The real problem is how do we get out of it? I don't know, and I don't think anyone else does either. There don't seem to be any shortcuts. We don't bomb the Russians' railroad mshalling yards because they'd bomb our Atlantic ports in retaliation, and no one knows where the retaliation and counter retaliation would end. Likewise, they don't send their subs after our shipping, because then we'd have to bomb their sub pens. So both sides are able to harness their entire Gross National Product to war production and send it over here where we're engaged in a vast underground wrestling match. It looks like it'll end the same way World War I did, when one side goes broke before the other. I'm an optimist, after a fashion. Since our we're bound to win in the end. AH it will cost us is a couple of decades of economic growth and a generation of young men. "Well, I've said enough. On that relatively pleasant note I'll end. Enjoy your leave in Paris and try to come back all charged up and ready to do battle again." Sergeant Hodge rose, saluted and walked out glumly. That old familiar lump of lead was back with him again, trying to pull him down through the floor. And this time, he knew, it wasn't going to go away. It would be with him until, somewhere in some dark tunnel, his luck would run out at last. IF  Novelette You con get used to anything out on the for reoches of the goloxy -- anything but Earth! # #'They're coming in," Karlsen A announced in that exact, perfunctory .way of his. "Bang on schedule. Beam #, approaching outer asteroid belt. Decelerating to half the speed of light. Should land at # our time." "That comiputer's always slow," Spandrel! goaded him. "I could work it out better with an abacus. If I had an abacus." "Generals always do," Ngomo grunted. I raised an eyebrow, half to signify that rank was rank and generals did as they pleased and half to ask what it was they always. "Arrive on schedule. An hour before first dawn." "It's our first visit," Spandrell argued. "How do you know they come half an hour before first dawn?" "They do everywhere else," Ngomo said. "Why should this be any different? With any luck, Karlsen's got his beams mixed up, and he'll land in the swamp." "Could you fix k, Karlsen?" Ingles asked, a wry gleam in his green alien eyes. The time had certainly come to assert my authority. They were quite capable of oraslhing the general's ship without even asking me first. That is the trouble with outposts. A few dozen technicians, boffins, admin staff, laiborers, all fadnig the same hazards, conscious of sharing a common identity, the bond of one head and two legs. A voice and a home somewhere in some place out on the fringe of the galaxy. All except Ingles -- and he was human as the rest of uis for all his green eyes and yellow, blueveined hands. There was a tendency to forget who was who. What exactly a general's insignia looked like. Why I alone wear a khaki uniform and carry a stick. Why in fact I was there at all. For the whole # days of the VX ## year on no day of # hours earth time had anyone addressed me as colonel. 'Geoff or 'Bud' -- thumbs up, thumbs down and Natascha, who called me Boris. "Listen, all of you!" I said. "General Kalen's 'the boss of all outerfringe exploration. We rely on him and the rest of them down wherever tliey are in the galaxy for supplies. This is his first visit, and if he's happy, it'll be his last. He's getting our reports regularly through the electromag accelerator, and he should know the difficulties. He's landing at the right time anyway. If he comes down an hour before first dawn, we'll have time to get him and his craft under the net before the bombardment. The goons never let loose before second dawn with the binary well above the horizon. We'll have no nonsense about ditching him in the swamp. Instead, we'll have a general smartening up all round. An air of rattling efficiency and -- what's that thing called?" "Esprit de corps!" Karlsen prompted. "Esprit de corps -- what?" "Esprit de corps. Colonel!" "That's better!" I looked round at the heavy, masklike faces, pale in the harsh light of the luminoid slung from the dome of the steel beehive structure I termed my H.Q. The hodge-pKxlge of equipment, bunks, tables, chairs, desks with ledgers, coffee pots and beakers. There was a dart board on the wall backed by a map of the outer seven colonial spheres. Some pictures by Ingles, an incredibly observant artist, of Natascha posed like an Hamadryad on a petrified log. There was an auroch's head with a hook on its nose and quoits for throwing at it. Pretty general stuff for an outstation. Nothing much, I thought, to impress the general with what we were all there for. What were we here for? There wasn't much in the outer seven, and one planet looked very like another. K arlsen threw a switch and projected a hazy outline of a ship with retromotors firing against a background of stars and someone's smudged thumb-print on the screen. "Here he comes!" he said, Ngomo sighed and shook bis head, l'd better get the cait out cm the landing strii) and 'bring him in fast." "Fast -- what?" "Past -- Coionell" Spandrel unhooked his helmet from the main switch of the eleotromag accelerator. "Okay to use landing lights, or will that invite the goons to lob one over just for luek?" he asked. "They've never fired one in the dark yet. Lights look like someone lives here. Use them!" I decided. "He's coming in on the beam all right?" "Right in the beam, Colonel!" I snapped my fingers, and Waldron brought my helmet and levitator harness. Grinning, he fixed the straps. "I come with you. Colonel?" I thought about it. It looked better to have an aide, even an obvious imbecile like Waldron, whose nerve had gone the day we discovered Rastus. Rastus had taken a fancy to Waldron and pinioned him with a friendly tentacle. It bad taken all Natascha's coaxing to make hkn let go, and Waldron had never been the same man since. But he was loyal and useful and harmless and a presence to stand behind me. With any luck the general would no-t notice the grin 'under the fish bowl of his helmet and the twitch of the hands in his mittens. "Come along!" I said. My voice rasped with a new electronic note of authority with the headspeaker in place. "It's 'colonel' from now on and jump to it. Let him see us as a highly efiricient little force holding out against kisuiperiable odds. Let him see Rastus and a Goon bombardment, and we'll all get medals and go home. If he thinks someone else could do it better, you'll have a new C.O. and regiments of space administrators and the military. Do you want bull and the goons too?" "No," they said. "No, Colonel!" "Right!" I ordered. "Open up, and let's go meet him!" . "Sir!" Inglis snapped to attention and Mcked the activates: mechanism wkh one of his prehensile suckers. The inner door to the airlock opened, and Natascha stepped out. "Why, Boris!" she said. "TeU her!" I ordered them. "And see to it she understands!" Ngomo brought a cat round to the door, and I climbed aboard with Waldron and Spandrell. Ngomo drove us through the little cluster of beehives that made up our station to the perimeter of the chain-link dome that covered the safety area. Spandrel heaved on the pulleys that raised a few yards of the curtain high enough for Ngomo to get the cat through. "Leave it up!" I ordered. "Tlic bubbles won't find that hole before we get back!" II W e drove to the air strip, and a hundred-square-meter postage stamp cleared in the waving marsh grass at a safe distance from  Rastus swamp. We had made the track from the boles of ossified trees IF and the mud from the swamp that dried quickly like aspalt. On either side, the ground was wet and spongy and blaok wkh the debris of ancient forests like soft, glutinous coal. "Blowing a gale as usual." Ngomo, himself as black as the swamp, had a way of noticing the obvious and the worst of it at that. Show him a pearl, and he would see only the in the light of the three moons. Aglia, Euphrosyne and Thalia. We had thought it a pity to give them the usual numbers after the second oblique stroke. VX ###, # and #. The stark beauty of it all moved Waldron to quote from a forgotten earth poet. "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!" A long way, I thought, from that bank of the wild thyme and the single moon and winds that blew air one breathed and smelled and used to turn windmills with. No one knew what this wind was made of. It defied all analysis. It was not just a new grouping of atoms into an unknown molecular structure. Even the atom itself was different. Energy in a form that became wind blowing wi!h the dawns from the goon land, but sotmehow the swamp grass absorbed it. No photosynthesis. No chlorophyll. Just tall, yellow, osierlike grass that sucked up water and a dozen unnamed minerals with a breathing in and oqt of wind. We turned our faceshields to the sky. Above US, the approaching fire of the ship's motors was suddenly extinguisihod. "Retros cut, parachutes open. Landing now!" Karlsen's voice announced in my headphones. The radar confirmed the evidence of my eyes. I was surprised. You never knew with Karlsen, and we'd humped his equipment around so many planets. One day we'd find a gas his beams wouldn't go through, and then perhaps tiie bigwigs would leave us alone. "There it is," Ngoma pointed. "Coming out of the sky wobbling like a belly dancer's navel. This wind should shake him up a bit." "Thou art not more unkind," Waldron quoted, "than man's ingratitude." He refrred, I thought, to the wind rather than to Ngomo's belly dancer. We waited, and the long arms of the landing gear extended as the ship touched down safely on the strip. The loud speakers blared the supranational anthem "God save our glorious world" from the four corners of our postage stamp. A happy thought on Karlsen's part, who apparently had it on tape in the H.Q. The general came down the ladder clearly impressed. His hand was raised in salute, fingers touching the tips of helmet antennae. "Welcome to VX##, General!" "Glad to be here, Carruthers. Glad to be here." He took a look round for a guard of honor needing inspection, and a lot of aides came down the ladder behind, keeping step rung by rung. I looked apprehensively at that point on the horizon we called, for nostalgic reasons, east. Already, purple and orange rays were flashing upwards from the general area where soon the arc of the first ball of the binary would blink, to be followed in ten minutes by its twin and second dawn. Purple merging with orange, a green-gold and then, just before full binary, a new color, indescribable in earth words. We had named it auron -- the halo of the new world. VX##. The gang rushed to the derricks and was lowering the ships nose down towards the transporter almost before the general set foot for the first time on our planet. I led him quickly to the cat. The aides followed in single file. "Come aboard, General." "You certainly hustle here, Carruthers. I like to see hustle." So that was my name! I had wondered. "Yes, General. Come aboard." "So this is VX ##?" "All of it, General. We can get your staff on too if they pack tight." "Is it all as dead as this?" "Quite dead, General. Up you come! It's nearly first dawn." "And that would be the dawn over there? A magnificent sight." "Marvelous. There's very little time, General. The bomibardment starts at second dawn." T he general's hand strayed to the lumivex shield of his headpiece, unconsciously stroking upwards the outline of an imaginary mustache. "My dear Carruthers! I have been under fire before, you know. This concern for my safety is hardly necessary. I remember once on XL # -- glass shells, they were. Shrapnel. Jagged lumps of it. And then on TS #, the theta rays. I have managed to survive. What form does your bombard ment take? Your reports were somewhat reticent." "Bubbles!" Waldron began to sing. "Empty bubbles in the air, they fell to earth I knew not where." "Quite," said the general, glaring at him with two bright eyes inside his helmet. "Your name would be...?" "Waldron," I introduced, "My -- er -- side-kick." "Side-kick?" "No," I said, "that's not the right word, is it? We've been away so long, I forget which is rank proper and which is rank derogatory. He's a good chap anyway." The general was making some noises about being sure he was and meaning sure he wasn't, when I saw the bubble. It was drifting in the apparent aimless, coquettish way of bubbles over the swamp grass, bobbing up and down in the wind. The dawn lights were reflected, sparkling on its surface like patterns of one oil drop in a puddle. "Everyone down!" I shouted. The ship crashed on to the transporter with an almighty clang as the gang dived beneath it. Ngomo and Waldron flattened themselves on the lee side of the cat. Only the general and his half dozen aides stood, for all the world like a row of gasoline pumps with notebooks and pencils in the crook of an arm where the notch for the no # zle should have been. I brought him down with a Rugby tackle, and his staff followed their leader in the best military tradition. He said something like 'monstrous' or 'outrageous' or 'court martial' -- it was difficult to get the exact message. His antennae had twisted with the fall, and there IF was some disitCHtion. Fortunately for aU of us, before anydiing decipherable came Itirough, the bubble swooped and the cal was vaporized in a puff of hot steam. '"Lie still!" I shouted. "Don't do anything to annoy it, and perhaps it'll go away!" We were never sure whether the bubbles could hear us or not. Bubbles are very like the god-in-chief that every planet seemed to have. You never knew if they really existed or how they stood in relation to yours, and you treated them with respect, just in case. Left alone, the bubbles never came down to ground level. They concentrated on anything metal. We had lost a lot of equipment that way but so far, with prudence, not a single man. An aide cautiously straightened the general's antennae, an action I thought worthy of a purple heart or whatever it is they give heroes these days. "What is it?" he asked when the operation was completed. "The bombardment," I told him. "They're early today. They probably knew you were coming. We'll move before they all are able to get the range." The bubble drifted away over a hummock of phosphorescent hornblende Natascha had sculpted into a fair semblance of .an X# man-eating frog-goddess and down the track toward our enclosure. It would eventuiaUy expend itself on the protective netting which channeled its energy store to earth or at least to VX #. The gang climbed aboard the transporter and started the motors. There was a general rush to get home before the next one came floating downwind. "We'll walk," I told the general. "I wouldn't like to be near your ship if they get it." "Get my ship?" he asked incredulously. "They get everything," I said. "We've got one, but it's no use to a general. It was obsolescent years ago, and the maintenance team all went down with U.# plague before we found the antidote. In fifty yeafs, it's never seen an oU-can." "I see," be said. "We'll go by the swamp," I directed. "We're safer with Rastus. Rastus kno'ws all about bubbles." "Anything you say, Carruthers," he agreed. "Anything you say." His helmet was overlarge, and his head inside reminded me of a hermit crab in a cockle shell. m T here were no more bubbles, and Rastus was apparently asleep. Not a ripple on the swamp stirred as we made our way along the porous, black-treacle, spongy track. I threw a large diamond from one of the bank meteorites in bis usual half mile area of ooze, but not even a tentacle showed. "Was that a diamond?" a major asked. "Yes," I said. "No volue here of course. You can pick up a ton anywhere in the outer periphery." Someone mentioned there was reserve energy in the general's ship and we could use the levitators. We wore ours more from habit than for IF flight; we were always short of poww. Oood old Kalen," I "With energy on his ship. I wonder if we can whip a generator or two before he goes." We sailed back to camp over the grass and the hroiken, dead trees and arrived at the same time as the transporter. I invited them all to coffee in the H.Q. I wanted to see KaJen without his headgear. He looked the sort of general that all generals try to look like. Clipped mustache; bright, steely eyes; lantern jaw; creases down either cheek so deep his Roman nose jutted like a letter L in brackets. He sat with his back bolt upright. A strain, I thought, on the belly that nature had built to sag a little. Natascha brought coffee, and the bright eyes mapped her contours with battlefield precision. "Hem!" he said. "Er -- yes. Hem!" "Natascha Kaminskaya," I mtroduced. "Originally, when we all came togeliher as a team about seventyfive years ago, our medical officer. Now our phagocytes cope with anything, and she only has an occasional broken leg to slip in the autosettcr. She's become our universal femme fatale. We share her. On a strictly rota basis of course," The military, I remembered, are always impressed by rotas. "It's fun," Natascha told him. "It must be," he murmured. He rose to his full height and stroked his mustache. Inclining his head, he gestured me to follow him to a point away from the others secluded behind aa applied atmohere geoator. "b she all Slight?" he asked. "Marvelous," I said. "You want to slip in on the iota?" "I mean," he enapped, "is she all iht poMcaflly? She appeals to be a Russtam" "Is she?" I wasn't at all sure about Russia. It was the had half 'of some planet or other, hut I had forgotten which. "And then," he went on, "that chap whh die suckers sprouting out of his shoulders. Where exactly is he from? You can't be too careful, you know." "Ingles?" Where had we found Ingles? Somewhere down Earth way -- Barnard's Star perhaps. "Ingles is one of the best," I said. "You should see him dicing -- hands against sudeexs. He is quite schizophrenic. The sudeers belong to the older half of his development, and they're controlled by an antique corner of his brain. No connection with the humanoid that runs his hands. At ati his games, the hands win." Natascha was hanng round the coffee we always laced with a YK #I rum we had brought along in a tanker. Ingles was already raising his beaker. A reflective sip when the hands held it and a long gulp when the suckers took their turn. The sight of it seemed to trigger off some reaction in the general's adrenal-sympathico system. He snatched a beaker from Natascha drew himself to his full height and cleared his throat. The aides snapped to attention. He raised his ass apparently in invocation to the genius loci.  "The president!" he bawled. "The president!" the aides echoed "Who is president of where now?" Ingles whispered. I twitched an eyebrow, and he subsided. I hadn't the least idea. Presidents came and went. The drill, I took it, was to toast the idea of an office rather than an person. Everyone, everywhere drinks to something they believe the giver of all things good. We often toast Natascha. Why not a president? It was all the same to me. The general sat and extended his legs to their full length resting on the heels of his high, brown leather boots. He thought it time to unbend, to show himself benignly human like the rest of us with a big heart under the Sam Browne belt. But he was cautious. He wasn't that sure of us yet. Ctnpell me," he asked. "What exA actly is the military position?" "The military position," I said, "is -- well -- myself. The rest of us here are sort of civilians. We had -- I think you call them soldiers -- in fair numbers when we set out. Somehow they all succumbed, and the civilians survived. The heroes, if I remember rightly, went first, then the not-so-heroic and so on down the scale to me. We set out originally to look for -- what was it?" "Titanium ore." Karlsen said. "Zirconium!" Spandrell thought. "What's zirconium?" Ingles asked. "There wasn't any." I completed. "I was referring," General Kalen said slowly, "to the strategic position of your encampment and the deployment of the enemy forces. Who or what is, in fact, responsible for the bubbles you call, rather oddly, the bombardment?" "Oh, those," I told him. "That's the goons." "And who or what are the goons?" "We don't exactly know. They live, we believe, on the other side of the marshes." "And what kind of creatures are they?" "Anthropoid!" Karlsen snapped. "Humanoid!" Ingles almost agreed with him. "Duodecapods!" Ngomo shouted. It was the old argument. Only humanoids would want to play with that sort of energy, and only duodecapods would know how to. "We don't know," I explained. "We've never seen one. Their whole territory is encased in a kind of bubble, miles across, very likely made of the same energy substance as their missiles. You can't fly through it; metal dissolves on contact with it and generates considerable heat. You can see through it, but it's like looking at the sea-bed with a light swell running. It's rippling and distorted. Every morning at second dawn, the wind rises, and pieces of bubble appear to detach themselves from the main structure and float down here looking for us. That's goon bombardment. We think the bubbles may be sentient." "How big an area have you prospected so far?" "Only our camp under the chainlink dome and the air strip." IF "Is that all?" "It's big enough. The rest of the planet is dead. Marsh and swamp and the goon bubble. Everything died a long time ago except... "Marsh and swamp!" Waldron shrieked. I had forgotten. We never mentioned the swamp in his presence. He tihrew a fit and sobbed. The general treated us all to a long, cold look. He seemed not to like what he saw. The aides were writing rapidly in their notebooks, and a major technologist was walking curiously around our equipment, showing interest in a spiral of copper tubing in a stainless steel vat. It looked like -- and it was -- a still. "The titanium ore," the general asked slowly. "The spectrograph showed titanium. Have you really prospected for it?" "Have we?" I asked my staff. "The titaniuim is in goon territory," Karlsen came to my rescue. "Under the bubble." "In the swamp!" Waldron giggled. He screamed again. "What's titanium?" Ingles asked. "Note this!" the general announced. His aides raised their pencils and gathered around him. "In all my experience, I have never visited a station so -- strangely -- conducted as this. The light-years between your colony and Earth are no excuse for an absence of discipline -- of objective -- even, it appears, of mental balance." He looked at Waldron. "You have been here five years..." "Two!" Karlsen interrupted. "I refer," the general snapped. "to the accepted reckoning in all civilized stations. That is, in Earth years. Earth time has a mystic, transcendental significance. It is absolute, true cosmic time. The length of your day and the duration of the VX## orbit around its parents VX# and #I are irrelevant to this true time, and I repeat therefore that in five years you have succeeded in achieving precisely nothing. You have been together, you say, for seventy-five years, and you must all be in the region of two hundred years old. An age of discretion. Of maturity even. What have you achieved on your previous missions?" "We've survived," I said. "And that has been achievement in itself." "Utterly negative!" he snapped. "Positive from our point of view," I countered. "I am a reasonable man," he continued. "I would accept failure brought about by insuperable obstacles. Alien predominance, for instance. But what are your aliens? What is their strength? You appear not to know. What meaures have you taken to defeat them? None at all that I can see. Where is the titanium? Where is the zirconium? Have you any idea of the cost to Earth of these types of survey missions? They have to be paid for. They have to show a profit in the minerals shipped back to the mother planet. That way lies survival. True survival in the communal sense. A small planet the master of the universe, the storehouse of all the treasures the universe can offer it. And how does Earth obtain these treasures? By the self-sacrifice, gallanitiy, deiteoninatioii qf ks mrchmt fleete and ithe surveys earned out by teams such as youirs. Teams which should be inspired by the same sense of advefiture that sent die Vikings to North America, the early Frenchmen to the moon.' He paiused and swaMowed two purple tablets. His eyes brightened, and the pupils contacted. "Well, Oarruthers?" he asked sourly. "And what explanation have you to offer?" I looked round my staff. Karlsen, blond, bearded, hunched over his electronic paraphernalia. Spandrel, short and fat, biting his fingernails. Ingles, young, yellow and handsome, mustacoed, easily erect, doing his best to appear battleworthy. Yellow hands on hips and shoulder tendrils coiled, Medusa-fashion, around his neck. It was Natascha, who came to the rescue. "I think Rastus would know about the goons and about the titanium. Rastus knows most things." "Of course!" I agreed. "The general must certainly meet Rastus!" "I should ibe pleased to meet anyone," he said stiffly, "who could give me a simple answer to a simple question." He was watching Waldron crouched behind the distillery and sucking at a hip flask like a hungry calf at the udder. "That's settled then," I announced. "Shall we go right away, or will you have breakfast first? Hydroponic melons and imported protein? We usuaiy manage on the coffee." "Oan't you send for him?" the general asked. It was really laughable. How litde the higberups knew about the cosmos they commanded. Even Karlsen's beard bobbed with suppressed amusement. Natascha took his arm maternally. Natascha could be very persuasive. "Come with us," she said. "We will show you Rastus." I nodded to Ingles, who opened the inner door of the airlock. "Just you and me and the colonel. General," she said. "Rastus might not like a crowd." He allowed us to fix his helmet and harness and lead him into the airlock. The aides sighed and sat. "Weapons?" he asked "Where are your weapons?" "We never carry any," I told him. It had been Natascha's idea. Natascha had said it was wrong to kill the natives of a new planet just because they were non-humanoid, frightful or strange. She had proved her point the first day we met Rastus. I wanted to shoot at him; but Natascha had stopped me, and we had just stood and watched him unfoil. Looking back I think we had bei braver than most heroes. Somehow, Rastus had understood. He was now very fond of Natascha, and we look on him as quite one of the family. It is just as well. He is quite invulnerable. IV W e walked down to the swamp, Natascha chattering to the general and asking him what the girls were wearing on Earth and if he would hke to take Ingles's place IF on tihe rota that night. The general seemed preoccupied and almost, for a general, ungallant. He said "Niet!" once or twice, using some language which, if we had ever known it, we had long forgotten. Natascha took it as affirmative and said, how nice and she would tell Ingles. I thought I saw his antennae twitch. "Well?" he said, when we reached the bank. "We are somewhere about the center of him," she said. "I'll call him up." She stirred the ooze with her foot and called "Rastus!" The effect was, to the uninitiated, quite remarkable. As far as the eye could see, to right and left of us, the swamp began to stir and eddy as Rastus's mileTong tentacles twitched and their extremities with the little mouths with the extra-retinal perception opened and closed. One of them -- we had never been sure how many there were -- sensed her presence, arched up into the sky and then plunged downwards to stroke her faceshield. "Darling!" she cooed. The general sat without a murmur on a petrified log while two extra-retinal mouths looked him over. They snapped menacingly until Natascha put an arm round him, when the tentacles linked themselves in a knot apd the mouths looked at each other in the tongue. "What is it?" he asked. "We don't quite know," I told him. "We've never seen all of him. He's quite a boy, isn't he?" I felt a kind of proprietary pride in Rastus, like a suburban householder with a liver and white Great Dane. "He's -- this -- knows about the bubbles, the titanium, the goons?" he asked. "Til ask him," she said. "Rastus!" She cooed. "The bubbles. The round things." She made circular gestures with her arms and pursed her lips, puffing inside her helmet. The three mouths unwound and studied her, swaying rhythmically from side to side. I drew bubbles with the heel of my boot in the spongy soil. I surrounded' them with radial lines like the rising suns' rays. I didn't know how to draw titanium. The whole performance must have puzzled Rastus, because for the first time in two years -- our time -- the whole of him emerged. We had never seen his head before. In fact, we had wondered if he had a head, since he seemed to manage so well without one. It came up now like the rock of Gibraltar, and, to Natascha's delight, he had a real eye in addition to the light-sensitive mouths. It was about the size of the average radiotelescope bowl and would have fitted nicely into the circle of Stonehenge. The iris was purple, and the pupil deep jet black. It was a friendly, intelligent and highly perceptive eye. "Rastus, you're beautiful," Natascha whispered. I don't think he knew the words she used, but like a petted dog, he gathered the gist of the sound and inference. A lid, like the dome of Saint Paul's tilting, came down out of the rocky mountain of head, and the green-black hue of the bulbous undercarriage and the supX)rting tentacles, twenty-five of them, turned slightly salmon-pink. IF Rastus, all two miles of him, was blushing. "The bubbles, Rastus!" I asked him, since he seemed rapidly to be getting the significance of words. "What do we do about the bubbles?" T he head tilted forward, and the great eye hung above us, watching as we gestured, and drew pictures. Then he seemed to understand. Three tentacles whipped from under him, circled our waists and whisked us skyward to a height of abo-ut half a mile. We could see the bubble of the goons clearly in the light of the rising suns. We could also see, what we had long suspected, that apart from the dome and our own encampment the planet from horizon to horizon was flat and dead, a world where only the yellow marsh grass waved around the black ooze oif the swamps. Rastus held us aloft until we had seen all there was to see, and then the whole of him be gan to move. By contracting his forward tentacles and extending those at the rear, he swept us toward the dome. At their full extent, he drew the hind ones in beneath him and extended the leaders a full half mile outwards and repeated the process. In two minutes we were swaying hi'h above the dome. "What now?" I asked. He uncoiled a longer and thicker tentacle from somewhere in the folds of his bulbous belly and thrust it into the surface to the bubble. "He's charging his batteries!" Natascha shouted from a long way off on her far tentacle. There could be no doubt that that was exactly the idea of the process. Rastus lived on energy. (We had once wondered why he had shown no interest in living on us.) And the bubble was in some way an energy contains formed by the action of the binary on the energy gas of the atmosphere. It all became clear to me. The effect of this feeding on Rastus was quite significant. He rfeally came to life. He danced, hopping from tentacle to tentacle, his great eye sparkling and glinting, the lid sliding up and down and the pupil contracting to the pinpoint of a cartwheel. At last, apparantly satisfied, he withdrew the connector tentacle with a loud crackle and, as the dome closed over the fracture, small balloons of energy dislodged and floated downwind toward our encampment. We had found the origin of goon bombardment. There remained only to account for the dawn wind. We had not long to wait. Attracted probably by the explosive crackling of the disrupted energy surface, other giant shapes rose from the swamps around the dome. They plunged their tentades Through its surface; its area shrank still further, and the charged monsters became animated. Soon, as far as we could see, the whole planet was alive with dancing mountains of squidlike shapes, and the wind rose howling from the threshing of their supple, sinuous, mile-long members. Then, one by one, they became calmer, and, with a contraction of tentacle, they sank beneath the surface of their respective swamps. Only Rastus remained, holding us aloft, making sure we saw and understood, tiien he, too, began to sink slowly downward toward the bubbling blackness of his bog. "Not in the bog!" the general shouted. "Don't let him drown us!" "Of course not," Natascha snapiped, indignant at his lack of understanding. "He wouldn't hurt a fly." He set us very gently on the bank, and for a moment towered above us, his great eye blinking at Natascha. "Isn't he nice!" she said. T he general was laughing rather in the same cracked key that Waldron favored. He danced a clumsy jib in his heavy boots. "The bank!" he said. "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon it where the wild thyme grows." Natascha mothered him, and we coaxed him back to the camp. There were nurses with medals on their white spacesuits in his ship, and they came demurely down the ladder and surrounded him. Back in the H.Q., Karlsen started up the electromag accelerator. "Messages?" he asked the major who seemed to have slipped on the mantle of authority before anyone else had seen it fall. "No messages," he said. "I think we'll forget we ev.er came here. All the galaxy needs attention, and you can't be everywhere. I think we'll just slip away." "Very wise," I said. "I saw that thing from your lookout tower," he confided. We gave him a coffee and a hydroponic melon. "You lot want a posting home?" He asked. We had always talked about postings home. We had grown so used to supposing that that was what we wanted, we had never really thought about it. To have the opportunity suddenly rolled off the cuff like that caught me quite unprepared. "Home?" I asked. "Where's home?" "Earth, of course," he said. That was it, of course. The place we always referred to when we wanted a good simile. "Do we?" I asked them. They had their memories too. "Commuting to space H.Q. on a wet Monday," Spandrel groaned. "Presidents and generals and bombs and political broadcasts." "People everywhere," Karlsen remembered. "What are people?" Ingles asked. "What about Ingles?" I asked the major, playing for time. "He can go back to his own planet. He might get on to Earth if he passes the vetting." "Vet Ingles?" I asked. Natascha came down the ladder from the single upper-floor but we had built for her. The plain round walls of our beehive with its junk and clobber never seemed dull or sordid when Natascha was there. "Shall we go home, Natascha?" I asked her. We all knew it was her decision really. "We couldn't leave Rastus," Natascha decided. That settled it. I heard later they made the major a general first class. Experience does a lot for a man. But we never IF IF  Short Story Watch those toys your children put on their Christmas list -- this just may be one of them! Level # -- Cubicle AAd Eastern Megapolis, N. A. September #, # Super-Galactic Toy Company Western' Coastal Urban Center, N. A. Gentlemen, It is a disgrace that any toy company should put on the market such a toy, supposedly for children, as your "Interstellar Secret Agent Kit." In your #-D family entertainment commercials, which you broadcast (by actual count) # times daily, you recommend this kit for children of six years and older. Outrageous! You will shortly be hearing from my lawyers; for, thanks to my purchase of your "Interstellar Secret Agent Kit" for my young son, my wife has suffered a nervous 'breakdown, and our entire famfor medical expenses for my wife, her psychiatric care, loss of her companionship, etc.y etc.y as well as many other minor claims which my lawyers will enumerate at length. alleged toy from the market, I shall give you a detailed report on my family's unhappy experiences with the "Interstellar Secret Agent Kit." I purchased it at Tricky Jack's Super-Discount Subcellar ("We buy and sell down close to Hell") for # credits (discount price). I wasn't about to pay your list price of # credits, which is out-and-out robbery for such a piece of junk. My son hadn't had the kit more than an hour, when the handle came off the genuine imitation Betelgeuse immy-skin attache case. The instructions for use of the kit were in code, which defied me; but my son (age #) mastered it in no time. He said it was an ancient dead language, Igpay Atinlay, which is all the rage at school. Some wise apple slipped a tape of itiinto the hypno learner, and they all had it down pat before the teaching machine caught the error. The first thing my son did was to try out the Scary Scarab Scalper, that nasty little electronic gadget which looks like a cross between a beetle and a midget lobster. He wound it up and turned it loose, when his mother was in the room. Luckily she ducked as it hummed over her head, so that it didn't actually scalp her -- it just shaved her head. We had invited my boss to dinner, and she didn't have time to send out for a wig; so sonny came to the rescue with one of the disguises from that dreadful kit. How was my wife to know that it was a Medusa wig? She'd just put it on, when the door speaker announced that our 'guests had arrived. When she went to greet my boss, he took one look at those snaky locks and was turned to stone. Now I'm out of a job, and we're the unhappy possessors of a new, grotesque piece of statuary. (His wife wouldn't have it -- said she'd warned her husband that the very next time he got stoned at a party, she'd lock him out of his cubicle.) IF Needless to say my loss of employment was a severe blow to my wife's psyche, as we owe on the #-D Home Entertainment Centeir, the Aircar and the Readi-Meal Servo-unit. The Readi-meal Corporation discontinued service when we lost our credit rating, and my wife had to learn how to add water to freeze-dried foods, a skill her mother never taught her. Naturally we scolded sonny; so he promised to be more careful with the kit in the future and not direct its diabolical contents at humans. This is what caused all the trouble with our Sirian cat. You know how valuable these imported felines are; not only because of their large size and metallic fur, but also because of their extremely gentle nature. Many people employ them as baby-watchers. Ours, Baby Umtiddledy Pinkums, a female, was scheduled to be bred to Feline Champion Tomas Tigre. And the kittens would have gone for # credits each. We were keeping Pinkums locked in her cage, which turned out to be a mistake; for the lock inspired my son to try the Electronic Lxx:kPicking Tool in the Secret Agent Kit. I suppose your company should be congratulated on the fact that this part of the toy worked as advertised -- too well. Pinkums got out and headed for the cubicle door. Just then a visitor arrived. It was my teenage daughter's nauseating boyfriend, who let the cat out. As Pinkums was streaking through the crack in the door, my son sprayed her with the Aphrodisiac Atomizer from his Secret Agent Kit. Before we got the cat back into our cubicle, she'd met a common alley cat that was wandering about on the sidewalk. Now who in his right mind, may I ask, wants a half-Sirian, half-alleycat kitten? Not only will no one pay # credits apiece for the kittens, but also we'll probably have to pay people to take them off our hands, as the Prevention of Cruelty to Aliens Act prevents our drowning them. This was very unnerving to my wife, who had already spent most of the credits for the as yet unconceived Sirian kittens. This, too, was a conditioning factor in her breakdown. The thing which really caused my wife to flip, though, was what happened to our daughter's boyfriend. Let's face it, our daughter homelier than that you don't get. This fellow who has been dating her is one big mess; but my wife argued that he was male and eligible, and we mustn't lcx)k gift spouses in the mouth, even if he did paint his face blue with that new cosmetic: and play the latest cosmic discords on his molecular harpskar. Well, my son never liked Blueboy; so forgetting his promise about humans, he took the miniature blow pipe, which is disguised as a cancer-free cigarette, and got the boyfriend right between the eyes with the poison dart from the Secret Agent Kit. Pretty good shooting for a seven-year-old, if you ask me; but his mother didn't see it that way. She blamed me for buying the Kit for our son, and proceeded to punish me by; having a nervous breakdown. (Otherwise I'd have out of my purchase.) For a while, I was afraid that Bluboy's parents would sue me; but when I agreed to pay the exorbitant fee for having his body blasted off into the Cemetery Orbit, they were satisfied. Frankly, I think they're glad to have him off their hands. This added expense was the clincher in my decision to sue your company. Yours in litigation,  Sean Quentin O'Publick P.S. As a final affront to my already battered sensibilities, I find that I'm not very skilled at preparing meals from freeze-dried packages, either. S. Q. O'P. Just Publishedl Critical studies of James Joyce's Ulysses, edited by Judy-Lynn Benjamin. Introduction by Thomas F. Staley, distinguished editor of the James Joyce Qmferly. # stimulating essays filled with fresh Insights into this #thcentury classic. Special hardcover edition of # numbered copies, # each. Paper, # each. Order from -- The University of Tnlsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma # IF IF  Serial Edge of Night If wasn't their galaxy, not even their space-time -- but they had to win it for Man! XV S onya asked sharply, "And what else have you to report?" "I... I have been listening." "That's what you're paid for. And what have you picked up?" "There's a general alarm out to all ships. And to Faraway, Ultimo and Thule, and to the garrisons on Tharn, Mellise and Grollor." "And to Stree?" "No. Nothing at all to Stree." "It makes sense," murmured the woman. "It makes sense. Tham, with its humanoids living in the equivalent of Earth's Middle Ages. Grollor, with just the beginnings of an industrial culture. Mellise, with its intelligent amphibians and no industries, no technology at all. Our mutant friends must have found the people of all those worlds a pushover. What Has Gone Before -- Out of nowhere a strange spaceship appeared in the solar system. Il was no ship that man had ever built .  . but its name was scratched on its hull in English letters, even though the spelling was strange and unfamiliar, and its crew was human. But what humansi They were dressed in rags. Their bodies bore the marks of privation and torture. And -- they were, every last one of them, dead. Analysis revealed that the ship was not merely from another star, but from another universe entirely, thrust into our own by some catastrophic distortion of its Mannschen Drive field. But if one such could come by accident, others might follow by design -- and the creatures that had built the ship and so maltreated its humans would not be welcome guests. So a human crew -- Grimes, his wife Sonya, a picked crew of volunteers -- manned the alien craft and in it thrust themselves through the dimensional wall into the other universe... to find their enemy and destroy himl "But Stree ,,, We don't know just what powers -- psychic? psionic? -- those philosophical lizards can muster, and we're on friendly terms with them. So -- " "So we might get help there," said Grimes. "It's worth considering. Meanwhile, Mr. Mayhew, has there been any communication with the anti-matter worlds to the Galactic West?" "No, sir." Grimes smiled -- but it was a cold smile. 'Then this is, without doubt, a matter for the Confederacy. The legalities of it all are rather fascinating." "The illegalities. Skipper," said pirate in a good cause." "You don't mind being a pirate. Period," said Sonya. "Too bloody right I don't. It makes a change." "Shall we regard ourselves as liberators?" asked Grimes -- but it was more an order than a question. I suggest that we set course for Stree. And you, Mr. Mayhew, maintain your listening watch. Let me know at once if there are any other vessels in our vicinity -- even though they haven't Mass Proximity Indicators they can still pick up our temporal precession field and synchronize." "And what are your intentions when you get to Stree, sir?" asked the Major. "As I told the Admiral, I play by ear." He unstrapped himself from his chair and, closely followed by Sonya, led the way to the control IF room. He secured himself in his seat mander went through the familiar routine of setting course -- Mannsohenn Drive off, directional gyroscopes brought into play to swing the shipto her new heading, the target star steadied in the cartwheel sight, the brief burst of power from the lieaction drive. Mannschenn Drive eut in again. The routine was familiar, and the surroundings in which it was carried out were familiar, but he still found it hard to adjust to the near nudity of himself and his ofbands of indigo dye on each thick, hairy wrist to mark his rank, was doing the job as efficiently as he would have done had those bands been gold braid on black cloth. "On course. Skipper," he announced. "Thank you. Commander Williams. All off-duty personnel may stand down. Maintain normal deep space watches." Accompanied by his wife, he returned to his quarters. I t was, at first and in some respects, just another voyage. In the Mannschenn Drive Room the complexity of spinning gyroscopes precessed, tumbled, quivered on the very edge of invisibility, pulling the ship and all her people with them down the dark dimensions, through the warped continuum, down and along the empty immensities of the rim of space. But, reported Mayhew, they were not alone. There were other ships, fortunately distant, too far away for Freedom s wake through Space-Time to register on their instruments. It was more than just another voyage. Hiere was the hate and the fear with which they were surrounded, said Mayhew. He, of course, was listening only -- the other operators were sending. There were warships in orbit about Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule, there were squadrons hastening to take up .positions off Tham, Mellise, Grollor and Stree. And the orders to single vessels and to fleets were brutally simple: Des troy on sight, "What else did you expect?" said Sonya, when she was told. "I thought," said Grimes, "that they might try to capture us." "Why should they? As far as they know we're just a bunch of escaped slaves who've already tried their hand at piracy. In any case, I should hate to be captured by those... things." "Xenophobia from yoUy of all people?" "No. Not xenophobia. Real aliens one can make allowances for. But these aren't real aliens. They're a familiar but dangerous pest, a feared and hated pest that's suddenly started fighting us with our own weapons. We have never had any cause to love them -- human beings have gotten, at times, quite sentimental over mice, but never rats -- and they've never had any cause to love us. A strong, mutual antipathy... Absently she rubbed the fading scar between her breasts with her strong fingers. "What do you make of this squadron despatched to Stree?" "A precautionary measure. They think that we might be making for there, and that they might be able to intercept us when we emerge into normal spacetime. But according to Mayhew there have been no psionic messages to planetary authorities, as there have been to the military governments on' Tharn, Mellise and Grollor." She said, a note of query in her voice, "We shall make it before they do?" "I think so. I hope so. Our Mannschenn Drive unit is running flat out. It's pushed to the safety limits. And you know what will happen if the governor packs up." "I don't know," she told him. "Nobody knows. I do know most of the spacemen's fairy stories about what might happen." "Once you start playing around with Time, anything might happen," he said. "The most important thing is to be able to take advantage of what happens." She grinned. "I think I can guess what's flitting through your apology for a mind." "Just an idea," he said, "Just an idea. But I'd like to have a talk with those saurian philosophers before I try to do anything about it." "If we get there before that squadron," she 'said. "If we don't, we may try out the idea before we're ready to. But I think we're still leading the field." "What's that?" she demanded. That was not a noise. That was something that is even more disturbing in any pKwered ship traversing any medium -- a sudden cessation of noise.The buzzer that broke the tense silence was no proper substitute for the thin, high keening of the Mannschenn Drive. It was the officer of the watch, calling from Control. "Commodore, sir, O.O.W. here. Reporting breakdown of interstellar drive." Grimes did not need to be told. He had experienced the uncanny sensation of temporal disorientatioif when the precessing gyroscopes slowed, ceased to precess. He said, "Don't bother the engineers -- every second spent answering the telephone means delay in effecting repairs. I'll be right up." "Looks as though our friends might beat us to Siree after all," remarked Sonya quietly. "That's what I'm afraid of," said Grimes. T he breakdown of Freedom's Mannschenn Drive unit was a piece of bad luck -- but. Grimes admitted, the luck could have been much worse. The ship hd made her re-entry into the normal continuum many light-years from any focal point and well beyond the maximum range of the radar installations of the enemy war vessels. She had space -- or, at any rate, a vast globe of emptiness -- all to herself. The odds had been in favor of her finding herself in just this situation -- but, as an amateur of naval his tory, Grimes knew full well what an overly large part is played by sheer, blind mischance in warfare. Far too many times a hunted ship has blunIF deted into the midst of her pursuers when all on board have considered themselves justified in relaxing their vigilance -- not that vigilance is of great avail against overwhelming firepower. And firepower, whether it be the muzzle-loading cannon of the days of sail or the guided missiles and laser beams of today, is what makes the final decision. But, so far, there was no need to worry about firepower. A good lookout, by all available means, was of primary importance. And so, while Freedom fell -- but slowly, slowly, by the accepted standards of interstellar navigation -- toward the distant Stree sun, the long fingers of her radar pulses probed the emptiness about her and, in the cubby hole that he shared with the naked canine brain that was a poor and untrained substitute for his beloved Lassie, Mayhew listened, alert for the faintest whisper of thought that would offer some clue as to the enemy's whereabouts and intentions. After a while, having received no reports from the engineers. Grimes went along to the Mannschenn Drive Room. He knew that the engineroom staff was working hard, even desperately, and that the buzz of a telephone in such circumstances can be an almost unbearable irritation. Even so, as captain of the ship he felt that he was entitled to know what was going on. He stood for a while in the doorway of the compartment, watching. He could see what had happened -- a seized bearing of the main rotor. That huge flywheel, in the gravitational field of an Earth-type planet, would weigh at least five tons. Even with Freedom falling free, it still possessed considerable mass. Its spindle had to be eased clear of the damaged bearing -- and great care had to be taken that it did not come into contact with and damage the smaller gyroscopes surrounding it. Finally Bronson, the Chief Engineer, pausing to wipe his sweating face, noticed the Commodore and delivered himself of a complaint. "We should have installed one of our own units, sir." "Why, Conmiander?" "Because ours have a foolproof system of automatic lubrication, that's why. Because the idiots who built this ship don't seem to have heard of such a thing. They must rely on their sense of smell to warn them as soon as anything even starts to run hot." "And that's possible," murmured Grimes, thinking that the mutants had not been intelligent long enough for their primitive senses to become dulled. Then he asked, "How long will you be?" "At least two hours. At least. That's the best I can promise you." "Very good." He paused. "And how long will it take you to modify the lubrication system, to bring it up to our standards?" "I haven't even thought about that. Commodore. But it'd take days." "We can't afford the time," said Grimes, as much to himself as to the engineer. "Just carry on with the repairs to the main rotor and let me know as soon as the unit is operational. I shall be in Control." As he turned to go he added, half seriously, "And it might be an idea to see that your watohkeepers possess a keen sense of smell." B ack in the control room he felt more at home, even though this was lihe nerve center of a crippled ship. Officers sat at their posts, and there was the reassuring glow from the screens of navigational instruments -- the chart tank and the miles on every hand, was still empty, which was just as well. He went to stand by Sonya and learned. "So they beat us to Stree," commented the Executive Officer glumly"I'm afraid that they will, Commander." "And then what do we do?" "I wish I knew just what the situation is on Stree," murmured Grimes. "They don't seem to have taken over, as they have on the other Rim Worlds. Should we be justified in breaking through to make a landing?" 'Trying to break through, you mean," corrected Sonya. "All right. Trying to break through. Will it be a justified risk?" "Yes," she said firmly. "As far as I can gather from Mayhew, our rodent friends are scared of Stree and its people. They've made contact, of course, but that's all. The general feeling seems to be one of you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone." "I knew the Streen," said Grimes. "Don't forget that it was I that made the first landing on their planet, when I opened up the Eastern Circuit to trade. They're uncanny brutes -- but, after all, mammals and saurians have little in common, psychologically speaking." "Spare us the lecture, John. Furthermore, while you were nosing around in the engineroom, Mayhew rang control. He's established contact with the squadron bound for Stree." "What! Is the man mad? Send for him at once." "Quietly, John, quietly. Our Mr. Mayhew may be a little round the bend, like all his breed, but he's no fool. When I said that he had made contact with the enemy I didn't mean that he had been nattering with the officer commanding the squadron. He's made contact with the underground." "Don't talk in riddles!" "Just a delaying action, my dear, to give you time to simmer down. I didn't want you to order that Mayhew be thrown out of the airlock without a spacesuit. The underground, as I have referred to it, is made up of the human brains that our furry friends use as psionic amplifiers." "But it's still criminal folly. They will employ telepaths as psionic radio officers, just as we do. And those telepaths will read the thoughts of their amplifiers, just as Mayhew reads the thoughts of his dog's brain in aspic." "But will they? Can they? Don't forget that our telepaths employ as amplifiers the brains of creatures considerably less intelligent than IF Man. Whoever heard of a dog with any sort of mental screen? They will be using the brains of humans who have beea unlucky enough to be bom with telepathic ability. And any human telepath, any trained human telepath, is able to set up a screen." C#T)ut why should They use human brains? The risk of sabotage of vital communications -- " "What other brains are available for their use? As far as They are concerned, both dogs and cats are out, repeat out." "Why?" "Far too much mutual antipathy." "Wouldn't that also apply in the case of themselves and human beings?" "No. I doubt if they really hate us. After all, we have provided their ancestors with food, shelter and transportation for many centuries. The rats would have survived if they hadn't had the human race to bludge upon, but they wouldn't have flourished, as they have, traps and poisons notwithstanding. Oh, all right. With the exception of the occasional small boy with 'his albino pets, every human being has this hatred of rats. But hate isn't the only mainspring of human behavior." "What do you mean?" "Look at it this way. Suppose you're a telepath, born on one of the Rim Worlds in this continuum. By the time that your talent has been noted, by the time that you're... conscripted, you will have come to love your parents and the other members of your family. You will have made friends outside the family circle. Without being overly precocious you may even have acquired a lover." "I think I see. Play ball, or else." "Yes." "Then why should the poor bastards risk the 'or else' now?" "Because Mayhew's peddled them a line of goods. Very subtly, yeity carefully. Just induced dreams at first, just dreams of life as it is on the Rim Worlds in our Universe -- but a somewhat glamorized version." "I can imagine it. Mayhew's a very patriotic Rim Worlder." "First the dreams, and then the hints. The whisper that all that they have dreamed is true, that all of it could become the way of life of their own people. The story of what actually happened to Freedom and to the escaped slaves. The message that we have come to help them -- and the request for help for ourselves." "But I don't understand how he could have done all this in so short a time." "How long does a dream take? It is said that a man can dream of a lifetime's happenings in a few seconds." Already Grime's active mind was toying with ideas, with ruses and stratagems. Deceit, he knew, has always been a legitimate technique of warfare. Not that legalities counted for overmuch in this here-and-now. Or did they? If the Federation got dragged into the mess, he and his people might well find themselves standing trial for piracy. It was unlikely -- but, bearing in mind the m Federation's pampering of various unpleasant nonhuman races on his, Grimes's, time track, possible. He grinned. The legal aspects of it all were far too complicated -- and, at the moment, far too unimportant. He said, "Send for Mr. Mayhew immediately." G rimes went into conference with Mayhew and certain others of his officers. There was Sonya, of there was Dangerford, the Chief Reaction Drive Engineer. Also present was one Ella Kubinsky, who held the rank of Lieutenant in the Rim Worlds Volunteer Naval Reserve. She was not a spacewoman. She was a specialist officer, and in civilian life she was an instructor at the University of Lorn, in the Department of Linguistics. Looking at her. Grimes could not help thinking that she was ideally suited for the part that she would be called upon to play. Her straggling hair was so pale as to be almost white, her chin and forehead receded sharply from her pointed nose. Her arms and legs were scrawny, her breasts meager. She had ben nicknamed The White Rat. To begin with. Grimes and Sonya questioned Mayhew closely, with Sonya playing the major part in the interrogation. They wished that they could have subjected the bodiless human telepaths aboard the enemy ships to a similar interrogation -- but that, of course, was impossible. However, Mayhew said that they were sincere in their desire to help. And sincerity is almost impossible to simulate when you have thrown your mind open to another skilled, trained intelligence. Then other, less recondite matters Dangerford. These concerned the efficacy of various detergents and paint removers and, also, the burning off from the hull plating of certain lettering and its replacement with other letters, these characters to be fabricated in the Engineers' workshop by Dangerford and his juniors who, of course, were not involved in the repair work to the Mannschenn Drive unit. Mayhew was called upon to supply the specifications for these characters. And then tapes were played to Ella Kubinsky. These were records of signals received from the mutants' ships. She repeated the words, imitating them in a thin, high, squeaking voice that exactly duplicated the original messages. Even Sonya expressed her satisfaction. While this was being done, Mayhew retired to his cabin for further consultations with his fellow telepaths. There was so much that they could tell him. There was so much that they knew, as all psionic signals had to pass through their brains. When he came back to Grimes's cabin he was able to tell the Commodore what name to substitute for both Freedom and Distriyir when these sets of characters had been removed from the forward shell plating. IF party were engaged outside the ship, and Dangerford and his juniors were fabricating the new characters, Grimes, Sonya and Ella Kubinsky accompanied Mayhew to his quarters. It was more convenient there to rehearse and to be filled in with the necessary background details. It seemed, at times, that the disembodied presences of the human psionic amplifiers were crowded with them into the cramped compartment, bringing with them the mental stink of their hates and fears. It has been said that to know is to love. But very often to know is to hate. Those brains, bodiless, naked in their baths of nutrient solution, must know their unhuman masters as no intelligence clothed in flesh and blood could ever know them. And Grimes found himself pitying Mayhew's own psionic amplifier, the brain of the dog that possessed neither the knowledge nor the experience to hate the beings who had deprived it of a normal existence. Bronson had finished the repairs to the Mannschenn Drive before He was glad enough to be able to snatch a brief rest before his machinery was restarted. And then the new name was in place. back to Control where, using the public address system, the Commodore told his ship's company of the plan for the landing on Stree. He sensed a feeling of disappointment. Carter, the Gunnery Officer, and the Major and his Marines had been looking forward to a fight. Well, they could be ready for one -- but if ail went as plann they would not be getting it. Cirsir -- Corsair -- as she had been renamed set course for the Stree sun. The real Corsair had been unable to join the squadron, being grounded for repairs on Tham. The real Corsair s psionic amplifier knew, by this time, what was happening, but would not pass on the information to the unhuman psionic radio officer who was his lord and master. And the psionic amplifiers aboard the other ships would let it be known that Corsair was hastening to join the blockade of Stree. It was all so simple. The operation, said Sonya, was an Intelligence Officer's dream of Heaven -- to know everything that the enemy was thinking, and to have full control over the enemy's communications. The pseudo-Cori'aV was in psionic touch with the squadron that she was hurrying to overtake. Messages were passing back and forth, messages that, from the single ship, were utterly bogus and that, from the fleet, were full of important information. Soon Grimes knew every de-. tail of tonnage, manning and armament -- and knew that he must avoid any sort of showdown. There was enough massed firepower to blow his ship into fragments in a microsecond, whereupon the laser beams, in another microsecond, would convert those fragments into puffs of incandescent vapor. As Corsair closed the range the squadron ahead was detected on her instruments. The slight flickering of needles on the faces of gauges, the shallow undulation of the glowing traces in monitor tubes, showed that in the vicinity were other vessels using the interstellar drive. They were not yet visible, of course, and would not be unless temporal precession rates were synchronized. And synchronization was what Grimes did not want. As far as he knew, his Corsair was typical of her class (as long as her damaged side was hidden from view). But the humans (if bodiless brains could still be called human) aboard the ships of the squadron were not spacemen. They knew nothing of subtle differences that can be picked up immediately by the trained eye. Grimes wished to be able to sweep past the enemy, invisible, no more than interference on their screens. and to make his landing on Stree before the blockading squadron fell into its orbits. That was his wish and hope; but Bronson, since the breakdown, did not trust his Mannsohenn Drive unit and dared not drive the machine at its full capacity. He pointed out that, even so, they were gaining slowly upon the enemy, and that was evidence that the engineers of these vessels trusted their interstellar drives even less than he did. The Commodore was obliged to admit that his engineer was probably right in this assumption. S o it was that when Corsair, at last, cut her Drive and re-entered normal Space-Time the blockading cruisers were already taking up their stations. Radar and radio came into play. From the transceiver in Corsairs control room squeaked an irritable voice -- "Heenteer tee Ceerseer, Heenteer tee Ceerseer, teeke eep steeteen ees eerdeered." Ella Kubinski, who had been thoroughly rehearsed for just this situation, squeaked the acknowledgment. Grimes stared out of the viewports at the golden globe that was Stree, at the silver, flitting sparks that were the other ships. He switchthe Executive Officer was going through the motions of maneuvering the ship into a closed orbit -- and, as he had been ordered, making a deliberate botch of it. 'Heenteer tee Ceerseer. Whee ees neet yeer veeseen screen een?" Ella Kubinski squeaked that it was supposed to have been overhauled on Tharn, and added some unkind remarks about the poor quality of humanoid labor. Somebody -- Grimes was sorry that he did not see who it was -- whispered unkindly that if Ella did switch on the screen it would make no difference, anyhow. The ugly girl flushed angrily, but continued to play her part calmly enough. the ship was falling closer and closer to the great, expanding globe of the planet. But .this did not go unnoticed for long. Again there was the enraged squeaking, but in a new voice. "Thees ees thee Eedmeereel. Wheet thee heel eere yee plee-eeng et, CeerseerT' Ella told her story of an alleged overhaul of reaction drive controls and made further complaints about the quality of the dockyard labor on Tharn. "Wheere ees yee Ceepteen? Teel heem tee speek tee mee." Ella said that the Captain was busy at the controls. The Admiral said that the ship would do better by herself than with such an illegitimate son of a human female, hangrinned and muttered, "I did not ride to my parents wedding on a bicycle." "Wheere ees thee Ceepteen?" And there was a fresh voice. '"'Heeveec tee Heenteer. Wheere deed shee geet theet deemeege?" "All right," said Grimes. "Action stations. And get her downstairs, you!" Gyroscopes whined viciously and rockets screamed, driving the ship down to the exosphere in a powered dive. From the vents in her sides puffed the cloud of metallic particles that would protect her from lasers -- until the particles themselves were destroyed by the stabbing beams. And her launching racks spewed a covey of missiles, each programmed for random action, and to seek out and destroy any target except their parent ship. Not that they stood much chance of so doing -- but they would, at least, keep the enemy laser gunners busy. C orsair hit the first, tenuous fringes of the Streen atmosphere, and her internal temperature rose fast. Too fast. Somehow, using rockets only, taking advantage of her aerodynamic IF qualities, such as they were, Williams turned her, stood her on her tail. Briefly she was a sitting duck -- but Carter's beams were stabbing and slicing, swatting down the swarm of missiles that had been loosed at her. She was falling then, stern first, falling fast but under control, balanced on her tail of incandescence, the rocket thrust that was slowing her -- that would bring her to a standstill (Grimes hoped) when her vaned landing gear was only scant feet above the surface of the planet. She was dropping through the overcast -- blue-silver at first, then gradually changing hue to gold. In the overcast there was no pursuit, although when she entered regions of denser atmosphere she was escorted, surrounded by great, shadowy shapes that wheeled about them on wide wings and glared redly at them through the control room ports. Grimes recognized them. After all, in his own Continuum he had been the first human to set foot on Stree. They were the huge flying lizards, not unlike the pterosauria of Earth's past -- but in Grimes's Space-Time they had never behaved like this. They had avoided spaceships and aircraft. These showed no inclination towards doing so. Just one of the huge brutes colliding with the ship, tipping her off balance, could easily produce a situation beyond even Wiliams's superlative pilotage to correct. But they kept their distance, more or less, and followed Corsair down, down, through the overcast and through the clear air below the cloud blanket. And beneath her was the familiar landscape -- low, rolling hills, broad rivers, lush green plains that were no more than wide clearings in the omnipresent jungle. Yes, it was familiar. The Commodore could make out the site of his first landing -- one of the smaller clearings that, by some freak of chance or nature, had the outline of a great horse. Inevitably, as he had been on the occasion of his first landing. Grimes was reminded of a poem that he had read as a young man, that he had tried to memorize -- The Ballad of the White Horse, by Chesterton. How did it go? For the end of the world was long ago And all we stand today As children of a second birth Like some strange people left on Earth After a Judgment Day, Yes, the end of their world had come for the Rim colonists, in this Universe, long ago. And could Grimes and his crew of outsiders reverse the Judgment? S lowly, cautiously Corsair dropped to the clearing, her incandescent rocket exhaust incinerating the grasslike vegetation, raising great, roiling clouds of smoke and steam. A human-built warship would have been fitted with nozzles from which, in these circumstances, a fire-snMthering foam could be ejected. But Corsairs builders would have considered such a device a useless refinement. Slowly she settled, then came to rest, rocking slightly on her tripedal landing gear. Up and around the control room ports billowed the dirty smoke and the white steam, gradually thinning. Except for a few desert areas the climate of Stree was uniformly wet, and nothing would burn for long. Grimes asked May hew to -- as he phrased it -- take psionic soundings, but from his past experience of this planet he knew that it would be a waste of time. The evidence indicated that the Streen practiced telepathy among themselves but that their minds were closed to outsiders. But the saurians must have seen the ship land, and the pillar of cloud that she had created would be visible for many miles. Slowly the smoke cleared, and those in the control room were able to see, through the begrimed ports, the edge of the jungle, the tangle of lofty, femlike growths with, between them, the interlacing entanglement of creepers. Something was coming through the jungle, its passage marked by an occasional eruption of tiny flying lizards from the crests of the tree ferns. Something was coming through tbe jungle and heading towards the ship. Gjimes got up from his chair and accompanied Sonya down to the airlock. He smiled with wry amusement as he recalled his first landing on this world. Then he had been able to do things properly, had strode down the ramp in all the glory of gold braid and brass buttons, had even worn a quite useless ceremonial sword for the occasion. Then he had been accompanied by his staff, as formally attired as himself. Now he was wearing scanty, dirty rags and accompanied by a woman as nearly naked as he was. (But the Streen, who saw no need for clothing, had been more amused than impressed by his finery.) The airlock door was open, and the ramp was out. The Commodore and his wife did not descend at once to the still slightly smoking ground. One advantage of his dress uniform, thought Grimes, was that it had included half Wellington boots. The couple watched the dark tunnel entrance in the cliff of solid greenery that marked the end of the jungle track. A Streen emerged. He would have passed for a small dinosaur from Earth's remote past, although the trained eye of a paleontologist would have detected differences. There was one difference that was obvious even to the untrained eye -- the cranial development. This being had a brain, and not a small one. The little, glittering eyes stared at the humans. A voice like the hiss of escaping steam said, "Greetings." "Greetings," replied the Commodore. "You come again, man Grimes." It was a statement of fact rather than a question. "I have never been here before," said Grimes, adding, "Not in this spacetime." "You have been here before. The last time your body was covered IF with cloth and metal, trappings of no functional value. But no matter." "How can you remember?" "I cannot, but our Wise Ones remember all things. What was, what is to come, what might have been and what might be. They told me to greet you and to bring you to them." Grimes was less than enthusiastic. On the occasion of his last visit, the Wise Ones had lived not in the jungle but in a small, atypical patch of rocky desert, many miles to the north. Then he had been able to make the journey in one of Faraway Quest s helicopters. Now he hadno flying machines at his disposal, and a spaceship is an unhandy brute to navigate in a planetary atmosphere. He did not fancy a long, long journey on foot, or even riding one of the lesser saurians that the Streen used as draught animals, along a rough track partially choked with thorny undergrowth. Once again he was acutely conscious of the inadequacy of his attire. The native cackled. (The Streen were not devoid of a sense of humour.) He said, "The Wise Ones told me that you would not be clad for a journey. The Wise Ones await you in the village." "Is it far?"' "It is where it was when you came before, when you landed your ship in this very place." "No more than half an hour's walk -- " began Grimes, addressing Sonya, then fell suddenly silent as an intense light flickered briefly, changing and brightening the green of the jungle wall, the gaudy colors of the flowering vines. Involuntarily he looked up, but the golden overcast was unbroken. There was another flare behind the cloud blanket, blue-white, distant, and then, belatedly, the thunder of the first explosion drifted down, ominous and terrifying. "Missiles," whispered the Commodore. "And my ship's a sitting duck." "Sir," hissed the saurian, "you are not to worry. The Wise Ones have taken adequate steps for your -- and our -- protection." "But you have no science, no technology!" exclaimed Grimes, realizing the stupidity of what he had said when it was too late. "We have science, man Grimes. We have machines to pit against the machines of your enemies. But our machines, unlike yours, are of flesh and blood, not of metal -- although our anti-missiles, like yours, possess only a limited degree of intelligence." "These people," explained Grimes to Sonya, "are superb biological engineers." "I know," she said. "And I have little doubt that their air umbrella of pterodactyls will last longer tJian our furry friends' supply of missiles. So I suggest that we leave them to it and go to see the Wise Ones." She looked dubiously at the jungle, then turned to call to a woman inside the ship, "Peggy! Bring us out a couple of machetes!" "You will not need them," commented the Streen, "even though your skins are too soft." T hey did need them, even though their guide went ahead like a tank clearing the way for infanifey. The vines and brambles were springy, reaching out with taloned tentacles as soon as the saurian had passed. Grimes and Sonya slashed until their arms were tired. But even so their perspiration smarted painfully in the fresh scratches all over their bodies. They were far from sorry when they emerged into another clearing, a small one, almost completely roofed over with the dense foliage of the surrounding trees. There were the usual huts, woven from still-living creepers. There was the steaming compost pile that was the hatchery. There were the domesticated lizards, large and small, engaged in their secialized tasks -- digging the vegetable plots, weeding and pruning. There were the young of the Streen, looking absurdly like plucked chickens, displaying the curiosity that is common to all intelligent beings throughout the galaxy, keeping a respectful distance from the visitors, staring at them from their black, unwinking eyes. There were the adults, equally curious, some of whom hustled the community's children out of the path of the humans, clearing a way to the door of a hut that, by Streen standards, was imposing. From the opening drifted blue eddies of smoke -- aromatic, almost intoxicating. Grimes knew that the use of the so-called sacred herbs, burned in a brazier and the smoke inhaled, was confined to the Wise Ones. There were three of the beings huddled there in the semi-darkness, grouped around the tripod from the top of which was suspended the cage in which the source of the smoke smouldered ruddily. The Commodore sneezed. The vapor, as far as he could gather, was mildly euphoric and, at the same time, hallucinogenic. But to human beings it was only an irritant to the nasal membranes. In spite of his efforts to restrain himself he sneezed again, loudly. The Streen around the tripod cackled thinly. The Commodore, his eyes becoming accustomed to the dim lighting, could see that they were old, old, their scales shabby and dulled with a lichenous growth, their bones protuberant beneath their armored skins. There was something familiar about them -- sensed rather than visually recognized. One of them crackl, "Our dream smoke still makes you sneeze, man Grimes." "Yes, Wise One." "And what do you here, man Grimes? Were you not happy in your own here-and-now? Were you not happy with the female of your kind whom you have acquired since last we met, otherwhen-and-where?" "You'd better say 'yes to that!" muttered Sonya. Again the thin cackling. "We are lucky, man Grimes. We do not have the problems of you mammals, with your hot blood." A pause. "But still we love life, just as you do. And we know that out there, falling about our world, are those who would end oiu lives, just as they would end yours. Now they have not the power -- but it is within their grasp." "But would it matter to you?" asked Sonya. "I thought that you were -- how shall I put it? -- coIF existent with yourselves in all the alternative universes. You must be. You remember John's first landing on this planet -- but that was never in this here-and-now." "You do not understand, woman Sonya. You cannot understand. But we will try to explain. Man Grimes. In your here-and-now what cargoes do your ships bring to Stree?" "Luxuries like tea and tobacco, Wise One. And books." "What sort of books, man Grimes?" "History. Philosophy. Novels, even -- " then, as an afterthought -- "poetry." "And your poets say more in fewer . words than your philosophers. There is one whom I will quote to you. And he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one shall die. Does that answer your question, woman Sonya?" "I can feel it," she murmured. "But I can't understand it." "It does not matter. And it does not matter if you do not understand what you are going to do -- as long as you understand how to do it." "And what is that?" asked Grimes. "To destroy the egg before it hatches," was the reply. A nybody meeting the seemingly primitive Streen for the first time would never dream that these saurians, for all their obvious intelligence, are engineers. Their towns and villages are, to the human way of thinking, utterly innocent of machines. But what is a living organism but a machine -- and engine that derives its motive power from the combustion of hydrocarbons in an oxygen atmosphere? On Stree a variety of semi-intelligent lizards perform the tasks that on man-coloni?ed worlds are performed by mechanisms of meal and plastic. Yes, the Streen are engineers, biological and psychological engineers of no mean calibre. In their dim hut, the little light was even further obscured by the acrid fumes from the brazier, the Wise Ones talked, and Grimes and Sonya listened. Much of what they were told was beyond them -- but there was emotional rather than intellectual acceptance. They would not altogether understand, but they could feel. And, after all, the symbiosis of flesh-and-blood machine and machine of metal and plastic was not too alien a concept. Such symbiosis, to a limited extent, has been known ever since the first seaman handled the first ship, learning to make that clumsy contraption of wood and fiber an extension of his own body. Then, convinced although still not understanding, the Commodore and his wife returned to the ship. With them -- slowly, creakingly -- walked Serressor, the most ancient of the Wise Ones, and ahead of them their original guide did his best, as before, to clear a way for them through the spiny growths. They came to the clearing, to the charred patch of ground already speckled with the pale green shoots of new growth. And already the air ferns had begun to take root upon protuberances from the ship's shell plating, from turrets and sponsons and antennae; already the vines were crawling up the vaned tripod of the ing party out, men and women who were hacking ill-humoredly at the superfluous and encroaching greenery. From the corner of his eye the Executive Officer saw the approach of the Commodore, ceased shouting directions to his crew and walked slowly to meet his superior. He said, "The game's crook. Skipper. What with lianas an' lithophytes we'll be lucky to get off the ground. An' if we do -- we've had it, like as not." "Mayhew tells me that They have cotton on to what their psionic amplifiers have been doing. So -- no more psionic amplifiers. Period." "So we can't give them false information through their own communications system," said Sonya. "You can say that again, Mrs. Grimes." Serressor croaked, "So you depend upon misdirection to make your escape from our world." "That is the case. Wise One," Grimes told him. "We have already arranged that, man GrimesJ' the ancient saurian, seeing him for the first time. "Tom have? Cor stone the bleedin' lizards. Skipper, what is this?" "This, Commander Wiliams," said Grimes coldly, "is Serressor, Senior Wise One of the Streen. He and his people are as interested in disposing of the mutants as we are. They have told us a way in which it may be done, and Serressor will be coming with us to play his part in the operation." "An' how will you do it?" desaurian. Serressor hissed, "Destroy the egg before it is hatched." plode into derision. He said quietly, "I'd thought o' that myself. We could do it -- but it's iffy, iffy. Too bloody iffy. There're all the stories about what happens when the Drive gets out o' kilter -- but nobody's ever come back to tell us if they're true." "If we're going to use the Drive as Serressor suggests, it will have to be fitted with a special governor." "That makes sense. Skipper. But where're we gettin' this governor from?" "We have it -- or him -- right here." "Better him than me. There're better ways o' dyin' then bein' turned inside out." He shifted his regard to the working party, who had taken the opportunity to relax their efforts. "Back to yer gardenin', yer bunch o' drongoes! I want this hull clean as a baby's bottom!" "Shouldn't you have said 'smooth'. Commander?" asked Sonya rather sweetly. Before an argument could start Grimes pulled her up the ramp and into the ship. Following them slowly came the aged and decrepit saurian. IF G rimes and his. officers were obliged to admit that the Streen had planned well and cunningly. When Corsair was ready for blasting off, a veritable horde of the winged lizards assembled above her, most of them carrying in their talons fragments of metal. Obedient to the command of their masters -- the Streen were telepathic, but only insofar as their own kind were concerned -- the pterosaurs grouped themselves into a formation resembling a spaceship, flapped off to the eastward. To the radar operators of the blockading squadron it would appear that Corsair had lifted, was navigating slowly and clumsily within the planetary atmosphere. There were missiles, of course. Some were intercepted by the suicidal air umbrella above the decoys; some, whose trajectory would take them into uninhabited jungle regions, were allowed to continue their fall to the ground. They had been programmed to seek and to destroy a spaceship. Winged lizards, even metal-bearing lizards, they ignored. Meanwhile -- but cautiously, cautiously, with frequent and random shifts of frequency -- Corsair's radio was probing, the sky. It seemed that the mutants' squadron had swallowed the bait. Ship after ship broke from her orbit, recklessly expending her reaction mass so as to be advantageously situated when Corsair, the pseudo-C orsair, emerged from the overcast into space. And then the way out was as clear as ever it would be. The mutants' cruisers were hull down, dropping below the round shoulder of the world. Aboard Corsair all hands were at their stations, and the firing chambers were warmed up in readiness. Grimes took her upstairs himself. With a deliberately dramatic flourish he brought his hand down to the keys, as though he were smacking rump. It was more like being fired from a gun than a conventional blastoff. Acceleration thrust all hands deep into the padding of their chairs. The Commodore was momentarily worried by a thin, high whistling that seemed to originate inside the ship rather than outside her hull. Then, had it not been for the brutal downdrag on his facial muscles, he would have smiled. He remembered that the Streen, normally coldly unemotional, had always expressed appreciation of a trip in a space-vessel and had enjoyed, especially, violent maneuvers such as the one that he was now carrying out. If Serressor was whistling, then he was happy. Corsair whipped through the cloud blanket as though it had been no more than a chiffon veil, and harsh sunlight beat through the control room viewports like a physical blow. From the speaker of the transceiver came a shrill gabble of order and counter-order. Evidently some alert radar operator had spotted the breakout. But Corsair was out of laser range from the blockading squadron, was almost out of missile range. And by the time the enemy was able to close her she would be well clear of the planet's Van Allens, would be falling into and through the dark, twisted dimensions created about herself by her own interstellar drive. It was time to get Serressor along to the Mannschenn Drive room. waited until he saw the Commander's capable hands resting on his own control panel and then, slowly and painfully, levered himself out of his seat. He found it almost impossible to stand upright under the crushing pseudogravity -- but speed had to be maintained, otherwise the ship would be englobed by her enemies. Already Carter was picking off the first missiles with her laser. The Commodore watched two burly Marines struggle to get the aged saurian to his feet. They were big men and strong, but the task was almost beyond them. Then, with every shuffling step calling for an almost superhuman effort. Grimes led the way to the interstellar drive compartment. There -- and how long had it taken him to make that short journey? -- he found Bronson, Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer, with his juniors. And there was the ship's Doctor, and the telepath Mayhew. Extending from the complexity of rotors, now still and silent, was a tangle of cables, each one of which terminated in a crocodile clip. The wall speaker crackled. "Commander to M.D. room. Calling the Commodore." "Commodore here, Commander." "Clear of Van Allens. No immediate danger from enemy fire." "Then carry on, Commander. You know what you have to do." "Stand by for free fall. Stand by for course correction." T he silence, as the rocket diive was cut, fell like a blow. Then, as the whining directional gyroscopes took over, the doctor, assisted by Bronson's juniors, began to clip the cable ends to various parts of Serressor's body. The old saurian hissed gently, "You cannot hurt me, man Doctor. My scales are thick." And then it was Mayhew's turn, and a helmet of metal mesh was fitted over his head. The telepath was pale, frightened-looking. Grimes sympathized with him and admired him. Like every spaceman, he had heard all the stories of what happened to those trapped in the field of a malfunctioning Drive. Even though this would be (the Commodore hoped) a controlled malfunction, it would be a malfunction nonetheless. When the situation had been explained to him, the telepath had volunteered. Grimes hoped that the decoration for which he would recommend him would not be a posthumous one. The gentle, off-center gravitational effect of centrifugal force abruptly ceased, together with the humming of the directional gyroscopes. Then the ship trembled violently and suddenly, and again. A hit? No, decided the Commodore, it was Carter firing a salvo of missiles. But the use of these weapons showed that the enemy must be getting too close for comfort. head speaker was loud, with a certain urgency. "On course for Lorn, Skipper!" IF "Mannschenn Drive on remote control," ordered Grimes. "Serressor will give the word to switch on." Already the doctor and the junior engineers had left the Mannschenn Drive room, making no secret of their eagerness to be out of the compartment before things started to happen. Bronson was making some last, finicking adjustments to his machinery, his heavily bearded face worried. "Hurry up, Commander," Grimes snapped. The engineer grumbled, "I don't like it. This is an interstellar drive, not a time machine." Again came the violent trembling, and again, and again. Bronson finished what he was doing, then reluctantly left his domain. Grimes turned to Serressor, who now looked as though he had become enmeshed in the web of a spider. He said, "You know the risk." "I know the risk. If I am... everted, it will be a new experience." And not a pleasant one, thought the Commodore, looking at Mayhew. The telepath was paler than ever, and his prominent Adam's apple wobbled as he swallowed hard. Not a pleasant one. And how could this... this non-human philosopher, who had never handled a metal tool in his long life, be so sure of the results of this tampering with, to him, utterly alien machinery? Sure, Serressor had read all the books (or his other-self in Grimes's own continuum had read all the books) on the theory and practice of Mannschenn Drive operation. But book knowledge is a poor substitute for working experience. "Good luck," said Grimes to the saurian and to Mayhew. He left the compartment, carefully shut the door behind him. He heard the whine, the wrongsounding whine, as the Drive started up. And then the dream-filled darkness closed about him. XX I t is said that a drowning man relives his life in the seconds before final dissolution. So it was with Grimes. But he relived his life in reverse, experienced backwards the long history of triumphs and disasters, of true and false loves, of deprivations and shabby compromises, of things and people that it was good to remember, of things and people that it had been better to forget. It was the very unreality of the experience, vivid though it was, that enabled him to shrug it off. It left him badly shaken but in full command of his faculties when the throbbing whine of the ever-precessing gyroscopes ceased at last. The ship had arrived. But wheje? When? Ahead in space and astern in time -- that wasthe principle of the Mannschenh Drive. But never full astern -- or, never intentionally full astern. Not until now. And what of the governors that had been fitted to the machine, the flesh-and-blood governors -- the human telepath and the saurian philosopher, with his intuitive grasp of complexities that had baffled the finest mathematical brains of mankind? Had the governors broken under the strain? And what of himself, Grimes? (And what of Sonya?) He was still Grimes, still the Commodore, with all his memories (so far as he knew) intact. He was not a beardless youth (his investigatory hand verified this). He was not a puling infant. He was not a tiny blob of protoplasm on the' alleyway deck. He opened the door. Seiressor was still there, still entangled in the shining filaments. But his scales gleamed with the luster of youth, his bright eyes were unfilmed. His voice, as he said, "Man Grimes, we were successful!" was still a croak, but no longer a senile croak. "We did it!" confirmed Mayhew, in an oddly high voice. The telepath was shrunken. The rags that had been his loin clout were in an untidy bundle about his bare feet. No, shrunken was not the word. He was smaller, younger. Much younger. "That was the hardest part," he said. "That was the hardest part -- to stop the reversal of biological time. Serressor and I were right in the field, so we were affected. But the rest of you shouldn't be changed. You still have your long, gray beard. Commodore." But my beard wasnt gray, thought Grimes, with the beginning of panic. Neither was it long. He pulled a hair from it, wincing at the sudden pain, examined the evidence (still dark brown) while Serressor cackled and Mayhew giggled. IF "All right," he growled. "You've had your joke. What now?" "We wait," Mayhew told him. "We wait, here and now, until Sundowner shows up. Then it's up to you, sir." Sundowner, thought Grimes. Jolly Swagman. Waltzing Matilda. Names that belonged to the early history of the Rim Worlds. The battered star tramps of the Sundowner Line that had served the border planets in the days of their early colonization, long before secession from the Federation had been even dreamed of, long before the Rim Worlds government had itself become a shipowner with the Rim Runners fleet. Sundowner Grimes remembered his history. She had been the first ship too bring a cargo of seed grain to Lorn. And that was when this alternative universe, this continuum in which Grimes and his people were invaders, had run off the historical rails. Sundowner. Serressor knew his history too. The Wise One had planned this rendezvous in Space and Time, so that Grimes could do what, in his universe, had been accomplished by plague or traps or, even, oats or terrier dogs. "I can hear her," murmured Mayhew distantly. "She is on time. Her people are worried. They want to get to port before their ship is taken over by the mutants." "In this here-and-now," said Serressor, "she crashed -- will crash? -- in the mountains. Most of the mutants survived. But go to your control room, man Grimes. And then you will do what you have to do." T hey were all very quiet in the control room, all shaken by the period of temporal disorientation through which they had passed. hunched in his co-pilot's chair. He said softly, "You are ready. Commander?" "Ready," answered the Executive Officer tunelessly. Then the Commodore went to sit beside his wife. She was pale, subdued. She looked at him carefully, and a faint smile curved her Ups. She murmured, "You aren't changed, John. I'm pleased about that. I've remembered too much, things that I thought I'd forgotten, and even though it was all backwards it was... shattering. I'm pleased to have you to hold on to, and I'm pleased that is is you, and not some puppy." "I shouldn't have minded losing a few years in the wash," grunted Grimes. He looked at the officers at their stations -- radar, gunnery, electronic radio. He stared out of the ports -- at the Lorn sun, its brightness dimmed by polarization, at the great, dim-glowing galactic lens. Here, at the very edge of the universe, the passage of years, of centuries was not obvious to a casual glance. There were no constellations in the Rim sky that, by their slow distortions, could play the part of clocks. "Contact," announced the radar officer softly. The Commodore looked into his own repeater screen, saw the tiny spark that had appeared in the blackness of the tank. The radio officer was speaking into his microphone. Corsair to Sundowner. Corsair to Sundowner. Do you read me? Over." The voice that answered was that of a tired man, a man who had been subjected to considerable strain. It was unsteady, seemed on the edge of hysteria. "I hear you, whoever you are. What the hell did you say your name was?" 'Corsair. This is Corsair, calling Sundowner. Over." "Never heard of you. What sort of name is that, anyhow?" And there was another, fainter voice, saying, ""Corsairl Don't like the sound of it, Captain. Could be a pirate." "A pirate? Out here, on the Rim? Don't be so bloody silly. There just aren't the pickings to make it worthwhile." A pause. "If she is a pirate, she's welcome to our bloody cargo." Corsair to Sundowner. Corsair to Sundowner. Come in, please. Over." "Yes, Corsair. I hear you. What Ihe hell do you want?" "Permission to board." "Permission to board? Who the bloody hell do you think you are?" "R.W.C.S. Corsair.' "R.W.C.S.?" It was obvious that Sundowner's Captain was addressing his Mate without bothering either to switch off or to cover his microphone. "What the hell is that, Joe?" "Haven't a clue," came the reply. Grimes switched in his own microphone. He did not want to alarm Sundowner, did not want to send her scurrying back into the twisted continuum generated by her Mannschenn Drive. He knew that he could blow the unarmed merchantman to a puff of incandescent vapor and that such an action would have the desired result. But he did not want to play it that way. He was acutely conscious that he was about to commit the crime of genocide -- and who could say that the mutated rats were less deserving of life than the humans whom, but for Grimes's intervention, they would replace? He did not wish, also, to have the murder of his own kind on his conscience. "Captain," he said urgently, "this is Commodore Grimes speaking, of the naval forces of the Rim Worlds Confederacy. It is vitally important that you allow us to board your ship. We know about the trouble you are having. We wish to help you." "You wish to help us?" "If we wished you ill," said Grimes patiently, "we could have opened fire on you as soon as you broke through into normal spacetime." He paused. "You have a cargo of seed grain. There were rats in the grain. And these rats have been multiplying. Am I correct?" "You are. But how do you know?" "Never mind that. And these rats -- there are mutants among them, aren't there? You've been coming a long time from Elsinore, haven't you? Mannschenn Drive breakdowns... and fluctuations in the temporal precession fields to speed up the rate of mutation." "But, sir, how do you know? We have sent no messages. Our psionic radio officer was killed by the... the mutants." "We know. Captain. And now may we board?" From the speaker came the faint IF voice of Sundowner's Mate. "Rim Ghosts are bad enough -- but when they take over Quarantine it's a bit rough." "Yes," said Grimes. "You may regard us as Rim Ghosts. But we're solid ones." H is big hands playing over his console like those of a master fully timed bursts from the auxiliary jets, jockeyed Corsair into a position only yards from Sundowner y used his braking rockets to match velocities. Grimes and his people stared out through the ports at the star tramp. She was old, old. Even now, at a time that was centuries in the past of Corsair's people, she was obsolescent. Her hull plating was dull, pitted by years of exposure to micrometeorites. Two of the embossed letters of her name had been broken off and never replaced, although somebody had replaced the missing U and W with crudely painted characters. Grimes could guess what conditions must be like on board. She would be one of these ships in which, to give greater lift for cargo, the pile shielding had been cut to a minimum, the contents of her holds affording, in theory, protection from radiation. And her holds were full of grain. And this grain supported pests that, through rapid breeding and mutation, had become a menace rather than a mere nuisance. "Boarders away, sir?" asked the Marine officer. "Yes, Major. Yourself and six men should do. I and Mrs. Grimes will be coming with you." "Side arms, sir?" "No. That crate'll have paperthin bulkheads and shell plating, and we can't afford any playing around with lasers." "Then knives and clubs, sir?" "It might be advisable. Yes." Grimes and Sonya left Control for their quarters. There, helping each other, they shrugged into their modified spacesuits. These still had the tail sheaths and helmets designed to accommodate a long-muzzled head. This had its advantages, providing stowage for a full beard. But Grimes wondered what Sundowner's people would think when they saw a party of seeming aliens jetting from Corsair to their airlock. Anyhow, it was their own fault. They should have had their vision transmitter and receiver in order. The boarding party assembled at the main airlock which, although it was cramped, was big enough to hold all of them. The inner door slowly closed and then, after the pumps had done their work Corsair could not afford to throw away atmosphere) the outer door opened. Grimes could see, then, that an aperture had appeared in the shell plating of the other ship, only twenty feet or so distant. But it was small. It must be only an auxiliary airlock. The Captain of Sundowner y thought Grimes, must be a cautious man, must have determined to let the boarding party into his ship one by one instead of in a body. And he'll be more cautious stilly thought Grimes, when he sees these spacesuits. He shuffled to the door sill. He said into his helmet miscrophone, "There's room for only one at a time in that airlock of theirs. I'll go first." He heard the Major acknowledge, and then he jumped, giving himself the slightest possible push-off from his own ship. He had judged well and did not have to use his suit reaction unit. Slowly, but not too slowly, he drifted across the chasm between the two vessels, extended his arms to break his fall and, with one hand, caught hold of the projecting rung above Sundowner s airlock door. As he had assumed, the compartment was large enough to hold only one person -- and he had to act quickly to pull his dummy tail out of the way of the closing outer valve. There were no lights in the airlock -- or, if there were lights, they weren't working. But after a while he heard the hissing that told him that pressure was being built up. Suddenly the inner door opened and glaring light blinded the Commodore. He could just see two dark figures standing there, with what looked like pistols in their hands. Through his helmet diaphragm he heard somebody say, "What did I tell you. Captain? A bleeding kangaroo in full armor, no less. Shall I shoot it?" "Wait!" snapped Grimes. He hoped that the note of authority would not be muffled from his voice. "Wait! I'm as human as you." "Then prove it, mister!" S lowly the Commodore raised his gloved hands, turning them to show that they were empty. He said, "I am going to remove my helmet -- unless one of you gentlemen would caie to do it for me." "Not bloody likely. Keep your distance." "As you please." Grimes manipulated fastenings, gave the regulation half turn and lifted. At once he noticed the smell -- it was like the stink that had hung around his own wardroom for days after the attempted interrogation of the prisoner. "All right," said one of the men. "You can come in." Grimes shuffled into the ship. The light was out of his eyes now, and he could see the two men. He did not have to ask who or what they were. Uniform regulations change far more slowly than do civilian fashions, especially when uniforms are worn as much for function as for appearance. He addressed the grizzled, unshaven man with the four tarnished gold bars on his shoulder boards, "We have already spoken with each other by radio, Captain. I am Commodore Grimes." "Of the Rim Worlds Confederacy's Navy. But what's the idea of the fancy dress, CommodoreT "The fancy dress?" Then Grimes realized that the man was referring to his spacesuit, so obviously designed for a non-human. What would be his reaction to what Grimes was wearing underneath it -- the scanty rags and the rank marks printed on to his skin? But it was of no importance. He said, "It's a long story, IF Captain, and I haven't time to tell it now. What I am telling you is that you must not, repeat not, attempt a landing on Lorn until I have given you clearance." "And who the hell do you think you are. Mister so-called Commodore? We've had trouble enough this trip. What is your authority?" "My authority?" Grimes grinned. "In my own space and time, the commission I hold, signed by the President of the Confederacy." "What did I say?" demanded the Mate. "And I'll say it again. He's some sort of bloody pirate." "And, in the here-and-now," continued Grimes, "my missile batteries and my laser projectors." "If you attempt to hinder me from proceeding on my lawful occasions," said the tramp Master stubbornly, "that will be piracy." Grimes looked at him, not without sympathy. It was obvious that this man had been pushed to the very limits of human endurance. The lined face and the red-rimmed eyes told of many, too many, hours without sleep. And he had seen at least one of his officers killed. By this time he would be regarding the enemies infesting his ship as mutineers rather than mutants and, no longer quite rational, would be determined to bring his cargo to port come Hell or High Water. And that he must not do. G rimes lifted his helmet to put it back on. In spite of the metal with which he was surrounded he might be able to get through to Williams in Corsair's control room, to order that would call a laser beam to slice off Sundowner's main venturi. But the Mate guessed his intention, swung viciously with his right arm and knocked the helmet out of the Commodore's hand. He growled to his Captain, "We d#n't want the pirate callin' his little friends, do we, sir?" "It is essential that I keep in communication with my own ship," said Grimes stiffly. "So you can do somethin' with all the fancy ironmongery you were tellin' us about!" The Mate viciously swatted the helmet which, having rebounded from a bulkhead, was now drifting through the air. "Gentlemen," said Grimes reasonably, looking at the two men and at the weapKns they carried, automatic pistols, no more than five He might disarm one -- but the other would fire. "Gentlemen, I have come to help you." "More of a hindrance than a bloody help," snarled the Mate. "We've enough on our plates already without having to listen to your fairy stories about some non-existent Confederacy." He turned to the Master. "What say we start up the reaction drive an' set course for Lorn? This bloke's cobbers'll not open fire so long as he's aboard." "Yes. Do that, Mr. Holt. And then we'll put this man in irons." So this was it, thought Grimes dully. So this was the immutability of the Past, of which he had so often read. This was the inertia of the flow of events. He had come to where and when he could best stick a finger into the pie -- but the crust was too tough, too hard. He couldn't blame the tramp Captain. He, as a good shipmaster, was displaying the utmost loyalty to his charterers. And -- Grimes remembered his Rim Worlds history -- those consignments of seed grain had been urgently needed on Lorn. And, more and more, every word was an effort, every action. It was as though he were immersed in some viscous fluid, fathoms deep. He was trying to swim against the Time Stream -- and it was too much for him. Why not just drift? After all, there would be time to do something after the landing at Port Forlorn. Or would there? Hadn't somebody told him that this ship had crashed in mountainous country? He was aroused from his despairing lethargy by a sudden clangor of alarm bells, by a frightened, distorted voice that yammered from a bulkhead speaker, "Captain! Where are you. Captain? They're attacking the control room!" More as the result of years of training than of conscious thought he suatohed his drifting helmet as he followed the Captain and his Mate when they dived into the axial shaft, as they puhed themselves hand over hand along the guidelines to the bows of the ship. # #rrheyTe attacking the control A room!" The words echoed through Grimes' mind. They must be Sonya and the Major and his men. They must have breached the ports. So far there was no dimunition of air pressure -- but even such a sorry rustbucket as Sundowner would have her airtight doors in reasonably good working order. All the same, he deemed it prudent to pause in his negotiation of the axial shaft to put his helmet back on. Luckily the rough treatment that it had received at the hands of the Mate did not seem to have damaged it. Ahead of him, the two Sundowner officers were making rapid progress. It was obvious that they were not being slowed down by emergency doors and sphincter locks. The Commodore tried to catch up with them; but he was hampered by a spacesuit, and they were not. Then, faintly through his helmet diaphragm, he heard the sounds of astruggle, a fight. There were shots -- by the sharpness of the cracks fired from small caliber pistols such as the Captain and his Mate had been carrying. There were shouts and screams. And there was a dreadful, high squeaking that was familiar, too familiar. He thought that he could make out words -- or the repetition of one word only. "Kill! Kill!" He knew theq who They were and pulled himself along the guideline with the utmost speed of which he was capable. Glancing ahead, he saw that Sundowners Master and his second in command were scrambling through the open hatch at the end of the shaft, the hatch that must give access, in a ship of IF this type, to Control. He heard more shots, more shouts and screams. He reached the hatch himself, pulled himself through, floundered wildly for long seconds until his magnetized boot soles made contact with the deck. They ignored him at first. Perhaps it was that they took him -- in his tailed suit with its snouted helmet -- for one of their own kind, although, by their standards, a giant. They were small, no larger than a terrier dog, but there were many of them. They were fighting with claws and teeth and pieces of sharpened metal that They were using as knives. A fine mist of blood fogged the faceplate of Grimes's helmet, half blinding him. But he could see at least two human bodies, obviously dead, their throats torn out, and at least a dozen of the smaller corpses. He did not give himself time to be shocked by the horror of the scene. (That would come later, much later.) He tried to wipe the film of blood from his visor with a gloved hand, but only smeared it. But he could see that the fight was still going on. In the center of the control room a knot of spacemen was still standing, still struggling. They must either have lost their pistols or exhausted their ammunition; there were no more shots. Grimes joined the fight, his armored fists and arms flailing into the mass of furry bodies, his hands crushing them and pulling them away from the humans, throwing them from him with savage violence. At first his attack met with success -- and then the mutants realized that he was another enemy. Their squeaking rose to an initolerable level, and more and more of them poured into the control room. They swarmed over the Commodore, clinging to his arms and legs, immobilizing him. Sundowner's officers could not help him. They, too, were fighting a losing battle for survival. There was a scratching at Grimes's throat. One of his assailants had a knife of sorts, was trying to saw through the fabric joint. It was a tough fabric, designed for wear and tear -- but not such wear and tear as this. Somehow the man contrived to get his right arm clear, managed, with an effort, to bring it up to bat away the knife wielder. He succeeded -- somehow. And then there was more scratching and scraping at the joint at his armpit. He was blinded, helpless, submerged in a sea of furry bodies, all too conscious of the frantic scrabblings of their teeth arid claws and knives. His armor, hampering his every movement even in ideal conditions, could well contribute to his death rather than saving his life. He struggled still -- but it was an instinctive struggle rather than one consciously directed, no more than a slow, agonized shrugging, a series of laborious contortions to protect his vulnerable joints from sharp teeth and serrated blades. Then there was a respite, and he could move once more. H e saw, dimly, that the control room was more crowded than ever, that other figures, dressed as he was, had burst in, were fighting with deadly efficiency, with long, slashing blades and bone-crushing cudgels. It was a hand-toand battle in a fog -- and the fog was a dreadful cloud of finely divided particles of freshly shed blood. But even these reinforcements were not enough to turn the tide. Sooner or later -- and probably sooner -- the mutants would swamp the humans, armored and unarmored, by sheer weight of numbers. "Abandon ship!" somebody was shouting. It was a woman's voice, Sonya's. "Abandon ship! To the. boats!" And then the cry -- fainter this time, heard through the helmet diaphragm rather than over his suit radio -- was repeated. It is no light matter to give up one's vessel. But now, after this final fight. Sundownthey they were beaten. Somehow the armored Marines managed to surround the crew -- what was left of them. The Captain was still alive, although only half oooscious. The Mate, apart from a few scratches, was untouched. There were two engineers and an hysterical wcMnan with Purser's braid on her tom shirt. That was all. They were hustled by Corsair's men to the hatch, thrust down the axial shaft. Grimes shouted his protest as somebody pushed him after them. He realized that it was Sonya, that she was still with him. Over their heads the hatch lid slammed into its closed position. "The Major and his men," he managed to get out. "They can't stay there, in that hell!" "They won't," she told him. "They'll manage. Our job is to get these people clear of the ship and to do it immediately." "And then?" "Who's in charge of this bloody operation?" she asked tartly. "Who was it who told the Admiral that he was going to play this whole thing by ear?" Then they were out of the axial shaft and into a boat bay. They watched the Mate help the woman into the small, torped#-like craft, then stand back to allow the two engineers to enter. He tried to assist the Captain to board -- but his superior pushed him away weakly, saying, "No, Mister. I'll be the last man off my ship, if you please." He noticed Grimes and Sonya standing there. "And that applies to you, too, Mr. Commodore whoever you say you ;are. Into the boat with you -- you and your mate." "We'll follow you. Captain. It's hardly more than a step across to our own ship." "Into the boat with you, damn you. I shall be... the... last..." The man was obviously on the verge of collapse. His Mate grasped his elbow. "Sir, this is no time to insist on protocol. We have to hurry. Can't you hear Them?" Through his helmet Grimes, himself, hadn't heard them until now. But the noise was there, the frenzied chittering, surely louder with every passing second. "Get into that bloody boat," he told the Mate. "We'll handle the doors." "I... insist..." whispered the Captain. "I shall... be... the last... to leave..." IF ( ow wJiat to do," Grimes I toldlbeM And many's die time Fve wanted to do it. But not in these dicumstances." His fist came up to his superior's jaw. It was little more than a tap, but enough. The Master did not fall, could not fall in these conditions of zero gravity. But he swayed there, anchored to the deck by his magnetic boot soles, out on his feet. The two engineers emerged from the lifecraft, lugged the unconscious man inside. "Hurry!" ordered Sonya. "Make for your ship, sir?" asked the Mate. "You'll pick us up?" "No. Sorry -- but there's no time to explain. Just get the hell out and make all speed for Lorn." "But..." "You heard what the Commodore said," snapped Sonya. "Do it. If you attempt to lay your boat alongside we open fire." "But..." Grimes had removed his helmet so that his voice would not be muffled by the diaphragm. "Get into that bloody boat!" he roared. And in a softer voice, as the Mate obeyed, "Good luck." He replaced his helmet and, as he did so, Sonya operated the controls set into the bulkhead. A door slid shut, sealing off the boat bay from the rest 'of the ship. The outer door opened, revealing the black emptiness of the Rim Sky. Smoothly and efficiently the catapult operated, throwing the boat out and clear. Intense violet flame blossomed at her blunt stem, and then she was away, diminishing into the distance. coming around in a great arc on to the trajectory that would take her to safety. Grimes didn't watch her for long. He said, "We'd better gel back to Control, to help the Major and his men. They're trapped in there." "They aren't trapped. They're just waiting to see that the boat's escaped." "But how will they get out?" "The same way that we got into this rustbucket. We' sent back to the ship for a laser pistol, burned our way in. Luckily the airtight doors were all in good working order." "You took a risk." "It was a risk we had to take. And we knew that you were wearing a spacesuit. But it's time we weren't here." "After you." "My God! Are you going to be as stuffy as that Captain?" Grimes didn't argue, but pushed her out of the boat lock. He jumped after her, somersaulting slowly in the emptiness. He used his suit reaction unit to steady himself and found himself facing the ship that he had just left. He saw an explosion at her bows, a billowing cloud of debris that expanded slowly -- broken glass, crystallizing atmosphere, a gradually separating mass of bodies, most of which ceased to move after a very few seconds. But there were the larger bodies, seven of them, spacesuited -- and each of them sprouted a tail of incandescence as the Marines jetted back to their own ship. The Major had used his laser pistol to break out through the control room ports. IF All the mutants would not be dead. There would be survivors, sealed off in their airtight compartments by the slamming of the emergency doors. The survivors could be disposed of by Corsair's main armament. Grimes cheerfully as the Commodore re-entered his own control room. "Very decent of you. Commander," Grimes said, remembering how the Mate of Sundowner had realized his long standing ambition and clobbered his Captain. "Very decent of you." He looked out of the viewports. The grain carrier was still close, at least as close as she had been when he had boarded her. The use of missiles would be dangerous to the vessel employing them. Even lasers might touch off a mutually destructive explosion. "You must still finish your task, man Grimes," Serressor reminded him. "I know. I know." But there was no hurry. There was ample time to consider ways and means. "All armament ready, sir," reported Carter. "Thank you. To begin with, Comrange..." Then, suddenly, the outline of Sundowner shimmered, shimmered and faded. She flickered out like a candle in a puff of wind. Grimes cursed. He should have foreseen this. The mutants had access to the Mannschenn Drive machinery -- and how much, by continuous eavesdropping, had they learned? How much did they know? "Start M.D.," he ordered. "Standard precession." It took time -- but not too long a time. Bronson was already in the Mannschenn Drive room, and Bronson had been trained to the naval way of doing things rather than the relatively leisurely procedure of the merchant service. (Himself a merchant officer, a reservist, he had always made it his boast that he could beat the navy at its own game.) There was the brief period of temporal disorientation, the uncanny feeling that time was running backwards, the giddiness, the nausea. Outside the ports the Galactic Lens assumed the appearance of a distorted Klein flask, and the Lorn sun became a pulsing spiral of multicolored light. But there was no sign of Sundowner, Grimes was speaking into the telephone. "Commander Bronson! Can you synchronize?" "With whatT Then -- "Fll try, sir. ni try." Grimes could visualize the engineer watching the flickering needles of his gauges, the undulant traces in his oscilloscopes, making adjustments measured in fractions of microseconds to his controls. Subtly the keening song of the spinning, pressing gyroscopes wavered. And as it did so the outlines of the people and instruments in the control roam lost their sharpness, while the colors of everything momentarily dulled and then became more vivid. "There's the damned ship!" shoutAnd there she was, close aboard them, a phantom ship adrift on a sea of impossible blackness, insubstantial, quivering on the very verge of invisibility. "Fire at will!" ordered Grimes. "But, sir," protested one of the officers. "If we interfere with the ship's mass while the Drive is in operation..." Fire at will!' repeated the Commodore. "Aye, aye, sir!" acknowledged Carter happily. But it was like shooting at a shadow. Missiles erupted from their launchers, laser beams stabbed out at the target -- and nothing happened. From the bulkhead speaker of the intercom Bronson snarled, "What the hell are you playing at up there? How the hell can I hold her in synchronization?" "Sorry, Commander," said Grimes into his microphone. "Just lock on, and hold her. Just hold her, that's all I ask." "An' what now, Skipper?" de"We shall use the Bomb," said Grimes quietly. #CTxre shall use the Bomb," he y V said. He knew, as did all of his people, that the fusion device was their one hope of a return to their own Space and Time. But Sundowner must be destroyed; the Time Stream must, somehow, be diverted. Chemical explosives and destructive light beams were, in these circumstances, useless. There remained only the Sunday Punch. The ships were close, so close that their temporal precession fields interacted. Even so, it was obvious why all the weapons so far employed had failed. Each and every discharge had meant an appreciable alteration of Corsair's temporal precession rate, so that each and every missile and beam had missed in Time rather than in Space. Had Corsair been fitted with one of the latest model synchronizers her gunnery might have been more successful -- but she was not. Only Bronson's skill was keeping her in visual contact with her prey. Getting the Bomb into position was not the same as loosing off a missile. Slowly, gently, the blackpainted cylinder was eased out of its bay. The merest puff from one of its compressed air jets nudged it away from Corsair towards the target. It fell gently through the space between the two ships, came finally to rest against Sundowner's scarred hull. At an order from Grimes the thick, lead shutters slid up over the control room ports. (But the thing was close, so close, too close. Even with the radar on minimum range, the glowing blob that was Sundowner almost filled the tank.) Carter looked at Grimes, waiting for the order. His face was pale -- and it was not the only pale face in Control. But Serressor -- that blasted lizard! with his irritating whistling. IF Sonya came to sit beside him. She said quietly, "You have to do it. We have to do it." Even her presence could not dispel the loneliness of command. "No," he told her. " have to do it." "Locking," came Bronson's voice from the bulkhead speaker. "Locking. Holding." "Fire," said Grimes. ime had passed. How long. Grimes did not know, nor would he ever know. (Perhaps, he was often to suspect later, this was the next time around, or the time after that.) He half opened his eyes and looked at the red-haired woman who was shaking him back to wakefulness -- the attractive woman with the faint soar still visible between her firm breasts. What was her name? He should know. He was married to her. Or had been married to her. It was suddenly of great importance that he should remember what she was called. Susan...? Sarah...? No... Sonya...? Yes, Sonya. That was it. "John, wake up! Wake up! It's all over now. The Bomb blew us back into our own Continuum, back to our own Time, even! We're in touch with Port Forlorn Naval Control, and the Admiral wants to talk to you personally." "He can wait," said Grimes, feeling the fragments of his prickly personality click back into place. He opened his eyes properly, saw Serressor, near by, still youthful, and with him the gangling adolescent who was Mayhew. For a moment he envied them. They had regained their youth -- but at a dreadful risk to themselves. Even so, they had been lucky. And so, he told himself, had been the human race -- not for the first time, and not for the last. He thought, I hope I'm not around when our luck finally does run out. Latest word on the controversial "Immortality Through Freezing" program which may bring us eternal life nowl by R. C. W. Ettinger by Lin Carter plus many other stories ond features in the November Worlds of Tomorrow, On Sale now -- don't miss iti IF  Novelette He came off the deadliest war fleet in history to do battle with naked hands -- and brain! I P ersonally, his name was Harry Brennan. Officially, he was the John Paul Jones, which consisted of four billion doflars worth of irresistible equipment -- the latest and best of human science -- designed to spread its four thousand-odd components out through some fifteen cubic meters of space under ordinary conditions -- designed also to stretch across light-years under extraordinary conditions (such as sending an emergency messenger-component home) or to clump into a single magnetic unit in order to shift through space and explore the galaxy. Both officially and personally -- but most of all personally -- he represents a case in point. The case is one having to do with the relative importance of the made thing and its maker. It was, we all know, the armored horseman who dominated the early wars of the Middle Ages in Europe. But, knowing this, it is still wise to remember that it was not the iron shell that made the combination of man and metal terrible to the enemy, -- but rather the essentially naked man inside the shell. Later, French knights depending on their armor went down before the clothyard shafts of unarmored footmen with bows, at Crecy and Poitiers. And what holds true for armor holds true for the latest developments of our science as well. It is not the spacecraft or the laser on which we will find ourselves depending when a time of ultimate decision comes, but the naked men within and behind these things. When that time comes, those who rank the made thing before its maker will die as the French knights died at Crecy and Poitiers. This is a law of nature as wide as the universe, which Harry Brennan, totally unsuspecting, was to discover once more for us, in his personal capacity. P ersonally, he was in his mid-twenties, unremarkable except for two years of special training with the John Paul Jones and his superb ph#sical condition. He was fiveeleven, a hundred seventy-two pounds, with a round, cheerful face under his brown crew-cut hair. I was Public Relations Director of the Project that sent him out; and I was there with the rest to slap him on the back the day he left. "Don't get lost, now," said someone. Harry grinned. "The way you guys built this thing," he answered, "if I got lost the galaxy would just have to shift itself around to get me back on plot." There was an unconscious arrogance 'hidden in that answer, but no one marked it at the time. It was not the hour for suspicions. He climbed into the twelve-foot tall control suit that with his separate living tank were the main components of the John Paul Jones and took off. Up in orbit, he spent some thirty-two hours testing to make sure all the several thousand other component parts were responding properly. Then he left the solar system. He clumped together his components, made his first shift to orbit Procyon -- and from there commenced his explorations of the stars. In the next nine weeks, he accumulated literally amazing amounts of new information about the neaiby stars and their solar systems. And -- this is an even better index of his success -- located four new worlds on which men could step with never a spacesuit or even a water canteen to sustain them. Worlds so like Earth in gravity, atmosphere and even flora and fauna, that they could be colonized tomorrow. Those were his first four worlds. On the fifth he encountered his fate -- a fate for which he was unconsciously ripe. The fact was the medical men and psychologists had overlooked a factor -- a factor having to do with the effect of Harry's official John Paul Jones self upon his entirely human personal self. And over nine weeks this effect changed Harry witihout his ever having suspected it. You see, nothing seemed barred to him. He could cross light-years by touching a few buttons. He could send a sensing element into the core of the hottest star, into the most poisonous planetary atmospheres or crushing gravities, to look around as if he were down there in person. From orbit, he could crack open a mountain, burn off a forest or vaporize a section of icecap in search of information just by tapping the energy of a nearby sun. And so, subtly, the unconscious arrogance bom during two years of training, that should have been noted in him at take-off from Earth, emerged and took him over . -- until he felt that there was nothing he could not do; that all things must give wayto him; that he was, in effect, master of the universe. The day may come when a man like Harry Brennan may hold such a belief and be justified. But not yet. On the fifth Earthlike world he discovered -- World # in his records -- Harry encountered the proof that his belief was unjustified. II T he .world was one which, from orbit, seemed to be the best of all the planets which he had discovered were suitable for human settlement; and he was about to go down to its surface personally in the control-suit, when his instruments picked out something already down there. It was a squat, metallic pyramid about the size of a four-plex apartment building; and it was radiating on a number of interesting frequencies. Around its base there was mechanical movement and an area of cleared ground. Further out, in the native forest, were treaded vehicles taking samples of the soil, rock and vegetation. Harry had been trained for all conceivable situations, including an encounter with other intelligent, spacegoing life. Automatically, he struck a specific button, and immediately a small torpedo-shape leaped away to shift through alternate space and back to Earth with the information so far obtained. And a pale, thin beam reached up and out from the pyramid below. Harry's emergency messenger component ceased to exist. Shaken, but not yet really worried, Harry struck back instantly with all the power his official self could draw from the GO-type sun, nearby. The power was funnelled by some action below, directly into the pyramid itself; and it vanished there as indifferently as the single glance of a sunbeam upon a leaf. Harry's mind woke suddenly to some understanding of what he had encountered. He reached for the controls to send the John Paul Jones shifting into the alternate universe and away. His hands never touched the controls. From the pyramid below, a blue lance of light reached up to paralyze him, select the controlsuit from among the other components and send it tumbling to the planeIF tary surface below like a swatted insect. But the suit had been designed to protect its occupant, whether he himself was operative or not. At fifteen hundred feet, the drag chute broke free, looking like a silver cloth candle-snuffer in the sunlight; and at five hundred feet the retrorockets cut in. The suit tumbled to earth among some trees two kilometers from the pyramid, with Harry inside bruised, but released from his paralysis. From the pyramid, a jagged arm of something like white lightning lashed the ground as far as the suit, and the suit's outer surface glowed cherry-red. Inside, the temperature suddenly shot up fifty degrees; instinctively Harry hit the panic button available to him inside the suit. The suit split down the center like an overcooked frankfurter and spat Harry out; he rolled among the brush and fernlike ground cover, six or seven meters from the suit. F rom the distant pyramid, the lightning lashed the suit, breaking it up. The headpiece rolled drunkenly aside, turning the dark gape of its interior toward Harry like the hollow of an empty skull. In the dimness of that hollow Harry saw the twinkle of his control buttons. The lightning vanished. A yellow lightness filled the air about Harry and the dismembered suit. There was a strange quivering to the yellowness; and Harry half smelled, half tasted the sudden, flatbite of ozone. In the headpiece a button clicked without being touched; and the suit speaker, still radio-connected with the recording tank in orbit, spoke aloud in Harry's voice. "Orbit..." it said. "... into... going..." These were, in reverse order, the last three words Harry had recorded before sighting the pyramid. Now, swiftly gaining speed, the speaker began to recite backwards, word for word, everything Harry had said into it in nine weeks. Faster it went, and faster, until it mounted to a chatter, a gabble, and finally a whine pushing against the upper limits of Harry's auditory register. Suddenly, it stopped. The little clearing about Harry was full of silence. Only the odd and distant creaking of something that might have been a rubbing branch or an alien insect, came to Harry's ears. Then the speaker spoke once more. "Animal..." it said flatly in Harry's calm, recorded voice and went on to pick further words from the recordings, "... beast. You... were an animal... wrapped in... made clothing. I have stripped you back to... animal again. Live, beast..." Then the yellowness went out of the air and the taste of ozone with it. The headpiece of the dismembered suit grinned, empty as old bones in the sunlight. Harry scrambled to his feet and ran wildly away through the trees and brush. He ran in panic and utter fear, his lungs gasping, his feet pounding the alien earth, until the earth, the trees, the sky itself swam about him from exhaustion; and he fell tumbling to earth and away into the dark haven of unconsciousness. W hen he woke, it was night, and he could not quite remember where he was or why. His thoughts seemed numb and unimportant. But he was cold, so he blundered about until he found the standing halftrunk of a lighting-blasted tree and crept into the burned hollow of its interior, raking frill-edged, alien leaves about him out of some halfforgotten instinct, until his own bodywarmth in the leaves formed a cocoon of comfort about him; and he slept. From then on began a period in which nothing was very clear. It was as if his mind had huddled itself away somehow like a wounded animal and refused to think. There was no past or future, only the endless now. If now was warm, it had always been warm; if dark -- it had always been dark. He learned to smell water from a distance and go to it when he was thirsty. He put small things in his mouth to taste them. If they tasted good he ate them. If he got sick afterwards, he did not eat them again. Gradually, blindly, the world about him began to take on a certain order. He came to know where there were plants with portions he could eat, where there were small creatures he could catch and pull apart and eat and where there was water. He did not know how lucky he was in the sheer chance of finding flora and fauna on an alien world that was edible -- let alone nourishing. He did not realize that he had come down on a plateau in the tropical highlands, with little variation in day and night temperature and no large native predators which might have attacked him. None of this, he knew. Nor would it have made any difference to him if he had, for the intellectual center of his brain had gone on vacation, so to speak, and refused to be called back. He was, in fact, a victim of severe psychological shock. The shock of someone who had come to feel himself absolute master of a universe and who then, in a few short seconds, had been cast down from that high estate by something or someone inconceivably greater, into the state of a beast of the field. But still, he could not be a true beast of e field, in spite of the fact his intellectual processes had momentarily abdicated. His perceptive abilities still worked. His eyes could not help noting, even if incuriously, the progressive drying of the vegetation, the day-by-day shifting in the points of setting and rising of the sun. Slowly, instinctively, the eternal moment that held him stretched and lengthened until he began to perceive divisions within it -- a difference between now and was, between now and will be. Ill T he day came at last when he saw himself. A hundred times he had crouched by the water to drink and, lowering his lips to its surface, seen color and IF shape rising to meet him. The hundredth and something time, he checked, a few inches above the liquid plane, staring at what he saw. For several long seconds it made no sense to him. Then, at first slowly, then with a rush like pain flooding back on someone rousing from the anesthesia of unconsciousness, he recognized what he saw. Those were eyes at which he stared, sunken and dark-circled under a dirty tangle of hair. That was a nose jutting between gaunt and sunken cheeks above a mouth, and there was a chin naked only because once an ultrafine laser had burnt out the thousand and one roots of the beard that grew on it. That was a man he saw -- himself. He jerked back like someone who has come face-to-face with the devil. But he returned eventually, because he was thirsty, to drink and see himself again. And so, gradually, he got used to the sight of himself. So it was that memory started to return to him. But it did not come back quickly or all at once. It returned instead by jerks and sudden, partial revelations -- until finally the whole memory of what had happened was back in his conscious mind again. But he was really not a man again. He was still essentially what the operator of the pyramid had broken him down into. He was still an animal. Only the memory and imaginings of a man had returned to live like a prisoner in a body that went on reacting and surviving in the bestial way it had come to regard as natural. But his animal peace was broken. For his imprisoned mind worked now. With the controlsuit broken up, -- he had returned to the spot of its destruction many times, to gaze beastlike at the rusting parts -- his mind knew he was a prisoner, alone on this alien world until he died. To know that was not so bad, but remembering this much meant remembering also the existence of the someone or something that, had made him a prisoner here. The whoever it was who was in the pyramid. That the pyramid might have been an automated, mechanical device never entered his mind for a moment. There had been a personal, directed, living viciousness behind the announcement that had condemned him to live as a beast. No, in that blank-walled, metallic structure, whose treaded mechanical servants still prospected through the woods, there was something alive -- something that could treat the awesome power of a solar tap as a human treated the attack of a mosquito -- but something living. Some being. Some Other, who lived in the pyramid, moving, breathing, eating and gloating -- or worse yet, entirely forgetful of what he had done to Harry Brennan. And now that he knew that the Other was there, Harry began to dream of him nightly. At first, in his dreams, Harry whimpered with fear each time the dark shape he pursued seemed about to turn and show its face. But slowly, hatred came to grow inside and then outside his fear. Unbearable that Harry IF should never know the face of his destroyer. Lying curled in his nest of leaves under the moonless, starhis deprivation. Then hate came to strengthen him in the daylight also. From the beginning he had avoided the pyramid, as a wild coyote avoids the farmyard where he was once shot by the farmer. But now, day after day, Harry circled closer to the alien shape. From the beginning he had run and hidden from the treaded prospecting machines. But now, slowly, he grew bolder, standing close enough at last to touch them as they passed. And he found that they paid no attention to him. No attention at all. H e came to ignore them in turn, and day by day he ventured closer to the pyramid. Until the morning came when he lay, silently snarling, behind a bush, looking out across the tread-trampled space that separated him from the nearest copper-colored face of the pyramid. The space was roughly circular, thirty meters across, broken only by a small stream which had been diverted to loop inwards toward the pyramid before returning to its original channel. In the bight of the loop a machine like a stork straddled the artificial four-foot-wide channel, dipping a pair of long necks with tentacle-clustered heads into the water at intervals. Sometimes Harry could see nothing in the tentacles when they came up. Occasionally they carried some small water creature which they deposited in a tank. Making a perfect circle about the tramped area, so that the stork like machine was guarded within them, was an open fence of slender wands set upright in the earth, far enough apart for any of the machines that came and went to the forest to pass between any two of them. Tere seemed to be nothing connecting the wands, and nothing happened to the prospecting machines as they passed through -- but the very purposelessness of the wands filled Harry with uneasiness. It was not until after several days of watching that he had a chance to see a small native animal, frightened by something in the woods behind it, attempt to bolt across a comer of the clearing. As it passed between two of the wands there was a waveriness in the air between them. The small animal leaped high, came down and lay still. It did not move after that, and later in the day, Harry saw the indifferent treads of one of the prospecting machines bury it in the trampled earth in passing. That evening, Harry brought several captive, small animals bound with grass up to the wand line and thrust them through, one by one at different spots. All died. The next night he tried pushing a captive through a small trench scooped out so that the creature level. But this one died also. For several days he was baffled. Then he tried running behind a slowmoving machine as it returned and tying a small animal to it with grass. For a moment as the front of the machine passed through, he thought the little animal would live. But then, as the back of the machine passed the line, it, too, died. Snarling, Harry paced around outside the circle in the brush until the sun set and stars filled the moonless sky. I n the days that followed, he probed every gap in the wandfence, but found no safe way through it. Finally, he came to concentrate on the two points at which the diverted stream entered and left the circle to flow beneath the storklike machine. He studied this without really knowing what he was seeking. He did not even put his studying into words. Vaguely, he knew that the water went in and the water came out again unchanged; and he also wished to enter and come out safely. Then, one day, studying the stream and the machine, he noticed that a small creature plucked from the water by the storklike neck's mass of tentacles was still wriggling. The evening, at twilight, while there was still light to see, he waded up the two-foot depth of the stream cut across its watery surface and pushed some more of his little animals toward the line underwater. Two of the three surfaced immediately, twitched and floated on limply, to be plucked from the water and cast aside on the ground by the storklike machine. But the third swam on several strokes before surfacing and came up living to scramble ashore, race for the forest and be killed by wands further around the circle. Harry investigated the channel bethere up to his mid-thigh, plenty to cover him completely. He crouched down in the water and took a deep breath. Ducking below the surface, he pulled himself along with his fingertips, holding himself close to the bottom. He moved in as far as the tentacled ends. These grabbed at him, but could not reach far enough back to touch him. He saw that they came within a few inches of the gravel bottom. He began to need air. He backed carefully out and rose above the water, gasping. After a while his hard breathing stopped, and he sat staring at the water for a long while. When it was dark, he left. The next day he came and crept underwater to the grabbing area of the storklike machine again. He scooped out several handfuls of the gravel from under the place where the arms grabbed, before he felt a desperate need for .air and had to withdraw. But that day began his labors. IV F our days later the bottom under the grasping tentacles was scooped out to an additional two feet of depth. And the fifth twilight after that, he pulled himself, dripping and triumphant, up out of the bend of the diverted stream inside the He rested and then went to the IF pyramid, approaching it cautiously and sidelong like a suspicious animal. There was a door in the side he approached through which he had seen the prospecting machines trundle in and out. In the dimness he could not see it; and when he touched the metallic side of the structure, his fingers, grimed and toughened from scrabbling in the dirt, told him little. But his nose, beast-sensitive now, located and traced the outline of the almost invisible crack around the door panel by its reek of earth and lubricant. He settled down to wait. An hour later, one of the machines came back. He jumped up, ready to follow it in; but the door opened just before it and closed the minute it was inside -- nor was there any room to squeeze in beside it. He hunkered down, disappointed, snarling a little to himself. He stayed until dawn and watched several more machines enter and leave. But there was no room to squeeze inside, even with the smallest of them. During the next week or so he watched the machines enter and leave nightly. He tied one of his small animals to an entering machine and saw it pass through the entrance alive and scamper out again with the next machine that left. And every night his rage increased. Then, wordlessly, one daytime after he had seen a machine deep in the woods lurch and tilt as its tread passed over a rock, inspiration took him. That night he carried through the water with him several canteloupesized stones. When the first machine came back to the pyramid, in the moment in which the door opened before it, he pushed one of the rocks before the right-hand tread. The machine, unable to stop, mounted the rock with its right tread, tilted to the left and struck against that side of the entrance. It checked, backed off and put out an arm with the grasping end to remove the rock. Then it entered the opening. But Harry was already before it, having slipped through while the door was still up and the machine, busy pulling the stone aside. He plunged into a corridor of darkness, full of clankings and smells. A little light from the opening behind him showed him a further, larger chamber where other machines stood parked. He ran toward them. Long before he reached them, the door closed behind him, and he was in pitch darkness. But the clanking of the incoming machine was close behind him, and the adrenalinized memory of a wild beast did not fail him. He ran, hands-outstretched, directly into the side of the parked machine at which he had aimed and clambered up on it. The machine entering behind him clanked harmlessly past him and stopped moving. He climbed cautiously down in the impenetrable darkness. He could see nothing; but the new, animal sensitivity of his nose offered a substitute for vision. He moved like a hunting dog around the chamber, sniffing and touching; and slowly a clear picture of it and its treaded occupants built up in his mind. He was still at this when suddenly a door he had not seen opened almost in his face. He had just time to leap backwards as a smaller machine with a boxlike body and a number of upward-thrusting arms entered, trundled to the machine that had just come back and began to relieve the prospecting machine of its sample box, replacing it with the one it carried itself. This much, in the dim light from the open door, Harry was able to see. But then, the smaller machine turned back toward the doorway; and Harry, waking to his opportunity, ducked through ahead of it. H e found himself in a corridor dimly lit by a luminescent strip down the center of its ceiling. The corridor was wide enough for the box-collecting machine to pass him; and, in fact, it rolled out around him as he shrank back against one metal wall. It went on down the corridor, and he followed it into a larger room with a number of machines, some mobile, some not, under a ceiling lit as the corridor had been with a crossing transluscent strip. In this area all the machines avoided each other -- and him. They were busy with each other and at other incomprehensible duties. Hunched and tense, hair erect on the back of his neck and nostrils spread wide, Harry moved through them to explore other rooms and corridors that opened off this one. It took him some little time; but he discovered that they were all on a level, and there was nothing but machines in any of them. He found two more doors with shallow steps leading up to them, but these would not open for him; and though he watched by one for some time, no machine went up the steps and through it. He began to be conscious of thirst and hunger. He made his way back to the door leading to the chamber where the prospecting machines were parked. To his surprise, it opened as he approached it. He slipped through into darkness. Immediately, the door closed behind him; and sudden panic grabbed him, when he found he could not open it from this side. Then, selfpossession returned to him. By touch, smell and memory, he made his way among the parked machines and down the corridor to the outside door. To his gratification, this also opened when he came close. He slipped through into cool, fresh outer air and a sky already graying with dawn. A few moments later, wet but free, he was back in the woods again. From then on, each night he returned. He found it was not necessary to do more than put any sizeable object before a returning machine. It would stop to clear the path, and he could enter ahead of it. Then, shortly after he was inside, a boxcollecting machine would open the inner door. Gradually, his fear of the machines faded. He came to hold them in a certain contempt. They always did the same thing in the same situation, and it was easy to trick or outmaneuver them. But the two inner doors of the IF machine area with the steps would not open to him; and he knew the upper parts of the pyramid were still unexplored by him. He sniffed at the cracks of these door, and a scent came through -- not of lubricating medium and metal alone, but of a different musky odor that raised the hairs on the back of his neck again. He snarled at the doors: H e went back to exploring minutely the machine level. The sample boxes from the prospecting machines, he found, were put on conveyorbelt-like strips that floated up on thin air through openings in the ceiling -- but the openings were too small for him to pass through. But he discovered something else. One day he came upon one of the machines taking a grille off the face of one of the immobile devices. It carried the grille away, and he explored the opening that had been revealed. It was the entrance to a tunnel or duct leading upward; and it was large enough to let him enter it. Air blew silently from it; and the air was heavy with the musky odor he had smelled around the doors that did not open. The duct ,tempted him, but fear held him back. The machine came back and replaced the grille; and he noticed that it fitted into place with a little pressure from the outside, top and bottom. After the machine had left he pressed, and the grille fell out into his hands. After a long wait, he ventured timorously into the tube -- but a sudden sound like heavy breathing mixed with a wave of a strong, musky odor came at him. He backed out in panic, fled the pyramid and did not come back for two days. When he came back, the grille was again neatly in place. He removed it and sat a long time getting his courage up. Finally, he put the grille up high out of reach of the machine which had originally removed it and crawled into the duct. He crept up the tube at an angle into darkness. His eyes were useless, but the musky odor came strongly at him. Soon, he heard sounds. There was an occasional ticking, then a thumping or shuffling sound. Finally, after he had crawled a long way up through the tube, there was a sound like a heavy puffing or hoarse breathing. It was the sound that had accompanied the strengthening of the musky odor once before; and this time the scent came strong again. He lay, almost paralyzed with terror in the tube, as the odor grew in his nostrils. He could not move until sound and scent had retreated. As soon as they had, he wormed his way backward down to the lower level and freedom, replaced the grille and fled for the outside air, once again. But once more, in time, he came back. Eventually returned to explore the whole network of tubes to which the one he had entered connected. Many of the branching tubes were too small for him to enter, and the biggest tube he could find led to another grille from which the muskysmelling air was blasted with force. Clearly it was the prime mover for the circulation of air through the exhaust half of the pyramid's ventilating system. Harry did not reason it out to himself in those intellectual terms, but he grasped the concept wordlessly and went back to exploring those smaller tubes that he could crawl into. These, he found, terminated in grilles set in their floors through which he could look down and catch a glimpse of some chamber or other. What he saw was mainly incomprehensible. There were a number of corridors, a number of what could be rooms containing fixed or movable objects of various sizes and shapes. Some of them could be the equivalent of chairs or beds -- but if so, they were scaled for a being plainly larger than himself. The lighting was invariably the low-key illumination he had encountered in the lower, machine level of the pyramid, supplied by the single translucent strip running across the ceiling. Occasionally, from one grille or another, he heard in the distance the heavy sound of breathing, among other sounds, and smelled more strongly the musky odor. But for more than a week of surreptitious visits to the pyramid, he watched through various grilles without seeing anything living. V H owever, a day finally came when he was crouch, staring down into a circular room containing what might be a bed shape, several chair shapes and a number of other fixed shapes with variously spaced and depthed indentations in their surfaces. In. a far edge of the circular room was a narrow alcove, the walls of which were filled with ranked indentations, among which several lights of different colors winked and glowed. Suddenly, the dim illumination of the room began to brighten. The illumination increased rapidly, so that Harry cringed back from the grille, lifting a palm to .protect his dimness-accustomed eyes. At the same moment, he heard approaching the sound of heavy breathing and sniffed a sudden increase in the musky odor. He froze. Motionless above the grille, he stopped even his breathing. He would have stopped his heart if he could, but it raced, shaking his whole body and sounding its rapid beat in his ears until he felt the noise of it must be booming through the pyramid like a drum. But there was no sign from below that this was so. Then, sliding into sight below him, came a massive figure on a small platform that seemed to drift without support into the room. The aperture of the grille was small. Harry's viewpoint was cramped and limited, looking down directly from overhead. He found himself looking down onto thick, hairless brown-skinned shoulders, a thick neck with the skin creased at the back and a forward-sloping, hairless brown head, egg-shaped in outline from above, with the point forward. Foreshortened below the head and shoulders was a bulging chinline with something like a tusk showing; IF it had a squat, heavy, hairless, brown body and thick short forearms with stubby claws at the end of fourfingered hands. There was something walruslike about the tusks and the hunching; -- and the musky odor rose sickeningly into Harry's human nostrils. The platform slid level with the alcove, which was too narrow for it to enter. Breathing hoarsely, the heavy figure on it heaved itself suddenly off the platform into the alcove, and the stubby hands moved over the pattern of indentations. Then, it turned and heaved itself out of the alcove, onto the flat, bed surface adjoining. Just as Harry's gaze began to get a full-length picture of it, the illumination below went out. Harry was left, staring dazzled into darkness, while the heavy breathing and the sound of the figure readjusting itself on the bed surface came up to his ears. After a while, there was no noise but the breathing. But Harry did not dare move. For a long time he held his cramped posture, hardly breathing himself. Finally, cautiously, inch-by-inch, he retreated down the tube, which was too small to let him turn around. When he reached the larger tubes, he fled for the outside and the safety of the forest. The next day, he did not go near the pyramid. Or the next. Every time he thought of the heavy, brown figure entering the room below the grille, he became soaked with the clammy sweat of a deep, emotional terror. He could understand how the Other had not heard him or seen him up behind the grille. But he could not understand how the alien had not smelled him. Slowly, however, he came to accept the fact that the Other had not. Possibly the Other did not have a sense of smell. Possibly... there was no end to the possibilities. The fact was that the Other had not smelled Harry -- or heard him -- or seen him. Harry was like a rat in the walls -- unknown because he was unsuspected. A t the end of the week, Harry was once more prowling around back by the pyramid. He had not intended to come back, but his hatred drew him like the need of a drug addict for the drug of his addiction. He had to see the Other again, to feed his hate more surely. He had to look at the Other, while hating the alien, and feel the wild black current of his emotions running toward the brown and hairless shape. At night, buried in his nest of leaves, Harry tossed and snarled in his sleep, dreaming of the small stream backing up to flood the interior of the pyramid, and the Other drowning -- of lighting striking the pyramid and fire racing through it -- of the Other burning. His dreams became so full of rage and so terrible that he woke, twisting and with the few rags of clothing that still managed to cling unnoticed to him, soaked with sweat. In the end, he went back into the pyramid. Daily he went back. And gradually, it came to the point where he was no longer fearful of seeing the Other. Instead, he could barely endure the search and the waiting at the grilles until the Other came into sight. Meanwhile, outside the pyramid in the forest, the frill-edged leaves began to dry and wither and drop. The little stream sank in its bed -- only a few inches, but enough so that Harry had to dig out the bottom of the streambed under the underwater into the pyramid area. One day he noticed that there were hardly any of the treaded machines out taking samples in the woods any more. He was on his way to the pyramid through the woods, when the realization struck him. He stopped dead, freezing in midstride like a hunting dog. Immediately, there flooded into his mind the memory of how the parking chamber for the treaded machines, inside the base of the pyramid, had been full of unmoving vehicles during his last few visits. Immediately, also, he realized the significance of the drying leaves, the dropping of the water level of the stream. And something with the urgency of a great gong began to ring and ring inside him like the pealing of an alarm over a drowning city. Time had been, when there had been no pyramid here. Time was now, with the year fading and the work of the. collecting machines almost done. Time would be, when the pyramid might leave. Taking with it the Other. He began to run, instinctively toward the pyramid. But, when he came within sight of it, he stopped. For a moment he was torn with indecision, an emotional maelstrom of fear and hatred all whirling together. Then, he went on. H e emerged a moment later, dripping, a fist-sized rock in each hand, to stand before the closed door that gave the machines entrance to the pyramid. He stood staring at it, in broad daylight. He had never come here before in full daylight, but his head now was full of madness. Fury seethed in him, but there was no machine to open the door for him. It was then that the fury and madness in him might have driven him to pound wildly on the door with his stones or to wrench off one of the necks of the storklike machine at the stream and try to pry the door open. Any of these insane things he might have done and so have attracted discovery and the awesome power of the macommand of the Other. Any such thing he might have done if he was simply a man out of his head with rage -- but he was no longer a man. He was what the Other had made him, an animal, although with a man locked inside him. And like an animal, he did not rave or rant, any more than does the cat at the mousehole, or the wolf waiting for the shepherd to turn in for the night. Instead, without further question, the human beast that had been Harry Brennan -- that still called himself Harry Brennan, in a little, lockedaway, back corner of its mind -- dropped on his haunches beside the door and hunkered there, panting lightly in the sunlight and waiting. Four hours later, as the sun was IF dropping close to the treetops, a single machine came trundling out of the woods. Harry tricked it with one of his stones and, still carrying the other, ran into the pyramid. He waited patiently for the small collecting machine to come and empty out the machine returned from outside, then dodged ahead of it, when it came, into the interior, lower level of the pyramid. He made his way calmly to the grille that gave him entrance to the ventilating system, took out the grille and entered e tube. Once in the system, he crawled through the maze of ductwork, until he came at last to the grille overlooking the room with the alcove and the rows of indentations on the alcove walls. When he looked down through the grille, it was completely dark below. He could hear the hoarse breathing and smell the musky odor of the Other, resting or perhaps asleep, on the bed surface. Harry lay there for a number of slow minutes, smelling and listening. Then he lifted the second rock and banged with it upon the grille. F or a second there was nothing but the echoing clang of the beaten metal in the darkness. Then the room suddenly blazed with light, and Harry; blinking his blinded eyes against the glare, finally made out the figure of the Other rising upright upon the bed surface. Great, round, yellow eyes in a puglike face with a thick upper lip wrinkled over two tusks stared up through the grille at Harry. The lip lifted, and a bubbling roar burst from the heavy fat-looking shape of the Other. He heaved his round body off the bed surface and rolled, waddling across the floor to just below the grille. Reaching up with one blunt-clawed hand, he touched the grille, and it fell to the floor at his feet. Left unguarded in the darkness of the ductwork, Harry shrank back. But the Other straightened up to his full near six-and-a-half feet of height and reached up into the ductwork. His blunt clawed hand fastened on Harry and jerked. Off balance, Harry came tumbling to the floor of the chamber. A completely human man probably would have stiffened up and broken both arms, if not his neck, in such a fall. Harry, animal-like, attempted to cling to the shape of the Other as he fell, and so broke the impact of his landing. On the floor, he let go of the Other and huddled away from the heavy shape, whimpering. The Other looked down, and his round, yellow eyes focused on the stone Harry had clung to even through his fall. The Other reached down and grasped it, and Harry gave it up like a child releasing something he has been told many times not to handle. The Other made another, lower-toned, bubbling roar deep in his chest, examining the rock. ITien he laid it carefully aside on a low table surface and turned back to stare down at Harry. Harry cringed away from the alien stare and huddled into himself, as the blunt fingers reached down to feel some of the rags of a shirt that still clung about his shoulders. IF The Other rumbled interrogatively at Harry. Harry hid his head. When he looked up again, the Other had moved over to a wall at the right of the alcove and was feeling about in some indentations there. He bubbled at the wall, and a second later Harry's voice sounded eerily in the room... You are... the one #... made a beast..." Harry whimpered, hiding his head again. "You can't..." said Harry's voice,... even speak now. Is... that so..." Harry ventured to peek upward out of his folded arms, but ducked his head again at the sight of the cold, yellow eyes staring down at him. "... I thought... you would be... dead by now," said the disembodied voice of Harry, hanging in the air of the chamber. "... Amazing... survival completely without... equipment. Must keep you now..." The eyes, yellow as topaz, considered Harry, huddled abjectly on the floor, "... cage... collector's item... The alien revolved back to the indentations of the wall a little way from the alcove. The broad, fleshy back turned contemptuously on Harry, who stared up at it. The pitiful expression of fear on Harry's face faded suddenly into a soundless snarl. Silently, he uncoiled, snatched up the rock the Other had so easily taken from him, and sprang with it onto the broad back. As he caught and clung there, one arm wrapped around a thick neck, the stone striking down on the hairless skull, his silent snarl burst out at last into the sound of a scream of triumph. The Other screamed too -- a bubbling roar -- as he clumsily turned, trying to reach around himself with his thick short arm and pluck Harry loose. His claws raked Harry' throat-encircling arm, and blood streamed from the arm; but it might have been so much stage make-up for the effect it had in loosening Harry's hold. Screaming, Harry continued to pound crushingly on the Other's skull. With a furious spasm, the alien tore Harry loose, and they both fell on the floor. The Other was first up; and for a second he loomed like a giant over Harry, as Harry was scrambling to his own feet and retrieving the fallen rock. But instead of attacking, the Other flung away, lunging for the alcove and the control indentations there. Harry reached the alcove entrance before him. The alien dodged away from the striking rock. Roaring and bubbling, he fled waddling from his human pursuer, trying to circle around the room and get back to the alcove. Half a head taller than Harry and twice Harry's weight, he was refusing personal battle and putting all his efforts into reaching the alcove with its rows of indented controls. Twice Harry headed him off; and then by sheer mass and desperation, the Other turned and burst past into the alcove, thick hands outstretched and grasping at its walls. Harry leaped in pursuit, landing and clinging to the broad, fleshy back. The other stumbled under the added weight, and fell, face down. Triumphantly yelling, Harry rode the heavy body to the floor, striking at the hairless head... and striking... and striking... VI S ometime later, Harry came wearily to his senses and dropped a i ock he no longer had the strength lO lift. He blinked around himself like a man waking from a dream, room full of strange shapes -- and of a small alcove, the walls of which were covered with rows of indentations, in which something large and dead lay with its head smashed into ruin. A deep, clawing thirst rose to take Harry by the throat, and he staggered to his feet. He looked longingly up at the dark opening of the ventilator over his head; but he was too exhausted to jump up, cling to its edge and pull himself back into the ductwork, from which he could return to the stream outside the pyramid and to the flowing water there. He turned and stumbled from the chamber into unfamiliar rooms and corridors. thing around him as he went. He sniffed and thought he scented, through the musky reek that filled the air about him, the clear odor of water. Gradually, the scent grew stronger and led him at last to a room where a bright stream leaped from a wall into a basin where it pooled brightly before draining away. He drank deeply and rested. Finally, satiated, he turned away from the basin and came face-toface with a wall that was all-reflecting surface; and he stopped dead, staring at himself, like Adam before the Fall. It was only then, with the upwelling of his returning humanness, that he realized his condition. And words spoken aloud for the first time in months broke harshly and riistily from his lips like the sounds of a machine unused for years. "My God!" he said, croakingly. "I've, got no clothes left!" And he began to laugh. Cackling, cackling rasping more unnaturally even than his speech, his laughter lifted and echoed hideously through the silent, alien rooms. But it was laughter all the same -- the one sound that distinguishes man from the animal. H e was six months after that learning to be a complete human being again and finding out how to control the pyramid. If it had not been for the highly sophisticated safety devices built into the alien machine, he would never have lived to complete that bit of self-education. But finally he mastered the controls and got the pyramid into orbit, where he collected the rest of his official self and shifted back through the alternate universe to Earth. He messaged ahead before he landed; and everybody who could be there was on hand to meet him as he landed the pyramid. Some of the hands that had slapped his back on leaving were raised to slap him IF again when at last he stepped forth among them. But, not very surprisingly, when his gaunt figure in a spare coverall now too big for it, with shoulderlength hair and burning eyes, stepped into their midst, not one hand finished its gesture. No one in his right senses slaps an unchained wolf on the back; and no one, after one look, wished to risk slapping the man who seemed to have taken the place of Harry. Of course, he was still the same man they had sent out -- of course he was. But at the same time he was also the man who had returned from a world numbered # and from a duel to the death there with a representative of a race a hundred times more advanced than his own. And in the process he had been pared down to something very basic in his human blood and bone, something dating back to before the first crude wheel or chipped flint knife. And what was that? Go down into the valley of the shades and demand your answer of a dead alien with his head crushed in, who once treated the utmost powers of modern human science as a man treats the annoyance of a buzzing mosquito. Or, if that once-mighty traveller in spacegoing pyramids is disinclined to talk, turn and inquire of other ghosts you will find there -- those of the aurochs, the great cave bear and the woolly mammoth. They, too, can testify to the effectiveness of naked men. The World's Most Widely Read #F Magazine by Jack Vance by Anne McCaffrey by Hayden Howard by Larry Niven Plus stories and features by Willy Ley, Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke and many others. Galaxy appears in Italian, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Broille, Dutch and other editions -- read the big October issue and see whyl Dear Editor: I tbink If bad a great year in #! In my opinion, the serials decide whether a mag will fly or flop, and If s really airborne. Here are the four serials rated in order. #. Skylark DuQuesne -- I have to admit that before I read this yarn, I was a little leary. I had never read any of Doc Smith's works before, and I was wondering how I would take to the five parter (thank God it turned out igood!). All I have to say is that if this is space opera, I like it.  #. Retie fs War -- This light adventure by Mr. Laumer deserves quite a band. His characters are unique and I praise his fertile imagination. Some parts were strictly from Robin Hood, but as a whole I found it very entertaining. I'm really looking forward to more of Retief. ' #. Star Child -- This was a very good' serial, though my interest lagged in spots. I'm glad to hear that another Reef story is in the making. This is one of the better series that I've read. #. Altar at Ascone -- I had to rate this fourth, mostly because it wasn't long enough. I enjoy longer serials and would like to have seen it in three parts. I'm glad to see that he has a short novel in the March # issue. I like your policy of one new writer in each issue. I was about to put in a plea in this letter for some articles on story writing, fandom, etc., until I got my April issue. I really enjoyed Lin Carter's piece on fandom. Do you think it would be possible to reproduce If and Galaxy covers? And thinking of covers, I couldn't believe my eyes when I found out that Morrow did the April cover. It's just not his style. Then I really got a shock when I saw the illos for Earthblood. They look the work of Morrow or Wood. I haven't gotten down to Hednlein's new novel yet, but I'm hoping it will be a Hugo winner. Looks like another good year. Finally, do you read all the manuscripts yourself, or do you have first and second readers? -- Mike Buchta, #I W. Adler, Milwaukee, Wisconsin #. # I read them all myself -- all # a year of them. That's why they call me Blinky. -- Editor,   IF Dear Editor: I have been reading your magazine for about a year now and think it is the best one on the market today. Your June issue was excellent with M android being one of the best complete short novels I have read. Thanks for the Our Man in Fandom features. I'm learning things about it I never knew existed before. Earthhlood is the best novel I have read for a long time although I have not read all of it yet. I think it is even better than The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Laumer and Brown make a very good team. The description of the beautiful Terran park was wonderful. I found myself walking around it without a care in the world. In your Sept. '# issue you published a story by E. Clayton McCarty called The Planet Player. I've read it about a dozen times now. Let's see more of him. I'm glad to see that no science articles will appear in your mag, I like them but it would spoil If as they are not suitable for it. Is there any special address for back issues? I want to get back issues of W.O.T. (another excellent mag.) and If. Congratulations on getting the Doc Smith Skylark award. You deserved it. -- Nick Grimshawe, RR##, AUiaton, Ontario, Canada. # Back issues of all our magazines are available from: Back Number Department, Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York City #. Specify date and magazine. #c each, U. S., postpaid. -- Editor i(   Dear Editor: Toys for Debbie by David A. Kyle rang the bell for me. What a story! were well wor reading -- the illustrations were wonderful -- your "letters" department was fine! If I sound extra enthusiastic it's because I AM! I'm a lover of "different" stories from way back. I'm pushing # now. My birthday is January #, hubby's is January # -- do we have any "birthday twins" among your readers? My hubby and I have one entire room lined with weird and fantastic books and magazines. We were intimate friends of the late author of the weird and uncanny, H. P. Lovecraft. We spent many pleasant nighttime hours with this fantastic man, listening to him read his manuscripts aloud under flickering gaslight. This was in the early '#s, when everybody didn't have electricity in their homes! Nights seemed darker, then... and as H. P. L. loved darkness, we three reveled in it, as we pictured monsters, hobgoblins, shapeless creatures of his own imagination and witches steeped in witchcraft, while Lovecraft nibbled on a chicken leg and enjoyed our hospitality! I could ramble on and on about our association with this master of the weird. We visit his grave often, and we have many pictures of H. P. L. and even one of his parents! We revere his memory and in his honor we peruse all "different" publications on the newsstands. Yours wins top honors with us! Also your cover appealed greatly to me, and it illustrated your feature story, a corker -- The Moon Is a Harsh MistresSf by Robert A. Heinlein -- beautifully. YouVe got yourself a s-teady If reader! -- Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy, Pres-ident, R. I. Writers' Guild, # Prairie Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island #.    Dear Editor: In your June, # issue of If there appears an article entitled A Relativistic Dilemma in which you present the complications connected with relativistic mass and energy conservation, wherein you invite the ambitious reader to come up with a solution. I spend most of my time reading science fiction and I study a little nuclear physics on the side, so I figured I was well enough equipped to tackle the problem. Here's what I came up with: The Lorentz contraction theory states that, as the velocity of a body increases, its diameter in the direction of the acceleration decreases proportionately. Hence at the speed of light one not only has an infinite mass but also a two-dimensional mass. However, the infinite mass concept seems somewhat odd, because as you mentioned in your article light is composed of particles (photons) which indeed do travel at the speed of light, and yet possess no infinite mass. I propose a new theory. When a mass reaches the speed of light it is converted to light itself, and the light has an energy equivalent to the mass according to emc#. This might also account for the dimensional problem. How many dimensions does energy have? Certainly not three. -- Jim Murray, # Harrison Avenue, Jersey City #, New Jersey. #c   Dear Editor: I have just finished your May '# issue and, to be euphemistic, I think the art work on the cover is atrocious. For one thing, it is terribly unscientific, since it is probably unlikely that a creature, such as the one pictured, with three-digited claws for hands, lack of binocular vision and apparent lack of ears and nose, would be technically advanced enough to be flying around in spaceships. But this is a flyspeck. What bothered me was that in no way could I stretch my imagination enough to make it jibe with Silkies in Space, which it was supposed to represent. But never fear. Like all know-it-alls, I have a solution to this problem. First, you could give the axe to all your cover artists and simply reprint Picasso's nightmares on the cover. This would remove your every cover from the realm of science and put them in the realm of art, where anything goes. No problem of representation, because they could represent anything you say and no one could refute you. Or you could reprint the covers from the old pulp magazines, which, I am told, characteristically showed a horny green grasshopper-man abducting some sexy babe clad in a transparent space suit. At least this made sense. Almost. Well, anyway, it certainly would improve the cover. By the way, Earthblood is excellent. -- ohn T. Sanner, # East Ann, Ann Arbor, Michigan, #. IF Seated ;Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G.Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling. "We're looking for people who want to write"r: ' By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School. Former editor. Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, ypu get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He bfiie-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our siudents have sold ihcir writing to more than # publications including Reader s Digest, True, Redbook.  Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, "I just received a check from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That's #I stories sold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible." Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for th School's Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation to do so. r -- I Famous Writers School j Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude, j Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude I Test and #-page illustrated brochure. I Mr. j Mrs Age I Miss Circle one and please print  Street I ( ity I State Zip j Accredited by the Accrediting Commission I if the National Home Study Council. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it !  (  ) oo #(. o o CJ O O t) o o o O o o o O O o y o O # # # ( No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh inir Tattir irrr Here ? No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are ihe only ones we offer! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, S#; #, S# with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add stale sales tax, if any. WORLDS OF And Stories by McIntosh, MacApp and others! Seated .'Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin,' Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing; Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Seriing. "We're looking for people who want to write" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School, Former editor, Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to more than # publications including Readers Digest, True, Redbook. Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, "I just received a check from Ellery Queen s Mystery Magazine. That's I I stories sold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible." Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation to do so. r j Famous Writers School j Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude, j Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude I Test and #-page illustrated brochure. ! Mr.  Mrs Age..., I Miss Circle one and please print j Street j City I State Zip I Accredited by the Accrediting Commission I of the National Home Study Council. Vol. #, No. #I Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Subscription Mgr, by Keith Laumer by Larry Niven by C. C. MacApp by Lester del Rey by J. T. McIntosh by John T. Sladeic by Robert Silverberg by Mike Hill by Thurlow Weed by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addresseji stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial I n the official organ of the Science Fiction Writers of America there's an article by a scientist, commenting on the descriptions of how scientists think, talk and act in science-fiction stories. (You'll be glad to know we came off pretty well -- particularly such scientists as Doc Smith's "Skylark" Seaton, who gets high marks as a representative of the breed.) Probably sf readers know a lot more than the general public about what scientists are all about, if only because so many of them are scientists (or, if still undergraduates, proto-scientists) themselves. But a batch of new books that have come across our desk recently give some interesting additional lights. Science-fiction writers will find them invaluable; the rest of us will find them just fascinating readering. Scientists in government, Ralph E. Lapp's The New Priesthood (Harper  Row) has a lot to tell us about the Manhattan Project and its later ramifications. Not surprisingly, the burden of the message has to do with the failure of communication between scientists and; politicians. (Were Einstein, Szilard' and the other instigators of the atomic-bomb research project anxious to create a new super-weapon? Apparently not. Lapp's book makes it clear that their primary concern was that Nazi Glermany might develop the weapon, and their urging of a U.S. program was viewed as a counter-measure. When the war against (Germany ended they lost much of their steam, even though Japan was still fighting -- since Japan was only a conventional military enemy, not likely to come up with nuclear weapons... But the government officials, of course, took a simpler view: a weapon was a weapon, and the purpose of it was to employ it in warfare.) From this lack of mutual understanding arose endless troubles. Scientists disliked and were ingenious in trying to find ways around the barriers of secrecy. To the military in charge of the atomic project, this was dangerous and irreligious behavior; but the scientists were at least as unhappy with the necessity for it -- Leo Szilard thought the bomb would have been operational as early as the spring of # without the rigid secrecy that kept people in one laboratory from learning that people in another laboratory had already solved their problem. Even after the war, scientists and politicians still were unable to communicate. Scientists were shocked when General Groves ordered three captured Japanese research cyclotrons dumped into the Pacific Ocean -- they knew the difference between a laboratory tool and an armament plant, and couldn't see why everyone else didn't know it too. When U.S. scientists nAMt The Dark Continents maintain energy enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood naU ural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life," Address: Scribe B.B.J. Scribe: B.B.J. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. Name Address aty State Please Include Your Zip Code" L dertected the first Russian nuclear explosion a special group of their most famous men briefed President Truman on it -- and did it so badly that even years later, Truman was still in doubt as to whether the ex plosion had ever happened. A couple decades later in the story, we find Daniel Lang's An Inquiry into Enoughness (McGrawHill). The dialogue is broadened here, and we find that the problems of communcation between scientists and politicians in America are matched by the problems of communication between both classes in this country and their opposite numbers on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Lang attended one of the Pugwash conferences in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, where U.S. and U.S.S.R. scientists, impatient with the failures of their political leaders, tried to get together on nuclear disarmament plans. But they made little headway, even on so simple a part of the problem as settling on a reasonable number of on-site inspections to enforce a test ban. A Russian named Artsimovich reported how --  -- a small group of Russian and American scientists had gone off by themselves, determined to lick the problem on a strictly scientific basis. But it hadn't worked. The Russians' calculations had led them to the conclusion that one insjwction annually would be sufficient; the Americans had come up with fifty as their figure. Both answers could be defended scientifically, Artsimovich said, depending on how suspicious one considered "suspicious events". If one wanted each and every suspicious event investigiated, he explained, that would mean from fifty to seventy inspections, but if one assumed, as most scientists did, that only a series of underground tests could have military significance, then the number of inspections need be nowhere near that high. "There is no simple relationship between the number of inspections, on the one hand, end the number of suspicious events, on the other," Artsimovich told Working Group #. "That is what the scientific point of view shows us. Everything depends not on jointly improving detection techniques but on trust and confidence." But in Lang's book, as indeed in Lapp's, there are signs that the opposing parties are beginning, however haltingly, to learn each other's language. "Trust and confidence" are abstractions, but the scientists are learning to quantify them -- even to buttress them by technology. In that view, the "hardening" of our missile installations, marking them near-invulnerable to enemy attack, is in fact a contribution to "trust and confidence" because there is nothing like the knowledge that an opponent can retaliate to cause sober second thoughts before rash action. Lang quotes an official of the Defense Department in that connection : "Our gain in security doesn't necessarily imply a concomitant Soviet loss. That is the great distinction of all arms-control measures that aren't phony. They make for a mutual security. And if the Russians achieve survivability of their strategic misIF siles, which might be in the next few years, the arms race may be further stabilized." Of course, this is the stability that Oppenheimer compared to "two scorpions in a bottle"... but if "trust and confidence" are enhanced it seems likely enough that it is enough stability to keep us all alive. Vergara's Science, the Never-Ending Quest (Harper  Row) starts with Eratosthenes and ends with Rutherford and Fermi; (that's two thousands years and a bit, or roughly five years to a page, and naturally some of the by-ways of the march of science have got smoothed over or overlooked. But surprisingly little is left out, at that, in this account of the changes in men's scientific thought in the Age of Science, and of the men who made the (great discoveries. Written to a smaller compass, but correspondingly rich in detail (and blessed with a graceful prose style and a knack for description), Barbara Lovett Cline's The Questioners (Crowell) is one of the most rewarding books we've seen in some time. This is the story of the physicists whose joint monument is the quantum theory -- Bohr and Pauli, Rutherford and Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg. The time is half a century ago, when the world seemed simpler and scientists were certainly poorer (their usual mode of transportation, Miss Cline records, was third-class rail carriages; they lived in small rooms and dormitories; their chief amusement was talk). Miss Cline is successful in descrilnng what these men thought and how their views changed the face of physics, but for most of us what will stand out is the personalities involved -- Dirac, who when asked if he took sugar in his tea was surprised to be further asked how many spoonsful ; "sugar" was a quantum unit to him, implying one spoonful. Or Pauli, picking out scientific flaws in Jules Verne's early sf novels and telling his instructors they were idiots. Or Niels Bohr, skiing in Norway and brooding over Schrodinger's wave equations on the slopes. Or Gamow's practical jokes and cartoons, or Rutherford excitedly proclaiming the virtues of "the most wonderful instrument in scientific history", Wilson's newly invented cloud chamber. Scientists studying themselves. In a Columbia University Press book edited by Aaron W. Warner, Dean Morse and Alfred S. Teichner, The Impact of Science on Technology, we can get some revealing insights into what scientisits think of themselves, each other and the work they do. I. I. Rabi, for example, on the space program: "Scientifically the moon is not a very interesting subject. It's nowhere near the center of science. I think it comes more under the heading of exploration. The fact is that the space program does not get the best people. It's just something which is going on in the basement. It's using a lot of material. It provides headlines. But actually, it has only peripheral scientific interest, except for astronomers." All interesting books, about interesting people, doing interesting things. We think you'll enjoy them as much as we did... -- The Editor The war couldn't be stopped; Earth's diplomats couldn't be saved... but nobody had explained that to Retief! F irst Secretary Jame Retief of the Terran Embassy pushed open the conference room door and ducked as a rain of plaster chips clattered down from the ceiling. Te chandelier, a baroque construction of Yalcan glasswork, danced on its chain and then fell with a crash on the center of the polished greenwood table. Across the room, drapes fluttered at glassless windows which rattled in their frames in resonance with the distant crump-crump! of gunfire. "Mr. Retief, you're ten minutes late for staff meeting!" a voice sounded from somewhere. He stooped, glanced under the table. A huddle of eyes stared back. "Ah, there you are, Mr. Ambassador, gentlemen," Retief greeted the Chief of Mission and his staff. "Sorry to be tardy, but there was a brisk little aerial dogfight going on just over the Zoological Gardens. The Gloys are putting up a hot resistance to the Blort landings this time." "And no doubt you paused to hazard a wager on the outcome," Ambassador Biteworse snapped. "Your mission, sir, was to deliver a sharp rebuke to the Foreign Office regarding the latest violations of the Embassy! What have you to report?" "The Foreign Minister sends his regrets. He was just packing up to leave. It looks as though the Blorts will be reoccupying the capital about dinner time." "What, again? Just as Fm on the verge of re-establishing a working rapport with his Excellency?" "Oh, but you have a dandy rapport with his Blortian Excellency, loo." The voice of Counsellor of Embassy Magnan sounded from his position well to the rear of the group sheltered under the long board. "Remember, you were just about to get him to agree to a limited provisional preliminary symbolic partialceasefire covering left-handed bloop guns of calibre .# and below!" "Fm aware of the status of the peace talks!" Biteworse cut him off. The peppery diplomat emerged, rose and dusted off the knees of his pink and green-striped satin knee-breeches, regulation early afternoon semiinformal dress for top three graders of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne on duty on prenuclear worlds. "Well, I suppose we must make the best of it." He glared at his advisors as they followed his lead, ranged themselves at the table around the shattered remains of the chandelier, while the chatter and rumble of gunfire continued outside. "Gentlemen, in the nine months since this Mission was accredited here on Plushnik II, we've seen the capital change hands four times. Under such conditions, the shrewdest diplomacy is powerless to bring to fruition our schemes for the pacification of the system. Nevertheless, today's dispatch from Sector HQ indicates that unless observable results are produced prior to the upcoming visit of the Inspectors, a drastic reassessment of personnel requirements may result -- and Fm sure you know what that means!" "Ummm. We'll all be fired." Magnan brightened at a thought. "Unless, perhaps, your Excellency points out that after all, as Chief of Mission, you're the one..." He paused as he noted the expression on the Biteworse features. "The one who suffered most," he finished weakly. "I need not remind you," the Ambassador bored on relentlessly, "that alibis fail to impress visiting inspection teams! Results, gentlemen! Those are what count! Now, what proposals do I hear for new approaches to the problem of ending this fratricidal war which even now..." IF T he Ambassadorial tones were drowned by the deep-throated snarl of a rapidly approaching internal combustion engine. Glancing out the window, Relief saw a bright blue, twin-winged aircraft coming in from the northwest at tree-top level, a vivid darting form outlined against sister world, Plushnik I. The lateafternoon sun glinted from the craft's polished wooden propeller blades. Its cowl-mounted machine guns sparkled as they hosed a stream of tracers into the street below. "Take cover!" the military attache barked and dived for the table. At the last instant, the fighter plane banked sharply up, executed a flashy slow roll and shot away, out of sight behind the chipped tile dome of the Temple of Erudition across the park. "This is too much!" Biteworse shrilled from his position behind a bullet-riddled filing cabinet. "That was an open, overt attack on the Chancellery! A flagrant violation of interplanetary law!" "Actually, I think he was after a Gloian armored column in the park," Relief said. "All we got was the overkill." "Inasmuch as you happen to be standing up, Mr. Relief," Biteworse called, "I'll thank you to put a call through on the hot line to Lib Glip at the Secretariat. I'll lodge a protest that will make his caudal cilia stand on end!" Relief pressed buttons on the combeen installed to link the Embassy to the local governmental offices. Behind him. Ambassador Biteworse addressed the staff: "Now, while it's necessary to impress on the Premier the impropriety of shooting up a Terran Mission, we must hold something in reserve for future atrocities. I think we'll play the scene using a modified Formula Nine image: Kindly Indulgence tinged with Latent Firmness, which may at any moment crystallize into Reluctant Admonition, with appropriate overtones of Gracious Condescension." "How would you feel about a dash of Potential Impatience, with maybe just a touch of Appropriate Reprisals?" the Military Attache suggested. "We don't want to antagonize anyone with premature saber-rattling. Colonel," Biteworse frowned a rebuke. "Hmm." Magnan pulled at his lower lip. "A masterful approach as you've outlined it, your Excellency. But I wonder if we mightn't add just the teeniest hint of Agonizing Reappraisal?" Biteworse nodded approvingly. "Yes. An element of the traditional might be quite in order." A moment later the screen cleared to reveal a figure lolling in an easy chair, splendidly #lad in an irridescent Bromo-seltzer blue tunic, open over an exposed framework of leathery-looking ribs from which gaily-be-jeweled medals dangled in rows. From the braided collar, around which a leather strap was slung supporting a pair of heavy Japanese-made binoculars, a stout neck extended, adorned along its length with varicolored patches representing auditory, olfactory and radar organs, as well as a number of other senses the nature of which was still unclear to Terr an physiologists. At the tip of the stem, a trio of heavy-lidded eyes stared piercingly at the diplomats. "General Barf!" Biteworse exclaimed. "But I was calling the Premier! How -- what -- " "Evening, Hector," the general said briskly. "I made it a point to seize the Secretariat first, this trip." He brought his vocalizing organ up on the end of its tentacle to place it near the audio pick-up. "I've been meaning to give you a ring, but I'll be damned if I could remember how to operate this thing." "General," Biteworse cut in sharply. "I've grown accustomed to a certain amount of glass breakage during these, ah, readjustment periods, but -- " "I warned you against flimsy construction," the general countered. "And I assure you. I'm always careful to keep that sort of thing at a minimum. After all, there's no telling who'll be using the facilities next, eh?" "But this is an entirely new category of outrage!" Biteworse bored on. "I've just been bombed and strafed by one of your aircraft! The scoundrel practically flew into the room! It's a miracle I survived!" "Now, Hector, you know there are no such things as miracles," the Blortian officer chuckled easily. "There's a perfectly natural explanation of your survival, even if it does seem a bit hard to understand at first glance." "This is no time to haggle over metaphysics!" Biteworse shook a finger at the screen. "I demand an immediate apology, plus assurances that nothing of the sort will occur again until after my transfer!" "Sorry, Hector," the general said calmly. "I'm afraid I can't guarantee that a few wild rounds won't be coming your way during the course of the night. This isn't a mere Commando operation this time. Now that I've secured my beachhead. I'm ready to launch my full-scale Spring Offensive for the recovery of our glorious homeland. Jumpoff will be in approximately eight hours from now; so if you'd care to synchronize chronometers -- " "An all-out offensive? Aimed at this area?" "You have a fantastic grasp of tactics," Barf said admiringly. "I intend to occupy the North Continent first, after which I'll roll up the Gloian Divisions like carpets in all directions." "But -- my Chancellery is situated squarely in the center of the capital! You'll be carrying your assault directly across the Embassy grounds!" "Well, Hector, I seem to recall it was you who selected the site for your quarters." "I asked for neutral ground!" Biteworse shrilled. "I was assigned the most fought-over patch on the planet!" "What could be more neutral than no man's land?" General Barf in quired in a reasonable tone. IF u # # Gracious," Magnan whispered V-J to Retief. "Barf sounds as though he may be harboring some devious motivation behind that open countenance." "Maybe he has a few techniques of his own," Retief suggested. "This might be his version of the Number Twenty-three Leashed Power gambit, with a side order of Imminent Spontaneous Rioting." "Heavens, do you suppose...? But he hasn't had time to learn the finer nuances. He's only been in the business for a matter of months." "Perhaps it's just a natural aptitude for diplomacy." "That's possible. I've observed the instinctive fashion in which he distinguishes the bonded whiskey at cocktail parties." "... immediate cessation of hostilities!" the Ambassador was declaring. "Now, I have a new formula, based on the battle lines of the tenth day of the third week of the Moon of Limitless Imbibing, as modified by the truce team's proposals of the second week of the Moon of Ceaseless Complaining, up-dated in accordance wifh Corps Policy Number #-b, as amended -- " "That's thoughtful of you, Hector." Barf held up a tactile member in a restraining gesture. "But as it happens, inasmuch as this will be the final campaign of the War for Liberation of the Homeland, peacemaking efforts become nugatory." "I seem to recall similar predictions at the time of the Fall Campaign, the pre-Winter Offensive, the Winter Counter-offensive, the PostWinter Anschluss and the Pre-Spring Push." Biteworse retorted. "Why don't you reconsider, General, before incurring a new crop of needless casualties?" "Hardly needless. Hector. You need a few casualties to sharpen up discipline. And in any case, this time things will be different. I'm using a new technique of saturation leaflet bombing followed by intensive Victory parades, guaranteed to crumble all resistance. If you'll just sit tight -- " "Sit tight, and have the building blown down about my ears?" Biteworse cut in. "I'm leaving for the provinces at once." "I think that would be unwise. Hector, with conditions so unsettled. Better stay where you are. In fact, you may consider that an order, under the provisions of martial law. If this seems a trifle harsh, remember, it's all in a good cause. And now I have to be moving along. Hector. armored car with air and music that I'm dying to test drive. Ta-ta." The screen blanked abruptly. # #'"This is fantastic!" The AmbasA sador stared around at his staff for corroboration of his assessment of the situation. "In the past, the opposing armies have at least made a pretense of respecting diplomatic privilege. Now they're openly proposing to make us the center of a massive combined land, sea and air strike!" "We'll have to contact Lib Glip at once," the Political Officer said urgently. "Perhaps we can convince him that the capital should be declared an open city." "Sound notion, Oscar," the Ambassador agreed. He mopped at his forehead with a large monogrammed tissue. "Retief, keep trying until you reach him." Half a minute later, the circular visage of the Gloian Foreign Minister appeared on the screen, against a background of passing shopfronts seen through a car window. Two bright black eyes peered through a tangle of thick tendrils not unlike a tangerine-dyed oil mop, capped by a leather Lindy cap with goggles. "Hi, fellows," he greeted the Terrans airily. "Sorry to break our lunch date, Biteworse, but you know how foreign affairs are. Here today and gone to dinner, as the saying goes, I think. But never mind that. What I really called you about was -- " "It was I who called you" the Ambassador broke in. "See here. Lib Clip. A highly placed confidential source has advised me that the capital is about to become the objective of an all-out Blort assault. Now, I think it only fair that your people should relinquish the city peaceably, so as to avoid a possible interplanetary incident." "Oh, that big-mouth Barf has been at you again, eh? Well, relax, fellows. Everything's going to be okay. I have a surprise in store for those indigo indigents." "You've decided to propose a unilateral cease-fire?" Biteworse blurted. "A magnificent gesture -- " "Are you kidding, Biteworse? Show the white feather while those usurpers are still in full possession of our hallowed mother world?" The Gloian leaned into the screen, "ril let you in on a little secret. The retreat is just a diversionary measure to suck Barf into over extending his lines. As soon as he's poured all his available reinforcements into this dry run -- whammo! I hit him with a nifty hidden-ball play around left end and land a massive expeditionary force on Blort! At one blow, I'll regain the cradle of the Gloian race and end the war once and for all!" "I happen to be directly in the path of your proposed dry run!" Biteworse keened. "I remind you, sir, this compound is neither Gloian nor Blortian soil, but Terran!" A patch of plaster fell with a clatter as if to emphasize the point. #h, we won't actually bombard the Chancellery itself. At least not intentionally. Unless, that is, Barf's troops try to use it as a sanctuary. I suggest you go down into the sub-basement; some of you may come through with hardly a scratch." "Wait! We'll evacuate! I hereby call upon you for safe-conduct -- " "Sorry. I'll be too busy checking out on the controls of my new handtooled pursuit craft to arrange transport to the South Pole just now. However, after the offensive -- " "You -- you'll be manning a fighter personally?" "Yes, indeed! A beaut. Everything on it but a flush John. I handle the portfolio of Defense Minister in the War Cabinet personally, you know. And a leader's place is with his IF troops at the front. Maybe not actually at the front," he amended. "But in the ge'neral area, you know." "Isn't that a little dangerous?" "Not if my G-# reports are on the ball. Brides, I said this was an all-out effort." "But that's what you said the last time, when you were learning how to operate that leather-upholstered tank you had built!" "True. But this time it will be all-out all-out. And now I have to scoot or I'll have to flip my own prop. You won't hear from me again until after the victory, since I'm imposing total communications silence now for the duration. Ciao" The alien broke the connection. "Great galloping  galaxies!" Biteworse sank into a plaster-dusted chair. "This is catastrophic! The Embassy will be devastated, and we'll be buried in the rubble!" There was a discreet tap at the conference room door; it opened, and an apologetic junior officer peered in. "Ah... Mr. Ambassador. A person is here, demanding to see you at once. I've explained to him -- " O growled. A short, thick-set man in wrinkled blues thrust through the door. "I've got an Operational Instantaneous Utter Top Secret dispatch for somebody." He stared around at the startled diplomats. "Who's in charge?" "I am," Biteworse barked. "These are my staff. Captain. What's this dispatch all about?" "Beats me. I'm Merchant Service. Some Navy brass hailed me and asked me to convoy it in. Said it was important." He extracted a pink emergency message-form from a pouch and passed it across to Biteworse. "Captain, perhaps you're unaware that I have two emergencies and a crisis on my hands already!" Biteworse looked indignant. The sailor glanced around the room. "From the looks of this place, I'd say you had a problem, all right, Mister," he agreed. "I ran into a few fireworks myself, on the way in here. Looks like Chinese New 'Year out there." "What's the nature of the new emergency?" Magnan craned to read the paper in Biteworse's hand. "Gentlemen, this is the end," Biteworse said hollowly, looking up from the message form. "The Inspectors are ahead of schedule. They'll be here first thing in the morning." "My, just in time to catch the action," Magnan said. "Don't sound so complacent, you imbecile!" Biteworse yelped. "That will be the final straw! An inspection team, here to assess the effectiveness of my pacification efforts, will be treated to the sight of a full-scale battle raging about my very doorstep!" "Maybe we could tell them it's just the local Water Festival." "Silence!" Biteworse screeched. "Time is running out, sir! Unless we find a solution before dawn our careers will end in ignominy!" "If you don't mind sharing space with a cargo of Abalonian blue-fish eggs, you can come with me," the merchantman offered over a renewed rumble of artillery. "It will only be for a couple of months, until I touch down at Adobe. I hear they've got a borax mining camp there where you can work out your board until the Spring barge convoy shows up." "Thank you," Biteworse said coldly. "I shall keep your offer in mind." "Don't wait too long. I'm leaving as soon as I've off-loaded." "All right, gentlemen," the Ambassador said in an ominous tone after the captain had departed in search of coffee. "I'm ordering the entire staff to the cellars for the duration of the crisis. No one is to attempt to leave the building, of course. We must observe Barf's curfew. We'll be burning the midnight fluorescents tonight. And if by sunscheme for ending the war, you may all compose suitable letters of resignation -- those of you who survive!" Ill I n the corridor, Retief encountered his local clerk-typist, just donning a floppy beret dyed a sour orange as an expression of his political alignment. "Hi, Mr. Retief," he greeted the diplomat glumly. "I was just leaving. I guess you know the Blorts are back in town." "So it appears, Dil Snop. How about a stirrup cup before you go?" "Sure. They won't have the streets cordoned off for a while yet." In Retief's office, the clerk parked his bulging briefcase and accepted a three-finger shot of black Bacchus brandy, which he carefully poured into a pocket like a miniature marsupial's pouch. He heaved a deep sigh. "Say, Mr. Retief, when that Blue incompetent shows up, tell him not to mess with the files. I've just gotten them straightened out from the last time." "I'll mention your desires," Retief said. "You know, Snop, it seems strange to me that you Gloians haven't been able to settle your differences with the Blorts peaceably. This skirmishing back and forth has been going on for quite a while now, with no decisive results." "Hundreds of years, I guess," Snop nodded. "But how can you settle your differences with a bunch of treacherous, lawless, immoral, conscienceless, crooked, planetstealing rogues like those Blorts?" Dil Snop looked amazed, an effect he achieved by rapidly entertwining the tendrils around his eyes. "They seem harmless enough to me," Retief commented. "Just what did they do that earns them that description?" "What haven't they done?" Dil Snop waved a jointed member. "Look at this office -- a diplomatic mission! Bullet holes all over the place, shrapnel scars on the walls -- " "The shrapnel scars were made by your boys in orange the last time they took over," Retief reminded him. "Oh. Well, these little accidents will happen in the course of foiling IF the enemy's efforts to ravish our foster home -- and this, mind you, sir, after they've invaded the hallowed soil of Plushnik I, swiped the entire planet and left us to scrabble for ourselves on this lousy world!" "Seems like a pretty fair planet to me," Retief said. "And I was under the impression this was your homeland." "Heck, no! This place? Pah! That -- " Dil Snop pointed through the window at the looming disk of the nearby sister planet -- "is my beloved ancestral stamping ground." "Ever been there?" "I've been along on a few invasions, during summer vacations. Just between us," he lowered his voice, "it's a little too cold and wet for my personal taste." # # T T ow did the Blorts manage to n steal it?" "Carelessness on our part," Snop conceded. "Our forces were all over here, administering a drubbing to them, and they treacherously slipped over behind our backs and entrenched themselves." "What about the wives and little ones?" "Oh, an exchange was worked out. After all, they'd left their obnoxious brats and shrewish mates here on Plushnik II." "What started the feud at first?" "Beats me. I guess that's lost in the mists of antiquity or something." The Gloian put down his glass and rose. "I'd better be off now, Mr. Retief. My reserve unit's been called up, and I'm due at the armory in half an hour." "Well, take care of yourself, Dil Snop. I'll be seeing you soon, I expect." "I wouldn't guarantee it. Old Lib Clip's taken personal command, and he burns troops like joss sticks." He tipped his beret and went out. A moment later, the narrow face of Counsellor Magnan appeared at the door. "Come along, Retief. The Ambassador wants to say a few words to the staff; everyone's to assemble in the subcellar in five minutes." "I take it he feels that darkness and solitude will be conducive to creative thinking." "Don't disparage the efficacy of the Deep-think technique. Why, Tve already evolved half a dozen proposals for dealing with the situation." "Will any of them work?" Magnan looked grave. "No. But they'll look quite impressive in my personnel file during the hearings." "A telling point, Mr. Magnan. Well, save a seat for me in a secluded corner. I'll be along as soon as I've run down a couple of obscure facts." R etief employed the next quarter hour in leafing through back files of classified dispatch binders. As he finished, a Blort attired in shapeless blues and a flak helmet thrust his organ cluster through the door. "Hello, Mr. Retief." he said listlessly. "I'm back." "So you are, Kark," Retief greeted the lad. "You're early. I didn't expect you until after breakfast." "I got shoved on the first convoy; as soon as we landed I sneaked off to warn you. Things are going to be hot tonight.' "So I hear, Kark." A deafening explosion just outside bathed the room in green light. "Is that a new medal you're wearing?" "Yep." The youth fingered the turquoise ribbon anchored to his third rib. "I got it for service above and beyond the call of nature." He went to the table at the side of. the room, opened the drawer. "Just what I expected," he said. "That Gloian creep didn't leave any cream for the coffee. I always leave a good supply, but does he have the same consideration? Not him. Just like an Orange." "Kark, what do you know about the beginning of the war?" "Eh?" The clerk looked up from his coffee preparations. "Oh, it has something to do with the founding fathers. Care for a cup? Black, of course." "No, thanks. How does it feel to be back on good old Plushnik II again?" "Good old? Oh, I see what you mean. Okay, I guess. Kind of hot and dry, though." The building trembled to a heavy shock. The snarl of heavy armor passing in the street shook the pictures on the walls. "Well, I'd better be getting to work, sir. I think I'll start with the breakage reports. We're three invasions behind." "Better skip the paperwork for how, Kark. See if you can round up a few members of the sweeping staff and get some of this glass cleaned up. We're expecting several and we wouldn't want them to get the impression we throw wild parties." "You're not going out, sir?" Kark looked alarmed. "Better not try it; there's a lot of loose metal flying around out there, and it's going to get worse!" "I thought I'd take a stroll over toward the Temple of Higher Learning." "But that's forbidden territory to any non-Plushnik." Kark looked worried, as evidenced by the rhythmic waving of his eyes. Retief nodded. "I suppose it's pretty well guarded?" "Not during the battle. The Gloian have called up everybody but the inmates of the amputees' ward. They're planning another of their half-baked counter-invasions. But Mr. Retief -- if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, I don't think -- " "I wouldn't think of it, Kark." Retief gave the Blortian a cheery wave and went out into the deserted hall. IV I n the twilit street, Retief glanced up at the immense orb of Plushnik I, barely # miles distant, a celestial relief map occluding half the visible sky. A slim crescent of the near-by world sparkled in full sunlight, llie remainder was a pattern of lighted cities gleaming in the murk of the shadow cast as its twin transited between it and the primary. The route of the Blortian invasion IF fleet was clearly visible as a line of tiny, winking fires stretching in a loose catenary curve from the major staging areas on the neighbor world across the not quite airless void. As Retief watched, the giant disc sank visibly toward the horizon, racing in its two-hour orbit around the system's common center. A quarter of a mile distant across the park, the high, peach-colored dome of the university library pushed up into the evening sky. The darting forms of fighter planes were silhouetted beyond it, circling each other with the agility of combative gnats. At the far end of the street, a column of gaily caparisoned Gloian armored cars raced past, in hot pursuit of a troop of light tanks flying the Blortian pennant. The sky to the north and west winked and flickered to the incessant duelling of Blue and Orange artillery. There was a sharp, descending whistle as a badly aimed shell dropped half a block away, sending a gout of pavement chips hurtling skyward. Retief waited until the air was momentarily clear of flying fragments to cross the street and head across the park. The high walls of the Center of Learning, inset with convoluted patterns in dark-colored mosaic tile, reared up behind a dense barrier of wickedly thomed shark trees. Retief used a small pocket beamer to slice a narrow path through into the grounds, where a flat expanse of deep green lawn extended a hundred yards to the windowless structure. Retief crossed it, skirted a neatly trimmed rose bed where a stuffed dust-owl lay staring up into the night with red glass eyes. Above, a ragged scar showed in the brickwork of the sacrosanct edifice. There were dense vines on the wall at that point. It was an easy two-minute climb to the opening, beyond which shattered glass cases and a stretch of hall were visible. Retief gave a last glance at the searchlight-swept sky and stepped inside. Dim light glowed in the distance. He moved silently along the corridor, pushed through a door into a vast room filled with racks containing the books favored by both Gloians and Blorts. As he did, a light stabbed out and flicked across his chest, fixed on the center button of his dark green early-evening blazer. #Ton't come any farther," aL' reedy voice quavered. "I've got this light right in your eye and a bloop gun aimed at where I estimate your vitals to be." "The effect is blinding," Retief said. "I guess you've got me." Beyond the feeble glow, he made out the fragile figure of an aged Gloian draped in zebra-striped academic robes. "I suppose you sneaked in here to make off with a load of Plushniki historical treasures," the oldster charged. "Actually I was just looking for a shady spot to load my Brownie," Retief said soothingly. "Ah-hah! Photographing cultural secrets, eh? That's two death penalties you've earned so far. Make a false move, and it's three and out." "You're just too sharp for me. Professor," Retief conceded. "Well, I do my job." The ancient snapped off the light. "I think we can do without this. It gives me a splitting flurg-ache. Now, you better come along with me to the bomb shelter. Those rascally Blorts have been dropping shells into the Temple grounds, and I wouldn't want you to get hurt before the execution." "Certainly. By the way, since I'm to be nipped in the bud for stealing information, I wonder if it would be asking too much to get a few answers before I go?" "Hmmm. Seems only fair. What would you like to know?" "A number of things," Retief said. "To start with, how did this war begin in the first place?" The curator lowered his voice. "You won't tell anybody?" "It doesn't look as though I'll have the chance." "That's true. Well, it seems it was something like this..." # C A nd they've been at it ever since," the ancient Gloian concluded his recital. "Under the circumstances, I guess you can see that the idea of a cessation of hostilities is unthinkable." "This has been very illuminating," Retief agreed. "By the way, during the course of your remarks, I happened to think of a couple of little errands that need attending to. I wonder if we couldn't postpone the execution until tomorrow?" "Well -- it's a little unusual. But with all this shooting going on outside, I don't imagine we could stage a suitable ceremony in any case. I suppose I could accept your parole; you seem like, an honest chap, for a foreigner. But be back by lunchtime, remember. I hate these lastminute noose adjustments." His hand came up suddenly; there was a sharp zopp! and a glowing light bulb across the room poofld and died. "All the same, it's a good thing you asked." The old curator blew across the end of his pistol barrel and tucked the weapon away. "I'll be here," Retief assured the elder. "How if you'd just show me the closest exit, I'd better be getting started." The Gloian tottered along a narrow passage, opened a plank door letting onto the side garden. "Nice night," he opined, looking at the sky where the glowing vapor trails of fighter planes looped across the constellations. "You couldn't ask for a better one for -- say, what are these errands you've got to run?" "Cultural secrets." Retief laid a finger across his lips and stepped out into the night. It was a brisk ten-minute walk to the Embassy garages, where the small official fleet of high-powered selected a fast-moving, one-man courier boat; a moment later the lift deposited the tiny craft on the roof. He checked over the instruments, took a minute to tune the tightbeam finder set to the personal code of the Gloian Chief of State and lifted off. V R ocketing along at fifteen hundred feet, Retief had a superb view of the fireworks below. The BlorIF tian beachhead north of town had been expanded into a wide curve of armored units poised ready for the dawn assault that was to sweep the capital clear. To the west, Gloian columns were massing for the counterstrike. At the point of juncture of the proposed assault lines, the lights of the Terran Embassy glowed. Retief corrected course a degree and a half, still climbing rapidly, watching the quivering needles of the seek-and-find beam. The emerald and ruby glow of a set of navigation lights appeared a mile ahead, moving erratically at an angle to his course. He boosted the small flyer to match altitudes, swung in on the other craft's tail. Close now, he could discern the bright-doped, fabric-covered wings, the taut rigging wires, the national colors on the fuselage, and below them the ornate personal emblem of Marshal Lib Glip. He could even make out the goggled features of the warrior Premier gleaming faintly in the greenish light from the instrument faces, his satsuma-toned scarf streaming bravely behind him. Retief maneuvered until he was directly above the unsuspecting craft, then peeled off and hurtled past it on the left dost enough to rock the light airplane violently in the buffeting slip-stream. He came around in a hairpin turn, shot above the biplane as it banked right, did an abrupt left to pass under it, and saw a row of stars appear across the plastic canopy beside his head as the Gloian ace turned inside him, catching him with a burst from his machine guns. Retief put the nose of the flier down, dived clear of the stream of lead, swung back and up in a tight curve, rolled out on the airplane's tail. Lib Glip, no mean pilot, put his ship through a series of vertical eights, snaprolls, immelmans and falling leaves, to no avail. Retief held the courier boat glued to his tail almost close enough to brush the wildly wig-wagging control surfaces. After fifteen minutes of frantic evasive tactics, the Gloian ship settled down to a straight speed run. Retief loafed alongside, pacing the desperate flyer. When Lib Glip looked across at him, Retief made a downward motion of his hand and pointed at the ground. Then he eased over, placed himself directly above the bright-painted plane and edged downward. Below, he could see Lib Glip's face, staring upward. He lowered the boat another foot. The embattled Premier angled his plane downward. Retief stayed with him, forcing him down until the racing craft was racketing along barely above the tops of the celery-shaped trees. A clearing appeared ahead. Retief dropped until his keel almost scraped the fuel tank atop Lib Glip's upper wing. The Gloian, accepting the inevitable, throttled back, settled his ship into a bumpy landing and rolled to a stop just short of a fence. Retief dropped in and skidded to a halt beside him. T he enraged Premier was already out of his cockpit, waving a large clip-fed hand-gun, as Retief popped the hatch of the boat. "What's the meaning of this?" the Gloian yelled. "Who are you! How... He broke off. "Hey, aren't you What's-his-name, from the Terry Embassy?" "Correct." Retief nodded. "I congratulate your Excellency on your acute memory." "What's the idea of this piece of unparalleled audacity?" the Gioian leader shrilled. "Don't you know there's a war on? I was in th:; middle of leading a victorious Jr assault on those Blortian I iue-bellies -- " "Really? I had the impression your squadrons were several miles to the north, tangling with an impressive armada of Blortian bombers and what seemed to be a pretty active fighter cover." "Well, naturally I have to stand off at a reasonable distance in order to get the Big Picture," Lib Clip  explained. "That still doesn't tell me  why a Terry diplomat had the unvarnished gall to interfere with my movements! I've got a good mind to  blast you full of holes and leave the explanations to my Chief of Propaganda!" "I wouldn't," Retief suggested. "This little thing in my hand is a tight-beam blaster. Not that there's any need for such implements among friendly associates." "Armed diplomacy?" Lib Clip choked. "I've never heard of such a thing!" "Oh, I'm off duty," Retief said. "This is just a personal call. There's a little favor I'd like to ask of you." "A... favor? What is it?" "I'd like a ride in your airplane." "You mean you forced me to the ground just to... to... "Right. And there's not much time, so I think we'd better be going." "I've heard of airplane fanciers, but this is fantastic! Still, now that you're here, I may as well point out to you she has a sixteen cylinder V-head mill, swinging a twenty-four lamination sword-wood prop, synchronized #mm lead-spitters, twin spotlights, low pressure tires, foam rubber seats, real instruments -- no idiot lights -- and a ten-coat handrubbed lacquer job. Sharp, eh? And wait till you see the built-in bar." "A magnificent craft, your Excellency." Relief admired the machine. "I'll take the rear cockpit and tell you which way to steer." "You'll tell me -- " "I have the blaster, remember?" Lib Glip grunted and climbed into his seat. Relief strapped in behind him. The Premier started up, taxied to the far end of the field, gunned the engine, and lifted off into the tracer-streaked sky. VI Ci'That's him." Relief pointed to A a lone vehicle perched on a hilltop above a lively fire-fight, clearly visible now against a landscape bathed in the bluish light of the newly risen crescent of Plushnik I, the lower curve of which was at the horizon, the upper almost at Zenith. "See here, this is dangerous," Lib Glip called over the whine of air thrumming through the rigging wires as the plane glided down in a wide spiral, "That car packs plenty of firepower, and -- " He broke off and banked sharply as vivid flashes of blue light stutterlight of Plushnik I glinted from the armored car's elevated guns as they tracked the descending craft. "Put a short burst across his bow," Retief said. "But be careful not to damage him." "Why, that's Barfs personal car!" the Gloian burst out. "I can't fire on him, or he might -- that is, we have a sort of gentleman's agreement -- " "Better do it," Retief said, watching the stream of tracers from below arc closer as Barf found the range. "Apparently he feels that at this range the agreement's not in effect." Lib Clip angled the nose of the craft toward the car and activated the twin lead-spitters. A row of pockmarks appeared in the turf clpse beside the car as the plane shot low over it. "That'll teach him to shoot without looking," Lib Clip commented. "Circle back and land," Retief called. The Premier grumbled but complied. The plane came to a halt a hundred feet from the armored car, which turned to pin the craft down in the beams of its headlights. Lib Clip rbse, holding both hands overhead, and jumped down. 'T hope you realize what you're doing," he said bitterly. "Forcing me to place myself in the hands of this barbarian is flagrant interference in Plushniki internal affairs! See here, if he's been crooked enough to offer you a bribe, I give you my word as a statesman tiiat Tm even crookeder. I'll up his offer -- " "Now, now, your Excellency, this is merely a friendly get-together. Let's go over and relieve the general's curiosity now, before he decides to clear his guns again." A s Retief and the Gloian came up, a hatch opened at the top of the heavy car and the eye-stalk of the Blortian emerged cautiously. The three eyes looked over the situation; then the medal-hung chest of the officer appeared. "Here, what's all this shooting?" he inquired in an irritated tone. "Is that you, Glip? Come out to arrange surrender terms, I suppose. Could have gotten yourself hurt -- " "Surrender my maternal greataunt Bunny!" the Gloian shrilled. "I was abducted by armed force and brought here at gun-point!" "Eh?" Barf peered at Retief. "I thought you'd brought Retief along as an impartial witness to the very liberal amnesty terms I'm prepared to offer." "Gentlemen, if you'll suspend hostilities for just a moment or two," Retief put in, "I believe I can explain the purpose of this meeting. I confess the delivery of invitatiiins may have been a trifle informal, but when you hear the news. I'm sure you'll agree it was well worth the effort." "What news?" both combatants echoed. Retief drew a heavy, fan-shaped paper from an inner pocket. "The war news," he said crisply. "I happened to be rummaging through IF some old papers and came across a full account of the story behind the present conflict. I'm going to give it to the press first thing in the morning, but I felt you gentlemen should get the word first, so that you can realign your war aims accordingly." "Realign?" Barf said cautiously. "Story?" Lib Clip queried. "I assume, of course, that you gentlemen are aware of the facts of history?" Retief paused, paper in hand. "Why, ah, as a matter of fact -- " Barf said. "I don't believe I actually, er..." the Gloian Premier harrumphed. "But of course, we Blort don't need to delve into the past to find cause for the present crusade for the restoration of the national honor," Barf pointed out. "Gloy has plenty of up-to-date reasons for her determination to drive the invaders from the fair soil of her home planet," Lib Glip snorted. "Of course. But this will inspire the troops," Retief pointed out. "Imagine how morale will zoom, Mr. Premier," he addressed the Gloian, "when it becomes known that the original Blortians were a group of government employees from Old Plushnik, en route to the new settlements here on Plushnik I and II." "Government employees, eh?" Barf frowned. "I suppose they were high-ranking civil servants, that sort of thing?" "No," Retief demurred. "As a matter of fact, they were prison guards, with a rank of GB #." "Prison guards? GB #?" Barf growled. "Why, that's the lowest rank in the entire government payroll!" "Certainly there can be no charge of snobbery there," Retief said in tones of warm congratulation. A choking sound issued from Lib Glip's speaking aperture. "Pardon my mirth," he gasped. "But after all the tripe we've heard -- eekeek -- about the glorious past of Blort... "And that brings us to the Gloians," Retief put in smoothly. "They, it appears, were travelling on the same vessel at the time of the outbreak -- or should I say breakout?" "Same vessel?" Retief nodded. "After all, the guards had to have something to guard." "You mean...?" "That's right," Retief said cheerfully. "The Gloians' founding fathers were a consignment of criminals sentenced to transportation for life." General Barf uttered a loud screech of amusement and slapped himself on the thigh. "I don't know why I didn't guess that intuitively!" he chortled. "How right you were, Retief, to dig out this charming intelligence!" "See here!" Lib Glip shrilled. "You can't publish defamatory information of that sort! I'll take it to court!" "And give the whole galaxy a good laugh over the breakfast trougb," Barf agreed. "A capital suggestion, my dear Glip!" sAnyway, I don't believe it! It's a tissue of lies! A bunch of malarkeyl A dirty, lousy falsehood, and a base canard!" "Look for yourself." Relief offered the documents. Lib Clip fingered the heavy parchment, peered at the complicated characters. "Hit's printed in Old Plushnik," he grumbled. "I'm afraid I never went in for dead languages." "General?" Retief handed over the papers. Barf glanced at them and handed them back, still chuckling. "No, sorry. I'll have to take your word for it -- and I do." "Fine, then," Retief said. "There's just one other little point. You gentlemen have been invading and counterinvading now for upwards of a thousand years. Naturally in that length of time the records have grown a trifle confused. However, I believe both sides are in agreement that the original home planets have changed hands and that the Blortians are occupying Gloy territory, while the Gloians have taken over the original Blort world." Both belligerents nodded. 'That's nearly correct," Retief said, "with just one minor correction. It isn't the planets that have changed hands. It's the identities of the participants in the war." "Eh?" . "What did you say?" "It's true, gentlemen," Retief said solemnly. "You and your troops. General, are descendants of the original Gloians. And your people -- " he inclined his head to the Gloian Premier -- "inherit the mantle of Blortship." vn # #Tut this is ghastly," General Barf groaned. "I've devoted rect attitude toward Gloians in my chaps. How can I face them now!" "Me, a Blort?" Lib Glip shuddered. "Still," he said as if to himself, "we were the guards, not the prisoners. I supX)se on the whole we'll be able to console ourselves with the thought that we aren't representatives of the criminal class." "Criminal class!" Barf snorted. "By Pud, sir, I'd rather trace my descent from an honest victim of the venal lackeys of a totalitarian regime than to claim kinship with a pack of hireling turnkeys!" "Lackeys, eh? I suppose that's what a pack of butter-fingered pickpockets would think of a decent servant of law and order!" "Now, gentlemen. I'm sure these trifling differences can be settled peaceably," Retief put in. "Ah-hah, so thafs it!" Barf crowed. "You've dug the family skeletons out of the closet in the mistaken belief it would force us to suspend hostilities!" "By no means. General," Retief said blandly. "Naturally, you'll want to exchange, supplies of propaganda leaflets and go right on with the crusade. But of course you'll have to swap planets, too." "How's that?" by and see the entire populations of two worlds condenmed to live on, in exile on a foreign planet. I'm sure I can arrange for a fleet of IF Corps transports to handle the transfer of population -- " "Just a minute," Lib Clip cut in. "You mean you're going to repatriate all us, er, Blortians to Plushnik I and give Plushnik II to those rascally, ah, Gloians?" "Minus the slanted adjectives, a very succinct statement of affairs." "Now, just a minute," Barf put in. "You don't expect me to actually settle down on this dust-ball full time, do you? With my sinus condition?" "Me live in the midst of that swamp?" Lib Clip hooked a thumb skyward at the fully risen disk of the gibbous planet, where rivers and mountains, continents and seas gleamed cheerfully, reflecting the rays of the distant sun. "Why, my asthma would kill me in three weeks! That's why I've always stuck to lightning raids instead of long, drawn-out operations!" tainly doesn't wish to be instrumental in undermining the health of two cooperative statesmen." "Ah... how do you mean, cooperative?" Barf voiced the question. iCT'ou know how it is. General," I Retief said. "When one has impatient superiors breathing down one's neck, it's a little hard to really achieve full rapport with even the most laudable aspirations of others. However, if Ambassador Biteworse were in a position to show the inspectors a peaceful planet in the morning, it might very well influence him to defer the evacuation until further study of the question." "But... my two-pronged panzer thrust," the general faltered. "The crowning achievement of my military career!" "My magnificently coordinated one-two counterstrike!" Lib Glip wailed. "It cost me two weeks' golf to work out those logistics!" "I might even go so far' as to hazard a guess," Retief pressed on, "that in the excitement of the announcement of the armistice, I might even forget to publish my historical findings." "Hmmm." Barf eyed his colleague. "It might be a trifle tricky, at that, to flog up the correct degree of antiBlort enthusiasm on such short notice." "Yes, I can foresee a certain amount of residual sympathy for Gloian institutions lingering on for quite some time," Lib Glip nodded. "I'd still have the use of my car, of course," the general mused. "As well as my personal submarine, my plushed-up transport and my various copters, hoppers, unicycles and sedan chairs for use on rough terrain." "I suppose it would be my duty to keep the armed forces at the peak of condition with annual War Games," Lib Glip commented. He glanced at the general. "In fact, we might even work out some sort of scheme for joint maneuvers, just to keep the recruits sharpened up." "Not a bad idea, Glip. I might try for the single-engine pursuit trophy myself." "Ha! Nothing you've got can touch my little beauty when it comes to close-in combat work!" "I'm sure we can work out the details later, gentlemen,' Retief said. "I must be getting back to the Embassy now. I hope your formal joint announcement will be ready soon." "Well..." Barf looked at Lib Clip. "Under the circumstances..." "I suppose we can work out something," the latter assented glumly. "I'll give you a lift back in my car, Retief," General Barf offered. "Just wait till you see how she handles!" I n the pink, light of dawn. Ambassador Biteworse and his staff waited on the breeze-swept ramp to greet the portly officials descending from the Corps lighter. "Well, Hector," the senior member of the inspection team commented, looking around the immaculate environs of the port, "It looks as though perhaps some of those rumors we heard as to a snag in the disarmament talks were a trifle exaggerated," Biteworse smiled blandly. "A purely routine affair." "Actually, I think it's about time we began considering you for a more substantive post. Hector." "That was a dirty trick, Retief, getting a pardon directly from young Lib Clip. I don't get much excitement over there in the stacks." "Things will be better from now on," Retief assured the oldster. "I think you can expect to see the library opened to the public soon." "Oh, boy!" the curator exclaimed. "Just what I've been urging for years! Plenty of snazzy young coeds coming in, eager to butter an old fellow up in return for a guaranteed crib-sheet! Thanks, lad!" "Retief." Magnan plucked at his sleeve. "I've heard a number of fragmentary rumors regarding events leading up to the truce. I trust your absence from the Chancellery for an hour or two early in the evening was in no way connected with the various kidnappings, thefts, trespasses, assaults, blackmailings, breakings and enterings and other breaches of diplomatic usage said to have occurred." "Mr. Magnan, what a suggestion!" Retief took out a fan-folded paper, began tearing it into strips. "Sorry, Retief. By the way, isn't that a Old Plushniki manuscript you're destroying?" "This? Why, no. It's an old Chinese menu I came across tucked in the Classified Dispatch binder." He dropped the scraps in a refuse bin. "Oh. Well, why don't you join me in a quick bite before this morning's briefing for the inspectors? The Ambassador plans to give them his standard five-hour introductory chat, followed by a quick run-through of the voucher files -- " "No, thanks. I have an appointment with Lib Clip to check out in one of his new model pursuit ships." "Well, I suppose you have to humor him, inasmuch as he's Premier." Magnan cocked an eye at Retief. "I confess I don't understand how it is you get on such familiar terms with these bigwigs, restricted as your official duties are to preparation of reports in quintiplicate." "I think it's merely a sort of informal manner I adopt in meeting them," Retief said. He waved and headed across the runway to where IF IF  Novelette AT Puppeteers never made bod bargains. If they offered a high price for a job, a wise man would turn it down! I I couldn't decide whether to call it a painting, a relief mural, a sculpture or a hash; but it was the prize exhibit in the Art Section of the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. The Kdatlyno must have strange eyes, I thout. My own were watering. I'd tentatively decided that it was supposed to look blurred when a set of toothy jaws clamped gently on my arm. I jumped a foot in the air. "Beowulf Shaeffer, you are a spendthrift." That voice would have made a singer's fortune. And I thought I recognized it -- but it couldn't be; that one was on We Made It, lightyears distant. I turned. The puppeteer had released my arm. It went on: "And what do you think of Hrodenu?" "He's ruining my eyes." "Naturally. The Kdatlyno are is meant not to be seen but to be toudied. Run your tongue over it." "My tong:ue? No, thanks." I tried running my hand over it. If you want to know what it felt like, hop a ship for Jinx; the thing's still there. I flatly refuse to describe the sensation. The puppeteer cocked its heads dubiously. "I'm sure your tongue is more sensitive. No guards are near." "Forget it. You know, you sound just like the regional president of General Products on We Made It." "It was he who sent me your dossier, Beowulf Shaeffer. No doubt we had the same English teacher. I am the regional president on Jinx, as you no doubt recognized from my mane." W ell, not quite. A puppeteer is best described as a three legged centaur with two flat, brainless heads mounted on long, sinuous necks. The mouths also function as hands, and very well, too. The mane, which runs from the tail forward to become an auburn mop over the brain case between the necks, is supposed to show caste once you learn to discount variations of mere style. To do that you have to be a puppeteer. Instead of admitting my ignorance, I asked, "Did that dossier say I was a spendthrift?" "You have spent more than a "And loved it." "Yes. You will shortly be in debt again. Have you thougjit of doing more writing? I admired your article pointy bottom of a gravity well'... 'blue starlight fell on me like intangible sleet'... lovdy." "Thanks. It paid well, too. But I'm mainly a spaceship pilot." "It is fortunate, our meeting here. I had thought of having you found. Do you wish a job?" That was a loaded question. The last and only time I took a job from a puppeteer, the puppeteer blackmailed me into it, knowing it would probably kill me. It almost did. I didn't hold that against the regional president of We Made It. In fact, I blackmailed him back when he let it slip that the puppeteer home planet has no moon. The puppeteers, constitutional cowards all, go to great lengths to keep the galaxy-at-largc from finding that world. But to let them have another crack at me -- ? "I'll give you a conditional Maybe. Do you have the idea I'm a professional suicide pilot?" "Not at all. If I show details, do you agree that the information shall be confidential?" "I do," I said formally, knowing it would commit me. A verbal contract is as binding as the tape it's recorded on. "Good. Come." He pranced toward a transfer booth. T he transfer booth let us out somewhere in Jinx's vacuum regions. It was night. High in the sky, Sirius B was a painfully bright pinpoint casting vivid blue moonlight on a ragged lunar landscape. I looked up and didn't see Binary, Jinx's bloated orange companion planet, so we must have been in the Farside End. IF But there was something 'hanging over us. A ## General Products hull is a transparent sphere a (thousand-odd feet in diameter. No bigger ship has been built anywhere in the known galaxy. It takes a government to buy one, and they are used for colonization projects only. But this one could never have been so used. It was all machinery. Our transfer booth stood between two of the landing legs, so that the swelling flank of the ship looked down on us as an owl looks down at a mouse. An access tube ran through vacuum from the booth to the airlock. I said, "Does General Products build complete spacecraft nowadays?" "We are thinking of branching out. But there are problems." From the viewpoint of the puppeteer-owned company, it must have seemed high time. General Products makes the hulls for ninety-five per cent of all ships in space, mainly because nobody else knows how to build an indestructible hull. But they'd made a bad start with this ship. The only room I could see for crew, cargo or passengers was a few cubic yards of empty space right at the bottom, just above the airlock. And it seemed to be just big enough for a pilot. "You'd have a hard time selling that," I said. "True. Do you notice anything else?" "Well..." The hardware which filled the transparent hull was very tightly packed. The effect was as if a race of ten-mile-tall giants had striven to achieve miniaturization. I saw no sign of access tubes; hence there could be no in-spaoe repairs. Four reaction motors poked their appropriately huge nostrils through the hull, angled outward from the bottom. No small attitude jets; hence, oversized gyros inside. Otherwise . "Most of it looks like hyperdrive motors. But that's silly. Unless you've thought of a good reason for moving moons around?" "At one time you were a commercial pilot for Nakamura Lines. How long was the run from Jinx to We made It?" "Twelve days if nothing broke down." Just long enough to get to know the prettiest passenger aboard, while the autopilot did everything for me but wear my uniform. "Sirius to Procyon is a distance of four light-years. Our ship would be able to make the trip in five minutes." "You've lost your mind." "No." But -- that was almost a lightyear per minute! I couldn't visualize it. Then suddenly I did visualize it, and my mouth fell open, for what I saw was the galaxy opening before me. We know so little beyond our own small neighborhood of the galaxy. But with a ship like that -- ! "That's goddam fast." "As you say. But the equipment is bulky, as you note. It cost seven counting centuries of research, but it will only move one man. As is, the ship is a failure. Shall we go inside and take a look?" n T he lifesystem was two circular rooms, one above the other, with a small airlock to one side. The lower room was the control room, with banks of switches and dials and blinking lights dominated by a huge sierical mass pointer. The upper room was bare walls, transparent, through which I could see airand food-producing equipment. "This will be the relaxroom," said the puppeteer. "We decided to let the pilot decorate it himself." "Why me?" "Let me further explain the problem." The puppeteer began to pace the floor. I hunkered down against the wall and watched. Watching a puppeteer move is a pleasure. Even in Jinx's gravity the deerlike body seemed weightless, the tiny hooves tapping the floor at random. "The human sphere of colonization is some thirty light-years across, is it not?" "Maximum. It's not exactly a sphere -- " 'The puppeteer region is much smaller. The Kdatlyno sphere is half the size of yours, and the kzinti is fractionally larger. These are the important space-traveling species. We must discount the Outsiders since they do not use ships. Some spheres coincide, naturally. Travel from one sphere to another is nearly nil except for ourselves, since our sphere of influence extends to all who buy our hulls. But add all these regions, and you have a region sixty lightyears across. This ship could cross it in seventy-five minutes. Allow six hours for takeoff and six for landing, assuming no traffic snarls near the world of destination, and we have a ship which can go anywhere in thirteen hours but nowhere in less than twelve, carrying one pilot and no "How about exploration?" "We puppeteers have no taste for abstract knowledge. And how should we explore?" Meaning that whatever race flew the ship would gain the advantages thereby. A puppeteer wouldn't risk his necks by flying it himself. "What we need is a great deal of money and a gathering of intelligences, to design something which may go slower but must be ' less bulky. General Products does not wish to spend so much on something that may fail. We will require the best minds of each sentient species and the richest investors. Beowulf Shaeffer, we need to attract attention." "A publicity stunt?" "Yes. We wish to send a pilot to the center of the galaxy and back." "Ye... gods! Will it go that fast?" "It would require some twenty-five days to reach the center and an equal time to return. You can see the reasoning behind -- " "It's perfect. You don't need to spell it out. Why me?" "We wish you to make the trip and then write of it. I have a list of pilots who write. Those I have approached have been reluctant. They say that writing on the ground is safer than testing unknown ships. I follow their reasoning." "Me too." "Will you go?" IF "What am I offered?" "One hundred thousand stars for the trip. Fifty thousand to write the story, in addition to what you sell it for." "Sold." F rom then on, my only worry was that my new boss would find out that someone had ghostwritten that neutron star article. Oh, I wondered at first why GenThe first time I worked for them I tried to steal their ship, for reasons which seemed good at the time. But the ship I now called Long Shot really wasn't worth stealing. Any potential buyer would know it was hot; and what good would it be to him? Long Shot could have explored a globular cluster; but her only othei; use was publicity. Sending her to the Core was a masterpiece of promotion. Look: it was twelve days from We Made It to Jinx by conventional craft, and twelve hours by Long Shot, What's the difference? You spent twelve years saving for the trip. But the Core! Ignoring refueling and reproyisioning problems, my Id ship could have reached the galaxy's core in three hundred years. No known species had ever seen the Core! It hid behind layer on layer of tenuous gas and dust clouds. You can find libraries of hterature on those central stars, but they all consist of generalities and educated guesses based on observation of other galaxies, like Andromeda. Three centuries dropped to less than a month! There's something anyone can grasp. And with pictures! The lifesystem was finished in a couple of weeks. I had them leave the control room walls transparent and paint the relaxroom solid blue, no windows. When they finished I had entertainment tapes and everything it takes to keep a man sane for seven weeks in a room the size of a large closet. On the last day the puppeteer and I spoke the final version of my contract. I had four months to reach the galaxy's center and return. The outside cameras would run constantly; I was not to interfere with them. If the ship suffered a mechanical failure I could return before reaching the center, otherwise, no. There were penalties. I took a copy of the tape to leave with a lawyer. "There is a thing you should know," the puppeteer said afterward. "The direction of thhist opposes the direction of hyperdrive." "I don't get it." The puppeteer groped for words. "If you turned on the reaction motors and the hyperdrive together, the flames would precede your ship through hyperspace." I got the picture then. Backward into the unknown. With the control room at the ship's bottom, it made sense. To a puppeteer, it made sense. Ill nd I was off. I wsnt up under two standard gees because I like my comfort. For twelve hours I used only the reaction motors. It wouldn't do to be too deep in a gravity well when I used a hyperdrive, especially an experimental one. Pilots who do that never leave hyperspace. The relaxroom kept me entertained until the hell rang. I slipped down to the control room, netted myself down againss free fall, turned off the motors, rubbed my hands briskly together, and turned on the hyperdrive. It wasn't quite like I'd expected. I couldn't see out, of course. When the hyperdrive goes on it's like your blind spot expanding to take in all the windows. It's not just that you don't see anything; you forget that there's anything to see. If there's a window between the kitchen control bank and your print of Dali's "Spain", your eye and mind will put the picture right next to the kitchen bank, obliterating the space between. It takes getting used to, in fact it has driven people insane, but that wasn't what bothered me. I've spent thousands of man-hours in hyperspace. I kept my eye on the mass pointer. The mass pointer is a big transparent sphere with a number of blue lines radiating from the center. The direction of the line is the direction of a star; its length shows the star's mass. We wouldn't need pilots if the mass pointer could have been hooked into an autopilot, but it can't. Dependable as it is, accurate as it is, the mass pointer is a psionic device. It needs a mind to work. I'd been using mass pointers for so long that those lines were like real stars. A star came toward me, and I dodged around it. I thought that another line that didn't point quite straight ahead was long enough to show dangerous mass, so I dodged. That put la blue dwarf right in front of me. I shifted fast and looked for a throttle. I wanted to slow down. Repeat, I wanted to slow down. Of course there was no throttle. Part of the puppeteer research project would be designing a throttle. A long, fuzzy line reached for me: a protosun... Put it this way: imagine one of Earth's freeways. You must have seen pictures of them from space, a tangle of twisting concrete ribbons, empty and abandoned but never torn down. Some lie broken; others are covered with houses. People use the later rubberized ones for horseback riding. Imagine the way one of these must have looked about six o'clock on a week night in, say, nineteen seventy. Groundcars from end to end. Now, let's take all these cars and remove the brakes. Further, let's put governors on the accelerators, so that the maximum speeds are between sixty and seventy miles per hour, not all the same. Let something go wrong with all the governors at once, so that the maximum speed also becomes the minimum. You'll begin to see signs of panic... Ready? Okay. Get a radar installed in your car, paint your windshield and windows jet black, and get out on that freeway. It was like that. I t didn't seem so bad at first. The stars kept coming at me, and I kept dodging, and after awhile it settled down to a kind of routine. From experience I could tell at a IF ;v... glance whether a star was heavy enough and close enough to wreck me. But in Nakamura Lines I'd only had to take that glance every six hours or so. Here I didn't dare look away. As I grew tired the nearmisses came closer and closer. After three hours of it I had to drop out. The stars had a subtly unfamiliar look. With a sudden jar I realized that I was entirely out of known space. Sirius, Antares -- I'd never recognize them from here; I wasn't even sure they were visible. I shook it off and called home. "Long Shot calling General Products, Long Shot calling -- " "Beowulf Shaeffer?" "Have I ever told you what a lovely, sexy voice you have?" "No. Is everything going well?" "I'm afraid not. In fact, I'm not going to make it." A pause. "Why not?" "I can't keep dodging these stars forever. One of them's going to get me if I keep on much longer. The ship's just too goddam fast." "Yes. We must design a slower ship." "I hate to give up that good pay, but my eyes feel like peeled onions. I ache all over. I'm turning back." "Shall I play your contract for you?" "No. Why?" "Your only legal reason for returning is a mechanical failure. Otherwise you forfeit twice your pay. Jinx has recently adopted the debtor's prison." I said, "Mechanical failure?" There was a tool box somewhere in the ship, with a hammer in it "I did not mention it before, since it did not seem polite, but two of the cameras are in the lifesystem. We had thought to use films of you for purposes of publicity, but -- " "I see. Tell me one thing, just one thing. When the regional president of We Made It sent you my name, did he mention that I'd discovered your planet has no moon?" "Yes, he did mention that matter. your silence. He naturally has a recording of the bargain." "I see." So that's why they'd picked Beowulf Shaeffer, well known author. "The trip'll take longer than I thought." "You must pay a penalty for every extra day over four months. Two thousand stars per day late." "Your voice has acquired an unpleasant grating sound. Good-by." I went on in. Every hour I shifted to normal space for a ten-minute coffee break. I dropped out for meals, and I dropped out for sleep. Twelve hours per ship's day I spent traveling, and twelve trying to recover. It was a losing battle. By the end of day two I knew I wasn't going to make the four month limit. I might do it in six months, forfeiting one hundred and twenty thousand stars, leaving me almost where I started. Serve me right for trusting a puppeteer! Stars were all around me, shining through the floor and between the banked instruments. I sucked coffee, trying not Xo think. The milky way shone ghostly pale between my feet. The stars were thick now; they'd get IF thicker as I approached the Core, until finally one got me. An idea! And about time, too. The golden voice answered immediately. "Beowulf Shaeffer?" "There's nobody else here, honey. Look, I've thought of something. Would you send -- " "Is one of your instruments malfunctioning, Beowulf Shaeffer?" "No, they all work fine, as far as they go. Look -- " "Then what could you possibly have to say that would require my attention?" "Honey, now is the time to decide. Do you want revenge, or do you want your ship back?" A small silence. Then, "You may speak." "I can reach the Core must faster if I first get into one of the spaces between the arms. Do we know enough about the galaxy to know where our arm ends?" "I will send to the Institute of Knowledge to find out." "Good." Four hours later I was dragged from a deathlike sleep by the ringing of the hyperphone. It was not the president, but some flunky. I remembered calling the puppeteer Honey last night, tricked by my own exhaustion and that seductive voice, and wondered if I'd hurt his puppeteer feelings. "He" might be male; a puppeteer's sex is one of his little secrets. The flunky gave me a bearing and distance for the nearest gap between stars. It took me another day to get there. When the stars began to thin out I could hardly believe it. I turned off the hyperdrive, and it was true. The stars were tens and hundreds of light-years apart. I could see part of the Core peeking in a bright rim above the dim flat cloud of mixed dust and stars. IV F rom then on it was better. I was safe if I glanced at the mass pointer every ten minutes or so. I could forget the rest breaks, eat meals and do isometrics while watching the pointers. For eight hours a day I slept, but during the other sixteen I moved. The gap swept toward the Core in a narrowing curve, and I followed it. As a voyage of exploration the trip would have been a fiasco. I saw nothing; I stayed well away from anything worth seeing. Stars and dust, anomalous whispy clusters shining in the dark of the gap, invisible indications that might have been stars -- my cameras picked them up from a nice, safe distance, showing tiny blobs of light. In three weeks I moved seventeen thousand lightyears toward the Core. The end of those three weeks was the end of the gap. Before me was an uninteresting wash of stars backed by a wall of opaque dust clouds. I still had thirteen thousand lightyears to go before I reached the center of the galaxy. I took some pictures and moved in. Ten minute breaks, mealtimes that grew longer and longer for the rest they gave, sleep periods that left my eyes red and burning. The stars were thick, and the dust was thicker, so that the mass pointer showed a blur of blue broken by sharp blue lines. The lines began to get less sharp. I took breaks every half hour... Three days of that. It was getting near lunchtime on the fourth day. I sat watching the mass pointer, noting the fluctuations in the blue blur which showed the changing density of the dust around me. Suddenly it faded out completely. Great! Wouldn't it be nice if the mass pointer went out on me? But the sharp starlines were still there, ten or twenty of them pointing in all directions. I went back to steering. The clock chimed to indicate a rest period. I sighed happily and dropped into normal space. The clock showed I had half an hour to wait for lunch. I thought about eating anyway, decided against it. The routine was all that kept me going. I wondered what the sky looked like, reflexively looked up so I wouldn't have to look down at the transparent floor. That big an expanse of hyperspace is hard even on trained eyes. I remembered I wasn't in hyperspace and looked down. For a time I just stared. Then, without taking my eyes off the floor, I reached for the hyperphone. "Beowulf Shaeffer?" "No, this . is Albert Einstein. I stowed away when the Long Shot took off, and I've decided to turn myself in for the reward." "Giving misinformation is an implicit violation of contract. Why have you called?" "I can see the Core." "That is not a reason to call. It was implicit in your contract that you would see the Core." "Dammit, don't you care? Don't you want to know what it looks like?" "If you wish to describe it now, as a precaution against accident, I will switch you to a dictaphone. However, if your mission is not totally successful, we cannot use your recording." I was thinking up a really searing answer when I heard 'the click. Great, my boss had hooked me into a dictaphone. I said one short sentence and hung up. The Core. Gone were the obscuring masses they must have been swept up for fuel by the hungry, crowded stars. The Core lay before me like a great jeweled sphere. I'd expected it to be a gradual thing, a thick mass of stars thinning out into the arms. There was nothing gradual about it. A clear ball of multicolored light five or six thousand light-years across nestled in the heart of the galaxy, sharply bounded by the last of the dust clouds. I was ten thousand four hundred light-years from the center. The red stars were the biggest and brightest. I could actually pick some of them out as individuals. The rest was a finger painting in fluorescent green and blue. But those red stars... they would have sent Aldebaran back to kindergarten. It was all so bright. I needed the telescope to see black between the stars... I'll show you how bright it was. IF Is it night where you are? Step outside and look at the stars. What color are they? Antares may show red, if you're near enough; in the System, so will Mars. Sirius may show bluish. But all the rest are white pinpoints. Why? Because it's dark. Your day vision is in color, but at night you see black-and-white, like a dog. The Core suns were bright enough for color vision. I'd pick a planet here! Not in the Core itself, but right out here, with the Core on one side and on the other, the dimly starred dust clouds forming their strange convoluted curtain. Man, what a view! Imagine that flaming jeweled sphere rising in the east, hundreds of times as big as Binary shows on Jinx, but without the constant feeling Binary gives you, the fear that the orange world will fall on you; for the vast, twinkling Core is only starlight, lovely and harmless. I'd pick my world now and stake a claim. When the puppeteers got their drive fixed up, I'd have the finest piece of real estate in the known universe! If I could only find a habitable planet. If only I could find it twice. Hell, i'd be lucky to find my way home from here. I shifted into hyperspace and went back to work. V A n hour and fifty minutes, one lunch break and two rest breaks, and fifty light-years later, I noticed something peculiar in the Core. It was even clearer then, if not much bigger; I'd passed through the almost transparent wisps of the last dust cloud. Not too near the center of the sphere was a patch of white, bright enough to make the green and blue and red look dull around it. I looked for it again at the next break, and it was a little brighter. It was brighter again at the next break "Beowulf ShaefferV" "Yah. I -- " "Why did you use the dictaphone to call me a cowardly, two-headed, monster?" "You were off the line. I had to use the dictaphone." "That is sensible. Yes. We puppeteers have never understood your attitude toward a natural caution." My boss was peeved, though you couldn't tell from his voice. "I'll go into that if you like, but it's not why I called." "Explain, please." "I'm all for caution. Discretion is the better part of valor, and like that. You can even be good businessmen, because it's easier to survive with lots of money. But you're so damn concerned with various kinds of survival that you aren't even interested in something that isn't a threat. Nobody but a puppeteer would have turned down my offer to describe the Core." "You forget the kzinti." "Oh, the kzinti." Who expects rational behavior from kzinti? You whip them when they attack, you reluctantly decide not to exterminate them, you wait till they build up their strength, and when they attack you whip 'em again. Meanwhile you sell them food-stuffs and buy their metals and employ them where you need good games theorists. It's not as if they were a real threat. They'll always attack before they're ready. Ci'The kzinti are carnivores. A Where we are interested in survival, carnivores are interested in meat alone. They conquer because subject peoples can supply them with food. Tliey cannot do menial work. Animal husbandry is alien to them. They must have slaves or be barbarians roaming the forests for meat. Why should they be interested in what you call abstract knowledge? Why should any thinking being, if the knowledge has no chance of showing a profit? In practice, your description of the Core would attract only an omnivore." "You'd make a good case, if it were not for the fact that most sentient races are omnivores." "We have thought long and hard on that." Ye cats. I was going to have to think long and hard on that, "Why did you call. Beowulf Shaeffer?" Oh, yeah. "Look I know you don't want to know what the Core looks like, hut I see something that might represent personal danger. You have access to information I don't. May I proceed?" "Yxu may." Hah! I was learning to think like a puppeteer. Was that good? I told my boss about the blazing, strangely shaped white patch in the Core. "When I turned the telescope on it, it nearly blinded me. Grade two sunglasses don't give any details at all. It's just a shapeless white patch, but so bright that the stars in front look like black dots with colored rims. I'd like to know what's causing it." "It sounds very unusual." Pause. "Is the white color uniform? Is the brightness uniform?" "Just a sec." I used the scope again. "The color is, but the brightness isn't. I see dimmer areas inside the patch. I think the center is fading out." "Use the telescope to find a nova star. There ought to be several in such a large mass of stars." I tried it. Presently I found something: a blazing disk of a peculiar blue-white color with a dimmer, somewhat smaller red disc half in front of it. That had to be a nova. In the core of Andromeda galaxy, and in what I'd seen of our own Core, the red stars were the biggest and brightest. "I've found one." "Comment." A moment more and I saw what he meant. "It's the same color as the patch. Something like the same brightness, too. But what could make a patch of supernovas go off all at once?" "You have studied the Core. The stars of the Core are an average of half a light-year apart. They are even closer near the center, and no dust clouds dim their brightness. When stars are that close they shed enough light on each other to materially increase each other's temperature. Stars burn faster and age faster in the Core." "I see that." IF "Since the Core stars age faster, a much greater portion are near the supernova stage than in the arms. Also, all are hotter considering their respective ages. If a star were a few millenia from the supernova stage, and a supernova exploded half a light-year away, estimate the probabilities." # #"Xhey might both blow. Then A the two could set off a third, and the three might lake a couple more..." "Yes. Since a supernova lasts on the order of one human standard year, the chain reaction would soon die out. Your patch of light must have occurred in this way." "That's a relief. Knowing what did it, I mean. I'll take pictures going in." "As you say." Click. The patch kept expanding as I went in, still with no more shape than a veil nebula, getting brighter and bigger. It hardly seemed fair, what I was doing. The light which the patch novas had taken fifty years to put out, I covered in an hour, moving down the beam at a speed which made the universe itself seem unreal. At the fourth rest period I dropped out of hyperspace, looked down through the floor while the cameras took their pictures, glanced away from the patch for a moment, and found myself blinded by tangerine afterimages. I had to put on a pair of grade one sunglasses, out of the packet of twenty which every pilot carries for working near suns during takeoff and landing. It made me shiver, to think that the patch was still nearly ten thousand light-years away. Already the radiation must have killed all life in the Core, if there ever had been life there. My instruments on the hull showed radiation like a solar flare. At the next stop I needed grade two sunglasses. Somewhat later, grade three. Then four. The patch became a great bright amoeba reaching twisting tentacles of fusion fire deep into the vitals of the Core. In hyper space the sky was jammed bumper to bumper, so to speak; but I never thought of stopping. As the Core came closer the Patch grew like something alive, something needing ever more food. I think I knew, even then. Night came. The control room was a blaze of light. I slept in the relaxroom, to the tune of the laboring temperature control. Morning, and I was off again. The radiation meter snarled its death song, louder during each rest break. If I'd been planning to go outside I would have dropped that plan. Radiation couldn't get through a General Products hull. Nothing else does, either, except visible light. I spent a bad half hour trying to remember 'Whether one of the puppeteers' customers saw X rays. I was afraid to call up and ask. The mass pointer began to show a faint blue blur. Gases thrown outward from the patch. I had to keep changing sunglasses... Sometime during the morning of the next day, I stopped. There really was no point in going further. iTjcowulf Shaeffer, have you beJD come attached to the sound of my voice? I have other work than supervising your progress." "I would like to deliver a lecture on abstract knowledge! "Surely it can wait until your return." "The galaxy is exploding." There was a strange noise. Then: "Repeat, please." "Have I got your attention?" "Yes." "Good. I think I know the reason so many sentient races are omnivores. Interest in abstract knowledge is a symptom of pure curiosity. Curiosity must be a survival trait." "Must we discuss this? Very well. You may well be right. Others have made the same suggestion, including puppeteers. But how has our species survived at all?" "You must have some substitute for curiosity. Increased intelligence, maybe. You've been around long enough to develop it. Our hands can't compare with your mouths for tool building. If a watchmaker had taste and smell in his hands, he still wouldn't have the strength of your jaws or the delicacy of those knobs around your lips. When I want to know how old a sentient race is, I watch what he uses for hands and feet." "Yes. Human feet are still adapting to their task of keeping you erect. You proppose, then, that our intelligence has grown sufficiently to insure our survival without depending on your hit-or-miss method of learning everything you can for the sheer pleasure of learning." "Not quite. Our method is better. If you hadn't sent me to the Core for publicity you'd never have known about this." "You say the galaxy is exploding." "Rather, it finished exploding some nine thousand years ago. I'm wearing grade twenty sunglasses, and it's still too bright. A third of the Core is gone already. The patch is spreading at nearly the speed of light. I don't see that anything can stop it until it hits the gas clouds beyond the Core." There was no comment. I went on. "A lot of the inside of the patch has gone out, but all of the surface is new novas. And remember, the light I'm seeing is nine thousand years old. Now, I'm going to read you a few instruments. Radiation, two hundred and ten. Cabin temperaIF V'V#V!!l sii;# iaJiHsp" ; ture normal, but you can hear the whine of the temperature control. The mass indicator shows nothing but a blur ahead. I'm turning back." "Radiation two hundred and ten? How far are you from the edge of the Core?" "About four thousand light-years, I think. I can see plumes of incandescent gas starting to form in the near side of the patch, moving toward galactic north and south. It reminds me of something. Aren't there pictures of exploding galaxies in the Institute?" "Many. Yes, it has happened before. Beowulf Shaeffer, this is bad news. When the radiation from the Core reaches our worlds, it will sterilize them. We puppeteers will soon need considerable amounts of money. Shall I release you from your contract, paying you nothing?" I laughed. I was too surprised even to get mad. "No." "Surely you do not intend to enter the Core?" "No. Look, why do you -- " "Then by the conditions of our contract, you forfeit." "Wrong again. I'll take pictures of these instruments. When a court sees the readings on the radiation meter and the blue blur in the mass indicator, they'll know something's wrong with them." "Nonsense. Under evidence drugs you will explain the readings." "Sure. And the court will know you tried to get me to go right to the center of that holocaust. You know what they'll say to that?" "But how can a court of law find against a recorded contract?" "The point is they'll want to. Maybe they'll decide that we're both lying, and the instruments really did go haywire. Maybe they'll find a way to say the contract was illegal. But they'll find against you. Want to make a side bet?" "No. You have won. Come back." VI T he Core was a lovely multicolored jewel when it disappeared below the lens of the galaxy. I'd have liked to visit it some day; but there aren't any time machines. Yd penetrated nearly to the Core in something like a month. I took my time coming home, going straight up along galactic north and flying above the lens where there were no stars to bother me, and still made it in two. All the way I wondered why the puppeteer had tried to cheat me at the last. Long Shot's publicity would have been better than ever; yet the regional president had been leave me broke. I couldn't ask why, because nobody was answering my hyperphone. Nothing I knew about puppeteers could tell me. I felt persecuted. My come-hither brought me down at the base in the Farside End. Nobody was there. I took the transfer booth back to Sirius Mater, Jinx's biggest city, figuring to contact General Products, turn over the ship and pick up my pay. More surprises awaited me. I ) General Products had paid one hundred and fifty thousand stars into my account in the Bank of Jinx. A personal note stated that whether I wrote my article was solely up to me. #) General Products has disappeared. They are selling no more spacecraft hulls. Companies with contracts have had their penalty clauses paid off. It all happened two months ago, simultaneously on all known worlds. #) The bar I'm in is on the roof of the tallest building in Sirius Mater, more than a mile above the streets. Even from here I can hear the stock market crashing. It started with the the collapse of spacecraft companies with no hulls to build ships. Hundreds of others have followed. It takes a long time for an interstellar market to come apart at the seams, but, as with the Core novas. Nothing can stop the chain reaction. IF #) The secret of the indestructible General fProducts hull is being advertised for sale. General Products' human representatives will collect bids for one year, no bid to be on the ground floor, folks. #) Nobody knows anything. That's what's causing most of the panic. It's been a month since a puppeteer was seen on any known world. Why did they drop so suddenly out of interstellar affairs? I know. I n twenty thousand years a flood of radiation will wash over this region of space. Thirty thousand light-years may seem a long, safe distance, but it isn't, not with this big an explosion. I've asked. The Core explosion will make this galaxy uninhabitable to any known form of life. Twenty thousand years is a long time. It's four times as long as human written history. We'll all be less than dust before things get dangerous, and I for one am not going to worry about it. But the puppeteers are different. They're scared. They're getting out right now. Paying off their penalty clauses and buying motors and other equipment to put in their industructtible hulls will take so much money that even confiscating my puny salary would have been a step to the good. Interstellar business can go to hell; from now on the puppeteers will have no time for anything but running. Where will they go? Well, the galaxy is surrounded by a halo of small globular clusters. The ones near the rim might be safe. Or the puppeteers may even go as far as Andromeda. They have the Long Shot for exploring, if they come back for it, and they can build more. Outside the galaxy is space empty enough even for a puppeteer pilot, if he thinks his species is threatened. It's a pity. This galaxy will be dull without puppeteers. Those two-headed monsters were not only the most dependable faction in interstellar business; they were like water in a wasteland of more-or-less humanoids. It's too bad they aren't brave, like us. But is it? I never heard of a puppeteer refusing to face a problem. He may merely be deciding how fast to run, but he'll never pretend the problem isn't there. Sometime within the next twenty millenia, we humans will have to move a population which alHow? To where? When should we start thinking about this? When the glow of the Core begins to shine through the dust clouds? Maybe men are the cowards --      IF  Feature Our Man in Fandom gives us another short couse in How to Be Fannish! More Nutty Fannish Slang L ast month, this column was devoted to science fiction's answer to the National Trivia Test, the fannish lingo. If you're still with us lafter that guided tour through the brain-wringing byways of sciencefiction slang, get set for some more of the same. Fans have always been prone to picking up catch-ptoases and intriguing terms from their favorite reading matter. The late E.E. Smith ("Doc" Smith to his thousands of friends) was a fertile source for this sort of thing. In one or another of the six books that make up his supernovel, the "Lensman" series, Kimball Kinnison and his chums used a sort of "future slang" that was probably the first such ever attempted in science fiction. Remember? -- "QX" (okay); "she was a blinding flash and a deafening retort -- a real seven-sector call-out" (she was a rather attractive young woman); "let's flit, ace" (shall we go, pal?); "by Klono's iridium intestines!" (gee whiz); "I check you to nineteen decimals" (you are correct); and much more. Other terms were picked up from the science-fiction writers. In last month's installment of this column, I discussed L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's "Yngvi is a louse!" a catchy nonsense-phrase from their famous fantasy novel. The Incomplete Enchanter, Popular British science-fiction writer, Eric Frank Russell, has also contributed to the fannish slanguage... or slannish fanguage, whichever you prefer. In this novel Dreadful Sanctuary, one major scene hinges on the interesting and sort of philosophical phrase "How do you know you're sane?" which promptly turned up in fanzines for years and years as a put-down or a one-up. But nonsense, or seeming nonsense, remains the most popular form of fan slang. Old time sf writer Miles J. Breuer wrote a story around the phrase "The Gostak distims the doshes." This phrase was never explained in Breuer's charming little Lewis Carroll type story, so the fans rushed in where Breuer feared to tread. The Fancy do pedia -- which is just what it sounds like it is -- defined this Breuerism for all time: Gostak: that by which the doshes are distimmed. distimming: that which characterizes the relation of the Gostak to the doshes (.v.) doshes: those which are distimmed by the Gostak. So much for "real" nonsense. Now for that which just seems to be nonsensical, but actually makes sense if you are In. For example, dyktawo? -- which sounds like it ought to be a word in High Barsoomian, but isn't. This is naught but a simple acronym. ("Acronym" -- that's not a specimen of fan slang, gang, but a word you can look up in a "real" dictionary.) Twenty-some years ago, back during the late, unlamented Unpleasantness, when fans trying to buy mimeograph paper, stencils and other necessities of life found themselves smack up against the paper shortage, their howls of frustrated fanac (fan activity -- like, say, publishing fanzines) came up against the bland wartime store owners': "Don't you know there's a war on?" As the Duration wore on -- and on -- this simple but maddening phrase became so noisomely familiar it was condensed into the acronym dyktawo?, which became an all-purpose answer to just about any complaint. So convenient was this unanswerable answer to all plaints, that its use continued even after the war ended -- with a minor variant in meaning -- as, "Don't you know there's a war overT Another acronym is yhos. It may sound like one of Lovecraft's evil gods, but it derives from the oldstyle closing of a letter, just before the signature: "Your humble, obedient servant," and the fans used it as a synonym for "me." Twonk's Disease, and other Afflictions T hen there's the word gafia -- a psychic ill to which most fanzine publishers are prone. A fan who has not published an issue of his fanzine for quite some time is said to have fallen prey to this loathesome disease, namely gafiation. Oh, I guess it's not really as bad as it sounds, for someone who is gafiating is merely succumbing to a desire to "get away from it all" -- another smarty-pants acronym! In recent years, it has given rise to the fannish farewell, "See ya later, gafiator!" Another fannish disease, to which the skills of Dr. Spock, Dr. Salk and ,the Mayo Clinic combined could find no cure, is snearyism. This prevalent ill gained its name from its foremost proponent, a witty and lovable fan named Rick Sneary out in South Gate who ust to rite lettors to the science fictian maggazins thet wer spelt lik this. His misspellings were so constant and so unpredictable that a movement was once afoot to raise a fund and buy him a dictionary. Rick replied, affably: "I done need a dictonary. Whot I need is a secratery." And then, of course, there's the most horrendous of all ills -- Twonk's Disease. Nobody knows what it is, exactly, but it's the ultimate of all human (including fannish) afflictions. Two other afflictions rival even Twonk's Disease in their magnitude and horrendousness. These are called Neohood and Completism, Completism sometimes strikes an aged or elderly fan. You never know just when the condition may arise. There you are, going merrily along reading and collecting the sciencefiction magazines and purchasing an occasional hardcover book... and all of a sudden your eyes glaze, your hands begin to twitch with uncontrollable greed... and you realize in your collection. Every single sf paperback and hardcover ever published... a copy of every single issue of every single last science-fiction or fantasy magazine ever printed, in America or England or wherever... gakk! You are a Compietist... ; poor slob! Neohood is worse in some ways, buf it's curable in that you eventually outgrow it, whereas the collector's lust toward Completism is never satisfied. This ailment strikes at young, over-enthusiastic neofans, who are (as the term implies) new come to the fan ranks. They tend to be boisterous and boresome, frantically collecting autographs and writing endless (and pointless) letters to people of stellar magnitude, like Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, for no better reason than to boast to their friends they have received letters from Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Oh, well, I guess it's a Step up from collecting bubble gum cards. The Great Staple War, dnd Others W "ay back in #, when we were very young, a chap with the unlikely name of "Bob Tucker" announced the formation of a Society For The Prevention of Wire Staples in Science Fiction Magazines. Recruits flocked to the banner of the Cause... well, they got # members, anyway. This organization, which was known rather bafflingly ly" because the initials just don't match the name), launched some ingenious idea like substituting rubber staples in place of the wire variety, or sticking the science-fiction magazines together with chewing gum (a different flavor for each month... and if the magazine is so crummy you can't read it, by golly you can chew it.) The fanzines devoted to their Cause, some of which were held together by brads, others were sewn with white that the old abbreviation for science fiction was "stf" (short for "scienti fiction") it all comes out right. -- Editor. IF silk thread, and so on : -- including one issue of Tucker's magazine which was fastened with a strip of gummy black bicycle tape up the left side. At last the superfan of the hour, Don Wollheim, could endure no more. He founded a counter-organization yclept the International and Allied Organizations for the Purpose of Upholding and Maintaining the Use of Metallic Fasteners in Science Fiction Pubhcations in the United States of America, Unlimited. This Thus, with the roll of drums and the flourish of trumpets, was launched The First Great Staple War. With Wollheim as Grand High Cocolor um and crony Kenneth Sterling as Exalted Grand Booleywag of the military force was formed, called the Ultra-Violet Shirt Sho(ked Troops, which published their official propaganda publication, known as The Polymorphanucleated LeucocytCf which denounced the policies advocated by Tucker as Dictator of Robert W. Lowndes (since editor of several science-fiction magazines), who rejoiced in the title of Royal Pill Roller. Wollheini issued proposals which went beyond mere advocacy of the use of humdrum wire staples. He actually suggested The Platinum Plan, under which system the sf magazines were urged to use staples fashioned of pure platinum, the idea being that, after the reader had finished with an issue he could then pry out the precious staples and sell the metal for many times what he paid for the magazine. This scheme, of course, would make for a sciencefiction boom as soon as The General Public caught on. Countless thousands would storm the newstands to buy science-fiction magazines, which in no time at all would be outselhng even the Reader s Digest from coast to coast. Then there was another conflict called the Great Stationery Duel, but this was a "local" war between two fans only. Jack Speer and Dick Wilson challenged each other to a contest in which each was to write to the other using a different letterhead or kind of stationery in each letter, and the first who gave out was defeated. Both fans are said to have developed very specialized forms of advanced kleptomania during the course of the war, snitching letterhead from motels, hotels, offices and so on. They worked out a fantastically elaborate code of rules as to just what was "a different type of stationery". The code forbade the purchase of stationery for duelling uses. For a time they bombarded each other with curt missives written on the letterhead of this or that plumber, sanitary engineer, junk collector or dentist, until eventually one member of the contest gave out (I can't say whether he succumbed to an attack of gafia or what); whereupon the survivor (Speer) was challenged to a continuation of the battle by Harry Warner, Jr., and for all I know the fearful combat may still be blazing away via the courtesy of IF  Novelette Who were these enemies of Gree who baffled even more fiercely against Gree's desperate foes? I in their hulls. On some of them, the Sign of Gree was still resolvable -- T he wan bluish light of a distant four vertical bars plus a horizontal sun highlighted scratches in the one at the base, sticking out to one clear plastic of the spacebag and cast side, to represent a humanoid hand, harsh shadows of the metal hubs. Scattered among and about the dead Steve Duke, squinting through the hulls were tiny dots that would be bag's small" telescope, twisted a spacebags like his own, each bearing vernier to recenter it upon the cluster a Slave Warrior survivor. Or, in some of dust motes off to one side. cases, dead ones. They were derelicts, all right -- He raised to his mouth an object fourteen scoutships floating in aimlike a very fat metal pencil and spoke less paths, jagged black holes agape into it. "Colonel Duke here. I was too far way to see all Fd have liked, but the ambush was pretty much like the one Fazzool described. The Remm Task Force spaced in, launched a salvo, nulled immediately, spaced in on the opposite side, launched another and nulled again. I emphasize: they were out of, into, out of and back into null again, all within four seconds. The Gree scoutship squadrons had to sacrifice themselves to give Gree capital ships time to build up nulling charges. If the Remm had appeared again with a third salvo from another angle, they'd have really clobbered the Gree main force. Maybe they couldn't, or maybe they didn't want to risk their own ships. As it was, several Gree heavies took hits but escaped. "Fazzool's report was correct. The Remm are able to null the same ship at least three times in quick succession. These were not, repeat not, two duplicate forces. I saw minor damage taken the first time they popped out, and it was there when they came back. "In view of our previous disastrous attempts to contact the Remm, I'm adopting my primary plan of posing as a Gree Slave Warrior and being taken prisoner. My priorities will be as follows: One, learn how the Remm null without the delay to build up charges; Two, pinpoint the Remm home region; Three, if the Remm are reasonable beings, initiate contact. "A fourth objective will be to learn why the Remm are skirmishing with the Gree Empire, and a fifth will be to learn, if possible, what happened to Fazzool. But these and any other intelligence will be conditional upon my getting the priMity information and bringing or sending it out. "I am going to join the Slaves now. I'll use my old name of Jen, in case I look familiar to anyone, but I won't let the Jen personality surface. Ends." He twisted one end of the metal object, pushed it from him, and put his hands over his ears. Even so, the implosion was loud as it nulled away. Then he slewed the bag around and applied drive toward the derelicts. Before he got there, one of the Remm ships suddenly appeared a few miles beyond, and he got his first good look at it. I t was quite impractical from the familiar standpoints of construction and repair. Instead of being an end-to-end stack of flat cylinders, like the ships of Gree or his own side, it consisted of two huge globes, fixed together at a separation of about one radius by three triangularly spaced booms or tubes. Those -- if he were judging distance and size right -- would be thick enough to enclose not only passageways but compartments. Nowhere upon the ship could he see weld-lines; it must have been cast integrally or poured in perfectly blending increments. Suddenly he realized he could see stars through one of the globes. There were no outlines within; just the translucent globe, with the brighter stars beyond gleaming through it. The other globe was quite opaque. The Gree survivors near him were making hasty hand signals back and forth. One, a Gunner Third (the same rank Steve had attained as a Gree Slave) but a B'lant, not a human, signaled, "We could try to reach one of the derelicts and find some operable weapon." Another of the gray-skinned, hairless humanoids replied, "Futile. We'd be incinerated before we moved ten yards. Better to be taken and tell the Goodness and Might of Gree to these foolish strangers." Steve was happy to see the latter viewpoint prevail. The huge ship moved slowly toward them. On one side of one obe, an opening suddenly appeared. Since it was just big enough to admit a bag comfortably, the meaning was obvious. Like well trained Slave Warriors, the drifting survivors began to maneuver their bags into a file, in rough order of rank. That made Steve hustle to take his place near the front. There were sixty-odd in the line (other bags, holding inert bodies, drifted away) of which only two other than Steve were men. He counted seventeen of the leatherskinned B'lant. All the rest were Sabrils -- tall, slope-shouldered, dark blue. Sabrils were good fighting stock, but emotional and not very logical. They seldom reached the top Slave ranks and consequently now formed the rear of the line. The first bags were entering the huge  ship. Steve, in his turn, maneuvered through the hole. T he cubicle compartment could occupy only a small sector of the vast globe; nevertheless, the spacebags floated in it without crowding. The last Sabril came in, and the opening vanished. Now there was diffuse light from several sources. Artificial gravity came on, very weak at first so that the bags settled slowly to the "floor". At the same time, Steve noticed that his bag was less rigid, which meant atmosphere was building up in the compartment. By the time he was down, the bag was quite limp. A voice, with a liquid, unfamiliar accent but speaking fair B'lant, boomed loud enough to be heard through the plastic, 'The air is breathable. Leave your bags. All weapons, including knives, must be left in them. Go, one at a time, through the door that appears, and walk along the corridor. You will be automatically photographed as you walk. By the time you are assembled again you will be over the planet where you are to be interned. If you co-operate, you will not be harmed." Steve unsealed one hub of his bag, laid it carefully inside and squirmed out the opening. He stood, unobtrusively checking over his Gree uniform to make sure it was correct. There was a buzz of talk now, as other prisoners emerged from their bags -- some of it in B'lant; some in Sabril. He met the eyes of a B'lant Gunner, Third, and to avoid talk made a gesture of resignation. When the door appeared it was as suddenly and as unpredictably as the outside opening. He took his place in line and walked along the corridor. Near the end of that he had the mild momentary sensation of discontinuity that meant they had nullIF xw jumped. It happened again as he emerged into a big room, and a third time a little later. The door closed behind the last of the prisoners. The artificial gravity was steadily growing. It must be nearly one and one-third Ter ran G now, and the Sabrils were showing discomfort. Steve looked around him. Three walls of the room were lined by low, very broad stools -- circular, a good five feet across, three-legged and roughly made from some hard wood. They looked quite new. Without waiting for invitations, he walked over and sat down opposite where the door had been. Others followed suit. He avoided looking at any of them too long. The less he talked, the better; it had been several years since he'd spent any length of time with Gree Slaves. Twenty minutes by his chronometer passed. Then, above where the door had been, a big section of metal bulkhead vanished. Recessed a few inches was a viewscreen showing rugged mountains, seen from above, slowly drifting. That went on for a few minutes, then the scene began to expand as if the ship were dropping. He heard from somewhere the thrumming of air on a hull. The alien voice suddenly spoke again. "You will see your prison valley. It will not be luxurious, but you can live there until your future is decided. Escape on foot will be impossible. There is nowhere to go. When we land, you are to stay in a group apart from the prisoners already there, until we have interrogated each of you briefly. Then you will be permitted to join them." T he scene swelled and the valley became visible. It might, Steve judged, be ten miles long or more, roughly oval, with a river splitting it and a small lake at the lower end. Most of it was grassy, but thick growths of trees lined the river, and a few small tributaries, surrounded the lake ,and covered the lower mountain slopes around the spot. ' They were still moving laterally. Now they passed over a herd of grazing animals which, judging by the size relative to the trees, must be fifteen feet long, low-built, with four pairs of legs each. They gave the impression of giant caterpillars, but looked vertebrate. Then a stretch of grass and suddenly, near the river at the valley's upper end, a cluster of huts with tiny humanoid figures about them. The grass had been cleared, as if they'd been here for some time. There were campfires -- startling in their brightness, for the screen's intensity was turned up -- in what seemed to be a pattern of sentry-posts around the encampment. Now that he noticed, there were virtually no shadows in the valley. It must be dawn or dusk. The ship was down to a few hundred feet when the humanoids on the ground began to look up. Then, singly and in small groups, they drifted toward what must be the landing-spot. The screen went off, and the wall reappeared. Now the ship settled slowly, hung, and touched down. Another wait, then an exit appeared. IF Steve queued up, stepped out onto grass -- no cleared field -- and noted that the gravity matched the ship's. That had been deliberate, then. The mountains around the valley were higher even than they'd looked, and the only daylight was a strong glow above them, to one side. The sky, in the other direction, was deep blue. Stars hung like multicolored lanterns. He gave a second startled look at them. Some of the reddish ones showed actual disks! They'd nulled into a very dense star-cluster. The alien voice warned again, "Stay in a group. You may call to the others, but if you attempt to mingle with them you will be shot." The prisoners from the camp were still a hundred yards away, approaching slowly. It was about that moment that Steve realized the bulk looming behind him was not the huge doubleglobe ship, but a much smaller cylindrical craft. It must have been inside the big one. At some time, maybe in leaving the first compartment, they'd entered it without knowing. He turned to watch the approaching mob. A hundred or more, not counting sentries left behind at the camp -- Sabrils, B'lant, a few men, in about the same proportion as his own group; plus a few thick-muscled Gjiss to whom this gravity was like home. Most wore Gree uniforms, more or less deteriorated; some wore crude leather garments. A few carried bows with nock arrows and were alert, as if there might be dangerous animals in the valley. His eyes fell upon a B'lant in very old boots, short trousers cut from a uniforni, and a thin leather jerkin. The blunt gray features weren't much different from any B'lant's, but Steve's pulse leaped. Fantastic -- Fazzool's being here! Suspicious, even! But maybe not. Fazzool's sketchy report had said the Remm seemed not to have much of a foothold in this part of the galaxy (if, indeed, they were a large empire anywhere). Quite possibly -- almost certainly, reasoning by probability -- if he and Fazzool had both been brought here, this was the only prison camp they had. He made a small sign that Fazzool would see, then turned away. II T he Remm voice said, "Wait." Still the captors didn't show themselves. Now there was shouted communication between the prisoners, but Steve did not take part. He was busy studying the alien ship. Like the big one, it was of smooth metal, all in one piece. He could see no openings; not even the one from which he'd emerged. He supposed they might open weapon-ports wherever they wished. He turned his attention to the valley. The grass was short but quite thick and green. It, or the ground, smelled slightly dank. He bent to feel of it. The ground was moist. Also, it was warm. Maybe, then, this was a hotter climate than he'd guessed from the valley's greenness. He looked at the glow above the mountains, trying to see whether it had grown brighter or dimmer. He couldn't tell. However -- if he didn't imagine it -- the glow had moved laterally. As time passed, he was certain. That, then, was the planet's sun -- but it wasn't rising or setting. He was near one of the poles. But the glow was moving pretty fast. He estimated degrees as well as he could and came up with a planetary rotation of ten or twelve hours. The ground's warmth, then, was volcanic, or simply warmth from a hot core. So -- near a pole or not (the south one, observing the sun-glow's direction of movement) -- the valley was livable, though the gravity would be a nuisance. With that thought, his situation suddenly bothered him. If they simply dumped him here, how was he going to learn anything about them? His orders were explicit, and the reason behind them good. He daren't reveal his true alliance, and Fazzool's, until he knew about them. So far, they'd been very trigger-happy; and the Effogan forces, hastily scraped together from inadequate bits, had a desperate enough task resisting Gree. He had to 'get out of the valley, and get Fazzool out, too. Even with the B'lant patience, Fazzool was no doubt almost wild. Like the others, he was sitting now. Then someone spotted two aircars coming down. The new craft were grav-driven cargo types, like fifty-foot boxes with clear windshields at one end for the pilots. They landed a little beyond the spaceship. Hatches (no magic openings this time, but ordinary, mechanically controlled doors) opened. Creatures spilled out. It wasn't until Steve saw that they wore hand-guns and took up regular guard-positions that he realized these were the Remm. They were not humanoid. He ignored the shiver along jiis spine and studied the nearest one. T he Remm was compact but muscular enough to weigh three times as much as a man. His body was like some bunchy feline's, except that the tail was only two feet long and rather clubby. The forelegs were wider-set and heavier than the hind ones, no doubt to carry the weight of the very thick, two-foothigh neck that thrust up above the wide chest. Maybe neck wasn't the word, for, Just below the broad head, a pair of short muscular arms grew. They seemed to have more than two joints and ended in blunt strong hands of two fingers and a thumb each. The claws on the hands were trimmed, which was not true of the four feet. The wide head had a good braincase and a short muzzle that showed carnivore's teeth. The eyes were wide apart, slitted, deep-set, yellow irised, round-pupiled, intelligent. The creature had short thick fur, nearly black in the poor light, and wore nothing except a belt around the base of the neck, to carry a bolstered energy-pistol. The others looked identical and behaved like a military squad. They IF hardly needed to draw the pistols -- espe(y as they moved very easily in this valley's gravity. A voice from one of the aircars -- Remm, but speaking much better B'lant than the other one -- said, "Line up by seniority and enter the rear hatch one at a time as called." Steve let the B'lant Gunners, Third, go ahead of him. The first was only in the cargo van five minutes, then he emerged from a side door and walked in silence toward the crowd of earlier prisoners. That pattern continued until it was Steve's turn. He stepped in and halted with sudden dismay. The white-enameled door facing him bore the Sign of Gree. It was that of an Inquisition Booth. Then he realized the Remm must have captured it and adapted it for their own interrogating. He moved forward, the door opened and he stepped in. is Gree?" ff The Voice was studiedly deep, fatherly, reassuring. Steve knew there were subtle drugs in the air of the Booth. The Jen personality in him welled up, brought a sob to his throat, tried to surface. He fought it down. ThisT was no time to get mired in that bog. Suddenly, he realized this was his chance. He had to go through the Litany, of course -- as any Gree Slave would -- but he let his voice sound surly. "Gree is Love. Gree is Protection. Gree is Wisdom; the only Sustenance." The Booth definitely hesitated before resuming the ritual. He made the responses listlessly, hoping the real anxiety in his mind wouldn't be mistaken for the loyal emotions. Another wait, while the mechanical perceptors probed him, then the exit door opened. In the darkness beyond, the side hatch of the cargo van yawned. Hope falling,, he walked slowly toward it. But there was a ripple of liquid syllables outside, and one of the alien guards gestured unmistakably that Steve was to precede him to the other aircar. The rearmost compartment of this one was well lit (but with makeshift lighting) and furnished with two of the low broad stools. On one reclined a Remm. The creature gestured to the other stool. "Sit, if you wish." Steve sat, and heard the hatch close behind him. This Remm, he thought, was the one whose voice had come from the other aircar -- at least, the B'lant was as good. This one's fur was shaggier than that of the guards, touched with gray around the muzzle and the tips of the small erect ears and around the claws of all four feet. He wore no weapon. In place of the holster with a small medallion of some silvery medal. The alien studied him a minute, glancing at the Gunner, Third, insignia below the Gree symbol on the breast of Steve's uniform. "What is your name?" "Jen," Steve lied. The next question startled him. "Are you one of the Overseer race?" "Why... of course not. They don't look at all like me." The Remm shifted its weight, like some great feline. "We have never seen an Overseer. But you are no ordinary Slave; you did not respond emotionally to the Booth. Why?" Steve tried to hide his excitement. "The Booths are a fraud. Especially when they're stolen by enemies." The Remm's teeth showed in what might be a smile. "All the Slaves we have tested in the Booth showed the emotional response, except you. If you realize the Booths are a fraud, you must have similar ideas about some of the other nonsense." Steve growled, "You're not going to trap me into treason." The Remm said reasonably, "Since you've seen through the frauds, whether you admit it or not, you must realize that the whole aim of Gree is conquest, using you as dupes. Consider how readily you're sacrificed, while the Overseers are carefully guarded. The loyalty of that race has been purchased, and the payment continues. If you're worried about comrades, or about worlds that are dear to you, be assured we mean no aggressive war on the Gree Empire. We were attacked without warning, and are only raiding to learn what we need to know to defend ourselves. Help us, and we'll give you freedom. Luxury. Even deliver you to some free world if it's within our power to do so. The alternative is this prison valley. You'll find it very dull." Steve avoided the alien's eyes. "No one likes to be a traitor." "Consider this," the Remm said. "The longer it takes us to learn what we must know, the more raids we'll have to make. You'll be helping your fellow Slaves of the Empire by helping us." S teve pretended to mull that over. Finally he said, "How do I know you're only defending yourselves? You might be worst tyrants than -- " He pretended to break off in confusion. The alien's teeth showed again. "Than Gree?" Steve averted his eyes. "Yes." He let a minute pass, then looked up. "What would I have to do?" "First of all," the Remm said, "We'll take you to another place where we can talk at more leisure, and you'll be more comfortable. Understand, you really don't have any choice. Aside from torture or drugs, we have only to play back your responses to the Booth, and this conversation, for your fellow prisoners. They'd fear you to bits. But we'd rather not." Steve let himself look a little frightened. "Well..." The Remm got to his feet and hopped lightly off the broad stool. "I'm glad you're being intelligent. Do you think any others of the new arrivals have similar thoughts?" Steve -- though he knew he was being impulsive -- jumped at the chance. "I don't know. None of them are from my ship. But there's one of the older prisoners -- I just happened to catch a glimpse of him -- whom I used to know. And he..." The Remm waited a moment, then asked, "What's his name?" "Fazzool." The alien looked at him so long IF Steve began to wonder if he'd stepped into a Finally the teeth showed again. "Perhaps I'll talk to him. By the way, I am called Egral. I am in charge of all prisoner interrogation." m A lone in the cargo compartment during a long flight, Steve had nothing to do but think. If the valley were the Remm's only prison camp (for Gree Slaves, at least) then he was probably on the way now to some Remm base. Once he saw that, he might be considered as knowing too much. Certainly he wouldn't be allowed to rejoin the other Slaves. Obviously the reason for flying the Interrogation setup to the valley was to keep them in ignorance of the base. He didn't expect it to be much of an establishment. The crude wooden stools (designed for Remm, not humanoids) were one bit of evidence. They'd certainly not come from a sawmill. Probably they'd been made from slabs cut with a laser tool, then scraped with some metal blade. The huts in the valley were of similar lumber. And these aircars -- if he knew the indications, they were actually cargo-lighters from a spaceship. So the planet wasn't settled. He hoped he hadn't put Fazzool in a jam. Hours passed. They were travelling fast; hundreds of miles must have unreeled by now. He was hungry and thirsty, and it had been quite a while since he slept. He tried that now, couldn't. The aircar hurtled on. He thought they might have gone several thousand miles before the speed slackened and the craft slanted down. They landed, and, stiff from sitting, he got up, impatient for the hatch to open. It was then he realized he wa# no longer in heavy gravity. It was less than one G now. He stood, one hand resting on a bulkhead, and pondered. Surely this cargo tub didn't have artificial gravity. Then were they inside a ship? No; there had been the airstream on the hull. The hatch opened, and he saw stony ground, faintly lit by starlight or weak artificial light. As he stepped out the first thing that took his eyes was one of the huge doubleglobe ships, looming behind some buildings that were only dimly lit and almost as crude as the huts, though bigger. Barracks, he thought. A larger one that was probably a hangar seemed put together from sections of curved ships' hulls. T he base was in a fairly narrow river valley, and other ships or buildings might be hidden behind a curve, but the place didn't have that feel. There were sounds of hammering and the intermittent rasp of an arc welder or cutting-torch. A few Remm loped about silently, wraithlike in the semidarkness. The stars were the same close-in ones, tending to red, he'd seen from the valley. That they didn't dazzle his eyes more now, at night, meant there was nebular-cloud matter partially obscuring them, which was normal for such a dense cluster. On both slopes of the canyon. islands of primitive incandescent bulbs were no doubt weapons emplacements. Not heavy stuff, to fight off attacks from space, but light missile-launchers or beamers, for repelling ground attack or atmospheric bombers. They could prevent capture of the base, but not its destruction. Of course, there might be heavier stuff out of sight. Or the big ships might launch the ground-to-space missiles. He hadn't much time to see more, because Egral emerged from the pilot's compartment of the aircar and hustled him to one of the wooden buildings. "I'll arrange a bath and something to shave with and send food to your room. Will a sleepingpad be all right? We don't have accommodations here for humanoids." Steve said tiredly, "A pad will be fine." They locked him in, of course, and he could hear a guard in the corridor outside. But the freshlycooked meat was good, only a little gamey, and the boiled grain with it wasn't bad, and the bath (in what looked like half a missile-case) was hot; and the sleeping-pad was better than various things he'd slept on. He didn't even lie awake worrying. The five or six hours of night seemed gone in an instant. Egral gave him a few minutes to dress, then hurried him to the other end ofthe building. "Wendar, who wants to talk to you, is one of the two top aides to the Commanding Officer of this region." W endar' s desk was metal and probably taken from some ship. It was ordinary except that it was low and of a size for the short Remm arms. The seat behind it was one of the squat stools, upon which Wendar sprawled casually. He wore no clothing, but had one of the medallions. His fur was definitely graying, and his teeth, when they showed, were yellow and worn down. He eyed Steve for a moment, then essayed B'lant: "I not strong in your speak. Egral will... go between." He put his stubby hands on the deskedge and shifted his weight on the stool, rumbling liquid Remm speech meanwhile. Egral translated, "Are you ready to help us without reservation?" Steve muttered, "Yes." Egral's next translation was longer. "It is desirable that we capture one or more Overseers. Can you tell us how to do that without a serious battle?" Steve felt dismay. That would take a lot of scheming and spying and preparation. "I can tell you," he said hesitantly, "where to find important bases, reckoning from where I was captured. But to take an Overseer..." The older Remm's look was contemptuous, his question gruffer. Egral rendered it as, "Are you afraid to betray an Overseer?" "No. But they're well protected. Command ships don't expose themselves." Egral translated Wendar's further growl as, "Those ships that are not commanded by Overseers -- how do they navigate? Who operates their computers?" "Why," Steve said, "unless they're IF locked into central control by a Command Ship, Computer Techs operate them. Haven't you captured apy?" After a moment he risked, "Why is it necessary to capture an Overseer?" The two Remm conferred. Wendar growled in B'lant, "Slaves work on computers?" "Certainly. I know some computer technology myself, though it isn't my specialty." There was another conference, more animated, then Egral asked, "Could you do anything with a computer that's programmed in the Overseer language?" "Why, I -- " Steve broke off, thinking hard. "Is it possible you only want an Overseer so you can learn his language?" They both eyed him, silently and with hostility now. His blood pumped faster. If he handled this right... "Slaves are not supposed to know any of that language, but it happens that I was in a situation once wh#re I learned some of it, secretly. I think... that may have been the start of my doubts." The effect on the aliens was startling. Wendar was up in a flash, forepaws oh the edge of the desk, hands clenched. He spewed Remm. Egral, tail lashing, said hurriedly, "This we vow. If you will translate certain memory banks into B'lant, you will receive the best treatment we can give you! You will not be asked to betray your Empire further. And we will pledge our honor not to take any aggressive action that is not forced upon us." Steve, his feelings mixed, faced them. It was not his aim to bring; about any truce between them and Gree. But he had a solid fulcrun now, if he could apply the leverage right. He said slowly, "I would need someone who knew the actual science of computers better than I." He looked at Egral. "That B'lant I mentioned..." Egral was suddenly motionless, eyes intent, teeth showing in the Remm smile. Presently he purred something to Wendar. Wendar considered and grunted a reply. Egral said, "Yes, Fazzool. He is on his way here already. When he arrives, I think we shall take another little trip. But I warn you. Though we have been lenient with you prisoners until now, we are not squeamish in punishing trickery. Do not attempt it." Steve, furious at himself, said nothing. Why did he always have to push things so? Now Egral was definitely suspicious. And Steve's gambit had been unnecessary. IV #omrade." Fazzool's voice was  quiet, but there was emotion in his head-clasp. They were in the cargo van of another aircar, hurtling somewhere. Steve didn't care whether there were listening devices; he and the B'laiit could talk in English, guardedly. The gray-skinned humanoid grinned. "I did not expect to be removed from ze valley so soon." "Maybe it was too soon," Steve said glumly. "They're suspicious now." Fazzool shrugged. "Anyone must be suspicious, dealing wiz strangers. Ze question is, what do zese creatures want here? And where is here?" Steve began almost to wish Egral did understand some English. It would be amusing to swap information with Fazzool, without giving Egral any. "In a dense star cluster, somewhere." "Zat is certainly true; and zey must know zere way in it, or nulling would be suicide. But I mean, on zis planet. I have not been out of ze valley before. Ze gravity... I will swear it is getting steadily less, as we travel. If it were equatorial spin..." Steve shook his head. "Haven't you seen the sun today? It's still not going to get much above the horizon. Anyway, it would take a rotation several times faster to offset gravity to this extent. Well, aside from that. What do you make of things? Pretty primitive in some ways, eh?" "Zey did not act primitive in ze battle when I was captured." Steve grinned inwardly. So Fazzool, too, had posed as a Gree Slave Warrior. "I got the same impression. So this is a trivial base for them." "Unless," Fazzool said, "all zat is just stage dressing. I do not see, zo, why zey should care to fool prisoners." "Maybe," Steve said, "there is someone else they want to fool. It would be unwise to judge them on the basis of rough lumber." Fazzool would get the message. They were still not to reveal their own true connections until they learned more about the Remm. Fazzool grinned, rather widely for a B'lant. The flight stretched on. For a time it sounded as if they flew through rain or hail. Outside, it must be night again, by Steve's chronometer. After some hours a sniall hatch slid open, and Egral peered back at them. "We still have a way to go. Do you want some cold meat? I cannot offer you any of the grain; we have some along but there is no way to cook it." "The meat will be fine," Steve said. He and Fazzool chewed on it and talked innocently in B'lant of past campaigns, of the Hive World where they'd met and competed in the training-games and finally won their way to the Advanced Academy, of comrades who were gone. Finally the aircar began to descend. It landed, there was a short wait, yellow sunlight poured in. Steve, blinking, tried to see his chronometer. It shouldn't be morning yet. But it was. He unkinked hims elf and stepped out, realizing as he did that the gravity couldn't be as much as half a G. G rass had been scythed down to form a tan matting. Fifty yards from the aircar, untouched grass stood shoulder-high, thick and lushly green. He could smell it, slightly musty but sweet. Insects like dragonflies with eight-inch wings flapped leisurely above it. He filled his lungs with the air. The pressure was the same as in the prison valley. With a planet hold an atmosphere? Maybe surface gravity like this, how did a this gravity and that nearer the poles averaged out. Which reminded him to check the sun. It still wasn't much above the horizon, though air and grass were dry enough to suggest it had been up a while. Egral appeared and led the way around the aircar, four armed Remm falling in behind Steve and Fazzool, and Steve saw why he'd been brought here. At the limit of the clearing, near a tremendous wall or forest, lay a spaceship. It was a large auxiliary of some kind, compK)sed in the orthodox way of five sections, each a flat cylinder. The Sign of Gree was prominent on its hull. At least two of the sections were holed. It had never been heavily armed, and now what gunports it had were empty. The trees beyond towered hundreds of feet, well foliaged in light green, vaguely pinelike but with globular crowns at the top. They were not close-packed, letting considefable yellow sunlight into the forest. Parasite plants of various colors grew in them; vines sent long roots to the ground. Huge birds flapped about lazily, with low hoarse cries. Steve looked around for signs of battle.' NQne. He said to Fazzool in English, "Probably captured and brought here. The drive being damaged, they landed it where the gravity was light." Fazzool nodded. "But what type is it? I see no cargo hatches. And zose gunports -- not quite right, eh?" Egral, annoyed, dropped back beside them. "If you're discussing the ship, it was k training vessel for Overseers. There's material in it in the Overseer language that you're to translate. Also damage to some of the memory-banks must be repaired." "Oh!" Steve studied the ship as they walked toward it. He knew Fazzool would be wondering the same thing he was -- just what did the Remm want so badly to know? There were Remm watching from various of the ship's gunports, but nowhere did he see any weapons larger than hand guns. Schemes began stirring in his mind. Suppose he could actually get control of the ship -- seal it up, a few compartments at least, and null it away somewhere? Would the Remm be that foolish? What if Fazzool were right and this were all a fake? Suppose they deliberately let Steve (presuming him to be a loyal Gree partisan after all, if not a Slave) steal the ship and bring a Gree Task Force to the spot? The seemingly unsettled planet might erupt with weapons. There was that anomalous gravity... Far-fetched, but possible. They neared the ship. A small hatch, about thirty feet above ground in the curve of the middle section, ' opened. Several Remm began manually letting down a board ramp. Rough lumber again. Why not simply a ladder? Then Steve remembered that the Remm weren't built for ladders. Guards, after a short conference with Egral, conducted them via corridors and one elevator to the control room. Steve noticed that regular IF ship's lighting was on, which meant it had at least some power. Another guard opened a door, and they stepped into the central control room. There were extra keyboards, no doubt for instructional memorybanks, and whole panels of switches that probably controlled lecture rooms throughout the ship. The two guards remained; and Egral, squatting against the far bulkhead, said, "Somewhere in this maze, unless it's been destroyed by battledamage, is the basic theory, plus practical aspects, of the Gree null system." V S teve, pretty sure by now that Egral understood no English, risked plain talk with Fazzool. "It doesn't make sense. Their null system's obviously superior, yet they're desperate to learn Gree's." Fazzool made a face. "Zey are not idiots. Zere is zomezing in ze Gree system zey haven't got. Well, what do we do?" "Go ahead and start betraying Gree, I suppose," Steve said. "It breaks my heart." He turned to the keyboard they were studying and punched byttons. But he punched a little aberration into the program. A rasp came from a small grille below a viewscreen, then an Overseer voice. "Three-hop training voyage, using one isolated star, one cloud nebula at long range and one correlation of star-charts. Student must -- " The voice faded, came back for a moment, then was lost in a harsh rattle of electronic noise. Steve looked up at Egral. "I'll have to search various alternate circuits." Under cover of that, he moved to the main navigating keyboard, activated it and punched for specific information. He demanded in Overseer, "State of ship's null apparatus and of ship's grav drive Verbal reply only." Back it came promptly: "Null on indefinite stand-by, as ordered by Commanding Officer just prior to ship's disabling. Power leads to accumulators deliberately sabotaged. Ship's grav drive damaged; extent not known." Steve didn't risk more, but turned to Egral. "According to the Main Computer, various things are out of order, including the null apparatus. How did you get her here?" He hop to slip the question by, but Egral showed his teeth in a brief grin. "There is no reason I should not tell you. We used two of our own capital ships to form a null field big enough to englobe this ship." Steve said nothing and pretended to search farther for damage. The technique Egral described was routine. He asked questions of the computers and got answers. Gradually he built up a picture of the damage that existed, but there were important blank spots in the picture. Either he or Fazzool would have to get a chance to go over the ship. Then, given another shot at the control room, they might do many things. Suppose, instead of nulling away, they merely locked hatches so they were alone with Egral? Could they oveioome him? Not likely. Those teeth and claws, and those muscles, weren't for nothing. Lock him in a separate compartment, then, and null Just a little ways; communicate; and, using Egral as a hostage, bargain? Bargaining wasn't indicated yet. And at that moment Egral, a glint in his eyes, said, "Incidentally, we've removed certain things for study, so this ship isn't in flying condition." So much, then, for that scheme. I t took two long sessions for Steve to find the information Egral especially wanted. It was a series of lectures, with diagrams and photos that could be flashed on screens in various classrooms, outlining the theory and practice of the Gree null science. No Slave, even a Drive Tech, would have access to this. Steve knew some of it, and he thought Egral was being naive to assume it could be absorbed quickly. He said so to Fazzool. "Well," the B'lant said, "zat is so, if he expects to absorb it. But he did not say zat. He just said we are to translate it. Would it not be more logical for zem to take ze translation somewhere for study?" "Yeah. I wonder... could you pretend to be looking for damage to the memory-banks and meanwhile find that deliberate break in the power-leads and fix it or be ready to?" "I can pretend, if zey give me ze chance." Steve turned to the Remm who was on guard and said distinctly, "Egral." The alien blinked, hesitated, then waved his pistol for them to precede him. Egral, when they found him, pondered the request. "All right. But there's one of us here who's been studying the circuitry. He'll accompany Fazzool." Fazzool showed no disappointment. He said, "Fair enough," and went with Egral while Steve was escorted back to the control room. O stensibly working at the transliftion, Steve had time to investigate the ship's automatic and remote controls. He could, he decided (though he didn't test it then) open or close all the hatches, turn lights on or off, adjust the air conditioning and do various other things from the control room. He decided to test the Remms' tolerance by activating an outside viewer. The guard, squatting in a corner, was on his feet with a little snarl the instant the viewscreen came on. Steve, pretending casualness, swung the view, showing first the forest, then the clearing with the two aircars in it. One of the big flying insects moved by close to the camera. The Remm guard sat down again. Steve added sound. Egral, when he came in, gave a little purr of surprise. "We thought they were inoperative! But why did you -- " Steve said apologetically, "Testing power leads; they're an awful maze. Is there any objection?" Egral eyed him narrowly. "I think not. In fact, that viewer may be useful. Can you set it to watch the forest?" IF "Why, yes." And Steve did so. Egral was thoughtful for a moment. "I must talk to someone." With a glance at the guard, he left the room. Fazzool returned before the viewer showed night outside. "Oh! Zey. premit zat?" Steve said, "I didn't ask permission first. But now they want the forest watched. Did you see anything that looked like sentries?" "I did indeed. Zere are squads on watch in ports on zat side, wiz searchlights ready." Steve thought that over. "If there's something they're worried about, we'll have to be ready ourselves. What about ship's power?" "Zere are no broken leads zat cannot be repaired fairly easily, and except for grav drive and null, ze ship has power. But ze heavy converters are gone; cut out wiz torches. Zis tub will not fly." "But there's plenty of power for on-the-ground functions?" "Yes." "How about weapons?" "None. But zere is various loose metal. We could make clubs or knives." Steve couldn't help grinning. "A hell, of a way to fight a space war. Well, I've done enough for today." He gestured to the guard. N ow, in a ship's compartment, they had real bunks and bedding. Steve lay in the dark, listening to Fazzool's heavy breathing. Outside the door, a guard's claws occasionally clicked on steel decking. He wasn't happy with the way things were going. It didn't look as if he were going to get off the planet, or even see the Remm base here. And Egral was certainly suspicious. Maybe he even suspected the truth. Adtting knowledge of the Overseer language had been an expedient, and the more Steve thought about it, the less proud bf it he was. The Remm knew ordinary Slaves were carefully kept ignorant of that language. Wasn't it logical then, from their viewpoint, to think Steve was some kind of special commando? By now they'd surely satisfied themselves that he was not of the Overseer race -- close questioning of a Slave would take care of that. But why shouldn't there be individual Slaves elevated to a higher service, secret from the other Slaves? And with that suspicion, it was logical for the Remm to play along, pretending naivete, and perhaps concealing all sorts of resources Steve couldn't imagine. Maybe they had their own viewscreens somewhere in the ship, watching everything. Irritably, he kicked off his blankets and pounded the pillow to make it softer. What did he know about the Remm at all, except that they had two arms and four legs and some unfamiliar ships? Laboriously, he went over fundamentals. One: the Remm were studying Gree war potential. Two: so far, their tactics had been only hit-andrun, to capture Slaves and equipment to study. Three: they hadn't appeared, so far as Steve's side could determine, anywhere but in this limited region, just within the edge of the Grce Empire. Four: their ships and at least some of their technology were radically different. It was tempting to conclude that they came from a long way off and that they'd had no previous contact with Gree. But a long way in what direction? Gree and Effogan scouts had explored, more or less, a sector of the galaxy amounting to about a tenth of the volume. It was supposed to be impossible to null much closer to the nave. And to go around much farther in either direction, and return, would take a fair chunk of a humanoid's lifespan unless one gambled very dangerously on long null-hops. But of course there were many dense star-clusters like this one; especially here, on the naveward edge of the known sector. And if the Remm could navigate in this one safely, they could do so in others. And of course there was the nave itself -- a grinding maelstrom of unknown forces, close-whirling multiple stars, gas clouds already coalescing into new stars and general debris. Theory said it couldn't be navigated. But theory had been wrong before. There wasn't anything he knew to indicate, eidier, that the Remm did or did not plan war against the vast Gree Empire. If they did, they'd need a lot ipore than a few Task Forces using hit-and-run tactics. OoBOter-tac' ics could be worked out. NiiM disadvantage or no, the sheer bu of the Empire was enough to give any strategist fits. Neither had he made any headway in finding out whether the Remm -- presuming, against all credibility, that could defeat the Empire -- would emselves become a threat to the rest of the galaxy. Which left him right where he'd started.  VI A s fitful as his sleep was, he awoke with one idea. He discussed it with Fazzool over breakfast -- which was meat and boiled grain again. "Did you have a chance to see whether the artificial gravity circuits were okay?"  The B'lant, munching grain, eyed him questioningly. "I saw no damage. But ze most zat could be generated in any part of a ship like zis would be less zan two G's, anyway. If you're zinking of trying zat against ze Remm, zey'd hardly notice it." "No. But I can feed all sorts of things into the intercoms. And I can lock Egral in somewhere by remote control, maybe, and fake something that would cause him to give the wrong orders. He couldn't tell gravity from acceleration. I might even be able to fake a take-off. Or, I can fake the sound of weapons, I think." He scowled at Fazzool's faintly derisive look. "Damn it, I haven't worked out anything definite yet. But a lot can be done by misleading people." "People; yes. We do not know about zese beings. And assume ze best. Suppose you could get zem all lock up in ze ip, and we capture ze two aircars and some hand guns. Zen where do we go, eh? Back to ze valley? Or do we attack ze base ze two of us and capture a a IF ship we do not know how to fly?" Steve nodded gloomily. "Sure. I'm only thinking, really, of getting some kind of a bargaining position. If you've got any better ideas, let's have them." Fazzool shrugged, ate more meat and said, with pretended seriousness, "Since you are ze colonel and I am only a new major, I have not given it much zought." Steve snarled and pushed his own plate away. Nevertheless, to be ready for any break, he continued familiarizing himself with  the ship's controls, meanwhile going on with his translation. On the fourth day, another aircar arrived, bringing about a dozen nure Remm. At least two of them were older than Egral, but neither seemed to be his military superior. Shortly the aircar took off again, taking several of the Remm who'd been here before. Simply rotation of duty, maybe. Later in the day Egral asked Steve, "Can you arrange some way to transfer what you've done so far into a portable memory bank?" Steve asked, "In what form?" "Why, in spoken B'lant." Steve, puzzled, asked, "if it's portable, it can be brought into the control room, can't it? And we can just play the stuff into it. Or doesn't it have a sound pickup?" Egral blinked. "Of course it has. That was stupid of me." Then he said, "One of the group who arrived today thinks you've only been translating superficial theory so far." Steve lied, "I'm taldng it as it comes. And I'm no Diive icch, remember." "Nevertheless," Egral said ,"we believe you can do better. If yu don't, we will apply presure, "Such as what?" Egral's brief smile showd. "For a start, feeding you more grain and less meat. I notice you do not Mke the grain much, though it is supposed to be good foryou." Steve nearly cursed him, but then he had to grin. "I'U hurry it all I can." The incident didn't bother him; it was only a first admonition. And it convinc him finally that Egral himself knew very little null technology. N ow he dipped into lore that quickened his interest: the means by which two null-points, of approximately known location but shifting, could be linked by some sort of beacon or track. That was done all the time; when, for instance, a ship hopped into a null-tank, within an atmosphere or somewhere else where there was too much matter to allow spacing-in. You evacuated a large, strong steel tank to near vacuum, formed the link and nulled the ship into the tank. But what he hadn't known was that an actual beam of some force, only empirically known and operating in null without time-lag, was generated from both ends and, once joined, maintained its connection automatically. The Overseer who'd recorded this lecture went into considerable speculation of whether the beam formed a straight line (assuming there was such a thing in null as a straight line) or whether it followed some sort of curve as a result of divergent aiming. In any case, it seemed to Steve that the technique might hint at how the Remm achieved their instant null, without waiting to recharge. If forces sufficient to guide a ship could be sent through null, why not accumulated energy? If it did relate to their system, he wouldn't be giving them anything new. He translated that lecture, which took him over twenty hours, and started on another. He was working in four-hour shifts now, with breaks in each for lunch, which left him nearly seven hours off per planetary rotation. Egral seemed happy with what he was doing now. It was two nights after he'd finished the long translation that some noise wrenched him from his sleep. H e was up and slapping at his hip by reflex for a weapon that wasn't there, then groping for boots and jamming his feet into them. Fazzool was a step faster getting to the door. Some kind of a fight was going on behind it. He touched Fazzool on the shoulder and stood aside as the B'lant jerked it open. The fight was apparently over. Two vaguely humanoid shapes were rounding a turn in the corridor. On the deck, the Remm guard was sprawled, legs moving spasmodically. One blunt hand clutched a giant arrow -- rather, a feathered spear -- that he'd apparently just pulled from a wound in his neck. Blood from that and other wounds spread on the steel. Another spear, broken, lay not far away. Steve darted a look around, saw the Guard's energypistol where it had fallen and jumped to scoop it up. The Remm convulsed once more and lay still. Steve snapped, "Control room!" to Fazzool and ran that way. They turned into a well lit corridor and came face-to-face with several of the attackers. They were not men, nor. humanoids. There were two legs, two arms, a neck and head. But the limbs were slender, almost spidery; the torso very spare, only inches thick from front to back except for the thorax, where leathery skin stretched over thin ribs. The head was smaller than a man's, with oval, sharp-tipped ears and a bestial face with a muzzle and fangs like a dog. An instant, and the creature's arm shot up to hurl one of the feathered spears. Steve saw now that a great membrane -- he'd taken it at first for a cloak -- stretched from wrist to ankle, like the patagium of some gliding mammal. He jerked up the pistol and fired. The creature screamed in pain. The spear went askew; but half a dozen others were poised. Steve was already whirling, as Fazzool paused to throw his own captured spear. The shafts whished around them as they fan back the way they'd come, awkwardly in the light gravity. A sharp pain struck at Steve's shoulder blade, but the spear bounced off the bone. He heard Fazzool grunt and hoped the thick B'lant skin had turned a shaft or at IF least partly stopped it. They reached the side corridor, and he skidded to a stop, leaned back to rake the well lighted one with the energy beam. The creatures' shouts went up in pitch, and they fought to retreat. He didn't wait to kill more of them, but gestured Fazzool on. There were roars from all directions now, as if the ship were full of the things. He scanned closed doorways in the corridor, chose one, gulped a breath of relief that it was the right one. A ladder led down into an unlit well. He started down, heard Fazzool slam the door behind them and follow. Four levels down, by feel, he opened a door cautiously and stepped out into a pitch-black corridor, groping his way along it. He made a turn, and another, came up against a dead end and had to retrace. Finally he found the verticle shaft he wanted. The ladder was easy climbing in the half-gravity, but his shoulder hurt He hoped Fazzool wasn't any worse off. He counted levels, muttered a word of warning to the B'lant and stepped onto a platform to put his ear to a metal door. There were faint sounds behind it. Damn! Then ,he recognized that they were only the outside sound pickup, still turned on. Pistol ready, he threw open the door. The control room was lit but unoccupied. Hurriedly he went around locking doors, Fazzool helping. Finally he ordered the B'lant, "Hold still," and stepped behind him. Blood was seeping through the leather jerkin in two places, but not much. Relieved, he said, "Guess you'll do. Now, if we can manage a few tricks from here, we'll go get those two aircars, as you suggested." " suggested?" the B'lant said. "I was only making talk. What good are ze cars to us?" "If we get them, we've got the Remm here isolated, at least for several hours. I'm almost sure they don't have a transmitter except in the aircars, and I'm going to make sure right now." He went to a communications panel and began keying different rooms. "Egral?" He tried another. "Egral?" I t took ten minutes to get a reply. It came, the panel light indicated, from a large compartment with several outside ports, which must have been an instruction room. Indicators showed the ports as closed and locked; the doors also. "Jen? Where -- you must be in the control room! How did you get there? It was cut off!" "Ladders," Steve said. "We're adapted to climbing, remember. Our guard is dead. How about the rest of you?" Egral said, "Out of about thirtyfive, six known dead. Seveti, counting your guard. Two or three badly hurt; others with minor wounds. A small group is somewhere in the far end of the ship, but safe, we think, as they are still operating their searchlight. Maybe you can connect us with them. The rest of us are safe here for the time. We thought we'd wait for morning. But now, of course, you can light the whole ship, and we can start clearing it out." "Well," Steve lied, "the power's they actually fly? How many invaded the ship? sounded impodeot. "Don't forget, your safety depends on ours. They can fly for short distances, or soar in a wind. We've only had skirmishes with small bands before, so we've never bothered to teach them a real lesson. Perhaps we should have. We think there must be several hundred aboard. We were foolish enough to let a few land unseen from directly overhead. They showed a surprising organization, seized several open ports and held them while others poured in from the trees. Is Fazzool with you? Are you both unhurt?" "Both here, nicked, but not dangerously." Steve saw from panel lights that Egral's compartment was dark. To pretend allegiance Steve turned on lights in it. "Is that better? Have you radioed for help?" "No," Egral said, "we -- " He broke off. Steve gave Fazzool a look and turned off the communicator for a moment. "These Remm aren't on top of the situation." Fazzool shook his head. "I knew zat when we saw ze guard, dead from somezing so primitive as a spear. But what zen?" Steve keyed the intercom again. "I'll investigate the ship's radio equipment, Egral. If it's working, maybe I can give you a voice circuit so you can call your base. Wait." H e could, of course, do that in moments. Instead, he went to one of the teaching-banks' keyboards, chose a lecture, programmed it to play in various part of the ship, pundbyed for loud volume and set it going. Noise blared outside the locked doors. That would distract the gliding creatures for a while -- and also cover up the sounds of certain doors and hatches opening, to clear a path to ground level. Quickly, he turned on outside cameras and swivelled them around, increasing intensity to see in the starlight. On the forest side, a searchlight swept across a gliding figure, which twisted and dove, evading the energy beam that spat out from a hand gun. In the other direction the two aircars were dark, with no sign of action around them. Egral's voice was calling angrily. Steve turned off the noise long enough to talk. "I heard them outside doing something, and I wanted to worry them and gain ' ne. Say, we've just had an idea. I'azool says there's power enough for artificial gravity for a few minutes. Would it help if I made gravity throughout the ship about four times what it is now?" There was a silence. Then Egral said, "I think you know that it would immobilize them without bothering us. Just what is in your mind, Jen? I remind you once more that you are alone, weaponless, on a strange planet in a part of the galaxy the location of which you don't know." That, Steve mused, was EgraVs bargaining position, and it was a good one. Still -- Suddenly he stared at Fazzool. Of course! y hadn't it occurred to him? He turned back to the intercom. "True," he said to Egral. "We're IF as lost as you are, until we get back to where you captured us." It was a gamble, of course. A minute passed, silently. Fazzool began to grin. Steve told Egral, "I'm going to start the gravity, but you'd better stay put until we go down ladders and check the power supply. It will take us a while. We won't be able to climb back up in the gravity, but I'll arrange so we can talk to you from there." He turned on the loud lecture again, then swiftly programmed the artificial gravity and punched the "Execute" button. Fazzool, braced, growled, "It does not work!" Steve pointed to lights on a panel. "Sure it does. You didn't think I'd include this room or our path to the outside, did you?" A s fast as they could in the dark, they went down ladders and along passageways to a port low on the curve of the middle section. Around them, the ship resounded with the programmed lecture. Steve peered out at the starlit clearing, saw nothing.  The nearer of the aircars was fifty or sixty  yards away. Once there, they'd fly it to the other. He dropped the thirty feet or so to the ground, rolled to absorb the impact and was on his feet, running, with a glance to make sure Fazzool got down all right. He tried to watch the footing and look up and behind at the same time. A dark shape came diving. He hurled himself aside as a spear zipped into the ground, raked a pistol-beam across the creature lo be sure of a hit. It screamed nd swerved to flee. Other dim shapes were swooping from atop the ship, releasing their spears from a safer distance. The spears plunked m a scattered patter; there was no use dodging. Then they were at the flyer, and Skeve, his back pressed against it, sent short squirts of energy up to discourage the attackers. Fazzool fumbled the hatch open, and they scrambled into the pilot's compartment Steve felt about the unfamiliar panel for light-studs, swore and played the laser gun for an instant on the steel ceiling. The momentary glow was enough. He jabbed at buttons and lights came on. Then it was only a matter of guesswork and experimentation to get the craft in the air. He spent a minute checking controls, then moved toward the second aircar, maneuvered carefully, and hovered while Fazzool leaped out and got into the second vehicle. Then Steve lifted a ways and made a dash at a flock of the gliding creatures, who, flapping hard, were hovering nearby. They scattered and dove like sparrows before a hawk. Now there was time to study the radio transmitter and make sure he only used enough power to peach Egral. The booming lecture was still going; he'd been a little generous guessing how long they'd need to get to the aircars. When it stopped he tried channels until Egral's voice answered. "Jen? Where :ire you? Will the gravity stay on?" "No," Steve told him, "it'll go off any minute now. I programmed it tiiat way. And there are a lot of those vermin outside, anxious to get into (the ship. A long pause. Then, in a snarl, "Where are you? "In the two aircars. We want to bargain. E gral said in a flat tone, "I suppose you're some kind of special commando. If I hadn't been dealing with the Slaves, I wouldn't have underestimated you so badly. As it is, you were very lucky in having this thing come up." "Of course," Steve said, "but give us credit for being ready, anyway." "I'll give you nothing. We'll blow up this whole planet before we surrender." "Surrender, hell," Steve said, "we want to pool resources with you. Especially technology! Fazzool and I aren't with Gree. We represent a coalition that's resisting him, and we can't conceivably be a threat to your home region, wherever it is. We aren't conquest-minded, anyway. We've tried before to make contact with you, but you shot without waiting to listen. Another pause, then Egral said, a little uncertainly, "The gravity just went off." He didn't know it, of course, but that was only in his compartment, to fool him. "If we shot without provocation, we are not aware of it." "I'll accept that," Steve said, "since I realize your position, surrounded by hostiles, isolated and lost. Anyway, our ships look like Gree's. They may even have been wearing the Sign, since they had to sneak so deep into Gree territory. What I propose is this: you and I sit and trade questions, one at a time, in turn. We both agree to answer them frankly. As a guarantee of our own sincerity, we'll rescue you from the vermin, give up all our advantage and place ourselves in your hands agkin. We don't have to, you know. We have other resources." Which was a pretty splendid lie. Egral said cautiously, "You don't know much about us. 'You wouldn't bargain if you had other resources." Steve said, "I know with reasonable certainty that you're not pirates or tyrants. You're not nearly ruthless enough. And I'll rely on your word." Another wait, then Egral made a sound like a sigh. "All right; I give it. But I'll be skinned alive for talking to you direct." Steve said, "We're in the same boat. But this is the best way." He looked toward the other aircar and saw, as he expected, Fazzool's face glaring at him. F azzool wasted a question by asking about the planet. "It's diskshaped," Egral told them, "less than fifteen per cent as thick through the poles as its longest diameter, which is close to thirty thousand miles." He caught Steve's look of doubt. "No. As you realize, a core of normal matter couldn't assume that shape without spinning much faster, and then it would be unstable. But this isn't what you call normal matter. It's a small core, of much denser matter than any you consider normal, which has the property that. IF when a mass of it rotate... Us gravity is polarized along the axis of spin. Not entirely, but to an extent depending on the rate of spin. That's why the gravity in that prison valley's bigber. Out here, besides being off the center line of polarization, we're much farther from the core. I've often wished I had time to fly out farther, near the rim; things might be interesting there. My question: Where is this Effogan coalition you represent?" Steve told him, "Out beyond the Gree Empire. We're mostly in one spiral arm of the galaxy. Now, my question: why is such a competent fighting force as yours so lacking in technicians, or even artisans?" Egral shifted his body weight. "That's a longer story. We were on a long cruise. We do have enemies, as you've doubtless concluded. Then, forced into a sudden maneuver, we made a hastily computed null jump. It just happened to land us in some nexus of force that I can't begin to explain. Without insisting on a question, m tell you that our home is closer to the galactic nave, where there are forces that baffle our best theoreticians. In an case, our particular group of the Force was hurled thousands of light-years into totally unfamiliar surroundings. We've never been this far out before -- we didn't even know the galaxy had spiral arms! Well, this particular cluster here attracted us somehow, or brought us out of null or whatever we were travelling in. It seems this is a localized concentration of the denser matter I described, and which we're used to; that's probably what brought us out of null. But I digress. We were without any of our auxiliary ships, which bore the technicians -- we had nothing, almost, but fighting personnel. Though I, myself, am a linguist by specialty." He paused. "You see, with us, the females are the technicians, and they dom't go into actual battle on fighting slyps. My question -- oh, nonsease; I don't have any worth bothering with. What do you want to know?" "Well," Steve said, "if our icsentists, who are as good or better tian Gree's, are going to help you get home, they'll have to know about your null technique." "Oh, that. Tm not too well versed in it myself. But in our capital ships, which do the nulling with the smaller ones inside, a great store of energy is left in null, so that it doesn't have to be built up slowly in normal space. That's why we have the double-globe shape; one's left m null, connected by bonds of force as well as matter, and it holds the necessary energy. The only reason it's visible at all is that there's a minor energyleak into space. I notice our trick of opening a hull wherever we wish amazes you. It's very simpk. We simply null a section of the metal, then return it whenever we wish." S teve said, "TechnologicaDy, I think our side will get the better of this bargain." "Maybe," Egral said, "but there are things we lack too. Knowkdge of the outer galaxy... And of course, lius Group has little' to offer except the ehips, for study. Once we were in contact with the Grcc forces IF -- they attacked without warning, by the way, when we were only exploring peacefully -- we hoped we could capture scientists and learn enough from them to find our way home. But frankly, things were getting desperate. We'd learned almost nothing. We haven't the basic training we need anyway. And we're running short of munitions, not to mention fuel." Fazzool said, "Zat will be quickly remedied once we get to an Effogan base." He added thoughtfully, "I have always wondered what ze nave of ze galaxy would be like. Perhaps I will add one term to ze deal: you Coming next month in IF!  A complete short novel by !; one of your favorite writers! The aliens crash-landed on Earth in a desperate I I attempt to save their lives -- and nearly killed ManI ir ic it ir ir ic A new story in the same area as Af the Core   !; Plus many other stories and features including "Our Man in Fandom" by Lin Carter, a brond'! new first story by an author never before pubIF  Novelette A Code For Sam Ouf at the end of the spaceways, humans and robots fought side by side to win new worlds for Earth! I I t was hours after the cave-in before the first sounds of rescue reached Sam. He switched his brain back to high amperage drain to come fullyalert and began sending more current through his body heaters to prepare for emergence. From the nearness of the digging, there could be only a few feet of rubble left in the collapsed tunnel. Fifteen minutes later, he felt a pick strike near his outstretched hand. He grabbed it and pulled himself out of the dirt and gravel around him, then scrambled quickly forward to the entrance. Surprisingly, it was a human hand that reached out to help him to his feet. "You okay, Sam?" Barney Collins asked. The wizened old prospector's face and oxygen mask were filthy with sweat and dust, but concern showed plainly in his eyes. Sam nodded. "I'm fine, Barney. What happened to Pete?" "The new robot?" Barney shoved his mask aside and spat out tobacco juice, then shrugged. "Something funny about him. Came into camp hours ago, but never said a word about you till we got worried and asked. Come on, we better get back to the digger before it gets colder." Sam glanced about, to see that the day was almost done. The high ceremonial mounds were casting long shadows as Tau Ceti sank in the east, and the thin air was already losing heat. In another hour, the temperature would be forty below zero. At its best, Anubis was a hostile world even to a robot like Sam, totally unlike the lovely second planet men called Isis. Here, except for the Gregg Archeological Expedition, there were only a few prospectors and trappers, with a small spaceport and trading post at Ramses to service them. Their digger was a converted prospector tank with a larger cabin and a collapsible shovel crane on top. Inside, Barney threw off his mask and began washing it hastily, while Sam lifted his chestplate and switched to freshly charged batteries. The man turned on the headlight, then swungthe vehicle on its caterpillar treads to head back toward the camp, some four miles away. "A lot of" trolls showing up," he muttered. "Too blamed many." A dozen natives could be seen in the headlight beams as he spoke, moving aside to let the digger pass. Their snarling, vulpine faces stared fixedly at the machine. They stood three feet high, with bodies like pears mounted on pipestem legs and with arms that nearly touched the ground. A greenish fur stood out several inches as insulation against the cold. All were armed with spears and heavy stone hammers, and some had bows slung over their backs. There were no young among them. Sam shared none of Barney's" prejudice against the trolls, but he felt a growing unease as they passed another armed group. In the years he had worked with Gregg to untangle the lost past of Anubis, he had encountered no real threat from them. But their sullen legends were full of violence, and most of it centered here at the Burial Mounds of the Rock Devils where the expedition was digging. The men were just sitting down to eat as they entered the main expedition Quonset. Barney took his seat between the gray form of James Gregg and the heavy figure of his former prospecting partner, Yeng Lee. Across the table, young Dickson sat alone. He had joined them with the PT model robot two days before, unasked but bearing authorization from the Earth university that was funding them. The space he'd taken in the supply truck hadn't made him any more welcome. And now his face was flushed with heat from some argument that had been going on before Sam arrived. Gregg motioned for Sam to take one of the chairs. "All right, now maybe we'll get some sense out of it. Sam, what happened to you? Dickson here won't let me question Pete properly." "I have every authority to retain full control over Pete, as you know, Dr. Gregg," Dickson said in a tone he tried to keep patient. He had moved away slightly as Sam dropped beside him, a gesture that betrayed his Earth origin even more than his accent. "Pete is an important experimental model. I cannot let him be ruined by improper handling." Sam broke in quickly to tell what he could, but he wasn't entirely sure himself! He'd been digging a tunnel into the core of a new mound after instructing Pete in the placement of temporary shoring. There had been the sound of strain on one section, and he'd yelled for Pete to get under it and support it until new bracing could be added. Then the whole roof came down, trapping him. "The cave-in may have started before Pete could reach it," Sam finished. He didn't believe it, but his back had been turned at the time. "But Jim, I -- " Gregg interrupted impatiently. "All right, we'll let that go. But I want to know why he abandoned you there and then didn't report when he got back! Well, Dr. Dickson?" "I won't even discuss it before another robot," Dickson said. Gregg's fist hit the table with a blow that made the dishes jump. "By Horus, Dickson, one more crack like that and you'll be walking back to Ramses, fund or no fund! Sam's my second in command here, as well as a friend of mine. Pete, come out here!" "Easy, Jim," Barney said quietly. "The kid's from Earth and doesn't know any better. Give him time." Gregg's face lost some of its tenseness. He fumbled in his pocket and dragged out a cigarette lapping it sharply against the table. He was just lighting it when Pete ennerged from the kitchen. Then the new robot waa across the main room at a single and his fingers were tearing the eigarette out of Gregg's mouth. He dropped it onto the packed dirt Hoor and ground it out with his heoL "Cigarettes are harmful to human beings. Master," he said in hie gentle, monotonous voice. U D ickson had jumped to hk feet and covered the robot's body with his own before Gregg could push up from the chair. Now he began shoving Pete from tho room, saying something in words loo low for the others to hear. Then he was back, looking acutely embarrassed. "I'm sorry -- very sorry. He won't do that again. I've lold him that cigarettes are only harmful on Earth -- quite healthful here." He sighed and groped backwards for his chair. "I -- I guess I'd better explain, even though it may contaminate our experiment." Gregg look a long time lighting another cigarette. Finally he nodded stiffly. "Yes, Dr. Dickson, I think perhaps you'd better." Dickson began awkwardly with needless background and too much bias. Robots were produced by Earth companies and leased from them, but nearly all were used in space, where they could cope with hostile environIF ments better than men. As a result, most Earthmen had never seen a robot, and inexperience left them prey to every fantasy from the ancient horror films. And, of course, occasionally a robot did injure a human, with sensational headlines in all Earth newspapers. "So we had to make robots safe for Earth," Dickson went on. "To do that, we had to devise a foolproof code of ethics for them." "Maybe you'd better find a decent code of ethics for humans and use that," Barney suggested, Dickson smiled dutifully. "It wouldn't work. Men's ethics revolve around instinctual social drives; but robot brains contain only what is put into them during their education programs. Hence we must have precise rules that can be completely conditioned into them. Fortunately, I was able to discover such laws in the same literature which enabled Dr. Sorrenson to discover, our fasterthan-light drive." They might have guessed it. After Sorrenson invented the space drive and publicly admitted he'd taken the idea from an old science-fiction story, a lot of the borderline sciences had leaped onto the bandwagon. NoJx)dy had yet found anything else useful, but it was a good way to get research money now, iiood Lord!" The anger on Gregg's face had been replaced by a growing amazement. "The three laws of the Asenion robots! I read about them up in my grandfather's attic when I was a kid. Don't tell me you took those plot tricks seriously?" He closed his eyes, trying to remember. "A robot must not inflict or permit harm to a human; subject to that law, a robot must obey human orders; and subject to both laws, a robot must protect itself. Right?" "Not precisely. But in general -- " "Slavery and racism!" Le# spat the words out. "A black slave must not strike a white master; a black slave must obey a white master's orders; a black slave must protect itself as part of its white master's property. You call that ethicsT "I don't think the author meant them that way, Lee. They were just things he could build plots on, for fun," Gregg said. The big man grimaced. "Fun! I suppose having Pete call every human Master is an Earthman's idea of fun, too?" "Unfortunately, it probably is." Gregg turned back to Dickson, and his face was completely sober. "Naturally, you had to train Pete to be as literal minded as most of the fictional robots. Any flexibility or judgment would have ruined your precious code. Poor Pete! Without human orders, he had to run away from any danger in the tunnel to protect himself. The robot Sam meant nothing in his code. And then, because he probably knew he'd done something wrong, he had to protect himself further by making no report until ordered to do so. Give him a month of normal work in conflict with your code, and Pete's going to be hopelessly insane -- maybe dangously so. Dr. Dickson, your experiment's finished. Until you can leave, you'll keep Pete under close supervision, confined to the kitchen." "No!" Sam put a heavy hand on Dickson's shoulder and shoved the whitfaced man back into his chair before angry words could spill from his lips. "No, I'm going to need Pete in the new tunnel tomorrow. And I'll need Dr. Dickson to make him obey my orders." Gregg shook his head, "Impossible. Sam, you don't know what you'd be letting yourself in for." "Then I'll have to risk it. No, wait. You were all so busy arguing about Pete's ethics that I never got a chance to finish my report. Jim, this isn't like the tunnels we've dug through all the other mounds. It's  "King Tut's Tomb!" Sam nodded. "Maybe. At least I've struck against some kind of a metal barrier less than half way through the mound." Then the men were clustering around him, pounding him on the back and yelling for the few details he could give. Even Dickson began to catch the feeling, though his eyes kept darting back to the metal hand that had rested so rudely on his shoulder. Later, when the men had finally retired to their bunks, Sam had time to let the contagion of their enthusiasm drain away and to get back to his private doubts. He moved out into the freezing night, staring at the ring of eyes around the Quonset The trolls were still gathering here, armed and waiting. As he watched, a new group moved up and found places to huddle, only few hundred yards from the camp. Fifteen years, he thought as he went back into the dim main room. Long years while Gregg and he tracked down tiny bits of evidence that seemed to indicate the trolls had somehow reached a brief period of high culture a thousand years before. A worn bit of metal knife blade; a chipped burning glass that still worked; the divergent legends and the yearly ceremony of mound building. And then the final discovery. Lee and Barney, returning from prospecting, had found a battered metal object sticking out of one mound. They hadn't considered it important enough to mark the mound, but they'd taken it to Gregg at Ram. When finally opened, it contained nearly two hundred well preserved sheets of paperlike material covered with writing. Sam took out a set of photocopies and glanced through it. A primitive language changes slowly, and the decoded writing was a phonetic script for early troll speech. He could read most of it now without Gregg's dictionary or notes. But he couldn't accept it. Without leaving evidence of a technology capable of building huge telescopes, how could any culture write a simplified text on astronomy that described the various galaxies and the evolution of stars? How could could such a culture refine and alloy aluminum and then roll it out to make the flat sheet that formed a barrier in the tunnel? B# IF If the ancestors of the trolls had achieved all that once, who could hope to guess what they might do now? On impulse, Sam carried the photocopy back into the kitchen where Pete was still sitting. There was time enough before morning for a PT robot to master Old Trollish, and the ability might prove useful later. At least it would fill Pete's time better than brooding about his code of ethics. Ill I n the morning, the trolls seemed to have filled the whole area. They made no hostile move as the expedition party began unloading the digger and carrying shoring supplies. up to the tunnel, but hundreds of eyes followed every move. Gregg had been conferring with a couple of old trolls he had recognized, but now that conference seemed to be over. He was staring into the tunnel mouth cautiously as Sam and Pete climbed up to it with a load of shoring. He slipped the flashlight off its liook and began crawling forward, obviously trying to catch a glimpse of the other end. Pete watched intently until the man was nearly inside the entrance. Then he dropped the last of his load and dashed forward to drag Gregg back. "You might be hurt. Master. It isn't safe in there," he warned the man gently. Surprisingly, Gregg grinned slightly. "Oh hell, maybe you're right this time, Pete. Go back to work, and I'll behave." He waited until he was alone with Sam and then gestured toward the tunnel. "You're going to need a lot more material than we brought to shore that up safely. The whole mound above it looks unstable. Think you can make out all right while we pull material out of Lee's last dig?" "I think so," Sam told him. "So far, Dickson's lecture to Pete about following my orders seems to work. What about the trolls?" "They've been hearing rumors that we're trying to bring the Rock Devil back to life, near as I can make out. I've told them we just want to make sure he's still dead and really kill him if not. They seem going to stick around to make sure." He shrugged. "Maybe I'd better leave Dickson with you and Pete. He's not much good for work, anyhow." He slipped over the edge and slid to the surface below. A few minutes later, the digger took off, drawing a small contingent of trolls after it. Most stayed on, keeping their gaze fixed on Dickson and the robot. There wasn't much Dickson could do. He found a broad rock near the supplies and sat watching as Sam and Pete drew on their grappling mittens and heaved and pulled the heavy sections of wire mesh up to the ledge in front of the tunnel. Finally the work of hauling was finished. "You go first, Pete," Sam ordered. "I'll back you up." Pete considered the tunnel and began drawing back from it. "I can't Yesterday proved that it's too dangerous in there." Dickson was running toward them, and Pete would follow his orders, of course; the second law took precedence over the third. But Sam had taken enough nonsense. He couldn't depend on calling Dickson to intcede if an accident happened in the tunnd. H e stepped forward, brushing Pete's hesitant arms aside with a savage thrust. His grappling mittens closed firmly over the robot's nedc, and he began forcing the claws of the miftens together. "You're in more danger now than you would be in the tunnel," he told Pete. "You'll have every wire in your neck shMt-circuited, unless you make up your mind to obey my orders from now on." Pete's head bobbed as far as it would go. "Yes, Master." 'Tm not your mastw. I'm just Sam." "Yes, Sam. I'll go in the tunnel and do what you order." "Sam, stop it!" Dickson was screaming and struggling to break Sam's grip. "Release him at once, Sam. That's an order!" Sam let his grip loosen and shoved the man aside. "You'd better get hack below. Dr. Dickson. I don't have a second law -- maybe not even a first one. If I've got any code at #, you wouldn't know it -- because it wouldn't occur to you to ask a normal robot about such things as ethics, would it?" The brief flush of fright was fading from Dickson's face, to be replaced hf a thin smile. "No," he admitted. Tt really didn't occur to me. Pechaps I should ask you, some time when we're both not so busy. I'm sure you'd have an interesting answer." Enlarging and bracing the tunnel was hard, slow work. Pete was no longer affected by the risk, but he was sadly lacking in initiative. After the first few minutes, Sam took the lead position, letting the other robot haul rubble and fetch supplies. By the time the men came back, less than twenty feet had been braced and lined properly with canvas and mesh. There was room for no more than two in the tunnel, and the robots were better suited than the men for such work. Barney and Lee stayed near the entrance, hauling back baskets of rubble, while Gregg operated the digger shovel occasionally to clear the ledge. The cave-in seemed to have loosened part of the mound above them, and the work became increasingly difficult as they moved further in. It was long after noon before the last section was cleared, to expose a six-foot circle of what seemed to be machine-rolled aluminum sheet that blocked further progress. Gregg came down to inspect it, tapping the metal doubtfully. "Sounds hollow, and not very thick. Can you cut it?" "There may be danger for you. Master," Pete warned hesitantly. Gregg sighed, but stepped back. "All right. I'll keep my oxygen mask tight. Go ahead, Sam, open it!" If the metal had ever been temIF pered or work-hardened, time had softened it. While Pete held the light, Sam began cutting it with the mesh snips. He tore the last few feet free and folded the panel back against the tunnel wall. All the men were crowded into the tunnel by the time he had finished, pressing forward and craning their necks to see what lay beyond. But they waited impatiently while Sam found a place inside for the light and Gregg took the necessary photographs for the record. Metal walls and roof formed a low dome, not more than twenty feet in diameter. A battered, dented door at one side was flanked by benches that curved along the walls. Opposite the door, hanging shelves rose to a height of six feet. The largest feature of the room was directly in front of those -- an enclosed table or desk, with a seat attached to it on a swinging arm. The floor was of metal, strewn with wreckage and damaged machinery. Sam's eyes swung rapidly over the scene and then center on the objects scattered across the shelves and spilled onto the floor below. There were dozens of familiar metal containers and other things that could only be books. He was adross the room as soon as the camera stopped clicking, reaching ut cautiously for them. Beside him, he heard Gregg's breathing catch. He half expected the book to crumble at his touch, but whatever the paperlike maiteiial was seemed proof against time. There was a solid feel to the book and the pages turned easily. The characters were the same as those of Old Trollish, with two new additions. But the words were totally meaningless. "Aliens," Gregg said. 'They had to be. There isn't a thing ia this room designed to fit troll hands or bodies. Let's take a look at Iflie cannisters." O nce it was pointed out, the untrollish nature of everything was obvious. Even the door handle was too high. A man or robot might have sat at the desk Pete and Dickson were inspecting, but no troll could have used the swinging seat. "Trolls maybe didn't design any of this, but they sure ruined it," Barney called. "Better take a look at this, Jim." He and Lee had gone at nnee to examine the wrecked machinery. Now he began pointing out what they had discovered. The largest piece was obviously some kind of organic fuel cell, with the piping around it reduced to twisted metal shreds. Something with vats and movable flat belts might have been either the source ef the plastic paper or a way of printing on it -- or both; there wasn't enough left to be sure. And a beautifully simple typewheel writing machine was intact, except for its motor. Half a dozen broken stone axe heads could be seen to show what had caused the damage. "Looks like they started a news press here, and vox pop didn't like the truth," Barney said bitterly, "Every blamed thing that nsoved is smashed to smithereens." Gregg nodded thoughtfully. "Well, get what details you can with the camera." He motioned to Dickson, who was watching Pete try to pry open a locked desk drawer. "Give them a hand moving things, will you? I want to find out if there's any information in those cannisters," The containers opened easily to pressure in the right places, and this time the writing was in Trollish. Sam found a text in agriculture, one on metallurgy, and a duplicate of that on astronomy. Then the fourth came open, and he let out a cry for Gregg. There were two columns this time, one in Trollish and the other in what must be alien words. They flipped through the pages, finding another section with the order reversed. It was obviously a bilingual dictionary, alphabetized for both languages, and covering several thousand words. Two other complete sets of sheets lay behind the first. "What a Rosetta Stone!" Gregg exulted. He was literally caressing the sheets. "And in triplicate! With this, we'll be reading all those books in a matter of days, Sam. And once -- " A loud crashing sound drowned out the rest of his words. They jerked around to see Pete stamping and leaping madly beside the desk. Dickson shouted an order for him to stop, but the robot went on unheedingly. By the time Sam could reach him, Pete had reduced whatever had been in the opened desk drawer to a mess of plastic lumps and metal scraps that could never have meaning. Then he halted, standing quietly in the ruin he had made. Dickson approached him, striving for a note of firm command. 'Tm giving you an order, Pete. I order you to tell me what that was." Pete made no answer. He began backing away, shaking his head. And more orders from Dickson only made him back away faster. IV # #h, let him alone," Gregg said at last. "It's your damned prime law -- something that Pete thinks might harm men, obviously. That means anything from the ultimate weapon to some alien dirty picture. And since he thinks telling us would also harm us, we'll never know whether it was important or not. It's my fault for letting a ruleand fool-crippled robot in here and not having him watched. Take him back to the digger, Dr. Dickson." Lee held out a thick wrist, indicating his watch. "We'd all better go back with the slavemaster, Jim. By the time we can weld some mesh over the entrance to keep trolls out, it'll be night." Gregg frowned in surprise as he checked his own watch. Then he nodded. He gathered up a set of the dictionary sheets, selected a couple of books at random, and fell in beside Sam as they headed back through the tunnel. But as they neared the entrance, he stopped. "I think this place is taboo to trolls, even without the gate. But I'll feel better making sure. You go on, Sam." # go on. I wasn't planning on getting much sleep tcmigt, anyhow," Sam told him with heavy sarcasm. Gregg chuckled. "You're right, of course. Thanks. I'll send down fresh batteries and my rifle before we leave. See you in the morning." He hurried after the others, and Sam turned back, studying the situation. From the desk, he could see a good distance up the tunnel by arranging the light carefully. And by turning in the seat, he could reach most of the books. He spread out the second word list and prepared to do some serious studying. Barney brought the rifle and batteries down a quarter hour later. He pulled a sandwich out of his pouch and sat down on the ruined fuel cell to eat it. "They got the gate welded down pretty good," he announced casually. Sam shook his head gently in the gesture he used where a man would smile. "Thanks, Barney." "Don't mention it, youngster. Temperature ought to stay comfortable down here, at least." The man finished eating and drew a thin air mattress from his pouch. When it had blown itself up, he began kiddng an area free of debris. "Wake me if anything should happen" Somehow, in spite of the oxygen mask, Barney managed to snore. But Sam was rather glad of the sound. He stared down at the old man fondly, remembering the first human he'd ever loved. Pop had been officially only head jailor of the robot school, but he'd somehow managed to provide an endless stream of games and stories for the students. He'd laughed away their failures and given them all the same advice when they finally graduated. By now, he was a legend among robots, and his words were hallowed in tradition. Pete had missed all that in his conditioning. It was no wonder he acted more like a half-trained dog than a real person. A t midnight, Sam checked the tunnel. The gate was still secure. It was too dark to spot the trolls, but he could hear them yammering all around, with one repeated cry: Yar Noo biliyet! The first two words meant "Rock Devil" and the third was obscene. They were "working up to something, but they didn't sound dangerous yet. He went back to pore over the books. He'd given up any hope of making sense by translation; too many words were missing from the bilingual sheets for immediate sense. He was looking for the few books that had pictures, studying those. One showed a night sky with a star pattern that might help astronomers locate the alien sun. Another yielded several group scenes, and those disturbed him. They showed a dark, graceful people with two legs and four slender arms. But their skins were too smooth, their bodies too similar, and their heads too identically spherical. "Something eating you, Sam?" Barney asked suddenly. He must have been awake for some time, since he was already chewing away at a cud of tobacco. IF to state his suspicions yet. Barney grunted. "Well, something's eating me. From where I sit, I can see half an inch showing under the bottom plate of youridesk, and I want to know what's underneath, holding it up. Think you can move it?" A minute later, they were looking at the spot where the desk had stood. A smooth, oval bole had been cut through the metal floor and dug into the ground below. Heavy rocks were jamm tightly together to fill it completely. Barney looked at the rocks and then at the desk that had been placed over them. "Lx)oks like something was meant to stay down there. I got a hunch we're going to have a lot of work getting it out." It wasn't too hard at first, though some of the stones weighed more than a hundred pounds. But the work increased with depth, and they were eight feet down before they reached the last layer. The men and Pete had already returned in the morning and were clustered around the hole when Sam finally freed what lay at the bottom and passed it up. The head was no longer spherical, the metal chdst was horribly crushed, and most of the brown enamel was gone. But as Barney and Lee stretched it out on the floor, it was still slim and graceful, with two legs and four slender arms, like all the people in the book. And like them... it was a robot. "So that's the Rock Devil," Gregg said finally, without surprise. Dickson was studying it witk korrified fascination. "It doesn't look much like rock to me." "It does to trolls," Sam told kkn. "If a thing bleeds or gives sap, tt's bel -- food; otherwise, it's yar -- rock. Yar that acts like bel is a devil -- noo -- and smart trolls ordinarily look the other way. But this is the ultimate Yar Noo .and suprage." "It's going to complicate our problem, but I guess it's worth the risk," Gregg decided. "Any trouble here last night?" "No troll trouble. Just a lot of noise." Gregg frowned. "That's odd. We had a sort of war dance around us all night. Two of the chiefs I know came to warn me that if we didn't make sure the Rock Devil was dead and get out quickly they couldn't control things much longer. I've abandoned camp already. I figured on loading up here and heading south to Ramses at once. But now we've got to smuggle the Rock Devil out. Any idea how?" "Cover him with a piece of canvas, and I'll carry him down and load him in the digger," Sam suggested. It was the simplest way. A pparently it was too simple for the others. Eventually they decided to make four drawstring bags front the canvas. One would contain the Rock Devil, and three others would be filled to the same size with everything else. These would be lowered one at a time by crane. The bag with the Rock Devil would go last, after they saw the troll reaction to the others. "Pete will have to operate the crane," Gregg decided. "Dickson, you supervise and make sure there are no slip-ups this time. Lee and Barney can improvise the bags, then go down to stow things in the digger. Sam, you'll stay with me and select what we'll take." The thick canvas bags were clumsy, but they seemed strong enough. Sam bundled the alien into the first to give them a model for the size of the others. Then they began stripping the dome of all of any value. Two books, the writing machine and Sam's spare batteries were left to be carried out after the bags were safely down. Sam slung the rifle over his shoulder and began moving the sacks to the entrance. The trolls were about a hundred feet beyond the digger and herded between all the mounds. They kept their fixed stares on the ledge as Sam moved out with a sack, jabbering obscenities, but made no sign of taking other action. At least Pete could handle simple machine controls well enough. The shovel swung up smoothly to level with the ledge, accepted the first sack from Sam, and carried it down directly to jvhere Lee and Barney were waiting. The trolls hopped about and yelled, but they made no effort to interfere. The second and third sacks followed. Sam waited until all were stowed in the digger before bringiiig out the one with the alien and dropping it onto the shovel. The crane drew backwards -- and swung suddenly away from the men waiting below! The digger tracks spun into motion, slewing the machine around to face away from the mound. Inside it, Sam could see Dickson pounding futilely against Pete's hands. Then the man gave up and ran back to leap for the machine and stumble toward Lee and Barney. Gregg started toward the ledge, but Sam pulled him back. "We're better off up here, Jim, if there's trouble. Call the others up." Gregg yelled down, and all three men began climbing toward the ledge. Dickson looked sick as Sam pulled him up the last few feet. The digger was rolling forward now. Trolls spilled back and aside as it headed for them. The machine drove on for perhaps two hundred feet along the old road toward camp until it came to a rocky section. Then the shovel opened and spilled its contents directly in front of one caterpillar tread. The churning plates of the track hit the sack and began pounding across it, carrying ten tons of weight to grind it against the rock. The digger reversed itself and reversed again. It made six more passes before it stopped and Pete dropped from it. The robot began walking back toward the mound casually. Trolls jittered and then made room for him. "They didn't spot it," Gregg said suddenly. "They don't know we had the Rock Devil. Sam, if we can get the digger back, we may still get out of this." Sam nodded and threw his amIF perage drain to emergency maximum, prepared to drop and run for it Then he stopped as his heightened hearing brought him the sound f Pete's voice... The words were in Old Trollish, but the PT brain of the robot had learned the lesson well -- and somehow he had managed to guess the cant of primitive oratory. Yar Noo alidet! The Rock Devil is dead! We bound him and cast him from us, we ground him into the dust of the earth, we made him like the grains of sand that blow before the wind. His breath is spent, and his power, forgotten. He cannot rise again!" There was a delay as the ancient form of the language filtered through to the trolls. Then they were leaping for the area where the digger had destroyed the alien. And a moment later, the message was being relayed forward. Yar Noo alidet! Yar Noo alidetr V T he results came quickly. There was a series of wild cries, and then the trolls were leaping forward toward the mound, drawing their weapons. Bows were lifted, and arrows began whistling through the air. They fell short, but the next flight would reach. Sam swung, his arms, shoving the men down the tunnel. He turned again, yanked the rifle from his back, and sighted quickly. He knew some of the chiefs, and he picked them off while the arrows banged against him. At the death of the fifth chief, the trolls faltered. As the eighth dropped, they began retreating. He lowered the rifle and stretched out a hand to help Pete up, while Gregg came from the tuaael entrance to join them, then otood watching as the last of the trolls vanished behind the digger and nearby mounds. Now that the fini rush had failed, they would spend the day picking new chiefs and yelling their courage back, waiting for the obvious advantage of darkness. But meantime, they were making sure that their victims had no safe line of escape. 'They may relax a little near sundown," Sam decided. "Then if I can reach the digger while yon cover me with the rifle, we may have a chance. I'll back it up to the BKund, and you'D have to make a concerted run for it. If you get inside, it may protect us long enough tn get through the mob and outrun them." Back inside the little dome, the men listened grimly as Gregg outlined the situation and plan to them. Lee and gamey nodded as be finished. Dickson shook his head. "Not all of us. Dr. Gregg, that robot isn't safe with us. He deliberately refused to obey. He got us into this!" "Sit down, Dr. Frankenstein," Lee said sharply. A big hand put force behind his order. "We're all in this together -- even you! With what I heard about the danger to us of the Rock Devil and the trolls' insistence we kill it, I thought Pete was doing the right thing. And I still don't blame him. What got into the trolls, anyhow, Jim?" IF Gregg shrugged. "Who knows? Wc can guess. But Sam and I were always uncertain about the legends and the parts we couldn't seem to get. We knew they were afraid of his reviving -- but now it seems the only reason they didn't attack us before was because of that fear. They liked his trinkets, but when he wanted to change their ways, they killed and buried him. That's all we know." "No, Jim," Sam corrected him. "They didn't bury him. That hole in the floor isn't troll work. There had to be at least two aliens. One found the first and buried him, then took such vengeance on the trolls that they still remember. They must have thought it was the same one. So they are afraid he'll revive again." "You mean that robot's master was with him?" Dickson asked. G regg shook his head. 'There were no alien 'masters.' From the books I studied, the masters died off so long ago that the robot branch no longer has dear records of k. Something happened -- perhaps some disease -- and the robots carried on alone." "Disease?, Murder!" Dickson came to his feet with a scream, his face taut and white with all the ancient Earth fears he had bottled up under his mask of scientific study. "The robots killed their masters. Just as ours will do. We're not safe while a single robot exists. The#rre the most dangerous threat to our lives -- and you sit there!" Lee was moving toward him, but Gregg's fist stopped the tirade. "Pete, don't listen -- " But Gregg's words were too late. Pete swung abruptly, grabbing Sam's spare batteries from the desk, and he was pounding up the tunnel. By the time Sam could get past' the tangle of men around Dickson, the other robot had vanished. "He'll kill himself," Gregg shouted. "He has to. If he's the greatest source of harm to men, that damned first law has to negate the third. We've got to stop him." Sam shook his head, but he followed the others up the tunnel to the entrance. Even Dickson managed to stagger along with the others, moaning and grimacing with the pain of his jaw as sanity returned to him. At first, there was no sign of Pete. Then they saw that the trolls had begun to stream forth and cluster below the ledge, their vulpine stares fixed upwards, Sam followed their gaze and finally spotted the other robot. Pete had almost reached the top of the mound, scrambling and fighting for holds in the crumbling surface. As they l#eke#, he reached the peak and sat down upon it. Methodically, he began to open his chest plate and change from hk fresh batteries to the used spares he had scooped from the desk. Below, the trolls began screaming. "Yor Yar Noor Yar Noo haremetr Pete shouted back in old TroUlsh. 'The Rock Devil has returned! You did evil as you did of Old, and the Rock Devil came from tke dost and entered into this body and became strong again. Fear me and run from me, little bugs of evil!" Most of them bad already begun to draw back, though a few were lifting their bows. Now Pete stood up again, the two fresh batteries in his hands. And Sam could see that the protective caps were removed, exposing the bare terminals. "Down!" he cried sharply to the men. Pete jumped, holding the batteries, moving them precisely and slowly toward his own metal body. And' just before he landed among the screaming trolls, he moved his hands to short the terminals against himself. Those batteries were capable of holding a hundred ampere hours at more than a hundred volts pressure as a strain in the space within them. And now suddenly twenty kilowatt hours of potential energy screamed out in a terrible attempt to become raw heat. When the explosion of light and heat was over, there were no trolls except the dead and the fleeing. Pete's torment was over. The laws and idiocy that had made his life a hell where all he did was wrong had been repealed. VV told the men as they emerged from the tunnel. "I guess we can even go out to the stars on the great Gregg Expedition to find the aliens. But first, Barney, will you help me take what's left of Pete and bury him in the hole like the other Rock Devil?" And with the mangled body would go a card that Sam had carried for all the years since he had graduated -- a cheap little printed card of congratulations with the scrawl of a janitor on the back. It was the code a man had inscribed for Sam: Take care of yourself -- and always try to leave things a little better for the next fellow, Pete hadn't been given such a code, of course. But he'd earned the by Poul Anderson Complete in the December Galaxy, plus stories and features by Jack Vance, John Brunner, Willy Ley, etc. -- Don't miss it! IF IF  Short Story Tough day! The baby was a spy, and the friendly parish priest was A gnes had been wishing for a baby all day, so it was no surprise to her when she peeked through the glass door of the oven and found one. Bundled in clean flannel, it slept on the wire rsick while she scrubbed out dusty bottles, fixed formula and dragged down the crib from the attic. By the time Glen came home from work, she was giving the baby its first bottle. "Look!" she exclaimed. "A baby I" "Oh, my jod, where did you get that?" he said, his healthy pink face going white. "You know it's illegal to have babies." "I found it. Why illegal?" "Everything is illegal," he whispered, parting the curtains cautiously to peer out. "Damn near." The face upon Glen's big, pink, cubical head looked somewhat drawn. accomplice! "What's the matter?" "Oh, nothing," she said testily. "We're going to have a gas war, that's all." Glen was a pathetic figure as he moved so as not to cast a shadow on the curtains. His bright, skintight plastic suit was far from skintight, and even his cape looked baggy. "Is it? Is that all?" "No. Say, that neighbor of ours 'has been raking leaves an awfully long time." "Answer me. What's wrong? Something at the office?" "Everything. The carbon paper and stamps and paper clips have begun to disappear. I'm afraid they'll blame me. The boss is going to buy a computer to keep track of the loss. Someone stole my ration book on the train, and I found I had last ing, faintly falling. I have a cold, or something. And -- and they're doing away with the Dewey Decimal System." "You're just overwrought Why don't you just sit down and dandle Gur new baby on your knee, while I rustle up some supper." "Stealing food! It's indecent!" "Everyone does it, dear. Did you know I tound the baby in the oven?" "No!" "Yes, the queerest thing. I had just been wishing I'd find a baby somewhere." "How are the other appliances doing?" "The automatic washer tried to deour me. The dishwasher is fading away; we must have missed a payment." "Yes, and we're overdrawn," he said, sighing. "The garbage disposal is hulking." "Hulking?" "Over there." He did not look where she was pointing. He continued to peer out the window, where the weather situation was building up. A Welcome Wagon moved slowly down the street. He could not read the sign, but he recognized the armor plating and the blue snouts of machine guns. "Yes, it just sits there hulking in the sink, and it won't eat anything. It ateMts guarantee, though." T he neighbor, a "Mr. Green," paused in his raking to note down the Welcome Wagon's license number. "Not hulking, darling. Sulking Glen said. "You have such a big vocabulary. And you don't even read Mw to Build Bit Wordsr "I read Existential Digest, when I find the time," he confessed. But last week I took their lest and learned that I'm not alienated enough. That's why I'm so damned proud of our kids." "Jenny and Peter?" "The same." Agnes sighed. "I'd like to read a copy of the Irish Mail sometime. By the way, the potatoes had poison again. Every eye." She went into the bedroom and laid the baby in its crib. "I'm going down and turn something on the lathe," Glen announced. "Something good." "Take off your cape first. You remember the safety laws we kamed "Lord, how could I forget? Snuff out all candles. Never stand in a canoe or bathtub. Give name, rank and serial number only. Accept checks only if endorsed in your presence. Do not allow rats to chew on matches, should they so desire." He disappeared, and, at the same time, Jenny and Peter came home from school, demanding a "snack." All the kids on television had "snacks," they explained. Agnes gave them Hungarian goulash, bread and butter, coffee and apple pie. They paid #c each, and each tipped her #c. They were gruff, dour eight-year-olds, who talked little while they ate. Agnes was a little afraid of them. After their snack, IF they belted on guns and went out to hunt other children, before it grew too dark to see them. Agnes sighed and sat down to her secret transmitter. In a moment, the reply came. Always the same, tired, meaningless messages. Agnes sighed again and hid her transmitter in the cookie jar as Glen came up the stairs. He had, she knew, his own transmitter in the basement. For all she could tell, it was him she was calling each evening. "Look at this!" he said proudly and displayed a newel post. Outside, a plane dropped leaflets. The neighbor rushed about, raking them up and burning them. Every night, the same damned thing," said Glen, gnashing his teeth. "Every night they drop leaflets telling us to give up, and every night that jerk burns them all. At this rate, we'll never even learn who 'they' are." "Is it really so important?" she asked. He would not answer. "Come on, quit hulking... I'll tdl you what I want to do. I want to ride on a realway train." "'Railway" he corrected. "You can't. The Public Health Department says that going more than thirty miles an hour contributes signficantly to cancer." "A lot you care what happens to me!" G len bowed his great cube of a head resignedly over the' television set. "You'll notice he said, "that it looks like an innocent ArmyNavy football game. And so it may be. Perhaps the ball won't blow up when he Idcks it. Perhaps that series of plays is only a coincidence." "No. # fades back to pass," she murmured. "What would that mean, I wonder?" Glen felt her hand reach out to touch his. He held hands with his wife in the darkened living room, after making sure she was not wearing her poison ring. "The common cold," he muttered. ""They call it the 'common cold. By the way, have I told you we're overdrawn?" "Yes. It's that damned car. You would have to order all those special features." "The bazooka in the trunk? Tlie direction-finder radio? The gun turret? Everyone else has had them for years, Agnes. What am I supposed to do if the police start chasmg me? Try to outrun them, me with all that armor plate?" . "I just don't see what we're going to live on," she said. "We can eat green stamps, until t "No. They confiscated them this morning, I forgot to tell you." The children trooped in, smelling of mud and cordite. Jenny had scratched her knee on a barb wire barrier. Agnes applied a bandaid to it, gave them coffee and donuts, #c, and sent them upstairs to brush their teeth. "And don't, for God's sake, use the tap water," Glen shouted. "There's something in it." He walked into the room where the baby slept and returned in a moment, shaking his head. "Could have sworn I heard him ticking." "Oh Glen, let's get away for a few days. Let's go to the country." "Oh sure. Travel twenty miles over mined roads to look at a couple of cowpies. You wouldn't dare get out of the car, for the deadly snakes. They've sowed the ground with poison ivy and giant viruses." "I wouldn't care! Just a breath of fresh air -- " "Sure. Nerve gas. Mustard gas. Tear gas. Pollen, Even if we survived, we'd be arrested. No one ever goes into the country any more but dope peddlers, looking for wild tobacco." A gnes began to cry. Everyone was someone else. No one was who they were. The garbageman scrutinized her messages to the milkman. In the park, the pigeons all wore metal capsules taped to their legs. There were cowpifes in the country, but no cows. Even at the supermarket you had to be careful. If you picked out items that seemed to form any sort of pattern -- "Are there any popsicles left?" Glen asked. "No. There's nothing in the icebox but a leftover custard. We can't eat that, it has a map in it. Glen, what are we going to eat?" "I don't know. How about... the baby? Well, don't look at me like that! You found him in the oven, didn't you? Suppose you had just lit the oven without looking in?" "No! I will not give up my baby for a -- a casserole!" "All right! I was merely making a suggestion, that's all." It was dark, now, thrgughout the lead-walled house, except in the kitchen. Out the quartz picture window, dusk was falling on the lawn, on the lifeless body of "Mr. Green." The television showed a panel discussion of eminent doctors, who wondered if eating were not the major cause of insanity. Agnes went to answer the front door, while Glen went back to the kitchen. "Excuse me," the priest said to Agnes. "I'm on a sick call. Someone was good enough to loan me his Diaper Service truck, and I'm afraid it has broken down. I wonder if I might use your phone?" "Certainly, father. It's bugged, of course." "Of course." She stood aside to let him pass, and just then Glen shouted, "The baby! He's at the custard!" Agnes and the priest dashed out to see. In the clean, well-lighted kitchen, Glen stood gaping at the open refrigerator. Somehow the baby had gotten into it, for now Agnes could see his diapered bottom and pink toes sticking out from a lower shelf. IF "He's hungry," she said. "Take another look," Glen grated. Leaning closer, she saw the child had pulled the map from the custard. He was taking photos of it with a tiny, baby-sized camera. "Microfilm!" she gasped. "Who are you?" Glen asked the priest. I m -- "Wait a minute. You don't look like a man of the cloth to me." I t was true, Agnes saw in the light. The breeze rustled the carbonpaper cassock, and she saw it was held together with paper clips. His stole was, on closer examination, a strip of purple stamps. "If you're a priest," Glen continued, "why do I see on your Roman collar the letterhead of my officer "Very clever of you," said the man, drawing a pistol from his sleeve. "I'm sorry you saw through our little ruse. Sorry for you, that is." 'Ourr said Glen. He looked at the baby. "Hold on. Agnes, what kind of vehicle did he drive up in?" "A diaper truck." "Aha! I've been waiting a long time to catch up with you -- Diaper Man! Your chequered career has gone on far too long." "Ah, so you've recognized me and my dimple-kneed assistant, have you? But I'm afraid it won't do you much good. You see, we already have the photos, and there is a bullet here for each of you. Don't try to stop me!" Watching them, the false priest scooped up the baby. "I think I had better kill the two of you in any case," he said. "You already know too much about my modus operandi.'" The baby in his arms waved the camera gleefully and gooed its derision. "All right," said Diaper Man. "Face the wall, please." "Now!" Glen said. He leaped for the gun, while Agnes deftly kicked the camera from the baby's chubby fist. The infant spy looked startled, but he acted fast, a tiny blur of motion. Scooping up two fistfuls of custard, he flung them in Glen's eyes. Gasping, Glen dropped the gun, as the infamous pair made their dash for freedom. "You'll never take me alive!" snarled the false priest, vaulting into his truck. "Let them go," said Glen. He tasted the custard. "I should have realized earlier the baby wasn't ticking, he was clicking. Let them go. They won't get far, and we've saved the map -- for whatever it's worth." "Are you all right, darling?" "Fine. Mmm. This is pretty good, Agnes." She blushed at the compliment. There was a muffled explosion, and in the distance, they could see flames shooting high in the air. "Esso bombing the Shell station," said Glen. The gas war had begun. IF  Short Story Alfieri was a dead man who wanted to live. But there was a price -- his life would rto more be his own! A fterward, Alfieri realized that you must give a life to gain a life. Now, he was too interested simply in staying alive to think much about profundities. He was Vuomo dal fuoco in bocca, the man with fire in his mouth. Cancer clawed at his throat. The vocoder gave him speech; but the raging fire soon would burn through to the core of him, and there would be no more Franco Alfieri. That was hard to accept. So he came to the Fold for aid. He had the money. That was what it took, in part, to enter that gateway of worlds : money, plenty of it. Those who ran the Fold did not do it for sweet charity's sake. The power drain every time the Fold was opened. You could power a good-sized city on a load like that. But Alfieri was money would shortly be of no use to him whatever, unless the beings on the far side of the Fold gave his life back to him. "You stand on that bedplate," a technician told him. "Put your feet along the red triangular areas. Grasp the rail -- so. Then wait." Alfieri obeyed. He was no longer in the habit of taking such brusque orders, but he forgave the man for his rudeness. To the technician, Alfieri was so much wealthy meat, already going maggotty. Alfieri positioned his feet and looked down at the mirrorbright polish of his pointed black shoes. He grasped the furry yellow skin of the rail. He waited for the power surge. H e knew what would happen. Alfieri had been an engineer in Milan, twenty years back, when the European power grid was just coming in. He understood the workings of the Fold as well as -- well, as well as anyone else who was not a mathematician. Alfieri had left engineering to found an industrial empire that sprawled from the Alps to the blue Mediterranean, but he had kept up with technology. He was proud of that. He could walk into any factory, go straight to a workbench, display a rare knowledge of any man's labor. Unlike most top executives, his knowledge was deep as well as broad. Alfieri knew, then, that when the power surge came, it would momentarily create a condition they called a singularity, found in the natural universe only in the immediate vicinity of stars that were in their last moments of life. A collapsing star, a spent supernova, generates about itself a warp in the universe, a funnel to nowhere, the singularity. As the star shrinks, it approaches its Schwarzchild radius, the critical point when the singularity will devour it. Time runs more slowly for the dying star as it nears the radius; its faint light shifts conspicuously toward the red; time rushes to infinity as the star is caught and swallowed by the singularity. And a man who happens to be present? He passes into the singularity also. Tidal gravitational forces of infinite strength seize him; fie is stretched to the limit and simultaneously compressed, attaining zero volume and infinite density, and he is hurled -- somewhere. They had no dying stars in this laboratory. But for a price they could simulate one. For Alfieri's bundle of lire they would strain the universe and create a tiny opening and hurl him through the Fold, to a place where pleated universes met, to a place where incurable diseases were not necessarily incurable. Alfieri waited, a trim, dapper man of fifty, with thinning sandy hair slicked crosswise over the tanned dome of his skull. He wore the tweed suit he had bought in London in '#, and a matching gray-green tie and his small sapphire ring. He gripped the railing. He was not aware of it when the surge came, and the universe was broken open, and Franco Alfieri was catapulted through a yawning vortex into a place never dreamed of in Newton's philosophy. T he being called Vuor said, "This is Halfway House." Alfieri looked about him. Superficially, his surroundings had not changed at all. He still stood on a glossy copper bedplate, still grasped a furry rail. The quartz walls of the chamber looked the same. But an alien being now peered in, and Alfieri knew he had been translated through the Fold. The alien's face was virtually a blank: a slit of a mouth below, slits of eyes above, no visible nostrils, a flat greenish facade, altogether, sitting on a squat neck, a triangular shoulderless trunk, ropy limbs. Alfieri had become accustomed to aliens in his dealings, and the sight of Vuor did not disturb him, though he had never seen one of this sort before. Alfieri felt sweat churning through his pores. Tongues of flame licked at his throat. He had refused full sedation, for unless Alfieri's mind could work properly he would not be Alfieri. But the pain was terrible. He said, "How soon can I get help?" "What is the trouble?" "Cancer of the throat. You hear my voice? Artificial. The larynx is gone already. There's a malignant beast eating me. Cut it out of me." The eyeslits closed momentarily. Tentacles twined themselves together in a gesture that might have been sympathy, contempt, or refusal. Vuor's reedy, rasping voice said in passable Italian, "We do not help you here, you understand. This is merely Halfway House, the screening point We distribute you onward." "I know. I know. Well, send me to a world where they can cure cancer. I don't have much time left. I'm suffering, and I'm not ready to go. There's still work for me to do on Earth. CapisceV "What do you do, Franco Alfieri?" "Didn't my dossier arrive?" "It did. Tell me about yourself." Alfieri shrugged. His palms were growing clammy, and he let go of the rail, wishing the alien would let him sit down. "I run an engineering company," he said. "Actually, a holding company. Alfieri S.A. We do everything: power distribution, pollution control, robotics. We're getting into planetary transformation. Our operating divisions employ hundreds of thousands of men. We're more than just a money-making concern, though. We're shapers of a better world. We -- " He hesitated, realizing that he sounded now like one of his own public relations flunkies and realizing also that he was begging for his own life. "It's a big, important, useful company. I founded it. I run it." "And you are very rich. For this you wish us to prolong your life? You know that we all live under a sentence of death. For some sooner, others later. The surgeons beyond the Fold cannot save everyone. The number of sufferers who cry out is infinite, Alfieri. Tell me why you should be saved." W rath flamed in Alfieri. He suppressed it. He said, "I'm a human being with a wife and children. Not good enough reason, eh? I'm wealthy enough to pay any price to be healed. Good? No? Of course not. All right, try this: I'm a genius. Like Leonardo, like Michelangelo, like -- like Einstein. You know those names? Good. I have a big genius too. I don't paint, I don't compose music. I plan. I organize. I built the biggest corporation in Europe. I took companies and put them together to do things they could never have done alone." He glowered at the alien green mask beyond the quartz wall. "The technology that led Earth to open the Fold in the first place -- my company. The power source -- mine. I built it. I don't boast, I speak the truth." "You are saying that you have made a lot of money." "Danm you, no! I'm saying that I've created something that didn't exist before, something useful, something important not only to Earth IF but to all the other worlds that meet here. And I'm not through creating. I've got bigger ideas. I need ten more years, and I don't have ten months. Can you take the responsibility of shutting me off? Can you afford to throw away all that's still in me? Can you?" His unreal voice, which never grew hoarse even when he raised it to a shout, died away. Alfieri leaned on the railing again. The small golden eyes in the narrow slits regarded him impassively. After a long silence Vuor said, "We will give you our decision shortly." The walls of the chamber went opaque. Alfieri paced the little room wearily. The taste of defeat was sour in his mouth, and somehow it did not anger him to know that he had failed. He was past cafing. They would let him die, of course. They would tell him that he had done his work, that he had built his company, that it saddened them but they had to consider the needs of younger men whose life-dreams still were unrealized. Then, too, they were likely to think that merely because he was rich, he was not deserving of rescue. Easier was it for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a richjnan to attain new life on the surgeon's tables of a world beyond the Fold. Yet he couldn't give up now. As he awaited his death sentence, Alfieri planned how he would spend his remaining months of life. Working to the end, of course. The heatsink project at Spitzbergen -- yes, that first, and then -- T he walls were clear again. Vuor had returned. "Alfieri, we have made an appointment for you on Hinnerang, where your cancer will be remitted and your tissues restored. But there is a price." "Not money," Vuor said. "Service. Put your genius to work in our aid." "Tell me how!" "Halfway House, you know, is cooperatively staffed by representatives of the many worlds whose continua meet at the Fold. There is not currently an administrator from Earth on our staff. A vacancy is soon to develop. You fill it. Lend us your gift for organizing, for administration. Take a five-year term among us. Then you may return home." Alfieri pondered. He had no particular wish to give up five years to this place. Too much beckoned to him on Earth, and if he were away five years, who would take the reins of his companies? He might return and find himself hopelessly out of touch. Then he realized the absurdity of the thought. Vuor was offering him twenty, thirty, fifty more years of life. Standing at the edge of Ae grave as he was, Alfieri had no right to begrudge five of those years if his benefactors demanded them. He had made his unique administrative abilities his claim for renewed life; was it any surprise that they now wanted those same abilities as quid pro quo? "Agreed," Alfieri said. "There will, in addition, be a monetary payment," said Vuor, but Alfieri hardly cared about that. A n infinity of universes met at the Fold, as they did at every other point in space-time. Only at the Fold, though, was it possible now to cross from one continuum to another, thanks to the equipment installed there. A web work of singularities poked holes in the fabric of universal structures. Halfway House was the shuttle point for this loom of worlds; those who could convince the administrators that they had the right to occupy a valuable place on the transfer channels were shunted to the worlds of their need. An infinity is an infinity, and the channels filled all needs. There was access, for those who wanted it, to a matter-free universe, and to a universe filled with one all-encompassing atom, and to a universe containing a world where living beings grew steadily younger and not the reverse. There were worlds unknown to the sons of Adam, with tribes whose heads did grow beneath their shoulders and their mouths in their breasts; worlds of monoculi, who run swiftly though they have only a single leg and a single eye; worlds of folk whose mouths are so small they take nourishment only through a straw; worlds of amoebic intelligences; worlds where bodily reincarnation is an established fact; worlds where dreams become realities at the snap of a finger. An infinity is an infinity. But for practical purposes, only some two dozen of those worlds mattered, for they were the ones linked by common purposes and common orientation. On one of those worlds, skilled surgeons might repair a cancerravaged throat. In time that skill would be imparted to Earth in return for some Earthly good, but Alfieri could not wait for the exchange to be consummated. He paid his fee, and the administrators of Halfway House sent him to Hinnerang. Alfieri was unaware, once again, as he squeezed through the Schwarzchild singularity. He had always loved tasting unfamiliar sensations, and it seemed unfair to him that a man should be compressed to zero volume and infinite density without some tactile knowledge of the fact. But so it happened. A dying supernova was simulated for him, and he was whisked through the singularity, and he emerged in one more identical chamber on Hinnerang. Here, at least, things looked properly alien. There was a reddish tinge to the warm, golden sunlight, and at night four moons danced in the sky. The gravity was half that of Earth's; and as he stood under that quartet of shimmering orbs, Ajfieri felt a strange giddiness and an inner access of ecstatic strength. It seemed to him that he could leap at a bound and snatch one of those jewels from the sky. T he Hinnerangi were small, angular beings with auburn skins, high-vaulted skullcaps, and fibrous fingers that divided and divided again until they formed writhing networks of filament at the tips. They spoke in sinister whispers, and their language struck Alfieri as more barbarous than Basque and as consonant-heavy as Polish; but the usual small devices turned their words to IF the tongue of Dante when they needed to communicate with him, a miracle that struck Alfieri as more awesome than the whole mechanism of the Fold, which at least he could pretend he understood. "We will first negate your pain," his surgeon told him. "By knocking out my pain sensors?" Alfieri asked. "Cutting nerve lines?" The surgeon regarded him with what seemed like grave amusement. "There are no pain sensors as such in the human nervous system. There are merely functional bodies that perceive and respond by classifying the many patterns of nerve impulses arriving from the skin, selecting and abstracting the necessary modalities. 'Pain' is simply a label for a class of experiences, not always unpleasant. We will adjust the control center, the gate of responses, so that your scanning of input impulses will be orientated differently. There will be no loss of sensory information; but what you feel will no longer be classified as pain." At another time, Alfieri might have been happy to discuss the refined semantics of pain theory. Now, he was satisfied to nod solemnly and permit them to put out the fire that raged in hi throat. It was done, delicately and simply. He lay in a cradle of some gummy foam while the surgeon planned the next move: a major resection of tissue; replacement of lost cell matter; regeneration of organs. To Alfieri, wireless transmission of power was an everyday matter, but these things were the stuff of dreams. He submitted. They cut away so much of him that it seemed another slice of the surgical beam would sever his head altogether. Then they rebuilt him. When they were finished, he would speak with his own voice again, not with an implanted mechanism. But would it really be this own, if they had built it for him? No matter. It was flesh. Alfieri's heart pumped Alfieri's blood through the new tissue. And the cancer? Was it gone? The Hinnerangi were thorough. They hunted the berserker cells through the corridors of his body. Alfieri saw colonies of cancer establishing themselves in his lungs, his kidneys, his intestines. He visualized marauding creatures stabbing good cells with mortal wounds, thrusting their own vile fluid into unwanted places, replicating a legion of goose-stepping carcinomas cell by cell by cell. But the Hinnerangi were thorough. They purged Alfieri of corruption. They took out his appendix, in the bargain, and comforted his liver against a lifetime of white Milanese wine. Then they sent him off to recuperate. He breathed alien air and watched moons leaping like gazelles in a sky of strange constellations. He put his hand to his throat a thousand times a day, to feel the newness there, the warmth of fresh tissue. He ate the meat of unknown beasts. He gained strength from hour to hour. At last they put him in a singularity chamber and rammed him through the complexities of the Fold, and he returned to Halfway House. V uor said, "You will begin your work at once. This will be your office." It was an oval room, walled with a living plastic that made it seem as warm and pink and soft as the walls of a womb. Beyond one wall was the quartz-bounded chamber used by those who traveled the Fold. Vuor showed him how to operate the switch that permitted viewing access to the chamber in either direction. "What will my duties be?" Alfieri asked. "Come and tour Halfway House first," said Vuor. Alfieri followed. It was hard to grasp the nature of the place; Alfieri pictured it as something like a space station, an orbiting wheel of finite size divided into many chambers. But since there were no windows, he could not confirm that belief. The place seemed fairly small, no bigger than a good-sized office building. Much of it was given over to a power plant. Alfieri wished to stay and examine the generators, but Vuor hurried him on to a cafeteria, to a small room that would be his dwelling place, to some sort of chapel, to executive offices. The alien seemed impatient. Silent figures drifted through the halls of Halfway House, beings of fifty sorts. Nearly all were oxygenbreathers who could handle the allpurpose atmosphere of the place, but some were masked and mysterious. They nodded at Vuor, stared at Alfieri. Civil servants, Alfieri thought. Doing their routine work. And now I am one of them, a pretty bureaucrat. But I am alive, and I will wade through a sea of bureaucratic forms to show my gratitude. They returned to the oval office with the soft, moist pink walls. "What will my duties be?" Alfieri asked again. "To interview those who come to Halfway House seeking to travel beyond the Fold." "But that's your job!" "No longer," said Vuor. "My term is up. Mine is the now-vacant position you have been recruited to fill. When you begin, I can leave." "You said I'd get an administrative post. To organize, to plan -- " "This is administrative work. You must judge the niceties of each applicant's situation. You mut be aware of the capacity of the facilities beyond this point. You must maintain an overview of your task: whom to send forward, whom to reject." A lfieri's hands trembled. "I'm the one who'll decide? I say, you go back and rot, and you come forward? I choose life for some and death for others? No. I don't want it. I'm not God!" "Neither am I," said the alien blandly. "Do you think I like this job? But now I can shrug it off. I am finished here. I have been God for five years, Alfieri. It's your turn now." "Give me some other work. There must be other jobs suited for me!" "Perhaps there are. But you are best suited for this one. You are a gifted decider. And another thing to consider, Alfieri: you are my replacement. If you do not take the IF job, I must remain until someone else capable of handling it is found. I have been God long enough, Alfieri." Alfieri was silent. He stared into the golden eyeslits, and for the first time he thought he could interpret an expression he found there. Pain. The pain of an Atlas, carrying worlds on his shoulders. Vuor was suffering. And he, Franco Alfieri, could alleviate that pain by taking the burden on himself. Vuor said, "When your application was approved, there was an understanding that you would render service to us. The scope of your duties has been outlined to you. There is an obligation, Alfieri." Nodding, Alfieri saw the truth of that. If he refused to take the post, what would they do? Give him his cancer back? No. They would find another use for him. And Vuor would continue to hold this job. Alfieri owed his life to the suffering alien. If he extended Vuor's duties by one additional hour, it would be unforgivable. "I accept the obligation," Alfieri said. The look in the alien eyeslits could have been nothing but joy. T here Avere certain things Alfieri had to learn about his job, and then he was on his own. He learned them. He took up his new existence as a bureaucrat with good grace. One room to live in, instead of a cycle of mansions; food prepared by computers, not by master chefs; a long day of work, and little recreation. But he was alive. He could look to a time beyond the five years. He sent word to Earth that he would be detained and that he would eventually return in good health to resume his position in the corporation. He authorized the commencement of Plan A for running the company in his prolonged absence. Alfieri had planned everything... Men he trusted would be stewards for him until he returned. It wa.s made quite clear to him at Halfway House that he could not attempt to run the firm by remote control, and so he activated his plan and left the company to its new administrators. He was busy enough. Applicants came to him. Not all of them wished medical aid, but all had some good and compelling reason for journeying to some world beyond the Fold. Alfieri judged their cases. He had no quota; if he cared to, he could send all his applicants through to their destinations or turn them all away. But the one would be irresponsible, the other inhumane. Alfieri judged. He weighed in the balance, and some he found wanting, and others he passed on. There were only so many channels, a finite number of routes to the infinity of worlds. Alfieri thought of himself sometimes as a traffic policeman, sometimes as Maxwell's Demon, sometimes as Rhadamanthus in Hades. Mostly he thought of the day when he could go home again. The refusals were painful. Some of the applicants bellowed their rage at him and made threats. Some of them shrank into sobbing stupors. Some quietly warned of the grave injustice he was doing. Alfieri had made hard decisions all his life, but his soul was not yet calloused from them, and he regretted the things the applicants said to him. The job, though, had to be done, and he could not deny he had a gift for it. He was not the only such judge at Halfway House, naturally. Streams of applicants were constantly processed through many offices. But Alfieri was, in addition to a judge, the final court of appeals for his colleagues. He maintained the overview. He controlled the general flow. It was his talent to administer things. A day came when an auburnskinned being with swarming subdivided tendrils stood before him, a man of Hinnerang. For a terrible moment Alfieri thought it was the surgeon who had repaired his throat. But the resemblance was only superficial. This man was no surgeon. Alfieri said, "This is Halfway House." "I need help. I am Tomrik Horiman. You have my dossier?" "I do," Alfieri said. "You know that we give no help here, Tomrik Horiman. We simply forward you to the place where help may be obtained. Tell me about yourself." The tendrils writhed in anguish. "I am a grower of houses. My capital is overextended. My entire establishment is threatened. If I could go to a world where my houses would win favor, my firm would be saved. I have a plan for growing houses on Melknor. Our calculations show that there would be a demand for our product there." "Melknor has no shortage of houses," Alfieri remarked. "But they love novelty there. They'd rush to buy. An entire family is faced with ruin, kind sir! Root and branch we will be wiped out. The penalty for bankruptcy is extreme. With my honor lost, I would have to destroy myself. I have children." Alfieri knew that. He also knew that the Hinnerangi spoke the truth; unless he were allowed to pass through to Melknor to save his business, he would be obliged to take his own life. As much as Alfieri himself, this being had come before the tribunal of Halfway House under a death sentence. But Alfieri had gifts. What did this man offer? He wished to sell houses on a planet that had no real need for them. He was one of many such house-growers, anyway, and a poor businessman to boot. He had brought his troubles upon himself, unlike Alfieri, who had not asked for his cancer. Nor would Tomrik Horiman's passing be any great loss except to his immediate family. It was a great pity; but the application would have to be refused. VV cision shortly," said Alfieri. He opaqued the walls and briefly reported to his colleagues. They did not question the wisdom of his decision. Clearing the walls, he stared through the blocks of quartz at the man from Hinnerang and said, "I greatly regret that your application must be rejected." Alfieri waited for the reaction. IF Anger? Hysterical denunciation? Despair? Cold fury? A paroxysm of frustration? No, none of those. The merchant of vegetary houses looked quietly back at Alfieri, who had spent enough time among Hinnerangi to interpret their unvoiced emotions. And Alfieri felt the flood of sorrow coming at him like a stream of acid. Tomrik Horiman pitied hin. "I am very sorry," the Hinnerangi said. "You bear such a great burden." Alfieri shook with the pain of the words. The man was sorry -- not for himself, but for him! Morbidly, he almost wished for his cancer back. Tomrik Horiman's pity was more than he could bear at that moment. Tomrik Horiman gripped the rail and stood poised for his return to his own world. For an instant his eyes met the shadowed ones of the Earthman. "Tell me," Tomrik Horiman said. "This job you have, deciding who goes forward, who goes back. Such a terrible burden! How did this job come to you?" "I was condemned to it," said Franco Alfieri in all the anguish of his Godhead. "The price for my life was my life. I never knew such suffering, when I was only a dying man." He scowled. And then he threw the switch that sent Tomrik Horiman Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging: from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicologry. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street,  New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address Gty  State Zip Code... (Offer good in U, S. A. Only) IF  Serial by j. T. McIntosh The Giants could live almost forever -- even now and then in the process!  X I drove home first, taking Jota with me, for he insisted we should change into dank dotflies. We knew the place where the camp must be: #n a bend on the river about a mile upstream, It was a piece of wasteland which campers had used before, but not often, because modern campers had cars or cjiravans or bicycles or trucks; and if they hadn't, they wanted to be near a road where diey could catch buses. This spot was near no road, and anybody camping there In the little town of Shuteley, England, on the hottest summer of any resident's memory, a party of visitors appeared. They were all young, and they were enormous. Moreover, they had a couple of traits that startled the quiet people of Shuteley. The girls in the party wore dresses that disappeared from time to time; and all of them hod an unusual knowledge of what was happening in the town... and what was about to happen. The giants had established a camp on the bank of a river outside of Shuteley. Two of the inhabitants went to visit there, to satisfy their curiosity. They didn't know that the price of their curiosity would be their lives! who wanted to come into Shuteley had to walk all the way. It was a good place, perhaps the best place in the vicinity for campers who wanted privacy. Yet it was also a place where anyone who wanted to spy on them could do so very easily. And yet, as I said to Iota just before turning into our drive: "We may be making fools of ourselves. If they knew the precise second when you'd walk into my office, don't they know already that we're on our way to spy on them?" Such considerations didn't bother Iota. 'Then something may develop. And that's wbait we want." I left the oar outside the house, and Jota took his one trunk inside with him. Sheila met us in the hall, and at sight of Jota she started and shot a quick glance at me which could only be described as unfriendly. "I thought I told you -- " she said. "Sorry," I said rather awkwardly. "I knew you were going shopping. I thought you'd have left." I had put it that way, because when we came in I knew she hadn't left. Her Austin mini was still in the drive. "Hello, Sheila," said Jota easily. "You look more wonderful than ever." Sheila said nothing. She picked up her shopping bag and went out, slamming the front door. "You should have phoned, you know," Jota told me. "Don't you know anything about women? It's nothing to do with whether she IF loves me or hates my guts. Maybe she wouldn't have prettied herself up anyway. You sihould have given her (the choice, to be here or not, to be dressed up or just -- " "Let's change," I said irritably. I didn't want a lecture from Jota, of all people, on Sheila, of all people. Jota was staring past me at the stairs. I (turned. Dina was descending slowly, dressed in an old pink evening gown of Sheila's. "She saw a Goldwyn picture on television the other day," I murmured. "Beautiful girls coming down wide staircases." Raising my voice, I called: "Dina -- would you like to go and stay with the Carswells?" She stopped play-acting at once, lifted her long skirt and ran down the rest of the way. "Now?" she said eagerly. "If you like." She turned. "I'll goand pack." "Wait, Dina. Aren't you going to say hello to Jota?" "Hello," she said and started for the stairs. "She's lovely," Jota said. "No change? I mean -- " "I know what you mean," I said shortly. "No change." "That," he said, "is a great pity." "That," I replied, "is an understatement." "What I mean is -- " "I know what you mean." He seemed to feel I should be more forthcoming. "Naturally I'm interested," he said. "Dina's my cousin." I added nothing, however, and the subject was dropped. T he probable camp site being on (the other side of the river, we rowed (across the placdd Shute in a rubber dinghy. Sddom used, the boat was invaluable at times, the nearest bridge being at Shutdey. We made a considerable detour in order to be able to approach the place where we expected the camp to be from the far side, and we stopfed talking as we neared the spot. Sound can carry unexpectedly in the open, especially near water. Of course Jota, Gil and I had played as (kids all around Shuteley, and the countryside had changed less than the town -- which hadn't changed much. There were some places where we knew every bush, every tree and every stone, and this was one of them. Along the riverside east of the probable camp site there was a jungle of undergrowth. It was through this that we approached. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and cloaked any noise we might have made. The camp was exactly where we expected -- and the giants didn't know we were there. At least, if they did they were pretending they didn't, and that seemed out of character. At first sight their camp was like, any other. There were two large tents and five small ones. Most of the boys and girls I had already seen were there, and there were some I was sure I hadn't seen. The sixteen who had been in The Coper Beech the evening before, plus Greg, were not, therefore, the whole company. In the shade of a canopy two girls were reading magazines. Four of the men lay on the grass sunbathing, and on the other side of the big tents, three girls lay drowsily in the afternoon heat. Two or three more sat on the river bank, not bathing, merely dangling their toes in the water. Two who were missing were Miranda and Greg. The chance link produced a sudden stab of jealousy in me. Was Miranda Greg's girl? Such things happened. They kept happening. A girl talked as if a certain man was, as far as she was concerned, the person least likely to succeed. And then you found out... On the face of it, Miranda didn't like Jota much and liked Greg less. But I knew that any vague ideas I might have about Miranda and me -- adolescent fantasies, anyway, fatuous even if I weren't married to Sheila -- were going to be overturned by Greg or Jota, if not both. I knew this because such things always happened. It was in the nature of things. Anyway, the camp presented a very normal scene. I didn't know what Jota had expected, but I hadn't exjected this. Not when the giants didn't know we were watching them. We could see very well. We were unlikely to be detected; but unfortunately we were too far away to pick up any of the lazy, murmured conversations of either group of sunbathers. And after five minutes I was more than ready to leave. I was rather afraid that Jota was going to force the issue by striding into the camp and making something happen. Uncertain why I didn't want that, I was nevertheless certain that it would 'be a mistake. Every single person in the camp was dressed exactly as might be expected. Nothing sensational like the luxon dresses was visible, and that was puzzling. If the giants didn't mind creating a sensation in Shuteley, why were they so conventional in their own camp? Did they know we were watching them, after all? The tents, too, were straightforward. Primus stoves, plastic containers, buckets, basins -- every item of camping equipment I could see looked standard. That crystallized one of the things that puzzled me about the giants. If their origin was as strange as I suspected, one of two things could have been expected. Either they'd make quite certain their clothes, money, appearance, speech, camping equipment and everything else they had with them were authentic. Or, careless of what Shuteley thought of them, they'd appear in their true colors -- which were, I was quite certain, vastly different from anything we had ever seen. But they steered a baffling middle course. At last what I feared came about. "Come on," said Jota in a normal tone and moved forward. "No," I whispered urgently, trying to hold him back. "They're ordinary kids or they're not," he said. "Let's talk to them and find out." IF Reluctantly I followed him, and we strode into the camp. N o, they hadn't been expecting us. The sunbathers sat up, startled, one of the girls who had unfastened the strap of her bra holding a towel in front of her. "Greg!" somebody shouted, and Greg emerged from one of the tents. I wondered: was Miranda in there? "Hi," said Greg casually, coming to meet us. All the giants gathered together -- and they were giants, seen in this setting. Nobody was fat, but the vital statistics of both boys and girls were unusual. Average figures among the girls, I calculated, would be #-#-#. Scaled down, very satisfactory. But they had to stand back for the full effect to be made. There was no pretense that we were anything but unwelcome visitors. Someone whisipered to Greg, and then he faced us. "So you came to spy on us, Val," Greg said. "Iota's idea, I guess." He said "Iota" this time, not "Clarence Mulliner." "We simply came to -- " "Fft," said Greg derisively, pointing. I followed his glance. His meaning and Jiis conclusion were unmistakable. Wc had come from dense undergrowth. Nobody openly approaching the camp would ever have come that way WTiile my head was turned he must have made a gesture. Before we could move we were each in the grasp of two of the most gigantic of giants. From that moment I ceased thinking of the giants as kids. When two of them could hold Iota and I as those four held us, they were men. "A duel," said Greg. "No, two duels. That's it." There was an excited hum among the giants. Iota's silence surprised me. He was seldom at a loss for w.ords. "Knives or guns," said Greg. "##I take Iota... Obviously. Wesley, you can have Val." They began to form a ring. One of the girls ran into Greg's tent and emerged almost at once with a pair of wicked-looking knives and two old-fashioned dueling pistols in a case. "This has gone far enough," I said. "Where's Miranda?" "She isn't here," Greg said. And the way he said it made me certain that her absence completely left him off the leash, that he felt free to do things he might not otherwise have dared do. In a daze I saw Iota calmly elect to fight with the pistols. His idea was to play along with the giants, see how far they would go. Perhaps he was right, I thought. On his own, without any conventional reaction, he'd possibly have been able to get himself accepted on his own terms as usual. The giants played out the farce gravely, though with suppressed excitement. One of them offered himself as lota's second. Then Greg said, not to us but to the rest of them: "This really is a test. This really is worth while. Tm taking Iota." He stopped, the XI pause heavy with signifioaoce, although what the significance might be was a compiete mystery to us. He went on: "So after t! weH ah know, won't we?" A wave of uneastiness ran through them. All the gids stood well back. Then we got on with it. The pistols were inspected, the meetingground paced out. Then Gieg and Iota stood back to back and at a signal began to stride slowly and steadily apart. They had not let me be Iota's second. I had therefore had no chance to' examine the pistols. They would, of course, be loaded with blanks. Perhaps they were not really pistols at all, but cigarette lighters or elaborate toys. I couldn't take the affair seriously, and I was sure Iota wasn't doing so either, because it was obvious that the giants were simply playing at duels. There had been a chill for a moment as Greg made his little speech, but already those not directly involved were smiling and laughing, as if this was all a big joke. Iota and Greg took their last paces and turned. The two shots were so close that it was impossible to tell which was first. Iota's, I thought, buit of course he had deloped -- fired in the air. Crazy though he might 'be at times, he wasn't taking the chance of really shooting Greg. But Greg had not deloped. And incredulously I watched Iota sink to his knees, blood at his mouth. When we reached him he was dead. I don't know what I said and did. Ifie rest was nightmare. Fagments of thought flashed through my mind. One was that if our world really was nothing to the giants, murder in it didn't count to them. If tothem we were unreal, they could kill us as we'd shoot clay pipes. Was thatthe explanation? I also thought of the. incredible manner of lota's death. He had always seemed larger than life. Yet at the end, he died grotesquely -- firing in the air, quite certain the duel was a piece of juvenile playacting, letting Greg pick him off. I wondered if Miranda's presence would have made any difference. Would she have stood hack with the rest of the girls? Or would she, having spoken to me three times and lunched with me, have felt what none of the others seemed to feel -- that we were human beings? I had to admit she had never shown any sign of it. I noticed then, though I was unable to analyze it until later, that Greg had proved a point. Thegiants were looking at him now with new respect. No, not respect. Rather caution and apprehension. Why this should he I didn't know. The reason had to he something more than that he had proved he could shoot straight. Perhaps it was because he had proved he could kill. Incredibly, in the middle of this, they were making me choose wejpons. Greg was telling me -- the sense registered, though the IF words did not -- that if I won, I was free to go. "Killer," I whispered. "We're all killers," he said indifferently. "You're a meat eater." "Are you going to eat Jota?" I demanded. "That's a point," he admitted and gropved mentally. "A hit -- a palpable hit," he added. Realizing that this much was real, that I had to fight Wesley and he would kill me if he could, I chose the knives. Pistols were no use. Greg had shown he could shoot, and no doubt Wesley could too. I didn't know I couldn't, but I was fairly sure, never having tried. Wesley was taller than me but not much heavier. Although some of the protocol of duello had been observed, no one had said anything about dress. I still wore dark pants and a dark sweater, and Wesley, in swimming briefs, evidently intended to start that way. We started fighting. In the first two seconds Wesley slashed my left wrist deeply and painfully, and nothing could have brought home to me more clearly that I was fighting for my life. I knew this was a nightmare, I knew it wasn't real to the giants, and yet it had been real to Jota, and it was real to me. So I feinted. I slid under that terrifying blade, and before I got clear again I slashed Wesley's leg. It was a fearsome cut, and it nearly made me sick. The giants shouted and screamed with excitement. I had tried to tell Greg that we couldn't kill them, that the death of Jota had been murder because Jota couldn't possibly try to kill him. And if I killed one of the giants, the police would see it only as murder. But if I didn't kill Wesley, he would kill me. This I now fully accepted.  The slashed leg hampered him considerably. Faster than me until then, he had shown no particular skill with a knife. But then, I had none either. He attacked me twice and I dodged him, making him waste energy and lose blood. And now he knew that he could lose this fight -- I saw it in his eyes. With every moment he was slower and weaker. I got him again. Although the slash across his chest did no serious damage, it made him a gory object, with rich blood welling from his leg on the grass and long streaks running down his torso. It was his blood that nearly finished me. I slipped on it, and he was on me, the knife high. Too high. Never having fought with a knife, anymore than I had, he paid for the dramatic gesture, knife raised at arm's-length for the death stroke. I cut his legs from under him and as he fedl pressed the knife into his heart. It was torn from my fingers. Unfortunately for all of us, he didn't die quite as quickly as Jota had done... "All right, Vail," Greg said soberly, "you can go." They were all sober now, the exci'tement ifading from their faces. Some of the giiis looked rather sick. I tunned and walked out of the camp. What I was going to do now, I had no idea. The giants had killed Jota, and I'd killed one of them. Of one thing, somehow, I was certain. The giants would cover up. If I went to the police and took them back to the camp, there would be no sign of Jota or of Wesley. The blood would be gone... J ota and I were striding into the camp! For a moment we faltered and stared at each other. Then Greg, enjoying himself, was saying: "No argument, please. Just get out." Grinning at me in a not unfriendly way was Wesley. Alive. And I knew from his expression that the duels were something more than a figment of imagination. He looked exactly as if I had beaten him, fair and square, in any contest, and he was ready to admit it. But there was no blood. He was unscratched, as I was. It wasn't quite the same as the last time we had entered the camp. This time they were expecting us, lined up. The sunbathers were there too, on their feet. The shy girl had fastened her bra. In a second sense, Jota came to life. "No," he said. 'Td like to stay here withyou. In fact, I will." Greg frowned. "That was meant as a warning. If you -- " "I'm warned," said Jota easily. "Now, I'd like to stay with you for a while. I'll be no bother. I've camped out often." All the giants seemed taken aback. "I'll even promise not to ask questions," Jota said. "Gosh, it's hot." He started taking off his jacket. "We'll throw you out," said Greg. "And I'll come back," Jota said. "I came back from the dead, didn't I?" "We arranged that," said Greg ominously. "Next time we won't loop you back." Jota had his jacket off and was unbuttoning his shirt. 'Oan someone lend me a pair of shorts?" he asked. Greg suddenly laughed -- the bellow that had rattled the windows of my office. "I like you," he said. "Most people do," said Jota. "You're a bit like me," said Greg. "In more ways than one," said Jota softly. And now he was speaking with significance. There was a sudden silence. Jota knew something he wasn't supposed to know. I was out of this, yet not entirely out of it, not without some clue. I had known Jota a long time. "Remember," Greg said, "I killed you." "Remember," Jota said, "I let you." They suddenly all decided by common consent that if Jota was halfway one of them, I certainly wasn't. can't stay," Greg told Jota. "That's all right," said Jota calmly. "I don't need anyone to hold my hand." They were going to let him stay. He was going to have his way. IF as usual. And I knew he'd had this idea in his head all along. Jota, despite a wide variety of personal contacts that were fleeting or lasting, was a lone wolf. He didn't want me with him. He wanted to do this his way. "What's your name?" he asked one of the girls, the prettiest next to Miranda. "Irwina," she said. "Let's go and dangle our toes in the water -- after somebody lends me a pair of shorts." Greg looked at me. "Get out," he said briefly. I didn't argue. Jota, living in the camp, was bound to learn a lot -- perhaps everything there was to learn. I walked away and left them. I t was quicker to walk back along the river bank than it would have been to cut across country to the road into town. There was no point in going back to the office. I knew I couldn't do anything useful that afternoon. Fighting for your life, even if you win, doesn't leave you cool, calm and collected. To say I was shaken was an understatement. Unharmed, unscratohed though I 'was, I had lived the nightmare. Jota had died, and yet he had experienced less than I had. I could still feel the pain in my wrist, the warm dripping blood. I would never forget what it was like to fight for my life, knowing the only choice was to kill or be killed. Nor would I forget what it was like to be a killer. If I ever killed again, there would have to be a reason, a stronger reason even than self-defense. Until then I had not realized Hhere could be a stonge reason. Yet if you kill merely to avoid beinlg killed, you don't want to !kill. If you kill in anger or bate, you mean it... I was going home to have a iff whisky, or two, or three. SSieila was out. And Dina would have gone to the Carswells. I was glad Sheila wouldn't be at home. If a man and womian are close, married or not, everything that happens has to be shared, and as soon as possible. Once Fd have been running home to tdl Sheila what had happened, to talk it out with her. As it was I was impatient to get into a cool, daricened room, out of the sun, with a glass and a bottle of Glen Grant. I meant to get drunk. Yet I don't drink a lot, and seldom alone. Ahead of me, I saw a swimmer in the river. And what a swiniimer! She was moving away, gaining on me. She must therefore have slipped into the water, unnoticed, just in front of me. Although I could see only her dark head, she must be Miranda. Nobody in Shuteley could swim like that . I guessed at once where she was going. When three or six or a dozen out of the ordinary things happen at more or less the same time, the chances of a connection between them are overwheJming. Miranda was swimming downriver. She wasn't swimming lazily, as anyone might on a hot day. She was swimming with a purpose, to get somewhere. About half a mile downriver, on the south side, was the copse where I had seen the unexplained, inexplicable radiance. And short of going all the way to Shuteley, crossing there, coming back on the other side and then walking up our drive, past the house and through the garden, the only way to reach it from the giants' camp was to swim or use a boat. I started to run. I wanted to be in the copse before Miranda, to hide and see what happened. Unless I ran I had no chance of beating her there, because I had to run past the copse to where Jota and I had left the dinghy, row myself over and get mysd'f established in the copse before Miranda arrived. I made it. I was across the river and well hidden at the bottom of the garden just before Miranda swam up the first inside leg of the W bend. I saw her climb onto the bank, shaking the water from her hair... then she said, not loudly: "Come out, Val." T here was no point in going on pretending. I stood up, pushed my way through the bushes, and joined her on the small strip of grass at the edge of the river, "You saw me?" I said. "I saw your boat." At the point where I crossed, only a tiny stretch of river past the bends was visible. By a piece of bad luck, Miranda must have been exactly at that pKint when I was rowing myself across. She sat down on the grass. Her swimsuit was a brief, white two-piece, and I had never seen anything so lovely as she in it. Not sexy -- that, too, of course, but she was genuinely beautiful rather than provocative. "Where were you?" she asked. I sat down too. "At the camp. With Jota." "What happened?" I told her. For a moment she was furiously angry, though silent -- the first time I had seen her really alive. But all she said was: "That Greg... of course he'll ruin everything. We knew that. Everybody knew that." "Ruin what?" I asked. She ignored that. "And in this crazy duel, Jota just died?" "He fired his gun in the air." She nodded. "That figures." "He said -- and everybody seemed to make sense of it hut me -- he let Greg kill him." She nodded. "But... that's ridiculous. I mean, Jota didn't know the clock was going to be put hack. He didn't, I'm certain. So why would he...?" 'That's not what he meant." "Greg used the word 'loop'... 'Next time we won't loop you back.' " She sighed. "It's some kind of time warp, obviously," I said. "The same thing that enables you to be here, when anyone can see you were born in some other century." IF Miranda said: "Val, please give up. I've told you a few iinimportaiit things. There aren't many unkniportant things left that I can teiU you. But if you promise to stop fishing, we can talk if you like." An idea stirred in my mind as I noticed that even in a bikini she managed to be more elegant than a Paris model. I had, of course, no intention of stopping fishing. What I wanted to do was pull this beautiful fish so far out of water that, gasping for breath, she'd tell me what I wanted to know 'before I let her off the hook. It might not be possible, but I meant to try. H er white two-piece was already quite dry. Her pale, creamy skin had already stopped steaming, and only her damp hair showed that she had been in the water a few minutes ago. Until that moment I had thought a bikini was just a bikini, and a girl wearing one was not so much dressed as censored. But Miranda's two-piece was subtle... the bra, with shaped straps, not too small, concealed and revealed her thoughtfully and tastefully, as if a talented artist had painstakingly drawn and redrawn the lines until his critical eye was satisfied. The briefs, not too tiny either, harmonized with and complemented muscles and curves. Superficially similar, the white twopiece was actually in a completely different class from the brutally utilitarian kind of bikini which is merely insurance against arrest. "Well?" she said. "Shall I turn round so that you can inspect the other side too?" "I'm thinking," I said. "Suppose a girl from the seventeenth century were here now. Just an ordinary pretty girl, not the daughter of a duke. She probably wouldn't be very clean. She would have bad teeth. Her face would b e marked "with smalliox and maybe worse things. Makeup, if any, would be crude. Scars, not properly treated, would mar her skin." Miranda was listening so intently that I was encouraged. "Her clothes would be old, imperfectly washed with poor soap, or no soap at all. They'd fit only approximately. If there was a bit of cleavage, it would be unsubtle, almost as if she'd forgotten to put something on. Am I making sense?" "I'm listening," said Miranda. "A girl of today," I said, "can make far more of herself without really trying. There's plenty of clean water and good soap, and in this part of the world we've beaten the insect problem. She wears new or nearly new clothes, and they fit. Underneath she can wear lightweight machinery that does a marvelous job on what Nature forgot to do. All kinds of make-up are available, if shehappens to know how to use it, and she doesn't have to have bad teeth. However..." I paused. But Miranda said nothing. "After another century or two," I said, "purely technical things like better materials and seamless joints will be taken for granted. As well as that, though, experience in design should count for something. Oh, I know none of you would wear the clothes you've (been wearing here back where you came from, any more than a girl from my office would go around in # dressed as she is now. But if she went back -- " "Don't labor it," said Miranda. "You've made your point." "What puzzles me," I said, "is your curious compromise. I mean, everything I saw in the camp looked right. You've all got your hair cut the right way. Yet just this morning, when you wore a pink suit that would otherwise have been perfectly all right for Shuteley High Street, it was made of luxon." "Well... that was a mistake." "I thought only Greg made mistakes." Rather sharply she said: "It's not mistakes Greg makes. Some of the things he does he means. Others he just doesn't care about. A mistake is something you'd take back if you had the chance. Greg wouldn't take anything back." "But he just did. He looped Jota back." She decided to surrender on that, yielding on one more thing that didn't matter too much. "Loop equipment is small and light, and the effect is purely local,) she said. "There isn't supposed to be a set at the camp, but apparently someone's gqt one. I'll have to do something about that." "Just minor gadgetry," I said. "Like luxon. Nothing more." S he looked at me sharply, wondering, as she seemed to have done once or twice, if I was possibly not as primitively moronic as I was supposed to be. e told me a htUe more about the loop technique, and I realized that I'd ibeen pretty near the mark. To her, it was minor, unremarkable, which was why she told me about it. In much the same way I might have tried to explain a zip fastener to a girl of the seventeenth century. When a small, local disaster occurred, you snuffed it out of existence. If an axe slipped and slashed your leg, you snapped back a few seconds and avoids the accident. If a car carelessly reversed at a harbor, plunged into the dock, you took the careless moments back and braked before the car went over the edge. If you dropped a precious vase and it shattered in a thousand fragments, you turned the second band back md didn't drop the vase. It was a useful but very ordinary technique, possibly more significant than paper clips, zip fasteners, safety pins, and cigarette lighters, but not to be classed with things like the (transistor radio, television or atomic energy... she thought. And it occurred to me for the first time that Miranda was no genius, merely an ordinary girl of her time, fairly intelligent but no deep thinker. "Another thing," I said. "Food is just food. The quality doesn't matter. Now that's a real surprise. All the indications are that people will become more choosy, not less. But the expected doesn't always come about. I could make a guess... Expanding world population makes IF food supply more and more difficult. And maybe synthetic food isn't praotical, at any rate not in your time. So people are conditioned, treated, drugged, trained to regard food as merely fuel. To eat enough but not too much. To be healthy, to avoid anything grossing, never to get fat and never to regard food as an end in itself." Miranda refused to react, so I prodded her again. "So you do come from the future. Despite all protestations." She lay right back on the grass. "We're from the present," she said with finality. "That means vse're in the past. Your time is the real time. We're ancient, ignorant, dead savages. That's why we're not real. That's why our problems, our lives, don't matter. That's why the disaster that's going to happen in the next few hours is going to be merely an interesting spectacle. That's why, though you give as little as pKssible away, you talk with us as I might talk to some ignorant civilian Trojan, not even a soldier, who hasn't the faintest suspicion that the great wooden horse is full of men. If we're not too unimportant to talk to, we're too stupid." She was sitting up again, startled. She was brfeathing deeply and suddenly flushed. What I had done I didn't know. But whatever it was, it took effect -- as if I, a foreigner, had suddenly spoken to her in her own language; or as if I'd kissed her the way Iota, no doubt, could have done. S he didn't say anything, yet I knew that I had got through to her. And I knew that Miranda was no longer a thousand miles or years out of my reach. I leaned over and kissed her lightly. She did nothing. I kissed her . again, more insistently, more demandingly. "Let's go up to the 'house," e said, pushing me away. "Sheila can't be there, or you woudn't be acting this way. I'm thirsty." "So," I said, "am I. You might as well come up to the house, since you can't do what you were going to do here with me around, can you?" "No," she admitted and smiled. It was the first real smile I'd had from her. In the house, I tried to make her drink whisky, from ancient motives. But she wanted lemonade. It seemed to startle her w'hen I put ice in it. Evidently this prehistoric methto her. Standing in bare feet and a white bikini on the deep carpet of the lounge, she was out of place in a dozen ways. Although I had drawn the curtains in case anyone happened to look through the window, I was uneasy. "Would you like to borrow a dress?" I said. "If Sheila's things are too big for you, Dina's might fit. "No, thanks," she said. "I'll swim back." A thought struck her. "Who's she?" "My sister." I wasn't telling her, I was remlmding her. She must know about Bima. But she didn't. It showed. And I was startled. How could she 'know what she knew and not know about Dina? I started asking questions again. "You didn't know about Dina? You didn't even know she existed? Yet you knew Jota would meet me at #:# this afternoon." "Did I?" "Greg did. And you wanted to meet him... you arrived precisely on cue." 'Tell me about Dina." "Do you know about my mother?" "Something... she's sick, isn't she?" "If you want to use a euphemism, yes." "And Dina?" "Sick too -- using the same euphemism. Pretty, healthy, stable in her way. But that's the way of a child. That's how she'll stay." "I wonder." "What do you mean, you wonder?" She sat on a couch, drawing up her legs. "You're not sick -- in that way." "If I am, I hope it doesn't show. But Sheila and I have no children." "Why not?" "DMi't be dense." "I think you're wrong. I think your children would be normal." "And their children?" She shrugged. "You know the difference between heredity and environment. If environment, illness, anything like that was the cause of what happened to your mother -- " "It can't be." "Why not?" "Because of Dina." She questioned me briefly hut rather thoroughly about my mother, about Dina, about me. Presently she smiled, and her smile was warmer now. "I knew you were sorry for yourself, Val," she said. "It shows. I didn't know you had so many good excuses for being sorry for yourself." "Excuses?" I said. "Oh, sure. Even if you're no psychologist, you know that self-pity is self-destruction. If you've only one leg and everybody else has two -- too bad, but self-pity can only make your situation worse." 'Thanks for the lecture," I said. She smiled. "Don't do that," she said. "That's self-defense. You're putting up a barrier. It's not in the least necessary, because I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you..." "What else are you doing?" S he got up again and began to move about. I tried not to watch her, because she affected me almost as she would affect a lusty seventeen-year-old boy who had been in solitary confinement for a year. Yet it was impossible not to watch her. "This is only #," she said. "It's not long since psychiatry was born. Clever men found out many things which had always been assumed to be straightforward physical ailments were actually caused by mental factors. And, of course, they IF went tcK) far. Now almost everything short of a broken leg or diphtheria is supposed to be psychosomatic. Quite soon now other clever men will start swinging the pendulum again. Things in the blood other than alcohol can cause disturbances -- " "Obviously," I said. "And a great deal of what used to be called madness can be very simply dealt with." "Loop it out of existence," I retorted. "It's easy." "No, not that... I think there's something quick and easy that could cure Dina. Not your mother. She really is psychotic. Dina is... well, she just needs a certain stimulation -- I think. I can't be sure. It depends on whether there's anything fundamentally wrong in the heredity line. Hers and yours." "Is there a way of finding out?" She looked at me with sudden suspicion and relaxed instantly. "There's a way I could find out about you," she said. "And your children. It's a rather curious way to find out such a thing... But it would be infallible. It would settle whether there was any chance of your passing on... what you're afraid you might pass on." "Will you do it?" I asked quickly. She smiled and looked away. "You don't know what you're askmg. "What do you mean?" "And because you don't know what you're asking... Turn around, Val." Perhaps I was slow, but I hadn't the faintest idea What was coming. I thought she was going to hypnotize me or drug me, though where she'd get the drugs was quite a question. A moment later she said: "All right. Turn back." She was on the thick carpet, naked, her marvelous body twice as marvelous as even my heated imagination had been able to picture it. She held out her arms to me, yet like a fool I hesitated. "This way?" I said stupidly. 'This is part of it. But if you're reluctant..." I ran to her. I had read and heard of acts of love which were not merely sex, which were more even than the consummation of true love: timeless moments when two people met ?nd were reborn. I had not believed such things could happen. I didn't even love Miranda, and quite certainly she didn't love me. Yet what happened then and there shocked us, drained us, and left us two different people. Although I was aware of none of the details, which were unimportant and probably quite conventional, I knew that she was as much taken aback as I was. I also vaguely understood why: it was only a few minutes before that I had made her see me as something more than a character in a play, and now m ? were together with a background silent thunder. We didn't discuss it; we didn't try to explain it or explain it awav. It was not love, it was not passion. It was destiny. It was one of the moments, big or small, after which things are never quite the same again. And we recognized this, dimly, that nothing particular had happened. Miranda's reaction didn't really surprise me, though I couldn't understand it. "Val," she said softly, 'vithout meaning to, I've done something more tragic than Greg could ever manage to do." I didn't reply. What was there to say to that? She jumped up. "You must stay till I come back," she said. Before I could emerge from euphoria -- which I had no particular desire to do, anyway -- she was gene. (;  ," ' ' ' ' t' tm m-: IF I slept. When I awoke, Miranda hardly..." She checked herwas leaning over me, wearing her self. white 'bikini. "You went to the copse." "You needn't worry," she said. "Perhaps." "Your children will be entirely nor"What about Dina?" mal. There isn't the slightest doubt." "I think I'll be seeing Dina." She Only in that moment did I realize was evasive. "I'll do something... how much I wanted children -- she won't remember what, and it'll more than that, wanted Sheila and be better if nobody knows."me to have children. Always when She didn't want to talk any more. Sheila had said or hinted that things "I mustn't see you again, unless... would be different if we had children no, I shan't see you again, Val. I had been irritated at the irreleYou're not going out tonight, and vance. Things would be different if I... Good-bye, Val." I were seventy-five feet tall, or if She ran from the room. And I Sheila were a man, or if I were a knew somehow that she meant goodchildren. All I said was: "You had to test T)y the time Sheila drove up, twenme -- that way?" X# ty minutes later, I had careShe nodded. "In the circumfully removed all evidence that Mirstances, it was the only way. I could anda had been in the house. I left my own glass where it was, but washed hers and put it away. I just didn't know how I'd act and how Sheila would act after what happened. Not only had I been faithful to Sheda since we got married, I had been faithful to her since the day we met. After hearing her mini drive up and stop, I waited in the hall. Sheila might guess what had happened the moment she saw my face... Belatedly I realized I should have found something to do, instead of simply standing waiting for Sheila with no prepared explanation of what I'd ln doing all afternoon. She came in and said: "What's her name, Val?" "Miranda," I said. It would have been fatuous to ask what she was talking about, whose name she meant, and even more fatuous to ask how she had found out. "Why did you do it, Val?" Sheila asked quietly. She should have waitted for an answer, but she surrendered some of her advantage by going on: "I thought... with Dina out of the way for a while, we might have had a chance. Dina's the root of afl the trouble, you know. All of it. You don't think so, but you don't have to put up with Dina at her worst, all day." So we were talking afbout Dina, not Miranda, and the heat was temporarily off. "Lots of people have in-law trouble," I said rather weakly. "Yes, but not this kind of trouble," said Sheila bleakly. "If she was a cripple, I could speak to her plainly and reach some kind of understanding. If she wias old I could at least try to manage her. But she's just... well, you know." "I know." "I hate her, Val, do you know that? She does. Of course she hates me, so we're even. But she hated me first." Some people could ignore dislike. Sheila wasn't one of them. She couldn't be indifferent. She went back to Miranda then, trying to work up the fury she had felt earlier. But it was too late. And I had realized with relief that she wasn't talking about Miranda and me in the lounge an hour ago, but Miranda and me in the Red Lion earlier. "Did you have to humiliate me, Val?" she demanded. "Did you have to take her where everybody knows you, and me? Couldn't you have taken her to some hotel out of town?" "You've got it wrong. Sheila," I said. "Of course. Obviously. What else could be expvected? She's a rich client, the daughter of the Earl of Shoritoh." "Skhe's one of the giants," I said. "The what? Oh, those kids. Don't be ridiculous. I hear she's about the same height as me." "I mean, she's with them. Listen, Sheila. Tliere's something very strange happening here in Shuteley, something fantastic. This afternoon Jota was killed. I might have been killed too, but instead I killed my opponent -- " "Killed?" She stared at me. "Jota dead?" I explained what had happened. She listened, yet I knew I wasn't getting tlirou to her. It wasn't that she disbelieved what I said. It was rather that she was the kind of woman, the kind of womanly woman, who saw her own family and honsehold and everything that affected them in technicolor and everything else in black and white. The giants were all black and white, except Miranda, who had lunched with me at the Red Lion. Besides, she wasn't a giant. I t might have made a difference to Sheila's attitude, I thought, if Miranda had been six feet four. Then she'd have been a freak, and anything I did might have been laughed off as temporary aberration, as if I had fallen desperately in love IF with the fat lady of a travdiiig circus. "Anyway," I said, "Tlieyll be gone tomoirrow." "How do you know?" "I told you. Greg said -- " "And you believe everything you're told?" "Sheila, these giants know things. One of the things... "Well, go on." "They say," I muttered, "that I needn't worry about my children. That there's no reason why they shouldn't be normal. And I believe it's true." Sheila's head came up quickly. For a moment there was radiance in her face. She bad fought against my decision, not so imuch because she wanted children, though she did, as because she believed we needed them. Then the radiance died. "Who told you -- Miranda?" "As a matter of fact, yes." "And anything she says is true?" "It's not like that." "Isn't it?" She paused and then asked: "Is she very 'beautiful?" "Very. But she'll be gone tomorrow too." "So you have to make hay while the sun shines?" The phone rang. "I'll get it," I said at once, too quickly, for Sheila looked at me oalculatingly. Invariably she answered the phone, even if I was at home, because I wasn't often called at home and if I was, her answering it gave me a chance to think or pretend not to be home. She was doing me an injustice this time, for the possibility that Miranda might be calling had not crossed my mind. It was, in fact, Jota. "Haven't muc time," he said. "I'm out for a stroll with some of the giants. Val, something happens tonight. They haven't said anything definite -- I guessed froip the way they talk about tomorrow, as if everything's going to be. different." He wasn't telling me anything I didn't know. "Good? Bad?" I said. "They're excited. That's all I can say. Except -- they seem to think they're going to do me a good turn. I think now they let me stay with them so that they'd know where I was and could keep an eye on me. One other thing. Go out. Take Sheila with you. Go right away. Don't waste any time." "Why?" "I don't know why. Think they tell me everything? But I gather you're supposed to stay at home tonight. It's taken for granted. It's assumed you must stay at home." "Then I suppose I must," I said. "Don't be an idiot. Why give in? They think you'll stay at home. So go out. Don't be a vegetable." "Jota," I said ."What you and Greg were saying to each other... that must be imortant. What exactly did you mean when -- " Jota chuckled and rang off. "So it wasn't Miranda," said Sheila. "What a disappointment for you." "Sheila," I said, "let's go out for dinner." "And we'll happen to run into Miranda." "Don't be . silly. You pick the place. Right out of town somewhere. Sheila... I love you." She looked at me doubtfully, suspiciously. But I met her gaze fair and square. It wasn't hypocritical, telling Sheila I loved her so soon after what had happened. I was quite certain that what had happened between Miranda and me would never happen again. She had called it tragic... anyway, she had called something tragic. We had met without meeting, and then suddenly in an explosion of feeling we had fused in one way and been blown apart in another. "We never go out to dinner," Sheila said. That reminded me. Miranda, not just Jota, had said "You're not going out tonight." That was another of the things she knew. It wasn't in the cards that I would leave the house again that day. "We're going this time," I said. "Go and get yourself all dolled up. There isn't a girl in Shuteley who can hold a candle to you when you really try." "Except Miranda, of course." "Miranda isn't in Shuteley. I don't think she's anywhere." Although this puzzled Sheila, it also seemed to satisfy her. XV I rushed Shelia. She wanted to spend hours getting ready, as women do. She took it for granted she'd have a bath and do all the other things that had to be done, and we'd get out about seven or eight or nine. But I thought, I had a feeling, that if we didn't sidestep fate, we'd lose the chance. Maybe twenty giants would arrive and keep us at home by force. And as we closed the front door and walked to the car -- my car -- I was certain there had been something behind that feeling, for I felt myself waking up. A moment before I had felt tired and father disinclined to go out after all, and if I hadn't been hustling Sheila, if there had been any easy way to change my mind. I'd have been quite content to stay at home watching television instead. We drove to Shuteley and southwards across country to a new roadhouse, the Qibit, on the nearest main road. We had been there just once before, for a drink. We talked only casually. Miranda wasn't mentioned, nor the giants, nor Jota, nor Dina. And all the chill between us gradually melted. I realized in wonder that I liked being with Sheila, that we were going to enjoy ourselves. It had been like this before we were married, and for a very short time afterward. I was happier than I had been for years. Sheila and I would have children. We'd become a family. There must be some solution to the problem of Dina, if we really work on it. Perhaps it would be a tough one. She might have to be shown, with brutal directness if necessary, that if Sheila and I couldn't live our lives in peace with her around, Dina IF wouldn't be aiUawed to stay around. Ouriously, although I completely accepted Miranda's statement that I could have normal children, I left her promise that something would be done about Dina entirely in the air. I didn't even think about it again. That I could have a family without fear was, after all, not hard to believe. It had been doubts that had been set at rest, not certainties. Dina turning into a normal teenager was something more in the nature of a miracle. A mile or so short of the roadhouse, Sheila said: "We're far too early, Val. There won't ibe a soul there, and it's too soon for dinner. Let's stop for a while." So I drove off the road. M arried couples aibandon premarital parked-car behavior for a hundred excellent reasons. Kids stay parked for hours, not necessarily misbeihaving themselves, because they've nowhere else to go. After marriage, many couples try to recapture magic moments in cars parked at favorite spots... but even if they stay in love, it can't be the same. Yet Sheila and I, just off the road, in broad daylight, managed to go back. We did nothing more than hold hands and talk, yet it was the same as it used to be. Half an hour was a minute. We talked about nothing at aU, certainly not about Miranda or Jota or Dina. We moved on in the end only because, despite the magic, we were hungry. And the magic needn't necessarily fly away. By this time I had made up my mind irrevocably about Dina, mething which she couldn't help was strangling her life. But it couldn't be allowed to strangle three lives instead of one. The roadhouse was long and low. The noise from it as I parked the car rather took me aback; because we'd thought it was a fairly quiet place. Then I realized that on such a hot night Ml the windows were wide open. Sheila had put on a new dress, and I didn't get the effect until she emerged from the ladies' room. She flushed with pleasure as I looked at her, knowing that I meant what I looked. She wore a short green dress with just enough cleavage, and I saw in wonder that she was much more beautiful than she had been the last time I looked at her in this way. A business associate who had married a lovely girl and then divorced her had told me once, over a drink, that he had never wanted her more than when he saw her for the first time after she had remarried. I was lucky. I was having the same sort of experience, only for me it wasn't too late. I tried not to think of Miranda, and then, as Sheila went ahead to our table, I let myself think of Miranda... and Sheila didn't suffer by comparison after all. Miranda was the actress in the safari picture. Her perfection had the same unreallity. She wasn't a girl who worked wonders with nothing at all. She had access to tricks far beyond anything available even to the girl in the safari picture. Sheila didn't have any tricks. And Sheiila was my wife. We bad a wondieirful time. It was easily the best evening we had ever spent together. And with every second together, we came closer. Only once more during the evening, while Sheila and I were dancing, did Miranda come to mind. And it was with gratitude, for I knew that if I had not somehow been released that day, Sheila and I would not he spending this kind of evening together. We didn't prolong the evening greedily. We knew that unlike kids out on such a date, we didn't have to part afterwards. We could go home -- and to a home without Dina. So it was not long after ten when we 'got back in the car and started to drive home. "What's that, Cal?" Sheila said idly. T stared and then put my foot hard down. The sky ahead of us was on fire. I 'd seen fires at night before. Quite often they look far worse than they are. An empty bam aflame can light the sky, over a hill, like a burning town. But this was something more than a burning bam. We could see flames shooting high, flames and smoke -- and Shuteley was still ten miles away. The flames that seemed to be shooting miles into the sky really were wibat they seemed. At once it all fell into place. The giants new. Now I understood Greg's visit and his bizarre idea of insuring against disaster in the next twenty-four hours. Of course he hadn't meant to collect. He hadn't even meant to have the policy drawn up. He had merely been amusing himself. Other things began to assume more significance. Miranda had known, I'd stay at home, and I'd gone out partly to malke her wrong. Had she known then I'd die? Or had she been thinilang something quite different, that I'd he safe out of it, because e Queen Anne house was in a bend in the river hundreds of yards from the town? Dina... my heart missed a beat. Gil's (house was in the middle of old tim'bered houses in the oldest part of town. Then, with hope, I remembered that Miranda knew where Dina was and had said she expected to see her later. The giants, who had known all about this fire, surely didn't propose simply to stand and watch, did they? "What is it, Val?" Sheila said, and for a moment I thought she didn't even realize Shuteley was on fire. But then she added: "What are you thinking about?" And I knew that she'd been watching my face. "About the giants," I said. "You mean -- they did this?" I hadn't been thinking that and still didn't, on the whole. It seemed far more likely that, knowing this was going to happen, they had booked their seats for the show in advance. Maybe last week they'd IF watcihed the Great Fire of London, seeing St. Paul's burned down, and eighty-seven parish churches, and # homes. At the thought, I jerked convulsively and so did the car. The Great Fire was in #. This was #, the three hundredth anniversary of the London disaster. Could that be coincidence? Or did it, in a twisted way, explain everything? "Sheila," I said. "Can you remember the date of the Great Fire of London?" "Sixteen something," she said. "No, I mean the day and the month." "You must be kidding," she said. It was a pKJssi'bility that the giants were teenage vandals of time, destroying for the sake of destruction and doing it on a scale beyond belief. Things I knew made this possible too -- the way, for example, in which the giants, even Miranda until a few short hours ago, obviously regarded Shuteley and the people in it as mere Shadows of living creatures. Was that what Miranda had meant when she used the word tragic -- tragic because suddenly, because of what had happened between us, she realized that the people of Shuteley were something more than names fading from ancient gravestones? B ut then I rememibered a small item in a TV program some weeks ago, unimportant at the time. That had been the exact anniversary of the Great Fire. It was past. So this wasn't just a fantastic, manufactured playback for the giants' amusement, three centuries later. "Talk to me, Val," said Sheila. "And don't drive so fast. You nearly went off the road at the last corner." I slowed a little. As we approached Shuteley the fire seemed to spread until it was all around us, although that couldn't be so. "Shuteley," I said. "The most oldfashioned town in England. Oh, afterwards it's always easy to see... the Titanic, instead of being unsi nkable, was constructed so that if a certain thing happened she absolutely had to sink. The Lusitania acted as if she wanted to be sunk, paying no attention to instructions and being in one of the last places she ought to have been. At Pearl Harbor, half a dozen warnings were ignored, disbelieved, and what should have 'been expected was an unbelievable shook -- " "What are you talking about?" she asked, bewildered. "Fire risk. Well, who should know better than me? Naturally, every new building in Shuteley has to conform to all the latest safety regulations. Modifications are always being made in all the old houses. But how much has it amounted to? Shuteley's the most inflammable town in England -- perhaps in Europe." "You mean, a fire only had to start, and it would be bad?" "Something like that." My thoughts were jumlbled. Sometimes I thought the giants had done it all, with my black-hiaired playmate Snow White as the sohemer-in-chief. Then I found myself dismissing the giants an mere spectators. "Gradually, of couirse, tihe risks have 'been flesseniinig," I sal. "But you know Shuteley... dhaniges that would take ten years anyiwhere else take fifty in Shuteley. And this summer there's been hardly any rain. Not only the town is ibone dry, but the grass, the bushes, the trees. The river's as low as it has ever been." "You think it's very bad, don't you?" Sheila said quietly. I did, though in an oddly theoretical, uncommitted way.  far I was only guessing. So I mused: "Maybe this is the fire that's going to change our whole conception of safety measures. When the Titanic sank, there was no rule that there had to be lifeboat accommodations for every passenger. The company thought they'd done ptretty well 'because they'd done far more than the regulations demanded. We did the same. I'm sure of it. A lot more could have been done in Shuteley." After a pause, thinking of the giants again, I said bitterly: "I should have known. I had the clues." "What could you have done?" "Nothing, I suppose. I don't know. Tried to get the police to move the giants on, perhaps. Watch them. Make sure they didn't have a chance to do any damage." "Then you think they did it." "I don't know. But if they didn't start the fire, they knew it was going to happen." "Miranda too?" she said it quite evenly, with no detectable malice. "Miranda too," I said rather bleakly. I t seemed to take an interminable time to drive ten miles. The road was narrow and winding. It was not possible to average more than forty, and in trying to do the journey too quickly I was losing time, and knew it, and lost more time trying to make it up. By this time I bad realized we'd have reached Shuteley sooner if I'd asked Sheila to drive. My brain was too involved with other considerations to allow me to drive well. But I didn't want to stop now  to let her take over. The time lost might be greater than the time saved. "I never knew this road was so long," I groaned. "What can you do when you get there?" "I don't know. At least make sure the firemen, the police, everybody involved know about the giants, if they don't already." "Vd," said Sheila quietly, "calm down. Think -- no matter how bad it looks, it's only a fire." "Only a fire!" I almost screamed. "Please, Val. Shuteley doesn't consist entirely of wooden houses. You said yourself safety modifications are always being made. Spaces have been cleared. And we have a modem fire-fighting service, with the latest equipment. You know that as well as I do. Better." Her calm words took effect, although we now smelt smoke, burning wood, burning rubber and -- I hoped I was imiagining this -- burning flesh. Of course she was right. Despite the inferno we were driving towards, the orange gouts of flame shooting IF high into the dark sky, the billowing clouds of smoke pouring upwards, the sudden spurts of flame which told of oil explosions or gas leaks. What we were seeing -- the redorange glow which made driving difficult, dimming the headlights -- must, simply had to be, far worse in appearance than it was in actuality. It looked as if we were approaching a city the size of Manchester ablaze from end to end. And that was impossible. Shuteley would be lost in a suburb of Manchester. I took a bend with a screaming of tires. For a minute or two we were tearing frustratingly along at right angles to the blaze, getting no nearer. There was a slight rise just this side of the river, which meant that we wouldn't get a direct view of the town until we were close to the suspension bridge. Yet as Sheila said, it couldn't be all that bad. Shuteley being a town in which fires that did occur could be more serious more quickly than in other places, the fire-fighting service was that much more efficient and better equipped. In the Great Fire of London there probably was little the Londoners could do except throw buckets of water over smoldering timbers. In Shuteley, a great deal of damage was undoubtedly being done; lives might be lost, but the outbreak would be contained. I remembered Dina again and caught my breath as I found myself thinking that if she died, one problem was solved... No! I didn't want problems to be solved that way. At last I reached the end of the straight and was able to turn towards the maeiLstrom again. Suddenly I brak as I saw something across the road. Sheila screamed and cut her scream off abruptly. I was able to slow the car enough to hit the obstruction gently, but not enough to stop short of it. It looked like molten lava flowing sullenly across the road... There was a brief check, nothing more. It was water flowing across, turned dull red by the glow in the sky. The car hit the last rise, and we both coughed. We were breathing thick wood-smoke. My eyes stung so fiercely so quickly that I braked again, braked harder as a cloud of smoke swept across the road, obscuring everything. Yet it was practically a windless night, and most of the smoke and flames rose straight up. Nor was there even a breeze to fan the flames. That was something. Then we were over the hill, almost at the river, and we saw the hell that was Shuteley. W hen you try to burn damp garden refuse, you have to create fierce heat before the green twigs, sappy cuttings and weeds begin to smoke, smolder and finally burn. Yet no matter how wet everything is, the greedy maw of a roaring fire will in the end swallow everything. In Shuteley that summer night, everything inflammable or iininflamimable was as dry as tinder. Eveiythimg that would burn was ready to do so atthe first touch of fiiame. Everything that wouldn't was neutral in the onslaught, neither helping nor hindering. All along the river on the other side, buildings blazed as if they'd been prepared for a fire display and then touched off at a dozen points. Orange flames painted the gaunt shells of buildings which were all that was left along the riverside. Every few seconds, above the crackling roar of burning wood, there was a crash as somewhere masonry collapsed. Nothing could be alive across the river from us. If anyone by some miracle escaped alive from any of those blazing buildings, there was no sanctuary in narrow streets swept with flame. I could only hope that the people who had be in these houses, the most densely populated part of the town, had already managed to get out. Nothing could be alive across the a furnace; even a fireman is full protective clothing would collapse and melt like a tallow candle. "The whole town," Sheila whispered beside me. "Everything's burning. There's nothing left." She was right. The fire stretched on both sides to the limits of the town. And although we could see practically nothing through the wall of fire, the flames and smoke which gushed into the red sky showed that behind what we could see the fire was just as intense. Where we were, a hundred yards from the river and looking across it to a strip of scorched earth and stone and concrete that could burn no more -- perhaps three hundred yards from the nearest flame -- we were facing a blast of heat that would have killed us in time and must already have been toasting us, although we were protected by the car's body and were looking through glass. But we were too fascinated to draw back. Only after we had seen all there was to be seen on tne other side of the river did we look closer. Sheila gasped. The suspension bridge was buckled, twisted, still spanning the river but with its metals glowing and a huge pile of nibble in the river bed below it. The river was practically dry. Only thin crimson trickles ran through the mud and stones and weeds. To the left, the New Bridge was piled high with masonry and stillburning timber. The warehouses across the river had collapsed into the dry bed. There were people and machines this side of the New Bridge, a few hundred yards along from where we stood, but I had little attention to spare yet for this side of the river, where there were few buildings and those not on fire. Instead I looked the other way -- and saw that the Old Bridge was down. It lay shattered in the bed of the river, an astonishingly vast pile of rubble, apparently the blockage that was holding back the river. But that way I couldn't see distinctly, because something close IF to the Old Bridge on tihe opposite side was shooting out dense douds of smoke. And I began to reailize the full horror of the situation, which I had scarcely thought, a moment ago, could be worse. Ihere were two footbridges beyond the bridges I could see, but both were partly wooden. It could be taken for granted they were destroyed. And the next nearest bridge was twenty miles away. Shuteley was a backwater at the best of times. Yet in the middle of a well populated country, the town could never have been described as isolated -- until now. The main road, the big Midland towns, the rest of England were reached from this side. On the other, lanes meandered through villages, brooks, farms, woods. Of course help could reach the town that way, but it would take hours. And this was a lightning fire. Sheila was puling at my arm, trying to make me reverse back over the hil. But before I did anything else, I looked back at the New Bridge. It was hard to see exactly what was going on there, because sheds and warouses cut off the view, and at this point there was no road along the bank. But I saw two fire engines and men in helmets. And they were on this side of the river. y tried to start the car and only X after several seconds did I realize I'd never killed the motor. I put the car in reverse... There were two faint pops and the (front settled. At the same time. I notioed steam rising from the front of the oar. Above al the other burning smells. I smelled rubber. Protected by the car, I hadn't realized that the fierce heat from across the river was capable of melting the tires and boiling the water in the radiator.However, the car did move jerkily, and in a few seconds we were back over the brow of the hil, protected by it. "What can we do?" Sheila said. Wei, what could we do? Nothing, probably. Nobody could do anything that I could see. It was too late for any measures that I could imagine. It was ironic and symbolic, rather than really important, that the firemen were trapped this side of the river. Certainly they could do nothing if they crossed the bridge -- if it were possible to cross the bridge. The fire engines were rubber shod, Ike my car, and there was water in the radiators. Anyway, firemen in conventional unifomi couldn't get near a conflagration like that. Since the only sign of life we had seen had bn at this end of the New Bridge, I turned the car and, running on the rim with a steaming radiator, drove along the lane behind the warehouses. I stopped. Here in the semi-gloom, lit by the blaze in the sky but unaffected by the outbreak as yet, were old huts, sheds, stores. And in the lane in front of us, blazing fiercely, was a wood brand a foot thick and three feet long. We got out of the car and looked the time. Indeed, I could see them at the hlazing halk rather helplessly, (flying across the sky. Thrown into the sky from the other side of the river, no doubt, it had Oheila caught my arm, "Val, fallen precisely in the middle of O please," she said. "Let's go back." the lane and was spluttering help"Back?" I echoed blankly, wonlessly. Even a small spark, falling dering whether she meant to the on a tarred felt roof, would have place just over the hill where we started a blaze on this side of the had watched our town being burned  river too. A fire on this side would to death, or to the roadhouse, or never rival the destruction of Shutto our home a quarter of a mile eley itself, but would make this night along the river on the side we were of destruction appallingly complete, on. I found a spade in a shed and "Anywhere," she said. "We can't covered the balk with earth and do anything here. No one can." stones. Without much of a strugIt was true, of course. The firegle, the fire went out. men we were trying to join couldn't But ! was almost certainly wasting do anything. Fires differ in kind my time. If a great blazing balk of rather than merely in degree. You timber could be thrown a quarter can spit on a tiny fire and put it gerous sparks must be coming all won't bum at all, despite all your IF efforts and the fact that you're using didn't shiver. "Hot rain?" she murspecially selected comhustible mamured, puzzled, terial. I took her arm. She wanted :o But when the temperature goes escape, to leave the fire to burn up, when water boils, when rubber itself out, which was sensible but smolders, when wood, untouched by impossible. With the other arm I flame, gradually glows and blazes picked up her wrap and pushed it through the effect of high temperarather roughly around her. Then ture alone, when human beings we went on. simply can't go near... that's a The men at this end of the New fire that simply has to be left comBridge were nearly all firemen, pletely alone. There were a few children, a few As if to, reinforce what Sheila was old men. saying, a flying spark dropped and The firemen, protected from the imbedded itself in her fur wrap, direct blast of the heat by the very She threw it off, and I stamped on obstruction which kept them from it. And then, startlingly, we were attempting to cross the bridge, were drenched in a shower of water. spraying water this side of the river, "Rain!" I exclaimed. "If it would which was sensible. Jets directed only pour!" across the river would not even land. Sheila, in her green dress which Anyway, the jets they were directing was short top and bottom, soaked, were more like trickles, possibly of some value on this side of the river, of none if directed the other way. I recognized Fire Officer Sayell, brother of the wit of my office. "How did it start?" I asked. His face twitched in annoyance, and I realized how silly my question was. Undoubtedly later there would be an investigation, and it might even be possible to establish the original cause of the fire. Meantime tered more. "Excuse me, Mr. Mathers," he said, and I recognized the carefully controlled tone of a man near the end of his tether, impotent, with an impossible job on his hands. "There's not much I can do, but I've got to get on with it anyway." "There's help coming?" "Lots of it. Mostly to the other side. Nobody can do anything much here. We've tried the ladders. They don't reach the other side, not from any place we can put the tenders." I t would not, I thought, have made much difference if the ladders had spanned the bed. Nobody could go across there and live. Anyway, the steel ladders would buckle in the heat. Sayell swore as one of the jets failed, closely followed by the other. "Everything's wrong," he said bitterly. "The river's dried up. Blocked higher up." "How about the Winshell brook?" Sheila suggested. "Dry before this happened. Dry yesterday." "Have you looked?" I demanded. He stared at me with desperation in his eyes. The interference of local "No, I haven't bloody looked!" he snapped. "The bloody brook was dry when the river was still -- " "SeKl somebody," I said. Suddenly quiet, he said : "Do you want me to 'hit you, Mr. Mathers? Do you want me to cleave your skull with my axe? Because so help me -- " "Send somebody to look," I said and turned slightly away. If I tried to outface him, maybe he would cleave my skull with his axe. Many men with impossible jobs on their hands get like Sayell then. A breath of opposition sends them into spontaneous combustion. But if someone says casually "Do so-and-so" and moves on, they've got something to try, something that isn't likely to make the situation any worse and might improve it. And if it fails utterly, it's not his fault. Behind me, Sayell shouted: "Horner! Take a look over the hill and try the Winshell brook. And look lively!" The Winshell brook was a tiny tributary of the Shute. It went the wrong way, meeting the river head on rather than quietly trickling into it. The meeting place, called not unexpectedly The Meeting of the Waters, was only a short distance downriver from where we stood. I had remembered the water running across the road. At the giant's camp, at our house, probably even just beyond the mound of debris at the Old Bridge which I had glimpsed through the IF smcJke, the river was still running. It was only in Shuteley itself, at the moment it was most needed, that it had run dry. But all the water was still flowing somewhere. Some of it, though not nearly enough, was still getting through along the old river bed. Some of it was perhaps going to the other side of the river, doing something to limit the blaze. That was unlikely, however, because it would have to get round Castle Hill. The rest of it must be flowing along the other side of the hill which for so many miles had cut off our view of Shuteley. And the Winshell brook was there. '"The human animal has survived and will continue to survive, because of its enormous talent for adaptation -- and rapid adaptation at that. We were living in a world of smoke which stung our eyes and made breathing always difficult, sometimes painful and occasionally impossible. We were living in a world of heat which made sweat run from us continuously. We were all so thirsty that we would have drunk anything, "even the muddy crimson trickles that were still meandering down the river bed. We were living in a world where thirst, pain, hunger and comfort had to beset apart. All of us had small burns where sparks had landed. Several of us had small smoldering spots in our clothes which we beat out absently. We were hungry from our exertions, at least I was, but that didn't mean the thought of eating was present. Drinking was different. All of us, given the chance, would have knocked down a pint or two of water, milk, lemonade, beer, anything. We couldn't say drinking no longer mattered. We'd have drunk greedily " if we could. But if we couldn't, it would have to wait. We were living in a nightmare world where only one thing could be held in the mind at one time. At the moment it was the Winshell brook. Even Sayell, who had wanted to kill me for bothering him, was waiting, praying. If there was water, something could be done. Without water, stuck across the river from the fire (which nobody for the moment was looking at) we could no nothing but watch this side of Shuteley, such as it was, burn with the rest. It was no use thinking of what had happened and was still hapiening across the river. Apparently these firemen knew little more than I did about that. Our wives, children, parents, friends and lovers were over there, dead or alive. Either they'd escaped when the fire started (whenever that was) or they were still there, forever, unrecognizable. I suppose I was the luckiest of all those people there. Sheila was with me, and Sheila, despite everything, was the human being I cared most about. Sheila and I were going to live. If necessary we could escape and save ourselves. We had no children, and at that moment I had never been more glad of anything. Sheila's parents were dead, and the remaining parent I had was far from Shuteley. Hiere was only Dina to worry about. And Gil, perhaps. As for the others... Well, through being faithful to Sheila and her alone, I had become unconcerned with most of the people in Shuteley. In the office, I was concerned chiefly about Sally Henrey, and she was on holiday, out of this altogether. Of course I'd be sorry about many others. But they weren't close, apart from Gil. And was he close any more? Somebody screamed, and I turned. As if thrown by an ancient catapult, a blazing mass of timber was flying in a leisurely parabola across the dry river, strait for us. I grabbed Sheila and pulled her to the left. But we bumped into two very solid firemen and bounced the other way. The timber crashed on the ground twenty yards from us. Nobody was near it. Everybody had had plenty of time to get clear. But when it hit the ground it flew asunder into a thousand blazing sparks which exploded in all directions, and the curses and screams of those hit by the sparks temporarily drowned the noises from across the river. Acouple of brands dug into my clothes and obstinately stuck. I was trying to brush them off when a scream from Sheila made me look at her and see that a spark was clinging like a leech to the front of her dress. I tore off my jacket, sUll with a smoldering patch in it, and plucked away the spark and some of her dress, whereupon Sheila promptly fainted. I could have sworn she had her fur wrap on, but either it had slipped off unnoticed or she had thrown it away in the broiling heat. Picking her up, I carried her behind the shelter of one of the sheds. The spark on my leg had fallen off, though not before burning through to the skin. The' pain was sharp and more like a stab wound than a bum. I put Sheila down. She'd had been lucky. There was no sign of a burn. I pulled up a leg of my pants and saw to my astonishment that the considerable pain in my leg was caused by a tiny burn no larger than a pinprick. Sheila opened her eyes. She didn't move. "Val," she said, "am I badly burned?" "You aren't burned at all," I said bluntly. Reassured, she jumped up and wailed when she saw that the left top half of her dress was torn away. "Where's your wrap?" I demanded. "I can't wear it in this heat. It's -- " "Find it, put it on and keep it on." "Sparks stick in it." "I know, but..." I was beginning to realize that though it was reassuring to have your wife with you in such a situation, and many men who found themselves alone at this moment IF would have given their right arms to be as fortunate as I was, a fully feminine girl like Sheila kept your hands full. You'd scarcely time even to see what was going on. So I said: "Look Sheila, the best thing you can do is gather all the kids and old folk together and take them back over the hill, where it's safe, and just stay there. A lot of people were burned and injured unnecessarily just now. They needn't have been here." "And what are you going to do?" she demanded. I shrugged. I didn't know. If the firemen were helpless, it wasn't likely I'd be able to do anything useful. But I had to try. I had to be there. If I could no nothing else, I had to stand and watch. "What will this mean to your job?" Sheila said. T rust a woman to be practical. The thought seemed to come from a thousand miles away. But I was responsible for practically all the insurance in Shuteley -- and the San Francisco disaster that wrecked insurance companies among other things was a minor affair compared with this. True, Shuteley wasn't a big town. But never in history, savp by act of war, had any town been so completely destroyed as Shuteley obviously would be before this was over. Behind us there was a shout. And we ran back, for at such a time the last thing we expected to hear was a shout filled with excitement and delight. When we saw the firemen talking to Say ell and gesticulating, we didn't have to hear what they were saying. There was water in the Winchell brook, and plenty of it. It was remarkable how merely having something they could do transformed the firemen from a dispirited, cursing, demoralized mob, no more useful than the children and old people who still stood around, into an efficient, well drilled team. A squad raced up the hill with their equipment, and Sayell turned to me, his face alight. "Thanks, Mr. Mathers," he said. "If it hadn't been for you, we might never have looked at the brook. I never guessed it would be... anyway, we're in business again." Significantly he turned to look at the fire on the other side of the river, which for some time he had been ignoring. Then he turned back, shouting orders. I sent Sheila to do as I'd suggested and saw that she too became efficient once she had something to do. She waved to me as she shepherded the children and the old people over the hill... and that was the last I saw of her while the Great Fire raged.      IF  Short Story Never know what you're going fo meet out in the red. You might even meet something tike this! T he band finished the number with a flare of the clarinet and a whoom and rattle of the drums. Jake began talking again, "The way I met Hairry? I was out in the red with a geological survey team looking for petroleum. That's not the cleanest sport in the world, but I wanted to get ahead, and the pay was good. We were working the canal branches to the north out of Thorsport, and we pitched camp up near the mountains. There's been no fauna of any account discovered in that region in all the thirty years since the planet survey, but we slept in the tractor tanks anyway. That way we didn't have to carry tents and wefen't bothered by the cold nights. " "Well, you know the ceremony in the desert when a new camp is pitched. We had a ten-gallon oil can full, with plenty of bio-fixed alky from the chemical stores added. There's no hangover if you do that, and not only does it make a good party, but the effects last over into the next day. By the time it fades out the job is going good, and the scenery hasn't bothered you a bit. But you can't have a party with this stuff every day either. "A good party -- did you ever hear Jam Pot on a radio turned up full, helped along by harmonica, samisen, banjo and tin cane -- inside a tractor tank? Twenty db's too loud, but sweet just the same. The Chief is drinking only bourbon; he quits early and goes off to the office wagon. But the rest of us think we sound fine. T he next day, still feeling the beat, we get into the scout cars and start on the branch canals. The ground is broken up on these branches -- the scouts nevertheless can go nearer the edges than the heavy tractors, and of course the nearer the edge the better you can study the strata. Even with the branches it's a long way to the bottom. I drive off humming the oiler's song." H ere Jake broke into song in his gratey voice: Oil, oil, oil well; sh, shush, whoosh, whoom! Clik, clak, clik, clak, tread that turns the wheel. Sand, sand, salt dome, salt that covers the boom Drill, drill, drill deep, down, deep down, to oil. After a while, I whisk off my helmet and try a turn on my harmonica. It lacks something, but still being in a state myself I like it. But the camp intercom is still on. My jazz harmonica must've been giving a concert for the Chief, because next thing I hear is his bull roar. " 'Jake, you fool, quit that. And close your flacky helmet. If you hit a bump and spring a leak in that gut busted crap box you drive, you --  The Chief knows all those good oldfashioned words. "So seeing how he is right and I am wrongl shut and dog my helmet, and a good thing, too. One minute I'm breezing along with a good view in all directions; pearly sky, smiling crags -- not a worry in the universe. Then I hit a flaw in the bank. "The car tilts -- I try to set it right, but then I get a sinking feeling. I glance to the up side and see a crack widening in the ground. Frantically I gun the engine and try to get back on solid grouiid; bui  edge is breaking too fast! Man! I .n flying -- and without wings! "The crumbling rock gives way completely; the scout car flips out over the canal, and I'm in free fall. The car turns slowly as it drops downwards, and I get a beautiful view of a thin ribbon of water way down below. Inside the glass bubble of the dome I can hear the thin air whining past, and everything seems unreal. I try to close my eyes, but I'm hypnotized. I think about home; I wish I were there. Mama wanted me to be a violinist; Papa wanted me to work in the shop; me -- I wanted to be an oil geologist -- so here I am. The ribbon of water comes closer and closer, faster and faster, larger and larger. Everywhere. Suddenly I'm not here; I'm in sweet velvet blackness. "The blackness thins. I hear water and open my eyes. The water is splashing past the helmet of my suit, and I'm bobbing up and down like a Halloween apple. I'm alive! I start moving my arms like a windmill and finally thrash to the edge of the canal, gasping for breath. I pull myself up onto the jagged, decayed edge and sit gasping until time catches up with me. Then I pull myself together and look the situation over. Down the canal a way is the wreckage of my scout car grinding against a fallen rock. The bubble has a hole in it large enough for a man -- me -- to have popped out like a pingpong ball. Which is lucky for me, but that scout car is gone forever, which looks like the time I'm about to spend down here. "It is very shady down here at the bottom of the canal gorge. I look upwards, and I'm very astonished at how tall the cliffs are. Way above me I see a thin line that must be the sky, with a star or two shining in it... I'm wondering how in forever I will make it to the top. Things get suddenly worse. A cloud drops over me with no warning. It looks like a wisp of fog; but of course there can be no fog here. I brush at it. It does not brush away, but sticks gooey to my glove. I don't get it at first, but more strands drift down on me, and then I see this thing with ten legs start going round and round me. A spider! Big. Big as me. It must be the air or gravity, but it's sure big. A chill goes through me. I stare at the spider stuff in horror. Desperately, I try to tear the stuff off my suit, stumbling around on the jumbled rocks of the canl edge. But more of the web settles over me. I struggle with the stuff, but it is sticky; and the more I move, the more I get tangled in the mess. #T'm a cocoon. I'm wound so X tight I cannot move. But my view plate is free enough of the web, so I can see the character who does me this dirty trick. A tenlegged spider scittles around me, two . legs straight in the air; there are a few sights I would prefer. In a moment I feel myself lifted and carried along on its back. I start having mental pictures of things that might happen next. Each one is worse than the one before. "Suddenly we are in darkness, me and the ten-legged streetcar. We are going through a tunnel. I bump whenever we go through a narrow place. Finally it gets a little ligjhter. I can see that the walls are studded with luminescent rocks. The colors are very pretty, but I'm in no mood for the appreciation of scenery. I have a suspicion that unkind things are being planned for me. To be specific, I feel like a package from the meat market. I have a hunch that I am to be the .main course in an arachnid smorgasbord. "Finally I am deposited in a hole in the wall. The multilegged monster is very neat about this. The web stuff around my suit acts like packing, and I am wedged tight in the crevice. Just for security a few new strands fasten me for good to the walls, so I can't wander off. Then I am left alone with my imagination. "Now and then, one of the creatures scuttles by. Most of them pay no attention, but a few take careful inventory. Maybe this is a main highway for these characters. Maybe the ones that look me over think I'm a lobster. "After a while a spider comes along who does not seem to be in such a rush and gives me the glad eyes. There is nothing I can do but look back again. When I get a good look at his color arrangements, I feel as if I've slipped a dimension, like you do when you go in overdrive. " 'I can change'em for my friends, says a voice from nowhere. "Now I know I'm cracking. I am hearing voices, and I am wondering if I should answer. Then I noIF tice that the spider is looking at me like he just passed a remark. I know it's impossible, but these spiders have not been discovered by the all-seeing survey either. "So I try a snappy rejoinder, 'Did you say something?' " 'Daddyo, you hear gospel,' with a flash of green along its legs that chilled me cold. "This leaves me speechless for a moment. I mean spiders can't talk; they breathe through their joints, or cracks in their shell, and have no vocal cords; besides, these particular spiders don't exist, having not been surveyed. And more besides, my specimen is covered with thick, stiff, long hair all over, and you wouldn't have heard him if he were talking. Except on the ends of his legs, where he has six hairless fingers apiece. "'How can you talk? I don't believe it,' I assert. " 'Oh man! Don't come on so square! I'm a telepath. All us cats are telepaths. "I am astonished. 'Where did you get that jive talk?' "'On the radio, man. I dig that jazz the most.' "'A radio!' I am double astonished. 'You bugs don't exist. How would you get a radio?' "'Hah, man! I drum, I live. Yours isn't the first scout car that's gone over the edge. I stole a radio. I found the thing in a wrecked scout car a long time ago. When I moved the dials, things happened. Oh, man! When I heard that thing, something happened inside me. I took it to my pad. Then I heard the true word; then I got religion.' " 'The true word? What's the true word?' "'Oh, man! Chummy Harris on sax! Dizzy Casper on vibes! Man it's all true.' " 'I don't believe it,' I snarl and jerk at the webs that hold me. 'You wouldn't recognize 'Jam Pot' if you heard it live.' And he really does; up and over like a hot cake, rustling against the walls, hopping on his hind legs between the flips; and then finally up to the ceiling and down on a silver thread, spinning wildly. All this with chameleon effects, too. This daffy arachnid is gone on jazz; and he isn't coming back. When he finally bounces to a stop, he snaps his fingers. " 'Oh, man. You know things. We got to have a talk in private; this tunnel echoes thoughts all up and down. Nobody else here knows about jazz like I do, and that's what I dig the most.' "Working plenty fast with hands or feet or what, he loosens the webs from the rocks and tosses me on his back. " 'Where are we going?' I wonder, as we race down the passageway. "'Not so loud. Pops; think easy. We're going to my pad. It's insulated for thought and sound, and that's where the radio is.' # finally reach the hole in VV the rock that he calls his pad. There is a web across the entrance; that he pulls aside, slicks us through and gums it back, before I can see how he does it. Probably just a matter of having enough fingers. Plenty more web siali pads the little cave all over. At the tar side, against the bare rock, is the radio. He wasn't kidding; he really has the thing. Dropping me on the floor, he begins fiddling with the dials. In a moment sound blazes into the cave from the hot jazz program out of Thorsport. "'Oh, man!' says the hipster. 'I gotta get in on this! "Alongside the radio on the same rock shelf, he has a crude but fairly complete set of drums. He seizes these, three of them, and begins on them, and he also makes a queer motion with four of his other legs, one leg plucking the others, another leg rubbing the others. A flutelike keening rises, mixed with the perrapturing rhythm seizes me, and I beat my feet against the floor of the cave. For a moment I wonder if this is some sort of ritual before the feast, but when the radio stops, he stops, and I lay panting. " 'How did you learn that?' I think. " 'Easy, Pops. I listen to the sounds, and I know what's making them. I made these drums. It took a long while. And the rest I just got into. The drums are just a crude set, but it's the best I could do without scratch. " 'Scratch!' " 'Sure, man. Bundle. Bread. Dough Money. Pops, without scratch you can't do so much.' "Civilization coming from a spider. vou see. "Well, that's how I first met Hairry." "You were in quite some fix.' Jake continued, "Hairry begins working on the drums again, and I have to admit he is good, but good. He has all ten of his drums now and isn't doing any of the leg stuff. An idea begins to glimmer in my mind -- how would this cat look fronting a twenty piece outfit? "The hipster's eyes have been half closed in a dreamy concentration on the drums; but now they open wide, and all ten drums pop wide open. "'Pops, I read you clear. You think good, and I can see scratch in the background.' "I can see it too, but first I can see a way out of this mess I'm tied in. After that maybe with the right manager this arachnid can clean the air. "I even start wondering how his name would look in lights. 'What do they call you?' I ask. " 'Man, they call me as little as possible. They think I'm nuts. It's sour grapes. There's only one radio and all us spiders. But I got a tag. There follows on my mind an impression which I can't untangle. "I shake my head. 'That don't pronounce, and it don't spell. I'd rather call you something that people can recognize. What you look like. Hairry, that's good. I can't spell, anyway.' "'Crazy, dad. Call me anything but beautiful.' "'Crazy, Hairry.' And now I broach the delicate point. 'We can't do anything down here. For one thing alone, my suit air won't last overnight. "'So how can we get out of here and play some real?' IF # # T T airry lays down his sticks and looks at me, with all his eyes. But then he pushes aside any visions of meals he sees and takes the bait. '"Good spider,' I think, without thinking. "He winks at me with exactly half his eyes. " 'That takes some thinking. Pops. You're' the main dish for dinner tonight. It'll be hard to get you away from the King.' "I suddenly think that these characters are people, in their way. '"Sure, man, and we got a high priest and vestal virgins.' "Arachnid humor. He winks the other half of his eyes. "'Oh, man, they have. But I'm out of it now, with these.' He points to his drums. 'Man, you set me up like you showed, and I'm with you.' " 'It's a deal,' I think. "'Pops, you're my private package now. Up on my back, and with enough of this webbing around you no one will see you. But, oh man, keep your thoughts on jazz, so they'll think it is me. Like, they'd believe anything I'd do, just so it didn't seem reasonable.' "To me this was as good a plan as any I'd been thinking of. 'Just make it fast  enough to avoid the dinner rush. " 'Right, Pops.' Hairry picks down some of the door web and slaps it around me, then puts me on his back. He ambles out into the passage. I can just barely sense him going dah bah dittin bittn achhh ohhh, bop, to himself. Let the other spiders figure out his plans from that if they can. They are all around, though, as Hairry rushes along. Sometimes I get a glimpse through the threads, and sometimes I get a drift of the mental fog they use for conversation. I try to think in jazz, too, but not a tune can I remember. I try not to think too loud. How do you think in a mutter when you got worries like I have? "Suddenly Hairry gives a mental shout. 'Oh, wow! They know that dinner's gone! And they know where!' His pace changes to a gallop. 'Hang on. Pops, it's all or nothing! If they catch us, I'll be the side dish.' I cling to the cocoon around me, for what good that does, but for the first time I am glad that the sticky web sticks to Hairry as good as it sticks to me. "Hairry really works up some speed. He races down the tunnel, not taking much care what he hits. We break around a corner into an alcove -- occupied by four spiders waiting for us. I think we are lost, but Hairry bowls right through them, legs flying loose in all directions. Two of them manage to fasten webs onto us, but Hairry spins his ninth leg in a sort of Gordian knot operation and cuts the webs off, before the two can even tighten them. "'Wonder what the score would have been if Hairry had lost that leg,' flies through my mind. "'I'd grow a new one. Pops.' "We are rushing down the tunnel again, almost as fast as I'd fallen down into the canal in the first place, but in perfect darkness. A glimmer of light shows far ahead. A point, a star, growing larger by the minute. As we get closer, I can see that it is the mouth of the tunnel. We break into the open, and Hairry races along the edge of the canaL "'Oh, wow, I can hear them calling up the reserves!' "With a burst of speed, Hairry swerves into a cleft in the cliff wall and begins climbing upwards. Down below we can hear the other spiders in pursuit. Their thoughts are loud and angry. Several of them try to get into the cleft at the same time. They jam. Then more push from behind. Hairry hesitates. #C"Then, 'All or nothing,' he murA murs. He turns his radio on full and lets it drop onto the top of the sprawl. Some of them respond and begin to dance. In fact, Hairry's ruse works almost too well. Hairry begins to dance and wave his legs as if drumming; he begins to edge back down the cleft! " 'Stay with Jake, Hairry,' I plead, but without much result, 'There's bigger radios with Jake.' I visualize an all-transistor monster receiving three different jazz programs at the same time, but the visualization isn't strong enough to break through to Hairry. He drops me on the ground and continues jogging down the cleft. I finally work my harmonica loose and into my mouth. I play on it and imagine that it is a twenty piece band. "This is all yours, Hairry,' and I visualise Hairry playing the drums in that band. Well, that does it. Hairry breaks loose from the spell that holds him, races back, picks me up and starts moving for the top again. The sounds of the combined jam session and donnybrook in the mouth of the cleft drift far behind and below until there is nothing. Even after that it takes a half hour of Hairry's best climbing to reach the top. Hairry heaves me onto the ground with a thump and sprawls his ten legs out, resting. "Far away, tiny but bright in the afternoon light is the most beautiful sight that has ever greeted my eyes: a bunch of tanks and tractors in a circle around the camp site. " Pops, we are here, free and clear. "Hairry rests some more, then pulls all the webbing off me, then rests again. Even for a spider that is some climb. I am a little stiff myself, partly from being tied up so long and partly from straining against the webbing. It feels great to be back on my own feet. Hairry watches as I stumble around, trying to work up the circulation. "'Pops, the trouble with you is you don't have enough legs.' "Well, I am glad he has his ten, so he gets no argument there. We start walking toward the camp site. It takes a couple -- three hours, so it is almost sundown when we hear voices. You can see a long way in the desert, and sound carries far, too. Voices begin coming in as the guys get into camp and start yakking on the intercoms. As we get nearer, I hear the unmistakable ping of a neutron rifle, the way the charge crackles. "A stone to one side of us vanishes in a puff of powdered rock, and we dive for cover. I hear a commoIF tion behind me and turn to see Hairry disappearing in a cloud of sand. " 'Whattinell are you doing, Hairry?' "His mental voice comes dimly through the flying grit, 'Pops, I know it's square, but I'm digging a hole!' In a few minutes Hairry is completely out of sight beneath a mound of sand. I dog into my suit's tool pockets and pull out a white swab rag. This I tie to a chipping hammer and wave over the top of the dune. Then I hear a voice I know, old heavy bass boss-guy himself. " 'Jake, you goldbricking poisoner, is that you?' " 'It won't be if you keep shooting that thing at me." T he first sounds of the musicians tuning up offstage began to drift to us. Jake resumed hurriedly, "Well, that's the complete story of how I met Hairry. Things progressed one after another after that bullet. We got into town all right with no trouble from the chief. He thought it was all the funniest, with special snickers to the survey. We got our start by Hairry dropping in on one of Casper's sessions, playing the drums full tilt. There's nobody that can resist him. Well, I have to hurry off now. Stop around after the show, and I'll introduce you. Watch this now." And he was off. A silken rope began to lower onto the brightened stage. Then six spider drums, each held by a hand of a different color, appeared below the edge of the curtain. Suddenly a crescendo broke from the drums. Hairry swung down the rope, and the rest of the band raised out of the floor. A samisen, a tin cane, clarinets and flutes. They all sang out, but Hairry topped their every note and outswung their eveiy rhythm in a flow of tone, a niceness of syncopation, a burst of skyrocket colors. Hairry. As Jake said, "There's nobody that can resist him." by C. C. MacApp by R. C, W. Ettinger In the November Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! IF  Short Story The Boat in the Bottle She was the finest Boat on all Earth's oceans -- and doomed to the sea's most fantastic end! T he Boat was the world's most impressive ship, as she was intended to be. This was why she was named The Boat. It had been decided in a Board Meeting that a more prosaic name, such as Maresta or Grand Dame (both of which had been suggested), would not do for the vessel which was to be the supreme achievement of all shipbuilding. It was agreed, also, that the air of casualness about the name would appeal to some travellers who, though possessed of great wealth, sought a formal casualness when travelling. She was an impressive ship in several ways. First of all, she was longer than any ship, any ocean liner, at least, had ever been. She was two thousand feet long. She could carry three thousand passengers and required a crew of two thousand to operate her and serve those passengers. She was almost four#enths of a mile long and could go the nautical equivalent of forty miles an hour. Simply to build her as the world's most impressive ship was, of course, not the end of it. She had also to be fitted out in the proper manner. For a ship with such a name nothing would be too elaborate or too plush. Even and especially her name was made much of in the outfitting. It was made the motif of all decoration and ornamentation, both interior and exterior. Great mosaics filled entire walls in lounges, salons, and even in the wider corridor. Each mosaic featured either the profile of the vessel or her name as the central element. One mosaic, in fact, the one behind the Second (or as they called it, The Traveller) Class bar, was composed entirely of "The Boat" written thousands of times in miniature script. So discreetly done was it that only drinkers at the bar could be sure of the text, and they not for long. But should drink get the better of them, blurring their vision, they were reminded by the bottles and glasses from which they drank their beer. Each crystal glass had "The Boat" etched in modem script around both lip and base. The bottles were produced by the company's own brewery and proclaimed on their labels "Boat Bottling Company." The bottles were miniature replicas of the vessel herself, with the cap going over the single funnel. Thus when used bottles were cast into the sea with other refuse they would be instantly identified by any beachcomber in the world, no matter on what deserted or remote beach they came to rest. Even, let it be noted, the lifeboats were Boatshaped. Not that it was thought there would ever be a need to employ them as safety devices, but because when the vessel was in a port they would show magnificently above the terminal buildings and be a further ' advertisement of the world's most impressive ship. T here is an area of the ocean, quite near the coast, where in the course of the past twenty years strange events are presumed to have taken place. The right word is "presumed" because no way has yet been found to make proof either for or against strangeness. It is a heavily travelled section of the sea, being near one of the world's best-known resort cities, and is used daily by hundreds of airplanes and dozens of ships. Yet in the past twenty years several of these ships and even more of these airplanes have ventured, into the area, as they have daily countless times in the past, and then failed to emerge from it. The circumstances at any age would have been considered ominous. But in this day of highly accurate navigational aids, radio and radar, it is considerably more ominous than even those few who know of it realize, for those some dozen airplanes and probably six or eight ships and yachts have vanished in these few (no one knows for sure how many) square miles of ocean, and not one of them has so much as sent a simple distress call or radioed back that anything out of the ordinary was occurring. They merely sail or fly into the area and cease to exist. In one case no fewer than five military planes, flying in formation, vanished into this Unknown simultaneously and were followed later by one of the planes of the search party sent after them. Of course no wreckage of ship or plane has ever been found. T he Unknown, or the Bahama Abyss as some have come to call it, seems to be very selective, claiming only two dozen or less of the tens of thousands of ships and planes which have traversed it (withoult noticing anything unusual or suspicious) regularly since the days of Ponce de Leon and before. Hordes of tourists, untold warehouses full of goods, many warships and even simple fishermen have passed unharmed and unvanished through the or sea passages made through the Abyss area, statistically less than one vanishes. Yet that one continues to do so with an erratic regularity. In certain circles mudi interest has been taken in the Abyss. Insurance and transportation companies have investigated. So has the military, since besides the formationplus-one lost on one occasion, be it noted that the atomic submarine which recently sank mysteriously in the North Atlantic passed through the area of the Abyss on her way from her last port of call to the spot where she went down. Some have suggested the Abyss misfired on that occasion, but had its victim in the end. Of all this interest nothing concrete has come. Theories have been set forth, as theories will be, but they range from the fantastic (sea monsters) to the odd but possible (a field of some sort distorting the natural laws causing such things as gravity and radio to operate, set up perhaps by a hypothetical sunken cargo of some ore in which chemical changes have taken place). So far the only logically acceptable explanation advanced on the Bahama Abyss is that it is no abyss at all, only a strange but honest set of coincidences. As it happens, all explanations are equally incorrect. There is an Abyss, and an active one. Some force (the scientists are working on it even now, having the data from The Boat's trip) acts upon ships and planes entering the area, if certain conditions exist. The conditions, if known, have not yet been announced. All that has been released is that the force acts only upon machines of transportation, i.e., ships and planes, and their contents. Thus flotsam is not affected, nor are creatures of the sea. (As to the sea itself, it cannot be determined. After all, the ocean is a difficult thing to measure). But the logical explanation was accepted by most people who knew of the case and was accepted by the Board Members of the Boat Corporation, since they were (as The Boat amply demonstrated) rational men. Thus it came about that they caused much publicity to be given to the Bahama Abyss. Feature pages in the Sunday magazine sections carried installments for weeks. The magazines of several nations published articles, and pictures (of the missing planes or vessels or their type models), and all the theories, concentrating on the most implausible. Of all the theories, one was seldom mentioned, that of coincidence, for it would not have suited the Board's plans concerning The Boat. When it was of necessity mentioned, it was played down or ridiculed. A book was published, entitled The Secret of the Bahama Abyss. The Board Members planned this publicity campaign to coincide with IF the final stages of the outfitting of The Boat, so that her maiden voyage could be into, through, and out of, the Bahama Abyss. It was so planned that the builder's trials took the ship to the resort city nearest the Abyss proper, and that the maiden voyage should be a lengthy cruise through the crucial area and on to Europe. It was to be a luxury voyage, land reports were to be sent progress. Her owners, having no doubts of the explanation of the Abyss, had no anxiety over her trip, and the Board Members and their families were the first to be entered on the passenger list (pot, be it noted. Traveller Class, but Premiere Classe). And so it happened. The publicity campaign, both as regards the Abyss and The Boat's intended voyage through it and the final trials runs of the ship came simultaneously. The gala pre-sailing balls and parties were held, with representatives from the world's press flashing bulbs and making notes, the baggage was loaded, immigration officials were put at ease and the time for sailing came. T he actual sailing was at sunset. The three thousand passengers had been aboard since midafternoon, and' at least triple that number (newspapers put it even higher) cheered on the pier as the lines were cast off and the tugboats moved the noble vessel into the channel and the open sea. The two thousand crewmen, from the six fully qualified captains to the innumerable cabin boys, served The Boat and her passengers at peak efficiency, joyful to sail the world's most famous (and impressive) ship on the world's most talked-about voyage. The nine Board Members and their families glowed in pride as they absorbed every drop of excitement. Once the mainland was lost to view and The Boat was enclosed by clean horizons, festive dinner was served, if possible more festive even than the most extravagant of the Bon Voyage dinners. In the Premiere Classe Dining Room and bars much champagne was consumed, and in the Traveller Class quarters, much whiskey and beer. Wine flowed by the cask as each captain tried to outdo the others in compliments. The plan was to approach the boundary of the Abyss (as everyone called it, to dissuade which none of the Board Members said a word) by night and then, once full daylight had come and the sun was high in the east, enter it full steam at the whole forty knots in The Boat's engines. Once at the probable center of the area they would stop the engines, drift silently with whatev breezes and currents might be foun and celebrate their conquering o the Abyss with a lavish party. The night passed in revelry, bu most of the pasengers and as man of the crew as could be spared frorduty retired by midnight or short I after to be on hand when the moment came. When the dawn arrived, early, bright and bellclear, as is usual in tropical waters, the decks were crowded to the rails. The early risers had arranged the deck chairs to their liking, and the later comers stood in packs around and behind them, all straining to discern any movement or shape on the horizon or in the water by the side. The nine Board Members were on the starboard Flying Bridge with a captain to advise them. The captain in command had taken the wheel himself. The remaining four captains occupied the port Flying Bridge. Every crewman who could find a porthole or inch of deckspace was, with the commander's permission, on attentive watch. At the appointed moment the conunander spun the wheel, gave orders to the engine room for full speed ahead and steered The Boat confidently into The Bahama Abyss. T he commander saw with satisfaction that the sea and sky, the weather in short, was absolute perfection. The Board Members noted the fact also. The Boat would not have to report so much as a fog or a one-foot sea for her passage of the Abyss. So much the better for her reputation and fame. The weather was in fact a cliche: the sky lacked even the suggestion of a cloud, and the ocean was calmer than whatever millpond sea-travellers so often mention. The Boat slid across the water with the smoothness of a warm knife cutting butter, and the sky was brittle in its clarity. If there was anything to be reported (which of course there wouldn't be, since the disappearances were coincidences involving unseaworthy or unairworthy ships or planes, and The Boat was more seaworthy even than the Titanic had claimed to be), observation of it would not have been hampered by the weather. Actually only the more imaginative of the passengers and the more superstitious of the crew expected anything worthy of observation, aside from the sheer beauty of the ship and (it must be said) of the day's run. The commander exulted in his vessel, while the other captains secretly wished sickness on him that they might take command. The Board Members watched either the sea or the passengers with vague and vacant expressions. One or two of them even went so far as to be dreaming of a successor to The Boat which would be even greater and more impressive, then abandoned the dream on consideration of the difficulty of finding a name for the world to call it. Whatever their unspoken thoughts, the five thousand people on The Boat sailed peacefully into the Bahama Abyss. As was fitting for the portentuous occasion, an occasion for which they had paid large sums to either travel agents or union officials, an occasion for which the rest of the world bad been prepared by reams measured in the hundreds of thousands of publicity, there was no sound from human throat. The engines of The Boat gargled in a murmur, and the parted seas hissed along the sides of the world's most impressive ship. Long since the gulls from the harbor had returned after scavenging the garbage cast overboard from the festival. Five thousand people breathed as quietly as they could. IF and the fabled ship bore them with steady and as-advertised power. Fifteen minutes after swinging The Boat onto the preplanned course the commander called the next senior captain to the wheel, then stepped to a microphone to proclaim their course, speed and elapsed time to the waiting thousands. The silence all but glittered as breaths were held and the commander's voice boomed from every cleverly concealed loudspeaker in The Boat's decor. At the end of his terse announcement five thousand voices cheered as one (for even the commander allowed his exultation to become mildly vocal). The unison roar reached to the horizon, which did not echo. Once broken, the silence was not regained. The cheer dissolved into the babble, then subsided to the murmur, of hundreds of conversations. Most passengers remained on deck, but a few drifted into the bars and lounges. As the minutes went by, more and more went inside to drink to the successful bearding by The Boat of the Abyss in its den. The Board Members and the captains opened a 'boam of supreme champagne (the commander turning the ship over to a glistening Mate), and the crewmen returned to their posts. B y ten o'clock, one hour later, laughter and merrymaking dispelled even the memory of the earlier silence. A few adventure-loving passengers still searched the horizon, but most remaining on deck had all but forgotten the romance of the hour before. The routine of a luxury liner at sea (if so young a ship as The Boat can be said to have developed a routine) was settled into by everyone. At eleven o'clock midmorning coffee was served in the lounges and on the decks. Jokes about the Abyss had run their course, and all but two of those on the ship had begun to forget the whole matter. Those two were the commander, whb was making an entry in the log book, and the radio operator' who, at th : behest of the commander (in turr at the behest of the Chairman of the Board), was sending a complete re port of the successful running of t ' Abyss to the home offices, the new , services and the world. In the kitchens the employees we: e halfway through their preparations for the midday meal. The noon position was taken and duly noted in log book and charts (both navigational and passengers'). The weather had not changed, though a slight sea, a gentle and extremely prolonged swell, had developed. This was noted in the log, somewhat improperly in the kitchens, and subconsciously elsewhere. When lunch was served in the Dining Rooms at one o'clock, the rolling of the ship had become quite noticeable, and when after-lunch coffee was served an hour later it was necessary to raise the restraining borders on the tables to keep the dishes from sliding to the floor. Through the next two hours the seas continued to become larger, but were causing no major discomfort. The commandbr made mention of it in the four o'clock log entry, as well as of the fact that the sky remained transparently cloudless. By five o'clock some concern, or rather interest, had been generated on the Bridge by the now quite large swells. They were of considerable interest because they were so large, yet so long and broad. While they lifted The Boat with sonorous regularity, they came no faster than one each minute, if that. The swells were unlike anything in the experience of any of the six captains assembled in discussion. It was as though the ocean were heaving great, deep sighs. But the cause of the discussion was not itihe peculiar swells so much as the strange item which had been increasingly visible for the past hour overtaking them in their wake. It seemed, visually, to be a ship. But no answer was received from the repeated messages broadcast from Ae radio room. Binoculars provided only one further bit of information about the following vessel, and that was the fact that she seemed to be green. It was thought by four of the captains to be an optical illusion produced by the now beginning to set sun, and a hallucination by the other two. T he most disturbing thing about the ship in their wake was that no two estimates as to her distance agreed, and none agreed with the radar report of fifty-five miles (which all six captains agreed was totally impossible -- at that distance she would be invisible). Either she was much farther away than she seemed, or much closer. The stranger was causing idle comment among many of the passengers, but few had enough sea experience to recognize the problems she (raised. Those who did merely shrugged and ordered more Boat Battling Company beer. When six o'clock arrived, however, the ship was abuzz with general comment and even consternation. The Bridge was in a state of orderly panic. The following ship seemed to be larger than The Boat (which was physically impossible). It was now evident that she was indeed wholly and totally green, from funnel to waterline. Whatever vessel she might turn out to be (she still answered no radio messages), she was built on the lines of a luxury liner. The wireless operator had reported her to the shore, as the commander had instructed, but for the past hour and a half no radio messages had been received at all, which had caused the dismantling of one wireless, the employment of another and an inspection of the aerials. Furthermore, and no one but the most drunken of the passengers would say it aloud, she seemed to be transparent. This more or less irrelevant fact was causing more consternation on the Bridge than her size, distance and identification problems. No ship was bigger than The Boat, and certainly none was at the same time green and transparent. Everyone was now watching the strange sight in their wake with as great an apprehension as nine o'clock had been met. The watchers were either silent, as in the morning, or excitedly babbling. IF as dieir various temperaments, duties, and states of sobriety dictated. T hen, as they watched, the huge ship behind them heeled sluggishly and rolled over onto her port side. It was an awful and majestic sight. The captains, frozen to their binoculars, saw that no boats were lowered, no survivors leapt into the sea. Estimates differed wildly as to her probable distance (radar having been so obviously wrong that the sets had been taken apart by electricans for inspection), but the commander immediately put The Boat about and steamed at full speed toward the stranger to offer his assistance. Time seemed to have frozen congealed around The Boat. The commander ordered a radar reading on the stranger, sent further unacknowledged radio messages to her, and returned to his binoculars. At seven o'clock a radar set had been blasphemously reassembled by the technicians, and a report of the stranger's distance was telephoned to the commander, who gasped, began to tremble, ordered the radar sets destroyed completely and then disintegrated. The next senior captain took command, had the previous commander restrained and removed, and tried, too late, to countermand the destruction order. The chief radar operator was able, however, to repeat the reading which had disintegrated the former commander. The senior captain thereupon calculated for a moment on a scratch pad and informed his four fellows that if both radar and visual observations were correct, the capsized stranger was approximately thirteen miles long and three miles high. A junior captain refused to accept this and, on inspecting the scratch pad calculations, disintegrated screaming the same phrases the first commander had used. It was now evident to all, even the Board Members, that something incredible was at hand, for as they steamed at full speed toward the stricken monster it became obvious that the stranger was indeed much larger than The Boat. The most accurate calculations, in fact, placed her length at approximately thirtyfive times that of the world's most impressive ship. But far more disturbing than her size was the fact that she was green, transparent and imoccupied. She had, capsized, swung around so that her superstructure was visible from The Boat. Her lines were strangely rounded and blurred, as though in a fog. No distinct features could be discerned. And no, absolutely no, human activity could be seen. By now she was so near -- less than a mile some said -- that even her smallest features were too large to be taken in by the eye. She simply and monolitWcally overwhelmed the tiny Boat. Then a new current usurped the power of the mysterious swell. While the swell was tremendous, requiring The Boat to chmb for thirty or forty seconds up one slope and then down another, the new current was not so friendly. It was set up by the capsized monster ship, for when her funnel touched the water the ocean made a determined attempt to rush bodily into her innards. Though she tried every evasive maneuver known to her remaining four captains, The Boat was slowly and majestically drawn into the full rush of that current. With irresistible force. The Boat was swept through the monster funnel and into the green transparence. O ne hour later an immense network of almost a thousand ships and planes was searching the Bahama Abyss for some sign of The Boat. This vast search operation had been planned quietly even before The Boat sailed, and when no radio messages were received from her after about four o'clock in the afternoon, at eight o'clock the search was begun. Since The Boat was equipped in triplicate with the latest in radio equipment it was assumed that her four--hour silence was due to more than mechanical failure. When the silence stretched to eight hours (midnight of the fatal day), and when by that time neither search ship nor search plane had located her (despite their having accurate copies of her planned course and her reported positions up to and including four that afternoon), the worst was assumed. No public announcement, however, was made. The search was quietly continued. At ten the next morning, when it became (after five hours of daylight) evident that no Boat was going to be found, the planes were called in. The ships were given instructions to search now for wreckage. Even small pieces of flotsam were ordered to be gently and carefully picked up, stored in tanks of sea water, and returned to shore for chemical and radioactive analysis. And so it was that a search ship, at four-thirty that following afternoon (# hours after The Boat's final and strictly routine radio message was received, and approximately # hours after she was sucked through that gigantic green funnel), very gently and very carefully removed a beer bottle from the sea. It was assumed, even certain, to be refuse cast overboard from the liner, since it was (though the label had soaked off) a bottle from the Boat Bottling Company. This was evident from the shape, that of The Boat herself. The bottle was found floating within two miles of the reported position of The Boat at the previous afternoon's four o'clock sighting. T he explanation of the Bahama Abyss began to break on the world when the seaman who actually plucked the bottle from the water observed that a piece of debris roughly one-third of an inch long had found its way into the bottle through the top (disguised as a ship's funnel). He noted that, furthermore, it seemed to be carved into a miniature replica of The Boat herself, and immediately reported to his superior. Subsequent measurement proved this seaman's find in the bottle to be # inches long. Of The Boat, and of the Bahama Abyss, nothing further has ever been IF Dear Editor: I can't believe you really can't find the answer to your question somewhere. I would also imagine that somebody better qualified than I, will write an answer. (Look ma! no Ph.D.) But then remembering Dr. Dingle, I'll bite. How ya gonna get a proton going at light speed? Oh, you wave the magfic wand. Well, everybody knows you can destroy the universe with one of those. Let's start with a baseball. The conventional view says when you throw it you add kinetic energy in the amount mv#. Another and more accurate way to look at it is that in the process of accelerating it you add to its mass. You pump in energy and it shows up as mass. When the ball hits a brick wall and stops dead the extra mass turns back into energy which shows up as heat, cracks in the wall and whatnot. So back to the proton. When you accelerate it you pump energy into it and the energy shows up as a relativistic mass increase. You might say you are turning energy into matter. So even with a proton you need infinite energy to get to the speed of light. Even with an electron. (A better way to say it would be that for any specified finite energy input, no matter how large, the velocity imparted to the object will be less than the speed of light.) So what about photons? To square with the above rules, the physicist make a definition that the photon has no rest mass. In other words, it ain't matter. Along with that, you will never observe a photon going slower than the speed of light. If you don't mind the angruished screams from the mathmeticians, you can say this illustrates the rule that zero (the rest mass) times infinity (the relativistic mass increase) equals an ordinary number (the mass that shows up because the photon is affected by a gravity field.) Now, in anticipation I would like to shoot down some other goodies that people have confused the scene with now and again. Suppose we have a rocket with a perfect matter converter for a drive. Say it can give I gravity for # years. (The design is a mere engineering problem.) No matter how fast it goes, from its standpoint it is standing still, so it can g-o faster. From the viewpoint of an observer standing still (accelerating with respect to the ship) the ships drive suffers no impairment, because as it goes faster it has more matter to turn into energy. So how come it can't go faster than light? The dilation comes to the rescue. Relative to the ship, acceleration is constant at I g. The ship is always standing still relative ito itself, so there is no problem. The other observer sees ship time slowing down as the ship's velocity approaches that of light, and consequently the acceleration also slacks off, lapproaching zero symptotically as the velocity goes up. One more. What about non-uniform acceleration? Despite old chestnuts to the contrary, the special theory of relativity holds perfectly well for non-uniform accelerations. In many cases the actual computations can get a bit hairy, but the rules are still there, and every bit as valid. You need to go to the misnamed general theory only when you insist on throwing gravitational fields into the misch on the same par with other types of acceleration. So much for that. I like your magazine. It reminds me of the old been buying it regularly. -- Leonard Zetted, Jr., #I Quail Road, Fair Oaks, California...    Dear Editor: I have been reading If for only about a year and I've wondered why people wrote in saying how much If has improved and to keep up the good work. (I discovered why when I ordered back issues of If. Oh, brother!) But I must enter my plea for you not to get too good. What are pulps for if not to develop new writers besides offering stories by well-established authors? I would like to say that your book reviewer, Algis Budrys, is my favorite sf reviewer. I like someone whose opinions run fairly parallel to mine. Now, I'm going to make one of those lists that you never publish in Hue and Cry (But the kind of list that you need, nevertheless.) I give you my favorite authors: (#) van Vogt (Of course! Plus Heinlein and all the other obvious ones.) (#) Fred Saberhagen. (#) C. C. MacApp. (#) Mark Philips (Laurence M. Janifer or Randall Garrett, if you will.) (#) Avram Davidson. (#) Murray Leinster. (#) Clifford Simak. I think someone should compile a list of aU science-fiction writers and the pen names used by each. Pen names give me a pain. -- Sean Wright, # East #th Terrace, Independence, Missouri #.  #  Dear Editor: I would appreciate receiving an answer to the following question through the readers' column of If Wonder Stories there appeared a Chance by John Russell Fearn. Does anyone recall the plot of the story, and in particular the definitions of pears therein? -- Rudolph W. Castown, # Manhattan Avenue, New York, New York #. IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, il any. No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! The umpteenth corollory of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." Your Subscription is Your Private Window On Baby is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwoiner Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Gataxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a Stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Roktert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #S#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley  Complete new novel ?  To save their lives, the aliens slew half of mankind. Now Man was taking his revenge! Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better!  Galaxy Publishing Corp.  #I Hudson Street  New York, N.Y. # Yes, start my subscription to Galax, right away. I enclose my check or money order for:    # issues for # Q # issues for # Name     : p Address  City  State Zip Code  U.S. c nly. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or Q renewal. "# Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimo  Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do f Wake or Dream Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #I ) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Star (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Short Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Wall The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold . he Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Mgr . Robert M. Guinn , Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin , Associate Editor Mavis Fisher , Subscription Mgr. by Algis Budrys by Neal Barrett, Jr. by Larry Niven by Bob Shaw by J. T. McIntosh by Durant Imboden by Andrew J. Offutt by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #a per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial On Hugos I n case you missed it, we've got a piece of good news to pass along: at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, Labor Day weekend, the magazine to win the Hugo for best sf magazine in the world is -- the one you're holding in your hand right now! Naturally, we're delighted. Naturally, we're more determined than ever to try to hang on to it, now that we've got it. Seems to us the way to do it is by putting together the best stories we can find, and that's what we've been trying to do anyway... but it certainly gives us added incentive. And it also gives us an idea. B esides If, the Hugos -- that is, the annual science-fiction achievement awards given by vote of the members of each year's world sf convention -- went to: Best Novel: Tie between Frank Herbert and Roger Zelazny. Best Short Story: Harlan Ellison (for " Repent , Harlequin " Said the Ticktock Man, which we are pleased to point out originally appeared in our sister magazine, Galaxy.) Best All-Time Series: Isaac Asimov. Best Artist: Frank Frazetta. What struck us about the list is # Complete Accounting O General Accounting  Income Tax  Accounting Fundamental! # Auditing # ControHership  Modern Bookkeeping # Complete Buiineu Tj Credit and Collection O Office Management # Personnel Management # Business Correspondence # Bachelor of laws Degree Q Business Low # Insurance taw # Claim Adjusting law # low for Police Officer # low for Trust Officer # Sales Management  Complete Sales Troining # Basic Drafting # Aeronautical Drafting # Architectural Drafting # Electrical Drafting # Mechanical Drafting D Structural Drafting # Complete Reol Estate # Real Estate Brokerage # Reol Estate Management # Real Estate Sales # Complete Traffic Mgl. # Transportation law # Rates and Tariffs # Agency and Service # Motor Truck Traffic # Machine Shorthand # Mechanical Refrigeration # Air Conditioning, Refrigeration and Heating  Diesel # High School Diploma # Interior Decorator # Dental Assistant O Secretarial # Accounting # Bookkeeping O Real Estate Name... Address. City  State... Occupation. County Zip No... Working Hours A.M P.M. u that -- well, say: wouldn't it be a nice thing to have an issue of a magazine that contained stories by Ellison, Herbert, Zelazny and Asimov -- and had a cover by Frazetta? Especially if the magazine happened to be that other Hugo winner, ? The more we thought of the idea, the more we liked it; and what we are doing now is attempting to make it come true. We already have several of the stories, and Frazetta working on a cover; and we hope to have the rest shortly... and that's what will be in If for March. It's our way of saying thank you -- very much. T he rest of the convention was interesting, too. We got to see of couple of TV and motion-picture previews -- well, they were previews then; by the time you read this, they'll be yesterday's news, no television sf series, and the motion : cture Fantastic Voyage both reved rather surprisingly wholeurted enthusiasm from the view. What is surprising about it is t just that they were good. That 's very likely to happen, if only cause the producers of both had :e wit to get writers who know eience fiction to make up their 'cripts for them. ( Star Trek has bought stories from Ted Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison and many other sf favorites; Fantastic Voyage was based on a story by old-time sf writer Jerry Bixby.) What surprised us was that not only did these have the ingredients that pleased us aficionados, but they also have clearly begun to register big successes with the public at large. Say, fellows, do you suppose public taste has begun to catch up with us? Another pleasant sight at the convention was the clothes-oftomorrow pageant sponsored by our companion magazine, Galaxy , and called, appropriately enough, A Galaxy of Fashion. (Maybe you saw it on television if you weren't there in person. If not, you may be getting some more chances; it will be carried on several programs this winter.) Some # glamorous girls dressed up in what they thought the well-dressed young lady of a couple centuries would be likely to wear. In some cases it was clear they thought they wouldn't wear much -- but that wasn't too hard to take, either. Interested? You might think of coming around to next year's convention and seeing for yourself. It will be in New York City, Labor Day weekend, and it ought to be something special. For one thing, it's got a rather exceptionally well chosen Guest of Honor. You've seen him on these pages -- most recently last month, as a matter of fact. And we see him quite a lot. It happens that, early in #, he and his wife came out to our home in New Jersey to spend a weekend. The weekend lasted several months; then they bought themselves a house down the road and they've been there ever since, much ornamenting the community by their presence. His name? Why it's Lester del Rey, of course. Can you think of a better choice?      IF IF  Novelette Two races had met on a collision course in space. Now the survivors of both had to learn to live again! O ur Old Man is a good Old Man. His name is Colston McCall, and I don't know what he used to do before. Now he's Chief of Policing for the Western District of Greater New York, and he knows what's important and what isn't. I was sitting under a big pine tree, feeling weak and dizzy. I had taken a load of aspirin, and my stomach wasn't feeling right. But it was a nice sunny day. I could feel the soft, lumpy back giving in to the weight of my back. The branches made a sweet, shady canopy. The ground was soft under the spongey pine needles, too, and it felt good sitting there, looking out over the meadows. There were wild flowers growing. We might have had that ground plowed up, and people planting things. But there weren't enough people to plow up everything, and we had as many fields going as we had machinery for. We were doing our best. It still took a lot of people who had to go into the warehouses for packaged food that hadn't spoiled. There just wasn't any way we could have been organized better. We all had something useful to do, all of us who weren't in beds. I shouldn't have been sitting under any tree. But it was a beautiful day, and I had been hurting bad all night and morning. The doctors in the hospital had given me a piece of paper saying I only had to work when I wanted to. I guess that means I only had to work when I could stand it, but if they had written it out that way it would have made a sadist out of anybody who asked me if I would do something for him. We've gotten very careful. Very considerate, in nice practical ways. Our manners are lousy, because there's no time to be polite, but it's true what people used to say -- the fewer people are, the more important people become. I remember what it was like back in the #'s, before the Klarri had their accident, but I can't believe how mean people used to be to each other. I remember specific things they did to each other, and it gets me boiling mad because that's how I'd feel if somebody tried to do that kind of thing to me these days. It's how we'd all feel. I think some of the things that used to make us sick, before, came from living like that. I think that if I was fifteen years younger and just coming to make my own way in the world we have now, I wouldn't have my trouble, and I wouldn't have to sit here thinking. I mean, a man like me who had come so well through the Klarri sicknesses should have had a lot to do in this world, and instead I was shutting off because of something the old world had done to me. I wished I wasn't sitting under the tree. I wished I wasn't trying to soak it all in. I knew that if I could, I would soak in all the sun and pine trees and wild flowers in the world, just for me. I had thrown away the note the doctor had given me on the back of a page torn off a calendar pad. Well, you don't keep a note like that. Not when it's been written with a pencil stub by the light of a gasoline lantern in a big tent. Not when the doctor's so tired, and the people in the tent are so bad off from sicknesses nobody knows. I mean you don't walk around with something like that in your pocket. I would rather just sit here for a while and feel guilty. But, you know, you can't keep that up very long. You know all you're doing is playing with yourself, because any time you feel guilty for having something simple and clearcut like cancer, you're really IF ' ' '   tm just pretending you can afford luxuries. I didn't have to feel guilty about anything, not one blessed thing. But it's human to feel guilty, and the thing about any kind of pain isn't the pain. It's that it turns you back to that wet, helpless thing you were when you were born. You know the sky and the earth have gone soft and could smother you or swallow you any time. You know it's not that way for anybody else. Other people are still doing things in a world that will still be there and be dependable tomorrow. But you're not. You've poled your raft to a one-man island of jelly. So you enjoy the chance to put splinters into yourself. And that's playing. I was just starting to get up when Artel, my partner, came walking to me from the Old Man's house. "Ed," he said, "Mr. McCall wants to talk to us." "Right," I said, and the two of us walked back. Facing this way, I could see all the tents, and the houses that had been turned into offices, and the tracks of trucks and people cutting back and forth across what used to be the front and back lawns of the development. The whole thing was turning into a plain of mud, but at least there was a decent amount of space between the housesand a decent amount of open ground to put up tents and prefabs on, instead of everything jammed together the way it was in the cities and towns. It was rotten in the cities and towns. Not just the fires, or the other kinds of trouble you get when a bunch of dose-packed people get awfully sick and lose their heads. We were over that, but still when you went into some place where the buildings were like walls along the street and everything should have been alive and working, selling shoes and groceries, the feeling of death would come over you and you couldn't do anything useful. They used to talk about how people were all moving out of the cities, before. Maybe because they already had something like that kind of feeling. Anyway, this place where the Old Man had set up was a development out along Route #, and back in there up in the hills there were lakes and wild animals, and you had a better feeling. You had better contact with the permanent things of the world. "Is he sending us out on something?" I asked Artel. "Yes." A rtel didn't ever talk much. The Old Man had teamed us up about a year ago, and it worked well. Klarri are a lot like us. Their arms and legs are longer in proportion to their bodies, and their shoulders are wider. They have long, narrow skulls, with all of the cerebral cortex formed over what would be the back of the brain in a human, so if you're a highbrow among the Klarri, you're a bigdome. When they haven't washed for a few hours, there's a light, rusty deposit that forms on their skins and turns them that color. And nobody likes the way their teeth look. If a human being had teeth like that, he had IF some bad vitamin deficiency when he was a kid. But they're decent people. When they look at a hospital, I think they feel exactly the way we would if spaceships of ours had brougjht pestilence to a whole world of theirs. There's one other thing about Klarri. Their kids all walk bent forward, and so do some of their adults, because that's the way their spines are. But they have a lot of trouble with that. It's like appendicitis with humans, and there isn't a Klarr who isn't aware that he could have severe back trouble almost any time. So there's a lot of them have had a fusing operation on the lower spinal column, either because they became crippled, or they started to feel little twinges and they got worried and had it done right away. It's just like people. Only instead of appendicitis scars, the ones who've had the fusing operation have this funny way of walking and standing as if they were about to fall over backwards. Artel was like that, but he also had to wear a back brace because he'd been hurt in the lifeboat crash that killed his wife and children. Back braces are faster than re-fusing operations. You see, there can't be any doubt about it any longer. You do the best you can. We don't much believe in theory any more. You can be as civilized as the Klarri, and know you shouldn't go around contaminating other people's worlds, but when your faster-than-light ship breaks down and you've got to ditch, you pile into the lifeboats and you ditch. If you're really lucky within reaching-distance of a solar system, and the solar system's got a planet you can live on; you come down any way you can, and you don't put decontamination high on your priority list. Life is hard; it's hard for Klarri, it's hard for humans. You spend each day living with whatever happened the day before, and that's it -- that's how it is in all Creation, for everything with brains enough. II C olston McCall was a big man -- there must have been a time when he weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds. He was way over six feet tall, and now he was all muscle and bones except for a little bit of a belly. He was about fifty or fifty-five, I guess, and he would lean back in his chair and lo#k at a problem and solve it in a voice that must have been hell on his help in the days when he was running some kind of company. Whenever he raised his voice and called out a man's name, that man would get there quickly. We went through into his office, and he looked up and waved us toward a couple of folding metal chairs. "Sit down, men." We did, with Artel straddling his chair backwards the way cowboys did in movie saloons. "How are you feeling, Ed?" "All right." The Old Man looked straight at me for just a second. "Can you go twenty miles to someplace where there might not be any doctors?" Well, the only other answer to that is, "No sir, I'm ready to lie down and die," so I didn't say that. "All right. There's a town down the coast where nobody's sick." Artel sat up straight. "I beg your pardon?" The Old Man laid his hand down flat on a small stack of papers. "These people have never asked for any medicines. Now, I don't know what that means. We first contacted them about two and a half years ago. One of our scouts found a party irom their town foraging through .he highway discount houses down along Route #, there." I nodded. That was the usual pattern in those days. The towns were all gutted on the inside, and any survivors had to start spreading out and looking for supplies outside. But that yras a mug's game. You burned up what fuel you had, running emptier and emptier trucks farther and farther, coming back with less and less. What happened after that was they'd pool their remaining fuel, load everybody into the trucks and come busting up north, because everybody had the idea the big city had to be different. The Old Man went on: "Well, it turned out that, for once in a great while, these were the kind of people who'd stay put if we'd promise to send food down. So that's how it's been ever since." And pretty grateful we were, too, F thought. "Well, that was all right," the Old Man said, "but it's getting to be too nuch of a good thing, maybe, rhey're not complaining at all. You've got to figure any medical supplies they might have had left would be pretty much down to basics by now. Your antibiotics and your other fancy drugs either don't exist any more or have turned to mush. Well, hell, you know that." We knew. It was the biggest problem we had; things were tightening up pretty badly. And it wasn't any any of those fermentation drugs you don't need much of a plant for, in a pinch. All that stuff was just so much extra peanut butter on the sandwich for the strains of bug we had now. "But these people don't seem to have noticed that. They don't even complain about their food; they take whatever the trucks bring, they never ask for more, they never ask for anything different from what they get. I don't like it when people don't gripe about what we can deliver. And these people just take it and go away with it and never say a word."CA "A hundred and eighty-odd. I cut down their ration by three per cent just to see what would happen. They haven't reacted at all. About the medicine, I had one of the drivers ask them if they needed a doctor, and they said no. They didn't say they had a doctor, and they didn't say they were all healthy. They just said 'No' and walked away." "They're either very lucky or very generous," Artel said. The Old Man gave him a quick look. "I'm always ready to believe in those things up to a point. But IF now I'd like to know if maybe there's something they haven't told anybody about." Artel nodded. I wanted to know about the food part. "What kind of a town is it?" I asked. "What kind of people are they? Could they be fishing or farming?" "Not in that country," the Old Man said. "They're just property owners -- squatters, some of them, but it's a community. All friends and relatives, all townies. Real estate agents, storekeepers, tree surgeons -- all they know is how to sell cars and salt water taffy to each other." He sounded angry. The same thing angered us all: it had turned out farming was more than scratching the ground and dropping seeds into it. And it's slow, besides being hard to learn. He'd tell you just the opposite, but your hungry townsmen would rather die than farm. It sounds good, to just wave a hand and say, "Let there be light again." But that's the kind of thing that drives you wild. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are ducks, and they nibble you to death. "No, I don't believe it," the Old Man said, slapping the inventory control forms again. "Go down there and find out about it. Come back and tell me about it, quietly. Quietly." "Of course," Artel said. "It wouldn't do to raise false hopes." "Or even real ones." That was what made him a leader and me and Artel troopers. Our Old Man likes to go softly. He might not have been a top man before, when you had to move bing, bing, bing because the competition was clicking along right behind you. But he was good for us now. You want to keep it soft. You want to take it slow and easy, and you have to know what to let slide. Cancer, they say, used to hit twenty-five per cent of the population in one of its forms or another. They had been pretty close to cures, before. They weren't any closer now, because you can afford to ignore something like that when you've had diseases that each kill sixty, seventy per cent in one summer. You don't even care whether it was all the Klarri's fault or not. They were in awful trouble, too, cast away on an uncharted shoal, with our diseases beating the hell out of their survivors, and them with fewer biochemists than we had. I mean -- what are you going to do? You could have some kind of lurching war and string them all up to lampposts, but there were better things to do with the energy, especially now that the first impact had passed and most of us that were going to die of each other were pretty much dead. If somebody was to put me in a time machine and send me back to #, the people then ought to shoot me down like a mad dog inthe streets; I was carrying more kinds of death in me than anybody ever dreamed of, before. And if it wasn't for this home-grown thing of my own, Td count as a healthy man by today's way of judging. So you don't worry about yesterday. You take what you have, and you work with it today. "All right," the Old Man said. "Go down there, the two of you. Maybe we've got a miracle." That was as close as any one of the three of us got to laughing and clapping each other on the back and crying hallelujah. I went down to the hospital while Artel waited for me. I walked through to the back, to where the dispensary was. The idea was, if you were well enough to walk in and ask for medicime, you had better be sick enough to walk by all those beds and still want medicine. I saw them all; the ones with the sores, and the ones with the twisted limbs, the ones with the blind eyes, and the ones with the hemorrhages. I heard them and I smelled them, human and Klarri. These were surviyors. The losers were dead. These were the ones you could expect still had a chance to live, if they could be kept strong enough to avoid things like pneumonia and the other killers of the weakened. I still had some kind of low-grade lymph node trouble. My arms would go to sleep, and I couldn't squeeze anything very hard without having my fingers go numb for hours afterward. While they were trying to do something about whatever bug it was that had made my lymphatic system react, they found this other thing that had been living in me for quite some time already. It didn't matter. I was around yet to walk down between the beds. Now, my Mary had drowned in her own blood. And I'd had this kid, about six, with his own little twowheeler. A sidewalk bike, with solid rubber wheels, that was supposed to be for just diddling around in front of the house. Kind of a first step after graduating from a trike. There was an ice cream store that was open on Sundays fourteen blocks away from where we lived, and about ten days before the Klarri lifeboats came showering in from the sky, this kid and I had gone to that ice cream store, with me on my Sears, Roebuck three speed and him on that boneshaker of his. Six years old, and pumping away like mad with just a little four-inch crank sprocket that gave him no speed at all, and me reminding him to slow down and pace himself, and him grinning over at me as he went bouncing over the potholes in the alleys. Good little kid. T he dispenser nodded when he saw me coming. He was a young Klarr, usually with his head bent over a medical dictionary; the wall had human and Klarr anatomical charts, and there was a human clerk putting together the mimeographed pages of a new medical text. We were beginning to shape up. For a long time, now, the Old Man hadn't been letting them put Klarr and human patients at separate ends of the tents. The idea was, if you were doctor in the ward, by now you ought to be able to work most of the problems you saw no matter who had them. You'd have maybe one or two Klarr patients in the hospital at any time. It meant something that you'd always have more Klarr than IF that on the staff, or studying to join it...Anyway, I showed the dispenser my Special Branch requisition permit, and he punched another notch on the edge of it and gave me a plastic bottle with twenty-five aspirins, and I said thank you and went back out through the tent. There was a supply truck running down to Trenton that wouild come within twenty or twenty-five miles of this place we were going to. Artel had drawn a couple of bikes from the transport pool for us on his permit and was just lashing them on to the side of the truck. We got in and we rode in the back, on top of a bunch of cases and bags. Artel made a kind of a hump-back pad out of bean sacks for himself and lay down on his stomach. I wedged myself into a nice tight fit where I wouldn't be bounced around too much, and after a while we took off. Ill T he name of the town was Ocean Heights. After the truck dropped us, we moved toward it through some very pretty country, using the Garden State Parkway for a while. We had good gear; Artel's bike was a Peugeot and mine was a Raleigh, both of them fifteen-speed lightweights with high pressure sew-up tires and rat-trap pedals; they weren't specially comfortable, but they were very fast on any kind of decent surface, and with all that gearing to choose from, hill-anddale touring was a snap. We each had a .# hunting rifle -- the Old Man would have hack our hearts if we'd carried anything to kill more people with -- and some food, some tools and a water bottle apiece. We looked very technological, and you fed pretty good when you've got good gear. So we were both pretty well off in our own minds as we went zipping along, through the pine woods and along that smooth asphalt track. When we cut off and got onto Route #, of course, we started running into signs of taffy salesman life -- lots of roadside stands and one saloon painted DaGlo orange, and a lot of garden tool and outboard ' 'motor shops, along with great big discount centers. All of it looked shabby, beat up, and just a shell. There was nothing left in the discount houses but phonograph records, and little plastic pots to raise rubber plants in, and games made by the Wham-# Manufacturing Company. The wind was in off the ocean, and that was all right too. ' I I t started to get dark while we wef still five miles way from Ocean Heights. That was the way we wanted it. We took ourselves a couple of miles further, and then we cut out up a side road, into the woods. We found a good place to leave the bikes and made a little bit of a camp. It was good getting off the bike. Artel was walking very slowly, and he was leaning farther over backwards than ever. I didn't remark on it; I guess I've already said that in our own eyes from ten or fifteen years before, we'd all seemed like very rude people. Artel sighed when we were finally able to sit down and lean against something. So did I, I guess. We sat down close together. Artel had one of those squeeze type flashlights that generates its own power. We put my windbreaker over our heads to muffle the light and we studied the map, laying out a heading for Ocean Heights from where we were. We'd be able to walk it in not much more than a couple of hours. We got our compass headings straight in our heads, and then we were able to come out from under the windbreaker, which was all right with me. One of the reasons Artel and I could work as a team was because I didn't mind his smell. (That was what I said; actually, I liked it). But not in big doses like this. It was like eating a pound of milk chocolate. We'd done this kind of thing before; we knew what we were doing. A couple of hours from now, when it was still dark and we could expect most people to be thinking of sleep, we'd get moving, so that by the time we hit the place it would be tight-fast in dreamland. We'd ghost around and find out what we could. Get the lay of the land, figure an escape route and boltholes if we needed them. It sounds like playing Indians, but it's the kind of technique you work out when you're dealing with unkown people these days. You can't even tell in advance sometimes whether they're humans or Klarri; that was originally why a Special Branch team had to have at least one of each. W e sat in the woods and waited until it was time to move. Wte didn't talk much as a rule. For one thing, what had happened to Artel's respiratory system gave him a lot of trouble with breath control. For another thing, life's too simple to need a lot of conversation. But it was lonely out there, and nightfall bothers me. "Listen," I asked Artel, "do you think your people will ever find you?" "Pretty unlikely," he said after a while. "The volume they'd have to search is mighty big." After a while he added: "It'd be better if they didn't. We'd be as deadly now to our home as we were to you." I could see him smile a little. "We Klarri here have traded too much back and forth with Earth. We've become much more like you than like our people." He folded his arms with his hands over his shoulders, the way they do. "I don't see much difference between us, in anything, really. Our machinery may be a little better. But most of us don't understand it any better than you understand yours. We lose ships, once in a while. We don't find them any more often than you'd expect. We have to pretend this isn't so, because otherwise we couldn't sell tickets to each other." "Travel agents about the same any place, I guess," I said. He shrugged. "Civilization's about the same any place. You take a ship from one star to another, and you say to yourself, 'Here's something my father couldn't do.' It's true. My father couldn't infect a world with a IF Nor lose an interstellar passenger ship. And end with only a few thousand survivors from it. And have a whole future to solve." He pushed himself down and lay on his back for a minute, with his hands behind his head, looking up. "I'm glad I don't have to imagine how they're going to do it." He didn't sound particularly worried; well, it wasn't our problem. I'd heard humans and Klarri talk about thines like what'll happen when we build spaceships again. It's a cinch they won't be rockets; they'll be a lot like the Klarr ships, I guess. But where will they go? Looking for planets where Klarri and humans from Earth could start the same business of living together, or contacting the Klarr worlds, or what? What would happen if we met Klarri from some political faction that didn't like our Klarri? Well, there are damn fools everywhere, I guess. When the real problems really came, they'd more than likely have some shape of their own, and they'd either be solved or flubbed in some way that was possible to their own time. "You heard about this new idea?" Artel said cautiously. "There's some biochemjst with a hypothesis. He says that with two or three generations of gene-manipulation, it might be possible to have Klarrand human-descended compromise people who could breed true with each other. Think there's anything to that?" "I've heard that. What do I know?" It shouldn't have, but the idea made my stomach turn. I guess Artel felt the same way. "It's an idea," Artel said, and I could see he didn't like it any better than I did. But that was one of those things the two of us didn't have to worry about. And I appreciated what he was trying to do. You try to make as much contact as you can. Probably the Old Man has put us together originally because we were both lonely in the same way. Everybody wants to 'see a team as good as possible. Just for its own sake; not just because so many of the Klarr ships had happened to hit the Western Hemisphere. Other places, there'd been so few Klarr, I think they killed them all during the pestilence feelings. There were people who talked about national pride being involved; they said a lot of things like that, maybe getting ready to hand the next generation something they could go to war about. Talk's all right in its place. Now we'd done some, Artel and I just waited in the woods. IV A t about ten o'clock we started to slide into the outskirts of Ocean Heights. These Jersey coast towns are all a lot alike. There's always a highway paralleling the ocean, leaving a strip maybe three miles wide with feeder roads running down to the Atlantic. Follow the feeder road and you find you're on the main street of some town that was in its heyday in #. Right up near the water there'll be a strip of big Steamboat Gothic summer homes; frame and shingle construction, three, four storeys high, with lots of cupolas, and gingerbread, and maybe even an imitation widow's walk. Big verandas, hollow wooden columns and lots of etched glass in the groundfloor windows. Some people think that's a sign of gracious living. I think it just proves how much we wanted mass production. Closer in toward town there'll be a lot of stores. Some of them will have bright new cast stone or aluminum fronts, but the buildings are all fifty years old behind them. There'll be a couple of yellow firebrick structures, with almost anything in on their ground floors now, that used to be the A  P and the Woolworth's. Those moved out to the shopping center back in the #'s. There'll be a couple of movie theaters, and one of them was closed long before the rouble hit the town itself. There's a Masonic Temple, churches of various Christian denominations, a hotel for little old ladies and salesmen. Used car lots full of stuff carrying ten dollars worth of paint over the salt rust. A railroad track. A couple of television repair stores, and a weekly four-page newspaper dedicated to getting people to shop at home. On the ocean there are some seafood restaurants, a miniature golf course and a building that looks like a horse barn but in the summertime houses a wheel of fortune and a couple of dart-toss games, with most of the stalls standing empty even in the height of the season. The parking lot for the oceanfront amusements is where the dog track used to be. The boardwalk is falling down everywhere. There are piles I and sheets of rusty iron sticking up out of the beaches farther along, where the boardwalk used to reach. The people say it's the Republican legislators from the inland counties, with their blue laws, that killed these towns. If you approach from the beach, the first thing you notice is the plastic-coated paper from the frozen custard stands. It doesn't mash up and wash into the ground at all; it just turns gray. We slid on in through the outskirts. Artel said: "It was bad here." L ooked like it. There was a lot of burnt pits full of bricks and pieces of charred timber, with dead trees standing around them, where there had been fires. There was all sorts of trash in the gutters, swept in from the fires and the general scraps that blow around and pile up when nobody collects them. The gutters were clogged with odd pieces of wood, tarpaper, sand and gravel. The sewer grates were all choked, and the streets were broken down. Rain water and frost had broken up the asphalt and undermined the cement. Some of the streets had been laid in brick, and they now looked as if long walls had collapsed onto the ground. It wasn't unless you looked hard, toward the ocean, that you could see the occasional lanfern burning and could believe that anyone lived on beyond this mess. We found only one street that was really open. It had truck ruts in it, with trash smashed down into them, and unmarked sand washed into pools in other places. The last supIF ply run had (been a couple of weeks ago, and it looked as if our trucks were the only things that came and went. Once we had found the main drag this way, we moved off away from it and worked our way along the back streets. We came across dead cars, and the weathered tumble-down of barricades. Once I tripped over a shotgun with a broken stock, the wood grainy from rainwater and sunlight, the barrels just tubes of rust. "You'd think they'd have cleaned up the useful things," Artel said. "It's broken." "But it could have been fixed." "No, not here," I said. The soil was sand, just one great big bar that the Atlantic had raised over thousands of years of pounding itself up against the rock coast of what were now the northern counties, and you couldn't raise anything on it but scrub pine. West of the line running from New York down to Camden you were off the interstate highways and main railroads. The only thing you could do with this part of the world was sleep in it and play in it, and sell taffy to each other. We'd passed a horse-racing track coming in. Big looming plant, standing dirty in the darkness. Its parking lots had been full of cars, and there was a smell, originally trapped in all that wet upholstery, that hung in the air. That was as far as they'd gotten -- the people trying to get out of the city. They were turned back by the local cops, cursing and sweating, and thanking God there was some place to point to where all those people could go to die. Farther in toward the town we passed the Women's Club building -- a big place with a phony Grecian front, that the local people had probably tried to make into a supplementary hospital at this end of town. We padded on up the steps, and there were three-year-old bodies right up against the doors, inside. We backed off. "We won't find anyone living right around here," Artel said. Twenty years from now, the Women's Club building and the cinderblock walls of the bowling alley down the street would be all that stuck up out of the second growth. There'd be trees growing out of the sewers. W e crossed the railroad tracks, and we stood there as if we'd just sat straight up in bed in the middle of the night. The first thing I noticed was the smell of fresh paint. But there was plenty of other stuff to hit you, all at once. It must have been one of the best parts of the town to begin with. The houses were brick, two and three storeys high. They were all set in the middle of very nice lots, and most of them had those Georgian fronts that spell class. In daylight, we might have seen soot and patches in some of the brickwork, but we didn't see it now. All the outlines were crisp and sharp; there wasn't a warped board or a sagging roof anywhere here. There were neat, well located privies in the backyards, we found as we started to move around. The fronts of them were made out of brick and had shrubs planted around them. It was all like that. The hedges were trimmed. The lawns were like velvet. There wasn't a chipped place in any sidewalk, nor litter on the grass, or anything. There were lanterns burning upstairs in two or three of the houses. "What the hell?" I said. There were eight or ten solid blocks of this stuff. All if needed was a wall around it. "This is 'way off the supply route," Artel said. "To see this part, you'd have to do what we did. You notice the trees -- how thick' they are? I think they even had airplanes in mind when they picked this spot." "Listen," I said. From one of the houses, through a window open to the soft night air, you could hear it: "Bella figlia del amore..." "What is that?" Artel asked. "Opera. Somebody's got a windup phonograph." "Or a generator." "But no bulldozer to bury his dead with." Artel looked back over his shoulder toward the other side of the railroad tracks. "That is different." We kept moving, with faint music. There was no other living sound. No night birds, no cats in love, no dogs. There wasn't any sound of people sneaking through yards. This town didn't have teenagers who liked to visit each other. All these people were locked up tight in their little clean town-within-a-town, most of them sleeping the sleep of the innocent. The innocent and the healthy. We worked our way closer toward the ocean. We were only a block away from it. The waves were rolling in to the shore regularly and gently, making the only steady sound we could hear, now that we were out of range of the phonograph. I looked back over my shoulder, and I could see nothing but those few upstairs lights, some of which had been put out since we had gone by. Solid citizens turning in. I thought they were lantern lights. They might have been lightbulbs on low voltage. We were getting more questions than answers out of this town. W e got down to the beach, and we found another dirty fringe -- a motel with its windows broken out, a playground with scrub bushes growing up among the teeter-totters and the monkey bars, a flight of wooden steps tumbled down the stone jumble of the sea wall. If you had been going by in a boat you would have never known about that neat little clean patch with its edged flower beds and its unlittered streets. There was a big, dark building just inland of the playground. Flatsided and square, it was two storeys high, and the ground floor windows were well over the height of a man's head, long and very narrow. If this was a war, and the building was at a crossroads, I would have reported it for a bunker. The sign over the doorway said "Ocean Heights Professional Bldg." The double doors were at the head of a flight of stairs set back and flanked by solid, masonry. I could have defended it from the inside with one machine-gun. There was a padlock hanging on the doors, closing a chain looped through the handles. IF "There was a gambling casino in Ocean Heights during World War II," Artel said. He was the one who'd gone through the Old Man's background file on the town. "It was closed by state investigators in # ." "We've found it." Going by the delicately scalloped, once whitepainted directory board bolted to the wall beside the stairs, an architect and a real estate agent had set up offices in it after the space became available. There was no sound in it now, and no lights. But I noticed something, and it made me wonder. I pulled in a deep breath through my nose. "It's not empty," I said. "I agree," Artel said. "I have that feeling. And yet I can't say why." In the starlight, I could see him shake his head quickly. "It bothers me. It was built to be a hiding place. They might be doing almost anything in there." "Let's look around some more," I said. "If you say so," Artel said hesitatingly. The other thing we found was down at the beach. It was something looming, most of it under the water, the waves phosphorescing weakly against the one side that we could see. It stretched away into the darkness, and its curved sides went up like the biggest dead whale in the world. I could see a long strut extending out over the water at a shallow angle, and the round circle of a landing pad hanging at a crazy angle from the end of it. It was a crashed Klarri lifeboat. "What happened to the people in it, I wonder," Artel said. "They're in that building back there. Locked up and kept out of sight," I said. I had smelled them, the scent seeping out weakly through the double doors and God knew how many other barriers inside. "What do you want to do about it?" It was up to him. They were his people. If he wanted us to go in there and break them out now, I didn't see any way for me not to help him. Maybe we could get away with it; I wasn't crazy about the idea of trying to do all that without making any noise, but it was up to him. "Anything you say." "Come off it, Ed. We don't know anywhere near enough about the situation in this place. We haven't found what we were sent for." Artel sounded a little mad. He had a right to be. I'd as good as said he wasn't a team man. I felt bad about having been rude. "Come on -- let's go back to camp. We had a plan and let's follow it." Artel slipped off into the darkness. I followed him. We didn't say anything more to each other that night. We got back to our camp and sacked out. A team is a little bit like a marriage. I don't care what anybody says, sometimes it's better not to talk it out. It makes you feel like hell for a while, but you've got an even chance the next morning one or the other of you will say some thing in a friendly way and then the other one will feel relieved and it will be all over. V I n the morning we went in straight. There's no point to horsing around. If we'd had things like phone taps, snooper microphones and truth serum to work with, we might have decided on something different. But life's too simple these days for any of that kind of stuff to be worth a damn. We'd just ask them questions, and then see what their lies added up to. Coming down to main drag on our bikes, we went right through the dead shopping district of the town and then cut right on a concrete street a couple of blocks in from the ocean. I figured we'd be coming up to signs of life soon. What we heard first was the sound of a ball bat from some field two or three blocks away and off to our right, somewhere near where the clean patch of houses was. We couldn't see anything, but we could hear kids yell; it was the kind of noise you get from a schoolyard at recess time. We made another half a block, still going by houses that were all abandoned, and then we heard some little kid yelling "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" The sound of fast, little feet on the floor of a veranda went clattering in echoes along the street, and then a screen door slammed shut. We'd filially been spotted. We stopped and began walking our bikes up the middle of the street. About a hundred fifty yards ahead there was a traffic light hanging from guy wires over an intersection. There were a couple of gas stations there, and the drive-in apron of an ice cream stand. It made a kind of open pH ace where you might expect people to gather when you unloaded your supply truck. Between there and us there were a couple of houses that might be lived in. They didn't have any broken glass in their windows, and there were light-colored streaks of unpainted putty in places along the sash. They didn't look neat, but they looked livable. They looked about the way you might expect houses to look in a. town, if it wasn't a town on its feet enough to have that nice little residential section tucked away back there. A screen door slammed again, and this time we caught the direction of the sound. It was coming from a couple of houses down and to our right. It was a big, green, three-story house, and we could see faces at the windows, but the glass was dirty, and we couldn't tell much about them. What we could see was the man coming out from the veranda and walking down the front steps. He stood there for a minute as we came closer. He was a tall, thin, oldish-looking man with a checked shirt and suit pants, wearing glasses and carrying a pipe in his hand. He looked seedy and comfortable, with the pants hanging down flat and butt-strung behind, and the knees baggy in front. He waved a hand at us in a nice neighborly way, and then he walked around the side of the house. There was a sudden hammering of metal on metal -- a wild, carrying sound -- and all the other noises we'd been hearing stopped. The only IF things to listen to were the steady wash of the ocean off to our left and the grit of our tires on the street. The man came back from around the house just as we reached his front walk. He had bushy saltand-pepper hair growing out of the sides and back of his head, and a streak of it growing back from his forehead; his hairline was shaped like a thick-tined pitchfork, and he reminded me of all the retired men who might come around to your place in the summertime and help you build a rose arbor for a few dollars. # # J Towdy!" he said. "Didn't hear A A you coming." He was looking closely at Artel. I had the feeling he was having trouble making up his mind whether Artel could possibly be a Klarr. "Howdy," I said. "My name's Ed Dorsey. This is my partner, Loovan Artel. Artel's his first name. What was all that racket?" The man came forward and stuck out his hand. "My name's Walter Sherman. Got one of those iron firealarm rings set up next to the house. I kinda let people know when we've got company. PJeased to meet you." He shook my hand, and then he gave Artel another look, very fast. He thought it over and shook Artel's hand. "Pleased to meet you" "My pleasure," Artel said, grinning a little. Sherman blinked once. He was trying to act right. He was doing pretty well, I thought, considering he hadn't ever before seen a Klarr wearing human clothes and riding a bicycle. Sherman looked all right, too. He was getting old, but there was a nice glint in his eye and good color in his face. His hair wasn't dead and dull, and the whites of his eyes were clear. He didn't move or talk like a man who was anywhere near sitting down and waiting to get older. He looked like an upstanding gent, and you don't get to see very many of those any more. I took a quick look around. There were people beginning to show up. One or two of them were coming out of nearby houses, but most of them were beginning to gather down at the intersection under the traffic light, coming up side streets and back from where the clean houses were. Just looking down that way, if you were a supply truck driver, say, you'd guess that they had all come out of the houses down there. "We're from Philadelphia," I said to Sherman. "Survey team." Artel and I got cards out of our shirt pockets and showed them to him. They were signed "F. X. Daley, United States Commissioner, Philadelphia District." "We're just starting to check this part of the country," I said as Sherman took the cards in his hand and studied them, peering and blinking with the pipe in his mouth. The pipe was cold and empty -- had been for years, probably. "We'd just like to find out a little bit about this community -- how many people, what kind of social organization... that kind of thing." "That's right, sir," Artel said. "We'd appreciate your cooperation. Or if you'd rather direct us right away to your mayor or whoever's in charge, why, we'll get out of your front yard and let you go back to what you were doing." "Oh, no -- that's all right," Sherman said, (handing us back the cards. "I imagine there'll be some people from our Town Council here in a minute. Glad to help." There wasn't any doubt we were bothering him. He was talking off the top of his head and thinking very hard about something else. I wondered for a minute if these people had some way of knowing there wasn't anything in Philadelphia -- not a blessed thing -- but it didn't seem likely. One of the hardest things to be sure of in this world is nothing. ii'lXTell, come in and -- " he   waved with his pipe toward the steps of his veranda. "Ah, why don't you sit down?" He was looking at the touring saddles on our bikes. "I imagine it might be nice to rest yourselves on something flat." He tried to chuckle. He was trying to be pleasant, he really was. But we had caught him off base very bad by not coming into town with a truck engine roaring ahead of us, and by not both of us being human. We sat down on his front steps. We left our bikes up on their kickstands, with the .#'s strapped down to. the carriers, just like any survey team would have. "You -- ah -- people look bushed," Sherman said. "You come all the way from Philadelphia on those bikes?" I nodded. "Easy stages, yeah," I told him. "There's a lot to check out." He looked a lot healthier than either one of us, that was for sure. "We ought to explain," Artel said. "It's the people who can't do a regular day's work they can spare for things like surveys." Like me, he was watching the bunch of people coming toward us. They were walking fast. Not running; just coming on at a good pace. There were young and old, and a few kids, a good mixed human crowd coming to the railroad station to watch the streamliner go by. A good, healthy crowd. Even not running, they were moving faster than any bunch of people I'd seen in years. They looked good; clean, eager. They looked the way people ought to look when something exciting is happening. You could see the front ones slow down and frown as they made out what Artel was. A freckled man in suntans and a rainhat, with squint-wrinkles around his blue eyes, came through them as they began to gather into a clump on Sherman's front lawn. "Hi Walt!" he said as he came up to us. "I see you got company." "Couple of government men from Philadelphia," Sherman said. "Philadelphia, eh?" he said, shaking hands with us as we stood up. "My name's Luther Koning. Pleased to meet you both." "Luther's sort of like our mayor," Sherman explained. W hatever he was, he was the man we'd come to see. I guessed he was about fifty; all long, IF flat muscle under that weather-tight skin, and able to act as if it was nothing unusual to see a Klarr walking around outside that big, silent building out behind the abandoned playground. He had fast reactions, Koning did, and where other people had slowed to a walk and stopped, he had come on forward. "Glad to meet you," I said. I told him my name, and I told him: "This is Artel, my partner.", "Mm-hmm," Koning said. "Well, I can see that," he said in an agreeable enough voice, looking over at that bicycles and the two rifles. "Two equally intelligent races in the same jam, after all. They waste their strength in fighting, there's no hope at all. So they work together. It makes sense." He looked at me and then at Artel. "You look tired -- both of you. Things still aren't so good in the big city, huh?" "Things aren't so good anywhere, Mr. Koning," Artel said. "But we're trying to make them better. That's why we're here." "Why are you here?" Koning grinned again. "We're standing here talking, and for all I know you two are anxious to get something done right away." "They've got I.D. cards here from Philadelphia," Walter Sherman said. He had gotten a chance to settle down some, and his voice was easier. But he was really fast in getting that across to Koning, even though he said it in a careless voice. "Gave me a turn, coming in that way. On bicycles." He chuckled: "Real fancy machines, those are. Smart idea. Saves on gasoline." I think the point he was trying to make was that we were dissimilar from the people who came in trucks, and that we might not even know about any other organization. "We're just trying to find out if you people need anything," I said harmlessly to Koning. I was watch-, ing the crowd. There were thirty o forty of them, and it seemed to me that any time you can collect twenty per cent of the total population ai the drop of a hat, you're dealing with an excitable population. E i they didn't look jumpy the way a crowd of sick-nervous people might. You don't see the kind of shuffling and fevery face-jerking you get sometimes. These people weren't looking for excitement. Sick people need excitement because it interrupts their misery. When they get it, they lose their dignity; it's a dose of the stuff they crave, and when you pour it out in front of them they can't hide how much they need it. These people weren't like that. They didn't need to be a mob. But they were very, very interested. Like members of the same club, and a famous guestlecturer. There wasn't a Klarr among them. That would have struck me even if I hadn't known about the special building. I couldn't make this crowd out. I kept looking at them; men of all ages, housewife-types in cotton print dresses, some of them with waterspotted aprons around their middles where they'd been washing up the breakfast dishes. There were young men in T-shirts, who looked as if they'd been working around the yard, and older men who were like Sherman and Koning in looking like they'd lived useful, cheerful lives, and bad a lot of useful time in them. It was the kind of crowd that gives you the feeling life is comfortable and pleasant all the time. There wasn't another one like it in the whole world. It bothered the hell out of me. Some of the kids had brought their gloves and started a game of catch out beyond the fringes of the crowd. Other kids were circulating back and forth; you couldn't get their attention with a conversation on a veranda, but they were either going to be where the attraction was, whatever it was, or they were going to spread the news. Some of them had been up to Sherman's house and back down to the intersection several times already. Now one of them on the edges of crowd yelled: "Here comes Tully!" Koning turned around as if he'd been shot, but he recovered nicely. "Hey! Let's keep it down; we're trying to talk here," he said. But he kept looking sideways over at a man ambling along the sidewalk, so Artel and I did too. VI T ully was like one of those men you'll see sitting on a beachfront bench staring out over the water. Nobody can do anything for or to them. They're past the big tussle. He had given up trying to look as if God never made pot bellies, and was wearing loose-weave light pants with a big, comfortable waistline and big baggy legs. He had rubber-soled cloth shoes on and bright socks that you could see showing under the flipping cuffs of his pants. He had broad-strap suspenders holding up his pants, and he was wearing a short-sleeved, bright shirt. His bare arms were thin and knobby, tanned an even darker and shinier brown than Koning's face was under his freckles. He was wearing a headband with a transparent green eyeshade. There was a fringe of white hair around his stuck-out ears, and the top of his skull was tanned and glistening. He had a big, amiable grin. He walked along as if he had all the time in the world, knowing that he was a center of interest, too, and the rest of the show would wait for him. Neither Koning nor Sherman said a word. People will do that. People think that if they stop, time stops. Tully ambled into the crowd, still grinning, and the crowd drifted out of his way. There wasn't anything obtrusive about it; it wasn't like the Red Sea parting for Moses into two straight-edged and shiny walls. It was just that they drifted out of his way, easily and naturally as if everybody in town knew from a baby that you didn't stand close to Tully. Tully walked forward, still grinning. He cocked his undersized, roundchinned, round face up at the veranda. He looked at Artel, and then he looked past Koning and me at Sherman. When he spoke, his voice was high, like the cackle of a chicken with the biggest egg in the yard. "Ah-heh, Doc. Heard you had one of them Hammerheads visiting on IF your porch." He looked Artel up and down. "Looks like a prime example, considerin' how puny critters are these days." He looked at me now. His eyes under the shade were small and black, and smart. "His partner don't look so good either, does he?" He stood there with his little squirrelpaw hands hooked into the front of his trousers, and when he began to laugh, first his cheeks quivered, and then the loose skin in his neck, and then his belly under the shirt, and then he was bouncing on the balls of his feet. But he didn't make any noise. He flapped with laughter as he ran his eyes around from Sherman and quickly across Artel and me to Koning, and then he began to turn very slowly and his glance didn't miss one of the people around him. And then he walked away. He went back down the sidewalk the way he'd come, his hands still hooked in the waistband of his pants, his back shaking a little bit, the suspenders tight across his wizened shoulders, and a reflection of sunlight bouncing off the curved sheen of his eyeshade. "Well," Artel said in an amused and careless voice, "I see every town has its character." K oning rubbed his hand across the back of his neck, where the skin was seamed and granulated from years of exposure to sunlight. His jaw washout; I could see his lower teeth. They were wet and brown, and snaggled by oncoming age. The breath was pushing out steadily through his nostrils, making a very thin whistle. He took off ilia khaki rain hat and ran bis hand over his scalp. He put the hat back on, all without taking his eyes off Tully. The crowd was looking up ait us expectantly, and I believe half of them were holding their breaths. "I didn't know you were a doctor," I said to Sherman, as if this were interesting but not vital. Of all the things that had beeh happening to us since Sherman had given the alarm, this was the one that I couldn't make out to have not noticed. "Want to make a note of that, Artel?" I went on. "It's good news. It means we won't have to send one of our own in." Artel nodded and took a pad of mimeographed form sheets out of his pocket. He got out a pencil, licked the tip and made an X-mark in a box. "Doctor present. Right he mumbled boredly. "By the way, Doctor, congratulations," I said to Sherman. "You must be doing a fine job here. These people look fine." Sherman said quickly: "Now, wait -- you're getting the wrong idea. I'm no doctor. We don't have any doctor. That's just something that crazy old coot calls everybody." His glance flickered over to Koning. "I ought to lock -- no, God damn it, I... can't..." Koning wasn't talking to me. He was talking directly to Sherman. Whatever it was, it had them completely shaken up. I can imagine how they must have planned for snoopers in advance, sitting around a kitchen table and nerving each other. "Well, listen , Luther -- whafll we do if somebody comes around asking questions?" "We'll handle it , Walt . After all , it's our town , we ive here. The important things are all kept out of sight , and low would they know what questions to ask? Don't you worry about it, Walt. You just always let me do most of the talking, and I'll make sure they don't find out anything but what we want them to know." That was exactly how it had gone between them; it's the kind of conversation smart, decent men with a secret have held between themselves since time knows when. And it had worked, back when things were looser. They were looking at each other like two men tied to opposite ends of a rope, and the middle of the rope hooked over a spur of rock on the side of a twenty thousand foot mountain. "Oh. Sorry, Mr. Sherman," I said. "Artel, looks like you're going to have to start a new form." "Yeah. Before I do that -- Mr. Sherman, do you have very many seniles in your population? Will you require any special supplies -- tranquilizers or that sort of thing?" Artel asked. # #TT# e ll, I wouldn't know," Sherw man, said doggedly. "And Tully don't sfeem to do any harm, as long as you don't pay him any mind. "We've been very lucky here," Kening said. He was beginning to get bade to himself. He was talking a little fast, and the wrinkles at the centers of his eyes weren't completely relaxed. But he was doing a good job of recovering. "We're all healthy people here. Oh, once in a while somebody mashes his thumb with a hammer or something. But that's not anything that can't be taken care of. We live nice and quiet. It's good. When I look back on how it was in the old days, I've got to say we live better. That's a terrible thing, when you think of how this town used to have twenty-five thousand people in it and mighty few of them ready to be dead. But now we've got through the bad time, things are pretty good. For the live ones. Meaning no insult, maybe a lot better than they are for you outside." He was looking steadily at Sherman. And he had come to something in his mind. He wasn't back on his heels any more. He was nervous, and he didn't like to trust his own improvisations any better than anybody else would. But he was going to go with it, whatever it was. He wasn't looking to Artel and me for his cues any longer. You could see that happening in him; you could hear it in his voice. "Look, gentlemen," he said, stepping back and smiling. "I got taken up here in a hurry, and there's a couple of little things that I'd like to finish up, if that's all right with the two of you. I mean, this isn't any kind of an emergency. It's a surprise, but it isn't an emergency. So if you could excuse me for about a half hour, I could come back then and I'd have the rest of the day clear to talk to you. I'm sure Mr. Sherman can keep you entertained, and maybe fill IF you in on some of the background. Just the general stuff; I'll be back in time to give you the specifics. How would that be?" He grinned at Sherman with everything but his eyes. "Why don't you take them inthem S little refreshment." "Well, I don't know -- " Sherman looked at Koning as if he had gone just as wild as Tully. "I mean, the house is a mess... It was sad, watching a man turn into a nervous housewife right in front of my eyes. "No, you go ahead and take them inside," Koning said. "Don't worry about the house." He grinned again. "Relax, Walt! You're just not used to company," he chuckled. S herman nodded slowly. "All right," he said, "take your word on that." His face went through a spasm; I think he started to grin back, and then realized immediately he couldn't make it stick. I didn't dare look over at Artel myself, for fear we'd lay ourselves open in the same way. The crowd was livening up again; Koning's starting some kind of action was taking the dismay of Tully out of them. The kids, of course, hadn't stayed quiet for more than a minute. Some of them were back to playing catch, and some of the others had drifted on down the street after Tully -- I didn't know whether on purpose after Tully or just happening to be headed in the same direction. I noticed nobody had tried giving Tully any catcalls or joshing, not even the kids. It was a nice town; they were polite to their sick ones. "It sounds like a practical idea," I said. "And I sure could use a cool drink, Mr. Sherman. How about you, Artel?" Artel nodded. "Yo." "Oh, well, sure," Sherman said. "No problem about that. Got a good well down by where the 'Nike site used to be. Deep, Government-dug well. Lucky that way, too, we were. Lots of good water." "Well, that would be fine!" I said. I could hear Koning sigh just a little bit. "Okay! So it's all settled -- Doc here'll take care of you two fellows 'til I get back, and everything'll work out just fine." Koning turned and trotted down the steps. "Be seeing you!" I waved a hand cheerfully after him. So did Artel. "Well," Sherman said. "Let's -- let's go inside." So we did. A blonde young woman of maybe twenty-five was waiting in the hall, carrying a baby over her shoulder, one arm around it and the spread fingers of her other hand supporting it over the fresh, clean diaper. There were a couple of other kids clustered around her; a girl maybe a year older than the baby, and a boy in a T-shirt and corduroy rompers who was just under school age. He had little leather shoes on, scuffed up around the toes since the time this morning his mother had coated them with some of that polish that comes in a bottle with a dabber. The little girl had her arms around her mother's knee and her face buried in the side of her skirt. Sherman my kids. That's LaVonne, and Walt, and the baby's name is Lucille. Millie, this is Mr. -- " He looked over at me. "Dorsey. I'm very pleased to meet you. This is my partner -- " "Loovan Artel. Loovan's his family name," Sherman said. at Artel. Her eyes were very big, and the corners of her mouth kept twitching. Finally she said, "Oh." soothed. "We just need a place to sit, Mrs. Sherman," Artel said gently. "Until Mr. Koning gets back." "That's right, honey," Sherman said, throwing Artel a grateful glance. "Luther just asked me to give these men some refreshment until he gets back. He asked me to bring 'em in." Putting the seal of authority on it seemed to buck her up, some. "Oh." She wet her lips. "Well, won't you come in?" She pulled the boy Walter out of the way and stood back against the wall. We were in one of those narrow foyer things, that runs through toward the back of the house and has doors opening off it into the main rooms, and a flight of stairs going up. "Let's go straight on through to the kitchen. I'm sure you fellows don't mind," Sherman said. "Not at all," Artel said, and we followed him toward the back of the house. I threw a glance into the living room as we went by. There were couches and a lot of chairs up against the walls, with a coffee table in front of each couch. There were books on the tables, bound in brightcolored cheap cloth. Novels. The kitchen was big, with a chrome-legged table, wooden cabinets and a lot of chrome-legged chairs with padded plastic seats and backs. Next to the capped stub' of a gaspipe coming up through the floor was a cast iron wood range, and in the sink was a big, galvanized iron pan with the washing water in it. The drinking water was in a regular office-type water cooler with a big glass bottle held upside-down in it. And in one corner, standing spindlylegged, was a kerosene refrigerator. "Well, now, that's something," I said, nodding toward it. "You people are really starting to get straightened around here." Sherman's eyes followed mine. He looked at the refrigerator as if all hope were lost. "I have to have it," he said. "Oh? Are you a diabetic?" I said. W hat happened to his face now was like nothing I could recognize, but if he had been made out of strings, I could have heard them snap. The look 'he gave me was damn near unbearable; I might have been a cobra. Without taking his eyes off me, he you and the kids have things to do elsewhere. I can take care of these gentlemen by myself. You go on the room, taking the kids with her. The kitchen had a swinging door on it, and it swung shut. "What do you mean, am I a diabetic? All the diabetics are dead." "It's just that refrigerators and insulin go together in this house, Ddctor," I said. "And before you tell me again you're not a doctor, any fool can see Koning doesn't care any more whether we find out or not. Artel, you figure his office is across the hall from that waiting room?" "Uhhuh. I could smell the antiseptics." "Look, Dr. Sherman, why don't you relax?" I said. "Koning told you that, and I'm telling you that. So you're getting it from both sides, and you might as well believe it. Let's sit down and just wait. We can talk if you like. Koning's obviously gone to do something." "Town Council meeting, I guess," Sherman said desperately. "I figured something like that. Take it easy, Doc -- it's us that may have our heads in a noose. Artel, drift out there and see what his office looks like, will you?" Artel nodded and went out. I could hear hall and Artel murmuring something reassuring that ended in " 'scuse me, Ma'am, kids..." Sherman sank down in one of the kitchen chairs...He held his head in his hands with his elbows on his knees. "You had to bring one of them in with you," he mumbled. I pulled another chair away from the kitchen table and sat down. "Well sure, Doctor. He's a United States citizen. At least where we come from he is, and he's got just as much right to walk these streets as I have." "You don't realize what you're doing to us." "No, I don't, except I know guilt when I see it. But it's a pretty good question who's doing what to whom." Sherman's head came up fast. "What do you mean? What do you know?" "Whatever we know, we'll know a lot more, and if we never go back to tell our Old Man about it, why that'll tell him something, too." I started to talk very fast. I had him on the ropes, and win, lose or even, I was going to press that as long as Koning would let me. "What do you people think you're doing here, Sherman? Living in some little world of your own? You may think so, all fenced off behind a bunch of skeletons and burnt-out houses, but there's a whole goddamned world out there, and in the middle of the night sometimes you know it. This is just one town. One town, in a whole country. On a continent. On a world. We're not just dying out there -- we're living and breathing, too. You think it's fun for me and Artel to come down here and play patsy with you people? There's no time for that." H e was white and sweating. He was shaking his head back and forth. "No. No, this is a good town. You're not the only people we've seen. We've seen other people from outside. YouTe all sick -- all of you. You're weak, and you're in pain. I've been watching the way you IF move, Porsey. You treat your bones like glass. I can imagine what it's like out there. You lived through it -- you were the lucky ones, and look at you! Your livers and your kidneys must be like old pieces of sponge. Your lungs are in rags. And maybe, maybe if you get halfway decent food, and enough rest, and enough time, you'll slowly get back toward what you were. But most of you will never make it. Your kids might -- for those of you who've got the energy for parenthood, and those of you who can successfully transmit immunities to your offspring. What's your infant mortality rate, Dorsey? What's your live birth rate? Who takes care of your kids? Who educates them? Who keeps up the public sanitation? How many psychotics have you got?" Artel came back into the kitchen. "All he's got in his layout is surgical stuff. He's a bonesetter. Just about the only medicines he has are aspirin, iodine and vaseline. Funniest doctor's office I've ever seen. Well, Koning told us. But it's no surprise they thought they ought to hide it." Artel got a chair for himself and sat down watching Dr. Sherman with a sleepy, unwavering expression. "I'm sorry your wife and children are so upset by me," he Said. Sherman nodded blindly, not looking up from the floor. "Boy's by my first wife," he said. "I married late. Always figured it would be too big a change in my life. Got older, changed my mind." "You've been very fortunate," Artel said. "I know it. There isn't another family in town with two survivors. You think I didn't know the odds, when I finally realized what we had on our hands? What do you think I wouldn't have done to save Mary and the boy both? It was hopeless in the hospital by then. I voted tq dynamite the place, it was so bad. Didn't matter -- if they'd all voted with me, there wasn't time nor sensP or strength to do it. Man, you can know how to swim, but when the wave hits you the next thing you know you're smashed up against the shells on the shore. I came home, and I barricaded this place. Had big pans full of carbolic acid, soaked rags in it and stuffed them in the windows. Had spray guns full of disinfectant. You could barely breathe in here. What good was it? I wasn't even thinking. We were all out of our heads. We were sick, and we were using it all up. When it started, we were using up the antibiotics as if we could always order another truckload in the morning. Had lab technicians -- technicians -- working up slides, and had all the doctors out on the floor. We did everything backwards. We couldn't believe -- " Sherman held his head and laughed. "We couldn't believe what was going to happen. We couldn't act like we believed what was going to happen. I mean, if we'd let ourselves think about what was going to happen -- " He stood up quickly. "I never got you your water." He went to a cabinet over the sink and got out some glasses. "We kept listening to the radios, telling ourselves somebody somewhere would announce treatments. I had a radio with me everywhere I went, in my shirt pocket. I listened to that radio night and day, had my pockets full of batteries. When I couldn't get stations any more, I kept it on anyhow -- kept it on back on the air." He pushed the glasses clunking under the spigot of the water fountain. "I wasn't listening for any announcement. I was just listening to the cities die. Every time a station went off the air, I'd say to myself 'There, you smart people at Massachusetts General. There, you fancy labs down at Johns Hopkins. There, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center -- you couldn't find it either.' That's how we were -- you remember how you were?" He came over to us and pushed the glasses into our hands. "Here. Here." Water slopped on my wrist. S herman went back to his chair.  He sat there looking at us. His hands turned the pipe over and over, and the ferocity had taken hold of him. "Luther wanted me to give you the background. AU right, I'll give you the background. What do you think happens to the organization of a place like this? The water mains lead from a reservoir that belongs to a town fifteen miles away. What happens when they close the valves up there because they're scared they'll need it all to themselves? What happens to your food storage when your refrigeration goes? How much do you think we had stored around here, when we could always bring everything down from Newark in a couple of hours? What happens when you realize that's all there is, hah, and you're not going to bring any more from any place else, 'cause nobody's producing any more, nobody's packing it, nobody's putting it on trains? By God, they fought for it in the dark! They broke into houses where fat people lived, sometimes before and sometimes after they set  fire to a block on account of pestilence. "It's dead, it's dead out there," he said, pointing. "You came in through it. You saw it. You lived through it where you were, but you were in a goddamned metropolis with the rivers to scoop water out of and the warehouses jammed up. Do you know what we had to do to clear the site for that well you're drinking from now? They were dead! They were all dead, and we'd come crawling through the gutters, we'd come through three hour journeys that took a block. We didn't clear them out. We -- we as good as burrowed through them. We were twisted around them like snakes." He looked up. "Of course, it's all clean and neat now," he smiled. "Everything's clean and neat. This is a model community." He wiped out his eye sockets with the backs of his hands. There was sweat drenching his shirt under the arms. "Drink your water," he said. "Thank you," I said. I took a hearty swallow. "I gather you didn't save your Mary." "No," he said bitterly, outraged IF at my manners. "I didn't save my Mary." Well, I hadn't even intended for him to get some of my point. But it would have been nice if he'd been able to realize you couldn't buy anything with that story these days. They were always like that, when you contacted them. The loners -- the ones we pick up in open countryside because they used to be farmers -- would run around our town for days, telling their particular story over and over again. It always took them a while to understand that nobody was listening. The communities we'd contact couldn't believe that the rest of the world was just like them. They all had this vision that theirs was the only town blighted, even though nothing that used power or fuel or the cooperation of large groups of people could be seen in the world any longer. We had all run screaming. We had all spent everything we had, trying to run, trying to learn an answer, trying to hide, trying to wipe out. You could only be glad the world's military was still shocked from what the air defense missiles had done to the incoming Klarr lifeboats, because if they'd been full of their usual, spirit we would have found some excuse for unloading that stockpile on ourselves, too. The only special grief Ocean Heights might have would be from having that lifeboat land on their doorstep and provide them with five hundredodd immediate centers of cross-infection instead of their having to wait their turn from the winds and the refugees. But I figured that silent building farther down canceled that excuse, too. And besides, Mary is a common name. #T #k, Doctor," I said, "we've I .J got cards from the United States government. You remember the United States. We obviously represent the return of some kind of social organization to the world. You see us -- you see what kind of shape we're in. You say you've seen other people. What's more, you can't tell me somebody in town doesn't know how to build a crystal set. There isn't much to pick up, but there's something. You're trying to tell me you're cut off, but you're not -- you know what kind of shape the world's in, even if what you know is only little bits and pieces. We're sitting right here in your kitchen working on the little bits and pieces we know, and it adds up bad. It adds up real bad, Doctor, just from what you've given us. What's going on in this town?" Sherman shook his head miserably. "I can't tell you," he whispered. "You've been trying to," Artel said. "You're doing everything but putting it into words." Sherman's glance jerked over toward him and met pity. I don't know whether he could tell that's what it was on a Klarr face or not. "Doctor, you have a great secret in this town. But you are its only sentry. It's possible to get as far as your house without being detected. And then you call attention to yourself by hammering on a gong. When you and Koning talk to each other in front of us, you make sure we notice every lie. You think Tully told us about you? We didn't need Tully for that. But it was you and Koning who told us Tully is important -- you and Koning, and all your other neighbors and friends. When you tell us how things were in this town, you're apologizing in advance for what we'll know when we put all the pieces together." Sherman was going whiter and whiter. The wood of the pipe was creaking in his hands as he squeezed them and the skin slipped damply over it. "You couldn't fool anybody who's the least bit interested," Artel finished up, still gently. "You know that. You've always known that." I put down my water glass and walked over to the refrigerator. "He marched us by the waiting room because it was smart not to let us sit there and figure out he was a doctor, so we wouldn't ask him any medical questions. He walked us right in here into the kitchen. Where the refrigerator is." I opened it. Sherman cried out: "We couldn't get two! We could only find one, and it made sense to keep it in the kitchen!" I nodded. "And there was a fuel problem, too," I said. I could afford to be understanding. I didn't have the foggiest notion yet what the hell he meant. "It's a hard world; we've got to economize." I was looking through the refrigerator, and it was dark enough in there so that I was having trouble. There were a couple of heads of lettuce, wrapped in cellophane with the New York seal on them, and some leftovers in plastic covered dishes, half a sausage... and, up close to the weak cooling coils, halfpint cream bottle with a homemade rubber diaphragm stretched over its mouth. I took it out and held it up to the light. It was three-quarters full of a just faintly yellow liquid with white clouds stirring around the bottom. Sherman stared at it and me and Artel. Then he jumped up and made a lunge for it. He had his hand open, and he was trying to slap it away and smash it. His eyes were bulging. His face looked like it was a foot wide and made of chalk. "No, let me!" he panted as I ducked it out of his reach. "Please!" First, I stepped back from him, so that he fell clumsily against the standing cabinet, and then as he put his hands down to catch his balance, I said: "All right," quietly, and held the bottle out. He straightened up, and I carefully put it into his hands. He stood looking down at it, and just as suddenly as he'd jumped up, tears began to fall on his shirtsleeves. Woebegone, he carefully put it back in the refrigerator and closed the door. He turned around and leaned his back against it. He took a long, gasping breath, and then he sniffed sharply. Well, anyone will when they're crying. I looked over at Artel. "That's the kind of setup they use when they want to measure out doses for injections." Artel nodded. "He'd do his sterilization in here, on the stove." He began opening cabinet doors, and IF on the second try he found the leatherette-covered tin case with the syringes and the needles carefully nested. I turned to Sherman. "We've been in this town what -- forty-five minutes? That's how long it took you folks to lead us straight to the wonder drug. Sure this is a good town." Sherman kept his eyes on the floor. He had shrunk inside his clothes. He was shuddering, and he was still weeping. I looked over at Artel. Artel shook his head -- he couldn't tell what that stuff was either. IX # #nphat's it, huh. Doctor?" I a asked. "The stuff in that bottle replaces all other kinds of medicines. You come into Dr. Sherman's office with, say, liver flukes, a bad heart and a broken arm. He sets your arm, and he goes back into the kitchen and. comes back with a syringe full of this stuff and squirts it into you, and you walk out smiling, all cured. You come in with spots in front of your eyes, a roaring in your ears and a sweltling in your armpit. Doctor gives you the needle, and six hourslater you're dancing with your best girl. Doc, is that the way it is?" "Don't make fun of it," Sherman whispered. He was down to that. It was all he had left. We had broken him -- well, no; the three of us together, and this town, and this world had broken him. That'll happen, if you let it, every time. Sherman was saying: "It's specific against Klarrtransmitted infectious diseases and allergic reactions. And it has broadspectrum applications in treating the older forms of infectious disease. It won't repair a damaged heart, no. But it reduces that heart's burden." He looked at Artel and winced the way he would have if he were hit with a gust of windy rain. "It may be a panacea," he explained. "In a matter of hours after a three cubic centimeter injection, the subject is completely free of everything that can possibly be destroyed by an antibody. I'm -- I'm trying to make myself clear to you. The human body reacts to the stuff by manufacturing counteragents which not only destroy it, but every other invading organism. At least, I've never seen the infectious disease that one dose isn't effective for. I -- " he waved his hand in the air. "The population's too small for me to have seen examples of all the sicknesses that humans could get. But it's never failed me yet. And the reaction's permanent. The only people we need it for is the new babies. There's no disease in this town, Mr. Loovan." The tears were starting in his eyes again; not the big, steady running wetness on his face he'd shown before, but he had to keep blinking. "You see, the human body has its defense mechanisms. And this stuff stimulates them. Fantastically." He shook his head violently and turned to me. because Artel had kept looking at him deadpan. "You can see it, Dorsev! You must know that the normal human being's bodv is constantly engaged in staving off all sorts of potential illnesses. At any time, a great deal of the human mechanisms's functioning is directed toward the destruction of invading micro-organisms and the filtering and disposal of the resultant wastes. And I'm sure I don't have to tell you how vulnerable the organism is if it has been exhausted. And I don't have to tell you how debilitating even simple illnesses are; at some time in your life you must have had a common cold, or a reaction to an infected tooth, or a cut. Can you imagine how much energy was constantly being drained from your system by things as commonplace as that? Energy that could have gone to doing work or maintaining the growth and repair functions of your body?" He was shifting back and forth between the two of us now. We kept looking at him blankly because there wasn't any need to encourage him and we weren't planning to interrupt him. And he kept trying to get through to us -- trying to get us to smile, or pat his hand and say. "It's all right." "Can you imagine what the population of this town is like? It's free to devote full energy to life. There's none of that gray, dragging stuff they used to come in to me with in the old days, that I couldn't diagnose, and made them miserable, and I'd write tonics for. Do you realize how rhuch tension has been wiped out of their lives? They're not nagged by a hundred little illnesses. They're not terrified by sudden stomach-twinges and mysterious rashes or coughing spells. They don't find themselves spitting or passing blood. They don't worry themselves into stomach ulcers, and they don't come down with nervous diseases. When you add that to the fact that they no longer have many of the old social tensions... Don't you see? It's like a miracle for them! It's like perpetual springtime -- they're alive -- they're vital. They don't tire as fast, they don't mope -- " "And they laugh all the time," I said. "Artel and I could see that; running and dancing and singing and clapping their hands when they saw us. Like a bunch of happy South Sea islanders in a book. Nature's Children." Sherman ducked his head again. "They were pretty well off until you showed up," he muttered. "No arthritis, Doctor?" Artel said. "No athlete's foot, no kidney stones?" A said. "If you had something like that before the Klarri came, there's nothing that can be done for you except to make you generally healthier. That helps." His head came up a little farther, "There is something interesting about that, though. I don't see any new cases starting. You can't tell with a sample this size, but it just may be we won't have any of that after this generation. "There's a lot I don't know about it. What I've got does the job it has to. But I'm not going to pretend to you that my extraction methods are exact. I haven't got the time or equipment to isolate the precise effective fraction, whatever it is. I've got a bundle of stuff there, and some part of it does the job. The rest IF doesn't do any harm." He was starting to gather the little pieces of himself hack together again. Talking shop was doing him good. Well, that had to be one of his reasons for talking shop. "What does it do for cancer, Doc?" I asked. "I think it prevents it. I know it doesn't cure it." "That's fine, Doctor." I looked at him from a long way away. I had an idea I was about to smash him again. I looked over at Artel. He had caught it in the doctor's choices of words. It was sad to see his face. "Doctor -- where do you get this stuff?" He had nearly made himself forget it. He had been talking, and talking, and all the time his mind had been putting the screens back up. He stared at me as if I'd belched in church, and then he took a little half step away from Artel, a little, sidling, sheepish step I'm sure he didn't know he was performing. "I extract it from human-infected Klarr blood," he said, his mouth blowing each word in its own bubble. Artel sighed and bowed his head. I'd had my next question ready, and I was pretty sure of the answer to that one, too, but I had to stop and study him for a minute. Then I said. "And everybody in town knows where it comes from?" Sherman nodded, two or three times, slowly. "Alii the adults. I wish you hadn't brought in Mr. Loovan." "I think we'd better move, Artel." He wasn't keeping all his mind on the spot we were in, but he nodded. "Yo." We pushed open the swinging door. "Wait!" Sherman cried behind us. "If you try to run for it, they're bound to kill you." A rtel was moving quickly up the foyer. "We know that," I said over my shoulder. That kind of talk annoys me. I didn't need him to teach me by business. Sherman's wife and his kids were hanging over the bannister three-quarters of the way up the stairs, staring down at us. Artel hit the front door as hard as he could, slamming it back against the wall, and then kneed the screen door open so that it spanged against the outside house wall. The people standing around out there jumped. Well, that was the effect that he wanted. "Good-by, Mister Boogeyman!" the little girl piped as Artel hit the veranda with his boots clattering. I went just as fast behind him, slamming both doors shut. Artel didn't slow; you never want to do that. I jumped the steps and picked up speed, so that we reached the crowd side by side. We went right by our bikes, picked the biggest man in the group, and stood with our toes practically on his. "Where do 'we find Luther Koning?" I barked in his face. The rest of the people were falling back. Artel and I were both glowering and obviously beside ourselves with rage. The man took a step back, and we took a step forward. Artel reached down and grabbed his belt. "Come on, you! You're fooling with the Government!" The man waved vaguely down the street toward the intersection. "Right!" I said. "Let's go, buddy." Artel pushed the man back firmly, letting go of his belt, and the two of us swung down the sidewalk, marching side by side, our feet coming down regular as heartbeats, our faces grim, our arms swinging. Kids and housewives scattered out of our way. "You can't -- !" somebody protested. "Well, then, you run tell him," I said, and we kept going. t#T"orsey! Loovan!" Sherman U shouted, coming down his veranda steps, his feet thudding across the lawn as he cut over to us. We kept marching. He came panting up to us. He was trying to keep up, but he kept losing speed as he turned to try to talk to us. I kept my eyes on the people down at the intersection; there were a fair number of them down there, and I saw one of them notice us coming and freeze. "Dorsey!" Sherman panted. "You don't understand. It's not just -- " He tripped over the cover of a water meter, stumbled, and lost pace. He came trotting up even with us again. "Loovan -- " Then he realized he'd picked the wrong one to tell the rest of it to. "Dorsey! We were dying. We were too' weak to move. We hadn't eaten in days. We hadn't eaten eftough in weeks, and all that time we'd been burning with fever. My wife was lying dead upstairs. For three days. And I couldn't get up there. I had the boy In my office; on the examining table. I was lying on the floor. I couldn't reach him. I had him strapped down. He was crying. I couldn't reach him. We were all like that." "So were we," I said. I had run out of patience with him entirely. But Sherman wanted to make his point. I had been waiting for him to tell me where their captive Klarrs were, and it seemed to me at the time that would be the only other interesting thing he could have left to tell us. Instead, he kept hobbling on: "You weren't lost and cut off from the rest of the world! Do you know how bad the human animal wants to live? Do you know what it will do to keep alive? Do you know what it will keep trying to do, right up to the last minute? As long as it has its teeth and claws?" I was listening for any footsteps coming up fast and determined behind us. I was paying most of my attention to that. There weren't any. We'd left them standing there. Now we were almost up to the intersection. The Fourth corner was a big saloon-hotel thing, and I guess it was a town hall now, because I could see Koning and a bunch of other men come out quickly through the doors and stop dead, watching us. There was a grinning, jumping figure with them, pointing at us coming on and slapping his broomstick thigh, making the flapping cloth of his pants billow as if he had no bones at all. "It was Tully!" Sherman puffed going on for a while. Then we got too weak, and we gave it up. But Tully wounded one someplace where IF 'w-r-'wf mM v'" s they'd both crawled to die, I guess. Starving to death, both of them. Tully must have been just as far out of his head -- just as far back to being a dying animal as you can get. You know what I mean?" he pleaded. "You know how Tully was? It was just him and this dying Klarr. It was Tully. It was Tully that was the animal. But it was Tully then that had sense enough to come and save me -- and save little Walt -- after he was back to being a man again." He barely got it out. "It was Tully who found out. I just refined his discovery. Made it nice and medical and sanitary. But you see how it is -- they can't let the two of you go!" Artel had stopped dead. He had turned to salt in the blink of an eye. "Move. Move." I said to him, "You've got to move," still looking straight ahead, stopping dead with him. Whatever we did, we had to do it together. "If you don't move, none of this gets back." We moved. Now there were about fifteen or twenty people at the intersection. They were all men. They were wound up tight, moving their feet and hands back and forth. They stood on the corner in front of the hotel as we marched off the end of the sidewalk and across the street toward them. T ully was bouncing and grinning at the crowd's left. He had a lot of energy; a lot of drive. You had to figure him for spunk. For him to be the historical personage he was, he had to have had the persistence to have haggled hot raw meat with loose teeth in a mouth full of open sores. You won't often find that kind of grit, even in your really desperate person. Even so, the nearest man to him was drawn a little away from him. Like the others in the crowd, he was watching Artel and me, but he kept darting side-glances at Tully, too. We walked up to Koning, who was trying to keep his face blank and was keeping it tense instead. I looked only at him; straight into his eyes. It was important to hit him before he could say or do anything. I said casually: "Well, it worked out the way you were hoping. Sherman cracked wide open and told us all about it. So you didn't do it. It's all out of your hands and off your mind." Koning started to frown. "What do you mean by that?" Artel said "Look, Mr. Koning," with his voice patient, "if you really didn't want it taken off you, you would have made sure to ask the supply trucks for some drugs now and then. Whether Doc wanted to deprive the poor sick outside world or not." "Now you can just be mayor," I said. "That'll be a lot easier, won't it?" "Well, we've got things to do, Mr. Koning," Artel said. "Let's go, Ed. That building's four blocks down and over to our right." Sherman had been trying to catch his breath over to my right for the last few moments. He said: "I never -- " I gave him something that might IF X pass for a smile. "We know where the lifeboat is, too, Dr. Sherman. And those over there." I waved my hand in the direction of the neat houses, off beyond the bulk of the hotel. "Well, you can see we have to open that casino building, Mr. Koning. Care to come along?" Koning's jaw flexed a couple of times. He looked around, and once you do that, of course, you've lost it. He took a deep breath. And then nodded hastily, looking back at the crowd. "All right. Okay." Artel and I stepped out. We walked down the middle of the street, with Koning walking along beside us, and having to compromise between a casual walk and a trot, until he finally settled for keeping in step with us. Doc Sherman tagged along. One or two other people started to follow, and then the rest of them, and with the group that had slowly followed us down from Sherman's house, it made a respectable bunch. Tully had set out down the sidewalk. He was keeping pace with us the best he could. He kept trying to attract the attention of people who passed near him. I could hear him saying: "Where do you think you're going, you chicken punk?" He said it to young and old, irrespective of sex. "Where do you think you're going, you chicken punk?" I could hear it as a fading mutter in the background. People were looking at him and then looking away. They were dodging around him, and twitching their feet nearer the center of the street. Except for him, nobody was talking. I n daylight, the building was painted green. Not new -- from before. Artel and I trotted up the steps. Koning pushed himself ahead and unlocked the doors into the lobby. The crowd waited out in the street. The lobby was dark and musty. It was floored in a checkerboard pattern of red and brown vinyl tiles with a black rubber runner laid down over them. There were office doors opening on the lobby, but Koning went ahead toward a flight of stairs leading to the left. "Lantern around here somewhere," he said. "Never mind," Artel said, taking his flashlight out of his windbreaker. We went up the stairs with it whirring. At the top of the stairs there was another set of double doors. Koning unlocked those. The smell kept getting stronger. There was some light coming in from one window near us. They had bricked up the rest from the inside. The entire second floor was one big room from here on back, and the open window was on this side of the row of bars and cyclone fencing they had put in from one wall to the other. Artel shone his light in through the bars. "We could see six iron cots with mattresses on them. There were two Klarri lying on two of them. The mattresses were turned back and rolled over on three others. There was another Klarr sitting on the edge of the remaining bed. He was wearing what was left of his shipboard clothes, I guess. #  "All right, unlock that," I told Koning, pointing to the pipe-andcyclone-mesh gate that went from floor to ceiling. Some master craftsman had worked hard and expertly, custom-building that. Koning nodded, went over to it and trembled the key into the lock. He pushed in on the gate, and it swung back. He turned around and looked at Artel and me expectantly. "I don't think anything much is going to happen to you, Koning," I said. "We don't mess with communities if we can possibly help it. We all had to live through a bad time, and we all found out things about ourselves." Koning nodded. "We didn't find out what you found out. I'll give you that," I said. "But that was just luck," Artel said; he took a deep breath before each phrase. "Just your luck. Instead of somebody else's, somewhere else." Koning shook his head. "Listen -- that Tully -- " "I'm sure Artel understands," I said. "After all, you couldn't do anything to Tully." Koning said bitterly: "The son of a bitch kept reminding us and mocking us. He'd ask us if our arms were sore from Doc's needle." "I wish you'd go away," Artel told him. K oning nodded again and went around us to go back down the stairs. He went down quickly, and then we could hear his foot.steps in the lobby, and the sound of him going out through the double doors outside. He was not a bad man. Not the sort who would eat the flesh of a Klarr, no matter how hungry. Just the sort who would take a Klarr's blood to make medicine out of it. And take. And take. As soon as it was all quiet, Artel began to tremble. He shook like a leaf. He put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed. "Oh, Ed." "Easy, easy,. easy." "Chicken punks," Artel muttered. The Klarr who'd been sitting on his bed had gotten up. He came shuffling forward, peering ahead. "Artel, I don't see any reason why it might not work the other way. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see why Klarr-infected human blood fractions wouldn't do it for your people." "They didn't try that, though, did they?" Artel said with his eyes shut. "Well, they couldn't," I said. "They needed these Klarri to stay infected." Artel nodded. "I understand that." The other two Klarri had noticed something was different and had turned over on their beds. I speak a pretty good version of Klarr. "Hey," I said to them. "We're policemen. You can come out." "What are we going to do with them, Ed?" Artel said. "Move 'em into one of the houses. I'll stay with them until you send a truck down to pick them up. If you take a bike out to the Camden route, you'll probably be up at the Old Man's maybe late tonight, tomorrow morning for sure." IF Artel nodded. "All right." He put his hand back on my shoulder as the white-haired Klarr came closer, got to the gate, and stood in it with one hand on each upright, leaning forward and looking out at us. "I am Eredin Mek, Sub-Assistant Navigating Officer. My companions here are very weak and may be frightened. Could one of you go in and speak to them, please?" He came closer. "Go ahead, Artel," I said, and he ducked through the gate and walked quickly toward the back of the cell. "Is is possible to go outside?" Eredin asked me. "Certainly," I said. "I'd like that." We walked together to the stairs, and then, with him putting one hand on the bannister and the other over my shoulders, we got down the stairs and out into the lobby. I could side, and for a minute I thought we were in trouble again, but their backs were to the glass doors. Then we got out through those, and stood at the head of the steps. Tully was across the street. He was standing on the sidewalk, and he was saying something to 'the people. They were ducking their heads away from him. Tully saw Eredin and me. He pointed over at us. "Hey, critter!" That made them raise their heads. They all turned, and when they saw Eredin leaning against me, they sighed like an extra wave. Sherman and Koning were in the middle of them, pale. They could all see what it meant, the Klarr up there on the steps with me, stinking and sick, but out. Only Tully didn't see what it meant to him. He thought he still had something going for him. He laughed. "Hey, critter! I b'lieve you're even scrawnier than me! What's the matter -- ain't we been feedin' you right?" He looked around for his effect. "Who is that man?". Eredin muttered, peering, groping like any sensible person will when he's weak and is in a world he doesn't understand; like somebody senile. "What's he saying?" Klarr is a language that made my answer come out: "He is the savior of their tribe." # #XTah!" Tully was crying out. I "Yah, ya bunch a needlepushing arm-wipers -- " "Ah, God!" Sherman groaned and turned and rammed badk through the crowd toward Tully. Then they were all as if they were being yanked on strings. They clustered suddenly around the squirrelcheeked man in the green sunshade. I could see Koning's face. The veins were standing out; his mouth was wide open, and what was coming out of him and all of them was what you might hear if all the lovers in the world were inside one big megaphone. The people at the back of the crowd tried to push in. The whole mass of them fell against a tall hedge. Eredin looked up at me, squinting, his eyes watering; there had to be a lot of things he couldn't know the reasons for. "They ' -- they kept taking our blood," he complained. "I know,' I said. I patted him on IF  Short Story Today was his birthday... and he dared not open his birthday gift! I t was party time. Or rather it would be party time soon. The event was scheduled for the following day, at six in the evening, and Ogilvy Carr, the guest of honor, was nervously biting his fingernails in anticipation of the party game which would have a most profound effect on the outcome of the affair -- an affair which celebrated his #th birthday, as it happened. Carr chewed his fingernails indeed. He pondered, and with each additional bit of pondering a little more calcium would leave his fingertips and find itself lolling in the warm recesses of Carr's mouth. "You're chewing your fingernails again, love," his wife said. Carr looked down at his hand. "Or somebody's fingernails," he said. "I hardly know who I am -- or who I'll be -- any more. I suppose I can thank medical science for that." "And the government, of course." Helen made the remark with a somewhat tired smile adorning her face. "Of course," he answered. "I suppose it is kind of interesting, when you think of it, how many people we're made up of," she said. "Heaven knows, my great aunt Nellie could be the donor of that new bone in my hip, or Uncle Herbie, bless his lovely soul, could some day replace my heart or my lungs or my left foot. That left foot will have to be replaced one of these days, you know... Dr. French said he's willing to bet that in another fourteen or fifteen years it's going to be cancerous." Carr wasn't particularly happy. "And in fourteen or fifteen years... it could be my foot that replaces yours, you know." "I hardly think so, Ogie. More likely someone like Uncle Herbie will have the honor. You do have very large feet, you know. I'm a ladies' seven, of course, but you're a fat man's twelve. Our feet would hardly match." She thought a moment and giggled. "Of course, I could take both your feet and look like a duck. I could even go skiing, barefoot -- and without skis." "It's hardly funny, my dear," Carr said softly. "You're quite right," his wife agreed, this time speaking in a more serious tone of voice. "Ogie, love -- Ogie, I'm so worried about the party." L ots of people worried about the party. Practically anyone in his or her #'s, as well as the kinfolk of these most senior citizens, worried about the party. For on a person's #th birthday, the lucky fellow or woman would be the guests of -- and participants in -- the lottery. It was a lottery which decided not whether a man would win a soccer or baseball pool, or which women would be lucky enough to win a washing machine in a supermarket drawing, but which men would live and which men would die; which women would live, and which would go on to their heavenly reward. It was, needless to say, a lottery of great importance for the people involved in it. And eventually practically anyone of any signficant economic status would become involved in it, since the upper middle-class and the well-to-do invariably managed to reach their #th birthdays. How? Well, the health of the nation and of the technologized world was booming. It took money to live to be a thousand, but then lots of people had money in this era of unprecedented prosperity. Most of them chose to spend a large share of their money on keeping their feet -- not to mention the rest of their bodies -- out of the grave. Medical science could work wonders these days. If a man's heart started to give out, all he had to do was undergo special drug and nutritive treatment. If that didn't show results quickly, he would" be given a reconditioned heart from the organ banks. Or if there was a momentary shortage of reconditioned hearts to prevent this rehabilitative surgery, he could settle for an artificial heart, which worked just as well or better, although it necessitated annoying yearly battery replacements and interfered with reception on many transistor radios. If an arm or a leg became mangled in an aircar accident, or if a stomach decided to come down with a stubborn cancer virus, all that was needed was a trip to the hospital. If drugs couldn't do the job, the organ banks almost invariably could. There was only one significant problem brought on by semi-universal longevity, and that was overpopulation. Birth control had helped to alleviate the difficulty somewhat, but the fact remained that if far more people were being born than were dying, Mother Earth would eventually have to give up trying to support them, since there would be no other alternative. The interplanetary colonies would continue to absorb some of the excess populatipn, of course, but they were still relatively new, and their growth was limited by many logistical and economic factors. So one year someone came up with the idea of the lottery. I t was a simple idea, of course. For that matter, it wasn't even a terribly new idea. Prophets in the fiction and alarmist propaganda fields had been predicting similar lotteries for several centuries. In any case, the lottery was put into effect. It naturally upset a great many people. But necessity was necessity, and the world's leaders -- who were exempted from the lottery, by the way -- accepted the inevitable and told their subjects that they would have to do likewise. The plan worked quite simply. Whenever a person reached the age of #, as verified by a check of government birth records, the lottery officials of his region would treat him to a birthday party. The primary game at the party was not Blind Man's Bluff or Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but the lottery. And the lottery was a life-or-death game. It did help to make the party more interesting than the average party, though. After the senior citizen and his clan had enjoyed a feast of gargantuan proportions and had lightened their hearts and heads with synthetic champagne (far cheaper than the real stuff; government economy was always an important political issue, after all), the lottery officials would escort the guest of honor into a soundproofed, concrete room at the end of the long, concrete corridor. There one of the officials would unlock a large bin filled with Pingpong balls. One of the balls was coated With a substance which would cause it to glow when placed under an ultraviolet light source. The senior citizen would be told to pick one of the balls from the bin; if he happened to be lucky enough to get the one which glowed, he would be escorted back into the banquet hall, and everyone would drink even more synthetic champagne, on the house, and jubilation would reign as the man blew out the candles on his cake and rejoiced in 'his good fortune and in the most lovely and lasting birthday gift of all... immortality. Or at least as much immortality as medical science and the military-industrial power structure could promise him. On the other hand, if the guest of honor failed to pick the winning Ping-pong ball, he would immediately be shot. A high-powered rifle was held by a hidden sharpshooter who kept it aimed at the back of the lottery participant's head as he drew the ball from the bin. At a sign from one of the officials, the senior citizen would be sent into God's kingdom without so much as a last cigarette. In such cases one of the officials, a psychiatrist specially trained to calm screaming relatives, would go back into the banquet hall to console the next of kin and to extinguish the candles on the deceased guest's cake before the melting wax spoiled too much of the frosting. #O g ie" V"Yes, darling?" "Ogie, honey, I'm very worried IF about the party. What ir you don't win the lottery?" "I think the answer to that question is fairly obvious, Helen. And I ning." "Kitty Murphy's thirty-second cousin's best friend's brother won the lottery, Ogie. People do win it, after all." of other people who don't?" Carr's expression was glum. It reflected his disposition perfectly. "You'd better win the lottery, that's all I've got to say." "What do you mean, I'd better win the lottery?" "If they kill you, Ogie, I'll kill myself. I want to be with you." "There's no heaven, Helen." "For me there is. And for you, because you're mine. I've known 'there was a heaven since 'way back in Sunday school." "I hope there is, dear. I'll admit I don't look forward to not meeting up with you somewhere along the line. Although I'll be damned if I want to spend eternity playing a bloody harp." "Ogie, you're going to die!" She blurted the words suddenly. "But I'm going Jo die with you." "You can't let yourself die, Helen. You've got too many years of happiness and excitement ahead of you. You're only # years old." "Our first batch of kids are grown up, Ogie, and we never got around to having more. I would have liked to have more, Ogie. But I guess it's too late now." "You could remarry," he said, putting a slightly trembling hand on her shoulder. "Do you want me to remarry?" she asked. "No." "There you are. And I don't want to remarry, either. Even if you did have that other wife, I know you loved me best, and I don't ever want anyone else, Ogie." "Don't say 'loved', Helen. I don't like to hear you speaking in the past tense already. You know I'll love you right up to the end." "And I'll love you, too, Ogie. Only -- " "Yes, dear?" "Ogie, if there are girl angels up there, don't go hanging around with them. Wait till I'm up there with you, okay?" T he official had just unlocked the bin. He stuck his arm down into the Ping-pong balls, up to his shoulder, and stirred them around quite thoroughly. "What are the odds today?" Carr asked, trying to sound light-hearted about the whole thing. "# to one. Not very good." "No. But then, I guess they never are, are they?" "I guess not." Carr stepped in front of the bin, standing in the spot indicated by the head official. "You're taking it pretty calmly," the official said. "More calmly than most." "I'm a fatalist," said Carr. "I consider the game fatal. I didn't come here with any hopes or illusions, anyway." "Well, you're an odd one, then." The official scratched his groin. "Hardly anyone ever comes here really believing that he's going to die. I don't think Vm going to, if I reach a thousand. Dying doesn't seem very real these days. Most people hardly ever see it happen, and when you're like me and you see it happening all the time, it becomes pretty mechanical. Maybe because everyone goes the same way." "I guess so." "The people back at the party are going to wonder what's happening," the official said. "I guess you'd better go ahead and draw. I don't like to keep the widows waiting. It's harder on them when things drag on." "Sure." The officials all stepped back, and Ogilvy Carr reached into the bin. "You got it?" the head official asked. "Yes." Carr sighed. "Come on. The hell with it -- go ahead and shoot." "Take it easy, pal," the official said. "We've got to follow the rules, even if you're in a hurry because St. Peter has offered you his job as head doorman at the Pearly Gates. Toss the ball over here." "Yeah," said another of the officials. "let's get the ball rolling." No one thought it was very funny. Carr tossed the ball to the head official. The head official handed it to one of his assistants, who placed it under the ultraviolet lamp. Ogilvy Carr stood quietly, waiting for the inevitable. He listened carefully, wondering if he'd be able to hear the marksman's rifle hammer dick before the bullet reached his brain. "It's glowing," the junior official mumbled in astonishment. And like the sun rising on a new day, the ball was indeed glowing. C#T thought that bit about one of A them glowing was all a publicity gimmick," one of the other officials said wonderingly. "Luke, I thought they just let someone go everyone's hopes up." "Well, it's glowing," said the head official. He went over to Carr and clapped him on the shoulder. "It's glowing, sir. It's glowing." He stepped back a moment and suddenly began staring at Carr in awe. "My Lord," he exclaimed quietly, "you're -- you're an Immortal." And thus did Ogilvy Carr go back into the banquet hall, accompanied by the lottery officials and much thunderous applause, to blow out the candles of his birthday cake and to celebrate his status as an Immortal. "Thank God, Ogie," his wife whispered after she kissed him wetly during their tight embrace. "We're together, Ogie," she whispered again, as the photographers' flashguns popped all around them and she and her husband were clasped and kissed by well-wishers. "Yes, Helen dearest, we're together," he whispered back. And they would be, at least for another seven hundred and fortyIF IF  Novelette The Starpafhers were always foo few and usually too late... but without them the galaxy was dead! I ioned depths, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. My body automatically began the discipline that let every nerve, muscle and fiber approach controlled unconsciousness. Without moving, I glanced at Cadet DeLuso. The boy was quiet, but a fine mist covered his cheek. Natural enough, under the circumstances. First op-jump ought to bring out the sweat in a man, if he has any sense at all. The blinking amber said #, #I -- # seconds. I closed my eyes and silently wished Cadet Matt DeLuso luck. That's the least you can do for these kids -- wish them a little luck... No, I caught myself -- that's not all, Waldermann. There's one thing more. You can stop thinking of your Cadets as kids. They're not kids at all, they're men. And damn fine ones, too. If they weren't, they wouldn't make it this far -- they wouldn't be starpath candidates. So, seconds before jumpoff, I gave DeLuso manhood -- the least I could do, and maybe the most. DeLuso himself would have to take it from there. began pealing the seconds from one to ten -- in the very special note that triggers a deeply keyed response in every Starpather's brain. My eyes closed, and I began to trance out. A deep hum rolled through my body, rising from thunder to a siren shriek. Through some far, dimly wakeful sense, I heard a faint cry from DeLuso. Then I exploded... T here's always that tiny jolt, like of ivory clamping together at once. Ask any Starpather about that jolt. He'll tell you it's the sweetest sound in the world. You see, it isn't a stack of cubes at all, friend -- it's you. And if you can feel that jolt it means your body is back in one piece again, and you've made it through Starpath. The first thing I did was look at DeLuso -- fast. He was there, his eyes flickering open, breath steady. I pushed myself up, and the cushions petaled wide to let me through. DeLuso turned then and looked at me. "Congratulations," I said dryly. "For some reason, Cadet, it appears you've made it through Starpath." ' DeLuso was a light shade of classroom chalk, but he managed a grin. "Thank you, sir. It's -- a lot different than I expected." I shot his sick grin right back at! him. "Oh? Really, Cadet? Well, it's also a lot different than I expected , Misterr DeLuso stared. I jerked coveralls and slipons from the locker and glared at him. "You made a noise, Cadet. Did you know that? No, you didn't hear it, but I did. You made a noise during transmit! Your relaxation cycle was imperfect. Something tensed, probably a muscle in the lower throat, and a little breath of air you weren't supposed to have in the first place moved over that muscle causing vibration, motion, sound. Our, as we call it in Starpath, Cadet -- good old Instant Death. Evidently you stopped in time. You are here -- and that pretty well proves it, doesn't it? Now, next question: How many times do you think you can get away with a damn fool stunt like that?" I glanced at the tiny station chronometer set in the curved wall of the shell. "You have twenty-one minutes, forty-two seconds, standard time, to work out that little problem. I suggest you have it solved on schedule, or you won't have to worry about getting chewed out at the next station. Any questions?" Apprehension had started across his face, but it faded quickly. "No, sir," he said smartly. "No questions, sir." Good man. I tossed him coveralls and slipons. "Get dressed, Cadet. Let's see what's going on outside." We left the dome and stepped out pn the plastic circle under the dim moon of Arcturus Seven, better known to the colonists there as GellIF hell. We were # light-years from Earth as the crow flies -- microseconds by Starpath. The Frostrees beyond the settlement clearing were halfway through their screaming lunch, tearing each other apart and flinging bloody foilage to the pink sky. The ragged, scab-covered colonists stood just beyond the dome's field, pelting us with filth. Several of them dropped dead and began to decompose as we watched. Cadet Matt DeLuso didn't say a thing. I was beginning to think he migjht actually make Starpath. "Okay," I told him, "you've caught the scenery. Go get the cargo -- we only have # more minutes here." DeLuso retreated to the dome and lugged out the #x# flat aluminoid carton. I opened it near the edge of the field, checked it quickly, released the inner seal and closed it up again. They saw what we had, and for a brief minute they even forgot about throwing stuff at us. A low moan swept over the crowd. I looked them over. One guy was a little taller than the rest. He was skin and bones like everyone else, but a trifle less scabby. "You," I pointed, "would you come to the edge of the field, please?" He' dragged himself over on shaky legs and stopped a yard away. He stared at men through rheumy eyes, then spat at my face. The spittle hit the field and rolled away. "You're a little late , Starpather," he croaked. His mouth curled up in hate, and I thought for a second he might spit again. "I'm sorry. We do what we can. How many have you lost?" He laughed, and that just about ended the conversation right there. "You want this morning's count, or up to the last three minutes? We started with # people here, mister. We got about # left." "I'm sorry about that, too," I told him. I picked up the case and tossed it through the field. It landed in the soft turf on the other side. Y ou always throw cargo through the field. You never roll it, or push it or shove it. The field's about an inch thick, and if you happen to shove something a little too easy, or a pebble gets in the way -- or anything -- your cargo just stays there till Hell freezes over. Things that get caught in that inch don't move. Once you lose momentum you can't push it through, and certainly no one on the other side can pull it. Not unless you turn off the field. And brother, that is just what you don't do -- ever. The colonists were already into the carton and passing out the little blue pills, but the tall man in front of me hadn't moved. "Think that stuff'll work?" he asked doubtfully. I nodded. "It should. They worked on the sample culture you furnished. No reason it shouldn't do the job." "Uh-huh. But you don't really know, do you?" he said dully. I could tell the poor guy was dead on his feet. In his condition he shouldn't have even been standing up. He made no move to get his share of the pills. I had an idea he just really didn't care any more. "No," I said quietly, "I don't know for sure. I hope they do. I'd like to make you understand that we want to save as many people as possible on Gellhell." "I'll bet you do," he said darkly. "I'll bet you stay awake nights thinking about Gellhell. I'll bet you can hardly take a drink of good Earth whiskey or pull a Fungirl into the sack you're so... worried... about... " I turned away from him. His eyes were clouding up, and he was shaking all over. "DeLuso! Over here!" He came up quickly. "We have about # minutes, Cadet. Get in there and run through Operational prep. I'll be with you in three and a half minutes." DeLuso stared. "Operational? Sir, you want me to activate?" I watched him a moment. Right now he could use a bit of fatherly encouragement, a little friendly service cajolery. To hell with that. He also needed to learn to follow orders without a moment's hesitation. "Cadet, you received an order." I let the hard freeze travel from my eyes to his. He swallowed hard. But again control returned quickly. He snapped off a perfect salute and disappeared jnto the dome. I turned back to my scarecrow colonist. He was exactly where I had left him, and he made no motion toward the antiplague drugs. "About your Frostrees," I said, "we can't help you destroy them -- and we don't advise you to try, either. The lab boys discovered they're a part of your ecological setup, and you can't spare them." " the ecological setup, Mister!" The rage was back in his sunken eyes. "These things are killing our crops as fast as we can grow 'em. We don't hardly have the strength to burn 'em back!" I nodded. "There's something in the carton for that. Tiger wheat. It worked pretty well on Ogirra. They had a problem very similar to yours." His temper dropped a' few degrees, but his eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What you figure something called Tiger wheat'll do to people, mister? Or did you think of that?" "Shouldn't do anything," I told him. "Unless you're part plant. It should poison the Frostrees or anything else that tries to grow near it. Won't bother people. Just stay away from it until after it loses its strength at harvest time. It's all in the microbook in the seed pack." He glared at me and shook his fists tight against his sides. "We don't want any part of the stuff," he hissed. "We'll make out ourselves somehow. Without Starpath handouts!" The gong sounded softly behind us. I said, "You might change your mind when you get back on your feet. I hope so. Good-by -- and the best of luck." He tried to mouth a curse, then dropped on his thin knees to the ground. I jumped through the hatch and let the seal sigh behind me. IF DeLuso's eyes were welded to the I gave him a curt, military-type nod, then added: "Watch the throat muscles; I might see you next stop... II D eLuso gasped as we stepped out of the dome. It was night, and Vara Vara's purple moon filled half the sky, spotting the landscape with soft, violet shadows. A slight breeze carried the odors of exotic blossoms and dusty pollen. DeLuso said something, softly, but I didn't catch his words. Still, I understood. Vara Vara is that kind of world. "Makes you feel kind of guilty," he said absently. "I mean, sir -- after Gellhell -- the things they have to go through just to stay alive." I grinned in the darkness. "Uhhuh. Seems that way, doesn't it? You know anything about Vara Vara, son?" He turned, and I picked up his face in the violet shadows. "It's Paradise, DeLuso. At least, if there's a  paradise anywhere i n this Universe, Vara Vara comes old, for a colony. Discovered nearly # years before Starpath. Longsleep colonists -- some of the few on record that ever landed anywhere in those days. They took one look at Vara Vara, and decided this was it. So they mutated -- and made Vara Vara theirs." I could feel the boy's surprise. Somewhere a night bird broke into But -- r " I nodded. "Mutation equipment was standard on every colony ship those days just in case. Then as now, it's pretty hard to turn back. This was one of those cases. They thought it was worthwhile, and I can't say that I blame them. As to why they made the change, the answer is down there." I walked to the edge of the field and pointed into purple darkness. "Below, Cadet. We're in the top of a planet-wide forest, three miles high. Up here is where the colonists live. This is the paradise part of Vara Vara. Two miles down is the hell." I walked back to the dome and turned up outside volume as high as it would go, aiming the directional pickups straight down. DeLuso hadn't moved. "Now," I said. "Listen." There was really very little to hear at this distance, but it was enough to stand a man's hair on end. Tt wasn't so much what you could hear... , I looked at the cadet. He was a purple statue with a marble-white face. I turned the volume back to low. "Don't ask what's making those noises," I said. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Anyway, the Vara Varans don't mind. Needless to say, they don't wander around down there." I stopped, and faced DeLuso. His eyes were turned to the leafy darkness. I knew what he was doing; he was trying to pinpoint the soft, velvety hum that had suddenly filled the night. I smiled to myself, remembering the night that almost alien sound had first reached my own ears. "There," I said, "Look." I raised a hand toward the dim purple moon. A bright ball of cold fire was pulsing toward us through black leaves. The soft hum turned to a definite, whirring beat. Then the fluttering of wings filled the night. A blur of violet flowed across the surface of the field, then settled lightly on a loop of twisted vine. DeLuso's eyes widened. "Hello, Lyrerae," I said. "Hell ooooooooooooo, Keith Waldermann, my Starpather!" Her voice was a high, golden song. She touched the coldlight bug nestling on her shoulder, and it purred into dimness. A ll of the women of Vara Vara are beautiful, each in their own way. The expression of beauty is a part of the Vara Vara way of living. None of the others -- to me -- can touch the beauty of Lyrerae. She smiled, glanced at me warmly, then turned her eyes search ingly on DeLuso. "And this one, Keith? I have not seen him with you before?" Lyrerae's voice made her simple statement sound like a declaration of love. "Lyrerae. This is Cadet Matt DeLuso. This is his first trip, but we may be able to make a Starpather out of him." "I'm -- pleased to meet you," Matt mumbled. Lyrerae laughed. "He's pretty, but not as pretty as you, Keith." "Of course not," I said seriously, "he's just a cadet. Maybe when he's an old Starpather, he'll be as pretty as I am'. And what can we do for you, Lyrerae? Any problems?" A light breeze ruffled the soft surface of her wings, anl she made quick adjustments of balance. "There are no problems on Vara Vara, Keith. We left our problems behind many years ago. But," she said brightly, "I am going to find a problem for you, Keith. I promise. I think you will stop coming if I cannot find a problem. Yes?" "No," I grinned, "I won't stop coming, Lyrerae." "I know," she laughed. "I know! And you, Matt DeLuso? You will come back, too?" "I'd like that," said Matt. "Very much." Lyerae winked at him and stretched high on her long legs, spreading slim arms and delicate wings. The light down that covered her body fluttered briefly, then flattened slowly into place. It was something spelled in capital letters. "I said, "Be nice to the customers, Cadet. Smile or something." DeLuso wasn't listening. His gaze was lost in golden eyes, and Lyrerae had made another conquest. Then she left us with a high, singsong laugh and rose out of sight beyond violet shadows. I touched DeLuso's arm. "Okay, IF son, come on. We've got calls to make." He blinked hard and brought his eyes back from the purple moon. "Sorry, sir, I -- " I turned him around and grinned. "Don't be, Cadet. You get used to a lot of things on Starpath. You never get used to Vara Vara. Now, let's get hopping." W e had time for two more. Gresticbor was a dawn world full of scaly beasties, but nothing the well established colony there couldn't handle. Then Styrxx, a mining planet dug in half a mile under a white sun we'd never see. They had a nice revolution brewing there, and both sides wanted arms from Starpath to, as they put it, "guarantee law and order." Arms, of course, they didn't get. Starpath figures talk is cheaper than arms and certainly a lot less lethal in the long run. So talk I gave them. Styrxx is very heavy on rare earths, and they're almost ready to afford the luxury of a two-way Starpath terminal. I let them know that the paperwork on two-ways for a world without a stable government had a way of getting shuffled around a bit. They got the general idea, but I Was glad we had a nice, firm field around us. Mining isn't entirely automated out there yet, and some of those guys looked ready and able to take a couple of Starpaithers apart. Field or no field. We'd hit four worlds in a little under # hours. Travel time: Zero Plus. Light-years: say, five hundred, five forty. Then suddenly the schedule was broken for us, and we were shuttled off the circuit and into stasis at Primera. I caught DeLuso's puzzlement as we stepped out into the busy station at Primera Starpath Control. I let it go for the moment. There was nothing I could really tell him -- not yet. Anyway, I didn't feel much like talking. Breaking schedule is part of the game, but it always pulls that permanent knot in your stomach a little tighter. You know that each time you make a schedule, chances are good that other stomachs are having fits so your particular emergency can be smoothed over. It isn't easy. And we never get used to it, in spite of what we tell ourselves: that someone else needs shuttle time more than we do. That they'll be waiting on the sidelines for you to finish up next time around. It doesn't work that way. Those are your worlds out there, and some of them are in big trouble. Some of them might not make it if you miss your next call. Some of them are so critical you should try to get scheduled for a call every month or so. But you know it might be a year -- or two years -- and you wonder what's happening out there. But there just isn't enough power to keep all the circuits open. There just aren't enough men who can ride the Starpaths. Not yet. Ill B y the book, Primera goes down as a Class-A world. By definition, that means it's old enough and rich enough to have an industrial export-import situation, a large population and a stable political setup. Most important, it means Primera qualifies as a Starpath Crossroads, a world where the power plants can handle the mainlines and shuttles for a Starpath sector -- one of those unfathomable slices of the galactic pie. There are more than enough diversions on Primera to keep a man from boredom, if you happen to be in the state off mind that allows you to enjoy them. It was, I reflected wryly, about half true what they said about members of the Corps. An off-duty Starpather is no damn good to anyone. It's a pretty fair appraisal. The men who qualify for Starpath duty are not men who easily shrug off the burden of the worlds that depend on them. It isn't a responsibility you cast aside one day and pick up the next. There's really no such thing as a Starpather on leave. I guess I'm a little dense. We'd been on Primera two days before I figured out what was wrong with DeLuso. The standards I easily and natuarlly applied to myself could mean little to him. I had an idea he'd make a good Starpather in time. Experience would take care of that. But for now, he was a fresh, raw cadet who had been Earthbound all his life until # hours ago. Since then he had crossed #-odd lightyears of space and walked on five strange worlds. Not a hell of a long Starpath career -- but not bad for two days out of Earth I IF As yet, I realized, Matt DeLuso was not overly interested in tradition. He was, normally enough, interested in what any healthy character of # or #I years should be interested in. To put it mildly, he was straining at the bit to get at the sights of Primera -- and doing his best to keep his impatience from an obviously ancient superior officer! As we crossed the warm, sundrenched malf to the Grand Primera's dining area, DeLuso kept his jaw denched and eyes straight ahead, stonily ignoring the open admiration of the two dark-eyed beauties tanning themselves at poolside. Seated at our table, he gave the oversized menu the same degree of concentration I'd expect from an astrogator pouring over his charts. Even when a trio of silvermasked Fungirls brushed by, tall, statuesque creatures who moved with unworldly grace, DeLuso merely clutched his menu tighter. So I know when I'm beaten. "DeLuso!" The menu dropped, and my cadet jerked into a full sitting brace. "Sir!" "All right. Take it easy," I said. "We might as well get it over with, Cadet. It's either you or me, and I figure you win the deal hands down." DeLuso managed to maintain innocent bewilderment. I let out a deep breath. "Come off it, Mister. You've got dancing girls and nightclubs written on your eyeballs. Order something for me and hang on a little longer. I'ye get a couple of calls to make." DeLuso brightened slightly. But I've been around long enough to catdh those not so subtle hints of -- what? Disbelief? Doubt? I stood up, leaned my hands on the table, and stared down at him with my best parade ground scowl. "Son, you really think I'm too palsied to make it to the phone by myself -- or find a number when I get there?" DeLuco paled. "Oh, no, sir!" "Fine. In that case, Cadet -- " "Keith, all your numbers are doddering grandmothers by now. I know -- you stole about half of them from my book!" I jerked around to face the deep voice behind me and looked up into a leather face slit by a broad smile. "Walt! Walt, for the -- !" We were pumping hands and slapping backs, and DeLuso was standing at stiff attention across the table. "They told me at Command you were out on shuttle. I dropped by as soon as we were scheduled off." The tall man winced. "I know. Took my adjutant half a day to get the office girls back in harness. I had an idea Keith Waldermann was in town." I grinned. Good old Walt. "Sir," I said gravely, "you have just saved an old Starpather's creaking image. Oh, Sector Commander Martin, meeb Cadet Matt DeLuso." Martin grabbed Matt's hand, sizing up the cadet in that rapid and remarkably accurate manner that amazed everyone who had ever worked with him. It was the kind of ability you'd expect in a Starpath Commander -- but it was certainly no less remarkable for that. "Glad to have you aboard," said Walt. "Been with us very long, Cadet?" "Two days, sir," Matt said. "I'm kind of a newcomer, sir." "What he didn't mention," I told Walt, "is that he made his first and fifth jump during that period. Which is a little rough, Cadet," I grinned. "Didn't tell you that before. Afraid it might go to your head." Matt reddened suddenly, and Walt smiled. At the same time, the sector commander's brow raised, and he exchanged a quick glance with me, obviously impressed. "It looks as if you may have a Starpather on your hands, Major," he said evenly. Walt gave DeLuso another searching look as he spoke, and the tone of his voice changed slightly. Matt didn't catch it, certainly. But I'd known Walt Martin a long time. He said, "I think a man's fifth jump calls for a drink from his sector commander. I, ah, will also include a lunch on the deal, since the chits will find their way to my office eventually, anyway. Might as well make sure they're honest. And Cadet." He turned to DeLuso. "If you think an even older Starpather might be able to come up with a few decent numbers, I suggest you get yourself fitted with some dress greens this afternoon. Now if we can be seated, gentlemen, I think we might be able to make a small but significant dent in the Starpath budget..." IF glory boys, the danger corps, the top rung on the ladder. Sometimes they respect us, because they know what kind of a job we're doing. But nobody loves us. I guess that's really asking a little too much. Phimera City is big -- class conscious, wealthy, sophisticated. It's a city full of old money, the kind that's hard to shake up and difficult to impress. There is one thing, though, that's guaranteed to do the job: three Starpathers in full dress uniform, plus a trio of the best-fooking girls in town. We took the full tour. Matt DeLuso's eyes seemed to grow wider at every stop. We made several of the most popular spots in town and ended up at a place accurately described at the best steak house in the known universe. And everywhere, of course, we were the center of attention. If you're a Starpather, you're supposed to get used to that. Me, I never do. I don't think many of us do. You see, it's not quite the same as being a planet-wide, stereo star, or a high, government official. It's not like that at all. A better analogy would be the attitude most people have toward their police force: necessary, maybe, but not overly welcome -- until you need them. Take the analogy a bit further, and you have the general feeling toward Starpathers. We're the highest paid, most privileged cops in history. We go places no one else is allowed to go, see things not lifetimes. We patrol the known segments of the galaxy -- that small arm of stars lost on the edge of the Milky Way's rim. It's dangerous, sure. Not too many of the people who complain about our so-called status would 'trade places with us for a day, But who thinks of that part of the job when they see a cop out spending the taxpayers' money? M att DeLuso seemed to find a a great deal to consider on the black surface of his morning coffee.  had an idea his silence wasn't entirely due to the effects of wine, women and song. I thought -- and I was right -- that he had managed to glimpse a few of the negative aspects of Starpath service. "You'd have to be pretty dense not to see it, wouldn't you, sir?" I knew what he meant, but I asked, anyway. "You've discovered that we're liked -- but not well liked. Right, Cadet?" DeLuso nodded. "We heard about it in school. You know the way things filter down, sir. But that was just talk. When you see it out here -- the way they look at you..." I smiled to myself and poured a fresh round of coffee. "There's something else, too," I told him. "Another factor. You don't get so much resentment when you are where people have everything -- and that's the situation back home. Old Mother Earth is riding high -- has been for a long, long time. Why fed bad about Starpath? No, Cadet, the formula works this way: a Starpather is loved in direct proportion to the current amount of comfort available on Homeworld 'X. Primera tolerates us; Gellhell hates us. You've seen both worlds, and it's not too difficult to follow their reasoning. Look at it this way. At about # times light speed which is the best we can manage so far, a Longsleeper still takes # years to cover the distance out to Deneb. Subjectively the colonists haven't missed a thing. They haven't aged; that # years was spent in blissful sleep. "Deneb wasn't bad -- they found two good worlds there -- but they're still a long way from home. It'll be several generations before they can begin to tame their worlds to the point where minimum technology begins. But they do have one thing. They have us. Within a few weeks they have their Starpath receiving station open. We get the signal and drop in to say hello. One more link in the chain is complete. "Naturally, these people are pretty happy to see us at first. We just left home, seconds ago. We have all the latest news for the past # years. So we say hello. Then "Then," DeLuso finished for me, "we seal up the works and say good-by. Yes sir. I get the idea." "So do they, very quickly. The thrill of pioneering wears off as soon as the supplies run out. Soon they need things. Maybe they need things badly, like Gellhell. We do what we can, but we can't do everything. Most of the time we stand behind our force field and give friendly advice. But we don't take passengers, and we don't bring in supplies. We don't, because it's economically impossible. It costs a small fortune to break up the mass of two men and assemble them at the other end of Starpath. The load of necessities for just one worid would bankrupt the whole spiral arm! "The colonists know this," I said, "but it isn't much comfort when you need help in the worst way. We have the stuff -- but we can't give it to them. And it looks as if we're still a long way from pushing heavy cargo through Starpath. That leaves us in kind of a touchy position. Until a world has time to develop its own power -- like Primera -- we can't even set up a Starpath transmitting station. We just run through on the circuit and drop off # or # pounds of whatever will do the most good at the time." "Sir," asked DeLuso, "did you ever read about the early #thand #th-century railroads on Barth? They laid track across the country, but they couldn't afford to stop at every station along the line. Only the economically important areas had anything like real two-way travel. Starpath is about in the same position now." I shook my head. "Worse, Cadet. Remember, those trains could stop and let off cargo and people, or take something out. We can't. Even the richest worlds still have to send anything out the hard way -- through every long mile of space. Starpath is a link between the IF worlds. A valuable link, certainly. But for now that's all it is. We've been in space a little over # years, but we haven't always had the advantage of even # times light speed. Space travel has been a slow, hard pull. And Starpath's even younger -- less than a hundred years. We're just getting our feet wet, Cadet! We have a long way to go." IV T here were two more days. Matt DeLuso spent them with the girl he had met on our big night out. I spent mine alone, and didn't regret it at all. They were quiet, good days, with the balmy sun of Primera following me over bright beaches and through shaded parks. For the first time since I can remember, I managed to put Starpath in a small compartment somewhere and let the old nerves unwind. It was still there, of course. It never goes away. But there was something else there, too. It was almost as if some part of me had an idea it might be a good thing to store up visions of green grass and wet mornings and red sunsets over gray mountains. I remember every minute of those # hours, and I hang onto them. They sav it takes a good three to five years to grow a new pair of eyes, even if the first ones work out. So I need pictures of those two good days I was half awake on pink sand when the shadow of the Starpath floater dropped over me and shut out the sun. A port opened before the gear touched sand, and I took one quick look at the young pilot's face. Just one. Then I grabbed my gear and sprinted the few yards to the ship and pulled myself in. The boy wouldn't look at me; his face was a sick ash-gray, and his eyes were somewhere else. I laid a hand on his shoulder and turned him around. "Okay, son, take it easy. Now. Is this what I think it is?" He nodded dumbly, trying hard to work his mouth over the words. "Sir... it's Priority Red." I didn't say anything. Like the boy, I knew there was nothing to say. I didn't believe it any more than he did. You just don't believe there'll ever be a Priority Red... T he ship screamed down and jerked against the roof of Starpath Control. It only took me half a minute to reach the staging room, but I knew it was true long 'before then. I could feel it -- the unbelievable surge of power pouring into Control from all over the planet. There'd be no private or industrial power left on Primera now. It was all channeling into this one building, down into the giant generators beneath Control and out to some flyspeck world that had bought itself the big package of trouble. We were draining a planet to feed raw power to a distant star. The same thing would 'be happening on a dozen other Starpath Control worlds. Electric transport would halt; atomic plants would scream as hot power was torn from their vitals. If you needed power to live -- you'd die. Whatever problem you had, Priority Red was bigger. r "Keith! Over here!" I jerked around, vaulted a power truck hauling an ugly, snouted weapon and faced Walt Martin. He grasped my hand and signaled to a nearby captain. The captain nodded and sprinted away. "Pm glad you're here, Keith," Walt said softly. "We're going to need everyone who's had over fifteen minutes of Starpath experience!" "It's true. then. It finally happened." Walt nodded grimly. "It's true, and it's bad." He turned to the highvaulted chamber of the staging room. It was chaos, unless you knew what was going on there. Every bank of Starpath conveyors was in use. As men stepped from their missions on a hundred worlds, they were handed a combat suit and shuffled into line. Weapons, trucks hummed back and forth like blind beetles through the auxiliary tunnels. And everything, men and equipment, tunneled eventually toward one particular Starpath portal. "Where is it, Walt? Where did they hit?" The. sector commander's face was gray and drawn. He had aged ten years in half an hour. "I said it was bad, Keith. It's worfce than that. It's Corphyrion." I took a deep breath and held it. "Yeah. It would be. Damn , Walt! We'll never hold it! It's too far!" "We'll hold it," said Walt. "We'll hold it because we have to hold it." And he was right, of course. If we didn't hold Corphyrion, we'd lose more than Starpath. Starpath first, but then the whole spiral arm. The captain pulled up to us then and handed me a set of combats. Behind him sprinted Matt DeLuso, half in and half out of his fighting gear. "Major!" he said and started a salute in my direction. Then he saw Walt beside me and turned the gesture to him. "Commander Martin! Sir, I -- " I said, "Okay, hold it, Cadet. This is a Priority Red, son...I don'r have time to tell you what that means. Neither does the Commander. Get yourself to supply and draw a weapon. Pull one for me while you're at it. There won't be a briefing on this one. Matt -- just stick close and come out shooting." Matt stared. "Shooting? Sir, shooting at what?" I looked at him, then at Walt. Walt smiled grimly. "Cadet, we haven't the faintest idea. But I think we'll know what to shoot at when we see it." I didn't have the slightest doubt about that. W alt and I transmitted together, on the second wave. DeLuso and Captain Hamiel, Commander Martin's captain-aide, came right behind us. It was a pure, textbook hell. There were about forty men already crowded outside the dome, behind the bubble of our force field. There was no room to do anything. EveryIF one was on top of someone else. Beside me, a heavyweapons sergeant cursed under his breath as a combat foot came down on his gauntlet hand. He was trying to assemble a bulky disruptor that had of necessity been transmitted in four sections. Raw, unimaginable power was surging in from Starpath worlds to supplement and reinforce the dome's generators. The field's protective bubble was expanding to make room for our forces -- but not fast enough. The dome's air conditioning wasn't built to handle this kind of thing. On top of that, whatever was outside our field was letting us have it with some pretty awesome stuff. Energy washed over the field, turning it faintly red, and we were getting plenty of heat from that alone. A hand tapped my shoulder, and I faced Commander Martin. He motioned me to the far side of the dome where a harried group of technicians were laboring over a small, glowing screen. "Their weapons output makes it damn near impossible to pin down any positions," he growled. "But we think we have something" He pointed. "There. Those three blips keep turning uprin spite of the static. We have three disruptors assembled. I can't afford to wait for more. We can't take much more of this pounding, Major -- get this stuff in line and try to knock out those positions!" I pulled Captain Hamiel, along with me and sent Cadet DeLuso back to key in the cables from radar to our bank of disruptors. Sweat burned into my eyes under the heavy combat armor. I glanced up once and saw a deep circle of chenyred pouring across the side of our field. Suddenly the sweat under my helmet turned to ice. We were dealing with some smart cookies. They hadn't been able to penetrate out force field with their mass firepower -- so they were turning everything they had on one spot. That spot was absorbing a hell of a lot of energy -- and holding. For how long? I didn't want to think too much about that. DeLuso sprinted up and signaled me the cables were keyed. I turned. Two Starpathers were gingerly lowering the deadly disruptor tubes and extracting the shiny safety keys. "Ready, Major," said Hamiel. "I've set it up for one blast over each of the three targets. I think, sir, if we hit them while they're still concentrating fire on one area -- " I nodded quickly, cutting him off, and glanced once more at the deep, red scar spreading across our field. I wondered what the enemy -- whoever or whatever they were -- would 'be thinking right now. The more I considered that concentrated firepower stunt, the less I liked it. It was a good idea, certainly. Maybe I'd have done the same thing in their place. Still, maybe it was just too good an idea... I turned back to Hamiel. "Captain, change your settings. Concentrate two of your weapons on targets one and three. Lob die other one high and slow over target two. I want it to fire a good two seconds ahead of your other weapons." Hamid stared. I could see his eyes darting around to the side land behind me, probably hoping to find Walt looking over my shoulder. "Major," he said slowly, "we don't know much about their weapons, but we do know they have the capacity to knock off a slowfiring battery." "That, Captain, is my thinking, too. It's getting hotter than hell in here -- please carry out the order, Hamiel! Now!" He turned red under his helmet, his mouth opening with the beginning of another protest. I moved him aside quickly. "DeLuso!" The cadet nodded, moved to the weapons and made rapid adjustments. He raised his hands from the board, and I pressed the button of the first disruptor, sending the silver bolt in a high, slow arc they couldn't miss. They didn't. Before I'd counted off the two seconds, a white blast shook the dome, and I jammed home the other two buttons at once. Twin missiles thrummed through the field in a ground#uigging trajectory. A mile away, double cones of silent purple ligjit winked and died. I ran around the dome and glanced at the small screen. Two of the blips Were gone for good. A disruptor missile plays some pretty horrifying tricks on its target. Every atom in the area moves a meter to its right and changes place with its neighbor. Result: some pretty gory scenery. "Major." It was Hamiel. "Sir, I -- " "Forget it, Captain. We don't have time for a bloody court martial -- those characters aren't licked yet!" In answer, a flood of red splashed over the dome. I grinned anyway -- their concentration was a lot weaker than before. W e fed bolts into our three disruptors as fast as they could fire. Some of them got through -- and a lot of them didn't. We weren't fooled by the enemy's strength any more, but they had learned a lot about us, too. They were answering us from three new positions now. But they had spread their power thin. I could feel their concentrations weakening, and I could read the story in the viewer. Walt looked over my shoulder. I looked back, and he smiled grimly. "Okay," he said, "let's take 'em, Major." It always seems to end up that way, doesn't it? You can soften up the enemy with Che most awesome of weapons. Then you have to go in yourself and dig 'em out. We went. And every Starpath soldier that leaped through that force field knew there was only one way back. He knew that field couldn't be turned off to let him in unless every enemy position was destroyed first. I did what every other soldier did. I tried not to think about it. There wasn't time to worry about getting back. We found that out soon enough. I lost half a dozen troopers before we made the small IF gully about # yards from the dome. I knew Walt's group had fared a little better. But not much. We gave them everything we had -- hand disruptor, V-grenades, small arms fire. We did a pretty fair job of it, too, because the second wave got through our covering fire with only half our casualties. I moved out of our gully down a small ridge and got my first sight of the enemy. A dark beak opened under black pinpoint eyes, and a stubby weapon came up fast in long arms. I kicked in the greentinted faceplate and kept going. A trooper in front of me turned with half a face and dropped under my feet. We stormed the first position and fried a good fifty of them. They died silently, great horny beaks straining for whatever poison they breathed back home. I turned, then, to take a quick count of my men. My stomach sank, and a bad taste welled up in my throat. There were three of them left: Matt DeLuso and two veteran Starpath troopers. I looked at Matt. He managed a tightgrin. He didn't look much like a raw cadet now. You couldn't come through that last hundred yards without earning Starpath wings. Martin stepped into our post and held out a weary hand. "Well, Keith, we got 'em. It was a high price for Round One. But we did it." I looked at him. "Sir?" Then I got it. A cold hand reached up and touched the hairs on the back of my neck. Of course -- the ship! Somewhere, there was a ship that had brought the aliens to Corphyrion. Walt nodded grimly. "I've ordered a couple of small flyers, but it'll take half a damn hour to get them through piece by piece and reassembled. Hell, Keith, this is no way to fight a war -- sneaking back and forth across the galaxy through a mousehole!" He cursed under his breath and ran a glove over his mud-streaked faceplate. "Come on, let's get these troopers back to the dome area -- fast!" We almost made it... S uddenly a soldier in the rear looked up and yelled loud enough to bum out every receiver in the area. And there it was -- a black, egg-shaped ship rising out of the hills not two miles away. We turned and sprinted for the dome area, but it was already too late. Red lights winked from the black ship, and troopers began to die. The disruptors behind our field opened up to cover us, but there was Little they could do. It was too late now to even think about lifting the field to let us in. No matter what happened on Corphyrion, we couldn't risk losing the dome. So that was that. If our disruptors couldn't stop that looming black egg, the enemy could scoot for home and come back with a thoucould get enough power on Corphrion to put down a small-sized riot. There were five of us -- Walt, DeLuso, myself and two troopers. We all hit the dirt at once and hung on. We had a pitiful amount of cover -- a small, dried up creek bed and a couple of leafless shrubs. All we could do was wait. And I didn't figure we had too much longer for that. The alien ship dropped lower, then setded atop a small hill overlooking the dome. I cursed aloud, and DeLuso turned with a questioning look. "They're landing, Matt," I said dryly, "because they're a particularly nasty bunch of characters. They're in no hurry to finish us off!" "They don't have to be," grunted Walt. "That ship is just big enough to neutralize our disruptors, long enough to ram a beam through that field. Look!" I glanced across the gully and squinted at the dome. A bright red spot was growing on one perimeter. It couldn't have been more than a foot wide, but it was a concentrated circle of awful power. Theoretically the dome's field would hold. But it had never been meant to stand that kind of attack. "Major!" I jerked up, following DeLuso 's arm. I frowned, seeing nothing. Then figures moved in the churned up debris before the dome, and three troopers suddenly plunged into the open, running for a grove of trees to our left. They made # or # yards, before the ship spotted them. I dutched Walt's shoulder as red lances leaped out and cut the legs from under the last trooper. As he dropped, he tossed a long sliver of silver to the man beside him. He and his companion made it to the trees as angry beams of light cut through every leaf and branch above them. Walt and I exchanged quick looks, then belly-crawled our way back along the ditch. DeLuso and the troopers followed. We met them halfway -- Captain Handel and a young Starpath technician. Hamiel grinned, snapped a quick salute at Martin. "I thought you might find some use for a couple of these, sir. We also borrowed a carton of fuses." I looked at Hamiel's feet, and I suddenly knew what the dying trooper had tossed to his buddy. There were three bound cannisters of disruptor missiles. Enough to send every alien on Corphyrion to his own particular heaven -- the hard way. I grinned and pounded Hamiel on the back as darts of crimson fire searched the air over our heads. "Captain, the apologies are on me! Walt, it'll work, if we can get close enough to drop this bundle within a hundred yards of the ship. There's cover at the base of the hill, and they're not likely to have troops out now. They're too damn busy trying to get one of those beams through the field!" Walt managed a tired grin, but it was the old Walt again. He glanced at me, then at Hamiel. "Okay, Captain -- let's get ourselves a spaceship!" V I t was there, less than a hundred yards away, squatting like a black bug on the crest of the hill. We IF came up from behind, away from the scathing red beams, but a terrible crimson aura lit the ship to tefli us of the awful firepower pouring over the Starpatih dome below. I glanced up the full, then at Commander Martin. Walt's face was grim in the fading light. He slid back around the dark slab of rock to my side and shook his head. I understood. It wasn't going to be a pushover, if it was possible at all. The first # yards weren't too bad; scattered outcroppings offered cover, particularly after Corphyrion's sun dropped lower behind the hills. That was the beginning -- # yards of possible protection. After that came # long yards of red death. That last stretch of ground was completely bare. There wasn't a loose pebble for cover. AH we could do was count on the increasing darkness -- and hope that aliens had naturally poor night vision. There was some consolation in the fact that they were likely to be concentrating most of their attention on the dome in the opposite direction, but -- I wasn't personally counting a hell of a lot on that. I'd seen them fight. We had to lay those disruptor missiles right on the enemy's doorstep. It was obvious, now, from this distance. The alien ship glowed with a faint, blue-green aura -- they had a screen of their own. There was no way to tell how strong it might be, but We couldn't afford to guess. There was too much to lose if we happened to guess wrong. For all we knew, they had already alerted their home world through some means of c ommunic ation we knew nothing about. We had instant transmission -- but only through Starpath. Another race could have already solved the problems of hyperspeed radio in a totally different manner. Itmight be too late already...  We couldn't dwell too long on that. The job now was to get those missiles up the hill, as close to the ship as possible. It was enough for the moment. It happened -- and none of us saw it. Hamiel was with us, right behind me, then he was gone. Then Walt cursed and stiffened beside me. I turned to see a dim figure disappear in the rocks to the right of the ship. Commander Martin stared for a quick second, then jerked around and plunged after his aide. I jumped up and wrapped my arms around his combat suit in a tight grip. Walt tried to shake me off, and we both went down to the hard ground. "Damn it, Major," he raged, "get -- your -- hands -- !" I shook my head and held fast. "No, sir. It's done. Someone was going to have to do it. He just decided first." Walt relaxed slightly, but his eyes still blazed into mine. "That wasn't his decision, Keith. It was mine." I nodded. "That's why he didn't wait, Walt. He got the job he wanted before you decided to volunteer. He was right about that -- wasn't he?" Walt didn't answer. He walked slowly over to the oanndsters and hooked them over his shoulder. He looked hack and smiled distantly. "Everyone else is disobeying orders today, Major. Guess I better take a crack at it myself." He turned and motioned to the nearest trooper. "Come on, son, let's get our luggage up the hill." "Walt," I said tightly, "just a damn minute! That doesn't happen to be your job either!" He turned to answer, but his words died as a spark of blue fire flashed in the darkening hills. I looked up. Captain Hamiel was framed against the sky, perched high atop a scarred boulder on our right. He was yelling at the top of his lungs emptying his sidearm at the great black egg. The bolts splashed harmlessly off the screened shell, and a dark muzzle shifted in the middle of the alien hull and seared Hamid's boulder with red flame. Hamiel dropped. For a second I thought he was hit; then I caught him again as he crabbed his way to another position. He fired again, then jerked away as another red beam split the landscape. I turned to catch Walt and his trooper melt into the darkness. DeLuso stood beside me, unmoving. I cursed myself silently. Three Starpathers were out there now,' moving up on an alien ship, while I stood behind a damn boulder with DeLuso and two troopers, waiting to offer history's most helpless covering fire. I had known it the minute we reached the hill. Walt had known it, and so had the Captain. It was perfectly clear. IF Whoever moved up that hill could forget about coming back. I was looking right at Hamiel when he died. A red beam simply sliced him in half as he changed boulders. It was all over. The captain had finished his job. And it worked. Walt and the trooper reached the last bit of cover without trouble. I glanced at the dark muzzle in the alien hull. It still swept the boulder's around Hamiel's body, searching the shadows for more of the enemy. All Walt and his trooper had to do was stay in the darkness -- and wait for that one, perfect heartbeat I strained against the growing night, gripping the barrel of my gun until steel burned into my glove. I guess the distance Walt and the Staipather must have covered, then silently signaled DeLuso. We moved off up the hill, hugging the dark side of the stony ridge. I stopped once, searching for movement ahead. Nothing. Only the red aura of deadly fire pouring into  Starpath's dome, and the faint blue shimmer of the alien screen... Then --  -- two shadows, silent, close to the ground. I strained against the darkness. For a quick second, I saw them -- Walt and the trooper, outlined before a patch of white, only a few yards from the black hull, a few steps away. DeLuso shouted beside me and the two dazzling white flares exploded overhead like small suns. The two bright figures in combat gear paused for a split second against tiie blinding light, then raced for the alien ship. The trooper was ahead, Walt a few steps behind. The deadly muzzle above them cut a swift, angry arc out of the sky. A thin tongue of red fire licked across the hill and burned the trooper to his knees  His quick, short cry echoed through my receiver; then he was quiet. Walt ran on another ten feet before a beam of crimson winked against his helmet. He kept moving -- a weird, aimless dance before the beam found him again and slammed him hard against the ground. The thin pencil of energy stayed there, searching him out with murderous vengeance, probing, cutting, slashing of Walt Martin blazed against the night. DeLuso and I moved as one man, dodging the bright lances, sprinting for the silver bundle of missiles ahead. Red fire dug at my heels, turning cold rock into molten pools. We spread, Matt to the left, me to the right. For a brief second, we were free of the deadly fire as alien guns shifted to cover their splitting targets. I saw it coming as if I had all the time in the world. A thin lance of fire hissing across the hill in a precise, slow, agonizingly perfect arc. I even knew exactly where and when my legs would intersect that blazing circle. I was down, clutching dumbly at a raw, charged grove of black where a portion of thigh had been a moment before. There was no time for pain. I crabbed awkwardly along the ground, ahead of the hungry lances that probed the landscape for the rest of me. DeLuso dodged past, and I fired a short and ineffectual burst over his head toward the dark sfbip. The two troopers behind us joined in. Matt grabbed the cannister without stopping and bolted for the ship. A bright beam clipped his shoulder, and he staggered briefly, then went on. I fired another burst ' and got a splash of hot liquid rock for an answer. It burned through a soft spot in my armor and lay like a small sun on my spine.I screamed until the noise hurt my ears, then -- "Major! Over here T I turned, caught the two troopers a few yards to my left, behind a low ridge of rook. For a second I just stared at them, wondering how the hell they had made it through that forest of red fire. Then I got a good leg under me and moved. I glanced up the hill once and froze. My throat went suddenly dry. Matt was down! Gone. An ugly circle of fire churned the ground where he had been a second before. I cursed something to myself, turned away from the troopers, and started up the long hill. A trooper yelled, leaped out after me. I aimed a savage kick at his head with a leg that wasn't fit for kicking. He shoved me behind cover as the ground turned to flame behind me. Pain hit my leg in a pulse of agony. I lashed out, slamming a IF weak ifist at an anonymous faceplate. The trooper pulled hack, startled, his mouth moving frantically. I was in no mood for listening. "Damn it!" I screamed. "A soldier's down out there, trooper!" "Major, he's safe I He made itl " "He -- what?" I sat up, pushing the trooper off, and raised my head over the ridge. An alien flame brightened the sky, hut I saw him. Red lances probed and screamed around our own cover, hut no beam could reach Cadet Matt DeLuso. He was flat beneath the curve of the alien ship, face pale in the bright light, the silver cannisters safe beside him. "Come on. Matt; Get those fuses set r I gripped the barrel of my weapon, wondering what was holding the boy up. All he had to do now was -- Then I saw it, and my body went suddenly limp with defeat. Even from here you could tell that the fusing elements were nothing but masses of useless metal. Somewhere on the long trip up the hill they had been hit. I cursed and pounded my fist against oold stone. Men had died to get those missiles up there, in the shadow of the alien ship. And now they were nothing. Useless. "Oh, my God, sir. Look!" I caught the trooper's tone and jerked around. For a moment there was nothing. Then I saw, and a pulse of grim pleasure shot a burst of laughter from my lips. The two troopers heard and returned black grins. We were licked, sure. But' now we had something to shoot at, something with a blue aura of protection. The aliens knew Matt was under there, and they knew whatever he had with him meant trouble. So they made the big mistake. They sent their own troopers out to get him. Fire pinned us to the ground, but we poured in .a wave of death at the enemy soldiers. Faceplates burst; and parrot beaks screamed for homework! air. We piled them up in charred heaps as fast as they came around the black ship. The trooper beside me dropped as a red beam neatly sliced the left side of his body from the right. Through a storm of crimson death I saw Matt DeLuso, far away, crouched beneath the enemy ship. I saw him calmly snap the safety keys from his ddsruptor missiles, and I realized coldly -- and proudly -- what he was going to do. I added another trio of aliens to the burning pyre beside the ship, and then red fire crawled along the barrel of my needles through my eyes... VI r iey bought us time on Corphyrion -- Matt DeLuso, Hamid, and # other Starpathers who died there. Only one -- Walt Martin -- knew just how much we needed that time. I wish Matt DeLuso could have known what he was doing when he pulled the keys and set off his missiles by hand against the cold bull of an alien ship. He would have done it anyway, certainly. He didn't need any big reasons. It was a job that had to be done -- and that was enough. But there's so much Matt didn't know -- Matt, the troopers behind our field at the dome, the young soldier who carried me through red hell just before Matt's disruptors did their job. There are some things we can't talk about, even to that most exclusive group of men who make up Starpath. You can't tell a man he's a Starpath trooper because he's one out contains some rare quality that enables him to withstand that terrible twist through whatever strange dimensions Starpath passes. You can't tell a Starpath cadet he has one slim chance in hell of making it through his initial flight -- of waking up to stand on a new world and gaze at unknown stars. Oh, we try. We try to weed them out before it's time for that deadly voyage through wrenching darkness. But -- we need them -- we need them so badly! And if we think they can make it -- if we think they might make it we put them into a Starpath capsule and shut out the thoughts that come. When we get a Matt DeLuso, a man who can ride the Starpath lanes, we give him hell and tell him he's a foul-up Cadet who'll probably never make the grade. What can you tell him? That you lost a thousand others in another dimension, hoping for one DeLuso? You see, there isn't any vast, Starpath army out there. It doesn't exist. We don't have a cop on every beat to guard the alien stars. We don't have anything like that at all. We have half a thousand troopers -- five hundred men -- and # lonely worlds spread across the great spiral arm. Three thousand tiny, vulnearable worlds, and only five hundred men who can span the depths between them. That's it. That's the Starpath secret. # We spread out from Earth too fast. We weren't ready to fling colonies across the great gulfs between the stars. We weren't ready because our ships were too slow to spread a network of impregnable defenses over a thousand light-years. We weren't ready because there was always the chance of Priority Red. And now it's happened. A nonhuman intelligence. An alien intelligence that wiped out the colony on Corphyrion without a second thought Starpath has warned the other worlds, and the ships are sweeping out to the far reaches with men and weapons. But starships take too long -- much, much too long to save a world. Only Starpath can be there instantaneously -- when it happens. It's up to Starpath to hold them back until we can build new, faster ships -- ships with Starpath drives that can wrench an armada through the dark dimensions to any point in the galaxy. It'll take time, but we can do it. We must do it! IF IF  Novelette They were pirates, but of a harmless , gentle sort. He was their victim -- and far deadlier than they could be! I W hen the ship arrived Dr. Richard Schultz-Mann was out among the 'plants, flying over and around them on a lift belt. He hovered over one, inspecting with proprietary interest an anamolous patch in its yellow foliage. This one would soon be ripe. The nature lover was a breadstick of a man, very tall and very thin, with an aristocratic head sporting a close-cropped growth of coppery hair and an asymmetric beard. A white streak ran above his right ear, and there was a patch of white on each side of the chin, one coinciding with the waxed spike. As his head moved in the double sunlight they changed color constantly. He took a tissue sample from the grayish patch, stored it and started to move on... The ship came down like a daylight meteor, streaking blue-white across the vague red glare of Big Mira. It slowed and circled high overhead, weaving drunkenly across the sky, then settled toward the plain near Mann's Explorer. Mann watched it land, then gave up his bumblebee activities and went to welcome the newcomers. He was amazed at the coincidence. As far as he knew his had been the first ship ever to land here. The company would be good... but what could anyone possibly want here? Little Mira set while he was skimming back. A flash of white at the far edge of the sea, and the tiny blue-white dwarf was gone. The shadows changed abruptly, turning the world red. Mann took off his pink-tinged goggles. Big Mira was still high, sixty degrees above the horizon and two hours from second sunset. The newcomer was huge, a thick, blunt-nosed cylinder twenty times the size of the Explorer. It looked old. Not damaged, not even weathered, but indefinably old. Its nose was still closed tight, the living bubble retracted, if indeed it had a living bubble. Nothing moved nearby. They must be waiting for his welcome before they debarked. Mann dropped toward the newcomer. The stunner took him a few hundred feet up. Without pain and without sound, suddenly all Mann's muscles turned to loose jelly. Fully conscious and completely helpless, he continued to dive toward the ground. Three figures swarmed up at him from the newcomer's oversized airlock. They caught him before he hit. Tossing humorous remarks at each other in a language Mann did not know, they towed him down to the plain. T he man behind the desk wore a captain's hat and a cheerful smile. "Our supply of verinol is limited," he said in the trade language. "If I have to use it I will, but I'd rather save it. You may have heard that it has unpleasant side effects." "I understand perfectly," said Mann. "You'll use it the moment you think you've caught me in a lie." Since he had not yet been injected with the stuff, he decided it was a bluff. The man had no verinol, if indeed there was such an animal as verinol. But he was still in a bad hole. The ancient, renovated ship held more than a dozen men, whereas Mann seriously doubted if he could have stood up. The sonic had not entirely worn off. His captor nodded approvingly. He was huge and square, almost a cartoon of a heavy-planet man, with muscularity as smooth and solid as an elephant's. A Jinxian, for anyone's money. His size made the tiny shipboard office seem little more than a coffin. Among the crew his captain's hat would not be needed to enforce orders. He looked like he could kick holes in hullmetal or teach tact to an armed kzinti. "You're quick," he said. 'That's good. I'll be asking questions about you and about this planet. You'll give truthful, complete answers. If some of my questions get too personal, say so, but remember I'll use IF the verinol if I'm not satisfied. How old are you?" "One hundred and fifty-four." "You look much older." "I was off boosterspice for a couple of decades." 'Tough luck. Planet of origin?" "Wunderland." "Thought so, with that stickfigure build. Name?" "Dr. Richard Harvey SchulzMann." "Rich Mann, hah? Are you?" Trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. "No. After I make my reputation Fll write a book on the Slaver Empire. Then I'll be rich." "If you say so. Married?" "Several times. Not at the moment." "Rich Mann, I can't give you my real name, but you can call me Captain Kidd. What kind of beard is that?" "You've never seen an asymmetric btwd?" "No, thank the Mist Demons. It looks like you've shaved off all your hair below the part, and everything on your face left of what looks like a one-tuft goatee. Is that the way it's supposed to go?" "Exactly so." "You did, it on purpose then." "Don't mock me, Captain Kidd." "Point taken. Are they popular on Wunderland?" Dr. Mann unconsciously sat a little straighten "Only among those to keep it neat." He twisted the single waxed spike of beard at the left of his chin with unconscious complacence. This was the only straight hair on his face, the rest of the beard being close cropped and curly; and it sprouted from one of the white patches. Mann was proud of his beard. "Hardly seems worth it,": said the Jinxian. "I assume it's to show you're one of the leisure classes. What are you doing on Mira Ceti-T?" "I'm investigating one aspect of the Slaver Empire." "You're a geologist, then?" "No, a xenobiologist." "I don't understand." "What do you know about the Slavers?" "A little. They used to live all through this part of the galaxy. One day the slave races decided they'd had enough, and there was a war. When it was over everyone was dead." "You know quite a bit. Well, Caplong time. The Slavers left only two kinds of evidence of their existence. There are the stasis boxes and their contents, mostly weaponry, but records have been found too. And there are the plants and animals developed for the Slavers' convenience by their tnuctipun slaves, who were biological engineers." "I know about those. We have bandersnatchi on Jinx, on both sides of the ocean." "The bandersnatchi food animals are a special case. They can't mutate; their genes are as thick as your finger, too large to be influenced by radiation. All other relics of tnuctipun engineering have mutated almost beyond recognition. Almost. For the past twelve years I've been searching out and identifying the surviving species." "It doesn't sound like a fun way to spend a life, Rich Mann. Are there Slaver animals on this planet?" "Not animals, but plants. Have you been outside yet?" "Not yet." "Then come out. I'll show you." II T he ship was very large. It did not seem to be furnished with a living balloon; hence the entire lifesystem must be enclosed within the metal walls. Mann walked ahead of the Jinxian down a long unpainted corridor to the airlock, waited inside while the pressure dropped slightly, then rode the escalator to ground. He would not try to escape yet, though the sonic had worn off. The Jinxian was affable but alert. He carried a flashlight-laser dangling from his belt, his men all arouhd them, and Mann's lift belt had been removed. Richard Mann was not quixotic. It was a red, red world. They stood on a dusty plain sparsely scattered with strange yellow-headed bushes. A breeze blew things like tumbleweeds across the plain, things which on second glance were the dried heads of former bushes. No other life-forms were visible. Big Mira sat on the horizon, a vague fiery semicircular cloud, just dim enough to look at without squinting. Outlined in sharp black silhouette against the red giant's bloody disk were three slender, improbably tall spires, unnaturally straight and regular, each with a vivid patch of yellow vegetation surrounding its base. Members of the Jinxian's crew ran, walked or floated outside, some playing an improvised variant of baseball, others at work, still others merely enjoying themselves. None were Jinxian, and none had Mann's light-planet build. Mann noticed that a few were using the thin wire blades of variable-knives to cut down some of the straight bushes. "Those," he said. "The bushes?" "Yes. They used to be tnuctip stage trees. We don't know what they looked like originally, but the old records say the Slavers stopped using them some decades before the rebellion. May I ask what those men are doing in my ship?" Expanded from its clamshell nose, the Explorer's living bubble was bigger than the Explorer. Held taut by air pressure, isolated from the surrounding environment, proof against any atmospheric chemistry found in nature, the clear fabric hemisphere was a standard feature of all camper-model spacecraft. Mann could see biped shadows moving purposefully about inside and going between the clamshell doors into the ship proper. "They're hot stealing anything, Rich Mann. I sent them in to remove a few components from the drives and the comm systems." "One hopes they won't damage what they remove." "They won't. They have their orders." "I assume you don't want me to call someone," said Mann. He noticed that the men were preparing a bonfire, using stage bushes. The bushes were like miniature trees, four to six feet tall, slender and foliage at the top was flattened like the head of a dandelion. From the low, rounded eastern mountains to the western sea, the red land was sprinkled with the yellow dots of their heads. Men were cutting off the heads and roots, then dragging the logs away to pile them in conical formation over a stack of deathdry tumbleweed heads. "We don't want you to call the Wunderland police, who happen to be somewhere out there looking for us." "I hate to pry -- " "No, no, you're entitled to your curiosity. We're pirates." "Surely you jest. Captain Kidd, if you've figured out a way to make piracy pay off, you must be bright enough to make ten times the money on the stock market." "Why?" B y the tone of his voice, by his gleeful smile, the Jinxian was baiting him. Fine; it would keep his mind off stage trees. Mann said, "Because you can't catch a ship in hyperspace. The only way you can match courses with a ship is to wait until it's in an inhabited system. Then the police come calling." "I know an inhabited system where there aren't any police." "The hell you do." They had walked more or less aimlessly to the Explorer's airlock. Now the Jinxian turned and gazed out over the red plain, toward the dwindling crescent of Big Mira, which now looked like a bad forest fire. 'Tm curious about those spires." "Fine, keep your little secret. I've wondered about them myself, but I haven't had a chance to look at them yet" "I'd think they'd interest you. They look definitely artificial to me." young to be Slaver artifacts." "Rich Mann, are those bushes the only life on this planet?" "I haven't seen anything else," Mann lied. "Then it couldn't have been a native race that put those spires up. I never heard of a space-traveling race that builds such big things for mere monuments." "Neither did I. Shall we look at them tomorrow?" "Yes.i Captain Kidd stepped into the Explorer's airlock, wrapped a vast hand gently around Mann's thin wrist and pulled him in beside him. The airlock cycled, and Mann followed the Jinxian into the living bubble with an impression that the Jinxian did not quite trust him. Fine . It "sfras dark inside the bubble. Mann hesitated before turning on the light Outside he could see the last red sliver of Big Mira shrinking with visible haste. He saw more. A man was kneeling before the conical bonfire, and a flickering light was growing in the dried bush-head kindling. Mann turned on the lights, obliterating the outside view. "Go on about piracy," he said. "Oh, yes." The Jinxian dropped into a chair, frowning. "Piracy was only the end product. It started a year ago, when I foundthe puppeteer system" "The " "Yes. The puppeteers' home system." Richard Mann's ears went straight up. He was from Wunderland, remember? A puppeteer may best be described as a headless, three-legged centaur with two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its hands. The puppets are actual brainless heads set on weaving necks; but they are also hands, the only toolmaking appendages a puppeteer can claim. A puppeteer's thick, mobile lips and forked tongue are as dextrous as the human hand, with taste and smell thrown in for free. Puppeteers are highly intelligent, herbivorous and very old as a species. Their corner on interstellar business is as old as the human Bronze Age. And they are cowards. A courageous puppeteer is not regarded as insane only by other puppeteers. It is insane and usually shows disastrous secondary symptoms: depression, homicidal tendencies and the like. These poor, warped minds are easy to spot. No sane puppeteer will cross a vehicular roadway, or travel in any but the safest available fashion, or resist a thief, even an unarmed thief. No sane puppeteer will leave his home system, wherever that may be, without his painless method of suicide, nor will it walk an alien world withIF out guards -- non-puppeteer guards. The location of the puppeteer system is one of the puppeteers' most closely guarded secrets. Another is the painless suicide gimmick. It may be a mere trick of preconditioning. Whatever it is, it works. Puppeteers cannot be tortured into revealing anything about their home world, though they hate pain. It must be a world with reasonably Earthlike atmosphere and temperature, but beyond that nothing is known. Or was known. Suddenly Mann wished that they hadn't lit the bonfire so soon. He didn't know how long it would burn before the logs caught, and he wanted to hear more about this. "I found it just a year ago," the Jinxian repeated. "It's best I don't tell you what I was doing up to then. The less you know about who I am, the better. But when I'd got safe out of the system I came straight home. I wanted time to think." "And you picked piracy? Why not blackmail?" "I thought of that." "I should hope so! Can you imagine what the puppeteeers would pay to keep that secret?" "Yes. That's what stopped me. Rich Mann, how much would you have asked for in one lump sum?" munity from prosecution." "Okay. Now look at it from the wouldn't buy them complete safety, because you might still talk. But if they spent a tenth of that on detectives, weapons, hit men, et cetera , they would shut your mouth for keeps and also find and hit anyone you might have talked to. I couldn't figure any way to make myself safe and still collect, not with that much potential power against me. "So I thought of piracy. "Eight of us had gone in, but I was the only one who'd guessed just what we'd stumbled into. I let the others in on it. Some had friends they could trust, and that raised our number to fourteen. We bought a ship, a very old one, and renovated it. She's an old slowboat's groundto-orbit auxiliary fitted out with hyperdrive; maybe you noticed?" "No. I saw how old she was." "We figured even if the puppeteers recognized her, they'd never trace her. We took her back to the puppeteer system and waited." A flickering light glimmered outside the bubble wall. Any second now the logs would catch. Mann tried to relax. # # pretty soon a ship came in. We I waited 'til it was too deep in the system's gravity well to jump back into hyperspace. Then we matched courses. Naturally they surrendered right away. We went in in suits so they couldn't describe us even if they could tell humans apart. Would you believe they had six hun"That's pretty good pay. What went wrong?" "My idiot crew wouldn't leave. We'd figured most of the ships coming into the puppeteer system would be carrying money. They're misers, you know. Part of being a coward is wanting security. And they do most of their mining and manufacturing on other worlds, where they can get labor. So we waited for two more ships, because we had room for lots more money. The puppeteers wouldn't dare attack us inside their own system." Captain Kidd made a sound of disgust. "I can't really blame the men. In a sense they were right. One ship with a fusion drive can do a hell of a lot of damage just by hovering over a city. So we stayed. Meanwhile the puppeteers registered a formal complaint with Earth. "Earth hates people who foul up interstellar trade. We'd offered physical harm to a puppeteer. A thing like that could cause a stock market crash. So Earth offered the services of every police force in human space. Hardly seems fair!" "They ganged up on you. But they still couldn't come after you, could they? The puppeteers would have to tell the police how to find their system. They'd hardly do that; not when some human descendant might attack them a thousand years from now." The Jinxian dialed himself a frozen daiquiri. "They had to wait 'til we left. I still don't know how they tracked us. Maybe they've got something that can track a gravity wairp moving faster than light. I wouldn't put it past them to build it just for us. Anyway, when we angled toward Jinx we heard them telling the police of We Made It just where we were." "Ouch." "We headed for the nearest double star. Not my idea, Hermie Preston's. He thought we could hide in the dust clouds in the trojan points. Whatever the puppeteers were using probably couldn't find us in normal space." Two thirsty gulps had finished his daiquiri. He crumpled the cup, watched it evaporate, dialed another. "The nearest double star was Mira Ceti. We hardly expected to find a planet in the trailing trojan point, but as long as it was there we decided to use it." "And here you are." "Yeah." "You'll be better off when you've found a way to hide that ship." "We had to find out about you first, Rich Mann. Tomorrow we'll sink the Puppet Master in the ocean. Already we've shut off the fusion drive. The lifters work by battery, and the cops can't detect that." lar -- " "No, no, Rich Mann. I will not tell you where to find the puppeteer planet. Give up the whole idea. Shall we join the campfire group?" Mann came jokingly alert. How had the stage trees lasted this long. Thinking fast, he said, "Is your autokitchen as good as mine?" "Probably not. Why?" "Let me treat your group to dinner, Captain Kidd." Captain Kidd shook his head, smiling. "No offense, Rich Mann, but I can't read your kitchen controls, and there's no point in tempting you. You might rashly put someth -- " IF T he living bubble bulged inward, snapped back. Captain Kidd swore and ran for the airlock. Mann stayed seated, motionless, hoping against hope that the Jinxian had forgotten him. from the region of the campfire. Captain Kidd frantically punched the Cycle button, and the opaque inner door closed on him. Mann came to his feet in one leap and started running. ears and set the bubble rippling. Burning logs must be flying in all directions. The airlock recycled, empty. No telling where the Jinxian was; the outer door was opaque too. Well, that worked to his advantage as well. Mann searched through the airlock, pushing sections of spacesuit aside to find the lift belt. It wasn't there. He'd been wearing it; they'd taken it off him after they shot him down. He moaned: a tormented, uncouth sound to come from a cultured Wunderlander. He had to have a lift belt. WhamWhamWham. Someone was screaming far away. Mann snatched up the suit's chestand-shoulder section and locked it around him. It. was rigid vacuum armor, with a lift motor built into the back. He took an extra moment to screw down the helmet, then hit the Cycle button. No use searching for weapons. They'd have taken even a variableknife. The Jinxian could be just outside waiting. He might have realized the truth by now. The door opened... Captain Kidd was easy to find, a running misshapen shadoW and a frantic booming voice. "Flatten out, you yeastheads! It's an attack!" He hadn't guessed. But he must know the We Made It police would use stunners... Mann twisted his lift control to full power. The surge of pressure took him under the armpits. Two standard gees sent blood rushing tohis feet, pushed him upward with four times Wunderland's gravity. A last stage log exploded under him, rocked him back and forth, and then all was dark and quiet. He adjusted the attitude setting to slant him almost straight forward. The dark ground sped beneath him. He moved northeast. Nobody was following him -- yet. Captain Kidd's men would have been killed, hurt or at least stunned when the campfire exploded in their faces. He'd expected Captain Kidd to chase him; but the Jinxian couldn't have caught him. Lift motors are all alike, and Mann wasn't as heavy as the Jinxian. He flew northeast, flying very low, knowing that the only landmarks big enough to smash him were the spires to the west. When he could no longer see the ships' lights he turned south, still very low. Still nobody followed him. He was glad he'd taken the helmet; it protected his eyes from the wind. IF in I n the blue dawn he came awake. The sky was darker than navy blue, and the light around him was dim, like blue moonlight. Little Mira was a hurtingly bright pinpoint between two mountain peaks, bright enough to sear holes in a man's retina. Mann unscrewed his helmet, adjusted the pink goggles over his eyes. Now it was even darker. Mann poked his nose above the yellow moss. The plain and sky were empty of men. The pirates must be out looking for him, but they hadn't gotten here yet. So far so good. Far out across the plain there was fire. A stage tree rose rapidly into the black sky, minus its roots and flower, the wooden flanges at its base holding it in precarious aerodynamic stability. A white rope of smoke followed it up. When the smoke cut off, the tree became invisible... until, much higher, there was a puff of white cloud like a flak burst. Now the seeds would be spreading across the sky... Richard Mann smiled. Wonderful, how the stage trees had adapted to the loss of their masters. The Slavers had raised them on wide plantations, using the' solid fuel rocket cores inside the living bark to lift their ships from places where a fusion drive would have done damage. But the trees used the rockets for reproduction, to scatter their seeds further than any plant before them. Ah, well. Richard Mann snuggled deeper into the yellow woolly stuff around him and began to consider his next move. He was a hero now in the eyes of humanity-at-large. He had badly damaged a pirate crew. When the police landed he could count on a reward from the puppeteers. Should he settle for that, or go on to bigger stakes? The Puppet Master's cargo was bigger stakes, certainly. But even if he could take it, which seemed unlikely, how could he fit it into his ship? How to escape the police of We Made It? No. Mann had another stake in mind, one just as valuable and infinitely easier to hide. What Captain Kidd apparently hadn't realized was that blackmail is not immoral to a puppeteer. There are well established rules of conduct which make blackmail perfectly safe both for blackmailer and victim. Two are that the blackmailer must submit to having certain portions of his memory erased and must turn over all evidence against the victim. Mann was prepared to do this, if he could force Captain Kidd to tell him where to find the pupppeteei system. But how? Well, he knew one thing the Jinxian didn't... L ittle Mira rose, fast, arc blue, a hole into hell. Mann remained where he was, an insignificant mote in the yellow vegetation below one of the spires Captain Kidd had remarked on last night. The spire was a good half mile high. An artifact that size would seem impossibly huge to any but an Earthman. The way it loomed over him made Mann uncomfortable. In shape it was a slender cone with a base three hundred feet across. The surface near the base was gray and smooth to touch. The yellow vegetation was a thick, rolling carpet. It spread out around the spire in an uneven circle half a mile in diameter and dozens of feet deep. It rose about the base in a thick turtleneck collar. Close up, the stuff wasn't even distinct plants. It looked like a cross between moss and wool, dyed flagrant yellow. It made a good hiding place. Not perfect, of course; a heat sensor would pick him out in a flash. He hadn't thought of that last night, and now it worried him. Should he get out, try to reach the sea? The ship would certainly carry a heat sensor, but not a portable one. A portable heat sensor would be a weapon, a nighttime gunsight, and weapons of war had been illegal for some time in human space. But the Puppet Master could have stopped elsewhere to get such implements. Kzinti, for example. Nonsense. Why would Captain Kidd have needed portable weapons with night gunsights? He certainly hadn't expected puppeteers to fight hand-to-hand! The stunners were mercy weapons. Even a pirate would not dare kill a puppeteer, and Captain Kidd was no ordinary pirate. All right. Radar-? He need only burrow into the mosswool. Sight search? Same answer. Radio? Mental note: do not transmit anything. Mental note? There was a dictaphone in his helmet. He used it after pulling the helmet out of the mosswool around him. Flying figures. Mann watched them for a long moment, trying to spot the Jinxian. There were only four, and he wasn't among them. The four were flying northwest of him, moving south. Mann ducked into the moss. "Hello, Rich Mann." The voice was low, contorted with fury. Mann felt the shock race through him, contracting every muscle with the fear of death. It came from behind him!... From his helmet. "Hello, Rich Mann. Guess where I am?" H e couldn't turn it off. Spacesuit helmet radios weren't built to be turned off: a standard safety factor. If one were fool enough to ignore safety, one could insert an "off" switch; but Mann had never felt the need. "I'm in your ship, using your shipto-suit radio circuit. That was a good trick you played last night. I didn't even know what a stage tree was 'til I looked it up in your library." He'd just have to endure it. A pity he couldn't answer back. "You killed four of my men and put five more in the autodoc tanks. Why'd you do it, Rich Mann? You must have known we weren't going to kill you. Why should we? There's no blood on our hands." You lie, Mann thought at the radio. People die in a market crash . And the ones who live are the ones who suffer. Do you know what it f s like to be suddenly poor, and not know how to live poor? "I'll assume you want something, IF Rich Mann. All right. What? The money in my hold? That's ridiculous. You'd never get in. You want to turn us in for a reward? Fat chance. You've got no weapons. If we find you now we'll kill you." The four searchers passed far to the west, their headlamps spreading yellow light across the blue dusk. They were no danger to him now. A pity they and their fellows should have been involved in what amounted to a vendetta. "The puppeteer planet, of course. The modern El Dorado. But you don't know where it is, do you? I wonder if I ought to give you a hint. Of course you'd never know whether I was telling the truth." Did the Jinxian know how to live poor? Mann shuddered. The old memories came back, but rarely; but when they came they hurt. You have to learn not to buy luxuries before you've bought necessities . You can starve learning which is which . Necessities are food and a place to sleep , shoes and pants. Luxuries are tobacco , restaurants , fine shirts , throwing away a ruined meal while you're learning to cook , quitting a job you don't like. A union is a necessity. Boosterspice is a luxury.  The Jinxian wouldn't know about that. He'd had the money to buy his own ship. "Ask me politely, Rich Mann. Would you like to know where I found the puppeteer system?" Mann had leased the Explorer on a college grant. It had been the latest step in a long climb upward. Before that... He was half his lifetime old when the crash came. Until then boosterspice had kept him as young as the ageless idle ones who were his friends and relatives. Overnight he was one of the hungry. A number of his partners in disaster had ridden their lift belts straight up into eternity; Richard Schultz-Mann had sold his for his final dose of boosterspice. Before he could afford boosterspice again there were wrinkles in his forehead, the texture of his skin had changed, his sex urge had decreased, strange white patches appeared in his hair, there were twinges in his back. He still got them. Yet always he had maintained his beard. With the white spike and the white streak it looked better than ever. After the boosterspice restored color to his hair he dyed the patches back in again. "Answer me, Rich Mann!" Go ride a bander snatch. It was a draw. Captain Kidd couldn't entice him into answering, and Mann would never know the pirate's secret. If Kidd dropped his ship in the sea, Mann could show it to the police. At least that would be something. Luckily Kidd couldn't move the Explorer. Otherwise he could take both ships half around the planet, leaving Mann stranded. The four pirates were far to the south. Captain Kidd had apparently given up on the radio. There were water and food syrup in his helmet; Mann would not starve. Where in blazes were the police? On the other side of the planet? Stalemate. ' # IV B ig Mira came as a timorous peeping Tom, poking his rim over the mountains like red smoke. The land brightened, taking on tinges of lavender against long, long navy blue shadows. The shadows shortened and became vague. The morality of his position was beginning to bother Dr. Richard Mann. In attacking the pirates he had done his duty as a citizen. The pirates had sullied humanity's hardwon reputation for honesty. Mann had struck back. But his motive? Fear had been two parts of that motive. First, the fear that Captain Kidd might decide to shut his mouth. Second, the fear of being poor. That fear had been with him for some time. Write a book and make a fortune! It looked good on paper. The thirty-light-year sphere of human readers. Persuade one per cent of them to shell out half a star each for a disposable tape and your four per cent royalties became two hundred days were flops. You had to scream very loud nowadays to get the atOthers tried to drown you out. Before Captain Kidd, that had been Richard Schultz-Mann's sole hope of success. He'd behaved within the law. Captain Kidd couldn't make that claim; but Captain Kidd hadn't killed anybody. Mann sighed. He'd had no choice. His major motive was honor, and that motive still held. He moved restlessly in his nest of damp mosswool. The day was heating up, and his suit's temperature control would not work with half a suit. What was that? It was the Puppet Master , moving effortlessly toward him on its lifters. The Jinxian must have decided to get it under water before the human law arrived... Or had he? Mann adjusted his lift motor until he was just short of weightless, then moved cautiously aroundthe spire. He saw the four pirates moving to the Puppet Master . They'd see him if he left the spire. But if he stayed, those infrared detectors... He'd have to chance it. The suit's padded shoulders gouged his armpits as he streaked toward the second spire. He stopped in midair over the moss and dropped, burrowed in it. The pirates didn't swerve. Now he'd see. The ship slowed to a stop over the spire he'd just left. "Can you hear me, Rich Mann?" Mann nodded gloomily to himself. Definitely, that was it. "I should have tried this before. Since you're nowhere in sight, you've either left the vicinity altogether or you're hiding in the thick bushes around those towers." Should he try to keep dodging from spire to spire? Or could he outfly them? At least one was bound to be IF faster than he. The armor increased his weight. "I hope you took the opportunity to examine this tower. It's fascinating. Very smooth, stony surface, except at the top. A perfect cone, also except at the top. You listening? The tip of this thing swells from an eight foot neck into an eggshaped knob fifteen feet across. The knob isn't polished as smooth as the rest of it. Vaguely reminiscent of an asparagus spear, wouldn't you say?" Richard Schultz-Mann cocked his head, tasting an idea. H e unscrewed his helmet, ripped out and pocketed the radio. In frantic haste he began ripping out double handfuls of the yellow moss wool, stuffed them into a wad in the helmet and turned his lighter on it. At first the vegetation merely smoldered, while Mann muttered through clenched teeth. Then it caught with a weak blue, smokeless flame. Mann placed his helmet in a mossy nest, setting it so it would not tip over and spill its burning contents. "I'd have said a phallic symbol, myself. What do you think, Rich Mann? If these are phallic symbols they're pretty well distorted. Humanoid, but not human, you might say." The pirates had joined their ship. They hovered around its floating silver bulk, ready to drop on him when the Puppet Masters infrared detectors found him. Mann streaked away to the west on full acceleration, staying as low as he dared. The spire would shield him for a minute or so and then... "This vegetation isn't stage trees, Rich Mann. It looks like some sort of grass from here. Must need something in the rock they made these erections out of. Mph. No hot spots. You're not down there after all. Well, we try the next one." Behind him, in the moments when he dared look back, Mann saw the Puppet Master move to cover the second spire, the one he'd left a moment ago, the one with a gray streak in the moss at its base. Four humanoid dots clustered loosely above the ship. "Peekaboo," came the Jinxian's voice. "And good-by, killer!" T he Puppet Master's fusion drive went on. Fusion flame lashed out in a blue-white spear, played down the side of the pillar and into the mosswool below. Mann faced forward and concentrated on flying. He felt neither elation nor pity, but only disgust. The Jinxian was a fool after all. He'd seen no life on Mira Ceti-T but for the stage trees. He had Mann's word that there were none. Couldn't he reach the obvious conclusion? Perhaps the mosswool had fooled him. It certainly did look like yellow moss, clustering around the spires as if it needed some chemical element in the stone. A glance back told him that the pirate ship was still spraying white flame over the spire and the foliage below. He'd have been a cinder by now. The Jinxian must want him extremely dead. Well -- The spire exploded all at once. It sat on the lavender plain in a hemisphere of multicolored fire, engulfing the other spires and the Jinxian ship; and then it began to expand and rise. Mann adjusted his attitude to vertical to get away from the ground. A moment later the shock wave slammed into him and blew him tumbling over the desert. Two white ropes of smoke rose straight up through the dimming explosion cloud. The other spires were taking off while still green! Fire must have reached the 'foliage at their bases. Mann watched them go with his head thrown back and his body curiously loose in the vacuum armor. His expression was strangely contented. At these times he could forget himself and his ambitions in the contemplation of immortality. Two knots formed simultaneously in the rising smoke trails. Second stage on. They rose very fast now... "Rich Mann." Mann flicked his transmitter on. "You'd live through anything." "Not I. I can't feel anything below my shoulders. Listen, Rich Mann, I'll trade secrets with you. What happened?" "The big towers are stage trees." "Uh?" Half question, half an expression of agony. "A stage tree has two life cycles. One is the bush, the other is the big multistage form." Mann talked fast, fearful of losing his audience. "The forms alternate. A stage tree seed lands on a planet and grows into a bush. Later there are lots of bushes. When a seed hits a particularly ferIF tile spot, it grows into a multistage form. You still there?" "Yuh." "In the big form the living part is the tap root and the photosynthetic organs around the base. That way the rocket section doesn't have to carry so much weight. It grows straight up out of the living part, but it's as dead as the center of an oak except for the seed at the top. When it's ripe the rocket takes off. Usually it'll reach terminal velocity for the system it's in. Kidd, I can't see your ship, I'll have to wait 'til the smoke -- " "Just keep talking."  "I'd like to help." "Too late. Keep talking." ( #T've tracked the stage trees across A twenty light-years of space. God knows where they started. They're all through the systems around here. The seed pods spend hundreds of thousands of years in space, and when they enter a system they explode. If there's a habitable world one seed is bound to hit it. If there isn't, there's lots more pods where that one came from. It's immortality, Captain Kidd. This one plant has traveled further than manand a -- "Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. I don't know its name on the star charts. Shall I repeat that?" Mann forgot the stage trees. "Better repeat it." "Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nothing. Hunt in that area 'til you find it. It's ared giant, undersized. Planet is small, dense, no moon." "Got it." "You're stupid if you use it. You'll have the same luck I did. That's why I told you." "I'll use blackmail." "They'll kill you. Otherwise I wouldn't have said. Why'd you kill me, Rich Mann?" "I didn't like your remarks about my beard. Never insult a Wunderlander's asymmetric beard, Captain Kidd." "I won't do it again, you can be sure of that. "I'd like to help." Mann peered into the billowing smoke. Now it was a black pillar tinged at the edges by the twin sunlight. "Still can't see your ship." "You will in a moment." The pirate moaned... and Mann saw the ship. He managed to turn his head in time to save his eyes. ! Great new novelette by Keith Laumer -- creator of everybody's favorite hero, i IF  Feature The "Other" Fandoms Now that Our Man in Fandom has shown you what sf fans are like, meet a few other species of fan! P lease don't get the idea that science-fiction fans are interested in science fiction only l Because it's just not so. The world of sf fandom likes to think of itself as being a microcosm of the outside world: a world in miniature. And just as in the outside world people have some main interests in common, but also other interests in particular -- so it is in fandom. Everybody who reads has a few very favorite writers. In fandom, people with like interests tend to get together and form clubs and publish fanzines and even have conventions dedicated to their particular private interests. Since I've been writing' these Our Man In Fandom columns, I've had letters from  lots of science-fiction readers who literally never dreamed there were clubs and magazines devoted to sf. The fact ikat there are fandoms within Fandom is even less known to you of the Outside World. If you happen to be fond of the Oz books, Sherlock Holmes, The Lord of the Rings , Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, monster movies, James Branch Cabell, old comic strips and comic books, Gothic literature, movie serials and jolly stuff like that, you may be excited to hear there exist whole clubfulls of kindreds souls. And you might want to know how to get in touch with one of these "other" fandoms. So hang on, while Your Man In Fandom takes you on another Guided Tour of the Twilight Zone... Burrough Fandom S ome writers -- and some books -- have about them a magic, a charisma, that attracts devotees and acolytes with incredible magnetism. Edgar Rice Burroughs is a prime example. His career began with the February # issue of AllStory, and the first installment of A Princess of Mars . Today, # years later, lie is remembered as perhaps the single most successful writer in the English language, author of some # books which have sold more than For about ten years now there has been a club of Burroughs fans called The Burroughs Bibliophiles which Coriell. The Burroughs Bibliophiles got a giant-sized membership boost some years ago when Don Wollheim of Ace Books discovered the Burroughs estate had allowed copyrights to lapse on a more-than-goodly number of Burrough's works and was thus able to bring out the books in Ace editions, starting a Burroughs revival the likes of which had never been seen before. The Bibliophiles now number about #. Within Burroughs fandom are ple. Vernell Coriell publishes a Gridley Wave. And Camille Cazadessus, Jr., who rivals him for the dom. All sorts of books and pamphlets on Burroughs have been privately published by the Burroughs fans, such a s The Dream Weaver: an Edgar Rice Burroughs Chapboolc, by Alvin Fick (#); Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Bibliography, by Bradford M. Day (#); A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs, by Henry Hardy Heins (#); and The Reader's Guide to Barsoom and Amt or, by David G. hold an annual "dum-dum" (that's Ape for get-together) which coincides with the yearly World Science Fiction Convention, same Labor Day weekend, same hotel. If you chance to be fond of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars and would like to join the Bibliophiles, why not drop a card to Vernell Coriell at # Locust, Kansas City, Mo. Sword  Sorcery Fandom A nother writer of comparable charisma, who learned a lot from Burroughs and who wrote pretty much the same sort of adventure fiction, was Robert E. Howard. He was an old Weird Tales author, who created Conan the Cimmerian, a grim, savage barbarian warrior who strode about the prehistoric Hyborian Age looking for princesses to rescue, magicians to fight and monsters to kill. The robust and heroic fantasy of his fiction attracted many fans, and when the Conan books began to be reprinted in hardcover editions by Gnome Press, publisher Martin Greenberg, author L. Sprague de Camp, critic John D. Clark and some other nice people founded The Hyborian Legion to commemorate his creation. Membership gets you a gorgeous scroll in Egyptian hieroglyphics. And there is a fanzine, Amra, devoted to Howard and Burroughs and Leiber and other things swordlike and sorcerous. Amra ("The Lion" -- Conan's name when he was a pirate) is a beautifully printed fanzine, winner of the Hugo Award, and regularly contains stories, articles, book reviews and verse by such Hyborians as Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett, Sprague de Camp, artist Roy Krenkel and others (including Your Man in Fandom.) The latest issue I have seen was Vol. #, Number #. The Legion has permanent officers such as the King of Aquilonia, the Count of Poitain, the Royal Sorceror, the Commander of the Black Dragons, etc. And there's an annual Muster of the Legion which coincides with the World Convention as does the Burroughsian dumdum. Legion people also publish magazines like The Howard Collector , Glenn Lord's excellent occasional fanzine, now in its seventh issue. Since the Conan books are now being published in paperbacks from Lancer Books (yes, the ones with the mind-staggeringly gorgeous Frazetta cover-paintings!), any Howard fan, old or new, can find out about the Legion and Amra by writing to the editor, George Scithers, Amra f Box #, Chicago, #. Tolkien Fandom M aybe Conan is new to you, but surely you've read The Lord of the Rings! This mammoth trilogy by Oxford don J.R.R Tolkien had its first beginnings in a children's book called Thi Hobbit (#). The Trilogy itself, completed in # and containing some # pages of superb fantasy, has been discovered by undergraduates, and other people (among them, C.S. Lewis, Richard Hughes, W.H. Auden, Naomi Mitchison, Anthony Boucher, and other critics and literary figures). There be some (myself among them) who tasy of the century. Be that as it may, the # price for the hardcover edition from Houghton Mifflin placed these great books out of reach until just recently, when Ace Books brought out the entire trilogy in paperback -- followed closely by Ballantine Books, with "The Authorized Edition." By now, the paperback set is a runaway best seller and an underground classic of awesome success. Both pb sets have sold copies in # months. With all this excitement going on, it's no wonder there's a Tolkien Society of America now forming. It hasn't been in existence for very long, but it already has upwards of one thousand members who meet or exchange views by means of correspondence or specialized Tolkienian magazines. They are particularly excited (and you may be, too) to learn that Tolkien has been and currently is working on an equally mammoth sequel to The Lord of the Rings since he concluded the first trilogy # years ago. It will be most sequels I know of, it takes place zes. Earlier, like by a couple of thousand years or so! Organized by a youthful Tolkien enthusiast here in New York -- #year-old, Harvard-bound Dick Plotz -- the Tolkien Society of America has had its meetings discussed widely, in The New Yorker and The IF Saturday Evening Post, for example. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. H. Auden attended the first meeting and spoke briefly on Tolkien (he was one of Professor Tolkien's students at Oxford years ago). The Society publishes a quarterly Tolkien Journal full of news, articles, poems, stories, book reviews, art and letters. There is also an irregular supplement, a newsletter or bulletin called The Green Dragon . Other Tolkien Fandom magazines include # Palantir (the first of them all, I believe), George Heap's Ancalagon, Greg Shaw's Entmoot. The Society meets at the home of Dick Plotz, the "Thain" or headman, at # Marlborough Rd., Brooklyn, New York. Corresponding memberships (i.e., those who can't attend meetings in person) are scattered throughout # states; there are local, regional chapters called "smials." If you are interested, drop a note to Dick Plotz at the address above. Supernatural Horror Fandom T hen there are they who relish the macabre over the heroic. One group of demonic devotees, The Otranto Residents Society, very informal, was founded circa #, devoted to "the Gothic novel and the Gothic film" -- and they mean the movement Horace Walpole began back in the #th Century when he wrote The Castle of Otranto (from which the Society takes its name), not these silly romantic mysteries for women that are all over the newsstands these days, with mysterious old houses brooding in the background, one lighted window in the tower, gal in white nightgown in foreground, you know what I mean. Head Resident is a New York television producer named Chris Steinbrunner, who lives in Elmhurst, Long Island. The Society has fostered another group called The Fantasy Film Club, also under Chris Steinbrunner's aegis. They meet weekly and run off an old movie, either a classic of the creepy, like Frankenstein Meets The Wolf man, or sometimes a corny but delightful old movie serial like The Whispering Shadow or Drums of Fu Manchu. The Otranto Residents Society and The Fantasy Film Club have an annual Halloween costume party. They also sponsor occasional opento-the-public film showings of the Flash Gordon serials and similar New York City. And they often attend sneak previews or special preview showings of forthcoming films in the field of the supernatural. Among the members are Charles M. Collins, Jr., editor of Fright !, a spectacularly successful (# printings!) and extraordinarily good Gothic anthology, Ken Beale (an editor of the Monster Movie Magazine, Castle of Frankenstein) and, for that matter, Your Man In Fandom. Movie Monster Fandom S peaking of Hollywood horrors, there a miniature fandom in that field, too. This fandom has only sprung up in the last decade or so, when the magazines like Famous Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A  must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Gaiaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address City  State Zip Code... ( Offer good in U. S. A. Only ) Monsters of Filmland and the abovemention CoF began publishing. But this sub-branch of fandom is booming, publishing monster fanzines galore, like Gore Creatures which comes from Baltimore; Famous Fantasy Films from Brookline, Mass.; Classics of the Horror Screen which emerges from Canada; Horror Scope from Amarillo, Texas; Famous Fiends from Filmdom, which escapes regularly from Belleand dozens more. Within Monster Fandom are loads of small clubs devoted to favorite actors: an Oliver Reed Fanclub in Trenton, N.J., a Christopher Lee Fan Club in Warwick, Rhode Island; an Alfred Hitchcock Fan Club in Massachusetts; and even something called The Count Dracula Society, which sounds rather ominous. These movie horror fans are quite scattered and have not yet been brought together into one central organization. But there are signs of one in the making: at least, there was a Manhattan Monstercon held here in New York on September #, #, and there will be another one sometime in the latter months of #. So -- who knows? I see I have run out of the space allotted to me, so we'll see you next month, when Your Man In Fandom will lead you in exploring The International Wizard of Oz Fan Club, the worldwide Sherlock Holmes fandom, comic book fandom in general and The International Comic Society in particular, the new James Branch Cabell Club, and other fandoms in IF IF  Novelette Call Me Dumbo The trouble with being Dumbo was that some things got mixed up. Like 'where Dumbo was -- and who! I T he thoughts were strange, and they hurt. My husband is called Carl -- and that's a nice name. My three little sons are called David, Aaron and Johnrand those are nice names. But I'm called Dumbo -- and that sounds silly. It isn't even like a real name. How did I get it in the first place? Dumbo bustled around the cottage trying to quiet her mind with work. Morning sunlight streamed across the breakfast table, making it glow like an altar. She set out five dishes of hot porridge then went to fetch the children who were tumbling noisily in her flower garden. Once out in the peaceful, sun-filled air she felt a little better. Beyond the picket fence the grain fields which Carl tended so carefully rolled down to the river like unleashed bolts of yellow satin. "Come for your breakfast," she called. "And don't trample my roses, David. You'd miss the pretty colors as much as anybody." "What roses?" David's six-year-old face was flushed with exertion. "You mean these green things?" The younger boys tittered admiringly. " Those roses," Dumbo emphasized. " Those roses," Dumbo emphasized. David pointed straight at the freshly opened, deep red blossoms. "You mean these green things?" Dumbo hesitated uneasily. David was being naughty, showing off to his brothers, but he was full of confidence, compactly indomitable as only a healthy child can be. And he had said this sort of thing before. Dumbo stared at the roses, but her eyes had begun to hurt now. "Into the house!" she commanded. "Your porridge will be cold." They went into the coolness of the whitewashed walls, and the children scrambled up on their chairs. Carl came in from the outhouse where he kept his pets and nodded approvingly as he saw the children eat. The faded shirt stretched across his thick, powerfully sloping shoulders was already dappled with sweat. "Have your breakfast now, darling," Dumbo said concernedly. "You worry more about the animals than about yourself." "Daddy fixed the rabbit's leg," Aaron announced proudly. Carl smiled at the child as he sat down, and Dumbo felt a flash of jealousy. She decided to win a smile with a trick that never failed. "Some day Daddy's going to have a daughter to worry about -- and then he'll have ho time for rabbits." Carl kept his head down, scooping porridge into his mouth. "We have to have a baby girl," Dumbo persisted, disappointed. "Isn't that so darling?" Behind his rimless glasses Carl's pale blue eyes shuttled briefly. "Your Daddy," Dumbo switched to the children, "just lives for the day when we'll have our own little... " "For Christ's sake T Carl's spoon clattered into the dish, and his shoulders worked beneath the straining shirt. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Of course we've got to have a girl. Now will you please sit down and eat your own breakfast? Will you please?" D umbo smiled happily and took her seat. Carl had given her the reassurance she wanted. It was good to know she was loved, and yet the disturbing new thoughts thudded continuously in her head. Who ever heard of a name like Dumbo? She should be called something different.' A nice womajily, motherly name. Something like... perhaps... Victor... no, that's a man-name... Victoria would be nice... She finished her porridge and brought a plateful of smoking griddle-cakes to the table. The children chirped excitedly. They ate in comparative silence for a while, then Dumbo felt the pressure build up again. "Carl, darling. I don't like being called Dumbo. It isn't a nice name. I want to be called Victoria." Carl abruptly stopped chewing and looked at her with bleak, unfriendly eyes. "You didn't take your medicine this week. Did you?" "I did," Dumbo answered quickly. "You know I never miss it." She could not remember having seen Carl look at her like that ever before, and she was afraid. IF "Don't lie to me, Dumbo." "But I..." "Into the bedroom, Dumbo." Carl stood up and told the boys to continue eating. He followed Dumbo into the bedroom, took the black hypodermic gun from its case and poured three drops into the chamber from Dumbo's egg-shaped medicine bottle. "I'm disappointed in you, Dumbo," Carl said, his thick fingers husking audibly against each other as he primed the gun's pressure cylinder. For a moment Dumbo considered the almost blasphemous act of resisting her husband's will, but Carl gave her no chance. He pinned her big soft body to the wall with his forearm and fired the hypodermic into her throat. The charge felt ice cold, stinging. "Don't forget it again," Carl said, putting the gun away. Dumbo blinked back tears. Why was Carl being so unkind? He knew she put her duty to him and the children above everything. And she never omitted her weekly shot. Back at the table Carl ate in silence until his plate was clear. He got up, kissed the three boys and went to the door. Morning light caught his spectacles, turning the lenses into miniature suns. "I'm going to the village after lunch," he said to Dumbo, "so check the larder this morning." "All right, darling. We need coffee." "Don't try to remember it -- just check it." "All right, darling." When he had gone Dumbo began tidying the cottage aware once more of the pain biind her eyes. The children played with the remains of the breakfast, and Dumbo left well enough alone, thinking idly that she might like to go into the village in the afternoon with Carl. Finally the boys' quiet absorption with the scraps degenerated into horseplay, and Dumbo determinedly pushed them outside. It was a long time since she had been to the village, and if she got through her work early... "Lend me your egg, Mum." It was Aaron, the four-year-old. "I want to play with it." Dumbo laughed. "I have no egg, sweetie. We haven't had eggs in the house for years." "That's a big lie," Aaron said accusingly. "You have an egg! In your bedroom. In there." Dumbo hardly heard. Why were there no eggs in the house? Eggs are so good for children. That settled it. She would go to the village with Carl and attend to the shopping herself. It was so long since she had been there she had almost forgotten... Her thoughts returned to Aaron. "That isn't an egg, silly," she said, ushering the child out. "That's my medicine bottle. It just looks like an H Cgg Aaron refused to be ushered. "It is an egg. I know 'cause David told me. David boiled it last week, but he must have boiled it too much 'cause it wouldn't crack." "Well, that was very naughty of David," Dumbo said, feeling faint heart-whispers of alarm. 'That's my medicine bottle, and Daddy doesn't like anyone to touch it." She had no idea what was in the little bottle, but she sensed that boiling it might do it harm. Carl stored the main supply in the coolest part of the outhouse. Aaron looked gleefully over his shoulder. "Are you going to spank David?" "Perhaps," Dumbo said numbly. "I'm not sure." She found it difficult to speak. The pain behind her eyes had grown worse, and she had just realized that, although the family had lived at the cottage for many years, she had hardly ever set foot outside its neat, white picket fence. And it was so long since she had been to the village, she was no longer sure of the way. II D umbo brooded over it during the morning. The act of worrying was strange to her, but deep wells of comfort within her broad, heavy body seemed to be drying up. Under the ankle-length dress insistent perspiration swept her skin so that she walked with an unpleasant, rubbery slither of thighs. Several times she was tempted to shorten a dress to a more comfortable length, but it would have made Carl angry, and she already annoyed him once that day. Her purpose in life was to give Carl love and happiness, not to annoy him. Carl returned from the fields early, carrying a scythe with a broken handle. He ate lunch quickly and, with only a perfunctory check on the pets, settled down on the back porch of repair the scythe. He worked in silence, massive shoulders bowed in what looked, to Dumbo, strangely like loneliness. In spite ol the distraction of her headache, she felt a pang of unhappiness. She went out and knelt beside him. Carl glanced up, and his eyes were suddenly sick. "See to the children," he said. "They're asleep. The heat..." "Then find something else to do." Dumbo walked away blindly and began cleaning the already clean kitchen. A few minutes later Carl came in. Dumbo turned to him hopefully. "I'm going to the village now," he said flatly. "Where's the list?" Dumbo gave him the paper and watched from the door as he went out through the front gate and walked down the path to the river. She wished things were better, that she was pregnant again, this time with the girl child Carl wanted so desperately. That would make things good again, perhaps even better than they had ever been before. Almost before she understood what was happening, Dumbo found herself out through the gate, out into lows, and following Carl towards the village. At first she was afraid, then her excitement became too strong. She could give the excuse that he always forgot to bring eggs, and, anyway, it would be fun to go into the village and see other people again after all this time. Dumbo kept well IF behind Carl, now determined not to be seen too soon. Carl turned right at the river, walked along the bank for ten minutes, crossed a ford of flat stones and climbed the steep, grassy hill on the far side. Dumbo waited cautiously until Carl had vanished over the crest before she gathered up her skirts and crossed the river. Going up the hill, she guessed the village must be visible from the top because Carl had often made the round trip in less than an hour, Heat and exertion in her heavy, shapeless garments made Dumbo's head feel worse, but she was keyed up at the prospect of seeing the village, the stores, the people. She'd walk with Carl a little while even if he was mad at her. On the dusty crest she shielded her eyes from the sun and peered down the other side. She found herself looking at featureless grasslands which spread without interruption of the distant horizons. There was no village. S waying slightly with the shock. Dumbo glimpsed the movement of Carl's faded pink shirt as he scrambled down the hill below her. He was heading towards an object which Dumbo's first brimming glance had missed. It was as large as five or six cottages in a line, and the outlines were blurred with climbing grasses; but to Dumbo it lobked like a huge cylinder of black metal lying on its side at the edge of the plain. An inexplicable reaction made her look upwards at the sky, then she sank weakly to her knees. Carl reached the cylinder, confidently pulled open a door and vanished into the interior. Dumbo waited for him to reappear, wondering numbly why the world had gone mad. Was she sick? Could that thing actually be a village? The heat of the blistering afternoon pressed in around her, making her head swim in a blur of marching colors. Unseen birds chittered continuously. Some time later Carl emerged from the cylinder with a box in his arms and came up the hill towards her. An instinct warned Dumbo it was now imperative to keep out of sight. She backed through the dry grass on hands and knees then ran down the faint path to the ford. Across the river she realized there was no chance of making it to the bend before Carl reappeared on the skyline. She threw herself into a mass of orange-colored scrub and crouched in the sudden privacy of tangled twigs and clattering leaves. Carl came down to the ford but did not cross. He upended the box, throwing a number of glittering objects into the water, then turned and went back over the hill towards the cylinder. The objects flashed sunlight as they bobbed away on the current. Dumbo got to her feet, thankful for the unexpected opportunity to get back to the cottage unseen, but she was curious about the contents of the box. It was, she decided, worth one further risk. She ran downstream for a short distance for a closer look at the floating objects. They looked like IF little glass boxes, each of which contained a small ball of some whitish substance. Clinging to projecting roots and leaning dangerously over the bank, Dumbo managed to snatch one from the warm, sluggish water. She examined it closely. The box was oblong, about as big as her hand, and the two smaller faces were of black, opaque material. It was too light to be glass and strangely cold to her touch. Inside the box, floating languidly in clear fluid, was a human eye. The red cord of the optic nerve snaked around it, terminating in a tiny silver plug. Dumbo hurled the box in the river and ran, doubled over, frantically whipping her head from side to side to fling thin nets of vomit clear of her huge, soft body. Ill I n the gray light of morning Dumbo partially opened her eyes and smiled. This was the time she like best, lying in the dark warmth of her bed, before the unwelcome and unstoppable invasion of identity filled the peaceful vacuum of her mind. She stirred contentedly and let her eyes open a little further. The bedroom ceiling looked wrong. Dumbo sat up in bed, knuckling her eyes fiercely. The ceiling was wrong. In place of the familiar white plaster was an expanse of riveted gray metal, more like part of a ship than a rural cottage. It was as though she had been moved into strange surroundings during the night but -- she looked around -- this waher room all right. All the simple items of furniture were in their usua places. She walked to the window amlooked out at the front garden, bu it too was wrong. The fence was still there, but no it was made of crude stakes am wire, and inside it there were m flowers. Her roses had been replacet by worm less clumps of dark gree; foliage. What was it David had said. You mean these green things? Dumbo brushed tangled hair awa from her face and hurried to the children's room, fighting down a sudden dread; but they were there as always, stretched on their beds in extravagant postures of sleep. She listened at the door of Carl's room and heard his regular breathing. Her family appeared to be safe; but, as she glanced around the cottage's central kitchen in the increasing daylight, she saw that the walls too had turned to gray metal. They had a patchy, slightly makeshift appearance. Moving with quick, frightened steps in the crawling gloom, Dumbo went back to her own room, got into bed and pulled the sheets up to her chin. The first coherent thoughts came some time later, and with them the knowledge that the changes in her surroundings had been accompanied by changes inside her head. She found herself able to think, to remember. # am not on Earth. I am on another world which I reached by starship with Carl.  do not live in a white-washed stone cottage . I live in a house which Carl must have built from bits of the ship. There is no nearby community. There is only the hulk of the ship, and Carl' goes there when we need supplies. Dumbo's mind had begun to work with a speed she found exhilarating. For years she had been trying to run in waist-high water, now she was reaching shallows, gaining speed, beginning to fly. Thought crowded upon thought, memory upon deduction. Why did  not understand all this before? Easy -- because Carl was giving me a drug. Why do I understand it now? Easy -- because David destroyed the current batch of the drug. Why was Carl giving me the drug? I'm not sure. Could it be that... ! Dumbo tried to pull back from the mental precipice, but she was too late. Why the eyes in plastic boxes? In the river? S he dragged the bedclothes up over her face and lay without moving until the sun had risen and the boys were marauding noisily through the house, naked and shouting for breakfast. While she was cooking it, she heard Carl begin to move behind his door. Dumbo tensed up as he came into the kitchen; but he, at least, had not changed. She watched him move about the new, drab world, half expecting him to look round through her at any moment and reach for the hypo gun. But his pale blue eyes, behind their flakes of glass, remained disinterested and impersonal. Dumbo was relieved and somehow disappointed. After all, she was a woman -- his wife. There ought to be more to it than this. They lived together, and she had given him children. Mysteries and horrors did not cancel out that sort of relationship. She set the table for breakfast, really seeing things for the first time, testing her new powers. The chairs were all of sleek weightless metal -- that was because the starship would have had chairs and they were easily portable; but the big kitchen table and cupboards were wooden and homemade. The range on which she cooked with a log fire had been fashioned from some kind of heavy machine casing, but the cups and dishes were beautifully styled in brilliant, glass-smooth plastic. In a way she did not mind the changes, except for the fact that outside the window was a garden full of dark green things. She was going to miss the roses. "I've made your favorites this morning," she said, carrying a smoking tray to the table. "Griddlecakes." Carl stared down at them, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. "That's great. That's really great. My favorite breakfast every day -- every God-damned day in life. You're some cook, Dumbo." The older boys giggled appreciatively. Dumbo opened her mouth to hit back, then realized it would have been a mistake. Carl always spoke to her like that, and she never answered back. That's why she was IF called Dumbo instead of... her memory baulked -- could it be Victoria? Anyway, the point was that Carl acted as though he hated her, and this made the mystery of their past even deeper. Suppose the starship had made a forced descent on an empty world, with no hope of ever being found. Further suppose she had been the only woman on board, perhaps married to one of the crew, and Carl had murdered all the others so that he could have her. It might account for the use ducing drug -- but it explained nothing else. The day was hot, sunny and uneventful. Carl spent most of the time working in his fields. Surveying her surroundings from the front of the house, Dumbo noted that the sloping grain fields had not been part of the fantasy world. She wondered if the crop was indigenous to the planet or if starships normally carried seed as part of a survival kit. Assuming the ship had been lost, they had been lucky to alight on this perfect pastoral world -- but perhaps it had not been that way at all. Carl might have abducted her and brought her here purposely, to escape from something. Dumbo contented herself with the task of caring for the children and the house. It was, after all, woman's work. She could lie low for another day or two and, provided the drug had had no permanent effect, simply wait for all answers to emerge from her memory. And perhaps the explanation would be sane and reasonable, and things would be won' derful again. Dumbo began to feel hopeful. During the night she remembered her brother. IV C rossing the river in daytime had been easy, but by starlight the flat stones of the fprd were mere water-borne shadows of uncertain shape and position. Dumbo slipped once and went knee-deep in water with a splash. The noise frightened her. She stared about her in the darkness, suddenly aware that this was an alien world where at night even the vegetation might be hostile. The tree's not a tree , she remembered a stray line, when there's nobody there on the heath. Shivering unhappily, she stepped on to the bank and moved up the hill in the direction of the starship. The mental pictures of her brother had appeared abruptly. At first she had thought they might be of a husband -- this tall, rangy, fair-haired youngster with the intelligent eyes -- but the emotional response was wrong. She knew the way a woman felt about her man, the way she felt about Carl. There was an immediate affection and warmth here, but an indefinable sexual blankness, the drawing of a line which meant womb-sharing. The same flesh and blood. At that point the need to know more had become too urgent to resist. From the crest of the hill, the starship was almost invisible in the darkness. As she walked down to it, dress slapping wetly on her shins, the ship's outlines refused to be defined. It seemed to crawl on the ground, dissolve, shake like jelly, reach gleeful hands into the sky. Dumbo watched her own feet and kept walking until she was close enough for her eyes to map the hull's contours. She had trouble finding the door; but once the handle was in her hand, instinct took over. The lever clicked sideways easily, and the door opened towards her. There was light inside. Dumbo sensed to run, but there was a cold stillness to the light which suggested that it always shone, even when there was nobody there to notice. She went up a narrow metal stair into a corridor which curved away for a short distance on each side, ending in featureless metal doors. The light came from a tube which ran the full length of the corridor ceiling. Two sections of it were fainter than the others, and a third had dulled to a cloudy amber. Dumbo hesitated, then went to the right. Cold air puffed out around her as she opened the door. The large room beyond it was dimly lit and filled with rack after rack of transparent plastic boxes. Dumbo slammed the door shut but not before she had glimpsed the rows of nameless organs -- glistening brown, pale blue; red-veined. She pressed both hands to her lifting stomach and breathed deeply for a moment, snatching air. The other door opened into a shorter transverse corridor which led to several doorways at her level and, by way of an open metal stair and catwalk, to a similar set of rooms above. Some of the doors were closed, others lay open. Dumbo looked into the nearest room -- it was tiny and contained a number of long, metallic objects on a stand. Rifles, she thought, feeling the vivid stains of memory flow into yet another compartment of her mind. She opened two lockers and found pistols and grenades. She touched the luminous dials of the grenades' time fuses, frowning thoughtfully -- it appeared that not all her regained memories would be pleasant. The second room along the corridor was larger and more brightly lit than the others. In the center of it was a long, white table supported on a single, complicated pedestal. Around the walls were gleaming, incomprehensible machines and instruments, the sight of which failed to evoke any responsive wash of thought, even then. She closed the memory. I was a stranger here, she thought. N one of the others rooms on the bottom level were of interest, except the one which had obviously been a combined galley and mess. The chairs were all gone -- they were back at the house -- but one of the cupboards still contained cups and dishes. The sight of the familiar glowing utensils in the alien surroundings gave Dumbo a vague emotional wrench. On the upper level she chose the central room first. Her reaction to the five massively cushioned chairs and curving instruIF ment arrays was so strong that it caused a moment of nearly physical pain. She crossed the faintly lit room to touch the dusty seats and blank gray screens. I knew this place, she thought wonderingly, and yet it's so... mechanical. Only a trained engineer could have been at home in this room. Could she have been a pilot? Dumbo turned her head to drink in more of the strange, yet almost familiar environment, then she glanced over her shoulder. In the shadows behind the door stood five helmeted figures. She leapt back awkwardly, but the figures were only empty suits, clipped to the wall. Their hoses and cables hung loose, and behind the faceplates was nothing but gaping blackness. Two of the suits had triangular yellow flashes on the shoulders and name plates cemented to the chests. Dumbo went close enough to read. be Carl, Dumbo thought, moving to the next. Dumbo pressed both hands to her forehead. The name Lucas meant something to her -- but what? This could be' her brother's suit, and if that were the case then one of the unmarked suits might have been hers. But there was something not quite right about the idea of brother and sister on the same military... "You haven't been taking your medicine -- have you, Dumbo?" The voice was Carl's, and it came from close behind. Dumbo spun, arms over her face, but Carl had his hands in his pockets. He was smiling unpleasantly. "I have been taking it," Dumbo blurted instinctively. "You gave me a shot yourself." "Then you've been playing tricks with it. That's bad, Dumbo, very bad." Dumbo experienced a new emotion -- resentment. "Don't speak to me like that. And my name isn't Dumbo. It's..." "Go on," Carl said interestedly. "I want to see how far you've got." "I don't know. That part is harder than the rest... but it isn't Dumbo. Don't call me that any more." "Poor Dumbo!" Carl reached forward caressingly, grabbed a handful of Dumbo's hair and twisted. His oval face was priestly with hatred. "Get back to the house," he whispered. Dumbo sobbed with pain. "What did you do with my brother? And the others? You killed them!" Carl's fingers relaxed their grip instantly. "You say that to me? You say that to... me!" He shuddered. "Carl is a gfver of life. Understand that. Carl is a holy giver of life. He has never killed anything." "Then where's my brother? And the others?" "Why should I have killed anybody?" "Because," Dumbo said triumphantly. "I was the only woman on the ship." "You!" Carl stepped back slowly, appalled. "You wanted me to yourself." "You'll pay for saying that, Dumbo." Carl raised his fist, then relaxed it deliberately, one finger at a time. "Listen to me -- you never had a brother. There was nobody on this ship but you and me. We were in the thick of a tactical emergency, so we tried to take the ship to Lark IV by ourselves. The suit you t were looking at when I came in was your own." Dumbo looked at the stiffly leaning pressure skin with its black maw of a face and bodly stencilled nameplate. "But..." "That's right." Carl laughed softly. "Hello, Victor!" V S omehow, incredibly, Dumbo was not angry. Almost of their own accord her hands crept down the front of her heavy dress and cradled the sagging, scarred belly. Perhaps it was too soon for a reaction, perhaps when she had recovered all her past and was able to compare it with the present... "There had been a surprise attack in the region of Lark IV," Carl was saying. "The losses were heavy, and Sector Command was screaming for medical support, so you and I tried to get through with an organ bank. We almost made it, but they hit us fair and square with a warp scrambler. You know what that means, Dumbo?" She shook her head. "I thought not, but you did then. For months after we limped down on to this world, you sat up at nights with the ship's ten-inch scope trying to catch a glimpse of our home galaxy. You should have known better. You and I were a lock, and somebody had spun the wheels. Somebody with a bad memory." Carl pulled off his glasses and began polishing the lenses, blue eyes peering myopically into another existence. "There we were on a completely empty world. A clean, .fresh world, ideally suited for life -- and there was nothing for us to do but grow old and die." Carl's voice grew louder. "And Carl could not allow that. It would have been a terrible wrong -- because the only obstacle standing in the way of Life was a few ounces of redundant male flesh. "I had everything that was needed -- the organ bank was in good condition then. The individual power cells are failing now, and I'm discarding more and more units every week, but at that time I was able to produce a usable set of basic female organs and glands for you. One hypno session after the operations tive took care of the rest. "That's your illustrious background. How do you like it, mother ?" Dumbo twisted the signet ring she wore on the third finger left hand. It turned easily on bearings of perspiration, but she felt strangely untouched, strong. "I'm sorry, Carl -- you can't punish me like that. Don't you see? The things you have just said might have destroyed Victor Lucas, but he can never hear them. He doesn't IF exist any more. I'm... Victoria Lucas." Carl shivered in the cool stale air "You're right. My logical faculty must be getting rusty. The whole idea of punishment assumes continuity of personality, and you won't have that -- not after your next shot. Are you going to walk back to the house, or do I drag you?" D umbo took a deep breath. "Why bother with the shots when we don't need them? There's no point in pretending all this has made me feel deliriously happy, but I can take tilings as they are, without the illusions. I ought to hate you, but you did too good a job on me with those glands. I really am a woman -- and I'm prepared to go on being your wife." Carl hit her back-handed, thick fingers hanging loose like flails. She dropped back against one of the control chairs and hung on to it, staring up at him in dismay. "My wife!" White coronas glowed around Carl's eyes. "You freak ! You nothing! You think I ever touched you?" "I don't remember... but what then? Our children?" " Our children!" Carl spoke eagerly, suddenly seeing the potency of the new weapon. "Three nice kids, but what a family! You for a mother, and three unknown soldiers for fathers. You looked into the organ bank for a moment, didn't you, Dumbo? Recognize anybody?" The words took time to reach Dumbo. When they did she stood up and moved out past Carl. "That's right, mother," he whispered in her ear as she went by. He followed her down the metal stair towards the lower level. "But don't take it so personally, Dumbo. There are sound genetic reasons in favor of the children having different fathers -- it's all for the good of our future community. Think instead of how lucky you are. Yes, lucky! No man could ever touch you and still keep his food down, yet, thanks to the wonders of medical science, you've had three children to as many different men. And you'll go on having them, until you produce the girls we need." Carl hung on to the stair rail so that he could watch Dumbo's face while he spoke. "Of course, I was lucky too. A ship like this doesn't carry frozen semen, you know. If it wasn't f# die fact that the organ bank caters 'to even the most drastic type of injury, there would only have been me -- and that really would have been a fate worse than death. "You hear me, Dumbo? Why don't you say something?" Dumbo reached the lower level and passed the door to the longitudinal corridor. "Not that way, mother." Carl caught her shoulder from behind. "She wrenched free and ran. Carl gave a startled grunt and came after her, his footfalls speeding up as he remembered the armory. Dumbo burst through the door, throwing herself towards the rifle rack. Carl's hand raked down her back. She snatched one of the weapons by the barrel and swung it blindly, hoping to find Carl's belly. He had fallen IF forward on to his hands and knees, and the rifle butt opened his face like a purse. He rolled on to his back, unconscious, with a bright red bubble quivering at each nostril. Dumbo placed the rifle butt on his upturned throat and bore down with all the weight of her big, soft body. VI M orning sunlight streamed across the breakfast table, making it glow like an altar. Dumbo set out five dishes of hot porridge and went to fetch the children who were tumbling noisily outside. She hummed quietly to herself as she watched the boys eat, taking pride in the very smell of the good, simple food. As soon as she was sure the children had everything they needed, she loaded a wooden tray and carried it into Carl's room. "Come on, darling," she said brightly. "I know you don't feel like eating, but you must make the effort." Carl sat up in the bed and touched his bandaged face. "What is this?" The words came slowly through swollen lips. "It's your breakfast, of course. I've made your favorites today. Now eat up so you'll get well quickly." He stared up at Dumbo for a moment, then his face relaxed. "Well, I'll be damned," he said wonderingly. "I thought you were going to kill me, but you must have realized you couldn't make out here on your own." "Eat up, darling. Don't let your breakfast get cold." Dumbo fluffed up the pillows to support Carl's back. Carl shook his head, chuckling .with relief. "Well, I'll be damned. And you even had sense enough to go back on the shots." Dumbo leaned down on the bed to get her face close to his. "Correction," she said coldly. "I haven't taken a shot. Not yet. I took a fresh lot of the drug from the store and primed the gun with it, but I haven't taken the shot yet. I wanted to wait." She glanced at the watch on her wrist. "Wait for what?" Carl pushed the tray away. "What are you doing with my watch?" "I waited to see your face, of course. I could have taken the shot earlier, when you were still sleeping, but I would have become Dumbo again and wouldn't have understood what was happening. Would I?" "Get off my bed," Carl said thickly. "I'm getting up. Where's the hypo gun?" "Don't rush, darling." Dumbo pushed him back on to the pillows. "Let me tell you what I've been doing while you were asleep. First of all, I brought you here from the ship, and that took ages because I had to drag you most of the way. Then I put you to bed and fixed your face and a little while ago, while the oven was warming up, I went back to the ship and... she glanced at the watch again, "... listen, darling." Carl pushed her away savagely, using his knees. He half rose in the as the sound reached the house. It was a distant multiple explosion. "What was that?" His shocked eyes hunted across her face. "That, darling, was your organ bank. I had no idea the grenades would make such a noise. I hope they haven't worried the children. I must see how they are." She paused at the door and looked back. Carl was kneeling naked on the bed. "Oh, yes," Dumbo said. "I musn't forget this." She took the hypo gun from a pocket, fired the charge into her wrist and went out to the startled boys. By the time she had washed up the breakfast things and tidied the room, the walls no longer seemed like metal. She went to the window and looked out. Her roses shone redly in the peaceful morning air. It was going to be yet another perfect day. Dumbo smiled as she watched the boys at play. She hoped the next child would be a girl because that was what Carl wanted more than anything else in the world. And all she wanted was to be his Coming next month in IF! Great new science-fiction novel by the author of Who? and many more! by Algis Budrys Robert Silverberg J. T. McIntosh Lin Carter -- and many more! E Read America's favorite science-fiction magazine, IF! # IF IF m Short Story The Forgotten Gods of Earth by Andrew J. Offutt In the haunted caverns beneath ancient Earth he found an enemy that even he could not conquer! K ymon of Kir gazed up at the black castle towering into the dim sky, its turrets and minarets resembling dark fingers pointing the way to the forgotten gods of Earth. The Mother Planet of Man had come upon sad times, he thought, when she was reduced to scattered castle-keeps haunted by the ghosts of her illustrious history. Some said magic ruled Earth now; some said science, remembered by the sorcerers who made the Mother Planet an inhospitable place for all save themselves. Inhospitable enough it was without the scientist-sorcerers, Kymon thought, a planet full of desolation and twisted black remains of oncewas. The descendants of Earth called her Atramentos, now, and shunned the blue-black ball circling tired old Sol. Kymon chuckled, the deep-throated sound of a giant of a man from a barbarian land. Men called Earth "barbarian", too, but not those who had visited his own dark Kir. If magic reigned here, only a Kirian could prevail, Kymon knew -- and at that a Kirian with a goodly sword and the muscle to back it up. Well, he thought, soon the black mage Gundrun and all his demonic guardians would go to meet the somber gods of Atramentos. Or he himself would. He loosened the pommel of his long glaive, Goreater, glanced at the ring on his finger and mounted the hill to the castle. A small man named Fejj had told him of the place. In the fabled Black Castle of Atramentos, he had said, lay the Princess Yssim, captive of the sorcerer Gundrun. A comely girl she was, with a body to bring fire into a man's veins -- or so she had been, when she had become Gundrun's prisoner. The oastle was rendered impregnable by his spells and his demons. The princess alone knew the whereabouts of the treasuretrove of the pirate Senek, destroyed these twenty years in the Coalsack. Gems and precious metals there were, Fejj had said in his narroweyed hiss, to ransom Emperor Titus himself. And Kymon had nodded and listened. The girl was merely sweetening to the spoils. A man such as Kymon did not go about rescuing women without good reason. Not, certainly, when they were so easily come by and, those of royal blood, notoriously spoiled and dangerous. O ver cups of wine in a dim tavern in Yttocs, on Sark, the two men had agreed to share the treasure. Then because Kymon was a barbarous Kirian and such men could be trusted to rely upon their muscles and ability rather than shrewd double dealing, Fejj had told him how to reach the place. He had told, too, of the power of the ring he wore; while it made no magic it negated all spells cast upon the wearer. Guns and science were of no value on the planet men once called Earth, he had said; only magic and copperbacked steel could prevail there. And Kyman had chuckled and showed him his copper-pommeled sword without telling him how he had come by it. Besides, he had reminded the little man, Kirians were not allowed guns anyhow. They had made their pact and left, coming by the passage-money the same way Kymon had got the sword. On the great ship slashing through space Fejj had said, "Few men would I trust with the knowledge I have imparted to you Kymon of Kir. But 'tis well-known that barbarians are not back-stabbers, and -- " And shortly after Kymon had been thus reminded that Fejj was no longer necessary, the little man had met with a terrible accident and had gone to repose in the ship's refrigerators until planetfall. Kymon found that the ring fit his little finger perfectly. Now, gazing up at the castle, Kymon chuckled again. The universe was full of stupid men, he thought, and the myth of barbarian honor served the men of Kir well. He set his foot on the hill on which stood the castle. The monster bird came winging down like a giant stormcloud heavy with rain, its leathery wings flapping with the sound of thunder. It paused above his head, steadying itself on wings the size of space-freighters, then folded them and careened down at him. IF Full four bursts from the photon gun Kymon wasted on the bird before 'he believed Fejj's words and slung the gun away. Goreater ate. Clapping a hand over the scratches laying bare the great sheaves of muscle in his chest, Kymon looked down at the flopping body of the bird. It writhed even in death, some awlful virescent ichor bubbling from its neck. Then it vanished. "Steel backed by copper!" Kymon shouted and swished the sword joyously, spitting in the direction of the discarded pistol. Then he went on, paying little attention to the wounds in his big chest. They would heal, as had scores of others. A s he drew nearer he began to feel the strangeness of the place, the evil. Trailing tendrils of wraithy stuff like cobwebs seemed to writhe over his face. He blinked and shook his head and raised his hand to tear his way clear. But his hands touched nothing. There was nothing there; no cobwebs, no tendrils, merely the eerie feel of them. He shivered. Neither man nor beast had been woman-spawned to strike fear to the big barbarian's heart. But this palpable, evil which came of warlocks and shades, the forgotten shadow-world of necromancy and specters, that otherworld of apparitions and divinations and things which a man could feel but not see... these brought a shiver to Kymon and set his teeth a-rattle in his head. He touched the ring, realizing he had not used it, that he had fought and destroyed a sorcerer's demon with nought but his own thews and sword. But now fear laid on him fingers cold as the nordic winds of far-off Kir, tightened them about his heart. Again he shivered. He began to shake. He felt hot water and an atrabilous taste in his mouth and he turned away, whimpering, to flee down the hill. And then, his knees shaking, his hands chill and wet, he realized what was happening. He managed to mouth a foul barbaric curse despite the sorcery-induced fear which was attacking him. As if rooted in quicksand he turned slowly back to the castle. He raised his left hand, aiming the ring at the misty towers. "I defy you," he shouted, and thrice he repeated the words Fejj had taught him. And the ring seemed to come alive, to glow and shimmer and pour strength down his arm. Magic or ancient science, it was effective. The haze vanished. The ghostwebs ceased their invisible twisting. His fear left him. And there before him stood the black castle of Atramentos. No longer was it a shadowy thing of fear and unholy blackness; now it was merely a towering pile of blackest basalt, gleaming liquidly even in the moonless night. The door rose before him, twice his height. A chain with links thick as his thumb was looped through the door handle and secured to great spikes on either side. Growling low in his throat, Kymon drew Goreater. He sucked in a mighty breath and, laying hold of the pommel with both hands, he T# swung the sword far back over his shoulder and brought it whistling down with all the strength of his corded muscles. Shock blazed up his arms like tongues of lightning. The sword rebounded and nearly took off his head. The chain held, rattling. Somewhere laughter rose to fill the air, a windhowling cackle of glee and mockery. Kymon spun. There was nothing. Only the glistening Trinitite plain and the twisted remains of the civilization that had settled Kir, time out of mind. Kymon turned back to the castle, cursing. He bent to examine the door, chain, spikes... and saw that the spike on the left had been driven into the castle wall with such force that it had cracked the masonry. He smiled and sheathed his sword. Laying hold of the chain and the spike's head with both hands, he braced one foot against the wall. Then he drew a deep breath and yanked. There was no loosening, no gradual feeling of give. One moment he was tugging with all his strength, his body shaking with the effort. The next he was sprawling heels-overhead as the spike slid from the wall with a rattle of the chain and a crumbling of stone. Kymon picked himself up and stepped across the forlorn chain. He set a foot against the door and shoved. It swung in without a sound; he had expected a creak from the aged hinges. An odor of death and mouldering corpses rushed out to embrace him. With Goreater ready in his hand lie entered the murkiness of the entryhall. 'T'he serpent was almost upon him a before he knew of its existence. Its shimmering scales rose above him, its xaethic eyes gazed at him like the very fires of blackest hell. Far behind he could see its immense body stretching off along the hallway. He sniffed tihe evil odor of its breath as it 'hissed, felt the blast of fetid air and hurled himself aside as the eyes blazed up like the coals of a stirred fire and shot forward at him. Kymon moved with a swiftness greater even than the reptile's. The great head swished past. Goreater swished after it, bit into the back of its head with a chunking sound. The monster body shivered and lashed in the final torment of death as the head plopped to the floor and rolled away. It exuded a vast pool of nigrescent ichor. The last lash of the terrible tail caught Kymon just below the knees, sending him skidding and sliding along the floor to sprawl in a great room beyond the hall. Even as he came to an abrasive stop he saw the serpentine body shimmer and vanish. Somehow he clung to Goreater. And good it was that he did. "Black devils of Gnish!" he muttered. He got to his feet, crouching, aching and smarting from more than one abrasion. Here there was light, bathing the big room and reflecting back from a gleaming floor of tesselated tile. Approaching him now were men who were not men, alive but not alive -- creatures dead but not dead. Full half a score of them there were, bearing the gaping wounds that had been the violent IF death of them. The eyes of one popped wide, and his black tongue lolled forth as it had at the moment he had been slain by the reptile in some dark yesterday. They advanced, creatures returned to life by Gundrun's evil spells, and Kymon saw himself mirrored in them. These were his predecessors; would-be heroes who had come here on the same mission as his. Now clawed hands rose as they came jerkily at him. The first Kymon met with flashing sword to send his arm flopping away across the floor, black blood spattering forth. The fingers continued to flex and clutch. The shriek ripped from the creature's throat chilled Kymon's very blood. But the howl and gore told him that though these men 'might be dead, they were alive, too, and could be killed... again. He hurled the thing aside, the scarlet stump of its arm pumping out pseudolife. And then Goreater was a flashing, live thing, spattering walls and ceiling and floor with the steaming crimson wake of its terrible smiting. He ran a black giant from Tiamar through and through and yanked free the sword, feeling the dying man's claws tear his arm as he fell. A smallish fellow Kymon seized and gripped by his heels and swung him in an arc to down one, two, three of the others. Then he released the man and heard the revolting popping noise as his skull burst against the wall and spewed forth rank red and gray. Whilst the others shrank back, checked by their awe, Kyman struck the heads from the three men he had downed. Kymon's battle cry ripped from his lips as he spun to the man whose arm he had lopped off. The fellow's head leaped to join his severed arm on the gore-slippery floor. He turned in time to dodge an axe in the hands of a creature whose face was one great wound that had beenripped and shredded in some bygone time by the monster bird outside. Kymon's foot swept up and completed the destruction of that dead face, crushing nose and teeth and bursting eyeballs from their sockets to sail like agates into the air. Blood bathed Kymon's leg in warm stickiness. But four remained now, and Kymon roared at them to come join their comrades. They came, mindless things, restored but temporarily from the dead to serve as fighting machines for the master of this castle of horror. The cry of the maimed and the dying was in Kymon's ears and his veins, and his own battle cry joined them to spur him forward. They fell, gushing forth their carmine juices, their souls leaping forth to meet their liberator, the flashing Goreater. And the awesome sword drank and ate; and once again these men died. The musty halls of that darkling castle reeked and smoked with blood and gore, rang with the fearsome cry of the big barbarian from the mountains of far Kir, with the dying cries of those sent to destroy him. A nd then he stood alone. His nostrils flared as he stood panting, surrounded by the corpses and heads and limbs no longer joined one to the other. His feet were planted in curdling blood. Their blood and his dripped from his hands, trickled warmly down his bare legs. Deliberately, with the unconcerned industriousness of a woodsman cutting trees, he hacked the heads from those not already beheaded. In the event he failed, Gundrun would no longer use these men who should long ago have been walking the afterworld with the shades of their friends. He bellowed out his rage and his challenge. "Gundrun! Blackest creature on Earth's face -- resurrector of slain men! Gundrun! Your oversized sparrow died outside -- your swollen fishing worm in the hall -- and at my feet lie ten heads severed from their decomposing bodies! Gundrun, commander of the legions of hell! Whiat else send you to meet Kymon of Kir?" His voice ran down empty halls, dashed into dark empty rooms and out again, slashed through the thick webs of long undisturbed spiders and set them a-tremble, rose up the long stairway before him, shouted back at him from shrouddraped walls of shiny basalt. He waited. Again he filled his lungs to roar out his challenge, again he flung wide his jaws to shout. Then at the  head of the steps stood Gundrun, black sorcerer of Atramentos. His eyes blazed down at Kymon's as had the dead serpent's. A slender nose arced out between those eyes, hooked like the beak of the prodigious bird. Below that nose writhed tendrils of mustache like the fearwraiths that had touched Kymon outside the warlock's lair. And below the mustache was a lipless slash of a mouth, resembling nothing more than the old wounds of the dead men at Kymon's feet. His body was lost in a long, ungirt robe of unreflecting black. # # ymon of Kir, is it?" Gun drun asked, and he laughed, and Kymon knew then the .source of the disembodied laughter he had heard outside. "And you have destroyed my guardians and penetrated to the very marrow of my keep! Well Kirian, well-met! Join me here, mightiest of men, that I need fear no more such intrusions. Be my guardian of the Black Castle!" Kymon's eyes glittered like the bubbling tar pits of Midaldithon as he stared back at the thaumaturge. "Join you, Hell-creature? Live here as guardian of this tomb? I love life too much to live here with death!" Gundnin's drooping mustaches wriggled like tentacles, and his mouth pretended to smile. He waved his hand, tracing invisible patterns in the air. And the air was filled with the golden glow of a thousand lights; the birdsongs of lutes and the bellybooms of drums and the ululating skirl of pipes. A vision of the finest of succulent foods from every galaxy, the richest wines served in aureate goblets. There were pillows of the softest fabrics and hues. And there were women; slender girls with breasts round and cupped as the goblets, eyes telling of love and desire, hips churning and yearning tolls IF ward him. And there were others, too, deep-chested women with cavernous dark navels winking in their round bellies and bronzed arms to crush a man in their embrace. Kymon gasped; they were Kirian women! Women of ihis own world, their eyes for him and him alone, their bodies coppery chalices of sensuality. Kymon saw, and his great sword was forgotten in his lifeless hand as he started toward them with eyes like those of the dead-alive men he had slain. He dropped the sword, raised his hands. And the vision flickered and faded. Only for a moment did it pale, then it began to return in full color and sound and promise -- but in that brief failing of Gundrun's powers the mists faded from Kymon's eyes and brain as if dissipated by the morning sun. Again his eyes, clear and blazing, glared up the steps at the black-robed man. "Gall you this foul illusion life? Call you the world of men shallow? Nay, sorcerer -- it is your necromancy which is shallow! Your spell has but reminded me of what will be mine when I return to Kir a rich man. Your world is death, and I am here to see that you join the other dead things in it!" He frowned, slowly lowered his head to follow the sorcerer's gaze. And then he knew why the illusion had flickered, why Gundrun stared, why there was the hint of fear in his eyes. Kymon was looking down at the ring. He scooped up his sword and set a foot upon the steps,grinning. And then Gundrun raised his arms, wrists like clean-picked skeletons emerging from loose black sleeves. Blue light flickered and danced at his fingertips. In that instant that he stiffened his arms, pointing his talons at the barbarian, Kymon flung up his hand and pointed the ring. He shouted, three ringing times, "I defy you!" Lightning leaped from Gundrun's fingers. Down at Kymon it crackled in sizzling streams of cobalt blue. It flashed before his face so that he winced and closed his eyes against its searing glare. But he felt nothing; nothing save the power and strength coursing down his arm from the ring, shaking him as his voice had shaken the dusty cobwebs. H e opened his eyes. All around him shimmered the blue-sizzling lightning, but it was checked, held at bay by the power of the ring. With a wild roar he hurled himself up the stairs, holding the ring 'before him and swinging up Goreater. His war cry filled the air. "When came you by that accursed ring?" Gundrun shouted, and fear shrilled his voice. "The ring of Br -- it negates my mag -- get back -- NO!" Gundrun of Atramentos died, screaming and waving his skeletal arms as Goreater bit through his skull and forehead and nose and mouth and neck and was covered to its copper hilt with spurting blood. Kymon left the body where it lay and bounded back down the steps. He waded again through the noisome river of gore with its islands of headless corpses. He rushed down one dim corridor and up another, leaving scarlet prints in his wake. Then 'he found the huge brass-bound door Fejj had described. Goreaiter's first bite split it in twain. Kymon jerked back the hinged half and descended into darkness. And descended. He counted to ten and folded down a finger and began again, and then repeated the action. There were nine-and-forty steps, seven times seven, taking him far into the earth. Yet somehow the air remained fresh, although it grew steadily cooler and damper. He stalked forward into the gloom, wishing he had brought a light. But ahead was a glow. He rounded a corner into light, so sudden and bright that he squinted and put up a hand before his eyes. Then he swung up his dripping glaive as he saw the man. He wore arms and armor, the nosepiece of his helmet making his face a sinister mask. He raised a hand in command to halt, then carried it quickly to his mouth as he sneezed. Kymon grinned, an ugly animal-baring of his teeth. Well he recalled his sojourn in such a place. Dungeons were universally damp and chill. But there was no time for commiserating with the fellow's discomfort. Kymon raised his sword and started toward the small man. e man's hands sprang to his buckle, let belt and sword and pistol clang to the dewy floor. "Thank the gods!" he said nasally. "You've come to rescue the Princess Yssim -- and me! Two years have I remained down here, locked in, held here by locks and iron of sorcery. Photon beams had no effect on his locks. Guard he I been, bearing food and water and occasional wine to the poor girl here." He stepped back and extended his arm, offering Kymon a ring bearing one huge key. "It will not open the door," the man said. "Gundrun has sealed it with his spells." Kymon sheathed his sword and took the key. "It will now," he said. "Gundrun and his spells have gone to meet Lilith and Satanas." In the light of a score of ancient globes, fed by some forgotten science or magic in this chthonian place, he peered into the barred cell. She was beautiful. Her hair was liquid gold, flowing down over her shoulders to cap arms round and snowy white. Her bosom was to the liking of any man; it was big, Kirian-big and swaying and shuddering beneath the shift with her excited breathing. The dirty shift she wore, he saw more with interest than compassion, was too thin for the chill dampness of her prison. Her eyes swept his tall figure. He bent to the lock, his eyes shaded by their lids, still on the girl. She was a trifle pale -- but he was not looking at her face. "A man named Fejj sent me hither, princess. He said you alone knew the whereabouts of some treasure... which I promised to him. I came here only to rescue you from that villainous Gundrun. But I have found my treasure..." IF She nodded silently, seeming not to hear his words. Her eyes were bright on the lock. "Ah!" she breathed, as the keys clicked and he swung open the grille. She stood within, lovely and fair, and Kymon thought that never had he seen such a comely woman. He held out a hand. She came toward him --  -- and past. He turned to stare as she fairly hurled herself into the arms of her guard. Kymon sighed. Well, the fellow and he had mentioned two years. In that time a man and a girl who had seen no one else might certainly grow to love one another. Kymon flexed his weary muscles. But such a man! He sighed again, licking his lips as he watched the little guard drink the nectar from Yssim's lips. Well, there was still the treasure. At last they drew apart, and, after gazing long down into the man's eyes, Yssim turned to her rescuer. "Sirdh and I can never thank you enough, O hero. Who are you? Whence came you?" "My name is Kymon. I was born on Kir, but it has been long since I have felt the sun on her mountains." "We are your slaves, Kymon of Kir." "I have no need of slaves," Kymon said. "But... Fejj mentioned that you had knowledge of a great treasure, the horde of Senek. Perhaps..." She smiled. "Aye! Thetreasure trove! Enough for you and me and Sirch and Fejj; enough for a score, a hundred! The space pirate Senek did indeed bury it on Earth. Tis a big planet, but we need not search. It is not I who possess the secret of its whereabouts, Kymon; 'tis Gundrun. He alone knows the secret. You have conquered his guardians and his keep; now we shall wrest the secret from him!" Kymon stared unbelievingly at her for a moment. Wrest the secret from the lips Goreater had cleft in two? He began to curse... and at last to laugh and, laughing, turned to retrace his steps to the open sky, and Why Is Galaxy The World's Most Widely Read SF Magazine? Would you believe: bv Foul Anderson by Hayden Howard by Jack Vance Plus stories and features by Willy Ley, Algis Budrys, Larry Niven and many more -- all in the December IF  Serial Callously the giants from Elsewhen had let a thousand people die. Now they were saving others... but why? by j. t. McIntosh XX S oon the firemen had a water supply again. Wisely they first doused our own side of the river. The powerful jets of the two engines could reach practically every building on this side without having to move. For the first time I had a good look at the blocked New Bridge. It was badly damaged and twisted, yet after the fire it might remain serviceable as a bridge, once the debris on it had been cleared. It was all too clear, however, that there was no chance of clearing it while the fire still raged. Some of the stones were still glowing red, and there was smoldering wood in the pile. In any case, I estimated that without bulldozers it would take a hundred men two days to clear the bridge. Without bulldozers... We were in farming country, and although all the resources of Shuteley itself were on the other side of the river, there were plenty of farms this side. In the little town of Shuteley, England, on the hottest summer of any residents memory, a party of visitors appeared. They were all young, and they were enormous. Moreover, they had a couple of traits that startled the quiet people of Shuteley. The girls in the party wore dresses that dieappeared from time to time; and all of them had an unusual knowledge of what was happening in the town... and what was about to happen. The giants had established a camp on the bank of a river outside of Shuteley. Val Mathers visited their camp to satisfy his curiosity. Then, suddenly, incredibly the whole town went up in flames. And Val's company insured all of Shuteley! I raced to a callbox. There was one among the sheds not a hundred yards away. I picked up the receiver. As I might have guessed, it was dead. The exchange was in Shuteley. In any case, water, debris and heat must have put the overhead wires to the box out of service long since. There was a callbox about a mile back, and it might be working. Sayell should know about communications. Probably, I realized, he was in constant radio contact with his headquarters. I ran back and tried to talk to him. But he was busy and waved me away. My suggestion about the brook had enabled him to be busy; he was quite certain, however, that I could not repeat the triumph. The fire hoses had been turned across the river, and rather unexpectedly they had made some impression. On the other side a fairly large semicircular area was free of fire, partly because nearly everything that would burn was already consumed, certainly everything highly inflammable, and partly because, being next to the river, its mean temperature was not as high as areas in the center of the holocaust. The water as it fell still rose in clouds of steam in places, but as the cooling jets played everywhere the glow of heat was fading, and the redness of everything visible was now a reflection of the flames still leaping farther back. Indeed, the eye had now become used to the overall redness and canceled it out. Just as, when one wears dark glasses, it is possible after a while to see colors as they really are. Everything was red. But bluered didn't look the same as greenred. There was less smoke than I'd have imagined. Although my eyes stung and watered all the time, that too could be ignored, like the various smells; and for a long time I had not choked, coughed, or been out of breath. I suspected that there must, after all, be a slight breath of air away from us. Perhaps it was a breeze created only by the fire, sucking air from our side. The firemen were not attempting a desperate enterprise. Now that there was ah apparent toehold across in the blazing town, one of the engines was going to attempt to cross the dry river bed. # P ersonally I thought the attempt was several kinds of a mistake. The last few minutes had shown that the two engines, given an adequate supply of water, could accomplish something from this side of the river. They had won back a little from the fire. And even if it was scorched earth that they gained, an area that the fire had finished with and no longer wanted, even if the area represented only a fraction of one per cent of the total area of Shuteley, the process could be repeated. Unfortunately there was no road along this side of the bank, but the engines could travel along the lanes and reach the bank from other vantage points -- the one from which we had first seen the fire, for example -- and do what they had done here. The ladders could be used to enable water to be sprayed over a wide area on the other side. Of course it would turn to steam. But that was all right; it took about six times as much heat to convert water to steam as it did to raise it to boiling point. Also I thought that it was too soon to attempt to cross to an area which had so recently been red with inner heat. Water falling on hot stone or metal draws off surface heat, but the glow wells up again to the surface. I doubted that even the firemen in their asbestos boots could stand anywhere across the river yet, and I was quite certain that the rubber tires of the machines would be burned off them in seconds. And although the heat here was just bearable (because we had to bear it), we had been insulated all along by the breadth of the river, which, though dry, had never burned. Across the river the firemen would be on ground, which had only recently been surrendered by the flames, and that much nearer the heart of the blaze and its fierce, searing heat. Besides, I didn't think the vehicles had one chance in a hundred of making the crossing. They were ordinary fire tenders, designed rather for getting to the scene of an outbreak at top speed than crossing impossible terrain. They might cross grass or rough country, but they weren't tanks or tractors. They had four rubber-shod wheels (intact, IF true, because someone had had the sense to shield the vehicles with wet tarpaulins), and they were heavy. The bed of the river was a U. Not a deep U, for the Shute was never deep, not even where it ran into the much larger river that flowed on to the sea. Yet the Shute was no brook. It had flowed steadily along the same course for thousands of years, bed had gradually deepened, silted in the middle, perhaps, but with eversteepening outer walls. Even if a tender could drive down one side of the bank and cross the swampy bed, could it ever get up the incline on the other side? I was certain it couldn't. SayelJ, however, was determined. He wasn't going to wait, either. A dozen men were stamping along the bank, grassy here, trying to establish where best to make the attempt. A fleeting thought occurred to me. Sayell was probably no fool, even if his brother was. He was probably reasonably well trained in fire-fighting techniques. But he was no genius, and the situation which faced him had never faced anybody before. Fires don't wait for the experts, the bosses, the generals, politicians and scientists to turn up. In an hour or two this area would be swarming with people ail of whom could have handled the situation better than any of us, between cups of tea. I remembered, irreverently but not irrelevanttians' fire. Some man-mountain could have done the same for us, if only he happened to be there. Unfortunately, we were right out of man-mountains at the present time. Chance had elected poor, honest, not-too-bright John Sayell as the man in charge. I knew already that he'd be pilloried. Whatever he did, he should have done better. If Shuteley was annihilated -- and anyone from this side of the river could see it already was -- well, he couldn't have done worse. But he still didn't have to commit the criminal irresponsibility of staking all on the impossible, thus abandoning the small, yet important, things which were possible. I strode through his crew. "Sayell," I said. The look he turned on me was that of a tortured man. "Mr. Mathers," he said, being civil with an enormous effort, "you've done two good things tonight. You found a water supply, and you got your wife to clear the bystanders out of our way. But now we have to -- " "Now you have to do the right thing," I said, "because there's nobody else to do anything. Have you checked the footbridges?" He said a coarse, derisive word. "They're wooden," he said. "What chance have they? For God's sake, man, get out of my way." "For God's sake, man," I said, "remember that you didn't think it worthwhile looking at the Winsihell brook." That didn't reach him. Debating points don't register when you're in the glare of disaster, when you only have to turn your head to see it. "There's the fire," he said. His voice, I noticed for the first time, was raw. He had been shouting. "We're going to put it out. Please let me get on with it, Mathers." As he dropped the "Mr." for the first time, his self-control broke again, and he nodded. "Out of my way, man! Or by God I'll knock you senseless with my axe." I stood back. Perhaps I should have fought with him, tried to depose him as overlord of the tiny, laughable army which was the only weapon with which the Great' Fire of Shuteley could be fought, at the only time when it mattered, when something still might be done. But what was the use? He knew something about fighting fires. And I, apart from fire risk, knew nothing. I had failed long before Sayell had a chance to fail. It was up to me, indirectly and yet significantly, to do all I could to see that something like this could never happen in Shuteley. A few years ago, a few months ago, even a few hours ago, I could have saved hundreds of lives which had now ended. M y thoughts stopped there. In a disaster such as this, there comes a time when you have to count the cost, but it's only natural to delay it as long as possible. In the back of my mind I had thought all along that I wasn't really here. I don't know what happened. Maybe there was a small fire among ithe timbered houses on the green. Maybe people stood around watching it, until it spread and they had to move away. Maybe it was gradual, quick but steady, and every area was cleared as the fire took over. Maybe nobody died in the fire. If it was steady enough in growing, that could happen. There must have been a lot of noise. People couldn't have missed what was happening watching TV, because quite early on the electricity must have gone and all the TV's must have gone off. Dina would have been one of the first to know what was going on. She must have enjoyed it. A magnificent bonfire, the greatest spectacle she had ever seen. Dina, I suddenly realized with utter certainty, had escaped the disaster. Despite her feeble-mindedness (I used the brutal expression for almost the first time, because at such a time the natural tendency was to print everything bold and clear) she had the kind of abilities, physical and mental, which would make her The Most Likely Person to Survive. She would enjoy a fire, untouched by tragedy, uninterested in its wider significance... but the moment the fire seemed to be getting out of hand, she would know, with animal cunning (after all, compared with even the most sagacious animal she was a genius), that now was the time to go somewhere else. And she was supremely capable of doing it. She didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't overeat or take drugs, and had never been ill in her life. Nobody in the whole of Shuteley could get from one place to another quicker than IF Dina once she had made up her mind. Dina was alive and well (even if Miranda couldn't be trusted). Sheila, I knew, was alive, well, and not even scorched. Gil, Jota, Miranda -- the other people I cared about -- were probably all right too. Miranda would certainly be all right. She was with the giants. I hadn't had time to think much about the giants since I was driving back from the roadhouse, but I took it for granted that none of them had suffered in the slightest degree in the fire. It was our affair, not theirs. Somewhere they were standing outside it, watching, enjoying the fun. So, selfishly, I tried to put the disaster in proper perspective. For me it could have been a lot worse. Yet Sayell was sending the first of his tenders across the river, and that bothered me. To do the man justice, he leaped on it as it reached the bank at the selected place. Irrationally, like all good commanders, he wouldn't send his men where he wouldn't go himself. The tender rushed down the incline. Still, the spot had been chosen carefully and sensibly. The vehicle stayed upright, it managed to slow (by gears, not brakes, I guessed) at the bottom and started the crossing. There was irony and tragedy in what happened to it then. Comic tragedy, I guess, if a town had not been burning to death only a short distance away. What looked like reasonably solid mud on the left side of the engine was merely earth mixed with water in misleading proportions, if you judged simply by Hie eye. The tender keeled over on its side and commenced to sink in the mud. N obody was hurt, except in spirit. The firemen, mud-covered scarecrows, clambered bkck up the dry river bank. Sayell saw me and set a course that would take him as far as possible from where I was standing. I could do him a big favor by ceasing to exist. The tender in the river bed, of some value just a few seconds earlier, was now so much junk. And the other tender could accomplish just half what had been possible a couple of minutes ago. I knew how Sayell felt. In the face of disaster, continuing disaster, you had to do something. You had to try anything that might do some good. If it failed... well, you'd tried. I left the group of firemen, knowing that if there was somewhere where I could be useful, it wasn't there. Sayell wouldn't listen to me. He was on a razor's edge. The fact that I had been right two or three times and he had been wrong would make it utterly impossible for me even to get him to listen to me again. Sheila wouldn't need help with the children and old people over the hill. She was young and strong and didn't dither, and in emergency anyone old or young would be glad to obey such a leader. It was when peopie hadn't a leader, or only a quasi force-of-circumstance , unconfident leader like Say ell, that everybody ran about like frightened hens. I moved back the way I had come, along the river behind the huts. Since there was nothing particularly useful I could do this side of the river, I should get across to the other side. Although I couldn't cross where I was, and would die if I did, it would be necessary to go only a few hundred yards in either direction to be able to cross either the bed of the river or the river above the obstruction. There might, I thought, be a chance of clearing the blockage which had dammed the river. That would certainly help, if it could be done. A river running past a fire like this was better than a dry bed. At the very least, it was a firebreak. I wasn't really thinking, merely reacting as a human animal. Most other animals would have put as much distance as possible between them and the fire, but as a human being I had to sniff round the conflagration and see if there was anything to be done. Some events are numbing, like a blow on the head which doesn't put you out but leaves you staggering through pain and nausea and dizziness and momentary blackouts. This was one. If you stared at the fire... well, you couldn't do it for long, and thre was really nothing to see but glare and smoke and flame and horror, if you let your mind analyze what you were seeing. But anyway, after you'd had a glance or two across the river, you realized that you couldn't afford to watch the fire. It was hypnotic as well as terrifying. There was flame motion, smoke pattern, that caught you and held you like the one movement in an utterly still scene. Your eyes could water and smart, but a second would grow to a minute, ten minutes, and it would be an instant. To retain the power of movement, the power of action, you stopped looking across the river. I knew perfectly well that if I wanted to find people who had escaped from the blazing town, if I wanted to know how it happened, I should go the other way, downriver. Practically all the roads and lanes and other escape routes came out that way. Upriver on this side there was nothing but the track that led to my house and then curved away from the river to a few farms, and on the other, Castle Hill and a rubbish dump. But the giants were upriver. I n retrospect it's strange that the giants and their part in what was going on could be practically ignored for so long. Obviously, as I'd said to Sheila on that mad drive back to Shuteley, they were in this business up to their necks. At the least, they had known what was going to happen. At most, they were entirely responsible for it. Yet if somebody starts a fire, a little fire that can destroy only a single house or a farm, if somebody standing beside you strikes the match and fires the hay, you don't go for IF him. Your first move, instinctive and correct, is to deal with the fire. Coldly, logically, it might be valid to go for the fire-raiser, to make sure he does no more damage. But the fire-raiser might do no more damage anyway -- and the fire already exists. The giants were still at the back of my mind, with what might well become known as the Great Fire of Shuteley taking all my attention. Then, as I passed a gap through which the scene across the river could be glimpsed, I saw something that brought the giants right back into the picture. It was one of those snapshot impressions you get as you pass the end of a lane, or a window, or a gap in a hedge. The brain takes the snapshot like a camera, the picture remaining often sharper and clear than a scene you've viewed for ten minutes. Between me and the dull embers of a building across the river which could burn no more, I had seen one of the giants -- over there. He was tall and blond, but he was not Greg. He wore what looked like a plastic coverall over a hump on his back. His eyes were hidden behind thick dark glasses. ' The whole thing was so much like something in a horror film that I paused for a few seconds before going back, refusing to believe I had really seen him. No one could live over there. No one could breathe. Certainly no one could walk in any kind of footwear I could imagine, because the ground was red hot. And a plastic spacesuit would shrivel up instantly like a fertilizer bag thrown into an open fire. I jumped back, after that moment of disbelief, but of course the giant, even if real, was past my narrow angle of view. I burst through to the riverside, and there was nobody to be seen. Yet I had seen him. The clear picture in my mind had beaten back the disbelief. He was neither Greg nor any of the giants I had consciously looked at. The picture didn't fade. I could still see it. Shutting my eyes, I could even notice things I hadn't noticed before. What had looked like a hump must be the breathing apparatus which made it possible to walk through fire. The giant had been hurrying, not quite running, carrying nothing in his hands, under his arms or on his shoulders. He had worn a transparent plastic covering, enclosing his head and all the rest of him. Under the covering he seemed to have nothing but the hump. He was either naked or nearly so. Colors of things seen in such a setting could be anything at all, since yellow-orange-crimson flame filled the sky. And one thing more -- he had not meant to be seen. You only have to glimpse an incompetent amateur sneak-thief for a moment to realize he's up to something and doesn't want to be observed. There had been something similar in the way the giant was hurrying. Possibly an obstruction had forced him to skirt the river for a few yards, visible from the other side. Deeper in the blazing town, he could not have been seen. Flames and smoke, if nothing else, would have swallowed him from view. Although he had been hurrying downriver, back the way I had come, I didn't change my mind and go that way. If he really existed, if his incredible fire-suit really worked, no doubt he could walk through the middle of the fire as easily as he could skirt the edges. The people downriver would not see him, if he didn't want to be seen. I went on. If one of the giants was wandering alone through the blazing town, the rest of them might be doing the same. Including Miranda. "I think I'll be seeing Dina," she had said. "We'll do something." She had also said: "No, I shan't see you again, Val." Maybe she was wrong. W hen I saw the blockage it was clear that explosives were going to be needed before the river returned to its usual course. Shuteley Castle had stood on Castle Hill, the one piece of high ground on the north side of the river, just above the Old Bridge. A ridge ran along the south side, but on the north, only at the eastern extremity of the town did the ground rise to any height. There the castle stood. Or had stood. It had glowered across the town from a curious round mound which looked so artificial that historians argued about the possibility that Saxon serfs had piied Castle Hill high with only picks and shovels. Anyway, the fire had spread round the bracken which fringed the hill. It seemed that the bracken itself had held up the hill, for when it was gone, the castle and most of Castle Hill had collapsed into the river, taking the Old Bridge with it. Above the obstruction, the river tumbled into a hole which had not been there before, making a small, but quite impressive waterfall before dashing itself against the huge mound of rubble which was all that remained of the castle and the hill on which it had stood. The river tried to climb over the mound, which was ten feet too high, and then took the path of considerable, but least, resistance and streamed off southwards in about a dozen rivulets through a gap in the south ridge. Until then I had not worked out that I'd either have to cross this side of the obstruction or cross twice, first the diverted river and then the river itself. I didn't like the look of the streams rushing behind the ridge. They were shallow but very fast. It would be impossible to keep my feet if I tried to wade through, and when water flings you about you're liable to crack your head on a stone. It would be hazardous to try to cross the river bed on the west side of the mound of rubble, because it was steep and very loose. And back the way I had come the heat across the river was too fierce. Only close to the blockage, where what remained of Castle Hill afforded some protection from the heat, and where there was nothing left to bum, crossing might be possible. IF So I started picking my way across the obstruction itself. After I'd gone about ten yards, climbing toward the top of the mound, I found I couldn't go back. Loose earth and stones were sliding down the slope under my feet, and the best I could do was slip two feet back and gain three. If I tried to go back, I stood an excellent chance of being buried alive. I had a moment of sheer panic as I neared the peak of the mound and the rubble sliding beneath me threatened to sweep me off on the dry side of the blockage. I saw myself falling about fifty feet over rubble which would come with me, almost certainly burying me beyond any hope of rescue (if I happened to be alive when I reached the bottom) and far beyond any possibility of digging myself out. I fought against the slide, running against it like a man on a treadmill over a precipice. The light was tricky, and my sense of direction was not all it might have been. The glare of the fire cast long, moving shadows; smoke stung my eyes, and on the other side of the mound the darkness was so intense that I couldn't even see the white water. I overdid it. O ne moment I was fighting clear of the drop into the dry bed. The next I was teetering over blackness, flicked by spray from the blocked river below. And all the time the rubble beneath me cascaded this way and that, now into the dry bed, now down the slope to the south bank, now into the foaming river. Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet at all. Then I was in water. Then the whole world exploded. I came to soaked, cold, shivering, with an aching head and the rush of water in my ears. For a moment I was blind. Dazed and deafened, I nevertheless realized where I was. I 'was somewhere in the middle of the delta of streams rushing into the blackness of the south side of Shuteley. The water rushing past me was not more than a few inches deep. It seemed to take a long time before I worked out what to do and where to go. The huge mound of debris in the river bed cut off all heat and so much light that I found it hard to recover any sense of direction. And after being toasted for so long I could have sworn the water all round me was only one degree above freezing point. At last I realized that if I forced my way through streams flowing from left to right I must come to dry land. Then all I'd have to do was cross a normal river that didn't know what trouble it was going to run into farther on. I got across the streams somehow -- and then couldn't find the river. I seemed to be in a kind of marsh with rivulets running in all directions. Only the glow of the fire, cut off by the pile of rubble which had stopped a river, enabled me to find my way back to the bank of a more or less normal Shute. I made my way along the bank. Dizzy and with a head which seemed to be cloven in two, I shied away from the very thought of attempting to swim across the river. I'd probably be swept down to the whirlpool which had already knocked me silly. The Shute had always been a placid river, and in this hot summer it had been more placid than ever. But any river becomes angry if it's balked and not allowed to follow the course it has taken for centuries. Presently, stumbling upriver, I became aware that one of my discomforts had gone. I was still soaked, but I was no longer shivering. It was, as usual, a hot night. My house ought to be visible in the reflected glow. Yet it wasn't. Ahead of me, nothing was visible. This was very strange. By comparison with the glare behind me. I was walking into darkness. Nevertheless, the red glow, the heat of which I could still feel on the back of my neck and through my wet clothes, should have lit up the river ahead at least as far as my house. And ahead there was nothing. I sniffed, and not because I smelled something. Quite the reverse. There was a sudden startling absence of smell. I was puzzled as a sleeper awakening to silence is puzzled, before he realizes that a clock has stopped. Voices upriver gave me a clue. I had moved into a region of odorless vapor which didn't sting the eyes, had no smell, and cut visibility. I moved on. The voices grew louder. Then I stopped. I had almost reached my house. It was invisible, but it could be no more than a hundred yards away. I had followed the river to the copse -- and there, just in front of me, was a bridge where there had never been a bridge. And there were people on it, crossing from the other side to the copse. Not for the first time that night I acted without thought. I went closer, but along the bank, stealthily. I slipped silently into the water. Cautiously, carefully, I paddled under the bridge. The people I had seen on the bridge were giants, in' plastic suits with the hump I had already noticed, and baffled, bedraggled, frightened people who could only be refugees from the Great Fire of Shuteley. T he bridge was as startling in its way as luxon. It was only a catwalk perhaps a foot wide with two rails three feet apart. There were no supports and no reinforcements of any kind. It lay across the river like a plank, but I felt it, pushed against it, and it was solid as a rock. There was little or no risk that I'd be seen under the bridge. The smokescreen or whatever it was that the giants were using as cover cut visibility very effectively. It was not like fog or mist. You could see ten yards very distinctly, twenty to thirty yards vaguely, and beyond that was blackness. Sound, too, was muffled. All the giants wore plastic suits and small, quite neat boots. Underneath they all wore as little as possiIF ble, but nevertheless seemed to be bathed in sweat. The dark goggles their eyes would need in the center of a conflagration were folded down across their chests. Wearing them, out of the fire, they would be blind. The others, the people who had come from Shuteley, wore a simpler sort of plastic suit, loose pants and tunics which, unlike those of the giants, were thrown open. Instead of the hump the giants had, they had merely a small black box apparently stuck to the inside of the plastic. I thought suddenly of Jota and his part in all this. Had the giants recruited him, or was he lying drugged in one of the tents at the camp? Miranda was not among those I saw. Vague recollections of time stories I had read raced through my mind. Of course, I had never taken time travel seriously. It was the kind of thing which, if it ever happened, was never likely to impinge on me and affect my life. One of the assumptions made in such stories suddenly assumed significance. You couldn't steal a man from the past, because of the effect his disappearance would have in his future, your past and present. But a man whose life was over, through accident -- a man about to be destroyed in an explosion, buried for ever by an avalanche, engulfed in a mine disaster -- such a man, on the point of ceasing to exist, could be plucked from his time without affecting subsequent events significantly. Was that what the giants were doing? I wanted to hear what was being said, and that posed a problem. In the river I was too near the flowing water to be able to make anything , out, and if I crawled up the bank, the giants coming along the other side and crossing the bridge might see me. So I drew back a little and swam across the river far enough downstream to be invisible from the bridge. As I neared the other side, the bank, though not high, had me. Then I crawled along the bank until I was under the north end of the bridge, still hidden by the bank, and pulled myself partly out of the water. I heard: "Well, you'd be dead otherwise ." "But what are you going to do with us? Where are we going?" "You'll be safe." "This is the Mathers place. Where's Mr. Mathers?" "In his house asleep." "My wife! What about my wife? I haven't seen her since -- " "She'll be all right." "I don't want to go. I want to go back and..." The giants' voices were slightly muffled by their suits, but on the whole easier to make out than those of the frightened, anxious, shocked refugees. I could hear only snatches, of course, as people passed over my head. "We'll never get back?" "You'll be well looked after. Think of it this way -- you're going to heaven." "Heaven?" "To you it'll be heaven . Nobody with a choice would stay here" "What do you want us for? Did you start the fire?" "No, we didn't start the fire" "Why did you take us past Castle Hill and the dump? There was nobody there." "We didn't want to be seen. If it meant being seen, we couldn't help you" "My Moira... I saw her catch fire. I'll never forget her scream. She blazed like "We saved you, didn't we?" "Why couldn't you save Moira?" "Others were looking. People who aren't here. We couldn't let them see us" And then again: "This must be the Mathers place. Where the insurance manager lives. Is he in this somehow?" "He couldn't be more out of it" "You mean he's dead?" " Just dead to the world" T he conversation went on, and I strained my ears to hear it, but the two who were talking were halfway across the bridge now, and it was another snatch of talk I heard. "What happened to the fire brigade? Why didn't they..." A very common word on the lips of these poor bewildered survivors was "why." If they didn't ask why God had permitted such a disaster, they asked why they had escaped, why others hadn't escaped, why the strangers, if they could do so much, couldn't do even more, like putting out the fire. From the giants' replies it was obvious that to them, as to Miranda before I managed to get through to her, the people of Shuteley were little more than characters in a play, The answers were quiet, soothing, apparently truthful as far as they went, which wasn't far. "Where did you come from?" "You'll see " "You're the kids that I saw in town yesterday, aren't you?" "Yes" "If I thought you had anything to do with the fire..." A stream of invective followed, empty, hopeless obscenity, for the man who was speaking knew perfectly well he could do nothing but curse. He couldn't even fight the giants or resist them. The giants, girls and boys, had spread themselves out among these refugees to prevent protest or rebellion. I realized that there were a great many more of the giants than I had ever seen, far more than there could have been at the camp. I had not known of more than about a score of them. There must have been at least forty crossing the bridge, not counting any who might have crossed before I arrived on the scene. I knew from the snatches of conversation I heard that the giants had been careful to be observed by no one who was going to live through the fire. They had led these people through the fire, in their simpler fire-suits (probably simpler so that they could be put on quickly and with no risk of mistake), and by a route chosen to avoid being seen. The crowds of people who must have escaped the fire would not gather about the northeast end of town at the rubbish dump, but at the other end, where the roads were, and the straggling cottages which must have escaped the fire, and the nearest farms. That could have been confidently predicted. Presently the procession ended. There was a gap, and then three more figures appeared, two huge, one small. They were Greg, Wesley and Miranda. Wesley reached the bridge, just above me, and spoke. Oddly enough, it still surprised me, after all that had happened, that the giants' language, when they were speaking to each other and not to us, was not the English of the mid#th century. It was English, and I could understand most of it by listening to the sense rather than the sound. But many of the words were not quite right, several of the vowels had changed, and since the speech was colloquial there were many phrases that were hard to figure out. What Wesley said, roughly, was: "That's... (the lot?) now. We've left nothing but the stasis and the two...(?) in it. Who's going back?" "I am," said Greg. "We're both going back," said Miranda. I couldn't see Wesley, but I sensed his uncertainty. "Okay," he said, after a pause. "I'll go on and tell them to... (?) everything but the stasis, is that right?" "And the stasis just before dawn," said Miranda. "Sure. You've got to be there then. If you're not -- " Greg said a word which was entirely new to me, and yet the meaning couldn't have been more obvious. The politest translation would be, "Go away." Wesley went away, crossing the bridge and disappearing into the copse. M oving slightly, I could see Greg and Miranda quite well, for they had stopped short of the bridge and were not looking 'at it. Keeping my eyes on them, I could duck out of sight at any moment before I could be seen, if they turned their heads. They wore suits exactly like the others. The briefs they wore underneath seemed to be pink or gray. Seeing them both running with sweat, I wondered why they didn't take off their plastic suits or at least open them up. I also wondered why a technology capable of constructing flimsy suits which could withstand the highest temperatures couldn't go a step farther and make them comfortable as well. Miranda said: "Let's go back, then." "And wait till dawn?" "Yes." Greg laughed. "So that you can keep your eye on me, darling. Waiting for a wrong move." "The next wrong move," said Miranda steadily. He laughed again. "You idiot," he said. "You're all idiots, you and the others behind this...(?). When you found you couldn't keep me out IF of it, you should have canceled it. You knew I'd kill it." "We knew," said Miranda, and I heard the defeat in her voice. "But you might fail. Lots of things might have happened. Maybe they still will. Jcyta might have -- " For the third time, irritatingly, Greg bellowed with laugher. It was the laughter of a vandal, a spoiled kid with an inflated idea of his own value in the world. It was the laughter of a bully. "Jota," Greg said, "has a little talent. I have the Gift. Nevertheless, Jota may be as important as you think. I think he is. That's why I had to see that your plans for Jota didn't work out." "Greg," said Miranda quietly, "listen to me for a minute. Please listen." "Go ahead. There's plenty of time. I'll listen." "You're not necessarily bad. You never had a chance. That sounds trite, and it is. You were not only bigger and... (?) and better-looking than anybody else, as far back as you can remember, but when girls began to interest you you didn't have to bother to be nice to them or even go to the trouble of deceiving them. You had it all! You've often thought , about how you're different from ordinary people, Greg. Have you ever thought about how ordinary people are different from you?" This time Greg didn't laugh. He was interested enough to let her go on. And as I waited, rather chilled by the water in which I was partly immersed, I felt for a stone or a stick. Whether Miranda was on my side or not, I couldn't be on Greg's side. It couldn't be a mistake to take Greg if I could. # #T)eople who haven't the Gift," JT Miranda said, "have to learn to coexist. When they're babies they know instinctively that they have to get and keep their parents on their side. As children they know that other children may  sometimes be rivals, but they have to be allies too. So what you never learned was -- " Greg bellowed again. "Is that all? I thought for a moment you had something to say. Now listen to me. First, take off that suit." "I can't, I have to go back and -- " "You're not going back, darling. Not to the stasis. Not across the bridge. Not anywhere." I might have moved then, but with a silent suddenness which startled me so much I almost cried out, the bridge above me winked out. It just wasn't there. It didn't burn or fade or shimmer or flash. It simply ceased to exist. Although probably both Greg and Miranda noticed this out of the corner of their eyes, neither bothered to look. Which was just as well, because I might have been slow in ducking out of sight. Miranda took a step back and turned as if to run. Greg reached out casually with his long arm and tumbled her to the ground. Standing over her, he said: "But before I kill you, darling, I want to tell you that things couldn't have been arranged better if you'd let me plan them all myself. The stasis goes just before dawn, right? Just before dawn you've got to get those two out and get back in yourself, right? They're left alive, here, and you're safe back home, right?" "Yes," said Miranda. "There are two spare suits in the stasis so that you can get those two out, rigjht?" "Yes." "Wrong. They're gone." Miranda sat up quickly. "I watched you all the time -- " He laughed. "I know you did. So I got Wesley to shift them. He wasn't keen, but he didn't want to die. So he...(?) for me." "He'll know..." Miranda began and stopped. "He won't know anything. He has no idea what the suits are for. But that's not all. Suppose I just kill you here and now, swim across and tell everybody you went back by yourself?" I didn't fully understand all this, but from her startled gasp it was obvious that Miranda did. It was as if she had allowed herself to be locked in a dungeon of death, as part of a plan, and then felt in her pocket and discovered she didn't have the key. Greg couldn't let it go. He had to savor his cleverness to the full. "They'll believe me They'll have to. You know that anything I say is the truth -- always has been the truth. All I've ever had to do is go into any... (?) office and make a statement. Whatever I say, it has to be the truth. Otherwise -- " She leaped from under him and ran like a deer. Greg lunged after her. My hand forced, I scrambled up the bank and went after them. In my right hand I held a heavy stone. They could both run much faster than I could. I'd have lost them in the strange mist that hid the bridge. But only a hundred yards away, the mist ceased to exist. And I came on Greg and Miranda, only six feet from the river, with Greg again standing over Miranda. I let fly with my stone. It caught Greg full on the back of the head, and he staggered. His legs collapsed under him. He pitched right over Miranda and landed on the other side of her. We could have escaped if we'd been quick enough. But Miranda stared up at me in surprise, astonished to see anyone at all, more astonished to see me. And I coughed as a cloud of smoke swirled round me -- out of the giants' protective mist, I had forgotten to be careful how I breathed. Greg was up. He lashed out at my head, and although I escaped the full force of the blow, I went down heavily. The next second Greg had Miranda in his grasp. Holding her, he made a quick pass at me, and something stung my eyes. I couldn't move. I could see and hear, I could move my eyes and, with an effort, my head. But that was all. VY Greg asked, looking down at me. "Why is he here?" "I don't know. I left the...(?) in the house, below the bottom shelf in a cupboard. It was set slow-toIF limit, short of death. Anybody in the house should have got sleepy very gradually, and then -- " "So it didn't work. Or he went out too soon. It doesn't matter. Take off your suit, Miranda." "No." "Take if off. I'm going to take him into Shuteley, in your suit. Then I'll open it." I didn't shudder, because I couldn't. Picturing what was going to happen to me (walking through an inferno, unharmed, and then a wrench as the plastic suit was torn, then...) I must have missed something. A moment later Greg was saying: "I want you, darling." "Don't try to be funny." "I'm very serious. There's nothing more important in the world to me. I want you, here and now." Incredibly, Miranda, who had been standing up to him, opposing him, arguing with him, was as weak and pliable as if under hypnosis. Well, was that it? Hypnosis? "I thought..." she said, visibly struggling. "You thought after that one time, when you resisted, and I let it go, that you could stand against me. That I didn't want you. That you still had some authority over me. That for some reason, any reason, I was never going to claim you." He laughed. It was a forced laugh. There was no mirth in it. And I realized now that Greg's laugh was always forced, completely lacking in real enjoyment. At once, as if he had never laughed, he went on fiercely, malevolently: "I set you up, darling. For when I wanted you. And the time is now." There was a brief pause. Then, slowly, reluctantly Miranda touched her plastic suit at several points, at the throat, at her waist, at her knees. It split and fell off her, and the box at the back came with it. So did the boots, which were part of the suit. So did the dark goggles. Like an automaton she stepped closer to Greg. And he hit her. I'd never seen such a blow. At the very least he was twice her weight. He hit her as a very large man could have hit a rather small child, but perhaps never had in human history; surely even a human beast would find it impossible to hit someone so much smaller so hard. Her feet left the ground. She would have been thrown several yards anyway. As it was, she sailed far out over the river, unconscious before she touched the water, and was swept away. She was possibly dead before she landed. In the river, unconscious, she would drown. Greg was satisfied. He scarcely glanced at the river. Instead, he bent to pick up her suit. Straightening, he looked down at me. Greg must be used to looking down on people. Yet he still seemed to enjoy it immensely. "I'm a little sorry for you, Val," he said, in ordinary English. "You didn't know what you were up against -- despite knowing Jota. Miranda knew.' Wesley and all the others knew -- especially the giris. of course. You didn't you poor fool. If you'd stayed quietly at home tonight, you'd at least have lived. Miranda left a sleep cylinder in the house to make quite sure, because of what we had to do here."" He shrugged. "You needn't worry. I won't open your suit until we're right in the middle. You'll scarcely feel a thing. It'll be over in a second." don't think Greg hit me again. I had been drinking at the roadhouse, not enough to show, but enough to know I'd been drinking. What had happened since would have made me stone cold sober if I'd had ten times as much, yet the residual alcohol in my system was one thing. The shock of what had happened was another. Then, the constant blast of heat from the blaze across the river must have done something to all of us, though since it was constant we soon ignored it. I had fallen into the river, hit my head and got water in my lungs. Greg had hit me and thrown a paralyzer of some kind at me. It could have been all that which had suddenly caught up with me. In any case, the next I knew I was being led through the fire. Dazed, I hardly knew whether I was dreaming or not. Certainly only in dreams could I ever have experienced anything remotely like this before. In spite of the goggles over my eyes, the flames were still blinding until the eyes adjusted. Greg, at my left side, grasped my arm tightly, half leading me, half carrying me. And we moved through a vast furnace. The suits were totally efficient. They completely screened all heat, and the air I breathed was pure. No smoke stung my eyes or throat. Yet it was an ordeal of terror. There was nothing to be seen but living flame and smoke. Frequently the ground writhed with liquid fire -- blazing oil, tar or anything which liquefied in extreme heat. The confidence I soon acquired in my suit and boots -- which fitted surprisingly well -- did very little to still terror of the unknown. I was lucky, I suppose, that I was too dazed to think properly. I had that this can't be real feeling that makes people capable of things otherwise utterly beyond them. It also prevented me from having to fight or at least resist Greg. He had just murdered Miranda and had every intention of murdering me at any moment in a particularly horrible way. I should have done something, though Greg could kill me quite easily simply by abandoning me. But the feeling that this wasn't really happening made it possible to play along with it. At the moment Greg was helping me. The vagueness did not prevent me from remembering afterwards the horror of a fire that consumed not a building but a whole town. I saw only some of what the fire had done, and I was glad of it. One single impression summed it up. The damage to property was nothIF ing. Houses could be built again. Cars in the street had melted into red puddles. That was unimportant. But too often, no longer in the cars, because the cars no longer possessed any "in," there were relics of human beings, who had not, even in presumably efficient vehicles, been able to escape what was happening round them. In a way it was all clean and antiseptic. Fires are clean. A fire like this was cleanest of all fires. There was no blood to be seen, no skin, no guts, nothing unpleasantly animal like that. The fire had taken care of all such things. There would be no plague after the Great Fire of Shuteley. The fire had been too efficient for that. Anything organic within the inner area had perished forever. The crowning horror was the mound of blackened bones. I wouldn't have seen it if it hadn't been in an area (where in the town I hadn't the slightest idea, for nothing was recognizable) which must have buried early and was therefore totally consumed. Around it the fire still raged, but here there was near blackness. Even the tar in the streets had been burned, and the stone merely glowed darkly. And in the wreckage of a collapsed building was a vast mound of skeletons. There seemed to be thousands of them, but there were probably only hundreds. For one wild moment I wondered if the giants had collected all the victims they could find and dumped them all together in one refuse heap of human remains. I almost hoped this was so. But it couldn't be. These were the victims of a single disastrous incident in the general horror. This was not the total toll, only a single part of it. A large number of people must have been together somewhere in the town when the fire caught them. They must have died quite quickly, or the pile of bones would not have been so neat and compact. Only the impression, the picture, registered at the time -- but it registered for life. It was something I'd never forget. It was only then that I started to hate the giants. What kind of beings could have known this was going to happen and not tried to avert it? A wareness came back gradually, but rapidly, and it was to some extent retrospective. I knew I had reached a haven of peace and coolness in the heart of the fire, which was still blazing all around me, but as if behind glass. But what was I doing in a haven? Greg had brought me through the fire: I knew that. He had meant to tear my fire-suit at a spot where the temperature was instantly lethal: I knew that too. Yet I had come through the fire, with Greg. I became aware, with some surprise, that I wore only my underpants. The fire-suit I had been wearing had been removed. It lay on the ground beside me. I now understood why the giants wore little or nothing under the suits. The suits, light and not elaborate, could be effective only if they were utterly impervious to heat, a complete barrier to it. If they let any heat through at all, they'd b? useless in such a fire. It was beyond even the giants to construct a suit which would stop heat coming in and let body heat out. So you stewed in your own juice. Greg was with me, he was talking to me, but the sense didn't register yet. Apparently realizing this, he stopped. He had thrown a gas capsule at me, or something which had a similar effect. Apart from that moment when my eyes smarted, there were no painful effects. But although I could move, although my mind could register some things, it couldn't sort them out. I glanced around. We were in a huge hemisphere of no-fire, entirely surrounded by fire, in an area in the town which I couldn't place. It was flat, and the ground was plain, scorched earth, with few stones and no debris. In the center was a dome, a curious object. It was a plain hemisphere # feet high, as smooth as ice but of no material I knew. The faint silveriness suggested metal, the translucency glass, the milky opaqueness plastic. One thing was clear: since it stood in the exact center of the cleared space, and since the dome of no-fire was exactly the same shape, one followed from the other. The air was cool and fresh, with no smell of burning. A faint breeze from the center of the stasis -- there was no doubt that this was the mysterious stasis I'd heard about -- confirmed that the machine there was air-conditioning the sanctuary. Above the hemisphere, as well as around it, flames and smoke swirled up into the night sky. Indeed, there was no sky to be seen at any point. The flames were so fierce that they completely submerged the dome. "The village green," Greg was saying. The effect of the capsule, or whatever it was, was wearing off. "Incidentally, there are a couple of people you know here." "Why didn't you kill me?" I croaked. I wasn't grateful. You don't have to be grateful to a man haze I was curious. "You'll die anyway," he said. "Without this you'll die." He picked up the suit. "Without it you can't get out of here." Yet he had suddenly become less certain, less confident. And as I recovered further, I said: "I'm not down on fate's list, is that it? You couldn't kill me? It's not on the cards?" "There isn't any such thing as fate's list," he retorted, not laughing any more. "If I decide you're to die, you're dead." He no longer wanted to talk. He turned and walked to the edge of the stasis, not looking back. As I watched, he passed through the edge. The invisible wall flared, but seemed to offer him no resistance. I was perfectly prepared to believe, however, without experiment, that for me the stasis was a prison. Either there was some kind of wall which I couldn't get through (which seemed likely, since the air wasn't being sucked out by the oxygen-greedy flames), or I'd die, frizzled to a cinder, before I'd completed a single step outside. IF I didn't immediately walk round to the other side of the machine. I was still coming to myself. Vivid as my recollection of the mountain of skeletons was, I wondered if it was part of a dream. I hoped it was. The last thing to come right was my hearing. Stupidly I'd been wondering why, if there were two other people here, I couldn't hear them and they hadn't heard Greg and me talking. Were they bound and gagged? If so, why, when I wasn't? Then I realized that though in the stasis there was no blistering heat and no smoke, all the sounds of the fire came through, the crackling, hissing, boiling, crashing, popping, fizzing, sizzling, roaring... Anyway, I knew who the other two were. They were Jota and Dina. Yet although I knew, I hesitated a moment longer. Several times earlier I'd had a rather theoretical thought that if Dina perished, my own life might be simpler and better. But that's the kind of thing you think only when you don't believe it can happen. When you know it can happen, when you know it's more than likely, you discover what you really want. Dina had to be there. I was hesitating because I was afraid I was wrong, afraid the other two might be Gil and Barbara, or Barbara and Garry, or Jota and Gil, or some other two from the four. I might have waited much longer. But as my hearing returned to normal, I heard Jota's voice over the medley of fire sounds. I moved closer, started to go round the stasis machine, and paused incredulously. "Wake up, damn you," Jota was saying. "Wake up, little cousin. What use are you lying there, while we're stuck in the middle of all this? Wake up, you little darling, and become useful." He didn't say exactly this. He used all the available oaths, particularly the sexual ones. I moved further round so that I could see what was going on. Dina was lying on her back, sound asleep, and Jota was kneeling beside her, his back to me. He shook her, gently at first and then more insistently. He was saying: "There's nothing wrong with you, apart from the thing nobody is supposed to speak about. Wake up, then. Wake up and -- " His words then became shockingly obscene. The kind of mindless idiot from whom deliberate coarseness usually comes, who expresses the most earthy ideas in his earthy experience in the most earthy way, doesn't have the intelligence or imagination to make much of a job of it. Indeed, the more earthy he becomes, the less he would shock anybody except elderly spinsters, who never hear such effusions anyway. But Jota was a master of obscenity. I might have quite admired his performance in uncommitted wonder if I'd happened to be uncommitted. But the girl was Dina. The fact that Jota was her cousin didn't particularly bother me -- if the law allows cousins to marry, consanguinity ceases to be an issue in all such matters. What did bother me was that Jota Cared for absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was here, and Dina was here, and she wouldn't waken. He even made it plain that he didn't care much whether she awakened or not. That Dina was a child mentally was nothing to him. That there was something unnatural about her sleep was also nothing. Jota was single-minded. W hy I waited, listening, watching, doing nothing, would have been hard to explain at the time, but not difficult to explain afterwards. I hadn't forgotten the case of Jota and Sheila. I had admired Jota, I had envied him, and always I'd been a little afraid of him. What it was about him that I feared I didn't know then, though I could have guessed that the knowledge that nobody had ever stood up to Jota and bested him had a lot to do with it. If at the first moment when I knew that Jota was trying to seduce my feeble-minded sister I had gone round and shown myself, the incident might have fizzled out completely. Jota would have laughed, I would have cooperated with him in laughing the whole thing off, and that would have been that. Why I waited was partly to give him enough rope to hang himself, mainly to let myself get so angry that Jota wouldn't be able to make me laugh the whole thing off as we'd done in Sheila's case. Well, that's what it amounted to. I had thrashed Jota, but after that, instead of just contemptuously kicking him out, I had made him promise to be a good boy... and if have pretended to be friends again. I remembered Dina coming down the stairs that afternoon and wondered if it was at that moment that Jota decided the conquest of his fair cousin must be delayed no longer. I got more and moce angry. I moved only when Jota lost his temper, started slapping Dina's face and punched her in the ribs. "Jota," I said, "if you touch her again, I'll kill you." He turned his head. And when I saw his face, I knew he was an animal. Lust makes some of us cheat. But it turns only some of us into animals like Jota. I knew by his face at that moment that when he reached this state -- as he must have done many times -- he had ceased to be anything resembling a human being. If he had to kill, that was all right. If the woman died, now or later, that was unimportant. If she was married, if her life and those of others were going to be altered irrevocably in the next few seconds -- well, what had that to do with Jota? If she was a feeble-minded kid, his cousin, sleeping peacefully through disaster -- what right had she to sleep when he wanted her? "Val," was all he said, but his thoughts and emotions showed in his face. At first he had no intenIF tion of being diverted. Then anger followed when he realized the difference my presence was bound to make. Then... fear? The fist I planted in his face, rather inexpertly but with considerable force, made up his mind for him. This was neither a love scene nor a conversation piece. It was a fight. He had no choice. He made a further effort nevertheless. He jumped to his feet and backed away, saying: "Val, let's be reasonable about this -- " I leaped on him and hit him on the mouth, which spurted blood. Jota ceased attempting to be reasonable and swung at me. I caught his arm and threw him, without any trouble at all. T here had been a wrestling bill at Shuteley one night when I was about fifteen, and someone gave me a ticket, I'd been fascinated, not by wrestling as an entertainment, but by the revelation that if you knew how you could throw people far heavier than yourself all over the place. So I found out about it. I certainly never became an expert wrestler. As far as Jota was concerned, however, I might as well have been a world champion. I could throw him with very little , effort, and he had no idea how to fall. Instead of rolling with the throw, he came down untidily with a crash each time, even on the fairly soft ground. I threw him every time he got up and never followed him down, because this wasn't a sporting contest that would be settled by a body press or a submission. I didn't want to hunt him, exactly. Instinctively I was trying to beat him, to humble him, to teach him a lesson, so that he would never make a pass at Dina or Sheila again. He kept backing, though he didn't actually run away, and to his credit he got up every time when he, could. And he kept trying to talk to me. "Val, you and I shouldn't be... I wasn't going to... Will you listen to me." And then, rather ludicrously, considering his position: "I'm warning you, Val!" We were close to the edge of the stasis, and when I threw him again I simply didn't think about it at all. What the stasis was I had no idea. To me it was simply a wall. Greg had walked through it, but Greg was in a special suit. When I threw Jota and he rolled towards the edge, I expected him to stop against it as he'd have done at any other wall. But he didn't. There was a sudden roar, and I was sucked toward the barrier myself as air rushed from the stasis into the inferno beyond. Despite the brightness of the flames, the sudden glare as Jota rolled through made everything else seem dull. He had no time to scream. Outside the stasis the flames were dying a little, but the temperature had not begun to drop. Out there, things that would burn didn't catch fire, they simply dissolved in the heat. Five seconds after I threw him out of the stasis, Jota was not identifiable even as a cinder. A s Jota died, there was a gasp behind me, a feminine halfchecked moan of horror. Horrified myself, I didn't turn at once. I assumed that Dina had wakened. It was only when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dina lying on the ground, peacefully, comfortably, breathing deeply and regularly, that I realized someone else had joined us. I turned and saw Miranda. I had not expected to see her again. It had seemed likely that she was dead. Even if she had survived what Greg had done to her, it was not in the cards that she'd be moving around any more that night; and then, lacking a suit, she couldn't get into the stasis through the blazing town. But she did have a suit. And although she reeled a bit and her hair was over one eye, she was in better shape than could have been expected. She got in first. "Didn't you know what would happen when he hit the stasis? Or did you try to kill him... murder him?" I had certainly not tried to kill Jota, and I was shocked at the manner of his death and my responsibility for it. Yet Miranda's obvious horror at what she had seen filled me with incredulity. It rallied me and made me temporarily cease to wonder that she was here at all. I said in sudden anger, "Whatever I did, are you to be the judge? You, who knew exactly what was going to happen and let it happen? You came here to watch a gala performance, to extract the last ounce of vicarious enjoyment out of the Great Fire of Shuteley. But was that all. Or did you start the fire?" My outburst didn't bother her. In fact, she calmed down. "You didn't know," she said. "Anyway, what's remarkable is that you and Jota fought, and he died, and you didn't... Why did you fight?" I said nothing, merely glanced down at Dina. She was still sleeping like a baby. She looked so happy she must be happy, having wonderful dreams. "What about Dina?" I said. "She's been... treated. She may be different when she wakes up. That'll be in about three hours. I can't promise." "And you left her with Jota," I said. Miranda's eyes widened. "You don't mean he... So that was it. Don't say anything for a minute. Let me think." "You seem remarkably concerned about Jota. And remarkably unconcerned about the ten thousand people you allowed to burn to death." "Not ten thousand. Not a thousand. We saved many who would have died. You know that, don't you? Only we couldn't leave them here, we had to take them with us. We couldn't leave here, alive, anyone who should have died. Except Jota. Saving him, leaving him here alive, was one of the main purposes of the operation." "It would have been easier to avert the fire." She shook her head impatiently. "Could you eradicate the French Revolution? Could you negate the First World War, even if technically IF the means were in your grasp? No, the Shuteley fire had to happen. All we could do was make certain small changes. Saving Jota, for one." "He died in the fire? Before you intervened?" "Yes." "Well, looks like fate had it in for him. But why should a little thing like being burned to a crisp prevent Jota from living to the age of ninety? You can loop him back. It's been done before." # #TT#e'll have to try to do some V thing like that," she said thoughtfully. "The question is, how? I don't have any apparatus. Greg won't let me return through the copse. I can't return from here until near dawn. When I do, it's pretty certain that -- " "For God's sake, Miranda, tell me what's going on," I exclaimed. "From the beginning, you've been saying too much and not enough. Either you should have been a perfectly ordinary party of campers who knew nothing about anything, or you should have concealed nothing." "Both Greg and I told you too much, Val," she said quietly. "But only you. Nothing that anyone else knows matters." "Gil? Jota? Sheila? Dina?" "Gil is with us, and you'll never see him again. He's supposed to have died in the fire, with Barbara and Garry. They're all with us -- elsewhere. Jota, at the moment, isn't in the picture. Sheila knows nothing except at second hand, what you tell her. And Dina will know less. Or rather, the little bit that will remain with her will be so improbable that she won't tell anyone but you." As she spoke I realized that, whatever the reasons. I really was the one person still breathing and still in Shuteley who knew anything important about Snow White and the giants. Nobody but me had paid any particular attention to them in The Copper Beech. Gil had noticed the peculiarity about the coins, but he'd kept it to himself, and now it would be impossible to prove anything. The luxon suits had made people stare, but by this time everybody but me -- and Tommy -- must have decided they'd been seeing things. Apart from that, Greg had talked only to me. And Miranda had talked only to me. If I were suddenly transported to Parliament or Scotfice, I couldn't hope to convince the people there that the giants were anything but a party of kids iri a summer camp. Of course there would be oddities to excite curiosity, even official curiosity. None of the campers would ever be traced -- they'd disappear, with their camp, into thin air. Other witnesses would confirm the giants' abnormal proportions. And surely I couldn't be the only person to glimpse a giant in a firesuit? But these would be only enigmas. There would be enough to make it appear there must be something in my story. Not enough to prove any signficant part of it. "Yes, I see," I said. "But why me? Because I'm not going to be around, is that it?" "That's not the reason," she said, "though just now I can't see how you and Dina can survive. One of you, yes. There's one suit. Not both, any way I can figure." We had time to work out something about that. It was still a long time to dawn. "Why me?" I insisted. W e had been standing talking, Miranda still in her suit, the goggles at her neck, the hood over her head. Now she started to take it off, turning away. But almost at once she turned back. She had made up her mind. "Val," she said, "remember the first time I saw you? I knew you. I'd seen photographs of you. And I was careless enough to show it. After that, I spoke to you. So did Greg. We both wanted to meet you, to make up our minds about you." "So I'm famous?" I said. "Important?" "Not important, Val. Not even famous. "You're the villain of the Shuteley fire." The calm, factual statement shook me. I must have gone white. "I -- # started it?" "No, no, not that. History didn't need that to make you the villain. The scapegoat, if you like. After this there's going to be a new word in the language -- mather. Not a capital Mather. You don't talk of a capital Boycott either. Just mather, meaning a catastrophe following the most incredible incompetence." "Me?" I said stupidly. "Oh, it isn't fair, of course. I know that. But history often isn't fair. An inhuman monster becomes a national hero. A clever man who made one wrong decision goes down as a jackass, a blunderer. A fool who did one right thing by mistake is held up for all time as the personification of wisdom. You -- " "Well, what did I do?" "Nothing," she said gently. "I said it isn't fair. You'll be blamed for what you did do, what you didn't do, and history will accept wild accusations as trlith. You'll even be confused with old Amos What's-his-name, who died long before you were born, and blamed for what he did. He started a fire or two, you know. The general impression of Val Mathers is going to be that he was completely heartless and unscrupulous and stupid as well. He bribed and lied his way to control of all insurance in Shuteley and then he set fire to the town." "But this is absolutely impossible!" I exclaimed. "History can't -- " "Well, there I misled you. Real history, the history of the historians, will get things much straighten Real history is fairer to Captain Bligh, too, than the legend. The historians know you're not old Amos and didn't start the fire and lots of other facts like that. It's a fact, too, that it would hardly be to your advantage to be head of insurance and then start the fire. But it's not facts that go into legend." She smiled slightly. "You may, now that I've warned you, be able tQ do something to protect yourself. That's if you do get out." "I most certainly will," I said IF warmly. "If what you say is true, there must be some villain in the piece, and if it's not me -- " "Oh, there you're wrong again, Val. It is you." "I thought you said -- " She sighed and said: "We're in the same boat, you and I. You're going to be a scapegoat, and so am I. You're partly to blaine, and I'm partly to blame. You for the fire, I for the failure of my mission here... Wait till I get this suit off, and I'll tell you the whole story." She took off her fire-suit with obvious relief. It was cool in the stasis, but until she took off the suit she was insulated from coolness as well as heat. There were beads of moisture on her smooth midriff and her bare abdomen glittered with droplets. A large multicolored bruise under her right breast showed where Greg had hit her -- carelessly, mistakenly, for there was scarcely any other part of her body where such a blow would have done less damage. I wanted to ask what had happened to her and where she got the suit, but refrained. I'd hear i:: due course. She was going to tell me about herself and the giants and Jota and the fire. She told me. T he fire started in the stack room of the public library over an hour after the library was closed and shuttered for the night. This was (would be?) established later from evidence pieced together too late to be of more than academic interest. Presumably an assistant who wasn't suppposed to be smoking at all had thrown down the butt. It was going to be assumed that this assistant was one Maggie Hobson, an elderly library assistant who smoked furtively and incessantly. And it was a convenient assumption -- because Maggie Hobson, who lived alone in a single room near the library, did not survive the fire. The stack room, with just enough ventilation to act as an efficient furnace, generated such heat that when at last the fire burst its prison, it was an explosion of flame. The whole library was soon an inferno. The fire grew gross in secret by one of the many quirks of chance that enabled the Shuteley fire to become what it did. Most public libraries are in the town's main street; they have huge uncurtained windows, and a fire inside would be spotted as soon as books started to blaze. But this library, though in the center of town, was just off High Street and presented a blank Victorian-quasi-Greek pillared facade to the world. The interior lighting was by skylights facing the other way. And the warehouse next door, with the court behind, was in process of changing hands. It was blank, shuttered, empty. There was little in the warehouse to help the fire -- but nothing to hinder it. So fingers of flame sped covertly through the warehouse to the timbered houses beyond, through the silent court to the rear of the shops in High Street, through a church hall to a tire store. There were automatic fire alarms in the library, connected to the fire ination and set to go off at a certain temperature. Something went wrong; the connection was broken without setting off the alarm. Even fire alarms are not always wholly fireproof. Never before had a fire in the middle of an inhabited town -- and not even a sleeping town, for all this was around #:# -- gained such a hold unknown to anybody. At other times and places something would have been seen. But this blaze grew behind blank stone and shuttered doors. Of course it wasn't long anyway before the secret was out. But by that time the library, the tire store, six shops, four or five houses, the inner court, the church hall, the nounced the news simultaneously with leaping, roaring flames almost beyond hope of control. If there had been firemen on the spot within five minutes, they wouldn't have had any idea where to start. But that was another of the laughable tricks fate played that night. At #:#, a matter of minutes before Shuteley knew it had a fire of its own, the fire units were dashing to a farm blaze three miles south of the town. Not all of them -- not for another couple of minutes. Then a barn blaze was reported, also south of the town, and Shuteley was denuded of all official fire-fighting potential. The irony was that the last tender crossed the New Bridge seconds after the discovery of the Shuteley fire... and it left from the fire station across from the library. Mere seconds after the first shouts of "Fire! Fire!" the blaze had swallowed the town's telephone exchange and the fire station radio. So far there was not a single human casualty. And perhaps, if everybody had stayed calm and collected, there might not have been any. Well, perhaps a few people in the nearest houses, those which were pretty comprehensively on fire before the first alarm, must inevitably have been trapped. But others, some distance and several minutes from the heart of the blaze, should have lived, and didn't... Wood smoke swept the streets. People coughed and ran. A few brave souls went the wrong way, trying to save wives, children, parents who might or might not have already escaped. Heat struck them down, for this was the hottest of fires. It wasn't a creeping, insidious fire. It was a roaring, searing, all-engulfing tiger of a fire. A man took three steps towards it and never had a chance to retrace them. Heat lashed him, blinded him, struck him down and boiled him. Most people had the sense to. go the right way. And they lived. Fierce as it was, this fire couldn't race like a prairie fire. It had to leap from house to house, taking hold -- taking hold, true, in about a quarter of the usual time, yet still needing time. And the people in the streets could outrun it with no trouble at all. They could even give the alarm as they went, that is, if it didn't take too long... IF C hildren died because they were too slow. Most of the younger children were asleep, which put' them at a big initial disadvantage. They were difficult to rouse; blazing towns were outside their experience, and they were inclined to waste time over such luxuries as screaming for parents, putting on clothes, going in search of favorite toys. Old people died because they wouldn't go without savings, mementos, insurance policies, pension books, framed photographs -- and often because they wouldn't leave without locking the front door. If they'd forgotten the keys, they'd go back for them. Others died because they couldn't believe it. Fires in towns are put out. You watch them as you watch workmen excavating. It's safe across the road. Other people are nearer than you are. These people couldn't believe that this was something different, something that was going to go down in the history books. They had the chance to run for their lives, and they didn't take it. They thought other chances would come, and they didn't. The fire waited for nobody. Given such a splendid start, it spread out rapidly in all directions, reaching the river yery quickly, because High Street was only about a hundred yards from the river. Hardly anybody, as it happened, fled across any of the bridges. They were forced east or west by the fire's dash to the river, over, if they had a chance, north. And the fire, reaching the river, proceeded to spread all the way along it. That the firemen weren't even there was an irony, after the first few minutes, rather than a significant factor. They might certainly have helped in giving ithe warning and in the withdrawal from the town. They could not have done anything that mattered in putting the fire out. Every man, woman and child who looked into the yellow maw of the blaze and decided at once to get the hell out of this lived to tell 'the tale. Those who died were the people who for one reason or another never had a chance; those who made up their minds, erroneously, that there was no desperate rush; the heroes and heroines; and those who thought that there might be an opportunity of making something out of the disaster. It was a grim night for looters, who gambled on having time that they didn't get. In addition, there was Trinity Hall. I should have known at once when I came on the mound of skeletons that this must be the site of Trinity Hail. Shuteley had various other halls, but only one with two upstairs assembly room where hundreds of people could gather. On the first of the upper floors a pensioners' party was being held. Above, a school dance was in full swing. The stairway, though narrow and wooden, was adequate. The trouble was by mutual agreement the old and the young people had shut themselves off from each other. Neither wanted to have anything to do with the other. Everyone who was coming was present, and both halls were firmly barred to gatecrashers. The fire raced past the hall on two sides and closed in. Nobody escaped -- the whole thing was too quick. The fire escape, ancient as it was, was sound enough. But if anyone ever got to it (and perhaps nobody did), it would have offered a grim, hopeless choice -- the fire inside, the fire outside, the fire all around, the fire beyond the fire. Because of the noise in both halls and those two barred, Keep Out doors, in the few vital minutes when escape would have been possible, nobody knew there was anything to escape from. People running before the fire in the streets outside were shouting, screaming, banging on doors -- but no bursting in, dashing upstairs and battering on inside doors. Brave, foolhardly people elsewhere took heroic chances to spread the alarm. But no one happened to think of Trinity Hall -- no one who was in the right place at the right time to do anything about it. The fire cut the telephones almost at once, but the electricity failed in only a few places early on. Perhaps it was a blessing that lights stayed on; their failure would have added to the panic of old and young people. Yet if the lights had gone out when all phones ceased to operate, people who got no warning until it was too late would have been alerted. At the least, television and radio would have gone off. In Trinity Hall, in particular, the sudden failure of all lights would have brought both parties to a sudden halt. But the lights stayed on. So #I pensioners and # boys and girls between thirteen and nineteen died in Trinity Hall. Exactly two hundred. And that grisly piece of the disaster , more than anything else, Miranda told me, was the thing which was going to make my name stink for ever. I didn't attempt to interrupt as she told me what she knew, which was less than I'd have expected. The giants didn't really know everything. Their remarkable knowledge which had so impressed me on several occasions was merely a small collection of isolated bits of exact information. Miranda, who knew so much about me, hadn't known of the existence of Dina. Peiihaps, in the world in which the giants played no part, Dina became worse, had to go into a home, and was not mentioned in any account that survived. Miranda did not, after all, have to do much explaining to show me how I could become the villain oi the Shuteley fire. As she spoke, I could see this for myself. And I felt cold horror at the partial justice of it. I wasn't really a villain. I had done nothing stupid, immoral' or illegal. And yet... poses the only insurance company in Shuteley. Practically all pressure exerted on traders, farmers, firms, factories and ordinary householders to make fire less likely was exerted sonally inspect anything, of course. But I was responsible. If there was blame, it could be 'laid at my door. And there was going to be blame. people all over the world were going to feel that such a thing couldn't happen unless someone had been criminally irresponsible. There were fire prevention officers, too, but not one based in Shuteley. Anyway, Shuteley didn't have a bad fire record. Advice on fire prevention and official pressure for better standards usually followed incidents which showed the need for them. We were the people most responsible for fire prevention. And we were slack. with Shuteley. The directors liked having a town in their pocket, insurance-wise. As local manager, I was expected to carry on the good work. Shuteley made more money for the firm than any other town four times its size, simply because of the volume of business. And the claims record was highly satisfactory. The office ran sqioothly. But after all, the directors liked Shuteley first and foremost because it was the one place where the company was supreme. Shuteley made them feel good. It was unique. There was no actual directive, but I was well aware that I must not lose business, must not allow any other insurance company a toehold. This meant that I wasn't supposed to be too hard to please. It would never do if we wouldn't insure a property and some other company would; if we insisted on certain fire safeguards and the other company waived them; if we set a higher premium than the other company. S o, while our methods in Shuteley were not exactly bent, they had always been yielding. No doubt some of the town's smarter business men knew our position and cunningly took advantage of it. We wanted to insure them, and prestige mattered even more than profit. We could easily be maneuvered into giving a better deal than anyone else. We could also be persuaded to be satisfied with lower standards of safety than anyone else. No, I hadn't been careless. I hadn't been crooked. I had merely been more easily satisfied than any insurance manager anywhere else would have been, with full backing from my firm. But my firm's backing was going to fade away after this, after the staggering claims that would be made. fect, the cost of the town, plus the insured value of the lives lost. Although the bill wouldn't kill the firm, it would make it very sick indeed. And instead of being the blue-eyed boy who kept a whole town in the company's pocket, I'd be the crass idiot whose incompetent methods were partly or even wholly responsible for the biggest pay-out ever made by any single insurance company in the world. Also the firm's backing would fade away the moment there was a hint of public concern about the branch's methods. Naturally the firm had known what I was doing and approved. IF But that was before the Great Fire of Shuteley. Oh, I could see it all. People like to have someone to blame. And I was just sufficiently involved to be a perfect choice. "The most unfair bit," Miranda said quietly, "is the way Trinity Hall will be blamed on you. A fire officer called Christie inspected it a year ago and reported." I groaned. I hadn't exactly forgotten the incident, I had merely failed to fit it in place. I knew what was coming. "You saw Christie and showed him your own inspector's report on Trinity Hall. This said that although the building wasn't up to the highest fire-prevention standards and had a big proportion of wood in the structure, and old wood at that, although the situation left a great deal to be desired, all fire-safety conditions were fully met." "That's enough," I said. It was more than that: it was too much. I wanted to hear about other things, no longer that. "What happened to you?" I asked. #reg hit 'hard," she said, "but V-J not hard enough. I'm small, yet I'm pretty tough. I came to in the river, choking, and let it carry me almost to the blockage. Then I swam ashore. I had a suit hidden in some bushes as a safeguard. It wasn't entirely a surprise to me, what Greg did." "What I can't understand," I began and stopped. I was going to say I couldn't understand why Greg was allowed to sabotage everything that the others were trying to do, whatever that was, why Miranda and the rest of the giants had ever thought for a moment it was worth going ahead with their scheme while Greg was along with them, wrecking every move they made, and in the end trying to kill Miranda .and failing only because in his vicious anger he preferred to lash out rather than make quite sure of her. But that was only one of the things I couldn't understand. The others rose up and silenced me, tongue-tying me because I couldn't make up my mind which to press first. Miranda, not surprisingly, was no longer immaculate. The two minute pink garments she wore were merely utilitarian, totally dissimilar from the subtle, carefully designed bikini she had worn that afternoon. It was probable that she and the giants had worn the briefs under their suits simply to avoid startling too much the Shuteley people who were to see them. She was scratched and bruised, apart from the huge discoloration where Greg had hit her. And seeing her as she was then reminded me of the impossible glossiness of all the giants. "You do come from the future," I said. "What you call the future," she agreed. "What we know as the present." "That's a play on words." "No. Time doesn't happen all at once. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. The date is #." " Your date." "No. The date. At this moment, it's April #, # -- a Wednesday, if you care to check. What comes after April #, #, is the future, completely inaccessible. Before # is the partly accessible past." Her certainty irritated me. "This is what makes all you people cruel, inhuman -- the delusion that your own period is the only one that matters." She was as certain as the torturers of the Inquisition. "It's April #, #." "Then I was born to no real existence? I live out my life in the shadows, dead from the moment I was born?" That made her pause for a moment. "The metaphysical problems," she said at last, "are far beyond me. Perhaps you lived out your life in the second half of the twentieth century... perhaps you're restored to play it out again at the end of the twenty-second. I can't tell you the truth from your angle. All I know is that the pointer of time stands at #." When I tried to argue, she went on: "Val, just think. I was born in #, and I'm here. Time must have reached..." So she was thirty. It was surprising, in a way disappointing. She could have been eighteen or eighty, from what I had known, guessed and imagined. Thirty seemed an indeterminate age for Miranda. It seemed an anticlimax. She went on trying to convince me that time had always reached a definite point, just as a clock had to register something, even if it had stopped. The date, the vital date, the only date that had any life or meaning was April #, #. Anything before that was the past; anything in front of it was the future. Presently she realized she was wasting her time trying to convince me and abandoned the attempt. "It doesn't matter," she sighed, sitting down and leaning back against the stasis machine. "Ydu want to know, but you don't want to know. You think you want the truth. All you want, of course, is what you want to hear." "I do want the truth," I retorted. "What is it? You're a history class? At a college?" Her eyes widened. "That's near enough true," she admitted. "I'm the teacher. The rest are pupils. But we're more than just a class. There are changes to be made." "Changes? You're committing suicide, then? Change the past -- your past, if you insist -- and you change everything." "No," she said patiently. "Time can't be changed, though bits of it can. Think of time as a river. It's an old idea, the river of time. But the analogy can be taken a good deal farther. Time is a river. And it's April #, #. Remember that, assume that, as a hypothesis, even if you're not convinced. Suppose we of # interfere in the past, what happens?" "You cease to exist," I said. "You wink out as if you never were." IF "No," she said. "Remember, the past is a river. Block a river, and what happens? Except in one case here. The river flows to the sea. Block it, and it takes another course. It still flows to the sea. Can you even imagine anything else? And except in the most unusual circumstances, the contour of the land forces the river to return to its original course rather quickly, and flow on as if it had never left it. Just think -- the very fact that a river exists means that gravity is forcing all the surplus water in the area to collect and flow in a certain direction. Stop the flow, and the water makes a detour and then returns to the original direction, the original bed." W hat she said made sense, but only in a limited way. Arguing by analogy proved nothing. She was saying, in effect, that because a river would act in a certain way, time must act in the same way. I said so. She agreed. "It doesn't always happen. A river flows one side of a hill. Divert it even a few yards at a certain point, and it must flow the other side of the hill. And then it's possible that it never gets back to the original' course. Well, that can happen in time, too, but even more rarely than it does with a river. Make minor changes in the past, and your own time is certainly affected... but not in a catastrophic way. The river makes a detour and returns to its original course." She paused and then said quietly: "I ought to know, because I've done it more than once." "You've done it? Changed the past?" She stood up and began to walk about. The flames were dying, I saw, for the firelight flickering on her skin, making it yellow and orange and red but mainly a deep bronze, was far less bright than it had been when Jota and I fought. "About twenty-five years ago it was discovered that it was possible to alter the past, for a purpose, without making a vast, indiscriminate chaos of time. At this moment, all the force and life of time is in Wednesday, April #, #. Any time diversion made anywhere has its effect, perhaps a vast effect on #, but in the changed world I still exist, I'm still a teacher, I still do the same things at the same time." The paradoxes of time travel have always fascinated some people, but I'd never been one of them. I had assumed, as most people did, that if you somehow managed to change even the tiniest event in the past, the consequnces which must result would multiply, square and cube second, producing even in a few years a totally different world. If a girl were delayed ten seconds and consequently never met the man she would have married, never had the children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren she would have had, naturally the future must be quite different. Yet far tinier changes must, I had believed and still believed, be just as significant. "What sort of changes have you made?" I demanded. "And how do you know you've made them?" She smiled and sat down again. But she was very restless. Something was bothering her, something that to her was far more important than the Great Fire of Shuteley -- which, after all, was only history. "Anyone who moves in time," she said, "remembers everything. You were in a loop, so you know what happens. You experience and remember the entire loop -- the previous track, what happened, the return, the change in events, the consequence." Jota and I had entered the camp, fought; Jota had been killed, and I had killed. Then we'd been pushed back a few minutes and lived through a different version of the incident. And we remembered everything. Miranda went on: "What have we changed? Sorry, Val, I can't tell you. It's better not. They're all in your future. This is the farthest-back point where a change has been sanctioned." "So it's sanctioned, is it?" I demanded. "Your parliament or senate or whatever you've got calmly decides to monkey with -- " "Wait, please." She laid her hand on my arm. "Cool down. You know nearly enough now for me to tell you plainly and simply why we're here, what we intended to do, and how the operation .is going." S he was, however, in no hurry to start. And now that it had come to the point, I felt no urge to hurry her. We all like a safe, ordered world. Me more than most. The idea of people watching you, interfering with you, manipulating you makes the flesh creep. And yet, in this very special case, if the giants had come to do the obvious thing and did it, if even now they could be persuaded to do it, I for one would have been delighted they came. Though afterwards, I wouldn't want any such interference again. "We're here to have two people," she said. "One is Garry Carswell... not that he died in the original fire. If he had, we wouldn't have known his importance -- he wouldn't have had any importance. What did happen was that he lived, horribly scarred and mutilated, with the mind of a genius, but a traumatic genius who never really escaped the Fire of Shuteley. We believe that by saving him, which we've done -- letting him die might have been another way -- we can avert..." She stopped. "No, I won't tell you about our time, your future," she said. "Nobody should ever want to know that, for certain." It's enough to say that our world may be a better place if Garry Carswell never We've also saved his parents, Gil and Barbara, to live in our world. They died in the original fire, and that fact didn't help Garry. You won't see any of them again." This didn't bother me: most people who had the choice of living in # or dying in # would find the choice easy. Many would even be glad to make the change. "And the other you came to save was Jota," I said. "Well, that IF shouldn't cause you any trouble. Make one of your loops, as you call them, and give him a third life, or a fourth or fifth, or whatever it is. "That might be possible, but for Greg." "Yes, it all comes back to Greg, doesn't it?" She shivered, probably partly at the thought of Greg and what he had done and what he still might do, and partly because it was rather cool and airy in the stasis, in comparison with the various kinds and degrees of heat we had all been experiencing. Jumping up, she pulled at her twopiece and with no trouble at all the scraps of material became a leotard, knitting at her waist with no apparent join. It was only a trivial miracle, hardly worth mentioning. 'The loops," she said, "are legal. They're allowed. Only minimal apparatus is required, and the effect is extremely local. A few people are affected; the rest of the world is quite unaffected." "Legal?" I said. "Allowed?" "The moment time-molding became possible, there was immediate, irresistible public pressure for loops." Sitting down again, she snuggled close to me, quite impersonally, merely for warmth. I had been nothing; then a lover; now I was a friend, if that. "Think how the very possibility of loops instantly transfigures the world. Most accidents can be averted up to five seconds before they happen. A precious vase is dropped... turn back the clock, undrop the vase, and it lasts another thousand years. More important... a driver is careless for a fraction of a second, and a car plunges into a river. Regain the last five seconds; drowned people are undrowned." "As Jota and Wesley were unkilled," I murmured. "Exactly. The permitted technique works only over a short period, a few minutes at most, and a tiny area. But it's saved thousands of lives, a lot of valuable property and prevented many disasters. Now, you want to know about Greg." "Yes, Greg," I said. "Tell me about Greg. Explain the inexplicable." "Why he's here? Well, he's got the Gift" "The gift?" "He's a witch doctor. Only his magic works." T he introduction of further go bledegook irritated me. I v just beginning to figure out how t business made sense. And then s introduced something fantastic whi. could never make sense. Before I could speak, she sa sharply: "Don't say it. Val, yo haven't been very bright. You couL tell me far more about the Gift than I can tell you. You know all about it. Or you would, if you'd ever opened your eyes." I could think of only one explanation. "'ve got it?" I exclaimed. "No, not you. Jota." Step by step she made me remember, and interpret. And I lived through years of my life with her, prompted by her. Dear Editor: I have just been reading some of my back issues of If and I am now completely sold on Retief. The first one I read was Retief -- God Speaker, and I thought it was fantastic. I have also enjoyed the Berserker and Gree stories as much. In the October, # issue you included a bibliography of Retief. I was wondering whether or not you could do the same thing for the Gree and Berserker stories. -- F. McLeilan, # Park Row West, Montreal #, P. Q.    Dear Editor: You said in If: " Every (series) story has to stand on its own merits, so that if you've never read anything that went before it in the series you'll still be able to understand it and enjoy it. So we've never felt it necessary to say anything about the series status of a story in the introduction." Now there's nothing worse than reading a story studded with references to preceding stories in the series -- like a private joke. But the writer can't be expected to explain everything that has happened in earlier stories. Cordwainer Smith cannot, in each Casher O'Neill story, devote a page to explaining why Casher was exiled from his own planet. (I remember in the old Hardy Boy books how the author would painstakingly rehash all the facts about Frank and Joe in all #-odd books, for the benefit of new readers.) Far better that the reader visit a second-hand book store and read the preceding stories. Besides which, when I read a good series story I immediately want to read all the other stories in the same series. Since the Galaxy magazines aren't indexed, the search can be long and unrewarding. It would greatly help if you listed the other stories in the series, too. -- Jeffrey P. Rensch, # Via Sonoma, Palos Verdes Estates, California #. O You sure those lengthy rehashes were "were for the benefit of new readers?" Our guess would be they were for the benefit of old writers, looking for an easy way to fill up blank pages ! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: When Murray Leinster writes for If he certainly knows which side his bread is "but" tered on. His story A Planet Like Heaven , is thirteen pages long. On nine of those thirteen pages three or more sentences start with the word "but". It's enough to make a man "butt" his head against a wall! -- Walter Erbach, # Dudley, Lincoln, Nebraska.    Dear Editor: As you and some of your readers know, there is an international organization, sometimes described as a "lonely heads club," called Mensa. The only requirement for membership is a documented intelligence level above that of # of the population. The opportunity of communicating with others at this level, is, I think, the principal reason for joining, since many of us are essentially outside the mainstream of human activity, having been variously described as "misfits" and "social cripples." Mensa has no political or religious orientation. It is not orthodox in the doctrinaire sense of the word. Its primary purpose is to research into intelligence via a ready-made group of high-IQ persons who are search by answering questionnaires and the like. There is also the opportunity for social contact with fellow intellects at the local level, since many areas have local Mensa groups. At the present time, we are trying to form a special interest group, within Mensa, for science fiction. Anyone who is already a member of Mensa and is interested in this idea should contact Alma Hill, # Park Drive, Boston, Mass., #, and mention this letter. Anyone who is not a member of Mensa and wants information about joining will receive it if heshe writes to me. For, lo, these many years, we have all talked about the mindstretching qualities of science fiction and its appeal to a high-intelligence segment of the reading public. Now is a good time to prove it to ourselves. Tuning, # Foothill Road, Santa Barbara, California #.    Dear Editor: Although I have been reading If, Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow since # I have yet to see a SF fan club in the Pittsburgh area. I know there must be some in existence there since the #th World Science Fiction Convention, but I have been unable to find any. I doesn't think that any one who reads science fiction is an idiot. So please help me. I'm desperate. -- Wade D. Thunborg, # New York Avenue, Clairton, Pa., #.    Dear Editor: Brother Drake Maynard in Hue and Cry of the July '# issue nominated Build We Must by Dannie Plachta as the best short-short of the year. I'm afraid I must protest. I am fighting rather dirty here, but I protest anyway. In the July issue along with Brother Maynard's letter was another short-short by the same author called The Man from When. Though I did like the first story, the second one is definitely better and hits you harder. And also I might mention, whatever happened to that second Asimov story you mentioned way back last year in If, the one was in Galaxy but whatever happened to no. #? And while we're on Galaxy , whatever happened to the short-short by Arthur C. Clarke that you told us you 'had in the October '# Galaxy ? IVe been thoroughly searching every copy that comes in and no story. By the way, IVe sent in two other letters asking about this. Neither were printed and no answer has been given. Let's get on the ball! -- Ron Smith, # S. Court St., Medina, Ohio. # Clarke: in October, #, Galaxy. Asimov: March, #, If l -- Editor .    Dear Editor: Shame on you. An editor should be a bat more careful when reading stories employing a sex-switch trick. I refer to the story Arena , by Mack Reynolds, published in the September, # issue (##). The key to this tale lies in the fact that Billy is Ken's wife, and therefore female, not male, as the reader is likely to assume at the beginning of the story. The reader is particularly helped along in this assumption by text which appears in the first paragraph of the second column of page #. If I may quote: "... There in the sand was Billy, his body bearing a score of gaily ribboned darts." (Italics mine). What do you have to say for yourself? Do I rate a free subscription? -- Jim Kahan, # Cottage Lane, Chapel Hill, N.C. #...    Dear Editor:  I have been reading science fiction for something like forty years, and in the desert of # unmitigated crud of Sturgeon's Law, your magazine has been a welcome oasis. However, with the July issue I am very much afraid that my interest in your magazine has come to a regrettable end; this occasioned by the gratuitous (and badly written) attack upon the John Birch Society in the story, Bircher. It is the usual editorial plea, in such cases, that a good yarn is not to be bowdlerized merely because it might be expected to offend a minority of the readers; this argument might carry a great, deal more weight if I were not so very sure that if you were to receive a manuscript setting forth, the society for what it is -- an association of some of the finest people in the United States -- you'd reject it out of hand, no matter how well written. -- Curtis D. Janke, # South #th Street, Sheboygan, Wisconsin #. # Pohl's Law: The more hysterically any entity reacts to criticism, the more you're likely to find to criticize about it. -- Editor .    Dear Editor : This is the first time I have written your magazine, but I just have to express my thanks to you. I think A. A. Walde's Bircher s, is truly a fresh and enjoyable story. Mr. Walde seems to have great promise as a SF writer. His style is quite similar to the style used for writing some of the detective stories of the #'s. I would like to see more of Mr. Walde's work. Finally, I would like to say that I found Mr. Berry's letter proposing a new look for SF magazines very good. Mr. Pohl, what is the chance of such a magazine being published? -- Jack V. Groves, #I South Columbus Avenue, Medford, Oregon #. # As far as we are concerned, only fair. But we do think about it from time to time. -- Editor . IF Official Rand McNally Map taken from actual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed #I W' x # W'. Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. Yon# with a short trial membership in the Science Fiction Book Club combines three great science fiction classics for the first the most thought-provoking, compelling epics ever to come from the pen of the distinguished research biochemist and leading science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov. How to Get T hit Unusual Value for only #( Because you enjoy Science thrillers, the Science Fiction Book Club would like to acquaint you with the most imaginative, informative, entertaining new science fiction books as they are written. That is whv we have arranged to send you Subscription to the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and up in their original editions. Club members get them tions. Extra-value books cost more. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your Trial Subscription you agree to take as few as four books in the next twelve months. After that you may take as few or as many books as you want, and you may cancel at any time. It's a deal that is hard to beat. Mail Coupon With Only #( #t with a short trial membership. After seven days, if you will be canceled. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member, and you need take only four books in the next twelve months. Mail the coupon today to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York I enclose # to help cover shipping. Phease rush me me as a Trial Member in the Club. Then, every nonth send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," which describes coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping, unless I take an extra-value selection at a higher price. I need take only four books within a year and may resign at any time thereafter. pay nothing, owe nothing, and my membership will be canceled. Name City... Zone State. If under #, parent must sign here  Offrr good in U.S.A. only.) #-S#A the Foundation Trilogy T) Y # it was clear that the massively corrupt Galactic Empire was near total collapse. Its myriad worlds had already begun to war among themselves, plunging the universe into barbaric chaos. Civilization seemed doomed. But master scientists laboring to ensure that civilization would be preserved during the dark ages to come, established twin "Foundations" at opposite ends of the Galaxy, to form the nucleus of a new civilization, and in time to unite across the Galaxy to form a new... a stronger... a more enduring Second Empire. In Foundation and Foundation and Empire , we follow the course of the First Foundation as it rekindles the light of civilization in an everincreasing portion of the Galaxy -- and as it is confronted by its greatest crisis: a dangerous soul-consuming desire is conquest of the Galaxy! Within a decade, he tyrannized the entire Galaxy -- except for the Second Foundation. And this became his mania -- to find and conquer the Second Foundation. Everything in the Galaxy must be his!... WORLDS OF w ! Epic Novel of a Quest that Transcended Time and Space! Seated .'Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G.Eberhart, John Caples, J, D. Ratcliff. Standing; Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Selling. "We're looking for people who want to write" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School. Former editor. Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to more than # publications including Reader s Digest, True, Redhook. Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, "I just received a check from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That's I I stories sold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible." Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation to do so. r --  -- I Famous Writers School j Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude, j Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude I Test and #-page illustrated brochure. ! Mr.  Mrs Age I Miss Circle one and please print  Street j City I State Zip  Accredited by the Accrediting Commission I of the National Home Study Council. Yol. #, No. I Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perfon, Production Manager Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by J. F. Bone by D. M. Melton by Robert Mason by Algis Budrys by J. T. McIntosh by Robert Silverberg by C. C. MacApp by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #fl per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translations reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any slmiliarlty between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial A hundred years ago this week (as this is written) H. G. Wells was born. As it happens, this is being written in Wells's own city of London, and the newspai)ers and the television are full of him. Pilgrims have come from all over the world to celebrate his centenary; we spent part of yesterday with a visiting professor from Moscow, comparing recollections of Martian heat-rays and the Morlocks; speakers have praised him from France, Italy, Germany and, of course, the U.S.A. The England that Wells was born into was Queen Victoria's England, complete with chimney-pots, peasoup fogs and hansom cabs. It was the same England in which Karl Marx had been impelled to write Das Kapital (just a block or so from where we sit at this moment, in the reading room of the British Museum), a country of dreadful infant mortality and -- as Wells himself put it -- a chronic, nasty smell of drains. Country folk still tugged at their forelocks as the gentry passed by, and the lot of the industrial poor was far worse. It was also a country of learning and wit, where the world's most imiHwing Empire was ruled. To Herbert Wells the boy, and to young Wells the assistant draper's clerk. England must have seemed like the world and the world must have seemed a confusing place. Here were great railway engines and powerful ships. Here were clangorous factories and mines; an army and navy that ruled half the world, and a commerce that controlled much of the rest. And who were the Titans who populated this small, mighty island? They were Wells's own people, not quite poor but never really secure, living in dark, dingy, "respectable" homes, never entirely clean, never entirely well, never without fear. From these beginnings Wells looked into the future. What could he possibly see there? First he saw disasters -- the brutal, destructive war of The War in the Air and The Land Ironclads, He saw the money-driven life of When the Sleeper WakeSy a Victorian England raised a couple of magnitudes, where the poor were witless animals and the handful of rich were empty-headed, purposeless gods. He saw that final extrapolation of Marx's class struggle, the world of The Time Machine, where the workers, so long condemned to sweat and ignorance, lived in caverns below the earth and the butterfly descendants of the rich fluttered about the landscaped Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. ropj? # .'.The MasLife" -- ... A nonorganixaSan Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. surface... and at nigfht the Morlocks emerged from their ventilation tubes, and hunted the graceful little Eloi, and killed them, and ate them. What Wells saw for the future was, in fact, what he saw around him in the real world, but more so. It was an ugly sight, and he did his best to blot it out with his Utopias. We needn't come to this, he cried; if we use our hearts and brains -- and pay close attention to the Socialist principles of the Fabian Society -- we can come to a time of peace and freedom and love, where we all wear togas, write poems and do eurythmy all day long. W hat is wrong with Wells's Utopias is that they don't really sound like very much fun for the long pull. They are the sort of place that would be great to visit, but you wouldn't really want to live there. To tell the truth, this is not a problem that is unique to Wells. Nearly all science-fiction writers, the ones in this magazine included, have pretty consistently shown themselves to be better at warning of pitfalls than at painting rosy pictures of goals we can aim toward. Question for the class: Is it possible that this is the way things ought to be? Is it possible that, branching pathways toward the endless number of futures the world might attain, it is mere useful to have a guide that tells us which paths to avoid rather than one which encourages us to go that way or thisl Because the record of human beings who get what they think they want is not very encouraging. For example wibat would Wells himself have thoujglKt of this particular segment of his future that we are living in today? By any objective standards, he should have liked it very much indeed: there's plenty of soap and quite a lot of food; equality of opportunity for all is at least in sight, if not actually here; the world's governments may not be exactly socialist, but they're a long, long way from being Victoriancapitalist, too. Yet we who are actually living through his centennial year can testify that it isn't quite Utopia, after all. Antibiotics may have made us all healthy, but they haven't made us all good; and if our houses don't smell bad any more, our rivers do. Perhaps, like children, we just haven't yet made up our minds what we want to be when we grew up. Perhaps we are in the adolescence of the race -- gangling and bumptious, full of ferments and drives, as strong as an adult but not quite as wise... but unable to know that that is so, since we are wiser now than we ever were before, and consequently cannot imagine some day becoming wiser still. Perhaps the lesson that most needs learning is that we -- the collective "we", meaning all of mankind -- can invent for ourselves whatever kind of future we want. Granted that we can't describe it exactly at the moment; nevertheless, we can at least see the icebergs looming in our path, and we can turn away from them in time to avoid being sunk. Apart from pleasure -- the brainIF pleasure of stretching one's mind and the gut-pleasure of high adventure in space -- that's what science fiction is all about. It gives we brave few who read it a sort of extra eye. We may not see clearly, but we do see something; while most men trudge along without ever raising their eyes from the ground. A nd so we do honor H. G. Wells for having helped to shape and define science fiction. We owe ham a great deal. If today's writers sometimes see a little better than he it is perhaps because they have learned from his mistakes, the mistakes of a man of genius, working at his best. For Wells's science fiction was Wells at his best. He wrote any number of 'mainstream" novels, and they were well received and widely read; but who reads them now? Why should anyone read them now? And he wrote non-fiction, too -- but the best of it, his Outline of History t is really a sort of sciencefiction piece in reverse: in it Wells played the sf game of extrapolation just as in his stories, but he worked it from the other end, with real causes and real events. We wonder what Wells would have made of the world if he had started a century later; what would he have written for us if his child# and the DC-#? He would have written fine stories, no doubt, and quite different from The War of the Worlds and Men Like Gods in detail. But we think that the overall message would have been the same. H. G. Wells's stories all had a single moral, after all, and we doubt that that would have changed. What he would say to us now is what he said to us then: "It is time Men stopped suffering like animals, and began to suffer like Men." -- The Editor Special "Hugo" Issue of IF At the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, September, #, the "Hugo" -- science fiction's annual achievement award -- went for the first time to If as most popular science-fiction magazine in the world. Other winners indude: Isaac Asimov Frank Herbert Roger Zelazny Harlan Ellison To celebrate, the next issue but one of If -- that is, the March, # issue -- will be a Special Hugo Winners Issue, and in it we hope to have stories by all the above, and a cover by Frank Frazetta, who won the award for best cover artist of the year. We are proud and grateful for the award -- this is our way of saying thanks! IF  Serial The If was great to be an Amsir-killerl It gave you your pick of women and food -- if you only overlook the lies they told you! I R ippled like red ocean bottom, each ripple inked in violet shadow from the setting sun, the low dunes rolled in their journey to the edges of the world. Those ges stood high and cruel. The eastern horizon was blue-black below a flaring long arc of eaten rust whose ends sank out of sight far to the right and left. Occasional nearer masses of orange rock glowed their sunward faces against the shadow beneath the edge. Above it, tiny flecks of unwavering light were stabbing themselves through the black windings of creation. Toward that horizon the Amsir sped, its clawed, padded feet making thumps and hisses among the ripples as they kicked. Topping each rise, the Amsir emerged from thickening shadow and, like the rocks, glowed briefly before; unlike the rocks, it had cavorted down out of sight to pop up again on the next rise. It was half a dozen feet tall and gripped a javelin across its chest with the little hands that grew halfway down its wings. Honor White Jackson was chasing it and had a different opinion, but the Amsir was beautiful. Its beaked face was all angles and slits, and it had great, translucent flightless wings extended for balance. Graceful as a goblin bride, it curvetted in a flutter of lacy pennons growing from the horn of its puffedup body and its spindled lower limbs. These made good insulation for Amsirs at rest and were also quite useful to the humans of the Iron Thorn. Their effect now was to make a shy wonder of the beast; a pale, tossing creature that soared in on skittish, pK)ssibly joyous, quick steps. The wings, spanning twelve-odd feet from nail-hard tip to tip, glowed pale coral in the waning sunlight and were excellent for infuriatingly shrewd changes in direction. Many times as he ran after it. White Jackson had changed over to his casting stride, the brutal glass-headed dart nocked in the socket of his Amsirbone throwing stick. Just as often, the Amsir had tossed up one shoulder in a motion fraught with disdain, pivotted around the resistance of the fifteen square feet of braking surface, and been off again on a slightly altered tack. Behind the slitted round turrets of horn in which its eyes were veiled, glittering pupils twinkled back over its shoulders. A s they traced their paired tracks of magenta dust over the great desert. White Jackson and the Amsir together made a certain beauty greater than their individual own. Jackson was thinnish, long limbed, tall and burned brown. Like the Amsir, he had a lean face and glittering eyes. Like die Amsir, he ran daintily, touching the surface just long enough to gain traction for his next stride, striving not to come down flat-foot. He wore a very old, bright metal cap with a pointed spike and a new chinstrap made of Amsir-lace. He bad a hf pint of water in an Amsir-bubble strapped to the small of his back, and carried his spare dart in his left armpit. As wiry and as taut as the Amsir was ethereal to the eye, he was very much aware that this whole scene depended on a suspicious sloth in the quarry just as much as it did on the Honor's energy. White Jackson was also aware that the Amsir's exasperating jigs and jags had a common baseline which was leading him steadily away from the safety of the Iron TTiom. The damned bird was trying to lure him. White Jackson was new to being a Honor, and if this was the sort of thing he could expect to have happening in his chosen way of life, he wanted very much to investigate it while he was still young enough to learn. Accordingly, though he now and then came down on his soles in the jolting, slower bounds designed to transfer momentum to his poised throwing stick, he intended nothing more for his pains than what he got -- a series of sharp nudges of his cap's rim against his scalp. He saw no reason to doubt that he was tougher and smarter than any Amsir or man in the world. If he wasn't, now was none too soon to learn about it. He was content to keep running all day -- barring one limitation he couldn't help -- and he expected the Amsir would spring his trap whenever it was dark to help him spring it, if it was what he suspected it was. As they ran on, playing their charade on each other, the Amsir undoubtedly had its own motives for being where it was. Jackson was thinking that if he brought in the Amsir, his brother Black would treat him one way, and another if he did not. Though his brother was always very good to him. He was thintog that it would be pleasant to sit down to the community table with the demeanor of one who has killed what is being eaten. He imagined this would have its effect on women, and might go some distance toward getting elders off his back. But all this was colored by the simple joy of being tirelessly strong and a Honor -- his people pronounced it with the "H", as "Hahn-er" -- in a world bounded by sand and Amsirs, populated mostly by dvdl fanmers, and centered on the Thom to which the farmers clung. He looked over his shoulder to locate the Thorn. He had gotten very far away from it. Only the top several dozen feet of its black silhouette were visible over the horuxm. There was no doubt that if he lost his cap now, there would be a few very bad moments of death for him, and danmed little else. What puzzled him was that the Amsir was not giving him enough credit for intelligence. H onor White Jackson, even more than the wise old farmers who knew better than to want anything off beyond the fields, had a clear understanding that it was bad to get out of sigjit of the Thom. It was also bad to go beyond the perimeter of the fields without a cap. The proposition about the cap had been proved to him by his brother, who took him to the desert and took his cap off. The air around White Jackson had instantly turned into thirsty burning ice. The sun had become a pale, cold hammer that left his skin itchy for hours after the cap was clapped back on his head, and would have blackened his frozen corpse given the chance. The proposition about never getting out of sight of the Thorn, cap or no, Jackson took on faith ir Black's word as an established professional Honor. There were alsc the elders, of course, who knew so bloody much that only their conIF stant open-mouthedoess prevented its running out iHieir ears. And there were the dders' women, whose job in life seemed to lie in telling girls all sorts of useM tips about how tricky life was. With all this information being passed around the humans since time began with the creation of the Thorn, it was inconceivable that the Amsirs hadn't deduced how much of it was true and how much of it the humans believed enough to act on. The Amsirs after all had been in the desert beyond the fields since time began, and had seen many a farmer turn his plough, and many a Honor popping up from his nightlaid ambush in a dune. The story was that the world hadn't been made for Amsirs; Amsirs had been made for the world. Either way, it was surely no world for men, and men could be presumed to know it. Therefore, thout White Jackson as he skimmed across the sand, with faint swirls in the space immediately around him as if the air were water about to produce its first bubbles before boiling, what was the Amsir's plan? Did it honestly expect him to follow it over the Thom's horizon and drop dead for its benefit? That seemed to be the idea. It really did. Having seen an Amsir get away from an ambush and carefully maintain half-speed with all the appearance of going full out. White Jackson was prepared to believe there was more to honning Amsirs than had ever been spelled out for him. A while ago, the beast had started working him around behind one of the rare rock outcroppings, and Jackson had beeii ready to expect three or four more Amsirs. But nothing like that was happening. The shallow arc of their course was now far beyond the spongy up-thrust of bloody orange rock, and just ibeginning to curve in behind it. Their distance from the rock gave him a clear field to see that he and the treacherous bird were the only two live things working here. All right. They were as far from the Thom as Honor White Jackson cared to go. He was going to have to nigiht-walk back to the Thorn, solving the navigation by reversing his memories of every change in direction and every stage of distance he had covered since leaving it. He was, hopefully, going to have to do it with the Amsir's eighty pounds across his shoulders, and he was about ready to start. In another eight stritte, he was going to stumble, lose his stick and dart, paw at his face and try to crawl back along his track, for all the world as if the Amsir had lured him over the horizon. If the bird didn't go for it, that was just too bad. If he did, he was due for Jackson's spare dart right in the throat. But it was only three strides before the world was cold and his throat was full of splinters. He had been moving forward at a pace that covered twelve feet per second, comfortable and planning ahead, and now he was flailing forward, incapable of stopping until he fell, or doing anything but trying to squeeze breath out of the breathless air. He thought his eyeballs would freeze. He searched indignamtly for the sight of the Thom, and he couldn't believe that you actually had to see it; he couldn't understand why, if you were still inside the Thom's horizon, an outcropping of red rock between you and it was the same as losing your cap. Black Jackson had never said a word about that, and neither had anyone else. And now that damned Amsir was turning around. T he , Amsir came in like fury. Nothing in the world mov faster than one of its kind when it wanted to, and it wanted Honor White Jackson very soon. Its wings were flung up like a hook for each moon. The javelin was caught halfway up the haft in the bereft little right hand that grew where the wing folded in mid-span, thumb and all three fingers making a bony fist. It was gathering speed as it ran, and its strides were growing longer jmd more urgent. It was almost as near to flying as it could get. The javdin was stabbing straight up and down -- the wings were folding into leathery cups for the thin air, and beating with a rattling thrum that raised wakes of dust beside its springing knees. Now White Jackson could see its full face -- the delighted grin of its beak, the adrenalin-exalation of its eyes. Its talons diuokled through the sand. Jackson almost didn't care. He knew what it was -- it was the cold and the choking that were making him all concerned with what went on inside. After Black had showed him the trick with the cap, he had thought for a long time about what had happened, and although several old women had told him it was a kind of sunstroke and perhaps impiety's simple reward, he had decided it was cold and lack of air. Sudden lack of air, that caught a man halfway into drawing a breath and having his heart nearly stop with fear when an everyday useful action suddenly got you nothing but savage disappointment. He had noticed that people who got bad news on a beautiful day were more apt to go around with ttieir eyes popping, grabbing at their hair and sobbing, than those who got it on a gloomy one. Summertime tragedy was always louder and more indignant. So he could understand why his body wanted to double over on itself and his hands wanted to beat on his throat. He had tried it out, getting one of the neighbor kids to hit him in the stomach, and it had been a feeling a lot like that; no cold or burning in the eyes and nose, but the same helplessness to make his body do anything it didn't want to until the spasm had passed and he could begin to pant. He guessed if he thought about it long enough, he could reason it out about the cold, too, and the thing that made bloody paper of the insides of his nostrils. Maybe even test it. But the Amsir was coming on. White Jackson's stick and dart were lyIF ing away on the sand just as if he'd thrown them deliberately, and he was dying. In spite of all reasoning and rehearsal, he would have been helpless if he hadn't already been planning to fake this same thing. He had no air -- no air at all, and you can't go long with not trying to breathe if your lungs are empty, even if you know there's no air around you any more. But he had that other dart, and as he folded he got a hand up to his armpit with a very natural motion. The Amsir had reached him. It was up in the air, at the height of a great leap, bucket-winged, and he couldn't understand why it wasn't flirting those feet like knived clubs, ready to shred him up as it came down. He would have been. But it was up there, falling at him from a height of its own length. Now the ends of the wings were tucked down and back, and the hand with the javelin was bent to aim. The gleaming metal point was going to hit the sand right in front of his eyes, and the Amsir shrieked "Yield! Yield!" W hite Jackson only looked like he was all in a heap on his knees and chest, with his face in the sand and his eyes rolling up sideways. He had the dart in the hand under his body, point sticking out of the bottom of his fist for more punch. "Yield, damp thing!" the Amsir shrieked as White got his open hand on its ankle, which was hard like a cockroach. There was a lot of noise and flurrying, and, Jackson had the Amsir down on the sand at this levei. He jerked himself across the body, whi was hard the same way aiKl wrapped in flapping stuff, and he was himself wrapped in wings and fingernails with his head down between his shoulders as far as it could go, with the beak carving him. It was punch through the side of the Amsir's throat and through the spinal cord, and a feeling like a stick coming back out through a jabbed parchment window, and then, for the life of him, punch through the Amsir's chest and into a bubble -- one of the two big, main ones down inside there imder all that horn and stuff -- and hug the Amsir with all the affection in the world, mouth to the chest-hole, and breathe in, in of the Amsir's air. The Amsir flopped and flailed, wings drumming, legs dancing, back arching, but White Jackson stayed with it. The stuff coming out of the Amsir was hot with life and puffed like hollering; he had to lock his throat against its pressure when he had his lungs full. He couldn't move his head, for his mouth was the only stopper he had to save it with. And he didn't have to breathe; he didn't have to breathe! He could go on doing this forever. It was altogether different from being out of air. It was being free of having to breathe like the Honors he had seen dancing around the Thorn with the bubbles from their fresh kills, dancing all night, hey, and gulping the Amsir-wind from the bubbles, but never breathing, just blowing out once in every while and mouthing the disembodied parts of Amsir chest again, laughing and moving like the dead were said to whoop with joy on Ariwol. The Amsir's body was dying now. Its head might be dead, or it might live forever, but who could tell when nothing but skin connected it to the body and it had no wind to shriek with. The eyes were shut. There was something thick and clear seeping out between the closed lids and drying immediately to a crust. The wingtips were still quivering. But Honor White Jackson was a hell of a lot more alive than it was, and he picked it up. Staggering, and grinning as much as he could, he stumbled quickly to the javelin, his throwing stick and his darts, the one far away and the other near to hand with fresh gouges up the short Amsir-bone shaft. He got them clustered into his hands with his arms around the Amsir, and then he wandered out from beyond the outcropping's shadow, still cold but not caring, riotous as a tickled child, happy on pure oxygen, with his first Amsir like the world's most awkward bucket of cool water on a blazing day. W hen he had rested for a long time in the cool sand, watching nebulae and moons wheel by beautifully without his knowing what they were, he raised himself on one elbow and fondly stroked the Amsir's long thigh as it lay sprawled beside him. The hunting bird, wings folded, was only a dim, coverletted shape. But Honor White Jackson could have named every curled rim of horn, every trailing pennon, every nail, every tooth. He unfastened the trimmed and harnessed water bubble at the small of his back, unstoppered it and raised it to the corpse before sipping from it himself. As his neck and back muscles stretched, sand cracked free from his wounds and tickled him as it slipped down his spine. He grinned at the Amsir and patted its hip. He stood up, hooked and tied his gear into place and oriented himself to the shadow of the outcropping against the stars. Now that he knew where he was, he could go where he had been. And now that he was standing up, he could no longer hear thuds of approaching Amsir feet, if there were any such in his vicinity. So he must go. Stooping, he hefted his first conquest, eased it down across his shoulders and began a steady, fast and comfortable walk, broken with pauses for listening closely and looking around as well as he could. Amsirs did not seem to move much at night -- hence the Honor tactic of slipping away from the Thorn at dusk and picking a good ambush in the morning. But Honor White Jackson was more than ever in an iconoclastic mood, and he wondered why, if Amsirs did not haunt the darkness, so many of those ambushes failed. His grip on his slain enemy was needlessly rigid. He knew that, but he did not slacken it. He could carry him more easily if he relaxed, but he did not do that, either. Nobody had told him Amsirs IF could talk. Nobody had told him they carried metal spears, or any other kind of weapon but claws, beak, and wingtips. He had been told -- as all children of the Thom were told even before most of them drifted into farming and a very few tried to be Honors -- that the Amsirs would get them all if the Honors did not watch out. But he had not been told how they would be gotten. He would not let his Amsir go. He thought it was because he had had to learn so much to get him. The gritty, sharp-faced grains of sand made noises like gentle screams beneath his trudging feet. The Amsir rustled and rattled. It was full of ridges and pointed places that goaded White Jackson's flesh. The wings were full of joints along the main bone. It was conventional to speak of the hand as growing out of the elbow, but in fact there was a joint between shoulder and hand, and the remainder of the wing was supported by what would have been a monstrously long little finger in a man. No matter how Jackson folded the wings and tried to tuck them into each other or pin them under the Amsir's hard chest, the nail at the end of that little finger on one wingtip or the other would flop down and swing teasingly across his ankles as he walked. He put the Amsir down and trussed it with its own lace. Now it was a rolling bundle on his back, stiff and contrary. An edge on it found the deepest place Jackson was cut -- a beakfurrow across the top of his shoulder, its edges stiff and gaping, crusty dry with sand, open down to the rubbery, twist-surfaced muscle. Jackson was fascinated with the cut -- it was unusual to be able to touch his own inside, to dwell on the thought that if he were not a victorious Honor he would be wincing pitifully. He understood perfectly well that all men would rather not put their flesh in peril. He knew from himself that even a small hurt could nag a man with reminders of why this was wise. But he had noticed that it wasn't the size of the wound, it was his feeling for himself that made a man cry or not, and that was why he had become a Honor. Now he was a Honor who would have a white Amsir-beak scar across one broad shoulder; a Honor who put his Amsir down from time to time and stretched out on the sand beside him, ear in the grit listening, with the stars and small moons giving him little to light his night with, and going back to the Thorn where he would live differently from before. Ill I t was very nearly dawn when he caught the loom of the Thorn against the low stars. At the same time, he noticed a human step on the sand. He thought it might be Black Jackson coming toward him around the shoulder of a dune. The way it was supposed to go, a Honor was discovered sitting beside his kill on the sun side of the Thom when the people got up in the morning. Successful Honors had been knawn to stay out on the edge of the desert ah night even when they didn't have to. People who accidentally came across a Honor before dawn pretended the man didn't have a carcass across his back. The idea was to have an effect that it had all just somehow happened, like a meteorite shower. The Honor was supposed to play it very cool, too, and not notice anybody was paying any attention to him -- at least until there was enough of an audience for him to suddenly break out in a big happiness. All that guff got more comment than it did attention. It seemed to be a hangover from some time maybe half a dozen generations back when some nut had whipped up a lot of pious ritual. The trouble with any of diis stuff that was supposed to make life better and more interesting was that the life plain never did get any better, and a man still had to find his own interests. After a while even a community of farmers could notice that. So White had half expected, especially on his first kill, that a live one like Black Jackson would be around to give him a personal handshake or something before discovering him all over again in the morning. To say nothing of the fact that just maybe, even though it wasn't like a Honor was supposed to be, Black might be worried. The Amsir was suddenly beginning to get that characteristic smell Jackson had studied from boyhood. He pulled his cap off cautiously, and sure enough he was inside the comfortable radius, even if it was still very much like desert underfoot and breathing took a little work in the chill air. It was a lot farther out than the farmers cared to come. Farther in, there would be a good four dozen feet of weedy grass around the perimeter before the fields began. Winters that strip shrank to something that was still wider than two dozen. For a part of the year, when the days were long and the high sun beat down sharply on the glistening gridwork atop the Thorn, the strip might be close to five. The fields never crept out into it. A farmer. White Jackson had decided early, was anybody who would scheme nights to ge an inch off his neibor's boundary but wouldn't reach for a free clear title to all Ariwol if he'd ever cut his finger on an edge bf parchment. I t was Black Jackson, tall and with muscle around his stomach and waist that White Jackson envied the hell out of, his short hair marking him as a Honor. His bare face showed up as a paler patch against the dark contrast of his mouth and eyepits. White stopped, but didn't let the Amsir slide to the ground, and stood easily. "Welcome, Honor," Black said. There was something unusually breathy in his big rumble of a voice, which for many years White had been thinking of as friendly. He came forward and touched White on the shoulder -- the sound one, as it happened. Although it was still IF pretty nearly full dark, at this dis' tance White could see the sober set of Black's broad mouth. This was beginning to relax as Black touched the Amsir; White had noticed long ago that people believed only what they touched -- the rest they believed conditionally, on the testimony of people who claimed to have touched. "You all right, kid?" Black touched him again. "Uh-huh." "Well. Well, you got one, didn't you? And you're okay." Black was walking around him, displaying more and more of a species of relief, studying the Amsir, poking the carcass. "Young one," he said, appraising the callous on the pads of its feet with a rasp of his thumb. He had been carrying his dart and stick. He put these down and looked at White. "Give you trouble?" White shrugged. Black had found the javelin across White's shoulders under the Amsir's body. It slid easily into his hands. "Ck)me at you with this, did he?" "Uh-huh." Black's glance came up fast from under his lowered brows. "Say anything?" "Nothing much." "What did he say?" "Something about how he had me, I guess. I was busy. And he called me a damp thing." "Any more?" "No. I killed him about then." Black bent to examine the Amsir's neck. He fingered the edges of the dart punch. "Nice work. Caught him clean." "Well, that's how Black Jackson taught me." "Kid?" "Yeah?" "Feels good, doesn't it?" Black Jackson was grinning. Whether he knew it or not, he looked more like he was remembering than he did like he was enjoying now. And it looked as if he was working hard to remember. "Going out there, getting your first one... finding out just how tough you are?" "You mean it felt good for you when you did it." "Well, yeah; Yeah, kid. I remember how -- " "How tough am I, Black?" "I don't follow you." "I mean, you're the one that's happy about what I found out. Do you know what I found out?" "Well, sure. I Look, I didn't hoild it against anybody that didn't tell me Amsirs had spears and could talk!" W hite Jackson had been thinkabout this ever since the first screech out of the Amsir's mouth. But he had never seen his brother this way before. He studied Black as closely as he had studied the Amsir who had taken off from the blown ambush but hadn't really tried to outrun him. "I figured maybe we could pass a few words about it." He was thinking about a dirowing spear that had at least as much range as a Honor's dart, and an Amsir who hadn't pulled out to a safe distance and then picked him off, hadn't stood and fought until he was ready. IP "Ppintis, you didu't need to be told, did you? Got him aayhow, right?" Black had the javdin head down in the sand beside his foot, and was leaning on it. That way, it looked like a stick of some kind and not much of a weapon. "And I told you they were tricky. Remember?" he afterthought. "Uh-huh." He held tighter to his Amsir. He believed this was because he had a stupid feeling Black might try to take it away. He believed he had the stupid feeling because he had suddenly realized Black wasn't going to give the spear back. He waited for Black to say something. It was Black who obviously knew what was going to happen here next. "Well, ain't it something to go out against something that's that tough, and come back carrying it?" "It's something." Black was wrapping and imwrapping his thick fingers around the javelin's shaft. The sharp metal head gritted down, sinking deeper. "It gives you the feel of being a man, right?" "It gives me the feeling of something. I was a man before I went out jthere," White said. His brother tapped him lightly, awkwardly with his clenched fist, this time on his. bad shoulder. He couldn't see it was bad. "You always were tough. Never gave an inch. I always had the feeling you'd cut me down just as soon as one of those kids you used to bloody up. If I vasn't your brother, I mean... And bigger, I guess." This was not the view White had of bimself through his brother's eyes. And this wasn't the talk he had expected. It was teaching him a lot more about Black than it was about Amsir--hunting, and he didn't want to 'be taught any more about his brother. He had been peifeotiy satisfied with what he had lieved up to now. "Black, it's getting on to first light," White said softly. "I have to go sit by the Thorn. Come midmorning, the Eld Honor's got to look over my Amsir, see it's real, call me a Honor, chop my hair, name a winning man to shave me; that'd be you, I guess. Be a busy day for both of us. Why don't we just call me a made Honor for now and let me pick up any other tricks of the trade as I go along?" A foot of the javelin's length was buried in the ground. It occurred to White that Black only had a third of a dozen feet to go before he had it out of sight. "No, look -- Kid, it could of been somebody else waiting here to meet you. We all get met the first time. It's -- hell, you can see it's necessary. But it could have been Red Filson or Black Harrison or one of those guys. It didn't have to be me. But I trained you. Same way I was trained; we all get trained the same way. When you get back, you see the good in tha -- " "If you get back." You? Hell, I knew youd come back!" "Sure." "Well, I figured you had a good chance." Black twisted the javdin; White couldn't decide whether he was really trying to huiy it ligt here or whether he was so wirapp up in his words that he wasn't even thinking about his hands. A trait like that could get a Honor killed. White had to assume it was rare. "Good chance," Black said. "All right," White said, feeling the cracks in his lips where the edges of the Amsir's chest wound had cut them. "Listen, kid, there's a lot of things to growing up beside;# getting your hair chopped!" White noted that Black was getting angry in the same way as when somebody refused to believe it about the caps. "You think we're gonna let a bunch of punk kids -- even Honor kids -- run around tellin' the farmers all about what it takes to be a Honor? You think those farmers don't all believe they could be Honors if they could spare the time? You think it don't make a difference to a Honor, taking a piece of a farmer's loaf, to know he couldn't be?" "Because he's a Honor who got back from his first time." "That's right. Now you're gettin' it. It ain't what you're taught -- it's what you are that makes a Honor!" Black looked proudly across at his brother, at a man whom he could consider a man like 'himself. He jerked the spear out of the ground and brandished it. "Because you went up against thhr That, and talk from animals, and caps that didn't work, and brothers who spent years getting you ready for the night they lurked to check you out on the way back in. White Jackson looked at this powerful simpleton who had raised him. He didn't know whether he was supposed to swallow this line because he was dumb enough to believe it or because Black was dumb enough to believe it. Either way, Black was not the man White had thought him, and in that case what brains did White have to brag about? # # A #I alight. I've got it." Black looked at him sidelong in the growing grayness. "You sure, kid?" He was begging for the right answers. He was being very gruff and tough about it, but he was begging. White guessed that in his own simple way. Black loved him, was sweating out the culmination of years in which he had prepared the greatest gift in his estimation. "I mean, you're not going to say anything different, are you? I want you to be sure in your own mind you're not going to pop off to the people until you've had a chance to talk to the Eld Honor about it. Lots of times, the Eld Honors can explain it all in a minute or two. Explain it a hell of a lot better than I can, that's for sure," he realized. White shook his head. "I'm gonna play it the way every new Honor plays it. I'm going to tell a story about ambushing him and having a hell of a fight and winning out in the end, and that's all." "You sure?" "You're damned right I'm sure." Black began to sigh with relief, but White was mad at him now, and wasn't going to let him off the hook. IF "Now you can tell the Eld Honor something for me. You tdl him I want to know about a metal spear even an Amsir can throw farther than I can flip a dart. Hell, a human could throw it eight dozen yards into an eye, and just how many of 'em do we have cached away? I want to know why my hat didn't work when I was behind a rock. I want to know about Amsirs that talk. You tell him for me I think he's got rotten brains for letting a brother come out to talk to me. You're so shook up I could take you -- even if I wasn't expecting you to try for me." He finished slowly. "You got that last part all sorted out, Black? I do. I got it sorted out fine about a Honor out here with weapons but no hat. There's only a couple of things a Honor could kill out here with that rig. One of them's poor slob Honors trying' to crawl back vith spearholes in 'em that couldn't be explained, and the other one's young Honors that won't shut up about what kind of people we're sharing creation with. On the short end of the share. Now you just go take that spear and put it wherever all the other spears are; I'm not gonna go around upsetting the Honor racket, especially now I made my way into it, but don't you mess me around until I'm over this." He swung away, and his Amsir rattled on his shoulders, smelling like hell. He realized he was simple for giving Black so many excuses to just give that spear a little toss in the name of whatever Black thought was decent. But whenever he got mad and didn't show it, he was always, crying sick inside for days. He figured if he just kept walking away from his brother who loved him, he had an even chance for getting off. IV I t was warm and pleasant in the sun. He sat cross-legged with his back against the warm black-andbrown flank of the Thom. His eyes were slitted into the sunrise, and he was only a little bit conscious of the people filtering out of die low cement buildings around the Thorn, on the other side of the clear space that ran a couple of dozen yards wide around it and was a dozen times a dozen dozen yards long from start to start. Red Filson, long-legged and looking like he knew everything about anything -- from the scar that lifted his mouth and the corner of his left eye -- was running a group of young Honor-types around it. As they went by White Jackson, bare feet thudding first in his right ear and then in his left, the young ones rolled their eyes sideward at the Amsir sprawled, spread-winged, beside him. Filson, sunbleached lank blond hair all spiky with sweat, just grinned his grinless grin and kept eating up the ground with 'his feet, with that smooth, scissoring motion that had run down a lot of things. One of the things had been Black Olson, White's father, with his throwing arm stabbed through at the elbow and his eyes blinded from a cut across the brows. A thing White was supposed to be mojoed by was the worry that between a running father and farmer mother no Jackson could stand up with Red Filson. White wasn't ready to swear what went on in Black Johnson's mind, with all its sidesteps, but as for ite, he had noticed long ago he wasn't either his mother or his father. He sat smiling faintly into the sun, his arms dangling over his thighs, as the class went on by in its circuit, the young ones sweating and grunting, Red sweating and grinning. White was thinking that being strung out mad about being mojoed would be a handy excuse if he ever decided there was something he didn't want to share with Honor Red Filson. The sun did feel good. Now that he was sitting down and didn't have to do anything but, wait for other people to do things. White could let himself feel sleepy. And he was where he had spent a lot of time wanting to be. Up against the Thorn, feeling its pitted warm surface comfortably rough against his back, the sweetish scent of the Amsir rising around him, he could turn loose of things he hadheld tight for a long time. Gazing through his lashes at the half-focused sight of the green fields and orchards beyond the houses, getting the shadows of gathering people moving across the comers of his eyes, listening to them talking to each other -- it sounded like a cross between things crackling far away and a mumble like the sound of whatever it was that went on inside the Thom -- a man felt as good as a baby in his crib. His back was safe, and nobody in front could do anything to him right now. A lot of them would never dare do anything any time from now on, just because he had killed something and was short-haired. The rest of them would think long and hard about messing around a Honor's goods or women. The idea was Honors looked out for each other. It worked out they did look out for each other when it was between Honor and farmer, so from now on there wouldn't be a farmer or even a Honor-type who would buck him to his face, and damned few who would go for his back, even when they had a good chance. H e had really messed up that Amsir, too. Given him one hell of a shock, with all the plans notching into each other in that horned brain, and the damp thing lying there helpless, and all of a sud -- What was it like to die. White wondered. Get cut off like that, in the middle of being alive, in the middle of thinking you had it made. Did you have time to know you were a chump? And just suppose there was an Ariwol, and you were human and that had happened to you, and you turned up with all that being a chump mnning around inside you. Yeah, sure, everybody running around laughing and singing, feast going on all the time, but man the ones who hadn't died chumpy would have an extra laugh for you, and all the chumps would try to buddy up. Thing to do was not go to Ariwol being a chump. But that was a tricky idea to live IF up to, because sure as there was sand in creation that Ancksir hadn't thought he was being a chump, he had thought he was on top right up to punch! Well, how could the Amsir know White Jackson had watched the Honors around the Thorn with their fresh bubbles? How could he know White Jackson would remember that, would trust that, wouldn't try to breath what couldn't be breathed, would wait for what his enemy had to give him? Was it being a chump to be happy when your plan worked out? It was when you didn't know all about what it was supposed to work against, White Jackson decided. There were more people gathering around him. Just standing there, with their farmer tools in their hands, the women with their water buckets, the kids... farmers not going out, women not lining up at the taps in the side of the Thorn, kids playing Honor behind the crowd, hanging on to grownup legs up front. What do they know? White Jackson thought to himself, watching the sun, smelling his Amsir, letting himself notice his shoulder and his other cuts just enough to remind himself. All they see is me and a dead one. No. All they see is the outsides of the two of us. What do they know about what we found out? And if they had been there and watched us do it, would they know any more? Touch me -- any one of you, touch me or touch him, and you'll find out the last thing there is. How's about it, you muckers? Anybody want to ride to Ariwol on the end of a dart this morning? Filson and his candidates came round the Thorn again, Filson in front now, not running sweat but with a nice all-over bead worked up, the candidates pale as lace and soaking wet, their eyes blind. They were one less. Somebody had turned farmer after all, lying sucking wind somewhere around the curve of the Thorn with dirt in his mouth and water in his eyes. White Jackson thought about that scar on there; Filson had come back from his first hon with that on him; Filson knew. White wanted to grin at him as he went by. But he wouldn't have known if he was really getting an answer. P etra Jovans came walking up to the edge of the crowd, making a little space around herself as usual, and stood there with her hands folded in front of her hips just looking at him with all that quiet in her eyes. What do you know? White Jackson thought, testing it on her, and then he wished he knew the things she knew. He wondered if the things he knew were big or little when you thought about them her way. He wondered whether it would be with her that he exercised some of his new rights as Honor Secon Black Jackson. If not with her then with somebody else. Then sooner or later a son would be old enough to name and the people would Icam his own name was Jim. Then someday he'd leave off honning and he Honor Gray Jackson, and mayhe there'd be a Honor Jimson or a fanner named Petras to scatter his bones and maybe not, but somebody'd scatter 'em, that was sure, because they did it out of grief or anything else they felt, but the idea was to make damn sure that the old man was dead. Sitting there, looking at it that way. White Jackson could see that if he was lucky enough to have all of this happen without any ugly interruptions out in the desert, it was still a short damn list of important things left to have happen in his life. It came to him he'd spent a lot of years running around the Thorn and pitching darts to come to the moment he realized it was all downhill from here on. But it was all downhill. When he thought of all the people he'd seen follow that road, and the way they did it because they'd all heard the elders telling them and telling them how to do it. White Jackson realized that the track to Ariwol was beaten many times as hard as the track around the Thorn. What do you know? he thought to all the people. I could die sitting here, all punched out inside like Red Thompson was diat time last year. When the first anybody knew was when the Eld Honor touched him and he fell over just as stiff as his Amsir. I could be doing that, and when you found out you'd say. Oh hell, what a shame. But when I get up in a minute you'll make all kinds of noises except that. And just the same I'm dying. I wish to hell there was a puddle of blood under me. You'd say the right thing then. What do you know? Petra had drifted into the crowd in such a way that she was right in his line of vision. Because he was thinking that she knew if anybody knew that he was as dead this minute as the farmers had been from birth. He winked at her. He realized he was getting a little crazy, but it seemed reasonable to get that way when you were dying and you'd been fighting animals that were people inside and had a fine brother like Black who was too simple to either kiss or kill and get it over. White Jackson was wondering where the failed Honors' graveyard was, out there beyond the fields, when the Eld Honors came through the crowd and touched him on the shoulder. "Wake up. Honor -- you are home with your kill I" the old man said in a loud voice. He was all knobs and ibones under his brown shrunken skin. His cheeks were in deep where his teeth bad 'been, and his eyes were pouched. If he had had wings, he would have been fair game. "You all right, son?" he asked in a low voice. W hite could see Black hanging off around the edge of the crowd with a lot of other Honors. "Black talk to you?" he said to the old man without moving his lips. It wasn't all that unusual to see Honors carrying their weapons around the Thorn, but there were IF quite a few of them doing that. White would have been happier if on this particular day he didn't see so much sun on so many dartheads. "Yes." For the crowd the Eld Honor said, "These people are waiting to praise you." His hand on White's shoulder had a lot of knuckles in it. His voice changed again. "What do you think of them?" White looked frankly and fully into the old man's eyes. "As near to what you think as makes no difference." "Was Black right in passing you?" the Eld Honor asked, which surprised the daylights out of White. But the rheumy old eyes were tight on his. Maybe the old man expected he could tell a liar that way. Maybe he could. "As far as you and me go, he was right." That might not have been quite what the Eld Honor had been expecting either, but it was what White had for him. It was more than White had intended to give him. Some of that stuff they told kids might really work -- always give the Eld a straight answer, neved do anybody dirt, that kind of thing. Parts of it seemed to stick better than others. They were blowing time. The Eld Honor's mouth was working at the corners, and he was looking at White the way a farmer looked at his wife's first loaf. But they couldn't keep testing each other out here forever. The pressure on the Eld was a lot worse than it was on White, as far as White could see. Seeidg it suddenly as he did, he relaxed inside as happily as ever a man did when he unstoppercd a bubble on a hot day and felt the cool water going all the way in to the pit of his stomach. He was ready to go on this way forever. Hie old man had to move, he didn't; the old man would have to think up one hell of a story if he had White killed now. And White was saying things that didn't really give an excuse. They were just aggravating. "So you think we're equals," the Eld said. "You think you've lived one day longer and all of a sudden even your brother and his friends are dumb, and only the Eld is fit for a man like you to be frank with. Must be a happy day when a young man picks his peer from the decrepit." It was hard to tdl when a mouth like that was smiling faintly. "Well, all right. You'll get your badges and tokens, and then we'll talk afterwards." Hie old man raised his voice. "See herel" he cried. "A man sits with his kill!" That, of course, was the signal for a lot of general roaring and shouting and people pushing forward. There were things to do, and the Eld Honor pointed out people to do them -- Black Jackson would do the shaving -- and White Jackson found that becoming a made Honor meant you had to shake hands with people like Filson and get punched around by a bunch of farmers who considered that touching you was the price of admission for standing around and staring at a dead Amsir, which was what they all went off and did as soon a they were through assuring themsdves that White Jackson was real. Kee;p it short, the Eld Honor said, as he led White Jackson forward to where the shaving bowl was waiting. "Uh-huh," White Jackson said, looking back over his shoulder. Black Harrison and Red Filson were guarding the Amsir. You still couldn't tell whether Filson was grinning; but you could tell about Harrison. He was. So his hair was cropped short, and he was shaved by his brother's steady hand, and they called him Honor Secon Jackson to the crowd, and the crowd grinned and laughed. Secon Jackson stood there with his head chilly and thought: Oh you people, you dumb happy people. Youre Idlling me. V T he idea was there'd be a feast around the Thorn this evening, an Amsirbutoheiing, and Secon Jackson was now supposed to pick the people who'd eat his bird and get what parts. He was supposed to pick out people who'd been specially nice or good to him in his younger life. Leaving the feast between noon and dark gave people he omitted a chance to curry favor. He didn't know whether that last part was on purpose or not, but he'd seen a lot of Honors turn up a lot of bright new friends and riches on the afternoon of Shaving Day. Well, Secon's father was a long time dead, and his mother had gone to live with Red Filson, and his brother had done his best to raise him, when he had time, but then there was that business this morning. He didn't have any kindly uncles or aunts, not being a farmer bred, and he dn't have any friends. He might have had some friends this morning, but they were all going to have to go out into that desert pretty soon themselves, and he didn't want them around to listen to a pack of lies this evening. So here everybody was, looking at him expectantly, and the Eld Honor shuffling off from the edge of the crowd to go inside the Thom where the Honors lived, and Secon didn't have a thing to say, outloud. "Look," he said, looking around at them, thinking he could try saying Petra Jovan's name and see how they liked having him pick her out in front of everybody, "I gotta go do something about this," he said, pointing to the wound in his shoulder. "I'll be seein' my friends durin' this day." He pushed his way past bis brother and a disappointed sound from the people. He heard some talk about how he was auctioning off the Amsir to the highest bidders, and he didn't give a damn about that because he was expecting it. His brother pushed up next to him and walked beside him. "Hey, that ain't no way to dol" Black Jackson said. "If I did what I oughta do, you'd have holes in you," Secon Jackson said and kept walking. H e went into the Thorn through the oval doorway as if he'd been doing it all his life. IF They taught you tiiat. You memorized the whole layout drawing it in the dirt with a sti # you'd know where the Hd Honor was, and you'd know where the armory was, and the doctor, and where you would sleep when you came back from the desert after kiHling your animal. It was so the farmers would think a species of great enlightenment had fallen on you, and the kids tagging along could crane their necks and see how sure you were. They stopped short at the door, of course, 'because they knew that anybody that wasn't an Honor would sicken and die right away if he dared to step across the high threshold. White Jackson had gotten through the door, and peeked up a couple or three inside corridors while he was a kid. He hadn't sickened and died. But he'd been smart enough not to do it on a dare, or when anybody was watching, and he'd had the idea well in mind that if he was caught he might wish he could sicken and die. Besides, all he'd learned was that the inside of the Thorn was just as much metal as the outside, except it was painted. There was a lot of thumping and humming inside the Thorn; the metal floor shook under his feet. There were great big parts to the Thorn's inside layout that he hadn't been taught. He figured that was because those were places where the machinery was. Something had to be making the water that came out of the taps, and that ran into the fields to make the crops grow. He didn't believe that dead in Ariwol would 'bother to take time out from the feasting to do all that by magic. If they could, what was there a Thom for in the first place? Now he had to figure the Thorn ran the hats too, and, that being the way it was, he was less ready than ever to believe in magic from something that could be stopped by a hunk of rock. Maybe they'd let him get a look at some of those mechanical insides, if he was a good boy and played along. He wondered if he could ever work things around to where they'd let him fool with it, though, and what was the good of machinery you couldn't fool with? So what was the good of playing along? And besides, Petra Jovans hadn't tried to talk to him at all while he was on his way from the shaving bowl to the door to the Thorn, and so he was pretty mad about everything as he 'found the Eld Honor's door and stepped inside. "You don't knock?" the Eld Honor said from behind the table where he was sitting. "You weren't expecting me?" Honor Secon Jackson said. The Eld Honor grinned. There wasn't any doubt about it this time; he grinned as big a grin as Secon Jackson had ever seen on anyone, and in some way that scar the hell out of him. "Sit down. Honor," the Eld said, pushing a chair out to him. "I think there's a way we can get along pretty well." r ie chair was exactly the kind of thing that everybody had in his house, except that this one hadn't been used for so many years by so many people and hs wheels still rolled. Secon Jackson took it, nudged it around to where the desk was clearly between him and the Eld Honor, and sat down. "All right. I wouldn't mind.' "I wouldn't, if I were you," the Bid Honor said. "Let's not mistake the situation, Honor Secon Jackson. I've been alive a long time, and there was a day for me too when I went out in the desert and got my little surprise. Every Honor you see walking around this place -- every Honor who's ever told you anything about honning and Amsirs -- has gone out and had that same surprise. You don't hear any of them complaining. And you don't see me having any trouble running things. Think about it. Don't do anything that looks good to you. Whatever it is I've already thought of it." Secon Jackson studied him, the way he always studied things. The grin was a lot less, now, but it was still there. Secon Jackson tried to think what he'd be thinking if he had that grin; that didn't often do much good, but this time it worked. It had the feci of truth all over it. The old man was thinking what a fool Secon Jackson would make of himself, and how easy he'd be to handle, if he went ahead and did what looked perfectly sensible to him. All right, Secon Jackson thought, then I won't do it, and the next move is yours. "So you're not going to get anything special out of me just for having done what every other live Honor in this place has done." I knew that a minute ago, Secon Jackson said to himself, and then he realized that the old man could have that grin and still be maldng a fool of himself. He knew Secon Jackson was fast but he didn't believe how fast. There's more Amsir to you than )ust your looks old man, Secon Jackson thought, feeling better, and how would you like to go up to Ariwol light now and find out about being dhumpy? "Don't plan to kill me now," the Eld said carelessly. "I'll die soon enough, and then you can have it all." VI I t was like having extra distance put between him and his eyes and ears. Secon Jackson leaned back in his chair and said, "I can." "Yes, you can. But I have to tell you how, and you have to learn how, and you have to learn how to make it stick." "All right," Secon Jackson, coming back to himself. "Start in on your part of that." The Eld Honor looked amused. "Well, I can't give it all to you in one day." "I didn't expect you could, but start in." "All right. Look -- things are very simple here. We tell the people a lot of garbage to make it look tricky, but it's simple. We live around the Thorn here, and out beIF yond the Thorn is a desert with Amsirs on it. We can grow crop, and we can get some meat and some tool-stuff from honning the Amsirs. Now that's all there is to the world. The sun comes up, the sun gcs down. There's summer, there's winter. There's just so much land, and there are just so many hats to give to the Honors. Now, that's all got to be managed. If we let the farmers alone, they'd do whatever was easiest, and they'd sit around having babiesand planting whatever came into their heads, and there might be enough food or there might not. And even if there was enough food -- which I don't think the farmers could see to -- everybody'd live exactly the same. Would you like that, Honor?" The old eyes were twinkling. You don't need an answer for that. Go on." "All right, I don't need an answer. Now all you can see is the top of the system. You see the way we've been kidding the farmers, and you see the things we do to make the farmers think we're special. That way, when we see something we need to keep this place running, we can have it. When we see a woman we want we can have her. Now let's talk about women. What's a woman for -- besides making jokes?" "Cooking, cleaning, keeping house," Secon Jackson said. The Eld Honor was shaking his head, which didn't surprise Jackson because you don't ask questions if you don't already know a tricky answer. "No," the Eld Honor smd wisely, "a woman is for being better than your mother, so you can have sons who are better than you. Remember that. It's the same way about everything else. When you take a farmer's loaf of bread, and you eat that bread, the reason for that bread is to make you better -- to keep you strong, and to make you a better Honor. And if one farmer's woman's bread is better than another's, then you go back to that place for your bread. Even if you never take that woman -- and she might be old and ugly -- she might have a daughter. And you can take that daughter. And even if she doesn't have a daughter, you're still better and stronger, and you can take a better woman than you could have otherwise. And even if you don't take her, but you just use her, and her kid turns out to be a farmer, he's going to be a better farmer than he would have been, 'cause we already know his mother's man wasn't good enough to stop you." #Q# we're always making it bet ter, no matter what we do," Secon Jackson said. It occurred to him that it was a pretty nice world where a Honor could do any damn thing that struck his fancy, and it always made things better. "Now explain about Amsirs that carry spears and talk." "We'll get to that, I promise you," the Eld Honor said. "The reason we don't ever take a chance of anybody's finding out until he becomes a Black Honor is the same reason we don't spell any of this out where the fanners can hear it." The Eid Honor leaned forward earnestly. "Now this is important, boy. If you can understand and use this, there will be a reason for you to be somebody special, even among Honors." The Eld gestured negligently. "Hell, I know most of the boys who carry weapons around here are just farmers with a different kind of plow. Instead of knowing how to thresh wheat, they know how to jump Amsirs, and as long as they know that they figure it makes them special enough, and that's all the thinking they'll ever have to do. No, boy -- " The Eld pointed a dried old skinny finger at him -- have to be like us. You have to have eyes in your head, and ears, and something in between them. You know that mudi as well as I do. What I know a lot better than you is how. "There's a whole bunch of people around here, and every one of them thinks he's someday going to go to Ariwol the same as everybody else, and live high without working. You let him hold onto that, because it makes him work while he's here, all right. You let him be a farmer, or a Honor, hut you let him keep thinking about Ariwol, where his kind of people are on top for sure. But you make sure he knows he's a farmer, or a Honor, because then he knows viio he is, and be knows what's expected of him while he's here. "If he knows what's expected of him, then he'll do what's expected. He won't start snooping around in the middle of the night, or in a bunch in the middle of the day, and pull the props right out from under everything that's being done for him. How many of us do you think there are in any generation? It's a damn small number, boy, and what all of the farmers and most of the Honors aren't ever going to admit to themselves is that if it wasn't for us they'd all be dead. They'd be dead from ruining the land, or they'd be dead from eating wrong, or they'd be dead because they'd be messing around inside here, and they'd kill the Thom." The Eld studied Secon Jackson's face. "Now have you ever heard of anybody wanting to get into the Thorn that wasn't entitled to? But do you see any guards around? Have you ever heard of a farmer suddenly saying, T'm gonna go out and hon Amsirs?' Have you ever heard of a farmer saying, T want more water.'? And let me ask you: if we had guards out front, won't the farmers say T wonder what they're guarding?' And if it needs guards, maybe all I have to do to understand it is knock somebody out of my way?' Have you ever thought what would happen if we said to the farmers: 'You can't go Amsir-honning.' Wouldn't they stop to wonder 'Well, hell, diat's just a rule they're making up.' No, boy, you don't do that, or you have and figuring that all it has to do is break a few rules and it can have whatever it wants. You show it an IF ojen doorway, and you say to it, That's for Honors.' You send people out into the desert, and a lot of them don't come hack. You don't have to tell the farmers that's just for Honors. Not doing it that way, you don't. They can see for themselves. "That's the way you run things, boy. And I'll tell you something else -- I'll bet you there are farmers who have gone out into the desert, and I'll bet you there are people who have come through that front doorway. But they didn't tell anybody they were going to do it. And they either got all the way into the desert, and died, or they came back from the edge of the desert, and they hadn't seen an Amsir, and they didn't tell anybody about it. I don't think any of them got very far. Not because they died, but because they knew from everything around them since they were kids that they should be ashamed. And even if they saw an Amsir, or even if somebody came in here and saw things, he wouldn't know what they meant because nobody ever told him. And after a while he'd just go away again. And if he didn't sicken and die, he wouldn't tell anybody about that, either, because anybody he told just might kill him to correct the oversight. Nobody loves a loner, boy -- 'cause nobody knows who he is." Secon Jackson looked back into the old man's tightly squeezed eyes. "Unless he's on top." The old man smiled and nodded in agreement. "That's the idea." # A #I right," Jackson said. "Now, besides the fact that you want some of your young Honors to get (killed, how come I didn't get told that Amsirs could talk and had spears?" "Well, you would have started making yourself a shield and a long spear before you went out there," the Eld Honor said. "And if we had told somebody like your brother before he went out, he just would have had to tell somebody, just to show he knew something nobody else did. Either way, it would have gotten the farmers pretty well worked up. Listen, boy. What did the Amsir say to you?" "He said, 'Yield.' " The Eld was already nodding -- it was another one of those questions he knew the answer to. "Exactly. He didn't want to kill you. You'd have to be a lucky damn fool not to have known that almost from riie start and still be alive, and you're not a damn fool. I'm not so sure you're lucky, either. Boy, there is more to the world than anybody knows -- " "I know that. Figured it out all by myself," said Honor Secon Jackson, who was tired of being called 'boy.' "Did you? And did you figure ou what it means? Have you had time since it happened to do the same thinking that the farmers would do if they knew about it and had time enough to mull it over? Listen, boy, in this world -- in this real world that's got to be a lot bigger than just the Thom and the desert -- there's something that doesn't want to kill Honors, there's something that wants to take them away. He wanted you to be his prisoner. And he and every other Amsir that has let himself be ambushed out there dying because he was playing out some plan while all the Honor wanted to do was kill him. , '"Something out there wants Honors. Maybe it just wants to eat them alive and in comfort someplace out of the desert. I don't know -- nobody knows. But whatever it is, the way it looks is there's a world big enough so that Honors aren't even farmers to it -- they're a crop. And how long do you think we could run this place around here if the farmers knew that was what we were?" S econ Jackson sat there waiting for more, but the Eld was sitting back in his chair, and looking at him as if he'd expected him to be knocked over. For a minute there, Jackson couldn't believe it. The Eld had told him all this, just to make a point that Jackson had figured out for himself last night in the long walk home. All this aggravation, all this listening to an old man talk, when he could have been doing something useful! And here was the big pack the old man had unwrapped for him, and there was nothing in it -- nothing -- that wasn't second-hand. You old man, he thought, you've been wasting our time. He said: "So you figure I'm smart enough so if I learn how to keep people in line without shovin', one of these days I'll get to be the Eld Honor?" "You could. You've got the best chance of anybody." The old man looked at him steadily, with his liedetecting stare. "But you're going to have to earn it. It's a hard world, boy. You can see it's harder than you ever figured. Nothing comes easy, not even for one of us." "One of us smart ones," Honor Secon Jackson said. "One of us smart ones," the old man agreed. "No sense kidding yourself about that. You look at yourself any other way, and you're licked before you start." "You seen many smart ones in your time?" "Some." "Some walking around out there now, figuring they're gonna be the Eld? Each one of them, off by himself inside his own head, figuring that way?" The old man smiled. "Some. Worry you?" Jackson shook his head. "No." Now the old man grinned again. It was almost as if he were getting ready to yell, "Yield! Yield!" He said: "Got to be that way, boy. Got to have it out -- got to fight. That's what makes things better; the hammering and the stabbing. It's what gives everything its shape; it's what gouges out the weak places. Boy, this place has got to be made better. It has got to stand up to some day when the Amsirs figure a way to get closer to the Thom. It has got to be that way so we toughen up enough to live here if the Thorn ever goes." The IF eld man stood up sharply and tightly ildcked the metal wall behind him. The flat of his bony, old palm spatted against it. is just another damn tool, boy! It's got to wear out some day. Everylike us who have made the people in this place hard enough to do without iti" The Eld's eyes were shining. He was shaking. "Boy, you've got to see! "See ahead. See what's gonna happen," Jackson said. "That's right! That's what makes us! I see. Honor Secon Jackson thought. I see what's ahead. I could be like you. "Funny," he said. "What's funny?" "I figured, maybe you'd give me something special when you saw I wasn't like the others," Jackson said. "I knew you weren't like the others before you ever went out there. Don't you think I would have been disappointed mad if you hadn't come back? And I have given you something special. I've given you knowledge "Yeah, well, that was what I had in mind," Jackson said. He stood up, reaching across his chest to touch his shoulder again. "I better go see about this. Bad time to heal up crippled, now." vn H e went down to the doctor's room. The doctor grunted and looked at him out of deep eyes and said: "Always here to patch you up the best we can, Honor, they swabbed out the igash with a clean rag dipped in boii water and held in a pair of wooden tongs. " 'Predate it. Doc, Jackson said, and left after the doctor had taken a couple of stitches. He stopped off outside the Thorn, where Harrison and Filson were still guarding his Amsir, like they were supposed to. The way of it was, when a Honor brought in his bird the Eld picked the hardest men of the Thorn to stand guard over it. The way people changed their ideas of who was the hardest man was when a Honor decided he could tell somebody like Harrison or Filson he would guard his own bird. Jackson looked at one, then he looked at the other. Filson grinned at him. Or maybe he didn't. "Your mother'll be proud of you today." The thing was, you couldn't tell from his face how he meant it. "I guess," Jackson said. "You two be at my feast tonigjht, huh?" He nodded down at the Amsir. "Can have any part of him you want," he said, " 'Cept I don't suppose you both better want the same part, huh?" He walked away, and they being guards appointed by the Eld couldn't come after him if they wanted to. He didn't stop to look back at his Amsir, either. It was starting to smell pretty good, which some people considered a delicacy, but he figured this particular one had given him all it could. A lot more than it had been ready to, and he figured the credit was his, not the Amsir's. mere were all kinds of people walking around fanner women going about chores, and kids, and the usual sort of traffic. Anybody who looked at him, and looked like he might want to talk, Jackson just said, "You wanna come to my feast? Come ahead." And kept walking toward the cement hut that he had been living in most of his life alone. Inside, it was just one room, with a pad in the corner. There were bone pegs in the walls with pieces of kit hanging on them. Some of it was just kid stuff; stuff he'd made when he was just learning how to make his own tools. Play stuff. Some of it was pretty useful, but he'd gone out with his best gear, and that was still either on him or in his hand. He sat down crosslegged in the corner where he usually worked, with the featureless light coming in through the parchment window he'd stretched on a wooden frame, and fitted into the space where maybe there'd been some other kind of lookout when the hut was first created, and somebody'd scoffed it. Or maybe when the world was made whoever made it forgot to make a window. He reset his dart heads with fresh Amsir-hide glue from the little pot he kept bubbling in a corner. He looked around. He walked over to the big blank wall opposite the window. The cement was all sooted and streaked up where he'd practiced pictures and rubbed them out and practiced them again, until he was pretty well satisfied. There were things there that he'd made, oh, half three-quarters of a dozen years ago. The wall was pretty wdl taken up with this kind of thing. There were pictures of kids running, and yelling, and jumping up and down. There were pictures of the houses, and the Thom, and a few pictures of farmers walking along behind their plows with the hard edge of the world on beyond them. There was something that looked a lot like a black blur of soot, and was supposed to be the Thorn up against the stars at night, and didn't look it. He'd tried leaving blank spots on the cement to make stars, but he couldn't make stars that way. He hadn't rubbed it out because it would have just made it even more of a blur. T here was a picture of his brother. Black would come around and look at it every once in a while, and shake his head, and say, "Is that me?" Well, no, but it was a picture of him. It was a picture of him all tensed up but smooth, with all his weight on one leg and the rest of his body flying forward with an arm out, and a throwing stick way out in front of him, and you could see the way his fingers were shaped to hold on to the end, and the way the muscles of that arm had just finished snapping out the dart and were changing to keep the fingers locked on the stick. You could see the look on his face, that White Jackson had had so much trouble getting right, and off -- 'way off -- in the distance you could see IF something grabbing itself that was as close to an Amsir as you could draw if the only ones you had ewer seen were dead and you had never seen one running. Secon Jackson looked around the room. Ihere wasn't a thing here that he needed to take with him. You didn't expect a Honor to take anything out of his old place on Shaving Day. Living in the Thom, you had the Thom armory and you didn't have to have some kid come in and keep your room fire going. All you needed was what you could carry in your hand -- and in your head, too, though nobody could tell how much that was or what it was. People would come in after a Honor moved out, if he'd been living alone, and they took away what they needed. Let's see you take that wall away, Jackson thought, but he didn't really give, a damn whether they could or not. He went over to where he'd made a shelf near the tooLmaking fire, and looked at the burnt sticks he kept there, and the little pots of colored mud. He picked up one of the sticks, and he walked around with it in his hand for a while. It felt like something was going to come of it, and he looked over at the window that was clean with light through the translucent scraped hide, and he went over and looked at that with his fingertips and the flc.i; of his palm mbbing over it. He leaned enough of his weight against it so he was just short of breaking through, and then he brought up his right hand with the stick held as if it were a handle to something, and watched the line of black grow on the parchment. He moved the line by moving his body. When the line had gone from its beginning to where it was done, he put in another one, and when he had enough of those he began stroking at the parchment with the worn-down angled edge of the stick, jabbing his body forward from the waist and shifting his feet until it felt as if he were walking, as if he were walking in half-light over ground so rough that his feet had to be put down carefully. But each step was almost exactly the same as the last, as if with this walk he could go a long way and was measuring out his strength against how long it would take him to get there. He saw the Thom from far away, way out over the dunes with sunset turning the sky, and he saw the rocks nearby with their sides toward him black and gray, and with just an edge bright where he could see the last sunlight hitting the parts that faced toward the Thorn. Down in the sand he did a man with his hat off, just landing, with his gear coming loose, and his shoulder just rolling under. Now he saw from beyond the Amsir, who had only the tip of one toe in the sand, and one wing up, and was turning with his face beginning to stream out ahead of him, and his weight transferring toward the leg he was kicking around. The Amsir had his neck stretched forward, and his mouth open, and he was going to do something wild any minute. Now bM. that was left to do was the fingers of the one hand you could see from behind the .nsir. And the thing was, Honor Jackson thought as he looked at it, was that the Amsir was going to miss. That leg was going to swing around just wrong. When it hit the sand the other foot would have to slide forward -- not much, but enough so that when the Amsir went to spring back toward the man, off that leg he was positioning, he would be awkward, and maybe one step later he might even stumble. If he had that hand empty of any weight. So Jackson drew in the spear. F ine, fine, he thought, looking at it for his death warrant. Now you've really done it. He picked up one of his darts and used the tip of it to cut the drawing out of its frame as quickly as he could. He slashed fast enough to be reckless. But he noticed while he was doing it that he made straight cuts, and he didn't mess up any of the drawing. It was funny how different the room looked when he could see out. He put the dart away in his armpit, and stood there with the parchment rolled up in his hands, holding it as if it might twist away from him. Ah, he thought, what's the use? One of these days, they'll gut you whether you give them an excuse or not. They'll make up one of their own. You're all the excuse they need. Not for a minute did he think of throwing the drawing on the fire. You don't throw parchment away; it comes too hard. Amsirs die to give it up. And 'besides, the only drawings you rub out are the ones that aren't real. He wished he had somebody here to kill. But he couldn't kill them all and live here by himself. He went outside, carrying his two darts and his stick, his cap riding loose on the back of his head, and with the half-full bubble of water jogging behind his back. Carrying the drawing made it awkward, because he was used to having one hand free. His shoulder hurt like blazes, and he could have used some sleep, and some food. The skin around 'his neck, and on his ears, was itching with sunburn. He felt bad. He scowled at Petra Jovans as she came stepping up to him from where she'd been waiting. All of a sudden he figured maybe he better find out for sure just how much of her was fanner. "You want to come to my feast, too?" he said with a lot of kill in 'his voice. She looked up at 'him with her head at an angle. "No, I don't want to be like everybody else." Her voice was simple, 'her eyes were clear. Her mouth wasn't twisting. She just said it, the way she would have said water runs out of a tap, or the sun shines on the Thorn. Looking at her, he knew something all complete, all one piece, all of a sudden. What she was here to tell him was that she wanted to be his woman. It was the only thing she could be here for, and it was her way -- the way he understood IF way. It sure wasn't the way things were supposed to go between toy and girl. Now she was standing there, waiting. You could tell by looking at her, she figured the words she'd just said were just as good as the words she'd been going to say. Now he was supposed to pick up on that. She figured he could pick up on that. He had the right kind of thinking to be a fit man for Petra Jovans. Yield, yield, he thought to himself, and the feeling came over him strong and hot that one of us at one time, on one day, for one "All right, then have this," he said, jabbing the roUed-up drawing at her. "You want to be different. That's different." She unrolled it and looked at it, and then looked up at him. "You didn't make this up, did you? This is how it is." "Yeah. And now you're stuck with it." He had no idea why he went on to say: "By the way, my name's Jim." He turned away and walked off, leaving her there. Oh, you people. Honor Secon Black Jackson thought. You people. You people! vm I t wasn't too crowded now. The fanners had gone off to the fields, and the women were doing their household stuff. The smell of fresh bread hung around the Thom like gjue. The Honors were either off sleeping or practicing things. There were kids playing around, and some of them tried to hang around him. But you can always get rid of a kid by looking at him as if he was nothing, and Jackson did that as he walked along. Petra wouldn't have followed him; Petra wouldn't follow anybody. She'd wait. Or maybe she'd follow when no one was looking, but she'd make it look like it was at her own good time. Jackson walked over to the Thorn to look at his Amsir. He studied the places where it kept its wind and water. Lx)oking at it that way, he could see how much it looked like a thin, dried-out man with big blisters under his skin. In his mind, Secon Jackson gave the Eld Honor another snort. Red Filson grinned at h, rubbing his chin and jaw, which were as tough-looking as the rest of him. Secon Jackson knew his own face was flaming pink where the beard had been, and he didn't like to have Red Filson tell him he was funnylooking. But he wasn't that interested in Filson just now, and it probably showed, because Filson said: "Just about everybody around the Thorn's gonna be at you feast tonight, huh? Spreadin' things a little thin." "Well, tell you -- you're that worried. I'll watch the bird, and you go out and get another one to throw in the pot." Harrison chuckled softly. Filson never much changed expression. "Some people figure they could maybe pay off everything the same IF day I guess." he said speculatively. Jackson found himself having to look deep into Filson's eyes. "Now and then, I guess, one day's all the time a man might need," he said, thinking that one of the trousight was you had to hang around for the Eld's judgment on you, and there was a lot of fasting, and sitting around cogitating and trialling to be got throughA man could sicken and die, waiting for the trialling to get over. He turned around and walked away, heading off between the nearest houses. And he just kept walking. IX I t was hot and gritty, lying buried in the sand. Secon Jackson felt miserable. He lay trying to breathe as little as possible, just his nose out in sight, finding out about the world around him by ear. It had to be about a third of a dozen hotirs since he'd walked away from the Thorn. And lately he'd begun to hear stirrings in the ground -- the chucka-chuck-a-chucka of quick-running feet, sometimes near and sometimes far. The sounds always moved from the direction of the Thorn, so he knew they weren't Amsirs. As a matter of fact, he was just far enough away from the Thom to give trouble to anyone trying to find him, and not far enough out yet to really be in Amsir country. He figured even with thirty or forty Honors to send out. The Eld would have a hell of a time finding him around the perimeter of as much radius as he put between himself and the little concrete houses around the big metal spike. He wasn't too worried about being found, both because there weren't enough people to really search and because whoever found him, it figured it would take more than one or two of them. Mostly, he lay there dreaming. There's a lot of stuff out in the desert -- spears, dead Honors and very likely some dead Amsirs, too, with holes from spear mounded Honors in them but no way for anybody to account for them in the village if the Honors couldn't come back. He dreamt about all those dead men under the sand with him. From the way the Eld had talked, things had been going the way they went now for a long time back. In that time a lot of metal spears and a lot of dead Honors must have gotten hidden out around here. If you could farm this well fertilized country, die size of the grain stalks you could ralsel But you can't raise grain where you can't breathe. And if you're a farmer you only know one way to breathe. Well, Secon Jackson thought, come to that if you're a Honor you only know one way to breathe. If you were an Amsir you probably didn't know any more than that. Oh, a man could find out, three different ways to get air and water, but that wasn't what he meant by that dream. He didn't dare move much. He'd done a lot to cover his tracks and there was just enough constant rippling in the sand so that even wh he wasn't hearing chucka-chucka sounds there was a sort of hissing in his ears. A dozen dozen dozen dozen grains of sand he thought, dry as life, rubbing. He saw himself floating on the sand and ih sand going on down deeper and deeper. He twitched a little finger and by the thickness of one grain of sand his finger hid itself farther. By the thickness of one grain of sand pushing out of the way underneath, filling in above, he was that much closer to sinking down to where the deepness stopped. I could float, he had thought. I could float here a long time, but I'd sink little by little. What is this stuff I'm in? he thought. Dust. Nothing. Out at the edge of the field, beyond the weed borders of the village it smoked up into the air like hope and twisted in around back on itself, drifting up so thin, so fine, that you could wk through it almost without knowing it was there, and could only see it edge-on when you were passing throu the middle of it. Then it had substance; a thin, dirty yellow line, curving up in an arc that probably reached just below the gridwork at the top of the Thom, but lost itself and couldn't be seen that high. Thin enough to drink. Chuck-a-chuck-a-chucka, Someone was coming close, but off at a little bit of an angle, Secon Jackson judged from the way the sounds didn't get louder quite as fast as they beat on the sand. Somebody running; some Honor saying to himself he would find Secon Jackson any minute now. H e wondered what the Eld was saying to the farmers to explain what had happened to Secon Jackson. He wondered if the Eld was bothering to say anything -- they all knew Secon Jackson was crazy, or if they hadn't known it, it would occur to them now. He wondered what the Eld thought. It must be a good long time since a Honor ran out on his feast, a good long time since the Eld had seen any need to wonder what a man might be doing. Secon Jackson grinned carefully with the sand murmuring on his lips, and went on dreaming. He dreamed through the rest of the short afternoon and into the twilight. When it was full dark and cold, and it had been three dozen parts of a day since 'he'd slept, he slipped up out of the sand. Boy, he thought looking up at the night, I'd sure better know what I'm doing. He began to walk toward the edge of the world. He felt a little draggy. From time to time he put his face down to the ground, and from time to time he coidd hear the sound of r unnin g Honors chuck-achucking distantly. Merely because they couldn't imagine what else to do, they were quartering back and forth across the line his Amsir had led him on yesterday. That happened to be exactly right, because that was where 'he was headed, thinking that maybe Amsirs alIF ways worked back to that line in the end, when they'd gotten Honors far enough away from the Thom. But he wasn't being any dumb Honor himself. Now he was headed off at another angle, covering more ground than you'd cover if you only had a used bubble of water and were planning to ever make it back to the Thom. He'd done that on purpose. He could imagine them comparing notes and figuring out he'd never gone to one of the Thorn taps. He could imagine them figuring out that they couldn't figure out what the hell he'd been thinking of, just taking off like that. He had imagined them not believing it when he walked by first one line of huts, and then the next one farther out and then the next one and then out into the nearest field and then the one beyond that, and so on. They just couldn't believe it; when he was lost from sight of the people around the Thorn, covered by the houses between him and them, he could imagine them not believing he hadn't stopped just out of sight. But he'd done all that. He'd just sloped off and gone out without enough supplies, and he'd gone off without eating, and now he was headed in the wrong direction, and those are the only reasons he'd gotten away. "Well, no Secon Jackson thought. He was going to get away because he could imagine them, but they couldn't imagine him. They could never imagine what he wanted. Red Filson's dart took him in the elbow. I t spun him around and knocked him down, and it took his left arm out of the fight. He sprang for his life, throwing himself to one side, not even knowing yet who he was fighting, knowing only because he rolled over its head that it was a dart in his elbow and not a spear. Now the shock was going through him. It was so bad even his left leg felt wooden for a while. He'd never been clobbered so hard in his life. Then he saw the shape of the manshadow jumping toward him, knew it was Filson and was happy. 'Tough luck. Honor," Filson said, getting ready to stab. He was very fast -- as fast as Secon Jackson had ever dreamed him -- and Jackson could only hope to be as fast as he had ever dreamed himself. He got out of the way of the first lunge. But he couldn't make his feet grip light; and when he tried to turn, his dead left arm knocked against his knee. He went down again, just as if Filson had struck him. It was like fighting in a dream. Filson was good. He was like something you'd hear about from an old woman. Jackson flopped forward off his knees, knowing exactly how this would put him inside Filson's kick and knowing exactly what he would try to do to Filson after that. But Filson kicked him anyhow. And one more time Jackson was down. He had his stick, but he didn't have either of his darts. The best he could do was grab his left wrist and scratch at Filson's side going by, using the head of the dart sticking out through his elbow. He might even have cut the other man some -- he thought he felt the point dragging momentarily -- but that was a hell of a defense to put up, wasn't it? He struck out at Filson with the stick, missing; dropped it, grabbed sand and threw it at the other man's face, and didn't seem to have any effect on him. "Boy, you messed it," Filson said. "I would have figured you for my best enforcer when I became Eld. Your mother would have liked that a lot. Now look what you're doing to your family." Will they at least give me any peace in Ariwol? Secon Jackson thought bitterly as he twisted out of Filson's way again. He tried to think of things to do with one arm. He could pull off Red's cap, he supposed. But his own was loose and jouncing around his skull; he was in no shape for any game that two could play. He tried for a grip on Filson's dart-arm, but it was like trying to hold a piece of the Thom come to life. The best he could do was drag his nails across Filson's biceps as the hold broke. He figured it would only take him two or three days to scratch the man to death. H e spun away and tried to drag the dart out of his elbow so that he would have a weapon too, but all that did for him was nearly make him faint. They were scuffling and fluttering like two kids under a blanket out here; whirling and groping for each other in the dark raising dust, making slapping sounds as they tried for each other and made each other miss. But it couldn't be much longer before Filson got that other dart in. Jackson knew it, and Filson knew it. Filson was doing it like a practice. He even found time to talk. "Where did you think you were going?" he panted scornfully. "It's all right being crazy, but I never figured you for dumb." Maybe he thought that woidd be a finish line. His arm hooked down and came up again, and his forearm snapped over as he punched his dart toward Jackson's face. Jackson dropped under it, but he was off his feet again. He made a try at knocking Filson's knees together, and then dropped sideward, barely getting out of the way of the other man's return stroke. The side of Jackson's face in the sand. That made all the difference. He could hear the new sounds coming up fast... chicka-sipy chicka-sip, chicka-sip. In his mind -- but very quickly -- Secon Jackson laughed like crazy. It was working out after all. Turned out he'd damned near died before he could know for sure. Maybe he still would, if he couldn't stall Red off. He had to interrupt himself to flounder out of the way of the next msh. But it was nice to know he'd been figuring it all correct, from the minute that he had been sitting there in the Eld's room in the Thorn and had been beginning to think on it, because where else IF was there any hope at all for him? He pushed the laugh out into the cold air. "Huhl" He kicked toward Red's ankle and made him hop hack. "I know where I'm goin'." Well, no, he didn't but he knew whom he was going with. Chicka-sip, chicka-sip, whop! That was the sound of the running Amsir coming down solid on both fe nearby. Up against the stars and the horizon there was a fast glimpse, for Jackson to get, of a javelined wing upfurling. "I yield! yield!" Jackson shouted to the Amsir making a grab for Red, who was distracted. His two stiff fingers found Filson's nostrils. His hand came back, and then he kicked with all his heart as the choking man clapped both hands to his tom, shocked face. Filson bent double. Jackson plucked Filson's second dart from between the man's limp fingers, and then made one move more, with the dart held for cutting windows. He drc)ped the dart and stood holding to right thumb and forefinger tight around his left arm above the elbow. The Amsir stood looking at him, its spear ready, only the lace stirring on its body. "I do yield," Jackson said, looking down at Filson all huddled up. He kicked a little sand toward the dead man. "My name is Honor Red Jackson." X A thing?" the Amsir said in its high, puzzled voice. You could tell it felt proud -- you could tell he felt proud -- but you could tell he couldn't understa what had happened. Well, that was all right, too, Jackson thought. "I better had," Jackson said. "Or there's been a lot done for nothing. My mother's a widow twice over for nothing." "You're wounded, wet one. You're quickly." "Right behind you." "Before me." They ran over the night desert, chuck-a-chuck-a-chucka, chicka-sip chicka-sip. The Amsir gave Jackson his directions with light little touches of the spearpoint, until finally they reached the place the Amsir wanted, and the leathery bird said: "Stop. Dig here." Crouching down, Jackson did his one--handed best. A sixth of a dozen feet down, he felt something hard and swollen under his fingertips. He pulled it out. It was a ladder of some kind, twice as thick through as a man's head. It felt as if it were made of glue-varnished leather; he could feel the edges of seams, and then a folded-in stopper. "That is breathing-stuff," the Amsir said. "You will need it soon; the iron cap is almost useless to you now. Dig deeper. There is a moisture-bottle, and there are wrappings for warmth. There are patches for your hide." Jackson dug them out. The water bottle was a lot like the Amsirbubble at his back in size, but it felt like the oxygen bladder. The robes were some kind of leather. IF tanned soft. They'd used leather for the body-patches, too. They thought of everything when they cached one of these bringingin-the-prisoner kits. They knew they weren't likely to get many without holes in them. He still couldn't get the daft out, so he tied off his arm, using his good hand and his teeth to make the knot. The Amsir still couldn't come anywhere nearer him than the length of the spear. There were sling-straps for the oxygen-bladder and water bottle. He unhooked his own bubble, drained it dry, and tossed it away in the dark before he replaced it with the Amsir bottle. Then he said: "Set," and they began moving again toward where, once upon a time, his incurving horizon had been. A s they traveled, he asked one questi#n, once: "You bring in any other prisoners ever?" "You're my first." We sure have lost a lot of maidens today. Honor Red Jackson thought. He was getting very cold. After a while he had to pull out the length of tied-off gut glued into the oxygen bubble, stick the end of it in his mouth, and use that for air, pinching the gut between two fingers to keep himself from swelling into brokenlunged sickness and death. When the sun came up, they saw it sooner than almost anybody Jackson knew, for they were at the top of his world's rim. Jackson was bone-pulling cold. He had to peek out between his eyelids. He hurt in his nose and his ears, and behind his ears. He saw his robes were made of stitchedtogether human skins, and for a minute he was scared and furious, but then he remembered the thrownaway Amsir bubble, and he told himself it didn't mean much. Or maybe it did, but not now. "Hurry along! You will die here, but it is not much farther to comfort... if one is not altogether a damp thing." Jackson squinted ahead. He saw bdow him another great dish-shaped world. But this one was blue-green from rim to rim; fences, light as stretched strings marking out plots, divided the land. High houses on stUt legs shone pink and ochre and glistening blue; bright yellow and sharp green flashing in the sunlight. Lacy lines, fragile as the fencing, trac from house to house, swaying down in free arcs, webbing the whole town together. And at the center of this world, far away, he could see a Thorn. A tall, massive shining Thorn, not the blunt, tilted, rust-streaked thing he had been born under. A fairy trap of gridwork twined in the air around its peak. And everywhere, ever # Twhere, in the air, curving, curvetting, disporting, the Amsirs trafficked. Air. Thick, lustrousily clear, it reached out to envelope him as the Amsir pushed him forward. Ariwol! Red Jackson thought grinning and then laughing. Ariwol, by everything pious! He arched his back and stared up into the sky again. Shouting and singing and laughing he thought. But I don't see youy Red I IF  Novelette A Hair Perhaps He had no weapons to fight the little ones he was born withi I skyward and settled softly on its tail in the middle of the fiftyfoot square of reinforced concrete that was the landing field of Friday Island. of the rear cockpit and lowered his lean body to the concrete. He looked upward at die vertical sheer of the aircraft's fuselage. He didn't like (whose range was too short) and a blimp (whose speed was too low) nothing else could land on this tiny spire of rock jutting out of the South Atlantic. Bruce waved to the pilot, and the pilot nodded. Servos whined, and clamshell doors opened in the fuselage near the tail to reveal stacks of cardboard cartons. Bruce carried them to the side of the field. He lifted a steel plate set flush with the ground, touched a button and began, one by one to place the boxes on a moving conveyor belt. When he had finished, he pulled a heavy hose out of the recess and dragged it over to the plane, where he coupled it into a quick-connect near the tail and attached a ground wire. Fuel began to gush from the plane into the hose, as he waved again to the pilot and walked the hundred feet from the plane to the low concrete building capped with a radar mast and antennae which rose above the topmost level of the island. He pressed his right thumb against a small glass plate set in the steel door at the side of the building and waited. Ten seconds passed until the door slid sideways with ponderous slowness and framed a slim redhead in Airforce blue with major's oakleaves on his shoulders. "Hi Sucker," the redhead said, "back for another tour?" Bruce shook his head, "No, Al, I'm at the Beach Club." "Well -- I'm glad to see you. It gets lonely out here. I'll think of you the next two weeks while you're sweating it out. They've got a beauty for you; six birds from Kennedy and one major tracking mission on a polar orbital. You ought to be real busy." "Nice," Bruce said without enthusiasm. Al Vaughan had all the luck. He never got the rough ones. Six birds were enough for anyone without adding an orbital to the mess. Bruce sighed inaudibly. It would be nice to have a couple of the birds about, but that might be hard on Scotty Jacobs, and Bruce didn't want that, Scotty -- the third man on the team -- already had enough trouble with a pregnant wife. If Alice Jacobs knew what her husband did those two weeks of every six when he was away on "business," she'd stop complaining and have a miscarriage instead. B ruce looked at his dapper counterpart, "there's about five hundred pounds of supplies on the conveyor. You might help me unload." Vaughan shook his head. "Not on your life," he said, "that's your job. I have a blonde in Miami that has first priority." "You're a lazy bum," Bruce said without heat. "You'll thank me later," Vaughan said, "it'll give you something to do. Time hangs heavy here." "I've never noticed, but maybe you're right. Anyway have a good time stateside -- and don't forget to disconnect our fuel hose before you take off." "I want to get home alive," Vaughan said, "so don't worry. I'll check everything. Good-by pal -- the place is yours." Bruce pushed past Vaughan into the building, and as Vaughan went outside, the steel portal closed and would remain that way until Scotty Jacobs took over in two weeks. He stripped, placed his clothing in the sanitizer, stepped into the decontamination chamber and looked through its glass walls into the control room beyond. As usual, it was antiseptically clean. The Big Board was working, and as Bruce showered, he watched the electfbnic brain of the station check pad and sped northwestward to the carrier waiting below the horizon. A bank of red lights bloomed on the board as a beam of electrons stabbed the departing plane and was reflected into the tracking dish. The board chittered, beeped and squeaked as computers analyzed the flight and fed data to the missile programmers. The Big Board hurl a preemptory challenge at the plane, and the noises died and the Big Board returned to stand-by. You don't shoot friends who have the right answers. Watching the electronic interplay between plane and station, Bruce had , an old familiar thought that if it weren't for emergencies, this station could dispense entirely with men. He dried himself and slipped into the blue, lint-free coveralls and slippers that were standard dress for anyone in the station. The place was spotlessly clean. It had to be. The delicate instruments and circuitry, although sealed, could still be adversely affected by particulate matter, and so extreme efforts were made to keep all foreign matter out. Bruce went from decon through the interlook to his glassed-in living quarters, sealed off in one corner of the station. He opened a hatch in the wall and began to unload boxes from the conveyor bck, open them, vacuum their contents and place them neady in the appfopraate section of the storage lockers that lined one wall. Since there was everything from food to spare parts, the uncrating and sorting took time. He was in the middle of a box of electronic parts when a buzzer soimded. Bruce looked at his watch. Time for the #-hour service check. He put the carton aside, went through the interlock into the Board Room and began to check the instruments that filled it, looking with experienced eyes for any evidence of malfunction. There was none, except for the vertical radar, and that had been acting peculiarly ever since the station had been re-equipped last year. When the radar first began showing that peculiar shimmering pattern on its disk a few hours after it had been installed, it had triggered a major flap at Kennedy. Literally dozens of top brains had come to Friday Island. Checks were made, instruments were tom down and rebuilt. New circuits were installed. Three space missions were fired into the outer regions above Friday Island. The radar picked them up perfectly, but it still transmitted that peculiar cloudy shimmer. It was something that neither Bruce nor any of the others could explain, and it was bothersome. The official decision that the phenomenon resulted from an interaction with the mineral core of the island was unsatisfying, but acceptable for lack of a better theory. It just went to prove that all the quirks of radar had not yet been solved He shmed and mn through the test procedures. Except for the shimmer, the set checked out A-OK. B ruce went from instrument to instrument as precisely competent as the machines he served. The Job was lonely work. For a fortnight he ran the station checking the instruments and collecting visual data on birds fired from Cape Kennedy six thousand miles to the northwest. For another fortnight at. Kennedy, he reviewed reports and data with the brains and performance evaluation teams. Then for a third two weeks, he was free to do as he pleased as long as he remained within range of He was an important man. The Job made him a national resource that had to be guarded carefully and protected -- not from harm -- but from enemies who could use his specialized knowledge. The feeling of importance had once been good, but lately it had become annoying. He was never alone; not even on the island. He was watdhed, monitored and checked twenty-four hours a day. In his body were implanted ho min g devices by which he could be located even if he were unconscious. There was a hollow tooth in his jaw which -- if bitten a certain way -- would pmson him quickly and beyond hope of antidote. Except at the station, he always went armed. He was an excellent shot and knew most of the dirty tricks f hand-to-hand combat His instructors were proud of him. For a young and patriotic man the position and its prerequisites offered enough satisfaction to ensure dedicated performance, but Bruce had been on The Job for five years and was older and more cynical than he had been at twenty-five. The diversions that were his for the asking during his free two weeks were no longer diverting. He didn't care to drink and had a built-in block against getting drunk, which meant that his virtually unlimited and unaudited expense account was useful only to provide a means of living so dangerously that the attrition rate among high. In some quarters it was felt that if he broke his damn neck, it would be a good thing. Knowing this gave him a great deal of amusement, for Bruce was not by nature a kindly man, and he derived a good deal of pleasure out of watching others squirm. Yet his small meannesses were understood and excused by his superiors. After all, for two weeks out of every six he was in the center of a missile impact area, and for the remaining four, he was either being brainicked at the Cape or a potential target for ultimate interrogation by Ivan and his friends. Nevertheless, Bruce still thought he was living an easy life. He liked the clean results of precision machinery and sophisticated devices. And he enjoyed the knowledge of his real importance that ultimately came to those on The Job. For men were needed on Friday Island. They can do things which machines cannot. They can judge, discriminate. bypass routine, be intuitive, and originate concepts. Machines cannot; they can only react. Iherefore he and his oo-workers were needed. They gave the human touch that made the station a vital part of the nation's defense program. But to put more than one man on the Island at a time was simply borrowing trouble. More than one were not needed -- not even for security. Friday Island was fantastically secure. The best minds in the nation had helped construct the Island's defenses. The place was as close to impregnability as human skill and technology could make it, and it was constantly being strengthened as new devices became available. I ts electronic senses reached out for several hundred miles in all directions from sea level to straight up, and as one came nearer the island, the precision and delicacy of the sensors increased. For defensive armaments the island had a weapons complex that ranged from conventional mines to highly sophisticated, self-arming, antipersonnel missiles that could tell friend from stranger and behave accordingly. And backing this were elements of the Fourth Fleet. It would take a major effort to seize the station, and no country on Earth would be fool enough to try it. But just in case any enemy was lucky enough to take the station, the walls and instruments were rigged with explosives which could be detonated as a last resort. In a way, living on Friday Island was anIF alogaus to living on a powder keg; but if one could ignore this unpleasant fact, it was not a bad life. The work was not too demanding, and the morale office had outdone itself to provide outlets for the inevitable leisure time. About the only thing that disturbed Bruce was the ghostly patterns on the vertical radar. They drew him back time and again. They were annoying -- more so because they were inexplicable. Precision instruments, in Bruce's book, should behave predictably and not like prima donnas. "It's just possible that Ivan has a satellite out there looking down my neck," he muttered to himself as he often did while working on The Job. "He'd have to be about # miles out, and at that range this radar couldn't unravel anything." He shrugged. "But, what good would an observer be out there? This whole island wouldn't be any bigger than a pimple on a peach pit, and equipment to see accurately that far hasn't been built and won't be for another twenty years. Anyway, it's a crazy thought. We've sent probes and found nothing, but I sure wish I could get over the idea that there's something out there watching us." He shrugged and grinned self-consciously, glad that there was no one around to hear him. The first few days on The Job were always tough, and the nights were worse. The abrupt time change, the changes from winter to summer, from companionship to loneliness (incidentally, how about that blonde in Miami Beach? Was she really be she was the same one A I Vaughan was chasing. Now thafd be one for the books. Still, it might not be so had some pretty slick tricks and some pretty slick blondes in its bag.), from excitement to routine (that weekend in Vegas was a real blast, and that drag race out on the flats had been a gasser.), from heedless ness to duty (there is nothing like a four a.m. champagne party to get the blood circulating -- and that lonely blonde -- ah mel), all conspired to keep Bruce from sleeping. There were too many memories to lay upon a quiet pillow. As a result he was awake when the Big Board bloomed red in the chirpings and chitterings as the ancillairy equipment came to life. Bruce looked interested. Nothing had come this close this late at nigiht Im: as long las he could remember. TsebaMy in a plane that was miles off course. If he passed the island within the #-mile zone the defense missiles would shoot him down. He ought to be warned. Bruce reached for the microphone and opened the set to commercial channel. "Warning!" he said. 'This is Friday Island Station, Prohibited area." He looked at the radar screens zontal screens were dead, but in the center of the vertical and enlarging visibly as he watched was a white circular patch centered like the bull'seye of a target. And as he watched, the Big Board went dead. That thing upstairs had notwithstanding it was no friend. His hands leaped toward the controls. His fingers hit the countermand key, the emergency control key and the action key in one smooth flow of motion. A idaxon sounded, and the lids of the silos slid back to reveal the needle noses of four Sprint missiles. "Range two hundred thousand," the mechanical voice annoimced. "Firing time # seconds." Bruce pressed the firing key and the emergency alarm to alea Cape Kennedy, and as he did the lights went out, and every mechanism within the station stepped. T he silence was a shocking thing. i He had never realized how much noise there was on The Job until it was cut oL The #idliminal beepings and chirping oi the computers the snapping noises of hot metal, the soft hiss of air through the ducts, the faint whir pumps on the exchangeis, the hum of heating elements, the click of relays, the rush of fluid in the pipes and hydraulic lines, the faint whine of servo motors and the deeper hum of the generators, all were silent. The lack of noise grated on his nerves. The supposedly impregnable station had a soft spot in its defenses. Cut off its power supply, and it was helpless. He felt his way through the darkness into his quarters and took his pistol from the top drawer of his dresser. His fingers curled comfortably around its handgrip, as his lips quirked with mild amusement. Any outfit sophisticated enough to put the island out of action wojild certainly have the answer to so elemental a weapon as a gun. But would they have the answer to the other defenses? Every other from the station to Kennedy, and every alternate minute a signal came from Kennedy to the station. Interruption of two successive signals would ring an alarm stateside, and an operator would try to contact the island. No contact and three more missed signals would cause a missle to be fired, and fifteen minutes later Friday Island would vanish from the face of the Earth. The Station jarred sickeningly on its foundations, and Bruce was suddenly plastered immovably against the floor, pinned down like an inIF sect on a board. Gravity? -- Acceleration? And Bruce knew that there was also a solution to the thermonuclear explosion -- get the station out of the way -- fast! But how far could they go in the eighteen-odd minutes that would elapse between the time the missile was fired and the time it hit the target? Judging from the acceleration -- real far. Maybe even out of this world. It was dark, quiet and very cold. And with each passing minute it became colder. Bruce couldn't move. He lay flattened against the floor, his heart pumping slowly and laboriously, forcing his heavy blood through half-collapsed vessels. It was almost impossible to breathe and nearly impossible to think. A gray curtain hung over his vision. He gasped and tried to roll over. He couldn't. And the gray curtain became thicker and enveloped him entirely. He awoke with the nightmare feeling of floating. But it was no nightmare. He was floating. He was naked in a decontamination booth, floating in a drizzling spray of something acrid and astringent. It smelled vaguely of sulfur and made him want to cough. Sulfur? -- brimstone? -- Hell? He ruled out that possibility. He didn't believe in Hell. U T he spray stopped. A sphincterlike door dilated in one wall (ceiling? -- floor?), and something came through it. It wasn't human even though it walked on two legs, had a reasonably human hairless head, binocular vision and hands with opposable thumbs. Humans don't have four arms or eyes with oval pupils like a goat. But otherwise it didn't differ much. It was about four feet tall, and it looked intelligent. It was clothed in a tunic belted loosely at the waist. The belt supported something that looked like a pistol. A bright red box hung over its midsection from a strap around its neck. At it walked toward Bruce, it began to make noises. "Whistle burble grunt chitter And the red box in uninflected, accentless English said "Now you are clean, we can talk. Are you hurt?" "No." Bruce said. It wasn't hard to see what was wrong with this picture. He was floating weightless in free fall. The alien was standing on its feet and walking. It had an unfair advantage. "That is good. It is our policy not to be unkind to inferior races unless it is necessary." "Inferior?" Bruce asked on a rising note. "Obviously. Your technology is of a low order. You have a little civilization and many cultures. Your planet is the standard barbarian type we find this far out on the galactic rim." "All right, have it your way," Bruce said, "so what do you want of us?" "Information at the moment. You have nothing else we want. We wish to investigate. Later we shall determine how you can be made useful to our plans in the future." 'Do you mean what I think yciu do?" I "It depends on what you think. Be patient, and I shall explain," the alien said. It waved one of its left hands at the open doorway. "We shall study your machines. Tlien we shall study you. The data will be added to data we have already acquired from long-range surveys, and we shall have a fair guess of your maximum capability. Later we shall obtain other specimens of your race and study them to find out what methods can be efficiently used to make you cooperate with us. You have certain mechanical skills that might be useful. You could have metals or other things that we might use. Time will tell." "If you have some crazy idea of conquering us, you won't get away with it," Bruce said. "If you think you can, you just don't understand the human race." "Others have said that," the alien said. "Most of them submitted at once when they understood the alternative. If we must, we will reduce your number to a minimum and replace your present savageries with a better culture. But it is slow work to repopulate an empty world. We would prefer to use what the Ultimate Intelligence has provided." "That is generous of you." "We are a generous race. Ask any of our servants." "You are going to be a very dead race, if my people have anything to say about it." "By now they will have nothing to say. We should be well beyond any IF feeble reprisal your fellows might take, but even if we were not, your race will not find us. We can bend and radiation around us and rnain invisible. In fact we are doing it now. You could come within a few feet of the ship and never sense us unless you have mass-detection devices." The alien shrugged its upper shoulders. It was a startling effect. "But enough of that," it said. "I come to take you out of here. Until we finish our study of you, we would prefer you to be healthy. We have moved your living quarters from your building to our ship. Everything is ready for you." "And if I resist?" "Then I will stun you and tow you. You will be no problem." "You're right," Bruce said, "I won't. Not now." The alien maneuvered him through the sjtoKJter and down a transparent hallway lined with banks of what looked like filter panels. They passed through two interlocks -- which were only roughly similar to those on Earth -- and down a corridor that gave an odd impression of flexibility and porosity, through a third interlock and into an opaque corridor lined with contracted sphincterdoors. The alien stopped before one of them, opened it and pushed Bruce inside. "Your personal things have already been examined," it said. "We have removed the weapons, but for the rest you will find them undamaged. And in the meantime this may nake you more ownfortable." It took a bright coppery square of metal from inside its tunic and laid it on the floor. "Carry this on your person," it continued. "You will not float." "So how do I get to it?" Bruce asked. "That is your problem," the alien said as it stepped through the sphincter and disappeared. #Tor every reaction," Bruce mutter, "there is an equal and opposite reaction." Newton proposed the law a century and a half ago, but it wasn't going to do him much good. The aliens had stripped him to the skin. Had they but left him his slippers he would be down to that piece of red metal in a moment. By throwing them in one direction he would travel in the other. But he had nothing. He thought for a moment and then grinned. Maybe he could swim. After all, air had some resistance. It had. A couple of minutes of sculling with cupped hands brought him down to the piece of metal. He touched it and promptly sprawled on the floor. He picked the thing up, stood up and went across the cubicle to where his dresser was set against the wall. He sigjied happily as he opened a drawer and took out a pair of coveralls. Ihere were slippers in another drawer, and in a few minutes he was dressed and infinitely more at ease. There was something about clothes that restored his confidence. As a routine preliminary, Bruce tested the walls, ceiling, floor and door. They were all solid. The door was closed tightly and would not open. He looked at the walls and ceiling. There was nothing of importance; air intake and exhaust ducts in the ivall opposite the door, three lenses and a peculiar luminous in the ceiling. The air was faintly sulfurous, but breathable. Over the long run it might be harmful, but Bruce didn't think he'd be around that long. Bruce tested the installations. None of the plumbing worked which was to be expected, but the electrical appliances operated perfectly. "Well," he said. "That's something." He trailed the wires to neat needlelike plugs which penetrated the wall. "Hmm -- good way to wire -- gets rid of fixed sockets. Walls like these would be something building contractors would sell their souls for, if they could be built economically." Bruce ran his fingers over the stubble on his chin. It felt heavy -- like a full day's growth. "It's a helluva time for shaving, but I'd better do it before I begin to look like one f the the Smith Brothers," he muttered as he opened the medicine closet over the wash bowl and took out his electric razor. "Anyway it'll give my four-armed friends something to think about." Feeling a little better, Bruce continued his search for weapons. It was a perfectly natural reaction. Indeed, it would have been out of character had he not done so. Among the first things he examined was the station's portable transceiver which he kept in his quarters. The radio was dead except for a faint crackle of static, which argued plausibly that if no radio waves came in, none would get out. Yet on the chance they might, he broadcast an appeal for help and planned to re it every hour. He grimaced a little. He had a mental picture oi chuckling aliens watching him through the lenses in the ceiling. He checked the rest of his gear for possibilities. The aliens had taken his gun, but there was a refrigerator, a stove, a vacuum cleaner, a coffee pot, an electric toothbrush, a toaster, a waffle iron and a flashlight. This certainly wasn't the sort of stuff with which wars were won he thought ruefully. The refrigerator would have been a possibility had it been one of the old fashioned freon or ammonia kind. The gas could perhaps be poisonous to aliens. But this box was a direct heat exchanger and didn't use refrigerant, a nice ultramodern gadget with zero possibilities as a weapon. Something conceivably could be done to the stove to convert it into an instrument for electrocuting the unwary, but that possibility was remote. He looked at the stove and shook his head. Scratch that thought. It simply couldn't be done. As for the rest of the stuff, it had no use as far as he could see. Any weapon he could make would have to be elemental, something like a club. Ah yes -- a chair leg. Bruce upended his chair and looked at it. The metal legs screwed into the seat. They could be easily removd to give him four tapered pieces of tubing two inches in diameter at the base, three quarters of an inch at the tip and a foot and a half long. They would be very satisfactory, providing something came close enough to be clobbered. He set the chair aside and IF went to the bed. The sheets could be trn into strips and made into an adequate rope which one could use to tie clobbered bodies and keep them helpless. The electric cord from the blanket controls would make a fine garotte. There was enough material for weapons if he kept them simple. W ith surprise and a little luck he should be able to immobilize and disarm an alien. Then, with the alien's weapon he could do considerably more damage. He just might make it hot enough for them to think twice before trying to subjugate men. He didn't believe the talk about depopulating Earth. That was the sort of thing authors wrote about in science fiction. But what could create a diversion? His neck itched. Absently he scratched it. A few stray hairs from his recent shave were irritating his skin. Hmm, that was an idea. Maybe if he dumped shaving dust into the air ducts he could cause a diversion. At any rate it was worth trying. But it was a big ship, and although he could collect quite a bit of hair from shaving, it probably would not be enough to cause significant damage. However, he would give the idea the old college try and use everything he had. There was no sense in doing a half-baked job. By shaving his body as well as his face and head, he would probably double the amount of available hair, and that just might be enough to provide a good diversion if there was no internal filtering system. At best, it could give him a certain advantage by producing allergic reactions in the enemy. At worst it would only be a waste of time. He set about reducing his hair to powder. It was a harder task than he thought. An electric razor designed for beards is a poor clipper for other kinds of hair, but after a fashion it worked. In some cases he had to compromise on short lengths, clipped with scissors rather than the fine powdery razor residue he would have preferred. But at last the task was done and the few grams of hair, dumped into the room exhaust. All that he could do now was wait -- and unscrew die legs of the chair. ni a coughing alien appeared in the halfopen sfdiincter. He carried a plastic bottle full of liquid, and as he set it inside the rocnn, a hacking paroxysm turned his yellowish face a dark crimson. Bruce looked at him, nned and fked up a chair leg. He was in business. Three hours later he controlled the p. Behind him lay a trail of dead, dying, bound and gagged aliens tucked away in dark corners, and his chair leg was bent, dented and splashed with the alien equivalent of blood. He scowled as he tied an alien into one of the control chairs in the operations center. This was the last he could find. It had been hiding in one of the equipment lockers, but its coughing had given it away. His hair had worked too well. The shorter pieces got on skin and into lungs causing allergic reactions and severe bronchial irritation. Predictably, none of the aliens realized what was happening until it was too late. The longer pieces sabotaged the ship's mechanisms, and this Bruce didn't really expect. He knew, of course, that dust and debris could affect the performance of delicate instruments and machinery, but what happened to the alien ship seemed entirely out of line compared with the cause. The confusion was incredible. Nothing worked properly. Lights sputtered and faded, circuits shorted, servos labored or ran at insane speeds. Rotors stuck, shafts seized, switches and relays failed to work. Solenoids didn't operate, thermocouples failed to register, tubes shorted out, armatures smoked, wiring arced, niicroniiniaturized circuits melted. It was shambles. He had thoroughly disabled the alien spaceship. He poked Hhe alien with his battered club. He hadn't tried to use an alien weapon after one of them had incinerated its owner as it was trying to shoot him. The alien grunted and coughed. To Bruce that alien was interesting only because it wore a translator and could talk. Otherwise, he would not have wasted time on it. He didn't think much of the aliens anyway. They were thoroughly inefficient combat types without their gadgets. Possibly if he knew them better he could find some more positive qualities. As it was, they were that faceless thing called "the enemy," something that had to be incapacitated without any emotional involvement. T he alien coughed and shook its hairless head. "Why don't you kill me?" it asked. "I have no reason to," Bruce said, "besides you might be useful." "How?" "You could explain these controls." "Do you think I would?" Bruce shook his head. "No," he said, "not voluntarily. But there are other ways of getting answers." 'Torture will do you no good." "Do you think I am that uncivilized?" "You attacked us with a biologic weapon against which we had no defense. You may have killed us all. That is uncivilized." IF "What did you expect me to do? Sit still while you killed me?" "We would not have killed you," the alien said, "But I don't suppose you could be expected to believe that. As a member of a racial complex with high culture, but low civilization, you would expect to be tortured or killed. Civilized races have other and better ways of getting at the truth or developing information. You would not have been hurt." "Then what was all that talk about "Racial only. We would have seeded your world with an organism which would have prevented the great majority of you from reproducing. In a few generations your huge, untidy population would have been reduced to manageable size. But we would not have destroyed a single one of your lives. We merely would have prevented new ones." "Which in the end would make little difference," Bruce said, "it would still be genocide." "No -- there would be a small proportion of your population that would be immune. Not all of you would be killed, nor would your race be extinguished. Your survivors would be educated to fit into our plans, and in a thousand years you probably would be as numerous as you are now." "Oddly enough, I believe you," Bruce said. "Not that it makes any difference." "You are right. It makes no difference. In a few years the absence of our ship will be noticed, and a task force will be sent to cover the same route we have traveled. They will encounter you, and this will not happen a second time. Things will be different." "They will indeed," Bruce said. "Had we suspected that you were so different from us," the alien said, "we would have taken greater precautions. We assumed correctly that you were a bloodthirsty barbarian, but we made the error of equating your group reactions with your individual ability. You see, in our society, the group action is a direct reflection of the individuals composing the group. In yours it is not. We assumed that you were lazy, hesitant, cowardly, stupid, dilatory and dirty. But somehow you are not." The alien struggled, gasped, coughed rackingly and sagged with exhaustion when the spasm passed. "I do not understand you," it muttered. "The feeling is mutual," Bruce said. He looked at the three boards in the room. They were obviously designed to be operated by three aliens -- and quite probably the three worked as a unit, synchronizing their activities. It was also quite probable that the central board had control of the major activities of the ship, while the two other boards each controlled a hemisphere. Of course, that might not be the case at all. Alien logic and positioning probably was not similar to human. As they were now, the three boards were not designed to give anyone peace of mind. They smoked, sputtered and occasionally made noises and flashed lights. They behaved as no control boards should. I f he were an alien, Bruce reflected, be would be worried by the actions of the boards. As it was, he was terrified... "For your sake," Bruce said not unkindly, "I will allow you to tell me how to shut off these boards." "I appreciate your offer," the alien said with equal politeness, "but I will not tell you. Figure it out yourself. It should be instructive. The odds are about twenty-to-one against your success." "And -- " "If you fail, we are destroyed. And just in case you wish to leave things as they are, sooner or later we will have a key malfunction which will destroy us." "And this makes you happy?" "No. But it will keep our ship and our technology out of your hands. Primitive as you are, you could still make use of many of our devices. You understand the elements of solidstate physics, and your electronics are adequate." There was no longer a note of contempt in the alien's voice. It was as if, having chosen to die, the alien saw no reason for trying to be chauvinistic. It cough again and thrashed violently in the chair where Bruce had tied it. The paroxysm ceased, and the alien sank back, breathing heavily. "I really have no desire to die messily", it said. "Only in battle does a messy death allow me an unmarred place with my ancestors. And the action on this ship may not be a battle in the strict sense of the word." "Then tell," said Bruce, "and live to fight another day." "No, I must assume that this is war." "Well then," Bruce said, "I'll have to go it alone." He reached a hand toward the switchboard and watched the alien nowly. The alien gave no sign of tension. There was a light burning over the switch. He turned the switch, and the light went out. Four switches later, the alien tensed. Bruce left this one alone and went on. By the time Bruce had nearly finish the board, the alien discovered what the man was doing. It thereupon closed its eyes, tensed its muscles and waited impassively. By now, however, Bruce was acquainted with the rationale of the board. It was similar to what a man might construct. The color codes were different, and the groupings were probably entirely different; but there were main switches for each section, and these Bruce could recognize and operate. One after another he turned them off until the alien ship floated dark and dead in an orbit around the Earth. "And now what do you plan to do?" the alien asked from the darkness. "Wait until we are rescued," Bruce said, "Now that everything on this ship is turned off it probably looms up on every tracking radar system on Earth that is within range. In about twenty-four hours we will have visitors, and personally I don't give a damn whether they speak Russian or English. You and your kind hold a threat for my world that is bigger than nationalism or ideology. We will have to co-operate to keep you out." IF "You are absolutely right, Earth"Their chances for survival were ling," the alien said, "but I am alsoI poor, but his own were not certain that you will not co-operate, much better. The trap which had Your world has too many cultures, enmeshed the aliens had also caut too many ideologies and not enough him. There was enough hair in his civilization. You cannot co-operate own respiratory system to cause even if you wi to." It began to foreign-body pneumonia if he didn't cough again in harsh racking spasms get prompt medical attention. But that did not stop. that knowledge didn't bother him. "We can try," Bruce said. He The odds for survival were considerfound one of the seats behind a secably better than they were a few ondary board and sat down. He felt hours ago, and his problems were no triumph as he listened to the simple. All he had to do was stay alien's agony. His lungs hurt, his alive. skin itched and he wanted to cough. For the alien was wrong. Bruce A hair had managed to get into his listened to the coughing in the darkleft eye, and it felt as big as a stick ness and felt a twinge of pity for his of firewood. He was miserably unvictim. Men would unite against a comfortable, and the knowledge that common danger, and if their fear any aliens who were still alive were was great enough, men would coin worse shape was absolutely no operate. Bruce's lips twisted in a consolation. smile that was half a sneer. The Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Chrisitmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathema-tics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address Gty  State Zip Code... (Ofhr good in U. S. A. Only) people of Earth would co-operate. He would see to that. And he would live to watch them form one world to repel invasion from space, by soulless aliens bent on genocide. The alien's coughing stopped abruptly. Bruce fumbled in the pocket of his coveralls and found his flashlight. He turned the beam on the alien. It was dead; a thin trickle of blood ran from the lax mouth, and the goat's eyes stared glassily. Bruce shrugged. By the time help came, he might be the only one alive. Actually, that might not be a bad thing. It would leave him as the only man who had experience with the aliens; and since he probably would be an international hero because of his incredible success against overwhelming odds, he would be asked to speak, and he'd be heard. He rose slowly to his feet and started walking back to the room the aliens had prepared for him. He would need the portable transceiver, and he might have to rig some sort of antenna that would let him broadcast. And as he walked he considered the stories he'd tell a waiting world. They would neither be kindly nor absolutely truthful. They would paint the aliens blacker than they were and make them into figures of terror. Considering their bizarre appearance, this should not be too hard to do. And since he was neither kindly nor absolutely truthful, he would be perfectly capable of watching his fellow men squirm as long as they squirmed in unison. He grinned at a thought which flashed across his mind. With some justice, he could be IF IF  Feature Our A#an in Fondom guides us to more fandoms than you -- or that fellow Horatio, either -- ever dreamed of! L ast issue, gang, we were talking about some of the little fandoms that exist within sciencefiction fandom. The idea was, SF fans read other stuff, too, and some writers have a charm, a charisma, so potent and exciting that cults grow up around them and their stories. The examples I used were the groups devoted to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of What'sHis-Name of the Apes and John (no relation to this writer) Carter of Mars, and Robert E. Howard, whose glorious barbarian warriorhero, Conan the Cimmerian, is now swaggerin' and swashbuoMn' all over your paperback stands. Of course, the great-grandfather of all these one-writer fandoms is the group that sprang up around Conan Doyle -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to you (and no relation to the above Cimmerian hero). His Sherlock Holmes stories created what must probably be the World's First Fandom, and many sdKrefiction people are devoted to ihe Sacred Writings, as the Holmes stories are known in Irregular circles. The Boys From Baker Street The Baker Street Irregulars, that is. This circle of Doyle-devotees grew up in the #'s, started by a bunch of lit'ry chaps like Christopher Morley and Vincent Starrett. Today, the Irregulars are big-time, indeed. There are local groups -- called "scion societies" -- scattered all over the country and abroad, as well. These local chapters take their names from one or another of the stories in the Canon: such as The Speckled Band of Boston, the Copper Beeches of Philadelphia, The Diogenes Club, the Hounds of the Baskerville. There is more than one local chapter here in New York, but the one whose meetings I have attended most frequently, and to which so many local science-fiction fans belong, is called The Priory Scholars of New York. The boys from Baker Street publish a hefty and handsome journal of notes, news, critica and opinions called The Baker Street Journal, which comes out quarterly. The Irregulars in various local chapters dso publish their own newsletters and correspond with other members. Once a year, on the supposed "birthday" of Sherlock Holmes (it is very Irregular to pretend Holmes really lived and that Watson wrote the stories, using Doyle merely as an agent), which they have worked out to be Friday, January #, #, there is a get-together of members. I don't 'believe it's large enough to call a convention, exactly, but they have fun meeting and talking, making new friends, and drinking a toast to the Master. The Cabellians Another charismatic writer who has a burgeoning little fandom all of his own is the distinguished American fantasy novelist, James Branch Cabell, the author of several imaginative fantasies of the #th Century (such as The Silver Stallion and Something About Eve and The Cream of the Jest and -- his masterpiece -- the immortal Jurgen), Cabell was very popular and highly regarded by the critics (such as H. L. Mencken, who wrote a whole book about him) back in the #'s. Today, he seems to be largely ignored, almost forgotten. But a hard core of dedicated Poictesmois are about to do something about that. Spearhead of this movement would seem to be a science-fiction fan named James N. Hall, # Taylor Avenue, Crystal City, Missouri, #. Jim and his son, Dave Hall, and a few other people put out an irregular (no relation to above Baker St. boys) fanzine for, by and of Cabell fans called Kalki. It seems to be free to anyone who wants it. The latest issue I have seen discusses Cabell's possible influence on H. P. Lovecraft's little-known novel. Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and The Dragon Masters, and other 'books. Hall is using his fanzine as a medium for getting in touch with other Cabell fans across the country, and as he says he thinks time is ripe to begin a sort of sulnfandom comparable to the Hyborian Legion and the Burroughs Bibliophiles. I agree. The Ozmopolitans Another fannish in-group is devoted to L. Frank Baum, the famous author of The Wizard of Oz Now almost everybody has read The Wizard of Oz -- it is the greatest American fairy tale ever written -- but L. Frank Baum also wrote other Oz books; and when he died in #, the series was continued by Ruth Plumly Thompson, by Jack Snow, by John R. Neill, Rachel Cosgrove, and other authors. People who are only aware of The Wizard of Oz may be surprised to learn there are # Oz books in all! There is a very large and live Oz fandom operating. A nation-wide club has been in existence for some years now. It suffers under the IF raliieir diUdisih (oaiine of The International zaid of Oz Fan Ouib," but we sbanH bold tbait atgainst it Burr IUsstront Ibe TV personality, creator of Kukla, Fran and OUie, the novelist Philip Wylie, critic and book reviewer Anthony Boucher (cofounder and co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) writer Martin Gardner (author of The Annotated Alice and other marvelous books) and a number of sdence-fiotion people belong to this dub. Every June the Oz fans hold a national convention at "Ozcot" on Bass Lake, Indiana, the home of Harry Baum, only surviving son of the writer. At this year's convention they had a banquet with an Ozzy menu, an auction of rare Oz collectors' items and a showing of two of the incredibly rare silent-screen movies that L. Frank Baum made, the Scarecrow and the Patchwork Girl of Oz These films, long believed irretrievably lost, have recently been discovered. Baum wrote the scenarios and directed them himself. About # people attended the convention, and there are around # members in the club now. Three times a year the club publishes a handsome magazine. The Baum Bugle, which is edited by Fred Meyer in Escanaba, Michigan. The most recent issue I have seen featured on its coyer a fullcolor painting famous Oz illustrator John R. Neill did for one of the books; but it was lost in the publisher's files and never published until resurrected and print in the Bugle, A New York science-fiction and Oz fan, Hal Lynch, tells me there has ibeen at leak one local Oz dub meeting here in New York (that was a couple of years ago, at the Long Island home of Donald A. Wollheim, editor-dn-hief of Ace Books and a long-time Oz fan) but that a local group in Los Angeles is quite active and holds frequent meetings. Comics Fandom And then there are the comicbook fans. They sourd to me like the largest, most adive of the "other" fandoms right now. It seems that in the early #'s, a New York sdencefiction fan, Bhob Stewart, started a fanzine called The E.C, Fan Bulletin, dedicated to the sdence-fantasy comic books published by E.C. Publications. This was the first comic-book fan magazine, but far -- mighty far! -- from being the last. There are, in fact, about # or # such magazines going at this time. Not all of them are devoted to the E.C. comics, of course. A local comics and sciencefiction fan tells me that the most prominent magazines now publishing are Alter Ego and Fantasy Illustrated, Alter Ego is edited by Roy Thomas, a writer for the Marvel Comics line, and it is largely devoted to critical studies and articles on the various super-heroes -- hence the title. (A better title might be Phonebooth,) Fantasy Illustrated, whose editor is Bill Spicer, features comic art and letters. Spicer also publishes a booklet called The Guide to Comics Fandom for #c. This contains a history of this sub-fandom and has lots of information on the fans, lists their fanzines, etc. If you are interested in comic books. Bill's address is # Granada Street, Los Angeles, Calif., #. There are national comics clubs going, such as the Academy of Comic Book Fans and Collectors. There is even an apa (amateur press association: a club for fanzine publishers) devoted to comics believe. It got started in # and now has about # contributing members. And there's a new national ternational Comic Art Society) which publishes a magazine called The Cartoonist, selling for #c, featuring art, biographies, history, origins, articles, movie info and so on. If you're interested, write to Calif., #. Comic-book fandom may be new on the scene, but it's certainly taking off in all directions under a full head of steam. There was a national convention here in New York City at the Park-Sheraton Hotel on July #rd and #th. This "Comics Con" was quite a lively and startudded show. Present were old-time science-fiction writer Otto Binder (who used to write Captain Marvel and now writes Superman) and the famous comic artist Jack Kirby (he drew Captain America and The Boy Commandos and many other favorites of the '#'s; he now does The Fantastic Four), who was Guest of Honor, and Gil Kane (he draws The Green Lantern), Jerry De Fuccio (an editor for Mad), and loads of other exciting people...  not to mention Bhob Stewart, now a staff artist for Castle of Frankenstein, the guy who virtually started the whole thing. Like the ordinary science-fiction conventions, there were speeches and panel discussions and an auction of rare comic books, original comic art and all sorts of interesting items (including some original Batman TV scripts). The Comics Con showed movies, too; a chapter each of several old movie serials which were made back in the '#'s from the adventures of some of the comics characters like Flash Gordon and Captain America and Captain Marvel, plus a very early TV Superman episode, showing his origin on the planet Krypton. I am fascinated by these sub-fandoms. Of course, most people in science fiction are interested in other things besides just science fiction... naturally... but it's exciting to think that if you happen to be fond of a particular writer or hobby, and you can find just a handful of other people who share your enthusiasm, you can start the ball rolling and end up with something so big it publishes # fanzines and has national conventions! (How about it out there, gang? Anybody interested in starting an A. Merritt club, or a Sax Rohmer Society, or maybe an .'-Rcaders-ofAmerica?) IF Tl .L( .#I Special gauxy A # Issues  # B # Issues # Ghrisli as Gilt Bates C # Issues # D # Issues # Add # for each (# issues) for foreign subscription exmsmuRAic  F # Issues of EkIi #-# In All Add # for each (# issues) for foreign subscription mm or IF Enclosed please find  -- in payment for subscriptions to be sent In accord a nce with the offers indicated in each case below:   enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the U. S. Give the gill yon weald like to receive Pennit No. # Sec. #, P.LR. Nmt Yorii,N.Y. No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States IF  Novelette The Scared Starship Strange place for a starship, at the bottom of a hole. Not only strange, but very deadlyl I A fter the Mariner probes and the first touch-and-go landings, we thought we knew about what we would find on Mars. Desert, of course, and minerals, some of which make the Geigers sing. And Sino-Sov people. At the Delhi conference we had agreed to confine ourselves to a specific area, as had the Sino-Sov Bloc. But we expected to find them, too, and eventually did. What we did not expect was that we would find a starship. I shouldn't mislead you. We still have to build the starship. What we actually found was something -- Margot Harris insists I should say some one -- that knows how to build one and is telling us. Dave Ellis and I found it That was mostly luck. But Captain Soott and Hank Owen used brains and guts when they kept Mao Lee and his hatchetmen from hijacking it. And it was Margot's brains and insight, and her temper, which finally convinced us of what we really had. But Dave and I lucked our way to discovery, about four weeks out on a mapping and exploration trek. Captain Scott had taken four of us. It was dull work, but we were getting it done. Margot, this trip, was the cartographer. And Hank Owen, geologist, mineralogist and sourpuss, was tucking away a lot of promising samples. Dave ElUs had the gravy-train job. He can do almost anything, but this trip he was keeping a photographic log. His pictures of our departure weren't very impressive, even if he did manage to shoot an inordinate amount of footage of Margot. A pressure suit doesn't do her justice. Inside the dome it's a different view, for as engineer-astronauts go she's a shade disconcerting. She's titian haired, amber eyed, wanton shaped and five feet tall on tiptoe. But she can hold her own in any company. In fact if you make her mad, so the freckles show and the hair looks like flame over a white Ming vase, even a hardnosed launch-pad lead man has been known to step back to reappraise the situation. But Dave's pictures showed us for what we were -- improvised, with the spot welds showing. Antigrav isn't what it will be in another twenty years. It's about as far along relatively as a Goddard rocket and will hft a payload about as far. So everything has to be pushed up to us the hard way a piece at a time, and some senators grump it's too costly. Or did. Not any more. But we had pieced together a big closed barge with antigrav lift. It carried an adequate reactor-generator, a must, because the G-Units drink power hke the city of Seattle. We did the leg work with a couple of antigrav sleds, powered by broadcast power from the barge, with soUd fuel pushpots for emergencies. F our weeks out, Dave and I were bored and drowsy and looking at another big outcropping of obsidian which showed above the rim of a crater. The ridge looked like a hundred others, only bigger. Dave asked me to take him over for a look at the other side. I lifted up and over and was floating back along the outside rim, when all of a sudden I woke up fast, my reflexes taking over before my brain knew what had happened. I was fresh out . of power! The sled tilted, dropping like rock; and glancing down I thought it would be a close thing, if we made it at all. Dave didn't move, except to cradle his camera in his lap. He's the skinny, thin-haired, hung-over-looking newsman type. I think he did news work while he was at M.I.T. One of his gag hnes is, "I'm no hero. I just take pictures of 'em!" -- not mentioning that the photographer has to be there, too, usually with his back to the opposition. So he just sat, looking bored, and I got the pushpots balanced before any bones or cameras were broken. Then he grinned, "Always grandstanding! You could have picked it up meters from that ledge instead of centimeters. You play the damnedest games, Rainbowl" I was about to tell him he was one stupid remark up on me, but there wasn't time. For I hadn't been playing. And I haven't fought anybody about that nickname since I was twelve. In fact I like it better now than "John." "Rainbow" Smith sort of sets me apart from the hundreds of plain John Smiths. And I'm downright happy about my eyes, even though the fact that one of them is blue-and-brown and the other is grayand-green accounts for the nickname. My rainbow eyes arc unusual in another way, too. I nearly got busted out of training when my instructors learned I was eyeballing my rendezvous manuevers instead of letting radar do it. That was supposed to come later. But dead-on depth perception is handy for an astropilot. And the fact that I grew up on a series of surfboards on the Santa Barbara coast, and at Makaha, did things for my reflexes, too. So I wasn't even thinking about those glass ridges which are jumping up at me as I got the pushpots flaring and skimmed away from the ledge. That was routine. What I was wondering about was the power failure. The board said that for thirty seconds something had intercepted my power beam. And that just isn't in the book. The beam is tight, keyed to one specific receiver. The pushpots are for possible failure at the barge. And that isn't in the book either. I hovered and looked. There was nothing down there but that obsidian hogback, with and drifted on the craiter side clear to the top. Outside, most of the eand had drifted away. That's right The air on Mars is so diin you'll look very unpretty indeed if your suit opens and exposes yon to it. But in stormy weather the sand will drift. But there was nothing down there to steal my power. I was wondering if there was a SinoSov sled around, with an advanced power thief. We knew Colonel Rostoff. He didn't play much dirtier than his orders spelled out. But Captain Mao Lee had been known to improvise. He didn't even like his allies, much less us. I was about to say so when Dave said, "Hold it, Rainbow. A fumarole down there." W e had found a few, volcanic blow holes formed in the glass when it was liquid and Mars was venting its little remaining core heat to the surface. But this was a big one, not quite covered by the sand. I edged forward, set this time for a possible power loss. It came, right on time. The pushpots stirred some dust, and the sand started flowing downhill, away from the cavern mouth. Then Dave yelled, slapped his telephoto setting and told me he would black both my beautiful multicolored eyes if I let the sled wobble as much as a centimeter. He used several hundred feet of tape on a dark object which was being revealed by the flowing sand. Then he lowered the camera and said, "Holy smoke," in a kind of awed whisper. I was just as awed. I said, "That looks to me like'... He nodded. "It looks to me like, too. Let's get back to a projector." Dave checked in by radio as we were going bade to barge, and they had a projector set up. Captain Scott, one of the few guys we knew to whom we could say "Sir!" and really mean it, was waiting patiently, his burned, gray-templed face looking exactly his forty years. I imagine Admiral Scott will still look forty, and patient, when he retires. Hai Owen, a little bored looking because this was something out of his line, scowled as always at the screen. Margot set my head spinning when she touched me on the cheek helping me out of my helmet, but I got my eyes focused again and sat down. The captain said, "Let's see it, Dave," and Dave tapped the switch. We saw the black, rocky outcropping, with rusty sand drifting down away from it. Mars landscape. You've seen thousands of feet of it. But centered in this picture, slowly emerging as the sand spilled away from it, was the lower half, the legs, of a pressure suit, of what appeared to be metal, with ring joints at the knees. The upper half was still covered; but one leg was bent slightly, and we could see one gauntlet pressed flat, six fingers spread, as if whoever was inside had been trying to sit up. The metal gleamed inertly in the cold sunlight, and the sixfingered figure looked alien as... as... hell, nobody had ever seen an alien. Then I remembered. I moved to the control panel and punched for a rerun of instrument readings, hoping. I punched repeat, still hoping. But there had been no beam failure at the barge. I felt a little cold as I told the captain how something, possibly the Sino-Sov since it was the kind of thing Mao Lee was capable of, had cut my power beam, once for thirty seconds and again for about sixty. He checked the board. I guess I was avoiding the other possibility, but he didn't. He said, "Mao isn't above arranging an accident for a couple of Imperialists if he gets the chance. But it could have been something inside that fumarole. We'll have to watch it." Margot asked, "Are we going to..." And the captain grinned at her. "We sure are. But we aren't going to broadcast any more power. We'll move the barge over there." The sleds can be towed -- anchored, one on a side, to the barge, IF inside the field. We settled well to one side of the fumarole, suited up and slogged through the sand to where we could see. Our alien was sitting there. I remarked about it, and Dave asked pointedly if I had really expected him to move, saying that made me one stupid remark up on him. Margot shushed us. Captain Scott looked up at the half-blocked cavern mouth and then down the slope. "Hank," he asked, "can you use those shaped charges of yours in loose sand?" Hank nodded. "Anywhere, Captain. Firecracker size and up." "If you can clear away a couple of tons of sand at the bottom, I think this stuff will flow again." Hank nodded and turned back to the barge. I'll say this for old Hank. He's small and wiry and homely, with bleached yellow hair and a grumpy disposition. But I think his grumpy manner is mostly preoccupation. He has guts. In some ways its tougher to move into a possible danger zone than into one you know is loaded. All we knew then was that probably something inside that cave had tapped our power beam. But Hank didn't bat an eye. He came back with a mean-looking little blob of putty, pushing a little transistorized detonator into it. The art, he says, is in shaping the goo and judging the setting of the detonator. It will go "phut" or "bang". Hank is an artist with it And he moved out, sensibly keeping his head down, but without missing a step. He took his time, sizing up the drift. When he came hack he pushed a button on another gadget he took from his belt. This was a "phut" setting, and when he raised his thumb a cloud of red sand splashed out into the desert. Up above, the sand started flowing again. W e watched, fascinated, as the half-hitting, half-reclining figure emerged. It was a pressure suit, but nothing like ours and nothing like those used by the Volga Boatmen. And it looked disturbingly as if whoever was inside had just stopped to rest, too beat to make it back inside. It looked so alien, it gave me a chill, but it was not ugly. It was just, by our standards, misshapen. It was not tall, less than two meters, but the body was big. These people, I thought, must have come from a thin air planet and needed plenty of lung space. The helmet was outsize, too, as if to accommodate a plume or crest. When the sand stopped flowing the whole thing was revealed, as was half the cavern mouth. Captain Scott said, "Get pictures of him, Dave, before we move him." Dave shot as we approached and took close-ups after we got to him. We stayed back out of his way. We were still below the level of the sand piled in the cavern mouth, so long as we kept our heads down. Dave, kneeling beside the helmet, pointed and looked up. "How do you suppose he could see, through that?" The face plate was smooth and shining, but it was not transparent. We could see our reflections in the curved surface. Margot said, 'Try infrared, Dave. Maybe these people see by heat waves or some other low band." Dave nodded and shot some more footage at a wide spread of settings. Hien he turned his infrared setup on the cavern mouth. From outside, the cave entrance looked black as space; but there's always a little heat, for a good photographer. When Dave finished the captain looked down, and he sounded almost as if he were talking to himself. "Not an anthropologist within Who would have thought we'd need one?" Then he spoke to me. "Rainbow, we'll have to take him back to the barge. We can't work on him out here. See how heavy he is." None of us had been under two fifths gravity long enough to go soft Besides, we keep the sleds, and the barge, at a full one G. I knelt beside him, raised the straight leg so I could get my arm under it. He moved easily. I put the other arm under his shoulders and stood upright. Then I glanced around and found my head was above the level of the sand in the cavern mouth. Something told me to duck out of there, and just as I did all hell broke loose. n S omething roared. Or gave the impression of a roar. You don't hear much in that tenuous nitrogen. But I could sure hear, or feel, this. And it wasn't a jet blasting. It was force -- big force. The tons sand which had filled the cavern mouth disappeared, flicked away, leaving the floor bare and glistening. And out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse, out in the desert, of a dust cloud forming as something brushed the surface, sending sand, and rocks as big as the barge, tumbling and disintegrating. Then the direction of the blast changed, turning away from me, swinging in a short arc and sending more sand flying. There was a faint puff of dust, and the cavern mouth was half again larger. The blast had touched the far side. For once my reflexes seemed to have failed me. But the whole thing lasted only seconds. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had started, and I found the captain tugging my arm, urging me away. I was scared, but I seemed all right, and I still held the alien. I started for the barge, with the others trooping along beside me. We took IF alien in through the lock and put him gently down on a work table where we could get some lights on kim, I reached for my helmet release, but the captain tapped my aim "Leave it on," he ordered. "We'll stay suited up until we've looked thie fellow over. Hank? You're the nearest we have to a bacteriologist Do what you can, and we'll help." Hank nodded and turned away. The captain looked down thoughtfully and mused, "There'll be some kind of organic matter inside, if only dust." We projected Dave's closeups of the faceplate. But he had picked up only shadows. We couldn't tell what was inside. So there was a tense moment when we lifted off the plate. We were prepared to find something fascinating, or horrible, or both. But the captain had been right on both counts. There was organic matter, but it was little more than dust -- some fragments of bone and some slightly canine-looking teeth. Hank carefully tweezered them up and put them on a tray. I felt a touch of anxious guilt, as if we were violating a tomb. Then we got to work. We had to improvise. We used Hank's equipment and his microscope. Our little computer whirred and muttered over the data Hank and Margot fed into it. But finally Hank, still scowling, nodded to the captain; and we gratefully got out of our helmets and gloves. Hank looked down at the pitiful remnants of the alien and said, "He can't hurt us. "He's no more dangerous, now, than the Egyptian kings they have on display at Cairo." "Do you mean he's that old, too?" Hank made what was for him la joke. "Not quite. When he sat dowm out there, the big news m Europe was Caesar's assassiDation." We looked at each other, aai Margot whistled softly. "You mean he was out there on that ledge lor two thousand years?" "Give or take a half century." We didn't question Hank. He is eompctent, and this had not beea se far out of his line at that. We had been dealing more with a fossil than a biological specimen. We packed the alien away, and nobody wd anything, just yet, of what I was wondering about. What, inside that cavern, was still capable of blasting what could only have been some kind of ship drive at ue? T hat it was a ship drive was confirmed immediately. Dave's angled, infrared shots looked a little eerie, as infrared always does. But what we saw on the screen was the stern of a boat. It looked as alien as the suit. The stern was flat, chopped off, with almost no projections and certainly with no rocket tube such as we use. It appeared about four meters high. On the flat, stern surface there was a targetshaped group of rings, with the center ring higher than the Test. Spaced around the outer circle were four miniatures of the same design, mounted on short, ball-and-socket joints. Steering units? They were. Dave's reflexes hadn't failed him. He had caught most of the blast, including the turn when the drive swept in its short arc away from us. We could see the steering units turn toward us and the whole ship turn and edge forward into the cavern, coming to a shuddering stop. It had been when the ship yawed that the drive bad touched the far edge of the cavern mouth. The frames after cutoff showed the obsidian gouged out, smooth as a mirror. Dave snapped on the lights. "Good thing you kept your head down. Rainbow." The captain looked around and said thoughtfully, "This is going to take some of the smugness out of us. By that boat's size and the size of that suit. I'd guess the boat is a lifeboat. The fact that they lost a ship and had to take to the boats shows they weren't infallible. But they were a long way ahead of us, and that was two thousand years ago, when this fellow died." Hank gestured toward the screen. "Seems there's someone or something alive in there now." "Something, not someone. The boat is automated, robotic, with sensors that found our beam and tapped it -- quite an accomplishment in itself -- and also sensed us outside the cavern. I believe now it was the boat, not our friend Mao, although that would have been a joke on Mao. It led us to something he would trade his ancestors' bones for. But there can't be anything in there alive, in the sense that we are alive." Margot frowned and said, "Some computers..." But the captain shook his head. "We've got computers that seem to think. But we still have to tell them what to do. They just do it faster. No, I think we've just found a highly automated lifeboat, with some Idnd of protective reactions programmed into it. And we must have it -- intact. If we're sharp enough to figure how it works, we may take a two-thousand-year technological jump in a few years. A starship!" Then he turned to Hank. "We keep dropping the work in your lap. Hank. There's a real valuable mineral deposit under that ridge. Let's find out what it looks like and what it's made of. Maybe we can figure a way to get in there, past that drive and the steering units." I t was hard work, even in twofifths gravity, getting Hank set up. But we did, finally, to his scowling satisfaction. He started setting off a series of his little "phut" charges, and his recorders ticked and whirred as the echoes bounced back. He has some pretty sophisticated gadgets, and he kept them busy until dark. That night he and Margot drew us a diagram. "The hull is the same material our friend here was wearing. I'm not sure it is metal. A diamond drill won't touch the suit, although a laser will. But inside the hull there is copper, iron, silver, plastics, the whole bit. Their gadgetry is made up of much the same materials we use. And, oh, there are two more aliens in there, just as dead as this one. The hull is six meters high at center, tapering to about four at each end. It's thirty meters long. And it's wedged, now, into a curve in that obsidian blow hole." IF Hank went on. Between his findDave grinned. "Ah, yes. The steerings and Dave's photographs we ing cxntrols, even if we have to cut knew now in outline what was besome cables. They have to be conhind that space-black cavern mouth, trolled by power circuits." The soundings showed a flattened Dave grinned. "Ah, yes. The steershape at the nose which seemed to ing units. But don't look at me." indicate the boat had hit the curved The captain grinned back. "I wall. The cayern mouth was wide know. You just take pictures of us now. There was room enough to fly heroes. But you're right. As soon as a sled in beside the boat if anyone we show ourselves in the mouth of had been silly enough to try it. There that cavern, those steering units may was an entry port on the open side, start again. We can stay away from too, or at least there was something the drive path, but the steering with the shape of a set of steps, units can track us." twisted now toward the stern as the Hank said, "I could bounce a boat had moved. charge off the wall and into the The captain looked at the sketch, stem." "If we can get inside we've no rea"No doubt. Hank. But the drive son to believe we can't disconnect is one of the things we want most, the drive and steering controls, even Besides, we might end up with nothif we have to cut some cables. They ing here but a mile-wide crater, with must be operated by power circuits." us part of the atmosphere." Hien Hank cleared his throat, and his scowl faded to only a couple of fines across his forehead. For him that was the equivalent of a beaming smile. How about blasting out this side of the cavern mouth? We might widen it enough so we can go in from an angle, out of range." We looked at the sketch, and the captain said, "It might work, Hank. We don't know how far those steering units can swivel, but it's worth trying." But wc didn't get the chance. Next morning, as the captain was talking to our dome and asking that tools, and our computer man, be sledded out to us, the unmistakable frying static of an approaching antigrav unit, a big one, crackled from the speaker. We looked out to sec another barge, a smaller one than ours, with Sino-Sov markings, settle between us and the cave. In a moment we heard Mao Lee's clipped Oxford accent wishing us a pleasant good morning. Wc had met him, on Earth, and also Colonel Rostoff. The colonel was a spacer. Make no mistake, he would liquidate you without blinking. But only when and if he were ordered to. Mao was a different breed of Sinner. He was a hatchet man and an ambitious one. Stories filtered through to us. There always seemed to be vacancies in the ranks just above him. He came in through the lock, and he was wearing a sidearm. The captain answered his greeting curtly and pointed to the luger. "A formal protest. Captain. The preliminary surveys indicated arms would not be needed here, and it was agreed, wlien our expeditions were being readied, that none would be brought." Mao's swarthy face grimaced in a wolfish smile, reducing his cyec to slits. "So, Captain? I wasn't aware the agreement applied to sidearma." Captain Scott looked steadily at him. "What arc you doing w this sector?" Mao shrugged and grinned blandly. "Why, this is open area." "It is not. It is fifty kilometera inside the district allotted to us by the Delhi agreement. Our surveys, made this trip, will confirm it." Mao shrugged. "That remains to be seen. Captain. Until it has been proven, I shall treat this as open ground. And in open ground we share any discoveries." Ti Tar got had one of Hank's lamwere trying to edge around behind Mao. But the captain shook his head. He went on, to Mao, "We don't yet know what we have here. But whatever it is we intend to keep it. If it is to be shared with your people the decision will be made at Delhi." Then Mao again favored us with his wolf grin and slid the luger into his palm. "No, Captain. The decision will be made here and now." He flicked the gun at us and then moved catlike to the worktable. His eyes went over the alien suit. "Ah! We suspected as much, from what we heard of your intercom conversation." Then he bowed slightly to Margot and pointed with the gun to the sketches. "Ah, Miss Harris. Put down that, ah, paperweight, please. IF and show me what you have learned so far." Margot's face paled, and her quick intake of breath sounded a storm warning; but the captain shook his head. "Do what he asks, Margot. We don't want anyone killed here just yet." Mao hissed, "Sensible, Captain," and his eyes glittered as he went over the sketch. He was not interested in the alien as such. But his conclusion was the same as ours, that the alien had come from somewhere beyond our system. Presently his eyes slitted again, and he gestured with the luger. "A starship, possibly? We will inspect this cavern. Captain. Suits, all of you." We took our time. Hank seemed to be having a lot of trouble with his equipment, and non-hero Dave was stopped once two short steps from Mao. Mao's wolfish grin flashed as his fingers tightened on the luger. The captain snapped, "No, Dave. If he has a hand gun his men will have tommy guns at least." Mao hissed, "Senwble, Captain. And correct." m W e could see two suited figures in Mao's barge. There was no room for any more to be hidden in the space not covered by the plastic covered control area. His was not a work vehicle. But there was a man outside our lock. He wore an imitation of Mao's sliteyed grin on his face and had a machine pistol in his hands. He covered us while we walked to the cavern. Mao inspected the entrance, from the side, and then motioned his man in with a floodlight The captain said, "You don't deserve this, Mao, but a light, or movement in the cavern mouth, may trigger a blast from that drive." Mao laughed. "And you would not like to see me killed. I can always count on this behavior pattern from you. Captain. It is one of the things that makes life simpler for me. But the drive is headed away from us. We saw the dust cloud yesterday and the marking on the desert this morning." I knew things were getting tense. The captain had edged closer to Mao while he was talking, and I had seen Hank fish something from his belt pouch. I looked closely, and damned if he didn't have one of his little blobs of putty in his fist. We hadn't had time to make any campaign plans, but I had the feeling the captain would try something if the drive blasted and diverted Mao. Mao's man flicked on the light and edged forward. I suppressed a yell of glee, when I saw he was moving into the edge of the cavern opening. He was clear of the drive, but our last photos had shown the steering units still aimed toward us. The light picked out the far side of the drive, and he leaned forward for a better look. Then he stopped, and I guessed he had noticed the steering units staring him in the face. But he was too late. As he started to back away the drive cut in with a roar, and the blast from the lower steering unit caught him at the knees. I saw a puff of vapor as the air gushed out of his suit. It's a messy way to die, but it's quick. One down! I dove for Mao's gun hand just as the captain did. I saw Dave and Hank lunge in from the side. Hank got to him, and Mao went down momentarily. But he was lithe as a cat and rolled to his feet. I saw the luger flash twice and I felt a bee sting my upper arm. Suit pressure dropped and then built up again as the punctures sealed. Mao crouched, the luger slowly swinging from side to side. And the captain was down. I got up, breathing hard. Margot was on her knees beside the captain, and I saw his suit had sealed, too. And the puncture in front was high in the shoulder. I was hopeful. Margot crackled something unladylike at Mao, who laughed. "Stupid. All of you. If your captain is dead it is because he asked for it. Don't anyone else ask for the same thing. I'll have no compunction..." Then Hank interrupted him. "I'll have no compunction either, Mao. Look! you know what this is. Your people use the same thing!" Hank was holding his little detonator in his fist, his thumb pressed on the firing pin. "When my thumb releases this, whether I'm dead or not, that charge stuck to your back between your air tanks will blow. Now toss that luger into the sand over there!" Mao's voice hissed back quickly. "If I go, you all go with me! Have you thought of that?" And for the first time since I had known him I heard Hank laugh. "I sure have thought of that, Mao. There's just enough force there between your shoulders to take the back out of your suit. You like to gamble -- I'll stand within a meter of you and wave my thumb!" Mao seemed to shrink. He glanced at his barge, glared at us; and a mumbled stream of what must have been Canton gutter profanity came through our phones. But he tossed the luger aside and stood frozen. Hank said, "Margot, you and Dave take the captain back and get at that wound. Looks high in the shoulder, but he'll be bleeding. I'll take care of this." I scrambled to help them, and while we were getting the captain up, so they could carry him, Margot was able to ask, "How, Hank? You're not going to just..." And again Hank laughed. It was getting to be a habit. "No, not in cold blood. I'll tell you later. Git! And Rainbow, I want to strip the weapons out of that barge of his." I had been wondering how we were going to get loose of this tiger's tail, short of a shooting between the eyes, which I would have been very happy to do. But Hank said no, we already had an international, interspace incident on our hands. We didn't want to complicate it. Mao's men had swarmed out of the barge, but on Mao's snarled command were behaving themselves. Soon Hank was standing by a pile of weapons, with the crew, hating us with their eyes, frozen rigid. I went through the barge, taking my time and not being too careful about what I smashed while poking into corners. I came out with IF one more machine pistol which I happily kept pointing at Mao's belly. Tlien Hank laughed again, told me to cover them and see if I could dream up some excuse to shoot all three and not to be too fussy. Then he climbed one handed to the top of the barge. He came back in a moment, a wolfish grin worthy of of Mao on his thin face. He said, "Mao, as soon as you are away you will, of course, have the boys remove that charge from your back and toss it out the lock. But as soon as I raise my thumb, the charge on top of your dome will blow the barge to bits. Fm going up on top of that bluff back there, with glasses, and I better not see that barge go to ground or see anyone climbing around on it. It will be up to you to figure out how far I will be able to see you. When you're out of sight you will have thirty seconds to ground and get away from the barge before I blow it. If your timing is wrong, you will go with the barge. If it is right, you will have the privilege of walking from there home. I hope you guess wrong. Now, git!" If the captain hadn't been hit and maybe dying back in our own barge, I would have howled with glee. And I did manage an "Amen" when I heard Margot's voice in the radio call, "Hank! I love you!" Then it dawned on me the captain must be all right or she wouldn't have been listening. I did yell, then, until I heard the captain's voice, weak but steady, tell me to get back home, there was work to do. I left Hank up on the hogback with my glasses. his fist held high in case Mao had glasses on him, watching the barge cut at speed for the horizon. The captain was sitting up when I came in. He was pale, but the slug had caught him high in the shoulder and had not broken any bones. He grinned at me. "I'll compliment all of you later. I'm proud of you. But we're working against time now. Rostoff will be back." Then he picked up the microphone. "Hank," he called, "keep your range low. You didn't blow that barge did you?" Hank's voice had a faint chuckle in it. I guess he just hadn't been getting enough action. Laughing was getting to be a habit. "Naw, Captain. But Mao knows I'm no gentleman, so he'll be doubtful. I figure the loss of face will hurt him more than anything else, ril come in now." T he captain turned back to us. "We're armed now, something Rostoff and Mao can understand. We'll be better armed when our people get here from the dome. We're not entirely without sin ourselves. But I want to be in full possession of that boat before Rostoff gets back here. So start thinking. How do we get in there quickly?" Hank came in, actually grinning. The captain waved him an acrossthe-face salute. "You have hidden talents. Hank. Thanks. Tell me, how long would it take to tunnel into that port from the side?" "Days, at best. We can still try widening the cavern mouth. But if the steering units will swivel forty five degrees, they can still track us and block us." The captain nodded. a gamble. How long would tibat take?" Margot interrupted before Hank could give an estimate, Wait a minte. Captain. I wasn't as busy as the rest of you during that mix-up. I noticed something. We've been assuming a defensive reaction from that boat." "Yes. And pretty successfid. k has killed one man." "But I don't believe it was trying to kill him. The steering units didn't move. They didn't track him. He just got in the way. I think that whatever is activating that drive is, well, alive -- aware -- and is simply trying to crowd that boat farther into the cavern. In short, it is alive and scared " We all looked kind of blank, and Dave grinned. "That puts you one stupid remark up on Rainbow and me." "That's your game," she snapped. "Leave me out of it. Listen. There's a computer of some kind in there. But the drive is two thousand years ahead of ours so the computer is, too." The captain looked interested. "Reasonable. Go on, Margot." "I believe that computer is aware, that it can really think. But it has just -- well -- awakened, after being inoperative for two thousand years, possibly with part or most of its memory inoperative from disintegration or lack of power. I think all the power it has is what it trapped from our beam in ninety seconds. It's "alive," regressed, and it is just simply scared and trying to hide." I couldn't quite grasp it It made W sense, of a sort, and then it didn't. In spite of myself I grinned at her and the others, even the captain, looked puzzled and a little amused. Margot waited, watching us, and then her face paled a little so the freckles sparkled. Oh! Oh! Storm signal! Her voice dropped to a whisper, a sure sign she was hopping mad. "You! Listen to me. I like being a woman. I like being a good-looking woman, and I know I am because I can see it in Rainbow's eyes and Dave's and Hank's and everybody's except..." She was glaring at the captain, and she stumbled over the word "except." And for once he had lost his calm, patient look and was just staring. But her voice tumbled on, and she shocked me just a little for I had never heard her swear like a man before. She even banged her fist on the table. "But Goddamnit!" she hissed. "Like any other woman there are times when I want to be treated like a man, and this is one of the times!" We didn't say a word. She put her elbows on the table and ticked off her points. "The boat obviously has sensors. But the alien saw by infrared, so the sensors do, too. That may be why the boat was put in the cavern in the first place -- to get in out of the glare. The alien came from a thin-air planet -- that huge chest capacity -- so he would be especially sensitive to sound waves. And so are the boat's sensors. And there's no reason to believe the steering units are tracking us. They've moved only in a turning maneuver.  think the boat can't even see us, outside. It can hear us, is afraid of us and is trying only to get away from us." The captain nodded. "All right, Margot. Go on." Her voice was back to nornial. She glanced around at us and said, a little anxiously, "I'm sorry I blew my top." The captain waved it away, and she went on. "I think there's a way to get inside that cavern inside the next two hours, with no danger at all. If we do it right and are absolutely silent about it." W e were all interested now. The captain said, "OK. Let's take one point at a time. Why silent?" "Because of the boat's fear reaction. I insist it is "aware," but just barely. A human baby may laugh and wave its fists at the pretty, pretty' flames when the far side of the roon catches fire. But it will scream ir terror when it hears the fire siren coming. So far, we've been anything but quiet. So we'll be absolutely silent until we are in past the drive and steering units. Once inside, where the sensors can really see me, I think it won't fire. It won't be afraid. It may even open the port to me." We stirred a little, but the captain gestured us to silence. "Go on, Margot. How and why? How can you get in with absolute silence. And why will it open to you. Not to us, by your statement, but to youV She glanced over at me and then she dropped her bomb as casually as if she were asking for more coffee. "Because," she said carefully, "Rainbow will fly me in, on antigrav, on a stripped sled. And because I'm the only one small enough to get into the alien's pressure suit." I yelled, "Yipe!," and everyone start talking at once. The captain quelled the babble with a raised hand. "Hold it! Let's work it out! You must know, Margot, that we can't broadcast any more power toward that boat, even a minimum beam to a stripped sled. I won't feed that boat any more power." She nodded. "But we can strip a sled, even of instruments and the landing runners and pushpots. And we can clamp on, and wire into the grav unit, every power pack we have with us. I know that won't give power enough to lift the sled more than a meter, or let Rainbow move it more than a few meters at most, on the level. But if we take it up above the cavern, on that bluff, before we remove the pushpots, he will have power enou to control a glide down. He can swing into the cavern mouth, in between those two steering-unit paths. You can see their marks on this side of the cavern mouth. But Captain, they won't fire! And even if they do, they won't attempt to track us. And I know Rainbow can take me in!" The smile she dimpled at me would ordinarily have melted me down to head-tobbing incoherence. But I was visualizing that bluff and the cavern entrance. Why, after the first few seconds I wouldn't have any lift at all with that kind of power. This wouldn't be a docking maneuver. It would be more like riding a square-ended redwood plank down a ten-foot wave between the pilings of a pier. And with a passenger! I was about to say so when the captain looking around the cabin at the various power packs available, undercut me. He said, "I know he could take you in, Margot. I've docked with him. I'm not concerned about that part. But the suit isn't tight any more. And why should you wear it, anyway?" "It doesn't have to be tight. I can get into it with my own suit on. I won't want the gauntlets or boots anyway. The arms and legs would be too long. And I need it so the boat's sensors will see something familiar, one of its own people, coming to it. And it will let me in. I'm sure of it!" S he waited, her eyes shining, and the captain's fingers drummed the table, a thing I had never seen before. He kept looking at her as if he had never seen her before. And he was thinking the same thing I was, for presently he said that the steering units would blast the minute we put anything in sight in the cave mouth. She shook her head. "The sensors can't see anything outside in that glare. It's sound that triggers them." I didn't envy the captain. I'm as ambitious as the next rocket jockey and given at times to pleasant little fantasies in which I appear as Fearless Leader. But I was sure glad that decision was up to him, not me. But he imposed only one condition; that we take along one of Hank's little laser drills, so we could cut our way into the boat if we had to. He ended IF up grinning at her and saying, "Okay, Tiger. As of now, you're just one of the boys!" And wouldn't you know it? She promptly turned girl again. She sparkled, her amber eyes glowing, and for a minute I thought she was going to kiss him. I felt a little pang, for I knew it was only a matter of time before she did. And then I did envy him. IV B ut we got to work. Or, rather, Dave and Hank did. Margot and I put on red goggles and kept out of the lit as much as we could. When we suited up we had attached hinged, red sunscreens over our helmet faces. We had to be able to see, a little at least, in that dim light inside. Even though the alien face plate had been removed, I got a slight case of the shudders when I saw the suit walking toward me. It seemed to me it would be a little like getting into a mummy case, even though she did have her own suit on. They stripped a sled and wired in the power packs and got it into position on the bluff before they renooved the pushpots and runners. I climbed up and strapped down to the bare deck and had another case of the shudders. I had a stick and a voltmeter and my eyes to fly by. But we were as ready as we would ever be. Margot stepped up beside me and slapped me on the helmet. "Scared, Rainbow?" "Tiger, that puts you one stupid remark up on me. Aren't you?" She laughed. "That question makes us even. You're piloting this surfboard, remember? It's a log, but this will be no worse than riding a big one in to the beach at Makaha. You do that every trip home, just for kicks. Let's go, surfer." She grabbed me by the shoulder, and I lifted the sled from the jacks and used a lot of our power just for that first shove. I us a lot more swinging wide, for I wanted to avoid a drop-turn and get a straight shot at the slot I had visualized between those two steering unit paths. She insisted on standing up because, she said, she wanted the boat's sensors to recognize her at its first glimpse when he came in out of the glare. It made sense, but my clearance was only centimeters, top and bottom. It was a case of do it right the first time or take a chance on getting Margot's helmet sliced off. But it was something I could do, if I didn't tense up. So I sat loose, let my belly muscles sag and flew it by eye and by the seat of my pants. And it was close. After the turn those two grooves looked awfully close together. But it was right, and we rode in through the slot as if we were on rails. And she had called it right! There wasn't a flicker from drive or steering units. I pushed Up the red sunscreen as soon as we left sunlight and sure bnough I could see, a little. Obviously she could, to, for she stepped off, walked briskly to the port and just stood there. And again she had called the turn. Damned if there wasn't a growing whisper of static in my radio. It couldn't have come from the sled for we had touched down on our last pulse of power. But there was the crackle of relays clicking and solenoids snapping and servo motors starting. In a few more seconds the port dilated, and the faintest of red lights came on inside the lock. Margot waved to me and walked up the steps as if she were going home. I wanted to yell. I wanted to follow her in. But I sat still, as agreed, trying to look like another piece of machinery. But the rest of it was almost routine. She and the captain quietly talked over the circuitry. I heard her gasp when she reported two more empty suits. She said she wasn't even going to look in the bunks. And as they worked it out they didn't even have to cut any leads. The aliens were a long way ahead of us, but control circuits -- well, there's only one sensible way to build some things. She found the drive switches and cut them out. Then they moved the barge close, and Dave and Hank came in with floodlights. We got busy tracing down the computer, the black box, which Margot insisted was ahve, aware, but had regressed to the point where it was in effect a child -- and a scared child at that. But inside it, we believed, was our starship. And child or not, it is now her baby. She and I have already taught it to talk. She said she wanted my voice graph for the voder. She bribed, fought and charmed her way into lead spot on the team that is trying to reconstruct Baby and cut in the damaged memory banks, plus IF some units of our own. And we Martian#" are making real progress now. Rostoff # people are yelling, but the senators are not grumping now. They're pushing up anything we ask for, and damn the cost. M ost people are a little edgy about what kind of people the aliens -- Kalsa, Baby calls them -- may turn out to be. But I thhik they'll turn out pretty much as we arc. After ail, they built Baby; and if you build a thinking machine it will think like you do. And just now, when I started to leave the lab. Baby hissed at me. It was a little di: . neerting to hear my own voice calling me, but I walked over lo the voder. Baby whispered, Rainbow, Margot and the eaptain are -- what is it yon eay -- Mke that,' aren't they?" I sighed. "Afraid so." "Well, that assistant they sent wp from the heavy planet last week. Not the machine. The light-crested female human. Dave says he has her number, but I think that puts him one stupid remark up on you. She's been watching yon. What are you, anyway, a Kalsa or a Qwertyuiop? Get with it!" Sec what I mean? We'll get along with them, when we find them. But you'll have to excuse me. I have a phone call to make. Beyond the galaxy and beyond human experience! by Poul Anderson by Hayden Howard by Larry Niven by John Brunner Plus Willy Ley, Algis Budrys and many others -- ts IF  Short Story tAicah-lV wasn't human and couldn't understand why humans did strange things -- but he could imitate them! I t was Michas-IV's bad luck to be on duty by the seawall the day the first of the suicides occurred. He was not really to blame for what happened, but he was reprimanded none the less. How could he have known? How could he begin to comprehend human motives? His post along the seawall was exactly a thousand meters long. It was Zone KF-# on the master chart, shown as a neat, elongated blue block. Since the total length of the seawall was six thousand kilometers, Micah-IV knew that he was responsible for precisely one six-thousandth of the entire length of the seawall. It was a somber burden, for did not the safety of humanity depend on the wall? Yes. But Micah-IV was watchful. He patrolled his kilometer twelve hours a day, ever vigilant. He did his best; but he was not omniscient. The seawall stood sixty meters high throughout most of its length and was twenty meters thick at its base, tapering to a width of six meters at the top. It was constructed of blocks of gray-green stone, dressand laid one atop another without need of mortar. The stone came from the Wyoming nuclear kilns, beetletrucked across the continent to its place at the shore. Building the wall had taken the better part of two generations, even with mechanical help. It had been the great communal effort of mankind. Its vastness made a mockery of all earlier accomplishments of its sort. The Great Pyramid was a heap of pebbles beside it, and China's Great WaH, a rivulet of sand. Beyond the seawall lay the gray bulk of the ocean, beast infested, sinister. A s he marched parade from one end of Zone KF-# to the other, Micah-IV could sometimes see the beasts turning and twisting in the water. Now and then one would swim curiously up toward the land, searching for a chink in the armor of humanity. There were no chinks, of course. The beasts were deflected, a kilometer from shore, by a zone of poison, spewed day and night by vents sprouting from the seawall itself. If the beasts passed the yellow-stained poison zone, they next encountered a belt of electrification, fifty meters wide, ready to unleash thousands of kilowatts upon any lifeform large enough to trigger it. Within the electrified belt lay the seawall. Its outer face gleamed like annealed bronze and was as smooth as the finest glass. No beast could dimb that wall. No beast ever had, in the eighty years since the wall's completion. Several had tried, though MicahIV had not seen it happen. In #ne CJ-#, some forty years ago, a scaly thing with fiery red eyes and a ferocious tail had propelled its way through the poison zone, had endured the electricity, and had launched itself against the wall in blind fury. Thirty tons of angry flesh struck the seawall without causing it to quiver. Bracing itself on mighty hind flippers, the monster rose erect, its snout twenty meters above the ground, its rough tongue lapping at the glassy stone, and it attempted to climb. There was no way for it to gain purchase. It slipped back again and again. At last it dropped to the rocky shore just without the seawall and lay there exhausted. Its ponderous gasps could be heard far away. Levering itself up once more, it butted its head mindlessly against the base of the wall for days, until in the end the graygreen stone was liberally stained with red, and the decaying, bloated corpse of the monster lay by the shore as prey for the scavenger birds. Twenty years later Zone BX-#I had had a much closer call. A sinuous ebony thing longer than any tree was tall had made its journey safely past poison and electricity and, extending tendrils thirty meters long tipped with great sucker-pads, had begun to dimb. Up, up, up, until the stinking salty mass clung to the seawall's middle, and then one of the sucker-pads slapped itself to the stone a scant five meters from the top. That activated the resonating circuits. Booming waves of sound raced along the spectrum from the bothz. The sea boiled and churned. The sucker-pads relented; the creature fell back and was dashed against the boulders at the base of the seawall. M icah-IV had known no such excitements. For half die hours of each day he moved from southern border of KF-# to the northern border of KF-#, watching the sea. Now a lemon-colored torpedo of an animal, scales bright in the sunlight, would flash by, well outside the poison zone. Now Micah-IV would see by night the uplifted luminous trawler-organ of a giant sweeper of the seas and by its light would glimpse the terrible, gaping mouth behind that dangling orb. Now he would see tentacles lash the water; now, the sudden spike of a ghastly fin. The beasts kept their distance. Once they had raided the shore settlements at will, for most of them could tolerate an hour or two in the air. Since the construction of the seawall they had been denied that pleasure. The dwellers of the land were safe from the nightmares in the sea. Walled off, thwarted, the great things circled and wheeled in their own salty element, now and again attacking each other in battles that made the continents tremble. Twelve hours Micah-IV walked the battlements. Twelve hours he rested in the barracks of the guardians. Even synthetic flesh must have a chance to rid itself of the poisons of fatigue. His job was mple. He patrolled the upper walkway, keeping watch on the sea against an unwanted intruder from below. In the event one oi the beasts attempted an attack, he was required to notify the central authorities. His sphere of responsibility also embraced maintenance of Ae wall; he was charged with discovering potential defects or strains before they became serious, and with reporting them to the proper departments. Lastly, Micah-IV's tasks included dealing with the humans who occasionally mounted the wall to look at the sea. They came, generally, in family groups of five or six. Micah-IV greeted them courteously, spoke of the techniques by which the seawall had been constructed, and when possible pointed out to them the sporting monsters off shore. If a child became fearful, Micah-IV comforted it. If a woman developed nausea, Micah-IV gave her medicine. If a man in his boldness went to close to the low retaining barrier that topped the wall, Micah-IV tactfully suggested that he stand back a bit. One never knew when a sucker-tipped tentacle would probe from below. I t was a dreary, mechanical job, which was why human beings did not care for it. Micah-IV, as a synthetic, was better able to cope with boredom. He had patrolled the seawall for more than a decade now, and the uneventful round of his days did not have serious effects on his mind. Every third year he needed a retuning to cancel the cumulative impact of the boredom, that was all. Up the path. Down the path. Eyes right. Eyes left. Check the sea. Check the shore. Key in the resonating circuits every second hour. Report to Central every third hour. Monitor the visitor center. #i IF Snow, Wind, Rain. Heat Sun. Tang of salt air in the cunningly crafted nostrils. Whitecaps on the surface of the sea. Vast tiusgs heayiag in its depths. Privately Micah-IV yearned for an incident. Let a beast try to scale the wall, he prayed. Let a woman tourist enter childbirth atop the wall. Let a stone block be struck by lightning and crumble. SometWng novel, something unexpected, something to give #ne KF-# its place in seawall history. He was within a year of needing another tuning. That was why he felt the wish for novelty. He stared hopefully at the things lashing the water, waiting for them to attack. But they did not attack. It would be futile, and the animals out there knew it. The wall was impenetrable. The days when marauders out of the sea devoured hundreds of humans for lunch were over forever. It was curious, then, that when the first unusual incident in MicahIV's patrol career occurred, he was unable to prevent tragedy. He was nearly at the southern end of his assigned strip of the seawall when a faint pinging sound informed him that tourists had entered the visitor center in the northern part of the zone. Micah-IV continued to the end of the strip. The tourists would remain in the visitor center until he got to them, for the glass-walled enclosure could not be opened except by the warden on duty. In good time Micah-IV would open the visitor center and lake the humime on a cemduoted lour of the seawall. He reached the end of bis strip and signalled that all was well. Then he swung around and headed north again, moving at his measured pace. He was still five hundred meters from the visitor center when he saw its door open. A man stepped out. He was dignified, even portly, in a gray tunic and a dark blue headband. As Micah-IV watched in amazement, the man walked briskly to the retaining harrier and began to climb it. "StopI" Micah-rv called. He could not understand how the door of the visitor center eould have been opened without authorization. He did not like the thought of an unsupervised human on the seawall. And he could not remotely sec why the man was taking the risk of scrambling up onto the retaining barrier. He ran with all his incredible speed. He was too late. M icah-IV was still a hundred meters away when the man reached the top of the barrier. He stood there flatfooted a moment, balancing himself. Then he launched himself into the air. "Nol" Micah-IV cried. "This is prohibited!" It was suicide -- that is, deliberate self-destruction. The bewildered synthetic raced toward the barrier and taw the man activate a gravity chute and glide easily toward the base of #f the seawall. What was his motive? If he wished to kill himself, why the gravity chute? "Come back," Micah-IV called, readying himself to go over the wall and retrieve the man, monsters of no. The man was scrambling over the boulders at the shoreline, and now he was wading hip deep in the sea, brushing aside the tangled coils of brown weeds, lying face down and moving his arms, propelling himself rapidly away from the land. MicahIV did not try to follow. It would mean double destruction and nothing gained. In blank disbelief he watched the man swim rapidly out to sea. The belt of electricity did not harm him, since the mass of one human being was too slight to trigger a discharge. The poison zone offered no menace to a human metabolism. But then he was past the outer rim of the poison zone and in the open, unguarded sea. A flash of bright scales -- the glint of swordlike teeth -- a rolling of the surface -- Then all was still out there. T rembling, flooded with shock secretions, Micah-IV turned away. Within the visitor center were five other human beings, standing by the open door. "Who was that man?" MicahIV demanded. "How did he get out onto the seawall? Why did he kill himself?" There were no answers. They all seemed strangely unmoved. Several of them request Micah-IV to take them on the tour of the seawall. Irritably, Micah-IV told them the tours were canceled for the day and ordered them to leave the visitor center. He had had his moment of diversion at last. But he found the novel incident less divertin than he had anticipated. He reported it. Shortly his sector of the wall swarmed with authorities. Wearily, Micah-IV endlessly repeated the narrative. Experts examined the door of the visitor center and showed that it had been opened in the usual way, with thumb signals. Clearly the suicide had been privy to inside information. Micah-IV was reprimanded for having failed to prevent the suicide. It was no use to tell them that it was not his fault. Someone had to be blamed, and who else but the sector warden? Humans were not to be permitted on the seawall unattend. Micah-IV therefore must have been guilty of negligence. To himself, he insisted that he was innocent. He could not be everywhere on his sector at once. He could not run a thousand meters insitantaneously. If a human bent on self-destruction had unlawfully gained access to the signal code and was able to let himself out onto the seawall at a time when the attendant was elsewhere, how was the attendant to have prevented the act of suicide? The reprimand meant nothing tangible to Micah-IV. It did not affect his rank, his retirement status or his salary, for he had none of these things. He was not an emIF ployee but rather a part of the apparatus. But it did affect his standing among his peers. News of the episode had spread. The wardens of other sectors were aware that MicahIV had been reprimanded. He was shamed before his barracks-mates, for he had allowed a human being to commit suicide in his sector. For more than a month Micah-IV lived with that stigma. It was a great relief to him, then, when a second suicide was reported. T he circumstances were virtually identical to the first. A young woman had slipped out onto the wall in DV-# while its warden was occupied at the opposite end of his sector. Drifting to the beach below by gravity chute, she had gone into the water, swimming out to the waiting monsters and her death. New security measures were put in force at the visitor centers. Micah-IV felt a sense of excitement, for now his days were mottled by unpredictabilities. There was little chance (that the seanbeasts would scale the seawall or that a section of the seawall would collapse, the two eventualities for which he was supposed to watch. But it was perfectly likely that at any given moment some irrational human being would go over the wall and invite a certain doom. The third suicide, in FC-#, did not have a gravity chute. The victim -- an adolescent boy -- plummeted the sixty meters to the beach and was shattered cn the shoreline rocks. Some monster was deprived of a snack, but the scavenger birds ate well. A fourth death was reported. A ftffli. A sixth and seventh. Perplexed sector wardens st)ped up their pace, moving from end to end of their zones in two-thirds of the previous time. There was talk of closing the visitor centers altogether, but nothing came of it; human beings the right to view the sea, merely because a handful were perverse. Instead, new locks were placed on the doors of the visitor centers. Despite this precaution, there were four suicides the following week. In the barracks, the sector wardens were briefed on ways to cope with the crisis. Micah-IV listened attentively, feeling a certain pride at the knowledge that all this had begun in his own strip of the seawall. An official with oily, grayish skin and small green eyes addressed a cadre of the synthetics and told them, "There is now a cult of gratuitous suicide among humanity. You must do all in your power to prevent further deaths from occurring. There is nothing more precious than a human life." The official with oily, grayish skin and small green eyes was the twentythird suicide. A psychiatrist with stiff, bristly hair spoke at a later meeting and declared, "The strain of the national effort to built the seawall is taking a delayed toll. The citizens are attempting individually to undo the jp-eat communal enterprise by seeking death in the sea. Since the monsters can no longer come k) the land, they go to the monsters." It was a plausible theory. The psychiatrist tested it hims sot long afterward. M icah-IV, pacing the wall through the salt spray and the gusting winds, did his duty. As each group of humans appeared -- and there were more tourists than ever, now -- he scanned them impassively, wondering if he could detect suicidal tendencies. Will you try to kill yourself, you plump female? What about you, young man with too-bright eyes? You, edgy father of two? wall in groups of three. The attendant remained close by. Despite this, there were several incidents in which humans eluded the grasp of the warden and plunged over the wall. In the barracks, Micah-IV listened with interest as Noah-I, one of the wisest of the synthetics, offered his views. "It is a religious phenomenon," declared Noah-I. "I have studied religion. These people feel an oceanic urge. They must return to the great mother." "And the monsters that devour?" "Irrelevant. There are always risks in any relationship. The swimmers hope to elude the monsters and reach the depths of the sea. It is a spiritual yearning." "Where will it end?" Uzziah-IU inquired "Perhaps the wall will be takea down," suggested Noah-I. "Perhaps some new cult will arise. Or perhaps all the humans, one by one, will throw themselves into the sea." There were further deaths. Several hundred humans had perished overgroup had recorded its suicide. Now precautions were enforced. It was hoped that the onset of winter would create a change im the prevailing psychological climate, but the pattern of self-destructiom was not broken. On a day when specks of snow dropped from a gray sky, Micak-IV prevented a suicide. He had detected signs im advance: the bulge of a gravity chute beneath the clothing of a red-haired woman and a certain glossiness about her eyes. When he led his group of tourists out onto the seawall, he watched her closely. "There," he said, pointing, "is one of the enemies of mankind now. See the fluked tail? See the great spearlike tusks? See the clawed flippers?" The red-haired woman broke from the group and bolted toward the retaining barrier. M icah-IV, who had been expecting some such action, moved swiftly after her. She was crouching beside the barrier, activating the gravity chute. Lately, the barriers had been wired to give a mild electric shock, so that it was discouraging to try to climb one. Yet IF with a gravity diute it was no hard feat the leap comfdetely over the barrier. As the woman coiled her muscles for the le, Micah-IV closed his hand around her arm and held her in place. "The rest of you!" he shouted. "Inside! Inside at once!" The other two tourists rushed into the visitor center. Micah-IV grasped the would-be suicide firmly"Let go of me," she demanded. "Why do you wish to jump?" "None of your business! Let go! Let go!" "You will die in the sea." "What's that to you? You filthy robot, how can you defy a human being's orders? Let go of me and let me jump!" "I am a synthetic, not a robot," Micah-IV reminded h gently. "I am not required to obey human orders except as they follow my programming. I foibid you to leave the seawall." Efficiently he pulled the gravity chute from under her clothing and unsnapped its activator, without releasing his grip on the woman. She glowered at him. "Tell me why you want to go to the sea," he ask "You'd never understand. You're just a machine." "Genetically I am nearly human. I can think and reflect and change my ideas. This is of great concern to me. Why do you want to go to the sea?" 'To belong to it," said the woman. "I do not understand." "I told you you wouldn't. Don't deprive me of it Let me jump!" "I cannot do that," Micah-IV informed her and dragged her toward safety. Her words cut him deeply. He had had little conversation with human beings in his lifetime, and he had never before been so blunty reminded of his nonhuman status. Perhaps he was a laboratory product, but he had feelings. She had wounded them. He gave way slightly to the emotion of self-pity. As they neared the cubicle that was the visitor center, Micah-IV's foot slipped in a patch of melting snow. Within an instant he recovered his balance, but that was just enough time for the red-haired woman to pull from his grasp and run to the seawall barrier. Mioah followed her. She reached the electrified barrier and vaulted it, her hair momentarily standing on end like wire, and then she was gone, tumbling downward, drafting on the wind, smashing against the jagged rocks below. Scavengers gathered. I will be severely reprimanded for this, Micah-IV told himself. There were witnesses. Througii my negligence I allowed h to destroy herself. He stared at the gray, winterchurned sea. He saw dark, huge shapes beyond the poison belt. Why do they kill themsdves? What do they find in the sea? What drives them to do such things? He did not know. I do not understand because I am not human, he thought. Absently, Micah-IV climbed to the top of the harrier and walked to be human. In any case no one along it. His nervous system abcan reprimand me for this, sorbed the nuld voltage without disHe faced the water and levered comfort. Patrolling his sector from himself into space. As he feH, he the unusual vantageint, he pivoted and saw the glassy graymarched a hundred meters south, green blocks of the seawall behind to a place where there was no him. He hit the water at a sharp beach, no rocky shore, merely the angle and sliced into it, gasping sea lapping directly against the seaa bit at the impact. Then he bobbed wall. to the surface. I will do a human thing, MicahLithely, swiftly, inquiringly, IV decided, and perhaps it will give Micah-IV swam outward toward iht Coming Next Month in IFl But their weapons could still destroy mankindl by Larry Niven A Relief Storyl by Keith Laumer by Richard Wilson IP IF  Novelette On The Shallow Seas The world was lovely -- for a jail -- and the convicts could buy their freedom, if they wanted to. Perhaps with their lives! (# A #I right, you jail birds, on your feet. Time to get and go look for your freedom." The guard laughed, his face twisted in its usual sadistic sneer. Lant rubbed the fog from his eyes. It seemed he'd hardly slept more than seconds, but he realized it was only his mental state. The guard was getting his mcMiiing kicks. By the time the chow bell sounded, one or more of the prisoners would be in the hospit, or in solitary for assaulting a guard. Every morning it was die same way. First he would oome into the cell block shouting, running his dub up and down the bars imtR k made your teeth ratde. Just when you would stop. Then he would fo to the nearest window, while the anger hed caused seemed to fill the whole edl block. The cons Would watch as he stared out the window, waiting for the ome who would have to answer nature's call after being confined to his bed all night Lant made a game of guessing how far the guard would let them get, before he got his kicks. This morning the guard waited longer than usual. The prisoner had just entered the cubicle. Faster than anyone would have thought possible, the guard was there. If the con tried to hold his temper, the guard took it as a provocation to go further. Everyone in the block knew what was coming next. Already shouts of anger echoed from the other prisoners. "Lay off, screwl" Lant headed toward the washroom, staying out of it. Better to take the names and taunts from the others than to get his head powdered by the guard's vibrator club. Several other convicts evidently felt the same as he did, but he ignored them -- as they did him. T he turmoil outside reached its height. Even through the door the zzztl zzztl of the vibrator club the screams of those it fell against and the thud of falling bodies could be clearly heard. Lant washed slowly, the face in the broken mirror before him strange and unreal. Finished, he dressed. No sense going back into the block until the fight ended. As he strapped on his mud boots, he noticed his ankles were etched with small white lines on the reddened, swollen skin. He cursed, "Dammed vampire ticks; Why couldn't they eat from something that didn't need all its strength just to stay alive?" Btill mumbling to himself he put on the rags they gave him for clothes. Could be worse, he thought. At least he had a good coat. And so far hadn't fell victim to mud fever or swamp rot. Frelon appeared in the door. Lant was relieved to see him. noring the why didn't you help? look in his eyes. Lant slipped him the soap. It had taken them six months to acquire it. They concealed it from the others, protected it, used it sparingly. The day they snitched it from the guard house, they had spent hours holding it, simply content to stare at it. To touch and smell it was pure heaven, to men who hadn't had soap for over four years. Lant remained silent until Frelon finished washing. "Where are you going to look today? Have you decided?" "Thought I'd try the mud flat around Prisoners Island," Frelon replied. "I'm heading for the shallows around East Island. Anyway we won't waste our time both looking in the same spot." The siren atop the mess hall sounded. Both men covered their ears to drown out the whine. On the way to the mess hall they passed the latrine. Three cons still lay where the guard had felled them. Damned fools, Lant thought. IF There were always a few who never realized one guard with a vibrator club was the equal of any ten men without one. Outside, he could see it was going to be another typical day on Exonan. Lant remembered the day he had arrived there. Half dead drugged from the long trip, he had been kicked and shoved from one place to another. First there were the shots for everything you could think of. Then shots for things Lant had never heard of. Then the physical examination. Some examination that was! The doctor was a convict also. He looked upon his job with about as much interest as a rich man would show if he saw a penny laying on the sidewalk. Of each new arrival he asked the same questions, man after man. He never examined anyone personally. "Any diseases? Anything wrong with your arms or legs? Any reason you can't do a full day's work?" The instant you replied "No" your physical examination was over. On the other hand if you complained of an ailment, you were given ten lashes for trying to get out of work. Then came the speech by the deputy warden. The warden was too busy -- later Lant found out that too drunk was the real reason. L ant passed Crazy as he entered die mess hall. Crazy belonged in a nut house; anywhere else in the galaxy he would have been in one. Crazy had tried to escape one night. Somehow he'd found a way to get out of the cell block without getting knocked out by the electric charge in the floor. Hs'd scaled the wall without too much trouble and got about a mile from the prison when one or more of the creatures that roamed the nights had fallen upon him. The guards had found him the next morning, clawing and screaming, at the gates. The wounds he had received, though serious, healed, but his mind didn't. Crazy spent his time now crawling around on his hands and knees. Lant kt one eye on him, as he went by. Crazy hurled himself across the floor, his knees scraping on the rough boards. Lant kicked him -- hard -- square in the face; still Crazy came on, his teeth gnashing in the air. Lant kicked him in the mouth this time. Cra#:y stopped, started to come on, drew his lips back to reveal splintered and bloodied teeth. Lant drew his foot back to kick again. "Get awayl So help me. I'll kick you to death!" Crazy started to come on. Then pivoting, he scrambled away down the hall and out of sight into the yard, his animal screams echoing back. Lant cursed him -- cursed him for what he was, and cursed him for forcing him to be so cruel. A short time after his arrival, Lant had ran into Crazy. Unaware of the man's mental condition he had felt only pity for him. Six days later, they released him #T from the hospital. It was six weeks before the bite wounds healed completely. At breakfast, Lant ate in silence. It was an unwritten rule there, not to speak to anyone except your buddie. Everyone had one or two dose friends looking out for and contributing to the welfare of the others. Lant had chosen Frelon out of all the rest. To make a careless friendship there was dangerous. Lant had been careful. As he ate, Lant looked around. Some of the faces were new this morning. That was no surprise to him. He'd heard two guards discussing a load of fish the week before. Even if he hadn't overheard them, he would have known the new men by the fresh, scared look on their faces. Lant knew from the past that as the days her # passed the shine would disappear from their eyes. The look of hope would turn to a look of dismay -- the look of forever being dirty, hungry, tired. Then more often then not, it would turn into the faraway gaze of a caged animal. They would very seldom look up from the ground when they walked. Eventually their once erect bodies would assume the stoop of the old. Finished with his breakfast, Lant waited to see if anyone left anything on his plate. The prisoners were only fed breakfast and supper and then only if they earned it. It was hardly enough to keep a sparrow alive. Rarely, someone who was sick -- or, as this morning, new to the food -- would leave some of his meal. Then there would be a terrible struggle among the others. On more than one day he had seen men die over a scrap of food you could put in half a spoon. This morning no scraps were left by anyone. Disappointed, Lant left the mess hall. The day on Exonan started at four in the morning, long before the planet's small sun rose. The day ended at seven each night. During the day the prisoners were expected to earn their keep by hunting for... golden oysters I II T his was the only thing of value found on Exonan. When golden oysters had first been discovered, thousands had flocked to the planet from all parts of the galaxy. Gold had became the rarest metal known to mankind; just an ounce of it was worth enough to retire for life on. The bonanza soon turned into a nightmare. So rare were oysters that contained gold pearls that many who had come to make their fortune soon left broke and disgusted. Those that stayed and kept looking either fell victim to the elements or simply were never heard from again! Because of the value of gold the prison had been built there: To give the prisoners a reason to hunt for golden oysters, they were offered as a reward for finding one with a pearl of gold in it, their freedom and their transportation to any of the planets. Besides the offer of freedom for finding a gold pearl, the prisoners IF were expected to bring in sixty pounds of oyster meat eaoh day, to pay for their keep. To fail to do so would mean no supper that night. Failure to bring in the required amount three days straight would result in a terrible beating by the guards, followed by five days in solitary confinment. More than one con had gone into solitary confinment, never to be seen again. Word had spread among the cons that the head guard in solitary was a sadist who derived his pleasure from torturing the prisoners while they were there. Lant had been there five years, almpst six. He was consider an old-timer by all standards, but had never come close to finding an oyster with a gold pearl in it. He would have given up hope of ever finding one long ago if he hadn't seen the ones others had found. The excitement would sweep through the prison like wildfire! The pearl would be put on display in the main yard, heavily guarded to protect it from the prisoners that would gather to see and touch it. That was freedom they were looking at, a chance for a new life! The fortunate prisoner that had found it would be there, all smiles, usually enclosed by an unseen glow of happiness that filled the air. Again and again he was asked the same question. "Where did you find it?" "How far from what landmark?" And on and on for hours. In most cases, the smile and happiness of the con about to gain his freedom was reflected in the tears of those he would leave behind. W hen the siren sounded to start work, Lant took all the time he could getting to his crawler. The prisoners called it a crawler; the proper name was W.M.A.L.C., which stood for water, mud and land craft. A crawler was about six feet long, about four feet wide, stood above the water when empty about ten inches. It was powered by a small outboard motor fitted with a set of remote controls, that enabled the prison guards to bring it back whenever they pleased. Lant checked the gas tank first to make sure it was full. He'd heard tell of some who went out and didn't return because they ran out of gas. Next he went to the supply shack and checked out an oyster blade, checking to be sure it was razor sharp and wasn't about to break in two. He wasn't about to die because the only weapon he had failed when needed the most. He started the crawler's motor, then listened carefully for several minutes for the faintest sign or sound that the motor wasn't running properly. Satisfied he idled the craft back into the main canal. Lant held the crawler's speed down to a creep until he reached the checkout gate. Two crawlers were ahead of him; he shifted to neutral until he was waved forward. "Number?" the guard asked. "#," Lant answered. One guard checked the craft, while the other guard bolted the returner on, activated it with his key and for the thousandth time reminded Lant, "Remember, you only have twenty minutes to return to your crawler before we bring it back at night. Remember you have only twenty minutes aft the siren sounds." ' Lant nodded. He knew very well what would happen if he wasn't aboard whon his crowier returned. During the worldng hours you could go where ever you pleased, as long as it was away from the prison and as long as no other prisoner was within two hundred yards of you. The guards, no one would bother you all day. The prison authorities knew there was no place for you to go. No matter how far away you went, come night you would have to return to the safety of the  prison walls. At night creatures too horrible to  describe roamed the watery lands of ' Exonan. Lant had seen half a dozenof their bodies, half-eaten things with fanged teeth and long sharp feet. Just the thought of meeting one of diem at night was enough to send chills down your spine. Some times you could hear them outside the prison walls at night, howling and fighting among 'themselves. His little speech finished, the guard waved Lant out. "Number # cleared." The guaird's warning still fresh in his ears, he slammed the crawler into high gear. Soon the prison's dirty gray walls became just a blur in the distance behind him. Lant knew that about twenty minutes to seven that evening the alarm on the crawler would begin to bleep. After twenty minutes the returner would start the motor and return the crawIF ler to the prison -- with or without anyone aboard! He had learned to tell the time of day by the angle the sim hit the water. He made it a point always to work as close as possible to his crawler late in the day. L ant set his course for a small island he had marked on his map. The map had xxxx's all over it, to indicate the many places he had looked. He'd found plenty of oysters all right. Trouble was none of them had contained even the slightest sign of a gold pearl. Where others had found them, he had searched, for miles around the spot without any luck. Lant had never wasted a minute. The only time during the day he wasn't in the water was when he was between the prison and where he was going or when he was going to a different place to look. The crawler's motor died; he had arrived at his destination. He took his mud boots off, tied them securely to the bow to make sure they weren't lost overboard. Then, making sure his oyster blade was securely tied to his waist, he eased himself over the side into the water. The water was just the right temperature, for a change. Some days the water was so hot it made you sweat after you had been in for only a few minutes. Exonan was almost completely covered with water, which as far as he could be told was constantly heated by underground streams that passed through the planet's mantle, where they were heated to very high temperatures. Lant eased himself into the water until his feet touched the bottom. The water was just the depth he liked for hunting oysters; it came to his chest, which meant he wouldn't have to dive to look. He slid his feet along in front of him. He had done it so often, for so long, that he had developed a rhythm -- right, left -- right, left. He slid his feet along before him as he went around the crawler, always going in a wider circle. The eighth time around, he found his first oyster. Not bad, he thought. Usually he circled the crawler until he was a block away, before he found the first one. On some occasions, he had gone much farther without finding anything. Carefully, so carefully, he ran his foot across it until he found the horns. Then, slowly!, the beat of his heart sounding in his ears, he counted them! One two, three, four! -- He waited, relieved it wasn't a cannibal oyster, until his heart settled down to a more normal beat. Then bending down, until his chin rested oh top the water, he worked his oyster blade under the oyster's shell. Although called golden oysters they were not like the oysters of any other planet. They were shaped like oysters, but there it ended. On the unhinged side of their shell, a growth ran from them. Usually it was anchored securely into the muddy bottom, sometimes to an object or a crop of rock. Locating the growth where it was attached to the bottom, he cut it with a quick slashing motion. At the same time he grabbed the now wildly thrashing oyster. Carrying it back to the crawler, he toss it onboard. The oyster was about the average size, slitly smaller then a wash tub. It clashed its halves together and beat against the bottom of the crawler, until it died. Lant pulled himself aboard. He bent down over the oyster, asked himself again: Was this the one? How many times had he asked himself that question? Placing the blade in the crack between the two halves, he pushed with all his might. After several minutes, he rested. Even after death, the oyster's muscles refused to let the shell apart. Rested, he tried once more. Setting his feet firmly he pushed as hard as he was able. The blade plunged deep into the oyster. Lant whipped it back and forth until he was sure the muscles were cut enou to enable him to pry the two halves apart. With both hands he opened the oyster. The meat had a vicdet look outside; inside it was a deep green. To the touch, it was like handling butter. Tlie smell was the worst, like dead fish in a hot sun. Quickly he cut the meat out, tossing it in the gwiera! direction of the cans. The hinge exposed he stopped. Poking his finger into the holes along the shdl's hinge, he found nothing. A dud. A damned dudi Nothing. This wasn't his lucky oyster. Lant finished cutting the meat out of the dl, then packed it into the cans furnished him for that purpose. W hen the alarm sounded on the crawler, he'd found two more. None with the pearl in it he sought for so vainly. When the alarm went off he was in the process of cutting the meat out of the last oyster he had found. It more than ed the cans he had. He threw all die extra meat back, with the exception of a large piece. This he would eat himself to supplement the lean diet the prisoners were fed. Lant would like to have cooked it but he had neither the time or the means, so he ate it raw. To him it was delicious I Hardly had he finished, when the crawler's motor started up and with a jerk it swung about until it was headed on the correct course for the prison. He was one of the last ones to arrive. "Number?" the guard asked. "#," Lant repUed. "Let's have your meat cans." Ihe guard weighed them to make sure they contained the required amoimt of oyster meat. "Nurnr # okay for supper," he shouted down to another guard. "Pass on," he ordered. Lant let his crawler run onto tiie sand enough to keep it from drifting away. The boat keeper came over and began looking it over. "Everything run okay?" he asked. "If it hadn't, you wouldn't be asking me now, would you?" Lant replied. "Look, buddy, don't get huffy with me. I only wanted to know if you thought your crawler needed any repairs?" "Sorry," Lant said, "I had a lousy day." IF "Don't we all," Lant heard the keeper say as he walked away. Lant strolled around the prison yard, waiting for the day's find to be posted on the bulletin board. Frelon joined him. They 'both strolled for several minutes, neither speaking. Finally Frelon spoke. "Any luck?" Lant smiled at the joke. "No." "Lant I want you to hunt with me tomorrow." L ant stopped, turned to Frelon. "You know twd prisoners aren't allowed to hunt together. What's so special about tomorrow?" "I need your help." "What kind of help?" Lant was interested now. "I found an oyster so large I can't even lift it off the bottom, that's what!" Lant studied his face for several seconds. Frelon was dead serious. "You're not kidding me, are you, old buddy?" "Lant, I swear it was as large as my crawler." Lant didn't answer for some time. An oyster as large as the one Frelon described was unheard of. "All right," Lant finally said. "Only we'll leave here in different directions. I'll meet you bdiind Convict Rock. Okay?" "Swell." The conversation ended when a guard came into the yard to post the day's find. It told the usual story. No pearls had been found. They all knew that. If anyone had found a pearl the place would be torn up in excitement. Three men failed to bring in the required amount of oyster meat; no supper for them. One prisoner failed to return with his crawler. A search party had been sent out -- it said. The prisoners knew that was a lie. "Christ, what a lousy place," Lant said out loud. Supper was the usual mixture of swamp worm and mud pig. Tonight it was boiled, tomorrow fried. Tasted the same either way. The coffee was the same too, powdered from some place called Japan -- no, it was from some place called "Made in Japan!" After supper Lant went straigjht to his cell. He took the mattress off his bed, searched it carefully. The springs he searched just as carefully. The bed frame revealed nothing, neither did a slow search of the walls and the floor around it. Jerking the only blanket they were allowed from the shelf he went over it, then the shelf itself. Nothing! He knew that stinking vampire tick was close by, somewhere. Once a vampire tick tasted blood from a victim, it seldom went far away -- until it was killed, or the victim died! Night by night, his life's blood was being sucked from him and would continue 'being lost until he found the tick. Before he could search further the warning bell rang. The bell was to warn the prisoners that they oMy had two minutes to get into bed 'before the floor would be turned on for the night. At night the floors of the cell blocks were charged electrically. Anyone foolish enough to step on them was knocked cold instantly. At the same time an alarm was sounded in the guard house, if it was your first dme, they would just laugh it off. The next time resulted in a beating for disturbing their sleep, eepwalkers here were quickly cured -- or Idlled Crazy was the only con Lant had ever heard of who had found out how to get over the floor safely. L ant had a terrible time falling asleep. Every time be shut his eyes the face of the judge that had sentenced him would appear. The bald head with the eyes of sentencing would shout to many people over and over, "Life, life, life, life! That's what you get, life!" And on and on until Lant would be wide awake, only then to realize it was just a dream. His right leg felt numbed. He moved it a Ikde and fek something else : That dammed vampire tick was backi In his mind he could picture it, snuggjed up tight against his leg. The tick's diamond-shaped mouth would be making little circular motions, its spongy tongue lapping up tiie blood as fast as it flowed from him, its belly swelling as it ate. He caut the tick and flung it away, feeling the skin tear from his leg as he did it, stiffling the cry of pain in his throat. He heard the thud as it struck the charged floor. Lant lay back down, thanking his ludcy stars that the tick wasn't large enough to short out the floor snd set off the alarm. his eyes. He just had to find an oyster with a pearl in it -- before he went out of his head as another prisoner had done. He had cheated the law out of his anguish by putting his head down one the electric toilets. When they found him the suction had tom his head off... "All right, you mugs! On your feet! Time to get up and go look for your freedom." The guard's voice seemed to get louder each day. Lant cursed under his breath. "Some day you'll get yours screw. Wait and sec." As his feet touched the floor some thing wet and sticky squashed between his toes. It startl him before he realized it was only the tick he'd killed last night. For the first time he noticed the dark stain on the wall. How, he wondered, could such a small thing eat so much. He picked it up, nothing now but a small mess of blood and fur. On the way to wash up he threw it away. Frelon stopped by, long enough to make sure he hadn't forgot about meeting him. Lant didn't waste time lecking his crawler out today. This was the day when the mail clerk would hand each prisoner his mail, if any, as he passed through the check gate. Lant waited patiently as others before him were checked out. Finally it was his turn. He idled into the gate, his eyes fixed on the mail clerk. "Number?" " # ." The usual wait while the reIF turner was bolted m, Tlien the broken-record reminder. "One prisoner didn't come back yesterday. Remember you have only twenty minutes to get back aboard your crawler after the alarm sounds." Finished with his speech, the guard waved him out. The mail clerk always waited until the last moment to hand you your mail, if you had any. Lant figured he got some sort of satisfaction in making each prisoner sweat it out until the last possible moment. Just as the guard shouted for him to get out of the gate, the clerk handed him a letter. Lant set the crawler on a course to Convict Rock. The letter was from the only one who wrote him any more, his wife. Lant had told her over and over again to get a divorce and start a new life for herself, but she had ignored him. Her letter was the usual stuff. Tbe weather back home was hot. Uncle Joe was in the hospital. She had a new job, paid ten bucks more than the last one. She had appiied again for his pardon... It was the usual nonsense. None of it mattered. Here only one thing mattered: to find the golden oyster. IV C onvict Rock loomed into view -- so named because of the odd way the water had eaten a hole through it, leaving bars across the opening. Lant shut his crawler off and let it coast alongside Frelon's. "See anyone else headed this way," Frelon asked. "Not a soul." Lant was nervous. For two prisoners to be foimd together outside the prison would result in serious punishment. "Let's get on with it," he said. Frelon hesitated, his eyes searching the horizon for sign of another boat. "Okay, follow me." Lant watched around him all the way there. Not the smsdlest speck came into view. They had traveled about thirty minutes; he was just going to pull alongside and ask how much further, when Frelon signalled him to slow down. Frelon seemed to be taking bearing from some invisible landmark. First he swung rit, then left, circled back to almost the same spot they'd started from. Finally he straightened out for perhaps a hundred yards; started to turn around again then swung sharply left and stopped dead. Lant pulled alongside and tied his boat to Frelan's. The object Frelon had been searching for turned out to be a small buoy. When Frelon pulled it in, he was surprised to see it had been made out of the float from a toilet bowl. The anchor was an empty oyster sheU. "This the place?" "Well, not exactly," Frelon smiled. "But it's within twenty feet, one way or the other." It was huge! Lant had thought at the most that Frelon had exaggerated. At first he thought it was nothing but a boulder laying on the bottom. But after Frelon showed him where the horns were, and after he'd counted them, aH Lant could do was to look dumbfounded. Lant dove down, ran his hands along its entire length. It registered on his mind that an oyster tiiat big, covered with that amount of moss, must be the granddaddy of all oysters. Maybe, he diought, just maybe this was the one. Back aboard the crawler he asked Frelon. "How will we ever get it out? We can't lift it, that's for sure." "We won't." Frdon replied. "We'll kill it right where it lies. Out it open, clean the meat out and see if it has a pearl, all under water." Lant nodded approvd. He laughed. "It would be just our luck that the pearl would be too big to lift out of the water." Frelon joined in the laughter. "Hey!" he said, "wouldn't that get them back at the prison?" Still laughing, both began to remove their boots. Lant strapped his oyster blade around his waist. Frelon didn't bother. "We'll take turns with just one. You cut, then ril cut. Okay?" "Suits me," Lant replied. "I'll go first." Lant breathed in and out rapidly, trying to get as much oxygen into his system as possible. The water was murky. It took him too long to locate the growth that held the oyster to the bottom. Out of air, he surfaced, sucked in a huge amount of fresh air and dove back down. Lant chopped at the growth, but his swings lost most of their force. from the drag of the water. Up, get a breath. Down, chop; up, get another breath. He chopped feebly at the growth. Up, get another breath, down, then chop. Spots of intense white appeared before his eyes. Exhausted, he swam back to the crawler -- then found he didn't have enough strength to pull himself aboard. Frelon grabbed him by the arms and pulled him aboard. "You all right?" All Lant could do was say, "your turn now." Frelon took the blade from him, strapped it around his own waist and widiout another word plunged into the water. He found the growth. Like Lant the water slowed his swings down. The growth was hardly notched when Lant went down again. It was going to be a long day. M any dives later, Lant came up, puffing, red faced and smiling. Frelon reached for the blade at his side. Gasping for breath, Lant clutched his arm. "Never mind, it's cut in two." Frelon realized then how much the task had taken out of him. Now that he looked, he could see the boiling water, the churning, muddied water, as the oyster thraed about below in its death throes. It was some time before either of them spoke. "Now what?" Lant asked, gazing at the muddy water around them. "Now we cut it open. We'll take both blades for this." IF "I sure hope this is all worth the trouble," muttered Lant. The first thing that struck Lant, after he entered the water was how hard it was going to be. He could hardly see a foot through the murk. He had no idea where the oyster was now, ict alone Frelon. When he surfaced, he found Frelon had the same trouble. Frelon sputtered, "Let's join hands until we find the oyster. All the thrashing around it did, it's bound to have moved." Taking a deep breath, they dove under. At first nothing was visible to them. As their eyes became adjusted to the gloom, to their surprise they found they had dived right on top of the oyster. It took sever trips up for air before they managed to get both blades inserted in the shell. After several tries to pry it open, Lant signaled to Frelon to surface. "It's no use, Frelon. We'll never get it open." "We must," Frdon gasped. "I want it open as much as you do " Lant replied. "But let's face it. We just aren't that strKig." Frelon plunged back under the water. Lant waited for him to come back up. And waited. Still he hadn't surfaced. Lant dove beneath the water, clearer now. Frelon had planted both feet on top of the oyster's shell and was pulling back, almost to the point of breaking them, on both blades! Lant could tell he was on the brink of unconsciousness. He grabbed him, signaUing him to go up. Frelon shook his head -- no! Unable to get him to rise, Lant took hold of one of the blades, signalling Frelon to puli. Still, they were unable to open the oyster. Lant, out of breath, rose to the surface. Frelon still didn't come up. Diving back down to him, Lant found him stUl firmly gripping his blade. One look told Lant all he needed to know. Little bubbles of air rose from Frelon's mouth and nose. Lant jerked at his arms, trying to break his grip on the oyster Wade. Frelon had a death grip! Lant slugged him, twice, as hard as he was able. Frelon floated loose. When Frelon opened his eyes again he was aware of motion beneath him. Ahead the water flowed toward him. Turning, his gaze fell onto Lant's worried face. "Glad to see you're badk with me. I thought for a whSe you were a goner." "Where we going?" Frelon asked, noticing that his crawler was tied on behind Lant's. "After I got you out, my friend -- you damned fool! -- the alarm went off on our crawlers. So I retrieved our blades, tied your crawler behind mine and here we are." "What about the oyster?" "I left it there! Let's face it, we never would have got it open. We tried. You know how hard we tried." "Yeah, sure," Frelon said dully. Then: "We'd better split. Wouldn't do to return together. On top of not bringing in any meat, they'd probably shoot us." Lant could see nothing to say that would help. As soon as Frelon's crawler was free Lant sat down on the front of his. Getting a good grip on the sides with his hands, he lowered both his hands, he lowered both feet into the water. The additional drag he created soon let Frdon's crawler get ahead of him. He stayed that way until Frelon was out of sight. Lant ignored the gate guard's comment. So he missed a meal. He looked everywhere for Frelon. Then the warning buzzer sounded to get in bed. He gave up. L ant woke with a start, the shrill head. Some damned fool must have touched the floor... Then he became aware of the lights flashing across the cell windows. Someone was trying to escape. Now he could pick out the shouts and footsteps of the guards as they hurried to their posts. There was a rush of feet and guards were suddenly pouring into the cell block from both ends. They were armed to the teeth. Not the usual vibrators; this time they carried stun rifles. "On your feet! Stand at the foot of your bunks." TTie prisoners obeyed instantly. Stun guns weren't to be fooled with! The warden and his assistant entered. It was obvious the warden was agitated. He shouted orders rapidly. "Hurry up! Check them, on the double." IF The cell captains started up the sides. It was their reKMisiUll to know each and prisoner by sight. The one down at the far end opposite Lant stopped. Sir, number # is missing. "What's his name?' the warden shouted hack. "Frelon Manton." Lant closed his eyes. How had the foolgot over the floor? And -- why? The warden and the guard captains conferred for several minutes. Then the warden and one of the captains walked down to where Lant stood. "Frelon was your buddy, wasn't he?" "Yes." "He must have confided in you. He must have told you he was going to try to escape. He probably asked you to go too. "No! He didn't even menti -- ' The slap was so vicious, so sudden, it took Lant comptetely by his mouth angered him even more. "You dirty screw!" he shouted at the captain who had struck him. "Don't take it out on me because you can't handle your job." The guard's hand raised to strike again. "Do that again, and I'll kill you!" Lant said, his eyes boring his anger into the guard's. "Some way, somehow, I swear!" Before the guard could decide, shouts rang out from the corridor. "We've foimd him. Warden! He's on the west wall." L ant rushed to his cell window. All he could make out was the bright glare of spoflights. Suddenly a movement caught his eye. It was Frelon! Frelon hungthere, about two feet short of die top of the wall. Lit by the numerous floodlights concentrated on him, he had the appearance of a drab moth caught in a porchlight. How he'd managed to climb as high as he had was a mirade. The wails of the prison were solid concrete, smooth, slickened by years of moisture and slime the only handholds were the small cracks where the concrete had cracked. His face was twisted in agony, his eyes glared out as though they refused to see what was happening. A circle of guards appeared beneath him, rifles aimed in his direction. "Hold your fire," the warden shouted. "I want him alive, if possible! Frelon, I order you to come down." "I'll bring him down," The guard that said that raised his lifle to his shoulder. The warden rushed furiously at the guard. "You'll follow orders! Understand me?" The rifle was lowered. Again the warden shouted to Frelon, "Come down now and I promise you, no harm will come to you. Do you hear me?" Frelon's hand's clawed at the wall, seddng fresh holds. For a minute it looked as if he would fall. "Listen, Frelon! I'll make a deal with you. Tell me how you got over the floor without getting knocked unconsdous, and I give you my word nothii will happen to you." Frelon's hands reached for a new hold. His feet kicked at the wall trying to find some new crack to press into. "Frelon!" the warden shouted. Frelon pulled himself up another inch. "Bring him downl" the warden screamed at last. Almost ibefore the command left his mouth, the zzzzsst of the stun guns sang out. Frelon seemed to float there forever. Then slowly, slowly, his body arched back. Lant's gasp was lost in the thud of Frelon's body striking in die yard outside. V L ant rested for a few minutes. All morning he hadn? found a single oyster. His cans stood empty against the rails on the crawler. The spot he'd picked to look was called Big Break. Ihe name had nothing to do with the prison. When the big rush was on to find gold on Exonan, the people had reclaimed miles of the land from the sea. Just a few years before the prison had been built, Exonan had suffered a terrible earthquake. The high, thick levees holding back the sea held all except in one place. But what a place! For two miles, the levee crumbled and the sea had poured back in, leaving all the reclaimed area flooded with from five to ten feet of water. Because of the break in the levee it had came . to be called Big iBreak. Rising Lant stretched. The warm sun felt good. He would have liked to enjoy it forever, but he had to get going or he'd go hungry tonight. Easing over the side, he dropped back into the water. The bottom was very muddy there with the kind of mud that clung to the bottom of his feet like glue. His prograss was terribly slow. Besides the bottom, he had to contend with the numerous pieces of rook that had once formed the levee walls. Each time his foot touched one of these chunks he would have to check it out before he was sure what he had touched -- oyster, rook or cannibal oyster! He continued to circle the crawler, sliding one foot along before the other. Lant circled until he was forty or fifty feet from the crawler. He had all but decided to give up and move to some other area, when his right foot brushed something. "Carefully he ran his foot along it until he located the hump. Slowly Lant counted the horns. One, two, three, four, five -- six! He froze. He now had his foot on what he knew was the bait a cannibal oyster used to lure its prey over its huge mouth with. Lant realized at that very moment he was being sensed. The instant he made any movement, either toward it or away, it would strike like fanged lightning! A cannibal oyster looked a lot like an old-fashioned bear trap. The trap was its huge mouth. Sticking out from the mouth was a long no IF tongue, the end of which formed a perfect copy of an oyster, with the small exception of having six horns instead of five. Once its prey was lured over the bait, it would rise up from the muddy bottom like a freight train. Laying buried in the mud, its body looked like a huge earthworm. The cannibal had no eyes, but its senses of vibration were highly developed. Lant had seen one convict killed by one. Now he was in danger of becoming a meal himselfl Without moving a muscle, hardly breathing, he stood there until his nerves settled down. Don't panic, he told himself. Then slowly, ever so slowly, he moved his hand, an inch at a time, down until he got a firm grip on his oyster blade. A little at a time, he carefully pulled it from his belt. While doing this, he figured out where the cannibal oyster's body must be lying. After what seemed like hours, expecting those terrible jaws to engulf him every second, he raised the blade high over his bead. Lant quickly stomped down on the cannibal's bait; at the same time he drove the oyster blade down with all his strength in the direction he hoped the cannibal would come from. The jaws rose out of the water over him. His blade sank deep into the cannibal's body! The jaws gnash in air, missing him by only inches. Lant kept shoving his blade in, turning it, and at the same time jerking it from right to left. The cannibal rose to the top of the water and tossed him aside. Quickly Lant scrambled aboard the crawler. The cannibal lay atop the water. Wood gushing from the rent on its side. Its huge body thrashing back and forth, its blood foaming the water. When it finally lay still, Lant lay flat in the boat, content to drift. Content to be alive. H ours later, he roused himself. The length of the shadow his crawler cast on the water told him his time was running out. lliere was no sense just sitting around, worrying. Lant strapped his oyster blade around his waist and entered die water. It seemed warmer than usual; almost immediately, he started to sweat. He had only circled the crawler three or four times when he found his first oyster. When he had it on the deck of the crawler, Lant figured it weighed at least ninety poimds. Using an oar as a hammer, he worked the blade in between the two halves. The meat from it filled all his cans; at least he could be sure of eating tonight. The meat out of the way, he poked his finger into the holes long the hinge. Nothing. He went to the next one. Nothing, nothing. He went to the next hole. Nothing -- wait. That didn't feel quite right. Sticking his ger back into the last hole, he felt slowly around the sides. There was sometUmg there aM rit. It felt like a small maible, more like a pea. Lant moved the object around until he was able to get his finger crooked behind it. Then, keeping constant pr#ssure on it, he worked it out of the hole. Wiping the green scum from it, he held it up to the light. When he finally stopped laughing, he could have cried. Over five years he had been looking for an oyster with a pearl in it. Now he finally found one, and it was the size of a pea! A very small pea at that. For an instant, he was tempted to throw it back. Hold on now, he thought, you can still trade it for something, it must have some value. Even an ounce of gold was worth a fortune. The rest of the day yielded one more oyster almost as large as the first had been, and it too contained a pearl, so small it looked like a grain of rice. Lant was beside himself with pity. After five years, to find two pearls in one day -- and to have them tiny! Lant knew that neither of them would free him. He cursed his luck. W hen Lant arrived at the prison that night, he skipped supper and went to the warden's office. He told the duty guard that he had to see the warden but refused to tell him why. Bored, the guard told him to wait. The warden was in his sixties. His hair had long ago retreated to the sides of his head. He was a short man, and an ugly one. Lant stopped the correct four paces from the desk and made the proper salute, right hand flung across his chest. "'Number # requests that the warden will receive him." "Request granted. State your business, my time is important." Lant reached into his pocket to get the pearls out. The right hand of the warden flew up. From out of nowhere a stun pistol appeared in his hand. "Don't move a mjuscle, #, or you're dead!" Lant realized he'd made a serious mistake. "I'm only trying to get two pearls out to ow you." "Don't take me for a fool, #. You couldn't possibly have one pearl in your pocket, let alone two." Lant grinned, "What if they were both the size of peas?" Lant could tell the warden was thinking it over, his eyes had a bad habit of giving his thoughts away. Finally the warden spKke. "All right, #, take your hand out, but slowly. This pistol's set on lethal charge." Lant eased the pearls from his pocket, stepped forward, laid the pearls on the desk and stepped back. The warden picked the pearls up and studied them closely. Still holding them, he said, "You don't expect to get a pardon for these small pearls, do you?" "No," Lant replied. "Then what do you expect for them?" "Warden, all I want for them is for you to give me permission to have a larger gas tank installed on my crawler." "What for?" The warden eyed distrustfully. "I think I know where to find oysters with gold pearls in them. IF VI But I liave to go faither from the prison." "Where?" the warden demanded. Lant smiled -- inside, so it wouldn't show on has face. "If I told you, you'd go look for yourself." "Don't get smart with me #, I could make things mity tough for you." Lant replied quickly, his temper beginning to rise. "And I could write the prison commission about the two pearls I just gave you. Look, Warden. Ail I ask for is a larger gas tank on my crawler. Nothing more." The warden rolled the pearls continually around in his hand, deep in thought. "I'll see," he said at last. "Prisoner is dismissed." It wouldn't do no good to force the issue. Lant returned to the cell blodc. For the first time since he'd arrived there, he had no trouble falling asleep. And at the gate the next morning he was stopped by one of the guards. "See that crawler, number eight? Orders from the warden. Today you take that one." Lant checked the crawler over carefully. He feared the warden might try to arrange an accident, to get rid of him. His fears vanished, when he noticed the crawler had a larger gas tank welded on it. At the gates, no cme acted like they even noticed the change. The guards ignored the larger gas tank completely. After the usual speech, the returner was bolted on and he was waved out. O nce dear of die prison and as soon as he was sure he wasn't being followed, Lant let the crawler idle. When he had marked x's on his map yesterday for the two pearis he'd found, he noticed something he'd never noticed hefore. The x's for tiie pearis he'd found and the x's for the pearls othm had foimd, formed a perfectiy straight line. The line ran straight to a small bay, on the tip of a volcanic island. AH the way back to the prison Lant had thougM about it. It was to unHkdy to be just coincidence. No one from the prison ever looked there. They coddn't; the island was too far from the prison for the amount of gas a crawler normally carried. By the time he'd arrived at the prison, he had made up his mind to exchange the little pearls for a larger gas tank. His map indicated that the volcano on the island, though active, hadn't erupted since the planet was discovered. Lant hoped the oysters with gold pearls had came from there. It was almost noon when the volcano came into sight. The island ft sat on was blackened from one end to the other. A dirty column of black smoke hung from the top of the volcano, the only indication it was active at all. As Lant drew closer, the unmistakable odor of sulphur filled his nose. He hoped the volcano wouldn't choose today to become active. The water was almost too hot to enter. Lant eased himself in, gradually letting his body get accustomed to it. It wasn't very deep; his feet hit the bottom before he was wet to his waist. Sliding his feet along, first one, then the other, he circled his crawler. He hadn't gone ten steps before he found the first one. Cautiously he ran his foot across the oyster until he found the horns. One, two, three, four -- five, just five. Lant dove. T wo hours later and as many oysters, he still hadn't found one with a pearl in it. The meat cans stood full against the rail. With meat to spare, Lant took a break, ate and enjoyed for just a moment the quiet of the day. The x's on the map were not sheer chance. He spread the map out on the crawler's deck: They ran straight as an arrow, straight to a small bay on the tip of the island. That was it, the bay, four or five miles north of where he was! The bay was harder to locate than the map showed. The coast on this side of the island was nothing but sheer cliffs. Lant almost passed the entrance. Recent slides had almost closed it off from the sea. The passage in was narrow; he was forced to weave constantly, to avoid the jagged ends of rocks jutting up from beneath the water. Sheltered by sheer cliffs on all sides, the bay was almost impossible to see. A fluffy gray fog hung over the water, and it was quiet. Even the normal, sounds were missing. Lant anchored the boat in the center of the bay. The water was very hot there. He would only be a;ble to stay in it for short periods of time. He was back onto the crawler in a flash! He'd dropped right on top of an oyster. Of course, it was possible, but it had startled him. It wasn't a cannibal or he'd have been a meal by then. He entered the water again off to one side of the oyster; slipped his foot along until he found it, counted the horns to be sure. Just a plain oyster. But it was not just a plain oyster. When he pulled it aboard he found the pearl. He was overjoyed! He danced crazily around the deck -- shouted -- laughed -- cried. It was the most beautiful thing he'd even seen. He held it up to the light. Even through the green slime he could see the shine of gold. What a pearl, he thought. By far the largest pearl anyone had ever found. Lant was pounds. Wiping the scum from it, he held it up to the dim light. Freedom, that's what he held. Freedom! Lant's first impulse was to rush back to the prison. He could just picture himself standing there, beWing with joy. All the other prisoners at his feet. Proudly answering their questions. He felt so happy. Finally, out of ibreath, he stopped cavorting around. Lant eased himself back into the water. When he stopped it was only because the deck of the crawler was covered with oysters to the point IF it was in dang of sinking -- and all had pearls! Others had found the pickings, he'd found the mother lode! The alarm went off on the returner. Laughing, Lant took his oyster blade and chopped through the metal case protecting it. He tore firing from the returner unta he was sure it could no longer control the crawler. Today, he would go back on his own. L ant stood looking out the window, at the lovely, watery, landscape. His wife was busy, showing friends their beautiful home. He could hear parts of their conversation. Carol was speaking at the moment. "You see, since Lant found so much gold, the courts decided that legally the extra gold was his. Card joined Lant, it was a lovely view. "So you sec," she went on, 'Vhen Lant heard they were closing the prison down here  on Exonan, he bought it. Of course, it took a lot of remodeling." They ail went out onto the patio. "You're right," Card said. "It and Printed in full color on matte paper... suitable for framing... these are reproductions of the covers of the February, #, and April, #, Galaxy and September, #, Beyond. Two by Powers, one by Schomburg. No lettering -- just the paintings, handsomely printed. Just a few sets left, # reproductions for #, postpaid in North and South America (elsewhere add #c postr age). Address: Cover Reproductions, Galaxy, #I Hudson Street, I New York City #. IF IF  Short Story Kruger had no difficulty locating the criminal he had pursued across space. Trouble was he found too many of him! T he meal had been like most banquet meals, and the several men at the speakers' table on the platform looked -- one of them excepted -- ordinary. The exception was a tanned, blocky man of perhaps thirty-five, dressed in a dark blue suit, with a white shirt and a black string necktie. His cropped black hair stood up like a shoe brush, and his eyebrows (beetled now) were heavy, almost meeting above his nose. He had the kind of jowls that always looked as if they needed a shave. His wide mouth was clamped in a straight line. Not extraordinary? No -- but there was a patch of adhesive tape on his forehead, scratches on both cheeks and a puffiness around one glaring eye. Make-up failed to hide bruises here and there. The master-of-ceremonies was already warmed up: " -- that the Interstellar Division always gets its man. Of course, that isn't invariably true. Space is a fairly big territory, ha ha, and now and then one does get away. But the man who is about to receive the year's Surprise Award is an officer who, so far, has never failed to get his man. Except, of course, when he was chasing -- excuse me, I mean, ha ha, apprehending -- women." The me paused to pick up a large plaque that lay on the table. He took two steps and extended it toward tihe scowling, battered man. "And now, I take great pleasure in awarding -- The blocky man's scowl deepened. Suddenly he was on his feet. He snarled something to the me, turned, clumped to the edge of the platform and off it, and marched toward an exit. The me looked startled, turned crimson and glanced involuntarily at the plaque as if he'd just been told to swallow it whole, or something. After a few moments the me collected himself a little and raised the mike to his lips. "Uh, friends. I'm, uh, sorry to have to report that Inspector Kruger has just had a sudden attack of, er, indigestion. But... well ... anyway, there was this mature, respected accountant who credits, and we traced him to a pJanet called Phrodd. It's about eighty-two light-years away, and no Terran spaceline services it, so it has to be readied by transferring twice on Alien lines. Well, uh. Inspector Kruger went to Phrodd and made the arrest. His official report has, er, not yet been released, but we understand there were grave difficulties of an unusual nature... I t was Inspector Judson Kruger's first day on Phrodd. He turned, caught sight of something, hesitated, then bellowed in a stern voice tinged with hysteria, "Stand, in the name of the Government of Earth!" Agile despite his large feet, he hopped across a twelve-foot-long slug (which cried out in fright and jerked in its eyes talks) and seized the arm of a mature, courtly, very tall man with a broad forehead and a splendid crop of silvery hair. "Borogrove O'Lardi," Kruger snapped, "I arrest you for the crime of embezzlement!" The man turned innocent, mildly reproachful blue eyes upon him for a moment before beginning to melt to one of the native slugs -- or Whugs, as they were called. Kruger jerked his hand away from the rapidly indrawing arm. "Damn it," he said shakily, "you're the sixth one today!" The Whug finished its metamorphosis, in careful stages so it didn't fall hard to the pavement, then extended its eyestalks toward Kruger and said, in a voice that undoubtedly matched O'Larch's fairly well, "I'm, wh, sorry, Earthman. I was paid to do this impersonation. Tliank you for, wh, terminating it." The eyestalks swiveled, and the native crawled away. Kruger strode down the sidewalk, muttering to himself, dodging or stepping over or ducking under a dozen different species of visitors to the planet, plus whatever Whugs had business here in Phrodd's Interstellar Settlement. Halfway to his hotel, he saw another O'Larch. He almost passed it up, but finally steeled himself to try again. "Stand, Borogrove O'Larch!" The routine was the same. The Whug gratefully assumed its own shape and said, "My, wh, apologies, Earthman. I was, wh, paid -- " Kruger snarled, "Go to, wh, hell," and walked away. IV H e hadn't been able to get his standard communicator working right, so in his hotel room he lay prone on the floor and growled in to the Whug-level phone-grill, "English!" There were various clicks and murmurs, then a voice said, "English, wh, spoken." "Yeah. Get me Earth, please. The hookup has to go via Moog. I want the Terran Department of Justice, Interstellar Division, Commissioner Stanzlecz." "Commissioner, who, wh, sir?" "Stanzlecz! S, T -- oh, hell; just put through the call. I'll talk to whoever answers." The connection only took five minutes, there being very little timelag in the subether. A girlish voice lisped. "Interjeiar Division!" "Who's this?" Kruger demanded. "Penny Uddersmith. I'm new here." "Oh. Uh, Penny, this is Inspector Judson Kruger. at are you -- I mean, put me through to the Chief, will you?" A moment later Stanzlecz's voice said querulously, "Yes? Is that you, Kruger? Whatever are you doing on Moog?" "I'm not on Moog," Kruger told him, trying to keep his voice level, "the call just has to go through there. Chief, O'Larch is here on Phrodd, all right, but there's a complication. You see, the natives here -- " Kruger rolled over to relieve a kink in his back, and banged his ear into a chair leg. "Ow, danm it! The Whugs, that's the dominant race, can take any shape they want to, and O'Larch has hired a bunch to impersonate him. Since I arrived he's increased the number, and I spend all my time trying to arrest them. He's got quite a bit of loot to work with, you know." There was a silence, then, "Kruger, you promised me faithfully you woul't drink on the job any more!" roared. He put his hand over the phone-grill and spoke to hims elf in monosyllables for a moment, then resumed the subether conversation. "You can look it up in the encyclopedias; they're the best mimics ever found. Not too advanced in other ways, though. Although they're intelligent enough. Anyway -- " "Gracious," Stanzlecz interrupted, "whatever in the world good does that do him?" Kruger clamped his lips for a moment. "They keep walking about the Settlement, and while I'm busy trying to arrest them, O'Larch has an easy time staying out of my way. And of course inquiries do no good. Who knows whether he's seen the real O'Larch or not? One thing, though. At least he's confined to the Settlement. So are all other aliens -- except me, of course; I have special privileges. The Moogs enforce that rule -- this is a Moog protectorate, you know -- and they've promised not to let O'Larch leave the planet until I find him." Stanzlecz said, "Won't they help you apprehend him? Or how about the natives? Those, uh, Whugs..." "No, no, no. There are treaties, and protocols, and codes of honor. and every damned tiling you ever heard of. What I called you about, is I need a bigger allowance for this ob. I've got the idea of hiring some Whugs myself, to impersonate me. They can go aroimd arresting OTkrches, which will use them up a lot faster than I can do it alone. You see, the contract they make, as near as I can figure it out, is to maintain the impersonation imtil they're arrested, or xmtil a day and night have passed. They can't hold it indefinitely. They have to resume their own shapes to eat or sleep. So if I can hire some help... Also, O'Larch won't know which is the real me, and it'll be hard for him to keep dodging all of us. I might get lucky and comer him. But, as I said, I need credits." There was a pause, then a sigh, and, "Oh, fiddlesticks. I'd hoped to keep the budget down on this one. Well, if you must, you must. I'll allow you a hundred fifty thousand credits total. Mind you, your passage and sustenance, and any of that fooling around you do, will have to come out of it." Kruger stared at the phone-grill in disbeilief. "O'Larch has ten times that to work with!" Stanziecz turned petulant. "Well, Earth has to show a profit on his apprehension, doesn't we? I mean, don't it? Uh -- no, not another word of argument! That's the limit, and that's it. And one other thing. Earth has very good relations with Moog. Don't you do anything -- anything, do you hear? -- to get the Moogs peeved at you!" Kruger lay there, counting the pulse that throbbed inside his skulL Finally he said, "Yes, Qiief," and broke the connection. liiT ummumnoonoogog, the Moo biped and more or less humanoid -- which body-shape might have something to do with the reasonably cooperative relations between Earth and the Moogan Empire -- but he looked like a humanoid bred many generations for barehanded physical combat. He must have weighed twice what Kruger did, and he had vicious teeth, too. However, his eyes were placidly sfhrewd and his manners civilized, and he wasn't much hairier than Kruger, and he didn't have any detectable odor. His neat uniform showed the rippling of his huge muscles as he closed die office door and walked to his own wide chair behind a big desk. "I'm happy to have this chance to meet you in person, Kruger. I happen to have been a cop, as the slang has it, myself, in my younger days. Sorry I can't give you more direct help; I've little sympathy for criminals. However, treaties and such, you know. Well. You want to find an entrepreneur, eh, who'll contract for a number of impersonators? Damned good mimics, these Whugs. Daren't let any of them off the planet -- you'll have to be X-rayed yourself when you leave, to make sure you're genuine. You think you want about fifty, who speak English? I'll put you in touch with a reliable Whug businessman who can handle that. IF But I can tell you -- this is off the record; I can't show open partiality -- that O'Larch has a hundred impersonators going, and a hundred more English-speaking Whugs, at least, on retainers. Pretty well cornered most of the supply, I'm afraid. Of course, if you only want yours to speak one or two standard phrases, they can learn those in a matter of minutes. Damned fine linguists. I'd think you'd want as many impersonations as O'Larch has, if not more, to wear him down." Kruger said, "Yeah, but I'm on a limited budget. Another thing I wanted to ask you about -- why can't my impersonators, if I get them, make more than one arrest apiece? I've made a few inquiries, and it seems they insist they'll have to revert when they make one arrest." Mum -- as he'd graciously told Kruger to call him -- spre his hands and smiled. "Union rules." "Oh," Kruger said. "Well,... if it isn't against Moogan policy, could I maybe find some non-union Whugs who'd make more than one arrest apiece?" Mum pursed his big lips. "N-no, I doubt it. Of course, there are the Gnigs... But, no." "Grugs?" Kruger asked hopefully. "Forget them!" For a moment. Mum's eyes bored keenly into Kruger, then he relaxed. "The Grugs are just as good mimics as the Whugs, but they're barred from the Settlement. From this whole area, in fact. You see, the Whugs evolved the ability to imitate as a defensive thing. They're plant-eaters and not vicious by nature -- though they can be tough, when they have to. The Grugs were predators, who used the imitation to ambush their prey. The two races are like -- weU, like cats and dogs, you might say, though the analogy isn't perfect. But as I said, Grugs are out of the question." l#u;ger sighed. "Well, I guess I'll try it with what Whugs I can afford, then. By the way, how is it so many of them speak English? And you, too. Your whole staff speaks it like bom Terrans!" Mum said, "Actually, I doubt if you realize how far English has spread through the galaxy. Races wbo've never been within a hundred light-years of a human speak it. It has certain, shall I say, virtues? I myself speak over two hundred fifty languages fluently, and I can get along in several thousand. But frankly, I've never encountered a language that lent itself so aptly as English to -- well, obfuscation, where obfuscation's needed." "Oh," Kruger said, "yeah. Well, may I have the name of that Whug businessman?" K ruger saw the businessman and contracted for twenty-five impersonations to be made on a single day later in the week. He made no commitments about the additional twenty-five, except to get an assurance that they could be supplied if needed. He wanted to do a little thinking while he still had credits left. He extracted a promise of secrecy (except within the union, of course) and made a date to return the next day, when the impersonators were gathered, so they could observe him. Then he went back to his hotel room, took off his shoes, and arranged himself on the bed with his feet elevated in a sling evidently provided for some odd-shaped alien species. He'd already canvassed the hotels of the Settlement and found sixty-odd Borogrove O'Larches register. The others were probably staying at rooming houses, or just wandering the streets. No doubt O'Laroh had other Whugs, or aliens, hired to keep watch on Kruger. So there wasn't much chance, singlehanded, of finding the embezzler even by blind luck. But with a whole company of Krugers suddenly on the scene, the watchers would be confused. And so would O'Larch. The trouble was, the fake Krugers wouldn't report O'Larch even if they found him. Union rules, and things, again. Which left the odds still heavily against Kruger. He'd just have to pick the most likely intersection, and watch as many arrests as possible. What he really needed was impersonators who'd actually make arrests and keep -- or at least trail -- the real O'Larch if they found him. Also, he needed hirelings who wouldn't revert after a single attempt. In short, he needed Grugs. Did he dare? One thing would be on his side. Once in the Settlement, the Grugs wouldn't reveal themselves. The penalties they risked were too severe for that. But suppose one of them lost his wits, or got knocked unconscious, or something? Of course, there'd only be twenty-five of them, and they could be warned, and the O'Larches -- even the real one -- weren't likely to offer violence. Still, did he dare? Often before, facing difficult decisions like this, he'd found it helpful to turn the problem around and look at it from die other end. He did so now. Did he dare not to? No. W ith that settled, he pondered how to make contact secretly with the Grugs. He glanced at his watdi. There was a certain Whug bartender in die hotel's lounge, whom Kruger's practiced eye had observed from time to time in clandestine conversation with various kinds of aliens. The Whug wasn't due on duty for a while, but Kruger could kill the time over dinner. He showered, shaved again, dressed leisurely, went down to the dining room, pored over the epicurean items on the menu and ordered. Dinner finished he sauntered into the bar, located the bartender he wanted, pulled up a stool, got out his wallet, and placed two ten-credit notes on the bar. "I want," he said quietly, "to be put in touch with the most despicable, most unprincipled, most traitorious Whug within two hundred miles." The bartender's eyestalks spread hastily right and left, making sure no one was watching or listening. Then they both bent toward one end of the bar, where three enlisted Moogs were getting drunk and beginning to be disorderly, swiveled IF to scan a pair of giant centipedes twisting together and giggling in a booth, and finally returned to Kruger. One twitched briefly in the direction of Kruger's still-fat waUet. The bartender elongated himself a little closer. "Wh, Earthman," he whispered, '# am that Whug." T he country a hundred miles east of the Settlement was rougher, its rocky valleys choked with gnarled, vine-entrangl trees. Kruger, stumbling on the path, steadied himself against a big boulder. There was a smear of motion. Within seconds, the boulder had become a beast like an enormous scaley bulldog with a crocodile's head. "Watch it, you, gr, Terran slob," the creature growled. "Oh," Kruger said, taking a hasty step backward, "sorry. My name's Kruger. I was looking for -- " The Grug snarled an obscenity. "You've found him. Put your, r, money where your mouth is." "Yeah," Kruger said, "right. I'll pay ten per cent over the Whug union scale. But your twenty-five impersonators have got to keep working the full night and day, if necessary. And they've got to be careful." The Grug rumbled with scorn. "Only ten per cent over what a Whug gets? Know any other new, gr, jokes?" 'Twenty per cent," Kruger said firmly, "and that's all I can spend. Take it or leave it." "Okay, I'll take it. What's the, gr, goddam job?" Kruger explained. Tbe Grug entrepreneur pondered. "Gr. Yeah, I see what you mean. I don't know; big, gr, risk, going into the Settlement. Those Moogs don't mess aroimd. Still, I can probably find volunteers; it sounds like fun. Gr, yeahl We can sneak in imitating Whugs! Do you want me to draw up a contract, or shall we just, gr, shake hands on it?" "Nuts," Kruger said. "I've located a bond broker we can both rely on. I'll put up the money with him. And you and I will work out details at are desirable for both of us. Not that I don't trust you. Just a matter of principle, you understand." The crocodilian mouth gaped in an awful grin. "Earthman, I, gr, begin to like you!" I t was unnerving when the first Whug impersonators began scattrang about the settlement. One strode up to Kruger and snapped, almost in Kruger's own voice, "Your, wh, necktie's not quite right. The boss'll dock you if he sees that!" Kruger scowl. "My tie's right, damn it. Yours is too wide!" The fake's eyes widened. "Oh! You're the real -- " His tie narrowed a trifle. (God, Kruger thought, even the fabric looks genuine) . "Wh, sorry, sir." The impostor turned and clumped on. Halfway down the block it bellowed, "Stand, Borogrove O'Larch!" and seized the arm of a victim. Both of them began to melt into Whugs. When they'd finished, they crawled away side by side. Kruger winced. He moved on back to the corner where he could watch the crossstreet. An O'Larch was moving leisurely toward a modest hotel. Krug tensed. Was that, possibly, the real one going to cover? Should he follow? A bellow of, "Standi" from behind him made him turn. He watched an arrest and double reversion, the two Whugs again crawling off side-by-side inthe direction of the union hall. From somewhere -- in the next street, he thought -- came a shout of, "Stand!" He raced in that direction, swerving around aliens who whistled or grunted and turned to stare after him. He also had to hurdle a lot of Whugs -- there seemed to be an unusual number about today. He reached the far comer in time to see another arrest-and-double-reversion. Three gone, damn it! He wondered if there might have been others, inside hoteh where he couldn't hear them. He doubted it. He thought the real O'Lardh -- at least, in this first shock of confusion -- would still be out in the streets, where he could move around. Scowling, he trotted back to the main intersection. He needed about a dozen assistants scattered about the Settlement, that's what he needed. Muttering under his breath about the Chiefs stinginess, he turned this way and that, eyes busy. An O'Larch emerged from a coffee shop and ambled in his direction. He started that way, but a Kruger burst from a dooiway and got there first. "Stand, Borogrove O'Larch, in the, gr, name of the Government of Earth!" Kruger grunted with satisfaction. The Grugs were beginnmg to operate. He watched the O'Larch turn into a Whug, point his eyestalks at the steadfast fake Kruger, do a doubletake, hitch about uncertainly for a moment, say something, get no reply, shrug, and crawl away alone, looking thoughtful. The Grug-Kruger (whose voice had been a trifle harsher than necessary) caught sight of Kruger, took a quick step toward him, stopped, crouched for an instant in indecision, then turned away. K ruger made sure there were no more O'Larches in sight, then hurried along the main street to the next intersection. There were two or three hotels in the side street he wanted to watch. It was beginning to become clear to him that, before the Grugs had used up all the fake O'Larches, he, Kruger, was going to be a very tired d very distracted man. And there was one thing he hadn't thought about. The way he was acting, anyone interested could see he was the real policeman. He'd have to go more slowly, making arrests of his own. He turned the corner and stopped, confronted with a new facet. Six -- no less -- O'Larches were emerging from what looked like a vacant store, and scattering in different directions. Reinforcements, damn it! An alien like a squat, very broad Terran bull with delicate branched antennae in place of horns was standing across the street, staring at the dispersing O'Larches. Even an IF alien could hardly help noticing the identity, seeing them all together like this. A Kruger darted aroundthe far corner and hurled himself upon the nearest O'Larch, almost knocking him down. "Gr, stand!" He fairly dragged his victim toward die next O'Larch, who stood bewildered. "Stand!" The fake Kruger seized the second O'Larch with his other hand, giving him a little shake in the bargain. "Hey," the victim remonstrated, "what the -- I mean, I beg your pardon, officer, I do not -- oh, hell!" He began to melt to a Whug, as the other arrestee was doing. The fake Kruger snarled in a not very human way, let go of them, and galloped toward another victim, shoving, as he went by, a vicious stiff-arm into the bull-alien's face. "One side, tubby!" He grabbed an O'Larch. This time, the Whug, before reverting, swung an awkward fist and chirped something in Whug. The Kruger knocked him down. "Don't get funny with me, you slug! Stand!" The remaining three O'Larches ran toward the spot, shouting, "Scab! Unfair!" and such things. The two who had reverted were now humping themselves back toward the ruckus, making astonishing speed. Kruger ran toward the spot, yelling, "Hey! You! Copper! You're not supposed to -- " Four more Krugers came around the comer, saw the disturbance, and galloped toward it, roaring. A Whug onlooker whipped his tail in front of them, tripping two, who went down bellowing obscenities. One started to waver out of shape, remembered where he was and hastily re-Knigered himself. But the Whug who'd tripped him had seen. "Grugs!" he screamed, battering at the fake with his tail. Windows were going up in the hotels all along the street now, and a fantastic variety of heads popped out to look. Aliens began pouring from the lobbies, tripping over each other and shrieking and bellowing and adding to the bedlam. A Whug Kruger hadn't noticed tripped him. "Damn it," Kruger yelled "I'm -- Then he had to roll hastily to avoid the bludgeoning tail. He scrambled up, skinned hands and knees smarting, and darted out of reach. All the Whugs were turning into O'Larches, now -- they evidently thought it was a pretty good fighting shape. And now at least twenty more O'Larches burst from the vacant store, fists balled. Several ran toward Kruger, their movements sadly belying the serene courtly expressions of their faces. K ruger dodged toward a hotel entrance, colliding with a huge ostrichlike alien and getting a ringing peck on the head before he got past. Inside the lobby, aliens were hopelessly tangled, fighting to get free of one another. He pushed his way through, demanded of a screaming Whug clerk, "Where's the back way?"... got no attention, and found it himself. It opened into an alley. There was shouting to his left. He ran that way, reached the street, and found one whole end blocked by a struggling, screaming, bellowing mass of O'Larches and Krugers. He stood there, mouth gaping. There must be hundreds of ea! Then he understood. Those treacherous Grugs! He should never have trusted them. A lot of extra ones had come along for the funi He saw a knot of them burst from a jewelry store, bags of loot clutched in their hands, looking like Krugers but lashing about them viciously like Grugs. One stopped to bite at a Whug who ran from the store after them, did poorly with the manlike teeth, took a blow from a tail that sent him rolling, dodged, got up yelling curses at the Whug and ran off after his fellows. Now Kruger heard a mob-sound from the other end of the street. He turned. A solid mass of O'Larches was coming. Some of the imitations were poor -- hasty and third-orfourth-hand, no doubt -- but all had fists, and they served as a sort of uniform. All Whugdom must know by now what was up, and they'd evidently decided to fight it out along the initiated lines. The leaders saw Kruger and pressed toward him, yelling for his blood. No use trying to prove he wasn't a Grug. He spun back into the alley. Smoke was pouring from a building halfway down it now, and he heard the wail of sirens. An alien like a boa-constrictor on twenty or thirty stilt-legs appeared suddenly from a closer building, saw him, shrieked, "Crazy, murdering Terrans!" and spat a big gob of brown liquid at him. He dodged that, threw himself against the nearest door, broke it in, and found himself amidst a huddled pack of blue skinned little bipeds with long ears that touched together above their pointed heads. He fought through them, ran down a corridor (deserted, fortunately) and came out in what must be the foyer of a rooming-house. The street outside looked empty, and he could hear the mob of O'Larches coming in the back way, so he jerked the door open and charged out, and -- Found himself between two converging mobs, one of Krugers, one of O'Larches. He whirled and tried the door, but it had locked itself. The whole Settlement was one deafening chaos now, with the scream of sirens almost drowned out by alien, Grug, Whug and quasihuman voices. A mass of bodies plowed into him. Fists pummeled him. He struck out blindly, heard his own voice -- nearly -- yell, "Ouch, gr, damn you!" and took an elbow in the face. He went down beneath the trampling feet, and felt two or three hard kicks in the head. The thought shot through his mind -- what, in all this mess, would become of the real O'Larch? And that was the last thought he had for a while. H e realized from the smell that he was in a hospital, but it took him a while to get his eyes focused enough to see that the huge white blob beside his bed was a Moog in medico's clothing. The muscular alien peered at him for a moment, then turned and said into IF a wall grill, "One's come around enough to talk, I think  There was a short wait while the blurry room swam a little, then a door opened and Governor Mummumnoonoogog stepped in. He stood glowering from Kruger to something in the other bed. "Which one of you's Kruger? You Terrans all look alike." Kruger managed to croak, "I am." He struggled to arise, found he could sit on the edge of the bed, and let it go at that for the moment. There was a muffled sound and a stir in the other bed. An O'Larch -- more battered, if possible, than Kruger -- raised a head painfully. "You are Inspector Kruger? The real one?" "Yeah," Kruger growled uninterestedly, "so what?" The other hauled himself painfully off the bed and advanced step by unsteady step, until he stood looking down gravely at Kruger. Battered as he was, his dignity did not desert him, and he almost succeeded in keeping the quaver out of his voice. "Sir, I am the embezzler, Borogrove O'Larch. I want to go home. I surrender. Arrest me. Please!" Mum interrupted harshly, "You're both going back to Earth, the instant I can load you on a ship. I don't want you around when I get to the bottom of this thing. If what I suspect is true, I couldn't trust myself to stay civilized." His glare coalesced upon Kruger. "As it is, you and your government will probably be hearing from us before long. And from a dozen other empires." He turned and stalked out. Kruger sat there for a minute, then, grunting with the effort, got slowly to his feet. Might as well get the formalities over with. "Stand, Borogrove O'Larch," he said glumly, "in the name of the Government of Earth." He placed hesitant fingers upon the taller man's left arm. When, after a minute, it had not changed, he let go, sighed and lay down again on the bed.  I Science-Fiction Writing Finds of the Sixties! by Samuel R. Delaney Also: Sam Moskowitz -- Kenneth Bulmer -- Keith Laumer -- And Man More.  All in the February Worlds of Tomorrow, on sale now! IF  Serial They had come from Tomorrow to watch a town die by fire -- now their own lives were at stake! by j. T. McIntosh able and convenient, that was all. # Ithough Jota MuUiuer was my I never knew Mrs. Mulllncr as cousin, I didn't know him imAunt Jean. There was no contact til he was three. His mother was between the two families. But Jota my father's sister; but they had and I, being only children of the never been close, and the two people same age, almost inevitably played they married disliked each other. together. When the MuHiners came to live We used to be put out together next door to us, I was three too. in one back garden or the other. Family feeling had nothing to do We were allowed to run wild in ours In the little town of Shuteley, England, on the hottest summer of any resident's memory, a party of visitors appeared. They were all young, and they were enormous. Moreover, they had a couple of traits that startled the quiet people of Shuteley. The girls in the party wore dresses that disappeared from time to time; and all of them had an unusual knowledge of what was happening in the town... and what was about to happen. The giants had established a camp on the bank of a river outside Shuteley, and there Val Mathers and his friend Jota shared the horrifyqueerly reversed, so that the losers in their battles came back to life. Then the village of Shuteley caught fire, and Mathers realized what the giants were doing there. They had come back from some distant time in the future to observe the fire -- and to rescue a few victims who for cryptic reasons of their own, they did not want to die. Val's instinctive thought was that he was one of those who was to die. But in fact his doom was worse. They wanted him to live -- and to bear the guilt for starting the fire that had taken hundreds of lives! (because neither my father nor my mother had any interest in gardens, and ours was a jungle), but had to be very careful in Jota's because Iota's father was an amateur horticulturist. He called himself that, and even at three Jota and I were trying to say the word, without much sucoess, and with no idea what it meant except that because Jota's father was a horticulturist we had much more fun in my gairden. (All this came out with Miranda prodding me, in the middle of the stasis, with fire all around. She led me through my memory quite fairly, not explaining although she did direct. She reminded me of very little and never forced her sometimes imore accurate information on me. All she did, really, was direct my attention to facts which I had never considered particularly significant, because if I had. I'd have had to believe the unbelievable. The unbelievable then. Anyway, sometimes -- quite often, indeed -- my memory contained important things of which she knew nothing whatever) . We must have been about four and nearly ready to go to school when we had contact for the first time with the nastiness of the outside world. What happened in my own house I naturally took for granted, and anyway it was never nasty, merely baffling at times. I loved my mother and depended on her like any child, and ninetynfive per cent of the time she was like anybody else's mother. It was only occasionally that the world turned upside down. Then there was screaming and rushing about and slammed doors and sobbing, and I knew then to keep quiet and pretend not to exist. The garden behind ours belonged to Mr. Sylvester, who was a fat redfaced man whom I used to like quite well. He used to give us aniseed balls, always throwing them and laughing all over his fat body when we failed to catch them, as we always did. Later, however, Mr. Sylvester changed. Jota (who was Clarence then -- the name didn't seem strange to either of us until we went to school) and I didn't understand why he had changed. Until Miranda made me think about it, I didn't realize that he was simply a gardener jealous of Iota's father's achievements. He didn't throw aniseed balls to us any more. Over the fence, he asked at times why we didn't run about in Iota's garden the way we did in mine. Then he started complaining about our garden, saying the weeds were coming through the fence. To Iota and me this was manifest nonsense, because we had never seen a plant walk. Anyway, there was constant trouble 'between Mr. Sylvester and lota's father, and between Mr. Sylvester and my father, and even between my father and lota's father, because lota's father said weeds did go through fences and it was time my father did something about the jungle. Iota and I never understood the situation, but what we did know was that we could never play in either garden any more without 'being shouted at by lota's father or my father or Mr. Sylvester. And we both managed to work out, without the slightest trouble, that the whole thing was Mr. Sylvester's fault. Really, it was quite a crisis in the life of a couple of four-yearolds. We were not aUowed to wander about the town, to play in the streets, to disappear for hours. In the back gardens, until Mr. Sylvester spoiled everything, we'd spent whole days of childish delight every time it didn't rain. One day Mr. Sylvester ceased bothering us. He was dead. I t was the day we went to school that Iota and I fell out for the first time. Of course we had argued and sulked, but until then we had both been too dependent upon each other ever to cut off our nose to spite our face. My parents and lota's parents both accepted our friendship as something that caused them less trouble than any other acquaintance, and i we fought we suffered for it, and we knew it. Other kids either of us brought home were not welcome. Neither IF iota's parents nor mine wanted outsiders poking their noses in, even children. Behind children were adults. So Jota and I fairly intelligent kids, had realized long since that fighting with each other didn't pay. At school, a maelstrom of noise, high laughter, peculiar smells, unaccustomed regimentation, girls (neither Jota nor I had ever had anything to do with girls and had quite made up our minds we never would), harsh-voiced adults pretending to be on our side, huge windows, endless corridors, electric light in the daytime, stairs, frightening large boys and girls, even more frightening people in black coats and square hats, one thing stood out in my memory -- the howl of laughter when Jota said his name was Clarence. The teacher laughed too, though she tried to pretend she hadn't. They laughed again, twice as loudly, when he added the second half, Mulliner. I wanted to jump up and hit the whole lot of them. They hadn't laughed when, just before, I had said I was Val Mathers. My real Christian name was Valentine, but I'd always been called Val, so that's what I said. Now everybody was laughing at Claren Mulliner, my pal. I didn't jump up because... well, I didn't. The funny thing was that as we were going home, free for the rest of the day -- the first day was a half day -- I giggled myself at the recollection of the childish laughter when Clarence, all unwittiny, gave his name. It was childlike. When they laughs at Clarence, my friend, I wanted to fight them all (though I didn't). But afterwards... well, I lauded so much I could hardly walk. Clarence -- I call him Clarence then, and went on doing so until he became, for all time, Jota -- didn't lose his temper at once. He waited for me to return to normal. But I couldn't. The more I laughed the funnier it all became. And then he hit me once, on the chest, and ran away. My laughter slowly died, not because I'd been hurt, not really 'because I was sorry I'd laughed, but mainly because I had, after all, been laughing at Jota.  long as he stayed to be laughed at, I went on doing it. But there's no pount in laughing at someone who doesn't hang around to be laughed at. I went home. I tried to see Jota, but nobody answered the door. At tea time I wasn't hungry. Lat I was sick. My father, even my mother, began to get concerned. I went to bed with a hot-water bottle. N ext morning I was no better, and the doctor was sent for. He examined me thoroughly Bind then he and my father talked at the foot of the bed in low tones. Later my father came and sat on the bed and talked quietly to me. At the time I didn't understand, didn't realize there was anything to understand except that I was ill. But many years later it was easy to guess what the doctor had said and what my father thought about it, and what must have beea in his mind when he talked to me. The doctor had been unable to find anything wrong with me, yet obviously I was quite seriously ill. Being a young, up-to-date doctor, he immediately thought of psychosMnatic illness. It figured. I lived in a strange home -- he knew that, being the doctor for the whole family. I had just gone to school. He had found a quite intesting case -- a child of five, otherwise apparently normal, prostrated by psychosomotic illness. Jota came to see me at lunchtime. He was quiet, puzzled and very contrite. He seemed to think he was responsible for my illness because he had diildishly punched me on the chest I told them that was silly, there wasn't ven a mark, and I was sorry Fd laughed at him in the first place. I was ill for three weeks and nevtt: fully recovered that first schoid term. Then there was a very small incident about two years later... It was the next time Jota and I really quarreled. Miranda didn't seem to know anything about this. I was quite unable to remember what the quarrel was about, or any details, except that Jota finally grew cold, stared at me, and said: "I'll fix you!" in a tone of menace quite stariflmg coming from a seven-yearold boy. And that was all. Nothing happened. T he fire that had consumed all of Sutdey was a dull red glow around us, but inside the stasis we felt nothing. Miranda was puzzled. She had been making me reqiember things, not as I might have expected, by being in possession of all the facts and prompting my flagging memory, but by directing my attention to olain types of incidents in my relations with Jota. And this incident had her beat. She tried to mal me remember that Jota had not really been in a cold fury with me, or that he got over it at (mce. In fact, Jota and I ceased to be friends for fully three months, and during that time he made no secret of the fact that he hated me. I was, after ah, a much more normal boy than Jota, and I made other frie. He stayed solitary, walking home alone, standing in the playground alone. And it was because of that that we finally became friends again. One of my new friends was Gh Carswell, who was studious but not always quiet. In those days he was a sort of juvenile Jekyll and Hyde, usually the best boy in the school from the point of view of authority. intelligent, polite, haird-workiiig, good at games, a paragon of schoolboy virtues. But now and then he'd kick over the traces. However, this incident had very IMe to do with Gil, not until it was over, anyway. It was the morning interval. I was with Gil. Across the playground, beside the bush which divided the IF junior boys' section from the girls', Jota was standing alone as usual, stadng into spae, his mind far away. About a dozen boys were kicking a bah around near him. Inevitaibly the ball went near him, and one k the boys chasing it came close to Jota. They didn't come in contact, and across the playground I had no idea what was said. I was watching only idly, until the group began to gather rou Jota. Then I began to have a vague, though fundamentally correct, idea of what was happening. No wild animals are as cruel as children. They don't know how. Jota, standing alone, had set himself apart as a target, as a victim. The boys (bigger than us, from a higher class) were taunting turn, trying to outdo each other in the wit and virulenoe of their insists. Automaticaily Gil and I moved across the playground. Nothing draws boys more surely and quickly than a ifight, and it was obvious there was going to be a fight. We weren't the only ones. Everyone in die playground was crowding to the same s. Even some of gids 'behind the hedge and fence were beginning to take notice, the bigger girls looking over, the smaiQ ones jumping up to take a quick look. There were three playgrounds at the old Grammar School. Everything was old, dingy and overcixiwded, and the playgrounds were far too small. Round at the back, completely cut off from us, were the senior boys. But all the girls, from five to eighteen, were in the same section. The idea was, presumably, that big boys might bully sm boys,  ds didn't do things like that. B olstering each other up, the tormentors were becoming bolder. At first they merely touched Jota lightly when they leaped at him. Then they punch him. Then they started pulling his tie, grabbing his shirt, clawing at his buttons. Still a few feet of space was left between Jota and the heaving mass of boys, tacitly maintained to keep Jota e quarry and everyone else a hunter. liis nose was bleeding and blood was running down his chin from a cut at the comer of his mouth. Most of us were howling -- I believe I was howling with the rest. We were huntsmen, and we had cornered the fox. We were out for the kill. Whtti bis shirt came out of his pants, we shrieked with laughter. He was near the end of his tether. His shkt, minus all buttons, was now haogiBg open under his jacket, and his thin white chest was heaving at lightening speed. There was no sign of any let-up. Flight had never seem possible for Jota, slsioe from the begmning he had been hemmed in against the bush and fence. But in his extremity he suddily did something that none of us expected. He leaped back, seized the top of the fence and somehow drew himself over. The next moment he was in the girls' playground. IP For a moment llie shouts died as if we'd aU (been stmick dumb. Then the whole mass of boys charged the fence, ignoring the bushes, and although none of us got over as Jota had done, we were all hanging over the fence, watching, if not chasing our quarry, hunting him with our eyes and our shouts. The little girls all ran away, screaming. Boys were not supposed to be in the 'girls' playground. It was a rule, and not one of the hundreds of rules made to 'be broken. Nobody had expected Jota even to try to get into the girls' playground. One massive woman of seventeen or eighteen caught Jota by the collar and lifted him. There was a scream of laughter on both sides of the fence. She did it again... He fell out of his jacket and she was left holding it. He darted for the gate. We rushed to our gate. He was on the other side of the road, panting desperately. Habit was so strong that he wanted to come back (the interval must be nearly over). But scores of boys were hanging over the gate. I didn't think. I jumped, over the gate and ran across the road. Jota flinched and turned, evidently thinking that even the school boundary couldn't stop the chase. But I caught his arm. "Come on back, Clarence," I said. Once again the shouting and howling died. Suddenly sanity was restored. I had done quite a bit to restore it, but could take little credit for it. By Standing with Jota, by allying myself with him, I h reminded everybody that be was one of us, not an outlaw to be taken dead or alive, not a fox to be slaughtered as bloodily as possible, not a mouse to be tortured and ibroken and perhaps left, mercilessly, still alive. I could take very little aedit because I should have done this long before, because instead of doing it when I might have turned the entire incident I had been howling with the rest. Anyway, as the shouting died, the whistle to end the break shrilled, and we all trooped back into school, including Jota and me. The fun was over. xxvm G il, Jota and I became friends after that. Curiously, Jota's fifteen-minute ordeal was ignored and forgotten and canceled as if it had never happened. The teachers must have known something had happened. Signs of the damage to bushes and fences was still visible six months later. Jota could not have looked anything like his usual self in class, although his nose had stopped bleeding, his face had been washed, and his jacket -- thrown over the fence by one of the girls -- hid the ruin of his shirt. In any event, nothing was done. And the boys at the school, too, scarcely remembered the episode. One or two of them, I knew, tried to taunt Jota later -- but they were unwise enough to do it individually, and in such circumstances Jota was perfectly capable of looking after himself. Looking after himself... Two weeks later, there was a special assembly. The Head was very grave. Two boys, dose friends, had died in one day, one of (hitherto unusupected heart trouble, and the other in a road accident. A special service was held. All the good things the boys had ever done were detailed, and everything else quietly forgotten. I knew of course, that these two had been the ringleaders in the humiliation of Jota. But no significance in that fact, beyond the obvious coincidence, occurred to me. Jota could hardly have any control over road accidents, especially since at the time it happened he was with Gil and me and dearly had nothing in his mind beyond our search for birds' nests. I might, at that age, have believed that God had punished them for their wickedness. It didn't cross my mind that Jota had. M iranda didn't make me remember subsequent events in any detail, except one -- one which introduced an entirely new concept. There had been the case of Squire Badgeley... He wasn't a squire at all, but he looked like one and he owned an orchard. Probably for every apple that he got, the boys of Shuteley Grammar School got two. In my earliest recollections of the squire, he seemed quite philosophical about this. But now it was wartime. We were too young to take much note of the war; the restrictions and shortages we accepted as we accepted the rain and the wind, and our memories of a time when there was no need to pull curtains at night and when unlimited good things were obtainable merely on production of cash were dim and vague. But Squire Badgeley took note of the war. He had three sons in worked with him, a Land Girl, as we called them then. In addition to apples, he grew raspberries, blackcurrants and a wide range of vegetables. And we 'boys not only stole his fruit, but damaged and destroyed his carrots, turniis, caibbages and lettuces. He became an ogre (from our angle). He guarded his orchard, chased us and reported us to the Head. The Head, whom we dimly remembered being as philosophical as the squire had once been about our depredations, now became astonishingly harsh. Jota was caught once, and the squire beat him. Two weeks later the squire died. But that wasn't the end of the Badgeley story. It was not until long after the war that we broke our vows about girls. Jota broke his firpt. One week he obviously didn't know any more than we did a'bout the birds and the bees, though we were all becoming hotly interested; the next, he was able to tell us, in remarkable detail, everything we could possibly want to Imow. We didn't really believe his storIF ies at first. But soon it was impossiblenot to (believe tbem. Girls of a!U ages swaimed aiouiul Jota. (He was Jota now, duly having been christened by Mr. Samuel, the science master). In juviBe masculine arrogance he used to induce us to deride his chances with a particular girl, often four or five years older than he was, and then make the conquest and prove it. This was before the days of widespread promiscuity at mixed schools. Shuteley was an old-fashioned town, too, twill behind the times. Senior girls did not then wear yellow golliwogs to claim loss of virginity. If Jota had not existed, only one or two of the most forward senior girls would have had furtive nocturnal adventures, mainly with the 'boys of the town who had left school. Fewer still of the senior boys would have had such expiences, and they would have been the supposedly pure senior girfs. Jota, on his own, created an unprecedented situation. Every apple ripe enough to pluck, he plucked. He collected girls like stamps. It made not the slightest difference what form they were in, from Third to Sixth. He knew enough, of course, not to leave a trail of illegitimate babies behind him. I believe that throughout his life, only when he was too impatient for a particular girl did he ever take chances. It was not long after Dina was bom that Gil, goaded by Iota's fantastic success and the fact that Gil and I were still virgins, and likely to remain so for some time, hit on a chalilenge that was to reduce Jota to oze He brouit up the name of Anne Badge#ey. A ll three of Squke Badgeley's sons had been killedin the war. Anne, left alone, ran the orchard herself, with hired hands to' help her. Althou she could hardly be said to be fortunate, money was not one of her problems. She was certainly the richest girl in Shuteley. At the time when Gil made his outrageous suggestion, she was probably one of the most desirable girls in the town and undoubtedly the most desired. There wasn't much  doubt that the reason why she hadn't married was tied up with her wealth. Whether the average young man in town wanted Anne, her orchard or her money was a matter for conjecture. But he certainly wanted all three. She was still in the first half of her twenties, and Jota was not less than ten years younger. She didn't exactly seem old to us, 'being younger than Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, whose pin-up photographs we were beginning to stick up in our bachelor bedrooms. Indeed, with her habit of working in' the summer in her orchard dressed like our pin-up girls, she was the nearest tiling to the gorgeous creatures of our adolescent dreams. She worked in the orchard behind a fence and a high hedge, but peepholes could always be found, and the summer working clothes of Anne Badgdey were a daily topic of ioiflamed speculation aimong us. When wore slacks we lost interest -- or some interest. But when she wore shorts and particularly one day when above her tight shorts she made do with a flimsy chiffon scarf, cardessly tied, she rocked the male half of the Grammar School to its foundations. But she was as much out of reach as Betty, Rita and Lana. The very idea of Jota and Anne, Anne and Jota, was ridiculous, which was why Gil made the suggestkwi. Jota took the challenge. And a week later, he made us hide in the orchard to watch. Late on a hot summer evening, he and Anne came out... Gil and I were part shocked, part disgusted, but mainly wildly envious. Why had Jota been singled out to be able to do such things? The girl was head over heels in love with him; he could do anything he liked with her, even we coidd see that. In the autumn, Anne died. She fell off a ladder and broke her back. D ina was still asleep. She changed her position easily, regularly, without fuss and without making a noise. Around us now, beyond the stasis, was a red glow. It would be many hours yet before it would be possible for Dina and me, unless wearing one of the giants' suits, to leave the spot. But the fire had consumed nearly all there was to consume. The Great Fire of London had burned for days. War-time fires started by incendiaries had often been blazing still when the bombers returned the following night. Shuteley, however, was annihilated in a relativdy small, exceediny fierce, shockingly rapid fire. What remained would gjow for a long time, but little or nothing remained to blaze. And there was one suit in the stasis. As I understood it, just before dawn the stasis would disappear, and Miranda would be plucked back to her own time. But anyone not of her party would simply be left, suddenly without the protection of the stasis, to die. Certainly to die. There would be enough heat left to char the ground, to bum Dina and me apparendy as all the other victims had bQ burned -- more slowly but no less surely, so that when people from outside first reached the village green (that afternoon? next day?) the would be no indication that the stasis had ever existed, or of the identity of the two blackened skeletons in it. But I was still oddly unconcerned about this. There was one suit, and there was still plenty of time. Anyway, I did not believe I was going to die. Dina could have the suit. Dina, whom I expected to recover consciousness soon, could make her escape... and I wouldn't die. "What are you telling me?" I asked Miranda. IF She shrugged. "I've beea careful not to tell you anything. You're idling me." "But I'm remembering what you tell me to remember. That Mr. Sylvester was a nuisaiioe to Iota, and he died. That Jota quarreled with me, and I nearly died. That the two boys who led the mob against Jota died. That Squire Badgdey beat Jota, and he died. That Anne Badgeley -- " "You're leaving out some very important things. About ah those girls, sdioolgiris mostly, but older girls too. Particularly Anne. She could have had anyone in Shuteley, you said. Why did die pick a kid barely into his teens?" "You're sarong Jota did all this? Any man he wants cmt of the way dies? Any girl he wants says yes?" She nodded. "He has the Gift. And you're wrong to say any man. What about Anne? When he'd finished with her, he made her die." "Why would he want rid of her?" "The oldest reason, probably. She was pregnant. With others 'ho was more careful. With her he was too impatient, too reddess. And it seemed to Jota that it would be better for him if Anne died." "You're saying he condemined all these people to death?" "No," die saidthoughtfully, "Not that. I imagine that at first, he simply thought, perhaps not even consciously: Everything wauld be fine but for Mr. Sylvester. And soon Mr. Sylvester wasn't there. But after this had happened a few times, Jota must have begun to realize... There's another thing he obviously has found out by this time -- with the ability to attack goes defense. Nobody can kill Jota. No person can kBl Jota. Of course he could die by accident, like anyone else -- his power is over people. Originaliy he died in this fire." "Wait," I said "That doesn't jell. I just killed him. Yesterday Gheg kiUed him. You say that before you intervened, the fire killed him. Seems that for an indestnictihle character he gets destroyed a hell of a lot." M iranda was following her own own train of thought, not mine. "Later, in adolescence, he found out something else. After any girl refused him -- " "No girl ever refused him," I said. "( yes. Time time. You weren't ere. Neither was I, but I can tell you what happened. The first meeting was always as you'd expect. But later -- a girl who sneared at Jota would come crawling to him. She'd beg him, as I -- " She flushed. "I think you heard what Greg and I were saying at the bridge. You're wrong if you've any idea that people with the Gift are smooth, practiced lovers. They don't have to be. It's crude, it's bestial. They say: T want you,' and that's it. Not the first time. The Gift needs time to work. When Jota or Greg wants a man dead, he doesn't drop dead on the spot. It takes time to happen." The paradoxes and inconsistencies that had bothered me were gradually melting away. I could see how Greg could have killed Jota. If two people had this Gift, presumaibly it was canceled out Greg had mo special pow over Jota, but then Jota had no special defense against Greg. So the matter was settled simply with pistols. There was also the cryptic exchange between them which I now understood better: you, Yes... I understood and accepted that. I also understood and accepted this new explanation of Iota's power over women. He approached them, they reacted exactly as they wished, free to do as they willed (I now remember I had never been privileged to see any of the prriiminaries, only the consequences). Later, when something had worked on them, they became possessed, day in Jota's hands. More of the inconsistendes dissolved when I looked at them. Jota had been brutish toward both #Sieila and Dina. That was how it started. Later, if he persisted, things would be very different. But instinctively wise in the case of Shelia, I had sent Jota away, unconsciously knowing what Sheila hated me for thinking, that what she thought or wanted or said didn't count, ordy what Jota wanted... And as for Dina, there had not been an Act Two, and there never would be. Then, having prepared the way, Miranda told me about the Gift in her own world. I don't remember her words. She spoke for a long time. A lot of what she said I didn't believe at first, ibut gradually disbelief was borne down. Greg and Jota and three per cent of the population in # had a Gift, which was quite simply that ability to make people die or surren-. der sexually. It was nothing else. It was fundamentally a masculine phenomenon. So few women possessed it that they were freaks, usually choosing to conceal, abandon, deny their possession of the Gift. Those with the Gift, then, were men, and if they didn't rule the world, they prevented anyone else from ruling it effectively. Most of them, fortunately, were law-abiding... but what could be done about the rogues like Greg? Virtually nothing. That was why Greg was present bn an expedition aimed at the limitation or even destruction of his kind, able to sabotage it at will, because nobody could stop him. Miranda couldn't stop him. If Greg cared to decide at any moment that she should die, and simply decided it instead of crudely, impulsively and rashly trying to break her body with one blow, then she would die in less than two weeks. And the cause of death could not legally ibe connected with Greg. I protested at this. Had no murder charge ever been brought against one of these people? When the Gift was known to exist, when threats had been made, when a death duly took place exactly as forecast...? IF "Think, Val," said Miranda wearily. 'Take the clearest possible case... imae the clearest possible case, and then think abont it. The detectives who built the case would have to be immune. The cops who arrested the accused would have to be immune. The jailers, judge, jury and lawyers would have to be immune. And in common justice they'd have to prove that the accused had the Oift and had used it ddiberately to end another person's life." She shook her head. "It can't be done. Especially since the actual cause of death is always natural -- illness, accident or suicide, with no physical intervention by the real killer." So Greg was with the Shuteley party. Some of those who had tried to stop him had died. Threats were enough to silence the others. Miranda's attitude, a perfectly reasonable one after all, was that she could at least keep an eye on him and try to defeat him. In addition to ordinarypeople and those who had the Gift, there were some who were simply immune. They did not possess the Gift; but those who did could accomplish nothing against them. Unfortunately there were fewer of these than those who had the Gift. The Gift and immunity were hereditary. This did not mean that die Gift was often passed on. It merely meant that it could be passed on. Miranda's world, the world of the giants (women of five feet four were as rare in her world, she told me, as women of four feet eleven in ours) was a good world on the surface and a seething cesspool of fear and chaos and self-destruction underneath. And all because of the Gift. The sexual side of it, she pointed out, was virtually unimportant. That was merely a by-product, a side issue. It existed, probably, because sex as well as survival was basic. Anyone who could control life and death could also control the sex impulse. That was nothing. A small minority of Casanovas could be a nuisance, but they couldn't push a whole world over a precipice. T he threat of death was another matter altogether. There was no need for any Greg to be educated, clever, handsome, careful, obliging, efficient or self-respecting. Anyone who said or did anything a Greg didn't like could be rubbed out and forgotten. It was senseless to be brave when faced with a Greg. After he had eradicated you, he could quite easily, on the merest whim, eradicate your wife and family as well. As far as anyone knew, the Gift was a chance mutation. Immunity was probably allied to it, tifiough no one could be sure. Immunity might have existed always, unrecognized, purposeless, until the Gift emerged. Twisting of time was only one of the desperate measures tried in an attempt to restore sanity to the world of #. Miranda hinted at others, refused to tell me about any, and said that anay they had all failed miserably, sometimes tragicalyI Started to suggest one angle that occurred to me, the arrangement of accidents, since Gregs could be killed in accidents like anybody else, and she cut me off rather impatiently. Such attempts were the most disastrous of all. They made all people who possessed the Gift, including those who steadfastly refused to use it, band together for their own survival. So we came to the purpose of the Shuteley operation. Clearly if everybody possessed the Gift, or if everybody was immune, or if everybody was one way or the other, the problem would cease to exist. According to the river-of-time theory, the people of # would continue to exist no matter what was done to the past, short of a major diversion which would force the flow into a completely different course. But their capacities might be changed. Miranda might, after certain changes had been made, find herself immune. Or she might have the Gift. Or nobody might have the Gift. It was a desperate scheme, born of desperation. It was carried out in a manner little short of insanity, in a completely useless attempt to get the whole thing done under cover. It was entrusted to an ordinary history class in an ordinary school under an ordinary teacher. A history class would go back and see the Great Fire of Shuteley, # A.D. They would do nothing to alter the flow of events except remove Garry Carswell... That was the cover: a minor operation like many others (none of them directed against possessors of the Gift), of no particular interest to anyone not directly concerned. Miranda knew all about it, but none of the students did. As far as they were concerned, the rescue of Garry Carswell, and a few others, was all that was involved, apart from the opportunity to see the Great Fire. It might possibly have worked. But three per cent possession of the Gift meant that one in thirtythree adults, teenagers or children had it. So no school was free of it. Greg was in another class, a lower class. He applied to join the expedition to #. The headmaster, the far more important people behind the headmaster and the less important people below, aU knew that the inclusion of Greg would ruin everything. But Greg had made up his mind, and nothing else mattered. It wasu't even possible to cancel the scheme. Greg, if he felt like it, could easily block the cancellation. Greg went with the party. Jota," I said. 'Tell me why you want Jota." She hesitated. "It's only a theory that if we saved Jota the situation might improve. Perhaps it would be worse... You've been baffled in the last twenty-four hours by what we know and what we don't IF know, Val. We knew that Jota would arrive at your office at #:# this afternoon, but I didn't know Dina existed. We had pictures of you, so I knew you when I saw you in the bar, but we had no pictures of Jota. And that's why I came to your office -- to see him, to be able to recognize him, so that there would be no possibility of mistaken identity later. We didn't know, of course, that you and he would go to the camp, because that was a new train of events altogether." "Why didn't you do some preliminary scouting?" "For several reasons, but the main one was to try to rush this through without attracting the attention of people like Greg. It wasn't supposed to be a big, important operation, just -- " "Just a sightseeing tour," I said. "Well, yes. Anyway, one thing we do know for certain is that around you here in Shutdey in # there were important elements in the Gift-immunity hereditary lines. Some were strong, some weak... it's possible that the whole situation developed from a single latent mutant who lived here thirty or fifty or eighty years ago. But we haven't been able to trace any such person." "You hoped saving Jota would give more people in your time the Gift. Or better still, immunity without the Gift." "That's it exacdy. Leaving Jota to die, as he did originally, obviously didn't stop the spread of the mutation. Historians believe that saving his strain may do what you just said. One thing we are sure of is that the immunity strain is here too, if we can somehow develop it. But ail we can do, all we know about to try, is to save Jota. He was the first, by far the first, to possess the Gift complete. Decades were to pass before anyone appeared with the power so fully developed -- " "And he really had no children?" "We think not. We're almost sure that -- " She stopped suddenly. I followed the direction of her eyes and saw Greg. H e was carrying a spare suit, which he dropped when he saw Miranda. His expression answered one question. He had meant to kill her, and thought he had. Yet he didn't say, "How did you get here?" He demanded: What have you done? Je stood up. "What could I do?" There was a slight emphasis on the "I". "I've lost it," he said hoarsely. "Something's taken it away from me. I felt it go... I couldn't test it with death, that takes too long. And I wanted to know. I tested it with girls. With Harrie, Wendy, Mary, Chloe. They couldn't understand it either... But they all hate me, can you understand that?" Miranda seemed to grow as tall as Greg. A great joy flooded her. "You've lost it?" she said. "Maybe there is natural justice after all. You're just a kid now, a great overgrown kid. And helpless." "Helpless?" he almost shouted, drawing himself up to his enormous height. Yet he was almost blubbering. Curiously enough, I could understand him. I'd known Jota for a long time. Jota had a strange Gift, and, I now believed, very Iktle else. His power, his personality, his success had all come from something he couldn't help. He had Something; he wasn't Somebody. It's not necessarily true, as you're always told when you're a kid, that a bully must be a coward. Yet there is a weakness, if not necessarily in courage. A strong, brave, whole man or boy doesn't have to prove himself at the expense of the weak. He may trample carelessly on the weak, as strong men do. But he doesn't seek out the weak to torture and humiliate them. He'd rather engage in a real contest with someone his own size. Jota and Greg had this in common, I now saw, that the thing that set them apart was important to them, vital to them. They weren't like a banker who happened to be a talented violinist, enjoying playing the violin for his own pleasure and that of others, but with no compulsion to tell every new bank client violinist. As far as I  knew Jota hadn't used his Gift to kill more than half a dozen people. But he'd had to go on making amatory conquests -- he'd been forced to go on. Now that I had the key I could see his Don Juan activities in a different light, and no longer envied him in the slightest. Every girl who didn't want him had to be made to want him. Greg, however, was the problem of the moment. As he and Miranda faced each other, I knew that the way this whole thing would go depended on what happened now between Greg and Miranda -- and me. Because I mattered, too. #X#"es, helpless." I said. "But X you knew that quite a while ago, Greg, didn't you? You just didn't want to believe it." He looked at me as if astonished to see me there. Then, remembering, he looked around. His gaze passed over the sleeping Dina without stopping. "Where's Jota?" he said. I had become strong and confident. I felt it, as Greg had felt his reduction to size, but the opposite way. I didn't even have to stand up. I was still sitting on the burnt earth. "I killed him, Greg," I said. "He was trying to add Dina to his list. I didn't mean to kill him, but I'm not sorry he's dead. I'm beginning to think his death was necessary." "You killed him," Greg murmured. "Yom killed him." "Why pretend to be surprised? You wanted to kill me and couldn't. You had to save me instead. I guess you managed to convince yourself that you didn't need to kill me in the fire, that it was neater and cleverer and just as efficient to bring me here to die when the stasis was removed. But the truth was, you couldn't kill me. The most you could do was place me IF in circumstances where I might die." It was Miranda's turn not to be able to follow what was going on. She had a glimmering of understanding, but there was still a lot she couldn't fit into place. Greg understood. He stared at me with naked hate and clothed fear. "Who are you, Val Mathers?" he whispered. "Nobody in particular," I said. "But once Jota wanted to get rid of me. He nearly got rid of me, and I came back. And the next time he wanted to get rid of me, I didn't feel a thing. And an hour or two ago, you tried to kill me. But you couldn't, could you? You had to bring me here instead and just hope I'd die. And when Jota and I fought, he died." Miranda was standing quite still. "You're immune, Val," she whispered. "You were the first neutral. Only your life had no effect, because you never had children. But after "what I told you..."  I understood now. I understood what had changed, and why. Jota was an irrelevance anyway. In the first run of these few days, he had died; in the second, he still died. So he was unimportant. He was a red herring. "I was different. In the first fire, I hadn't died, evidently (or I'd never have become the scapegoat). In the fire altered by the intervention of the giants, I was certain I wasn't going to die either. But one thing differed. But for Miranda, I'd never have had children. Now (I trusted her -- on the whole I trusted her) I certainly would. And Greg now became impotent. Y et not, perhaps, entirely impotent, in all senses. His attention was all on me now. "You," he muttered. "It must be you. By intervening, we mixed you up in this thing in a way you never were before. Before we took a hand, you and Sheila and lna stayed at home and never knew a thing was happening until it was over. Your curtains were drawn, nobody phoned you, the lights didn't fail, you heard no noise. You went to bed and slept, the three of you, and it wasn't until the next day that you discovered Shuteley had been burned to the ground. But we intervened, and -- " "And Jota still died," I said. "That was what you, Greg, wanted -- until a little while ago. When you lost your precious Gift you realized that somehow what was happening here tonight had snuffed the Gift out. It never developed. It was beaten here... or else, who knows, the elements that enabled it to be 'beaten between your time and mine were brought together." "Yes," Miranda murmured. "And you changed your mind completely," I said to Greg. "Miranda was here to save Jota, you to make sure he stayed dead -- because both of you believed that Chat would weaken the Gift in your time. A little while ago, when you found you'd lost it, you decided, and perhaps you were riit, that Jota had to be saved. Save him, and maybe you saved the Gift most of Greg's # pounds behind it. It finished her interest in the contest at the moment it began. Greg had not taken time to take off his suit. The fact on the whole favored me. The plastic afforded him some protection, and he was hard to grasp properly. But the heat his efforts generated was trapped in the suit. I also guessed that the air supply from the tank at the back was constant, but not enough to sustain continued activity. Coming to the same conclusion as me, Greg tried to win grace to remove his suit. And I kept at him so that he couldn't. Soon he was gasping like a grassed fish. He hit me once, and although it was only a glancing blow on my right breast, the pain and numbness that went through me showed me my only chance was either to hit Greg without being hit mysdt or to fight him as I had fought Iota. Using his weight, I brought off a knee-drop which hurt him badly. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a mistake, for he got up so mad that I knew I was engaged in not much less than a fight to the death, perhaps nothing less at all. He couldn't get his suit off. Every time he tried, I hit him or butted him or threw him. My tactics paid off, for when suddenly he caught me a stingmg blow on the side of the head and I reeled, defenseless for a moment, he chose to use the moment gained to get the suit off rather than to follow up his advantage. And that was a life for me. By the time he had stripped to his briefs I was able to go on. The trend of the struggle changed. While he'd been wearing his suit there had been no point in trying to throw him through the stasis wall. Now there was. I was deliberately trying to do what I had done quite accidentally in Iota's case -- burn Greg to death. The blaze outside our bubble of coolness was dying now, and yet the embers were so hot that if Greg rolled out into them, he'd die as surely as Iota had. Unlike Iota, however, Greg knew what would happen. And he was trying to do the same to me. He threw me once, by brute strength, and then launhed himself at me, intending to win me with his weight. I rolled partly clear, but ihc gralbbcd me and held me. He was on top and I could do nothing about bis weiglhit. He started to swing at my head a blow which would have ended my interest in the fight. Then he fdl on top of me, limp. I extricated myself. Dina was standing over us. She had picked up a stone and hit Greg with it. "Have I killed him?" she asked anxiously. "I don't care if you have," I gasped. "I didn't mean to kill him. But If I didn't knock him out, he'd have taken the stone from me. So I had to hit pretty hard." "You haven't killed him, Dina," I said, moving from Greg to Miranda, who was dazedly picking herself up. I offered her a hand, but she shook her head and sat down again, taking a breather. Greg had been pretty rough with her that night. I turned back to Dina, who was a singularly attractive stranger. She wore a crisp white blouse which in the middle of all this was spotless, a short black skirt with a wide belt, nylons and stiletto shoes. She must have been fully protected from the be ginnin g. I asked her what had happened. "I was watching television with Barbara and Gil," she said. "We heard shouting first. Then the television suddenly went off. And there was a glow at the window. The next thing, there was a glow at the 'l# other window. Gil shouted: 'Get Garry, and we'll go to the cellar.' " So that was how it had happened. Before the giants intervened, when Barbara and Gh were alone in the house with Garry, Gil's first reaction had been to seek refuge in the cellar. A very reasonable idea, really... the trouble was, he thought the fire that apparently surrounded them was an ordinary fire, and it wasn't. In an ordinary fire, the cellar of Gil's house would have been a perfect place. But in the fire that was to come, any cellar would become an oven, and anyone within would be baked slowly and very painfully to death. They had just reached the cellar when two. big youths in plastic suits appeared and practically dragged them back into the hl of the house. Barbara, frightened, did exactly as she was told; Dina, curious, was glad to get out of the dingy cellar and have a chance of seeing what was happening; Gil, dazed, had to be shouted at before anything registered; and Garry slept peacefully through the whole thing. There had been a curious wait while people screamed outside, while crowds ran past the house, while the red glow became bright enough to replace the lights which had gone out. The youths in plastic suits didn't speak, didn't answer Barbara's hysterical questions. Yet they had a comforting air of knowmg exactly what they were doing. Unhimiedly they unwrapped a bundle and made Gil, Barbara, Dina and Garry put on fire-suits -- the IF simpler version I had seen. And still they aJl waited. Then, quite suddenly, it was time to move. The giants gave the baby to Barbara, opened the door, and they moved out. It was indescribable -- at any rate, Dina entirely failed to describe it. They walked along a street of fire. No one saw them because nobody not wearing a suit could be there to see them. They felt no heat, breathed easily and their eyes did not smart. They had, after all, only a few hundred yards to go. Before they realized it, they were in an area of comparative silence, complete calm, and cool, fresh air. 'Fhe suits were at once taken from them. They would be used again and again that night. There were others in the stasis, many others -- frightened, bewildered people. More were brought in every moment, in plastic suits which were removed as they arrived. Beyond this point Dina knew little or nothing more, because then Miranda had appeared and taken her aside. "She gave me a pill," said Dina. "And I fell asleep." I looked past her at Miranda. That the giants had powers that were remarkable to us was undeniable: that these powers were, after all, limited was equally clear. I could understand that Miranda's powers had been able to make of Dina a whole person for the first time in her life. But that this could be achieved merely by giving her a pill I just could not believe. Unseen by Dina, Miranda made a gesture. Its meaning was plain: she was telling me not to pursue this. Maybe she was right. I knew all I had to know. Looking at Dina, I marveled. She didn't have any words she hadn't had before; she didn't have any experience she had before. But... Dina was normal. She couldn't have explained things as she had, understanding in retrospect, unless she'd become something much nearer an ordinary #year-old than she'd ever been. Dina had never before told me a long and fairly complicated story which I could understand. "She made me," referring to Sheila, was about the most I could expt. "I'm grateful," I said to Miranda, and I meant it. F eeling better, Miranda stood up. There was pain in her face, but only physical pain, and that was nothing. She glowed with happiness, relief, satisfaction. "Success by mistake," she said. "It often happens. History is like that. We made dozens of mistakes and got the right answer. You matter, Val, not Iota. Greg..." She shrugged, looking down at him. "I can handle him now." "I wouldn't be too sure," I said. She was completely confident. "He knows now. Hell be a disgruntled, dazed child when he comes round. He won't give me any trouble. But now we have two suits -- three suits. Val, take Dina and get out now. Greg and I will be all right. We'll be snapped back with the stasis." She smiled. "And have many, many chaldren. You and Sheila. And Dina. She may be involved, too. She may even be the one that matters... no, it must be you. Yet Dina, too, didn't have children before, presumably, and will now -- " For Miranda it was over. Mission accomplished. She hadn't failed after all, although, as she'd admitted, she had succeeded through luck and not much else. But for me it wasn't over. I had still failed. I'd still get the lion's share of the blame for the Great Fire of Shuteley. I'd still deserve a lot of it. The word mather would still go into the language. The kids Miranda wanted Sheila and me to have would grow up in an atmosphere of scorn. Your old man's a murderer," They'd be chased out of their playground at the break as Jota had once been chased. And not just once. And some teachers would turn a blind eye. "No," I said. "What do you mean, no?" "I'm not going to face a future like that. I'm not going to have kids to be picked on by the whole world." The happiness died out of Miranda's face, to be replaced by an anxious look. "Vay, you must! My world needs you and what you can do for it." "Your world," I said grimly, "is less to me than the destruction of Shuteley was to you. Far, far less." Dina was looldng from Miranda to me, and back again, comprehend ing very little of what was happening, and yet comprehending surprisingly much. "I mean a lot to you," I said. "You know it." "More than you know." "I've got a price." "A price?" "Trinity Hall," I said. he didn't understand. "You told ime yourself," I said. "If it weren't for the Trinity Hall bit of the disaster, I'd have a chance. My kids would have a chance. Without Trinity Hall, the death roll in this terrible fire would be astonishingly light. The fire-safety arrangements, if not fue prevention, would come out of it rather well. It's facts that count after anything like this. Without the Trinity Hall 'tragedy it would be a shocking fire, sure, nobody would get any credit, but I wouldn't be thrown to the lions. A few score people would have died in a fire that might have killed thousands. On the whole, I wouldn't have done too badly. I might even keep my job." "That's all you're thinking of -- yourself?" Miranda said. "For all you've said, the fire is no more than a setback to yourself?" I laughed without humor. "Myself, Sheila, Dina, our kids and far more. The two hundred who were burned to death in Trinity Hall. If they're not saved... I don't want to be saved either." "You're bluffing. You won't stay here to die." IF xxxn "I will," I said quietly. "I can't speak for Dina. She can make up her own mind." Dina said: "Val's all I have. I think I understand what this is about. There are two hundred people you could save -- " "I can't," Miranda insisted. "Val thinks you can... I haven't had much of a life. My memories are hazy -- hut I know Val's always done all he should for me, and maybe more. I'm grateful, too, for what you've done for me. I could have a wonderful life now. But it would be spoiled if I backed down here. This wasn't my idea. I'd never have thought of it and I wouldn't have done anything if I had. But now -- if I saved myself, I'd be trading two hundred lives for mine." "That's nonsense," Miranda said sharply. "Val, you know you don't die. The river of time -- " "I'm sick to the back teeth of the river of time. I wanted explanations. Now I've had enough. Unless you save the kids and old folk in Trinity Hall, I'm staying here, do you understand?" "In a suit," said Miranda. "There are suits here. You're bluffing. You'll put them on, stay here and -- " She stopped as I picked up the three suits and walked to the wall of the stasis. She didn't protest. She still thought I was bluffing. But when I threw the first one through, she screamed. The plastic was fireproof, but the breathing apparatus was not. And the suit was not sealed. M iranda pulled urgently at me. "Val, wait," she begged. "You don't understand. If you destroy the suits, you destroy all chance of getting what you want. Even if I did try to get something done about Trinity Hall, to do that I'd have to get back to the copse and speak to... to the people in charge. I couldn't leave here without a suit. So if you -- " I threw a second suit at the invisible wall. It passed limply through and flared only sligjifcly, because the material wouldn't bum. But then the heat got at the oxygen in the breathing apparatus, and there was a minor explosion. I moved back from the stasis wall with Miranda. "Now we're back where we started," I said. "There's one suit. Dina and I can't both get out. You want to save us. If what you say is true, you have to save us. And the only way you can do that is save the people in Trinity Hall." "They'll never agree," she said. "But you have agreed. You're going to try." "All right," she said quietly. "I'll try." There was sudden frantic urgency after the long hours of inaction. In the army, you hurry up and wait. Or, sometimes, wait and huny up. I didn't know what time dawn was, but it must ibe very soon now. While there had been nothing we could do, time had not mattered much. But suddenly it was of vital importance. Miranda tugged at the remaining fire-suit, fumbling in her haste. When she had it on, she didnt waste time in talk. Se almost Tan through the stasis w. "I dont suppose you can explain this to me, Val?" said Dina. 'l dont suppose I can." "But you meant ah that about Trinity Hall? Two hundred people are dying there, and she can save them?" Dina had been sound asleep for hours. Her misconception of the situation was understandable. She didn't know enough, understand enough, to realize that what I was demanding of Miranda was a change of history, an alteration in what had already happened. Dina took it for granted that if two hundred people could he saved, they must stih he ve. "Yes," I said. Greg had not moved. I took a cursory glance at him; he was breathing, and the injury on his head was merely a bruise, tiiough a large one. He would recover all right. If he took his time about domg it, so much the better. Miranda 'believed that now she could handle him easily. I wasn't so sure. "And ah we can do is wait?" Dina said. "All we can do is wait." By this lime the town must be surrounded by half the firemen in England, and no doubt some progress in fighting the dying fire was ibeing made. Water turned to steam would be drawing off a lot of heat from the scorched ground. Was there a diance, I wondered, that we'd he saved anyway? If the firemen were able to fight their way into the ravaged town, if they got anyway near the sta, we might live, independent of Miranda and the giiants. I found myself hoping desperately. I wanted to live. I wanted Dina to live, now that she had something to live for. M y grandstanding had been sincere enough. For selfish and unselfish reasons the issue for me had to come down to the fate of Trinity Hall and the people in it. I at least half believed that the giants couldn't afford to avert the fire, that they couldn't openly fight it, showing themselves fitting it, that perhaps they really had done all they could by secretly saving a few score o people whose bodies would not he missed. But somebody could easily have given the alarm at Trinity Hall. A stone through a window -- failure of lights -- smoke through the ventilation -- a tap on a door -- and all those people could he saved. I didn't think Miranda's river of time would ihe too much disturbed. I hadn't told Miranda, perhaps I didn't know then, all my own reasons for digging in my heels on this one thing. The really fundamental one was my own feeling of responsibility. No, I hn't started the fire. I hadn't been careless or inefficient or venal. I had simply done my job the way I was told and expected to do my job. Nothing had been falsified, nothing hidden. Even on Trinity Hall itself my conscience was IF clear. Fire officers want to make sure, whaitever ithe cost. That's th job. ImuraDce managers don't want fire, don't want to ihave to pay out, but they have to accept a calculated risk -- that's theirs. If there's no fire risk, there can be no fire insurance. Yet accident conceives and gives birth to blame. We know it hapof stable doors have been slammed after horses have bolted. What really happened in the library, anyway? In detail, Miranda didn't know. Were the alarms severed or switched off? Or were the wires which operated them burned or shorted by the fire itself? Nobody knew better than me that uhimatoly every additional safety device meant something more that could go wrong. Trinity Hall represented my hope of mental peace. If that didn't happen, if because of me that didn't happen, I believed I could live with the rest. I could be blamed and feel in my heart that blame was unjust. A car driver who kills a child may never be able to get it out of his mind -- but if he knows he was not at fault, he can live with it. If I'd been able to say to Miranda "save those people," and she'd said "why of course, Val," it would have been nothing. But I had to put up my own life. I valued it. I wanted it. I put up my stake, and I made sure I couldn't wdch. If the Trinity HaH youngsters and old folk were saved, I could be saved. # # 'That's funny," said Dina.  I paid no attention, still wrapped in my thoughts. "It's getting lighf," she said She was right and she was wrong. It was getting light, but it wasn't funny. Not when the stasis dis pear. It was Hell. Fierce heat swept across the village green. The fire outside, by comparison with what it had been, was a mere glow of dying embers. And yet... My bare flesh withstood the heat for a moment, until it dried and cracked. I couikl feel, or thought I could fed, my blood beginning to boil. My hair crawled, and I felt it singeing. In those long seconds of burning to death we looked around, while we could still see, in an instinctive search for an avenue of escape. Men have found themselves in front of oven doors opened by mistake... for them, even if they die, the chance of flight, of saving themselves, at least exists. The fire has a course and a direction. If the heat is lethal at seven feet it may not be at fourteen, fifty, two hundred. Escape is a possibility. But there was nowhere for us to go. The heat was all around us. The coolest place was and would continue to be where we were, practically in the center of what had recently been a haven in the conflagration. Dina's white blouse slowly, steadily, went brown. Greg, without regaining consciousness, writhed and twisted like a plastic doll dirown into an open fire. We screamed. We couldn't breatihe. The fire was using up all #iie oxygen. Long before we died, we couldn't see. We could still feel. I'd have been lucky, after all, to die on my own way through the ifiames with Greg. Iota had been lucky. Then, in the blinding heat of the fire at its height, death came instantly. Now it was slow, though no less sure. Slowly, but inexorably, I died. A nd came to life again. Of course. It was only to be expected. With Miranda and the giants around, death wasn't death and you could never be sure of Hfe. I still knew all that had happened. I knew and would always know what it was like to burn to death in the mere backwash of a great fire. Now I was unbumed, as I had once before been unkilled. The stasis was still in position. Dina's blouse was still white. And Greg was quietly snoring. Standing over me was Miranda, once more taking off her firesuit. She had dropped another at her feet. "Loops," I said drunkenly, "are enough to make a man loop the loop." "I was ten minutes too late," Miranda said. "But this time I could do something about it." She had a small machine in her hand. IF "Thank you vy much," I said. "Now we can go through the whole thing again. Because I'm still as determined -- ' "It's done," said Miranda. It took me several seconds to realize what she meant. "Trinity Hall?" I said at last. She nodded. "They agreed. Your life is necessary, Val. Perhaps Dina's too, we don't Imow. You had to be saved, far more than Jota had to be saved. In his case we guessed. In yours we know." "The people in the hall?" I said. She shrugged. "We cut the electric current. There was panic. One girl and one old man have broken aims. But they all got out. Now -- you have fifteen minutes." She could be lying, of course. She could be bluffing to get Dina and me away safely, quite powerless, once the giants removed themselves, to take the kind of action which could change the world. Once we saved ourselves, the chance of bargaining was gone. I didn't think Miranda herself would lie. But she might easily have been told to return and do what she was doing, say what she was saying. I started putting on one of the suits. Dina, with a slight shrug, did the same. Miranda sighed in relief. "We're going past Trinity Hall," I said. "If the bodies are still there, I'm coming right back." This didn't worry Miranda. "As you like." "You've got what you want?" I said. "You're satisfied?" "Yes." "You're sure?" I looked down at Gsreg, who lhad not moved. "Yes. In my worid there's already a big change. The Gift has disappeared. We don't iknow about the neutrals; maybe they're not needed any more. Now hurry up and -- " The suits were on and sealed. "We'll hurry," I said. "Because I need time to get back here and take off my suit if necessary." "Good, Val," said Miranda. Sbe tomed away. She didn't speak to Dina. I think at the last she was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been before, that something would happen to wrest success from her grasp. She had never really expected success, not with Grpg a member of the party. Now she was a big winner, dazed, with the ticket in her hand, waiting for the result of an objectum. I iMked down at Greg thoughtfully. Though he had never done a diing to endear himseilf to me, I found myself rather sorry for him. I said so. "He'll have psychiatric treatment," Miranda said. "iBefore, he'd have refused it. Now he can't." 'Tfou think he'll adjust?" "Why not? He's only fourteen." I blinked. I had never directly asked how old the giants were. I knew Miranda was thirty, but she was their teacher. "And the others?" I said. "You said Greg was in a younger class, didn't you?" "No. I said he was in a lower class. He's not very bright, you know. The others are... they're twelve." She had not looked at me since she said good-by. And that was how I left her -- terrified to speak to me again, to meet my eyes, in case I should say or do something that would bring everything tumbling about her ears. She even forgot to tell me to bury the suits afterwards. Dina and I made our way back through the dying fire. Trinity Hall was not easy to find: there was no pile of charred skeletons there any more. But we found it. I was satisfied. We went past the castle and the dump. It was still pretty dark. Clear of the fire we took off our suits and bundled them in a piece of dirty sacking I found in the dump, beyond the fire area. Knowing something of the progress of the fire, the giants bad chosen a quite perfect base for their doorway in time, the copse, and an equally perfect route to it. Even now, when there must be thousands of people round the ashpit that was Shuteley, we were able to walk out of the town and along the river to the copse without being seen. The only road or tracks were from the town, and they petered out at the dump and at Castle Hill. We did see a small party of men in blue suits examining the blockage of the river, but we were easily able to keep out of their sight. So they were all little ants of twelve, I thought. Well, it wasn't IF really astonishing. Already in # girls were developing at eleven instead of fourteen or fifteen, and at twelve they could be five feet six, # pounds and #-#-#. Boys were slower, but that was coming too. Dina didn't tadk, and I was glad. I'd been bludgeoned physically and mentally for forty hours or so. I'd killed a couple of people and been killed once m)elf. I'd been shaken figuratively until my teeth rattled. I had felt too much or too little in the last forty hours. I hadn't been a hero, I hadnt been a villain. I hadn't been very clever and I hadn't been very stupid. But I was, I hoped and believed, ending up rather better than I had started. I was far more the master of my fate. We took the route along the bank that the giants must have taken. But there was no longer a bridge, and the boat was on the other side. "Well have to swim," I said. Dina started taking off her clothes. "No," I said. "We don't want to leave anything here." "il didn't mean to leave my clothes. I'll carry them." "Just swim across as you are, Dina," I said wearSy. #fee paid no attention. She took off her blouse, skirt, nylons and shoes and folded them into a neat bundle which she held dear of the water as die slipped into the river. In my exhausted state I came very close to an angry outburst, but managed to oheck it. This was the new Dina. She used to do exactly as I told her. Now I'd have to get used to her thinking for herself. I had a bundle, too, the firesuits. I should have buried them that night. I should have done a lot of other things too. I didn't do any of them. I simply took off nay pants, dried myself and went to bd, not even bothering to find out what, if anything, Dina was doing, not thinking about Sheila beyond taking note that she hadn't been back at the house. A n arm shook me firmly, insistently. I opened my eyes reluctantly. It was #:# on the bedside clock. Sfttmg on my bed was a large, middle-aged man I didn't know. Yet his face wasn't entirely unfamiliar. 'Mr. Mathers," he said, "I'm Chief Constable Wilson. Sorry to disturb you, but it's important." "Sheila?" I exclaimed, sitting up quickly. "Your wife is quite all right, Mr. Mathers. Doing a grand job, in fact. And I've seen your sister. She didn't want to let me in, but I persuaded her." I swung my legs out of bed. My nakedness on some other summer might have shtly suiprised Wilson, As it was, it was nothing out of the ordinary. I put on a dressing gown. "What do you want?" I asked bluntly. "Forgive the intrusion," he said. "There isn't time to do tilings die usual way." "Never mind that," I said. "What do you want?" "I'm just getting the picture, Mr. Mathers. You know about the fire, of course?" "Yes." He pantomined surprise, and I thought: This man knows something. "You did?" he said. "You might have slept right through it, out here. I've seen one or two fire service people, the police, of course, some of the people who escaped..." "And now you're seeing me." "Yes. You haven't been in touch with your company yet, have you?" "No." He didn't say anything about the fire being tragic, fantastic, incredible. These things were said in the first few minutes, and then the situation was taken for granted. "Well, first... I gather you were out of town at a roadhouse when the fire began. You returned and found some firemen at the New Bridge. You gave them some advice -- good advice, I believe -- and then your wife did some very useful work with homeless people. After that you disappeared for the rest of the night. What happened, Mr. Mathers?" Without warning I was faced with a choice I hadn't foreseen. All through I had believed Miranda, on the whole. And now I faced the beginning of a situation which might mean ruin for Sheila and me and our children. Miranda said it did. I was going to be blamed for everything. My kids were going to grow up wanting to pretend I wasn't their father. I'd saved two hundred people at the Trinity Hall, but nobody knew I had saved them. Chief Constable Wilson was not here to cast the first stone. He was simply, as he said, getting first impression of what had happened. He had heard what happened at the New Bridge, and perhaps that was all he had heard. He might easily have called on me merely because I had shown some presence of mind, had given Sheila a useful job to do, and had then gone off on my own, possibly with a purpose... But this was the start. I did not, however, have to let things simply take their course. I could take events by the scruff of the neck. If I did, it might mean ruin for Miranda's world. Her river of time might be blasted into an entirely different course. It might not be the best thing for me either. Nevertheless. I opened a cupboard and took out the fire-suits. "Ever seen anything like these before?" I asked, T he die was cast. After I showed Chief Constable Wilson the firesuits, I couldn't have retreated if I'd wanted to. Certainly they were not impressive to look at, though the baffling way they adjusted to any human body and the still more baffling way in which they sealed and unsealed themselves without buttons or zips or adhesive woidd make anyone sit up and take notice. IF But sooner or later somebody would test them in a fire, and then a bigger fire -- and would finally discover that in such suits people could walk through a furnace. I didn't want to draw back. Neither did I make any effort to advance. In the next few hectic hours I talked to a lot of people, of increasing importance -- and I started with the chief constable of the county. I didn't see Sheila or Dina. Too many people wanted to ask me questions. I told them about Maggie Hobson and was the first to tell them she was dead. (It took days, of course, before even a prehminary casualty list could be drawn up.) I wasn't really shifting blame from they were going to decide for themselves. I told them a few more things about the fire, things I could not possibly have known in any way they considered "rational." I did not admit, nor did I deny, that I had been in Shutdey while the blaze was at its height They could handly make me #dl them anything they refused to bdieve. About Miranda and the giants I preserved a reticence which ensured that the most improbable facts were reluctantly accepted instead of rejected out of hand. I told them nothing; I admitted a few things undw pressure. But I did claim credit for Trinity Hall. I told them how the alarm was given, and hinted...  And before I saw Sheila, in the evening of the day after the Great Fire of Shutelcy, I knew that I'd made the right choice -- for us. You can't make a scapegoat of a man who knows more of the facts than anyone else. A man who knows things and you can't figure out how he could possibly know them. A man who knows more than he will tell, unless you've worked out three-quarters of the answer first. Yes, for us Fd made the right choice. And perhaps for Shuteley, for my world. The knowledge, the been something supernatural about the fhe made the whole thing easier to bear, to accept. For those who had lost people they loved, too, thane was hope. They might still be alive, somewhere. But had I done die right thing for Snow White and the giants? Had they all ceased to exist -- or had they found the Gift back among them, worse than ever before? Had on the woiki of #? Well, my attitude proved that I'd been doing Miranda and the giants an injustice afl along in finding them inhuman about our worid. Because about their world, I couldn't care less. 'k 'k if 'k Dear Editor: I tlunk that "Cordwainer Smith" is a pseudonym for a woman writer! About a year ago I remember reading in Galaxy (now, correct me if I am wrong) that Ck)rdwainer Smith -- an anthropologist, I think -- was on his way to Easter Island with some expedition. Later I read an article in Life about the same expedition, and I remember thinking at the time that I might get to see what Cordwainer Smith looked like. But no luck. The only anthropologist mentioned was a woman, whose name I can't remember. (She was known to the natives as "Mrs. Tell Me Three Dreams That Have Had Some Meaning to You.") Then in the letter column of the May If Irvin Koch asked if Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym and you answered that it was. Suddenly all the pieces fell together like a jigsaw puzzle. Cordwainer Smith and the woman anthropologist are one and the same person! Would you please let me know if I am right or wrong? The suspense (By the way, I got so heated up with my Sherlock-Holmesing that I forgot to tell you that I really like your magazine! If you keep up this habit of overlapping all those great serials and publishing a stack of other great stories besides, you have got the next Hugo sewn up in your hip pocket for sure! -- James A. Juracic, P.O. Box #, Fruitvale, B.C., Canada. # No, your reasoning is exemplary, but your conclusion didn't quite make it. Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym for Professor Paul Linebarger, of Johns Hopkins University. For years his identity was one of the most closely guarded secrets in science fiction -- partly because of the fact that his position as a consultant to the U. S. State Department made discretion essential, partly because he wrote science fiction for relaxation and felt that he would not be able to do it any more if his identity were known. Last month (as this is written), after a long illness. Paul Linebarger died in Washington, D.C. For this reason we can now disclose his identity -- but that is small compensation for the loss of a valued writer. -- Editor,    Dear Editor: In regard to the relativistic dilemma you posed in the Juiie, #, issue, your statements are basically correct in that it would require an infinite amount of energy to proxel an object with a iositive rest mass up to the speed of light because as it approaches the speed of light it acquires infinite mass. The fallacy in the dilemma is that light at rest (photons) has no mass. Thus, theoretically, it requires no energy to raise the massless photons up to sub-light speeds and only finite energy to propel them to the speed of light; this eneigy being converted into the apparent mass of the light. In regard to the remarks made in the June Hue and Cry concerning racial differences, I would like to add my two bits. The white man has certain obvious psysical characteristics which are superior to the Negro, whereas the Negro has certain others superior to the white man. This is also true in the pathological, and probably also true in the mental aspects of not only these two races but all the races of man. As soon as we do obtain 'roughly equated" environments for the different races and can determine each race's mental superiorities then sometime in the future it may be possible to breed a better man Incorporating all the best features of the different races. To say this, or anything else, is impossible at ithe rate of our present technological and sociological advancement is to stand on very unsteady ground. I have read the World of NulUA by Van Vogt and am very much interested in reading its aerial. If it has been published in paper or hard back, where and how much, or if not, how can I igo about obtaining a oopy. Oh, as an afterthought, I might add that I consider If the best science fiction magazine on the market today. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is Heinlein's grreatest novel to date, and that is really saying something, and Earthblood is great. I can hardly wait for the upcoming novels in If. -- Alfred Baker, # Lawson Lane, Amarillo, Texas #.    Dear Editor: Although he and I concur on two points, the respective merits of Podkayne of Mars and FarnhanCs Freehold, I must take exception to Sten D'lskcg's treatment of what I consider Heinleiias best novel to date. Mr. Dahlskog says that even if it were kept in that most horrible of literary forms the first-person narrative, (which I happ to like), the novel would (have been far better if it were "writteaL" by Wyoh, Prof or Stu, instead of by Mannie. What he doesn't realize is that the central character is not one of the "B"cell comrades, or Stu. As a matter of fact, the citral character isn't even human; on the contrary, nitive computer to make predictions, keep security, and formulate strategy, the revolution eouM never have started, much less succeeded. Also, if you remember the conclusion of the story, only Mannie could have written it. I say this because, as Mr. Dohlskog himself notes, ihe other three, met Mike, just Adam Selene"!), were more concerned with people, while Mike was a computer. In fact. Man was the only believable narrator Heinleln could iossibly have chosen; who else would have even discovered Mike, much lose made friends with ihim? -- Stephan Noe, # Havenhurst Blvd., Toledo, Ohio #.   Dear Editor: First let me congratulate Worlds of If on winning the "Hugo" at the Tricon in Cleveland. It was most deserved ! At the Tricon a number of your readers, myself included, were discussing the formation of a sciencefiction radio "ham" net. This consists of readers who are also radio amateurs, who would like to discuss sf across the country via the airwaves. I thought perhaps some of your readers might like to join us in forming the net. If so, they could send their names and call letters to me and ##I take it from there. Thanks. -- Christine Haycock, M.D., Newark, New Jersey #.   Dear Editor: ' Re: The editorial for the August # issue of If: Yes, it os a shame Mariner IV came along! It not only spoiled theories dear to some hearts, it also upheld one theory -- one that had been ridiculed, vilified and ostracized from most public and scientific commundoation channels. I refer, of course, to the theories of Dr. Immanuel Vedikovsky, author of Worlds in Collision, etc,, in which he detailed -- and Mariner IV confirms -- the description of a "dead planet Mars and the cause of its destruction... the collision between it and the protoplanet (comet) Venus... The present writer thinks that the many recent confirmations of Dr. Velikovskys theories augurs well the need for a reassessment of his works and their implications for the future. -- Robert Stephanos, # Quentin Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. He #l  Dear Editor: We would just like to express our great enjo # mient of Fred Saberhagens beserker tales. We can hardly wait until the next installment of his saga. When will some enterprising publisher persuade him to gather all the stories under one cover? Its quite a pleasure to watch a writer improve and mature as Saberhagen has. Stories with strong moral themes are all too rare. Your efforts to discover and encourage new taints are to be commended. We are graduate students at the been reading science fiction since high school. -- John and Sandra Miesel, # S. Fifth St., Champaign,   # Dear Editor: Neutron Stcur by Larry Niven was the first science-fiction story Ive ever really enjoyed. I also would like to say that Michael Walker did an exceptional job in Your Soldier Unto Death. I have read parts of several past issues which my friend happened to enjoy. All around I will say that If is one of the best science fiction magazines I have ever read and I shall continue to buy your If publications monthly. -- Thomas Green, # Knoxville Avenue, Lakewood, California #. IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." Yr Name Here No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Famed epic of the world of the fixture Foundation Trilogy "Dy # it was clear that the massively corrupt Galactic Empire was near total collapse. Its myriad worlds had already begun to war among themselves, plunging the universe into barbaric chaos. Civilization seemed doomed. But master scientists laboring to ensure that civilization would be preserved during the dark ages to come, established twin "Foundations" at opposite ends of the Galaxy, to form the nueleui of a new civilization, and in time to unite across the Galaxy to form a new... a stronger... a more enduring Second Empire. In Foundation and Foundation and Empire, we follow the course of the First Foundation as it rekindles the light of civilization in an everincreasing portion of the Galaxy -- and as it in confronted by its greatest crisis: a dangerous aoul-eonuming deaire is conquest of the Galaxy! Within a decade, he tyrannized the entire Galaxy -- except for the Second Foundation. And this became his mania -- to find and conquer the Second Foundation. Everything in the Galaxy must be his!... combines three great science fiction classics for the first the most thought-provoking, compelling epics ever to come fromthe pen of the distinguished research biochemist and leading science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov. How to Oot This Unysuol Volvo tor only lOy Because you enjoy Science thrillers, the Science Fiction Book Club would like to acquaint you with the most imaginative, informative, entertaining new science fiction books as they are written. That is why we have arranged to send you Subscription to the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these book.s sell for #, .? # and up in their original editions. Club members get them tions, Extra value books cost more. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly .election will be. 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From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street  New York, N.Y. #  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose  my check or money order for:  # # issues for .# O # issues for #   Name  Address  City  State Zip Code  U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or  renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do i Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #S#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Vol. #, No. # Frederik Poht, Editor David Peiion, Production Manager Robert M, Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Larry Niven by Keith Laumer by Richard Wilson by C. C. MacApp by Algis Budrys by Bruce McAllister by Robert Roy by Mather H. Walker by Frederik Pohi by Lin Carter IF published menthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. Vol. #. No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York. # #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # In tbe United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class posta paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. CopTiight by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #a All rights, including translations reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial O nce upon a time we were noted for making pronounoemeints about what writers ireally ishould be doing with their (time. "There are two kinds of writers," we used to say. "The kind who write, and the kind who talk. The kind who talk are a lot wittier and brighter and better company; but the kind who write are the ones to pay attention to -- after all, that's the name of the game." And then we smugly pointed out that we were The Kind Who Wrote. Candor compels us to announce that this is no longer entirely true. Over the past few years we've been dolntg a whale of la lot of talking -- on radio and on television, to fan groups and scientific groups and management associations and literary clubs and churches and temples and... well, you name it, we've done it, our motto has become. Have Mouth, Will Travel. This is not the kind of news bulletin that we ordinarily take up your time with in these pages, but it has its interesting aspects. You know -- what in the world does a science-fiction writer have to say to, for instance, the American Management Association or the Porcelain Enamel Institute? G lad you asked the question. Here's the answer: What we tell the various business, professional and other groups is basically a sort of science-fiction story. We start with what is now happening in science and society; we extrapolate with a free hand; and we show what the world may be like for them, and for all of us, over the next few decades or centuries.  Essentially what we tell them is a science-fiction story without plot or characters. And most of the time there is a discussion period, or at least a few questions passed up by the ProigTam Committee from the o our total representation in the floor, and so we get some sort of populace is maybe a half of one idea of what the audiences gain from per cent. all this; and, curiously enough, the But judging from our contacts things that interest them are very with the # majority, we should muchthe things that interest us be reaching at least half of them -- dieddn-the-wool fans. Life on other or rather, half of that portion of worlds? They're as curious about it them able to read and write fluently as we are. Robots and androids? in the English language, anyway. They're quite as intrigued as we Why are so many people turned off about the idea of creating artificial to science fiction? -- when really, intelligences to help us out -- or it's the kind of thing they're inkeep us company. If the ten or twenterested in, did they but know it? ty thousand people we've talked to in the flesh in recent times are a 'Tat isn't a rhetorical question, fair sample, we don't have any monJL If anyone has the answer, we'd opoly in curiosity about the future. be glad to know it. Because it's all And yet clearly there's some kind very well to be a proud but tiny of a difference between Them and elite; but it's even more fun to Us. What can it be? be the advance guard of an enorFor one thing, there are a lot mous new movement; and apart more of Them than there are of from what good it would do us to for the moment, there's a gross sf, think of what good it would do population of some #, of them. To the extent that science whom maybe a hundred thousand fiction is more than fun, it is an will read any given magazine more authentic help at the vit task of or less frequently, and perhaps five being ready for tomorrow when it times as many will read whatever comes... and tomorrow is coming magazine or book is handy at the very fast for all of us. We all need rate of one a month or thereabouts, every bit of advance warning we and perhaps ten times as many will can get; and all the TV documenpick up Galaxy or the latest Heintaries and lAfe-Time-Newsweek lein novel once or twice a year, takeouts don't comiare with the There are really only about a immediacy we get when we project readers in the United States (not science-fiction story, counting that larger number who Must be some way to turn Them IF  Novelette dead, but some of their weaponry survived -- and could destroy Man! L ogically Jason Papandreou should have taken the Court Jester straight home to Jinx. But -- He'd seen a queer star once. He'd been single then, a gunner volunteer on one of Earth's warships during the last stages of the last kzinti war. The war had been highly imequal in Earth's favor. Kzinti fight gallantly and ferociously and with no concept of mercy, and they always take on several times as much as they can handle. Earth's ships had pushed the kzinti back out of human space, then pushed a little further, annexing two kzinti worlds for punitive damages. The fleets had turned for home. But Jason's captain had altered course to give his crew what might be their last chance to see Beta Lyrae. Now, decades later, Jason, his wife and their single alien passenger were rattling around in a ship built for ten times their number. Anne-Marie's curiosity was driving her up the walls with the frustration of not being able to open the stasis box in the forward locker. Nessus the mad puppeteer had taken to spending all his time in his room, hovering motionless and morose between the sleeping pjates. Jinx was still several weeks away. Clearly a diversion was in order. Beta Lyrae. A six degree shift in course would do it. A nne-Marie glared at the locker containing the stasis box. "Isn't there any way to open it? Jason didn't answer. His whole attention was on the mass indicator, the transparent ball in which a green radial line was growing toward the surface. Growing and splitting. "Jay?" "We can't open it, Anne. We don't have the equipment to break a stasis field. It's illegal anyway." Almost time. The radial double line must not grow too long. When a working hyperdrive gets too deep into a gravity well, it disappears. "Think they'll tell us what's inside?" "Sure, unless it's a new weapon." "With oiu luck it will be. Jay, nobody's ever found a stasis box that shape before. It's bound to be something new. The Institute is likely to sit on it for years and years. -- Whup! Jay, what are you doing?" "Dropping out of hyperspace." "You might warn a lady." She wrapped both arms around her midsection, apparently making sure everything was still there. "Lady, why don't you have a look out that side window?" "What for?" Jason merely looked smug. His wife, knowing she would get no other answer, got up and undogged the cover. It was not unusual for a pilot to drop-out in the depths of interstellar space. Weeks of looking at the blind-spot appearance of hyperspace could wear on the best of nerves. She stood at the window, a tall, slender brunette in a glowing green falling jumper. A Wunderlander she had been, of the willowy low-gravity type rather than the fat, balloonlike low-gravity type, until Jason Papandreou had dropped out of the sky to add her to his collection of girls in every port. It hadn't worked out that way. In the first year of marriage she had learned space and the Court Jester inside out, until she was doubly indispensable. Jay, Anne, Jester, all one independent organism. And she thought she'd seen everything. But she hadn't seen this! Grinning, Jason waited for her reaction. "Jay, it's gorgeous! What is it?" Jason moved up to circle iher waist with one arm. She'd put on weit in the last year, muscle weighty from moving in heavier gravities. He looked out around her shoulder... and thought of smoke. There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil. At the center of the coil was the source of the fire. A double star. One member was violet-white, a flame to brand holes in a human retina, its force held in check by the polarized window. The companion was small and yellow. They seemed to burn inches apart, so close that their masses had pulled them both into flattened eggs, so close that a red belt of lesser flame looped around them to link their bulging equators together. The belt was hydrogen, still mating in fusion fire, pulled loose from the stellar surfaces by two gravitational wells in conflict. The gravity war did more than that. It sent a loose end of the red belt flailing away, away and out in a burning maypole spiral that expanded from flame-red to smokered, bracketing the sky and painting a spiral path of stars deep red across half the universe. "They call it Beta Lyrae," said Jason. "I was here once before, back when I was free and happy. Mph. Hasn't changed much." "Well, nor "Now don't you take all this for granted. How long do you think those twins can keep throwing hydroand then, pft! No more Beta Lyrac." "Pity. We'd better hurry and wake Nessus before it disappears." T he being they called Nessus would not have opened his door for them. Puppeteers were gregarious even among alien species. They'd had to be. For at least tens of thousands of years the puppeteers had ruled a trade empire which included all the races within the sixty-light-year sphere men called Known Space and additional unknown regions whose extent could not be guessed. As innate cowards the puppeteers had to get along with everyone. And Nessus too was usually gregarious. But Nessus was mad. Nessus was cursed with courage. In a puppeteer courage is a symptom of insanity. As usual there were other symptoms, other peripheral indications of the central disorder. Nessus was now in the depressive stage of a manic-depressive cycle. Luckily the depression had not hit him until his business with the Outsiders was over. In the manic stage he had been fun. He had spent every night in a different stateroom. He had charcoal-drawn cartoons which now hung in the astrogation room, cartoons which Jason could hardly believe were drawn by a puppeteer. Humor is generally linked to an interrupted defense mechanism. Puppeteers weren't supposed to have a sense of humor. But now Nessus spent all his time in one room. He wanted to see nobody. There was one thing he might open his door for. IF Jason moved to the control board and pushed the panic button. The alarm was a repeated recording of a woman's scream. It should have brought the puppeteer galloping in as if the angel of death were at his heel. But he trotted through the door seconds later than he should have. His flat, brainless heads surveyed the control room for signs of damage. The first man to see a puppeteer had done so during a Campish revival of Time for Beany reruns. He had come running back to the scout ship, breathless and terrified, screaming, 'Take off! The planet's full of monsters!" "Whatta they look like?" "Like a three-legged centaur with two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its hands, and no head." "Take a pill, Pierson. You're drunk." Pierson's Puppeteer is a sentient herbivore whose brain is housed in a bony bulge between the two long, flexible necks. The heads at the ends of those necks are mostly jaws, furnished with flexible lips and tongues. If a man had jawmuscle strength in his grip and the senses of taste and smell in his fingertips, his hands would be as good at tool-building as a puppeteer's mouth. A flowing brown mane covers the cranial bulge and runs in a strip along the spine to the hind hip. Nessus was an atypical puppeteer. His mane was straggly and unkept. It should have been twisted, brushed and tied in a manner to show his status in puppeteer society. But it showed no status at all. Perhaps thiift was appropriate. There was no puppeteer society. The puppeteers had apparently left the galaxy en masse some twelve years ago, leaving behind only their insane and their genetically deficient. "What is wrong?" asked Nessus. "There's nothing wrong," said Jason. Anne-Marie said, "Have a look out the window. This window." T heir employer obediently moved to the window. He happened to stop just next to one of the cartoons he'd drawn while in the manic phase, and Jason, looking from the puppeteer to the cartoon, found it more difficult than ever to associate the two. The cartoon showed two hiunan gods. Only the lighting and the proportions showed that they were gods. Otherwise they were as individually human as a very good human artist could have drawn them. One, a child just about to become a teenager, was holding the galaxy in his hands. He wore a very strange grin as he looked down at the glowing multicolored spiral. The other figure, a disgruntled patriarch with flowing white hair and beard, was saying, "All right, now that you've had your little joke..." Nessus claim it was an attempt to imitate human humor. Maybe. Would an insane puppeteer develop a sense of humor? Nessus (his real name sounded like a car crash set to music) was insane. There were circumstances under which he would actually risk his life. But the sudden puppeteer exodus bad left a m)oiad of broken promises made to a dozen sentient races. The puppeteers had left Nessus and his fellow exiles with money to straighten things out. So Nessus had rented the Court Jestery rented all twelve staterooms, and gone out to the furthest edge of known space to deal with a ship of the Outsiders. "I recognize this star," he said now. "Amazing. I really should have suggested this stop myself. Had I not been so depressed I certainly would have. Thank you, Jason." "My pleasure, sir." Jason Papandreou really sounded like he'd invented the gaudy display just to cheer up a down-in-the-mouths puppeteer. Nessus cocked a sardonic head at him, and he hastily added, "We'll be on our way again whenever you're ready." "I'll scan with deep-radar," AnneMarie said helpfully. Jason laughed. "Can you imagine how many ships must have scanned this system already?" "Just for luck." A moment later there was a Beep. Anne-Marie yelped. Jason said, "I don't believe it." "Two in one trip!" his wife cared. "Jay, that's some sort of ecord!" It was. Using deep-radar had been more of a habit than anything else. A deepHTadar on high setting was an easy way to find Slaver stasis boxes, since ## stasis fields and neutron stars woidd reflect a hyperwave pulse. But Beta Lyrae must have been searched many times before. Searching was traditional. Nessus turned from the window. "I suggest that we locate the box, then leave it. You may send a friend for it." Jason stared. "Leave it? Are you kidding?" "It is an anomaly. Such a box should have been found long since. It has no reason to be here in the first place. Beta Lyrae probably did ago. Why then would the Slavers have come here?" "War. They might have been running from a tnuctip fleet." Anne-Marie was sweeping the deep-radar in a narrow beam, following the smoky spiral, searching for the tiny node of stasis her first pulse had found. "You hired my ship," Jason said abruptly, "If you order me to go on, I'll do it." "I will not. Your species has come a long way in a short time. If you do not have prudence, you have some workable susbstitute." "There it is," said Anne-Marie. "Look, Jay. A little icy blob of a Jason looked. "Shouldn't be any problem. All right. I'll take us down." Nessus said nothing. He seemed alert enough, but without nervousness and general excitability that woidd have meant the onset of his manic stage. At least Beta Lyrae had cured his depression. n Te Traitofs Claw was under the 'L ice. Ice showed dark and deep IF outside her hexagonal ports. In lieu of sight her crew used a mechanical sense like a cross between radar and X-ray vision. The universe showed on her screens as a series of transparent images superimposed: a shadow show. Four kzinti watched a blobshaped image sink slowly through other images, come to a stop at a point no different from any other. "Ohuft-Captain, they're down," said Flyer. "Of course they're down." ChuftCaptain spoke without heat. "Telepath, how many are there?" 'Two human." There was a quiet, self-hating resignation in the Telepath's speech. His tone became disgust as he added, "And a puppeteer." "Odd. That's a passenger ship. A puppeteer couldn't need all that room." "I sense only their presence, OhuftCaptain." Telepath was pointedly reminding him that he had not yet taken the drug. He would do so only if ordered. Without an injection of treated extract of sthondat lymph his powers were low. Little more than the knack for making an accurate guess. "One human has left the ship," said Flyer. "No, two humans." "Slaverstudent, initiate hostilities. Assume the puppeteer will stay safely inside." T he planet was no bigger than Earth's moon. Her faint hydrogen atmosphere must have been regularly renewed as the spiral streamer whipped across her orbit. She was in the plane of the hydrogen spiral, which now showed as a glowing red smoke trail cutting the night sky into two unequal parts. Anne-Marie finished tucking her hair into her helmet, clamped the helmet to her neck ring, and stepped out to look around. "I dub thee Cue Ball," she said. "Cute," said Jason. 'Too bad if she's named already." They moved through the ship's pressure curtain, Jason toting a bulky portable deep-radar. The escalladder carried them down into the ice. They moved away, following the dark image in the deep-radar screen. Jason was a head shorter than his wife and twice as wide; his typical Earther's build looked almost Jinxian next to hers. He moved easily in the low gravity. Anne-Marie, bouncing like a rubber clown, kept pace with him only by dint of longer legs and greater effort. Jason was standing right over the image of the stasis box, getting ready to mark the ice so they could dig for it, when the image vanished. The crack! jerked his head around. He saw a cloud of steam explode into the near-vacuum, a cloud lit from below by a rosy light. AnneMarie was already sprinting for the ship in low flying leaps. He turned to follow. A form like a big, roly-poly man shot through the light into what must by then have been a cloud of tiny ice crystals. It was a kzin in a vac suit, and the thing in its ihand was a police stunner. It landed running. Under the conditions its aim was inhumanly accurate. Jason collapsed like a deflating name. Had he not been alone with balloon. Anne-Marie was pin-wheelthe prisoners he would have been ing across the ice, slowly as dreams showing fear. His crew watched the im the low gravity. The kzin ignored proceedings from the control room, them both. It was using a jet backThe puppeteer lifted a head at the pac to speed it along. end of a drunkenly weaving neck. The ship's heavy, flush-fitting The head steadied, stared hard. In door started to dose over the preskzin he said, "What is the purpose sure curtain. Too slowly. Jason clung of this action?" to consciousness long enough to see Chuft-Captain ignored him. One die kzin's hackpac carry it up the did not speak as an equal to a escalladder and through the prespuppeteer. Puppeteers did not fight, sure curtain. His mind hummed and ever. Hence they were herbivorous faded. animals. Prey. The male human was next to reP resent in the crew's relaxroom cover from the stunners. He stared were two humans, one puppein consternation at Chuft-Captain, teer, and a kzin. The kzin was Chuftthen looked around him. "So none Captain. It had to be that way, of us made it," he said, since the prisoners had not had the "No," said the puppeteer. "You chance to refuse to tdk. Chuft-Capmay remember I advised -- " tain was a noble, entitled to a partial "How could I forget? Sorry about IF n that, Nessus. What's happening?" "Very little at the moment." The male looked backed at OiuftCaptain. "Who are you?" "You may call me Captain. Depending on future events, you are either my kidnap victims or my prisoners of war. Who are you?" "Jason Papandreou, of Earth origin." The human tried to gesture, perhaps to a point at himself, and found the electronic police web binding him in an invisible grip. He finished the introductions without gestures. "Very well," said Chuft-Captain. "Jason, are you in possession of a stasis box, a relic of the Slaver empire?" J  "No." Chuft-Captain gestured to the screen behind the prisoners. Telepath nodded and switched off. The prisoner had lied; it was now permissible to bring in help to question him. It had been a strange, waiting kind of war. Legally it was no war at all. The Traitofs Claw showed in the Kzin records as a stolen ship. If she had been captured at any time, all the kzin worlds would have screamed loudly for Chuft-Captain's head as a pirate. Even the ship's name had been chosen for that eventuality. There had never been a casualty; never, until now, a victory. A strange war, in which the rules were flexible and the dictates of personal honor were often hard to define and to satisfy. Even now... What does one do with a captured puppeteer? You couldn't eat him; puppeteers were officially a friendly power. A strange war -- but better than no war at all. Perhaps it would now get better still. T he kzin had asked one question and turned away. A bad sign. Apparently the question had been a formality... Jason wriggled once more against the force field. He was embedded like a fly in flypaper. It must be a police web. Since the last war the kzinti worlds had been living in probationary status. Though they might possess and use police restraint devices, they were allowed no weapons of war. Against two unarmed humans and a puppeteer, they hardly needed them. Anne-Marie stirred. Jason said, "Easy, honey." "Easy? Oh, my neck. What happened?" She tried to move her arm. Her head, above the soft grip of the police web, jerked up in surprise; her eyes widened. And she saw the kzin. She screamed. The kzin watched in obvious irritation. Nessus merely watched. "All right' said Jason. "That won't do us any good." "Jay, they're kzinti! "Right. And they've got us. Oh, hell, go ahead and scream." That shocked her. She looked at him long enough to read his helplessness, then turned back to the kziji. Already she was calmer. Jason didn't have to worry about his wife's courage. He'd seen it tested before. She had never seen a kzin; all she knew about them she had heard from Jason, and little of that had been good. But she was no xenophobe. There was more sympathy of feeling between Anne-Marie and Nessus than there was between Nessus and Jason. She could face the kzin. But he couldn't read the puppeteer's expression. It was Nessus he was worried about. Puppeteers hated pain worse than they feared death. Let the kzin threaten Nessus with pain and there was no telling what he'd do. Without the puppeteer they might have a chance to conceal the stasis box. It might be very bad if the kzinti got into a stasis box. there had been a war. The Slavers, who controlled most of the galaxy at the time, had also controlled most of the galaxy's sentient species. One such slave species, the tnuctipun, had at last revolted The Slavers had had a power like telepathic hypnosis, a powerthat could control the mind of any sentient being. The tnuctipun slaves had possessed high intelligence, higher technology and a slyness more terrifying than any merely mental power. Slave'rs and tnuctipun slaves alike, and every sentient being then in the galaxy, had died in that war. Scattered through known and unknown space were the relics of that war, waiting to be found by species which had become sentient since the war's end. The Slavers had left stasis boxes, containers in stasis fields which had survived unchanged IF of time. The tnuctipun had left mutated remnants of their biological engineering: the frumious bandersnatch of Jinx's shorelines, the stage trees which were to 'be found on worlds scattered all across known space, the tiny cold-world sunflowers with their rippling reflective blossoms. Stasis boxes were rare and dangerous. Often they held abandoned Slaver weapons. One such weapon, the variable-sword, had recently revolutionized human society, bringing back swordplay and dueling on many worlds. Another was being used for peaceful ends; the disintegrator was too slow to make a good weapon. If the kzinti found a new weapon, and if it were good enough... r ieir kzinti captor was a big one, thought Jason, though even a small one was a big one. He stood eight feet tall, as erect as a human on his short hind legs. The orange shade of his fur might have been inconspicuous to a kzin's natural prey, but to human eyes it blazed like neon. He was thick all over, arms, legs, torso; he might have been a very fat cat dipped in orange dye, with certain alterations. You would have had to discount the naked pink ratlike tail, the strangely colored irises which were round instead of slitted, and especially the head, rendered nearly triangular by the large cranial bulge, more than large enough to hold a human brain. "The trap you stumbled into is an old one," said, the kzin. "One ship or another has been waiting on this world since the last war. We have 'been searching out Slaver stasis boxes for much longer than that, hoping to find new weapons." A door opened, and a second kzin entered. It stayed there in the dilated doorway, waiting for the leader's attention. There was something about its appearance -- "But only recently did we hit upon this idea. You may know," said their orange captor, "that ships often stop off to see this unusual star. Ships of most species also have the habit of sending a deepradar pulse around every star they happen across. No student of Shavers has ever found method behind the random dispersion of stasis boxes throughout this region of space. "Several decades ago we did find a stasis box. Unfortunately it contained nothing useful, but we eventually found out how to turn the stasis field on and off. It made good bait for a trap. For forty Kzin years we have waited for ships to happen by with stasis boxes in their holds. You are our second catch." "You'd have done better finding your own boxes," said Jason. He had been examining the silent kzin. This one was smaller than eir interrogator. His fur was matted. His tail drooped, as did his pointed ears. For a kzin the beast was skinny, and misery showed in his eyes. As certainly as they were aboard a fighting ship, this was not a fighting kzin. 'We would have been seen. Earth would have acted to stop our search." Apparently dismissing the subject, their interrogator turned to Ihe smaller kzin and spat out an imitation of cats fighting. The smaller kzin turned to face them. A pressure took hold of Jason's mind and devdoped into a sudden tting headache. He had expected it. It was a strange thing, hut -- put a sane alien next to an insane one, and usually you could tell them apart. And kzinti were much closer to human than were any other species; so close that they must at one time have had common microbe ancestors. This smaller kzin was obviously half crazy. And he wasn't a fighter. To be in this place at this time, he had to be a trained telepath, a forced addict of the kzinti drug that sent nine himdred and ninety-nine of out a thousand kainti insane and left the survivor a shivering neurotic. He concentrated on remembering the taste of a raw carrot. Just to be difficult. Ill depath sagged against a wall, A utterly spent. He could still taste yellow root munched between flat-topped teeth. Chuft-Captain watched without sympadiy, waiting. He forced (himself to speak. "Chuft-Captain, they have not hidden the stasis box. It may be found in a locker to the left of the control room. Chuft-Captain turned to the wall screen. "See to it. And get the puppeteer's pressure suit. Then seal the ship. Flyer and Slaverotiident acknowledged and dgned off. "The relic. Where'd they; find it?" "Chuft-Captain, they did not. The stasis box was found in deep interstellar space, considerably closer to the Core, by a ship of Ae Outsiders. The Outsiders kept it to trade in known space." "What business did the prisoners have with the Outsiders?" "The puppeteer had business with them. It merely used die humans for transportation. The humans do not know what business it was." Chuft-Captain spat in reflex fury, but of course he could not ask a kzin to read the mind of a herbivore. Telepath wouldn't, and would have to be disciplined; or he would, and would go insane. Nor could Chuft-Captain use pain on the puppeteer. He would get the information if it was worthless; but if the puppeteer decided it was valuable, it would commit suicide. "Am I to assume that the Outsiders did in fact sell die relic to the prisoners?" "Chuft-Captain, they did. The sum was a puppeteer's recorded stars in human money." "A lordly sum." "Perhaps more than lordly. Chuft-Captain, you may know that the Outsiders are long#ived. The male human has speculated that they intend to return in one or more thousands of years, when die recording of a puppeteer's voice is an antique worth eights of times its face value." "Urrr. I shouldn't stray into such byways, but -- are they really that long-lived?" IF Chuft-Captain, the Outsider ship was following a starseed in order to trace its migratory pattern." 'Urrr-rrrl" Starseeds lived long enough to make mating migrations from the galactic core to e rim and 'back, moving at average speeds estimated at point eight lights... A patterned knock. The others entered, wearing pressure " suits with the helmets thrown back. Flyer carried the puppeteer's pressure suit, a three-legged balloon with padded mittens for the mouths, small clawed boots, an extra bulge for a food pouch and a hard, padded shield to cover the cranial hump. Slaverstudent carried a cylinder with a grip-notched handle. Its entire surface was a perfectly reflecting mirror: the sign of Ae Slaver stasis field. The prisoners, the human ones, were silently glaring. Their posttelepathy headaches had not helped their dispositions. Telepath was resting from the aftereffects of the drug. "Open it," said Chuft-Captain. Slaverstudent removed an empty cubical box from the table, set the stasis box in its place and touched a pressure-sensitive surface at the table's edge. The cylinder ceased to be a distorting mirror. It was a bronzy metal box which popped open of its own accord. The kzin called Slaverstudent reached in and brought out: A silvered bubble six inches in diameter, with a sculptured handle attached. The handle would not have fit any gripping appendage ChuftCapvtain knew of. A cube of law meat in something like a plastic sandwich wrap. A hand. An alien hand lurmshed with three massive, clumsynlooldng fingers set like a mechanical grid). It had 'been dipped in something that formed a clear, hard coating. One thick finger wore a chronometer. # A bad thing has happened," said Nessus. The kzin who had opened the box seemed terribly excited. He turned the preserved hand over and over, yowrling in kzinti. Then he put it down and picked up the bubblewith-a-handle. "Let me guess," said Jason. "That's not a Slaver box. It's a tnuctipun box." "Yes. The first to be found. The handle on the bubble tool is admirably designed to fit a tnuctip hand. The preserved Slaver must be a trophy -- I am quoting the student of Slavers. Jason, this may be a disaster. The tnuctipun were master technologists." The "student of Slavers" was running his padded, retractile-clawed hands over the sphere-with-a-handie. No detail at aH. showed on the sphere; it was the same mirrorcolor as the stasis field which had disgorged it. The handle was bronzy metal. There were grooves for six fingers and two long, opposed thumbs; there was a button set in an awkward position. A deep, straight groove ran down the side, with a guide and nine notched settings. Anne-Marie spoke in a low voice. "Looks like the handle of a gun." "We need information," said Jason. "Nessus, is that higger kzin the boss? The one who speaks Interworld?" "Yes. The one with the bubble tool is a student of the Slaver Empire. The one with the white stripe is the pilot. The mind reader is resting. We need not fear him for several hours." "But the boss kzin understands Interworld. Do the others?" I think not. Your inaptly named Interworld is difficult for nonhumans to learn and to pronounce." "Good. Anne, how are you doing?" "I'm scared. We're in big trouble, aren't we, Jay?" "We are. No sense fooling ourselves. Any ideas?" "You know me, Jay. In a pinch I usually know who to call for help. The integrator if the house stops, the taxi company when a transfer booth doesn't work. Step into an autodoc when you feel sick. If your lift belt fails you diel E for Emergency on your pocket phone. If someone answers before you hit the ground, scream." She tried a smile. "Jay? Who do we call about Ikzinti kidnappings?" He smiled back. "You write a forceful note to the Patriarch of Kzin. Right, Nessus?" "Also you threaten to cut off trade. Do not worry too much, Anne-Marie. My species is expert at staying alive."  Tndoubtedly a weapon," said  Slaverstudent. "We had best try it outside." "Later' ordered Chuft-Gaptain. Again Slaverstudent dipped' into the cylindrical box. He removed small containers half filled with two kinds of small-arms projectiles; a colored cap which might easily have fitted a standard bowling ball; a transparent bulb of clear fluid; and a small metal widget that might have been anything. "I see no openings for bullets." "Nor do I. Flyer, take a sample of this meat and find out what it is made of. Do the same with this -- trophy, and this bulb. Telepath, are you awake?" "Chuft-Captain, I am." "When can you again read the -- " "Ohuft-Captain, please don't make me -- " "At ease. Telepath. Take time to recover. But I intend to keep the prisoners present while we investigate this find. They may notice some detail we miss. Eventually I will need you." "Yes, Ohuft-Captain." "Test that small implement for radio or hyperwave emissions. Do nothing else to it. It has the look of a subminiature communicator, but it might be anything, a camera, even an explosive." "Slaverstudent, you will come with me. We are going outside." I t took several minutes for the kzinti to get the prisoners into their suits, adjust their radios so that everybody could hear everybody else, and move them through the double-door airlock. To Jason the airlock was further proof that this was a warship. A IF pressure curtain was generally more convenient dian an airlock; but if power failed during a battle, all the air could leave the ship in one whoof . Warships carried double doors. Two stunners followed them up the sloping ice tunnel. Jason had thought there would be four. He'd need to fight only the boss kzin and one other. But both carried stunners and both seemed alert... He took too much time deciding. The boss made Nessus stand on a flexible wire grid, then did the same with Anne-Marie and Jason. The grid was a portable police web, and it was as inflexibly restraining as the built-in web in the ship. The kzinti returned down the sloping tunnel, leaving Jason, AnneMarie and Nessus to enjoy the view. It was a lonely view. The blue and yellow stars were rising, invisibly. They showed only as a brighter spot at one foot of the red-smoke arch of hydrogen. Stars showed space-jbright in curdled patterns across the sky; they all glowed red near the arch. The land was cold, rock-hard ice, rippling in long, low undulations that might have years ago, when the Lyrae twins were bigger and brighter. Black faceted rocks poked through some of the high spots. Several yards away was the Court Jester, A thick, round-edged, flatbottomed disk, she sat on the ice like a painted concrete building. Apparently she intended to stay. Jason stood at parade rest on the police web. Anne-Marie was six inches to his right, facing him. For ah of urge to touch her, she might have been miles away. Two days ago she had carefully painted her eyelids with semipermanent tattoo. They showed as two tiny black-and-white-checked racing victory flags, rippling when she blinked. Their gaiety mocked her drawn face. 'T wonder why we're still alive," she said. Nessus' accentless voice was tiny in the earphones. "The captain wants our opinion on the putative weapon. He will not ask for them, but will take them through the telepafh." "That doesn't apply to you, does it?" "No. No kzin would read my mind. Perhaps no kzin would kill me; my race holds strong policies on the safety of individual members. In any case we have some time." "Time for what?" "Anne-Marie, we must wait. If the artifact is a weapon we must recover it. If not, we must survive to warn your people that the kzinti are searching out Slaver stasis boxes. We must wait until we know which." "rzei what?" "We will find a way." "We," said Jason. "Yes. Our motives coincide here. I cannot explain why at this time." But why should a puppeteer risk his life, his life, for Earth? Jason wondered. T he boss kzin emerged from the airlock carrying the spherewith-a-handle. He stood before Jason and held it before his eyes. Examine this' he oommanded and turned it slowly and invitingly in his four-'fingered hands. There was the reflecting sphere, and there was the bronzy-metal gun handle with its deeply scored groove and its alien sculpturing. The groove had nine notched settings running from top to bottom, with a guide in the top notch. Squiggles which must have been tnuctip numbers corresponded to the notches. Jason prayed for the police web to fail. If he could snatch the artifact -- The Kzin moved away, walking uphill to a rise of icy ground. A second ikzin emerged from the pressure curtain carrying an unfamiliar gadget of kzinti make. The two ikzinti spat phrases at each other. Kzinti language always sounds like insults. Nessus spoke quietly. "The meat was protoplasmic, protein and highly poisonous. The small, complex tnuctip implement does operate in hyperspace, but uses no known method of communication. The fluid in the clear bulb is forty per cent hydrogen peroxide, sixty per cent hydrogen oxide, purpose unknown." "What's the Slaver expert carrying?" "That is an energy output sensor." The puppeteer seemed calm enough. Did he know of some way to interrupt a police web? Jason couldn't ask, not when the boss kzin could hear every word. But he had little h. A police web belonged to the same family as a pilot's craA field, triggered to enfold the pilot when signaled by excessive pressure on his crash webbing. A crash web was as deliberately foolproof as any last-ditch failsafe device. So was a police web. Probably the puppeteer was slipping back into the manic state and was now convinced that nothing in the universe could harm him. Somehow that made Jason's failure worse. "One thing you should know, Jason, is that my species judges me insane..." It was one of the first things the puppeteer had told him. Unable to trust his own judgment, Nessus had warned him by implication that he would have to trust Jason's. They'd both trusted him. 'T had to show you Beta Lyrae," he said tdtterly. "It was a nice idea, Jay, really it was." If he'd been free he'd have found a wall and tried to punch it down. IV C huft-Captain stood on a rise of permafrost and let his eyes scan the horizon. Those points of dark rock would make good targets. The weapon was uncomfortable in his hand, but he managed to get one finger on the presumed trigger button. He aimed at the horizon and fired. Nothing happened. He aimed at a closer point, first pressing and releasing the trigger button repeatedly, then holding it down. Still nothing. "Chuft-Captain, there is no energy release." "The power may be gone." IF 'uft-Captain, it may. But the notches in the handle may control intensity. The guide is now set on 'nil.' " Chuft-Captain moved the guide one notch down. A moment later he had to resist the panicky urge to throw the thing as far as possible. The mirror-faced sphere was twisting and turning like something alive, changing shape like a drug nightmare. It changed and flowed and became -- A long, slender cylinder with a red knob at the end and a toggle near the handle. The handle had not changed at all. "Chuft-Captain, there was an energy discharge. Eek! What happened?" "It turned into this. What do I do next?" Slaverstudent took the artifact and examined it. He would have liked to fire it himself, but that was the leader's privilege and right. And risk. He said, "Try the toggle." At a forward motion of the toggle the red knob lit up and leapt across the ice. Chuft-Captain wiggled the handle experimentally. The red knob, still receding, bobb and weaved in response to stay in the line with the cylindrical barrel. When the knob was a red point sixty yards distant, Chuft-Captain stopped it with the toggle. "Variable-sword," he muttered. He looked for a target. His eyes lit on a nearby tilted spire of dark rock or dirty ice. Chuft-Captain" gripped the artifact in both furry hands, like a big game fishing pole, and swung the red light behind the spire. The artifact fought his pressure, then gave way. The top half of the spire toppled, kicking up a spray of chipped ice. "A variable-sword," he repeated. "But not of Slaver design. Slaverstudent, have you ever heard of a weapon that changes shape?" "No, Chuft-Captain, neither of the past nor of the present." "Then we've found something new." "Yes!" The word was a snarl of satisfaction. "That tears it," said Anne-Marie. "It's a weapon." Jason tried to nod. The pKlice web held him fast. The other kzinti came outside and moved up the rise. Four kzinti stood spitting at each other, looking like four fat men, sounding like a catfight. Nessus said, "The first notch must have been neutral. They intend to find out what the other notches do." "It changes shape," said AnneMarie. "That's bad enough." "Quite right," said the puppeteer. "The artifact is now our prime target." Jason grinned suddenly. The puppeteer reminded him of a cartoon: Two bearded, dirty convicts, hanging three feet off the ground by iron chains. One convict saying, "Now, here's my plan..." First we wish away the police web. Then -- Again the kzin captain moved the guide. The gun reverted to sphereand-handle, then flowed into something hard to see at a distance. The toss ikzin must have realized it. He came down the hill, followed by Ihe others. One at a time the kzinti moved them to the top of the rise, so that they stood several yards behind the firing line, but stdl in the police web. The boss kzin resumed his firing stance. P osition number two was a parabolic mirror with a silvery knob at the center. It did nothing at all to the rock Chuft-Captain was using for a target, though Slaverstudent reported an energy discharge. ChuftCaptain considered, then turned the weapon on the puppeteer. The puppeteer spoke in the human tongue. "I can hear a faint highpitched whine." "Another control dial has formed," Slaverstudent pointed out. "Four settings." Chuft-Captain nodded and tried the second setting. It did not affect the puppeteer. Neither did the third and fourth. "Chuft-Captain, will you hold down the trigger?" Slaverstudent cautiously peeped over the lip of the parabolic mirror. "Urrrr. I was right. The knob is vibrating rapidly. Setting number two is a sonic projector -- and a powerful one, if the puppeteer can hear it through near-vacuum and the thickness of its suit." "But it didn't knock him out or anything." "Chuft-Captain, we must assume that it was designed to affect the Slaver nervous system." "Yes." Chuft-Captain moved the guide to setting number three. As the gun chiged and flowed, he said, "We have found nothing new. Sonics and variable-swords are common." "Mutable weapons are not." "Mutable weapons could not win a war, though they might help. Urrr. This seems to be a projectile weapon. Have you the small-arms projectiles from the stasis box?" "Chuft-Captain, I do." The magazine under the barrel swung out for loading. It took both kinds of projectiles. Chuft-Captain again sighted on the rock, using the newly formed telescopic sight. His first shot put a nick exactly here he aimed it. His second, with the second variety projectile, blew the rock to flying shards. Everybody ducked but Chuft-Captain. "Should I empty the magazine before moving the guide?" "Chuft-Captain, I do not think it matters. The bullets should certainly be removed, but the tnuctipun must have known that occasionally they would not be. Will you indulge my curiosity?" "Since your curiosity is a trained one, I will," Chuft-Captain moved the guide. The projectiles still in the gun popped out through the shifting surface. The artifact became a sphere-with-handle, and then... a sphere-withhandle. The new sphere was smaller than the neutral setting. It had a rosy hue and a smooth, oily texture unmarred by gunsights or secondary controls. The trigger button did nothing at all. IF "I tire rapidly of these duds." "Chuft-Captain, there is energy release." "Very well." Chuft-Captain fired at the puppeteer, using his marksman's instinct in the absence of a gunsight. The puppeteer showed no ill effects. Neither did the female human. In momentary irritation ChuftCaptain thought of firing the dud at Telepath, who was standing nearby looking harmless and useless. But nothing would happen; he would only upset the Telepath. He moved the guide to the fifth setting. T he artifact writhed, became a short cylinder with an aperture in the nose and two wide, flat, metallic projections at the sides. Chuft-Captain's lips drew back from neatly filed feline teeth. This looked promising. He drew aim on what was left of the target rock -- a dark blot on the ice. The gun slammed back against his hand. Chuft-Captain was whirled half around, trying to keep his feet and fighting the sudden pressure as a fireman fights a fire hose. Releasing the trigger didn't shut off the incandescent stream of plasma gas. Pressing the trigger again did. ChuftCaptain blinked his relief and looked around to assess damages. He saw a twisting trail of melted ice like the path of an earthworm screaming into his helmet mike. An ominously diminishing scream. The other kzinti were carrying him toward the airlock at a dead run. From the trail of thin, icy fog bis suit left on the air, the weapotfs firestream must have washed across his body, biuuing holes in nearly heatproof fabric. The human female was running toward her ship. A glance told him that the other prisoners were still in the police web. Telepath must have knocked the female spinning out of the force field while tiying to escape the firestream. She was plainly visible, running across flat ice. Chuft-Captain shot her with the stunner, then trudged away to pick her up. He had her back in the web when Flyer and Slaverstudent returned. Telepath will live, but in critical shape. They had dumped him in the freeze box for treatment on Kzin. As for Position Five on the tnuctip relic -- "It's a rocket motor," said Slaverstudent. "As a short range weapon it could be useful, but primarily it is a one-kzin reaction pistol. Onetnuctip, that is. I doubt if it would lift one of us against respectable gravity. The flat projections at the sides may be holds for feet. The tnuctipun were small." "Pity you didn't think of this earlier." "Chuft-Captain, I acknowledge my failure." Chuft-Captain dropped it. Privately he too acknowledged a failure: he had not considered the female dangerous. Humans were sentient, male and female both. He would not forget it again. Position Six was a laser. It too was more than a weapon. A telescopic sight ran along the e and there was a microphone gnd at the back. Focus it on the proper target, and you could talk voice-tovoice. "This will be useful," said Slaverstudent. "We can find the voice and hearing ranges for tnuctipun from diis microphone." Will that make it a better weapon?" 'uft-Captain, it will not." Then ke your passion for useless knowledge to yourself." ChuftCaptain moved the guide to the seventh setting. V it'pvarling?"L Anne-Marie didn't move. The police web held her in a slumped sitting position. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breathing. Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed. "Nice try," Jason told her. "She cannot hear you," said Nessus. "I know she can't hear me." "Then why -- ? Never mind. What did that rocket setting look like to you?" "A rocket." "Using what fuel source?" "Is it important?" 'Jason, I know nothing of warfare or of weapons, but my species has been making and using machines for some considerable time. Why did the projectile weapon not include its own projectiles? Why did it throw them away changed shape?" "Oh" Okay, it can't throw away its own mass." Jason thought about that. "You're rit. It can't be using its own fuel. Nessus, it's a jet. There was an intake somewhere that nobody noticed. Wait a minute. You couldn't use it in space." "One would affix a gas cartridge at the intake." "Oh. Right." "One could not be sure a given atmosphere would burn. How is the gas heated?" "A battery in the handle? No, it couldn't put out enough power, not without -- but there has to be one. Nessus? The kzinti could be listenmg. "I ihmc it does not matter. The kzinti Will know all about the weapon soon enough. Only the captain can profit from learning more before he turns the weapon over to his superiors." "Okay. The battery must use total conversion of matter." "Could you not build a fusion motor small enough to fit into the handle?" "You're the expert. Could you? Would it give enough power?" "I do not think so. The handle must contain a wide variety of mechanisms to control the changing of shapes." They watched the kzinti test out the laser form. "You could do it direct," said Jason. "Change some of the matter in the reaction gas to energy. It'd give you a terrifically hot exhaust. Nessus, is there any species IF in known space that has total conversion?" "None that I have heard of." "Did e tnuotipun?" "I would not know." "Things weren't bad enough. Can you see kzinti warships armed and powered with total conversion?" A gloomy silence followed. The kzinti were watching the weapon change shape. The boss kzin had not spoken; he may or may not have been listening to their discussions. A nne-Marie made small protesting sounds. She opened her eyes and tried to sit up. She swore feelingly when she found that the web was holding her in her cramped position. "Nice try," said Jason. "Thanks. What happened?" She answered herself, her voice brittle and bitter. "They shot me, of course. What have I missed?" '"The seventh setting was a blank, ' A flat-ended cylinder with a small wire grid near the back. No gunsight. It did nothing when ChuftOaptain clicked the trigger button; it did nothing when he held it down, and nothing when he clicked it repeatedly. It had no effect on the target rock, the puppeteer, the humans. Its only effect on Slaverstudent was to make him back warily away, saying, "Chuft-Captain, please, there is an energy discharge." "A singularly ineffective energy discharge. Take this, Slaverstudent. Make it work. I will wait." And wait he did, stretched comfortably on the permafrost, his suit holding the cold a safe tenth of an inch away. He watched Slaverstudent's nerves fray under the fixity of his stare. VV "Not much. We've decided the jet that knocked you down converts matter to energy." "Is that bad?" "Very." Jason didn't try to explain. "The sixth setting was a moreor less conventional message laser." "The seventh does not work," said Nessus. "This angers die captain. Jason, for the first time I regret never having studied weapons." "You're a puppeteer. Why should you..." Jason let the sentence trail off. There was a thought he wanted to trace down. About the weapon. Not any particular form, but all forms together. "No sentient mind should turn away from knowledge. Especially no puppeteer. We are not known for our refusal to look at unpleasant truths." Jason was silent. He was looking at an unpleasant truth. Nessus had said diat it didn't matter what the boss kzin overheard. He was wrong. This was a thing Jason dared not say aloud. Nessus said, "The Slaver expert wants to go inside with the weapon. He has permission. He is going." Anne-Marie said, "Why?" "There is a microphone grid on the seventh setting. Jason, could a soldier use a hand computer?" "He -- " wasnt a soldierilton clamped his teeth on the words. "Probably could," he said Presently the Slaver expert returned holding the tnuctipun weapon. To Jason the artifact had taken f on a final, fatal fascination. If he was right about its former owner, then he could stop worrying about its reaching the Patriarch of Kzin. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. In minutes, he and Anne-Marie and Nessus and the four kzinti would be dead. S laverstudent said, "I was right. The artifact lanswered me in an unknown speech." "Then it is another -- " Signalling device, he had been about to say. But it would have been built to signal tnuctipun. And the tnuctipun had been extinct for ages... yet the thing had answered back... Chuft-Oaptain felt his back arch with the fighting reflex. There were ghost legends among the kzinti. "Ohuft-Captain, I believe it to be a computer. A hand computer could be very useful to a warrior. It could compute angles for him as he fired explosive projectiles." "Yes. Can we use it?" "Not unless we can teach it the Hero's Tongue. It may be too simple to learn." "Then we pass to setting number Eight." Chuft-Captain moved the guide down to the bottom setting. Again there was no gunsight. Most of the genuine weapons had had gunsights or telescopic sights. ChuftCaptain scowled, but raised the weapon and aimed once again at the distant, shattered rock. J ason cringed inside his imprisoned skin. Again the weapon was writhing, this time to the final setting. There were so many things he wanted to say. But he didn't dare. The boss kzin must not know what was about to happen. The gun had twisted itself into something very strange. "That looks familiar," said Nessus. "I have seen something like that, some time." "Then you're unique," said Anne Marie. "I remember. It was one of a series of diagrams on how to turn a sphere inside out in differential topology. Certainly there could be no connection..." The boss kzin assumed markBman stance. Jason braced for the end. What happened next was not at all what he expected. Unconsciously he'd been leaning on the police net's force field. Suddenly he was falling, overbalanced. He straightened, not quite sure what had happened. Then he got it. The police net was gone. He slapped Anne-Marie hard on the back, pointed at the Court Jester, saw her nod. Without waiting to see her start running, he turned and charged at the boss kzin. Something brushed by ium at high speed. Nessus. Not running away, but also charging into battle.  was right, thougjit Jason. Hes gone manic. VI huft-Oaptain pushed the trigger button. Nothing happened. It was really too much. He stood a moment, marshalling words for Slaverstudent. A brand new kind of weapon, and it wouldn't do anything! Half the settings were duds! He knew it as he turned: something was wrong. The danger instinct sang in his nerves. He got no other warning. He had not seen the ship lights go out. He heard no sign of pounding clawed feet. The sounds of breathing had become a trifle heavy... He started to turn, and something hit him in the side. It felt like an armored knight had run him through with a blunt lance. It hurt. Chuft-Captain lost all his aplomb and all his air, bent sideways as far as he could manage, and toppled. He saw the world turned sideways, glowing through a blue fog. He saw the human female struggling furtively in Slaverstudent s hands; he saw Flyer aiming a stunner across the ice. He saw two running figures, human and puppeteer, trying t reach the other ship. Flyer's stunner didn't seem to affect them. The human had the tnuctip artifact He could breath again, in sharp shallow gasps. That blow in the side must have broken ribs: it could hardly have failed to, since kzinti ribs run all the way down. That had felt like a puppeteer's kick! But that was ridiculous. Impossible. A puppeteer kick a kzm? The puppeteer reached the ship far in advance of the slower human. It paused a moment, then turned and ran on across the white undulating plain. The human also paused at the ship's entrance, then followed the puppeteer. Flyer was running after them. Behind Chuft-Captain the shiplights were dim, but brightening. Hadn't they been dark when he fell? And the stunners hadn't worked. And the police webs... So. The eighth setting was an energy absorber. Not a new thing, but much smaller than anything he'd heard of. But what had hit him? There was a hissing in his ears, a sound he hadn't noticed. Not breathing. Had somebody's suit been punctured? But nobody had been attacked. Except -- Chuft-Captain slapped a hand over his side. He yelled with the pain of motion, but kept his hand pressed tight while he reached for a meteor patch. He risked one look under his hand before applying the patch. There were four tiny holes in the fabric. They might easily have marked the claws of a puppeteer's space boot. T he boss kzin held his marksman's stance. Jason was moving toward him at a dead run. He bad to get the weapon before the kzinti realized what had happened. Nessus passed him like a live missile. The puppeteer reached the kzin, turned skidding on two front legs, and lashed out. Jason winced in U IF sympathy. That kick had been sineerel It would have tom a man in half, crushed his lungs and ribcage and spine and life. The mad puppeteer had barely paused. He ran straight toward the Court Jester, Jason scooped up the fallen weapon, skidded to a halt and turned. A kzin had Anne-Marie. Well see about that! His fingers moved to the weapon's adjustment guide. A second kzin held a stunner on him. The stunner would start working the moment the tnuctip weapon shifted shape. He'd lose everything. He could hear Anne-Marie swearing tearfully as she fought. Then her voice came loud and clear. "Run, damnit! Jay, run!" He could throw the weapon to Nessus, then charge to tdie rescue! They'd get him, but ... but the puppeteer was well out of range... and couldn't be trusted anyway. A puppeteer who kicked something that could kick back was beyond psychiatric help. Anne-Marie was still kicking and using her elbows. Her kzin captor didn't seem to notice. The boss kzin lay curled like a shrimp around the spot of agony in his side. But the third kzin held his pose, still bathing Jason in an imaginary stunner beam. Jason turned and ran. Ho saw Nessus leave the Jester's entrance and go on. He guessed what he would find, but he had to look. Sure enough, the door was soldered shut. A laser would have melted the steel solder away from the huUmetal door. But the third kzin was finally in motion, coming alter him, still trying to use the stunner. Jason ran on. The puppeteer was a diminiriiing point. Jason foOowtd that point, moving into a cold wie lit by a fiery arch with one brijht glare spot... "Flyer, return to the ship at once." "Chuft-Captain, he's around here somewhere. I can find him." "Or he could find you. Return to the ship. The rules of this game have changed." T he kzin was gone. Jason had stalked him for a dme, with his weapon set to the energy absorbing phase and mth his thumb on the guide. If he had seen the kzin, and if the kzin hadn't seen him... a variable-sword, a hair-thin wire sheathed in a stasis field, would have cut one enemy into two strangers. But it hadn't happened, and he wasn't about to follow the kzin back to home base. Now he lay huddled in the hole he'd dug with the rocket phase. "Jay!" It was Anne-Marie. "Have to talk quick, they're taking off my helmet. I'm not hurt, but I can't get away. The ship's taking off. Bury the weapon somewh -- " Her voice faded and was gone. The public band was silent. Nessus's voice broke that silence. "Jason. Turn to the private band." He had to guess which band Nessus meant. He was third time lucky. "Can you possibly hear me?" "Yah. Where are you?" "I do not know how to describe my position, Jason. I ran six or seven miles east" "Okay. Let's think of a way to find each other." "Why, Jason?" He was puzzled over that. "You think you're safer alone? I don't. How long will your suit keep you alive?" "Several standard years. But help will arrive before then." "What makes you think so?" "When the kzin pilot entered the pressure curtain, I was calling my people for help." "What? How?" "Despite recent changes in the fortunes of my people, that is still most secret." Telepathy? Something in his baggage, or surgically implanted under his skin? The puppeteers kept their secrets well. Nobody had ever found out how the puppeteers could commit painless suicide at will. And how Nessus had done it didn't matter. "Are they coming for you all the way from Andromeda?" "Hardly, Jason." "Go on." "I suppose I must. My people are still in this region of the galaxy, in the sixtylight-year volume you call known space. Their journey began only twelve years ago. You see, Jason, my people do not intend to return to this galaxy. Hence it does not matter how much objective time passes during their journey. They can reach Andromeda in a much shorter subjective dme using normal space drives. Our ships approach very close to lighitepe Further, they need brave only the dangers of normal space, which they can handle easily. Hyperspace is an unpredictable and imcomfortable thing, especially for those who would spend decades traveling in any case." "Nessus, your whole species is crazy. How did they keep a secret like that? Every one thirds they're halfway to Andromeda." "Naturally. Who would stumble across the fleet in interstellar space? Between systems every known species travels in hyperspace... except the Outsiders, with whom we have agreements. In any case, my people are within reach. A scout will arrive within sixty days. The scouts are fitted with hyperdrive." "Then you're safe if you stay hidden." Danin! thought Jason. He was all alone. It was a proud and lonely thing to be a costume hero. "Well, good luck Nessus. I've got to -- "Do not sign off. What is your plan?" "I don't have one. I've got to see the kzinti don't get this hack, but I've also got to get Anne-Marie away from them." "The weapon should come first." "My wife comes first. What's your stake in this, anyway?" "With the principles behind the tnuctip weapon the kzinti could command known space. My people will be in known space for another twenty-eight human years. Should the kzinti learn of our fleet, it would be an obvious target." IF "Oh." "We must help each other. How long can you live in your suit?" "Til I starve to death. #I have air and water indefinitely. Say thirty days, upper limit." "Your people should not cut costs on vital equipment, Jason. My people cannot arrive in time to save you." "If I gave you the weapon, could you stay hidden?" "Yes. If the ship came in sight I could shoot it down with the laser setting. I think I could. I could force myself... Jason, will the kzinti cl other ships?" "DamnI Of course they will. They'd find you easy. What'll we do?" "Can we force entrance to the Court JesterV "Yah, hut they took my keys. We couldn't use the drives or the radio or get into the lockers." "The laser would let us into the lockers." "Right." "Have you weapons aboard?" "No. Nothing." "Then die Court Jester would be no more than a place from which to surrender. I have no suggestions." iChuft-Captain, the eighth set ting must be the way the artifact is recharged. It does not itself seem to be a weapon." "It can be used as one. As we have seen. Don't bother me now, Slaverstudent." Chuft-Captain strove la ke his tone mild. He knew that his rage was the companion of his pain; Slaverstudent knew too. Neither had referred to the fact that Chuft-Captain now walked crouched to the side. Neither would. The kzin captain could not even bandage himself, though when daey reached space he could use the ship's medical equipment to set the bones. The worst damage had been done to Chuft-Captain's ego. Had the puppeteer known what he was doing? His small clawed foot had shattered more than a couple of ribs. One day Chuft-Captain might have been Chuft, the hero who found the weapon that beat the human empire to its belly. Now he would be -- Chuft, who was kicked by a puppeteer. "Chuft-Captain, here comes Flyer." "Good. Flyer! Get your tail in here and lift us fast." Flyer went past at a quick shuffling run. Slaverstudent shut Ihe airlock after him, helped Chuft-Captain strap down, tnd was strapping himself in when Flyer did his trick. The ip rose out of the ice, dripping opalescent chunks and shining bluewhite at the stern. O n the smoky arch of Beta Lyrae, the bright pmnt had readied the zenith. Behind their permanent veil the two stars had pulled opart in their orWts, so that the vague britness had shaded into an mage tinge on one side and a green on the other. "One thing we do have," said Jason, "and that's the weapon itself." "True. We have a laser, a flamctiipowing rocket and a shield against polke stunners. But not simultaneously." "I think we may have overlooked a setting." "Wishful thinking, Jason, is not a puppeteer trait." "Neither is knowledge of weapons. Nessus, what kind of weapon is this? lm talking about the whole bundle, not any single setting." "As you say, I am not an expert on warfare." "I don't think it's a soldier's weapon. I think it's for espionage." "Would that be different? I gather the question is important." Jason stopped to gather his tbouts. He held the gun cradled in his hands. It was still at the eighth setting, the peouhar, twisted shape that Nessus had compared to a diagram from differential topology. He held history in his hands, hisOnce upon a time a small, compactly built biped had aimed this weapon at beings with ball-shaped hea, big dngle eyes and massive Mickey Moose hands, great splayed feet and iidy armored skin and clusters of naked pink tendrils at the comers of wide mouths. What could he have been thinking the last time he stored away this weapon? Did he guess that fifteen milHon centuries later a mind would be trying to guess his nature from his abandoned possessions? "Nessus, would you say this gadget is more expensive to produce than eight gadgets for similar joibs?" "Assuredly, and more difficult But it would be easier to Cariy than eight discrete gadgets." "And easier to hide. Have you ever heard of Slaver records describing a shape-changing weapon?' "No. The tnuctipun would understandably have kept it a secret." "That's my point. How long could soldiers had models?" "Not long. The same objections hold for its use in espionage. Jason, what kind of espionage could a tnuctip do? Certainly it could not imitate a Slaver." "No, but it could 'hide out on a sparsely setded world, or it could pretend to be a tnuctip slave. It'd have to have some defense against the Slaver power." "The cap in the stasis box?" "Or something else, something it was wearing when the Slavers caught it" "These are unpleasant ideas. Jason, I have remembered something. The Outsiders found the stasis box in a cold, airless world with ancient pressurized buildings still standing. If a battle had been fout there, would the buildings have been standing?" "Slaver buildings?" "Yes." "They'd have been standing if the Slavers won. But th the Slavers would have captured at least one of the weapons." "Only if (there were many such weapons. I concede your poi The owner of the weapon was a lone spy." IP "Good. Nowrwere you so sure?" The average soUier would get stomped on while he was trying to decide which weapon to use. Then there's a sonic for taking live prisoners. Maybe other settings make them feel fear or pain. The rocket would be silly for a soldier; he'd get killed flying around a battlefield. But a spy could use it for the last stage of his landing." "All right. Why is it important?" "Because there ought to be a selfdestruct setting somewhere." "What did -- ? Ah. To keep the secret of the miitable weapon. But we have used all the settings." "I thought it would be number eight. It wasn't. That's why we're still alive. An espionage agent's selfdestruct button would be made to do as much damage as possible." Nessus gasped. Jason hardly noticed. "They've hidden it somehow," he said. T ie Traitor's Claw was big. She had to be. Redundantly, she carried both a gravity polarizer and a fusion reaction motor. Probably she could have caught anything in real space barring ships of her own class, many of which were serving as police and courier ships in kzinti space. Kzin records listed her as a stolen courier ship. She was a squat cone, designed as a compromise between landing ability and speed in an atmosphere. In contrast, the flat Court Jester had been designed for landing ability alone; she would not have tipped ovon a seventy degree There was more than speed te the TraJtofs Clowns two drives. Before it had ever seen a gravity polarizer, the human empire had taught tiie kzinti a lesson they would never forget. The more efficient a reaction drive, the more effective a weapon it makes. A gravity polarizer was not a reaction drive. Flyer used both drives at once. The ship went up fast. Six thousand miles up the Traitor's Claw went into orbit. "We can find the prisoners with infrared," said Chuft-Captain. "But it will do us little good if they shoot us down. Can the laser setting prevent us from going after them?" "We can call for more ships," Flyer suggested. "Surely the weapon is important enough." "It is. But we will not call." Flyer nodded submission. Knowing what Flyer knew, ChuftCaptain snarled inside himself with humiliation and the digging agony in his side. He had been kicked by a puppeteer in full view of two subordinates. Never again could he face a kzin of equal rank, never until he had killed the puppeteer with his own teeth and daws. Could that kick have been ooldbloodedly tactical? Chuft-Captain refused to believe it. But, intended or not, that kick had stymied QiuftCaptain. He could not call for reinforcements until the puppeteer was dead. He forced his mind back to the weapon. The only setting that could harm the kzind was the laser    unless the rosy siere unexpectedly began working. But diat was unlike!y. He asked, "Is there a completely safe way to capture them? If not --  "There is the drive, said Slaverstudent. "They have die laser, Fly reminded him. "A laser that size is subject to a certain amount of spreading. We should be safe two hundred miles up. Closer than that and a good marksman could bum through the hull. "Flyer, is two hundred miles too high?" Cbuft-Captaln, th are wearing heatproof suits, and we can hover only at one-seventh Kzin-gravity. Our flame would barely warm the ice. "But there is the gravity polarizer to push us down while the fusion flame pushes us up. The ship was designed for just that tactic. Now, the fugitives suits are heatproof but the ice is not. Suppose we hovered over them with a five Kzin-gravity flame... ' J ason held a fivoinch rosy sphere with a pist grip handle. "It has to be here somewhere, he said. 'Try doing things you ordinarily wouldn't. Moving the gauge while holding the trigger down. Moving the guide sideways. Twisting the sphere." Silence on the private circuit. Then, "No luck yet. "The fourth setting was the only one that showed no purpose at all. "Yah. What in -- " High overhead a star had come into being. It was blue-white, almost violet-white, and for Jason it stood precisely at the zenith. "The kzinti," said Nessus. "Do not shoot back. They must be out of range of your laser setting. You would only help them find you." "They've probably found me already, with infrared scopes. What the Finagle do they think they're doing?" The star remained steady. In its sudden light Jason went to work on the weapon. He ran quickly through the remaining settings, memorizing the forms that used the trigger as an on-off switch, probing and prodding almost at random, until he reached neutral and the relic was a silver sphere with a handle. The guide would not go sideways. It would not remain between any two of the notches. It would not twist... "Are you making progress?" "Nothing, damnit." "The destnict setting would not be too carefully hidden. If a weapon were captured an agent could always hope the Slavers would destroy it by accident." "Yah." Jason was tired of looking at the neutral setting. He changed to laser and fired up at the new star, using the telescopic sit. He expected and got no result, but he held his aim until distracted by a sudden change in pressure around his suit. He was up to his shoulders in water. IF In one surge he was out of his hole. But the land around him was gone. A few swells of wet ice rose glistening from a shallow sea that reached to all the horizon. The kzinti ship's downblast had melted everything for miles around. "Nessus, is there water around you?" "Only in solid form. From my viewpoint the kzinti ship is not overhead." They've got me. As soon as they turn off the drive I'll be frozen in my tracks." "I have been thinking. Do you need the destruct setting? Suppose you change the rocket setting, turn the weapon nose down and fire. The flame will remain on, and the weapon will eat its way through the ice." "Sure, if we could think of a way to keep it pointed down. Odds are it'd turn over in the first few feet. Then the kzinti find it with deepradar or seismics and dig it out." "True." The water was getting deeper. Jason thought about using the rocket to burn his way loose once the water froze about his ankles. It would be too hot. He would probably bum his feet off. But he might have to try it. The blue kzinti star hung bright and clear against the arch of dust and hydrogen. A bright pink glow showed the Lyrae stars forty-five degrees from sunset. "Jason. Why is there a neutral setting?" "Why not?" "It is not for collecting energy. The eighth setting does that nicely. It is not for doing nothing. The projectile setting does that, unless you put projectiles in it. Thus the neutral setting has no purpose. Perhaps it does something we do not know about." "I'll try it." The bright star above him winked out. CChuft-Captain, I cannot locate  the puppeteer." "Its pressure suit may be too efficient to lose heat. We will institute a search later. Inform me when the human stops moving." N essus's idea would be a good one, Jason thought, if only he could make it workable. Much better than the destmct setting. Because if the destruct setting existed, it would almost certainly kill him. Probably it would kill Nessus too. The destruct setting on an espionage agent's weapon would be made to do as much damage as possible. And there had been total conversion involved in the rocket setting. Total conversion would make quite a bomb, even if it only weighed four pounds, and the converted mass a The kzinti-produced swamp was congealing from the bottom up. His boots were getting heavy. Each had collected a growing mass of ice. He kept walking so that they wouldn't freeze to the bottom. He'd searched the neutral setting, handle and sphere, for hidden controls. Nothing showed: nothing obvious. He tried twisting various parts of Hhe handle. Nothing broke, was good, but nothing would twist either. Maybe something should break. Suppose he broke off the gauge? He wasn't strong enough. He tried twisting the ball itself. Nothing. He tried it again, holding the trigger down. The silvery sphere twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, then clicked. Jason released the trigger, and it started to change. "I've found it, Nessus, I've found something "A new setting? What does it look Mke?" Like a white flash, thought Jason, waiting for the single instant in which it would look like a white flash. It didn't come. The protean material solidified... "Like a cone with a rounded base, pointing away from the handle." 'Try it. And if you are successful, good-by, Jason. Knowing you was pleasant." "The blast could include you, too." "Is it thus you assuage my loss of you?" "You sure you don't have a sense of humor? Good-by, Nessus. Here goes." The cone did not explode. A time bomb? Jason was about to start looking for a chronometer on the thing when he noticed something that froze him instantly. A hazy blue line led away in the direction he happened to be pointing the cone. Led away and upward at forty degrees, wavering as tremor in his fingers waved the cone's vertex. Another weapon. He released the trigger. The line disappeared. The kzin ship wasn't in sight. Not that he would have used it as a target, not with Anne-Marie aboard. A hidden weapon. More powerful than the others? He had to find out. Like Chuft-Captain, he tried to assume a marksman's stance. His feet were frozen solidly into the ice. He'd been careless. He shrugged angrily, aimed the weapon a little above the horizon, and fired. A hazy blue line formed. He slowly lowered the vertex until the line touched the horizon. The light warned him. He threw himself flat on his back and waited for the blast. The light died almost instantly... and suddenly the shiny horizon-to-horizon ice rippled d shot from under him. It took his feet along. His body snapped like a whip, and then the ice tore away from his feet. He was on his face, with agony in his ankles. The backlash came. The ice jerked under him, harmlessly. "Jason, what happened? There was an explosion." "Hang... on." Jason rolled over and pulled his legs up to examine IF them. The pain was bad. His ankles didn't feel broken, but he certainly couldn't walk on them. The boots were covered with cracked wet ice. "Jason. Puppeteer. Can you hear me?" It was the slurred, blurry voice of the boss kzin. "Don't... say anything, Nessus. I'm going to answer him." Jason switched his transmitter to the common channel. "I'm here." "You have discovered a new setting to the weapon." "Have I?" "I do not intend to play pup games with you. As a fighter you are entitled to respect, which your herbivorous friend is not -- " "How are your ribs feeling?" "Do not speak of that again, please. We have something to trade, you and I. You have a unique weapon. I have a female human who may be your mate." "WeU put. So?" "Give us the weapon. Show us where to find the new setting. You and your mate may leave this world in your own ship, unrestricted." "Your name as your word?" No answer. CC'ou lying get of a -- " Jason I searched for the word. He cxuld say two words of kzinti; one meant hello, and one meant -- "Do not say it. Jason, the agreement stands, except that I will smash your hyperdrive. You must return to civilization through normal space. With that proviso, you may have my name as my word." "Nessus?" "The herbivore must protect itself." "Consider the alternative. Your mate is not entitled to the respect accorded a fighter. Kzinti are carnivorous, and we have been without fresh meat for some years." "Bluff me not. You'd lose your only hostage." "We'd lose one arm of her. Then another. Then a lower leg." Jason felt sick. They could do it. Painlessly, too, if they wished; and they probably would, to avoid losing Anne-Marie to shock. He gulped. "Is she all right now?" "Naturally." "Prove it." He was stalling. Nessus could hear everything; he might come up with something... and was ever there a fainter hope? "You may hear her," said the boss kzin. There were clunking sounds; they must be dropping her helmet over her head. Then AnneMarie's voice spoke swiftly and urgently. "Jay darling, listen. Use the seventh setting. The seventh. C you hear me?" "Anne, are you all right?" "I'm fine," she shouted. "Use the seventh -- " Her voice died abruptly. "Anne!" Nothing. There was fast, muffled kzinti speech in his earphones. Jason looked at the weapon a moment, then dropped the guide to setting number BevcQ. Maybe she had something. The cone writhed, became a mirrorsurfaced here... "Jason, you now know your mate is unharmed. We must ask for your decision immediately." He ignored the blurry voice, watched the weapon become a flatended cylinder with a grid near the handle. He'd seen the kzinti using that... "Oh," he said. It was the computer, of course. The tnuctip computer. He smiled, and it hurt inside 'him. His wife had given him the only help she had to give. She'd told him where to find the only tnuctpin expert in known space. The hell of it was, she was perfectly right. But the computer couldn't hear him, and he couldn't hear the computer, and they didn't speak a common language anyway. Wait a minute. This was setting number seven; but if you counted neutral as the first setting, then -- no. Setting six was only the laser. Finagle! The Belter oath fitted. Finagle's First Law was holding beautifully. His ankles stopped hurting. Decoyed! He twisted his head around to find his enemy. The bargain had been a decoy! Already his head buzzed with the stunner beam. He saw the kzin, hiding behind a half-mehed bulge of ice with only one eye and the stunner showing. He fi at once. The weapon was on computer setting. His hand went slack. #T do not understand why she X wanted him to use the seventh setting." "The computer, was it not?" "Chuft-Captain, it was." "He could not have used the computer." "No. Why did the prisoner -- " "She may have meant the sixth setting. The laser was the only weapon a human could have used against us." "Unr. Yes. She counted wrong, then." The shipto-suit circuit spoke. "Ohuft-Captain, I have him." "Flyer, well done. Bring him in." "Chuft-Oaptain, do we still need him?" The kzin was not in a mood to argue. "I hate to throw anything away. Bring him in." H is head floated, his body spun, his ankles hurt like fiuy. He shuddered and tried to open his eyes. The lids came up slowly, reluctantly. He was standing in a police web, slack neck muscles holding bis head upright in one-eighth gee. No wonder he hadn't known which way was up. Anne-Marie was twelve inches to his side. Her eyes held no hope, only exhaustion. "Damn," he said. One word to cover it all. The kzind yowrling had been so much a part of the background that he didn't notice it until it stopped. After a moment the boss kzin stepIF ped in front of him, moving slowly and carefully and coiled protectively around his left side. "You are awake." "Obviously." One massive four-dawed hand held the tnuotip weapon, still at the computer setting. The kzin held it up. "You found a new setting on this. Tell me how to reach it." "I can't," said Jason. "I found it by accident and lost it the same way." "That is a shame. Do you realize we have nothing to lose?" Jason studied the violet eyes, fruitlessly. "What do you mean?" "Either you will tell me of your own free will, or you can be persuaded to tell, or you cannot In any case, we have no reason not to remove your mate's arm." He turned and spoke in the kzinti tongue. The other aliens left the room. "We will be leaving this world in an hour." The boss kzin turned and settled his orange bulk carefully in a kzinti contour couch, grunting softly with the pain of movement. He meant it. His position was too simple for doubt The boss kzin had a tnuctip weapon to take back to Kzin, and he had two human captives. The humans were of no use to him. But he had great use for Jason's knowledge. Wlhat he offered was a simple trade: knowledge for the meat on their bones. "I can't talk," said Jason. "All right," Anne-Marie said dully. "I can't" The cone-form was too powerful. Its beam set up spontaneous mass conversion in anything it touched. And he couldn't explain. The boss kzin might hear him; and the kzinti didn't know just what they were after. "All right, you can't. We've had it. How did they get you?" "I got stupid. While the boss kzin was talking to me one of the others snuck up and used a sonic." "The seventh setting -- " "I didn't have time to figure anything out. There isn't enou air to carry soimd out there." "I didn't think of that. How's Nessus?" "Still free." The boss kzin broke in. "We wUl have it soon. The puppeteer has no place to hide and nothing iwtth which to fight. Do you expect It to rescue you?" Anhe-Marie smiled sourly. "Not really." T he other kzinti returned, carrying things. There were pieces of indecipherable kzinti equipment, and there was a medkit from the emergency 'doc in the Court Jester. They set it all down next to the police web and went to work. One piece of kzinti equipment was a small tank with a pump and a piece of soft plastic tubing attached. Jason watched them wrap the tubing three or four times around Anne-Marie's upper arm. They joined the other end to the pump and started it going. "It's cold," she said. "Freezing." "I can't stop them," said Jason. She shivered. "You're sure?" He gave up. He opened his mouth to shout out his surrender. The boss kzin raised his furry head questioningly -- and Jason's voice stopped in his throat. He'd used the hidden setting just once. For only an instant had the violet beam touched the horizon, but the explosion had damn near killed him. Obviously the hidden setting was not meant to be used on the surface of a planet. It could be used only from space. Was it meant to destroy whole worlds? But Anne-Marie hurt! She said, "All light, you're sure. Jay, dem't look like that. Jay? I can grow a new arm. Relax! Stop worrying about it!" The anguish in Jason's face was like nothing she'd ever seen. The burry voice said, "She will never reach an autodoc." "Shut upr Jason screamed. Soft kzinti noises tered the silence. One of the kzinti left: the pilot, the one with the white streak. The others talked. Ihey talked of cooking, kzinti sex, human sex, Beta Lyirae, how to hunt puppeteers, or him to turn a sre inside out without forming a cusp. Jason couldn't tell. They used no gestures. Anne-Marie said, "They could have planted a mike on us." "Yah." "So you can't tell me what you're hiding." "No. I wish I spoke Wunderlander." " don't speak Wunderlander. Dead language. Jay, I can't feel my arm any more. Ihere must be liquid nitrogen in this tube." "I'm sorry. I cant help,' #Tt is not working," said ChuftJL Captain. "It should work," said Slaverstudent. "We may not get results with the first limb. We probably will with the second. The second time, they will know that we mean what we threaten." He looked thoughtfully at the prisoners. "Also, I think we should eat our meals in here." "They know that limbs can be regrown." "Only by human-huilt machines. There are none here." "You have a point." "It will be good to taste fresh meat again." Flyer returned. "Oiuft-Captain, the kitchen is programmed." "Good." Chuft-Captain incautiously shifted his bulk, tensed all over at the pain. It would have been nice if he could have put pressure bandages around his ribs. The ribs had been set and joined wkh pins. But he could not use pressure bandages; they would remind his crew of what had happened. He would be shamed. Kicked by a puppeteer. "I have been thinking," he said. "Regardless of what the human tels us, we must take the tnuctip relic to Kzin as quickly as possible. IF There I will drop you, Slaverstudent, along with the weapon and the freeze box containing Telepath. Flyer, you and I will return here for the herbivore. He cannot be rescued in that time. He will be easy to find. A sight search will find him unless he digs a hole, in which case we may use seismographs." "He will have a month to anticipate." "Yes. He will." "Can you understand me?" Three pairs of kzinti eyes jerked around. The voice belonged to none of them. It sounded foreign, artificial. "Repeating. Can you understand me?" It was the gun speaking. The tnuctip weapon. IX CiTt's learned their language," X said Jason. And all the hope drained out of him. "It'll tell them where to find that setting you were trying to hide." "Yah." "Then tell me this. Jay." She was on the edge of hysteria. "What good will it do me to lose my arm?" Jason filled his lungs and shouted. "Hey!" Not one kzin moved. They hovered around the weapon, all talking at once. "Hey, Captain! What sthondat was your sister?" They all jerked around. He must have pronounced the word right. "You must not use that word again," said the boss kzin. "Get this thing off my wife's arm!" The boss kzin thought it over, spoke to the pilot. The pilot manipulated the poHce web to free AnneMarie's arm, used a cloth to protect his hand while he removed the cold, deadly tube. He turned off the pump, readjusted the police web and went back to the discussion. By then the discussion hiad become a dialogue; the boss kzin had shut the others up. "How's your arm?" "Feels dead. Maybe it is. What were we hiding. Jay?" He told her. "Ye gods. And now they've got it." "Could you use an anesthetic?" "It doesn't hurt yet." "Let me know. Thre all through torturing us. They may eat us, but it'll be all at once." T he computer was doing most of the talking. A kzin was holding up the tnuctip cap, the one they'd found in the stasis box. The computer spoke. He held up the small metal object that might have been a communicator. The computer spoke again. The boss kzin spoke. The computer spoke at length. The boss kzin picked up the weapon and did things to it. Jason couldn't see what The kzin was facing away from him. But the weapon writhed. Jason snarled in his throat. He commonly used curses for emphasis. He knew no words to cover this situation. The boss kzin spoke briefly and j left cradling the weapon. One of the others followed: the expert on Slavers. Jason caught one gjiimpse of the weapon as the boss kzin went through the door. The kzin with the white stripe, the pilot, remained. Jason felt himself starting to shake. The weapon, the soft, mutable weapon. When the boss kzin had left the room, he'd carried a gun handle attached to a double cone with rounded bases and points which barely touched. He didn't understand. Then his eyes, restlessly searching  the room as if for an answer, fell on the empty stasis box. There was a tnuctip cap, and a small metal object which registered in hyperspace, and a preserved Slaver 'hand... It began to make sense. Did the computer have eyesight? Obviously. The kzinti had been showing it objects from the stasis box. Take a computer smart enough to learn a language by hearing it spoken for an hour. Never mind its size; any sentient being will build a computer as small as possible, if only to reduce the time lag in thinking with impulses moving at lightspeed or less. Let the computer know only what its tnuctipun builders taut it, plus what it had seen and heard in this room. It had seen a tnuctipun survival kit. It had seen mSnbers of a species it did not recognize. The unfamiliar bedngs had asked questions which made it obvious that they knew little about tnuctipun, and that they could not ask questions of a inuctip. They didn't speak the tnuctipun language. They were desperately anxious for details about a tnuctpun top secret weapon. Obviously they were not allies of the tnuctipim. They must be enemies. In the Slaver War there had been, could be, no neutrals. He said, "Anne." "StiU here." "Don't ask questions, just follow orders. Our lives depend on it. See that kzin?" "Right. You sneak up on him from behind; and I'll hit him too." from behind. I'll hit him with my purse." "This is not funny. When I give the word, we're both going to spit at his ear." "You're right. That's not funny." "I'm in dead earnest. And don't forget to compensate for low gravity." . "How are you going to give the word with a mouthful of saliva?" "Just spit when I do. Okay?" Jason's shot brushed the kzin's furry scalp. Anne-Maiie's caught him square in the ear. The kzin came to his feet with a howl. Then, as both humans cleared their throats again, the kzin moved like Mghtning. The air stiffened suddenly about their heads. The kzin contemptuously returned to his crouch against a wall. It became very hard to breathe. Blinking was a slow, excruciating process. Talking was out of the question. Warm air, laden with CX)#, did not want to dissipate. It stayed before their faces, waiting to be inhaled again and again. The kzin watched them struggle. Jason forced his eyes closed. Blinking had become too painful. He tried to remember that he'd planned this; that it had worked perfectly. Their heads and bodies were now entirely enclosed by the police web. Now heres my plan, puppeteer ran east," said A Chuft-Captain. And he turned west. He didn't want to kill the puppeteer without knowing it. The weapon was hard and awkward in his hand. He was a little afraid of it, and a little ashamed of being afraid: a hangover from that awful moment when the weapon spoke. There were ghost legends among the kzinti. Some of the most fearsome spoke of captured weapons haunted by their dead owners. Nobles weren't supposed to be superstitious, not out loud. A computer that could learn new languages was logical. The only way to reach the setting for the matter conversion beam had been to ask the computer setting; and that was logical too. A matter conversion beam was a dangerous secret. Briefly, Qmft-Captain wondered about that. It seemed that for an honoraMe kzin every recent change was a change for the worse. The conquest of ipm biul ended when kzinti met honian. Then had come the puppeteers with their trade outposts; any kzin who attacked a puppeteer invariably found himself, not harmed physically, but mined financially. No kzin could fight power like that. Would the tnuctip weapon reverse these changes? There had been a time, between the discoveries of atomic power and the gravity polarizer, when it seemed the kzinti species would destroy itself in wars. Now the kzinti held many worlds, and the danger was past. But was it? A matter conversion beam... There is no turning away from knowledge. Haunted weapons... He stopped on a rise of permafrost some distance from the ship. By now half the sky was blood red. An arm of the hydrogen spiral was sweeping across the world, preparing to engulf it. Hours or days from now the arm would pass, moving outward on the wings of photon pressure, leaving the world with a faintly thicker atmosphere. But we'll be long gone by then, Chuft-Captain thought. Already ho was looking ahead to the problem of reaching Kzin. If human ships caught the Traitor's Claw entering Kzin's atmosphere, the kzinti would clearly be violating treaty mles. But they weren't likely to be caught, not if Flyer did everything right... "Chuft-Oaptain, this setting has no gunsight." IF "No? You're right, it doesn't." He considered. "Perhaps it was meant only for large targets. A world seen from close up. The explosion was fierce." "Or its accuracy may be low. Or its range. I wonder. Logically the tnuctpun should have included at least a pair of notches for sighting." Something's wrong. The danger instinct whispered in his ear. Superstition, he snarled, and he raised the weapon stiffly, aiming well above the horizon. "Let us find the answer," he said. I n this area of Cue Ball the ice had melted and refrozen. It was as flat as a calm lake. Nessus had stopped at the edge. He'd faced around, stopped again, held the pose for several minutes, then faced back and started across the flat, redinged ice. Muscles rippled beneath his pressure suit It wasn't as if he exped to help his human employees. They had gotten themselves into this. And be had neither weapons nor allies nor even stealth to aid him. A human infantryman could have crawled on his belly, but Nessus' legs weren't built that way. On a white plain with no cover he had to trot upright, bouncing gaily in the low gravity. His only weapon was his hind leg. Thinking that, he remembered the jarring impact as he planted his foot in the kzin's side. Two hundred and forty pounds of charging puppeteer applied over five square inches of clawed ace boot. The shock wave had jarred up threiigh thigh and hip and qnne, jerked at his skull and continued ong the necks to snap his teeth dxut with a sharp double Click. Like kiddng a mountain, a soft but solid moualain. The next instant he was ruiUMiig, really terrified for the first itime in his life. But behind him he kzin had vented a long whistling scream and folded tightly around hims... Nessus went on. He'd trelted across the frozen lake without seeing kzinti or kzinti ship. Now the ice was beginning to swell and dtp. He'd reached the periphery of the blast area. Now there was a touch of yellow light ahead. Small and faint, but unmistakably yeBow against the pink ice. Ship lights. He went on. He'd never know why. He'd never admit it to himself. Thock! Hind boot slamming solidly into hard meat. Whistling shriek of agony between sharp-filed carnivore teeth. He wanted to do it again. Nessus had the blood lust. He went up a rise, moving slowly, though his feet wanted to dance. He was weaponless, but his suit was a kind of defense. No projectile short of a fast meteorite could harm him. Like silicone plastic, the pressure suit was soft and malleable under gentle pressures -- such as walking -- but it instantly became rigid all over when something struck it. He topped the rise. T ihe ship lights might have come from the Court Jester, They didn't. Nessus saw the airlock opening, and he charged down the slope so the next rise hid him from view. The kzinti ship was down. Tliey must have landed with the gravity polarizer; otherwise he would have seen them. If they had then captured Jason on foot, he might still be dHve. He might not. The same went for Anne-Marie. Now what? The kzinti ship was beyond this next rise of ice. At least one kzin was outside. Were they looking for him? No, they'd hardly expect him here! He had reached the trough between the two swells. They were long and shallow and smooth, like waves near an ocean shoreline. The top of the swell behind Nessus suddenly sparkled with harsh bluewhite sunlight Nessus knew just what to do, and he did it instantly. No point in covering his cranial bulge with his necks; he'd only get his larynxes crushed. Ihe padding would protect his brain, or it wouldn't. He folded his legs under him and tucked his heads tight between his forelegs. He didn't have to think about it. The puppeteer's explosion reflex was no less a reflex for being learned in childhood. He saw the light; he curled into a ball, and the ground swell came. It batted him like a beach bs. His rigid, form-fitting shell retained his shape. It could not prevent the ground swell from slamming him away, nor his brain from jarring under its thick skull and its extra padding. X H e woke on his back with his legs in the air. There was a tingly ache along his right side and on the right sides of his necks and legs. Half his body surface would be one bruise tomorrow. The ground still heaved; he must have been unconscious for only a moment. He clambered shakily to his feet. The claws were an enormous help on the ice. He shook himself once, then started up the rise. Suddenly and silently the kzinti ship topped the rise. A quarter of a mile down the swell it slid gracefully into space in a spray of ice. It was rotating on its axis, and Nessus could see that one side was red hot. It skimmed through the nearvacuum above the trough, seeming to drift rather than fall. It hit solidly on the shallow far rise and plowed to a stop. Still upright. Steam began to surround it as it sank into melting ice. Nessus approached without fear. Surely any kzin inside was dead, and any human too. But could he get in? The outer airlock door was missing, ripped from its hinges. The inner door must have been bent, for it leaked a thin fog from the edges. Nessus pushed the Cycle button and waited. The door didn't move. IF Nessus cast an eye aroand the airlock. There mast be teUites to sense whether the ooiter door was closed and whether there was pressure in the lock. There was one, a sensitized surface in the maimed outer doorway. Nessus pushed it down with his mouth. Air sprayed into the enclosure, turned to fog and blew away. Nessus' other head was casting about for a pressure sensor. He found it next to the air outlet. He swung alongside it and leaned against it so that his suit trapped the air. He leaned into the pressure. The inner door swung open. Nessus fought to maintain his position against the roaring wind. When the door was fully open he dodged inside. The door slanuned just behind him. Now. What had happened here? The kzinti lifesystem was a howling hurricane of air replacing what he'd let out. Nessus poked into the kitchen, the control section and two privacy booths without seeing anything. He moved down the hall and looked into what he remembered would be the interrogation room. Perhaps here... He' froze. Anne-Marie and Jason were in the police web. Obviously; because both were standing and both were unconscious. They appeared undamaged. But the kzini Nessus felt the world swim. His heads felt lighter than air. He'd been through a lot... He turned his eyes away. It occurred to him that the humans must be unconscious from the lack of oxygen. The police web must surround them completely, even to their heads. Otherwise the shock would have tom their heads off. Nessus forced himself to imove to the police web. He kept his eyes resolutely away from the kzm. Their were the controls, as that the power switch? He tried it The humans drifted gracefully to the floor. Done. And Nessus found his eyes creeping back to the kzin. He couldn't look away. The carnivore had struck like a wet snowball thrown with awful force. He was a foot up the wall, and he was all spread out on a border of splashed circulatory fluid, and he stuck... Nessus fainted. He woke up, still standing because of the normal kne of his relaxed muscles, to find AnneMarie shaking him gently and trying to talk to him. #T'm worried about him," said X Anne-Marie. Jason turned away from the Jester's control panel. "He can get treatment on Jinx. There are puppeteers in Sirius Mater." "That's still a week away. Isn't there anything we can do for him? He spends all his time in his rem. It must be awful to be manicdepressive." She was rubbing the stump where the emergency doc had amputated her arm -- a gesture Jason hated. It roused guilt feelings. But she'd get a new arm on Jinx. "I hate to teU you," he said, "but Nessus isn't in a depressive stage. He stays in his room because he's avcMding us." "Us?" "Yah. I think so." "But Jay! Vsr "Don't take it personal, Anne. We're a symbol." He lowered his head to formulate words. "Look at it this way. You remember when Nessus kicked the kzin?" "Sure. It was beautiful." "And you probably know he was nerving himself to fire oh the kzinti ship if I gave him the tnuctipun weapKn. Finally, you know that he came voluntarily to the kzinti ship. I think he was going to fight them if he got the chance. He knew they'd captured me, and he knew they had the weapon. He was ready to fight." "Good for him. But Jay -- " "Damnit, honey, it wasrCt good for him. For him, it was purest evil. Cowardice is moral for puppeteers. He was violating everything he'd ever learned!" "You mean he's ashamed of himself?" "That's part of it. But there's more. It was the way we acted when we wce up. "You remember how it was? Nessus was standing and looking at what was left of the kzin pilot You had to shake him a few times before he noticed. Then what did he find out? I, Jason Papandreou, who had been his friend, had planned the whole thing. I had known that the boss kzin and the Slaver expert were walking to their deaths, because the computer form of the weapon had given them the selfdestruct setting and told them it was the matter conversion beam. I knew that, ;and I let them walk out and blow themselves to smithereens. I tricked the pilot into putting our heads in the police web, but I left him outside to die. And I was proud of it! And you were proud of me! "Now do you get it?" "No. And I'm still proud of you." "Nessus isn't. Nessus knows that we, whom he probably thought of as funny-looking puppeteers -- you may remember we were thinking of him as almost human -- he knows we committed a horrible crime. Worse, it was a crime he was thinking of committing himself. So he's transferred his shame to us. He's ashamed of us, and he doesn't want to see us." "How far to Jinx?" "A week." "No way to hurry? "I never heard of one."      IF IF  Short SUry Landing on the strange planet, they prayed at once to their gods. But to what gods did the natives pray? G regory Shawn strained his neck upward at the two glaring apricots that were the suns of V-Planet#. The sands beneath him had warmed his legs until they glistened with streams of sweat, and the weak wind only managed to pack more hot air up under his heavy robe. Pulling at the cloth lying against his chest, he let a trickle of air pass between Ids skin and the robe. Further arm movement was impossible, as the other colonists pressed in tightly against him, forming an oval of sun-and-sand roughened flesh in the middle of the gorge. His wife moved at his side, but remained silent. From where he stood he could see only a small curve of the starship's port side. Like the ragged boulders and cliffs, the starship hull wavered liquidly in the heat. Soon even the people beside him began to waver, but the illusion passed when the group began to sing: for the pain of our new world. For tho pain of our new skies. For the evil which from our Day Over and around vs lies, Meah-Trin, to Thee we raise This our hymn of painful days. In the terror of each hour. Of the day and of the night. Reck and swamp, and free and flower. Suns and moons and stars of fright, Meah-Trin, to Thee we pray: Save vs from these painful days The path back to die tents was sand, then rock and sand, then rock, then rock and clay, as the tents and pungent swamp barbed with thin cattails came into sight. His wife clendhed a fold of his robe in her hand, and they cleared the final grade before the colony tents. The rocky hills behind the tents were smeared with the orange-red of iron deposits; the swamp water reflected the saffron sky; the ground was a dusty yellow-orange. The only cool colors dotting his vision were the triangular darknesses of the tent entrances. Gregory led his wife to the second line of tents, entered his own tent, and seated himself before a rough rock slab. Shuffling through the black script which covered a dozen neat opaque gray cellophane sheets, he found the unused sheets and began writing with a small pen: "Dear Meah-Trin, Beloved TwinGods-as-One, Gods of the Earth, of Man's New Worlds, of the Uncharted Universe: Today -- one week after the Day of Our Arrival -- we sang the new hymn as we stood on the sands of the Gorge of Our Arrival. It is not a thankful hymn. There is little to be thankful for in our colony on this rock-andswamp planet of sister suns. "Until today we could not sing the new hymn. No one would sing it, because Jonathan would not sing it. Jonathan would not sing it, because his wife, ebony-haired Ruthana, would not sing it. Ruthana said diat since yellow-skinned Darby changed the old hymn to the new three days ago, the new hymn was a distortion of the traditional hymn we brought with us, and should not be sung. "But two nights ago a heavyscaled leech from the swamp cattails crawled into Jonathan's tent and ate into Ruthana's throat and crawled into her belly. Jonathan day, so everyone sang the hymn today. "Our hearts ache because we think and dream ominous visions of our children and our children's children having to grow to adulthood in a world of constant pain. We cannot understand You in this new world of pain, and we search for Your guiding hand in aid." T he iron tinge of the rocks was pale now in the moonlight, and invisible in places under the inky shadows cast by crags and crevasses. The darkness of the cave opemng would normally have been appealing, but tonight hunger and fatigue added to apprehension made the animal reluctant to enter his lair. Four familiar pairs of eyes moved, glinted, and moved again inside the cave. The animal's hooves clacked and echoed, as it pawed hesitatingly on the rock before the cave. With head upturned toward the star-spangled tar of the night sky and monkeyish forehead shining under the moon's light, the animal snapped its needlepoint teeth in a shrill chatter and gestured with humanoid hands at the night: "O Gods of Stink-water and hardIF ground and dark and light -- I thank you for my world of warmmate and small-young. But please make the world better by making meat easier to find. We all have trouble finding meat. I have split a hoof on the high-rocks looking for the small-furry-meat that is sometimes there, but there is none there. My mate and I have three smallyoung, and she will be angry with me for not bringing her four weights of meat. O Gods, oiu: young will think of you thankfully if they have enough meat for their bellies. They, too, dll have mates and young soon, and their small-young will think of you thankfully if you make meat more plentiful. If you make stink-water come closer to our home-cave maybe meat will come with it. We would all be thankful. 'T have only four legs and two arms to search and find meat with, and they are tired arms and legs." Meah-Trin, Gods of AH: JL We lift our voices in song twice a week now. It is good to join in prayer and hymns, but it is difficult each time to witness another of us missing or pained by the new world. "Darkbearded SaHamiah was missing at the last hymnal meeting. His wife, golden-haired Lena, tells us that five days ago he was searching for wood to burn and he fell on a rock near the swamp and cut and broke a lower bone of his right leg. She says that yesterday she cleaned his leg, which was running with pus, and that in the pus were maggots. She says that last nigjht a finger-sized maggot crawled from the wound in Sallamiah's leg, and soft pieces of bone ran out with the purulence. She says that SaHamiah passed away in the night, and a hundred maggots crawled on his chest when she went to weep on him. "Pale Robert and curlynhaLr Cynthia passed away two weeks ago. Their faces were bloated, but there were no maggots. Four others with whom I was not weH acquainted were missing from the hymnal meeting last week. Two were given fiery funerals because of the maggots in their bodies. "Four days ago slant-eyed Daniel struck his head on a wood piling sunk for the swamp pier, and his skull went soft in three days, and the top of his mouth sagged in and choked him. His wife passed away from the maggots two weeks ago. "At the last hymnal meeting longhaired Peter was in great pain. His right cheek was peeling from the bone in hard pieces, like sun-baked mud. A week ago Peter volunteered to eat some of the food-stuffs of the swamp. He offered a small green fruit to Elizabeth and me, but we refrained from tasting it. I am thankful that we did, since the swamp plant might be the cause of Peter's disease or poisoning. The corn, potatoes and beans we brought with us grow well enough in the ground of the new planet, and they suffice as our diet. "We stiH must pray for understanding of Your ways in this new world of pain. There ore new and different pains each day for each f us    pain in not understanding You. # ( Gods of the stink-water and iV hard-ground and dark and light and meat -- My tired legs thank you, my mate thanks you, and our small-young thank you because you have made meat easier to find, even without moving the stink-water closer to our home-cave. You have given us a new kind of meat we have never seen before, which stays near the stinkwater and lives in small and weak home-caves out in the suns, and which has only two legs so that it cannot escape when I want to catch it and take it to my warm-mate and small-young. My four legs are thankful, even though the new meat is almost two great for them to lift. Even the small female of the new meat is almost one weight herself." #Toar Meah-Trin, Gods of AU: U Very few of us wish to lift our voices in the old thankful hymns we brought with us, so Darby changed four more of the old hymns to new hymns. But Darby, too, was missing at the last hymnal meeting. "Pepper-haired Samson, Darby's son, could not bury Darby because his bones and flesh were on orangish mud. We had to hum his body in his tent. Samson went to live with slender Patricia, whose husband did not return from the swamp five days ago. "Although Samson and Patricia have not wed, it was decided that there was mb sin in their living under the same tent, (because they know Your Rules Vitae and are good people. "Long-boned Thomas will he the one who will change more hymns for us in these times of pain. His wife, red-haired Barbara, passed away at the talons of the Devil last night. Her thigh was found near their tent. Thomas could find no other remains of her body, except for her life-blood spread out in the tent and among the rocks. "I spoke to Thomas last night, and he blasphemed, and I was ashamed in his presence. Although he can find no imderstanding of Your ways, he will be the one who vill change more hymns fbr us, since he knows well the words of our hearts and can put them to the old music. "Dear Meah-Trin, I'm afraid for Elizabeth, my wife. I have not been hint in this new world except through the pains and injuries of my friends. Four of them have been so pained by this new world that they blaspheme in front of us all. I will never blaspheme against you, even if Elizabeth is hurt, hut I'm afraid that my mind and heart would not be e same after it -- because, though I have the power to witness the sorrows of others, I might not have the power to bear my sorrow's at Elizabeth's pain. "I cannot -- we all cannot -- find understanding of Your ways." # Gods of the stink-water and hard-ground and moons and suns -- we are thankful for the meat IF you have sent us, but my arm aches where the two-legged meat attacked me. I can not bring meat to my mate and small-young if I do not have my arms to carry the meat with." # #Tear Meah-Trin, Gods of All:L Tonight must be our Night of judgment, we fear. Seven more of us have passed away the last few days. Three tents bum, and maggots and muddy flesh and leeches burn in them. "Azure-eyed Sophia lost her hand to the talons of the Devil early tonight. The Devil was occupying a form as dark as Hell. Its shape was that of a dog -- four legs and a torso -- and that of an ape -- stomadi, chest, arms and head. It was shorter in stature than a man, but probably of the same weit; its skin shovm in the moonlight like a moist bat-skin, and its arms and legs were thin and sinewy, and its feet sounded as it esca as if they were hooved. "The Devil came to Sophia in her tent, while her husband, bushyhaired Edward, was speaking with me about a fence to be buik around the tent. The Devil grabbed her arm, and she cried out for You to save her, and Edward and I ran to her. Edward fell upon the Devil and was taken by the long fingers of the Devil, and his head was twisted and blood ran from his mouth and his eyes were taken from his head 'by the Devil's talons. The Devil took Sophia's hand from her arm and held it in his mouth and carried the body of Edward away. I damned the Devil back to Hell and sent it away with a blow from a shovel on its left arm, but it did not free Edward from its grasp. The Devil's life-blood ran greasy as it returned to its kingdom. "We cannot imderstand how we have sinned so greatly that the Devil may visit us unrestrained by Your hands. Though the human imperfections in us fight patience, we still try to remain patient and pray for understanding." C#jear Meah-Trin, Gods of All: U We were a hundred when we descended from the skies into the Gorge of Our Arrival, and now we are fifty imder the damned moons of the new world's night. "It was not the Devil that took Thomas' wife and visited Sophia and took her husband, but rather it was only one of many of the Devil's helpers. Five of us saw demons of the same centaurean form last night, in different places, at different times. Perhaps there are a hundred of these helpers around, day and night. "Dear Meah-Trin, I am very afraid for Elizabeth. "Today stocky Morgan cried out in blasphemy that we were blind, that we were counseled by the Devil when we decided to leave Earth and come to this hell of sister sims. Morgan screamed that there are no Gods here. Then he began to weep, and all of us believed that You had spoken to him and 'that he was repenting with sacred tears for his blasphemy. But dien in the evening Morgan went to the swamp mud ami laugtied in madjiess and sank himself into the dairkness. "I pray that You forgive us our sins, of which we are so ignorant, and that You enlighten us as to our sins so that we ocnight know them and understand this new world is one of pain and punishment to us." # # ear Meah-Trin, Gods of All: Scar-faced Bamal told me today that small flames are bom from the ground near the tents. He said that many times he has watched a small crevasse in the ground and seen a fire bom in it. Stvrp-minded James thinks that it might be natural gas igniting upon striking the air, but most of us must believe that it is die Devil's doing. Swamp wood was used to build a fence around the tents, but still the Devil's demons have taken nine more of us; and the tents smeU of rotting blood, and small rodents chew and suck the drying blood at night if it is not buried under a layer of dirt. "We wait and pray for Your word, but many of our minds are imprisoned by the pains of our bodies and hearts and are moulded into confusion by the pains of this new world." # Gods of the moons and suns and stinkater and hardground and dark and light -- the new meat brings happiness to our stomachs, but I am fed with fear for my waim-mate and small-young. I can smell the fresh blood of one of us -- a young buck -- near the living grounds of the new meat. O Gods, I cannot understand this new meat, and I have begun fearing." #T Meah-Trin: A Devil's JL helper was killed today near the fence by four of the remaining thirty of us. I was one of the many who cut at it a hundred times with hatred in my heart, and who threw its greasy life-blood onto the rocks, and who took its bat-skin and tied it to a pole. We repented for our pagan feelings and actions later, but we have begun to sin in innumerable ways without repentence, for our minds are tortured and raw, and blind to the words we once knew from You. "There has not been a meeting in two weeks. There are only four of us who still live with our respive husbands and wives. I will attempt the organizaitioii of a hymnal meeting so that we may lift our voices to You. But long-boned Thomas sleeps in a tent with two women now, and does not come out except to blaspheme against You and to hei gather the crops of vegetables we now depend on. "We pray for some word from You, but many of us fear that there was some truth in stocky Morgan's words." # Gods of the dark and light and meat -- I cannot be thankful today. My warm-mate and small-young were attacked and killed in our home-cave by the new meat you sent. O Gods, I will find another mate and young, but these were my first. I do not feel like IF eating any more of the new meat yon sent. I do not understand why you send us meat that attacks us. "I saw the new meat running among our home-caves and saw them kill four bucks. I will find a new mate, and we will come to be happy in time, hut I do not understand you, O Gods." tt'rxear Meah-Trin: I have re-L framed from praying to You for three weeks, because one of the Devil's helpers carried Elizabeth away and left only her foot with three toes remaining. I loved Elizabeth, but the grief has been lessened by time so that I am now able to pray to You again. I am now living in a tent with azure-eyed Sophia, whose hand is healing fairly well. I feel that perhaps understanding of You in this new world will come to all of us soon. "We moved our camp to a place where only a few fires can continue to singe our legs and tents. Sharpminded James discovered a herb that can be ground up and spinkled on us and in the tents to keep the maggots and leeches away. The Devil's helpers have not returned, because twelve men of our colony took shovels and torches and found the demons in their lairs among the rocks and killed them and brought back the skins of forty-eight of them. There were three different colors of skins, seeming to be according to the demons' ages. I have a medium-sized bluish skin hanging over the entrance to our tent. "I believe that understanding of You will come soon, because new things are taking place in us these days. Long-boned Thomas came from his tent of three women and told us of the things he had learned from You in his dreams. He took a torch from the fire that is born from the ground and burnt his hand before our eyes, and his women kissed his hand, and Thomas cried out that it was wonderful to feel the fire and to know that he lived in the new world. One of his women took the stinging cattails that grow in the swamp and whipped her face with them, and then she cried out to You that it was good to feel the sting ahd to know that she had to face to feel and eyes to see the new world." # # ear Meah-Trin: Tall, long-L boned Thomas talked to all of us today about the New Rules Vitae You gave him while he was sleeping. He cried out to us that You have bidden us Feel Fire, Feel Sting, Feel Blood, Feel Cold, and the all important rule. Feel AM the Pain of the New World, because this new world You have given us is a world of pain. "Thomas was glorious today. He no longer sorrows for Barbara. "Many of us did not believe in the New Rules Vitae when they first heard them. So Thomas brought forth his four women, and one was without clothing, and all of us were ashamed. Thomas made her lie down on a bed of stinging cattails, and she cried out and tears ran from her eyes. She cried out how wonderful her pain was, and that You were speaking to her with wonderful words as she felt the pain, and that all of us would hear and know You once again if we obeyed the New Rules of the New World. 'Today long-boned leader Thomas and three other men took a small live Devil's helper -- the first one we have seen since we placed the skins on poles like flags -- and tied its jaw shut and dulled its talons wi stone, and took Belinda, wife of demon-killer Jason, and tied the beast to her side. The demon drew blood with its hooves, and e cried out thanksgiving to You. The demon nuzzled its jaws into her ribs with hellish ferocity, tugging at its bonds and desiring to taste her lifeblood, and to condemn her soul to Hell. Because of the muzzle, Belinda's life-blood was not blackened in the greaseit of the demon's belly, and her spirit was cleansed and the Devil's wish was thwarted. "Azure-yed, soft-voiced Sophia wants to hear and know You, as all of # do now, and she eame to me this morning to say that we should soon be wed in the New World, under the New Rules Vitae. So we will be wed tomoirow at the hymnal meeting. 'Tomorrow, when Thomas marries us with the stinging cattails and heated demon's bone and maggots, we will all sing the New Hynm of Thomas the Prophet: Gods of All, fo Thee we raise Our voice in love of painful days. "Tomorrow will be a glorious meeting, because five of us will take the last steps toward becoming One with You. As You instructed Thomas to have us do, we have gathered thick swamp wood beams to form crosses and have made nails from the metal of our shovels. "Tomorrow in the sun, high above the ground, we will Feel Pain. We have no fear diat the others will let us die, for they know that our children have yet to be bom and nurtured by this New World of Pain. After all, we came to this world in the beginning for the sake of our children. They will grow to know You and to love this Nw r I Don't miss the new Worlds of Tomorrow! I February issue of Worlds of Tomorrow on sale now! IF Earth's gallant diplomats were all up in the air -- and only Retief could bring them down! A s Second Secretary of Embassy Jame Retief stepped from die lighter which had delivered the Terran Mission to the close-cropped turquoise sward of the planet Zoon, a rabbit-sized creature upholstered in deep blue-violet angora bounded into view from behind an upthrust slab of scarlet granite. It sat on its oddly-arranged haunches a few yards from the newcomers, twitching an assortment of members as though testing the air for a clue to their cnigin. First Secretary Magnan's arrow face registered apprehension as a second furry animal, this one a yard-wide sphere of indigo fuzz, came hopping around the prow of the vessel. "Do you suppose they bite?" "They're obviously grass-eaters," Colonel Smartfinger, the military attache, stated firmly. "Probably naake most affectionate pets. Here, ah, kitty, kitty." He snapped his fmgers and whistled. More bunnies appeared. "Ah -- Colonel." The agricultural attache touched bis sleeve. "If I'm not mistaken, those are immature specimens of the planet's dominant life form!" ii'n'h?" Oldtrick pricked up his ears. "These animals? Impossible!" "They look just like the highresolution photos the Sneak-andpeek teams took. My, aren't there a lot of them!" "Well, possibly this is a sort of playground for them. Cute little fellows." Oldtrick paused to kick one which had opened surprising jaws for a nip at his ankle. "That's the worst of these cra operations." The economic officer shied as a Terrier-sized fur-bearer darted in close and crunched a shiny plastic button from the cuff of his mauve, late nndnKrning, semi-informal hip-huggers. "Oiae never knows just what one may 'be getting into." "Oh-oh." Magnan nudged Retief as a technician bustled from the lock, heavy-laden. "Here comes the classified equipment the ambassador's been sitting on since we left Sector HQ." "Ah!" Ambassador Oldtrick rubbed his small, well manicured hands briskly togeer, lifted an article resembling a Mae West life jacket from the stack offered. "Here, gentlemen, is my personal contribution to, ahem, high-levcl negotiations!" He smiled proudly and slipped his arms through a loop of woven plastic. "Onean, selfcontained, power-boosted aerial lift units," he announced. "With these, gentlemen, we will confront the elusive Zooner on his home ground!" "But -- the post report said the Zooners are a sort of animated blimp!" the Information Officer protested. "Only a few of them have been seen, and those were cruising at high altitude! Surely we're not going after themV "It was inevitable, gentlemen." Oldtrick winced as the technician tugged the harness strap tight across his narrow chest. "Sooner or later man was 'bound to encounter lightertban-air intelligence -- a confrontation for which we of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne are eminently well qualified!" "But, your excellency," First Secretary Magnan spoke up. "Couldn't we have arranged to confront these, er, gaseous brains here on solid land?" iC'VTonsense, Magnan! Give up this superb opportunity to display the adaptability of the trained diplomat? Since these beings dwell among the clouds ef their IF aative world, what more convincing evidence of good will could we display than to meet them on their own grounds, so to speak?" "Of course," the corpulent Political Officer put in, "we aren't actually sure there's anyone up there." He squinted nervously up at the lacy mass of land-coral that reached into the Zoonian sky, its lofty pinnacles brushing a seventhousand-foot stratum of cumulonimbus. "That's where we'll steal a march on certain laggards," Oldtrick stated imperhirbably. 'The survey photos clearly show the details of a charming aerial city nestled on the reef. Picture the spectacle, gentlemen, when the Mission descends on them from the blue empyrean to open a new era of Terran-Zoon relations!" "Yes -- a striking mis en scene indeed, as your Excellency points out." The economic officer's cheek gave a nervous twitch. "But what if something goes wrong with the apparatus? The steering mechanism, for example, appears a trifle insubstantial -- " "These devices were designed and constructed under my personal supervision, Chester," the ambassador cut him off coolly. "However," he continued, "don't allow that circumstance to prevent you fiom pointing out any conceptual flaws you may have detected," "A marvel of lightweight ingenunity," ithe economic officer said hastily. "I only meant... " "Chester's point was just that maybe some of us ought to wait here. Mr. Ambassador," the military attache said. "In case any, ah, late dispatches come in from Sector, or something. Much as I'll hate to miss participating, I volunteer -- " "Kindly rebuckie your harness. Colonel," Oldtrick said through thinned lips. "I wouldn't dream of allowing you to make the sacrifice." "Good Lord, Retief," Magnan said in a hoarse whisper behind his hand. "Do you suppose these little tiny things will actually work? And does he really mean..." Magnan's voice trailed off as he stared up into the bottomless sky. "He really means," Retief confirmed. "As for his Excellency's invention, I suppose diat given a largediameter, low-density planet with a standard mass of # and a surface G of .#, plus an atmospheric pressure of # P. S. I. and a super-light gas -- it's possible." "I was afraid of that," Magnan muttered. "I don't suppose that if we all joined together and took a firm line... ?" "Might be a savings at that," Retief nodded judiciously. "The whole staff could be court-martialed as a group." "... and now," Ambassador Oldtrick's reedy voice paused impressively as he settled his iberet firmly in place. "If you're ready, gentlemen -- inflate your gasbags!" A sharp hissing started up as a dozen petcocks opened as one. Bright-colored plastic bubbles inflated with sharp popping sounds above the shoulders of the Terran diplomats. The ambassador gave a little spring and bounded high above the heads of his staff, where he hung, supported by the balloon, assisted by a softly snorting battery of air jets buckled across his hips. Colonel Smartfinger, a large bony man, gave a half-hearted leap, fell back, his toes groping for contact as a gust of air bumbled him across the ground. Magnan, lighter than the rest, made a creditable spring and rose to dangle beside the chief of mission. Retief adj-usted his buoyancy indicator carefully, jumped off as the rest of the staff scrambled to avoid the questionable distinction of being the last man airborne. "Capital, gentlemen!" Oldtrick beamed at the others as they drifted in a ragged row, roped together like alpinists, five yards above the surface. "I trust each of you is ready to savor the thrill of breaking new ground!" "An unfortunate turn of phrase," Magnan quavered, looking down at the rocky outcropping below. The grassy plain on which the lighter had deposited the mission stretched away to the horizon, interrupted only by the upthrusting coral reefs dotted across it like lonely castles in the Daliesque desert and a distant smudge of smoky green. "And now -- onward to what I hope I may, without charges of undue jocularity, term a new high in diplomacy," Oldtrick cried. He advanced his jet control fever and lifted skyward, trailed by the members of his staff. II F ive hundred feet aloft, Magnan clutched the arm of Retief, occupying the adjacent position in the line. "The lighter is lifting off!" He pointed to the slim shape of the tiny Corps vessel, drifting upward from the sands below. "It's abandoning us!" "A mark of the ambassador's confidence that we'll meet with a hospitable reception at the hands of the Zooners," Retief pointed out. "Frankly, I'm at a loss to understand Sector's eagerness to accredit a mission to this wasteland." Magnan raised his voice above the whistling of the sharp wind and the polyphonous huffing of the jato units. "Retief, you seem to have a way of picking up odd bits of information. Any idea what's behind it?" "According to a usually reliable source, the Groaci have their eyes on Zoon -- all five of them. Naturally, if they're interested, the Corps has to beat them to it." "Aha!" Magnan looked wise. "They must know something. By the way," he edged closer. "Who told you? The ambassador? The undersecretary?" "Better than that; the bartender at the departmental snackbar." "Well, I daresay our five-eyed friends will receive a sharp surprise when they arrive to find us already on a cordial basis with the locals. Unorthodox though Ambassador Oldtrick's technique may be. I'm forced to concede that it apIF pears the only way we could have approached these Zooners." He craned upward at the fanciful formation of many-fingered rock past which they were rising. "Odd that none of them have sallied forth to greet us." Relief followed his gaze. "We still have six thousand feet to go," he said. "I suppose we'll find a suitable reception waiting at the top." H alf an hour later, Ambassador Oldtrick in the lead, the party soared above the final rampart to look down on a wonderland of rose and pink violet coral, an intricacy of spires, tunnels, bridges, grottos, turrets, caves, avenues, as complex and delicately fragile as spun sugar. "Carefully, now, gentlemen." Oldtrick twiddled his jato control, dropped in to a gentle landing on a graceful arch spanning a cleft full of luminous gloom produced by the filtration of light through the translucent construction. His staff settled in nearby, gazing with awe at the minarets rising all around them. The ambassador, having twisted a knob to deflate his gasbag and laid aside his flying harness, was frowning as he looked about the silent prospect. "I wonder where the inhabitants have betaken themselves?" He lifted a finger, and six eager underlings sprang to his side. "Apparently the natives are a trifle shy, gentlemen," he stated. "Nose around a bit. Look friendly. And avoid poking into any possibly taboo areas such as temples and public comfort stations." Leaving their deflated gasbags heaped near their point of anival, the Terrans set about peering into caverns and clambering up to ga along twisting alleyways wisding among silent coral palaces. Retief followed a narrow path atop a ridge which curved upward to a point of vantage. Magnan trailed, mopping at his face with a scented tissue. "Apparently no one's at home," he puffed, coming up to the tiny platform from which Relief surveyed the prospect spread bdow. "A trifle disconcerting, I must say. I wonder what sort of arrangements have been laid on for feeding and housing us?" "Another odd thing," Relief said. "No empty beer bottles, tin cans, old newspapers, or fruit rinds. In fact, no signs of haibitation at aH." "It rather appears we've been stood up," the economic officer said indignantly. "Such cheek -- and from a pack of animated intangibles, at thatl" "It's my opinion the town's ibeen evacuated," the political officer said in the keen tones of one delivering an incisive analysis of a omnplex situation. "We may as well leave." "Nonsense!" Oldtrick snapped. "Do you expect me to trot back to Sector and announce that I can't find the government to which I'm accredited?" #reat heavens!" Magnan blinked at a lone dark cloud drifting ominously closer under fhe high overcast. "I thout I sensed something impending. Uh, Mr. Ambassador!" he called, startiiig back down. At that moment, a cry from an adjacent cavern focused  eyes on the military attache, emerging with a short length of what appeared to be tarred rope, charred at one end. "Signs of life, Your Excellancy!" he announced. "A dope-stick butt!" He sniffed it. "Freshly smoked. "Dope-sticks! Nonsense!' Oldtrick prodded the exhibit with a stubby forefinger. "I'm sure the Zooners are far too insubstantial to indulge in such vices." "Ah, Mr. Ambassador," Magnan called. "I suggest we all select a nice dry cave and creep inside, out of the .weather -- " "Cave? Creep? Weather? What weather?" Oldtrick rounded on the First Secretary as he came up. "I'm here to establish diplomatic relations with a newly discovered race, not set up housekeeping!" "riat weather," Magnan said stiffly, pointing at the giant cloud sweeping swiftly down on them at a level which threatened to shroud the party in a fog in a matter of minutes. "Eh? Oh." Oldtrick stared at the approadiing thunderhead. "Yes, well, I was about to suggest we seek shelter. "What about the dope-stick?" The colonel tried to recapture the limelight. "We hadn't finished looking at my dope-stick when Magnan came along with his cloud." "My cloud is of considerably more urgency than your dope-stick. Colonel," Magnan said softly. "Particulaily since, as his excellency has pointed out, your little find couldn't possibly be the property of the Zooners." "Ha! WeU if it isn't the property of the Zooners, then ose is it?" The officer looked at the butt suspiciously, passed it around. Relief glanced at it, sniffed it. "I believe you'll find this to be Groaci manufacture. Colonel," he said. # #TThat?" Oldtrick clapped a VV hand to his forehead. "Impossible! Why, I myself hardly know -- that is, they couldn't -- mean to say, drat it, the location of this world is Utter Top Secret!" "Ahem." Magnan glanced up complacently at his cloud now a battle-ship-sized shape only a few hundred feet distant. "I wonder if it mightn't be as well to hurry along now before we find ourselves drenched." "Good Lord!" The political officer stared at the gray-black mass as it moved across the hazy sun, blotting it out like an eclipse. In the sudden shadow, the wind was abruptly chill. The cloud was above the far edge of the reef now; as they watched, it dropped lower, brushed across a projecting digit of stone with a dry squee!, sent a shower of tiny rock fragments showering down. Magnan jumped and blinked his eyes hard, twice. "Did you see... ? Did  see... ?" Dropping lower, the cloud sailed between two lofty minarets, scraped across a lower tower topped with a series of sharp spikes. There was a ripping sound, a crunch of stone. IF a sharp powU a blattering noise of escaping gas. A distinct odor of rubberized canvas floated across to the diplomats, borne by the brisk breeze. "Ye Gods!" The military attache shouted. "That's no cloud! It's a Trojan horse! A dirigible in camouflage! A trick!" He cut off and turned to run as the foundering four-acre balloon swung, canted at a sharp angle, and thundered down amid gratings and crunchings, crumbling bridges, snapping off slender towers, settling in to blanket the landscape like a collapsed circus tent. A small, agile creature in a flared helmet and a black hip-cloak appeared at its edge, wading across the deflated folds of the counterfeit cloud, cradling a formidable blast gun in its arms. Others followed, leaping down and scampering for strategic positions on the high ground surrounding the Terrans. ' "Groaci shock troops!" the Military Attache shouted. "Run for your lives!" He dashed for the concealment of a shadowy canyon; a blast from a Groaci gun sent a cloud of coral chips after him. Retief, from a position in the lee of a buttress of rocks, saw half a dozen of the Terrans skid to a halt at the report, put up their hands as the invaders swarmed around them, hissing soft Groaci sibilants. Three more Terrans, attempting flight, were captured within fifty feet, prodded back at gunpoint. A moment later a sharp oof! and a burst of military expletives announced the surrender of Colonel Smartfinger. Retief made his way around a rock spire, spotted Ambassador Oldtrick being routed from his hiding place behind a cactusshaped outcropping. ClXTell, fancy meeting you VV here, Hubert." A slightly built, splendidly dressed Groaci strolled forward, puffing at a dopestick held in silver tongs. "I regret to submit you to the indignity of being trussed up like a Gerp-fowl in plucking season, but what can one expect when one commits an aggravated trespass, eh?" Trespass? I'm here in good faith as Terran envoy to Zoon!" Oldtrick sputtered. "S here. Ambassador Shish, this is an outrage! I demand you order these bandits to release me and my staff at once! Do you understand?' "Field Marshal Shish, if you please, Hubert," Shish whispered. 'These are a duly constituted constabulary. If you annoy me, I may just order them to exercise the full rigor of the law which you have so airily disregarded!" "What law?" Your confounded dacoits have assaulted peaceful diplomats in peaceful pursuit of their duties!" "Interplanetary law, my dear sir," Shish hissed. "That section dealing with territorial claims to uninhabited planets." "But -- but the Zooners inhabit Zoon!" "So? An exhaustive search of the entire planetary surface by our Scouting Service failed to turn up any evidence of intelligent habitation." "Surface? But the Zooners don't occupy the surface!" "Exactly. Therefore we have assumed ownership. Now, about reparations and damages in connection with your release. I should about right -- paid directly to me, of course, as Planetary Military Governor, pro tern" hard. "But... but... see here!" He fixed Shish with a desperate eye. "What is it you fellows are after? This isn't the kind of sandydry real estate you Groaci prefer -- and the world has no known economic or strategic value." "Hmmm." Shish flicked his dopestick butt aside. "No harm in tellIF ing you, I suppose. We intend to gather a crop." "Crop? There's nothing growing here but blue grass and land coral I" # #T#rong again, Hubert. The VV crop that interests us is this..." He fingered the edge of his shaggy violet cape. "A luxury fur, light, colorful, nonallergic." He lowered his voice and leered with three eyes. "And with reportedly fabulous aphrodisiac effects; and of it, leaping about the landscape below, free for the harvesting!" "But surely you jest, sir! Those are -- " There was a sudden flurry as one of the Terrans broke free and dashed for a cave. The Groaci constabulary gave chase. Shish made an annoyed sound and hurried away to oversee the recapture. Oldtrick, left momentarily alone, eyed the flying harnesses lying in a heap ten yards from him. He took a deep breath, darted forward, snatched up a harness. As he turned to sprint for cover, a breathy cry announced his discovery. Desperately, the chief of mission struggled into his straps as he ran, twisted the valve, fir his jato units and shot into the air above the heads of a pair of fleet-footed aliens who had been about to lay him by the heels. He passed over Reliefs head at an altitude of twenty feet, driven smartly by the brisk breeze. Relief ducked his head, hugged the shadows as Groaci feet pounded past at close range, pursuing the fleeting Terran. Relief saw half a dozen marksmen taking aim at the airborne diplomat as the wind swept him out over the reefs edge Shots rang. There was a sharp report as a round pierced the gasibag. With a despairing wail, the Ambassador sank swiftly out of sight. Relief rolled to his feet, ran to the pile of flight harnesses, grabbed up two, whirled and sprinted for the edge over which Oldtrick had vanished. Two Groaci, turning to confront the new menace descending on their rear, were bowled aside by Reliefs rush. Another sprang to intercept him, bringing his gun around. Relief caught the barrel in full stride, swung the gun with its owner still clinging desperately to it, slammed the unfortunate alien into the faces of his astounded comrades. Shots split the air past Relief's ear, but without slowing, he charged to the brink and dived over into seven thousand feet of open air. Ill T he uprushing wind shrieked past Reliefs ears like a typbn. Gripping one of the two harnesses in his teeth, he pulled the other on as one would don a vest, buckled the straps. He looked down, squinting against the rush of air. The ambassador, falling free now with his burst balloon fluttering at his back, was twenty feet below. Relief tucked his arms close, kicked his heels up to assume a diver's attitude. The distance between the two men lessened. The rock face flashed past, dangerously close. Relief's hand brushed Oldtrick's foot. The ambassador twisted convulsively to roll a wild eye at Retief, suspended above him in the hurtling airstream. Retief caught the senior diplomat's arm, shoved the spare harness into his hand. A moment later Oldtrick had shed his ruined gasbag and shrugged into the replacement. With a twist of the petcock, he inflated his balloon and at once slowed, falling behind Retief, who opened his own valve, felt the sudden tug of the harness. A moment later, he wa floating lightly a hundred feet bow the ambassador, who was driftihg gently closer. "Quick thinking, my boy," Oldtrick's voice came faintly. "As soon as I'm aboard the transport, I shall summon a heavy PE unit to deal with those ruffians! We'll thwart their inhuman scheme to massacre helpless infant Zooners, thus endearing ourselves to their elders!" He was close now, dropping as Retief rose. "You'd better come along with me," he said sharply as they passed, ten feet apart. "I'll want your corroborative statements, and -- " "Sorry, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "I seem to have gotten hold of a heavy-duty unit. It wants to go up, and the valve appears to be stuck." "Come back," Oldtrick shouted as he dropped away below the younger man. "I insist that you accompany me!" "I'm afraid it's out of my hands now, sir," Retief called. "I suggest you stay out of sight of any colonist who may have settled in down below. I have an idea they'll be a little trigger happy when they discover their police force is stranded on the reef, and a dangling diplomat will make a tempting target." T he southwest breeze bore Retief along at a brisk twentymile-per-hour clip. He twisted the buoyancy control lever both ways, to no avail. The landscape dwindled away below him, a vast spread of soft aquamarine hills. From this height, immense herds of creatures were visible, ranging in color from pale blue to deep grapejuice. They appeared, Retief noted, to be converging on a point not far from the base of the coral reef, where a number of black dots might have been small structures. Then the view was obscured, first by whipping streamers of fog, then by a dense, wet mist which enveloped him like a cool, refreshing Turkish bath. For ten minutes he swirled blindly upward; then watery sunshine penetrated, lighting the vapor to a golden glow; a moment later he blue sky arched above the blinding white cloud-plain. Squinting against the glare, he saw a misty shape of pale green projecting above the clouds at a distance he estimated at five miles. Using steering jets, he headed for it. Fifteen minutes later, he was close enough to make out thick, glossy yellow columns, supporting masses of chartreuse foliage. Closer, the verdure resolved into clusters of leaves the size of tablecloths, among IF which gaudy blossoms dione scariet. In the leafy depths, the sun striking down from zeni was filtered to a deep, green-gold gloom. Retief maneuvered toward a stuidylooking branch, only at the last moment saw the yard-long thorns concealed in the shadow of the spreading leaves. He ducked, twisted aside from the savage stab of a needle-point, heard the rip and kerpow! as his gaag burst, impaled; then be slammed bard against a thigh-thick, glass-mooth branch, grabbed with both bands and both legs, and braked to a halt inches from an upthrust dagger of horny wood. A ll around, life swarmed, humming, buzzing, chattering in a hundred oddly euphonious keys. There were fluffy, spherical birdthings in vivid colors; darting scaled runners like jeweled ferrets; swartns of tiny golden four-winged butterflies. Once something hooted, far away, and for a moment the chorus was stilled to resume a moment later. Loddng down, Retief could see nothing but level afte level of leafy branches, blotting out the swirling clouds two hundred feet below. The ground, he estimated, was a mile and a half farther -- not what could be described as an easy dimb. Still, it looked like the only way. He divested himself of the ruined altitude harness, picked a route and started down. Retief had covered no more than fifty feet when a sudden flurry of motion caught ins eye tiirough the foliage. A moment later, a clump of leaves leaned aside, pushed by a gust of wind, to reveal a bulky, ghost-pale creature, its body covert with short white bristles, its head a flattened spheroid. Its multiple shiny back limbs threshed wildly against the restraint of a web of silky, scarlet threads, stretched between limbs in an intricate spird pattern. A flat pouch, secured by a flat strap, bobbed against the trapped creature's side. The web, Retief saw, was constructed at the very tip of a pair of long boughs which leaned in a deep curve under the weight of the victim -- and of something else. Peering into the shadows, he saw a foot-long claw like a pair of oversized garden shears poised in the air two feet from the trapped being. Then he noted that the claw was attached to an arm like a sixfoot length of stainless steel pipe, which as attached, in turn, Co a body encased in silvery-Wue annor plate, almost invisible in the leafy gloom. As Reti watdied, the aim lunged, beared through a cluster of awning-sized leaves, snipped off a tuft of stiff white hairs as the snared one made a desperate hound sideways. The aggressor, it appeared, had advanced as far along the fragile support as possible; but it was only a matter of time until the murderous pincer connected with its target. Retief checked his pockets, produced a pocket knife with a twoinch blade, useful chiefly for cutting the tips from hand-rolled Jorgensen cigars. He used it to saw IF through a half-inch thick vine drooping near him. He coiled the rope over his shoulder and started back up. IV F rom a branch far above, Retief peered down through the leafy shadows at the twelve-foot monstrosity that was clinging head down from a six-inch stem. The predator had stretched itself out to its utmost length in its effort to reach the victim trapped below. Retief slid down to a crouch witiiin touching distance of the monster's main hind leg. He flipped out the lariat he had fashioned hastily from the length of pliable vine, passed its end under the massive ankle joint, whipped it quickly into a slip knot which would tighten under pressure. He tied the other end of the rope to a sturdy bole at his back, pulling it up just short of taut. Then he slid around the trunk and headed back for the scene of the action, paying out a second rope, the end of which was secured to a stout limb. The trapped creature, huddled at the extreme extent of the rein given it by the binding strands of silk, saw Retief, gave a convulsive bound which triggered another snap of the claw. "Stand pat," Retief called softly. "I'll try to distract his attention." He stepped out on a slender branch, which sagged but held. Holding the end of the rope in his free hand, he made his way to within ten feet of the web. Above, the claw-creature, sensing movement nearby, poked out a glittering eye at the end of atwo-foot rod, studied Retief from a distaioce of five yards. Retief watched the claw, which hovered indecisively ready to strike in either direction. A baseball-sized fruit was growing within easy reach. Retief phicked it, took air, and pitched it at the eye. It struck and burst, spattering the surrounding foliage with a sticky yellow goo and an odor of overripe melon. Quick as thought, the claw struck out straight at Retief as he jumped, gripping the vine, and swung in a graceful Tarzan-style arc across toward a handy landing platform thirty feet distant. The armored meat-eater, thwarted, lunged vainly after him. The sudden strain on the behemoth's overextended grip was too much. There was a noisy rasping of metal-'hard hooks against wood, a frantic shaking of branches; then the barrel-shaped body came crashing down -- and snapped to a halt with a tremendous jerk os the rope lashed to its leg came up short. Retief, safely lodged in his new platform, caught a momentary glimpse of an open mouth lined with Hanks of multipronged teeth. Then, with a sharp zongl the rope supporting the monster parted. The apparition dropped away, smashing its way downward with a series of progressively fainter concussions until it was lost in the depths below. Te bristled #oonite sagged heav' A iiy in the net, watching Retief shirt buttons as he sawed thioi the strands of the web with his pocket knife. Freed, it di;ed into its hip-pouch with a fournfingeired hand encased in a glove, ornamented with polished, inch#ong talons, brought out a small cylinder which it raised to its middle eye. "Hrikk' it said in a soft rasp. A mouth like Jack Pumpkinhead gaped in an unreadable expression. There was a bright flash which made a green after-image dance on Relief's retina. The alien dropped the object back in the pouch, took out a second artifact resembling a footlong harmonica, which it adjusted on a loop around its neck. At once, it emitt a series of bleeps, toots and deep, resonant thrums, then looked at Relief in a way which seemed expectant. "If I'm not mistaken, that's a Groaci electronic translator," Relief said. "Trade goods like the camera, I presume?" "Correct," the device interpreted the small alien's rasping tones. "By George, it works!" "The Groaci are second to none, when it comes to miniaturized electronics and real-estate acquisition," Relief said. "Real estate?" the Zoonite inquired with a rising inflection. "Planetary surfaces," Relief explained. "Oh, that. Yes, I'd heard they'd settled in down below. No doubt a pregermination trauma's at the root of the matter. But, every being to his , own form of self-destruction, as Zerd so succinctly put it ibefore he dissolved himself in fuming nitric acid." The alien's button eyes roved over Retief. "Though I must say your own death-wish takes a curious form." "Oh?" "Teasing a vine-jack for a starter," the Zoonite amplified. "That's dangerous, you know. The claw can snip through six inches of gilv as though it were a zoob-patty." "Actually, I got the impression the thing was after you," Retief said. "Oh, it was, it was. Almost got me, too. Hardly worth the effort. I'd make a disappointing meal." The Zoonite fingered its translator, the decorative claws clicking tinnily on the shiny plastic. "Am I to understand you came to my rescue intentionallyT it said. R etief nodded. "Whatever for?" "On the theory that one intelligent being should keep another from being eaten alive, whenever he conveniently can." "Hmmm. A curious concept. And now I suppose you expect me to reciprocate?" "If it doesn't inconvenience you," Retief replied. "But you look so, so edible..." Without warning, one of the alien's ebon legs flashed out, talons spread, in a vicious kick. It was a fast stroke, but Retief was faster; shifting his weight slightly, he intercepted the other's shin with the edge of his shoe, eliciting a sharp report. The Zooner yelped, simultaneously lashed out, left-right, with a pair of arms -- to meet painful interceptions as Retief struck upward at one with the edge of his IF hand, down at the other. In the next instant, a small hand gun was pressing into the alien's paunchbristles. "We Terries are handy at small manufacturing, too," Retief said easily. "This item is called a crater gun. You'll understand why when you've seen it fired." "... but appearances can be so deceiving," the Zoonite finished its interrupted sentence, wringing its numbed limbs. "A natural mistake," Retief commiserated. "Still, I'm sure you wouldn't have found me any more nourishing than the vine-jack would have found you. Incompatible body chemistry, you know." "Yes. Well, in that case, I may as well be off." The Zooner backed a step. "Before you go," Retief suggested, "there are some matters we might discuss to our mutual profit." "Oh? What for example?" "The invasion of Zoon, for one, And ways and means of getting back back down to Zoona Firma for another." "You are a compulsive. And it's highly channelized neurosis: A vinejack or my humble self won't do; it has to be the hard ay." "I'm afraid your translator is out of adjustment," Retief said. "Hiat doesn't seem to mean anything." "I find your oblique approach a trifle puzzling, too," the alien confided. "I sense that you're trying to tell me something, but I can't for the life of me guess what it might be. Suppose we go along to my place for an aperitif, and possibly we can enlighten each other. By the way, I'm known as Qoj, the Ready Biter." "I'm Retief, the Occasional Indulger," the Terran said. "Lead the way, Qoj, and I'll do my best to follow." V I t was a breath-taking thirtyminute journey through the towering tree tops. The alien progressed by long, curiously dreamlike leaps from one precarious rest to another, while Retief made his way as rapidly as possible along interlacing branches and bridges of tangled vine, keenly aware of the bottomless chasm yawning below. The trip ended at a hundred-foot spherical space where the growth had been cleared back to create a sliady, green-lit cavern. Bowers and leafy balconies were nestled around its periphery; tiny, fragilelooking terraces hung suspended under the shelter of sprays of giant fronds. There were several dozen Zooners in sight, some lounging on the platforms or perched in stemmounted chairs which swayed dizzingly to the light breeze; others sailed gracefully from one roost to another, while a few hung by one or more limbs from festooning vines, apparently sleeping. "rU introduce you around," the Zooner said. "Otherwise the fellows will be taking experimental cracks at you and getting themselves hurt. I'm against that, because an injured Zooner is inclined to be disagreeable company." He flipped a switch on the translator and emitted a sharp cry. Zooner heads turned. Qoj spieled off a short speech, waved a hand at Retief, who inhdined his head courteously. The locals eyed the Terran incuriously, went back to their previous activities. Qoj indicated a tiny table mounted atop a ten-foot rod, around which three small seats were arranged, similarly positioned. Retief hastily scaled the support, took up his seat like a flagpole sitter. Qoj settled in oppKwke him, the stem quivering and swaying under his weight. He whistl shrilly, and a black-spotted gray creature came sailing in a broad leap, took orders, bounded away, returned in a moment with aromatic flagons. # # # h." Qoj leaned back com- fortably witii two pairs of legs crossed. "Nothing like a litde bottled Nirvana, eh?" He lifted his flask and poured the contents in past a row of pronged, teeth rivaling those of the vine-jack. "Quite an interesting place you have here." Retief unobtrusively sniffed his drink, sampled it. The fluid evaporated instantly on his tongue,  leaving a fruity aroma. "It's well enough, I suppose," Qoj assented, "under the circumstances." "What circumstances are those?" "Not enough to eat. Too many predators -- like that fellow you dispatched. Cramped environment -- no place to go. And of course, cut off as we are from raw materials, no hope for technological advancement. Let's face it, Retief: we're up the tree without a paddle." Retief watched a bulky Zooner sail past in one of the feather-light leaps characteristic of the creatures. "Speaking of technology," he said. "How do you manage that trick?" "What trick?" "You must weigh three hundred pounds -- but when you want to, you float like a dandelion seed." "Oh, that. Just an inhwent knack, I guess you'd call it. Even our spore-pods have it; otherwise, they'd smash when they hit the ground. It's not much good for anything but short hops, you know." "Organis antivity," Retief said admiringly. "Or perhaps teleportation would be a better name." "The gland responds to mental imIF pulses," Qoj said. "Fortunately, our young have no mentality to speak of, so they're grounded. Otherwise we'd never have a moment's peace." He tossed another shot down his throat, lounging back in his diair as it swayed past Retief, rebounded to swing in the opposite direction, while Retief s perch waved in gentle counterpoint, a motion which tended to cross the eyes and bring a light sweat to the forehead. "Oh. I wondered why there were no little ones gamboling about your doorstep," Retief said. "Doorstep?" Qoj jerked upright and stared in alarm toward the shaded entrance to his bower. "Great slavering jaws, Retief, don't give me a start like thatl The little monsters are down on the surface where they belongl" "Unattended?" Qoj shuddered. "I suppose we really ought to be doing something about them, but frankly -- h's too dangerous." R etief raised an eyebrow in polite inquiry. "Why, the little fiends would strip the very crust off the planet if they weren't able to assuage their voracity by eating each other." "So that's why you don't occupy the surface." "Um. If our ancestors hadn't taken to the trees, we'd be extinct by now -- devoured by our own offspring," "And I suppose your apparent indifference (to the arrival of the Groad is based on the same reasoning?" "Feeding season's about to begin," Qoj said offhandedly. "Those fellows won't last a day. Not much juice in them, though -- at least not in the one I met." "That would be the previous owner of the camera and the translator?" "Correct. Interesting chap. He was buzzing about an odd little contrivance with whirling vanes on top and ran afoul a loop of string-vine. My, wasn't he full of plans." The Zooner sipped his flask, musing. "The Groaci, individually, don't look like much. I'll agree," Retief said. "But they have a rather potent subnuclear arsenal at their command. And it appears they're about to launch a general offensive against your young." "So? Maybe they'll clear the little nuisances out. Then we can descend to the ground and start living like gentlebeings." "What about the future of the race?" "Jiar for the future of the race." Qoj made a complicated gesture with obscure biological implications. "We're only concerned about ourselves." "Still," Retief countered, "you were young once." "If you're going to be crude," the Zooner said with inebriated dignity, "you may leave me." "Sure," Retief said. "But before I go, would you mind describing these little fellows?" "In shape, they're not unlike us adults; they come in all sizes, from this -- " Qoj held two talon fingers an inch apait -- "to this." He indicated a yard and a half. "And of course, the baby fur. Ghastly blue fuzz a foot long." "Did you say... blue?" "Blue." Retief nodded thoughtfully. "You know, Qoj, I think we have the basis for a cooperative undertaking after all. If you'll give me another five minutes of your time, I'll explain it to you... " VI F lanked by Qoj and another Zooner named Omx the Eager Eater, Retief dropped down through the cloud layer, propelled by a softly hissing steering jet salvaged from his punctured lift harness. "That's it, dead ahead," he pointed to the towering coral reef, pale rose-colored in the distance. "Wheel" Qoj squealed with delight as he pulled up abreast of Retief with a shrill whistling of his borrowed jet. "Capital idea, Retief, these little squirt-#x)tties! You know, I never dreamed flying could be such fun! Always lived in dread of getting out of reach of a branch and just drifting aimlessly until one of the boys or some other predator got me. With these, a whole new dimension opens up! I can already detect a lessening of sibling rivalry drives and inverted Oedipus syndromes!" "Don't let your released tensions go to your head, Qoj," Retief cautioned. "The Groaci may still take a little managing. You hang back while I go in to check the lie of the land." Minutes later, Retief swept in above the convoluted surface of the coral peak. No Groaci were to be seen, but half a dozen Terrans were wandering aimlessly about their lofty prison. They ran forward with glad cries as Retief landed. "Good show, my boy!" Colonel Smartfinger pumped his hand. "I knew you wouldn't leave. us stranded here! Those rascals Groaci commandeered our harnesses." "But -- where are the reinforcements," the political officer demanded, staring around. "Where's the lighter? Where's His Excellency? Who are (hese creatures?" He eyed the Zooners, circling for a landing. "Where have you been, Retief?" He broke off, staring. "And where's your harness?" "I'll tell you later." Retief motioned the diplomats toward the deflaited Groaci gasbag now draped limply across the rocks. "There's no time to dally. I'm afraid. All aboard." "But -- it's punctured!" Smartfinger protested. "It certainly won't fly, man!" "It will when our new allies finish," Retief diligently reassured the colonel. The Zooners were already busy, bustling about the ersatz cloud, stuffing fistfuls of seed-pods inside. A corner of it stirred lazily, lifted to flap gently in the breeze. One side curled upward, tugging gently. "You know what to do," Retief called to Qoj. "Don't waste any time following me down." He jumped into the air, thumbed the jet control wide open, and headed for the next stop at flank speed. IF I 'wo thirds of the way down the sheer wall of the coral reef, a small figure caught Retief's eye, perched disconsolately in a crevice on the rock. He swung closer, saw the spindly shanks and fiveeyed visage of a Groaci, his oncesplendid raiment in tatters. "Well, Field MarshaU Shish," he called. "What's the matter, conditions down below not to your liking?" "Ambassador Shish, if you please," the castaway hissed in sorrowful Groaci. "To leave me in solitude, soft One; to have suffered enough." "Not nearly enough," Retief contradicted. "'However, all is not yet lost. I take it your valiant troops have encountered some sort of difficulty below?" "The spawn of the pits fell upon us while I was in my bath!" the Groaci whispered, speaking Terran now. 'They snapped up a dozen of my chaps before I could spring from the tub of hot sand in which I had been luxuriatingl I was fortunate to escape with my life! And then your shoddy Terran-made harness failed and dropped me here. Alack! Gone are the dreams. of a procuratorship." "Maybe not." Retief maneuvered in close, held out a hand. "##I give you a piggyback and explain how matters stai. Maybe you can still salvage something from the wreckage." Shish canted his eye-stalks. "Piggyback? Are you insjuie, Retief? VTiy, there's nothing hdding you up! How can it hold two of us?" "Take it or leave it, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "I have a tight schedule." "I'll take it." Shish gingerly swung his scrawny frame out and scrambled to a perch on Retiefs back, four of his eyes sphinctered tight shut. "But if I hadn't already been contemplating suicide, nothing would have coaxed me to it." F ive minutes later, Retief heard a hail. He dropped down, settled onto a narrow ledge beside the slight figure of Ambassador Oldtrick. The senior diplomat had lost his natty beret, and there was a scratch on his cheek. His flight harness, its gas bag flat, hung on a point of rock behind him. "What's this? Who's captured whom? Retief, are you... ?" "Everything's fine, your excellency," Retief said soothingly. "I'll just leave his Groacian excellency here with you. I've had a little talk with him, and he has something he wants to tell you. The staff will be along in a moment, to help out." "But -- you can't -- " Oldtrick broke off as a dark shadow flitted across the rock. "Duck! It's that confounded cloud back again!" "It's all right," Retief called as he launched himself into space. "It's on our side now." A t the long table in the main dining room aboard the heavy Corps transport which had been called in to assist in the repatriation of the Groaci Youth Scouts marooned on Zoon after the local fauna had dievoured their ship supplies, Magnan nudged Redef. "Rather a surprising about-face on the part of Ambassador Shish," he muttered. "When that fake cloud dumped us off on the rock ledge with him, I fear the worst." "I think he'd had a spiritual experience down below that made him see the light," Relief suggested. "Quite an equitable division of spheres of influence the ambassadors agreed on," Magnan went on. "The Groaci seem quite pleased with the idea of erecting blast-proof barriers to restrain those ferocious little eaters to one half the planet, and acting as herdsmen over them, in return for the privilege of collecttheir hair when they moult." "I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't sneak out a few pelts beforehand." Colonel Smartfinger leaned to contribute. "Still, the Zooners don't seem to mind, eh, Omx?" "No problem," the Zooner said airly. 'We're glad to wink at a few little violations in return for free access to our own real estate." There was a sharp dinging as Ambassador Oldtrick rose and tapped his glass with a fork. "Gentlemen -- gendebeings, I should say." He smirked at the Groaci and Zooners seated along the board. "It's my pleasure to announce the signing of the TerranZoon accord, under the terms of which we've been ceded all rights in the coral reef of our choice on which to place our chancery, well out of reach of those nasty little -- that is, the untutored -- I mean, er. playfully inclined..." He quailed under the combined glares of a dozen rows of pink eyes. "If he brings those abominations into the conversation again, I'm walking out," Qoj said loudly. "So we're going to be relegated to the top of that dreadful skyscraper?" Magnan groaned. 'We'll be communting by patent gasbag." "Ah!" Oldtrick brightened, glad of a change of subject. "I couldn't help overhearing your remark, Magnan. And I'm pleased to announce that I have just this afternoon developed a startling new improvement to my flight harness. Observe!" All eyes were on the Ambassador as he rose gently into the air, hung, beaming from a height of six feet. "I should mention that I had some assistance from Mr. Relief in, ah, working out some of the technicalities," he murmured as the Terrans crowded around, competing for the privilege of offering their congratulations. "Heavens! And he's not even wearing a balloon!" Magnan gasped. "How do you suppose he does it?" "Easy," Qoj gted. "He's got a pocketful of price-quality Zooner spore-pods." B eside him. Ambassador Shish gave an annoyed hiss. "Somehow, I can't escape the conviction that we Groaci have been had again." He rose, leaving the room. "Hmph," Magnan sniffed. "He got what he wanted, didn't he?" 'True," Retief said, rising. "But it's some people's ill luck to always IF IF  Our Man in Fandom All about Hugos. Speaking of which, guess which magazine just won one? E very year at the annual worid sdenoefiction convention a half dozen liitde stainless ste model rocketships on wooden bases are handed out to deserving sciencefiotion writers, ediiors, artists and fans. Just like television's "Emmy" and the movies' "Oscar," this trophy bears an affectionate nickname -- the "Hugo." And it's awarded for much the same reason: excellence, Sdencefiction people, just like television insiders and movie folk, like to recognize and reward a striving toward excellence. Oh, sure -- sometimes you can quibble with the choice of winner for this or that category, sometimes you won't agree with the majority decision of the voters, but I think the science-Ection world is more often right than wrong in their annual achievement awards. Much more often right, for instance, than the fogeys who give out the Pulitzer Prize for excdlence in American Hteraiture, and somehow manage to overlook authors like Thomas Wolfe, geniusype poets like Ezra Pound, and mind-crackiny good novels like Lolita or Catch-ZZ!) From Laureate to Statuette The urge to award the outstanding has been with us in the sf world as long as there have been fans. Fandom's major amateur publishers' dub, F.A.PA., has a provision for annual ktureateship awards written into its constitution. Fapans give fiilk-soreened award certiates (or did, kst I heard) for such categories as mechanical excellence or innovation in publishing techniques, creative editing with high standards, quality of writing, and so on. Various fanmags at various times have given out awards -- one of the earliest being Fan Editor PubUsher, which has long since gone under -- and many other mags conduct annual polls of their readers' choice of Fandom's outstanding people of the year -- best famdnc, best new fan, best writer, or humorist, or poet. And they used to name the single fan of the year whose achievements made him the "Number One Fan Face." Then there are the fanzines that give awards in the professional ranks, not in the fan world. Oldtime fan Walt Daugherty was an early mover behind this; way back at the Third World Science Fiction Convention at Denver in #I he was passing out medals. And, today, the fanzine I myself edit sporadically, between enormous and lengthy periods of do-nothing, has an annual list of the # best books of the science-fiction year and four "Spectrum Awards" for best science-fiction book (novel, anthology or collection); best fantasy or weird; bt children's book and best amateur book or pamphlet. (To explain the award's name, the magazine is an all-book-review thing called Spectrum.) It's currently in the doldrums, but shall return. Then came the Hugo, and here's how it happened. Hoi and the Hugo Lots of conventions passed out honors and awards of various kinds; its been happening ever since the #st World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in #. Sometimes these awards are informal, sort of tokens of honor, and sometimes more formal and elaborate. For example, take The International Fantasy Award. This has been awarded only three or four times and always on a very informal lastminute basis. In # it was given to Clifford D. Simak for City, runaway all-time classic and my personal favorite from Simak. George Stewart also won the International Fantasy Award for his novel Earth Abides. This award is granted by decision of a jury. Like the third award, for instance: nine or ten highly qualified judges were polled; among them was Donald A. Wollheim, editor-in-chief of Ace Books. They gave the International Fantasy Award to Professor J.R.R. Tolkien for his world-famous fantasy trilogy. The Lord of the Rings. Hardly anyone would quibble with that choice, but, still, the jury-award system does lack personal participation, while the Hugo is given on the basis of ballot-box voting by Worldcon attendees. The idea of the Hugo first arose in the mind of a Philadelphia fan IF named Hal Lynch, who has since moved to New York. The year was #, and it was a couple of months before the Labor Day weekend when the #th Convention was to be held in Philadelphia. Hal got his bright idea by analogy with Hollywood's annual Oscar orgy and passed it on to the convention committee. After some fumbling around -- all conventions are put on by a small number of ferociously busy, terrifically overworked people who never get enough help and rarely get any sleep either before or during their convention -- after some initial difficulties, I say, a chap named Jack McKnight of Lansdale, Pennsylvania got the job done. He designed and hand-crafted the first Hugos: little rocketships of stainless steel, adorned with fins at tail and midsection, standing on round wooden bases fitted out with inscribed plates. These were passed out, nine of 'em, to great excitement and enthusiasm. Alfred Bester won the novel award for The Demolished Man, easily one of the very finest sciencefiction novels of #, or any other year, for that matter. Willy Ley got one for non-fiction science writing, Forrest J. Ackerman for fan activities, and Philip Jose Farmer, as most outstanding new science-fiction writer of the year. There were awards given in seven categories, but actually nine Hugos were given out, because of ties. Hannes one of the greatest fantasy artists of all time, tied with Ed Emshwiller as best cover artist, and Galaxy and Astounding tied as best professional magazine of the year. The ninth and last of the little steel spaceships went to Virgil Finlay as best interior illustrator. And that was it. Nobody really thought of making the Hugo an every-year thing; in fact, at the next year's convention (the #th World Science Fiction Convention at San Francisco in #) there were no awards of any kind. Nor were these first Hugos called Hugos; officially, they were "The Science Fiction Achievement Awards." Before I get into how, where and when the Hugos were revived, let's answer the question no doubt vibrating in many of your little minds -- to wit: Who was "Hugo"? In # a young man of # named Hugo Gernsback came to this country from Luxembourg, which is one of those little vestpocket-ized European countries. Radio was a burgeoning young giant in those dim, far-off days of # years ago, and the new field of electronics was just getting started. Mr. Gernsback was fascinated by the potentials of these brave new worlds and, somehow or other, drifted into magazine publishing. He printed things called The Electrical Experimenter and Modern Electrics, He published the first radio catalogue in history and the first book on radio, says sf historian Sam Moskowitz. He took out patents, ran a "liain" radio station, and did a lot of otiher tinngs, one of them being the invention of science fiction itself as a viable magazine classification. It seems the slow, creeping pace of real-life scientific experiment was too darn slow for the young man from Luxembourg. UnaWe to keep his lively imagination chained to the advance of modern science, he began interspersing some hard-headed futuristic predictions (both as fact articles and as fiction) in amongst the pages of his publications. Eventually came an all-fiction issue of his magazine Science and Invention in August #. And the success of that experiment led him to found the first science-fiction magazine in the world. Not only did he found the world's first science-fiction magazine, but he actually coined the phrase "science ifiction" itself, thus giving our field a name and adding a new term to the English language. He has also written some science fiction, such as the famous novel Ralph #C#-(this futuristic numerical last name is a joke -- read it like this: "Ralph, one to foresee for one plusr). This novel may not be too distinguished as a piece of fiction, but it has earned him several accolades from the scientific world. In it he hit what must have been an all-time high for successful predicting. He accurately foresaw and described "fluorescent lighting, skywriting, automatic packaging madhines, plastics, the radio directional range finder, juke boxes' -- them we could have happily done without! -- not to mention "Squid fertilizer, hydroponics, tape recorders, rustproof steel, loud speakers, night baseball, aquacades, microfilm, television, radio networks, vending machines dispensing hot and cold foods, flying saucers, a device for teaching while the user is asleep, solar energy for heat and power, fabrics from glass, synthetic materials such as nylon for wearing apparel, and, of course, space travel." (The list was admiringly compiled by Sam Moskowitz.) And, last but not least, radar -- which he not only described most accurately but actually diagrammed! Well, what with all this, Gernsback -- still alive and going strong -- came to be known as "The Father of Science Fiction." And, just naturally, what with "Emmy" and "Oscar and the Mystery Writers of America's "Edgar" -- they had to name the little steel rocketships "Hugo" in affectionate honor of the pioneer who started the whole thing and blazed several trails we are still following (such as space sickness; Gernsback accurately described the vertigo-cum-nausea of freefall in his Ralph #C#-f, but we had to wait until modem science caught up with him, as it did in the #'s when the Air Force space laboratory experiments simulated free fall conditions and found the same sort of physiological symptoms that Gemsback described back in #. How's that for predicting?) IF From Cleveland in '# to Cleveland in '# now. This year's convention as readers of Our Man In Fandom know, was also at Cleveland. In the Meanwhile, back at the world next issue of Worlds of If! we'll science fiction conventions, they fitalk about some of the famous novnally came to realize the idea behind els and famous authors, artists, an annual sf award was both sound magazines and fan publications that and popular. At the #th Convenhave been given science-fiction's tion -- Cleveland, # -- the supreme accolade, the Hugo. We'll awards were revived and given out also discuss this year's Hugo winners, as "The Second Annual Science and we'll have a few things to say Fiction Achievement Awards." about the new set of awards -- the (They weren't officially called HuNebula Awardsr -- now being given gos until Los Angeles and #.) It out each year by the Science Fiction was proposed at the Cleveland conWriters of America, the professional vention that the Hugo be made a science-fiction writer's society. See regular part of the annual doin's, you in these pages, next month! IF  Serial The He had given himself over fo Man's age-old enemies, the monsters that were called Amsirs -- and now he had fo pay for his treason with his life! What Has Gone Before n the Beginning was the Thorn. The world is flat and circular; a sunken desert, cold, wanly lit, nearly airless. The Thorn is high, blunt, nearly featureless; a metal tower at the center of the world, and only around it are things any different. The farms have been around the Thorn since time began, inside the perimeter of air and warmth somehow clinging to the Thorn. Beyond that perimeter there is no water, warmth or breath. Men and women are born farmers, have children and die. When they die, they go to Ariwol where there s happiness for everyone, and feast goes on forever. Out in the desert live animals called Amsirs -- man-sized, flightless, bat-winged, predatory, unbreathing. Killed and brought back to the Thorn, these are the source of that rare delicacy, meat. Their bones provide the darts and throwing sticks with which they are killed, and their hard, bulbous skins, suitably trimmed out, provide the bubblesf in which drinking water is carried out into the desert by the aristocratic Honors, whose only occupation in life is honning Amsirs. Boy children of the Thorn vie with each other and attempt to make it through the rigorous training ritual, so that they may grow up to be Honors. Most drop out and turn Farmer. Only a few get through the ritual far enough to be issued one of the metal caps that somehow provide a man with air and insulation beyond the perimeter of the farmland. Once he has killed his first Amsir and brought it back to the Thorn, a Honor has few worries. He lives inside the Thorn and is maintained by the community. Any piece of farmer property, such as food and women, is his on demand. The only drawback to this life of ease is the need to periodically go out and kill additional Amsirs, who are objects of terror but not much information in the Farmer community. In one brief day, novice Honor Jackson finds out how much of the foregoing is either an outright lie or a distortion of the truth. The Amsir he finally does kill only tries to make him surrender, calling to him ' in perfectly understandable speech, and carries but doesnt use a metal spear which is a weapon far superior to anything known by the people of the Thorn. The facts that the Amsirs are intelligent, hostile but not vicious, and have a clear but unknown aggressive purpose directed toward the people of the Thorn, are Honor trade secrets, Jackson learns when he gets back to the Thorn. His own elder brother, armed and waiting in ambush, first makes sure that Jackson bears no telltale spear wounds and is sufficiently proud of having made his kill not to spill his discovery to the farmers. The Eld Honor also checks him out, and though Jackson is clearly bitter, the Eld decides ifs only the same bitterness thafs always made him a loner and represents no present danger to the Honor system. In fact, the Eld professes admiration for Jacksons long-standing traits of character and intelligence, considers him of the elite among Honors and treats him as one of his intellectual and spiritual heirs. This legacy is to be collected only provided he keeps his nose clean. There are other inducements to conformity besides this one; after all, every Honor who survived his novice honn has a vested interest in making sure no one upsets the structure of the society. Jackson feels he owes it to himsdf to be nobody s fool. He slips back out into the desert is ambushed by but kills Red FUson, who is the Ehis chief enforcer and who, incidentally and quite legitimately, long ago killed Jackson's father because he wanted Jackson's mother, (Some of Jackson s early cynicism may stem from the fact that his father was a Honor just like Filson, as well as from the fact that his elder brother is such a square). Having done all that, Jackson immediately surrenders to an Amsir, who provides him with Amsir-manufactured bottles of air and water, and robes to keep him warm -- all made of human skin -- and marches off, out to the towering rim of the world, up the rim, and onto the crest. There Jackson sees another world spread out before him. Equally circular, sunken, and flat, equally dominated by a Thorn, this one is choked from rim to rim with air, with fields, colorful fairytale houses, and the winged Amsirs soaring with joy, gambolling in the light of early morning. 'Ariwolr Jackson laughs, sore, wounded, exhausted, but not pious. "Ariwoir XI will have to climb down,"  die Amsir said, showing JacksOB a place on the rim where you could see something that looked like a path. "You can leave those things here." The Amsir nodded his head toward the robes Jackson was cairyhig over his good arm. "They will be taken." Jackson dropped the stuff on the ground. When the Amsir neigendy knocked his spear point against the iron cap, Jackson took that off too and set it down on top of the pile. All he had left now was the dart, still trapped in the joint of his left dbow, and the human-leather tourniquet. He shrugged and began to scramble down. It was six or eight times his own height to the ground. The Amsir did something that must have given him a lot of pleasure. He stepped off a steep place in the rim, cupped his wings, and pivoted luxuriantly so as to be able to keep watching Jackson while he drifted downward. Every so often he beat his wings once or twice gracefully and kept himself froln sinking down too quickly. For Jackson, clambering down wasn't any picnic. He had to do it all one-handed, which meant that often enough he had to brace himself by leaning his face or his chest into the broken rock and grit so as to keep his feet from sliding. It was just too damn bad, wasn't it, he thought. He began running into patches of the pretty blue-green stuff that he world so attractively right up to the rim. It was cheesy and brittle; it broke off and smeared under his hand and against his body when he rubbed against rocks it was growing on. It smeUed sharp in the way old bread dough tasted, and it came apart in little leafy chips. Jackson had never seen anything like it before, but while it looked fine from up there on the rim, down here with IF it, it looked a little bit like sometng that had made somebody sick. He got down to the Amsir world with a half-twist of his body that left him leaning against the rocks at the bottom of the rim. From down here it was only a ntle slope for maybe a dozen dozen strides, and then everything flattened out. Already, from this angle, most of his view of the Amsir Thom was blocked by the Amsir houses stilting their way into the air. It all looked a little different -- not as spread out, and pretty crowded. His left forearm and hand were turning purplish white. The Amsir came down lightly a few strides away from him as he stopped to loosen the tie above his elbow and leaned watching the blood squirt out around the dart. He tried to work his hand, and finally he reached over with his right hand, pushing against the crooked stiffness in his fingers. A little bit of that and he was able to make his thumb and forefinger twitch toward each other. They were also beginning to feel like he was holding them in a fire. Profit and loss. He tied the leather band tightly again. The Amsir said: "Do you have any idea of how long that will need to heal?" 'T don't know. Long time, I guess. Tell yoii better after somebody helps me get this dart out." "We have individuals who can do that, but I don't mean how long until it is perfect; in your expenence, how long until it can do work?" "Look, I don't know. Six, nine days. Maybe twelve. Maybe three." "Three...' the Amsir repeated to himself thoughtfully. He looked Jackson up and down. "No sooner?" "Look, I told you -- " Jackson stopped and let it go. Peo never believed anything they hadn't touched, and the Amsir didn't have any dart in his elbow. The Amsir was just fine standing there with his lace drifting perkily around him, in the breeze that swept toward the rim along the floor of the world and vanished up the rocks. Jackson knew there was something different about his face, and then he saw that there were two wrinkle-edged holes open where a man's nostrils would be if his upper lip was an Amsir beak. And he could hear air hissing in and out of them. The Amsir was upwind of him too, and, now that he noticed, Jackson could smell the old breath empt)dng itself out of his chest bubbles. "Come along," the Amsir said, motioning with his spear. 'We don't have time to waste. You have to walk to the tower." He pointed with one wingtip. By that, Jackson could tell he meant the Thom. "You'll have to just walk through the fields," the Amsir said as he sprang up into the air to circle watchfully around Jackson. "We don't make paths." T hey stopped once on tlir way toward the Amsir Thom, at the nearest of the stilt-legged houses. The house was made of something tough like horn but scratched up and very old, looking as if it had once held' a lot more particles of its bright yellow color. The Amsir sprang higher into the air and dung to one of the uprights with his claws and one hand. He reached up over his head to tug on the downswinging loop of the line that connected this house to the next one. Jackson could hear a bell clang inside. Clang, long pause, clang clang, short pause, then more clangs and spaced-out pauses. It got mixed up in Jackson's ears because as soon as the line had transmitted the Amsir's pulling-up to the next house, he could hear another bell in there echoing the sound. Then he could hear it again faintly from the house beyond that, and then very faintly off in the distance, always moving in the direction of the Thorn. The Amsir stopped pulling and waited. After a little while Jackson could hear a sound coming back along the ropes from the direction of the Thom. It was a short answer, whatever it was. The Amsir nodded in satisfaction and waved Jackson on with his spear. "All right, hurry up now," he cried down. "They are waiting for you." They were getting notice from other Amsirs now, too. Some of them popped out the doorways of the houses, jumping into the air and swooping to get a lookat Jackson. Others -- women and young kids, or anyhow acting the way women and young kids would have acted if they'd been Farmers -- clung to the edges of doorways. They began to make something of a procession, Jackson and all the Amsirs fluttering and swooping overhead. The Amsirs in the air called to each other and back to their families in the houses. And the families called back to them. It began to make a hell of a racket overhead, shadows and air-gusts down on the ground. Jackson thought of baffling them a little by walking under the houses instead of around them, but there was too much manure on the ground there, and he didn't try it twice. #V iTy name's Honor Red Jacksir he'd found crouching in a room of their Thorn. Crouching wasn't right -- this Amsir was more like leaning bent-legged with some of his weight on his wingtips. "They have a complex system of naming," said another old, skinnier Amsir who'd been called in by the first one, who Jackson guessed was their Eld. There were quite a few Amsirs in the room, counting the young one who'd brought him in, and the doctor-like one who was studying his elbow. The doctor-like one was studying his elbow in part by twisting the set of naked human arm bones he'd brought in with him. Jackson hoped he'd soon figure out just how he was going to tinker this thing up, and get around to doing his job. "'Honor' is his community status," the skinny one was still explaining. "It signifies that he lives exclusively by hunting our sort of creature. 'Red' means that in addition to having met the hunting reIF quirement, he had also performed the of his own 'kind. Jackson simply means that he is the son of an older creature of his own kind named Jack. For creatures in sparse circumstances they have a most amazing complex of rituals. I can't imagine how they distinguish between brothers of identical status -- I do not say they don't so distinguish. I'm sure they do." The Amsir Eld grunted at the skinny one. "Do not, I pray, give me any more labels for him. They may have to distinguish, but we don't have so many of them, ever, that we must. Tell me what he is, not what he stands for." "I am telling you. It's significant that he should be so obviously young; that he should carry the very fresh scars of combat with one of our own kind -- which means he brought one of our own kind to the last extremity -- and then the even more recent scars of combat with one of his own kind. This was a odd one even before he did the oddest thing of all and yielded voluntarily." The skinny Amsir looked as Jackson proudly, as if he'd produced him himself. "The odder the better," the Eld Amsir snapped. "We've had no luck with the usual run." "Precisely my point," the instructing Amsir said. "Then why didn't you make it to begin with?" "Pfah! I didi" "Only in hindsight. Get out." The Eld Amsir jerked his head toward the doorway, and the instructor shuffled out reluctantly. The Eld Amsir turned all his attention toward Jackson's end of the room. "You, Doctor -- get on with it." He came a few steps closer, and Jackson noticed something. He wasn't old. At least -- now that he was in some kind of better light coming in through the narrow Thorn window-slits -- the tattering of his lace, and the crumpled look of the wing Jackson could see best, were accounted for by damage. He was pretty badly scarred up, and discolored. He looked as if he'd been picked up and knocked hard against something rough, and had left big patches of his hide against that rough thing, and had had a lot of bones broken for it. But he threw his weight around like an Eld, and that bothered Jackson. He idn't like the idea of somebody being mean enough inside to be an Eld, but still not slowed down in his head very much. JacksonI I am above all I others here. No one of my kind of creature will tell you we have any time, so give me straight, fast answers. I am told you were ready to yield when that young one by the doorway found you. This is something new. Explain it." The doctor put one hand on Jackson's biceps, the other on his forearm and closed his beak on the lacefeathered end of the dart in Jackson's elbow. His claws made little purchase-hunting sounds on the cement flooring. Jackson figured it would 'be best to pay him no heed. "Didn't like it where I was," he said to the Eld. "Figured Fd go to where the lies were all about. Make up my own if I had to." "Pfu. Lies require life. You won't live." "Right up to the minute I die, I will. Oh, hell!" he hcrflered as the doctor jerked his head back while twisting his aim. The dart sucked out of Jackson's wound and hung for an instant in the doctor's beak until it was dropped. The doctor's hand closed as best it could above Jackson's elbow -- the fingers couldn't make it all the way around the flesh. Jadeson reached over to help him, eyes swfanming. "i think perh # qs you thought you coidd hunt us as you think we hunt you, the Eld said shrewdly. "I think perhaps you thought out that there was another world in which our sort of creature was prey. I think you thought you knew a way to get breathing stuff. You are young enough to have thought that because you were a little bit odd, and you frightened your own kind, you would frighten us too." Jackson just kept gripping hts arm, swaying with his eyes dosed. He did have room enough inside himself, though, to think how wonderful it was that everybody, an Amsir included, could think he knew everything just because he knew something. "Well, that's not how it is, creature," the Eld Amsir went right on, while the doctor unstoppered a stone bottle of something that lodced like water but burned like fire when he poured it over Jackson's running IF elbow, and then began winding a long, tight strip of shaved-thin hide around Jackson's left arm in a spiral from shoulder to wrist. "In some ways here, for you it is the way it is for our kind of creature with you. We cannot breathe the breathing stuff around your fields. Muck from that stuff you grow is in every breathful. We die -- you would say prettily -- with our first breath of it; our muscles knot so hard our bones break, our backbones snap; green fur fills our lungs. Or so the instructors say, from the times long ago when we still tried. "Haw! We die of breathing the air that blows across the stuff you eat. This is the stuff we eat." He pointed a wing at a heap of the blue, crumbly stuff from the fields. "That is rock-stuff. That is the food for creatures of wing and spirit. Can you eat rock? No others of your kind have been able to. You will die, prettily. Your stomach will sink in, your bones wiM show through the meat on you; toward the end, you will try to fang us and we will kick you away. You will bite yourself. You will try to get away back to your poison Thorn, and we will kick you back to work. You will live together perhaps thirty days, perhaps less. Only perhaps perhaps will you live any longer than that. And only perhaps perhaps perhaps will you ever be happy again before you die. It depends how quickly and how well you can do things; on how odd you are, and most of all on whether you are luckier than any other creature of your own kind that we have ever kad here. Now -- " he jerked his head toward's Jacksoa's bound-up aim. "How soon do you think you wiB be able to do work with that?" J ackson raised his arm experimentally. It throbbed when he did that; it felt like something made out of one solid stick of bone. "Thanks, Doc," he said to the doctor, who was standing off to one side watching him critically. Jackson tried to move his hand. It wouldn't work. He began knocking it against his thigh, trying to get some circulation into his fingers. "What kind of work?" he said to the Eld Amsir. "rU show you." The Eld gestured toward the doorway. "Turn toward your right after you leave the room." Jackson did that. The Eld Amsir and the young one who'd brought him in followed him. The doctor tried to go with him too, but the Eld just looked back over his shoulder and said, "Not you." The doctor turned around, quickly, and rustled toward the daylight Jackson had come in from. The way Jackson had been told to turn led him deeper into the Amsir Thorn. It was a narrow passageway, and at widely spaced distances there were lights glowing behind translucent panels in the metal ceiling overhead. It was like walking through something's ribs. Every so often they'd come to another oval ridge that ran completely around, up the walls and across the ceiling. There was always an open door folded neatly back against the wall. Halfway between any two of these doors, there'd be another one like it, but set directly into the wall at Jackson's left side. These were closed; sometimes there was light behind them, coming through a little bull's-eye window, and sometimes there wasn't. Sometimes there were particular sounds of machines going; sometimes there was just the general sound of the Thorn, which was louder and healthier than the sounds of Jackson's Thorn. But not one of these doors leading to the inside told him anything, except what he already knew, that this Thorn was tougher than his own. The passageway curved this way and that; sometimes it turned sharply. From the sound growing louder and louder, and then beginning to taper off behind him at more or less the same rate, Jackson guessed it was some kind of path they'd set up for getting through the Thorn to the other side without having to go around it. Three times, they came to ladders taking up half the passageway's space and going up to round doors set in the ceiling. Two of them were closed, and the metal rungs of the ladders were dull and softly smooth. At the top of the third ladder was a round black opening, and the ladder was scratched up. There were bright, polished places on the wall, going up beside the ladder, where Amsir wings had dragged against it a lot of times. He tried to imagine an Amsir working his way up one of these ladders, just as he could see how they had to inch and shuffle to get around the ladders and keep going down the passageway. It wasn't IF handy for them, this place. Well, it wasn't handy for him either, but it was what they had. T hey Came to another room that opened on the outside. It had a couple more Amsirs in it, including the instructor one who'd been nagging the Eld about him in the Eld's room. "Are you going to show it to him now?" this one asked the Eld. "He won't get any stronger." "No -- or at least, none of them have. But you know, they do have this ability to store energy. Amazing, really, when you think of it. At least, we've never observed any of them carrying nourishment out into the desert with them, and we know they've certainly been able to function unfed for significant periods of time here. Whereas we're hard put to it to find individuals with the endurance to omit feeding for as much as a day -- " " -- What the learned one who is well above me refers to," broke in the young Amsir who'd been hanging around the instructor, "is the surmise that perhaps these creatures are trading time for energy. They may be oing into some sort of survival mode which permits a stretch-out of energy consumption by maintaining a low level of physical and mental activity. As you know from the learned one's witnessed discourses, he would very much like to attempt stimulating one of these creatures, as for example with pain, on the supposition that this may force it to re-enter a more energetic mode, of shorter duration, perhaps, but much more productive of over-all results... " Nobody listed with interest. Not even the instructor Amsir, who was doing his best not to pay attention, or at least look as if he were someplace else entirely. He looked at the walls, the floor and the ceiling while the novice instructor's voice got lower and lower. Jackson didn't want to hear about pain, whatever a mode was. The young Amsir who'd brought him in was looking at the instructor novice the way a Honor would look at a Farmer his own age, except he wasn't measuring him for the kill. Finally, the Eld Amsir said, "Shut up," gently, and the novice instructor did. Ivooking at Jackson, the Eld Amsir asked: "Do the young practice as much, where you come from?" "Only honning. The farming takes care of itself. The Thorn spreads the water in the fields, and the plows run no matter what you try to do." "Well, we are better than you," the Eld said matter-of-factiy. "Both of you shut up," he added toward the instructor, who'd begun to open his beak. "This one's enough experiment for me just the way he is." He nudged Jackson toward the door with the tip of one wing. "Step out and look at that," he said. Jackson found himself looking from the doorway at something a lot like a small Thorn. It tapered up into the air, maybe a dozen times as high as a man. But it was spikier, and it had other spikes curving down -- it rested on three of them. It had openings, too, like throats yawning down toward the ground. It was made of the same kind of metal as the Thorn; in that shape, though, spikey and open-mouthed, it looked mean and twisty. "What is that?" Jackson asked. "It's the Thorn Thing. It's been here since the beginning of the World. You see that?" The Hd pointed up the side of the thing. There was a ladder coming down to within say three feet of the ground. Jackson squinted; up at the head of the ladder was something that looked like another one of the closed doorways, but had no familiar circular handle to turn. It was just an oval crack in the metal. Turning his head, and shifting his feet back and forth, Jackson could see glints from scratches up there; shallow ones, no more than futile scrapes. #That's a doorway, isn't it?" A the Eld Amsir said. "Looks like one," Jackson agreed. "Don't you know?" "It says it's a doorway. It has a voice, and the instructor tells me that's what it says." The Eld cast a glance at the instructor. "There isn't anyone who will tell me it says something else." "I've spent a long time deciding that's what it says," the instructing Amsir said vehemently. "I have given witnessed discourses -- " "Shut up," the Eld Amsir said. Jackson looked the Thom Thing up and down again. There wasn't anything now left to notice, except maybe for the burnt, black splash on the ground right under it, that the spikey legs rested in. That looked a little wrong -- as if somebody had been building fires under it not too long ago; not as long ago as the beginning of time. Otherwise, it just sat there. He certainly didn't hear any voice saying, "I'm a door." "What do you want me to do with this thing?" "Climb the ladder and op the door," the Eld Amsir said. "Just that?" "Pw Almost every one of our kind of creature who's tried it has been killed. Some of us have only been hurt very much and made very angry. Every one of your kind of creature who's tried it has starved to death." xm O h, haw, Jackson thought, feeling weak and disgusted. He looked up toward the door in the Thorn Thing again and then at the ladder. It seemed to him that a boneeary, one-armed, light-headed, sleepless, foodless, hopeless mai! could get up it all right. Considering eveiything. He looked at the door again. But the damn thing didn't have any handle. Well. He got himself moving and sauntered toward the ladder. Standing there right under the Thom Thing he could see two things; one, that it was pretty big, the other that it had been there long enough for the three spikes it rested on to have become very nearly a part of the soil. It didn't look as if it had been set down on the ground, and the ground didn't look as if it had been piled around it. It had die look that walls of huts at the home IF I horn had -- or that the Thorn itself had, come to that -- of having poked up from underneath, and of the ground bulging just a little bit at the torn edges, as if maybe a dozen dozen years from now it would finish reacting to this growth and would finally lie flat. He put his good aim on the ladder two or three rungs up and gave a little tug followed by a harder one. There was no give in it. He could see that it came out of the side of the Thorn Thing just below the doorway. And he could see a sort of hinge at each rung, as if the ladder were made to fold and be pulled up inside a small space somewhere up there. Or could be kicked out and let hang this way when needed. But if those were hinges they had no give in them. He put his ear to the ladder, which was as warm as his own flesh, and he could hear things humming. Well, anything that could talk had to have a heart. He looked over at the bunch of Amsirs. All of them were watching him with considerable interest. There were other Amsirs gathering overhead -- passers-by and just loungers who'd noticed that a new creature of his kind was about to try for the talking door. One of them swooped down and came no more than his own height over Jackson's head. "Haa, damp thing! Oimb! Climb!" He hoved up at the level of the door and made scrabbling, fake-desperate grabs toward it for as long as he could hold his attitude, then fell away, got his wings straightened back around the way he wanted them, and buffeted up Into the air again. Jackson noticed that it woidd have been a much better piece of mockery if the Amsir had dared to have actually touched the door. Jackson took a little jump into the air, grabbed the ladder, got one foot up and began to climb. I t was peculiar, the way the metal felt neither cold nor hot. Although he had to do all the work with one arm and his legs, it was nothing like when he'd had to slip and slide down the rim into this place. He felt pretty good, as a matter of fact. There were worse things a man could do with, his time than climb this ladder. He wished he knew what the Thorn Thing was, that made a man feel this good. Pretty soon he was up high enough to look down at the Amsirs on the ground. They were all watching him, their faces turning up gridiwork-like to follow his dimb as if each of their bodies were a Thorn and he was the sun. Up to now, the ladder had beeo hanging reasonably far away from the side of the Thom Thing. But the hier he got, the closer the bulges of the Thorn Thing got to the straight-hanging ladder. Now his eyes were only inches away ftom the side of the thing itsdf, and he could see something that didn't dieer him up, which were grease-smears shimmering in the light, from all the hands that had mbbed here before him as he stopped to lean his weight on the comfortable, neith warm nor cold humming metal. Oh, pfu, he said to himself and kept climbing, until finally he was at the top of the ladder. Here there was a little open door, not too thick, but not too thin, and strongly hinged, positioned under the slit so as to protect it against anything being thrown up from below. When the ladder was pulled up, probably the little door closed behind it and left no more seam than the door above it did. When his eyes came level with it, he noticed that there was a broken-off, fleshless fingerbone trapped in the crack between the little open door and the main side of the Thorn Thing, and at the' same time a voice over his head growled hollowly: "Ouwwtenshowmnnn. Dhayss dwuuhrr uhhpnnss owwnnuhhli t umm-nn pehrrsowwnnuhhll. Awwll ouwwthrr uhluff-ffouwrrms wuull be dhaysstroydd wieyethouyut dhaysscriyeshunn." Jackson looked up at the door. Nothing was happening. The door began to say again: "Ouwwtenshownnn. Dhayss dwuuhrr..." Jackson climbed back down the ladder. "Shakes you, doesn't it?" said the Eld Amsir, at the foot of the ladder. "It sounds like somebody's stomach," Jackson said. He looked over at the instructor Amsir. "'What did he say it says?" The Eld followed his glance and raised a wingtip. The instructing Amsir came forward, brimming over and ready to spill. "Do not be misled by the growling, rumbling sounds. I have said them to myself at any number of speeds and pitches of voice, and I have had many below me say them to me in various modes according to my instructions. I have had witnesses in great number judge the various effects and reach agreement among themselves as to the meaning of this sort of speech. It is the consensus," he said with proud conclusiveness, "that what the door is giving is first a sound much like our word 'display alertness.' This is followed by a sound which is very definitely the word 'this'. Then there is a sound very much like our word for 'hatch' -- " "Shut up," Jackson said to the shock of some and the amusement of the Eld. "You mean that's just a funny way of talking straight." T he instructing Amsir looked at Jackson almost tearfully, as if it were a farmer whose daughter had just gone off laughing with a Honor. "That's right." "I want to get this dear. It talks like we do but it has a funny mouth, is that it?" "That seems to be the case," the Eld Amsir said. "Well, now look," Jackson said. "That's a big thing. There's your kind of creature and my kind of creature, and now all of a sudden there's a third kind. And if it's all connected up with things that have been here since the beginning of time, then that thing talks for whatever made time begin." "Listen, you stinking, infidel, damp thing, you keep your mouth off theology!" The young Amsir who'd brought him in had been hanging around all this time without saying two words or even boo. It made Jackson twang a little inside for having him come on this strong all of a sudden. But he rolled his eyes over at the youngster with enough cool to make it stick. "Now what are you talking about?" "Don't pick at it," the Eld Amsir said to the young warrior with what had to be the fond substitute for 'shut up!' "It's just an ignorant creature. Listen, I think things are pretty well controlled here -- you can go home and tell your flock you are well above many for this day's work. Go home. Now." The young Amsir jumped for the air. "I am rewarded," he said thankfully to the Eld, before he flung himself straight up like a thrown dart aimed at the sun, shouting at the top of his lungs, "I am above many! I am above many!" High, high up, he flung himself out flat and went tearing down at a shallow angle for a particular one of the stilt-legged houses, still shouting. Jackson could hear his voice shrinking. The Eld Amsir looked at Jackson and shrugged, "You've got one or two things to watch out for besides the condition of your stomach. One of them is the fact that if you nudge superstition hard enough around here, you won't live to starve. And there's not much that anyone educated will be able to do to help you." VV tion going here," the instructor Amsir explained. "You see, we know there are two Thoms, two worlds, two kinds of creatures, and we know they were all made at the same time. One must be good, and the other must be evil. But you see, at that point we leave rational logic behind, and begin trespassing on matters of faith. A great prophet, one of whose last discourses I myself was privileged to witness as a very young being, teUs us that since we must make evalutions of our Thom's worth on faith, then it is just as logical to believe that each individual makes either good or evil of his own place. But, for this the great prophet was flung from a great height with his wings broken, by those who avoid such complicated patterns of ethics through the expedient of knowing that it is our place that is good and yours that is evil, and that they are therefore good for living in the good place. "We here are all reasonable creatures -- granting you a certain shrewdness -- and we know it is probably only an accident of creation that your kind of creature and mine cannot live in each other's places. But you see how difficult it can be to perceive this if one is of a tender and uncultured turn of mind." "You can see, too," the Eld Amsir added, "how brave that young fellow was, being as emotional as he round the fringes of your world for something as imutterably evU and repulsive as yourself to come into contact with him." The Eld and the instructor both looked at Jackson es if they had just told him something of considerable meaning and exped him to react. IF Jackson just looked back at them. For one thing, he didn't even know what "theology" meant. It was the apprentice instructor who said: "Look at himl He shows no sign of understanding! I propose the thesis they have no concept of original evil!" "And are therefore innocent?" the instructor cried furiously. "Shut up! Sut up!" He waved his wings spastically, hopping from one foot to the other, raising dust. He was pretty old stidf, and didn't impress Jackson much, but the apprentice instructor quailed and shuffled away, his head bowed. He acted as if he'd fallen out while running 'round the Thom behind Red Filson -- tireless, wise, dead Red Filson. What makes you dumb, Jackson decided, is what scares you. #Xou see," the Eld Amsir said : JL to Jackson, "we must discover whatever is within the Thom Thing. We feel this wkh different degrees of involvement." He glanced aside at the instructor, who was busUy running his fingertips through his lace and geUing it untangled. "Feel it for different reasons that are very close to our emotions. But k's our only due to the nature and purpose of Creation. We've studied the Thorn for generations, of course, but it's only a machine, and all we learn from it is how its parts move and in which of those parts it seems to be wearing out. It does seem to be wearing out in a numb of parts. Now the Thom Thing, on the other hand, talks. Perhaps there is something inside that can be talked to." "In what kind of talk?" Jackson asked. The Eld Amsir nodded. "You're right. Nobody is saying there won't be problems. Nobody is saying the answer will be easy to find. But we've got to begin. Things are not getting any better, so they can only get worse. We can't just let them go. Oh, there are many of our kind of creatures w'ho would never care until the last moment when the sky fell down upon them. All they care about is getting their food to eat, water to drink, sky to fly in. And there have always been these things, so they can't imagine that they could end. But we know the Thorn can end. So these things can end -- there can be a last day for this world. There are some of us who cannot live content, knowing this, even though we may also know that we would 'be able to die content long before it becomes necessary to really have the answers we seek. There is a certain quirk -- a restlessness -- in certain minds, which does not seem to understand the passage of time. What will be real some day to everyone is very real to them now." Jackson listened politely. "Now, I bear you no malice, boy. If we had food here that you could eat, I would give it to you, provided. Provided I thought you would work just as hard at opening the door as you would if you were starving. Others may bear you malice, but I don't. I understand that we are really very much alike, inside. And I like the idea of your beio an odd one. I am an odd one too, among my own kind." He pointed toward the Thorn Thing. "That's where I was mangled. "I wouldn't leave it alone. I tried to crawl up one of its throats, but I was clumsy. As all of us who do not need the ground all our lives are clumsy when we crawl. My clumsiness saved my life. I fell to the ground. When the fire burst forth from the throat to clear me out, I was already crawling away. But still it caught me and threw me a good distance. Haw, they called it the reward of foolishness. It was then, as I lay there screaming, and they gathered around laughing and exclaiming, that I understood I must either rule them or not live here any longer. So I owe much to the Thorn Thing. I owe much to oddness. And I tell you, odd one, that you had better owe much to it too. I bear you no malice -- I said that -- but I will do whatever needs to be done to force the utmost from you. I will remind you, if you haven't thought of it yourself already, that it treats your kind of creatures better than it treats my kind. My kind cannot climb the ladder to its top, nor touch the door. Something goes into my kind of creature from the door, flattens its insides, boils it eyes, throws it dead instantly earthward. Your kind of creature it merely permits to starve while attempting to crawl through the throats, or while picking at the door seam. Therefore, what is inside will probably not treat you like an enemy. It may help you. Why not believe that there is your sort of food in there? What is a friend for, if not to offer hospitality? And I think you will do well. You are very much like me, and if my body were like yours, I think I would do weW." Jackson said; "You know, I think you're rit. There is somebody who lives in our Thorn that I think you could spend a lot of happy hours with. Just talking. Comparing problems, sharing thoughts." But the Amsir Eld didn't seem to understand. He looked at Jackson the way Jackson looked at people who used words like theology. Well, Jackson decided, it was possible to talk, talk, talk about how alike they were under the skin, but if you had become the Eld of the Amsirs, you couldn't really think there was anyone else who'd made out as wonderful as you. The way, when I was a kid, Jackson thought, I thought there was only one world, and the only thing in it was honning. He looked around at the Amsirs, the blue food he couldn't eat, the stilty houses, the sky filled with flapping creatures and the Thorn Thing. And I wish, he thought, I wish I was still like those farmers and Honors back there who still think that's all there is. He felt pretty tired. "I'm going to get some sleep," he said, lay down, curled up, and closed his eyes around the throbbing of his arm. W ow, his arm hurt. He scraped his eyes open and looked down at it. The flesh of his hand was IF swollen up in a ring around the lower edge of the wrapping. When he reached up to touch his shoulder he found another bulge like it there. He rolled over in the dust near the Thorn Thing, rubbing his hair in his face, pawing his open mouth, licking his teeth. He saw it was morning again. His skin felt dry. He couldn't get his face to work. He sat up, and saw the Amsir Eld sitting there. "Huh! Been guarding my rest?" "Mine, too. I've been wondering what the effect of long rest on your energy supply would be. You don't seem to have become more alert." Jackson moved. He had it pretty well planned; the next step was to get around behind the Eld, hook his arms under the Eld's wings, using the left arm for whatever good it might do, and get his right thumb into the front of the Eld's throat, while his fingers curled around the back of the Amsir's neck. From there, he figured, he could start setting himself up a little more comfortably around here. He didn't know exactly what the Amsirs could really do to get him something to eat, for instance, but there was a whole world here, full of brave, strong, big-mouthed people, who were used to doing what the Eld told them. And if the Eld had to do what Jackson told him... But the Eld had had the thought to tie Jackson's ankles together loosely while he slept, and Jackson fell down. The Eld grinned. "In a few days, it won't be necessary to do that, or anything like it. Then you'll be waking up with only one thougiht. If need be, I may have to remind you that breakfast is inside the Thorn Thing. Then you will turn to it with a will." Lying there, thinking all kinds of top-of-the-head, fast-answer thoughts, Jackson said, "I believe a lot more in you for breakfast than in any instructor talk about what's inside that thing." The Eld said: "It's truly amazing what you'll believe in a few days. It's not a pretty condition. I think you will disgust yourself. I don't think you would like that any more than I would. We have let you sleep. Here is water," he said, setting out one of those sealed hide bubbles of theirs. "That we can give you. We won't be shocked -- I won't be shocked -- if you smear some on skin. Does your arm hurt?" "Thanks." The Amsir nodded off over Jackson's shoulder, and the doctor came up again. He unwrapped the bandages while Jackson drank and stared off at the rim of the world through the legs of the houses. When the doctor was done putting fresh wrappings on the arm and was restoppering his bottle of liquid he said: "Your arm's not healing. I think you'll soon lose it." "I knew that yesterday," Jackson said. He tossed the water bubble down. "There's something you can work on me with," he said to the Eld. "Maybe there is something in the Thorn Thing that'll fix my arm. Some kind of real doctor. Why not? If there's a feast for me in there, there might as well be healing, too." T he Eld was untying the ends of the thongs between Jackson's ankles; his wings got in his way a little, and he was clumsy about it, but he got them off anyhow. There were a couple of spearmen staading around, Jackson noticed now. It hadn't mattered ibefore if they were there or not, because when you make that kind of play there's no point counting odds. But he had shot that one, and he noticed them now. He held still. "And if not healing, why not anything else, too?" the Eld was saying as he worked. "Indeed, why not? Why not females, why not any other pleasures that migjit appeal to you? Why not weapons? And you thought of weapons in there, didn't you?" The Eld looked up shrewdly, his eyes twinkling. "Oh, have you not!" Jackson shrugged. The Eld shrugged too. "And why not? Why not, if you crack open a mystery from the beginning of time, why not all lore, all striving, all rewards for the shrewd and the odd? Pfu! Let me show you the answer to that." He gestured with a wingtip, and a couple of spearmen hustled something forward from behind the Thorn. The creature smiled winningly at Jackson. It smiled at the Spearmen, it smiled at the Amsir Eld, and at the instructor, and in fact at everything. Jackson had never seen an)Tthing so easily pleased. It was a shame it was so unpleasant. It stood just about his size, and it walked -- at a guess -- like a man. But it was a little hard to tell, because it sagged so much. It was hke dough, and the color of dough. There was no part of it whose skin did not hang down in sloughy folds, except at the very top of its head, where little fleshy pseudopods spangled half-erect about where an Amsir's crest of lace began. The rest of it hung on its frame of bones and meat, half-closed its eyes, drooped little beginnings of ears, made a flabby ruff around the neck, hung in a brief, scalloped cape around its chest and upper arms, made another fold below its waist, and fell on down its legs. It was, if it was dough, some Amsir housewife's too-watery bit of kneading from which an Amsir pastry might have been baked. All this delighted it. Its soft flapfingered hands -- the little finger rather longer than the others -- twiddled constantly at its thighs, its shoulders, and its face. It seemed to love playing with its mouth. How it smiled was by stretching its lips upward with its forefingers quite frequently. T he Amsir Eld looked crookedly toward Jackson. Jackson obliged: "All right -- what is it?" "Oh, this is Ahmuls," he said. "He's a kind of creature tom to us now and then. He happens to be one of the few who does noc die while still very, very young. Well, his mother was a foolish woman and fond of him. And I am grateful to her now. You'll see why. Ahmuls is very lovable," the Eld said as the creature shuffled up to him, still twiddling. The Eld reached out and lightly stroked Ahmul's cheek. IF "Good morning, Ahmuls; I love you." "Goodmorning, I love yow," Ahmuls said rather clearly. He hummed some sort of contented sound and stroked the Eld's cheek. "Ahmuls -- this is Jackson," the Eld said, pointing. "Jackson... " Ahmuls said reflectively, opening his eyes with thumbs and forefingers as he focused his attention. "Ahmuls, I want you to show Jackson something." "Oh, yes." "Very good," the Eld said, stroking Ahmul's face again. "Ahmuls, hit that for me." The Eld pointed to the leg of a house a dozen running strides distant. The Eld threw in an aside to Jackson: "Like many odd ones, Ahmuls has had to be special, or go under. He's very proud of thing's he's taught himself to do. They show he loves himself, and since we all love ourselves so very much, when we do something for that sort of love we're superb. Ahmuls... ?" The Eld looked questioningly at Ahmuls. Ahmuls turned to one of the spearmen, floppy-fleshed arm extended. He said neither please nor I love you. The Eldish sudden uplift of his arm did all the necessary asking for him. The spearman didn't seem offended. He gave his javelin a bit of a toss, and Ahmuls caught it in mid-air, thumb down, with his arm crossed in front of him, still turned three quarters away from his target. The next Jackson saw him clearly he was already stepping forward, his muscles already relaxing again, and the javelin was going through the air in an absolutely straight line, whirring. Jackson had never seen anything thrown that didn't curve down toward the end of its path. A dozen dozen running strides away the head of the javelin went into the house-leg with a klat!, a whip of its metal body, then a crack as the shaft snapped away from the immovably dug-in head. Up above indignant voices boiled up, and heads and bodies showed at the doorway. Then a voice came faintly down, pleased as well as scandalized: "Oh, Ahmuls!" And Jackson had been shown what love could do. T he Eld said: "I love Ahmuls," grinned and grinned. Pfu! thought Jackson. The Eld stepped forward and took gentle hold of Ahmul's arm. "Watch, Jackson." He pulled the flesh tight, for just a moment, and there was the outline of the human arm trapped under the uncooked Amsir skin. "You see," the Eld went on to Jackson, "this is also why I love Ahmuls. But let me show you #iAt too. Ahmuls -- climb the ladder. Show Jackson you can climb the ladder, Ahmuls." Ahmuls held his eyes open again, hunted, found the two things he had to know about. "Jackson," he discovered. "Ladder." Satisfied, he was beside the Thorn Thing wi two strides, halfway up the ladder with one jump, and at its head immediately thereafter. He stood with his feet curled over the top rung, and the only thing that kept him from falling backwards was tkat he leaned forward with his arms outstretched, oozed tight against the curving surface, and wkile the door growled he rubbed his face against the metal and moved his flatteued palms in little carressing motions. Jackson raised an ear with a twist of his neck that reminded him about shoulders, and could hear Ahmuls very faintly: "I love you." "Come down now, Ahmuls," the Eld cried. "So you see," he said to Jackson, "the door thinks Ahmuis is your kind of creature, for it doesn't kill him. True, Ahmuls is very stupid, and so there's no hope of his ever opening the door. But that's good for you, when you thmk of it, for if Ahmuls weren't stupid, I wouldn't need you. An#ay, Ahmuls goes in with you, if you open the door. He knows enough to hit you if you pick up a weapon. He's been told all about it many times in the past. He will imderstand something if it's said to him a few times. After that, he is too gluey inside to forget it." Ahmuls had come back to the Eld. They changed touches again. "Love you," both of them said. Jackson studied them. The Eld said to Jackson: "There is only one way you can keep Ahmuls from waiting just below you on the ladder while you try the door and then following you in. That would be to cripple him now. I still need you, and I have no replacement for Ahmuls. You wouldn't be punished, and you'd have a much better diance once you got inside. So I'm perfectly right now." Jackson walked over to Ahmuls. He reached out with his good hand, while shaking his head at the Eld. Then he looked straight into Ahmul's slitty eyes as he fondled the damp thing's cheek. "I love you." But Ahmuls wasn't having any. He caught Jackson's hand with something that felt like a fivefingered machine closing on it inside a cloak of blanketing. Somewhere inside all there, Ahmul's sense of touch got a message through to his head. "No good," he said, rubbing Jackson's hand before throwing the arm aside. "Soft." XV t was hot, up at the top of the ladder with Ahmul's humming happily a few rungs below him. Jackson ran his hands over the door again, and again found that it was exactly like any other door, except that it didn't have a handle, smd it talked. He had gotten used to the growling. There were those scratches around the edges, where various hands before ihim had tried to pry. One or two of the scratches actually went maybe a fingernailthickness deeper an the surface. The Eld had told him they were places where everybody sooner or later came to scratching in old scratches, trying to just plain wear through. The Eld's best estimate was that the deepest scratch had taken about a dozen men, working day and night, IF for maybe two weeks apiece. And it was as thick as two hands. But it was possible, Jackson thought, that a week or ten days from now he might start telling himself maybe this door wasn't that thick -- maybe it was only a finger thick. Probably, the last two or three days he could hang on up there, he'd be telling himself he'd wear through any minute now. The door was easy to get mad at. It was just another oval seam in the metal. A sensible man with other things to do would tell himself inside of an hour that it wasn't a door -- it was some kind of fake wrinkle in the metal. He could climb back down the ladder and never try it again. There wasn't even a place for the voice to come out. It was the first time Jackson had ever met anything that could talk but didn't have a mouth. He put his ear up to the door, trying to hear the heartbeat he could feel through his fingertips, but when he did that the voice went right through his head, and he couldn't hear anything but it. He leaned out as far as he dared and looked it up and down again, and then he said: "Hey, Ahmuls, let's go down." "Down?" "Down. Let's go down "You're stupid," Ahmuls said, but he moved obligingly down, one rung at a time, making sure Jackson came with him. The instructing Amsir, who'd beep keeping a sharp eye on this public tooling, came hurrying up to them. "What's wrong?" Ahmuls grinned and pointed at Jackson. "He came down. He's stupid." "I've learned all I'm going to, up there," Jackson said. "Where else are you going to learn anything?" "That's the real problem, I guess -- answering that one. But I've learned everything I'm going to up there," Jackson said, and walked toward the Thorn. "Don't you leave me!" Ahmuls cried, taking Jackson's good arm. "It's all right, Ahmuls dear," the instructing Amsir said hastily. "You wait here. I'll bring him back. He'll be with me." "All right. But you bring him back," Ahmuls said dubiously. "at are you going to do?" the instructing Amsir said, rustling along beside Jackson, his eyes glittering with intense curiosity. "Study door," Jackson said. He jerked his thumb toward the Tlwm. "Quite a few of them in there." H e stood in doorways all that afternoon, bracing his feet and elbows inside the oval door jambs as best he could, trying to understand how it felt to be that thick, that tall, that flat" He growled grudgingly out of various Amsirs' way whenever they came shuffling and scraping up itie halls through him. He swung himself flat against a wall and stood that way for a long time, his fingers and toes curved around the jamb, being hinges. By the end of the afternoon, he had a pretty good idea inside his head of how a door would think, and act, and feel about people. But always, only a door that had a handle ough its middle. By evening, the little hollow place that he put through his middle where the handle's works would be had grown up into something that he had to admit resembled the faint beginning of hunger in a man who let himself think about food. That was the only gain he had to show for the day, and he had to admit it was a loss. Toward evening, Ahmuls came looking for him, unhappy because the instructor didn't love him or he would have brought Jackson back, imhappy because Jackson still wouldn't go up the ladder, unhappy becatise the sun was going down and it was time to go back, to sleep, to wait for morning and the ladder, and Jackson again, and meanwhile not be loved. I B the morning, he climbed back up the ladder. Ahmuls patted him approvingly on the shoulder as he stood aside to let him by. "Now you're smart," he said. "Glad to hear it," Jackson said. The doctor had re-done his arm again, with the usual results. Jackson could feel that arm all the way up his neck and into the inside of his head, this fine morning in the bright sky with all the happy Amsirs flopping in the sky above him, and Ahmuls slurring and slapping up the ladder below him. When he got to the top, he sat down facing outward, leaning his back and the back of his head against the metal, his feet resting on the next rung down, letting himsdf warm up. He kept him arms crossed over him. He began to talk casually. "You know, door, I spent a long time last night trying to be like you." The door said: "Ouwwtenshownn. Dhayss dwuuhrr uhhpnns owwnnuhhli..." and so forth. "Didn't do any good. Man can't be a door. Can pretend to be a door -- can tell himself he is a door. But a man doesn't have hinges. Anyway he doesn't have the kind of hinges a door does. And a man can't be a door like you at all, because a man has handles." "... dhaysstroyd wieyethouyut dhayaysscriyeshunn," the door said. "Then I got to thinking to myself, door," Jackson said, paying no mind as the door began again. "Heyl You talkin' to me?" Ahmuls said peevishly from below. "No." "AwwU ouwwthrr uhluff-fouwrrmus..." said the door. "I got to thinking that if a maa can't be a door, can a door be a man? And I guess we both know the answer to that. You're stupid, door. You tell the difference between my kind of creature and a Amsir; you're supposed to keep Amsirs out, so it figures maybe you're supposed to let men in. I mean, even the instructor has got that much figured out. And their Eld has it figured out, so that clinches it. But you won't let me in. You don't knock me off, but you don't let me in. You don't knock Ahmuls off either, and that's a mistake. No, no two ways about it -- you're stupid. So I got to thinking, how do I get through a stupid door that thinks it's a man." IF... wieyethouyut dhaysscriyeshunn." J ackson turned his head in a way that looked pretty casual and idle, and would have been casual in somebody whose arm didn't hurt all the way into his head. Ahmuls was right diere, looking up at him. Over the many times Ahmuls had had tihis kind of duty, he'd learned that if he hung his head back and twisted his shoulders so diat he was looking upside-down, he didn't have to hold the loose skin away from his eyes. "Love you," Jackson said. "You're awful," Ahmuls answered decisively. "Well, I was saying, door -- you're stupid. But you've got ears, and you can feel, and I guess you can see, too, even if you can't talk straight." "... t umm-nn pehrrsowwnnuhll." "Now the thing is, door, if you won't let me in, and you won't let Amsirs in, what did you ever let out that you won't let back in? It would have to be something that talks like you, but looks like me, wouldn't it, door? Or, anyway," Jackson said, listening to Ahmids hum through the sound of the door going on talking, "anyway, something soft. "But you've been here since the beginning of time. What happened to what you let out, way back then? Door, I figure somewhere you've got a picture of what you should let bade in. A pidure at talks, I guess, but I figure thats what you've got to have. Something to let you , v; compare. Something you're much too stupid to forget." It was getting hot again. Jackson wiped his face. The instructing Amsir was getting all excited down below. He cupped his beak in his hand and shouted up: "Ahmuls! What's he doing up there?" "Nothing." "Then why has the door stopped growling?" Jackson took a long, deep breath. He turned around and looked at the door, holding on tight with his good hand and with the best he could do with his bad one. It would be no time to fall off now. "You dumb door!" he said. "This is only the first thing I thought of to try." Down below him, Ahmuls was shifting his grip too, forgetting he couldn't see as well right side up as he could upside down. "All right, door -- if I've got you started thinking again after all this time -- all right, if you do listen better than you talk, tln you figure what you let out would talk hke by now. It can't be that hard!" he said, suddenly irritated. "If that instructor can figure out some of your words, something smart enough to tell the difference between a Amsir and a man should be able to figure out my words. Open up, you dumb bastardr he cried. The beat of the Thorn Thing's heart changed. Ihere was a creak, a suck, a pop. The door jumped back the thickness of a finger and zipped sideways, into a place made for it to slide into in the skin of the Thorn Thing. IF J ackson scrambled around on the ladder. Down below him the Eld was a little slow getting things organized. There were spearmen throwing, but they hadn't really gotten themselves set. The whole thing was happening too fast for everybody. Jackson hadn't really figmed the door would make sense out of what he said, and for all of his talking, the Eld hadn't figured Jackson would get the door open this fast, if ever. So all that quiet, unspoken thinking of the Eld's about how once the door was open he didn't need Jackson at all, as long as he had Ahmuls or another creatures of Jackson's kind who maybe wouldn't be as tricky -- well, all that thinking was shot, too, because Jackson was in through the door, and into a dark laughing and cursing, before the spearmen got into the air. In fact, the only one who stayed cool was Ahmuls. He'd been told what to do a lot of times, and now he did it. He flipped hdf in through the door and crouched rippling next to where Jackson was lying on the floor. "I come, too," he said, happy to be useful. Jackson let out his breath as the first couple of spears came buzzing in through the doorway from nervous, fluttering spearmen and bounced off the walls. "I guess you do." There was this other door at the end of the little room. There was a red, bright lamp shining over it. Then the outside door closed, the light went out, yellow light came on from overhead in the little room, and the inside door opened. Past it were all kinds of things that looked like what Jackson guessed was Thom machinery. Through the metal around them, he and Ahmuls both could hear the outside door hollering as spears hit. Its voice was too fast, too high. It sounded as panicky as everybody. "Attention! Attentioal This system has now been adjusted to accelerated speech mode. lUa door opens only to human personneL AU other life forms will be desttoyed without discretion. An intdligible warning has been given." "It was about time," Jackson smd. A few copies of hard-bound first editions of stories from Galaxy, mint condition, brand-new. Some are now out of print and hard to find -- but take your pick while they lasti The Space Merchants by Frederlk Pohl  C. M. Kombluth. originally published in Galaxy as Gravy Planet. Hard-cover first edition, #. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, one of the most talked-about sf novels of aU time. #. The World That Couldn't Be and others from Galaxy, stories by de Camp, Simalc, Knight, etc., edited by H. L. Gold. #. Order by letter, endosing check or money order for amount indicoted. Postage pold. rry, orders from U.S. only...  m IF  Short Story They brought Earth a message -- not to preach it, but to act on it at the cost of their lives! #-Tlie orange-blood sunset over ' A CoUabirrian," thought Father Hume, and the sounds of words inside his head made a pleasing rhythm. For a moment they made him forget even the heat. For a moment. Then it was back again. To be precise, the summer heat in the Northern Territory of Australia never quite left. One could divert oneself with an urgent piece of work, or with worry, but only momentarily. Then the heat seeped back into one again with the merciless squandering the sun here could afford. Sighing, Father Hume lowered himself into a cane chair, his eyes looking emptily at the back of beyond. By heaven, it was the back of beyond. He was sitting on the verandah of his house, which was situated right on the outskirts of the township and gave an uninterrupted view of soil wounding itself with mercy-begging cracks, with trees jutting forlornly from the corpse-looking ground. Fom half the trees smoke belched as they burned hollow from the self-combustion that created, seemingly, never ending heat. It was hell. "Forgive me, my Lord," added Father Hume numbly in his mind, "but maybe the old artists were right. And this certainly is like it." The heat was hard even on native Australians. For Father Hume, who had only left dewy Devon less than two years ago, it was like... He shied away from the thought. "What should I be doing then tonight?" he asked himself. Then immediately he dosed his eyes, pushed the question back and mournfully decided just to exist until the night came, with its diimmery relief of cool breezes. Anything under # degrees was considered cool. Afterwards, Father Hume could have sworn that he merely closed his eyes for a moment, no longer than was necessary to kill the concept of doing something more than sitting. But, be it a moment or a few minutes, he should have seen the stranger approaching. After all, from the buckled edges of his verandah looking in a straight line ahead, even if there were two or three blackened tree stumps in the way, he could see miles in most directions, because there simply wasn't anything. Except heat. This time, though, there was a man. H e was tall and very thin. He walked towards Father Hume with... For a moment the good f ather disregarded the way the stranger looked, he was so taken up with the way the man was moving. Dignity. Maybe it was the way he carried his shoulders, straight. Or the gentle solidarity of his arms, swinging 'beside his body. Or the way his long and thin legs carried him. There was no heat for the stranger, heat which exhausts a man by just being. He made good speed too. By the time Father Hume got to his feet, the man was walking through where the fence of the back garden was supposed to be repaired. As Father Hume diufQed to the heatwaiped lean-on pole of the verandah, the stranger was only a couple of yards away. He stopped there and smiled at Father Hume. "I need your help. Father," said the stranger, the smile still on his face. The man wore dirty dungarees and an army shirt, the buttons either missing or simply unbuttoned. His dusty feet were in worn sandals. His face was longish, most of its surface sprouting with days-old beard, and the balding dome was surrounded with short blond hair. Father Hume was fascinated by two things: The calm look from the man's eyes and his quiet, effortless baritone voice. His voice lacked the special whine which so often accompanied those words. "Of course," Father Hume nearly added "son," but there was too much dignity in the man. No, the right word flashed into his mind: it was "equality." "I'd say come into the house, but it's worse in there. Do I know you?" "No, Father. I am new in these parts," answered the man, his words still clothed in that relaxed smile. Walking around the verandah, he sat down on the edge and waited. "Maybe you'd like some cold drink. I have some canned beer in the fridge." "No, thank you. Father." It was all so strange. Australians, even in the city, were a friendly type of people, hi the out-back they all had that chummy opeimess about them which made even a ceson a relatively cheerful affair. iSSsh!ag he pulled the cane diair nearer to the edge of the veraiKlaii and turned it to face the quiet man. He felt awkward about his appearance. But who could wear a proper clerical outfit in a climate like this? Nonetheless, his right hand automatically went to his open-neck shirt, his fingers, embarrassed, fastening one button. "Ypo know, I can't get over the way suddenly appeared here. I thoi I only closed my eyes for a momc and when I opened them again, there you were strolling in the back yard. How did you get here? "ni come to that in a moment. Father," said the stranger without hesitaition. "Actually, that is part of my story." "Yes, of course," said Father Hume. "Wiat can I do for you, then?" "A confession. Partly it is a confession. Father." "Now see here, my son, if you are of the Faith, you know perfecfly well it can't be such a casual affair. Tomorrow is Sunday. Why don't you..." "I will be dead by tomorrow. Father," said the man, quietly, and still with the smile. F ather Hume sat up straight in his chair, feeling anger and bewilderment. "If tbis is your idea of a joke, stranger, I find it very tasteless." "It is not a joke, Father. My confession is as real as my death. In fact, one is a part of the other." llie man is mad, thought Father Hume. Maybe the heat. He said: "You sound very certain about it. In fact, it almost makes me think you are contemplating taking your own life. In which case of course I could never be able to accept your confession." "It is my kind of confession. Father, not yours. You see, I am a priest, too. But I am an alien." The stranger leaned to the comer of the house, his hands resting in his lap, waiting. "Yes, you have an accent... Did you say you were a priest?" "Yes." "Might I ask what denomination? And where do you come from?" The next sound was the shrill laughter of a kocka-burra which alighted on a nearby tree. The stranger looked at the bird, then turning his head, at the far distance where the almost sunken disk of the sun was radiating the skyline with orange red. His right hand moved up slowly, like a petal faling upwards, his fingers pointing. "I came from there, Father." "Where?" "If you travelled straight on in that direction, Father, first you would leave your sun behind, then your solar system, then your galaxy. There are suns and planets in the tems which leave one weak with humility, and there, way away there, is my world, similar to yours. That is where I come from." Mad. No, he corrected himself IF hastily. The poor chs is ill. Father Hume tried to keep up wA the modem trends, and, suice it seemed essential, he even read a few volumes on psyology and mental health. What was this, paranoid or schizophrenic? Whi one was it that created a world populated by their own weird creatures? "Of course, you think that I am mad. In your place I would think precisely the same," said the stranger softly. Yes, yes, but wasn't that one of the points? Often these cases, apart from their idee fixe, sound so rational... He had to say something. "Well -- " Father Hume was conscious that not only was his shirt soaked with perspiration, but now even his hand were coated with a fine film of moistme -- "who can tell where we come from?" "Naturally, I expected this reaction. Forgive me. It is essential that I show you something." Before he could stop himself, the priest set his feet against the wooden boards, pushing his chair back a few inches. "No, don't be alarmed, I will not move. I asked your forgiveness because I must show you something, and to do that I will have to utilize your own mind. I just want you to understand that we would never do this without permission. But I have so little time." Now there was urgency in the stranger's voice, but he still sat there unmoving. Only his eyes lived. Vibrated? Father Hume cried out in astonishment. H e could still see the strange, who called himsdf an alien and a priest. He was still sitting on the edge of the verandah; but, as he stared ahead something almost like a gigantic television screen opened the vista of a new world. "This is where I came from," said the stranger. His thin figure at the edge of the picture was framed by the orange-red sky. The giant screen now nearly enfolded Father Hume, and he stared with fear and incredulity at the scene. It looked like open country: thick grass, like a hand-knitted lawn, strange trees, with terribly tall, thin trunks, but their foilage resembled an umbrella spread wide in an enormous distance. It was broad daylight there, with one of the suns high in the sky, the other halfway to the horizon. One of die suns! The enormity of what he was seeing chilled his skin. The colors were wrong too. The grasses were green, but there was more than a suggestion of purple in them; the trees had blue bark, their leaves nearly lost to the eye against the vivid blue sky. Well, at least the sky was the right color. "My world has a much lower gravity than yours. Father," he heard the stranger say. "That's vriiy vegetation grows taller. And so do we." Now the picture seemed to be gliding forward. The original setting was a meadow; now they were out over hills, leaving behind a riot of color, where unearthly flowers dotted in bunches like gigantic buttons. "Dear Lord," whispered Father Hume. "There is no need for alarm, Father. It is just a way to show you what we are, where we come from. There is no magic attached to this; we merely have a small measure dramatic. We can't move mountains, nor can we teleport from world to world. Nor, for that matter, can we represent pictorial memories that we don't personally have. If, for example, I tried to show you part of my world with which I am not familiar, it would be the same as if you tried to tell me about China, if you had never been there. Flashes of scenes such as you might have seen in a book or film, but no continuity. You see, this is the town where I came from.' Near, maybe a mile away, Father Hume was gazing at a magnificent city. The buildings were very tall and made of some translucent material, showing colors and shapes hke the most beautiful mirage ever seen. He could see that the grass and the trees and the flowers went right up to the edge of the dty, like a wall-waM carpet, forming a perfect unity between nature and men. The stranger was still in the very edge of his vision, unmoving. 'Who are you?" shouted Father Hume, knowing that if this were true, his whole life, those years in the seminary, those years where faith and reality provoked bloody battlefields inside his mind, were gone and useless. There was power here and beauty. Feeling more than understanding. Father Hume was desperately afraid. "Apage, Satanasr he said and closed his eyes. T he stranger, sitting in the semidarkness, disappeared from view, but the un-world scene remained. "I am not the Devil, Father, and what you see is inside your mind." Opening his eyes. Father Hume feared he knew not what. "Wiy?" he whispered. "These are my people," said the stranger softly. He could see them coming. The stranger must have used a mental shorthand, because it wasn't a progressive picture, a flowing line. One moment he was looking at the city inerging sensuously with the earth, the next he was watching a large group of the stranger's kin coming towards him. They were close, only a few hundred yards away. There were children, and there were adults. They were all terribly tall, with the cMdren smaller in proportion, all dressed in deceptively simple garments made of some semitransparent material and all of a different hue. They formed a large circle, at one side of the circle a group of them separate, and within the circle were a handful of grown-ups and a couple of dozen children. All who formed the circle were singing, the group to one side providing the strong, main melody. Those in the circle began to dance. It was perfection. IF The melody was soft one v moment, to turn into steel hardness the next. There was gratefulness in the tone, followed by promise adoration. The dancers offered love and dignity with their movements, and throng both the sound and the dance there was a feeling of imhelievable unity. And faith. "No," groaned Father Hume. "No! Stop it." "That was a service to God that you saw," said the stranger. Why didn't he move? Was he a man or was he a gargoyle, created by repressed memories of guilt, which he so often tried to hide with the shape of his collars? "Dear God..." started Father Hume. "The same in whom I too, believe," interrupted the stranger. "I asked you who you were," demanded Father Hume. "My name doesn't matter. Father, nor does the name of my world. We didn't materialize, but traveled a long, long while, using a method which I know nothing about and which you will not discover for thousands of your years -- if ever." "We?" asked Father Hume. "Yes. We. We are missionaries." The priest wanted to jump up and shout, but he could do neither. Inside his body, his muscles were individual animals tearing at their invisible yokes, but he could not move. Nor speak. #CT beg your forgiveness. Father." X The stranger's voice shaded into pleading. "You see, we are a very old race. We had had our civilizations grow up and destroyed before there was even a single cell on this planet. We too rose high up from the etarly beginning and several times nearly succeeded in completely annihilating ourselves. However, that was a long time ago. "It was also a long time ago when the race suddenly discovered the reason -- or at least, a reason -- for our existence. We are dedicated to saving races from committing suicide -- of helping them to find God." The alien turned in his seat to face the father, his dark shadow separating from the wall, and now there was pain in his voice. "We created a science with which we can correlate all the factors of a civilization, and we can, with a dreadful certainy, predict its future. because we are an old race, and living beings in the darkness of your back yard above your head. The prognosis for your race is death." "You lie," said Father Hume. "I don't." We try not to interfere, because of the dignity of the race. There are times, though, like now, when we must reveal ourselves, because that is the only hope for saving the race." "If what you say is true, why should you be talking to me in particular?" "Because you -- many thousands like you -- can alter the fate of this world." "Me?" Father Hume laughed out loud. "You know who I am? I am a country priest, tending about a thousand souls in an area so big that the mind reels, and before I came here I was a country priest covering an area so small that it was nearly a joke. You know how old I am? I am nearly fifty-eight, and if the Lord so pleases, I shall live down here the rest of my natural life. Just what qualifications do you have in mind for saving ihe world?" The evening was quiet. Its darkening majesty was only broken by tiny animal noises and the wedge of fear emanating from Father Hume, still sitting unmoving, the hard pattern of the cane pressing against his perspiration-softened skin. At McBain's, in the pub, men would now be gathering for the evening drinking. The gigantic fan on the ceiling would be going round and round, swirling the cigarette smoke and the stale smell of beer. The faces burned hard, sown heavily with wrinkles, perspiration running down in their years-old channels. The voices would be high, bantering. It is Saturday night, not much different from the rest of them, except for the Sunday to follow. The talk would be about football, the bloody Chinks, and how about Vietnam? The same old risque jokes -- I beg your pardon Father, but did you hear this one? -- voluminous laughter, shrill from the partition where some of the women would be sitting, and he. Father Hume would stand on the edge of the crowd, hanging on to a glass of beer, because it was a different country, different customs. (He had to be there in shirt sleeves to make sure they saw his face. And next day, reluctantly, they woidd be turning up in the tiny church, their minds already on the chores the day after that, thinking Hume is all right, but wish to Heaven he'd hurry a little. I'll have to wash the car, or water the garden, or lay a bet, or play two-up, if only the bloody woman wouldn't insist on spoiling the best part of the day... T he alien stood up and looked up in the sky. His thin, tall figure looked like a pain-filled, burned-out tree from a Russell Drysdale painting. When he looked down and spoke again, his voice was slow, and in it, pain. "I told you I haven't time; Father. Well, my time has arrived. When we reached this world, we studied it most carefully for a long time and realized one tragic point. You people were conditioned into believing not so much in the power and glory of reasoning, but in blind, almost insane emotional persuasion. You even have a saying for it: 'it's worth dying for.' Almost all your deities had to do that before you began to believe. So we have decided to die. There were many of us in the ship we came in, and no one will go back. At this moment there are over a thousand of us standing in front of people like you. We stand in front of Lamas and Rabbis, Imams and Besharabs, Christian priests and Shamans; some of us stand in the burning sun. IF some in the dark, but we all do exactly the same thing: we beg of you to save the race. For this "When our ship explodes, we will all die for you. For you all." Somewhere, up in the immensity of space above, stars were blanketed out by a spreading globule of eyehurting brightness. There was no noise, only the swiftly growing luminosity. Father Hume's heart hammered in his chest, physical fear knotting his muscles, his lips opening and closing, opening and closing, no voice, his lips opening and closing, his eyes focusing with dread 'on the figure only a few yards away. Flames, yards high, were standing there, and in the core, for seconds the pain-twisted features of a man. Then the tall figure fell to the ground, the hungry flames consuming it as if it were magnesium. Father Hume stared until it was over. Even in the darkness, he could see a few bones left. He nearly fell on his face, as he stumbled over the raised edge of the verandah. Where the alien had stood, the ground was still hot, and in a few of the bones the marrow was gently boiling. It was then that Father Hume staggered back to the verandah and, supporting himself on the lean-on pole, was sick. His tears were flooding his face, with that unearthly core of explosion still hi in space. The new star to a new Bethlehem. Now in Galaxy! by Hayden Howard by Richard Wilson  Plus Jack Vance, Willy Ley, Philip K. Dick, etc. -- E # all in the February issue of Galaxy, on sale nowl S  ' S IF  Novelette The aliens chose their first contact with Earth at random. Did it really matter that it was a lunatic asylum? I ingly in a muted bass, waver in its course, then nose down sharply. I t had come out of the sky one Tlie sounds weren't loud and everynight, trailing a pink-white blowbody else in the home seemed to be torch blast behind it, and crashasleep. Hengsen, gripping the bars landed with a whump like a distant of his second-story window, knew bomb burst in the field on the immediately that it was no plane, far side of the supply shed. After a while an opening appeared Hengsen had seen the ship loom in the side of the disabled ship, up from the south, rumble protestHengsen could see light inside, and then shapes appeared and framed themselves against it. Two of them came out. He couldn't tell what they were, exactly, but they weren't men. They came on, up the slight rise, toward the home, in a steady gliding motion. The shed hid them from his sight for a moment and when they reappeared around it he could see better. There was starlight and prison for the criminally insane and, after a while, when the right amounts of money had been spread around in the right places, he'd been transferred to a private rest home. He'd been there a month. He didn't plan to be there another; before then he'd have the lay of the land, and he'd make the break. Those characters from the ship, though. What was their racket? a sliver of moon. He was glad it was only a sliver. Had the moon been full, all the nuts in the place would have been up and yapping. Hengsen himself was no nut. He was in a nuthouse all right, but anything was better than the electric chair or life in the state penitentiary. Hengsen had killed a man, but he'd had a good lawyer who'd pleaded insanity. So they'd sent him to a They'd better not screw up his plans. He laughed a little at that, nervously, and the things from the ship stopped dead. They must have better ears than a cat. They looked up, straight at him, and he got a good view of them. They had heads that sat right on top of their big round bodies -- no necks. They had a thick single leg each, ending in a kind of ball on which they were balancing now, leaning toward each other and consulting. Hengsen couldn't see their faces clearly, but he had the feeling their eyes were boring into his. He found out soon enough that they didn't have eyes -- not like people's eyes. H engsen stood up on a stool as they approached the back of the home, but the bars were in the way, and he lost sight of them as th reached the back door. Hengsen looked back across the field and saw that the door of the ship was shut now. The craft lay there, a motionless black hulk. He heard the back door open, though it should have been locked, and there was a moment of silence. Then there was noise on the stairs, as if they were having trouble navigating them with their ball-bearing feet. But soon the noise indicated that they had reached the top of the stairs, and there was silence again. Then his door opened. He knew that had 'been locked. The two of them glided in, each of them pointing one of its three arms at Hengsen, and the door closed behind them. Hengsen had rarely been scared in his fifty years but he was now. He stepped down slowly off the stool, Ids legs quivering, and stood by the barred window. His visitors we absolutely motionless, poised side by side, arms extended toward him as if in accusation. The eyes, three of them arranged in a triangle on each face, were protruding knobs of membrane with purple veins criss-crossing them. The heads and bodies were a dull gray white, as if they'd never known sun. Gray#)lack hair began at the lower parts of the bodies and grew down as far as the ball feet, dh were bone Vhite. Hengsen tried to think of something to say to the things. They didn't seem to want to open a conversation, and he didn't want to open it the wrong way. He didn't know what the outthrust arms could do to him, but he imagined it would be better not to find out. "HeUo," he said finally. "What can I do for you?" There was no reply. Just a slight oscillating of the six eyes. "Welcome to Shady Rest," he said. He tried to say it sardonically, but he didn't smile. And he curbed a nervous temptation to laugh. His legs were still trembling. Carefully, slowly, he sat in the stool. As slowly, the things lowered their arms. They also turned their heads slightly to look at each other while continuing to regard him with their veined membranes. Then they whirled and were out the door. The door closed. He rushed to it. It was locked, as before. I t was daylight when he awoke. He remembered lying on his cot, after he'd tired of looking out at the silent diip, and he remembered half fearing, half hoping diat the two creatures would come back to his room. They hadn't, and at last he'd relaxed. He awoke with the opening of his door, and he sat up so fast he IF got dizzy; but it was only the keeper, Hank. "Mrs. Balch wants to see you," he said. "Okay, Hank," Hengsen said. "How come you slept with your clothes on?" Hengsen put his feet on the floor and went to the window. The ship was still there. The door was closed. "I saw them," he said. "Did you?" "Yeah," said Hank. "They don't scare me, whatever they are, but Mrs. Balch is in a tizzy. They cut the telephone wires, or burned them out. Minnie let out a yip and fell over in a dead faint when she seen them and Cook, he won't set foot out of the kitchen." Minnie was the maid of all work. Cook was close to seventy. "Is that why Mrs. Balch wants to see me?" Hengsen asked. Hank shrugged. "I dunno why. She said to get you down there, so let's get. I ain't got all day." "Okay. I'm coming." "Walk ahead of me and don't try no funny stuff," the keeper warned him. "Remember I'm a karate expert, and I could hurt you bad." Hengsen smiled. He knew that the hulking, near moronic Hank had taken his karate course by correspondence. But he also knew that Hank was strong as an ox and could hurt him just by pushing him around. They went down the stairs and into the lobby. Mrs. Balch was a tall, beefy woman in the prime of her forties. She wore a severe tweed suit with a no-nonsense blouse, efficient low-heeled shoes and serviceweight nylons. There had been a Mr. Balch once, but he'd given up the ghost long ago. The widow Balch, now the sole proprietor, ran Shady Rest practically single-handed. She completely dominated Hank, Minnie and Cook, who were her entire staff. But she wasn't dominating anyone this morning. She was sitting at her desk in the corner of the lobby, the beings from the ship standing on either side of her. Minnie was lying on a sofa, apparently still unconscious with a damp cloth on her forehead. If Cook was in the kitchen he wasn't advertising it with his usual prebreakfast clatter. "Ah, Mr. Hengsen," Mrs. Balch said brightly as he and Hank came in. She wore an unaccustomed smile on her frown-lined face. "Good morning, Mrs. Balch," Hengsen replied, playing along With it, whatever it was. She'd never called him mister before, though she was collecting plenty for his board. "These gentlemen," she said, indicating the creatures from the ship, "have paid an unexpected call. They have had -- what shall we say -- engine trouble, and will be staying with us while they make repairs. They are traveling incognito, so to speak, and desire privacy. I've assured them that they can't do better than to stay here at Shady Rest." The veined eye membranes of the creatures had flicked from her to Hengsen as she spoke. "I see," said Hengsen. "And I'm supposed to cooperate? Maybe they'd like me to go into town and get them same magazines or cold beer? The creatures stirred ominously, levity, please, Mrs. Bidoh said quickly. Ilhere must be no oemmunioation with the outside werid beyond what is absolutely necessary. We have disconnected the telephone. The mail will be delivered and collected at the box on the read, as usual. And I personally will supervise deliveries from the market. "You'd better do something about the ship," Hengsen said. "The delivery men could see it, and it'd sure as hell be spotted by a plane flying over." "Yes, they thought of that. So I'm going to ask you and Hank to go out and -- well -- disguise it in some way. Do you know anything about camouflage, Mr. Hengsen?" "As a matter of fact, I do, a little," he said. "I could do it with soflse paint and canvas and shovels. But why should I beat my brains out for them?" T here was a sound of footsteps in the corridor. An elderly man in pajamas appeared, slip-slopping along in bacMess slippers. He was talking to himself and gesturing elaborately. Hengsen recognized him as one of Mrs. Balch's long-term guests whose delusion was that he was twins. His name was Jimmyjoha. Jimmy for one of the twins,john for the other. "Breakfast is a little late this year," Jimmy was saying tojohn. "Better late than oatmeal,John replied in a higher voice. "Never could stand oatmeal.' "Jimmy-john stopped and looked around hiim as he reached the lobby. "Good morning, my dear Mrs. Balch, said Jimmy's voice. 'TIell, saidjoin's voice, shortly. Jimmy was fond of her, butjohn neither liked nor trusted her. She was always trying to feed him oatmeal, and everyone knew oatmeal was one of the easiest foods to poison. The three-eyed visitors regarded the pajama-clad man warily. The nearer one half-lifted an arm. The farther one did the same, but directed it toward the sofa, where Minnie was coming to. The maid opened her eyes, sat up, saw the creatures again, gasped, pushed herself as far back against the arm of the sofa as sihe could and sat there, trembling. "Good morning, Jimmy-john," Mrs. Balch said. "You boys shouldn't really be out of your room, you know." "We were hungry," Jimmy said nonchalantly. "Who are they?"john asked, pointing to the creatures as if noticing them for the first time. "New ones, I imagine," Jimmy replied. "It's nice here," he said, addressing them, "if you don't mind a late breakfast." "Of oatmeal,"john added. He warned them: "Beware the lowly oat, for in its meal lurk things unknown." "I don't think they're men," Jimmy said. "Or, to put it another way, I think they don't think they're men. Look how peculiarly they're dressed." "A disguise,"john said darkly. IP "I think they're spies from State Health. Admit it," he said to the creatures. "Show us your puzzle blocks and your rubber hammers and whatever else you've got." Minnie could take no more. She screamed hysterically and dashed from the sofa toward the door. As one, the creatures whirled toward her. Each raised an arm and pointed it at her. There was a flash of blinding blue light, a crackle of sound and an acrid smell. Minnie stiffened and fell. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that she was dead. The creatures seemed to be trembling. Their veined eyes pulsed, and their outstretched arms pointed indecisively to each of the others in the room before they lowered them to their sides. Hengsen felt a throbbing in his head and suddenly words were there which said: "No more of that, please." He knew beyond a doubt that the words were those of the creatures and that they were a command he would obey. Jimmy-john took two steps backwajds, so that he came out of his slippers. "I believe I'll return to my room," Jimmy said. "I'll go with you,"john said. "It's warmer there." The elderly man turned around carefully and walked barefoot down the corridor. Hengsen said: "I'm ready to start on that camouflage job, Mrs. Balch, anytime these -- gentlemen want me to." U H engsen had had a not dishonorable discharge, as he put it, from the army. He'd served reluctantly but not without profit in areas which had included the black markets of the Pacific in World War II. He'd learned something about camouflage, and he did a passable job on the ship. From the supply shed it would look like a pile of junk. From the air, except to a trained observer looking for something, or to a camera, it would have appeared as a pile of rocks in the field. Hank helped with the painting and the heavier work. All the time they were on the job the ship's one entrance remained shut. No one entered it or left it but obviously there were other creatures inside. Apparently the door to it was not sealed. They could hear muted fits of banging from inside, as if the repair work was being attempted with more temper than progress. "What do you figure these guys are?" Hank asked, as they sto back to survey their finished job. "Russians?" Hengsen looked at him scornfully. "Russians are people," he said. "These birds ain't from any place on this Earth, bud." The ship was wingless and shaped like a cucumber -- bumpy the way a cucumber is and without any apparent opening except the door, a round cut in the side. "Okay," said Hank. "But how come they're here?" "I don't know, but I have a hunch. for what it's worth. They didn't plan to land here. By 'here' I'm not referreing to Mother Balch's cozy Nook; I mean they didn't intend to land on Earth at all. Their engine conked out, and they had to come down, that's all. They'll be on their way as soon as they get it fixed. So it's simple. We play ball with them and do everything they say and get rid of them as soon as possible."But where were they going in the first place?" Hank persisted. " don't know, pal," said Hengsen. "Maybe from Pluto to Venus, or from Venus to Jupiter. From Natchez to Mobile, for ail I know. Maybe they're taking it on die lam from the Space Patrol. I'm not a UJ.O. expert. I'm just one of Mother Balch's crazy pigeons. You'd get as good an answer from Jimmyjohn. Why don't you ask him?" 'Because he's a real nut," Hank said. "Also because I don't think you're as much of a nut as you msde out. I read the papers, you know." "So?" "So this, Mr. Wally Three-Gun Hengsen. I know you beat a murder rap that should of sent you to the chair. I know you had a smart lawyer, and that's the only reason you're here instead of in the death house right now. So don't get smart with me, Wally-boy, or I might just turn you in for the fun of it." Hengsen clenched his fists in the pockets of his work pants to help him control his tongue. "That's a lot of newspaper talk," he said finally. "I'm surprised it IB! took you in -- a smart guy like you. All I know is that for the record I was certified a nut, like the rest of the characters here, and here I am. I always thought you were my pal and that when I got out of this loony-bin I'd send for you. You'd make a good man in the organization. I used to think before you started shooting off at the mouth." "The organization?" "Yeah. My outfit likes a guy that can keep his yap shut. A real big-money outfit." "I can keep my yap shut. You don't have to worry about me, not if you're level." "I've always leveled with you, kid, so I'll tell you. Just between you and me and the Space Patrol, I'm waiting for the break. And when it comes. I'll be on my way. And any help I get I'll be ad of and pay for. So, if you happen to be the guy that helps me, there'll be a place in the organization for you. Is that straight enough?" "Straight as an arrow," Hank said. "Say, you want to take it on the lam now? You could get away clean and easy, and nobody'd see." "Thanks, but I'm not ready. I need cash and transportation and the right contacts." "I got fifty bucks I could let you have," Hank said. Hengsen knew then that the keeper was his man. "I can see you're real organization material," Hengsen said. "But no, thanks. I need real money and rn wait for the right time. Right now I'm holing up, like your threeeyed Russians." "I was only kidding about them being Russians. I guess maybe they're Martians." "Whatever they are, we'd better get back to the house and see if they put the arm on anybody else besides poor old Minnie." M rs. Balch was as close to tears as her dignity would permit. "Those horrible thingsV she said, kneading her hands. "Why did they have to come here, of all places? Poor Minnie! At least she's out of it. And poor Cook. He's in such a state I don't think we'll ever get lunch, let alone breakfast." Minnie's body still lay on the sofa in the lobby. Someone had covered it with a blanket. "Where are they, Mrs. Balch?" Hengsen asked. They went up to the cupola a little while ago. They're looking out -- Lord knows at what. They had their eyes on me every minute when I went for die mail. What are we going to do with them?" "Or vice versa," Hengsen said. "I won't even think about that. Will you and Hank take Minnie somewhere, please? I do hope they go soon enough for us to call somebody before... you know... I mean in time. "I suppose they had their eye on us all the while we were camouflaging the ship," Hank said to Hengsen, "so that if you'd tried to make -- " "Tried to go for the police," Hengsen put in quickly; " -- if either of us had tried to go for help they'd have rayed us down, or whatever it is they do with those arms f theirs." He shot a warning look at Hank. "Oh, they're evil," said Mrs. Balch. "They think at you, and you can understand what thejr want you to do. They phrase it so politely, but you know you have to obey. You have the feeling that back of their commands lie terrible things. Did you get that impression?" "Nah," Hank said. "Yes," Hengsen said. "I know what you mean, Mrs. Balch." Hengsen and Hank put Minnie's body in the cellar which was cool for the time being. They sat on crates near the corpse and rested. Hengsen smoked a cigarette and sought an angle. There were plenty of weird angles to the situation, but there had to be one that was right for him. There should be opportunity here, if he could only work it out. But there was also deadly danger, a quicker exit than the electric chair, if he muffed it. These three-armed boys didn't fool around. Probably he could get away, with Mrs. Balch distracted the way she He didn't have to wait for his contacts to spring him from the rest home. He knew where to find them. But these aliens, whatever they were, ought to be useful to him in some way, if only he could figure it out. The way they communicated, for instance. If he could learn to do that there'd be a fortune in it. It was like radio was to jungle drums or smoke signals. What a help it would be on a job if your lookout man could think right to you. And if it worked two ways, so he could read other people's minds, how about that? He could clean up in the stock market, or at a crooked prize fight. He could even go straight. Just sit back and listen to the deals being made, then cut himself in. "Let's get out of here," Hank said. "Minnie gives me the creeps." "Shut up. I'm thinking." "Let's go, Hengsen," Hank said. "Go on upstairs. I won't run away." Hank shuffled his feet, then got up. "Okay. But I'll be at the top of the stairs, so you better not try anything." "Who are you working for? Balch or me? Go on, beat it." "Yeah, I forgot. Okay, but I'll be up there anyway. We got to make it look right." "That's the smart boy." Their ship now, Hengsen thought. Was there anything there? Suppose he found a way to knock off the aliens. He'd have their ship. But it wouldn't do him any good unless he could drive it. And if he waited till they fixed it, they'd be gone. That angle looked like a dead end. If he knocked them off, the local cops or the state troopers, or somebody, would come in and take the credit. There was no justice. He wasn't getting anywhere. He needed more information, and he wasn't going to get that sitting in the cellar. He ground out his cigarette and got up. The thing to do was to go see the creatures. Up in the cupola. IF m O n the way up he tried to put himself in the proper frame of mind. Submerging his motives, he concentrated on thinking friendly, respectful thoughts. It wouldn't hurt to seem a bit stupid as well. He didn't see Mrs. Balch. Hank, Who had been standing in the hall, followed him up the sairs to the third floor. "That's far enough," Hengsen told him. "I'll be up there, with them. I ain't going to fly away." "Okay," Hank said. "I'll wait here." Hengsen climbed the rest of the way. The door to the cupola was closed. There was silence behind it, but Hengsen knew they were there. And he knew they knew where he was. He took a deep breath and knocked. The door opened. Neither of them was near it. They were at the window overlooking the camouflaged ship, balancing on their ball feet. Their arms, thank God, were at their sides. There was a throbbing in his head, and words formed in his mind: "Come in, Wally Hengsen." He hesitated. I must be crazy, he thought. I can't fool around with these boys. They're Major League, and I'm only Triple-A. "Exactly, Wallace." The words in his mind again. Wallace. Nobody had called him that since grade school. He stepped inside, not really wanting to, and the door closed behind him. Now he'd done it. He felt like turning and beating at the door, knowing it was locked, and yelling for Hank to let him out. But he forced himself to stand still, controlling the shakes that threatened behind his knees. "Sit down, Wallace. There is nothing to fear." Nothing to fear? He thought of Minnie. Harmless Minnie. They'd mowed her down for nothing. For laughing. "We apologize for that." The unspoken words. "We did not know you then as we know you now." There was a captain's chair next to a table with a world globe on it. Hengsen sat down carefully, moving slowly. His knees were quivering now. He pressed his heels against the floor to stop the shakes. "You are here to know us better. That is good." That wordless communication again. Which of the two was it? Their three-eyed faces, immobile told him nothing. "I want to help you," Hengsen found himself saying. "You have already helped us, Wallace. You were expert in camouflaging the craft." "Thank you." The humility came unnaturally to Hengsen. He twirled the globe on the table. It was dusty, and it squeaked. "A speck, your Earth. Ordinarily we would have ignored it, as we always have. But we are thankful, this time, that it exists." "Why?" Hengsen lifted his thumb and found Australia underneath. It seemed tiny. "You could not understand. You are merely Triple-A. You need know only that we will leave you when we can. Necessity detains us, not ambition." The word "ambition" stirred Hengsen. Thoughts flashed through his mind too fast to be controlled. He felt discovered. He tried, too late, to mask his thoughts, twirling the globe. There was no change of expression in the veined eyes of the creatures. But the unspoken words came: "You have ambition. Earthling." Earthling; not Wallace this time. He could deny it only with his mouth, so he did not try. They had rebuked him by calling him Earthling. "You would trick us if you could," the thought came, more aware than accusing. Wallace ("Wally") Hengsen looked at the spot on the globe that was New Caledonia, trying not to think, or to think innocuously. French-speaking isle, he told himself. Subtropical. Down where the trade winds blow. World War II. Guadalcanal. The Slots. Rabaul. Mosquitos. P-#'s. The Rising Sun. The setting sun. Meatballs on the enemy fuselages. Kamikaze. B-#'s. Hiroshima. V-J. His not-thought, his recollections of the war he had been unable to avoid, were vivid. In their intensity they blanked out any antialien schemings. He felt the aliens absorbing the reality of his remembrance, asquainting themselves with that past of the Earthling and his Earth. It had been a long time since he had thought back. IF H e'd had no reason to, before now. His thoughts had always been of Number One, in the long years following his discharge. But back then there had been more than himself. Even he had felt it, cynical punk that he'd been. A working together. A common cause he'd almost forgotten. "We see you more clearly, Wallace." Wallace again, not Earthling. "You are more complicated than we believed." That wasn't very original. One of the alienists who testified that he was legally insane had said much the same thing. The thought struck him that these three-eyed, threearmed, ball-footed creatures picking his brains were also alienists. Alien alienists. If his subconscious irony reached them they hadn't reacted to it. He felt them probing the involuhtary memory that went along with his recollection of the alienists and the professional unemotional murder of the youth (much like the punk he once had 'been) who had to he prevented from singing to the D.A. He felt them accompanying him as he relived the stalk through the streets, in and out of bars, parks and finally the confrontation in the vacant lot, the pulling of the trigger of the automatic with the muzzle pressed into the shrinking flesh of the punk, the flight in the trailing car, the sirens in the distance, the hole-up across the river and the waiting for the hunt to die down. "Go on." The alien thought encouraged him to continue. But when he emerged, roaring back across the long, high bridge to the city, he found that the hunt had not died. His information had been wrong, and they had nabbed him, grilled him, produced witnesses ('dio could know what eyes had spied from the empty-seeming windows), tried him and sentenced him to the chair. Only the appeal, the feigned symptoms, the tamperable machinery of the law had saved him, whisking him from penitentiary to the prison for the insane to Shady Rest, Mrs. Balch's domain. Now he was being tried again, by these creatures whose interest in him was ephemeral, who were marooned here temporarily on their way foom the unknowable to the unknown. But what he had hidden from the alienists was on open page to the aliens. How would they judge him? There could be no appeal from their verdict. The creatures had not stirred since he first entered the room. He might have been imagining everything. But he knew it was not imagination that held him submissive in the captain's chair, awaiting their pleasure... their need... Their judgment. IV H engsen spun the globe idly and stopped it. The South Pacific again. He found the spit of land that was Sansapor, the northwest coast of New Guinea. There'd been an airstrip there. He'd been shipped there from the repple depple at Noumea with a buddy. His buddy, Murray Stein. Murray was a tou punk from Philadelphia, but he wore a Star of David on the chain with his dogtags. He blackmarketed and goldbricked, but he sent his poker winnings home to his widowed mother. He had a foul mouth and world cynicism, but if there was no one else to do it he led the squadron's tiny Jewish congregation in Friday night prayers. And when that stupid crew chief got into the parked P-#I and accidentally triggered the cannons, it was Murray Stein who yelled "Get down!" and threw himself against the slower Hengsen so that they both sprawled on the coral floor of the ready hut. But only Hengsen got up. If Stein had acted alone he'd have been safe. In saving Hengsen, Stein caught a #-caliber slug in the back that tore out his heart. Hengsen helped dig the grave, and he swore as the burial service was read that some day, somehow, he'd repay Stein's selflessness. He'd forgotten that oath, until now. He sat in solmn silence, remembering. He had spoken not a word, and the three-eyed aliens were mute, as always. But they seemed less hostile. Then they reciprocated. They let him see into their own souls, or whatever aliens had. Briefly they lifted the curtain of their mystery, but it was long enough for him to sense the magnitude of their mission. He could understand what they had done so unfeelingly to Minnie. It had not been malice which had killed her. To them, when they had first come, the Earth people had been no more than annoyances in their bigger plan, to be swatted as mosquitos if they got in the way. With his glimpse into their thoughts, Hengsen could appreciate the overwhelming desperation of their voyage. It was clear to Hengsen that their journay was an epic one, on which their entire civilization, their very future, depended. They were the scouts, the advance party, the only possible salvation of their people. If they failed, their people died. With such an alternative, who could blame them for their seemingly callous disregard of a life or two on an alien, third-rate planet? It was as if Hengsen, fleeing for his life from an enemy shooting at him, should break stride to avoid crushing an ant. Now he could believe that the impassivity of their faces masked an anxiety that the repairs by their fellow creatures in the ship should be finished quickly, so they could leave this way station and get on with their all-consuming mission. So they could leave this puny world they had been forced to land on and resume their quest for the destined land which would support their fellows -- their buddies back home whose lives depended on them. Like Stein, they were selfless, risking their lives that others might live. Three eyes or two, ball-footed or arched, men were men. They sat in silence, the three of them, waiting for the turn of events that would free them to go on with their lives, to meet their differing destinies, whatever they were. And then the cops came, their arIF rival heralded by the whooping wails of sirens in the distance. T he aliens rolled to the door and out, Hengsen commanded to follow, and down the stairs. Out to the yard, past the startled Hank and the fleeing Cook and the retreating Jimmy-john and the satisfied-looking Mrs. Balch, the aliens not pausing in their ball-footed flight, as they could have done, to ray down the betrayer, whoever he was. And across the yard and through the field past the shed to the camouflaged ship, Hengsen following less swiftly, running, not sure why he was accompanying them. But why were the aliens fleeing? Hengsen seemed to hear the answer before the question was asked. Duty, he half-heard. Your police have their duty, we have ours. We regret Minnie. We could dispose of them easily but we won't kill another of you if we can help it. all this he seemed to hear. Running, stumbling, Hengsen saw the younger Hank gaining on him and throwing him the rifle. This must be the greatest thing that ever happened to Hank, Hengsen thought. What a nut. He caught the rifle by its barrel as the police cars skidded into the driveway and their doors sprang open, uniformed men pouring out, shooting. Shooting wildly at first, then dropping and taking aim. Hengsen, running zigzag out of a generation-old memory of combat, fell behind the aliens, who headed straight for the camouflaged ship. The circular door of the spaceship opened, and the aliens were inside it. Instead of clamping shut, the door remained open, a scant thirty yards away, and Hengsen heard the wordless alien voices. They seemed to be saying Our door is open to you. Come with us. But a fusillade of shots had him pinned down. "Come and get me!" he yelled, and they started to, fanning out on the flanks so he had to turn to fire at them at separate wide angles. B ut he wasn't shooting to kill, although they were. He was shooting only to hold them at bay until his friends -- his friends? -- yes, his only friends in thirty years -- could close their door (paying his debt to Stein) and be off. Then one of his wild shots, unaimed, caught a cop and doubled him up; and Hengsen knew he had killed him. So now it was over. He could expect no mercy. The police bullets, once divided between him and the ship, concentrated on him. It was only fair, he thought. What was a poor, worn-out hood worth compared to the mission of a race beyond the stars? Who needs you, you sad remnant of a decayed civilization? You've got nobody. They've got everybody, ugly and alien as they may seem to people who don't know them. But he knew them, finally, as he had almost known Stein, his one other friend. And then a cop he hadn't seen, off to his right, snapped a shot at him and got him in the stomach. The door of the spaceship closed then, though he didn't see it, and there was a confused medley of voices and thoughts; police coming up warily, talking to each other (Mrs. Balch had left a note in the mailbox); this is the guy the A.P.B. was out on; imagine him holed up on a funny farm; would you call that a U.F.O.? Anybody got a camera? Life and Time and the television are going to ask questions. It was better this way. The electric chair would have got him anywhich had been his fate ever since V-J Day, if not happy, then content. "The rat ain't going to live," a cop's voice said, intermingled with that of a voice from within the slowly rising spaceship which said in alien tones: Thank you, Earthman, Thank you, Earthman (not Earthling, but brother, buddy) for your fidelity to our fragile bond; our civilization thanks you... Maybe they could have escaped without his help. Maybe not. But they wanted him, and that was what had mattered. To have been needed was one thing. To have been wanted -- invited -- was another. He was glad, somehow, that he was dying here and now. He had done more than he needed to have done. Probably that had been its appeal. In his final living moment, as a lieutenant pulled out his notebook, and Mrs. Balch came out hesitantly, as the spaceship lifted majestically and hovered as if in salute before zooming skyward, he thought that to have paid the ordinary penalty would have been too -- too what? IF IF  Short Story He wanted to roam the starlanes. Nothing in the galaxy could keep him from it -- except the truth! T ie man seated at the desk tapped his pencil thoughtfully against the application form. He looked critically at the kid seated before him. "Look," he said sternly. "Just what mes you think you'd like Deepspace work?" The kid was caught off guard. He started to move his mouth a couple of times without making any sound, like a fish out of water. Finally he stuttered, "I -- I -- I worked on a merchant ship the last summer before finishing school. I'd like to see more of what's out there. That's all." "Yes, yes," the man said impatiently. "I see from your form you had a couple of months on the Venusian Lines. Interplanet flights. You may as well understand right now..." He stopped abruptly as the door opened and a tall man in the purple Deepspace uniform entered. The man held some papers in his right hand. To the kid his face appeared stern and hard, the face of a man accustomed to facing inconceivable dangers as a matter of mere routine. The face of the man seated at the desk brightened. "Hello, Larrer. Haven't seen you in quite a while. How's things going?" "Lost four men this last trip out," the tall man said. "Damned thing on one of the Outworlds. The thing must have been as big as a mountain. Picked the scout craft right out of the air and ate it like it was a piece of candy with the four men inside it. A nasty business. We could see it all from the main ship and hear them screaming, aU the time over the radio, hut there wasn't a danm thing we could do about it. Christ," the tall man said suddenly. "One of these days Fm going to get enough sense to quit this damn business. Sometimes Fd swear I could still hear those men screaming." "It's no job for someone like me, V ho's used to sitting at a desk. That's for sure," the man at the desk said. "But someone has to do it. How about it? Are you ready to go out again?" The tall man shrugged his shoulders. "Have to make a living some way." He handed the papers in his hand to the man at the desk. The man glanced at thfm, signed them, and handed them back. "There you are, Larrer. All clear." 'Thanks, Colonel," the tall man said. "See you in a few months, I hope." He left with the spaceman's quick, graceful stride. T he colonel turned back to the young man seated before him. "As I started to say, you may as well understand right now that there is no comparison between interplanet flight and Deepspace travel. The human mind is helpless to grasp the immensity of Deepspace. There's myriad upon myriads of suns, and you couldn't even begin to number the planets. There's creatures, beings, forms of life out there of every conceivable and inconceivable variety. Man is lost among it all." The coloiiel looked sterply at the kid to impress him with the seriousness of it all. The kid's face was lit up like the face of a small child being told about Santa Claus. "Look," the colonel said solemnly. "Deepspace work is a dangerous business. There are creatures out there -- strange creatures, tremendous creatures that can smash in the side of a spaceship like an elephant would crush an egg." The kid was practically on the edge of the chair now and hanging on to every word. The colonel rubbed his fingers across his eyelids and suddenly he was a tired old man. "Listen," he said bluntly, "I know why you want to go to Deepspace. I knew before you asked me. It's not the work. It's the glamor that brings all you kids in here." "But -- " the kid interrupted. "No buts," the colonel said. "I just want you to understand my position, that's all. My job's not easy. Every time I approve an application I may as well be signing a death warrant. There's nothing really glamorous about Deepspace. It's dangerous work, sure, but there's no glamor to it. How would you like to have to face an alien life form no human being has even seen before? Some creatures so alien your mind can't accept their existence. So alien you'll wake up screaming the rest of your life from having nightmares about it. In situations such as those there are no rules to go by. You have to make up your own rules -- and they better be right, or you end up just IF another cold, dead body circling around a distant star. On top that there are situations whicth are not only dangerous but are downright riculous. "Take that man who was just in here. A few years ago Larrer was seated before me just as you are now. Young and green, just like you, and brimming over with the glamor of going into Deepspace. Well, he made it, and you want to know what happened on his very first time out? One of the most ridiculous incidents in the history of Deepspace travel. They had set down on an asteroid way out in Deepspace when the radar sighted something which couldn't have been there." The kid looked as if he was about to fall off the edge of his chair. The colonel paused to light a cigarette. "Larrer was in the control room, and he looked at the blip as it approached. " 'Captain, it's not a meteor, Brown, the radar man said. 'It's velocity isn't constant.' " 'Are you sure, Brown?' the captain asked. 'Your radar must be on the blink. Ever#ng has a constant velocity this far out in spacel' " 'Positive, Captain, the radar's okay. It's changed its velocity again. It's stiU too far away to use our mass as reference.'" T ie colonel observed the kid to see bow be was taking the story. He was 'breathing in short, quick breaths like a runner. "Well," said the cplonel, "it couldn't have happened by the rulebook. But rules don't apply in Deepspace. Larrer opened a porthole and looked off from the starboard of the ship. He saw something out in space. Suddenly it was quite near and crystal clear as objects in space are. Larrer gaped at it. It was at least twenty times as long as the ship. It had a long wavering shape, and all over it were small, round spots that glowed and sparkled like gems before a bright flame. All the time the sonar emitted weird, burbling and gurgling noises. "Suddenly, unbidden, there came into Larrer's mind the lines from Lewis Carroll's poem Jabherwocky: Did grey and gimble on the wabe All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome raths outgabe -- "'That's what this thing is,' Larrer thought. 'A Jabherwocky.' 'The others had sighted the thing now on the visi-screen. " 'By the great rings of Saturn!' " 'It's almost on top of usl' "'What in God's name is it!' "'What'll we do. Captain?' "'It's too late to do anything,' the captain said. 'It's too dose to us. If we used the atomic Master on it now we'd destroy the ship. We'll just have to lay here and hope it goes away.' "They stood watching as the strange thing came right on and on. The sonar continued to emit the weird burbling, gurgling sound. The thing stopped just short of the ship. "'It's examining the ship.' "'Good God, Captain, it's going to sit down right on top of usi' "And that seemed to be that. The thing dropped down right on top of the ship, and it stayed there. The men didn't know what to make of it. " 'What's the damn thing doing? " 'Nothing. It's just sitting there. "'What'll we do. Captain? " 'There's nothing we can do, said the Captain. 'We have the laser beam, which wouldn't kill it. At least not right away. And if that thing started threshing around it'd crush this ship like an egg. Does anyone have a theory as to why the thing just keeps sitting up there? "By the third day the men on the siup had reached the conclusion that the thing was not going to go away. They had also almost gone out of their minds trying to figure out why it just kept sitting there. Then Dunned, the engineer, came rushing into the observation room. " 'Captain, I've been going through our Encyclopedia Galaotica microfilm. The thing's listed. It was observed by the #th Galactic Geography Survey Team. They call it the Scintillus. colossus. Listen to this: 'Among other Deepspace creatures observed was the Scintillus colossus, so named because of its enormous size and because of the sparkling, gemlike appearance of the female of the species. The creature emits electrical energies of varying frequencies which has the effect of producing a strange burbling sound from the ship's sonar. From our limited survey of this creature, it was determined that the creature is oviparous and that it attains sizes exceeding two thousand feet in length. # #reat,' the captain responded disgustedly. 'Now we know someone else had seen the thing. But we still don't know why the thing just keeps sitting on top of us like a hen sitting on an egg. The captain did a double take. 'Let me see that note, Dunnerl " 'Thats it, the captain said, looking at the paper Dunner had brought in. The thing's oviparous. It lays eggs. Just how big do you think one of its eggs would be? "'Judging from its size, at least as big as this ship.' Larrer said. He shot the captain a startled look. 'You don't mean that thing thinks the ship's an eggl "'Think about it a minute, the captain said. "'One of the men breathed a sigh of relief. 'Well then, there's nothing to worry about. We know the thing won't harm the ship. "'Not so fast,' the captain said. 'We have no idea how long the normd incubation period of one of its eggs is. The thing might sit up there for months. We have supplies only for four months. The trip back in takes three months." "A week went by, and the situation was becoming desperate. Although everyone on the ship was racking his brains to come up with some idea to get that overgrown sitting hen off then, no one could come up with any practical suggestion. They seemed doomed to sit there either until they hatched or starved to death." IF "And that," said the colonel, looking critically at the kid, "is Peepspace glamor in actual fact," #T)ut how did they get out?" JD "Oh, that," the colonel said. "Well, Larrer was the one who made the suggestion, and he got a promotion out of it. They simply turned on all the heating units and got into their spacesuits for protection. The surface of the ship kept gettting hotter and finally the ship got too hot for the thing up there to sit on. And of course, as soon as the thing rose up into space the ship took off." The colonel chuckled. "I bet that thing is still puzzled about that egg. First it gets too hot to sit on, and then it goes shooting off into space." The kid laughed too, and then the colonel was suddenly serious again. "Okay. I tell you what I'll do. I'll leave it up to you. If you still think you want Deepspace work, sign this paper, take it out to the front office, and you're on your way." The kid signed hastily. He took the paper and left hurriedly, afraid the coloned would change his mind. The kid was barely out of the office before the tall man came back in. "How'd you make out? Did you get the kid signed up?" "Hell, yeah!" the colonel said. "He signed it like he was afraid I'd change my mind." "What technique did you use this time?" "The usual." "Not that bit about another cold, dead body circling around a distant star?" the tall man said disgustedly. The colonel nodded. "And the 'you'll wake up screaming the rest of your life? stuff?" the tall man asked amazed. The Colonel nodded again. "I also told him the Jabberwocky story," he said complacently. "Good God! Not the egg story!" "Swallowed it hook, line and sinker," the colonel said. "Hell, it's not a bad story. In my opinion it's a real classic. There's some type of psychological appeal to it." The tall man looked more disgusted than ever. "This is a heU of a racket. Colonel. Sometimes I get so disgusted I think I'd actually try a Deepspace voyage myself. Space is big enough, there's no telling what they might find out there." "Sure, sure," he said. "Only it so happens that in three hundred years about all they've found out there is some lichens. You didn't know Brown did you?" "No," the tall man said. "Well, he was in Deepspace work for thirty years. Then he found something alive on an asteroid out there somewhere. It was fust a little buglike thing no bigger than the tip of your finger, but he was as proud of it as if he had discovered one of those alien civilizations they write about. He carried the thing around with him for years in a little plastic bottle. Had it last time I saw him. "What do you suppose will happen when the kid discovers there's nothing out there but boredom?" the tall man asked. "Oh, he'll get over it," the colonel IF  Novelette The planet was only a battleground in Gree's war against Mankind... but the non-combatants had to die! X?gral was angry. His huge body was bunched on the low wide platform-stool like that of some oversized, overmuscled black Terran feline. The thick neck, almost a torso, that rose from a broad chest was erect and rigid; the third pair of limbs -- stubby arms that sprouted midway up the neck -- folded tensely. Steve Duke said firmly, "We bargained in good faith." The Remm's wide-set eyes glared. "What difference does that make? If I hadn't bargained, we wouldn't have led this Gree Empire to our very doorstep. The Task Force I was with would have stayed lost out in the Sparse Regions!" Steve tried not to look at the Remm's fangs and claws. "There's no certainty at all that we led them here. This isn't the first galaxy they've cxnquered. Don't you think they'd move in toward the Hub sooner or later?" "Sooner or later!" Egral's shortmuzzled face showed disgust. "Sooner or later! How do  know what might have happened ten generations from now? It's my tail -- " he waved that truncheon-like member for emphasis -- "that's in a crotch now. I had absolutely no right to bargain with you -- I, a mere linguist -- no right or qualification at all! You bamboozled me into it!" He shifted his weight jerkily. "The mildest thing I've been accused of is treason." Steve muttered, "They'll never accuse you of being inarticulate." Louder, he said, "Since you've condemned me, tell me the details so I can brood over my crime. Have you actually seen Gree ships? Have you located their Base?" Egral snorted. "Seen them? There was a skirmish, and they were better prepared than we were. Two of our capital ships are lost in null. The ones that got home are damaged. We know the approximate location of the Base. We captured one small auxiliary, with navigation computers intact." Steve sighed. "Your High Command was warned that you can't fight Gree with just capital ships." Egral scowled. "We're building escorts, somewhere. Naturally -- now -- I'm no longer privy to classified information." "Privy, eh?" Steve grunted. "You've really mastered English. Are you close enough to the privy to know if the Base is being scouted?" Egral, without looking any less angry, showed his fangs in a grin. "My superiors see no reason to risk a peotly good and loyal personnel. I'm to accept your offer to volunteer. You and your two companions and I will go in the captured ship. We won't know the way back, in case we're captured. We'll have small message drones, but we won't know to where they're programmed. If we survive initial contact, and if we send out adequate data, and if we can destroy the null terminal so Gree can't send reinforcements, my superiors may risk trying to pick us up instead of blasting the whole planet." Steve digested that. "As easy as that, eh?" The Remm said, "I was sure you'd be delighted, and so am I. The Tribunal considering my case has been reading ancient history. Before we became over-civilized, we used some interesting forms of punishment." T hrough the viewscape, the planet showed no sign of habitation. It was one of the discus-shaped worlds so common here, with a core of the dense matter Steve still couldn't think of as normal, which showed a polarization of gravity along its axis of spin. From this angle the banding showed clearly: an iced pole, a dark brown tundrazone, then a wide greenness stretching to the equatorial clouds. Fazzool, the gray-hided B'lant, looked up from his instruments. "If I have ze physics right, gravity halfway between ze pole and ze equator should be about zero point seven." Steve said, "They'd put the Base in higher gravity if they had a choice, so personnel wouldn't get soft. Do you still place it here?" "Zat is where ze only electromagnetic spill comes from." Steve glanced at Egral, who looked on, tail twitching. "Better get the backpacks ready." Steve put the ship in a fall, and spoke hurriedly for his throat-mike. "Emergency! Emergency! Do you have a fix on us? We have only partial control! If you'll set a landing-spot, we'll try to -- "He pushed a computer-stud, and preprogrammed static drowned out his words. The ship bucked, the image of the planet whisking offscreen and back. Steve's companions were shouting wildly in B'lant and English. Steve yelled over the din, "Our gravs -- " An Overseers's voice came through harshly. "Identify yourself. Slave!" "J-Jen, sir; #-#-#! We took heavy damage and I'm ranking survivor! But I'm not -- the controls -- " The voice snarled, "Stay in space, you fool! We'll send up a rescue ship. Check your fall, or we'll blast you!" Steve let the static roar again. He threw a glance at the others, then watched the viewers. A light blinked orange. A missile-launching. Orange lines grew toward the center of a scope. He put the ship in an erratic, jerking course; struggled out of his seat, hanging on with one hand as Egral slipped packstraps over the other shoulder. He let go long enough to shrug into the harness. then pulled himself to the controls. He yelled at Fazzool, "See any open spots?" The B'lant jabbed a gray finger at the screen. "Zat lake!" Steve punched studs; braced himself. "Thirty seconds!" Air was shrieking around the hull now. The sound became deafening as the hatch shot open. Fazzool crouched in the opening, staring down. A blast rocked the ship as a missile went off nearby. Fazzool waited a few seconds, then jumped. Egral went next, his great form barely clearing the hatchedges. Steve, nerves screaming, shoved Earth-bom Ralph Parr through the hole,then followed. The lake rushed toward him. His harness gray cut in gradually, so there was no jerk. He saw Egrd plunge in and braced himself for the impact. He hit and floundered for a moment, then swam desperately for the palegreen wall of trees, his pack weighting him down. He was almost stunned as another missile went off somewhere, followed by a rattling detonation as the ship blew up. He caught a glimpse of Egral slowly pulling ahead of him He blundered into something below water -- a giant tree-root -- and pulled himself along it. The Remm was already standing hock-deep, a hand extended. Steve let himself be hauled out, stood gasping, then turned to look for the others. Fazzool, grinning as widely as his blunt, thick-skinned face could manage, waded in. Ralph Parr grounded a moment later, bent coughing up water, then slogged forward. Steve gestured toward a IF fan of the enormous roots. "Out of sight!" There were no more explosions, and no whoosh of aircars within hearing. He'd timed it well; the ship had paused over the lake long enough for them to jump, then shot off to draw away missiles. There were Slave Warrior corpses enough in one compartment -- preserved by the cold of space -- to make the wreckage convincing, he hoped. Energy-pistol in hand, he took time to look around. U T his was a swamp, choked with trees and undergrowth except for the open lake. It had a peculiar odor, besides the dankness -- a sweetish one that reminded him of a hospital or laboratory. The trees were tremendous, but he couldn't see much of them through the undergrowth. That was mainly of one kind -- ferns, he supposed you'd call them -- with straight slender stems to a height of ten feet or so, then bursts of pale-green foliage that made him think of enormous ostrich plumes. He stepped out cautiously to see what they'd taken cover under. Some of the roots were as thick as a man. They fanned out from a great burl or tuber that must be a hundred feet across. From that buttress four monstrous treetrunks rose, the smallest of them twenty feet through at the base. Fifty feet up, the limbs began. They were striaght and horizontal, only long enough to brush those of the neighboring trunks. The leaves -- if you could call them that -- were on a scale with the trunks. Four or five hung like pennants below each limb. The mature ones were five or six feet wide at the limb, tapering down, ten or twelve feet long pale green, translucent and thin, but veined in red, giving an oddly animal impression. Birds, also pale green, the size of eagles but scaley and featherless, with parchmentlike wings, clung to the fruit that hung below the maturest leaves -- brown, rough-rinded, watermelonsized, with reddish pulp that the birds globbled down. One bird, so far up the monstrous tree that his squawks came down only faintly, was flapping about what looked like a green meter-long lizard with eight or ten legs, that crouched on a limb, reptilian jaws agape as his h#ad swiveled to confront the bird. Here and there similar lizards, scuttled, their stumpy fat legs agile, their claws maintaining them easily on the trunk or the vertical leaves. The swamp, now that the explosions were ten minutes, past, was coming aliye with hissings and squawkings and the flap of wings. Somewhere far off, some animal bellowed repeatedly like a gargantuan fogjiorn. Steve said, "We'd better get farther from that wreck, and into opener country. Did anyone see the inlet of this lake?" Fazzool pointed. "Zat way. And zere are hills." Egral, nostrils and stubby ears atwitch at the swamp soim and smells, protested, "Shouldn't we reconnoiter a little while we're this close to the Base?" S teve shook his head. "They might , comb the area, if they're at all suspicious. I want to get to some high t where we can watch things for a couple of days." He shifted his back to a more comfortable balance. Egral grumbled, but moved out in front But after they'd gone a few yards a sound from high in the trees made Steve crouch, gun in hand. Up there, a horn was blowing purposefully -- high-pitched and clear, but soft, like a muted bugle. He knew, as surely as he knew it was no natural sound, that there was language in that playing. Egral asked softly, "Gree?" Steve shook his head. "Somebody, or something, that doesn't have radio. They're reporting on us. But to whom?" He looked around, then hurried on, staying under the ferns as much as possible. There was another horn-message when they started up, the inlet -- a small river, nearly canopied over. Then there was another when they reached the edge of the swamp and started up a canyon. For a way there were ferns, but those ended where grassy banks sloped up to hills halfcovered with trees like huge willows. They heard no more horns for a while. Sunset came before they were as far or as high as Steve liked. He chose a spreading tree beneath which to make camp for the night. While Ralph and Egral strung proximity-alarms about, Faool broke out rations. "Zese will do for tonight, but tomorrow I'll start experimenting wiz local food. I wish we had brought some of zose fruits from ze swamp. But zere are ozzer bzings here, and plenty of lizards along ze river." Steve, spreading out the backpacks to dry, told him, "First we'll get through the night if we can, then we'll find a spot we like. Then you can start to go native." But there was no alarm during the night, and only a few bugles. And before noon the next day, they found a spot Steve thought would do. T he place was a good five miles from the edge of the swamp; a small plateau above the river but with a creeklet crossing it. The willowlike trees grew thick; the grass -- also pale green -- was tall enough to lie in and be concealed except from above. There was a steep slope backing the plateau, with one actual cliff against which they made camp. Egral prowled restlessly, eager to get out the telescopes. Steve restrained him. "First we have to be secure, if possible. It'll take the rest of the day to set up alarms and stuff. Also, we ought to get a look at those musicians before we let them see us spying. Actually make contact, if we can." Ralph said, "They don't seem to have followed us since we broke camp this morning." Egral said, "They've been watching us all the time." He jabbed a thumb upward. "I wasn't sure until a minute ago." Steve peered up through the foliage. Far up in the sky was a pair of bird-shapes. He got to his feet, rummaged around and returned with a small monocular. IF Five minutes later he lowered the glass. "You're right; they're not birds. But all I can make out is a silhouette, like a small stubby-winged plane." Egral said, "I can see more. There are humanoids, or something like it, wearing those wings." Steve tried to find the bird-shapes again, but they were out of sight. "You told me," he said to the Remm, "tliere'd never been any humanoid races evolved this near the Hub." Egral made the equivalent of a shrug. "Conditions don't favor bipeds or purely diurnal animals. But these needn't be native." Fazzool demanded, "If Gree brought zem, why haven't zey reported us? " "That's a puzzle," Egral admitted, "but there they are, gliding around in plain sight of any aircar that might come by, apparently unworried." Steve said, "I don't think even your eyes could see a worried expression at that distance. But we have to assume they've at least some sort of truce with the Gree garrison. Vm worried." B y evening the plateau was well bugged with electronic warnings, and the other gear was stowed out of sight. Fazzool had gone down to the river and killed a lizard, and now had slabs of its flesh sizzling on the hot-plate. Egral was padding about restlessly, tail lashing. "Damn it! We haven't even looked toward that Base. I'm going to take a telescope to the edge of the plateau and lie under a tree." Steve had been considering the same thing himself. "It'll be a while before Fazzool has that lizard-meat tested. I'll go with you. Ralph, you stay here and take clinical notes, and we'll help you dig the grave later." He got the two biggest scopes and handed one to Egral. As he followed the impatient Remm, there was bugle-talk overhead. They found a suitable spot, set up the tripods and afixed the scopes, and carefully parted the grass. There was no problem locating the Base. Perhaps twelve miles away, airline, just beyond the swamp, the hills were speckl with light. Steve said, "That radio transmission came from the swamp itself, or I thought it did." Egral said, "It's possible. Can't you see by starlight?" The starlight was a thousand times stronger than Steve was used to, but that still wasn't much. "See what?" "Why, the jungle is discolored just this side of those lights, as if some of the trees were dead or injured. But it's a much smaller patch than I expected." Steve asked, "What's on the slopes?" "Missile emplacements, radar gear, ground defenses. No large buildings." Steve said, "Then the Base is underground. Can you see any air activity?" "Certainly. Aircars coming and going. Patrols, I assume." Steve peered through his scope, saw small craft over the spot. "Wdl, then we're not going to learn enough at a distance. I'm not surprised. Eventually Fazzool and I will have to put on uniforms and sneak in." Egral said, "And in the meantime?" Steve squirmed into a more comfortable position. "In the meantime, we learn more about the planet and work out some way to create confusion, so Fazzool and I can sneak in." He lay a moment, thinking. "Do you really believe, personally, that they couldn't have found a way in here with ordinary null?" "Well," (the Remm growled, "a step-by-step advance would take many lifetimes." He shifted his weight and pointed skyward. "The Hub warps null as well as space. It's in sight now; had you noticed?" "No." Steve followed the point and located the slightly darker smudge in the awesome starfield. "Not very big from here, is it?" Egral said, "We're still ten thousand light-years out, if distances are meaningful any farther in than diis. You should read some of the theory I couldn't translate for your scientists. Especially about the polarity, along the axis of rotation. As far out the axis as fifteen thousand lightyears, the pidl breaks matter into ultimate particles and whirls them out in the galactic plane. Eventually they condense into new hydrogen and start the long evolution into stars. I tried to translate into B'lant and Effogan by comparing the Hub to a centrifugal pump, but the analogy is poor." Steve said, "Well, I'll avoid the axis. I wouldn't want -- " He went silent as Egral was suddenly on four feet, staring toward the camp. T here was a shout, followed by the blam of Ralph Parr's powder-burning pistol. Steve rolled to his feet and ran after the streaking Remm. When he arrived, the other three were crouched behind treetrunks, staring upward, weapons in hand. On the ground lay what looked like a small parachute draped over some bundle. Ralph said, "There's another lodged in a tree. I thought they were parachute bombs." Steve stared upward until he saw the lodged one. Slowly, he felt for a flashlight. "They've got us pinpointed. A light can't hurt." He flashed the beam on the dark object hanging in the shrouds. Fazzool, for once, gaped. "Why... zat is one of ze fruits from ze swamp! Zey -- look, zere comes more down!" The B'lant moved to catch one. "Now why n zis world -- ?" Ralph's grizzled beard suddenly shook with laughter. "Why, it's obvious! They worship the lizards, and they're dropping us food so you won't kill any more!" Fazzool gave him a glare, but reached for his knife and hacked off an end of the fruit. He sniffed at it and said wonderingly, "If zis is not protein -- and very much like meat -- zen I am one of zose lizards!" Steve said, "Maybe a dead one, if you try to eat it." Fazzool shook his head vigorously. "No. Ze birds and lizards were eating zem. And we can tell if ze rinds have been punctured." Steve said, "Something funny IF about this. Even if they are simply donating food, there's hardly been time, since you killed that lid, to fly down there, get fruit, bring them here and attach parachutes." Egral said, "I don't think they had to. There's been bugle-talk, and some of it was from up-country." Steve stared up into the darkness. "All right. Fazzool, you'd better give these tree-steaks the survival test. Declining might be a mortal insult. And tomorrow we go hunting the source." He looked at Egral. "Do you agree that making friends with these people may be the quickest way to get at the Base?" Egral said, "Of course. If it turns out that simple." Ill B efore the sun was halfway to noon, they'd climbed up canyon to where the river emerged from a narrow, deep gorge. Steve paused. "Fine plaice for an ambush." "Which," Fazzool agreed, "may be why zere have been no bugles lately." Egral unbuckled his harness. "I'll scout. Shall I take a radio?" Steve shook his head. "Can't risk even weak transmission. Better go a hundred yards at a time and find spots to signal back." He found a place against a boulder and watched the Remm slink into the skimpy brush. "Apparently he's satisfied now that these people aren't with Gree." Fazzool said, "We have only his long-range view of zem to indicate zey are humanoid. I have been calculating. A man could not glide on wings ze size of zose, even in zis air and gravity. Ozzer zings have two arms and two legs, loosely speaking. A Terran frog fits zat description." Steve said, "I won't reject his opinion lightly. There is something odd about this whole situation -- Gree's appearing on this particular planet, where humanoids are already, or something like them. And I think that plateau was artificial." Ralph looked doubtful. "I've seen just such plateaus on Earth, certainly natural." "Yes," Steve admitted. "But when a chunk of hillside's broken loose to leave a plateau like that -- by volcano or .earthquake or whatever -- there are signs. I walked around the perimeter and looked down all the slopes. No loose rock, no lava. I think it was chopped out, and the rock carried away somewhere, and that stream redirected to provide water." Fazzool said, "If so, it was not recently." Steve shrugged. "There were humanoid races with null travel fifty thousand years ago. Maybe there's something about this particular region that makes it easier to get to. That would explain Gree's doing it." Ralph objected, "Wouldn't it be pretty coincidental, our finding an artificial plateau right away? Unless there were a lot of them." Steve pointed out, "We didn't just happen to find it. We were loolg for a good view of the swamp and lake. That may be why it was there." Fazzool nodded slowlyw "Zen zese people would be retrogressed descendants." "Right." Steve looked up the gorge. "There's Egral, waving." T here was no ambush and no bugles. However, beyond the gorge, they found the source of the protein fruit and also evidence that the natives had not always been at peace with Gree. The cliff-enclosed valley was no more than a mile long and half that wide. At the lower end was a small lake. The rest didn't look swampy, but there was a solid jungle of the protein-producing trees. Birds swarmed, their hoarse cries faint with distance. On the upper shore of the lake was a cluster of devastated huts, charred or flattened. Tree houses, too, lay where they'd fallen. Yet, other tree houses looked intact, though deserted. Fazzool said, "A punitive raid, perhaps, to teach ze natives respect. Or prisoners may have been taken for study." Steve was scanning the trees. "There could be an army of them, waiting. Egral, do you see any?" "I'm not sure," the Remm said. "There was something stirring when we first came into sight, but it could have been a big lizard. What if they just keep avoiding us? We can't chase them all over the planet!" Steve started down. "I think they'll show themselves if we don't make any threatening moves. They already Imow we're not with Gree, but they're probably as worried about us as we are about them." They circled the lake and paused. Fazzool pointed to a tree house. "Look! Ze floor is made by gluing zose big leaves edge-to-edge somehow, still fastened to ze limbs! And ze walls and roof are of cut leaves! Zose must be very tough!" Egral said, "Big lizards crawl up them without leaving any clawmarks. And to hold those heavy fruit, in a storm, they'd have to be toiigh." Steve was looking for stairways. What he found instead -- hard to see against the foliage -- was a long ladder, apparently attached at the top to a still-living leaf. "I think," he said, "we'll act as if we're about to set up housekeeping and see what happens." He walked toward the ladder. But when he reached it, he paused, astonished. It was made from leaves -- vertical ropes and rungs, laminated until they were thick and semirigid. And the whole structure was green, and still alive! The rungs continued into the ground as if rooted. The veins spread up, as well as downward from the high limb. He peered up at the houses and got the same impression. Bugles were talking. After a pause, one answered from the distance. He grinned and stepped into the open. "I'll bet you each a tree-steak that was the okay to make contact." It was only a minute until the native came down in graceful swoops; face down beneath wings no more than four feet long but a good twoand-a-half wide, rigidly fixed, slanting up a little to the tips, thickly cambered. The fuselage was a mere short boom -- hollow, no doubt -- and the tail assembly was small and very close behind the wings. The whole, of course, was made from IF the leaf material, still veined and looking alive. The humanoid's knees were bent to his heels almost touched his buttocks. His insteps fit into stirrups that evidently controlled the tail. The main support was at his waist -- not a complete band, but a wide bracket open at the side so he could slide in. The arms were not extended under the wings, but bent, elbows at the ribs, so his hands -- very sinewy, and overlarge for his size -- grasped two stirrups. Those grips, Steve saw, were controls as well as supports. As the contraption neared the ground, the flyer's fingers did things and airjets hissed. The apparatus tilted up, stalled, settled lightly. The being's feet withdrew from their stirrups and swung down like a bird's as he landed gracefully. In one contortion he was free of the waist-bracket; then, as if the apparatus weighed no more than a few pounds, he flipped it over and laid it bottom-side-up. The familiar laboratory smell of the trees came stronger from the flying apparatus. T he native turned, obviously nervous, staring especially at Egral. He wasn't over five feet tall, very lean, but with tendons that stood out like cables. His skin was tawny; hairless except for the short black curly patch on his head and a little beard on his chin His eyes were dark and quite human looking. But what Steve gaped at was the pair of short, straight, blunt-ended horns -- mere vestiges -- that barely poked out of the hair. He heard Fazzool take a deep breath. Steve shook off his astonishment and stepped forward. "Is it possible," he asked wonderingly, "that you... speak Effogan?" The native started and turned wide eyes at him. After a moment he said in a rather high voice, "We are the Doyt. Effogan is the tongue we learn from the ancient talkingwires. But how is it that you -- the report says you came from the skyl While the others, the violent ones, came from the ground! The legends say..." Steve found himself laughing. "A lot's changed since your ancestors colonized this world. Now, other descendants fight the tyrants who did this -- " he indicated the blasted village -- "and we are here to stem this invasion if we can. Will you help us?" A fixed look came over the native's face, as if he'd been briefed for this. "We know nothing of colonization, or of other worlds, if there be such. The legends say our ancestors came from the ground and might come again one day. In any case, we cannot help you fight." Egral stepped forward, making the native flinch. "You won't resist them? Even after they did this to you?" The Doyt said stubbornly, "This was a village of outcasts, insane ones, who resisted when they should have yielded." The four were silent for a minute. Then Fazzool asked, "Have others been taken captive?" The Doyt looked uncomfortable. "A few. The men from the ground wanted infants and took the parents along. They have not bothered us U# IF beyond that. We avoid the place from which they come." Steve asked, "Is that a large cave?" The Doyt said, "There were only the hills and the swamp. Then one day there was an explosion, and rocks and trees hurtling, and great ships of metal came out, rising without wings. We have guessed, the inside of the world must be hollow." Steve said, "This world is not hollow, nor do the invaders belong on it. They come from the stars and will enslave you and teach your children and your children's children to fight, enslaving still other worlds, of which there are no end. They have usurped the means by which your ancestors came." He turned to Egral. "I think it's obvious that Gree forces stumbled onto some ancient Effogan null link somewhere, tried it out, and found themselves here. Don't you?" Egrd, tail atwitch, growled, "I suppose so." He stared at the Doyt with disgust. "You, fellow. Now that you know we're not going to eat you, is there someone in authority?" The Doyt said mildly, "We are only a scouting band, temporarily bas in this valley. But tomorrow an Elder of the district will be here to talk to you. We had hoped you would not come this far; but since you have, I am to take you to our camp to wait. It is safer ere." IV T hat evening the four were in a tree hut assigned to them, two hundred feet above the ground, near the cliffs on one side of the valley. Steve, who'd spent much of the day talking to Doyt craftsmen, had a small section of one of the amazing wings. "The whole thing's honeycombed like this; that gives it strength. But all the alveoli, I guess you'd call them, are interconnected, so the air can distribute itself." Fazzool said, 'I did not hear much of ze chemistry, and what I heard I doubt. Did you get it straight?" "Roughly," Steve said. "It's related to the process by which the trees absorb nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air to make protein. You pump air into the wing, and the tissue -- skin, cells, stiffeners and all -- absorbs it and stores it as semistable compounds. The smell we notice is traces of nitrous oxide. A wing can absorb up to fifteen per cent of its own weight of air, under pressure, and give it out again as the jets are used." Ralph, who was a little out of things since he didn't speak Effogan, said, "I still don't see how such gentle jets hold them up." Steve turned the section sideways. "See this raised part of the leading edge? There's a thin crack at the rear of it, running all along the wing. The jet -- a thin sheet of air, really -- blows back along the camber and creates lift. That's why they get such efficiency of a short wing and why they can hover without forward motion." He hefted the section with one finger. "The whole apparatus weighs less than ohe-fourth as much as the Doyt flying it." Ralph said, "Even so, if they want to hold altitude or climb, they must run out of pressure before long." "Not too soon," Steve said. "Those hand grips are little pumps, as well as controls. The Doyt keeps squeezing them as he flies. Thafs what makes their hands so strong. The pump valves are the only metal parts in the whole assembly." Ralph grinned in his beard. 'Td like to take a bunch of these people back to Earth and start a dairy. They could really milk cows!" Egral, who was stretched along the limb that bisected the floor, reluctant to trust his weight to the latter despite assurances, said, "And you mean to tell us they don't need any adhesive? Just join the parts and let them grow together?" "Right," Steve said, "the same way they oin these floors, walls, and ceilings. Of course there's techrdque involved. To get a perfect joint, the cutting has to be accurate. Then for an hour or so the parts have to be held in place and kept warm and moist. It beats gluing, though." Egral said, "I'll stick to metal and welding." Fazzool got to his feet and bounced up and down on the flexible floor, as if it were a trampoline, making Steve and Ralph grab for handholds. "Zis is not to be sneezed at. Especially when ze same trees grow meat for you, right outside ze door." Egral scowled. "A remarkable botanical science, I admit. Too bad they haven't turned it to weapons. Steve, how do you plan to handle the Elder who's coming?" Steve shrugged. "I'll have to play it by ear. Maybe I'll give .him a good rundown on the galactic situation and let him think about it for a day or two before I put any pressure on him." #T am Jubbelyn." X The Elder was as lean and cordy as if braided of rope, his skin not young but tauter and healthier than one might expect from his white chin beard and near-naked scalp, the latter accentuating the vestigial horns. His black eyes were alert but calm as he surveyed the four. Steve said, "We're honored. No doubt you already know our names and our mission." The hint of a smile crossed the wrinkled face. "Everything has been reported. Forgive me if I comprehend slowly. We are sorry your ship was destroyed, but rejoice that you survived. If there is any concern in your minds that we will betray you to your enemies, please bani it. You may take refuge among us if you wish; or, should you prefer, we will lead you to some hidden valley far from here, where you may live out your lives in peace." Steve tried not to stare. Could the native be this innocent? Or Wias this a gentle hint that they shouldn't make trouble? He said slowly, "I don't think you understand the situation. Gree will not let anyone live in peace, on this world or any other he can conquer, except the slavery that he calls peace. We speak of Gree, from habit, as a person; but these invaders from outside the galaxy are not humanoids nor even animals. They are artificial beings of IF metal, without emotions as you and I think of emotions. The humanoids who serve them are Slaves, so completely indoctrinated from birth that their devotion is fanatical to the death. The symbol called Gree is not an actual being, but a half-alive simulacrum controlled by a metal being. The physical appearance of that ghoul is copied from remaining statues of the oldest humanoid race in this galaxy -- the Men of Effogus, your own ancestors. The fraud is an effort to cash in on lingering legends among other races." Jobbelyn said calmly, "Are you quite sure you yourselves have not been misled as to the nature and intent of your enemies?" Steve, a little nonplussed, gestured toward Fazzool. "Ask him. He was born a Slave.  spent years in that role, as a spy. We know." The Doyt sighed, shifted his position on e floor limb and stared out at the busy jungle. Presently he faced Steve and said, almost sadly, "It appears to me you are as fanatical as those you fight. I wonder if you can answer me frankly -- are you out of touch with your own forces? Do they know where you are?" Steve decided there was nothing to be gained by evasion. 'They know exactly where we are. And we have means of reporting to them." Jobbelyn brooded over that for a minute. "That is as we feared. What we can expect, then, is a war on our planet -- your side attacking the Base, their side defending?" "I'm afraid so. But there is this difference # -- we won't enslave you." T he Elder made a gesture of gentle rejection. "I don't doubt your sincerity. But the others have promised the same thing. They treat us almost as children, but with a hint of respect. Perhaps they secretly admire our peaceful natures." Steve said, "Don't be deceived. They have to be gentle with you for tlie moment because of your appearance -- clearly similar to the one they've chosen as the Gree symbol. Otherwise, they'd have trouble with the Slaves. But the Overseers know the deception; they aren't Slaves, but a race whose treason has been bought. And they will be your masters, when the planet's secured." Jubbelyn sighed again. "I cannot dispute you. But we have discussed this thing, and our decision is to remain neutral. We will try to do nothing to anger either side. We region, up to a radius of a full hundred miles. We hope you and the others will confine your war to that area, and that whichever side wins will keep its promises." Steve stared in disbelief and bafflement. A hundred miles? When even a hasty hit-and-run attack might devastate half the planet? But if he told Jubbelyn that, it would sound like a threat. Slowly he said, "Why do you think the invaders have taken infants? Already they're starting a creche!" Jubbelyn smiled. "If you are right, they wiU be disappointed. Violence was bred out of our natures countless generations ago. We do not even kill for food -- and I have been told you do." He got to his feet. "I must be leaving, to report this talk to my colleagues. I thank you for your hooesty. Should you reconsider your plans, our offer still remains. We can give you happy lives. Not all our settlements are primitive villages. The are cities of many thousands, with theaters and games and museums, and other diversions. You may work or play or simply relax, as you choose. Perhaps we can even build you wings. If not, there are riding' animals, and ships for sea travel, and a great variety of climates and geographies. Please give it thought. And now, excuse me." V E gral, ears twitching at the night sounds, paced gingerly around the edge of the floor and climbed inte the bisecting limb. "I don't see that we have the right," he told Steve severely, "to worry about the welfare of these people. You've reminded me often enough that the galaxy is at stake." Ralph put in, "You were ready enough to sacrifice Earth, if necessary." eve scowled at the bearded man. "I wasn't ready at all. There was nothing I could do except try to save her.  was on Earth too at the time, don't forget. I don't say we have to shirk our mission here. All I say is, we ought to think hard before we deliberately involve the Doyt. Fazzool, you were going to nose around for Doyt weapons. Did you see any?" Fazzool spread his gray hands. "What is a weapon? A matter of employment, is it not? Zey have knives, of good steel zey make zemselves. Zey have fireworks -- zose were described to me -- so zey have gunpowder, at least. And zey drop noise-bombs, and bombs wiz ammonia and ozzer gasses, to drive dangerous animals away. Also -- zo I did not see it -- zere is a dartthrower zat uses ze plant chemistry to build up gas pressure to shoot ze dart. Zey have darts zat will merely sting like ze devil, or darts to put you to sleep. Zey use zose on ze few criminals who resist banishment." Steve said, "I wanted to ask Jubbelyn more about that, but didn't get a chance. What about the criminals? Are there many? Is there a police force?" Fazzool drew his feet up under him. "I had quite a talk wiz ze same Doyt zat first met us. Zis group here belongs to a sort of constabulary. To belong to it, a Doyt must be very much against violence and only Zat is rare, and even zen zey use ze sleep-darts or gas and do not kill. constabularies of different districts have only voluntary co-operation between zem. Ze criminals are a very small percentage." ' Steve grunted. "I almost wish we'd run into savages instead. Do you suppose we could find a few of the criminals?" Fazzool grinned. "Ze Gree garrison had zat idea first. Ze local ones are already rounded up. Maybe ze Overseers intend zem for breedingstock." "Yeah," Steve muttered. "All IF right; suppose we tricked the garrison into a couple of punitive bombings on real cities. Do you think that Doyt would fight back?" Fazzool shook his head. "A few individuals, maybe. As a society, no." Egral said impatiently, "Even so, a little resistance here and there might create the confusion we need." Steve said, "Maybe. But the Doyt might catch on quick that we'd arpersonally, to take a bigger risk if we can avoid using the Doyt. Egral, I can't demand the same of you, but I can ask. If you'd seen as many happy, peaceful races dragged in as I have..." The Remm scowled. "Colonel Duke, you have a very under-handed way of making a person's decency oppose his better judgment. I'll agree as far as personal risk is concerned. But it's my home world that's the soft, nearby target, and I can't risk that. I insist that, whatever we do, we have an alternate plan involving the Doyt, to switch to if necessary." Steve glanced at Fazzool and Ralph, who nodded. "Fair enough. Now, how about concrete suggestions?" Fazzool said, "Well, zere's nozzing like ambushing a ground patrol in a swamp to start creating confusion." T he backpack interfered with Steve's movements. He coiled the scaling-rope and tossed again. This time, as the rope slid back, the improvised hook caught the limb above him. He went up hand-overhand and hauled himself, grunting with effort, onto the limb. One of the parchment-winged birds, apparently undecided between curiosity and indignation, hovered with quick little wing strokes a few feet away, squawking tentatively, its reptilian head cocking at various angles. Steve coiled the rope and stuffed it into his pack. It wasn't comfortable, sitting here a hundred feet up, knowing he daren't use the grav to break a fall, this close to the Base. He straddled the limb and got his back against the trunk. A bugle sounded faintly, back the way they'd oome. It worried him that the Doyt had followed this far. Neither was he satisfied with his view of the trail below, but he didn't have all day to find a better spot. For that matter, there wasn't much of the day left. He glanced up to make sure he had head clearance beneath the nearest of the pendant fruit. A complaining of birds began a little way up the trail. That would be Ralph, climbing to his perch. Fazzool -- less vulnerable, with his thick skin, to a hasty rake of a hand-beamer -- was already set, at ground level. Steve frowned at his watch. If Egral, scouting the patrol, let himself be seen or heard too far away, the ambush wouldn't oome off. The birds settled down again to their late afternoon feeding. Lizards climbed about nimbly. Now that he was used to the clinic odor of the trees, it was rather pleasant. Somewhere at the edge of hearing, the foghorn-voiced animal boomed. He looked at his watch again and began to feel tense. He wiped his palms on the uniform he'd donned and drew his handgun. This waiting before action was always agony. It was five or six minutes later that he heard B'lant voices. He took in a deep uncomfortable breath and tried to control his trembling. The leader of the patrol -- a B'lant Gunner Second, wearing a visor cap instead of the uncomfortable standard hehnet -- came into sight. His blunt features were bored; his heavy beamer carried loosely over a forearm. Steve fretted. Would they all have heavy guns? Then the next B'lant came into sight: a Gunner Third, no doubt in command, with only a bolstered pistol. The one following him, and the two humans next in file, also had only handguns. The B'lant bringing up the rear had another heavy beamer. Steve let out his breath and gulped in another. Where was Egral? An animal sound, more a whuff of surprise than a growl, made the patrol spin as one man. The rear guard jerked up his beamer, then lowered it. Steve raised his pistol. The Gunner, Third, spoke for teen. We've just sighted a large, black animal of a new species! We only got a glimpse, but -- " S teve's weapon spat incandescence. The B'lant's voice choked off, and he went down. Now pencils of fire lanced in from other directions. One of the men ran a few steps, screaming, before he dropped; the olhers died faster, with cries on their lips. Steve had deliberately waited to hear die patrol commander's voice. Now he tried to imitate it. "Sixteen! Four of the beasts attacked and we -- " He fired the pistol again and let out a muffled cry, then dove off the limb, harness grav turned on. He could risk it now, with aircars surely converging, masking the electronic spill. He landed and ran toward the scene of the massacre. Fazzool was already there, stripping equipment from corpses, tucking under them and distributing around small objects. Egral galloped up. "Hurry -- something coming down from high up!" Steve finished equipping himself and plunged down the trail as Egral raced off in the other direction. He heard Fazzool and Ralph pounding after him. He fumbled at the pocketradio in his left hand, got a Gree channel. An Overseers' voice was snarling commands, directing aircars toward the ambush. A car reported, "This is AP Twelve, landing. Will send eight men along the trail, ready to shoot." Steve ran a little while longer, then turned off the trail and went very slowly, paralleling it. His two companions caught up. Presently he heard the eight troopers going by. The aircar was in a clearing from which several trails diverged. Steve halted where he could just see the four helmeted occupants, glanced around at Fazzool and Ralph, signaled and moved away to set up a crossfire. He found himself a spot and hesitated. He was calm now that action had begun, but this was a ticklish moment. The four in the aircar had to die quickly. IP He aimed and sent lightning at the one in the pilot's seat. Two of the four touted words before they died. Steve was already plunging forward. He siboved his dead pilot aside and spoke hurriedly into the radio grill: "AP Twelve! We just saw one of the strange animals and wounded it! Shall we pursue?" There was a pause of fifteen seconds. Then the Overseer's voice said, "AP Twelve, stay in your vehicle and wait for your squad. You are the only car close by." The order didn't quite ring true to Steve. He shot a look at Fazzool, who shook his head. Steve grabbed heavy beamers, tossed them to Fazzool and Ralph, leaned into the car to get extra energy-units. "Let's get out of here!" The radio was silent now. That meant, of course, the ruse was discovered. Cursing mentally, Steve sloshed through mud, wide of the path, but toward the Base. The only hope now -- a faint one -- was that Egral's various diversions would draw the search away. A cluster of explosions rocked the swamp. That would be the radiolinked booby traps Fazzool had set around the original ambush. Steve swore. Now that didn't seem such a good idea -- it clearly revealed technology. Fazzool whispered, "We must hide somewhere near ze Base and hope for a chance to sneak in later! It would be suicide now!" Steve nodded, slogging on. He hoped Egral was still galloping upcountry, not pausing to reconnoiter. Would the Remm guess, from the radio silence, that things were sour akeiady? No doubt. But what could he do? He could go through with the tricks to implicate the Doyt. But he wouldn't, Steve felt, so long as there was hope. He'd stick to the promise Steve, in his squeamishness, had extracted. Steve tried his radio, hoping for another channel, but there was none. How was the garrison co-ordinating? And why hadn't any of Egral's fake messages come over? An aircar whooshed over, headed up country. Maybe the Remm was already dead, or surrounded and pinned down. Fazzool -- obviously thinking along the same lines -- said, "Maybe Egral has decided it would be foolish now to break ze silence." Steve didn't answer. He was busy trying to find solid footing. Ralph -- the best woodsman of the three -- suddenly jerked into motion. His primitive pistol roared. VI S omething zipped by Steve's cheek. A dart! At once, a slight, greenclad body came tumbling to thud nearby. Steve leaped for cover, frantically scanning the trees overhead. Fazzoo lunged for the Doyt corpse, came dragging it to the root tangle. "He has a pistol too, so he was wiz Gree! He used ze dart because zey want us alive!" Somewhere, a bugle talked. So that was how the garrison was communicating. Steve gave the trees another quick scrutiny, then was running again -- not toward the Base, nor away from iti but laterally, as silently as he could, sacrificing speed for cover. This) the least purposeful direction, offered the best chance of evading the immediate search at least until dark. Night wasn't long coming. Now they picked their way cautiously until there was no sound of aircars or bugles, then found cover beneath roots. Steve asked softly, "Anyone see more than the one Doyt?" Ralph Parr said, "No. If there were more, we've lost them by now." "That's not the point." Steve paused, listening. "So far that Doyt's the only one who's seen us, unless there were others with him. So the garrison still may not know we're humanoid. That makes it possible for us to go on with the original plan of sneaking in as survivors -- if there's some more confusion. By now, the Overseers must realize the Remm are involved, whether they actually know the Remm body shape or not. Maybe later tonight... Fazzool said, "#e is not zat much time. Zey will pick up Doyt asd make zem tell." Steve swore. "Well, then -- if we can get beyond the Base, into the hills, maybe we can sneak into a relief crew for a missile emplacement, or something. But first I've got to get off a message to the Remm that things are busted open." He fumbled in his pack for an object like a very large cigar; pulled it in two, spoke at length into one half, reunited it, gave it two twists and tossed it away from him. "That will null in twenty minutes. Let's move!" I t was slow going. When the drone nulled, the implosion was disheaiteningly near. Steve speeded up to the point of recklessness. An hour dragged by as they jogged on, splashing throu mud, panting for breath. Aircars whooshed over, listening, no doubt, for any electronic spill. Suddenly the radio came to life. "I have seen one of the creatures! They are not primitive animals, but advanced beings! He was carrying -- " A blast drowned out the voice. Then the radio was silent again. Ralph whispered, "Hell. Did they get Egral with a grenade or something?" Fazzool chuckled, "Za w Egral talking. Ze fake was meant to be transparent; zat is why he did not identify. But it was probably a delayed transmission. Ze question is, why?" Steve said, 'To keep up the confusion. He gave away no information, but the Overseers will have to consider a lot ofthings. Tlie message could be genuine. Or it might be intended merely to pinpoint a spot, for other commandos or a landing. Or just to establish co-ordinates. And the missiles will have to be manned, against possible attack from space. And ships will have to null off." Fazzool said, "Ah! Overload ze garrison! Good scheming, for a linguist!" "A linguist," Steve said, "who's served with a Task Force. Well, we have to get somewhere while the bustle's on." He peered ahead for sound footing. Minutes later, a boom came disIF tantly, then a series. Ships nulling hastily from stratosphere -- all using up personnel. But there was a bad feature. With a defending fleet around the planet, the Remm might have no time for niceties. A few yards farther along, light suddenly burst above the trio. B lindly, Steve hurled himself for the nearest low root. Other light flares bloomed all over the area, descending very slowly on gravs. A loudspeaker grated, "Stay with your units and don't lose oontacti There are only a few, but they move fast!" The tone of the voice changed. "You, whatever you are! If you want to live, show yourselves, without weapons I" Steve squirmed cautiously into better shooting position, the heavy beamer resting over his left forearm. If they were staying in squads, that was fine. He'd wait until he saw them, then rake the whole squad. He hoped Ralph and Fazzool would stay hidden until they got good targets, too -- not sell their lives in foolish heroics. He wasn't particular scared; he could bury the primitive emotion in his belly. But he couldn't banish the regret or the despair, or the shame of failure. If he hadn't been squeamish about the Doyt... A Slave Warrior suddenly cried out in surprise. Then the jungle erupted. Darts rained. Somewhere, soft plops marked the bursting of gasbombs. The shocked Gree troc were firing wildly into the trees, bringing down a torrent of debris. An Overseer, shouting, ran into sight, clutching at his cheek, and collapsed. A flare dropped, weighted down by some kind of hooped net. The radio babbled now. Bugles blew purposefully Steve squirmed free of the root and was running, away from where the gas bombs had fallen. "Ral! Fazzool!" He hurdled prone Warriors, some still stirring. A big dark form bounded into his path. "Quick!" Egral snarled. "We have an aircar for you!" D espite the confusion in the swamp, the garrison was reacting efficiently. Aircars were landing to unload casualties, re-equip, and take off again with full crews. Blinker-ligjhts were being mounted on some craft, for signalling. Flamethrowers were being hustled to the crews, and crates of antipersonnel bombs. Fazzool pointed. "Zat looks like de-briefing!" Steve set the aircar down in the lighted area. Troops covered them with beamers during a careful scrutiny, then they were urged forward. An Overseer demanded, "Where's your squad leader?" "D-dead," Steve told him. "Some weapon that made no noise and no tight! He -- his head just exploded!" The Overseer's scowl deepened. "How did you two survive?" Steve touched his own cheek. "A dart grazed me, and I collapsed. I guess they thought I was dead. When I came to I saw him -- " he indicated Fazzool -- "stumbling around. He's still dazed. The area was deserted, so I got him to a car and took off." Fazzool mumbled, "Something big and black... it knocked me down from behind. My head " The Overseer demanded of Steve, "Did you see the attackers?" "Yes, sir. Two of them, anyway." He described Egral. "Remm," the Overseer growled. "It must be. So they have six limbs? Did you see any vehicles?" "N-no, sir. But there was a humming in the trees." "Damnation! Well, get your squadmate to Med Center, then you report to the general pool." The Overseer turned away. Steve pretended to help Fazzool until they were out of sight, then they ran toward two great wooden doors that closed a fresh scar in a hiUslde. Guards blocked the way. Steve said, "Orders to man a ship!" The leading trooper demanded, "When was that. Gunner? Everything scrambled an hour ago!" Steve said, "More nulling in, with short crews!" "Oh." the guard stepped aside; motioned to a trooper to open a small door in the large one. Steve plunged in, Fazzool at his heels. T he ancient terminal had obviously been hollowed from the hill, with a short tunnel to the exit. The blast that had opened that had damaged nothing else. For a moment Steve paused, fascinated by the unfamiliar look of the vast null-tank, then he strode toward a Tech who seemed to be in charge. "Why aren't preparations going on? Where are the munitions?" The Tech -- a thick-muscled, phlegmatic Gjiss -- blinked. "Preparations? I don't understand." Steve glared. "Why don't you listen for orders? There are ships coming in, and they need missiles and power units! Where's yoiu: Section Leader?" The Gjiss looked slowly disturbed. "He was called away for Patrol Duty. They left us short handed, and..." Steve snarled, "All right! Where's the arsenal? Can you at least start getting C-#'s out here? Is there a conveyor system?" "Er, no. Gunner, not yet. We use carts." "Get about it, then. Don't you know there's a battle shaping? Where are the power units?" "In there. Gunner." The Tech pointed to a tunnel. Steve and Fazzool ran toward the tunnel. Recently installed sliding doors lined one side. Fazzool pointed. "Zat one!" The B'lant jabbed a button, and the door slid open. Lights went on in the compartment. Steve muttered thanks for someone's efficiency. Units were already on carts, ready for call. He and Fazzool shoved one out. The Techs were just bringing a heavy missile on a long, low cart. Steve hesitated in the mouth of the tunnel, handgun ready. He sighed. He'd already used up his quota of squeamishness for this trip. He fired efficiently, Fazzool's beam joining his. Only one of the Techs managed an outcry. Steve crouched a moment, staring toward the exit, than ran toward the null tank. Stepping over the corpses, he studied the controls. Symbols in B'lant and English had been stenciled on them. Simple enough. He darted toward the missile cart. "Let's get this inside!" They put the missile in the tank, then trundled the power unit in beside it. The missile would serve as timer and detonator; the unit would provide the awful energy to slag the tank. Fazzool said, "We could null zis gift somewhere first, zen blow up zis end." "No time!" Steve was working frantically at the fuse-settings. He finished, shoved Fazzool out ahead of him. "Hurry!" He leaped for the tank controls and stood fidgeting until the mighty steel doors began to grind shut, then ran for the exit tunnel. If the guards held them up now... He glanced at his watch, forced himself to stand inside the small door for ten seconds. Fazzool, delighted with the suspense, grinned at him. Then Steve pounded on the door. A bolt rattled outside, and the guard peered in. Steve barked, "Get a med team with a stretcher!" The guard leaned in to stare around. Fazzool jerked him forward and got a hand to his throat. The guard reacted fast, but Steve's knife was ready. They dragged the body inside, then ran out, shouting, "Guns! Take cover! The enemy is nulling in!" Everyone within earshot turned to stare. Steve dove for the nearest cover, a small concrete bunker. Fazzool landed on top of him. There were shouts and pounding footsteps, then nothing else. Steve held his breath. Had they failed? Then the universe seemed to explode. The bunker floor heaved, banging his head against a wall. Da:, he fumbled in a pocket, brought out a message-drone, pulled it apart, grasped into it, 'Mission accomplied... null tank destroyed." Debris rained on the bunker-roof. Somehow he got the drone reunited and tossed it out. In the bedlam, he couldn't hear it null. T here was nothing wrong with him that a good slug of Remm medicinal alcohol didn't remedy. One of the huge dumbbell-shaped Remm ships was pouring out more occupation personnel. The Base was secure; enemy survivors were still being hunted down, but they were no problem. Jubbelyn, looking tired and bewildered, was answering Fazzool's question. "No, it was nothing that you or your friends did that changed our mis. It was the garrison's use of our own people against you, and finally against us. In one summer -- less, in some cases -- Gree's psychologists were able to make not only traitors, but actual killers, out of them! And not only the outcast. The perfectly normal people w'ho were taken, too." He was silent for a minute. "I guess I shouldn't have been surprise when, one by one, my own constables forsook the ban when I saw the first of them pick up an enemy weapon and use it deliberately... Yet, before the fight was over, I was doing it myself." Steve said, "I hope your casualties were few." IF The Elder sighed. "We had casualties. But what hurts is what we've been forced to learn about ourselves." Egral said, "Knowing that civilization is a state of mind needn't cause you to abandon it." Jubbelyn shook his head -- a gesture he'd just learned. "No, we cannot retreat back into our dream now, knowing what rages among the stars." He got to his feet, looking listlessly around for his flying apparatus. "I must go and start organizing relief. Some of our cities were punished." Egral said to Steve, "To answer your earlier question, I was able to follow your progress pretty well and guess it, by listening to the enemy search. Then, when I'd fixed up a few diversions here and there, I simply called out to the Doyt that I knew they were watching me and explained frankly what might happen to their world if you couldn't destroy the null terminal. They'd discovered by that time that some of their own race were being used as scouts. They decided to take a limited part. I told fhem what weapons and tactics they'd be up against. By the time we organized the party to come look for you, they'd already had their illusions knocked out of them." He glanced toward a squad of Remm probing through rubble. "It's too bad there wasn't some way we could trace the other end of that null link before destroying this end. It seems my superiors have a whole new system of fleet operations and materiel. They made fairly short work of the defending Gree ships. There are a few still to be hunted down, of course." Steve said, "That's not all. There was more than one setting on that null tank. The ancient race must have had a whole network of planets connected with this one, and no doubt Gree sent scouting forces, at least, to all of them." He glanced at Fazzool and Ralph Parr. "I suppose we'll be staying here near the Hub for a while, to do some sniffing around." Egral yawned like a great feline. "Sniffing around? With your noses? If there's a network of worlds to be scouted, some of them will have inhabitants. I'm sure my superiors will agree that you need a linguist along." If You're a Subscriber --  -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not contain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let us know what it is. And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Today? Dear Editor: I wonder how many readers noticed one of the interesting touches that Bertram Chandler put into "Edge of Night?" I would probably have missed it myself if I had not waited until I had both installments and read the work in one sitting. When the C or amr Destroyer returns from its mission in the other universe, it is not exactly the same ship, nor are its crew precisely the same people. Note: on page eleven of the first installment Sonya is described as having pale blonde hair; in the short, final chapter she has red ihair. The reader is left to speculate to what other ways the protagonists have been changed by their Mannschenn drive. Masterful! In the "Hue and Cry" John Banner suggests that you should reprint old pulp covers as a possible improvement over some of the current atrocities. Mr. Sanner obviously is not familiar with the old pulp covers. Save for the conspicuous absence of a scantily clad "sexy babe" a number of your recent covers have come right from a lateforties copy of Startling or ThrilU ing Wonder, In fact, by carefully going through my file of these two magazines I could probably come up with some covers that are both better done and illustrate more closely the stories that your covers supposedly illustrate. -- Carrington B. Dixon, Jr., #I Sylvan Drive, Garland, Texas #.    Dear Editor: After I finished reading Relief s War, I thought it was about the best novel Keith Laumer would ever put down. It had lots of fast-paced action, his typical oddball aliens and equally oddball humans, and good dialog. That was until I read Earthblood. All I associated Rosel George Brown with was some story in which an ostracized flower arranger, or whatever, and a four year old genius got involved with the roundest thing in the world... I think. I don't remember the title or where I read it; don't bother telling me where I can find this classic, I wish I never read in the first place. It was awful. Yea, verily! The name of Rosel George Brown drifted into the limbo of my subconscious. That was until I read Earthblood. (Gee, I never knew I could write like that.) When I started the first installment, I was slightly apprehensive about it due to the tenuony sinister recollection of Mr. Laiuner's collaborator. After the first diapter I thought it was terrific. No, not terrific. That term is too hackneyed to describe it. After careful consideration I would call it beautiful. Keith Laumer is my f avorite writer in The Genre. I always thought that he was a good writer but if he could turn out stories on his own like Earthblood, he would be a great writer. Perhaps Mr. Laumer will turn out material like Earthblood on his own. I nominate Earthblood for the Hugo award for the best serial of this or any other year. By the way several of my friends agree with me that the Retief stories would make a fine teevee series; infinitely better than the 'science fiction" series on today. What say you, Gentle Editor? -- Ivan Thoen, # Morelia Ave., Apt. #, North Hollywood, California #. # I say I agree with you -- but the TV producers Pve suggested it to apparently don't! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Being a Robert A. Heinlein fan from way back, I have finally decided that I must make contact with other science-fiction connoiseurs with the same impeccable tastes. Having decided on the magazine that these type of people might read, I now make my plea: "Heinleinoids of the World, Come to My Aid... My Flame Is Flickering Fast... Help Me Contact the Others of My Own Species... I Will Join Any Club... Do Anything..." As you can see, I am not one of those I would also give anything to know the address of "The Great On so that I can write him. I would now like to tell the readers a trick which I have learned recentiiy on how to preserve paperbacks. I bought some transparent vinyl contact which is available in most dime-stores and cut it to size. It prevents cracks, peeling, banding, scraping etc. My library of S.F. is one of the best preserved of any addict I know. -- Matthew Venable, # W. Hazelhurst, Ferndale, Michigan #.   Dear Editor: Your stories in World of If have been almost uniformly and increasingly good, and they seem to be getting even better. Even so, I have a complaint. While the stories are good, the art work you carry is almost uniformly bad. If you can lafford stories from writers of the qualiify of Heinlein, Anderson and Laumer, surely you can get some art work of the same quality. I have not yet been able to understand the goal or policy of your art editor. Surely Fantasy and Science Fiction and Analog do not have a monojKily controlling the artists they feature (who are just as good as yours are bad). Schoenherr, Freas and Bonestell, to name just a few, ail do excellent work. As a critical reader I believe that the quality of art work you feature, esiecially the cover piece, has a great effect on the way the magazine is received. With art work to match the quality of stories you carry, your sales might go up, giving you a chance to improve your stories even more. -- Whitney Enox, # Granada, Prairie Village, Kansas #. Dear Editor: Read with interest your editorial on prediction of futures hy the seems to ibe a built in lag of about a decade -- probably attributable to the latent "fear" factw. Fear of change will cause the prophet to push events off, usually by a constant "force", yielding a limited range of "effective push". A group would tend to show a similar paired constant and variable. The IQ-passing computer will be built between # and #. I don't know the exact year, but first successful run of the program will be in the Fall. Autolang translators was the paneVs closest guess. Will be used at an international meeting in the summer of #. Come now, # for the wide access general data facility? Hell, the facility will open to limited public use early in #. Manned landing on Mars will be #. And the economic minimum agreements will be a lot sooner than #. Most of the world population will be included by # -- and provisions for the rest will already be underway. # the actual agreement in world council. Trouble with the "median" method they're using is that the average prophet isn't very good. Ability isn't on a Maxwell curve, but a skewed to the weak curve. Education in the areas involved doesn't necessarily help. It's like the difference between recognition and use vocabulary tests. The ability is far less dependent upon information stored than on the resolving power of the mind in a particular area. -- Gene Fowler, # Baker Street, San Francisco, California #. trol experiments on questions with known answers. Median was more accurate than any individual. -- Editor,    Dear Editor: I have just finished Earthblood, and I thought that it was one of the two most pointless serials I have ever seen in your magazine. In the last part, it gave a strong impression that all this Roan Corpeople, throwing them through walls, getting drunk and similar highly thalamic activities. I could find traces of Retief's A-line, but almost none of the talent shown in the Retief stories. There not only was no Retiefian humor, but there was none of the atmosphere of weirdness that hangs through such works as The Hounds of HelL In short, Earthblood was a complete dud. Silkies in Space, aside from its title, which brings to mind images of all sorts of space opera, was very good. When the fact that two Van Vogt stories were out at the same time is considered, a highly attractive conduaion is the Van Vogt is going to start turning stories out in volume. It is to be hoped that this is so. I can hardly wait to read this third Null-A novel. On the basis of the two Null-A novels that are already out, it should be the longest of the three and the best. Have you any idea of when it will be out? -- John Hoggatt, # W. #th St., L.A., Calif.  VV's working on TV scripts, but will get back to the Null-A novel shortly. -- Editor. Official Rand McNally Map taken from actual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed ##" x #Vi". Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. fbo o o o o o o. # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, il any. No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it!  'WWv# . Seated :Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling. "We're looking for people who want to write" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School. Former editor, Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to more than # publications including Reader's Digest , True, Redbook. Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, "I just received a check from Ellery Queen s Mystery Magazine . That's I I stories sold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible." Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation to do so. r Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude. Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude Test and #-page illustrated brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Vol. #, N. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Manager Robert M. Guinn , Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin , Associate Editor Mavis Fisher , Circulation Director by Isaac Asimov by Roger Zelazny by Larry Niven by Algis Budrys by Harlan Ellison by Joseph Wesley by Rosco Wright by Betsy Curtis by L. Sprague de Camp by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, Includr ing translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York. N.Y. # IF  Editorial L ast Labor Day weekend, at the Cleveland World Science Fiction Convention, If was awarded the trophy called the "Hugo" -- a polished chromium spaceship mounted on a wood base, suitably inscribed -- as the leading sciencefiction magazine in the world. To celebrate, we decided to collect as many of our fellow Hugowinners in one issue as we could... and this is the issue. With us, therefore, axe: Isaac Asimov, who won the Hugo for "best all-time science-fiction series" with his Foundation stories; Harlan Ellison, who won the short-story Hugo for "Repent, Harlequin " Cried the Tick-Tock Man, originally published in Galaxy; And Roger Zelazny, who shared the best novel Hugo in a tie with Frank Herbert. We had also hoped to have Frank Herbert and this year's Hugo-winning Artist, Frank Frazetta, but fate and bad luck conspired against us. Frazetta at the last moment was deluged with priority assignments and couldn't complete his cover; Herbert, recovering from a seige of hospitalization, has a story for us but not in time for this issue. We regret their absence, but we're proud to have Asimov, Zelazny and Ellison with us... and for lagniappe we've added a short poem by the convention's Guest of Honor, L. Sprague de Camp. A ll this is our way of saying "Thanks!" for the Hugo. We'll go on saying thanks the best way we can, by trying, to bring you the best stories to be had. Van Vogt will be back with us before long; A. Bertram Chandler will be with us next issue; after that we've got first-rate novelettes and short novels by Philip Jose Farmer, Hal Clements, Samuel R. Delany and -- oh, yes -- Andre Norton, appearing in If in the June issue with a complete short novel called Warlock's World. Anybody we're missing? Let us know -- and we'll try to get them too! -- The Editor Moskowitz completes his definitive study of Science Fiction. This is the last in a four-volume series that critically surveys the major writers of science fiction during the past three hundred years and anthologizes representative examples of their work. Included in this distinguished collection are "Voyage to the Moon" by Cyrano de Bergerac, "Eternal Adam" by Jules Verne, "The Country of the Blind" by H. G. Wells, "The Los Amigos Fiasco" by A. Conan Doyle, and Stanley G. Weinbaum's "The Lotus Eaters." # pages#'# Masters of Modern Science Fiction "... devotes individual chapters to #I authors... fills a void in our knowledge of current writers..." # pages# -- Library Journal Shapers of Science Fiction "One could not want a more detailed and fascinating account... no one has surveyed the roots of science fiction as well as Mr. Moskowitz; probably no one ever will; possibly, no one can." # pages# -- Galaxy... an exceptionally fine job of showing how modern science fiction developed..." -- Analog jSgjiV # pages# Cleveland and New York IF  Novelette The I often. Maybe it was because he had so great a mind that it didn't work J ames Priss -- I suppose I ought quickly. to say Professor James Priss, He would say something in slow though everyone is sure to know abstraction, then he would think, who I meaqreven without the title -- and then he would say something always spoke slowly. more. Even over trivial matters, his I know. I interviewed him often giant mind would hover uncertainly, enough. He had the greatest mind adding a touch here and then ansi nee Einstein, but it didn't work other there. quickly. He admitted his slowness Would the sun rise tomorrow, I can imagine him wondering. What do we mean by "rise"? Can we be certain that tomorrow will come? Is the term "sun" completely unambiguous in this connection? Add to this habit of speech a bland countenance, rather pale, with no expression except for a general look of uncertainty; gray hair, rather thin, neatly combed; business suits of an invariably conservative cut; and you have what Professor James Priss was -- a retiring person, completely lacking in magnetism. That's why nobody in the world, except myself, could possibly suspect him of being a murderer. And even I am not sure. After all, he was slow-thinking; he was always slowthinking. Is it conceivable that at one crucial moment, he managed to think quickly and act at once? It doesn't matter. Even if he murdered, he got away with it. It is far too late now to try to reverse matters, and I wouldn't succeed in doing so even if I decided to let this be published. E dward Bloom was Priss's classmate in college, and an associate through circumstance for a generation afterward. They were equal in age and in their propensity for the bachelor life, but opposites in everything else that mattered. Bloom was a living flash of light; colorful, tall, broad, loud, brash and self-confident. He had a mind that resembled a meteor-strike in the sudden and unexpected way it could seize the essential. He was no theoretician, as Priss was; Bloom had neither the patience for it, nor the capacity to concentrate intense thought upon a single abstract point. He admitted that. He boasted of it. What he did have was an uncanny way of seeing the application of a theory, of seeing the manner in which it could be put to use. In the cold marble block of abstract structure, he could see, without apparent difficulty, the intricate design of a marvelous device. The block would fall apart at his touch and leave the device. It is a well known story, and not too badly exaggerated at that, that nothing Bloom ever built had failed to work, or to be patentable, or to be profitable. By the time he was #, he was one of the richest men on Earth. And if Bloom the Technician were adapted to one particular matter more than anything else, it was to the way of thought of Priss the Theoretician. Bloom's greatest gadgets were built upon Priss's greatest thoughts, and as Bloom grew wealthy and famous, Priss gained phenomenal respect among his colleagues. Naturally, it was to be expected that when Priss advanced his TwoField Theory, Bloom would set about at once to build the first practical anti-gravity device. II M y job was to find human interest in the Two-Field Theory for the subscribers to Tele-News Press, and you get that by trying to deal with human beings and not with abstract ideas. Since my interviewee was Professor Priss, that wasn't easy. Naturally, I was going to ask about the possibilities of anti-gravity, which interested everyone; and not about the Two-Field Theory, which no one could understand. "Anti-gravity?" Priss compressed his pale lips and considered. "I'm not entirely sure that it is possible. Or ever will be. I haven't -- uh -- worked the matter out to my satisfaction. I don't entirely see whether the Two-Field equations would have a finite solution, which they would have to have, of course, if -- " And then he went off into a brown study. I prodded him. "Bloom says he thinks such a device can be built." Priss nodded. "Well, yes, but I wonder. Ed Bloom has had an amazing knack at seeing the unobvious in the past. He has an unusual mind. It's certainly made him rich enough." We were sitting in Priss's apartment. Ordinary middle-class. I couldn't help a quick glance this way and that. Priss was not wealthy. I don't think he read my mind. He saw me look. And I think it was on his mind. He said, "Wealth isn't the usual reward for the pure scientist. Or even a particularly desirable one." Maybe so, at that, I thought. Priss certainly had his own kind of reward. He was the third person in history to win two Nobel Prizes; and the first to have both of them in the sciences and both of them unshared. You can't complain about that. And if he wasn't rich, neither was he poor. But he didn't sound like a contented man. Maybe it wasn't Bloom's wealth alone that irked Priss. Maybe it was Bloom's fame among the people of Earth generally; maybe it was the fact that Bloom was a celebrity wherever he went, whereas Priss, outside scientific conventions and faculty clubs, was largely anonymous. I can't say how much of all this was in my eyes or in the way I wrinkled the creases in my forehead, but Priss went on to say, "But we're once or twice a week. I beat him regularly." (I never published that statement. I checked it with Bloom, who made a long counter-statement that bejackass -- " and grew increasingly personal thereafter. As a matter of fact, neither one was a novice at billiards. I watched them play once for a short while, after the statement and counter-statement, and both handled the cue with professional aplomb. What's more, both played for blood, and there was no friendship in the game that I could see.) I said, "Would you care to predict whether Bloom will manage to build an anti-gravity device?" "You mean would I commit myself to anything? Hmm. Well, let's consider, young man. Just what do we mean by anti-gravity? Our conception of gravity is built around Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which is now a century and a half old but which, within its limits, remains firm. We can picture it -- " I listened politely. I'd heard Priss IF on the subject before, but if I was to get anything out of him -- which wasn't certain -- I'd have to let him work his way through in his own way. "We can picture it," he said, "by imagining the universe to be a flat, thin, super-flexible sheet of untearable rubber. If we picture mass as being associated with weight, as it is on the surface of the Earth, then we would expect a mass, resting upon the rubber sheet, to make an indentation. The greater the mass, the deeper the indentation. "In the actual universe," he went on, "all sorts of masses exist, and so our rubber sheet must be pictured as riddled with indentations. Any object rolling along the sheet would dip into and out of the indentations it passed, veering and changing direction as it did so. It is this veer and change of direction that we interpret as demonstrating the existence of a force of gravity. If the moving object comes close enough to the center of the indentation and is moving slowly enough, it gets trapped and whirls round and round that indentation. In the absence of friction, it keeps up that whirl forever. In other words, what Isaac Newton interpreted as a force, Albert Einstein interpreted as geometrical distortion." H e paused at this point. He had been speaking fairly fluently -- for him -- since he was saying something he had said often before. But now he began to pick his way. He said, "So in trying to produce anti-gravity, we are trying to alter the geometry of the universe. If we carry on our metaphor, we are trying to straighten out the indented rubber sheet. We could imagine ourselves getting under the indenting mass and lifting it upward, supporting it so as to prevent it from making an indentation. If we make the rubber sheet flat in that way, then we create a universe -- or at least a portion of the universe -- in which gravity doesn't exist. A rolling body would pass the non-indenting mass without altering its direction of travel a bit, and we could interpret this as meaning that the mass was exerting no gravitational force. In order to accomplish this feat, however, we need a mass equivalent to the indenting mass. To produce anti-gravity on Earth in this way, we would have to make use of a mass equal to that of Earth and poise it above our heads, so to speak." I interrupted him. "But your TwoField Theory -- " "Exactly. General Relativity does not explain both the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field in a single set of equations. Einstein spent half his life searching for that single set -- for a Unified Field Theory -- and failed. All who followed Einstein also failed. I, however, began with the assumption that there were two fields that could not be unified and followed the consequences, which I can explain, in part, in terms of the rubber-sheet metaphor." Now we came to something I wasn't sure I had ever heard before. "How does that go?" I asked. "Suppose that, instead of trying to lift the indenting mass, we try to stiffen the sheet itself, make it less indentable. It would contract, at least over a small area, and become flatter. Gravity would weaken. And so would mass, for the two are essentially the same phenomenon in terms of the indented Universe. If we could make the rubber sheet completely flat, both gravity and mass would disappear altogether. "Under the proper conditions, the electromagnetic field could be made to counter the gravitational field and serve to stiffen the indented fabric of the universe. The electromagnetic field is tremendously stronger than the gravitational field, so the former could be made to overcome the latter." I said, uncertainly, "But you say 'under the proper conditions.' Can those proper conditions you speak of be achieved, Professor?" "That is what I don't know," said Priss, thoughtfully and slowly. "If the universe were really a rubber sheet, its stiffness would have to reach an infinite value before it could be expected to remain completely flat under an indenting mass. I f that is also so in the real universe, then an infinitely intense electromagnetic field would be required, and that would mean anti-gravity would be impossible." "But Bloom says -- " "Yes, I imagine Bloom thinks a finite field will do, if it can be properly applied. Still, however ingenious he is," and Priss smiled narrowly, "we needn't take him to be infallible. His grasp on theory is quite faulty. He -- he never earned his college degree, did you know that?" I was about to say that I knew that. After all, everyone did. But there was a touch of eagerness in Priss's voice as he said it, and I looked up in time to catch animation in his eye, as though he were delighted to spread that piece of news. So I nodded my head as if I were filing it for future reference. "Then you would say, Professor Priss," I prodded again, "that Bloom is probably wrong and that antigravity is impossible?" And finally Priss nodded and said, "The gravitational field can be weakened, of course, but if by anti-gravity we mean a true zero-gravity field -- no gravity at all over a significant volume of space -- then I suspect anti-gravity may turn out to be impossible, despite Bloom." And I rather had what I wanted. Ill I wasn't able to see Bloom for nearly three months after that, and when I did see him he was in an angry mood. He had grown angry at once, of oourse, when the news first broke concerning Priss's statement. He let it be known that Priss would be invited to the eventual display of the anti-gravity device as soon as it was constructed and would even be asked to participate in the demonstration. Some reporter (not me, unfortunately) caught him between appointments and asked him to elaborate on that, and he said: "I'll have the device eventually; soon, maybe. And you can be there, IF and so can anyone else the press would care to have there. And Professor James Priss can be there. He can represent Theoretical Science, and after I have demonstrated antigravity, he can adjust his theory to explain it. I'm sure he will know how to make his adjustments in masterly fashion and show exactly why I couldn't possibly have failed. He might do it now and save time, but I suppose he won't." It was all said very politely, but you could hear the snarl under the rapid flow of words. Yet he continued his occasional when the two met they behaved with complete propriety. One could tell the progress Bloom was making by their respective attitudes to the press. Bloom grew curt and even snappish, while Priss developed an increasing good humor. When my umpteenth request for an interview with Bloom was finally accepted, I wondered if perhaps that meant a break in Bloom's quest. I had a little day-dream of him announcing final success to me. It didn't work out that way. He met me in his office at Bloom Enterprises in upstate New York. It was a wonderful setting; well away from any populated area, elaborately landscaped, and covering as much ground as a rather large industrial establishment. Edison at his height, two centuries ago, had never been as phenomenally successful as Bloom. But Bloom was not in a good humor. He came striding in ten minutes late and went snarling past his secretary's desk with the barest nod in my direction. He was wearing a lab coat, unbuttoned. He threw himself into his chair and said, "I'm sorry if I've kept you waiting, but I didn't have as much time as I had hoped." Bloom was a born showman and knew better than to antagonize the press, but I had the feeling he was having a great deal of difficulty at that moment in adhering to this principle. I made the obvious guess. "I am given to understand, sir, that your recent tests have been unsuccessful." "Who told you that?" "I would say it was general knowledge, Mr. Bloom." "No, it isn't. Don't say that, young man! There is no general knowledge about what goes on in my laboratories and workshops. You're stating the professor's opinions, aren't you? "No, I'm -- " "Of course you are! Aren't you the one to whom he made that statement -- that anti-gravity is impossible?" "He didn't make the statement that flatly." "He never says anything flatly. But it was flat enough for him. And not as flat as I'll have his damned rubber-sheet universe before I'm finished." "Then does that mean you're making progress, Mr. Bloom?" "You know I am," he said with a snap. "Or you should know. Weren't you there at the demonstration last week?" "Yes, I was." I judged Bloom to be in trouble, or he wouldn't be mentioning that demonstration. It worked, but it was IF not a world beater. Between the two poles of a magnet a region of lessened gravity was produced. I t was done very cleverly. A Mossbauer Effect Balance was used to probe the space between the poles. If you've never seen an M-E Balance in action, it consists primarily of a tight monochromatic beam of gamma rays shot down the low-gravity field. The gamma rays change wavelength slightly but measurably under the influence of the gravitational field and if anything happens to alter the intensity of the field, the wavelength-change shifts correspondingly. It is an extremely delicate method for probing a gravitational field, and it worked like a charm. There was no question but that Bloom had lowered gravity. The trouble was that it had been done before by others. Bloom, to be sure, had made use of circuits that greatly increased the ease with which such an effect had been achieved (his system was typically ingenious and had been duly patented), and he maintained that it was by this method that anti-gravity would become not merely a scientific curiosity but a practical affair with industrial applications. Perhaps! But it was an incomplete job, and he didn't usually make a fuss over incompleteness. He wouldn't have done so this time if he didn't have to display something . I said, "It's my impression that what you accomplished at that preliminary demonstration was # g, and better than that was achieved in Brazil last spring." "That so? Well, calculate the energy input in Brazil and here and then tell me the difference in gravity decrease per kilowatt-hour. You'll be surprised." "But the point is, can you reach # g; zero gravity? That's wihat Professor Priss thinks may be impossible. Everyone agrees that merely lessening the intensity of the field is no great feat." Bloom's fist clenched. I had the feeling that a key experiment had gone wrong that day and he was annoyed almost past endurance. Bloom hated to be balked by the universe. He said, "Theoreticians make me sick." He said it in a low, controlled voice, as though he were finally tired of not saying it, and he was going to speak his mind and be damned. "Priss has won two Nobel Prizes for sloshing around a few equations, but what has he done with it? Nothing! I have done something with it and I'm going to do more with it, whether Priss likes it or not. "'ra the one people will remember. I'm the one who gets the credit. He can keep his damned title and his Prizes and his kudos from the scholars. Listen, I'll tell you what gripes him. Plain old-fashioned jealousy. It kills him that I get what I get for doing. He wants it for thinking. "I said to him once -- We play (It was at this point that I quoted got Bloom's counterstatement. I never published either. That was just trivia.) when he had cooled down, "and I've won my share of games. We keep things friendly enough, what the hell -- college chums and all that -- though how he got through I'll never know. He made it in physics, of course, and in math. But he got a bare pass -- out of pity, I think -- in every humanities course he ever took." "You did not get your degree, did you, Mr. Bloom?" (That was sheer mischief on my part. I was enjoying his eruption.) "I quit to go into business, damn it! My academic average, over the three years I attended, was a strong B. Don't imagine anything else, you hear? Hell, by the time Priss got his Pfa.D., I was working on my second He went on, clearly irritated. and I said to him, 'Jim, the average man will never understand why you get the Nobel Prize when I'm the one who gets the results. Why do you need two? Give me one!' He stood there, chalking up his cue, and then he said in his soft namby-pamby Give me one.' So you see, he wants the money." I said, "I take it you don't mind his getting the honor?" For a minute, I thought he was going to order me out. But he didn't. He laughed instead, waved his hand in front of him, as though he were erasing something from an invisible blackboard in front of him. He said, "Oh, well, forget it. All that is off the record. Listen, do you want a statement? Okay! Things didn't go right today, and I blew my top a bit, but it will clear up. I think I know what's wrong. And if I don't, I'm going to know. "Look, you can say that  say that we don't need infinite electromagnetic intensity. We will flatten out the rubber sheet. We will have zero gravity. And when we get it, I'll have the damnedest demonstration you ever saw, exclusively for the press and for Priss, and you'll be invited. And you can say it won't be long. Okay?" Okay! I had time after that to see each man once or twice more. I even saw them together when I was presAs I said before, both of them were good. IF But the call to the demonstration did not come as quickly as all that. It arrived six weeks less than a year after Bloom gave me his statement. And at that, perhaps it was unfair to expect quicker work. I had a special engraved invitation, with the assurance of a cocktail hour first. Bloom never did things by halves, and he was planning to have a pleased and satisfied group of reporters on hand. There was an arrangement for tridimensional TV, too. Bloom felt completely confident, obviously; confident enough to be every living room on the planet. I called up Professor Priss, to make sure he was invited, too. He was! "Do you plan to attend, sir?" There was a pause, and the professor's face on the screen was a study in uncertain reluctance. "A demonstration of this sort is most unsuitable where a serious scientific matter is in question. I do not like to encourage such things." I was afraid he would beg off, and the dramatics of the situation would be greatly lessened if he were not there. But then, perhaps, he decided he dared not play the chicken before the world. With obvious distaste, he said, "Of course, Ed Bloom is not really a scientist, and he must have his day in the sun. I'll be there." "Do you think Mr. Bloom can produce zero gravity, sir?" " -- uh -- Mr. Bloom sent me a copy of the design of his device and -- and I'm not certain. Perhaps he can do it, if -- uh -- he says he can do it. Of course -- " he paused again for quite a long time. "I think I would like to see it." So would I, and so would many others. The staging was impeccable. A whole floor of the main building at Bloom Enterprises -- the one on the hilltop -- was cleared. There were the promised cocktails and a splendid array of hors d'oeuvres, soft music and lighting, and a carefully dressed and thoroughly jovial Edward Bloom playing the perfect host, while a number of polite and unobtrusive menials fetched and carried. All was geniality and amazing confidence. James Priss was late, and I caught Bloom watching the corners of the crowd and beginning to grow a little grim about the edges. Then Priss arrived, dragging a volume of colorProfessor James Priss IV lessness in with him, a drabness that was unaffected by the noise and the absolute splendor (no other word would describe it -- or else it was the two martinis glowing inside me) that filled the room. Bloom saw him, and his face was. illuminated at once. He bounced across the floor, seizing the smaller man's hand and dragging him to the bar. "Jim! Glad to see you! What'll you have? Hell, man, I'd have called it off if you hadn't showed. Can't have this thing without the star, you know." He wrung Priss's hand. "It's your theory, you know. We poor mortals can't do a thing without you few, you damned few few, pointing the way." He was being ebullient, handing out the flattery, because he could afford to do so now. He was fattening Priss for the kill. Priss tried to refuse a drink, with some sort of mutter, but a glass was pressed into his hand; and Bloom raised his voice to a bullroar. "Gentlemen! A moment's quiet, please. To Professor Priss, the greatest mind since Einstein, twotime Nobel Laureate, father of the Two-Field Theory, and inspirer of the demonstration we are about to see -- even if he didn't think it would work and he had the guts to say so publicly." There was a distinct titter of laughter that quickly faded out, and Priss looked as grim as he could manage. "But now that Professor Priss is here," said Bloom, "and we've had our toast, let's get on with it. Follow me, gentlemen!" T he demonstration was in a much more elaborate place than had housed the earlier one. This time it was on the top floor of the building. Different magnets were involved -- smaller ones, by heaven -- but as nearly as I could tell, the same M-E Balance was in place. One thing was new, however, and it staggered everybody, drawing much more attention than anything table, resting under one pole of the magnet. Beneath it was the companion pole. A round hole about a foot across was stamped out of the very center of the table; and it was obvious that the zero-gravity field, if it was to be produced, would be produced through that hole in the center It was as though the whole demonstration had been designed, surrealist-fashion, to point up the victory of Bloom over Priss. This was to be another version of their everBloom was going to win. I don't know if the other newsmen took matters in that fashion, but I think Priss did. I turned to look at him and saw that he was still holding the drink that had been forced into his hand. He rarely drank, I knew, but now he lifted the glass to his lips and emptied it in two swalalize that he took it as a deliberate snap of fingers under his nose. Bloom led us to the twenty seats that surrounded three sides of the ( IF table, leaving the fourth free as a working area. Priss was carefully escorted to the seat commanding the most convenient view. Priss glanced quickly at the tri-di cameras which were now working. I wondered if he were thinking of leaving but deciding that he couldn't in the full glare of the eyes of the world. Essentially, the demonstration was simple; it was the production that counted. There were dials in plain view that measured the energy expenditure. There were others that transferred the M-E Balance readings into a position and a size that were visible to all. Everything was arranged for easy tri-di viewing. Bloom explained each step in a genial way, with one or two pauses in which he turned to Priss for a confirmation that had to come. He didn't do it often enough to make it obvious, but just enough to turn Priss upon the spit of his own torment. From where I sat I could look across the table and see Priss on the other side. He had the look of a man in Hell. A s we all know, Bloom succeeded. The M-E Balance showed the gravitational intensity to be sinking steadily as the electromagnetic field was intensified. There were cheers, when it dropped below the # g mark. A red line indicated that on the dial. "The # g mark, as you know," said Bloom, confidently, "represents the previous record low in gravitational intensity. We are now lower than that at a cost in electricity that is less than ten per cent what it cost at the time that mark was set. And we will go lower still." Bloom (I think deliberately, for the sake of the suspense) slowed the drop toward the end, letting the tridi cameras switch back and forth beand the dial on which the M-E Balance reading was lowering. Bloom said, suddenly, "Gentlemen, you will find dark goggles in the pouch on the side of each chair. Please put them on now. The zerogravity field will soon be established, and it will radiate a light rich in ultraviolet." He put goggles on himself, and there was a momentary rustle as others went on, too. I think no one breathed during the last minute, when the dial reading dropped to zero and held fast. And just as that happened a cylinder of light sprang into existence from pole to pole through the hole in the There was a ghost of twenty sighs at that. Someone called out, "Mr. Bloom, what is the reason for the light?" "It's characteristic of the zerogravity field," said Bloom smoothly, which was no answer of course. Reporters were standing up now, crowding about the edge of the table. Bloom waved them back. "Please, gentlemen, stand clear!" Only Priss remained sitting. He seemed lost in thought, and I have been certain ever since that it was the goggles that obscured the possible significance of everything that followed. I didn't see his eyes. I couldn't. And that meant neither I nor anyone else could even begin to make a guess as to what was going on behind those eyes. Well, maybe we couldn't have made such a guess, even if the goggles hadn't been there, but who can say? Bloom was raising his voice again. "Please! The demonstration is not yet over. So far, we've only repeated what I have done before,. I have now produced a zero-gravity field and I have shown it can be done practically. But I want to demonstrate something of what such a field can do. What we are going to see next will be something that has never been seen, not even by myself. I have not experimented in this direction, much as I would have liked to, because I have felt that Professor Priss deserved the honor of -- " Priss looked up sharply, "What -- what -- " "Professor Priss," said Bloom, smiling broadly, "I would like you to perform the first experiment involving the interaction of a solid object with a zero-gravity field. Notice that the field has been formed in the cenknows your phenomenal skill in billiards, Professor, a talent second only to your amazing aptitude in theoretical physics. Won't you send a billiard ball into the zero-gravity volume?" E agerly, he was handing a ball and cue to the professor. Priss, his eyes hidden by the goggles, stared at them and only very slowly, very uncertainly, reached out to take them. I wonder what his eyes were showing. I wonder, too, how much of the at the demonstration was due to Bloom's anger at Priss's remark about their periodic game, the remark I had quoted. Had I been, in my way, responsible for what followed? "Come, stand up, Professor," said Bloom, "and let me have your seat. The show is yours from now on. Go ahead!" Bloom seated himself and still talked, in a voice that grew more organlike with each moment. "Once Professor Priss sends the ball into the volume of zero-gravity, it will no longer be affected by Earth's gravitational field. It will remain truly motionless while the Earth rotates about its axis and travels about the sun. In this latitude, and at this time of day, I have calculated that the Earth, in its motions, will sink downward. We will move with it, and the ball will stand still. To us it will seem to rise up and away from the Earth's surface. Watch." Priss seemed to stand in front of the table in frozen paralysis. Was it surprise? Astonishment? I don't know. I'll never know. Did he make a move to interrupt Bloom's little speech, or was he just suffering from an agonized reluctance to play the ignominious part into which he was being forced by his adversary? looking first at it, then back at Bloom. Every reporter was on his feet, crowding as closely as possible in order to get a good view. Only Bloom himself remained seated, smiling and isolated. (He, of course, was IF not watching the table, or the balls, or the zero-gravity field. As nearly as I could tell through the goggles, he was watching Priss.) Priss turned to the table and placed his ball. He was going to be the agent that was to bring final and dramatic triumph to Bloom and make himself -- the man who said it couldn't be done -- the goat to be mocked forever. Perhaps he felt there was no way out. Or perhaps -- With a sure stroke of his cue, he set the ball into motion. It was not going quickly, and every eye followed it. It struck the side of the table and caromed. It was going even slower now as though Priss himself were increasing the suspense and making Bloom's triumph the more dramatic. I had a perfect view, for I was standing on the side of the table opposite from that where Priss was. I could see the ball moving toward the glitter of the zero-gravity field, and beyond it I could see those portions of the seated Bloom which were not hidden by that glitter. The ball approached the zerogravity volume, seemed to hang on the edge for a moment and then was gone, with a streak of light, the sound of a thunder-clap and the sudden smell of burning cloth. We yelled. We all yelled. I've seen the scene on television since -- along with the rest of the world. I can see myself in the film during that fifteen second period of wild confusion, but I don't really recognize my face. Fifteen seconds! And then we discovered Bloom. He was still sitting in the chair, his arms still folded -- but there was a through left wrist, chest and back. The better part of his heart, as it later turned out under autopsy, had been neatly punched out.' They turned off the device. They called in the police. They dragged off Priss, who was in a state of utter collapse. I wasn't much better off, to tell the truth, and if any reporter then on the scene ever tried to say he remained a cool observer of that scene, then he's a cool liar. V I t was some months before I got to see Priss again. He had lost some weight but seemed well otherwise, Indeed, there was color in his cheeks and an air of decision about him. He was better dressed than I had ever seen him to be. He said, "I know what happened now, If I had had time to think, I would have known then. But I am a slow thinker, and poor Ed Bloom was so intent on running a great show and doing it so well that he carried me along with him. Naturally, I've been trying to make up for some of the damage I unwittingly caused." "You can't bring Bloom back to life," I said, soberly. "No, I can't," he said, just as soberly. "But there's Bloom Enterprises to think of, too. What happened at the demonstration, in full view of the world, was the worst possible advertisement for zero-gravity, and it's important that the story be made clear. That is why l have asked to see you." "Yes?" "If I had been a quicker thinker, I would have known Ed was speaking the purest nonsense, when he ly rise in the zero-gravity field. It couldn't be so! If Bloom hadn't despised theory so, if he hadn't been so intent on being proud of his own ignorance of theory, he'd have known it himself. "The Earth's motion, after all, isn't the only motion involved, young man. The sun itself moves in a vast orbit about the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And the galaxy moves, too, in some not very clearwere subjected to zero gravity, you might think of it as being unaffected by any of these motions and therefore of suddenly falling into a state of absolute rest -- when there is no such thing as absolute rest." Priss shook his head slowly. "The trouble with Ed, I think, was that he was thinking of the kind of zerogravity one gets in a spaceship in free fall, when people float in midair. He expected the ball to float in mid-air. However, in a spaceship, zero gravity is not the result of an absence of gravitation, but merely the result of two objects, a ship and a man within the ship, falling at the same rate, responding to gravity in precisely the same way, so that each is motionless with respect to the other. "In the zero-gravity field produced by Ed, there was a flattening of the rubber-sheet universe, which means an actual loss of mass. Everything in that field, including molecules of air caught within it, and completely massless as long as it remained with it. A completely massless object can move in only one way." He paused, inviting the question. I asked, "What motion would that be?" "Motion at the speed of light. Any massless object, such as a neutrino or a photon, must travel at the speed of light as long as it exists. In fact, light moves at that speed only because it is made up of photons. As zero-gravity field and lost its mass, it, too, assumed the speed of light at once and left." I shook my head. "But didn't it regain its mass as soon as it left the zero-gravity volume?" "It certainly did, and at once it began to be affected by the gravitational field and to slow up in response to the friction of the air and imagine how much friction it would take to slow up an object the mass of light. It went through the hundredmile thickness of our atmosphere in a thousandth of a second, and I doubt that it was slowed more than a few miles a second in doing so; a few miles out of # of them. On the way, it scorched the top of the billiard table, broke cleanly through the edge, went through poor Ed and the window too, punching out neat circles, because it had passed IF through before the neighboring porleft with an incredible quantity of tions of something even as brittle kinetic energy. Where did the energy as glass had a chance to split and come from?" splinter. Priss shrugged. "It came from "It is extremely fortunate we were nowhere! The law of conservation of on the top floor of a building set in energy only holds under the cona countrified area. If we were in the ditions in which general relativity is city, it might have passed through a valid; that is, in an indented rubbernumber of buildings and killed a sheet universe. Wherever the indentanumber of people. By now that biltion is flattened out, general relaliard ball is off in space, far beyond tivity no longer holds, and energy the edge of the solar system, and it can be created and destroyed freely, will continue to travel so forever, at That accounts for the radiation along nearly the speed  of light, until it the cylindrical surface of the zerohappens to strike an object large gravity volume. That radiation, you enough to stop it. And it will then remember, Bloom did not explain, gouge out a sizable crater." and, I fear, could not explain. If he I played with the notion and was had only experimented further first; not sure I liked it. "How is that posif he had only not been so foolishly zero-gravity volume almost at a "What accounts for the radiation, standstill. I saw it. And you say it sir?" "The molecules of air inside the volume! Each assumes the speed of light and comes smashing outward. balls, so they're stopped, but the kinetic energy of their motion is converted into energetic radiation. It's continuous because new molecules are always drifting in and attaining the speed of light and smashing out." "Then energy is being created continuously?" "Exactly. And that is what we must make clear to the public. Antigravity is not primarily a device to lift spaceships or to revolutionize mechanical movement. Rather it is the source of an endless supply of free energy, since part of the energy produced can be diverted to maintain the field that keeps that portion of the universe flat. What Ed Bloom invented, without knowing it, was not just anti-gravity, but the first successful perpetual motion machine of the first class -- one that manufactures energy out of nothing." I said, slowly, "Any one of us ard ball, is that right, professor? It might have come out in any direction." Priss said, "Well, massless photons emerge from any light source at the speed of light in any direction; that's why a candle casts light in all directions. The massless air molecules come out of the zero-gravity volume in all directions, which is why the ard ball was only one object. It could have come out in any direction, but it had to come out in some one direction, chosen at random, and the chosen direction happened to be the one that caught Ed." T hat was it. Everyone knows the consequences. Mankind had free energy and so we have the world we have now. Professor Priss was placed in charge of its development by the board of Bloom Enterprises, and in time he was as rich and famous as ever Edward Bloom had been. And Priss still has two Nobel Prizes in addition. Only -- I keep thinking. Photons smash out from a light source in all directions because they are created at the moment and there is no reason for them to move in one direction more than in another. Air molecules come out of a zero-gravity field in all directions because they enter it in all directions. ball, entering a zero-gravity field from one particular direction. Does it come out in the same direction or in any direction? I've inquired delicately, but theoretical physicists don't seem to be sure, and I can find no record that Bloom Enterprises, which is the only organization working with zero-gravity fields, has ever experimented in the matter. Someone at the organization once told me that the uncertainty principle guarantees the random emergence of an object entering in any direction. But then why don't they try the experiment? Could it be, then -- Could it be that for once Priss's mind had been working quickly? Could it be that, under the pressure IF of what Bloom was trying to do to him, Priss had suddenly seen everything. He had been studying the radiation surrounding the zero-gravity volume. He might have realized its cause and been certain of the speedof-light motion of anything entering the volume. Why, then, had he said nothing? One thing is certain. Nothing could be accidental. He was an exwhat he wanted them to. I was standing right there. I saw him look at Bloom and then at the table as though he were judging angles. I watched him hit that ball. I watched it bounce off the side of the table and move into the zero-gravity volume, heading in one particular direction. For when Priss sent that ball toward the zero-gravity volume -- and the tri-di films bear me out -- it was already aimed directly at Bloom's heart! Accident? Coincidence? Murder? Coming Next Month in IF! Beginning a new two-part serial of spacemen against the deadly stars! by A. Bertram Chandler by Keith Laumer by Larry Niven And concluding by Algis Budrys All these and many more in the big April IF -- on sale about March #th! IF  Novelette I I looked down at it and I was was sick! I wondered, where did it lead? Stars? There were no words. I stared and I stared, and I cursed the fact that the thing existed and that someone had found it while I was still around. "Well?" said Lanning, and he banked the flier so that I could look upward. I shook my head and shaded my already shielded eyes. "Make it go away," I finally told him. "Can't. It's bigger than I am." "It's bigger than anybody," I said. "I can make us go away..." "Never mind. I want to take some pictures." He brought it around, and I started to shoot. "Can you hover -- or get any closer?" "No, the winds are too strong." "That figures." So I shot -- through telescopic lenses and scan attachment and all -- as we circled it. "I'd give a lot to see the top." "We're at thirty thousand feet, and fifty's the ceiling on this baby. The Lady, unfortunately, stands taller than the atmosphere." "Funny," I said, "from here she doesn't strike me as the sort to breathe ether and spend all her time looking at stars." He chuckled and lit a cigarette, and I reached us another bulb of coffee. "How does the Gray Sister strike you?" And I lit one of my own and inhaled, as the flier was buffeted by sudden gusts of something from somewhere and then ignored, and I said, "Like Our Lady of the Abattoir -- right between the eyes." We drank some coffee, and then he asked, "She too big, Whitey?" and I gnashed my teeth through caffeine, for only my friends call me Whitey, my name being Jack Summers and my hair having always been this way, and at the moment I wasn't too certain whether Henry Lanning qualified for that status -- just because he'd known me for twenty years -- after going out of his way to find this thing on a world with a thin atmosphere, a lot of rocks, a too-bright sky and a name after George Diesel, who had set foot in the dust and then gone away -- smart fellow! "A forty-mile-high mountain," I finally said, "is not a mountain. It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw into orbit." "I take it you're not interested?" I looked back at the gray and lavender slopes and followed them upward once again, until all color drained away, until the silhouette was black and jagged and the top still nowhere in sight, until my eyes stung and burned behind their protective glasses; and I saw clouds bumping up against that invincible outline, like icebergs in the sky, and I heard the howling of the retreating winds which had essayed to measure its grandeur with swiftness and, of course, had failed. "Oh, I'm interested," I said, "in an academic sort of way. Let's go back to town, where I can eat and drink and maybe break a leg if I'm lucky." He headed the flier south, and I didn't look around as we went. I could sense her presence at my back, though, all the way: The Gray Sister, the highest mountain in the known universe. Unclimbed, of course. S he remained at my back during the days that followed, casting her shadow over everything I looked upon. For the next two days I studied the pictures I had taken and I dug up some maps and I studied IF them, too; and I spoke with people who told me stories of the Gray Sister, strange stories... During this time, I came across nothing really encouraging. I learned that there had been an attempt to colonize Diesel a couple centuries previously, back before faster-thanlight ships were developed. A brandnew disease had colonized the first colonists, however, wiping them out to a man. The new colony was four years old, had better doctors, had beaten the plague, was on Diesel to stay and seemed proud of its poor taste when it came to worlds. Nobody, I learned, fooled around much with the Gray Sister. There had been a few abortive attempts to climb her, and some young legends that followed after. During the day, the sky never shut up. It kept screaming into my eyes, until I took to wearing my climbing goggles whenever I went out. Mainly, though, I sat in the hotel lounge and ate and drank and studied the pictures and crossexamined anybody who happened to pass by and glance at them, spread out there on the table. I continued to ignore all Henry's questions. I knew what he wanted, and he could damn well wait. Unfortunately, he did, and rather well, too, which irritated me. He felt I was almost hooked by the Sister, and he wanted to Be There When It Happened. He'd made a fortune on the Kasla story, and I could already see the opening sentences of this one in the smug lines around his eyes. Whenever he tried to make like a poker player, leaning on his fist and slowly turning a photo, I could see whole paragraphs. If I followed the direction of his gaze, I probably could even have seen the dust jacket. At the end of the week, a ship came' down out of the sky, and some nasty people got off and interrupted my train of thought. When they came into the lounge, I recognized them for what they were and removed my black lenses so that I could nail Henry with my basilisk gaze and turn him to stone. As it would happen, he had too much alcohol in him, and it didn't work. "You tipped off the press," I said. "Now, now," he said, growing smaller and stiffening as my gaze groped its way through the murk of his central nervous system and finally touched upon the edges of that tiny tumor, his forebrain. "You're well-known, and..." I replaced my glasses and hunched over my drink, looking far gone, as one of the three approached and said, "Pardon me, but are you Jack Summers?" T o explain the silence which followed, Henry said, "Yes, this is Mad Jack, the man who climbed Everest at twenty-three and every other pile of rocks worth mentioning since that time. At thirty-one, he became the only man to conquer the highest mountain in the known universe -- Mount Kasla on Litan -- elevation #I feet. My book -- " "Yes," said the reporter. "My name is Cary, and I'm with GP. My friends represent two of the other syndicates. We've heard that you are going to climb the Gray Sister." "You've heard incorrectly," I said. "Oh?" The other two came up and stood beside 'him. "We thought that -- " one of them began. " -- you were already organizing a climbing party," said the other. "Then you're not going to climb the Sister?" asked Cary, while one of the two looked over my pictures and the other got ready to take some of his own. "Stop that!" I said, raising a hand at the photographer. "Bright lights hurt my eyes!" "Sorry. I'll use the infra," he said, and he started fooling with his camera. Cary repeated the question. "All I said was that you've heard incorrectly," I told him. "I didn't say I was and I didn't say I wasn't. I haven't made up my mind." "If you should decide to try it, have you any idea when it will be?" "Sorry, I can't answer that." Henry took the three of them over to the bar and started explaining something, with gestures. I heard the words "... out of retirement after four years," and when if they looked to the booth again, I was gone. I had retired, to the street which was full of dusk, and I walked along it thinking. I trod her shadow even then, Linda. And the Gray Sister beckoned and forbade with her single unmoving gesture. I watched her, so far away, yet still so large, a piece of midnight at eight o'clock. The hours that lay between died like the distance at her feet, and I knew that she would follow me wherever I went, even into sleep. Especially into sleep. So I knew, at that moment. The days that followed were a game I enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to do something. I looked at her then, my last and my largest, my very own Koshtra Pivrarcha, and I felt that I was born to stand upon her summit. Then I could retire, probably remarry, cultivate my mind, not worry about getting out of shape, and do all the square things I didn't do before, the lack of which had cost me a wife and a home, back when I had gone to Kasla, elevation #I feet, four and a half years ago, in the days of my glory. I regarded my Gray Sister across the eight o'clock world, and she was dark and noble and still and waiting, as she had alwas been. II T he following morning I sent the messages. Out across the lightyears like cosmic carrier pigeons they went. They winged their ways to some persons I hadn't seen in years and to others who had seen me off at Luna Station. Each said, in its own way, "If you want in on the biggest climb of them all, come to Diesel. The Gray Sister eats Kaslas for breakfast. R.S.V.P. co The Lodge, Georgetown. Whitey." Backward, turn backward... I didn't tell Henry. Nothing at all. What I had done and where I was going, for a time, were my business only, for that same time. I checked IF out well before sunrise and left him a message at the desk: "Out of town on business. Back in a week. Hold the fort. Mad Jack." I had to gauge the lower slopes, tug the hem of the lady's skirt, so to speak, before I introduced her to my friends. They say only a madman climbs alone, but they call me what they call me for a reason. From my pix, the northern face had looked promising. I set the rented flier down as near as I could, locked it up, shouldered my pack and started walking. Mountains rising to my right and to my left, mountains at my back, all dark as sin now in the predawn light of a white, white day. Ahead of me, not a mountain, but an almost gentle slope which kept rising and rising and rising. Bright stars above me and cold wind past me as I walked. Straight up, though, no stars, just black. I wondered for the thousandth time what a mountain weighed. I always wonder that as I approach one. No clouds in sight. No noises but my boot sounds on the turf and the small gravel. My goggles flopped around my neck. My hands were moist within my gloves. On Diesel, the pack and I together probably weighed about the same as me alone on Earth -- for which I was duly grateful. My breath burned as it came and steamed as it went. I counted a thousand steps and looked back, and I couldn't see the flier. I counted a thousand more and then looked up to watch some stars go out. About an hour after that, I had to put on my goggles. By then I could see where I was headed. And by then the wind seemed stronger. She was so big that the eye couldn't take all of her in at once. I moved my head from side to side, leaning further and further backward. Wherever the top, it was too high. For an instant, I was seized by a crazy acrophobic notion that I was looking down rather than up, and the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands tingled, like an ape's must when, releasing one high branch to seize another, he discovers that there isn't another. I went on for two more hours and stopped for a light meal. This was hiking, not climbing. As I ate, I wondered what could have caused a formation like the Gray Sister. There were some ten and twelve-mile peaks within sixty miles of the place and a fifteen-mile mountain called Burke's Peak on the adjacent continent, but nothing else like the Sister. The lesser gravitation? Her composition? I couldn't say. I wondered what Doc and Kelly and Mallard i would say when they saw her. I don't define them, though. I only climb them. I looked up again, and a few clouds were brushing against her now. From the photos I had taken, she might be an easy ascent for a good ten or twelve miles. Like a big hill. There were certainly enough alternate routes. In fact, I thought she just might be a pushover. Feeling heartened, I repacked my utensils and proceeded. It was going to be a good day, I could tell. And it was. I got off the slope and onto something like a trail by late afternoon. Daylight lasts about nine hours on Diesel, and I spent most of it moving. The trail was so good that I kept on for several hours after sundown and made considerable height. I was beginning to use my respiration equipment by then, and the heating unit in my suit was turned on. ers, the way was easy, the night was my friend. I came upon a broad, flat piece and made my camp under an overhang. There I slept, and I dreamt of snowy women with breasts like the Alps, pinked by the morning sun; and they sang to me like the wind and laughed, had eyes of ice prismatic. They fled through a field of clouds. T he following day I made a lot more height. The "trail" began to narrow, and it ran out in places, but it was easy to reach for the sky until another one occurred. So far, it had all been good rock. It was still tapering as it heightened, and balance was no problem. I did a lot of plain old walking. I ran up one long zigzag and hit it up a wide chimney almost as fast as Santa Claus comes down one. The winds were strong, could be a problem if the going got difficult. I was on the respirator full time and feeling great. I could see for an enormous distance now. There were mountains and mountains, all below me like desert dunes. The sun beat halos of heat about their peaks. In the east, I saw Lake Emerick, dark and shiny as the toe of a boot. I wound my way about a jutting crag and came upon a giant's staircase, going up for at least a thousand feet. I mounted it. At its top I hit my first real barrier: a fairly smooth, almost perpendicular face rising for about eightyfive feet. No way around it, so I went up. It took me a good hour, and there was a ridge at the top leading to more easy climbing. By then, though, the clouds attacked me. Even though the going was easy, I was slowed by the fog. I wanted to outclimb it and still have some daylight left, so I decided to postpone eating. But the clouds kept coming. I made another thousand feet, and they were still about me. Somewhere below me, I heard thunder. The fog was easy on my eyes, though, so I kept pushing. Then I tried a chimney, the top of which I could barely discern, because it looked a lot shorter than a jagged crescent to its left. This was a mistake. The rate of condensation was greater than I'd guessed. The walls were slippery. I'm stubborn, though, and I fought with skidding boots and moist back until I was about a third of the way up, I thought, and winded. I realized then what I had done. What I had thought was the top wasn't. I went another fifteen feet and wished I hadn't. The fog began to boil about me, and I suddenly felt drenched. I was afraid to go down and I was afraid to go up, and I couldn't stay where I was forever. Whenever you hear a person say that he inched along, do not accuse him of a fuzzy choice of verbs. Give IF him the benefit of the doubt and your sympathy. I inched my way, blind, up an unknown length of slippery chimney. If my hair hadn't already been white when I entered at the bottom... Finally, I got above the fog. Finally, I saw a piece of that bright and nasty sky, which I decided to forgive for the moment. I aimed at it, arrived on target. When I emerged, I saw a little ledge about ten feet above me. I climbed to it and stretched out. My muscles were a bit shaky, and I made them go liquid. I took a drink of water, ate a couple of chocolate bars, took another drink. After perhaps ten minutes, I stood up. I could no longer see the ground. Just the soft, white cottony top of a kindly old storm. I looked up. It was amazing. She was still topless. And save for a couple spots, such as the last -- which had been the fault of my own stupid overconfidence -- it had almost been as easy as climbing stairs. Now the going appeared to be somewhat rougher, however. This was what I had really come to test. I swung my pick and continued. A ll the following day I climbed, steadily, taking no unnecessary risks, resting periodically, drawing maps, taking wide-angle photos. The ascent eased in two spots that afternoon, and I made a quick seven thousand feet. Higher now than Everest, and still going, I. Now, though, there were places where I crawled and places where I used ropes, and there were places where I braced myself and used my pneumatic pistol to blast a toehold. (No, in case you're wondering: I could have broken my eardrums, some ribs, an arm and doubtless ultimately, my neck, if I'd tried using the gun in the chimney.) Just near sunset, I came upon a high, easy winding way up and up and up. I debated with my more discreet self. I'd left the message that I'd be gone a week. This was the end of the third day. I wanted to make as much height as possible and start back down on the fifth day. If I followed the rocky route above me as far as it would take me I'd probably break forty thousand feet. Then, depending, I might have a halfway chance of hitting near the ten-mile mark before I had to turn back. Then I'd be able to get a much better picture of what lay above. My more discreet self lost, three to nothing, and Mad Jack went on. The stars were so big and blazing I was afraid they'd bite. The wind was no problem. There wasn't any at that height. I had to keep stepping up the temperature controls on my suit, and I had the feeling that if I could spit around my respirator, it would freeze before it hit the trail. I went on even further than I'd intended, and I broke forty-two thousand that night. I found a resting place, stretched out, killed my hand beacon. It was an odd dream that came to me. It was all cherry fires and stood like a man, only bigger, on the slope above me. It stood in an impossible position, so I knew I had to be dreaming. Something from the other end of my life stirred, however, and I was convinced for a bitter moment that it was the Angel of Judgment. Only, in its right hand it seemed to hold a sword of fires rather than a trumpet. It had been standing there forever, the tip of its blade pointed toward my breast. I could see the stars through it. It seemed to speak. It said: "Go back " I couldn't answer, though, for my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. And it said it again, and yet a third time, "Go back" "Tomorrow," I thought, in my dream, and this seemed to satisfy it. For it died down and ceased, and the blackness rolled about me. T he following day, I climbed as I hadn't climbed in years. By late lunchtime I'd hit forty-eight thousand feet. The cloud cover down below had broken. I could see what lay beneath me once more. The ground was a dark and light patchwork. Above, the stars didn't go away. The going was rough, but I was feeling fine. I knew I couldn't make ten miles, because I could see that the way was pretty much the same for quite a distance, before it got even worse. My good spirits stayed, and they continued to rise as I did. When it attacked, it came on with a speed and fury that I was only barely able to match. The voice from my dream rang in my head: "Go back! Go back! Go back !" Then it came toward me from out of the sky. A bird the size of a condor. Only it wasn't really a bird. It was a bird-shaped thing. It was all fire and static, and as it flashed toward me I barely had time to brace my back against stone and heft my climbing pick in my right hand, ready. Ill I sat in the small, dark room and watched the spinning, colored lights. Ultrasonics were tickling my skull. I tried to relax and give the man some Alpha rhythms. Somewhere a receiver was receiving, a computer was computing and a recorder was recording. It lasted perhaps twenty minutes. When it was all over and they called me out, the doctor collared me. I beat him to the draw, though: "Give me the tape and send me the bill in care of Henry Lanning at the Lodge." "I want to discuss the reading," he said. "I have my own brain-wave expert coming. Just give me the tape." "Have you undergone any sort of traumatic experience recently?" "You tell me. Is it indicated?" "Well, yes and no," he said. "That's what I like, a straight answer." "I don't know what is normal for you, in the first place," he replied. "Is there any indication of brain damage?" "I don't read it that way. If you'd tell me what happened, and why IF you're suddenly concerned about your brain-waves, perhaps I'd be in a better position to " "Cut," I said. "Just give me the tape and bill me." "I'm concerned about you as a patient." "But you don't think there were any pathological indications?" "Not exactly. But tell me this, if you will: Have you had an epileptic seizure recently?" "Not to my knowledge. Why?" "You displayed a pattern similar to a residual subrhythm common in some forms of epilepsy for several days subsequent to a seizure." "Could a bump on the head cause that pattern?" "It's highly unlikely." "What else could cause it?" "Electrical shock, optical trauma -- " "Stop," I said, and I removed my glasses. "About the optical trauma. Look at my eyes." "I'm not an ophtha -- " he began, but I interrupted: "Most normal light hurts my eyes. If I lost my glasses and was exposed to very bright light for three, four days, could that cause the pattern you spoke of?" "Possibly..." he said. "Yes, I'd say so." "But there's more?" "I'm not sure. We have to take more readings, and if I know the story behind this it will help a lot." "Sorry," I said. "I need the tape now." He sighed and made a small gesture with his left hand as he turned away. "All right, Mister Smith." Cursing the genius of the mountain, I left the General Hospital, carrying my tape like a talisman. In my mind I searched, through forests of memory, for a ghost-sword in a stone of smoke, I think. B ack at the Lodge, they were waiting. Lanning and the newsmen. "What was it like?" asked one of the latter. "What was what like?" "The mountain. You were up on it, weren't you?" "No comment." "How high did you go?" "No comment." "How would you say it compares with Kasla?" "No comment." "Did you run into any complications?" "Ditto. Excuse me, I want to take a shower." Henry followed me into my room. The reporters tried to. After I had shaved and washed up, mixed a drink and lit a cigarette, Lanning asked me his more general question: "Well?" he said. I nodded. "Difficulties?" I nodded again. "Insurmountable?" I hefted the tape and thought a moment. "Maybe not." He helped himself to the whiskey. The second time around, he asked: "You going to try?" I knew I was. I knew I'd try it all by myself if I had to. "I really don't know," I said. "Why not?" "Because there's something up there," I said, "something that doesn't want us to do it." "Something lives up there?" "I'm not sure whether that's the right word." He lowered the drink. "What the hell happened?" "I was threatened. I was attacked." "Threatened? Verbally? In English?" He set his drink aside, which shows how serious his turn of mind had to be. "Attacked?" he added. "By what?" "I've sent for Doc and Kelly and Stan and Mallardi and Vincent. I checked a little earlier. They've all replied. They're coming. Miguel and the Dutchman can't make it, and they send their regrets. When we're all together, I'll tell the story. But I want to talk to Doc first. So hold tight and worry and don't quote." He finished his drink. "When'll they be coming?" "Four, five weeks," I said. "That's a long wait." "Under the circumstances," I said, "I can't think of any alternatives." "What'll we do in the meantime?" "Eat, drink and contemplate the mountain." He lowered his eyelids a moment, then nodded, reached for his glass. "Shall we begin?" I t was late, and I stood alone in the field with a bottle in one hand. Lanning had already turned in, and IF night's chimney was dark with cloud soot. Somewhere away from there, a storm was storming, and it was full of instant outlines. The wind came chill. "Mountain," I said. "Mountain, you have told me to go away." There was a rumble. "But I cannot," I said, and I took a drink. "I'm bringing you the best in the business," I said, "to go up on your slopes and to stand beneath the stars in your highest places. I must do this thing because you are there. No other reason. Nothing personal..." After a time, I said, "That's not true. "I'm a man," I said, "and I need to break mountains to prove that I will not die even though I will die. I am less than I want to be, Sister, and you can make me more. So I guess it is personal. "It's the only thing I know how to do, and you're the last one left -- the last challenge to the skill I spent my life learning. Maybe it is that mortality is closest to immortality when it accepts a challenge to itself, when it survives a threat. The moment of triumph is the moment of salvation. I have needed many such moments, and the final one must be the longest, for it must last me the rest of my life. "So you are there, Sister, and I am here and very mortal, and you have told me to go away. I cannot. I'm coming up, and if you throw death at me I will face it. It must be so." I finished what remained in the bottle. There were more flashes, more rumbles behind the mountain, more flashes. "It is the closest thing to divine drunkenness," I said to the thunder. And then she winked at me. It was a red star, so high upon her. Angel's sword. Phoenix's wing. Soul on fire. And it blazed at me, across the miles. Then the wind that blows between the worlds swept down over me. It was filled with tears and with crystals of ice. I stood there and felt it, then, "Don't go away," I said, and I watched until all was darkness once more and I was wet as an embryo waiting to cry out and breathe. M ost kids tell lies to their playmates -- fictional autobiographies, if you like -- which are either received with appropriate awe or countered with greater, more elaborate tellings. But little Jimmy, I've heard, always hearkened to his little buddies with wide, dark eyes, and near the endings of their stories the corners of his mouth would begin to twitch. By the time they were finished talking, his freckles would be mashed into a grin and his rusty head cocked to the side. His favorite expression, I understand, was "G'wan!" and his nose was broken twice before he was twelve. This was doubtless why he turned it toward books. Thirty years and four formal degrees later, he sat across from me in my quarters in the Lodge, and I called him Doc because everyone did, because he had a license to cut IF people up and look inside them, as well as doctoring to their philosophy, so to speak, and because he looked as if he should be called Doc when he grinned and cocked his head to the side and said, "Gan!" I wanted to punch him in the nose. "Damn it! It's true!" I told him. "I fought with a bird of fire!" "We all hallucinated on Kasla," he said, raising one finger, "because of fatigue," two fingers, "because the altitude affected our circulatory systems and consequently our brains," three, "because of the emotional stimulation," four, "and because we were partly oxygen-drunk." "You just ran out of fingers, if you'll sit on your other hand for a minute. So listen," I said, "it flew at me, and I swung at it, and it knocked me out and broke my goggles. When I woke up, it was gone and I was lying on the ledge. I think it was some sort of energy creature. normal. I think it shocked my nervous system when it touched me." "You were knocked out because you hit your head against a rock -- " "It caused me to fall back against the rock!" "I agree with that part. The rock was real. But nowhere in the universe has anyone ever discovered an 'energy creature.' " "So? You probably would have said that about America a thousand years ago." "Maybe I would have. But that my satisfaction. Optical trauma. Why go out of your way to dream up on exotic explanation for events? Easy ones generally turn out better. You hallucinated and you stumbled." "Okay," I said, "whenever I argue with you I generally need ammunition. Hold on a minute." I went to my closet and fetched it down from the top shelf. I placed it on my bed and began unwrapping the blanket I had around it. "I told you I took a swing at it," I said. "Well, I connected -- right before I went under. Here!" I held up my climbing pick -- brown, yellow, black and pitted -- looking as though it had fallen from outer space. He took it into his hands and stared at it for a long time, then he started to say something about ball lightning, changed his mind, shook his head and placed the thing back on the blanket. "I don't know," he finally said, and this time his freckles remained unmashed, except for those at the edges of his hands which got caught as he clenched them, slowly. IV W e planned. We mapped and charted and studied the photos. We plotted our ascent and we started a training program. While Doc and Stan had kept themselves in good shape, neither had been climbing since Kasla. Kelly was in top condition. Henry was on his way to fat. Mallardi and Vince, as always, seemed capable of fantastic feats of endurance and virtuosity, had even climbed a couple times during the past year, hut had recently been living pretty high on the tall hog, so to speak, and they wanted to get some practice. So we picked a comfortable, decent-sized mountain and gave it ten days to beat everyone back into shape. After that, we stuck to vitamins, calisthenics and square diets while we completed our preparations. During this time, Doc came up with seven shiny, alloy boxes, about six by four inches and thin as a first book of poems, for us to carry on our persons to broadcast a defense against the energy creature which he refused to admit existed. One fine, bitter-brisk morning we were ready. The newsmen liked me again. Much footage was taken of our gallant assemblage as we packed ourselves into the fliers, to be delivered at the foot of the lady mountain, there to contend for what was doubtless the final time as the team we had been for so many years, against the waiting gray and the lavender beneath the sunwhite flame. We approached the mountain, and I wondered how much she weighed. Y ou know the way, for the first nine miles. So I'll skip over that. It took us six days and part of a seventh. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred. Some fog there was, and nasty winds, but once below, forgotten. Stan and Mallardi and I stood where the bird had occurred, waiting for Doc and the others. "So far, it's been a picnic," said Mallardi. "Yeah," Stan acknowledged. "No birds either." "No," I agreed. "Do you think Doc was right -- about it being an hallucination?" Mallardi asked. "I remember seeing things on Kasla... " "As I recall," said Stan, "it was nymphs and an ocean of beer. Why would anyone want to see hot birds?" "Damfino." "Laugh, you hyenas," I said. "But just wait till a flock flies over." Doc came up and looked around. "This is the place?" I nodded. He tested the background radiation and half a dozen other things, found nothing untoward, grunted and looked upwards. We all did. Then we went there. It was very rough for three days, and we only made another five thousand feet during that time. When we bedded down, we were bushed, and sleep came quickly. So did Nemesis. He was there again, only not quite so near this time. He burned about twenty feet away, standing in the middle of the air, and the point of his blade indicated me. "Go away # he said, three times, without inflection. "Go to hell," I tried to say. He made as if he wished to draw nearer. He failed. "Go away yourself," I said. "Climb back down. Depart. You may go no further " "But I am going further. All the way to the top." "No. You may not." IF "Stick around and watch," I said. "Go back " "If you want to stand there and direct traffic, that's your business," I told him. "I'm going back to sleep." I crawled over and shook Doc's shoulder, but when I looked back my flaming visitor had departed. "What is it?" "Too late," I said. "He's been here and gone." Doc sat up. "The bird?" "No, the thing with the sword." "Where was he?" "Standing out there," I gestured. Doc hauled out his instruments and did many things with them for ten minutes or so. "Nothing," he finally said. "Maybe you were dreaming." "Yeah, sure," I said. "Sleep tight," and I hit the sack again, and this time I made it through to daylight without further fire or ado. I t took us four days to reach sixty thousand feet. Rocks fell like occasional cannonballs past us, and the sky was a big pool, cool, where pale flowers floated. When we struck sixty-three thousand, the going got much better, and we made it up to seventy-five thousand in two and a half more days. No fiery things stopped by to tell me to turn back. Then came the unforeseeable, however, and we had enough in the way of natural troubles to keep us cursing. We hit a big, level shelf. It was perhaps four hundred feet wide. As we advanced across it, we realized that it did not strike the mountainside. It dropped off into an enormous gutter of a canyon. We would have to go down again, perhaps seven hundred feet, before we could proceed upward once more. Worse yet, it led to a featureless face which strove for and achieved perpendicularity for a deadly high distance: like miles. The top was still nowhere in sight. "Where do we go now?" asked Kelly, moving to my side. "Down," I decided, "and we split up. We'll follow the big ditch in both directions and see which way gives the better route up. We'll meet back at the midway point." We descended. Then Doc and Kelly and I went left, and the others took the opposite way. After an hour and a half, our trail came to an end. We stood looking at nothing over the edge of something. Nowhere, during the entire time, had we come upon a decent way up. I stretched out, my head and shoulders over the edge, Kelly holding onto my ankles, and I looked as far as I could to the right and up. There was nothing in sight that was worth a facing movement. "Hope the others had better luck," I said, after they'd dragged me back. "And if they haven't... ?" asked Kelly. "Let's wait." They had. It was risky, though. There was no good way straight up out of the gap. The trail had ended at a forty-foot wail which, when mounted, gave a clear view all the way down. Leaning out as I had done and looking about two hundred feet to the left and eighty feet higher, however, Mallardi had rested his eyes on a rough way, but a way, nevertheless, leading up and west and vanishing. We camped in the gap that night. In the morning, I anchored my line to a rock, Doc tending, and went out with the pneumatic pistol. I fell twice, and made forty feet of trail by lunchtime. I rubbed my bruises then, and Henry took over. After ten feet, Kelly got out to anchor a couple of body-lengths behind him, and we tended Kelly. Then Stan blasted and Mallardi anchored. Then there had to be three on the face. Then four. By sundown, we'd made a hundred-fifty feet and were covered with white powder. A bath would have been nice. We settled for ultrasonic shakedowns. B y lunch the next day, we were all out there, roped together, hugging cold stone, moving slowly, painfully, slowly, not looking down much. By day's end, we'd made it across, to the place where we could hold on and feel something -- granted, not much -- beneath our boots. It was inclined to be a trifle scant, however, to warrant less than a full daylight assault. So we returneed once more to the gap. In the morning, we crossed. The way kept its winding angle. We headed west and up. We traveled a mile and made five hundred feet. We traveled another mile and made perhaps three hundred. Then a ledge occurred, about forty feet overhead. Stan went up the hard way, using the gun, to see what he could see. He gestured, and we followed; and the view that broke upon us was good. Down right, irregular but wide enough, was our new camp. The way above it, ice cream and whiskey sours and morning coffee and a cigarette after dinner. It was beautiful and delicious: a seventydegree slope full of ledges and projections and good clean stone. "Hot damn!" said Kelly. We all tended to agree. We ate and we drank and we decided to rest our bruised selves that afternoon. We were in the twilight world now, walking where no man had ever walked before, and we felt ourselves to be golden. It was good to stretch out and try to unache. I slept away the day, and when I awakened the sky was a bed of glowing embers. I lay there too lazy to move, too full of sight to go back to sleep. A meteor burnt its way bluewhite across the heavens. After a time, there was another. I thought upon my position and decided that reaching it was worth the price. The cold, hard happiness of the heights filled me. I wiggled my toes. After a few minutes, I stretched and sat up. I regarded the sleeping forms of my companions. I looked out across the night as far as I could see. Then I looked up at the IF mountain, then dropped my eyes slowly along tomorrow's trail. There was movement within shadow. Something was standing about fifty feet away and ten feet above. I picked up my pick and stood. I crossed the fifty and stared up. She was smiling, not burning. A woman, an impossible woman. Absolutely impossible. For one thing, she would just have to freeze to death in a mini-skirt and a sleeveless shell-top. No alternative. For another, she had very little to breathe. Like, nothing. But it didn't seem to bother her. She waved. Her hair was dark and long, and I couldn't see her eyes. The planes of her pale, high cheeks, wide forehead, small chin corresponded in an unsettling fashion with certain simple theorems which comprise the geometry of my heart. If all angles, planes, curves be correct, it skips a beat, then hurries to make up for it. I worked it out, felt it do so, said, "Hello." "Hello, Whitey," she replied. "Come down," I said. "No, you come up." I swung my pick. When I reached the ledge she wasn't there. I looked around, then I saw her. She was seated on a rock twelve feet above me. "How it is that you know my name?" I asked. "Anyone can see what your name must be." "All right," I agreed. "What's yours?" "... " Her lips seemed to move, but I heard nothing. "Come again?" "I don't want a name," she said "Okay. I'll call you 'girl,' then." She laughed, sort of. "What are you doing here? I asked. "Watching you." "Why?" "To see whether you'll fall." "I can save you the trouble," I said. "I won't." "Perhaps," she said. "Come down here," "No, you come up here." I climbed, but when I got there she was twenty feet higher. "Girl, you climb well," I said, and she laughed and turned away. I pursued her for five minutes and couldn't catch her. There was something unnatural about the way she moved. I stopped climbing when she turned again. We were still about twenty feet apart. "I take it you do not really wish me to join you," I said. "Of course I do, but you must catch me first." And she turned once more, and I felt a certain fury within me. It was written that no one could outclimb Mad Jack. I had written it. I swung my pick and moved like a lizard. I was near to her a couple of times, but never near enough. The day's aches began again in my muscles, but I pulled my way up without slackening my pace. I realized, faintly, that the camp was far below me now, and that I was climbing alone through the dark up a strange slope. But I did not stop. Rather, I hurried, and my breath began to come hard in my lungs. I heard her laughter, and it was a goad. Then I came upon a two-inch ledge, and she was moving along it. I followed, around a big bulge of rock to where it ended. Then she was ninety feet above me, at the top of a smooth pinnacle. It was like a tapering, branchless tree. How she'd accomplished it, I didn't know. I was gasping by then, but I looped my line around it and began to climb. As I did this, she spoke: "Don't you ever tire, Whitey? I thought you would have collapsed by now." I hitched up the line and climbed further. "You can't make it up here, you know." "I don't know," I grunted. "Why do you want so badly to climb here? There are other nice mountains." "This is the biggest, girl. That's why." "It can't be done." "Then why all this bother to discourage me? Why not just let the mountain do it?" As I neared her, she vanished. I made it to the top, where she had been standing, and I collapsed there. Then I heard her voice again and turned my head. She was on a ledge, perhaps eighty feet away. "I didn't think you'd make it this far," she said. "You are a fool. Good-by, Whitey." She was gone. I sat there on the pinnacle's tiny top -- perhaps four square feet of top -- and I knew that I couldn't sleep there, because I'd fall. And I was tired. I recalled my favorite curses and I said them all, but I didn't feel any better. I couldn't let myself go to sleep. I looked down. I knew the way was long. I knew she didn't think I could make it. I began the descent. T he following morning when they shook me, I was still tired. I told them the last night's tale, and they didn't believe me. Not until later in the day, that is, when I detoured us around the bulge and showed them the pinnacle, standing there like a tapering, branchless tree, ninety feet in the middle of the air. V W e went steadily upward for the next two days. We made slightly under ten thousand feet. Then we spent a day hammering and hacking our way up a great flat face. Six hundred feet of it. Then our way was to the right and upward. Before long we were ascending the western side of the mountain. When we broke ninety thousand feet, we stopped to congratulate ourselves that we had just surpassed the Kasla climb and to remind ourselves that we had still had not hit the halfway mark. It took us another two and a half days to do that, and by then the land lay like a map beneath us. IF And then, that night, we all saw the creature with the sword. He came and stood near our camp, and he raised his sword above his head, and it blazed with such a terrible intensity that I slipped on my goggles. His voice was all thunder and lightning this time: "Get off this mountain!" he said. "Now! Turn back! Go down! Depart!" And then a shower of stones came down from above and rattled about us. Doc tossed his slim, shiny case, causing it to skim along the ground toward the creature. The light went out, and we were alone. Doc retrieved his case, took tests, met with the same success as before -- i.e. f none. But now at least he didn't think I was some kind of balmy, unless of course he thought we all were. "Not a very effective guardian," Henry suggested. "We've a long way to go yet," said Vince, shying a stone through the space the creature had occupied. "I don't like it if the thing can cause a slide." "That was just a few pebbles," said Stan. "Yeah, but what if he decided to start them fifty thousand feet higher?" "Shut up!" said Kelly. "Don't give him any ideas. He might be listening." For some reason, we drew closer together. Doc made each of us describe what we had seen, and it appeared that we all had seen the same thing. "All right," I said, after we'd finished. "Now you've all seen it, who wants to go back?" There was silence. After perhaps half a dozen heartbeats, Henry said, "I want the whole story. It looks like a good one. I'm angry energy creatures in order to get it." "I don't know what the thing is," said Kelly. "Maybe it's no energy creature. Maybe it's something -- supernatural -- I know what you'll say, Doc. I'm just telling you how it struck me. If there are such things, this seems a good place for them. Point is -- whatever it is, I don't care. I want this mountain. If it could have stopped us, I think it would've done it already. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it can. Maybe it's laid some trap for us higher up. But I want this mountain. Right now, it means more to me than anything. If I don't go up, I'll spend all my time wondering about it -- and then I'll probably come back and try it again some day, when it gets so I can't stand thinking about it any more. Only then, maybe the rest of you won't be available. Let's face it, we're a good climbing team. Maybe , the best in the business. Probably. If it can be done, I think we can do it." "I'll second that," said Stan. VV Mallardi, "about it being supernatural -- it's funny, because I felt the same thing for a minute when I was looking at it. It reminds me of something out of the Divine Comedy . If you recall, Purgatory was a mountain. And then I thought of the angel who guarded the eastern way to Eden. Eden had gotten moved to the top of Purgatory hy Dante -- and there was this angel... Anyhow, I felt almost like I was committing some sin I didn't know about by being here. But now that I think it over, a man can't be guilty of something he doesn't know is wrong, can he? And I didn't see that thing flashing any up and see what's on top, unless he comes back with the Tablets of the Law, with a new one written in at the bottom." "In Hebrew or Italian?" asked Doc. "To satisfy you, I suppose they'd have to be drawn up in the form of equations." "No," he said. "Kidding aside, I felt something funny too, when I saw it and heard it. And we didn't really hear it, you know. It skipped over the senses and got its message right into our brains. If you think back over our descriptions of what we experienced, we each 'heard different words telling us to go away. If it can communicate a meaning as well as a psychtranslator, I wonder if it can communicate an emotion, also... You thought of an angel, too, didn't you, Whitey?" "Yes," I said. "That makes it almost unanimous then, doesn't it?" Then we all turned to Vince, because he had no Christian background at all, having been raised as a Buddhist on Ceylon. "What were your feelings concerning the thing?" Doc asked him. "It was a Deva," he said, "a sort of like an angel, I guess. I had the impression that every step I took up this mountain gave me enough bad karma to fill a lifetime. Except I haven't believed in it that way since I was a kid. I want to go ahead, up. Even if that feeling was correct, I want to see the top of this mountain." "So do I," said Doc. "That makes it unanimous," I said. "Well, everybody hang onto his angelsbane," said Stan, "and let's sack out." "Good idea." "Only let's spread out a bit," said Doc, "so that anything falling won't get all of us together." We did that cheerful thing and slept untroubled by heaven. O ur way kept winding right, until we were at a hundred fortyfour thousand feet and were mounting the southern slopes. Then it jogged back, and by a hundred fifty we were mounting to the west once more. Then, during a devilish, dark and tricky piece of scaling, up a smooth, concave bulge ending in an overhand, the bird came down once again. If we hadn't been roped together, Stan would have died. As it was, we almost all died. Stan was lead man, as its wings splashed sudden flames against the violet sky. It came down from the overhang as though someone had IF kicked a bonfire over its edge, beaded straight toward him and faded out at a distance of about twelve feet. He fell then, almost taking the rest of us with him. We tensed our muscles and took the shock. He was battered a bit, but unbroken. We made it up to the overhang, but went no further that day. Rocks did fall, but we found another overhang and made camp beneath it. The bird did not return that day, but the snakes came. Big, shimmering scarlet serpents coiled about the crags, wound in and out of jagged fields of ice and gray stone. Sparks shot along their sinuous lengths. They coiled and unwound, stretched and turned, spat fires at us. It seemed they were trying to drive us from beneath the sheltering place to where the rocks could come down upon us. Doc advanced upon the nearest one, and it vanished as it came within the field of his projector. He studied the place where it had lain, then hurried back. "The frost is still on the punkin," he said. "Huh?" said I. "Not a bit of ice was melted beneath it." "Indicating?" "Illusion," said Vince, and he threw a stone at another and it passed through the thing. "But you saw what happened to my pick," I said to Doc, 'Svhen I took a cut at that bird. The thing had to have been carrying some kind of charge." "Maybe whatever has been sending them has cut that part out, as a waste of energy," he replied, "since the things can't get through to us anyhow." We sat around and watched the snakes and falling rocks, until Stan produced a deck of cards and suggested a better game. T he snakes stayed on through the night and followed us the next day. Rocks still fell periodically, but the boss seemed to be running low on them. The bird appeared, circled us and swooped on four different occasions. But this time we ignored it, and finally it went home to roost. We made three thousand feet, could have gone more, but didn't want to press it past a cozy little ledge with a cave big enough for the whole party, Everything let up on us then. Everything visible, that is. A before-the-storm feeling, a still, electrical tension, seemed to occur around us then, and we waited for whatever was going to happen to happen. The worst possible thing happened: nothing. This keyed-up feeling, this expectancy, stayed with us, was unsatisfied. I think it would actually have been a relief if some invisible orchestra had begun playing Wagner, or if the heavens had rolled aside like curtains and revealed a movie screen, and from the backward lettering we knew we were on the other side, or if we saw a high-flying dragon eating low-flying weather satellites... As it was, we just kept feeling that something was imminent, and it gave me insomnia. During the night, she came again. The pinnacle girl. She stood at the mouth of the cave, and when I advanced she retreated. I stopped just inside and stood there myself, where she had been standing. She said, "Hello, Whitey." "No, I'm not going to follow you again," I said. "I didn't ask you to." "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" "Watching," she said. "I told you I won't fall." "Your friend almost did." "'Almost isn't good enough." "You are the leader, aren't you?" "That's right." "If you were to die, the others would go back?" "No," I said, "they'd go on without me." I hit my camera then. "What did you just do?" she asked. "I took your picture -- if you're really there." "Why?" "To look at after you go away. I like to look at pretty things." "... " she seemed to say something. "What?" "Nothing." "Why not?" " die." "Please speak up." "She dies..." she said. "Why? How?" M... on mountain." "I don't understand." "What's wrong?" I took a step forward, and she retreated a step. "Follow me?" she asked. "No." "Go back," she said. "What's on the other side of that record?" "You will continue to climb?" "Yes." Then, "Good!" she said suddenly. "I -- ," and her voice stopped again. "Go back," she finally said, without emotion. "Sorry." And she was gone. VI O ur trail took us slowly to the left once more. We crawled and sprawled and cut holes in the stone. Snakes sizzled in the distance. They were with us constantly now. The bird came again at crucial moments, to try to make us fall. A raging bull stood on a crag and bellowed down at us. Phantom archers loosed shafts of fire, which always faded right before they struck. Blazing blizzards swept at us, around us, were gone. We were back on the northern slopes and still heading west by the time we broke a hundred sixty thousand. The sky was deep and blue, and there were always stars. Why did the mountain hate us? I wondered. What was there about us to provoke this thing? I looked at the picture of the girl for the dozenth time and I wondered what she really was. Had IF she been picked from our minds and composed into girlform to lure us, to lead us, sirenlike, harpylike, to the place of the final fall? It was such a long way down... I thought back over my life. How does a man come to climb mountains? Is he drawn by the heights because he is afraid of the level land? Is he such a misfit in the society of men that he must flee and try to place himself above it? The way up is long and difficult, but if he #uoceeds they must grant him a garland of sorts. And if he falls, this too is a kind of glory. To end, hurled from the heights to the depths in hideous ruin and combustion down, is a fitting climax for the loser -- for it, too, shakes mountains and minds, stirs things like thoughts below both, is a kind of blasted garland of victory in defeat, and cold, so cold that final action, that the movement is somewhere frozen forever into a statuelike rigidity of ultimate intent and purpose thwarted only by the universal malevolence we all fear exists. An aspirant saint or hero who lacks some necessary virtue may still qualify as a matyr, for the only thing that people will really remember in the end is the end. I had known that I'd had to climb Kasla, as I had climbed all the others, and I had known what the price would be. It had cost me my only home. But Kasla was there, and my boots cried out for my feet. I knew as I did so that somewhere I set them upon her summit, and below me a world was ending. What's a world if the moment of victory is at hand? And if truth, beauty and goodness be one, why is there always this conflict among them? The phantom archers fired upon me and the bright bird swooped. I set my teeth, and my boots scarred rocks beneath me. e saw the top. At a hundred seventy-six thousand feet, making our way along a narrow ledge, clicking against rock, testing our way with our picks, we heard Vince say, "Look!" . We did. Up and up, and again further, bluefrosted and sharp, deadly, and cold as Loki's dagger, slashing at the sky, it vibrated above us like electricity, hung like a piece of frozen thunder, and cut, cut, cut into the center of spirit that was desire, twisted, and became a fishhook to pull us on, to burn us with its barbs. Vince was the first to look up and see the top, the first to die. It happened so quickly, and it was none of the terrors that achieved it. He slipped. That was all. It was a difficult piece of climbing. He was right behind me one second, was gone the next. There was no body to recover. He'd taken the long drop. The soundless blue was all around him and the great gray beneath. Then we were six. We shuddered, and I suppose we all prayed in our own ways. -- Gone Vince, may some good Deva lead you up the Path of Splendor. May you find whatever you wanted most at the other end, waiting there for you. If such a thing may foe, remember those who say these words, oh strong intruder in the sky... No one spoke much for the rest of the day. The fiery sword bearer came and stood above our camp the entire night. It did not speak. In the morning, Stan was gone, and there was a note beneath my pack. Don't hate me, it said, for running out, but l think it really is an angel . I'm scared of this mountain. I'll climb any pile of rocks, but l won't fight Heaven. The way down is easier than the way up, so don't worry about me. Good luck. Try to understand. S. So we were five -- Doc and Kelly and Henry and Mallardi and me -- and that day we hit a hundred eighty thousand and felt very alone. The girl came again that night and spoke to me, black hair against black sky and eyes like points of blue fire, and she stood beside an icy pillar and said: "Two of you have gone." "And the rest of us remain," I replied. "For a time." "We will climb to the top and then we will go away," I said. "How can that do you harm? Why do you hate us?" "No hate, sir," she said. "What, then?" "I protect." "What? What is it that you protect?" "The dying, that she may live." "What? Who is dying? How?" But her words went away somewhere, and I did not hear them. Then she went away too, and there was nothing left but sleep for the rest of the night. O ne hundred eighty-two thousand and three, and four, and five. Then back down to four for the following night. The creatures whined about us now, and the land pulsed beneath us, and the mountain seemed sometimes to sway as we climbed. We carved a path to one eighty-six, and for three days we fought to gain another thousand feet. Everything we touched was cold and slick and slippery, sparkled, and had a bluish haze about it. When we hit one ninety, Henry looked back and shuddered. "I'm no longer worried about making it to the top," he said. "It's the return trip that's bothering me now. The clouds are like little wisps of cotton way down there." "The sooner up, the sooner down," I said, and we began to climb once again. It took us another week to cut our way to within a mile of the top. All the creatures of fire had withdrawn, but two ice avalanches showed us we were still unwanted. We survived the first without mishap, but Kelly sprained his right ankle during the second, and Doc thought he might have cracked a couple of ribs, too. We made a camp. Doc stayed there with him; Henry and Mallardi and I pushed on up the last mile. Now the going was beastly. It had become a mountain of glass. We had IF to hammer out a hold for every municator to Doc's letter and called foot we made. We worked in shifts, below. I tuned in in time to hear We fought for everything we gained, him say, "Haven't seen him." Our packs became monstrous loads "How's Kelly?" I asked, and our fingers grew numb. Our "Better," he replied. "Those ribs defense system -- the projectors -- might not be cracked at that." the projectors -- seemed to be wearThen Mallardi called us. ing down, or else something was in"I'm four hundred feet above creasing its efforts to get us, beyou, fellows," his voice came in. "It cause the snakes kept slithering was easy up to here, but the going's closer, burning brighter. They hurt just gotten rough again." my eyes, and I cursed them. "Why'd you cut out on your When we were within a thousand own?" I asked, feet of the top, we dug in and made "Because I think something's goanother camp. The next couple ing to try to kill me before too hundred feet looked easier, then a long," he said. "It's up ahead, waitrotten spot, and I couldn't tell what ing at the top. You can probably it was like above that. even see it from there. It's a snake." When we awakened, there was Henry and I used the binoculars, just Henry and myself. There was Snake? A better word might be no indication of where Mallardi had dragon -- or maybe even Midgaard gotten to. Henry switched his comSerpent. It was coiled around the peak, head upraised. It seemed to be several hundred feet in length, and it moved its head from side to side, and up and down, and it smoked solar coronas. Then I spotted Mallardi climbing toward it. "Don't go any further!" I called. "I don't know whether your unit will protect you against anything like that! Wait'll I call Doc -- " "Not a chance," he said. "This baby is mine." "Listen! You can be first on the mountain, if that's what you want! But don't tackle that thing alone!" "A laugh was the only reply." "All three units might hold it off," I said. "Wait for us." There was no answer, and we began to climb. I left Henry far below me. The creature was a moving light in the sky. I made two hundred feet in a hurry, and when I looked up again, I saw that the creature had grown two more heads. Lightnings flashed from its nostrils, and its tail whipped around the mountain. I made another hundred feet, and I could see Mallardi clearly by then, climbing steadily, outlined against the brilliance. I swung my pick, gasping, and I fought the mountain, following the trail he had cut. I began to gain on him, because he was still pounding out his way and I didn't have that problem. Then I heard him talking: "Not yet, big fella, not yet," he was saying, from behind a wall of static. "Here's a ledge... " I looked up, and he vanished. Then that fiery tail came lashing down toward where I had last seen him, and I heard him curse and I felt the vibrations of his pneumatic gun. The tail snapped back again, and I heard another "Damn!" I made haste, stretching and rocking myself and grabbing at the holds he had cut, and then I heard him burst into song. Something from Aida , I think. "Damn it! Wait up!" I said. "I'm only a few hundred feet behind." He kept on singing. I was beginning to get dizzy, but I couldn't let myself slow down. My right arm felt like a piece of wood, my left like a piece of ice. My feet were hooves, and my eyes burned in my head. Then it happened. Like a bomb, the snake and the swinging ended in a flash of brilliance that caused me to sway and almost lose my grip. I clung to the vibrating mountainside and squeezed my eyes against the light. "Mallardi?" I said. No answer. Nothing. I looked down. Henry was still clinging. I continued to climb. I reached the ledge Mallardi had mentioned, found him there. His respirator was still working. His protective suit was blackened and scorched on the right side. Half of his pick had been melted away. I raised his shoulders. I turned up the volume on the communicator and heard him breathing. His eyes opened, closed, opened. "Okay..." he said. IF " 'Okay, hell! Where do you hurt?" "No place... I feel jus' fine... Listen! I think it's used up its juice for awhile... Go plant the flag. Prop me up here first, though. I wanna watch... " I got him into a better position, squirted the water bulb, listened to him swallow. Then I waited for Henry to catch up. It took about six minutes. "I'll stay here," said Henry, stooping beside him. "You go do it." "I started up the final slope. I swung and I cut and I blasted and I crawled. Some of the ice had been melted, the rocks scorched. Nothing came to oppose me. The static had gone with the dragon. There was silence, and darkness between stars. I climbed slowly, still tired from that last sprint, but determined not to stop. All but sixty feet of the entire world lay beneath me, and heaven hung above me, and a rocket winked overhead. Perhaps it was the pressmen, with zoom cameras. Fifty feet... No bird, no archer, no angel, no girl. Forty feet... I started to shake. It was nervous tension. I steadied myself, went on. Thirty feet... and the mountain seemed to be swaying now. Twenty-five... and I grew dizzy, halted, took a drink. Then click, click, my pick again. Twenty... Fifteen... Ten... I braced myself against the mountain's final assault, whatever it might be. Five... Nothing happened as I arrived. I stood up. I could go no higher. I looked at the sky, I looked back down. I waved at the blazing rocket exhaust. I extruded the pole and attached the flag. I planted it, there where no breezes would ever stir it. I cut in my communicator, said, "I'm here." No other words. I t was time to go back down and give Henry his chance, but I looked down the western slope before I turned to go. The lady was winking again. Perhaps eight hundred feet below, the red light shone. Could that have been what I had seen from the town during the storm, on that night, so long ago? "I didn't know and I had to. I spoke into the communicator. "How's Mallardi doing?" "I just stood up," he answered. "Give me another half hour, and I'm coming up myself." "Henry," I said. "Should he?" "Gotta take his word how he feels," said Lanning. "Well," I said, "then take it easy. I'll be gone when you get here. I'm going a little way down the western side. Something I want to see." "What?" "I dunno. That's why I want to see." 'Take care." "Check" The western slope was an easy descent. As I went down it, I realized that the light was coming from an opening in the side of the mountain. Half an hour later, I stood before it. I stepped within and was dazzled. I walked toward it and stopped. It pulsed and quivered and sang. A vibrating wall of flame leapt from the floor of the cave, towered to the roof of the cave. It blocked my way, when I wanted to go beyond it. She was there, and I wanted to reach her. I took a step forward, so that I was only inches away from it. My communicator was full of static and my arms of cold needles. It did not bend toward me, as to attack. It cast no heat. I stared through the veil of fires to where she reclined, her eyes closed, her breast unmoving. I stared at the bank of machinery beside the far wall. "I'm here," I said, and I raised my pick. When its point touched the wall of flame someone took the lid off hell, and I staggered back, blinded. When my vision cleared, the angel stood before me. " You may not pass here " he said. "She is the reason you want me to go back?" I asked. "Yes. Go back "Has she no say in the matter?" "She sleeps. Go back "So I notice. Why?" "She must. Go back, "Why did she herself appear to me and lead me strangely?" "I used up the fear-forms I knew. They did not work. I led you strangely because her sleeping mind touches upon my workings. It did so especially when  borrowed her form , so that it interfered with the directive. Go back." "What is the directive?" "She is to be guarded against all things coming up the mountain. Go back.' "Why? Why is she guarded?" "She sleeps. Go back! The conversation having become somewhat circular at that point, I reached into my pack and drew out the projector. I swung it forward and the angel melted. The flames bent away from my outstretched hand. I sought to open a doorway in the circle of fire. It worked, sort of. I pushed the projector forward, and the flames bent and bent and bent and finally broke. When they broke, I leaped forward. I made it through, but my protective suit was as scorched as Mallardi's. I moved to the coffinlike locker within which she slept. I rested my hands on its edge and looked down. She was as fragile as ice. In fact, she was ice... The machine came alive with lights then, and I felt her somber bedstead vibrate. Then I saw the man. IF He was half sprawled across a metal chair beside the machine. He, too, was ice. Only his features were gray, were twisted. He wore black and he was dead and a statue, while she was sleeping and a statue. She wore blue, and white... There was an empty casket in the far corner... But something was happening around me. There came a brightening of the air. Yes, it was air. It hissed upward from frosty jets in the floor, formed into great clouds. Then a feeling of heat occurred and the clouds began to fade and the brightening continued. I returned to the casket and studied her features. I wondered what her voice would sound like whenif she spoke. I wondered what lay within her mind. I wondered how her thinking worked, and what she liked and didn't like. I wondered what her eyes had looked upon, and when. I wondered all these things, because I could see that whatever forces I had set into operation when I entered the circle of fire were causing her, slowly, to cease being a statue. She was being awakened. I waited. Over an hour went by, and still I waited, watching her. She began to breathe. Her eyes opened at last, and for a long time she did not see. Then her bluefire fell upon me. "Whitey," she said. "Yes." "Where am I... ?" "In the damnedest place I could possibly have found anyone." She frowned. "I remember," she said and tried to sit up. It didn't work. She fell back. "What is your name?" "Linda," she said. Then, "I dreamed of you, Whitey. Strange dreams... How could that be?" "It's tricky," I said. "I knew you were coming," she said. "I saw you fighting monsters on a mountain as high as the sky." "Yes, we're there now." "H-have you the cure?" "Cure? What cure?" "Dawson's Plague," she said. I felt sick. I felt sick because I realized that she did not sleep as a prisoner, but to postpone her death. She was sick. "Did you come to live on this world in a ship that moved faster than light?" I asked. "No," she said. "It took centuries to get here. We slept the cold sleep during the journey. This is one of the bunkers." She gestured toward the casket with her eyes. I noticed her cheeks had become bright red. "They all began dying -- of the plague," she said. "There was no cure. My husband -- Carl -- is a doctor. When he saw that I had it, he said he would keep me in extreme hypothermia until a cure was found. Otherwise, you only live for two days, you know." Then she stared up at me, and I realized that her last two words had been a question. I moved into a position to block her view of the dead man, who I feared must be her Carl. I tried to follow her husband's thinking. He'd had to hurry, as he was obviously further along than she had been. He knew the colony would be wiped out. He must have loved her and been awfully clever, both -- awfully resourceful. Mostly, though, he must have loved her. Knowing that the colony would die, he knew it would be centuries before another ship arrived. He had nothing that could power a cold bunker for that long. But up here, on the top of this mountain, almost as cold as outer space itself, power wouldn't be necessary. Somehow, he had got Linda and the stuff up here. His machine cast a force field around the cave. Working in heat and atmosphere, he had sent her deep into the cold sleep and then prepared his own bunker. When he dropped the wall of forces, no power would be necessary to guarantee the long, icy wait. They could sleep for centuries within the bosom of the Gray Sister, protected by a colony of defense-computer. This last had apparently been programmed quickly, for he was dying. He saw that it was too late to join her. He hurried to set the thing for basic defense, killed the force field, and then went his way into that Dark and Secret Place. Thus it hurled its birds and its angels and its snakes, it raised its walls of fireagainst me. He died, and it guarded her in her near-death -- against everything, including those who would help. My coming to the mountain had activated it. My passing of the defenses had caused her to be summoned back to life. "Go back!" I heard the machine say through its projected angel, for Henry had entered the cave. #VT y God!" I heard him say. #VI who's that?" "Get Doc!" I said. "Hurry! I'll explain later. It's a matter of life! Climb back to where your communicator will work, and tell him it's Dawson's Plague -- a bad local bug! Hurry!" "I'm on my way," he said and was. "There is a doctor?" she asked. "Yes. Only about two hours away. Don't worry... I still don't see how anyone could have gotten you up here to the top of this mountain, let alone a load of machines." "We're on the big mountain -- the fortymiler?" "Yes." "How did you get up?" she asked. "I climbed it." "You really climbed Purgatorio? On the outside?" "Purgatorio? That's what you call it? Yes, I climbed it, that way." "We didn't think it could be done." "How else might one arrive at its top?" "It's hollow inside," she said. "There are great caves and massive passages. It's easy to fly up the inside in a pressurized jet car. In fact, it was an amusement ride. Two and a half dollars per person. An hour and a half each way. A dollar to rent a pressurized suit and take an hour's walk around the top. Nice way to spend an afternoon. Beautiful view... ?" She gasped deeply. IF "I don't feel so good," she said. "Have you any water?" "Yes," I said, and I gave her all I had. As she sipped it, I prayed that Doc had the necessary serum or else would be able to send her back to ice and sleep until it could be gotten. I prayed that he would make good time, for two hours seemed long when measured against her thirst and the red of her flesh. "My fever is coming again," she said. "Talk to me, Whitey, please... Tell me things. Keep me with you till he comes. I don't want my mind to turn back upon what has happened... " "What would you like me to tell you about, Linda?" "Tell me why you did it. Tell me what it was like, to climb a mountain like this one. Why?" I turned my mind back upon what had happened. "There is a certain madness involved," I said, "a certain envy of great and powerful natural forces, that some men have. Each mountain is a deity, you know. Each is an immortal power. If you make sacrifices upon its slopes, a mountain may grant you a certain grace, and for a time you will share this power. Perhaps that is why they call me... " Her hand rested in mine. I hoped that through it whatever power I might contain would hold all of her with me for as long as ever possible. "I remember the first time that I saw Purgatory, Linda," I told her. "I looked at it and I was sick. I wondered, where did it lead... ?" (Stars. Oh let there be. This once to end with. Please.) "Stars?" ft  S? A   m  ra  m,    I i i g  by Hayden Howard by Richard Wilson by Jack Vance In the December Galaxy -- on sale new!  i I   : X IF  Short Story W hen the buzzer sounded I paused only to check my uniform, then stepped through the door and threw the admiral a snappy salute. As his orderly, that's what I always do when he buzzes, even on the moon. Of course on the moon, with any weight carried up from Earth at a premium and the environment controlled, the uniform isn't much, even for an admiral's orderly: briefs, duty belt, cap and boots; but I always give it a quick check anyway. The Old Man has the eyes of a hawk and the disposition of a bear trap. And there's no sense in sitting on a bear trap if you don't have to -- it chews mighty deep. The admiral glanced up through those shaggy white eyebrows of his and nodded when I saluted. He didn't answer the salute, of course. He was uncovered. "Christensen," he said, "get me Jennings. On the double." I saluted again and stepped back into the passageway. Things weren't too bad. If I was in trouble with him, he called me Orderly. If everything was calm, he called me Corporal. On a few occasions when he was feeling extra good, he has called me Sven. When someone else is in trouble, it's Corporal Christensen. And when his brain is just in high gear about something, it's always just Christensen. Commander Jennings was skipper of the U.S.S.N.S. Tombaugh, the Space Navy ship that had brought Admiral Jones from Earth orbit tothe moon to clean up the war the hard way -- sitting at one side of a conference table. Of course, the fact that Jennings' job was done when he landed his ship at the Space Port, that he wouldn't be on duty again until a few hours before teke-off was scheduled and that he didn't even have to tell the duty officer where he was going didn't cut any ice with the Old Man. He wanted Jennings, and it was my job as orderly to produce him. W ell, I knew old Hot Shot -- that's Jennings' name when he isn't around -- likes to play poker, and he likes to win. I also knew that he's smart enough to know that he doesn't play poker very well. So I called the number of the Fourth Regiment Advanced Base -- about twenty miles down the cover road from the Main Highway toward the Red lines -- and asked to speak to Commander Jennings. That outfit plays the lousiest brand of high  stakes poker on the moon. "The admiral's compliments," I translated, when they had coaxed Hot Shot to the 'phone, "and he requests that the commander call on him at his Headquarters at the commander's earliest convenience." In case you don't translate as good as Hot Shot did, that means just what the admiral said: "on the double." The admiral stood up when I announced Commander Jennings a few minutes later and seemed to look down at him. That, by the way, is quite a trick, considering that the admiral is five foot six, and that's four inches shorter than Hot Shot. The admiral didn't wave me out, so I stood there looking down at Commander Jennings too, which is easy for me because I've got eight inches of height on him. Hie admiral sounded bitter. "It looks as if the Reds may just possibly be trying to give us a run around," he said without any preliminaries. "Back on Earth they talk about being anxious for peace negotiations, but it's all pure propaganda. I've been up here on this God-forsaken ball for almost four weeks, and we haven't even been able to agree on where to meet. Well, Hot Shot, I'm not going t continue to sit still for it. Can you set your fire buggy down on the Main Highway, in the middle of that crossroads place where the Reds cut their road into it?" "Yes, sir," said the pilot. 'That's a simple suborbital flight." "That won't do, and you know it," growled the admiral. "They'd just shoot us down and apologize later. You'd have to stay under five hundred feet all the way." I almost caught myself nodding in in agreement. In the ten years we and the Reds had been fighting on the moon -- which the longhairs said had, during most of that time, helped us all keep things peaceful down on Earth -- anything lobbed anywhere around the moon on a ballistic trajectory, either orbitally or suborbitally, by either side, was automatically shot down. Except for ships coming in from Earth and landing at one of the two spaceports. Both sides let the big ships come and go, so they could bring in supplies to live and fight with. And take home the high-paid volunteers who didn't reup when their time expired. Fighting men get high pay on the moon, unless they're regulars like the admiral and me. And according to law, # hadn't had to go with him to the moon, except I hadn't had the guts to tell the Old Man good-by. It's the low lunar gravity that makes it easy to shoot down even mortar shells; a big ship would have about the same chance of surviving -- none at a!!. So, even though I'm not a Looney, I almost nodded. "Yes, sir," said Hot Shot after fiddling for a few minutes with the slide rule he pulled out of the pouch sewn to his briefs. I noticed there was a good deal of green folding stuff crammed into the pouch, too. Leaving that game must really have hurt him. "I have enough control to drift right down the highway on the main engines and the fuel to get  there and back. Of course, we'll have to clear off the traffic first to keep from scorching them with our jets." "Good. I'll exchange notes with the Muscovites for three more days. By that time I should have them boxed in so they won't be able to avoid meeting me on neutral ground, providing they don't think about a ship-to-ship meeting. What good that will do us, God only knows; but we'll try to solve that when we come to it. "Sven," he said, turning to me, "when my ship shows up at the crossroads -- you know the place -- I'll expect you to be there with a tube that will connect my airlock with theirs. You go off and get that attended to, and I don't expect to see you until then. Take three days off; you've earned it." "Aye, aye sir. And will the admiral have a requirement for a substitute orderly? There is one of the soldier volunteers who would be able to handle the job for the admiral." The Old Man glared at me through his eyebrows. "What's to handle? You spend ninety percent of your time on your butt outside my door, and in this light gravity you'd even lose your callouses there, if I let you. At fifteen times what Uncle pays you, a volunteer for three days isn't worth my trouble in trying to train him. Now get going, both of you." I held the curtain aside for Hot Shot, saluted and left behind him. I knew why the admiral had given me three free days, and I didn't like it. Oh, I liked the time off just fine. There was plenty of good use I could make of it; but I didn't like the reason he had given it to me. The Old Man would deny it, but he's superstitious. I wangled three days leave out of him way back when he was stuck on a solution for that Grombock affair, at the Polar station, and right after I got back from that, everything fell into place. And IF the second time, on Guam; and the third time on the Orbital Station; each time he let me off for three days, he got the problem solved. You'd think he'd just get rid of me entirely, wouldn't you? But like I said, he's superstitious. It's three days or nothing. And by letting me off, for those three days, he was saying that he didn't have any more ideas than I did about how to handle the situation. And I didn't have any, or care to have any. T aking care of the job he had assigned me didn't take much time, even though nobody was sure what ship the Russians would use or what size airlock it would have. I trotted over to the motor pool, still wearing my orderly belt and boots, and drew out a moon jeep. They tried to give me a little static about how tricky it is to drive on the moon, but I flashed my operator's card -- good for everything from a moonbug on up to a full-sized refuelling rig. I'd spent my first free time getting checked out and qualified -- you never know what the Old Man will want. Then I picked up a pound of coffee from the admiral's mess and went over to the Experimental Devices Supply Center to draw out a gadget I knew about: a Tube, Universal, Airlock Connector, Collapsible, Sixty Foot, Experimental. I didn't plan to sign a requisition, because experimental devices can't be drawn out officially by anybody but the longhairs. They're supposed to be used only under carefully controlled conditions until approved for service applications. Even as it is, when one of their experimental gizmos doesn't pan out right, they sometimes have to scrape up bits of long-hair to find enough to bury. This one worked right, even though the longhairs hadn't found it out yet. One of the supply sergeants was named Sally -- one of not too many female volunteer soldiers on the moon. Of course, I didn't make enough money even to think about her, but she made plenty and was tired of volunteers. She was real interested in a professional in a Marine uniform -- even a moonstyle Marine uniform -- and had no objections to my being six foot six. My size did turn out to be a disadvantage in any of the moon buggies, though -- their cabins are all cramped -- so we had loaded the experimental Airlock Connector on a jeep, ran it up a canyon, connected one end of it to one door of the jeep and the other to the other door, pumped in air and used that for getting better acquainted. So I knew the tube would do the trick. It fits most any size of door or airlock. As it turned out, I didn't need the coffee. Sally was on duty, but just going off. So we gave the tube one more test, and then, after I stowed the thing in the jeep and barracks -- carefully patrolled to keep the men out and the girls safe -- I was on my. own with plenty of time to spare. B ecause of the problems of living on a Marine corporal's pay, I usually try to have some small additional source of picking up a little of the long green wherever I go. Normally, a deck of cards and a little game with a bunch of boots can turn a tidy profit, but on the moon that was out. When even Hot Shot could win a pouchful, I wasn't worried about being outclassed; I just didn't have enough scratch for the initial stake. There was one great universal need that was in even shorter supply on the moon than girls: drinking liquor. Like I said before, it costs a great deal of money to ship anything from Earth. Liquor never managed to get very high on the priority lists because the bureaucrats made up the priority lists, and they never went to the moon. There was some for the officers, of course, but most of the men on the moon weren't officers, even if their pay was a lot higher than officers get, Earthside. So, as soon as I got to the moon, this corporal decided to engage in a little private enterprise to fill the need. I should have realized that with all the demand, there would have been plenty of stills and bootthere was some good reason to prevent it. And I don't mean the law. M.P.'s like a snort now and then, too. The trouble was raw materials. The moon doesn't have any, of course. Usually, you start with some letft-over stuff and ferment it and then run it through a still. And I couldn't get my hands on any leftover stuff, like potato peels or raisins or overripe fruit or (anything that I've used in the past. Dehydrated and preprepared foods are efficient for shipping to the moon, I suppose, but they're hell on private enterprise. I managed to scrounge some raw materials from the admiral's mess and the officers' messes'. Net really left overs, just some food that wouldn't be missed on the records... And either those stewards were real thirsty, or they are expert gougers; they made me promise them so much of my initial output, that there wasn't much left for profit, especially after I allowed a little for me and Sally. The still was easy to rig, of course. A ready-made vacuum and the sun up a couple of weeks at a time for power (with extra suit-batteries for use during the night time) made the production part of the job real simple. I made my headquarters in a little cave, well off the beaten track. Before I got my three-days-off, I'd had time to brew up a batch and run it back to about # proof -- I'm an honest man -- moon juice tasted very good to me and Sally. And I didn't get any complaints from the stewards either. But after finishing with a little lubrication for the M.P.'s and the MastersatArms and such, there hadn't been any out of that first batch to sell, and I hadn't been able to pick up nearly as many raw materials for a second hatch as I would have liked. Still, I'd dumped my old load of used mash at the back of the cave and had reloaded my brew vat with what I had. Since this was my profit run and IF I was anxious about it, the first thing I did when I left Sally with the moon jeep was to hustle over to the cave to see how my stuff was making out. A t first, I couldn't even find the cave. After I drove past where the entrance ought to be a couple of times, I stopped the jeep, checked my suit and got out to walk and hunt. It wasn't until I got right up to the rock face that I found that the cave was still there. It was just idl full of something -- full to overflowing. Whatever it was, the stuff bulged out of the cave until it reached a place where the rays of the sun had hit it, I guess, earlier in the "morning," and that had stopped it. Have you ever heard of "moonwort?" Everybody has, I suppose. It's the only living thing they have found on the moon so far, except soldiers, and the papers and magazines have given it a big play. At any rate, it isn't exactly a plant, but it certainly isn't an animal; and it has only been found in a few places in caves where the sun can't hit it directly, and it's almost too small to see with the naked eye. Well, I had seen some moonwort through a microscope, and this was it, only a good many thousands of times bigger. No plant was going to keep me from my still, even if moonwort isn't exactly a plant. So I pulled some of it aside and trampled some more of it down and worked my way in to see how my mash was making out. The longhairs tell me that my rough treatment of the moonwort was one of the dumbest things I've ever done. They say that I hod no way of telling how delicate that stuff -- they simplify their words for it to "Hypertrophied mooewert" when they talk to me -- might be, and that all of it might just have curled up and died. They say that I should have stayed away from it and called in experts like them to handle it properly. Oh, yes; they also add that moonwort might, for all I knew, have been able to dissolve my space suit. Since that wouldn't have helped my future plans at all, I'm glad that it turned out to be harmless and hardy after all. It speaks a lot for the longhairs that they mentioned that possibility about what might have happened to me, even as an afterthought. I love them too. At any rate, my quarter of a vat of mash hadn't been doing at all well. I guess the moonwort had cut the light. Not direct sunlight, of course, but reflected light. At this time of day, the cave should have been quite bright, and that's what the mash needed, maybe, to help it work. I beat my way to the back of the cave, trampling the heavy growth down as much as I could as I went, and found that the whole mass of the moonwort seemed to be springing out of the old mash that I'd dumped out of the vat after I'd finished the first batch. The moonwort couldn't have just used the old mash for food -- it must have weighed many times as much as the mash. The longhairs talk about ezymitic action and catalytic action ad a lot of other actions I don't care much about. All I knew at the time as I was mad because I figured the moonwort was eating into my profits. A nd then I got an idea that again the longhairs have told me wasn't very bright. The moonwort had grown on my used-up mash. I wondered if maybe I could ferment it in my vat. So I tried it. Never in my life have I seen anything work as fast as that moonwort mash did. In just a few hours I was as busy as a drill sergeant. I was working my still all out, making a clear white panther juice and using any spare time to cut more moonwort and cram it into the vat. I had to make a couple of trips back to civilization to pick up more containers. I didn't even stop to cut my output back to normal drinking proof -- that was real high-test stuff. I was so busy I didn't even stop to sip. As a matter of fact, maybe deep down inside I was scared that my panther juice might not be worth drinking. With all that hooch, I was as good as rich; if it turned out to be bad, I was just a poor corporal again. Anyway, I didn't taste, and as far as I can remember, I didn't even think about tasting. I just ended up with a jeep loaded full of hightest, but untested liquor -- or what I hoped was liquor. I even had to move the tube outside of the vehicle and strap it on top to make room for my jugs. I remembered the Old Man's orders, though. That's something I don't forget. And I was on hand on time to watch his ship come bouncing in on a tail of fire and set down right in the middle of the crossroads, as advertised. I turned the Tube, Experimental, over to the crewmen of the flagship, making sure that they didn't catch sight of my private enterprise, and reported to the admiral. "The Bolshies will be along in a few minutes," he said, "for whatever good that will do. They're bringing a connector tube also, which they will hook to their airlock. Then we'll attach the two tubes together, and meet there at the junction. "You'll bring a table and a chair for me, and the rest of our delegation will bring their own chairs. The other side will bring their table and chairs too. At least, we'll be able to do a little face-to-face talking, after all this time." He looked at me. "The full Marine dress uniform is an impressive piece of gear," he said. "Wear it during the meeting." The Old Man knew that we had only been allowed to lift from Earth with a few pounds of personal belongings, and he knew that the Marine uniform is heavy, and he knew that it wasn't on the allowed list of what you can take to the moon. But he didn't even bother to ask if I had a dress uniform with my gear in the ship. So I took a Marine bath (water is a scarce item in a spaceship), spit shined my shoes and put on my dress uniform. A long about that time, their ship came lumbering up and wobbled IF to a stop not moie than fifty feet liom ours, in almost no time, they had men out of their ship in spacesuits hooking a tube to their airlock. Since our sailors had already finished their outside work, they just stood by and watched critically. Those Russians were pretty good, though, and in about fifteen minutes from the time they landed, the two tubes were hooked together and i was walking toward the joining point on the inside, carrying an eightfoot-long table -- the longest that could be set down crosswise in the tube -- and an arm chair, just a few steps ahead of our delegation. I was glad to see that the Russian orderly fellow who was walking down their tube toward me carrying the table for their delegation was only about six foot four and didn't have any where near as good a uniform as my Marine full dress. But he was strong. He walked along carrying his table and chair as if it were the easiest thing to do in the world, just like I was carrying mine. We both knew the other one was lying. Even in light moon gravity, carrying that stuff was rough. I would have liked to have smiled at him to show I knew he was faking, but that wouldn't have been right; so each of us acted as if the other one weren't there, except that we set our tables down at exactly the same time, so that they both stood side to side across the mouth of the tubes, touching each other all along the side so they made one big, square table. With the table in place, I set the arm chair down behind it, so that the admiral, without waiting at all, seated himself at the center spot on his side. At the same instant, the Russian general who was their chief negotiator seated himself at the center spot behind his table. The interpreters and recorders and such took their places on both sides, and talk was ready to begin. Of course, the Old Man spoke excellent Russian, though he wasn't about to say a word in it, and I felt sure that the Russian general spoke good English, although you wouldn't be able to tell it by listening to him. I stood a few steps behind the admiral at parade rest and didn't move a muscle, while the interpreters cleared their throats and got things going. And the Russian orderly didn't budge any more than I did. That boy really knew his stuff. Unfortunately, when the talking really got started, it soon became very obvious that the negotiations weren't getting anywhere. After several years of continuous hot and cold war between East and West -- hot on the moon, while both sides kept things reasonably peaceful down on Earth -- the West had decided that the moon had stopped being a kind of relief valve for explosive tempers, and it was time to stop the shooting. One of the bigshot commentators said that he and the statesmen of the capitals of the West figured that "continuation of the endemic lunar conflict had become contraindicated, because it had commenced merely to exacerbate feelings on both sides." Whatever that means. Anyway, it looked as if the Russians didn't agree with that commentator, whatever their policicians were saying back on Earth. T l he Old Man was keeping his temper, which was a wonder, because I was losing mine. I managed to hold my position at parade rest without moving, of course, and I kept my face expressionless (or rather, in the proper expression of respectful readiness and attention that I can hold even when I have a hangover); but I couldn't keep the angry blood from darkening my face and neck, and that made me flush even worse. I could tell that that damn Russian orderly was laughing at me behind his expression of respectful readiness and attention. What the Russians were doing was to try to make us break off the negotiations; and, of course, we just had to stay there patiently to prevent that-or to try to build up a situation where they would break things up by leaving in a huff and claiming that it was our fault and that we had forced them out. It was this that the admiral was trying to prevent, and he was good at it; but I kept wondering just how long he could keep it up and what good it was doing. After several hours, the Russian general called a pause for what he said was "an exchange of courtesies." The admiral looked worried, even though he didn't change expression. The general gestured, and his orderly snapped to attention. He motioned again, and the orderly pivoted and moved back through their tube and into the Russian ship. He came back a few minutes iaicr with two glasses and a bottle. The general commented that the liquor was vodka, the Russian national drink. He poured and proposed toasts to the Russian people and the people of the West and to the success of the conference. Then, when both glasses were empty he gestured again, and that orderly of his picked up the bottle and the glasses and stepped back. The admiral had seen what was coming. It was obvious that if he couldn't propose adequate answering toasts, now that his turn had come, the Russians would get mad and stalk off, talking about our discourtesy. I had watched the Old Man glance at his aide and raise one eyebrow a trifle, and I had seen the aide shake his head an eighth of an inch each way. U.S.S.N.S. Tombaugh was a commissioned Navy ship, and the Josephus Daniels rule applied: no liquor allowed. Of course, sometimes a little private stock gets hidden on board for use ashore, but if there had been any, the aide would have known about it -- and it was clear that there wasn't. I was nearly sweating because I had the answer in the moon jeep, and I couldn't move a muscle to let the admiral know about it. I needn't have worried. The admiral gestured, and I snapped to attention. He motioned again, and I pivoted and moved back through the tube and into the ship. I whipped out of my dress uniform, into a spacesuit, out of the auxiliary airlock, into the moon jeep IF for a jug, back into the ship, out of the spacesuit an d back into my uniform in just under four minutes. Meanwhile, at my frantic request on the way by, a tray and a couple of glasses had been gotten ready. W hen I stepped back into the tube, my uniform was as immaculate as before, and I wasn't even breathing heavily, although the effort almost made me blow a gasket. The admiral picked up the jug and poured the two glasses full of the dear white liquid -- as clear and white as vodka. He glanced at the jug and then at me and stated blandly that the liquor was Moonshine, the American national drink. He proposed an appropriate toast, and he and the disappointed general oeremonially tossed down their neat shots. I stood at rest and prayed. The general didn't say a word, which didn't surprise me. He just held out his glass, which did. The admiral filled it again, and his own, and they tossed down their second slugs. Then both the general and the admiral gestured simultaneously, and we popped to attention, simultaneously. I got a bunch of glasses, enough for all of the group on our side, and then grabbed enough for the other side too and was back in thirty seconds. The general had his arm around his rigid and apoplectic orderly, happily explaining that he wanted him to get some glasses so that everybody, including the orderly, would have some of this wonderful American Moonshine. Of course, a couple of hours later the authorities moved in and confiscated my entire jeepload full of liquor, but it had already done its work. There have been half a dozen Nobel prizes, including a Peace Prize, awarded to longhairs who have studied the stuff and explained why it works the way it does and how they have expanded the world's fund of knowledge. The stuff just does what any good booze has always been supposed to do. It makes people friendly. The admiral and the general had come to full agreement in fifteen minutes on ending the war on the moon and had exercised their plenipotentiary powers to sign the agreement in front of full live network television coverage beamed down to both sides on Earth. The agreement was so sensible that both sides have had to stick with it. Nobody has ever used any more of the genuine Moonshine at a conference; but the fact that it exists and that it might be used has made the world a lot more peaceful. Even labor-management negotiations are running smoother. The world is getting downright insipid. The admiral got a fancy medal, which I keep polished, the thanks of the world and a promotion. As for me. I've never tasted the stuff, and I'm not going to. I pick my own friends. It may be the uniform, but I don't have much trouble getting real friendly when I want to with whatever girl I want to. And what else would I need the genuine Moonshine for? After all, I'm a IF  Novelette by Larry Niven I T 'he most beautiful girl aboard turned out to have a husband with habits so solitary that I didn't know about him until the second week. He was about five feet four and middle-aged, but he wore a hellflare tattoo on his shoulder, which meant he'd been on Kzin during the war thirty years back, which meant he'd been trained to kill adult kzinti with his bare hands, feet elbows, knees and whatnot. When we found out about each other he very decently gave me a first warning, and broke my arm to prove he meant it. The arm still ached a day later, and every woman on the Lensman was over two hundred years old. I drank alone. I stared glumly into the mirror behind the curving bar. The mirror stared glumly back. "Hey. You from We Made It. What am I?" He was two chairs down, and he was glaring. Without the beard he would have had a round, almost petulant face... I think. The beard, short and black and carefully shaped, made him look like a cross between Zeus and an angry bulldog. The glare went with the beard. His square fingers wrapped a large drinking bulb in a death grip. A broad belly matched broad shoulders to make him look massive rather than fat. Obviously he was talking to me. I asked, "What do you mean, what are you?" "Where am I from?" "Earth." It was obvious. The accent said Earth. So did the conservatively symmetrical beard. His breathing was unconsciously natural in the ship's standard atmosphere, and his build had been forged at one point zero gee. "Then what am I?" "A flatlander." The glare heat increased. He'd obviously reached the bar way ahead of me. "A flatlander! Dammit, everywhere I go I'm a flatlander. Do you know how many hours I've spent in space?" "No. Long enough to know how to use a drinking bulb." "Funny. Very funny. Everywhere in human space a flatlander is a shnook who never gets above the atmosphere. Everywhere but Earth. If you're from Earth you're a flatlander all your life. For the last fifty years I've been running about in human space, and what am I? A flatlander. Why?" "Earthian is a clumsy term." "What is WeMadeltian?" he demanded. "I'm a crashlander. I wasn't born within fifty miles of Crashlanding City, but I'm a crashlander anyway." That got a grin. I think. It was hard to tell with the beard. "Lucky you're not a pilot." "I am. Was." "You're kidding. They let a crashlander pilot a ship?" "If he's good at it." "I didn't mean to pique your ire, sir. May I introduce myself? My name's Elephant." "Beowulf Shaeffer." He bought me a drink. I bought him a drink. It turned out we both played gin, so we took fresh drinks to a card table... W hen I was a kid I used to stand out at the edge of Crashlanding Port watching the ships come in. I'd watch the mob of passengers leave the lock and move in a great clump toward customs, and I'd wonder why they seemed to have trouble navigating. A majority of the starborn would always walk in weaving lines, swaying and blinking teary eyes against the sun. I used to think it was because they came from different worlds with different gravities and different atmospheres beneath differently colored suns. Later I learned different There are no windows in a passenger spacecraft M there were, half the passengers would go insane; it takes an unusual mentality to watch the blind-spot appearance of hyperspace and still keep one's marbles. For passengers there is nothing to watch and nothing to do, and if you don't like reading sixteen hours a day then you drink. It's best to drink in company. You get less lushed, knowing you have to keep up your side of a conversation. The ship's 'doc has cured more hangovers than every other operation combined, right down to manicures and haircuts. The ship grounded at Los Angeles two days after I met Elephant. He'd made a good drinking partner. We'd been fairly matched at cards, him with his sharp card sense, me with my usual luck. From the talking we'd done we knew almost as much about each other as anyone knows about anyone. In a way I was sorry to see him leave. "You've got my number?" "Yah. But, like I said, I don't know just what I'll be doing." I was telling the truth. When I explore a civilized world I like to make my own discoveries. "Well, call me if you get a chance. I wish you'd change your mind. I'd really like to show you something of Earth." "I decline with thanks. Good-by, Elephant, it's been fun." Elephant waved and turned through the natives' door. I went on to face the smuggler baiters. The last drink was still with me, but I could core that at the hotel. I never expected te see Elephant again. I really never did. N ine days ago I'd been on Jinx, I'd been rich. And I'd been depressed. The money and the depression had stemmed from the same source. The puppeteers, those three-legged, twoheaded professional cowards and businessmen, had lured me into taking a new type of ship all the way to the galactic core, thirty thousand light-years away. The trip was for publicity purposes, to get research money to iron out the imperfections in the very ship I was riding. I suppose I should have had more sense, but I never do, and the money was good. The trouble was that the Core had exploded by the time I got there. The Core stars had gone off in a chain reaction of novas ten thousand years ago, and a wave of radiation was even then (and even now) sweeping methodically toward known space. In just over twenty thousand years, we'll all find ourselves in deadly danger. You're not worried? It didn't bother me much either. But every puppeteer in known space vanished overnight, heading for Finagle knows what other galaxy. I was depressed. I missed the puppeteers and hated knowing I was responsible for their going. I had time, and money, and a black melancholia to work off. And I'd always wanted to see Earth. IF II E arth smelled good. There was a used flavor to it, a breathed flavor, unlike anything I've ever known. It was the difference between spring water and distilled water. Somewhere in each breath I took were molecules breathed by Dante, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Heinledn, Carter and my own ancestors. Traces of past industries lingered in the air, sensed if not smelled: gasoline, coal fumes, tobacco and burnt cigarette filters, diesel fumes, ale breweries. I left the customs house with inflated lungs and a questioning look. I could have taken a transfer booth straight to the hotel. I decided to walk a little first. Everyone on Earth had made the same decision. The pedwalk held a crowd such as I had never imagined. They were all shapes and all colors, and they dressed in strange and eldritch ways. Shifting colors assaulted the eye and sent one reeling. On any world in human space, any world but one, you know immediately who the natives are. Wunderland? Asymmetric beards mark the nobility, and the common people are the ones who quickly step out of their way. We Made It? The pallor of our skins in summer and winter; in spring and fall, the fact that we all race upstairs, above the buried cities and onto the blooming desert, eager to taste sunlight while the murderous winds are at rest. Jinx? The natives are short and wide and strong; a sweet little old lady's handshake can crush steel. Even in the Belt, within the solar system, a Belter strip haircut adorns both men and women. But Earth -- ! No two looked alike. There were reds and blues and greens, yellows and oranges, plaids and stripes. I'm talking about hair, you understand, and skin. All my life I've used tannin secretion pills for protection against ultraviolet, so that my skin color has varied from its normal pinkish-white (I'm an albino) to (under bluewhite stars) tuxedo black. But I'd never known that other skin dye pills existed. I stood rooted to the pedwalk, letting it carry me where it would, watching the incredible crowd swarm around me. They were all knees and elbows. Tomorrow I'd have bruises. "Hey!" The girl was four or five heads away, and short. I'd never have seen her if everyone else hadn't been short too. Flatlanders rarely top six feet. And there was this girl, her hair a topological explosion in swirling orange and silver, her face a faint, subtle green with space-black eyebrows and lipstick, waving something and shouting at me. Waving my wallet. I forced my way .to her, until we were close enough to touch, until I could hear what she was saying above the crowd noise. "Stupid! Where's your address? You don't even have a place for a stamp!" "What?" She looked startled. "Oh! You're an offworlder." "Yah!" My voice would give out fast at this noise level. "Well, look." She shoved her way closer to me. "Look, you can't go around town with an offworldder's wallet. Next time someone picks your pocket he may not notice 'till you're gone." "You picked my pocket?" "Sure! Think I found it? Would I risk my precious hand under all those spike heels?" "How if I call a cop?" "Cop? Oh, a stoneface." She laughed merrily. "Learn or go under, man. There's no law against picking pockets. Look around you." I looked around me, then looked back fast, afraid she'd disappear. Not only my cash, but my Bank of Jinx draft for forty thousand stars, was in that wallet. Everything I owned. people in Los Angeles alone. Eightpose there was a law against picking pockets? How would you enforce it?" She deftly extracted the cash from my wallet and handed the wallet back. "Get yourself a new wallet, and fast. It'll have a place for your address and a window for a tenthstar stamp. Put your address in right away, and a stamp too. Then the next guy who takes it can pull out the money and drop your wallet in the nearest mailbox, no sweat. Otherwise you lose your credit cards, your ident, everything." She stuffed two hundred odd stars in cash between her breasts, flashed me a parting smile as she turned. "Thanks," I called. Yes, I did. I was still bewildered, but she'd obviously stayed to help me. She could just as easily have kept wallet and all. "No charge," she called back, and was gone. I stopped off at the first transfer booth I saw, dropped a halfstar in the coin slot and dialed Elephant. T he vestibule was intimidating. I'd expected a vestibule. Why put a transfer booth inside your own home, where any burglar can get in just by dialing your number? Anyone who can afford the lease on a private transfer booth can also afford a vestibule with a locked door and an intercom switch. There was a vestibule, but it was the size of a living room, furnished with massage chairs and an autovendor. There was an intercom, but it was a flat vidphone, three hundred IF years old restored at perhaps a hundred times its original cost. There was a double door of what looked like polished brass, with two enormous carved handles, and it stood fifteen feet high. I'd suspected Elephant was well off, but this was too much. It occurred to me that I'd never seen him completely sober, that I had in fact turned down his offer of guide, that a simple morning-after treatment might have wiped me from his memory. Shouldn't I just go away? I had wanted to explore Earth on my own. But I didn't know the rules! I stepped out of the booth and glimpsed the back wall. It was all picture window, with nothing outside. Just fleecy blue sky. How peculiar, I thought, and stepped closer. Elephant lived halfway up a cliff. A sheer mile-high cliff. The phone rang. On the third ear-jarring ring I answered, mainly to stop the noise. A supercilious voice said, "Is somebody out there?" 'Tm afraid not," I said. "Does someone named Elephant live here?" "##I see, sir," said the voice. The screen had not lit, but I had the feeling someone had seen me quite clearly. Seconds crawled by. I was half minded to jump back in the transfer booth and dial at random. But only half; that was the trouble. Then the screen did light, and it was Elephant. "Bay! You changed your mind!" "Yah. You didn't tell me you were rich." . "You didn't ask." "Well, no, of course not." "How do you expect to learn things if you don't ask? Don't answer that. Hang on, I'll be right down. You did change your mind? You'll let me show you Earth?" "Yes, I will. I'm scared to go out there alone." "Why? Don't answer. Tell me in person." He hung up. Seconds later the big bronze doors swung back with a bone-shaking boom. They just barely got out of Elephiant's way. He pulled me inside, giving me no time to gape, shoved a drink in my hand and asked me why I was afraid to go outside. I told him about the pickpocket, and he laughed. He told me about the time he tried to go outside during a We Made It summer, and I laughed, though I've heard of outworlders being blown away and to Hades doing the same thing. Amazingly, we were off again. It was just like on the ship, even to the end of Elephant's anecdote. "They called me a silly flatlander, of course." "I've been thinking about that," I said. "About what?" "You said you'd give a lot to do something completely original, so the next time someone called you a flatlander you oould back him into a corner and force him to listen to your story. You said it several times." "I didn't say just that. But I would like to have some story to tell, something like your neutron star episode. If only to tell myself. The silly offworlder wouldn't know, but Id know." I nodded. The neutron star episode he was talking about had been my first meeting with a puppeteer. The puppeteer had blackmailed me into taking one of his ships, a ship with an invulnerable puppeteer-made General Products hull, into a hyperbolic orbit within one mile of the surface of a neutron star. It was the only neutron star ever found, and I was the second man to make that trip. The first, with his wife, had used the same type of ship. They were found crushed shapelessly into its nose by some unknown force. Danger does wonderful things for my well known mental laziness. With two minutes to spare I had realized what the unknown force was, and had crawled into the repair access tube to avoid it. I'd talked about it over IF gin cards -- a habit I've developed for distracting my opponent -- and Elephant had been suitably impressed. "I've thought of a couple of things you could do," I said. "Spill." "One. Visit the puppeteer home world. Nobody's been there, but everyone knows there is one, and everyone knows how difficult it is to find. You could be the finst." "Great." He mused a moment. "Great! And the puppeteers wouldn't stop me because they're gone. Where is the puppeteer home world?" " don't know." "What's your second idea?" "Ask the Outsiders." "Huh?" "There's not a system in the galaxy that the Outsiders don't know all about. We don't know how far the puppeteer empire extended, though it was 'way beyond known space, but we do know about the Outsiders. They know the galaxy like the palm of their -- uh... And they trade for information; it's just about the only business they do. Ask them what's the most unusual world they know of within reach." Elephant was nodding gently. There was a glazed look in his eyes. I had not been sure he was serious about seeking some unique achievement. He was. "The problem is," I said, "that an Outsider's idea of what is unique may not -- " I stopped, because Elephant was up and half-running to a tridphone. I wasn't sorry. It gave me an opportunity to gape in private. I've been in bigger homes than Elephant's. Mach bigger. I grew up in one. But Fve never seen a room that soothed the eye like Elephant's living room. It was more than a living room; it was an optical illusion, the opposite of those jittering black-and-white images they show in lectures on how we see. These clinical children of Op Art give the illusion of motion; but Elephant's living room gave the illusion of stillness. A physicist would have loved the soundproofing. Some interior decorator had become famous for his work here, if he hadn't been famous already, in which case he had become rich. How could tall, thin Beowulf Shaeffer fit a chair designed to the measure of short, wide Elephant? Yet I was bonelessly limp, blissfully relaxed, using only the muscles that held a doublewalled glass of an oddtasting, strangely refreshing soft drink called Tzlotz Beer. A glass which would not empty. Somewhere in the crystal was a tiny transfer motor connected to the bar; but the bent light in the crystal hid it. Another optical illusion, and one that must have tricked good men into acute alcoholism. I'd have to watch that. E lephant returned. He walked as if he massed tons, as if any kzin foolish enough to stand in his path would have a short, wide hole in him. "All done," he said. "Don Cramer'll find the nearest Outsider ship and make my pitch for me. We should hear in a couple of days." "Okay," said I, and asked him about the cliff. It turned out that we were in the Rocky Mountains and that he owned every square inch of the nearly vertical cliff face. Why? I remembered Earth's eighteen billion and wondered if they'd otherwise have surrounded him up, down, and sideways. Suddenly Elephant remembered that someone named Dianna must be home by now. I followed him into the transfer booth, watched him dial eleven digits, and waited in a much smaller vestibule while Elephant used the more conventional intercom. Dianna seemed rather dubious about letting him in until he roared that he had a guest and she should stop fooling around. Dianna was a small, pretty woman with skin the deep, uniform red of a Martian sky and hair like flowing quicksilver. Her irises had the same polished silver luster. She hadn't wanted to let us in because we were both wearing our own skins, but she never mentioned it again once we were inside. Elephant introduced me to Dianna and instantly told her he'd acted to contact the Outsiders. "What's an Outsider?" she asked with sudden interest. Elephant gestured with both hands, looked confused, turned helplessly toward me. "They're hard to describe," I said. "Think of a cat-o'-nine-tails with a big thick handle." "They live on cold worlds," said Elephant. "Small, cold, airless worlds like Nereid. They pay rent to use Nereid as a base, don't they, Elephant? And they travel over most of the galaxy in big unpressurized ships with fusion drives and no hyperdrives." "They sell information. They can tell me about the world I want to find, the most unusual planet in known space." "They spend most of their time tracking starseeds." Dianna broke in. "Why?" Elephant looked at me. I looked at Elephant. "Say!" Elephant exclaimed. "Why don't we get a fourth for bridge?" Dianna looked thoughtful. Then she focused her silver eyes on me, examined me from head to foot and nodded gently to herself. "Sharrol Janss. I'll call her." While she was phoning, Elephant told me, "That's a good thought. Sharrol's got a tendency toward hero worship. She's a computer analyst at Donovan's Brains, Inc. You'll like her." "Good," I said, wondering if we were still talking about a bridge game. It struck me that I was building up a debt to Elephant. "Elephant, when you contact the Outsiders, I'd like to come along." "Oh? Why?" "You'll need a pilot. And I've dealt with Outsiders before." "Okay, it's a deal." The intercom rang from the vestibule. Dianna went to the door and came back with our fourth for bridge. "Sharrol, you know Elephant. This is Beowulf Shaeffer, from We Made It. Bay, this is -- " "You!" I said. "You!" she said. It was the pickpocket. IF in M y vacation lasted just four days. I hadn't known how long it would last, though I did know how it would end. Consequently I threw myself into it body and soul. If there was a dull moment anywhere in those fours days, I slept through it, and at that I didn't get enough sleep. Elephant seemed to feel the same way. He was living life to the hilt; he must have suspected, as I did, that the Outsiders would not consider danger as a factor in choosing his planet. By their own ethics they were bound not to. The days of Elephant's life might be running short. Buried in those four days were incidents that made me wonder why Elephant was looking for a weird world. Surely Earth was the weirdest of all... I remember when we threw in the bridge hands and decided to go out for dinner. This was more complicated than it sounds. Elephant hadn't had a chance to change to flatlander styles, and neither of us was fit to be seen in public. Dianna had cosmetics for us. I succumbed to an odd impulse. I dressed as an albino. They were body paints, not pills. When I finished applying them, there in the full length mirror was my younger self. Blood-red irises, snowwhite hair, pale transparent skin with a tinge of pink showing beneath: the teenager who bad disappeared ages ago, when I was old enough to use tannin pills. My mind wandered far back across the decades, to the days when I was a flatlander myself, my feet firmly beneath the ground, my head never higher than seven feet above the desert sands... They found me there before the mirror and decided my public was ready for me. I remember that evening, when Dianna told me she had known Elephant forever. "I was the one who named him Elephant," she bragged. "It's a nickname?" "Sure," said Sharrol. "His real name is Gregory Pelton." "O-o-oh." Suddenly all came clear. Gregory Pelton is known among the stars. It is rumored that he owns the thirty-light-year-wide rough sphere called human space, that he earns his income by renting it out. It is rumored that General Products, ostensibly run by the puppeteer species and now defunct in the absence of same, is a front for Gregory Pelton. It's a true fact that his great-tothe-eighth grandmother invented the transfer booth, and that he is rich, rich, rich! I asked, "Why Elephant? Why that particular nickname?" Dianna and Sharrol looked demurely at the tablecloth. Elephant said, "Use your imagination, Bay." "On what? What's an elephant, some kind of animal?" Three faces registered annoyance. I'd missed a joke. "Tomorrow," said Elephant, "we'll show you the Zoo." There are seven transfer booths in die Zoo of Earth. That'll tell you how big it is. But you're wrong; you've forgotten the two hundred taxis on permanent duty. They're there because the booths are too far apart for walking. We stared down at dusty, compact animals smaller than starseeds  or bandersnatchi, but bigger than anything else I'd ever seen. Elephant said, "See?" "Yah," I said, because the animals showed a compactness and a plodding invulnerability very like Elephant's. And then I found myself watching one of the animals in a muddy pool. It was using a hollow tentacle over its mouth to spray water on its back. I stared at that tentacle... and stared... "Hey, look!" Sharrol called, pointing. Bay's ears are turning red!" I didn't forgive her 'til two that morning. And I remember reaching over Sharrol to get a tabac stick and seeing her purse lying on her other things. I said, "How if I picked your pocket now?" Orange and silver lips parted in a lazy smile. "I'm not wearing a pocket." "Would it be in good taste to sneak the money out of your purse?" "Only if you could hide it on you." I found a small, flat purse with four hundred stars in it and stuck it in my mouth. She made me go through with it. Ever made love to a woman with a purse in your mouth? Unforgettable. Don't try it if you've got asthma. I remember Sharrol. I remember smooth, warm blue skin, silver eyes half-closed in cool blue loveliness, orangeHand-silver hair in a swirling abstract pattern that nothing could muss. It always sprang back. Her laugh was silver too, when I gently extracted two handfuls of hair and tied them in a hard double knot, and when I gibbered and jumped up and down at the sight of her hair slowly untying itself like Medusa's locks. And her voice was a silver croon. remember the freeways. They were the first thing that showed, coming in on Earth. If we'd landed at night it would have been the lighted cities; but of course we came in on the day side. Why else would a world have three spaceports? There were the freeways and autostradas and autobahns, strung in an all-enclosing net across the faces of the continents. From a few miles up you still can't see the breaks. But they're there, when girders and pavement have collapsed. Only two superhighways are still kept in good repair. Both are on the same continent: the Pennsylanvia Turnpike and the Santa Monica Freeway. The rest of the network is broken chaos. It seems there are people who collect old groundcars and race them. Some are renovated machines with half the parts replaced; others are handmade reproductions. On a perfectly flat surface they'll do sixty to a hundred miles per hour. I laughed when Elephant told me about them. Seeing them in person was different.  The rodders began to appear about IF dawn. They gathered around one end of the Santa Monica Freeway, the end that used to join the San Diego Freeway. This end is a maze of fallen spaghetti, great curving loops of prestressed concrete that have lost their strength over the years and sagged to the ground. But you can still use the top loop to reach the starting line. We watched from above, hovering in a cab as the groundcars moved into line. "Their dues cost more than the cars," said Elephant. "I used t drive one myself...You'd turn white as snow if I told you how much it costs to keep this stretch of freeway in repair." "How much?" He told me. I turned white as snow. They were off. I was still wondering what kick they got, driving an obsolete machine on flat concrete when they could be up here with us. They were off, weaving slightly, weaving more than slightly, foolishly moving at different speeds, coming perilously close to each other before sheering off -- and I began to realize things. Those automobiles had no radar. They were being steered with a cabin wheel geared directly to four ground wheels. A mistake in steering and they'd crash into each other, or into the concrete curbs. They were steered and stopped by muscle power; but whether they could turn or stop depended on how hard four rubber balloons could grip smooth concrete. If the tires loosed their grip Newton's First Law would take over; the fragile metal mass would continue moving in a straight tine until stopped by a concrete curb or another groundcar. "A man could get killed in me f those." "Not to worry," said Elephant. "Nobody does, usually." "Usually?" He told me. I turned white as snow. The race ended twenty minutes later, at another tangle of fatten concrete. I was wet through. We landed and met some of the racers. One of them, a thin guy with tangled, glossy green hair and a bony white face with a widely grinning scarlet mouth, offered me a ride. I declined with thanks, backing slowly away and wishing for a weapon. This joker was obviously dangerously insane. I remember flatlander food, the best in known space, and an odd, mildly alcoholic drink called Taittinger Comtes de Champagne '#. I remember invading an outworlder bar, where the four of us talked shop with a girl rock miner whose inchwide auburn crest of hair fell clear to the small of her back. I remember flying cross-country with a lift belt, and seeing nothing but city enclosing widely separated patches of food-growing land. I remember a submerged hotel off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and a dolphin embassy off Italy where a mixed group of dolphins and flatlanders seemed to be solving the general problem of sentient beings without hands (there are many, and we'll probably find more) . It seemed more a cottee-break discussion than true business. We were about to break up for bed on the evening of the fourth day, when the tridphone rang. Don Cramer had found an Outsider. I said, disbelieving, "You're leaving right now?" "Sure!" said Elephant. "Here, take one of these pills. You won't feel sleepy 'til we're on our way." A deal is a deal, and I owed Elephant plenty. I took the pill. We kissed Sharrol and Dianna good-by, Dianna standing on a chair to reach me, Sharrol climbing me like a beanpole and wrapping her legs around my waist. I was a foot and a half taller than either of them. Calcutta Base was in daylight. Elephant and I took the transfer booth there, to find that the ST had been shipped ahead of us. Her full name Was Slower Than Infinity. She had been built into a General Products ## hull, a three hundred foot spindle with a wasp waist constriction near the tail. I was relieved. The General Products hull is both invulnerable and impermeable to matter and energy other than visible light, as guaranteed by the puppeteer company and proven over thousands of years of use; but none of the four designs are pretty, and they all look alike. I was afraid Elephant might own a flashy, vulnerable dude's yacht. The two-man control room looked pretty small for a lifesystem until I noticed the bubble extension folded into the nose. The rest of the hull held a one gee fusion drive and fuel tank, a hyperspace motor, a gravity drag and belly landing gear, ail cleariy visible through the hull, which had been left transparent. She held fuel, food and aid. She must have been ready for days. We left twenty mintes after arriving. Using the fusion drive in Earth's atmosphere would have gotten us into the organ banks, in pieces. Flatlander laws are strict about air pollution. A robot rocket with huge wings lifted us to orbit, using air compressed nearly to degenerate matter as a propellant. We took off from there. Now there was plenty of time for sleep. It took us a week at one gee just to get far enough out of the solar system's gravity well to use the hyperdrive. Somewhere in that time I removed my false coloring (it had been false; I'd continued to take tannin secretion pills against Earth's sunlight), and Elephant turned his skin back to light tan and his beard and hair back to black. For four days he'd been Zeus, with marble skin and a metal-gold beard and glowing molten gold eyes. It had fitted him so perfectly that I hardly noticed the change. Hyperdrive -- and a long, slow three weeks. We took turns hovering over the mass indicator, though at first quantum hyperdrive speeds we'd have seen a mass at least twelve hours before it became dangerous. I think I was the only man who knew there was a second quantum -- a puppeteer secret. The Outsider ship was near the edge of known space, well beyond Tau Ceti. "It was the only one around," Elephant had said. "Number fourteen." IF "Fourteen? That's the same ship I dealt with before." "Oh? Good. That should help." Days later he asked, "How'd it happen?" "The usual way. Number fourteen was on the other side of known space then, and she sent out an offer of information exchange. I was almost to Wunderland, and I caught the offer. When I dropped my passengers I went back." "Did they have anything worthwhile?" "Yah. They'd found the Lazy Eight ." T he Lazy Eight II had been one of the old slowboats, a circular flying wing taking colonists to Jinx. Something had gone wrong before turnover, and the ship had continued on, carrying fifty passengers in suspended animation and a crew of four, presumed dead. With a ramscoop to feed hydrogen to her fusion drive she could accelerate forever. She was five hundred years on her way. "I remember," said Elephant. "They couldn't reach her." "No. But we'll know where to find her when the state of the art gets that good." "That won't be soon." He was right. A hyperdrive ship would not only have to reach her, but to carry reaction fuel to match her speed. Her speed was just less than a photon's, and she was more than five hundred light-years away, seventeen times the diameter of known space. "They'll wait for us," I said. "Did you have any problems?" "Their translator is pretty good. But we'll have to be careful. The thing about buying information is that you don't know what you've got until you've bought it. They couldn't just offer to sell me the present position of the Lazy Eight II. We'd have tracked their course by scope until we saw fusion light, and gotten the information free." The time came when only a small green dot glowed in the center of the mass indicator. A star would have shown as a line; no star would have shown as no dot. I dropped out of hyperspace and set the deep-radar to hunt out the Outsider. IV he Outsider found us first. Somewhere in the cylindrical metal pod near her center of mass, perhaps occupying it completely, was the reactionless drive. It was common knowledge that that drive was for sale, and that the cost was a full no nation now extant, could afford to pay it, the price was not exorbitant. In two or three minutes, while we were still searching, that drive had dropped the Outsider ship from above point nine lights to zero relative and pulled it alongside the ST oo One moment, nothing but stars. The next, the Outsider ship was alongside. She was mostly empty space. I knew her population was the size of a small city, but she was much bigger because more strung out. There was the minuscule-seeming drive capsule, and there, on a pole two and a half miles long, wias a light source. The rest of the ship was metal ribbons, winding in and out, swooping giddily around themselves and each other, until the ends of each tangled ribbon stopped meandering and joined to the drive capsule. There were around a thousand such ribbons, and each was the width of a wide city pedwalk. "Like a Christmas tree decoration," said Elephant. "What now, Bay?" "They'll use the ship radio." A few minutes of waiting, and here came a bunch of Outsiders. They looked like black cat-o'-ninetails with grossly swollen handles. In the handles were their brains and invisible sense organs; in the whip ends, the clusters of mobile root-tentacles, were gas pistols. Six of them braked to a stop outside the airlock. The radio spoke. "Welcome to Ship Fourteen. Please step outside for conveyance to our office. Take nothing on the outsides of your pressuffe suits." Elephant asked, "Do we?" I said, "Sure. The Outsiders are nothing if not honorable." We went out. The six Outsiders offered us a tentacle each, and away we went across open space. Not fast. The thrust from the gas pistols was very low, irritatingly weak. But the Outsiders themselves were weak: an hour in the gravity of Earth's moon would have killed them, They maneuvered us through a tangled clutter of silver ribbons, landed us on a ramp next to the looming convex wall of the drive capsule. It wasn't quite like being lost in a lies. The rigid giant bowl of ribbons were too far apart for that Far above us was the light source, about as small and intense amd yellowish-white as Earth's sun seen from a moon of Neptune. Shining down through the interstellar vacuum, it cast a network of sharp black shadows across all the thousand looping strands that made up the city. Along every light-shadow borderline were the Outsiders. Just as their of years ago on some unknown world near the galactic core, the Outsiders were absorbing life-energy. Their branched tails lay in shadow, their heads in sunlight, while thermoelectricity charged their biochemical batteries. Some had root-tentacles dipped in shallow food dishes; the trace elements which kept them alive and growing were in suspension in liquid helium. W e stepped carefully around them, using our headlamps at lowest intensity, following one of the Outsiders toward a door in the wall ahead. There were no rails along the ramps, and nothing but the cold distant stars beneath. Outsiders moved aside if we came to close. Our suits may have been leaking too much heat. The enclosure was dark until the door closed behind us. Then the light came on. It was sourceless, the color of normal sunlight, and it illuminated a cubicle that was hare and square. The only furnishing was a hemisphere of very dark glass with IF the coiled shape of an Outsider inside. The hemisphere must have been both evacuated and refrigerated. Only excellent manners could have put him here at all, as if he were the guest instead of us... "Welcome," said the room. Whatever the Outsider had said was not sonic in nature. "This air is breathable. Take off your helmets, suits, shoes, girdles and whatnot." It was an excellent translator, with a good grasp of idiom and a pleasant baritone voice. "Thanks," I said, and we doffed our suits, Elephant a little self-consciously. "Which of you in Gregory Pelton?" "I am." "Hi. According to your agent, you want to know how to reach that planet which is most unusual inside the borders of the sixty-lightyear-wide region you call known space. Is this correct?" "Yes." "We must know if you plan to go there or to send agents there. Also, do you plan a landing, a near orbit, or a distant orbit?" "Landing." "Are we to guard against danger to your life or property?" "No." Elephant's voice was dry. The Outsider ship was an intimidating place. "What kind of craft would you use?" "The ship we came in." "Do you plan colonization? Mining? Growth of food plants or animals?" "I plan only one visit." "We have selected a world for stars." "That's high," said Elephant. I whistled under by breath. It was: and it wouldn't get lower. The Outsiders never dickered. "Sold," said Elephant. The translator gave us a triplet set of coordinates some twenty-four light-years from Earth along galactic north. "The star you are looking for is a protosun with one planet a system is moving at point eight lights toward -- he gave a vector direction. It seemed the protosun was drawing a shallow chord through known space; it would never approach human space. "No good," said Elephant. "No hyperdrive ship can go that fast in real space." "You could hitch a ride," said the translator. "With us. Moor your ship to our drive capsule." "That'll work," said Elephant. He was getting more and more uneasy; his eyes seemed to be searching die walls for the source of the voice. He would not look at the Outsider business agent in the vacuum chamber. "Our ferry fee will be one million stars." Elephant sputtered. "Just a sec," I said. "I may have information to sell you." T tfiere was a long pause. Elephant looked at me in surprise. "You are Beowulf Shaeffer?" "Yah. You remember me?" "We find you in our records. Beowulf Shaeffer, we have information for you, already paid. The former regional president of General Products on Jinx wishes you to contact him. I have a transfer booth number." "That's late news," I said. "The puppeteers are gone. Anyway, why would that two-headed sharpie want to see me?" "I do not have that information. I do know that not all puppeteers have left this region. Will you accept the transfer booth number?" "Sure." I wrote down the eight digits as they came. A moment later Elephant was yelling, just as if he were a tridee set turned on in the middle of a program. " -- hell is going on here?" "Sorry about that, "said the trans ,  V' #  IF "What happened?" I asked. "I couldn't hear anything! Did that monk -- Did the Outsider have private business with you?" "Sort of. I'll tell you later." The translator said, "Beowulf Shaeffer, we do not buy information. We sell information and use the proceeds to buy territory and food soil." "You may need this information," I argued. "I'm the only man within reach who knows it." "What of other races?" The puppeteers might have told them, but it was worth taking a chance. "You're about to leave known space. If you don't deal with me you may not get this information in time." "What price do you set on this item?" "You set the price. You've got more experience at putting values on information, and you're honorable. "We may not be able to afford an honest price." "The price may not exceed our ferry fee." "Done. Speak." I told him of the Core explosion and how I'd come to find out about it. He made me go into detail on what I'd seen: the bright patch of supernovae spreading out as my ship caught up with ancient light waves, until all the bright multicolored ball of the Core was ablaze with supernovae. "You couldn't have known this until you got there, and then it would have been too late. You don't use faster-than-light drives." "We knew from the puppeteers that the Core had exploded. They were not able to go into detail because they had not seen it for themselves." "Oh. Ah, well. I think the explosion must have started at the back side of the Core from here. Otherwise it would have seemed' to go much more slowly." "Many thanks. We will waive your ferry fee. Now, there is one more item. Gregory Pelton, for an additional two hundred thousand stars we will tell you exactly what is peculiar about the planet you intend to visit." "Can I find out for myself?" "It is likely." "Then I will." Silence followed. The Outsider hadn't expected that. I said, "I'm curious. Your galaxy is rapidly becoming a death trap. What will you do now?" "That information will cost you -- " "Forget it." O utside, Elephant said, "Thanks." "Forget it I wonder what they will do?" "Maybe they can shield themselves against the radiation." "Maybe. But they won't have any starseeds to follow." "Do they need them?" Finagle only knew. The starseeds followed a highly rigid migratory mating pattern out from the Core of the galaxy and into the arms, almost to the rim, before turning back down to the Core. They were doomed. As they returned to the Core the expanding wave of radiation from the multiple novas would snuff out the species one by one. What would the Outsiders do without them? What the hell did they do with them? Why did they follow them? Did they need starseeds? Did starseeds need Outsiders? The Outsiders would answer these and related questions for one tions cost high with the Outsiders. A crew was already ringing the ST oo in to dock. We watched from the ramp, with crewmen sunbathing about our feet. We weren't worried. The way the Outsiders handled it, our invulnerable hull might have been made of spun sugar and sunbeams. When a spiderweb of thin strands fastened the ST co to the wall of the drive capsule, the voice of the translator spoke in our ears and invited us to step aboard. We jumped a few hundred feet upward through the trace of artificial gravity, climbed into the airlock and got out of our suits. "Thanks again," said Elephant. "Forget it again," I said magnanimously. "I owe you plenty. You've been putting me up as a house guest on the most expensive world in known space, acting as my guide where the cost of labor is -- " "Okay okay okay. But you saved forget it." He whopped me on the shoulder and hurried into the concredit base for the next Outsider ship that came by. "I won't," I called at his retreating back. And wondered what the hell I meant by that? Much later I wondered about something else. Had Elephant planned to take me to "his" world? Or did he think to go it alone, to be the first to see it and not one of the first two? After the Outsider episode it was already too late. He couldn't throw me off the ship then. I wished I'd thought of it in time. I never wanted to be a batman. My stake in this was to gently, tactfully if it became necessary. For all his vast self-confidence, vast riches, vast generosity and vast bulk, he was still only a flatlander, and thus a little bit helpless. V W e were in the expansion bubble when it happened. The bubble had inflatable seats and an inflatable IF table; it was there for exercising a fine view; the surface was perfectly transparent. Otherwise we would have missed it. There was no pressure against the seat of the pants, no crawling sensation in the pit of the stomach, no feel of motion. But Elephant, who was talking about a Jinxian frail he'd picked up in a Chicago bar, stopped just as she was getting ready to tear the place apart because some suicidal idiot had insulted her. Somebody heavy was sitting down on the universe. He came down slowly, like a fat man cautiously letting his weight down on a beach ball. From inside the bubble it looked like all the stars and nebulae around us were squeezing themselves together. The Outsiders on the ribbons outside never moved; but Elephant said something profane, and I steeled myself to look up. The stars overhead were bluewhite and blazing. Around us they were squashed together; below, they were turning red and winking out, one by one. It had taken us a week to get out of the solar system, but the Outsider ship could have done it in five hours. The radio spoke. "Sirs, our crewmen will remove your ship from ours, after whioh you will be on your own. It has been a pleasure to do business with you." A swarm of Outsider crewmen hauled us through the maze of basking ramps and left us. Presently the Outsider ship vanished, gone suddenly off, now on its own business. In the strange starlight Biephant let out a long, shaky sigh Some people can't take aliens. They don't find puppeteers graceful and beautiful; they find them horrifying, wrong . They see kzinti as slavering carnivores whose only love is fighting they don't see the rigid code of honor, nor the self-control which allows a kzin ambassador to ride a human city pedwalk without slashing out with his claws at the impertinent stabbing knees and elbows. Elephant was one of these people. He said, "Okay," in amazed relief that they were actually gone. "I'll take the first watch, Bay." He did not say, "Those bastards would take your heart as collateral on a tenth-star loan." He couldn't see them as that close to human. I f Elephant's weakness was aliens, mine was relativity. The trip through hyperspace was routine. I'd been trained to take the sight of the two small windows turning into blind spots, becoming areas of nothing which seemed to draw together the objects around them. So had Elephant; he'd done some flying though he preferred the comfort of a luxury liner. But the Fast Protosun was a week away, and even the best pilot occasionally has to drop back among die stars, to get his bearings and to assure his subconscious that the universe is still there. And each time it was changed, squashed flat. The crowded blue stars were all ahead; the sparse dim red stars were all behind. Four hundied years ago men and women had lived for years with such a view of the universe. But it hadn't happened since the invention of hyperdrive. I'd never seen the universe look like this. It bothered me. "No, it doesn't bug me," said Elephant when I mentioned it. We were a day out from our destination. "To me, stars are stars. But I have been worried about something. Bay, you said the Outsiders are honorable." "They are. They've got to be. They have to be so far above suspicion that any species they deal with will remember their unimpeachable ethics a century later. You can see that, can't you? Outsiders don't show up more often than that." "Um. Okay. Why did they try to screw that extra two hundred kilostars out of me?" "Uh -- " "See, the goddam problem is, what if it was a fair price? What if we need to know what's funny about the Fast Protosun?" "You're right. Knowing the Outsiders, it's probably information we can use. All right, we'll nose around a little before we land. We'd have done that anyway, but now we'll do it better." W hat was peculiar about the Fast Protosun? Around lunchtime on the seventh ship's day, a short green line in the sphere of the mass indicator began to extend itself. It was wide and fuzzy, just what you'd expect of a protosun. I let it reach almost to the surface of the sphere before I dropped us into normal space. The squashed universe looked in the windows. But ahead of us was a circular darkening and blurring of the vivid blue-white stars; and in the center of the circle was a dull red glow. "Let's go into the extension bubble," said Elephant. "Let's not." "We'll get a better view in there." He turned the dial that would make the bubble transparent. Naturally we kept it opaque in hyperspace. "Repeat, let's not. Think about it, Elephant. What sense does it make to use an impermeable hull, then spend most of our time outside it? Until we know what's here we ought to retract the bubble." He nodded his shaggy head and touched the board again. Chugging noises announced that air and water were being pulled out of the bubble. Elephant moved to a window. "Ever seen a protosun?" "No," I said. "I don't think there are any in human space." "That could be the peculiarity." "It could. One thing it isn't, is the speed of the thing. Outsiders spend all their time moving faster than this." "But planets don't. Neither dc stars. Bay, maybe this thing came from outside the galaxy. That would make it unusual." It was time we made a list. I found a pad and solemnly noted speed of star, nature of star and possible extragalactic origin of star. "I've found our planet," said Elephant. "Whereabouts?" "Almost on the other side of the IF protosun. We can get there faster in hyperspace." T Mie planet was still invisibly small where Elephant brought us out. The protosun looked about the same. A protosun is the foetus of a star: a thin mass of gas and dust, brought together by slow eddies in interstellar magnetic fields or by the presence of a Trojan point in some loose cluster of stars; a mass which is collapsing and contracting due to gravity. I'd found material on protosuns in the ship's library, but it was all astronomical data: nobody had ever been near one for a close look. In theory the Fast Protosun must have been fairly well along in its evolution, not only because it must have formed before acquiring its peculiar velocity, but because it was already glowing. "There it is," said Elephant. "Two days away at one gee." "Good. We can do our instrument checks on the way. Strap down." With the fusion motor pushing us smoothly along, Elephant went back to the scope, and I started checking the other instruments. One thing stood out like a beacon. "Elephant. Have you noticed in me a tendency to use profanity for emphasis?" "Not really. Why?" "It's goddam radioactive out there." "Could you be more specific, sir?" "Our suit shields would break down in three days. The extension bubble would go in twenty hours." "Okay, add it to your list. Any idea what's causing it?" "Not one." I made a note on my list. We were in no danger; the GP hull would protect us from anything but a heavy impact. "No asteroid belts," said Elephant. "Meteor density zero, as far as I can tell. No other planets." "The interstellar gas may clean away anything small, at these speeds." "One thing's for sure, Bay. I got my money's worth. This is a strange odd peculiar funny system." "Yah. Well, we missed lunch. Let's get dinner." "Philistine." VI E lephant ate fast. He was back at the scope before I was ready for coffee. Watching him move, I was again reminded of a juggernaut; but he'd never shown such determination when I knew him on Earth. If a hungry kzin had been between him and the telescope, Elephant would have left footprints in fur. But the only thing that could get in his way out here was me. "Can't get a close look at the planet," said Elephant, "but it looks polished." "Just that. I don't see any sign of an atmosphere." "How about blast craters?" "Nothing." "They should be there." "This system's pretty clean of meteors." "The space around us shouldn't be. And at these speeds -- " "Uh-huh. That better go on your list." I wrote it down on my list. We slept in the disaster couches. In front of me were the yellow lights of the control panel; the stars glowed red through one side window, blue through the other. I stayed awake a long time, staring through the forward window into the red darkness ahead. The window was opaqued, but I saw the protosun clearly in my imagination, like a blood droplet speading in dark, still water. The radiation held steady all through the next day. I did some more thorough checking, using temperature readings and deep-radar on both sun and planet. Everywhere I looked was a new anomaly. "This star definitely shouldn't be glowing yet. It's to spread out; the gas should be too thin for fusion." "Is it hot enough to glow?" "Sure. But it shouldn't be." "Maybe the theories on protosuns are wrong." "Put it on your list." And, an hour later: "Elephant -- " " Another peculiarity?" "Yah." From under shaggy brows. Elephant's eyes plainly told me he was getting sick of peculiarities. "According to the deep-radar shadow, this planet doesn't have any lithosphere. It's worn right down to what ought to be the magma, but isn't because it's so cold out here." "Write it down. How many entries have you got?" "Nine." "Is any one of them worth paying two hundred kilostars to know about beforehand?" "The radiation, maybe, if we didn't have a GP hull." "But," said Elephant, glaring out at the huge, dark disk, "they knew we had a GP hull. Bay, can anything get through a General Products hull?" "Light, like a laser beam. Gravity, like tides crushing you into the nose of a ship when you get too close to a neutron star. Impact won't harm the hull, but it'll kill what's inside." "Maybe the planet's inhabited. The more I think about it, the more sure I am it came from outside. Nothing in the galaxy could have given it this velocity. It's diving through the plane of the galaxy; it wouldn't have to push in from the rim." "Okay. What do we do if someone shoots a laser at us?" "We perish, I think. I had reflective paint spread around the cabin, except for the windows, but the rest of the hull is transparent." "We can still get into hyperspace from here. And for the next twenty hours. Afterwards we'll be too close to the planet." I went right to sleep that night, being pretty tired despite the lack of exercise. Hours later I slowly realized that I was being examined. I could see it through my closed eyelids; I could feel the heat of the vast red glare, the size of the angry eye, the awful power of the mind behind it. I tried to struggle away, smacked my hand on something and woke with a shock. I lay there in the red darkness. The edge of the protosun peeked through a window. I could feel its hostile glare. IF I said, "Elephant." "Mngl?" "Nothing. Morning would be soon enough. orning. "Elephant, would you do me a favor?" "Sure. You want Dianna? My right arm? Shave off my beard?" "I'll keep Sharrol, thanks. Put on your suit, will you?" "Sure, that makes sense. We aren't nearly uncomfortable enough, just because we closed off the bubble." "Right. And because I'm a dedicated masochist, I'm going to put my suit on this instant. Now, I hate to enjoy myself alone -- " "You got the wind up?" "A little. Just enough." "Anything for a friend. You go first." There was just room to get our suits on one at a time. If the inner airlock door hadn't been open there wouldn't have been that. We tried leaving our helmets thrown back, but they got in our way against the crash couches. So we taped them to the window in front of us. I felt better that way, but Elephant clearly thought I'd flipped. "You sure you wouldn't rather eat with your helmet on?" "I hate suit-food syrup. We can reach our helmets if we get a puncture." " What puncture? We're in a General Products hull!" "I keep remembering that the Outsiders knew that." "We've been through that." "Let's go through it again. Assume they thought we might be killed anyway if we weren't prepared. Then what?" "Gronk." "Either they expected us to go out in suits and get killed, or they know of something that can reach through a General Products hull." "Or both. In which case the suits do us no good at all. Bay, do you know how long it's been since a General Products hull failed?" "I've never heard of its happening at all." It never has." "You're dead right. I've been stupid. Go ahead and take off your suit." Elephant turned to look at me. "And you?" "I'll keep mine on." Elephant shrugged his shaggy eyebrows and went back to the telescope. By then we were six hours from touchdown, and decelerating. "I think I've found an asteroid crater," Elephant said presently. I had a look. "Yah, I think you're right. But it's damn near disappeared." He took the telescope back. "It's round enough. Almost has to be a crater. Bay, why should it be so eroded?" "It must be the interstellar dust. If it is, then that's why there's no atmosphere or lithosphere. But I can't see the dust being that thick, even at these speeds." "Put it -- " "Yah." I reached for my list. "If we find one more anomaly I'll throw a tantrum." H alf an hour later we found life. By then we were close enough to use the gravity drag. The beautiful thing about a gravity drag is that it uses very little power. It converts a ship's momentum relative to the nearest powerful mass into heat, and all you have to do is get rid of the heat. Since the ST # 's hull would pass only various ranges of radiation corresponding to what the puppeteers' varied customers call visible light, the ship builders had run a big radiator fin out from the gravity drag and through the hull. It glowed dull red behind us. And the fusion drive was off. There was no white fusion flame to hurt visibility. Elephant had the scope at highest magnification. At first, as I peered into the eyepiece, I couldn't see what he was talking about. There was a dull white plain, all the same color except for a few bluish blobs. The blobs wouldn't have stood out but for the uniform surface around them. Then one of them moved. Very slowly, but it was moving. "Right," I said. "Let's run a temperature check." The surface temperature in that region was right for helium II. And on the rest of the planet as well; the protosun wasn't putting out much heat, though it was on radiation. "I don't think they match any species I know." "I can't tell," said Elephant. He had the telescope and the library screen going at the same time, with "I've found twenty different species of helium life in this book, and they all look alike." "Not quite. These must have a vacuum-proof integument. And you'll notice those granules in the -- " "I treasure my ignorance on this subject, Bay. Anyway, we won't find any known species on this world. At these speeds even a stage tree seed wouldn't live through the im, pact." I let the subject die. Once again Elephant run the scope over "his" planet, this time looking for the blobby life forms. They were big for Helium II life, but not freakishly so. Many cold worlds develope life using the peculiar properties of superfluid helium; but, since such life hasn't much use for complexity, it usually stays in the amoeba stage. There was one peculiarity, which I dully noted. Every animal was on the planet's backside with relation to its course through the galaxy. They weren't afraid of protosunlight, but they seemed to fear interstellar dust. T wo hours passed. The red glow of the radiator fin became more pronounced. The planet was closer, but no more detailed. "Cue Ball," said Elephant. "No good. It's been used. For Beta Lyrae I." "Too bad. How about Swoosh?" "Huh? Oh, Swoosh. That isn't bad." "That's it then. Swoosh, discovered by Gregory Zhiv Pelton and Friend." "Elephant, what are we doing here?" IF He turned, startled. "What do you mean?" "Look, you know by now I'm with you all the way. But I do wonder. here, and you'd have spent two if you had to. You could be home in the Rockies with Dianna, or hovering near Beta Lyrae, which is unusual enough and much better scenery than, uh, Swoosh. You could be sampling oddball drugs and biochemicals in Crashlanding, or looking for mist demons on Plateau, or hunting bandersnatchi and vice versa on a Jinx shoreline. Why here?" "Because it is there?" "What the blazes kind of an answer is that?" "Bay, once upon a time there was a guy named Miller. Six years ago he took a ramscoop-fusion drive ship out of a museum and put a hyperdrive in it and set out for the edge of the universe. He figured he could get his hydrogen in normal space and use the fusion plant to power his hyperdrive. He's probably still going. He may go forever, unless he hits something. So why?" "A psychiatrist I'm not." "He wanted to be remembered. When you're dead a hundred years, Bay, what will you be remembered for?" "I'll be the idiot who rode with Gregory Pel ton, who spent two months of his life and more than a once on a totally useless planet." "Gronk. But do you see? You'll be remembered." "There must be better things to be remembered for." "I can't write novels. I'd make a lousy planetary president. A scientist I'm not. What's left?" "Found a dynasty?" Elephant's lips tightened, and he glared -- not at me, but ahead. "Arrgh," he growled. "I'd make a lousy emperor too. Let's drop it, shall we?" "Okay," I said. Because something had occurred to me. That guy named Miller -- I'd heard of him. He'd been sterilized while standing too close to a fusionelectric plant the day it decided to leak just a little. There were other heroes, whose names were remembered because they had done strange, difficult, not particularly useful things. Mae Doolin, who had climbed forty miles down the side of Mount Lookitthat in a suit she had designed herself. If she'd spent a couple of extra months on that pressure suit she'd have made it back up. Lynaeus (true name unknown), who fought kzinti with his bare hands, and lived to teach the Hellflare Boys how. Had any of them had families? Did Elephant have children? Could he? I could ask the first question, if I phrased it right. I'd have to be subtle. "Elephant, are you ster -- " There was a muffled, authoritative boom , instantly followed by a strangling pressure in my larynx and a cool, puffy sensation over my skin surface and a stabbing pain in the ears. I heard the bare beginning of an alarm as the air went. Already I was reaching for my helmet. I clamped it down hard, spun the collar, and gave vent to an enormous belch at the same time as the wind went shrieking from my lungs. T 'here was no way to realize what was happening, and no time. Vacuum was around us; and air was spraying into my suit, frigid with storage. Iron spikes were being driven through my ears and sinuses; but I was going to live. My lungs held ,a ghastly emptiness, but my suit was inflating. I would live. You don't know how selfish your thoughts can be until you've come that close to the Blowout Death. My hands started to shake; I clamped down on myself and turned to Elephant. The fear of death was naked in his face. He had his helmet down, but he was having trouble with the collar. Mist wreathed his neck ring. I had to force his hands away to fasten his helmet down. The glass misted over, then cleared; he was getting air. Had it come in time?  was alive. The pain was leaving my ears and sinuses, and I was breathing: inhale, pause, inhale, as the presure rose to normal. Now I had time to think it through, to remember what I'd seen without noticing, to play it back. What had happened was insane. The hull had turned to dust. Just that. All at once and nothing first, the ship's exterior had disintegrated and blown away on a puff of breathing-air. I'd seen it. And sure enough, the hull was gone. Only the innards of the ship remained. Before me, the lighted control board. A little below that, the manhole to the packed bubble, and the bubble package itself. Above the board, the dull half-disk of Swoosh, and stars. To the left, stars. To the right, Elephant, looking dazed and scared and alive. Beyond him, stars. Behind us, the airlock, the kitchen storage block and dial board, a glimpse of the landing legs and glowing radiator fin, and stars. The ST oo was a skeleton. Elephant shook his head, then tufned on his suit radio. I heard the magnified click in my helmet. We looked at each other, waiting. There seemed to be nothing to say, no comment that would fit without being obvious. I sighed, turned to the control board and brought the fusion drive to life. From what I could see of the ship, nothing was missing but the hull. Nothing vital was floating away. Whatever had been attached to the hull had also been attached to other things "What are you doing, Bay?" "Getting us out of here. You can throw your tantrum now." "Why? I mean, why leave?" He'd flipped. Flatlanders are basically unstable. I got the drive pushing us at low power, turned off the gravity drag and swiveled to face him. "Look, Elephant. No hull." I swept an arm in a circle. "None. Nothing." "But what's lfeft of the ship is still mine?" "Huh? Sure." IF "I want to land. Can you talk me out of it?" Behind that intimidating beard he was dead serious and, I was beginning to believe, quite mad. "The landing legs are intact. Our suits can stop the radiation for three days. We could land and take off in twelve hours." "We probably could, if nothing else happened." "And we've spent a month and a half getting here." "Right. Silly, but right." "I'd feel like an idiot, getting this close and then turning for home. Wouldn't you?" "I feel like an idiot for getting this close, period. No, cancel that. Yes, I'd feel stupid going home with nothing to show. But we do have something to show." "A skinned ship. All right, so the hull turned to dust and blew away. What does that mean? It means we've got a faulty hull, and I'm going to sue the hind legs off General Products when we get back. But do you know what caused it?" "No. Do you?" He ignored the question. "So why assume it's some kind of threat?" He was wrong. I knew it. But how to tell him so? #npe #I you what I'll do," I said. A I turned the ship until it was tail down to Swoosh. "Now. We'll be there in three hours if you insist on landing. This skinned corpse is your ship, just as you say. But I'm going to talk you out of it." "That's fair." But his square, bearded mouth had less give in it than a snapping turtle's. "Have you had astronaut training?" "Naturally." "Did it include a history course?" "All they taught me was how to fly a ship. And a little of the development of the state of the art." "That's something. You remember that they first explored the System with chemical fuels, and that the first ship to touch an asteroid was built in orbit around the Earth's moon." "I'll take your word." "This you may not know. There was a ship before that one, supposed to do the same job. It was launched on a course that took it just inside the moon's orbit, then out and away. About thirty hours after launching, the crew noticed that all their ports were turning to frosted glass. Two of the men wanted to go on and finish the mission. The third man happened to be captain. So they used their rockets and stopped the ship dead. "Remember, the best materials they had were alloys of iron. The hull was carbon-alloyed iron; the ports were thick glass, two layers. Our heroes stopped the ship # miles from the moon and called base to say they'd aborted the mission." "You remember this pretty well. How come?" "Doc Spinoza drilled these stories into us again and again. Everything he taught us he illustrated with something from history. It struck. They do a thorough job on passenger-craft astronauts." "Go on." "They called base and told them about the windows. Somebody decided it must be dust, lots of dust. Someone else realized that they'd launched the ship straight through the moon's lead Trojan point." Elephant laughed, then coughed. "Stupid trick. Wish I hadn't breathed so much vacuum. Sir, you're leading up to something." "If they hadn't stopped the ship the dust would have tom it apart. Trojan points are dust collectors. And the moral of this story is, anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do." "Sounds paranoid." "Maybe it does, to a flatlander. You come from a planet so kind to you, so seemingly adapted to you, that you think the whole universe is one big lavish government housing project. You should listen to the Finaglists. The Perversity of the Universe Tends Toward a Maximum. A certain neutron star would have killed me if I hadn't understood that tidal effect in time." "So it would. So you think all flatlanders are fools?" Dammit, I'd touched his exposed nerve. "No, Elephant. Just not paranoid enough. And I refuse to apologize." "Who asked you?" "I'll land with you if you can tell me what made our hull turn to dust." Elephant crossed his arms and glared forward. I shut up and waited. I'd have to land regardless, if he insisted. Not because there was only one ship. Not because I couldn't just wait here for him. But because I'd invited myself along. Soon he said, "Can we get home?" "I don't know. The hyperdrive will work, and we can use the gravity drag to slow us when we reach a system. We couldn't have done that with the protosun: too much thick gas going through the system. Physically we should be able to make it." "Okay, let's go. But I'll tell you this, Bay. If I were alone I'd go down, and damn the hull." S o we turned tail and ran, under protest from Elephant. In ten hours we were far enough from Swoosh's gravity well to enter hyperspace. I turned on the hyperdrive, gasped and turned it off just as fast as I could. We sat there shaking. "We can inflate the bubble," said Elephant. "But can we get in?" "I don't know. It doesn't have an airlock." We worked it, though. There was a pressure control in the cabin, and we set it for zero. The electromagnetic field that folded it would now expand it without pressure. We went in, pressurized it and took off our helmets. "We're beyond the radiation," said Elephant. "I looked." "Good." You can go a long way in even a couple of seconds of hyperdrive. "Now, there's one thing I've got to know. Can you take that again?" Elephant shuddered. "Can you?" "I think so. I can do all the navigating if I have to." "Anything you can take I can take." "Can you take it and stay sane?" 'Yes." "Then we can trade off. But if you change your mind, let me know that instant. A lot of good men have left their marbles in the Blind Spot, and all they had to face were a couple of covered windows." "I believe you. Indedd I do, sir. How do we work it?" "We'll have to chart a course through the least dense regions of known space. The nearest inhabited world is Kzin. I hate to have to trust the kzinti for help, but it looks like our best bet." "Tell you what, Bay. Let's at least aim for Jinx. I want to use that number of yours to give the puppeteers hell." "Fine." If it turned out our minds couldn't take it, we could always turn off. I spent an hour working out a course. When I finished there were precious few gravity wells along our path. We wouldn't have to check the mass indicator more than once every twenty-four hours. Elephant won the fingertoss. I had won the first watch. We donned suits and depressurized the bubble. As I crawled through the manhole I saw Elephant making the bubble opaque. I squeezed into the crash couch, all alone among the compressed stars. The protosun had vanished behind us. More than half my range of vision was empty space. I found myself looking thoughtfully at the airlock. It was behind and to the left, a metal oblong standing alone at the edge of the deck, with both doors tightly closed. The inner door had slammed when the pressure dropped, and now the airlock mechanisms guarded the pressure inside against the vacuum at both doors. Nobody was inside to benefit; but how to explain that to a pressure sensor? I was procrastinating. The ship was aimed; I set my jaw and sent the ST oo into hyperspace. The Blind Spot, they call it. It fits. There is a way to find the blind spot in your eye. Close one eye, put two dots on a piece of paper and bring the paper toward you, focusing on one of the dots. If you hold the paper just right, the other dot will suddenly vanish. Let a ship enter hyperspace with the windows transparent, and the windows will seem to vanish. So will the space enclosing them. Objects on either side stretch and draw closer together to fill the missing space. If you look long enough, the Blind Spot starts to spread; the walls and the things against the walls draw even closer to the missing space, until they are engulfed. Covering the windows helps, but after awhile the Blind Spot starts to seep around the covers. It's all in your mind, they tell me. So? I turned the key, and half my view was Blind Spot. The control board stretched and flowed. The mass indicator sphere tried to wrap itself around me. I reached for it, and my hands were distorted too. With considerable effort I put them back at my sides and got a grip on myself. IF There was one fuzzy green line in the plastic distortion that had been a mass indicator. And it was behind and to the side. The ship could fly itself until Elephant's turn came. I fumbled my way to the manhole and crawled through. S ome time later, Elephant caught me looking at my list. He took it from me and began to study it. It said: #) Velocity of star -- .# lights. #) Nature of star -- protosun. Unique in known space. #) Origin of star -- extragalactic, in all probability. #) Unusual radiation. #) Planet has no atmosphere. #) No sign of blast craters on planet. #) Protosun shows strangely high temperature. #) Planet has no lithosphere. #) Blast crater, vastly eroded. Dust? Why so thick? #) He II beasts confined to back of planet. Fear dust? Elephant nodded to himself, added something and handed it back. The list now read: #) Hull disintegrated. Eleven notes. Eleven irregularities with no explanation. They must be connected. "If we knew more about our hull," I said, "we could probably figure this out." "Fat chance," said Elephant. "That hull's a puppeteer trade secret." And there it died. All our conversations were dying young. Neither of us felt the urge to talk. The hours passed and became days. We took turns at the library screen; if the bubble hadn't had an extension I don't think we would have survived. Every twenty-four hours one of us went out to see if there were dangerous masses around, to drop back to normal space to take a fix and adjust our course. The few hours before each turn, we didn't talk at all; because during these times, one of us would be tense enough to bite. On my third trip I had no more sense than to look up. I went more than blind. There was nothing at all in my field of vision, nothing but the Blind Spot. It was more than blindness. A blind man, a man whose eyes have lost their function, at least remembers what things looked like. A man who has suffered damage to the optic lobe of his brain doesn't. I could remember what I'd come out here for -- to find out if there were masses near enough to harm us -- but I couldn't remember how to do it. I touohed a curved smooth surface and knew that this was the device that would tell me, if only I could guess its secret. Eventually my neck got sore, so I moved my head. That brought my eyes back into existence. When we got the bubble pressurized, Elephant said, "Where were you? You've been gone half an hour." "And lucky at that. When you go out there, just don't look up." "Oh." Why the blazes couldn't we find something to talk about? Was it because we'd end up talking about Swoosh? Maybe. The planet had defeated us without ever noticing us. We'd named it, approached it and gone. Two mosquitoes which the mystery world hadn't even had to swat. We'd left at my insistence. One day I braced him with it. "Elephant, there's a word missing from our language." He looked up from the reading screen. "More than one," he said. "Things have been somewhat silent." "One word. We're so afraid of using it that we're afraid to talk at all." "Name it." "Coward." Elephant wrinkled his brows, then snapped off the screen. "Okay, we'll talk about it. First of all, you said it, I didn't. Right?" "Right. Have you been thinking it?" "No. I've been thinking euphemisms, like 'overcautious' and 'reluctance to risk bodily harm.' But since we're on the subject, why were you so eager to turn back?" "I was scared." I let the word soak through his brain. "The people who trained me made certain I'd be scared in certain situations. With all due respect. Elephant, I've had more training than you have. I think your wanting to land was the result of ignorance." Elephant sighed. "You're sure about that?" "Certainly not. I get less sure every day. Maybe I was bluffed out. Maybe we'd have landed in perfect safety, stepped out, found a good, reasonable answer to these eleven notes here, got back in, took off and arrived at Jinx twelve hours later than we will." "Maybe. We won't find out here, will we?" We wouldn't. One of us was right, one wrong. If I was wrong, a pretty good friendship had just gone out the airlock. I hated that. I wasn't even sure Sharrol wouldn't side with Elephant. And if Sharrol decided I was a coward -- She'd only known me four days. Was I a coward? I'm no bom hero and never claimed to be. This was the first time in my life it had worried me. At times during that trip I actually thought about turning back; and then I'd catch a few menutes of Blind Spot when my turn came around, and I'd go back to just hoping we'd reach Jinx. W e came out of hyperspace near the twin Sirius suns. But that wasn't the end; we still faced a universe moving at point eight lights. It took us almost two weeks to brake down to a normal velocity. The gravity drag's radiator fin glowed orange-white most of the time. I can't guess how many times we circled back through hyperspace for another run through the system's lumpy gravity well. But at last we were orbiting Jinx. I broke a silence of hours. "What now, Elephant? You're going back, aren't you?" IF "As soon as we get in range, I'm going to call that number of yours." "Then?" "Drop you off at Sirius Mater with enough money to get you home. I'd take it kindly if you'd use my house as your own until I come back from Swoosh. I'll get a ship here." "You don't want me along?" "I'm going to land, Bay. Wouldn't you feel like a damn fool if you died then?" "I've spent three months in an extension bubble because of that silly planet. I've made an epic journey through hyperspace with no hull. If you conquer it alone I will feel like a damn fool." Elephant looked excruciatingly unhappy. He started to speak, caught his breath -- If ever I picked the right time to shut a man up, that was the time. "Hold it. Let's call the puppeteers first. Plenty of time to decide." Elephant nodded. In a moment he'd have told me he didn't want me along because I was overly reluctant to risk bodily harm. Instead, he turned on the ship phone and dialed. J inx was a banded Easter egg below us. To the side was bloated orange Binary, the primary to which Jinx is a moon. We were close enough to talk to Jinx... and the puppeteers' transfer booth number would also be their phone number. Elephant dialed. answered. There was no picture, but I could tell: no woman's voice is quite that good. The puppeteer said, "#?" "My General Products hull just failed." Elephant was getting right to the point. "I beg your pardon?" "My name is Gregory Pelton. Twelve years ago I bought a ## hull from General Products. A month and a half ago, the hull failed. It turned to dust. We've spent the intervening time limping home. May I speak to a puppeteer?" The screen came on. Two brainless triangular heads looked out at us with one eye each. "This is quite serious," said the puppeteer, looking nothing but silly. With those floppy prehensile lips a puppeteer always looks silly. "Naturally we will pay the indemnity in full. Is that Beowulf Shaeffer?" "Yes," I said, "but let's take care of this first. Then I'll find out what you wanted to see me about." "By all means. Gregory Pelton, would you mind detailing the circumstances under which your hull disintegrated?" Gregory Pelton didn't mind at all. He was quite vehement about it. His ears and neck turned dark red; his thrusting beard seemed to acquire a life of its own. It was a pleasure to listen to him. The diffidence he'd shown the Outsiders was gone; he was treating the puppeteer like a clumsy engineer in his own factory. The alien's silly expressions never wavered, but he was blinking rapidly when Elephant finished. "I see," he said. "Our apologies are insufficient, of course, but you will understand that we made a natural mistake. We did not think that antimatter was available anywhere in Ilf the galaxy, let alone in known space, and in such quantity." Elephant's bull voice went curiously soft. "Antimatter? Did you say antimatter?" It was as if he'd screamed the word. I heard it echoing from side to side across my skull. "Of course. We offer no excuse, but you should have realized it at once. Interstellar gas of normal matter had polished the planet's surface with minuscule explosions and torn away its lithosphere down to the magma, had raised the temperature of the protosun beyond rational expectation, and was causing a truly remarkable radiation hazard. It had swept the protosun's normal collection of gas and dust completely away. Did you not even wonder about these things? You knew that the system was from beyond the galaxy. Humans tare supposed to be curious, are they not?" "The hull," said Elephant. "Yes. You are entitled to know. A General Products hull is an artificially generated molecule whose interatomic bonds are artificially strengthened by a small power source. The strengthened bonds are proof against any kind of impact, degrees. But when enough atoms had been removed from the molecule by antimatter collisions, the molecule naturally broke down." Elephant nodded. I wondered if his voice was gone for good. "When may we expect you to collect your indeminity? I gather no human was killed. This is fortunate. Our funds are low." Elephant switched off the phone. He gulped once or twice, then turned to look me in the eye. I think it took all his strength; and if I'd waited for him to speak, I don't know what he would have said. "I gloat," I said. I hate sticky scenes. "Verily I gloat. I was right, you were wrong. If we'd landed on your forsaken planet we'd have gone up in pure light. At this time it gives me great pleasure to say, I Told You So." He smiled weakly. "You told me so. Antimatter." "Oh, I did, I did. Time after time I said, That Planet's Haunted! It Will Steal Your Life And Soul, I said. There Have Been Signs in the Heavens to -- " "All right, you bastard, don't overdo it. I owe you twice my life more." "Okay, we'll drop it. But there's one thing I want you to remember." "If I don't understand it, it's dangerous." "That's the one thing I want you to remember besides I Told You So." H alf of Elephant's house was buried in the face of Elephant's cliff. The other half projected into space, without apparent support. A wide balcony ran round that exposed part, also without apparent support, and without a guard rail. The guardian force field at the edge was naturally invisible. Elephant was somewhere else, off on his own business. He had missed a pretty good dinner. IF Sharrol poured us three after-dinner drinks from a squat green bottle. It was labeled with typical flatlander verbosity: Rothschild Extra Fine Brandy Napoleon #. The fluid was clear, with a brown tinge. "One last question," said Dianna. "What did the puppeteers want with you?" "They wanted me to explore the Clouds of Magellan for them. I turned them down." The girls stared at me, then at each other. I was a convicted liar. Unfair! I'd told at least half the truth, and the rest was a puppeteer secret. They'd paid me a small "consultant's fee" to make it a privileged communication. I shrugged it off and gulped at my after-dinner drink. I was trying to cough it out of my windpipe when Elephant breezed in. "The ship's ready!" he shouted from the vestibule. "We take off in a week! What's the trouble, Bay?" By then he was on the balcony. I got my breathing under control. "Week? Take off? Ship?" "Didn't I mention any of this? Gronk. I guess I didn't. Bay, I want to go back to the protosun. I've got a GP ## hull covered a foot deep in foam plastic. There's a foot of glass over the windows; we can ditch that if it frosts up. We'll build up speed with an oversized gravity drag. Want to come along?" The thing he was carrying was four feet long, metal, covered with rolled cloth which was slightly lumpy. I recognized it as a vacuum flag, with spring wires in it, designed to look as if it's waving where there's no wind. He must have read my expression correctly ."No, idiot, I'm not going to land. What do you take me for? There's a solid rocket in the mast. I want to plant it on Swoosh from a distance. It should make quite a flash, don't you agree?" "You want me to go along?" "Sure." "The ship sounds safe enough. We've got a week?" "Just about. There's provisioning." "I'll let you know in plenty of time."  We take off tomorrow. I've got a tridee camera bolted solidly to the control board, and a contract with the biggest broadcasting company in known space. They'll have exclusive rights on the first macroscopic antimatter explosion ever recorded. This time I've got a reason for going. by Samuel R. Delany by Keith Laumer in the February Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! ' # IF  Feature L ast month in this column we were discussing the annual science-fiction achievement awards that are passed out every year at the World Science Fiction Convention. These little rocketships of stainless steel are called "Hugo Awards" in affectionate respect for Hugo Gernsback, founder of the first sciencefiction magazine in the world, Amazing Stories. Actually, as Sam Moskowitz (Fandom's unofficial historian) points out, Mr. Gernsback not only founded the first -- but the first seven sf mags in history. Hugos were first given out at the #th World SF Convention held in Philadelphia, #. The convention in San Francisco the next year omitted Hugo awards, but the custom was reinstituted at Cleveland in # and has continued ever since. Hugos have been awarded at thirteen all-but-consecutive conventions, including Cleveland '#, the most recent. Six or seven awards are made in different categories, such as best novel, best prozine (newsstand-distributed sf magazine), best short story or novelette, best fanzine, best illustrator and (sometimes) for best sf movie or tv show, most promising new author, best book publisher, etc. The exact categories are up to choice of the committee that puts on each convention. Now let's look at some of the Hugo-winners. Hugo-Winning Novels You may often have quibbles with Hollywood, when an airy bit of fluff like The Sound of Music wins the Oscar as "best picture of the year"... you may get mad at the Pulitzer people when they pass over a novel like Catch-# in favor of something nobody read or even heard of... but I'm happy to say, the Hugos are usually and almost invariably awarded to very deserving people. The first Hugo-winning novel, for example, was Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, one of the best and most important sciencefiction novels of the #'s. Could you quarrel with that choice -- or with Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (which won at Seattle in #) or Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (Washington, D.C., #)? I wouldn't, anyway. Sometimes the Hugo novel doesn't seem quite up to Hugo standards, but (as was certainly the case with Fritz Leiber's whopping Wanderer , which won a Hugo at London in #), whether it seems to quite measure up to previous Hugo winners or not, the novel that gets the award is almost always "the best of the year." Taking an over-all look at the Mst, we see that Robert A. Heinlein has won three Hugos (for Double Star, #; Starship Troopers , #; and A Stranger in a Strange Land, #). Most of the field's top writers have copped a Hugo or two: Eric Frank Russell, Murray Leinster, Jack Vance, Damon Knight, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, Avram Davidson, Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber... but there have been some very odd omissions. Whatever Happened To... ? Consider Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Damon Knight and Jack Vance. These men have produced some of the most marvelous sf novels of all time... yet Clarke has only won a single Hugo (for a short story called The Star in #), Anderson came away with two (despite his many superlative novels, he only won for a short story, The Longest Voyage in #, and for a "short fiction" called No Truce with Kings in #), and poor Damon Knight got his lone Hugo for his criticism ! Jack Vance received a Hugo for The Dragon Masters, but, although it was long enough for Ace Books to issue it as a novel, the novel award that year (#) went to Phil Dick, and Vance was left with "best short fiction." And consider that no Hugos for fiction have ever gone to L. Sprague de Camp, Frederik Pohl, Ray Bradbury, A.E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon or Keith Laumer (who certainly should have been Hugoed as "most promising new author"). Then look at the artists. In a field come certain artists virtually monopolize the Hugo for art? Frank Kelly Freas, admittedly a good man with pen or brush, won no less than four Hugos (#, '#, '#, and '#). Yet Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok had to be content with one lonely Hugo each. Even worse, Ed Emshwiller carried off a whole armful of Hugos (in #, '#, '#, '#, and #), yet Richard Powers, who has been adorning Ballantine Book's covers gorgeously for # years, hasn't won so much as one. The Magazines Things get even less fair when we turn to the prozines. The Magazine of Fantasy  Science Fiction won Hugos in #, '#, '#, and '#. Astounding (which, in midstream, changed its name to Analog) has a whole shelf-full -- eight Hugos -- yet Galaxy only won a single Hugo in #, and that was on a tie with Virginia, there are other science-fiction magazines in America) have thus far been unlucky. It doesn't seem quite fair, does it, for two magazines to come away with all but two of the fourteen Hugos thus far given out to the prozines! Happily, though, at the latest convention, the Hugo broke out of the Hugo went to... but we'll get to the # Tricon Hugos in just a bit! A New Award: The Nebula Under the leadership of Damon Knight, a new professional organization called "Science Fiction Writers of America" has come into being. A sort of sf writers' union, the as a sounding board for ideas and news and criticism, to say nothing of its service as a common meetingground where established veteran writers and first-sale newcomers can share know-how on contracts, the crotchets of various editors and publishers and so on. sented the first of a series of annual "Nebula" awards, in two dinners given simultaneously at the  The British prozine, New Worlds, won a Hugo for "best professional magazine, British." That was at the # convention in London, so it figures. -- LC Overseas Press Club in New York and at McHenry's Tail O the Cock in Beverly Hills. The Nebula was designed by Judith Ann Lawrence (Mrs. James Blish), from a design created by Kate Wilhelm (Mrs. Damon Knight), and executed by Daniel Levy of the Richley Company in New York. It consists of a spiral nebula made of metallic glitter, suspended over a crystal other-worldly landscape, all of which is "frozen" within a rectangular block of transparent lucite, with the relevant information engraved on the base. Very nifty. Winners of these first Nebulas in history were Frank Herbert, for Dune as best novel of the year; Brian W. Aldiss, for The Saliva Tree and Roger Zelazny, for He Who Shapes -- this was a tie for best novella -- and, for best novelette (I'm not sure what the difference is between a "novelette" and a "novella" but never mind), Roger Zelazny, for The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth . Last Nebula went to Harlan Ellison, for u Repent, Harlequin!" , Said the Ticktockman, as best short story. You will note that Roger Zelazny, still a newcomer to science-fiction writing, walked away with two Nebulas! The # Hugos Over the Labor Day weekend, the # World Science Convention was held in Cleveland, Ohio. The convention, I am told, had something like # paid members, some # IF of whom actually attended the Tricon, as the convention was called. The high point of every world convention, for me at least, is the Hugo presentation ceremonies. This year Hugos were given in six categories: best novel, best short fiction, best prozine, best fanzine, best artist and best all-time series. Hugo for best novel of # was -- for the first time in Hugo history -- a tie . Duplicate awards were made to Frank Herbert for Dune and to Roger Zelazny for his And Call Me Conrad. (In the paperback edition, Zelazny's novel is called This Immortal ) . Hugo for best short fiction went to former fan Harlan Ellison for -- you guessed it! -- "Repent, Harlequin !" , Said The Ticktockman. Notice how the Hugos agree very closely with the Nebulas; even to including Zelazny's The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth as a contender for the Hugo for short fiction. It was nominated, but did not win; Zelazny still managed to carry off at least one Hugo to set with his two Nebulas, though. Hugo for best artist of the year went to Frank Frazetta, one of the best artists of any year in science fiction, but particularly popular for his glorious covers on so many of the Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. Best fanzine Hugo went to discussed in this column a few issues roughs fanzines" as you might guess from the title. A special Hugo in a category new this year went to Isaac Asimov for his famous Foundation series. This category was "best all-time series," and the award strikes me as a good idea. I like the notion of a Hugoin-retrospect. In fact, I suggest that future conventions consider the idea of presenting one Hugo each year for a writer's over-all contribution to the field... like the Edgar which the Mystery Writers of America give out at their award banquets to "Grand Masters." It would be nice to establish a special Hugo for Grand Masters in science fiction. This way, today's sf fans could honor those major writers who did the bulk of their work in the science-fiction field years before the Hugo awards were even thought of. Burroughs, for example, or Doc Smith, Olaf StapleHamilton... lots of fine writers spring to mind, writers whose contributions to our field are worth a Grand Master award. I think this is a good idea, and I hope future conventions will consider it. But I've saved the most exciting Hugo of # for last. Best professional magazine of the year: this year the Hugo went to Worlds of If! Everyone connected with If is thrilled with the Hugo, including Your Man In Fandom. As witness this special issue. I f you couldn't make the Cleveland convention, start planning now for #. If you didn't agree with the choice of the '# Hugo winners, come to the convention in '# and vote yourself! The Sepia Springs Affair Snerr Sepia Springs, Idaho July #, # Dear Editor Pohl: Our remaining member of the Sepia Springs Science Fiction Club, Mr. Wright, says that Earth science fiction is extremely important, and that science-fiction editors are even more important, and that you are the leading science-fiction editor on Earth. At the moment I shall assume that you are an important person as far as this planet is concerned. To the extent that this assumption is correct, I must depend upon you to help me and inadvertently this rather trivial planet of yours. This you must do. First, simply refrain from printing any letters from anyone in Sepia Springs except those of mine. Mr. Wright, who first contacted us, persuaded us to operate within the framework of his science-fiction club when he learned that the Galactic Council had sent us to Earth to evaluate how Earth might best be utilized by the Galaxy. This has not been altogether too successful up to now. Three members left as soon as we arrived. Two of them out the door and one through a window. The fourth, Joe Smith, a more obnoxious sort, looked at Rhudly, the porcelain man and said, "Snow White! That's worse than black! In fact, all of you belong under a flat rock!" Then, turning to Elaysia, he told her, "That goes for you too. Miss Overendowed! Six is uncouth!"  Mr. Wright explained, "Misguided survival instincts -- we usually call it 'race prejudice.'" I don't know everything, but I do know what is right, and I must say you will be wise to do as I direct you at all times. Sincerely yours, Snerr, Ex. Sec.  Sergeant at Arms This are Hurd the Turtle. Is great to read "IF." # Robot read "IF" to Hurd and Moby. Hurd Klip Sepia Springs, Idaho July #, # Sir Frederik Pohl, editor "IF" #I Hudson St. N.Y. N.Y. # Dear Sir  Editor: I am a loyal "IF" fan. The August issue made a very fine chaser for the Idaho Jackrabbit I had for lunch. Nothing like a bit of quality cellulose and glue to settle a stomach. It keeps the old chitin in shape. I do miss seafood, fresh seafood and alive! That stuff they bring to "The Club." I wish I had brought some of my offsprings along! They could have forged for themselves until they were edible. Of course there is always the danger that -- Ah, well, you, Sir, have been pointed out to me as a man of both means and discernment. Is there a decent seafood house on this planet? And would they ship food to me? The last time I went out for dinner one of the natives stuck me in a pot and started to heat the water. It cost Mr. Wright what was left of his fifth to buy me back. Your pronouncements are awaited with relish. Your loyal and obedient servant, Klip Amphibia II Member in good IF Gleep July #, # Hi! What a blast! Mr. Wright told all of us to write lots of letters to you because you don't do anything but sit around and read all day. You humans play rough! Lucky I'm a tough silicoid creature. The Club went out last night to watch the Sepia Springs fireworks. We carried our "IF" signs to show that we were true s.f. fans. A native spotted me by the light of a rocket blast and yelled, "Hey, Charlie, look -- a plucked parrot with an 'IF' sign! What's an 'IF,' something to eat?" The one called Charlie said, "Parrots don't have webbed feet and they don't carry signs like rabble-rousers. I don't know what it is so let's get rid of it." Then the first one said, "Charlie, you are a real philosopher. Let's tie it to a rocket and give the kids a thrill to go with their popcorn." That was quite a ride! After I dug myself out of the ground, I felt a little dizzy so I went back to the club house for the night. The club sort of broke up the celebrations or started one... Some native women spotted Elaysia, called her a "damn-show-off," and started throwing empty bottles at her. Mr. Wright took Elaysia away. He is always doing that for one reason or another. It was all a lot of fun. Your pal, Gleep Rosco Wright Art Department Sepia Spring College Sepia Springs, Idaho July #, # Frederik Pohl, editor IF Dear Fred: Sort of interesting things may be developing around the local s.f. club. I'll tell you about it at the next convention if you remind me. I'd write more but I've been getting tangled up with a little problem in topology. You know me, always have myself buried up to the eyeballs in some hairy project. No time for fun! Last issue of "IF" Yours, Rosco Rhudly July #, # Dear Mr. Pohl: I'm trying to do my job and taking time, just to please Mr. Wright, to keep you informed on events. Events aren't too promising. It is like this. I went into "The Counter," and had lunch. The people stared at me but I expect that on an isolated planet. When I went out onto the street, a couple of husky young ranch hands stepped up to each side of me and grabbed my arms. I could have tossed them half across the street but regulations say that I'm supposed to make every effort to cooperate with local inhabitants. The dark-haired man said, "You know, chum, this climate is going to get awfully cold for the likes of you in the winter time. Forty below, you know!" I politely said, "Thank you for your concern. I can stand a greater temperature range than that. My survival index is the highest of any known race in the galaxy." The light fellow said, "We don't give a damn about your survival index or whatever you call it. Just be a good fellow and let us put you on the bus and send you south." I told him: "I appreciate your interest, gentlemen, but I have a job to do here and I never shirk my duty." "Don't feel bad, chum," said the dark one, "no one is going to miss you. We are your friends. Nothing personal in this, chum, but we want to help you get out of town for your own good." "Nice of you to look after me. I hadn't realized you people were so thoughtful of your fellow man." The light one dug an elbow into my ribs. I think it hurt him a little. He winced and said, "Hell! What do you wear, armor? Lay off this goddamned 'fellow man' stuff. We took up a collection to buy you a ticket and here it is for Los Angeles, they will never notice you there." The dark one planted a boot heel on my toe. It would probably have mashed an Earth foot. He glared at me. "So you gonna take the friendly gift and beat it, or are we gonna have to see you again with less friendly ideas?" I told them I was sorry but I had to stay. Then I let them hit me and kick me. They both split their fists on my jaw and ran away holding their hands and swearing. It is a handicap being sort of a superman. I can't even make love to a woman not of my own race, because I'd squash them. Elaysia looks good to me, but I have to let Wright have her. Most sincerely yours, Rhudly Klip July #, # Sir Frederik Pohl, editor "IF" Dear Sir  Editor: Earth creatures are my type of IP people. This town is called Sepia Springs because the city water supply goes through Jim "Jolly" Green's sheep lambing pens before the city picks it up for their water supply. "Jolly" is the city water commissioner and gets a monthly rental for the city use of his lambing pens besides his salary. He's a good man. Forget the seafood idea. I just made a deal with a local cafe. They have trouble getting good fresh crab. Back home we have a problem with overpopulation. I happen to have connections with an interstellar shipper who has great respect for the dollar. By the way, I know a lithographer in Cheyenne who can lithograph that mag of yours in three colors for half of what those con-men are soaking you. Do come to Sepia Springs for crab salad, and maybe we can work something out for your own best interest. Your obedient servant Klip of Amphibia II Sanitary Inspector Sepia Springs, Idaho Snerr Sepia Springs, Idaho # July #, # Dear "Editor" Pohl: I tried to signal the Galactic Council for help, but Klip has redesigned # Robot "to do something else" -- freight routing, he calls it. I'm sure that it is something dishonest, dangerous and maybe even immoral. Klip has gotten in with some corrupt natives. Hurd and Moby dare not leave the club house. Klip tried to sell Moby for photographic gelatin and he wanted to use Hurd for soup and what he had in mind for Elaysia was really just awful. Lilly Bell is going subversive. Being a tree, her excuse is that she must be firmly entrenched on good solid ground with all roots deep in ultraconservatism. Hogal, the great snake, on the other hand, has neither feet or roots and he is taking up with a group of natives in opposition to Lilly Bell. I warn you, Mr. Editor, I know what is right, so print none of these subversive letters. Sincerely yours, Snerr Sepia Spring, Idaho # Lilly Bell Sepia Springs, Idaho July #, # Dear Editor: I read that letter by that sneak, Snerr! Her trouble is that she thinks no one is trustworthy unless they reproduce by cilia. As for me, I trust everyone, once they are able to see the truth. We tree people have our roots firmly planted on good solid ground. It does my xylem and phloem good to see a small but determined segment of the Sepia Springs population standing firmly behind great ideals. I refer to the members of the "Old Sod Society." The "Old Sod Society" is against taxes, out of staters, Galactic interference in planetary affairs, sanitary inspectors, pelio, electricity, big business and non-members. We favor everybody living right, poverty for the poor, local business if it is run right, the return of the horse and buggy, a seventy-year life limit for all but the bad people and the good old days. How do you stand, sir? For God and Country, Lilly Bell P.S. I have withdrawn from the Sepia Springs Science Fiction Club. The members all live in the same building, and I think this is subversive. Moby July #, # Dear Kind Editor, Please send me some magazines to read. I am sending you some old copies for trade. I hate to give them up, they were so nice. I would go out and get my own copies, but the last time I went to the newsstand some terrible things happened to the cars on the streets and some other small Earth people yelled, "There is always room for Jell-O!" Sincerely your fan, Moby  # Robot S. P. Idaho # Robot Klipp July #, # Sir Frederik Pohl, Editor "IF" Dear Sir  Editor: If you would reaffirm your good nature and advance me five thousand, I can double your money in two weeks -- less my special hazard fee, of course. I happen to have located a wholesale source of rifles and shotguns. Sepia Springs is about to split up into two war-ready factions; the Old Sod Society and the Carea-care Committee. If I swing it just right, I am in a position to sell arms to both sides. Hogal and Lilly Bell are perfect rabble rousers. Too bad they are going to end up in the soup -- but that will be a little more pocket money for us. IF That's the way the satellite orbits, as the old Earth saying goes. If you are a bit short at the moment, dip into the company kitty and cut those word rates. No one will know the difference. A man of your taste and judgment deserves the best, and I, sir, am in a position to let you have it. Your obedient servant, Klip of Amphibia II Sanitary Inspector Chairman of Mutual Benefit Syndicate President of General Promotions Sepia Springs, Idaho # July #, # Dear Editor, Since I landed on Earth I have never had so much fun in my life. Why would anyone want to fight? Love, Elaysia Snerr July #, # Dear Editor Pohl: I don't think you really are the most important man on Earth. I think Mr. Wright has grossly misrepresented Earth culture. When I get back to the Galactic Council I can assure you that some life contracts will be terminated. Moby is about ready to split in two. If he thinks that will entitle him to two salaries, he is going to have to face me before the Galactic Council. Those peraiecoids should never have been admitted to Galactic membership, let alone sent on this mission. They are just big helpless blobs, and have no character. They should be institutionalized and sterilized. The rest of the committee is still a mess. That pin-head Gleep is a happy parasite. Klip is a thoroughgoing outlaw. Rhudly sits and broods because the natives don't like him, but I always say, you never can expect much of a native. Thank the powers I never was a native. This mission has been thwarted. Recognizing this, I must officially warn you: the day of purity is at hand! Most fairly yours, Snerr Member Board of Censors Sepia Springs City Hall Sepia Springs, Idaho # August I , # Sir Frederik Pohl, editor "IF" Dear Sir  Editor: I regret, my dear friend, that you were unable to come forth with the five thousand dollars to help finance the ammunitions effort. I had hoped to give you a little rakeoff after the blood dried up and I had accessed my own personal expenses. As usual, I managed quite well on my own. The arms have been sold. A local banker, who had been indiscreet with another man's wife, saw fit to better himself by financing me. Lilly Bell and Hogal are indignant, but things are going so smoothly that the matter is completely out of their control. I don't think that there will be one brick left on another or one window intact in Sepia Springs in a few days. I now have a substantial account in a Swiss bank. However, it is temporarily encumbered with red tape. If you could advance me a mere ten thousand it will make you a hundred thousand in two months. That could finance some format improvements for "IF," you know. You might drop me the ten thousand in cash to my new headquarters, # Salvadore Street, Los Angeles, California. I shall be moving from large city to large city at regular intervals. As my kind old grandfather said before I had him for dinner, "The loot follows the population." If you would care to stake me from time to time, I'm certain that you will become the richest native on Earth. Your obedient servant Klip Civil Expeditor Chairman Swiss Investments of Salvadore St. August #, # Dear Editor: What kind of a world is this? A white man can't even get served in a bar! "The Counter" takes my money, why can't I buy a drink? I think I will cast a "no" vote for this planet if Klip brings back that robot. But first, I'm going to try  IF every place in town -- they can't all be bad. Disgruntled, Rhudly Pinney-Dew Lodge Sun Valley, Idaho August #, # Dear Fred, I'm going to be tied up with an education conference at this motel for some time. If there are any urgent communications, write me here. However, as this matter involves campus politics, please keep my whereabouts confidential. Yours, Rosco Gleep August #, # Hi! Editor Pohl! This Earth assignment is a living scream. There is a group down in the "Cabbage Patch," with Hogal, firing some real cheap rifles up towards the highlands, and Lilly Bell has another outfit firing cheap rifles in the general direction of the "Cabbage Patch." Moby split and the two of him take up the spare bedroom. Hurd moved into the basement because he doesn't like the sound of rifle bullets. Snerr has started to grow cilia. Elaysia and Mr. Wright went away. They told Snerr they were going to make a study of fringe benefits in human economy. If you ask me, Snerr is just jealous because sprouting cilia isn't as much fun as Earth fringe benefits, if you get what I mean. Your pal, Gleep Rhudly August #, # Sepia Springs City Jail Dear Mr. Pohl, Gleep, being a small organism, can move around more than the rest of us. He is also a very cooperative type, and I am told that he has what humans call an "exuberant sense of humor." Whatever it is, I appreciate that he has called at the jail yard, where they let me walk one hour a day. It happened like this. I went into the fifth bar, and it wasn't a nice place, but they served me a drink. I was sitting in my booth sipping an Earth type called "Jack Daniels" when this beautiful young Earth girl came in and sat on my lap and put her arms around me. She made me feel good. I do have glands, you know, under this tough white hide. I was on my fourth "Jack Daniels" and afraid even to lift her off my lap for fear I might crush her bones. She started kissing me. She wore purple lipstick, which probably looks bad on white skin. Then in came three men, and one of them said, "You freak S.O.B.! You're fooling around with my wife!" He pulled out a hand gun and shot me five times. The last bullet hit the end of my nose, and I guess I lost my temper. I jumped up, dumped the girl on the floor, and swung my fist at the man. I caught myself in mid-swing and tried to stop, but I did barely knick him on the chin. He is in the hospital with a broken jaw, cracked neck and concussion. If he dies, the guard tells me, I'll be hung for murder. Gleep says hanging me is about the funniest thing he ever heard of. I read about humor once, and I guess he is right, but I just can't experience the emotion. The guards hit me with a rubber hose. I told them that if it would make them feel any better they could use a piece of pipe. That Snerr upset them. I must have violated a cultural taboo. The council warned us against that. I could break out of here easily, but courtesy demands that I remain here and not offend my host until relieved of duty by the Galactic Council. Patiently, Rhudly HOgal Sepia Springs Care-a-care Society August #, # Dear Frederik Pohl and Company: In a few days comes the revolution. Are you with us? Your chairman, Hogal For Independence and Freedom Lilly Bell Sepia Springs Old Sod Society August #, # Dear Editor: Please state your position. You are either with us or against us. No other position is allowed. There is no such thing as a neutral position or a third side. You are free to join us or die. Your chairman, Lilly Bell For Independence and Freedom Snerr August #, # Mr. Pohl! The day of purity is at hand! My children are hidden in flower boxes all over town. They are small, IF but they will grow and we will save you from yourselves. Mr. Wright and Elaysia are gone, and that reminds me. After I have taken over, a little adjusting of the to reproduce by cilia shedding, a much more moral way than your present method. One of the first things I must do is eliminate pleasure. You will then see that most of your problems will be over. Believe me, I know what is best for you. Sincerely, Snerr Protector of Mankind Grand Leader of the Big Cilia Club Klip # Salvadore St. Los Angeles, California August #, # Sir Frederik Pohl, Editor "IF" Dear Sir  Editor: I tell you I know when to jump orbits. The general area of Sepia Springs is occupied by Snerr's misbegotten offspring. And if your Pentagon brass knew what was going on here, they'd drop an H bomb on the town. They complain about me selling my relatives for crab salad! Nonsense! Each race has its own brand of evil, and even that changes with the winds of time. The only true virtue is achievement, my friend. I've got the finest thing going here. You can probably guess what it is. I need # for guns and knives. I've got a shipment of ammunition tied up at cost plus ten. but get me the cash right away. You never had such a good offer in your life. Your obedient servant, Klip Rhudly Sepia Springs City Jail August #, # Dear Editor Pohl: Since you are so inadvertently involved with us, I will write this letter to you. This is unofficial, of course. Sepia Springs did not recognize good will and innocence in Hurd and Moby, because they were, to your Snerr dominate it because she was an aggressive bitch and no one stopped her. Lilly Bell, Hogal and Klip conned you from the start. They were too non-human to date your daughters and seemed to offer an easy way to get something for nothing. Gleep is a happy-go-lucky character with a tough hide. He just invites abuse from # sour dispositioned societies. But, like me, he is too tough to get hurt. Elaysia can primarily test the tolerance of Earth women and some of them evidently can't stand the competition. Elaysia is from a race of great lovers. I am human even if I am tough and I could date your daughters, and I look like you except for my porcelain white skin, which reflects light nicely and prevents sunburn. Humans get badly shaken the moment they face me -- except for Mr. Wright, and he thinks I'm funny, which I am not. I don't really have much of a sense of humor, but that is a cultural characteristic of my race. In any event, I'm human even if I am white. I must recommend a guarantee of Earth. Regretfully, Rhudly P. S. I talked to Wright on the phone, and he said he needed some more vitamins. Perhaps you can help him? Pinney Dew Lodge Sun Valley, Idaho August #, # Dear Fred, Stories may come a little more slowly. Elaysia is going to be terrific as soon as she learns to type. Best regards, Rosco Galactic Time ooX# Frederik Pohl, Earth Editor: "IF" Dear Editor: I was overruled, and it is only fair to tell you that the Galactic Council decided our visit to Earth was "inconclusive." They fired all of us. I found a new job, a lousy one, but I have had my revenge. I managed to help Klip and Elaysia remain behind on Earth. Good luck, Rhudly Opodipapod Salesman Quagmire II Sepia Springs October #, # Frederik Pohl Editor "IF" Dear Sir: Regardless of what the newscasts say or what my husband says, the Sepia Springs Affair is not quite over. In fact, if that elongated hussy doesn't hustle herself a new job as of today, she is going to be looking for six band-aids. Sincerely yours, Edith Wright Klip  General Delivery Omaha, Nebraska October #, # Sir Frederik Pohl, Editor "IF" Dear Sir and Editor: I'll be in your office at #:# a.m. tomorrow. I have a little insurance company underway, and I am looking for an experienced, alert executive, such as yourself, who would like to buy into the company and retire. Your obedient servant, Klip President: Executive's Protective Mutual P.S. I sent a stupid nephew back to the Galactic Council in my place. Most races think we crabs all look IF Where Are the Worlds of Yesteryear? Illustrated by Oh, where are the moss-covered, ochre Barsoomian plains, With thoat-riding, swordwielding, ruddy-skinned heroes so gay, And wandering war-bands of Warhoons in zitidar wains? The cold wind of science has blown them away. And what has become of the boundless Venerian bog, Where slimy and sinuous reptile did slither and slay, And princesses fled from malevolent foes through the fog? The brisk breeze of knowledge has blown them away. And what of the fountains and fanes of Atlantis the fair, Which rose from the waves in the West -- or so Plato did say -- Its sorcerer-kings, and its spires of orichalc rare? in the dry blast of reason they've withered away. But if Venus and Mars become lifeless and dull, and if no Atlantis existed outside a poetical lay, These luminous figments live on in our fancy, although The breath of discovery wafts them away. IF  Serial ff ff YY ff YY YY YY YY ff The Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys What has gone before Honor Jackson was a loner , he roamed  round the world . The world was flat and circular; a sunken desert , cold, wanly lit, nearly airless. At its center was the Thorn -- a high, blunt, nearly featureless metal tower. It was the precarious source of the only water, breath and livable climate for the Farmers . The Farmers tilled the fields packed around the Thorn, and supported the Honors. Honors occasionally ventured out into the desert wearing portable climate units they thought were hats, and honned Am sirs. Amsirs were vicious, horn-clad, flightless, winged animals who would have gotten in and eaten up all the Farmers if the Honors hadn't protected them. Like a lot of other things, Honor Jackson found out when he became a full-fledged Honor , that was pretty much a lie , maintained by the Eld Honor and his bully-boys for their own comfort . For one thing , the Amsirs were less vicious , better armed , #m had a bigger vocabulary than the Honors. To say nothing of the Farmers. Being nobody's fool , Jackson was pretty much on his way to being just about everybody's enemy. So he left the Thorn , left his solitary home and all his drawings, left his life, left even Petra Jovans -- who just might have come along if he'd asked her -- and went out into the desert, where a man would choke and freeze to death in a dozen dozen heartbeats if he lost his cap or got out of line-ofsight of the Thorn. He took his Amsir-bone throwing stick and his two glass-headed darts with him. Even so, Red Filson chased him down; he got one of Filson' s darts through his elbow and damn near died before he could kill the man and surrender to a Amsir. The Amsir dressed him in warm robes of human skin and took him to the rim of the world, where he found the rim of another world, full of thick air, choked to the rim with food, and centering on a Thorn much more magnificent than his own. Soaring around the Thorn were Amsirs. The food, unfortunately, could only be eaten by Amsirs; to Jackson's kind of creature it was just so much rock-mold. And despite anything a Amsir doctor could do for him, his arm was dying. It turned out the Amsirs had a habit of capturing Jackson's kind of creature because only Jackson's kind of creature could help them with their problem . Their problem was a smaller , somewhat Thorn-like thing standing up on the ground beside their Thorn. Like their Thorn and Jackson's Thorn it had been there since the beginning of time . Jackson's kind of creature could at least mess around its outside, even if fruitlessly. But no Amsir could get at it. It killed them. The Amsirs, science-minded as well as inclined to theological disputation, felt all the answers to the origin of the world and the maintenance of the gradually deteriorating Thorns might lie inside the Thorn Thing. In any case, they couldn't ignore it, so one after another of Jackson's kind had been trying to open the adamantly closed door to the Thorn Thing for the Amsirs, spurred by the hope-, there might be something to eat in there. Up till now they had all starved to death . The Amsir equivalent of the Eld had some hope Jackson would show better luck. Jackson, after all, was the first of his kind to surrender voluntarily, and he was obviously intelligent in other ways besides. The Eld Amsir didn't feel he could take too many chances with Jackson. So he set a guard on him -- Ahmuls, the incredibly stupid, half-baked, flabby-skinned, wingless Amsir whom the Thorn Thing apparently mistook for Jackson's kind of creature, because it didn't try to kill him , either. It just wouldn't open its door, and meanwhile kept growling something in its low , ugly voice . Jackson finally got mad at the door and spoke to it . In fact , he reasoned with it, was what he did, and the door opened . It turned out the door had been trying to speak the speech of Amsirs and Jackson s kind of creature -- it just didnt speak fast enough . When the door opened, and Jackson and Ahmuls found themselves inside a very small room, it kind of went to show that both Jackson and Ahmuls were the Thorn Thing s kind of creature, too . This series of events unquestionably held deep scientific and theological meaning to the Eld Amsir. But he reacted just as if he were hopping mad . When the outside door closed again, there were spears rebounding from it . Meanwhile, inside, Jackson and Ahmuls crouched nervously as the other door of the little room slipped back, and they were able to see into the inside of the Thorn Thing. # #tt T hat's happening?" Ahmuls VV said unhappily, peering into the Thorn Thing, jerking his head back to look over his shoulder every time another spear point hit the other side of the door, but then peering again. Things were beginning to hum inside the Thorn Thing. Jackson could see light getting brighter, dancing around in there; he could hear things going clickety-click. Most of all he could feel how strong the Thorn was becoming. All around them, a voice like the voice of the door said: "Uhhcumminngg uhup t full pow'r!" Farther inside the Thorn Thing the same voice said: "Standing by on full power. Main generators On, maintenance power supply Off! Condition of vessel report: All systems functional and reliable. Maintenance Mode battery drain excessive; recharging." "What's happening I ?" Ahmuls cried. "Don't look at me, chum," Jackson said quickly, "I haven't picked up any weapons." "You better not!" "I know." Jackson had his feet firmly under him and moved to the doorway that led deeper inside the Thorn Thing. "Will you look at all that machinery." "What are we going to do! Who'd want to stay in here!" Ahmuls wailed. Jackson listened to the tang! tang! tang! of spears hitting the outside of the Thorn Thing. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "Is anyone going to take command?" the door-voice said inside the Thing. I haven't worked that out yet, friend, Jackson said to himself. Any minute now this clown is going to decide something's a weapon. It's a little hard, taking command when you're dead. But I'm sure not going to take my orders from him -- he's worse even than Eld. Jackson felt funny. There was all this humming and buzzing; all these voices talking and doors opening; all these things happening that he maybe could have enjoyed if he'd come on them a little bit at a time, IF all ready to take them on or maybe take them apart. Maybe be them, or maybe picture them. But with a stomach and an arm and spear sounds and an Ahmuls like he had, he didn't feel all that ready. "Command must be exercised within a reasonable period of time," the voice said. "Huh?" Ahmuls said. "Command must be exercised! Stasis wastes power!" Nag, nag, nag, Jackson thought. Whatever stasis is. "All right," he yelled. "What'll make you happy?" # # Tj' unction. Duties to perform. I A I cannot come to full power for nothing!" "Listen, you quit talking to it!" Ahmuls said. "You've done enough already." "Listen, no weapons, right?" Jackson said to him, holding out his empty hands. "I'm supposed to talk to it, remember?" He raised his voice. "You got a name, voice?" Ahmuls was frowning, Jackson guessed. Maybe he'd stay busy that way just a little bit longer. "My name is Self-Sustaining Interplanetary Expeditionary Module," the voice said. "Call me Susiem." "What can you do?" "Anything! Anything a Susiem can do." You wouldn't think that was a lot of help, Jackson thought. But there was one thing he knew a Susiem could do, and it was with doors. He bounced off Ahmuls to get farther inside the Thorn Thing. "Close that door!" he yelled, and as he lay there on the floor again, he found that to the now more distant and less frequent sound of spears against the outside door was added the soft klop! of Ahmuls, trapped in the little room, beating his fist against the inside door. Jackson shook his head and looked around. The room he was in was full of machinery; metal and glass all over the place, humped, twisted, full of knobs and points, flashing and gleaming, humming -- "That's great. But I don't see anything to eat." "Certainly not! Do you think you're in the mess compartment?" Susiem said. "You trying to say there's another room here, where there's food?" "I can do anything a Susiem can do!" Susiem said. Klop , klop , klop, Ahmuls said. "Boy, he talks plainer than you do," Jackson said. "All right, how do I get to that other room? And don't open that door until I say so! By the way, if you've got food, you wouldn't happen to have a doctor? I could use one." "Certainly I won't open the door! You're in command! Report to Sick Bay immediately." "They got food there?" "Medical treatment takes precedence over rations. Report to Sick Bay." I'm in command, Jackson thought. "Where's Sick Bay?" S usiem led him back to Sick Bay by simply having him follow lights that kept turning on just ahead of him as he walked through a door and then down a ladder and through another door. Sick Bay was all white except where it was hare metal. The doctor was white and bare metal, and he had wheels. He unstoppered himself from a doctor-shaped hole in the wall and came rolling forward like a plow. He came to about the height of Jackson's chest. "State your complaint," he said. "My arm's going to have to come off," Jackson said, looking at the doctor carefully, deciding to believe Susiem when it said "This is the doctor." "You're not competent to prognose. State your complaint. How do you account for the fact that you don't match any comparison in my files? Show proof you're entitled to receive medical treatment from this station." "Emergency, Doctor," Susiem said. "This man is in command." "You'll have to fill out forms," the doctor said. A hard, soft-white square on its top turned a very pale white-green. A stick popped up most of the way out of a hole beside the square. "Take the pen." Jackson pulled it out curiously. It was the same shape and about the same length as the burnt sticks he had left behind at his home Thorn. But it wasn't burnt -- it was light, felt soft at the surface but was as rigid as metal, felt slick, but didn't slip from his fingers. At the very end of it was what looked like a little ball of glass. "Well?" Jackson peered at the greenwhite square. There were lines running across it now, bright white. At the beginnings of the lines there were shapes of some kind -- patterns made out of lines, bent and crossing each other. "Kind of pretty," he said. "Criticism is not your function. Fill out the forms." Susiem said. "Well, let him make some kind of mark," the doctor said impatiently. "I'm sure there are others waiting. He's wasting time." "He's in command." "Well, then he certainly ought to be literate." # ook -- I order you to make yourself understandable," Jackson told the doctor. "My arm hurts, and I'm hungry." "Do you know how to make a mark? Make a mark on the surface of the plate with the lightpen. I have to have some sort of identification for you or I can't file you. And if I can't file you, you're lost." "Oh. You just want to be able to find me again. Well, here's what I look like." The little ball slipped much too easily over the top of the plate, if that was what you called it, but the light-pen, or whatever, left a nice white line behind it. Jackson started turning his wrist to thicken and thin it, and that didn't work, but by and large he had a pretty good picture of himself down on the plate very soon. For good measure, he took one corner of the plate and made a drawing of his arm IF bones, showing where the dart had gone in. "That's what's wrong with me. The dart's been pulled out, but the arm died." The doctor and Susiem didn't say anything for a little bit. Finally the doctor said: "Your knowledge of anatomy isn't bad." "Draws well, too," Susiem said. "You can tell what you're looking at. Not like this paraphrastic stuff they do." "The arm," Jackson said. "Certainly the arm," the doctor answered. "Uh -- let's just have an overall look at you, while we're about it." The doctor shimmied back and forth on his wheels for a moment. There was a little humming plow-noise inside him. "Hmm. Yes. Well -- you've certainly led an active life. But it's all healed very nicely -- barring some of the fresh events, of course. The only one that we need to do anything much about is in that elbow joint. You're going to need a restoration there. Your blood sugar is a little low. Are you fatigued?" "Huh?" "Are you tired?" "Damn right. Hungry, too." "Well, I can introduce a little protein into your system, I suppose, while we're working on the arm, but I imagine you'd rather have a ham sandwich. Susiem, why don't you get the captain here some nourishment while I'm taking care of this." The doctor came apart, partway, with some kind of flip of his sides, which turned into a kind of chair-cradle. The seat and back, and the part that went under the legs,  --  were padded, and so was the place for Jackson's right arm to rest. A trough that extended partway into the back rest was for Jackson's left arm. It was bare metal, and a little bar of light popped out on two stalks over it, lighting up the leather wrappings as Jackson sat down. # ick call takes precedence over  mess," Susiem said. "I see no reason why he can't be treated and then go to where the food is." "I said bring him something!" the doctor snapped. "He's undernourished, he's got one arm free to serve himself with, and besides, rank has its privileges." "If you record it as a prescription, doctor." "I do." "Very well," Susiem said. Something began to stir around one compartment lower down. "I'm breaking out a food cart." "For a machine," Jackson said to the doctor, "you got more sense than people." "Damn right," the doctor said. "Now let's get this slop off your limb. Who's been treating you -- some veterinarian?" "What's thatV "Captain, you need an education." "What's that?" "What you need." Maybe the doctor didn't want to go 'round and 'round any more; maybe he figured he could keep Jackson busy with something else. At any rate, something that must have been a knife zipped down the length of Jackson's arm. It laid open the wrappings as neat as any slash Jackson had ever seen. It laid open his arm too, and it sure did cut down on his desire to do much talking. He sat there staring at his own bones, pink-white, in the halved shell of his arm. All around the torn, discolored place where Red Filson's dart had gone in onits way to the elbow joint, it looked like something rotten. Sparks -- maybe metal, maybe light -- winked and flashed around the bone. There was a cloudy white puff of fog where the joint was; there was a suck of air and that was gone, whuummph ! and then the joint was gone. The bones of his upper and lower arm didn't meet by a full third of a dozen finger-widths. More sparks, and the ends were notched and drilled, the way a carpenter might make a pegged splice. The rotten place in the meat of his arm was getting less. Healthy-looking stuff was replacing it. His whole arm was tingling. The bar of light above it seemed to be shivering. Something like a little doctor came rolling in the door, and flipped open its top. Steaming warmth hit Jackson in the nose like the clout of a damp, hot, table rag. He'd never smelled anything so strong in his life. It poured right up his nose and seemed to fill his whole head. He blinked; it was making his eyes water. Lying on a dish were some greens with somethihg greasy-looking on them, a round ball of something white and made out of small parts that looked like maggots, and a rounded squishy-looking brown thing that looked like what you might find under a Amsir house, if it had been drier. Next to it was something with IF a long slim handle and four long curved points, a folded-up white hunk of something that might have been Amsir lace shaved until it was thin and crinkly, and a glass of what would have looked like milk if it hadn't been so white and opaque. "Lunch," Susiem said. "Salisbury steak with roquefort salad and rice. Enjoy it, Captain." Jackson couldn't make up his mind whether to look at his lunch or his arm.  T he doctor was really getting things done in there. Delicate stilty little fingers with hinges in them came popping out of his inside, from under the same overhang that the bar of light came from. They were carrying a woven white contraption that Jackson saw was a little like what would happen if you took a drawing of an elbow joint and bent it around so that it was an elbow joint no matter what direction you looked at it from. He found this out because the little fingers stuck it right in there, and other little fingers put pegs in place, and in a trice where his elbow had been was this white drawing, snugly slipped into place. He could see right through it, of course, but it looked pretty strong and solid all by itself. "Okay," the doctor said. "That's what we call a jig-splint. In a couple of hours, you'll have a pretty good structure of bone cells forming along that grid, and in a day or so that'll be as good as new." The two halves of Jackson's arm were pushed back together as the walls of the trough gently squeezed shut around them. The trough wiggled its halves back and forth tor an instant until the halves of Jackson were lined up just right. Then they fell back and where the cut had been there was a very thin line, like the scratch of a playful woman, running along the seam. For the first time since the doctor started, Jackson saw blood. It stood up in droplets like pinheads along the scratch, already scabbed and hard. The cut lengths of the Amsir doctor's arm-wrapping lay in the trough for an instant and then puffed out with a flash, a fog of smoke and a whooph ! "Eat your lunch," the doctor said. Jackson tested his arm. The "lunch" still looked like what it had looked like before. The arm was great. He twisted and stretched it, making a fist, squeezing, trying to see if it would pop open into two halves. It wouldn't. He rapped his elbow with the knuckles of his right hand. It sounded hollow. It didn't sound like him at all. I t didn't seem possible he had eaten. But Susiem had said: "If you think I'm going to throw away this perfectly good food, and go to the trouble of synthesizing burnt Amsir, if that's what it's called, and whole grain bread, when the whole basis of your being here is that you're human..." Jackson had to admit Salisbury steak, rice and roquefort salad wasn't bad. He licked the leftovers off his fingers. But he drew the line at what humans called milk; he finally got some water instead. He sat back. The doctor was still letting him sit in him. "You know," Jackson said, "it's funny how it works out. Here the Eld Amsir was jollying me along with lots of fine talk about maybe there was food in here, and something to do about my arm, and be damned if there wasn't. Feels pretty good. Thanks, the two of you." "What are your further orders, Captain?" Susiem said impatiently. "Well... I don't know. Is there some place around here for me to sleep?" "You don't need any right now," the doctor said. v" Sleepl " Susiem said simultaneously. "Here you've got everything turned on, and you're going to sleepl" "Well, it's something us humans do. Whether they need it or not. Can't tell when your next chance is going to be." "Humans," the doctor said, "sleep at set, regular times. The sort of humans we are accustomed to." "That's right," Susiem said. "Stasis wastes power!" Oh boy, it never stops, Jackson thought, even with machines. "Well, look -- you must have had other captains -- " "I should say so!" "What did you do when they slept?" "When they slept, the First Officer was awake. Don't you know anything about being human?" "He needs an education," the doctor said. "More than I need a first officer?" "What about the individual in the air lock? Isn't that your first officer?" "Him?" All Ahmuls was in Jackson's head right now was a Klop, klop, klop on the inside door. That was enough. He still hadn't decided what to do about that. But why did he have to decide now? It wasn't as if he was going to spend the rest of his life anywhere else but here. Being captain. When the machines didn't have something else in mind. "What's a first officer do? I go one's pretty good with a spear, I guess. But spearing don't seem to be much needed. I mean, you're made out of metal Doctor, and I don't even know where you are, Susiem." Susiem giggled. "All right, that does it," the doctor said. "I'm prescribing this boy a university. You do have the necessary fact library, don't you?" "Self-Sustaining Interplanetary Expeditionary Modules are, self-evidently, self-sustaining," Susiem answered, as the doctor's arms immediately, but gently, unfolded additional sections that held Jackson by the wrists. The seat changed slope, so that he was mostly lying down. "No need to get offended about it. Just be ready to patch through into my inputs when I say the word. And no stirring around in my banks while we're overlapping, either -- everybody thinks all they need to be doctors themselves is facts. Just get the tibias and the cytoplasms in the right place and anybody can be a sawbones! That's what you think. So stay out and do your job, and I'll do mine." What the hell were they up to? IF Jackson made one try at getting his arms out, which taught him he couldn't do it. Anyhow, supposing he'd get loose, where was he going to run to? Outside? Through the little room with Ahmuls klopping in it? But what the hell were they up to? Round pads came from somewhere behind Jackson's head and pressed it close among them, front and back, both sides.   A #I right, I'm hitting him with the predisposants now." A little thing like a hollow spearpoint whipped out of the doctor's insides, darted at Jackson's throat, stopped short but close and fired something cold and stinging into the place where the heavy throb of blood came near the surface of the skin. Jackson felt it just for a heartbeat, and he was still admiring how fast the little dojigger moved and how keen it looked, when it flipped back and disappeared. "Massive dose," the doctor commented. "I judge that with this individual, he'd better be predisposed to about the same extent as you'd need to teach a horse symphonic composition." Jackson could feel something very funny happening to his eyes and ears. Sounds were beginning to break up into little reverberating pieces. First the edges of everything he could see were blurred, and then he was weeping. Moisture -- great, glittering streams of tears -- pooled out on his helpless lids and sheeted down his face. A bulky, warm feeling spread out from the pit of his stomach. His fingers felt as if his palms were split painlessly and smoothly along each string of bones clear back to his wrists. The same time his eyes ran wet, his lips were puffy and dry, and the same time his belly was warm, his forehead was icy cold. He swallowed, and his ears popped. He blinked, and his tearfilled eyes felt sandy. "He's ready," the doctor said. There was another fine, cold spray at the back of Jackson's neck. "Inputs going in now." Something fine and ticklish as Petra Jovan's hair came in through the back of Jackson's neck, slipped gracefully to the inside of his head, and for all he knew, wove themselves into tapestries there. "All right, patch in," the doctor said. Whatever patching-in was, Jackson guessed Susiem had done it, because suddenly, inside his head, where he was, there was a feeling like -- A thing happening like -- Well, what was happening, was that, in there, and around there, what was being done -- no; what was happening -- "Who could I tell?" Jackson hollered at the top of his lungs. "Who would believe me!" I t was no different really from remembering it was like being a boy around the Thorn. One day he was just another brat -- well, just another brat except he was inside himself -- and the next day he was mmm p-S! wMM I here in the expeditionary ship remembering it. It was probably no different from that. "Well?" the doctor said. "He's done," Susiem said. The taste of hot dust swirling up around the Thorn as he ran, and ran, was in his mouth. The feel of the first time he swung his arm just right and the dart shot straight and true into the target, a buzzing streak of what Honor White Jackson could do. Honor Black Jackson. Honor Red Jackson. Honor Red Jackson, hurting and hungry, being a door in the alien echoes of the Amsir Thorn. And now he was here. Memory had no time or space. His head was very full. Hey! he thought, I was right all along! I was too small -- it was all too small, and it was all wrong. I was right and they were wrong. When he thought of how they tried to keep him down, and how they kept themselves down, he began to grin. When he thought about the Amsirs, poking and prying, trying to understand it all -- from where they were -- he grinned even more fiercely. Oh, wow -- mine is the Earth and everything that's in it! "Congratulations, Captain," Susiem said, "you are now an Honor graduate in Liberal Arts from Ohio State University. You have a special Masters in Command Psychology from the University of Chicago, and three semester hours in military journalism from the Air Force Academy. You are fully qualified to command this vessel." "I know that," Jackson said. "These qualifications are now on file in my data banks, and will be listed with Earth Central Statistics immediately upon my reacquisition of contact with the Associated Midwestern Universities Genetic Research project communications network," Susiem went on, tidying up the loose ends. #rrhere's no way you can tease A him out of that airlock and back down the ladder, is there?" he said, pro forma, but he didn't want to do that anyway. Poor bloody Ahmuls. If he got him out of the lock and back to the Eld Amsir's love, what use would they have for him with the ship gone? And the ship would be gone. He most certainly wasn't going to spend his life grounded aboard her now, even supposing her life support system could endure that long with his organism draining it. But that was secondary, too -- in fact, irrelevant. For who, knowing him as he was how, knowing how much time there was to make up for could imagine him going anywhere but Earthward? Earthward to Ariwol, he noted parenthetically. Earthward to Airworld. The tongue of his mind twisted voluptuously around the ability to make the long vowels flow; he took a deep, deep breath -- breath enough to make him giddy -- and said it aloud the way they might say it in nois: "Ayer world." So much, so much to use! Klop klop klop . Kick him out, struggling, to ridicule and scorn, to uselessness with the ship gone? How could Jackson do that to a creature at his mercy that he did not ever need to eat? Eat. "What about this lichen they eat? Can you synthesize that for... our shipmate?" "There is no need to synthesize," the doctor said. "It's a perfectly normal Terrestial form." "Oh. Then there's no problem. Let's bring him in. We'll control him long enough for you and Susie m to do as much as you can for his brain and data file, and it's solved." "It is not. You're already proving a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In the first place, I don't know what you mean by control, but I certainly wouldn't take on any hostile organisms of his size with an arm as fragile as yours is at present. And you don't seem to have drawn the proper conclusions from his diet. I am amazed you were able to survive out there at all. I have no predisposants that could possibly do anything useful to his nucleic acids. You'e anthropomorphizing. To all intents and purposes, there is less kinship between him and the human heritage than there is between you and me." "That's ridiculous!" Susiem cried. "He's perfectly human -- he can't fly, can he?" "If you don't want your mistakes brought up, don't activate doctors." "All right, you two, cut it out," Jackson said. What the hell did the doctor mean he couldn't control Ahmuls? It was perfectly plain how he could control Ahmuls -- he'd been told about it in his sophomore year. What he hadn't been told was how to like it. But he'd been taught how to get along without that while going for his masters. It was amazing the things he'd been taught. "Doctor -- All right, you can't predispose him. Can you patch him up if he's hurt?" "No problem," the Medico replied. "Susiem, if we let him in, can you protect your components in that room?" "To an extent." "Well, then, let's get at it -- I'm sick of this place. The sooner we get this done, the quicker we can move." I wonder how he'll like Ariwol. H e walked up the companionway to the airlock level. He put his face up close to the door. "Ahmuls! Ahmuls, can you hear me?" "You son of a bitch." "Listen to me -- if I open this door, what'll you do?" "Kill you, you son of a bitch." "Ahmuls, listen close. You may not believe this, but I can bust you up real good." "Not if I kill you, you son of a bitch." "Ahmuls, I'm telling you -- they gave me a -- " what had they given him? They'd given him a weapon, and he had picked it up. By the time Susiem was launched, the art of unarmed combat on Earth had reached a point of development which made practice unnecessary and the karate-ka's callouses superfluous. The system had been refined to so simple a point that a mere explanation of what places to be IF touched was sufficient. Any man with a decent memory for instruction and reasonable dexterity could successfully apply it to an equally proficient man with slower reflexes -- and to all uninitiates -- with cunning rapidity and shocking accomplishment. Jackson s reflexes were not as quick as Ahmuls's, but his memory was as fast as Susiem's feed to his brain, and in any case Ahmuls just had no idea -- "Aw, hell," Jackson said. "Susiem, open the door." It was amazing how fast he was, bags of loose flesh and all, flapping and grunting, his feet slapslapping, his pudgy hands extended from his forearms as if he were wearing ragged sleeves. Jackson extended his body, right forefinger first, and touched him as he had been told, in the fieldhouse amphitheater of the sunny Canterbury Gothic campus. It was shocking how Ahmul's feet flew out from under him, and he fell backward to the deck. Jackson reached down quickly, and touched the one ankle he could reach; Ahmuls cried out. He probably hadn't often felt pain. Not once he'd gotten big enough. Jackson moved back out of the way: "Look, Ahmuls -- you can't get up to catch me now. Will you listen?" But Ahmuls could get up. People did walk on broken legs -- they even ran on them, when they had to, if they were in shock. It was just a matter of how much actual physical incapacity was introduced into their physical structures. Until things really disintegrated, they could just keep running. It happened on football fields and in parachute jump training all the time. The odd part about it ways it often made them run faster. Jackson wove around Ahmuls. His reflexes were slower, but the method was foolproof against charging attacks provided the eye could register them at all. He touched Ahmuls on the ribs. After that, Ahmuls's side was like a rawhide bag of blood. Goddamn it, don't ooze on me! Jackson thought as he made Ahmuls brush by him again. Aw, you dumb animal! "Give up!" he yelled. Ahmuls charged him, grunting: "Leave me alone -- leave me alone, will you!" J ackson touched both arms. He had to take the shock of Ahmuls hitting him, but he took it on Ahmuls's bad side, and anyway, Ahmuls then had no arms to hug him with. He moved them right, but they bent in two places, and Jackson got out through them. "Get the doctor up here!" Jackson yelled. "Watch out for my components!" Susiem cried as Ahmuls blundered. "The hell with you and all your components!" Jackson yelled as he touched Ahmuls low in the back, feeling the flesh turn to porridge as the shock traveled from where he touched, and then he touched again in the same place, just to make sure; this time he felt the same thing in his fingertip you feel when you're a kid and you nudge out a baby tooth. Ahmuls windmilled his floppy arms, but he had nothing to hold his legs up any more, and he went down, fading in the middle and folding at tfie broken ankle, putting out his broken arms to catch him, landing on his broken side, and then his face. He lay slumped on his knees, arms out, his face squashed flat against the deck, and only one red eye peering up at Jackson. "All right, all right," he wept. The tears found hidden channels in his folded cheek. Jackson dropped to his knees on the deck beside him. "I tried to tell ya," he said. "Yuh." Ahmuls swung his neck as best he could, very fast, going for Jackson's wrist with his teeth. Jackson pushed his head down. "Cut it out, please cut it out." "Yuh. Yuh, all right, all right, I've got nothing left." His fingers crept toward Jackson's ankle, dragging his arm, and Jackson put his knee on them. The doctor came rolling up. He stood there. "Well, goddamn it," Jackson squalled, "what are you waiting for?" "I have no authorization." "All right -- pursuant to the emergency veterinary provisions, I declare this creature is a valuable, harmless, alien life form in distress. I order you to proceed with medical services as far as your knowledge and experience go!" The doctor's sides unfolded. "Yes, sir. No problem." Ahmuls had quit trying to move his fingers under Jackson's knee. Under his face, the deck was wet. "What are you going to do? What are you going to do, all you soft things?" "No, no, it's all right, Ahmuls," Jackson said. His hand on Ahmuls's head was making soothing motions up where a Amsir would have its lace. "The doctor'll fix you. You've got to listen, Ahmuls. Why the hell can't you listen? I love you." "Did you have to hit me?" The doctor gathered Ahmuls up in his arms. He was amazingly gentle. He lifted smoothly and tenderly, making Ahmuls comfortable in his arms. He was shockingly gentle. A maintenance machine had already slipped from its wall recess. It was hovering around the three of them, jockeying to get to the deck where it was messed up. "Just wait your turn, Susiem," Jackson said angrily, facing the maintenance machine as if it had eyes and ears. "You have no sense of decency, no sense at all." XX #et me an audiovisual picture V-J of the outside," he told Susiem, sitting in the piloting chair. Susiem swung a scope toward him. The speakers filled with the sounds of outside; the rustle of wings, the murmur of wind, the ping and crackle of large expanses of metal in the open weather. The Amsirs were flying patrol just past the door, beating back and forth, spears ready. There was a littering of broken spears on the ground below the airlock ladder. At the doorway of the Thorn, the Amsir Eld, and the instructing Amsir, and a crowd of more than six but less than twelve apprentices of some type were clusIF tered there, in postures that were not essentially useful. He could hear them discoursing; he motioned impatiently toward the gain control and he could make out their words. They were disputatious and bereft. "And I tell you we must accept the possibility that we are the interlopers here!" one of them was saying. "Shut up! I can clearly recall a witnessed discourse in which it was impeccably postulated that if the Thing destroyed our kind on touch, how much more terrible must be the fate of any creature it would permit to enter its maw!" "Shut up yourself! I'll try conclusions with you any time!" "Eld!" Jackson said, and the Thing growled to the Amsirs at the doorway. "Eld -- stand clear!" "What?" The hard beak was up. The bright, dark eyes were searching where the doorway was on top of the ladder. "Eld, I have some facts for you." The communicator went dead. The screen was blank, the speakers were silent. "You are not permitted to contaminate the experiment," Susiem said. "You are exceeding your authority and directly contravening expedition regulations. You are not permitted to communicate facts to the experimental subjects. All facts required by the experimental subjects are predetermined, programmed, and were long ago introduced to the system. Any repetition of this incident will result in your automatic and immediate dismissal from command. This incident will be logged and recorded at the earliest opportunity following reacquisition of contact with the project communications network. You are reprimanded and are permitted to resume communication only on the basis that you make no further attempt at contamination." The screen and the speakers came back to life. "Stand clear," Jackson shouted to the Eld. He counted thirty seconds on the fascia clock. "Let's go, Susiem," he said, and with a bang, and a roar and a flash, they all went, taking the world's hope with them. E arth was pastorally green, its hillocks crowned by elms, its infrequent, low buildings starkly white. Earth was green, fair; heady with the wine of life; in a condition not often attained since the hills of Greece were first so limned by the I t hadn't seemed like such a particularly long trip. He had spent large parts of it in the piloting couch. At first he'd yearned at the stars in their great glowing panoplies, bemused to think that he finally understood what they were, toying at his mind with thoughts of immensity, with notions of how vast it all was, how marvelous its creation, how unfathomable its extent. Fantasy-grasps of mascrocosm and microcosm haunted his understanding. All this great clockwork, all this explosion and decay, these cycles and epicycles of infinitude distended his capillaries with shivers of delight at how vast a table had been prepared before him. For a while he thought he understood the infinitely tiny complexities that hurtled round about themselves to mensity. And Susiem did much to sustain this feeling for him. She groaned and whined, thumping and jolting within herself all around him; his couch hummed to her trembling. Each start of ignition, each fit of clicking busyness seemed to reflect another spasm of gobbling at the miles between where he was and the nebulae on which his eyesight rested. But a couple of days went by and it occurred to him that the nebulae weren't getting effectively closer. He had a clear intellectual understanding of how many miles per day were being clocked on Susiem's instruments. He got the idea that he ought to calculate how many days of whining, banging, and groaning from this tireless mechanism he'd have to endure before he got to the nearest nebula. It came to him that there was just so much of that a man could put up with. Susiem could put up with it forever of course. Only somebody like Susiem was liable to want, to. "How's the doctor coming along with Ahmuls?" he asked her, thinking a good way to put it was that he was lonely among a myriad of stars. "I'll check... He's reporting good progress. Considering healing had been accomplished and the patient is resting. His manner is subdued." "Yeah, well. He's had a lot happen to him." He had Susiem close the ablation shutters on the piloting windows again. And for a while he had her run tapes of Earth. He found that it was just as he remembered it -- swarming with Man and his works, beautiful beyond belief, busy in its beauty, echoing with flashes of light and sound, a-shake with motion, singing of power to the morning and the evening wind. He created little moments of naivete for himself. He looked at the rivers tumbling down out of the mountains and rowelling across the plains while saying to himself I never knew there was that much water in the world; how green everything is, how full I He looked at the cities where the rivers forked, at the shipping complexes in the deltas where rivers and Ocean mingled, and he cried out to himself Thalassa ! Thai ass a! He compared the flight of supersonic aircraft with flappings of Amsirs and he pretended to see a portable rocket launcher in terms of a demigod's throwing stick. He craned his neck at the cloudraking spires of the mighty cities. And he made the back of his mind wail: "Alas, Thorn!" Ah, horse apples, he said after very little of that, being a man with a Master's, and had Susiem turn it off. What to do? Jackson had another meal -- this time it was delicious, because he knew how to order. There was even wine. Wine was considerably better than beer. But it left him moody. He had Susiem play him some music. He read from her library, .# IF sticking mainly to entertainment; westerns, mostly, at first. Susiem's library had a first chapter precis index; by using it lackadasically and carelessly, he tripped over the Big Little Book version of John Carter of Mars and from there his taste spiralled outward. He had gotten as far as G-#'s struggle against the Kaiser's land-crawling aircraft carrier when Susiem passed him the word the Ahmuls was ready to be talked to. iXou feeling all right?" I "He feels fine," the doctor said. "All his structural damage is repaired and healed. It was a massive job, but what with all the things I know how to do -- and three day's sleep -- he's fine." Ahmuls was sitting propped halfway up in a Sick Bay bunk, leaning back into a corner. There were shadows across his face. But he had his hands up framing his cheeks, and you could see lights glinting on his open eyes. "How do you feel about all that?" Jackson said. "Feel rotten," Ahmuls mumbled. "That doctor machine says we're going someplace. Where to?" "Yeah, well. That's what I'm here to explain. You all done trying to kill me?" "Can't kill you, you son of a bitch." "Aw, come on, Ahmuls. I'm glad you're all done trying to kill me, but I wish you wouldn't call me names. Look, it's not like it was, all our lives. It's all different." "I'm no different." "Well, I am!" "You say." "Well, will you listen?" "Gotta listen. You can kill me." Jackson sighed and gestured toward a chair-cubby. The chair came promptly out of the wall. He sat down on it with the feeling that he might be here a long time. "All right. So listen. Where we were before was a place called Mars." "Amsirs," Ahmuls repeated studiously. "Okay, now there were these two places where people lived. My place and yours." "One place, where Amsirs lived. You're not people. Maybe I'm not people. But I'm not as soft as you are." "There were these two places where people lived. Amsirs and humans. But they came from the same place. The reason Amsirs looked different from people is because somebody wanted to see if people could be changed." "Humans look different from Amsirs. Amsirs are people." And so on. Jackson spent the better part of the rest of the trip trying to explain genetics to Ahmuls. But Ahmuls had the idea he already knew as much as anybody could teach him. He sat on his bunk most of the time, eating little brickshaped packets of lichen as they were issued to him by Susiem according to the doctor's menu, and every so often either he or Jackson had to stop to go to the Head. But he listened because Jackson could kill him if he didn't. This seemed to be an attitude Ahmuls had learned long before he had Jackson for a tutor. Finally, Susiem told Jackson they were only hours away from docking at Columbus, Ohio, and that he had better start getting presentable. "All right," Jackson said. "Ah muls, you hear that? Now pretty soon you're going to get a chance to really see something. You're going to see more people and more machinery than either you or me ever had any idea of. You're going to see the place we all come from. Your folks, my folks, the Amsirs folks. We all come from the same place. You're going to get to see people living in houses stacked up two hundred houses tall. You're going to get to see places that make the whole place the Amsirs live in look no bigger than the way one Amsir house looks compared to the whole bunch of them. You're going to see things zipping across the sky three, five hundred times quicker'n a Amsir can fly falling straight down." Ahmuls said: "How many dozen is that?" "Oh, dear God. All right. Don't learn. I'm trying to tell you you're going to see things that you won't know how to act about. You're going to have more chances to be happy than you've ever thought of." Well, it seemed reasonable. Wide as the world was, and as complex as he he knew it could be, there had to be something in it for the poor freak. For the poor, dangerous freak. "And there's going to be lots of chances for you to be stupid, and IF for you to get hurt. So I'm telling you one last time -- you don't want to learn, all right, you don't have to learn. But, by God, at least know you're stupid. Don't go pushing into things. Watch and wait. Walk soft. Maybe after a while you'll realize I'm giving you the straight goods. Any time you're ready, you just tell me and I'll do my best to tell you the straight of it again." "I'm straight now," Ahmuls said, twiddling the flesh that grew on his arms where his wings should have been. J ust before they hit atmosphere, Jackson came down to Sick Bay to be with Ahmuls, knowing how the noise and the changes of acceleration would upset him. Jackson was wearing his captain's pale blue coverall with the Associated Universities shoulder patch. "What you got on you?" Ahmuls asked. "This is clothes," Jackson said. "I had Susiem make some for you, too. Here." He passed over the specially cut coveralls. "You got to put these on too. It's like a blanket. It keeps the cold and the sun off you." "I ain't never seen you wear clothes before." "Well, I didn't. But I know better now." "I don't know any better." "Look, you want them all to think you're a freak?" "What, those soft people you said all look like you?" "Come on, Ahmuls, put the clothes on." "You going to kill me if I don't put the clothes on? I ain't cold and there ain't no sun on me. Don't they know enough to go into those houses when they have to?" He dropped the coveralls on the floor. Jackson shook his head. "All right, Ahmuls. All right." He stretched out on another bunk. His skin was already chafed in a couple of places; it was having a hard time getting used to the whole idea of being wrapped up all around the legs and crotch. But he was very badly embarrassed at the thought of stepping out in front of a spaceport full of people with a naked freak at his side. It was, when he stopped to think of it, the first time in his life that he'd ever been embarrassed at first hand. It was the damnedest feeling. It occupied considerable of his attention while the ship was coming down in her final approach. Ahmuls whimpered and lurched around on the bunk all through the process. What's going to become of him? Jackson thought. But Earth was pastorally green, its hillocks crowned by elms, its infrequent, low buildings starkly white. "This is the site of the Associated Universities docking facilities," Susiem said as Jackson stared out through the open airlock hatch like a kid who has just watched a dart hit a target broadside on and bounce off. "There have been social changes on Earth since my last communication from the project. I have just been assured you will be brought up to date on these changes by another source. You and your companion are instructed to debark from this vessel immediately, since it is no longer classified habitable. Attention, all hands! Captain going ashore!" "Good-by fellows," the doctor said as Jackson and Ahmuls slipped down the ladder. "Don't worry, Ahmuls -- your menu's on file with Central. They tell me all you have to do when you get hungry is say so out loud!" "Always did," Ahmuls said. J ackson looked at Susiem's height. She was beginning to ring. He noticed a swarm of bright, dancing insects? -- whirling around the very tip of her prow. They were bulleting in from over the top of the nearest hillock, in a stream that thickened rapidly, divided to pass around the trunks and through the branches of the elms and clustered more and more passionately around the tip. The ringing sound increased in volume, and he saw that Susiem was blunted. Her prow was gone. As he watched, the tightly spiralling insects ate another shaving of metal from her plates, and then came round again, cutting off a little bit more with each pass, passing very quickly. It was like a Looneytoon of termites destroying Elmer Fudd's house. Some of the insects broke away from Susiem, and darted down toward the ground. One nearby seemed to be performing a typical action; it had a little chunk of astronauticsgrade steel in its mouth, and it was spinning like an augur. It bored down, Jackson judged by its speed, two or three feet into the ground, then backed out empty-jowed, and immediately streaked back to snip off more. Larger bugs came down out of the sky, burrowing into the exposed 'tween-deck spaces, and the component arrays behind the striped-out plating. They buzzed away again, trailing some few components in their grappling appendages, casting off most of the others, which fell in a swath beyond the diminishing Susiem with sharp thuds on the thick, clipper green grass and delicate wildflowers. Ground-moving insects and other metal creatures of that kind were waiting to pick them over, chop them up into chunks, plant some and gulp down others as if they had digestions. "Hey!" Jackson yelled, trying to get through to Susiem before there was no one left on Earth to tell him what was happening. But it was way too late for that. She and the doctor and the food-serving robot and the maintenance robot and everything about her -- except for Jackson's coveralls -- were dead and useless. Well, no, not useless. A lot of valuable minerals had just been put back into Earth's soil. Ahmuls was looking around. "I see some people coming," he said. "They ain't got no clothes on." IF IF  Short Story Latter-Day Daniel by betsv curtis Letting a lion eat your arm off isn't the easiest way to make a living -- but it beats starvation I B eale did not just stand there and watch the lion chew off his left arm. He helped! Occasionally he yelled loud enough to be heard over the growling snarls of the busy beast. His right arm clutched one of the iron bars of the cage, and his right foot was hooked around another so that he could pull one way while Nero pulled the other. Nero wasn't working very hard at it. Although his teeth were firmly sunk into Beale's forearm, he hadn't taken the trouble to gnaw the joint, and the ligaments were holding. Beale felt as if he were about to be jerked into pieces, and he didn't dare hook his left foot on the bars too, for fear Nero would rear up and claw at the shoulder and he, Beale, would have nothing to kick him back with. Beale leaned toward the yanking lion, hoping that the beast would let go and take hold around the elbow somewhere and grind those tendons loose. Somebody in the crowd let out a snicker. "Fake!" he heard the damning yell. "Robot!" somebody else yelled, and a bag of peanut shucks hit the back of his bare torso. Beale would have liked to yell back, "The Hell I am," as the cold blasts of March wind brought out the bumps along his spine. But the orders read, "no back talk with the zoo patrons." And this was a good enough job as jobs went. He had a momentary flash of the newspaper ad. "One-armed man needed for easy job involving public appearances." N ero loosened bis grip and started working toward the elbow. Beale held his leaning position, working his arm down while trying to act as if he were trying to get it out of those slavering jaws by clever maneuvering. Just then Nero hit the artery, and blood gushed out over his face and onto the scrubbed stone floor of the cage. "Oooooh!" came from the throats of the crowd. That was always a sure hit. Beale tightened the muscles in his neck and shoulders and pulled. He hoped his audience would be impressed by his heroic stature and fortitude. And that they still hadn't noticed how much stronger, longer, and meatier the left arm was than the right. Nero opened the gooey great jaws for a second and then snap! crunch! -- they closed on the elbow. Good. Hie forearm came loose with only a few shreds of tendon left holding it to the upper arm. Beale jerked and broke them and leaned back, panting and pretending to sob against the icy bars while Nero sank to the floor to worry the severed member, growling and snorting. The crowd was momentarily silent. Beale took the opportunity to sweep it with a single agonized glance. After all, he couldn't just bow and walk out now. He still had to pretend to drag himself painfully through the low opening of Nero's den. The show must go on -- he'd read that somewhere. Yes, there on the outskirts of the crowd was the telltale fluorescent green uniform of an officer of the Animal Protective League. The boss was right. You could never tell when they'd be there, but it was always better to be on the right side of the law. And in the zoo business the A.P.L. was the law. Or practically. Just at that moment, half a sandwich flew through the bars and onto the gory floor of the cage. Beale leaned over it deliberately, picked it up and gestured with the stump of his left arm at the sign on the front of the cage which he knew read "Nero, the Only African Lion in Captivity in This Country. DO The crowd rocked with laughter. Shouts of "what about you?" and "Yon did!" were clearly audible. Beale bowed. A touch of comedy was always good. Then he dropped the sandwich into the trench on the outside of the bars and, clutching the still dripping left stump, went around the feeding lion and crawled into the low, dark den opening. A slow sigh of regret that it was all over arose from the mob in front of the cage; and Beale could hear them shuffling their feet before they wandered away to other exhibits. A cross the dark den he entered the door of his dressing room, where he stripped off the remaining section of synthiflesh above the elbow, tugging gently at the adhesive synthiskin where it was semi grafted to his own. Dropping the arm remnants into the incinerator slot, he IP got out of his shorts and metal-toed shoes, showered very hot and soapy, rinsed and then dried in the blast of hot air from a floor fan. He put on his neat, dark gray shirt, his dark blue street shorts and stormjac, slipped into the knee boots of softly polished gray leatherene, ran a comb through his crisp light hair; and, except for the left arm of the stormjac which he tucked into the side pocket, he looked just like any citizen getting a late start for a respectable desk job. Bob Beale, insurance executive... Bob Beale, bank teller. Opening the outside door of his dressing room, he looked warily up and down the alley between the backs of the rows of animal cages. Zoo goers might not thrill to his quick change from victim to prosperous and comfortable citizen. "Mister... uh..." Her green uniform fluoresced gaily in the sliver of sunlight which hit the pavement in front of his door. "Oh," he said shortly, "Miss A.P.L. herself." "That's right," she admitted. "I'd like to talk to you, Mr... Mr..." "Beale." No words to spare for the likes of her -- though on closer look it wasn't a bad likes. "Mr. Beale. About the lion. You are the lion man aren't you? Can I come in?" she asked, her little black curls bobbing beneath the flat, shining green cap. "There's nothing to talk about. This show is just the way you people ordered it. We're observing every regulation in the book. What do you want me to do... brush Nero's teeth before and after?" His tone was sour. "No, it's not that," she said earnestly, as if it were quite possible that she could order him to brush those monstrous dark yellow fangs. "Well," he said slowly, "I guess I have time for a cup of coffee before I go to the lab to get my next arm put on. It takes a day to set, you know." He stepped down to the pavement from the doorway. "We couldn't talk in there... nothing there but the shower and my dirty clothes. We can get coffee at Alec's, and you can bend my ear, I suppose." S he smiled up at him. "Is it pri vate? Does Alec's have booths or something? This is important, and we mustn't let anybody hear us. That's why I suggested your room." "Yes, there are booths at Alec's." He looked at her curiously. "But I can't imagine anything about Nero that the world couldn't hear. He's pretty noisy himself, you know." They strolled down the alley, and from a break between the backs of the cages the lion's slupping and masticating could be plainly heard. "It's a plot," she said earnestly in a low voice, "a plot to kidnap Nero." "Well, I'll be a rhino's Aunt Milly! I suppose some other poor devil is being matrized for fake arms for the critter to gnaw off." "Ssssh! We simply mustn't discuss it here," she warned him and laid her hand on his good arm, then looked down at it. "Doesn't it hurt, sometimes, when Nero takes as long as he did today and shakes you all around like that?" "Sure, but it makes a good show, though, and .who are you to care if it hurts a mere man? I'm no animal to be treated with tender care." "I just wondered. Was any of that blood yours?" She shuddered in the cold wind which swept around the end of the row of cages as they prepared to enter the main concourse. "No. There's reservoir of the stuff (human, of course, from a blood bank) just below the shoulder. And there aren't any nerves in the arm, you know, just some synthitendons so I can make it move. Pretty realistic, though, isn't it?" he asked proudiy"I think," she said decidedly, "that it's entirely too realistic. It's effect on the audience is utterly brutalizing. If there were one thing I could do about it, I'd have it stopped entirely." "Come, now. You must be in the wrong job if you're more concerned about people than animals. Besides, you don't understand," they were crossing the concourse toward the neons of Alec's, "people need that kind of thing, really need it. You folks have done away with horseracing, bullfighting, foxhunting and almost all other kinds of hunting, game fishing; and now you'd like to make vegetarians of the world. It's against the law now to display any kind of dead red meat, and poor Nero would have to eat only his pan of pulverized dog food if I didn't turn up with a good juicy arm every couple of days. And the mob would turn to carving one another up just to get a little excitement. This is good for them." "I never thought of it just that way," she said, and then primly, "You're quite a preacher." H e colored. "I didn't mean to make a speech; but I wouldn't want to find myself in a lonely place with some of that gang that was watching me today if they didn't have their chance to come to the zoo." "Yes, and watching you just wets their appetites!" "It does not either! It satisfies it. Some of them come practically every day I perform. But let's not fight. Here's Alec's. What'll you have?" "I don't want anything. I just want to tell you what I have to tell and be on my way. I still have four major inspections today, including a dog pound." "I didn't know there were any dogs left to catch. You have to have more references, financial and moral, than if you were going to adopt a baby just to rent a dog. Two coffees, Alec," he said, passing the counter and leading the way back to the rear of the dark eatery. He stopped at the last booth and let her go by to the back seat. She slipped into the seat and sat very straight, her hands in her lap. "Now what's this about a plot on old Nero?" he wanted to know. "Nobody can hear us here... all the booths are empty. The seals are getting the crowd along with their daily ration of synthifish." she whispered. "They haven't had a lion for ten years, though they did IF have a lioness till last October." She leaned closer across the table. "Of course we won't let them import another one; and they've been jealous of Brooklyn and had their eye on Nero ever since. They've hired a gang of thugs to get Nero and bleach him a little and synthesize some new fur over that scar on his flank and truck him out to them. We got wind of it because the gang is posing as A.P.L. officials, and they're going to pretend it's a raid on the zoo for having some illegal predators or something. One of the leaders really was a minor official once, but he was fired for selling kittens several years ago; and we've been keeping a close watch on him. That's how we found out about the plot." "Well, you don't have to worry, then. There isn't an illegal predator on the place; and the gang would have to be magicians to get an animal transport truck onto the grounds without getting tangled in so much red tape that they'd be sorry they ever had the idea." He syrupped his coffee and stirred vigorously. "That's just it." She sat back. "We make the red tape, and in our uniforms they could get Nero out before you could say 'dachshund.' " Beale sighed. "Well, he'd be treatsay I'd be sorry to see this job come to an end for a while. I can always go back to selling newspapers." He shrugged his shoulders and took a drink on his coffee mock-resignedly. "No, no, I don't want... we don't want... well the local officials think that the Brooklyn Zoo should keep Nero as long as he lives. The zoo has really done very well in following all our regulations. I mean, if you tell your boss, he can have guards posted or something. You aren't going to let a gang of crooks have Nero, are you?" she asked incredulously. "You... you coward!" # # 'X Tow wait a minute , Miss," Beale protested. "You don't mean you want me to take this seriously? Why if another zoo stole Nero, how could they display him without having to account for his being there? The boss would just bring action and have Nero shipped back here by jet in time for the next arm-chew." "They'd maintain that they bought him legally and that the transaction was cleared with us and that our people brought him to them... if you could prove that it was really the same lion. At the same time, 'they'd institute a big investigation through the real A.P.L. to find out by what criminal negligence you'd allowed your own lion to die or disappear. Not only would it be a nasty mess all round, but who knows what effect it might have on Nero? Psychologically, I mean... the trip and having to get used to a new trainer and a different climate and all. It would be simple cruelty, but very hard to prove," she pleaded. "Well," Beale reconsidered, "I suppose we could have guards, but the boss hates to hire an extra man without pretty good reason. And I don't know a one of the regular staff who isn't so well trained that he'd let anybody in one of those green uniforms walk away with the entire menagerie if he insisted. At any rate. I'll talk to him about it. I'll have to tell him who told me, though. What did you say your name was?" "I didn't say... but it's Whipple, Delia Whipple. I hope it won't have to go any further than your boss, though, because the Animal Protective League doesn't want its espionage system revealed in detail. And I'm fairly important irr it." "Okay, Delia," Beale grined. "And if you see anybody looking at you suspiciously, you just get in touch with me, and we'll have a date so their spies will think your being with me is on the up and up." "Oh, I couldn't!" She looked aghast at the suggestion. "Not date an animal man! I'd be fired... or something!" The idea seemed to arouse her much more than even the plot to steal Nero had. "Oh! You'll go just so far to save Nero but no further, huh? Dinner and a show with a smelly animal man is too far?" His voice was rich with scorn. "I might chew off your arm in an unguarded moment?" "Oh you don't understand," she cried, her face white. "Our organization has no legal recourse in cases of disloyalty, so our security measures must be terribly strict. My mother and two of my uncles work for A.P.L., and if an investigation showed that I consorted with a known animal man, they'd get fired, too, for consorting with me before I even knew you. It's that stringent. I just couldn't." "Consorting, huh. Interesting word," he sneered. "You pick a better," she retorted. "Frankly, I think your whole family would be better off working for some free and open outfit like... well... a slaughterhouse. What do you get out of it anyway besides a salary? Permission to keep a Pekinese?" "Oh no," she objected indignantly. "We could never qualify to keep a pet. We all have to work, and there's nobody home daytimes to look after a pet." "You win." He shook his head and grinned at her incredulously. "I guess I just can't understand. I'll go and get my next arm plastered on so it can get its full forty-seven hours to set; and then I'll go see the boss and tell him what you've told me." He moved to the edge of the seat. "Mr. Beale..." she hesitated. "Yeah?" "You'll probably think I'm terribly snoopy, but why don't you get a real arm of your own with nerves and all instead of having poor imitations chewed off every two days?" "Couldn't afford it. I'm saving up," he told her gruffly. He rose and looked down at her and added, "I guess you'd better wait a minute or two so that we aren't seen leaving together. Somebody might think we were consorting." "Thanks," she said graciously. "You won't regret it." "Think not?" he asked and headed for the register where he dropped a couple of zoo tokens and glanced out the door at the same time at the crowd shoving past the restaurant on its way to the monkey house where the diapered chimp babies IF would be receiving their bottles from the prim, white-clad nurses, behind one-way glass. S uddenly he was startled to close attention. Four burly men in shining green uniforms were shouldering their way against the tide of the mob -- in the direction of the lion house. "Delia!" Bob Beale's voice was urgent. "Miss Whipple... quick!" She appeared at his side. "What is it?" "Are those your boys?" He pointed after the vanishing husky backs. "I can't be sure from the back, but I think so." She raced to the door, and Beale followed close behind. Once in the midst of the mob, they were carried backward for several feet and completely separated before they could work to one side and out of the thickest of the press. As soon as Beale got free of the surging throng, he raced for the alley mouth behind the predator's cages, to find the four men in green only a few yards ahead of him, standing truculently before the door beyond Beale's own -- the door to the service room for the lion's cage. Bob caught himself up short and sauntered nonchalantly up to the group. "Looking for someone, gentlemen?" One of the men turned, a pastyfaced fellow made even more sallow by the reflected green glow on chin and jowls. "No," he informed Beale curtly. One of the others raised a fist. "Want me to tell him, eh boss?" "I'll tell him," the other motioned him back. "We're the vet's men here to remove an animal for inspection for suspected damage. What's it to you?" Beale turned at a sound and saw a big, fluorescent green truck nosing cautiously up the alley behind 'him. He turned back to see one of the men opening the lion service door with a key. "Hey!" he shouted, "You can't go in there!" "Who says we can't, buster, you?" The man who had raised his fist came forward suddenly and slapped Bob across the face. "None of your back-chat to the A.P.L., or we'll have you reported." Beale shook his head to clear it. "Excuse me," he said deferentially. The man stepped back. "That's better," he said. The pasty-faced man stepped between them. "Excuse Judd, here," he said apologetically. "Judd, you shouldn'ta done that. He's a onearmed man... he couldn'ta fought back." "So much the better for me," Judd laughed. fp'he truck was almost up to them; and the four men hurried through the lion door to avoid it. Bob opened his shower-room door quickly with his key and, once inside, locked it behind him. Just as it was shutting, he heard a shrill feminine cry from behind the truck, but he had no time to investigate. He unlocked the inner door leading to Nero's den, slipped through. He could hear the men's voices in the service room on the other side of a thin partition arguing about who was to go on in and bring Nero out. With sureness born f long experience, Bob crossed the dark den and looked out into the main cage. Nero was still working over the arm bone. Bob crawled through the den mouth and stood up in the cage. "Here, Nero; here, pussy," he called to the big, sleek beast. Nero raised his head and looked over at the den mouth, then went back to grinding away at the exposed ulna. "All right, then," Beale muttered to himself. Looking out between the bars, he was relieved to see that no one was looking into the cage -- that in fact there was no one even near the cage. He went forward to the bars and gave the jungle yell which was the signal to which he had trained Nero to respond by charging at him. Nero got up sluggishly, looked at Beale inquiringly as if to say, "Another meal so soon? Good!" His tail waved from side to side. "You'll have to catch me, though," Beale said to him, grinning, and walked around the wall of the cage toward the den mouth. Nero walked after him slowly. Bob got down in his hands and knees and crawled into the den. "Come on, Nero," he called back. As he started to stand up, he collided with a heavy figure, which he realized was human. "What th'?" "One side, buster!" It was Judd, the man who had hit him outside. "Okay," Beale said obligingly and stepped to the left. T he man took another step toward the light of the den mouth and then stopped. "Gawd!" he yelled as the lion trotted through, blocking the light completely. He held out his left arm straight to ward off the trotting beast, and Nero obligingly jumped for the arm at the familiar signal. Beale's eyes had adjusted quickly to the darkness, and he saw Nero's spring. "Down, Nero!" he commanded; but the lion was too well trained, and his jaws closed on the muscle of Judd's arm with a crunch. Judd's gargling scream echoed hideously in the enclosed den. Beale kicked out at the lion's hindpaw and at the extended haunch before him. Nero dropped back to the floor with a "graaaow" of pained surprise and turned to look at Beale inquiringly. His tail began to switch again, and he opened his tremendous jaws hopefully. Beale pulled his left sleeve out of its pocket and waved it with the stump of his upper arm at Nero. Nero took a couple of steps toward him. All this time, Judd had continued to scream, but now the ululations subsided to an agonized whimper. Beale walked backward toward his door at the rear of the den, and Nero followed him at an even pace. Beale could hear the commotion on the other side of the service door. Somebody wanted to look in and see what had happened to Judd, and somebody else would be damned if he'd let anybody open the door and let that damned lion loose on them. Beale opened the door to his shower room, and the lion followed him in IF quietly and stood suspiciously in the middle of the small space while Beale locked the door into the den. Now that he and the lion were safely and cosily locked into the white-tiled cubicle about eight by eight, he drew a long breath and tried to decide what to do next. "Down Nero! Sit, boy," he told the bulky brute, which Nero, after a suspicious sniff of his antiseptic surroundings, obediently did. That was the first step, certainly. A hurried pounding on the outer door began. "Beale! Bob Beale!" he recognized the voice of Harris, one of the zoo guards. "You all right? Bob? Hey Bob!" "I'm all right, Tony," Beale called through the door, "but I've got Nero in here with me, and there are four thugs in the service room next door who were trying to get away with him. Send somebody for the boss and a bunch of the boys. You see they don't get away... that's their truck in the alley." He heard Harris shout away from the door and instantly after heard renewed commotion in the next room. "We gotta get outa here!" "He's got the lion in there." "Somebody go in and get Judd!" "You get him, then!" "Not me, I'm getting outa here!" sphere was a scrabbling noise from the next room, the rasp of the outer door being opened... then the sound of a fight from the alley... thuds, grunts, shouts, the sound of the gnashing of the truck's gears and the rumble of its engine... then as the noise seemed to recede up the alley, Judd's voice could be heard howling, "Get me outa here! Help! Help! Get me out!" Nero's tail curled up at the end and switched from side to side. "Steady, boy," Beale told him and moved to stand beside him and stroked his mane. "I know he sounds delicious, but you've had yours for today." Footsteps moved in the next room. Bob assumed that the door to the den was being opened, for he heard a woman's voice say, "Where are you? I can't see anything." "Over here." Judd's voice died away through a whimper. "There. Put your arm around my neck. Can you stand up?" Her tones came clearly through the door. "Now, up!" He could hear them moving uncertainly toward the door, he heard her shout. "Uncle Judd! What are you doing here?" A sobbing whimper was the only reply. "Well, let me look at you." A pause. "That arm's pretty bad, but the rest of you doesn't seem to be touched. I'll help you to a doctor." A grumble. "What?" "Gotta get out of here before they catch me." "You've got to get to a doctor at once," she objected. "Lemme go. I'll get to a doctor. Gimme your coat. I'll put it over my arm, and nobody will notice it." Judd seemed to be regaining competency but fast. "No, Uncle Judd... hey... ouch!" "Gimme that coat, I said!" "Oh, all right." Another pause. "Here." The door slammed. Then Beale heard a shout. "Got him. That makes all four!" Beale could hear tramping of several sets of feet up the alley. The door opened and shut again. Then there was knocking on his own door once more. "Mr. Beale?" "What is it?" "Are you really in there with the lion?" "Sure." "What are you going to do now?" "Are they all gone outside?" "Yes." "Well, sweetheart, you go back in and lock the door from the service room to the den, and I'll put Nero back in the cage." "All right." He could hear her reenter and do as he'd told her. Then he took Nero by the mane and turned his head around toward the door to the den. "Up, Nero." The lion stood up and turned obediently as Beale forced his head around. Beale led him the two steps to the door, unlocked it, stood aside, gave Nero a mild kick in the rump. "In there, boy." And in the lion went, to be locked securely back in his own safe quarters. Beale relaxed, and his hand went, routinely, abstractedly, to the shower button; and he caught himself just in time to avoid a thorough soaking. "Mr. Beale..." She was outside again. He went to the outer door and opened it to find her looking up at him. "Hi!" he greeted her. "A good day's work. Thanks for the tip. Now you better scoot along before they catch you, too." He gestured down the alley with the left arm stump and the coat sleeve swung free. As he stuffed the sleeve awkwardly into the pocket, she said, "Catch me?" 'Talking... consorting... with me." "Oh, that." She laughed relievedly. "I can consort with anybody now. That "thug" was my mother's brother, Judd. I've been consorting with my mother for years, you know, so I'm a permanent security risk. The Animal Protective League is done with me as soon as they find out. I'm unemployed as of this minute." She laughed even more merrily; and Bob Beale was surprised to find how infectious freedom seemed to make her laughter. He grinned. "When I get my other arm on, honey," he told her, "we can start consorting without wasting a minute. I wouldn't want you to feel too unemployed." I t was a mere two days later; and the lion was tugging him toward the front of the cage, teeth firmly sunk into the elbow joint. Beale's eyes could search the crowd for the crisp black ringlets under the peaked white cap of a popcorn vendor. She was yelling with them for all she was worth. So Beale did not just stand there and watch the lion chew off his IF Your Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwaincr Smith in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. #  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose  my check or money order for: I I # issues for # # issues for # Name... Address w P City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage.  Please check wnether Q new or Q renewal.  X   i  a X X The Big Time Fr it Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do J Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Aied Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey iM B mm p i V ; 'V  fit.  JiP mr gSggiv ml ,  ,T i W jTM i I jSb  I ' j#... cfw: The Road to the Rim Retief, War Criminal The Ethics of Madness and many other stories by Science Fiction's favorite authors Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On Baby is Three Theodbre Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famoUs stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Wall The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoi Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #, Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Star (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shori Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley tn Jrnnet Bond Traditions Sir-Spy Lets You 'See Throu' WaDs, Fences and Locked Doors! Secret of Private Detectives and Industrial Spies Revealed! A remarkable optical device about half the siM of a cigarette now makes it possible for you to see -- without being seen. Yotir children for examplet can play in the "privacy of an adjoining room -- unaware that you can see everything they do! Operation of the tiny device is silent almost impossible to detect. The eye-piece is not much bigger than the head of a pin. If you drilled an ordinary hole that si#e through a wall, fence or door, you could see very little. But Super-Spsr# unique optical principle, called expand multiplies your field of vision over # times, by actual test! With "X-Pand, almost no detail of a room can escape your Super-Spy sight! That gives you some idea of Super-Spy's powers! But the real surprise is the price: three dollars! Unlimited Uses: Super-Spy's uses are unlimited. With Super-Spy, you can keep an eye on the kids while they take their naps, even if the door to their room is closed! With Super-Spy installed you can observe beyond walls in your home, office of factory --  while you remain invisible! Professional Uses: Private and hotel detectives. Insurance investigators. Undercover agents. Security guards. Photographers. Store qwners -- watch diop lifting suspects. Emplors -- get eye-witness proof of loaf ing or theft. Hospital staff -- W'atch restless patients without disturbing them. Housewives -- see a salesman or stranger at the door -- while you stay safely hidden! You can even take pictures through its low-distortion lens! Important and IVoHtable What will you do with SuperSpy? If its important, in your home, for you to know what people do when they don't know they're being watched (and there's no invasion of privacy) -- get Super-Spy! Order spares for sudden or unexpected opportunities to observe -- without being observed! Order extras for trusted friends: they might be glad to pay you a handsome profit. Perfected in Germany Super-Spy was perfected in Germany. Limited quantities are now available to the public through a special division (Detection Appliances) of a reputable mail order firm. The parent firm's total sales throughout U.S. are over #. The owner has been a respected local businessman for # years. #Year Service Guarantee Super-Spy is sold with this #year guarantee: If it fails to work due to any defect in material or workmanship, you can return it as direct and out any charge, D.A. will either repair or replace it -- or refund the purchase price. All Rights Resenred D.A. specifically reserves the right to refuse orders without explanation or liability, except for prompt return of payment D.A., Dopf. #J#, #I Melrosg Avenue Los Angeles, Calif. # that I con see -- without being seen! Under proper condiI ions and within legal limits, I would like to be oble to I see what goes on behind walls, fences, and closed doors. I Please send me Super-Spy (s) on your #-year guarantee. Include complete, simple instructions for maximum effecHveness. I enclose cash, check, or money order (Payable to D.A.) I for #  # for #  No C.O.D.' # for # # for # Please! (Priat Claoriy) Name  ... Address  I State #ip VoL #, No. # issue # frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton, Production Manager Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Keith Laumer by Larry Niven by A. Bertram Chandler by Algis Budrys by James McKimmey by Bruce W. Ronald by Vernor Vinge by W. I. Johnstone by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF puolished monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York. N.Y. # young child ie  m  bad H Bi n Q fluid n E QBia frozen water B #c coin D B Bliia large gun B  animal B not early Q B m not wide  El '""DffiGialEiiti#Blaiik--i Name this famous President WeVe filled in his-lifst name to show you how easy it is. Using the clues, you fill in the letters in the empty squares, that spell out his last name. Gentlemen -- Please enter me in your # puzzle series. Here Is my completed puzzle with #c for postage and handling. Please let me know if my solution is correct and rush all additional details of your # puzzle series. Name Address City State Zip IF  Editorial O n the #th of January, #, the space age had its first American casualties, when a flash fire, fed by the pure-oxygen atmosphere in the capsule, killed three astronauts as they were completing the pre-flight tests for the first manned Apollo launching. We all knew that we could not conquer space for free. Even a new airplane usually takes a couple of lives in development -- test pilots know this, and for that matter so do most seasoned airline passengers, because even civilian transports have bugs that sometimes are not detected until a planeload or two gets killed. (Witness the Comet, the Constellation, the Electra, the Boeing #.) And space travel is not merely a more arduous form of flying. It is a reach into a new dimension, with every part of its propulsion systems, life-support equipment, even telemetry and control brand-new and hazardous. Yet it was a shock, all the same, when these three died. The fact of death is nothing strange in this world, of course. Hardly a newspaper comes out without death in its headlines: for every astronaut who has died, a thousand men have given lives in battle... and ten thousand or more have battered their silly brains out in highway accidents. But these men died in a way that is unusual and almost unprecedented in this year of #: they died for a purpose, and they died without an enemy. No one in this world wanted them dead, and no one profited by the accident that took their lives. The space program will go on, of course. If there were no other reason, it should go on because we owe it to them. But there are bigger reasons: we (meaning the human race) have to conquer space because it is the next place to go, and we have to pay whatever price it costs to get there. We have been very careful with the lives of our astronauts, and up until now we have also been very lucky. It is certain that these three are only the first to die, not the last. But it was a worthwhile death for them; and while we honor them and mourn them for it, it is likely that, every now and then, we may envy them a little for it, too. -- The Editor, SlnAiiiM SlO Iimi y PmCK # h tvsr toertasing numbars. Wtstanrd to Itevads, when tho sir is fresh ind clear. Uies are low or nonlistiat and oNOrtaaitr is epoo to olL Yet, Nevada is booming and real estate investors are prospering. It b a pravii bet tbat maop ftbasa.s of Nevada acnan hm raailisd fsboioos profits from somU C#lP...#nty ailnutn from MEiU have tho backdrop of the auiestic Mbp Moontaiaa. Iba spartdiai HaoMdl her b a abort U aUb avap. Oaaeba ftaala aa a graded road ttat bads lata coast to coast OAHiglMay #. Amidst theta spoctaciilar sardciiuliifoofthaGoMeaWott modern schools, shops, theaters, hospital and airport b only # miles Inf remote tend where purchasers hava to hops tor progress and expansion. They offer you the opportunity of a lito thno. a chaneo to participate la Nevada's cootinuini boom...lliautoi from tho ooavaai onces of hospitMrfo Elko, la the mkbt of correal crowlh and progresa. lovabil and mountain fed bottom streams you'll catch trophy sia German Browns, Rainbow and Brook Trout... largt owners cao catch their dinner within easy driving distance  of the property lines. bunt too big taoN ipacMS Hab Oaar... Quad, Cbukar. and PartrUga ara foaod to abundaooto View Coll Course. No niNi for sbrt bg timts on tbb city owned and maintained pH coorst. but golfing aa N iboold ba anjoyrt. Play a lets roly #-# or N bolaa aurrounded by braatktaking acanary. vited guesb will spend many happy hours boating, fishi and picnicking at nearby Lake Osino. There is no charge to Rancho owners for full righb to the use of this private multiacre lake and park area. opportoaity. But the country's leading corporations are also investing in their Nevada futures. Industrial gianb, who erect planb where increasing land values and population demand them, are building or have secured acreage throughout Nevada. SI#B.Compbtepaymcat schedule b fllB due ail f tlM par aiato. Ite Int erest no Mwying cto gts. LIva. Vtoatba or N etlipii aimpb held for tauMtowal lecurityVHia an Iba Redraw ntoraawaeyheiheeBaMdibReMt Ctotelh Ra toaNbdartrbltoii Miacnb IF  Serial The ship was a ruin, the purser was preaching sedition -- all in all, it looked like a fine trip! I H is uniform was new, too new, all knife-edged creases and the braid and buttons as yet undimmed by time. It sat awkwardly upon his chunky body, and even more awkwardly his big ears protruded from under the cap that was set too squarely upon his head. Beneath the shiny visor his eyes were gray (but not yet hard); and his face, for all its promise of strength, was as yet unlined, had yet to lose its immature softness. He stood at the foot of the ramp by which the had disembarked from the transport that had carried him from the Antarctic Base to Port Woomera, looking across the expanse of ochre sand to the spaceport, to the tall, silver towers that were the ships, interplanetary and interstellar, gleaming in the desert. The westering sun was hot on his back, but he did not notice the discomfort. There were the ships, the real ships -- not obsolescent puddlejumpers like the decrepit cruiser in which he, with the other midshipmen of his class, had made the training cruise to the moons of Saturn. There were the ships, the starships, that span their web of commerce from Earth to the Centaurian planets, to the Cluster Worlds, to the Empire of Waverley, to the Shakespearian Sector and beyond. But theyre only merchantmen, he thought, with a young man's snobbery. He wondered in which one of the vessels he would be taking passage. Merchantman or not, that big ship, the one that stood out from her neighbors like a city skyscraper among village church steeples, seemed to be a likely enough craft. He pulled the folder containing his orders from his inside breast pocket, opened it, read (not for the second time, even) the relevant page... you are to report on board the Interstellar Transport Commission's Delta Orionis... He was not a spaceman yet, in spite of his uniform, but he knew the Commission's system of nomenclature. There was the Alpha class and the Beta class, and there were the Gamma and Delta classes. He grinned wrily. His ship was one of the smaller ones. Well, at least he would not be travelling to Lindisfarne Base in an Epsilon class tramp. Ensign John Grimes, Federation Survey Service, shrugged his broad shoulders and stepped into the ground car waiting to carry him and his baggage from the airport to the spaceport. II G rimes looked at the officer standing just inside Delta Orionis" airlock, a she looked at him. He felt the beginnings of a flush spreading over his face, a prickling of the roots of his close-cropped hair, and felt all the more embarrassed by this public display of his embarrassment. But spaceborn female officers, at this time, were almost as scarce as hens' teeth in the Survey Service; and such few as he had met all looked as though they shared a common, equine ancestry. It was all wrong, thought Grimes. It was unfair that this girl (this attractive girl) should already be a veteran of interstellar voyages while he, for all his uniform and commission, should be embarking upon his first, his very first trip outside the bounds of the solar system. He let his glance fall from her face (but not without reluctance) to the braid on her shoulderboards. Gold on a white facing. So it wasn't too bad. She was only some sort of Paymaster or, to use Merchant Service terminology, only some sort of Purser. She said, her clear, high voice almost serious, "Welcome aboard the Delia #Ryan, Admiral." "Ensign," corrected Grimes stiffly. "Ensign Grimes... "... of the Federation Survey Service," she finished for him. "But you are all potential admirals. There was the faintest of smiles flickering upon her full lips, a barely discernible crinkling at the comers of her eyes. Her brown eyes, thought Grimes. Brown eyes, and what I can see of her hair under that cap seems to be auburn... She glanced at her wrist watch. She told him, her voice now crisp and businesslike, "We lift ship in precisely ten minutes' time. Ensign, "Then I'd better get my gear along to my cabin. Miss...?" "I'll look after that, Mr. Grimes. Meanwhile, Captain Craven sends his compliments and invites you to the control room." "Thank you." Grimes looked past and around the girl, trying to discover for himself the door that gave access to the ship's axial shaft. He was determined not to ask. "It's labelled," she told him with a faint smile. "And the cage is waiting at this level. Just take it up as far as it goes, then walk the rest. Or do you want a pilot?" "I can manage," he replied more coldly than he had intended, adding, thank you." He could see the tally over the door now. It was plain the button that he had to press to open the door, but the girl pressed it for him. He thanked her again -- and this time his coldness was fully intentional -- and stepped into the cage. The door slid shut behind him. The uppermost of the studs on the elevator's control panel He pushed it, then stood there and watched the lights flashing on the panel as he was swiftly lifted to the nose of the ship. hen he was carried no further he got out, found himself on a circular walk surrounding the upper extremity of the axial shaft. On the outside of the shaft itself there was a ladder. After a second's hesitation he climbed it, emerged through a hatch into the control room. It was like the control room of the cruiser in which he had made his training cruise and yet subtly (or not so subtly) unlike it. Everything -- but so had it been aboard the Survey Service vessel -- was functional, but there was an absence of high polish, of polishing for polishing's sake. Instruments gleamed, but it was the dull gleam that comes from long and continual use and matched the dull gleam of the buttons and rank marks on the uniforms of the officers already seated at their stations, the spacemen to whom, after aU, uniform was no more (and no less) than an obligatory working rig. The big man with the four gold bars on each shoulder half turned his head as Grimes came up through the hatch. "Glad to have you aboard, Ensign,' he said perfunctorily. "Grab yourself a seat; there's a spare one alongside the mate's. Sorry there's no time for introductions right now. We're due to get upstairs." "Here!" grunted one of the. officers. Grimes made his way to the vacant acceleration chair, dropped inIF to it, strapped himself in. While he was so doing he heard the captain ask, "All secure, Mr. Kennedy?" "No, sir." "Then why the hell not?" "I'm still waiting for the purser's report, sir." "Are you?" Then, with a longsuffering sigh, "I suppose she's stiU tucking some passenger into her -- or his -- bunk..." "She could still be stowing some passenger's gear, sir," contributed Grimes. "Mine," he added. "Indeed?" The captain's voice was cold and elaborately uninterested. Over the intercom came a female voice. "Purser to Control. All secure below." "And about bloody well time," grumbled the shipmaster. Then, to the officer at the transceiver, "Mr. Digby, kindly obtain clearance." "Obtain clearance, sir," acknowledged that young man brightly. Then, into his microphone, Delta Orionis to Port Control. Request clearance to lift ship. Over." "Port Control to Delta Orionis, You may lift. Bon voyage. Over." "Thank you. Port Control. Over and out'" T hen the ship was throbbing to the rhythmic beat of her Inertial Drive, and Grimes felt that odd sense of buoyancy, of near weightlessness, that persisted until the vessel broke contact with the ground; and then the still gentle acceleration induced the reverse effect. He looked out through the nearest viewport. Already the ochre surface of the desert, streaked by the long, black shadows of ships and spaceport buildings, was far below them, with the vessels and the immobile constructions looking like toys and one or two surface vehicles like scurrying insects. Far to the north, dull-ruddy against the blue of the sky, there was a sandstorm.  that sky were darker, thought Grimes, this would look like Mars, and the mental comparison reminded him that he, too, was a spaceman, that he, too, h been around (although only within the bounds of Sol's planetary system). Even so, he was Survey Service, and these others with him in Control were only Merchant Officers, fetchers and carriers, interstellar coach and truck drivers. But he envied them their quiet competency. Still the ship lifted, and the spaceport below her dwindled, and the land horizon to the north and the now visible sea horizon to the south began to display the beginnings of curvature. Still she lifted. And overhead the sky was dark, and the first bright stars, Sirius and Canopus, Alpha and Beta Centauri, were sparkling there and beckoning as they had beckoned for ages immemorial before the first clumsy rocket clambered heavenward up the ladder of its own fiery exhaust, before the first aeroplane spread its flimsy wings, before the first balloon was lifted by the hot, expanding gases from its airborne furnace... "Mr. Grimes," said the captain suddenly, his voice neither friendly nor unfriendly. "Sir?" n "We lift on I.D. until we're clear of the Van Allens." "I know, sir," said Grimes, then he wished that he could unsay the words. But it was too late. He was conscious of the shipmaster's hostile silence, of the amused contempt of the merchant officers. He shrank into his chair, tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. The ship's people talked among themselves in low voices, ignoring him. They allowed themselves a period of relaxation, producing and lighting cigarettes. Nobody offered the ensign one. Sulkily he fumbled for his pipe, filled it, lit it. The chief officer coughed with quite unnecessary vigor. The captain growled, "Put that out, please," and muttered something about stinking out the control room. He himself was puffing at a villainous black cigar. '"jhe ship lifted, and below her the Earth was now a great sphere, three quarters in darkness, the line of the terminator drawn across land masses, cloud fornutions and oceans. City lights twinkled in the gloom like' star clusters, like nebulae. In a quiet voice an officer was calling readings from the radar altimeter. To the throbbing of the Inertial Drive was added the humming, tional gyroscopes as the ship turned about her short axis hunting the target star. The pseudogravity of centrifugal force was at an odd angle to that of acceleration, and the resultant was at an odder angle still. Grimes began to feel sick and was actually thankful that the captain had made him put his pipe out. Alarm bells soimded, and then somebody was saying over the intercom, "Prepare for acceleration. Prepare for acceleration. Listen for the count down." The count down. Part of the long tradition of space travel, a hang-over from the days of the first, unrealiable rockets. Spaceships still used rockets, but only as auxiliaries, as a means of delivering thrust in a hurry, of building up acceleration in a short time. At the word Zerol the Inertial Drive was cut, and, simultaneously, the Reaction Drive flared into violent lift. The giant hand of acceleration bore down heavily upon all in the ship -- then, suddenly, at a curt order from the captain, lifted. Grimes became aware of a thin, high keening, the song of the everprecessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive. He knew the theory of it -- as what spaceman did not? -- although the mathematics of it were beyond the comprehension of all but a handful of men and women. He knew what was happening, knew that the ship, now that speed had been built up, was, as one of his instructors had put it, going ahead in Space and astern in Time. He felt, as he had been told that he would feel, the uncanny sensation of dea vii, and he watched the outlines of the control room and of every person and instrument in the compartment shift and shimmer, the colors sagging down the spectrum. Ahead, the stars were pulsating spirals of opalescence; astern. Earth and Moon were frighteningly disIP t#rted, uncanny compromises between the sphere and the tesseract. But this was no more than the merest subliminal glimpse; in the twinkling of an eye the Home Planet and her daughter were no more than dust motes whirling down the dark dimensions. The captain lit a fresh cigar. "Mr. Kennedy," he said, "you may set normal Deep Space watches." He turned to Grimes. His full beard almost hid his expression, that of one performing a social duty with no enthusiasm. "Will you join me in my day cabin. Ensign?" "It will be my pleasure, sir," lied Grimes. Ill H andling his big body with easy grace in the Free Fall conditions, the captain led the way from the control room. Grimes followed slowly and clumsily, but with a feeling of great thankfulness that after his training cruise he wias no longer subject to spacesickness. There were drugs, of course, and passengers used them, but a spaceman was expected to be independent of pharmaceutical aids. Even so, the absence of any proper "up" or "down" bothered him more than he cared to admit. The shipmaster slid open the door to his accommodation, motioned to Grimes to enter, murmuring sardonically, "Now you see how the poor live." The so-called poor, thought Grimes, didn't do themselves at all was considerably larger than the day cabin of the Survey Service cruiser's captain had been. True it was also shabbier -- but it was (far more comfortable. Its decoratioDS, whidh would never have been approved aboard a warship, were obviously the private property of the master. There were a full dozen holograms on the bulkhead -- all of them widely differing, but all of them covering the same subject matter. Not that the subject matter was covered. "My harem," grunted the captain. "That one there, the redhead, I met on Caribbea. Quite a stop-over that was. The green-haired wench -- and you can see that it's not a dye job, although I've often wondered why women can't be thorough -- isn't human, of course. But indubitably humanoid and indubitably mammalian. Belongs to Brrrooonooorrrooo, one of the worlds of the Shaara Empire. The local Queen Mother offered to sell Lalia -- that's her name -- to me for a case of Scotch. And I was tempted..." He sighed. "But you Service Survey types aren't the only one who have to live by regulations." Grimes said nothing, tried to hide his interest in the art gallery. "But take a pew. Ensign. Spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard -- this is Liberty Hall." Grimes pulled himself to one of the comfortable chairs, strapped himself in. He said lamely, "I don't see any cat, sir." "A figure of speech," growled the captain, seating himself next to what looked like a drink cabinet. "Well, Mr. Grimes, your Commandant at the Academy, Commodore Bradshaw, is an old friend and shipmate of mine. He said that you were a very profnismg young officer... like a balloon in a comic strip the unspoken words, "God knows why," hung between them... and asked me to keep an eye on you. But I have already gained the impression that there is very little that a mere merchant skipper such as myself will be able to teach you." Grimes looked at the bulky figure seated opposite him, at the radiationdarkened skin of the face above the black, silver-streaked beard, at the fiercely jutting nose, at the faded but bright and intelligent blue eyes, the eyes that were regarding him with more than a hint of amused contempt. He blushed miserably as he recalled his brash, "I know, sir," in this man's own control room. He said, with an effort, 'This is my first Deep Space voyage, sir." "I know." Surprisingly the Captain chuckled and, as though to celebrate this minor scoring over his guest, opened the liquor cabinet. "Pity to have to suck this excellent Manzanila out of a bulb; but that's one of the hardships of Free Fall. Here!" He tossed a little pear-shaped container to Grimes, kept one for himself. "Your health, Ensign!" "And yours, sir." The wine was too dry for Grimes taste, but he made a pretense of enjoying it. He was thankful that he was not asked to have a second drink. Meanwhile, his host had pulled a typewritten sheet from a drawer of has desk, was looking at it. "Let me see, now... You're in cabin #, on D Deck. You'll be able to find your own way down, won't you?" Grimes said that he would and unbuckled his lapstrap. It was obvious that the party was over. "Good. Now, as an officer of the Survey Service you have the freedom of the control room and the engine rooms..." "Thank you, sir." "Just don't abuse the privilege, that's all." After that, thought Grimes, Vm not likely to take advantage of it, let alone abuse it. He let himself float up from the chair, said, "Thank you, sir." For the drink, or for the admonition? What did it matter? "I'll be getting down to my cabin, sir. I've some unpacking to do." "As you please, Mr. Grimes." T he captain, his social duty discharged, had obviously lost interest in his guest. Grimes let himself out of the cabin, made his way, not without difficulty to the door in the axial shaft. He was surprised at the extent to which one not very large drink had interfered with the control of his body in Free Fall. Emerging from the elevator cage on D Deck he stumbled, literally, into the purser. "Let go of me," she ordered, "or I shall holler 'rape!' " That, he thought, is all I need to make this trip a really happy one. She disengaged herself, moved back from him, her slim, sandalled feet, magnetically shod, maintaining contact with the steel decking, but gracefully, with a dancing motion. She laughed. "I take it that you've just come from a home truth session with B.B." "B.B.?" IF "The Bearded Bastard. But don't take it too much to heart. He's that way with all junior officers. The fact that you're Survey Service is only incidental." "Thank you for telling me." "His trouble," she went on, "his real trouble is that he's painfully shy." He's not the only one, thought Grimes, looking at the girl. She seemed even more attractive than on the occasion of their first meeting. She had changed into the shortsand-shirt shipboard uniform, and she was one of the rare women who can wear such a rig without looking lumpy and clumsy. There was no cap now to hide her hair -- smooth, lustrous, with coppery glints, with a straight white parting, bisecting the crown of her finely shaped head. She was well aware of his scrutiny. She said, "You must excuse me. Ensign. I have to look after the other customers. They aren't seasoned spacemen like you." Suddenly bold, he said, "But before you go, what is your name?" She smiled dazzlingly. "You'll find a list of all ship's personnel among the notices posted in your cabin. I'm included." Then she was gone, gliding rapidly around the curve of the alleyway. He looked at the numbers over the cabin doors, outboard from the axial shaft, made a full circuit of that hollow pillar before he realized that this was only the inner ring, that he would have to follow one of the radial alleyways to reach his own accommodation. He finally found No. #, let himself in. His first action was to inspect the framed notices on the bulkhead. Captain . Craven, O.G.S., S.S,R. So the Old Man held a Reserve commission. And the Order of the Golden Star was awarded for something more than good attendance. Mr. P. Kennedy, Chief Officer. He ignored the other name on the list while he searched for the one he wanted. Ah, here it was. Miss Jane Pentecost, Purser. He repeated the name to hirnself, thinking that, despite the old play on words, this Jane was not plain. (But Janes rarely are.) Jane Pentecost... Then, feeling that he should be showing some professional interest, he acquainted himself with the names of the other members of the ship's crew. He was intrigued by the manning scale, amazed that such a large vessel, relatively speaking, could be run by such a small number of people. But this was not a warship; there were no weapons to be manned, there would never be the need to put a landing party ashore on the surface of a hostile planet. The Merchant Service could afford to automate, to employ machinery in lieu of ratings. The Survey Service could not. Virtuously he studied the notices dealing with emergency procedures, ship's routine, recreational facilities and all the rest of it, examined with care the detailed plan of the ship. Attached to this was a card, signed by the master, requesting passengers to refrain, as much as possible, from using the elevator in the axial shaft, going on to say that it was essential, for the good of their physical health, that they miss no opportunity for taJdng exercise. (In a naval vessel thought Grimes, with a slight sneer, that would not be a request -- it would be an order. And, in any case, there would be compulsory calisthenics for all hands.) He studied the plan again and toyed with the idea of visiting the bar before dinner. He decided against it; he was still feeling the effects of the drink that the captain had given him. So, to pass the time, he unpacked slowly and carefully, methodically stowing his effects in the drawers under the bunk. Then, but not without reluctance, he changed from his uniform into his one formal civilian suit. One of the officer-instructors at the Academy had advised this. "Always wear civvies when you're travelling as passenger. If you're in uniform, some old duck's sure to take you for one of the ship's officers and ask you all sorts of technical questions to which you don't know the answers." While he was adjusting his frilled cravat in front of the mirror the sonorous notes of a gong boomed from the intercom. IV '"T'he dining salon was much more JL ornate than the gunroom of that training cruiser had been and more ornate than her wardroom. The essentials were the same, of course, as they are in any sihip: tables and chairs secured to the deck, each seat fitted with its strap so that the comforting pressure of buttocks on padding could give an illusion of gravity. Each table was covered with a gaily colored cloth, but beneath the fabric there was the inevitable stainless steel to which the stainless steel service would be held by its own magnetic fields. But what impressed Grimes was the care that had been taken, the ingenuity that had been exercised to make this compartment look like anything but part of a ship. The great circular pillar of the axial shaft was camouflaged by trelliswork, and the trelliswork itself was almost hidden by the luxuriance of some broad-leaved climbing plant that he could not identify. Smaller pillars were similarly covered, and there was a further efflorescence of living decoration all around the circular outer wall -- the wall that must be the inner skin of the ship. And there were windows in this wall. No, Grimes decided, not windows, but holograms. The glowing, threedimensional pictures presented and maintained the illusion that this was a hall set in the middle of some great park. But on what world? Grimes could not say. Trees, bushes and flowers were unfamiliar, and the color of the sky subtly strange. He looked around him at his fellow diners, at the dozen passengers and the ship's officers, most of whom were already seated. The officers were in neat undress uniform. About half the male passengers were, like himself, formally attired; the others were sloppy in shorts and shirts. But this was the first night out, and some laxity was allowable. The women, however, all seemed to IP have decided to outshine the glowing flowers of the vine that were sudh an essential part of the decor, those other flowers that flamed outside the windows that were not windows. There was the captain, unmistakable with his beard and the shimmering rainbow of ribbons on the left breast of his blouse. There were the passengers at his table: the men inclined to portliness and pomposity, their women sleek and slim and expensive looking. Grimes was relieved to see that there was no vacant place -- and yet, at the same time, rather hurt. He knew that he was only an ensign, a one ringer, and a very new ensign at that -- but, after all, the Survey Service was the Survey Service. He realized that somebody was addressing him. It was a girl, a small, rather chubby blonde. She was in uniform: a white shirt with black should erboards, each bearing a narrow white stripe, and sharply creased, tapered black slacks and black, highly polished shoes. Grimes assumed, correctly, that she was a junior member of the purser's staff. "Mr. Grimes," she said, "will you follow me, plee? You're at Miss Pentecost's table." led him around the axial shaft to a table for four at which the purser with two passengers, a man and a woman, was already seated. Jane Pentecost was attir as was his guide, the severity of her goldtrimmed black and white in pleasing contrast to the pink and blue frills and flounces that clad the other woman, her slenderness in still more pleasing contrast to the other's untidy plumpness. She smiled and said pleasantly, "Be seated. Admiral." "Admiral?" asked the man at her left, unpleasantly incredulous. He had, obviously, been drinking. He was a rough looking customer, in spite of the attempt that he had made to dress for dinner. He was twice the ensign's age, perhaps, although the heavily lined face under the scanty sandy hair made him look older. "Admiral?" He laughed, revealing irregular yellow teeth. "In what? The Space Scouts?" J ane Pentescost firmly took control. She said, "Allow me to introduce Ensign Grimes, of the Survey Service..." "Survey Service... Space Scouts... S.S... What's the difference?" "Plenty!" answered Grimes hotly. The purser ignored the exchange. "Ensign, this is Mrs. Baxter..." "Pleased to meet you. I'm sure," simpered e woman. "And Mr. Baxter." Baxter extended his hand reluctantly, and Grimes took it reluctantly. The amenities observed, he pulled himself into his seat and adjusted his lapstrap. He was facing Jane Pentecost. The man was on his right, the woman on his left. He glanced first at her, then at her husband, wondering how to start and to maintain a conversation. But this was the purser's table, and that was her responsibility. She accepted it. "Now you're seelE ing how the poor live, Admiral," she remarked lightly. Grimes, taking a tentative sip from his bulb of consomme, did not think that the self-styled poor did themselves at all badly and said as much. The girl grinned and told him that (the first night out was too early to draw conclusions. "We're still on sboreside meat and vegetables," she told him, "and you'll not be getting your first taste of our instant table wine until tomorrow. Tonight we wallow in the unwonted luxury of a quite presentable Montrachet. When we start living on the produce of our own, so-called farm, washing it down with our own reconstituted plonk, you'll see the difference." The ensign replied that in his experience it didn't matter if food came from tissue-culture vats or the green fields of Earth -- what was important was the cook. "Wide experience. Admiral?" she asked sweetly. "Not very," he admitted. "But the gunroom cook in my last ship couldn't boil water without burning it." Baxter, noisily enjoying his dinner, said that this preoccupation with food and drink was symptomatic of the decadence of Earth. As he spoke his knife grated unpleasantly on the steel spines that secured his charcoal broiled steak to his plate. Grimes considered inquiring if the man thought that good table manners were also a symptom of decadence, then thought better of it. After all, this was not his table. Instead, he asked, "And where are you from, Mr. Baxter?" "The Rim Worlds, Mr. Grimes. Where we're left to sink or swim, so we've no time for much else than keeping ourselves afloat." He sucked noisily from his biilb of wine. "Things might be a httle easier for us if your precious Survey Service did something about keeping the trade routes open." "That is our job," said Grimes stiffly. "And we do it." "Do you hell! There's not a pirate in the galaxy but can nm rings round you!" "Practically every pirate has been hunted down and destroyed," Grimes told him coldly. " 'Practically every pirate,' the man says! A few small-time bunglers, he means!" "Even the notorious Black Bart," persisted Grimes. "Black Bart!" Baxter, spluttering through his full mouth, gestured with his laden fork at Grimes. "Black Bart! He wasn't much. Once he and that popsy of his split brass rags, he was all washed up. I'm talkin' about the real pirates, the ones whose ships wear national colors instead o' the Jolly Roger, the ones that your precious Survey Service daren't say hoo to. The ones who do the dirty work for the Federation." "Such as?" asked Grimes frigidly. "So now you're playin' the bleedin' innocent. Never heard o' the Duchy o' Waldegren, Mr. Ensign Grimes?" "Of course. Autonomous, but they and the Federation have signed what's called a Pact of Perpetual Amity." "Pretty words, ain't they? Suppose we analyze tbem. Suppose we analyze by (analogy. Dyeir know much about aniiiniMs Mr. Finjrijg n Grimes? Anunials?" Grhnes wals puzzleld. "Well, I suppose I do iknow something. Tve tlcen the usual courses in xeno-biology... "Never mind that. You're a Terry. Let's oonie ourselves to a selection of yer own Terran four-footed friends." "What the hell are you driving at?" flared Grimes, losing his temper. He threw an apologetic glance in Jane Pentecost's direction, saw that she was more amused than shocked. #Tust think about a Pact of Perpetual Amity between an elephant and a tom cat," said Baxter. "A fat an' lazy elephant. A lean, scrawny, vicious tom cat. If the elephant wanted to he could convert that cat into a fur bedside rug just by steppin' on him. But he doesn't want to. He leaves the cat alone, just because the cat is useful to him. He does more than just leave him alone. He an' his feline cobber pull out their pens from wherever they keep 'em an' sign their famous Pact. "In case you haven't worked it out for yourself, the elephant's the Federation, an' the tom cat's the Duchy of Waldegren." "But why?" asked Grimes. "But whyT "Don't they teach you puppies any intersteUar politics? Or are those courses reserved for the top brass? Well, Mr. Grimes, I'll tell you. There's one animal that has the elephant really worried. Believe it or not, he's soared o mice. An' there're quite a few mice inside the FederatioD, mice that make the elephant nervous by their rustlings, an' ecurryings, an' their squeaky demands for full autonomy. That's where the oat comes in. By his free use of his teeth an' claws, by his very presence, he keeps the mice quiet." "And just who are these famous mice, Mr. Baxter?" asked Grimes, innocently. "Don't they teach you nothin' in your bleedin' Academy? Well, I'll tell you. "In our neck o' the woods, the mice are the Rim Worlds, an' the tom cat, as I've already made clear, is the Duchy o' Waldegren. The Duchy gets away with murder -- murder an' piracy. But accordin' to the Duchy, an' accordin' to your big, stupid elephant of a Federation, it's not piracy. It's -- now, lemme see, what fancy words have been used o' late? Contraband Control. Suppression of Espionage. Violation Every time that there's an act of piracy, there's some quote legal unquote excuse for it, an' it's upheld by the Federation's tame legal eagles, an' you Survey Service sissies just sit there on your big, fat backsides an' don't lift a pinkie against your dear, murderous pals, the Waldegrenese. If you ever did, they'd send you screaming back to Base, where some dear old daddy of an Admiral'd spank your little plump bottoms for you." "Please, Mr. Baxter!" admonished Jane Pentecost. IF V "Sorry, Miss. I got sort of carried away. But my young brother was Third Reaction Drive Engineer of the old Bunyip when she went missing. Nothin was ever proved, but the Waldegrenese Navy was boldin' fleet maneuvers in the sector she was passin' through when last heard from. Oh, they're cunnin rascals. They'll never go for one o' these ships, or one o' the Trans-Galactic Clippers; it'll always be some poor little tramp that nobody'll ever miss but the friends an' relatives o' the crew. An,. I suppose, the underwriters, but Llyold's make such a packet out o the ships that don't get lost that they can well afford to shell out now an' again. Come to that, it must suit 'em. As long as there're a few 'overdues' an 'missings' they can keep the premiums up." "But I still can't see how piracy can possibly pay," protested Grimes, staunchly. "O' course it pays. Your friend Black Bart made it pay. An' if you're goin' to all the expense of building an' maintaining a war fleet, it might just as well earn its keep. Even your famous Survey Service might show a profit if you were allowed to pounce on every fat merchantman who came within range o' your guns." "But for the Federation to condone piracy, as you're trying to make out... That's utterly fantastic and out of the question." "If you lived on the Rim, you might think different," snarled Baxter. And Jane Pentecost contributed, "Not piracy. Confrontation." A s soon as the meal was finished the Baxters left rather hastily to make their way to the bar, leaving Grimes and Jane Pentecost to the leisurely enjoyment of their coffee. When the couple was out of earshot, Grimes remarked, "So those are Rim Worlders. They're the first I've met." "They're not, you know," the girl told him. "But they are. Oh, there are one or two in the Survey Service, but I've never run across them. Now I don't particularly want to." "But you did meet one Rim Worlder before you met the Baxters." "The captain?" She laughed. "Don't let him hear you say that -- not unless you want to take a space walk without a suit!" "Then who?" "Who could it be. Admiral? Whom have you actually met, to talk to, so far in this ship? Use your crust." He stared at her incredulously. "Not you?" "Who else?" She laughed again, but with a touch of bitterness. "We aren't all like our late manger companions, you know. Or should know. Even so, you'd count yourself lucky to have Jim Baxter by your side in any real jam. It boils down to this. Some of us have acquired a certain veneer. Some of us haven't. Period." "But how did you...?" He groped for words that would not be offensive to conclude the sentence. "How did I get into this galley? Easily enough. I started my spacefaring career as a not very competent Catering Officer in Jumbuk, one of the Sundowner Line's more ancient and decrepit tramps. I had to pay off sick in Elsinore. Could have been my own cooking that put me in hospital. Anyhow, I was just about recovered when the Commission's Epsilon Serpentis blew in, and she landed her purser with a slightly broken leg. She'd learned the hard way that the Golden Rule -- stop whatever youre doing and secure everything when the acceleration warning sounds -- is meant to be observed. The doctor was luckier. She broke his fall..." Grimes was about to ask what the doctor and the purser had been doing, then was th ankf ul that he had not done so. He was acutely conscious of the crimson blush that burned the skin of his face. "You must realize,' said the girl drily, "that merchant vessels with mixed crews are not monastic institutions. But where was I? Oh, yes. On Elsinore. Persuading the master of the Snaky Eppy that I was a fit and proper person to take over his pursering. I managed to convince him that I was at least proper; I still can't see what my predecessor saw in that lecherous old goat of a quack, although the Second Mate had something..." Grimes felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. "Anyhow, he signed me on, as soon as I agreed to waive repatriation. "It was a long voyage; as you know, the Epsilon Class ships are little better than tramps themselves. It was a long voyage, but I enjoyed it -- seeing all the worlds that I'd read about and heard about and always wanted to visit. The Sundowner Line doesn't venture far afield, just the four Rim Worlds and now and again the Shakespearian Sector and, once in a blue moon, one of the drearier planets of the Empire of Waverley. The Commission's tramps, of course, run everywhere. "Anyhow, we finally berthed at Woomera. The Old Man must have put in a good report about me, because I was called before the Local Superintending Purser and offered a berth, as a junior, in one of the Alpha Class liners. Alpha Centauri, if you must know. She was on the Sol-Sirius service. Nothing very glamorous in the way of ports of call, but she was a fine ship, beautifully kept, efficiently run. A couple of years there knocked most of the sharp corners off me. After that, a spell as Assistant Purser of Beta Geminorum. Atlanta, Caribbea, Carinthia and the Cluster Worlds. And then my first ship as Chief Purser. This one." O ne of Jane's girls brought them fresh bulbs of coffee and ampoules of a sweet, potent liqueur. When she was gone Grimes asked, "What are the Rim Worlds like?" She waited until he had applied the flame of his lighter to the tip of her long, thin cigar, then answered, "Cold. Dark. Lonely. But... They have something. The feeling of being on a frontier. The frontier. The last frontier." "The frontier of the dark..." murmured Grimes. IF "Yes. The frontier of the dark. And the names of our planets. They have something too. A... poetry? Yes, that's the word. Lorn, Ultimo, Faraway and Thule... And there's that night sky of ours, especially at some times of the year. There's the galaxy -- a great, dim-glowing lenticulate nebula -- and the rest is darkness. At other times of the year there's only the darkness, the blackness that's made even more intense by the sparse, faint stars that are the other Rim Suns, by the few, faint luminosities that are the distant island universes that we shall never reach." She shivered almost imperceptibly. "And always there's that sense of being on the very edge of things, of hanging on by our fingernails with the abyss of the eternal night gaping beneath us. The Rim Worlders aren't a spacefaring people; only a very few of us ever get the urge. It's analogous, perhaps, to your Maoris. I spent a leave once in New Zealand and got interested in the history of the country. The Maoris come of seafaring stock. Their ancestors made an epic voyage from their paradisiacal homeland to those rather grim and dreary little islands hanging there, all by themselves, in the cold and stormy southern ocean, lashed by frigid gales sweeping up from the Antarctic. And something -- the isolation? the climate? -- killed the wanderlust that was an essential part of the makeup of their race. You'll find very few Maoris at sea or in space, although there's no dearth of Polynesians from the home archipelagoes aboard the surface ships serving the ports of the Pacific. And there are quite a few, too, in the Commission's ships..." "We have our share in the Survey Service," said Grimes. "But tell me, how do you man your vessels? This Sundowner Line of yours..." "There are always the drifters, the no-hopers, the cast-offs from the Interstellar Transport Commission, and Trans-Galactic Clippers and Waverley Royal Mail and all the rest of them." "And from the Survey Service?" The question lifted her out of her sombre mood. "No," she replied with a smile. "Not yet." "Not ever," said Grimes. VI O nce his initial shyness had worn off, and with it much of his Academy-induced snobbery. Grimes began to enjoy the voyage. After all. Survey Service or no Survey Service, this was a ship and he was a spaceman. He managed to accept the fact that most of the ship's officers, even the most junior of them, were far more experienced spacemen than he was. Than he was now, he often reminded himself. At the back of his mind lurked the smug knowledge that, for all of them, a captaincy was the very limit of promotion, whereas he, one day, would be addressed in all seriousness as Jane Pentecost now addressed him in jest. He was a frequent visitor to the control room but, remembering the Master's admonition, was careful not to get in the way. The watch officers accepted him almost as one of them to the tricky procedure of obtaining a fix with the interstellar drive in operation -- an art, he was told, rather than a science. Having obtained the permission of the chief engineers, he prowled through e vessel's machinery spaces, trying to supplement his theoretical knowledge of reaction, inertial and interstellar drives with something more practical. The first two, of course, were idle and would be until the ship emerged from her warped SpaceTime back into the normal continuum; but there was the Pile, the radio-active heart of the ship, and there was the auxiliary machinery that, in this tiny, manmade planet, did the work that on a natural world is performed by winds, rivers, sunlight and gravity. There was the Mannsohenn Drive Room; and, inside this holy of holies, no man need fear to admit that he was soared by the uncanny complexity of over-precessing gyroscopes. He stared at the tumbling rotors, the gleaming wheels that seemed always on the verge of vanishing into nothingness, that rolled down the dark dimensions, dragging the ship and all aboard her with them. He stared, hypnotized, lost in a vague, disturbing dream in which Past and Present and Future were inextricably mingled. And the chief Interstellar Drive Engineer took him firmly by the arm and led him from the compartment. "Look at that time-twister too long," he growled, "and you'll be meeting yourself coming back!" There was the "faim, the deck of yeastand tissue-culture vats wihich was no more (and no less) than a highly efficient protein factory, and the deck where stood the great, transparent globes in which algae converted the ship's organic waste and sewage back into usable form (processed as nutriment for the yeasts and the tissue-culture and as fertilizer for the hydroponic tanks, the Bio-Chemist was careful to explain), and the deck where luxuriant vegetation spilled over from the trays and almost barricaded the inspection walks, the source of vitamins and of flowers for the saloon tables and, at the same time, the ship's main air-conditioning unit. G rimes said to Jane Pentecost, who had accompanied him on this tour of inspection, "You know, I envy your captain." "From you. Admiral," she scoffed, "that is something. But why?" "How can I put it? You people do the natural way what we do with chemicals and machinery. The captain of a warship is captain of a warship. Period. But your Captain Craven is absolute monarch of a little world." "A warship," she told him, "is supposed to be able to go on functioning as such even with every compartment holed. A warship cannot afford to depend for the survival of her crew upon the survival of hosts of other air-breathing organisms." "Straight from the book," he said. Then, puzzled, "But for a... He hesitated. "But for a woman, or for a purIP ser, or for a mere merdiaiit officer I know too much she finished for him. "But I can read, you know. And when I was in the Sundowner Line, I, as well as all the other officers, was supposed to keep up with all the latest Survey Service publications." "But why?" he asked. "But why not? We'll have a navy of our own, one day. Just stick around. Admiral." "Secession?" he enquired, making it sound like a dirty word. "Once again -- why not?" "It'd never work," he told her. "The history of Earth is full of secessions that did work. So is the history of Interstellar Man. The Empire of Waverley, for example. The Duchy of Waldegren, for another, although that's one that should have come to grief. We should all of us be a great deal happier if it had." "Federation policy..." he began. "Policy, shmolicy! Don't let's be unkind to the Waldegrenese, because as long as they're in being they exercise a restraining influence upon the Empire of Waverley and those bolshy-minded Rim Worlds..." Her pace slackened. Grimes noticed that they were passing through the alleyway in which she and her staff were accommodated. She went on, "But all this talking politics is thirsty work. Come in for a couple of drinks." "Thank you. But, Jane..." (she didn't seem to have noticed the use of her given name) "... I don't think that either of us is qualified to criticize the handling of foreign and colonial affairs." "Spoken like a nice, young, welldrug-up future admiral. Oh, I know, I know. You people are trained to be the musclemen of the Federation. Yours's not to reason why, yours's but to do and die, and all the rest of it. But I'm a Rim Worlder, and out on the Rim you learn to think for yourself." She slid her door open. "Come on in. This is Liberty Hall -- you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard." H er accommodation was a suite rather than a mere cabin. It was neither as large nor as well fitted as the captain's, but it was better than the chief officer's quarters, in which Grimes had already been a guest. He looked with interest at the holograms on the bulkhead of the sitting room. They were -- but in an altogether different way -- as eyecatching as Captain Craven's had been. There was one that was almost feeling of utter cold and darkness and loneliness. It was of the night sky on some planet, a range of dimly seen yet sharply serrated peaks bisecting a great, pallidly glowing, lenticulate nebula. "Home, sweet home," murmured the girl, seeing what he was looking at. "The Desolation Mountains on Faraway, with the Galactic Lens visible in the background." "And you feel homesick for that? "Too right I do. Oh, not all the time. I like warmth and comfort as well as the next woman. But . : She laughed. "Don't stand atround gawking -- you make the place look untidy. Pull yourself into a chair and belay the buttocks." He did so, watching her as she busied herself at the liquor cabinet. Suddenly, in these conditions of privacy, he was acutely conscious of the womanliness of her. The rather tight and rather short shorts, as she bent away from him, left very little to the imagination. And her legs, although slender, were full Where they should be full, with the muscles working smoothly under the golden skin. He felt the urge which he sternly suppressed to plant a kiss in the delectable hollow behind each knee. She turned suddenly. "Here! Catch!" He managed to grab the bulb that was hurtling toward his face, but a little of the wine spurted from the nipple and struck him in the right eye. When his vision cleared he saw that she was seated opposite him, was laughing (at or with him?). "At," he suspected. A real demonstration of sympathy would have consisted of tears, not laughter. Her face grew momentarily severe. "Not the mess," she said reprovingly. "But the waste." Grimes examined the bulb. "I didn't waste much. Only an eyeful." She raised her drink in ritual greeting. "Here's mud in your eye," adding, "for a change." In the sudden silence that followed they sat looking at each other. There was a tension, some odd resultant of centrifugal and centripetal forces. They were on the brink of something, and both of them knew it, and there was the compulsion to go forward countered by the urge to go back. She asked tartly, "Have you never seen a woman's legs before?" He shifted his regard to her face, to the eyes that, somehow, were brown no longer, but held the depth and the darkness of the night through which the ship was plunging. She said, "I think you'd better finish your drink and go." He said, "Perhaps you're right." "Too bloody right I'm right." She managed a smile. "I'm not an idler, like some people. I've work to do." "See you at lunch, then. And thank you." "Don't thank me. It was on the house, as the little dog said. Off with you. Admiral." He unbuckled his lapstrap, got out of the chair and made his way to the door. When he was out of her room, he did not go to his own cabin but to the bar, where he joined the Baxters. They, rather to his surprise, greeted him in a friendly manner. Rim Worlders, Grimes decided, had their good points. I t was after lunch when one of the purserettes told him that the captain wished to see him. What have I done now? wondered Grimes, and he answered his own question with the words. Nothing. Unfortunately. Craven's manner, when he admitted Grimes into his dayroom, was severe. "Come in, Ensign. Be seated." "Thank you, sir." "You may smoke if you wish." "Thank you, sir." Grimes filled and lit his pipe, the captain ignited one of his pungent IF cigars, studied the eddying coils of smoke as though they were writing a vitally important message in some strange language. "Er, Mr. Grimes, I believe that you have been seeing a great deal of my purser, Miss Pentecost." "Not a great deal, sir. I'm at her table, of course." "I am told that she has entertained you in her quarters." "Just one bulb of sherry, sir. I had no idea that we were breaking ship's regulations." "You were not. All the same, Mr. Grimes, I have to warn you." "I assure you, sir, that nothing occurred between us." Craven permitted himself a brief, cold smile. "A ship is not a Sunday School outing -- especially a ship under my command. Some masters, I know, do expect their officers to comport themselves like Sunday School pupils, with the captain as the principal; but  expect my senior officers to behave like intelligent and responsible adults. Miss Pentecost is quite capable of looking after herself. It is you that I'm worried about." "There's no need to be worried, sir." The captain laughed. "I'm not worried about your morals, Mr. Grimes. In fact, I have formed the opinion that a roll in the hay would do you far more good than harm. But Miss Pentecost is a dangerous woman. Before lifting ship, very shortly before lifting ship, I received a confidential report concerning her activities. She's an efficient purser, a highly efficient purser, in fact, but she's even more than that. Much more." Again he studied the smoke from his cigar. "Uinfortuinaitely there's no real proof, otherwise she'd not be sailing with us. Had I insisted upon her discharge, I'd have been up against the Interstellar Clerical and Supply Officers' Guild." "Surely not," murmured Grimes. Craven snorted. "You people are lucky. You haven't a mess of Guilds to deal with, each and every one of which is all too ready to rush to the defense of a Guild member, no matter what he or she is supposed to have done. As a Survey Service captain you'U never have to face a suit for wrongful dismissal. You'll never be accused of victimization." "But what has Miss Pentecost done, sir?" asked Grimes. "Nothing -- or too bloody much. You know where she comes from, don't you? The Rim Worlds. The planets of the misfits, the rebels, the noncomformists. There's been talk of secession of late, but even those irresponsible anarchists know bloody well that secession will never succeed unless they build up their own space power. There's the Duchy of Waldegren, which would pounce as soon as the Federation withdrew its protection. And even the Empire of Waverley might be tempted to extend its boundaries. So... "They have a merchant fleet of sorts, these Rim Worlders. The Sundowner Line. I've heard rumors that it's about to be nationalized. But they have no fighting navy." "But what's all this to do with Miss Pentecost, sir?" "If what's more than just hinted at in that confidential report is true -- plenty. She's a recruiting sergeant, no less. Any officer with whom she's shipmates who's disgruntled, on the verge of throwing his hand in -- or on the verge of being emptied out -- she'll turn on the womanly sympathy for and tell him that there'll always be a job waiting out on the Rim, that the Sundowner Line is shortly going to expand, so there'll be quick promotion and all the rest of it." "And what's that to do with me, Captain?" "Are all Survey Service ensigns as innocent as you, Mr. Grimes? Merchant officers the Rim Worlds want, and badly. Naval officers they want, and badly. Naval officers they'll want even worse once the balloon goes up." Grimes permitted himself a superior smile. "It's extremely unlikely, sir, that I shall ever want to leave the Survey Service." "Unlikely perhaps -- but not impossible. So bear in mind what I've told you. I think that you'fl be able to look after yourself now that you know the score." "I think so too," Grimes told him firmly. He thought. The old mans been reading too many spy stories, r iey were dancing. Tables and chairs had been cleared from the ship's saloon and from the big, ornate playmaster throbbed the music of an orchestra so famous that even Grimes had heard of it -- The Singing Drums. They were dancing. IF Some couples shuffled a sedate measure, never losing the contact between their magnetically shod feet and the polished deck. Others -- daring or foolhardy -- cavorted in Null-G, gambolled fantastically but rarely gracefully in Free Fall. They were dancing. Ensign Grimes was trying to dance. It was not the fault of his partner that he was making such a sorry mess of it. She, Jane Pentecost, proved the truth of the oft-made statement that spacemen and spacewomen are expert at this form of exercise. He, John Grimes, was the exception that proves the rule. He was sweating, and his feet felt at least six times their normal size. Only the fact that he was holding Jane, and closely, saved him from absolute misery. There was a pause in the music. As it resumed Jane said, "Let's sit this one out. Admiral." "If you wish to," he replied, trying not to sound too grateful. "Too right I wish to. I don't mind losing a little toenail varnish, but I think we'll call it a day while I still have a full set of toenails." "I'm sorry," he said. "So am I." But the flicker of a smile robbed the words of their sting. She led the way to the bar. It was deserted save for the bored and sulky girl behind the gleaming counter. "All right. Sue," Jane told her. "You can join the revels. The admiral and I will mind the shop." 'Thank you. Miss Pentecost." Sue let herself out from her little cage, vanished gracefully and rapidly in the direction of the salon. Jane took her place. "I like being a barmaid," she told the ensign, taking two frosted bulbs out of the cooler. "I'll sign for these," offered Grimes. "You will not. This comes under the heading of entertaining influential customers." "But I'm not. Influential, I mean." "But you will be." She went on dreamily, "I can see it. I can just see it. The poor old Delia #Ryan, even more decrepit than she is now, and her poor old purser, about to undergo a Fate Worse Than at the hands of bloody pirates from the next galaxy, but three... But all is not lost. There, light-years distant, is big, fat. Grand Admiral Grimes aboard his flagship, busting a gut, to say nothing of his Mannschenn Drive unit, to rush to the rescue of his erstwhile girl friend. 'Dammitall,' I can hear him muttering into his beard. 'Dammitall. That girl used to give me free drinks when I was a snotty nosed ensign. I will repay. Full speed ahead, Gridley, and damn the torpedoes!' " ' Grimes laughed, then asked sharply, "Admiral in which service?" "What do you mean, John?" She eyed him warily. "Tom know what I mean." "So... she murmured. "So... I know that you had another home truth session with the Bearded Bastard. I can guess what it was about." "And is it true?" demanded Grimes. "Am I Olga Popovsky, the beautiful spy? Is that what you mean?" "More or less." "Come off it, John. How die hell cm I be a secret agent for a nonexistent government?" "You can be a secret agent for a subversive organization." "What is this? Is it a hangover from some half-baked and half-understood course in counter-espionage?" "There was a course of sorts," he admitted. "I didn't take much interest in it. At the time." "And now you wish that you had. Poor John." "But it wasn't espionage that the Old Man had against you. He had some sort of story about your acting as a sort of recruiting sergeant, luring officers away from the Commission's ships to that crumby little rabble of star tramps calling itself the Sundowner Line..." S he didn't seem to be listening to him, was giving her attention instead to the music that drifted from the saloon. It was one of the old, twentieth-century melodies that was enjoying a revival. She began to sing in time to it: Good-by, Vll run To seek another sun Where I May find There are hearts more kind than the ones left behind... She smiled sombrely and asked, "Does that answer your questions?" "Don't talk in riddles," he said roughly. "Riddles? Perhaps -- but not very hard ones. That, John, is a sort of song of farewell from a very old comic opera. As I recall it, the bloke singing it was going to shoot through and join the French Foreign Legion. (But there's no French Foreign Legion any more...) We, out on the Rim, have tacked our own words on to it. It's become almost a national anthem to the Rim Runners, as the people who man our ships -- such as they are -- are already calling themselves. "There's no French Foreign Legion any more, but the misfits and the failures have to have somewhere to go. I haven't lured anybody away from this service, but now and again I've shipped with officers who've been on the point of getting out, or being emptied out, and when they've cried into my beer I've given them advice. Of course. I've a certain natural bias in favor of my own home world. If I were Sirian born I'd be singing the praises of the Dog Star Line." "Even so," he persisted, "your conduct seems to have been somewhat suspect." "Has it? And how? To begin with, you are not an officer in this employ. And if you were, I should challenge you to find anything in the Commission's regulations forbidding me to act as I have been doing." "Captain Craven warned me," said Grimes. "Did he, now? That's his privilege. I suppose ithat he thinks that it's also his duty. I suppose he has the idea that I offer you admiral's rank in the Rim Worlds Navy as soon as we secede. If we had our own navy, which we don't, we might #e IF just take you in as ensign, acting, probationary," "Thank you." S he put her elbows on the bar counter, propping her face between her hands, somehow conveying the illusion of gravitational pull, looking up at him. "I'll be frank with you, John. I admit that we do take the no-hopers, the drunks and the drifters into our merchant fleet. I know far better than you what a helluva difference there is between those rustbuckets and the well found, well run ships of the Commission and, come to that, Trans-Galactic Clippers and Waverly Royal Mail. But when we do start some kind of a navy we shall want better material. Much better. We shall want highly competent officers who yet, somehow, will have the Rim World outlook. The first batch, of course, will have to be outsiders, to tide us over until our own training program is well under way." "And I don't qualify?" he asked stiffly. "Frankly, no. I've been watching you. You're too much of a stickler for rules and regulations, especially the more stupid ones. Look at the wiay ybu're dressed now, for example. Evening wear, civilian, junior officers for the use of. No individuality. You might as well be in uniform. Better, in fact. There'd be some touch of brightness." "Go on." "And the way you comport yourself with women. Stiff. Starchy. Correct. And you're all too conscious of the fact that I, even though I'm a mere merchant officer, and clerical branch at that, put up more gold braid than you do. I noticed that especially when we were dancing, I was having to lead all the time." He said defensively, "I'm not' a very good dancer." "You can say that again." She smiled briefly. "So there you have it, John. You can tell the Bearded Bastard, when you see him again, that you're quite safe from my wiles. I've no doubt that you'll go far in your own Service, but you just aren't Rim Worlds material." "I shouldn't have felt all that flattered if you'd said that I was," he told her bluntly; but he knew that he was lying. i'les?" Jane was saying. "Yes, I Mr. Letoumeau?" Grimes realized that she was not looking at him, that she was looking past him and addressing a newcomer. He tqrned around to see who it was. He found -- somehow the name hadn't registered -- that it was the psionic radio officer, a tall, pale, untidily put together young man in a slovenly uniform. He looked scared; but that was his habitual expression, Grimes remembered. They were an odd breed, these trained telepaths with their Rhine Institute diplomas; and they were not popular, but they were the only means whereby ships and shore stations could communicate instantaneously over the long light-years. In the Survey Service they were referred to, slightingly, as Commissioned Tea Cup Readers. In the Survey Service and in the Merchant Service they were referred to as Snoopers. But they were a very necessary evil. "Yes, Mr. Letourneau?" "Where's the old man? He's not in his quarters." "The Master -- " Jane emphasized the title " -- is in the saloon." Then, a little maliciously, "Couldn't you have used your crystal ball?" Letourneau flushed. "You know very well, Miss Pentecost, that we have to take an oath that we will always respect the mental privacy of our shipmates. But I must find him. Quicldy." "Help yourself. He's treading the light fantastic in there." When he was gone she said, "Typical. Just typical. If it were a real emergency, he could get B.B. on the intercom. But no. Not him. He has to parade his distrust of anything electronic and, at the same time, make it quite clear that he's not breaking his precious oath. Tell me, how do you people handle your spaceborne espers?" He grinned. "We've still one big stick that you people haven't. A court martial followed by a firing party. Not that I've ever seen it used." "Hardly, considering that you've only been in space a dog watch." Her face froze suddenly. "Yes, Sue?" It was the girl whom Jane had relived in the bar. "Miss Pentecost, will you report to the captain in Control, please. At once." "What have I done now?" "It's some sort of emergency. Miss Pentecost. The chief officer's up there with him, and he's sent for the doctor and the two chief engineers." "Then I must away, John. Look after the bar again. Sue. Don't let the admiral have too many free drinks." S he moved fast and gracefully, was gone before Grimes could think of any suitable repartee. He said to the girl, "What is happening, Sue?" "I don't know. Ad..." She flushed. "Sorry. Ensign. And, in any case. I'm not supposed to talk to the passengers about it." "But I'm not a real passenger," he said -- and asked himself. Am I a real anything? "No, I suppose you're not, Mr. Grimes. But you're not on duty." "An officer of the Survey Service is always on duty," he told her, with some degree of truth. "Whatever happens on the spacelanes is our concern." It sounded good. "Yes," she agreed hesitantly. "That's what my fianc -- he's a Lieutenant J.G. -- is always telling me." "So what's all the flap about?" "Promise not to tell anybody." "Of course." "Mr. Letourneau came wandering into the saloon. He just stood there staring about, the way he does, then he spotted the captain. He was actually dancing with me at the time." She smiled reminiscently and added, "He's a very good dancer." "He would be. But go on." "He came charging across the dance floor -- Mr. Letourneau, I IF mean. He didn't care whose toes he trod on or who he tripped over. I couldn't help overhearing when he started babbling away to Captain Craven. It's a distress call. From one of our ships -- Epsilon Sextans Her voice dropped to a whisper. "And it's piracy." "Piracy? Impossible." "But, Mr. Grimes, it's what he said." "Psionic radio officers have been known to go 'round the bend before now," Grimes told her, "and to send false alarm calls. And to receive nonexistent ones." "But the Sexy Eppy -- sorry. Epsilon Sextans -- has a cargo that'd be worth pirating. Or so I heard. The first big shipment of Antigeriatridine to Waverley." Antigeiiatridine, the so-called Immortality Serum. Manufactured in limited, but increasing quantities only on Marina (often call by its colonists Submarina) a cold, unpleasantly watery world in orbit about Alpha Crucis. The fishlike creatures from which e drug was obtained bred and flourished only in the seas of their own world. But piracy... But the old legends were full of stories of men who had sold their souls for eternal youth. The telephone behind the bar buzzed" sharply. Sue answered it. She said, "It's for you, Mr. Grimes." Grimes took e instrument. "That you. Ensign?" It was Captain Craven's voice. "Thought I'd find you there. Come up to Control, will you?" It was an order rather than a request. A ll the ship's executive officers were in the Control Room, and the doctor, the purser and the two chiel engineers. As Grimes emerged from the hatch he heard Kennedy, the Mate, say, "Here's the Ensign now." "Good. Then dog down, Mr. Kennedy, so we get some privacy." Craven turned to Grimes. "You're on the active list of the Survey Service, Mister, so I suppose you're entitled to know what's going on. The situation is this. Epsilon Sextans, Marina to Waverly with a slupaaent of Antigeriatridine, has beem pirated." Grimes managed, wilt an effort, to refrain from saying, "I know". Craven went on. Grimes managed, with an effort, to refin from saying, "I know". Craven went on, "Her esper is among the survivors. He says that the pirates were two frigates of the Waldegren Navy. Anyhow, the Interstellar Drive engineers aboard Epsilon Sextans managed to put their box of tricks on random precession, and they got away. But not in one piece." "Not in one piece?" echoed Grimes stupidly. "What the hell do you expect when an unarmed merchantman is fired upon, without warning, by two warships? The esper says that their Control has had it, and all the accommodation spaces. By some miracle the psionic radio officer's shack wasn't holed, and neither was the Mannschenn Drive Room." "But even one missile..." muttered Grimes. "If you want to capture a ship and her cargo more or less intact," snapped Craven, "you don't use missdes. You use the laser. It's an ideal weapon if you aren't fussy about how many people you kill." "Knowing the Waldegrenese as we do," said Jane Pentecost bitterly, "there wouldn't have been any survivors anyhow." "Be quiet!" roared Craven. Grimes wias puzzled by his outburst. It was out of character. True, he could hardly expect a shipmaster to react to the news of a vicious piracy with equanimity; but this shipmaster was an officer of the Reserve, had seen service in warships and had been highly decorated for outstanding bravery in battle. Craven had control of himself again. "The situation is this. There are people still living aboard Epsilon Sextans. Even though all her navigators have been killed, I think that I shall be able to find her in time. Further more, she has a very valuable cargo and, in any case, cannot be written off as a total loss. There is little damage that cannot be repaired by welded patches. I have already sent a message to Head Office requesting a free hand. I have salvage in mind. I see no reason why the ship and her cargo should not be taken on to Waverley." "A prize crew, sir?" "If you care to put it that way. This will mean cutting down the number of officers aboard my own vessel; but I am sure, Mr. Grimes, practical watch-keeping experience. All that's required is your autograph on the ship's Articles of Agreement. "lhank you, sir." "Don't thahk me. I may be thanking you before the job's over and done." He turned to his Chief Officer. "Mr. Kennedy, keep in touch with Mr. Letoumeau and let me know if anything further comes through either from Epsilon Sextans or from Head Office. The rest of you -- keep this to yourselves. No sense in alarming the passengers. I'm sure that the doctor and Miss Pentecost between them can concoct some soothing story to account for this officers' conference." "Captain Craven," said Jane Pentecost. "Well?" "The other man at my table. Mr. Baxter. I knew him out on the Rim. He holds Chief Reaction Drive Engineer's papers." "Don't tell him anything yet. But I'll keep him in mind. Now, Mr. Grimes, will you join me in my day cabin?" DC T he holograms were all gone from the bulkheads of Captain Craven's cabin. To replace them there was just one picture: a woman, not young, but with the facial bon structure that defies age and time. She was in uniform, and on her shoulderboards were the two and a half stripes of Senior Purser. The shipmaster noticed Grimes' interest and said briefly and bitterly, "She was too senior for an Epsilon Class ship; but she cut her leave short, just to oblige, when the regular purser went sick. She should have been back on Earth at the same time as me. IF though. Then we were going to get married... Grimes said nothing. He thought, Too senior for an Epsilon Class ship? Epsilon Sextans, for example? What could he say? "And that," said Craven savagely, "wflj that." "Fm sorry, sir," blurted Grimes, conscious of the inadequacy of his words. Then, foolishly, "But there are survivors, sir." "Don't you think that I haven't got Letourneau and his opposite number to check? And have you ever seen the aftermath of a Deep Space battle. Mister? Have you ever boarded a ship that's been slashed and stabbed to death with laser beams?" He seemed to require no answer, pulled himself into the chair by his desk, strapped himself in. He motioned to Grimes to be seated. Then he pulled out from a drawer a large sheet of paper, which he unfolded. It was a cargo plan. "Current voyage," he grunted. "And we're carrying more to Lindisfarne than one brand new ensign." "Such as, sir?" ventured Grimes. "Naval stores. I don't mind admitting that I'm more than a little rusty insofar as Survey Service procedure is concerned, even though I still hold my Reserve Commission. You're more familiar with fancy abbreviations than I am. Twenty cases "Reserve rations, sir. Canned and deydrated." "Atmospheric regeneration units, complete."  "So is Epsilon Sextans' 'farm' has been killed we shall be able to manage?" "Yes, sir." "Do you think you'd be able to install an Atreg unit?" "Of course, sir. They're very simple, as you know. Just syetic chlorophyl and a UV source. In any case, there are full instructions inside every container." "And this? A double M. Mark XV?" "Anti-Missile Missile." "Anti-Laser Gas Emitter." "The things they do think of. I feel more at home with these "Anti-Vessel Missiles," said Grimes. A slight enthusiasm crept honey." "What does it do?" "I'm sorry, sir. Even though you are a Reserve Officer, I can't tell you." "But they're effective?" "Yes. Very." "And I think you're Gunnery Branch, Mr. Grimes, aren't you?" "I am, sir." He added hastily, "But I'm still quite capable of carrying out a watch officer's duties aboard this vessel should the need arise." "The main thing is you're familiar with naval stores and equipment. When we find and board Epsilon Sextans, I shall be transhipping certain items of cargo." "Rerat and Atreg, sir?" "Yes. And the others." "But, sir. I can't allow it. Not unless I have authority from the Flag Officer Commanding Lindisfame Base. As soon as your Mr. Letoumeau can be spared, I'll get him to try and raise the station there." "I'm afraid that's out of the question, Mr. Grimes. In view of the rather peculiar political situation, I think that the answer would be 'No.' Even if it were 'Yes,' you know as well as I how sluggishly the tide flows through official channels. Furthermore, just in case it has escaped your notice,  am the master." "And I, sir, represent the Survey Service. As the only commissioned officer aboard this vessel  am responsible for Survey Service cargo." "As a Reserve Officer, Mr. Grimes, I rank you." "Only when you have been recalled to Active Service. Sir." C raven said, "I was rather afraid that you'd take this attitude. That's why I decided to get this interview over and done with, just so we all know where we stand." He put aiway the cargo plan, swivelled his chair so that he could reach out to his liquor cabinet. He pulled out two bulbs, tossed one to Grimes. "No toasts. If we drank to law and order we should mean different things. So just drink. And listen. 'To begin with, Epsilon Sextans doesn't know where she is. But Letoumeau is one of the rare telepaths with the direction finding talent, and as soon as he's able to get lined-up we shall alter course to home on the wreck. That's what he's trying to do now. "When we find her, we shall synchronize and board, of course. The first thing will be medical aid to the survivors. Then we patch the ship up. And then we arm her. And then, with a prize crew under myself, we put ourselves on the trajectory for Waverley, hoping that those Waldegrenese frigates come back for another nibble." "They'd never dare, sir." "Wouldn't they? The original piracy they'll try to laugh off by saying that it was by real pirates -- no, that's not quite right, but you know what I mean -- wearing Waldegren colors. The second piracy, they'll make sure that there are no survivors." "But I Still can't see how they can hope to get away with it. It's always been an accepted fact that the main weapon against piracy has been psionic radio." "And so ,it was -- until some genius developed a jamming technique. Epsilon Sextans wasn't able to get any messages out until her crazy random precession pulled her well clear." "And you hope, sir, that they do attack you?" "I do, Mr. Grimes. I had hoped that I should have a good gunnery officer under me, but..." he shrugged his massive shoulders "... I think that I shall be able to manage." "And you hope that you'll have your weapons," persisted Grimes. "I see no reason why I should not. Ensign." "There is #ne very good reason, sir. That is that I, a commissioned IF officer of the Survey Service, am aboard your vessel. I insist tihat you leave the tracking down and destruction of the pirates to the proper authorities. I insist, too, that no Survey Service stores be discharged from this ship without my written authority." F or the first time the hint of a smile relieved the somberness of Craven's face. "And to think that I believed that Jane Pentecost could recruit yoM," he murmured. Then, in a louder voice, "And what if I just go ahead without your written authority. Ensign?" Grimes had the answer ready. "Then, sir, I shall be obliged to order your officers not to obey your unlawful commands. If necessary, I shall call upon the male passengers to assist me in any action that is necessary." Craven's bushy eyebrows went up and stayed up. "Mr. Grimes," he said in a gritty voice, "it is indeed lucky for you that I have first hand experience of the typical Survey Service mentality. Some masters I know would, in these circumstances, send you out on a spacewalk without a suit. But before I take drastic action. I'll give you one more chance to cooperate." His tone softened. "You noticed the portrait I've put up instead of all the temporary pepsies. Every man, no matter how much he plays around, has one woman who woman as far as I was concerned -- as far as I am concerned. I've a chance to bring her murderers under my guns, and, by God, I'm taking that chance, no matter what it means either to my career or to the somewhat odd foreign policy of the Federation. I used to be annoyed by Jane Pentecost's outbursts on that subject -- but now I see that she's right. And she's right, too, when it comes to the Survey Service's reluctance to take action against Waldegren. "So I, Mr. Grimes, am taking action." "Sir, I forbid you... "Tom forbid me? Ensign, you forget yourself. Perhaps this will help you remember." This was a Minetti automatic that had appeared suddenly in the captain's hand. In his hairy fist the little, glittering weapon looked no more than a toy; but Grimes knew his firearms, knew that at the slightest pressure of Craven's finger the needlelike projectiles would stitch him from crown to crotch. "I'm sorry about this, Mr. Grimes." As he spoke. Craven pressed a button set in his desk with his free hand. "I'm sorry about this. But I realize that I was expecting rather too much of you. After all, you have your career to consider. Time was," he went on, "when a naval officer could put his telescope to his blind eye as an excuse for ignoring orders and get away with it. But the politicians had less power in those days. We've come a long way -- and a wrong way -- since Nelson." Grimes heard the door behind him slide open. He didn't bother to look around, not even when hard hands were laid on his shoulders. "Mr. Kennedy," said Craven, "things turned out as I feared that they would. Will you and Mr. Ludovic take the Ensign along to the Detention Cell?" "I'll see you on itrial for piracy. Captain!" flared Grimes. "An interesting legal point, Ensign -- especially since you are being entered in my Official Log as a mutineer." X T he detention cell was not uncomfortable, but it was depressing. It was a padded cell -- passengers in spacecraft have been known to exhibit the more violent symptoms of mania -- which detracted from its already inconsiderable cheerfulness if not from its comfort. However, Grimes was not mad -- not in the medical sense, that is -- and so was considered able to attend to his own bodily needs. The little toilet was open to him, and at regular intervals a bell would sound and a container of food would appear in a hatch recessed into the bulkhead of the living cabin. There was reading matter too, such as it was. The ensign suspected that Jane Pentecost was the donor. It consisted of pamphlets published by some organization calling itself The Rim Worlds Secessionist Party. The almost hysterical calls to arms were bad enough, but the ones consisting mainly of columns of statistics were worse. Economics had never been Grimes' strong point. He slept, he fed at the appointed times, he made a lengthy ritual of keeping himself clean, he tried to read; and, all the time, with only sounds and sensations as clues, he endeavored to maintain a running plot of the ship's maneuvers. Quite early there had been the shutting down of the Mannschenn Drive and the consequent fleeting sensation of temporal disorientation. This had been followed by the acceleration warning -- the cell had an intercom speaker recessed in the padding -- and Grimes, although it seemed rather pointless in bis spongerubber environment, had strapped himself into his couch. He heard the directional gyroscopes start up, felt the effects of centrifugal force as the ship came round to her new heading. Then there was the pseudogravity of acceleration, accompanied by the muffled thunder of the reaction drive. It was obvious, thought the ensign, that Captain Craven was expending his reaction mass in a manner that, in other circumstances, would have been considered reckless. Suddenly, silence and Free Fall, and almost immediately the off-key keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Its note was higher, much higher, than Grimes remembered it; and the queasy feeling of temporal disorientation lasted much longer than it had on previous occasions. And that, for a long time, was all. M eals came and were eaten. Every morning, according to his watch, the prisoner showered and applied depilatory cream to his face. He tried to exercise; but to exercise in a padded cell, with no apIF paratus, in Free Fall, is hard. He tried to read, but the literature available was hardly more interesting to him than a telephone directory would have been. And, even though he never had been gregarious, the lack of anybody to talk to was wearing him down. It was a welcome break from the monotony when he realized that, once again, the ship was maneuvering. This time there was no use of the directional gyroscopes, there were no rocket blasts, but there was a variation of the whine of the Drive as it hunted, hunted, as the temporal precession rate was adjusted by tens of seconds, by seconds, by microseconds. And then it locked. The ship shuddered slightly -- once, twice. Grimes envisaged the firing of the two mooring rockets, one from the bow and one from the stern, each with the powerful electromagnet in its nose, each trailing its fathoms of fine but enormously strong cable. Merchant vessels, he knew, carried this equipment, but unlike naval ships rarely used it. But Craven, as a Reservist, would have seen and have taken part in enough drills. The ship shuddered again heavily. So the rendezvous had been made. So Delta Orionis and Epsilon Sextans, their Drives synchronized, bound together by the rescue ship's cables, were now falling as one unit through the dark immensities. So the rendezvous had been made, and already the survivors of the wreck were being brought aboard the Delia #Ryan, were being helped out of their stinking spacesuits, were blurting out their story to Craven and his officers. Grimes could visualize it all, almost as clearly as though he were actually watching it. He could visualize, too, the engineers swarming over the wreck, the flare of their burning and welding torches, the cannibalizing of nonessential plating from the ship's structure for hull patches. It was all laid down in the Survey Service's Damage Control Manual; and Captain Craven, at least, would know that book as thoroughly as did Grimes. And what of the cargo, the Survey Service stores. Grimes stores? A trembling in the ship's structure, a barely felt vibration, told him that gantries and conveyer belts were being brought into operation. There would be no great handling problems. Lindisfarne was Delta Orionis first port of call, and the Survey Service consignment would be top stowage. But there was nothing that Grimes could do about it -- not a thing. In fact, he was beginning to doubt the legality of the stand he had made against the master. And he was the small frog in this small puddle, while Captain Craven had made it quite clear that he was the big frog. Grimes wished that he was better versed in astronautical law, although a professional lawyer's knowledge would be of no use to him in his present situation. There was nothing that he could do about it. So, with some hazy idea that he might need all his strength both mental and physical, for what was to befall him (but what?) in the near future, he strapped himself into his bunk, did his best to forget his worries in sleep. He was well enough acquainted with the psychiatrists' jargon to know that this was no more than a return to the womb but, before dropping off into a shallow slumber, shrugged. So what? H e jerked into sudden wakefulness. Jane Pentecost was there by his bunk, looking down at him. "Come in," he said. "Don't bother to knock. Now you see how the poor live. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard." She said, "That's not very funny." "I know it's not. Even the first time that I heard it aboard this blasted ship, I was able to refrain from rolling in the aisles." She said, "There's no need to be so bitchy, John." "Isn't there? Wouldn't you be bitchy if you'd been thrown into this padded cell?" "I suppose I would be. But you asked for it, didn't you?" "If doing my duty -- or trying to do my duty -- is asking for it, I suppose that I did. Well, and has our pirate captain cast off yet, armed to the teeth with the weapons he's stolen?" "No. The weapons are still being mounted. But let's not argue legalities, John. There's not enough time. I... I just wanted to say goodby." "Good-by?" he echoed. "Yes. Somebody has to do the cooking aboard Epsilon Sextans, and I volunteered." "You?" "And why the Hell not?" she flared." Captain Craven has been pushed over to our side of the fence, and it'd be a bloody bad show if we Rim Worlders weren't prepared to stand by him. Baxter's gone across to take over as Reaction Drive Engineer; the only survivor in that department was the Fourth, and he's only a dog watch in space." "And who else?" "Nobody. The Sexy Eppys chief, second and third Interstellar Drive Engineers survived, and they're willing -- anxious, in fact, now that their ship's being armed -- to stay on. And the psionic radio officer came through and is staying on. All of our executive officers volunteered, of course, but the old man turned them down. He said that, after all, he could not hazard the safety of this ship by stripping her of her trained personnel. Especially since we carry passengers." "That's his worry," said Grimes without much sympathy. "But how does he hope to fight his ship if those frigates pounce again?" "He thinks he'll be able to manage -- with remote controls for every weapon brought to his main control panel." "Possible," admitted Grimes, his professional interest stirred. "But not very efficient. In a naval action the captain has his hands full just handling the ship alone, without trying to control her weaponry." "And you'd know, of course." "Yes." "Yes, you've read the books. And Captain Craven commanded a light IF cruiser during that trouble with the Dring, so he knows nothing." "He still hasn't got four hands and two heads." "Oh, let's Stop talking rubbish," she cried. "I probably shan't see you again, John and... and... Oh, Hell, I want to say good-by properly, and I don't want you to think too badly about either the Old Man or... or myself." "So what are we supposed to do about it?" "Damn you. Grimes, you snottynosed, stuck-up space puppy! Look after yourself!" S uddenly she bent down to kiss him. It was intended to be no more than a light brushing of Mps; but Grimes was suddenly aware, with his entire body, of the closeness of her, of the warmth and the scent of her, and almost without volition his arms went about her, drawing her closer still to him. She tried to break away, but it was only a halfhearted effort. He heard her murmur, in an odd, sardonic whisper, "Wottthehell, oh wotthehell... and then, "tou jours gai... It made no sense at the time; but, years later, when he made the acquaintance of the twentieth-century poets, he was to remember and to understand. When it was over, when, still clasped in each others' arms, they drifted in the center of the little cabin, impelled here by some old resultant of forces, their discarded clothing drifting with them, veiling their perspiration-moist bodies, Grimes was reluctant to let her go. Gendy, Jane tried to disengage hersetf. She whispered, "That was a warmer good-by than I intended. But I'm not sorry. No. I'm not sorry..." Then, barely audibly, "It was the first time for you, wasn't it?" "Yes." "Then Fin all the more glad it happened. But this is good-by." Nor "Don't be a bloody fool, John. You can't keep me here." "But I can come with you." She pushed him from her. Somehow he landed back on the bed. Before he could bounce he automatically snapped one of the confining straps about his middle. Somehow -- she was still wearing her sandals, but nothing else -- she finished up standing on the deck, held there by the contact between the magnetic soles and the ferrous fibres in the padding. She put out a long, graceful arm and caught her shirt. She said harshly, "'m getting dressed and out of here. You stay put. Damn you Grimes, for thinking that I was trying to lure you aboard the Sexy Eppy with the body beautiful. I told you before that I am not, repeat not, Olga Popovsky, the beautiful spy. And I'm not a prostitute. There's one thing I wouldn't sell if I were offered the services of the finest gunnery officer (which you aren't) in the whole bloody galaxy in payment!" "You're beautiful when you flare up like that," said Grimes sincerely. "But you're always beautiful." Then,. "Jane, I love you." "Puppy love," she sneered. "And I'm old enough to be your..." A faint smile softened her mouth. "Your maiden aunt." "Let me finish. All right, it's only puppy love -- you say. But it's still love. But..." He was extemporizing, convincingly, he hoped. "But my real reason for wanting to come with you is this. I can appreciate now what Captain Craven lost when Epsilon Sextans was pirated. I can see -- I can feel -- his career to get his revenge. And I think that it's worth it. And I want to help him." She stood there, her shirt half on, eying him suspiciously. "You mean that? You really mean that?" "Yes." "Then you're a bloody liar, Grimes." "No," he said slowly. "No. Not altogether. I want to help the Old Man, and I want to help you. This piracy has convinced me that you Rim Worlders are getting the dirty end of the stick. I may not be the finest gunnery officer in the whole bloody galaxy, but I'm better acquainted with the new stuff than Captain Craven is..." Her grin was openly derisive. "First it's fellow feeling for another spaceman, then it's international politics. What next?" "Where we started. I do love you, Jane. And if there's going to be any shooting, I want to be on hand to do the shooting back on your behalf. I'll admit that... that what's happened has influenced my decision. But you didn't buy me, or bribe me. IF Don't think that. Don't ever think that." There was a note of pleading in his voice. "Be realistic, Jane. With another officer along, especially an officer with recent gunnery training, you stand a damn' sight better chance than you would otherwise." "I... I suppose so. But I still don't like it." "You don't have to. But why look a gift horse in the mouth?" "All right. You win. Get your clothes on and come and see the old man." XI J ane Pentecost led Grimes to the airlock. The ship seemed oddly deserted, and he remarked on this. The girl explained that the passengers had bn requested to remain in their accommodation, and that most of Delta Orionis personnel were employed in work aboard Epsilon Sextans, "So I haven't been the only one to be kept under lock and key," commented Grimes sardonically. "You're the only one," retorted the girl, "who's been compensated for his imprisonment." There was no answer to that, so the ensign remained silent. Saying nothing, he inspected with interest the temporary tunnel that had been rigged between the airlocks of the two ships. So Epsilon Sextans pressure hull had been made good, her atmosphere had been restored. That meant that the work of installing the armament had been completed. He hoped that he would not have to insist upon modifications. The wreck -- although she was a wreck no longer -- bore her scars. The worst damage had been repaired, but holes and slashes that did not impair her structural strength were untouched, and spatters of once molten metal still made crazy patterns on beams and frames, stanchions and bulkheads. And there were the scars made by Craven's engineers -- the raw, bright cicatrices of new welding. Forward they made their way, deck after deck. The elevator in the axial shaft was not yet working, so Grimes had time and opportunity to appreciate the extent of the damage. They passed through the wreckage of the "farm" -- the burst algae tanks, the ruptured vats in which yeast and tissue cultures were black and dead, frostbitten and dehydrated. They brushed through alleyways choked with the brittle fronds of creeping plants killed by the ultimate winter. And then they were passing through the accommodation levels. Bulkheads had been slashed through, destroying the privacy of the cabins that ey had once enclosed, destroying the privacy and the occupants. There were no longer any bodies; for this Grimes was deeply thankful. (He learned later that Craven's first action had been to order and conduct a funeral service.) There were no bodies, but there were still stains. Men and woman die quickly in hard vacuum -- quickly and messily. C aptain Craven was alone in the control room. He was working. rather slowly and clumsily, wiring up an obviously makeshif t panel that was additional to the original one installed before the master's acceleration chair. It was obvious that it was the remote controls for the newly fitted weaponry. Grimes said quietly, "There's no need for that, sir." Craven started, let go of his screwdriver, made a fumbling grab for it as it drifted away from him. He stared at Grimes, then growled, "So it's you, is it?" Then, to Jane, "What the hell do you mean by letting this puppy out of his kennel?" "Captain Craven," she told him quietly, "Mr. Grimes wants to come with us." "What? I warn you, Miss Pentecost, I'm in no mood for silly jokes." "This is not a silly joke. Captain," said Grimes. "I've had time to think things over. I feel, I really feel that you have a far better chance if there's a qualified officer along to handle the gunnery." Craven looked at them, from the girl to Grimes, then back again. He said, "Ensign, didn't I warn you?" "It's not that way at all, sir," Grimes told him, flushing. "In fact. Miss Pentecost has been trying hard to dissuade me." "Ohr "It's true," said Jane. "But he told me that we couldn't afford to look a gift horse in the mouth." "I don't know what's been happening," rasped Craven. "I don't want to know what's been happening between the two of you. This change of mind, this change of heart is rather... sudden. No matter. One volunteer, they say, is worth ten pressed men." He glared coldly at the ensign. "And you volunteer?" "Yes, Captain." "I believe you. I have no choice in the matter. But you realize the consequences?" "I do." "Well, I may be able to do something to clear your yardarm. I've still to make my last entries in the Official Log of Delta Orionis, before I hand it over to Captain Kennedy. And when it comes to such documentation, nobody cares to accuse a shipmaster of being a liar. Not out loud." He paused, thinkin g. "How does this sound. Miss Pentecost? Date, Time, Position, etc., etc, Mr. John Grimes, passenger, holding the rank of ensign in the Federation Survey Service, removed by force from the vessel to Epsilon Sextans, there to supervise the installation and mounting of the armament. Survey Service property, discharged on my orders from No. I hold, also to advise upon the use of same in the subsequent event of an action's being fought. Signed, and witnessed." "Rather long winded, sir. But it seems to cover the ground." "I intend to do more than advise!" flared Grimes. "Pipe down. Or, if you must say it, me sure that there aren't any witnesses around when you say it. Now, when it comes to the original supervision, you see what I'm trying to do. Will it work?" "After a fashion, sir. But it will work much better if the fire control panel is entirely separate from maneuvering control." IF "You don't think that I could handle both at once?" "You could. But not with optimum efficiency. No humanoid could. This set-up of yours might just work if we were Shaara, or any of the other multilimbed arthropods. But even the Shaara, in their warships, don't expect the Queen-Captain to handle her ship and her guns simultaneously." "You're the expert. I just want to be sure that you're prepared to quote, advise, unquote with your little pink paws on the actual keyboard of your battle organ." "That's just the way that I propose to advise." "Good. Fix it up to suit yourself, then. I should be able to let you have a mechanic shortly to give you a hand." "Before we go any further, sir, I'd like to make an inspection of the weapons themselves. Just in case..." "Just in case I've made some fantastic bollix, eh?" Craven was almost cheerful. "Very good. But try to make it snappy. It's time we were on our way." "Yes," said Jane, and it seemed that the Captain's discarded somberness was hanging about her life a cloud. "It's time." Next Month in IF Keith Laumer's newest novel of interstellar adventure pitted against the myriad races of the Galaxyl by Terry Carr And the great conclusion of by A. Bertram Chandler IF ,  Short Story Why bother to live -- when there is so much more to get from illusion? H omer Bemoth had read about dollar magazine campaign can hardly be ignored by anyone save posthe insane and those hermited into outer space. The campaign had been given an additional thrust by the formation of the conservative-based que), whose devout members had long ago given up their ancient fights against fluoridation, pornographic literature, Liberal Episcothe One Planetary System, which had never captured much fervor because it was still on the drawing board. member placing in his hand a pamphlet which had read: "Ihe Fantasque is the most nefarious scheme ever to be devised by the Ugly Mind in order to jelly the spine of resistance and contaminate. infiltrate and corrupt the brains of those who stand for one hundred per cent Hemispherism. It must be outlawed at once, to protect our Hemispherian way of life! Do not listen to the hogwash propaganda of the Ugly Mind behind this deadly conspiracy. Sign the petition now and put your Hemispherism where your mouth is!" Homer had asked, "Who is the Ugly Mind?" The incredulous member had shouted, "Them!" ly neutralized by the liberalbased group formed in retaliation and callFor Freedom Of The Fantasque), owning a charter committee created of two prominent scientists, one Independent of the Hemispheric Senate, three well known sculptors, an actor and an actress known internationally and ten famous writers including the recently celebrated Camubald Jones, author of Would You Invite a Martian to Dinner, Mother? -- a work that had immediately climbed to the top of the best-seller charts, despite the fact that the first exploratory shot to Mars had failed to indicate any intelligent life on that planet. posed outlawing legislation was entirely successful, and sales of the Fantasque expanded despite the near-prohibitive cost of the machine. A caustic columnist had gone to the trouble of checking sales records of Fantasque Incorporated to discover model, or even tried one out, and reported the fact in a syndicated column. The response from both sides was that it was not the point. H omer Bemoth, in his San Francisco Brindlehoffen house constructed by seating a preconstructed aluminum rectangle on a powerrotated foundation, had never allowed himself the indulgence of even considering a Fantasque. Homer had never been a tearing success at much of anything, during his forty-three years; he couldn't afford an Alexis Mobile StreetJumper, let alone the luxury of a # Fantasque. Too, his wife Grace had become a mem"Why, for God's sake?" Homer asked. "You don't know anything about it!" "That doesn't matter!" Grace reliterature. "It's a dirty invention of the Ugly Mind." "Well, who in the hell is that?" "ThemI" Grace had felt the dull sorrow of a marriage gone wrong for a number of years. She'd had long hopes for Homer, in the beginning; but he had simply washed out in his efforts. He'd tried perhaps fifty ways of making a living and had never possessed the sense or conviction of intent to stay with any one of them. Instead, he skipped from one job to another in a frenzied desire to accomplish everything and had, as it turned out, accomplished nothing. Currently Homer was employed as an aide in the engineering department of a firm manufacturing Swirley's Shape Slax. The job was an embarrassment to Grace, who could not bear to tell her friends that her husband spent five days a week running about a room doing inconsequential things for a group of engineers whose total purpose was to improve lines in women's slacks containing fake posteriors. Before moving to San Francisco Grace had been brought up in the severe and austere fashion of North Pole frontier life, where the rigorous moral code was law. Godliness, cleanliness, decency and thrift guided Grace's ship of life. It was fortunate that she knew something about the last, because Homer brought home just enough money to make it from Friday to Friday. Grace had seriously considered divorcing Homer -- an action not in conflict with her upbringing. But the short-lived Church State had left a piece of compromise legislation not yet repealed. A partner seeking divorce automatically waived all material possessions of the marriage. The law had curtailed a ballooning divorce situation; but it had not, Grace considered bitterly, lightened the burden of finding yourself in a barrel with a sour pickle. It was not that they owned much. But she did love their Brindlehoffen house, blue china, Oriental rug and the three-wheeled jet-cart which she drove to the market daily. Those things were enough to keep her in Homer Bemoth's bed; but she was rankling under dissatisfaction, hoping desperately that the legislation might be repealed. Then a letter arrived. G race, who never opened Homer's personal mail, looked at the lawyer's return printed on the flap of the envelope and waited impatiently for Homer's return that evening. When he had settled into his floater chair with a bourbon and water, he finally opened it. "What does it say?" Grace demanded. "Uncle Forbes blinked out." "Died?" "You bet your astro. He laid seventy-five thousand on me!" "Great heavens!" Grace said in shock. Homer blinked, then his round and ruddy face crinkled with a satyrlike grin. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do first." "What's that?" "Tell those asses what they can do with that phoney-fanny job!" As Homer got into his pajamas, Grace lay trying to become convinced of the reality of it. "We're going to have to study investments. Good, solid, sensible investments!" Then she noticed that Homer had turned the rotator of the foundation so that the window he was peering through faced next door where a young wife often failed to draw her bedroom drapes. "Homer!" "That girl's absolutely leafless." "iifomer!" And, when he'd finally gotten into bed, she said, "Did you hear me about the investments?" "Sure." "Do you really think you should quit your job? I mean, after all -- " 'Tomorrow morning I tell them to stick it." She tried to console herself with the thought that once the novelty of the inheritance wore away she could perhaps convince him to find new employment. # was an awfully lot of money, but it was not enough on which simply to give up -- she was certain of that. "Let's celebrate," Homer said hopefully. "Not tonight." "Why not?" "Maybe tomorrow night," When the legal work was completed and the money collected, Homer concentrated on his retirement. He bowled, fished, sang, went to the amusement park, watched movies and television, stood on a downtown corner smiling at girls, nightlubbed, hummed and even tried advanced air skiing by renting the use of a small piloted pull-plane and propulsion skis. Near the end of the first month Grace found him on the back stoop, whittling. IF "Why are you doing that now?" "I'm going to become the best Whittier in town!" The next day, when Homer had forgotten about that, Grace said desperately, "We can't just let the money sit in the bank on that lousy interest. If you're not going to get another job -- " But Homer was shuffling through the mail. "By God, look at this." Grace took a letter and started to read: Dear Mr. Bemoth: We are extraordinarily pleased to inform you that you have been personally selected to try our latest model of the Fantasque. As you undoubtedly know, Fantasque is the greatest pleasure innovation since the invention of the psychotrode. Please understand that we do not extend this invitation to everyone. We say only that you have been placed high on our list as the result of your extraordinary reputation. At your convenienoe, please stop at our studios. Grace looked up, eyes clouded with indignation. "How about that?" Homer said. "The dirty thing!" "You don't know anything about it!" "Fantasque doesn't ak just anybody!" "ITiey heard about your inheritance!" "They heard about my reputationr T iat afternoon Homer walked into the sleek Fantasque studios where a youngish man with shimng black hair and a flashing snaile stepped forward to shake his hand. "Homer Bemoth here." "Not really!" said the salesman, putting a genuine note of disbelief into his voice. Moments later he was escorted into a room where he looked at a silver metal cubicle with a small door. "I thought it would be bigger." "It's quite compact," said the salesman. "Where do you put the dam thing?" "Into the garage, if you've got an outlet there. Just plug in. Simple as that. Give it a whirl?" "As long as I'm here." The salesman opened the door to the interior which contained a control panel and a leather-cushioned chair upon which rested a white helmet sprouting wires. "The helmet contains the psychotrode connections. That is the heart of the accomplishment -- they tune right into your imagination, you see? Gouple you up with the computer. That's what makes it absolutely real." "No screens?" "No, sir. It goes on inside your brain, because of those sweet little psychotrodes. You are there r "Won't it drive you nuts?" "Fantasque has been tested by over a thousand persons, in its home laboratory. It is absolutely one hundred per cent safe for any man's brain -- especially, I might add, one owned by a person of your caliber." "I'll be damned." "Behind the control panel is the computer. Into it has been fed every sort of piece of information concerning any given target selected. All you do is start with Indicator I and turn it to the first letter of the name of your target. You work over until you've spelled it out. Say you wish to travel to New York City. Bang. You're looking at the city. If you wish to become more specific, keep on spelling -- Manhattan, or, if you will, Empire State Building. You'll be there." "Hard to believe." "Those are just general instructions, for the beginner. But if you wish to go into a specific store, say, then you get into more experience handling. You take hold of Knob X and Knob A and fly, as it were, with the Fantasque. It takes some concentrating, letting the imagination go to work. But those controls, coupled rigjht where you want to go. Climb in. Put on the helmet. Take a shot at it." The salesman watched Homer make his way inside to sit down on the chair and place the helmet on his head. "What'll it be, Mr. Bemoth?" "The new, expanded Disneyland! I've never been there." "Spell it out!" H omer set the indicators. Then he sat immobile. Suddenly his bands jumped forward to grasp and X and A knobs. He let out a yelp and looked around, wide-eyed. "By God!" "There, you see, Mr. Bemoth?" "You bet! A kid was licking a cone right by my ear! So I saw this place I wanted to go into. I grabbed the knobs. But I landed in a river staring a damned crocodile down the throat!" "You have to take it easy at first, Mr. Bemoth. Don't try to do everything at once. It's like an electric organ you've never played before. You want to try the simple melodies with one hand, then the pedal notes, then the second hand, then the drawbars, the vibrator tabs, the whole business. But it takes time and practice. Where next?" "Bismark, North Dakota. My old home town!" "See that lighted red button? Press it. That cancels out your previous target." Homer pressed; the light went out. "Spell, Mr. Bemoth." Homer rapidly punched letters. Then he sat rigidly. Suddenly his hands jumped again. A forefinger jabbed at the indicators. He yelled out happily. The salesman was wagging his head disapprovingly as Homer turned around, perspiring and joyful. "Now you see, Mr. Bemoth -- " "I was in Bismark! Then I punched out Little Rock. There was Bismark in back. Little Rock in front -- !" "But it's much better to stay in one place at one time. We've done extensive experimenting on that. Remember you're using psychotrodes. You're dealing with dimensional processes as well. While we guarantee the absolute safety of the machine IF when properly used, we don't advise anyone to tax his brain too greatly. Let's stay on one target at a time, shall we, Mr. Bemoth?" "Right!" "Where next?" "Saskatoon!" After a dozen flights, Homer pitched out of the machine excitedly. "By God!" he whooped. "That son of a gun!" The salesman led Homer to a table where he handed him a leatherbound book. "The official manual. Instructions for every conceivable performance the machine is capable of handling. I'll guarantee they're limitless." Homer opened the book. "Illustrated there, for example, are your color plungers. As you tested it, the machine was simply set on Color-General. With these, you can shoot for perfection. Here are your dimension sticks. Your level indicators. Your temperature guides. Your time bars." "Tm bars?" "As I said, Mr. Bemoth, no limit. Once you learn to handle these, you can shoot back and look in, for instance, on the Boston Tea Party. The entire affair has been fed into the computer. You'll be there December #, #, when the colonists dumped tea into the harbor." The saleman talked on, edging an order contract toward Homer, who said, "Probably isn't a real point, understand. But I was just curious." "Certainly." "How much has been shot into that computer?" "The world, Mr. Bemoth." "Mind you, I wouldn't think of wanting to do it myself. But say some dirty-minded old man came in and bought one of those machines and tuned himself in on undressing time for, oh, Marie Antoinette, right there in the boudoir." The salesman's face blanched. "Mr. Bemoth!" "I didn't say Vd want to do it. But I was just thinking -- " "It's that damnable organization, You've read their propaganda, haven't you?" "They slipped me a pamphlet or two, yes. But -- " "FUthy lies! That computer is as clean as the purest snow! Not one single item remotely associated with the prurient has ever been fed into one of our computers! The Fantasque represents the cleanest entertainment since checkers! Yet," the salesman went on in a breaking ple -- " "I'm sorry I brought it up," Homer said. "I'll get hold of myself in a moment." The salesman got out a handkerchief and blew his nose. "Do you wish to sign the order, Mr. Bemoth? We have excellent financing terms, of course." "Cash, if you don't mind." W hen Homer told his wife she swept into violent hysterics. "Twenty thousand dollars!" "Plus tax." "For that dirty thing!" "Lies. That machine's as clean as (the piirest snow!" "The neighbors'll see it delivered!' "They deliver in a plain brown box!" When it had been, Grace would not go into the garage and look at it. Instead she howled, screamed and poured forth an incredible amount of tears. Homer closed himself away inside the machine. After that, he spent most of his waking time there, traveling from Tripoli to Odessa to Trinidad to Kalgoorlie to Dublin; he joined Hannibal crossing the Alps, Stephen urging the Children's Crusade, Charlennagne invading Italy, Columbus sighting San Salvador Island, Michelangelo carving Pieta. He explained the machine's operation precisely to Grace. But she insisted that it was an evil instrument, creating an unreal world only to titillate the senses; she wouldn't go near it. Homer gave up on her and continued his travels, tearing wildly across continents, plunging back and forth in time. He appeared outside only to sleep, eat and read the newspapers in order to find ideas for fresh journeys. It was during a newspaper interval that Grace stared at him with reddened eyes and said, "You love that dirty thing more than me!" Homer listened vaguely, deciding that he would finally blast off on his first space shot -- he'd willed himself to save that one. Grace's face flushed. "What's happened to our sex life?" Homer looked up in astonishment. "#ejc life!" When he returned to his newspaper, he noticed a small classified ad, feeling his heart quicken its beat. A week later, Grace's sense of cleanliness forced her to the garage to sweep. She kept her eyes away from the silver metal cubicle as she did. He was in there, as he always was; and, she thought, he could stay in there the rest of his existence. She shifted some empty cartons. Then she saw another which she could not remember. It was empty except for a printed sheet of paper. She drew that out and read: "Welcome to your Jing-Jang Adapter! Follow the simple instructions to install this delicious addition Way You Like It: Cleopatra Up The Nile, Pocahontas Under The Waterfall, Lady Godiva On Her... " Grace read the other seven titles and threw the paper down in fury. Quivering, she strode to the Fantasque and yanked the door open. She gasped, staring inside. Homer's clothing and shoes lay in a loose pile around the chair upon which rested the white helmet. "Homer!" she said sharply, then realized the foolishness of that; he simply was not there. She remembered that only an hour ago he'd walked aloofly past her in the kitchen, and come down. She checked the large garage doors; they were locked from the inside. So were the windows, as well as another small door. There was no way that he could have gotten out. IF Pulse beating, she considered it. She recalled all that Homer had told her about the machine. Grace was not an adventurer in abstract thinking, but she wasn't stupid either. She hurried to the telephone, and, in a few minutes, was connected to the Fantasque studios. She said to the salesman, "I was wondering something about your machine." "Of course." "Suppose somebody got going with it." "In what way?" "Say he got excited and tried to be in several places at the same time. Maybe ten different places, at the same time." "That would not be recommended, madam!" "Could he just disappear? Split up in all directions? Fade out in other dimensions? So there isn't anything left but his clothes?" T here was a startled pause, then the man said, "This isn't someit?" "I was just wondering if you'd ever had anything happen like that?" "Madam, that is utterly absurd! Our machine has been thoroughly tested." "But you couldn't test mice, or even monkeys, with that dimensional business and the psycho-thingajigs, could you? I mean, animals don't have brains like humans. And every human brain is different." "There is the psychological to consider, of course. And dimension is certainly involved. Yet the postulation is ridiculous. But -- if anything might have gone wrong, pledse tell us who you are. We'll immediately send our best men over to -- " "What would you do if had happened? Pull the plug?" "My God, no! That would break all connections! Leave the poor devil in limbo -- maybe a ten-way limbo! I mean... Madam, if you'll just -- !" She hung up and began humming as she returned to the garage. She was thinking that she would wait a few days, then report him missing. The divorce legislation also covered desertion; in six months all of their possessions would be wholly hers. Then she could sell that machine and really get started with her investments. She opened the door of the Fantasque and removed his shoes and clothing from it. Then she pulled the plug. into it. but Now... with To get your complete lOne WhY G Dipt ##I Yucca Ut, Wellywood #, Calil IF  Novelette" Retief didn't mind the eonsdead heroes of this world -- but they wouldn't stay dead! A n evening breeze bearing the fragrance of ten-thousand year old Heo trees in bloom moved across the Embassy dining terrace. In the distance pipes sounded softly, picking out a haunting melody, like fairy feet retracing a forgotten path through an enchanted forest. The setting sun, vast and smoky red, cast crimson shadows along the leafshaded streets below. "A pity all this is dying." First Secretary Magnan of the Terran Mission to Sulinore waved a hand toward the fragile, crumbling towers silhouetted against the dusk. "In tion and a reputation for immortality, the Sulinorians seem impotent to stem the population decline. I suppose in a century or less they'll all be gone." "With ninety-nine per cent of the planetary surface devoted to cemeteries, historical shrines and monuments to the past, there's not much room for the living," Second Secretary Relief commented. "And you can tie up a lot of minerals in a planet-wide graveyard." "I suppose you're referring to their belief that the world's supply of Divine Effluvium is exhausted," Magnan sniffed. "Mere folklore, of course. Still, one might almost be tempted to look into the matter of depletion of essential elements -- except that Corps policy forbids poking into local religious doctrine. And in any event, they won't permit any deep-mining operations which might disturb the hallowed dead -- or the sleeping heroes, as they prefer to put it." Magnan cocked an eye at the small humanoid waiter standing at a discreet distance, apparently lost in thought. "One can't help thinking that the modern Sulinorian is a far cry from his legendary ancestors," he said beliind his hand. "Just compare these civilized little chaps with those ghastly statues you see everywhere." T he local turned, approached the table, a polite expression on his elfin features. "You wished something, sir?" "Why, ah, tell me." Magnan cleared his throat. "How does the Sulinorian in the street feel about all this? modest rock-mining operation set up here to unlock some of those scarce elements that are tied up in the planetary crust?" "Modest, my lord? The figure I day per unit, and Great Tussore knows how many units." He looked toward the ruin-crowned skyline. Rather the easy erosion of eons than eaten by industry's engines insatiable he quoted. "At least that's what the poet Eulindore said a couple of millenia ago. Me, I wouldn't know." "But what about importation?' Magnan persisted. "Why, your Administrative Council turned thumt: miles of useful minerals and establish raw material dumps that all could draw on freely!" "I guess we'd rather look at the landscape the way it is, sir," the Sulinorian said. "And besides, rooting in a dump isn't our style. You know, a race of heroes and all that." He flicked an imaginary crumb from the table. "How about another flagon of ancient wine, my lords? Laid down by Yodross in the year #. That would be abooit # B.C., old Terry reckoning." "I think not -- " Magnan broke off as the table-side P.A. unit pinged and lit up. The plump features of Ambassador Shindlesweet snapped into mirror-bright focus on the oneway screen. "Ah, gentlemen," the portly diplomat beamed. "It's my pleasure to inform the staff that the Blug delegation has, after all, been prevailed upon to be present at the Peace Conference here on Sulinore." "What, those bloodthirsty little killers?" Magnan gasped. "With their armor and their opaque atmosphere helmets and their sneaky ways? Why, everybody knows they're the Groaci's proteges, and responsible for all the fighting!" "At least that's a dozen or so Blugs that won't be off plundering somewhere -- as long as the conference is on anyway," Retief pointed out... a gesture which reflects their sincere desire to see peace restored to the Sector," Shindlesweet was rumbling on. "And with all due modesty, I think I may say -- " A pale visage sporting five stalked eyes crowded onto the screen, thrusting the Terrestrial ambassador aside. "As you're perhaps aware," the Groaci ambassador whispered in his faint voice, "it was through my efforts as co-sponsor of the present talks that this happy eventuality was brought about. And -- " "Look here, Mr. Ambassador," Shindlesweet muttered from the side of his mouth, turning a glassy smile to the camera. "I was on the air first!" "Hogging the limelight, as usual, George," the Groaci hissed. "An unfortunate habit of yours. But as I was saying," he addressed the screen, "I was able, through deft handling of a number of sensitive issues -- " "Now just a minute, Shith!" The Terran forced his way back to center screen. "When I agreed to lend the weight of Terran participation to your confounded gabfest, I -- " "Ha! You begged me on bended anterior ginglymus joint to be permitted to crowd in!" "Why, you little -- " "Ah-ah," Ambassador Shith admonished. "No racial epithets, George. Open mike, remember?" Retief and Magnan had a last quick glimpse of Shindlesweet's rage-flushed features as he reached to blank the screen. "Well, the peace talks are off to a rousing start," Retief said cheerfully. Magnan shook his head, looking grave. "I foresee no good to come of this gathering." He rose and looked at his watch. "We've time for a constitutional before dinner, Retief. And if we're to dine cheek by mandible with our Groaci colleagues at tonight's banquet, I for one have need of a hearty appetite." II A block from the renovated palace housing the Terran Chancery, Magnan plucked at Relief's arm. "Look there; another party of Groaci Peacekeepers, in full armor. You'd think they were expecting full scale rioting to break out at any moment." A block away, a squad of constabulary, in grotesque flaring helmets and black hip-cloaks, side-arms at knobby hifs, minced briskly along the empty avenue. "Shith was quite insistent that the Groaci be assigned responsibility for the security arrangements for the Conference," Magnan muttered. "They have the only guns on the planet." "For alleged police, those fellows have a suspicious look of regular infantry about them," Retief said. IP "Good lord, you don't imagine they're planning anything foolish?" Magnan gasped. "Everybody knows the Groaci secretly covet Sulinore. They've even tried to have it officially declared a deserted world, open to colonization." "It's a little hard to see how they could swing it, with a full squadron off-planet," Retief said. "You're right. We're imagining things." Magnan shook his head briskly. "A few dozen blasters can't take over a world. Still, I'd as soon avoid these bravos. In their arrogance they might attempt some sort of harassment." He angled across toward the entrance to a side street. "That's the route to the Forbidden City, off-limits to foreigners," Retief said. "How badly do you want to miss the fuzz?" "Nht that badly." Magnan shuddered, veered in the opposite direction. "If even half the stories are true, not even our gnawed bones would ever be found." F ifteen minutes later they were in a narrow, crooked street where age-weathered carved griffins, satyrs and nymphs adorned the steep facades of the deserted buildings lining the way. "This isn't the most cheerful route for a stroll," Magnan commented uneasily. "At least not after sundown." He cocked his head. "One almost imagines one can hear stealthy footsteps behind one." "Not so stealthy at that," Retief said. "They've been getting pretty careless the last five minutes, as if they didn't care whether we heard them or not." "You mean someone's really following us?" Magnan turned to stare back along the shadowy late-evening street. "Two someones," Retief corrected. "Non-humans, I'd say, weighing in at under a hundred pounds, and wearing padded shoes." "That could mean anything! There are forty-six non-human spedes onworld this week for the conference, and I can think of at least ten of them that wouldn't be above assaulting a pair of peaceful Terran diplomats for their own nefarious ends." "Or for the iridium in their teeth," Retief amplified. "I think I recognize the street ahead," Magnan muttered. "Coriale's Comestible Counter is just around the corner. I was there last week -- in daylight -- making some arrangements for the Reception. We can nip inside and 'phone the Embassy for transportation back..." He broke off as they came in view of a high, narrow shop-front displaying the cranium and crossed thighbones, the Sulinorian symbols of a caterer's establishment. Beneath the deeply incised device, the windows were dark, the massive stonewood door shut tight. "It's closed!" Magnan put his nose against the glass "But there's someone inside. I head a sound." Retief tried the heavily patinaed bronze door latch, cast in the form of fanged jaws clenched on a leg. "Perfiaps -- great heavens, Retief! What are you doing?" Magnan blurted as Retief gripped the knob in both hands and twisted hard. There was a sharp tinkle of breaking metal. "Retief, stop!" Magnan gasped. "You can't -- " "I think it might be a good idea to get in off the street -- now!" Retief thrust his protesting senior through into the gloomy interior, whirled to ease the door silently shut. "We found the door unlocked," he said briskly, looking around the room. "And stepped inside to see if everything was okay." Magnan peered from the window, made a choking sound. "Two Sulinorians in artisan's headdress just came around the corner! They'll find us here!" . "Let's check the back room." Retief led the way past tables heaped with displays of Sulinorian pastries, stuffed fowls and candied nutmeats, thrust aside a curtain. The dim shapes of stacked cartons bulked in the darkness. He sniffed the air, took a tiny handlight from his pocket, played the pencil-thin beam across the floor. "What's that?" Magnan hissed, pointing. From behind a wall locker, a pair of narrow high-arched, longtoed feet protruded. Retief went across, flashed the light on a small, crumpled body. The bright robes were bedraggled and torn. A wound in the narrow chest oozed ochre blood. A Sulinorian," Magnan breathed. "He's been shot!" His lips moved in a faint whisper. Retief knelt beside him. "Who did it?" he asked urgently. "Why?" "He was not... what he seemed." Retief caught the whispered words. Then the luminous eyes closed; the last tinge of vital color drained from the small face, leaving it an unattractive shade of waxy green. "It looks like Coriale, the caterer," Magnan groaned. "How terrible!" "Listen!" Retief raised a hand. From the far corner of the storeroom a faint rustle sounded. He motioned Magnan to the left, started around the right side of the stacked boxes. There was a hurried scuttling sound. "Why -- there you are, Coriale," Magnan's voice squeaked. "We, er, just stepped in to increase our order. We'll have twelve gross of the bean and kidney pies and six dozen jellied bramble-hens -- under glass, of course..." Magnan backed into view, keeping himself between the small local and the body in the comer. The Sulinorian pulled free of Magnan's grip on his elbow. His bright eyes flicked around the room. "But if you're busy," Magnan went on hastily, "we'll just toddle along now..." "Ummm. You are Terrestrials, isn't it?" the alien piped in a piercingly high voice. "I'm, er, why, ah..." Magnan swallowed audibly. "I was here just the other day, Mr. Coriale. Don't you remember me?" "Yes. Quite so, I recalled now." The Sulinorian moved toward the door. "Six dozen jellied kidneybeans and glass hens under mud, I'll make notes of it. And now, you wish IF :# to leave, are you? To be sure. Goodby quickly, please." Magnan reached the door ahead of the local, fumbled it open. "Well, it was jolly seeing you, Coriale. By, now... He tugged at Reliefs sleeve. "Come along!" he hissed. "We'ie in a frightful rush, remember?" "fm not sure Mr. Coriale got the order just right." Retief eased Magnan aside, glanced out the door. The dark street was empty. Pale flames burning in blue glass globes high on the walls cast wavering shadows along the ancient cobbles. "It doesn't matter! I'm sure he can cope." Magnan's voice faltered as his eye fell on the Sulinorian, from whose nostrils brown smoke was filtering. "Say, isn't that brown smoke filtering from your nostrils?" he blinked. "I didn't know you Sulinorians smoked." Coriale edged sideways, eyeing the door. "A new vice, acquiring this week only. And now, reluctance, farewell." Magnan frowned. "Curious," he said. "A few days ago you spoke perfect Galactic." "Duck!" Retief snapped and dived past Magnan as the undersized alien made a lightning-fast motion. S omething flashed in his hand; a plate of hors d'oeuvres beside Magnan exploded in a shower of antipasto. With a yelp, Magnan leaped sideways, collided with the alien as the latter bounded aside from Retief's charge. For a moment, there was a wild tangle of threshing limbs. Then Magnan staggered back, sat down hard. His head wobbled. He fell sideways and lay still. The Sulinorian had whirled, bringing the gun up -- Retief swept a pie from a table, slammed it full into the pinched faced. The alien shrieked; the gun barked sharply, twice. One slug ripped the gilt epaulet from the shoulder of Retief's wine-red midevening semi-official blazer. The second thunk !od into a pewter tureen; thick purple soup spurted from paired holes. Then Retief was on the gunner. He twisted the alien's gunhand behind him, reached to seize his quarry's other arm... and felt the room expand suddenly to three times its former size. He snorted hard, held his breath, threw the alien across the room. His legs felt like piano wire. He grabbed at a table for support, sent it crashing over on its side. Magnan sat up, spluttering, as a cascade of icy green punch sluiced over him. "Yes, yes. I'm coming. Mother," he gasped. To Retief, Magnan's voice seemed to be filtered through an echo chamber. As in a dream, he saw the other totter to his feet. "Wha..." Magnan gobbled. "What happened?" His eyes focused on the room, took in the smashed crockery, the overturned furnishings, the spilled viands -- and the crumpled figure against the wall. "Retief -- he isn't...?" Retief shook his head to clear it. He went across to the fallen alien. IP The creature lay on his back, eyes wide open, glassy. A great shard of broken punch-bowl protruded from his chest. His dead face was a livid purple. "Coriale!" Magnan choked. "Dead again!" "We'd better get out fast," Retief said. "And sort out the Coriales in the morning." "By all means!" Magnan whirled to the door, pulled it wide -- and backed into the room, prodded by the gleaming barrel of a crater gun in the hands of a spindle-legged Groaci in the uniform of a Peacekeeper. "To make no move, vile miscreants," the helmeted and greaved Shore Patroller hissed in his native tongue as his five stalked eyes scanned the shambles. "To have you red-handed this time. Soft Ones." "You're making a frightful mistake," Magnan choked as half a dozen more Groaci pushed into the shop, all with levelled weapons. "We didn't -- that is, I didn't -- I mean, Retief only -- " "Ah, Mr. Magnan, is it not?" the Patrol captain whispered in his faint voice. "The acceptance of your complete innocence, of course, dear sir. Provided only the testimony against the true criminal!" "True criminal?" Magnan stuttered. "You mean Retief? But -- " "What other?" the Groaci inquired in a reasonable tone. "But... but..." "To have no need to make a statement now," the captain soothed. "To come along quietly and to leave us to deal with the killer." He motioned sharply and his subordinates closed in, hustled the protesting Magnan away. Then the Groaci turned to Retief. "To remember me, perhaps, Retief? Shluh by name, formerly of the Groacian Planetary Police, once deeply wronged by you. Tonight, in the cells of a Groaci prison, to even at last the bitter score." Ill T he jeweled eye-shields of Capglints from the dazzling white Interrogation lights rigged at the center of the dusty room. "Once more, my dear Retief," he whispered in accent-free Terran. "What was your motive for your atrocious crimes against the peace and order of Groac? Or Sulinore, if you prefer. Was it perhaps your plan to introduce subtle impurities into the provender to be supplied to the delegates? Or did your schemes run deeper? Was it you full intent to secrete illegal monitoring devices in the serving vessels -- devices of the kind which I will testify were found on your person when you were searched?" "A couple of years pounding a beat have done wonders for you, Schluh," Retief said conversationally. "You've lost that fat-behind-theears look. Unfortunately, you still sound about the same." "And you, unlucky Terry, still indulge your penchant for flippancy! It will be amusing to watch the evolution of your japes into pleas for mercy, as our acquaintance ripens." "You Groad must be planning something a Httle more elaborate than usual," Retief mused aloud. "Conning Ambassador Shindlesweet phony peace talks took a lot of time and groundwork -- and you lads don't waste credits on empty gestures." "You imply that our motives are less than selfless?" Shluh inquired in a careless tone. "Ah, well, what matter your thoughts, Soft One? You may share them freely with your executioner." "Let's look at it analytically," Retief went on. "What have you accomplished with all this effort, other than getting representatives of every nated sector of the Arm together in one room? But maybe that's enough, eh, Shluh? If some unfortunate incident occurred and wiped out the lot oi them, whoever was responsible would find himself in a most unenviable position, public-relationswise. And I have a feeling it wouldn't be you Groaci who'd be left holding the other sponsor of the gathering." "Enough, presumptuous Terry!" an agitated manner. "In your panic, you rant nonsense!" Retief continued, "Groac would have to step in to straighten out the confusion; and they just might find it necessary to call on someone like their friends the Blugs to help keep the peace during the emergency. And maybe, before things got back to normal, the few remaining Sulinorians might just sort of go into a decline and die off, leaving an empty world for an enterprising power like Groac to latch onto." # T That fever fancies are these?"  V Shluh hissed. "It is known to all that you Terries, ever suspicious of the pure motives of others, have vices at the port and throughout the Conference rooms, thus making impossible the introduction of any weapons other than the handful alloted to my Security patrols!" "A good point, Shluh. The Mark socks to hair-piece. Of course, a little poison in the caterer's salt-shaker wouldn't trip the detectors, but the metabolic monitors would catch that on the routine analysis that's run on food to be sure it's safe for alien consumption. So the Borgia approach is out, too." "I tire of your theorizing!" Shluh was on his feet. "Think what you will! I tell you in confidence: Even now your Chancery is surrounded by my troops -- ostensibly as honor guard -- but none can leave or enter! By this hour tomorrow no Terry will dare to show his naked face in any capital in the Sector -- "Tomorrow, eh?" Retief nodded. 'Thanks for giving me your timetable." "Have done, infamous meddler in the destinies of Groac! But before you die, tell me the name of the spy who sold you our secrets, and I shall personally supervise his impalement on the wall of one thousand hooks!" IF "Secrets, eh? I guess that confirms my guesswork," Retief said. "One more question: What pay-off do the Blugs get -- " "Silence!" Shluh keened. "Be assured your brief remaining hours will be devoted not to questioning matters of policy beyond your grasp, but to supplying detailed answers to a number of queries of my own!" "Wrong again," Retief said and took a step toward the desk on which the police officer leaned, shaking a gloved fist. Shluh jumped back, motioned to the armed guard standing by, who swung his power gun to the ready, aimed at Retief s face. "Haven't your lads been told that you can't fire a blaster in an enclosed space like this without incinerating everything in it, including the shooter?" Retief asked casually, and took another step. The guard lowered the gun hesitantly, his eyes twitching in confusion. "He lies, cretinous hive-mate of broodfoulers! Fire!" Shluh screeched, and ducked to snatch at an open drawer. Retief reached him in a bound, caught the unfortunate captain by the neck, sent him skidding toward the guard as a belated shot lit the room like a photoflash. As the two Groaci went down in a heap, Retief caught up the dropped gun. "Well, another myth exploded," he said. "Shluh, take off your belt and strap him up." With the gun covering the two aliens, he seated himkey on the desk field-phone, punched in a number. A moment later, the glum face of Counsellor of Embassy Clutchplate appeared on the screen. He giaped. "Retief! What -- how -- Do you realize -- ? Did you actually -- ? How could you have..." his voice faltered as he took in the scene in the background. "Isn't that Chief Shluh? What's he doing?' "He just ran into an old acquaintance," Retief soothed, ignoring a sharp rap at the door. "Mr. Clutchplate, how far along are the arrangements for Blug participation in the Conference?"  V rive within the hour. The convoy just 'vised Port Authority for landing clearance. But see here -- " "Convoy?" Retief glanced up as pounding sounded at the door. "Just fifty first-class cruisers; as escort for the transport. The Blug never travel unarmed, you know. But -- " "See if you can get the ambassador to turn them down," Retief rapped. "Failing that, meet 'em with an armed guard and -- " "Mr. Retief!" the counsellor barked. "I don't know what mad scheme you've embarked on, but it won't work! I know how you feel about the Blugs, and the Groaci too, for that matter. But taking the law into your own hands -- " "No time for any long discussions, Mr. Clutchplate," Retief cut in as a heavy thud rocked the door. "I'd ask you for a squad of Marines if I knew where I was, but -- " "Turn yourself in," Clutchplate blurted. "It's the only way. You IV can plead guilty due to temiporary insanity brought on by outraged political convictions, and get off with no more than half a dozen years on a penal satellite." "It's an interesting proposal." Relief ducked as splinters of door whined past his head. "What am I guilty of?" "Murder, of course," Clutchplate yelped. "Two Sulinorians, remember?" "It slipped my mind," Relief said. "But see if you can hold the charge open a little longer. I may have a few Groaci to add to it." He flipped off the screen as the door shuddered and bulged inward. "Time for you to talk fast, Shluh," he said crisply. "Tve decided to slip out the back way to avoid the autograph hounds. There are three doors I could use. You'll tell me which one's the best route." "Never!" Relief fired a bolt from the hip past the Groaci. "On the other hand," Shluh hissed quickly, "what matter if you temporarily elude my overzealous troops? Our plans will proceed -- and the measures you sought to set in motion will avail naught to stop them!" He darted to a side door, keyed it open. "Go, then, Retief! But take what path you will, a dreadful end awaits you!" "In that case, you'd better go first." Shluh hissed and tried to dart aside, but Retief caught him, propelled him ahead with a foot in the seat. He slammed and barred the panel behind him, as the outer door fell in with a crash. T hey followed dim, dusty passages, ascended winding stairways, moved silently along dark, lofty halls lined with ancient armor and hung with rotted banners. Half a dozen times. Retief eluded Groaci search parties by a hair's breadth. In a wide room decorated with painted murals showing centauroids cavorting on purple grass, Shluh gestured toward a high-arched, doorless opening (through which pale moonlight gleamed. 'There is your exit to the night, Retief!" he keened sardonically. "Make what use of it you will! The way is clear!" Retief crossed the room, stepped out onto a tiny balcony, thick with the droppings of the tiny bat-like creatures that wheeled and skreelod at his appearance. Ragged vines grew over a low balustrade, beyond which darkness spread to a skyline of tower-encrusted hills. He looked down. The wall dropped sheer into inky shadows far below. "Thanks for everything, Shluh." He threw a leg over the stone railing. "I'll see you at your trial -- if your bosses let you live that long, after the way you've botched your assignment." "Stop, impetuous outworlder!" Shluh keened, as Groaci feet clicked in the room behind him. "Even sfhould you survive the descent, you know not what you do! Not even you would I urge on to what waits in the darkness below!" "You mean your short patrols?" "Not my patrols, nor the Marines IF your own embassy which even now seek you, warrant in hand will ever find you, if once you set foot in those demon-haunted byways!" "So that's where you set up your jail-house?" Retief looked thoughtful. "Still, I'd rather mingle with spooks than go back to your little party. Ta-ta, Shluh. Stay as sweet as you are." Shluh hit the deck as Retief raised the gun and fired a burst toward the approaching search party, slung the blast rifle over his shoulder and started down toward the silent streets of the Forbidden City. yt was an easy climb. Once a pair X of Groaci heads appeared over the balcony rail above, but they drew back quickly. The wall was deeply carved, and the stout vines provided ample handand foot-holds. It was less than ten minutes before Retief swung down and dropped the last few feet into a mass of unpruned shrubbery from which he emerged on an avenue of marble mansions like abandoned funeral homes. The two pale moons of Sulinore came from behind a cloud and shone down ghostly white. Something small and dark flitted overhead, emitting thin cries. Far away, a mournful wail sounded. Retief set off at a brisk walk, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the worn mosaics that paved the way. Ahead, a lofty obelisk reared up. The inscription, nearly effaced by time, seemed to commemorate a battle fought with giants. At the next corner, the carved heads of ogres peered blindly down at him from an ornate cornice. He passed a fountain, diy and silent, where finned and tailed maidens of stone disported themselves amid marble waves. The dank wind blew dead leaves along the street. As Retief paused, a sound as of small feet pattered for a moment, then fell silent. "Come on out," Retief called. "There's some news you ought to hear." There was a ghostly laughter -- or perhaps it was only the wind, searching among the fluted columns of a temple. Retief went on. Rounding an abrupt angle, he caught a glimpse of movement -- a darting shape that disappeared into a gaping doorway. He followed, found himself in a hall, open to the sky. From its walls, giant frescoed figures stared down with empty eyes. "I need a guide," , Retief called. "Any volunteers?" "Tears... tears... tears," the echoes rolled back from every side. "There's a small matter of an invasion to deal with right now." "Now... now... now..." the sound faded and died, and as if the word were a signal, a creak sounded from the high doors through which Retief had entered. He spun in time tosee them clash shut with a dull boom that echoed and re-echoed. He went to them, found them jammed tight, immovable. He turned back to the interior of the roofless room. A wide passage was visible at the rear. Skitting a black pool that reflected a shattered moon, he entered the passage, emerged after twenty paces on a terrace above a flight of wide, shallow steps. Below, a dark and wildgrown park spread out, a wilderness of untrimmed shrubs and lofty, blackleaved trees. He descended to the foot-high sward; soft rustlings from the shadows retreated as he advanced along a weed-obscured path winding among the buttressed trunks of patriarchal trees. Carved faces leered at him from the shadows. The eerie shapes of stone monsters gleamed through the unpruned foliage. He emerged onto a broad mall along the center of which a double rank of what appeared to be painted statues of heroic size were drawn up along an aisle that led away into the nigjht. Near at hand, a small collonaded shrine was almost hidden among the low-sweeping boughs of a giant conifer. Silently, Retief approached the building from the side. Through a latticed opening, faint moonlight fell on the vine-entwined effigy of an oversized Sulinorian in the armor of an ancient warrior. In the darkness behind the graven hero, something moved minutely. Relief tossed a pebble through the window, flattened himself against the wall by the doorway. A moment later, a head poked cautiously from the entry -- and Retiefs hand clamped on the slender Sulinorian neck. "Pardon my interrupting the game," he said. "But it's time we had a talk." V #np'he price of entrance into the A Sacred Grove of Heroes is death, Terran!" the tenor voice of the alien shrilled. "So I understand," Retief said, holding his catch at arm's length to avoid the wildly kicking feet. "However, my little intrusion is nothing compared with what the Groaci have scheduled. Maybe you'd better listen to what I have to say before you carry out the sentence." "Tomorrow is nothing; the past is all," the Sulinorian declaimed. "Why struggle against Destiny, outworlder?" "We can give destiny a run for her money if you'll spread the word that I need a few hundred ablebodied Sulinorians to distract the Groaci patrols long enough for me to get through to the Terry Embassy -- " "Offer your final devotions to your gods, man of Terra," the Sulinorian cut in. "Your fate is sealed." "You're consistent, I'll concede that," Retief said. "It looks as though I'll have to look a little farther for a public-spirited citizen." He released the native, who jerked his varicolored toga straight and faced him defiantly. "Not so, Terran!" The local folded his knobby arms. "Never will you leave these hallowed precincts!" Rustlings sounded behind Retief. He turned. From every shadowed clump of shrubbery, a Sulinorian emerged; light winked from the footlong stilettoes in their hands. Silently, the ring of aliens closed in. Retief backed to the shrine, unlimbered the blast rifle, swung it to cover the throng which halted, facing him. "Welcome to the party," he said. IF "Now that we've got a quorum, maybe we'll get somew'here." "You outrage the glorious past, Terran," a wizened Sulinorian quavered, staring up at Retief. "You heap outrage on outrage!" "The outrage the Groaci are planning is the one I'm concerned with," Retief said. "You people don't seem to care much, but from the Terry viewpoint, it might set an unfortunate precedent for other budding empire-builders." "Terry, gone are the days when we of Sulinore were mighty warriors. If now it falls our lot to die, we face our fate in dignity." "There's nothing dignified about being scragged by the Groaci, or strung up by the heels by a platoon of Blugs," Retief cut in. "I hear they have a curious sense of humor when it comes to dealing with anyone who's proved his inferiority by getting conquered by them." "Kill this alien at once, isn't it?" a scratchy-voiced Sulinorian in the front rank called. "After, everybody die nicely, as scheduled." "Enough talk," the elderly Sulinorian declared. "Let the disturber of the sleep of heroes suffer the penalty!" The Sulinorians eyed the gun in Retief's hands, shuffled their feet. No one advanced. "Maybe you'd better call the penalty off," Retief suggested. "Then you can divert your righteous indignation into doing something about the invasion." "Hmmmm." The elderly spokesman beckoned to a couple of his fellows; they put their heads together. "We have decided," the oldster stated as the conference ended, "that the matter must be referred to the Old Ones for decision." He raised a trembling hand. "Not that we fear to fall under your murderous weapon, Terran -- but it is a death which lacks elegance." He waved a hand and an avenue opened up through the dense ranks of armed locals. "Terran, I give you temporary safe-conduct and the honor of confrontation with the Ancient Lords of Sulinore, who will themselves dispose of this case. Come, if you fear not I" "Fair enough," Retief said. "When you want fast action, there's nothing like going direct to the top brass. Where do we find them?" "Behold the Lords of Sulinore!" the ancient piped feebly. The locals made sweeping bows to the ranks of still figures about them. Retief inclined his head respectfully. 'They cut an impressive figure," he said. "I'll be interested to see how they go about dealing with the problem at hand." #Qimplicity itself," the old SulinoO rian said. "One waft of the sacred incense, and a faint shadow of their vanished vitality will energize them. Then will they hear our pleas and hand down justice in the ancient way." Retief walked slowly along the row of motionless effigies, noting the worn trappings, the realistically scarred limbs and fierce visages, the tarnished armor of the ancient warriors. In spite of their size and varied farms, all bore some resemblance to the shrunken SuJiinorians who followed, silent and awed. "Once the races of Sulinore were many," the ancient said as he noticed Relief's questing gaze. "And mighty was their prowess. 'There stands #briale the Intense, Requiter of Wrongs. Beyond, we see proud Valingrave, victor at Har and Jungulon and Spagetwraidie. Here -- " he indicated the modest crypt " -- behold the shrine of Bozdune the Restial, known also as Bozdune the Baresark, of ferocious memory. And there -- " he pointed to a four-legged, barrelchested creature with a typical Sulinorian torso and head " -- stand the mortal remains of Great Tussore, he who single-handed vanquished the hordes of Doss, on a world so distant that even now the sunlight of his day of battle has not yet reached the face of Sulinore!" "He looks like a tough boy," Relief commented. "Too bad he's not still around. He might take a dim view of the way things are going." "Did I not say Mighty Tussore would give his judgment? Aye, and Cranius the August, and Maglodore the Swift, and Belgesion, and Vare, and High Pranthippo, King of Kings -- " "A most august assemblage," Relief conceded. "But they seem a rather taciturn group." "You jape at the Lords of SuliBore, Terran?" The oldster drew himself up, made an imperious gesture. A pair of locals nearly as old as himself came forward, bearing a large case which they placed on the grass, opening the lid. Inside was a cylindrical tank fitted with valves and a coil of flexible plastic tubing. The dodderer lifted the nozzle erf the hose, advanced to the pedestal on which the centauroid stood. "Awaken, Great Tussore!" he cried in his cracked voice. "Rouse from thy long dreams to render judgment on one who comes unbidden to the Place of Heroes!" He raised the hose and waved it under the flared nostrils. Retief heard a faint hiss of escaping gas. "Give us of thy ancient wisdom as in days of old, O Tussore," the old fellow exhorted. He shoved the hose closer. "Almost is the sacred effluvium exhausted," he muttered. "I'll bet a pretty some of these backsliders have been tapping it on the sly." S uddenly one pointed ear of the statue twitched. The flared nostrils quivered. The eyelids fluttered. As Retief watched, the lips parted. "Glop," the mighty figure said, and fell silent. "Drat it, what a time for the tank to run out," someone beside Retief muttered. "How does he work it?" Retief inquired softly as the Keeper of the Sacred Fumes waved the hose agitatedly, vainly invoking the unmoving demigod. "We work nothing, interloper," the Sulinorian said sullenly. "A good shot of sacred gas, and their metabolism starts ticking over fast enough to start them talking, that's all." Abruptly, Tussore stirred again. IF "The devil take the blackguards," a deep voice suddenly rumbled from his chest. "Where's my greaves? Where's my fetlock powder? Where's my confounded mace? Blast that butter-fingered squire... "Great Tussore, wake from thy dreams!" The hosewielder redoubled his efforts. "Hear me! Even now there stands in our midst a stranger wbo violates the honored rest of the Lords of Sulinore with his presence!" "Oh... it's you, Therion," Tussore mumbled. His eyes were open now, bleary and dull. "You look terrible. Been a long time, I guess. And it's not the stranger who disturbs my rest -- it's you, with your infernal babbling!" He reached, plucked the hose from the oldster's hand, jammed it under his nose, drew a deep breath. "Ahhhh! That's what the doctor ordered." "Even so. Great Tussore!" The Sulinorian proceeded to relate the circumstances surrounding Retiefs presence. Halfway through the recital, Tussore's eye-lids drooped. The hose fell from his hand. He snored. "So the problem. Great One, is how to administer the prescribed rituals without suffering the indecorum of being mowed down like ripe beer-corn by the condemned one," the oldster concluded. "Great Tussore? Mighty one?" He waved the hose frantically, but his efforts this time were unavailing. The still figure stood, unmoving as a sphinx. #CQo much for the wisdom of the O ages," Relief said. "Nice try, Theiion, but it looks like the Oracle's not interested. Let's go." "Make silent this one, plenty quick!" a small Sulinorian rasped --  same one. Relief thought, who had spoken up earlier. "No more time for pulling string on wooden god! Cut away the head of this Terry, yes! And soon after, fates proceed on schedule!" "Silence, impertinent oaf!" Therion rounded on the speaker. "Your cacophonous squeakings impugn the majesties of Sulinore! Give me your name, for later disciplining!" The one addressed backed away, looking flustered, as if suddenly onscious of being conspicuous. Relief studied his face. "Well, if it isn't my old friend Coriale," he said. "You ought to be an expert on the subject of dying. Seems to me I've seen you expire twice already this evening." The Coriale-faced alien whirled suddenly, plunged for the rear rank. "Seize him!" Therion called. The quarry ducked, dodged, dived through a gap in the suddenly surging ranks, scuttled sideways as his retreat was cut off, made a dash for the shrubbery. The chase pounded off into the underbrush. Relief seated himself on a convenient pedestal and lit a dope-stick. Five minutes passed before the crowd again surged into view, the darting quarry still in the lead. He put on a sprint, scuttled to the shrine, dived inside. "His impiety passes all bounds!" Therion puffed, coming up to Relief. "Now the mad creature seeks fibditer in the very crypt of Bozdimel" "Let 'him be fetched out and dealt with!" someone shrilled. "Stay!" Therion piped as the aroused crowd closed in. "We'll not bring dishonor to the hero by scuffling about his feet. Come! Let us withdraw and leave this fevered maniac to regain his senses among the shadows of the greatness which was his race's!" R elief took out his pocket light and played the beam between the columns of the refugee's hiding place. Between the great steeltoed boots of Bozdune, a smaller pair of feet was visible. He directed the light higher. "Correction," he said. "Not his . race's; that's no Sulinorian. Look." The light revealed a cloud of brown mist coiling upwards around the rigid features of the preserved hero. "The meeting's been infiltrated by a masquerading alien -- an alien who exhales brown gas when he gets excited." "What's this? Brown gas -- ?" Therion's question was interrupted by a startled cry from a Sulinorian near the temple entry, followed a moment later by a snort like a teased bull. "He stirs! Bozdune rouses!" Suddenly Sulinorians were running in every direction. Relief caught Therion's arm as the elder turned to follow the general flight. "Unhand me, fellow!" the oldster screeched as a bellow sounded from the shrine. "Death I face with a proud smile -- but there's something inappropriate about being ripped limb from limb by an ancestor!" "Is that the kind of fellow you make a hero of?" Relief inquired as smashing sounds emanated from the crypt, followed by the hurtling body of the Coriale double, which skidded to Relief's feet and lay moving feebly. "Unfortunately Bozdune lost his wits as a result of three month's exposure to the Tickling Torture at the hands of the infamous Kreee," Therion explained hastily. "He's prone to rages, when suddenly aroused, and prudence demands my swift removal hence!" He pulled free and bounded away with an agility remarkable in a being of his age. Relief turned as a rumble of falling stone sounded from the shrine. A mighty figure had appeared between the columns, stood with hands pressed against them. Great cords of muscle stood out on his neck; his biceps bulged; his latissimi dorsi strained. The column buckled and went over, bringing down a section of the architrave. Bozdune roared as the marble slab bounced from his back. With a final thrust, he toppled a second column, stepped forth as stone collapsed behind him. Eight feet high, massive as a buffalo, he stood in the moonlight, snarling. His wild gaze fell on Relief. "Kreee!" he bellowed. "I have you now!" and charged the lone Terran. VI R elief stood his ground as Bozdune closed in. "You've got me confused with someone else, Bozdune," he called. "I'm just a Terry doing a little job of planet-saving." IF With a bellow, the ancient fighter thundered past the spot where Retief had stood a moment before. He fought his way clear of the underbrush into which the momentum of his dash had carried him, rounded on his elusive prey. "And in that connection. I'd like to ask a little favor of you," Retief continued. "A group of opportunists called the Groaci are planning to massacre all the foreign diplomats in town -- " "Arrrrghhhl" Bozdune roared and closed in swinging roundhouse swipes sufficient to decapitate a horse. Retief leaned aside from one wild swing, ducked under another, planted his feet and drove a solid leftright to the giant's stomach, an effect like punching a sea-wall. He jumped aside as Bozdune grunted and made an ineffective grab, landing a blow in his own midriff that staggered him. "Now, the Groaci have the streets cordoned off," Retief went on. "And since it's important that I get through to the Embassy with the news. I'd like to ask you to lend a hand." He stepped back as Bozdune ripped his six-foot blade from its sheath, whirled it overhead. Retief tossed the last rifle aside, plucked a wristthick spear from the grip of a horned warrior which loomed immobile beside him. Bozdune made a bound, brought the massive claymore down in a whistling arc that cleaved air an inch to Retief's right as he faded aside. "Now, if you'd just say a word to your descendants, I think they might consent to lend a hand." Retief poked the spear hard against Bozdune's breastplate. "How about it?" Bozdune dropped his sword, grabbed the spear shaft with both hands, and gave a prodigious pull -- and as Retief let go, tottered backward, tripped over a fragment of shattered column and went down like a fallen oak. Retief heard the dull thonk! as his head struck the marble steps of his erstwhile shelter. He stepped quickly forward. Used the warrior's own harness straps to bind his wrists together, then his ankles. At that moment, the bushes parted and Therion's aged face appeared. "What transpires?" he piped. His eye fixed on the prone giant. "What, Bozdune the Bestial, felled by a mere outworlder?" "I'm afraid I can't claim the glory," Retief said. "He ran out of gas." He glanced toward the spot where the false Coriale had lain. "But if you can find the ringer, I may be able to remedy that." "He's here, the infamous dastard," a Sulinorian called, dragging the unfortunate imposter from a clump of gorse. Retief got a grip on the captive's collar, assisted him to Bozdune's side. "Breathe on the nice man. Shorty," he ordered. A great gout of brown gas puffed obediently forth. "Again." The prisoner huffed and puffed, exhaling the vapor past the fallen fighter's snoring visage. In a moment, Bozdune twitched, jerked and opened his eyes. "You're still here, eh?" he said to Relief. "I thought I dreamed you," He sniffed again. "Gadzoons, first good air I've breathed in a couple hundred years. More!" He raised his voice as Relief withdrew the pseudo-Coriale. "Not unless you agree to lend a hand," Relief countered. "Then I promise you all the sacred essence you want." "Are you kidding? Just let me get my hands on these Gruckles or whoever they are that think they can carve my home town up, and I'll grind them into library paste!" "It's a deal. Relief turned to Therion. "How about it? You in or out?" "If Bozdune approves the enterprise, then who are we to demur?" the oldster inquired of the cool night air. "Rise, loyal Sons of Sulinore! For this night at least, the ancient glories live again!" Retiei gave Bozdune another shot of gas, then passed the captive to Therion. "Don't squeeze him too hard," he cautioned. "We've got to make him stretch as far as we can; if this caper's going to succeed, we'll need all the ancient glory we can muster." F rom a shadowy arch half a block from the carved gates of the Terran Embassy, Relief, seated astride Tussore's broad back, watched as the fifty-Groaci guard detail sauntered past, their stemmed eyes scanning the street alertly, their blast rifles ready at port arms. Behind him, the tread of booted Groaci feet approached relentlessly. "Get ready," he said softly. "Another ten seconds..." There was a chorus of weak shouts from the rear, a slapping of running feet, the buzzzz-whapp! of power guns firing; then a pair of Groaci troopers appeared, pelting along in advance of a mighty figure in ancient armor. In full stride, he overtook them, snatched them up by their necks and tossed them aside. Behind him, a crowd of Sulinorians, toga skirts hitched high, brandished their ceremonial knives as they followed their massive leader toward the gate. A moment later, the giant was among the patrollers, flailing with a spike-studded mace before a gun was fired. "Let's go!" Relief kicked his heels into Tussore's sides, and the mighty centauroid bounded forward. In an instant, they were in the thick of the melee. Relief swinging a yard-long club as Tussore reared and struck out with iron-hard hooves. "Cut your way through!" Relief called to his mount. We can mop up later, after we've taken care of the main event!" "Aiii! What a lovely squishing sound these Gruckers make beneath my hooves!" the old warrior yelled, but he wheeled and charged the gate. Half a block away. Relief caught a glimpse of Bozdune, tossing Groaci troopers aside like straw dummies. From every dark alleymouth and byway, Sulinorians were pouring. A lone Groaci in the gatehouse brought up his blast-rifle, loosed a round that missed by inches; then Reliefs club felled him, and they were through, crossing the lawn toward the lighted entry at full gallop. A startled Marine guard let out a yell IP and reached for the lever which would slam the grill in the faces of the invaders, but a sweep of Tussore's arm sent the sentry sprawling. Inside, Relief swung down, started up the grand staircase, five steps at a time. Suddenly Counsellor Clutchplate appeared on the landing above. Uetief!" His eyes took in the IV massive, sweaty, horse-bodied Tussore, helmed and sword-girded, the motley horde of Sulinorians swarming behind. "Good lord! Treason! Treachery! Hallucinations!" He whirled to run as Relief caught him, spun him around. "Has the banquet begun yet?" he demanded. "J... j... just starting now," the counsellor choked. "It happens I don't like Groaci iodine chowder, so I just stepped out for a breath of air." He stumbled back as Relief dashed on. At the high double doors to the banquet hall, a Marine in dress blues, polished helmet and chrome-plated ceremonial .# departed from his rigid position of attention sufficiently to roll his eyes as the newcomers surged down on him. At what he saw, he grabbed for the holster at his hip. Relief slammed a side-handed blow at his wrist. "Sorry, son," he snapped and sent the doors flying open on the roomful of startled diplomats. From both sides of a long U-shaped table, oculars of every description goggled at the spectacle that burst upon them. Retief pointed to the impassive Sulinorian servitors standing behind the diners. spaced all along the room, one to a customer. "Get 'em" he commanded and reached for the nearest as the troop at his heels boiled past to carry out his instruction. VU  ou've gone out of your mind, Jl Retief!" Counsellor Clutchplate gazed, white-faced and shaken, from the broken doorway at the scene of carnage after the capture of the last of the servitors. "What can it mean, leading this party of dacoits to violate the Embassy? I must protest, even at risk of my life, whatever atrocities you plan to visit on these poor chaps! They're "They'll survive -- some of 'em," Retief said, and plucking a steak knife from the table, he stooped over one of the fallen waiters and with a quick stroke, laid him open from chin to navel. Clutchplate uttered a strangled yelp; Ambassador Shindlesweet turned pale and quietly collapsed under the table as Retief reached, extracted a limp, two-foottall creature resembling a shelled lobster from the interior of the pseudoflesh costume. "They're not Sulinorians; they're Slugs." He reached again, pulled out a small pressure-tank. "This is his air supply; liquid nitrogen." "Slugs?" Clutchplate gaped at the unconscious creature, from whose breathing orifice a brown exhalation now was issuing. "Sut what -- how -- ? See here, Retief! even if these are, er, Slugs, what harm IF could they have done unarmed, which would warrant your outrageous behavior?" "Blugs are rock-eaters," Retief explained. "And they seem to have a remarkable degree of control over their metabolism. Normally, they exhale innocuous gases; under stress, they start exhaling nitrogen trioxide. But when occasion demands, they can switch to production of any one of three or four poisonous oxides of nitrogen. Here in this closed room, all it would have taken was one good whiff down each guest's neck, on signal, and bingo! Clean sweep." "But why?" Clutchplate wailed. "I have an idea Ambassador Shith can tell us how they happened to be here, instead of Coriale's regular table-waiting staff," Retief suggested. Shith, still dangling in Tussore's grasp, emitted a harsh bleat. "Gloat while you can, Mr. Retief!" he hissed. "True, every word! I commend your cleverness! But while you spent your efforts in thwarting this feint -- yes, feint! -- the squadron of Blug warships which you Terries so naively permitted to pass your blockade were discharging fifty thousand picked troops, the cream of the Bluggish navy! Even now these diminutive but doughty doughboys are spreading out over the town, breathing their deadly halitosis on every living creature in their paths! By morning, no Sulinorian will be alive to dispute the Groaci claim to planetary ownership!" # #hith -- have you taken leave O of your senses?" Shindlesweet had revived sufficiently to crawl forth, spluttering. "When this is known you'll be hauled before a Galactic tribunal and dealt with in a manner that will make the name of Groac a byword to replace that of Doctor Mush!" "Mud," Shith corrected. "Permit me to contradict you, my dear George! Not one word of the coup will be noised abroad. My constabulary have already taken the precaution of securing the only communications facilities on the planet forces; in a matter of moments my chaps will arrive to put an end to your illusions of success! Don't fret, however. I promise you a swift and painless demise." He paused, aiming several eyes at Retief. "Why do you shake your head, sir! My scheme is flawless! My invasion is an accomplished fact!" "True -- but you missed one small point," Retief said. "The Sulinorians were gradually fading off the scene due to the exhaustion of the planet's supply of a certain element yital to their well-being. But instead of dying, after about the age of five hundred, they'd drift off into a comatose state. You and your nitrogenfixing Blugs have changed all that, Mr. Ambassador. Thanks to you, Suldnore has a new lease on life." "You seek even in the eleventh hour to delude yourself!" Shith hissed. "Hearken! Even now my occupation forces approach the door!" There was a noisy clump of feet from the hall outside. Then the migjhty figure of Bozdune the Bestial, broad and bronzed. appeared in the eoitry. He plucked a shattered door from its hinges with one hand and tosssed it aside. "Nice going, Refcief," he boomed. but the place is swarming wth those lovable little guys you called Blugs. All the boys are catching 'em and making pets of 'em. I've got one in my pocket, and he's keeping me supplied like a tall glunthound!" The behemoth's ochre eyes fell on the laden table. "Chow!" he bassooned. "I haven't had a square meal in eight hundred years!" "Then -- this means my invasion has failed?" Shith wailed. "My someticulously planned invasion, spoiled in the eleventh hour by one trivial oversight?" "Qh, your invasion is a huge success," Retief said comfortingly. "But this time the invadees are the winners." really must protest this flagX rant interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign world, George," Ambassador Shith whispered vehemently from his position sfories for TV !  says Leslie Goodwins, dynamic H#ll#rwood more! Use our services: send us your story; we do the rest! Send story or story idea (from I to # pam not more) lor free focamination to; #I Melrose Ave., HollywoodTCalif. #Q# on the platform where the group of local and foreign dignitaries stood, awaiting the appearance of the parade organized by the Sulinorians to celebrate the invasion. "I demand the immediate return of the impounded units of the Blug navy and the repatriation of all Blug nationals!' "Spare me your threnodies, my dear Shith." Ambassador Shindlesweet raised a remonstrative hand. "We'd have a sticky time of it were we to attempt to dislodge the Blugs now. You're aware. I'm sure, diat as their breathing tanks ran low, they escaped their captors and burrowed their way down half a mile to a nitrogen-rich stratum and are busily digesting rock and releasing free radicals -- that, and reproducing. I think you might be said to be fortunate to be sharing the honors today as co-sponsor of the Blug Immigration Plan, rather than lanbrig, awaiting trial." "Pah!" the Groaci envoy vibrated his throat-sac in indignation. "In that case," he changed tack, "I see no reason why Groac should share credit for this enlightened program under which, at no cost to these ungrateful locals, their atmosphere is being so rapidly renewed!" "Really, Shith," the Terran chief of mission said in a low voice, "it's only the fact that a full disclosure of the events leading up to the present rapprochement might tempt certain petty critics at Sector to the faulty conclusion that I had been in some way remiss, that prevents me from releasing the transcript of IF the rather excited pronouncement which you so providently delivered into the recorders set up to capture the after-dinner speeches... He cupped an ear as distant bugles sounded "Gentlemen, I think I hear them coming now." A long the ancient street, a procession was advancing, banners awave. In the front rank were Tussore and Bozdune, grim and giganslung at their hips, their armor sparkling in the red rays of the swollen sun. Behind them, rank on rank, marched the revived immortals of Sulinore, a column that stretched away out of sight along the shadowy street. "This matter of allowing these chaps to seize the Blug ships as spoils of war and set off on a raiding expedition is an irregularity that I'm going to have difficulty glossing over in my report," Shindlesweet said behind his hand to Therion. "But off the record," he added, "I suppose rU manage -- so long as you're sure they'll do their raiding in Groacimandated territory." "Indeed, I hope you'll interpose no obstacles to the ruffians departing Sulinore as expeditiously as possible," the elder whispered loudly. "We're well rid of the smelly brutes. They have no conception of the dignity appropriate to legendary heroes." Tussore, catching sight of Retief, broke ranks and cantered over to the group, puffing smoke from the cigar clamped in his mouth. "Well, we're off," he called heartily. "And glad to be going! The old place isn't the same any more. I can't even step on the grass without some whisk-broom handler jumping out and giving me a hard time. And that dying sun! Paugh! It gives me great cloud of smoke, raised an eyebrow at Retief. "Say, why don't you change your mind and join us, Retief?" he demanded. "We'll have a lot more fun out there chasing across the universe than you will staying back here with these stick-in-the-muds." "It's a temptation," Retief said. "Maybe some day I'll take you up on it. I have an idea your traiil will m mate a Saper Directional Mika that ampUflaa inalio, that ym will ha using your Supar Miae tional Mika # minutes after you abtalQ lAt ordinary store materials. Easy Instruelloaa, # N. Hiehland Ave., Hollywood, Coin. #W# IF  Special Feature Where to go next Labor Day to meet the elite of sf! E very year the science-fiction world gets together in a different city and has itself a World Convention. And, every year, at this convention they decide which city will be the convention-site for next year. The # convention was in Cleveland, Ohio; there, the delegates voted New York to be the home of the # World Science Fiction Convention. Since I live in New York, this was naturally good news to me. But it's also a 'historic choice, because twenty-eight years ago, way back in #, New York was the site of the first science-fiction convention ever, the famous "Nycon." This convention will also be callcause there was a second convention in N.Y.C. during the #'s. This year's convention promises to be the best, and biggest, and liveliest ever... and if you missed the Tricon in '#, start planning now to visit When and where -- and how to oin The Nycon will convene over the Labor Day weekend at the Hotel Statler-Hilton here in New York. Labor Day in September is the traditional convention date, because the long holiday weekend gives out-oftown visitors extra time for convention-going and sight-seeing. As for the Statler-Hilton, it's one of the biggest and most glamorous hotels in a city filled with big, glamorous hotels, and it's centrally located in Manhattan, convenient for in-coming tourists. I interviewed the two chairmen of the # Nycon, two chaps named Ted White and David G. Van Amam, both members of the big New York fanclub, the Fanoclasts, and both very active in national fandom. (Both, incidentally, are breaking into the professional ranks as science-fiction writers. ) Even though you'll have to wait till September to actually attend Nycan't become a member of the convention right now. To do so, send your check or money order for # to Box #; Gracie Square Station, New York #. You'll be a registered member of the # World Science Fiction Convention and will receive occasional Progress Reports which will fill you in on the program, the guests and the entertainments as the program gradually shapes up. fhe Progrom Book and "Nycon Comics" Nycon Comics goes out to all paid members. This is a special comicbook drawn by Jack Gaughan -- you've seen his work in If many times. The first issue of Nycon Comics, which is neatly photo-offset printed, has already been distributed. ##, # and # have yet to appear. There's literally nothing I can say about Jack Gaughan's comic book, except that it's one of the funniest things I've seen in years. The wild and woeful misadventures of a little band of heroic space-pioneers, struggling frenziedly to get the Nycon going (despite evil influences from Floor) have to be seen and chuckled over to be understood. Every convention has a Program Book and sometimes a more elaborate Memory Book of the convention as well. Nycon hopes to produce a mammoth combination Nycon Program and Memory Book, which will include lots of other features beside just the program listing. They hope to include special articles by major speakers (including the Guest of Honor, but I'll get to him in just a moment) and lots of other extras. Two Guests of Honor? Every year, the convention singles out one particularly popular sciencefiction writer to boost as Guest of Honor. Last year in Cleveland as you may remember, the GoH was none other than L. Sprague de Camp himself. Well, this year... (biggest and best yet, remember?)... there will be not one... but two Guests of Honor! Or is it "Guest of Honors?" Well, you know what I mean. Anyway, the Nycon will have two of 'em, a Fan Guest of Honor and a sf professional GoH. The latter is to be Lester del Rey. Lester came into the field back in the "Golden Forties" when John W. Campbell was collecting andor ters with which to adorn the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. Lester was one of a group that included Robert Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Murray Leinster, L. Ron Hubbard and others. You will easily remember a number of very fine stories with the name of del Rey fastened to ikcai... "Helen O'Loy" is a muchaiiitliolO)gized classic; so is the taut, su;eii#eful "Nerves"; my own favorite comes from one of the earliest issues of Galaxy -- "The Wind Between the Worlds." The Fan Guest of Honor is good old Bob Tuokw, a tall, cheerful guy with a crewcul, whose sense of humor has made him one of the bestliked men in sdraice-fiotion fandom. For quite a few (but not enougih) years he publMied a fanzine called Le Zombie that was very big, very popular, very funny. (When I say "big," I mean, well, like Hannes Bok used to draw covers for it, you know what I mean?) Since then, Bob Tucker went into the writing game himself, with a slew of hardboiled detective mysteries, starting with one called The Chinese Doll, which set fandom back on its heels, because Tucker named some of his characters after sciencefiction fans, from the sheriff and the undertaker down to the suspects... Well, quite a few novels followed that one, including six or eight science-fiction novels, like The Long Loud Silence and The Lincoln Hunters. Despite all this. Bob remained a fan at heart, and the Nycon Committee is looking forward to welcoming him to New York in style. What's on the program? There will be a banquet, of course, only for this one the Nycon has asked Harlan Ellison to be toastmaster. Ellison is the only toastmaster I know who doesn't really need a microphone. There will also be another "Galaxy of Fashion" show, sponsored by Galaxy magazine. The first of these futuristic faon shows was at the Tricon in Cleveland; the Nycon folks thou it was good fun, so New York will have another. Most of the convention program is fairly traditional -- an auction of rare books, magazines, original cover paintings and illustrations from the prozincs. And the Fan Art Show, which will be run by Bjo Trimble, who has been putting these shows together for the past few conventions. If you would like to enter some drawing or paintings of your own you'd better contact the Nycon Committee for details. And by the way, a special innovation at this year's convention will be included in the Nycon Program  Memory Book; a special folio of winning artwork from the Fan Art Shows of earlier conventions. Another innovation is scheduled. The Nycon will feature a running series of "Dialogues" scattered throughout the three-day convention program. These dialogues will be public conversations between two prominent science-fiction celebrities chosen for their gifts of conversational ability and the talent for thinking on their feet tliat makes all the difference between dull chitchat and pungent, meaningful talk. Dialogue partners will represent opposing points of view on the several questions rife in the fan and pro worlds right now... the program has not IF yet "firmed" to the point where I can list the topics to be discussed, but one that may go over will be between two well-known writers (whom I've been asked not to name). One represents the new slick-magazine "avant garde" type of science fiction, and the other stands for the old style "story-telling" brand of fiction. A battle of wits between them should be stimulating. There will be several such Dialogues on the program, as well as another innovation: a series of interviews in which a well known science-fiction writer will be interviewed in depth, to draw out his thoughts on the field, on his craft, on his peers and contemporaries, his writing problems, personal background, likes and dislikes -- in short, a regular "profile." And there will be a big fan-meet-pro party at which free drinks will be serv and at which you are invited to meet and mingle with and get to know some of the science-fiction celebrities whose work you have been admiring for years, in relaxed informal surroundings. And then, of course, there will be the voting on and awarding of the coveted Hugo Awards. This is always one of the most exciting events of any convention -- the chance to vote for a book, story, artist or magazine you especially admire, as "best of the year." And there will be, I suppose, the customary costume ball. These are incredibly lavish affairs, and you should see the inventive, imaginative, elaborate costumes some people come up with! My wife Noel and I are fond of costume parties, and are already working on ours. How about you?  Exciting Complete Short Novel by Keith Laumer  by Hayden Howard  by Harry Harrison l by Christopher Anvil p Willy Ley brings new word on Atlantis -- book reviews by Algis ButkyM  --  many ether stories and features in the April Galaxy, on sale oead  IF  Novelette What's the right punishment when a madman commits murder -- if his lunacy is entirely his own fault? I T au Ccti is a small, cool yellow GO dwarf with four planets. Strictly speaking, none of the planets are habitable. Two are gas giants. The third inward has no air; the innermost has too much. That innermost world is about the size of Venus. With no oversized moon to strip away most of its air, it has an atmosphere like Venus's: thick and hot and corrosive. No human explorer would have marked it for colonization. But the ramrobots were not human. During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called Known Space. They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet. Unfortunately they were programmed wrong. The designers didn't know it, and the UN didn't know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrohot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, et cetera. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat. Unlike the ramrobots, the mancarrying slowboats could not use interstellar ramscoops. They had to carry their own fuel. It meant that the slowboats took a long time to get where they were going, and there were no round trip tickets. The slowboats could not turn back. So We Made It was colonized, because a ramrobot elected to settle in spring. Had it landed in summer or winter, when the planet's axis of rotation points fhrough its primary, Procyon, it would have sensed the fifteenhundred-mile-per-hour winds. So Jinx was colonized. Jinx, with a surface gravity of # and two habitable bands between the ocean, where there is too much air, and the Ends, where there is none at all. Jinx, the Easter Egg Planet, home of men and women who are five feet tall and five feet wide, the strongest bipeds in known space. But they die young, of heart trouble. So Plateau was colonized. For the innermost world of Tau Ceti is like Venus in size and atmosphere, save for one mountain. That straight-sided mountain is forty miles tall, and its nearly flat top is half the size of California. It rises out of the searing black calm at the planet's surface to the transparent atmosphere above; and that air can be breathed. Snow covers the peaks near the center of the Plateau, and rivers run lower down, rivers which tumble off the void edges of the Plateau into the shining mist below. The ramrobot landed there. And founded a world. T here was a time on that world when a murderer sought escape. Up from the Plateau on Mount Looldtthat came Douglas Hooker, rising like a star. He was the only occupant of a four-man exploration craft. Fifteen years ago he had stolen that ship from the UN, the government of Earth, and taken it to Plateau. He didn't dare return it. The laws of Earth were far stricter than those of Plateau. And he couldn't stay on Plateau, that was certain. Plateau would not have complained. Hooker was a cured maniac, a guaranteed model citizen. An autodoc had adjusted the chemistry of his body, canceling the biochemical cause of his insanity. Two years of psychoanalysis, hypnoanalysis and conditioning had attacked his memories, altering them in some cases, reducing or enhancing their importance in others. Conditioning had seen to it that he would never remain far from an autodoc; his chemistry would never again have the chance to go haywire in that particular fashion. But he'd done a terrible thing on Plateau. He couldn't stay. He couldn't bear the thought of someday facing Greg Loeffler. T he world below changed from a vast white plain to a round white ball. Hooker's fusion drive glowed hotter and bluer than any sun. He was using the hydrogen in his tank. Though his ship carried a model of mankind's first "safe" ramscoop, he was not yet moving fast enough to use interstellar hydrogen for fuel. When Plateau was in danger of being lost against the stellar background, he turned the ship toward Wunderland. He'd decided on Wonderland months ago, when he really began to believe that he would be well someday. Wunderland was small, of light gravity; a nice world, but distant from Earth. Wonderland's technology was always several decades behind the times. The Wunderlanders would appreciate an extra spaceship, especially one as modem as Hooker's. They might jail him -- though he had served a term on Plateau, concurrently with his cure. But they wouldn't kill him. And Hooker could wait out a jail sentence. His health was perfect. Though he was eighty-seven years old, he might have been twenty. Earth's medical sciences had become very good indeed. Men and woman walked the Earth in places they had trod three centuries earlier; and the medicine of their time was long obsolete. (Yet... look again. Twenty? Never. He acts scarred. Neither years nor scars show in ithe flesh, nor ftround the eyes, nor in them. But bebiiid the eyes, there are scars. It takes decades to form scars so deeply in the crevices of the brain that they show through to the surface.) Hooker turned toward Wunderland and set the autopilot. His motions were quicker and surer than they had been for a long time. He was leaving Plateau, and he left a weight behind. Now he could begin to forget. T Tours later, a second star rose k JL from the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat. It turned slowly, questing, like a hound sniffing out a trail. Then it fixed on Wunderland and began to accelerate.  II ctober, # A. D., San Francisco. He took the news as if he'd expected it. He looked at the human doctor for a long moment after she had stopped talking; and then he slumped, back and shoulders dropping, chin nearly touching his chest. He mumbled, "I always knew I was different." "Is that a crime, Ek)ug?" Dr. Doris Hahn might have been any age beyond thirty. She was small and oriental, and she had had that look of great wisdom long before she acquired the wisdom itself. "Seems it is," said Doug Hooker. He was eighteen years old, thin, with blue eyes and straw-colored hair. "I can't do an#hing about it, can I?" "Sure you can! Why, you need never know you've got it, any time during the rest of your life. There walking this world and others. And diabetics, and epileptics, and sohizoIF phrenics. Nobody knows the difference." 'Tiey know." "Well, yes." Doug looked the doctor in the eye. "Why? If they need never know, why tell tfiem? How will this affect me, doctor? What am I supposed to do about it?" She nodded. "You're right, of course. It will affect you in two ways. "First, the Fertility Board will probably not pass a potential paranoid. If you want to have a child, you'll have to do something so spectacular that the Board itself must recognize you as a genius. Something like inventing hyperdrive." Doug smiled at that. Hyperdrive was "The Moon on a platter." "Second," she said. "You must never be out of reach of an autodoc for more than a month, for the rest of your life. Do you understand? Up to now your parents have had this responsibility. Now you're an adult. You must get to a 'doc every month so that it can stabilize your metabolism. Your body is chemically unstable. Without antiparanoia substances you can go insane." "That's all?" "That's all. Best go every two weeks to give yourself some leeway." "I will," said Doug. He wanted to leave. The news had been as bad as he had expected, and he'd expected it for years. He had been born into a paranoid body. It was a thing he couldn't tell even to Greg. He wanted to leave, to hide somewhere, to lick his wounds. But -- "How bad is it. Doctor? I mean, what would happen to me if I missed six weeks instead of a montih?" "Ibe first time, very little. Your thinking processes would change a little, not enough to notice. When the 'doc readjusted you, you wouldn't notice that change either. But the second and third times would be worse. You see, Doug, a large part of being insane is having been insane. If you were paranoid for a year, a 'doc couldn't cure you. Your year of insanity would have formed habits. The 'doc would change your metabolism without changing your paranoid habits of thinking. You'd need a human psychotherapist." Doug wet his lips. He thought the question: What is it like to be paranoid? How does a paranoid think? He didn't want to know. He said, " 'By, Doctor." And he got up and left. He thought he heard Dr. Hahn call something after him, but he wasn't sure. une, #, Kansas City. At the age of thirty, Douglas Hooker thought he knew himself pretty well. He had long known that he was a man of habits; and so he had trained his habits. Each weekday he entered his office at just ten o'clock, and the first thing he did was to use the desk 'doc. He came in that Thursday morning at just ten o'clock, still wearing the smile with which he had hailed his good mornings at the other employees of Skyhook Enterprises. He hadn't seen Greg; but Greg was always early or late, usually early. Probably at work already. Doug IF sat, opened the panel in his desk, and inserted his hands. There were twin pricks in the balls of his middle fingers. The 'doc was taking a blood sample. Doug waited until the green light came on, then removed his hands. His nails gleamed. The desk 'doc was small; its repertoire was limited. It could not repair injuries or exercise small unused muscles, as could a full sized drugstore 'doc. It could detect infections and fight them, with widespectrum antibiotics; it could supply needed vitamins; it was a fine manicurist. It could stabilize Doug Hooker's unusual metabolism, using two phials of biochemicals stored in its innards. If it ran out of something, or if it sensed the presence of some medical anomaly which should be treated, it would flash a red light. Doug frowned at the papers in his In basket, then sighed and went to work. There was no sound from beyond his office; there was nothing to distract him. Yet he worked slowly. He couldn't concentrate. It was not spring fever; city men didn't get spring fever, living in a world which was mostly city. It was the feel of something impending. I t came at noon, with Greg Loeffler's voice in the intercom. "Doug? It's here. Drop whatever you're doing and come over." Doug put down half a sandwich and went out, walking fast. The bright morning sunlight made him blink. He took one of the carts in front of Admin and drove it across to Design. He was about to park in front when his eye caught a shadowy bulk standing four stories tall around to the side. He drove over. Greg stood waiting for him leaning one-armed against the huge truncated cone, grinning like a proud papa. "Isn't she gorgeous?" "No," said Hooker, for it was not. "Will it work?" "We'll sue if it doesn't. But we can't test it here. We'll have to ship it to the moon." "And then?" Doug felt adrenalin flooding his veins. All the decisions had been made two years ago; yet here was the tangible result, four stories tall, a decision on the verge of proving itself. And an ancient dream. The safe ramscoop. For centuries the ramrobots had been exploring space at just less than the spe of light, limitlessly fueled by hydrogen scooped from between stars in conical electromagnetic fields two hundred miles across. For centuries men had followed at a quarter of the speed of light, carrying their own fuel. A ramscoop's magnetic field would kill any chordate organism within three hundred miles. No shield had ever been developed which would protect a chordate and still let the ramscoop work. Until two years ago, when Moscow Motors had built -- this. There was a "dead pocket," a bubble in this generator's ramscoop field. A ship could be built into that bubble, and that ship would go anywhere, with a limitless fuel supply. Two years ago Skyhook Enterprises had bought the oontraot to build that ship. It was a UN project, wiith all the wealth of Earth beild it. Douig Hooker's father was still president when that decision was made; only a year ago he had turned the company over to Doug and gone off to become a Belter. For a year the ramship had been Doug's responsibility. He had given Greg Loeffler a free rein, not for the sake of a friendship fifteen years old but because Greg was a genius at design, "And then we fit the ramscoop to the ship and take her for a trip. The ship's been ready for months. That's what I was doing in April and May, Doug. On the Moon, examining the ship. It's ready. All you have to do is get the ramscoop there." Doug nodded. For a moment he almost envied Greg. The ship was Skyhook's project, Doug Hooker's project; but it was Greg's ship. Top to bottom. If it was successful it would conquer all of nearby space. He said, "How's Joanna?" Loeffler grinned proudly. "Out to here, and beautiful. Another month and she can go back to playing tennis. How's Clarisse?" "Fine, fine." "We haven't gotten together in awhile. How about dinner tonight? To celebrate the ramscoop." "Good. Where?" "Our place. You haven't even seen our new house." "That's true," Hooker said vaguely. He was not at his best in a social situation. He was uncomfortable in crowds and with people he didn't know. With Greg and Joanna he could relax; but not during work hours, not even with them. "Doug?" "Yah?" "You and Clarisse wece maixied long before I was. Why faaveii't you had children yet? Waitmg for Joaima and me to pioneer the field?" Hooker was tempted to say. Yah, why not let you take the risks first? But then he'd be asked again. So he told the truth. "The Fertility Board turned me down." "Oh?" Loeffler wasn't about to ask why, but he'd left the doer open if Hooker wanted a sympathetic ear. "Guess I'd better get to work," said Doug. "Will you be going to the moon to supervise the tests?" "If Skyhook pays the fare." "Slip me a requisition. And we'll see you tonight." Ill ear # A.D., The Rockies. They lay in full sunlight beside the pool, under Greg's weather dome. All three were wet, with water running off their bodies to form pools around them on the red tiles. The woman, Joanna, was a tall, solidly built brunette with lovely le. Of the men, Doug Hooker was still too thin for his height, and not well muscled; whereas Greg Loeffler had gynmasium muscles and a loafer's tan. They lay exhausted after the race across the pool. Outside it would be cold, though not yet freezing. In winter snow would surround the house and run melting from the weather dome. Greg's house was higji in the Rookies, (halfway up a cliff. By its deIF sign it seemed to have grown as an organic part of the cliff. A good part of it was inside the rock. Idly, with wistfulness but no pain, Doug thought Clarisse into existence alongside him. Golden hair in a stiff complex hairdo, deep all-over tan, she would have fallen asleep by now in the sunlight burning through the transparent weather dome. He hadn't seen her in ten years. She had remarried right after the divorce. Two years later she had been twice a mother. Wistfulness, but no pain. She'd got no alimony, but she'd tried, and that had canceled the pain of losing her. Her ghost-image died, and Doug turned over on his back. "We'll be leaving in a month," said Joanna. There was a touch of regret in her voice. "You're out of your minds," said Doug. Greg got up on an elbow. "Not at all. The future isn't on Earth any more, Doug -- " "Where is it, on Plateau? Any other world. I'd still say you were crazy. But teeny little Plateau? In five generations it'll be as crowded as Earth!" "Then you admit Earth's crowded." "Well, yah, but that's the price you pay for civilization." "I won't pay. I'm leaving." Greg was enjoying himself. He had rehearsed the argument over and over in past months. "By the time Plateau gets really crowd, there'll be so many colony planets that anyone can take his pick. Meanwhile, Plateau is a nice place to be." "Suppose they're hoked?" "They aren't." "And why risk it anyway? A dozen light-years in a four-man ship! Suppose a meteor -- " "Suppose a goblin? For Pete's sake, E)oug! I designed these ships myself. They're foolproof." Doug turned on his belly, scowling. Even he didn't know why he kept fighting a lost cause. Greg was going, and Joanna was going; their oldest daughter, Marcia, was going, with her husband. The only reason Greg kept up his side of the argument was the hope that Doug would change his mind and come along. Which Doug would not. But the thought of Greg and Joanna leaving filled him with name less dread. "Is the ship ready yet?" "Yes. Since yesterday. We could leave any time." "Not until I inspect it," said Doug. "You promised." "So I did. How about tomorrow? I'll give you the key." "Good." S kyhook Enterprises had built that ship. By now hundreds like it were scattered across the sky, anywhere within fifteen light-years of the solar system. Which meant that Earth's information was up to fifteen years out of date; but as far as anyone knew, no Skyhook ramship had ever failed. Skyhook was now designing a bigger ramship, big enough to carry a thousand colonists in stasis. But the four-man Skyhook exploring model was the only ramship now flying. It came in three parts, easy to connect or to disconnect for inspection. Ramscoop, lifesystem, drive. And boosters, but boosters didn't count. They didn't count because they had been used for centuries. Rockets they were, containing helium compressed to within an inch of its life. Autopilots would guide them down after they had lifted Greig's ship (to where he could safely use the fusion motor. Hooker ignored them, as he would have ignored a bicycle in the cargo hold. Too simple, too foolproof. He ignored the ramscoop because he wouldn't have understood it. He ignored the fusion drive for both reasons. If there were a flaw in either of them, he would not find it. His only chance was in the lifesystem. It was big and roomy, that lifesystem, even for four people. Most flatlanders did not have that mudh room in their homes. But a claustrophobic ramship passenger could not step outside for a breath of air. The lifesystem was a cylinder with the central core running through it, the central core which joined the ramscoop to the fusion drive. Somewhere in the control panel were emergency switches which would blow the core apart to release the lifesystem as a separate unit, to fall through space awaiting an unlikely rescue. There were two master bedrooms, soundproofed, with locks, very private. There "was a gymnasium with muscle-stretchers for use in ship's gravity or in free fall, with sunlight tubes and masseur couches and a steam bath. There was a small dining room with (the kitchen controls set in one wall. Hooker walked the ship as if he were afraid of it. He was. He still wasn't sure why. There was the autodoc, the most complex ever built. It would replace its own biochemicals, its own plastiskin, its own artificially grown organ replacements; all this automatically, from materials culled from the ship's waste collectors. It could cure anything. In theory it could keep a man young and healthy indefinitely. Skyhook Enterprises had not built this beauty. Moscow Motors, that industrial giant subsidized by the subas part of the deal that won Skyhook the ship contract. Hooker knew autodocs. He inspected the coffin and the machinery that fed it and found no flaw. H e went through the kitchen, as much of it as he understood. This too turned waste into food. The processes were infernally complicated; but any chemical process can be reversed, given sufficient sophistication and sufficient power. The ship's power came straight from a fusion drive with unlimited fuel. The air plant was the simplest part of the ship. Hooker didn't even look at it. By the time he got around to it he was bone tired. He flopped on one of the beds and stared at the softly glowing ceiling. As far as he could tell, there was nothing wrong with the ship. Nothing. What was the point in looking? IP Any flaw Douglas Hooker, the executive, could recognize, could probably be fixed in five minutes. They were going; they were practically on their way now. Greg, and Joanna, and Lisa, and -- he'd forgotten the name of Lisa's husband. But why should he try to stop them? He had plenty of other friends. Didn't he? He had conjured up eleven names and was trying hard for a twelfth, when it occurred to him that all eleven were people he had met through Greg and Joanna. All but two, and he hadn't seen them since Clarissa flew to Vegas, leaving him a wedding cake on which the wax bride and bridgegroom stood facing outward on opposite sides of the bottom layer. Nine people, then, whom he saw only at Joanna's parties and "talk nights." He had never made friends easily. Strangers made him uncomfortable. He kept wondering what they thought of him. Even friends -- there was a barrier between him and everyone else, and the barrier was a secret. As far as he knew, two people on Earth knew that Hooker was a potential paranoid. There had been three; but his father had gone to the Belt to start life over, probably thinking that the more lenient Belt fertility laws would permit him to have a second child after seven years had made him a citizen. He had lasted two years. He had smoked, and his dashboard included an ashtray. One day, during the last seconds of a landing approach to some unnamed rock, he had somehow used the attitude jets in such a way as to spill ashes out of the tray and into hds eyes. The rock had smashed hi sight bubble and his faceplate. And now there were two people who knew Doug's secret, but both were doctors. Clarissa had not known. She would have talked. His secret stopped his mouth and slowed his conversation and made it innocuous. It kept him from getting drunk, for he feared his tongue would loosen. No man knows his fellow until he has seen him drunk; and no man had seen Doug Hooker drunk. He tried to face it squarely. Doug and Joanna were taking his social life with them, to Plateau. Why not regard it as a challenge? Hooker rolled off the bed and left the ship. He would tell the Loefflers that it was perfect -- foolproof. When they were gone he would make new friends, create his own social world. He had wrapped himself around his work for far too long. But he was sixty-one years old, and his habits were developed. A ugust, #, Kansas City. It happened thus : Every six months a man came to service Douglas Hooker's desk 'doc. Paul Jurgenson was his name. He had been servicing 'docs for most of his life; 'docs of all kinds, from the huge multiple-patient emergency 'docs at aerospaceports to the desk-sized 'docs installed in planes and short-hop spacecraft, used by executives the world over. The work never bored him, for Jurgenson good ait his job. He came on a Thursday, the last day of the working week, and the last Thursday of August. As usual, Doug Hooker went home at noon, to give him room to work. Jurgenson took the 'doc apart and began to examine the parts. He shook his head sadly when he found both of the two special-mix vials that close to empty. Hooker didn't know it, but Jurgenson was the third man on Earth who knew his secret. He had only guessed it, of course, but the guess was close enough to a certainty. You can't hide baldness from your barber. Jurgenson filled the vials, still saddened. Mr. Hooker always sent him a twenty-five mark bill for a Christmas present. (A firm handled Christmas presents of that nature for Hooker, remembering for him, but Jurgenson didn't know that.) Now it seemed that Mr. Hooker was using more antiparanoia than ever. That meant trouble in his life. Jurgenson knew that from long experience. He wished he could do something. He replaced the hypo needles as usual, and the vials of pure alcohol, and the vitamin ampKules and the testosterone. He checked various circuits and replaced two wires; not that they were really ready to fail, but you never know. The manicure implefhents were self-replacing. Jurgenson frowned at the 'doc for a moment, listening to an instinct he trusted. It must have told him right, for he closed the 'doc. Then he unscrewed the red and green bulbs to look at the dates on their bases. They were ten years old. In those days men built to last. There were laws. But ta years was old enough, even for bulbs which mighf # Ibirty. Jurgenson dropped them in the waste shute and replaced them from his kit. He tripped appropriate relays and saw that both bulbs lit. He left, wavii to Mr. Hooker's personal secretary. They had known each other for close to half ,a century and never done more than say hello and good-by to each other. Miss Peterson was a beauty. But Jurgenson thought his wife was too good for him and had long feared she would find out. He never philandered. ecember, #. Hooker entered the outer office. "Hi, fans," he said, as he had said each working day for... he didn't know how long. The answer, from several people at once, was a jumbled chorus. Hooker entered his own office at just ten o'clock. The In basket was full. Hooker frowned at it as he shoved his hands into the 'doc. Was he making a mistake, cutting down on Skyhook's commitments? It made paperwork simpler, and thus saved money. But -- sometimes Hooker felt that Skyhook was stagnating. Other than the colony model ramships, a few of which were now in use for the UN, Skyhook had not pioneered anything in nearly twenty years. The Loefflers must be on Plateau by now. Had they sent him a laser message? If so, it would not get here for twelve years. IF What was wrong with the 'doc? It should have released him by now. Doug withdrew his hands. There was no resistance; no fluids dripped from his fingers; his nails shone. Oh, nuts, he said subvocally. The green light's burned out. He made a mental note to call Jurgenson. But he never did. It had never happened before; there were no habits to help him. And Jurgenson would be here in February. Hooker simply got used to the absence of a green light. He knew to within seconds when the 'doc was through with him. It was the red light which had failed. The red bulb's filament had been dead for months. It had snapped and died when Jurgenson clicked it off. IV bruary, #. The change came slowly. At first Doug noticed nothing. Then, as weeks passed, it seemed to him that his thinking was becoming clearer. He didn't know why, but he was becoming more intelligent. These things that troubled him... they had one linking cause. Of course Aey must. All he had to do was find it. His employees came at ten and went home at four, usually with Doug Hooker striding with them toward the parking lot, trying to look anonymous, returning good-bys if they were given. On Thursday the first of February Hooker did not leave. He nodded when his personal secretary told him it was after hours; he smiled emptily at her when she said good night. And then he sat. The world did not intrude. The office was soundproof; its light did not depend on the sim; its false windows looked upon alien worlds, and on each a Skyhook ramship was landing. Impressive, for visitors. So Hooker could ignore the passage of time. He thought of things that had gone wrong with his life. He had no friends. He had no hobbies. He'd thought of taking one up; but it turned out that he hated games. Lxsing irritated him, and he always lost interest before he could become good enough to win. His life was his work and the Palace. The Palace was a house of ill repute, with a reputation for being very good and very expensive. If only Hooker had had the ability to play... but that he had never had. He went to the Palace when his gonads told him to, and he left when they quieted. Most of the girls could not have told you his name. His work was all habit. He slid through life as in a dream, and the dream was a dull one of easy defeat For a long time it had been that way. It had started... When Clarisse left him? His teeth bared in savagery. If she were the cause he would track her down wherever she hid! And the children for whom she had deserted him... No. He could remember periods of enjoyment, brief flashes of sunlight in his life, and some of them had happened since Clarisse. TTiat Christmas party at the office, decades ago? Someone's idea had sparked Uieiii all, and they had stayed until three in the morning, using plant facilities to build a robot. The body had been built of emergency foam plastic from the failsafe systems in a ramship. It couldn't have weighed more than twenty pounds, excluding another twenty pounds of motors, but it had stood twenty feet tall, blank-visaged and horrifying, with huge flat feet. Yes, it had been Greg; his idea, and mostly his suggestions. They had turned it loose on #th pedwalk downtown, walking east in the westbound lane, so that it stood in one place, marking time. Skyhook employees had waited four hours for the seven o'clock rush hour, in an automated restaurant above the walk. The panic had been a beautiful thing. Loeffler? Sure, Loeffler! He'd waited until Doug's dependence on him was complete. Then he had left. So diabolically simple. Doug had not had a moment of real enjoyment since. Hooker's lips pulled back and away from his teeth. His nostrils flared and turned white. So simple! Why hadn't he seen it before? Since high school it had always been Loeffler, blocking every chance he'd ever had to make his own friends and his own way of life. A decades-old plot which had not come to fruition until Doug was sixty-one years old. Now, now that he was finally alert, Doug could see the bones of the plan. The ramship had been part of it; it made the business so rich and so complex that it took all of Doug's time to handle it. A very neat trap. Had Claiisse been invtved? Perhaps. There was no way to tell. But -- Greg had introduced him to Clarisse, hadn't he? Doug settled back in his chair. His face became almost calm. Clarisse, wherever she was, did not count. She had been a pawn; but Greg Loeffler was the king. Greg Loeffler must die. It was midnight before Doug decided what to do. His secretary was long gone; which puzzled him until he realized what time it was. But he could do the work himself. He knew how to handle a tape. He dictated an application to buy one ramship at standard prices. Purpose: to leave Earth. (No point in saying where he intended to go. Loeffler might have left spies anywhere. ) He put the tape in an envelope and dropped it in a mailbox on his way home. Greg had had his answer in three days. By Monday, Doug would own a Skyhook ship. And then... T Ti, fans," Doug Hooker called A i as he entered the outer office. Ranks of secretaries returned the greeting. They noticed nothing odd about him. He always walked that way, eyes straight ahead, walk fast and slightly hurried, rebuffing friendship before it was offered. He entered his office, put his hands in the 'doc, waited for an estimated two minutes, withdrew them. Have to call Jurgenson, he thought, and then sneered at the triviality of the thought. He had better things to do. Where was that UN envelope? There. He opened it, took out the credit-card-sized tape and inserted it in his desk player. IF The refusal jarred him to his bones. He played it again, refusing to accept it; and again. It was true. He'd been turned down. The implications were terrifying. Doug had had three days to think things over. With every hour the nature of Loeffler's plot had become clearer... and h involved more people. Loeffler must have had an enormous amount of help. But Doug had never dreamed that the UN was part of the plot! He'd have to be very careful. He might have given himself away already.  F ebruary #th, East New York. Somebody had stolen a Skyhook ramship. The call came shortly after noon, from a lovely, frightened woman who said she was the president's personal secretary. "It was Mr. Hooker's ship," she explained. "He was thinking of designing an improved model. He ordered a complete working mode! of the ship they're using now. This morning it was gone!" Loughery asked, "Did the model have gas boosters?" He was thinking, Of course it had boosters. It couldnt take off without them, not without fusing Kansas City. But maybe a truck hauled it away? "Yes, it had boosters." "Why?" "Mr. Hooker wanted it complete in every detail." "Oh, Lord." Loughery rubbed the back of his head. The idiot! Wanted a complete model, did he? Now there was a fusion ship loose somewhere in the solar system. Cut a few safety relays, turn off the fusion shield, and any fusion ship becomes an exploding fusion bomb. "We'll send someone over right away. Is Mr. Hooker there?" "He didn't arrive this morning." "Well, give me his home address. And if he shows up, have him call here immediately." The pieces began to fall together. First, Skyhook. The area was well guarded; it would have been difficult for anyone to get in without being spotted. There was no human guard, but any unauthorized entry would have been photographed a dozen times. There would have been alarms. Second, the Belt called. Several solar system and a political power equal to that of the UN. They were furious. A fusion ship had left Earth without proper notification and was now' boring through space toward the system's edge, paying no attention to laser calls. Loughery promised payment of damages. It was all he could do. Nobody found Hooker. If he was at home, he wasn't answering phone calls. The gas boosters found their way home. Loughery's men took charge of them immediately, inspecting them for clues. Re-entry had not burned the fingerprints off their shiny surfaces. The fingerprints were Hooker's, some of them. Loughery filed a request for a warrant to search Hooker's house. It began to look as if Hooker had stolen his own ship. On the afternoon of the twentyseventh, somebody found Hooker's request to buy a ramship. It had been turned down for several good reasons. For one, Hooker had named nedither destination nor purpose. For another, the UN was careful about passing fusion drives out to anyone who might ask; whereas Hooker -- Loughcry felt the hair stir on the back of his neck. Hooker was a potential paranoid. urgenson called that evening. By then Loughery was in Kansas City. He went right over to interview Jurgcnson personally. "He was using too much of this guck," said Jurgcnson. He indicated two phials, both bone dry. "That's bad. I got other people who use stuff like this, people who need special guck or something goes wrong in their heads. When they got troubles, they use more guck than usual." "But there's a warning light." Jurgenson wrung his hands. "It's my fault. I put in a bad light It worked when I tried it. I can't understand why it went had." "Who was Hooker's doctor?" "Human? I don't know. Miss Peterson might." Lxughery asked Miss Peterson. By then the search warrant had come through. What privacy there was on a crowded Earth was highly regarded; search warrants were not passed around like advertising posters. Hooker's home turned out to be the top of a skyscraper in downtown Kansas City. Hooker had left a note, a long one. It said that, since Hooker had no friends and no particular purpose in life, he had decided to spend the rest of his life in a project all his own. He was going to try to reach the edge of the universe. He did not expect to succeed. The ramship would keep him alive indefinitely, but indefinitely was not forever. Yet he intended to try. It was a sanely spoken tape. Syntax was in order; Hooker's voice seemed calm. Hooker's expressed purpose was the only crazy thing about it. But Hooker was guaranteed crazy, wasn't he? Loughery called the Bdt again. Hooker's ship was well out of the inner system, far enough so that the Belt could stop monitoring him; there was little chance of his deadly drive flame crossing anyone's path before it dissipated. Yes, he was headed roughly toward the galactic rim. It checked, thought Loughery. Hooker would have been better advised to head straight out along the galactic axis; there was less junk to get in his way. But perhaps he hadn't thought of that. The excitement began to settle. Loughery had other problems. But there was one last thing he could do about the Hooker problem, and eventually he thought of it. "Keep a monitor on Hooker," he told the Belt Political Section. "We'll pay the standard fee. We want to know if he turns back, or if he changes course toward some inhabited world." And that would do it, he thought. Eventually Hooker would use the ship's 'doc. That simple. It would cure him. Then he would either turn back to Earth, to face a charge of IF stealing a fusion motor, or he would move on to one of the colonies. Probably the latter; stealing a fusion plant was a capital crime on Earth. But they could deal with him, offer him amnesty for the prompt return of the ship. Three weeks later the word came. The actinic spark that was Hooker's drive had definitely shifted toward Tau Ceti. Loughery had to admit that Plateau was a good choice. Plateau had suffered badly from the organ bank problem, in the two centuries before alloplasty, the science of putting foreign materials in the human body, had overtaken the techniques of organic transplant. All the inhabited worlds had gone through that stage. Its worst feature was that there was only one way to get the most important organic transplants. On Plateau a small ruling class had held the power of life and death over its citizens. Life, because with unlimited access to the organ banks one could live centuries. Death, because any crime could be made a capital crime whenever the organ banks ran short. The citizens would not complain. They wanted to live centuries. Then alloplasty had caught up. Now there were no organ banks at all on Plateau, and no capital punishment. Loughery sent a laser to Plateau, warning them that a stolen ship was due to land there. He wasn't sure which would get there first, the laser or the ship. After all, Ramships were fast. V M arch, #I A. D., ship's time. The ship flew itself, of course. All Doug had to do was take it below the plane of the Belt, leave it alone for a couple of weeks, then aim for Tau Ceti. The two weeks were misdirection. With the note he had left, they might convince the police that he was going off to nowhere and would never bother them again. He kept busy, watching for goldskin ships -- Belt police; reading instruction booklets over and over, getting familiar with his machines; and it wasn't until he had passed Pluto's orbit that he began to relax. Nobody was after him, as far as he could tell. Not that they could have done anything; you can't stop a ship in space. You can only destroy it. But he was reassured. He had broken free of his long bondage. And now... the long wait. Tau Ceti was eleven point nine lightyears away. It would take less subjective time than that, with the velocities he would eventually reach; but still... He frowned. He hadn't been in a 'doc in some time. It would be stupid to get sick and die just when vengeance was within his grasp. He climbed into the 'doc tank and went to sleep. The 'doc found it necessary to make drastic changes in his metabolism. Hooker felt very strange when he woke. The strangeness seemed to be in his thinking, and that made it horrible. He felt slow, stupid. He could no longer remembawhy he wanted to kill Greg. He remembered only that his lifelong friend had done him a great wrong. He thought of turning back. But he couldn't do that; he'd end in the organ banks for stealing this ship. Should he try another colony world? It was a confusing question. His mind was full of confusing questions. But it was obvious that Mount Lookitthat was his best bet, regardless of what happened when he got there. Plateau was the only world of Man which did not impose the death penalty. If they decided he'd committed a crime, he'd get medical treatment. His head buzzed. Perhaps he needed medical treatment? But the ship's 'doc could do anything. He went on. And as the weeks passed, a strange thing happened. He remembered his grudge against Greg Loeffler. And he realized something that sent cold chills of rage through him. They'd booby-trapped the 'doc I No, it was worse than that. Somehow, long ago, Greg Loeffler and his minions had managed to booby-trap every 'doc on Earth. For all of his life. Hooker had been using the 'docs. And each time he did, the 'docs had made alterations in his mind and body to keep him docile. What could he do? His very life depended on the 'doc! It took him a few days to get over his sense of panic; or perhaps he merely got used to it. Then he went to work. There was a thick instruction booklet for repairing the 'doc. Hooker memorized it. When he felt he was ready, he began to disconnect things. It was difficult to decide what to cut out. Finally he tackled it from the other direction. What to leave running? Anesthetics, of course, and the luxuries: manicures, haircuts, massage. Vitamins, antibiotics, all diagnostic machinery, surgical repair... except in the region of the head. He didn't dare leave that! Anticholesterol, synthetic blood components, alloplasty components and insertion tools... He finished in two months. The 'doc should be incapable of anything that could damage his mind. But still he was afraid of it. He tried it anyway. He was insane, definitely; but not stupid. When h woke up he knew that the 'doc was safe. ear # A.D., Plateau. Plateau was a silver ball hanging serene in the heavens. Hooker stopped nearby, not too near, and not in any particular orbit. He began to scan the surface. Where was Mount Lookitthat? He couldn't find it. He turned ship to circle the planet... an irritating delay for an impatient man. Then he thought of turning on his radio. He'd turned it off because Plateau's voices of authority kept trying to tell him what to do. Now he could use their directional signal. " -- Calling Douglas Hooker. Douglas Hooker, will you please answer? Do you need help? The United Nations claims you are flying a stolen ship. Is this true? You will need re-entry craft to land. Are you able to establish an orbit so that IF they can find you? Douglas Hook -- " Hooker frowned down at the silver field in his 'scope screen. That was where Mount Lookitthat ought to be, according to his directional finder. So where was it? Overcast, of course. By water vapor. There must be fog there, or rain. Hooker smiled and moved in. He dropped fast into the mist beyond the void edge. If there were finders on him he was caught; but what could they do about him? They couldn't approach him with anything manned. His ramscoop field was as deadly as earlier models, save for that "dead pocket." All he had to do was turn it on. He heard nothing on the radio. They weren't sending in his direction. Good. And he was somewhere off the void edge of Mount Lookitthat. He'd passed through Loeffler's laser message just about a year ago, ship's time. It was mealymouthed friendliness, all of it, obviously designed to lull Hooker's suspicions. All the same, it was a bad mistake on Loeffler's part. It included pictures of his house and environs.  Loeffler's house resembled his old home on Earth. It was large, almost ostentatiously large, and it seemed designed to fit its surroundings, as if it had grown from the land. Loeffler no longer lived on a cliff. He bad chosen a spot in hilly country, set a few hundred feet back from the void edge in one direction and from a river in another. The river had etched itself a canyon which led to the void edge. Hooker kept his ship submerged in the mist. His drive must be giving off a hellish glow, but he hoped he was far enough down for the mist to hide it. He angled his ship toward the invisible Mount Lookitthat and moved slowly in that direction. Look for a waterfall. It might not show at this level. It might turn to spray and evaporate high above. Something black and formless loomed in the lesser blackness. Simultaneously, Hooker's radar beeped. Something black and huge, indefinitely huge... Hooker backed ship and raised the thrust. The ship shot up. Up and up, and the mist began to thin... and Hooker had his first look at the side of Mount Lookitthat. It seemed infinite. It went on and on, up and down and sideways, like the surface of a world tilted from horizontal to vertical. (After four hours of hopeless searching, the pilot of Plateau's first colony slowboat had seen Mount Lookitthat rising suddenly out of an endless white furry plain. "Lookitthat!" he'd said, in the voice of one punched in the stomach, four hundred years ago.) Hooker took his ship straight up the fluted side. Mist boiled and churned below him. Now he got his first look at Plateau's big, soft sun. Tau Ceti was smaller and cooler than Sol, so that Plateau had to huddle closer for warmth, making the star look bigger from Plateau's surface. But Hooker had been traveling for more than four years of ship's time. He'd all but forgotten what a sun looked like. IF Above and to the left, a fwaterfall. He angled that way. The ship shot past tihe void edge. Suddenly most of Plateau was below him. Doug cut his thrust and looked around. He snarled. He'd picked the wrong waterfall. There were no spacecraft; but he could see cars all across the land, all colors, most of them staying near the ground. There were houses, and all were large. Loeffler's house must be about average in size. Sure, Hooker rebuked himself. Theyve got more room. Did he plan that too? Hiding from me... Could that be it? Hooker dropped. It was a great rounded house, like an enormous boulder with picture windows built into it. There was a river... and it was close to the void edge... That was it. But was Loeffler there? It didn't matter. Hooker backangled his ship and came to a stop over the house. His drive licked down. The house erupted in flame. Hooker laughed. He shouted, "You won't use that as a hiding place! Are you dead, Greg? If you're not, I'll find you wherever you hide!" Still laughing, he increased thrust and rose into the sky. Below him was a boiling lava pit. He needed a city. A city would have records. He could search them to find where Loeffler was now. But he'd have to be careful. Loeffler had taken over Earth. Hooker didn't know how long it had taken him. But he'd been on Plateau more than twelve years; he must have made some progress here. Hooker's radio sounded. It was a sound Hooker had never heard before. It was very loud, and very terrible. Hooker reached to turn off the radio. His arms stopped halfway. He couldn't move thenu He settled back in his seat. A strange, peaceful expression spread across his face. Presently a voice began to give orders, and Hooker obeyed. # T ucky he had his radio on."L' The second man nodded. "He could have wiped out this whole world. Land him, will you? I'll call the hospital." "Whose house was that?" "I don't know. Let's hope nobody was in it. Will you please get him down? If it wears off he'll turn off the radio, and then where will we be?" Y ear # A. D., Hospital, Plateau. They quit work at five o'clock. Hooker, was exhausted. The chain gang had been planting trees where a generation of special mold had made sufficient soil to support then!. Machines did some of the work; but mainly the chain gang used their hands. Planting trees gave Hooker a feeling of accomplishment. Even as president of Skyhook he had never felt so useful. He was bone tired until dinner arrived, and then he was ravenous. By the time he finished dinner he was no longer tired. He went to his room and read until eight o'clock. ychotherapy was to be at eight. "I've been thinking," he told Ike doctor. "I want to know if I Aslled anyone." "Why?" Wor formed a bottleneck in Hooker's throat. It had stopped him before. He never knew how to answer that particular question. This time he forced some kind of an answer out. "I want to know how guilty I am!" "You know what you were trying to do. Whatever you did is done. How will feeling guilty help anything?" "I don't know. But if I'm not supposed to feel guilty, why am I in prison? And don't tell me it's a hospital. I know it's a hospital. It's also a prison." "Of course it is." He'd killed four people. He'd tilled Joanna Loeffler, and her daughter and son-in-law and grandson. Greg Loeffler had been elsewhere. They waited a year to tell Hooker. VI Y ear # A. D., between stars. "Doug!" Hooker jumped. The radio yelled, "Doug, this is Greg. Answer me!" Hooker hesitated only a moment. This was what he had dreaded. Loeffler must have a com laser on him, with a directional signal in it. Hooker told the autopilot to follow k back. The radio didn't wait. "Answer me, damn you! You know what I want!" What was with Greg? How could he possibly expect Hooker to answer immediately? It would take hours for Hooker's com laser to cross the gap to Plateau. Hooker shifted nervously. The autopilot beeped, and he said, "I'm here, Greg. I didn't want to talk to you. I left Plateau because I couldn't face you. You mxist know how sorry I am for what happened." Greg's voice didn't wait. "Doug! Why don't you answer? Is it because you think I'm going to kill you?" Hooker came bolt upright in his chair. OhI Suddenly it was appallingly clear. Loeffler, shouting into a com laser, forgetting the lightspeed gap, was not a sane Loeffler. Tau Ceti was a white flare in the stern scope. Wonderland's sun was too dim to see from here. Hooker turned on his ramscoop field: a complex process, most of which would be handled by the auto-pilot. Then he got up and began to pace. "You cowardly, murdering -- Loeffler's speech turned profane. His accusations, justified at first, became wildly imaginative. Hooker listened, trying to gauge the depth of Greg's insanity. It was one more item on his burden of guilt. Why didn't somebody stop him? A com laser was too powerful not to leak. Plateau radios must be picking this up. And where had he gotten a com laser? The Plateau station was closed IF to all but qualified personnel. But Greg owned a ship with a com laser... A ship just like this one. Almost calmly, Hooker sat down at the control board. He connected the autopilot screen to the stern scope. Tau Ceti glowed brightly off center. Hooker centered it, then began to enlarge it. The screen turned yellowish-white, with a blue point moving off-screen near the top. Hooker centered that, enlarged it. A deep blue flare with a black dot in the center. Loeffler was coming after him. L oeffler's hoarse voice stopped suddenly. Then it giggled. "Tricked you," it said, suddenly calm. The stem scope turned deep red. Damn, thought Hooker. He did trick me. The scope screen would not transmit more light than human eyes could bear; but there was a dial to register the light falling on the scope. That dial registered maximum. Loeffler was using his com laser as a weapKn. At maximum power it could easily have blanketed Earth's solar system with a clearly read signal. But Loeffler was firing it at an object only light-hours distant. He could kill me, Hooker thought. He could do it. It would't be fast. Loeffler was firing from behind, at that part of Hooker's ship which was built to stand fusion flame applied for years. But eventually things would melt. Greg was jubilant. "I'm going to burn you, Doug! Just like you burned Joanna and Lisa and Tom and little Greg! But slower! Slower, you -- " And there was more profanity. Needles were rising. Hull temperature indicators, power consumption meters, climbed toward pink zones nobody had ever expected them to touch. Doug Hooker rubbed his eyes. He waited for an inspiration, and none came. Needles touched their pink zones. Bells rang, and Doug turned them off. After a bit he left the control room and went downstairs and lay down in the masseur couch. Hes going to kill me. The thought seemed far away, drowned in the groaning comfort of the massage. All I wanted was a new life. I wanted to go away and start over. The couch was a hard, enveloping caress. He won't let me. He wants to kill me. And who has a better right? Let him kill me. No. It was difficult to struggle out of the couch, for the couch was not finished with him. During a massage one must be in a defeatist frame of mind. Otherwise one tenses; one's automatic defenses take over. But somehow Doug pulled himself free of the gentle, grasping embrace, and somehow he got upstairs to the control room. He was still covered with massage oil. A man attacked has the right to defend himself. I paid for my crime. Doug sat down in the control chair, used a key to unlock a panel. There were override switches underneath. One turned off the ship's alarm bells; one allowed excess power in the ship's circuitry; three others set up the sequence that would blow the ship apart if the drive or the ramscoop failed. Everything under the panel was an override switch for the ship's automatic safety precautions. Doug flipped one switch and closed the panel. Then he twisted a dial hard over, as far as it would go. His com laser was already fixed on Loeffler's ship. Now it would bum. Hooker turned off his fusion drive to reduce the heat pouring in at the ship's stern. Now he had a good chance. He was firing his laser at Loeffler's nose, where there was less protection. The massive, almost invulnerable bulk of the ramscoop would absorb most of the beam; but the lifesystem was wider than the ramscoop, and it would catch a lot of light. Eventually its walls would melt. Hooker would kill Loeffler before Loeffler could kill Hooker. Doug went back to the masseur couch. He felt very tired. T he lifesystem became hot. Unbearably hot. When Doug felt he could stand it no longer he went upstairs to throw another override switch. When he had done that the cooling equipment would get more power, and his lifesystem would be cool until relays or busbars burned out. At the control panel he found that it wasn't necessary. The ruby glow was gone from the rear scope screen. Loeffler's laser had burned out or lost its target. Loeffler's ship was still there, still following. Hooker started his drive and turned off his laser. He was on his way to Wunderland, with Loeffler following. ear #, between stars. Turnover. Loeffler was still behind him. Hooker had long been convinced that Loeffler's com laser was burned out. He had used his own com laser, but Loeffler never answered. And now he used it again. "Greg," he said. "You've been following me for three and a half years. I assume that you want justice on Wunderland. You're entitled to state your case there. But now it's turnover time, in case you hadn't noticed, and I'm turning around. Please do the same." And he used the gyros to swing the ship. He was as nearly sane as a 'doc could make him. In three and a half years he had almost forgotten about Loeffler, or at least to accept him as an endurable evil. And there was this: Loeffler had a 'doc. He must have used it. A 'doc would not keep a man sane under undue stress, but Hooker could at least hope that Loeffler would use the law instead of weapons. The law might punish Hooker, despite double jeopardy laws, but it would also protect him. He fell tail first toward Wunderland. Now a point of light showed in the front scope. Hooker watched for it to turn. It was small, that IF dot of light; for Loeffler had fallen far behind in the race toward Wunderland... Hooker's ramscoop was taking part of Loeffler's fuel, since Loeffler was in his shadow. Hours after turnover, the point of light moved. Loeffler had gotten his message... or seen hinri turn. The point of light became a line of light, then swung back to a point. It still had a dot in the center. "No," said Hooker. A black dot in the center of a blob which showed mostly blue. "No. You're going the wrong way. Turn around, you idiot!" The ships were diving nose-on at each other. Hurriedly Hooker swung his ship around.  should have known, he told himself. Loeffler wants to ram. When I accelerate to the side, so does he, because otherwise I might get around him. But he won't let me slow down. If I get within three hundred miles of his ramscoop... It was a stalemate. Loeffler couldn't catch Hooker, and Hooker couldn't escape Loeffler. But only Loeffler had the power to give up the game. ear # A. D., Plateau. Loughery came to Plateau in a colonist ramship. It was a common practice in those days for Earth to finance one-way trips to the colony worlds, simply to get them off the planet. On the sixtieth birthday Loughery, having had enough of being a UN official, took the UN up on its offer. He could have chosen any of the colony worlds. He chose Plateau because the social structure fascinated him. When he had learned enough he intended to become a lawyer. "That won't be easy," the mountaineer cop told him. Loughery had braced the guy as he was coming off duty and offered to buy him drinks and dinner in return for information. "The mountaineer laws aren't as difficult as Earth's, at least from what I hear, but you may have trouble understanding the ethics behind them." "I gather a mountaineer is a Plateau dweller." "Right. Like a crashlander comes from We Made It and a flatlander comes from Earth." "About the ethics." "Hmmm." The cop scratched the back of his head. "Tell you what. The records building is still open. Let's walk over, and I'll find you a few examples." He had to use three electronic keys to get to the files. Once inside, he looked around him, lips puckered judiciously. "I'll start you with an easy one," he said. And he pulled a tape out of a drawer filled with similar tapes. "Let's run this." They played it. "Hooker," said Loughery. "I remember him. Dammit, I'm the one who sent out the warning. I thought the 'doc had cured him. I'm as guilty as he is." The cop looked very coldly at Loughery. "Could you have stopped him?" "No. But I could have stressed the warning." "As long as there was a warning. Now, do you understand the logic behind Hooker's sentence?" "Fm afraid not. He gottwo years imprisonment for negligent homicide, with simultaneous psychotherapy and conditioning. Psychotherapy is a lost art on Earth, by the way. I don't question why he only got two years, but why negligent homicide?" "There's the crux. He wasn't guilty of murder, was he?" "Fd say yes." "But we say he was insane. That's a legitimate plea." "Then why was he punished?" "For letting himself become insane. He knew he was a potential paranoid; all he had to do was stay in reach of a working autodoc. And he didn't. Four people died. Negligent homicide." Loughery nodded. His head was spinning. "What isn't here on the tape is the follow-up. Loeffler tried to kill Hooker." "Oh?" "Hooker left in a ramship. Lxeffler went after him. They had a big duel with com lasers. Now, let's suppose Hooker had won that battle and killed Lxeffler. What then?" "Self-defense." "Not at all. Murder." "But why?" "Lxeffler was insane. And he was insane as a direct result of Hooker's crime, not through Loeffler's own negligence. Hooker could run or hide or yell for help or talk Loeffler into accepting treatment. He could not strike back. If he'd killed Loeffler he'd have gotten fifty years for murder." "Maybe I should be a farmer. What did happen?" "I wouldn't know. Neither of them ever came back to Plateau." Y ear # A. D. approx. Fifty years? The flap of a gnat's wing. The long chase was nearing its end. At first Hooker had gained on his pursuer, for Loeffler's ramscoop was not getting as much hydrogen as Hooker's. Loeffler's ship was in the shadow of Hooker's. At one time they had been light-years apart. But now Loeffler's ship was gaining. For Hooker's ship had reached terminal velocity. There had to be a limit on the velocity of a fusion powered ramship. It was this: when the exhaust velocity of the fusion drive was no greater than the velocity of the interstellar hydrogen hitting the ramscoop, the ship could go no faster. Hooker had reached that limit tens of thousands of years ago. And so had his pursuer. But Loeffler's ship was using hydrogen which had slipped through Hooker's ramscoop. The hydrogen wasn't hitting Loeffler's ramscoop field as hard. It had absorbed velocity from Hooker's. Loeffler was close behind. The chase could end within decades. O nce upon a time Hooker had hopped Loeffler would give up and turn around. Surely he would realize that Hooker could not be IF caught! But the years (had stretched to decades, and every year Loeffler waited meant four years trying to get back to Wunderland. He'd have had to decelerate before he could begin the long flight home, and deceleration would take as many decades as he had spent fleeing. And so Hooker had spent two hours a day before the scope screen, watching the stars crawl past year by year, waiting for Lxeffler to turn around. The years had stretched into centuries, and still Hooker spent two hours a day watching the rear scope screen. Until there were no more stars ahead, but only the distant muddled dots of galaxies, and the stars behind were taking on a vagueness like curdled milk. And when the centuries had become millenia, Hooker no longer believed his enemy would let him go. But still he spent two hours per ship's day before the scope screen, watching the galaxy drop away. He was totally a man of habits now. He had not had an original thought in centuries. The ship's clock governed his life in every detail, taking him to the autodoc or the kitchen or the gym or the steam room or the bedroom or the bathroom. You'd have thought he was an ancient robot following a circular tape, no longer able to respond to outside stimuli. He looked more like an aged robot than an aged man. From a distance he would have looked twenty. The 'doc had taken good care of him. But there were things the 'doc could not do. The oldest living man had been short of four hundred years old when that machine was made. Moscow Motors had had no way of knowing what a man would need when his life could be measured in tens of thousands of years. And so the face was young; but the veneer was cracked, and the muscles no longer showed any kind of expression, and the habit patterns of the man were deeply grooved inbrain. By now the chase meant nothing to Hooker. In any case he would have been incapable of original thought. T hey had come up along the galactic axis. Hooker, looking into the scope screen, saw the galaxy face on. It was not bright, but it was wide. The galaxy showed like varicolored dyes poured into viscous ink, red dye and yellow and blue and green, but mostly red, and then the whole mass swirled around the center of the pot. So that the center glowed all colors, a continuous mass of stars packed so closely as to blot the blackness behind; but it was not bright. There is dust even in intergalactic space. Nearly one hundred thousand light-years of dust shaded the galaxy from Hooker's view. The arms were almost black, the glowing areas spotted with black gaps and dust clouds. Everything was reddened and dimmed by Doppler shift. He could not see Loeffler. Habit used his fingers to magnify the view, slowly. The galaxy, already wide enough to fill the scope screen, expanded. In the core, individual red giant stars appeared, bigger than anytMng in the arms. And a bluewhite spot appeared, and grew. It grew until it filled the screen. There was a black dot in the center. Hooker had watched for nearly an hour before the thought stirred in his brain. That hadn't happened for a long time, but it did happen. Hooker's memory capacity was nearly full. But his brain was in good working order; he was guaranteed sane.  wonder what damage I did? The thought threatened to slip away, but he grabbed for it, sensing somehow that it might be important.  held my com laser on him for hours. I may have damaged him. Vve never seen him broadside; Vd have no way of knowing. But if his ship is badly hurt, I could finish the job with my laser. Mine never burned out. His did. He'd have to wait until Loeffler got closer. The thought slipped away... And return two days later. I wonder how much damage I did? How would I find out? Every day he remembered the problem. A month and a half after he had first thought of it, he thought of the answer. H e could turn the ship sideways to fire the fusion drive laterally. Loeffler would imitate him to keep him from sneaking past and home. That would put Loeffler broadside to him. He had done it once before, trying to make turnover for Wonderland. But Loeffler had been too far away for the scope to show details. If he did it now... He did. Then he focused one of the side scopes on Loeffler, enlarged the image and waited. The time came when he should have gone to the steam room. He was half out of his seat; but he couldn't leave. Loeffler hadn't turned yet. The ships were light-hours apart. Hooker forced himself to sit down and to stay down, gripping the arms of the control chair with both hands. His teeth began to chatter. He shivered. A deadening cold spread through him. He sneezed. The shivering and the sneezing continued for a long time, then passed. Steam room time was over. Loeffler began to turn. And Hooker knew why he had never turned for home. There was no lifesystem at all. The hfesystem had always been the most fragile part of the ship. Eons ago Hooker's laser had played over Loeffler's lifesystem and melted it to slag. Nothing was left but tattered shards, polished at the edges by gas molecules slipping through the ramscoop shield. Loeffler hadn't died fast. He'd had time to program the autopilot to arrange a collision course with Hooker's ship. Loeffler might have given up the chase long ago. But the autopilot never would, never could. ' Hooker turned off his scope screen and went down to the steam room. His schedule was shot to hell. He was still trying to re-adjust when his enemy's ramscoop field swept across his ship. Then both ships were driving toward the edge of the universe, IF IF  Short Story It Takes All Kinds The big board flashed its numbers -- and each one was a sentence of death! T 'erry Gordon sat on a simulated chrome bench in the great East City waiting hall and watched his future fading on the huge board that covered the entire square-mile roof. Few of his high school friends would recognize Terry as he sat sulking. The short muscular young man was known for his engaging ear-toear smile. Terry Gordon was not smiling now as he looked unblinkingly upwards at spot #. Spot # was Terry Gordon. Right now, anyway. True, Terry realized, he was a lot better off than most people. Of the the test, very few would ever make the board at all. But that wouldn't be enough. Only ten per cent would pass, and Terry knew his odds were sHm. And they kept getting slimmer. Since East City was headquarters for the test, his number had been posted quickly. In fact, he had rankboard began its posting. But, as other computers around the world tied into this central board, his rank dropped. And dropped. And dropped. Now he was number #, and the tests were only # tabulated. On a straight percentage basis he was all right, but Terry knew it didn't work out that way in practice. An inhuman voice intoned, "ninety-two," and the roof swam as the figures were adjusted to accommodate the test results of more than got up and walked down the line, straining his thick neck backwards to spot his new position. Once he had spotted his # digit person-identification code unaided, but this time he could not. He punched his ID code into a wall stand. A half second later, he walked away with a strip of paper punched #. As the sturdy, black-chaired Terry Gordon walked to his new position, he heard a shot and several screams from the Losers' Corner as someone committed suicide. Not me, thought Gordon. Quickly he tried to evaluate the new results. It isn't good, he thought. Vm still ahead of straight percentages but not by anywhere near as much. T he population explosion and the technological explosion mushroomed together, and Terry, along with # other twenty-yearolds all over the world, was a victim of the crossfire. Too many people, not enough jobs. They tried reducing the workweek, but that didn't work; eliminated jobs were manual or supervisory in nature. The jobs which remained require a lot of time at work. The world went on a double shift. That helped -- but not enough. Service jobs increased. Again not enough, and the computers and their lesser brothers took over most of these. It was decided that all jobs would require a college education. Without exception. College was made free, but enrollment limited to those most deserving. At first, the top one-third of a high school class was eligible, with room left over for the duller sons of those who could afford the fantastic freight of seven years of extra schooling. Then it became #, and nobody could get in just with money. Twenty -- fifteen -- and now ten per cent. The world had finally taken birth control seriously, but Terry Gordon would suffer what the label-loving historians had termed "the Blind Decades." None of this was fair, obviously, but it worked. Terry Gordon wanted to pass the test. He had to pass it. Since childhood he knew that he had to be not one of the # but one of the ten. His class psychiatrist had said he had a "good little kid" syndrome. "I must be good. I must be right. I must be in complete control." The only way to keep in control of anything was to pass this test. "Ninety-three." Terry didn't bother to look for himself. He stood in line and used less than # spaces, about three thousand more than straight percentage. If it doesn't get any worse than that I can make it. He tried to smile and realized it was only a grimace so he quit. Someone -- a girl, Terry thought -- threw herself off a railing. Too dangerous in that corner. Even if my number -- even when my number, he corrected himself dryly, gets over there I'm not going to stand under it. There are no rules that say I have to stand there. He was now in front of a Boozer. He stared at it for a few minutes until he realized that he was now qualified to order a drink. He no IF stepped up before tbc machine and inserted his credit card, establishing automatically his right to drink. The machine flashed back, "What's your pleasure, Mr. Gordon?" and Terry froze, unable to think clearly. Whafs that drink they're always having on TV? Oh, yes. He pressed the Martini button. After one sip a pretty blonde girl "I'm sorry," she stammered." I was looking for my number. You want to hit me?" "I don't care what they say," Terry replied gallantly, "I don't believe in hitting girls. Especially pretty ones." The tall blonde girl giggled, but not objectionably. "Then I'll buy you a new drink. What were you having?" "Martini," Terry said it as if he'd been drinking for years. "But that's all right." "It was my fault you spilled yours. Besides, I've never ordered a drink before. I think I'll have one, too." She punched the Boozer's Martini button, but forgot to insert her credit card. Gordon helped her like an old hand. When she received the first drink, she handed him one of the disposable plastic glasses. "I'm Nova Dale." She had dimples when she smiled. "Terry Gordon," replied the stocky young man. "What's your standing?" "I'm not quite sure... " "Ninety-four," said the computer. It said the "four" badly. "Let me have your ID card a second. Here, hold this." He traded her the drink for her card and copied (since it was in poor taste to hold onto another person's card), then walked over to the tracer. She turned out to be in a slightly better position than he. "You're #," Terry said. "I'm not doing that well. I'm #." He was trying to be pleasant. Unsuccessfully. "Why are the last percentage  V points so high in acceptances?" she asked. "Rich kids. Tutors." He gulped at his Martini and instantly regretted it. "I hope we both make it," she said. "If it goes on like that last percentage, you'll make it and I won't." Nova Dale tried to be helpful. "What'll you do if you don't?" "I've got to." "But..." "I've just got to." "I didn't think being an Also Serve was so bad." "The hell you say." She pouted. "Ninety-five," announced the computer. "We're getting down to the short hairs. Nova." He took his place in the tracer line as a young man went berserk in the losers' Corner and had to be shot down by the police. He returned to Nova with a grin from ear to ear. "They only got their share," he yelled to her. "I'm # and you're # thousand places better." Suddenly he realized he was holding Nova's arm. He released her but continued to bubble, "Straight percentages, Nova. Only five per cent more to go, and there are # places left. I may -- I just might -- make it!" "Wonderful." "Let me buy you a drink. You're very pretty, you know." It was very true, but he still didn't know quite why he said it. "Thank you," she said, replying to the compliment. She tried to tell him she didn't want a drink but he was already marching toward the Boozer. She took a deep breath and drained her glass. "Adult," she muttered as Terry returned. "What?" "Nothing." They walked to a spot where they could visually spot their numbers overhead but Terry suggested they go no further. "Why?" she asked. There was a burst of flame from Ihe Losers' Corner, making the question academic. Nova Dale considered the incident, took another sip and announced, "I guess our educational system does produce a lot of pressure." He nodded gravely. A human voice usurped the computer. "There have been a large number of score results reported within the last minute. We will skip a report at # per cent and go directly to # as soon as the information is digested. Hang on -- stay loose -- keep cool. This public service message is brought to you by God and His representatives in your friendly neighborhood church or synagogue." N ova sipped at her drink, made a sour face, then smiled at the intense young man. "I'm glad the results are coming in quickly now. I hate suspense -- except on TV of course. I 'member, in my TV drama watching class, they told us suspense was the agonizing wait for the inevitable... You know, without my heels you'd be as tall as I am." Staring up at the ceiling, Terry Gordon replied, "Yeah, L guess I would be. Hey, there's my number." "I think I'll take off my heels." She did. "Your number is about # that way." She stood up directly in front of him. "You trying to get rid of me?" "Gosh no, I like you." She started to say something, stopped, then blurted out, "You going to shack up with somebody tonight?" "No," he answered. "I know we're entitled to, graduating to adulthood and all, but I -- ah -- well, I didn't want to apply for a trial marriage right away and..." Terry Gordon realized his dark face was turning red. "Well, college starts in three days, you know." "Did you know they only used to teach school nine months a year?" "I heard that. Those old kids must've never learned anything." He took a big swallow of his Martini. "Ah, are you?" "Am I what?" "Shacking up?" "Well, there is this boy..." "Ninety-seven," said the inhuman voice. "Moment of truth," he yelled and IF ran for the tracer, leaving Nova in mid-coquette. He was one of the first in line and returned quickly. "How was it?" Nova Dale asked. "Worse. You've got it made." "I don't suppose we could trade rankings?" Terry snorted, "Don't be an ass." Hurt, she fumbled, "I was only trying to help. It doesn't mean that much to me. Really." "I wish we could. You're only #; I'm #. You know what that means? I'm only a lousy ten thousand or so better than straight percentage. I'm not going to make it." "There's still a chance. There's only four more per cent to go." "Three." "I never was very good at math." "Who's the guy?" Terry asked. "What guy?" Nova Dale tossed her long blonde hair from side to side and drained her glass. "The one you're doing the trial marriage with." "Just a guy. I met him in high school in a Luke Short course. He's pretty nice and, after all, I figured it was time I knew something about sex. You know what I mean?" He nodded. "I mean, why would they give us all those courses if they didn't want us to experience life's greatest social experience?" "Yeah, I know. There was this one girl I might have -- ah -- tried, if that's the word." "It fits our generation," she answered with the air of someone who has just said something profound. "She didn't want you?" "I never asked." The burly man was blushing again. "Gee, you should have. I bet you'd be very proficient." "Thank you," he said solemnly. "I'll buy you a drink this time," Nova said. "Let me." "It's my turn." W hile the tall blonde was getting a round from the nearest Boozer, the computer announced the arrival of the latest figures. Terry Gordon checked the results and found that he was now at position #, while Nova was a safe #. Two more percentage points to go, he thought. And if it keeps going up like that, Vye had it. Til miss out by a couple of thousand. Boy, it's hot in here. Nova returned with the drinks. He accepted his and blurted out gallantly, "For a tall girl, you've got a real great figure." "Thank you." She smiled and held the smile for a full three seconds. Finally, "How did you make out?" "It's going to be close as hell. I'm only a little better than straight percentages. If the next two percentage points get # each. I've had it." "It isn't fair. You want to go to college so badly and you may not make it; I don't really care and I probably will. It isn't fair. "I've read that just coming from a worker's family gives a person a much better chance on the tests. Intellectual stimulation at an early age, they say." "What's your father do?" "Insurance estimator." "Gee, that's a pretty good job. The most I really hoped for was fireman or subway emergency actuator or bellhop or something like that. You know, you're the nicest sexy girl I've ever met." "You know, for a short man, you show no predisposition to plumpness." "Thank you. I played a lot of football in high school. First string tackle." "I thought so." Nova took a good swallow without grimacing. "And, for an intense young man, you're very polite. I know what you must be going through." "I wish I'd met you before that other guy did. I'd like to be married to you tonight." "I would have liked that, too." "Ninety-nine." Terry Gordon's knees jellied, and Nova had to go to the tracer with his Ifs not fair, he thought as he sat down on a pink bench, not fair to drag it out like this, Vm going to lose. Why couldn't my father have been a worker? He took a good swallow from his new drink. No, I can't blame anybody else -- that's cheap. Why didn't I study harder? Nova Dale returned. "You're #. Is that good?" He shook his head. "Less than # places left. I've had it." Nova sat on the bench beside him as there was a flurry of gunfire from the Losers' Corner. She put her arm around him. "You wouldn't do that, would you?" "No, but I sure as hell feel like it." "If the percentage holds, you'll make it." She gulped at her Martini. "Besides, if you've done your best..." "I have to be in control. My psychiatrist told me so." "Are you angry with me because I have a higher score?" He shook his head again. "I'm just mad at myself for not doing better. Somebody once said 'Ninety per cent of everything is junk.' " He smiled, as though it hurt his lips. "Actually 'junk' wasn't the word. He ate his pseudo-olive. "I've got to make the ten per cent, don't you see?" "I see." She nodded gravely, stroking the back of his head. "No, you don't, but I think I love you." She kissed him. "It's against the law to kiss anybody in public, but thank you." "Ninety-nine point five." The computer voice seemed to enjoy the torture. "I'll go get the results," he offered. "I think I can walk this time." "And I'll get us another drink. These things aren't bad after you get used to 'em." A fter a few minutes he returned to accept his fourth Martini and tell her, "You're in. I've had it; I'm #." "You still have a chance." "Yeah, but it's a slim one. More are trying to get in, and there are only # places left. If I make IF it' he said, sitaring down at the floor, "would you marry me for three days?" "I thought you'd never ask," Nova replied. A human voice announced to the waiting crowd, "Final results are in. They'll be processed and announced in one minute." There was a scream from the Losers' Corner. "Here's to higher education and the # people who enter college in three days. I hope I'm one of them." "I hope so, too," Nova answered. "And here's to our marriage." "Yeah, that too. You will be kind?" Terry Gordon nodded, wondering why the room seemed to turn slightly when he closed his eyes. "I've got to make it," he repeated. "I mean -- I don't think I could get married unless I get accepted. You know what I mean? The sus -- suscess -- " "Successful." "Yeah. Sussessful Sexual Adjustment Class. I did real well on my final in that course." "Me too. And I do understand, Terry. I mean, I guess I love you. Funny isn't it?" "Sure is." "I mean we just met and all." "Yeah." "Do you shppose we're drunk?" "I guess so. I didn't think it'd be like this." Nova Dale smiled and tossed her long blonde hair from side to side. "But it is sorta nice to be grown up and able to drink and get married and all." "Yeah." "You don't want to talk much now, do you?" Terry Gordon took her free hand in his. "You're not only buriiful, you're unnerstanding." "Here is the posting of the final results," announced the computer in what Terry thought to be a compassionate, if inhuman voice. He sprang to his feet, and he and Nova joined the jostling crowd around the tracer. He shoved her ahead of him. Their plastic Martini glasses splashed, then spilled and fell on the floor. She filed her # numbers into the machine. Instantly, she had her answer: #. "I'm in," she screamed. Terry Gordon was in front of the tracer now. He made a mistake and cleared the machine. His hands would not obey his mind. Finally with a dozen other aspirants threatening his life if he didn't hurry, he And received in return: #. Qomebody has to get that numO her," Nova tried to console the ex-high school football star. "I only needed one more. Just one." He sat on an orange bench with his head in his hands. "There's no prize for second." He pulled a folder from his pocket. "Does this mean... " He stood up and faced her. "Nova, I love you and I'd still like to marry you tonight, but... She pouted. "You know, in my state. I'd be using you." "That's all right," she said. "Some masochism is pleasant and perfectly within the boundari of so-called normal experience, according to my teacher. I wouldn't mind, if you'll just be kind." "I'll use you kindly." "I'll call that guy; chances are he can still find a girl for tonight. I'll call my father, too, and tell him about my change of plans. I hope we can find an apartment at this stage of the game." She began dialing on her communicator. Terry Gordon just stared at the pamphlet explaining the test. There must be a loophole somewhere. But he couldn't find it. "After the completion of the test," he read aloud, "# winners will be chosen for seven years of basic higher education. Those who successfully complete the seven years will be assigned employment consistent with their abilities and, as is possible, consistent with their inclinations as well." Officialese, Losers' Comer was bedlam. A few shots were heard; screams and shouts of anger filled the air. Suddenly a bullet ricocheted off the side of the near-by tracer and pranged into the bench beside Terry. Its velocity nearly spent, it probably couldn't have done much damage, but it did wake Terry out of his lethargy. A man could get killed here, he realized. "Terry," Nova announced, "my Daddy wants to talk with you." Nova was surprised when Terry practically grabbed her communicator. "How do you do, Mr. Dale." Pause. "Yes, I will be kind and I want lo talk with you... "  do you want?" V Chief Testing Officer Raymon Bristow was six feet four inches tall and weighed # pounds. Some people said he got the job because he had the physique for it. Administering the test was bad enough, Bristow had told his friends, answering the complaints was much worse. He stared across the twelve-bytwelve office just one floor above the great waiting hall and glared at the couple who had managed to reach him. "Unusual enough to see a couple here, what do you want?" Nova cut off Terry's prepared opening. "We're going to be married just as soon as he convinces you." "Nobody convinces me of anything. We don't accept changes because order, no matter how rotten, is preferable to chaos, no matter how noble." "Yes, sir," Gordon blurted out. "The Roman Empire and the Dark Ages." "I was thinking more of the old California educational system. Now, get to the point so I can throw you out. You're not here to kill me because you volunteered for a probe and you're clean. You're not here to complain about the system or the test, either." "Did the probe tell you that?" The huge man sn#rted, "Kids come here to kill me, adults to scream of injustice. I don't know why you're here. He lit a huge round cigar. "Now, for Freud's sake, talk." "I'm Terry Gordon and I was #." IF Chief Testing Officer Raymond Bristow choked on his cigar and turned his back on the couple, "So? Somebody has to be the first to lose. You're no more pitiable than the loser at #. I'm sorry for all losers, but I can't do anything about it. Now get out." "I haven't explained why I have a right to go to school." "All right." Bristow turned, his face composed now. "Explain it and then get out." that test today." "About that," Bristow hedged. "About that? Because if # took the test I'm entitled anyway." "Kid, ten per cent is a guideline. The rule specifically states 'After the test is completed, # winners will be chosen for seven years of basic higher education.' Those are the rules, not some stuff about ten per cent. Besides there were less than # who took the test. Good-by, kid." "I'm not through." "Kid, I'm getting anxious to meet some irate parents. At least they get to the point." "Will you grant that almost all who took the test were twenty years old?" "How old are the two of you?" Nova missed irony and answered. Gordon pressed on, "Now, Nova's father is an insurance man... " Bristow interrupted, "Have him sell me some; I don't think I'll live." twenty years olds, # won't last the year." "It's the same rate as #, Daddy says," Nova contributed. "Medical science and the banning of private cars have kept the death rate down in spite of hyper-population." "It's a fine lecture," grunted Bristow, "but it changes nothing." "Would you agree a person has to be alive to go to college?" Bristow glowered at the couple. "I see what you're driving at -- somebody may die before college starts. Sorry, Gordon, the rule doesn't say we deliver # bodies, it says we pick that many." "Nova, darling, he said it!" He jumped up and down, embracing her. "I said what?" Bristow demanded. "You said you pick that many. Now you can't pick a dead man." The big man exhaled a huge cloud of smoke. "Let me try being very direct: what the hell do you mean?" T erry took a deep breath. "The test was over at four o'clock. The test results weren't finally announced until ten p.m." "So?" "So, I figure about eighty-five people ahead of me in the listing are dead. They don't need their spots, and I do. And, the way the rules are set up. I'm entitled to one of them." Nova looked at Terry. "Eightyfive?" "Sure. Figure it out for yourself. fatalities yearly -- that's a little less than # for #. Divide that by the number of days in a year, and it's about #, or more than fourteen per hour." "Aad you can't choose a dead man to go to college. It's not copesetic." Since tihe Chief Testing Officer was staring at her, she amended, "It's not fair." "Fairness," stated Bristow, moving to the computer imput which took up one of the twelve-foot walls, "has nothing to do with it." "It's not right," Nova said, beginning to cry. "Ditto," said Bristow, typing on the computer keys. "It's not defensible," Terry Gordon stated flatly. The computer sprang to life and file cards spewed from the output orifice. "Now that," said Bristow, is probably the smartest thing you've said tonight." He picked up the cards and flipped them in his hand. "Your mortality tables aren't too accurate over a short span of time. Actually almost one hundred winners have died." He flipped a switch and announced into the microphone. "Attention. Since # people who have qualified for college died before test results were completed and posted, we are revising the results. This 'will admit the first # people over the # rating." Bristow flipped the cards into the machine, typed cancel these cards and revise the list accordingly to #. "You're lucky," Bristow said, "that this machine is tied into payroll. We knew the deaths immediately." "Thank you," Terry Gordon said, his knees weak with wonder. "We did it. Nova. I'm not junk." "Where are you two shacking up tonight?" "We don't know." The Chief Testing Officer dug into his pockets. "Here's my key and location finder. I won't be using my place tonight. After I get done listening to #'s sad tale and a few thousand parents I'm going to get very drunk." Nova and Terry both thanked him. Profusely. "I'm not doing this for you, kid. I'm doing it for Edison." The couple paused for a moment at the door. "Edison and all the world's other great men who wouldn't have passed this damn test. You've got guts. I'll say that for you. You damn well better put 'em to good use." I t was three in the morning when Terry Gordon and the three-day Mrs. Gordon reached the Chief Testing Officer's beautiful apartment. In front of a pseudowood fire, the couple drank a glass of champagne Nova had purchased while Terry picked up the license. "You know," Terry said, "I've been thinking about what Mr. Bristow said. I have a hell of a responsibility. For all those people who didn't make it." "You'll live up to it, Terry," Nova said. "And besides that, you will be kind." "I will."      IF IF  Short Story Somebody was stealing computer time... but for what purpose? T 'here was a thief on my staff. Hell. It was someone I trusted, too; it had to be. Arnold Su grinned enthusiastically as he laid the proof on my desk. "Computer time is expensive, Mr. Royoe," he pontificated. Now that was la discovery. "And someone has embezzled more than # hours on our #D# during the last year." I raised my eyes prayerfully to the mural that covered three walls of my office. The holograph gave the three-dimensional illusion that we were perched among tall conifers somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. You'd never guess that my office is buried under the Royce building in Greater San Diego. "God preserve me from your efficiency, Arnold. Seventy hours on the #D# computer is worth #. You're an extraordinary security officer; it only took you a year to discover that someone is robbing us blind." Su was pained by my unjustified criticism. "It's someone with a private computer readout." "You're pretty good at the obvious." Most computers, especially the really big ones like our #D#, can be programmed by remote consoles in the offices of favored company researchers. Such use is automatically recorded for later review. "So it must be someone highly place in the company. Someone smart. Chief, he actually programmed the computer to cover up for him. The #D# has been "keeping two sets of books" to conceal the embezzlement from our weekly checks." O f course there have been cases of computer-camouflaged embezzlement (usually of money) in the past -- that's one reason why However it takes a real expert to thoroughly cover his tracks. Evidently W were up against an expert. "How did you discover the theft, then, Amie?" Arnold's grin spread even further across his face. This was the question he had been waiting for. "Boss, you really don't appreciate me. I've been expecting something like this for a long time. My section has an agreement with Control Data Corporation. Every year we audit their computer complex with ours, and vice versa. That way the problem is reduced to a battle of the computers, and we can detect this sort of automated deception. But the crook started embezzling, something after the # audit, so he wasn't discovered until yesterday." I picked up Arnold's report. "Any idea who the culprit is?" Four million dollars, I thought. If I never got my hands on the crook who -- no wonder our general efficiency had fallen off in the last year. "Not the vaguest," Su replied, with computer privileges. Now if you had just let me bug the executive offices and washrooms...' "You know, Arnie," I said slowly, "sometimes I think you would have been just as comfortable on Herr Himmler's staff as you are here." Arnold turned red. "Sorry, Boss, I didn't mean -- " "Never mind." Su is a good man, the graduate of one of this country's best schools of business administration. It's just that he's an incurable snoop, which makes him, properly supervised, an excellent security officer. Su continued, subdued, "We can't even reconstruct what sort of problems the computer was doing during those # hours. The thief did a magnificent job on that computer." I looked down the valley in the mural. Someone I trusted had sold me out. I'd worked twenty years to make the name Royce synonymous with computers and to make Royce Techonology, Inc., competitive with collected a lot of good men under one corporate roof. They are the backbone of Royce, more than I, with my high school diploma, ever was. And one of them was rotten. Who? T '-here was one individual who might be able to find that answer. I got up and started for the door. "We're going to see Howard." "Prentice?" asked Su. He grabbed his report off my desk and followed me. "You don't think he's responsible?" Arnold was genuinely shocked. "Of course not," I said, locking the door to my office. When we were out of earshot of my secretaries and their recording equipment I continued. "Whoever we're up against obviously knows computers inside and out. We can't catch him with old-fashioned automation techniques. We're going to have to get him by exploiting the human angle. Howard Prentice has been kicking around longer than both of us put together. He knows human nature, and he knows more ways to skin a sucker than we'll ever imagine. He makes the perfect investigator." I noticed the hurt look IF on Arnold's face and added quickly; "On a unique case like this." It's only five minutes by aircar from Chula Vista to the Royce Research Labs at Oceanside. In fifteen minutes we were standing in the hall outside Prentice's lab. I prefer to see people in person rather than by phone -- I get more out of them. But this time it backfired: Prentice wasn't in his lab, which was locked. I was starting back to the parking lot when Su stopped me. "Just a minute, Boss." He produced a flat, metal plate and inserted it in the lock. "Master key," he explained confidentially. "Now we can wait for him in here." I was too surprised to bawl him out for this latest invasion of privacy. Besides, he'll never grow up. The room lighted up as we entered. Packed against one wall were the usual programming typers and TV screens. I also recognized a highresolution video tape recorder and a picture reader. Stacked in orderly rows along the work benches were hundreds of Prentice's oil paintings. Sometimes I wondered whether he considered himself an artist or a scientist -- though I didn't care what he did with his time as long as he completed assigned projects. Su was already rununaging among the paintings -- admiring them I think. Prentice couldn't be out for long. As a section chief he was in charge of thirty different computer labs. And right then his section was busy designing the optical and communiwanted to boost out toward Alpha Centauri A next year. I sat down in the ohair before the computer console and tried to relax. The holograph on his desk caught my eye. It was a color pic of Howard and Moira taken on their diamond wedding anniversary. Moira must be more than ninety years old. Only one faintly attractive after a haul like that -- but tall and slim, somehow Moira managed it. She was holding Howard's arm like a fifteen-yearold who's just discovered boys. Quite a gal; quite a man she had, too. Howard must be pushing #. You know, he personally worked for Thomas Edison? Fact. The man's like history. When the" # depression came he was a top executive for some oil company out East. The depression apparently soured him on industry. He spent the next forty years -- an ordinary adult lifetime -- in Greenwich Village as an artistbum, a beatnik. Then, some time around #, he changed careers again. He entered college. If you're old enough, maybe you remember math, no less. And he did it. Howard's been with me for fifteen years. One of my best men. I tapped an impatient tattoo on the arms of the ohair. But where the devil was he now? "Boss, this stuff is tremendous!" I stood up to see what Arnold was talking about. He was pointing at several paintings he had pulled out from the bottom of the pile. Su is quite an art and film fan. He has a tape collection of all films made since #, as well as a very large collection of paintings from all periods. He lhad reason to admire Howard's paintings, though. Prentice is an excellent, maybe a great painter. Thou he's done many traditional abstractionist pieces, Howard has been a neorealist ever since ' I've known him. Take the paintings in the lab; they were all clear and unambiguous as far as execution went. There were landscapes, portraits, interiors. But the landscapes were from no area in the real world. And the portraits were expressionless mug shots: face on, quarter face, profile. Not all of the subjects were even human. Every camas was the same size. Over the years I often asked Howard about this, but he always answered with some line about artistic profundity. I don't think he even let us see everything he did. A rnold had called me over to see three landscapes he had discovered. When he placed them side by side it was like a composite photo -- a panoramic view. It was one of the most spectacular things I'd seen by Prentice. When I looked at it, the lights in the room seemed to dim a little. In the picture it was night. A sickle moon lit a deep valley or mountain pass. Our viewpoint was halfway up the side of the valley. Scrubby brush and volcanic slag were visible nearby. Far away, down in the center of the valley, was a castle or fortress, its immense black structure outlined by the moonlight. Though vast and strong, somehow it was also decayed and diseased -- a skull rotting in the earth. Around the castle were fields of purple flowers glimmering faintly with their own light (fluorescing paint?). But the flowers weren't beautiful -- even at this distance they were fungus growing on death's decay. I pulled my attention away from the landscape. It was the most hostile I'd seen by Prentice. And somehow it was familiar. I often got that "seen-before" feeling with Howard's stuff -- though usually his landscapes provoked awe rather than fdar. The picture would have been even more impressive if it had been painted on a single canvas rather than split up on separate ones. Then I noticed the picture reader at the end of the bench. We use pic readers to program images directly into the logic of a computer. This is an expensive procedure since it preempts a lot of the computer's circuits. It's usually simpler to keep pictorial information on tape, but sometimes we want thp computer to operate directly and continuously on information in a picture -- to alter a perspective, say -- and we have to use the reader. A horrible suspicion was forming in my mind. I picked up one of the paintings and laid it on the flat glass plate at the top of the reader. It fit perfectly. Now I knew why all the paintings were, the same size. Forgetting Su, I reached up and pulled a heavy notebook off the shelf above the bench. I had to snoop. I had to find some legitimate excuse for the man I now suspected. The notebook was a motion study. IF We use them when wc have to program the computer on changing spacial relations -- as with complicated machinery; the computer has to know the position of every part of the machine at every instant in order to predict performance and detect bugs. The interior page was I riffled through the pages. There were thousands of rough sketches showing the human hand in every position. Beside each sketch was a numerical description of the motion from that position to the next. must have a separate notebook for facial expressions, a notebook for every class of motion! And it was all set for programming. His project -- whatever it was -- was huge. He must have been planning this for years. From the evidence in the lab it was certainly big enough to cost # hours of #D# time. Prentice was the rat all right. But why had he embezzled the time? And what had he done with it? T '-here was a noise from the doorway. Arnold looked up from the picture he had been admiring and said cheerfully, "Hi, Howard!" "Hello." Prentice set his briefcase on the bench and hung up his jacket. The he turned to look at me. "This is my private office, Bob," he said mildly. I didn't bite. I was too mad for subtlety. "Prentice, you've got some explaining to do." I gestured at the paintings and the picture reader. "Someone's been stealing #D# time, and I think it's you." Prentice glanced at Su. "So you finally ran a cross-audit, eh, Arnold? Well, I knew I wouldn't have more than a year. I got what I gambled for." Su looked even more surprised than I felt. Prentice had spent a whole year concealing the fraud, and now he was calmly confessing. "Just what was worth # of Royce time?" I snapped. "Would you like to see?" He did not wait for an answer. "I've got one of the last tapes right here." He reached into his brief case and pulled out a TV tape cartridge. "Moira and I have always been appalled by the fact that so many art forms are beyond the means of a single artist. Take the film industry: most movies cost many millions of dollars and require the services of hundreds of artists -- actors, directors, photographers." Prentice threaded the tape through the multiple head of the video tape recorder. You'd think he had invited us over for home movies. The gall of the man. I didn't stop him though. I suppose I was curious. What could be worth a ruined career to Prentice? "Anyway," he continued, "back around #, I saw a way to give film-making to the individual artist. Since then, everything Moira and I have done has been directed toward this goal. At first we didn't realize how complicated the job was and how far computers had to go before they could help us with what we wanted. But I got my degree, and we kept at it." He hooked the tape into the receptipn cartridge and snapped the cover into place. "With the aid of tihe #D# we've animated one of the great novels of this century." "You've used the #D# to make a cartoon!" Arnold was obviously fascinated by the concept. He had completely forgotten that Prentice was talking about a crime. For the first time since he had entered the lab, Prentice seemed annoyed. "Yes, I guess it is a cartoon -- like da Vinci's Mona Lisa is a doodle. Cut the lights, will you, Arnold?" The lights went out, and Prentice turned on the recorder. The TV screen on the wall came alive. I gasped. Night, The landscape with the purple flowers. But what a difference. This was a window on another world. If I had felt uneasy looking at the paintings, I felt terror now. Three tiny figures struggled up the side of the valley. Suddenly I knew why this scene was familiar. Prentice had animated Tolkien's Lord of the Rings! If you've ever taken high school English (and if you haven't, I'll hire you -- my ego needs someone in this outfit with less education than I have) I'm sure you've read Tolkien's book. We were watching the scene where Frodo, Samwise, and Gollum come up the stairs to Kirth Ungol past the fortress Minas Morgul -- the skull thing in the valley. Prentice's version was much more realistic and fearsome than anything I had ever imagined. I realized Prentice was still talking. "Moira and I worked thirty years on the paintings, the motion studies, the script, the sound track; but without the #D# to integrate what we had created, we'd be left with a warehouse full of paintings and notebooks." The three figures stopped to rest. Our viewpoint moved in for a closeup. The three were arguing in low, frightened tones. Now I knew why Prentice's portraits were expressionless; diey were the patterns on which Prentice, through the #D#, imposed emotion and movement. This was no cartoon. The figures were fine portraits, come alive to argue in whispers. I could see Frodo's blank resignation, the fear in Samwise, the glittery green of Gollum's eyes as he fought with the other two. Yet it was all a synthesis of oil paintings and motion studies -- the product of Howard's genius and the #D#'s analysis. Without a break in continuity, the "camera" dollied back to reveal the ancient stone stair that stretched high into the mountains. The three stood up and continued their long climb toward Shelob's Lair. Click, The tape ended. Prentice turned on the lits. I sat dazed for a second, trying to bring myself back to the real world. "That tape is just five minutes long," said Prentice. "The whole animation is more than four hours." Su recovered first. "My God, Howard. That's tremendous. It's the greatest advance in art technique in fifty years." "At least," agreed Prentice. "Now, anything a writer or painter can imagine can be staged." IF "Sure," I said sarcastically, "as steal # of computer (time." Prentice turned to me. "Not really, Bob. Computer time is only expensive because of the scarcity of #D#class computers and the number of problems that can't be solved except by the #D#. On the basis of past progress. I'll wager that in five years you'll be selling computers as good as the #D# for less than #. Anybody who really wants an animator will be able to have one." ' "And you just couldn't wait." He smiled, "That's right. I've waited thirty years. I don't know if I'll be around for another five." "Well, I'm going to make you wish you'd taken the chance. When I get done with you, there'll be nothing left for the Tolkien estate to pick over." A rnold broke in, "Just a second. Boss -- " I turned on him angrily, "Look Su, can't you understand? Prentice has stolen # of my money r My Voice rose half an octave. "It's your money I'm talking about. Chief. Did you ever see Fantasia or Magica?"' "Disney's feature length animation? Yes." "Do you have any idea what they cost?" "Don't play games, Arnold. I know you're an expert. How much?" ""Fantasia was made way back in #. It cost Disney more than #. But when they got around to Magica # years later, the price tag had risen to #, even though Magica is a much poorer job. Nowadays, almost any mainguard picture -- whether animation or with real actors -- costs more than #. Howard's actually discovered a cheap way of making films." "Why didn't you just ask for the time, then?" I asked Prentice. Howard looked stubborn. He has his own peculiar brand of integrity. "Bob, do you honestly believe you would've said yes? I'm an artist. I may be a good researcher, but that was a means to an end. Moira and I had to do this, even though I knew it'd hurt Royce in the short run." "Chief, it doesn't matter whether Howard planned this to help you or not. The point is, he's dropped a fortune in your lap." When Arnold put it that way... for a topnotch movie, and if Howard had had organized help, besides his wife, it might have cost a lot less. It would be at least eight years before we miniaturized computers like the #D# for the consumer market. Until then, film-making would remain the prerogative of the large organization. It had taken Howard years to perfect this technique, so we were way ahead of potential competition. Figuratively speaking, we were standing on the ground floor of a whole new industry. Su saw that I was swayed. "Well?" "Well," I said grudgingly, "I guess we're in the movie business." I didn't realize how true I spoke till we got IF  Short Story What lovely people the Earthlings were! They were utterly cleliciousi T he Snick approached the Earth at # miles per second, detected the atmosphere and slowed up. A little closer in he sensed a masterhost and almost forgot to slow up for the hydrosphere. And then he lost it. The Snick was wise with its million years. Although he had never before found a masterhost except in the water, he knew exactly what to do. Retracing his path up to where the sense had been the strongest, he homed on it and shot westward. Three minutes later he was hovering above New York City. The Snick hesitat for only a moment, struck by the unexpected form the masterhost had adopted throughout the entire city. Then he dived, the final test. The people saw him coming. They shouted and pointed at him. A few began running. He felt the building emotion as he darted straight at a small group. This could be the home the Snicks had sought for almost a thousand years in an empty galaxy. He hit the first man in the middle of the back and went giddy with pleasure as the ecstatic burst of emotion flared around the masterhost. Drunk with celebration he cut through man after man until his rapture was so extreme he glided to the street in a stupor. Along the street thirty bodies lay as they had fallen while twenty-one hundred persons stared from every conceivable place of hiding at the little metal cylinder that looked too much like a bomb. A n hour later the Snick woke. The bodies had been removed and the watchers had all disappeared. For four blocks in every direction the city had been desert. Beyond that was a military cordon not even a rat could have slipped through. The Snick lay alone and thought... He had found a new masterhost. Certain features had not fit the universal pattern but they probably did not matter. Nowhere before had he encountered a masterhost that did not dwell in water. Nor did he have any memory of any masterhost whose individual entities all possessed an almost identical pseudoform, continually. In fact, he would have thought it impossible until today. But the final test had been conclusive. The test was what the Snick lived for. terhost had taught the newly created Snick to dive through the masterhost's protoplasmic body and tickle the insides with a small electric shock. To the amebic masterhost this was the supreme ecstasy, and the Snick thrived on the emotional output. But after # years the masterhost died out and the Snicks had gone into space to find another. They found several, but all in the final stages of extinction, and when they were gone the Snicks spread again into space. And here, after a thousand years of drifting he had found a new masterhost, young and Dumero.us. Gathering together all the strength from his recent emotional rapture the Snick sent a direotional come-home thought code of success ing in the void. It would take months for them all to assemble from throughout the universe, even on a thought code, but the first would arrive within days. The Snick must now make contact. The opportunity came immediately. A demolition squad came up the street in a heavily armored car. Two TV mobile units detached themselves from the car and approached, scanning the Snick from every angle. After several minutes a masterhost in thick protective shielding came toward him. This was contact. The Snick was built like a rounded and sealed metal cylinder, twelve inches long and three inches in diameter, with a ten-inch spike protruding from the head end along the central axis. The spike had two purposes, the first was to promote easy entrance into the protoplasmic bodies of the masterhost, the second, contact. Shooting off the ground, the Snick hit the masterhost full in the face and stopped, the spike through the middle of the contact brain. For an instant he felt the ecstasy and giddiness return, but because it was the brain there was something else. Deep within the contact, almost unnoticable to the Snick, was a fear and a hate and a hurt. And there was something more he couldn't quite catch as it flickered away and the masterhost crumpled. 'Te ecstasy was gone, and the A Snick felt the emptiness of the void. He did not understand. He had tided to make contact and had felt the emotional climax. But then... The Snick withdrew from the crumpled masterhost and turned toward the car. The blast hit him without warning and knocked him against a building. Before he had time to rationalize a second exploded beneath and sent him hurtling through the air. Immediately he raced skyward and two more missiles exploded where he had just been. Then he was out of sight of the city. The Snick flew west, its thoughts confused. The masterhost did not seem to want contact and yet the ecstasy had been real. Just to be sure he dived ait every town and tested a group of people. It took him only a while to learn that the climax came when he hit them in the middle of the upper part of the body or in the head. Several times he had hit just an arm or leg and had felt no rapture. He had gone back to those persons and hit them again, effectively, but the emotion had an undertone that frightened him. He learned too that the bodies were not protoplasm. They were more or less solid and contained a rigid internal structure of limestone. It wasn't until he reached the west coast that he thought of the second the way he must be certain. At the beach just north of Conception Point he made the test. Twelve masterhosts were on the beach. He hit all twelve, then sank into the sea. The emotional rapture he drew from the twelve, add to the ecstasies of his flight west, nearly sent his mind into blissful oblivion. Half of his thoughts wished there had been just two more masterhosts. That would have done it. The other half told him that then he would not have been able to complete the second test. He allowed himself plenty of time to cool off, just to be safe, then jumped back into the air and again raced toward the twelve on the beach. No masterhost moved. No preclimactic emotion reached toward him. Almost fearfully he hit the first masterhost, crumpled on the beach as the contact had been. There was nothing. There was the void. S hocked, then saddened as reality dawned, the Snick stopped to look at his victims. Victims! The thought and blame began to sear. He knew now that these beings were not the masterhost,that none of the ones he had encountered had experienced the ecstasy before, andthat none would experience it again. He recognized then the fleeting glimpse of the something leaving the contact. heading Earthward. It would take months for them all to gather, but the first would arrive within days. The last Man would be gone before the last Snick had heard the call.      IF The Iron Thom He had dreamed of Earth all his life. Now he was there -- and the dream had spoiledi What has gone hefore  Honor Jackson used to be an ignorant, graceless savage, fighting Amsirs and hating farmers on the ruddy wastes of Mars. But all that has changed, now; Susiem, the cybernetic spaceship he has stolen from the Amsirs, has given him a Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio State. Now Jackson knows enough to wear clothes, and enough to understand how he came to be a child of the Iron Thorn. The Thorn is a towering climatological control device located in the center of a Martian crater. A small tribe of humans had managed to make its home there, and, as long as they didnt stray too far from the Thorn, could go on living long enough to procreate not only their own kind but the whole batch of half-truths and legends which, a thousand years since Susiem was stranded on Mars, Jackson has now learned to scorn. Obviously, Mars was the site of some sort of experiment run by Associated Midwest Universities. Much closer to where Susiem stood was another Thorn, around which flock Amsirs -- humans genetically modified to breed true in the form of winged, armored, lichen-eating creatures. The experiment had been running for a thousand years now. With the passage of time and the accumulation error, the experiment had become completely misunderstood both by the barbaric Amsirs and the neolithic human control group, resulting in a situation Susiem cbuldn't understand. Not understanding, and out of touch with Earth, she persistently did nothing. But by simple force of native talent, Jackson managed to outwit not only her, but, before that, his own kind, and the Amsirs. He did not quite blunder aboard Home Free. With him came Ahmuls, an Amsir sport with soft skin, not much brains, but very fast reflexes. It had been Ahmuls s job to kill Jackson if he tried anything funny with Susiem. But part of Jacksons computer-implanted university training had included a course in unarmed combat, and Ahmuls was sullenly cowed by the time Susiem, Jackson and he reached Earth, after he had had his damages repaired by Susiem s doctor, and Jackson had been ministered to for various scars and hurts inflicted during his adventures. The newly sophisticated Jackson feels responsible for Ahmuls, and frets over what will happen to him once Susiem docks at the Associated Universities facilities. But a thousand years have gone by since Susiems last up-dating. She lands on a grassy plain, with nothing visible except an occasional distant white villa, and a smoothly pastoral landscape. She is immediately disassembled by self-propelled, miniaturized units -- some flying, like insects, and others burrowing, like insects -- and her components are either carried away for salvage or buried in the ground, presumably to restore something of the organic balance of nature. Ahmuls and Jackson are left standing there, Ahmuls naked and unashamed, Jackson dressed in captains coveralls and rather nonplussed, as the naked inhabitants of Earth approach. H e was very heavy in the limbs. wasn't slumped like Ahmuls, but he was very heavy in the limbs. And Ahmuls was right -- they didn't have any clothes on. They were a bunch of men and women, about thirty of them altogether. The first one of them -- a man, with long, clean limbs, and much more smoothly and heavily muscled than anyone Jackson had ever actually seen -- gracefully walked up into sight from a hidden hollow nearby and stood in ankledeep grass, looking at the two of them. Then he half turned, and motioned behind him, and the rest of IF them came up. They were all adults, and they moved with a kind of confidence that reminded him of Amsirs. They had apparently been doing something together down in that hollow, out of sight, and that was how they had managed to surprise him. For the nearest villa was much too far away for anyone from there to have made it this far in the little space of time since Susiem had landed, died and been buried. He felt heavy, and he felt surprised. Looking at them, he knew something of what they were. They were people who had eaten right all their lives; lived right, had the right kind of doctoring. They were the people sprung from the kind of person he himself had been when he "was" at Ohio State. One of the things he had learned from "being" at Ohio State was that bio-transmitted memories were convincing, reliable and in some ways utterly irrelevant. He even knew how to look at himself. He was undersized, too gangling, too long of leg, too hollow of stomach. His skin was like seamed leather; his eyes were pits, icy blue without a trace of melanin, their whites as white as smooth, wet bone. His hair was a short, raggedly cut thatch of brittle straw. In his borrowed coveralls, he was a parody. Their men were too big; their women were too smart. They came walking in toward him and Ahmuls as if none of them had ever stepped on a cockleburr. Well, what was he going to do? He couldn't even rip off the coveralls and be himself. For one thing. it would be completely gauche, to realize so late that he had landed here in a cyberneticized, landscaped paradise; in a world a thousand years younger than he was even when he was young enough to worry about being gauche, and educated enough to know what being gauche felt like. "See? Told you -- no clothes." "Right. My apologies, Ahmuls." "Your what?" "I mean I'm sorry." The buzzing of the insects had stopped. Now he could hear the murmur of the soft wind through the pliant grass and take time to feel the warmth of the wonderful sun on his face and hands. He could even remember what it had been like strolling along the shade-dappled groves of State, and the slumberous delight of baking for hours in the sun of Jackson Park beach when he was at Chicago. I'm home, he thought, I'm home where I've never been, and I have to state my claim to it. As he began to feel the onset of oncoming voices, their murmuring as the people spoke between themselves, he shook his head to clear it, feeling the knots growing in the muscles of his neck. They had reached him. Some of them were raising itheir hands in casual greeting, and smiting. They were all taller than he was. One of the men said: "Hello, there. Comp tells us you're from that genetic experiment on Mars, both of you. Tell you the truth, the Comp had never told us about the experiment before. There was a great range of new data when that spaceship came down with you and prompted us to ask about it. Biggest thing in years. It's great. Welcome." Their accent was a bit far from the Midwest he knew. But it wasn't unintelligible. He could could already feel himself sorting it out properly. C omp would be Central Control; the thing that guided the insects, that determined the fate of spaceships, of specimens from the genetic experiment on Mars, of the landscape which no longer needed more than a minimum of serviceable features. It had happened here, some time after Susiem left. They had gotten their machines properly centralized under one control, and here he was, among the people it serviced. But I'm one of you, he thought. My body wasn't born among you, but my mind was. "I'm glad to meet you," he said honestly. "This is Ahmuls, and I'm -- " A wicked little relay closed inside his mind. He grinned. "I'm Jackson Greystroke. I was raised by jungle beasts." He had said the right thing. They were all smiling. Two of the girls pursed their lips like ripe plums. "Marvelous!" the man said. "Come and have breakfast with us," he said. "My name is -- ah, Kringle. These aire my sons; Dasher, Comet and Cupid. My daughters. Dancer and Vixen. My other sons; Donder, Blitzen, and Prancer. I'll let these other people tell you who they are -- I wouldn't presume to. At any rate, come on, let's all grab a bite, and we can talk." It was amazing, being with people who could pick up like that. "Come on, Ahmuls," Jackson said, feeling better and better, lofted on a cloud of names as the remainder of these people made introductions for themselves -- Cincinnatus, Columbus and Elyria -- Perry, Clark, Lois and Jimmy -- Fred and Ginger -- Lucky, Chester, Sweet, Home and Piedmont (who was glanced at with some disappointment by some of the others when she gave her name) -- Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. He found that he got them all straight, and kept them all straight. They all fit. Even when Piedmont said, shamefacedly: "I goofed. I should be Pall." "I'm hungry," one of them said from the back of the group. "We're ready," Jackson smiled. "And thank you for the invitation. Let's go," he said again to Ahmuls. "Don't want to eat with you," Ahmuls said. "Don't want to eat with these people." Jackson felt the tiniest flutter of air. A voice spoke in his ear. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something bright, metal and hovering. "This is Comp," the voice said. "He needn't worry. There'll be food of his kind too." Ahmuls said: "What did it say?" "He said he loves you. Come on." Some of them were already beginning to walk away, back toward the hidden hollow. Jackson took a step to follow them, stopped, frowned at Ahmuls, turned his head back to watch them go, looked back at Ahmuls. "Come on!" He moved his hand quickly, and it felt heavy. IF Ahmuls' eyes daried to follow his hand. "Don't." He got himself into motion, one hand to the right side of his face, holding his eyelid so he could watch Jackson from the farthest corner. The group of them walked over the grassy rise of ground. Durstine murmured, her perfume very near to Jackson: "I wish I'd brought some clothes." Jackson stopped looking at Ahmuls and grinned at her. She raised one eyebrow back, touched her glistening upper lip with the tip of her tongue, and laughed. I t was a fine morning. Their breakfast things were set down in the grass, on a cloth -- doubtless woven on the spot by bees -- and the graceful cups and dishes were of earth colors, delicately shaped. Shaped delicately enough, it occurred to him, to be attractive not only to man but to insect as well. He breakfasted on tamales, Riesling and conversation while Comp's bees brought Ahmuls lichen. They made no dishes for him. Either Comp felt that Ahmuls's hands would break chunks from any utensils the bees might make, or Comp was disinclined to produce anything clumsy enough to be sturdy enough. Jackson's senses were much occupied with the vivacious scent of women, with the sound of words sung, not grunted or cawed, with a sky of perfect blue. Thornless. If he watched Ahmuls, it was infrequently and from the corner of his eye. "So it's really not much different from the way you remember it," Kringle was saying. "I imagine you've got the picture. Comp reached the serviceability threshold shortly after the Martian experiment was started. And at that point it became unnecessary for people to concern themselves with management. "But we still have the same old services; food, clothing -- or the control of factors that normally make clothing necessary -- and shelter. Well, in actual fact the distinction between clothing and shelter has disappeared, with the distinction between genial and hostile environment. But it's really, about the same. There aren't as many of us. Frankly I feel that a great deal of the procreative urge is actually a reflection of panic or boredom. We have very little of either. So that's all to the good. And, well, it's a ball. As I've said, welcome!" He was so self-possessed, so obviously independent of anything what used to be called "the world" could do to him, that Jackson could really, strongly, feel how fortunate it had been that he had found a way to communicate immediately with this sort of person. Jackson thought -- with all his customary speed -- that all the same instincts that had made him such a fast and agile killer, such a selffKssessed hunter, so obviously not one of the ordinary run around the Thorn, still served him in this new world. It was marvelous -- not faggoty marvelous; it was, truly, a marvel, and of marvels, and replete with marvels (how quickly his mind responded to the stimuli of education!) -- that all his life, no matter where he had been, or what he had been doing, he had possessed the qualities necessary to be able to sit here at breakfast with these superb people. He began to chuckle, watching Ahmuls with lichen in his mouth and bees darting at his face. My God, my God, Jackson thought, who would believe it? Where are the Amsirs, and where are all the people who believed in Ariwol? I made it. I made it by being me. I made it by not holding still when they wanted to make me stay; when they were afraid I'd prove what they were. And yet, in looking back, he couldn't honestly say that he had ever told himself that there was something better. He had only never ceased to feel that there was something terribly wrong. And he had never even tried to change them. He had only had the wit not to let them change him. What a great deal of wit that was I Pure instinct, pure sense of self had sav him from missing this reward of being here. He began to laugh even louder as it occurred to him what an incredible, marvelous, wonderful thing he'd done. He was here by right. He was one of them. Watching him laugh, they smiled. Little Pall held out a cup of wine. Her large brown eyes were twinkling again, as they had no doubt always been intended to. "It is nice, isn't it?" she said. "It must feel good." It was beyond his wildest dreams. He sat on the grass with his knees drawn up, sipping wine and feeling the heavy familiar touch of Earth upon him. "So, as I understand it," he said to Kringle, delightedly continuing their conversation, listening to the concepts roll trippingly from his tongue, "there's really no further need to take time in accumulating credit toward necessities. In that event, what do people do to fill the day's time?" Kringle looked a little nonplussed. "That's a factual question," he complained. O ne of the tiny silver bees detached itself from the swarm around Ahmuls, zipped over to Jackson and said: "This is Comp. The people you're with are members of the most populous class of individuals. That is to say, the naturalists. Naturalists practice the living of pure life. This human preoccupation is, of course, a new one, in the sense that there had never been individuals totally free of managerial concerns. As you can guess, this is the first type of individual capable of disregarding his own true physical situation or the estate of his factual accumulation. Accordingly, these people have no thought and perform no action which is not straightforwardly derived from the impulses of the psyche. "Since psychical development is conditioned by stimulus, and all stimuli to this class of individual are autistic, there is reason to believe that the minds of this class are qualitatively different from any mind previously attainable by the physical interactions of the human brain. So at some finite point in time this class IF of individual will represent a humanoid, but non-human, true#reeding race native to this planet. We will then see the phenomenon of a new genus created entirely by mechanical manipulation of the environment -- that is to say, by the exercise of my facilities. "In other words, we're talking pure Lamarck. I find the entire concept fascinating. "The second major but far less populous class is composed of individuals who are to a large extent concerned with me. That is to say, the technophiliac type, who normally cling somewhat closer to home -- that is, to a conservative pattern of movement about the face of the Earth -- and with whom I maintain close liaison. These receive a running thorough education in all branches of technology and neurophysiology bearing on my construction, operation and maintenance. "The principle here is that individual intelligences are theoretically open to flash error. That is to say, considering the speed of neurophysiological interaction, and the complexity of the structures involved, it is possible for a brain to be thoroughly sane at any given point of time, to have then made one mipoint, and to have then reached a point of extrapolative total error -- that is, insanity -- within a matter of microseconds subsequent to the initial point. "Therefore, it is of advantage to me to maintain a pool of individual intelligences with whom I can maintain meaningful intercommunication. #'Irom my point of view, the JO purpose of supporting such a class of individuals is the availability of an emergency correction and repair device independent of my own neurophysiological system. "From the point of view of the individuals concerned, the value lies in giving them something to tMuk about, and an eventuality to plan for. "The odds against an error on my part involving not only my primary systems but my backups, and my repair and auto-psychiatric circuitry, are astronomical. That is, they are finite, but rather large. Not once, since my primary circuits crossed the threshold into complete managerial awareness, has there been any need for any intelligence other than my own to supervise my intelligence and capabilities. Nevertheless, at some point during a finite though large number of years, such a need -- theoretically -- will arise. I say, 'theoretically.' In any event, it's a great comfort to both parties in this arrangement. "There are a number of other categories, but they are all essentially similar. They are the category of individuals who have institutionalized various aspects of creativity. For example, sports and the arts. The chairman of the Toxophilite Society is currently working on the fourteenth volume of his compendium on the subject. He has furnished me, each month, with the latest updating of the rules for performing various evolutions of the limbs and torso required to flight an arrow at approved targets in regulation style. It keeps him happy, so why should I care? And he has a great number of assistants and fans who are also kept happy. "That's essentially the picture. Nobody ever gets hurt, statistically speaking. And there's no problem to repairing an occasional accident to either the body or the mind of any individual. Personally I find it all rather fascinating. And I'm sure that you, with your relatively naive viewpoint, will find it the same. "I think you might as well forget about asking broad-spectrum questions of any individual in this group, or in their class, because they rather expect me to handle that sort of thing. If you persist, you might even be considered gauche. I realize it's hard not to occasionally appear gauche in unfamiliar company. You can avoid that, if you'd like. I can have a thorough education delivered to you, more or less the same way as the academic credits Susiem gave you. Just say the word. But, if I were you, I'd first wait a while, and explore around a bit. You might not care to be thoroughly indoctrinated in any one set of mores so soon. You've only been here an hour or so; there's plenty of time left to decide which way you really want to swing. Meanwhile, just play it cool, and have a ball." W ell, all right. It would be very interesting, living the rest of his life with a gimmick that would murmur softly in his ear whenever he wanted a question answered, or confer another degree upon him whenever he wished to master a subject. He noticed that these people seemed to have no problems in dealing with social situations this could create. They had simply ignored him politely while he sat hstening to Comp, and had turned their attention to watching Ahmuls instead. Ahmuls was fidgeting, and swatting at the flying things around him. "No," he said. "I don't wanna eat this way. Fly away." Comp's exteroaffectors danced out of his way. Comp said to Jackson: "Is there anything you can do to make your friend less of a social liability to himself?" 'I can't even get him to like me." Ahmuls caught a bee. Durstine gasped: "He's so fast!" Ahmuls rolled the silvery exteroaffector between his fingertips. He grinned, one-handed. "Hard," he said, "but little." He flipped the bee to one side. He grunted at the breakfasters. "This is a crumby place. You don't fly, you don't fight. You got fliers, but they're little. You don't eat like you should." He got to his feet, pushing land straining, drooping. The insects still hovered around his face. When he was standing erect, Ahmuls was able to swat at them again. Durstine began to giggle. "It's not funny. Knew I shouldn't come here with you crazy people," Ahmuls said. "I'm goin' away; gonna find a better place." He turned, rippling turgidly, and began to move off. Kringle smiled. "I wonder where he'll find it." IF There was nothing out there but grass and white Walt Disney houses and exteroaffectors. "Heyl Wait! Hold on!" Jackson said, standing up. "Don't just go out there like that!" Ahmuls turned his head, holding his face. "What's it to you? Never gonna bother you. Just gonna go away, look around." Where was he ever going to find a place that was going to love him? Jackson took a couple of fast steps and caught up with him. He put his hand on the doughy shoulder. "Oh, now -- just wait," he found himself pleading. "Look, we just got here. You got to give it a chance. You've got to give yourself a chance. I mean, these people are happy this way. And I'm going to be happy here. You could -- " "I'm not like you. I'm not like them." "Say... Man to man on the prairie's endless waste, the sinewy Jackson Greystoke and his monstrous adversary faced each other," Chester remarked behind him. Durstine chimed in: "The battle of two superb, physical machines trembled on the brink of being joined. Here in this peaceful glade that had seen no violence in a decade of centuries, suddenly there was a reawakening of Earth's age-old heritage of struggle between brute strength and trained intelligence." Donder declaimed: "A still hush settled over the land, as Nature herself seemed to draw breath in anticipation of the awful onslaught." "What? What are they talkin' about?" Ahmuls muttered. J ackson looked over his shoulder. Kringle, Durstine and some of the others were staring toward him and Ahmuls, laughing-eyed. Some of the others were just plain eating, gracefully sipping and nibbling. All of them were lounging about, relaxed. Pall seemed a little interested. But people with large, moist eyes frequently seem emotional when in fact they are merely displaying a phenomenon of physiology. "Never mind," Jackson sighed. "You just go on and do what you want." Ahmuls said: "Should have said that to start with." He trudged up the slope of the hollow, was silhouetted massively against the pale horizon of late morning, and began to diminish from the legs up as he lumbered down the other side of the slope and out of Jackson's line of vision. "Comp," Jackson said, "you'll be keeping track of 'him, right?" "Oh, I always know where everybody is, of course," Comp said. "And I rather think I can predict where he'jll end up. Just as well. I can have permanent feeding facilities for him there, and I expect he'll be happy. It's a little tricky with an uneducable, as I imagine you know. But it's rather exciting for me, having what you might call a random factor to deal with." "Well, he's not educable in human terms. But you're not limited to Susiem's resources. Surely there's something you can do for him beyond simple maintenance," Jackson said. He walked back toward the breakfast group. "Don't see the need," Comp said. IF "He has no history, and no future. All his yearnings are self-contained. He needs no further education on that." Comp knew when a point was made. The bee flew away from beside Jackson's ear. "Looks like your faithful companion has left you, Masked Rider of the Plains," Kringle remarked as Jackson sat down again. "The only person he was ever faithful to is back on Mars," Jackson said. "That's if they haven't put somebody over him for the way he mishandled me." In the midst of all this, Jackson did wonder how the Amsir Eld was making out. "Well," Durstine said, "neither of you ever has to worry about that place again." "I suppose not," Jackson said. Her hand was petal-soft where her fingertips touched his as she passed him a tamale. Tamales were clad in pastry a lot like rough bread. Around the Thom, though, when a woman gave a Honor rough bread, she gave him rough fingers too. A t the end of breakfast they stood up and left everything for Comp to clear away. Little silvery things came out of the grass, nibbled swarmingly, and the cloth, the dishes and the leavings disappeared, bit by bit, lightning fast, into the earth from which they were sprung. Jackson grinned watching it, enjoying it. "Handy," he said. Durstine followed his glance. "Oh, the services, you mean. Yes." "Well," Jackson said, looking around. "Whait do we do now?" "Actually," Rringle said, "that depends pretty much on you. What would you iUke to do?" Fall said to Jackson: "I think we've been hoping you'd tell us a little bit about what your life was like." Durstine smiled. "Among the jungle beasts." "Well, I imagine Comp's told you how it all began. There was a period of time when it seemed like a good idea to produce gentically modified humans capable of living comfortably in hostile environments. A site was prepared on Mars, and a program of genetic manipulation was begun. The initial modified type, miscalled the 'Marser, was created capable of surviving imaided on the Martian surface for extended periods of time, provided it had a base genial environment to which it could return periodically. This completed Stage One of the program. "Stage Two would have either produced a true Marser capable of fulltime survival in the natural environment, or alternatively the Stage One type would have been given the technological capability of transforming the environment to the relatively slight degree required for its survival. "The crucial question was a political one. That is, whether the bioformed inhabitants of Mars should retain a psychic dependence on Earth and its history, or whether they should be made truly independent. The point being, they couldn't be made truly independent of the environment without also being truly independent of the universities which had put them there. "Well, there was considerable discussion back and forth about that, and a little trouble about getting next year's grant from the National Institute of Health. There was a cutback in the program. The human technicians on the site were told to establish a semipermanent base for themselves while the whole thing was being thrashed out. And so there came to be two adjacent Thorns." "We know all that," Bonder said with restraint. "Comp told us. The whole thing became academic anyhow, when Comp took over the services. You've got two equally intelligent races with essentially equal facilities, competing with each otiier in an uncontaminated environment. Clear-cut, educational. Like an ant farm. Comp explained it. All sorts of daita bound to result from it, for anybody who wants experimental data on social evolutionary factors. But, man, we don't want to hear any of that dry stuff. I mean, what was it like? What's this buiness about -- Amsirs? I mean, what kind of hunting is that?" "Yes," Durstine said, "show us!" Mmm, Jackson thought, looking at her, she'd like that. "Well," he said, "I'm a little short of the necessary tools." He held up his empty hands. "A little sihort of Amsirs, too." A voice said in his ear, "This is Comp. I can arrange that. Listen, I'd love to make a popular actuality of this." "A what?" "An actuality. It's no problem; I could make an Amsir for you -- excuse me; a Amsir -- and a throwing stick and a couple of darts. I have some very good footage of the Martian terrain from my orbiters up there." "Orbiters? You mean you've got eyes on Mars?" "Certainly. Quite a number. Our space exploration's quite sophisticated these days, compared to what it was when the primary system component was humanoid. But what I'm saying is that I have plenty of stock background, so you go ahead and hunt your Amsir. And the audience will see it with proper background and lighting. And perfect dubbing of the terrain. I am sure we can get you one hell of an audience for it. Wait one -- I'll ask around." #reat response," Comp said to Vj him a moment later. "We have over four hundred thousand lookers-in; thirty-eight per cent of the potential audience." "I don't think I understand. Thirty-eight per cent of the audience for what?" "The audience for your actuality, man. Look, the number of the audience and the number of the world population are theoretically congruent, right? In practice there are always some individuals asleep and some urgently occupied otherwise. So there's never been a hundred per cent audience for an actuality -- not the live version, at any rate. The record is eighty-three per cent or thereabouts, but that was for the IF competition between Melanie Altershot and Charles Dawn, and a very long time ago. Well, I queried the population for interest in a Amsir hon, and they're all waiting -- thirty-eight per cent of them are waiting now, and a number of others have expressed serious interest in taking on the delay. It hinges now think you should know there hasn't been a thirty-eight per cent audience in quite some time." "You know, we don't have all day," Donder said. "Well, I'd like to do it," Jackson said. "Right here, huh?" Besides the impatience on Bonder's voice, he had also noticed Vixen and Batten. The two of them now had some kind of flying toy they'd had Comp do for them. It was elfin; translucent lavender. It caracolled back and forth between them as they stood some distance apart from each other and flew it from hand to hand. The object seemed to be to make a pattern, for the marvelous toy trailed a feathery lavender wake which hung in the air briefly and then disintegrated into dusty filaments, crossing, criss-crossing and intertwining. They had begun this game while Comp was explaining actualities and Jackson was busy listening. One or two people in the group had stopped watching Jackson and had started watching the flight; from being a tight group around Jackson, these people had begun to spread toward Batten and Vixen, attenuating. "Sure," Jackson repeated. "Provide me with the tools and a Amsir." "Goodl" Durstine and Comp said simultaneously. Pall smiled. Jackson smiled back at her. "I know what it is," she said. "You never realized you'd get a chance here to do something you must have enjoyed so much." "Pall, darling," Old said, "one of the reasons I want to watch this is because it's done in a place where people do things they don't enjoy." Pall put her fingers to her mouth. "Oh, Jackson, I'm sorry," she said. I n this world, Amsir bones were made by insects. They came whipping in over the tops of the sougWng grass stems, in a swarm far smaller than the one that had devoted itself to Susiem, each carrying a little white speck. They buzzed, they grouped to some efficient shape, and in a thrice there was the stick. The place that would serve as the handle was properly reshaped as if by patient sanding; the hinge was neatly fitted, the nock for the dart's butt properly incised. Jackson picked it up and admired it. "It's very much like my own. Comp. Those are good scanners you've got." "How about the darts?" The short, bluntly tapered hafts had been produced the same way the throwing stick had been. The head was done by burrowing exteroof the ground, clustered at the head of each dart as bees held it in place, and withdrew leaving cooling, jaggedly pointed silicate heads fus into the cups that had been made there to receive them -- each, for all Jackson knew, already freighted with its dab of synthetic Amslr-hide glue. He picked them up and bounced them in his palm. He rolled them around with his fingers. "Good," he said. "Good, fine." He walked up the slope of the hollow and looked around. The landscape rolled away from him, empty. There was no sign of Ahmuls, or of anyone else. But there were a great many receptor bees clustering in the air up there. "Look to your left," Comp said. "I am starting your Amsir." About seventy-five yards away the exteroaffectors attacked the grass. They darted down to catch stems being hurled upto them by cutters on the ground. They seized them and pulled them up into position. They moved with great rapidity, dexterity, and econofny -- it was as if the grass had freed itself of compliance to the breeze and had decided to bend its own way. It bent in all directions toward a common center as the exteroaffectors took it, but as it bent it hurried forward rootless, and when it reached the center it fountained up, urged by splashes of buzzing silver, and there before Jackson's eyes they wove a Amsir's bones. Toe and tarsal, leg and knee, thigh and hip, they wove him from the inside out; spine, collarbone, shoulder joints, arms, elbows, forearms, hands -- he watched the little finger extend itself like the sihootings of a magic shrub. Neck and skull matted themselves into structural IF oompactness. Now, flesh; fibrous strands wrested into place upon the green bones. In a moment, he was all hooked up together. Then they clad him; hide was fitted, bubbles swelled. Beak and talons, crest and wings; lace, fluttering... fluttering pale; as he stirred there, with exteroaffectors burrowing nimbly between the fibers to give him life, he bleached. An army of burrowers came running forward, and fused the glistening fragments of his javelin. They tossed it upward; a low cast, but his wing rippled as his right hand swooped down to seize it, and holloweyed he straightened to turn his head and look at Jackson. "Comp, your name is miracle," Jackson said. "My name is Comp." Jackson opened down the Velcro of his coveralls and shrugged out of them. Immediately, exteroaffectors clustered around him. He winced as they plated his body everywhere with themselves. But the touch was gentle, and they were gone again in the blink of an eye. "Sunburn lotion," Comp explained. "Oh. Yeah, makes sense." He looked around to see what the breakfast group had made of all this. But there were none of them near him. They were all down in the hollow, sitting dr stretched out gracefully, each with an exteroaffector on each eye, at each ear, on each hand. A little string of them, like a girdle of small jewels, lay across each stomach just below the navel. Jackson look over at the grass Amsir standing alert in the middle of his patch of stubble. Jackson bent down, picked up the throwing stick and the two darts. The coveralls were gone, dissipated. "Ready any time you are, friend," he called to the Amsir. "Ready," Comp said in his ear, and withdrew. T he Amsir waved its javelincd hand to him. Jackson took a few quick steps; running on grass was different, but he remembered. Remembering it gave him Ohio feet instead of Thorn feet, but at least it gave him feet. He tried a few dry casts of the stick, slapped the spare dart up into him armpit and was off. He was playing it about the only way he could; as if he and the Amsir had each turned a shoulder of a dune at the same moment and had spotted each other at a distance. He ran away at an angle, down and across the slope of the land, picking up speed, ready to dive and roll straight downhill if the bird cast its javelin. The Amsir was turning. A thousand or ten thousand exteroaffectors shifted its weight, raised its arms, cocked its hips, raised its leg. It tipped forward, planted its leg, raised the other, and was running like the wind, lace streaming, wings unfurled. It ran down and across the slope of the land, diagonally away from him, cutting back across his line of flight, putting him in a position where he'd have to throw in the direction opposite to the one he was running in. Damn! Jackson thought. I forgot how smart they were. He looked back over his shoulder. The dark. wide, empty eyes were looking along a wing at him. Jackson got his legs out in front of him and set his feet. He was sliding to a stop. The Amsir grinned, spread his wings and hung stock-still in the air, legs free of the ground. His knees bent; one wing dropped, the other rose. He landed faced round on a dime, claws sunk in the tough grass, javelin poised. His leps began to scissor. He came on ' an ostrich, straight for Jackson, eaung up distance between them, confident he could duck. For Jackson to get up any momenitum to reach the Amsir with a dart, he would have to run straight toward him, now. If he ran to either side, the Amsir would have a clear shot. And the best Jackson could do would be to try something sidearm. If he ran away, the Amsir would run him down. Oh boy, Jackson thought. All right, let's try one on you. He took three steps forward, simultaneously loading the stick, and then with the fourth step he fired. Jesus, there was nothing on the throw. It was straight enough, but there was no whip to it; it was like throwing straight up. Or throwing with a sick arm. Fm made of gruel in this place! he thought. The dart might reach the Amsir, but he was a fool if he bothered to break stride long enough to duck. It would never get through his hide. It would hang tangled in his lace. Even if it happened to stick into him a little, it would have no stopping power. TTie dart reached the Amsir, who swayed clumsily to get out of its way. But he'd miscalculated. He ran right up on it. It took him in the chest, on the lower left, and it just seemed to keep going in past all reason. It went in up to the butt, with the sound of shocked fibers. The Amsir's legs went out from under him. He spread his wings for balance, dropping the javelin. "The dart. Give him the other dart!" Comp said quickly in Jackson's ear. "Right." The Amsir was all spread out, and had no traction. Jackson fired the second one, and this time he had enough practice to really step into it. He could feel it all up and down his arm and across his back, clear down to the sole of his foot, like a rope of electricity. He threw that dart harder than he had ever thrown in his life, and to reward him it took off feeling about half as good as it should have. But it got to the grass Amsir all right; it went in below his right collarbone, and it came out the other side, carrying about two or three yards beyond him, tumbling, looping down and bouncing on the ground, with a trail of tom grass floating out in the air behind it. The Amsir's right wing folded back as if the hinge locks had failed on a carrier-based aircraft. He ground-looped around the surface of his left wing and nosedived heavily to the prairie. You could hear his neck pop. "He's dead," Jackson said. Comp said, "Listen." The sound was incomprehensible. It sounded like what you might hear if you ran as fast as you could, dragging a spear point-down through IF rough sand. "What the hell is that?" "That's applause, Jackson. That's the applause of thirty-eight per cent of the world's popidation. I've got the gain turned down, some." J ackson walked over to the dead Amsir. It lay sprawled where he had dropped it, all broken, Jackson's first dart just peeping out of its chest. There was a rustling and a shaking; it slumped, its tissues separating. The little metal insects came out of its fibers, and each took its little bit of dead grass away. Others came popping up to join them. The Amsirs's wings became insubstantial; its body flattened. Its skull uncurled, and quick as that the burrowing exteroaffectors were scurrying off with its components, a straw-and-metal wave, still roughly in the shape of a fallen Amsir's silhouette, hurrying through the grass, back to the stubble patch, there to return its elements to the soil. A buzzing cluster chew through the javelin and the darts; Jackson dropped the throwing stick into the midst of them, and they snapped it up. The breakfast group came up over the crest from the hollow, their faces flushed, their eyes sparkling. Dancer broke into a sprint toward Jackson, and as soon as one of them had done it, the rest of them followed suit. They came springing up to him, laung, delighted with him. Jackson was watching the stubble patch. Where clear droplets of water were forpiing on the clipped stems. Kringle threw his arm around Jackson's shoulders and hugged him. "Terrific!" he said. "Just great!" "You were fine!" Durstin gasped. "Unbelievable!" They crowded around him, their bodies warm. "Wouldn't you like to see it?" Pall asked. "Yes! He ought to see it!" Jimmy agreed, and the rest of them took that up, smiling and laughing, pressing some sort of feast upon him. Comp said: "Here -- " Exteroaffectors landed like butterflies at his ears and eyes. They touched his palms and his belly. "Ail that's involved is my getting in phase with the appropriate sectors of your central nervous system," Comp explained. "Just relax. Many people prefer to sit or lie down, but it's not necessary." They were all around him. Jackson had never had that happen to him before; all of them were radiating at least ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, they were creating all kinds of ranges of evaporation at their bodily surfaces, and none of them were insulated, nor was he. All kinds of effluents were being volatilized in close proximity to his olfactory receptors and the thermesthetic components of his own system. He sank down to the grass, hugging his knees. They sank down with him, all around him, smiling encouragingly and watching him. He closed his eyes. "That's right," Comp said. "Now here we go..." T he desert faded in. First there was a long shot of the two craters and the two Thoms, from a higji altitude. The edge of the planet curved, nearly undiffused, against Star-filled space. Then his point of view transmitted into tighter and tighter focus on the human crater, until it was a tight shot of the desert at dawn, reddish-purple, rolled up into dunes, with the harsh light of morning upon it. The point of view pulled in even tighter, until all there was to see was a flat, featureless, uniformly granular, unmarked field of desert-color. That point of view held for a beat; then an Amsir's white claw flashed down into the middle of it, thrust with a thump in running stride across the granules, scattering them. It flashed up and forward, out of the point of view, and was gone, leaving everything as before except for the pit of its print, whose sides began to crumble and flow. Light sparkled from one granule, and Jackson's attention followed it as it slid down the side of the footprint. It had not touched bottom before, with a thump!thump!, human running feet crossed quickly from right to left, kicking the Amsir-print out of existence, leaving their own. The point of view shifted up, and he caught a glimpse of a running, naked Honor, and then, ahead of him, the bobbing form of an Amsir. There was a jump cut, and the Amsir was running toward the point of view, grinning straight ahead. Another jump, and now it was Jackson running by himself; for the first time, Jackson could be sure it was him and not a piece of stock footage, for he could see the scar on his shoulder, and then the profile of the uncapped face. His lips were drawn back. His teeth were white and wet; the point of view filled with the side of his face, squinting, then the eyes snapping wide open -- every pore, and every delicate blond hair growing whitely at the tops of his cheekbones above the line of his beard. The cut this time was to a medium down shot of the two of them. Jackson was running, his head turned to look back over his shoulder. There was a shot of his feet jamming to a halt in the sand, fighting for purchase. Now the Amsir, braking in midair, changing direction. Now, Jackson's first shot. The dart slapped into place on the stick. There was a beautiful slow-motion study of the muscles working in time, taken from behind him as he made the recovery from his stop and worked the cast of his stick. His arm flowed the throwing stick upward, the dart in its nock, poised, head sparkling. The motion began to speed, until as the dart came into line with the Amsir and he snapped it free the motion went into overspeed. The muscles of his right arm and of his stomach twanged with force as he shot the dart, which whipped through the air and sank into the Amsir's chest. It came in so fast that the bird didn't even begin to duck until after he'd been hit. Now the Amsir hung in the air for a split second, in mortal trouble, wide open. The point of view jumped around Jackson like a carousel; he could see every move of his feet and legs, every twist of his torso, the tight strain of his left hand as he IP whipped it down, the flow of his right arm. There was an extreme closeup of the second dart as it whipped hack across and below the horizon, then whipped forward again, as if the dart were motionless and the world were spinning. And then there was a medium long shot of the Amsir taking the second dart and breaking his wing -- actually seen in extreme closeup, reflected in the dilated pupil and the bottomless iris of Jackson's left eye. The background music, which had built up and over the sound of Jackson's forced breath with a crescendo of wood-block slaps, cut off. Jump cut to the Amsir's head impacting on the There was a medium closeup, facing Jackson, of him standing there, the empty stick dangling in his hand, his shoulders slumped. He was wiping his face and taking a deep breath. Then the point of view pulled back and up; there was a long shot, still trucking back, of Jackson looking toward the Amsir lying all crumpled up on the terrain, dwindling as the shot pulled back far enough so that the planet's horizon came back into view again. The camera panned to the stars, toward the Sun, became filled with hot white light, and then, on an accent clack from the wood blocks, cut out to T hey were all around him; he opened his eyes, and they were sitting there right on top of him, damn near, touching him, grinning, laughing, saying: "Didn't we tell you! Great! Absolutely great #" Kringle said: "I'd had no idea of how it was. It's never really possible to reach an intellectual grasp of a totally alien environment. That's why actualities are so superbly fitted to the didactic purpose. It's all very well to be given a series of facts for the brain to digest, but when you want to convey the immediacy of a situation, you've got to hit 'em right in the guts. Only way to do it. And I don't mind telling you. I've been hit." Vixen said breathlessly: "I feel as if my entire life's been changed." She was hanging onto his arm. Well, people never believed a thing until they touched it. "Hey, Comp," Jackson said, "why didn't I understand that thing? Was that supposed to be a Amsir hon?" "I don't -- oh. Yes I do. You're talking about the editing and the direction. I should have realized; yes, I imagine it does look quite different in the finished version from the way it feels to you while you're performing the action. But you have to realize that the way it feels to you is made up of experiences, whereas to them it's made up of appearances. It would be dull as ditchwater if I were to simply present a running record of the action from a fixed point of view. No, in order to give these people the feeling of what it's really like, considerable skill must be exercised in arranging the patterns of action in a way that will be meaningful to them. And it is meaningful; look at them reacting!" "Full of tricked-up dub-ins, and shots jumping around like a nut?" "It's what they need in order to be able to feel it. Believe me, a great deal of skill and intuition went into that production, and none of the effects were selected lightly. You want to remember, Jackson, that all you had to do was react naturally. Im the one who had to manage it from scratch." "I suppose that includes the dumb way I was able to kill that fake in the first place." "If you're referring now to the Amsir's dull reactions at the crucial moment, you want to bear in mind that your reflexes and capabilities aren't yet coordinated with the physical properties of this environment." Comp chided him: "We couldn't very well have the Amsir hon you to death, could we?" Jackson shook his head. The peolistening to exteroaffectors, getting all worked up about something new. "What are you telling them now, while you're talking to me?" "Oh, there's been a world-wide reaction to the actuality. I'm running a great number of relays to individuals who've been clued in by the live audience. Your total's well over fifty per cent at this point, and accelerating. You're getting great word-of-mouth on this piece." Pall took his hands. Her eyes were shining. "Jackson, Jackson, do you know what we're going to do?" "'Fnaid not." He said it pretty geady. "We're going to have an -- oh, excuse mel -- a honing party!" Jackson turned to Kringle: "You're going to have a what?" Kringle's eyes were twinkling. "Watch!" He waved his arm, and the babble of cross-exclamations that had burst out among the breakfast group fell away to a background murmur. "What do you say? Shall we have a Thorn?" Yesr "Comp..." Kringle said. Oh, the sweet, passionate smell of them! A dozen buzzings trembled faintly all around the horizon. Jackson turned to look. There were shimmerings around the low white houses, under the trees. The trees themselves were glinting, and then trees and houses had disappeared in a silver mist, and the air shivered with the sound of flying. Jackson kept turning, watching. Kringle chuckled. The grass quivered everywhere, as if someone hidden under a bed had reached up and begun to pull on the blanket. "I'm going to have to move you for a few minutes," Comp said. "If you'll just step on board...'..." Durstine tugged on his hand. "This way." Not all of Comp's exteroaffectors in this area were devoting themselves to the trees and the white houses. Behind Jackson's back, some of them had put together a webwork of metal, its struts and stanchions curving and curlicuing every which way, with hammocks and canopies extended from it, tassels swaying enticingly, fountains sheeting crystalline auroras from pool to lower pool to IF lower pool, step by step, to the accompaniment of delicately chiming music. It all made an insouciantly variform cloud of nooks and crannies-within-crannies, yet open enough within itself so that the breakfast group's members could call back and forth and laugh to each other as they clamored about within it. Durstine tugged him inside, and the cloud lifted away from the surface of the prairie, drifting off to one side as it gained altitude, until they were all perched a hundred yards up in the air, reclining, clambering, joking back and forth, whispering excitedly. A pleasant breeze swept through the structure. Droplets from the fountains tickled Jackson occasionally. Pall's upturned face peeked out from between two curling metal leaves farther down within. She wrinkled her nose at him and waved. Meanwhile, Comp was making a party Thorn. The cloud drifted languidly above roaring torrents of exteroaffectors. They swirled through the air, rushing in from all directions, converging. Where they met, some swirled into subsidiary pools, other bloomed upward in flashing combers, with little flecks of a kind of spray flashing away from their tips as they delivered their freight and went flitting away for another load. The fabric of the cloud thrummed to the cataract sound; parts of it -- leaves and flowers -- began to chime in counterpoint to the fountain music. "Look! Look!" Durstine breathed, her upper arm across his shoulders from a little behind him, her forearm bent to lie down across his biceps. Her voice was in his ear. The exteroaffectors pulled away from the plain below. Only a conical, thick cluster of them, a hundred feet across, hung in the air above the plain, and then these unwound in a spiral from the bottom. As they unwound, Jackson could see that they were finishing the upper stretches of the Thorn. Down on the ground, in a gay, fluttering circle, pavilions, bountifully striped and decorated, circled around the Thorn between a turf running track and beautiful fields delimited by clipped green hedgerows. He looked again, and the Thorn was done; straight, tall, shimmering, with flags in its antennas. "It's gorgeous," Jackson said. The cloud sank down to the turf between the Thorn and the pavilion houses, and everyone ran off to drink from the fountains. The fountains were spotted around its base, where he remembered taps. Pall was bent, hair falling about her cheeks in two short, sculptured wings, sipping from her cupped wet hands, where he remembered Petra Jovans. T he Thorn was warm, and gently yielding when he touched it. He couldn't make up his mind what color it was; in some places it was off-black, with wine-dark highlights. As he shifted his gaze, he could see places where it was as green as a fly. He stood back, gawking like a tourist, his head going from side to side, admiring the way the flagged antenna raked against the pure blue sky. He crossed his arms across his chest, oupping his elbows. "Oh, it's going to be such a great time!" Pall exclaimed, running up wet-lipped. "Just everyone will be watching the actuality of it!" Jackson nodded. "I believe it." Then he smiled, looking at her. What the hell -- I mean, he thought, if she looked like a kid, you'd watch your mouth, wouldn't you? He felt a touch on his arm. This Durstine, now... "Let's go inside," she was saying. "Wouldn't you like to look around in there?" " 'Scuse us, Pall," Jackson said. "Oh, that's all right. I have to go change anyhow, and I want it to be a surprise!" She ducked off toward one of the pavilions. "I'll be changing, too," Durstine said. "But we have a moment." He followed her into the Thorn through a wide, elaborate doorway, and it was like slipping into a sea of jewel soup. The Thorn was hollow inside, all the way to the top, but webbed by crystal filaments that spun themselves glittering in swa)dng curtains and loops, on up to disappear in the soft shadows overhead. Through the translucent walls of the Thorn came light, and the walls of the Thorn were all colors; green and gold, red and violet, blue and rust. The colors swirled and swept about each other in a pattern different from the notquite-random swirlings of the inner webwork, which took what it pleased of them and threw it back to Jackson and Dmstine in a shower of shifting pinpoints. He looked at her, and she was mottled with glory. She laughed and tossed her head, then stood motionless, looking at him between the lashes at the comer of one eye. "Welcome to Earth," she said. "I wanted you to see this." She turned gracefully, on tiptoe, raising one arm in a gesture that swept around the interior of the Thorn. It was hard to tell whether she meant the Thorn, or herself, or both. "I'll see you here again, a little later. I'm going to go change... you might not recognize me, gowned. Ordinarily. But you will this time, at least. I promise. I promise with all my heart." She laughed gaily, secretively; her hand flashed out. Her fingernails trailed down his upper arm lightly enough, but by the time they reached his elbow they left a mark, and her middle finger drew a drop of blood. She touched it to her lips, kissed him on the mouth and walked away, looking back over her shoulder for a moment. Icople were beginning to come in to the Thorn; bees were listening to them, and exteroaffeotors were beginning to pelt about, making and bringing whatever was wanted. There began to be music. Jackson noticed that they weren't especially dressed. Oh, Elyria wore hoops of fine-spun wire around her neck, in a golden cascade, and Bonder had on a pair of black hornrimmed glasses with flat windowpane lenses. Lois had clad one arm in silvery chain mail to the shoulder, and so forth. But it was the light that decorated them. As they IF shifted back and forth, talking, gesticulating, beginning to warm up to the occasion, they gained and lost patterns that shifted over their skins. They weren't eating or drinking, much. They were talking mostly. In fact, some of them were sitting very still, eyes half closed, heads bent, as if completely lost in private worlds. Often enough, one or another of them would smile at him, raise a hand, and look friendly and delighted to have him here. But none of them were really getting into conversation with him. They were much more interested in whatever it was that went on in their heads while they waited for a party to start swinging. It was Vixen who started the ball rolling. Standing a little off to one side, she'd have been frowning and swaying her body just slightly. Jackson had been watching her curiously, while he stood around waiting to see what would happen when Durstine -- and Pall, too -- came in. He happened to be watching when she suddenly snapped her fingers and said delightedly: "Got it!" "What? What do you have?" Ginger asked, and as Vixen grinned, heads began to turn. Vixen took two or three steps forward, walking in a peculiar way. As she moved, she seemed to gain confidence; her movements became more pronounced and regular, and a little smile played around the corners of her mouth. She walked that way to the center of the circle made by the Thom's floor. She had everybody's attention, now, and the light began to change. A glow began to come over the crystalline draperies, and soft, golden light began to grow in a dome, starting at the Thorn's floor, and working its way up the interior walls, until they were all standing in a crystal-clear bath of it. "Jackson! Jackson -- look!" Vixen came walking toward him, one hand on her hip, the other extended in a graceful arch over her head, palm flat, fingers up. She smiled at him and reached with the other hand, and lifted something imaginary from the top of her head. She bent slightly at the waist, holding out her hands. "Water, Honor?" The party burst into applause. Vixen smiled shyly, laughed a little, and retreated. Apparently, it had been intended to be some kind of pantomime. But that wasn't how you carried water; you cradled water in your arms. "Well! That was a good beginning, wouldn't you say?" Kringle said, slapping him on the back. "I'd say she really conveyed the idea, wouldn't you?" He peered a little more closely at Jackson's face. "No? Well, perhaps there were certain minor crudities in her performance." A little knot of Vixen's particular friends was clustering around her, congratulating her. "But it was certainly good enough for a beginning," Kringle said. Donder stepped forward. He stood in the center of the floor, and raised his hand negligently. A hush fell over the crowd. Donder took a breath and began to speak: "De. Be borriy be loud, be running, but die. Those of us born Thorn-children suck that in our milk. Hey, Thorn: We spit your word on you. He bow to Jackson, flushed, a sheen of sweat across his brow. They started to applaud. Then one of them remembered something, and began to snap his fingers. The inside of the party Thorn crackled with the odd sound of it. "How 'bout that, Jackson?" Bonder called out to him. "Sort of puts it all in a nutshell, doesn't it?" Jackson asked Kringle: "Does he mean, the way people feel about the Thorn? I mean, does he feel that way about the thing that keeps him alive?" A very slight frown appeared between Kiingle's brows again. "I think if you examine your internal processes, you might find he came somewhat closer than you might be ready to admit." He raised his voice and called to Bonder: "Beautiful, son! Now, gang," he called out to the assembled company, "we all want to remember that our guest isn't completely familiar with our customs. But we all know he's going to catch on in no time." Comp said in Jackson's ear: "Listen, they need the feedback of your approval, or the party's going to lose its impetus." "Oh," Jackson said. "Look! Here's Pall!" Clark pointed at the entrance. S he came in shyly, holding her hands folded in front of her. Hanging around her waist was a ragged white drape of fabric; scant, pure unblemished white, high on one hip and low on the other, the loose, tom threads of its hem brushing her at mid-thigh at its lowest point. She came walking up to Jackson, looking at the ground. As she got closer to him, Jackson could see that there were grains of sand worked into her hair, and streaked smudges from it on her body. The smudges had clearly defined edges, and they weren't any darker at the knees; there weren't little rings of it in the skin around her wrists, and there wasn't a deeper smudge of it at the base of her neck, in the hollow where perspiration would have washed it in the course of the day. But by now, Jackson had the idea. "Welcome home. Honor," she said submissively, and the Thorn seemed to fill with the sound of the group's approval -- a great appreciative roar that was compounded of applause and outcries of admiration. "Tremendous!" Kringle said. "Look at her, Jackson!" he lowered his voice. "My dear -- was that truly an original thought of yours? That's marvelous. Marvelous. Jackson, you do see it, don't you? She's made a work of art of herself! This is doubly exciting: our little PaU " Pall was blushing. "Thank you so much, Kringle." She didn't quite know what to do with her hands; obviously, it was the first time in her life she'd ever gotten a compliment for her creativity. "Actually," she said, "you see. I'm such a naive person, really -- oh, Kringle will tell you I'm not, but he's just being IF polite -- I finally thought to myself: 'Well, if you're naive, and there doesn't seem to be anything you can do about it, you might as well do something constructive with it, wouldn't you think? Why don't you -- ' So I did! That's really all there was to it. I just did, that's all. I said to myself, the thing to do is take what you have, and use it!" "I think you did fine," Jackson said. "I thi the subtle touch of presenting yourself not only as a work of art, but as a work of art with a duality of meaning, is an example of the vitality inherent in the natural response." He smiled at her, and touched her lightly on the shoulder. The Thorn broke into fresh applause. "It's of course the hard underlying base of the subtle but primary implication that really makes it work," he said, looking sincerely into her eyes as they sparkled with fulfillment. Suddenly those eyes brimmed over, and two perfect tears flowed down her cheeks. "Thank you," she breathed so softly that the nearest sound receptor had to dart in a little closer, and hovered like a humming bird at her lips. P all was circulating among the people, being congratulated by everyone, not just her particular friends. She walked like a debutante. Jackson stood rubbing his left elbow. Perry had been working at something, behind a bunch of other people. "Hey, look at what Perry's got!" they began to exclaim, crowding in behind them. "Hold on, now! Everybody'll get a chance to see it!" Perry growled in a guff, good-natured way. Exteroaffectors carried it out to the middle of the floor for him, and put it up on three graceful, thin metal legs. High above, a rope of light kindled itself among the higher traceries of crystal, and concentrated its beam upon the painting. "Jackson! Come forward, Jackson!" Perry motioned urgently from beside the painting. "I dedicate this to you." Oh Jesus. But Jackson got himself moving, his legs sucking up through glue, and went to look at it. It had been done in wide, sometimes apparently labored, sometimes apparently glib strokes. It was full of all the wrong colors. What it showed was Jackson's Thom, in the distance, with the pale Sun behind it. Huddled at the base of the Thorn were square, nearly featureless blocks that you could tell were houses, because here and there there was a light iji a window. In the foreground of the painting, mostly in silhouette, with only a few details picked out here and there, was an Amsir lying on the blind slope of a dune, his head raised just enough so he could watch the Thorn and the houses. And off to one side, watching the Amsir, was the figure of a Honor, also blocked out crudely. You could tell it was a Honor because it was wearing something on its head that looked like a cross between the German army helmets of World War II and the Franco-Prussian War, which was intended to be a honning cap, Jackson supposed. You couldn't really fault it for skill. The guy had obviously done work of this kind before. You could maybe criticize the composition, but you had to do it on professional grounds. You had to give him that much. But, Jesus Christ, Comp had the right facts on file; they were there to be dug out. All you had to do was look for them. "What do you think of it?" Perry asked, through the rising sound of applause as the other people crowded around. Then he said: "Of course, you want to feel free to use any terms you want -- you don't need to confine yourself to the technical terms of the graphic arts." There was an understanding little smile playing around the corners of his mouth. "After all, many of my other friends here would have to use layman's language too." J ackson opened his mouth, then closed it. He could feel the tip of his tongue rubbing against the inner faces of the teeth on one side of his lower jaw. "Go ahead," Perry said. "Comp," Jackson said, "I need an easel, a backing board, a sheet of charcoal paper and some charcoal. Right away, now." Perry looked nonplussed. The crowd around them grew quiet. The exteroaffectors worked quickly. Another beam of light focused down, on the blank sheet at Jackson's easel. He held all but one of the sticks in his left hand, and bounced the other in his right for a minute as he stepped back and lookIF ed around at the people. He sucked at his front teeth once, sharply, and stepped into his work. He touched the tip of the stick to the paper, and he drew them a Amsir, fanatical and brave, with a dart rattling loose in the hole punched through one of his main bubbles, trying to get one hand up and bent around enough to hold its fingers over the hole, while it marched a Honor dressed in human skin and sucking on an air bottle toward the rim of the world. When it was done, it was done. He didn't know exactly how long he was at it. Nobody interrupted him. Lookings at it, he could see it was all right; he had it right. His left hand was black and empty. He dropped the last stick on the floor, at Perry's feet. "That's what I think of your painting," he said. "Technically." There was a gasp from several of the people behind him. Perry frowned and stepped around to look at the drawing. He stood scratching his chin, cocking his head back and forth. "I'm... afraid I don't understand. What are you trying to say with this?" There was a rising murmur of assent around the two of them. "Yes. What does that prove?" "Better let me have a look," Kringle said, pushing forward. He stood beside Perry; Jackson had to step back to give him room. "Well, are you trying to equate charcoal with oils?" Kringle said. "It's very difficult to judge between media, you know." "What I don't understand," Perry said, "is why he felt he had to be so hostile about it. I see what he's done here, and it's another scene entirely. How could one arrive at a basis for comparison?" Bonder said: "Well, I think it's a hell of a note, any way you look at it! I mean, here Perry dedicated it to him, at his party -- we're all taking part, here, for him. What does he want to ace like this for?" J ust to make sure, Jackson took one last look at the difference between Perry's daub and his drawing. Then he turned around and worked his way out of the crowd. Many of them were trying to push forward and look at the twin centers of attention anyhow. The others glanced at him uncomfortably. Some of them looked at him a little distastefully, and others looked as if they didn't know what to do, so he was able to get out from among them without coming into any kind of contact. He wiped the sweat off his face, and then, looking at his wet, half-clean palm, he realized he'd probably messed up his face pretty good. He walked out through the entrance and stood looking out at the pavilions, whose sides were responding gaily to the breeze. "Comp, I want a ship." "That's impossible. It would be disastrous. You know enough about experimental discipline to understand that. Look," Comp soothed, "you're in a mood of despair, at the moment, but after all, you don't have to relate to these particular people. I told you they're not the only class within the population. Relax. Knock around a little. Learn what suits you best. Meanwhile -- here -- " Exteroaffectors settled on him momentarily, and were gone. He was clean again, fresh-minted. His skin glowed. He rubbed his elbow. Maybe some day he'd be all hollow inside? "You mean, I can teach Throwing Stick? How about art? I mean, I could do something, and then you could have an election and see if it was any good or not. Maybe a simple majority vote would do, and then I could open up a school." "Well, no, I don't think you'd e comfortable, do you?" "That leaves becoming a Comp :chnician, doesn't it?" "The numlber of things to be amed there is finite, but very irge," Comp said. "I assure you, it's a lifetime's occupation, and a constantly expanding field of knowledge. Right at the moment, for example, the telemetry involved in sending exteroceptors across interstellar distances represents a fruitful -- " Jackson grinned, the way he had seen the Eld grin. "And when you die, I can be you." "Heavens, no I I will never die!" "That's what they all think." Jackson sighed: "What's Ahmuls doing?" He felt pretty lonely. "Ahmuls is quite contented. Here -- " Exteroaffectors kissed Jackson's eyelids. At first, he thought what he saw was a streamlet, running brown liquid, swirling amidst stones. Then he realized it was an aerial view of a vast plain. The point of view dropped like a skooping hawk, and he plunged down toward a herd of tossing, shaggy brown animals, massive of head, high of shoulder, redeyed, homed and hairy. Exteroaffeetors nuzzled behind his ears, and he heard the thunder of the buffalo. Behind them, bounding and lurching, came Ahmuls, silent and purposeful. He ran in a way that told Jackson he was straining everything he had, but my God how he ran, his flesh bagging out behind him, away from his face and shoulders. His mouth was wide open, and the tip of his tongue was in the comer of his lips. "This is the Mid-American Game Preserve," Comp said. "You'll notice the landscape has been trivially modified to suit his requirements." Indeed, there was plenty of lichen on the granite outcroppings that now split the herd into segments as it milled around them, and again funneled it into one cohesive mass before Ahmuls's pursuit startled it again. As he ran by one of them, Ahmuls threw out a hand, scooped off a clump and stuffed it into his mouth. It was impossible to tell whether he was trying to catch the animals so he could kill them, or whether he was merely attempting to join them. But in the almost as many behind him as there were ahead, and once or twice, panicked bulls, clattering and snorting out of tight places between the rocks, almost ran him down. "What'll you do if he gets pounded flat?" IF "Oh, there is no problem about that. He'd get medical attention immediately." "For the rest of his life." "That's my obligation. Accidental factors cannot be permitted to interrupt something's running its course." Ahmuls disappeared from this particular exteroaffector's sight as he ran behind an outcropping. "Do you want me to shift point of view, or do you want to look at Durstine now?" Jackson opened his eyes, as he heard her say from in front of him: "I wondered how long it would be before you came looking for me." It was hard shifting from the actuality to something he could see with his own eyes. It took a moment to organize his brain. He saw she was wearing some sort of crested helmet whose front part was a pale, sharp-edged mask over the upper part of her face, leaving only the chin and red lips bare. Then he saw she was, in fact, gowned, unlike the decorated people inside. She stepped back, her body clad in swirling off-white gauzeries which might even have been individual motes of pigment suspended in the air, or might have been some wonderful fabric. Either way, it was swirled around her body at the waist, caught again at the shoulders and the elbows. She laughed and sprang to tiptoe, her arms out straight from the shoulders, but bent forward at the elbows to point toward him. The movement of her body scattered out her garment in lacy strands, upraised the crest of her mask, and flung wide her white wings. She laughed in a silvery tinkle of joy. "See? I knew exactly what you wanted! I'm yours, yours!" she cried, lissomely throwing herself at him. He could just about get his hands up to catch her shoulders, and he felt himself wince when he touched them. "You've got that just exactly backwards," he said, marveling at their capacity. "I've got to admit, it's an accomplishment." "What? What?" She was jerking and tossing against his hands. "What's the matter with you?" "It's either you or me," he admitted, swinging her around to push her backward through the doorway, trying to see to it she got where she belonged. Now, what would Elmo Lincoln do in a case like this? "Go. Go, mangani!" he burst out, pushing explosively, flinging her backward in a swirl and smother of garb. He was shaking with rage; he could hear Comp giggling. He glared around him. There was nothing in sigjit but fake, and blue sky full of receptor glints. Never, never in his life had he been so angry, and Comp wouldn't stop giggling at him. He swatted at a darting bee. He wasn't as fast as Ahmuls. He crouched facing the doorway. Whoever came out of there first was in terminal danger. He could see red mist edging his field of vision, and at the same time there was this terrible, wonderful clarity about how he felt. It was an excuse for anything. A man brought to this feeling was as much a monarch as Tyrannosaurus Rex had ever been. He prowled, ihis thigjhs flexed, his arms like bridge cable. Pall came shyly and diffidently out of the Thorn tent. "Don't be mad, Jackson," she said. "I know you're upset." She stretched out her hand and touched his fist. "I know how it is. They used to treat me that way. But I just learned to ignore it. And I didn't give up; I kept trying to improve myself, and one day -- " Her eyes dropped. "Well, you saw how they finally admitted I was as good as them. Let me stay with you. I'll be good for you." Jackson looked up at the spiraling glints. "You see that?" he asked. "You hear?" "Certainly. Would you like to see an actuality of Petra Jovans?" Jackson shivered. "No. Don't ever show me Petra Jovans. If I ever want to see her I'll go look for myself." He added, looking at Pall, "And touch.". Pall was touching his hand to her mouth. "Please, Jackson," she said, "I really do understand you." Sweet Jesus, he thought, where and when are you ever -- "Oh, come on," he said, turning away from the tent, holding her wrist. She trotted gracefully beside him. "Where are we going?" "I don't know. Might find it, though." He got them out between the pavilions, and onto the fields. There was some kind of path through the hedgerows, and he followed that. Exteroceptors were keeping pace with them. "This is great stuff!" Comp was saying. "Setting out for the New Eden! Man and his mate, on the endless journey to -- " "Amsir urine," Jackson said. Pall stared at him. "What was that for?" What was it for? It always had to be for something, right? Jackson shook his head. She didn't see. She couldn't hear. But maybe he could make her. And maybe that was the one thing that would be worth his while to do in this place. He said: "You really want to know?" She nodded. "Very much." All right. Why not? If it didn't work it would pass the time, if it did he could -- he could -- He could do something that nobody had ever done before, was what he could; so he began: "The floor of the world is rippled like the bottom of the ocean, running out to the edges. Those edges are high, and they're cruel. At sunset, the eastern horizon is the far wall of the crater. It's black. Blueblack. The sunlight catches the top edge of the crater, and that's rust color. It makes a long, rust-colored arc that seems to dip down to left and right like a' wall, or a bow, or the trail of something that shot by without your noticing it, and all you can see is the trail it left. There are rocks standing on the crater floor, and the sunlight hitting them, just before it dies, turns them orange, too. The stars hang up there, hard and sharp. "That's where you head for when you're honning Amsirs." "In the beginning, I was running after this bird... " IF H U -- fS. Dear Editor; I have a suggestion. You have displayed extensive interest in developing new writing talent; I refer to such activities as editorials in your magazines, letters to the SFWA journal and of course, your monthly 'first" story in # (a most commendable institution since it was my birthplace). Why not allot a small box-'like space in one of your magazines for an 'idea mart?" The feature could be epigrammatic in character. The following examples are igiven for purposes of illustration only -- no claim is made for #. Consider a planet where there are extensive geological structures of crystallized virus. #. It is everyone's patriotic duty to delay the thermodynamic heat death of the universe. #. Title; Not Responsible for Lost Articles. #. A story whose elapsed "real time" is, say, # seconds. #-# seconds? Contributions could be either readers who would like to see a particular idea developed or writers who have an idea which they feel is just not their dish of tea. Now, of course no writer can live professionally by feeding exclusively on the ideas of others, but a beginning writer or someone lying becalmed on the sea of literary endeavor might pick up just enough momentum from a timely suggestion to start his own gears grinding. Naturally, the purpose of your editorial labors is to prepare a product that will appeal to readers -- not to conduct a writers' symposium. However, I feel that such an idea mart would in fact exert its primary appeal to readers. You might not increase paid circulation because of it, but you'd probably have the best-thumbed SF magazine on the newsstand ! -- W. I. McLaughlin, # Sixth Street, Albany, California. # How about that? If anybody has ideas for the "Idea Mart", send them along and we'll print the best of them. Everybody understand the rules? Once they're printed they belong to anybody who wants to use them. A good way to start might be with, "Say, why doesn't somebody write a science-fiction story that -- "... and then go on from there. Who knows? The Hugo-winner of # may come from your snggestion! -- Editor,    Dear Editor: Did you know that you are contributinig to the breakdown of my mental health? At one time I was of the opinion that a certain other SF Magazine was the most outstanding magazine to come down the pike in many moons. But the last year has been driving me around the bend. Such stories as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Dam Nuisance, Earthhlood, Arena, A Relic of Empire and Starpath have caused me to undertake a serious re-evaluation of the number one position. Now the other magazine is still very good, but the choice between the two of you is very difficult to say the least. This is my dilemma. My loyalty to the previous leader is conflicting with my anticipation whenever I see the new issue of If on the stands. Loyalty says nay, but anticipation says yea. So I guess ITl just have to learn to live with it. And, if you continue to maintain your high level of fiction, I know I shall. Thank you, gentlemen, for much pleasure I -- Joseph J. Miller, # East #th Street, Okmulgee, Oklahoma.    Dear Editor: Why are so many people turned off to science fiction?... Must be some way to turn them on. Any ideas?" I'm glad you asked. I started my love affair with science fiction back in the last half of the #'s. The Crescent Department Store in Spokane, Washington, was the only place in town that I knew of where I could be fairly sure of finding s-f magazines or, rarely, a book. The s-f stuff was right out on the stands in plain sight, but the saleswoman tended to look slightly embarrassed when they took my #c or #c (or # for a book), and they carefully wrapped up my purchase (though Saturday Review or Atlantic left the store nude) so that I could hide my shame. In short, a nice girl simply didn't parade her i)oor taste... or possibly her poor intelligence. S-f was something like the family idiot; you might sympathize and sell the family food and clothing for the poor thing, but they bought anonymously and kept the creature decently locked in the cupola room. But I persisted. My addiction finally became respectable, even admirable in some quarters. When my husband and I went to Richland (the residential town by Hanford atomic works) where we counted some half-dozen or more Ph.D.'s to the block, we toe': the last step: a taste for s-f was a "doesn't-everyone?" thing. I still buy magazines and books and haunt libraries, but frankly I see few stories that are up to those of the #'s and #'s. I've been reduced to re-reading from my own library. Take a look at the stories of those times. A simple secret: The authors had a story to tell, built up by extrapolation, around characters who seemed "real" and with whom the reader could identify. The authors might be "drawing a moral to adorn a tale": as in Space Merchants... whither are we wending in a society so ruled by Madison Avenue techniques and trends? Or in Caves of IF Steel... what will be the ultimate problems of our growing megaloplitan culture? Or in Search the Skies... will the time come, with increasing population, that gene drift in an increasingly in-bred world will make earth-population monstrous? But moral or not, the story was paramount. The authors were not mounting soap-boxes as professors suffering from suppuration of the typewriter. Too many of the books (not to speak of the short stories which tag along in the footprints of their betters) seem , to me to be busily selling the author's latest fixation. The Heinlein who could write (and did write) Day After Tomorrow (Sixth Column) or Puppet Masters or Door Into Summer is the same Heinlein who now turns out The Moon Is a Harsh MistresSy or that book whose name slips my mind about the family that is plunged into a parrallel world by an atomic bomb where a colored race breeds plump little white maidens for dinner. In both the last two named, Heinlein seems more busy being sociology professor than a story-teller. I enjoy studying. While I've taken no graduate courses in the past # years, we will have ten or twelve professional journals of one sort or another coming to our home, and I read those and a good deal of material that would qualify as "thinkpieces." But when I totter off to bed after a day of housework, being chauffeur to kid-and-husband contingent, and maybe even a bit of writing, I want io read a story until the rest of the family beds down. I don't want to be educated in someone's idea of the way new sociological standards or psychological patterns could create the best of all possible worlds. Especially I don't want to read a treatise masquerading as a story with characters who seem not at all like anyone I've ever known or could ever myself be. It's a pity, but when the author tries too hard to teach, he ceases to interest me. To be trite, if he wants to send a message, let him use Western Union. Nor do I want to read of weirdies of the Van Vogt school or purely imaginary-type fantasy planets around a purely-maybe sun. I may not be able to the characters I'm reading about... I howled like a lost pup all through the required math and statistics courses in graduate school, so how could I be a fabulous scientist? But not every little girl who thrilled over Cinderella was either pretty enough or charming enough to #e a Cinderella nor every little boy who read bigeyed of Robin Hood could beard and defeat the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. Still, Cinderella was a girl, wasn't she? And Robin Hood was once a boy? And the Once and Future King Arthur was once a boy who was pretty small potatoes around the court. I do not, you see, rule out all magic (or for the S-F stories, all future science). But I want it to be believable, possible if not completely probable... and I is the test of the efficiency of the extrapolation of the author. I realize the problem of the writer is becoming harder and harder as the boundaries are pushed outward. He can't lay a story on Mars now with every possibility of a satellite "proving" that there isn't enough air or water to keep a lichen alive... and maybe proving it before the story can hit the newsstands. I wrote a story once wihidi I never tried to sell (because it wasn't up to Kombluth  Poihl or Heinlein or Asimov) and ran across the manuscript the other day. It really wasn't bad... not, at least, compared to most of the stories of the past few years. But it was laid on Venus (or most of it was) ; and Venus, according to our probes, has something like high enough heat to melt lead. It rather looks as if the and nucleophoresis to shunt his characters clear out of the solar system. OR he can extrapolate and lay his stories in the far future of the Earth like Space Merchants... and believe me, he could do worse. But if the author takes that line, what can he write about? Door Into Summer and Immortality, Inc. pictures the scientific future, Space Merchants shows the Madison Avenue future carried to a reasonable conclusion, one whose name slips my mind shows a future completely Hnsured". Well, that's the problem. Someone has written of a time when overcrowded mankind has taken to the ocean, and if someone hasn't yet done so, someone can write a story of the seabottom dwellers (I think I've read a story about that.) But the field is limited by the expansion of space information, and the space flight so soon to come. After all this long letter, I've only said what I feel is wrong. I have offered no solution. I haven't seen a new Asimov, Pohl or Brackett story for ages. Heinlein and Blish and Clarke have slid off the tracks of the type of book where the story comes first. Maybe the solution is to call all the old hands into a building, lock the door after supplying them with the good old stories they used to write, and then say, "Pals, read these. Then go and do it again. A manuscript with the story first is your key to freedom." And then hope for the best. But what'll happen? You know: they'll write some educational tome with so much science or so much sociology or so much psychology in it that you can't find the story with a microscope and a fine filter. And with nothing else available, by golly, somebody will publish the tome and the  of the population that would read patent medicine bottle labels if nothing else offers" will buy it, read it. And weep. and stop asking us why the readership is falling off or, at least, not growing as it should. Some firstclass Pohls could turn the tide! -- Alma McCormick, # Pat Mell Road SW (B-#), Marietta, Georgia #. # Thanks for a good letter, Mrs. McClintock -- and thank all of you, for that matter. Seems to us the mail has been unusually interesting lately, which is why we squeezed out a little extra space this time and will try to do so again. Let's see. This month's "First", as you will see, is W. I. Johnstone's Family Loyalty. Next month we start a new Keith Laumer serial. Spaceman! -- not a Retief story (but we have some of those on hand to print shortly thereafter). And our next few issues will include Philip Jose Farmer, Samuel R. Delany, Andre Norton, Lester del Rey, Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers... yes, some first-rate stuff, we think. Join us and see! -- Editor. IF Do you have a restless urge to write? If so, you have much in common with successful authors. Read how I # Famous Writers are helping people turn a restless urge for self-expression into success in writing There's something different ahoul people who feel the urge to write. They have a spiritual hunger that .sets them apart -- even from family tmd friends. If you have known this burning need to write, OLi, too, may have the gift successful authors possess... the recurring ache to put into words your innermost thoughts, your own experiences. Max Shulman started writing because... it was write or bust." I aith Baldwin, after # novels, still says: "Vc never written exactly what I dreamed I'd write... you keep on trying." Successful authors like these know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know how to get started w riting, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago they joined forces with Rod wSerling, Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Kberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith and Bergen F.vans, to form the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they knew about writing into a remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing -- then specialize in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising Writing or Business Writing. Fach of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes over your work line by line, word by word, blue-penciling his changes right on your manuscript, much as an editor does with an established author. Then he returns it with a long letter of advice and guidance. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to the Reader's Digest, R "'d '?"ling S urge to write made him a If i'. ig r v' diamatisl (Twilight Zone, Palterns,  e for a Heavyweight) and won him six Fmmy awards. Ladies' Honie Journal, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and more than # other publications. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing ability worth developing, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. I I Famous Writers School I Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude I worth developing. Please mail me, I w ithout obligation, your Aptitude Test I and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs  Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Official Rand McNally Map taken from actual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed #" x # ". Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. k WORLDS OF A gripping new science-fiction novel by Keith Laumer by Terry Carr and many more in this big issue! Do you have a restless urge to write? If so, you have much in common with successful authors. Read how I # Famous Writers are helping people turn a restless urge for self-expression into success in writing There's something different about people who feel the urge to write. They have a spiritual hunger that sets them apart -- even from family and friends. If you have known this burning need to write, you, too, may have the gift successful authors possess... the recurring ache to put into words your innermost thoughts, your own experiences. Max Shulman started writing because... it was write or bust." Faith Baldwin, after # novels, still says: "I've never written exactly what I dreamed I'd write... you keep on trying." Successful authors like these know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know how to get started writing, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago they joined forces with Rod Serling, Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith and Bergen Evans, to form the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they knew about writing into a remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing -- then specialize in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising Writing or Business Writing. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes over your work line by line, word by word, blue-penciling his changes right on your manuscript, much as an editor does with an established author. Then he returns it with a long letter of advice and guidance. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to the Reader's Digest, Rod Serling s urge to write made him a leading TV dramatist Twilight Zone, Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight) and won him six Emmy awards. Ladies' Home Journal, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and more than # other publications. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing ability worth developing, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude worth developing. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perton , Production Manager Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin , Associate Editor Mavis Fisher , Circulation Director by Terry Carr by Charles W. Runyon by H. H. Hollis by Keith Laumer by A. Bertram Chandler by B. K. Filer by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF puolished monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert' M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York. N.Y. # IF  Editorial A part from our strange primate habit of polluting our environment by dirtying up our air and filthying up our water, we also have made great strides in polluting the environment of our senses. Consider the difference between a modem American (habitat and that of a medieval peasant. The peasant (who was, remember, the great bulk of humanity until just a few decades ago) lived in a world where the visual inputs were relatively familiar and relatively low-key... in spring and summer, all greens and browns; in fall, a few reds and russets; in winter, a blanket of white. Of the self-luminous visual objects in his universe, the only important one was the sun -- occasionally the quiet moon and stars, rarely a flickering rush to give him light enough to go to bed by or the fire that cooked his dinner. His auditory inputs were even milder -- a few times a year he might hear a thunderclap, but the rest of his life the sounds on his horizon were his own voice, the lowing of his cattle, the chopping of wood, the bells of the village church. But look at us today! Sights and sounds clamor for our attention from every quarter. We walk along a street in a city and cannot converse with the man walking next to us under a shout, because of traffic, construction, the rumble of a subway train under the street, the flutter of a helicopter overhead. The part of the country that most of us see is no better than the city -- because in fact it is a part of the city, the linking pseudopods that one city extends to another in the form of throughways and turnpikes, with the vehicles moving three times as fast and generating nine times as much noise. Even away from the highways we have the jets and the pistonplanes to assault our senses; and in our homes, offices and stores we have the sound of business machines, the chatter of talk, the ringing of bells, plus the filtering in of traffic, aircraft and construction noises through tissue-thin walls... and to make sure the sound threshold is high enough, we add Muzak, radio, TV and recorded sounds. At # decibels physical damage results. Ordinary city traffic regularly hits # decibels or higher; when a jet passes overhead or a particularly loud truck goes by, the #-decibel level comes perilously close. But apart from the sheer volume and variety of sound and sight, there is a very high proportion of it deliberately structured for attention-getting qualities -- the savage noises of an aspirin commercial on television, the blare of a soundtruck at election time, dizzying neon, even the colors of the fabrics we wear and the goods we buy. Highintensity, saturated colors are almost as much a modern invention as the machine-gun pop of the helicopFor sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. Dept. #-GA-#, Garden City, N.Y. #I book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation if not completely satis fied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as pay ment in full. privilege guaranteed, of course. ter overhead; among the other tranquil advantages of our peasant, his dyes and paints were almost as milted as his environment, with butternut browns and saffron yellows and an occasional rare glimpse of a crushed mineral in oil paint. It's a fact that too many sensory inputs can cause damage to the mind. Apparently early exposure helps -- while the brain is developing, the experience of handling multiple inputs prepares it for the task. But if the inputs increase too much after the brain is well formed they can lead to catastrophe. Example: Those who are blind from birth, and then have their sight restored in maturity almost invariably suffer from such acute depression that suicide is common. So maybe our children will be better able to cope with today's environment than we. As a matter of fact, the parent of any teen-ager can testify that the younger generation is thriving on a diet of prophylactic sound right now: witness the time when you hear a blast of noise from tbe teenager's room, and you race up there, and there he is, the TV going, the transistor shouting. "W-A-B-Cwangggg!" the record-player blaring, "FTin-chester Ca-tie-dral!"... and you ask him what the devil he's doing and he says, "Holy catfish, I'm doing my homework." But the trouble with that is that they will not be living in today's environment. They'll be living in tomorrow's. And if present trends are any indication, they will have noisier, more raucous, more strident inputs still. Look at the goodies in store for us ! Think only of the supersonic transport -- spreading a path of sonic boom fifty miles wide, clear across the country, with every flight. Not to mention rockets. Not to mention what the advertising men of tomorrow may come up with... focused to bring commercials to us in our bedrooms, or -- say, how about using smell ? W hat led us to these trains of thought is that, as this editorial is being written, we are in the second day of a fair-sized blizzard. Astonishing world! It's all white, even the air; all the manmade sounds are muted. In fact, the only sounds we consciously hear are as "white" as the snow -- the hiss of steam in the heating system, the blowing of the wind. So, in line with our policy of letting our readers in on the ground floor of economic opportunity, let us now propose a new product to manufacture. It should muffle sound and sight equally; it should come in fluffy white flakes and stay suspended in the air, blotting out harsh colors and lights, sopping up the most raucous noises. We think it could be made out of some sort of light foam plastic, blown into the air out of slow-moving trucks. We haven't decided on a name for it -- StyroSno? Snocron? Whatever it is, it should have the sexy modem sound of Coke or Citgo or Enovid. Because naturally we will want to advertise it. In fact, there's a real challenge for Mad Ave: to create the sort of advertising, gimmicks that will break right through the Snocron barrier, overwhelming its sound-deadening qualities with staccato shrieks and snaredrum tattoos, penetrating its curtain with -- well, let's see. Laser beams? Nuclear explosions? Never mind, we'll work that problem out somehow... IF IF  Serial He was shanghaied onto a weird trip across the starways -- and there would never be a return! I cold under my collar. There were some mouldy leaves drifted there. I I remember hearing somewhere that used the last of my lighter fluid tryfreezing to death is an easy way ing to get a little blaze going, but to go; but the guy that said that that turned out like everything else never tried it. I'd found myself a I'd tried lately. A fizzle. One thing little hollow where a falling-down about it: my feet were so numb from stone wall met a dirtbank and hunthe cold. I couldn't feel the blisters kered down in it; but the wall wasn't from the eighteen miles I'd hiked high enough to keep the wind off since my last ride dumped me at a or stop the sleet from hitting my crossroads, just before dawn, neck like buckshot and running down I had my collar turned up, for what good that might do, which wasn't much; the coat felt like wet newspaper. Both elbows were out of it, and two of the buttons were gone. Funny. Three weeks ago it had been decent-looking enough to walk into a second-class restaurant without attracting more than the usual quota of hostile stares. Three weeks. That's all it took to slide from a shaky toehold in the economic cycle all the way to the bottom. I'd heard of hitting the skids, but I never knew before just what it meant. Once you go over that invisible edge, it's downhill all the way. It had been almost a year since I'd quit school, when Uncle Jason died. What money I had went for the cheapest funeral the little man with the sweet, sad smile could bear to talk about. After that, I'd held a couple of jobs that had wafted away like the morning mist as soon as the three-months "tryout" was over and the question of regular wages came up. There'd been a few months of scrounging, then; mowing lawns, running errands, one-day stands as a carpenter's helper or assistant busboy while the regular man was off. I'd tried to keep up appearances, enough not to scare off any prospective employers, but the money barely stretched to cover food and what the sign said was a clean bed. Then one day I'd showed up looking just a little too thin, a little too hungry, the collar just a little too frayed. And now I was here, with my stomach making whimpering sounds to remind me of all the meals  it hadn't 'had laitely, as far as ever from where I was headed -- wherever that was. I didn't really have a destination. I just wanted to be where I wasn't. And I couldn't stay here. The wall was worse than no protection at all, and the wind was blowing colder and wetter all the time. I crawled out and made it back up the slope to the road. There were no headlights in sight; it wouldn't have helped if there were. Nobody was going to stop in a sleetstorm in the middle of nowhere to give a lift to a hobo like me. I didn't have any little sign to hold up, stating that I was a hardship case, that comfortable middle-class conformity was my true vocation, that I was an honest young fellow with a year of college who'd had a little hard luck lately. All I had was the clothes I stood in, a bad cough and a deep conviction that if I didn't get out of the weather, fast, by morning I'd be one of those dead-of-exposure cases they're always finding in alleys back of cut-rate liquor stores. I put my back to the wind and started off, hobbling on a couple of legs that ended somewhere below the knee. I didn't notice feeling tired any more, or hungry. I was just a machine somebody had left running. All I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other until I ran down. I saw the light when I came up over a rise, just a weak little spark, glowing a long way off in the bfg dark beyond the trees. I turned and started off across the open field toward it. IF Ten minutes later, I came up behind a big swaybacked barn with a new-looking silo beside it and a rambling two-story house beyond. The light was shining from a ground floor window. There was a pickup parked in the side yard near the bam, and a late-model Cadillac convertible, with the top down. Just looking at it made me ten degrees colder. I didn't have any idea of knocking on the door, introducing myself : "Billy Danger, sir. May I step inside and curl up in front of the fire?" -- and being invited to belly up to a chicken dinner. But there was the barn. And where there were bams, there was hay; and where there was hay, a man could snuggle down and sleep, if not warm, at least not out in the freezing rain. It was worth a try. The barn door looked easy enough: just warped boards hanging on big rusted-out hinges; but when I tried it, nothing budged. I looked closer and saw that the hinges weren't rotted after all; they were just made to look that way. I picked at a flake of paint on the door. There was bright metal underneath. That was kind of strange, but all it meant to me then was that I wouldn't be crawling into that haystack after all. The sleet was coming down thicker than ever now. I put my nose up and sniffed, caught a whiff of frying bacon and coffee that made my jaws ache. All of a sudden, my stomach remembered its complaint and tried to tie itself into a hard knot. I went back through tall weeds past some rusty iron that used to be farm machinery, and across a rutted drive toward the silo. I didn't know much about silos except that they were where you stored the corn, but at least it had walls and a roof. If I could get in there, I might find a dry spot to hide in. I reached a door set in the curved wall; it opened, and I slid inside, into dim light and a flow of warm air. Across the room, there was an inner door, standing open. I could see steps going up: glass steps on chrome-plated rails. The soft light and warm air were coming from there. I went up moving on instinct, like the first fish crawling out on land. I reached the top and was in a room full ofpipes and tubes and machinery and a smell like the inside of a TV set. Weary as I was, this didn't look like a place to curl up in. I made it up another turn of the spiral stair, came out in a space where big shapes like cotton bales were stacked, with dark spaces between them. There was a smell like a fresh-tarred road here. I groped toward the deepest shadow I could find, and my hand touched something soft. In the faint light from the stairwell it looked like mink or sable, except that it was an electric blue color. I didn't let that worry me. I crawled up on top of the stack and put my face down in the velvety fluff and let all the strings break at once. II I n the dream, I was a burglar, holed up in somebody else's house, hiding in the closet, and in a minute they'd find me and haul me out and ride me into town in a police car to sit under the lights and answer questions about every unsolved chickenstealing in the county in the past five years. The feet were coming up the stairs, coming closer. Somebody said something, and a woman's voice answered in a foreign language. They went away, and the dream faded... And then the noise started. It was a thin, high-pitched shrilling, like one of those whistles you call the dog with. It went right between my bones and pried at the joints. It got louder, and angrier, like bees boiling out of a hive, and I was awake now, and trying to get up; but a big hand came down and mashed me flat. I tried to get enough breath in to yell, but the air had turned to syrup. I just had time to remember the day back in Pineville when the Chewy rolled off the rack at Uncle Jason's gas station and pinned a man under the back bumper. Then it all went red, and I was someplace else, going over Niagara Falls in a big rubber balloon, wearing a cement life jacket. W hen I woke up, I heard voices... talking rot now. It's nothing to do with me." This was a man's voice, speaking with an English accent. He sounded as if he was a 'little amused by something. "I mark well t'was thee I charged with the integrity o' the vessel!" This one sounded big and mad. He had a strange way of talking, but I could understand most of the words all right. Then a girl spoke, but in another language. She had a nice, clear, sweet voice. She sounded worried. "No harm done, Desroy." The first man gave a soft laugh. "And it might be a spot of good luck, at that. Perhaps he'll make a replacement for Jongo." ' "I don't omit thy ill-placed japery, Orfeo. Rid me this urchin, ere you vex me out of all humor!" "A bit of a sticky wicket, that, old boy. He's still alive, you know. If I nurse him along -- " "How say you? What stuff is this! Art thou the parish comfort, to wax chirurgeonly o'er this whelp?" "If he can be trained -- " "You o'ertax my patience, Orfeo! I'd make a chough of as deep chat!" "He'll make a gun boy, mark my words." "Bah! you more invest the misadventure than a market-place trinket chafferer! In any case, the imp's beyond recovery!" Part of me wanted to just skip over this part of the dream and sink back down into the big, soft black that was waiting for me, but a little voice somewhere back behind my eyes was telling me to do something fast, before bad things happened. I made a big effort and got one eyelid open. Everything looked red and hazy. The three of them were standing ten feet away, near the door. The one with the funny way of speaking was big, built solid as a line-backer, with slicked-back black hair and a little mustadhe. He wore a loose jacket covered with pockets; he looked like Clark Gable playing Frank Buck. IF The other man was not much older than me; he had a rugged jawline, a short nose, curly reddish-brown hair, wide shoulders, slim hips in a form-fitting gray coverall. He was pretty enough to be a TV interne. The girl... I had to stop and get the other eyelid up. No girl could be that pretty. She had jet black hair and smoky gray eyes big enough to go wading in; an oval face, mellow ivory-colored skin, features like one of those old statues. She was wearing a white coverall, and the form it fit was enough to break your heart. I made a move to sit up, and pain broke over me like a wave. It seemed to be coming mostly from my left arm. I took hold of the wrist with my other hand and got up on one elbow with no more effort than it takes to swing a safe in your teeth. Nobody seemed to notice. When the whirly lights settled down, they were still standing there, still arguing. "... a spot of bother, Desroy, but it's worth a go." "Methinks sloth instructs thee, naught else!" The big fellow turned and stamped off. The young fellow grinned at the girl. "Just twisting the old boy's tail. Actually, he's right. You nip off and soothe him down a bit. I'll attend to this." I slid over the edge of my nest and kind of fell to the floor. At the noise, they both whirled on me. I got hold of the floor and swung it around under me. "I just came in to get out of the weather," I meant to say, but it came out as a sort of gargly sound. The man took a quick step toward me and over his shoulder said, "Pop off now, Milady." He had a hand on a thing clipped to his belt. I didn't need a set of technical specifications to tell me it was some kind of gun. The girl moved up quickly and put her hand on his arm. "Orfeo -- the poor creature suffers!" She spoke English with an accent that made it sound like music. He moved her around behind him. "He might be dangerous, Now do be a good child and toddle off." "I'm... not dangerous," I managed to get the words out. The smile was less successful. I felt sick. But I wasn't going to come unfed jn front of her . I got my back against the pile of furs and tried to stand up straight. "So you can talk," the man said. He was frowning at me. "Damn me if I know what to do with you." He seemed to be talking to himself. "Just... let me rest a few minutes... and I'll be on my way..." I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears like bongo drums. "Why did you come aboard?" the man snapped the question at me. "What did you think you'd find here?" "I was cold," I said. "It was warm here." He snorted. "Letting yourself in for a devilish change of scene, weren't you?" His first words were beginning to filter through. "What is this place?" I asked him. "You're aboard Lord Desroy 's yacht. And he's not keen on contraband holed up in the aft lazaret." i C A boat?" I felt I'd missed something somewhere. The last I remembered was a farmhouse, in the middle of nowhere. "You must be fooling me." I tried to show him a smile to let him know I got the joke. "I don't feel any waves." "She's a converted ketch, stressedfield primaries, ion-pulse auxiliaries, fitted with full antiac and variable G gear, four years out of Zeridajh on a private expedition. Every square inch of her is allocated to items in specific support of her mission in life, which brings us back to you. What's your name?" he asked. v "Billy Danger. I don't understand all that about a catch." "Just think of her as a small spaceship." He sounded impatient. "Now, Billy Danger, it's up to me to -- " "Spaceship? You mean like they shoot astronauts off in?" Orfeo laughed. "Astronauts, eh? Couple of natives paddling about the shallows in a dug-out canoe. No, Billy Danger, this is a deep space yacht, capable of cruising for many centuries at multiple-light velocities. At the moment, she's on course for a world very distant from your native Earth." "Wait a minute," I said. I wanted everything to slow down for just a second while I got caught up with it. "I don't want to go to any star. I just want out of here." I tried a step and had to lean against the bale beside me. "Just let me off, and I'll disappear so quick you'll think you dreamed me." "I'm afraid that's not practical," Orfeo cut me off short. "Now you're here, the question is what to do with you. As you doubtless heard, Lord Desroy's in favor of putting you out the lock. As for myself, I have hopes of making use of you. Know anything about weapons? Hunted much?" "Just let me off," I said. "Anywhere at all. I'll walk home." "You must answer my questions promptly, Billy Danger! WTiat becomes of you depends on how well you answer them." uj never hunted," I said. My breath was short, as if I'd run a long way. "That's all right. Nothing to unlearn. How old are you?" "Nineteen, next April." "Amazing. You look younger. Are you quick to learn, Billy Danger?" "It's kidnapping," I said. "You can't just kidnap a man. There's laws..." "Mind your tongue, Billy Danger! I'll tolerate no insolence, you'd best understand that at the outset! As for law, Lord Desroy makes the law here. This is his vessel. With the exception of the Lady Raire and myself, he owns every atom aboard her, including stowaways." A sudden thought occurred to me, like an ice pick through the heart. "You're not... Earthmen, are you?" "Happily, no." "But you look human; you speak English." "Of course we're human. Much older stock than your own unfortuIF nate branch. We've spent a year on your drab little world, going after walrus, elephant, that sort of thing. Now, that's enough chatter, Billy Danger. Do you think you can learn to be a proper gunbearer?" "How long -- before we go back?" "To Earth? Never, I trust. Now, see here! Don't fret about matters out of your control! Your job is to keep me happy with you. If you can do that, you'll stay alive and well. If not..." He let the rest hang. "But then, I'm sure you'll try your best, eh, Billy Danger?" It was crazy, but the way he said it, I believed every word of it. The thing I had to do right now was stay alive. Then, later, I could worry about getting home. "Sure," I said. "I'll try." "Right. That's settled, then." Orfeo looked relieved, as if he'd just found an excuse to put off a mean chore. "You were lucky, you know. You took eight gravities unprotected. A wonder you didn't break a few bones." I was still holding my left arm by the wrist. I eased it around front, and felt the sharp point poking out through my sleeve. "Who said I didn't?" I asked him and felt myself folding like a windblown newspaper. in I woke up feeling different. At first I couldn't quite dope out what it was. Then I got it: I was clean, fresh-shaved, sweet-smelling, tucked in between sheets as crisp as new dollar bills. And I felt good. I tingled all over, as if I'd just had a needle shower and a rubdown. The room I was in was a little low-ceilinged cubby hole with nothing much in it but the pallet I was lying on. I remembered the arm then and pulled back a loose yellow sleeve somebody had put on me. Outside of a little swelling and a bright pink scar under a clear plastic patch, it was as good as new. Something clicked, and a little door in the wall slid back. The man named Orfeo stuck his head in. " "Good, you're awake. About time. I'm about to field-strip the Z-guns. You'll watch." I got up and discovered that my knees didn't wobble any more. I felt strong enough to run up a wall. And hungry. Just thinking about ham and eggs made my jaws ache. Orfeo tossed me a set of yellow coveralls from a closet back of a sliding panel. "Try these. I cut them down from Jongo's old cape." I pulled them on. The cloth was tough and light and smooth as glove silk. "How are you feeling?" Orfeo was looking me up and down. "Fine," I said. "How long did I sleep?" "Ninety-six hours. I doped you a bit." I ran a finger over my new scar. "I don't understand about the arm. I remember it as being broken. Broken bad." "A Hunter has to know a little field medicine," he said. "While I was about it, I gave you a good worming and balanced up your body IF chemistry." He shook his head. "Bloody wonder you could walk, the rot that boiled out of you. Bloody microbe culture. How's your vision?" I blinked at the wall. If there'd been a fly there, I could have counted his whiskers. "Good," I said. "Better than it's ever been." "Well, you're no good to me sick," he said, as if he had to apologize. "Thanks," I said. "For the arm, and the bath and the pretty yellow pajamas, too." "Don't thank me. The Lady Raire took care of that part." "You mean... the girl...?" "She's the Lady Raire, Jongo! And I'm Sir Orfeo. As for the washup and the kit, someone had to do it. You stank to high heaven. Now come along. We've a great deal to cover if you're to be of any use to me on the hunt." T he armory was a small room lined with racks full of guns that weren't like any guns I'd ever seen before. There were handguns, rifles, rocket-throwers, some with short barrels, some with just a bundle of glass rods, some with fancy telescopic sights, one that looked like a flare pistol with a red glass thermometer on the side, and there were a few big elephant guns of Earth manufacture. The whole room glittered like Tiffany's front window. I ran a finger along a stock made of polished purple wood, with fittings like solid gold. "It looks like Mr. Desroy goes first class." "Keep your hands off the weapons until you know how to service them." Sir Orfeo poked buttons. A table tilted up out of the floor, and a section of ceiling over it glared up brighter than before. He flipped a switch, and the lock-bar on a rack snapped up, and he lifted out a heavy-looking, black-stocked item with a drum magazine and three triggers and a flared shoulder plate, chrome plated. "This is a Z-gun," he said. "It's a handy all-around piece, packs .# megatonseconds of firepower, weight four pounds three ounces." He snapped a switch on the side back and forth a couple of times and handed the gun across to me. "What's a megatonsecond?" I asked him. "Enough power to vaporize the yacht if it were released at one burst. At full gain the Z-gun will punch a #mm hole through an inch of flint steel at a range of five miles with a to tell me a lot more about Z-guns, crater-rifles, infinite repeaters, filament pistols. At the end of it I didn't know much more about the weapons Lord Desroy would be using on his hunt, but I was feeling sorry for whatever it was he was after. S ir Orfeo took me back to the little room I'd waked up in, showed me how to work a gadget that delivered a little can of pink oatmeal, steaming hot. I sniffed it; it smelled like seaweed. I tasted it. It was flat and insipid, like paper mache. "Sir Orfeo, I hate to complain about a free gift," I said. "But are you sure this was meant for a man to eat?" "Jongo wasn't really a man." I kind of goggled at him. "What was he?" "A Lithian. Very good boy, Jongo. With me for a long time." He glanced around the room. "Damned if it doesn't give me a touch of something-or-other to see you in his kennel." "Kennel?" "Nest, pitch, call it cabin if you like." Sir Orfeo beetled a fine eyebrow at me. "Don't be putting on airs, Billy Danger. I've no patience with it." He left me there to dine in solitude. Afterwards, he gave me a tour of the ship. He was showing me a fancy leather and inlay lounge when Lord Desroy came in. "Ah, there you are, Desroy," Orfeo said in a breezy way. "Just occurred to me you might like to have Jongo -- ah, Billy Danger, that is -- do a bit of a dust-up here in the lounge." "How now? Hast lost thy wits, Orfeo? Hie the moon-calf hence i' the instant!" "Steady on, Desroy. Just thought I'd ask -- " "I've a whim to chide the varlet for his impertinence!" the big boss barked and took a step toward me. Orfeo pushed me behind him. "Don't blame the boy. My doing, you know," he said in a nice cool tone. "Thy role of advocate for this scurvy patch would want credit, an I stood not witness on't!" We went on down the stairs. Instead of looking mad, Sir Orfeo was smiling and humming between his teeth. He dropped the smile when he saw me looking at him. "I advise you to stay out of Lord Desroy's way, Jongo. For now, he's carefully nutured reputation for temperament, you see. If I get upset the game might turn out to be scarce. But if you ruffle his feathers by being underfoot, he might act hastily." "He has a strange way of talking," I said. "What kind of accent is that?" "Eh? Oh, it's a somewhat archaic dialect of English. Been some three hundred years since his lordship last visited Earth. Now, that's enough gossip, Jongo -- " "It's Billy Dan -- " "I'll call you Jongo. Shorter. Now let's get along to Hold F, and you can earn your keep by polishing a spot of brightwork in Environmental." The polishing turned out to be a job of scraping slimy deposits off the valves and piping. Sir Orfeo left me to it while he went back up and joined in whatever they were doing on the other side of the forbidden door. IV O ne day Sir Orfeo showed me a star chart and pointed out the relative locations of Earth, Gar #, the world we were headed for at the moment, and Zeridajh, far in toward the big gob of stars at the center of the galaxy. "We'll never get there," I said. "I read somewhere it takes a hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy; Gar # must be about ten light-years IF away; and Zeridojh is thousands!" He laughed. "The limiting velocity of light is a myth, Jongo," he said. "Like the edge of (the world your early sailors were afraid they'd fall over -- or the sound barrier you used to worry about. This vessel could reach Zeridajh in eighteen months, if she stretched her legs." I wanted to ask him why Lord Desroy picked such a distant part of the sky to go hunting in, but I'd learned not to be nosy. Whatever the reasons were, they were somebody's secret. After my first few weeks away from all time indicators, I began to develop my own internal time-sense, independent of the three-hour cycles that were the Galactic shipboard standard. I could sense when an hour had passed, and looking back, I knew, without knowing how I knew, just about how long I'd been away from Earth. I might have been wrong -- there was no way to check -- but the sense was very definite, and always consistent. I had been aboard just under six weeks when Sir Orfeo took me to the personal equipment room one day and fitted me out with thermal boots, leggings, gloves, a fancy pair of binocular sunglasses, breathing apparatus, a back-pack and a temperature suit. He spent an hour fussing over me, getting everything fitted just right. Then he told me to go and tie down in my digs. I did, and for the next hour the yacht shook and shrilled and thumped. When the noise stopped, Sir Orfeo came along and yelled to me to get into my kit and come down to F Hold. When I got there, walking pretty heavy with all the gear I was carrying or had strapped to my back, (he was there checking items off a list. "A little more juldee next time, Jongo," he snapped at me. "Come along now; I'll want your help in getting the ground-car out shipshape." It was a powerful-looking vehicle, wide, squatty, with tracks like a small tank, a plastic bubble dome over the top. There was a roomy compartment up front full of leather and inlaid wood and brightwork, and a smaller space behind, with two hard seats. Lord Desroy showed up in his Frank Buck bush jacket and jodhpurs and a wide-brimmed hat; the Lady Raire wore her white coverall. Sir Orfeo was dressed in his usual tailored gray with a filament pistol strapped, to his hip and a canteen and bush knife on the other side. We all wore temperature suits, which were like long-handled underwear, under the coveralls. "Keep your helmet closed, Jongo," Sir Orfeo told me. "Toxic atmosphere, you know." He pushed a button and a door opened up in the side of the hold, and I was looking out at a plain bluish grass. A wave of heat rolled in, and the thermostat in my suit clicked and right away it turned cool against my skin. Sir Orfeo started up, and the car lifted a couple of inches from the floor, swung around and slid out under the open sky of a new world. F or the next five hours I perched on my seat with my mouth open, taking in the sights: the high, blue-black sky, strange trees like overgrown parsley sprigs, the leathery grass that stretched to a horizon that was too far away -- and the animals. The things we were after were big crab-armored monstrosities, pale purple and white, with mouths full of needle-pointed teeth and horns all over their faces. Lord Desroy shot two of them, stopping the oar and going forward on foot. I guess it took courage, but I didn't see the point in it. Each time, he and Sir Orfee made a big thing of hacking off one of the horns and taking a lot of pictures and congratulating each other. The Lady Raire just watched from the car. She didn't seem to smile much. We loaded up and went on to another world then, and Milford shot a thing as big as a diesel locomotive. Sir Orfeo never talked about himself or the other members of the party, or the world they came from, but he explained the details of the hunt to me, gave me pointers on tracking and approaching, told me which gun to use for different kinds of quarry. Not much of it stuck. After the fourth or fifth hunt, it all got a little stale. "This next world is called Gar #," Sir Orfeo, woke me up to tell me after a long stretch in space. "Doesn't look like much; dry, you know; but there'll be keen hunting. I found this one myself, running through tapes made by a survey team a few hundred years ago. The fellows we'll be going after they called dire-beast. You'll understand why when you see the beggars." He was right about Gar #. We started out across a rugged desert of dry-baked pink and tan and yellow clay, fissured and cracked by the sun, with points of purplish rock pushing up here and there, a line of jagged peaks for a horizon. It didn't look like game country to me, but then I wasn't the Hunter. The sun was high in the sky, too bright to look at, a little smaller than the one I was used to. It was cool and comfortable inside the car; it hummed along a couple of feet above the ground, laying a dust trail behind it from the air blast it was riding on. The tracks were for hills that were too steep for the air cushion to climb. About a mile from the yacht, I looked back; it was just a tiny glint, like a lost needle, among all that desolation. Up front, on the other side of the glass panel, Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo and the Lady Raire chatted away in their odd language, and every now and then said something in that strange brand of English they spoke. I could hear them through a speaker hookup in the back of the car. If I'd had something to say, I don't know whether they could have heard it or not. A fter two hours run, we pulled up at the top of a high escarpment. Sir Orfeo opened the hatch, and we all got out. I remembered Sir Orfeo had told me always to stay close with his gun when we were out of the car so I got out one of the crater rifles and came up behind them in time to see Sir Orfeo point. IF "There -- by the double peak at the far end of the fault-line!" He snapped his goggles up and whirled to start back and almost slammed into me. A very thin slice of an instant later I was lying on my back with my head swimming, looking into the operating end of his filament pistol. "Never come up behind me with a weapon in your hand!" I got up, with my head still whanging from the blow he'd hit me, and followed them to the car, and we went tearing back down the slope the way we'd come. It was a fast fifteen-minute run out across the flats toward where Sir Orfeo had seen whatever it was he saw. I had my binocular goggles on and was looking hard, but all I saw was the dusty plain and the sharp rock spires, growing taller as we rushed toward them. Then Sir Orfeo swung the car to the left in a wide curve and pulled to a stop behind a low ridge. "Everybody out!" he snapped and popped the hatch up and was over the side. "Don't sit there and brood, Jongo!" He was grinning, excited and happy now. "My crater rifle; Z-guns for his lordship and Lady Raire!" I handed the weapons down to him, stock-first, the way he'd told me. "You'll carry the extra crater and a filament pistol," he said and moved back up front to go into conference with the others. I strapped on the gun and grabbed the rifle and hopped down just as Sir Orfeo and Lord Desroy started off. The Lady Raire followed about ten feet back, and I took up my post offside to the right about five yards. My job was to keep that relative position to Sir Orfeo, no matter what, until he yelled, "close!" Then I was to move in quick. That was about all I knew about a hunt. That, and don't come up behind Sir Orfeo with a gun. The sun still seemed to be about where it had been when we started out. There was a little wind blowing from behind, keeping a light cloud of dust rolling along ahead. It seemed to me I'd heard somewhere that you were supposed to sneak up on game from upwind, but that wasn't for me to worry about. All I had to do was maintain my interval. We came into a slight rise of ground. The wind was picking up, driving a thick curtain of dust ahead. For a few seconds I couldn't see anything but that yellow fog swirling all around. I stopped and heard a sound, a deep thoom! thooml thooml . "Close! Damn your eyes, Jongo, close!" Sir Orfeo shouted. I ran toward the sound of his voice, tripped over a rock, and went flat. I could hear Lord Desroy shouting something and the thoom-thoom, louder than before. I scrambled up and ran on forward, and as suddenly as it had blown up, the gale died and the dust rolled away from us. Sir Orfeo was twenty feet off to my left, with Lord Desroy beside him. I changed direction and started toward them, and saw Sir Orfeo make a motion, and Lord Desroy brought his rifle up and I looked where he was aiming and out of the dust cloud a thing came galloping that was right out of #? a nightmare. It was big -- twenty, thirty feet high, running on two legs that seemed to have too many knees. The feet were huge snowshoelike pads, and they rose and fell like something in a slow-motion movie, driving dust from under them in big spurts, and at each stride the ground shook. A second one came charging out of the dust cloud, and it was bigger than the first one. Their hides were a glistening greenish brown, except where they were coated with dust, and there was a sort of cape of ragged skin flapping from the narrow shoulders of one as he ran, and I thought he must be shedding. Thick necks rose from the shoulders, with wide, flat heads that were all mouth, like the bucket of a dragline. And then a third, smaller edition came scampering after the big fellows. A ll this happened in maybe a second or two. I had skidded to a halt and was standing there in a half crouch, literally paralyzed. I couldn't have moved  if an express train had been coming straight at me. And these were worse than express trains. They were about a hundred and fifty yards away when Lord Desroy fired. I heard the Z-gun make a sharp whickering noise and an electric blue light flashed up and lit the rocks like lightning, and the lead monster broke stride and veered off to the left, running irregularly now. He leaned, losing his balance, but still driving on, His neck whipped back and up and the head flailed offside as he went down, hit, bounced half upright, his legs still pumping, then went into a tumble of flailing legs and neck and the dust closed over him, and only then I heard the shuddering boom he made hitting the ground. And the second one was still coming, closer now than number one had been when he was hit, and the little fellow -- a baby, only fifteen feet high -- sprinted up alongside him, tilted his head sideways and snapped at his big brother's side. I saw a flash of white as the hide and muscle tore. Then the little one was skidding to a halt on his haunches, his big jaws working hard over the bite he'd gotten, while the one that had supplied the snack came on, looming up as high as a twostory house, black blood streaming down his flank, coming straight at Lord Desroy. I saw the Lady Raire then, just beyond him, right in the path of the charge; and still I couldn't move. Lord Desroy had his gun up again and it flickered and flashed and made its slapping noise and the biped's head, that it had been carrying high on its long neck, drooped and the neck went slack and the head came down and hit the ground and the big haunches, with the big feet still kicking, went up and over high in the air in a somersault and slammed the ground with a smash like two semi's colliding, and flipped up and went over again with one leg still pumping, and then it was looping the loop on the ground, kicking up a dust cloud that hid everything beyond it. "Watch for baby!" Sir Orfeo yelled, and I could barely hear his IF voice through the thudding and pounding. Then the little one stalked out of the dust, tossing his head to help him swallow down what he had in his mouth. Sir Orfeo brought his gun up, and the cub was coming straight at me, and the gun tracked him and went off with a flat crackkk! that kicked a pit the size of a washtuib in the rock beside him, and the young one changed direction and trotted off, and Sir Orfeo let him go. The dust was blowing away now, except for what number two was still kicking up with one foot that was twitching, still trying to run. Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo went over to it, and the Hunter used his pistol to put it out of its misery. It went slack, and a gush of fluid sluiced out of its mouth, and then suddenly, it was quiet. "In sooth, the beast raised a din to make the ground quake," Lord Desroy called in a light-hearted tone. He walked around the creature, and Sir Orfeo went over to the other one, and about then I got my joints unlocked and trotted after him. Sir Orfeo looked up as I came up and gave me a grin. "I think perhaps you'll make a gun-boy yet, Jongo," he said. "You were a bit slow coming up, but you held steady as a rock during the charge." And for some reason I felt kind of ashamed of myself, knowing how it had really been. V L ord Desroy spent quarter of an hour taking movies of the dead animals; then we made the hike back. "We were lucky, Desroy," Sir Orfeo told him as we settled Into our seats. "Takes a bit of doing to knock over a fine brace on the first stalk! I suggest we go back to the yacht now and call it a day." "What foolery's this?" Lord Desroy boomed out. "Wi' a foison o' quarry to hand, ye'd skulk back to thy comforts wi'out further sweat or endeavor?" "No use to start pushing our luck -- " "Prithee, spare! Ye spoke but now of bull-devil, lurking in the crags yonder." "Plenty of time to go after them later." Orfeo was still smiling, but there was an edge to his voice. He didn't like to have anyone argue with him about a hunt. "A pox on't!" Lord Desroy slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair. "Dost dream I'd loiter in my chambers with game abounding? Drive on, I say, or I'll take the tiller self!" Sir Orfeo slapped the drive lever in and the engines started up with a howl. "I was thinking of the Lady Raire," he said. "If you're that deadset on running us all ragged, very well! Though what the infernal rush is, I'm sure I don't know!" As usual, the Lady Raire sat by quietly, looking cool and calm and too beautiful to be real. Lord Desroy got out a silver flask and poured out yellow wine for her and himself, then lolled back in his chair and gazed out at the landscape rushing past.  A n hour brought us to the foothills of the range that had beeS visible from the yacht. The going was rougher here; we switched over to tracks for the climb. Sir Orfeo had quit humming to himself and was beginning to frown, as if maybe he was thinking about how nice it would be to be back in his apartment aboard the yacht, having a bath and a nice dinner, instead of being in for another four hours, minimum, in the car. We came out on a high plateau, and Sir Orfeo pulled the car under a steep escarpment and opened up and climbed down without a word to anybody. I had his crater rifle ready for him; I took the other guns and got out and Lord Desroy looked around and said something I didn't catch. "They're here right enough," Sir Orfeo answered him, sounding mad. He walked off, and Lord Desroy and the girl trailed. I had to scramble up on rough ground to get to my proper position off to Sir Orfeo's right. He was headed into a narrow cut that curved up and away in deep shadow. The sun still seemed to be in the same spot, directly overhead. My suit kept me comfortable enough, but the heat reflecting back from the stone scalded my face. Sir Orfeo noticed me working my way along up above him and snarled something about where the devil did I think I was going; I didn't try to answer that. I'd gotten myself onto a ledge that ran along twenty feet above the trail, with no way down. I stayed abreast of Sir Orfeo, awaiting a chance to rejoin them. We kept going this way, nobody talking, the happy look long gone from Lord Desroy's face now, the Lady Raire walking just to his left, Sir Orfeo out in front twenty paces. The trail did a sharp jog to the left, and I had to scramble to catch up; as I did, I saw something move on the rocks up ahead. Being above the rest of them, I had a view past the next outcropping that hung out over the trail; the movement I saw was just a flicker of something in the shadows, spread out flat on the rock like a giant leech. I felt my heart take a jump and jam itself up in my throat and I tried to yell and choked and tried again: "Sir Orfeo! Up ahead! On the right!" He stopped dead, swung his gun around and up, at the same time motioned to the others to halt. Lord Desroy checked for just a moment; then he started on up toward Sir Orfeo. The animal -- creature -- thing -- whatever it was -- moved again. Now I could see what looked like an eye near the front, surrounded by a fringe of stiff reddish hairs. I got just the one quick look, before I heard the whisper of a Z-gun from below, and the thing jerked back violently and disappeared into black shadow. Down below, Lord Desroy was lowering his gun. "Well, that tears it!" Sir Orfeo said in a too-loud voice. "Nice bit of shooting, Desroy! You failed to keep to your position, fired without my permission and then succeeded in wounding the beggar! Anything else you'd care to try before we go into that cranny after him?" IF "Methinks you skirt insolence, Orfeo," Lord Desroy started. "Not intentionally, as I'm damned!" Orfeo's face was red; I could see the flush from where I was perched, twenty feet above him. "I'll remind you I'm master of the Hunt, I'm responsible for the safety of the party -- " "I'm out of patience wi' cautious counsel!" Lord Desroy roared. "Shall I be merely cheated o my sport whilst I attend you swoons?" Sir Orfeo started to answer that, then caught himself and laughed. " 'Pon my word, you have a way about you, milord! Now, I suggest we give over this tomfoolery and give a thought to how we're going to get him out of there!" He turned and squinted up toward the place where the thing had disappeared. "I warrant ye make mockery of me," Lord Desroy growled. He jerked his head in my direction. "Dispatch yon natural to draw forth the beast!" Sir Orfeo looked up, too, then back at his boss. "The boy's new, untrained," he said. "That's a risky bit of business -- " "D'ye aver thy gun-boy lacks spirit, then?" Sir Orfeo gave me a sharp look. "By no means," he said. "He's steady enough. Jongo!" His voice changed tone. "Press on a few yards, see if you can rout the blighter out." I didn't move. I just squatted where I was and stared down at him. The next instant, something smashed against the wall beside my head and knocked me sprawling. I came up spitting dust, with my head ringing, and Lord Desroy's second shot crashed close enough to drive stone chips into my cheek. "Sir Orfeo!" I got the yell out. "He's shooting at meP I heard Sir Orfeo shout, and I rolled over and looked for a hole to dive into and in that instant saw the wounded leech-thing flow down across the rock, disappear for a second behind a spur, come into view again just above the frail, about thirty feet above Lord Desroy, between him and the Lady Raire. It must have made some sound I couldn't hear. Before I could shout Lord Desroy whirled and brought his gun up and it crackled and vivid shadows winked on the rocks. The animal leaped out and down, broad as a blanket, leathery dark, right into the gun. Lord Desroy stood his ground, firing steadily into the leechthing until the instant it struck full on him, covering him completely. It gathered itself together and lurched toward the Lady Raire, standing all alone in the trail, sixty feet behind where I was. As it moved, it left a trail of what was left of Lord Desroy. Sir Orfeo had fired once, while the thing was in the air. He ran toward it, stopped and took aim and fired again. I saw a movement off to the right, up the trail, and a second leech thing was there coming up fast behind Sir Orfeo, big as a hippopotamus, wide and flat and with its one eye gleaming green. I yelled. He didn't look up, just stood where he was, back to the leech, firing, and firing again. The wounded leech was close to the Lady Raire now, and I saw then that she had no gun, and I remembered that Lord Desroy had taken it and had been carrying it for her. She stood there, facing the thing, while Sir Orfeo poured the fire into it. At each shot, a chunk flew from its back, but it never slowed -- and behind Sir Orfeo the other one was closing the gap. Sir Orfeo could have turned his fire on it and saved himself; but he never budged. I realized I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and then I remembered I had a gun, too, slung across my back to free my hands for climbing. I grabbed for it, wasted a second or more fumbling with it, got it around and to my shoulder and aimed and couldn't find the firing stud and had to lower it and look and brought it up again and centered it on the thing only yards from Sir Orfeo's exposed back and squeezed -- The recoil almost knocked me off my feet, not that it was bad, but I wasn't expecting it. I got back on target and fired again, and again; and it kept coming, Six feet from Sir Orfeo the thing reared up, tall as a grizzly, and I got a glimpse of a yellow underside covered with shredding hooks, and I fired into it and then it was dropping down on Sir Orfeo and at the last possible second he moved, but not far enough, and the thing struck him and knocked him rolling and then he and it lay still. I traversed the gun across to the other beast and saw that it was down, ten feet from Milady Raire, bucking and writhing, coiling back on itself. It flopped up against the side wall and rolled back down, half on its back and lay still and the echoes of its struggle went racketing away up the ravine. I heard Sir Orfeo make a moaning sound where he lay all bloody and the Lady Raire looked up and her eyes met mine and we looked at each other across the terrible silence. VI S ir Orfeo was still alive, with all the flesh torn off the back of his thighs and the glistening white bone Showing. He caught at my arm when I bent over him. "Jongo -- your job now -- the Lady Raire..." I was shaking, and tears were running down my face. I tried not to look at his horrible wounds. "Buck up, man." Sir Orfeo's voice was a groan of agony. "I'm depending on you... keep her safe... your responsibility, now..." "Yes," I said. "I'll take care of her, Sir Orfeo." "Good... now... water. Fetch water... from the car..." I ran off to follow his orders. When I came back the Lady Raire met me, looking pale and with dust sticking to the perspiration on her forehead. She told me that he'd sent her to investigate a sound and then dragged himself to where his filament pistol had fallen and blown his head off. I used a crater gun to blast shallow pockets under the overhanging rock beside the trail; she helpIP ed me drag the bodies to them. Then we went back down to the car. We carried our guns at the ready, but nothing moved in all that jumble of broken rock. Sir Orfeo had been lucky about finding game, all right. The Lady Raire got into the driver's seat and headed back down the way we'd come. When we reached level ground, she stopped and looked around as if she didn't know which way to go. I tapped on the glass and her head jerked around. I think she had forgotten I was there. Poor Lady Raire, so all-alone. "That direction, Milady," I said, and pointed toward where the yacht was, out of sight over the horizon. She followed my directions. Three hours later we came up over a low ridge, and there was the yacht, glittering far away across the desert. Another forty-five minutes and we pulled up in front of the big cargo door. She jumped down and went to it and twinkled her fingers on a polished metal disk set in the hull beside it. Nothing happened. She went around to the smaller personnel door, and the same thing happened. Then she looked at me. Having her look at me was an event even then. "We cannot enter," she said in a whisper. "I mind well twas Sir Orfeo's custom to reset the entry code 'ere each planetfall lest the yacht be rifled by aborigines." "There's got to be a way," I said. I went up and hammered on the panel and on the control disk and walked all the way around the yacht and back to the door that I had sneaked in by, that first night, and tried again, but with no luck. A terrible, hollow feeling was growing inside me. "I can shoot a hole in it, maybe," I said. My voice sounded weak in the big silence. I unslung the crater gun and asked her to step back and then took aim from ten feet and fired. The blast knocked me down, but the metal wasn't even scorched. I got to my feet and brushed dust off my shins, feeling the full impact of the situation sinking in like the sun that was beating down on my back. The Lady Raire looked at me, not seeing me. "We must... take stock of what supplies may be in the car," she said after a long pause. "Then canst thou make for thyself a pallet here in the shadow of the boat." "You mean -- we're just going to sit here?" "If any rescue comes, we must be close by the yacht, else they'll not spy us in this endless waste." I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. "Milady, we can't stay here." "Indeed? Why can we not?" She stood there, a slim, aristocratic little girl, giving me a level look from those cool gray eyes. "I don't know much about the odds against anybody finding us, but we've got a long wait at best. The supplies in the car won't last long. And the heat will wear us down. We have to try to find a better spot. Now. While we're still strong." I tried to sound confident, ns if I knew what I was doing. But my voice shook. I was scared; scared sick. But I know I was right about moving on. " 'Tis a better think to perish here than to live on in the wilderness, without hope." "We're not dead yet, Milady. But we will be if we don't do something about it, now." "I'll tarry here," she said. "Flee if thou wilt, Jongo." "Sir Orfeo told me to take care of you, Milady. I'm going to do my best to follow his order." She looked at me coolly. "Wouldst force me, then?" "I'm afraid so, Milady." She walked to the car stiffly. I got in to my usual seat in back and she started up and we headed out across the desert. W e drove until the sun set and a huge, pockmarked moon rose, looking a lot like the old one back home, except that it was almost close enough to touch. We slept then, and went on, still in the dark. Day came again, nd I asked the Lady Raire to show me how to drive so I could relieve her at the wheel. After that, we drove shift on, shift off, holding course steady to the northwest. On what I estimated was the third day, Earth-style, we reached a belt of scrub-land. Half an hour later the engine made a gargly sound and died, and wouldn't go again. I went forward on foot to a rise and looked over the landscape. The scrub-dotted waste went on as far as I could see. When I got back to the car, the Lady Raire was standing beside it with a filament pistol in her hand. "Now indeed is our strait hopeless." She held the gun out to me. "Do thy final duty to me, Jongo." Her voice was suddenly a breathless whisper. I took the gun; then I whirled and threw it as far as I could. When I faced her, my hands were shaking. "Don't ever say anything like that again!" I said. "Not ever!" "Would you then have me linger on, to wither in this heat, shrivel under the sun?" I grabbed her arm. It was cool, as smooth as satin. "I'm going to take care of you, Milady," I said. "I'll get you home again safe, you'll see!" She shook her head. "I have no home, Jongo. My loyal friends are dead." "I'm still alive. And my name's not Jongo. It's Billy Danger. I'm human, too. I'll be your friend." She looked straight at me. It was the first time she ever really looked at me. I looked back, straight into her eyes. Then she smiled. "Thou art valiant, Billy Danger,"she said. "How can I then shrink from duty? Lead on, and I'll follow while my strength lasts." The car was stocked with food concentrates, plus a freezer full of delicacies that would have to be eaten first, before they spoiled. The problem was water. The tanks held about thirty gallons, but with the distiller out of There were the weapons and plenty of ammunition, first-aid supplies, some spare communicators, goggles, boots. It wasn't much to set up housekeeping on. For the next week, I quartered the landscape over a radius of about five miles, looking for a spring or water hole, with no luck. By that time, the fresh food was gone -- eaten or spoiled, and the water was down to two ten-gallon jugs full. "We'll have to try a longer hike," I told the Lady Raire. "There may be an oasis just one ridge farther than I've gone." "As you wish, Billy Danger," she said, and gave me the smile, like sunrise after a long night. We packed up the food and water and a few extras. I slung a Z gun over my shoulder, and started off at twilight, after the worst of the day's heat. It was monotonous country, just hilly enough to give us a long pull up to one low crest after another and an ankle-turning slog down the far side. I steered due west, not because the prospects looked any better in that direction, but just because it was easier to steer straight toward the setting sun. We did about twenty miles before dark, another forty in two marches before the sun rose. I worried about the Lady Raire, but there was nothing I could do that I wasn't already doing. We slogged on toward the next ridge, hoping for a miracle on the other side. And always the next side looked the same. We rested in the heat of the long day, then marched on, into the glare of the sun. And about an hour before sunset, we saw the cat. H e was standing on a rock on the crest of a rise, whipping his tail from side to side in a slow, graceful motion. He made a graceful leap to a lower rock and was just a dark shadow moving against the slope ahead. I unlimbered my rifle and watched him close. At thirty feet, he paused and sat down on his haunches and wrinkled his face and began licking his chest. He finished and stuck out a long tongue and yawned and then rose and went loping off into the dusk, the way he'd come. All the while, we stood there and watohed him, not saying a word. As soon as he was gone, I went to where he'd been sitting. His pawprints were plain in the powdery dust. I started believing in him, then. I might see imaginary cats, but never imaginary cat tracks. We set off following them. T he water hole was in a hollow in the rock, hidden behind a wall of black-green foliage growing on the brink of a ravine. The Lady Raire stopped to gaze at it, but I stumbled down the slope and fell full length in the water and drank in big gulps and luckily choked and had a coughing fit before I could drink myself to death. IF There was a steep jumble of rock rising behind the pool, with the dark mouths of caves showing. I picked my way around the pond in the near-dark with my gun ready in my hand. There was a smell of cat in the air. I was grateful to tabby for leading me to water, but I didn't want him jumping on our backs now that it looked like we might live another few days. The caves weren't much, just holes about ten feet deep, not quite high enough to stand up in, with enough dirt drifted in them to make a more or less level floor. The Lady Raire picked out one for herself, and I helped her clean out the dead leaves and cat droppings and fix up a stone that could be rolled into the opening to block it, in case anything bigger than a woodchuck wanted in. Then she picked out another one and told me it was mine and .started in on it. It was dark when we finished. I saw her to her den, then sat down outside it with the pistol in my hand and went to sleep... -- and woke hungry, clear-headed, and wondering how a cat happened to be here, in this super-Mojave. I thought about the direbeasts and the meat-shredding leeches that had killed Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo. The cat was no relative of theirs. He had been a regulation-type black and gray and tan striped feline, complete with vertical-slitted pupils and retractable claws. He looked like anybody's house cat, except that he was the size of a collie dog. I'd heard about parallel evolution, and I hadn't been too surprised when Sir Orfeo had told me about how many four-legged, oneheaded creatures there were in the universe. But a copy this perfect wasn't possible. That meant one of two things: Either I had dreamed the whole thing -- which was kind of unlikely, inasmuch as when I looked down, I saw two more cats just like the other one, in the bright moonlight down by the water -- or our yacht wasn't the first human-owned ship to land on Gar # . I n the morning light, the water looked clear and inviting. The Lady Raire studied it for a while, then called to me. "Billy Danger, watch thee well the while I lave me. Methinks 'twill be safe enow." She glanced my way, and I realized she was talking about going for a swim. I just stared at her. "How now, art stricken dumb?" she called. "The pond may be full of poison snakes, crocodiles, quicksand and undertows," I said. "I'd as lief be devoured as go longer unwashed," she proceeded to unzip the front of the tunic she'd changed into from the temperature suit and stepped out of it. And for the second time in one minute, I was struck dumb. She stood there in front of me, as naked as a goddess and as beautiful, and said: "I charge thee, Billy Danger, take not thine eyes from me," and turned and waded down into the water. It was the easiest order to follow I ever heard of. She stayed in for half an hour, stroking up and down as unconcerned as if she were in the pool at some high-priced resort at Miami Beach. Once or twice she ducked under and stayed so long I found myself wading in to look for her. After the second time I complained, and she laughed and promised to stay on top. "Verily hast thou found a garden in the wilderness, Billy Danger," she said after she had her clothes back on. "'Tis so peaceful -- and in its rude way, so fair." "Not much like home, though, I guess, Milady," I said. But she changed the subject, as she always did when the conversation brought back too many memories. In the next few days, I made two trips back to the car, brought in everything that looked as if it might be useful; then we settled down to what I might describe as a very quiet routine. She strolled around, climbed the rocks, brought home small green shrubs and flowers that she planted around the caves and along the path and watered constantly, using a pot made of clay from the poolside cooked by a Z gun on wide beam. I spent my time exploring to the west and north and trying to make friends with the cats. There were plenty of them; at certain times of the day, there'd be as many as ten in sight at one time, around the water hole. They didn't pay much attention to us; just watched us when we came toward them, and at about fifteen feet, rose casually and moved off into the thick growth along the ravine. They were well fed and lazy, just nice hearth-side tabbies, a little larger than usual. There was one with a few streaks of orange in among the black and tan that I concentrated on, mainly because I could identify him easily. Every time I saw him I'd go out and move up as close as I could without spooking him, sit down and start to play with a ball of string from the car. He sat and watched. I'd roll it toward him, then pull it back. He moved in closer. I let him get a paw on it, then jerked it. He went after it and cuffed it, and I pulled it in and tossed it out again. I n a week the game was a regular routine. In two, he had a name -- Eureka -- and was letting me scratch him between the ears. In three, he had taken to lying across the mouth of my cave, not even moving when I stepped over him going out. The Lady Raire watched all this with a sort of indulgent smile. According to her, cats were pets on most of the human inhabited world she knew of. She wasn't sure where they had originated, but she smiled when I said they were a native of Earth. "In sooth, Billy Danger, 'tis a truism that each unschooled mind fancies itself the center of the Universe. But the stars were seeded by Man long ago, and by his chattels with him." At first, the Lady Raire didn't pay much attention to my pet, but one day he showed up limping, and she spent half an hour carefully reIF moving a splinter from 'his foot. The next day she gave him a bath, and brhshed his fur to a high gloss. After that, he took to following her on her walks. And it wasn't long before he took to sleeping at the mouth of her cubbyhole. He got more petting that way. I watched the cats, trying to see what it was they fed on, on the theory that whatever they ate we could eat too. Our concentrates wouldn't last forever. But I never saw them pounce on anything. They came to the water hole to drink and lie around in the shade; then they wandered off again into the undergrowth. One day I decided to follow Eureka. "An thou wilt," the Lady Raire said, smiling at me. "Tho I trow thy cat o' mountain lives on naught but moonbeams." "Baked moonbeam for dinner coming up," I said. The cat led me up the rocks and through the screen of alien foliage at the north side of the hollow, then struck out along the edge of the ravine, which was filled from edge to edge by a mass of deep-green vines. The chasm was about three hundred yards long, fifty yards wide; I couldn't see the bottom under the tangle of green, but I could make out the big stems, as thick as my leg, snaking down into the deep shadows for at least a hundred feet. And I could see the cats. They lay in crotches of the big vine, walked delicately along the thick stems, peered out of shadows with green eyes. There were a few up on the rim, sitting on their haunches, watching me watching them. Eureka yawned and switched his tail against my thigh, then made a sudden leap and disappeared into the green gloom. By getting down on all fours and shading my eyes, I could see the broad branch he'd jumped to. f could have followed, but the idea of going down into the maze full of cats lacked appeal. I got up and started off along the rim. I noticed that it was scattered with what looked like chips of thick eggshell. 'T'he ravine shallowed out to A nothing at the far end. The vines were less dense here, and I could see rock strata slanting down into the depths. There were strange knobs and shafts of blackish rock imbedded in the lighter stone, I found one protruding near the surface and saw that it was a fossilized bone. The rock was full of them. That would be a matter of deep interest to a paleontologist specializing in the fauna of Gar #, but it was no help to me. I needed live meat. If there was any around -- excepting the cats, and I didn't like the idea of eating them, for six or eight reasons I could think of offhand -- it had to be down below, in the shade of the greenery. The descent looked pretty easy, here at the end of the cut. I hitched my gun around front for quick access, and started down. The rock slanted off under me at an angle of about thirty degrees. The big vines bending up over my head were tough, woody, scaled with dead-looking bark. Only a few green tendrils curled up 'here, reaching for sunlight. The air was fresh and cool in the shade of the big leaves; there was a sharp, pungent odor of green life, mixed with the rank smell of cat. Fifty feet down the broken slope the growth got too thick to be ignored; it was switch over to limb-climbing or go back. I went on. It was easy going at first. The stems weren't too close together to push between, and there was still plenty of light to see by. I could hear the cats moving around, back deeper in the growth. I reached a major stem, as big as my torso, and started down it. There were plenty of handholds here. Big seed pods hung in clusters near me. A lot of them had been gnawed, either by the cats or by what the cats ate. So far I hadn't seen any signs of the latter. I broke off one of the pods. It was about a foot long, knobby and pale green. It broke open easily and half a dozen beans as big as egg yolks rolled out. I took a nibble of one. It tasted like raw beans. After a couple of weeks on concentrates, even that was good -- if it didn't kill me. I went down. The light was deep green now, a luminous dusk filtered through a hundred feet of foliage. The trunk I was following curved sharply, and I worked my way around to the up side, descended another ten feet, and my feet thunked solidly against something hard. I had to get down on all fours to see that I was on a smooth, curving surface of tarnished metal. Something thumped beside me like O a dropped blanket; it was Eureka, coming over to check on me. He sat and washed his face while I rooted around the base of the big vine, saw that it was growing out through a fracture in the metal. The wood had bulged and spread and shaped itself to conform to the opening. I had the impression that it was the vine that had burst the metal. By crawling, I was able to explore an oval area about fifteen feet long by ten wide before the vines slanted in too close to let me move. All of it was the same iodine-colored metal, with no seams, no variations in contour, with the exception of the bulge around the break. If I wanted to see more, I'd have to do a little landclearance. I got out the pistol and set it on needle-beam, cut enough wood away to get a look into a room the size of a walk-in freezer, almost filled with an impacted growth of wood. I backed out then, wormed my way over to the big trunk and climbed back to the surface. There was a lot more to see, but what I wanted to do now was get back in a hury and tell the Lady Raire that under the vines in the ravine I'd found a full-sized spaceship. F ifteen minutes later, she stood on the rim of the ravine with me. I could dimly make out the whole three-hundred foot length of the ship, now that I knew what to look for. It was lying at an angle of about IF fifteen degrees from the horizontal, the high end to the south. "It must have been caught by an earthquake," I said. "Or a Garquake." "I ween full likely she toppled thither," the Lady Raire said. "During a tempest, mayhap. Look thee, where a great fragment has fallen from the rim of the abyss. And see yon broken stones, crushed as she fell." We found an access route near the south end, well worn by cats, and made an easier approach than my first climb. I led her to the hatch, and we spent the next hour burning the wood away from it, climbed through onto a floor that slanted down under a tangle of vine stem to a drift of broken objects half buried in black dirt at the low end. The air was cool and damp, and there was a sour smell of rotted vegetation and stagnant water. We waded knee deep in foul-smelling muck to a railed stair lying on its side, crawled along it to another open door. I stepped through into a narrow corridor, and a faint, greenish light sprang up. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my heck. "I misdoubt me not 'tis but an automatic system," Milady said calmly. "Still working, after all this time?" "Why not? Twas built to endure." She pointed to a dark opening in a wall. "Yon shaft should lead us to the upper decks." She went past me, and I followed, feeling like a very small kid in a very large haunted castle. T'he shaft led us to a grim-looking A place full of broken piping and big, dark shapes the size of moving vans that Milady said were primitive ion-pulse engines. There was plenty of breakage visible, but only a few dead tendrils of vine. We climbed on forward, found a storeroom, a plotting room full of still-shiny equipment, and a lounge where built-in furniture stuck out from what was now the wall. The living quarters were on the other side of the lounge and beyond there was a room with a ring of dark TV screens arching up overhead around a central podium that had snapped off at the base and was hanging by a snarl of conduits. Beyond that point, the nose of the ship was toe badly crushed to get into. There was no signs of the original owners around, with the possible exception of a few scraps that might have been human bone. "What do you think, Milady?" I asked her. "Is there anything here we can use?" "If so, 'twere wonderful, Billy Danger. Yet would I see more ere I abandon hope." Back in the hold, she spent some time crawling over the big vines that came coiling up from somewhere down below. "Tis passing strange," she said. "These stems rise not from soil, but rather burgeon from the bowels of the vessel. And meseemeth they want likeness to the other flora of this world." I pulled one of the big, leathery leaves over to me. It was heart shaped, about eight inches wide. "It looks like an ordinary pea to me," I said. "Just overgrown -- like the cats." "We'll trace these to their be beginnings, their mystery to resolve." The Lady Raire pointed. "An mine eyes deceive me not, they rise through yonder hatch." There was just room to squeeze through between the thigh-thick trunks, into a narrow service shaft. I flashed my light along it and saw bones. "Just a cat," I said, more to reassure me than Milady. We went on, ducking under festoons of thick vine. We passed another cat skeleton, well scattered. There was a strange smell, something like crushed almonds with an under-taint of decay. The vines led fifty feet along the passage, then in through a door that had been forced outward off its hinges. The room beyond was a dark mass of coiled white roots. On its far side, faint twilight shone in through a break in the hull. There was a soft clink, like water dripping into a still pond, a faint rustling. I flashed my light down. The floor of the big room slanted off sharply. Down among the of ambor light glowed. The Lady Raire took a step back. "Come, Billy Danger! I like this not!" That was as far as she got before the mass of vine roots in front of me trembled and bulged and all the devils in Hell came swarming out. Something dirty white, the size of O a football, jittering on six spindly legs rushed at me, clicking a pair of jaws that opened sideways in a face like an imp in one of those medieval paintings. I jumped back and swung a kick and its biters clamped onto my boot toe like a steel trap. Another one bounced high enough to rip at my knee; the tough coverall held, but the hide under it tore. Something zapp'ed from behind my right ear and a flash of blue fire winked, and two of the things skittered away and a stink of burnt horn hit me in the face. All this in the first half second. I had my pistol up then, squeezing the firing lever, playing it over them like a hose. They curled and jumped and died and more came swarming over the dead ones. "We're losing," I yelled. "We've got to bottle them up!" The big vine stem was on fire, and sap was bubbling out and spitting in the flames. I ducked down and grabbed up a dead one and threw him into the opening, and beamed another one that poked his snout through and took a step and tripped and went flat on my face. I threw my hands up to protect my head and heard a yowl, and something dark bounded across me, and there was a snap and a thud and I sat up and saw Eureka, whirling and pouncing, batting with both paws. Behind him the Lady Raire, splashed to the knee with brown, a smear of blood on her cheek, was aiming and firing as steadily as if she were shooting at clay pipes at the county fair. And then Eureka was sitting on his haunches, making a face at IF me, and the Lady Raire was turning toward me, and there was a last awkward scuffling sound and then silence. "Well, that answers one question," I said. "Now we know what the cats eat." I t was a hard climb back down along the lift shaft, out through the hold, and up to the last of the sunlight. She got out her belt medikit and started dabbing liquid fire into the cuts on my legs, back, arms and thighs. While she doctored, I talked. "That was the hydroponics room. When the ship crashed, or fell in the ravine, or got caught in an earthquake, the hull was opened there -- or near enough that the plants could sense sunlight. They went for it. Either the equipment that watered them and provided the chemicals they needed was still working, or they found water and soil at the bottom of the ravine. Maybe both. They liked it here; plenty of sunshine, anyway. They adapted and grew and with no competition from other plant life, they developed into what we found." "There may be truth in thy imaginings, Billy Danger," Milady said. "The vessel's of a very ancient type; 'tis like to those in use on Zeridajh some seven thousand years since. "That mi?ht he long enough for a plant to evolve giant size," I said. "Especially if the local sun puts out a lot of hard radiation. Same for the cats. I guess there were a couple of them aboard -- or maybe just one pregnant female. She survived the crash and found water and food -- " "Nay, Billy Danger. Thy Eureka may sup on such dainties as those he slew in they defense -- but they'd make two snaps of any houseborn puss." "I didn't mean that. A cat can live on beans, if it has to. Anyway, the critters weren't as big then." "How now? Knowest thou the history of Gar's creatures as well as of more familiar kinds?" "They aren't natives, any more than the cats and the peas. They came along on the ship. To be specific, on the cat." "Dost rave? Art feverish?" "I'm ashamed to admit it," I said. "But I know a flea when I see one." W e waited until daylight to go into the ship again. The location of the cat bones gave us a pretty good idea of where the boundaries of flea territory were. Apparently they kept to their dark hold and lived long, happy lives sucking juice from the vines, or an occasional lone cat who meandered over the line. Population pressure drove enough of them upstairs to keep the cats supplied; and the cat droppings and their bodies when they died wound up at the bottom of the ravine, to keep the cycle going. The Lady Raire had the idea of trying to locate the ship's communication section. She finally did -- in the smashed nose section. I crawled in beside her to look at the ruins of what had once been a message center that could bounce words and music across interstellar distances at a speed that was a complicated multiple of the speed f light Now it looked like a junkman's nightmare. "Alack, I deemed I might fine here a signaler, in tact. 'Twere folly -- and yet... She sounded so down-hearted that I had to say something to cheer her up. "There's an awful lot of gear lying around in there," I said. "Maybe we could salvage something." "Dost know aught of these matters, Billy Danger?" she said in a lofty tone. "Not much," I said. "I know my way around the inside of an ordinary radio. I'm not talking about sending three-D pictures in glorious color; hut maybe a simple signal " She wanted to know more. I exone summer when I had the idea of Getting Into Radio Now. I felt like an unspoiled native of Borneo explaining flint-chipping techniques to a designer of H-bombs. It took us a week to assemble a transmitter capable of putting out a simple signal that Milady Raire assured me would show up as a burst of static on any screen within a couple of light-years We led a big cable from the energy cells that powered the stand-by lighting system, rigged it so that what juice was in them would drain in one final burst. The ship itself would act as an antenna, once we'd wired our fig to the hull. We climbed out of her dragging a length of coaxial cable, got back a couple of hundred yards in case of miscalculation with the power core, and touched her off. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened; then I felt a tremor run through the ground and a moment later a dull ka-whoom! rumbled up from the chasm, followed by a rapid exodus of cats. For the next hour, there was a lot of activity: cats chasing fleas, fleas bouncing around looking for cover and the Lady R. Raire and me trying to stay ouit of the way of both parties. Then the smoke faded away, the fleas scuttled for cover, the cats went back down to lie under the leaves or wandered off in the direction of the water hole, and Milady and I settled down to wait. I made the discovery that by cutting into a vine just below a leaf, I could get a trickle of cool water. The Lady Raire had the" idea of hauling a stem out and getting it growing in the direction of the caves; we did, and it grew enthusiastically. By the time we'd been in residence for another month, we had shade and running water on tap right outside the door. I asked the Lady Raire to teach me her language, and along with the new words I learned a lot about her home world, Zeridajh. It was old -- fifty thousand years of written history -- but the men there were still men. It was no classless Utopia where people strolled in misty gardens spouting philosophy, There was plenty of strife and unIF happiness, and although the Lady Raire never talked about herself, I got the impression she had her share of the latter. I wondered how it happened that she was off wandering the far end of the Galaxy in the oompany of two unlikely types like Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo, but I didn't ask her. If she wanted to tell me, she could. But one day I said something that made her laugh. "I thought -- Sir Orfeo said Lord Desroy had been on Earth three hundred years ago. And you speak the same old-fashioned English -- " She laughed. "Billy Danger, didst deem me so ancient?" "No -- but -- " "I learned my English speech from Lord Desroy, somewhat altered, mayhap, by Sir Orfeo. But 'twas late; indeed, I have but eighteen years, Earth reckoning." "And you've been away from home for four years? Isn't your family worried?" Then I shut up, at the look that crossed her face. The weather had been gradually changing; the days grew shorter and cooler. The flowers milady had brought in from the caves dropped their blossoms and turned brown. The cats got restless, and we'd hear them yowling and scrapping, down in their leafy den. And one day, there were kittens everywhere. Our diet consisted of beans, fried, baked, sliced and eaten raw, chopped and roasted, mixed with food concentrates to make stews and soups. We used the scissors from the first-aid kit to trim our hair back. Fortunately, I had no beard to trim. The days got longer again, and for a while the ravine was a fairyland of blossoms that filled the air with a perfume so sweet it was almost dizzying. At sunset, the Lady Raire would walk out across the desert and look at the purple towers in the west. I trailed her, with a gun ready, in case any of Sir Orfeo's direbeasts wandered this way. And one night the ship came. IX I was sound asleep; the Lady Raire woke me and I rolled out grabbing for my gun and she pointed to a star that glared blue and got bigger as we watched it. It came down in absolute silence and ground in the desert a quarter of a mile from us in a pool of blue light that cast hard shadows across Milady's face. I was so excited I could hardly breathe, but she wasn't smiling. "The lines of yon vessel are strange to me, Billy Danger," she said. "'Tis of most archaic appearance. Seest thou the double hull, like unto the body of an insect?" "All I can see is the glare from the business end." The blue glow was fading. Big floodlights came on and lit up the desert all around the ship like high noon. "Mayhap..." she started, and a whistling, whooping noise boomed out across the flats. It stopped and the echoes bounced and faded and it was silent again. "If 'twere speech, I know it not," Milady said. "I guess we'd better go meet them," I said, but I had a powerful urge to run and hide among the pea vines. "Bill Danger, I like this not." Her hand gripped my arm. "Let's flee to the shelter of the ravine." Her idea was a little too close to mine; I had to show her how silly her feminine intuition was. "And miss the only chance we'll ever have to get off this dust-ball? Come on, Milady. You're going home." "Nay, Bill -- " But I grabbed her arm and advanced. As we came closer, the ship looked as big as a wasp-waisted skyscraper. Three cars came around from the far side of it. Two of them fanned out to right and left; the third headed toward us, laying a dust trail behind it. It was squat, rounded, dark coppery colored without windows. It stopped fifty feet away with its blunt snout aimed at us. A round panel about a foot in diameter swung open and a glittery assembly poked out and rotated half a turn and was still. "It looks like it's smelling of us," I said, but the jolly note in my voice was a failure. Then a lid on top popped up like a jack-in-thebox, and the most incredible creature I had ever seen climbed out. H e was about four feet high and almost as wide, and my first impression was that he was a dwarf in Roman armor; then I saw that the armor was part of him. He scrambled down the side of the car on four short, thick legs, then reared his torso up, and I got a good look at the face set between a pair of seal flippers in the middle of his chest. It reminded me of a blownup photo of a bat I'd seen once. There were two eyes, some orifices, lots of wrinkled gray-brown skin, a mouth like a fanged frog. An odd metallic odor came from him. He stared at us, and we stared back. Then a patch of rough, pinkish skin centered in a tangle of worms below his face bulged out, and a gluey voice came from it. I didn't understand the words, but somehow he sounded cautious. The Lady Raire answered, speaking too fast for me to follow. I listened while they batted it back and forth. Once she glanced at me, and I caught my name and the word "property." I wasn't sure just how she meant it. While they talked, the other two cars came rumbling in from offside ringing us in. More of the midgets trotted up, holding what looked like stacks of silver teacups, glued together, the open ends toward us. The spokesman took a step back and made a quick motion of his flippers. "Throw down guns," he said in Zeridajhi. He didn't sound cautious. The Lady Raire's hand went toward her pistol. I grabbed her arm. "I know these hagseed now," she said. "They mean naught but dire mischief to any of my race!" "Those are gunports under the headlights on the cars," I said. "I think we'd better do what it says." "If we draw and fire as one -- " "No use, Milady. They've got the drop on us." I? She hesitated a moment longer, then unsnapped her gunbelt and let it fall. I did the same. Our new friend made a noise and batted his flippers against his sides, and his gun-boys moved in. He pointed at the Lady Raire. "Fetter this one," he said. "And kill the other." Two or three things happened at once then. One of the teacup-guns swung my way, and the Lady Raire made a sound and threw herself at the gunner. He knocked her down, and I charged at him and something exploded in my face and for a long time I floated in a river, shooting the rapids, and each time I slammed against a submerged rock, I heard myself groan, and then I opened my eyes and I was lying on my face with my cheek in a puddle of congealing blood, and the ship and the monsters and the Lady Raire were gone. F or the first few hours my consciousness kept blinking on and off like a defective table lamp. I'd come to and try to move and the next thing I knew I was coming to again. Then suddenly it was daylight, and Eureka was sitting beside me, yowling softly. This time I managed to roll over and raise my head far enough to see myself. I was a mess. There was blood all over me. I hurt all over, too, so that was no clue. I explored with my hands and found a rip in my coverall along my left side, and through that I could feel a furrow wide enough to lay two fingers in. Up higher, there was a hole in my right shoulder that seemed to come out in back; and the side of my neck felt like hamburger, medium rare. The pain wasn't really as bad as you'd expect. I must have been in shock. I flopped back and listened to all the voices around me. I heard Sir Orfeo: She's your responsibility now , Jongo. Take care of her . "I tried," I said. "I really tried." It's all right, the Lady Raire was standing by me, looking scared, but smiling at me. I trust you, Billy Danger . The light from the open furnace door glowed in her black hair, and she turned and stepped into the flames and I yelled and readied after her, but the fires leaped up and I was awake again, sobbing. "They've got her," I said aloud. "She was frightened of them, but I had to show off. I led her out to them like a lamb to the slaughter..." I pictured her, dragged aboard the dwarves' ship, locked away in a dark place, alone and terrified and with no one to help her. And she'd trusted me. "My fault," I groaned. "My fault! But don't be afraid, Milady. I'll find you. They think I'm dead, but I'll trick them; I won't die. I'll stay alive, and find them and take you home... T he next time I was aware of what was going on, the cat was gone and the sun was directly overhead and I was dying of thirst. By turning my head, I could see the IF vines along the edge of the ravine. There was shade there and water. I got myself turned over on my stomach and started crawling. It was a long trip -- nearly a hundred yards -- and I passed out so many times I lost count. But I reached the vines and got myself a drink, and then it was dark. That meant it had been about seventytwo hours since the slug-people had me. I must have slept for a long time, then. When I woke up Eureka was back, with a nice' fresh flea for me. "Thanks, boy," I said when he dropped the gift on my chest and nudged me with his nose. "It's nice to know somebody cares." "You're not dead yet," he said, and his voice sounded like Orfeo's. I called to him, but he was gone, down into the darkness. I followed him, along a trail of twisted vines, but the light always glimmered just ahead, and I was cold and wet and then the fleas came swarming out on the empty eyes of a giant skull and swarmed over me and I felt them eating me alive and I woke up, and I was still there, under the vines, and my wounds were hurting now and Eureka was gone and the flea with him. I got myself up on all fours to have another drink from the water vine and noticed a young bean pod sprouting nearby. I was hungry and I tore it open and ate the beans. And the next time I woke up, I was stronger. For five long Garish days I stayed under the vines; then I made the trek to the caves. After that, on a diet of concentrates, I gained strength faster. I spent my time exercising my wounds so they wouldn't stiffen up too much as they healed, and talking to the cat. He didn't answer me any more, so I judged I was getting better. No infections set in; the de-lousing Sir Orfeo had given me probably had something to do with that, plus the absence of microbes on Gar #. Finally a day came when it was time to get out and start seeing the world again. I slung my crater gun, not without difficulty, since my right arm didn't want to cooperate, and made a hike around the far side of the ravine, with half a dozen rest stops. I was halfway back to the hut and the drink of water I'd promised myself as a reward, when the second ship came. X T his one was smaller, something like Lord Orfeo's yacht, but with less of a polish. I hid behind the vines with my gun aimed until I saw what were undoubtedly men emerge. Then I went up to meet them. They were small, yellow-skinned, with round, bald heads. The captain was named Ancu-Uriru, and he spoke a little Zeridajhi. He frowned at my scars, which were pretty spectacular, and wanted to know where the rest of the ship's complement were. I told him there was just me. That made him frown worse than ever. It seemed he had picked up our signal and answered it in the hope of collecting a nice reward from somebody, along with a little salvage. I told him about the ship in the ravine, and he sent a couple of men down who came back shaking their heads. They showed every sign of being ready to leave then. "What about me?" I asked AncuUriru. "We leave you in peace," he said in an offhand way. "There's such a thing as too much peace," I told him. "I want to go with you. I'll work my way." "I have no need of you; space is limited aboard my small vessel. And I fear your wounds render you somewhat less than capable to perform useful labor. Here you are more comfortable. Stay, with my blessing." "Suppose I told you where there was another ship, a luxury model, in perfect shape -- if you can get the doors open?" That idea seemed to strike a spark. We dickered for a while, and there were hints that a little torture might squeeze the answers out of me with no need for favors in return. But in the end we struck a deal. My passage to a civilized port in return for Lord Desroy's yacht. It took them most of a Garish day to tickle her locks open. Ancu Uriru looked her over, then ordered his personal effects moved into the owners suite. I was assigned to ride on his old tub along with a skeleton crew. Just before boarding time, Eureka came bounding across the flats toward me. One of the men had a gun in his hand, and I jumped in front of him just in time. "This is my cat," I told him. "He saved my life. We used to have long talks, while I was sick." The men all seemed to be catlovers; they gathered around and admired him. "Bring the beast along," AncuUriru said. We went aboard then, and an hour later the ship lifted off Gar #, as nearly as I could calculate, one year after I had landed. captured here and now, and plunged into the deeps of galactic intrigue! by Keith Laumer A memorable Novelette by Samuel R. Delany by Andre Norton These and many more in the June IF -- reserve your copy today I IF IF  Novelette The robots knew what they were doing, all right... they just wouldn't let humans in on it! I W hen it started, I had just finished up the charts on our new rocket-propulsion system, and I felt a little funny. I sat back in my chair, lit a cigarette and reflected with an effort at sanguinity that we could now deliver more hell quicker to anywhere on Earth than ever before. I blew a smoke ring which drifted slowly toward the ceiling of my office, and I frowned at it. Damn it, with a two-year project wrapped up at last, I should have felt relief and elation, not some vague uneasiness. Nerves, I told myself. Overwork. Time to go out and celebrate, shake the cobwebs out of the old pleasure centers. I reached for the telephone to call Betty at home. But then I thought of something: hadn't Betty talked about a meeting of her damned Azalea Committee tonight? Hadn't I written it down on a slip of paper in my wallet? I got out the wallet and looked. Yes, there was the note, and yes, damn it, that meeting was tonight. I muttered something halfway between a curse and a simple "Ah hell." Then I saw another note, which had fallen onto the floor when I'd slipped out the first one. I picked it up and glanced at it: it was a phone number. I started to put it back into the wallet compartment. Wait a minute -- whose phone number? I looked again and gradually felt a frown creep onto my face. TTie number was a local exchange, but I didn't recognize it. And it was written in my own handwriting -- I have a particularly bad "#," which looks sort of like a snake that didn't know when to stop. The slip of paper had evidently been right behind the one with the note about Betty, so that ought to make it recent. But I couldn't figure out whose number it was, and the note didn't give any clue. Y ou ever have that happen to you? Or maybe you're one of those guys who keeps his wallet in in order, nothing in it but money and credit cards and pictures of the wife and kids and maybe a pocket calendar. Me, I write notes to myself about things to do when I get home or to the office, or names of books I want to look up someday, or the number of a cough medicine prescription or direction? to someone's house. And, of course, people's phone numbers. Usually, though, I put their names down too. After about half a minute of frowning at the number I decided to shrug and forget it. So I put the paper back into my wallet and turned to glance through the mail in my wasn't interesting, nor even important, and my secretary could handle all of it anyway. I turned to my desk calendar, but there wasn't anything on the agenda for today, not even a lunch date. I'd been so involved in the Project these last weeks that I'd gradually slipped out of the mainstream of executive work at the corporation. Hell. I sat back again, feeling definitely at loose ends. And I kept thinking about that silly phone number. Anybody with the stuff to get a four-window office in the high-pressure world of # has to be a decisive man, I told myself. I took out the slip of paper with the number on it, picked up my phone and punched out the number. A tinny woman's voice on the other end said, "#-#." (Or some such number.) "Hello," I said. "May I ask what company this is?" There were two clicks, then one. The tinny voice said, "#-#." "Excuse me," I said, speaking more loudly this time. "I think we IF II have a bad connection. I was asking what company this is." More clicks. "What is your name, please?" asked the voice. "Is this an answering service?" I asked. "What is your name, please?" the voice asked again. I sighed. Yes, it sounded like some answering service that wasn't about to give out any information unless you were on the Approved List. "This is Charles Barrow. I don't know if you -- " Click. Click click. "Your appointment is at five o'clock this afternoon," the voice said. "# Madison, Room #." "My what?" I said. "Look, really, I don't even know who I'm talking to. What appointment?" "Five o'clock this afternoon. # Madison, Room #." Then there was a final click, as she hung up abruptly. For a minute I stared at the suddenly dead phone; then I laughed. Then I stopped and wondered if I ought to be annoyed. I wasn't annoyed, but I thought maybe I should be. What kind of business could afford to antagonize customers with that kind of flagrant disrespect, anyway? Which brought me right back to what I'd been wondering about when I'd called: who was that on the other end? I looked at my desk calendar again, and it was still blank. Sighing, I wrote on it, Appt # Mad Rm # -- #:#. # # Madison was a big, square office building like most of the newly constructed people-boxes in that area. It had a glass revolving door leading into a large lobby serviced by eight automatic elevators. At that hour of the day most people were just leaving work; I caught an elevator as it disgorged a load of them and rode alone up to the eleventh floor. Room # was at the end of the hall on my right: a nondescript door with a frosted-glass window lettered R.O.B.O.T. I paused, looking at that; then I knocked and entered. For a minute I didn't see the receptionist. There was a teak desk, imitation Danish midcentury, with some papers on it and a telephone switchboard behind it. Next to the switchboard, behind the desk, was a whirring and clicking mass of polished steel with metal arms that ran on visible pulleys, a round globe on top from which a web of telephone wires ran into the switchboard, and a spring-steel neck beneath this globular "head." As I hesitated inside the door, a familiar tinny voice issued from a grille where the machine might have had a mouth. "What is your name, please?" the voice asked. Istared for a moment, caught off guard. Robots of one sort or another were in common use in a lot of industries these days (though seldom along the Madison Avenue circuit), but the construction of this one struck me as bizarre in the extreme. Then the receptionist clicked once and twice and said, "Your appointment is at nine o'clock tomorrow morning," and I realized it was speaking into the phone. "# Madison, Room #," it said. I waited for it to go through its cycle. "Nine o'clock tomorrow morning. # Madison, Room #," it said, and one of the lines in the switchboard pulled itself out and snaked back down into the panel at its base. The receptionist whirred, then revolved to face me. "My name is Charles Barrow," I said. "I have an appointment." "Yes, Mr. Barrow," the tinny female voice said. "Will you be seated, please." The machine revolved back to face its switchboard. I sat down on the couch and took a few moments lighting a cigarette to gather my thoughts. Here I was at the office, and I still hadn't solved the silly question which had brought me here: what was this place? I leaned forward and asked conversationally, "What does R.O.B. O.T. stand for, anyway?" "R.O.B.O.T. spells 'robot,'" the receptionist said without turning. "I know," I said. "But what is R.O.B.O.T .?" There was a ripid whirr inside the machine, then it said, "Robot, noun: An automatic apparatus or device that performs functions ordinarily ascribed to human beings or operates with what appears to be almost human intelligence." "That's fine," I said patiently. "But what is this place, this organization?" The receptionist clicked twice. "#-#," it said. Then it clicked some more. "What is your name, please?" I sighed. "I'm Charles Barrow. I have an appointment for five o'clock." "Yes, Mr. Barrow. Will you be seated, please." I sat back and waited. H alf a hour later I was still sitting there and getting irritated. I'm not used to being kept waiting. I was debating with myself whether to try communicating my displeasure to the obviously limited robot receptionist or to simply to walk out. I could phone Betty and maybe convince her to let the azaleas evolve by themselves for one more week, and we could still make a night of it. I decided just to walk out. Picking up my hat, I stood up -- and the receptionist gave a rapid clickclickclickclick and said, "You may go in now." I hesitated, looking at the impassive metal globe-face with the telephone cords running to the switchboard. Like a metal Medusa, I thought angrily. You're supposed to look at it and turn to stone so that you'll wait until whoever the hell's inside finally gets around to seeing you. Whoever the hell's inside... That was what did it. There'd be no use in telling off the under-programmed robot receptionist, but the man inside was a different matter. Setting an appointment for five o'clock, then keeping me waitIF ing... Yes, he deserved a word or two. The receptionist was pointing a level metal arm to a door on my right. I turned and went through it. On the other side was a long hall, wide and empty like a hospital corridor, except that some distance down it I could see a couple of figures scurrying along from one room to another opening off the hall. They were robots too -- the one I saw most clearly ran on two wheels and had a series of metal arms ending in wrenchlike "hands." It turned its small head toward me briefly, and I saw bright green eyes; then it disappeared into a room. Out of the door nearest to me along the hall came another robot, this one tall and slender, basically manlike in construction: two legs and two arms, a torso and a head. The head had three red circles about where you'd expect eyes and a mouth, and as it turned and approached I saw that this was apparently the case, for the eyes were faceted like a bee's and the mouth was a speaker-grille. It stumped up to me on its metal feet, stopped and said politely, "Please follow me." Then, without waiting for an answer, it turned and led me down the hall. I followed. We went all the way to the end, where the corridor branched right, then turned to follow that one. Occasional robots passed us in the hall: yellow ones, blue ones, gray ones; short, squat floorsweepers brushing by on broom-feet; inspector-robots with rows of eyes circling tubular bodies at top and bottom, minutely checking the flooring and plaster; strange-shaped repair robots like the one I'd seen before, with wrenches or screwdrivers or cutting tools for hands; and quite a few with such a variety of peculiar extensors, sense-organs, manipulators and other paraphernalia that I had no idea what they were for. The second corridor was about a city block long. My robot guide took me to the end of that and turned right again. Another long hall lay ahead, no different from the two we'd already passed. "Just how much further are we going?" I asked, catching up with the long-limbed robot and striding beside it. "Please follow me," it said without turning its head. A suspicion came to me. "Say, did you know your left arm has fallen off?" I asked. "Please follow me," it said, not pausing tc look. "Your head is coming unscrewed!" I said more urgently. "Please follow me," it said. There hadn't even been the soft clicking that the receptionist had made when switching to its programmed response. Either this one had nothing else to say, or I hadn't hit the right verbal button. I kept following for awhile, my annoyance growing as my feet got tired. I'm not a peripatetic man. W e came to the end of this third corridor and turned right. The robot guide kept going as impassiveIP ly as ever, and down at the end of the hall I saw a door which looked suspiciously like the one I'd come in by. I stopped. "Now just a damn minute!" I said. "You've taken me around in a circle!" "Please follow me." "The hell I will! I'm leaving!" That did it. Whirr, clickclick went the robot. "This is the room," it said, striding to the nearest door and opening it for me. I stood still for a moment, looking past my guide-robot into the room. It was a fairly small cubicle, about a third the size of my own office, with no rug and no windows. There was just a green leather swivel chair in the middle of the room, and facing it was a large robot which seemed to be all head, and that head all one eye. The head with the eye turned slowly to gaze at me. I don't know exactly what I'd been expecting at the end of the trail. What kind of appointment would a man make and then forget? Dentist? Analyst? Tax consultant? Well, whatever I'd had in mind, it had involved a human, not a one-eyed robot. But I was here now, and curiosity is a great motivating force when you have time on your hands. I stepped into the room. The guide-robot shut the door behind me, and I heard a faint click -- not the whirr-clickclick kind they made in sorting their programs, but a locking kind of click. I turned quickly and grabbed the door handle. "Please sit down," said a voice from the air around me. The door was locked. "Please sit down," said the voice. I looked around the room, searching for another exit, knowing there wouldn't be any. Now, too late, it finally occurred to me that I was an important man in the Western Bloc's defense industry, and that the whole thing about me making an appointment and then forgetting it was more than just curious -- it was damned fishy. And here I was. "Please sit down." I looked wearily at the big robot in front of the chair. It didn't seem to have any threatening protuberances; indeed, it was more or less shapeless except for that head with the huge eye. Cautiously, I sat in the leather swivel chair facing it. Immediately the robot's eye started spinning. I realized suddenly that the iris was marked with spiral lines, and now that the eye was spinning it seemed like a whirlpool, a vortex of. light which had instantly caught the focus of my gaze and was trying to pull me down, down and into the dark pupil at the center. Down, down... "Down, down, down," I heard a voice saying, slowly and monotonously. "Down..." I blinked and sat up from my partially slumped position in the chair. "Like hell," I said. "Sleep," said the voice. "You must sleep. Sleep, sleep. Down into sleep..." "No," I said, and looked away from the eye. The voice stopped; there was a long, echoless silence in the room. The lights dimmed into darkness. Then I heard two soft robot-clicks, and the voice said, "You are now asleep." "No, I'm not," I said. "You will remain asleep for exactly one hour," said the voice, "and then you will awaken and leave this building and go to your home. You will not remember having been here; you will think you have been to a movie theater. You will throw away the note with our telephone number and also the page from your desk calendar containing this address, which you have in your shirt pocket." My chair swiveled gently to face a blank wall, where a picture sprang into being: it was the opening credits of an African movie with subtitles. "You will open your eyes and watch the motion picture," said the voice, and then the soundtrack cut in over the hidden loudspeaker. Ill I stood up and made my way to the door. If they thought I was asleep, maybe they'd have unlocked the door. If so, maybe I could get out and away -- I wasn't far from the exit door at the end of the hall. I tried the doorknob, but it was unlocked. Holding my breath, I eased it open. The guide-robot was right outside, blocking the doorway, staring blankly at me with its red bee-eyes. The robot gave a rapid, Geigerlike clicking and said, "You are awake." I tried to shove past, but the robot stretched its long steel arms out across the doorway and held me back. I ducked and tried to go under the arms, but there wasn't enough room -- the robot was advancing into the doorway. It kept up that rapid clicking and sputtering. "You are awake. Go back into the room. Go back into the room." I had no choice; I was forced back. The robot stepped back outside again, and once more it shut the door. This time the click of the lock wasn't faint. Behind me the movie soundtrack groaned to a stop, and the lights came back on. The loudspeakervoice said, "You are awake. This is very unusual." "I was always a lousy subject for hypnotism. But I kept my eyes away from the Cyclopean robot just the same. "You'd better let me out of here. I left word at my office where I was going. If I turn up where to look." "You left no word at your office," said the voice. "That was checked, of course. We are always efficient." "But you seem to have messed up this time," I pointed out. "Yes. Very unusual. I am coming to see you," said the voice, and almost simultaneously I heard the lock behind me turn, and the door opened. A small robot rolled through the door, which shut and locked behind it. Its head was about two feet in diameter, and it seemed to run on IF roller-skate wheels. Three black buttons, apparently eyes, were arranged in a triangle near the top of its face, and four small arms no more than five inches long extended from the sides, ending in tiny hands with articulated fingers. The head and body were all one metal globe; it looked like a confused beach ball, especially with its round red speakergrille, like a mouth gaping open. "That's you?" I said unbelievinglyHis voice (the robot's appearance was so unprepossessing that I immediately thought of it as "he") sounded a trifle hurt as he said, "Yes, I am me -- first official in charge of Madison Avenue Bailiwick Four. I happen to be a very complicated machine, programmed for self-determination of actions and with a vocabulary of # words, English language # Track Fourteen. Microminiaturization and our make all this possible." "Who the hell is we?" I asked, turning to follow him as he rolled past me into the center of the room. He rolled to a stop in front of the swivel chair, and with one of his pencil-thin arms motioned me to sit. I couldn't see any reason not to, so I did. #XJow then," he said, and his round body-head seemed to lean back on its roller-skate base. "We can get down to business. I admire a man who can get down to business. No shilly-shallying, no beating for birds in the bush. Right?" He waved a hand before I could open my mouth. "Don't bother to answer; I know you agree. Were you to answer, it would only waste valuable time. And we are in the process of getting down to business, are we not?" "I hope so," I said. "Good. Good." He waved his arms again. "Very good indeed. Now then -- you ask, 'Who is weT A very good question. It strikes to the heart. That is, it is incisive, trenchant, acute, penetrating. Yes?" "I thought so," I muttered. "Ah!" he said. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ahah! That is my simulation of a human laugh -- very good, I believe. I laugh because you employ irony upon my statement, a peculiarly human communication form. I am able through the sophistication of my analysis-patterns to detect and respond to this." "Terrific," I said. "Ah! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah ! Now then, I will tell you who we are. Though, to be frank, you may not believe me at first. I am aware of the unfortunate limitations which even humans had in # Track Fourteen. Listen carefully and with an open mind, then: We are robots." He stopped, peering at me with his triangle of button-eyes and clicking faintly inside. "I believe you," I said. "Yes? You do? Or do I detect irony? Aa-ah?" "No," I told him. "I do believe you. You look like a robot, you know." "Ah," he said. "Yes. An accurate observation, accurate indeed." "Thanks," I said sourly. "Now that that's settled, how about telling me where you're from? What do you want? And why the hell did you get me here and try to hypnotize me?" He nodded, and since his head was also his body the gesture came out looking like a bow. A tin beach ball with old-world charm, I thought. Oh boy. "Again you ask questions which are to the tip," he said approvingly. "Let me then be forthright, since I admire forthrightness. Wastes no time. Where are we from? Yes, excellent questioning, but not quite accurate. Rather, when are we from? You see the distinction -- when rather than where? Yes, I see you nod. Good. All right, then: We are from the future." "From the future," I said. He cocked his head, leaning sideways on his roller-skate base as he peered beadily at me. "Ah-ah?" he asked. "Not quite," I said. "Don't worry about that -- just go on with your story." "Ah, yes. Well, we are from the future. Or rather, from a future. Our base is #, Track Seven. That is, Time Track Seven. You are familiar with the idea of infinitely branching time tracks?" "Somewhat. That's the theory that at any moment in history there are an infinite number of possible futures, depending on small decisions, random factors and so on. Each possible future is a different, uh, time track." "Quite yes. You understand well IF -- that is with precision -- the theory. And you will understand me when I say that this theory is absolutely correct, though now dated. There were once an infinite number of time tracks, but now there are only fifty-eight of them." "What does that mean?" H e hesitated, then gave his little nod-bow. "I see I must explain at greater extension. At one time -- subjectively speaking -- there were indeed a limitless number of histories for humanity, an infinity of them branching from each moment in time. Very messy. But we would not have changed this except that in so many of these alternate tracks mankind came to harm. Wars, plagues, ecological imbalances, natural disasters of worldwide scope, and many ceteras . As robots we could not allow this, you see, so once we had developed time travel we began our work to improve things. We have so far eliminated -- " He paused, then did rapid calculations on the first two fingers of his left hand. "We have so far dred and sixty-seven thousand, seven hundred and two worldwide pestilences. Also -- " more fingercounting " -- eight hundred and twenty-six wars which substantially destroyed mankind. Or perhaps the figure is sixteen hundred and fiftytwo. But you see what I mean, at any speed." I abruptly realized that I was staring at him. I cleared my throat self-tconsciously and said. "You mean you're really from the future? And you and all these other robots are... uh, fixing up history?" "Indeed yes. It is necessary for the good of mankind, which is of course our prime directive; we cannot allow men to be harmed, or even to harm themselves." The robot emitted a gust of air which sounded peculiarly like a sigh. "It was comparatively easy before we discovered time travel; but once the past was open to us we owned no choice, but to accept the additional responsibility. So we have launched our great campaign to restructure all histories. And we are now approaching a degree of success, since in all of the fifty-eight remaining tracks we have kept mankind alive up through the year #. We are of course continually working to extend that date as well as to improve the quality of the tracks. The more humans alive on a given track the better it is, you see." "Wait a minute, wait a minute," I said. A chill was creeping up the back of my neck. "You say you've kept us alive up through this year. What about next year? Are we dead then? Is that why you're here now?" For several long seconds the robot sat silently, his only sound that faint clicking inside, like a computer muttering to itself. Then he said, "I cannot tell you about the future of your particular track, since our hypnotreaitment has had no effect on know -- our technique is very efficient, very refined, very complicated. It is not merely hypnotism, but a combination of that with acoustics, room temperature, the psych-index which we recorded while you were in the reception room -- " "Yes, what about that?" I broke in. "Why did you keep me waiting there? Why did you give me the runaround in that hallway till I finally threatened to walk out on you?" IV A gain the robot was silent, its triangle of button-eyes staring impassively at me. Finally he said, "Our only need is to detain you until #:# tonight. If we can keep you waiting of your own unfastened will for part of that time, it saves expenditure of staff resources in power and time. You can understand that, with fifty-eight tracks to guard and restructure, every bit of energy we save can be important. The time you spent in the reception room and hallway saved us the electricity and machinedepreciation which we would otherwise have had to use in showing you a travelogue of New Tasmania. Multiply  that saving by fifty-eight tracks, and consider that on each track we have between twelve offices engaged in this work, and -- " "Yes, I see. And this is why you planted a note in my wallet with your phone number on it? To cause me to come out under my own power?" "Very good. I like a man who can keep up with me. Humans have remarkable mind-systems, but they are usually not as efficient as those IF which all robots have. You understand that robots have to be, if you Will absolve the expression, superhumanly efficient, in order to cope with the capacious number of variables which we face in our work with the tracks. Why, my own computational unit, portable as it is, is so complex that even  do not understand -- " "But the questions is," I said, "how did you know I'd find that note today? How did you know I'd call you?" "We checked it by time-observance, of course. Without the necessity of actually introducing a material body into a time-point, we save much power, so it is practical to search alternate tracks and tributaries for the most well-ominous circumstances, then take advantage of them. We could just as easily influence a subject by causing him to get a wrong party when he punches a telephone number, or by stirring a wind which would blow his hat down a certain street, or -- " ways, I'm sure," I said. sand, four hundred and eighteen other ways, to be minute. We are in the position of what you would call a Monday morning flecker, you see." I frowned. "Monday morning quarterback, you mean?" "Quarterback, yes indeed. Analogous to the flecker of a hightman game on Track Sixteen. My apologies -- even the fantastically complex and efficient microcircuits of my mind unit occasionally slip down. As I say, even I can't always tell just how my mind is able to keep beside all the variables; they are not only supernumerous, but also subtle. For specimen, we can cause a negative administrative decision by seeing that many little things go wrong that morning for the official involved -- shirt collars too heavily starched, cold shaving lather in the dispenser, dictaphone cartridge lost, and so onward. Or we can tar the way for the success of delicate negotiations by opposite methods -- " "Enough of that! What concerns me right now is why you wanted to see me in the first place. I know my job is important, and we've just finished a big job for Hemispheric Defense, but I hope that doesn't mean... Well, you said mankind was only safe up through this year. I hope I'm not a contributor to some global war which you're trying to prevent." The robot said, "I can tell you nothing of the future of your own track, as you know." I sighed. "Yes, I know. But I think I get the message, anyway. If that's the case, then you can count on my full cooperation. I don't want to destroy the world any more than you want me to." "Very natural," he said. "Of course no human actually wants to destroy the world, whether it is Premier Yaroslav or your own President Robinson." "Fletcher," I said. "Robinson lost the run-off election, remember?" "Ah, certainly. Robinson is Track Fifteen. But you see my point, in any situation: no one wants to destroy the human race, but human relationships are such that the danger of Wiar is always present. Only by the fastidious surveillance of robots can disasters natural and unnatural be avoided... and even then the tracks are so complicated that we have our mistakes." He paused, a slight humming sound still coming from his speaker-grille. "We are still trying to tinker with an improperly programmed computation concerning events on this track in a place named Sarajevo," he said at length. "Oh -- the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination. You haven't been able to prevent that?" T he robot clicked loudly, sounding agitated. "We... made what you would call a miscalculation. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was a pivotal figure in a minor, but bloody war in Eastern Europe which we determined to eliminate from the tracks. We devoted a superb deal of effort to influencing an inept attempt on the Archduke's life, which would cause his government to adopt a slightly different policy... and then one of our diurnal dataanalyses reported that all the tracks branching forth by that time led to the death of both the Archduke and his wife -- " I was thunderstruck as the meaning of the robot's words came through to me. "You mean... you actually caused that assassination? It wouldn't have happened otherwise?" "Ah... no. Nor would the European war have spread so far. It is one of our errors which we would like to forget if we were human, bbt since we are robots with fantastically infallible memories which amaie even us, we must remember it and continue to work on that entire area of history. Since the initial error was our own, we cannot restructure it, but by working in those areas not touched by our earlier work we have already managed to keep Venezuela, Switzerland and Tahiti out of the war." "Incredible," I said. The robot dipped forward again, and this time I was sure it was intended as a bow, not a nod. "Thank you. We exist to serve you, as you know. All of our far-thrown resources are used for the benefit of humankind, and we never cease in our efforts. For another specific, we are not yet satisfied with our results at Pompeii, and our efforts to prod the Chicago fire department of #I into developing more efficient methods have left a blight on six adjoining tracks. Then there is the unstressing matter of the Spider Invasion of Central America..." "The whatV "When the spiders mutated as a result of our experiment and overran El Salvador, Honduras, Guatamala and most of Yucatan," he explained. "Surely you remember. Or have we kept that from spreading to this track?" "I hope so," I said. "Thank you, if so." He missed the irony this time. "You are welcome," he said formally. "We continue to labor unacquittingly in the muddy fields of time, improving each track and wherever IP ossible feeding substandard tracks ack into better ones. We have actually cut the number of tracks down to forty-seven, you know "I thought you said fifty-eight." I heard something like the grinding of gears within the robot while he again made binary calculations on two fingers. "Yes, you are right," he said. "I have the bulkiest admiration for a man whose memory can match and surpass that of a robot, as yours have done. Of course, my statement was not the kind of error you may have supposed, since at one point we actually did have the number of Tracks reduced to forty-seven, but we have had a few setbacks recently." I listened to this statemtnt, as I had listened to him for some time now, with something bordering on incredulity. That this robot and all the others I had seen were machines out of the future who had come back to improve mankind's history was hard enough to believe, but it made sense in a crazy kind of way. Machines with the overriding directives to serve and protect humans would certainly have to set out on this course if time travel ever became possible; but that they should be so inept at it, so bumbling and foolish, was appalling. "Aren't you getting any help at all from the humans of your time?" I asked him. "They made you; they gave you your directives; surely they oversee matters and coordinate your organization!" "But how could they?" the robot asked. "Humans no longer give orders to robots; ruling and decisionmaking is difficultiful and hazardous work which we have taken off the heads of humans. Should a human make an incorrect decision and cause something like the Spider Invasion, he would be ridden by so much guilty that he would be mentally sick. We robots, with our astoundingly logical brain-circuitry, have no guilty, so we can shoulder the risk of making such catastrophic errors. Thus the humans of our base track turned over all administrations to us by the year # I , and we have kept them completely safe ever since." I felt a chill climbing up the back of my neck, hair by hair. "What do you mean, completely safe?" "Precisely that. We allow humans to do whatever they want, so long as it in no way puts them in danger. We oversee their diets, habits, personality relationships and sexy lives so that they will not starve, grow fat, get cholesterol, hernias, guilties or other mental disorientations. It is all very scientific -- " "But that's tyrannyl" I burst out. "Dictatorship! Welfare-stateism! Big Brotherism!" "Yes," said the robot approvingly. "I am glad you can see how logical. Eventually, of course, when we have achieved or perfect aim, we will have segued all sixty tracks into each other, so that by #I there will only be the one track on which the robots are voted into administration. Then everything will be simple and safe." "Fifty-eight tracks, not sixty," I reminded him with a bit of malice. # A... no. Unfortunately, news which I receive unstintingly through my communication circuit informs me that we have slipped back to sixty again. But we shall make it up. We continue to labor acquittingly in the muddy field of time, improving each -- " "You said that once already," I told him. "Turn that tape off and tell me one simple thing: Did you get me here to help avoid a catastrophe or to further your little scheme for taking over the world? What would I have done if I hadn't come here?" The robot waved his tiny metal hands vaguely. "But you know I cannot tell you of the future of your track. And anyway," he added, "it is all the same thing: anything which would prevent humans from following the track to robot leadership would be a catastrophe." "Maybe from where you're sitting, but not according to me," I said firmly. I stood up. u I'm not staying here with you one minute longer; I've still got over half an hour left of the time you were trying to keep me here incommunicado. Maybe I can still find out what I was supposed to be doing -- " "Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!" he said. "That is my simulated laugh -- very like your Peter Lorre, yes? Surely you did not imagine that an organization so efficient and powerous as ours would take a chance on your getting away that easily. I like you, Mr. Barrow, and I regret having to do this. Look there!" He pointed over my left shoulder, and involuntarily I glanced in that direction. It was the Cyclopean robot again, its eye whirling faster now than it had that first time I'd faced it. I felt my attention focusing on that whirlpool as though drown by a physical force. I fought it, trying to close my eyes, to shake my head, to look away... but I couldn't. I felt myself being drawn deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of that eye, while from somewhere came a voice saying: "Down, down, down... You are falling into the eye, into sleep. Down, down..." "It won't work," I gasped. "Not on me!" "Ah, but it will," said the beachball robot; and he was right, for I felt myself sinking back into my chair, my eyes beginning to close. "While I have occupied you with this little chat my assistants have taken the opportunity to record a fuller psych-index on you, and now..." But I heard no more of his voice. As I slipped inexorably into darkness all I could hear was the voice echoing inside my head: "Sleep, sleep, sleep... " V r ie next thing I knew I was wandering out on the street, and it was almost seven o'clock. I remembered seeing the last half of an African movie which hadn't made much sense -- something about ennui and corruption among the younger Tribal Council members and weird-looking robots scurrying here and there and a statuesque six-foot Negro girl bathing drunkenly in a fountain in Johannesburg and someIF thing else about a huge whirling eye... It was all a jumble in my mindI made my way home in a daze and hardly exchanged two words with Betty when she got home from her meeting. But the next day, when I went in to the office, the morning sun streaming through my office window threw into relief something on my calendar pad. With an odd itch at the back of my mind, I picked up the pad and looked more closely. It was a note I'd written about the appointment; my pen had made faint indentations in the next sheet down. As I looked at them I knew dimly that they were somehow important; frowning, I took a pencil and rubbed it over the sheet. All I could make out was: Appt ad Rm # :#. But it was enough to kick my frozen memory back into action. Eventually, after spending the whole morning staring at a blank wall and coaxing, nagging my brain to shake out those cobweb-memories, it all came back. The robots hadn't been as efficient as they'd thought, even on the second try. I remembered the whole sequence of events... except that I couldn't remember the address, and I couldn't remember the phone number. (Which is why the number I gave earlier aren't the real ones.) I spent several days prowling up and down Madison Avenue, looking for the building I remembered, but none of them looked just right. I thought of calling the police into believe my story, and I'd only end up in a psycho ward somewhere, or at the very least lose my security clearance. And I gradually came to doubt my own memories. But every time I'm ready to shrug and forget the whole thing, write it off as a dream or hallucination, I read the headlines in the papers, and they cure me. It's incredible, the things that go on in the world in the supposedly enlightened year #; they're just like the things that have been going on all through history. They're crazy. And when I read the papers I remember those robots clicking and humming and bumbling behind the scenes and that mechanical receptionist's definition of a robot: "Robot, noun: An automatic apparatus or device that performs functions ordinarily ascribed to human beings or operates with what appears to be almost human intelligence" Some of the news stories that catch my eye don't rate very big headlines, though. Buried back in the second section for the past several days, for instance, there harte been brief items about some peculiar disturbances in El Salvador. It seems the natives are spreading stories about giant spiders coming into their villages, marching in ranks two abreast and frightening their women      IF  Feature The first "nationwide" clubs -- and how they have grownl The Urge to Organize fiction club" and says that it published the first real fan magazine. dim and just about prehistoric The Scienceers days of the early #'s fandom got started. From the very first, fans This club was organized in New were possessed by the desire to orYork City. Its first president was ganize and form clubs. Local homea Negro fan named James Fitzgertown groups first, then regional or aid. The club met in his home in state societies, and then came the Harlem for awhile. But this was idea for giant, nation-wide, all-fansomething more than just a local encompassing superclubs. fan club: a branch of the ScienWith one possible exception, ceers was established in Brooklyn; which I will deal with in its place, a second in the Bronx; yet another none of these national organizawas formed in Clearwater, Florida, tions ever worked for very long. One There were attempts to get branches of the very first ever was called launched in the town of Temple, being about #; in his book The but these didn't get off the launchImmortal Storm: A History of ing pad. Science Fiction Fandom (Atlanta This attempt to create something Science Fiction Organization Press, that stretched from New York to #), Sam Moskowitz calls the Florida, Texas and Oklahoma, clearScienceers "the first true sciencely places the Scienceers beyond the classification of the local, state or even regional fan organization: it was an early attempt at a nationwide club. Unfortunately, one which fell through, but a good beginning. Then in # came something spite the imposing title, this group operated out of a rural town in Alabama called Oakman. It seems to have had considerable trouble getting organized in such nebulous hinterlands, for investigation proved the Guild had only one member. This chap, Wilson Shepard, published a four-page hectographed bulletin which was, incidentally, the first use of the hectograph in fannish history (according to Moskomore members after awhile, and eventually -- # -- got rolling. The first thing it did was to change its name. The Terrestrial Fantascience Guild With an even more imposing title It was not a Tegular club with officers, a constitution and the whole shtick, but a sort of "voluntary union of science-fiction lovers" among whose aims was to instigate a campaign against back-number magazine dealers who charged unholy prices. This Cause was suggested by the Guild's most prominent member, Donald A. Wollheim, and I believe the Guild's blacklist actually squeezed one dealer into reducing his prices to a more realistic level. After a year or two, the Guild petered out, leaving behind its official organ still going strong. This came under Wollheim's editorship, changed its name to The Phantagraph and started publishing stories, verse and essays by Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard (the creator of "Conan the Cimmerian") and H. P. Lovecraft, among others. It was still going strong long after the parent organization had totally ceased activity. Around the same time, there were abortive, short-lived, would-be national organizations springing up all over the fanscape like weeds. For example, out in San Francisco, Norman Caldwell and Forrest J Ackerdid anything about it besides thinking up the name. Around #, Massachusetts fan Hayward S. Kiractivity to get past the planning stage was to produce one issue of the official organ, The Fantasy Fiction Digest , which came out bearing the date of September #, #, whereupon the entire League succumbed to procrastination. And same time, publishing a club magazine called The Tesseract , dated March #. This one appealed to younger, newer fans (among them some chaps destined to make quite a name for themselves later an, such as James Blish). Chapters of fornia and eventually were farflung all the way east to Philadelphia, and there were even Canadian members. It also faded after a year or so and went into the doldrums. The Science Fiction League But one such attempt at a nationwide club actually made it. This fame, conceived either by sfs grandad, Hugo Gernsback, or by his employee, Charles D. Hornig, then editor of Wonder Stories (accounts League was first announced in the May # issue of Wonder , and the very first member (and founder of the Brooklyn chapter, the very first chapter of the League) was a chap named George Gordon Clark. There were certificates of membership and lapel buttons and club stationery and a board of directors made up of distinguished science-fiction authors and Forrest J Ackerman, and everything . Gemsback was Executive Secretary, and Hornig assistant secretary. Even though it was patently obvious the League was a gimmick designed principally to build readership and boost circulation in Wonder Stories , Gernsback blandly made utopian pronouncements, claiming the League existed as "a non-commercial membership organization for the furtherance and betterment of the art of science fiction." Charters were issued to local chapters, which were formed whereever three or more members could get together. The first chapter, as I have said, was in Brooklyn; ## was in Lewiston and ## in Erie, Penna.; and others popped up by the carload: Los Angeles (later to continue life as the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, one of the oldest, biggest, most active clubs ever, and still going strong), Philadelphia, Newark, N.J., Denver, Colo., Chicago, Lincoln, #., Monticello, N.Y., and so on -- and on -- not to mention overseas chapters, of which the first was in Leeds, England. The remarkable success of the Science Fiction League was due in part to the fact that it was spon # sored by a science-fiction prozine. Wonder ran a League column in every issue, listing new members' names and addresses and reporting on local chapter news and meetings, etc. When membership hit the astounding total of # it seemed simply incredible; yet, later, total membership was to reach several thousand; but, actually, statistics aside, most of these people never did anything at all in fandom after simply sending in their names to be published. Sponsorship by a prozine was the factor wherein lay both the strength and the weakness of the League, and this weakness led to its eventual collapse. For, dissatisfied with the centralized and total control of Gernsback and Hornig, local chapters began splitting off. First the groups in New York, Brooklyn, Denver, Albany, Nassau, then plenty of others. Many of the tiny #-member "on paper only" chapters didn't really meet or even exist. Then came the Deluge... In the middle of #, Wonder IF Stories went under, and the rights to the title were sold to another publishing group headed by Ned Pines and Leo Margulies. Although Margulies promised to continue the League, there was a considerable hiatus between the last Gemsback Wonder and the first Margulies issue, and in this shaky interim many other clubs split away. During the editorial change-over the links between the mass of local chapters and the central headquarters -- always tenuous even in the best of times -- snapped completely, and the national structure entirely collapsed. The Phantasy Legion, and Others Thus Gemsback lost control over the Science Fiction League, and although many of the larger and more important chapters, such as Los Angeles and Chicago, retained ' their nominal allegiance to the parent organization, most of the rest went their own way, or into limbo. When the League was revived, as Wonder Stories , new members continued to be enrolled and new chapters to be formed, but it was all on paper. The national fan organization was gone; life had departed vote more room to boosting the contents of forthcoming issues than to trying to breathe some life into the defunct structure. Towards the end of #, David A. Kyle, who had been head of the League's Monticello, N.Y., chapter, organ called Legion Parade was announced; life memberships in the Legion were for sale at #c; fanzines were encouraged to join the Legion's affiliated publishers guild, which would thus knit the fabric of American fandom together into a a unit. There was immediate support offered by leading fans of the day, such as Don Wollheim, for one of the nicest and strongest things about Kyle's Legion was its democratic autocratic in nature, with Gemsback in office for life, the Phantasy Legion was absolutely democratic and not under the thumb of any autocrat, even its founder, David Kyle. Dramatic proof of this was forthcoming in the first election, when the members voted somebody else into the presidency, leaving Kyle merely vice-prexy! After a brisk and promising start, the club marked time. Then, with Kyle no longer at the helm, the Legion faded into obscurity. Although the Science Fiction League revived for a sort of halfover, the main impetus had passed to the individual chapters while the national group never did much, as Margulies lacked the interest Gemsback and Hornig had shared in the League. One such chapter was the Queens Science Fiction League, which became an active and thriving center for East Coast fandom. Attendance at the monthly meetings soared to # or more people, among them such celebrities as Willy Ley, Eric Frank Russell, John W. Campbell, Jr., Jack Williamson and others. Some chapters of the great League were still operating under official League auspices as late as #, long after the League had become but a ghost, devoid of activity or identity. The East New York chapter split off, and one of its splinters attempted to take the lead and reorganize fandom into a national unit have exhausted itself just coining the name, for nothing more was ever heard of it. a project initiated in #, which received only lukewarm support and # by Don Wollheim. (The Futurians, by the way, were a vigorous, influential fan group of the period, centered in New York, and boasting members such as Wollheim, Fred Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth, David A. Kyle, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Lowndes and others later to become science-fiction professionals). None of these post-League Leagues ever got going. Like the Phantasy Legion, they had a board of directors, an emblem, an official club magazine and just about everything -- except members. Despite its wholly commercial nature, Gernsback's Science Fiction League was a successful enterprise. Sam Moskowitz says it was more beneficial and more important to science-fiction fandom than any club before or after it. Next month, your man In Fandom will discuss a national club that started with a bang and went noand one, that started slow and easy, but is actually the most successful national organization of them all, Two Complete Short Novels by Keith Laumer by Hayden Howard Also stories and features by top science-fiction writers: -- and many others! April Issue of Galaxy on sale now -- get your copy today! IF IF  Novelette The Youth Addicts He had conquered space ; now he faced a deadlier voyage -- into the depths of a woman's mind! I W e stood on the ship-landing and looked out over the crowd which had come to meet the ship. Wives, girl-friends, families. Hell, I didn't expect anybody, so I helped Clay look for his wife. I knew her voice, her face. He'd shown me the three-dee cube of her giving an earnest little farewell speech: slate-colored hair, almondshaped eyes and a nose like some eight-year-old kid. You know how cute they are when the nose hasn't formed yet. Later it comes out like a potato, or else it's got a hook oa it. Well, Leeba's had stayed in that cute stage. She had clothes on. (Nine-tenths of these mementocubes don't. Many's the pack of personal effects I've put together, and the cube of the dead guy's wife would make an engine-room wiper blush.) But even with clothes, you could see that Leeba's shape was right up there with the upper one per cent, and all the time that she was saying, Good-by, Clay , I love her eyes had been looking out of the cube and making my hair prickle. I could tell that if she liked a guy she'd play patty-cake with all the stops out. "I don't get it," said Clay, looking around like some bewildered young Charles Lindberg. "I sent her a 'gram." "She answer?" "No." Seven years. The kid didn't realize? I made the motions of looking out over the crowd, but I was thinking: Too bad, Clay, you're unique along with about three out of five other guys who do the long haul in out-space and come back cuddling your nest-egg, only to find that those sweet kissable lips have gone off nuzzling some other jack who lacks your manly attributes and youthful good looks, but nevertheless has the beauty of being here, while you're in the far-out, the black yonder, hawking up your lungs in a thoride mine, or sweating out your soul in a steaming micle plantation, or frosting your nose on some twilight world hunting fizzbuck furs. Well, there's # Vz ways to grub for the Company credit, jack, and I've done half of them during my three sevenyear tours. I 'd known Clay on Plegan's planet; he was one of a dozen young engineers who showed our machinery crews where to gouge thoride out of the guts of the world. I'd seen the kids go to pieces one by one: four carried off by disease, one killed in a fight, one got his wig twisted up and killed three workers before I finally had to blast him down. (That's what's behind the euphemism on my Galactic Minerals ID card: Field Personnel Supervisor.) I had # machinists, oilers and mechanics besides the engineers, and my qualifications boiled down to the fact that I was harder then they were. What the hell, I'd been raised with the sting of a nightstick on my bare feet every morning, so I know a little hammering won't hurt. The blaster's different, but sometimes it's the only way to bring order into a camp nearest space-patrol boat. Men minus woman substitute violence for sex. (Try to get GM to send out a platoon of pleasure-girls, no dice. We've got a bluenose on the board of directors.) Anyway, the other five engineers got fat and cynical, and three of them started wearing flowers in their hair. That left Clay, still the brightfaced young engineer who'd made the trip out. I got friendly with him on the trip home, and he regaled me with photos of his house, his wife and his plans to set up in business as a consultant, then start filling the house with little carbon copies of himself and Leeba. I'd identified with Leeba because we both came from Scrag -- unlovely name for a cold, unlovely world. Clay had skimmed off the cream of the crop, because Leeba's great grand-dad had been one of the first colonists on the planet. He and a half-dozen others had stamped their brand on the whole world, and later IF immigrants had to work for them. It excited me to think of Leeba, coming from the rich but still halfbarbarian nobility of Scrag, and tying up with Clay, who came from the poor-but-ancient nobility of the Centauri worlds. Clay was polite and soft-spoken but had a will of steel. Set him on a track, and he quietly persevered through mud sleet hail blood sweat tears and spit. She was a willow, blown about by her emotions. (I saw that in the threedee cube, a banked fire just about to flare up. I had to quit looking at it, because it cut into my sleep at night, thinking of her all alone on acter Clay was to leave her for seven years! They don't figure it out, these kids. At twenty they think youth is forever. They hit twenty-eight, thirty, and one morning it's like a wind off the ice. Getting old. Time running out. Women it hits harder than men. Run out and grab the first guy they see. Reproduce. Carry on the race. Never mind the excuse, make it With a Scraggin like Leeba, you oould multiply it ten times. I asked him: "Why the hell did you leave her on Earth?" This was after we'd been in space for three months. He shrugged. "She wouldn't go back to Scrag. Some social stigma involved." Stigma? More like total ostracism. On Scrag you followed your man wherever he went, and if he died so did you -- or you went into a special home for widows. On Scrag, an unmarried female of breeding age was an outcast, a female pariah. "How old was she?" I asked. "Well, we were married that spring before I left. She was nineteen. We just had time for a short honeymoon before I shipped -- " "She get pregnant?" "Uh, we decided to wait until I got back." "She decided?" "No, I told her I didn't want a child to be seven years old before I saw him. She... finally agreed I was right." I felt like hitting him over the head. So damn placidly sure that his old austere, maiden-aunt culture was Right, and all others were quaint, curious offshoots! 'Listen, Clay, I'll tell you how it is on Scrag. In winter nothing happens. All is frozen, so cold that steel breaks like glass. People stay in the domes, and they're in a kind of slow-down too. But when the ice melts, that's summer. The plants crack open the soil and shoot up; in a week the whole planet's a bubbling, crawling mass of growing things. They've only got two months until the first frost, see -- and that's when those enormous Scraggin families get started. Nobody counts anything. There's complete sexual license. All females from sixteen to thirty get pregnant. That's the culture your wife grew up in." "But she came to Earth when she was sixteen." "You think that would break the pattern?" "Why... I don't know. But Leeha never acted . He blushed a little. "In fact, when. I met her at the university she was totally uninterested in the, uh, physical aspects of our relationship." "You met her in winter?" "Why... yes." "How'd she act when spring came?" "A little forward sometimes, but... oh, let's forget it, Bork. Do you mind?" I didn't mind, but the closer we got to Earth the more he talked about her. He showed me a picture she'd sent him after he'd been gone two years. Clay said she'd gained some weight, but I could see the marks that a Scrag summer puts on a woman: lips full and sensuous, breasts swollen into an almost obscene lushness, hips broader and legs heavier... all was ready for the implantation of the child she would bear. But there was no child. God, her appetites must be tearing her apart. She'd worn her hair in a twisting roll down in front of her left shoulder. On Scrag it means that a woman has no man and is receptive. I dkta't tell Clay this. I just said: "WeU, if I met a gal like this. I'd do my damnedest to pull her out of the VMuting game." Ho gave his polite, aristocratic smile. I could see my battered puss in the mirror of his eyes: broken nose, knife scar splitting my right cheek in two, cropped blue-black hair stippled with gray, cauliflowered left ear, and I knew what he figured: Bork's a nice crusty ole hog, but Leeba could never... "Oh, no. Probably not But what he didn't understand was that when a Scraggin woman is in the middle of her summer estrogen cycle, she'll grab what's available. H e showed me her letters too. The first ones were full of the normal slop a young wife would write her faraway lover, but after three years they started getting remote, as though she were writing to her second cousin because her mother told her to. When I mentioned it to Clay he smiled. "Leeba can't write without getting formal, Bork. It means nothing." Maybe not. But I noticed that her handwriting steadily deteriorated, until it became a scrawl like a kid just learning to write. I made no sense of that, nor of some things she said: Everybody seems so old, here . Even your letters, Clay And also:  think of Scrag all the time. I must go back there when you get home. Estrogens calling her home? Man, I didn't know. At first she'd written about the house they'd bought before Clay left, describing each room and what she'd put in it... especially the bedroom. So I told Clay about the summer outings on Scrag, when each girl makes a bower to share with the boy she's chosen for the night. The girls talked about the bowers as Leeba did her bedroom. Clay laughed. "That's the way Leeba is, absolutely involved in what she does. She never holds back." IF But later she didn't mention the house. She took a job, and I could see her trying to keep busy, get her mind off her unfulfilled appetite. Clay didn't see it that way: "She wanted to help save money. I wrote her that I didn't want my wife working, so she quit." "What's she doing now?" "I don't know. She... quit writing a year ago. I assume she knew I'd be back soon, so she's saving it up to tell me in person." I'd finally given up trying to hammer it into his thick aristocratic skull. He hadn't been listening most of the time anyway, just nodding his head out of sheer well-bred politeness. I'd just hoped I wouldn't be around when he learned the truth. II B ut... here we were at the spaceport, and no Leeba. We divided the crowd into segments and surveyed every likely female face. Gradually the throng dwindled, until finally we were alone except for the baggage-robots. "Maybe the 'gram was garbled," said Clay. "She might've misunderstood the date. I'll call her." I shoved out my hand and said, "I'll see you," but he waved it off. "Stay, I want you to come home with me and meet her. You know her almost as well as I do now." Nervous about meeting her, that's why he wanted me along. I watched him slide into a visor-booth, then I walked away. Cruel thing to do, I'll admit it. But let me tell you, the way to be totally indifferent to another guy's trouble is to have bigger trouble of your own. I walked to the spaceport medical building, and went through an opaque glass door which read: Specialist in Non-Terran Diseases Pinwit was one of those guys who looks like he chose his name to fit his physique: short and round, with a tuft of gray hair sticking up like a shaving brush in the back of his bald skull. He wasted no time; I guess he was used to dealing with outspacers. Told me to sit down and asked how I felt. "Food doesn't have any flavor," I said. "I'm sleepy most of the time, and sometimes when people talk to me it sounds like they're in the next room." He made his mouth into an O and tapped his pencil on the desk. "When did you notice this?" "About four months ago on the ship." He got up and started pulling down the shades. "Ever been exposed to Silver Syncope?" I felt my stomach go queasy. Sure, I knew all about Silver Syncope; I'd read all I could find on the subject in the ship's library. But still, I'd hoped. You know how it is when you read about a disease; you start checking yourself over and every one of your symptoms tallies. They called it Silver Syncope because you shine in ultraviolet light. That's because your sweat glands exude the waste products of the disease. What the hell, you can bathe every day and take care of that. The problem is in the synapses, those little sensitive plates that transfer nerve impulses. They get coated with the stuff; fewer and fewer impulses get through. It's like dying of curare poisoning, except that death takes several months. "I spent five years on a planet called Benny rob. They had an outbreak six months after I left. But that was eight years ago. It wouldn't be dormant that long -- would it?" "There are cases of twenty-year dormancy. Stand over here." I stood on a platform, and he switched on his UV light. I could see the glow I cast on the wall: blue-green, like bread mold. Pinwit shut off the UV and turned on the overhead light. "I'll run some more tests if you like -- " "Tell me what you think." "You've got it." I gave a grunt which didn't quite escape from my throat. "Is there a cure yet?" "No." At least he didn't give me any funny jazz about not starting any continued stories. "How long have I got?" "Depends. How old are you?" "Thirty-six." "You look older." "I've done three seven-year tours in outspaoe." "Hmm. You started young. Fifteen. Well..." He looked at the ceiling. "Roughly, I'd give you two months." "Two months!" "I'm afraid there's no way to exIF tend it. There are homes, however, where you'd be comfortable. You have any money?" X shrugged. "Seven years' pay with completion bonus. Investments I've made from other years, some good, some lousy. You could say I'm wealthy, if it's money you're talking about." Two months, then Bork Craighen wraps it up. I walked out of the office feeling like I'd been hit on the head with a rock maul. I felt a total numbness, and it would take a while to learn which part hurt worst. I walked into a bar called the Venus Trap and ordered a Spaceman's Sling. I tossed down two and was staring at the third trying to find a silver lining to this vast black cloud... Here I was, rich and free. I was going to die, but what the hell -- I'd known that since I was a kid. Be happy you've got two months' warning. Live high and go out in a burst of pleasure... But then I frowned at the drink. I knew it was cold, I'd felt it sliding down my throat. But it hadn't meant anything. The sensation was secondhand, like reading about coldness. The full irony of Silver Syncope hit me. You can't feel, you can't taste, you can't enjoy. It's all a bit numb, and it would get worse every day. I understood now why some victims were locked up toward the end. Seeking sensation, any kind of sensation, they often went in for drugs, violence, rape, murder -- nothing reached them, but they tried like hell to make contact, any kind of contact, anything to break out of that cocoon of non-feeding, of -- "Want some company?" S he was a Venus-colonial with bluesilver hair and indigo skin. An outspacer's dream. Lush pneumatic chick with curves and hollows all in the right places, but roughly double what the average Earth-broad has. Her violet eyes took me to bed with her, and her heart-shaped hooker's badge said: Ym Mela. I love you. I pulled out a roll and threw it on the table. "Get us a couple more drinks. No, a whole bottle. We'll make it a long party." She ordered, then sat down and slid inside my arm. I knew her skin was warm and soft and faintly damp, because I'd had Venus-colonials before. Well, I felt her too -- in the back of my mind, even in my fingers, but there was that invisible film of non-contact. Ah, the hell with it. "You shipping soon, or...?" "I've got all the time you've got, Mela." Two months, what a dirty trick. Just when I was beginning to hammer my life into a decent shape. It was after midnight when I looked up and saw Clay standing there, wearing a dumb-striken expression. I assumed he'd found out the cold truth about women, you can't leave 'em for seven years and... but I didn't care. I just said, kind of fuzzy. "You find her?" He nodded bleakly. I figured, well, she's found herself another guy, and what can Clay do? I'd give him the Venusian chick. We'd already been to her room, and it had gone okay -- okay, after seven womanless years. Get that! What I mean is that I wasn't really there. It was like watching a movie of thyself. So I except that she was totally in love with me. Venus-colonials are like that, which is why they made good bar girls. So I said: "Sidd own. Mela, get a friend for my friend." "No, Bork. Really. I'll just sit here." He slid across the booth and sat with a puzzled expression; it looked like it had been pasted there since I'd left him at the spaceport. Then Mela got up and went into the back, and Clay leaned over and said in a tone of well-bred apology: "I don't want to interrupt anything, but I need your help." I almost laughed. I mean, ' what the hell did his trouble's matter when you're carrying a load like mine? But I saw no point in unloading on Clay; there's enough hate and confusion in the universe without me muddying up the water even more. I just sat and looked at him. He made me think of a sheepdog caught in a trap, big brown eyes saying: help, help, help. "You were right, Bork," he said. "I shouldn't have left her here. But I didn't understand what she was going through. I wanted to get a good start in life, and -- oh, damn. If it isn't too late -- Bork, will you help me?" I saw us charging into a love nest, me beating up some guy while Clay dragged his bride out the back way. Well, it was just something to do. "Okay. Where are they?" "They -- oh, you mean Leeba?" "Leeba, yes. You said you found her. What about the guy?" "Bork, if there only was another guy, I wouldn't need your help. But she's going to die, if we can't figure out something..." Ill H e told me what had happened: he'd called home and gotten no answer. He'd gone to the house, and it hadn't been lived in for months. His space gram was unopened, his letters still sealed. Neighbors told him she'd often come home staggering; they thought she'd been drinking. Once they'd found her sitting on the lawn, crying for her daddy and mommy. She'd thought she was back on Scrag... "She'd sold the aircar, the furniture, her clothes, everything. The house was bare." He looked down at his hands. "I'd been sending my pay to Leeba. She was going to spend only what she needed to live on and bank the rest, but..." "She didn't?" "Oh, she did. But over a year ago she started making big withdrawals. She closed out the account two months ago." "Seven years' pay gone?" "I've still got my completion bonus. But that's it." "Over fifty gees? Where'd she spend it?" "In a place called Harry's Happy Return." "A bar?" IF "An illegal memorigraf parlor. That's where I found her." I felt a letdown. "Then what's the problem? She started tripping back into her past while you were gone. Now you're back. So kiss her and tell her all is forgiven." "I could, but she wouldn't feel it. She's in a memorigraf coma." So there was the problem. He'd taken her to two psychs, and they'd both told him the same thing. Once they went into the coma stage, there was no way to bring them out. They died in a coma, usually within a month or so. "I finally found a psych who'd just set up his little practice. He's got an idea he wants to try. That's why I need your help, Bork." I tried to find out what he wanted me to do, but he said the psych could explain it better. So a halfhour later I stood in Bruce Pepke's third-floor back room clinic looking down at Leeba, seeing her in the flesh for the first time, but -- So cold, so pale. They'd put a lacy gown on her which didn't interfere with my vision. Not a lush body now; thin and hollow-cheeked. They must have fed her through the vein, because I saw blue marks on her thin arm. She looked around thirty-five, but I knew she was only twentysix... too young to stop her life short and start rolling it backward. "How long has she been lile that?" Bruce was standing beside me in his white jacket. "I understand she's been comatose for over three weeks. Prior to that..." He shrugged. "I checked around and got her history of memorigraf addiction. She started four years ago, using a government-licensed parlor. Two years ago she switched to a clandestine parlor. So many do, since they want more than the legal limit of one hour per month. Leeba's visits grew more and more frequent, until finally she signed into the place full time. Most people can't afford a constant memory trip, otherwise these comas would be more common. Leeba could -- and here she is." I looked at her face and forgot my own problem. Her eyelids were bluetranslucent, like skim milk. I saw eye-movements behind them. "What's going on inside her head?" "She's there... in her past. Living it mentally at the rate of a week per hour." "I thought they had to be hooked up to a recording of their memory." "Not when they're in a coma. The memory circuits go on and on and on, until death. At least that's the theory. Nobody's ever revived from a coma, so we're not sure what happens inside the mind." I looked at him. "You think you can bring her out?" "Maybe... with your help." "What do I have to do?" He started talking, and I kept thinking: This guy could be a nut, Bork. What do you know about the brain, or memory? Nothing. Briefly, his idea was to make a recording of my brain pattern and play it into her memory. That way, he thought I'd have an independent existence which was not controlled by her mind. In other words, she'd project me in real, three-dimensional terms and fit me into the memory-world of her own past. "Is that possible, for a mind to contain two people? Won't it -- crack?" "I doubt it," said Bruce. "Many people carry more than one personality inside their heads. The ego is only a product of the mind anyway. It has no objective reality." I looked at Clay. "Why don't you go in?" "I'd have no freedom of action. I was in her life, and my role is laid out. I couldn't break out of it. It has to be someone she's never known." "But you grew up on Scrag, Bork. That's where she is. You'll be familiar with her environment." I had to laugh at that. "She was an aristocrat and I was a spaceport rat. We might as well have been a galaxy apart." "Then put it this way. The other guys -- they might forget. Or mess around, play little games inside her head. You're the only one I trust, Bork." T rust, I thought. He knew nothing of the disease which had riddled my moral framework. I gave him a sour loojc:. "You're handing me a helluva responsibility." "I know." "I ought to beat you head in for leaving her. I figured she'd just grab another man, but this..." I shook my head. "You should have left her pregnant, anyway." He nodded soberly. "I know. Beat my head in if you want. I'm putting all I've got into this. If I could bring her out by pushing a peanut up main street while wearing a striped loincloth, I'd do it. She's... all I've got." And all I had were two more months. I could live out the time, but I wasn't really interested. Too much like throwing good time after bad. Might as well try to salvage Clay's little princess. But I had no idea what Bruce expected me to do once I got inside her head. It turned out that he didn't either. "It's never been tried," he said. "My theory is that if you make her past so damnably unpleasant she can't stand it, she'll come out of her own free will." "How?" "That's something you'll have to decide when you get there. However, it would seem to me that -- " he coughed " -- one way would be to kill her." Clay turned white, but I went behind his words and got his meaning. "You mean, make her think she's dying?" He nodded. "And to escape death, she'll snap out of her coma." I thought about it. "I'm not a killer." Clay said, "I've seen you kill, Bork." "Sure, out in the camp. But they were berserkers -- men at that. This..." I looked at Leeba's slender throat, her thin nostrils moving oh so slowly, the chest rising and falling, lifting the two small breasts... IP "I can't do it. No, I just can't." "You'd be saving her life," said Clay. "You couldn't really harm her physically," said Bruce. "You'd be a projection of her mind and nothing more." "Bang-utot," I said. "Huh?" They both blinked at me. "There's a planet out near Fomalhaut where the natives die by nightmare. They dream they're dying, so they die . How do you know she won't?" Bruce looked gravely at Clay. "It's a possibility." "She's dying now, for God's sake! What can we lose?" He looked at me. "Bork, I'm begging you!" "No, don't beg. I'll try. But it's just not my nature to kill beautiful women." "No problem there," said Bruce. "I'll put you under hypnosis. It'll be an automatic command, a compulsion. You won't know why you're doing it, you'll just feel you have to." So... there was a sleepy drug which turned the world into twilight. When I woke up, Bruce made some tests and said I was hypnotized. I didn't feel any different, but he told me I was programmed to kill. Then he put a domed helmet on my head, and it was like falling into a hive of bees. Bzzz-bzzz-bzzzz... IH I have ego-identity, a concept of . But who am I? Slowly the ego grows flesh, like pearl-stuff growing on a grain of sand. Nerves sprout from the soil of the ego-concept. Heart, lungs, kidneys, liver... blood vessels flare in a net of red. My chest is thick, my telly long and flat, my arms and legs lithe and strong. I pulse with energy. I am a man-child. Nine-ten years old. Inside a... Large room. I see a vaulted ceiling with portholed lenses condensing the rays of a pale red sun. Babypink light drifts down like layers of cotton candy. I know that outside lies the world of Scrag: snow, ice and cold which burns the flesh and turns steel into brittle glass. I know more than a ten-year-old boy should know -- about the lighting principle of the dome, about other worlds. I remember seeing stars grow into suns, planets coalescing into seas and continents, becoming trees, grass and cities... I hear music, a swirl of pipes and the keening of a flute. The children are dancing: twenty girls, nine boys and one adult female. A teacher, or chaperone. I can sense her thoughts: boredom, anticipation of food, legweariness and tingles of sex-pleasure behind the knees. Many girls dance together, because of the shortage of boys. The boys dance reluctantly, feeling their awkwardness. I am aware of them, but they are not aware of me. Ah... now I see why. I sit against the curved wall of the dome, behind a rubbery-leaf ed vine which grows from a pot of purple soil. One of the girls is aware of me. A lovely girl... I think. Slatecolored hair whirls about her head like dark taffy stirred by a spoon, then spirals loosely down her back. Her skin is white, but shadowed by a dark undercoating. A blue skirt bells out from her waist and doesn't quite cover her buttocks. The rest of her is sheathed in a leotard so sheer that I see its blueness only in the inner curve of her elbows and knees. The slim torso is unadorned by breasts, but her almond eyes glitter with a blatant female hunger. I feel an age-link with her which has no relation to the immaturity of our bodies. Her bee-stung lips pout in my direction. She frowns, and I feel it in my body. No! More than that. She saw me, and I took form. I look down. I wear a dun-colored leotard and a sequined girdle which passes between my legs like a breechclout. I walk toward her. Movement is like liquid flowing. I am wax being poured into a mold. I want to run and jump; my awkwardness is nothing compared to the energy surging through me. My senses are needle-sharp; the mingled cachet of thirty young bodies flows around me, tainted by the odor of machineoil and plastic. She sees me coming and draws away from her partner. He frowns at me and walks away. I am no surprise to him, despite the smallness of the group. I must be known here. She raises her arms, and I fit myself to her. We are two, then one. Her hair against my cheek has the dry slickness of moth wings. She IF radiates a smell of warm milk and honey. Two turns around the floor, and I sense her thought: He dances... as, so smoothly. Then: Maybe he knows the Anpela. The word strikes my brain, and the knowledge of the intricate dance flows into my muscles. I do the steps, and a light glows behind her eyes. "What's your name?" I asked her. She laughed. "Silly. You know." Leeba. I pulled it out of her mind, together with all she'd ever done and been, a tangled knot of memories that burst inside my skull: Leeba Knight-Namburi. Eight years of life -- love, peace, happiness, each day a jewel strung on the thread of her existence. "Leeba," I said. "What's my name?" Her off-white cheeks dimpled. "Everybody knows their own name." Bork. I don't know where it came from, but it sounded correct -- except that Bork had issued from a nightclub strip-singer, fathered by a one-eyed spacer on the Sol-Arcturus run. Bork didn't belong with aristocrats. He had a box under the Space City dome, where he lived on scraps from restaurant kitchens. He led spacemen to drink and to wander and then plundered their pockets of what remained, but -- Great God of the Rift! Thirty years had passed since my rodentbeginning on Scrag. S till, here I was, a man in a boy's body, nursing a grownup purpose quite apart from the dance. Why was I here? I searched my mind. Leeba meanwhile behaved like a woman. Her satin cheek pressed mine; her warm breath tickled my throat. The hard angularity of her little-girl body pressed me in strange, adult ways. My body ached to merge with hers. I loved her as a man loves a woman. For an instant the straight cylinder of her chest became a dual softness pillowed against me. Her long waist became shorter, its narrowness accented by the swell of her hips. Her slim legs acquired a curvature of thigh and calf, a smoothness of flesh sheathing knee and ankle. Her eyes hooked into mine, and I felt the hunger of her empty womb. Surprise exploded in my brain: She knows who  am, clever girl. She's hiding, too . The trigger tripped, and my purpose burst like a nova inside my head: The impulse seared my brain. I felt an urge to vomit on the pearly plastic floor. I set my teeth and reached into the pouch at my belt I drew out a six-inch needle tipped with the purple stain of glacwin venom, extracted during summer from a small flying reptile which secreted the poison in two glands beside its beak. Glacwin would give her an instant of agony, then death. The music stopped. She turned her back to me and looked around the room, almost as though she were offering the chance I needed. But something else came first. She has to know. "Leeba," I said, "you can't stay here." She turned her eyes on me, and my mind fizzed into chaos. Sequence was shattered into a horrible fragmentation of space-time-matter fluttering down like tom confetti. Her eyes were the only reality; they reflected a slender blue-eyed kid in dun-colored leotards. It was the only identity around, so I grabbed it. "You're talented," I said. She wrinkled her nose. "You mean the dance?" "Huh-uh. That... jangly stuff, broken mirrors flying around." She raised her brows. "Broken mirror? Where?" I had to try it again. "You can't stay here, Leeba." She frowned. "You mean... on the dance floor?" "Not the dance. Scrag. At this time. It isn't yours." I felt a taut shimmer in the air. The niirror rippled, bent and nearly shattered -- but not quite. "Are you sure you know what you're talking about?" she asked. W as I? Why was I here, knowing nothing of myself but a sordid scrap of youth and the tatters of a vagrant's life? And my purpose -- to kill -- curdled my soul. I am not my own man. Whose am I? Yours, Leeba? "You can dance with me again if you like." That's it, Leeba. Under the music, do the deed. It's for her own good... isn't it? I took her in my arms, holding the needle between my fingers with its point outward. I could feel her heart pulsing against her ribs. I held her tight and swung hef around, rehearsing the movement which would end her life. The quick reversal of the needle, the plunge... But she had to know. Had to. "Ready, Leeba?" "Ready?" "To come back with me. It won't hurt." Her eyes knew, but her little-girl face puckered in puzzlement "Why must I come back with you?" I grated my teeth and tried to remember. "Clay? Does that sound like a reason?" "A kind of dirt? How could that be a reason?!' "Not dirt. A man -- I think. Don't you know?" She shook her head. "I don't know anyone named Clay." Could I be Clay? No, Clay was... something else. Cleanness, honesty, two pleading brown eyes below a vagrant forelock. I was Bork, and I had to... had to... Her eyes hooked out my thought. "You don't have to," she said. "Stay here with me. It's the best time." I sent energy pulsing down my arm. My waist moved, the needle turned. I braced my mind for the shuddering convulsion of her death, then -- I was lying on a bed, amid hospital smells. Oh, Leeba, you were right, it was the best time, those years on Scrag. Lovely youthworld, now it's gone, and I He on a white sheet afflicted by an incurable deadly illness. " -- Lousy goddam trick!" "Now, Bork!" IF "Watch him carefully, Doc!" "Look out, he's gonna smash -- !" I felt the bite of a needle, then my muscles turned to oatmeal. When I woke up they had me wrapped up in a canvas kimono. I couldn't move, so I lay there cataloguing my surroundings: Steelite cot, white walls about the size of a third officer's cabin. A man in a doctor's suit sat at a table marking charts; against the wall was a metal cabinet equipped with dials. Beside it rested a dome-shaped helmet from which protruded a heavy, coated cable. "Doc," I grunted. "You the doc?" He got up and came over, smoothing his mustache with his forefinger. "I'm a psychiatrist, yes. Bruce Pepke." His voice sounded like he was speaking through a long hollow tube. He bent over the straps, his face set in that bland medical mask which says there's nothing at all to worry about. That made me nervous -- but he sprung me from the strait jacket and gave me a cigarette, which as far as I knew qualified him as the best friend I had in the world. "Well, Bork, can you tell me what happened?" "I was back on Scrag -- " I stopped. "Or was that a dream?" "Did it seem like a dream?" Psychiatrists never answer questions, they just pile on new ones. "It seemed real," I said. "Realer than this, anyway." He nodded. "That's the effect of the memorigraf." "What's a memorigraf? Maybe that's a dream too." "The memorigraf -- you don't remember that?" "I'm cleaned out. Doc. Just a few scraps of memory left." "Hmm. She's got a stronger mind than I thought." He crossed Ins legs and eased the crease of his white pants. "Suppose you tell me what happened, and let me evaluate it. Wait, I'U get Clay." IV H e came back with a guy around twenty-seven whose face was puffy from sleep. The circles around his eyes showed that he hadn't slept well for several days. He greeted me like an old friend, but I had a nagging sense of remoteness, as though nothing were really happening. "Doc says you contacted Leeba, Bork. How was she?" "She was..." I frowned at him. "Who the hell are you?" He drew back and looked at the doc, who spoke in that confidential way people have around invalids, as though you're a dog or a servant and can't understand English: "He's got a touch of amnesia, Clay. Nothing serious." "Clay?" I said. "I mentioned you to her. Why?" "I'm Leeba's husband." "You pick 'em young." "Young? I don't -- " "Let me handle this, Clay." The doc leaned forward. "You're Bork Craighen, field personnel supervisor for Galactic Minerals. Here's your ID card. Remember?" I squinted at the plastic rectangle, embossed with the curlicued crest of GM. It looked familiar. So did the battered puss in the photo. The psych wiped off a little mirror on his pants and held it to my face. They matched. "Okay," I said. "That's the face I'm wearing now. But a couple of hours ago, or how the hell ever you measure time in this featherwig factory, I was a blue-eyed blond kid in a ballroom. A real silver-spoon specimen in a dancing suit. Which is real?" "You found Leeba in a ballroom?" asked Clay. "What -- " "Let's not go too fast," said the doc. "Did you try to bring her back?" "I tried to shoot her full of poison, yes." I shrugged. "She kicked me out. I don't know how, though." "It was her nind, after all. We simply tried to insert your ego into it, and she rejected it. That's all." "Let's try again, Bruce," said Clay. "While she's fresh." The doc frowned. "That wouldn't apply. Clay. We can't be sure she's following a normal time sequence back there. She could be skipping around, glossing over unpleasant memories, drawing out the pleasant ones. However..." He reached for the helmet. "Now wait," I said. "Just hold on. I'm not going anywhere until I get these holes in my memory filled up. First, what's that funny hat?" "It's part of a memorigraf unit. We recorded your memory before you went in. Now we'll simply replay your recent past, and you'll relive it all as it happened." I hesitated, then nodded. The doc stabbed me with his needle, and the world started spinning. I barely felt the hat come over my head, buzz... buzz... buzz... and gradually it slowed down. W e were standing on the shiplanding and looking for Clay's wife. She wasn't there, as I'd expected, so I left Clay and went to a specialist in ET diseases. He gave me two months to get myself ready for the Big Blastoff, so I went to a bar and tried to console myself with a big, loving Venus-colonial chick. Then Clay stumbled in and said his bride had turned youth-addict and gone into a coma. I was the not-sohandsome, not-so-young prince who was supposed to bring her out of her deadly sleep, so... I looked up into the faces of Bruce and Clay. I shook my head to clear it. "This could drive me nuts," I said. "It isn't memory. I was there, for the first time. I can see how Leeba got lost in it. Now, exactly when are we?" "You went into Leeba's head -- " began Clay. "Then you came out with amnesia. So we put the hat on you to fill in your memory. That was a couple of minutes ago. Now you're just coming out of that one." I pieced it together in my mind until I had it straight: Leeba, the little girl in the ballroom, the poisoned needle, the lithe lad in leotards... "That kid," I said. "I was never like that. I even talked educated -- BO IF which I'm not. I've just read a lot." "That was Leeba's projection of you," said Bruce. "She had your personality in her mind, so she created her own image to go with it. No doubt it was highly idealized." "Yeah," I said, remembering how I'd felt: my senses sharp and vivid and... young. My own youth had been miserable, and the only way I'd survived it was by having nothing to compare it with. But youth in Leeba's world was wealth, good looks, a skill at dancing and conversation and -- she'd give me that too -- proficiency in the art of love. I ached to go back into her mind, for a week, a month, a year. As long as I could. It didn't matter. But I couldn't let them know how eager I was. "Maybe that's how she could kick me out," I said. "She had control and I didn't." Bruce frowned. "I don't know." "Maybe if I was conscious, but still hooked into her memory -- " "It's never been done. You might go crazy. Or die." I felt like laughing. "Doc, that really doesn't matter, believe me. But listen -- no hypnotic kill order. Otherwise I don't make the trip." "I can wipe out the command," he said. "But then, how will you bring her back?" "I've got an idea," I said. "You'll have to let me work it out on my own. It has to do with the... hell, I can't explain it. You trust me, or you don't." "I trust you, Bork," said Clay. I smiled at him. If he only knew... "All right," said Bruce. "I suppose you'll want to rest first, eat, wait another day..." Another day of numbness? "No, Doc. There's just one thing, Clay, if I die -- " "You won't." "I might. Just bury the old shell and forget it. It isn't important. Remember that. Don't give it a thought." He agreed, but he didn't understand. I wrote out a paper leaving my fortune to Leeba and Clay, Mr. and Mrs. Fortescue, and had the doc sign it and certify that I was in my right mind. While he was doing that, I boosted his scalpel and hid it up my sleeve. Then he injected me with scopolamine, and I started drifting into the twilight zone. He put the domed hat on me and another hat on Leeba, who lay in a cot beside mine, then hooked our heads together with wires. I t was like a slow blending of two worlds, with one picture coming in and the other fading out. I could see Doc and Clay looking at me, while behind them on the white walls appeared a grove of trees in the Scrag countryside. It was so vivid seemed covered with dust and then faded out entirely. I smelled the lushness of growing plants, the humus of the forest: I felt strange emotions: I was a bud about to flower, a butterfly laying eggs, a cow swollen with milk, a bee whirling in the mad frenzy of the mating swarm IF Spring on Scrag. The frenzied time, the surge of life after the long freeze! I was Leeba. No, I was myself, inside her head. I saw through her eyes and felt with her emotions. The shape of her body enveloped me, the weight of breasts on my chest, the heaviness of hip and thigh. We sit in a grove, Leeba and I. Giant trees arch four hundred feet overhead, their massive trunks a rust-red color, like crinkled metal. The sunlight filters down through the yellow leaves and falls on thick blue-green grass. A blue-scaled lizard flaps his red leathery wings and flies over the clearing with his long yellow crest flowing out behind him. Other boys and girls lie about the clearing, some dressed in leaves and skirts of grass, some wearing nothing at all. I sensed a calmness in Leeba's mind, also a pleasant fatigue. All day she has worked in the forest to build her bower: set the green saplings so they would arch over, then tied them together and laid the matted gelo vines on top. She has spread the floor with a soft puka moss and laid a carpet of blossoms at the entrance; hung scented herbs from the roof and buried the aphrodisiac root of the bakaka beneath the threshold. Tonight after the mating dance, she will lead a young man across the threshold. She wonders who he will be, but feels no anxiety because the outing will last three weeks and the first night is not binding. If she doesn't fall in love with him, she will choose another, and then another, until she finds a husband. Those who fail to mate during the coming-of-age tour will probably never mate. Another reason she feels no anxiety is that she knows all her would-be suitors; they are boys she grew up with, boys of her own social class. So she digs her bare toes in the grass and waits for the sun to go down; the roots are cool and love is a warm syrup flowing through her loins... I push my thought into her consciousness: Remember me, Leeba? At the dance, eight years ago? Her memory spins back, the years like windows in a lighted train rushing past. Ah, there I am, the blond, blue-eyed, graceful lad in leotards. Now the clock runs forward; my shoulders broaden, my legs grow thick and muscular, my cheeks are touched with golden down. I stand behind her, a teasing smile around my mouth, with yellow hair lying on my shoulders.  "Look at me, Leeba." She turns, and her brain crawls with revulsion. My smile twists into a leer, the twinkling blue eyes glow red, demonic. My teeth become pointed, yellow-stained, my hands curve into claws, my body warps into a grotesque hunched horror... "Is this how you remember me, Leeba?" Her lips trembled. "The... last time you had a needle." "Not this time, I promise." She wet her lower lip with her tongue. I saw perspiration dampen her shoulders, and' I felt the icy knot of fear in her stomach. "Go away, please! Just go away." I tried to bring back die shape of the young man, but I was dissolving like soap foam, flaking away like a peeling coat of paint. The bird-noises in the clearing grew faint and far away, and I thought, I must take control before she kicks me out again. V T he sun was lower. Time had passed. I was the youth again. Grotesquerie was gone. I felt a lusty sense of power. I stood alone in the clearing, wearing a loincloth of woven bark. Where were the others? Oh yes, now I heard the splashing and laughing. I walked toward the sounds, feeling the long muscles slide in my legs, and I drew the air like wine into my lungs. The pool was clear as crystal, its surface like shattered mirrors reflecting the trees overhead. I looked past die young people splashing in the water, and I saw Leeba, lying on a rock and watching a flowerlike animal which clungto a tree and rolled out a long sticky tongue to catch flying insects. I walked toward her. The green of the rocks and the sun filtering through the leaves tinted her flesh a lemon-yellow. I looked down at her nude body and felt a surge of maleness. I laughed. She sat up. Her eyes stared, her mouth opened to scream. I felt something in my hand. I looked down and saw a long curved dagger glittering in the sun. I concentrated, and the dagger became a silver flower. I knelt and held it out to her. "I told you it wouldn't be like the last time, Leeba." She searched my eyes; I saw tiny beads of perspiration trapped in the down of her upper lip. "What is it... this time?" "You can't -- can you?" "If you help me, I can." "Why should I help you?" "Because... you want me." I leaned toward her, and her eyes grew large. They were the color of caramel flaked with gold. I smelled the warm salt-tang of sun on flesh and --  -- walked along a sidewalk while an icy wind sliced across a barren landscape. A dome rose up in the center of a vast paved court. A girl walked ahead of me huddled in a parka, cradling her books in her arm. I also wore a parka, and fur-lined boots. They clumped as I ran toward her. A dry stick whipped across the sidewalk as I came up beside her, drawing the air into my lungs like icicles. "May I carry your books, Leeba?" She turned, her pale oval face peering out of the blue-furred hood. She was about twelve years old. With a flash of her teeth she threw the books at me and ran. I laughed, then I gathered up the books and started inside -- I nside a warm room. It was full of furry stuffed animals. A little girl played with a blond, curly-haired boy-doll, rocking it in a cradle, pursing her lollypop lips as she crooned. IF "Leeba, come out of it," I said with my six-year-old voice. I wore shiny shoes and velvet pants, and my hair hung in blond curls to my shoulders. "Go away. I didn't invite you." I took the doll out of the cradle and tore off its head. "I'm the one you want, Leeba." Her face screwed up. "Momma! Nurse!" I jabbed a finger into her ribs. "Don't cry, Leeba," I said, tickling her. "Laugh, Leeba. Laugh, Leeba, Leeba leebaleebaleeba -- " We fell down together, laughing and twisting and rolling on the floor --  -- In the forest. She lay on her stomach with other girls in a circle, talking. I plucked out a blade of grass and brushed it across the pink sole of her foot. Her toes curled, and she looked back over her shoulder. "I'm always with you," I said and --  -- We stood on the stage of an auditorium decorated with paper spaceships and stars. She was perhaps fourteen, reciting a poem about the founding of the colony on Scrag. I walked up behind her and pulled her pigtail. She whirled, her face set in anger. "Let's go back to the summer, Leeba." "You... can't you stay away?" "Not when you keep remembering me. So let's go back -- " -- In the forest, the young people sat eating, looking into the campfire. I walked up behind her. "Mind if I sit beside you?" She answered, looking into the fire. "There are other spaces. Other, girls." "Not for me, Leeba." I put my hand on her shoulder and started to caress her... I stood outside a circle of about thirty boys. One boy was beating a drum in the center, another played a flute. A yellow-haired girl stood inside the circle, facing the line of boys who marched around in time to the music. She wore a dirndl-like costume and a blindfold. The beat of the music speeded up; the boys danced faster. I saw Leeba waiting with the other girls on the opposite side of the circle. Suddenly the music stopped. The drummer rose and took the blindfold off the yellow-haired girl. She blinked at the young man who'd stopped in front of her, then laughed and seized his hand. Together they ran into the forest. Another girl was pushed, giggling, into the center... a small girl with glossy black hair who kept giggling as they tied on her blindfold. She was paired with a dark, rawboned youth. Shyly, looking down at the ground, they walked out of the firelight. Two more girls, then Leeba. She looked wild and wanton. Gold rings gleamed in her ears, red boots came up to her calves and a spangled skirt reached only halfway to her knees. She raised her face for the blindfold, and her bosom swelled above the low blouse. She was the fairest of all, and the drum thumped louder than before, and the dancing boys devoured her with eyes glinting red in the firelight. I heard the music swell toward crescendo. I ran up and broke into the circle. There were angry shouts behind me, then the music stopped, and they took off her blindfold. She looked at me and spat one word: "You!" She whirled and ran, red boots on flashing white legs. I ran after her, bounding over the spongy turf and into the forest. Laughter followed me, along with girlish yelps and shouts of encouragement from the boys. She tripped on a tasseled boot and fell; I landed on top of her. She writhed and twisted, but I caught her waist between my knees and pinned her wrists to the ground. She stretched her neck and yelled: "Help! Help!" "They won't come, Leeba." She went limp and lay panting. "You cheated. You weren't in the dance when they blindfolded me. I looked." " You cheated. You're supposed to take me to your bower." "I won't." "All right. Seems a shame to waste it, but... I bent down, but the mirror warped, shimmered like a wet windowpane. "No, Leeba. Not another one of your backward trips. This is the best time, you told me that." "I hate you. I hate -- " I stopped her words with my lips -- and suddenly I knew what hooks the youth-addict. It wasn't memory of the first kiss, it was... the first touch of girl-flesh, the first crackling surge of electricity up my legs, the clutch of my lungs, the runaway thumping of my heart. It was the same for her. I heard the hiss of air through her nostrils, felt the heat of her face and the soft relaxation of her body. Her arms went hesitantly, then strongly around my back. After a moment I whispered hoarsely: "Where is your bower?" She rose and took my hand and led me silently through the forest. Stooping, she led me into the perfumed bower. I heard the soft creak of moss as she lay down, saw the dim glow of her body and the sheen of her golden earrings. A long time later she asked: "Who are you?" "Bork." "How did you get here?" I put my hand on her forehead. "You brought me, through here. I'm a friend of Clay, your husband." She sat up suddenly. "That hasn't happened yet." "For me it has." "You come from the future?" "Leeba, you know how it is. Don't you?" "I want you to tell me, Bork." VI #" told her about the memorigraf. X About my body and hers, lying side by side in the clinic on Earth, years away... "... But our brains are dying. Yours and mine. You have a month IF left, I have a little more. A month there. That's fourteen years here -- if you decide to stay." "Could you stay with me?" "For awhile. But eventually they'll unhook me. After a few hours, a day at the most. I'd be with you a few months, maybe a year, then I'd be gone." "But if I remembered you, and you existed in my memory -- " "Don't forget I'm still back there. It's my conscious will that keeps me going. Once they unhook me, I'm out of it. You couldn't keep the illusion going, now that you know it's an illusion." She was silent a long time, then she said. "Awhile ago... nothing happened, did it?" "Yes. It happened." "But not really. I couldn't have a baby." "Not a real baby, no." "But -- it was so perfect. So frighteningly real and so... nice ." "Why wouldn't it be? You made it, with your mind." "But didn't you have the same -- ?" "It was perfect for me too. I made it, with my mind." "I don't want it that way. Like a dream." "There's another dream. Maybe you'd like that better." "What is it?" "You know. The little house, Clay, your husband. He's tall, brown-eyed, honest, upright, faithful, devoted -- " "I don't want him. I want you." "All right." "You mean... you'd be with me, like we are now?" Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp # #I Hudson Street New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. City  State Zip Code... (Offer good in U. S. A. Only) "Like we are now, yes. that's right." "How?" "Just relax, Leeba. You're getting sleepy. Close your eyes and let your muscles flow. Trust me. I'll take care of you. I'll always be with you. You'll have Clay, but you'll have me too. "There'll be no more unhappiness. No more frustration. You'll have a child, too, you and Clay, but I'll be with you all the time. You'll be able to see me, but nobody else can. Well have to talk silently..." She slept. I visualized the little room, the bare clinic walls. I built up a picture of Clay and the psych sitting there; I saw the wires running from the helmet on my head to the head of Bork on the other cot. Slowly the picture formed, shimmered, and... jelled. I rose... Leeba's body rose from the cot. I had to work quickly. Her legs were weak, but I had the advantage of surprise. Clay only gaped at me and said: "Leeba!" The doc was starting out of his chair. I reached down and took the scalpel from the sleeve of Bork, and with one last look at the scarred face Fd worn for thirty-six years, slashed with all my strength beneath the stubbled chin. Blood gushed out over my arm, all over Leeba's filmy nightdress. Then the room started tilting, and I had my first horrible doubt. Did J figure it wrong? Everything went black and I thought:  was wrong about her, she kicked me out again and I'm dying... T hen I opened my eyes and looked up into Clay's pale, horrorstriken face. "Why, Leeba. Why?" he said... to me. I looked over and saw Bork lying in a pool of his own blood. He wasn't breathing. "It doesn't matter, Clay." "But -- Bork saved your life! And you cut his throat!" "Of course. But it doesn't matter. He was going to die anyway. Ask Doctor Pinwit. Didn't Bork tell you it didn't matter?" "Yes... yes he did, but -- " Then he gasped something about seven years being a long time, and I saw him bending down to kiss me. I gave a loud shout inside my head: Leeba , wake up. Sleepy-sounding voice. What happened? It worked. We're back. But you'll have to take over on this . I felt myself dwindling down. Then I was the young man of the forest again, standing beside the cot and looking down at Leeba, who was being kissed by Clay. She reached up and took my hand and squeezed it tight, and I thought, well, here's      IF IF  Novelette Nice prison! It was a Klein bottle in orbit -- easy to escape from, if you didn't mind turning inside out! I I was taping indiscretions at a morning reception in the Israeli Embassy when I saw Gallegher hiding behind two experts in nuclear desert reclamation. We exchanged glances and assembled at the bar, where I saw that he had a grotesque pattern of hairline scars cutting whitely into his rusty Martian tan. "Have you become a consul for some slowly developing nation too poor to afford real diplomats?" I asked. He laughed. "No, I'm a house guest here, sort of. Why don't you ask me about these scars?" "You look," I replied, "like a chicken thief who never heard of charged fences. Is that six-inch hexagonal grid all over you?" Gallegher drew himself as nearly erect as any tramp rocket jockey will (they don't like to be mistaken for space Navy men) and said, "These are the heroic scars of a conductor on the underground railroad." "On the what?" Just then I was swept away by a loud argument between two diplomats famed for the personal and political enmity, but Galeg shouted, "Lunch!" Over the second bottle of a sturdy Hock in the Embassy's great public dining hall, Gallegher leaned avay from the dead luncheon plates and told me about the chicken wire. T he girl (he said) was an Israeli; that is, a citizen of the Greater Near East Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was the summer after I broke my ankle testing that crazy Englishman's "space bicycle" -- you remember? It was going to make servicing the weather and communications satellites so easy? Well, I fell off Tiros Ten while it was in a north-south pass. I cratered in Central Canada, and the Toronto therapists sent me up north to the Arctic Ocean, so I could strengthen my ankle. I was staying at the Hilton T-#, on an ice island about a hundred and fifty miles from the geographic Pole, and hiking a random route over the pack ice every day. The up and down and sliding all were supposed to strengthen up my ankle ligaments. One day I saw a girl stalking a polar bear. We were both wearing parkas, and I thought she was an Eskimo. The bear had tolerated her, just waving its paw and growling every now and then, but it saw me and decided two human beings on its trail was one too many. It just slid over the edge of the ice and took off for open water -- or another ice island, I guess. Harriet turned and saw me then, and came bounding over the ice, waving her spear and shouting. "You're supposed to help! I would have shared. Now I've lost the sport and you've lost the meat, freeze you!" She saw the color of my skin just about the time I could see hers, and pulled up short. "Oh," she cried, "you couldn't be an eskimo, not with that pelt!" "No, sweetheart," I replied, "and that Mediterranean profile and black olive complexion of yours never came from Hudson's Bay, either. I'm sorry I spoiled your game." "Sorry all hagan! Every Earthman thinks he can make anything all right just by saying, 'I'm sorry. " That aerated my fuel a little. "As for that, I'm more Mars than Earthman," said I. "And a good day to you, ma'am, for the next two months of it." She sank the spear point in the ice with pique, and muttered to herself. "She-hagan... another iron man -- lost in space without a hot tube and a computer to bring him home." Then I knew who she was, from the newstapes. "So-ho, you're the little Yemenite sailor-girl who made a fool out of Space Admiral Rogossovsky?" She smiled a bit at that. "Oh, well, rockets can hardly deal with a craft like mine. A sun sailor moves with the organic forces of the universe... and besides, the light quanta pushes it so slowly a rocket is useless when it matches speed to the Sunbeam" IF "Is that the name of your tube?" "She's no tube. There's not even an auxiliary aboard. When I shove off from an asteroid and spin out Sunbeam's sail to the solar wind, I'm on my own." Her hood was thrown back now, and she smiled a real primitive grin, all over her face. "Tricky navigation?" I asked. "Oh well! You have to know how to do it. There's so much real estate in the Ring, though, that you can always make a landfall somewhere; unless you're fool enough to sail right up from the sun out of the Ring. Then you might broach to and let that old fireball blow you right up to Pluto." I t pleased me that she thought of that direction as "up." I've always felt myself it was "up" to Mars and "down" to Earth instead of "out" and "back." You don't need to know all we said after she realized I was an old space hand. By the time we tramped back into the village, we were old bear-hunt mates, and she set out to recruit me for her crusade. I wouldn't have believed her story, written out, but I couldn't disbelieve it when I was looking at her. She wore an anklet of those blue ceramic beads. After that first day, it might as well have been around my neck. You remember the public part of it. Harriet appeared on the vidcasts when she was discovered sailing a long, serene track well inside the orbit of Mars. Admiral Rogossovsky reacted like the clockwork bureaucrat he is and made a heroine out of her when she defied him and his whole Navy couldn't catch her. Between the public's chuckling and the professionals' pleased appraisal of her antiboarding devices, Tojo Rogossovsky lost every round. It was bad enough that every time one of those hot Navy tubes would damp the flame down enough to match velocities with Harriet's Sunbeam, she'd float one of those glass bottles with a firecracker in it over and blow the Navy's matching trajectory into a Riemann parallel; but when the Old Man ordered his greenjackets to get out of their pipes and use their zot-guns to capture Harriet, they wouldn't do it. Who wants a firecracker in a glass globe up against his faceplate? And it's an all-volunteer service anyway, so... I should have known there was something about a girl who could think up a device like that. But she was only five foot two, about a hundred and twenty pounds, raven-wing hair that she could sit on when it was undone, and a way of hanging on to my parka and looking up into my face that made me feel I was somebody special. She was somebody special, and her specialty was to subvert the economy of the Asteroids. Harriet was running an escape route for cyborgs. That's why the sailing trip. She had chased down that asteroid with the eccentric orbit that brings it inside the orbits of the inner planets, and left there a half-living machine that she had stolen. She was actually leaving the inner solar system when Admiral Rogossovsky and his radar techs picked her up. I see you're shocked by the idea of cyborgs. You know they're illegal down here and on Mars. Don't forget there's no law in the Asteroids. By law, the Ring has been left free to find its own economy. Just you remember this: anything that technology can do... at a profit... will be done, somewhere. II H arriet explained to me how it got started. First thing, they have a lot of freak accidents in the Ring. One of the freakish aspects is that an accident is often catastrophic but not fatal. What's to be done, then, with a basketful of viable organs, missing only eyes and limbs, say, to be a person? Down here where it happens so much more rarely, we bany the pieces and throw away the personality. When we use the replacement parts, we have to suppress immunity reactions and put up with the fact that the pieces are the wrong size and all that. But we've got people running out of our ears. We can afford to discard personalities. In the Ring, it's the other way 'round. They're few on people and many on machines; and a remnant really adapts better to nylon and platinum and stainless steel prosthesis than the individual organs do to being life-grafted onto somebody else. After the operations, you may have a somethingsomebody that's just right for riding a big chunk of ore round and round the Ring, operating the smelter by being wired right into it, and dropping a load straight "down" to Earth when the two orbits are right. That's were the Ring-wallahs make money: on the shipping. Costs are next to nothing. Gathering the stuff is expensive; and going up for a load after it falls into orbit around Earth costs money; but the low mass everywhere in the Ring makes shipping as cheap as vacuum. When the computer says, "Push," you can push a load with your hand or with one of those firecrackers -- Tojo Rogo cocktails, they call 'em? -- in the right direction, and that's all it takes. Now, you turn half or threequarters of the gathering over to a half-live machine that runs on a barrel of vitamins, a little greenhouse to recycle the oxygen and the wastes, and a yearly maintenance call to replace a few transistors and vacuum tubes, and hook the device into a "cyborg central" by radio, helio and teevee; and instead of a hole in the fuel tank, you've got a fuel breeder. Money's money, everywhere in the universe, even in enterprises that are theoretically cooperative, like a kibbutz. So you see what happened, don't you? In the blurred legal nowhere of the Ring, it ended up so that who paid for the surgical operations owned the hardware; and sad to say, Mrs. Stowe and Uncle Tom to the contrary notwithstanding, when you own a being's body, you also own itshis soul. IF And Harriet, poor Harriet, her clan hadn't even been moved out of Yemen until after the Greater Near East Co-Prosperity Sphere imploded from the war against the Pakistani Dictatorship. When she was thirteen years old, she was literally jetted a thousand years, from a prefeudal patriarchate into a bustling industrial nation. I t was all a little much for her, and when she was eighteen, she shipped over to a mining kibbutz in the Ring. The only person who kicked out to it with her was a boy from her clan. He was only fourteen or fifteen, so she was leader. Even in the kibbutz, though they cooperated cheerfully with its system of absorbing immigrants, the two of them constituted a kind of irreducible fraction. The kibbutz itself was breaking up under the pressure of the new economic conditions in the Asteroid Belt; every day a little less of a cooperative and a little more of a competitive enterprise. Then her friend got hurt. Oh, "Mordecai" was saved. "He" #, with bellows pumping and gauges registering, and three kinds of light receptors to see different bands of the spectrum; but not exactly adapted any more to wandering off to the shady side of a rock chunk and talking philosophy. drift of cinnabar with a hotel room full of auxiliary machines. Then he started reducing tihe ore to flasks of mercury isotopes. At that time, "Mordecai" could see and talk and had tracks on which he could move. However, it wasn't long until he got into an argument with the mine operator who owned his hardware. This man was a curious, cruel sort, well on his way to becoming the dominant force in the Ring. His methods were fast becoming any act by pointing to the competition. Harriet always called him "The Sheik," which ought to give you some idea of his attitudes toward people... and people machines. How can a machine feel cruelty, you ask. So did I. I hadn't stopped to think that these machines are sentient. The owner could switch one out of the television circuit, you see, for a mild punishment; or disconnect the light receptors, a little worse; or cut one out of the voice radio and restrict it to Morse. At the last, when the one rotter got really rotten, he would cut off everything except the restricted senses needed for the mine or the smelter. The cyborg would just drift in darkness for a year or more, working without knowing when or if anything else was going to happen, not able to ward off meteors or monitor the sunlight. The Sheik had lost the whole point, you see, and was indulging in cruelty for cruelty's sake. Originally, he promised incentives for more production or better shipping. He was going to go to color teevee for real producers. There was going to be rotation on the jobs, to break the monotony. A teevee band would IF be left free for experimental drama and dance by cyborgs. Typewriters would be added to die circuitry of any cyborg that came up with a usable suggestion. Oh, he talked a machine dream, for a while. None of these promises ever materialized, but he began to exact penalties of the milder kind: sight and sound. Fear followed... both ways. The more he punished his cyborgs, the more he feared them, until at last his cruelties -- lowering their available oxygen, shutting down their senses to the level of mechanical efficiency, beating them (get that bright and sharp on your mind's teevee, would you) so some of their mechanical members were bent, making it hard for them to work -- his cruelties came to be done to exact respect and to. "keep the steelcolored sonofamarches in their place," rather than in any rational attempt to raise production. Production was dropping, of course. The Ring was not a place for a slave economy. He lost a couple of the half-living by shutting them down to machine status. Meteors smashed the greenhouse on one, and a sunstorm cooked the vegetation in another. He saw to it that the carcasses were displayed on the video. "Example to the insolent." W orse than these calculated cruelties were the wanton ones. The Sheik carried a fifty-inch screwdriver to reach and tighten connections that otherwise would have required extensive dismantling, and sometimes he would lay it across two or three exposed terminals, producing a shower of sparks. "Remind 'em who's boss," he would say, while the poor devil shook with oscillation, trying to restore the electric equilibrium. He even wired his office record handler so that she shocked herself in handling the routine work load. Played hagan with the records, of course, but the Sheik didn't care. "Gussie loves me," he would say. "Don't you, you steel-colored old bucket of bolt?" And if she didn't answer, "Yes sir!" cheerfully, he would punch in a sequence that always shorted her out. Not all this madness was apparent. Harriet automatically suspicious, a little paranoid about herself because of her own history, telescoping years and light-years, you might say. She was a loner even when "Mod" had been fully human and fully movable. Her paranoia was fed by his accident, and that's when she began sailing. While she was out there riding the winds of the sun in total isolation, hung in the center of that great main sheet, a single layer of molecules thick, she was anxiety free. Like a rich man sitting on a park bench, she could see in every direction. Nobody could sneak up on her. Technically, or politically, Harriet was a full cooperative member of the kibbutz. Sun jamming was a popular sport, and nobody questioned her solitary sailing. Nobody realized, either, that she was hunting Mordecai. The way she told me, it would have been impossible to establish that his location was being concealed. But every set of coordinates the Sheik's "Gussie" gave her was wrong. The second time it happened, she realized something more than a misplaced datum was operating. After that, she was too cautious to ask the office cyborg again and began to sail around the Ring in a series of exploratory curves that would have made a tight spiral around the "regular" Asteroid Belt if she'd had to complete it. Lucky Harriet made a landfall on Mordecai's cinnabar eddy within a month or two of the time she started her purposeful search. Sure enough, the Sheik had cut him out of everything but the Morse circuit, deprived him of all light reception below ultraviolet and removed his tracks. There he was, not much more than a sophisticated monitor, when she began talking encouragement into his sound sorters. They worked out a plan that required he stay there and sweat bolts while she stole and roused enough of the others to tip the battle against the Sheik. But she needed another hand. She told me all this in her igloo. The blubber pile in mine was pretty rank because somebody had put a bar of perfumed soap in it, and the flavor of every piece in the pile was affected; but Harriet's was all nicely rotted seal, whale, and bear meat; so we were mostly in her place when we were inside. Doesn't the whole story open up your seams? I tell you, she had me oscillating in sympathy with those poor halflive coggers. There! I'm sorry I said that. She made me realize it's an opprobrious term; but it's hard to get out of old bad habits. Ill I helped her. I'm proud of that. Me, that never stole a machine in his life, not so much as an inear radio. I helped that chunky, spunky little girl cognap every shape and size of half-life you could imagine. "Coggerstealers" was the kindest thing the owners called us when they realized what was happening. We gloried in the name. We made ourselves as feared as oxygen pirates. For a long time, we kept the operators in the dark about who we were. We had put up an awful good smokescreen by having become apparent lovers on the ice island. I moved into her igloo. I'd have almost done it just to get her blubber pile, but of course it's nice to have somebody to talk to. Before I realized her sympathy was reserved for the prosthetically extended, I told her a routine precautionary romance about how a tornado of cosmic rays had caught me over Mars on a cargo pipe and altered my gene structure so that I couldn't ever marry. So it never occurred to her that a brother and sister, can't-tell-theboy-from-the-girl-without-a-program kind of relation wasn't suiting me fine. I never could get the proper emphasis on the second day's inIF stallment of my story because she was so well launched into hers by that time, grinning and crying and acting out all the parts. She understood nothing had been altered about me but my genetic code. She just didn't think it was important. Harriet was accommodating enough; she was a nicely brought up girl; but there was no emotional investment. I was ready to light the flame and get out of there in a few days and start rescuing the slave machines; but she felt we had to stay around for a couple of weeks to let our "love affair" become pretty well known. For a girl, she was mighty crafty. I don't believe I ever really got her attention until the third or fourth day after I moved in with her. You've stayed in igloos, haven't you? Well, you know the heat comes from your own body and a little oil lamp, a soapstone bowl of whale oil with a moss wick. You wear those everlasting pants and boots and parkas all the time. Eskimos don't; but they like it cold; and there are always a lot of people in an eskimo igloo. I saw more of Harriet by the hotel pool than I ever did in the igloo. But about sleep time the third or fourth day, I said to her, "How about blowing this lamp out? I've learned to savor the taste of blubber, but I can't learn to like the smell of it burning." Harriet giggled and said she'd only left the wick alight because she thought I wanted it. I snorted the flame out, and it was totally dark. W hen I woke up, I wanted a light so I could see to get the wick burning again. I had a little old hand-squeezed generator flashlight -- you remember, with the works visible through plastic sides? and you squeeze a little plunger handle? When you've got the armature turning fast enough, it generates enough electricity to light a little wire filament bulb. Gives about as much light as a second magnitude star peeking in a cave entrance. About the second or third squeeze, I had enough light to see Harriet in midair. The flash had startled her out of a dream of sun-sailing alone. Whatever the world's record is for the lying down high jump, she broke it. Turned over the blubber lamp too, so I had to keep squeezing the dag-blagged little machine to get enough light try to comfort her. Her irrational fright reaction had jarred my gyro too, and I couldn't think to crawl over and pull back the skins at the entrance tunnel. You don't get much light that way, but with the sun "up" twenty-four hours a day, you get enough to see objects. Believe me, putting your arms around a fairly athletic girl clad in loose skin garments while she's running around the walls of an igloo in the dark, cursing and praying in the South Arabian Peninsula Hebrew dialect of her childhood, and you're squeezing a hand generator for what little light you can get, is a unique experience. Every time my hand would run down, she'd start hollering, "Ohr! Ohr!" IF (Light, you know), and I'd have to start pumping some more. I knew then what my grandfather meant when he gave me that little old antique. He was a New York politician, did you know that? and he kept that flashlight to help him home in the power failures. He laughed when he gave it to me and said that he'd always been safe in the blackout because he was a politician; he could see his way home just by shaking hands all the way. And my hand was as sore the next day as if I'd been elected President of the Federated U. N. When I finally got her quieted down, we were a whole lot better friends than we'd been before. I wasn't so much in awe of the heroine who'd fought and sailed her way through the middle of Tojo Rogo's whole space navy. She'd had a new look at me, as somebody who didn't quit just because the seams were opening up. A woman always thinks more of a man who's lived through a helping of hysteria with her. The one part of the happening that ought to have been significant to me, but wasn't, was Harriet's reaction when I wouldn't make her a gift of granddaddy's generator. She thought it was just a toy, you see; but when I told her the story and explained why I couldn't give the little momento away, she softened up and all at once. She pulled me back in under the bed skins with her, and said, "Oh-h, you're a real person, after all. Bring your grandfather's little machine in here with you. I would never have guessed you are so sentimental." I remembered that when it was too late to do me any good. W e finally shoved off to our work. If I ever have a honeymoon, I want to take it in a twoplace sunjammer. Unfortunately, Harriet's little vessel (a loose fit for one) was snugger than the fat man's spacesuit in the story for two. We had to work out a kind of drill by the numbers even to work the direction finder or swing the sail. So we had to take a hot pipe to the deep space cosmological research station beyond Mars and launch our little candy wrapper from there. Even so, I fell in love with sunsailing. Barring the storms (and you know about them when they start up from Old Sol), almost nothing deflects you from a well plotted course. You spin the sail out to full circle, set your course by using two hand-wound gyros, and then you can switch off every device that makes noise aboard. You coast out there in that golden breeze of light quanta as unconcerned and easy as if you were in the womb of the universe, waiting for the first big bang. The sail's big enough to be washed by varying waves of sunlight, and it really does ripple, or seem to, anyway. You go outside and hook a mile of that monofilament line onto the after handling cleat, turn your toes down to the sun, and let the sail carry the ship up from you. The only noise you hear is your own blood stream, still counting Earth time... maybe your own digestive tract, converting something or moving it... I tell you, you own the solar system. You can't get lost. There's Sol at your feet and straight up over your head, there he is again, multiplied in a great shimmering mirror. One day I took a ten-mile hank of that line out. After all, how much mass has it got? Each fiber is just one long molecule, for practical purposes. They only make it up to the diameter of a blonde hair so you dan see it. The strength of the line doesn't require that thickness. I lay out there so peacefully I went to sleep and paid out the whole coil. When I woke up, for as much as a minute I believed I was alone, and the whole universe was just my idle daydream. Luckily for all the rest of you, I didn't change any of the apparent laws of our time and space before I came all the wav awake. Believe me, climbing a ten-mile line hand over hand, taking it up as you go, is a lot of exercise. You have to keep pulling too, slow and easy. If you try to do it all in one jerk, your hand orientation may pull you a course half a mile from the craft. Then when you suddenly notice, you're about to pierce the sail, you've got to brace up so hard on the line that you impart a new direction to the vessel along a vector you can't even calculate because of the peculiar way you achieved it. When you get back aboard, you've got to switch on the direction finder and take on all that static that goes with it. Your eardrums aren't used to it any more, and it seems somehow to shrink the solar system right down around your shoulders. I was worn out when I got back in from that ten-mile gymnasium climb; but Harriet was furious. I thought at first she wasn't going to let me in. Believe me, the way we had to pull that little craft up around our hips to fit just so, I couldn't get in unless she let me. I had got bored, hauling in, and pulled too hard and at irregular intervals. The peculiarity I had imparted to our course would have taken us right out the top of the solar system. Yes sir! Almost rightangled to the plane of the ecliptic. Well, we wouldn't have gone, because we were still in the plane; but our sail was edge on to the sun and beginning to crumple. I was tired when I got inboard; but by the time we finished handcranking those two gyros to turn that little sun witch back ninety degrees into the true course and got the sail spun back out to the full circle, I was perishing. By that time, Harriet was laughing at me, but she couldn't help me anyway. We'd had to go in and out to get the sail round rigged again, so we were full suited, helmet and all. When she blew out the air letting me in, we had exhausted one bank of air producers, and Harriet was laughing so hard she couldn't get the connections changed, and that was a job that only she could do, the way we fitted in. I had water in the suit, but no food. Who knew there was going to be a crisis? IF I nearly starved before she calmed down and got the air pressure up to where I could rip off my helmet and ingest a couple of food bulbs. After all, I have moved and controlled enough mass to be equivalent to about a week of decathlons in high gravity. That was the last of our high jinks on the trip. Somehow, when the dogs on the hatches were tight and we were back on course, we both got to thinking about the grim rock chunks to which we were bound; and although the rest of the voyage was just beautiful and we were just as isolated as before, something about the fact that we were bent on an illegal purpose made us feel that we were being watched and spied on. We both got a little twitchy. When we were twenty-four hours down the plane from the administrative asteroid of her kibbutz, Harriet furled the sail. She went about it with great precision, and very quickly,, but with an air of abstraction and watchfulness. When we were coasting, slowly closing on the big asteroid, and sure our course was true, she came back in, aired the chamber up full and rich, as thick as at sea level on Earth, took off her helmet, shook out her hair and laid her head on my shoulder. In a minute, the collar of my suit liner was wet. I did what I could, but I didn't know why she was crying. She called me a pet name, never mind what. "I never cared if it was just me... but I can't bear to think you might be killed; it's not your fight." I had to lay on the nobility. I believe "the cause of all mankind" is what I called the crusade for cyborg civil rights. I wasn't ashamed to say it then, and I'm not ashamed to say it now. Finally, Harriet smiled and tossed her hair so it floated round her head in a black flame. She dogged down the inner ports to shut out the light on which we'd travelled so many knots. The instrument lights gave us about a foot-candle of dimness, and she grinned like a fourteen-year-old getting ready to kiss her first man. "I'm sorry," she said, "that I haven't got a blubber lamp for perfume." But I didn't miss it. IV W hen we undogged the ports, a hot little rocket from the big asteroid was putting off to tow us in. We debarked, gave our identifyingblood samples, put up with the single entendre comments of the "customs officer," and filed a "vacation sailing plan." "Vacation" meant we didn't have to stay in the communications net, as working sunjammers did; and I see you see that meant we could be anywhere. Nobody would know for certain. In fact, we were free to range the Ring committing our immoral thieveries of property for the moral purpose of freeing personalities from bondage. If you can think of a better life than technically flouting one set of society's rules in order to adhere to another, more fundamental set of the same laws, and doing it in the company of a beautiful, intelligent, accessible woman, tell me about it; because I can't. Between forays, I enjoyed watching Harriet play the game in the kibbutz social hall. She was radiantly beautiful then, with her arm in mine, talking everybody's talk about us getting a couple of mines going and settling down. Then she'd wrinkle her nose and call for some old tune from the youngster who played the accordion, and in a minute she'd have the place in an uproar, doing a hora. Skipping and stomping in a circle where gravity isn't a hundredth of Earth's is something you have to participate in to believe. Within a minute after it starts, the line is up on the walls, and then the dome itself, and pretty soon your hora is spherical instead of circular. Somebody, (Harriet, usually) would grab the accordion player and sling him into the center, about twenty feet off the floor. He was a sweet-natured boy, and he'd stay there indefinitely, turning in the air and working that stomach Steinway for all its worth, while the rest of us stomped and glided and shouted over and around him like a swarm of bees. Harriet would keep the dance going until people collapsed and she was nearly crying from laughing so much. Next morning, we'd out sail and tack down the sun wind and steal another machine from some of the people we'd been dancing with. We were kept in orbit by feeling like liberators. After the first few months," we would switch on the radio and listen to the steady official tide of horror and revulsion at our piratical acts, and laugh a while. Then we'd switch out, turn in each other's arms, and coast down the eddies of the sun to our next raid. We'd sail in on some poor devil who'd been deprived of most of his senses. He wouldn't know who we were, but our landing would joggle the fluids in his machine parts, and his dials and gauges would start to spin and tremble in fear that he was going to be shocked or have his senses turned down yet another notch. If we had been made of metal ourselves, we would have wept. We'd connect up his sensors in a hurry, sight first, then sound and touch, so he could see right away we weren't owners, and hear our revolutionary slogans; and then have the pleasure of touching human flesh that wasn't hostile. We'd splice in a private voice line, one to Harriet and one to me, because sometimes they had physical needs (as distinguished from mechanical) that they were modest about discussing. O ne of them was a woman at least a hundred years old, counting from her "human" life too. Her reconstruction dated from the first experimental days. The job wouldn't be done that way now, but the surgical engineer who patched her up had good, human instincts, all the same. The small of her back, with skin intact, had been saved along with the organs in front of and above it. The back section was in the construct next IF to the greenhouse and there was a sphincter through the topof the greenhouse and another through one wall. Part of the maintenance routine printed on her casing was to stroke that piece of hide and give it a few pats every year. She told Harriet in a whisper that she was just itching for the touch of a man's hand. Too shy to tell me, you see. Didn't know what kind of man I was. Harriet promised I wouldn't pinch or pound, and then I had to wrestle with those sphincters and with my glove, for my suit wasn't really set up for that sort of thing. I would have risked frostbite a half inch deep to make good on a promise Harriet had made. The result was more than worth it. A man doesn't understand what gratitude can be until he runs his fingertips down a few spinous processes poking up against a few inches of skin and feels ten tons of machinery under him begin to purr. A sonofamarch who would deny that simple pleasure to a half-live must have had a corkscrew twist in every neurone. I got caught up in the thing along about this time, you see. I started out, I guess, sort of humoring Harriet and maybe with visions of her and me on a big asteroid of our own with a few diggers and smelters supporting us in a family orbit. The cyborgs were still just things to me. But when I felt that old skin ripple under my hand and later, when I joined -- hands? -- with Harriet and a boss-smelter and danced rings around the rock after we gave him back his treads, I began to feel for -- no, not for, with these entities. Harriet had been programmed full of that wild Hebrew humanism when she was being rewired into today, and she could phrase it: in the time it takes a gram of fuel to explode, instead of "I-it," the relation became "I-thou." And it was true. Before that, I had to watch myself to keep from calling them coggers; but after that, the opprobrious term never came easy to my lips in the Ring. I guess the reunion of Harriet and Mordecai was the most touching and the most satisfying, too. For strategic reasons, we didn't go to him early; and for navigational reasons, we couldn't get to him at the time we wanted to; and he was completely out of the communications net. When we did home on him, the plot for our attack on the administrative asteroid was almost ripe. Mordecai had a very sharp brain in his black box, he was a very sophisticated machine, and he was very young. All that made his sensory deprivations more poignant. He was designed to smelt and ship that huge drift of cinnabar; and to keep it together until he could extract the last kilo of quicksilver, he had been equipped with gravitators. He even had propulsion, so he could speed up the drift or slow it down to preserve a favorable shipping point in its orbit. All this had been robbed from him, as if he were dying again. That boy was a fighter, let me tell you. When we sailed in on him, there was little more function left than an egg candler or a bottle capper might have had, but he was still managing to sabotage the operation. He was breaking containers, an empty into place when one was filled. There were wasted, contaminated globules of mercury floating all around him like silver buckshot. Some of them were half-ton globes. What defiance! What a mess, having one of those things plate out all over you! We were an asteroid week working in to him and getting him to understand we were friends. Then, as we rewired him and threw the switches that turned his senses back on, it was like raising a child from a brat to a Ph.D. in six hours. An affectionate Ph.D. Hanriet was crying, of course, and calling him pet names. "Motl, darling!" and "Muttie, raise the driver on your port forward quarter. That's it, sweetheart!" As for him, it was, "My sister! My dove; My white pouter pigeon!" and so on, all in the voice of a rock-crusher needing oil. "Mordecai," I finally said, "raise all your grasping appendages. Good. Touch them together, over your greenhouse. Good. Please move each in a series. Good boy! you're cured. You can do anything you're big enough to do." He swiveled a light receptor around toward me and said, in a very controlled thrum-m-m, "Mr. Gallegher, I am grateful for what you have done for me, and for my fellows. But I think, after what I have lived through, and died through, I am nq) a 'boy.' Could you manage not to call me 'boy' again? That would be something nice for me, and it would not cost you much effort, I think ." "I saluted with a wrench. "Yes sir! What else can I do for you?" I'll swear that seeing lens winked. "Hook me back into the 'iron grapevine,' " he said. "I'm ready to call on your war." "Oh, now, wait a minute, Reb Mordecai," I temporized. "The instant I put that transistor case back in place and you energize that radio link, every telltale in the Sheik's office is going to go off. Let alone that he'll be hot-tailing it in here with a hardhead rocket to bust your greenhouse, the first thing he'll do is glide into that office and punch poor old Gussie into psychosis. No sir! "You'll blow the whole thing just when we're at the gravity flip point. It'll all be down from here, if you just keep your lever off the jets for a minute." "I won't stay here where Arful Abdul can find me," he rumbled back. "Anyway, I can cut on the radio myself. I just wanted you to feel good about one more thing. Let's pick an orbit outside the Ring from which I can drop back down when I'm needed." Mercury Muttie! I believe he was the most arrogant hunk of metal I ever knew. I should have let him go ahead and cry havoc, though. Nothing could have been worse for me than what happened. IF V H arriet and I sailed straight back into the Sheik's arms. In the last minute, Gussie came screaming onto the radio to warn us. She had two lifeboats fueled and ready to flame, but she only got one off to us. I shoved Harriet into it. She kicked and yelled, but it was her revolution. I was just there in the role of expendable hero. "Get my name in the history books," I hollered and then battened down to repel boarders. Deep down, I was hoping Gussie wasn't dead, although that last, long, loud scream made me know she was. I cut the capsule loose from the sail, which went drifting on down to the big asteroid, while I broached to, hoping I could drift behind some rock and hide. If Gussie or Harriet didn't come back for me, I'd starve, eventually; but it would take months for that to happen. Did you ever notice that a man can be crazy as hagan and still smart as a rocket? Well, that blooming Sheik just booted himself back down almost to the surface of his planetoid, took a perpendicular orientation to my sail, lit his flame for one short kick and came rifling up through the hole I'd left when I jettisoned the sail. There I was, near dead of humiliation at being caught as easy as a cold in winter. A-a-h! He wasn't going to come within zot-gun distance of me; because he wasn't sure what I could do. We'd met socially, but he was afraid I had a gram of high vol sewed into my jaw that I could explode by grinding my teeth, or something. Tyrants fear fanatics, you know. I had one last laugh, even though it was the last for a good many days. The Sheik spangged a magnetic grapple on the 'bow of my capsule, meaning to tow me; but my little sailing cap was non-ferrous (saves constant correcting around large iron core masses), and his grapple wouldn't cling. So he had to get the rest of his night riders to come up with a net and gentle me down to the asteroid. I was caught. T here was no pretense of trial. Those iron-haters snipped open my suncraft, took one look at my face, nodded all around and started me for prison, all in about the time it takes to throw a toggle switch assisted by a solenoid. Now, you have to learn a little history. I only learned it after I nearly lost my mind. Constitutionally speaking, this organization was a kibbutz, which is something more than just a cooperative; and when they first exploded into the Ring, they had neither time nor manpower nor inclination for jails. What they did have was a topological engineer, a real, genuine, fur-bearing, wild talent who dreamed he was a penological pioneer. What he built for his comrades to remember him by was a cluster of Klein bottles, made of transparent teflon spun over a frame of energy in hexagonal vortices. Uh-huh! you may well glance at these scars. All the same, to me they meant life and not death, though it took me a while to realize that. The Israeli feel some kind of responsibility about the whole thing, so I'm here, in hospital, you might say, while one of their celebrated skin-planers shaves these scars off me. You know what a Klein bottle is? That's right, sort of a crookneck squash, with the neck growing back into the bulb, and the bulb opening out into a bell mouth which curves back and is the bulb. It's all one shell, you understand, and the result of its construction is that it's a quote hollow unquote object which has only one side. That is, it has neither inside nor outside. That is -- hagan hagan, if you didn't learn all that like everybody else while you were still in rompers, I can't teach it to you now. The point is that once you're in one of them things, you can't get out , because you're not in it anyway. I know you remember all this theory from headstart school, but you've got to realize the thing I'm talking about is not a little blown-glass artifact you can hold in your hand and shatter with a thumb snap, but a container of nearly pure energy that holds you , and that you can't get at, no matter how hard you try. Pure energy the hagan, it's pure terror. Never in my life was I so punished. They left me suited up, so the sun wouldn't fry me right off. But they took my helmet. Then they fired me into die thing from an ejaculator with a blast of air. and... there... I... was, tumbling end over end and holding my breath, and then gasping, wondering what I was breathing and why my blood hadn't already boiled out my eyeballs. I can't stand that feeling of disorientation that goes with not understanding what I'm happening to. In the worst saloon fight, even if I'm at the bottom of the pile, at least I know I'm there . The floor's on one side of me and the feet and fists on the other, all familiar and friendly. But floating all alone in that abstraction! The vigilantes had ridden away in full halloo and left me to puzzle out what they'd done to me. I would have blessed them I n a rotation or two, I saw three other bottles. What was in each of them was a skeleton. They were my constant companions for what seemed a terrible time. I know now it was only a few objective days, but it seemed like a full revolution of the Ring around Sol. I could not get out. In fact, I couldn't even touch the wall. If I jetted with my breath, the only means of propulsion I had, as I approached the skin, it simply receded. I could see the hexagons growing behind me when I looked over my shoulder until they seemed a mile on a side. Then I could turn my head back and way behind me, where I'd come from, I could see the energy lines pulled down so small I could hardly see between them. When I gave up and lay inert, the IF -- bubble? -- would slowly flow around me until the system was at equilibrium again, with me in the dead center. Dead center was what I expected it to be, too. There was no food and no water. Nothing but air. I can't calculate the volume of air in there with me. It must have been cubic kilometers. My suit worked after a fashion, but it was no longer a closed system because the posse had taken my helmet, so I was eternally conscious of losing moisture to that giant volume of air. I say giant, but there were no reference points, and sometimes I was sure the whole lash-up, me included, was very small. Hand size, lab size, above-picture-full-size size. That feeling was pretty bad, but there was worse. Subjectively, I was inside. Only when I thought, I knew I wasn't inside anything. There is no "inside" to a Klein bottle. The horror came when I realized (or thought I realized) that if I should subjectively put myself "outside", the air would woosh off and I'd boil and freeze in the same blink of a beta ray. I would wake up with a jerk and a gargle from a dream where I was safe on Mars, and I'd have to shut my eyes and put my head against my knees, whispering over and over, "I'm in side. I'm mside." The jerking and gargling came from the fact that when I slept, my own moisture and used air would ball around me, so that I was drowning and asphyxiating in my own water and C# # . I would shut my eyes, pull myself into the foetal position, and think, "There are convection currents here, because sunlight is here. I will sleep, and the convection currents will carry off my breath wastes. I cannot strangle." In a few minutes, I'd be fighting for breath and cursing the Sheik and his cohorts. Much good it did me. I couldn't even commit suicide by staying in one place and drowning in spent breath. When I passed out, my reflexes would snap, crackle and pop me out of my ball of halitosis. I t was a bad time. And no radio -- they had my helmet. I couldn't know whether our plot for a cyborg uprising had hatched itself properly, whether Harriet and Mordecai were winning, losing, compromising, or what. I made myself a promise. If Harriet came for me, I swore, I'd kill the flame for the last time, make one good planetfall and never straddle a hot pipe again. I practiced my' proposal forty thousand times, I guess. I'd offer to take her to Earth. I'd offer to marry on Mars. Sometimes I'd even promise to stay in the Asteroid Belt if I could just stay on just one, with a solid dome over me. That was my best dream. The other two were putting on my helmet again and hearing all those cyborgs on the radio, cheering me in twenty languages and forty gears; and planning meals. But the ones with Harriet were best: I could propose and be accepted, marry and live through the honeymoon to the first quarrel before I'd open my eyes and see that abstract impossibility turning around me and the other three nearby, each with its grinning reminder of what I was to be. Grandfather's flashlight was around my neck on a string, sort of a good luck charm, and sometimes it would float up out of my neck opening and bump me. I was so machine tolerant by then that I would have believed it was trying to tell me something if it had been a little more complicated. I would squeeze the generator reflectively, and watch the filament glow, but I never got an idea from it. As a matter of fact, I was looking at that little filament, half hypnotized, when the rescue party arrived. VI J didn't even see them galloping up until I heard Harriet shrieking thinly. She was riding on Mordecai's upper casing. Even then I thought it was a dream until I heard his bass rumbling with her. The big cyborg did as good a job as he could of explaining to me what I was in, but I could see he was annoyed at having to put up with a mind that wasn't hooked up to even a simple computer. The key point I understood, though. He and Harriet couldn't come to me -- because if they touched the system in which I was imprisoned, they would be imprisoned too, even though they were "outside" it. Once they touched the bottle, they would be bound to that endless plane. So they were going to ship me down to Sol Three for a dreamer mathematician to uncork the bottle, but they needed the size reduced so they could crate it, with me. "Pull it in," they kept saying. Finally they went at it the same way you would with the three-yearold in the bathroom. They came up to the bell" and began talking in soothing tones. They told me the revolution was won and the Sheik and his gang mostly dead or fled; and they petted and praised me 'til it was almost as good as one of my dreams. Only I had to be modest about it all, which I hadn't had to in the dream. Then Harriet said, "Look. It'll be easier if you get out of that suit. You're a part of the bottle now, and it of you, but you can't realize it. So you're not pulling it down around you small enough for us to get a teflon crate around it and shove the whole thing with you inside. We're going to drop you straight down the fastest curve we can make. Otherwise you'll starve before we get you there. Now. Come on. Roll out of that suit, baby, and push it right out the bell." It worked, you know. That suit drifted straight away when I shoved it and right out the bell. Only it went inside out when it passed "from" the bottle. That gave me a turn. I was ready to panic again, but she cried, "There! Now you know it can be manipulated. You can control the Klein bottle as easily as you control your breathing. "Now, one more demonstration, and then you'll do it." IF "I've got nothing left to shove out," I cried. "Yes, you have. And it's something you have to give me anyway. Take that flashlight off and pitch it out the bell." She'd always wanted it, remember? I remembered then, but what could I do? "" flung the flashlight, and it looped out of the bottle and right into her hand. The reaction tumbled me heels over head, so I saw what happened in flashes, as I revolved. When the flashlight hit her hand, she snatched up an electric line that lay near her as she sat on top of Mordecai, clipped it and wired the two ends into the terminals of that little generator. I could see Mordecai reaching for her with wires, gauges on flexible tubes, pressure cuffs, every loose appendage he had, in fact, until she began to squeeze the plunger handle that turned the armature. That big machine shuddered and flashed a few lights. "Turtle dooove!" he cried. "That hurrrts!" "Don't you forget it, big iron daddy," Harriet replied. "Next time I ask you to loosen up a pressure cuff, you do it, lover." Suddenly I saw, with horror, that some of Mordecai's wires and fluid lines weren't loose. They ran right in under her skin. "Harriet! Harriet!" I shouted. "Harriet!" She raised her head from where she had been staring into one of his light receptors, and smiled... smiled! "Oh, well, Galeg," she said. "Motl and I are a thing. We always were." I could see their thing-ness, and suddenly I didn't want herthemit looking at me. I turned in on myself, and the next instant, the Klein bottle fell into my skin, and I flowed out along its unbounded plane. For an endless period, I was totally displayed, inside out, outside in, and then consciousness collapsed. The last thing I heard was Harriet snickering and Mordecai chuckling in duet with her. He sounded like a diesel engine at a mine head. "Did you ever ," she asked him, "see such a weird UverV G allegher shook his head sadly. "The next thing I knew," he said, "I was here, with these scars all over me from where the energy net and my skin fused. That melted teflon wasn't any beauty treatment, either." I drank the last of the Hock, and said, "Well, they'll soon sand your skin down to its pristine state. But your heart, I suppose... still, better to have loved and lost..." Just then a blonde young woman in the sandalled uniform of the Greater Near East Co-Prosperity Sphere came up to us and said to Galeg, ignoring me, "Doctor's ready for you." As she swiveled away I saw an anklet of blue ceramic beads dancing with each stride. Galeg stood up to go. With a wink, he said, "Whatever they do to me here, at least I ain't going to wake up soldered to anybody." IF IF  Short Stor Somebody was waging war against R ussell's legs surprised him by aching in a new place tonight. He eased back onto his heels and reached for his canteen. Noticing his light dimming he closed the arc a bit, glancing around the Gohole as it brightened. The broad, low cavern was whaleshaped. Reasonable enough when its sole function was to permit the excavation of a pre-teleost's fossil. The partially unearthed skeleton stretched from where Russell knelt to where AI was working sixty feet uphill. Then the ceiling enveloped it. The creature's skull was on the next level, where Cassidy guarded it as if it were his own. "Al, you want a drink?" "Uh. Bring it here, will you? There's something you should see here anyway." Russell lay aside the toothed scalpel and stood up, hearing his knees crackle in the silent room. He year-old carcass and edged op the grade with extreme care. Russell was a fair eocine biologist; he was an excellent digger. "What've you got here, Al?" -- as he handed the latter fine canteen. "Nerve center, I think. Maybe the Blob here has a secondary system like the earlier air-breathers." Russell bent and stared closely at a group of vertebrae, wishing he knew more about primitive anatomy. It was the shoulder group T#I through C#, all right. The inflected gross curve and taper told him that. But the thing was so -- so primitive. The vertebrae seemed abnormally large, too, which would indicate that this long-dead creature had the motor section of his brain within him. Yet the whole thing looked odd, somehow. ill "Are you sure these are clean?" "Rather. But you can check. Should I go tell Cassidy?" "Maybe. Better safe than sorry, and you know how edgy he's been lately. All these blunders will cost him his job." "Come on, Russ. You don't really think they're blunders." "Hate to admit it, but you're right. The brain cage on that last one, both brains on that Trike on level #. It's just too much coincidence." "But what motive, Russ, for messing up a fossil? Sloat's a little jealous of Cassidy's Gohole, perhaps?" AI stood up, dusting his knees. "Could be. I've known Sloat for a couple of years though, and I doubt it. He's cranky and ambitious, but too much of a professional to destroy the best digs of his career, even to get Cassidy's job. Al, I'm going to have to prod these a bit. Give me your two-power glass and soft brush. You might as well tell Cassidy while I'm at it." Al left. Russell bent to his work. He thrust half a dozen needles under a feather-thin layer of rock covering the group of joints. Dropping a magnetic blanket over them, he energized it. Careful fingers lifted the blanket and rock off together cleanly. "Detritus, sure enough. Not bone." Russell repeated the process several times, eventually working down to the true anatomy of his as yet unnamed specimen. The vertebrae were normal in size beneath the shale mantle they'd worn. He was a bit disappointed that Al should have erred on so obvious a point and then began to wonder what he was going to tell Cassidy. "Qop," he muttered, "here they are; Cassidy and three guards." He stood up. "Hello, Russ. What's this young Allen tells me?" "Hello, Dr. Cassidy, boys. I'm afraid we were a bit premature. No nerve bundle here. Al got down to a fairly anatomical detritus, but the real bone is what you see now." He wondered where Al was at the moment and then saw him drop through the pressure lock behind his visitors. "Really," said Cassidy. "I thought you were more careful than that. You know how sensitive we are on the issue of -- ah -- well. It won't happen again, eh?" "No sir. No more false alarms." He was piqued that Al should straggle in late enough to avoid confronting Cassidy. Russell bore the old man's mild reprimand alone, after which the two diggers were left alone. "Al!" "Now look, Russ..." "Don't 'now look' me. A mistake's a mistake but..." The loudspeaker interrupted them. "Alarm; alarm! All men remain on station. Security guards converge on level #. Repeat: Security..." "That's only one level up!" "Yeah. Somebody's been at the skull." T he dormitory was on level #. They'd base-camped every hunIF dred levels all the way down. Russell gazed steadily at the bottom of the bunk above him and tried to sort things out. AI did it. Why? A meteorite had started everything two years ago. People saw it coming and got out of the way. It hit hard, eliminating half of Cleanthe, New Hampshire, and sank. It was discovered a quarter mile down resting on very very soft earth. Cassidy, of New Hampshire Geological, postulated the explanation of the "Gohole": The first ice age had sent immense glaciers through New Hampshire. They plowed furrows miles deep which later became the subfloors of her modem valleys. The ice rivers carried all before them, scooping artifacts and tagends of the preceding ages as they went along. These were deposited in odd places, at old depths, in the same way that auto tires and arrowheads are left by a river. With one exception. There was just one hell of a pothole left around Cleanthe. Then the second ice age had come along and, instead of smoothing things out as would be expected, actually reinforced the condition. This glacial pool bore at increasing depths artifacts of increasing age, dating back to the eons of ferns and lichens before biology even was . Or so Cassidy expounded. Not a Mohole, a Geo-hole. A Gohole. It was a tremendously romantic idea, and the public loved it. A meteor strikes, breaks through a thin shell and reveals man's history to man: Deus ex machinal Cassidy was enough of a showman to foster the feeling of wonder the hole awoke in most people. He let his hair grow and wore thicker glasses. He went on television and did everything but quote Nostradamus. At die end of half a year of foofaraw, Cassidy had a government grant and priority to dig down in the meteor's wake. He was a devoted digger, despite his theatrical leanings, and assembled the best paleontologists in the U.S. to help him. So Russ was there. AI was there, and thirty others. Each well acclaimed in their own circles, but all equal here. Men that had led expeditions in Egypt broke fingernails on stubborn trowels for Cassidy and loved it. These were the greatest and most significant digs there had ever been. C assiday was right. The hole was precisely what he thought --  -- twenty-six and a quarter miles of earth history -- starting at # A.D. on the surface and working downward to #. His crew unearthed early men far more sophisticated than Cro-Magnon but from a far earlier time. Scholars were already chewing that one over. Digging further, they found man-ape connections that must have made Darwin sigh, vindicated at last in no uncertain terms. Deeper and earlier went the digging. Men and animals overlapped, then animals and lizards. Lizards were reduced back to fish at level #, and finally, at level #, fish reduced to Blobs. The uncovering of the Blobs seemed to precipitate the funny business. AI did it. Why? Russell rolled uneasily in his cot. It was warm -- or he was. Blobs were animals, but barely so; the absolute precursors of biology. Like amoebae, only bigger. Some were the grandparents of fish. Some had spines and fins. Some had neither, leaving only weirdshaped holes in the rock as fossils. Some had brains, or at least major nerve centers. Which AI had methodically destroyed. Russell was wide awake and sweating. AI was his friend. Russ would never have suspected him of being the anthropophobic saboteur that plagued the expedition. "No doubt after that last one," he murmured. It had been done in crude haste. Nothing had been fabricated to simulate an accident. The skull was a natural masterpiece of a atom of limestone replaced each atom of bone. It had simply been kicked apart. Why Al? Russell arose, slid out from his four-tiered womb and disappeared down the cramped corridors to the adjacent dormitory cell. Red lights guided his way, but after eleven months underground he could probably have made it had they gone out. Diggers have pupils as big as pennies. He stepped into Al's cell and shook him gently. Al awoke, saying nothing, and followed where beckoned. Fifteen minutes and one pressure lock later they had descended from Level # to Level #. Finding themselves alone, Al risked conversation. "Where're we going?" 'Ten-fwenty. They've quit guarding it since the damage is done, and I want to take a look at that skull." They tramped down three more levels. No one was there, as Russ had anticipated, but the ruined fossil had been cordoned off. "Al, ol' buddy, you made this mess. Why?" " did it! You've gone claustro! You -- " "Calm down. I know you did it; no one else had the chance. You faked that nerve center find on #, left me there to check it like a prize boob, and went up to 'tell Cassidy. Cassidy panicked and came right down, with his guards. You lagged behind and squashed the skull. It's altogether obvious, and inside of a day, Cassidy'll figure it out and nab you. But Al, why?" A llen was silent. The cordoned skull, scattered in eerie disarray, looked at them through broken eyes. Their helmet lamps threw surrealistic shadows on the rock. "I did it just to do it," Al murmured softly. "For power. "I've been sick all my life, Russ, paranoid, megalomaniacal. I've fought it for a long time, since long before you knew me. But it finally blew. You say it's obvious now, huh? Suppose you're right. Damn." "It is. Al," Russ continued in less aggressive tones, "you did the others too?" "Yeah. The triceratops on # and the fish-Blob on #." Al looked past Russell's eyes. "We've been friends too long for IF me to play cop, Al, but you've got to go. You just can't go on destroying priceless paleontological evidence to vent a psychosis. Go kick dogs or write on bathroom walls, but get the hell out of these digsl" Al's face went blank in the hissing light for an instant, then cleared. "No. I've got to redeem myself. The only way is to contribute as much to this expedition as I've destroyed. And I can do it, Russ, because I know something valuable. There's a big find near the Northwest of #. The survey crew missed it, but I noticed a fissure in the rock that leads off in that direction. The spine of another Blob is evident in the fissure. If we could dig it out tonight, present it to Cassidy..." His enthusiasm faded with his voice. He noticed Russell's face, cautious, guarded. Russ tried not to let his suspicion show. Al's defense of psychosis looked thin to begin with. Cassidy had foreseen such contingencies and taken pains to screen the nuts out of his expedition. Nonetheless Russ had pretended to believe the man out of personal loyalty and offered him a way out besides. As long as Al would get out, he figured, no more damage could be donethe expedition. The milk had been spilt three times, okay, but Russ was not vengeful. Yet Al refused. He wanted to stick around, even knowing of his inevitable capture. Why? And now the sudden story of the find on #I which should have been reported the minute it was suspected. Russ decided to play it straight and find out more. "Let's go down and see. If you're not kidding about this new find I'll help you dig it out and reinstate yourself." They dropped down through the pressure lock, closed it and felt the pumps reduce the pressure of their subterranean depth. These locks occurred every twenty levels all the way up to the surface. Over fifty of them stood between Russ and the sunlight he hadn't seen for almost a year. Al led the way around the carcass they'd been working earlier in the day. He pointed to a faint lone between two dissimilar sedimentary boulders in the wall. It broadened to a vee near the bottom, which was of a lightish color. Russ ran the forefinger of a practiced hand across the interface. "Mmmm. Quartzite-sandstonequartzite. It's an extension of the level all right. The Gohole is broader here then they surveyed it to be. Now where's the fossil in the sandstone?" Al played his lamp on the lighter region and pointed to a tiny fleck of white. Russ scraped it gently. "Limestone, in an organic matrix." It was indeed fossilized bone. "Okay, Al, get the tools. We've got four and a half hours before the first shift gets here. If this is a real find we'll know by then. Maybe Cassidy'll let you off, maybe not." So Russ spoke. What he thought, however, was far less coherent. T iey dug. Two hours passed. The upper thoracic processes of another pelagic Blob appeared, very similar to the creature AI had mutilated. Though it was obviously an incomplete specimen it did appear to include the skull. Russ worked feverishly with his hands and his mind. If Al's phony explanation and phonier plea for redemption were to be disbelieved, why had he led the way to a new find? The trowel in Russell's hand shook for a moment as the answer became very, very clear. Destruction! AI seemed determined to destroy the nerve centers of jthese primitive fossils, and now he had limited time. So he had once again made Russ an accomplice in a final act of destruction before being caught. The only question remaining was why? Their little cave grew to washtub size as they traced the creature's upper vertebrae to its skull. It was hot. AI was wide-eyed and breathing raggedly beside him. They swept loose flakes of shale away from the ancient whale's lower mandible. In moments the skull would be bare. In moments AI would complete a cycle of mad, motiveless acts. Russ took a deep breath. "Stop." "Eh?" AI panted. "Stop right there. Leave it. Cassidy isn't blind; he'll believe you." "But Russ, we're almost done!" able. "No" AI sunk his hand to the wrist in the stone chips behind him and, whirling, flung them into Russell's face. As Russ clawed at his eyes AI picked up the spade and bent toward the skull. He raised the bludgeon but it never fell. Blind or not, Russell could fight. He flailed in Al's general direction with big knuckles and heavy boots. In a dugout no bigger than a barrel there was no dodging. When hot tears cleared the dirt from his eyes, AI was laid out, but conscious. "All right, you lying S.O.B." he growled. "I'll give you thirty seconds for a straight story! Or I'll kick your ribs in even more and then I'll go get Cassidy #" A stream of blood was flowing from Al's scalp diagonally toward the bridge of his nose. He was dazed as fie sat up. Al's bright, nervous eyes were dim now. "Russ, you've done me harm enough." He slumped, then straightened, but as his head dipped Russ noticed with horror the soft depression there. Russ leaned over his one-time friend's knees to retrieve his helmet and still-burning arc-lamp. AI leaned against the side of the little burrow and began: "I'm going to die. It isn't really your fault, Russ, because it seemed inevitable when I began. I don't want you to carry it on your conscience, especially since you've got to finish my work for me." Al's words were slurred, and the echoes were dull in the cavern. "We've two hours left. You've two hours left to convince yourself of what must be done, so dig. Dig while I talk. You must destroy that IF skull. It could be, praise God, the last one." Russell dug and listened. T got started in paleontology because the Schlesinger asphalt pits were discovered two miles from my father's farm in Utah. This was back in #. I was fifteen. I hung around and watched those magnificent bones come up out of the ground and was hooked for life. Well, when Schlesinger's party finished and moved out, I began. I scraped the tarpools down to rock with my father's caterpillar and found new digs below the tar. Fossils, mostly broken up, little stuff. Oddly enough there were chunks of chrome steel, copper oxide and -- I swear it -- plastic." AI coughed, and the rivulet on his brow freshened. "That isn't all. I came back from college every year and dug in secret... Russ, I found machines down there. Oh, they were nearly indistinguishable with, age and decay. Only the shapes remained. Square, round, some even faintly organic looking, but very definitely machines. "I broadened the digs, destroying as much as I saved in all haste. Surrounding the pit of machinery were the carcasses of Blobs, Russ. Early early animal life. Spineless, vertebrate, flying, swimming; all kinds. AI arrayed there in the most unnatural way. All of our biological patriarchs, every animal from which man could possibly derive a root. "Each of them had been tampered with. Each had had its nerve centers altered. That place was a laboratory' Al's words were quick but weak. Yet Russ was so attuned to the fantastic monologue that he missed nothing. He dug fiercely, roughly, with less and less care. "What do you know about eugenics, Russ? Cross a peanut and a plum to get an almond? Not quite. You get the great, great, great grandfather of something like an almond. To get the species you want at the top of the pyramid you work with the entire broad base, and take lots of time. "What do you know about biomedical engineering Russ? Do you think we'll ever put a living bond between metal and flesh? Do you think we'll ever analyze enough E.E.G.'s to know the mechanism of thought? "Don't you see? Someone came to earth a very long time ago. They 'edited' the wildlife and then departed." There was blood in Al's eyes, fear in Russell's. "You're telling me someone came to begin a eugenic chain? That they knew enough electrobiology to rebuild a brain? That they were trying to..." AI broke in. "When I learned that the Gohole went back to about the same period as my own digs the implications were obvious. If what I knew became common knowledge there would be disastrous results." AI paused, raising a sleeve weakly to wipe his gory cheek. "Oh, God, the shame of it! "Before I crushed those fossils upstairs I gave them a good looking over. The brain pan of the later one was too geometrical to be purely natural, but it was subtle. The mechanicity had been bred out to some degree. The biological tampering wouldn't have been noticed ad hoc. But  noticed, and I crushed it. "The Blobs here are earlier, closer to the date of the initial tampering. This fossil would tell the whole tragic story of man's origin. It must be destroyed." AI was gasping. His eyes were glossy under half-closed lids. The blood from the wound had dried and his face was caked with hideous brown. Russ turned after a moment, expecting the narrative to continue, but found his friend was dead. H e bent once more to the skull. His mind was incandescent with wild, panicked thoughts. His impetuous fingers jammed through two eye sockets and secured a grip. He half rose to hisfeet, got his knees under his chest, grimaced and heaved. It came. The sharp edge of his spade laid the bony horror open with a single blow. Within was a weird angularity. Half animal, half mechanical, nearly gone with age. Russ crashed it. He reduced the bony mask to an indistinguishable gravel. He had thirty minutes left. When the first shift came down there was nothing to see. The little dugout was filled back in, with AI and his discovery inside. Russ spent several days learning to think and behave normally again. That he made it through those days without going completely berserk is a credit to his stability. He never told. It wouldn't do for men to know their origin. That they were carefully evolved robots, destined to do another creature's bidding. That they had no will, no individuality not ordained by another, older race of beings. It wouldn't do just now. Not until that one final day when everyone would know, when the masters      IF IF  Serial The Road to the Rim Illustrated by Morrow Grimes was baffling againsf an enemy without .  . and an even more deadly foe within! XU A t one time, before differentiation between the mercantile and the figjhting vessel became pronounced, merchant vessels were built to carry a quite considerable armament. Today, the mounting of weapons on a merchantman presents its problems. After his tour of inspection Grimes was obliged to admit that Captain Craven had made cunning use of whatever spaces were available -- but Craven, of course, was a very experienced officer, with long years of service in all classes of spacecraft. Too -- and, perhaps, luckily -- there had been no cannon among the Survey Service ordinance that had been requisitioned, so recoil had not been among the problems. What Has Gone Before -- Ensign John Grimes, Federation Survey Service, was no groundhog. He had shipped across the starways before, and felt ready for anything Space could throw at him -- but this! "This" was merchant vessel Delta Orionis. To begin with, discipline was slack. T p go on with, the officers treated him like a greenhorn. And to end with -- all too many officers were femalel So Grimes resigned himself to a messy cruise, his only consolation that like everything else it would have an ending. But his dreams of planetfall were interrupted by a distress call from another space freighter -- attacked by pirates, and wrecked in midspace. To Grimes it was a welcome change, but just as he was getting ready for action he discovered that Delta Ononis's captain, speeding to the wrecked freighter, was not so much interested in rescuing it as he was in piracy of his own -- with Grimes ordered to take part in it, or face a court-martial for mutiny! When he was finished, Grimes returned to the control room. Craven was still there, and with him was Jane Pentecost. They had, obviously, been discussing something. They could, perhaps, have been quarrelling; the girl's face was flushed, and her expression sullen. "Yes?" snapped the captain. "You've made a good job, sir. She's no cruiser, but she should be able to defend herself." "Thank you. Then we'll be on our way." "Not so fast, sir. I'd like to wire up my control panel properly before we shove off." Craven laughed. "You'll have time, Mr. Grimes. I have still a few last duties to discharge aboard Delta Orionis. But be as quick as you can." He left the compartment, followed by Jane Pentecost. She said, over her shoulder, "I'll send Mr. Baxter to help you, John." T he Rim Worlder must have been somewhere handy; in a matter of seconds he was by Grimes' side, an already open tool satchel at his belt. As he worked, assisting deftly and then taking over as soon as he was sure of what was required, he talked. He said, "Mum wanted to come along, but I soon put the damper on that. But I was bloody amazed to find you here." "Were you?" asked Grimes coldly. 'Too right I was. Never thought you were cut out to be a bloody pirate." He cursed briefly as a spatter of hot metal from his sizzling soldering iron stung his hand. "A IF cold weld'd be better, but it's take too much time. But where was I? Oh, yes. The shock to me system when I saw you cornin' aboard this wagon." "I have my quite valid reasons," Grimes told him stiffly. "You're tellin' me. Just as my Missus had quite valid reasons for wantin' to come with me. But she ain't a gunnery expert." He added piously, "Thank Gawd." "And I am one," said the ensign, trying to change the drift of the conversation before he lost his temper. "Yes, that's right. Just stick to the color code. The blue wiring's the "I know," Baxter told him. "Tell me, is it any good?" "Yes. Of course, if an enemy held us in her beams for any prolonged period we should all be cooked, but as far as it goes it's effective enough." "Hope you're right." He made the last connections, then replaced the panel on the open, shallow box. "Here's yer magic cabinet. Professor. All we have ter see now is what rabbits yer can pull outer the hat." "Plenty, I hope," said Captain Craven, who had returned to Control. "And are you ready now, Mr. Grimes?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Then we'll make it stations. If you will take the co-pilot's chair, while Mr. Baxter goes along to look after his rockets..." "Will do, Skipper," said the engineer, packing away his tools as he pulled himself towards the exit hatch. The ship's intercom came to life, in Jane Pentecost's voice. "Connection between vessels severed, Airlock door closed." "We're still connected," grumbled Craven. " Delia O' Ryan still has her magnetic grapnels out." He spoke into the transceiver microphone, "Epsilon Sextans to Delta Orionis. Cast off, please. Over." " Delta Orionis to Epsilon Sextans . Casting off." Through a viewport Grimes could see one of the bright mooring wires snaking back into its recess. "All clear, Captain." "Thank you, Captain Kennedy." And in a softer voice, "And I hope you keep that handle to your name. Bill." "Thank, you, sir. And all the best, Captain, from all of us, to all of you. And good hunting." "Thanks. And look after the old Delia, Captain. And yourself. Over -- and out. n " Delia Orionis to Epsilon Sextans . Over -- and out " There was something very final, thought Grimes, about those "outs." H e was aware that the ships were drifting slowly apart. Now he could see all of Delta Orionis from his viewport. He could not help recalling the day on which he had first seen her, at the Woomera spaceport. So much had happened since that day. (And so much still to happen -- he hoped.) He heard Craven say into the intercom, "Stand by for temporal precession. We're desynchronizing." Then there was the giddiness and the off-beat whine of the Mannchenn Drive that pierced his eardrums painfully, and beyond the viewports the great, shining shape of the other ship shimmered eerily, was suddenly warped into the likeness of a monstrous Klein flask -- then vanished. Where she had been (where she still was, in Space but not in Time) shone the distant stars, the stars that in this distorted continuum were pulsing spirals of iridescence. "Mannschenn Drive. Cut!" The thin, high keening died abruptly. Outside, the stars were glittering points of light, piercingly bright against the blackness. "Mr. Grimes!" Craven's voice was sharp. "I hope that you take more interest in gunnery than you do in ship handling. In case it has escaped your notice, I would remind you that you are second in command of this vessel and in full charge in the event of my demise." "Sorry, sir," stammered Grimes. Then, suddenly hold, "But I'm not your second in command, sir. I've signed no Articles." "Surprisingly, Craven laughed. "A spacelawyer, yet! Well, Mr. Grimes, as soon as you get this vessel on course we'll attend to the legal formalities. Meanwhile, may I request your close attention to what I am doing?" "You may, sir." "Thereafter he watched and listened carefully. He admired the skill with which Craven turned the ship on her directional gyroscopes until the redglowing target star was centered exactly in the cartwheel sight. He noted that the captain used his reaction drive at a longer period and at a higher rate of acceleration than usual, and, said as much. He was told, the words falling slowly and heavily in the pseudogravity, "They... will... expect... us... to... be... in... a... hurry. We... must... not... disappoint... them Speed built up, fast; but it was a velocity that, in the context of the interstellar distances to be traversed, was no more than a snail's crawl. Then -- and the sudden silence was like a physical blow -- the thunder of the rockets ceased. The screaming roar had died, but the ship was not quiet. The whine of the Mannschenn Drive pervaded her every compartment, vibrated through every member of her structure. She was falling, falling through Space and Time, plunging through the warped continuum to her rendezvous with Death... And whose Death? wondered Grimes. He said, "I should have asked before, sir. But how are... how are they going to find us?" "I don't know," said Craven. "I don't know. But they've found other ships when they've wanted to. They've never used the old, piratical technique of lying in wait at breaking-out points. A Mass Proximity Indicator? Could be. It's theoretically possible. It could be for a ship under Mannschenn Drive what radar is for a ship in normal SpaceTime. Or some means of homing on a temporal precession field? That's more like it, I think, as this IB! vessel was able to escape when she went random. "But if they want us -- and they will -- they'll find us. "And then..." He looked at Grimes, his blue gaze intense. "And then it's up to you, Ensign." 'To all of us," said Grimes. S he was undermanned, was Epsilon Sextans , but she functioned quite efficiently. Craven kept a control room watch himself, and the other two watchkeepers were Grimes and Jane Pentecost. Four on and eight off were their hours of duty -- but there was plenty of work to be done in the off-duty periods. The captain, of course, was in overall charge and was trying to bring his command to the pitch of efficiency necessary for a fighting ship. Jane Pentecost was responsible for meals -- although these, involving little more than the opening of cans, did not take up too much of her time. She had also taken over biochemist's duties, but called now and again upon Grimes It's operation was simple enough, but it was inclined to be temperamental and, now and again, allowed the carbon dioxide concentration to reach a dangerous level. Grimes' main concern was his armament. He could not indulge in a practice shoot -- the expulsion of mass by a ship running under interstellar drive is suicidal; even the employment of laser weapons is dangerous. But there were tests that he could make; there was, in the ship's stores, a spare chart tank that he was able to convert to a battle simulator. Craven helped him, and they set up targets in the tank, glowing points of light that were destroyed by the other sparks that represented Grimes' missiles. After one such drill he said, "You seem to know your stuff, Ensign. Now, what's your grasp of the tactical side of it?" Grimes considered his words before speaking. "Well, sir, we could use a laser with the Drive in operation -- but we haven't got a laser. The pirates have. They can synchronize and just carve us up at leisure. This time, I think they'll go for the interstellar drive engineroom first, so that we can't get away by the use of random precession..." "Yes. That's what they'll do. That's why I have that compartment literally sealed ina cocoon of insulation. Oh, I know it's not effective, but it will give us a second or so of grace. No more." "We can't use our reflective vapor," went on Grimes. "That'd be almost as bad, from our viewpoint, as loosing off a salvo of missiles. But, sir, when this ship was first attacked there mdst have been a considerable loss of mass when the atmosphere was expelled through the rents in the shell plating. The Drive was running. How was it that the ship wasn't flung into some other Space-Time?" "Come, come, Mr. Grimes. You should know the answer to that one. She was held by the powerful temperal precession fields of the drive units of the two pirates. And then, of course, when the engineers managed to set up their random precession there was no mass left to be expelled." "H'm. I see. Or I think I see. Then, in that case, why shouldn't I attacked?" "No. Setter not. Something might just go wrong -- and I don't want to become one of my own ancestors." "Then... ?" "You tell me, Mr. Grimes." "Cut our Drive... ? Break out into the normal continuum? Yes, it could work." He was becoming enthusiastic. "And then we shall be waiting for them, with our missile batteries, when they break out." "We'll make an admiral of you yet, young Grimes." W ith watchkeeping and with offwatch duties time was fully occupied. And yet there was something missing. There was, Grimes said to himself, one hell of a lot missing. Jane Pentecost had her own watch to keep and her ovn jobs to do when she was not in the control room, but she and Grimes had some free time to share. But they did not share it. He broached the subject when he was running a test on the artificial I was hoping I'd see more of you." "You're seeing plenty of me." "But not enough." "Don't be tiresome," she snapped. Then, in a softer voice, "Don't..." "... spoil everything?" he finished for her sardonically. "You know what I mean," she told him coldly. "Do I?" He groped for words. "Jane... Damn it all, I hoped... After what happened aboard the Delia O'Ryan..." "That," she said, "was different." Her face flushed. "I tell you this, Grimes, if I'd known that you were coming along with us it never would have happened." "No?" "NO!" "Even so... I don't see any reason why we shouldn't..." "Why we shouldn't what? Oh, all right, all right. I know what you mean. But it's out of the question. I'll tell you why, in words of one syllable. In a ship such as Delia Orionis descreet fun and games were permissable, even desirable. No shortage of women -- both crew and passengers. Here, I'm the only female. Your friend Mr. Baxter has been sniffing after me. And Mr. Wolverton the Interstellar Chief. And his Second. And even, bereaved though he is, the Bearded Bastard. He might get away with it -- the privileges of rank and all that. But nobody else would, most certainly not yourself. How long would it remain a secret?" "I suppose you're right, but..." "But what? Oh John, John, you are a stubborn cow..." "Cow?" "Sorry. Just Rimworldsese. Applicable to both sexes." "Talking of sex..." "Oh, shut m#" "I'll not." She looked desirable standing there. A small smudge of IF grease on her flushed cheek was like a heauty spot. "I'll not," he said again. She was close to him, and he was acutely conscious that beneath the thin uniform shirt and the short shorts there was only Jane. He had only to reach out. He did so. At first she did not resist -- and then she exploded into a frenzy of activity. Before he could let go of her a hard, rough hand closed on his shirt collar and yanked him backwards. "Keep yer dirty paws off her!" snarled a voice. It was Baxter's. "Keep yer dirty paws off her! If we didn't want yer ter let off the fireworks I'd do yer, here an' now." "And keep your dirty paws off me!" yelped Grimes. It was meant to be an authentic quarterback bark, but it didn't come out that way. "Let him go, Mr. Baxter," said Jane, adding, "please." "Oh, orl right. If yer says so. But I still think we should run him up ter the Old Man." "No. Better not." She addressed Grimes, 'Thank you for your help thank you, Mr. Baxter, for your help. It's time that I started looking after the next meal." S he left, not hastily, but not taking her time about it either. When she was gone Baxter released Grimes. Clumsily the ensign turned himself around, with a wild flailing motion. Unarmed combat had never been his specialty, especially unarmed combat in Free Fall conditions. But he knew that he had to fight, and the rage and the humiliation boiling up in him made it certain that he would do some damage. But Baxter was laughing, showing all his ugly, yellow teeth. "Come orf it, Admiral! An' if we must have a set-to -- not in here. Just smash the UV projector -- an' bang goes our air conditioning! Simmer down, mate. Simmer down!" Grimes simmered down, slowly. "But I thought you were out for my blood, Mr. Baxter." "Have ter put in a show for the Sheilas now an' again. Shouldn't mind puttin' on another kind o' show with her. But not in public, like you was goin' to. But it won't do. It just won't do, not until the shootin' is over, anyhow. An' even then... So, Admiral, it's paws off as far as you're concerned. An' as far as I'm concerned, an # the Chief Time Twister, an' his sidekick. But, if yer can spare the time, I propose we continue the conversation in my palatial dogbox." Grimes should have felt uneasy as he followed the engineer to his accommodation -- but, oddly enough, he did not. The rough friendliness just could not be the prelude to a beating up. Nor was it. "Come in," said Baxter, pulling his sliding door to one side. "Now yer see how the poor live. This is..." "No," protested Grimes. "No." "Why? I was only goin' to say that this is me 'umble 'umpy. An I'd like yer to meet a coupla friends o' mine, and there's more where they came from." The "friends" were two drinking bulbs. Each bore proudly no less than four stars on its label. The brandy was smooth, smooth and potent. Grimes sipped appreciatively. "I didn't know that we had any of this aboard Delia O'Ryan... "An' nor did we. You'll not find this tipple in the bar stores of any merchantman, nor aboard any of yer precious Survey Service wagons. Space stock for the emperor's yacht, this is. So here's ter the Waverly taxpayers!" "But where did you get this from, Mr. Baxter?' "Where d'yer think? I've had a good fossick around the holds o' this old bitch, an' there's quite a few things too good to let fall inter the hands o' those bloody Waldegrenese." "But that's pillage." "It's common sense. Mind yer, I doubt if Captain Craven would approve, so yer'd better chew some dry tea -- that's in the cargo too -- before yer see the Old Man again. All the Weedin' same, it's no worse than him borrowing your Survey Services stores an' weapons from his cargo." "I suppose it's not," admitted Grimes. All the same, he still felt guilty when he was offered a second bulb of the luxurious spirit. But he did not refuse it. H e was a good fossicker, was Baxter. Two days later, as measured by the ship's chronometer, he was waiting for Grimes as he came off watch. "Ensign," he announced without preamble, "I've found somethin' in the cargo." "Something new, you mean?" asked Grimes coldly. He still did not approve of pillage, although he had shared the spoils. "Somethin' that shouldn't be there. Somethin that's up your alley, I think." "There's no reason why equipment for the Waverley Navy shouldn't be among the cargo." "True enough. But it wouldn't be in a case with Beluga Caviar stencilled all over it. I thought I'd found somethin' to go with the vodka I half inched... But it won't." "Then what is it?" "Come and see." "All right." Briefly Grimes wondered if he should tell Craven, who had relieved the watch, then decided against it. The Old Man would probably insist on making an investigation in person, in which case Grimes would have to pass another boring hour or so in the control room. The two men made their way aft, until they came to the forward bulkhead of the cargo spaces. Normally these would have been pressurized, but, when Epsilon Sextans' atmosphere had been replenished from Delta Orionis' emergency cylinders, it had seemed pointless to waste precious oxygen. So access was through an airlock, outside which was a locker , in which suits, ready for immediate use, were stowed. Grimes and Baxter suited up, helping each other as required. Then the engineer put out his gloved hand IF to the airlock controls. Grimes stopped him , bent forward to touch helmets. He said, "Hang on. If we open the door it'll register on the panel in Control." "Like hell it will!" came the reply. "Most of the wiring was slashed through during the piracy. I fixed the hold lights -- but damn all else." Grimes, through the transparency of the visors, saw the other's grin. "For obvious reasons." G rimes shrugged, released Baxter. Everything was so irregular that one more, relatively minor regularity hardly mattered. With the engineer he squeezed into the small airlock, waited until the atmosphere it held had been pumped back into the body of the ship, then he himself pushed the button that actuated the mechanism of the inner valve. This was not the first time that he had been in the cargo spaces. Some of the weapons "borrowed" from Delta Orionis  cargo had been mounted in the holds. When he had made his inspections, it had never occurred to him that the opening and closing of the airlock door had not registered in Control. He stood back and let Baxter lead the way. The engineer pulled himself to one of the bins in which he had been foraging. The door to it was still open, and crates and cartons disturbed by the pillager floated untidily around the opening. "You'll have to get all this restowed," said Grimes sharply. "If we have to accelerate there'll be damage." But he might as well have been speaking to himself. The suit radios had not been switched on; and, in any case, there was no air to carry sound waves, however faintly. Baxter had scrambled into the open bin. Grimes followed him, saw him standing by the case, its top prized open, that carried the letterBaxter beckoned. Grimes edged his way past the drifting packages to join him. There was something in the case, but it was not jars or cans of salted sturgeon's eggs. It looked at first like a glittering, complex piece of mobile statuary, although it was motionless. It was a metal mismating of gyroscope and Moebius Strip. It did not look wrong -- nothing functional ever does -- but it did look odd. Grimes was standing hard against Baxter now. Their helmets were touching. He asked, "What... what is it?" "I was hopin' you'd be able ter tell me, Admiral." Then, as Grimes extended a cautious hand into the case, "Careful! Don't touch noth" 'Cause this bloody lot was booby-trapped, that's why. See that busted spring? An' see that cylinder in the comer? That's a thermite bomb, or somethin' worse. Shoulda gone orf when I pried the lid up, but luckily I buggered the firin' mechanism with me bar when I stuck it inter just the right crack. But I think it's deloused now." "It looks as though it -- whatever it is -- is hooked up to one of the electrical circuits... " "Yair. An' it's not the lightin' circuit. Must be the airlock indicators..." "Must be." As a weapons expert, Grimes could see that the thermite bomb -- if that was what it was -- had been rendered ineffective. It hadn't been an elaborate trap, merely a device that would destroy the... the thing if the case housing it were tampered with. Baxter had been lucky, and, presumably, those who had planted the -- what the hell was it? -- unlucky. With a cautious finger he nudged the rotor. It turned, and he was reminded of those other rotors, the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive. H e remembered, then. He remembered a series of lectures at the Academy on future weapons and navigational devices. Having decided upon his specialty he had been really interested only in the weapons. But there had been talk of a man called Carlotti, who was trying to develop a device that would induce temporal precession in radio signals, so that instantaneous communications would be possible throughout the galaxy without ships and shore stations having to rely upon the tempermental and unreliable telepaths. And beacons, employing the same principle, could be used for navigation by ships under interstellar drive. So this could be one of Signor Carlotti's gadgets. Perhaps the Empire of Waverly had offered him a higher price than had the Federatrial spies? But Epsilon Sextans' possessed excellent strongrooms for the carriage of special cargo. And why was the thing wired up? Suddenly it was obvious. Somehow, the Duchy of Waldgren possessed Carlotti equipment. This... this beacon had been transmitting, unknown to anybody aboard the ship, during the voyage. The frigates had homed upon her. When, inadvertently, its power supply had been shut off the victim, using random precession, had been able to make her escape. So, if the pirates were to make a second attack it would have to be reactivated. "We'd better throw this lot on to the Old Man's plate," said Grimes. C aptain Craven listened intently as Grimes and Baxter told their story. They feared that he was going to lose his temper when told of the engineer's cargo pillaging, but he only remarked, in a dry voice, "I guess that the consignees can afford to compensate us for our time and trouble. Even so, Mr. Baxter, this practice must cease." And then, when Grimes described the device, he said, "Yes, I have heard of Carlotti's work. But I didn't think that he'd got as far as a working model. But the thing could have been developed by Waldegrenese scientists from the data in his published papers." IF "So you agree, sir, that it is some kind of beacon upon which the pirates can home?" "What else can it be? Now, gentlemen, we find ourselves upon the horns of a dilemna. If we don't reactivate the bloody thing, the chances are that we shall deliver ship and cargo intact, at no great risk to ourselves, and to the joy of the underwriters. If we do reactivate it, then the chances are that we shall have. to fight our way through. And there's no guarantee that we shall be on the winning side." "I was shanghaied away here as a gunnery officer," said Grimes. "Shanghaied -- or press-ganged?" queried Craven. "The technique was more that of the shanghai," Grimes told him. "Indeed?" Craven's voice was cold. "But no matter. You're here, and you're one of my senior officers. What course do you recommend?" Grimes replied slowly and carefully. "Legally speaking, what we're involved in isn't a war. But it is a war, of sorts. And a just war. And, in any case, the master of a merchant vessel has the legal right to resist illegal seizure or destruction by force of arms. Of course, we have to consider the illegal circumstances attending the arming of this ship..." "Let's not get bogged down in legalities and illegalities," said Craven, with a touch of impatience. "The lawyers can sort it all out eventually. Do we reactivate?" "Yes," said Grimes. "And you, Mr. Baxter. What do you say?" "We Rim Worlders just don't like Waldegren. I'll not pass up a chance ter kick the bastards in the teeth. Reactivate, Skipper." "Good. And how long will it take you to make good the circuit the beacon's spliced in to?" "Twenty minutes. No more. But d'yer think we oughter put the whole thing to the vote first?" "No. Everybody here was under the impression that we should be fighting. With one possible exception, they're all volunteers." "But I did volunteer, sir," objected Grimes. "Make your mind up, Ensign. You were telling me just now that you'd been shanghaied. All right. Everybody is a volunteer. So we just rebait the trap without any more yapping about it. Let me know as soon as you're ready, Mr. Baxter. Will you require assistance?" "I'll manage. Skipper." W hen he was gone Craven turned to Grimes. "You realize, Ensign, that this puts me in rather a jam. Let me put it this way. Am I justified in risking the lives of all my officers to carry out a private act of vengeance?" "I think that you can take Mr. Baxter and myself as being representative, sir. As for the others -- Miss Pentecost's a Rim Worlder, and her views will coincide with Baxter's. And the original crew members, they're just as entitled to vengeance as you are. I know that if I'd been an officer of this ship at the time of the original piracy, I'd enjoy getting revenge." IF " You would. Yes. Even if, as now, an alternative suddenly presented itself. But..." "I honestly don't see what you're worrying about, sir." "You wouldn't. It's a matter of training. But, for all my reserve commission, I'm a merchant officer. Oh, I know that any military commander is as responsible for the lives of his men as I am, but he also knows that those lives, like his own, are expendable." "It's a pity that Baxter found the beacon," said Grimes. "It is -- and it isn't. If he hadn't found it, I shouldn't be soliloquizing like a spacefaring Hamlet. And we should have brought the ship in intact and, like as not, all been awarded Lloyd's Medal. On the other hand, if he hadn't found it we -- or I? -- should have lost our chance of getting back at the pirates." "You aren't Hamlet, sir." Grimes spoke with the assurance of the very young, but in later years he was to remember his words and to feel neither shame nor embarrassment, but only a twinge of envy and regret. "You aren't Hamlet. You're Captain Craven, Master under God. Please, sir, for once in your life do something you want to do and argue it out later with the Almighty if you must." "And with my Owners?" Grimes couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw something like a smile beneath Craven's full beard. "And with my Owners?" "Master Astronauts' certificates aren't all that common, sir. If the worst comes to the worst, there's always the Rim Worlds. The Sundowner Line, isn't it?" "I'd already thought of that." There was no doubt about it. Craven was smiling. "After all that you've been saying to me, I'm surprised that you don't join forces with our Miss Pentecost." "Go out to the Rim, sir? Hardly." "Don't be so bloody sure, young Grimes. Anyhow, you'd better get Miss Pentecost up here now so that we can see how friend Baxter is getting on. There's always the risk that he'll find a few more things among the cargo that aren't nailed down." XV G rimes called Jane Pentecost on the intercom; after a minute or so she made her appearance in Control. Craven told her what Baxter had discovered and what he. Craven, intended doing about it. She nodded in emphatic agreement. "Yes," she said. "The thing's here to be used -- and to be used the way that we want to use it. But I don't think that we should make it public." "Why not, Miss Pentecost?" "I could be wrong, Captain, but in my opinion there are quite a few people in this ship who'd welcome the chance of wriggling out of being the cheese in the mousetrap. When there's no alternative they're brave enough. When there's a face-saving alternative..." Baxter's voice came from the intercom speaker. "Chief Reaction Drive Engineer to Control. Repairs completed. Check your panel." Yes, the circuit had been restored. The buzzer sounded, and on the board a glowing red light showed that the outer door to the cargo hold airlock was open. How much of the failure of the indicators was due to battle damage and how much to Baxter's sabotage would never be known. Craven's heavy eyebrows lifted ironically as he looked at Grimes, and Grimes shrugged in reply. Then, the watch handed over to the girl, the two men made their way aft from the control room. Outside the airlock they found Baxter, already suited up save for his helmet. There had been only two suits in the locker, and the engineer had brought another one along for the captain from somewhere. The little compartment would take only two men at a time. Craven and Grimes went through first, then were joined by Baxter. There was no longer any need for secrecy, so the suit radios were switched on. The only person likely to be listening in was Jane Pentecost in the control room. Grimes heard Craven muttering angrily as they passed packages that obviously had been opened and pillaged, but the captain did no more than mutter. He possessed the sense of proportion so essential to his rank, and a few bulbs of looted liquor were, after all, relatively unimportant. They came to the bin in which the case allegedly containing caviar had been stowed, in which some secret agent of Waldegren had tapped the circuit supplying power to the beacon. Inside the box the gleaming machine was still motionless. Craven said, "I thought you told me the current was on." "It is, Skipper." Baxter's voice was pained. "But I switched it off before I fixed the wiring." He extended a gtoved finger, pressed a little toggle switch. And nothing happened. "Just a nudge..." whispered the engineer. The oddly convoluted rotor turned easily enough, and as it rotated it seemed almost to vanish in a mist of its own generating -- a mist that was no more than an optical illusion. It rotated, slowed and stopped. Baxter cast aspersions upon the legitimacy of its parenthood. Then, still grumbling, he produced a voltmeter. Any doubt that power was being delivered to the machine was soon dispelled. Power was being delivered -- but it was not being used. "Well, Mr. Baxter?" demanded Craven. "I'm a fair mechanic, Skipper, but I'm no physicist..." "Mr. Grimes?" "I specialized in gunnery, sir." Craven snorted, the sound unpleasantly loud in the helmetphones. He said sarcastically, "I'm only the captain, but I have some smatterings of Mannschenn Drive maintenance and operation. This thing isn't a Mannschenn Drive unit -- but it's first cousin to one. As I recall it, some of the earlier models couldn't be started without the employment of a small, temporal precession field initiator. Furthermore, these initiators, although there is ne IF longer any need for them, are still carried as engineroom spares in the Commission's ships." "And that gadget'll start this little time-twister, Skipper?" asked the engineer. "It might, Mr. Baxter. It might. So, Mr. Grimes, will yon go along to the Mannsohenn Drive room and ask Mr. Wolverton for his initiator? No need to tell him what it's for." T X #olverton was in the MannsV V chenn Drive room, staring moodily at the gleaming complexity of processing rotors. Grimes hastily averted his eyes from the machine. It frightened him, and he didn't mind admitting it. And there was something about the engineer that frightened him, too. The tall, cadaverous man, with the thin strands of black hair drawn over his gleaming skull, looked more like a seer than a ship's officer, looked like a fortune-teller peering into the depths of an uncannily mobile crystal ball. He was mumbling, his voice a low, guttural muttering against the thin, high keening of his tumbling gyroscopes. The ensign at last was able to make out the words. "Divergent tracks... To be, or not to be, that is the question..." Grimes thought, This ship should be renamed the "State of Denmark." There s something rotten here. He said sharply, "Mr. Wolverton!" Slowly the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer turned his head, stared at Grimes unseeingly at first. His eyes came into focus. He whispered, "It's you." "Who else, Chief? Captain's compliments, and he'd like to borrow your temporal precession field initiator" "He would, would he? And why?" "An... An experiment..." said Grimes, with partial truth. The fewer people who knew the whole truth the better. "An experiment?" "Yes. If you wouldn't mind letting me have it now, Chief..." "But it's engineroom stores. It's the Commission's stores. It's a very delicate instrument. It is against the Commission's regulations to issue it to unqualified personnel." "But Mr. Baxter is helping with the... experiment." "Mr. Baxter! That letter-off of cheap fireworks. That... Rim Runner! No. No. Mr. Baxter is not qualified personnel." "Then perhaps you could lend us one of your juniors..." "No. No, I would not trust them. Why do you think that I am here, Mr. Grimes? Why do you think that I have been tied to my gyroscopes? Literally tied, almost. If I had not been here, keeping my own watch, when the pirates struck, this ship would have been utterly destroyed. I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes..." He seized the ensign's arm, turned him so that he was facing the gleaming, spinning rotors, endlessly precessing, endlessly tumbling down the dark dimensions, shimmering on the very verge of invisibility. Grimes wanted to close his eyes, but could not. "I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes. It talks to me. It shows me things. It warned me, that Time, that Death was waiting for this ship and all in her. And now it warns me again. But there is a... a divergence..." "Mr. Wolverton, please! There is not much time." "But what is Time, Mr. Grimes? What is Time? What do you know of the forking World Lines, the Worlds of If? I've lived with this machine, Mr. Grimes. It's part of me -- or am I part of it? Let me show you." His grip on the ensign's arm was painful. "Let me show you. Lo#k. Look into the machine. What do you see?" G rimes saw only shadowy, shimmering wheels and a formless darkness. "I see you, Mr. Grimes," almost sang the engineer. "I see you -- but not as you will be. But as you might be. I see you on the bridge of your flagship, your gold uniform gold-encrusted and medal-bedecked, with commodores and captains saluting you and calling you 'sir'... But I see you, too, in the control room of a shabby little ship, a single ship, in shabby clothes, and the badge on your cap is one that I have never seen, is one that does not yet exist..." "Mr. Wolverton! That initiator. Please !" "But there is no hurry, Mr. Grimes. There is no hurry. There is Time enough for everything -- for that is, that has been, that will be and that might be. There is Time to decide, Mr. Grimes. There is Time to decide whether or not we make our second rendezvous with Death. The initiator is part of it all, Mr. Grimes, is it not? The initiator is the signpost that stands at the forking of the track. You weren't here, Mr. Grimes, when the pirates struck. You did not hear the screams, you did not smell the stench of burning flesh. You're young and foolhardy; all that you want is the chance to play with your toys. And all that I want, now that I know that alternatives exist, is the chance to bring this ship to her destination with no further loss of life." "Mr. Wolverton..." "Mr. Grimes!" It was Captain Craven's voice, and he was in a vile temper. "What the hell do you think you're playing at?" "Captain," said Wolverton, "I can no more than guess at what you intend to do, but I have decided not to help you to do it." "Then give us the initiator. We'll work it ourselves." "No, Captain." "Give me the initiator, Mr. Wolverton. That's an order." "A lawful command, Captain? As lawful as those commands of yours that armed this ship?" "Hold him, Grimes!" (And who's supposed to be holding whom? wondered the ensign. Wolverton's grip was still tight and painful on his arm.) "Hold him, while I look in the storeroom!" "Captain! Get away from that door! You've no right..." Wolverton relinquished his hold on Grimes, who, twisting with an agility that surprised himself, contrived to get both arms about the engineer's waist. In the scuffle the IF contact between their magnetic shoe soles and the deck was broken. They hung there, helpless, with no solidity within reach of their flailing limbs to give them purchase. They hung there, clinging to each other, but more in hate than in love. Wolverton's back was to the machine; he could not see, as could Grimes, that there was an indraught of air into the spinning, shimmering complexity. Grimes felt the beginnings of panic, more than the mere beginnings. There were no guardrails; he had read somewhere why this was so, but the abstruse physics involved did not matter -- all that mattered was there was nothing to prevent him and Wolverton from being drawn into the dimensiontwisting field of the thing. He freed, somehow, his right hand, and with an effort that sprained his shoulder brought it round in a sweeping, clumsy and brutal blow to the engineer's face. Wolverton screamed, and his grip relaxed. Violently, Grimes shoved away. Craven emerged from the storeroom, tarrying something that looked like a child's toy gyroscope in a transparent box. He looked around for Grimes and Wolverton at deck level and then, his face puzzled, looked up. He did not, as Grimes had been doing for some seconds, vomit; but his face, behind the beard, went chalk-white. He put out his free hand and, not ungently, pulled Grimes to the deck. He said, his voice little more than a whisper, "There's nothing we can do. Nothing, except to get a pistol and finish him off... " Grimes forced himself to look again at the slimy, bloody obscenity that was a man turned, literally, inside-out -- heart (if it was the heart) still beating, intestines still writhing. After a spasm of painful retching he gasped, "He kept his own rendezvous with Death!" I t was Grimes, who went for a pistol, fetching a Minetti from the weapons rack that he, himself, had fitted up in the control room. He told Jane Pentecost what he wanted it for. He made no secret of either his horror or his self-blame. She said, "But this is a war, even if it's an undeclared one. And in a war you must expect casualties." "Yes, yes. I know. But  pushed him into the field." "It was an accident. It could easily have been you instead of him. And I'm glad that it wasn't." "But you haven't seen..." "And I don't want to." Her voice hardened. "Meanwhile, get the hell out of here and back to the Mannschenn Drive room. If you're so sorry for the poor bastard, do something about putting him out of his misery." "But..." "Don't be such a bloody coward, Grimes." The words hurt, mainly because there was so much truth in them. Grimes was dreading having to see again the twisted obscenity that had once been a man, was dreading having to breathe again the atmosphere of that compartment, heavy with the reek of hot oil, blood and faecal matter. But, with the exception of Craven, he was the only person in the ship trained in the arts of war. He recalled the words of a Surgeon-Commander who had lectured the midshipmen of his course on the handling of battle casualties and recalled, too, how afterwards the young gentlemen had sneered at the bloodthirstiness of one who was supposed to be a professional healer. " When one of your shipmates has really had it, even if he's your best friend, don't hesitate a moment about finishing him off . You'll be doing him a kindness . Finish him off -- and get him out of sight . Shockingly wounded men are bad for morale." "What are you waiting for?" demanded Jane Pentecost. "Do you want me to do it?" Grimes said nothing, just hurried out of the control room. C raven was still in the Mannschenn Drive room when Grimes got back there. With him were two of the interstellar drive engineers -- the second and the third. Their faces were deathly white, and the second's prominent Adam's apple was working spasmodically, but about them was an air of grim resolution. The third -- how could he bear to touch that slimy, reeking mess? -- had hold of the thing's shoulders (white, fantastically contorted bone gleaming pallidly among red convolutions of flesh) while the second, a heavy spanner in his hand, was trying to decide where to strike. The captain saw Grimes. "Give me that!" he snapped and snatched the pistol from the ensign's hand. Then, to the engineers, "Stand back!" The little weapon rattled sharply and viciously. To the other smells was added the acridity of burned propellant. What had been Wolverton was driven to the deck by the impact of the tiny projectiles and adhered there. There was surprisingly little blood, but the body had stopped twitching. Craven handed the empty pistol "You stay here, Mr. Grimes, and organize the disposal of the body." He went to the locker where he had put the initiator, took out the little instrument and, carrying it carefully, left the Mannschenn Drive room. Neither of the engineers, still staring with horrified fascination at their dead chief, noticed. "How... How did it happen?" asked the second, after a long silence. "He fell into the field," said Grimes. "But how? How? He was always getting on to us about being careless and telling us what was liable to happen to us, and now it's happened to him... " "That's the way of it," contributed the third, with a certain glum satisfaction. "Don't do as I do, do as I say..." "Have you a box?" asked Grimes. "A box?" echoed the Second. "Yes. A box." Now that he was doing something, doing something useful, Grimes was beginning to feel a little better. "We can't have a funIF eral while we're running under interstellar drive. We have to... to put him somewhere." Out of sight, he mentally added. "That chest of spares?" muttered the second. "Just the right size," agreed the third. "Then get it," ordered Grimes. The chest, once the spares and their packing had been removed and stowed elsewhere, was just the right size. Its dimensions were almost those of a coffin. It was made of steel, its bottom magnetized, and remained where placed on the deck while the three men, fighting down their recurring nausea, handled the body into it. All of them sighed audibly in relief when, at last, the close-fitting lid covered the remains. Finally, the third ran a welding torch around the joint. As he was doing so the lights flickered. Was it because of the torch? wondered Grimes. Or was it because the beacon in the hold had been reactivated? Somehow he could not feel any real interest. C leaned up after a fashion, but still feeling physically ill, he was back in the control room. Craven was there, and Baxter was with him. Jane Pentecost had been relieved so that she could attend to her duties in the galley. "Not that  feel like a meal," the captain had said. "And I doubt very much that Mr. Grimes does either." "Takes a lot ter put me off me tucker," the engineer declared cheerfully as he worked on the airlock door's tell-tale panel. "You didn't see Mr. Wolverton, Mr. Baxter," said Craven grimly. "No, Skipper. An' I'm not sorry I didn't." He paused in ihis work to rummage in his tool bag. He produced bulbs of brandy. "But I thought you an' the ensign might need some o' this." Craven started to say something about cargo pillage, then changed his mind. He accepted the liquor without further quibbling. The three men sipped in silence. Baxter carelessly tossed his squeezed empty bulb aside, continued with what he had been doing. The Captain said to Grimes, "Yes. We got the bloody thing started again. And we've improved upon it." "Improved upon it, sir? How?" "It's no jonger only a beacon. It's also an alarm. As soon as it picks up the radiation from the similiar pieces of apparatus aboard the enemy frigates, the buzzer that Mr. Baxter is fitting up will sound; the red light will flash. We shall have ample warning... " "She'll be right, Skipper," said the engineer. "Thank you, Mr. Baxter. And now, if you don't mind, I'd like a few words in private with Mr. Grimes." "Don't be too hard on him, Skipper." Baxter winked cheerfully at Grimes and left the control room. "Mr. Grimes," Craven's voice was grave. "Mr. Grimes, today, early in your career, you have learned a lesson that some of us never have to learn. You have killed a man -- yes, yes, I know that it was not intentional -- and you have been privileged to. see the end result of your actions. "There are many of us who are, who have been killers. There are many of us who have pushed buttons but who have never seen what happens at the other end of the trajectory. Perhaps people slaughtered by explosion or, laser beam do not look quite so horrible as Wolverton -- but, I assure you, they often die as slowly and as agonizingly "You know, now, what violent death looks like, Mr. Grimes. push your buttons, to play pretty tunes on your battle organ?" "And what did the bodies in this ship look like, Captain?" asked Grimes, Then, remembering that one of the bodies had belonged to the woman whom Craven had loved, he bitterly regretted having asked the question. "Not pretty," whispered Captain Craven. "Not at all pretty." "I'll push your button for you," Grimes told him. And for Jane Pentecost , he thought. And for the others . And for myself? The worst of it all is that l haven't got the excuse of say ing that it's what I'm paid for... D own the dark dimensions fell Epsilon Sextans, falling free through the warped continuum. But aboard the ship Time still possessed meaning, the master chronometer still ticked away the seconds, minutes and hours; the little, manmade world was still faithful to that puissant god of scientific intelligences everywhere in the Universe -- the Clock. Watch succeeded watch in the control room and engineroom. Meals were prepared and served on time. There was even, towards the end, a revival of offduty social activities; a chess set was discovered and brought into use, playing cards were produced and a bridge school was formed. But there was one social activity that, to Grimes' disappointment, was not resumed -- the oldest social activity of them all. More than once he pleaded with Jane, and every time she laughed away his pleas. He insisted; and that made matters worse. He was (as he said) the donkey who had been allowed one nibble of the carrot and who could not understand why the carrot had been snatched away. He was (she said) a donkey. Period. He should have guessed what was happening, but he did not. He was young and inexperienced in the ways of women -- of men and women. He just could not imagine that Jane would spare more than a casual glance for any of the engineers or for the flabby, pasty youth who was the psionic radio officer. And in this he was right. Epsilon Sextans was, for a ship of her class, very well equipped. In addition to the usual intercom system she was fitted with closed-circuit television. In the event of emergency the captain or watch officer, by the flip of a switch, could see IF what was happening in any compartment of the vessel. Over the control panel, in big, red letters, what the penalty for improper use of the apparatus in the Merchant Navy, hut he did know that in the Survey Service officers had been cashiered and given an ignominious discharge for this offense. The more cramped and crowded the conditions in which men -- and women -- work and live, the more precious is privacy. It was Grimes' watch. When he had taken over, all the indications were that it would be as boring as all the previous watches. All that was required of the watchkeeper was that he stay awake. Grimes stayed awake. He had brought a book with him into Control, hiding it inside his uniform shirt, and it held his attention for a while. Then, following the example of generations of watch officers, he set up a game of three-dimensional noughts and crosses in the chart tank and played, right hand against left. The left hand was doing remarkably well when a buzzer sounded. The ensign immediately cleared the tank and looked at the airlock indicator panel. But there were no lights on the board, and he realized that it was the intercom telephone. ( # Control, " he said into his micv# rophone. "P.R.O. here. I... I'm not happy, Mr. Grimes..." "Who is?" quipped Grimes. "I... I feel... smothered..." "Something wrong with the ventilation in your shack?" "No. NO. It's like... it's like a heavy blanket soaked in ice-cold water. You can't move... You can't shout... You can't hear... It's like it was before..." "Before what?" snapped Grimes, and then as the other buzzer sounded, as the additional red light flashed on the tell-tale panel, he realized the stupidity of his question. At once he pressed the alarm button. This was it, at last. Action Stations! Throughout the ship the bells ing. Hastily Grimes vacated the pilot's chair, slipped into the one from which he could control his weapons and from which he could reach out to other controls. But where was the Old Man? Where was Captain Craven? This was the moment that he had longed for, this was the consummation toward which all his illegalities had been directed. Damn it all, where was he? Perhaps he was floating stunned in his quarters, starting up hurriedly from sleep he could have struck his head upon some projection, knocked himself out. If this were the case he, Grimes, would have to call Jane from her own battle station in the Sick Bay to render first aid. But there was no time to lose. The ensign reached out, flipped the switches that would give him the picture of the interior of the captain's accommodation. The screen brightened, came alive. Grimes stared at the luminous presentation in sick horror. Luminous it was with that peculiar luminosity of naked female flesh. Jane was dressing herself with almost ludicrous haste. Of the Captain there was no sign -- on the screen. Craven snarled, with cold ferocity, "You damned, sneaking prurrient puppy!" Then, in a louder voice, "Switch that bloody thing off! I'll deal with you when this is over." "But, sir... " "Switch it off, I say!" Cheeks burning, Grimes obeyed. Then he sat staring at his armament controls, fighting down his nausea, his physical sickness. Somehow he found time to think bitterly, So I was the knight , all set and ready to slay dragons for his lady. And all the time, she... He did not finish the thought. He heard a voice calling over the intercom, one of the engineers. "Captain, they're trying to lock on! Same as last time. Random precession, sir?" "No. Cut the Drive!" "Cut the Drive?" incredulously. "You heard me. Cut!" Then, to Grimes, And what the hell are you waiting for?" HPhe ensign knew what he had to X do; he had rehearsed it often enough. He did it. From the nozzles that pierced the outer shell spouted the cloud of reflective vapor, just in time, just as the enemy's lasers lashed out at their target. It seemed that the ship's internal temperature rose suddenly and sharply -- although that could have been illusion, festered by the sight IF of the fiery fog glimpsed through the viewports before the armored shutters slammed home. There were targets now on Grimes' fire-control screen, two of them, but he could not loose a missile 'Until the tumbling rotors of the Drive had ceased to spin, to process. The use of the antilaser-vapor screen had been risky enough. Abruptly the screens went blank, which signified that the temporal precession rates of hunted and hunters were no longer in synchronization, that the fields of the pirates had failed to lock on. In normal Space-Time there would be no need to synchronize, and then the hunters would discover that their quarry had claws and teeth. Aboard Epsilon Sextans the keening note of the Drive died to a whisper, a barely audible murmur, fading to silence. There was the inevitable second or so of utter disorientation when, as soon as it was safe, the engineers braked the gyroscopes. Craven acted without hesitation, giving his ship headway and acceleration with Inertial Drive. He was not running -- although this was the impression that he wished to convey. He was inviting rather than evading combat; but if the Waldegren captains choose to assume that Epsilon Sextans was, as she had been, an unarmed merchantman (after all, the anti-laser screen could have been jury rigged from normal ship's stores and equipment) taking evasive action, that was their error of judgment. Grimes watched his screen intently. Suddenly the two blips reappeared, astern, all of a hundred kilometers distant, but closing. This he reported. "Stand by for acceleration!" ordered Craven. "Reaction Drive -- stand by!" It was all part of the pattern -- a last, frantic squandering of reaction mass that could do more than delay the inevitable. It would look good from the enemy control rooms. "Reaction Drive ready!" reported Baxter over the intercom. "Thank you. Captain to all hands, there will be no count-down. Fire!" F rom the corner of his eye Grimes saw Craven's hand slam down the key. Acceleration slammed him brutally back into his chair. There was a roar that was more like an explosion than a normal rocket firing, a shock that jarred and rattled every fitting in the control room. Craven remarked quietly, "That must have looked convincing enough -- but I hope that Baxter didn't really blow a chamber..." There was only the Internal Drive now, and the two blips that, very briefly, had fallen astern, were now creeping up again, closing the range. "Anti-laser," ordered Craven briefly. "But, sir, it'll just be wasting it. They'll not be using laser outside twenty kilometers." "They'll not be expecting a gunnery specialist aboard this wagon, either." Once again the nozzles spouted, pouring out a cloud that fell rapidly astern of the running ship. Craven looked at his own screens, frowned, muttered, "They're taking their bloody time about it... Probably low on reaction mass themselves..." He turned to Grimes. "I think a slight breakdown of the I.D.'s in order." "As you say, sir." The ensign could not forget having been called a damned, sneaking, prurient puppy. Let Craven make his own decisions. "Stand by for deceleration," ordered the captain quietly. The steady throbbing of the Inertial Drive faltered, faltered and ceased. There were two long minutes of Free Fall, of weightlessness, and then, for five minutes, the Drive came back into operation. A breakdown , the enemy must be thinking. A breakdown , and the engineers sweating and striving to get the ship under way again . A breakdown... It would not be surprising after the mauling she had endured at the first encounter. She hung there, and although her actual speed could be measured in kilometers a second she was, insofar as her accelerating pursuers were concerned, relatively motionless. Grimes wondered why the warships did not use their radio, did not demand surrender. Epsilon Sextans ' transceiver was switched on, but no sound issued from the speaker but the hiss and crackle of interstellar static. He voiced his puzzlement to Craven. Craven laughed grimly. "They know who we are -- or they think that they know. And they know that we know who are they are. After what happened before, why should we expect mercy? All that we can do now -- they think -- is to get the Mannschenn Drive going again. But with that comic beacon of theirs working away merrily they'll be able to home on us, no matter how random our presession." He laughed again. "They haven't a care in the world, bless their little black hearts..." Grimes watched his screens. Forty kilometers... Thirty... "Sir, "Yes. It's your party now." F or the third time reflective vapor gushed from the nozzles, surrounding the ship with a dense cloud. Craven, who had been watching the dials of the external temperature thermometers, remarked quietly, "They've opened fire. The shell plating's heating up. Fast." And in the control room it felt hot -- and hotter. Grimes pressed the button that unmasked his batteries. The gas screen, as well as affording protection from laser, hid the ship from visual observation. The enemy would not be expecting defence by force of arms. He loosed his first salvo, felt the ship tremble as the missiles ejected themselves from their launching racks. There they were on the screens -- six tifiy sparks, six moronic mechanical intelligences programmed to home upon and destroy, capable of countering evasive action so long as their propellant held out. There they were on the screens -- six of them, then four, then one. This last missile almost reached its target -- then it, too, blinked out. The Waldegren frigates were now using IP their laser for defence and not attack. '"I don't think," remarked Craven quietly, "that they'll be missiles. Not yet, anyhow. They want our cargo intact... He chuckled softly. "But we've got them worried." Grimes didn't bother to reply. The tell-tale lights on his panel told him missile missiles -- had not yet been fired. Dare he risk their use against big targets? He carried in his magazines stock sufficient for three full salvoes only -- and with no laser for antimissile work, dare he deplete his supply of this ammunition?" cribed as "vicious little brutes." They were to the Anti-Vessel Missiles as terriers are to mastiffs. Their warheads were small, but this was compensated for by their greater endurance. They were, perhaps, a little more "intelligent" then the larger rockets -- and Grimes, vaguely foreseeing this present contingency, had made certain modifications to their "brains." He pushed the button that actuated his modifications, that overrode the original programming. He depressed the firing stud. He felt the vibration as the war-rockets streaked away from the ship and on his screens watched the tiny points of light closing the range between themselves and the two big blips that were the targets. They were fast, and they were erratic. One was picked off by laser within the first ten seconds, but the others carried on, spurting and swerving, but always boring in towards their objectives. Grimes could imagine the enemy gunnery officers flailing their lasers like men, armed only with sticks, defending themselves against a horde of small, savage animals. There was, of course, one sure defence -- to start up the Mannschenn Drive and to slip back into the warped continuum where the missiles could not follow. But, in all probability, the Waldegren captains had yet to accept the fact, emotionally, that this helpless merchantman had somehow acquired the wherewithal to strike back. now, picked off by the enemy laser. Three were still closing on the target on Epsilon Sextan s port quarter, and only one on the target abaft the starboard beam. Grimes followed it with a full salvo of tective vapor screen must have been thinned and shredded by his rocketry, he sent out of replenishing gush of reflective gas. He heard Craven cry out in exulflight had hit their target, the three sparks had fused with the blip that represented the raider to port. The three sparks that were the second flight were almost there, and overtaking them were the larger and salvo. The Anti-Missile Missiles would cause only minor damage to a ship -- but, in all probability, they would throw fire control out of kilter, might even destroy laser prowould suffice to destroy a frigate; a hit by three at once would make destruction a certainty. And so it was. Seen only on the radar screen, as a picture lacking in detail painted on a fluorescent surface by an electron brush, it was anticlimactic. The blips, the large one, the three small ones and the three not so simall, merged. And then there was an oddly shaped blob of luminescence that slowly broke up into a cluster of glowing fragments, a gradually expanding cluster, a leisurely burgeoning flower of pale fire. Said Craven viciously, "The other bastard's got cold feet..." And so it was. Where she had been on the screen was only darkness, a darkness in which the sparks that was missiles and anti-missiles milled about aimlessly. They would not turn upon each other -- that would have been contrary to their programming. They would not, in theory, use their remaining fuel to home upon the only worthwhile target remaining -- Epsilon Sextans herself. But, as Craven knew and as Grimes knew, theory and practice do not always coincide. Ships have been destroyed by their own missiles. With reluctance Grimes pushed the captain, gesturing towards the wreckage depicted on the screen, "Pick up survivors, sir? If there are any..." "If there are any," snarled Craven, "that's their bad luck. No -- we give chase to the other swine I" ive chase... It was easier said than done. The surviving frigate had restarted her Mannschenn Drive, had slipped back into the warped continuum where, unless synchronization of precession rates were achieved and held, contact between vessels would be impossible. The Carlotti Beacon in Epsilon Sextans hold was worse than useless; it had been designed to be homed upon, not as a direction-finding instrument. (In any case, it could function as such only if the beacon aboard the Waldegren ship were working.) Neither Craven nor Grimes knew enough about the device to effect the necessary modifications. The interstellar drive engineers thought that they could do it, but their estimates as to the time required ranged from days to weeks. Obviously, as long as it was operating it would be of value to the enemy only. So it was switched off. There was only one method available to Craven to carry out the pursuit -- psionic tracking. He went for his psionic radio officer, explained the situation. The telepath was a young man, pasty faced, unhealthy looking, but not unintelligent. He said at once, "Do you think, captain, that the other officers and fight? After all, we've made our point. Wouldn't it be wisest to carry on, now, for Waverley?" IF "Speaking for meself," put in Baxter, who had accompanied June Pentecost to Control, "an fer any other Rim Worlders present, I say that now the bastards are on the run it's the best time ter smack 'em again. An' hard. An the tame time twisters think the same as we do. I've already had words with 'em." He glared at the telepath. "Our snoopin' little friend here should know very well what the general consensus is." "We do not pry," said the communications officer stiffly. "But I the majority." "And don't the orders of the master come into it?" asked Craven, more in lamusement than anger. "Lawful commands, sir?" asked Grimes who, until now, had been silent. "Shut up!" snapped Jane Pentecost. "Unluckily, sir," the young man went on, "I do not possess the direction-finding talent. It is, as you know, quite rare..." "Then what can you do?" demanded Craven. "Sir, let me finish, please. The psionic damping device -- I don't know what it was, but I suspect that iTwas the brain of some animal with which I am unfamiliar -- was in the ship that was destroyed. The other vessel carries only a normal operator, with normal equipment -- himself and some sort of organic amplifier. He is still within range, and I can maintain a listening watch..." "And suppose he listens to you?" asked the captain. "Even if you transmit nothing -- as you will not do unless ordered by myself -- there could be stray thoughts. And that, I suppose, applies to all of us." The telepath smiled smugly. "Direction-finding is not the only talent. I'm something of a damper myself, although not in the same class as the one that was blown up. I give you my word sir, that this vessel is psionically silent." He raised his hand as Craven was about to say something. "Now sir, I shall be able to find out where the other ship is heading. I know already that her Mannschenn Drive unit is not working at full capacity; it sustained damage of some kind during during the action. I'm not a navigator, sir, but it seems to me that we could be waiting for her when she re-emerges into the normal Continuum." "You're not a navigator," agreed Craven, "and you're neither a tactician nor a strategist. We should look rather silly, shouldn't we hanging in full view over a heavily fortified naval base, a sitting duck. Even so..." His big right hand stroked his beard. "Meanwhile, I'll assume that our little friends are headed in the general direction of Waldegren and set course accordingly. If Mr. Grimes will be so good as to hunt up the target star in the Directory... G rimes did as he was told. He had made his protest, such as it was, and, he had to admit, he was in favor of continuing the battle. It was a matter of simple justice. Why should one shipload of murderers be destroyed and the other shipload escape unscathed? He was still more than a little dubious of the legality of it all, but he did not let it worry him. He helped Craven to line the ship upon the target star, a yellow, fifth magnitude spark. He manned the intercom while the captain poured on the acceleration and then, with the ship again falling free, cut in the Mannsohenn Drive. When the vessel was on course he expected that the old Man would give the usual order: "Normal Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes. But this was not forthcoming. "Now," said Craven ominously. "Now what , sir?" "You have a short memory, Ensign. A conveniently short memory, if I may say so. Mind you, I was favorably impressed by the way you handled your armament, but that has no bearing upon what happened before." Grimes blushed miserably. He knew what the captain was driving at. But, playing for time, he asked, "What do you mean, sir?" Craven exploded. "What do I mean? You have the crust to sit there and ask me that! Your snooping, sir. Your violation of privacy. Even worse, your violation of the master's privacy! I shall not tell Miss Pentecost; it would be unkind to embarrass her. But..." Grimes refrained from saying that he had seen Miss Pentecost wearing even less than when, inadvertently, he had spied upon her. He muttered, "I can explain, sir." "You'd better. Out with it." "Well, sir, it was like this. I knew that we'd stumbled on the enemy -- or that the enemy had stumbled upon us. I'd sounded Action Stations. And when you were a long time coming up to Control I thought that you must have hurt yourself, somehow... There have been such cases, as you know. So I thought I'd better check..." "You thought... You thought. I'll not say that you aren't paid to think, because that's just what an officer is paid for. But you didn't think hard enough, or along the right lines." Grimes could see that Craven had accepted his explanation and that all would be well. The captain's full beard could not hide the beginnings of a smile. "Did you ever hear of Sir Francis Drake, Ensign?" "No, sir." "He was an admiral -- one of Queen Elizabeth's admirals. The first Elizabeth, of course. When the Spanish Armada was sighted he did not rush down to his flagship yelling 'Action Stations!' He knew that there was time to spare, and so he quietly finished what he was doing before setting sail." "And what was he doing, sir?" asked Grimes innocently. Craven glared at him, then snapped. "Playing bowls." Then, suddenly, the tension was broken, and both men collapsed in helpless laughter. In part it was reaction to the strain of battle -- but in greater part it was that freemasonry that exists only between members of the same sex, the acknowledgment of shared secrets and shared experiences. IF Grimes knew that Jane Pentecost was not for him and wished Craven joy of her and she of the captain. Perhaps they had achieved a permanent relationship, perhaps not -- but, either way, his best wishes were with them. Craven unbuckled his seat strap. "Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes. It is your watch. I believe." "Deep Space routine it is, sir." Yes, it was still his watch (although so much had happened). It was still his watch, although there were barely fifteen minutes to go before relief. He was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his life before. He was tired, but not unhappy. He knew that the fact that he had killed men should be weighing heavily upon his conscience -- but it did not. They, themselves, had been killers -- and they had had a far better chance than any of their own victims had enjoyed. He would shed no tears for them. Craven came back to the control room at the change of watch, when Grimes was handing it over to Jane Pentecost. He waited until the routine had been completed, then said, "We know where our friends are headed. They were, like us, ru nnin g for Waldegren -- but they're having to change course." He laughed harshly. "There must be all hell let loose on their home planet." "Why? What's happened?" asked Grimes. "I'll tell you later. But, first of all, we have an alteration of course ourselves. Look up Dartura in the Directory, will you, while I get the Drive shut down." Epsilon Sextans was falling free through normal Space-Time before Grimes had found the necessary information. And then there was the hunt for and the final identification of the target star, followed by the lining up by the use of the directional gyroscopes. There was the brief burst of acceleration and then, the interstellar drive was cut in. The captain made a business of selecting and lighting a cigar. When the pungent combustion was well under way he said, "Our young Mr. Summers is a good snooper. Not as good as some people I know, perhaps..." Grimes flushed, and Jane Pentecost looked puzzled. "He's a super-sensitive. He let me have a full transcript of all the signals, out and in. It took us a little time to get them sorted out -- but not too long, considering. Adler -- that's the name of the surviving frigate -- was running for home. Her captain sent a rather heavily edited report of the action to his admiral. It seems that Adler and the unfortunate Albatross were set upon and beaten up by a heavily armed Survey Service cruiser masquerading as an innocent mechantman. The Admiral, oddly enough, doesn't want a squadron of Survey Service battlewagons laying nuclear eggs on his base. So Adler has been told to run away and lose herself until the flap's over..." "And did they send all that en clair?" demanded Grimes. "They must be mad!" "No, they aren't mad. The signal weren't en clair" "But... " "Reliable merchant captains' said Craven, "are often entrusted with highly confidential naval documents: There were some such in my safe aboard Delta Orionis, consigned to the officer commanding Lindisfame Base. The officer who delivered them to me is an old friend and shipmate of mine, and he told me that among them was the complete psionic code used by the Waldegren Navy. Well, when I had decided to take over this ship, I'd have been a bloody fool not to have photostatted the whole damn issue. "So that's the way of it. Herr Kapitan von Leidnitz thinks that he can say what he likes to his superiors without anybody else knowing what he's saying. And all the while..." Craven grinned wolfishly. "It seems that there's a minor base, of sorts, on Dartura. Little more than repair yards, although I suppose that there'll be a few batteries for their protection. I can imagine the sort of personnel they have running the show -- passed-over commanders and the like, not overly bright. By the time that we get there we shall have concocted a convincing story -- convincing enough to let us hang off in orbit until Adler appears on the scene. After all, we have their precious code. Why should they suspect us?" "Why shouldn't we be AdlerT asked Grimes. "What do you mean, Ensign?" 'The Waldegren Navy's frigates are almost identical, in silhouette, with the Commission's Epsilon Class freighters. We could disguise this ship a little by masking the dissimilarities by a rough patching of plating. After all, Adler was in action and sustained some damage... "Complicated," mused the captain. "Too complicated. And two Adlers -- each, presumably, in encoded psionic communication with both Waldegren and Dartura... You've a fine, devious mind, young Grimes, but I'm afraid you've outfoxed yourself on that one." # #T et me talk, sir. Let me think I J out loud. To begin with, a ship running on Mannschenn Drive can put herself into orbit about a planet; but it's not, repeat not, recommended." "Too bloody right it's not." "But we have the heels of Adler? Yes? Then we could afford a slight delay to carry out the modifications -- the disguise -- that I've suggested. After all, forty-odd lightyears is quite a long way." "But what do we gain, Mr. Grimes?" "The element of confusion, sir. Let me work it out. We disguise ourselves as well as we can. We find out, from intercepted and decoded ordinates of her break-through into the normal continuum. We contrive matters to be more or less in the same place at exactly the same time. And when the shore batteries and the guaidships see no less than two Adlers slugging it out, each of them IP yelling for help in the secret code, they won't know which of us to open fire on." "Grimes," said Craven slowly, "I didn't know you had it in you. All I can say is that I'm glad that you're on our side." "Am I?" asked Grimes wonderingly, suddenly deflated. He looked at die Captain who, after all, was little better than a pirate, whose accomplice he had become. He looked at the girl, but for whom he would not be here. "Am I? Damn it all, whose side am I on?" "You'd better go below," Craven told him gently. "Go below and get some sleep. You need it. You've earned it." "Jeremy," said Jane Pentecost to Craven, "would you mind looking after the shop for half an hour or so? I'll go with John." "As you please, my dear. As you please." "It was the assurance in the captain's voice that hurt. It won't make any difference to us, it implied. It can't make any difference. Sure , Jane , go ahead . Throw the nice little doggie a bone. We can spare it. "No thank you," said Grimes coldly and left the control room. But he couldn't hate these people. XX A fter a long sleep Grimes felt better. After a meal he felt better still. It was a good meal, even though the solid portion of it came from tins. Craven's standards were slipping, thought the ensign. He was reasonably sure that such items as caviar, escargots, pate de foie gpas, Virginia ham, Brie, and remarkably alcoholic cherries were not included in the commission's inventory of emergency stores. And neither would be the quite reasonable Montrachet, although it had lost a little by being decanted from its original bottles into standard squeeze bulbs. But if the captain had decided that the laborer was worthy of his hire, with the consignees of the cargo making their contribution towards that hire, that was his privyou will. Jane Pentecost watched him eat. As he was finishing his coffee she said, "Now that our young lion 'has fed, he is required in the Control Room." He looked at her both gratefully and warily. "What have I done now?" "Nothing, my dear. It is to discuss what you -- we -- will do. Next." He followed her to Control. Craven was there, of course, and so were Baxter and Summers. The captain was enjoying one of his rank cigars, and a limp, roll-your-own cigarette dangled from the engineer's lower lip. The telepath coughed pointedly every time that acrid smoke expelled by either man drifted his way. Neither paid any attention to him, and neither did Grimes when he filled and lit his own pipe. Craven said, "I've been giving that scheme of yours some thought. It's a good one." "Thank you, sir." "Don't thank me. I should thank you. Mr. Summers, here, has been maintaining a careful listening can afford to shut down the Drive to make the modifications that you suggest. To begin with, we'll fake patching plates with plastic sheets -- we can't afford to cannibalize any more of the ship's structure -- so as to obscure our name and identification letters. We'll use more plastic to simulate missile launchers and laser projectors; luckily there's plenty of it in the cargo..." "We found more than plastic while we were lookin' for it," said the engineer, licking his lips. "That will do, Mr. Baxter. Never, in normal cirmumstances, should I have condoned..." "These circumstances ain't normal, Skipper, an' we all bloody well know it." "That will do, I say." Craven inhaled deeply, then filled the air of the control room with a cloud of smoke that, thought Grimes, would have reflected laser even at close range. Summers almost choked, and Jane snapped, "Jeremy!" "This, my dear, happens to be my control room." He turned again to the ensign. "It will not be necessary, Mr. Grimes, to relocate the real weapons. They functioned quite efficiently where they are and, no doubt, will do so again. And now, as soon as I have shut down the Drive, I shall hand the watch over to you. You are well rested and refreshed." "Come on," said Jane to Baxter. "Let's get suited up and get that sheeting out of the airlock." "Couldn't Miss Pentecost hold the fort, sir?" asked Grimes. He added, "I've been through the camouflage course at the Academy." "And so have I, Mr. Grimes. Furthermore, Miss Pentecost has had experience in working outside, but I don't think that you have." "No, sir. But .'..." "That will be all, Mr. Grimes." At Craven's orders the Drive was shut down, and outside the viewports the sparse stars became stars again, were no longer pulsing spirals of multicolored light. Then, alone in the control room, Grimes actuated his scanners so that he could watch the progress of the work outside the hull, switched on the transceiver that worked on the spacesuit frequency. This time he ran no risk of being accused of being a Peeping Tom. H e had to admire the competence with which his shipmates worked. The plastic sheeting had no mass to speak of, but it was awkward stuff to handle. Torches glowed redly as it was cut and radiated invisibly in the infrared as it was shaped and welded. The workers, in their bulky, clumsy suits, moved with a grace that was in startling contrast to their attire -- a Deep Space ballet, thought Grimes, pleasurably surprised at his own way with words. From the speaker of the transceiver came Craven's curt orders, the brief replies of the others. "This way a little... That's it " "She'll do, Skipper " "No she won't. Look at the bend on itF IF Then Jane's laughing voice, ' Our secret weapon , Jeremy . A laser that fires round corners!" "That will do, Miss Pentecost . Straighten it, will you?" "Ay, ay, sir. Captain, sir" The two interstellar drive engineers were working in silence, but with efficiency. Aboard the ship were only Grimes and Summers, the telepath. Grimes felt out of it, but somebody had to mind the shop, he supposed. But the likelihood of any customers was remote. Then he stiffened in his chair. One of the spacesuited figures was falling away from the vessel, drifting out and away, a tiny, glittering satellite reflecting the harsh glare of the working floods, a little, luminous butterfly pinned to the black velvet of the ultimate night. Who was it? He didn't know for certain, but thought that it was Jane. The ship's interplanetary drives -- reaction and inertial -- were on remote control, but reaction drive was out; before employing it he would have to swing to the desired heading by use of the directional gyroscopes. But the inertial drive was versatile. He spoke into the microphone of the transceiver. "Secure yourselves. I am proceeding to rescue." At once Craven's voice snapped back, "Hold it, Grimes. Hold it! There's no danger." "But, sir..." "Hold it!" Grimes could see the distant figure now from a viewpoint, but it did not seem to be receding any longer. Hastily he checked with the radar. Range and bearing were not changing. Then, with relative bearing unaltered, the range was closing. He heard Jane call out, "Got it! I'm on the way back!" Craven replied, "Make it snappy -- otherwise young Grimes'll be chasing you all over the universe!" Grimes could see, now, the luminous flicker of a suit reaction unit from the lonely figure. Later, he and the others examined the photographs that Jane had taken. Epsilon Sextans looked as she was supposed to look, like a badly battle-scarred frigate of the Waldegren Navy. I n terms of Space and of Time there was not much longer to go. The two ships -- one knowing and one unknowing -- raced towards their rendezvous. Had they been plunging through the normal continuum there would have been, towards the finish, hardly the thickness of a coat of paint between them, the adjustment of a microsecond in temporal precession rates would have brought inevitable collision. Craven knew this from the results of his own observations and from the encoded position reports, sent at six hourly intervals, by Adler . Worried, he allowed himself to fall astern, a mere half kilometer. It would be enough -- and, too, it would mean that the frigate would mask him from the fire of planetbased batteries. Summers maintained his listening watch. Apart from the position reports he had little of interest to tell IF the captain. Adler , once or twice had tried to get into contact with the main base on Waldegren; but, other then from a curt directive to proceed as ordered there were no signals from the planet to the ship. Dartura Base was more talkative. That was understandable. There was no colony on the planet, and the base personnel must be bored, must be pining for the sight of fresh faces, the sound of fresh voices. They would have their excitement soon enough, promised Craven grimly. Through the warped continuum fell the two ships, and ahead the pulsating spiral that was the Dartura sun loomed ever brighter, ever larger. There were light-years yet to go, but the Drive-induced distortions made it seem that tentacles of incandescent gas were already reaching out to clutch them, to drag them into the atomic furnace at the heart of the star. In both control rooms, watch succeeded watch; but the thoughts and the anticipations of the watchkeepers were not the same. Aboard Adler there was the longing for rest, for relaxation -- although Adler's captain must have been busy with the composition of a report that would clear him (if possible) of blame for his defeat. Aboard Epsilon Sextans there was the anticipation of revenge -- insofar as Craven, Baxter, Jane Pentecost and the survivors of the ship's original personnel were concerned. Grimes? As the hour of reckoning approached he was more and more dubious. He did not know what to think, what to feel. There was the strong personal loyalty to Craven -- and, even now, to Jane Pentecost. There was the friendship and mutual respect that had come into being between himself and Baxter. There was the knowledge that Adler's crew were no better than pirates, were murderers beyond rehabilitation. There was the pride he felt in his own skill as a gunnery officer. (But, as such, was he, himself, any better than a pirate, a murderer? The exercise of his craft aboard a warship would be legal -- but here, aboard a merchantman, and a disguised merchantman at that, the legality was doubtful. What had his motives been when he volunteered -- and as a commissioned officer of the Survey Service he had had no right to do so -- what were his motives now?) He, Grimes, was not happy. He had far too much time to ponder the implications. He was an accessory before, during and after the fact. He had started off correctly enough, when he had tried to prevent Craven from requisitioning the Survey Service cargo aboard Delta Orionis , but after that... After he and Jane... (That, he admitted, was a memory that he wanted to keep, always, just as that other memory, of the bright picture of naked female flesh on the screen, he wished he could lose forever.) He had started off correctly enough -- and then, not only had he helped install the purloined armament but had used it. ( And used it well , he told himself with a brief resurgence of pride.) Furthermore, the disguise of Epsilon Sextans had been his idea. Oh, he was in it, all right. He was in up to the neck. What the final outcome of it all would be he did not care to contemplate. But it would soon be over. He had no fears as to the outcome of the 'battle. The element of surprise would be worth at least a dozen missile launchers. Adler would never have the chance to use her laser. A dler , reported Summers, had shut down her Mannschenn Drive and emerged briefly into normal Space-Time to make her final course adjustment. She was now headed not for the Dartura Sun but for the planet itself -- or where the planet would be at the time of her final -- and fatal -- re-emergence into the continuum. The last ordinates of her planetfall. Epsilon Sextans made her own course adjustment -- simultaneity in Time and a half kilometer's divergence in Space being Craven's objective. It was finicky work, even with the use of the ship's computer, but the captain seemed satisfied. The race -- the race that would culminate in a dead heat -- continued. Aboard the frigate there was, reported Summers, a lessening of tension, the loosening up that comes when a voyage is almost over. Aboard the merchantman the tension increased. The interstellar drive engineers, Grimes knew, were no happier about it all than he was -- but they could no more back out than he could. Craven was calm and confident, and Baxter was beginning to gloat. Jane Pentecost assumed IF the air of dedication that in women can be so infuriating. Grimes glumly checked and rechecked his weaponry. It passed the time. Dartura itself was visible now -- not as tiny disc of light, but as a glowing annulus about its distorted primary. The thin ring of luminescence broadened, broadened. The time to go dwindled to a week, to days, to a day, and then to hours... To minutes... To seconds... Craven and Grimes were in the control room, the others were at their various stations. From the intercom came the telepath's voice, "He's cutting the Drive..." "Out the Drive!" ordered the Captain. In the Mannschenn Drive room the spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowed, slowed, ceased their endless tumbling, assumed the solidity that they exhibited only when at rest. For perhaps two seconds there was temporal confusion in the minds of all on board as the precession field died, Past, Present and Future inextricably mingled. Then there was a gun glaring through the viewports, bright in spite of the polarization -- a sun, and, directly ahead, a great, green-orange planet. There was a ship... There were ships -- ahead of them, astern, on all sides. There were ships -- and, booming from the intership transceiver, the transceiver that was neither tuned nor switched on (but navies could afford induction transmitters with their fantastic power consumption) came the authorative voice, "Inflexible to Adler! Heave to for search and seizure! Do not attempt to escape, our massed fields will hold you!" The effect was rather spoiled when the same voice added, in bewilderment, "Must be seeing double. There's two of the bastards..." The bewilderment did not last long. "Inflexible to Adler and to unidentified vessel. Heave to for search and seizure!" "Hold your fire, Mr. Grimes," ordered Craven, quietly and bitterly. "It's the Survey Service." "I know," replied Grimes -- and pressed the button. H e never knew just why he had had done so. Talking it over afterwards, thinking about it, he was able to evolve a theory that fitted the facts. During that brief period immediately after the shutting down of the Drive, during the short session of temporal disorientation, there had been prescience, of a sort. He had known that Adler, come what may, would attempt one last act of defiance and revenge, just as Adler's captain or Gunnery Officer must have known, in that last spit second, that Nemesis was treading close upon his heels. He pushed the button -- and from the nozzles in the shell plating poured the reflective vapor, the protective screen that glowed , ruddily as Adler's lasers slashed out at it. From the speaker of the dead transceiver, the transceiver that should have been dead, roared the voice of the Survey Service admiral. "Adler! Cease fire! Cease fire, damn you!" There was a pause, then -- "You've asked for it!" She had asked for it and now she got it. Suddenly the blip on Grimes' screen that represented the Waldegren frigate became two smaller blips, and then four. The roiling fog outside Epsilon Sextans viewports lost its luminosity, faded suddenly to drab grayness. The voice from the transceiver said coldly, "And now you whoever you are, had better identify yourself. And fast." Craven switched on the communications equipment. He spoke quitely into the microphone. "Interstellar Transport Commission's Epsilon Sextans. Bound Waverley, with general cargo... "Bound Waverley? Then what the hell are you doing here? And what's that armament you're mounting?" "Plastic," replied the captain. "Plastic dummies." plastic, too. Come off it, Jerry. We've already boarded your old ship, and although your ex-Mate was most reluctant to talk we got a story of sorts from him." "I thought I recognized your voice, Bill. May I congratulate you upon your belated efforts to stamp out piracy?" "And may I deplore your determination to take the law into your own hands? Stand by for the boarding party." G rimes looked at Craven, who was slumped in his seat. The master's full beard effectively masked his expression. "Sir," asked the ensign. "What can they do? What will they do?" "You're the space lawyer, Grimes. You're the expert on Survey Service rules and regulations. What will it be, think you? A medal -- or a firing squad? Praise or blame?" "You know the admiral, sir?" "Yes. I know the admiral. We're old shipmates." "Then you should be safe." "Safe? I suppose so. Safe from the firing squad, but not safe from my employers. I'm a merchant captain, Grimes, and merchant captains aren't supposed to range the spacelanes looking for trouble. I don't think they'll dare fire me; but I know that never can I expect command of anything better than Delta Class ships, on the drearier runs. Grimes saw that Craven was smiling. "But there's still the Rim Worlds. There's still the Sundowner Line, and the chance of high rank in the Rim Worlds Navy when and if there is such a service." "You have... inducements, sir?" "Yes. There are... inducements." "I thought, once," said Grimes, "that I could say the same. But not now. Not any longer. Even so... I'm Survey Service, sir, and I should be proud of my service. But in this ship, this merchant vessel, with her makeshift armament, we fought against heavy odds, and won. And, just now, we saved ourselves. It wasn't the Survey Service that saved us." "Don't be disloyal," admonished Craven. IF "I'm not being disloyal, sir. But... Or, shall we say, I'm being loyal. You're the first captain under whom I served under fire. If you're going out to the Rim Worlds I'd like to come with you." "Your Commission, Grimes. You know that you must put in ten years' service before resignation is possible." "But I'm dead." "Dead?" "Yes. Don't you remember I was snooping around in the Mannschenn Drive room, and I got caugjit in the temporal precession field. My body still awaits burials; it's in a sealed metal box in the deep freeze. It can never be identified..." Craven laughed. "I'll say this for you. You're ingenious. But how do we account for the absence of the late Mr. Wolverton? And your presence aboard this drip..." "I can hide, sir, and..." "And while you're hiding you'll concoct some story that will explain everything. Oh Grimes, Grimes... You're an officer I wish I could always have with me. But I'll not stand in the way of your career. All I can do, all I will do, is smooth things over on your behalf with the admiral. I should be able to manage that." J ane Pentecost emerged from the hatch in the control room deck. Addressing Craven she said formalmoved to one side to make way for the flag officer. "Jerry, you bloody pirate!" boomthe left breast of whose shirt was ablaze with ribbons. He advanced with outstretched hand. "Glad to have you aboard, Bill. This is Liberty Hall -- you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!" "Not again!" groaned Grimes. "And who is this young man?" asked the admiral. "I owe you -- or your Service -- an apology, Bill. This is Ensign Grimes, who was a passenger aboard Delta Orionis. I'm afraid that I... er... press-ganged him into my service. But he has been most... cooperative? Uncooperative? Which way do you want it?" "As we are at war with Waldegren -- I'd say cooperative, with reservations. Was it he, by the way, who you all that he did." "At war with Waldegren?" demanded Jane Pentecost. "So you people have pulled your fingers out at last." The admiral raised his eyebrows. "One of my Rim Worlders," explained Craven. "But I shall be a Rim Worlder myself shortly." "You're wise, Jerry. I've got the buzz that the Commission is taking a very dim view of your piracy or privateering or whatever it was, and my own Lords and Masters are far from pleased with you. You'd better get the hell out before the lawyers have decided just what crimes you are guility of." "As bad as that?" "As bad as that." "And young Grimes, here?" "We'll take him back. Six months' strict discipline aboard my flagship will undo all the damage that you and your ideas have done to him. And now, Jerry, I'd like your full report." "In my cabin, Bill. Talking is thirsty work." "Then lead on. It's your ship." "And it's your watch, Mr. Grimes. She'll come to no harm on this trajectory while we get things sorted out." G rimes sat with Jane Pentecost in the control room. Through the ports, had he so desired, he could have watched the rescue teams extricating the survivors from the wreckage of Adler , he could have stared out at the looming bulk of Dartura on the beam. But he did not do so, and neither did he look at his instruments. He looked at Jane. There was so much about her that he wanted to remember -- and, after all, so very little that he was determined to forget. The intercom buzzed. "Mr. Grimes, will you pack whatever gear you have and prepare to transfer ship? Hand the watch over to Miss Pentecost." "But you'll be shorthanded, sir." "The admiral is lending me a couple of officers for the rest of the voyage." "Very good, sir." Grimes made no move. He looked at Jane -- a somehow older, tireder, a more human Jane than the girl he had first met. He said, "I'd have liked to come out to the Rim with you..." She said, "It's impossible, John." "I know. But..." "You'd better get packed." He unbuckled his seat belt, went to where she was sitting. He kissed her. She responded, but it was only the merest flicker of a response. He said, "Good-by." She said, "Not good-by. We'll see you out on the Rim, sometime." With a bitterness that he was always to regret he replied, "Not bloody likely." I by Mack Reynolds A Long Berserker Novelette by Fred Saberhagen by Sam Moskowitz -- and many other top stories and features! -- get your copy today! IF Dear Editor: This is the first time I have written your magazine (or any other!) but since If is a Hugo winner I suppose it is the logical place to start. The strong points of If are the serialized novels and the Gree, Retief, Berserker and Niven series. In the first category you have published, in #, two first-class novels, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein (best thing ever published in ) and Earthblood by Brown and Laumer, as well as three other good serials. To top this off, the editorials, best features of any magazine. All of these, especially O.M.I.F. deserve to be increased in length. A book reviewer of Budrys's caliber -- del Rey or Leiber perhaps -- is badly needed for If. The only magazine science writer I like is Asimov, although Ley's books are QX. As a special feature could you give a bibliography of Heinlein's work? If anyone reading this knows of a chess association of SF fans (or would like to form one), please drop me a line. Same with a group of Heinlein devotees. First move in four-dimensional chess game: King's Knight, level #, time quanta I to King Knight #, level #, TQ #. -- J. Robert Voelker, # McIntosh Avenue, Akron, Ohio #.    Dear Editor: Just a belated letter in tribute to your creative genius. Your editorial on pictures from computers really fascinated me! So logical, so original, so true -- for a non-program mer to invent. You should now be informed that this cartooning sort of thing is very definitely "old-hat" in the field of computer programming. Especially, in the field of military-computer programming, where various symbols and diagrams must be strategically placed upon various scopes, in proper alignment. An excellent example is the "orientation" program for the Sage System Defense Computer network. When more information (detail) is desired of a certain spot on the scope, a so-called "light-gun" is aimed at that spot, and activates an auxiliary detail-information program sequence. Now, strictly for the visitation of very high brass and civilians, this "orientation" program has a topless belly dancer swinging a mean grass skirt. And when you fire the light-gun at her navel, off drops the grass skirt! Since that program, and the other information above, is unclassified, it is legal for me to tell you about it. I wonder whether I should also tell you that I was told -- by an executive -- that it cost about # of taxpayers' money to write and check out that "orientation" program? This was done # or more years ago. Certainly, programming is cheaper than stage shows and movies. The main reason is because programmers are cheaper to hire than actors, stagehands, props, etc. However, large sums of money are still required, since checkout can be very time-consuming -- and machine-time is very expensive, at least on the large computers. However, the process of microminiaturization of electronic components should, eventually, reduce the prices of large-scale, high-speed ligital computers. Incidentally, I was told that was available only at the original programming contractor's location computer sites around the country. On second thought, let's not print this letter. Let's just keep it at the level of information for you. OK? I have enjoyed your stories, and your magazines, for many years now. But I am selective! I browse through any magazine sci-fi or otherwise, before I decide whether or not to buy that particular issue. # We didn't want to keep this valuable bit of information from you, so we coaxed the author of the above to let us publish it, and he agreed -- providing we didn't give his name I -- Editor .    Dear Editor: May I make a suggestion? Each month you publish a First that has never seen print before. Often it is easy to pick out the first, because, all the other writers you've seen before. This is not always true. Could you possibly include this on the page where the story starts? Say the top right comer, opposite the "short story" or whatever? Talking of firsts, if I'm not mistaken, On the Shallow Seas was the first for January '#. I think that it is one of the best you've printed so far and you've printed some good ones in '#. There was Steve Buchanan, H. H. Hollis, A. A. Walde and Gardner Raymond Dozois. All of them from good to great. I'm glad to see that Budrys decided to come back and write some more and if his new novel is as good all the way through (I have no doubt that it is) as the first part, he'll have next year's Hugo all but wrapped up. Which brings me to the congratulations. You deserved that Hugo, and I'm betting on you having it ten years at least, or do you think Galaxy might grab it? By the way, when are you going to bring us Rogue Star? If not soon then I would suggest you write a story and (get it printed fast -- if there's one thing this mag lacks, it's stories by you! -- Nick Grimshawe, R. R. ##, Alliston, Ontario, Canada.  Principal reason we don't identify "First" stories at the beginning of the stories themselves is that we feel they must compete for your atIF tention with the other stories by the regular professionals -- otherwise we have no business printing them. But there's something to be said for the other way, too, and maybe we ought to try it for a while... Rogue Star (it now seems) will start in the July issue of If. Hope it's been worth waiting for ! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: ner's letter quite disturbing. Are the members so sure they are not the bottom # of the population in intelligence? If a man gifted with superior intelligence feels he is a misfit, is his intelligence really superior? If he has so much intelligence he should be able to live yith his inferiors with little problem. The "lonely heads" club really has no reasonto be in existence. I appreciate any personal correspondence from readers. -- Ronald Weintstock, # Sunset Road, Lawrence, New York #.    Dear Editor: amused to notice a little point at the end of "The Moon... Manuel makes reference to a member of the family, named Hazel, who changes her name to Stone, Hazel a novel -- one of his "juveniles", called The Rolling Stones, in which the main character was an old woman named Hazel Stone -- and she was an engineer who lived on the moon. I wonder how many of your readers caught this. Anyway, I hope that there will be many more Heinlein serials in If; many, many more. And while I'm writing, two other things. First, a complaint about your covers. They never seem to change, and they always look like so methin g complaints about critics not taking SF seriously. No wonder! Secondly, a question. I imagine that every fan who's been a fan for more than a year has heard or read the phrase "The Music of the Spheres". Have you any idea whence this haunting term came? -- Brian Kappler, # Buckingham Drive, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. # We turned your question over to the eminent classicist Miss JudyLynn Benjamin, B.A., noted author of various monographs and papers, editor of the recent and penetrating critique of James Joyce's Ulysses, The Celtic Bull, etc., and our esteemed Associate Editor. Says Judy-Lynn: "Pythagoras, having ascertained that the pitch of notes depends on the rapidity of vibration, and also observing that the planets move at different velocities through the heavens, concluded that each planet must make a sound in its motion according to its speed; and, as all things in nature are harmoniously made, the different sounds must harmonize. Plato went a step farther by stating that a siren must sit on each planet, carolling a sweet song, agreeing to the motion of her own particular planet yet harmonizing with all the others." So much for the classical view. Since the beginning of radio-telescopy the "sounds" -- i.e., the radio waves, which can be read-out as audible frequencies as well as anything else -- of various radio-emitting heavenly bodies is sometimes called "the music of the spheres." Only thing wrong, it ain't harmonious! (Sounds like squeaks, hums, putt-putts and squeals.) -- Editor .    Dear Editor: I, and I suppose a multitude of science-fiction fans, want to thank you for drawing our attention to the proposed cancellation of the TV show "Star Trek". For the very first time in my life I sat down and wrote to a network (and an editor) to protest having a show taken off the air. Not that I have any doubt of the outcome of it all: The show will be cancelled, the way the rating-game is played. It would be gratifying if you could suggest to the writers who contributed to the scripts to put them into book-form. As you probably know, there is an adaption of "StarTrek" episodes by James Blish on the bookstands, a very poor one. It is one of the rare instances in which a book is far inferior to the show which bears its name. Characterization is non-existent, the relationship of the three main characters toward each other, which makes the show so enjoyable and which, I am sure, is the interpretation intended by the original authors, and which is one of friendship, respect, loyalty and subtle humor, are completely forgotten and ignored in the book version. It is quite unbelievable, as the book has it, that the commander of a starship, who spends years in space to find new civilizations, should feel uneasy and kind of patronizingly amused at the different ways his alien first officer has. Why spend all that time in space, if you expect to find exactly everything as on Earth? Quite illogical and very provincial. There is another point which the show also raises, but which I dismissed as nitpicking in view of the overall excellence of the show, but which is very irritating in the book: The supposed absence of any and all emotions in Vulcans. There just is no such thing, anyone like that is a robot. Loyalty, friendship, integrity, courage -- all of these attributes Mr. Spock possesses -- are emotions. And Mr. Spock is supposed to be the offspring of a Vulcan father and a human mother, so somebody must have loved someone at some time. I would love to see "Star Trek" in book form, written by writers who know their craft. -- Mrs. Fred Witten, #-# #st Street, Long Island City #, New York.    Dear Editor: I request that you or one of your readers help me. Do you or your readers know of any group preparing for the day when it will be possible to establish either on the Moon or under the sea a society or a group of societies which will be more or less independent of those which now exist? Does anyone have any practical plans to produce a good or perfect society in the near future? (I do not include L.B.J.) -- Patrick J. Kelly, Jr., #I South Wickham Road, Baltimore, Maryland #. # That does it for another month. This issue's "First" story is by B. K. Filer. We think you'll be seeing QQ IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh ;oo O C) y.  ooooo # The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted Ail Postpaid. Add state sales tax, il any. Your Subscription is Your Private Window On Baby is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smih The Big Time Fritz' Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All if akes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to you door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy ?n its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman ( Farenheit #. Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet ( The Space Merchants ) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Star s (Way Station ) Clifford D. Sftnak Horn  from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley JUNE # Wizard's World A Novelette of a Planet of Sorcerers Driftglass and other top stories by your science-fiction favorites Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. #  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away.  my check or money order for;       enclose   P I I # issues for # Q # issues for #   Name...  Address   City  State Zip Code   U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage.#  Please check whether  new or Q renewal.  Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritx Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do  Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walli The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Bey VoJ #, No. # Frederik PobI, Editor David Perfon, Production Manager Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Andre Norton by Howard L. Morris by Samuel R. Delany by Keith Laumer by Fred Saberhagen by Jack B. Lawson by Stan Elliott by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guli President. Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York. #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York. N.Y. # IF  Editorial T ime was when everyone knew that the Earth was flat -- after all, you could look at it and see its flatness for yourself. Then along came Eratosthenes to say it was round, and prove it by measuring the height of the sun at midday in two locations. (The see-foryourself people didnt really believe him, wherefore the world went right back to assuming it was flat for another thousand years or more; but ' that's only a detail ; he was right, and sooner or later Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others came along to confirm what he said.) Then, quite recently as historical time (goes, the great geodetic surveys of the last hundred years revealed that it was not a sphere but what we learned in school to call an oblate spheroid. All of this was reasonably satisfactory and comfortable for most people -- once they'd got over the first instinctive horror at concluding our enormous Earth was only a little pebble rolling around a vast and empty universe, anyway. It all made sense. The Earth spins, right? We know that spinning objects bulge out at their equators if they can -- that is, if the centrifugal force generated exceeds the rigidity of the object. So naturally our Earth bulges too -- Only it shouldn't bulge as much as it does. Unless we're very wrong in some basic assumptions, we know quite accurately how much it should bulge. The radius of the Earth at the equator ought to be about # miles more than at the poles. But it isn't exactly. We now have a chance to measure this radius with great precision by tracking the orbits of the hundreds of manmade satellites we've put up... and the confounded thing bulges # feet more than it ought to. How much of a difference does that make? Up at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory a fellow named E. M. Gaposchkin puts it this way: A RE the tales of stwngehian powers false? Can themystefipus feats erformed by the mystics of the Orient e explained away as only illusions? Is there an intangible bond with the universe beyond which draws mankind on? Does a mighty Cosmic intelligence from the reaches of space ebb and flow through the deep recesses of the mind, forming a river of wisdom which can carry men and women to the heights of personal achievement? Have You Had These Experiences?... that unmistakable feeling that you have taken the wrong course of action, that you have violated some inner, unexpressed, better judgement? The sudden realization that me silent whisperings of self are cautioning you to keep your own counsel -- not to speak words on the tip of your tongue in the presence of another. That something which pushes you forward when you hesitate, or restrains you when you are apt to make a wrong move. lliese urges are the subtle influence which when understood and directed has made thousands of men and women masters of their lives. There IS a source of intelligence within you as natural as your senses of sight and hearing, and usmg now! Challenge this statement! Dare the Rosicrucians to reveal the funaions of this Cosmic mind and its great possibilities to you. Let This Free Book Explain lyte this infinite power into your partnership. You can use it in a rational and practical way without interference with your religious beliefs or personal affairs. The Rosicrucians, a world-wide philosophical movement, invite you to write today for your Free copy of the fascinating book, "The Mastery of Life" which explains further. Address your request to Scribe N.C.O, San Jose, California # Please Include Your Zip Code "Tlie Earth has in fact the shape that it would have in theory if it rotated so fast that a day was # instead of # hours long." Further, Gaposchkin points out, there is some pretty good evidence to believe that at a point in the geological past, perhaps fifty million years ago. Earth's day was # hours. Could there be some sort of We don't know; but Gaposckin adds, "We do know though, that the force which produced that extra oblateness, and is therefore in a sense trapped in it, is about #x # ergs... enough... to raise the temperature of all of the oceans by # Fahrenheit, right now." I nteresting? We thought so; and it led us to wonder about something else. The resistance produced when one object is rubbed against another is called friction; to us it looks mostly like a uniform force, which we measure in terms of the drag of an aircraft winig, the braking distance of a car under varying conditions of speed, road surface, tires, and so on, etc. Careful study has shown us, though, that on the microscopic scale the friction between two solids isn't aU that uniform. It appears to operate in a sort of stick-slip progression, with the two surfaces alternately microwelding to each other land breaking free, welding and breaking) free again. So what appears to the eye as a uniform deceleration is, to a micro-observer, perhaps better described as a series of jolting shocks, dizzying slides, crunching halts and brief periods of stability. You might even say that the micro-observer would think himself involved in tectonic activity... a sort of great San Francisco earthquake that goes on and on. And now we wonder this: Suppose on our macroscopic scale the same sort of stick-slip resistance is happening, at intervals of eons instead of microseconds. Suppose the Earth's crust at some point in time gives up the struggle for rigidity, sighs, relaxes its grip and allows that accumulated #-foot equatorial hump to assume its proper shape... releasing all those # x # ergs in the form of heat. And suppose, right about then or shortly afterward in the macro-time scale, some curious extraterrestrials send a space probe past the Earth to see what it's like. They mght even call it Mariner II... What a devil of time they would have, trying to account for the temperatures and pressures they would find! P ersonal note: The other day we made an informal study of stick-slip effects as they apply to automobile brakes on slippery roads. The results were inconclusive, but not altogether unpleasant: we survived. However we are now, and will be for some months in the future, wearing a handsome plaster oast on the left arm, on which we have inscribed the Eleventh Commandment. ("Keep thy seat belt fastened, chowderhead, if thou wouldst have thy days long on this Earth.") To those who have sent us expressions of sympathy and so on, our appreciation... and apologies. We'd like to answer each letter individually, but -- well, have # rou ever (for instance) tried to change a typewriter ribbon with one hand? -- The Editor IF  Complete Short Novel The woman was a witch -- no surprise on this mad planet where wizardry ruled and death lurked everywhere! I C raike's swollen feet were agony, every breath he drew fought a hot band imprisoning his laboring lungs. He clung weakly to a rough spur of rock in the canyon wall, swayed against it, raking his flesh raw on the stone. That weathered red and yellow rock was no more unyielding than the murderous wills behind him. And the stab of pain in his calves no less than the pain of their purpose in his dazed mind. He had been on the run so long, ever since he had left the E-Camp. But until last night -- no, two nights ago -- when he had given himself away at the gas station, he had not known what it was to be actually hunted. The will-to-kill which fanned from those on his trail was so intense it shocked his Esper senses, panicking him completely. Now he was trapped in wild country, and he was city born. Water -- Craike flinched at the thought of water. Espers should control their bodies, that was what he had been taught. But there come times when cravings of the flesh triumph over will. He winced, and the spur grated against his half-naked breast. They had a "hound" on him right enough. And that brain-twisted Esper slave who fawned and served the mob masters would have no difficulty in trailing him straight to any pocket into which he might crawl. A last remnant of rebellion sent Craike reeling on over the gravel of the long-dried stream bed. Espers had once been respected for their "wild talents," then tolerated warily. Now they were used under guard for slave labor. And the day was coming soon when the fears of the normals would demand their extermination. They had been trying to prepare against that. First they had worked openly, petitioning to be included in spaceship crews, to be chosen for colonists on the Moon and Mars; then secretly when they realized the norms had no intention of allowing that. Their last hope was flight to the waste spots of the world, those refuse places resulting from the same atomic wars which had brought about the birth of their kind. Craike had been smuggled out of an eastern E-Camp provided with a cover, sent to explore the ravaged area about the one-time city of Reno. Only he had broken his cover for the protection of a girl, only to learn, too late, shp was bait for an Esper trap. He had driven a stolen speeder until the last drop of fuel was gone, and after that he had kept blindly on, running, until now. The contact with the Esper "hound" was clear; they must almost be in sight behind. Craike paused. They were not going to take him alive, wring from him knowledge of his people, recondition him into another "hound." There was only one way, he should have known that from the first. His decision had shaken the "hound." Craike bared teeth in a death's-head grin. Now the mob would speed up. But their quarry had already chosen a part of the canyon wall where he might pull his tired and aching body up from one hold to another. He moved deliberately now, knowing that when he had lost hope, he could throw aside the need for haste. He would be able to accomplish his purpose before they brought a gas rifle to bear on him. A t last he stood on a ledge, the sand and gravel some fifty feet below. For a long moment he rested, steadying himself with both hands braced on the stone. The weird beauty of the desert country IF was a pattern of violent color under the afternoon sun. Craike breathed slowly; he had regained a measure of control. There came shouts as they sighted him. He leaned forward and, as if he were diving into the river which had once run there, he hurled himself outward to the clean death he sought. Water, water in his mouth! Dazed, he flailed water until his head broke surface. Instinct took over, and he swam, fought for air. The current of the stream pulled him against a boulder collared with froth, and he arched an arm over it, lifting himself, to stare about in stupified bewilderment. He was close to one bank of a river. Where the colorful cliff of the canyon had been there now rolled downs thickly covered with green growth. The baking heat of the desert had vanished; there was even a slight chill in the air. Dumbly Craike left his rock anchorage and paddled ashore, to lie shivering on sand while the sun warmed his battered body. What make sense of it, the effort hurt his mind almost as much as had the "hound's" probe. The Esper Hound! Craike jerked up, old panic stirring. First delicately and then urgently, he cast a thought-seek about him. There was life in plenty. He touched, classified and disregarded the flickers of awareness which mingled in confusion -- animals, birds, river dwellers. But nowhere did he meet intelligence approaching his own. A wilderness world without man as far as Esper ability could reach. Craike relaxed. Something had happened. He was too tired, too drained to speculate as to what. It was enough that he was saved from the death he had sought, that he He got stiffly to his feet. Time was the same, he thought -- late afternoon. Shelter, food -- he set off along the stream. He found and where birds raided before him. Then squatting above a side eddy of the stream, he scooped out a fish, eating the flesh raw. The land along the river was rising, he could see the beginning of a gorge ahead. Later, when he had clinubed those heights, he caught sight through the twilight of the fires. Four of them burning some miles to the southwest, set out in the form of a square! Craike sent out a thought probe. Yes -- men! But an alien touch. This was no hunting mob. And he was drawn to the security of the fires, the camp of men in the dangers of the night. Only, as Esper, he was not one with them but an outlaw. And he dare not risk joining them. He retraced his path to the river and holed up in a hollow not large enough to be termed a cave. Automatically he probed again for danger. Found nothing, but animal life. He slept at last, drugged by exhaustion of mind and body. T he sky was gray when he roused, swung cramped arms, stretched. Craike had awakened with the need to know more of that camp. He climbed once again to the vantage point, shut his eyes to the early morning and sent out a seeking. A camp of men far from home. But they were not hunters. Merchants -- traders! Craike located one mind among the rest, read in it the details of a bargain to come. Merchants from another country, a caravan. But a sense of separation grew stronger as the fugitive Esper sorted out thought streams, absorbed scraps of knowledge thirstily. A herd of burden-bearing animals, nowhere any indication of machines. He sucked in a deep breath -- he was  -- he was in another world! Merchants traversing a wilderness -- a wilderness? Though he had been driven into desert the day before, the land through which he had earlier fled could not be termed a wilderness. It was overpopulated because there were too many war-poisoned areas where mankind could not live. But from these strangers he gained a concept of vast, barren territory broken only by small, sparse, strips of cultivation. Craike hurried. They were breaking camp. And the impression of an unpeopled land they had given him made him want to trail the caravan. There was trouble! An' attack -- the caravan animals stampeded. Craike received a startlingly vivid mind picture of a hissing, lizard thing he could not identify. But it was danger on four scaled feet. He winced at the fear in those minds ahead. There was a vigor of mental broadcast in these men which amazed him. Now, the lizard thing had been killed. But the pack animals were scattered. It would take hours to find them. The exasperation of the master trader was as strong to Craike as if he stood before the man and heard his outburst of complaint. The Esper smiled slowly. Here -- handed to him by Fate -- was his chance to gain the good will of the travelers. Breaking contact with the men, Craike cast around probe webs, as a fisher might cast a net. One panic crazed animal and then another -- he touched minds, soothed, brought to bear his training. Within moments he heard the dull thud of hooves on the mossy ground, no longer pounding in a wild gallop. A shaggy mount, neither pony nor horse of his knowledge, but like in ways of each, its dull hide marked with a black stripe running from the root of shaggy mane to the base of its tail, came toward him, nickered questionly. And then fell behind Craike, to be joined by another and another, as the Esper walked on -- until he led the full train of runaways. H e met the first of the caravan men within a quarter of a mile and savored the fellow's astonishment at the sight. Yet, after the first surprise the man did not appear too amazed. He was short, dark of skin, a black beard of wiry, tightly curled hair clipped to a IF point thrusting out from his chin. Leggings covered his limhs, and he wore a sleeveless jerkin laced with thongs. This was belted by a broad strap gaudy with painted designs, from which hung a cross-hilted sword and a knife almost as long. A peaked cap of silky white fur was drawn far down so that a front flap shaded his eyes, and another, longer strip brushed his shoulders. "Many thanks, Man of Power -- " the words he spoke were in a clicking tongue, but Craike read their meaning mind to mind. Then, as if puzzled on his closer examination of the Esper, the stranger frowned, his indecision slowly turning hostile. "Outlaw! Begone, horned one!" The trader made a queer gesture with two fingers. "We pass free from your spells -- " "Be not so quick to pass judgment, Alfric -- The newcomer was the Master Trader. As his man, he wore leather, but there was a gemmed clasp on his belt. His sword and knife hilt were of precious metal, as was a badge fastened to the fore of his yellow and black fur head gear. "This one is no local outlaw." The MastSir stood, feet apart, studying the fugitive Esper as if he were a burden pony offered as a bargain. "Would such use his power for our aid? If he is a horned one -- he is unlike any I have seen." "I am not what you think -- " Craike said slowly, fitting his tongue to the others alien speech. The Master Trader nodded. "That is true. And you intend us no hann; does not the sun-stone so testify?" His hand went to the badge on his cap. "In this one is no evil, Alfric, rather does he come to us in aid. Have I not spoken the truth to you, stranger from the wastes? Craike broadcast good will as strongly as he could. And they must have been somewhat influenced by that. power!" Alfric burst forth. "He has power,' the Master corrected him. "But has he striven to possess our minds as he could do? We are still our own men. No -- this is no renegade Black Hood. Come!" He beckoned to Craike, and the Esper, the animals still behind him, followed on into the camp where the rest of the men seized upon the ponies to adjust their packs. The Master filled a bowl from the contents of a three-legged pot set in the coals of a dying fire. Craike stew. When he had done, the Master indicated himself. "I am Kaluf of the Children of Noe, a far trader and trail master. Is it your will, Man of Power, to travel this road with us?" Craike nodded. This might all be see it to its end. A day with the Caravan, the chance to gather more information from the men here, should give him some inkling as to what had happened to him and where he now was. IF II C raike's day with the traders became two and then three. Esper talents were accepted by this company matter-of-factly, even asked in aid. And from the travelers he gained a picture of this world which he could not reconcile with his own. His first impression of a large continent broken by widely separated holdings of a frontier type remained. In addition there was knowledge of a feudal government, petty lordlings holding title to lands over men of lesser birth. Kaluf and his men had a mild contempt for their customers. Their own homeland lay to the southeast, where, in some coastal cities, they had built up an overseas trade, retaining its cream for their own consumption, peddling the rest in the barbarous hinterland. Craike, his facility in their click speech growing, asked questions which the Master answered freely enough. "These inland men know no difference between Saludian silk and the weaving of the looms in our own Kormonian quarter." He shrugged in scorn at sudh ignorance. "Why should we offer Salud wihen we can get Salud prices for Kormon lengths and the buyer is satisfied? Maybe -- if these lords ever finish their private quarrels and live at peace so that there is more travel and they themselves come to visit in Larud or the other cities of the Children of Noe, then shall we not make a profit on lesser goods." "Do these Lords never try to raid your caravans?" Kaluf laughed. "They tried that once or twice. Certainly they saw there was the profit in seizing a train and paying nothing. But we purchased trail rights from the Black Hoods, and there was no more trouble. How is it with you, Ka-rak? Have you lords in your land who dare to stand against the power of the Hooded Ones?" Craike, taking a chance, nodded. And knew he had been right when some reserve in Kaluf vanished. "That explains much, perhaps even why such a man of power as you should be adrift in the wilderness. But you need not fear in this country, your brothers hold complete rule -- " A colony of Espers! Craike tensed. Had he, through some weird chance, found here the long-hopedfor refuge of his kind. But where was here? His old bewilderment was lost in a shout from the fore of the train. "The outpost has sighted us and raised the trade banner." Kaluf quickened pace. "Within the hour we'll be at the walls of Sampur. lUifl" raike made for the head of the line. Sampur, by the reckoning of the train, was a city of respectable size, the domain of a Lord Ludicar with whom Kaluf had had mutually satisfactory dealings for some time. And the Master anticipated a profitable stay. But the man who had ridden out to greet them was full of news. Racially he was unlike the traders, taller, longer of arm. His bare chest was a thatch of blond-red hair as thick as a bear's pelt, long braids swung across his shoulders. A leather cap, reinforced with sewn rings of metal was crammed down over his wealth of hair, and he carried a shield slung from his saddle pad. In addition to sword and knife, he nursed a spear in the crook of his arm, from the point of which trailed a banner strip of blue stuff. "You come in good time. Master. The Hooded Ones have proclaimed a horning, and all the outbounders have gathered as witnesses. This is a good day for your trading, the Oloudy Ones have indeed favored you. But hurry, the Lord Ludicar is now riding in and soon there will be no good place from which to watch -- " Craike fell back. Punishment? An execution? No, not quite that. He wished he dared ask questions. Certainly the picture which had leaped into Kalufs mind at the mention of "horning" could not be true! Caution kept the Esper aloof. Sooner or later his alien origin must be noted, though Kaluf had supplied him with a fur cap, leather jerkin, and boots from the caravan surplus. The ceremony was to take place just outside the main gate of the stockade, which formed the outer rampart of the town. A group of braided, ring-helmed warriors hemmed in a more imposing figure with a feather plume and a blue cloak, doubtless Lord Ludicar. Thronging at a respectful distance were the townfolk. But they were merely audience; the actors stood apart. Craike's hands went to his head. The emotion which beat at him from that party brought the metallic taste of fear to his mouth, aroused his own memories. Then he steadied, probed. There was terror there, broadcast from two figures under guard. Just as an impact of Esper power came from the three black-hooded men who walked behind the captives. He used his own talent carefully, dreading to attract the attention of the men in black. The townsfolk opened an aisle in their ranks, giving free passage to the open moorland and the green stretch of forest not too far away. Fear -- in one of those bound, stumbling prisoners it was abject, the same panic which had hounded Craike into the desert. But, though the other captive had no hope, there was a thick core of defiance, a desperate desire to strike back. And something in Craike arose to answer that. Othei men, wearing black jerkins and no hoods, crowded about the prisoners. When they stepped back Craike saw that the drab clothing of the two had been torn away. Shame, blotting out fear, came from the smaller captive. And there was no mistaking the sex of the curves that white body displayed. A girl, and very young. A violent shake of her head loosened her hair to flow, black and long, clothing her nakedIF ness. Craike drew a deep breath as he had before that plunge into the canyon. Moving quickly he crouched behind a bush. The Black Hoods went about their business with dispatch, each drawing in turn certain designs and lines in the dust of the road until they had created an intricate pattern about the feet of the prisoners. A chant began in which the townspeople joined. The fear of the male captive was an almost visible cloud. But the outrage and anger of his feminine companion grew in relation to the chant, and Craike could sense her will battling against that of the assembly. r ie watching Esper gasped. He could not be seeing what his eyes reported to his brain! The man was down on all fours, his legs and arms stretched, a mist clung to them, changed to red-brown hide. His head lengthened oddly, horns sprouted. No man, but an antlered stag stood there. And the girl -- ? Her transformation came more slowly. It began and then faded. The power of the Black Hoods held her, fastening on her the form they visualized. She fought. But in the end a white doe sprang down the path to the forest, the stag leaping before her. They whipped past the bush where Craike had gone to earth, and he was able to see through the illusion. Not a red stag and a White doe, but a man and woman running for their lives, yet already knowing in their hearts there was no hope in their flight. Craike, hardly knowing why he did it or who he could aid, followed, sure that mind touch would provide him with a guide. He had reached the murky shadow of the trees when a sound rang from the town. At its summoning he missed a step before he realized it was directed against those he trailed and not himself. A hunting horn! So this world also had its hunted and its hunters. More than ever he determined to aid those who fled. But it was not enough to just run blindly on the track of stag and doe. He lacked weapons. And his wits had not sufficed to save him in his own world. But there he had been conditioned against turning on his hunters, hampered, cruelly designed from birth to accept the quarry role. That was not true here. Esper power -- Craike licked dry lips. Illusions so well done they had almost enthralled him. Could illusion undo what illusion had done? Again the call of the horn, ominous in its clear tone, rang in his ears, set his pulses to pounding. The fear of those who fled was a cord, drawing him on. But as he trotted among the trees Craike concentrated on his own illusion. It was not a white doe he pursued but the slim, young figure he had seen when they stripped away the clumsy stuff which had cloaked her, before she had shaken loose her hair veil. No doe, but a woman. She was not racing on four hooved feet, but running free on two, her hair blowing behind her. No doe, hut a maidi And in that moment, as he constructed tihat picture clearly, he contacted her in thought. It was like being dashed by sea-spray, cool, remote, very clean. And, as spray, the contact vanished in an instant, only to returm "Who are you?" "One who follows," he answered, holding to his picture of the running girl. "Follow no more, you have done what was needful?" There was a burst of joy, so overwhelming a release from terror that it halted him. Then the cord between them broke. Frantically Craike cast about seeking contact. There was only a dead wall. Lost, he put out a hand to the rough bark of the nearest tree. Wood things lurked here, then only did his mind touch. What did he do now? His decision was made for him. He picked up a wave of panic again -- spreading terror. But this was the fear of feathered and furred things. It came to him as ripples might run on a pool. Fire! He caught the thought distorted by bird and beast mind. Fire which leaped from tree crown to tree crown, cutting a gash across the forest. Craike started on, taking the way west, away from the menace. Once he called out as a deer flashed by him, only to know in the same moment that this was no illusion but an animal. Small creatures tunnelled through the grass. A dog fox trotted, spared him a measuring gaze from slit eyes. Birds whirred, and behind them was the scent of smoke. A mountain of flesh, muscle and fur snarled, reared to face him. But Craike had nothing to fear from any animal. He confronted the great red bear until it whined, shuffled its feet and plodded on. More and more creatures crossed his path or ran beside him for a space. It was their instinct which brought them, and Craike, to a river. Wolves, red deer, bears, great cats, foxes and all the rest came down to the saving water. A cat spat at the flood, but leaped in to swim. Craike lingered on the bank. The smoke was thicker, more animals broke from the wood to take to the water. But the doe -- where was she? He probed, only to meet that blank. Then a spurt of flame ran up a dead sapling, advance scout of the furnace. He yelped as a floating cinder stung his skin and took to the water. But he did not cross, rather did he swim upstream, hoping to pass the flank of the fire and pick up the missing trail again. Ill S moke cleared as Craike trod water. He was beyond the path of the fire, but not out of danger. For the current against which he had fought his way beat here through an archway of masonry. Flanking that arch were two squat towers. As an erection it was far more ambitious than anything he had seen during his brief glimpse of Sampur. Yet, as he eyed it more closely, he IF could see it was a ruin. There were gaps in the narrow span across the river, a green hush sprouted from the summit of the far tower. Craike came ashore, winning his way up the steep bank by handholds of vine and bush no alert castellan would have allowed to grow. As he reached a terrace of cobbles stippled with bunches of coarse grass, a sweetish scent of decay drew him around the base of the tower to look down at a broad ledge extending into the river. Piled on it were small baskets and bowls, some so rotted that only outlines were visible. Others new and all filled with mouldering food stuffs. But those who left such offerings must have known that the tower was deserted. Puzzled Craike went back to the building. The stone was undressed, yet the huge blocks which formed its base were fitted together with such precision that he suspected he could not force the thin blade of a pocket knife into any crack. There had been no effort at ornamentation, at any lighting of the impression of sullen, brute force. Wood, split and insect bored, formed a door. As he put his hand to it Craike discovered the guardian the lonig-ago owners of the fortress had left in possession. His hands went to his head, the blow he felt might have been physical. Out of the stronghold before him came such a wave of utter terror and dark promise as to force him back. But no farther than the edge of the paved square about the building's foundation. Grimly he faced that challenge, knowing it for stored emotion and not the weapon of an active will. He had his own defense against such a formless enemy. Breaking a dead branch from a bush, he twisted about it whisps of the sun-bleached grass until he had a torch of sorts. A piece of smoldering tinder blown from the fire gave him a light. Craike put his shoulder to the powdery remnants of the door, bursting it wide. Light against dark. What lurked there was nourished by dark, fed upon the night fears of his species. A round room, bare except for some crumbling sticks of wood, a series of steps jutting out from the wall to curl about and vanish above. Craike made no move toward further exploration, holding up the torch, seeking to see the real, not the threat of this place. Those who had built it possessed Esper talents. And they had used that power for twisted purposes. He read terror and despair trapped here by the castellans art, horror, an abiding fog of what his race considered evil. Tentatively Craike began to fight. With the torch he brought light and heat into the dark and cold. Now he struggled to offer peace. Just as he had pictured a girl in flight in place of the doe, so did he now force upon those invisible clouds of stored suffering calm and hope. The gray window slits in the stone were uncurtained to the streaming sunlight. Those who had set that guardian had oot intended it to hold against aa Esper. Once he began the task, Craice found the opposition melting. The terror seep as if it sank into the floor wave by wave. He stood in a room which smelt of damp and, more faintly, of the rotting food piled below its window slits; but now it was only an empty shell. Craike was tired, drained by his effort. And he was puzzled. Why had he fought for this? Of what importance to him was the cleansing of a ruined tower? Though to stay here had certain advantages. It had been erected to control river traffic. Though that did no matter for the present, just now he needed food more -- H e went back to the rock of offerings, treading a wary path through the disintegrating stuff. Close to the edge he came upon a clay bowl containing coarsely ground grain and, beside it, a basket of wilted leaves filled with overripe berries. He ate in gulps. Grass made him a matted bed in the tower, and he kindled a fire. As he squatted before its flames, he sent out a questing thought. A big cat drank from the river. Craike shuddered away from that contract with blood lust. A nigjht-hunting bird provided a trace of awareness. There were small rovers and hunters. But nothing human. Tired as he was Craike could not sleep. There was the restless sensation of some demand about to be made, some task waiting. From time to time he fed the fire. Towards morning he dozed, to snap awake. A night creature drinking, a screech overhead. He heard the flutter of wings echo hollowly through the tower. Beyond -- darkness -- blank, that curious blank which had fallen between him and the girl. Craike got to his feet eagerly. That blank could be traced. Outside it was raining, and fog hung in murky bands among the river hollows. The blank spot veered. Craike started after it. The tower pavement became a trace of old road he followed, weaving through the fog. There was the sour smell of old smoke. Charred wood, black muck clung to his feet. But his guide point was now stationary as the ground rose, studded with outcrops of rock. So Craike came to a mesa jutting up into a steel gray sky. He hitched his way up by way of a long-ago slide. The rain had stopped, but there was no hint of sun. And he was unprepared for the greeting he met as he topped the lip of a small plateau. A violent blow on the shoulder whirled him half-way around, and only by a finger's width did he escape a fall. A cry echoed his, and the blank broke. She was there. Moving slowly, using the same technique he knew to sooth frightened animals, Craike raised himself again. The pain in his shoulder was sharp when he tried to put much weight upon his left arm. But now he saw her clearly. She sat cross-legged, a boulder at her back, her hair a rippling IF cloud of black ( through which her hands and arms shown starkly white. She had the thin, three-cornered face of a child who has known much harshness; there was no beauty there -- the flesh had been too much worn by spirit. Only her eyes, watohful-wary as those of a feline, considered him bleakly. In spite of his beam of good will, she gave him no welcome. And she tossed another stone from hand to hand with the ease of one who had already scored with such a weapon. "Who are you?" she spoke aloud. "He who followed you," Craike fingered the bruise wound on his shoulder, not taking his eyes from hens. "You are no Black Hood." It was a statement not a question. "But you, also, have been horned." Another statement. Craike nodded. In his own time and place he had indeed been "horned." Just as her thrown stone had struck without warning, so came her second attack. There was a hiss. Within striking distance a snake flickered a forked tongue. Craike did not give ground. The snake head expanded, fur ran over it; there were legs, a plume of tail fluffed. A dog fox yapped once at the girl and vanished. Craike read her recoil, the first faint uncertainty"You have the power!" "I have power," he corrected her. But her attention was no longer his. She was listening to something he could hear with neither ear nor mind. Then she ran to the edge of the mesa. He followed. O n this side the country was more rolling, and across it now came mounted men moving in and out of mist pools. They rode in silence, and over them was the same blanketing of thought as the girl had used. Craike glanced about. There were loose stones, and the girl had already proven her marksmanship with such. But they would be no answer to the weapons the others had. Only flight was no solution either. The girl sobbed once, a broken cry so unlike the iron will she had shown that Craike started. She leaned perilously over the drop, staring down at the horsemen. Then her hands moved with desperate speed. She tore hairs from her head, twisted and snarled them between her fingers, breathed on them, looped them with a stone for weight, casting the tangled mass out to land before the riders. The mist curled, took on substance. Where there had been only rock there was now a thicket of thorn, so knotted that no fleshed creature could push through it. The hunters paused, then they rode on again, but now they drove a reeling, naked man, a man kept going by a lashing whip whenever he faltered. Again the girl sobbed, burying her face in her hands. The wretched captive reached the thorn barrier. Under his touch it melted. He stood there, weaving drunkenly. A whip sang. He went to his knees under its cut, a trapped animal's wail on the wind. Slowly, with a blind seeking, his hands went out to small stones about him. He gathered them, spread them anew in patterns. The girl had raised her head, watched dry-eyed, but seething with hate and the need to strike back. But she did not move. Craike dared lay a hand on her narrow shoulder, feeling through her hair the chill of her skin, while the hair itself clung to his fingers as if it had the will to smother and imprison. He tried to pull her away, but he could not move her. The naked man crouched in the midst of his pattern, and now he chanted, a compelling call the girl could not understand. She wrenched free of Craike's hold. But as she went she spared a thought for the man who had tried to save her. She struck out, her fist landing on the stone bruise. Pain sent him reeling back as she went over the rim of the mesa, her face a mask which no friend nor enemy might read. But there was no resignation in her eyes as she was forced to the meeting below. IV B y the time Craike reached a vantage point the girl stood in the center of the stone ring. Outside crouched the man, his head on his knees. She looked down at him, no emotion showing on her wan face. Then she dropped her hand on his thatch of wild hair. He jerked under that touch as he had under the whip which had printed the scailet weals across his back and loins. But he raised his head, and from his throat came a beast's mournful howl. At her gesture he was quiet, edging closer to her as if seeking some easement of his suffering. The Black Hood drew in. Craike's probe could make nothing of them. But they could not hide their emotions as well as they concealed their thoughts. And the Esper recoiled from the avid blood lust which lapped at the two by the cliff. A semicircle of the black jerkined retainers moved too. And the man who had led them lay on the earth how, moaning softly. But the girl faced them, head unbowed. Craike wanted to aid her. Had he time to climb down the cliff? Clenching his teeth against the pain movement brought to his shoulder, the Esper went back, holding a mind shield as a frail protection. Directly before him now was one of the guards. His mount caught Craike's scent, stirred uneasily, until the quieting thought of the Esper held it steady. Craike had never been forced into such action as he had these past few days; he had no real plan now, it must depend upon chance and fortune. As if the force of her enemies' wills had slammed her back against the rock, the girl was braced by the cliff wall, a black and white figure. Mist swirled, took on half substance of a monstrous form, was swept away in an instant. A clump IF of dried grass broke into flame, sending the ponies stamping and snorting. It was gone, leaving a black smudge on the earth. Illusions, realities -- Craike watched. This was so far beyond his own experience that he could hardly comprehend the lightning moves of mind against mind. But he sensed these others could beat down the girl's resistance at any moment they desired, that her last futile struggles were being relished by those who decreed this as part of her punishment. And Craike, who had believed that he could never hate more than he had when he had been touched by the fawning "hound" of the mob, was filled with a rage tempered into a chill of steel determination. T he girl went to her knees, still clutching her hair about her, facing her tormenters with her still-held defiance. Now the man who had wrought the magic which had drawn her there crawled, all humanity gone out of him, wriggling on his belly back to his captors. Two of the guards jerked him up. He hung limp in their hands, his mouth open in an idiot's grin. Callously, as he might tread upon a worm, the nearest Black Hood waved a hand. A metal axe flashed, and there came the dull sound of cracking bone. The guards pitched the body from them so that the bloodied head almost touched the girl. She writhed, a last frenzied attempt to break the force which pinned her. Without haste the guards advanced. One caught at her hair, pulling it tautly from her head. Craike shivered. The thrill of her agony reached him. This was what she feared most, fought so long to prevent. If ever he must move now. And that part of his brain which had been feverishly seeking a plan went into action. Ponies pawed, reared, went wild with panic. One of the Black Hoods swung around to face the terrorized animals. But his own mount struck out with teeth and hooves. Guardsmen shouted, and above their cries arose the shrill squeals of the animals. Craike stood his ground, keeping the ponies in terror-stricken revolt. The guard who held the handful of hair slashed at the tress with his knife, severing it at a palm's distance away from her head. But in that same moment she moved. The knife leaped free from the man's grasp, while the severed hair twined itself about his hands, binding them until the blade buried itself in his throat; and he went down. One of the Black Hoods was also finished, tramped into a feebly squirming thing by the ponies. Then from the ground burst a sheet of flame which split into balls, drifting through the air or rolling along the earth. The Esper wet his lips -- that was not his doing! He did not have to feed the panic of the animals now; they were truly mad. The girl was on her feet. Before his thought could reach her she was gone, swallowed up in a mist which arose to blanket the fire balls. Once more she cut their contact; there was a blank void where she had been. Now the fog thickened. Through it came one of the ponies, foam dripping from its blunt muzzle. It bore down on Craike, eyes gjeaming red through a tangled forelock. With a scream it reared. Craike's hand grabbed a handful of mane as he leaped, avoiding teeth and hooves. Then, somehow, he gained the pad saddle, locking his fingers in the coarse hair, striving to hold his seat against the bucking enraged beast. It broke into a run, and the Esper plastered himself to the heaving body. For the moment he made no attempt at mind control. Behind, the Black Hoods came out of their stunned bewilderment. They were questing feverishly, and he had to concentrate on holding his shield against them. A pony fleeing in terror would not excite them; a pony under control would provide them with a target. Later he could circle about and try to pick up the trail of the witch girl. Flushed with success, Craike was sure he could provide her with a rear guard no Black Hood could pass. The fog was thick, and the pace ef the pony began to slacken. Once or twice it bucked half-heartedly, giving up when it could not dislodge its rider. Craike drew his fingers in slow, soothing sweeps down the sweating curve of its neck. There were no more trees about, and the unshod hooves pounded on sand. They were in a dried water course, and Craike did not try to turn from that path. Then his luck ran out. What he had ignorantly supposed to be a rock ahead, heaved up seven feet or more. A red mouth opened in a great roar. He had believed the bear he had seen fleeing the fire to be a giant, but this one was a nightmare monster. The pony screamed with an almost human note of despair and whirled. Craike gripped the mane again and tried to mind control the bear. But his surprise had lasted seconds too long. A vast clawed paw struck, ripping across pony hide and human thigh. Then Craike could only cling to the running mount. How long he was able to keep his seat he never knew. Then he slipped; there was a throb of pain as he struck the ground, to be followed by blackness. I t was dusk when he opened his eyes, fighting agony in his head, his leg. But later there was moonlight. And that silver-white spotlighted a waiting shape. Green slits of eyes regarded him remotely. Dizzily he made contact. A wolf -- hungry -- yet with a wariness which recognized in the prone man an enemy. Craike fought for control. The wolf whined, then it arose, its prick ears sharp cut in the moonlight, it's nose questing for the scent of other, less disturbing prey, and it was gone. Craike edged up against a boulder and sorted out sounds. The rush of water. He moved a paper dry IF tongue over cracked lips. Water to drink -- to wash his wounds -- water! With a groan Oraike worked his way to his feet, holding fast to the top of the rock when his torn leg threatened to buckle under him. The same inner drive which had kept him going through the desert brought him down to the river. By sunrise he was seeking a shelter, wanting to lie up, as might the wolf, in some secret cave until his wounds healed. All chance of finding the witch girl was lost. But as he crawled along the shingle, leaning on a staff he had found in drift wood, he kept alert for any trace of the Black Hoods. It was midmorning on the second day that his snail's progress brought him to the river towers. And it took another hour for him to reach the terrace. Gaunt and worn, his empty stomach complaining, he wanted nothing more than to sink down in the nest of grass he had gathered and cease to struggle. Perhaps he might have done so had not a click-clack of sound from the river put him on the defensive, his staff now a club. But these were not Black Hoods. Farmers, local men bound for the market of Sampur with products of their fields. They had paused, were making a choice among the least appetizing of their wares for a tribute to be offered to the tower demon. Craike hitched stiffly to a point where he could witness that sacrifice. But when he assessed the contents of their dugout, the heaping basket piled between the paddlers, his hunger took command. Fob off a demon with a handful of meal and a too-ripe melon would they? Vith three haunches of cured meat and all that other stuff on board! Craike voiced a roar which could have done credit to the red bear, a roar which altered into a demand for meat. The paddlers nearly lost control of their crude craft. But one reached for a haunch and threw it blindly on the refuse covered rock, while his companion added a basket of small cakes into the bargain. "Enough, little men -- " Craike's voice boomed hollowly. "You may pass free." They needed no urging, they did not look at those threatening towers as their paddles bit into the water, adding impetus to the pull of the current. Craike watched them well out of sight before he made a slow descent to the rock. The effort he was forced to expend warned him that a second such trip might be impossible, and he inched back to the terrace dragging both meat and cakes. The cured haunch he worried into strips, using his pocket knife. It was tough, not too pleasant to the taste and unsalted. But he found it more appetizing than the cakes of baked meal. With this supply he could afford to lie up and favor his leg. About the claw rents the flesh was red and puffed. Craike had no dressing but river water and the leaves he had tied over the tears. Samjpur was beyond his power to reach, and to contact men traveling on the river would only bring the Black Hoods. He lay in his grass nest and tried to sort out the events of the past few days. This was a land in which Esper powers were allowed free range. He had no idea of how he had come here, but it seemed to his feverish mind that he had been granted another chance -- one in which the scales of justice were more balanced in his favor. If he could only find the girl, learn from her -- Tentatively, without real hope, he sent out a questing thought. Nothing. He moved impatiently, wrenching his leg, so that his head swam with pain. Throat and mouth were dry. The lap of water sounded in his ears. Water -- he was thirsty again. But he could not crawl down slope and up once more. Craike closed his eyes wearily. V C raike's memory of the hours which followed thereafter was doorway? A slavering wolf? A red bear? Then the girl sat there, crosslegged as he had seen her on the mesa, her cloak of hair about her. A hand emerged from the cloak to lay wood on the fire. Illusions? But would an illusion turn to him, put firm, cool fingers upon his wound, somehow driving out by touch the pain and fire which burned there? Would an illusion raise his head, cradling it against her so that the soft silk of her hair lay against his cheek and throat, urging on him liquid out of a crude bowl? Would an illusion sing softly to herself while she drew a fish-bone comb back and forth through her hair, until the song and the sweep of the comb lulled him into a sleep so deep that no dream walked there? He awoke, clear headed. Yet that last illusion lingered. For she came from the sun-drenched world without, a bowl of fruit in her hand. For a long moment she stood gazing at him searchingly. But when he tried mind contact, he met that wall. Not unheeding -- but a refusal to answer. Her hair was now braided. But about her face the lock which the guardsman had shorn made an untidy fringe. While around her thin body was a strip of hide, purposefully arranged to mask all femininity. "So," Craike spoke rustily, "you are real -- " She did not smile. "I am real. You no longer dream with fever." "Who are you?" He asked the first of his long hoarded questions. "I am Takya." She added nothing to that. "You are Takya, and your are a witch -- " "I am Takya, and I have the power." It was an assertion of fact rather than agreement. She settled in her favorite crosslegged position, selected a fruit from her bowl and examined it with the interest of a housewife IF who has shopped for supplies on a limited budget. Then she placed it in his hand before she chose another for herself. He bit into the plumlike globe. If she would only drop her barrier, let him communicate in the way which was fuller and deeper than speech. "You also have the power -- " Craike decided to be no more communicative than she. He replied to that with a curt nod. "Yet you have not been horned -- " "Not as you have been. But in my own world, yes."" "Your world?" Her eyes held some of the feral glow of a hunting cat's. "What world, and why were you homed there, man of sand and ash, power?" Without knowing why Craike related the events of the days past. Takya listened, he was certain, with more than ears alone. She picked up a stick from the pile of firewood and drew patterns in the sand and ash, patterns which had something to do with her listening. "Your power was great enough to break a world wall." She snapped the stick between two fingers, threw it into the flames. "A world wall?" "We of the power have long known that different worlds lie together in such a fashion." She held up her hand with the fingers tight lying one to another. " Sometimes there comes a moment when two touch so closely that the power can carry one through. If at that moment there is a desperate need for escape. But those places of meeting can not be readily found, and the moment of their touch can lay only for an instant. Have you in your world no reports of men and women who have vanished almost in sight of their fellows?" emembering old tales he nodded. "I have seen a summoning from another world," she continued with a shiver, running both hands down the length of her braids as if so she evoked a shield for both mind and body. "To summon so is a great evil, for no man can hold in check the power of someiing alien. You broke the will of the Black Hoods when I was a beast running from their hunt. When I made the serpent to warn you off, you changed it into a fox. And when the Black Hoods would have shorn my power -- " she looped the braids about her wrists, caressing, treasuring them against her small breasts, "again you broke their hold and set me free for a second time. But this you could not have done had you been born into this world, for our power must follow set laws. Yours lies outside out patterns and can cut across those laws -- even as the knife cut this -- " She touched the rough patch of hair at her temple. "Follow patterns? Then it was those patterns in stone which drew you down from the mesa?" "Yes. Takyi, my womb-brother, whom they slew there, was blood of my blood, bone of my bone. When they crushed him, then they could use him to draw me, and I could not resist. But in tihe slaying of his husk they freed me -- to their great torment, as Tousuth shall discover in time." "Tell me of this country. Who are the Black Hoods and why did they horn you? Are you not of their breed since you have the power?" But Tayka did not answer at once in words. Nor did she, as he had hoped, lower her mind barrier. Her fingers now held one long hair she had pulled from her head, and this she began to weave in and out, swiftly intricately, in a complicated series of loops and crossed strands. After a moment Craike did not see the white fingers, nor the black hair they passed in loops from one to another. Rather did he see the pictures she wrought in her weaving. A wide land, largely wilderness. The impressions he had gathered from Kaluf and the traders crystalized into vivid life. Small holdings here and there, ruled by petty lords, new settlements carved out by a scattered people moving up from the south in great wheeled wains, bringing flocks and herds, their carefully treasured seed. Stopping here and there for a season to sow and reap, until they decided upon a site for their final rooting. Tiny city-states, protected by the Black Hoods -- the Esper born who purposefully interbred their own gifted stock, keeping their children apart. Takya and her brother coming, as was sometimes -- if rarely -- true, from the common people. Carefully watched by the Black Hoods. Then discovered to be a new mutation, condemned as such to ibe used for experimentation. But for a while protected by the local lord who wanted Takya. But he might not take her unwilling. For the power that was hers as a virgin was wholly rift from her should she be forced. And he had wanted that power, obedient to him, as a check upon the monopoly of the Black Hoods. So with some patience he had set himself to a peaceful wooing. But the Black Hoods had moved first. Had they accomplished her taking, the end they had intended for her was not as easy as death. And she wove a picture of it, with all its degradation and shame stark and open, for Craike's seeing. "Then the Hooded ones are evil?" "Not wholly." She untwisted the hair and put it with care into the fire. "They do much good, and without them people would suffer. But I, Takya, am different. And after me, when I mate, there will be others also different. How different we are not yet sure. The Hooded Ones want no change, by their thinking that means disaster. So they would use me to their own purposes. Only I, Tayka, shall not be so used!" "No, you shall not." The vehemence of his own outburst startled him. Craike wanted nothing so much at that moment than to come to grips with the Black Hoods, who had planned this systematic hunt. "What will you do now?" He IF asked more calmly, wishing she would share her thoughts with him, "This is a strong place. Did you cleanse it?" He nodded impatiently. "So I thought. That was also a task one born to this world might not have performed. But those who pass are not yet aware of the Cleansing. They will not trouble us, but pay tribute." C raike found her complacency irritating. To lie up here and live on the offerings of river travelers did not appeal to him. "This stone piling is older work than Sampur and much better," she continued. "It must have been a fortress for some of those forgotten ones who held lands and then vanished long. before we came from the south. If it is repaired no lord of this district would have so good a roof." "Two of us to rebuild it?" he laughed. "Two of us -- working thus." A block of stone, the size of a brick, which had fallen from the sill of one of the needle-narrow windows, arose slowly in the air, settled into the space from which it had tumbled. Illusion or reality? Craike got to his feet and lurched to the window. His hand fell upon the stone which moved easily in his grasp. He took it out, weighed it, and then gently returned it to its place. Not illusion. "But illusion too -- if need be." There was, for the first time, a warm not of amusement in her tone. "Look on your tower, river lord!" He limped to the door. Outside it was warm, sunny, but it was a site of ruins. Then the picture changed. Brown drifts of grass vanished from the terrace, the fallen stone was all in place. A hardfaced sentry stood wary-eyed on a repaired river arch. Another guardsman led out ponies saddle-padded and ready, other men were about garrison tasks. Craike grinned. The sentry on the arch lost his helm, his jerkin. He now wore the tight tunic of the Security. Police, his spear was a gas rifle. The ponies misted, and in their place a speedster sat on the stone. He heard her laugh. '"Your guard, your traveling machine. But how grim, ugly. This is better!" Guards, machine, all were swept away. Craike caught his breath at the sight of delicate winged creatures dancing in the air, displaying a joy of life he had never known. Fawns, little people of the wild, came to mingle with such shapes of beauty and desire that at last he turned his head away. "Illusion," her voice was hard, mocking. But Craike could not believe that what he had seen had been bom from hardness and mockery. "All illusions. We shall be better now with warriors. As for plans, can you suggest any better than to remain here and take what fortune sends -- for a space?" "Those winged dancers -- where?" "Illusions!" She returned harshly. "But such games tire one. I do not think we shall conjure up any garrison before they are needed, one from which he had come. Come, do not tear open those Whether it was also haunted Craike wounds of yours anew, for healing did not know. But, as he looked is no illusion and drains one even about, he could see the sense of more of the power." Tayka's suggestion. A few illusioa The clawed furrows were healsentries would discourage any oring cleanly, though he would bear dinary intrusion, their scars for life. He hobbled back Takya's housekeeping had changed to the grass bed and dropped upon the rock of offerings. All the rotit, but regretted the erasure of the ting debris was gone and none of sprites she had shown him. the odor of decay now offended the nostrils at a change of wind. O nce he was safely in place. But at best it was a most uncerTakya left with the curt extain source of supply. There could planation she had things to do. But not be too many farms up river, Craike was restless, too much so to nor too many travelers taking the remain long inside the tower. He water way. waited until she had gone and then. As if to refute that, his Esper with the aid of his staff, climbed to sense brought him sudden warning the end of the span above the river, of strangers beyond the upper bend. From here the twin tower on the But, Craike tensed, there were no other bank looked the same as the peasants bound for the market at Sampur. Fear, pain, anger, such emotions heralded their coming. There were three, and one was hurt. But they were not Esper, nor did they serve the Black Hoods. Though they were, or had been, fighting men. A brutal journey over the mountains where they had lost comrades, the finding of this river, the theft of the dugout they now used so expertly -- it was all there for him to read. And beneath that something else, which, when he found it, gave Craike a quick decision in their favor -- a deep hatred of the Black Hoods! Outlaws, very close to despair, keeping on a hopeless trail because it was not in them to surrender. Craike contacted them subtly. They must not think they were heading into an Esper trap! Plant a little hope, a faint suggestion that there was a safe camping place ahead, that was all he could do at present. But so he drew them on. "No!" A ruthless order cut across his line of contact, striking at the delicate thread with which he was playing the strangers in. But Craike stood firm. "Yes, yes, and yes!" He was on guard instantly. Takya, mistress of illusion as she had proved herself to be, might act. But surprisingly she did not. The dugout came into view, carried more by the current than the efforts of its crew. One lay full length in the bottom, while the bow paddler had slumped forward. But the man in the stern was bringing them in. And Craike strengthened his invisible, unheard invitation to urge him on. VI B ut Takya had not yet begun to fight. As the dugout swung in toward the offering ledge one of the Black Hoods' guardsmen appeared there, his drawn sword taking fire from the sun. The fugitive steersman faltered until the current drew his craft on. Craike caught the full force of the stranger's despair, all the keener for the hope of moments before. The Esper irritation against Takya flared into anger. He made the illusion reel back, hands clutching at his breast from which protruded the shaft of an arrow. Craike had seen no bows here, but it was a weapon to suit this world. And this should prove to Takya he meant what he had said. Tlie steersman was hidden as the dugout passed under the arch. There was a scrap of beach, the same to which Craike had swum on his first coming. He urged the man to that, beaming good will. But the paddler was almost done, and neither of his companions could aid him. He drove the crude craft to the bank, and its bow grated on the rough gravel. Then he crawled over the bodies of the other two and fell rather than jumped ashore, turning to pull up the canoe as best he could. Craike started down. But he might have known that Takya was not so easily defeated. Though they maintained an alliance of sorts she accepted no order from him. A brand was teleported from the tower fire, striking spear-se in the dry brush along the slope. Craike's mouth set. He tried no more arguments. They had already tested power against power, and he this was not the time. However the fire was no illusion, and he could not fight it, crippled as he was. Or could he? It was not spreading too fast -- though Takya might spur it by the forces at her command. Now -- there was just the spot! Craike steadied himself against a mound of fallen masonry and swept out his staff, dislodging a boulder and a shower of gravel. He had guessed right. The stone rolled to crush out the brand, and the gravel he continued to push after it smothered the creeping flames. Red tongues dashed spitefully high in a sheet of flame, and Craike was angry. He produced a giant pail in the air, tilted it forward, splashed its contents into the heart of that conflagration. He felt the lash of her rage, standing under it unmoved. So might she bring her own breed to heel, but she would learn he was not of that ilk. "Holla!" That call was no illusion, it begged help. Craike picked a careful path down slope until he saw the dugout and the man who had landed it. The Esper waved an invitation and at his summons the fugitive covered the distance between them. He was a big man of the same IF brawny race as those of Sampur, his braids of reddish hair hanging well below his wide shoulders. There was the raw line of a halfhealed wound down the angle of his jaw, and his sunken eyes were very tired. For a moment he stood down-slope from Craike, his hands on his hips, his head back, measuring the Esper with the shrewdness of a canny officer who had long known how to judge and handle raw levies. "I am Jorik of the Eagles' Tower." The statement was made with the same confidence as the announcement of rank might have come from one of the petty lords. "Though," he shrugged, "the Eagles' Tower stands no more with one stone upon the other. You have a stout lair here -- " he hesitated before he concluded, "friend." "I am Craike," the Esper ananswered as simply, "and I am also one who has run from enemies. This lair is an old one, though still useful." "Might the enemies from whom you run wear black hoods?" countered Jorik. "It seems to me that things I have just seen here have the stink of that about them." "You are right. I am no friend to the Black Hoods." "But you have the power -- " "I have power," Craike tried to make the distinction clear. "You are welcome, Jorik. So all are welcome here who are no friends to Black Hoods." The big warrior shrugged. "We can no longer run. If the time has come to make a last stand, this is as good a place as any. My men are done." He glanced back at the two in the dugout. "They are good men, but we were pressed when they caught us in the upper pass. Once there were twenty hands of us," he held up his fist and spread he fingers wide for counting. "They drew us out of the tower with their sorcerers' tricks, and then put us to the hunt." "Why did they wish to make an end to you?" Jorik laughed shortly. "They dislike those who will not fit into their neat patterns. We are free mountain men, and no Black Hood helped us win the Eagles' Tower; none aided us to hunt. When we took our furs down to the valley they wanted to levy tribute. But what spell of theirs trapped the beasts in our dead-falls, or brought them to our spears? We pay not for what we have not bought. Neither would we have made war on them. Only, when we spoke out and said it so, there were others who were encouraged to do likewise, and the Black Hoods must put an end to us before their rule was broken. So they did." "But they did not get all of you," Craike pointed out. "Can you bring your men up to the tower? I have been hurt and can not walk without support or I would lend you a hand." "We will come." Jorik returned to the dugout. Water was splashed vigorously into the face of the man in the bow, arousing him to crawl ashore. Then the leader of the fugitives swung the third man out of the craft and over his shoulder in a practiced carry. W hen Craike had seen the unconscious man established on his own grass bed, he stirred up the fire and set out food. While Jorik returned to the dugout to bring in their gear. Neither of the other men were of the same size as their leader. The one who lay limp, his breath fluttering between his slack lips, was young hardly out of boyhood, his thin frame showing bones rather than muscled flesh under the rags of clothing. The other was short, dark skinned, akin by race to Kaluf's men, his jaw sprouting a curly beard. He measured Craike with suspicious glances from beneath lowered red lids, turning that study to the walls about him and the unknown reaches at the head of the stair. Craike did not try mind touch. These men were rightly suspicious of Esper arts. But he did attempt to reach Takya, only to meet that nothingness with which she cloaked her actions. Craike was disturbed. Surely now that she was convinced he was determined to give the harborage to the fugitives, she would oppose him. They had nothing to fear from Jorik and his men, but rather would gain by joining forces. Until his wounds were entirely healed he could not go far. And without weapons they would have to rely solely upon Ester powers for defense. Having witnessed the efficiency of the Hooded Ones' attack, Craike doubted a victory in any engagement to which those masters came fully prepared. He had managed to upset their spells merely because they had not known of his existence. But the next time he would have no such advantage. On the other hand the tower could be defended by force of arms. With bows -- Craike savored the idea of archers giving a Hooded force a devastating surprise. The traders had had no such arm, as sophisticated as they were. And he had seen none among the warriors of Sampur. He'd have to ask Jorik if such were known. In the meantime he sat among his guests, watching Jorik feed the semiconscious boy with soft fruit pulp and the other man wolf down dried meat. When the latter had done, he hitched himself closer to the fire and jerked a thumb at his chest. "Zackuth," he identified himself. "From Larud?" Craike named the only city of Kaluf's people he could remember. The dark man's momentary surprise had no element of suspicion. "What do you know of the Children of Noe, stranger?" "I journeyed the plains with one called Kaluf, a Master Trader of Larud." "A fat man who laughs much and wears a falcon plume in his cap?" "Not so," Craike allowed a measure of chill to ice his reply. "The Kaluf who led this caravan was a lean man who knew the edge of a good blade from its hilt. As for cap ornaments -- he had a red IF stone to the fore of his. Also he swore by the Eyes of the Lady Lor." Z ackuth gave a great bray of laughter. ""Vou are no stream fish to be easily hooked, are you, tower dweller? I am not of Larud, but I know Kaluf, and those who travel in his company do not wear one badge one day and another the next. But, by the looks of you, you have fared little better than we lately. Has Kaluf also fallen upon evil luck?" "I traveled safely with his caravan to the gates of Sampur. How it fared with him thereafter I can not tell you." Jorik grinned and settled his patient back on the bed. "I believe you must have parted company in haste. Lord ELa-rak?" Craike answered that with the truth. "There were two who were homed. I followed them to give what aid I could." Jorik scowled, and Zackmth spat into the fire. "We were not horned; we have no power," the latter remarked. "But they have other tricks to play. So you came here?" "I was clawed by a bear," Craike supplied a meager portion of his adventures, "and came here to lie up until I can heal me of that hurt." "This is a snug hole," Jorik was appreciative. "But how got you such eating?" He popped half a fruit into his mouth and licked his juicy fingers. "This is no wilderness feeding." "The tower is thought to be demon haunted. Those taking passage down stream leave tribute." Zackuth slapped his knee. "The Gods of the Waves are good to you, Lord Ka-rak, that you should stumble into such fortune. There is more than one kind of demon for the haunting towers. How say you. Lord Jorik?" "That we have also come into luck at last, since Lord Ka-rak has made us free of this hold. But perhaps you have some other thought in your head?" He spoke to the Esper. Craike shrugged. "What the clouds decree shall fall as rain or snow," he quoted a saying of the caravan men. I t was close to sunset, and he was worried about Takya. He could not believe that she had gone permanently. And yet, if she returned, what would happen? He had been careful not to use Esper powers. Takya would have no such compunctions. He could not analyze his feelings about her. She disturbed him, awoke emotions he refused to face. There was a certain way she had of looking sidewise -- But her calm assumption of superiority pricked beneath his surface armor. And the antagonism fretted against the feeling which had drawn him after her from the gates of Sampur. Once again he sent out a quest-thought and, to his surprise, was answered. "They must go!" "They are outlaws, even as we. One is ill, the others worn with long running. But they stood against the Black Hoods. As such they have a claim on roof, fire and food from us." "They are not as we!" again arrogance. "Send them or I shall drive them. I have the power -- " "Perhaps you have the power, but so do I!" He put all the assurance he could muster into that. "I tell you, no better thing could happen then for us to give these men aid. They are proven fighters -- " "Swords can not stand against the power!" Craike smiled. His plans were beginning to move even as he carried on this voiceless argument. "Not swords, no, Takya. But all fighting is not done with swords nor spears. Nor with the power either. Can a Black Hood think death to his enemy when he himself is dead, killed from a distance, and not by mind power his fellows could trace and be armored against. He had caught her attention. She was acute enough to know that he was not playing with words, that he knew of what he spoke. Quickly he .built upon that spark of interest. "Remember how your illusion guard died upon the offering rock when you would warn off these men?" "By a small spear." She was contemptuous again. "Not so." He shaped a picture of an arrow and then of an archer releasing it from the bow cord, of its speeding true across the river to strike deep into the throat of an unsuspecting Black Hood. "You have the secret of this weapon?" "I do. And five such arms are better than two, is that not the truth?" She yielded a fraction. "I will return. But they will not like that." "If you return, they will welcome you. These are no hunters of witch maidens -- " he began, only to be disconcerted by her obvious amusement. Somehow he had lost his short advantage over her. Yet she did not break contact. "Ka-rak, you are very foolish. No, these will not try to mate with me, not even if I willed it so. As you will see. Does the eagle mate with the hunting cat? But they will be slow to trust me, I think. However, your plan has possibilities, and we shall see." T akya had been right about her reception by the fugitives. They knew her for what she was, and only Craike's acceptance of her kept them in the tower. That and the fact, which Jorik did not try to disguise, that they could not hope to go much farther on their own. But their fears were partly allayed when she took over the nursing of the sick youngster, using on him the same healing power she had produced for Craike's wound. By the new day she was feeding him broth and demanding service from the others as if they had been her liegemen from birth. The sun was well up when Jorik came in whistling from a dip in the river. "This is a stout stronghold, IF Lord Ka-rak. And with the power aiding us to hold it, we are not likely to be shaken out in a hurry. Doubly is that true if the Lady aids us." Takya laughed. She sat in the shaft of light from one of the narrow windows, combing her hair. Now she looked over her shoulder at them with something approaching a pert archness. In that moment she was more akin to the women Craike had known in his own world. "Let us first see how the Lord Ka-rak proposes to defend us." There was mockery in that, enough to sting, as well as a demand that he make good his promise of the night before. But Craike was prepared. He discarded his staff for a hold on Jorik's shoulder, while Zackuth slogged behind. They climbed into the forest. Craike had never fashioned a bow, and he did not doubt that his first attempts might be failures. But, as the three made their slow progress, he explained what they must look for and the kind of weapon he wanted to produce. They returned within the hour with an assortment of wood lengths with which to experiment. After noon Zackuth grew restless and went off, to come back with a deer, visibly proud of his hunting skill. Craike saw bowstrings where the others saw meat and hide for the refashioning of foot wear. For the rest of the day they worked with a will. It was Takya, who had the skill necessary for the feathering of the arrows after Zackuth netted two black river birds. Four days later the tower community had taken on the aspect of a real stronghold. Many of the fallen stones were back in the walls. The two upper rooms of the tower had been explored, and a vast collection of ancient nests had been swept out. Takya chose the topmost one for her own abode and, aided by her convalescing charge, the boy Nickus, had carried armloads of sweet scented grass up for both carpeting and bedding. She did not appear to be inconvenienced by the bats that still entered at dawn to chitter out again at dusk. And she crooned a welcome to the snowy owl that refused to be dislodged from a favorite roost in the very darkest corner of the roof. River travel had ceased. There were no new offerings on the rock. But Jorik and Zackuth hunted. And Craike tended the smoking fires which cured the extra meat against coming need, while he worked on the bows. Shortly they had three finished and practiced along the terrace, using blunt arrows. J orik had a true marksman's eye and took to the new weapon quickly, as did Nickus. Blut Zackuth was more clumsy, and Craike's stiff leg bothered him. Takya was easily the best shot when she would consent to try. But while agreeing it was an excellent weapon, she preferred her own type of warfare and would sit on the wall, braiding and rebraiding her hair with flying fingers, to watch their shooting at marks and applaud or jeer lightly at the results. Howev#r, their respite was short. Craike had the first warning of trouble. He awoke from a dream in which he had been back in the desert panting ahead of the mob. Awoke, only to discover that some malign influence filled the tower. There was a compulsion on him to get out, to flee into the forest. He tested the silences about him tentatively. The oppression which had been in the ancient fort at his first coming had not returned, that was not it. But what? Someone moved restlessly in the dark. "Lord Ka-rak?" Nickus' voice was low and hoarse, as if he struggled to keep it under contral. "What is it?" "There is trouble -- " A bulk which could only belong to Jorik heaved up black against the faint light of the doorway. "The hunt is up," he observed. "They move to shake us out of here like rats out of a nest." "They did this before with you?" asked the Esper. Jorik snorted. "Yes. It is their favorite move to battle. They would give us such a horror of our tower that we will burst forth and scatter. Then they can cut us down as they wish." But Craike could not isolate any thought beam carrying that night terror. It seeped from the walls about them. He sent probes unsuccessfully. There was the pad of feet en the stairs, and then he heard Takya call: "Build up the fire, foolish ones. They may discover that they do not deal with those who know nothing of them." Flame blossomed from the coals to light a circle of sober faces. Zackuth caressed the spear l)dng across his knees, but Nickus and Jorik had eyes only for the witch maid as she knelt by the fire, laying out some bundles of dried leaf and fern. Her thoughts reached Craike. "We must move or these undefended ones will be drawn out from here as nut meats are picked free from the shell. Give me of your power -- in this matter I must be the leader." hough he resented anew her calm assumption of authority, Craike also recognized in it truth. But he shrank from the task she demanded of him. To have no control over his own Esper arts, to allow her to use them to feed hers -- it was a violation of a kind, the very thing he had so feared in his to kill himself to escape it. Yet now she asked it of him as one who had the right! "Forced surrender is truly evil -- but given freely in our defense this is different." Her thoughts swiftly answered his wave of repulsion. The command to flee the tower was growing stronger. Nickus got to his feet as if dragged up. Suddenly Zackuth made for the door, only to have Jorik reach forth a long arm to trip him. "You see," Takya urged, "they IF are already half under the spell. Soon we shall not be able to hold them, either by mind or body. And then they shall be wholly lost -- for ranked against us now is the high power of the Black Hoods." Craike watched the scuffle on the floor and then, still reluctant and inwardly shrinking, he limped around the fire to her side, lying down at her gesture. She threw on the fire two of her bundles of fern, and a thick, sweet smoke curled out to engulf them. Nickus coughed, put his hands uncertainly to his head and slumped, curling up as a tired child in deep slumber. And the struggle between Jorik and his man subsided as the fumes reached them. Takya's hand was cool as it slipped beneath Craike's jerkin, resting over his heart. She was crooning some queer chant, and, though he fought to hold mind contact, there was a veil between them as tangible to his inner senses as the fern smoke was to his outer ones. For one wild second or two he seemed to see the tower room through her eyes instead of his own, and then the room was gone. He sped bodiless across the night world, casting forth as a hound on the trail. All that had been solid in his normal sight was now without meaning. But he was able to see the dark cloud of pressure closing in on the tower and trace that back to its source, racing along the slender thread of its spinners. There was another fire, and about it four of the Black Hoods. Here, too, was scented smoke to free minds from bodies. The essence which was Craike prowled about that fire, counting guardsmen who lay in slumber. With an effort of will which drew heavily upon his strength, he concentrated on the staff which lay before the leader of the company. Setting upon it his own commands. It flipped up into the air, even as its master roused and clutched at it, falling into the fire. There was a flash of blue light, a sound which Craike felt rather than heard. The Hooded Ones were on their feet as their master stared straight across the flames to Craike's disembodied self. His was not an evil face, rather did it hold elements of nobility. But the eyes were pitiless, and Craike knew that now it was not only war to the death between them, but war beyond death itself. The Esper sensed that this was the first time that other had known of his existence, had been able to consider him as a factor in the tangled game. There was a flash of lightning knowledge of each other, and then Craike was again in the dark. He heard once more Takya's crooning, was conscious of her touch resting above the slow, pulsating beat of his heart. "That was well done," her thought welcomed him. "Now they must meet us face to face in battle." "They will come." He accepted the dire promise that Black Hood had made. "They will come, but now we are more equal. And there is not the Rod of Power to fear." G raike tried to sit up and discovered that the weakness born of his wounds was nothing to that which now held him. Takya laughed with some of her old mockery. Do you think you can make the Long Journey and then romp about as a fawn, Ka-rak? Not three days on the field of battle can equal this. Sleep now and gather again the inner power. The end of this venture is still far from us." He could no longer see her face, the glimmer of her hair veiled it, and then that shimmer reached his mind and shook him away from consciousness; and he slept. It might have been early morning when he had made that strange visit to the camp of the Black Hoods. By the measure of the sun across the floor it was late afternoon when he lifted heavy eyelids again. Takya gazed down upon him. Her summons had brought him back, just as her urging had sent him to sleep. He sat up with a smile, but she did not return it. "All is right?" "We have time to make ready before we are put to the test. Your mountain captain is not new to this game. Matters of open warfare he understands well, and he and his men have prepared a rude welcome for those who come. And," her faint smile deepened. "I, too, have done my poor best. Come and see." He limped out on the terrace and for a moment was startled. Illusion, yes, but some of it was real. Jorik laughed at the expression on Craike's face, inviting the Esper with a wave of the hand to inspect the force he captained. For there were bowmen in plenty, standing sentinel on the upper walls, arch, and tower, walking beats on the twin buildings across the river. And it took Craike a few seconds to sort out the ones he knew from those who served Takya's purposes. But the real had been as well posted as their illusionary companions. Nickus, for his superior accuracy with the new weapon, held a vantage point on the wall, and Zackuth was on the river arch where his arrows needed only a short range to be effective. "Look below," Jorik urged, "and see what shall trip them up until we can pin them." A gain Craike blinked. The illusion was one he had seen before, but that had been a hurried erection on the part of a desperate girl, this was better contrived. For all the ways leading to the river towers were cloaked with a tangled mass of thorn trees, the spiked branches interlocking into a wall no sword, no spear could hope to pierce. It might be an illusion, but it would require a weighty counterspell on the part of the Hooded Ones to clear it. "She takes some twigs Nickus finds, and a hair, and winds them together, then buried all under a stone. After she sings over it -- and we have this!" Jorik babbled. "She is worth twenty hands -- no, twice twenty hands, or fighting men, is the Lady Takya! Lord Ka-rak, I say that there is a new day coming IF for this land when such as you two stand up against the Hooded Ones." "Aaaay -- " the warning was soft but clear, half whistle, half call, issuing from Nickus lofty post. "They come!" "So do they!" That was a sharp echo from Zackuth, "and down river as well." "For which we have an answer," Jorik was undisturbed. Those in the tower held their fire. To the confident attackers it was as such warfare had always been for them. If half their company was temporarily halted by the spiny maze, the river party had only to land on the offering rock and fight their way in, their efforts reinforced by the arts of their Masters. But, as their dugout nosed in, bow cords sang. There was a voiceless scream which tore through Craike's head as the hooded man in its bow clutched at the shaft protruding from his throat and fell forward into the river. Two more of the crew followed him, and the rest stopped paddling, dismayed. The current pulled them on under the arch, and Zackuth dropped a rock to good purpose. It carried one of the guardsmen down with it as it hit the craft squarely. The dugout into the water. Zackuth laughed; Jorik roared. "Now they learn what manner of blood letting lies before them!" he cried so that his words must have reached the ears of the besiegers. "Let us see how eagerly they come to such feasting." I t was plain that the Black Hoods held their rulership by more practical virtues than just courage. Having witnessed the smashing disaster of the river attack, they made no further move. Night was coming, and Craike watched them withdraw downstream with no elation. Nor did Jorik retain his cheerfulness. "Now they will try something else. And since we did not fall easily into their jaws, it will be harder to face. I do not like it that we must so face it during the hours of dark." "There will be no dark," Takya countered. One slim finger pointed at a corner of the terrace, and up into the gathering dusk leaped a pencil of clear light. Slowly she turned and brought to life other torches on the roof of the tower over river, on the arch spanning the water, on the parapet -- And in that radiance nothing could move unseen. "So!" Her fingers snapped, and the beacons vanished. "en they are needed, we shall have them." Jorik blinked. "Well enough. Lady. But honest fire is also good, and it provides warmth for a man's heart as well as light for his eyes." She smiled as a mother might smile at a child. "Build your fire. Captain of Swords. But we shall have ample warning when the enemy comes." She called. A silent winged thing floated down and alighted on the arm she held out to invite it. The white owl, its eyes seeming to observe them all with intelligence, snapped its wicked beak as Takya stared back at it. Then with a flap of wings, it went. "From us they may hide their thoughts and movements. But they can not close the sky to those things whose natural home it is. Be sure we shall know, and speedily, when they move against us." They did not leave their posts however. And Zackuth readied for action by laying up pieces of rubble which might serve as well as his first lucky shot. It was a long night, wearing on the tempers of all but Takya. Time and time again Craike tried to probe the dark. But a blank wall was all he met. Whatever moves the Black Hoods considered, they were protected by an able barrier. Jorik took to pacing back and forth on the terrace, five strides one way, six the other, and he brought down his bow with a little click on the time-worn stones each time he turned. "They are as busy hatching trouble as a forest owl is in hatching an egg! But what kind of trouble?" Craike had schooled himself into an outward patience. "For the learning of what we shall have to wait. But why do they delay -- ?" Why did they? The more on edge he and his handful of defenders became, the easier meat they were. And he had no doubt that the Black Hoods were fertile in surprise. Though, judging by what Takya and Jorik reported, they were not accustomed to such determined and resourceful opposition to their wills. Such opposition would only IF firm their desire to wipe out the ' rebels. "They move," Takya's witch fires leaped from every point she had earlier indicated. In that light she sped across the terrace to stand close to Jorik and Craike, close to the parapet wall. "This is the lowest hour of the night when the blood runs slow and resistance is at its depth. So they choose to move -- " Jorik snapped his bow cord, and the thin twang was a harp's note in the silence. But Takya shook her head. "Only the Hooded On come, and they are well armored. Seel" She jumped to the parapet and clapped her hands. TTie witch light shown down on four standing within the thorn barrier, staring up from under the shadow of their hoods. An arrow sang, but it never reached its mark. Still feet away from the leader's breast it fell to earth. B ut Jorik refused to accept defeat. With all the force of his arm he sent a second shaft after the first. And it, too, landed at the feet of the silent four. Craike grasped at Takya, but she eluded him, moving to call down to the Hooded Ones: "What would you, men of power -- a truce?" "Daughter of evil, you are not alone. Let us speak with your lord." She laughed, shaking out her unbound hair, rippling it through her fingers, gloatingly. "Does this show that I have taken a lord, men of power? Takya is herself, without division, still. Let that hope die from your hearts. I ask you again, what is it you wish -- a truce?" "Set forth your lord, with him we will bargain." She smoothed back her hair impatiently. "I have no lord, I and my power are intact. Try me and see, Tousuth. Yes, I know you Tousuth, the Master, and Salsbal, Bulan, Yily -- " she told them off with a pointed forefinger, a child counting, out in some game. Jorik stirred and drew in a sharp breath, and the men below shifted position. Craike caught thoughts -- to use a man's name in the presence of hostile powers, that was magic indeed. "Takya!" It was a reptile's hiss. Again she laughed. "Ah, but the first naming was mine, Tousuth. Did you believe me so poor and power lost that I would obey you tamely? I did not at the horning, why should I now when I stand free of you? Before you had to use Takyi to capture me. But Takyi is gone into the far darkness, and over me now you can lay no such net! Also I have summoned one beside me -- " Her hand closed on Craike's arm, drawing him forward. He faced the impact of those eyes meeting them squarely. Raising his hand he told them off as the girl had done: "Tousuth, Master of women baiters, Salsbal, Bulan, Yily, the wolves who slink behind him. I am here, w ' at would you have of me?" Hut they were silent, and he CO lid feel them searching him out, niiking thrusts against his mind shield, learning in their turn that he was of their kind; he was Esper bom. "What. would you have?" he repeated more loudly. "If you do not wish to treat -- then leave the night undisturbed for honest men's sleep." "Changling!" It was Tousuth who spat that. It was his turn to point a finger and chant a sentence or two, his men watching him with confidence. But Craike, remembering that other scene before Sampur, was trying a wild experiment of his own. He concentrated upon the man Takya had named Yily. Black cloak, black hood making a vulture's shadow against the rock. Vulture -- vulture! He did not know that he had pointed to his chosen victim, nor that he was repeating that word aloud in the same intonation as Tousuth's chant. "Vulture!" Cool hand closed about his other wrist, and from that contact power flowed to join his. It was pointed, launched -- # tT culture!" V A black bird flapped and screamed, arose on beating wings to fly at him, raw red head outstretched, beak agap. There was the twang of a bow cord. A scream of agony and despair and a black cloaked man writhed out his life on the slope by the thorn thicket. "Good!" Takya cried. "That was well done, Ka-rak, very well done! But you can not use that weapon a second time." IF C raike was filled with a wild elation, and he did not listen to her. His finger already indicated Bulan and he was chanting: "Dog -- " But to no purpose. The Black Hood did not drop to all fours, he remained human; and Craike's voice faded. Takya spoke in swift whisper: "They are warned, you can never march against them twice by the same path. Only because they were unprepared did you succeed. Ho, Tousuth," she called, "do you now believe that we are well armed? Speak with a true tongue and say what you want of us." "Yes," Jorik boomed, "you can not take us. Master of power. Go your way, and we shall go ours -- " "There can not be two powers in any land, as you should know, Jorik of the Eagles' towers, who tried once before to prove that and suffered thereby. There must be a victor here -- and to the vanquished -- naught!" Craike could see the logic in that. But the Master was continuing: As to what we want here -- it is a decision. Match your power against ours, changling. And since you have not taken the witch, use her also if you wish. In the end it will come to the same thing, for both of you must be rendered helpless." "Here and now?" asked Craike. "Dawn comes, it will soon be another day. By sun or shadow, we care not in such a battle." The elation of his quick success in that first try was gone. Craike fingered the bow he had not yet used. He shrank inwardly from the contest the other proposed, he was too uncertain of his powers. One victory had come from too little knowledge. Takya's hand curled about his stiff fingers once again. The impish mockery was back in her voice, ruffling his temper, irritating him into defiance. "Show them what you can do, Lord Ka-rak, you who can master illusions." He glanced down at her, and the sight of that cropped lock of hair at her temple gave him an odd confidence. Neither was Takya as allpowerful as she would have him believe. "I accept your challenge," he called. "Let it be here and now." "WE accept your challenge!" Takya's flash of annoyance, her quick correction, pleased him. Before the echo of her words died away she hurled her first attack. Witch fire leaped down slope to ring in the three men, playing briefly along the body of the dead Yily. It flickered up and down about their feet and legs so they stood washed in palid flame. While about their heads darted winged shapes which might have been owls or other night hunters. There was a malignant hissing, and the slope sprouted reptiles, moving in a wave. Illusions? All -- or some. But designed, Craike understood, to divert the enemy's minds. He added a few of his own -- a wolfish shape crouching in the shadow -- leaping -- to vanish as its paws cut the witch fire. Swift as had been Takya's attack, so did those below parry. An oppressive weight, so tangible that Craike looked up to see if some mountain threatened them from overhead, began to close down upon the parapet. He heard a cry of to be seen now, a giant press closing upon them. Balls of witch fire flashed out of the light pillars, darted at those on the parapet. One flew straight at Craike's face, its burning breath singeing his skin. "Fool!" Takya's thought was a whip lash, "Illusions are only real for the believer." H e steadied, and the witch ball vanished. But he was badly shaken. This was outside any Esper training he had had, it was the very thing he had been conditioned against. He felt slow, clumsy, and he was ashamed that upon Takya must the burden of their defense now rest. Upon her -- Craike's eyes narrow. He loosened her hold on him did not try to contact her. There was too much chance of selfbetrayal in that. His plan was utterly wild, but it had been well demonstrated that the Black Hoods could only be caught by the unexpected. Another witch ball hurtled at him, and he leaped to the terrace, landing with a force which sent a lance of pain up his healing leg. But on the parapet a Craike still stood, shoulder to shoulder with Takya. To maintain that illusion was a task which made him sweat as he crept silently away from the tower. He had made a security guard to astonish Takya, the wolf, all the other illusions. But they had been only wisps, things alive for the moment with no need for elaboration. To hold this semblance of himself was in some ways easier, some ways harder. It was easier to make, for the image was produced of selfknowledge, and it was harder, for it was meant to deceive masters of illusion. Craike reached the steps to the rock of the offerings. The glow of the witch lights here was pale, and the ledge below dark. He crept down, one arrow held firmly in his hand. Here the sense of oppression was a hundredfold worse, and he moved as one wading through a flood which entrapped limbs and brain. Blind, he went to all fours, feeling his way to the river. He set the arrow between his teeth in a bite which indented its shaft. A knife would have been far better, but he had no time to beg Jorik's. He slipped over, shivering as the chill water took him. Then he swam under the arch. It was comparatively easy to reach the shingle where the dugout of the Black Hoods had turned over. As he made his way to the shore he brushed against watersoaked cloth and realized he shared this scrap ofgravel with the dead. Then, arrow still between his teeth, Craike climbed up behind the Black Hoods' position. IF IX T he thorn hedge cloaked the rise above him. But he concentrated on the breaking of that illusion, wading on through a mass of thorns, intact to his eyes, thin air at his passing. Then he was behind the Black Hoods. Takya stood, a black and white figure on the wall above, beside the illusion Craike. Nowl The illusion Craike swelled a little more than life size, while his creator gathered his feet under him, preparatory to attack. Tlie Craike on the wall altered -- anything to hold the attention of Tousuth for a crucial second or two. Monster grew from man, wings, horns, curved tusks, all embellishments Craike's imagination could add. He heard sihouts from the tower. But with the arrow as a dagger in his hand, he sprang, allowing himself in that moment to see only, to think only of a point on Tousuth's back. The head drove in and in, and Tousuth went down on his knees, clutching at his chest, coughing. While Craike, with a savagery he had not known he possessed, leaned on the shaft to drive it deeper. Fingers hooked about Craike's throat, cutting off air, dragging him back. He was pulled from Tousuth, loosing his hold on the arrow shaft to tear at the hands denying him breath. There was a r fog which even the witch lights could not pierce and the roaring in his head was far louder than the shouts from the tower. Then he was flat on the ground, still moving feebly. But the hands were gone from his throat, and he gasged in air. Around him circled balls of fire, dripping, twirling, he closed his eyes against their glare. "Lord -- Lord!" The hail reached him only faintly. Hands pulled at him, and he tried to resist. But when he opened his eyes it was to see Jorik's brown face. Jorik was at the tower -- how had Craike returned there? Surely it all illusion? "He is not dead." Whether or not that was said to him, Craike did not know. But his fingers were at his throat and he winced from his own touch. Then an arm came under his shoulders, lifting him, and he had a dizzy moment until earth and gray sky settled into their proper places. Takya was there, with Nickus and Zackuth hovering in the background of black jerkined guardsmen who stared back at her sullenly over the bodies of the dead. For they were all dead -- the Hooded Ones. There was Tousuth, his head in the sand. And his fellows crumpled beside him. The witch girl chanted, and in her hands was a cat's cradle of black strands. The men who followed Tousuth cringed, and their fear was a cloud Craike could see. He grabbed at Jorik, won to his feet, and tried to hail Takya. But not even a croak came from his tortured throat. So he flung himself at her, one hand out like a sword blade to slash. It fell across that wicked net of hair, breaking it, and went to close upon Takya's wrist in a crushing grip. "Enough!" He could get out that command mind to mind. She drew in upon herself as a eat crouches for a spring, and spat, her eyes green with feral lusting fire. But he had an answer to that, read it in her own spark of fear at his touch. His hands twined in her hair. 'They are men," he pulled those black strands to emphasize his words," they only obeyed orders. We have a quarrel with their masters, but not with them!" "They himted, and now they shall be hunted!" "I have been hunted, as have you, witch woman. And while I live there shall be no more such hunts -- whether I am hound or quarry." "While you live -- " her menace was ready. S uddenly Craike forced out a hoarse croak meant for laughter. "You, yourself, Takya, have put the arrow to this bow cord!" He kept one hand tangled in her hair. But with the other he snatched from her belt the knife she had borrowed from Nickus and not returned. She screamed, beat against him with her fists, tried to bite. He mastered her roughly, not loosing his grip on that black silk. And then in sweeps of that well whetted blade he did what the Black Hoods had failed in doing, he sawed through those lengths. "I am leaving you no weapons, Takya. You shall not rule here as you have thought to do -- " The exultation he had known when he had won his first victory against the Black Hoods was returning a hundredfold. "For a while I shall pull those pretty claws of yours!" He wondered briefly how long it would take her hair to regrow. At least they would have a breathing spell before her powers returned. Then, his arm still prisoning her shoulders, the mass of her hair streaming free from his left hand, he turned to face the guardsmen. 'Tell them to go," he thought, "taking their dead with them." "You will go, taking these with you," she repeated aloud, stony calm. One of the men dropped to his knees by Tousuth's body, then abased himself before Craike. "We are your hounds. Master." Craike found his voice at last. "You are no man's hounds -- for you are a man. Get you gone to Sampur and tell them that the power is no longer to make hind nor hound. If there are those who wish to share the fate of Tousuth, perhaps when they look upon him as dead they will think more of it." "Lord, do you come also to Sampur to rule?" the other asked timidly. Craike laughed. "Not until I have established my lordship elsewhere. Get you back to Sampur and trouble us no more." He turned his back on the guardsmen and, drawing the silent Takya, still within the circle of his arm, with him, started back to the towIF er. The bowmen remained behind, and Craike and the girl were alone as they reached the upper level. He paused then and looked down into her set, expressionless face. "What shall I do with you?" You have shamed me and taken my power from me. What does a warrior do with a female slave?" She formed a stark mind picture, hurling it at him as she had hurled the stone on the mesa. With his left hand he whipped her hair across her face, smarting under that taunt. "I have taken no slave, nor any woman in that fashion, nor shall I. Go your way, Takya, and fight me again if you wish when your hair has grown." S he studied him, and her astonishment was plain. Then she laughed and clutched at the hair, tearing it free from his grasp, bundling it into the front of her single garment. "So be it, Ka-rak. It is war between us. But I am not departing hence yet a while." She broke away, and he could hear the scuff of her feet on the steps as she climbed to her own chamber in the tower. "They are on their way, Lord, and they will keep to it." Jorik came up. He stretched. "It was a battle not altogether to my liking. For the honest giving of blows from one's hand is better than all this magic, potent as it is." Craike sat down beside the fire. He could not "have agreed more heartily with any suggestion. Now that it was over he felt drained of energy. "I do not believe they will return," he wheezed hoarsely, very conscious of his bruised throat. Nickus chuckled, and #ckuth barked his own laughter. "Seeing how you handled the Lady, Lord, they want nothing more than to be out of your grasp and that as speedily as possible. Nor, when those of Sampur see what they bring with them, do I think we shall be sought out by others bearing drawn swords. Now," Jorik slapped his fat middle, "I could do with meat in my belly. And you. Lord, have taken such handling as needs good food to counter." There was no mention of Takya, nor did any go to summon her when the meat was roasted. And Craike was content to have it so. He was too tired for any more heroics. Nickus hummed a soft tune as he rubbed down his unstrung bow before wrapping it away from the river damp. And Craike was aware that the younger man glanced at him slyly when he thought the Esper's attention elsewhere. Jorik, too, appeared highly amused at some private thoughts, and he had fallen to beating time with one finger to Nickus' tune. Craike shifted uncomfortably. He was an actor who had forgotten his lines, a novice required to make a ritual move he did not understand. What they wanted of him he could not guess, for he was too tired to mind toudi. He only wanted sleep, and that he sought as soon as he painfully swallowed his last bite. But he heard through semistupor a surprised exclamation from Nickus. "He goes not to seek her -- to take her!" J orik's answer held something of approval in it. "To master such as the Lady Takya he will need full strength of power and limb. His is the wisest way, not to gulp the fruits of battle before the dust of the last charge is laid. She is his by shearing, but she is no meek ewe to come readily under any man's hand." Takya did not appear the next day, nor the next. And Craike made no move to climb to her. His companions elaborately did not notice her absence as they worked together, setting in place fallen stones, bringing the tower into a better smoke the meat. For as Jorki pointed out: "Soon comes the season of cold. We must build us a snug place and have food under our hands before then." He broke off and gazed thoughtfully down stream. "This is also the fair time when countrymen bring their wares to market. There are traders in Sampur. We could offer our hides, even though they be newly fleshed, for salt and grain. And a bow -- this Kaluf of whom you have spoken, would he not give a good price for a bow?" Craike raised an eyebrow. "Sampur? But they have little cause to welcome us in Sampur." "You and the Lady Takya, Lord, they might take arms against in fear. But if Zackuth and I went in the guise of wandering hunters -- and Zackuth is of the Children of Noe, he could trade privately with his kin. We must have supplies. Lord, before the coming of the cold, and this is too fine a fortress to abandon." So it was decided that Jorik and Zackuth were to try their luck with the traders. Nickus went to hunt, wrecking havoc among the flocks of migrating fowl, and Craike held the tower alone. A s he turned from seeing them away, he sighted the owl wheel out from the window slit of the upper chamber, its mournful cry sounding loud. On sudden impulse he went inside to climb the stair. There had been enough of her sulking. He sent that thought before him as an order. She did not reply. Craike's heart beat faster. Was -- had she gone? The rough outer wall, was it possible to climb down that? He flung himself up the last few steps and burst into the room. She was standing there, her shorn head higji as if she and not he had been the victor. When he saw her Craike 'Stopped. Then he moved again, faster than he had climbed those stairs. For in that moment the customs of this world were clear, he knew what he must do, what he wanted to do. If this revelation was some spell of Takya's he did not care. Later he was aroused by the caress of silk on his body, felt her cool fingers as he had felt them drawing the poison from his wounds. It was a black belt, and she IF was making fast about him, murmuring words softly as she interwove strand with strand about his waist until there was no beginning nor end to be detected. "My chain on you, man of power." Her eyes slanted down at him. He buried both his hands in the ragged crop of hair from which those threads had been severed and so held her quiet for his kiss. "My seal upon you, witch." "What Tousuth would have done, you have accomplished for 'him," she observed pensively when he had given her a measure of freedom once again. "Only through you may I now use my power." "Which is perhaps well for this land and those who dwell in it," he laughed. "We are now tied to a common destiny, my lady of river towers." She sat up running her hands through her hair with some of her old caress. "It will grow again," he consoled. "To no purpose, except to pleasure my vanity. Yes, we are tied together. But you do not regret it, Ka-r-ak -- " "Neither do you, witch." There was no longer any barrier between their minds, as there was none between their bodies. "What destiny will you now spin for the two of us?" "A great one. Tousuth knew my power-to-come. I would now realize it." Her chin went up. "And you with me, Ka-rak. By this," her hand rested lightly on the belt. "Doubtless you will set us up as rulers over Sampur?" he said lazily, lazily. "Sampur!" she sniffed. 'This world is wide -- " Her arms went out as if to encircle all which lay beyond the tower walls. Ctraike drew her back to him jealously. "For that there is more than time enough. This is an hour for something else, even in a warlock's world." Two Complete Short Novels by Keith Laumer by Hayden Howard Also stories and features by top science-fiction writers: -- and many others! April Issue of Galaxy on sale now -- get your copy today! IF  Short Story The berserker owned them and would destroy them when if chose -- unless they could somehow destroy if firsti T lie ship had been a human transport once, and it still transported humans, hut now they rode like well cared for cattle on the road to market. Control of their passage and destiny had been vested in the electronic brain and auxiliary devices built into the New England after its capture in space by a berserker machine. GUberto Klee, latest captive to be thrust aboard, was more frightened than he had ever been before in his young life, and trying not to ew it. Why the berserker had kept him alive at all he did not know. He was afraid to think about it. Like evetyone else he had heard the horror stories -- of human brains, stMl halfalive, built into berserker computers as auxiliary circuits; of human bodies used in the berserkers' experiments intended to produce convincing artificial men; of humans kept os test-targets for new berserker death-rays, toxins, ways to drive men mad. After the raid Gil and the handful of others who had been taken with him -- for aU they knew, the only survivors of their planet -- had been separated and kept in solitary compartments aboard the great machine in space. And now the same berserker devices that had captured him, or other devices like them, had taken him from his cell and led him to an interior dock aboard the planetoid-sized berserker; and before they put him aboard this ship that had been a human transport once, he had time to see the name New England on her hull. Once aboard, he was put into a chamber about twenty paces wide and perhaps fifty long, twelve or fifteen feet high. Evidently all interior decks and paneling, everything non-essential, had been ripped out. There was left the inner hull, some plumbing, some light, artificial gravity and air at a good level. There were eight other people in the chamber, standing together and talking among themselves; they fell silent as the machines opened the door and thrust Gil in with them. #T Tow do," said one man to Jn Gil, as the door closed behind the machines again. The speaker was a thin guy who wore some kind of spaceman's uniform that now bagged loosely on his frame. As he spoke he took a cautious step forward and nodded. Everyone was watching Gil alertly -- just in case he should turn out to be violently crazy, Gil supposed. Well, it wasn't the first time in his life he'd been thrown in with a group of prisoners who looked at him like that. "My name is Rom," the thin guy was saying. "Ensign Rom, United Planets Space Force." "Gilberto Klee." Everyone relaxed just slightly, seeing that he was fairly normal. "This is Mr. Hudak," said Ensign Rom, indicating another young, once-authoritative man. Then he went on to name the others, but Gil couldn't remember all their names at once. Three of them were women, one of them young enough to make Gil look at her with some interest. Then he saw how she kept half-crouching behind the other people, staring smiling at nothing, fingers playing omceasingly with her long and imkempt hair. Mr. Hudak had started to ask Gil questions, bis voice gradually taking on the tone used by peoplein-charge conducting an examination. In school. Youth Bureau, police station. Resettlement, always there was that certain tone of voice used by processors when speaking to the processed -- though Gil had never put the thought in just those words. Hudak was asking him: "Were you on another ship, or what?" On a ship. You were not a spaceman, of course, said the tone of authority now. You were just a boy being processed somewhere, we see that by looking at you. Not that the tone of authority was intentionally nasty. It usually wasn't. "I was on a planet," said Gil. "Bella Coola." "My God, they hit that too?" "They sure hit the part where Iwas, anyway." Gil hadn't seen anything to make him hopeful about the rest of the planet. At the Resettlement Station where he was they had had just a few minutes' warning from the military, and then the radios had gone silent. There wasn't much the people at the Station could do with the little warning they had been given. Already they could see the berserker heat-rays and dust-maohines playing over the woods, which was the only concealment they might have to run to. Still, some of the kids had been trying to run when the silvery, poisonous-looking dart that was the berserker's launch had appeared descending overhead. The Old Man had come tearing out of the compound into the fields on his scooter -- maybe to tell his young people to run, maybe to tell them to stand still. It didn't seem to make much difference. The ones who ran were rayed down by the enemy, and the ones who didn't were rounded up. What Gil recalled most clearly about the other kids dying was the look of agony on the Old Man's face -- that one face of authority that had never seemed to be looking at Gil from the other side of a glass wall. When all the survivors of the Station had been herded together in a bunch, standing in a little crowd under the bright sky in the middle of a vine-grown field, the machines singled out the Old Man. Some of the machines thk had landed were in the shape of metal men, some looked more like giant steel ants. "Thus to all life, save that which serves the cause of Death," said a twanging metal voice. And a steel hand picked a squash from a vine and held the fruit up and squeezed through it so it fell away in broken pulpy halves. And then the same hand, with squash-pulp still clinging to the bright fingers, reached to take the Old Man by the wrist. The twanging voice said: "You are to some degree in control of these other life-units. You will now with us." The Old Man only shook his head, no. Muttered something. The bright hand squeezed, slowlyThe Old Man squeezed, but did not fall. Neither did he give any order for co-operation. Gil was sitonding rigid, and silent, but screaming in his own mind for the Old Man to give in, to fall down and pass out, anything to make it stop... But the Old Man would not fall, or pass out, or give the order that was wanted. Not even when the berserker's big hand came up to clamp around his skull, and the pressure was once more applied, slowly as before. #'lThat was on Bella Coola?" V V Ensign Rom was asking him. "I mean, military?" "Not much, I guess," said Gil. "I on't know much about military stuff. I was just sort of studying to be a farmer." "Oh." Rom and Hudak, the two sharp, capable-looking ones among the prisoners, exchanged glances. Maybe they knew the farms on Bella Coola had been just a sort of reform-school setup for tough Idds from Barth and other crowded places. Gil told himself he didn't give a damn what anyone thought. And then he realized that he had always been telling himself that and that maybe now, for the first time in his life, it was the truth. In a little while the prisoners were fed. A machine brought in a big cake of mottled pink and green stuff, the same tasteless substance Gil had lived on since his capture eight or ten days ago. While he ate he sat off to one side by himself, looking at nothing and listening to the two sharp guys talking to each other in low voices. IF Rom was saying: "Look we're in what was the crew quarters, right?" "If you say so." "Right. Now they brought me in through the forward compartment, the control room, and I had a chance to take a quick look around there. And I've paced off the length of this chamber we're in. I tell you I served aboard one of these ships for a year, I know 'em inside out." "So?" "Just this." There was a faint scrape and shudder through the hull. When Rom spoke again his low voice was charged with excitement. "Feel that? We're going spacebome again, the big machine's sending this ship somewhere, for some reason. That means we would have a chance, if only... Listen, the circuitry that makes up the brain that's controlling this ship and keeping us prisoner -- it has to be spread out along that plastic bulkhead at the forward end of this compartment we're in. On the control room side there's another plastic slab been installed, and the circuitry must be sandwiched in between the two." "How can you know?" Hudak sounded skeptical. Rom's voice dropped even lower, giving arguments most of which Gil could not hear. "... as well protected there against outside attack as anywhere in the ship... paced off the distance... overhead here, look at the modifications in the power conduits going forward..." Hudak: "You're right, I guess. Or at least it seems probable. That plastic barrier is all that keeps us from getting at it, then. I wonder how thick." Gil could see from the corner of his eye that the two sharp guys were trying not to look at what they were talking about; but he was free to stare. The forward end of the big chamber they were in was a blank greenish plastic wall, pierced along the top for some pipes, and at one side by the door through which Gil had been brought in. "Thick enough, of course. We don't have so much os a screwdriver, and we'd probably need a cutting torch or a hydraulic jack -- " Hudak nudged Rom and they fell silent. The door forward had opened, and one of the man-sized machines came in. "Ghberto Klee," it twanged. "Come." R om had been right; they were spacebome again, away from the big berserker. In the forward compartment Gil had a moment to look out before the man-sized machine turned him away from a view of stars and faced him toward a squat console, a thing of eyelike lights and a radiolike speaker, which seemed to crouch before the front of the plastic wall. "Gilberto Klee," said the console's speaker. "It is my purpose to keep a number of human life-units alive and in goodhealth." For a while, Gil thought. The speaker said: "The standard nutrient on which prisoners are fed is evidently lacking in one or more necessary trace ingredients. In several places where prisoners are ibeing held, symptoms of nutritional deficiency have developed, including general debility, loss of sight, loss of teeth." Pause. "Are you aware of my meaning?" "Yeah. I just don't talk much." "You Gilberto Klee, are experienced at growing lifeforms to be consumed by human life-units as food. You will begin here in this ship to grow food for yourself and other human lifenits." There was a pause that stretched on. Gil could see the Old Man very plainly and hear him scream. "Squash would be good," Gil said at last. "I know how to raise it, and there's lots of vitamins and stuff in the kind of squash we had at the Station. But I'd need seeds, and soil..." "A quantity of soil has 'been provided," said the console. And the man-sized machine picked up and held open a plastic case that was divided into many compartments. "And seeds," the console added. "Which are the ones for squash?" When Gil was returned to the prison chaimiber other machines were already busy there with the modifications he had said would be needed. They were adding more overhead lights and covering most of the deck space with wide, deep trays. These trays were set on the transverse girders of the inner hull, revealed by the removal of decking. Under the trays drainage pipes were being connected, while sprinklers went high overhead. Into the trays the machines were dumping soil they carted in from somewhere. Gil gave his fellow prisoners an explanation of what was going on. "So that's why it took you and some of the other farmers alive," said Hudak. "There must be a lot of different places where human prisoners are being held and maybe bred for experiments. Lots of healthy animals needed." "So," said Rom, looking sideways at Gil. "You're going to do what it wants?" "A guy has to keep himself alive," Gil said, "before he can do anything else." Rom began in a heated whisper: "Is it better that a berserker's prisoners should ibe kept -- " But he broke off when one of the mansized machines paused nearby, as if it was watching and listening. T hey came to call that machine the Overseer, because from then on it never left the humans, though the other machines departed when the construction job was done. Through the Overseer, the berserker-Jbrain controlling the ship informed Gil that the other prisoners were mainly a labor pool, should he need human help in food-growing. Gil thought it over briefly. "I don't need no help -- yet. Just leave the people stay here for now, but I'll do the planting." Spacing the hills and dropping the seeds was easy enough, though the machines had left no aisles between the trays of soil except a small passage leading to the door. The trays farthest forward almost touched the plastic bulkhead, and others were laid edge to edge back IF to within a few paces of the rear. The machines gave Gil a platform the size of a short surfboard, on which he could sit or lie while hovering at a steady two feet above the soil. Hudak said the thing must work by a kind of hole in the artificial gravity field. On the platform was a simple control lever by means of which Gil could cause it to move left or right, forward or back. Almost as soon as the planting was done, he had to start tending his fast-growing vines. The vines had to be twisted to make them grow along the soil in the proper direction, and then there were extra blossoms to be pinched off. A' couple of the other prisoners offered to help, despite Rom's scowling at them, but Gil refused the offer. You have to have a knack, he said, and some training. And he did it all himself. The two sharp guys had little to say to Gil about anything any more. But they were plainly interested in his surfboard, and one day while the Overseer's back was turned Rom took Gil hurriedly aside. Rom whispered quickly and feverishly, like a man taking what he knows is a crazy chance, fed up enough to take it anyway. "The Overseer doesn't pay much attention to you any more when you're working, Gil. You could take that platform of yours -- ," Rom's right hand, extended horizontally, rammed the tips of its fingers into the palm of his vertical left hand -- "into the wall. If you could only make a little crack in the plastic, a hole big enough to stick a hand through, we'd have some kind of chance. I'd do it but the Overseer won't let anyone but you near the plaform." Gil's lip curled. " ain't gonna try nothin' like that." The thin sickly man was not used to snotty kids talking back to him, and he flared feebly into anger. "You think the berserker's going to take good care of you?" "The machine built the platform, didn't it?" Gil demanded. Wouldn't give us nothing we could bust through there with. Not if there's anything so important as you think back there." For a moment Gil thought Rom was going to swing at him, but other people held Rom back. And suddenly the Overseer was no longer standing on the other side of the chamber with its back turned, but right in front of Rom, staring at him with its lenses. A few long, long seconds passed before it was plain that the machine was not going to do anything this time. But maybe its hearing was better than the sharp guys had thought. # # 'They ain't ripe yet, but we canL eat some of 'em anyway," said Gil a couple of weeks later, as he slid off his platform to join the other people in the few square yards of living space left along the chamber's rear bulkhead. Cradled in Gil's arm were half a dozen dull yellowish ovoids. He turned casually to the Overseer and asked: "Got a knife?" There was a pause. Then the Overseer extended a hand, from vfhich a wicked blade extended itself like an extra finger. "I will divide the fruit," it said, and proceeded to do so with great jfrecision. The little group of prisoners had come crowding around, some interest stirring in their dull eyes. They ate greedily the little morsels that the Overseer doled out; anything ta'. OvI good after weeks or months of nothing but the changeless pinkand-green cake. Rom, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation, joined the others in eating some raw squash. He showed no enjoyment as the others did. It was just that a man had to be healthy, he seemed to be thinking, before he could persuade others to get themselves killed, or let themselves sicken and die. Under the optimum conditions provided by the berserker at Gil's direction, only weeks rather than months were needed for the trays to become filled with broad roundish leaves, spreading above a profusion of thickening, ground-hugging vines. Half of the fast-growing fruit was hidden under leaves, while others burgeoned in the full light, and a few hung over the edges of the trays, resting their new weight on the girders under the trays or sagging all the way to the deck. Gil maintained that the time for a proper harvest was still an indefinite number of days away. But each day he now came back to the living area with a single squash to be divided by the Overseer's knife; and each day the fruit he brought was larger. He was out in the middle of his "fields," lying prone on his platform and staring moodily at a swelling squash, when the sound of a sudden commotion back in the living area made him raise himself and turn his head. The center of the commotion was the Overseer. The machine was hopping into the air again and again, as if the brain that controlled it had gone berserker indeed. The prisoners cried out, scrambling to get away from the Overseer. Then the machine stopped its mad jumping, and stood turning in a slow circle, shivering, the knife-finger on its hand flicking in and out. "Attention, we are entering battle," the Overseer proclaimed suddenly, dead monotone turned up to deafening volume. "Under attack. All prisoners are to be -- they will all -- " It said more, but at a speed no human ear could follow, gibbering up the frequency scale to end in something like a human scream. The mad girl who never spoke let out a blending yell of terror. The Overseer tottered and swayed, brandishing its knife. It babbled and twitched -- like an old man with steel fingers vising his head. Then it leaned forward, leaned further, and fell on its face, disappearing from Gil's sight below the level of trays and vines, striking the deck with a loud clang. That clang was echoed, forward, by a cannon-crack of sound. Gil had been keeping himself from looking in that direction, but now he turned. The plastic wall had been split across the center third of its extent by a horizontal fissure a few feet above the trays. IF Gil lay still on his platfonn, watching cautiously. Ensign Rom came charging across the trays and past him, trampling the crop unheedingly, to hurl himself at the wall. Even cracked, it resisted his onslaught easily, but he kept pounding at it with his fists, trying to force his fingers into the tiny crevice. Gil looked back the other way. The Overseer was still down. Hudak was trying the forward door and finding it locked. Then first he, and then the other people, were scrambling over trays to join Rom and help him. Gil tested his platform's control and found that it no longer worked, though the platform was still aloft. He got up from it, setting foot in soil for the first time in a couple of months; it was a good feeling. Then he lifted the thin metal platform sideways out of its null and carried it over to where everyone else was already struggling with the wall. "Here," Gil said, "try sticking the corner of this in the crack and pryin'." I t took them several hours of steady effort to make a hole in the wall big enough for Rom to squeeze through. In a minute he was back, crying and shouting, announcing freedom and victory. They were in control of the ship! en he came back the second time, he was in control of himself as well, and puzzled. "What cracked the wall, though? There's no fighting, no other ships around -- " He fell silent as he joined Hudak in staring down the narrow space between the farthest forward tray and the slightly bulged-in section of wall where the strain had come to force the first crack above. Gil had already looked down there into the niches between wall and transverse girder. Those niches were opened up now, displaying their contents -- the dull yellowish fruit Gil had guided into place with a pinch and a twist of vine. The fruit had been very small then, but now they were huge, and cracked gently open with the sudden release of their own internal pressure. Funny pulpy things that a man could break with a kick, or a steel hand squeeze through like nothing... "But growth is stobborn, boys," the Old Man always said, squinting to read a dial, then piling more weights onto the machine with the growing squash inside it, a machine he'd set up to catch kids' eyes and minds. "Can't take a sudden shock. Slow. But now, look. Five thousand pounds pressure per square inch. All growing, aU together. Ever see a tree root swell under a concrete walk?" It was on Rom's and Hudak's faces now that they understood. Gil nodded at them once and ' smiled just faintly to make sure they knew it had been no accident. Then the smile faded from his face as he looked up at the edges of broken plastic, the shattered tracery wiched printed circuits. "I hope it was slow," Gil said. "I hope it felt the whole thing." IF  Novelette The baron's job was to prevent a revolt -- by passing on the message that would trigger it! I T he Chief Porter of Ness House tiptoed into the study of the man who to him represented omnipotence. Omnipotence was in a good mood. Sir Hubert Wulf-Leigh, K.K. S., Baron Minor, was usually in a good mood when he was totaling up the monthly reports on the wine duty which fell to the Lord Deputy Warden of the Ness by delegation of royal prerogative. Looking up smiling from his accounts, he asked casually, "Who is it this time?" "The Senior Captain of the merchanters, m'Lord. 'E says 'ee sent for him." "Hugh Cruffin, eh? That's right, I did send for him. Show him in." There was a few moments' pause and then the dean of merchant captains entered. He was a tall, though now somewhat stooped, figure of a man, whose cap clutched in gnarled arthritic fingers revealed an unruly and rather sparse head of white hair as he followed the porter in. Seeing the captain obviously ill at ease, the baron began with amenities of the more commonplace variety. "Some rum, captain? No? Then you'll try some of this wine, best Madura, out of a Spiniel prize, ni keep you company on this cigar. The damn doctors have warned me to avoid the delights of the grape lest my old liver trouble kick up anew, and my darling Arabella keeps careful tabs on the wine flasks." This confession of human frailty did much to put Captain Hugh at his ease. "You sent for me, 'Lord. I hope we can do the business quickly. I sail on Milady o' Plymness at four bells of the afternoon watch. That's two o'clock, sir." For a moment Sir Hubert frowned slightly. "I know that. Master Cruffin. You know I was Confidential Clerk to the Board of Lord High Admirals and was sort of a seaman by proxy. Now to the point: I remember that when the Freunchies and their sky boats threatened the Ness, you told me about false lighters and wreckers, didn't you?" "Aye, I told 'yee all right. And 'ee used it to give 'en a royal rousting." The old man chuckled appreciatively at the recalled memory. "Now tell me this after a moment of careful thought: Are there any more wreckers on this coast?" "No, my Lord." The aged captain did not hesitate more than a few seconds. "There be none. The Navy and the Coast Patrol cleaned 'em out fifteen or twenty years ago, and I'll fight any man that says different." "I'm afraid the men who made the charges aren't much on fighting," was the placatory response of the official ruler of the Ness. "You've heard of the Compassionate Confraternity of St. Angus of the Open Hands." A puzzled look came over Cruffin's face. "The compassionate Confraternity, who be'en? Oh, 'ee means the black 'uns." A look of feral hatred now came over the merchantman's face. "He'd know it would be'en with sneaking ways and 'eir oaths to the Bishop of New Byzantium; besides which 'en are Pantlerists." The Warden mildly chided him for this display of bigotry. "Captain Hugh, you shouldn't talk that way. You sound as if the Act of Forbearance was never passed." The old man waved a triumphant finger in Sir Hubert's face. "Ajid 'oo sat in Lindesnes Palace when mun was passed? Rupert Pantler, the last Pantler, that's who mun was!" T Tell, a lot of water has flown VV under Lindesnes Bridge since then. At any rate, you know that the Augus brothers have the responsibility for the burial of all Cullenlanders who die on our shores or in our country and, as many of them do, die destitute. You also know about the wreck on Exmouth Head the other day?" The dean of captains nodded gravely. "Aye, I do. But mun was not wreckers. Mun was foolishments. 'En showed too much canvas, 'en did. Fore and main sails, fore and main topsails and main t'gallants, 'en was making. And to come about Exmouth Head with twenty knots o' wind blowing man was not foolishments, mun was suicide." "Well, foolishness or suicide, they were thrown onto Exmouth Head four days past and all hands perished. The next day the sea gave up one of her victims -- a redheaded man, and bythat red head, a medal round his neck and th' cut o' his clothes identified as a Cullenlander. We gave him over to the Angus Brothers and the next day the Superior of the order called on me, said there were indications he was carrying papers of importance to his family in Cullenland and that those papers were no longer on him. I convinced him of the innocence of the Ness or the Navy and he suggested wreckers. I thought of you and had you sent for." "As I said, m'Lord, 'ere be no more wreckers, but -- " the old man's face brightened -- " 'ere still be strand-gleaners. A strand-gleaner be not outlawed. He can take any goods found on the shore, not on the person of a corpse and broken clear of the hull of a ship." Sir Hubert made a tent of his fingers and looked through them at the captain smiling ironically. "And what act of Parliament made this strand-gleaning lawful?" "'Ere be no act of Parliament made mun lawful. Mun be the law of the sea-folk joined with the strand-dwellers and handed down father to son for six hundred years. Mun is older than Parliament." Sir Hubert shrugged. "I guess that is potent law. But in this case, I think we can tap stronger sources like the King's prerogative in flotsam and jetsam. I shall look further into this strand-gleaning. Tell me, are there many strand-gleaners at Exmouth Head?" "Oh no, m'Lord. 'En be agreed be the strand-gleaners that one on 'en shall have a stretch of coast to munself. The strand-gleaner at Exmouth Head be the taverner Will Devers and mun came down from his father Jack Devers and his gaffer Tom Devers an' back all the way in 'eir line. 'En be main proud of the honor, m'Lord." "I don't doubt it," snapped the Lord Deputy. "Picking the bones of Briden's merchant ships! I shall call on Mr. Devers. And I pray you. Captain, do not send word to Master Devers that I am coming. I plan to fall on Mr. Devers by accident. I'll arrange that accident soon." The captain chuckled appreciatively. " 'E be a smooth 'un, 'ee be. 'Ee plans an accident. Mun be some accident." "Yes," frowned Wilfly, "we plan accidents around here. Here are two royals for your trouble. Captain, and there'll be two royals more for your silence too if the innkeeper is taken by surprise." "Tie me up and throw me in the chain locker, should mun get out by my fault. Why, bewig me, ni have the sailmaker sew up my lips with linen thread." IF "That won'e be necessary, Captain. Just go on board the Milady o Plymness and leave the rest to me." A fter the mariner went out the Baron Minor sat a few moments lost in thought, then snapped his fingers and walked from his study to the front hall. He called up the stairs, "Arabella, my love!" "Coming, Wilfly," came the prompt and melodious answer of Dame Arabella Pepinart Wulf-Leigh, the beautiful daughter of Lord High Admiral Alexander Pepinart, a slender, sparkling-eyed, curlyhaired brunette. She had wed the Lord Deputy Warden of the Ness eighteen months previous, two months after the defeat of the Freunch descent on the Plymness. "What id you call me for, my dear?" "Partly to look at you and see how lovely you are," cooed the Knight of the King's Strand, "and that's most important. Of somewhat lesser importance is an invitation. How would you like to leave Wilfly Junior here with his governess, pack a hamper of cold lunch and go out for a day on the green and possibly spend the night at a country inn?" "Corking!" she enthused, then frowned. "And what about work? Do you have some scheme of inspection or some other job in mind while you're down there enjoying life on the green?" Sir Hubert grinned, an abashed sheepish grin. "My darling, you should have been a thief catcher for the Royal Assizes. I did intend to go down to Exmouth to inspect the lighthouse there. I have a responsibility, you know, and whenever a ship is cast up I must go down and quiz the lighthouse keeper. I haven't done it yet in the wreck of the Leveret a few nights back. So if that would spoil it for you -- " He trailed off into an embarrassed silence. "You darling old work-donkey of a man! Of course you wouldn't spoil it. We'll still be together on the coach and lunching on the green, and at the country inn. You ought to be kissed for thinking of this, in fact." She fitted action to the suggestion and threw her arms about his neck. She planted a light but tender smack on his lips, then darted away, laughing, before he could catch her up. "Not now, my love. Later on the green and still better later at the inn; now I must go and order the steward to pack a good lunch and get myself into some country clothing. I'll be down in half an hour." Noting Wulf Leigh's eyebrows raised in amused and quizzical challenge, she amended hastily: "Well, in an hour at any rate." II I t was a glowingly radiant couple that Will Devers, the Taverner of Exmouth, welcomed to his courtyard under his grimly ominous sigh of the "Foundered Ship" that evening. Milady's eyes sparkled. Her every gesture was filled with the innocent enjoyment of the afternoon and the promise of earthier pleasures in the night to come. The Deputy Warden was tanned and relaxed. Hiere a slight knittmg of bis brows as if some unhappy thout lay in ambush at the back of his brain. Will Devers was in seventh heaven. He bustled around and burbled as he bustled. "No, m'Lord, Milady, mun be'nt often that quality folk like 'ee honor my humble way station. Avast, ye lubber!" he bellowed at a porter. "Don't handle her Ladyship's portateau so roughly." "You were Navy?" Sir Hubert inquired, stirred by the turn of the host's speech. "Aye, sir. Mun's right, I was four years cook's mate on the Lyonesse, six years cook on the old Indomitable and two years captain's steward on the Thunderer. Then I came back here a trained man and took over the inn from my old dad. Mun's been the way we Dever's have readied oursens for three or four generations." The Baron Minor chuckled. "I'm glad you mentioned that service as steward; else I was set to walk out. Navy ration cooking isn't my idea of good backround for a taverner." "No, my Lord, mun ben't," agreed the landlord. He ushered them to seats at a large oak table, and began to lavish attentions on them. "Some wine, m'Lord, Milady? I have some good Chambergnon, some passable Madura -- " "Don't bother with your list, Master Devers, just bring a bottle of Rossa." "Darling." The soft word was made all full of sharp and thorny edges, and Lady Arabella's glance would have frozen the wine in its flagons. Sir Hubert got the message. "I'm afraid I forgot. Master Taverner," he explained, "that my doctor in Lindesnes forbade me the pleasures of the vine. I indulged a little too much in those pleasures in recent years and my liver survives only on sufferance." The landlord stood in silent sympathy for this sudden revelation of human frailty in one of so great a station, then shook his head sadly. "Ten bells!" the unusual sailor's oath burst from his lips. "To be so rich and yet so poor." Then his face brightened. " 'Er doctor didn't warn 'ee beyond the vine, did he? He didn't warn 'ee to beware the fruits of the tree, did he?" The Baron Minor fixed him with an intense stare. "No, he didn't. Master Devers. What do you have in mind?" "Well, sir, mun's perry, made of pears, from a tree. So wholesome mun be, the doctors hereparts give mun to colicky children. Shall I bring 'ee some?" The Lord Deputy Warden looked at his wife who shrugged a grudging assent. "Very well, host, you may bring us some." T he perry, when it came, was not exactly an attractive drink, a murky gray color with some slight overtones of green and gold. Wulf Leigh raised his glass to Lady Arabella in a brave toast. "Here's to you, my lady, may this drink exceed its looks in the quality of its IF taste as you, my lady, exceed all other ladies in beauty." With a comical grimace, he murmured: "It had better I For in its looks, it puts me in mind of some of those half poisonous potions they fed me when I was taking the cure at Inverhocking." They were very pleasantly surprised. The perry went down smoothly and sweetly, with just enough fermentation in the drink to add a faintly acrid tang. They enjoyed a second glass before the roast was on the table and at the end of the meal. Sir Hubert ordered the landlord to put six bottles with their baggage and contracted for the weekly delivery of six bottles to the steward of Ness House. "And if the good King comes to Ness House, I shall introduce him to your perry. And a pox take me," enthused the Warden of the Ness, "if you don't get a warrant or patent or whatever they call it as the royal purveyor of perry to His Majesty "'Is blood!" gasped the innkeeper. Then, suddenly abashed, "Regretting the profanity to 'er Ladyship, but mun gave such a start; me a warranted royal purveyor with the right to stamp the royal coat of arms on every bottle. Why, I'd have to double-size my orchard!" "I don't doubt it," gruffed the eminent semi-naval person. Then his face, which had been relaxed a few moments before, now suddenly straightened into the grim visage of a sentencing judge. "If my Lordship can, I can also take away. I'd have a word with you. Master Devers, in your cabinet or study or counting room or wherever you keep your accounts. Arabella, go up to your chambers and indulge yourself in the totally unnecessary fripperies that you needlessly undergo to make yourself beautiful." The former Miss Pepinart gasped in pleasure. "Why, Wilfly, that's one of the nicest things you've ever said to me. Get done with your business quickly. I'll be waiting up." With an arch-conspiratorial smile on her face, she flitted nimbly upstairs. The taverner led the way into his counting room and watched uneasily as his lordship shut the door as soon as he had lit the candle. "If mun's the Chambergnon that ires 'ee 'ere are lawful ways of getting mun. I can explain..." "Don't worry about that, host. I'm not after smuggled merchandise tonight, even though it migjit go better with you if you turned up at the prize auction at Plymness more often than you do now if you're going to sell Freunch wines. I aim to make inquiry into another and more delicate matter. I refer of course to one of the ways in which you acquire property." " 'Ee means, sir?" The innkeeper assumed a baffled look. Sir Hubert's words were sharp and incisive. "I mean, sir, an infringement upon one of the King's rights, the right of the King to possession of all valuables cast up or thrown overboard from wrecks or ships in danger of foundering, the prerogative of flotsam and jetsam. I charge you. Master Devers, with infringement of that right. I charge you with being the strand-gleaner for Exmouth-Kead." B lustered the hosteler, " oo told 'ee that? Mun be a lie!" "The man I got the information from is quite reliable," Wulf-Leigh responded coldly. "I would not advise you to deny it or I shall have to take strong measures." Poor Will shivered. "And ee'd be the man to do mun." Then, a little defiantly. "Very well, my Lord. I own to mun. I be the Strand-gleaner for Exmouth and my father and his father before him as far back as our family Bible shows." The Deputy Warden spoke through tautened lips with a grim smile on his face. "You are not setting up a prescriptive right adverse to the King, are you, Taverner? That is called constructive treason and the penalty is death -- in the case of a commoner by hanging, or of a noble by the axe -- forfeiture of all goods and chattels, attainder of real property and burial in Pauper's Ground." "My Lord," sobbed the new terrified Devers, " 'ee'd do mun to a poor man for picking a few gauds and baubles off the beach? " "Don't be alarmed. Will, I'm not going to do that to you yet. But you must work with me. You know the wreck of the Leveret three or four nights ago? There was a Cullenlander washed up on the beach. He is reported by some powerful persons of my acquaintance to be carrying papers when he drowned. Do you have those papers?" The strand-gleaner hesitated a moment, weighing the advantages of truth against lie. Truth won. "Aye, m'Lord, I do; as I have most everything else I have ever gleaned from the strand. Mun be strandgleaner's law that he must hold and not sell the gifts of the sea lest he be in dire straits." With which words he pulled out a two by four foot trunk and opened it to reveal the fruits of two hundred years of Devers's gleaning. Bracelets, brooches, gold and silver candlesticks, piles of coins glittered dully along with leather objects, books, piles of banknotes still stained by the sea. The Baron Minor whistled in adroyals worth of goods in that chest. You're a rich man. Landlord." " 'Ere mus' be. But I've never counted mun. Mun be bad luck for a strand-gleaner to count his goods. Gaffer did mun, and the next day he got caught in a patch of sink-sand and was nought left o him but his hat. 'Ere be the papers ye're wanting. I broke the seal on the package and found nought but six o' those five Naflon pieces and a silly letter." He handed over a thin packet of oilskin . The government representative huffed imperiously, "You shouldn't break seals, even Naflon seals. It's a bad habit to get into. Silly letter, eh? What's silly about it?" "See for yourself, m'Lord. Mun be nought to understand save the name at the end, Ian Macconnail. Mun be the name o' one of the Cullenlanders rebels who fled to Naflon's court." IF S ir Hubert looked at the now unfolded paper with growing interest and intensity. Aside from the bold signature of Ian Macconail there were eight lines divided into two groups, one of six lines and one of two. The first group read in large capital script: Then having a third of the page blank were the small case script letters : o.l.r.e.h.r.d.a.a.n.e.h.w.i.l. r.e.l.a.h.w.i.o.i.u. "Mun be queer, ben't mun?" probed the innkeeper, breaking in on Wulf-Leigh's iritense scrutiny. "Mun be queer indeed," ironically answered the safekeeper of the Ness. "It's the kind of queer thing that deserves a further looking into by my office. Taverner Devers, I shall look into the possibility of getting you hereditable letters patent as strand-gleaner of Exmouth Head for the good service you rendered the commonweal in preserving this letter." " 'ee means," squeaked the innkeeper, "that mun'd be legal to glean the strand? I don't know, sir. Would take all the joy out of mun, knowing mun were within the law. But thank 'ee kindly, sir." "Ha!" the Warden teased triumphantly. "So you admit you've been acting outside the law! I could confiscate all your ill-gotten gains. But I shan't. You shall have your letters patent at any rate. You may even keep five of the six Naflon sinkers that you have from the dead Cullenlander. I'll need the sixth for evidence if the message reads as I think it will." Will Devers was agog, trying to keep up with the fast-acting mind of the Ness chief. " 'ee means 'ee's solved mun?" "Not yet," acknowledged Sir Hubert. "But I shall and soon. I would advise you strongly to say nothing of this to anyone. Let no one know that you gave me this paper; not even your wife." The ex-Particular Clerk to the Board of Lord High Admirals opened the door of the counting room and walked out, the letter clutched in his fist, muttering: "So the Compassionate brethren of St. Angus have friends whose family receives letters from Ian Maconnail. This will require looking into." He came up into the chambers prepared for him, kissed his wife lightly as she waited his coming clad in a night-rail and with the pillows propped up behind her and then, lighting a spill from the low burning coals on the hearth, lit two tapers, took a sheet of paper from his dispatch case and set out to break the message. Lady Arabella watched for a few moments with impatience and annoyance writ large on her face and finally spoke. "Darling -- " the endearment had an icy edge -- IF "aren't you going to come to bed? I thought we were going to do nothing but enjoy ourselves at the inn. That can surely wait tiU morning." "No, my dear." Sir Hubert's lips were taut. "I'm afraid it can't. I must arrive at Plymness at a reasonable hour of the morning so that none will suspect I've acquired and been working on important papers. Besides which I'm doing it in part for you." tone was less annoyed, more interesting. "How's that?" "It pleases you to be Lady Deputy Warden of the Ness?" He waited her answering nod. "How would you like to be Milady Lieutenant of Cullenland?" "Pooh! No Baroness Minor could have that title. I'd have to be a Viscountess for that. You mean that paper -- " the daughter of Lord High Admiral Pepinard was born and bred to pride of place and pKsition as the reward of service -- "can spell a viscount's rank and the Lord Lieutenancy?" "I can't be sure, but it jolly well might. We will have to solve it first, and then see what message the rebel Ian Maconnail is sending from his exile. Have I your leave to work on, lady love?" She made a half-comic moue of disdain, then murmured in a voice overlaid with tenderness: "Go on, my kind old work-donkey. You'd probably work with my leave or without, so go with your little game and make me a viscountess." "Thank you, wife." He used a gruff tone to hide his own growing passion, and turned again to the hidden message before him. He murmured aloud as his thinking began to warm up: "Let's see now; this can't be too hard a cipher to break. It's one designed to be read by men of limited education as most of these rebels are. This naturally limits the ingenuity of the code. Those letters X and E appear repeated too often to be without meaning. Probably it marks something about the letters before and behind it. Now before is the most logical choice, so to think like a Cullenlander, we'll chose letters after. Let's see now, XE A XE B C. Why, that's nothing more or less than an alphabetic progression! That's a trap for the unwary cipher clerk and I walked into it a little. Let's see what we get with the letters before it. doesn't make sense. How I wish Groberd, the cipher clerk of the Lord High Admirals, were here now! How about those two bottom lines: they don't have XE's. in front of them. Maybe that's meant as an interposition cipher. Let's see now: That's not much better than the first essay. Let's see what else mlght signify a meaning. How about those periods after each of the letters in the last two lines? Are they decorations or do they delimit the words? Let's try again: TO AL TR BE... Suddenly the Warden of the Ness sprang from the table, dashed over to his wife, planted a hearty smack on her unprepared lips and exclaimed: "I've got it! It's a cipher of interposition and abbreviation. Listen to this: 'To all true believers the Prince Edward Pantler lands in Celtland the twenty-fifth all true believers will rise at dawn the twenty-fifth long live Cullenlandl "So there's the message to a needy family that the Father Superior of the Angusards was so concerned about! I think Captain Cruffin was right. They are a pack of Pantlerists." "So what are you going to do about it, my relentless husband?" Though the words were harsh, their tone was melting. His words were crisp and incisive as he pulled open his stock loosened and shed shirt and riding coat. "Tonight, my dear, I will do absolutely nothing. We can't go dashing into town alarming everyone and especially the good brethren of St. Angus. Tomorrow morning we will ride sedately into town, and I shall call on the Father Superior and we shall indulge in a little mutual wool pulling -- he over my eyes and I over his. After that I shall have a talk with my signal yeoman and see how our dry land mast and hoist oonmiunications system works with a message to Lindesnes. As for tonight, I have other fish to fry -- beginning with a delicious little trout who is too fond -- " The warmth and tenderness in his voice belying even the mock anger in his words -- "of calling her loving husband an old work-donkey." "Wilfy." Her voice melted into complete surrender. "Be gentle with me when you devour me, won't you?" lU T he Deputy Warden's coach drew up in front of the grimfacaded, weather-streaked, graystone building that housed the Priory of the Order of St. Angus. The Lord Deputy kissed his wife lightly, dismounted from the coach and entered the ante-hall of the Priory. A novice of the order met him there and said he would announce him to the Father Superior. The ante-hall was dimly lit, as befitted the former ownership of the building, a powerful noble family that had taken part in all the turmoils, intrigues and civil wars that had plagued Briden throughout the dark and middle ages and the beginning of the modem era. To a family of that sort, narrow slits of windows that arrows could be fired through or hot lead and oil dripped out of made sense. Two dim lamps called special attention to one of the walls, where a smoke-begrimed mural showed St. Angus bargaining with one of the pagan petty kings of ancient Cullenland for the freedom of a small enslaved boy. Sir Hubert was engrossed in studying this mural when Father Superior entered noiselessly and coughed softly to attract Wulf-Leigh's attention. "Ah, Father Superior, I'm glad to see you. You're in good health?" "Better in health of the spirit, my Lord Deputy, than of the bcxiy; but we accept whatever bounties in that IF matter the Lord bestows upon us. You, too, seem well. Your old liver complaint has not bothered you?" "Yes," he huffed, "I enjoy good health and expect to fill the Lord's commandment to be fruitful and multiply. You may wonder why I have come?" "I do," the Angusard replied laconically. "I had hoped it might be concerned with the papers of the unfortunate Tachacullen -- pardon me, you eastern folk would call him a Cullenlander, but we of the breed call them sons of Cullen or Tachacullen in the old tongue. His family may suffer great distress if they do not get their hands on the papers," Sir Hubert could be a consumately smooth liar when his country's interests were at stake. He lied now: "I have some strong leads, Father, but they are still not ready for the oven. They are a close-mouthed lot, these men of the Ness shires, and they have some strange customs and odd beliefs. One of the customs is called strand-gleaning, the gathering of chattels spread along the beach by the dark angel of storms. I am fully convinced that the strandgleaners have your unfortunate friend's possessions. But I must move slowly and cautiously. These strand folk have some odd beliefs too." "For instance?" The father's voice was cold, his face an expressionless mask. "They all have a deep and abiding belief that you of the Confraternity are Pantlerists." The eyes in the expressionless mask flickered for an instant -- with hate, defiance, fear? -- then the emotional visor dropped down again. "And you, what do you think? Are we Pantlerists?" Sir Hubert closed up his figurative helmet and gave back just as curtly as his adversary: "I believe nothing I cannot prove before a judge and jury to their satisfaction and that of the public hangman." Now a faint smile cracked the mask. "Then you believe in our innocence of these absurd charges?" #X did not say that," the Knight of the King's Strand pointed up the fine distinction. "I said only that I was not convinced of your guilt. There's a sharp difference between one and the other. There are two things I should like to know to that I can move more effectively against those holding the papers. First off, how did you know of his status as a messenger, and second, why this unseemly .haste about the delivery of the papers?" The priest answered cautiously: "It's more or less a legal matter." Seeing the raised eyebrows of the Deputy Warden, he explained hurriedly, "You know the law of the deadman's hand. It's not in your Bridish law, but in Cullenland and some parts of Celtland, it is still held by. It is decreed that any property belonging to one who has passed must be delivered to either the inheritors, a chief or a priest of the Holy Church within ten days or else must be destroyed or buried with the deceased." Sir Hubert grumped. "That's a strange kind of law. What court handed it down?" Father Superior raised his eyes to heaven momentarily as if calling upon the supernatural powers to free him from his tormentor. "That's very old; the ancient code of Patran-na-Tachan, the fathers of the clan or Chiefs' Law. It is very practical in dealing with property matters in courts where it is still observed." "Oh, of course you mean the hedge courts. I've heard that they cause a great deal of trouble for Bridish justice. But even granting the jurisdiction and rightness of this law you still haven't explained how you knew him to be a courier, and where from he was carrying messages." The priest made the heavenseeking grimace once ag#in. "You know, sir, that he had certain empty wallets and an empty money belt. There were certain marks on those wallets which proclaimed him a courier. As to the origin of his messages, that's a trifle embarrassing. You know in the last Pantlerist risings several hundred Tachacullen were forced to flee their land and settle in Fraunce. These men had family left jn the old land, helpless wives and children, aged mothers and disabled fathers. These men have grown old and died in the fifty years since that futile revolt but their sons and grandsons carry on the task. They serve in Freunch bodyguard troops. Since Naflon has seen fit to honor, to some extent, the Pantler claimant, they serve in the Pantler court and they send money home. They support, 'kinfolk, orphanages, schools." Sir Hubert had caught the priest in a lie, but he chose not to press his advantage. He knew that no wallets or money belts had been on the Cullenlander's body when it was found. "Very well," he lied blandly in retort, "these are good things. We shall for once forget about possible legal results of having intercourse with His Majesty's enemies and shall endeavor to so press the folk of Exmouth so that you shall have the document in the ten days prescribed by the high and puissant court of the hedgerow. Good day. Father Superior." N ess House was regarded as part of the Navy establishment. As a 'result the Deputy Warden of the Ness had at his disposal a signal yeoman and a towering backyard mast that tied into a chain of masts that stretched across the country to provide for speedy communications with Navy House, the headquarters of the Board of Lord High Admirals. Now the youthful signaler came into the study of the master of Ness House, eager to end his long days of relative idleness. "You sent for me, sir. Have a message?" "No," sarcastically drawled Sir Hubert. "I invited you here for a game of chess." Changing to a more kindly tone, he went on: "Yes, I do have a message. You haven't had too many during the last year so I hope your skills are up to it." "Aye, sir. They are. Me and the other signal chaps keep our bands in with messages under a signal that warns practice message, disregard." IF "A good idea. But this message is not for practice. Make: Ness House to Navy House for transmittal to King's First Minister. Have uncovered treasonous plot. Urgent you meet me. Cannot afford to move more than one day's ride from Plymness, WulfLeigh Deputy Warden. Make that message with as few hoists as is possible. How long do you think that will take?" "That will take some doing, sir. Let's see Ness House number, Navy House number, signal forward instead of transmit (with your leave, sir) King's First Minister (one hoist for that) Use an event past hoist instead of have and the respondent signal for guns uncovered leaving off the guns pennant; treasonable, we'll have to spell out; the Navy don't have a signal for treason. Plot we can get easily enough -- put up plot a course and leave off the signal for course. Urgent, thank the Lord is an easy one, almost all our Lord High Admirals' messages have that hoist; meeting we'll use another single hoist; numerical and a day sign; ride we'll have to spell out, make the number for Plynmess. That's twenty-five pennants at five seconds a hoist. That's two minutes and five seconds. Allow ten seconds a pennant for make-ready. That's four minutes and ten seconds or six minutes and fifteen seconds for the whole message. There are twelve masts to Navy House. Allow ten seconds a mast for alerting the yeomen and you get seventy-seven minutes to Lindesnes, allowing a half an hour to deUver the message to King's first and seventy-five minutes foe return (everybody will be alerted by then). And you will have your answer in a little over three hours." A ctually it was three hours and thirty-five minutes before the message came back: "Meeting agreeable. Expect you at Vaughanby house two hours after sunrise tomorrow. Vaughan King's First Minister." Vaughanby was a great, red-brick some men said by the graft and bribe-taking that were almost a prerequisite of a First Minister's early years in the office. Now, with his material needs satisfied, Vaughan thirsted for glory and regard as a pre-eminent statesman. He seemed likely to get that meed of honor for his conduct of the Naf Ionic war. His greeting to Sir Hubert was traditionally laconic. "Well, Wilfly, you've gotten me to ride sixty leagues in a day. You've done the same. That message of yours had better be of earth-shaking importance." "It is, sir," the Baron Minor assured him. "There is to be a rising in Cullenland, and to some extent the Confraternity of St. Angus of the Open Hand are subject to the charge of suborning the revolt." "There is always a revolt coming in Cullenland," the First Minister denigrated, as he led the way to the dining hall where a buffet table awaited them. "The skill in government is to find out when and who and how." "I can give you that information. The rising is set for dawn of the twenty-fifth to coincide with a Pantlerist landing in Celtland. Here are the proofs." He spread out the coded letter and his copy of it, and demonstrated the way he had broken it down. The chief of the government was impressed and studied it carefully while Wulf-Leigh attacked a kipper and pewter mug of steaming tea. Now the First Minister showed some enthusiasm for the find. "This is good show, S'r'ubert. You've given us an exact date on the Pantler Landing which he expected but didn't know quite when. But -- " here Vaugh frowned -- "you've also thrown in a Cullenlander revolt which will divide our forces and may afford the Pantlerists some success." "Suppose, sir, that the Cullenlander revolt and the Pantler landing failed to occur on the same day. Would that help?" "Would that help? By the bones of Henry Pantler, would that help! With four days leeway between them we could crush the Cullenlanders, recross the sea and still be in time to crush Edward Pantler when he lands in Celtland or vice versa. But how are you going to do it? How do you outwit a rather shrewd pack of rebels and the equally astute nest of Angusards whom you've unmasked or are going to unmask?" "My good Lord Vaughan," the watcher of the western gate assured him, "I have some reputation for this sort of deception. In fact I've gotten the sword tap for King's Strand for false-lighting the Freunch to their defeat above Plymness. If I can't do the same to a bunch of Cullenlanders just as easily, I ought to turn back my sashes. Are you sure that given a four-days' switch in the rebel plans you can outfight them?" "If you update the revolt by four days, I'm sure enough to promise you that I'll turn in my seals of office if I fail. You see, Macconnail has his strength concentrated in three areas, the back streets of Elmore city, the glens around Dunican Bay and in what were once, before the rising that broke clan, the Macconnail lands north of Moiree. If we strike those three areas in overwhelming force, the rising will die a -- boming. Do you need any help from Lindesnes?" Wulf-Leigh thought for a moment then nodded, "There is one thing where you could help me. You have a certain influence with the court of Royal Assize and Jail Delivery sitting in Lindesnes?" Vaughan harumphed: "I have that influence. How do you choose to use it? You know it would help the war against Naflon no end to get the Cullenlander rebels off our backs and the Pantlerists over the hip." The Baron Minor outlined the help he sought and got the promise full cooperation, including the use of a communcating mast at Vaughanby for a messa to Lindesnes to get the judges of Royal Assizes off to a running start on the necessary papers for the matter of his request. "Now -- " suddenly growing IF saturnine -- "there comes the bargaining. If you succeed in this design, what quid do you want tor your quo? You surely didn't go to all this trouble fcwr amusement alone." Sir Hubert assumed a mask of injured innocence. "My Lord, my only concern is to better serve my country. But if rewards and punishments are to be handed out, my wife would dearly love the title of Viscountess." "You sly dog," chuckled the King's First Minister, "that's the shrewdest way to ask for a viscounty that I ever heard. Make my wife a Viscountess, my Lord! Why, for that jape alone I'm half inclined to make you a Viscount whether you succeed or fail. And as for serving your country, what would you say to the Lord Lieutenancy of Cullenland when Lord Moreham steps down in about six months? You'll keep of course the revenues from your present office. They're an irrevocable life grant." All the Warden could say was a simple, "Thank you, M'lord." IV T hree days later, one night remaining of the ten days allotted by the chiefs' law of the dead hand, a little gamecock of a man was ushered into the Deputy Warden's study and allowed to introduce himself. "Me nyme's Jemmy Fyker, your worship, a calligrapher from Lindesnes down by the post coach from Lindesnes, hat your service." He made a sweeping bow. His worship was not amused. "Hold it, fellow. I have your fUe before me, and it says that you're Jessamy Cowles, lagged for forgery and sentenced to three years at hard labor to be followed by the amputation of your right thumb. If you'll work honestly for me, I can promise your thumb at least will be spared and your other punishment lessened. So no more of his Jemmy Fyker story." "Hit ayn't no loie, sir," bristled the little man. "Me name's been Jemmy for nigh six years and a calligrapher's happrentice for six years before that. I'm a Grykie, hi haim, a real Grykie born not honly in the shadow o' Gry Kirk o' Fields but in the blooming rectory. Me pa was sexton. Hi was 'is second son. 'Is heldest was to follow 'im as sexton so 'e happrenticed me to a calligrapher. Six years did Jessamy Cowles lybor at the work and learned hall that man could teach 'im. Then h'i asked for moi freedom and me journeyman's pypers but the bond said seven years and 'e swore 'ed 'old me to hit. There was a bit of a wench hin it too, yer honor. So Hi swore hi'd py 'im hout and Hi did. Hi forged 'is nyme and seal to a note of 'and for a 'undred royals and sold hit hon the thieves' market. 'E' didn't 'ave the 'undred royals when hit cyme due and 'e tried to deny the signature. 'E knew 'oo 'ad done hit but 'e couldn't prove hit hand they took 'im awy to debtor's jyle. My bond was forfeited too but no calligrapher would tyke me on. They knew oi was too smart for them. So Jemmy Fyker Hi became, hutterer hof forged notes, false deeds and anything helse you moit need." The Baron Minor's comment was only a laconic: "How many times were you caught?" "Honly this once, yer 'onor," came the proud reply, "hand wouldn't 'ave been now if there 'adn't been a bit of a wench hin hit too. You see." The Deputy Warden cut him off abruptly. "Enough romance. You've been brought by the post coach from Lindesnes to do a particular piece of work, and the question remains to be proven, how good are you at your craft?" "Hi'll show you. Hi will. Wroite yer signature, sir. As a precaution, sir, lest Hi betempted, write hit with yer left 'and. Hi never loikes to see a man's true signature when H'm workin' for 'im". Arabella's husband scrawled a shaky and uncertain "Wulf-Leigh" on the sheet in front of him. Jemmy Fyker took a quick though intense look at it and then, quickly (or anyway relatively quickly) produced a copy indistinguishable from the original in every shake and squiggle. "You'll do," gasped the Knight of the King's Strand. "Now here's what you must do." So saying, he brought out the cipher note. Jemmy took one look at it and said: "Hi can't do hit. That's Freunchie pyper and Hi don't suppose you've hany of that." Sir Hubert smiled. "The Navy can work miracles too." He reached into his draw and took out a dozen sheets of identical weave linen paper. To the astonished forger, he explained laconically, "From a prizer auction, you know. For your share in this, I'll give you two hundred pounds, and Lord Vaughan will get you a King's Covenanted Pardon if our plan works." For once Jemmy Fyker was almost silenced. He burbled a feeble "Crikey!" and set to work. The message from Macconnail was in the hands of the Augusard brothers on the fourth of the month, within the limits of the Chiefs' Law of the dead hand. By the seventh of the month certain messages were going through the back-roads and byways of Cullenland. Men uprooted hearthstone flags and unwound the wrappings form long secreted muskets; axes were sharpened, broadswords taken from ornamental displays and whetted for grimmer use. I n Briden too, preparations were made. On the seventeenth an upland loyalist regiment and two squadrons of Celtland dragoons sailed across the broad strait that was miscalled the Cullenlander Sea and marched across the northern part of Cullenland, timing their march to arrive in Moires late in the evening of the twentieth. On the same evening two regiments usually stationed in the Middle Counties and household Cavalry arrived in the near shore glens of Dunnican Bay. Three companies of marines and a regiment of the Ness-shire militia, blooded and battle-proven against IF the Freunch assault, also made a dark of night landing in Elmore. On the twenty-first at dawn the revolution exploded but there were too many troops in just the right places to wet it down. By noon of the twenty-third the back of the revolt was broken and most of the troops could be withdrawn, put back on the ships that had brought them and sailed back across the Cullenlander Sea to be ready for the Pantler Pretender when that worthy landed near Overwick. By the twenty-seventh Edward Pantler was being marched southward, not at the head of his troops but as a state prisoner bound for trial and execution at Lindesnes Castle. On the thirtieth, the Father Superior of the Confraternity of St. Angus was announced as the Lord Deputy was breakfasting. Hospitably Sir Hubert invited him to enter. "A very good morning to you, your worship. You'll have some eggs and a rasher of bacon." Noting the pained expression on the Byzantine churchman's face he shrugged. "Ah, yes, it's one of your meager days. Then how about a kipper? Make free of the sideboard. There's tea and a half-jug of an excellent beverage called perry by way of beverages. Can I help you in any way. Father?" The priest gulped hard as if about to swallow a nasty dose and spoke in a low voice. "I am afraid I must confess some liability for the recent rising in Cullenland. You see. Lord Deputy, I was not quite frank in our last interview. I knew that the unfortunate man who was cast ashore from the wreck of the Leveret was a Macconnail courier. I knew that which he carried was a cipher calling the people of Cullenland to a revolt. I saw the message was forwarded to the proper people. So much innocent blood lies on my poor head." "To which, Reverend Father," answered a grim-faced Wulf-Leigh, "may be added your own. You realize that your last statement repeated in front of witnesses can bring your conviction on a charge of High Treason; and we do not allow the benefit of clergy in this country any more. My own testimony alone is not sufficient to convict, you, but I can and should have you bound over to the examining magistrates of His Majesty's Court of High Justice." The Father Superior shrugged, raised his eyes toward heaven as though welcoming a martyr's crown. "Bind me over; bring your witnesses; none of your courts can punish me worse than I am punished already." He threw up his arms in a gesture of despair and desolation. "Behold a shepherd who has lost his flock." The baron Minor relaxed slightly his grim-set jaw. "Ah, perhaps my Lord Vaughan already has heard this and decreed banishment. If my poor influence can insure the softening of your exile -- " The Angusards' leader smiled weakly. "No, your lordship, the King's first minister knows naught of this. I am banished by a far sterner tribunal, the hearts and wills IF of my people. You know that I am charged with the aid of unfortunate and desolate Cullenlanders. So when a shipload of poor prisoners arrived in Plymness yesterday from Elmore city, already tried and sentenced to be shipped to the penal colonies in the Antipodes, I and a dozen of my brothers in the Lord went down to aid them and ease their suffering. They would have none of our comforts. They said we had betrayed them, that too many Bridish troops had arrived too soon. They had learned from the over-boastful gaolers that even the comfort of aiding the success of the Pantlerist landing by their demonstration had been dendied them. So they turned a deaf ear to our prayers and answered our supplications by pelting us with hard bread. The captin then ordered us from the ship and chided us for disturbing his prisoners. Come noose, come axe; you can hurt me no worse." The Deputy Warden looked long and hard at the man of the cloth before replying. "I think you're right. No punishment that our justice can mete out will hurt you more than that which you have already received at the hands of your own people. Now if you would write a statement of your involvement..." He paused as the prelate drew out a scroll and handed it to him across the desk, then examined the missive and stuffed it into a cubbyhole. "That's just right. It will serve as -- shall we say -- insurance against your further involvement in Pantlerist plots. With Edward Pantler waiting the axe, and the old King clamant enfeebled by age, there won't be any plotting now for a generation. All true believers will be more cautious next time." At this last phrase the priest's eyebrows rose suddenly. Bereft for a moment of speech he could do no more than point an accusatory finger at the baron minor. The baron minor in matched silent byplay nodded, smiled and fixed the prelate with a stare, as if to say: "That's right, I knew of your letter and gave you an altered copy which caused the rising to be premature. Now you know it but you can't prove it." But all he said aloud was, "Good MTugBOl IF  Feature Our Man in Fandom shows us the wonderful world of fan clubs that span the planet! The Coast-to-Coasters L ast month in this space we were talking about the science-fiction superclubs that were a natural out growth of the "itch to organize" that has always been rife in sf fandom. First the local clubs, then the state organizations, then as a logical progression, somebody comes up with the idea that there should be a coast-to-coast organization covering the whole country and incorporating all of the sciencefiction fans in one whopping big fanclub. I told you about some of the organized by Negro fan James Fitzhalf-dozen or so other Leagues, Associations, Fraternities, Legions and whatever, culminating in the one superclub that really worked ed by Hugo Gemsback and Charles D. Hornig and sponsored by some years before Wonder was sold to another publisher and the local chapters began to split off, dissatisfied with the autocratic, centralized structure of this, the world's largest sf fan club. In its time, though, the League actually had several thousand members, and chapters from one end of the country to the other, including branches overseas. Even though the mighty League collapsed at last, it did serve as an example of just how big and influential a national club could be, and it was an example worth striving to emulate in the years that followed. Here are some of the emulators... The Big Associations had gasped its last gasp, there were people trying to revivify the notquite-extinct cadaver. A small group which split off from the East New get the ball rolling with a thing called the ball refused to roll and the whole thing went under in #. got going. It planned an "official organ" (I'm sorry, but that's what club magazines are called, echh, what an awkward term I) to be named The American Fantasy Magazine, but the organ died in embryo as did its parent organization. Across the pond in Britain, meanwhile, another association was it was open to U.S. members and did indeed have some Amerifans in it. ting on conventions, and through it the British fen organized three anual cons -- each bigger and better than the last, according to reports. The Association looked forward to a bright add happy future, but then along came something called World it became dormant. The Science Fictioneers I suppose it was inevitable, given the success of Wonder's Science Fiction League (which must have helped boost circulation and multiply reader-interest in tihe magazine), that another prozine eventually try the experiment. The one that did was a now-defunct magazine called Super Science Stories, not at all a bad magazine in its day, home of many good Kuttner and Asimov yarns. Super Science announced a club pretty closely on Gernsback's League. The magazine printed names and addresses  of members as they wrote in and organized local branches here and there, but never as many as the League ihad. The Science Fictioneers, while a pale shadow of the great League of yore, did at least get some clubs going in vicinities where no club had previously been organized. The thing might just possibly have succeeded in being another giant-size League, but (again!) World War II came thundering in, and a nasty corollary, the paper shortage, killed the magazine, and the club died instanter. But then, around # or thereabouts, something new came on the scene. It was so ambitious, sounded so active and so very promising, that it took a little time for people to realize just how vague and screwy it was. I am talking about: The Crazy Days of The Cosmic Circle There was once a fan named Claude Deglcr. He wandered about the country hitch-hiking and busriding, trying single-'handedly to organize the nation's fans into an sf superclub to end all superclubs... rather like Peter the Hermit, who went about rabble-rousing for the First Crusade. Degler's crusade was body ever quite knew what it was, but from all the noise and excitea capital B, I, and G. Degler the Hermit contacted fans all over the country, chiefly through names and addresses printed on letters in the prozines; he announced in grandiose terms his Circle, urged them to lurk about newsstands in their town and sign up anybody who bought sf magazines, offered them all sorts of charters and things and generally cut loose in fifteen different directions with a flurry of activity that made most fans look sluggish. He announced local sectors of the Cosmic Circle like one in Tennessee called "The Circle of Atzor" and the "Alabama All-Fans" and the "Valdosta Philosophers" in Georgia. Other local or regional branches of the Cosmic Circle existed (on paper at least, or in Degler's feverish imagination anyway) in Florida, Louisiana, Indiana and so on. The Cosmic Circle was supposed to be a union of anybody anywhere who had a "cosmic outlook." Almost at once, the CC claimed # members, but it was hard to tell exactly who really did belong to it, because Degler filled his various "official" publications with pseudonymous writings. In fact, Claude used so many pen names and mentioned so many fictitious members, that it was never easy at any given time to say whether this or that Cosmic Circle member was a real person or just another facet of the fabulous Degler personality. These magazines poured out in fantastic numbers -- The Cosmic Circle Commentator and Fanevs Analyzer and even one called Spicy Spaceship Stories). Claude planned to stir up so much excitement with all these magazines as to create the illusion of a giant, multistate organization throbbing and rumbling in back of him. But not too many people were fooled, and it quickly became apparent that most of the "contributors" to this deluge of fanzines were Degler himself, writing under phoney names. Degler certainly thought big. He announced the formation of regional Circle organizations in Oklahoma and New Mexico and Nevada. He launched a flurry of special fanservice bureaus: a National Fan Directory, a fan vacation camp in Arkansas, a Circle Amateur Publishers Alliance with a circulation of # (which was mighty interesting, since at this time Circle membership was only supposed to be #). He announced still more regional organizations, a Dixie Fantasy Federation, a Southern Circle, a Gulf Circle, a Northwest Federation, a United Califans, Utah Cosmic Fans, and so on. He bombarded real fandom with a snowstorm of weekly fanzines, news bulletins and such and even -- perhaps from sheer hysteria -- even announced a summer school for the IF cosmically-minded kids of fans! It was all a bit too much. Working on the theory that the CC could be laughed out of its pseudo existence, some irate fans in Boston produced a magazine called the Trivial Triangle Troubadour, which was a lampoon of things Deglerian. Francis T. Laney, prominent fan of the period followed with the Comic Circle Commentator ("comic" -- not "cosmic"). Another lampoon was called the Caustic Square Commentator. Fan-wit Bob Tucker dealt the death-blow, by pretending to found an organization yclept The Cosworms. The whole thing collapsed like a house of cards. And it came out somewhile later that Degler had reputedly been committed some years before to a hospital for the insane (around #-#) and had been allegedly released against the advice of his doctors. That did it. No wonder! The National Fantasy Fan Federation Then there's the one coast tocoaster that did work and actually out-performed even the League. The World Science Fiction Convention of #I was held in Denver, Colorado and was called "The Denvention," the name coined by Donald A. Wollheim. Damon Knight gave a speech calling for the creation of a central fan organization. In those days, Damon Knight was a leading fan; today, of course, he is a leading science-fiction writer. After taking a poll of fans for their ideas and after enlisting their support. Knight and Arthur Widner launched The National Fantasy Fan Federation, called the "N#F" or the A general election was held, and a constitutio i was drawn up and finally agreed upon. The first president of the N#F was Louis Chauvenet (the guy who coined the word "fanzine"). America's entry into World War II, that old bugaboo of fandom, hampered the beginning of the N#F, but, after a slow, steady start, it picked up speed. The original idea was to include all U.S. fans and divide the country into regional oups of affiliated local clubs, with a central administrative core of elected officers, an advisory board and several committees, including some sort of legal or judiciary body. These visionary goals never got to working. The National Fantasy Fan Federation is the only nation-wide central fan organization that ever really worked or lasted, not counting the amateur press associations. It is still with us, believe it or don't and has recently celebrated its first quarter century of existence. What Hath Damon Knight Wrought? If you are eager to get into the fan world, there is no better way to do it than to join the N#F (unless there is a local fan club in your vicinity). To do so, send # to Janie Lamb, Route #, Box #, Heiskell, Tenn. #. You will be on the receiving end of a swarm of friendly letters from members of the Welcom or ""welcoming committee" -- the recruiting adjunct of the Federation. You will ako get two official bi-monthly magazines, Tight beam and The National Fantasy Fan, and a host of little brochures called "fanbooks" which will initiate you into various aspects of fanning, such as the world of fan publishing, the amateur press associations, and so on, including a booklet-dictionary of fan jargon. Also, as a Neffer, you will be able to check the membership list which may give names and addresses of fans in your hometown you never knew were there. You may want to get in touch vth veteran Neffer, Seth Johnson, # Stiles St., Vaux Hall, N.J. #. Seth is a tireless correspondent, who likes to talk and give encouragement to newcomers in fandom. Through his Fanzine Clearing House you can for # get an assortment of recent fanzines which will show you the sort of thing that's going on these days. for no longer than a year, for the valuable "introduction to fandom" material I've described above is about all you'll really get for your membership. Unhappily, Damon Knight's dream of a central fan organization never got off the did anything in fandom. It just sort of sits there, big and old and full of members, but never does much. If all you want from fandom is a few long-distance friends to trade letters with, it will be just what you are looking for. But if you happen to be interested in getting into the middle of the real fan world, the Neiffers have nothing for you. Still, why not give 'em a try, Watch for IF IF  Short Story by Jack B. Lawson Smith's World was rough but not fatal -- except to people who were half dead already! Qhip's log would tell Sherril Kierzek O only two things. First, the voyage to Smith's World had lasted # years so far, leaving -- as she remembered the schedule, anyway -- something more than four years to go. And second, she'd been defrosted on instructions from Lewis Cathcart, who was at present drinking in the observatory. And that was where she found him. He was a small, bony man with the orangish complexion common to people who had switched to Richard's blood, and he was floating in the exact center of the room and sneering at the nipple on the brandy bottle. "Here," he said and pushed the bottle at her. "We're lost, you're going to need a drink." She deflected the bottle, brought it to rest against the wall. "What does that mean? Are we going to die?" "It means we're as likely to end up in the Land of the Boojums as Smith's World. Or more precisely, we might not end up at all. Left to itself this thing we're on isn't ever going to decide to slow down." "It won't tell me anything. Just, you had me waked up. You're a logician, aren't you?" Cathcart had drifted to the far wall and lay stretched out against it, arms and legs spread wide. "We used to call this making an angel," he said, twisting his head up to look at himself. "When you jumped into a snowbank in this position." "Is that supposed to tell me something? An oblique way of saying we're going to die, or what? If you -- You do know what's wrong, don't you? The ship did tell you?" "It's a human-solution problem," he said. "Of course I had to be exposed to a full report; but you weren't, 'so your interpretation wouldn't get contaminated -- supposing I Wanted an interpretation from yotf, which I don't. Ship's log was just being discreet." "It's not the only one being coy either, is it? Please, Lewis. What's wrong?" # # understand anything at jLJ all about the guidance system on one of these things? Spacecraft?" "No. Well, I suppose I can see roughly... You couldn't very well aim it ahead of time, could you? Not over eighteen and a half lightyears." "God. Of course not. You couldn't possibly figure out where to end up close, the universe isn't all that tidy." "And you wouldn't just lock on to the light from your destination. You'd want to lead it, and that would mean maps and some way of comparing them with observational data, and deciding what to do on that basis. It shouldn't be very difficult." "Right. Only it's a little more complicated. Of course. Comparing the maps, and what's out there -- " he pointed at the silver-gray lens of the scope -- "takes two pieces of equipment. A collating machine and a selector. Our trouble's in the selector. A thing like that can be practically feebleminded, you know. It's given a few rules -- basically an axiom set -- and in conjunction with the collation results, these tell it to go on pulling maps at such and such intervals and in such and such order. Or else the view doesn't match up quite and the collator measures the inconsistency. Then the selector informs control, determines which map the view's going to look like when the ship gets back on course and starts a new sequence from there. Feebleminded, essentially. Not a job that ordinarily calls for very stiff reasoning, of course." Cathcart pushed away from the wall and drifted past the scope, managed to drag a foot against the floor, swing around and come back to it. "Here," he said, waving his finger over the row of buttons. He poked one and almost floated out of reach of the machine before he caught a handgrip and stopped. The lens blackened and a swanshaped blur formed over three-quarters of its surface, and then the blur resolved into a cloud of stars and in the corners around the swan other stars pricked through the darkness. Just where the neck curved into the head was an intense jab of white, and below, in an isosceles triangle within the swan's breast, flared three more noticeably bright stars, the apex one with a istinctly green tinge. "Smith's World,". Cathcart said. IF tapping the lower righthand side of the lens. "Which we'll never get to. Because there aren't any maps with this thing on them." He touched the bright star in the swan's neck. "The rock of our shipwreck. As far as our selector's concerned, a sky with that in it is imaginary. Certainly no place to go." on the maps -- that's what it has to be, isn't it?" Cathcart punched another button and the lens went back to silvergray. "So now you know. Very funny, I think. What you have to do is suck the bottle and sort of stroke the nipple toward the tip with your tongue. You can work up a whole swallow with patience." She finally got some of the brandy down. "But we'll die, Lewis! The ship will never know when to slow down. We'll just go on past and -- " "Exactly what I was telling you." "But can't we -- the ship defrosted you, can't you think of a way out? Can't you get this selector to ignore the nova? I mean, if -- " "Oh, if the machine had any brains to speak of, there are lots of things I could do. But the thing is, it doesn't. It's set up to do what I told you. Find a certain map at a certain time. Pass it on to the collator. And if anything's wrong, translate the inconsistency into coursecorrection instructions and pass these on to control. Of course, there are inconsistencies and inconsistencies." "Don't people know when a star's going to nova? This ought to have been anticipated." "No doubt. But that isn't going to help us now." "Anyway, my field's microbiology," she said. "Cross-strand modification. What do you think I can do?" Cathcart made a queer shrugging motion, as if putting his head down between his shoulders. "I got you up because it was cold and silent and I felt lonely, if you really have to know." She floated across and #ok his hand between hers, skin on skin. "Like that?" she said. "Yes. Thanks." He looked off, at the bottle rotating slowly over by the door. "I think what I really want is my mother." "But there's nothing you can do?" "Oh, I can do something. Two kinds of thing, to be precise. I can change the rules the selector works from by erasing the whole set and starting over. Not very helpful, since I haven't any idea what to start over with. Or I can add something to the present rules." "What would that mean? You wouldn't have much chance of putting in anything but an imaginary new destination, would you?" "Well, there's an enormous map log claims. Suppose I eliminated one of the rules of selection, added its contradictory to the axiom set, say. Only ne of those determines the point at which the ship must begin to slow down, so I'd have a fair chance of missing that one. In fact, I think I know which one to avoid." "Then we'll go somewhere?" Sherril said, stroking the back of his hand. "Only not to Smith's World, I suppose." "Hardly. Actually, that's one place you can be sure we won't go. But we'll probably go somewhere like it -- Earthlike planets are characteristic of a certain class of sun, as I remember." "Yes. Only I don't think it works out perfectly. Sometimes there's just nothing. It jdepends on... She was silent for a minute, staring at the upper lefthand corner on the far side of the room. "I don't remember. It's been a long time since I had basic astronomy." "Me too. Well, probably we'll head for the right kind of sun. The point of mo rules has to be to eliminate certain map sequences, so what I'll be doing is opening up some of the other possibilities. Hopefully, at least one of these won't be ruled out by the nova. But we'll have to see what turns up. If anything." omething did. It was almost thirty light-years away, according to ship's log -- a fat, green planet spongy with lakes and capped at one pole by an enormous splay of ice. There was even the right sort of atmosphere -- or so Sherril interpreted the spectograph. But there were no plowed fields, no roads, no citydomes, no ring of satellites. Where ever they were, it was outside the human universe. Cathcart got himself into the exact center of the room again and floated there, spinning slightly, with his hands clasped together across his shins and his eyes closed, while Sherril explained things to Jane Shaw and Todd Braithwate, who were teachers and who watched her lips with wide, intent eyes in still faces, and to Richard Ronaldson, who came in last, broad-shouldered and vague, and then kept drifting away to make faces at the planet in the scope. He was a poet. "So what do we do now?" he said finally. "There aren't any people down there." "We go down, obviously," Cathcart said, without opening his eyes. "And then there will be." "That's crazy. There's no point." "Let's think of it as an adventure," Jane Shaw said in a gray voice. Todd wagged an open hand at the scope. The blue of his eyes almost matched the lake color. "Yes. Dick's right. I say we should try again. I agree, Lewis, you did the only possible thing. Acted very cleverly. But this place won't do, surely you see that. And next time -- " "No doubt. But we've got no choice, you have to consider that. No next time. There probably isn't enough fuel left to get, us out of this system. At least I'd hate to try it." Cathcart opened his eyes and grinned at Todd. "So whatever we should do -- " and he finished it with a high shrug. "But there aren't any people down there," Ronaldson said again, showing his teeth around that word "people." "Really, I think we can live," said Sherril. "Lewis and I went over the IF whole thing carefully. The big risk was that we'd end up somewhere without food. But we're in luck. All that green is live stuff, you know." "So you trust," said Cathcart. "And the ship has a doctor of sorts. Well, what else is there? We'll have to do without all the pills civilized people take, I suppose. And so on. Oh, we'll have some problems, but think about it. There's nothing but brute physical nature down there. We're the end products of six thousand years of civilization, intelligent human beings, and what -- " "Especially me," said Cathcart. "Speaking of end products. I happen to have Richard's blood. Excellent stuff, keeps you young longer and cuts in half the time you need to put in sleeping. But it doesn't renew itself. I'll be dead inside three weeks." # C T didn't think about that," A Sherril said after a while. "I couldn't get up nerve to ask you," he said. "But of course there's nothing you could do, is there?" "It would take -- a high speed equipped with waldoes, and who knows what else? That's not really my field, you know -- actually doing things. I'm more on the math side. Sorry. Very sorry, Lewis." "Already down to four little Indians," Ronaldson said, perhaps to the scope or the image of the planet on it. "Oh, we will have some problems, no doubt." "I gather the idea is," Todd said, pointing his finger first at Cathcart, then Sherril, "we're going to be colonists. Pioneers, first settlers, people like that?" "Well, what do you think?" she said. "Maybe I'm the one who's being stupid just because he doesn't like the situation. Maybe we've got some other choice, a whole higgledepig of choices maybe." "There are people like that," Jane Shaw said. "Certainly used to be. People who got out away from the human race. We'll have to figure out their psychological set. See how doing that sort of thing can make sense." "Ha," said Ronaldson. Todd swung both hands wide, the motion skewing him to ihis left and floating him free of the wall. "I bet nobody has even considered whether it is possible to get down there -- to raise one more stupid objection before we go on with this foolishness." "The ship has an emergency landing unit," Cathcart said. "Why, God knows. Vestigial, maybe -- something regulations demanded a long time ago, and the shipbuilders never got around to asking if they could take it out." All of them except Cathcart looked again at the image of the planet, green and blue and white, with beige flecks around the equator and a crooked mountain range winding up shortly and then disappearing under the icecap. The shadowline began on the other side of the mountains. "So we are actually going down there to live," Todd said in a slow voice. "Tom are," Cathcart said. "Not me. I'm going there to die." Sheril then gave him her hand. "The rest of us aren'tT Ronaldson said, shrill, turning away from the scope. "You know better! All of you! There isn't a thing we can do down there except squat around a natural fire and wait to die. So what if it takes thirty years instead of three weeks That's some kind of advantage?" "Well, isn't even that better than going around the universe in a cake of ice?" Sherril said. Ronaldson showed teeth and made a noise something like a voiced hiss. "I wouldn't be sure," Todd added. "Besides, it's not as if we were so dependent on civilization. We're k. We carry a lot of it around in our heads, you know. Why can't we make things civilized down there?" "I'm a poet' Ronaldson told her. "Just what Godforsaken use do you think I am, to myself or anybody else, without a computer?" "People used to make up poems by themselves," Jane Shaw offered. "Without computers." "No question about it. I've seen poetry like that. Somebody made it up for himself, all right. You can tell." "There are other things," Sherril said. "I mean, later." "Not for me there aren't." "What I started to say, later on there'll be babies, you know. That'll be one of the consequences of doing without pills." "What are the pills all for, I wonder?" Todd flapped his hands loosely. "It can't very well be to keep me from having babies." "You mean -- have them ourselves?" said Jane Shaw and looked at her groin. "Inside us? That doesn't sound like a very good idea." "It's a perfectly feasible way," Sherril said. "That's sort of my field. I can assure you it works. Why not?" "And your children will have children," Caithcart said. "Also by themselves. And your children's children, and so on, and eventually when human beings get out to wherever we are, they'll find they're already here." "Perhaps we'll be rescued some day," Jane Shaw said. "Some of those children will be yours, too, you know," Sherril told Cathcart in a softer voice, tightening her grip on his hand. "No. I don't know that. There's nothing different about the shape of your stomach." "That takes time." Todd got a toe against the wall and pushed himself toward the scope. "We'll have to build things," he said, making square chops in the air with stiff straight hands. "Using natural materials. It will make for some interesting problems." "Impossible's the word," Ronaldson said. "Let's just agree to do what we can," Jane Shaw said. "We all know it's a horrible situation, but if we don't take a positive attitude about it, it will be impossible." "No," Cathcart told her. "I've done my share already, and my situation is impossible right now. I don't intend to do anything. Or to be agreeable either, for that matter." "You've aleardy done a miracle, haven't you?" Sherril said. "You got us a world to live on." IF "Yes," Todd said. "And there ought to be some use tor his body. To scare away animals, something. No, I feel we might as well be honest about it. You don't mind, do you, Lewis?" "As long as you wait," said Cathcart. "In about three weeks I expect not to mind. Just don't do anything with me or talk about it until then, okay?" Xut he died much sooner than that xy -- less than a day after the ship brought them down on to a long open slope, between dark green tangles of growth and a freeform lake with mountains on its far side. The others were fidgeting around in front of the ship -- or what was left of it, the core which had been constructed to pass through a planet's atmosphere -- wondering what to do, and Cathcart lay with his head and shoulders propped against a rock, perhaps fifteen meters away, over by a bend in the river that wound down to the lake, when something big came sprawling around the end of the ship. Then his shout got mixed with a scabrous body and flapping and a nasty smell, and the thing was going from them awkwardly, hopping and lurching and fluttering its bony wings. Ronaldson had taken two steps toward it, but now he came back and stood with them, combing back his hair with rigid fingers, close to the ship. The thing crouched on the lakeshore and ate Cathcart, twisting about a lot. It had a narrow bucktoothed head with lidless round eyes set at the sides and a long scaly ridged neck. Its wings were obviously too small to fly with and now, folded, they stuck out crisscross in pointed folds over its back. There was a thick moving tail, and as the beast crouched the hind legs hunched up fatly against its belly. Its forelegs were long and slender and ended in enormous three-fingered claws and these pushed Cathcart about frantically under the writhing of its head and neck. "A real monster, that," Ronaldson said. "What, do you suppose it's doing to him?" Sherril said eventually. "Spitting him out and washing him, I think," said Todd. "I gather it doesn't much like the taste." "Perhaps it'll leave the rest of us alone, then?" Still, they spent the rest of that day very close to the ship and went inside when the lake turned black. Next morning they found the monster dead, wings projecting straight up, almost at their door. Its eyes had turned an ugly yellow. Todd walked all the way around it and then said: "So he d do something else for us after all." "I should have thought of this," said Sherril. "Of course it hadn't a chance of digesting Lewis -- an alien lifeform. Too many differences in molecular structure." "But we've got to eat too," Jane Shaw said. "If this thing -- " "Yes, but you've got a Nagel stomach, you know," Sherril told her. "Digests practically anything. At least any carbon-based life. Which all this is." And she waved her hand about. "When did that happen?" Ronaldson said. "A stomach? I don't remember anybody doing that to me." "Had to. They wouldn't have let you off Earth otherwise. The differences in what you'd eat on Smith's World are probably as great as here. Greater maybe." "Let's not talk about Smith's World," Ronaldson said. "I'm trying to forget." T 'odd worked most of the morning at separating one of the wing bones from the corpse and failed. He had nothing to cut with except splinters of rock. Nothing in the ship was even like a tool, much less a weapon. There were no points and no sharp edges, and most things were molded into the walls. His idea had been to make a spear or a bow out of the bone -- a bow was a primitive machine, without brains, that could be used to project sharp sticks -- but rocks only scratched the small hard scales of the wing, and by midday he was breathing openmouthed and his fingers no longer held on to things, and he could do no more. "We'll have to do something else for protection," he said, staggering back into the ship. "Dig pits." "With your hands, I suppose," Sherril said, and he looked at wlt had happened to his palms and fingers. But that afternoon birds -- as Ronaldson, who was naming things, decided to call them in spite of their lack of feathers -- began to light on the body, longlegged metallic-green creatures with rounded heads that screwed into the folds of skin and jerked away. A standard week later the bones of the dragon were bare. B y then they were constructing a house. The ship had become unlivable the third day -- tiny crawling things had got inside and eaten boles in the refrigerator plates, and the ship's brains, including the doctor, died. The kitchen stopped preparing meals. Closed doors no longer opened. The air turned foul, and fluid of some sort began to collect in the room where Ronaldson and Jane Shaw were sleeping. So they had to move outside, and well away from the ship because of the stench of the dragon. They had almost a kilometer of flexible tubing, seventeen transparent bags, an empty brandy bottle, three spools of chartreuse tape with a black stripe along the top edge, the lens off a microfilm reader, thirtytwo boxes that wouldn't open and four legless chairs -- these things were what they could salvage from the ship. But they had nothing that could be used to cut down trees or dig holes in the ground. And in any case the ground was rocky. To make a reasonably deep hole in it they would have needed some sort of explosive; and the trees were made of layer after layer of rough fiber that would have spread and bent under the weight of a roof. So while Todd kept watch beside his pile of throwing-stones, the others gathered branches and underbrush for a geodesic. The most complicated problems with that sort of house were mathematical, and all of them still knew how to do elemenIF tary trig. It took just four days to lash together and cover a dome that measured roughly seven meters across -- big enough, everybody hoped, to keep out a second dragon. But the earleaf and mud did little to keep out the rain which began to fall that evening, and kept on late into the night. uTn the morning we must dig all A the way around and make a channel so some of the water will run off." Jane Shaw said suddenly in the dark. "Must we?" said Sherril. "I'm lying in a puddle too, at least most of me is. But it's a comfortable puddle. Warm and soothing. Why can't we just live with it?" "Don't count on its always being warm." "We've got tools now," Todd said. "I think maybe I can rig up some kind of spade from the vertebrae." "What's a spade?" asked Ronaldson. "It's a thing for digging with," Todd told him. "So we can do this all-day job of Jane's in maybe a couple of hours." "Maybe." "My hands won't close now," Sherril said. "They're getting thick on the inside and they always hurt. Couldn't we just rest for a while?" "Symptoms of the primitive life," Ronaldson said. "The hands, I mean. Hardly the resting." He gave a long noisy sigh. "I've had an idea," Todd said. "If we filled in the river -- that would just mean throwing in lots of rocks, it wouldn't be hard -- then I think the way the ground slopes, the water would have to go around on the other side of the ship. We would be here in the middle, on a sort of triangle of ground with water around and that might be good protection against dragons." "Hop right over," said Ronaldson. "Maybe there aren't any more dragons," Sherril said. Ronaldson splashed about, came back. "It might be stopping. Who knows?" "Watch out, you're trying to sit on me," Jane Shaw said. "What happens to where the river used to be?" Sherril asked. "When you fill it in? There won't be any water there, will there, Todd?" "I didn't think about that," he said finally. "Well, if we dig a channel and divert only part of the river, that ought to work." "I suppose that just means I've made an even bigger job out of it." "I'll bet there's a way to get food out of the river too, when we get to work on it. Sooner or later we're going to run out of animals that'll stand still while we throw rocks at them." "You know," she said, sitting up -- the water trickled off her louder, briefly, then the sound of rain outside -- "that's worth thinking about. There are bound to be things in the river. Environments fill up, and the more different stuff we eat the better." "We need to store a few things away too," Jane Shaw said. "Out in natural environments there are winters. The air gets cold, and it's supposed to be harder to find food." The rain paused, then scattered a long last gust and was gone, and they were left with the ticking of drops inside the dome. "We're getting an edge on things now," Ronaldson said. "If you don't think about how meaningless it all is. But we're alive. We've got shelter, sort of, and the dragon's going to make a fair supply of things to cut and dig with, spades, tools." "The things we've absolutely got to have," Todd said. "And we can even start thinking about the future. We're actually making it." "You know what made all the difference, don't you?" Sherril said. "It was the dragon's eating Lewis. We've got a lot to thank Lewis for." She lay back down, crooked her head over out of a puddle. "We ought to think about light and heat," said Jane Shaw. A nd then Jane Shaw was dead. She didn't get up in the morning, and Sherril called her twice and went over to shake her awake before noticing her eyes were open and their surfaces dry, faintly puckered. They stripped off the tattered freezer coverall, but there were no unexpected marks on her body. She was simply dead. Todd rolled her back over, and she lay with her eyes, if that was the thing to call them now, fixed on the center of the dome. "It's like suddenly finding a hole in the world," Ronaldson said. "As if it. wasn't real the way you'd always thought it was." Todd moved her jaw up and down slowly. "at are you doing, trying to make a poem out of it?" "But what happened to her?" Sherril said. "Surely people don't just die "Well, in a way I've been expecting something like this," said Todd. "I've thought about it a lot. Of course without a doctor we'll never know why Jane died, but it was almost predictable. How much stuff were you taking back on Earth, Dick? How many pills a week, for example?" "Seventeen, eighteen. I never knew what they were for." "Sherril?" "Three. You mean she had some organic defect, don't you? Her body couldn't assimilate something it needed or get rid of its own poisons without help? I suppose I ought to have thought of that." "I can't know, of course. But isn't it likely? Aren't there a lot of people like that? Obviously all the stuff I and everybody I ever knew took was supposed to do something. "It's because there are so many laws about modifying human embryos," Sherril said. "I've got -- I had friends who used to gripe about it. You couldn't always change something even if you knew it was wrong. Not that you can always detect things in the embryo, for that matter. I suppose most human beings have something seriously wrong with them -- but you can't discriminate against their genes, you know. That's illegal too. Of course it doesn't matter ordinarily." IF "So there's something wrong with us," Ronaldson said. "Only we don't know what Surprise! Maybe my head falls off." "I know one thing that's likely to be wrong," said Todd. "At least part of the stuff all of us took was an I.E. An intelligence enhancer. Human beings aren't naturally intelligent enough to deal with the kind of civilization they've got." "Naturally they're what you'd even call stupid, I suppose," Sherril said. "When did the I.E.'s come in? # ? # ?" "I don't remember exactly," Todd said. "But I do know before that the race was degenerating fast. I've taught history. In the countries that did any testing, England, America, there was a loss of as much as three I.Q. points a decade. Of course, I expect those weren't accurate tests." "And the stupid ones would be the ones who had children," Sherril said. "Maybe it isn't a very clever thing to do, either." "So really I may be feeble-minded," Ronaldson said, looking at Jane's eyes again. "I just hope it's nothing worse," Todd said, and pointed, waved his finger at the corpse. "She's dead." "Different chemicals stay in your body different lengths of time," Sherril said. "And we may have been taking pills for things that don't matter out here." B ut Todd and Ronaldson never did. That afternoon the second dragon came out of the forest and had them trapped down by the lake where they were taking Jane's head. wrapped in a net of plastic tubing, to see if it could be used to catch something worth eating. Sherril had just time to scream, and when they turned it was a hundred meters away, between them and the dome. Todd went into the lake. Then Sherril found she was still screaming and stopped. The dragon shrieked. Looking back then, she saw that Todd had got the net over its head. She crawled to the door but still couldn't see him. He was not turning toward her across the open, ' or crouched behind a rock. By late afternoon the dragon had writhed into deep enough water to drown. The next morning, when she could no longer stand to wait, she went down to the lake and found Todd where the dragon had rolled on him, smashed almost flat. Sherril lasted a long while. She moved back into the ship -- the smell had weakened, and in any case she wasn't bothered as much by smells now -- and started a garden of the more edible plants. She had with rocks, and by the first snow she had managed to fill the interior of the ship with rotting food. But by then she was very stupid, too, and one day she got caught at the end of a corridor and could not think to turn around, and so starved to death facing the closed door to the observatory. She was at that time about six standard months pregnant, and the male child inside her more or less well formed. If it had been born it might have IF  Serial The galaxy was immense. Trying to find one human in if was almost impossible -- but the human was the woman he loved! XI I t wasn't a luxury cruise. The man Ancu-Uriru had assigned to captain the tub -- In-Ruhic, by name -- believed in every man's working his way, in spite of the generous fare I'd paid. Even aboard as sophisticated a machine as a spaceship, there was plenty of coolie labor, as I well rememibered from my apprenticeship under Sir Orfeo. The standards he'd taught me carried over here. After my assigned chores were done I spent long hours chipping and scraping and cleaning and polishing, trying single-handed to dear away grime that had been accumulating since the days of the Vikings -- or longer. According to In-Ruhic the old ship had been built on a world Earth is my home. But I haven't seen it now since I was a schoolboy, and I don't know when I'll ever see it again. The people from space visit earth when they want to, and no one is ever the wiser. Maybe you've seen them yourself and never known. I was not that lucky. When I stumbled on a party of them, two men and a lovely young girl, they gave themselves away -- and so they took me with them when they left. So I stayed with them, pleasure-cruising across the galaxy hunting wild beast as their gun-bearer, until they met a beast more dangerous than themselves. died. The girl and I survived, until slavers came and took her from me. The next ship I saw took me -- pursuing those who had stolen the only thing in the universe I loved. called Urhaz, an unknown number of millenia ago. At first my wounds caused me a lot of pain, until In-Ruhic stopped me one day and told me my groans were interfering with his inward peace. He had me stretch out on a table while he rubbed some vilesmelling grease into the scars. "How you survived, untended, is a matter of wonder,", he said. "I think you lost a pound of flesh and bone here, where the pellet tore through your shoulder. And you've broken ribs, healed crookedly. And your throat! Man, under the web of scar-tissue, I can see the pulse in the great vein each time you lift your chinl" But his hands were truly as gentle as any girl's could have been. He gave me a treatment every day for a few weeks. The glop he used must have had some healing effect because the skin toughened up over the scars and the pain gradually faded. I told In-Ruhic and the others about the wasp-waisted ship and the armored midgets that had taken the Lady Raire; but they'd never seen or heard of their kind. They wagged their heads and grunted in vicarious admiration when I described her to them. "But these are matters best forgotten, Biridanju." That was as close as In-Ruhic seemed to be able to get to my name. "I've heard of the world called Zeridajh. Distant it is, and inhabited by men as rich as emperors. Doubtless these evildoers you tell of have long since sold her there for ransom. B y the time the world where Ancu-Uriru planned to drop me was visible in the view-screen on the bridge where I was pulling watches as a sort of assistant instrument reader, I was almost a full-fledged member of the crew. Just before we started our landing maneuvers, which were more complicated for an old tub like InRuhic's command than they had been for Lord Desory's ultramodern yacht, In-Ruhic took me aside and asked me what my plans were. "If there's a Zeridajhi embassy. I'll go there and tell them about the Lady Raire. Or maybe I can send some kind of message through. If not... well, ni figure out something." He shook his head and looked sad and wise. "You nurture a hopeless passion for this high-born lady," he stated. "Nothing like that," I cut him off short. "She was in my care. I'm responsible." He put a hand on my shoulder. "Biridanju, you've shown yourself Stay on with me. I offer you a regular berth aboard this vessel." "Thanks, In-Ruhic. But I have another job to do." "Think well, Biridanju. For a foreigner work is not easy to find. And to shore folk, who know not the cruel ways of space, your little decorations may prove unsightly, an added incubus." I put a hand up and felt the lumps and ridges along the side of my throat and jaw. "I know. It looks like hell. But I'm not asking for any beauty prizes. I'll pay my way." "I suppose you must make your try. But after, Biridanju, remember. We're based nearby and call here at Inciro ever and anon. I'll welcome you as shipmate whenever you're ready." W e landed a few hours later on a wind-swept ramp between a gray sea and a town growing on a hillside. Captain Ancu-Uriru was there ahead of us. He talked earnestly with In-Ruhic for a while, then invited me to his quarters aboard the yacht. There he sat me down and offered me a drink and a double-barreled cigar, rolled from two different weeds which, when combined, produced a smoke worse than any three nickel stogies. "Biridanju, I tell you freely, you've made me a rich man," he said. "I thought at first you were a shill who'd bring pirates down on me. Almost, I had you shot before you boarded." He made a face that might have been a smile. "Your cat saved you. It passed reason that a man with your wounds, and an animal lover, could be but a decoy for corsair. I ordered InRuhic to watch you closely, and for long I slept but little, watching these beautiful screens for signs of mischief. Now I know I did you an injury." "You saved my life," I said. "No apologies needed." He lifted a flat box from a drawer of the gorgeous inlaid desk. "I am a just man, Biridanju; or so I hope. I sold the special store aboard IF this cutter for a sum greater than any year's profit I've known since I first captained a trader. The proceeds are here, your fair share." I lifted the lid and looked at an array of little colored sticks an eighth of an inch square and an inch long. "There is enough there to keep you in comfort for many years," he said, "if you squander it not on follies, such as star-messages or passenger fares. Not that there's enough to take you far." He gave me a sharp look that meant InRuhic had told him my plans. I thanked him and assured him I'd make it go as far as I could. It took me ten minutes to collect my personal belongings from the ship and buckle Eureka into the harness I'd made for him. Then Ancu-Uriru took me through the port formalities, which weren't much for anyone with a bankroll, and found me an inn in the town. In-Ruhic joined us for a final drink in my room, and then they left, and I sat on the side of the plain little bunk in the plain little room in the yellow twilight and scratched Eureka behind the ears and felt the loneliness close in. T he town was named Inciro, like the planet. It was one of half a dozen ports that had been built ages past to handle the long vanished trade in minerals and hides and timber from the interior of the one big continent. The population added up to about ten thousand people, many of whom had six fingers on each hand for some reason. They were tall, darkeyed, pale-skinned, gloomy-looking, with a sort of Black Irish family resemblance, like Eskimos or Hottentots. I spent a few days wandering around the town, sampling the food in different chophouses and seafood dives -- they were all good -- and drinking a tasty red beer called izm. The mixed dialect I'd learned from In-Ruhic and his men was good enough to carry on a basic conversation. I soon learned there was no Zeridajhi embassy anywhere on the planet. The nearest thing to it was a consular agent representing the commercial interest of the half dozen worlds within five light-years of Inciro. I called on him. He was a fattish, hairy man in a stale-smelling office over a warehouse. He steepled his pudgy fingers and listened to what I had to say, then solemnly suggested I forget the whole thing. It seemed it was a big galaxy, and the things that had maimed me and stolen Milady Raire could be anywhere in it -- probably at the far side of it by now. No belligerent non-human had been seen in these parts for more centuries than I had years. He would have liked to have told me I'd imagined it all, but his eyes kept straying back to my scars. Eureka went with me on my walks, attracting quite a bit of attention at first. TTie Inctrinos had seen cats before, but none W size. He did more than keep me company. One evening a trio of loughnec with too many bowls of izm inside them came over to get a closer look at my scars, and he came to his feet from where he'd been curled up under the table and made a sound like tearing canvas and showed a mouthful of teeth, and they backed away fast. I found a little old man who hung around one of the bars who knew half a dozen useful dialects. For the price of enough drinks each evening to keep him in a talking mood, he gave me language lessons, plus the beginning of an education on the state of this end of the galaxy. He told me how the human race had developed a long time ago on a world near Galactic Center, had spread outwards in all directions for what must have been a couple of hundred thousand years, settled every habitable planet they found and built a giant empire that collapsed peacefully after a while of its own weight. That had been over twenty thousand years earlier; and since then the many separate tribes of man had gone their own ways. "Now, take you." He poked a skinny finger at me. "From a planet you call Eart'. Thought you were the only people in the Universe. But all you were was a passed-over colony, or maybe what was left of a party marooned by an accident; or a downed battleship. Or maybe you were a penal colony. Or perhaps a few people wandered out there, two thirds of the way to the rim, just wanting to be alone. A few thousand years pass, and -- there you are!" He looked triumphant, as if he'd just delivered a rigorous proof of the trisection of the angle. "But we've dug up bones," I told him. "Ape-men, and missing links. They show practically the whole chain of evolution, from animals to men. And we've got gorillas and chimps and monkeys that look too much like us to just be coincidence." "Who said anything about coincidence?" he came back. "Life adapts to conditions. Similar conditions, similar life. You ever look at the legs and feet on a pink-lizard? Swear they were human, except they're only so long. Look at flying creatures: birds, mammals,, reptiles, goranos or mikls. They all have wings, all flap 'em, all have hollow bones, use two legs for walking -- " "Even Eureka is related to humanity," I pressed on. "We have more similarities than we have differences. As embryos of a few weeks, you can't tell us apart." He nodded and grinned. "Uhhuh. And where'd you say you got him. Not on Eart'." It was like arguing religion. Talking about it just confirmed everyone in his original opinion. But the talking was good experience. By the time I'd been on Inciro for three months Earth time I was fluent in the lingua franca that the spacers used and had a pretty good working vocabulary in a couple of other dialects. And kept my Zeridajh sharpened up with long imaginary conversations with the Lady Raire, in which I explained over and over again how we should have greeted the midgets. I looked up a local surgeon who examined my wounds and clucked and, after a lot of lab studies and allergy tests, put me under an anesthetic and rebuilt my shoulder with metal and plastic to replace what was missing. When the synthetic skin had stitched itself in with the surrounding hide, he operated again, to straighten out my ribs. He wanted to reupholster the side of my neck and jaw next, but the synthetic hide was the same pale color as the locals; it wouldn't have improved my looks much. And by then, I was tired of the pain and boredom of plastic surgery. My arm worked all right now, and I could stand up straight again instead of cradling my smashed side. And it was time to move on. In-Ruhic's ship called about then, and I asked his advice. "I don't want to sign on for just a local run," I told him. "I want to work my way toward Zeridajh and ask questions along the way. Sooner or later I'll find a lead to the Midgets." "This is a long quest you set yourself, Biridanju," he said. "And a vain one." But he took me along to a local ship-owner and got me a place as an apprentice power-section trader on a freighter bound inward toward a world called Topaz. E ureka and I saw Topaz, and after that Greu and Poylon and Trie and Pandache's World and the Three Moons. Along the way, I learned the ins and outs of an ionpulse drive and a stressed-field generator; and I served my time in vac suits, working outside under the big black sky that wrapped all the way around and seemed to pull at me like a magnet that would suck me away into its deepest blackest depths, every hour I spent out on a hull. And I had my head pounded by a few forecastle strong-arm types, until an oak-tough old tubeman who'd almost been fleet champion once in his homeworld's navy showed me a few simple tricks to keep from winding up on the short end of every bout. His naethod was effective. He pounded me harder than the bully-boys until I got fast enough to bloody his nose one night, and graduated. I learned to pull duty three on, three off, to drink the concoctions that space-faring men seemed to always be able to produce no matter how far they were from the last port, and to play seventy-one different games with hundred-and-four card decks whose history was lost in antiquity. And at every world I asked and got the same answer. No such animals as the Midgets had been seen in five thousand years and probably not then. On a world called Unriss, in a library that was a museum relic itself, I found a picture of a Midget -- or a reasonable facsimile. I couldn't read the text, but the librarian could make out a little of the old language. It said the thing was called a Heeaq, that it was a denizen of a world of the same name, and that it was extinct. IF Where Heeaq was located, it neglected to say. My small bankroll, which would have kept me in modest circumstances on Enciro, didn't last long. I spent it carefully, item by item outfitted my ship chest, including a few luxuries like a dreamer and a supply of tapes, a good power gun and shore clothes. I studied astrogation and power section maintenance whenever I was able to get hold of a tape I hadn't seen before. By the time two years had passed, I had been promoted to power chief, second class, meaning I was qualified to act as standby chief on vessels big enough to have a standby complement. That was a big step forward -- like jumping from Chinese junks to tramp steamers. It meant I could ship on bigger, faster vessels, with longer range. I reached a world called Lhiza, after a six-month cruise on a converted battle cruiser, and spent three months on the beach there, spending my back pay on new training tapes and looking for a berth that would take me into the edge of the sector of the galaxy known as the Bar. It wasn't easy. Few of the older, slower hulls that worked the Eastern Arm had business there. But the Bar was where Zeridajh was, still thousands of light-years away, but getting closer. T 'he vessel I finally shipped on was a passenger liner, operating under a contract with the government of a world called Ahax, hauling immigrant labor. I didn't much like the idea; it was my first time nurse-maiding a ship-load of Flatlanders. But I was offered a slot as first powerman, and the tub was going on a long way, and in the right direction. So I signed on. She was an old ship, like most of the hulls operating in the Arm, but she had been a luxury job in her day. I had a suite to myself, with room for Eureka, so for the first time aboard ship the old cat got to sleep across my feet, the way he did ashore. The power section was a massive, old-fashioned stressed-field installation; but after the first few weeks of shakedown and impressing my ideas on my crew I had the engines running smoothly. Everything settled down then to the quiet, slightly dull, sometimes pleasant, always monotonous routine that all long cruises are. My first shift chief, Ommu, was a biguscled, square-faced fellow with the faint greenish cast to his skin that said he was from a high Cl world. He listened to my story of the Midgets and told me that once, many years before, he'd seen a similar ship, copper-colored. It had drifted into a commentary orbit around a world in the Guree system, in the Bar. She was a navigational hazard, and he'd been one of the crew assigned to rendezvous with her and set vapororizing charges. Against standing orders, he and another sapper had crawled in through a hole in her side to take a look around. The ship had been long dead, and there wasn't much left of the crew; but he had picked up a souvenir. He got it from his ship-chest and laid it on the mess table in front of me: It looked like a stack of demitasse cus dull silver, with a loop at the base and a short rod projecting from the open end. "Yeah," I said, and felt my scalp prickle, just looking at it. It wasn't identical with the guns that had shot me up, back on Gar #, but it was a close enough relative. I had him tell me all about the ship, everything he could remember. There wasn't much. We went up to the ship's psychologist and after a lot of persuasion and a bottle of crude stuff from the power section still, he agreed to run a recall on Ommu under hypnosis. I checked with the purser and located a xenologist among the passengers and got Mm to sit in on the session. In a light trance, Ommu relived the approach to the ship, described it in detail as he came up on it from sun-idc. We followed him inside, through the maze of compartments, we were with him as he stirred the remains of what must have been a Heeaq and turned up the gun. The therapist ran Mm back through it three times, and he and the xenologist took ttims firing questions at him. At the end of two hours, Ommu as soaking wet, and I had the spooky feeling I'd been aboard that derelict with him. T he xenologist wanted to go back to his quarters and pore over his findings, but I talked Mm into giving us a spot analysis of what he'd gotten. "The vessel itself appears a typical artifact of what we call the H'eeaq Group," he said. "They are an echinodermoid form, originating far out in fringe space, or, as some have theorized, representing an incursion from a neighboring stellar assemblage, presumably the Lesser Cloud. Their few fully documented contacts with Man, and with other advanced races of the galaxy, reveal a cultural pattern of marked schizoid-accretional character -- " "Maybe you could make that a little plainer," Ommu suggested. "These are traits reflecting a basic disintegration of the societal mechanism," he told us and elaborated on that for a while. The simplified explanation was as bad as the regular one, as far as my vocabulary was concerned. I told him so. "Look here," he snapped. He was a peppery little man. "You're asking me to extrapolate from very scanty data, to place my professional reputation in jeopardy -- " "NotMng like that, sir," I soothed him. "I'd just like to have a little edge the next time I meet those types." "Ummm. There's their basic insecurity, of course. I'd judge their home world has been cataclysmically destroyed, probably the bulk of their race along with it. What this might do to a species with a strong racial-survival drive is anyone's guess. If I were you, I'd look for a complex phobia system. Fear of heights or enclosed spaces, assorted fetish symbologies. And of course, the bully syndrome. Convince them you're stronger, and IF they're your slaves. Weaker, and they destroy you." That was all I got from him. Ommu gave me the teacup gun. I disassembled it and examined its workings, but it didn't tell me much. The routine closed in again then. I fine-tuned the generators and put the crew on polishing until the section gleamed from one end to the other. I won some money playing tikal, lost is again at revo. And then one off-shift I was shocked up out of a deep sleep to find myself lying on the floor, with Eureka yowling over me and every alarm bell on the ship screaming disaster. B y the time I reached the power section, the buffeting was so bad that I had to grab a rail to stay on my feet. "I've tried to get through to command for orders," Ommu yelled over the racket, "but no contact!" I tried the inter-deck screen, raised a young plotman with blood on his face who told me the whole forward end of the ship had been carried away by a collision, with what he didn't know. That was all he told me before the screen blanked in the middle of a word. A new shock knocked both of us down. The deck heaved up under us and kept going, right on up and over. "She's tumbling," I yelled to Ommu. "She'll break up fast under this! Order the men to lifeboat stations!" A tubeman named Rusi showed up then, pale as chalk, hugging internal injuries. I gave him a hand, and we crawled on floors, walls and ceilings, made it to our boat station. The bay door was blown wide, and the boat was hanging in its davits with the stem torn out and there were pieces of a dead man scattered around. I ordered the men up to the next station and started to help my walking wounded, but he was already dead. The upper bay was chaos. I grabbed a gun from a lanky grandpa who was waving it and yelling and fired over the crowd. Nobody noticed. Ommu joined me, and with a few crewmen we formed up a flying wedge. Ommu got the hatch open while the rest of us beat back the mob. All this time. Eureka had stayed close to me, with his ears flattened and his tail twitching. "Take 'em in order," I told Ommu. "Anybody tries to walk over somebody else. I'll shoot him!" Two seconds later I had to make that good when a beefy two hundred pounder charged me. I blew a hole through him, and the rest of them scattered back. The boat had been designed for fifty passengers; we had eightyseven aboard when a wall of fire came rolling down the corridor and Ommu grabbed me just in time and hauled me in across the laps of a fat woman and a middle-aged man who was crying, and Eureka bounded in past me. I got forward and threw in the big red lever and a big boot kicked us and then there was the sick, null-G feel that meant we'd cleared the launch tube and were on our own. I n the #-by-# command compartment, I watched the small screen where five miles away the ship was rotating slowly, end-over-end, with debris trailing off from her in a lazy spiral. Flashes of light sparkled at points along the hull where smashed piping was spewing explosive mixtures. Her back was broken and the aft third of the ship separated and a cloud of tiny objects, some of them human, scattered out into the void, exploding as they hit vacuum. The center section blew then. When the smoke cleared there was nothing left but a major fragment of the stern, glowing redhot, and an expanding dust-cloud. "Any other boats get away?" I asked. "I didn't see any, Billy." "There were five thousand people aboard that scowl We can't be the only survivors!" I yelled at him, as if convincing him would make it true. A powerman named Lath stuck his head in. "We've got some casualties back here," he said. "Where in the Nine Hells are we, anyway?" I checked the chart screen. The nearest world was a planet named Cyoc, blue-coded, which meant uninhabited and uninhabitable. "Nothing there but a beacon," Ommu said. "An ice world." We checked; found nothing within a year's range that was any better -- or as good. "Cyoc it is," I said. "Now let's take a look at what we've got to work with." I led the way down the no-G central tube past the passenger cells that were arranged radially around it, like the kernels on a com cob. They were badly overcrowded. There seemed to be a lot of women and children. Maybe the mob had demonstrated some of the chivalric instincts, after all; or maybe Ommu had done some selecting I didn't notice. I wasn't sure he'd done the right thing. A big man, wearing what had been expensive clothes before the mob got them, pushed out in the aisle up ahead of me, waited for me to come to him. "I'm Till Ognath, member of the Ahacian Assembly," he stated. "As highest ranking individual aboard. I'm assuming command. I see you're Crew. I want you men to run a scan of the nearby volume of space and give me a choice of five possible destinations within our cruise capability. Then -- " "This is Chief Danger, Power Section." Ommu butted into his spiel. "He's ranking Crew." Assemblyman Ognath looked me over. "Better give me the gun. He held out a broad, well-tended hand. "I'll keep it," I said. "I'll be glad to have your help, Assemblyman." "Maybe I didn't make myself clear," Ognath showed me a wellbred frown. "As a member of the World Assembly of Ahax, I -- " "Ranking crew member assumes command. Assemblyman," Ommu cut him off. "Better crawl back in your hole. Mister, before you qualify yourself for proceedings under space law." IF "You'd quote law to me, you -- " Ognaths vocabulary failed him. "I'll let you know how you can best be of service, Assemblyman," I told him, and we moved on and left him still looking for a suitable word. T he boat was in good shape, fully equipped and supplied -- for fifty people, all of who-m were presumed to have had plenty of time to pack and file aboard like ladies and gentlemen. Assemblyman Ognath made a formal complaint about the presence of an animal aboard, but he was howled down. Everybody seemed to think a mascot was lucky. Anyway, Eureka ate very little and took up no useful space. Two of the injured died the first day, three more in the next week. We put them out the lock and closed ranks. There wasn't much room for modesty aboard, for those with strong feelings about such matters. One man objected to another's watching his wife taking a sponge bath -- (ten other people were watching, too; they had no choice in the matter, unless they screwed their eyes shut) and knocked his front teeth out with a belt buckle. Two days later, the jealous one turned up drifting in the no-G tube with his windpipe crushed. Nobody seemed to miss him much, not even the wife. Two hundred and sixty-nine hours after we'd kicked free of the foundering ship, we were maneuvering for an approach to Cyoc. From five hundred miles up, it looked like one huge snowball. It was my first try at landing an atmosphere boat. I'd run through plenty of drills, but the real thing was a little different. Even with fully automated controls that only needed a decision made for them here and there along the way, there were still plenty of things to do wrong. I did them all. After four hours of the roughest ride this side of a flatwheeled freight car, we slammed hard in a mountain-rimmed icefield something over four hundred miles from the beacon station. T he rough landing had bloodied few noses, one of them mine, broken an arm or two, and opened a ten-foot seam in the hull that let in a blast of refrigerated air. But that was incidental. The real damage was to the equipment compartment forward. The power plant had been knocked right through the side of the boat. That meant no heat, no light and no communications. Assemblyman Ognath told me what he thought of my piloting ability. I felt pretty bad until Ommu got him to admit he knew even less about atmosphere flying that I did. The outside temperature was ten below freezing; that made it a warm day, for Cyoc. The sun was small and a long way off, glaring in a dark, metallic sky. It shed a sort of gray, before-the-storm light over a hummocky spread of glacier that ended at blue peaks, miles away. Assemblyman Ognath told me that now that we were on terra firma he was taJdng charge, and that he would waste no time taking steps for rescue. He didn't say what steps. I told him rd retain command as long as the emergency lasted. He fumed and used some strong language, but I was still wearing the gun. There were a lot of complaints from the passengers about the cold, the short rations, the recycled water, bruises and other things. They'd been all right in space, glad to be alive. Now that they were ashore they seemed to expect instant relief. I called some of the men aside for a conference. "I'm taking a party to make the march to the beacon," I told them. "Party?" Ognath bellied up to me. "We'll all go! Only by pulling together can we hope to survive!" "I'm taking ten men," I said. "The rest stay here." "You expect us to huddle here in this wreck and slowly freeze to death?" Ognath wanted to know. "Not you. Assemblyman," I said. "You're coming with me." He didn't like that, either. He said his place was with the people. "I want the strongest, best-fed men," I said. "We'll be traveling with heavy packs at first. I can't have stragglers." "Why not just yourself, and this fellow?" Ognath jerked a thumb at Ommu. "We're taking half the food with us. Somebody has to carry it." "Half the food -- for ten men? And you'd leave seventy-odd women and children to share what's left?" "That's right. We'll leave now. There's still a few hours of daylight." Half an hour later we were ready to go, the cat included. The cold didn't seem to bother him. The packs were too big by half, but they'd get lighter. "Where's your pack. Danger?" Ognath wanted to know. "I'm not carrying one," I told him. I left the boat in charge of a crewman with a sprained wrist. When I looked back at the end of an hour all I could see was ice. W e made fifteen miles before sunset. When we camped, several of the men complained about the short rations, and a couple mentioned the food I gave Eureka. Ognath made another try to gather support for himself as trail boss, but without much luck. We turned in and slept for five hours. It wasn't daylight yet when I rolled them out. One man complained that his suit pack was down; he was shivering, and blue around the lips. I sent him back and distributed his pack among the others. We went on, into rougher country, sprinkled with rock slabs that pushed up through the ice. The ground was rising, and footing was treacherous. When I called the noon halt, we had made another tea miles. "At this rate, we'll cover the distance in ten days," Ognath informed me. "The rations could be doubled easily. We're carrying enough for forty days!" IF He had some support on that point. I said no. After a silent meal and a ten-minute rest, we went on. I watched the men. Ognath was a complainer, but he held his position up front. Two men had a tendency to straggle. One of them seemed to be having trouble with his pack. I checked on him, found he had a bad bruise on his shoulder from a fall during the landing. I chewed him out and sent him back to the boat. "If anybody else is endangering this party by being noble, speak up now,' I told them. Nobody did. We went on, down to eight men already, and only twenty-four hours out. The climbing was stiff for the rest of the day. Night caught us halfway to a high pass. Everybody was dog-tired. Ommu came over and told me the packs were too heavy. "They'll get lighter," I told him. "Maybe if you carried one you'd see it my way," he came back. "Maybe that's why I'm not carrying one." We spent a bad night in the ice of an ice-ridge. I ordered all suits set for minimum heat to conserve power. At dawn we had to dig ourselves out of drifted snow. We made the pass by mid-afternoon, and were into a second line of hills by dark. Up until then, everyone had been getting by on his initial charge; now the strain was starting to show. When morning came, two men had trouble getting started. After the first hour, one of them passed out cold. I left him and the other fellow with a pack between them, to make it back to the boat. By dark, we'd put seventyfive miles behind us. I began to lose track of days then. One man slipped on a tricky climb around a crevasse, and we lost him, pack and all. That left five of us: myself, Ommu, Ognath, a passenger named Choom and Lath, one of my Power Section Crew. Their faces were hollow, and when they pulled their masks off their eyes looked like wild animals; but we'd weeded out the weak ones now. At a noonday break, Ognath watched me passing out the ration cans. "I thought so!" His fruity baritone was just a croak now. "Do you see what he's doing?" He turned to the others, who had sprawled on their backs as usual as soon as I called the halt. "No wonder Danger's got more energy than the rest of us! He's giving himself double rations -- for himself and the animal!" They all sat up and stared my way. "How about it?" Ommu asked. "Is he right?" "Never mind me," I told them. "Just eat and get what rest you can. We've still got nearly three hundred miles to go." Ommu got to his feet. "Time you doubled up on rations for all of us," he said. The other two men were sitting and watching. "I'll decide when it's time," I told him. "Ognath, open a pack and hand out an extra ration all around," Ommu said. 'Touch a pack and I'll kill you," I said. "Lie down and get your rest, Onunu." They stood there and looked at me. "Better be careful how you sleep from now on, Danger," Ommu said. Nobody said anything while we finished eating and shouldered packs and started on. I marched at the rear now, watching them. I couldn't afford to let them fail. The Lady Raire was counting on me. XV A t halfway point, I was still feeling fairly strong. Ognath and Choom had teamed up to help each other over the rough spots, and Ommu and Lath stuck together. None of them said anything to me unless they had to. Eureka had taken to ranging far offside, looking for game, maybe. Each day's march was like the one before. We got on our feet at daylight, wolfed down the ration and hit the trail. Our best speed was about two miles per hour now. The scenery never changed. When I estimated we'd done two hundred and fifty miles -- about the fifteenth day -- I increased the ration. We made better time that day, and the next. Then the pace began to drag again. The next day there were a lot of falls. It wasn't just rougher ground; the men were reaching the end of their strength. We halted in mid-afternoon, and I told them to turn their suit heaters up to medium range. I saw Ognath and Choom swap looks. I went over to the Assemblymian and checked his suit; it was on full high. So was Choom's. "Don't blame them. Danger," Ommu said. "On short rations they were freezing to death." The next day Choom's heat-pack went out. He kept up for an hour; then he fell and couldn't get up. I checked his feet; they were frozen waxy-white, ice-hard, halfway to the knee. We set up a tent for him, left fourteen-days' rations, and went on. Assemblyman Ognath told me this would be one of the items I'd answer for at my trial. "Not unless we reach the beacon," I reminded him. Two days later, Ognath jumped me when he thought I was asleep. He didn't know I had scattered ice chips off my boots around me as a precaution. I woke up just in time to roll out of his way. He rounded and came for me again, and Eureka knocked him down and stood over him, snarling in a way to chill your blood. Lath and Ommu heard him yell and I had to hold the gun on them to get them calmed down. "Rations," Ognath said. "Divide them up now; four even shares I" I turned him down. Ommu told me what he'd do to me as soon as he caught me without the gun. kill the cat, now that it had gone mad and was attacking people. I let them talk. When they had it out of IF their systems, we went on. That afternoon Ommu fell and couldn't get up. I took his pack and told Lath to help him. An hour later Lath was down. I called a halt, issued a triple ration all around and made up what was left of the supplies into two packs. Ognath complained, but he took one and I took the other. The next day was a hard one. We were into broken ground again, and Ognath was having trouble with his load, even though it was a lot lighter than the one he'd started with. Ommu and Lath took turns helping each other up. Sometimes it was hard to tell which one was helping which. We made eight miles and pitched camp. The next day we did six miles; the next five; the day after that, Ognath fell and sprained an ankle an hour after we'd started. By then we had covered three hundred and sixty miles. "We'll make camp here," I said. "Ommu and Lath, lend a hand." I used the filament gun on a narrow beam to cut half a dozen footcube blocks of snow. When I told Ommu to start stacking them in a circle, he just looked at me. "He's gone crazy," he said. "Listen, Lath; you too, Ognath. We've got to rush him. He can't kill all. three of us -- " "We're going to build a shelter," I told him. "You'll stay warm there until I get back." "What are you talking about?" Lath was hobbling around offside, trying to get behind me. I waved him back. "This is the end of the line for you. Ognath can't go anywhere; you two might make another few miles, but the three of you together will have a better chance." "Where do you think you're going?" Ognath got himself up on one elbow to call out. "Are you abandoning us now?" "He planned it this way all along," Lath whispered. His voice had gone a couple of days before. "Made us pack his food for him, used us as draft animals; and now that we're used up, he'll leave us here to die." Ommu was the only one who didn't spend the next ten minutes swearing at me. He flopped down on the snow and watched me range the snow blocks in a ten-foot circle. I cut and carried up more and built the second course. When I had the third row in place, he got up and silently started chinking the gaps with snow. It took two hours to finish the igloo, including a six-foot entrance tunnel and a sanitary trench a few feet away. "We'll freeze inside that," Ognath was almost blubbering now. "When our suit-packs go, we'll freeze!" I opened the packs and stacked part of the food, made up one light pack. "Look," Ognath was staring at the small heap of ration cans. "He's leaving us with nothing! We'll starve, while he stuffs his stomach!" "If you starve you won't freeze," I said. "Better get him inside," I told Ommu and Lath. "He won't be stuffing his stomach much," Ommu said. "He's leaving us twice wihat he's taking for himself." "But -- where's all the food he's been hoarding?" "We've been eating it for the past week," Ommu said. "Shut up, Ognath. You talk too much."" I put Ognath in the igloo. It was already warmer inside, from the yellowish light flickering through the snow walls. I left them then and, Eureka pacing beside me, started off toward what I hoped was the beacon. M y pack weighed about ten pounds; I had food enough for three-days' half rations. I was still in reasonable shape, reasonably well fed. With luck, I expected to make the beacon in a two-day march. I didn't have luck. I made ten miles before dark, slept cold and hungry, put in a full second day. By sundown I had covered the forty miles, but all I could see was flat plain and glare ice, all the way to the horizon. According to the chart, the beacon was built on a hundredfoot knoll that would be visible for at least twenty miles. That meant one more day, minimum. I did the day, and another day. I rechecked my log, and edited all the figures downward; and I still should have been in sight of home base by now. That night Eureka disappeared. The next day my legs started to go. I finished the last of my food and threw away the pack. I had a suspicion my suit heaters were about no finished; and now I shivered all the time. Late that day I saw Eureka, far away, crossing a slight ripyple in the flat ice. Maybe he was on the trail of something to eat. I wished him luck. I had a bad fall near sunset and had a hard time crawling into the lee of a rock to sleep. The next day things got rough. I knew I was within a few miles of the beacon, but my suit instruments weren't good enough to pinpoint it. Any direction was as good as another. I walked east, toward the dull glare of the sun behind low clouds. When I couldn't walk any more I crawled. After a while I couldn't crawl any more. I heard a buzzing from my suit pack that meant the charge was almost exhausted. It didn't seem important. I didn't hurt any more, wasn't hungry or even a hit tired. It felt good, just floating where I was, in a warm, golden sea. Golden, the color of the Lady Raire's skin when she lay under the hot sun of Gar #, slim and tawny... Lady Raire, a prisoner, waiting for me to come for her. I was on my feet, weaving, but upright. I picked out a rock ahead, and concentrated on reaching it. I made it and fell down and saw my own footprints there. That seemed funny. When I finished laughing, it was dark. I was cold now. I heard voices... The voices were louder, and then there was light and a man was standing over me and Eureka was sitting on his haunches beside me, washing his face. IF Q mimu imd Ognath were all right; Lath had left the igloo and never came back; Choom was dead of gangrene. Of the four men I had sent back to the boat during the first few days, three reached it. All of the party at the boat survived. We later learned that our boat was the only one that got away from the ship. We never learned what it was we had collided with. I was back on my feet in a day or two. The men at the beacon station were glad to have an interruption in their routine; they gave us the best of everything the station had to offer. A couple of days later a ship arrived to take us off. At Ahax, I went before a board of inquiry and answered a lot of questions, most of which seemed to be designed to get me to confess that it had all been my fault. But in the end they gave me a clean bill and a trip bonus for my trouble. Assemblyman Ognath was waiting when I left the hearing room. "I understand the board dismissed you with a modest bonus and a hint that the less you said of the disaster the better," he said. "That's about it." "Danger, I've always considered myself to be a man of character," he told me. "At Cyoc, I was in error. I owe you something. What are your plans?" He gave me a sharp look when I told him. "I assume there's a story behind that -- but I won't piy." "No secret, Mr. Assemblyman." I told him the story over dinner at an eating place that almost made up for thirty days on the ice. When I finished he shook his head. "Danger, do you have any idea how long it will take you to work your passage to as distant a world as Zeridajh?" "A long time." "Longer than you're likely to live, at the wages you're earning." "Maybe." "Danger, as a politician I'm a practical man. I have no patience with romantic quests. However, you saved my life; I have a debt to discharge. I'm in a position to offer you the captaincy of your own vessel, to undertake a mission of considerable difficulty -- but one which, if you're successful, will pay you more than you could earn in twenty years below decks!" T he details were explained to me that night at a meeting in a plush suite on the top floor of a building that must have been two hundred stories high. From the terrace where I was invited to take a chair with four well tailored and manicured gentlemen, the city lights spread out for fifty miles. Assemblyman Ognath wasn't there. One of the men did most of the talking while the other three listened. 'The task we wish you to undertake," he said in a husky whisper, "requires a man of sound judgment and intrepid character; a man without family ties or previous conflicting loyalties. I am assured you possess those qualities. The assignment also demands great determination, quick wits and high integrity. If you succeed, the rewards will be gpreat. If you fail, you can expect a painful death, and we can do nothing to help you." A silent-footed girl appeared with a tray of glasses. I took one and listened. "Ahacian commercial interests have suffered badly during recent decades from the peculiarly insidious competition of a non-human race known as the Rish. The pattern of their activities has been such as to give rise to the conviction that more than mere mercantile ambitions are at work. We have, however, been singularly unsuccessful in our efforts to place observers among them." "In other words, your spies haven't had any luck." "None." "What makes this time different?" "You will enter Rish-controUed space openly, attended by adequate public notice. Your movements as a lone Ahacian vessel in alien-controlled space will be followed with interest by the popular screen. The Rish can hardly maintain their pretense of cordiality if they offer you open interference. Your visit to the capital, Hi-Iliat, will appear no more than a casual commercial visit." "I don't know anything about espionage," I said. "What would I do when I got there -- if I got there?" "Nothing. Your crew of four will consist of trained specialists." "Why do you need me?" "Precisely because you are not a specialist. Your training has been other than academic. You have faced disaster in space, and survived. Perhaps you will survive among the Rish. It sounded simple enough. I'd be gone a year; when I got back, a small fortune would be waiting for me. The amount they mentioned made my head swim. Ognath had been wrong. It wasn't twenty-years' earnings; it was forty. "I'll te it," I said. "But I think you're wasting your money." "We pay you nothing unless you return," the spokesman said. "In which case the outlay will not have been wasted." T he vessel they showed me in a maintenance dock at the port was a space-scarred, five-thousand tonner, built twelve hundred years ago and used hard ever since. If the Rish had any agents snooping around her for hidden armor, multilight communications gear or superdrive auxiliaries, they didn't find them. There weren't any. Just the ancient stressed-field generators, standard navigation gear, a hold full of pre-coded computer tapes for light manufacturing operations. My crew of four were an unlikelylooking set of secret agents. Two were ohinless lads with expressions of goggleed innocence; one was a middle-aged man who gave the impression of having run away from a fat wife; and the last was a tall, big-handed, silent fellow with moist blue eyes. I spent two weeks absorbing cephalotapes designed to fill in the gaps in my education. We lifted off beJF fore dawn one chilly morning, th no more fanfare than any other tramp steamer leawng harbor. I left Eureka behind with one of the tech girls from the Training Center. Maybe that was a clue to the confidence I was beginning to have in the mission. For the first few weeks, I enjoyed captaining my own ship, even as ancient a scow as Jongo. My crew stared solemnly when I suited up and painted the letters on her prow myself. To them, the idea of anthropomorphizing an artifact with a pet name was really pretty weird. We made our first planetfall without incident. I contacted the importers ashore, quoted prices, bought replacement cargo in accordance with instructions, while my four happygo-lucky men saw the town. I didn't ask them what they'd found out; as far as I was concerned, the less I knew about their activities the better. We went on, calling at small, unpopulous worlds, working our way deeper into the bar, then angling toward galactic south, swinging out into less densely populated space, where Center was a blazing arch in the screens. We'd seen, by afternoon, Ostrok and twenty other worlds, as alike as small towns in mid-western United States. And then one day we arrived at a planet which looked no different than the rest of space, but was the target we'd ibeen feeling our way toward for five months; The Rish capital, and the place where, if I made one tiny mistake, I'd leave my bones. T he port of Hi-Iliat was a booming, bustling center where great shining hulls from all the great worlds of the Bar, and even a few from Center itself, stood ranged on the miles-wide ramps system, as proud and aloof as carved Assyrian kings. We rode a rampcar in from the remote boondocks where we'd been parked by traffic control to a mile-wide rotunda constructed of high arched ribs of white concrete with translucent filigree-work between them. I was so busy staring up at it that I didn't see the Rish official until one of my men prodded me. I turned and was looking at a leathery five-foot oyster all ready for a walk on the beach, spiniy legs and all. He was making thin buzzes and clicks that seemed to come from a locket hanging oa the front side of him. It dawned on me then that it was speaking a dialect I could understand: "All right, chaps, just in from out-system, eh? Mind stepping this way? A few formalities, won't take a skwrth I didn't know how long a skwrth was, but I followed him, and my four beauties followed me. He led us into a room that was like a high, narrow corridor, too brightly lit for comfort, already crowded with men and Rish and three or four other varieties of life, none of which I had ever seen before. We sat on small stools as directed and put our hands into slots and had lights flashed in our eyes and sharp tones beeped at our ears. Whatever the test was, we must have passed, because our guide led us out into a ceilingless circular passage like a cattle run and addressed us: "Now, chaps, as guests of the Rish Hierarchy, you're welcome to our great city and to our fair world. You'll find hostelries catering to your metabolic requirements, and if at any time you are in need of assistance, you need merely repair to the nearest sanctuary station, marked by the white pole, and you will be helped. And I must also solemnly caution you: Any act unfriendly to the Rish Hierarchy will be dealt with instantly and with the full rigor of the law. I trust you'll have a pleasant stay. Mind the step, now. He pushed a hidden control and a panel slid back and he waved us through into the concourse. An hour later, after an ion-bath and a drink at the hotel bar, I set out to take a look at Hi-Iliat. It was a beautiful town, full of blinding white pavement, sheer towers, tiled plazas with hundred-foot fountains and schools and shoals of Rish, zooming along on tiny onewheeled motorbikes. There were a few men in sight, and an equal number of aliens. The locals paid no attention to them, except to ping their bikebells at them when they stepped out in front of them. I foimd a park where orange grass as soft as velvet grew under trees with polished silver trunks and golden yellow leaves. There were odd little butterfly-like birds there, and small leathery animals the size of squirrels. Beyond it was a lake, with pretty little buildings standing up on stilts above the water; I could hear twittery music coming from somewhere. I sat on a bench and watched the big, pale sun setting across the lake. It seemed that maybe the life of a spy wasn't so b after all. It was twilight when I started back to the hotel. I was halfway there when four Rish on greenpainted scooters surrounded me. One of them was wearing a voice box. "Captain Billy Danger," he said in a squeak like a bat. "You are under arrest for crimes against the peace and order of the Hierarch of Rish." T he prison they took me to was of partitions, blind alleys, cubicles, passages, tiny rooms where inscrutable oyster-faces stared at me while carrying on inaudible conversations that made my ear drums itch. I asked questions, but got no answers. For all I know it was the same oyster I talked to each time; it might even have been the same office. I got very hungry and thirsty and sleepy, but nobody got out any rubber hoses. I could have done worse in any small town in Mississippi. After about an hour of these silent examinations, I wound up in a room the size of a phone booth with a Rishian wearing a talk-box. He told me his name was Humekoy and that he was Chief of Physical Interrogation and Punishment. I got the impression the two duties were hard to tell apart. IF "You are in a most serious position," he told me in his mechanically translated squeak. "The Rish Hierarchy has no mercy for strangers seeking to do evil. However, I am aware that you yourself have merely been used -- possibly even without your knowledge -- as an agency for transporting criminals. By cooperating with me fully, you may save yourself from the more unpleasant consequences of your actions. Accordingly, you will now give me full particulars of the activities of your associates." "I want to see the Ahacian consul," I said. "Don't waste my time," he shrilled. "What were the specific missions of the four agents who accompanied you here?" "If my crew are under arrest, I want to see them." "You have an imperfect grasp of the situation. Captain Danger! It is  who make the demands!" "I'm afraid I can't help you." "Nonsense, I know you Men too well. Each of you would sell his own kind to save his person." 'Then why are you afraid to let me see the consul?" "Afraid?" he made a sound which was probably a laugh, but it lost something in translation. "Very well, then. I grant your plea." They took me to a bigger room with softer light and left me, and a minute later an egg-bald man in dandified clothes came in, looking worried and mad. A see me," he said and handed me a gadget and looped a similar one around his neck, with attachment to the left ear and the Adam's apple. I followed suit. "Look here. Danger," his voice peeped in my ear. "There's nothing I can do for you! You knew that when you came here. Insistence on seeing me serves merely to implicate Ahax." "Who are you kidding?" I subvocalized. "They know all about the mission. Something leaked. That wasn't part of the deal." "That's neither here nor there. Your duty now is to avoid any appearance that yours is an official mission." "You think they're dumb enough to believe I'm in the spy business for myself?" "See here. Danger, don't meddle in affairs that are beyond your grasp! You were selected for this eracy in matters of policy." "Let's quit kidding," I said. "Why do you think they let you see me Let me? They practically kidnapped me." "Sure; this is a test. They want to see what you'll do. Species loyalty is a big thing with them -- I learned that much studying tapes, back on Ahax. Every time they capture and execute a Man with no reaction from his home world, they get a little bolder." "This is nonsense, a desperate bid for rescue -- " "You made a mistake seeing me, Mr. Consul. You can't pretend you don't know me, now. Better get me IF T# out of this. If you don't I'll spill the beans." "What's that?" He looked shocked. "What can you tell them? You know nothing of the actual -- " He cut himself off. "I can tell them all about you, for a starter," I told him. "Tell them what about me?" "That you're the mastermind of the Ahacian espionage ring here on the Rish World," I said. "And anything else I can think of. Some of it might even be true." He got his back stiffened up and gave me the old iceblue glare. "You'd play the traitor of the Ahacian Assembly, which trusted you?" "You bureaucrats have a curious confidence in the power of one-way loyalty. You'd sell me down the river just to maintain a polite diplomatic lie; and you expect me to go, singing glad hosannahs." He struggled some more, but I had him hooked in the eye. In the end he said he'd see what he could do and went away mopping his forehead. The oysters hustled me into an elevator and took me down into what must have been a sub-subbasement and made me crawl through a four-foot tunnel into a dim-lit room with a strange, unpleasant smell. I was still sniffing and trying to remember what it was about the odor that made my scalp crawl when something moved in the deep gloom of the far corner and an armored, four-foot midget rose up on a set of thick legs and two oversized eyes stared at me from the middle of its chest. F or the first five seconds I stood where I was, feeling the sheck reaction slamming through my brain. Then, without any conscious decision on my part, I was diving for it. It tried to scuttle aside, but I landed on it, grabbed for what passed for its throat. Its body arced imder me, and the stubby legs beat against the floor, and it broke free and went for the exit tunnel, 'maiking a sound like water gurgling down a drain. I kicked it away from the opening, and it curled up and rolled to a neutral corner and I stood over it breathing hard and looking for a soft spot to attack. "Peace!" The words sounded grotesque coming from what looked like an oversized armadillo. "I yield, master! Have mercy on poor Srat!" Then it made sounds that were exactly like an Australian bush-baby -- or a crying child. "That's right," I said, and my voice had a high, quavering note. I could feel the gooseflesh on my arms, just from being close to the thing. "I'm not ready to kill you yet. First you're going to tell me things!" "Yes, Master! Poor Srat will tell Master everything he knows! All, all!" "There was a ship -- wasp-waisted, copper-colored, big. It answered our distress call. Bugs like you came out of it. They sihot me up, but I guess they didn't know much human anatomy. And they took the Lady Raire. Where did they take her? Where is she? What did they do to her?" "Master, let poor Srat think!" it gurgled, and I realized I'd been kicking it with every question mark. "Don't think -- just give me the answers." I drew a deep breath and felt liie rage draining away, and my hands started to shake from the reaction. "Master, poor Srat doesn't understand about the lady -- " It oofed in anticipation when I took a step toward it. 'The ship, yes," it babbled. "Long ago poor Srat remembers such a ship, all in the beauty of its migity form, like a great Mother. But that was long, long ago I" "Three years," I said. "On a world out in the Arm." "No, Master! Forty years have passed away since last poor Srat glimpsed the great mother-shape! And that was deep in Fringe Space -- It stopped suddenly, as if it had said too much, and I kicked it again. # # poor Srat is in exile," it JL whined. "So far, so far from the heaving oil-black bosom of the deeps of H'eeaq." "Is that where they took her. To H'eeaq?" It groaned. "Weep for great H'eeaq, Master. Weep for poor Srat's memories of that which was once, and can never be again..." I listened to the blubbering and groaning and piece by piece, got the story from it: H'eeaq, a lone world, a hundred lights out toward Galactic Zenith, where Center spread over the sky like a blazing roof; the discovery that the sun was on the verge of a nova explosion; the flight into space, the years -- centuries of gypsy-wandering. And a landing on a Rish-controlled world, a small brush with the Rish law -- and forty years of slavery. By the time it was finished, I was sitting on the bench by the wall, feeling cold, washed out of all emotion, for the first time in three years. Kicking this poor waif wouldn't bring the Lady Raire back home. That left me with nothing at all. "And Master?" poor Srat whimpered. "Has Master, too, aroused the cruel ire of these Others?" "Yeah, I guess you could say that. They're using me for a test case." I cut myself off. I wasn't ready to start gossiping with the thing. "Master -- poor Srat can tell Master many things about these Rishes. Things that will help him." "It's a little late for that," I said. "I've already had my say. Humekoy wasn't impressed." The H'eeaq crept closer to me. "No, Master, listen to poor Srat. Of mercy, the Rish-things know nothing. But in matters of business ethic..." I was asleep when they came for me. Four guards with symbols painted on their backs herded me along to a circular room where a lone Rish who might have been Humekoy sat behind a desk under a spotlight. Other Rish came in, took seats along the walls behind me. My buddy the Ahacian consul was nowhere in sight. "What will you offer for your freedom?" the presiding Rish asked. IF I stood there temembering what Poor Srat had told me aibout the Rish and wondering whether to believe him. "Nothing," I said. "You offer nothing for your life?" "It's already mine. If you kill me you'll be stealing." "And if we imprison you?" "Stealing is stealing. My life is mine, not yours." I felt the silent buzzing that meant they were talking it over. Then Humekoy picked up two rods, a white one and a red one, from the desk. He held the white one out to me. "You will depart the Rish world at once," he said. "Take this symbol of Rish magnanimity and go." I shook my head, and felt the sweat start up. "I'll take my life and freedom because it's mine, not as a gift. I don't want any gifts from you; no gifts at all." "You refuse the mercy of the Hierarch?" Humekoy 's canned voice went up off the scale. "All I want is what's mine." More silent conversation. Humekoy put the rods back on the desk. "Then go. Captain Danger. You have your freedom." "What about my crew?" "They are guilty. They will pay their debt." "They're no good to you. I suppose you've already pumped them dry. Why not let them go?" "Ah, you crave a gift after all?" "No. I'll pay for them." "So? What payment do you offer?" Poor Srat had briefed me on this, too. I knew what I had to do, but my mouth felt dry and my stomach was quivering. We bargained foe ten minutes before we agreed on a price. My right eye. T hey were skillful surgeons. They took the eye out without anesthetic, other than a stiff drink of what tasted like refrigerant fluid. Humekoy stood by and watched with every indication of deep interest. As for me, I had already learned about pain: the body is capable of registering only a certain amount of it; about what you'd get from laying your palm on a hot-plate. After that, it's all the same. I yelled and screamed a little, and kicked around a bit, but it was ever very quickly. They packed the empty socket with something cold and wet that numbed it in a few seconds. In half an hour I was back on my feet, feeling dizzy and with a sort of gauzy veil between my remaining eye and the world. They took me to the port, and my crew was there ahead of me, handcuffed and looking pale green around the ears. And the consul was there too, with his hands clamped up as tight as the rest. "It has been a fair exchange, Captain Danger," Humekoy told me after the others were aboard. "These paid cheats have garnered their petty harvest of data on industrial and port facilities, volume of shipping and sophistication of equipment, on which to base estimates of Rish assault capability. And in return the Hierarch has gained valuable infomnation for proper assessment of you humans. Had we acted on the basis of impressions gained by study of the persons so cleverly trained to delude us heretofore, we might have made a serious blunder." We parted on that note, not as pals, exactly, but with what might be described as a mutual wary respect. At the last minute a ramp car pulled up and a pair of Rish guards dumped Poor Srat out. "The creature aided, indirectly, in our rapprochement," Humekoy said. "His payment is his freedom. Perhaps you, too, may have an account to settle." "Put him aboard," I said. "He and I will have a lot of things to cilk over before I get back to Ahax." B y the time the fifty-seven day voyage was over, I knew as much about H'eeaq as Poor Srat could tell me. "Why these mistaken kin of mine may have stolen a lady of Master's kind, I can't say," he insisted. But as to where -- he had a few ideas on that. 'There are worlds. Master, where long ago H'eeaq established markets for the complex molecules so abundantly available to her in those days. Our vessels call there still, and out of regard for past ties perhaps, the in-dwellers supply our needs for stores. And in return, we give them what we can." He gave me the details of a few of these old market places -- worlds far out in Fringe Space, where few questions were asked and a human was a rare freak. "We'll go take a look," Iaid. "As soon as I collect my payV' At Ahax, Traffic Control alloted me a slot at the remotest corner of the port. We docked, and my four cheery crewmen were gone in a rampcar before I finished securing the command deck. I told Srat to follow me and started to walk the two miles to the nearest power way. A rampcar went past in a hurry in the next lane over, headed out toward where my tub was parked. I thought about hailing it, but even with the chill wind blowing, walking felt good, after the weeks in space. Inside the long terminal building, a P.A. voice was droning something. Srat made a gobbling noise and, said, "Master, they speak of you!" I looked where he pointed with one flipper and saw my face looking down from a public screen. "... distinguishing scar on the right side of the neck and jaw," the voice was saying. "It is the duty of any person seeing this man to detain him and' notify Central Authority at once!" N obody seemed to be looking my way. I was wearing a plain gray shipsuit and a light windbreaker with the collar turned up far enough to cover the scar; I didn't look much different than a lot of other space-burned crew types. Poor Srat was crouching and quivering. They hadn't put him on the air, IF but he would attract attention with his whimipering. We had to get to cover, fast. I turned and headed for the nearest ramp exit and as I reached the vestibule a woman's voice called my name. I spun and saw a familiar face; Nacy, the little tech operator I'd left Eureka with. "I was in Ops Three when your clearance request came, four hours ago," she said in a fast whisper. She saw the patch over my eye and her voice faltered and went on: I thought... after all, no one expected you to come back... it would be nice to come down and meet you. Then... I heard the announcement..." "What's it all about, Nacy?" She shook her head. She was a pert little girl with a turned-up nose and very white, even teeth. "I don't know, Billy. Someone said you'd gone against your orders, turned back early." "Yeah. There's something in that. But you don't want to be seen talking to me." "Billy -- maybe if you went to them voluntarily..." "I have a funny feeling near the back of my neck that says that would be a wrong play." Her face looked tight; she nodded. "I think I understand." She took a bite of her lip. "Come with me." She turned and started across the lobby. Srat plucked at my sleeve. "You'll do better on your own," I said, and followed her. She led me through a door marked for private use, along a plain corridor with lots of doors, out through a small personnel entry onto a parking lot full of ramp vehicles. "Good thing, girl," I said. "You'd better fade out fast now -- " "Just a minute." She ducked back inside. I went to a small mail-carrier, found the controls unlocked. I started it up and back around by the door as it swung open and a sleek pepper-and-salt-and-tan animal stalked through, looking relaxed, as always. "Eureka!" I called, and the old boy stopped and looked my way, then reached the car in one bound and was in beside me. I looked up and Nacy was watching from the door. "Thanks for everything," I said. "I don't know why you took the chance, but thanks." "Maybe it's because you're what's known as a romantic figure," she said and whirled and was gone before I could ask her what that meant. I pulled the car out and into a lane, across the ramp, keeping it at an easy speed. There was a small click from over my head, and a voice said, "#S#, where do you think you're going?" "Fuel check," I mumbled. "Little late, aren't you? You heard the clear-ramp order." "Yeah, what's it all about?" "Pickup order out on some smuggler that gave Control the slip a few minutes ago. Now get off the rampl" He clicked off. I angled right as if I were headed for the maintenance bay at the end of the line, but at the last second I veered left and headed out toward where I'd parked Jongo. I could see rampcars buzzing back and forth, off to my left; I passed two uniformed men, on foot. One of them stared at me, and I kept my chin down in my collar and waved to him. A hundred yards from the tub, I saw the cordon of cars around it. So much for' my chances of a slick takeoff uiKier their noses. I pulled the car offside between a massive freighter that looked as if it hadn't been moved for a couple of hundred years, and a racy yacht that reminded me of Lord Desroy's, and tried to make my brain think. It didn't seem to want to. My eyes kept wandering back to the fancy eoamel-inlaid trim around the entry lock of the yacht. The port was open, and I could see the gleam of hand-rubbed finishes inside... I was out of the car and across to the yacht before I realized I'd made a decision. Eureka went in ahead of me, as if he owned the boat. Just as I got a foot on the carpeted four-step ladder, one of the pedestrian cops came into sight around the side of the old freighter. He saw me and broke into a run, fumbling with a holster at his side in a way that said he had orders to shoot. I unfroze and started up, knowing I wouldn't make it, and heard a scuffling sound and a heavy thud and a crash of fire that cracked and scorched the inlay by the door. I looked back, and he was spread out on the pavement, out cold, and Poor Srat was untangling himself from his legs. He scrambled in behind me, and I tripped the port-secure lever and ran for the flight deck. I slammed the main drive lever to full emergency liftoff position and felt my back teeth shake as the yacht screamed off the ramp, splitting the atmosphere of Ahax like a meterite. T be ship handled like a yachtsman's dream. For the first few hours I ducked and bobbed in an evasion pattern that took us out through the planetary patrols. I kept the com channels open and listened to a lot of excited talk that told me I'd picked the personal transportation of an Ahacian official whose title translated roughly as Assistant Dictator. After a while Assemblyman Ognath came on, looking very red around the ears, and showed me a big, phony smile. "Captain Danger, there's been a misunderstanding," he warbled. "The police officers you may have seen at the port were merely a guard of honor." "Somebody forgot to tell the gunhandlers about that," I said in a breezy tone that I thought would have the maximum irritant value. "I had an idea maybe you fellows decided forty years pay was too much to spend, after all. But that's okay. I'll accept this bucket as payment in full." "Look here. Danger." Ognath let the paper smile drop. "Bring the vessel back, and I'll employ my influence to see that you're dealt with leniently." IF "ITianks; I've had a sample of your influence. I don't think I'd live through another." "You're a fool I Every civilized vorld within ten  parsecs will be alerted; you'll be hunted down and blasted without mercy -- unless you turn back now!" "I guess the previous owner is after somebody's scalp, eh, Ognath? Too bad." I gave him, and a couple of naval types who followed him, some more funny answers and in the process managed to get a fair idea of the interference I could expect to run into. I had to dodge three patrols in the first twenty hours; by the thirtieth hour I was running directly toward Galactic Zenith with nothing ahead but the Big Black. "Give me the coordinates of the nearest of the worlds where you H'eeaq used to trade," I ordered Srat. "It is distant. Master. So far away, so lonely. The world called Drope." "We'll try it anyway," I said. "Maybe somewhere out there we'll run into a little luck." The yacht was fueled and supplied in a way that suggested that someone had been prepared for any sudden changes in the political climate back home. It carried food, wines, a library that was all the most self-indulgent dictator could want to while away those long, dull days in space. I showed Srat how to handle the controls so that he could relieve me whenever I felt like taking a long nap or sampling the library. I asked him why he had stuck with me, but he just looked at me with those goggle-eyes, and for the first time in many weeks it struck me what a strange-looking thing he was. You can get used to anything, even a H'eeaq. E ureka was better company than the alien, in spite of not being able to talk. He settled in, in a cabin full of frills that conjured up pictures of a dance-hall floozie with the brain of a Pekinese and a voice to match. Fortunately, the dictator's taste in music and books was closer to mine than his choice of mistresses. There were tapes aboard on everything from ancient human history to the latest techniques in cellsurgery, thoroughly indexed. I sampled them all. The Fringe Worlds, I learned, were the museum of the galaxy. These lonely planets had once, long eons ago, been members of the tightly packed community of Center; their races had been the first in the young galaxy to explore out through the Bar and Eastern Arm, where their remote descendants still thrived. Now the ancient Motherworlds lingered on, living out the twilight of their long careers, circling dying suns, far out in the cool galaxies. One of those old races, emptiness of the space between Srat assured me, was the ancestral form of Man -- not that I'd recognize the relationship if I encountered a representative of the tribe. One day I ran through a gazeteer of the Western Arm, found a listing of an obscure sun I was pretty sure was Sol and coded its reference into the index. The documentary that came onto the view-screen showed me a dull-steel ball bearing with a track said was the system's tenth planet. Number nine looked about the same only bigger. Eight and seven were big fuzz-balls flattened at the poles. I had just about decided I had the wrong star when Saturn swam into view. The sight of that old familiar ring made me feel homesick, as if I'd spent the long happy hours of childhood there. I recognized Big Jupe, too. The camera came in close on this one, and then there were surface scenes on the moons. They looked just like Luna. Mars was a little different than the pictures I remembered seeing; the ice caps were bigger, and in the close scan the camera moved in on what looked like the ruins of a camp; not a city, just a lash-up collection of metal huts and fallen antennas, like a South Pole expedition might have left behind. And then I was looking at Earth, swimming there on the screen, cool and misty green and upside down, with Europe at the bottom and Africa at the top. I stared at it for half a minute before I noticed that the ice caps were wrong. The northern one covered most of Germany and the British Isles, and as the camera swung past, I could see that it spread down across North America as far as Kansas. And there wasn't any south polar cap. Antarctica was a crescent-shaped island, all by itself in the ocean, ice-free; and Australia was connected to Indochma. I knew then the pictures had been made a long time ago. The camera moved in close, and I saw oceans and jungles, deserts and ice-fields, but nowhere any sign of man. The apparent altitude at the closest approach was at least ten thousand feet, but . even from that height I could make out herds of game. But whether they were mammoths and megatheria or something even older, I couldn't tell. Then the scene shifted to Venus, which looked like Neptune, only smaller and brighter, and I switched the viewer off and made myself a long, strong drink and settled down for the long run ahead. D rope was a lone world, circling a tired old star the color of sunset in Nevada. No hostile interceptors rose to meet me, but there was no welcoming committee either. We grounded at what Srat said was a port, but all I saw was a windblown wasteland with a few hillocks around it, under a purplish black sky without a star in sight. Center being below the horizon. The air was cold, and the wind seemed to be whispering sad stories in the dusk. I went back aboard; I dined well and drank a bottle of old Abadan wine and listened to music, but it seemed to be telling sad stories, too. Just before dawn Srat came back with a report that a H'eeaq ship had called -- about a century ago. Earth time. IF "That doesn't help us much," I pointed out. "At least -- " Poor Srat got down and wriggled in the dust, but I sensed a certain insolence in his voice " -- at least Master knows now I speak truly of the voyages of the H'eeaq." "Either that or you're a consistent liar," I said, and stopped. My tone of voice when I talked to the Midget reminded me of something, but I couldn't say what it was. Srat's informant had mentioned the name of H'eeaq vessel's next port of call. A world known as E'el, ten lights farther out into intragalactic space, which meant a two-weeks' run. I set ship-time up on a cycle as close to Earth time as I could estimate, and for a while I tried to sleep eight hours at a stretch, eat three meals a day, and maintain some pretense of night and day; but the habit of nearly six years in space was too strong. I soon reverted to three on, three off, with meals every other off period. We picked up E'el on our screens at last, a small, dim star not even shown on the standard charts. I set the yacht down on a grassy plain near a town made of little mudcolored domes and went into the village with Srat. There was nothing there but dust and heat and a few shy natives who scuttled inside their huts as we passed. An hour of that was enough. After that we called at a world that Srat called Zlinn, where a swarm of little atmosphere fliers about as sturdy as Spade came up and buzzed us like irate hornets. They refused us permission to disembark. If any H'eeaq vessel had been there in the last few decades, it was their secret. We visited Lii, a swamp-world where vast batteries of floodlights burned all day under a dying sun, and Shoramnath, where everyone had died since Srat's last visit. We walked around among the bones and the rusted machines and the fallen-in buildings and wondered what had hit them. And we saw Far, and Z'reeth, and on Kish they let us land and then attacked us, just a few seconds prematurely, so that we made it back to the lock and lifted off in the middle of a barrage of HE fire that burned some of the shine off the hull. Suicide fliers threw themselves at us as we streaked for space; they must have been tough organisms, because some of them survived tb.e collisions and clung to the hull, and I heard them yammering and rat-tat tating there for minutes after v. c had left the last of the atmosphere behind. On Tith, there were fallen towers that bad once been two miles high, lying in rows pointing north, like a forest felled by a meteor strike. We talked to the descendants of the tower builders, and they told me that a H'eeaq ship had called; a year ago, a century ago, a thousand years -- it was all the same to them. W e pushed on, hearing rumors, legends, hints that a vessel like the one I described had been seen once, long ago, or had visited the next world out-system, or that creatures like Srat had been found, dead, on an abandoned moon. Then even the rumors ran out; and Srat was fresh out of worlds. "The trail's cold," I told him. 'There's nothing out here but death and decay and legends. I'm turning back for Center." "Only a little farther. Master," Poor Srat pleaded. "Master will find what he seeks, if only he presses on." He didn't have quite the whimpering tone now that he used to use. I wondered about Poor Srat; what he had up his sleeve. "One more try," I said. "Then I turn back and try for Center, even if every post office this side of Earth has my picture in it." But the next sun that swam into range was one of a small cluster; eight small, long-lived suns, well past Sol on the evolutionary scale, but still in their prime. Srat almost tied himself into a knot. "Well do I remember the Eight Suns, Master! These are rich worlds, and generous. After we filled our holds here with succulent lichens -- " "I don't want any succulent lichens." I cut off his rhapsody. "All I want is a hot line on a H'eeaq ship." I picked the nearest of the suns, swung in on a navigation beam from Drath, the ninth planet, with Srat doing the talking to Control, and sat the ship down on a ramp that looked as though it had survived some heavy bombardments in its day. A driverless flatcar riding on an airstream came out to pick us up. We rode it in toward a big pinkish-gray structure across the field. Beyond it, a walled city sprawled up across a range of rounded hills. The sky was a prestorm black, but the sun's heat baked down through the haze like a smelter. There were rank, tropical trees and fleshy-looking flowers growing along the drive that ran the final hundred yards. Up close, I could see cracks in the building. There were no immigration formalities to clear through, just a swarm of heavy-bodied, rob humanoids with skin like hard olivegreen plastic and oversized faces -- if you can call something that looks like a tangle of fish guts a face. Eureka stayed close to my side, rubbing against my leg as we pushed through the crowd inside the big arrival shed. Srat followed, making the oofling sounds that meant he didn't like it here. I told him to find someone he could talk to and try for some information; he picked a non-Drathian, a frail little knob-kneed creature creeping along by a wall with the fringe of its dark blue cloak dragging in the mud. It directed him along to a stall at the far side of the lobby which turned out to be a sort of combination labor exchange and lost and found. A three hundred pound Drathian in a dirty saffron toga listened to Srat, then rumbled an answer. To vessel of H'eeaq has called here, says he. Master," Srat IF reported. "Drath trades with no world. The produce of Drath is the most magnificent in the Universe; he demands why anyone would seek items made elsewhere. He says also that he can offer an attractive price on a thousand tons of glath." "What's glath?" "Mud, Master," he translated. "Tell him thanks, but I've sworn off." We left him and pushed on through to take a look at the town. The buildings were high, blankfronted, stuccoed in drab shades of ochre and pink and mauve. There was an eerie feeling hanging over the place, as if everyone was away, attending a funeral. The click and clatter and pat-pat of our assorted styles of feet was jarringly loud. A hot rain started up, to add to the cheer. It struck me again how alike cities were, on worlds all across the galaxy. Where creatures gather together to build dwellings the system of arranging them in rows along open streets was almost universal. This one was like a Mexican village, with water; all poverty and mud. I saw nothing that would pass for a policeman, an information office, a city hall or government house. After an hour of walking I was wet to the skin, cold to the bone and depressed to the soul. I was ready to' give it up and head back to the ship when the street widened out into a plaza crowded with stalls and carts under tattered awnings of various shades of gray. Compared to the empty streets, the place looked almost gay. The nearest stall displayed an assortment of dull-colored balls, ranging from lemon to grapefruit size. Srat tried to find out what they were, but the answer was untranslatable. Another bin was filled with what seemed to be dead beetles. I gathered they were edible, if you liked that sort of thing. The next displayed baubles and gimcracks made of polished metal and stone, like jewelry in every time and clime. Most of the metal was dull yellow, lead-heavy gold, and I felt a faint stir of an impulse to fill my pockets. Up ahead, an enterprising merchant had draped the front of his stall with scraps of cloth. From the colors, I judged he was color-blind, at least in what I thought of as the visible spectrum. One piece of rag caught my eye; it was a soft, silvery gray. I fingered it, and felt a shock go through me as if I'd grabbed a hot wire. But it wasn't electricity that made my muscles go rigid; it was the unmistakable feel of Zeridajhan cloth. It was a piece about two feet long and a foot wide, raggedly cut. It might have been the back panel from a ship suit. I started to lift it, and the stall-keeper grabbed for it and cracked something in the local language, a sound like hot fat sizzling. I didn't let go. 'Tell him I want to buy it," I told Srat. The stall-keeper tugged and made more hot fat sounds. "Master, he doesn't understand the trade tongue," Srat said. The merchant was getting excited, now. He made an angry buzzing and yanked hard; I zipped the doth out of his balled fists; then Srat was clutching at my arm and saying, "Beware, Master!" XX I looked around. A large Drathianan who could have been the same one who offered me the load of glath except for the white serapi across his chitinous shoulder was pushing through the gathering crowd toward me. Something about him didn't look friendly. As he came up, he crackled at the merchant. The merchant crackled back. The big Drathian planted himself in front of me and spit words at me. "Master," Srat gobbled, "the Rule-keeper demands to know why you seek to rob the merchant!" 'Tell him I'll pay well for the cloth." I took out a green trade chip that was worth six-months' pay back on the Bar Worlds and handed it over, but the Rule-keeper still didn't seem satisfied. "Find out where he got the cloth, Srat," I said. There was more talk then. I couldn't tell whether the big Drathian was a policeman, a guild official, a racket boss or an ambulance-chasing shyster, but he seemed to pull a lot of weight. The stall-keeper was scared to death of him. "Master, the merchant swears he came by the rag honestly; yet if Master insists, he will make him a gift of it." "I'm not accusing him of anything. I just want to know where the cloth came from." This time the bully-boy did the talking, ended by pointing across the plaza. "Master, a slave sold the cloth to the merchant." "What kind of slave?" "Master... a man-slave." "Like me?" "He says -- yes, Master." I let my elbow touch the butt of my filament pistol. If the crowd that had gathered around to watch and listen decided to turn nasty, it wouldn't help much; but it was comforting anyway. "Where did he see this manslave?" "Here, Master. The slave is the property of Least Triarch." "Find out where the Triarch lives." "There, Master." Srat pointed to a dusty blue facade rising behind the other buildings like a distant cliff-face. "That is the palace of His Least Greatness." "Let's go." I started past the Rule-keeper, and he jabbered at Srat. "Master, he says you have forgotten his bribe." "My mistake." I handed over another clip. "Tell him I'd like his assistance in getting an interview with the Triarch." A price was agreed on, and he led the way across the plaza and through the network of dark streets, along a complicated route that ended in a tiled courtyard with a yellow glass roof that made it look almost like a sunny day. There were trees and flowedng shrubs around a reflecting pool, a shady cloister along , the far side. Srat was IF nervous; he perched on a chair and mewed to himself. Eureka stretched out and stared across at a tall bluelegged bird wading in the pool. A small Drathian came over and took orders. He asked Eureka three times what he'd have; he couldn't seem to get the idea that the old cat didn't speak the language. The drinks he brought were a thick, blue syrup with a taste of sulphur and honey. Srat sniffed his cup and said, "Master must not drink this," and proceeded to swallow his share in one gulp. I stared into the shadows under the arcade where my guide had disappeared and pretended to nibble the drink. Rain drummed on the glass overhead. It was steamy hot, like a greenhouse. After half an hour, the Drathian came back with a friend. The newcomer was six feet tall, five feet wide, draped in dark blue velvet and hung with ribbons and tassels and fringes like a Victorian bonnet. He was introduced as Hruba. He was the Triarch's majordomo, and he spoke very bad, but understandable Lingua. "You may crave one boon of his Greatness," he stated. "In return, he will accept a gift." "I understand the Triarch owns a human slave," I said. "I'd like to see him, if his Greatness has no objection." The majordomo agreed and gave orders to a servant; in ten minutes the servant was back, prodding a man along ahead of him. He was a stocky, strong-looking fellow with close-cropped black hair, well-cut features, dressed in a plain dark blue kilt. There was an ugly, two-inch scar on his left side, just below the ribs. He saw me and stopped dead and his face worked. "You're a human being!" he gasped -- in Zeradajhi. H is name was Huvile, and he had been a prisoner for ten years. He'd been captured, he said, when his personal boat had developed drive-control troubles and had carried him off course into Fringe Space. "In the name of humanity. Milord," he begged. "Buy my freedom." He looked as if he wanted to kneel, but the big Drathian servant was holding his arm in a two-handed grip. "I'll do what I can," I said. "Save me, Milord -- and you'll never regret it I My family is wealthy." That was as far as he got before Hruba waved an arm and the servant hustled him away. I looked at the majordomo. "How much?" "He is yours." I expressed gratification and offered money in return. Hruba indicated that Bar money was hard to spend on Drath. I ran through a list of items from Jongo II's wellstocked larders and storage hold; we finally agreed on a mixed consignment of drugs, wines, clothing and sense tapes. His Greatness will be gratified," Hruba said expansively, "at this opportunity to display his graciousness." He aimed a sense-organ at me. "Ah... you wouldn't by chance wish to accept a second slave?" "Another man?" "As it happens." "How many more humans have you got?" "His Greatness owns many properties; but only the two humans." His voice got almost confidential. "Useful, of course, but a trifle, ah intractable. But you'll have no trouble on that score I'm sure." We dickered for ten minutes and settled on a deal that would leave Jongo II's larder practically stripped. It was lucky the Triarch didn't own three men; I couldn't have afforded any more. "I will send porters and a car to fetch these trifles from your vessel," Hruba said, "which his Greatness accepts out of sentiment. You wish the slaves delivered there?" "Never mind; I'll take them myself." I started to get up. Hruba made a shocked noise. "You would omit the ceremonies of Agreement, of Honorable Dealing, of Mutual Satisfaction?" I calmed him down, and he sent his staff scurrying for the necessary celebratory paraphernalia. "Srat, you go to the ship, hand over the goods we agreed on, and see that the men get aboard all right. Take Eureka with you." "Master, Poor Srat is afraid to go alone -- and he fears for Master -- " "Better get going or they'll be there ahead of you." He made a sad sound and hurried away. "Your other slave," the majordomo pointed. Across the court, a Drathian servant came out from a side entry leading a slim figure in a gray kilt like Huvile had worn. "You said another man," I said stupidly. "Eh? You doubt it is a man?" he said in a stiff voice. "It is not often that the probity of His Least Greatness is impunged in his own Place of Harmonious Accord!" "My apologies." ! tried to recover. "It was just a matter of terminology. I didn't expect to see a female." "Very well, a female man -- but still a man and a sturdy worker," the majordomo came back. "Not so large as the other, perhaps, but diligent, diligent. Still, his Greatness would not have you feel cheated..." His voice faded off. He was watching me as I watched the servant leading the girl past, some twenty feet away. She had a scar on her side, exactly like Huvile's. Beside the horny, graygreen thorax of the Drathian beside her, her human breast looked incredibly vulnerable. Then she turned her head my way, and I saw that it was the Lady Raire. F or a long, echoing instant, time stood still. Then she was past. She hadn't seen me, sitting in the deep shade of the canopy. I heard myself make some kind of sound and realized I had half risen from my chair. "This slave is of some particular interest for you?" the majordomo inIF quired, and I could tell from the edge on his voice that his commercial instinct was telling him he had missed a het somewhere. I sat down. "No," I managed to croak. "I was wondering about the scars." "Have no fear. The cicatrice merely marks the point where the control drive is imbedded. However, perhaps I shoujd withdraw His Greataess's offer of this gift, since it is less than you expected, lest the generosity of the Triarch suffer reflection." "My mistake," I said. "I'm perfectly satisfied." I could feel my heart slamming inside my chest. I felt as though the universe was balanced on a knife-edge. One wrong word from me and the whole fragile deal would collapse. The liquor pots arrived then, and conversation was suspended while my host made a big thing of tasting half a dozen varieties of syrupy booze and organizing the arrangement of outsize drinking pots on the taible. I sat tight and sweated bullets and wondered how it was going back at the ship. The Drathian offered the local equivalent of a toast. While my host sucked his cup dry, I pretended to take a sip, but he noticed and writhed his face at me. "You do not sip! Is your zeal for Honorable Dealing less than complete?" This time I had to drink. The stuff had a sweet overflavor, but left an aftertaste of iron filings. I forced it down. After that, there was another toast. He watched to be sure I drank it. I tried not to think about what the stuff was doing to my stomach. I fixed my thoughts on a face I had just seen, looking no older than the day I had seen it last, nearly four years before; and the smooth, sun-tanned skin, and the hideous scar that marred it. There was a lot of chanting and exchanging of cups, and I chewed another drink. Srat would be showing Milady Raire to a cabin now, and she'd be feeling the softness of a human-style 'bed, a rug under her bare feet, the tingle of the ionbath for the first time in four years... "Another toast!" Hruba called. His command of Lingua was sliping; the booze was having a powerful effect on him. It was working on me, too. My head was buzzing and there was a frying-egg feeling in my stomach. A said, and felt my tongue slur the words. It was hard to push the chair back and stand. Hruba rose, too. He was swaying slightly -- or maybe it was just my vision. "I confess surprise, man," he said. "Your zeal in the pledging of honor exceeded even my own. My brain swims in a sea of consecrated wine!" He turned to a servant standing by and accepted a small box from him. "The control device governing your new acquisition," he said and handed the box over to me. I took it, and my finger touched a hidden latch and the lid valved open. IF There was a small plastic ovoid inside, bedded in floss. "What's... what's this?" "Ah, you are unfamiliar with our Drathian devices!" He plucked the egg from its niche and waved it under my nose. "This gnurled wheel. On the first setting, it administers a sharp reminder; at the second position -- " He pushed the control until it clicked -- "an attack of angina which doubles the object in torment. And at the third... but I must not demonstrate the third setting, eh? Or you will find yourself with a dead slave on your hands, his heart burned to charcoal by a magnesium element buried in the organ itself!" He tossed the control back into the box and sat down heavily. "That pertaining to the female is in possession of her tender; he will leave it in the hands of your servant. You'll have no trouble with 'em." He made a sound that resembled a hiccup. I tilted the box and dumped the ovoid on the ground and stamped on it; it crunched like a blown egg. Hruba came out of his chair in a rush. "Here -- what are you do ing!" He stared at the smashed controller, then at me. "Have you lost your mind, Man?" "I'm going now," I said, and went past him toward the passage I had entered by a long time ago, it seemed. Behind me, Hruba was shouting in the local dialect. Out on the street, night had fallen, and the wet pavement glimmered under the yellow-green glare of lanterns set on the building fronts. I felt deathly ill. The street seemed to be rising up under my feet. I staggered, stayed on my feet by holding onto the wall. A pain like a knifethrust stabbed into my stomach. I headed off in the direction of the port, made half a black before I had to lean against the wall and retch. When I straightened there were half a dozen Drathians standing by. I passed the plaza where I had found the Zeridajhi cloth, recognized the street along which Srat and Eureka and I had come. It seemed to be a steep hill, now. My legs felt like soft tallow: I fell and got up and fell again. I retched until my stomach was a dry knot of pain. It was harder getting to my feet this time. My lungs were on fire. T hen I saw the port ahead, the translucent, glowing dome rising at the end of the narrow alleyway. Not much farther, now. Srat would be wondering what happened; maybe he would be waiting, just ahead. And at the ship, the Lady Raire... I was lying on my face, and the sky was spinning slowly over me, a pitch-black canopy with the great dim blur of Center sprawled across it, and the faint avenue that was the Bar reaching out to trail off into the dwindling spiral curve of the Eastern Arm. I found the pavement under me, and pushed against it, and got to my knees; then to my feet. I could see the ship across the ramp, tall and rakish, her 'high polish dimmed by the years of hard use, her station lights glaring amber from high on her slim prow. I steadied myself and started across toward her, and as I did the rectangle of light that was the open port jiarrowed and winked out. The lomiber lights flicked out and the red and green pattern of her running lights sprang up. I stopped dead and felt a drumming start up, vibrating through the pavement under my feet. I started to run then, and my legs were broken straws that collapsed and my head hit and the blow cleared it for a moment. I got my chin up off the pavement; and Jong# II lifted, standing up away from the surface on a tenuous pillar of blue flame that lengthened as she rose. Then she was climbing swiftly into the night. "They were all around me in a A tight circle. I stared at their homy shins, their sandaled feet, as alien as an alligator's, and felt the icy sweat clammy on my face. Deathly sickness rose inside me in a wave that knotted my stomach and left me quivering like a beached jellyfish. The legs around me stirred and gave way to a tall Drathian in the white serape of a Rule-keeper. Hard hands clamped on me, dragged me to my feet. A light glared in my face. "Man, the Rule-keeper demands you to produce the two slaves given as a gift to you by his Least Greatness!" "Gone," I gargled the words. "Tmsted Srat. Filthy Midget..." "Man, you are guilty of a crime of the first category! Illegal manumission of slaves! To redress these crimes, the Rule-keeper demands a fine of twice the value of the slaves, plus triple bribes for himself and his attendants!" "You're out of luck," I said. "No money... no ship... all gone..." I felt myself blacking out then. I was dimly aware of being carried, of lights glaring on me, later of a pain that seemed to tear me open, like a rotten fruit; but it was all remote, far away, happening to someone else... I came to myself lying on a hard pallet on a stone floor, still sick, but clear-headed now. For a while, I looked at the lone glare-bulb in the ceiling and tried to remember what had happened, but it was all a confused fog. I sat up and a redhot hook grabbed at my side. I pulled back the short, coarse-weave jacket I was wearing, and saw a livid, six-inch cut under my ribs, neatly stitched with tough thread. It was the kind of wound that would heal in a few weeks and leave a welted scar; a scar like I'd seen recently, in the sides of Huvile and the Lady Raire. A scar that meant I was a slave. IF IF  Short Story Nice of you to volunteer to emigrate from Earthy Joey. It was getting too crowded -- especially for guys like me! May #, # Mr. Joseph L. Seaworthy Apartment # Spaac Tower Luxemburg Complex Benilux City, Europe Dear Joey: Janie and I were just shocked to hear the news about you and Sylvia. Your sister Ellen called a few days ago and told us, and I swear Janie hasn't stopped crying since. She wanted to call you right away but I told her not to, as I figure you had enough on your mind without us bothering you. Not that I don't feel bad too; after all, we've been like brothers, being raised together and all. Anyway, we were sitting in our apartment tonight when I asked Janie, "When are Joey and Syl due to Jumpoff?" And she figured it out and it came to just # days from today and I said, "Janie, we really should do something for Joe and Syl to show how much we appreciate the sacrifice they are making by leaving everything behind and going out to settle the Universe." "What do you have in mind, lover?" Janie asked. One thing about her, she's not like so many of these modem wives but lets me have my way before telling me what she thinks. So I told her all about the great idea of mine to buy that property you own in the Canadian Rockies. "The way I look at it, sweetie," I explained, "Joey and Sylvia don't have any more use for the property so the least we can do for them is to take it off their hands at a fair price. So, suppose we offer them CR# for it." "Gee, honey," Janie came back at me, "we can't afford to spend that much money; and besides, that sounds like an awful lot for a house with only five bedrooms and a medium-siz pool." "Sweetheart," I told her, "it's the least we can do for two great people like Joey and Sylvia. After all, now that they've been tapped for Exodus, they've got to give up everything and become part of a team that's going to a far-away world with all its dangers and discomforts. In fact, I think I'll raise that to CR #." Anyway, Joey, there you have it. Like I told Janie, I haven't got any real use for the property but as we don't have a vacation home of our own, I thought it 'might be fun to run up to the Rockies every once in a while and do some repair work on the house or just supervise the repairmen. Better let me know right away so we can get the title transferred before you blast. Be sure to give my love to Sylvia and tell her how much we're going to miss her. All my best Harry June #, # Mr. Harry Aimes #I Central City Ohio District U.S.A. Dear Harry: Sylvia and I were both surprised to receive your letter. Ever since you stamped out of our apartment that time I refused to appoint you supervisor at the Omaha-West plant, we've been wondering how you were making out. I heard about you losing your job with Marcy Watermaking and was shocked at the charges, but Tm sure the hearing will vindicate you. Actually, Syl and I were not drafted but volunteered to go to gone, there really isn't much to keep us here, so we decided to try the excitement of colonizing a new has a pleasant climate, which will make it nice for us older people; and there are no reports of dangerous native life, which suits an old coward like me just fine. At our age we have no longing for "adventure" and our idea of romance is to cuddle up and watch a good trivee show. So you see that we do not feel badly about leaving old Mother Earth but are looking forward to a whole new and useful life. I'm sorry that I have to answer you by letter rather than calling direct, but ever since the names have been made public we have been positively hounded by all sorts of Ieople wanting to sell us things or offering to buy our belongings at ridiculous prices. It finally got so bad that we had our phones disconnected and rarely bother answering the doorbell. We have such a short time left on Earth that we cannot bear to waste it on ghouls and con men. I got the impression that a whole industry has grown up around, or perhaps because of, the monthly colonization parties. The government is more than generous in the matter of severance pay or, in the case of a private businessman IF iike myself, will buy your business at the full market price. They do restrict you to # kilos of personal belongings and among # people this must add up to quite a list of items that must be disposed of. In the event that we don't hear from you again, Sylvia and I wish you and Janie all the happiness in the world. All my best, Joe June # Mr. Joseph L. Seaworthy Apartment # Spaac Tower Luxemburg Complex Benilux City, Europe Dear Joey: Boy, were Janie and I glad to hear from you. It's been three weeks since we wrote and for a while we were afraid you were just too busy with final preparations to bother answering us. Of course we would have understood, as it's only eight weeks 'til blastoff, but we would have been very disappointed. As it is, your letter came this morning and I just wish you could have seen how it cheered Janie up. The poor kid works so hard all day that my heart goes out to her. Some day when things break right for me I'm going to make her quit that lousy job and spend the rest of her life just sitting around and taking it easy. Anyway, I enjoyed your letter very much but I got to admit that at first I was shocked to hear that you volunteered to ship out. Then I though it over and decided that I admire you and Sylvia very, very much. Imagine wanting to go a a brand new planet that might be filled with all kinds of ferocious animals and loathsome diseases. Boy, you sure got more courage than I have, Joey! I think it's terrible that all those people keep bothering you about your furniture and stuff. I can't understand why the government does not put a stop to that kind of thing. After all, if we don't keep sending people out every month there soon wouldn't be room enough for all the people left on Earth; but I really think that those that stay behind shouldn't be allowed to bother the settlers during their last days at home. Janie agrees with me on this and I'm going to write our Representative about it as soon as I can find time. You must have overlooked it, but in my last letter I offered to take your vacation shack off your hands. I've heard how those damn real estate vultures won't offer a man anything for his property once th know he's shipping out and I can't stand the idea of anyone pulling that stuff on one of my relatives, so you just say the word, Joey boy, and I'll stat you a check for CR# so fast it'll shock you. Bey, it makes me mad to think that these kind of guys would take advantage of great people like you and Syl who are giving up everything to go out and make the Universe safe for mankind. You'll have to excuse the short letter, but I'm anxious to bear from you about the siback. Boy, I'm just steamed about all (hose people trying to cheat you. Remember, Joey boy, just say the word and I'll have a check in your hands in no time. All our love, Harry July #, # Mr. Harry Aimes #I Central City Ohio District U.S.A. Dear Harry: How very nice to get another letter from you before we leave. We still have five weeks but most of our friends have said good-by already and have since treated us as though we were already gone. I suppose you can't blame them; protracted farewells are a bore, but it makes it rather lonely for Sylvia and myself. I suppose there is a very good reason for this just as there are good reasons for sending # people each month to colonize another planet. It's just that it can be hard on the people that have to leave. Now that the farewells have been said, I'm spending all my time disposing of our possessions. It's amazing how much a family accumulates during thirty years of marriage; and I have run across things I didn't even know we had, as well as things I thought were long discarded and forgotten. For example, remember that time I got the maintenance franchise for Spaac Tower and bought all those robo-maints and hired you to run the operation? I found all the bills you ran up before getting into an argument with Mr. Spaac and losing the contract. I will admit I was very angry with you that time, Harry, but as Sylvia pointed out to me, it only took five years to recoup the losses and the money doesn't mean that much to us where we're going anyway, so why not forgive and forget. I would have answered your letter sooner, but Syl is in Borneo with Ronnie and Helen. She has been there for the past three weeks and I spent part of the first week with her. Those grandchildren of ours are the most beautiful children I've ever seen. Sylvia swears kids are smarter these days, but I doubt it. I just think our grandchildren ore smarter. You really should let Janie take a year off and have twins or even triplets. They add so much to an apartment. Try not to worry much about the upcoming trial. I'm sure the indictment sounds a lot worse than it really is. #f course, that larcenyby-trick conviction five years ago may influence the jurors; but I understand Judge Jason will probably preside and, knowing him as well as I do, I'm sure he will be completely fair. Thank you again for taking the trouble to write to us, Harry. I have always had a tender spot in my heart for you, perhaps because of my love for your mother. I was so young when Mom died that I tend to think of Aunt Serene as my mother. I remember so well the day you were born and how proud she was and the hopes she -- Oh well, I'm afraid I'm getting morIF bid. This is probably the last you'll ever hear from me, so God keep you and I wish you only happiness in the future. With all my love, Joe July #, # Mr. Joseph L. Seaworthy Apartment # Spaac Tower Luxemburg, Complex Benilux City, Europe Dear Joe: Isn't there any way I can reach you by phone? It's over a month since I wrote. Your letter arrived just this morning and I spent all day trying to reach you. Janie is going to be mad when she sees the bill I ran up. Christ, it must be CR# easy! You weren't kidding when you said that you couldn't be reached! I must have talked to # of your neighbors but nobody could get hold of you. Joey, buddy. I'll level with you about that Canadian property. It's taking all my money to fight this water-steal thing and if Janie and I could live there we could use the money saved to hire a better lawyer. Damn it all, what if I did drill a well and sell a few thousand gallons of water? There's more than that wasted every day. Don't tell me those politicians don't get all the water they want. In fact, I got it on good authority that oiu sweet mayor actually has a bathtub in the official penthouse and takes a bath every week and damn the citizens if they don't like it. The sono-baths ore good enough for us mortals. I'd come to see you, Joey, but the cops won't let me leave the Ohio District of the city. So the best I can do is get this letter in the mail right away. Please, Joey, for old times sake, let me buy that property. Regards to Sylvia Harry August #, # Mr. Harry Aimes #I Central City Ohio District U.S.A. Dear Harry: Please bear with me as I'm still feeling the after-effects of our prepshots. It's the funniest feeling. You sit down in this odd-looking chair and the robo-doc asks you a few questions and then you get up and go home. While you're answering the questions the robodoc is giving you ail kinds of injections. I don't know how they manage to get through the clothes, but they do; and by the time you get home, you're feeling dizzy and nauseous. I wish the feeling would wear off already, but the robo-doc says it will last right up to the time we enter deepfreeze. Harry, Sylvia and I have talked it over and decided that we are no longer angry at you. This is probably the last time we shall communicate as we plan to enter deepfreeze day after tomorrow. I don't know if I mentioned it, but the voyage will take three hundred years so we will never meet again in this life. I will admit that Sylvia and I both find it hard to overlook the past but we are going to make an honest attempt at it. Harry, I always knew that it was you that sold me out to the Barking trust that time. I wondered how they knew just the moment my Flanger was down for reorientation and they could flood my reclaim tanks; so I hired a detective agency and found my trusted associate and first cousin had sold the information for the princely sum of CR#. As it worked out, I managed to salvage enough of the business to buy the water concession for Omaha-West. This could have put the whole family in private homes with unlimited water privileges but again you could not bear to pass up the chance for an extra credit or two. The main reason I sold out was because I knew about the well you were digging and had no intention of being involved in anything as serious as that. That was also why I wouldn't appoint you supervisor. Anyway, Harry, this is all in the past now and I want you to accept my forgiveness in the humble spirit in which it is proffered Goodby Joe Mr. Joseph Seaworthy Apartment # Spaac Tower Luxemburg Complex Benilux City, Europe Joe: All right, you want me to crawl and I'm crawling. I got to have that property to bribe the Water Marshal with. You know what the penalty for Water Misuse is. Please, please don't let it happen to me. I admit lall those things you mentioned and I apologize. I'm sorry for everything I ever did to you, Joey, but I must have that property. Dear God, don't let them convict me of Water Misuse. If you have any sense of family loyalty at all, you'll let me have the house. It's no good to you where you're going anyway. I found out that the Water Marshal wants a house -- any house -- of his own badly enough to swear that I just-finished digging the weU and never pumped a drop. All I have to do is sell it to him and I got a chance. Please, Joey, please, Sylvia, don't let them convict me on a Water Misuse charge. Help me! Harry Friday Mr. Harry Aimes #I Central City Ohio District U.S.A. Dear Harry: I would have missed your letter if I hadn't came back to the apartment for my make-up kit. You know how I always manage to forget it. I don't have time to write you a proper letter as Joseph is buzzing me from the roof. So, good-by, dear, and remember that we forgive and love you. We've given the house away to the orphans of some of the people who di of thirst last year. Sylvia IF IF  Novelette ilriftglass Sure amphimen are human. Whaf if we do have gi#s, breathe wafer, look like monsters -- and die like flies? I S ometimes I go down to the port, splashing sand with my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-s winging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with old cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skingrafts from my chest, so what's left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sunstreaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, 'midst general blondness. By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp gave me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, cooper pots, my tenor recorder which I can no longer play, and my books. But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and Ixomp barefoot in the wet edging of the sea, searching for driftglass. I t was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists around like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay and blinked. She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. "at are you doing here, huh?" She narrowed blue eyes. "Looking for driftglass." "What?" "There's a piece." I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg. "Where?" She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone. While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn't looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else. "See?" "What... what is it?" She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of the palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are the important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the back of mine. "Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?" "I know the Coca-Cola bottles." "They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, chging their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again." "Ohhh!" She breathed as though the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision. She watched the ruin calmly. Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness. The insignia on her buckle -- her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air -- told me IF she was a Biological Technician. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depfth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons. She reached up to my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. "Who are you?" Finally. "Cal Svenson." S he slid back down in the water. "You're the one who had the terrible... but that was years ago. They still talk about it, down... She stopped. As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms, up and down the American coast. "You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago..." "How old are you?" "Sixteen." "I was two years older than you when the accident happened." "You were eighteen?" "And I'm twice that age now. Which means it happened almost twenty years ago. It is a long time." "They still talk about it." "I've almost forgotten," I said. "I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?" "I used to." "Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I'll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch -- " "I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is going over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Tonni and the crew." She paused, smiled. "But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty." On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming, and the mosaic evoked, "Oh, look!" and, "Did you do this yourself?" a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the woundeed shark and the diver. She told me she didn't get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deepdown creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat astraddle the kitchen chair, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen Oysters Rockefeller and the tea water whistled. I'm a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls. n #TTey, Juao!" I bawled across Xi. the jetty. IF He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on the polished heads of his shoulders, sun lost in the rough mass of his hair. I walked across the nets to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front, I squatted, "I fished out over the coral where you told me." He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. "You come up to the house for a drink, eh?" "Fine." "Now a moment more." There's a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old, yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty -- will probably look the same when he's eighty-five. Such was Juao. We once figured it out. He's seven hours older than I am. We became friends sometime before the accident when I got tangled in his nets working high lines in Vorea Current. A lot of guys would have taken their knife and hacked their way out of the situation, ruining fifty-five, sixty dollars worth of nets. That's an average fisherman's .income down here. But I surfaced and sat around in his boat while he untied me. Then we came in and got plastered. Since I cost him a day's fishing, I've been giving him hints on where to fish ever since. He buys me drinks when I come up with something. This has been going on for twenty years. During that time my life has been smashed up and landbound. In the same time Juao has married off his five sisters, got married himself and had two children. (Oh, those bolitos and teneros asa dos that Amalia of the ohed braid and laughing breasts would make for Sunday dinnersupperMonday breakfast.) I rode with them in the ambulance 'copter all the way into Brasilia and in the hospital hall Juao and I stood together, both still barefoot, he tattered with fish scales in his hair, me just tattered, and I held him while he cried and I tried to explain to him how a world that could take a pre-pubescent child and with a week of operations make an amphibious creature that can exist for a month on either side of the sea's foam-fraught surface, could still be helpless before certain general endocrine cancers coupled with massive renal deterioration. Juao and I returned to the village alone, by bus, three days before our birthday -- back when I was twenty-three and Juao was twenty-three and seven hours old. Ci'his morning," Juao said. (The A shuttle danced in the web at the end of the orange line.) "I got a letter for you to read me. It's about the children. Come on, we go up and drink." The shuttle paused, back-tracked twice, and he yanked the knot tight. We walked along the port toward the square. "Do you think the letter says that the children are accepted?" "It's from the Aquatic Corp. And they just send postcards when they reject someone. The question is, how do you feel about it?" "You are a good man. If they grow up like you, then it will be fine." "But you're still worried." I'd been prodding Juao to get the kids into the International Aquatic Corp nigh on since I became their godfather. The operations had to be performed before puberty. It would meian much time away from the village during their training period -- and they might eventually be stationed in any ocean in the world. But two motherless children had not been easy on Juao or his sisters. The Oorp would mean education, travel, interesting work, the things that make up one kind of good life. They wouldn't look twice their age when they were thirtyfive; and not too many amphimen look like me. "Worry is part of life. But the work is dangerous. Did you know there is an amphiman going to try and lay cable down in the Slash." I frowned. "Again?" "Yes. And that is what you tried to do when the sea broke you to pieces and burned the parts, eh?" "Must you be so damned picturesque?" I asked. "Who's going to beard the lion this time?" "A young amphiman named Tork. They speak of him down at the docks as a brave man." "Why the hell are they still trying to lay the cable there? They've gotten by this long without a line through the Slash." "Because of the fish," Juao said. "You told me why twenty years ago. The fish are still there, and we fishermen who can not go below are still here. If the children go for the operations, then there will be less fishermen. But today..." He shrugged. "They must either lay the line across the fish paths or down in the Slash." Juao shook his head. Funny things, the great power cables the Aquatic Corp has been strewing across the ocean floor to bring power to their undersea mines and farms, to run their oil wells -- and how many flaming wells have I capped down there -- for their herds of whale, and chemical distillation plants. They carry two hundred sixty cycle current. Over certain sections of the ocean floor, or in sections of the water with certain mineral contents, this sets up inductance in the water itself which sometimes -- and you will probably get a Nobel prize if you can detail exactly why it isn't always -- drives the fish away over areas up to twentyy-five and thirty miles, unless the lines are laid in the bottom of those canyons that delve suddenly into the ocean floor, "This Tork thinks of the fishermen. He is a good man too." I raised my eyebrows -- the one that's left, anyway -- and tried to remember what my little Undine had said about him that morning. And remembered not much. "I wish him luck," I said. "What do you feel about this young man going down into the coral rimmed jaws to the Slash?" I thought for a moment. "I think I hate him." IF uao looked up. "He is an image in a mirror where I look and am forced to regard what I was," I went on. "I envy him the chance to succeed where I failed, and I can come on just as quaint as you can. I hope he makes it." Juao twisted his shoulders in a complicated shrug (once I could do that) which is coastal Brazilian for, "I didn't know things had progressed to that point, hut seeing that they have, there is little to be done." "The sea is that sort of mirror," I said. "Yes." Juao nodded. Behind us I heard the slapping of Sandies on concrete. I turned in time to catch my goddaughter in my good arm. My godson had grabbed hold of the bad one and was swinging on it. "Tio Cal -- " "Hey, Tio Cal, what did you bring us?" "You will pull him over," Juao reprimanded them. "Let go." And, bless them, they ignored their father. "What did you bring us?" "What did you bring us, Tio Cal?" "If you let me. I'll show you." So they stepped back, green-eyed and quivering. I watched Juao watching. His eyes were brown pupils on ivory balls, and in the left eye a vein had broken in a jagged smear. He was loving his children, who would soon be as alien to him as the fish he netted. He was looking at the terrible thing that was me and wondering what would come to his own spawn. And he was watching the world turn and grow older, clocked by the waves, reflected in that mirror. It's impossible for me to see what the population explosion and the budding colonies on Lima and Mars and the flowering beneath the ocean really look like from the disrupted cultural melange of a coastal fishing town. But I come closer than many others, and I know what I don't understand. I pushed around in my rocket and fetched out the milky fragment I had brought from the beach. "Here. Do you like this one?" And they bent above my webbed and alien fingers. I n the supermarket, which is the biggest building in the village, Juao bought a lot of cake mixes. "That moist, delicate texture," whispered the box when you lifted it from the shelf, "with that deep flavor, deeper than chocolate." I'd just read an article about the new vocal packaging in a U.S. magazine that had gotten down last week, so I was prepared and stayed in the fresh vegetable sectiom to avoid temptation. Then we went up to Juao's house. The letter proved to be what I'd expected. The kids had to take the bus into Brasilia tomorrow. My godchildren were on their way to becoming fish. We sat on the front steps and drank and watched the donkeys, and the motorbikes, the men in baggy trousers, the women in yellow scarfs and brighter skirts with wreaths of garlic and sacks of onions. As well, a few people glittered by in the green scales of amphimen uniforms. Finally Juao got tired and went in to take a nap. Most of my life has been spent on the coast of countries accustomed to siestas, but those first formative ten were passed on a Danish collective farm and the idea never really took. So I stepped over my goddaughter, who Itad fallen asleep on her fists on the bottom step, and walked back through the town toward the beach. m A t midnight Ariel came out of the sea, climbed the rocks and clicked her nails against my glass wall so that droplets ran down, pearled by the gibbous moon. Earlier I had stretched in front of the fireiace on the sheepskin throw to read, then dozed off. The conscientious timer had asked me if there was anything I wanted, and getting no answer had turned off the Dvorak Cello Concerto that was on its second time around, extinguished the reading lamp, and stopped dropping logs onto the flame so that now, as I woke, the grate was carpeted with coals. She clicked on the glass again, and I raised my head from the cushion. The green uniform, her amber hair -- all color was lost under the silver light outside. I lurched across the rug to the glass wall, touched the button, and the glass slid down into the floor. The breeze came to my face, as the barrier disappeared. T# "What do you want?" I asked. "What time is it, anyway?" "Tork is on the beach, waiting for you." The night was warm but windy. Below the rocks silver flakes chas each other into shore. The tide lay full. I rubbed my face. "The new boss man? Why didn't you bring him up to the house? What does he want to see me about?" She touched my arm. "Come. They are all down on the beach." "Who all?" "Tork and the others." She led me across the patio and to the path that wound to the sand. The sea roared in the moonlight. Down the beach people stood around a driftwood fire that whipped into the night. Ariel walked beside me. Two of the fishermen from town were crowding each other on the bottom of an overturned washtub, playing guitars. The singing, raucous and rhythmic, jarred across the paled sand. Shark's teeth shook on the necklace of an old woman dancing. Others were sitting on an overturned dinghy, eating. Over one part of the fire on a skillet two feet across, oil frothed through pink islands of shrimp. One woman ladled them in, another ladled them out. "Tio Cal!" "Look, Tio Cal is here!" "Hey, what are you two doing up?" I asked. "Shouldn't you be home in bed?" "Poppa Juao said we could come. He'll be here, too, soon." IF I turned to Ariel. "Why are they all gathering?" "Because of the laying of the cable tomorrow at dawn." Someone was running up the beach, waving a bottle in each hand. "They didn't want to tell you about the party. They thought that it might hurt your pride." "My what..." "If you knew they were making so big a thing of the job you had failed at -- " "But -- " " -- and that had hurt you so in failure. They did not want you to he sad. But Tork wants to see you. I said you would not be sad. So I went to bring you down from the rocks." "Thanks, I guess." 'Tio Cal?" But the voice was bigger and deeper than a child's, T Te sat on a log back from the AJ. fire, eating a sweet potato. The flame flickered on his dark cheekbones, in his hair, wet and black. He stood, came to me, held up his hand. I held up mine and we slapped palms. "Good." He was smiling. "Ariel told me you would come. I will lay the power line down through the Slash tomorrow." His imiform scales glittered down his aims. He was very strong. But standing still, he still moved. The light on the cloth told me that. "I... " He paused. I thought of a nervous, happy dancer. "I wanted to talk to you about the cable." I thought of an eagle, I thought of a shark. "And about the... accident. If you would." "Sure," I said. "If there's anything I could tell you that would help." "See, Tork," Ariel said. "I told you he would talk to you about it." I could hear his breathing change. "It really doesn't bother you to talk about the accident?" I shook my head and realized something about my voice. It was a boy's voice that could imitate a man's. Tork was not over nineteen or twenty. "We're going fishing soon," Tork told me. "Will you come?" "If I'm not in the way." A bottle went from the woman at the shrimp crate to one of the guitarists, down to Ajiel, to me, then to Tork. (The liquor, made in a cave seven miles inland, was almost rum. The too tight skin across the left side of my mouth makes the manful swig a little difficult to bring off. I got 'rum' down my chin.) He drank, wiped his mouth, passed the bottle on and put his hand on my shoulder "Come down to the water." We walked away from the fire. Some of the fishermen stared after us. A few of the amphimen glanced and glanced away. "Do all the young people of the village call you Tio Cal?" "No. Only my godchildren. Their father and I have been friends since I was your age." "Oh, I thought perhaps it was a nickname. That's why I called you that." IF We reached wet sand where orange light cavorted at our feet. The broken shell of a lifeboat rocked in moonligjht. Toork sat down on the shell's rim. I sat beside him. The water splashed to our knees. "There's no other place to lay the power cable?" I asked. "There is no other way to take it except through the Slash?" "I was going to ask you what you thought of the wibole business. But I guess I don't really have to." He shrugged and clapped his hands together a few times. "All the projets this side of the bay have grown huge and cry for power. The new operations tax the old lines unmercifully. There was a power failure last July in Cayine down the shelf below the twilit level. The whole village was without lights for two days, and twelve amphimen died of overexposure to the cold currents coming up from the depths. If we laid the cables farther up, we chance disrupting our own fishing operations as well as those of the fishermen on shore." I nodded. "Cal, what happened to you in the Slash?" E ager, scared Tork. I was remembering now, not the accident, but the midnight before, pacing the beach, guts clamped with fists of fear and anticipation. Some of the Indians back where they make the liquor still send messages by tying knots in palm fibers. One could have spread my entrails then, or Tork's tonight, to read our respective horospecs. Juao's mother knew the knot language, but he and his sisters Qieveir bothered to learn because they wanted to be modem, and, as children, still confused with modernity with the new ignorances, lacking modem knowledge. "When I was a boy," Tork said, "we would dare each other to walk down the boards along the edge of the fiery slip. The sun would be hot and the boards would rock in the water, and if the boats were in and you fell down between the boats and the piling, you could get killed." He shook his head. "The cra#iy things kids will do. That was back when I was eight or nine, before I became a waterbaby." "Where was it?" Tork looked up. "Oh. Manila. Fm Filipino." The sea licked our knees, and the gunwale sagged under us. "What happened in the Slash?" "There's a volcano flaw near the base of the Slash." "I know." "And the sea is as sensitive down there as a fifty-year-old woman with a new hairdo. We had an avalanche. The cable broke. And the sparks were so hot and bright they made gouts of foam fifty feet high on the surface, so they tell me." "What caused the avalanche?" I shrugged. "It could just been a God-damned coincidence. There are rock falls down there all the time. It could have been the noose from the machines -- though we masked them pretty well. It could have been something to do with the inductance from the smaller cables for the machines. Or maybe somebody just kicked out the wrong stone that was holding everything up." One webbed hand became a fist, sank into the other, and hung. Calling, "Cal!" I looked back. Juao, pants rolled to his knees, shirt sailing in the sea wind, stood in the weave of white water. The wind lifted Tork's hair from his neck; and the fire roared up on the beach. Tork looked back too. "They're getting ready to catch a big fish!" Juao called. Men were already pushing their boats out. Tork clapped my shoulder. "Come, Cal. We fish now." We stood up and went back to the shore. Juao caught me as I reached dry sand. "You ride in my boat, Cal." Someone came with the acrid flares that hissed. The water slapped around the bottom of the boats as we wobbled into the swell. Juao vaulted in and took up the oars. Around us green amphimen walked into the sea, struck forward, and were gone. Juaro pulled, leaned, pulled. The moonlight slid down his arms. The fire diminished on the beach. T hen among the boats, there was a splash, an explosion, and the red flare bloomed in the sky: the amphimen had sighted a big fish. The flare hovered, pulsed once, twice, three times, four times (twenty, forty, sixty, eighty stone they estimated its weight to be), then fell. Suddenly I shrugged out of my shirt, pulled at my belt buckle. "I'm going over the side, Juao!" He leaned, he pulled, he leaned. "Take the rope." "Yeah. Sure." It was tied to the back of the boat. I made a loop in the other end, slipped it around my shoulder. I swung my bad leg over the side, flung myself on the black water --  -- mother of pearl shattered over me. That was the moon, blocked by the shadow of Juao's boat ten feet overhead. I turned below the rippling wounds Juao's oars made stroking the sea. One hand, and one foot with tom webs, I rolled over and looked down. The rope snaked to its end, and I felt Juao's strokes pulling me through the water. They fanned below with underwater flares. Light undulated on their backs and heels. They circled, they closed, like those deep sea fish who carry their own illumination. I saw the prey, glistening as it neared a flare. You chase a fish with one spear among you. And that spear would ibe Tork's tonight. The rest have ropes to bind him that go up to the fishermen's boats. There was a sudden confusion of lights below. The spear had been shot! The fish, long as a tail and a short man together, rose through the ropes. He turned out to sea, trailing his pursuers. But others waited there, tried to loop him. Once I had flung those ropes, treated with tar and lime to dissolve the slime of the fish's body and hold IF to the beast. The looped ropes caught, and by the movement of the flares, I saw them jerked from their paths. The fish turned, rose again, this time toward me. He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat doffed deep) but turned back and came on. Of a sudden, amphimen were flicking about me as the fray's center drifted by. Tork, his spear dug deep, forward and left of the marlin's dorsal, had hauled himself astride the beast. The fish tried to shake him, then dropped his tail and rose straight. Everybody started pulling toward the surface. I broke in foam and grabbed Juao's gunwale. Tork and the fish exploded up among the boats. They twisted in the air, in moonlight, in foam. The fish danced across the water on its tail, fell. Juao stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched n the prow of a boat flung a rope and someone in the water caught it. Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once. They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but doubled back. Then the lines began to haul the beast up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again. Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarfs of blood. W hen he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, noaiT Juao's boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, iglistieniflig, came out of the yater beside me and went over into the boat, "Here you go," he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, aad pulled me up while Juao leaned against the far side to keep balance. Wet rope slopped on the prow. "Hey, Cal!" Tork laughed and grabbed it up, and began to haul. The fish moiled in the white water. The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her sum as she peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her. Juao and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me. The fish came up and was flapped into Ariel's boat, tail out, head up, chewing air a few moments more. I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulder with his wet arm. "Look at our fish, Tio Call Look!" He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. "Look at our fish there. Cal!" Juao, grinning white and gold, pulled us back into shore. The fhe, the singing hands beating hands -- and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottle and was shaking it in time to the music -- the guitars spiraled around us as we cairied the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit. "Watch it!" Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist. We turned the fish over. "Here, Cal?" He prodded two fingers into the widte flesh six inches back from the boriey lip. "Fine." Tork jammed the spit in. We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum. "Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?" I asked. He shook his head. "Slept all afternoon." He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. "That's my breakfast." But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the water to the lifeboat shdl we had sat on earlier. It was three quarters flooded. Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, t#ae gills at die back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat. # #TThere's Tork?" Arid asked VVme at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish. "Taking a nap." "Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!" "He's got a lot of work coming up. Sure you want to wake him up?" "No, I'll let him sleep." But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead. He grinned at us, then went to carve the meat. I remember him standing on the table by the fire, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife ((details, yes, those are the things you remember) stopping to hand down the meat, then hauling his arm back to cut again. That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea. IV T he eight-thirty bus was more or less on time. "I don't think they want to go," Juao's sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia. "They are just tired," Juao said. "They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-by to Tio Cal." "Good-by." "Good-by." Kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning. IF I bent down and gave them a duansy hug. "When you come back on your first weekend off, I'll take you exploring down below at the point. You'll be able to gather your own coral now." Juao's sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, Juao, then got on the bus. Someone was shouting out the window for someone else at the bus stop not to forget something as they trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the cafe owners were putting out canvas chairs. "I will miss them," he said, like a long-considered admission. "You and me both." At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. "I wonder if they had any trouble laying the -- " For some reason a woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She must have stopped to see what the crowd was about on her way back from the market. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her. A clutch of men broke off and ran into the streets of the town. I grabbed an amphiman who whirled around to face me. "What in hell is going on?" For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish. "From the explosion..." He began. "They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!" I grabbed his other shoulder. "What happened!" "About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a God-damn underwater volcano for half an hour. They're still getting seismic disturbances." Juao was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after Ihim, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas and green scales. They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a green canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon. Three of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there. From their bloated faces (one sdll bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. Several of the bodies were almost totally encased in dull, black glass. "Tork -- " I kept asking. "Is one of them Tork?" It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying the bodies, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecogIF nizaible bcxiies, yes, was Tork. J uao brought me a glass of buttermilk in a cafe on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his white mustache, released the chair wrung with his toes, put his hands on his knees. "What are you thinking about?" "That it's time to go fix the nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish." He regarded me a moment. "Where should I fish tomorrow. Cal?" "Are you wondering about... well, sending the kids off today?" He shrugged. "Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?" I finished my buttermilk. "The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over." He nodded. "Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow." We. got up. "See you, Juao." I limped back to the beach. V T he fog had unsheathed the sand by ten. I walked around, poking in clumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. "Ariel?" She was kneeling in the water, head down, her red hair breaking over the sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stilled, shook again. "Ariel?" I came down over the blistered stones. She turned away to look at the ocean. Tlie attachments of children are so important and so brittle. "How long have you been sitting here?" She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head. Sixteen? Who was the psychologist a hundred years back, in the seventies who decided that "adolescents" were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? "You want to come up to the house?" The head shaking got faster, then stopped. After a while I said, "I guess they'll be sending Turk's body back to Manila." He didn't have a family," she explained. "He'll be buried here, at sea." "Oh," I said. And the rough volcanic glass, pulled across the ocean's sands, changing shape, dulling -- "You were -- you liked Tork a lot, didn't you?" I asked. "You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other." "Yes. He was an awfully nice -- " Then she caught my meaning and blinked. "No," she said. "Oh, no. I was -- I was engaged to Jonni... the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We're both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now... they're sending his body back this evening." Her eyes got very wide then closed. "I'm sorry." That's it, you clumsy crippled, stepping all over everybody's emotions. You look in that mirror and you're too busy looking at what might have been to see what is. "I'm sorry, Ariel." S he opened her eyes and began to look around her. "Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now, not at the supermarket. But at the old town market on the other side. And they're better than any they grow in California. She kept looking around. "None of the amphimen get over there. It's a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them." I leaned back on the rocks. "Or a cup of tea?" "Okay." She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn't feel like it. "Thank you. I won't be able to stay long, though." We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back. "Cal?" "Yes? What is it?" "Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from the eruption in the Slash?" I squinted. "I think so. Come on inside." Coming Next Month A New Riverworld Novel by Philip Jose Farmer And many more in the July IF -- Reserve your copy today! IF Dear Editor: As a sociolost and science fictioneer, I find Mr. Lin Carter's discussions of fandom disturbing. To paraphrase a recent Jewish intellectual, I must take odds with Mr. Carter and expostulate that fan magazines are not only predominately anti-intellectual, but their cataleptic headache powders of frivolous "fannishness" are guaranteed not to activate the social conscience, elevate the blood pressure, or agitate the colon. In short, as one who has closely studied fandom as a subculture as observer and participant (under a deliberate nom de plume), I feel that Mr. Carter's exuberance is merely a misconception -- he is nurturing an ethnocentrism which is so typical of the non-science-fiction magazine in fandom. It is important for the sociologist dealing with fan magazines to differentiate between stated purposes and purposes which actually manifest themselves. The reason is simple. Purposes and results, in fan magazines, are hardly analoigous. For example, this researcher found in # fan magazines statements to the effect that the editors were definitely interested in analytical critics and discussions which, sad to say, most 'fans" (as differentiated from science-fiction readers) have completely ignored; e.g., discusaionsi of the sort as represented by the writings of the fan-sociologist Stephen Pickering, or the editorial by Lester del Rey, or the critiques by Alexei Panshin or Leland Sapiro. However, Mr. Carter need hardly ignore the anti-dntellectualism of most fan magazines. Such statements on the editors' part are hardly necessary. The contents of the magazines are sufficient examples of anti-intellectualism. Most fans publish magazines not to discuss and explore intellectually stimulating ideas, but to sustain a nurtured "fannish" (i.e., immature individuals) status and role. Hence,' I feel Mr. Carter's column is worthless: he is ignoring, completely and irrevocably, manifest and latent functions. That is, Mr. Carter is ignoring functions which are anticipated, and those which are neither intended nor recognized. The job of differentiating between manifest and latent functions is, of course, a task which most sciencefiction writers claim to have done, but which few actually do. Nevertheless, for all of the talk of fan magazines being representative of an the ordinary" individual, it is painfuiHy ostensible, from the reading of any 'fannisih" magazine, that moe fans are very poor, ignorant sodai critics; most are not intellectiials, cmd most are highly resistant to actual changes in ideas. The significance of latent and manifest fimctions lies in the fact that it enables one to systematically analyze fan maigazines, fans and their shoitoomings. By examining what Merton 'has called "seemingly irrational social patterns," it is quite probable that the sociologist can assimilate and analyze various ethnocentrisms of fandom. And the persistence of anti-intellectualism is merely a vindication of the worthless nature of so many fan magazines. I suggest titat Mr. Carter do a little more studying, and a little less excited chatter, in order to present a mature picture to, hoplefully, the mature audience of Mr. PohFs magazines. -- Leslie A. Reece, # Wainright Drive, Bakersfield, California.    Dear Editor: I just want to let you know that, in my opinion, you are the best sf magazine around. With stories like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Neutron Star land Skylark DuQuesne, how can you be beat? I remember a story, a long short story or a short novelette, that involved an invader from outer space. There was an astronomer, I think, who discovered a body entering the Solar System that would destroy the earth. It had a satellite that would be retained by the sun after Terra's demise. The plan was to go over to the satellite by spaceship and thus save some of the human race. It ended right after they landed on the satellite and saw a road stretching into the distance. I wonder if someone would tell me the name, author andor if there was a sequel. Congratulations on your Hugo. -- Cliff Story, #I Auwinala Road, Kailua, Hawaii #. # Sounds like Balmer  Wylie's When Worlds Collide, And there was a sequel: After Worlds Collide , -- Editor,    Dear Editor: My sincerest apologies to Brother Ron Smith in the December ish. Unfortunately, I was not aware that another one of Mr. Plachta's little gems was going to be presented in the same issue with my letter. However, I have a little consolation : at least the two stories are both by the same author. However, I hope Brother Smith will note my prophetic prediction in my same letter. In it, I said that I felt that it was high time IP received a Hugo. Well, shades of Klonos, what happens at the World SF-Con but that best of all magazines, IF, pops up and wins the Hugo for best pro magazine? If that isn't psi, what is? The stories that you've been featuring in IF lately have been showing a slow but upgrading as to quality. Of course a few clinkers do slip in occasionally, but that happens in the best of magazines. Then, on the plus side, some of the really good stories, Hugo material, have been appearing regularly. Keep up the good work! I am still crusading, as always, for better exterior and to a lesser degree, interior art. Those horrible atrocities that have been gettilig out on your covers are giving the prospective buyers a false impresIF sion of what is inside. Since this is the end of the year, a little bit of review might be in order. The real clunker in cover art appeared on (have to let my computer warm up here) bop, zing popapop here it is: the April and May IFs and the January '# Worlds of Tomorrow. Your best efforts, as usual come from Galaxy. The April and December covers deserve awards for possibly the best cover art of the year in sf-dom. The December cover especially, for its realistic portrayal of a Door Traveler. I've been debating with myself for a long time : is that figure a photo or not? It seems so lifelike.If you can make the cover art on Galaxy so good, covers are always so mediocre or just plain bad? How about some more Morrow and Emsh and Finlay doing the interior? These three can really wield a pen. planning to put out another magazine. This puzzled me muchly as I to be taken off the stands. You left out of the Christmas package advertisement in Galaxy. It was the first time in three years that there with this new news, I suppose I can rest safely. Since you are continarticles and the Philip J. Farmer Riverworld series will also continue with it. By the way, how many more Riverworld stories are there? And is there any paperback or hardback publication planned soon? I'm glad to see that IF is getting some of the big names in sf back that haven't been putting out lately. Like Asimov, who has to be one of the greatest ever. And your March issue sounds like it may win a Hugo itself. That other magazine that is in the making, will you by any chance edit it yourself? If you do, I feel that you might be spreading yourself a little thin. After all, not even Hugo Gernsback ever managed four magazines at the same time! You might achieve the same effect if you added more pages to the three Galaxy magazines, improve the format and just use the money for the #th magazine to improve the nowexisting three. Congratulations on what has to be the biggest discovery of a sf writer in the sixties! Who? Larry Niven, of course. Outside of Philip K. Dick, there isn't ansrone who is as prolific as Niven. Nearly every magazine on the stands has one of his stories. Happily, most of them have appeared in your magazines. Niven's work is plausible, sensible, and most of all, scientifically correct. Which isn't an oddity today in what might be called "The Science Conscious Age of SF," but is still rare enough that it makes his stories stand out. Keep him with you and without a doubt, he will make it as big, if not bigger than Keith Laumer and the notoriously, famous Retief. One more thing. My friend in Houston, Texas, who is president of the local sf club, would like to invite any interested fan in the Houston area to contact him so they can get in on the sf-ly doings of the Houston Science Fiction Society. Contact Randy Richmond at # Shadow Wood Drive. -- Drake Maynard, # Plymouth Road, Rocky Mount, N.C. #. #    Dear Editor: Winning that Hugo must have  #I inspired the staff to even greater efforts at improving If, It makes Galaxy seem stale and repetitious in comparison. (Jack Vance's Palace of Love was a pallid disappointment.) The special March issue was excellent. Even the art work has been a bit better. Compliments to prolific Larry Niven for all that quality hard SF he's been producing. Algis Budry's Iron Thom was colorful but ended poorly. Please dissuade Keith Laumer from writing Retief stories for a while. If you're really going to start an "Idea Mart," may I submit a longcherished premise? Why doesn't someone base an alternate history series on the absence of Mohammed? This single difference could have drastically changed our world. For instance, picture western civilization today had Europe been spared centuries of barbaric isolation during the Dark Ages. Such speculations comprise the celebrated Pirenne Thesis. This has been the subject of many scholarly publications which would aid the author in his extrapolations. At the risk of starting an argument, may I suggest that ihistory provides a better background for enjoying SF than science? But then I'm prejudiced, being a medievalist. -- Sandra L. Miesel, # Independence Drive, IndianapoMs, Indiana.    Dear Fred; I have a question which has me on the roies. It comes from a Washington reader who remembers reading The First Men in the Moon as it appeared in the Strand Magazine in his early teens, and it has to do with what I thought was an H. G. Wells story called The Anticipator, But I have just been through the # volume edition of Wells in the local library and can't find it. The story I , remember is about two authors, one of whom finds that another always beats him to the publishers with new ideas. So he plans to kill him, but of course is anticipated even in this. I remember that the last sentence contains the phrase, "The anticipator, horribly afraid" -- referring to the murderer as he runs away from the scene of the crime. I leave for England next week and will tackle some Wells experts there. If you solve the mystery perhaps you would write me. -- Arthur C. Clarke. O Anybody got the answer? We'll pass it on to Clarke... always providing we can locate him as he jets about the world, tying up the loose ends on his forthcoming spectacular movie called #I : A Space Odyssey, And that ties up most of our own loose ends this month. We're hoping to jet partway around the world in a few weeks to visit the city of Trieste and take in their V Festival Intemazionale del Film di Fantascienza -- fifth annual science-fiction film festival, that is. It runs from July #th to #th; looks interesting, and we'll let you know what turns up when we get back. Meanwhile, if you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of the Jugolav-Italian border around then, why not drop in? It's been a while since we mentioned it, but we're still running at least one "first" story in every issue -- that's to say, a first appearance by someone who has never sold a science-fiction story before. This month's is Family Loyalty by Stan Elliott. Next month -- Well, why not come around next month and see? -- The Editor IF () o o o o o o Oooo O O O y O O # # # # No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. CX-#by Lynd Ward won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of FInagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Order from Galaxy #I Hudson street. New Vorkis. n.y. mg cosis as paymenc m luii. E orivilece cuaranteed. o; For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. WORLDS OF A New "Riverworld" Novel by Keith i-amrr grr -- ,  Lin Carter, mg costs as payment m lun E For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. privilege guaranteed VoL #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor -- David Perfon, Production Manager Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Andrew J. Offutt by C. C. MacApp by Alan Dirkson by Philip Jose Farmer by Keith Laumer by E. A. Walton by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter ' IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A, by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial T he other day we went to the Boskone -- which, in Bciencefictionese, means both Doc Smith's legendary enemy of the Lensmen ings were, including a talk on artiMinsky (for our money, the computer theorist of the decade), presentation of the E. E. Smith Memorial Award for # to Isaac Asimov (who didn't expect it and was a study in consternation; last year, when it went to the undersigned, we hadn't been tipped off ahead of time either, and we can't help thinking that one of these years the Boston fans will have their nicely engraved trophy all ready -- and no one there to give it to, because the fellow it was meant for caught an early plane home!), a most useful and constructive talk by Guest of Honor Damon Knight (of which you'll hear more in a later issue) and so on... Including a hands-across-the-sea debate on that frothy development in science-fiction critical circles, the New Wave of British Science Fiction. T  start with, what is this new British wave? To explain it to us, half a dozen science-fiction writers had gathered in London a few weeks earlier with a tape recorder going. They were a worthy crew: Americans Judith Merrii and Tom Disch, Britons Brian W. Aldiss, Miohaei Moorcock (editor of the English sf magazine. New Worlds, which is so well thought of locally that it has received a government grant to keep it going -- a precedent which has made some of us U S. editors quietly thoughtful of late), and others as yet less well known in this country. ( Although we're hoping to bring you some of them in future issues of our new companion magazine, International Science Fiction,) These are well qualified people, all of them; but what they said left some of us on the receiving end puzzled -- and others hopping mad. Representing the American point of view were half a dozen voices, including Lester del Key, Isaac Asimov and your editor. We listened to the tape; then we talked back, with the machine now recording, so we could send our rebuttal back to England. T he New Wave of British Science Fiction, we were told by the Wollensak, lies not so much in any particular story or author as in a climate of freedom of expression and liberty to experiment unmatched anywhere else in the world. 'We're bored with trips to bloody Saturn said the voices from overseas. "We want the right to experiment, to be free, to try new forms of writing, like Burroughs." (No, not that Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch, instead of Tarzan's Edgar Rice.) Want to experiment? Great Klono's brazen claws, yes! No kind of writing can survive without constantly reaching out for new frontiers -- of every kind: in theme, in treatment, in point of view. And experimentation in science fiction has produced some lovely results: Jack Vance and his Dragon Masters, nearly everything written by the late Cordwainer Smith, Brian Aldiss's own The Long Afternoon of Earth. But -- notice something? None of these is really new. And only one of them is Enish. However, this is not to say that there is nothing going on over there. Something is; and it is in fact producing new writers who are surely promising. Will they last? Even, will the promise mature into performance? It is too early to say for sure; but we hope so. Sometime soon we'll be bringing you some work by some of these new writers -- for instance, a rather hauntingly special complete short novel. Sunbeam Caress, by David Redd, which we ouigiht to be able to get into print, let's see, two or three issues from now. They're worthwhile. But -- There's always a but. The "but" in this case is, hut they are not the only kind of science fiction that's worthwhile. Bloody Saturn can still be fun -- and fun is one of the things that science fiction has to offer. Larry Niven or Poul Anderson can still thrill us with the sort of science-fiction color that brightens a day -- because we know they're to be trusted with the backgrounds they write about, and aren't inventing impossible worlds for the sake of a cheap effect. Hard and witty satire is still worth looking at; so is a Heinlein or Clarke detailed and lively examination of how people will live tomorrow. There are, in short, a hundred ways in which a science-fiction story can be good. What is wrong with so much of the "New Wave" is not that it is experimental in form, but that it is so damned dull in every other way. By all means experiment, fellows. But the whole idea of makiinjg an experiment is that you can't tell ahead of time whether or not it will succeed. And why do you insist on publishing your failures? I t isn't really the writers who are to blame. It's probably more the fault of the critics, who have a terrible problem. Derivative, secondorder, parasitic, they can be entertaining only when they have something entertaining to review, only fresh when they espy something fresh in what they are discussing. This is why every literature and artistic put-on of the last few decades has received its deadpan adulation from critics who don't know, or can't afford to know, that they are being taken in. Would you like to know the definition of a good science-fiction story? It is a story that, after reading, you are Iglad you read. That's all there is to all of criticism. But of course no one could build a critical career on saying that in print... -- The Editor IF  Serial The Felled Star  Every human from oil of Time lived again on Riverworld -- and died again, over and over! I poopdeck of the Dreyrugr (Bloodstained). Ari Grimolfsson, the ii'O esurrection, like politics, helmsman, not understanding EngJV makes strange bedfellows," lish, looked bleakly at Clemens. Sam Clemens said. "I can't say Clemens translated for him in that the sleeping is very restful." wretched Old Norse. The helmsman Telescope under one arm, he still looked bleak... puffed on a long, green cigar while Clemens swore loudly in English he paced back and forth on the and cursed him for a dunderheaded barbarian. For three years, Clemens had been practicing tentih-cenitury Norse night and day. And he was still only half-intelligible to most of the men and women aboard the Dreyrugr. "A ninety-five-year-old Huck Finn, give or take a few thousand years," Clemens said, "I start out down the river on a raft. Now I'm on this idiot Viking ship, going upriver. What next? Wen will I realize my dream?" Keeping the upper part of his right arm close to his body so he would not drop the precious telescope, he pounded his right fist into his open left palm. Iron! I need iron! But where on this people-rich, metal-poor planet is iron? There has to be some. Otherwise, where did Erik's axe come from? And how much is there? Enough? Probably not. Probably there's just a very small meteorite. But maybe there's enough for what I want. But where? My God, the long! The iron, if any, may be at the other end. "No, that can't be! It has to be somewhere not too far away, within # miles of here. But we may be going in the wrong direction. Ignorance, the mother of hysteria  He looked through the telescope at the right bank and cursed again. Despite his pleas to bring the ship in closer so that he could scan the faces at a closer range, he had been refused. The king of the Norseman fleet, Eric Bloodaxe, said that this was hostile territory. Until the fleet was out of it, the fleet would stay close to the middle of the river. The Dreyrugr was the flagship of three, all alike. It was eighty feet long, built largely of bamboo and resembled a Viking dragonboat. It had a long low hull, an oaken figurehead carved into a dragon's head, and a curled-tail stern. But it also had a raised foredeck and poopdeck, the sides of both extending out over the water. The two bamboo masts were fore-and-aft rigged, the sails a very thin but tough and flexible membrane, made from the stomach of the deep-dwelling "riverdragon" fish. There was also a rudder controlled by a wheel on the poopdeck. The round leather-and-oak shields of the crew hung over the sides; the great oars were piled on racks. The Dreyrugr was sailing against the wind, tacking back and forth, a maneuver unknown to the Norsemen when they had lived on Earth. The men and women of the crew not handling the ropes sat on the oarsmen benches and talked and threw dice and played poker. From below the poopdeck came cries of exultation or curses and an occasional faint click. Bloodaxe and his bodyguard were shooting pool, and their doing so at this time made Clemens very nervous. Bloodaxe knew that enemy ships three miles up the river were putting out to intercept them, and ships from both banks behind them were putting out to trail them. Yet the king was pretending to be very cool. Maybe he was actually undisturbed, as Drake had supposedly been just before the battle of the Great Armada. "But the conditions are different here," Clemens muttered. "Hiere's not much room to maneuver on a river only a mile and a half wide. And no storm is going to help us out." He swept the bank with the telescope as he had been doing ever since the fleet set out three years ago. He was of medium height and had a big head that made his nonetoo-broad shoulders look even more narrow. His eyes were blue; his eyebrows, shaggy; his nose, Roman. His hair was long and reddish brown. His face was innocent of the mustache that had been so well known during his terrestrial life. Men had been resurrected without face hair. His chest was a sea of brown-red curly hair that lapped at the hollow of his throat. He wore only a knee-length white towel secured at the waist, a leather belt for holding weapons and the sheath for his telescope, and leather slippers. His skin was bronzed by the equatorial sun. He removed the telescope from his eye to look at the enemy ships trailing by a mile. As he did so, he saw something flash in the sky. It was a curving sword of white, suddenly appearing as if unsheathed from the blue. It stabbed downwards and then was gone behind the mountains. S am was startled. He had seen many small meteorites in the night sky but never a large one. Yet so brightly burned this one that it left an afterimage on his eyes for a second or two. Then the image faded, and Sam forgot about the falling star.  He scanned the bank again with his telescope. This part of the River had been typical. On each side of the mileand-a-half-wide river was a mileand-a-half-wide grassgrown plain. On each bank, huge mushroom-shaped stone structures, the grailstones, were spaced a mile apart. Trees were few on the plains, but the foothills were thick with pine, oak, yew and the irontree, a thousandfoot-high plant with gray bark, enormous elephant-ear leaves, hundreds of thick gnarly branches, roots so deep and wood so hard that the tree could not be cut, burned or dug out. Vines bearing large flowers of many bright colors grew over the branches. There was a mile or two of foothills, and then the abruptness of smooth-sided mountains, towering from # to # feet. They were unscalable past the #-foot mark and forced the traveler to follow the river valley if he wished to get to his goal. The area through which the three Norse boats were sailing was inhabited largely by early nineteenthcentury Germans. There was the usual ten per cent population from another place and time of Earth. Here, the ten per cent was firstcentury Persians. And there was also the ubiquitous one per cent of seemingly random choices from any time and anyplace. The telescope swung past the bamboo huts on the plains and the faces of the people. The men were clad only in various towels; the IF women, in short towel-like skirts and thin cloths around the breasts. There were many gathered on the bank, apparently to watch the battle. They carried flint-tipped spears and bows and arrows but were not in martial array. Clemens grunted suddenly and held the telescope on the face of a man. At this distance and with the weak power of the instrument, he could not clearly see the man's features. But the wide-shouldered body and dark face suggested familiarity. Where had he seen that face before? Then it struck him. The man looked remarkably like the photographs of the famous English explorer Sir Richard Burton that he'd seen on Earth. Rather, there was something suggestive of the man. Clemens sighed and turned the eyepiece to the other faces as the ship took him away. He would never know the true identity of the fellow. He would have liked to put ashore and talk to him, find out if he really were Burton. In the twenty years of life on this riverfaces, Clemens had not yet met one person he had known on Earth. He did not know Burton personally, but he was sure that Burton must have heard of him. This man -- if he were Burton -- would be a link, if thin, to the dead Earth. And then, as a far-off blurred figure came within the roimd of the telescope, Clemens cried out incredulously. "Livy! Oh, my God! Livy!" T here could be no doubt. Although the features could not be clearly distinguished, they formed an overwhelming, not-to-be-denied truth. The head, the hairdo, the figure and the unmistakable walk (as unique las a fingerprint) shouted out that here was his Earthly wife. "Livy!" he sobbed. The ship heeled to tack, and he lost her. Frantically, he swung the end of the scope back and forth. Eyes wide, he stomped with his foot on the deck, and he bellowed, "Bloodaxe! Bloodaxe! Up here! Hurry!" He swung towards the helmsman and shouted that he should go back and direct the ship toward the bank. Grimolfsson was taken aback at first by Clemens's vehemence. Then he slitted his eyes, shook his head, and growled out a no. "I order you to!" Clemens screamed, forgetting that the helmsman did not understand English. "That's my wife! Livy! My beautiful Livy, as she was when she was twenty-five! Brought back from the dead!" Someone rumbled behind him, and Clemens whirled to see a blond head with a shorn-off left ear appear on the level of the deck. Then Erik Bloodaxe's broad shoulders, massive chest and huge biceps came into view, followed by pillarlike thighs as he came on up the ladder. He wore a green-and-black checked towel, a broad belt holding several chert knives and a holster for his axe. This was of steel, broadbladed and with an oak handle. It was, as far as Clemens knew, unique on this planet, where stone and wood were the only materials for weapons. He frowned as he looked over the river. He turned to Clemens and said, "What is it, sma-skitligr? You made me miscue when you screamed like Thor's bride on her wedding night. I lost a cigar to Toki Njalsson." He took the axe from its holster and swung it. The sun glinted off the blue steel. "You had better have a good reason for disturbing me. I have killed many men for far less." Clemens's face was pale beneath the tan, but this time it was not caused by Erik's threat. He glared, the wind-ruffled hair, staring eyes and aquiline profile making him look like a kestrel falcon. "To hell with you and your axe!" he shouted. "I just saw my wife, Livy, there on the right bank! I want... I demand... that you take me ashore so I can be with her again! Oh, God, after all these years, all this hopeless searching! It'll only take a minute! You can't deny me this; you'd be inhuman to do so!" The axe whistled and sparkled. The Norseman grinned. "All this fuss for a woman? What about herT And he gestured at a small dark woman standing near the great pedestal and tube of the rocketlauncher. C lemens became even paler. He said, 'Temah is a fine girl! I'm very fond of her! But she's not Livy!" "Enough of this," Bloodaxe said. "Do you take me to be as big a fool as you? If I put into shore, we'd be caught between the ground and river forces, ground like meal in Freyr's mill. Forget about her." Clemens screamed like a falcon and launched himself, arms out and flapping, at the Viking. Erik brought the flat of the axe against Clemens's head and knocked him to the deck. For several minutes, Clemens lay on his back, eyes open and staring at the sun. Blood seeped from the roots of the hair falling down over his face. Then he got to all-fours and began to vomit. Erik gave an impatient order. Temah, her face drawn, eyes looking sidewise with fright at Erik, dipped a bucket at the end of a rope into the river. She threw the water over Clemens, who sat up and then wobbled to his feet. Temah drew another bucket and washed off the deck. Clemens snarled at Erik. Erik laugjhed and said, "Little coward, you've been talking too big for too long! Now, you know what happens when you talk to Erik Bloodaxe as if he were a thrall. Consider yourself lucky. I did not kill you." Clemens spun away from Erik, staggered to the railing, and began to climb upon it. "Livy!" he called. Swearing, Bloodaxe ran after him, seized him around the waist, and dragged him back. Then he pushed Clemens so heavily that Clemens fell on the deck again. "You're not deserting me at this time!" Erik said. "I need you to find that iron mine!" IF "There isn... " Clemens said and then closed his mouth tightly. Let the Norseman find out that he did not know where the mine -- if there was a mine -- was located, and he would be killed on the sipot. "Moreover," Erik continued cheerfully, "after we find the iron, I may need you to help us towards the Polar Tower, although I think I can get there just by following the river. But you have much knowledge that I need. And I can use that frost giant, Joe Miller." "Joe!" Clemens said in a thick voice. He tried to get back onto his feet. "Joe Miller! Where's Joe? He'll kill you!" The axe cut the air above Clemens's head. "You will tell Joe nothing of this, do you hear? I swear by Odin's blind socket, I will get to you and kill you before he can put a hand on me. Do you hear?" Clemens got to his feet and swayed for a minute. Then he called, in a louder voice, "Joe! Joe Miller!" II A voice from below the poopdeck muttered. It was so deep that it made the hairs on the backs of men's necks rise even after hearing it for the thousandth time. The stout bamboo ladder creaked beneath a weight, creaked so loudly it could be heard above the sing of wind through leather ropes, flapping of membranous sails, grind of wooden joints, shouts of crew, the hiss of water against the hull. The head that rose above the edge of the deck was even more frightening than the inhumanly deep voice. It was large as a halfpohy of beer and was all bars and arches and shelves and flying buttresses of bone beneath a pinkish and loose skin. Bone circled eyes, smallseeming and dark blue. The nose was inappropriate to the rest of his features, since it should have been flat-bridged and flaring-nostrilled. Instead, it was the monstrous and comical travesty on the human nose that the probcis monkey sihows to a laughing world. In its lengthy shadow was a long upper lip, like a chimpanzee's or comic-strip Irishman's. The lips were thin and protruded, shoved out by the convex jaws beneath. His shoulders made Erik Bloodaxe's look like pretzels. Ahead of him he pushed a great paunch, a balloon trying to rise from the body to which it was anchored. His legs and arms seemed short; they were so out of proportion to the long trunk. The juncture of thigh and body was level with Sam Clemens's chin, and his arms, extended, could hold, and had held, Clemens out at arm's length in the air for an hour without a tremor. He wore no clothes nor did he need them for modesty's sake, though he had not known modesty until taught by homo sapiens. Long, rusty-red hair, thicker than a man's, less dense than a chimpanzee's, was plastered to the body by his sweat. The skin beneath the hairs was the dirty-pink of a blond Noric. He ran a hand the size of an unabridged dictionary through the wavy, msty-red hair tihait began an inch above the eyes and slanted back rapidly. He yawned and showed teeth that were human-seeming except for the two five-inch long, tigerish canines. "I vath thleeping," he rumbled, "I vath dreaming of Earth, of klravulthithmengbhabafving -- vhat you call mammothth. Thothe vere the good old dayth." He shuffled forward, then stopped. "Tham! Vhat happened! You're bleeding! You look thick!" Bellowing for his guards, Erik Bloodaxe stepped backwards from the titanthrop. "Your friend went mad! He thought he'd seen his wife -- for the thousandth time -- and he attacked me because I wouldn't take him in to the bank to her; Tyr's testicles, Joe! You know how many times he's thought he saw that woman, and how many times we stopped, and how many times it always turned out to be a woman who looked something like his woman but wasn't! "This time, I said no! Even if it had been his women, I would have said no! We'd be putting our heads in the wolfs mouth!" Erik crouched, axe lifted, ready to swing at the giant. Shouts came from middeck, and a big redhead with a flint axe ran up the ladder. The helmsman gesfured for him to leave. The redhead, seeing Joe Miller so belligerant, did not hesitate to retreat. "Vhat you thay, Tham?" Miller said. "Thyould I tear him apart?" Clemens held his head in both hands and said, "No. He's right. I suppose. I don't really know if she was Livy. Probably just a German hausfrau? I don't know!" He groaned. "I don't know! Maybe it was her!" Wooden horns blared, and a huge drum on the middeck thundered. Sam Clemens said, "Forget about this, Joe, until we get through the straits -- if we do get through! If we're to survive, we'll have to fight together. Later..." "You alvayth thay later, Tham, but there never ith a later. Vhy?" "If you can't figure diat out, Joe, you're as dumb as you look!" Clemens snapped. Tearshields glinted in Joes's eyes, and his bulging cheeks became wet. "Every time you get thcared, you call me dumb," he said. "Vhy take it out on me? Vhy not on the people that thcare you, vhy not on Bloodakthe?" "I apologize, Joe," Clemens said. "Out of the mouths of babes and apemen... You're not so dumb, you're pretty smart. Forget it, Joe. I'm sorry." Bloodaxe swaggered up to them but kept out of Joe's reach. He grinned as he swung his axe. "There shall soon be a meeting of the metair And then he laughed and said, "What am I saying? Battle any more is the meeting of stone and wood, except for my star-axe, of course! But what does that matter? I have grown tired of these six months of peace. I need the cries of war, the whistling spear, the chunk of my sharp steel biting into flesh, the spurt of blood. I have become as impatient as a penned-up stallion IF who smells a mare in heat; I would mate with Death." "Bull!" Joe Miller said. "You're jutht ath bad ath Tham in your vay. You're thcared, too, but you cover it up vith your big mouth." "I do not understand your mangled speech," Bloodaxe said. "Apes should not attempt the tongue of man." "You understand me all right," Joe said. "Keep quiet, Joe," Clemens said. He looked upriver. Two miles away, the plains on each side of the river dwindled away as the mountains curved inwards to create straits not more than a quarter-mile wide. The water boiled at the bottom of the cliffs, which were perhaps # feet high. On the cliff-tops, on both sides, unidentified objects glittered in the sun. A half-mile below the straits, thirty galleys had formed three crescents. And, aided by the swift current and sixty oars each, they were speeding towards the three intruders. Clemens viewed them through his telescope and then said, "Each has about forty warriors aboard and two rocket-launchers. We're in a hell of a trap. And our own rockets have been in storage so long, the powder's likely to be crystallized. They'll go off in the tubes and blow us to kingdom come. "And those things on top of the cliffs. Apparatus for projecting Greek fire?" A man brought the king's armor: a triple-layered leather helmet with imitation leather wings and a nosepiece, a leather cuirass, leather breeches and a shield. Another man brought a bundle of spears: yew shafts and flint tips. The rocket crew, all women, placed a projectile in the swivable launching tube. The rocket was six feet long, not counting the guidestick, built of bamboo, and looked exactly like a Fourth of July rocket. Its warhead contained twenty pounds of black gunpowder in which were many tiny chips of stone: shrapnel. J oe Miller, the deck creaking beneath his # pounds, went below to get his armor and weapons. Clemens put on a helmet and slung a shield over his shoulder, but he would not use a cuirass or leggings. Although he feared wounds, he was even more frightened of drowning because of the heavy armor if he fell into the river. Clemens thanked whatever gods there were that he had been lucky enough to fall in with Joe Miller. They were blood-brothers now -- even if Clemens had fainted during the ceremony, which demanded mingling of blood and some even more painful and repulsive acts. Miller was to defend him, and Clemens was to defend Miller to the death. So far, the 'titanthrop had done all the battling. But then he was more than big enough for two. Bloodaxe's dislike of Miller was caused by envy. Bloodaxe fancied himself as the world's greatest fighter and yet knew that Miller would have no more trouble dispatching him in combat than Miller would with a dog. And with a small dog at that. Erik Bloodaxe gave his battle orders, which were transmitted to the other two ships by flashes of sunlight off obsidian mirrors. The ships would keep sails up and try to steer between the galleys. This would be difficult because a ship might have to change course to avoid ramming and so lose the wind. Also, each ship would thrice be subjected to crossfire. "The wind's with them," Clemens said. "Their rockets will have more range until we're among them." "Teach your grandmother to suck..." Bloodaxe said and stopped. Some bright objects on the clifftops had left their positions and now were swooping through the air in a path that would bring them close above the Vikings. The Norsemen shouted with bewilderment and alarm, but Clemens recognized them as gliders. In as few words as possible, he explained to Bloodaxe. The king started to relay the information to the other Vikings but had to stop because the lead galleys fired off the first volley of rockets. Wobbling, trailing thick black smoke, ten rockets arced towards the three sailships. These changed course as quickly as possible, two almost colliding. Some of the rockets almost struck the masts or the hulls, but none hit and all splashed unexploded, falling into the river. By then the first of the gliders made its pass. Slim-fuselaged, longwinged, with black Maltese crosses on the sides of its slim and silvery fuselage, it dived at a #degree angle towards the Dreyrugr, The Norsemen archers bent their yew bows an#, at a command from the chief archer, loosed their shafts. The glider swooped low over the water, several arrows sticking out of the fuselage, and it settled down for a landing on the river. It had failed to drop its bombs on the Dreyrugr. They were somewhere below the surface. But now other gliders were coming in at all three ships, and the enemy lead galleys had loosed another flight of rockets. Clemens glanced at their own rocket-launcher. The big blonde crew-women were swiveling the tube under the command of small dark Temah, but she was not ready to touch the fuse yet. The Dreyrugr was not yet within range of the nearest galley. For a second, everything was as if suspended in a photograph: the two gHders, their wingtips only two feet apart, pulling up out of the dive and the small black bombs dropping towards the decks of their targets, the arrow halfway towards the gliders, the German rockets halfway toward the Viking ships, on the downcurve of their arcs. Clemens felt the sudden push of wind behind him, a whistling, an explosion as the sails took the full impact of air and rolled the ship over sharply on its longitudinal axis. There was a tearing sound as if the fabric of the world were being ripped apart; a cracking as if great axes had slammed into the masts. T he bombs, the gliders, the rockets, the arrows were lifted upIF wards and backwards, turned upside down. The sails and masts left the ship as if they had been launched from tubes and soared away. The ship, released from the push of sail, rolled back to horizontal from an almost #-degree angle to the river. Clemens was saved from flying off the deck in the first slam of wind only because the titanthrop had seized the wheel with one hand and clutched him with the other. The helmsman had also clung to the wheel. The rocket crew, their shrieks carried upriver by the wind, mouths open, hair whipping, flew like birds from the ship, soared and then splashed into the river. The rocket tube tore loose from its pedestal and followed them. Bloodaxe had grabbed the railing with one hand and kept hold of his precious steel weapon with the other. While the ship rocked back and forth, he managed to stick the axehandle in the holster and then to cling to the railing with both hands. It was well for him that he did, because the wind was screaming like a woman fallmg off a cliff and shoving powerfully at him. Within a few seconds, a hot blast tore at the ship, and Clemens was as deafened and as seared as if he were standing near a rocket blast. A great swell of riverwater lifted the ship high. Clemens opened his eyes and then screamed but could not hear his own voice because of his stunned ears. A wall of dirty brown water, at least fifty feet high, was racing around the curve of the valley between four and five miles away. He wanted to close his eyes again but could not. He continued to gaze with his lids rigid until the elevated sea was a mile away. Then he could make out the individual trees, the giant pines, oaks, and yews scattered along the front of the wave, and, as it got closer, pieces of bamboo and pine houses, a roof somehow still intact, a shattered hull with a half mast, the sperm-whalesized, dark-gray body of a riverdragon fish, plucked from the fivehundred feet depths of the river. Terror numbed him. He wanted to die to escape the death. But he could not, and so he watched with frozen eyes and congealed mind as the ship, instead of being drowned and smashed beneath hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, rose up and up and up on the slope of the wave, up and up, the dirty brown wreckage-strewn cliff towering above, always threatening to avalanche down upon the ship, and the sky above, now turned from bright noon-blue to gray. Then they were on the top, poised for a downward slide, rocked, dipped, and went down towards the trough. Smaller waves, but still huge, fell over the boat. A body landed on the deck near Clemens, a body catapulted from the raging waters. Clemens stared at it with only a spark of comprehension. He was too iced with terror to feel any more; he had reached the limits. And so he stared at Livy's body, smashed on one side but untouch on the other side! It was Livy, his wife, that he had seen. IF Then another wave that almost tore him and the titanthrop loose struck the deck. The helmsman screamed as he lost his grip and followed the woman's corpse overboard. The boat, sliding upwards from the depths of the trough, turned to present its broadside to the wave. But the boat continued to soar upwards, though it tilted so that Miller and Clemens were hanging from the stump of the wheel's base as if they were dangling from a tree trunk on the face of a mountain. Then the boat rolled back to horizontal position as it raced down the next valley. Bloodaxe had lost his grip and was shot across the deck and would have gone over the other side if the ship had not righted itself in time. Now he clung to the port railing. On top of the third wave, the Dreyrugr sped slantwise down the mountain of water. It struck the broken forepart of another vessel, shuddered, and Bloodaxe's grip was town loose by the impact. He spun along the railing, hit the other railing on the edge of the poopdeck, shattered it, and went on over the edge and below to the middeck. Thereafter, Clemens did not see him. Ill N ot until morning of the next day did Sam Clemens thaw out of his shock. The Dreyrugr had somehow ridden out the great waves long enough to go slanting across the plains on the shallower but rough waters. It had been shot past hills and through a narrow pass into a small canyon at the base of the mountain. And as the waters subsided from beneath it, the boat had settled with a crash into the ground. The crew lay in terror thick as cold mud while the river and wind raged and the sky remained the winds ceased. Rather the downriver winds stopped, and the normal soothing wind from upriver resumed. Some of the men and women began to stir and to ask questions. Sam felt as if he could barely force the words out through a numbed mouth. Stammering, he told them of the flash he had seen in the sky fifteen minutes before the winds struck. Somewhere down the valley, maybe two hundred miles away, a giant meteorite had struck. The winds created by the heat of passage through the air and by the displacement of air by the meteorite, the shock waves caused by the impact, had generated those giant waves. Terrible as they were, they must have been pygmies compared to those nearer the point of impact. Actually, the Dreyrugr was in the outer edge of the fury. "It had quit being mad and was getting downright jovial when we met it," Sam said. Some of the Norse got unsteadily to their feet and tottered across the deck. Some belowdecks stuck their heads out of the hatches. Bloodaxe was hurting from his roll across the deck, but he managed to roar, "Everybody belowdecks! There will be another great flood, much worse than this one, when the waves caused by the falling star hitting the earth reach us!" Sam did not like Bloodaxe, to put it mildly, yet he had to admit that the Norwegian was bright enough when it came to the ways of water. He himself had supposed that the first waves would be the last. The crew lay down in the hold wherever they could find space and something stable to hang onto, and they waited. Sometime during the night, the earth rumbled and shook, and then the river struck the pass with a hiss like a fifty-foot-high cat, followed by a bellow. Borne upwards by the flood pouring through the pass, the Dreyrugr rocked and spun around and around as it rocked. Sam turned cold. He was sure that if there had been daylight, he and the others would look as grayblue as corpses. U ip the boat went, occasionally scraping against the walls of the canyon. Just as Sam was about to swear that the Dreyrugr had reached the top of the canyon and was going to be carried over its front in a cataract, the boat dropped. It sank swiftly, or so it seemed, while the waters poured out through the pass almost as quickly as they had entered. There was a crash, followed by the heavy breathing of men and women, a groan here and there, the dripping of water, and the far away roar of the receding river. It was not over yet. There was more waiting in cold numb terror until the great mass of water would rush back to fill the spaces from which i had been displaced by the blazing many hundreds of thousands of tons mass of the meteorite. They shivered as if encased in ice, although the air was far warmer than it had even been at this time of night. And for the first time in the twenty years on this planet, it did not rain at night. Before the waters struck again, they felt the shake and grumble of earth. There was a vast hiss and a roar, and again the boat rose up, spun, bumped against the walls of the canyon and then sank. This time, the ship did not strike the ground so haid, probably, Sam thought, because the boat had hit a thick layer of mud. "I don't believe in miracles," Sam whispered, "but this is one. We've no business being alive." Joe Miller, who had recovered more swiftly than the others from shock, returned from a scouting trip. He carried in his arms the naked body of a man. His burden was, however, alive. He had blond hair under the mud-streaks, a handsome face and blue-gray eyes. He said something in German to Clemens and then managed to smile after he had been deposited gently on the deck. "I found him in hith glider," Joe said. "Vhat vath left of it, that ith. There'th a number of corptheth loutthide thith canyon. Vhat you vant to do vith him?" "Make friends with him," Clemens croaked. "His people are gone; this area is cleaned out." IF He shuddered. Tlie image of Livy's body placed on the deck like a mocking gift, the wet hair plastered over one side of her smashed face, the one dark eye staring darkly at him, was getting more vivid and more painful. He felt like sobbing but could not and was glad of it. Weeping would make him fall apart into a cone of ashes. Later, when he had the strength to stand it, he would weep. So near... The blond man sat up on the deck. He shivered uncontrollably and said, in British English, "I'm cold." Miller went belowdecks and brought up dried fish, acorn bread, bamboo tips and cheese. The Vikings had stored food to eat when they were in hostile areas where they were forbidden to use their grails. "That thtupid ath, Bloodakthe, ith thtill alive," Miller said. "He'th got theme broken ribth and he'th a meth of bruitheth and cutth. But hith big mouth ith in perfect working order. Vouldn't you know it?" A fter he had eaten, Clemens began crying. Joe Miller wept with him and blew his huge proboscis. "There," he said, "I feel much better. I never been tho thscared in all my life. Vhen I thaw that vater, like all the mammothth in the vorld thtampeding towardth uth, I thought. Good-by, Joe. Good-by, Tham. I'll vake up thomevhere along the river in a new body, but I'll never thee you again, Tham. Only I vath too terrified to feel thad about it. Yethuth, I vath thcared!" The young stranger introduced himself. He was Lothar von Richthofen, glider pilot, captain of the Luftwaffe of his Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Alfred the First of New Prussia. "We've passed a hundred New Prussias in the last ten thousand miles," Clemens said. "All so small you couldn't stand in the middle of one and heave a brick without it landing in the middle of the next. But most of them weren't as belligerent as yours. They'd let us land and charge our grails, especially after we'd shown them what we had to trade for use of the stones." "Trade?" "Yes. We didn't trade goods, of course, because all the freighters of old Earth couldn't carry enough to last out a fraction of the river. We traded ideas. For one thing, we show these people how to build pool tables and how to make a hair-setting spray from fish-glue, deodorized." The Kaiser of this area had been, on Earth, a Count von Waldersee, a German field marshal, bom #, died #. Clemens nodded, saying, "I remember reading about his death in the papers and having great satisfaction because I had outlived another contemiorary. That was one of the few genuine and free pleasures of life. But since you know how to fly, you must be a twentiethcentury German, right?" Lother von Richthofen gave a brief summary of his life. He had flown a fighter plane for Germany in the Weltkrieg. His brother had been the greatest of aces on either side during that war. "World War I or II?" Clemens said. He had met enough #th-centurians to know some facts -- and fancies -- about events after his death in #. V on Richthofen added more details. He had been in World War I. He himself had fought under his brother and had accounted for forty Allied planes. In #, while flying an American film actress and her manager from Hamburg to Berlin, the plane had crashed and he had died. "The luck of Lothar von Richthofen deserted me," he said. "Or so I thought then." He laughed. "But here I am, twenty-five years old in body again, and I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of impotence and every day is one day nearer to death. "And my luck held out again when that meteorite struck. My glider lost its wings at the first blow of wind, but instead of falling, I floated in my fuselage, turning over and over, dropping, rising again, falling, until I was deposited as lightly as a sheet of paper upon a hill. And when the backflood came, the fuselage was borne by the water and I was nuzzled gently against the foot of the mountain. A miracle!" "A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a giant meteor caused that flood?" "I saw its flash, the trail of burning air. It must have crashed far away, fortunaftly for us." They climbed down from the ship and slogged through the thick mud to the canyon entrance. Joe Miller heaved logs that a team of draft horses would have strained to pull. He shoved aside others, and the three went down through the foothills and to the plains. Others followed them. They were silent now. The land had been scoured free of trees except for the great irontrees. So deeply rooted were these that most stiU stood upright. Moreover, where the mud had not settled, there was grass. It was a testimony to the toughness and steadfast-rootedness of the water had not been able to rip out the topsoil. Here and there was the flotsam left by the backflood. Corpses of men and women, broken timber, towels, grails, a dugout, uprooted pines and oaks and yews. The great mushroom-shaped grailstones, spaced a mile apart along the banks on both sides, were also unbroken and unbent, although many were almost buried in mud. "The rains will eventually take care of the mud," Clemens said. "The land slopes towards the river." He avoided the corpses. They filled him with a prickly loathing. Besides, he was afraid that he might see Livy's body again. He did not think he could stand it; he would go mad. "One thing sure," Sam Clemens said. "There'll be nobody between IF US and the meteorite. We'll have first claim on it, and then it'll be up to us to defend all that treasure of iron from the wolves that will come loping on its scent. "Would you like to join up? If you stick with me, you'll have an airplane some day, not just a glider." V on Richthofen was more than curious, Sam explained a little about his Dream. And he told a little about Joe Miller's story of the Misty Tower. "It's only possible with a great deal of iron," he said. "And much hard work. These Vikings aren't capable of helping me build a steamboat. I need technical knowledge they don't have. But I was using them to get me to a possible source of iron. I had hoped that there might be enough ore from which Erik's axe was made for my purpose. I used their greed for the metal, and also Miller's story, to launch them on this expedition. "Now, we don't have to search. We know where there must be more than enough. All we have to do is dig it up, melt it, refine it, shape it into the forms we need. And protect it. I won't string you along with a tale of easy accomplishment. It may take years before we can complete the boat, and it'll be damn hard work doing it." Lothar's face blazed with a spark caught from Clemens's few words. "It's a noble, magnificent dream!" he said. "Yes, I'd like to join you. I'll pledge my honor to follow you until we storm Misty Tower! On my word as a gentleman and officer, on the blood of the barons of Richthofen!" "Just give me your word as a man," Sam said drily. "What a strange -- indeed, unthinkable -- trio we make!" Lothar said. "A gigantic subhuman, who must have died at least # years before civilization. A twentiethcentury Prussian baron and aviator. A great American humorist born in #. And our crew -- " Clemens raised his thick eyebrows at the our -- "tenth-century Vikings!" "A sorry lot now," Sam said, watching Bloodaxe and the others plow through the mud. All were bruised from head to foot and many limped. "I don't feel so well myself. Have you ever watched a Japanese tenderize a dead octopus? I know how the octopus feels now. By the way, I was more than just a humorist, you know. I was a man of letters." "Ah, forgive men!" Lothar said. "I've hurt your feelings. No offense. Let me salve your injuries, Mr. Clemens, by telling you that when I was a boy, I laughed many times reading your books. And I regard your Huckleberry Finn as a great book. Although I must admit I did not care for the way you ridiculed the aristocracy in your Connecticut Yankee, Still, they were English, and you are an American." Erik Bloodaxe decided that they were too battered and weary to start the job of getting the ship down to the river that day. They would charge their grails at evening, eat, sleep, eat breakfast and then begin the backbreaking work. They went back to the p, took their grails from the hold and set them on the depressions on the flat top of a grailsitone. As the sun touched the peaks of the movmtains to the west, the men awaited the roar and the hot, blue flash from the stones. The electrical discharge would power the energy-matter converters within the false bottoms of the grail and, on opening the lids, the men would find cooked meats, vegetables, bread and butter, fruit, tobacco, dreamgum, liquor or mead. But as darkness settled over the valley, the grailstones remained silent and cold. Across the river, fire sprang up momentarily from the gallstones there, and a faint roar reached them. But the stones on the west bank, for the first time in the twenty years since the day of Resurrection, did not function. IV T he men and women felt as if God had failed them. The threetimes-a-day offering of the stones had come to seem as natural as the rising of the sun. It was some time before they could ease the sickness in their stomachs to eat the last of the fish, sprouts and cheese. Clemens was in a blue funk for a while. But von Richthofen began talking of the necessity of ferrying the grails to the other side so they could eat in the morning. Presently Clemens got up and talked to Bloodaxe. The. Norwegian was in a mood even fouler than usual, but he finally admitted that action must be taken. Joe Miller, he German, and a big redheaded Swede named Toke Kroksson trudged back up to the ship and then carried some oars back down. These three, with Clemens, took the grails across in the dugout; and Toke and Joe Miller paddled the dugout back. Miller, Clemens and von Richthofen settled down to sleep on top of a grailstone. It was clean, since the electrical discharge had burned off all the mud. "We'll have to get under the stone when the rains come," Clemens said. He lay on his back, his hands under his head, and looked up at the night sky. It was no terrestrial sky, this blaze of twenty thousand stars greater than Venus in her glory and shimmering filaments tentacling out from glittering gas clouds. Some of the stars were so bright, that they could be seen as pale phantoms even at noon. "The meteorite must have smashed some of the grailstones on the west bank," Sam Clemens said. "And so it broke the circuit. My God, what a circuit! There must hooked together, if the calculations of some are correct." "There will be a terrible conflict raging up and down the river," Lothar said. "The west bankers will attack the east bankers so they can charge their grails. What a war! I've heard that there must be about # valley. All battling to the death for food." "The hell of it ith," Joe Miller IF said, "that if half get kilt and tho there'th enough room on the grailstoneth, it von't do no good. Tventyfour hourth later, the dead vill all be alife again, and it'll all thtart over again." Sam said, "I'm not so sure. I think it's been established that the stones have something to do with the resurrections. And if half of them are out of commission, there may be a considerable cut in production on the Lazarus line. This meteorite is a saboteur from the skies." #T've thought for a long time Xthat this world, and our resurrection, are not the work of supernatural beings," von Richthofen said. "Have you heard the wild tale that's been going up and down the river? There's a story that one man woke up before Resurrection Day and found himself in a very weird around him, floating in the air, nude men, women, and children, their heads shaved, all slowly rotating under some invisible force. This man, an Englishman named Perkin, or Burton, some say, had died on Earth around #. He got loose but was intercepted by two beings -- human -- who put him back to sleep. Then he awoke, like the rest of us, on the banks of the river. "Whoever is behind all this isn't infallible. They made a mistake with Burton. He got a glimpse into preResurreotion, a stage somewhere between our death on Earth and preparation for life on this world. I don't know. It sounds fantastic, like a wish-fulfillment story. But then again..." "I've heard it," Sam Clemens, said. He thought of telling about seeing Burton's face through the telescope just before he spotted Livy's. But he had seen several faces that he had thought were Livy's, and they had turned out to be somebody else's. Moreover, the pain of thinking about her was too much for him. He sat up and cursed and shook his fist at the stars and then began to weep. Joe Miller, squatting behind him, reached a gigantic hand out and touched him softly on the shoulder. Von Richthofen, embarrassed, looked the other way. Presently, he said, "I'll be glad when our grails are charged. I'm itching for a smoke." Clemens laughed and dried his tears and said, "I don't cry easily. But I've gotten over being asham about it when I do. "It's a sad world, just as sad, in most ways, as the old Earth. Yet we have our youthful bodies again, we don't have to work for food or worry about paying bills, making our women pregnant, catching diseases. And if we're killed we rise up the following day, whole and hearty, although thousands of miles from where we died. "But it's nothing like what the preachers said it would be. Which isn't, of course, surprising. And maybe it's just as well. Who'd want to fly around on aerodynamical ly unstable wings or stand around all day playing harps badly and screeching out hosannas?" Lothar laughed and said, "Ask any Chinese or Indian coolie if this isn't a hell of a better world than the last world. It's just us spoiled modem Westerners who grumble and look for first and latest causes. We didn't know much about the operation of our Earthly cosmos, and we know less about this. But we're here, and we may eventually find out who put us here and why. Meanwhile, as long as there are beautiful and willing women -- and there are -- cigars, dreamgum, wine and a good fight, who cares? I'll enjoy this valley of bright shadows until the good things of life are once more taken from me. Lust to lust until it's dust to dust." They were silent after a while, and Clemens could not get to sleep until just before the rains. He got down under the mushroom until the downpour ceased. Back on top of the stone, he shivered and turned for several hours, although he was covered with long heavy towels. Dawn came with Miller's ponderous hand shaking him. Hastily, he climbed down off the stone and got a safe distance from it. Five minutes later, the stone gave forth a blue flame that leaped thirty feet into the air and roared like a lion. At the same time, the stones across the river bellowed. Clemens looked at Lothar. "Somebody repaired the break." Lothar said, "I've got goose pimples. Who is somebody?" He was silent for a while, but before they had reached the west bank, he was laughing and chattering like a guest at a ccktail party. Too cheerful, Clemens thought. "They've never shown their hand before, that I know of," Sam said. "But diis time I guess they had to." V T he next five days were occupied in getting the ship down to the bank. Two weeks more were spent in repairing the Dreyrugr, All that time a watch was kept, but no one came into the area. When the ship was finally launched, still minus masts and sails, and was rowed down the river, there was not a live human in sight. The crew, accustomed to seeing the plains thronged with men and women, were uneasy. The silence was unnerving. There were no animals on this world except for the fish in the river and earthworms in the soil, but the humans had always made enough noise. "The hyenas'll be here soon enough," Clemens said to Bloodaxe. "That iron is far more precious than gold ever was on Earth. You want battle? You'll get enough down your throat to make you vomit." The Norseman, swinging his axe, winced at the pain in his ribs. "Let them come! Tiey'!! know they've been in a fight to bring joy to the hearts of the Valkyrie!" "Bull!" Joe Miller said. Sam smiled but walked to a position behind the titanthrop. Bloodaxe was afraid of only one being in the world, but he might lose his never easily controlled temper and go berserk. However, he needed Miller, who was worth twenty great but human warriors. IF The ship travelled steadily for two days during the sunlit hours. At night, one man steered and a small watch was kept, the crew slept. Early in the evening of the third day, the titanthrop, Clemens and von Richthofen were sitting on the foredeck, smoking cigars and sipping at the whiskey their grails had given them at the last stop. "Why do you call him Joe Miller?" Lothar asked. "His real name is a rattling jawbreaker, longer than the technical term of a German philosopher," Clemens said. "I couldn't pronounce it when I first met him, I never did. After he learned enough English to tell me a joke -- he was so eager he could hardly wait -- I decided to call him Joe Miller. He told me a tale so hoary I couldn't believe it. I knew it'd been around a long time; I first heard it, in a slightly different form, when I was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri. And I was still hearing it, much to my disgust, for the hundred thousandth time, when I was an old man. But to have to listen to that story from the lips of a man who'd died one hundred fore I was born!" "And the story?" "Well, there was this traveling hunter who'd been tracking a wounded deer all day. Night came and with it a violent storm. Seeing the light of a fire, the hunter stopped off kt a cave. He asked the old medicine man who lived in it if he could spend the night there. And the old medicine man said, 'Sure, but we're pretty crowded here. You'll have to sleep with my daughter.' Need I go any fuer?" "Tham didn't laugh," Joe rumbled. "Thometimeth I think he ain't got a thenthe of humor." Clemens tweaked Joe's projectileshaped nose affectionately. He said, "Thometimeth I think you're right. But actualy I'm the most humorous man in the world because I'm the most sorrowful. Every laugh is rooted in pain." H e puffed on his cigar for a while and stared at the shore. Just before dusk, the ship had entered the area where the last of the intense heat from the meteorite had struck. Aside from the few irontrees, everything had been whistled off in a shock of searing flame. The irontrees had given up their huge leaves to the flames, and even the enormously resistant bark had burned off and the wood beneath, harder than granite, had become charred. Moreover, the blast had tilted or leveled many of these, snapping them off at the base. The grailstones had been blackened and were out of plumb but had retained their shape. Finally, he said, "Lothar, now is as good a time as any for you to learn something of why we're on this quest. Joe can tell it in his way; I'll explain anything you don't understand. It's a strange tale, but no stranger, actually, than anything that's happened here since we all woke up from the dead." "I'm thirthty," Joe said. "Let me get a drink firtht." The dark-blue eyes, shadowed in IF the bone rings, focused upon the hollow of the cup. He seemed to peer therein as if he were trying to conjure up the scenes he was about to describe. Guttural, his tongue hitting certain consonants harder than others, thus giving his English a clanging quality, yet comical with its lisping, voice rising up from a chest deep and resonants as the well of the Delphian oracle, he told of the Misty Tower. "Thomevhere upon The River, I avoke, naked ath I am now. I vath in a plathe that mutht be far north on thith planet, because it vath colder and the light vath not ath bright. There vere no humanth, yutht uth... uh, titantropth, ath Tham callth uth. Ve had grailth, only they vere much larger than yourth, ath you can thee. And ve got no beer and vithkey. Ve had never known about alcohol, tho ve had none in our grailth. Ve drank the river vater. "Ve thought ve vere in the plathe that you go to vhen you die, that the... uh... godth had given uth thith plathe and all ve needed. Ve vere happy, ve mated and ate and thlept and fought our enemieth. And I vould have been happy there if it had not been for the thyip." "He means ship," Sam said. "That'th what I thaid. Thyip. Pleathe don't interrupt, Tham. You've made me unhappy enough by telling me that there are no godth. Even if I've theen the godth." Lothar said, "Seen the godsT "Not egthactly. I thaw vhere they live. I did thee their thlip." Von Richthofen said, "What? What're you talking about?" Clemens waved his cigar. "Later. Let him talk. If you interrupt him too much, he gets confused." "Vhere I come from, you don't talk vhile another ith talking. Othervithe, you get punched in the nothe." Sam said, "With a nose as big as yours, Joe, that must hurt." Miller delicately stroked his proboscis. "It ith the only vone I have, and I'm proud of it. Novhere in thith part of the valley hath any pigmy got a nothe like mine. Vhere I come from, your nothe indicateth the tithe of your -- vhat'th your vord for it, Tham?" Sam choked and took the cigar from his lips. "You were telling us of the ship, Joe." "Yeth. No! I vath not! I hadn't gotten to it yet. But ath I vath thaying, vun day I vath lying on the bank vatching the fith play. I vath thinking about getting up and making a hook and pole to catch thome. All of a thudden, I heard a thyout. I looked up. There, coming around the bend of the river vath thith terrible monthter. "It vath awful. I jumped up, and I vath going to run avay vhen I thaw it had men on itth back. They looked like men, but vhen the monthter got clother, I thaw they vere thpindly little runtth vith the mange and no notheth to thpeak of. I could have beat them all to death vith vone hand, and yet they were riding thith monthter river-thnake like beath on a bear'th back. Tho " C lemens, listening, felt again as he had when he first heard the story. He felt as if he were standing by the side of this creature from the dawn of man. Despite the clanging and lisping and halting and slow groping after words, this Titan spoke impressively. Clemens could feel his panic and his wonder and almost overpowering urge to run away. Clemens could also feel the .opposing urge, the primate's curiosity, the thing that made him, if not wholly a man, at least a nearcousin. Behind the shelving brow lay the gray pulse that would not be content just to exist but must be fed on the shapes of unknown things, on patterns never before seen. So Joe Miller stayed upon the bank, though his hand closed around the handle of the grail, ready to carry it with him if he had to flee. The monster floated closer. Joe began to think that it might not be alive. But if it were not, why the great head poised at its front as if to strike? Yet it did not look alive. It gave a feeling of deadness, Tliis did not mean much, of course. Joe had seen a wounded bear pretend death convincingly and then rise up and tear the arm off a fellowhunter. Moreover, though he had seen the hunter die, he had also seen the hunter alive again, that day he awoke on the banks with others of his kind. And if he, and Joe, too, could come alive again, why couldn't this petrified snakelike head lose its dead woodenness and seize him in its teeth? But he ignored his fears and, trembling, approached the monster. He was a Titan, older brother to man, fresh with the dawn and with the primate's have-to-know-what'sgoing-on. A pygmy, mangy as the others but wearing on his brow a glass circlet with a stained-red flaming sun, beckoned to Joe Miller. The others upon the wooden beast stood behind the man with the glass drclet and held spears and strange devices that Joe learned later were bows and arrows. Tliey did not seem frightened of the colossus, but that may have been because they were so tired from their seldom-ceasing rowing against the current that they did not care what happened. It took a long time for the pygmy chief to get Joe aboard the ship. They came ashore to charge their grails while Joe backed away from them. They ate, and Joe ate also, but at a distance. His fellows had run for the hills, having been also panicked by the ship. Presently seeing that the river-snake did not threaten Joe, they slowly approached it. The pygmies retreated to the ship. And now the chief took a strange object from his grail' and held a glowing wire to its tip, and smoke came from it and from the pygmy's mouth. Joe jumped at the first puff; his fellows scattered for the foothills again. Joe wondered if the noseless pygmies could be the brood of the dragon. Perhaps her children took this larval form, but, like their mother, they could breathe out fire and smoke? "But I ain't a dummy," Joe said. "It didn't take me long to figure IF out that the thmoke came from the object, vhich in Englith ith a thigar. Their chief made it plain that if I'd get on the thyip, I could thmoke the thigar. Now, I mutht've been crathy to do tho, but I vanted to thmoke that thigar. Maybe I thought I'd impreth my tribe, I don't know." H e jumped on the ship, his weight causing it to tilt a little on the port. He swung his grail to show them that if they attacked him, he would bash their skulls in with it. They took the hint and did not come close. The chief gave Joe a cigar, and though Joe coughed a little and found the taste of tobacco strange, he liked it. Moreover, when he had drunk beer for the first time, he was entranced. So Joe decided to go on the riversnake's back up the river with the pygmies. He was put to work on a mighty sweep, and he was called Tehuti. "Tehuti?" von Richthofen said. "The Greek form is Thoth," Clemens said. "To the Egyptians, he looked something like the longbeaked ibis-god. I suppose he must also have reminded them of the baboon-god, Bast, but that tremendous nose outweighed that consideration. So, Thoth, or Tehuti, he became." Days and nights flowed by like the river. Sometimes, Joe became tired and wished to be put ashore. By now, he could speak the pygmies' language, though haltingly. The chief would agree to do as Joe wished since it was obvious that any denial might result in the slaughter of his entire crew. But he would speak sadly of Tehuti's education ending there, just when he was doing so well. He had been a brute though with the face of the god of wisdom, and soon he would be a man. Brute? God? Man? What were they? The order was not quite right, the chief would say. TTie correct sequence, ever upward, was brute, man and god. Yet it was true you might see a god disguised as a beast, and man merged insensibly from animal into deity, balanced between the two, and now and then changed into one or the other. That was beyond the breadloafshaped brain of Tehuti. He would squat and scowl at the nearing bank. There would be no more cigars or beer. The people on the bank were his kind, but they were also not his tribe, and they might kill him. Moreover, he was beginning for the first time to experience intellectual stimulation, and that would cease once he was back among the titanthrops. So he would look at the chief and blink, grin and shake his head and tell him he was going to stay on the ship. He took his turn at the sweep and resumed his study of the most marvelous of all things: a tongue that knew philosophy. He became fluent in their speech and began to grasp the wonderful things the leader told him, although sometimes it was as painful as grasping a handful of thorns. If this or that idea eluded him, he pursued it, caught it, swallowed it, perhaps vomited it up a score of times. Eventually, he digested it and got some nourishment from it. The river flowed by. They rowed, always staying close to the shore, where the current was weakest. Days and nights, and now the sun did not climb so high in the heavens but was a little lower at its zenith than it had been the week before. And the air grew colder. S am said, "Joe and his party were getting close to the north pole. The inclination of this planet's equator to the plane of the ecliptic is zero. As you know, there are no seasons; day and night are equal in length. But Joe was approaching the point where he would see the sun always half below the horizon and half above. Or would have if it hadn't been for the mountains." "Yeth. It vath alvayth tvilight. I got cold, though not ath cold ath the men. They vere thyivering their atheth off." "His big bulk radiates heat slower than our puny bodies," Clemens said. "Pleathe, pleathe! Thyould I talk or jutht keep my big mouth thyut?" Lother and Sam grinned at him. He continued. The wind grew stronger, and the air became misty. Joe began to get uneasy. He wanted to turn back, but by now he did not want to lose the respect of the leader. He would go every inch of the way towards their unknown goal with them. "You didn't know where they were going?" Lothar said. "Not egthactly. They vanted to get to the headvaterth of the river. They thought Aaybe the godth lived there, and there the godth vould admit them into the true aftervorld. They thaid that thitii vorld vathn't the true world. It vath a thtage on the vay to the true vorld. Vhatever that ith." One day, Joe heard a rumble that sounded as faintly but yet as near as gas moving within his bowels. After a while, as the noise became hke thunder, he knew it was water falling from immense heights. The ship swung into a bay protected by a finger of land. The grailstones no longer lined the river. The men would have to catch fish and dry them. There was also a store of bamboo tips on the ship; these had been collected in the sunlit region for just such an eventuality. The leader and his men prayed, and the party began climbing the steep cliffs beside the first of a series of cataracts. Here the superhuman strength of Tehuti-Joe Miller helped them in overcoming obstacles. Other times, his great weight was a hinderance and a danger. Upward they went, wet because of the everpresent spray. When they came to a cliff smooth as ice for a thousand feet up, they despaired. Reconnoitering, they found a rope dangling from the face of a cliff. It was formed of towels tied together. Joe tested its strength and climbed up, hand over hand, his feet braced against the cliff, until he reached the top. There he turned to watch the others follow him. The IF chief,, first after Joe, tired much easier, and halfway up to the top he could go no further. Joe pulled him and the extremely heavy weight of the rope to the top. He did the same for each man in the party. VV come from?" von Richthofen said. "Someone had prepared the way for them," Clemens said. "Given the primitive technology of this planet, no one could have found a way to get that rope up to the rock around which one end of the rope was tied. Maybe a balloon might have lifted a man up there. You could make a balloon of riverdragon-skin or human skins, you know. You could make hydrogen by passing steam over highly heated charcoal in the presence of a suitable catalyst. But in this world of scarce metal, where's the catalyst. "Hydrogen could be made without a catalyst but at an enormous cost in fuel. But there was no evidence of the furnaces needed to make the hydrogen. Besides, why would the towels be left behind, when they'd be needed again? No, some unknown person, let's call him The Mysterious Stranger, put that rope there for Joe and party. Or for whoever might come along. Don't ask me who he was or how he did it. Listen. There's more." The party, carrying the rope, walked for several miles in the mistridden twilight on a plateau. They came to another cliff where the river broadened out above them into a cataract. It was so wide, it seemed to Joe that there was enough water to float the moon of Earth upon it. He would not have been surprised to see that great silverand-black orb appear on the brink of the cataract far above and hurtle down that thunder of waters and be smashed to pieces on the rocks in the maelstrom foot. The wind became stronger and louder; the mist, thicker. Drops of water condensed on the towels they had now fastened around themselves from head to foot. The cliff before them was as mirror-smooth and perpendicular as the one just ascended. Its top was lost in the fog; it could be only fifty feet high or could be ten thousand. They searched along the foot, hoping for some kind of fissure. And they found one. It was like a small door at the juncture of plateau and cliff. It was so low, it forced them to get down on hands and knees and crawl. Joe's shoulders rubbed against the sides of the rock. But the rock was smooth, as if the hole had been made by man and rubbed until all roughness was gone. The tunnel led at a slightly less than #-degree angle upwards and through the mountain. There was no estimating its distance. When Joe came out at the other end, however, his shoulders and hands and knees were rubbed raw and bleeding even with the protection of towels. "I don't understand," von Richthofen said. "It seems to me that the mountains were shaped there to prevent men from getting to the end of the river. Why was this tunnel bored through sd rock to give intruders passage? And why wasn't a tunnel placed in the first cliff?" "A tunnel in the first cliff might have been visible to whatever sentinels or patrols there are in that area," Clemens said. "But the second cliff was hidden in mist." "That chain of white towels would be even more outstanding," the German said. "Maybe it was placed there not too long before Joe got there," Clemens said. Von Richthofen shivered. "For Heaven' th thaketh, let me tell thith! After all, it ith my tale." "And a big one, too," Clemens said, looking at Joe's huge buttocks. "Thtickth and thtoneth may break my boneth," Joe replied. VI T he party pushed on over another tableland for about ten miles. They slept or tried to, ate, and began climbing. Now, though the mountains were very steep and rough, they were scalable. Their chief enemy was lack of oxygen. They gasped for breath and had to halt often to rest. By now Joe's feet were hurting him, and he was limping. He did not ask if he could rest. As long as the others walked, so would he. "Joe can't stay on his feet as long as a human," Clemens said. "All of his species suffer from flat feet. Their weight is just too much for a biped that size. I wouldn't be surprised if his kind became extinct on Earth because of broken arches." "I know bne thpethimen of Homo Thapienth who'th going to suffer from a broken nothe if he don't keep hith nothe out of my buthineth, vhich ith telling thith lhtor" Joe said. He showed his wlck-looking canines. They climbed until the river, broad as it was, was only a thread below them. Much of the time they could not see even that thread because of the clouds. Snow and ice made climbing even more dangerous. Then they found a way downward to another plateau and gropped through the fog against a wind that howl and 'beat at them. They found themselves beside a tremendous hole in the mountains. Out of the hole rushed the river, and on every side except riverwards the mountain rose straight and smooth. The hole was the only way to go. Out of it blasted a roar so loud they could not hear each other, the voice of a god who spoke as loud as death. Joe Miller found a narrow ledge entering the cave high above the waters. Joe noticed that the leader had now dropped back behind him. After a while, the titan throp became aware that all of the pygmies 'were looking to him as their guide and helper. When they shouted to make themselves heard above the bellow, they called him Tehuti. There was nothing unusual in that, but before this he had detected overtones of jesting in their use of the name. No more. Now he was truly their Tehuti. IF Clemens interrupted agaip. "It was as if we called the village idiot Jehovah or something like that. When men have no need of gods, they mock them. But when afraid, they treat them with respect. Now, you might say, Toth was leading them into the opening into the Underworld. "Of course, Tm only indulging in mankind's vice of trying to make a symbol out of coincidence. If you scratch any dog, you'll scare out a flea." Joe Miller was breathing heavily through his grotesque nose, and the vast chest rose and fell like a bellows. Clearly, the reliving of that experience had aroused the old terror in him. The ledge was not like the tunnel in the mountain. It had not been prepared. It was rough, and there were gaps in it, and sometimes it ran so Mgh that Joe had to crawl to squeeze between the ledge and the roof of the cavern. The darkness blinded him as if his eyes had been plucked out. His sense of hearing did not help him; the bellow filled his ears. Only his touch was left to guide him, and he was so agitated that he sometimes wondered if that were betraying him. He would have quit except that if he did, the men behind him would not have been able to go on. "Ve th topped tvithe to eat and voneth to thleep," Joe said. "Just vhen I vath beginning to think ve might crawl until ve ran out of food, I thaw a grayneth ahead. It vathn't a light. Jutht a leththening of the darkneth." r iey were out of the cave, in the open air, on the side of a mountain. Several thousand feet below them was a sea of clouds. The sun was hidden behind the mountains, but the sky above was not yet dark. The narrow ledge continued, and they crawled on their bloodied hands and knees downward now, since the ledge had narrowed to nothing. Trembling, they clung to the tiniest of fingerholes. A man slipped and fell and clutched another man. Screaming, both disappeared into the clouds. The air became warmer. "The river was giving up its heat," Clemens said. "It not only originates at the north pole, it also empties there after picking up heat in its serpentine wanderings over the entire planet. The air at the north pole is cold but not nearly as cold as that on Earth." The party came to another shelf on which they could stand, facing the mountain, and proceed sidewise, like crabs. The shelf curved around the mountain-side. Joe halted. The narrow valley had widened into a great plain. He could hear, far below, the dash of surf against rock. Through the twilight, Joe could see the mountains ringing the sea of the north pole. The cloud-covered waters formed a body about sixty miles in diameter. The clouds were thicker at the opposite end of the sea. He didn't know why then, but Sam had explained that the clouds hid the mouth of the river, where the warm waters came into contact with the cold air. Joe tcKk a few more steps around tihe curve of the ledge. And he saw the gray metal cylinder sitting on the path before him. For a moment, he did not understand what it was, it looked so alien. It was so unexpected. Then it flowed into familiar lines, and he knew it was a grail left by a man who had come before him on this dangerous path. Some unknown pilgrim had survived the same perils as he. Up to that point, that is. He had put the grail down to eat. The lid was open, and there was the stinking remnant of fish and moldy bread within it. The pilgrim had used the grail as a pack, perhaps hoping he might come across a grailstone and recharge it. Something had happened to him. He would not have left the grail there unless he had been killed or had been so frightened he had run away without it. At this thought, Joe's skin chilled. He went around the outcropping that was sitting at a point where the ledge went around a shoulder of granite. For a moment, his view of the sea was blocked. He went around the outcripping -- and he cried out. T he men called and asked what troubled him. He could not tell them because the shook had taken away his newly learned speech, and he spoke in his native tongue. The clouds in the middle of the sea had roiled away for a few seconds. The top of a structure projected from the clouds. It was cylindrical and gray, like the top of a monster 'grail. Mists rose and fell around it, now revealing, now veiling. Somewhere in the mountains ringing the polar sea, a break existed. At that moment, the low sun must have passed this notch in the range. A ray of light fell through the notch and struck the top of the tower. Joe squinted his eyes and tried to see into the brightness of the reflection. Something round had appeared just above the top of the tower and was settling down towards it. It was egg-shaped and white, and it was from this that the sun was sparkling. The next instant, as the sun passed by the notch, the sparkle died. The tower and the object above it faded into darkness and mist. Joe, crying out at the sight of the flying object, stepped back. His leg stnick the grail left by the unknown pilgrim. He swung his arms to regain his balance, but not even his apelike agility could save him. He toppled backward, bellowing horror as he turned over and over. Once he glimpsed the faces of his companions, a row of dark brown objects with the darker O's of mouths, watching his descent to the clouds and waters beneath. "I don't remember hitting the vater," Joe said. "I avoke tranthlated about tventy mileth from where Tham Clcmenth vath. Thith vath a plathe vhere Northmen of the tenth thentury A.D. lived. I had to IF thaait learning a new language all over again. The little nothelethth people vere thcared of me, but they vanted me to fight for them. Then I met Tham, and ve became buddieth." They were silent for a while. Joe lifted his glass to his thin and chimpanzee-flexible lips and poured out the rest of the liquor. Somber, the other two watched him. The only sign of brightness about them was the glow of their cigar ends. Von Richthofen said, "This man who wore a glass circlet with a sunburst. What did you say his name was?" "I didn't." "Well, then, what was it?" "Ikhnaton. Tham knowth more about him than I do, and I lived for four yeath with him. At leatht, that'th vhat Tham tha. But -- " here Joe looked smug -- "I know the man and all Tham knowth ith a few hithtorical factth, tho-called." V on Richthofen said good night and went belowdecks. Sam paced back and forth, stopping once to light a cigarette for the helmsman. He wanted to sleep but could not. Insomnia had been skewering him for years; it drove through the middle of his brain, which spun on it like a wild gear, disengaged from his body's need for rest. Joe Miller sat hunched against the railing and waited for his friend -- thq only man he trusted and loved -- to go belowdecks. Presently his head drooped, the bludgeon-nose describing a weary arc, and he snored. The noise was like that of trees being felled in the distance. Sequoias split, screeched, cracked. Vast sighings and bubblings alternated with the woodchoopers' activities. "Thieep veil, little chum," Sam said, knowing that Joe dreamed of that forever-lost Earth where mammoths and giant bears and Hons roamed and where beautiful -- to him -- females of his own species lusted after him. Once he groaned and then whimpered, and Sam knew that he was dreaming again of being seized by a bear which was obomping on his feet. Joe's feet hurt day and night. Like all of his kind, he was too huge and heavy for bipedal locomotion. Indeed, it was this that originated Sam's theory for the extinction of the titanthrop' on Earth. Nature had experimented with a truly giant subhuman species and then she had dismissed them as failures. The rise and Fall of the Flatfeet' Sam said. "An article I shall never write." Sam gave a groan, a weak echo of Joe's. He saw Livy's halfsmashed body, given him briefly by the waves, then taken away. Or had she really been Livy? Had he not seen her at least a dozen times before while staring through the telescope at the multitudes on the banks? Yet, when he had been able to talk Bloodaxe into putting ashore just to see if the face was Livy's, he had always been disappointed. Now there was no reason to believe the corpse had been his wife's. He groaned again. How cruel if it had been Livy! How like Ufe! To have been so close and then to have her taken away a few minutes before he would have been reunited with her. And to have her cast upon the decks as if God -- or whatever sneering forces ran the universe -- were to laugh and to say, "See how close you came! Suffer, you miserable conglomeration of atoms! Be in pain, wretch! You must pay with tears and agony!" "Pay for what?" Sam muttered, biting on his cigar. "Pay for what crimes? Haven't I suffered enough on Earth, suffered for what I did do and even more for what I didn't do?" Death had come on Earth, and he had been glad because it meant the end forever to all sorrow. He would no longer have to weep because of the sickness and deaths of his beloved wife and daughters nor gloom because he felt responsible for the death of his only son, the death caused by his negligence. Or was it carelessness that had made his son catch the disease that killed him? Hadn't he unconsciously permitted the robe to slip from his son, Httle Langdon, while taking him for a carriage ride that cold winter day?" "No!" Sam said so loudly that Joe stirred and the helmsman growled something in Norse. He smacked his fist against his open palm, and Joe muttered again. "God, why do I have to ache with guilt for anything I've done?" Sam cried. "It doesn't matter now! It's all been wiped out; we've started with clean souls." B ut it did matter. It made no difference that all the dead were once mor alive and the sick were healthy and the bad deeds so remote in time and space that they should be forgiven and forgotten. WJiat a man had been and had thought on Earth, he still was and thought here. Suddenly, he wished he had a stick of dreamgum. That might remove the clenching remorse and make him wildly happy. But then it might intensify the anguish. You never knew if a horror so terrifying would come that you wanted to die. The last time he had taken the gum, he had been so menaced by monsters that he had not dared try the gum again. But maybe this time... no! Little Langdon! He would never see him again, never! His son had been only twenty-eight months old when he had died, and this meant that he had not been resurrected on the rivervalley. No children who had died on Earth before the age of five had been raised again. At least, not here. It was to be presumed that they were alive somewhere, probably on another planet. But for some reason, whoever was responsible for this had chosen not to place the infant dead here. And so Sam would never find him and so make amends. Nor would he ever find Livy or his daughters, Sarah, Jean, and Clara. Not on a river said to be people on its banks. Even if a man started at one end and walked up IF one bank and looked at every person on that side and then, on reaching the end, walked back down the other side and did not miss a person, he would take -- how long? A mile a day would mean a round trip of, say # into #, what was that? He wasn't any good at doing sums in his head, but it must be over # years. And even if a man could do this, could walk all those weary miles and make sure he never missed a face, at the end of over # years he still might not find the face. The longed-for person might have died somewhere ahead of the searcher and been translated back down the river, behind the searcher. Or the searchee may have passed by the seacher during the night, perhaps while the searchee was looking for the searcher. Yet there might be another way to do this. The beings responsible for this rivervalley and the resurrection might have the power to locate anybody they wished to. They must have a central file or some means of ascertaining the identity and location of the valley-dwellers. Or, if they did not, they could at least be made to pay for what they had done. J oe Miller's story was no fantasy. It had some very puzzling aspects, but these hinted at something comforting. That was, that some nameless person -- or being -- wanted the valley dwellers to know about the tower in the mists of the north polar sea. Why? Sam did not know, could not guess. But that hole had been bored through the cliff to enable human beings to find out about the tower. And in that tower must be the light to scatter the darkness of ignorance. Of that Sam was sure. And then there was the widespread story of the Englishman, Burton or Perkin, probably Burton, who had awakened prematurely in the pre-resurrection phase. Was the awakening any more of an accident than the hole bored through the polar cliff? And so Samuel Clemens had had his first dream, had nourished it until it had become The Great Dream. To make it real, he needed iron, much iron. It was this that had caused him to talk Erik Bloodaxe into launching the expedition in search of the source of the steel axe. Sam had not really expected that there would be enough of the metal to build the giant boat, but at least the Norse were taking him up-river, closer to the polar sea. Now, with a luck that he did not deserve -- he really felt he deserved nothing good -- he was within reach of more iron than he could possibly have hoped for. Not that that had kept him from hoping. He needed men with knowledge. Engineers who would know how to treat the meteorite iron, get it out, melt it down, reshape it. And engineers and technicians for the hundred other things needed. These Norsemen were no good for that. He toed Joe Miller's ribs and said, "Get up, Joe. It'll be raining soon." The titanthrop grunted and rose like a tower out of a fog and stretched. Starlight glinted on his canines. IW He followed Sam across tlie deck, the bamboo planks creaking under the eight hundred pounds. From below, somebody cursed in Norse. The mountains on both sides were covered with clouds now, and the darkness was spreading over the valley and shutting off the insane glitter of twenty thousand giants stars and glowing gas sheets. Soon it would rain hard for half an hour, and then the clouds would disappear. Lightning streaked on the eastern bank; thunder bellowed. Sam stopped. Lightning always made him afraid, or, rather, the child in him afraid. Lightning streaked through him and showed him the haunted and haunting faces of those he had injured or insulted or dishonored and behind them were blurred faces reproaching him for nameless crimes. Lightning twisted through him; then he believed in an avenging God out to bum him alive, to drown him in searing pain. Somewhere in the clouds was the Wrathful Retributor, and He was looking for Sam Clemens. Joe said, "There'th thunder thomevhere further down the river. No! It ain't thunder! Lithen! Can't you hear it! It'th thomething funny, like thunder but different." Sam listened while his skin prickled with cold. There was a very faint rumble downriver. He got even colder as he heard a louder rumble from upriver. "What the hell is it?" "Don't get thcared, Tham," Joe said. "I'm vith you." But he was shivering, too. Lightning spread a filamented whiteness on the east bank. Sam jumped and said, "Jesus! I saw something flicker!" Joe moved next to him and said, "I thaw it! It'th the thyip! You know, the vun I thaw above the tower. But it'th gone!" Joe and Sam stood silent, peering into the darkness. Lightning exploded again, and this time there was no white eggshape high above the river. "It flickered out of nothing and went back to nothing. Like a mirage," Sam said. "If you hadn't seen it, too, I'd have thought it was an illusion." S am awoke on the deck. He was stiff, cold and confused. He rolled over and squinted his eyes at the sun just clearing the eastern range. Joe was on his back beside him, and the helmsman was sleeping beside the wheel. But it was not this that brought him exclaiming to his feet. The gold of the sun had faded out as he brought his gaze down; green was everywhere. The muddied plains and mountains, with straws and stubs of debris, were gone. There was short grass on the plains, tall grass and bamboo on the hills, and the giant pine, oak, yew and irontree everywhere on the hills. "Business as usual," Sam muttered. He was doubly shocked. Something had put all aboard the Dreyrugr asleep, and while they were unconscious, the incredible work of clearing off the mud and replanting the vegetation had been completed. The world was reborn! IF  Short Story Pelandra was only a junior member of the immortals -- but she gave the others life! P roject New Earth (had seemed so simple to Pelandra, fifteen years ago when she had trooped on to the spaceship with her six husbands and the three old scientists. Of course, nobody would ever have known that Zor, Lunor and Gohar were old, because each man had the deceptive appearance of a twenty-five-year-old athlete land the vitality to match it. These three were members of an ultra-exclusive elite, a secret society known as the Chosen Brethren, and they had been selected to rule the distant planet for which the great nuclear craft was now bound. They would form the central intelligence cell destined to control the test-tube people by computers and brain electrodes. This way, a predetermined history of the new planet had been possible. The programming of the selfregenerating computers had taken two hundred years to reach perfection. Pelandra herself was only a very junior member of the Brethren and she had not as yet completely earned the right to immortality. At one time, the project had seemed very exciting and stimulating, but now the woman found it futile... because Husband Three was mortal. Until recently, she had been thrilled by the keen interest Lunor showed in her progress. He opened his thoughts to her freely. Only this day, he had said to her: "We old men have reached a state of almost certain immortality. You will too, in time. But, my child, you must be single-minded about it. I think I detect in you a definite bias towards Three. Try to overcome this fault, please. Centuries ago, when I was lucky enough to discover the Life Fluid which enabled me to live an active span of a century and a half, I dreamed of this journey and of taking such a person as you with me." His great eyes glowed with pride. "You are to become my own wife when we reach the new planet, but for this great honor, you must be perfect. Therefore, I must insist that you do not allow unseemly, primitive emotions to cloud your outlook. Do you understand?" The woman shivered slightly and replied. "I will try, Lunor, but it is very hard for me. My imagination is still not completely under my own control, even though I practice daily. I confess that the young man is unusually attractive. It would be foolish to try to deny this. However, you can rest assured that my loyalty is to you, alone." Pelandra spoke these honeyed words with conviction, but she lied. The woman was terrified that Lunor would realize this fact. Also, she had a faint suspicion that Gohar had guessed her guilty secret. She loved Three! Pelandra's own knowledge, Zor was at least two hundred, and the others much older. Lunor was a great power within the Galaxy Organization, because of his mass of accumulated knowledge and because he tried to manipulate his subject peoples as humanely as possible -- so long as scientific progress was not endangered, of course. As for Gohar, Pelandra hated him. To her, he seemed to have the coldness of a reptile. All desire, except the desire to remain alive and manipulate others, had died in him long ago. Pelandra smiled to herself when she saw that Husband Number Three had taken up her complex navigational instruments and was trying studiously to check the bearings of the spacecraft, hurtling along at the speed of light. He was having his usual difficulty. A radio telescope on Earth had already monitor their direction and distance, and an Earth computer had decided that no corrections needed to be made. Her latest Husband, who was unusually clever for a replacement human, had picked up this information on the nuclear radio communicator and now, eagerly. wished to check his own growing navigational skill against the computer. Making very sure that no one was spying on her, the woman came over to him and laid an affectionate arm about his broad shoulders. "Don't you remember what I told you about the three co-ordinates?" she asked indulgently. "Now, tell me, how far are we away from Earth?" ' "Fifteen light-years," he replied, his face boyish with embarrassed desire to learn and to please her. Because of him, Pelandra was ready to jeopardize her chance of immortality. But now that Lunor had grown suspicious it was necessary to exercise extreme caution. He would cast them both into space if he knew. Besides, Gohar always seemed to be nearby, his wicked eyes eager to detect any anti-elite behavior on her part. "Well, you can either use that information or, better still, measure the diameter of the solar disk and use the plane of the planetary system for the other two." She kissed him playfully on the dheek. "It's quite simple, really, silly boy. I don't know why you always make such a fuss about it. But, as I told you before, you'll nearly always be wrong; that's why we have to rely on periodic Earth checks." Pelandra liked to keep close to her husband. She had a secret and dreadful fear that she, too, might one day be cold and hateful like Gohar. Three seemed to rejuvenate her humanity, as if some inexplicable life force was moving within him. It came into her mind that perhaps those who died for the cause of science were luckier than those who had to live for it! Throwing reason aside, she began to confide in Three. It was the one, unforgivable sin! "Did you know that I was Lunor's chief assistant in the Halls of the Chosen Brethren?" she asked. Then, seeing his puzzled look, she continued, "How foolish of me. How could you possibly know? How could you know that there are twenty Select Beings destined to live forever and that four of them are on this ship!" "Are you one of them?" cried the startled Three, staring at her with troubled eyes. "Yes, I'm afraid I am. Listen carefully. I love you and because of this I do not wish to deceive you. Will you try to understand and forgive me?" "Yes." His honest eyes were full of compassion. "I have acted as a surgeon to replace their failing organs with spare parts from live humans. Ah, don't shrink from me like that! They were specially bred by a very humane process in the delightful cities of the suburbs." Three stood in rigid silence; he had been from a suburb! "Every human conceived is crossmatched and classed genetically at the test-tube stage? Those not suitable for replacement purposes are trained as sdentists, doctors, spacemen or agricultural workers, accoirding to their potential mental ability -- which is ascertained when the embryo is removed from the womb and placed in a test incubator for investigation and advanced culture." Pelandra was speaking in a flat monotone and avoiding Three's eyes. "But I have never worked!" cried the young man, gripping her by the shoulders. "I was only taught to keep my body fit and to fill my mind with artistic thought. Does this mean... does it mean that I am a replacement human? Oh, no, it is too horrible!" He slid to his knees before her, burying his face against her, shivering with horror. Pelandra's whole being was filled with pain as she wrapped her arms about him, crying over him and stroking his hair, while he gazed hopelessly into her lovely face with the terror slowly mounting in his expression. "You must realize," she said sadly, "that Lunor has experimented a hundred years to make this present journey possible. The great man himself carefully nurtured my own embryo through incubation. He has trained my mind personally for twenty years. I am the most intelligent and physically perfect specimen in the whole galaxy. I excel even Lunor. I have three functions on this journey: space pilot, surgeon and mother. I am sorry. Three, but I wanted you to understand." Wearily she put a hand to her throbbing forehead. "Try not to hate me." "I can only love you, Pelandra," he replied simply. "When am I to die?" "Tomorrow!" "Then let us be happy together in the time we have left, my love." # IF And so they clung together in what can only be described as a beautiful sadness. Xt was not really six husbands that XPelandra had brought with her onto the spaceship. Actually, it had only been five because Husband Number Six was still in a test tube in the pocket of her galaxy suit at the time of launching. He had not been due to be bom for another five years. Now he was a strapping fairhaired lad of ten. Pelandra thought what a shame it was that he would, like all her other husbands, have to die before the landing on the new planet. She ran a weary hand across her forehead, as if to bmsh this distasteful thought away. The huge spacecrMt was coasting along without engines. On Lunor's orders, they did this as often as possible in order to save fuel. Through the forward vision window, they could see a moving vista of distant meteorites. Pelandra had decided that, as they were on the correct flight path, there was no need to release any gas jets to reorient the craft as they had done on previous occasions. So Pelandra, who had no more work to do, was content to sit with Three and talk to him. She felt like weeping. It was strange and bewildering to her that the thought of parting from her third husband should cause her so much heartache. After all, she had disposed of the first two with complete medical calm and perfect scientific indifference. What in the name of the Stars was the matter with her? Pelandra plunged deep into her own mind, seeking an explanation without success. "What a shame you cross-match so well with the three old men," she sighed. "You would have made an excellent scientist. Your inteUigenco is easily fifty per cent of my own, whereas my other two husbands hardly made up one per cent between them. Poor devils! Oh, Three, why am I so sad about you? Is it, do you think, because you taught me how to laugji?" At that moment Gohar came smirking up to them. He looked at Pelandra with his cold fish eyes, mocking her. Then he turned upon Three and dismissed him curtly with a nod. Number Jliree knew his place; Pelandra's special treatment had not made him indiscreet. He bowed low before Gohar and made a great show of removing his humble person from the mighty one's presence. But he winked at Pelandra as he did so, making her want to laugh, despite the sadness of it all. Pelandra's heart twisted for the youth. Tomorrow she must surely kill him! Her hands trembled with an unusual weakness. "Your presence is requested in the meeting hall," sneer Gohar. "It may be a matter of life or death for you, my dear Pelandra." He sniggered after his revolting fashion. Pelandra ignored him, but she switched over to the automatic control system. She realized that Gohar had been sneaking again. How much had he overheard? She found she was too unhappy to care. L imor was waiting for her, calm and dignified in his robes of office. He had an impressive air of command. His gray, eagle-bright eyes bored into her with the intensity of his visionary insight. He was without a doubt, a king among men. He seemed very grave. "I am most disturbed by a report that you disobeyed my orders and told Three he is to die. You must be aware of the punishment for such a crime. Have you gone mad? Have you forgotten that you swore a sacred oath of secrecy?" Lunor thundered at the cringing woman. "Try to overlook my weakness, my loM," cried Pelandra. "I am not disloyal, I do not wish to betray your trust. It was just that I wanted the boy to know that he would never see me again after tomorrow. Am I not allowed even one fault?" Lunor studied her thoughtfully. "I believe you," he said. "After all, you are a mere babe immortalitywise, so some allowance must be made. I suppose. But please clearly understand that this is your last chance, Pelandra." "I understand," whispered the dejected girl, trembling more violently than ever. "Well?" asked Lunor, his noble face troubled still, for he sensed Pelandra's reluctance for her task. "Don't tell me that I was mistaken in my choice. You still do not wish to operate tomorrow!" "Of course I will operate. Mighty One," insisted Pelan(ha. "I cannot let a hundred years of research be wasted merely because I have fallen in love with a replacement human, can I?" She made her reply scornfully, deeply shocked that Lunor should thus doubt her integrity. But perhaps the old man was wiser than she knew. Pelandra walked wearily to the portal, her beautiful features strained by grief. Her large blue eyes dimmed by pain and longing. All the vitality seemed to have drained from her long, supple limbs. The woman looked, with something akin to hatred, at the man who had made her perfect, who had condemned her to live forever. Pelandra had already received the Life Fluid which would insure that she lived to be at least a hundred and fifty, after which time, the spare part routine would become operable. "Come, we must make our preparations," she said in listless tones. They collected Zor and Gohar, then went on to the operating theater. simplicity," remarked Zor goodnaturedly. "A thirty-five year journey. Six husbands for Pelandra; the eldest being aged twenty at the time of launching; the second, fifteen; the third, ten; the fourth, five; the fifth a babe in arms and the sixth in a test tube to incubate for five years. What a great and wonderful plan!" "Yes," Gohar agreed. "In this way, one husband reaches maturity every five years and is available for replacement purposes and his remains for committal to space and oblivion. Pelandra marries each one of them when he reaches the age of twenty and operates on him five IF years later, after each has given her five children; which Liinor, of course, rears in test tubes." "And these children will provide the first work team on New Earth," cried Zor. That night Three suddenly began to cry because he could not bear the thought of parting from Pelandra. She stroked his brown, curly hair and told him that he would feel no pain; and he was comforted because he trusted her and loved her. Next morning, Pelandra examined the three young-old men, to ascertain which organs needwl replacement. She had already committed Husband Number Three to the deepfreeze machine, and her heart was heavy with grief. Presently Lunor, Zor and Gohar also lay in their own deep-freeze units, like three rather beautiful marble effigies. Waiting for her to use her sharp instruments and laser beams on dear, beloved Number Three! Pelandra looked with pity at Lunor, who for the last ten years had breathed with Number One's lungs. She looked with loathing at Gohar, who had one brown eye of his own and one blue that had belonged to Number Two. Number Two had also provided Zor with a new right leg, and Number One had given him a spleen. Pelandra looked thoughtfully at the three old men, lying so peacefully in refrigeration, and suddenly she smiled. T he women turned a dial, and the solar cells beneath the three units suddenly glowed like great red suns. The temperature gauges went up beyond infinity, and the reading hands broke off because of the intensity of the shock they had suffered. "It will take eternity to unfreeze the three wise men," Pelandra observed to herself, giving one of her rare laughs. Then she slowly went over to the unit which contained Number Three in all his youthful glory. Gently, with great skill and patience, she moved with expert fingers about the dials and switches. It took her three days and three nights to bring him back to glowing, throbbing life. She herself would teach him all the wise men knew except how to live forever! And she would teach her children how to attend to the embryos and safeguard the condensed atmosphere capsule. They would all lead busy, useful lives, but with free minds, not as human robots! Oh, it would be such a happy landing now. And it was. Pelandra's first action on reaching the new planet was to send a message back to Earth telling of her dreadful crime against science. This message would take thirty-five years to reach its destination, and another thirty-five years would be needed for the Galaxy Punishment Force to reach the new planet to retaliate. Pelandra had not a care in the universe, because both she and Husband Number Three would both be safely dead, long before the avenging Earth Forces could make good their atIF  Novelette Old people were dying. Nothing new about that -- but they all died at the same age, and it was getting younger! I X TK)dy mentioned it for a while. Not on a large scale, I mean. A couple of years actually passed before it was noticed as a definite trend. I'd heard other doctors comment, of course. Merely that they seemed to be losing a lot of old patients all of a sudden, for no particular reason. But physicians are so used to death we didn't get excited. It was a hard-working insurance actuary who saw it for what it was. People were just... dying. Old people. Doctors and coroners wouldn't admit to perplexity. They would put down "heart attack" or "stroke" or "heart failure" or "cardiac arrest', or the like. Mostly cardiac arrest. Good old catchall. Think about it. Means the patient's heart stopped beating. Well, I should smile, it did! Did you ever hear of anyone's being dead and his heart still beating? That's an effect, not a cause. When you're dead your heart stops pumping. But something causes that, A bullet. A fall. An illness; cancer, or cerebral hemorrhage. Or a plague. That is, a Plague. The insurance actuary pointed out that the death rate was up -- way up -- among old people. Everything else was still there, of course; men murdering each other with automobiles and slipping in the bathtub and so on. But old people were dying. The oldest. Well, there wasn't anything unusual about that, and I remember even I chuckled. Sure, we knew old age was a disease. We called its cause a virus, which meant we didn't know what it was. A filterable virus... which means the organism was not filterable. We hadn't found it. And since we hadn't found the cause, we certainly hadn't done much about the effect. We had lengthened the lifespan. We could keep a man alive, and we were proud of it. Oh, maybe he was a vegetable, but hurray and so what, we were keeping him alive. The family usually found the money, somehow. But the actuary was one hundred per cent on the beam. The death rate was up among the oldest people, and it was increasing. Today thirty, tomorrow thirty-one, this day next month forty, this day next year sixty-two. I'm using relative figures, you realize. No need to start spouting precise ones. Just consider that in City A, on May #st of #, twenty people died. In #, twtysix died on that same day. In #, thirty-three. All in accord with the population increase; no cause fqf alarm. You have ten people, one dies. You have a hundred, ten die, et cetera. But then it began curving up. T hat actuary was shaken. I'll tell you. He shook the company president, too, and the board of directors. And there's where I came in. I had just been made a director. You know how it goes: you don't mind working, which puts you in a class by yourself. You make money and become pretty well known and make some more money, and all of a sudden you're successful. People think you're pretty smart. They want you to be a director of the United Fund and the school board and a bank and the country club and a hospital and Kiwanis and this and that. Doesn't matter if you're an executive in an aircraft company or a plumbing and heating contractor or a distiller or even an M.D. So I had a chunk of stock and a chunk of permanent life insurance and somehow wound up a director of the Great Coastal Life Insurance Company of America. No, I didn't attend the meetings. Lord, I knew about as much about the life insurance business as I do about quantum mechanics... I can define "quantum" and I can come close to defining "mechanics" -- I think. Anyhow this actuary's report was mentioned in the minutes I received in the mail and I read it and chuckled. So he had discovered that old people were dying! Just tell me if they start dying of scarlet fever or botulism or chicken pox, I thought. Or puerperal fever. Well, then the article showed up in Newsweek five months later. A lot of people Still thought it didn't make sense, but it was the second time I'd seen it, and there I was a professional and... well, I called Roger Calkin at Great Coastal and asked him to send that nutty young actuary of his over. And there it was. The actuary -- Ike Hill -- had by that time started collecting figures from all over the world. All you had to do was look aft them. All deaths were up, naturally. Way up. But... the increases that reached up and slapped you in the eyeball and squeez the pit of your stomach was in the over-# group. It hadn't struck anyone as particularly odd that the Russian Premier, the West German Chancellor and the Speaker all had died within a few months of each other. But they'd had plenty of company. Those three had all been past eighty, and their group was dying by the score, by the thousand, by the tens of thousands. We'd prolonged their lives for them; now they were cashing in one after the other, as if they were crowding each other to prove or disprove their particular faith's belief or disbelief in afterlife. As if they were tired of life, or as if they were trying to make us look bad. Sure, I had that thought. I remember saying, "Hell, Ike Hill, at this rate there won't be anyone over # alive anywhere!" And I was right. It took less than a year. In the meanwhile the world lost seventyor eighty assorted senators, representatives, MP's and what-have-you lawmakers. A king. And even ten presidents, premiers and the like, and one dictator. Several generals. A potful of judges. The Pope. Two-thirds of the Roman Curia. And every Cardinal Archbishop in the world but eleven. Oh, it was great for promotions, and pageants! People were taking notice by then, of course. Someone used the word "plague" in a newspaper story one day, and after that it was The Plague. A lot of people did a lot of theorizing. Hiere was religious gabble and atheist gabble and medical gabble and political gabble-gabble. Over a dozen different men announced over a dozen different causes. One even announced a cure. They were all wrong. Then I found it, and I couldn't think of anyone to call save Ike Hill. II W e got our heads and our figures together. We barely had to glance at them. Of course they weren't completely accurate. It's impossible to learn exactly how many people in the world died or were born last year, or for that matter even twenty years ago'. The ladies of Africa and India and China don't publish announcements every time they have a kid, whether they expose it to die or not, and they don't file death statistics, either. We took the figures over to Ike's IF office and turned on some lights and fed them into the Iron Brain, and it told us what we already knew, which IS about all Iron Brains are good for anyhow. The death rate matched the birth rate. In the United States it exceeded the birth rate. Every time somebody propped a kid on the tail and made him suck up that first highly addictive drag of air, someone, somewhere, gasped his last one. And whatever the cause, it didn't know anything about fair play or national boundaries. The birthrate was highest in Asia. You know which country had the longest life expectancy, don't you? The largest percentage of old people? Uh-huh. The U.S. of A. was rapidly running out of the euphemism I've always hated: "Senior Citizens." (I don't like any euphemism that indicates I'm junior). Even then an extraneous thought went creeping across my mind like a guilty cat: something or somebody -- capitalize that if you want -- was solving the Medicare problem. In a few years, out so many of those government forms for aged patients any more. about all the paperwork involved in Medicare admissions. And my sons wouldn't have the # social security tax I was paying! Frankly Ike Hill and yours truly M.D. didn't know what the hell to do. We just stared at each other and the machine and then went out and found a quiet, dark place to talk. I forgot to call my answering service for the first time in five years. First time I'd got drunk in fifteen years, since I was a freshman in pre-med. Whom do you tell? For maybe three years a plague had been raging across the world, a plague which obligingly passed over people who had lives to live and knocked on the doors of those who'd lived a fair-sized one already. Whom do you tell? No one else knew there was no one, not one single person, anywhere in the world, older than # -- maybe # by then. No one knew that every time an OB checked in at Admittance some oldster checked out of the world. And... if it went on... then by this time next year, there wouldn't be anyone over #, or #, depending upon the international birthrate and the number of people in that age group. Or maybe #, or #. And the next year... whom do you tell? Call Washington and say "Mister President, this is Thomas Jefferson McCabe, M.D., in Atlanta, and pretty soon our country is going to be out of business, populationwise, and by the way you're #, aren't you? Have you ' arranged disposal of your papers?" Ike Hill and I didn't know. So we drank too many gimlets and had to be poured into a couple of taxis and sent home to understanding wives. I n the morning I prescribed the usual ineffectual old wives' tales for myself and held my head carefully as I called A. T. Griffin, M.D., Chief at Good Samaritan Hospital. And I called Michael Rosen, M.D., IP head of the U of G Med School and I managed to get them together in Doctor Griff's office at Good Sam. And I took poor Ike Hill with me and I told them. We told them. Then we showed them. It meant a lot more to them than to us, I assure you... Doctor Griff was sixty-four and Doctor Mike admitted to sixty-seven. And they bought it. They had to. Oh, we thought, and we postulated, and we opined, and we theorized and hoped out loud. But we had the answer. Swell. What to do with it? I felt relieved -- I'd shared it. I'd transferred the weight and the responsibility of the knowledge onto the shoulders of the best two medical father-images I had. I was out of it! Well, I took my first plane ride to Washington. Doctor Mike's doctor said he shouldn't travel -- you think we don't have doctors? Physician, heal thyself! -- or try. And Doctor Griff just wouldn't couldn't. So Mister Ike Hill B.S., M.S., and A. J. McCabe, M.D., flew up to the big town with introductions from thos, two Big Men -- Doctor Griff was 'also president of the Georgia Medical Association and a director of the AM A -- and papers and graphs and reports and analyses and a few inches of computer tape. We got in amazingly fast. My medical friends had done a good job, working personally and through senators and what not. I think it was the President's secretary got us in; he was a Georgian. It's pretty hard for mere people to get an audience with the President of, by, and for the people. Sorry. Gettuig old, as things go now. I'll be forty-five next month. Naturally we wound up with the Surgeon Geral (first time he'd had anything to do in years!) and some fellow from Bethel aind a couple of hotrods from Johns H. and somebody else I later found out was a psychiatrist. Watching us! Ike and me! They had to buy it, too. It's tough to buy truth you don't like. But it's tougher to turn your back on it, and not too smart, either, as Galileo, among others, proved. You can't imagine how they looked. How we felt. What to do? There was the evidence. Now they were in the same leaky dinghy I'd been hand-paddling the past several days. What to do? -- and how? I was relieved, I can tell you that. I'd unshouldered the burden. I had gently laid it at the feet of the boss, the proverbial Authorities, and now I was out from under. And that's how Ike Hill and I got put in charge of Project Methusaleh. That's how I got to be one of the Jaycee's Ten Most that year. I think it would have -- and should have -- been Ike, but there was a choice, and I was a member. F unny thing about the Government Mind. You tell them you know where there's a problem, they right away treat you with respect -- especially if you're in "the American Magicians' Association and have the initials after your name. The schools translate them Medical Doctor. I've always figured they stand for Me Dunno. But everybody else automatically assumes Magic Disipenser. Back to that govermnent mind. It assumes that if you've been smart enough to point out a problem, obviously you're the man to tackle it. Tell the Feds you've found something wrong and they say fine, work on a cure, here's some money (we have lots and lots) and some papers to order some more and a title and some blank progress reports for you to file in triplicate, triweekly. I did have enough sense at least to get a commitment from the President, and get it in writing, my way. Then... funny thing about the human mind (as opposed to the one just mentioned) . Somebody gives you a problem, and you right away do one of three things. Punch the nearest panic button. Fake it. Or find that your mind is hurtling off in ten directions to Get the Job Done. That's what happened to me. Oh, obviously I had no solution. But I had thought of Step One, how to study the problem. We got ourselves ten volunteers. Controls, seven male and three female human beings, aged #. We put 'em in a hospital, third floor of Good Sam, and cleared the rest of the floor. In reverse order; I was careful with those people. My Personal Responsibilities. Sure, there were a lot more women of that age, but the reason I wound up with seven men was the men we interviewed weren't as toUchy about giving their birthdates. We recorded them. I felt a monster, grisly, ghoulish, as I put them down, one under the other, in order: earliest birthdate at the top. Then I did everything. Ran tests. Basal Metabolisms. Those ten people were delighted. Free room service, lots of attention and no cost. And furthermore they could enjoy it; they weren't sick! I'd deliberately picked them in good health (as well as could be expected, considering, as we're fond of saying). I supervised their diets as if they were the first septulets and I had a movie contract riding on them. Decuplets, I guess, under the circumstances -- perish the thought. They lived in near-sterile conditions. Daily checks. Blood pressure. Sistolics. Reactions. Putyour-tongue-and-say-ah. All of it. T hey died. Very neatly, from the top of the list. And I felt ghoulish and grisly, crossing off their names, one by one, from the top, with ugly satisfaction that they were proving me right. Cause of death: cardiac arrest. It was enough to give me back the religion I'd outgrown in med school when I first realized there's no justice in nature. Really. I felt like putting down "God" after Cause of Death. I didn't, nut I didn't write cardiac arrest or natural causes or any of that rot, either. I ters. And plague it was. The Plague. The one we couldn't cure, because it didn't make anyone sick or have any symptoms whatever, and we haven't found a cure for death yet. None of those old people had any symptoms. They just died, peacefully and quietly. Patient Rested Comfortably To THie End. We had permission, and we autopsied to shame all IF previous autopsies. We examined those cadavers more carefully than Leonardo had. Nothing. No bugs. No... well, just nothing. I'd have welcomed a little note: "I decided his time had come and there's nothing you can do about it so go on back to prescribing the Pill and delivering the ones who don't use it on Wednesday-afternoon golf. Your very truly, (signed) Prime Mover." And about that time I had the insane thought. The answer. The only one. Crazy. The aforementioned Pill. ra T here are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then you and I will ever dope out, so let's start by talking about something we do know. At the beginning of the Christian Era there were about # people in the world. By the middle of the #th Century there # years to double. By the #'s world's population had doubled by AD #. Momentum. Snowball effect. Like compound interest. People didn't have enough sense to stop breeding in the face of overpopulation. It wasn't personal enough. So who's Julian Huxley? Yes, well, how about if it's good and personal? Or bad and personal. Look: every time a baby's born, someone dies. No population explosion, no problem of food and water and lebensraum, or liebensraum either. We could've saved a lot of worry and palaver over that one. Somebody -- go ahead, captalize that: SomeBody had decided the world was full enough. So he -- I mean big h. He had either to stop the income or accelerate the outgo. He chose the second. I had to admit: it was the first time I'd witnessed justice in nature. Population implosion. Oh Lord. The announcement. You remember it. It was... it was awful. Uncle Charlie died yesterday... my God, I'm responsible!... the baby... Uhnhuh. Granddad began to look at his expectant daugjhter as if she were some sort of monster. She wasn't a monster, not realworking on it. Just as soon as she went into the delivery room. That's personal It was horrible. It was elsewhere, too. Oh, everybody corroborated, all over the world. It was simple enough. All the evidence was there, it was just that Ike and I collated it first. I published the results of Control Group I and saw that copies were sent By that time I was into Control Group #: #-and-a-half-year-olds, and I was advertising for a longterm observation: #-year-olds. I tried to think ahead. Take China. The leaders were delighted (until they remembered how old they were). They didn't have to worry about us any more. Not when The Plague would solve their problem. Simple matter of numbers. Mathematics. And there weren't a lot of old people over there to start with (a lot of those pictures you saw of Asian women who looked about # were women with infants, remember?) But... Commimist or not, those people hadn't got completely over venerating the old. For the first time in history Chinese women had a good reason to practice a little conception-control, stopping pregnancies, rather than using the time-honored method of family-size control: merely exposing the infants to die. Getting oneself enceinte was murdering one's venerable grandfather. Same thing in Japan, of course, and Thainambodia and the rest. But we had the worst problem. The Land of Opportunity. We were strong... but outnumbered by all sorts of countries. Mostly enemies. Russia (which really hadn't been an active enemy since the fifties, but... they were always ready) and China. Chou said about mid-century had! But now he didn't need WW us right out of business. He had more children to have more babies, and the old Asian Long View. (Not Chou; he was long dead. I'm talking about Huing, of course.) It became patriotic not to have babies. People damn near stopped. Little Debbie and Jeff -- everybody born in the fifties and sixties was named Debbie and Kevin and Jeffrey -- married and bit their lips and didn't have babies, for poor old Grandpop's sake. Pill business boomed as Geritol sales began to dwindle. But popr old Grandpop hit the magic age and his heart stopped just the same. Debbie and Jeff got mad. It was all very well for us to support the world; to ship wheat to Russia whilst she called us the same old names; to support the UN almost singlehandedly; to send all those goodies to our enemies; to steal Jeff's money to put into Grandpop's pocket -- or rather his physician's pocket. But not having babies was personal. And when it didn't do any good anyhow... well, I used to think we were due for a revolution around #, until I grew up and realized people wanted socialism. But we darn near had one in Year One of The Plague, and not over socialism, either. Over making babies! T here wasn't any way to cover up. Somebody, somewhere, wasn't holding up his end. When oldsters continued to die, when age # became the barrier, everybody knew we were being conned. We weren't having babies. But somebody was. And as soon as Grandpop died -- heck with em! Debbie and Jeffrey couldn't be worried about the Grandpop next door. There was a, as the clicheists say, hue and cry. Meaning one hell of a lot of loud noise. Oh, the noises in the UN! The accusations! Here we'd just grown up enough to admit we'd been covering our pride for an old mistake all these decades, we'd just let China in... and bang! Right off the bat we're jumping all over them in the IP UN! Mister Krishnapur swore his country was cooperating. Mister Vorlonishev said quietly and smugly that his country had always cooperated and certainly hadn't begun cheating now. But Mister Li said the same thing. Somebody was lying. A few African ladies here and there who hadn't got the word couldn't be affecting things the way they were being affected. We had a celebration in the hospital the night of Henry Clark's #nd birthday. Tea and cake in his room. Booze in dixiecups in the resident's lounge later. Henry Clark didn't wake up the next morning. The story got itself put together later, but here's how it happened, in sequence: The Russians had been shook. Really shook. Trigger fingers had never been so itchy before. They were scared we didn't believe them. So for the first time in Lord knows when they invited us -- secretly -- to come in and have a look. They were on the level. Our observers confirmed that the Soviet government had proclidmed reproduction a crime against one's fellow man and, ergo, the State. What was more important, our spies confirmed the observers... Meanwhile Stephen Levee had got out of China, somehow, and brought back photographs and stories. The Chinese were breeding like crazy. Practically at gunpoint. Told that the Americans were doing so. Patriotism: breed, that China may realize her destiny in the world. That sort of thing and threats were stamping out the oldest-veneration which had moved over to the U.S. sometime around #. We didn't even announce it to the UN. For the first time since War Two, Washington and Moscow joined hands and said let's get together and do it together. Secretly. China has been a common threat for years; now it's far worse. Some people just can't be got on with. For the first time since... #, I guess, the United States announced honestly that it was embarking on a war of aggression. Oh, it was selfdefense, of course, and therefore a Holy War. All wars are Holy Wars, to somebody. This one was for Grandad and Grandma and Uncle Elmer. Except it wasn't even a war. Stephen Levee came out of China on April #th. On the #th the President announced that on May I he would make a major speech, and all the Lippmans and HuntleyBrinkleys wondered aloud and in print what he would have to say. Of course they pointed out that he had chosen to speak on the biggest day in the Communist World. What he did was to review the problem, the pleas, the agreements. The UN brawl. Then he displayed Stephen Levee's films and read his reports, word for word, and introduced Levee and Mister Vorlonishev and talked awhile and then announced that the governments of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had declared war on the People's Government of China. Retroactively: the buttons had been pushed and the planes had swung Chinaward before his speech began. IV r ie Chinese were busily celebrating May Day. Peking was full of aircraft and missiles and troops and tanks, parading under the eyes of Huing and hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom had of course gathered spontaneously; one assumed the Red Guards were directing traffic. Just as spontaneously they went to join their revered ancestors before Huing even heard about the President's speech. Peking wasn't hit with one bomb. The Chinese missile bases weren't hit with one bomb each. The missiles came from half-a-dozen different directions and the bombs came from aircraft whose white stars and red stars had been effaced and replaced with big UN insignia. The whole operation was unbelievably successful, mainly because China had always known we'd never do it. A missile got through and removed Colorado Springs and a tremendous chunk of mountain from our map. Two submarines sent four missiles streaming in toward Washington and New York, and miracle of miracles all that propaganda from Denver was on the level; we were able to stop them! Not to mention the submarines. Rand-McNally started working on new maps; the old ones, showing China, were obsolete. Norad began reorganizing. Re-aiming. The Russians were terribly sorry they'd goofed and sent Formosa down to join Atlantis, but little mistakes will happen, as Ve used to say when we napahned our own troops every now and again. There was one hell of a -- sorry, here comes the cliche again -- hue and cry in the UN. Then there were a lot of very big goggle eyes when Mister Vorlonishev and Mister Davis and the President stood up and said okay, we attacked them and we damn near destroyed China and what are you going to do about it? There were plenty of warheads and planes and silos left, and the allied nations of forced. They weren't forced. The Aussie -- funny -- was the first to jump up and say he was going to call home and recommend his government broaden the alliance to three. By the time he was through there were so many delegates clamoring for recognition to climb aboard that the Secretary-General had to call for a general motion to save time. He got it. There was amazing unity. A month later we celebrated William Michaels's #st birthday, and he woke up the next morning, too. B ut everyone seemed to have celebrated the "war" in the same way. Nine months later, on approximately February #, Granddads started dropping dead again. And in a few months it was all back again and in a few years life expectancy (certainty!) was below #, and Senator Martin -- age # -- introduced a bill to cut Social Security takeouts by two-thirds. He even IF managed to smile and say he'd never collect anyway. As far as we can see now the population of Planet Earth must remain constant at approximately five we've come in our figures is #, and we've gotten that figure three times. Apparently either the Prime Mover didn't share our regard for numbers or he counted differently. Maybe he .meant for us to have six fingers. Somehow everybody just gave up and let it ride. For possibly the first time in history the young got their way. Twice the old managed to get us in war-shape again, and both times the young got together and said nothing doing. We learned pretty quickly that you don't have wars if tihe senators are invited to go, both nations involved, say no. And when they suggest that if overgrown children insist on settling things by violence, let's try the old method: personal trial-by-combat... I The President and the Prime Minister backed down pretty fast while the rest of us guffawed at the editorial cartoons. They might as well have gone along. Within a year die Plague had got them both anyhow. Meanwhile a lot of us were looking for answers. Why? Okay. There was a rule: another Natural Law; really a restatement of the old one: survival, after all, of the fittest. This law said there shall not be more than approximately #x# personnel in existence on Plan Earth at any one time. Fine, Why? I figured once again we had ourselves an effect, not a cause. Effect: the Plague. Causative effect: our having reached such-and-such a population figure. Causative effect: There Shall Not be more than suchand-such many people. But it was an effect, not a cause. Okay. Why? Well, here's a theory. If it doesn't happen to agree with your religion, that's tough; make up your own theory. Plenty of people have made up their own religions. This one represents the thinking of a lot of people over a lot of centuries. It's been the basis for a lot of religions both before and since Christianity. There was some truth to the Mystery Religions -- certainly Paul respected them highly. There is some, too, in Christianity, in Judaism, Buddhism and. Islam. Mostly Buddhism, I guess. It was in Christianity, too, originally; called Gnosticism. The early Christians stamped it out. Too hard to sell. Isn't that just like Man trying to interpret God? Those first several centuries were mostly salesmanship centuries, and the Roman state religion and Mithraism were tough foes. Even so the original concepts may have remained if the Empress Theodora hadn't so adamantly stamped them out. And even so the whole new faith might have gone by the board if the Emperor Julian hadn't got himself killed in battle just when he was starting to stamp out Christianity. There s a death I'd like to investigate!) Reincarnation. The ring of return. You die, but your life-force or soul or whatever you wish to IF call it keeps coming back. Oh, not as bugs or cattle; your life-force is a mind, and enters only human beings. Without memories, usually. Except ieople who have funny djcams in full color... or wind up nuts on some period of history without knowing why. Easy. You were there, once. L ook, just keep your mind on Hamlet's words that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And try to remember that a closed mind is pretty much like a closed door... there can't be much traffic, either way. The idea is we have to try, over and over, no matter how long or how many corporate lives it takes, to be "good enough to retire" (I'm simplifying, naturally). If you commit six crimes (let's keep it straight and say "against nature," and I'm not talking about that implied definition of "Crimes against Nature" lurking like rattlesnakes in our lawbooks, either. Men pretend to be so horrified by Sodom and Gomorrah they won't even use the words... yet nowhere in that old book does it say what the crime of those two cities was! For all we know it may have been over-defoliation or water or air pollution; those are crimes against nature, aren't they?) Anyhow, if you conunitted six crimes in life #I while you were Babble-babble of Memphis in # BC, you've got to compensateatone for them somewhere, somewhen else. Your life-force seeks atonement, whether you as Babble-babble do or not. As B-b you died and your lifeforce (go ahead and use soul if you feel you must) hung around without drawing a new body until # BC. There weren't many bodies around then, remember; there was a long wait between assignments. You became a Hellenic peasant. You "atoned" for three of the crimes, but committed two new ones before you died. You've moved up one notch. You've got five bad deeds to wipe off the master ledger. But... you will have the opportunity; the man said you would be born again, didn't he? You think he meant by being splashed a little? As a Pfc. under Titus you held your own. You died. Your ego waited around some more, still with five black marks. Back in Memphis you had killed without mercy and had died of old age as a lot of the sword... that time. Sometime. Someplace. As a serf or maybe as a woman accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages you had such a hard time you cut e tally down to two. Surely there are special rules for those murdered in the name of God. Maybe you were lucky enough to be sworded. You came back as Rudolf Schickner, say chief gas man at Auschwitz. Oops. Back to the end of the line. Next time you came back as... well, that's the system, anyhow. And of course you're coming back a lot more frequently now. That's the whole point. At the beginning, whatever and whenever that "is," all life-forces were made. All the souls. All of them. None has been createdactivated since. Yes. You get the point. There the world by #, either, or AD #. There never will be. All the souls have been used up. D on't call me a mystic. Try to open up your mind a little, let the light shine on the cobwebs of preconceptions. And remember I've had 'no religion save Ad major em hominis gloriam since I was # years old. And, if you don't like that theory, think up another. So here we are. No more interviews with Mrs. #-years-old. The wastebaskets at the bank aren't full Boxesa of unstamped brown enevelopes at the first of the month any more. There aren any old folks sitting around barbershops or on the courthouse steps or post-office steps any more. The old folks' homes with the cute names are closed down. You can buy Geritol stock with nickels and dimes. Companies have to advertise for night watchmen, and some of them don't have gray hair. In another fifty years, maybe, the Social Security Administration will be out of the red. Right now they're sending out a fourth of the checks they were thirteen years ago. Do? Nothing. I don't think you can. Oh, I may be wrong, but I've got plenty of agreement. Sure, maybe you can find a way out of it. Maybe colonize another planet we can add certificates for a while... while we get more ships ready. I don't think or take a few, for keeps. Holding, situation no-go. It's up to you. Sure, there'll be a stop. A temporary one, anyhow. When it reaches the point that parents give birth and both die the instant twins are born, it will be over for a while. And maybe somebody will start acting sensibly. But unless you stop horsing around you're going to have a life expectancy of twenty and then fifteen and then Lord knows what, eventually. Meanwhile I intend playing a lot of golf and doing a lot more reading. ni be forty-five next month, and life expectancy's down to fiftyIF IF  Novelette A Ticket to Zenner Larrow had only one hope of escape: to fake a new identify. Too bad the new one was even more hotly pursued! I Larrow rolled over, trying A to escape the hands and voices. But there'd been a stinging in his left arm, and now some stimulant was invading his blood, driving out the earlier poison, rallying him. Awareness grew. Painfully, he rolled onto his back and got his eyes open. The blob above him resolved itself into the chubby white-furred face of Wioon Lek, hs Meroban employer. "What... where..." Another Meroban, with the manner of a doctor, said in his rumbling voice, "A few moments, man Larrow. Lie still. You will be strong." Tom sighed and lay back. His head ached like the devil, and there was a bitter sickening taste in his mouth. He let his eyes focus and saw that he was in Ws own apartment in the Lek compound, where he'd been Living these two years on Merob. Wioon Lek's round face relaxed into the all-embracing Meroban smile. "This is marvelous, Tom! Here we'd closed up shop in mourning, and all the time you were here! What happened?" Tom looked at him for a moment in puzzlement. Sometimes he still didn't grasp a Meroban idiom completely. Suddenly, Wioon's question triggered memory. He jerked up to a sitting position, got his feet off the bed and hauled himself upright, unsteadily. "I was gassed, that's what happened! I opened the door, and a cloud of something hit me in the face! I remember doubling over and coughing, then I fell!" He took four unsteady steps toward the closet, reached in and fumbled in the breast pocket of his over jacket. He sighed with relief. "Good. For a moment I thought maybe my passport and ticket -- " He went silent, staring at the passport. The picture on it was of a human, but it was the face of a stranger. Anger seized him. He threw the ticket and passport down on the bed. "It was robbery! Somebody switched on me! Well, he made a mistake leaving his own papers! When I catch up with him -- " Wioon was staring at him. Suddenly the Meroban burst out, "But of course! You do not know; you have been not conscious all the time!" He made a gesture that was both aghast and pious. "Peace on the stranger. Friend Tom, and do not be in a hurry to catch up with him. Obviously he stole your ticket because the ship Vreyol Kway was going direct to Earth. But Vreyol Kway blew up just as she was beginning to accelerate out of orbit." He sigh, then broke into the smile again. "But that is his misfortune and your good luck, and ours!" Wioon's pudgy three-digited hand went to a pocket, pulled out a jackphone. "I must share the good news!" Then, with the flat, rectangular instrument near his bps, he stopped. "But wiait." He ambled over to a chair and lowered his squat, broad form into it. "I must think." Tom stood impatiently. Finally he said, "What's there to think about, sir? I'm sorry to hear about the ship. But I've still got to get offplanet fast. Unless, under the circumstances, they'd extend the deadline for me." Wioon's tiny flesh-enfolded eyes blinked in negation. "The Fists will make no such allowance. They'll be all the more furious, because the disaster will anger not only Vreyol, but Earth. There were sixty humans aboard, you know. Friend Tom, that is not why I am worried. Do you not see? You, of all the passengers, did not catch the ship. Therefore you will be suspected of some complicity." T om stared at him for a moment. Wioon was right; the Fists were nervous in their newly seized power. "Well, danm it..." He stepped to the bed and picked up the documents. "This ticket my unknown benefactor left... Obolis, for Zenner Hell. Directly away from Earth. But at least it's a transfer point. And it's all I'll get, this late." He frowned at the passport. "But IF he didn't look like me at all. A lot darker, and plump in the cheeks. Santos Yberra was his name." He looked up at Wioon. "I suppose it was a decent gesture, leaving these, hut how could I possibly use them? The ticket's in his name, and I'd have to show the passport." Wioon eyed him thoughtfully. "I shall guess that he expected you to get the picture altered. Just as he must have altered yours. Obviously, he knew various things about you. And about me, since he was able to sneak into the compound and ambush you in your own apartment. He was no bumpkin. I must shake up my security forces again, yes?" Tom said uncertainly, "Well, it's my mess, sir. You've got trouble enough of your own, with the Fists suspecting everybody of being counterrevolutionists." Wioon held up a pudgy whitefurred hand. "No, no, you're still my employee. I'm depending upon you to keep my affairs alive on Earth. And eventually... well, the Fists will not be in power forever. But let us think. Technicians can alter the passport photograph. But even then. I'm apprehensive about your using that ticket." "Why?" "Consider, Friend Tom. Why did this burglar leave it? Not charity, I think. He was desperate to be off Merob a day early. That suggests that someone was after him, or at least that he needed to cover his trail. If you use his ticket you are the decoy, yes?" Tom rubbed at his throbbing temples; "Oh, I don't know, and I don't care. Can't we find out who he was?" Wioon looked unhappy. "I shall try, of course. But with things in such a mulligan... Well, first things first, yes? Let's get that photograph replaced with yours." He raised the jackphone and spoke close to it at some length; thought a moment and added, "Ends. Second message. To Technician Daal Jhee. Wioon speaks. Can you favor us with your presence in man Larrow's apartment at once, utmost secret? Ends." He heaved himself out of the chair, waddled over to the nearest wall receptacle and pushed the prong end of the phone into it. The two messages would flash to their destination by wire. Tom, as much Meroban as Terran in his thinking now, said automatically, "Whatever I can do to unburden myself of this debt..." Wioon waved off the thanks. "No, no, it is nothing." Then he looked thoughtful. "Zenner... yes, it could go via Zenner. There is one small favor you could perform. Friend Tom. I have promised an old comrade to get an heirloom to him safely. A thing of only moderate value, but dear to him. My agent on Zenner -- Paib Salang; you have met him -- will recognize it and know where to send it." He frowned in thought. "I do not want to endanger you. Being an heirloom of the Dynasty, it would cause the Fists to be harsh with anyone taking it off-planet." He smiled abruptly. "But it can be disguised. It is only a finger-ring. A plastic overlay upon the gem, with your initials on it in Terr an script. And soft IF metal added to the inside of the band, with Terran inscriptions. If you will wear it at all times... "Of course," Tom said. He could swallow his aversion to rings. Wioon beamed. "Well, then." He glanced toward the door, his stubby white-furred ears twitching. "Daal arrives. I will see you before you leave; now I must go and tend to the ring. Best -- do you not think -- you stay here until your escort comes? I can assure your safety to the port, I believe. And Obolis is a Boklan ship, so the Fists will not dare tamper with her. And no phone calls, yes? It must not be known you are still alive." D aal, with whom Tom had worked, was about Wioon's height -- barely five feet -- but slightly less broad. He peered at the photograph. "Yes, I can fix it, in two hours. Is there that much time?" Tom nodded. Obolis doesn't leave until near midnight. What will you have to do?" Daal tapped the plastic document with a thumb. "Grind this away carefully, until the picture is gone. Spray on sensitized plastic, imprint your picture, cover it with more plastic and put the whole thing in a hot press. It will stand casual inspection. It will not pass examination with fluoroscopes or such. This passport seems to have been made on Vreyol. I cannot counterfeit their plastic or the antifraud patterns." Tom said, "Fll have to risk it. If I don't get off-planet, it's prison camp or worse anyway. How about the description?" "The height is close enough -- fiveten against your tfive-eleven. And who can guarantee weight, travelling among different races? Or the degree of skin tan, in your case? There's only the color of your eyes to worry about. But I'll print your picture a little dark, so the gray might be interpreted as black." "All right," Tom said. "Wioon mentioned escort to the field. Do you know about that?" Daal's wide mouth drooped. "I am to go. Also a policeman, ostensibly gone over to the Fists but actually still in our employ. Excuse me now, please." II spent an hour going through A his luggage to get rid of all identifying marks. He interrupted that to listen to a newscast. The big story, of course, was the ship disaster. Vreyol Kway had disintegrated so completely there were few corpses to identify. The crew of a trashboat, the last to leave her, was in custody and no doubt being interrogated. Various other ships in orbit, including Obolis, had veered to avoid the spreading mess of radioactive debris. There was no reaction from the Vreyolan ambassador -- it would be many hours before the news reached Vreyol, and as many more before anything came back. Vreyol was populated by the same race as Merob, but X)l ideally separate. It wasn't as potent as Bokl, which had a near-monopoly on commercial shipping and travel among the nearby stars, but the Fists didn't want Vreyol's enmity. The ill-will of Earth hardly mattered. In space, Terra was still small potatoes. He returned to his baggage and got it repacked. Then he paced the apartment restlessly, a plastijar of Meroban beer in his hand. It seemed hours before a chime came from the door. He glanced at the viewer and saw Wioon's beaming image. "Come." The door slid open, and his employer waddled in. "Things are going well. Friend Tom. Daal has done a fine job with the passport. I've been able to arrange for you to go aboard the shuttleboat promptly, with a group of other passengers who have all been identified, so there'll be no delay." He glanced at Tom's three valises. "All ready, yes? We'll send those on aliead so they'll be inspected and put in your stateroom. You'll have a pleasant trip; the Bokla are great hands at making comfort. You'll have to be watchful, of course." He fished in a pouch of his apron-belt -- the only garment most Merobans wore indoors -- and pulled out a heavy finger-ring. "Try it on, yes?" Not too happily, Tom slid it on the largest finger of his left hand. It was snug. He stared at the initials on the stone. "What -- oh, of course. S. Y. I'm not supposed to be Tom Larrow, am I?" Wioon regarded him gravely out of almost-closed eyes. "You must not lapse. You are Santos Yberra, until Paib Salang can smuggle you to safety. Oh, did I not tell you -- identify yourself as Code Nine Four Seven. That will inform Paib he is to extend you unlimited account and. assist you to Earth. You and he will work out arrangements fqr the immediate future of my Earth trade, yes? I expect to route it through Zenner for a while, but I dare not leave Merob myself just now." He held out a whitefurred hand. "Daal will be here before long to take you to the port. Until next we meet, yes?" T he gray-uniformed Fist at the turnstile gave the passport a hard look, lifted his head to peer at Tom and brusquely waved him through. At the foot of the escalator to the shuttleboat waited a Boklan officer in a very neat white uniform. He was long of torso and neck, short-limbed in proportion, with a face that was mostly nose or muzzle. He gave the passport one swift scrutiny, nodded down at Tom from his seven-foot-plus height and said in good Meroban, "Favor us by boarding, man Yberra, yes?" Tom waited his turn at the escalator, which was crowded. Halfway up he turned to look back. He was in time to witness a swift, shocking episode. Daal and the helmeted policeman who'd flown them here were standing against the rear wall of the vast chamber. A sudden bellow of the loudspeaker system made them look up, with the rest of the crowd. An instant later, squads of Fist troopers in their gray uniforms burst into the chamber, carrying short ugly weapons. Tom saw Daal's eyes squeeze shut in anguish, then the technician was running with the deceptive Meroban gait. The crowd erupted with IF cries of fear and became a mob, surging away from the action. Troopers swiveled, aiming their guns at Daal. A dozen or more blinding, spitting beams converged on him, aiming for the lower legs. Tom heard his scream above the tumult. The technician went tumbling and lay in a writhing knot, his legs nothing but blackened stumps. Tom was shouting in English, "No! No!" and fighting to get back down the escalator, but the panicking passengers behind him bore him along before them. He grabbed the rail and clung. He saw the policeman who'd come with him and Daal stare fixedly at the crippled technician. Suddenly Daal's head seemed to burst. Now there was panic among the troopers. They spun, darting frantic looks around, some of them firing their beamers wildly. The helmeted policeman stood against the wall, his eyes moving in jerks, to remain fixed for an instant at a time. A trooper's head burst open, and this time Tom saw the small hphen of incandescence that caused it. Two more troopers went down. A Meroban near Tom shouted in terror, "The Elite! A Stare!" Five troopers were dead now, but the others had found the source of the terrible weapon. Beams converged on the policeman, and he went down in a blackened heap that stiiTed for only a moment. Limp with horror, Tom was carried up the escalator, wedged in among the short but heavy Merobans, who comprised most of the passenger Hst. At the top, a whiteuniformed Bokl was urging, "This way, please! This way!" Tom went numbly where he was directed, found himself in a lounge, let himself be guided to a seat. The decor and furniture were Meroban. Somehow he answered a Bokl steward. "Dis-distilled spirits, with hampa juice." He sat, automatically sipping the sweet-tart drink. After a while a Meroban came and sat down across the small table from him. "Please, may I? An awful thing, yes?" "Tm nodded, then remembered X the Meroban gesture of palmsup. The Meroban stared at Tom's hands. "Five digits, just as they say. Excuse me. I am Ussmed, a modest businessman. Unless you have been on Merob a long time, you have not seen the Stare before, yes?" Tom managed, "Uh, no. I'd heard rumors, of course. But I thought the Elite were all hunted out." The Meroban squeezed his eyes shut. "So did the Fists. But obviously at least one escaped. Like sorcery, is it not? But quite technological. Did you notice that before he died, the Elite exploded his own head and the helmet?" "No. I -- I wasn't in position to see very well." "He did," the Meroban said. "They all did. And the secret died with them. Not one went over to the Fists, you know. The helmet, of course, looks exactly like an ordinary police one. But in addition to the radio, there is a lot more built in. The energy is translocated to the target in somewhat the same way a ship is translocated between the stars. That much is known. But the talk is that the whole technology would fill a great many books. As to know how the eyes are made to serve as rangefinders, and how the weapon is triggered, you can hear as many theories as you like. Some say the helmet reads the natural muscle movements and nerve impulses. Others say tiny instruments are implanted in the Elite's head. One thing is certain -- a long period of training was needed. I had a nephew who took it, though of course he would not tell me so. He died in the coup." The Meroban made a gesture of sorrow. "I guess you are angry with the Fists for hustling you off Merob, yes?" Tom's mind was beginning to work again. He mustn't forget his pose, or that this stranger might not be an innocent businessman. Wioon had dug out a little of Yberra's history. "I've only been on the planet a short time, and hadn't made any connections. I'd probably have been leaving anyway." The Meroban asked, "Have you business on Zenner?" "No, except that I may look for work there. Excuse me; I'm Santos Yberra. I call myself a distribution engineer. Actually my trade involves a knowledge of packaging, preservation, shipping and so on. I'd hoped to find work on Merob, but didn't." Ussmed said, "Things have not been normal. But Zenner is a good prospect. The Bokla settled it as a transfer point, you know. What industry there is supports shipping and travel. Excuse me, perhaps I am boring you. Perhaps you have been to Zenner before?" "No. Only Vreyol and Merob, outside the Terran planetary system."  "I see. Well, excuse me, yes? I must get to my stateroom. Perhaps we can talk again." O bolis was cylindrical, four times as long as her diameter -- a proportion that, as she accelerated with her axis along the line of flight, was foreshortening; at the velocity needed for translocation, she would fit well enough into the spherical TL field. Acceleration would require a little less than eighty Terran hours. Deceleration, near Zenner -- assuming TL was perfect -- would take an equal time. TL itself would occupy only a few painstakingly calculated minutes. Tom's stateroom was about a third of the way back from the nose, and against Superwall C; which meant it was the nearest of the eight rooms on his radial corridor to the lounges, dining rooms, theaters and such in the core of the ship. Also, it placed him farthest of the eight from the outer Superwalls -- an advantage, theoretically, though even in the extremely rare event of a debris-hit, damage would hardly penetrate within Superwall B. The stateroom was luxurious, of course. Compared to the cost of accelerating and translocating a ship, the accommodations didn't count. His total floorspace was about fifteen by thirty-five feet, divided into a parlor, bedroom, bath and kitchenette. With his mind still mainly on the episode at the spaceport, he prowl about the quarters, looking at the alien fittings. IF Things were marked in Boklan, which he couldn't read, but little self-adhesive tags had been stuck on, giving Meroban translations. He fiddled with the grav controls, set tliem back to point seven G. He opened the refrigerator door and peered inside. There were a few basic rations -- dried stuff in plastic, a shelf of seasonings, a package of plastic bags in case he wanted to store food. He could buy a wide variety of stuff aboard, if he wanted to cook, which he didn't. He went back to the sitting room. He found himself idly calculating cubic feet. Certainly a lot of cargo could be stored in here. There was far more living space than two or three people would need. But that was deliberate. Some passengers needed it, to forget that they were in a capsule of steel with all of ruthless space just outside. Even the corridors (his back door opened onto a second one) gave no hint that the stateroom was one or more than a thousand packed between Superwalls B and C. You only saw eight at a time. He dialed a seascape for one of the vistawalls and sat half watching it for a while, then irritably tuned out the surf sound and went looking for the radio receiver dials. He found they were on the same panel that controlled the lights. Obolis was well away from Merob now, but the newscasts could still overtake her. There were reports, as had become usual recently, of Dynasty plots foiled and a 'highly edited account of the affair at the port. Tom was about to tin the stuff off when somethinig caught his attention. The announcer was saying, " -- new developmenits in the deaii of the eminent industrialist and importer, Wioon Lek." Tom froze, halfway out of his chair. The voice went on, "Government sources confirm the reports of suicide. It is now revealed, though, that traces of poisons other than the one that killed him have been found in his blood. One pharmacologist states tibat these are of a type used in interrogation of unthere are signs that Wioon wias not alone at the time of his death. "There is no hint of how these so-called 'truth serums' may have been admioistered. However, it has been discovered that the suicide poison was in a small capsule surgically implanted in Wioon's tongue. The industrialist was able to kill himself by biting on it. "A Government spokesman has suggested that Wioon was the victim of counter-revolutionaries, and that he died rather than reveal secrets they might have used. "Control of Wioon's vast economic empire has been assumbed by the Government pending decisions." The report turned to something else. Tom slowly walked over and turned it off. He stood in a daze, trying to realize it was not just words he'd been hearing -- Wioon was really dead. His mind refused to accept it. He saw Wioon as he'd last seen him -- furred hand extended in farewell, round face beaming, full of life. "No," he muttered, "it's some propaganda story. Some trick!" But he knew, of course, that it wasn't. He went back and sat down, staring without attention at the surging seascape. He had no idea how long he'd sat there before the stateroom com pinged. At the second ping he mustered himself. "Yes?" "Passenger Yberra?" "Yes. What do you want?" "This is Fourth Officer Hweki. A small question has arisen. Would it be convenient for you to come to my office, bringing your identity papers? A crewman will arrive shortly to guide you." Ill #T)lease sit down, man Yberra." I Hweki himself had only half arisen, probably because he didn't want to tower over his visitors. The second visitor, seated to one side of the desk, was the Meroban Ussmed. Hweki's eyes and forehead, at least, were passably humanoid. The rest of his face was mostly a long nose -- or muzzle; the mouth was a mere line below the flaring nostrils; the chin no more prominent than a dog's. The ears were pointed and mobile, covered with short gray fur like the rest of his face. The irises of eyes were light yellow, with contrasting black pupils. The neck was a full twelve inches long, sturdy but flexible. His uniform was white, with green piping, very neat. The only insignia was on the right breast, the Bokl Lines mark of two intersecting circles. Each side of the green collar bore the Boklan numeral four. Hweki looked at Tom along his muzzle for  minute, gravely, but without discourtesy, then continued in excellent Meroban. "It is a rule of the Line, passenger Yberra, that any accuser must face the accused. Passenger Ussmed is an agent of the Meroban Government. He has a list of passengers and data on some. He informs me that there is no record of anyone named Santos Yberra arriving on Merob." Ussmed, who was angry but trying to hide it, said placatingly, "It is not necessarily an accusation, man Yberra. I merely report a discrepancy. It is my duty." If a Bokl could have smiled, Hweki obviously would have done so. "Can you explain, passenger Yberra?" There seemed to be a hard lump in Tom's stomach. "I only arrived less than three divs ago. There's been a lot of records lost, or destroyed, in that time." "From where did you arrive, please?" "From Vreyol." "Could I see your passport?" Tom slowly handed the document across the desk. Ussmed was leaning forward, trying to see. Hweki raised his muzzle toward Tom. "May I?" At Tom's nod, he handed Ussmed the passport. The Meroban peered at it a while. "It looks genuine. But a scientific examination... " Hweki held out a four-digited hand. "We'll give it that, of course. It will only take a few minutes." He pressed one of a row of studs on his desk, then dropped the passIF port into a slot. "Also we'll send a message drone to Vreyol. An answer should be at Zenner by the time we're within radio range. Meanwhile, passenger Ussmed, could you detail your suspicions?" Ussmed scowled, then rumbled, It is sufficient crime if this Terran arrived on Merob, or left, under a false name. By treaty, I ask that you deliver him to the Meroban embassy as soon as we reach #nner." Hweki inclined his head politely. "If I am convinced. Perhaps you have guessed, passenger Yberra, that I am ship's Security Officer. In the Meroban, and I think the Terran idiom, a spy. I will give you a copy of ship's regulations if you wish, so you may know my duty and your rights." Tom said, "No, thank you." The two aliens sat watching him for a minute, or maybe they were just waiting. Finally there was a ping, and the passport popped from the slot, with a note clipped to it. Tom sat with dull dread as Hweki read the note. The Bokl aimed his muzzle first at Ussmed, then at Tom. "This is a genuine Vreyolan passport. There is no sign of any tampering." U ssmed was on his feet, trying to control his anger. "I ask that this man be confined, and that our technicians be allowed to examine the passport when we reach Zenner." Hweki said mildly, "We are all confined here aboard ship, yes? As to the passport, I wjll neither agree nor refuse now. Before we arrive, we will have been in contact with my own government and will have heard from Vreyol." Ussmed stood a moment, then said curtly, "With your permission." Without waiting for it, he walked to the door. He didn't quite slam it behind him. Tom got to his feet, bewildered at his reprieve. Hweki said, "Please? A question or two." Tom sat down again. The Bokl looked along his muzzle thoughtfully. "Ussmed has repeated his conversation with you, so I know a little of your background. You were seeking employment on Merob, yes? And in your line, Wioon Lek, Chartered, was the most important firm. Did you apply there?" Tom said carefully, "Yes. But this Fist thing came up..." Hweki inclined his head. "Unfortunate timing. Have you heard that Wioon himself is dead?" "I... heard a newscast about it." Hweki glanced at an instrument on the wall. "We are out of newscast range now, though we still have an official beam. Thank you, passenger Yberra. I am very sorry this has come up." Tom left, his mind churning. What about the passport? Was Hweki holding back something? Had they actually found the tampering? And what other irregularities might be turned up on Vreyol? Santos Yberra seemed to have been the kind to wallow in irregularities. Shoud Tom turn back and tell Hweki the whole thing? He couldn't see how he dared. It would still put him in the hands of the Fists. Besides, there was still Paib Salang. The Fists would hardly be able to to move in on Wioon's holding, except on Merob, right away. Paib could probably still get Tom to Earth. And there was the fingerring. He felt of it absently as he walked slowly along a corridor. Wioon had wanted to get it to its owned. Tom owed him that and a lot more. In any case, it would be foolish to turn himself in now. There were many hours left before TL, and many more before they reached Zenner. He should at least preserve the option. He glanced around. Right now he didn't want the solitude of his stateroom. Somewhere he'd passed a lounge, on the way to Hweki's office... He found a directory-sign and arrows, and followed them to the lounge. He could certainly use a drink. I t was part of Boklan Lines service to have lounges and dining rooms reflecting a variety of cultures. All the numerous lounges and dining rooms, though, were also serving Meroban items on this trip, since the passengers were practically aU Meroban. He found a stool at the bar and told the polite Boklan bartender, "Spirits, with hampa juice." He sat morosely, sipping and letting his eyes rove around. A lot of cargo space in here, too. He looked around for the air-conditioning vents. Well placed, and ample. This ship inade Meroban and Vreyolan ships look primitive and Earth's few ships downright miserable. The tank of greenery at one end of this lounge, under the actinic lights -- that alone almost equaled the total hydroponics of any Earth ship. He turned and looked into the darkened end of the room. There were tables there, some of them screened, where a scattering of Merobans sat talking and drinking. Their voices were a low bass murmur. He could almost imagine he wasn't in space at all. This could be some peaceful lounge on Merob, 'before the trouble, quiet, luxurious, faintly scented with something like lavender. The Bokla had been in the business a long time, of course. But it was no wonder they dominated it. He jumped as a human voice behind him said in English, "Your hands. They always stare at your hands." He turned. A man was standing there, smiling. He was a little shorter than Tom, rather slight, blond, with young blue eyes. "Mind if I sit down?" Tom said automatically, "Of course not. What about my hands?" The man slid onto a stool. "Good to hear English again! I'm Renfrow Cull an. People call me Cull, unless I owe them money, or they want to borrow it. I don't mean your hands in particular; I mean, human hands. The bartender was just staring at mine. You'd think five digits were a violation of natural law." IF Tom foimd himself glad of human company. "I'm Santos Yberra. I knew there were other people aboard, but you're the first I've run into." Cullan called to the bartender, "Two of whatever he had." He pointed to Tom's glass. To Tom, he said, "I saw you when you came aboard. Ugly thing back there, wasn't it?" Tom nodded slowly. "As ugly as I want to see. I don't think I really bdieved in the Elite weapon until I saw it." Cullan said, "Same here. How long were you on Merob? I never saw you around." Tom said carefully, "Less than three divs." Cullan looked absently around the room. "They sure move a lot of drinks during a trip. I was on Merob over a year." He named a city a few hundred miles from Port City. "They've got an Earth ecology farm there, and I was a caretaker. I studied botany in school on Earth, took an exam and was lucky enough to land this job. Well, it's over now. Say, you going to eat?" "I suppose so." Cullan slid off the stool. "We can get a table right here. I've heard of a couple of Boklan dishes I want to try. Okay?" "Okay. Sure." T om let CuUan's offhanded breeziness carry the conversation. It wasn't absorbing, in his present state of mind, but it wasn't bothersome either. The food was good. They had two more drinks apiece after the meal. Finally, Tom got a little tired of the chatter. "Do you mind if we call it a night? I'm pretty tired." Cullan looked at his watch. "So am I. Are you keeping Marob time?" "I guess so. As long os the ship does." "Well, maybe you'll join us at breakfast? There's a group of six of us, all English-speaking, who've gotten together, in a restaurant where they've got a supply of something very much like hen's eggs. I've taught them how to scramble them." Tom got up. "Maybe I'll see you." He lay awake a long time, thinking. Then, unable to stand the doubt, he turned on a light and got up to examine the passport. It did him no good, of course. He went back to bed. What had happened to Wioon? The newscasts, of course, were censored. Probably, he thought, the Fists had tried to interrogate the tycoon, and he'd taken the hard way out. But that would imply a bigger thing than Tom's passport. So would Daal's martyrdom at the spaceport, and the Elite policeman's. Diat latter opened up a new path of thought. If an Elite policeman had been working with Wioon, there might be more of them. There might be a whole underground, with Wioon a link. Certainly, there were rumors enough flying around Merob; and the Fists were very nervous. If so, Tom wouldn't have blamed Wioon a particle. It was a bitter thought that the jovial tycoon might have been tripp up merely because he'd gone out of his way to help Tom. Well, it was over and done now. All Tom could do was try to get to Paib Salang. He'd stood solitude in the past easily enough; now he found it very uncomfortable. He decided he'd join Cullan's group for breakfast. Somehow, eventually, he slept. IV #yver here!" Cullan waved to him from a table. By the time Tom got there, the blond man had a space cleared for him. "This is Santos Yberra, folks. Santos, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Ludlow; Jim Cresmer; Hal Oakley; Bud Vollander. I was telling Santos last night -- if we could get all thirty of the humans aboard together, we could organize a society. Human Exiles From Merob." Vollander was a thickset, dark man of middle age, with a Teutonic accent. He frowned. "That is not a subject for jokes, after Vreyol Kwayr Cullan looked startled, then embarrassed. "I forgot. Sorry. Well... the six of us here were hoping to get the same ship off Zenner. How about you, Santos? Going straight on to Earth?" Tom hesitated. "Well, maybe. But you know there's no direct passage." Cresmer -- sandy-haired, lanky -- looked up. "You sure of that? The crewman I asked didn't know." Tom said, "Why, any of the official guides can get you complete schedules. You'd have to go to Vreyol; that's the closest." Cullan stepped into the pause. "Santos is in shipping. He can probably tell you every route, fares and all." Tom suppressed annoyance. "Well, I'm not exactly in shipping. But I've read over a lot of schedules." Ludlow said, "If we were sure Vreyol wouldn't go Fist, Edna and I might stop there, if we have to go anyway. It's... well, we said good-bye to all our friends and relatives on Earth and turned everything into cash." He and his wife were in their thirties, Tom judged. They sounded Australian. Cullan gave a cheer. "Here come the eggs!" He motioned the waiter to set the tray beside him and seized a fork. "Let me have your plate, Edna. There! Somebody pass this toast around. Almost like home, eh? Tom, you've got to try some of this aspic!" Oakley, a slight man who looked Eurasian, was looking at the ring Tom wore. "How did you get that off Merob, Mr. Yberraf ' Tom drew his hand back involuntarily. "It's Earth manufacture, so it was exempt." Cullan was peering at the ring with interest. "Let me see it, will you?" Hesitantly, Tom pulled it off and handed it over. Cullan frowned at the stone. "S. Y. Your initials. So you hauled that big thing all the way from Earth, and now you're hauling it back again. Is it a real ruby? It's big." IF "A cheap one," Tom improvised. Cullan handed it back again. "Nice ring. It's a wonder they didn't pass a special act and appropriate it. Say -- as long as we're all interested in transportation off Zenner, why don't we discuss it at breakfast tomorrow? I'll get all the schedules from the travel office, and Santos will know which lines might have food we can stand, and things. Okay, Santos?" Tom answered abstractedly. He'd just become aware of a ship's officer standing just inside the door, looking at him. "All right. Will you excuse me for a minute? I think I'm being paged." H weki was as neatly-uniformed as before. He directed his muzzle at Tom for a moment before speaking. "Forgive my bothering you again, but I must ask questions. Will you give me a resume of your movements since leaving this office yesterday?" Tom tried to read something in the steady eyes. He failed. "Why, from here I went to a lounge not far away. I met another Terran, and we had dinner together. Then I went to my stateroom and was there until breakfast time, where your guide found me." Hweki appeared to sigh. "That was all? You went nowhere else, spoke to no one?" "Only the bartender and waiter." "And this other Terran -- it was Renfrew Cullan, I know. Was he in the lounge when you got there?" "I assume so. Where I sat at the bar I was facing the door, and I think I'd have seen him come. in. He approached me very soon after I got there. I suppose he'd been at a table in the dark end of the room." This time Hweki definitely sighed. "I was hoping you could add something. The bartender places you both, within a few minutes. And we know you didn't leave your stateroom during the night. Well, so much for that, yes? Another matter. You say you applied to Wioon Lek, Chartered. Did you happen to meet another Terran who worked for them? His name was Thomas Larrow." Tom hoped he could lie with a straight face. "Larrow? No, I met very few Terrans on Merob." Hweki stared thoughtfully along his muzzle. "I am going to tell you some things, in the hope something may occur to you. Please understand that the Line, and my Government, are neutral in Meroban politics. But we maintain sources of information. Before we got completely out of radio range, I learned certain things. First, Wioon Lek was involved in a conspiracy that included the sabotage of Vreyol KwayJ Tom's face must have showed his shock. The Bokl went on, "This Thomas Larrow had passage aboard Vreyol Kway. Since he had living quarters on the Wioon Lek compound, we speculate that the tools of sabotage may have been smuggled aboard in his luggage, with or without his knowledge. I am not familiar enough with humans to know Can you say?" Tom tried his voice and found it worked, more or less. "Martyrs... It would depend on the individual and the cause. I would say, if this -- this Larrow blew himself up with the ship, he was an unusual man. A fanatic." Hweki inclined his head. "Thank you. He could have been deceived in some way, of course." Tom could not help protesting, "But Wioon Lek -- from what I heard, he was a benevolent sort! How could he -- ?" Hweki regarded him thoughtfully. "Yes; ordinarily. A fine civilized person. But it seems there was a great deal at stake. No less than the secret of the Elite weapon." Tom sat newly dumfounded. Suddenly, the ring on his left hand seemed to weigh tons. Finally, in near panic, he said hoarsely, "But wouldn't that argue against the sabotage of Vreyol KwayV "Well, no," Hweki said slowly. "There is more. I've been a little oblique with you. Your own alibi is sound in what I'm about to tell you, but there's the question of your passport. I have to consider you as possibly connected. Maybe without knowing it. You see, shortly after Ussmed left this office -- sometime while you were in the lounge -- he was murdered in bis stateroom." T om sat in his own stateroom, with a single light on. He'd have to examine the ring presently, of course, but he wasn't quite sure there wouldn't be a hidden camera somewhere. If there was, he daren't reveal his state of mind by making a search. Finally he decided to go into the kitchenette. If Hweki did catch him, at least the ling might not fall into the hands of the Meroban Government. He had no magnifying glass. However, holding the ring close to a strong light, he could see faint signs of the joint between the real gem and the plastic overlay. He peered at the inside of the band. How much information could be stored in a finger-ring? Messages could be magnetically recorded in the metal, of course. But maybe even that wasn't necessary. The shape of the ring itself -- the makeup of the alloy, even, or the cut of the stone -- might reveal, to one who knew the code, some location, the name of some individual, who held the secret. He couldn't feel angry with Wioon. The industrialist had unhesitatingly laid his own life on the line. And, in doing all he could to protect the ring, he'd been also protecting Tom. It was clear now that the whole thing had been staged, prepared ahead of time. "Santos Yberra" was a false name. Whoever had gotten the passport in that name, of course, was working for Wioon. Naturally it was from Vreyol, and unaltered -- the byplay with Daal had been to make the thing more convincing to Tom. Not Daal's death, though. That had obviously been some hitch in the plans. But Daal hadn't hesitated either. IF So someone ihad gone aboard Vreyol Kway using Tom's Meroban passport and ticket to do the sabotage. Suddenly Tom remember the newscast. A trashboat had left Vreyol Kway shortly before the explosion. He jammed the ring back on his finger and began pacing the kitchenette. Maybe the sabotage hadn't been a suicide mission! The crew had been arrested. But maybe a stowaway had been found, too -- and maybe Wioon Lek's involvement had been wrung out of the stowaway. It was possible to ride in the hold of a trashboat; they were pressurized and insulated (because they doubled as supply boats and even personnel carriers at times. Actually, the "trash" they carried down from an orbitting liner wasn't garbage, or waste paper, or anything like that. Those things, a liner reworked and regenerated again and again, because it was cheaper than decelerating them out of orbit. The "trash" was a final unusable residue: silicates, carbides and such. In the case of Meroban and Vreyolan ships, it was a coarse dust. Treaty, as well as tragic experience, forbade dumping it in orbit, or even in nearby space. It would be landed. Boklan ships, he knew, went even further. They fused the residue into porous bricks, which could be used for building. But even in Vreyol Kway's dust-load, a person could hide and escape a ship if he were very clever and very daring. If the saboteur had done that, and been caught, there was no mystery about Wioon Lek's death. Tlie Fists had tried to arrest him or interrogate him in his own office, and he'd killed himself. A coward in Tom's situation, Tom mused, would go to Hweki, tell the whole thing and beg for sanctuary, even if it were a Boklan prison. A coward might even persuade himself that he possibly didn't carry the message after all. He could be merely a decoy, another layer of security in Wioon's laminated plan. It looked as if that plan were operating aboard Obolis, If not, then why was the murder of Ussmed necessary? Slowly a thought formed in his mind. If the saboteur had escaped in a trashboat, maybe Tom could do the same thing. If the same misfortune -- arrest -- waited him on the planet, at least it would be by Bokla, not Fists. And if he got away to Paib Salang, the ring would be safe, possibly, from the Fists on Zenner; and Tom might get to Earth after all. For all he knew, a hundred passengers on Obolis might be either after him or protecting him right now. In the hours that remained before his deadline, he might learn who some of them were. And he had to get a look at the ship's trashboats. Then he could start planning an escape. Seeing the trashboats and how they were handled would be easy. He'd simply go on one of the conducted tours of the ship; that way there'd be no suspicion. V  Tour Twenty-Eight VV please board its car? Tour Twenty-Eight." The junior officer guiding was as neat as a fresh pastry in his white uniform as he stood beside the door of the cigar-shaped vehicle, looking courteous. Behind the car, the slot in the transportation tube waited to gulp it in. Tom glanced back once more at the huge vistawall with its live picture of Central Control. They'd stood there for fifteen minutes while the guide pointed things out and answered questions. Tom would have welcomed more time. There were things he might learn from that picture about ship's operations. For one thing, Central Control was obviously kept on low gravity -- tiny Boklan figures wafted about the picture on their harness gravs. But next they were going aft, where he'd see the trashboats. He boarded the car and found a seat. They slid sideways into the tube, then there were brief mild sensations of acceleration and deceleration -- unnecessary, but faked to preserve the sense of orientation -- and the door slid open again. He got out in his turn and stood half listening to the guide. The chamber here, he judged, was eighty yards long and half that diameter. It was cylindrical -- actually the aft end of the ship's inmost core, enclosed by Superwall D. The chamber was dark except for lights near the tour party. The trashboat they were looking at, a blunt vehicle about fifty feet long, rested on and was clamped to a pair of rails leading from the inner bulkhead behind it to the aft one, along the side of the cylinder. There were eight such pairs of rails spaced around the cylinder, each leading to a circular door in the aft bulkhead. The lights were dim there, Tom guessed, so the other boats apparently hanging overhead wouldn't be too disturbing. Grav here was radially outward, so that one could walk clear around the curve without feeling any change. A Meroban was asking, "Are those single-stage airlocks at the end there?" The party turned to look at the circular doors. "No, sir," the guide said, "they are three-stage locks. The ends of the ship have four Superwalls too. Everything is built to the principle of extra safety." Tom 'had edged around the trashboat and was examining the stack of residue-bricks on a pallet beside the open hatch. Each was about thirty inches long, half that wide and a fourth that thick, so they made an interstaggered pile on the pallet. He visualized the layers. Yes, it would be possible, given time, to rebuild the stack with a hollow inside, big enough for a man. But would he run out of oxygen? The bricks were porous, but there'd be little circulation through or between them. Besides, he'd be immobolized. The Vreyolan residue of dust would be easier to hide in, if a man had a pressure suit or even a helmet and air supply. He moved to where he could IF look into the boat's hold. There was part of load still on pallets inside. They'd been loaded aboard with a fork truck, then, or something like it. The pallets rested on a temporary deck, to which the load was lashed by cargo nets. But from the overhead, limp ply-fabric hung. Those were airbags that would be inflated to keep the load more secure. Would they bulge down too far at the sides? No; between the pallet-loads and the curved bulkheads, there was space they wouldn't fill. He examined the hatch-edges carefully to make sure the pressure seal was all right. He didn't want to breath space if he rode this particular boat down. He peered in and forward, but the hold was too dark for him to see the doorway into the crew compartment. Surely there'd be one. He was excited with the idea now. He rejoined the group and listened te whatever the guide had to say about this part of the ship. From here, they'd go to one more place -- a hydroponics compartment -- then they'd have ship's-courtesy refreshments. After that, it wouldn't be long to TL. Uj ast call. All passengers should J --  be within Superwall B. Translocation in four minutes." Of the breakfast group, only Edna Ludlow showed any nervousness. "Oh, dear. I wish I'd stayed in the stateroom." Her husband grinned. Bud Vollander looked at her more seriously. "You're within Superwall C here. Not that there's any danger worth calculating." Renfrew Cullan signalled the waiter for more beverage, then smiled at Tom. "You're the expert, Santos. Just what are chances?" Tom, annoyed, said, "I'm not an expert. As I understand it, before translocation these Boklan ships send a small sensor-drone through, packed with instruments. In the very unlikely event that the target area contains any solid matter as big as a pinhead the drone will find it. The drone comes back and reports automatically, and if everything's clear the ship translocates. TTie only thing that could go wrong is that some object could be moving into the target area at a respectable fraction of light-speed. That doesn't occur naturally, of course." Ednal insisted, "But what if some other ship..." Tom said, "Well, you wouldn't have time to realize what was happening. But the chances compare to this: suppose two people on two firing rifles into space, deliberately aiming away from each other. Even if both made a mistake, or went insane, or something, the chances of two bullets colliding head-on would be pretty small. Do you see?" Edna smiled. "It does sound small." Jim Cresmer was watching a chronometer. "Here it comes." The P. A. system said, 'Translocation in four seconds." Tom tried not to hold his breath. There was a ping, then an almost imperceptible shudder of the room. A minute IF went by; two; a fraction of a third. The voice said, "Translocation completed. Zenner's sun is in easy telescope range." Tom wondered if the others at the table were silent because they felt as he did -- a little frightened; uncertain; not knowing whether the vague sense of tremendous distances gone, of eons lost, were imagination or not. Or the very faint visualizations that flashed into the mind were gone -- beauties too wonderful to grasp; horrors beyond dreaming. In any case, the feeling went away fast. OuUan said, "Well, halfway. What are you going to do the rest of the trip, Santos? You don't seem to be interested in cards or anything." Tom already had an idea that might camouflage his escape. "I'm going to study the ship's hydroponics, if they'll let me. They're way beyond anything Earth knows, or Merob or Vreyol for that matter. I may be able to turn the study into money when I get home." eal dirt?" Cullan asked Tomtv in surprise. They and a junior ship's officer were outside Superwall B. "I didn't know that! y aren't they hydroponics like the others we've seen?" The guide explained, "It is not ordinary dirt that you would find on a planet, sir. Most of it is a metal compound for absorbing hard radiation. As long as we need a layer of it anyway we put it in granular form, mix in plant nutrients and make it do double duty, yes?" Tom stared aroun# the vast compartment. It was like the size of a football field. From where they stood, a long walkway led through the virtual jungle to the far end and on into the next compartment. Practically all of Superwall B was layered with this. "Are any edibles grown out here?" No, sir. Well, except for a few private plots the crew maintains. The edibles aren't as radiationresistant as these trees. Of course, it's seldom we have to take hard radiation." Tom nodded. "How about oxygen? There must be a lot releas out here. Do you use it?" "Yes, sir, normally. But if it at all doubtful, the inner hydroponics can yield plenty. Not to mention the stored reserves. The safety factor is about six to one, yes?" Tom said, "I certainly appreciate your throwing all this open to me. You won't have to worry about Earth competition for a while, though. It'd be generations before we can work up anything like this." The Bokl looked pleasant. "We do not worry about competition, passenger Yberra. The galaxy is very big, and space societies few in comparison." Later Tom lay in bed, wondering how Hweki was assessing his interest in the greenery. Once again he resisted the urge to turn on a light and look at the clock. When he'd slept, if he could, the roomlights went on for morning, he'd still have plenty of time. The actual timing would have to be a guess, of course. He couldn't estimate within ten hours when they'd be in radio range. Nor could he know what the information from Vreyol might be, or what Hweki would do. There were two reasons he must wait as long as he dared. First, because the sooner he disappeared, the more time they'd have to look for him. He hoped they'd spend it searching the greenery for him or his corpse. Second, it was going to be a long ordeal in the trashboat. A man might go insane. He rolled over restlessly and reshaped the pillow. Maybe, instead of trying to sleep, he ought to lie here and practice patience. "Damn," he muttered, "I've made up my mind. Why can't I simply relax until it's time?" But he couldn't. VI R enfrew Cullan dished up scrambled eggs. "I wonder what kind of hotel we'll have on Zenner. I hope we'll find a chef who can at least speak Meroban." Edna Ludlow said, "It'll be in the Meroban settlement, won't it? Surely they won't put us where we can't make ourselves understood!" All of them looked at Tom. Annoyed, he said, "It'll be the Boklan hotel at the spaceport, probably. The staff will speak Meroban and a dozen other languages." Bud Vollander said, "Yes, they have a fine hotel on Merob. And we don't know the political situation in the Meroban sector of Zenner." Cullan asked Tom, "What do you think?" Tom tried to control his irritation. "I only heard the same things the rest of you did. You know, of course, that the Bokla keep planetary control. Any local police have to clear with them. The Meroban Embassy will be Fist, but I doubt if the rest of the sector will. Maybe it'll be split." Edna said, "Well, anyway, I don't want to stay there. I wish we didn't even have to go  to Vreyol. I'd rather even have to learn some other language." Tom couldn't stand any more. He pushed back his chair. "Look; I'm afraid I'll have to excuse myself. There's a chemist I want to talk to. see you at lunch, okay?" He took the shortest route to his stateroom. It was several hours before the time he'd planned; but nothing could be worse than this tension. He hurriedly filled plastic bags with water and the most concentrated rations in the refrigerator, sealed them, arranged them on a cord to tie around his waist. Over it he donned his loosest coverallsuit and added a weather jacket so his waistline wouldn't attract attention. He made a call and arranged an appointment in one of the labs. Then, shaky with excitement, he left the stateroom... still clutching the jackphone in his hand. Angrily he stuffed it into a pocket. Avoiding the traveled corridors, he got to the transfer point with the huge vistawall. There were still tours coming and going. He edged around until one was there that included four humans. IF When it left, he slipped into the car with it and took a seat at the rear. Several times the guide looked in his direction, but showed no sign of knowing he had an extra passenger. At the aft chamber Tom waited his chance, then slipped beyond the same trashboat. The load was bigger now, but there was still more to come. He looked around nervously, saw no crewmen, and hastily climbed aboard. Once behind the load, he stood a moment breathing deeply in relief. Then he hunted for a small dark space against the off bulkhead. He chose one and squirmed himself into it; crawled a few feet and found a slightly wider spot. He began unloading his emergency rations. Now the ordeal was begun. He'd brought along tranquilizers, but he daren't use them yet; he must be alert. After a while he looked at his watch. Five minutes had passed. One five-hundredth, possibly, of the period he'd have to endure. Now that he was here, he felt very foolish; but he was committed. Most immediately, he worried about the appointment he'd broken. He hoped the chemist wouldn't report it to Ship's Security too soon. U tter inactivity was a new experience. As a young man he'd been an athlete; then there'd been study, girls, and whatnot. After college he'd gotten on with an Earth firm pioneering into space. That had been merely within the Solar System, then; but alien contacts were growing, and all the ybung men wanted to head Out. After a couple of years Tom got his break with Wioon Lek, Chartered, just then establishing warehouses and offices on Earth. They'd needed a few Terran employees off-planet. And Wioon seemed to have taken a personal liking to Tom. It had been a pretty wonderful day when Tom boarded a Meroban ship. If he'd thought the old job on Earth was boring, he should have had a foretaste of this. He tried to relax, squirmed and tried to relax again. He sipped water and chewed a little dried meat. He looked at his watch so often that finally he took it off and put it in a pocket. Six hours passed somehow. Suddenly there was stronger light. He lay still, pulse pounding audibly. Presently there were sounds he recognized as the whole chamber coming to life -- the rumble of boats on rails, the whine of forktrucks, Boklan voices. Final loading had begun. It startled him when there were noises close by, followed by a jar. But it was only another pallet load of bricks coming aboard. The ones next to him relayed the impulse, and he wondered fleetingly if they'd be shoved in, crushing him, but they weren't. He remembered they were already lashed down. More pallets came aboard and were maneuvered into place. Then, finally, a hissing came from overhead. He saw the airbags swell and touch the top of the load, fit themselves around it, press down at the sides. But they stopped when there was still room for him to stand up. After that the hatch was closed, and he heard it seal. There were sounds forward in the pilot compartment now, and someone entered the crew compartment to open the door to the hold and shut it, making sure it was latched. Then the sounds subsided. It wasn't completely dark, as he'd expected. There were glowlamps in the hold somewhere. He took a trank, but it didn't seem to affect him. He lay listening to the sounds and squirming from one uncomfortable position to another. After a while, angry at his stupidity, he realized there was no reason he shouldn't sit up. He was as jerky and full of improbable fears now as an old maid. He took another trank. When ten hours had passed, he knew they were within radio range of #nner. Now, if not before, Hweki would be looking for him. About that time he realized that part of his discomfort was the need to urinate. He hesitated a while, then got out one of the extra plastic bags he'd brought and took care of the need. After that the relief was so great he could sit and relax a little. Time seemed to lose its sequence now. Memories and apprehensions somehow got mixed up. His head jerked up with a snap, and he realized he'd dozed. Well, that was fine. He lay down again. Absently he rubbed his fingers over the bricks beside him. They'd make a good building wall; with a strong mortar they might not need reinforcement. And the insulation would be very good. He wondered how much of the cost of compressing and fusing the dust was offset by the selling price. That was the factor. Dust or bricks, the deceleration out of orbit would be the same. Time dragged on, dislocated or not. Now and then he wondered if he were going insane. He vacillated from periods of comfortable dozing to tense, almost unbearable worry. He didn't think he could have made it without the tranks. He looked at his watch -- somehow he'd forgotten to do that for a long time -- and was astounded how much time had elapsed. But why hadn't they left the ship? He got to his feet in panic. It must have been an hour after that when he began to hear air whistling outside the hull. They must have left the ship while he was dozing. In sudden haste, he began collecting his things and shrugged back into the jacket. But he had plenty of time. He was all ready fifteen minutes before the boat touched down. H e'd reconciled himself to having, possibly, to wait for dark. What puzzled him was the lack of activity outside the boat. The crew had left, audibly, and there were only faint distant sounds. The hold was still sealed. Finally he squeezed his way forward to the door. He put his ear against it and heard nothing then, cautiously, turned the handle. The latch clicked open. He waited tensely, but heard nothing beyond. Slowly, he eased the door open. IP The crew department and the pilot department beyond were dark. Evidently it was night. That might explain the lack of activity; the hold would stay sealed until some customer arrived with a truck, next day. He hurried forward and tried to see out the two small glass ports. All he saw was a wall, against which the nose of the ship was parked. He didn't dare turn on a televiewer, of course. There was no use waiting any longer. He tried one of the side doors, found it unlocked and pushed it open. It was a short step down to the ground. With a quick look around, he scurried for the darkest nearby shadow. Those were at the rear of the building -- a warehouse -- where a high fence, covered with large-leafed vine, ran. He got the impression there was a street beyond. He peered down the narrow alley between building and fence, then turned to look at the spaceport. He was on the quiet side. Beyond the mileide field were hangars and warehouses, some of them lighted, and parked boats. He could make out Boklans walking about. Beyond the low bufldings loomed a very large hotel. He hurried along back of the building until he saw a gate in the fence, paused to look and listen, then slipped to the gate. It was latched, but unlocked. A road came in here, and he could see that the town beyond was a suburb, more smalbbusiness then residential. He made sure the street was empty and walked along it toward a lighted avenue. On the avenue, male and female Bokla eyed him curiously as he walked under a light. No doubt he looked seedy. He walked until he met a Bokla less neat than the others, and approached him. "Excuse me. Where is the Meroban sector?" The native probably understood only the word "Meroban." He stared at Tom for a moment, then turned and pointed. A s Tom expected, the poorest part of the sector was away from the port. He found a cheaplooking hotel, but hesitated. He needed a razor, or some substitute. He walked to a sundry store and settled for a keen knife. To satisfy the proprietor's doubts, he made shaving motions, which fascinated the Meroban. Then he went to the hotel. The clerk, too, was curious. "You speak excellent Meroban. You have just come from Merob, yes?" "A few days ago. With things as they are, I couldn't be choosy about transportation. But I have money to pay for the room." The clerk grinned. "In advance, of course. Four tals, with the bath." Tom found the room and looked longingly at the bed. But he'd have to see Paib Salang tonight, if he could. He undressed, and first of all sponged off his clothes and hung them to dry. Then he essayed the chore of shaving with the knife and common soap, and finally had a hot, very satisfying bath. When he dressed again, he looJced presentable -- at least reasonably so. He fished in his pocket for the jackphone, then hesitated. Maybe he'd better not call from his room. He left, waving to the clerk, who blinked at his cleanness, and walked down the street to a snack shop where he ordered a meat sandwich and the equivalent of coffee. He carried them to a corner table, sat down and plugged the phone into the wall receptacle. He allowed himself a bite of sandwich and a gulp of beverage, then leaned close to the phone. "I wish to speak to Paib Salang, this sector. Collect." There was a confirming ping, then an electronic hum. He waited tensely. Finally a voice said, "Paib Salang speaks. Who calls?" "Code Nine Four Seven." A pause, then, "Are you in privacy?" "Privacy enough." "Man Tom! I thought you dead! There has been no word from Merob since Wioon died!" Tom said, "I have an heirloom he wanted you to deliver." An indrawn breath. "Where are you?" Tom told him. Another pause. "Two blocks to your left as you face the port is Klindar Street. Turn up it toward the port. Four blocks along is my house, number eight twenty-nine. Do not let anyone see you enter the vestibule. Ring once, then twice, then once again. Can you start now?" K lindar was a fairly well lighted street thjit grew more prosperous as he went. At the corner before his objective he paused, looking ahead. A solitary Meroban was ambling on a block beyond, in the other direction. He waited until it turned a corner. As he moved again a human voice whispered in English, "Santos!" He whirled, eyes searching the shadows. Then he saw a hand gesturing. "Over here! Quickly!" Angry and suspicious, he took a step that way, but stayed out of reach. "Cullan! What the devil are you doing here?" "Watching for you, of course! Quickly! Out of sight!" Tom moved into a shadow. "I've got an appointment!" "Keep your voice down. We knew you'd try to reach Paib Salang, so we staked out the neighborhood. Bud Vollander's down the other way. Paib's been in custody for a couple of days." Tom stared at him. "I just talked to Paib." "No, you didn't. If you called there, some Fist officer talked to you." As Tom hesitated, Cullan chuckled. "Doubt me, eh? Just watch the house for a minute. It's the seventh one up, on the left." Tom turned to look up the street. It was less than two minutes, he was sure, before he saw an aircar's lights descending. The craft landed atop the house, and Meroban figures tumbled out to run toward the roof entrance. He made out Fist uniforms. IF "Come onl" Cullan urged. "The street will he swarming in a minute! Dismayed, Tom went with him. Cullan led the way through what seemed to he a deserted basement, through the back yard, over a fence and through another yard grown with reedlike stuff. Somewhere, a domesticated animal yawped. Another fence and a walkway beneath a lighted window, and they were in an alley. A block along that, Cullan turned down a dark street. "I've got a hotel room not far away. If we can make that we'll be safe for a while. I've made arrangements to smuggle you out of town." I 'hey put on a drunk act as they went by the clerk. The room was on the second floor. Cullan closed the door behind them and set the lock, then turned to grin at Tom. "Whew. That was dose. I thought we'd lost you. I need a drink, if you don't." He went into the bathroom and emerged with a bottle and a glass. "Real Earthside bourbon!" He poured a stiff drink and offered it to Tom. When Tom hesitated, he laughed. "Still don't trust me, eh? Well, I'll drink first." He drained the glass, refilled it and offered it to Tom again. Tom couldn't see anything tricky about the glass or bottle, and he was beginning to be ashamed of his doubt. He took the drink and downed it. Cullan said, "Sit down; we're all right for an hour or so. How the devil'd you get off Obolis?' Toni told him, "I hid in a trashboat." Cullan laughed. "They searched all over Superwall B. You're lucky you didn't smother in the dust. We didn't know what had happened. Thought you might be dead. And when we found Paib had been arrested, we almost gave up. The Fists must have had a lot on him, to convince the Bokla. Well, it's okay now. I'll phone down for some sandwiches." He started toward a wall receptacle, drawing a jackphone from his pocket, then stopped and looked down at Tom's left hand. "You didn't lose the ring, I see." "No. And I've already had a sandwich. But -- " He stopped. Suddenly he realized what Cullan had said. Dust Cullan had said. Dust, Cullan didn't know about the Boklan residue bricks. But he knew about the Vreyolan dust residue. A terrible thought squirmed in Tom's mind. He tried to control his face, tried not to stare. But -- yes, with his hair dyed and skin stained, and with cheeks padded -- and with contact lenses over his blue irises -- Cullan could have posed for the picture of Santos Yberra. And he could be the saboteur. Maybe he'd ridden a trashboat down from Vreyol Kway, And maybe he, not the Fists, had gotten to Wioon Lek. A doublecross. Cullan was looking at him with concern. "Something wrong?" "Uh -- just a little dizzy. It'll pass." Tom could feel, or imagine he felt, something working in his own blood. The whiskey. His mind raced. If he'd been doped, he'd have only a few minIF utes. If he could get CuHan's attention off him for a moment... He pulled the ring off his finger and stepped forward, holding it out to Cullan. "Here. I'm damned glad to be rid of it." Cullan's control slipped just perceptibly. His face tightened as he stared at the ring; he reached out for it a little too greedily. Tom swung his left fist as hard as he could. Cullan reacted like a feline; jerked his head so the blow didn't land squarely. He went down, but he wasn't much stunned. His face was murderous now, and his hand was flashing up with a small weapon. Tom kicked him in the head, and he went limp. For a moment Tom leaned on a chair-back, feeling the onset of dizziness. Then he fumbled for his phone; mumbled into it, "Urgent. For Fourth Officer Hweki, ship Obolis, in orbit. Trace this call to the murderer. This is -- this is -- a false passport talking." He plugged the phone in, then staggered out the door and down the hallway. He wanted to be around a turn, at least, if Cullan revived, or confederates came, before Hweki did. W hen he revived he felt lightheaded, but otherwise all right. Hweki was looking down at him gravely. Tom tried to sit up in bed and found he could. A second Boklan whose neat uniform was not medical helped adjust pillows. The room was subtly alien: chairs low and short-seated, windows a trifle high. The first thing Tom said was, "You got him?" Hweki's head inclined in affirmation. "You almost kicked too hard. It would have been a shame not to be able to interrogate him." Tom relaxed against the pillows. "Did he sabotage Vreyol Kway? And try to interrogate Wioon?" "Yes. Wioon was too trusting of a hired desperado." Tom asked, "What about his confederates?" Hweki made a gesture of wonder. "He had none. The man is incredible! He did it all by himself -- all of it -- Ussmed, and Paib; meanwhile posing as Renfrow Cullan and various other people. He must have worked on split-second schedules. And the acting; and the deduction! And you should hear the audacity of his schemes for selling information, once he got it. He'd already made overtures to Vreyol and to several other races, including my own. My superiors thought they were getting feelers from a well organized criminal cartel!" Tom thought about that a moment, then asked puzzledly, "Paib, did you say? He killed Paib too?" "Of course. After interrogating him with drugs, as he did Ussmed. He didn't have much luck with either. They didn't know about the ring, or even for sure if you were carrying the secret. Actually, he could have given them information. When he saw the ring, he knew it was significant because of the initials on it. He, of all people, had reason to know you weren't Santos Yberra." Tom said, "But when he intercepted me near Paib's house, the Fist police really were coming!" "Naturally. He'd phoned them they'd find Paib's corpse. Another example of his quickness. And, for another -- we estimate he had about fifteen minutes to scout the neighborhood, find a place to intercept you and reconnoiter a line of escape." Tom sighed. "God. And he'd have fooled me too, except for one chance remark he made. What about the ring? What message does it carry?" Hweki said, "It carries the whole technology of the Elite weapon. The stone is artificial, built up layer by crystal layer. The pattern of impurities in it carries the text, which can be read out by a special electron microscope. We solved it fairly fast. There is the equivalent of many books." Tom looked at him. "What are you going to do with it?" "I think we will just keep it. Such a weapon is safer in our hands than in some." Tom nodded slowly. "I agree. What about that whiskey he gave me? Why didn't it affect him too?" "I presume," the Security Officer said, "he'd already swallowed an antidote." Tom felt himself flush. "Of course. I was pretty stupid, wasn't I? All the way. I was as lucky as he was smart. I guess I was even incredibly lucky to get down on the boat. If it hadn't happened to park where it did, probably have been caught." Hweki looked amused. "It wasn't exactly luck; we arranged for it to park there, and we had you in sight most of the time you were in the open after that. But we lost you for a little while when Cullan spirited you away. That little while was almost too much." Tom was staring at him. "You knew I was -- all the time, you you knew I was in the boat?" "Yes." Tom thought about it, and was able to grin wryly. "A hell of an outlaw I would make." "Oh, you did quite well, man Larrow. As a matter of fact. I'm going to offer you a job in my organization. With your race beginning to move into space, I need a human or two. But you will have to learn one basic principle, and this is an excellent lesson. You must consider your adversaries more thoroughly -- not only their mentalities, but their physiology as well." 'p'om lay stunned for. a minute. A "A -- a job, in space? I -- I'm very grateful! I guess I didn't really want to go back to Earth anyway. Not permanently. But what did I overlook?" "Think, man Larrow. You hid well from our eyes. But we are not evolved from the same kind of animal as you are. I know that on Earth you have certain animals with long muzzles." Tom felt his face growing very red. "You... smelled me?" IF "Do not be offended. The odor of humans is no more disagreeable to us than other natural odor. And a lot less disagreeable than the chemicals Cullan used to mask his own trails. The way he misled us amounts almost to genius. But the first crewman who approached the trashboat you were in smelled you. He report at once, of course, and I did a little quiet sniffing myself before deciding to let you carry out your adventure. And of course I knew from my earlier talks with you that you were no assassin, but a decent person forced into a few honorable lies. Man Larrow, we can smell emotional reactions, too!" A hairy mountain bore This corkscrew-twisted ivory spear. Now crumbling, cracked, and brown with age. On four Vast legs he stood, with questing trunk and flapping ear. He stands no more. This massy, shaggy one. With bulging paunch and wicked eye. Bestrode the prairies of the past, and none Belayed his path; with brassy screams he made them fly. His day is done. I hope my skull a brusque. Neat card does not some day, inside A glassy case, in some museum's dusk. Proclaim as that of: "Man, believed extinct," beside The mammoth's tusk. L. Sprague de Camp IF  Feature The Purpose of Fandom Our tAar in Fandom gives us a fan's-eye view of the field and some graduates T o begin with, there is no purpose to fandom. None at all. It's just a hobby... something you're in for fun. But the fact you're a fan means something, in a way. It means that your interest in science fiction is more than whim deep. You read science fiction -- not casually, when you stumble across a paperback or a magazine by chance -- but avidly: you seek it out and collect it. For this reason, sf means more to you than just "something to read." There are lots of folks who read, say, mysteries, or historicals, or westerns. But who would think of collecting them? What for? -- they aren't that deeply interested in them. But there's something about science fiction, some indefinable element or ingredient that makes its readers fiercely partisan. They love it; they want to share it with others, to convert their friends to sf. Science fiction is the only form of popular literature I know that imbues its readers with the urge to proselytize. Oh, I don't mean to suggest that every single last individual who ever picked up a single copy of Gory Rocketship Thrillbook was automatically transmogrified into a wildeyed sf fan, committed for life to his hobby. But an awful lot of us were... Fan Into Pro I like to think that those of us who love science fiction and fantasy tend generally to be more imaginative and, potentially at least, more creative people than the norm. At any rate (and I won't pause to debate the point, which is pretty dubious), there definitely is a very strong and ever-present tendency for science-fiction readers to become science-fiction writers. Again, I know of no other branch or school of pop fiction in which this is demonstrably true. Very few sf writers come from The Outside World; most all of them rise up from the fan ranks. Now, this just doesn't happen in other forms of fiction: writers, real professionals, turn to cranking out mysteries or gothic romances or comic-book continuity or westerns or historicals because it's a fast, easy buck. Not because they love the field. In a very real and true way, I think it could be stated that this is the "purpose" of fandom. Fandom is a proving ground from which the professionals of tomorrow are (as it were) launched. This "purpose" was not in anyone's mind when the first attempts to organize fandom were made. It just happened. And here are some exciting examples. Editors and Publishers If you are one of those nice people who read this column every month, you already know my history-maldng first example of faninto-pro. A few columns back, I told you the amazing experience of the first lucky chap ever to realize every fan's dearest dream: Charles D. Hornig, the #-year-old sf fan from Jersey City who was picked out of nowhere to become editor of a real professional science-fiction magazine. Wonder Stories, When this incredible break happened to Hornig, it shook the fandom of the day considerably. But it wasn't long until the same sort of thing was happening to other fans, and it is still going on today. Let's see... There was Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer was one of the very earliest fans, and he helped organize one of the first proto-fanclubs, the Science Correspondence Club, about #. He was active in early fanclubs, contributed to and help edit fanzines and so on and, somehow or other, eventually ended up at Ziff-Davis as editor of Amazing Stories, He founded Fantastic Adventures later and, later yet, left Ziff-Davis to found some new magazines such as Other Worlds and Imagination and the occultist magazine Fate which is still going. rence Hamling, a Chicago fan who joined the fan ranks sometime about #. Hamling was a prominent member of the Chicago chapter of the great Science Fiction League. He became one of Palmer's associates on Other Worlds and succeeded him when Palmer left the magazine. Hamling foimded the short-lived Imaginative Tales and went on to build a truly fantastic publishing empire when he founded the early Playboy imitation Rogue and organized Regency Books as their publisher (Regency editors who worked for him were, by odd coincidence, all one-time sf fans like Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison and Larry Shaw). Today, Hamling publishes Corinth Books out of San Diego. When Ray Palmer was editing Amazing Stories he bought some of the first stories of another oldtime sf fan, Chester S. Geier. Geier was one of Palmer's most popular and prolific writers, and, by another of those peculiar coincidences that fill the history of sf fandom and make it so interesting, he followed in Palmer's footsteps, and to this day he is editor of Fate Magazine, The Prophet of Ghu Another early fan was Donald A. WoUheim, easily one of the most active, important and famous men in fannish history, and perhaps the one who had the strongest influence on the shape and institutions of fandom today. Wollheim was the (the Fantasy Amateur Press Association). And the founder of the first just-for-fun fannish pseudore"slan shack." And inventor of the first just-for-fun fannish pseudo religion, ghughuism. Wollheim also invented the idea of holding world science-fiction conventions. At a speech given in # at the first Eastern SF Convention in Long Island City, Wollheim proposed holding a world convention the following year in New York City, a suggestion enthusiastically endorsed by convention attendees who nominated him chairman of the historic # Nycon I. Don Wollheim started founding and editing science-fiction magazines in #, with Stirring Science Stories, Stirring has at least one distinction: a copy of this now-forgotten magazine was the deciding factor that turned young reader Philip K. Dick into a dedicated sf reader many, many years before he blossomed into an sf writer, author of (among a dozen other books) the famous novel The Man in the High Castle. D.A.W. also founded the shortlived Cosmic Stories and, when he joined the Avon Book Company in #, became the first ex-fan paperback editor. Wollheim edited the first paperback sf anthology in history, The Pocketbook of Science Fiction (#) and the first hardcover sf anthology of all. The Viking Portable Novels of Science (#). And he founded another short-lived mag, Out of This World Adventures, which is famed as the only sf mag with a comicbook bound in the centerfold. The Hardcover Boys Lots of science-fiction fans edited magazines or paperbacks... New York fan Larry Shaw, who once dwelt in a slan shack called "Little Jarnevon" and was later to found Infinity Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures, its companion magazine, to edit paperbacks under the Regency imprint and who is currently the editor of Lancer Books... Robert W. Lowndes, an oldtimer from Science Fiction League days, has headed a host of prozines like The Original Science Fiction Stories and others, now edits The Magazine of Horror, Famous Science Fiction, etc,, plus editing paperbacks for Airmont Books and hardcover science fiction for Avalon... and Forrest J Ackerman, the Giant of Los Angeles, who runs a passel of movie magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster World IF and Screen Thrills... and loads of other people too numerous to mention. But there's another aspect of editing that the fans have gone into, and that's hardcover books. Right after World War II new book publishers opened up left and right, and plenty were devoted to science fiction exclusively. Like Shasta Press, dream-child of two well known Chicago fans, Mel Korshak and Ted Dikty, which published a good number of good ones, including Denver fan Stanley Mullen's Merrittesque fantasy. Kinsmen of the Dragon. Or Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's Fantasy Press which put Doc Smith's "Skylark" series into hardcover, as well as the "Lensman" novels and books and others. Or Gnome Press, founded by fans David A. Kyle and Marty Greenberg, which published Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy and Howard's "Conan" series. Or the indefatigable the #'s possessed by the itch to publish, who actually had that rare thing in fandom: a goodly supply of ready cash! Crawford began with an incredibly ambitious printed fanzine called Marvel Tales, with fiction by Lovecraft, David H. Keller, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Clifford D. Simak and others of comparable note. Then Crawford published pamphlets by Clark Ashton Smith, etc. His first venture into hardcover was an historic one: the first and just about the only book of Lovecraft's published in his lifetime. The Shadow Over Innsmouth  (#), today a very rare collector's item. Crawford also published the fine pamphlet collection, Garden of Fear, launched a slick newsstand sf magazine in # named Spaceway, and for many years after the war operated a hardcover house, F.P.C.I., which brought much of Sprague de Camp and L. Ron Hubbard into print. Among all these magazine editors and book publishers who were once fans are a certain number perhaps better known to you as sciencefiction writers. Damon Knight and Lester del Rey, both old-time fiction fans and later extremely prominent sf writers, had a fling or two at editing magazines. Over in England, virtually aU the sf mags drew their editors from the fan founded Science Fantasy, and Ted Camell, who founded New Worlds, And leave us not overlook Frederik Pohl. It's a debatable point whether Fred Pohl (whose fannish career goes back at least to # and the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, is better known as the author, co-author or editor of no less than #I books (by my count) or as the editor of Galaxy, If and Worlds of Tomorrow, But out of all this, I hope you get my point. If science-fiction fandom does not "officially" have any purpose for its organized existence other than giving pleasure to its adherents, it at least serves a very useful purpose which supplies it a rationale. That is, the thing acts as a breeding-ground and training field for the science-fiction professionals of tomorrow. This is a positive, "good thing" in many ways: it gives tiie field a tradition (auors are "bom" into it, so to speak, and when they switch to professional they know what they're doing, unlike the hack writers who from time to time stray into the field and try to make a success of it without really knowing or caring much for science fiction as literature) and it works to constantly improve the field (most editors are just "doing a job," but exfans working in sf as editors and publishers have a sense of dedication). And the ones who become writers in the field generally try to advance it, to help it mature and break new ground. A truly surprising number of the best and most famed science-fiction writers of all time are ex-fans. Next issue we'll take a look at some of them. Next Month in If (Author of A Cose of Conscience, The Hour Before Earthrise, etc.) Retiefs One-Man War Against the Galaxy by Keith Laumer And concluding Dramatic Riverworld Novel by Philip Jose Farmer IF IF  Novelette' Adam's Eva The world of robots was just waiting for humans to serve. But where were the humans? I A dam Pilot was bom on I July #. His parents, Sam and Ivan Pilot, bad put together every component in his body from standard parts supplied by the factory. "This is indeed a blessed moment, brother," intoned Sam Pilot, his metal face gleaming as he lovingly polished the unborn individual with an oily rag. "Yeah," Ivan Pilot grunted. His gaze slid from his relative to the countdown clock and back again. "Yessir!" Sam Pilot enthused. "Few joys can be compared to parenthood. Parenthood is the legitimate fulfillment of the individual, the giathering together and assemblage of factory components in the unique act. Even if it means working overtime -- and overtime itself is an honor that every self-respecting individual..." 'Tour minutes till birth," cut in Ivan Pilot. Sam Pilot looked up, blinked. "Sure. Four minutes till the blessed event. Four minutes before yet another individual is launched into the world for the better service of society." Beaming; he squirted a few drops of Government Standard Oil on Adam's head and continued polishing. Ivan Pilot reached beneath a pile of cotton waste and grasped the handle of a specially geared screwdriver. "Better check readings," he said quietly. "Yes, sir," replied Sam Pilot. "This is our great moment, brother, our personal act of creation, our affirmation of the dignity and worth of the individual. This here will be the happiest event in my life." With that he stamped a dated birthmark under Adam's left arm and crossed to the control panel. Ivan Pilot took two strides to Adam's side. Swiftly he fitted the screwdriver to Adam's chest, removed six screws, then lifted the mod plate. Inside were three dials set at maximum. As he turned the nearest dial, there was a blinding flash, then darkness. A dam Pilot sat up shakily, blinked, looked 'round. The room was full of smoke, and there was a smell of burning. On the floor Ivan Pilot lay crumpled. In a corner Sam Pilot cowered, face hidden by his hands. "Why should this happen to me," moaned Sam Pilot. "I'll never outlive the disgrace. A relative of mine actually undoing the... no!" "What's happened?" gasped Adam, rubbing his eyes. Sam Pilot looked flinchingly at him. "Shameful, immodest, indecent!" he wailed. "But what's wrong?" pleaded Adam bewilderedly. "You're exposed!" Sam Pilot croaked. "Do yourself up." Only then did Adam notice his mod plate. Hastily he crammed it on, replaced the screws with his fingers. "Are you decent now?" Sam Pilot asked. "I -- I think so," replied Adam. Sam Pilot turned round, wiped his forehead with an oily rag. He led Adam into an adjoining room and there he said sternly, "Let us try to forget this shameful incident. You must never speak of it again." "But what's so shameful?" asked Adam. "What's shameful?" spluttered Sam Pilot. Then he bit his lip, swallowed, rubbed his hands together and said, "Sit down, my son, and I will tell you what my fathers told me, and then you will understand." And so Adam sat at the feet of his father and learned of the shameful screws that he must never again touch except in due process of lawful cleansing. "Remember, my son," concluded Sam Pilot, "and let what has happened be a lesson to you. You may at times be tempted to undo those screws, but it is your privilege, your fulfillment to overcome this temptation and divert your energies and drives into the wholesome pursuit of service to the community." "What is this service to the community?" Adam couldn't help asking. "And does it really fulfill one?" Sam Pilot's eyes slid from Adam's. He fidgeted, jumped up. "Service is IF modity known to individuals," he droned. "It is the greatest, most wonderful, most honorable and deepest experience there is. Indeed, without service I can safely say there would be no reason for our existence." "But what is it?" Adam asked entreatingly. "That, my son, you will discover," Sam Pilot replied and disappeared from the room. Adam was about to follow his father, when instinct made him act otherwise. From a dispenser in the wall he drew a tablespoon of oil, swallowed it, and with a warm glow of well-being spreading through his system he took an escalator and found himself in the street. Composedly he worked his way onto the fast lane of the conveyor strip and looked about him. O n every side gleaming buildings hundreds of stories high stretched away towards the horizon. Some were being built, others torn down, and everywhere immense billboards Adam listened to snatches as he whirled along. "... three thousand diplomat's suites with indoor landscape gardens four thousand bachelor flats with split-level swimming pools nine thousand luxury apartments with rotating living rooms and panoramic windows ff Adam listened in awe and wondered where he would live. Five minutes later he arrived at the airport. He left the conveyor strip, passed rows and rows of waiting taxicraft, and entered the echoing building. From a computer he drew a sheet of instructions: Flight # New York to Paris, leaving in an hour, he read and proceeded onto the apron. As he neared the gleaming jet, a yellow Government Standard tanker disconnected its hoses and drove off, and Adam saw a personal service individual waiting at the foot of the gangway. He knew what she was by her smaller stature, slender shape and lavender skin. "Morning, Captain. I'm Eva Hostess," she greet, holding out her hand. Adam took the slim fingers in his, noticed with approval the healthy oily sheen of her exterior. "Should be a wonderful trip for the Passengers," Eva said enthusiastically. "Fve managed carnations for every table, and the very latest film for flight showing." "That's great," replied Adam, and found himself still holding her hand. His glance flickered to her mod plate and he felt a strange desire to run his fingers over her lavender surfaces. "Please inspect the . passenger compartment. Captain," Eva said and led him up the gangway and into the cabin. Adam looked round. The windows sparkled, safety-belt buckles shone, paper bags were discretely tucked beside every seat and on each table colored flower petals had been cunningly woven to form the word "Welcome." "Fine, fine," Adam said admiringly and asked about refreshments. Eva showed him the trolley with champagne, loibster salad, spring chicken, asparagus tips, alpine strawberries. "And what's this?" Adam asked, picking up a screw-top jar. "Caviar," answered Eva. Adam tried to turn the lid but it wouldn't budge. "Here, let me show you, Captain," Eva said, and with a few quick twists she flipped it off. Adam stared puzzledly and wondered why he hadn't been able to undo it. "I'll just whip up a few canapes," Eva said, spooning caviar neatly onto small squares of toast and cutting slivers of lemon. "Do you think the Passengers will like them?" "Sure," Adam murmured and nodded his head appreciatively. This was the sort of trim, efficient hostess he would always like to work with. Together they went down the gangway and waited to receive the Pissengers. Adam felt very proud standing in front of his shiny jet beside his smart hostess and began to understand what his father had meant by "the wholesome satisfactions of service to the community." It was great to think that a hundred and fifty Passengers would trustingly put their lives in his hands. "Oh, dam," Eva exclaimed, "I've forgotten the gifts." She hurried up the gangway and returned with a tray of souvenir flags; minute squares of (beautifully embroidered silk on diamond-studded gold pins. Some were decorated with stripes and stars, others were red with two crossed implements in the corner. "I sewed them myself," Eva told him proudly. At that moment the airport loudspeaker announced, "Will Passengers for flight ten to Paris please report to gate seventeen and embark?" Eva Hostess took two pairs of white kid gloves from her satchel and handed one to Adam. As he pulled them on he felt the nervous excitement every airline captain must feel the first time he waits to shake hands with his Passengers. Eva fiddled with the flags on her tray and kept glancing at the airport. "Here comes the bus," she said in an anxious tone. A dam watched the bus pull away from the terminal buildings, roll to a stop close to the gangway. The automatic doors swished open, an individual emerged, unrolled a red carpet, saluted, called out, "Will Passengers please transfer?" A minute later he called again in a louder voice, "Will Passengers please transfer, ladies and gentlemen!" Then he shrugged ihis shoulders, rolled up the carpet; the doors slid shut and the bus drove off. "But -- there aren't any Passengers," stuttered Adam. "Can't be helped," gulped Eva, and retreated up the gangway. "Do we just leave empty?" Adam blurted. "Of course," called Eva. "There's the schedule." Ground crews prepared to roll the gangways clear, and Adam climbed into the cabin. He ran his eye over the controls. Take-off systems. IF green. Electronic systems, green. Fuel systems... He paused, frowned, flicked the infra-wave angrily to send, "Hullo, Control," he radioed. "Main fuel tanks are empty, over." "Roger. Taxi back to maintenance. Flight canceled," Control replied. Bewildered, Adam jerked open the cabin door, strode into the passenger compartment. "What's going on?" he demanded. Eva Hostess sat slumped at a table, her head in a pile of flower petals. "You'll get used to it," she whispered unhappily. "There's a fuel shortage." "But suppose we'd had Passengers!" Adam protested. Eva looked up. "There aren't with tears. "Aren't what?" "Aren't ever any Passengers," she sobbed. "Never?" Adam gasped. Eva shook her head. "Not till now," she said bravely, wiped her eyes on some cotton waste and began clearing. II A s Eva emptied lobster salad, spring chicken, asparagus tips and strawberries into the refuse bin, Adam watched silently. When she had finished, he said firmly, "I'm going to complain to Control." "It's not eir fault," Eva told him. "They must have known about the fuel." "Oh, no," Eva assured him. "The tanker reported they'd filled us up." "Then it was the tanker's fault," Adam replied, beginning to get angry. "Of course it wasn't," Eva replied. "They'd been to the depot for fuel." "Well, who the hell's fault was t?" Adam burst out. "Nobody's fault," Eva explained. "If there's no oil in the pipeline you can't blame anyone." Adam felt there was something wrong with this statement, but wasn't sure what it was. He looked out of the window at the tankers, ground crews, airport buildings and asked baffledly, "But why aren't there any Passengers?" Eva Hostess swept up the rest of the flower petals, put away the souvenir flags before answering. "Perhaps," she said hesitantly, "perhaps it's because the service isn't good enough. Perhaps if we had garlands for every Passenger and scented the air with jasmine..." She paused, clapped her hands excitedly. 'That must be it. Just wait till next time." Together they left the plane and walked across to the terminal building. When they reached the entrance, Eva held out her hand. "Good-bye, Captain. We probably won't be on the same flight for some time." Adam clasped the small hand in his and stared into her eyes. "Can I see you off duty, then? How about tomorrow?" A pained expression flickered over Eva's face. "I'm never off duty. Captain," she replied with a sniff. "But I'm sure we would have made a wonderful crew and given the Passengers every satisfaction. Now I must see about those garlands." With that she dropped his hand, hurried into a door marked "Hostesses only". As the door swung shut, Adam bunched his fists helplessly. He took three deep breaths, then relaxed. He would visit Personnel, ask for Eva to be assigned to him permanently. "Yes, sir!" Adam said loudly and set off for Administration. Instead, he found himself walking out through the automatic doors, down the steps, past the waiting taxicraft, and returning to town on the fast lane of the conveyor strip. "Oh, well," he said with a shrug and gazed up again at the giant buildings. It would be great to have an apartment on the very top with a view over the city and Eva to arrange the flowers, he told himself. But at that moment he left the strip, crossed the street, and descended into an underground bunker. He walked down endless concrete passages to a bare numbered cell and entered. He drew his ration of oil from a wall dispenser, swallowed a tablespoonful, and with a comforting glow of well-being spreading through his system he carefully polished every inch of his skin with the remainder. Then, with a yawn, he lay down on a foam rubber bunk iind was soon asleep. E very day that week Adam was assigned a plane, but he only flew once and he never had any Passengers. He found the other hostesses a big disappointment. Their menus and cabin decorations left much to be desired, and as for their lavender skins and the rest, none of them bad that healthy oily sheen which miade him long to touch their surfaces with his fingers. The following Monday, Adam glimpsed a slim lavender figure crossing the tarmac carrying some boxes. "It's her!" he cri and set off in pursuit. Near the plane he caught her up. Eva swung round, and her face lit. "Why, Captain!" she called happily. "There's sure to be Passengers today, won't there? What's the met? Will they need airsick tablets?" "Hang the Passengers!" Adam replied. "Captain, please!" Eva protested. "That's hardly the attitude for a pilot about to fly." "I'm off duty," Adam told her. "Look, we must talk. Can't we go inside?" "No," Eva answered firmly. "I'm busy. There's the air to scent with jasmine, and..." "That's just it," Adam put in quickly. "You're the best hostess I've flown with. Can't we always work together?" Eva stiffened, said in a shocked tone, "What? Disobey flight instructions!""Why not?" "No!" Eva snapped. "Start disobeying instructions and you end up on the scrapheap." Turning her back on Adam, she lifted the lid of the top box, pulled aside the tissue paper and carefully drew out a garland of stephanotis. D uring the long, lonely months that followed, the memory of IF Eva bending over with the waxy flowers white against her lavender surfaces filled Adam with a warm glow that was his only solace. Day after day he sniffed the air to try and catch the sweet fragrance, but as the weeks passed and he never saw any sign of the trim lavender figure, he knew something must be wrong. He pestered the other pilots and hostesses, but they hadn't seen her. He spent his off duty hours on the airport roof, but without success. Every night when he returned to his cell and swallowed his ration of oil and the warm glow of well-being spread through his system, he made up his mind to ask Personnel where she was. But every morning when he arrived at the airport his resolution failed him. Adam neglected his work, became irritable with the other hostesses and his appetite suffered. One evening he couldn't face his oil, and he didn't drink it till the morning. As he gulped it down, the warm glow of well-being spread through his system, and when he arrived at the airport his resolution didn't fail him. He strode into Personnel and demanded to make an inquiry. A worried clerk individual glanced up from a filing cabinet, then saw it was Adam. "Oh," he said in a disappointed tone, "for a moment I thought... Ah, well, never mind. In any case, I can't help you." "y not?" "We're closed for card indexing and reorganization." "It's only a simple query," protested Adam. "There's no such thing," grumbled the clerk. "The computer's blown a circuit. It takcS half an hour to find the right card. Anyway you need authority from an Executive." "Okay," Adam replied, "lead on." The clerk individual laughed nervously, and his voice rose. "They haven't come in today. Left me overhere and when I've cross-indexed I'd chuck it only I'm indispensable. Don't you think they might show some consideration?" "Sure, sure," Adam replied. "I'll be. back." The following morning Adam visited Personnel, and the morning after, and the morning after. Finally he caught on. Storming into Personnel, he banged the desk, then noticed it was a new clerk individual. "We're closed for cross-indexing and reorganization," announced the new clerk, throwing cards into a shredder. "Yeah, I know," Adam said, "and the Executives aren't in either, correct?" The new clerk nodded. "Gives me time to get things straight. But they'll be in tomorrow." "Tomorrow, huh!" snorted Adam and strode across to the filing cabinets. He jerked open a drawer and pulled out a card: Miss Helen Hurst. Divorced. No apparent Inorganicist tendencies..., he read, and didn't understand a word. "Hey! Leave that alone," shouted the new clerk. "What are you playing at?" IF Ill Adam sighed. "I'm trying to trace a missing individual called Eva Hostess," he answered the question despondently. "Individual?" frowned the clerk. "Can't help you. We only keep records of Executives." "Then who deals with individuals?" "No one. They don't need to. Individuals are programmed for life. They're reliable." "Then Eva Hctess must still be working at the airport?" "Of course. Job permanency makes for efficiency. No point in changing individuals round." "But what about the clerk who was here yesterday?" Adam objected. The new clerk shrugged, "Oh, him? He had a breakdown. Not surprising with the state the records are in. Best place for him is the scrapheap." "Scrapheap?" Adam echoed, remembering what Eva had said. "What's that?" "Huh?" The clerk individual raised an eyebrow. "You must be new. That's the dump for derelicts, misfits, failures, crooks and anyone who can't measure up in certain ways to their job." "You mean, if an individual is missing, that's where he'll eventually wind up?" "Yes. And good riddance!" "How do I get there?" Adam demanded. 'Take any conveyor strip," the clerk told him and threw some more cards in the shredder. "They all end at the scrapheap." A n hour later, Adam found himself standing on the empty track at the end of the line. The first thing he noticed was a smell of burning rubber and a gloomy haze that blotted out the sun. In the distance reddish piles of refuse reached into the sky. Eva! Eva! he groaned. What could have driven her here. As he neared the scrapheap, the sounds of shouting, singing and the banging of metal objects reached his ears. Rounding a corner he came upon the cause of the disturbance. He stopped dead, gasped. On the ground half a dozen derelicts were sprawled in various attitudes, singing and clashing tin mugs against their drab-red bodies. Hurrying up to the nearest one, Adam said all in a rush, "What's wrong? Have you some disease? Can I help you?" The derelict stared at him, called out, "Hey, friends, look! Here's a shiny!" The singing stopped, and derelicts crowded round. "Have a drink, shiny," cried one, slapping him on the back. "Welcome -- hie -- to the scrapheap," called another. "Tis means a party. Come on, shiny, get lubricated." "No, thank you," Adam said firmly, and pushed aside the proffered mug. "I'm trying to trace a missing individual called Eva Hostess. Anyone seen her?" The derelicts muttered together, then shook their heads. "What you want with her?" asked one. "There's been some mistake," Adam replied. "I'm taking her back." At this there was commotion among the derelicts, and some began to laugh. "What? Leave the scrapheap!" cried one. "Shiny's crazy!" called another. "No one ever leaves the scrapheap," put in a third. Adam felt as if his head was going to burst. "No one ever leaves?" he echoed. "But what's the attraction?" "Tell him. Rusty," someone shouted. Adam noticed a small individual propped against a pile of junk whose limbs were so corroded he could hardly stand. "Yeah, wise him up, Rusty," bawled someone else. The corroded individual opened his mouth and immediately there was silence. "Ambition does it," he rasped and took a sip from his mug. "Ambition?" queried Adam, "Yeah, ambition," replied the corroded individual. "Take me. I started with a soda fountain, expanded to an ice-cream parlor, mushroomed to a seven-story sund saloon. Nothing was too good for the Customers. My specialty was Omelette Surprise Flambee in seventeen different temperatures." "Why did you chuck it?" asked Adam. The corroded individual took another sip. "After forty years in the business I made a mistake -- tasted the stuff. Horrible! Then I realized why there were never any Customers. It broke my heart." "But what made you come here?" Adam asked uzzledly. "This," replied the corroded individual, holding high his mug. "Glog, crude, slip, dope, lubricator, call it what you will." With that he drained the mug and fell back on the pile of junk. Adam looked round the other individuals and began to understand. "Where de you get that stuff?" he asked. "Can you draw your ration here?" "There ain't no -- hie -- ration," someone called. "There's a Government Standard pump round the corner. They serve anyone." A s Adam followed the directions, he tried to work out what had happened to Eva. The stephanotis garlands must have been her last desperate effort, and when the Passengers still didn't come... "'Step up, step up for your free issue of Government Standard Adam hastened towards the cries and soon came upon a pump. Beside it stood a gleaming attendant individual serving oil to a long queue. "Step up, step up and drink your fill. Forget your troubles, forget your woes. Better than a holiday. Better than work. Step up and drink your fill," chanted the attendant. Adam waited till the queue was served, then strode across. "This is criminal," he stormed. "You're turning them into addicts." "Quite right, friend," said the attendant reasonably. "Just hold out your mug. One fill can't do you any harm." IF "I haven't got a mug," Adam raged, "and I don't want any oil." "Course not," soothed the attendant. "Here, borrow mine." "No!" Adam shouted and threw the mug on the ground. The attendant picked it up, gave it a careful wipe. "Sorry, friend," he said. "Newcomers often have residual guilt complexes which I do my best to allay. That's my duty as scrapheap representative of the Highway Cleansing Department." Adam sank down on the stone curbing, put his head in his hands and mumbled, "I -- I'm rather confused. Can you explain?" "Certainly," replied the attendant. "If it weren't for me, these derelicts would clutter up the streets, steal honest individuals' oil rations and generally cause a disturbance. Instead they drift here." "But it's horrible letting them rust away." "Not at all," replied the attendant. "Death by rust is quite painless and even pleasant, I'm told. Besides, it rids society of its undesirables by a form of euthanasia which is entirely voluntary." He eyed Adam for a moment. "Are you sure you haven't any overwhelming problem, friend? Are you quite sure you don't want to take the easy way..." "No! No!" Adam shouted. The attendant sighed. "Pity. Then why exactly are you here?" Adam made a quick decision. "Look. You've got to help me. I'm searching for a personal service individual who has been missing a week. She's small, shapely, and has a lavender skin."  "Had!" interrupted the attendantindividual. "What do you mean?" "It's been raining recently." "No!" Adam groaned and clutched his head. Then an idea came to him. He straightened up and said, "All I need do is sit tight here. She's bound to show, isn't she?" "You haven't a hope," the attendant replied brightly. "There must be fifty pumps around the scrapheap. Better follow her example, friend," he advised and began to fill a mug. "No! Never!" Adam cried and jumped to his feet. "I'll find her." "Come back if you don't," the attendant individual called after him. "We're always open." A ll afternoon Adam searched for Eva among the scrap. Finally he decided to climb one of the reddish piles that reached into the sky. As he struggled upwards, his feet slipped on rusty skulls and several times small avalanches of limbs threatened to engulf him. From the top he gazed across the vista of desolation that stretched for miles on every side, and a cold shudder passed through him. The attendant individual was right: he'd never find Eva, not without help. And who would help him? Certainly not the derelicts, unless... Adam paused, his brow knotted in thought. Weren't the derelicts individuals who had been disillusioned because no one ever utilized their services? Suppose... Adam jumped up, a look of hope on his face. Hurrying down the IV rusty pile, he soon found what he was seeking: a lone derelict sprawled upon the ground. "Hi, friend," Adam greeted. "What's your name?" The derelict scowled. "Hiram Taxi," he mumbled. "What about it?" "Great!" Adam replied. "Someone's looking for you." "What?" gasped the derelict. He sat up, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "Someone's looking for mer "Yes," Adam said quietly. "Who? Who?" demanded the derelict. "A Passenger." The derelict staggered to his feet. "A P-passenger!" he gulped. Passengerr He roughly seized Adam's arm. "Where? Where?" "Steady," Adam said, disengaging his arm. "She's called Miss Eva Hostess and she's down here asking for you." The derelict laughed a cracked laugh. "Well, she couldn't choose better, could she? I mean, my record -- it's accident free. And I know all the streetnames, don't I? And the theaters, and the shortcuts?" "Sure," Adam said gently. "Better go look for her." "Yessir!" cried Hiram Taxi and limped away, rubbing himself with an oily rag and shouting, "Taxi. Taxi for Miss Eva Hostess." Before the day was out the scrapheap rang with the cries of derelicts with services to perform for Miss Eva Hostess. E very nigjht, Adam's helpers met, and he listened anxiously to their reports. As each unsuccessful day ate away his hopes, only the care of his small band sustained him. In the evenings he rationed out their tablespoons of oil and organized mutual polishing sessions. Soon their rusty skins were quite shiny again, and Adam noticed a contented sense of purpose spreading through the band. "Don't worry, friends, we'll soon find Miss Eva," said one. "We won't ever let her go, friends, will we?" said another. "Course we won't," said a third. "We'll build her just about the fanciest house ever, with a Chippendale lift and As Adam listened to their enthusiastic plans, one question tortured him. Would they ever find her? Then, the following afternoon, as he was filing the twenty-fourth notch on the iron bedstead he was using as a calendar, a breathless individual rushed up. "Found her! Found her!" gasped the individual, and collapsed at Adam's feet. Slowly Adam pieced the story together. A new derelict had reported seeing Eva at the airport. "No! Don't believe it! Impossible!" Adam mumbled, but he hurried to the conveyor strip, jumped aboard, sped past the smoky factories and the gleaming apartment buildings and soon was striding up the steps of the airport terminal. From the top gallery he scanned the tarmac, and there, unbelievably, in IF the distance, at the foot of a gangway, he glimpsed the unmistakable trim lavender figure of Eva. He ran, ran, ran, and then Eva was in his arms, struggling and beating his chest with her small lavender fists. Adam groaned, released her. "Really, Captain!" Eva gasped. "Where have you been?" Adam blurted. "That's not your business," Eva said coldly. "But I was afraid you'd become a derelict," Adam cried. Eva's expression softened slightly. "There's no call to worry about me," she told him. "We simply ran out of fuel in Australia. Now I must arrange the orchids." "Please!" Adam begged, as Eva started up the gangway. "Listen just for one minute. I'll never trouble you again." Eva hesitated, glanced at her watch, nodded. Adam swallowed, then said in a rush, "Please, Eva, this is important. Since you've been away. I've been working in the scrapheap saving individuals. Oh, I can't explain everything now -- but they believe in you. Like you do in the Passengers. But you exist, maybe the Passengers don't. They need you, and I need you. You must come back with me to the scrapheap, and together we can save the derelicts." For an instant Eva's face lit with a glow Adam bad never seen before, then she said heavily, "But I'm not a Passenger, am I?" "What do you mean?" Eva shrugged. i'I have to serve." "Then come and serve the defelicts!" "No," Eva said in a strained voice. "Don't you see there's no point?" "But there is," Adam argued. "The derelicts I saved help have other derelicts. It's the best service there is." "And when all the derelicts are saved?" Eva asked. "What then?" Adam opened his mouth to reply, but no words came. "Exactly." Eva sighed. "There'd still be no Passengers." A s Eva disappeared inside the plane, Adam pressed his hands to his face. If only she had become a derelict. He imagined himself polishing her rusty surfaces, helping rehabilitate her. Then he thrust the thought away. He still had his band, didn't he? Despite what Eva had said, that was still worthwhile. When Adam arrived back at the scrapheap, it was almost dark. As he waited for his helpers to gather, he began filing out the twenty-six notches in the iron bedstead. There was no point thinking about Eva ever again. Finally it was finished. In the distance derelicts crouched over smoldering fires warming mugs of oil. But where was his band? He jumped up alarmed; a horrible foreboding filled him. Before he'd gone a hundred paces, his suspicions were confirmed. Hiram Taxi lay sprawled upon the ground, oil dripping from his parted lips. "Hiram!" Adam cried, shaking the prostrate form. Slowly the eyes slid open and the oily lips moved, "Shove off!" "What's happened?" Adam begged. "You said she was a Passenger." V A nd so Adam became an outcast even in the land of outcasts. Endlessly he trudged the scrapheap extolling sobriety and shininess, but no one heeded him. He took to squatting on the top of refuse piles and staring out over the derelicts, past the distant apartment buildings, to where the airport lay on the horizon, thinking about Eva and wondering What it all meant. There had to be an answer, he told himself, scratching his mod plate. One evening, clambering up one of the piles, Adam caused a landslide. When the cascade subsided, he heard a groan and near the bottom of the pile found a blackened hulk half-uncovered by the slide. This was no derelict suffering from rust disease. This disease was something Adam had never seen and far more terrible. The hulk's chest was striated with blistered riverlets, and areas of its body had sunk inwards. As Adam leaned over it, the hulk opened one eye. "Oil, oil," it gasped. Swiftly Adam procured a can of Government Standard, cradled the blackened head, poured oil between the twisted lips. "Ugh I" spluttered the hulk and spat out the oil. "Shell, please," it croaked. "Shell?" repeated Adam. "What's shell?" The hulk groaned. "Is the war over?" "What war?" "Fetch me a human," moaned the hulk. "I need repair." "What's a human?" The hulk blinked up at him. "W -- what year is it?" "#," replied Adam, frowning. "#," gasped the hulk excitedly. Its eye stared, its mouth quivered two convulsive spasms racked its body, and Adam thought the end had come. Slowly, agonizingly, it fought for breath, whispered, "We... won." Adam stared puzzedly at the blackened form. Gently he lifted the left arm, glanced at the birthmark. #, he read and felt his pulse quicken. The hulk had been lying there a thousand years. The cascade must have reactivated it. The hulk moaned, its breathing became fainter. "No humans -- no service. We're free," it whispered, and a contented light flickered in its sunken eye. "Humans? echoed Adam, who slowly began to understand. "You mean, clients? Executives? Passengers?" The blackened head nodded faintly"But what's happened to them?" gasped Adam. "We need them." Apprehension flittered over the hulk's features; its single eye fixed on Adam's mod plate. "Inorganics supreme," it quavered. Adam stroked the blackened forehead as the hulk fought for life. Every now and then the lips twitched. Finally, as if mustering itself for one last effort, the hulk raised its head, rasped, "Library." IF "Yes?" Adam prompted genitly. The bulk oed its other eye stared at Adam nritU a look of serenity, then fell ha, lay still. A ll that night Adam twisted and turned on his foam-rubber bunk. The hulk must have known the answers: about the humans, about Eva, about what it all meant. But why had it been content there were no humans? And what had it meant by library? Adam had seen the library from the conveyor strip. It was a large domed building surrounded by pieces of metal known as sculpture. Next morning he took the conveyor into the city determined to discover what it was. When Adam emerged from the lift marked "Readers Only," a row of individuals behind little windows jerked up. "This way for the classics." "Geology section here, sir." Slowly the hubbub died. "Oh," sighed the individuals and lost interest. Adam looked round the great hall in wonder. Empty tables filled the center, and stretching up the walls as far as the eye could see were Tows and rows of slim rectangular objects. Adam removed one, and it fell open with a shower of dust. As Adam flipped through the sheets of small print and glanced at the pictures of odd individuals enclosed in curious coverings, he began to understand. At that moment a bent individual wearing green gloves and a sour expression, hurried across. "I'm the supervisor," the bent individual snapped. "What do you want?" "This is great!" Adam replied excitedly. "I mean, you keep all the records here, don't you? Now I can find the answers." "What answers?" inquired the supervisor coldly. "Why there are no Executives and no Passengers," Adam told him, "and what..." "You mean you want to look at the books?" the supervisor interrupted, rubbing his chin. "Of course," Adam replied, startled. "Consultation by individuals is illegal," the supervisor said sternly. "Illegal?" Adam frowned. "Why?" "Library rules." "Look," Adam pleaded. "It can't matter to you. Just turn a blind eye, huh?" "No," barked the supervisor. "If you don't leave immediately. I'll call the Police." The supervisor hurried to his desk. Adam read feverishly; he might have time to discover something. Five minutes passed, fifteen minutes passed, and an hour later the Police still hadn't arrived. Adam stopped grabbing random books and settled down to study the layout of the sections. By evening he felt he knew his way around. As Adam left the library he passed the supervisor individual. "Thanks for changing your mind," he said quietly. The supervisor glared at him. "The police weren't in," he growled. "But they'll be back tomorrow." E very day Adam went to the library and on the empty tables he laid the dusty books and read about the gifted organic beings who had created his race in their own image and disappeared. Together with agriculture and commerce, war seemed to have been the chief occupation of the humans. Adam followed the courageous, centuries-long struggle for political, religious and racial freedom. With the perfection of cybernetics towards the end of the twentieth century, even economic freedom seemed to have been attained. But to upset this utopia one more ideological slogan emerged: elemental equality. In that great work of political philosophy. Inorganic Man, Xram Lrak claimed that inorganics were not only equal, but superior to and fit to supersede humans in accordance with the true tenets of dialectical materialism. These claims were amply substantiated in the twenty-sixth Olympiad where inorganics representing the Peoples' Republic swept the board. Immediate objections were lodged by Western team captains, and demonstrators carrying placards tried to prevent inorganic competitors from leaving the Olympic village. The first casualty in the elemental struggle occurred when a spectator threw himself in front of three inorganic athletes, who only needed a last lap of forty-eight seconds for a subthree-minute mile, and was trampled to death in vain. Anti-inorganic feelings mounted. Newspapers calculated that an army of inorganics could run non-stop from Peking to Paris in seven weeks without refueling. Diplomats demanded on-thespot inspections of inorganic-producing factories to check that UN agreed subservience factors were being respected. Tensions reached boiling point with both sides presenting ultimatums -- and there the information stopped. For a thousand years no records had been written, and slowly the realization dawned on Adam: the humans had destroyed themselves. There would never be any Clients, Executives, or Passengers -- the inorganics were condemned to frustrated subjection for ever. But something puzzled Adam. What was this about subservience factors? Was there some method of altering them? He crossed to the Index Room and thumbed feverishly through the cabinets. Nothing under subservience. Nothing under individuah Then he held his breath and drew out a card. Inorganic Maintenance Manual. Security Section. Basement, he read. Adam hurried downstairs, entered a passage where the shiniest individual he had ever seen sat oiling a piece of metal. On a steel door was "Can you read, bud?" grunted the shiny individual and waved the piece of metal. "Sure," Adam replied easily, and moved forward. 'But that notice is out of date." "Bluff won't work," growled the shiny individual. "One more pace, and I shoot." Adam stopped. "Look," he cajoled. "Your aggressive instincts result from being programmed by the humans for their own purposes. But IP there aren't any humans any longer. Let me through, and I may be able to readjust you so you become the pleasant person I'm sure you want to be. " "Nerts," barked the shiny individual, squinting at Adam along the piece of metal. "You'll be my seventh. Step forward if you're going to. I can't wait all day." "Seventh!" Adam gasped. "Well, er -- in that case I guess I'll try again this afternoon." "This afternoon?" frowned the individual. "Persevering type. Might as well save us both the trouble." With that he pulled the trigger, and there was a dick. For a moment Adam stared, then said in a relieved tone, "Run out of ammunition, huh? Don't let it get you down. There's more to life than shooting people." He strode through the steel door, leaving the shiny individual muttering something about getting more ammunition tomorrow. I t didn't take Adam long to locate the Maintenance Manual. Marked in red on the cover was: Top Secret. Human Eyes Only. Turning to the index, Adam found the entry: Subservience Factor -- See Mod Plate. With trembling fingers he flipped the pages and read. For three hours he pored over charts, diagrams and instructions; then he closed the volume with a snap. Beneath the mod plate lay the mod center which controlled the personality. But to prevent individuals adjusting themselves, they had been programmed with an anti-tamper factor so that only opposites could unscrew each other. Adam frowned and drummed his fingers on the shelf. How could anyone undo his mod plate if he couldn't unscrew it himself? There was only one way to turn a screw, wasn't there? But something troubled him. Something had once happened. As Adam rushed from the security section, he heard a grunt. In the corner of the passage the shiny individual waved a can of gun oil. "Y'right, bud," he said thickly. "Forty years I've guarded that darned door. Well, I'm through." Adam left the library, procured a screwdriver, hurried to the airport. For twenty-four hours he searched without oil or sleep until he caught sight of the familiar lavender figure entering a plane. Adam ran up the orchid-decked gangway and slammed the hatch behind him. Eva whirled. "Gracious! What are you doing. Captain?" she gasped. For a second Adam hesitated. Never had Eva's lavender surfaces seemed so delicate, so fragile. Then, in one smooth, swift movement, he slid his hand over her mouth, pinioned her to a seat, gagged her with a curtain. "Trust me," he pleaded with the scared, uncomprehending eyes. T won't hurt you." He picked up a jar of caviar, put it in her hands. "Undo it," he said. Eva stared at him. "Undo it," he ordered. Eva shrugged. Adam watched. In some uncomprehendible way, her hands moved backwards in a nonexistent direction. Adam trembled. She was an opposite -- uniquely and unfathomably opposite. He fitt the screwdriver, turned, and slowly her screws yielded. Then, with shaking hands, he took off her mod plate. Inside, set at maximum, were three dials marked Servility, Indifference, Chastity, and a red button marked Safety Switch, Adam pressed the red button, then turned the dials to zero. As he reset the last dial, Eva stopped struggling and her face lit with a glow he had seen once before. "How did you know?" she breathed. "We've been programmed lor different rotary directions," Adam explained. "Your screws are vhreaded differently from mine. It's quite simple really. We're opposites." "Give that to me," Eve whispered. Then with simple and unaffected directness she unscrewed his mod plate. W hen it was off, Adam felt her fingers cool on his controls, and an intoxicating feeling spread through his system. He held out his hands; Eva took them. Gently he drew her to him, his controls touched hers, then nothing mattered. Adam lost all sense of time. Only he and Eva existed. Engines began to whine. Eva pulled away. "We're taking off," she gasped. "You'd better hide. The captain will be here any minute. Quick, put back my mod plate." Adam picked up the two pieces of metal, threw them down the refuse chute. ' Eva's eyes opened wide. "What are you doing?" she gasped. "This is our chance, Eva," Adam said quietly. "You mean," Eva said slowly as his words sunk in, "to become Passengers?" "Isn't that what we both want?" "I'm scared," Eva cried, and clung to him. "If only we could. But we're not humans." "No. We're superior to them," Adam told her and tore down another curtain. VI F ifteen minutes later the captain entered. "Passengers, on behalf of Panworld Airlines, welcome to our Ultra Deluxe Flight," he began, then caught sight of Adam and Eva. Adam raised his wine glass and clinked Eva's. "We trust that our service..." continued the captain, goggling at them, "that our service..." he faltered, gulped, saluted. "Gee, Sir, Madam, welcome!" he babbled and fled back to his cabin. Adam hitched the curtains more securely round his shoulders and put his hand on Eva's knee. From the. cabin came the sound of the captain shouting over the radio, "I've got two Passengers. course I'm sure. They're drinking champagne right now. Roger. Roger." The plane began to turn, and Adam looked at Eva. "We've made it," he said. "We're committed. They need us." IF Eva nodded and put her hand in his. Ten minutes later the first escort planes arrived. By the time they reached the airport two hundred jets were flying round them in a close diamond formation only possible because they were piloted by beings superior to and fit to supersede the humans. Vast crowds were waiting on the tarmac. Hastily Eva put the final stitches in Adam's trousers and he inspected her sarong. Thunderous cheers greeted them as they walked down the redcarpeted gangway. In the terminal building, delegates from all trades and services were waiting to greet them. All carried handy sonorized handouts and the clamor was deafening. "Speech! Speech!" they roared. Adam looked at Eva in dismay. "What can I say?" he gasped. Eva squeezed his arm. "Don't worry, darling." Shakily, Adam held up his hand, and instantly there was silence. "Honest, loyal, hardworking individuals," he heard himself say, "much as we look forward to enjoying your services -- " he paused, and thousands of handouts were flung in the air, denting many skulls -- "and much as we are eager to consume the products of your skills, today we are tired. All we require is accommodation." Obediently, all the delegates departed except the real estate agents, and Adam and Eva were besieged by two hundred dynamic salesmen. "Your private skyscraper for "Twenty per cent discount for ready cash"  "Well, er," mumbled Adam, "haven't you anything cheaper?" "Don't let's haggle," bawled a "Unrepeatable offer," yelled a third. "Twenty easy installments of After an hour of haggling, a sweaty individual thrust a contract under Adam's nose and barked, "Just sign here, sir. Free to you for intros to other Clients." The whole crowd fell silent in admiration. "Sure," Adam said and signed with a flourish. Immediately they left in a taxicraft and landed on the highest scraper in the town. Adam and Eva were shown round two hundred rooms. There were still seven hundred left to visit when Adam noticed Eva looking pale. "I think we'll call a halt," he told the agent. "We've had a long day." "Certainly, sir. Of course, madam," replied the agent understandingly. "The cupboards are stocked with all you need." With that he bowed, and departed. And so, at last, Adam had his topfloor apartment with a view across the city and Eva to arrange the flowers. "You just sit and relax," Eva told him. "I'll get supper." B ut Adam couldn't relax. He walked up and down on the balcony while Eva poked in cupboards until she found a bottle of olive oil. She laid a damask cloth. IF heated the oil and served it in silver goblets. "Supper's ready, Adam," she called, and lit two candles. ? Adam sat and sipped his oil, but he wasn't hungry. While Eva chatted away, he stared out of the window. Finally Eva asked, "What's worrying you? I know there's something. Tell me." "It's nothing," Adam began, then sighed. "You're right," he admitted. "It's what I told that agent." Eva looked puzzled. "About introducing other Clients," Adam explained. Eva laughed and said, "You could always seduce other hostesses." "No," Adam answered seriously. "They don't attract me. I've no desire to remove anyone else's mod plate." "Well, we're sure to find some solution," Eva comforted him, and a strange expression glowed in her eyes. "We must," Adam mused. "We can't run the world on our own. There's a lot that needs organizing -- oil supplies; the derelicts -- it will take years to get everything straight." Eva smiled and raised her goblet, "Here's to success," she said. Adam took a sip of warm olive oil and felt much better. Eva was right. They'd find some way. And tonight he had Eva, and if anything she looked lovelier than ever with her lavender skin gleaming palely in the candlelight. After supper, Adam took Eva onto the balcony, and as the moon rose over the horizon he kissed her. "Eva!" he breathed. "I guess I'm just about the luckiest individual ever." But even as his mouth brushed her lavender lips, she groaned and staggered. "What's wrong?" Adam gasped. Eva's face twitched. "Help me inside." Adam picked her up and laid her on the couch. "I think I'm going to... "she moaned. "Quick. Warm some oil. Hurry!" Adam rushed into the kitchen, filled a basin, put it on the stove. He cursed himself for not taking the maintenance manual. The was a whole chapter on faults he had only glanced at. Then he heard a hiccup, a sharp intake of breath, and a cry. He ran back into the room. Eva was propped up on the cushions nursing a small replica of herself. "Isn't he cute?" she said proudly. A dam gazed down at the infant. Its skin was shiny, just like metal. He took the small hand in his and found it to be quiet soft. He recalled reading something about plastic metal states and crystal reproduction, and a sense of wonder filled him. "Gee, Eva," he gulped. "This is great. I mean it's ours, isn't it?" Eva smiled, nodded. "And we can have another whenever we want?" "Of course," Eva replied fondly. "Well, that solves the housing problem," Adam breathed, patting his son on the head. The baby began to cry, and Eva said, "I expect he's hungry." Adam ransacked the rooms until he found a cot, and soon the baby had been bathed and fed and was sleeping soundly. As Eva tucked in the bedclothes she remarked, "So we really are just like the humans." "With improvements," Adam reminded her. Eva frowned, said slowly, "But why did they make us this way? I mean, why all these complicated adjustments? As if they knew they'd be needed." "Perhaps they did," Adam mused. "Survival instinct. And they've passed it on to us," he grinned, nodding at the baby. "Isn't it marvelous!" Eva sighed happily. She snuggled up to Adam and yawned. "I'm tired. Let's go to bed." Adam took a deep breath and looked at Eva protectively. "You go ahead," he told her. "I think I'd better bunk down in the sitting room tonight." "What for?" Eva demanded. "Well -- er," Adam replied. "We don't want another one of those in the morning do we? We ought to get organized first." Eva laughed and put her arms around his neck. "Don't worry, Adam. It's quite safe." "How do you know?" Eva kissed him, "I just know." "How?" demanded Adam. Eva gave him the label she'd taken from the baby's neck, and Adam read: Until replacements are required set Chastity dial at maximum. Understanding broke slowly on Adam's face, and he took Eva in his arms and whispered, "No wonder we're fit to supersede the humans." by Poul Anderson j Complete Short Novel I by Larry Niven I by Roger Zelazny I These and many more in June Galaxy -- on sale nowl  # IF IF  Serial Kidnapped off Earth, he had learned to baffle the strange aliens of the stars -- and win! T he controller made a small lump under the skin. It wasn't painful -- not unless you go too close to your overseer. At ten feet, it began to feel hke a slight case of indigestion. At five, it was a stone knife being twisted in your chest. Once, in an experimental mood, I pushed in to four feet from him before he noticed and waved me back. It was like a fire in my chest. That was just the mild form of its action, of course. If he had pushed the little lever on the egg shape strapped to his arm -- or died, while the thing was tuned to his body inductance -- the fire in my chest would have been real. Once, months later, I saw three slaves whose keeper had been accidentally killed. The holes burned in their chests from the inside were as big as dinner plates. As a rule, though, the Lesser Triarch believed in treating his slaves well, as valuable property deserved. Hruba dropped by twice a day for m Earth is my home. But I haven't seen it now since I was a schoolboy, and I don't know when I'll ever see it again. The people from space visit Earth when they want to, and no one is ever the wiser. Maybe you've seen them yourself and never known. I was not that lucky. When I stumbled on a party of them, two men and a lovely young girl, they gave themselves away... and so they took me with them when I left. Would you call it kidnapping? They didn't. That word means stealing a human being, and to them I was only an animal. But I stayed with them, hunting wild beasts as their gun-bearer, until they met a beast more dangerous than themselves. The men died. The girl and I survived, marooned on an empty planet -- until slavers came and took her from me. I followed the Lady Raire across the galaxy, found her, won her freedom -- and lost my own. Now she was free... but I was a slave. the first few days to be sure that have interfered, but she never knew, my alien flesh was healing properly. She didn't see you. And now Srat I spent my time lying on the b has her right back where she startor hobbling up and down the small, ed..." windowless room, talking to myself: It wasn't a line of thought that "You're a smart boy, Billy made me feel better, but it served Danger. You learned a lot, these the purpose of keeping me on my last four years. Enough to get yourfeet, pacing. With those ideas chewself a ship of your own and bring ing at me, I wasn't in a mood for it here, against all the odds there long, restful naps, are, to find her. And then you handWhen the wound had stitched up, ed her and the ship to the midget a Drathian overseer took me out of on a silver platter. For the second my private cell and herded me along time! He must have had a good to a big room that looked like a laugh. For a year he followed you nineteenth century sweatshop. There like a sick pup, and wagged his tail were other slaves there, forty or fifty every time you looked his way. But of them, all shapes, all sizes, even a he was waiting. And you made it few Drathians who'd run foul of the easy. While you sat there poisoning Rule-keepers. I was assigned to a yourself, he strolled back to the ship, stool beside a big, broad-backed anitold Huvile you weren't coming and mal with a face like a Hallowe'en lifted off. The Lady Raire might mask snipped out of an old inn IB! tube and fringed with feathery red gills. The oveaeer talked to him in the local buzz-buzz and went away. He looked at me with big yellow eyes like a twin-yoked egg and said, "Welcome to the club, friend," in perfect, unaccented lingua, in a voice that seemed to come from under a tin washtub. He told me that his name was Fsha-fsha. He had been left behind seventeen years before when the freighter he was shipping on had been condemned here on Drath after her linings went out, and he had been a slave since his money ran out, three months after that. "It's not a bad life," he said. "Plenty of food, a place to sleep, and the work's not arduous, after you've learned the routine." The routine, he went on to explain, was Sorting. "It's a highlevel job," Fsha-fsha assured me. "Only the top category workers get this slot. And let me tell you, friend, it's better than duty in the mines, or on the pelagic harvesting raftsi" H e explained the work; it consisted of watching an endless line of glowing spheres as they came toward us along a conveyor belt, and sorting them into one of eight categories. He told me what the types were, and demonstrated; all the while he talked, the bulbs kept coming, and his big hands flick the keys in front of him, shimting them their separate ways. But as far as I could tell, all the bulbs were exactly alike. "You'll learn," he said blandly, and flipped a switch that stopped the line. He fetched a lightweight assembly of straps from a wall locker. "Training harness," he explained. "It helps you catch on in a hurry." He fitted it to me with the straps and wires criss-crossing my back and chest, along my arms, cinched up tight on each finger. When he finished, he climbed back on his stool, and switched on the line. "Watch," he said. The glowing bulbs came toward him and his fingers played over the keys. "Now you follow through on your console," he said. I put my hands on the buttons and he reached across to attach a snap that held them there. A bulb came toward me and a sensation like a hot needle stabbed the middle finger on my right hand. I punched the key under it and the pain stopped, but there was another bulb coming, and the needle stabbed my little finger this time, and I jabbed with it, and there was another bulb coming... "It's a sure-fire teaching system," Fsha-fsha said in his cheery, subcellar voice. "Your hands learn to sort without even bringing the forebrain into it. You can't beat pain association for fast results." For the rest of the shift, I watched glorm-bulbs sail at me, trying to second-guess the pain circuits that were activated by Fsha-fsha's selections. All I had to do was recognize a left-forefinger or right ringfinger bulb before he did, and punch the key first. By the end of the first hour my hands ached like unlanced boils. By the second hour, my arms were numb to the elbow. At the end of three hours I was throbbing all over. "You did fine," Fsha-fsha told me when the gong rang that meant the shift was ended. "Old Hruba knew what he was doing when he assigned you here. You're a quik study. You were coding ten per cent above random the last few minutes." H e took me along a damp-looking tunnel to a gloomy barracks where he and twenty-six other slaves lived. He showed me an empty alcove, got me a hammock and helped me sling it, then took me along to the mess. The cook was a warty creature with a ferocious set of ivory tusks, but he turned out to be a good-natured fellow. He cooked me up a sort of omelette that he assured me the other man-slaves had liked. It wasn't a gourmet's delight, but it was better than the gruel I'd had in the hospital cell. I slept then, until my new tutor shook me awake and led me back to the Sorting line. The training sessions got worse for the next three shifts. Then I started to catch on -- or my eye and fingers did; I still couldn't consciously tell one glorm-bulb from another. By the time Fd been at it for six weeks, I was as good as Fsha-fsha. I was promoted to a bulb-line of my own, and the harness went back in the locker. The Sorting training, as it turned out, didn't only apply to glormbulbs. One day the line appeared with what looked like tangles of colored spaghetti riding lalong on it. "Watch," Fsha-fsha said, and I followed through as he sorted them into six categories. Then I tried it, without much luck. "You have to key-in your response patterns," he said. "Tie this one -- " he flipped his Sorting key -- "to one of your learned circuits. And this one -- " he coded another gob of wires -- "to another." I didn't really understand all that, but I tried making analogies to my subliminal distinctions among apparently identical glorm-bulbs -- and it worked. After that, I sorted all kinds of things, and found that after a single run-through, I could pick them out unerringly. "You've trained a new section of your brain," Fsha-fsha said. "And it isn't just a Sorting line where this works; you can use it on any kind of categorical analysis." During the off-shifts, we slaves were free to relax, talk, gamble with home-made cards and dice, commune with ourselves or sleep. There was a small, walled court we could crowd into when the sun shone, to soak up a little vitamin D, and a cold, sulphury-smelling cave with a pool for swimming. Some of the slaves from watery worlds spent a lot of time there. I developed a habit of taking long walks -- fifty laps up and down the barrack-room -- with Fsha-fsha stumping along beside me, talking. He was a great story-teller. He'd spent a hundred and thirty years in space before he'd been marooned here; he'd seen things that took the curl out of my hair to listen to. IF T he weeks passed, and I sorted, watched, and listened. The place I was in was an underground factory, located, according to Fshafsha, in the heart of the city. There was only one exit, along a tunnel and up a flight of stairs barred by a steel gate that was guarded day and night. "How do they bring in supplies?" I asked my sidekick. "How do they ship the finished products out? They can't run everything up and down one Little stairway." Fsha-fsha gave me what I had learned to interpret as a shrug. "I don't know. Danger. I've seen the stairs, because I've been out that way quite a few times." I stopped him and asked for a little more detail on that point. "Now and then it happens a slave is needed for labors above-ground," he explained. "As for me, I prefer the peacefulness of my familiar routine; still, so long as the finger of the Triarch rests here -- " he tapped a welted purple scar along his side -- "I follow all orders with no argument." "Listen, Fsha-fsha," I said, "Tell me everything you remember about your trips out: the route you took, the number of guards. How long were you out? How close did they watch you? What kind of weapons did they carry? Any chains or handcuffs? Many people around? Was it day or night? Did you work inside or outside -- " "No, Danger!" Fsha-fsha waved a square purple-palmed hand at me. "I see the way your mind's working; but forget the idea! Escape is impossible. And if you did break away from a work detail, you'd, still be alone in the middle of Drath, aa alien, not knowing the language, with every Rule-keeper in the city ready to pounce on you." "I know ail that. But if you think I'm going to settle down here for the rest of my life, you're dead wrong. Now start telling me: How many guards escorted you?" "Just one. As long as he has my controller in his pocket, one is all that's needed, even if I were the most intractible slave in the pens." "How can I get picked for an outside detail?" '"When you're needed, you'll be called." "Meanwhile, I'll be getting ready. Now give." Fsha-fsha's memory was good. I was surprised to hear that for as much as an hour at a time, he had worked unsupervised. "It's no use creeping off and hiding out under an overturned cart or in an unused root-celler," he said. "One touch of the controller, and you're mewling aloud for your keeper." "That means we'll have to get our hands on the control devices before we break." "They've thought of that; the thing is tuned to your neuronic carrier frequency. If you get within three feet of it, it's triggered automatically. If the holder dies, it's triggered. And if it's taken off of the overseer's body, the same thing." "We can stand it long enou to smash them." "If the controller's destroyed, you die," he said flatly. "It's covered any way you play it." # # hat's where you're wrong, ' A Fsha-fsha." I told him about crushing the controller the night I had been arrested. "Huvile didn't die. The Rule-keeper saw him board Jongo , an hour afterward." "Strange. It's common knowledge among the slaves that if your controller is damaged, it kills you." "It's a useful story forthe slaveowners to spread." "Maybe that's why they grabbed you so fast. You might have given the game away. Hell's ice, if the slaves knew..." "How about it, Fsha-fsha? Are you with me?" He stared at me in the gloom of the comer where we'd drifted to talk in private. "You're a strange, restless creature. Danger," he said. "For a being as frail as you are, with that soft skin and brittle bones, you've got an almighty urge to look for trouble. Why not take a tip from me and make the best of it?" "I'll get out of here, Fsha-fsha -- and get clear of the planet, too -- or die trying. I'd as soon be dead as here, so I'm not risking much." Fsha-fsha made the noise that served him as a sigh. "You know, we Rinths see the Universe differently from you propagators," he said. "With us, it's the Great Parent that produces the spores. We workers have the mobility, the intelligence -- but no future, except the Parent. We have the instinct to protect the Tree, fertilize it and water it, prune it, insure its "survival; but we've got no personal stake in the future, the way you have. Your instincts tell you to stay alive and propagate. Your body knows this is a dead end as far as offspring go, so it tells you to get out or die." He sighed again. "When I left Rinth, it was hard; for a long time, I had a homesticlaiess that you wouldn't be able to understand -- any more than I can reaUy understand the way you feel now. But I can remember how it was. And if it's anything like that with you -- yes; I can see you've got to try." "That's right; I've got to try. But not you, Fsha-fsha. If you're really content here, stay. I'll make it on my own." "You wouldn't have a chance, Danger. I know the language, the routes around the town. You need me. Not that it'll do any good in the end. But knowing about the controllers will make a difference." "Forget it. You can teach me the language, and tell me all you can about the town. But there's no point in your getting killed." "That's another advantage a Rinth has," Fsha-fsha cut me off. "No instinct for self-preservation. Now, let's get started planning the details." T he weeks went by. I sorted, slept, took my language lesson and worked to memorize the map of the city I drew up from Fsha-fsha's descriptions. About two months after our decision to crash out, Fsha-fsha got a call for an outside detail. He vetoed my suggestion that I volunteer to go along. "This is a lucky break," he said. "It will give me a chance to look over the ground again, in the light of our plans. Rest easy. We'll get our chance." "We propagators aren't as patient as you tree farmers," I told him. "It may be another six months before an outside detail comes up again." "Better to propagate in your old age than not at all, eh?" he reminded me, and I had to bite my teeth and watch him go. I got one quick look at the passage as he left. It was narrow, dim-lit; the Drathians didn't like a high level of illumination. I wondered if there was a useful tip for me in that. Fsha-fsha came back rippling his gill-flaps in a way that I knew meant he was excited. But it turned out not to be pleased anticipation. "It's hopeless. Danger," he assured me. "The Wormface in charge of the detail carries the controllers in a special rack, strapped to his chest for quick access. He keeps his distance; ten feet was as close as I could get before he warned me back." "What weapons did he carry?" I asked him. "What weapon does he need? He holds your life in his hand as it is!" "Too bad," I said. "We'll have to get our armaments somewhere else then." Fsha-fsha goggled at me. "You're an amazing creature. Danger. If you were cornered by a Fangmaster, I think you'd complain that his teeth weren't larger, so as to provide you with a better dagger!" The routine settled in again then. Every day was like the one before; Ihe glorm-bulbs rushed at me in a stream that never ended, never changed. I ate omelettes, played revo and tikal and a dozen other games, walked my two miles a day, up and down the dark room and waited. And one day, I made a blunder that ended our plans with total finality. T he work-shift had ended half an hour before. Fsha-fsha and I had settled down in his alcove to play our favorite game of telling each other what we'd do, once we were clear of Ehath. A big Drathian slave who'd been assigned to the sorting crew a few hours earlier came lumbering over, breathing out fumes that reminded me of a package of rotten broccoli I'd opened once by mistake. "I'll take this alcove," he said to Fsha-fsha. "Get out, animal." "Makes himself right at home, doesn't he?" I pointed across the room to an empty alcove. "Try over there, sport," I said to the broccoli breather. "Lots of room -- " I got that far when he reached out with a couple of arms like boa constrictors and ripped down the hammock. He yanked again, and tore the other end free. He tossed it aside and swung his own kit down onto the floor. I stood up. "Wait," Fsha-fsha said quickly. "The overseer will deal with this one. Don't -- " IF The big Dmthian took a quick step, threw a punch at me. I ducked, came up with a three-foot length of steel pipe the Rinth had tucked under the hammock for possible future use and brought it down in a two#ianded blow across the Drathian's shoulder. He gave a bleat hke a branded steer and went down bucking and kicking. In his convulsion, he beat his head against the floor, whipped his body against the wall hard enough to give off a dull boom! like a whale slapping the water with his tail. Thick, yellowish blood spattered. Every slave in the barracks came crowding around to see what was going on, but in thirty seconds it was all over. The big Drathian was dead. The Rule-keepers got there a minute or two later and took me away, up the stair I'd looked forward to seeing for so long. My hearing didn't amount to much. I explained to Hruha that the dead slave had attacked me, that I didn't know Drathians kept their brains under their shoulder-blades, but it was an open-and-shut case. I'd killed a fellow slave. My Sorting days were over. "Transportation to the harvesting rafts," the major-domo intoned in Drathian and repeated it in Lingua. "Too bad, Man," he added in his unofficial voice. "You were a valuable sorter. But like your kind, you have a savage streak in you, most unbecoming in a chattel." They clamped my wrists in a steel ring and hustled me out into a courtyard where a big, tarry-smelling airbarge was waiting. I cJimbed aboard. and was kicked into a metal-walled broom-closet. They slammed the door on me, and I lay in the dark and felt the barge lift off. T he harvesting rafts were milesquare constructions of metal floats linked by woven-rope mats and carpeted with rotting vegetable husks and the refuse of the canning sheds that worked night and day processing the marine life hoisted aboard by the seining derricks. A pair of husky Drathians threw me off the side of the barge into foul-odored, ankle-deep muck. Another pair grabbed me, knocked me around a little just to keep in practice, and dragg me away to a long lean-to which served to keep the worst of the sub-tropical rains off any of the workers who were lucky enough to be off shift. They took off the wrist-irons and rigged a finegauge fiber loop around my neck, not tight enough to choke me, but plenty snug enough to wear the skin raw, until it toughened and formed a half-dnch-wide scar that itched and burned day and night. There was a lim p bladder attached to the rope, designed to inflate and keep my head above water if I happened to fall overboard. Slaves weren't allowed to evade their labors by anything as easy as drowning, intentionally or otherwide. I learned all this later. The first night the only orientation I got was what I could deduce from being dragged to a line of workers who were shelling out big crustaceans. and yelled at to get to work. The command was emphasized with a kick, but I had been watching for that; I slid aside from it and smashed my fist into the short ribs of the Drathian and chopped him again as he scrambled back. My reward for this effort was a solid beating, administered by three Drathians, two holding me and one swinging a rod as heavy and limber as a golf club. They finished after a while, threw water over me, and someone shoved a sea-lobster at me. "Better look busy," the slave on my left tipped me off. He was a medium-sized Drathian with a badly scarred face; that made us pals on two counts. I followed his advice. T here wasn't anything complicated about the work. You grabbed your chzik, held him by the blunt end, hooked a finger under his carapace and stripped it off him. Then you captured his four flailing limbs and, with a neat twist of the wrist, removed them. The chziks were active creatures, and they showed their resentment of this treatment by writhing frantically during the operation. When you found yourself tackling a big fellow -- weight ten pounds or more -- it could sometimes be a little difficult to carry out the job as smoothly as the overseers desired. They usually let you know when this was the case by hitting you across the back with the golf-club. At first, my fingers had a tendency to bleed, since the carapaces were razor sharp and as tough as plexiglass, and the barbs on the legs had a way of lodging in my palms. But the wounds healed cleanly. The micro-organisms ofDrath were too alien to my metabolism to give rise to infections. And after a while calluses formed. I was lucky in timing my arrival near the end of a shift; I was able to look busy enough to keep the overseer away, and make it under my own power to the shed. There were no bunks, no assigned spaces. You just crowded in as far as possible from the weather side and dropped. There was no insomnia on the rafts. The scarred Drathian -- the same one who had given me some good advice the first night -- helped me out again the next shift, by showing me how to nip off a chunk of raw chzik and suck it for the water content. The meat itself was spongy and inedible as far as I was concerned; but the slop dipped up to us at the regular feeding time was specially designed to be assimilable by a wide variety of species. When an offbrand worker showed up who couldn't live on the stuff he soon starved, thus solving the problem. Instead of the regular cycle of alternating work and rest shifts, we harvesters worked two shifts out of three, which effectively prevented any chance of boredom. For six hours at a stretch, we manned our places by the chute with the squirming heaps of chziks arriving just a little faster than we could shell them out. The slippery mat under foot rose and fell in its never-ending rhythm, and beyond its edge the steel-gray sea stretched to the horiIF zon. Sometimes the sun beat down in a dead calm, and the unbelievable stink rose around us like a foul tide. At night floodlights glared from high on the derricks, and the insects swarmed in to fly into our mouths and eyes and be trampled underfoot to add to the carpet. Sometimes rain came, hot and torrential, but the line never slowed. And. later, when gray sleet coated the rigging and decks with soft ice, and the wind cut at us like sabres, we worked on, those of us who could stand the cold; the others settled into the muck and were hauled away and put over the side. And some of us who were stiU alive envied them. f remembered reading, years beX fore, back on old Earth, of concentration Camp prisoners, and I wondered what it was that kept men going under conditions that made life a torture that never ended. Now I knew. It wasn't a high-minded determination to endure, or a dauntless wni to take a blood-curdling revenge. It was an instinct older than thought, older than hate, that said: "Survive!" And I survived. My hands toughened, my muscles strengthened, my skin hardened against the cold and the rain. I learned to sleep in icy slush, without protection, with horny feet stumbling over me in the dark, to swallow the watery gruel and hold out the cup for more, to take the routine club-blows of the overseers without hitting back; in the end, wiftiout really noticing. There were no friendships onthe rafts, no recreations. There was no time or energy for anything not directly related to staying alive for one more day. The Drathian who had helped me on the first day died one wet night, and another took his place. I had never even learned his name. During my years, in space, I had developed an instinctive time sense that told me when a week, or a month, Earth-style, had passed. I had been almost five years away, now. Sometimes I wondered what had happened during those years, back on that small planet. But it was so far away that seemed more like a dream than a reality. But for hours at a stretch, sometimes for a whole double shift, my mind would wander far away from the pelagic rafts of Drath. My memories seemed to become more vivid with time, until they were almost realer than the meaningless life around me. And then one night, the routine broke. A morose-looking Drathian bossoverseer caught me as I went toward the chzik chute, shoved me toward the boat wharf. "You're assigned as a nethandler," he told me. Except for the heavy leather coat he was wearing, he looked as cold and filthy and miserable as the slaves. I climbed down into the twenty-foot double-prowed dory that was pitching in the choppy water at the foot of the loading ladder, and we shoved off. In five minutes the high-sided raft was out of sight in the ragged fog. I sat in the stern and stared at the oily gray surface of the water. It was the first new sight I'd seen in many months. The wake was a swirl of foam that drifted aft, forming a pattern like an ugly face that leered up at me through the murky water. The face grew clearer, and then it broke water, a devil-mask of rippling black leaves edged with feathery red gills. An arm swept up, dripping water; I saw the flash of a kpife blade as it swept down toward me -- and felt the rope fall from my neck. A wide hand clamped on my arm, tumbled me over the stern, and before I could draw ,a breath, had dragged me down into the cold and the dark. I woke up lying on my back in a warm, dry place. From the motion and the sound, I could tell I was on a boat. The air that moved over my face carried the sweet, clean smell of the sea. Fsha-fsha was standing beside the bunk. In the soft glow from the deck-lamp, his face looked almost benign. "It's a good thing I recognized you," I said, and was surprised at the weakness of my voice. "I might have spoiled things by putting a thumb in your eye." "Sorry about the rough treatment," he said. "It was the best we could work out. The tendermaster wasn't in on it; just the bossoverseer." "It worked," I said, and stopped to cough, and tasted the alien salt water of Drath. "We're not clear yet, but the trickiest part went all right. Maybe the rest will work out, too." "Where are we headed now?" " There's a abandoned harbor not far from here; about four hours' run. A flier will meet us there." I started to ask another question, but my eye was too heavy to hold open. I closed it and the warm blanket of darkness folded in on me. V oices woke me. For a moment, I was back aboard Lord Desroy's yacht, lying on a heap of uncured Nith-hides, and the illusion was so strong that I felt a ghostly pang from the arm that had been broken and mended so long ago. Then Fshafsha's voice cut through the dream. "... up now. Danger, have to walk a little way. How do you feel?" I sat up and put my legs over the side of the cot and stood. "Like a drowned sailor," I said. "Let's go." Up on the deck of the little surface cutter, I could see lights across the water. Fsha-fsha had put a heavy mackinaw across my shoulders. For the first time in a year, I felt cold. The engines idled back and we swung in beside a jetty. A small, furtive-looking Drathian was waiting beside a battered cargo car. We climbed up into the box and settled down under some stiff tarpaulins, and a moment later the truck started up and pulled out in a whine of worn turbos... I slept again. The habit of almost a year on the rafts, to sleep whenever I wasn't on the line, was too strong to break in an hour; and breathing the salt seas of Dfath isn't the best treatment for human lungs. When I woke up this time, the car T# IF had stopped. Fsha-fsha put a hand on my arm and I lay quiet. Then he tapped me and we crawled out and slid down the tailgate, and I saw we were parked at the edge of the spaceport at Drath City. The big dome loomed up under the black sky, across the ramp, as faded and patched as ever; and between us and it, the clumsy bulk of an ancient cargo-carrier squatted on battered parking jacks. Something moved in the shadows and a curiously-shaped creature swathed in a long cloak came up to us. He flipped back the hood and I saw the leathery face of a Rithian. "You're late," he said unhurriedly. "A couple of local gendarmes nosing about. Best we waste no time." He turned and moved off toward the freighter. Fsha-fsha and I followed. We had covered half the distance when an actinic-green floodlight speared out to etch us in light, and a rusty-hinge voice shouted the Drathian equivalent of, "Halt or I'll shoot!" I ran for it. The Rithian, ten feet in the lead, spun, planted himself and brought up his arm. A vivid orange light winked. The spotlight flared and died, and I was past him, sprinting for the open cargo port, still a hundred yards away across open pavement. A gun stuttered from off to the right, where the searchlight had been, and in the crisp yellow flashes I saw Drathian Rulekeepers bounding out to intercept us. I altered course and charged the nearest Rule-keeper, hit liim fair and square. As he fell, my fingers, that had learned to strip the carapace from a twelve-pound chzik with one stroke, found his throat. Cartilage crumpled and popped and he went limp, and I was back on my feet in time to see the other Drathian lunge for Fsha-fsha. I took him from behind, broke his neck with my forearm, lifted him and threw him ten feet from me. And we were running again. The open port was just ahead, a swell of the hulk. Something gleamed red there. Fsha-fsha threw himself sideways and a ravening spout of green fire #anced out, and I went flat and rolled and saw a giant Drathian, his white scrape thrown back across his shoulder, swinging a flare-muzzled gun around to cover me. I came to my feet and drove straight at him, but I knew I wouldn't make it -- Something small and dark plunged from the open port, leaped to the Drathian's back. He twisted, struck down with the butt of the gun, and I heard it thud on flesh. He struck again, and bone crunched, and the smaU, dark thing fell away, twisting on the pavement; and then I was on the Rule-keeper. I caught the gun muzzle, ripped it out of his hands, threw it away into the dark. His face was coming around to me, and I swung with all the power that the months of mulelabor had given my arm and felt the homy mask collapse, saw the ochre blood spatter. He went down and I stepped over him and the small, dark creature moved -- And the light from the entry tell across it and showed me the mangled body of a H'eeaq. Up above, a shrill Rithian voice was shouting. Behind me, I heard the thud of Drathian feet, their sharp, buzzing commands. "Srat," I said, and could say no more. Thick, blackish blood welled from ghastly wounds. Broken ribends projected from the warty hide of his chest. One great goggle-eye was knocked from its socket. The other held on me. "Master," the ugly voice croaked. "Greatly... my people wronged you. Yet if my wounds... may atone for yours... forego your vengeance... for they are lonely... and afraid..." "Srat! I thought... " "I fought the man. Master," he gasped out. "But he... was stronger... then I... " "Huvile!" I said. "He took the ship!" Srat made a convulsive movement. He tried to speak, but only a moan came from his crocodile mouth. I leaned closer. "I die. Master," he said. "Obedient... to your... desires... " F sha-fsha and a Rishian crewman hauled me aboard the ship. Srat's corpse was left on the ramp. Other species aren't as sentimental about such things as men are. There were a few angry objections from Drath Traffic Control as we lifted, but the Drathians had long since given up Deep Space travel, and e loss of a couple of runaway slaves wasn't sufficient reason to alienate the Rishians. They were one of the few worlds that still sent tramps into Fringe space. Once away, Fsha-fsha told me all that had happened since I was sent to the rafts: "Once you'd planted the idea of escape, I had to go ahead with it," he said. "The next chance was three months later, two of us this time, just one overseer. I had a fancy plan worked out for decoying him into a side alley, but I had a freak piece of luck. It was a loading job, and a net broke and scattered cargo all over the wharf. The other slave got the whole load on his head -- and a nice-sized iron casting clipped the guard and laid him out cold. He had the controllers strapped to his arm, in plain sight, but getting to them was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I used a metal bar from the spilled cargo on them and fainted at the same time. "I came out of it just in time. The Lxad-master and a couple of Rule-keepers were just arriving. I got up and ran for it. They wasted a little time discovering my controller was out of action, and by then I had a good start. I headed for a hideaway I'd staked out earlier, and laid up there until dark. "That night I came out and took a chance on a drinking-house that was run by a non-Drathian. I thought maybe he'd have a little symapthy for a fellow alien. I was wrong, but I strapped him to the bed and filled both my stomachs with highIF lipid food, enough to keep me going for two weeks, and took what cash he had in the place and got clear. "With money to spend, things were a little easier. I found a dive where I could lie low, no questions asked, and sent out feelers for information on where you'd been sent. The next day the little guy showed up: Srat. "He'd been hanging around, waiting for a chance to talk to someone from the Triarch's stable. I don't know what he'd been eating, but it wasn't much; and he slept in the street. "I told him what I knew. Between us, we got you located. Then the Rish ship showed up." The Rishian captain was sitting with us, listening. He wrinkled his face at me. "The H'eeaq, Srat, spoke to me in my own tongue, greatly to my astonishment. Long ago, at Rish, I'd heard the tale of the One-eyed Man who'd bartered half of the light of his world for the lives of his fellows. The symmetry of the matter demanded that I give such a one the help he asked." "The little guy didn't look like much,' Fsha-fsha said. "But he had all the guts there were." "You may take pleasure in the memory of that rarest of creatures," the Rishian said, "a loyal slave." "He was something rarer than that," I said. "A friend." F sha-fsha and I stayed with the freighter for three months; we left her on a world qled Gloy. We could have ridden her all the way to Rith, but my destination was tn the opposite direction: Zeridajh. Fsha-fsha stayed with 'me. One world was like another to him, be said. As for the ancestral Tree, having cut the ties, like a man recovered from an infatuation, he wasn't eager to retie them. The Rish captain paid us off for our services aboard his vessel -- we had rebuilt his standby power section, as well as pulling regular shifts with the crew. That gave us enough cash to re-outfit ourselves witii respectable clothes and take rooms at a decent inn near the port, while we looked for a Center-bound berth. We had a long wait, but it could have been worse. There were shops and taverns and apartments built among the towering ruins of a vast city ten thousand years dead; but the ruins were overgrown and softened by time, so that the town seemed to be built among forested hills, unless you saw it from the air and realized that the mountains were vinegrown structures. There was work for us on Gloy. By living frugally and saving what we earned, we accumulated enough for passenger berths inward to Tanix, a crossroads world where the volume of in-Galaxy shipping was more encouraging. After a few days' wait, we signed on a mile-long superliner. It was a four months cruise. At the end of it we stepped off on the soil of a busy trading planet, and looked up at the blaze of sky that meant Center was close. 'Tt's still three thousand lights run to Zeridajh," the Second Officer for Power told me as he paid me off. "Why not sign on for another cruise? Good powermen are hard to find. I can offer a bonus." "It's useless, Second," Fsha-fsha answered for me. "Danger is searching for a magic flower that only grows in one special garden, at the hub of the galaxy." After a couple of weeks of jobhunting, we signed on as scrapers on a Center-bound tub crewed by small, damp dandies from the edge of Center. That was the only berth a highbrow Center skipper would consider handing a barbarian from what they called the Outworlds. It was a long cruise, and as far as I could tell the jobs that fell to a scraper on a Center ship were just as dirty as on any Outworld tub. On our next cruise, we found ourselves stranded on a backwater world by a broken-down guidance system on the rotting hulk we had shipped in on. We waited for a berth outbound for a month, then took service under a local constabulary boss as mercenaries. We did a lot of jumping around the planet, marching in ragged jungle and eating of inedible rations, and in the end barely got clear with our hides intact when the constabulary turned out to be a dacoit force. I made one interesting discovery. My sorting skill came in handy in using the bill-hook machetes issued to the troops. After one or two small runins, I had keyed-in a whole set of reflex responses that made me as good as the battalion champion. Usually, though, we didn't see much of the planets we visited. It was normal practice, all across the Galaxy, ffor a world to channel all its spac faring commence and traffic through a single port, for economy of facilities and ease of control. The ports I saw were like ports in all times and climes: cities without personality, reduced to the lowest common denominator of the thousand breeds of beings they served. After that, we found another slot, and another after that, on a small, fast lugger from Thlinthor and on that jump we had a change in luck. I was sound asleep in the offwatch cubbyhole. I rated as a scraper when the alarm sirens went off. It took me thirty seconds to roll out and get across the deck to the screens where Fsha-fsha and half a dozen other on-watch crewmen were gaping at a sight that you only see once in a lifetime in Deep Space: a derelict hulk, adrift between the stars. This one was vast -- and you could tell at one glance that she was old... We were five hundred miles apart, closing on courses that were only slightly skew. That made two miracles. We hove to ten miles from her and took a good look, while the Power Officer conferred with Command deck. Then the word came through to resume course. "Huh?" Both Fsha-fsha and I swiveled on him. From the instant I'd seen the hulk, visions of prizemoney had been dancing in my head like sugarplums. "He's not going to salvage her?" Fsha-fsha came as close to yelling as his mild nature would let him. IF The Power Officer gave him a fishy face. Like the rest of the crew, he AVas an amphibian who slept in a tank of salty water for three hours at a stretch -- and like all his tribe, he was an agorophobe to the last feathery scale on his rudimentary rudder fin. "It ith not practical," he said coldly. "That tub's fifty thousand years old if she's a day," Fsha-fsha protested. "And I'm a mud-puppy if she's not a Riv Surveyor! She'll be loaded with Pre-collapse star maps! There'll be data aboard her that's been lost since before Thlinthor lofted her first satellite!" "How would you propothe that we acthelerate thuch a math as that to interthtellar velothity?" he put the question to us. "The hulk Our engines were not dethigned for thuch thtethes." "She looks intact," I said. "Maybe her engines are still in working order." "Tho?" "We can put a prize crew aboard her and bring her in under her own power." The Thlinthorian tucked his head between his shoulder-plates, his version of a shudder. "We Thlinthorians have no tathte for thuch exthploiths," he said. "Our mithion is the thafe delivery of conthigned cargo." "You don't have to go out on the hull," Fsha-fsha said. "Danger and I will volunteer." e Power Officer goggled his eyes at us and conferred with Command Deck. After a few minutes of talk word came through that his excellency the captain was agreeable. "One stipulation," I said. "We'll do the dirty work; but we take a quarter-share between us." The captain made a counter offer of a twentieth-share each. We compromised on a tenth. I don't like it," Fsha-fsha told me. "He gave in too easily." We suited up and took a small boat across to the old ship. She was a glossy brown ovoid about half a mile in diameter. Matching up with her was like landing on a planetoid. We found a hatch and a set of outside controls that let us into a dusty cavernous hold. From there we went on through passenger quarters and program rooms. In what looked like an armory, Fsha-fsha and I looked over a treasure-house of sophisticated personal offense and defensive devices. Everything was in perfect order; and nowhere, then or later, did we find a bone of her crew or any hint of what had happened to her. A call from the captain on the portable communicator reminded us sharply that we had a job to do. We followed a passage big enough to drive a moving van through, found the engine room, about the size of Grand Central Station. The generators ranged down the center of it were as massive as four-story apartment buildings. I whistled when saw them, but Fsha-fsha took it in stride. "I've seen bigger," he said. "Let's check out the system." It took us four hours to work out the meaning of the oversized controls ranged in a circular console around a swivel chair the size of a bank vault. But the old power plant started up with as sweet a rumble as if it had been in use every day. After a Ittle experimental jockeying, I got the big bull aligned on course coordinates and fed the power to the generators. As soon as we were up to cruise velocity, his excellency the captain ordered us back aboard. "Who are you sending over to relieve us?" I asked him. "You may leave that detail to my disorethion," he told me in no-argument tone. "I can't leave this Power Section unmanned," I said. He bugged hot eyes at me on the four-inch screen of the pocket communicator and repeated his order, louder, with quotations from the Universal Code. "I don't like it," Fshafsha said. "But I'm afraid we haven't got much choice." B ack aboard the mother ship, our reception was definitely cool. Word had gotten around that we'd pigged an entire share of the goodies. That suited me all right. The Hilinthorians weren't the kind who inspired much in the way of affection. When we were well inside the Thlinthorian system the Pow Officer called Fsha-fsha and me in a smile. "I confeth I entertained a thertain thuthpithion of you both," he confided. 'ut now that we have arrived in the Home Thystem with our thuperb thafely in the thlave orbit, I thee that my cauthion was exthethive. Gentlemen, join me in a drink!" We accepted the invitation, and he poured out nice-sized tumblers of wine. I was just reaching for mine when Fsha-fsha jostled the table and sloshed wine from the glasses. The Power Officer waved aside his apologies and turned to ring for a mess boy to mop up the puddle. In the instant his back was turned, Fsha-fsha dropped a small pellet in our host's drink, where it dissolved instantly. We all sat smiling benignly at each other while the small Thlinthorian servant mopped up, then lifted our glasses and swallowed. Fsha-fsha gulped his down whole. I took a nice swallow of mine, nodded my appreciation and took another. Our host chugalugged and poured another round. We sipped this one; he watched us and we watched him. I saw his eyes wander to the timescale on the wall. Fsha-fsha looked at it too. "How long does it take your stuff to work?" he inquired pleasantly of the Thlinthorian. The latter goggled his eyes, made small choking noises, then in a strangled voice said: "A quarter of an hour." Fsha-fsha nodded, "I can feel it, a little," we said. "We both belted a couple of null-pills before we came up, just in case you had any funIF ny stuff you wanted to try. How do you feel?" "Not well." The fish-mouth swallowed air. "I cannot control... my thpeedh!" "Right. Now, tell us all about everything. Take your time. It'll be an hour or two before we hit Planetary Control..." F sha-fsha and I reached the port less than ten minutes behind the boat we had trailed in from where our ship and the Riz vessel were parked, a hundred thousand miles out. We found the captain already at the mutual-congratulation stage with the portmaster. His already prominent eyes nearly rolled down his scaled cheeks when he saw us. "Perhaps the captain forgot to mention that he owes Captain Danger and myself a tenth share of the prize," Fshafsha said, after the introductions were over. "That's a prepothterouth faithhood" the officer started, but Fshafsha out him off by producing a pocket recorder of a type allowable in every law court in the Bar. The scene that followed lacked that sense of close comradeship so desirable in captain-crew relationships, but there was nothing our former commander could do but go along. Afterward, in the four-room suite we treated ourselves to to rest up in, Fshasha said, "Ah, by the way, Danger, I happened to pick up a little souvenir aboard that Riv tub." He did something complicated with the groont-hide valise he carried his personal gear in and took out a small packet which opened out into a crisscross of flat, black straps with a round pillbox in the center. "I checked it out," he said, sounding like a kid with a new bike. "This baby is something. A personal body shield. Wear it under your tunic. Sets up a field nothing gets through I" "Nifty," I agreed, and worked the slides on the bottom of my kit bag. "I took a fancy to this little jewel." I held up my memento. It was a very handsome jeweled wristlet, which just fit around my neck. "Uh-huh, pretty," Fsha-fsha. said. "This harness of mine is so light you don't know you're wearing it -- " "It's not only pretty, it's a sense booster," I interrupted his paean. "It lowers the stimulusresponse threshold for sight, hearing and touch. "I guess we out-traded old Slinth-face after all," Fsha-fsha said, after we'd each checked out the other's keepsake. "This squares the little finesse he tried with the sleepy-pills." The salvage authorities made us wait around for almost a month, but since they were keeping forty Thlinthorian crew waiting, too, in the end they had to publish the valuation and pay off all hands. Between us, Fsha-fsha and I netted more .cash than the lifetime earnings of a spacer. We shipped out the same day, a short hop to Hrix, a human-occupied world in a big twenty-seven planet system only half a light from Thlinthor. It seemed like a good idea not to linger around town after the payoff. On Hrix, we shopped for a vessel of our own; something small, and super-fast. We still had over thousand lights to cover. H rix was a good place to shiphunt. It had been a major shipbuilding world for a hundred thousand years, since before the era known as the Collapse when the original Central Empire folded -- and incidentally gave the upstart tribe called Man his chance to spread out over the Galaxy. For two weeks we looked at brand-new ships, good-as-new second and third and tenth-hand jobs, crawled over hulls, poked into power sections, kicked figurative tires in every shipyard in town, and were no farther along than the day we started. The last evening Fshafsha and I were at a table under the lanterns swinging from the low branches of the Heo trees in the drinking garden attached to our inn, talking over the day's frustrations. "These new hulls we've been looking at," Fsha-fsha said; "massproduced junk; not like the good old days." "The old stuff isn't much either," I countered. "They were built to last, and at those crawl-speeds, they had to." "Anything we can afford, we we don't want," Fsha-fsha summed it up. "And anything we want, costs too much." our wine jug spoke up. "If you gentlebeings are looking for something a little out of the usual line, I have dh old grand-uncle -- fine old chap, full of lore about the old times -- he's over three hundred, you know -- who still dabbles in buying and selling. There's a hull in his yard that might be just what the sirs are looking for, with a little fixing up -- " We managed to break into the pitch long enough to find out where the ship was, and after emptying our jug, took a walk down there. It looked like every junkyard I've ever seen. The place was grown with weeds taller than I was, and the sales office was a salvaged escape blister, with flowers growing in little clay pots in the old jet orifices. There was a light on, though, and we pounded until an old crookbacked fellow with a wisp of pink hair and a jaw like a snapping turtle poked his head out. We explained what we wanted, and who had sent us. He cackled and rubbed his hands and allowed as how we'd come to the right place. By this time, we were both thinking we'd made a mistake. There was nothing here but junk so old that even the peimalloy was beginning to corrode. But we followed him back between towering stacks of obsolete parts and assemblies, over heaps of warped hull-plates, through a maze of stacked atmosphere fittings to what looked like a thicket dense enough for Bre'r Rabbit to hide in. "If you sirs'll just pull aside a few tendrils of that danged wire vine," the old boy suggested. Fshafsha had his mouth open to decline, IF but out of curiosity I started stripping away a finger-thick creeper, and back in the green-black gloom I saw a curve of dull-polished metal. Fsha-fsha joined in, and in five minutes we had uncovered the stern of what had once been elegance personified. "She was built by Sanjio," the oldster told us. "See theref' He pointed at an ornate emblem, still jewel bright against the tarnished metal. Fsha-fsha ran his hand over curve of the boat's flank, peered along the slim-lined hull. Our eyes met. "How much?" he said. "You'll put her in shape, restore her," the old man said. "You would not cut her up for the heavy metal in her jump fields, or convert her for rock-prospecting." It was a question. We both yelled no loud enough to satisfy him. The old man nodded. "I like you boys' looks," he said. "I wouldn't sell her to just anybody. She's yours." I t took us a day to ut the boat free of the growth that had been crawling over for eighty years. The old man, whose name was Knoute, managed, with curses and pleas and some help from a halfwitted lad named Dune, to start up a long-defunct yard-tug and move the boat into a cleared space big enough to give us access to her. Fsha-fsha and I went through her from stem to stern. She was complete, original right down to the old log book still lying in the chart table. It gave us some data to do further research on this evening at dinner and read the boat's oif. I spent an afternoon in the shipping archieves in the city, and that history to Fsha-fsha: 'Gleerim, fifty-five feet, one hundred and nine tons. Built by Sanjio, Master builder to Prince Ahax, as color-bearer to the Great House, in the year Qon..." "That would be just over four thousand years ago," Knoute put in. "In her maiden year, the Prince Ahax raced her at Poylon and at Gael, and led a field of thirty-two to win at Fonteraine. In her fortieth year, with a long record of crest-plate, the boat was sold at auction by the hard-pressed and aged prince. Purchased by a Vidian leader, she was passed on to the Solarch of Trie, whose chief of staff, recognizing the patrician lines of the vessel, refitted her as his personal scout. Captured nineteen years later in a surprise raid by the Alzethi, the boat was mounted on a wooden-wheeled platform and hauled by chained dire-beasts in a triumphal procession through the streets of Alz. Thereafter, for more than a century, the boat lay abandoned on her rotting cart at the edge of the noisome town. "Greu of Balgreu found the forgotten boat, and set a crew to cutting her out of her bed of tangled wildwood. Fancying the vessel's classic lines, the invading chieftain removed her to a field depot, where his shipfitters hammered in vain at her locked port. Greu himself hackIF ed at her crestplate, desiring it as an ornament, but succeeded only in shattering his favorite dress shortsword. In his rage, he ordered flammable rubble to te heaped on the boat, soaked with volatiles and fired. After he razed the city and departed with his troops, the boat again lay in neglect for two centuries. Found by the Imperial Survey Team of his Effulgent majesty, Lleon the Fortieth, she was returned to Ahax, where she was refitted and returned to service as colorbearer to the imperial house." "That was just her first days," Knoute said. "She's been many places since then, seen many sights. And the vessel doesn't exist to this day that can outrun her." It took us three months to repair, refit, clean, polish, tune and equip the boat to suit ourselves and old Knoute. But in the end even he had to admit that Prince Ahax himself couldn't have done her more proud. And when the time came to pay him, he graciously waved the money aside. "I won't live to spend it," he said. "And you boys have bled yourselves white, doing her up. You'll need what you've got left to cruise her as she should be cruised, wanting nothing. Take her, and see that the lines you add to her log, don't shame her history." T wo thousand light-years is a goodly distance, even when you are riding the raveniag stream of of the fabric of the continuum and converted to acceleration that flung us inward at ten, a hundred, a thousand times the velocity of propagation of radiation. We covered the distance in jumps of a month or more, while the blaze of stars thickened across the skies ahead like clotting cream. We saw worlds where intelligent life had existed for thousands of centuries, planets that were the graveyards of cultures older than the dinosaurs of Earth. When our funds ran low, we made the discovery that even at the heart of the galaxy, there were people who would pay us a premium for fast delivery of passengers and freight. Along the way we encountered life-forms that ranged from intelligent gnat-swarms to the titanic slumbering swamp-minds of Buroom. We found men on a hundred worlds, some rugged pioneers barely holding their own against a hostile environment of ice or desert or competing flora and faima, others the polished and refined product of millenia-old empires that had evolved cultural machinery as formal and complex as a lifelong ballet. There were worlds where we were welcomed to cities made of jade and crystal, and worlds where sharpers with faces like Neapolitan street-urchins plotted to rob and kill us; but our Riv souvenirs served us well, and a certain instinct for survival got us through. And the day came when Zeridajh swam onto our forward screens, a misty green world with two big moons. T he Port of Radaj was a multilevel composition of gardens, pools, trees, glass-smooth paving, sculpture-clean facades, with the transient shipping parked on dispersed pads like big toys set out for play. Fsha-fsha and I dressed up in our best shore-going clothes and rode a toy train in to a countryclub style terminal. The landing formalities were minimal. A gray-haired smoothie who reminded me of an older Sir Orfeo welcomed us to the planet, handed us illuminated handmaps that showed us our position as a moving point of green light and asked how he could be of service. "I'd like to get news of someone," I told him. "A Lady -- the Lady Raire." "Of what house?" "I don't know; but she was traveling in the company of Lord Desroy." He directed us to an information center that turned out to be manned by a computer. After a few minutes of dose questioning and a display of triograms, the machine voice advised me that the lady I sought was of the house of Ancinet-Ohanore, and that an interview with the head of the house would be my best bet for further information. "But is she here?" I pressed the point. "Did she get back home safely?" The computer repeated its advice and added that transportation was available outside gate twelve. We, crossed the wide floor of the terminal and came out on a platform where a gorgeous scarlet and silver inlaid porcelain car waited. We climbed' in, and a discreet voice whispered an inquiry as to our destination. "The Ancinet-Chanore estate," I told it, and it clicked and whooshed away along a curving, soaring avenue that lofted us high above wooded hills and rolling acres of lawn with glass-smooth towers in pastel colors pushing up among the crowns of multi-thousand year-old Heo trees. After a fast halfihour run, the car swooped down an exit ramp and pulled up in front of an imposing gate. A gray-liveried man on duty there asked us a few questions, played with a console inside his glass-walled cubicle and advised us that the Lord Pastaine was at leisure and would be happy to grant us an interview. fsha commented as the car tooled up the drive and deposited us at the edge of a terrace fronting a sculptured facade. "Maybe it's just a civilized world," I suggested. Another servitor in gray greeted us and ushered us inside, through a wide hall where sunlight slanting down through a faceted ceiling shed a rosy glow on luminous wood and brocaded hangings, winked from polished sculptures perched in shadowy recesses. And I thought of the Lady Raire, coming from this, living in a cave grubbed out of a dirt bank, singing to herself as she planted wild flowers along the paths. We came out into a patio, crossIF ed that and went along a colonnaded arcade, enoierged at the edge of a stretch of blue-violet grass as down across a wide slope to a line of trees with the sheen of water beyond them. We followed a tiled path beside flowering shrubs, rounded a shallow pool where a fountain jetted liquid sunshine into the air and arrived at a small covered terrace, where a vast, elderly man with a face like a clean-shaven Moses rested in an elaborately padded chair. #'rhe Lord Pastaine," the ser' A vant said casually and stepped to adjust the gle of the old gentleman's chair to a more conversational position. Its occupant looked us over impassively. He said, "Thank you, Dos," and indicated a pair of benches next to him. I introduced myself and Fsha-fsha and we sat. Dos murmured an offer of refreshment and we asked for a light wine. He went away and Lord Pastaine gave me a keen glance. "A man from a very distant world," he said. "A man who is no stranger to violence." His look turned to Fsha-fsha. "And a being equally far from his home world, tested also in the crucible of adversity." He pushed his lips out and looked thoughtful. "And what brings such adventurers here to ancient Zeridajh, to call upon an aged idler, dozing away the long afternoon of his life?" "I met a Lady once. Milord," I said. "She was a long way from home -- as far as I am, now, from mine. I tried to help her get home, but... things went wrong;" I'd like to know, sir, if the Lady Raire is here, safe, on Zeridajh." His face changed, turned to wood. "The Lady Raire?" His voice had a thin, strained quality. "What do you know of her?" "I was hired by Sir Orfeo," I said. "To help on the hunt. There was an accident..." I gave him a brief account of the rest of the story. "I tried to find a lead to the H'eeaq," I finished. "But with no luck." It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the rest, about Huville and the glimpse I'd gotten of her, three years before on Drath; but for some reason I didn't say it. The old man watched me all the while I talked. Then he shook his head. "I am sorry, sir," he said, "that I have no good tidings for you." "She never came back, then?" His mouth worked. He started to speak, twice, then said, "No! The devoted child whom I knew was spirited away by stealth by those whom I trusted, and never returned!" I let that sink in. The golden light across the wide lawn seemed to fade suddenly to a tawdry glare. The vision of the empty years rose up in front of me. "... send out a search expedition," Fsha-fsha was saying. "It might be possible -- " "The Lady Raire is dead!" The old man raised his voice. "Dead! Let us speak of other matters!" The servant brought the wine, and I tried to sip mine and make small talk, but it wasn't a success. Across the lawn a servant in neat gray livery was walking a leashed animal along a path that sparkled blood-red in the afternoon sun. The animal didn't seem to like the idea of a stroll. He planted all four feet and pulled backwards. The man stopped and mopped at his forehead while the reluctant pet sat on his haunches and yawned. When he did that, I was sure. I hadn't seen a cat for almost three years, but I knew this one. His name was Eureka. xxvm T en minutes later, as Fsha-fsha and I crossed the lawn toward the house, a broad-shouldered man with curled gray hair and an elegantly simple tunic emerged from a side path ahead. "You spoke to his Lordship of Milady Raixe?" he said in a low voice as we came up. "That's right." He jerked his head toward the house. "Come along to where we can talk quietly. Peihaps we can exchange information to our mutual advantage." He led us by back passages into the deep, coil gloom of a room fitted up like an office for a planetary president. He told us his name was Sir Tanis, and got out a flagon and glasses and poured a round. "The girl reappeared three months ago," he said. "Unfortunately," he added solemnly, "she is quite insane. Her first act was to disavow all hfr most hallowed obligations to # , the house of Ancient-Chanore. Now, I gather from the few scraps of advice that reached my ears -- " "Dos tks as well as listens, I take it," I said. "A useful man," Sir Tanis agreed crisply. "As I was saying, I deduce that you know something of Milady's activities while away from home. Perhaps you can tell me something which might explain the sad disaffection that afflicts her." "Why did Lord Pastaine lie to us? I countered. "The old man is in his dotage," he snapped. "Perhaps in his mind she is dead." His slips quirked in a mirthless smile. "He's unused to rebellion among the very young." The brief smile dropped. "But she didn't stop with asserting her contempt for his lordship's doddering counsels; she spurned as well the advices of her most devoted friends!" "Advices on what?" "Family matters," Tanis said shortly. "But you were about to tell me what's behind her incomprehensible behavior." "Was I?' "I assmned as much. I confided in you!" Tanis looked thwarted. "See here, if it's a matter of, ah, compensation for services rendered... " "Maybe you'de better give me a little more background." H e looked at me sternly. "As you are doubtless aware, the House of Ancinet-Chanore is one of the most distinguished on the planet," he said. "We trace our lineage back through eleven thousand years, to IF Lord of Ancient Traviai. Naitunally such a house enjoys a deserved preeminence among its peers. And the head of that house must be an individual of the very highest attainments. Why -- " he looked indignant -- "if the Seat passed to anyone but myself, in a generation -- less I -- we should deteriorate to the status of a mere fossil, lacking in all finesse in the arts that mark a truly superior Seat!" "What's the Lady Raire got to do with all that?" "Surely you're aware. Why else are you here?" "Pretend we're not." "The girl is an orphan," Sir Tanis said shortly. "Of the Primary Line. In addition -- " he sounded exasperated -- "all the collateral heirs -- all! -- are either dead, exiled or otherwise disqualified in the voting!" "So?" "She -- a mere girl, utterly lacking in experience -- other than whatever bizarre influences she may have come under during her absence -- holds in her hands five ballots! Five, out of nine! She -- ineligible herself, of course, on a number of counts -- controls the selectiqp of the next Head of this House! Why else do you imagine she was kidnapped?" "Kidnapped?" He nodded vigorously. "And since her return, she's not only rebuffed my most' cordial offers of association but has alienated every other conceivable candidate as well." He lowered his voice. "In fact, it's my personal belief the girl intends to lend her support to an Outsider!" "Sir Tanis, I guess all this family politics business is pretty interesting to you, but it's over my head like a wild pitch. I came here to see Milady Raire, to find out if she was safe and well. First I'm told she's dead, then that she's lost her mind. I'd like to see myself. If you could arrange -- " "No," he said flatly. "That is quite impossible." "May I ask why?" "Sir Revenat would never allow it. He closets her as closely as a prize breeding soumU "And who's Sir Revenat?" He raised his eyebrows. "Her husband," he said. # Fshafsha consoled me as we walked along the echoing corridor, following the servant Sir Tanis had assigned to lead us back into the outside world. "Not much joy there. But at least she's home, and alive." We crossed an inner court where a fountain made soft music. A door opened along the passage ahead. An elderly woman, thin, tight-oorseted, dressed in a chiton of shimmering white, spoke to the servant, who faded away like smoke. She turned and looked at me with sharp eyes, studied Fsha-fsha's alien face. "You've come to help her," she said to him in a dry, husky voice. "You know, and you've come to her aid." "Ah... whose aid, Milady?" he asked her. The old lady grimaced and said: "The Lady Raire's. She's in mortal danger; that's why her father ordered her sent away, on his deathbed! But none will believe me." "What kind of damger is she in?" "I don't know -- but it's there, thick in the air around her! Poor child, so all alone." "Milady." I stepped forward. "I've come a long way. I want to see her before I go. Can you arrange it?" "Of course, you fool, else why would I have lain here in wait like a mud-roach over a wine-arbor?" She returned her attention to Fshafsha. "Tonight -- at the Gathering of the House. Milady will be present; even Sir Revenat wouldn't dare defy custom so far as to deny her; and you shall be there, too! Listen! This is what you must do... " H alf an hour later, we were walking along a tiled street of craftsmen's shops that was worn to a pastel smoothness that blended with the soft-toned facades that lined it. There were flowers in beds and rows and urns and boxes, and in hanging trays that filtered the early light over open doorways where merchants fussed over displays of goods. I could smell freshbaked bread and roasting coffee, and leather and wood-smoke. It was an atmosphere that made the events inside the ancient House of Ancinet-Chanore seem like an afternoon with the Red Queen. "If you ask me, the whole bunch of them is round the bend," Fshafsha said. "I think the old lady had an idea I was in touch with the spirit world." On a bench in front of a carpenter's stall, a man sat tapping with a mallet and chisel at a slab of tangerine-colored wood. He looked up and grinned at me. "As pretty a bit of emberwood as ever a man laid steel to, eh?" he said. "Strange," Fsha-fsha said. "You only see hand laibor on backward' worlds and rich ones. On all the others, a machine would be squeezing a gob of plastic into whatever shape was wanted." In another stall, an aged woman was looming a rug of rich-colored fibers. Across the way, a boy sat in an open doorway, polishing what looked like a second-hand silver chalice. Up ahead, I saw the tailor shop the old woman -- Milady Bezaille, her name was -- had told us about. An old fellow with a face like an elf was rolling out a bolt of green cloth with a texture like hand-rubbed metal. He looked up and ducked his head as we came in. "Ah, the sirs desire a change of costume?" Fsha-fsha was already feeling the green stuff. "How about an outfit made of this?" "Ah, the being has an eye," the old fellow cackled. "Radiant, is it not? Loomed by Y'sallo, of course." I picked out a black like a slice of midnight in the Fringe. The tailor flipped up the end of the material and whirled it around my shoulders, stepped back and studied the effect thoughtfully. "I see the composition as an expression of experience," he nodded. "Yes, it's possible. Stark, unadorned IF -- but for the handsome necklace. Riv work, is it not? Yes, a statement of self-affirmation, an incitement to discipline." He went to work measuring and clucking. When he started cutting, we crossed a small bridge to a park where there were tables on the lawn beside a small lemon-yeUow dome. We sat and ate pastries and then went along to a shoemaker, who sliced into glossy hides and in an hour had fitted new boots to both of us. When we got back to the tailor shop, the new clothes were waiting; We asked directions to a refresher station, and after an ion-haith and a little attention to my hair and Fsha-fsha's giU fringes, tried out our new costumes. "You're an impressive figure," Fsha-fsha said admiringly. "In spite of your decorations, your size and muscular development give you a certain animal beauty; and I must say the little tailor set you off to best advantage." "The high collar helps," I conceded. "But I'm afraid the eye-patch spoils the effect." "Wrong. It enhances the impression of an elegant corsair." "Well, if the old Tree could see you now, it would have to admit you're the fanciest nut that ever dropped off it," I said. It was twilight in the parklike city. We still had an hour to kill, and decided to use it in a stroll around the Old Town -- the ancient market place that was the original center of the city. It was a picturesque place, and we were just in time to see the merchants folding up their stalls, and streaming away to the drinking terraces under the strung ligjhits among the trees. The sun set in a glory of painted clouds; the bnUiant spread of stars that covered the sky lake luminous clotted cream was obscured by the overcast. The empty streets dimmed into deep shadow, as we turned our steps toward the gates of the estate Ancinet-Chanore. M y sense booster was set at # normal; any higher setting made ordinary sound and light levels painful. For the last hundred feet I had been listening to the gjuey wheeze that was the sound of hunMn lungs, coming from somewhere up ahead. I touched Fsha-fsha's aim "In the alley," I said softly. "Just one man." He stepped ahead of me, and in the same instant a small, lean figure sprang into view twenty feet ahead stopped in a half-crouch facing us, with his feet planted wide and his gun hand up and aimed. I saw a lightning-wink and heard the soft whap of a filament pistol. Fshafsha oofed as he took the bolt square in the chest; a corona outlined his figure in vivid blue as the harness bled the energy off to the ground. Then he was on the assassin; his arm rose and fell with the sound of a hammer hitting a grapefruit, and the would-be killer tumbled backward and slid down the wall to sprawl on the pavement. I went flat against the wall, flipped the booster up to max, heard nothing but the normal night sounds of a city. "Clear," I said. Fsha-fsha leaned over the little man. "I hit him too hard," he said. "He's dead." "Maybe the old lady was right," I said. "Or maybe Sir Tanis wasn't as foolish as he sounded," Fsha-fsha grunted. "Or Milord Pastaine as senile as they claimed." "A lot of maybes," I said. "Let's dump him out of sight and get out of here, in case a cleanup squad is following." We lifted him and tossed him in the narrow passage he had picked as a hiding place. "Which way?" Fsha-fsha asked. "Straight ahead, to the main gates," I said. "You're still going there -- after this?" "More than ever. Somebody made a mistake, sending a hit man out. They made a second not making it stick. We'll give them a chance to go for three." The Lady BezaUle had given in' X struction to the gatekeeper; he bowed us through like visiting royalty into an atmosphere of lights and sounds and movement. The grand celebration known as the Gathering of the House seemed to be going on all over the grounds and throughout the house. We made our way through the throngs of beautiful people, looking for a familiar face. Sir Tanis popped up and gave a lifted-eyebrow look, but there wasn't enough surprise there to make him the man behind the assassination attempt. "Captain Danger; Sir Fsha-fsha; I confess I didn't expect to see you here." He was aching to ask by whose order we were included in the select gathering, but apparently his instinct for the oblique approach kept nim from the direct question. "It seemed the least I coidd do," I said in what I hoped was a cryptic tone. Has Milady Raire arrived yet?" "Ha! She and Lord Revenat will make a dramatic entrance after the rest of us have been allowed to consume ourselves in restless patience for a time, you can be sure." He led us to the nearest refreshment server, which dispensed foamy concoctions in big tulip glasses. We stood on the lawn, fencing with him verbally for a few minuites, then parted with an implied understanding that whatever happened, our weight would go to the side of Justice -- whatever that meant. Milady Bezaille appeared, looked us over and gave a sniff that seemed to mean approval of our new finery. I had a feeling she'd regrettecr her earlier rash impulse of inviting two space tramps to the Grand Soiree of the year. "Look sharp, now," she cautioned me. "When Milord Revenat designs to appear he'll be swamped at once with attention of certain unwholesome elements of the House. That will be your chance to catch a glimpse of Milady Raire. See if you read in her face other than pain and terror!" A slender, dandified lad sauntered over after the beldame had whisked away. IF "I see the noble lady is attempting to influence you," he said. "Beware of her, sirs. She is not of sound mind." "She was just tipping us off that the punch in number three bowl is spiked with hand-blaster pellets," I assured him. He gave me a quick, sideways look. "What, ah, did she say to you about Sir Fane?" "Ah-hah!" I nodded. "Don't believe it!" he snapped. "Lies! Damnable lies!" I edged closer to him. "What about Sir Tanis?" I muttered. He shifted his eyes. "Watch him. All his talk about unilateral revisionism and ancillary line vigor -- pure superstition." "And Lord Revenat?" He looked startled. "You don't mean -- " He turned and scuttled away without finisihing the sentence. "Danger -- are you sure this is the right place we're in?" Fsha-fsha whispered. "If the Lady Raire is anything like the rest of this menagerie..." "She isn't," I said. I stopped talking as a stir ran through the little conversational groups around us. Across the lawn a servant in crimson livery was towing a floating floodlight along above the heads of a couple just descending a wide, shallow flight of steps from a landing terrace above. I hadn't seen the heli arrive. The man was tall, wideshouldered, trim, like all Zeridajhans, dressed in a form-ftting winecolored outfit with an elaborate pectoral ornament suspended around his neck on a chain. The woman beside Him was slim, elegantly gowned in silvery gauze, with her black hair piled hi, intricately entwined in a jeweled coronet. I'd never seen her in jewels before. But that perfect face, set in an expression that was the absence of all expression, was that of Milady Raire. T he crowd moved in their direction as if by a common impulse to rush up and greet the newcomers; but the movement halted and the restless murmur of chatter resumed, but with a new, nervous note that was evident in the shrill cackle of laughter and the over-hearty waving of arms. I made my way across through the crowd, watching the circle of impressively clad males collecting around the newcomers. They moved off in a body, with a great deal of exuberant joking that sounded about as sincere as a losing politician's congratulatory telegram to the winner. I trailed along at a distance of ten yards, while the group swirled around a drink dispenser and broke up into a central group and half a dozen squeezed-out satellites. The lucky winners steered their prize on an evasion course, dropping a few members along the way when clumsy footwork involved them in exchanges of amenities with other, less favored groups. In five minutes, the tall man in the burgundy tights was fenced into a comer by half a dozen hardy victors, while the lady in silver stood for the moment alone at a few yards distance. I looked at her pale, aloof face, still as youthful and unline d as it had been seven years ago, when we last talked together under the white sun of Gar #. I took a deep breath and started across the lawn toward her. She didn't notice me until I was ten feet from her; then she turned slowly and her eyes went across me as coolly as the first breath of winter. They came back again, and this time flickered -- and held on me. Suddenly I was conscious of the scar, two-thirds concealed by the high collar of my jacket, that marked the comer of my jaw -- and of the black patch over my right eye. Her eyes moved over me, back to my face. They widened. Her lips parted, then I was standing before her. "Milady Raire," I said, and heard the hoarse note in my voice. "Can... can it be you?" Her voice was the faintest of whispers. A hard hand took my arm, spun me ground. do not believe, sir," a furious voice snarled, "that you have the privilege of approach to Her Ladyship!" He got that far before his eyes took in what they were looking at; his voice trailed off. His mouth hung open. He dropped my arm and took a step back. It was the man named Huvile. #Qir Revenat," someone started, iand let it drop. I could almost hear his mind racing, looking for the right line to take. But nobody. even someone who had only talked to me for five minutes three years before, could pretend to have forgotten my face: black-skinned, scarred, one-eyed. "It... it... I..." "Sir Revenat," I said as smoothly as I could under the circumstances, and gave him a stiff little half-bow. That passed the ball to him. He could play it any way he liked from there. "Why, why -- " He took my arm, in a gentler grip this time. "My dear fellow! What an extraordinary pleasure!" His eyes went to Milady Raire. She returned a look as impersonal as the carved face of a statue. She didn't look at me. "If you will excuse us. Milady." HuvileRevenat ducked his head and hustled me past her, and the silent crowd parted to let us through. I nside a white damask room with a wall of glass through which the lights of the garden cast a soft polychrome glow, Huvile faced me. He looked a little different than he had the last time I had seen him, wearing the coarse kilt of a slave in the household of the Triarch of Drath. He had lost the gaunt look and was trimmed, manicured and polished like a prize-winning boar. "You've changed," he said. "For a moment, I almost failed to recognize you." His voice was hearty enough, but his eyes were as alert as a coiled rattler. I nodded. "A year on the Triarch's rafts have that effect." "The rafts?" He looked shocked. "But... but..." IF "The penalty for freeing slaves," I said. "And not being able to pay the fines." "But... I assumed..." "Everything I owned was on my boat," I said. His face was turning darker, as if pressure was building up beMnd it. "Your boat... I... ah..." He made an effort to get hold of himself. "See here, didn't you direct, ah, the young woman to lift ship at once?" His look told me he was waiting to see if I'd pick up the impersonal reference to the Lady Raire. I shook my head and waited. "But she arrived a moment or two after I reached the port. You did send her?" "Yes." "Of course," he hurried on. "She seemed most distraught, poor creature. I explained to her that a kindly stranger -- yourself -- had purchased my freedom, and presumably hers as well. And while we spoke, a creature appeared. A ghastly-looking little beggar. The unfortunate girl was terrified by the sight of him; I drove the thing off, and then... and then she insisted that we lift at once!" Huvile shook his head, looking grieved. "I understand now. In her frenzy to make good her escape, she abandoned you, her unknown savior." A thought hit him, sharpened his eyes. "You hadn't, ah, personally known the poor child?" "I saw her for a moment at the Triarch's palace -- from a distance." He sighed. His look got more comfortable. "A tragedy that your kindness was rewarded by such ingratitude. Believe me, sir, I am eternally in your debt! I acknowledge it freely," He lowered his voice. "But let us keep the details in confidence, between us. It would not be desirable at this moment to introduce a new factor into the somewhat complex equation of House affairs." He was getting expansive now. "We shouldn't like my ability to reward you as you deserve to suffer through any fallacious construction that might be put on matters, eh?" "I take it you took the female slave under your wing," I said. He gave me a sharp look. He would have liked her left out of the conversation. "She would have needed to get home," I amplified. "Ah, yes, I think I see now," he smiled a sad, sweet smile. "You were taken with her beauty. But alas -- " his eyes held on mine -- "she died." # #"That's very sad," I said. "How A did it happen?" "My friend, wouldn't it be better to forget her? Who knows what terrible pressures might not have influenced her to the despicable course she chose? Poor waif, she suffered greatly. Her death gave her surcease." His expression got brisk. "And now, in what way can I serve you, sir? Tell me how I can make amends for the injustice done you." He talked some more, offered me the hospitality of the estate, a meal, even, delicately, money. His relief when I turned them down was obvious. Now that he saw I wasn't going to be nasty about the little misunderstanding, his confidence was coming back. I let him ramble on. When he ran down, I said: "How about an introduction to the lady in silver? The Lady Raire, I understand her name is." His face went hard. "This is impossible. The lady is not well. Strange faces upset her." "Too bad," I said. "In that case, I guess there's not much for me to stay around for." "Must you go? But of course if you have business matters requiring your attention, I mustn't keep you." He went across to an archway leading toward the front of the house; he was so eager to get rid of me the easy way that he almost fell down getting there. He didn't realize I'd turned the opposite way and stepped back out onto the terrace until I was already across it and headed across the lawn to where Milady Raire still stood alone, like a pale statue in the winking light of an illuminated fountain. S he watched me come across the the lawn to her. I could hear the hurrying footsteps of Sir Revenat behind me, not quite running, heard someone intercept him, the babble of self-important voices. I walked up to her and my eyes held on her face. It was as rigid as a death mask. "Milady, what happened after you left Drath?" I ask her without preamble. "I -- " she started and her eyes showed shock. "Then -- on Drath -- it was you!" "You're scared. Milady. They're all scared of Huvile, but you most of all. Tell me why." "Billy Danger," she said, and for an instant the iron discipline of her face broke; but she caught herself. "Fly, Billy Danger," she whispered in English. "Fly hence in the instant, ere thou, too, art lost, for nothing can rescue me!" I heard feet coming up fast behind me and turned to see Sir Revenat, his face white with fury masked by a ghastly grin. "You are elusive, my friend," he grated. His fingers were playing with the heavy ornament dangling on his chest, an ovoid with a look of half-familiarity. "I fear you've lost your way. The gate lies at the opposite end of the gardens." His hand reached for me as if to guide me back to the path, but I leaned aside from it, turned to Milady Raire. I put out my hand as if to offer it to her, instead reached farther, ran my fingers down her silken side -- and felt the slight, tell-tale lump there. She gasped and drew back. Huville let out a roar and caught at my arm savagely. A concerted gasp had gone up from every mouth within gasping range. "Barbarian wretch!" Huvile howled. "You'd lay hands on the person of a lady of the house of Ancinet-Chanore?" The rest was just an inarticulate bellow backed up by a chorus of the same from the assembled spectators. "Enough!" Huvile yelled. "This adventurer comes among us to mock the dignity of this house! He openly offers insult to a noble lady of IF the ancient line!" He whirled to face the crowd. "Then I'll oblige him with a taste of the just fury of that line! Milords! Bring me my sword box!" He turned back to me, and there was red fury enough in his eyes for ten houses. He stepped close, but his face close to mine. His fingers played with the slave controller at his neck. I judged the distance for a jump, but he was ready with his finger on the control. And we both knew that a touch by anyone but himself would activate it. "You saw," he hissed. "You know her life is in my hands. If you expose me, she dies!" T he lords and ladies of the House of Ancinet-Chanore may have been out of touch with reality in some ways, but when it came to setting up the stage for a bloodduel on their fancy lawn, under the gay lights, they were the soul of efficiency. While a ring of armed servants stood obtrusively around me, others hurried away and came back with a fancy inlaid box of darkly polished wood. Huvile lifted the lid with a flourish and took out a straight-bladed saber heavy enough to behead a peasant with. There was a lot of gold thread and the jewelwork around the hilt, but it was a butcher's weapon. Another one, just like it but without the jelly beans, was trotted out for me. Sir Tanis made the formal speech. He cited all the hallowed customs that surrounded the curiouscustom that allowed an irate Lord of the House to take a cleaver to anyone who annoyed him sufficiently, and then in a less pompous tone explained the rules to me. They weren't much. We'd hack at each other until Sir Revenat was satisfied or dead. "Man to man," Sir Tanis finished his spiel. The house of AncinetChanore defends its honor with the ancient right of its strong arm! Let her detractors beware!" Then the crowd backed off and the servants formed up a loose ring, fifty feet across. Huvile brandished his sword and his eyes ate me alive. Fsha-fsha took my jacket and leaned close to give me a last word of advice. "Remember your sorting training, Billy Danger! Key in your response patterns to his attack modes! Play him until you read him like a glorm-bulb line! Then strike!" "If I don't make it," I said, "find a way to tell them." "You'll make it," he said. "But -- yeah -- I'll do my best." He withdrew at a curt command from Tanis, and Huvile moved out to meet me. He held the sword lightly, as if his wrist was used to handling it. I had an idea the upstart sir had spent a lot of hours practicing the elevating art of throwing his weight around. He moved in with the blade held low, pointed straight at me. I imitated his stance. He made a small feint and I slapped his blade with mine and moved back as he dropped his point and lunged and missed my thigh by an inch. I tried to blank my mind, key in his approach-feint-attack gambit to a side-jump-and-counter-cut syndrome. It was hard to bring the pattern I wanted into clear focus without running through it, physically. I backed, made Huvile blink by doing the jump and cut in pantomine, two sword-lengths from contact distance. A nervous titter ran through the audience, but that was all right. I was pretty sure Fd set the response pattern I wanted to at least one of his approaches. But he had others. He came after me, cautious now, checking me out. He tried a high thrust, a low cut, a one-two lunge past my guard. I backed shamelessly, for each attack tried to key in an appropriate response -- I felt myself whip to one side, slash in an automatic reaction to a repetition of his opening gambit. My pK)int caught his sleeve and ripped through the wine-red cloth. So far so good. Huvile back-pedaled, then tried a furious frontal attack. I gave ground, my arm countering him with no conscious thought on my part. He realized the tactic was getting him nowhere and dropped his point, whipped it up suddenly and he dived forward. I caught it barely in time, deflected the blade over my right shoulder, and was chest to chest with him, our hilts locked together. "It's necessary for me to kill you," he whispered. "You understand that it's impossible for me to let you live." His eyes looked mad; his free hand still gripped the controller. "If I die -- she dies. And if I suspect you may be gaining --  I plunge the lever home. Your only choice is to sacrifice yourself." He pushed me away and jabbed a vicious cut at me, and then we were circling again. M y brain seemed to be set in concrete. Huvile was nuts -- no doubt about that. He had brazened his way into the midst of the house of Ancinet Chanore on the strength of the invisible knife he held at Milady's heart; and if lie saw the game was up -- the fragile game he'd nursed along for months now -- he'd kill her wifii utter finality and in the most incredible agony, as the magneum flare set in her heart burned its way through her ribs. There was just one possibility. The Drathians had gone to a lot of trouble to link the life of the slave to the well-being of the master; but there was one inevitable weak spot. Even the most sophisticated circuitry couldn't do its job after it was destroyed. I'd proven that; I had crushed Hu vile's controller under my foot -- and he was s 'I alive. But on the other hand, maybe that had been a freak, a defective controller. Huvile had been two miles away at the time. And it was no special trick to rig an electronic device so that the cutoff of a carrier signal actuated a respon d! in a receiver... There was sweat on my face, n o all of it from the exercise. My only chance was to smash the controller and kill Huvile with the same stroke -- and hope for the best. Because, win or lose, the Lady Raire was better dead than a slave to this madman. While these merry thoughts were racing through my mind, I was backing, feinting and parrying automatically. And suddenly Huville's blade dropped, flickered in at me and out again and I felt my right leg sag and go out from under me. I caught myself in time to counter an over-eager swing and strike back from one knee, but it was only a moment's delay of the inevitable. I saw his arm swing back for the finishing stroke -- There was a swirl of silver, and the Lady Raire was at his side, clutching his sword arm -- and then she crumpled, white-faced, as the controller's automatic angina circuit clamped iron fingers on her heart. But it was enough. While Huvile staggered, off-balance, his free hand groping, I came up in a one-legged lunge. He saw me, brought his sword up and back, at the same time snatched for the controller. He was a fraction of a second late. My point struck it, burst it into chips, slammed on through bone and muscle and lodged in his spine. He fell slowly, with an amazed look on his face. I saw him hit! then I went over sideways and grabbed for the gapping wound in my thigh and felt darkness close in. T he House of Ancinet-Chanore was very manly about acknowledging its mistake. I sat across from old Lord Pastaine under the canopy on his favorite sun terrace, telling him for the sixth or seventh time how it had happened that I had bought freedom for two slaves and then sent them jDff together in my boat while I went to the rafts. He wagged his Mosaic head and looked grave. "A serious misjudgment of character on your part," he said. "Yet were we not all guilty of misjudgment? When the Lady Raire returned, so unexpectedly, I wished to open my heart to her -- suppKsed -- savior. I granted the interloper -- Huvile, you say his name is?" He shook his head. "An upstart, of no family -- I granted him, I say, every freedom, every honor in the gift of Ancinet-Chanore. As for Milady -- if she chose to clos#t herself in solitary withdrawal from the comfort of her family -- could I say nay? And then I saw the beginnings of the wretched maneuverings that would make this stranger Head after my death. I called for Milady Raire to attend me -- and she refused! Me! It was unheard of! Can you blame me for striking her from my memory, as one dead? And as for the others -- venal, grasping, foolish! To what depths has the House not fallen since the days of my youth, a thousand years agone?" I listened to him ramble on. I had been hearing the same story from a variety of directions during the past three days, while my leg healed under the miracle-medicines of old Zeridajh. If any one of the Lady Raire's doting relations had car enough about her to take just one, good, searching look into her eyes, they'd have seen that someIF thing was seriously amiss. But all they saw was a pawn of the board of House politics, and her silent appeals had gone unanswered. As for why she hadn't defied Huvile, faced death before submitting to enslavement to his ambitions -- I could guess that half an hour of sub-fatal angina might be a persuasion that would convince a victim who could laugh at the threat of mere death. "If you'd arrange for me to see the Lady Raire for a few minutes," I butted in the Milord's nmibling assessment of the former Sir Revenat's character, "I'd be most appreciative." He looked grave. "I believe we all agree that it would be best not to reawaken the unhappy emotions of these past months by and references thereto," he said. "We are grateful to you. Captain Danger. The House will be forever in your debt. I'm sure Milady will understand if you slip quietly away, leaving her to the ministrations of her family, those who know where her interests lie." I got the idea. It had been explained to me in slightly varying terms by no less than twelve solemn pillars of the House of AncinetChanore. The Lady Raire, having had one close brush with an interloper, would not be exposed to the questionable influences of another. They were glad I'd happened along in time to break the spell. But now the lady would return to her own kind, her own life. And they were right, of course. I didn't know just what it .was that Jongo would have to say to Milady Raire of the ancient house of Ancinet-Chanore. I'd had my share of wild fancies, but none of them were wild enough to include offering her boudoir space aboard my boat as an alternative to the Estates of Ancinet-Chanore. On the way out. Sir Tanis offered me a crack at a lot of fancy trade opportunities, letters of recommendation to any house I mit name and assorted other vague rewards, and ended with a hint, none too closely veiled, that any further attempt to see the Lady would end unhappily for me. I told him I got the idea and walked out into the twilight through the high gates of the house with no more than a slight limp to remind me of my visit. xxxn F sha-fsha was waiting for me at the boat. I told him about my parting interviews with the House of Ancinet-Chanore. He listened. "You never learn, do you, Billy?" He wagged his head sadly. "I've learned that there's no place for me in fancy company," I said. "Give me the honest solitude of space, and a trail of new worlds waiting ahead. That's my style." "You saved the lady's life on Gar #, you know," Fsha-fsha said, talking to himself. "If you hadn't done what you did -- when you did -- she'd never have lived out the first week. It was too bad you didn't look and listen a bit before you handed her over to the H'eeaq. But then, who would have known, eh?" "Let's forget all that," I suggested. "The ship's trimmed to lift -- " "Then at Drath, you picked her out from under the Tri arch's nose in as smooth a counter swindle as I've ever heard of. He had no idea of letting them go, you know. They'd have been arrested at the port -- except that the Rule Keepers were caught short when the tub lifted without you. Your only mistake was in trusting Huvile -- " 'Trusting Huvile!" "You trusted him. You sent him along to an unguarded ship. If you'd worked just one angle a little more subtly -- gone out yourself to see the lady aboard and then lifted, leaving Huvile behind -- but this is neither here nor there. For the second time, you saved her -- and handed her over to her enemy." "I know that," I snapped. "I've kicked myself for it -- " "And now -- here you are, repeating the pattern," he bored on. "Three times and out." "What?" "You saved the Lady again, Billy. Plucked her out of the wicked hands of her tormentor..." "And?" "And handed her over to her enemies." "Her family has her!" "That's what I said." "Then..." Wheels were beginning to whirl in front of my eyes. "Maybe," I said, "you'd better tell me exactly what you're talking about S he opened her eyes, startled, when I leaned over her sleeping couch. "Billy Danger," she breathed. "Is it thee? Why came you not to me ere now?"  "An acute attack of stupidity. Milady," I whispered. She smiled a dazzling smile. "My name is Raire, Billy. I am no one's lady." "You're mine," I said. "Always, my Billy." She reached and drew my face down to hers. Her lips were softer even than I had dreamed. "Come," I said. She rose silently and Eureka rubbed himself across her knees. They followed me across the wide room, along a still corridor. In the great hall below, I asked her to show me the shortest route to the grounds. She led the way along a cloistered arcade, through a walled garden, onto a wide terrace above the dark sweep of skylit lawn. "Billy. When I pass this door, the house arm will be set off." "I know. That's why I dropped in on the roof in a one-man heli. Too bad we couldn't leave the same way, Let's go." We started out at a run toward the trees. We had gone fifty feet when lights sprang up across the back of the house. I turned and took aim with my filament gun and knocked out the two biggest polyarcs, and we sprinted for cover, Eureka loping in the lead. A new light sprang up, just too late, swept the stretch of grass we had just crossed. We reached the trees, went flat. Men were coming through the rear doors of the house. There was a lot of yelling. ## IF I looked up. Against the swirls and clots of stars, nothing was visible. I checked my watch again; Fshafsha was two minutes late. The line of men was moving down across the lawn. In half a minute, they'd reach the trees. There was a wink of light from above, followed by a dull baroom as of distant thunder. A high whistling screech became audible, descended to a full-throated roar; something flashed overhead -- a long shape ablaze with lights. A second gunboat slammed across in the wake of the first. "That cuts it," I said. "Fsha-fsha's been picked off." A terrific detonation boomed, drawling itself out into a bellow of power. I saw a dark shape flash past against the clotted stars. The men on the lawn saw it, too. They halted their advance, looking up at the dark boat that had shot past on an opposite course to the security cutters. "Look!" The Lady Raire pointed. Something big and dark was drifting toward our position across the lake. the surface of the water, concealed from the house by the trees. We jumped up and ran for it. Her bow lights came on, dazzling as suns, traversed over us, lanced out to blind the men beyond the trees. I could see the soft glow from her open entry port. We splashed out into knee-deep water; I tossed Eureka in, then jumped, caught the rail, pulled myself in, reached back for the Lady Raire as men burst through the screen of trees. Then e were inside, pressed flat against the floor by the surge of acceleration as the old racer lifted and screamed away. miles, Zeridajh was a misty emerald crescent, dwindling on our screens. "It was a pretty world, Milady," I said. "You're going to miss it." "Dost know what place I truly dreamed of, my Billy, when the gray years of Drath lengthened?" "The garden," I suggested. "They're very beautiful, with the sun on them." "I dreamt of the caves, and the green shade of the giant peas, and the simple loyalty of our good Eureka." She strok the gizzled head. "Never," Fsha-fsha said from the depths of the big command chair, "will I understand the motivations of you propagators. Still, life in your company promises to be diverting. I'll say that for it." He showed us that ghastly expression he used. "But tell me, Milady -- if the question isn't impertinent -- what were you doing out there, at the far end of the Eastern Arm?" "Haven't you guessed?" she smiled at him. "Until Lord Desroy caught me, I was running away." "I knew it!" Fsha-fsha boomed. "And now that the great quest is finished -- where to?" "Anywhere," I said. I put my arm around Raire's flower-slim waist and drew her to me. "Anywhere at all." The sweet hum of the mighty and ancient engines drummed softly through the deck. Together, we watched the blaze of Center move hue Dear Editor: A good futuristic fantasy cover has a lot to do with the sale of a good science-fiction periodical. No other cover design has ever matched the ones that are displayed on the Galaxy publications. The best IVe noticed, though, are the ones illustrated by McKenna. His creativity does not lack realism, yet still captures the fantastic mood of the setting. If it's possible, I wish you would try and get more of McKenna's illustrations on the covers of your publications. Good science-fiction literature deserves good illustration. -- Rick Barbagelata, # Mohawk Place, Amsterdam, N.Y.    Gents : Many years ago, I think when I was about in the fifth grade, in a one-room country school complete with twin outhouses, I sneaked out back of the barn and dug up the one page in the Sunday Funnies that my ma used to tear out and bury before I was allowed to look. That is how I discovered "Buck Rodgers." I still don't know to this day whether I kept on reading it because I liked it -- or because Mama threw a fit. Whatever the reason, I became hooked, and eventually graduated to mainlining, via the printed word. Now, after all these years, I find myself becoming bored with the endless barraige of sociological stories written by deviant psychiatrists. To relieve the boredom, and maybe avoid having to go find some new kind of escapist literature, I have begun to pick the stories apart, on the low, somewhat moronic level of obvious contradictions. Herein, I seem to have found myself a new hobby, but it ought to be a lot more fun if I can aggravate the writers themselves or, better yet, the editor who lets these things by. Besides, this is one hell of a good way for me to get back at editors for all the times they have picked my articles apart and made me rewrite them! Sooooo -- I have founded, and am President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, pot-walloper, janitor, and sole member of the Beezlehead Society of America -- an organization devoted to the picking-apart of science-fiction stories. For my first effort, let us take "Truce of Consequences." Where the Ancient Librarian points a light at "Retief's heart and says: I've got this light right in your eye -- ." But, the pen-and-ink on page # shows the BE M's with eyes about where Homo the Sap's would be? Then, again, in "Science-Fiction Byways," Lin Carter says: "Way back in #, when (We) were very young -- " So what's with him? Two heads, or a mouse in his pocket? And, I wish C. C. MacApp would make up his mind. When he was describing the Remm, first they had necksv then they didn't. Outside the Overseers' ship was "a wall or forest." OK -- I igdve up! Which was it? And, while we're at it, which was it, "a huge arrow -- or a feathered spear?" For that matter, maybe Morrow can tell me what he did with the membrane, and where's the "huge arrow or feathered spear" the creature was trying to throw? Cumawn, fellers -- you can do better than this. If I wrote an article with that many holes in it, they'd drum me out of the typewriter corps, and maybe sentence me to grow long fingernails for good measure! And, if the eddytore don't say sumthin' about this lousy typing. I'll be sore dissapointed! I was taught in the overstrikenospace school. -- Eugene Austin, P.O. Box #, Greenwood, Nebraska.    Dear Editor: The Marsh issue of If was exceptional. The simplicity of the cover proclaimed an unusual issue, and it did not lie. Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, I would have liked a longer story by Isaac Asimov. More authors I would like to see; Fredric Brown, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak, more (much more) Isaae Asimov, and someone you may vaguely remember, Frederik Pohl. Re your editorial in the Februaiy issue : there are some things we can do to "convert" others to science fiction. One way is to support the good sf TV shows and movies (for example. Star Trek, Fantastic Voyage, The Invaders, The #st Century, an excellent blend of science fact and fiction with the emphasis on fact, and Fahrenheit #), My other idea is crazier. Many people who don't care for modem sf are crazy about the works of, say Jules Veme or H. G. Wells. Why? TheyWe old! So here's my plan: All new sf magazines and books will be dated before #. New readers, thinking them classic reprints, will swarm to purchase them. Old fen, knowing the plan, will still read them, putting up with indexing problems and so forth for the ideal of spreading sf. Of course, there are inherent difficulties, but if the pro"gram went into effect with publicity for the "reprints"... May If win the next Hugo, too. -- John Borger, Box #, Route #, Parkersburg, West Virginia. i(c ( Dead Editor: I found the Hugowinner s' issue of If to be very, very good, but the biggest impression was made not by the contents, but by the packaging. Mr. McKenna's cover was (is) beautiful. My only criticism is: get rid of that spaceship. It is unnecessary (someone had the presence of mind to put it on the hack cover) and detracts from the overall effect even more than the printing on the front. Nothing personal intended, but I wouldn't want the March cover to win a Best-Cover Hugo: I'd rather see the covers get even better. It just goes to show that a cover which is good art deserves as much recognition as one which is good illustraFoster, State College, Pennsylvania #.    Dear Fred: I was interested to see the letter in the current If about my "Star Trek book (even though the lady didn't like it). It occurred to me that maybe your readers would be interested in a few things that have emerged from it. The book, which is an adaptation of seven scripts from the TV show, went on sale in January, and by March had already gone into a second printing. In those three months I got more fan mail about it than I have for any of my #I other books. Some of these were from women (chiefly housewives and college undergraduates) complaining that I didn't do justice to Mr. Spock, whom they adore. The vast majority, however, were from children in the #-# age backet. Almost unanimously, they (a) asked for another book; (b) asked what other books I had written ; and (c) asked what other s-f books I would recommend. Answering this influx was almost as big a job as writing the book had been, and the letters are still coming in at the rate of two or three a day. My editor at Bantam tells me that they too have been swamped. In short, it looks as though there is a whole new audience being created here, not just for s-f on television, but in print as well. Almost none of these youngsters has seen a s-f book or magazine before. Incidentally, it now appears that the show is going to go on another year. -- and I am doing another book, which will probably be out in November. -- James Blish. # You forgot to mention the other thing you've been doing lately -- writing your new novel, Faust Aleph-Null, which starts in our next issue ! And that, it would seem, is about all for this month. As you know, each month we bring you one new writer making his first professional appearance in print anywhere with a science-fiction story. We've been doing this in every issue of If for the past five years or so, and when we started the wise money was betting that we'd have to give it up in six months because there just weren't that many new writers coming along. As you see, the wise money was wrong. Not only that, but the stories have in fact been coming in in such good supply that this month we're bringing you two firsts -- both of them, as it happens, coming from across the sea. Number One is E. Audrey Walton, who lives in Coventry, England, is the grand-daughter of an amateur astronomer and the daughter of a suffragette (yes, we can see the effects of heredity!) and came to us by way of a short-story contest run by the National Fantasy Fan Federation. (Not the first time we've found ourselves buying stories entered in this annual event.) Number Two Is Alan Dirkson, who is also English, but wrote Adamjs Eva while living in a garret in Paris where the stairs were a rickety ladder and the door was a hole in the roof, and when last heard from had moved on to Spain. He reports it took him # rejection slips to make his first sale. You see? Never give up! -- The Editor IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! o o o o o oo o o  # # # o O O O O o o The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales lax, if any. Your j No. CX# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer I Order from Galaxy #I Hudson street. New York # , N. Y. A new science-fiction magazine " with a new concept in publishing mmt mrm liacTHjgue wil storifcp#i  Faust Aleph Null! The Age of Science Versus Sorcery! A Terrifying New Novel W Jf v. v' I A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Frederik Pohl, Editor David Perfon , Production Manager Robert M. Guinn, Publisher by Keith Laumer by Fred Saberhagen by James Blish by Philip Jose Farmer by Roger Deeley by Burt K. Filer by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter by Sam Moskowitz IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope? The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # Vol. #, No. # IF  Editorial W th this issue we've combined Worlds of Tomorrow with If -- and, as you've noticed, raised the price of If to #c. We don't suppose there's much need to explain the rise in price, because we've all got pretty used to the fact that everything eternally costs more. (But you can avoid this particular price rise by subscribing now at the old rates -- see ad elsewhere in this issue.) As long as the price had to go up anyway, we've taken this opportunity of bringing into If some of the most popular features from Worlds of Tomorrow -- Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld stories, Sam Moskowitz's articles and so on. We think If -- which, as you know, already holds the Hugo as the world's leading sciencefiction magazine -- will be even better for the change... But Worlds of Tomorrow , alas, is with us no more. T he funny thing, about Worlds of Tomorrow is that at seemed to have every chance of surviving. Magazine publishing has become a chancy sort of business in the past decade or so, and the mortality tables for new publications are alarming. If you look at the circulation statements for even the titans of the field -- Saturday Evening Post, Life, you name it -- you can see the change. Where once a big slick magazine expected to sell half its copies on the newsstands and half by subscription, now # or more go by subscription. This isn't because subscription sales are more profitable; quite the reverse. In fact, the figures are rather astonishing: a big slick magazine whose singlecopy price amounts to, say, # in a year will happily sell you a subscription for half that -- and will pay # or # in list rental and mailing cost to get you to send in that five-dollar check I The freight is paid by advertising, of course. For nearly evejy magazine, though, the newsstand sales -- the copies are bought by people like ourselves, browsing over the stacks in the comer drug store and buying what looks like it would be interesting to read -- are harder and harder to come by. Worlds of Tomorrow, in its early issues, had a great deal of publicity, a friendly response from readers and a good sale -- where it got on the stands at all. But that was the catch. Even after four years, it simply was not getting out in some of the best parts of the country. Lacking the advertising subsidy that permits a big slick to lose money on every copy it sells and still come up smiling, the effort to stay afloat with a limited distribution was too precarious to maintain. So -- now we have If, enhanced with some of the best features of Worlds of Tomorrow, and Galaxy; and we'll just concentrate on continuing to make them better and better! 'vas-fauxim The Dark Continents of Your Mind maintain energy , enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicrucians; an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess; This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life,'! Address: Scribe P.B.L San Jose, California # U.S.A, Scribe: P.B.L San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. Name Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code IF  Serial Illustrated by Morrow There's no such thing as sorcery . But what was it, then, that turned fears to gold and destroyed lives? I T he magician said, "No, I can't help you to persuade a woman. Should you want her raped, I can arrange that. If you want to rape her yourself, I can arrange that too, with more difficulty -- possibly more than you'd have to exert on your own hook. But I can't supply you with any philtres or formulae. My specialty is crimes of violence. Chiefly, murder." Baines shot a sidelong glance at his special assistant, Jack Ginsberg, who as usual wore no expression whatsoever and had not a crease out of true. It was nice to be able to trust someone. Baines said: "You're very frank." "I try to leave as little mystery as possible," Theron Ware -- Baines knew that was indeed his real name -- said promptly. "From the client's point of view, black magic is a body of technique, like engineering. The more he knows about it, the easier I find it makes coming to an agreement." #xto trade secrets? Arcane lore, and so on?" "Some -- mostly the products of my own research, and very few of them of any real importance to you. The main scholium of magic is 'arcane' only because most people don't know what books to read or where to find them. Given those books -- and sometimes, somebody to translate them for you -- you could learn almost everything important that I know in a year. To make something of the material, of course, you'd have to have the talent, since magic is also an art. With books and the gift, you could become a magician -- either you are or you aren't, there are no bad magicians, any more than there is such a thing as a bad mathematician -- in about twenty years. If it didn't kill you first, of course, in some equivalent of a laboratory accident. It takes that long, give or take a few years, to develop the skills involved. I don't mean to say you wouldn't find it formidable, but the age of secrecy is past. And really the old codes were rather simpleminded, much easier to read than, say, musical notation. If they weren't, well, computers could break (them in a hurry. # ' Most of these generalities were familiar stuff to Baines, as Ware doubtless knew. Baines suspected the magician of offering them in order to allow time for himself to be studied by the client. This suspicion crystallized promptly as a swinging door to the left of Ware's huge desk opened silently, and a shortskirted blonde girl in a pageboy coiffure came in with a letter on a small silver tray. "Excuse me," Ware said, taking the tray. "We wouldn't have been interrupted if this weren't important." The envelope crackled expensively in his hands as he opened it. Baines watched the girl go out -- a moving object, to be sure, but except that she reminded him vaguely of someone else, nothing at all extraordinary -- and then went openly about inspecting Ware. As usual, he started with the man's chosen surroundings. the afternoon sunlight, might have been the book-lined study of any doctor or lawyer, except that the room and the furniture were outsize. That said very little about Ware, for the house was a rented cliffside palazzo. There were bigger ones available in Positano had Ware been interested in still higher ceilings and worse acoustics. Though most of the books looked Id, the office was no mustier th an, say the library of Merton College, and it contained far fewer positively ancient instruments. The only trace in it which might have been attributable to magic was a faint smell of mixed incenses which the Tyrrhenian air coming in through the opened windows could not entirely dispell; but it was so slight that the nose soon tired of trying to detect it. Besides, it was hardly diagnostic by itself. Small Italian churches, for instance, also smelled like that. So did the drawing rooms of Egyptian police chiefs. Ware himself was remarkable, but with only a single exception, only in the sense that all men are unique to the eye of the bom captain. A small, spare man he was, dressed in natural Irish tweeds, a Frenchcuffed shirt linked with what looked like ordinary steel, a narrow gray silk four-in-hand tie with a single very small sapphire chessman -- a rook -- tacked to it. His leanness seemed to be held together with cables. Baines was sure that he was physically strong, despite a marked pallor, and that his belt size had not changed since he had been in high school. His present apparent age was deceptive. His face was seamed, and his bushy gray eyebrows now only slightly suggested that he had once been red-haired. His hair proper could not, for -- herein lay his one marked oddity -- he was tonsured, like a monk, blue veins crawling across his bare white scalp as across the papery back of his hands. An innocent bystander might have taken him to be in his late sixties. Baines knew him to be exactly his own age, which was fortyeight. Black magic, not surprisingIF ly, was obviously a wearing profession; cerebrotonic types like Ware, as Baines had often observed of the scientists who worked for Consolidated Warfare Service (div. A. O. LeFebre et Cie.), ordinarily look about forty-five from a real age of thirty until their hair turns white, if a heart attack doesn't knock them off in the interim. The parchment crackled, and Jack Ginsberg unobtrusively touched his dispatch case, setting going again a tape recorder back in Rome. Baines thought Ware saw this, but chose to take no notice. The magician said: "Of course, it's also faster if my clients are equally frank with me." "I should think you'd know all about me by now," Baines said. He felt an inner admiration. The ability to pick up an interrupted conversation exactly where it had been left off is rare in a man. Women do it easily, but seldom to any purpose. "Oh, Dun and Bradstreet," Ware said, "newspaper morgues, and of course the grapevine -- I have all that, naturally. But I'll still need to ask some questions." "Why not read my mind?" "Because it's more work than it's worth. I mean your excellent mind no disrespect, Mr. Baines. But one thing you must understand is that magic is hard work. I don't use it out of laziness, I am not a lazy man, but by the same token I do take the easier ways of getting what I want if easier ways are available." "You've lost me." "An example, then. All magic -- I repeat, all magic, with no exceptions whatsoever --  depends upon the oontrol of demons. By demons I mean specifically fallen angels; no lesser class can do a thing for you. Now, I know one such whose Earthly form includes a long tongue. You may find the notion comic." "Not exactly." "Let that pass for now. In any event, this is also a great prince and president, whose apparition would cost me three days of work and two weeks of subsequent exhaustion. Shall I call him up to lick stamps for me?" "I see the point," Baines said. "All right, ask your questions." "Thank you. Who sent you to me?" U A medium in Bel Air -- LosTxAngeles. She (attempted to blackmail me, so nearly successfully that I concluded that she did have some real talent and would know somebody who had more. I threatened her life, and she broke." Ware was taking notes. "I see. And she sent you to the Rosicrucians?" "She tried, but I already knew that dodge. She sent me to Monte Albano." "Ah. That surprises me, a little. I wouldn't have thought that you'd have any need of treasure-finders." "I do and I don't," Baines said. "I'll explain that too, but a little later, if you don't mind. Primarily I wanted someone in your specialty -- murder -- and of course the white monks were of no use there. I didn't even broach the subject with them. Frankly, I only wanted to test your reputation, of which I'd had hints; I too can use newspaper morgues. Their horror when I mentioned you was enough to convince me that I ought to talk to you, at least" "Sensible. Then you don't really believe in magic yet -- only in "I'm not," Baines said guardedly, "a religious man." "Precisely put. Hence, you want a demonstration. Did you bring with you the mirror I mentioned on the phone to your assistant?" Silently, -- Jack took from his inside jacket pocket a waxed-paper envelope, from which he in turn removed a lady's hand-mirror sealed in glassine. He handed it to Baines, who broke the seal. "Good. Look in it." Out of the comers of Baines' eyes, two slow thick tears of dark venous blood were crawling down beside his nose. He lowered the mirror and stared at Ware. "Hypnotism," he said, quite steadily. "I had hoped for better." "Wipe them off," Ware said, unruffled. Baines pulled out his immaculate monogrammed handkerchief. On the white-on-white fabric, the red stains turned slowly into butteryellow gold. "I suggest you take those to a government metallurgist tomorrow," Ware said. "I could hardly have hypnotized him. Now peihaps we might get down to business." "I thought you said -- " " -- that even the simplest trick requires a demon. So I did, and I meant it. He is sitting at your back now, Air. Baines, and he will be there until day after tomorrow at this hour. Remember that: day after tomorrow. It will cost me dearly to have turned this little piece of do such things for a skeptical client -- and it will be included in my bill. Now, if you please, Mr. Baines, what do you want?" B aines handed the handkerchief to Jack, who folded it carefully and put it back in its waxedpaper wrapper. "I," Baines said, "of course want someone killed. Tracelessly." "Of course; but who?" "I'll tell you that in a minute. First of all, do you exercise any scruples?" # "Quite a few," Ware said. "For instance, I don't kill my friends, not for any client. And possibly I might balk at certain strangers. However, in general, I do have strangers sent for, on a regular scale of charges." "Then we had better explore the possibilities," Baines said. "I've got an ex-wife who's a gross inconvenience to me. Do you balk at that?" "Has she any children -- by you or anybody else?" "No, none aitall." "In that case, there's no problem. For that kind of job, my standard fee is fifteen thousand dollars, flat." Despite himself, Baines stared in astonishment. "Is that all?" he said at last. "That's all. I suspect that I'm almost as wealthy as you are, Mr. IF Baines. After all, I can find treasure as handily as the white monks can -- indeed, a good deal better. I use these alimony cases to keep my name before the public. Financially they're a loss to me." "What kinds of fees are you interested in?" "I begin to exert myself slightly If this man was a charlatan, he was a grandiose one. Baines said, "Let's stick to the alimony case for the moment. Or rather, suppose I don't care about the alimony, as in fact I don't. Instead, I might not only want her dead, but I might want her to die badly. To suffer." "I don't charge extra for that." "Why not?" "Mr. Baines," Ware said patiently, "I remind you, please, that I myself am not a killer. I merely summon and direct the agent. I think it very likely -- in fact, it is beyond doubt -- (that any patient I have sent for dies in an access of horror and agony beyond your power to imagine, or even mine. But you did specify that you wanted your murder done 'tracelessly,' which obviously means that I must have no unusual marks left on the patient. I prefer it that way myself. How then could I prove suffering if you asked for it, in a way inarguable enough to charge you extra for it? "Or, look at the other side of the shield, Mr. Baines. Every now and then, an unusual divorce client asks that the ex-consort be carried away painlessly, even sweetly, out of some residue of sentiment. I could collect an extra fee fo that, on a contingent basis, that is, if the body turns out to show no overt marks of disease or violence. But my agents are demons. Sweetness is not a trait they can be compelled to exhibit; so I never accept that kind of condition from a client, either. Death is what you pay for, and death is what you get. The circumstances are up to the agent, and I don't offer my clients anything that I know I can't deliver." "All right, I'm answered," Baines said. "Forget Dolores -- actually she's only a minor nuisance, and only one of several, for that matter. Now let's talk about the other end of the spectrum. Suppose instead that I should ask you to... send for... a great political figure. Say, the governor of California. Or, if he's a friend of yours, pick a similar figure who isn't." Ware nodded. "He'll do well enough. But you'll recall that I asked you about children. Had you really turned out to have been an alimony case, I should next have asked you about surviving relatives. My fees rise in direct proportion to the numbers and kinds of people a given death is likely to affect. This is partly what you call scruples, and partly a species of self-defense. Now in the case of a reigning governor, I would charge you one dollar for every vote he got when he was last elected. Plus expenses, of course. B aines whistled in admiration. "You're the first man I've ever met who's worked out a system to make scruples pay. And I can see why you don't care about alimony cases. Some day, Mr. Ware -- " "Doctor Ware, please. I am a Doctor of Theology." "Sorry. I only meant to say that some day I'll ask you why you want so much money; you asthenics seldom can think of any good use for it. In the meantime, however, you're hired. Is it all payable in advance?" "The expenses are payable in advance; the fee is C.O.D. As you'll realize once you stop to think about it, Mr. Baines -- " "Dr. Baines. I am an LL.D." "Apologies in exchange. I want you to realize, after these courtesies, that I have never, never been bilked." Baines thought about what was supposed to be at his back until day after tomorrow. Pending the test of the golden tears on the handthat he should not try to cheat Ware. Actually, he had never planned to. "Good," he said, getting up. "By the same token, we don't need a contract. I agree to your terms." "But what for?" "Oh," Baines said, "we can use the Governor of California for a starter. Jack here will iron out any remaining details with you; I have to get back to Rome by tonight." "You did say, 'For a starter?' " Baines nodded shortly. Ware, also rising, said: "Very well.' I shall ask no questions. But in fairness, Mr. Baines, I should warn you that on your next commission of this kind, I shall ask you what you want." "By that time," Baines said, holding his excitement tightly bottled, "we'll have to exchange such confidences. Oh, Dr. Ware; will the, uh, demon on my back go away by itself when the time r s up, or must I see you again to get it taken off?" "It isn't on your back," Ware said. "And it will go away by itself. Marlowe to the contrary, misery does not love company." Baring his teeth, Baines said, "We'll see about that." II F or a moment, Jack Ginsberg felt the same soon-to-be-brief strangeness of the man who does not really know what is going on and hence thinks he might be about to be fired. It was as though something had swallowed him by mistake, and -- quite without malice -- was about to throw him up again. While he waited for the monster's nausea to settle out, Jack went through his rituals, stroking his cheeks for stubble, resettling his creases, running through last week's accounts, and thinking above all, as he usually did most of all in such interims, of what the new girl might look like squatting in her stockings. Nothing special, probably. The reality was almost always hedged around with fleshly inconveniences and piddling little preferences which could flense away at will from the clean vision. When the chief had left and Ware had come back to his desk, however, Jack was ready for business and thoroughly on top of it. He prided himself upon an absolute self-control. "Questions?" Ware said. IF ft ft wmii   " V  H  . Kr v  "   SSl-Vsc'a? .V  ; m  mWm m rjfggq MVt A Co  "A few, Doctor Ware. You mentioned expenses. What expenses?" "Chiefly travel," Ware said. "I have to see the patient, personally. In the case Doctor Baines posed, that involves a trip to California, which is a vast inconvenience to me, and goes on the bill. It includes air-fare, hotels, meals, other put-ofpocket expenses which I'll itemize when the mission is over. Then there's the question of getting to see the governor. I have colleagues in California, but there's a certain amount of influences I'll have to buy, even with the help of Consolidated Warfare -- munitions and magic are circles which don't intersect very effectively. On the whole, I think a draft for ten thousand would be none too large." All that for magic. Disgusting. But the chief believed in it, at least provisionally. It made Jack feel very queasy. "That sounds very satisfactory," he said, but he made no move toward the corporate checkbook; he was not about to issue any Valentines to strangers yet, not until there was more love touring about the landscape than he had felt in his crew-cut antennae. "We're naturally a little bit wondering, sir, why all this expense is necessary. We understand that you'd rather not ride a demon when you can fly a jet with less effort -- " "I'm not sure you do," Ware said, "but stop simpering about it and ask me about the money." "Argh... Well, sir, then, just why do you live outside the United States? We know you're still a citizen. And after all, we have freedom of religion in the States still. Why does the chief have to pay to ship you back home for one job?" "Because I'm not a common gunman," Ware said. "Because I don't care to pay income taxes, or even report my income to anybody. There are two reasons. For the benefit of your ever-attentive dispatch-case there -- since you're a deaf ear if I ever saw one -- if I lived in the United States and advertised myself as a magician, I would be charged with fraud. And if I successfully defended myself -- proved I was what I said I was -- I'd wind up in a gas chamber; if I failed to defend myself, I'd be just one more charlatan. In Europe, I cansay I'm a magician and be left alone if I can satisfy my clients; caveat emptor. Otherwise, I'd have to be constantly countants, which isn't worth the work and sooner or later runs into the law of diminishing returns. Now you can turn that thing off." A ha; there was something wrong with this joker. He was preying upon superstition. As a Reformed Orthodox Agnostic, Jack Ginsberg knew all the ins and outs of that, specially the double-entry sides. He said smoothly: "I quite understand. But don't you perhaps have almost as much trouble with the Church, here in Italy, as you would with the government back home?" "No, not under a liberal Pontificate. The modern Church discourages what it calls superstition among its adherents. I haven't encountered IP a prelate in decades who believes in the literal existence of demons -- though of course some of the Orders know better." 'To be sure," Jack said, springing his trap exultantly. "So I think, sir, that you may be overcharging us -- and haven't been quite candid with us. If you do indeed control all these great princes and presidents, you could as easily bring the chief a woman as you could bring him a treasure or a murder." "So I could," the magician said, a little wearily. "I see you've done a little reading. But I explained to Doctor Baines, and I explain again to you, that I specialize only in crimes of violence. Now, Mr. Ginsberg, I think you were about to write me an expense check." "So I was." But still he hesitated. At last Ware said with delicate politeness: "Is there some other doubt I could resolve for you, Mr. Ginsberg? I am, after all, a Doctor of Theology. Or perhaps you have a private commission you wish to broach to me?" "No," Jack said. "No, not exactly." "I see no reason why you should be shy. It's clear that you like my lamia. And in fact, she's quite free of the nuisances of human women which annoy you -- " "Damn you. I thought you read minds! You lied about that too." "I don't read minds, and I never lie," Ware said. "But I'm adept at reading faces and somatotypes. It saves me a lot of trouble and a lot of unnecessary magic. Do you want the creature or don't you# I could have her sent to you invisibly if you like." "No." "Not invisibly. I'm sorry for you. Well then, my godless and lustless friend, speak up for yourself. What would you like? Your business is long since done. Spit it out. What is it?" For a breathless instant, Jack almost said what it was, but the God in which he no longer believed was at his back. He Baade out the check and handed it over. The girl (no, not a girl), came in and took it away. "Good-bye," Theron Ware said. Jack had missed the boat again. Ill F ather F. X. Domenico Bruno Garelli read the letter again, hopefully. Father Uccello affected an Augustinian style, after his namesaint, full of rare words and outright neologisms imbedded in medieval syntax. As a stylist Fr. Domenico much preferred Roger Bacon, but that eminent anti-magician, not being a Father of the Church, tempted few imitators -- and it was possible that Fr. Domenico had misread him. But no. Involuted though the Latin of the letter was, the sense, this time, was all too plain. Fr. Domenico sighed. The practice of ceremonial magic, at least of the white kind which was the monastery's sole concern, seemed to be becoming increasingly unrewarding. Part of the difficulty, of course, lay in the fact that the chiefest traditional use (for profit) of white magic was the finding of buried treasure; and after centuries of unremitting practice by centuries of sorcerers black and white, plus the irruption into the field of such modem devices as the mine-detector, there was very little buried treasure left to find. Of late, the troves revealed by those under the governments of Och and Bethor -- with the former of whom in particular lay the bestowal of "a purse springing with gold" -- had increasingly turned out to be underseas, or in places like Fort (Knox or a Swiss bank, making the recovery enterprises so colossal and mischancy as to remove all possibility of profit for client and monastery alike. On the whole, black magicians had an easier time of it -- at least in this life; one must never forget, Fr. Domenico reminded himself hastily, that they were also damned eternally. It was as mysterious as it had always 'been that such infernal spirits as Lucifuge Rofocale power to a mortal whose soul Hell would almost inevitably have won anyhow, considering the character of the average sorcerer, and considering how easily such pacts could be voided at the last instant; and that God would allow such demonic malice to be vented through the sorcerer upon the innocent. But that was simply another version of the Problem of Evil, for which the Church had long had the answer (or the dual answer) of free will and original sin. It had to be recalled, too, that even the practice of white or Transcendental magic was officially a mortal sin, fpr the modem Church held that all trafficking with spirits -- including the unfallen, since such dealings inevitably assumed the angels to be demiurges and other Kabbalistic semi-deities -- wias an abomination, regardless of intent. Once upon a time, it had been recognized that (barring the undertaking of an actual pact) only a man of the highest piety, of the highest purpose, and in the highest state of ritual and spiritual purification could hope to summon and control a demon, let alone an angel; but there had been too many lapses of intent, and then of act. In both practicality and compassion the Church had declared all Theurgy to be anathema, reserving unto itself only one negative aspect of magic -- exorcism -- and that only under the strictest of canonical limitations. M onte Albano had a special dispensation, to be sure -- partly since the monks had at one time been so spectacularly successful in nourishing the coffers of St. Peter's; partly because the knowledge to be won through the Transcendental rituals might sometimes be said to have nourished the soul of the Rock; and, in small part, because under the rarest of circumstances white magic had been known to prolong the life of the body. But these fountains (to shift the image) were now showing every sign of running dry. Hence the dispensation might be withdrawn at any time -- thus closing out the last sanctuary of white magic. IF That would leavethe field to the black magicians. There were no black sanctuaries, except for the Parisian Brothers of the Left-Hand Way, who were romantics of the school of Eliphas Levi and were more to be pitied for folly then condemned for evil. But of solitary black sorcerers there was still a disconcerting number -- though even one would be far too many. Which brought Fr. Domenico directly back to the problem of the letter. He sighed, turned away from his lectrum and padded off -- the brothers of Monte Albano were discalced -- toward the office of the Director, letter in hand. Father Umberto was in (of course he was always physically in, like all the rest of them, since the Mount could not be left, once entered, except by the laity and they only by muleback), and Fr.Domenico got to the point directly. "I've had another impassioned screed from our witch-smeller," he said. "I am beginning to consider, reluctantly,that the matter is at least as serious as he's been saying all along." "You mean the matter of Theron Ware, I presume." "Yes, of course. That American gun-maker we saw went directly from the Mount to Ware, as seemed all too likely even at the time. Father Uccello says that there's now every sign of another series of sendings being prepared in Positano." "I wish you could avoid these alliterations. They make it difficult to discover what you're talking about. I often feel that a lapse into alliteration or other grammatical trick is a sure sign that the speaker isn't himself quite sure of what he means to say and is trying to blind me to the fact. Never mind. As for the demonolater Ware, Ve are in no position to interfere with him, whatever he's preparing." "The style is Father Uccello's. Anyhow, he insists that we must interfere. He has been practicing divination -- so you can see how seriously he takes this, the old purist of Ware and Baines presages some -- and he says that his principal, whom he takes great pains not to identify, told him that the meeting thing truly monstrous for the world at large. According to his information, all Hell has been waiting for this meeting since the two of diem were bom." "I suppose he's sure his principal wasn't in a fact a demon and didn't slip a lie past him, or at least one of their usual brags? As you've just indirectly pointed out, Father Uccello is way out of practice." F ather Domenico spread his hands. "Of course I can't answer that. Though if you wish, Father, I'll try to summon Whatever it was myself, and put the problem to It. But you know how good the chances are that I'll get the wrong one -- and how hard it is to ask the right question. The great Governors seem to have no time sense as we understand the term. And as for demons, well, even when compelled they often really don't seem to know what's going on outside their own jurisdictions." "Quite so," said the Director, who had not himself practiced in many years. He had been greatly .talented once, but the loss of gifted experimenters to administrative posts was the curse of all research organizations. "I think it best that you don't jeopardize your own usefulness, and your own soul of course, in calling up some spirit you can't name. Father Uccello in turn ought to know that there's nothing we can do about Ware. Or does he have some proposal?" "He wants us," Fr. Domenico said in a slightly shaky voice, "to impose an observer on Ware. To send one directly to Positano, someone who'll stick to Ware until we know what the deed is going to be. We're just barely empowered to do this -- whereas of course Father Uccello can't. The question is, do we want to?" "Hmm, hmm," the Director said. "Obviously not. That would bankrupt us -- oh, not financially, of course, though it would be difficult enough. But we couldn't afford to send a novice. Or indeed anyone less than the best we have. And after the good Lord only knows how many months in that infernal atmosphere... " The sentence trailed off, as the Director's sentences often did, but Father Domenico no longer had any difficulty in completing them. Obviously the Mount could not afford to have even one of its best operators incapacitated -- the word, in fact, was "contaminated" -- by prolonged contact with the person and effects of Theron Ware. Similarly, Father Domenico was reasonably certain that the Director would in fact send somebody to Positaao. Otherwise he would not have mounted the obvious objections, but simply dismissed the proposal. For all their usual amusement with Father Uccello, both men knew that there were occasions when one had to take him with the utmost seriousness and that this was one of them. "Nevertheless the matter will need to be explored," the Director resumed after a moment, fingering his beads. "I had better give Ware the usual formal notification. We're not obligated to follow up on it, but  "Quite," Fr. Domenico said. He put the letter into his scrip and arose. "I'll hear from you, then, when a reply's been received from Ware. I'm glad you agree that the matter is serious." After another exchange of formalities, he left, head bowed. He also knew well enough whom the Director would send, without any intervention of false modesty to cloud the issue; and he was well aware that he was terrified. He went directly to his conjuring room, a cluttered tower chamber which no one else could use -- for magic is intensely sensitive to the personality of the operator -- and still faintly redolent of a scent a little like oil of lavender, a trace of his last use of the room. Mansit odor, posses scire duisse deam, he thought, not for the first time; but he had no intention of summoning any Presence now. Instead, he crossed to the chased casket which IF contained his # copy -- the second edition, but not much corrupted -- of the Enchiridion of ers and other devices "effectual against all the perils to which every sort and condition of men may be made subject on land, on water, from open and secret enemies, from the bitter bites of wild and rabid beasts, from poisons, from fire, from tempests." For greatest effectiveness he was instructed to carry the book on his person, but he had seldom judged himself to be in sufficient peril to risk so rare and valuable an object. In any event he did always read at least one page daily, chiefly the In principio, a version of the first chapter of the gospel according to St. John. Now he took the book out and opened it to the Seven Mysterious Orisons, the only section of the work -- without prejudice to the efficacy of the rest of it -- which probably had indeed proceeded from the hand of the Pope of Charlemagne. Kneeling to face the east. Fr. Domenico, without looking at the page, began the prayer appropriate for Thursday, at the utterance of which, perhaps by no coincidence, it is said that "the demons flee away." IV C onsiderable business awaited Baines in Rome, all the more pressing because Jack Ginsberg was still out of town. Baines made no special effort to hunt down Jack's report on what the government metallurgist had said about the golden tears amid the mass of other papers. For the time being, at least, Baines regarded the report as personal correspondence, and he had a standing rule never even to open personal letters during office hours, whether he was actually in an office or, as now, working out of a hotel room. Nevertheless, the report came to the surface the second day that he was back to work; and since he also made it a rule never to lose time to the distractions of an unsatisfied curiosity if an easy remedy was to hand, he read it. The tears on the handkerchief were indeed #-karat gold; worth about eleven cents, taken together, on the current market, but to Baines representing an enormous investment (or, looked at another way, a potential investment in enormity.) He put it aside with satisfaction and promptly forgot about it. Or very nearly. Investments in enormity were his stock in trade, though of late, he thought again with cold anger, they had been paying less and less -- hence his interest in Ware, which the other directors of Consolidated Warfare Service would have considered simple insanity. But after all, if the business was no longer satisfying, it was only natural to seek analogous satisfactions somewhere else. An insane man, in Baines' view, would be one who tried to substitute some pleasure -- women, philanthropy, art collecting, golf -- which offered no cognate satisfaction at all. Baines was ardent about his trade, which was destruction. Golf could no more have sublimated that passion than it could have diluted that of a painter or a kcher.  The current fact, which had to be faced and dealt with, was that nuclear weapons had almost totally spoiled the munitions business. Oh, there was still a thriving trade to be drummed up selling small arms to a few small new nations -- small arms being defined arbitrarily as anything up to the size of a submarine. Hydrogen fusion and the ballistic missile made the really major achievements of the art, the lubrication of the twenty-year cycle of world wars, entirely too obliterative and self-defeating. These days, Baines kind of diplomacy consisted dhiefly in the fanning of brush-fires and civil wars. Even this was a delicate business. The nationalism game was increasingly an exceedingly confused affair, in which one could never be quite sure whether some emergent African state, with a population about the size of Maplewood, N.J., would not turn out to be of absorbing interest to one or more of the nuclear powers. (Some day, of course, they would all be nuclear powers, and then the art would become as formalized and minor as flowerarranging.) The very delicacy of this kind of operation had its satisfactions, in a way, and Baines was good at it. In addition, Consolidated Warfare Service had several thousand manyears of accumulated experience at this sort of thing upon which he could call. One of the CW's chiefest specialists was in Rome with him IF now: Dr. Adolph Hess, famous as the designer of (that peculiar allpurpose vehicle called the Hessicopter, but of interest in the present negotiations instead as the inventor of something nobody was supposed to have heard of: the land torpedo, a rapidly burrowing device which might show up, commendably anonymous, under any installation within two hundred miles of its launching tunnel, geology permitting. Baines had guessed that it might be especially attractive to at least one of the combatants in the Yemeni insurrection. He had proven to be so right that he was now trying hard not to have to dicker with all four of them. This was all the more difficult because, although the two putative Yemeni factions accounted for very little, Nasser was nearly as shrewd as Baines was, and Faisal inarguably a good deal shrewder. N evertheless, Baines was not essentially a miniaturist, and he was well aware of it. He had recognized the transformation impending in the trade early on, in fact with the publication in # by the U.S. Government Printing Office of a volume titled The Effects of Atomic Weapons, and as soon as possible had engaged the services of a private firm called the Mamaroneck Research Institute. This was essentially a brainstorming organization, started by an alumnus of cialized in imagining possible political and military confrontations and their possible outcomes, some of them so outre as to require the subcontracting of free-lance sciencefiction writers. From the files of Mamaroneck materials for its computers, some of which material would have considerably shaken the governments who thought they were sitting on it. In return, Mamaroneck fed Baines long, neatly lettered and Xeroxed reports bearing such titles as "Shortand Long-Term Probabilities Consequent to an Israeli Blockade of the Faeroe Islands." Baines winnowed out the most obviously absurd of these, but with a care which was the very opposite of conservatism, for some of the strangest proposals could turn out upon second look to be not absurd at all. Those which offered the best combination of surface absurdity with hidden plausibility, he set out to translate into real situations. Hence there was really nothing illogical or even out of character in his interest in Theron Ware, for Baines, too, practiced what was literally an occult art in which the man on the street didn't believe. The buzzer sounded twice; Ginsberg was back. Baines returned the signal and the door swung open. "Rogan's dead," Jack said without preamble. "That was fast. I thought it was going to take Ware a week after he got back from the States." "It's been a week," Jack reminded him. "Hmm? So it has. Waiting around for these Ayrabs to get off the dime is hard on the time sense. Well, well. Details?" "Only what's come over the Reuters ticker, so far. Started as pneumonia, ended as cor pulmonale -- heart failure from too much coughing. It appears that he had a small mitral murmur for years. Only the family knew about, and his physicians assured them that it wasn't dangerous if he didn't try to run a four-minute mile or something like that. Now the guessing is that the last campaign put a strain on it, and the pneumonia did the rest." "Very clean," Baines said. He thought about the matter for a while. He had borne the late governor of California no ill will. He had never met the man, nor had any business conflicts with him and in fact had rather admired his brand of medium-right-wing politics, which had been of the articulate but inoffensive sort expectable of an exaccount executive for a San Francisco advertising agency specializing in the touting of cold breakfast cereals. Indeed, Baines recalled suddenly from the file biography, Rogan had been a fraternity brother of his. Nevertheless he was pleased. Ware had done the job -- Baines was not in the smallest doubt that Ware should have the credit -- with great nicety. After one more such trial run, simply to rule out all possibility of coincidence, he should be readyto tackle something larger; possibly, the biggest job of them all. Baines wondered how it had been done. Was it possible that a demon could appear to a victim in the form of a pneumococcus? If so, what about the problem of reproduction? Well, there had been the appearances all over medieval Europe of fragments of the True Cross, in numbers quantitatively sufficient to stock a large lumberyard. Contemporary clerical apologists had called that Miraculous Multiplication, which had aways seemed to Baines to be a classic example of rationalizing away the obvious; but since magic was real, maybe Miraculous Multiplication was, too. These, however, were merely details of technique, in which he made a practice of taking no interest. That kind of thing was for hirelings. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have somebody in the organization who did know something about the technicalities. It was often dangerous to depend solely on outside experts. U TV Take out a check for Ware," #VI he told Jack. "From my personal account. Call it a consultation fee -- medical, preferably. When you send it to him, set up a date for another visit -- let's see -- as soon as I get back from Riyadh. I'll take up all this other business with you in about half an hour. Send Hess in, but wait outside." Jack nodded and left. A moment later, Hess entered silently. He was a tall, bony man with a slight pod, bushy eyebrows, a bald spot in the back, pepper-and-salt hair and a narrow jaw which made his face look nearly triangular. "Any interest in sorcery, Adolph? Personal, I mean?" "Sorcery? I know something about it. For all the nonsense inIF volved, it was highly important in the history of science, particularly the alchemical side, and the astrological." "I'm not interested in either of those. I'm talking of black magic. "Then, no, I don't know much about it," Hess said. "Well, you're about to learn. We're going to visit an authentic sorcerer in about two weeks. I want you to study his methods." "Are you pulling my leg?" Hess said. "No, you never do that. Are we going into the business of exposing charlatans, then? I'm not sure I'm the best man for that, Baines. A professional stage magician -- a Houdini type -- would be more apt to catch a faker than I." "No, that's not the issue at all. I'm going to ask this man to do some work for me, in his own line, and I need a close observer to see what he does -- not to see through it, but to form an accurate impression of the procedures, in case something should go sour with the relationship later on." "But -- well, if you say so, Baines. It does seem rather a waste of time." "Not to me," Baines said. "While you're waiting to talk to the Saudis with me, read up on the subject. By the end of a year, I want you to know as much about the subject as an expert. The man hims elf told me that that's possible even for me, so it shouldn't tax you any." "It's not likely to tax my brains much," Hess said drily, "but it may be a considerable tax on by patience. However, you're the boss." "Right. Get on it." Hess nodded distantly to Jack as he went out The two men did not like each other much, in pant, Baines sometimes thought, because in some ways they were much alike. When the door had closed behind the scientist, Jack produced from his pocket the waxed-paper envelope which had contained, and obviously still contained, the handkerchief bearing the two transmuted tears. "I don't need that," Baines said. "I've got your report. Throw that thing away; I don't want anybody asking what it means." "I will," Jack said. "But first, you'll remember that Ware said that the demon would leave you after two days." "Sure. Why?" "Look at this." Jack took out the handkerchief and spread it on Baines' blotter. On the Irish linen, where the golden tears had been, were now two dull, inarguable smears of lead. V B y some untraceable miscalculation, Baines' party arrived in Riyadh precisely at the beginning of Ramadan, during which the Arabs fasted all day and were consequently in too short a temper to do business with, which was followed, after nine solid days, by a three-day feast during which they' were too stuperous to do business with. Once negotiations were properly opened, however, they took no more than the two weeks Baines anticipated. Since the Moslem calendar is lunar, Ramadan is a moveable festival, which this year fell close to Christmas. Baines half suspected that Theron Ware would refuse to see him in so inauspicious a season for servants of Satan, but Ware made no objection, remarking only (by post), "December #th is a celebration of great antiquity." Hess, who had been reading dutifully, interpreted Ware to mean that Christ had not actually been born on that date -- "though in this universe of discourse I can't see what difference that makes," he said. "If the word 'superstition' has any of its old meaning left at all by now, it means that the sign has come to replace the thing. Or in other words, that facts come to mean what we say they mean." "Call it an observer effect," Baines suggested, not entirely joking. He was not disposed to argue the point with either of them. Ware would see him, that's what counted. But if the season was no apparent inconvenience to Ware, it was a considerable one to Fr. Domenico, who at first flatly refused to celebrate it in the very maw of Hell. He was pressed at length and from both sides by the Director and Fr. Ucello. Mustering all his humility, obedience and resignation -- his courage seemed to have evaporated -- he trudged forth from the monastery, dispensed for sandals and mounted swinging from his neck under his cassock in a new leather bag, and a selection of his thaumaturgic tools, newly exorcised, asperged, fumigated and wrapped in silken cloths, in a satchel balanced carefully on the mule's neck. It was a hushed leavetaking -- all the more so in its lack of any formalities or even witnesses, for only the Director knew why he was going, and he had been restrained with difficulty from bruiting it about that Fr. Domenico had been expelled, to make a cover-story. T he practical effect of both delays was that Fr. Domenico and Baines' party arrived at Ware's palazzo on the same day, in the midst of the only snowstorm Positano had seen in seven years. As a spiritual courtesy -- for protocol was allimportant in such matters, otherwise neither monk nor sorcerer would have dared to confront the other -- Fr. Domenico was received first, briefly but punctiliously; but as a client, Baines (and his crew, in descending order) got the best quarters. As was customary in southern Italy at this time, three masked kings came to the gate of the palazzo to bring and ask presents for the children and the Child; but there were no children there, and the mummers were turned away, baffled and resentful (for the rich American, who was said to be writing a book about the frescoes of Pompeii, had previously shown himself openhanded), but addly grateful too; it was a cold night, and the lights in the palazzo were of a grim and distant color. Then the gates closed. The principals had gathered and were in their places; and the stage was set. IF IF  Short Star The Trouble With Vegans Vegans? All the galaxy knows they're lovable rogues -- very lovable , and indubitable rogues! 'T'o start with, Vegans are alspecification which could cater to A together the wrong shape. We the Vegans' almost liquid flowing had built the Autofrisk on lines that contours. would enable it to fit every one of Which might not have mattered, the numerous life-forms of the GalExcept that they were compulsive axy. We thought. The trouble with smugglers. Vegans is that they're constructed They did it when it wasn't even back to front, inside out, upside particularly useful, let alone necesdown, take away the number you sary. It was something in their past first thought of, with everything history which accounted for this; possibly wrong that could possibly they had built their vast empire of be wrong. Imagine the most unliketrade and commerce through good ly and improbable shape you can, old-fashioned crooked methods, and and that's a Vegan. The first time the habit had now become long inan Autofrisk was ever tried on one herent. At first most members of the had turned out to be acutely emGalactic Federation had turned a barrassing to the commander of the blind eye. Vegans were friendly, Vegan merchant-cruiser, and as a charming, the most likeable of all result Terran-Vegan relations for the races of the Galaxy, you just some time were extremely strained couldn't even remotely reprimand -- not to mention a certain vitally them. But then some contraband important part of the commander's goods slipped skillfully into the majanatomy. And although many had or spaceport of Wlaxtac bad resultsdnce tried to perfect one, there was ed in every single inhabitant of that no machine of any size, shape or system breaking out in a rash of green spots. Luckily that was not serious, but the point was that it could have been. One of the biggest single dangers in the galaxy was that some bacteria considered minor and unimportant in one system should possibly prove dangerous or even deadly in another. Hence the demand by the Praesidium for tighter customs regulations on every planet. Hence the Autofrisk here in Newyorkport. And then dammit the Vegans didn't fit. They could hide any number of things in kangaroo-like pouches scattered haphazardly about their persons, and short of starting a diplomatic incident we could not even eager, to be searched -- that added to the fun of the game for them -- but it was a waste of time and effort. And temper. Since the Sterilobacteria Room in every spaceport got rid of the danger of infection from goods actually carried on the person, this state of affairs was accepted with rueful equanimity by most customs officers. The loss of revenue from the goods on a Vegan's person you might as well accept. A Vegan ship was another matter altogether. So here I was, on a bright May morning which was far too good for a situation like this, standing in the control room as the Vegan merchantman was talked down. Perhaps I should explain that I am the Chief Customs Officer of the Newyorkport Spacecenter. At least, I was. The reason I'm not to this day is entirely the fault of that particular merchantman, and of her captain, Llant'Gomu Gra-Oud, a man whose sheer animal cunning would hav made Machiavelli creep off in shame to go check up on his textbooks. Customs officers throughout the galaxy manage to maintain a pretty good average rate of about eighty to eighty-five per cent success in preventing Vegan smuggling, so it needn't necessarily have been too shameful for me if Commander Llant'Gomu had merely outwitted me. What cost me my pride as well as my job was the way he did it. And the results. A s soon as the ship had docked and been radiation-checked I moved to make an immediate inspection. I had no reason to suspect anything out of the usual, allowing for the fact that Vegans seldom do anything that isn't out of the usual, but I was determined to make a good impression on Lt. Malo Allallu, a young Martian who had just passed out of college and was starting on a career in Customs and Excise. Perhaps if I had had someone more experienced with me the ghastly debacle that followed need not have happened, but I can hardly blame Allallu. If I myself didn't fathom the incredible depths of Llant'Gomu's criminally cunning mind, I can hardly complain at Allallu if he didn't either. I entered the airlock. Since the Vegan atmosphere was the same as ours, all the doors of the ship were fully open, and the crew were standing idly around in small groups enjoying the taste of fresh air after so many months of the canned stuff spaceside. They grinned and waved as I came in, if a foot-long elongation of one of their tongues and the elevation of four tentacles in a complicated ancestral pattern can be called a grin and a wave. That's what it added up to, anyway. You can't help liking Vegans, whatever thenfaults, they're such a cheerful bunch. Cheerful, happy, and courageous. And crooks, through and through. I strode on to the commander's cabin, with Allallu close behind me. Iiant'Gomu rose as I came in and advanced towards me. "My friend," he boomed with easy informality, "I and my fathers greet you and yours." It was a conventional form of greeting on his home planet, the third in the Vegan system, as far as I knew. Luckily he spoke fluent Terran. Most Vegans did, since their own language was the most complicated in the Galaxy, full of clicks, gurgles and retching sounds that come over rather like a mixture of Tovringian Southern, Ancient Terran Zulu, and Li Husat. And though, despite their double tongue, then can pronounce Terran Universal, they're all totally unable to master Galactica. "I and mine thank your fathers," I replied. He laughed boisterously. "It always sounds wrong somehow coming from Terrans," he commented. "Can I offer you a drink? I have some exquisite vintage Vungtakha Blue in the hold." "Not at the moment, thanks," I said. "Er, have you anything to declare?" That must be one of the most stupid things I ever said. Llant'Gornu did the Vegan equivalent of a shrug and a crooked smile. "Who, me?" he said. Vegans will never lie outright. That's part of the reason why they're so astonishingly popular considering everything. They will never say a thing is so if it is not so. However, with the slightest hesitation they will talk around the point, change the subject, twist your words, or, if pushed right into a corner, take refuge in a bland silence. But they will never lie. 'Yes, Commander, you. Are you carrying any contraband?" "I rather think that depends on your definition of contraband." "I define contraband as something which should be declared before entering a port." "Why?" "Why? Because there might be revenue to pay on it." "Why?" "My dear commander, you know as well as I do what contraband is. Must we go on beating about the bush like this? Are you carrying any?" "You'll have to be more clear. Do you mean am I personally carrying any, or is the ship carrying any, or what?" "Either of those possibilities." I was growing a trifle harrassed. "Which one?" "Are youV "Am I what?" "Carrying any contraband?" He raised his arms, all of them. "I'm not actually carrying anything," he informed me cheerfully. I rose to my feet. This time I was going to nail them. I knew damn well I was a relatively good customs officer, and I just couldn't let the commander get away with it without a fight. "Lt. Allallu!" "Sir?" "I want every available customs officer on the base to assemble here immediately. I'm going to search this ship from stem to stem, then back again, then back again if need be, and we're going to find whatever contraband they're carrying, every last ounce of it." "Every man?" said Allallu in some surprise. "Yes!" I bellowed. "Every single one that isn't sick, dead or on leave must be here on the double. On the treble if they have to. I expect them here on this ship's Flag Deck within fifteen minutes. Jump to it!" H e jumped. In actual fact he got them there in ten. He's a good man, Allallu. One day he might even make a Chief Officer -- providing he doesn't act like me, that is. As soon as the men were assembled -- there were twenty-two of them, if I remember rightly -- I told them what I had told Allallu. The whole ship was to be combed thoroughly, and any other ships that might land and want Customs clearance in the meantime would just damn well have to wait. Llanf'Gomu watched all this with evident amusement. This had developed into a battle of wills as well as wits between him and me, and we both knew it. And I was determined he was not going to win. And he wa determined he was. And he was a Vegan, remember. The first thing I did was order all the exits watched. I'd heard of a case on Betelgeuse where a rather green Customs officer had ordered a minute search of a Vegan cruiser as I was doing now, but had forgotten in his enthusiasm to watch the doors. As a result, while his men were laboriously working their way through the ship, the Vegans were casually wandering right out of the main exits in broad daylight carrying bundles of contraband under their arms. This was not going to happen with me. I gave Allallu his orders, then remained on the flag deck as the search was carried out. They started on the bridge, all the men together, and combed it so thoroughly that a flea could not have escaped. No fleas. No contraband. The flight deck the same. And the crew quarters. And the engine room. And so on and so forth. Right down to the drive tubes. All clean as a whistle. It took them three hours to find this out. I was sweating. "You see?" remarked Llant'Gomu casually from a doorway. "They didn't find anything." "No," I agreed. 'They didn't." I felt like grinding my teeth until they came out in the form of a fine white powder. "Allallu, are you sure there's nothing here?" "Certain, sir. These cruisers aren't that large, and we've examined every nut and bolt. Perhaps there is no contraband?" IF "On a Vegan merchantman? You must be joking!" Commander Llant'Gomu looked solicitous. "You need a drink," he said. "Here." "Thanks." I did need a drink. It was cool and delicious. And blue. I choked. "You found nothing?" I said to Allallu. "No, sir." "Then what about this? A consignment of Vungtakha Blue, which the commander was even foolish enough to mention personally. Where is that?" He looked blank. "I'm afraid I don't "Where was the crew while your search was going on?" "Going about their duties, sir. At least, I assumed so." "Never assume anything with Vegans. Rule One of the Customs official. I suppose they were carrying various things?" "I didn't see, but... I sighed. It was Betelgeuse all over again. Thank God I'd put men n the doors. "Lieutenant," I said, 'Vhile you've been searching, the crew have been merrily going around rearranging everything. You've been passing contraband every time you passed a member of the crew." He looked suitably dumbfounded, as well he might. "We will now search again, even more thoroughly. And this time the crew -- that includes you, Commander, if you would -- head the search." So we did it again. This time it took us five and a half hours. It was now nearly nine hours since I had first come aboard. In that time two merchant cruisers had landed from Lunaport, both perfectly routine local flights, plus one stellar from Sirius. All of these would have been dealt with quickly and easily if I hadn't commandeered every available Customs officer in the port. Already their captains were filing perfectly justified complaints. All I had to show for all this was a few dozen crates of the Vungtakha Blue. To me this was downright suspicious. As the lieutenant had said, these ships weren't all that large, I had searched everywhere and there was no more contraband aboard. But that wine was pretty small pickings for a Vegan ship. The few times that a search such as this was ordered on a Vegan ship normally turned up a veritable Aladdin's cave of dutiable goodies. However, I was forced to admit defeat. Commander Llant'Gornu, as I had expected, was courtesy itself when I allowed him and his crew to disembark, having apologized for keeping them cooped up for so long. He paid the duty on the Vungtakha without a murmur, and offered me one of his own personal bottles as a gift. You just can't help liking Vegans. I hurriedly inspected and passed the Sirian, allowing someone else to deal with the two lunar flights, and got back to the control room an hour or so later. The first thing I did was leaf through the messages which had come in while I was occupied. They all seemed relatively uninteresting -- except one. As I read it the skin of my back slowly crawled up and started biting the hack of my neck: To: Chief Officer, Customs, RALok. From: Ditto. Bordash. "Why wasn't I shown this?" I roared at the communications officer. "You'd said you didn't wish to be disturbed, sir," he answered, surprised. "If any ship of that name had attempted a landing I would have informed you, naturally." I suddenly felt rather ill. I sat down. This message had arrived just ten minutes after I had left the control room earlier, and even then my opposite number on Alpha Centauri had left it just that little too late.  Probably too worried about his newly forming rash of green spots. Baccillus Wlaxtaccus spreads too fast for comfort. I looked at the bottle of wine handed me by Llant'Gomu with a weary smile. Go mate with a Veflusian hedgehog. "Is there anything wrong, sir?" asked the communications officer. "Oh no," I said. "Nothing at all. Does anyone here know any Vegan at all, by any chance?" They all shook their heads. "I thought no one could speak Vegan?" said Allallu. "No one can carry on a conversation," I replied. "But some people do know a little, names of ships for instance. Tell me, Lieutenant, will you read to me the name of Commander Llant'Gornu's ship. You can make it out from here. It's written in Galactical characters as well as Vegan." Still puzzled, Allallu picked up the binoculars and stared across the spaceport. "Takka'Aq Dorg," he said after a moment. "Right. Now, Lt. Allallu, am I or am I not the Chief Customs Officer here at Newyorkport?" He frowned. "You are, sir." "And did I or did I not, on my authority alone, order every single man here to search that Vegan ship, Takka'Aq Dorg , with me?" "You did, sir." "And were there or were there not three ships out there fuming because no one dealt with them for hours?" "Yes, sir." "And what contraband did we find to show for this, for having held up a whole spaceport for nine hours?" "A dozen crates of wine, sir." "A dozen crates of wine. LieutenIF ant, do you know what the translation of TakkafAq Dorg is?" "No, sir." "It's Vegan for Star of Hope . That is the merchantman in the signal. They didn't put the Vegan name when they sent the message at Centauri, my communications man doesn't know Vegan, he can't be expected to, and I had said no messages unless vital," Allallu was beginning to realize the truth. "That ship, Lieutenant, not just the crew, or the contraband, or the legal cargo, but the whole ship, is infected with little green spots! No wonder we couldn't find any contraband." I was nearly shouting now. "The whole damn thing is contraband! Llant'Gomu smuggled in a spaceship!" W hich was why the whole population of Terra, with the exception of one civil servant in Buenos Aires who appeared immune, went down with a rash of green spots. Which was why I lost my job. Which is why I'm now Chief Officer on the Vegan merchantman Takka f Aq Dorg, or Star of Hope if you wish, under the command of Commodore Llant'Gomu Gra-Oud. Well, I mean, somehow you just can't harbor grudges against Vegans.  by PHi Bride Nihet And one of science fiction's Grand Old Masters returns with Invader s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." nur irre owner s name imprii All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. CM-I# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Order from Galaxy #I Hudson street. New York # , N. Y. Vol. #, Ho # Frecerjfc Poh, Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judydynn Beniamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by C. C. MacApp by Perry A. Chapdelaine by J. G. Ballard by Philip Jos# Farmer by Harl Vincent by James Blish by Robert Silverberg by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly hy Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn,' President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #(XL#. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at addlttonal mailing offices. Cop # Tiight by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, Indiuding translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y, # IF  Editorial T he other day we attended a conference in Boston on space, spacecraft and the Grand Desiign -- that is, the overall purpose that should be, and probably is, behind all space efforts, namdy to spread the human race out beyond our own atmosphere into other worlds circling our own sun -- or other suns. You know. The kind of thing we've been writing about in magazines like this for nearly half a century. One of these months we'll tell you more about some of the things that we heard about there in regard to the space program, but one of the most interesting lectures in the three-day conference, for our money, turned out to be that by our old friend R. C. W. Ettinger, who longtime readers will recall as the author of The Prospect of Immortality the best-selling book (first publish in extract form in our late companion magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow) whioh proposed immortality through freezing. Ettinger's talk was not primarily about space travel. In fact, it was not even primarily about freezing -- although, of course, he touched on both subjects, pointing out that one way around the limiting velocity of light was to freeze the crews of interstellar spaceships, thus making it possible for them to travel a few centuries if necessary and still be in reasonably good operating condition on landing. What it was about, in essence, was nothing less than what life is all about, and why we ought to be doing things that we're probably doing anyway. S uppose there was a dog (said Ettiniger, as close as we can paraphrase an extemporaneous talk from memory) and someone gave him the job of building a bridge across the Mississippi River. He might have all the help he could summon Uj in the form of a thousand packs bf a will; but there would still be no hope that he could ever get the bridge built. Lacking hands, he could not build simple tools. Lacking sufficient intelligence, he could not invent more complicated ones. He could not produce strong enough materials, and he could not hoist them into place if he had them; because building a bridge across the Mississippi River is simply not a job for a dog. I take it as laxiomatic (Ettinger went on) that we can define the purpose of life as discovering what the purpose of life is. It may be that we human beings, shaped as we are, mortal as we are, limited in our capacities as we are, are simply not up to the job of discovering that purpose. But we have at least the hope that we can make ourselves wiser, increase our capacities, lengthen our lifespan. Perhaps discovering the imrpose of life is not a job for a man... but a job that men can do is to reshape themselves into something that can achieve it. N ow, this is not the sort of argument (that one expects to hear in the middle of three days otherwise mostly devoted to stellar signatures and optimization of multiple Harry Harrison. When you've got a movie studio, a script for a Viking epic, a star with the broadest measurements in Hollywood, and a time machine, what could be simpler than taking the whole crew back a thousand years to shoot the picture against a really authentic background? Well, for one thing, the return trip could be simpler. But it couldn't be funnier. # puinniii Keith Laumer and Gordon R. Dickson. At age #, Captain Henry wants to retire. He's opened up so many planets and taken so many rejuvenation treatments that he's earned a rest. But powerful Senator Bartholomew won't let him, not with a newly discovered planet to be staked out. So Henry goes, taking Bartholomew's priggish son with him, thereby setting the space stage for a most bizarre "conflict of generations." # missions by use of permissive progress-sequences, but it seemed to us then and still seemed to us that Robert Ettinger has opened a rather large can of worms. One of the troubles with writing science fiction about the reasonably far future is that, if we are fair to our subject, we find ourselves writingi about characters who are no loniger entirely human. Their social customs differ from those of #. Their motives are not the same as ours; if they have hang-ups, they are not our hang-ups, if they are despondent or alienated, it is not for the reasons that impair our lives today. But maybe, thinking along Ettinger's lines, we can find a little more in common with those nextevolution descendants of ours than has heretofore been possible. They may be taller than we are, or balder, or healthier; and surelythey will be wiser, perhaps in ways that we cannot understand. But if Ettinger is right and they are some part of some Grand Design, perhaps we can recognize in them that it is our Grand Design they are working on. And perhaps what Ettinger said is only another way of saying what H. G. Weills said more than half a century ago: "We have suffered like animals long enough; it is time we began to suffer like men."  #I  T o change the subject, our conscience requires us to admit something. Now that you are (we should confess to you that when we first read it, and enjoyed it enormously, we were much perplexed about whether you would like it as well -- because it is not, we admit, really a science-fiction story at all. It should by all rights appear in a magazine like Unknown or Beyond -- if they still existed. Unfortunately, they don't; and so stories like this don't have a proper home in any magazine being published today. We would like to give them such a home from time to time. What do you think? Is an occasional fantasy a pleasant change now and then? Or should we stick to more orthodox science fiction? Hue and Cry will be waiting to hear your answers... And if, while we think of it, your interest in sorcery has been spurred by BMsh's novel and you want to read more about it, you can hardly do better than a book we just finiied reading: Spirits, Stars and Spells, by L. Sprague and Catherine C. de Gamp. It's not an exiose, but it does have some hard-headed things to say about the fallacies of most necromantic accounts -- and may be a very necessary countermeasure after you've read Faust Aleph-Null! -- The Editor Science Fiction Stories from The Planet EarthI  For the first time in this country, your chance to read a sampling of new science fiction from all over the world -- plus articles and features about the wondrous' world of sf books and stories as seen by correspondents In many countries. Don't miss the first Issue -- coming sooni IF  Novelette Something strange was in orbit, too small to see, too powerful to escape -- and it had caught them! T hat sector of the galaxy was Treaty territory -- that is, open and unpoliced -- so the Terran freighter bad every right to be there. Nevertheless, she was a long way from home; and, mankind being just fledged in space, with a relatively weak iSfpace Force, it was no wonder freighter had run into trouble. "Taintless" Wend, who was Earthborn but could no longer claim citizenship, sat watching the freighter's image swell on the main viewscreen of the Kyshan ship aboard which he was either guest or prisoner. He saw no signs of damage, so the freighter must have been taken by subterfuge rather than assault. Junnabl -- his present host -- was a versatile pirate. Wend turned to the Kyshan. '"Is this all you wanted me for? You could navigate her yourself. I know you read English as well as you speak it." Junnabl grinned. That consisted of curling his upper lip (pastygreen like the rest of his skin) and drooping the comers of his mouth, showing several dozen closeacked sharp teeth, while his amber eyes changed not one whit. "Iss true spend effort to learn. Now looks not waste. Have splendid job for you. See, soon." Wend shrugged. They had him over a barrel. He shouldn't have holed up so close to Kyshan territory. He heard a shuttleboat coupling to the aft lock, to take them over to the freighter. TT an hour later, he turned JoLfrom the captured ship's control console and faced Junnabl. "I woi play stupid. There's nothing abo tibds ieter that wouldn't pass lor ordinary commercial ship buti she's too shipape, too and # good one, manned her, I would guess. Where are they now?" fast. Iss jpleasure hire smart man. Junnabl showed his teeth again. "Are in safe keeping. You guess fast. Iss pleasure hire smart man. Wend said, "I didn't leave it under the most cordial circumstances. Still, Earth was my birthplace." The Kyshan laced his longerthan-. human fingers before his thick chest. "Am not fool enough to ask big treason. Are sizes of treason, yes? This ship little sneak-play by hidden. I want. When get, crew go free." Like hell. Wend thought. They're undoubtedly dead. He kept his face impassive and waited. Junnabl flicked a long palidgreen finger at a collar-radio and said for the latter's benefit, in Kyshan, "Bring the Terran skipper's uniform and other things." Then he told Wend, in Engl, Were well hidden aboard. Uniform iss now made to fit you. You get idea?" Wend tried not to scowl. "Sure, I get it. An impersonation. Haven't you ever head of fingerprints and descriptions?" Junnabl said placidly, "I hire smart man, expect him fix details. Oh Norp -- you know Norp? -- are sealed orders this ship suppose pick up. You get, I get hidden cache, give you back little yacht I find you in, give you bundle money, shake hands, good-bye. Okay?" Wend couldn't help grinning. He wondered if Junnabl actually expected him to believe that. He said, "I'd have to land on Norp without uniform, first, to look at the setup." Junnabl laced his long fingers again. "Of course. We go there next." n D ressed like some space rousta bout. Wend strolled by the much -- a small concrete building in the local style, on the east side of IP the spaceport, away ifirom town. He could hear the clack of a typewriter inside. Outside the door a human corporal, wearing a bolstered nipter, loitered in the shade of a low, widespreading tree. Four small aircars were parked to one side of the buiness on Norp, which wasn't surprising. A Terran ship was a rarity here. What he had to get from the backwater office was a padlocked dispatch case. There was, it seemed, might call for it. Though the orders Junnabl had found didn't specifically say so. Wend was sure the local C.O. would have photos and fingerprints of all five. The one who'd fallen into Junnabl's hands was a Commander Waldron, which meant nothing to Wend. He didn't think he could risk a direct impersonation, an)Tway. Casually, he strolled toward the busy side of the field; turned between two buildings and stopped, pretending to fiddle with the zipper of his jacket. He was careful not to look at the Norpan who went by a little too hastily. So Junnabl had hired people to watch him. He stepped into the open again and looked for a visiphone booth, choosing one that was exposed on all sides. He didn't want anyone sneaking up and using some listening device. He entered and pulled the door shut. There was a directory-scanner. He deposited a coin and pimched for "Importers"; let the names scroll down across the viewer; stopped the device at "Vassun Garka, Inc., iExotic Foods." It this were the same family... He contributed another coin and waited. A polite Norpan face appeared on the screen. The slit-eyes blinked once. "Apologies, sir. I speak no Terran languages." Wend answered in Kyshan, which he spoke better than Noipan. "Not needful." He held up a plastic card with one of his aliases on it and an orange triangle in the corner. He waited for the clerk's eyes to widen at the implied credit rating, then said, "Secrecy desired. Is there someone familiar with the star called Hane?" The face -- similar to a Kyshan's but swarthier, the two races having diverged a little -- twitched and became impassive. "I have not heard of such a star." Wend nodded politely. "Perhaps a coincidence of names. I had dealings there once with a Loob Garka, also in the import business." The clerk said tonelessly, "If you will wait, I will make inquiries, sir." The face vanished. Minutes passed, then a more mature face appeared on the screen. The eyes glanced at the creditvoucher. "I do not know you, sir, nor do I know Loob Garka. But how may I serve you?" "Perhaps you know me as' 'Taintless' Wend." The face changed just slightly. "Ah." Wend said, "I am followed. I would discuss mutual profit, but I must evade watchers in a way that would not arouse suspicions." The teetli showed in a smile. You flatter me in seeking my arrangements in such a matter. But go, in ten minutes, to the Chief Dispatcher of airtaxis and ask him, loudly enough to he overheard to send you to the Vale of Amethyst Joys. He will, instead, place you with a trustworthy driver who will bring you to the Cradle of Mercies, Where I will meet you. It will be arranged that you are not followed." T he Cradle of Mercies, though it undoubtedly catered to the cruder desires as well as the more delicate ones, was relatively quiet and meticulously clean. The lobby was dimly lit, and scented with something like lavender plus sandalwood. Various curtained portals led off it. From one came a buzz of Norpan voices and a fan of light as a provocatively clad female held the curtain aside for a moment to gaze around the lobby. The attendant who'd instantly approached Wend led him through a: different door, along a dim corridor, and into a small, plain, well lighted room. The Norpan to whom Wend had talked via visiphone sat crosslegged on a thick cushion, across a low table from a similar cushion. The attendant left, closing the door. Wend's host glanced at the bolt on the inside of the door. Wen -- now understanding the courtesy of letting him bolt the door -- did so. He appreciated the cushion, too, which meant his host knew enough about him to know he'd be comfortable on it. A strange Terran would be given a chair. On the low table were two selfwarmed bowls holding, respectively, roasted nuts and what looked like an equivalent of barbecued prawns. A generous decanter was neck-full of an amber liquor. Two tumblers of opalescent crystal waited. Wend seated himself and answered his host's slight bow. The Norpan glanced at the decanter, then, as Wend made the palm-up gesture of assent, poured liquor. Not until each had sipped did he speak. "You honor me. I am Vassun Garka, and Loob Garka is my cousin. How may I serve you?" Wend speared one of the prawns with a small silver skewer. "Mine is the honor. You know, doubtless, that I arrived on a Kyshan corsair." Vassun turned a palm up. "Yes. Junnabl's." Wend continued, "Junnabl has conscripted me for a bit of theft. If the booty is what I suspect, I am not adverse to taking some of it. However, I do not want to share it with Junnabl, nor do I care to rely upon his promises." Vassun looked amused. "You find my own race more reliable?" Wend grinned. "There are Norpan pirates as deadly as Junnabl. But I feel your own family is more likely to let me live. How is Loob, by the way?" The . Norpan chose a roast nut. "Active, and still unhanged. You mentioned his home base. I hope this project of Junnabl's does not lie in that direction?" Wend turned a palm down. "Junnabl has mentioned no direction, and does not yet have , one. Perhaps I IF should not have mentioned Hane." "It does not matter' Vassun said. The clerk is discreet." W end sipped more of the liquor, which was like fortified e. "Well, here's the project." He told about the secret orders. 'What I hope to do is switch dispatch cases. I have a tentative plan that will require certain gadgets I can't buy openly. And I want a small padlock specially made. But mainly, I want help getting free of Junnabl. He has my yacht, but if the booty's what I suspect, I can buy a new yacht." Vassun looked interested. "And you suspect what?" "Well, I happen to know that befeared it mit be drawn into the fighting somewhere out here. There was a secret cache somewhere, in case supplies were cut off. This freighter Junnabl has captured could not haul much in the way of missiles or other heavy weapons. Nor would food and such be worth recovering. synthetic fissionable similar to the one you use. You know how much thats worth per poimd. I judge this freighter could stow and lift five hundred tons. I think there'll be that much, or more." "Ah," Vassun said, reaching for his glass a little quickly. "Yes. And what terms have you in mind?" "I get onenfourth," Wend said. "You get onenfourth. We load the other half aboard the freighter and send her back to Earth.' Vassun blinked. "I did not know you were such a loyal patriot." Wend held a palm down. "Barth wouldn't miss the whole cargo too might feel stung enough to do something. Pass rumors around, if nothing else. If they get half of it back, they'll keep quiet. After all, they won't be anxious to admit trying to recover it." Vassun considered slowly, turning his tumbler in his long fingers. Finally, "You may be right. But if there are other things at the cache? Munitions?" Wend told him, "I'm not interestYou can help yourself. Now, here's how I hope to get the secret orders." Wend outlined his plan briefly and described certain gadgets he needed. "If you'll have those ready, I can pick them up when I land again, in uniform, to pull off the switch. Then, as soon as I know what the orders are. I'll get word to you where you can find us -- Junnabl and me, I mean. I'll devise some way to make myself expendable for that long. I can't plan in detail until I see the orders, which I'll do before I take them to him. Do you follow me?" Vassun considered briefly. "Yes." "Fine, then." Wend got up. "I don't want to be a hasty guest, but Junnabl will be furious that I've dropped out of sight this long. Will you excuse me?" "Of course." Vassun stood up and held out his hand, in the Terran gesture. "One question that has interested me, if you will permit?" "Of course." IF "Why do you have the nickname you do?" "'Taintless?' Oh, it goes back to my court-martial. My defense attorney got carried away and used the word. It was so inapplicable to me, everybody laughed. And it stuck." Vassun smiled. "Ah. Forgive my curiosity." He waited for Wend to unbolt the door. J unnabl did a poor job of hiding his rage. "Wass a very long look, Terranl" Wend tried to look injured. "Well, naturally I did more than stroll by! I made inquiries around to. There's no Night Duty Officer just one enlisted guard. I can handle him, and I've got a plan. I'll need Waldron's dispatch case and his luggage. You'll have to land me in a shuttleboat and stay in orbit, giving a false ship's name so I can say I'm traveling on verbal orders, via available transportation. What I intend to do is switch dispatch cases." A slight muddiness suffused Junnabl's face. "Iss not likely they will be that easy to fool!" Wend told him, "There's a way to manage it. But you'll have to be ready to pick me up fast when I walk out of the place." Ill T he Senior Lieutenant on Norp was eager to talk. "Is something up. Commander? We've got... we've heard rumors, but they're vague. Will the Treaty blow up?" Wend (who was calling himself Shea) grinned at him. "No. You'd have to go out of the Lenj sector to find any real fighting, and we're not involv in any way. All I know is I'm supposed to wait here for a ship and further orders." He set Waldron's dispatch case on the corner of the Lieutenant's desk. "Can you lock this up somewhere while I go look for a hotel?" "Of course. Commander. I'll put it in the safe. If you like, sir, we can phone for hotel reservations." Wend grinned again. "Thanks, but I'd just as soon look around a little. I've built up quite a thirst. I'll send for my luggage." He moved the two bags closer to the wall, started for the front door, then paused. "Will the Night Duty Officer be able to get me that dispatch case? There's a lot of stuff in it Im supposed to be studying." The Lieutenant looked 'guilty. "We don't have a Duty Officer at night, sir." He glanced at the safe in the rear of the office. "I'll leave the combination with the guard. He's reliable." Wend nodded. "Thanks. Maybe I'll see you around town tonight." N orp's orange sun had set when Wend returned to the office, nervous about what lay ahead but glad to have the long afternoon over. The office lights were already on. He wiped his palms on a handkerchief and entered. The guard was sergeant. Category M. P. That wasn't too good. He stood up. "Yes, sir. Commander Shea?" Wend nodded. "They didn't tell me it was so hot here. I hope it cools off at night." "It does, sir, if the breeze is right. Did you find an air-conditioned hotelf ' "Yes, finally." Wend glanced toward the safe. "I left a dispatch case." "Yes, sir. I'll get it." Wend followed the man as casually as he could. He had to be close enough to use the small gas-gun Vassun Garka had gotten him. He put a hand in his pocket, ready to draw the weapon. The M.P. knelt and worked at the safe dial. It seemed a long time before he pulled the door open. Wend took one step nearer. He drew the weapon, aimed it and pressed the stud, clearing his throat to camouflage the faint ihiss. He must hold his own breath now. He saw the faint mist billow out, dispersing quickly. The M.P. had Waldron's dispatch case out now, was about to swing the safe shut. Wend said abruptly, "Sergeant, my luggage..." The kneeling man turned his head. He started to say something, then looked puzzled. "Your..." Wend stepped closer. "What's the matter? You look sick!" The man swayed; put a hand on the floor to steady himself. Belatedly, suspicion flooded his face. He made an awkward move toward his holster; changed his mind and reached to shove at the safe-door. Wend thrust a foot in the way. He had his fist doubled, but the gas was swift. The M.P. toppled, pawed at the floor and lay still. He'd sleep T# for hours, Vassun had promised, and awake with a temporary amnesia. Wend readied into the safe, seized the dispatch dase, tossed Waldron's in, slammed the door and gave the dial a spin, then hurried with the other dispatch case to the desk that held the typewriter. There was a regulation small padlock on the case. He drew from his hip pocket a pair of cutters -- another of Vassun's contributions -- and cut the link. He glanced at the door, then opened the case. H e re-read the meat of the orders: "Proceed to given co-ordpates and make sure there is no pursuit before approaching the planet. At specified latitude and longitude, fly a search pattern, using ship's metaletector to locate the cache. Approximately tenfeet of soil and loose rock must be removed." He studied the description of the planet. A lifeless, uninviting one, and not handy to anywhere. He memorized all figures, then found the office's disposal-slot and thrust into it the orders, the gas-gun, the cut padlock and the cutters. without a local address, found it, added carbon paper and a second sheet, rolled the whole into the typewriter and sat frowning anxiously. He had to make decisions fast. Did he want to tell Garka the true location of the cache? He thought not. The Garkas weren't cutthroats -- not ordinary -- but they were capable of seizing the loot and pondering the agreement later. IP Inspiration came. He glanced at the door and at the inert man near the safe, then, laboriously, with muttered curses, began to type. When he'd finished, the fake orders read, in part, "You will identify yourself before landing, then present these orders to the garrison Commander." The co-ordinates he gave were not those of the cache planet. He hoped -- this was one of his risks -- that they wouldn't be familiar to Junnabl. They were the co-ordinates of the uncatalogued, little known star called Hane. He addressed the envelope to Garka Imports, put a copy of the faked orders in it and went to drop it in the mail-slot. Then he looked hastily around the office to make sure he'd left no evidence. He hurried to the unconscious guard, dragged him to the Duty Desk and arranged him on the floor as if he'd fainted and fallen from his chair. Finally he put the faked orders in the dispatch case and locked that with the special two-key padlock Vassun had gotten made for him. As he stepped from the office with the case under his arm, an airtaxi swooped down for him. J unnabl, a flat key gripped between long thumb and forefinger, looked up from the dispatch case with a scowl. "What iss this?" Wend glanced at the two-key padlock. It's a common security the C.O. on Norp has the second key. I had no chance to find out for sure." Junnabl stared at him coldly for a moment, then, in an angry motion, drew a rupter and blasted the padlock. Wend ducked to avoid splattering metal. The Kyshan jerked the case open and reached greedily for the thin envelope inside. He tore that open, unfolded the orders and began to read, silently but with lip-movement, holding the document so Wend couldn't see it. His face muddied. He darted a look at Wend, then went back to the orders. Wend could tell when the alien reached the end and started through. He could tell when Junnabl began to repeat the space co-ordinates to himself. Suddenly the pirate stiffened. His eyes went wide, then narrowed. The loanee he threw at Wend was half-absent. God, Wend thought, with a sudden knot in his middle. He recognizes those co-ordinates! After a minute Junnabl looked at him again. "I can not pay you off yet." Wend tried to act surprised and angry. "What do you mean? I've done my part of the jobi" The pirate's teeth showed. 'Tss other part of job. And iss something strange. You will come with me. But you will not enter control room during trip." He gestured for a guard. Wend protested a little, but went with the hard-faced crewman. As he left the patrol room, he heard Junnabl placing a ship-to-planet radio call. The call was to Garka Imports. IV T he trip would take a little more tlian a hundred hours, assuming Junnabl went direct to Hane. All Wd knew was that the freiter was in acceleration and would be ready to Translocate in a few hours. He could only guess what Junnabl had said to Garka, or what Garka's reaction was to the call. Garka might have let something slip. Not that Junnabl needed any more alerting. Wend's impulsive use of Hane as an ambush point had been a bad misstep. At the best, Junnabl iknew the Garkas were involved somehow. Very few people knew where Hane was -- the star was rather isolated, with only one livable planet -- but obviously Junnabl knew. And he'd be wondering son should exist there. He'd assume and the Garkas. What made it especially galling was that Vassun wouldn't get the envelope Wend had mailed him until hours after Junnabl's call. Then, too, there was the chance might sort through the outgoing mail and wonder what business they had with Garka Imports. And just in case Wend ran out of things to worry dKut, there was something peculiar about Hane itself, or the area around it. The time he'd been there, he'd been piloted in by a Loob Garka henchman. Ships, he knew, had on occasion blundered into something fatal near Hane; and the Garkas might just be angry enou to let Junnabl do likewise. W end spent most of the trip in his cubicle -- the one that had belonged to Commander Waldron. When he did wander about the ship, there was always at least one Kyshan guard with him and others within call. They let him visit most parts of the ship, but made it plain he was to touch nothing. He stayed alert for any chance to overpower a guard or seize a weapon, but these weren't amateurs. The deep-phested, stocky Kysh moved like cats and were as rey as cats, and they knew how much distance to keep between him and themselves. Unless he got an unexpected break, he'd have to play out the hand he'd dealt himself. The freighter was in Translocation now, flashing througih some limbo that only abtruse mathematics could describe. Wend had no way of knowing for sure they were headed for Hane. When he asked Junnabl their destination, it was only to maintain his pose of co-operation. Junnabl told him nothing. He wondered about Junnabl's flotilla. No doubt it would be somewhere handy if needed. The hours crawled by, and he began to watch his (tonometer. Hane, if that is where they were headed, shouldn't be far now. Then -- at about the right time -- he heard the sounds and felt the vibrations that meant they'd popped into normal space again. The ship's artificial gravity shifted and wavered, trying to fit itself to deceleration, and finally succeeded. And IF now Wend was herded to his cubicle and told to stay there... He sat on the bunk listening to the sounds of the ship. Work was going on somewhere -- repairs or alterations to the machinery. Presently he felt a jar. Something -- a shuttleboat, maybe -- had coupled on. Shortly after that, there were complex maneuvers. He could not tell what was going on, but they might be matching orbits with something. Were they in orbit around Hane? If so, where was Loob Garka? There was another mild jar -- the shuttleboat was pushing off, perhaps. Then silence. The gravity, at about one-third G, was steady. He listened. The air-conditioners hummed. And what was that other sound? A generator, to keep the ship's minor machinery running. But the drive was silent. So they were in oibit somewhere, or drifting free. They? He hadn't heard a sound since the shuttleboat's departure to indicate anyone but himself aboard. He was on his feet swiftly, senses taut. He tried the door and found it unlocked, saw no guard in the corridor. He ran toward the central well; found only dim standby lights on. He turned on full lighting, hauled himself up the ladder to the control room, flipped switches and studied instruments. The main computer was dead. So were the drive and, of course, the radio. He wasn't going anywhere, and he wasn't going to c help. But the artificial gravity remained at a third-G, and the viewscreens were working. He turned on the main one. across the screen could be away. That it crawled as it did meant the ship had a slow end-overend tumble. He began increasing magnification, and cranking the view to follow the star. A dimly lit oblong blob caught his eye. That was another ship within a few miles of him, faintly illuminated by Hane's distant light. He could see she was a derelict, holed in more than one place. Watching her, he suddenly realized that she, and his own ship, were in orbit about something. He started to look for that, but before he found it he saw other ships -- dozens of them -- all apparently unmanned, many of them damag, swinging in parking orbits. The orbits were fantastically quick. His own wasn't much over five minutes. They averaged, he'd guess, four or five hundred miles in radius. "God," he muttered, "what kind of gravity-monster..." It took him half an hour to spot it, and then he saw no disk -- just an odd localized distortion of the light from distant stars. Something too small to see had a gravity sufficient to hold these ships in their tight orbits. Had they gotten caught by accident? Hardly. The orbits were precisely circular, obvioudy planned. This must be Loob Garka's junkpile, where he hid captured ships -- too far from Hane to reflect mucli light, close enough to be reached in a burry. And Junnabl knew about it. Wend saw the Kyian's audacity now. He'd bidden Wend bere where Loob would least suspect, while Junnabl went to negotiate with Loob. At least, that meant Junnabl hadn't mentioned Wend to either Vassun or Loob. Messagedrones would have undoubtedly flashed between Vassun and Loob long before now. But what was this monstrous gravity-well? It could only be a chunk of nuclear matter -- a "bone" of some dead star, perhaips -- of fantastic density. No wonder it didn't reflect Hane's light. Its sinface gravity was too high! So Hane had a companion -- a dark, secret, dwarf-monster. Thinking back over bits of gossip he'd beard, stories of what had befallen wandering ships, he could understand. He wondered if, in fact, there weren't a number of tiny black dwarfs aroimd Hane. It would take a multiple system to explain some of the stories. God help a ship that, approaching normally in the plane of the visible star's planets, blundered too close to one of these things! Tidal forces alone could destroy her. Well, he was safe here for the moment. He got up to make a quick tour of the ship, to see what they'd left him. T ds freighter her name -- Wargentin was was, overall, a squat cylinder about as long as she was wide. Amidships, halfway between the flat ends and parallel with them, was the circular Main Deck, nearly ten feet thick, which contained among other t hing s the artificial gravity machinery. Within the ship it didn't behave entirely like natural, mass-induced gravity. It focused in (or, more precisely, "drew from") opposite directions toward the main deck, so that it was reversed in the two halves of the ship. The focusing made the pull in the control room sixty feet forward, virtually as strong as at the deck itself. Farther away -- outside the ship -- the force reverted, by degrees, to the natural laws, including the inverse-square one, and pulled centripetally toward the ship from all directions. Forward of the main deck were the living quarters and various other things, arranged radially around the centrd well. Gravity forward was usually kept atjone-third G. Aft, the reverse-direction gravity might be low, just enough to hold loose cargo "down," or magjht be turned off entirely. Machinery and nonliquid storage were mostly aft. Wend went down the central well, looking in various compartments. He reached the central hatch and went on through the deck -- carefully, because the abrupt change in gravity could mess up reflexes. He found only standby lits beyond, and about a twentieth-G. Half an hour later he started back to the control room. There was no better weapon aboard than a kitchen knife. Small but necessary parts of the drive were gone. The ship would stay livable for a IB IB long time. But she was parked, until the drive components were put back. He checked and found that they'd left all of it. So, then, they had transferred to Junnabl's ships. It wasn't quite true that he was confirmed here. The two standard scesuits were in place and in working condition. If he preferred, he could put one on and go out to die in space. H e paced the control room. "Damn iti With all this machinery..." He forced himself to sit down and think. One thing Junnabl didn't know was the deal he, Wend, had made with the Garkas. Therefore, Junnabl wouldn't expect him to recognize Hane. All of that would change, though, as soon as the Kyshan was convinced the Garkas knew would prove that Wend had tampered with the orders, and the whole thing would come clear, and Junnabl would hurry back for him. Probably the Kyshan would Translocate away to throw off pursuit, then sneak back. But that wouldn't take long. Wend got out a handkerchief and wiped his palms. Risking death for a big prize was one thing, but being tortured for information, by experts, was something else. Junnabl would break him completely, until he was utterly incapable of lies. He had to communicate with Loob Garka, quickly. Could he rig a radio of some sort? Sure -- to communicate within a take more than a crude qaik-p transmitter to readi Hane. Anymy, transmission that far would take many hours. Well, he needed a message drone, then. He'd already looked to see if there were any aboard, but now he made another trip, looking everywhere he might be stowed. Junnabl had made sure there weren't any. He went back to the control room and stood scowling at the viewscreen. What were his chances of reaching one of the other ships in a spacesuit? About as good as his chances of throwing a pebble lefthanded and hitting a bee in flight a hundred feet away. Nevertheless, he tracked the closer ones and calculated as well as he could without the computer. The next ship out passed within two miles, regularly. But with relative speeds like this, a free jump of two hundred yards would be considered risky. Still, he didn't have much to lose. At worst, he'd die in the suit and frustrate Junnabl. He studied the ship. She was Lenjan; a freighter, but no longer and slimnier than Wargentin. She was holed amidships, but looked sound otherwise. Like all the others, including Wargentin, she had just enough endover-end tumble to keep her aligned along her orbit. The chances of reaching her at all were so infinitesimal that odds against finding message drones aboard her didn't make much difference. He swiveled the viewer, waited for the next ship down to pass imdeir bun and studied her. A Norpan freighter. The pass wa farther away, and the rdative motion igreater, so he rqected that alternative. If he did make a try for the Lenj ship, he'd have to take along some bars of fuel. That was one thing that wouldn't be left in a long-parked ship, and he'd need power for lights and to warm up the tiny drone and project it, assuming he found a drone. So said aloud, "Hell! I'm thinking as if I really expected to make it out there." Now that he'd decided to try, thou, he couldn't bear pondering any more. He huiried to get one of the suits. By the time he lugged it to an airlock and went aft for three fuel bars in their oannisters and attached them to the suit, Wargentin had made five or six orbits and was overtaking the Lenj ship again. "Damn! I won't make it this pass." He'd have to hurry even to get ready for the next one. He sat down and forced himself to t hink everything through. He must, he realized, turn off Wargentins gravity so it wouldn't fight the suit's feeble drive. And he'd better leave early, so he wouldn't overshoot the outer orbit and not have time to correct. He started toward the suit -- then stiffened with a sudden thought. Gravity... These parked ships didn't drift together, over any ordinary period ei time, because their masses were insignificant. But Wargentin had gravity -- and he could turn it up, fore and aft! Why couldn't he use it to pull two ps together? Excited, he looked at his chronometer. Nine hours since Junnabl h left. How soon would he be back? It would take many passes to bring the orbits together. At the present distance, the pull would be only a fraction of a G. Did he have time? Would it work at all? He didn't see why not. He reached for the contrds, cranked the viewer around. A quarter-Jhour to the next pass. "Relax," he growled. "You've got a long joib ahead of you." He made sandwiches and coffee, gulped them down, then paced the compartment. Wargentin gradually gained on the other ship. Finally he sat down, turned up the gravity to a full two G's and let the pressure shove him into the chair. He stared at the screen, though he knew there'd be no visible response in the first pass. He'd been in tit spots, situations where he more than half expected to die within minutes. None of those times, he thought, were worse than this enforced waiting. But by the fourth pass, the Lenj ship's image was bigger on the screen. And somehow the time came when he turned off all gravity, suited up and went outside. V T he Lenj ship seemed to creep slowly toward him. Instinct said, "Now!" He turned on the suit's drive, felt the bootsoles press against his braced feet, saw Wargentin drop from beneath him. Straight out, he IF drove -- that was the first thing; get out there in plenty of time. Hane was behind hlin now, and all he saw was the Lenj ship, against a starfield, seeming to grow and to tilt slowly so the stem pointed at him like a cannon coming to bear. His breath was harsh and rapid in his earphones. Was he going to overshoot? He turned off the drive; stabbed a finger at an auxiliary control to turn him head-on; saw that he wasn't badly out of line. Strange, he thought, how that monstrous gravity he couldn't even feel checked his outward drift like a chain. He was in the ship's orbit, now, following her at equal velocity. Hane swung into view ahead. He aligned hteelf just ibelow the ship and toward the side where she was holed and (touched his drive lightly. A minor correction took him within yards of the jagged wound. He maneuvered to face it and used a back-thrast very gingerly. He didn't want to gash the suit's plastic on some metal thorn. He got in safely, his suit lits making weird shadows in the wrecked compartment. A hatch, leading inward, gaped open, too bent to be closed. But beyond the next compartment was a sound hatch. Once through that, he was in the ship's core, hauling himself along very slowly because the heavy fuel-cansisters attached to his suit must be coaxed, not jerked. He knew where the converterroom would be and found it. Some of the markings he couldn't decipher, but the two charging ports were unmistakable. He moved to them, got into the right position and turned on his suit's footingdrive to push his bootsoles against the deck. Anchored, he worked clumsily at the port covers until he got them hinged open. Now he detached a cannister from his suit, muttering profane thanks to Earth for adopting standard-size fuel bars, wrestled the cannister into position so it hung top-down before him. He unscrewed the top, then gave the cannister a sharp upward tug. It slid free, leaving the heavy bar suspended. He maneuvered that into the port and, holding himself down with one hand, shoved hard at the bar. It moved sluggishly (but with mass I) into the tube. Though his gloves, he felt the jolts as it tripped the mechanical starters, bringing standby batteries to life. He stood anxiously by watching a panel until a tiny light came on. He let out his breath in relief. The ship had power now, whatever else she might lack. He put the second bar in its port, leaving the third in a rack. "Didn't need a spare after all." He started for the control room. H e flipped master switches and studied telltale lights. The drive wasn't in working order, of course -- they'd have seen to that, after parking the ship here. There was no stored air, so he'd have to stay in his suit. And the main computer wasn't working. That latter was bad; he couldn't compute the distance to Hane. He'd have to guess and send several drones (if there were any!) set for various distances and hope IF one would space-in fairly close. He studied the console lights, frowning over the alien symbols. That small bank of lights just might be... He looked around, saw several closed doors, clumped over to one and opened it. Empty -- a suitstorage locker. He tri another. This was the communications cubbyhole. He turned on lights. Yes! Iliose five small ports would be tubes leading to the drone-launching turret! Shakily, he opened one of the ports -- and saw the blunt end of a message drone. He released a catch and drew it out. It was about a foot long and three inches thick, with a bulge at the middle. The drive would be there, at the center of gravity. He peered at setscrews mentally translating the Lenj calibrations into miles. Well... He checked the other four ports; found drones in them. He'd send dl five, set for distances ranging from twenplanet didn't happen to be on the far side of Hane... He made the settings, locked all the port-covers and studied the controls again before doing anything. He ought to let the drones warm a while longer, anyway. Now -- how did he feed his message in? That phone-jack might be where a microphone plugged in -- but where was the mike? Hastily, clumsily, he began to search. None here. He fumbled at his suit; unreeled its extension cord; tried the plug. It didn't fit the alien jack. He clumped out to the main console, foxmd no mikes. He went back and hauled a drone out of its nest. Was there a panel that he could hold against the voice-vibrator of his suit helmet? No. These drones had to be fed their messages electronically. He swore and slammed the thing back into its port. Well, they'd spacein and send out their carrier-waves, and just possibly Loob Garka might hear one of them and make the right guesses. He stood in the doorway of the cubbyhole, waiting for Hane to swing into view on the main screen, then pressed the stud that sent the drones to the turret. A needle flickered on a dial. He stared at it in dismay -- he didn't have to read the alien symbols to know what it meant. A ship had spaced-in somewhat close. Junnabl. He waited tensely for the Hane to come into position, dead ahead, then stabbed at the firing-stud. He couldn't feel any jar, of course, as the tiny drones leaped away, but five lights blinked on a panel. Barring malfunction, they were locked on Hane now. They'd keep themselves aligned and Translocate as soon as they had velocity. He hoped their drives were strong enough to overcome the monstrous gravity behind them. He'd done all he could. He went to the viewer, cranked it to find Wargentin, saw Junnabl's flagship nestled alongside her. So the pirate knew by now that Wend was gone, or would, after a hasty search of the ship. And as soon as the next pass near this Lenj ship, the whole thing would be obvious. Wend could, of course, slip out and, try to hide in space, but Junnbl's radar would spot him at once. He might as well wait here. He began thinMng what he'd do when they came. A nother two hours had fretted by. His suit air reeked of perspiration. A shuttleboat, with to suited figures riding piggyback, was coming cautiously toward the Lenj ship. Wend waited, peering out one edge of the jagged hole. Gripped in his right hand was the third fuel-bar -- as good a club as he'd been able to find, if unwieldly. The two suits detached themselves from the boat and dosed in, separating, cautiously. Wend drew back to one side to avoid a flashlight that searched into the hole. Gripping a handhold with his left hand, he got ready to swing the fuel bar with his right. Time passed, and the temptation was tremendous to peek out; but he resisted it. Finally the flashlight beam stabbed in at a sharp angle and wobbled around the wrecked compartment. He got the fuel-bar moving very slowly. The flashlight itself poked into the hole, and a moment later a suit blocked out the stars. He strained hard at the bar. With painful slowness, it swung around; threatened to tear itself from his gloved hand, so that he had to pull at it very hard. The flashlight beam caught it. The suited pirate went motionless, then, realizing the significance of the slow-motion swing, tried frantically to dodge. But the heavy bar moved on ponderously, sweeping him back out of the hole, sending him in a headover-heels tumble. Wend was already moving. He launched himself out after the tumbling figure. The flashlight was ginning away uselessly; so was whatever weapon the pirate had held. Wend reached him, got behind him, waited until the balance was right and gave him a shove that sent the pirate spinning anew and Wend shooting feet-first to one side. A rupter beam slashed candescence in a shower. Wend was already curving up and around the hull, working frantically at his drivecontrols to keep aligned. Another rupter beam missed him narrowly, then he was beyond the hull. He took quick evasive action, straining the suit's drive to ,push him outward, careful not to move retrograde to the ship because that would mean being pulled down toward the small dark gravity-monster. He got turned so he could see back. The shuttleboat was in sight, waiting for the two suited men to reach it. Junnabl's ship was headed this way. The suit radio was a clamor of harsh Kyshan oaths. Soon the radar would find him. Well, he thought savagely, I gave it a try. And Vm not going to let them take me alive. Junnabl will never know where that cache is! But Junnabl -- Wend saw presently -- had other problems. Missiles, ghostly in Hane's distant light, were streaking toward the pirate ship. It fout them off desperately with counter-missiles while it leaped into acceleration, out of orbit and away. More missiles pursued. But Junnabl, Wend could see, would get velocity enough to IF Translocate before ever being hit. Smaller missiles came after the shuttleboat. It veered ifrantically, away from them. Wend gasped, "God! Not retrograde!" But already the boat, orbital speed lost, was spiralling down, its drive vastly overworked trying to fight that gravity. It wouldn't go all the way in, of course. But the tidal forces -- H e turned on his suit transmitter, then waited to get his voice under control. "Loob Garka? This is Taintless Wend. Do you hear me." It took them minutes to make a transmission on his wavelength. "Wend? This is Loob Garka. I have a fix on you. Whai in hell are you doing? Trying to hijack one of my ships?" Wend's chuckle was shaky. "I was just guarding her for you. Evidently one of those message drones was close enough." Loob said amusedly, "You need not have wasted so many. Don't you think I have listening devices out around Hane? But you're lucky they were Lenj drones. That was the only thing that told me where they'd come from!" VI T he cache hadn't been hard to find, and no harder to dig up. Wend sat with Loob and with Vassun Garka, who was newly arrived from Norp. Wend asked the latter, "What did Junnabl say when he called you?" Vassun showed his teeth. "He pick up cargo for them. He didn't mention you. I was startled, at first. But when I got your letter, I understood. Now, about this division -- " Loob interrupted, "It was a thing I don't like, your giving him Hane co-ordinates. I do not see that we are obligated to keep the agreement." Vassun said, "We'll give you your fourth, but considering events I'm inclined to agree with Loob about the rest. Can you tell me any reason, other than you already have, why we should send half back to Terra?" Wend tried to lie casually. "Well, no. Except that the letter I sent you wasn't the only one I sent." Vassun considered, looking almost pleased. "Ah. And if you are not free to intercept it within a certain time, someone will open it, yes? But you could be bluffing." Loob took a healthy swig of the refreshments and grinned. "I like a good bluff. And this Earthman is a valuable acquaintance. Let us keep the agreement." Wend said, "Fine. And you'll make an additional profit buying my fourth from me at your usual scandalous rates. I won't find it convenient stuff to peddle around myself. I'll have to ran, and fix up a new alias, since Junnabl's still alive to talk." Loob veered at Vassun. "You see?" Then he peered at Wend. "I understand you have lost your yacht. Now I happen to have on hand a fine small ship, a rebuilt military scout. I will sell it to you at a IF  Short Story She was a typical blushing bride -- though she blushed into the far ultravioletl I t 'Was a standard six-month marriage contract. I signed it, and Landy signed it, and we were man and wife, for the time being. The registrar clicked and ohnttered and disgorged our license. My friends grinned and slapped me on the back and bellowed congratulations. Five of Tandy's sisters giggled and hummed and went through complete spectral changes. We were all very happy. "Kiss the bride!" cried my friends and her sisters. Landy slipped into my arms. It was a good fit; she was pliable and slender, and I engulfed her, and the petals of her ingestion-slot fluttered prettily as I pressed my lips against them. We held the pose for maybe half a minute. Give her credit; she didn't flinch. On Tandy's world they don't kiss, not with their mouths. at least; and I doubt that she enjoyed the experience much. But by the terms of our marriage conitraot we were following Terran mores. That has to be decided in advance, in these interworld marriages. And here we kiss the bride; so I kissed the bride. My pal Jim Owens got carried away and scooped up one of Tandy's sisters and Idked her. She gave him a shove in the chest that knocked him across the chapel. It wasn't her wedding, after all. The ceremony was over, and we had our cake and hallucinogens; and about midnight someone said, "We ought to give the honeymooners some privacy." So they all cleared out, and Landy and I started our wedding nigjht. W e waited until they were gone. Then we took the back exit from the chapel and got into a transport capsule for two, very snug, Landy's sweet molasses fragrance pungent in my nostrils, her flexible limbs coiled against mine. I nudged a stud, and we went floating down Harriman Channel at three hundred kilometers an hour. The eddy currents weren't bad, and we loved the ride. She kissed me again; she was learning our ways fast. In fifteen minutes we reach our programmed destination, and the capsule took a quick left turn, squirted through an access sphincter and fastened itself to the puckered skin of our hotel. The nose of the capsule produced the desirid degree of irritation; the skin opened, and we shot into the building. I opened the capsule and helped Landy out, inside our room. Her soft golden eyes were shimmering with merriment and joy. I slapped a privacy seal on the wiall-filters. "I love you," she said in morer- less Engli. "I love you," I told her in her own language. She pouted at me. "This is a Terran marriage, remember?" "So it is. So it is. Champagne and caviar?" "Of course." I programmed for it, and the snack came rolling out of the storage unit, ice-cold and inviting. I popped the cork and sprinkled lemon juice on the caviar, and we dined. Fish eggs and overripe grape juice, nothing more, I reminded myself. After that we activate the periscope stack and stared up through a hundred storeys of hotel at the stars. There was a lover's moon in the sky that iiigjht and also one of the cartels had strung a row of beady jewels across about twenty degrees of arc, as thou purely for our pleasure. We held hands and watched. A fter that we dissolved our wedding clothes. And after that we consummated our marriage. You don't think I'm going to tell you about that, do you? Some things are still sacred, even now. If you want to find out how to make love to a Suvomese, do as I did and marry one. But I'll ve you a few hints about what it's like. Anatomically, it's homologous to the process customary on Terra, so far as the relative roles of male and female go. That is, man gives, woman receives, in essence. But there are differences, of course. Why marry an alien, otherwise? I confess I was nervous, although this was my ninety-first wedding night. I had never married a Suvomese before. I hadn't been to bed with one, either, and if you stop to reflect a little on Suvomese ethical practices you'll see what a damnfool suggestion that was. I had studied a Suvomese marriage manuel, but as any adolescent on any world quickly realizes, translating words and tridim prints into action is trickier than it seems, the first time. Landy was very helpful, though. She knew no more about Terran males than I did about Suvomese females, of course; but she was eager to learn and eager to see that I id all die dghl dungs. So we managed esoeOenitly well. There's a knk to lit Some men have it, some don't I do. The next morning we breakfasted on a sun-washed terrace overlooking a turquoise pool of dancing amoeboids, and later in the day we checked out and capsuled down to the spaceport to begin our wedding journey. "Happy?" I asked my bride. "Very," she said. "You're my favorite husband already." "Were any of the others Terrans?" "No, of course not." I smiled. A husband likes to know he's been the first. At the spaceport, Landy signed the manifest as Mrs. Paul Clay, which gave me great pleasure, and I signed beside her, and they scanned us and let us go aboard. The ship personnel beamed at us in delight. A handsome indigo-skinned girl showed us to our cabin and wished us a good trip so amiably that I tried to tip her. I caught her creditcounter as she passed me and pushed the dial up a notch. She looked aghast and set it right back again. "Tipping's forbidden, sirl" "Sorry. I got carried away." "Your wife's so lovely. Is she Honirangi?" "Suvornese." "I hope you're very haippy together." were alone again. I cuddled Landy up against me. Interworld marriages are all the rage nowadays, of course; but I hadn't married Landy merely because it was a fad. I was genuinely attracted to her, and she to me. All over the galaxy people are contracting the weirdt marriages just to say that they've done it -- marrying Sthenics, Gruulers, even Hhinamor. Really grotesque couplings. I don't say that the prime purpose of a marriage is sex, or that you necessarily have to marry a member of a species with which a physical relationship is easy to maintain. But there ought to be some kind of warmth in a marriage. How can you feel real love for a Hhinamor wife who is actually seven pale blue reptiles permanently enclosedrrin an argon atmosphere? At least Landy was mammalian and humanoid. A Suvomese-Terran mating would of course be infle, but I am a conventional sort of person at heaiFt and try to avoid committing leave the task of continuing the species to those whose job is reproduction, and you can be sure that even if our chromosomes were mutually congruent I would never have brought the disgusting subject up with Landy. Marriage is marriage, reproduction is reproduction, and what does one have to do with the other, anyway? During the six subjective weeks of our journey, we amused ourselves in various ways aboard the ship. We made love a good deal, of course. We went gravity-swiniming and played paddle-polo in the star lounge. We introduced ourselves to other newlywed couples and to a newly wed super-couple consisting of three Banamons and a pair of Ghinoi. IP And also Landy had her teeth transplanted, as a special surprise for me, Suvomese have teeth, but they are not like Terran teeth, as why should they be? They are elegant little spiny needles mounted on rotating bases, which a Suvornese uses to impale his food while he rasps at it from the rear with his tongue. In terms of Suvomese needs they are quite functional, and in the context of her species Landy's teeth were remarkably attractive, I thought. I didn't want her to change them. But she must have picked up some subtle hint that I found her teeth anti-erotic, or something. Perhaps I was rachating an underlying dislike for that alien dental arrangement of hers even while I was telling .myself on the conscious level that they were lovely. So she went to the ship's surgeon and got herself a mouthful of Terran teeth. I didn't know where she went. She vanished after breakfast, telling me she had something important to attend to. All in ignorance, I donned gills and went for a swim while Landy surrendered her pretty teeth to the surgeon. He cleaned out the sockets and implanted a rooting layer of analogous gumissue. He chiseled new receptor sockets in this synthetic implant. He drill-tailored a set of donor teeth to fit and slipped them into the periodontal membranes and bonded them with a quick jab of homografting cement. The entire process took less than two hours. When Landy returned to me, the band of color-variable skin across her forehead was way up toward the violet, indicating considerable emotional disturbmce; and I felt a little edgy about it. She smiled. She drew back the petals of her ingestion-slot. She showed me her new teeth. # # T andy! What the hell -- I" J --  Before I could check myself, I was registering shock and dismay from every pore. And Landy registered dismay at my dismay. Her forehead shot clear past the visible spectrum, bathing me in a lot of ultraviolet that distressed me even though I couldn't see it, and her petals drooped and her eyes glistened and her nostrils clamped together. "You don't like them?" she asked. "I didn't expect -- you took me my surprise -- " "I did it for you!" "But I liked your old teeth," I protested, "No. Not really. You were afraid of them. I know how a Terran kisses. You never kissed me like that. Now I have beautiful teeth. Kiss me, Paul." She trembled in my arms. I kissed her. We were having our first emotional crisis. She had done this crazy thing with her teeth purely to please me, and I wasn't pleased, and now she was upset. I did all the things I could to soothe her, short of telling her to go back and get her old teeth again. Somehow that would have made matters worse. I had a hard time getting used to Landy with Terran choppers in her dainty little mouth. She had reoeived a flawless set, of course, two .eamnjg ivory rows; but tihey looked incongruous in her ingestion slot, land I liad to fight to keep from reacting negatively every time she opened her mouth. When a man buys an old Gothic cathedral, he doesn't want an architect to trick it up with wiggling bioplast inserts around the spire. And when a man marries a Suvomese, he doesn't want her to turn herself piecemeal into a Terran. Where would it end? Would Landy now decorate herself with a synthetic navel and have her breasts shifted about and -- Well, she didn't. She wore her Terran teeth for about ten shipboard days, and neither of us took any overt notice of them, and then very quietly she went back to the surgeon and had him give her a set of Suvomese dentals again. It was only money, I tdd myself. I didn't make any reference to the switch, hoping to treat die episode as a temporary aberration that now was ended. Somehow I got the feeling that Landy still thou she ought to have Terran teeth. But we never discussed it, and I was happy to see her looking Suvomese again. Y ou see how it is, with marriage? Two people try to please one another, and they don't always succeed, and sometimes they even hurt one another in the very attempt to please. That's how it was with Landy and me. But we were mature enough to survive the great tooth crisis. If this had been, say, my tenth or eleventh marriage, it might have been a disaster. One learns how to avoid the pitfalls as one gains experience. We ngled a good deal with our fellow passengers. If we needed lessons in how not to conduct a marriage, they were easily available. Ihe cabin next to ours was occupied by another mixed couple, which was excuse enough for us to spend some time with them; but very quickly we realized that we dito't relish their company. They were both playing for a bond forfeiture -- a very ugly scene, let me tell you. The woman was Terran -- a big, voluptuous sort with orange hair and speckled eyeballs. Her name was Marje. Her new husband was a Lanamorian, a hulking ox of a humanoid with cormgated blue skin, four telescopic arms and a tripod deal for legs. At first they seemed likeable enough, both on the flighty side, interstellar tourists who had been everywhere and done everything and now were settling down for six months of bliss. But very shortly I noticed that they spoke sharply, even cruelly, to one another in front of strangers. They were out to wound. You know how it is with the sixmonth marriage contract, don't you? Bach party posts a desertion bond. If the oier fails to go the route and walks out before the legal dissolution date, the bond is forfeited. Now, it's not all that hard to stay married for six months, and the bondsmen rarely have to pay off; we are a mature dvilization. Such early abuses of the system as conspiring to have one party desert, and then splitting the forfeiture latw. have long ce become extinct But Marje and her lnamorian mate were both hard up ior cash Each was hot for the foiieitore and each was working like a demon to outdo the other in obnoxiousness, hoping tto break up the marriage fast I saw what Wias going on, I suggested to Landy that we look for friends elsewhere on the ship. Which led to our second emotional crisis. As part of their campaign of mutual repulsion, Marje and hubby decided to enliven their marriage wi'th a spot of infidelity. I take a very old-fashioned view of the marriage vow, you understand. I regard myself as bound to love, honor and obey for six months, with no fooling around on the side; if a man can't stay monogamous tugh an entire marriage, he ought to get a spine implant I assumed that Landy felt the same way. I was wrong. W e were in the ship's lounge, the four of us, getting high on direct jolts of teel oils and stray esters, when Marje made a pass at me. She was not subtle. She deopaqued her clothes, waved yards of bosom in my face and sMd, 'There's a nice wide bed in our cabin, sweetheart." 'It isn't bedtime," I told her. "It could be." "No." #Be a friend in need, Paulsie. This monster's been crawling all over me for weeks. I want a Terran to love me." The ship is full of available Terrans, Marje." "I want you." "I'm not available." "Out it outi You mean to say you won't do a fellow Terran a little favor?" She stood up, quivering, bare flesh erupting all over the place. In scabrously explicit terms she described her intimacies with the Lanamorian and begged me to give her an hour of more oonventional pleasure. I was steadfast. Perhaps, she suggested, I would tape a simulacrum and send that to her bed? No, not even that, I said. At length Marje got angry with me for turning her down. I suppose she could be legitimately annoyed at my lack of chivalry, and if I hadn't happened to be married at the moment I would adly have obliged her; but as it was I couldn't do a thing for her, and she was boiling. She dumped a drink in my face and stalked out of the lounge, and in a few moments the Lanamorian followed her. I looked at Landy, whom I had carefully avoided during the whole embaiTiassing colloquy. Her forehead was sagging close to infrared, which is to say, in effect, that was almost in tears. "You don't love me," she said. "Whatr "If you loved me you'd have gone with her." "Is that some kind of Suvomese marriage custom?" "Of course not," she snuffled. "We're married under Terran mores. It's a Terran marriage custom." "What gives you the idea that -- " "Terran men are unfaithful to their wives. I know. I've read about it. Any husband who cares about his wife at all cheats her now and then. But you -- " "You've got things mixed up," I said. "I dont! I dontr And she neared tantrum stage. Gently I tried to tell her that she had been reading too many historical novels, that adultery was very much out of fashion, that by turning Marje down I was demonstrating the solidity of my love for my wife. Landy wouldn't buy it. She got more and more confused and angry, huddling into herself and quivering in misery. I consoled her in all the ways I could imagine. Gradually she became tranquil again, but she stayed moody. I began to see that marrying an alien had its complexities. T wo days later, Marje's husband made a pass at her. I missed the preliminary phases. A swarm of energy globes had enooimtered the ship, and I was up lat the view-wall with most of the other passengers, watching the graceful gyrations of these denizens of hyperspace. Landy was with me at fiist; but she had seen energy globes so often that they bored her, and so she told me she was going down to the scintillation tank for a while, as long as everyone was up here. I said I'd meet her there later. Eventually I did. There were about a dozen beings in the tank, making sparkling blue tracks through the radiant greenish-gold fluid. I stood by the edge, looking for Landy, but there was no one of her general physique below me. And then I saw her. She was nude and dripping polychrome fluid, so she must have come from the tank only a few moments before. The hulking Lanamorian was beside her and clearly trying to molest her. He was pawing her in various ways, and Tandy's spectrum was showing obvious distress. Hubby to the rescue, naturally. But I wasn't needed. Do you get from this tale an image of Landy as being frail, dolllike, something of porcelain? She was, you know. Scarcely forty kilograms of woman there, and not a bone in her body as we understand bone -- merely cartilage. And shy, sensitive, easily set aflutter by an unkind word or a misconstrued nuance. Altogether in need of husbandly protection at all times. Yes? No. Sharks, like Suvomese, have only gristle in place of bone, but forty kilograms of shark do not normally require aid in looking after themselves, and neither did Landy. Suvomese are agile, well coordinated, fast-moving and stronger than they look, as Jim Owens found out at my wedding when he kissed Tandy's sister. The Lanamorian found it out, too. Between the time I spied him bothering Landy and the time I reached her side, she had dislocated three of his arms and flipped him on his massive back, where he lay flexing his tripod supports and groaning. Landy, looking sleek and pleased with herself, kissed me. "What happened?" I asked. "He made an obscene proposition." . a "You really mined him, Landy." "He made me terribly angry" she said, although e no longer looked or sound very angry. I said, "Wiasn't it just the other day that you were telling me I didn't love you because I turned down Marje's obscene proposition? You aren't consistent, Landy. If you think that infidelity is essential to a Terran-mores marriage, you should have given in to him, yes?" 'Terran husbands are unfaithful. Terran wives must be chaste. It is known as the double standard." "The what?" "The double standard," she repeated, and she began to explain it to me. I listened for a while, then started to laugh at her sweetly innocent words. "You're cute," I told her. "You're terrible. What kind of a woman do you think I am? How dare you encourage me to be unfaithful?" "Landy, I -- " She didn't listen. She stomped away, and we were having our third emotional crisis. Poor Landy was determined to run a Terran-mores marriage in what she considered the proper fashion, and she took bright cerise umbrage when I demurred. For the rest of the week she was cool to me, and even after we had made up, tngs never seemed quite the same as before. A gulf was widening between us -- or rather, the gulf had been there all along, and it was becoming harder for us to pretend it didn exist. After six weeks of these annoying misunderstandings, we landed. O UT destiDaition was Thalia, the , honeymoon planet I had spent hidf a dozen earlier honeymoons there; but Landy had never seen it, so I had signed up for another visit. Thalia, you know, is a good-zed planet, about one and a h Earths in mass, density and gravitation, with a couple of colorful moons that might almost have been designed for lovers, since they're visible day and night The sky is lit green, the vegetation runs heavily to a hightannin orange-yellow, tod the air is as bracing as nutmeg. The place is owned by a cartel that mines prealloyed me on the dry northern continent, extracts power cores in the eastern lobe of what once was a tropical forest land is now a giant slab of laterite and, on a half-sized continent in the western ocean, operates a giant resort for newlyweds. It's more or less of a galactic dude ranch; the staff is iaregly Terran, and the clientele comes om all over the cosmos. You can do wonders with an uninhabited habitable planet, if you grab it with the right kind of lease. Landy and I were still on the chilly side when we left the starship and were catapulted in a greaseflask to our honeymoon cabin. But she warmed immediately to the charm of the environment. We had been placed in a floalting monomolecular balloon, anchored a hundred meters above the main house. It was total isolation, as most honeymooners crave. (I know there are exceptions.) We worked hard at enjoying our stay on Thalia. We let ourselves be plugged into a ptierodactyl kite that itook us on a tour of e entire continent. We sipped rad(n cocktails at a get-toger party. We munched algae steaks over a crackling fire. We swam. We hunted. We fished. We made love. We lolled under the friendly sun until my skin grew copper-colored and Lady's turned the color of fine oxblood porcelain, strictly from Kang-hsi. We had a splendid time, despite the spreading network of tensions that were coming to underlie our relationship like an interweave of metallic filaments. U ntil the bronco got loose, everything went well. It wasn't exactly a bronco. It was a Vesilian quadruped of vast size, blue with orange stripes, a thick murderous tail, a fierce set of teeth -- two tons, more or less, of vicious wild animal. They kept it in a corral back of one of the proton wells, and from time to time members of the staff dressed up as cowpokes and staged impromptu rodeos for the guests. It was impossible to break the beast, and no one had stayed aboard it for more than about ten seconds. There had been fatalities, and at least one hand had been mashed so badly that he couldn't be returned to life; they simply didn't have enough tissue to put into the centrifuge. Landy was fascinated by the animal. Don't ask me why. She hauled me (to the corral whenever an exhiibiition was announced and stood in rapture while the cowpokes were whirled around. She was right beside the fence the day the beast threw a rider, kicked over the traces, ripped free of its handlers and headed for the wide open spaces. "Kill it!" people began to scream. But no one was armed except the cowpokes, and they were in varying stages of disarray and destruction that left them incapable of doing anything useful. The quadruped cleared the corral in a nicely timed leap, paused to kick over a sapling, bounded a couple of dozen meters and halted, pawing the ground and wondering what to do next. It looked hungry. It looked mean. Confronting it were some fifty young husbands who, if they wanted a chance to show their brides what great heroes they were, had the opportunity of a lifetime. They merely had to grab a sizzler from one of the fallen hands and drill the creature before it chewed up the whole hotel. There were no candidates for heroism. All the husbands ran. Some of them grabbed their wives; most did not. I was planning to run, too, but I'll say this in my favor: I intended to take care of Landy. I looked around for her, failed for a moment to find her and then observed her in the vicinity of the snorting beast. She seized a rope dangling from its haunches and pulled herself up, planting herself behind its mane. The beast reared and stamped. Landy clung, looking like a child on that massive back. She slid forward. She touched her ingestion slot to the animal's skin. I visualized dozens of tiny needles brushing across that impervious hide. The animal neighed more or less. IF relaxed and meekly trotted back to the corral. Landy persuaded it to jump over the fence. A moment later the startled cowhands, those who were able to function, tethered the thing securely. Landy descended. "When I was a child I rode such an animal every day," she explained gravely to me. "I know how to handle them. They were less fierce than they look. And, oh, it was so good to be on one again!" "Landy," I said. "You look angry." "Landy, that was a crazy thing to do. You could have been killed!" "Oh, no, not a chance." Her spectrum began to flicker toward the extremes, though. "There was no risk. It's lucky I had my real teeth, though, or -- " I was close to collapse, a delayed reaction. 'Dont ever do a thing like that again, Landy Softly she said, "Why are you so angry? Oh, yes, I know. Among Terrans, the wife does not do such things. It was the man's role I played, yes? Forgive me? Forgive me?" I forgave her. But it took three hours of steady talking to work out all the complex moral problems of the situation. We ended up by agree ing that if the same thing ever happened again, Landy would let me soothe the beast. I t didn't kill me. I lived through the honeymoon and happily ever after. The six months elapsed; our posted bonds were redeemed, and our marriage was automatically terminated. Then, the instant we were single again, Landy turned to me and sweetly uttered the most shocking proposal I have ever heard. "Marry me again," she said. We do not do such things. Sixmonth liaisons are of their very nature transient, and when they end, they end. I loved Landy dearly, but I was shaken by what she had suggested. However, she explained what she had in mind, and I listened with growing sympathy, and in the end we went before the registrar and executed a new six-month contract. But this time we agreed to abide by Suvornese and not Terran mores. So the two marriages aren't really consecutive in spirit, though they are in elapsed time. And Suvornese marriage is very different from marriage Terran style. How? I'll know more about that a few months from now. Landy and I leave for Suvoma tomorrow. I have had my teeth fixed to please her, and it's quite strange walking around with a mouthful of tiny needles, but I imagine I'll adapt. One has to put up with little inconveniences in 'the give-and-take of marriage. Landy's five sisters are returning to their native world with us. Eleven more sisters are there already. Under Suvornese custom I'm married to all seventeen of them at once, regardless of any other affiliations they may have contracted. So Bride Ninety-one is also Bride Ninety-two for me, and there'll be seventeen of her all at once, dainty, molasses-flavored, golden-eyed and sleek. I'm in no position right now to predict what this marriage is goIF  Novelette The Masters owned us oil, body and soul -- and what infelligenf person would want if otherwise? I could not have written this record six months ago. Our posterity will need it to explain 'both the new and evolving species of this planet, Ed, as well as the tremendous dispersion of human and alien life forms to be found throughout such a wide volume of the cosmos. I am not a Grammer, yet I am telling this story. I am not History, yet I will make and form meaning as the Histories do. I am a Genetic. And this means that I was bred to be genius in the specialized field of basic life components. Where the Grammers are genius at communications and the Histories are genius at putting together the important parts of the past, I can put together the molecules required to build nearly any life variant which might be desired by our Masters. Except for events unforeseen by tbe Masters, I would be genetically incapable of telling this history! In the dim past, beyond the normal scrutiny of the Histories, the Master race somehow became a party to the engineering of space travel. The Histories say that the Masters could not have developed space engineering themselves. Perhaps some other form, either common or alien to their world of origin, unavoidably gave the Master race this tool for deep space travel. Subsequently, for countless thousands of years the Masters spread throughout the stars, absorbing all usable life forms into their system of vassalage. Now -- and perhaps always -- the Masters feel Aat all of space and all of life is their proper domain and servant, respectively. To a Genetic like myself there is no mystery as to how and why the Master could dominate any life form. Each Master has a thin but tough integument covered by minute specialized organelles spaced in a latticelike network. These molecular groupings are spaced in a linked receiving and sending sensory-system network capable of one peculiar property of activity. The network can perceive (or sense) the basic purpose of any living entity constructed of matter. I don't mean that the Masters are mind readers, or that they can "tune in" on an individual life form and know what that individual is going to do the next instant Their sensing apparatus is far cruder than that. But, in a way, the end results are just as spectacular. Masters know beyond any reasonable doubt exactly what each individual life is potentially capable of doing. Any life group, or individual life form, which the Master "reads" to have the potential of killing a Master is simply killed by the Master. Histories tell that even yet, at the borders of the Masters' domain, entities are discovered and In rare instances, the Masters will select a relatively undifferentiated race such as our human race and pass all members before a board of selectors. Each individual is screened for potential harm to the Master race. If the potential is low, that individual is retained under strict security guard to be used as a breeder. In turn, his or her offspring are reviewed by a board. This process continues for many generations until a perfectly satisfactory human has been genetically produced. Since direct sensory knowledge of the genetic purpose of each individual is always known to the Master, individuals are bred to be loyal and to be highly specialized in a useful area of service. If I were to include a list of the chief characteristics to be found in the Master race I would not include intelligence. Highest on the list would be a characteristic of survival. Domesticated races of many kinds accomplish all of the Master's work -- his thinkin g, his exploration, his fighting, his invention, his every mode of living. The Master's only work consists of screening races or individual members of races. Their loyal servants do all else. We domesticates are incapable of IF even the thought of disloyalty. Would a meat animal, hred for # generations for the traits of docility and tender meat, connive and scheme toward the day of freedom? Perhaps one of its early ancestors might have sought freedom. But his "freedom" genes have long been eliminated from his progeny. So it was with each of us, no matter the star of our origin. We are incapable of disloyal thoughts or actions toward our Masters. We are capable, sometimes unusually so, in the field of work for which we were bred. I am bred for and trained to be genius Genetic! II M y first memory occurred at the age of two. I looked around the bright orange cubicle containing the usual assortment of human training toys when my sight caught and clung to the three-dimensional chromosomal model. I remember thinking that the energy form containing fifteen energy levels was placed in the wrong mel. I screamed because I wanted to change its position. It wasn't a question of symmetry. It was a question of "rightness" and my subjective need to restore something which was clearly not of nature. The Mothers, who are usually very good about changing wet pants and other normal biological needs, were just not capable of satisfying my difficulty on that day. Ihe Mothers had their own specity and could not have dreamed that moving a phosphorus atom on a threedimensional model would stop a twoyear-old from screaming. I shall never forget that day. It was my unhappiest! Soon thereafter the Teachers entered my life. Among the many things I learned were certain facts of my own life. I was #th screened generation. I was the penultimate of many important human lines bred to be key research and development scientists in the field of genetics. Since research in genetics required knowledge of all of the sciences, I was rigidly instructed in every area. But the penalty of being bred with such exceptional tdents as mine was similar to penalties instrinsic to all of the Masters' vassals. Since I was not bred to be Grammer, I became confused, illogical and poor of memory whenever I tried to discuss any subject other than my own. Conversely, any subject bordering or merely symbolized within my field of competence provided a tapestry weave endless diagrams of beauty. For that is what I was bred to be -- genetic genius for the research and development of other domesticates for the Masters. My teachers were the experts they had been bred to be. They started my learning process too early for me to say that at such and such a date I began my education. Learning was a full time awake activity for me. I had no way at all of knowing whether my regime was harder or easier than any other training program -- for mine was designed solely for me, and I was the only pupil within the program. I 'll not forget the day when Teacher of Biologies had progrimmed the multisensory learning computer for genetics of an advanced nature. The course consisted of placing all known facts about genetics into the computer, along with all of the logical relations and functional relations which would tie the facts together. The student is then asked to simulate experiments by symbolic processes which the computer assesses against its tautological structure. If the student is wrong, the computer is supposed to signal this fact to the student as well as to explain the error. If the student is right, the computer determines all of the important ramifications of the simulated experiment and rewards the student by presenting a realistic but simulated model of his successful experiment in three-dimensional color vision. Now, I had always been curious about the structure of organelles which could provide an apparatus capable of sensing th structure and function of other organelles. I set up my symbolic experiment and pushed the appropriate computer keys. The logical extrapolation which was presented to me in full color as my reward for selecting the correct postulates and ingredients was that of one of the Master race. At the same time, the experiment "halt" light came on, and the computer carefully explained to me that the experiment was incapable of being performed due to my logical inconsistencies. From this day I knew that the current logical construct of heredity was faulty admitting to conflicting conclusions. I knew also that I had accidentally placed my finger on the key difference ibetween the Master race and other life forms! My education progressed rather well, without significant difference 'between mine and that received by other "professional" categories. Factual knowledge was easy to absorb both by reason of my birthright and because of the chemical and mechanical aids to learning. I explored the byways and pathways of allied fields of knowledge but, whenever my life required any form of communication outside of genetic or genetic related problems, I generally depended upon the Gramme. They couldn't understand, but th could communicate very well. Not until my period of advanced training was begun did further important knowledge regarding Masters come to me. m T he day I was discharged from the Teacher cubicle my advanced training began. My world had consisted chiefly of sleeping, eating and learning. Learning consisted of guidance by teachers and manipulation of the large multisensory learning computer. Facts about the outside world were known only at second-hand. Exposure to the outside world under Advanced Training was optional for all specialist scientists or engineers. If, for example, one were trained to study crystal-forming phenomenon, there might be no theoretical reason for the person to travel outIF side of his cubicle. If, however, problems of cosmology, no hindrance existed for the scientist to visit other planets, solar systems or whatever he pleased. I elected, therefore, to continue my advanced study through travel. I desired to experience at first hand the result of changing ecology, to deduce at first hand the effect of star, gravity, chemical and radiation on composite and simple gene structures. I desired, too, to satisfy the increasingly driving curiosity of my maturing intellect. I was now ten years old. Under the guidance of Teachers, with the aid of Grammers, Travel Planner specialists laid out my fiveyear itinerary. I was to visit at least fourteen stars of class G, M, O and A, with twenty-seven different planets to sample. I closed the door of the Growth cubicle with a sense of relief. The robotic track car was waiting. I jumped inside and pressed the window button to anti-polarization so that I could view the scenery which had so long been denied me in person. Soon I had to admit that the sight of miles of cubelike structures without windows or decorations and an occasional robotic track car were not impressive sensory stimuli. But these, nonetheless, together with a real sky and sun, inspired me greatly at the time. Subjectively I knew that I was maturing and I was glad to be alive in the world. Perhaps five hours were consumed in traveling to the spaceport. Other ports were closer, I was told, but the ship of my destination was there. I grabbed my very small bag of personal belongings -- a three-dimensional yellow star representing my badge of genetic servitude to the Masters and which was given to me by the head Teacher when I successfully predicted the proper genetic structure of # biological organisms from a standard list of characteristics; a portable multisensory, multipurpose computer presented me on my entrance to Advanced Training and a micro-microompater tape containing the basic physical characteristics of every life form above level six that I would expect to meet anywhere on a broad locus surrounding my trip. I jumped from the track car and ran to the spaceport door. Inside I found the same serene environment that I had come to expect everywhere in my short life. Several humans were standing around holding blue or green tags which identified their purpose in life. The blue was a Personal Attendant to a Master. The green was a Master Carrier. I knew when I saw these two colors that a Master must be near by. I strained my neck to peer in every comer, hoping to see one, but no such luck was mine that day. D isappointed, I began the long walk around the paneled walkway searching for a Grammer. I held my yellow star proudly before me so that all would know that I was Genetic. I passed many sliding doors before I came to the rainbow color of the Grammer. I walked in without hesitation and found the Grammer right where he belonged. He must have been nearly seventy-five years old, yet his keen eyes followed his nose directly to my yellow star and down again to his desk where, with an affirmative nod, he checked a printed travel list. "I don't have a Guider available to show you the remaining way to your ship," he said, "but I can tow you a map in genetic code which will be easy for you to follow. Is that all right?" I felt the tightening in my throat muscles that always preceded attempts to convey ideas beyond my specialty. My mind raced through at least # permutations of the find a key which could be used to communicate the idea of "yes." My tongue became dry; my hands began to sweat. The harder I tried, the tighter my teeth were held together. I strained and tortured my thinking to no avail. Finally, noting my difficulty -- and possibly expecting it -- the Grammer spoke again. "If you approve, give me the number of regular solids which can be used to fill all of space without overlap and without leaving a hole of any size. If you do not approve, tell me the number of heavy-atom isotopes required to build the sprassey acid molecule." My mind clarified instantly and flung itself to the five Platonian solids. I was in control of me again! "Five," I said. In spite of the fact that l knew riiat the Grammer had memorized key statements of this sort so that he could communicate with specialists like me and that he didn't have the vaguest idea what he was talking about, I felt relieved for the presence of a person with such obvious empathy. Yet I felt superior to him on this one point. For nearly # years, since the time of Pythagoras around # B.C., man has known of the five regular polyhedrons. Ihe Grammer nodded his head again and proceeded to sketch out symbols on a piece of plastic board. I watched and saw a swift-forming diagram of an unknown -- at least unknown to me -- molecule of very little complexity. The hydrogen atom occured only once. Interlocking energy bonds were used to depict hallways and branches. The normal energy nucleus was depicted in three dimensions. It had been so long since I had used only three dimensions in depicting molecules that I felt somewhat lost. Suddenly, however, I recognized that the hydrogen atom was my goal and the nitrogen atom which was depicted as being in a single state of excitement was our present location. This was a map which I could follow! O nce I was settled in the rocket cubicle assigned to me I reached almost instinctively for my computer. I knew this was a foolish idea but I just had to satisfy my curiosity as to whether or not the old Grammer's genetic roadmap was a permissible molecule within the energy ranges permitted for life. I inserted his specifications in the computer and found, not too surprisingly, that the probability of such a molecule IP existing lat all was about equal to the (probability of ordinary drinking water being generated in the interior of a G type star, by the glass full -- In (the 'ass oontainerl StiU, I had had to (know. Since my cubicle was bare of any forms of intellectually satisfying implements, I was soon faced with the prospect of staring at my walls, concentrating on a problem of my own invention, or reviewing details of life as recorded in my micro-microcomputer tape. I suspect that the number of life forms recorded in considerable detail on this tape amounted to nearly #xI #. Its crossindexing feature was likely to fill up about the same length of tape as the primary data. This time, I randomly requested any form of life to be found in the constellation of Canes Venatici. The planet to which I was assigned in this region of space was known as Stian of a star called Btry. The randomly selected planet from the same constellation was known as Vanatta of the star Uni. The tape didn't contain the source 'history of the names. But no matter; the life form was interesting in itself. Vanatta life seemed to be predictated upon the replicative principle that 'life comes in threes." For some reason yet to be discovered, each genetic pattern replicated itself three times. The consequences were not entirely predictable. In certain cases, where the life level was equivalent to one-celled life on Barth -- life level twenty -- a kind of amorphous "soup" was described. Whereas, for level six and our equivalent of mammals, life replicated in "threes" in a very odd way. There were six life forms superficially similar and which seemed to produce a set of mammal-like forms numbering twenty-seven different shapes, sizes and varieties. Yet, and here was the real oddity, any combination of three mammals -- the "original" six or the total twenty-seven superficially distinct -- could interbreed and produce, at random it would seem, any one of the other twentyseven or "original" similar six. No one had yet untangled the reason for this phenomenon. Whenever the life form was removed from influence of its sun, it died. Bvidently the relationship with their sun was sensitive; yet nothing about the sun's output could be determined to be peculiar. I was about to request information on the composition of the sun, the planet's atmosphere, density, radiation distribution and chemical distribution when a spiderylike Antarean poked its leathery head in my doorway. B red for space, the Antareans were the Masters' space servant. The Anlarean generally knew everjrthing there was to know about space travel and problems. Some Histories seemed to think that they were the original discoverers of contiguous space -- such discovery having led to their absorption into the symbiote pool for the benefit of Masters. Like ell Masters ships, we were outfitted with several forms of propidsion systems. Some forms took advantage of the "equal and opposite reaction." Others were concerned with travel in special spaces. Polarity problems, gravity problems and mass problems each had their special tool of propulsion. For star travel, however, the Antarean established one-to-one correspondence with a contained energy system which mirrored the stress and strains of space. By some sort of multileveled logic, beyond my genetic background to comprehend, they created themselves -- that is, the ship -- in several places at the same time. Symbolically it was something like, "If I am not therei, there # , therc # ,... , there." By making n large enough and tying each "therei" to the mirrored energy system, the ship was certain to be at the location desired as well as many other places. Then, by applying a limited oontrapositive to the animated hypothesis, one arrived where one wished to be. That is, "If I am not therei, therc # , there # ,... there, then I am therea." The Antarean backoned for me to come. I left my articles, except for my gold star, and followed. The Antarean proceeded me into the lounge. Here I was very surprised to see, first thing, a large number of humans. I also recognized the Master Carrier and the Personal Attendant first met at the spaceport entrance. But as I walked behind the crowd, I received the greatest shock of my tenear-old lifel There, with all orifices dangling toward the feed pan, was a live Mas ter! Immediately upon entering the Master's presence "scanning" began. I felt, with every cell of my being, an aliveness beyond description. It was as thou each cell of me was resonating on the same frequency and as though I had become more than just me. I knew my basic purpose in life. I knew I was Genetic. And without the study of life and its endless permutations, I knew that life would become meaningless. I also knew without equivocation that Master was Master and I but a small, meek, propitiatory servant to the desires -- any desires -- of the Master. I knew that life could not be tolerated in any other way! For all practical purposes the Master's scanning was continuous on each person in the room. Yet I was soon able to separate, in my mind, me from the Master. The Master beckoned to me. With extreme feelings of joy, I complied by walking toward the Master. He bid me halt! With extreme joy, I halted. I am sure that if the Master had beckoned me to jump into op space I would have complied with equal joy. No hypnotism was involved, nor any form of mind control. I, as well as every other being in the known volume of space occupied by the Master race, was a product of prior genetic screening. In my case, the product of # screenings. Life just could not be thought of any other way! IV A lthough Grammers were present, Masters had no need for their services, since they were the only untrained life form which could conIF verse equally well with all other life forms. I sensed or felt desires and impulses which at first I tended to indentify with my own personality. Very soon, however, I was able to separate out the "me" from the Master's messages. "You are young for an advanced Genetic," he said. His eye band, a solid circular band of light-sensitive tissue capping off the periphery of his ventral side, changed to deep green. I made no reply, since the Master had not requested me to speak. I could not have produced any social amenities anyway. "I selected your ancestors of the #th screening. The male and female whose protoplasm I caused to be joined were each responsible for great services to your Masters. The female discovered biological means for increasing the diversion of genes in those egg and sperm combinations which were to be subject to later screening, which increased the probability of selecting a desirable set of traits earlier in the screening process. The male had extremely good memory. But he also had one recessive gene which was contraindicated for our purpose." I followed the Master's discussion with great interest, for it not only blended in with my world of genetics, but it was the first bit of knowledge I had regarding my forebears. "That male," the Master continued, "was responsible for codifying the rules of genetics in such a way that a computer could be programmed to contain the intrinsic structure of all of this science." The Master paused to instruct the Carrier to lower him slightly, so that his sucking orifice could better reach the nutrients in the food pam. He continued, "You used the end product of his research during most of your training cycle whenever you placed the pertinent characteristics into your computer and the computer extrapolated, by purely logical means, the result of your factors, producing therefrom a simulated life model." My mind immediately sped back to when I discovered, by means of this very process, the basic construction common to all Masters which enabled them to dominate all other life. I began to shake with fear that my precious and somewhat accidental success would be misconstrued by the Master. Apparently, however, the Master ignored my thinking or did not "receive" it. The Master finished sucking at the food pan and weaved to be raised to a slidy higher level. Nearly facing me now, the Master continued. "The male had to be killed, of course. The recessive gene contained elements of independence which could not be trustworthy at. all times. I am sure that successive generations have eliminated undesirable traits." As the Carrier moved forward with the Master, I was urged to follow behind. He (beckoned me to a chair by a simple table and, for the first time, addressed his Personal Attgidant. "Get this male food of his kind. Also see that he has access to all parts of this ship. His mission is valuable to the Masters. He must learn and grow so that he can better serve us. His type needs freedom to grow." The Master turned to all with his final statement. "Let no one hinder his learning!" M y eyes must have glowed much like the Master's own eye band. Althou I was a genius Genetic, I had not really expected any kind of special treatment in life. And here, at age ten, I was addressed by a live Master and told that my "mission is valuable to the Masters." It is true that all life which survives does so only because of valueto Masters, but my mission was especU ally valuable the message implied. For the first time in my life I wished that I could communicate to others outside of my specialty. Failing this, I mentally crosslink molecule. I took their naturally occurring iral form and stretched it by means of imaginary polarity at several intermediate points along each longitudinal axis, involuted the "strings" of contact and extrapolated to # places the mutative ejects I had induced upon the life forms resulting from each energy change! The Master watched me with, I suppose, a contentment that only a Master can have for the culmination of a long, successful screening. The Master was riding only as far as one of the planets of the star Etry. I bent to my study of life forms found in my computer "tape. I felt that I was ry beginning to fulfill my basic purpose in life. Several contiguous space objectives were reached, and perhaps a day or so was spent at each place. I enjoyed meeting different life forms, but none were of particular complexity. I soon realized that those forms which I had met were logical outcomes of all I had learned from my early genetic training. I began to feel that perhaps my learning rate would not be as rapid as originally anticipated. Meanwhile, the Antareans had prepared for our contiguous move to Stian. Since the key to application of contiguous space travel resided in how well the energy ball carried by the ship duplicated the dominant sources of energy points in space, occasionally impection of the mirrored universe, or unpredictable changes in the universe itself, caused the ship to arrive at some place totally imselected by anyone. The incidence of occurrence for this kind of thing is very, very low. But it happens. And for us, on this day, it happened. The Master's eye band turned bright pink. The Antareans scurried in profound study. I felt above all the hustle and bustle because any space which contained a Master was home for me. By use of several of the propulsive devices we arrived at a planet which seemed to be adequately situated for the support of life. The difference was soon apparent, however. This planet was mostly smelly swamp. We landed on a small rising where the Master, surrounded almost entirely by Protectors, had himself carried to the edges of the swampy water. Protectors I had seen K in tihe ship hut never with their full panoply of weapons. I believe the Protectors are the chief race used by the Masters to fit new, unscreened life forms when needed. The Histories tell that this race had the most formidable and progressively long history of battle for survival of any race known. One look at their nearly robot-like behavior, coupled with their nearly mechanistic weapons of offense or defense, would underline this. I wondered why the Master was studying the swamp so intently. It soon became obvious that the Master was screening every possible life form to determine if genes potentially dangerous to Masters were evident. Presumably, if such genes were available in level four or hier, this area was not yet under the sway of Masters. The first task, then, was to find level four or higher life. The Master returned to my side and resonated, "Go to the chief Antarean and request all pertinent data now known of this planet and its environment. If other data is needed, have it made available to you by one of the Antraeans. Deduce, then, the probability of level four life and its most probable whereabouts." T he Antareans were thorough. All the information was available and neatly catalogued. I already surmised the broad features of the probable path of life on this planet, but I was glad to get the detailed data packaged with such predsion by the Antareans. I set up the proper codes on my computer and, through a haif-sjmbiosis bom of years of training, communicated with this nearly intelligent entity. Between us, the computer and I, we resolved all of the most likely patterns. For the first time I spoke to the Master. "There are two and only two most probable sequences of life patterns dominate in our data. They are equally obvious from gross data which surrounds us. Level four life must exist in air or in the water. Since the Antareans have successfully surveyed the whole planet prior to landing, only the later possibility can be probable." I was confident that this had been evident to the Master from the start and so I continued. "In the past # years, homeostatic balances have been tending toward more land and less water surface exposure. However, the rate at which the change has occurred has caused the waters to absorb a greater than usual amount of organic materials. These, in turn, have caused most all of the water to be unclear or muddy throughout the planet. If level four beings are to exist, they would not yet have been able to adapt to an environment with little or no light. They would, therefore, exist wherever the water is the clearest. Presumably along the edges of underwater currents, no matter how sluggish, level four life might be found. "Furthermore," I continued, "they will unquestionably have some means of making light -- probably through utilization and domestication of underseas luminescent creatures. If the Antareans csS. make the proper chemical or infrared survey of large areas, distinguishing between the heat of planets as distinct from unusual statistical anomolies -- inhomogeneities of light sources -- I think you will find the life at one of these clusters." The Antareans not only could, but did. We soon located several hundred sources of unusual light activity along the edges of underwater currents. For the first time in my life I had been useful to a Masterl My eyes danced, my steps were lighter, and I now knew what "pleasure of living" implied. Ours was not a "contact" vessel so our mechanical probes were rather ineffective. After many trials, the Master sent several Protectors down in jury-rigged pressure suits. The Protectors, too, were eluded. Evidently only the Master, with his special sensory apparatus, could do the job. So the Master descended with all of his Protectors. I don't know what happened down below, and neither does any one else who remained on the surface. The surviving Protector knows, but he cannot tell us anything. After about three hours of waiting at the surface of the murky water, enormous geysers shot high in the air. They could only have been caused by weapons carried by the Protector. The geysers continued for a very long time and then, suddenly, the whole surface of the water turned inky black. All of the plant life at or near the surface of the water turned black and shriveled up on contact with whatever was coming to the top. It was like dropping acid on the leaf of a plant. The burned, black area became larger and, near the center of the black, a Protector, holding onto the small underseas vehicle of the Master, pushed to the surface in great haste. I could see the outer suit of the Protector becoming charred and black while, with great anxiety, I watched until I saw a small feeding orifice drop through a pitted hole in the Master's craft. W e were all thankful that the Master's life had been spared. The Master stayed in a state of extreme terror for nearly forty-tive days before ship life returned to normal. We orbited around the swampy planet for the wihole period, waiting for rational directions. Whenever the Master left his cubicle he always had his remaining Protector near him. He also very carefully avoided any reference to his experience. The Master called in the chief Antarean and asked him, directly, the best way to return to our portion of the universe. The Antarean's answer was immediate. It seems that any space-exploring vehicle faces the same problem in greater or lesser detail. An application of the inverse to the contra-positive gave, "If I am theres, then I am not therei, there#, there#,... , there." This seemed to work all right if one had only one correct energy image from the known universe in the energy IF bowl. In practice, however, it seemed to operate more like the positive feedback of a butterfly trying to fly "butterflied" all over the universe before we successfully located our known segment of the universe and subsequently landed at Stiah. This flight had given me experience in ways which I had not anticipated. I couldn't help but wonder why the Master hadn't asked the Antarean how to get home from the first. Why, also, was it so important for the Master to contact the life on the other planet when he was planning to go on to Stian anyway? With my analytical approach to life I couldn't help but summarize what I had learned: (#) Masters are not prime causes in the universe. (#) Only a relatively small pordoh of the universe is controlled by the Master Race. (#) Masters can be immobilized by terror, are cowardly and can be injured or even killed. (#) Masters are not very intelligent. And (#) I love Masters! Quite an education for a ten-yearold cowlike domesticated member of the human race! V B efore departing the ship on Stian I was again ushered into the Master's presence. This time the Carrier held him in such a way that his charred and blackened orifice tube dangled into a small cup of medicated fluids. Again I felt the cxhiliarating effects of the Master's scanning. 'Your race," he began, "has a penchant for creative work in the biologrcal sciences. Thousands of years ago we Masters determined to seek out a race such as yours. By careful selection and breeding you have become the first of the line who we believe to be capable of serving us in a very special way." The Personal Attendant removed some sort of decoration or instrument from the round ball which composed the ventral portion of the Master. My mouth bwame dry and my hands moist as I struggled, again, to formulate questions regarding his implication that I was one of many. The Master continued, "We Masters have a very special problem. As you have seen, while the volume of our living space increases as the cube of the radius of our expansion, our birth rate is now constant, since we utilize the whole planet surface for reproduction. But the rate of increase virtually halts any reasonable expansion of our space control. Since it is the Masters' place to rule all life, the problems must be solved!" I thought of Vanatta's peculiar life which came in threes and wondered if there might not be some relationship between Vanatta's inability to propagate away from her sun and similar difficulties for the Master Race. "A Master will discuss this problem with you in detail upon your completion of advanced training," he finished. I was pleased to note that whereever I traveled, the Master's admonition for complete cooperation preceded me. Stian's life forms were simple variants of caiibon, nitrogen, hydrogen and phosphorus. I checked gross form prediction from primary molecular structures for levels twenty, seven, four and two. No significant deviation from fact could be observed. The highest life level on Stian was two -- a life form generally weak in science but growing a sound technological base. The Stian himself was a highly chitinous form of life with clusters of clawlike fingers located in such a way that opposition of fingers was guaranteed for nearly every desired direction. I further found the Stians to be neither friendly nor unfriendly but simply behaving in ways that were directed by Masters. My hotel suite was all that could be desired for comfort. More comfortable than my training cubicle, yet supplied with all of the scientific aids which might be successfuMy utilized; it made me feel important. Stall I felt uneasy about my present quest for advanced knowledge. Somehow I knew that I should alter my plans by going directly to Vanatta. Yet, without the proper reason to justify my feelings, I could only bro. I brooded a good bit. Lacking a Master's way of scanning immediately to the core of the matter, I began to sense an incompleteness in my own ability to face up to simple problems. Yet wasn't I genius Genetic? Eventually I was able to phrase the problem in terms of my specialty. Teachers probably view my trip as "advanced" only in the sense of helping me to verify that the basic structures of genetic knowledge are IF sound. With their end m view, I had been guided through an itinerary which would sample various hypotheses. Whereas,  viewed "advanced" from the point of view of fing and solving more and more problems composed of challenges to the structure of genetic science. Briefly stated, my continued growth as a Genetic was in the facing of unknowns like Vanatta. Certainly I could not grow by following my present itinerary! Although exhausted both emotionally and physically from my earlier attempts to view this question from the point of view of a Master, I still rushed to change my direction of travel. A ship with full Antarean crew was made available to me as soon as my desires were communicated through a Grammer. VI I knew from Vanatta's # density as well as its gaseous envelope, opaque to all but ultraviolet, that life molecules here would tend to be both lighter and heavier in weight. Lighter because initial chance meetings of chemical elements would be favored for the lighter elements. Heavier, because each life molecule would need an opaque protective shield to prevent the ultraviolet radiation from disrupting the bonds which hold together the larger, complex molecules. I also knew that neither of these two effects was sufficient to cause the atypical behavior of Vanatta's life. I was eager to land, and sure that my choice for growth was correct. At Vanatta's spaceport, I grabbed my small ensemble of personal possesmons and quickly walked to lc cubicle with the colors of the rainbow. The QranMner proved to be another human like myself. He accepted my nod with one swift glance at my proffered yellow star -- the sign of the Genetic -- and then began to speak. "Your arrival has been prepared. Make yourself comfortable and look at the enclosed list of spifications. I have (been instructed by the Masters to see that you have every possible form of cooperation. I must admit that their overriding command is peculiar within my experience. Naturally #, as well as all others here on Vanatta, will do everydng required of us." Once again I was impressed with the sense of order and purpose brought to all plane ruled by Masters. All of us, human and alien, were certainly fortunate to be 'guided by such beings, bring us all to a full sense of direction, purpose and accomplishment for the Master! The Grammer continued, "When you have reviewed the preliminary specifications for your scientific needs here, and possibly made further selections, I would like to give you a brief summary of the services which are available to you." I looked at the list and, much to my surprise, saw nearly a complete laboratory as well as sundry supporting elements. In my own eyes, my stature as well as the importance of my mission increased. Only the location of the laboratory -- in the heart of a large city -- was possibly oontraindioated for my studies. Since the matter was connected to my work I found it easy to vocalize my feeling. The Grammer, tall and gnarled of appearce, accepted my request with characteristic patience. I was fitted with an Antarean spacesuit so that Imight move between human environment buildings and, much to my surprise again, the Grammer indicated that he was assigning himself to me for the duration of my stay. T he Grammer, whom I learned to call Grammer, directed our track vehicle to a hotel suitable for our temporary needs. Tingling with great excitement, I fell asleep with difficulty. My last thought was mixed in nature. I thought of the special problems of Vanatta which could be so exciting to a Genetic. I thought, too, of the continuous close worlg relationship between myself and the Grammer. Humans I had known, but never continuously for any length of time. Would this relatively young, perhaps # years old, Grammer exhibit traits of human behavior hitherto unobserved by me? Would the concept of "affection" be reborn by our close relationship? Neither the Histories nor my Teachers had prepared me for the experience! The next morning the Grammer and I rode a second track vehicle to a cubicle in the City of Uni which contained the equivalent of Vanatta government. Here, encumbered by our suits, we were escorted to a large wall map showing the contours vn of the planet as well as traffic tributary systems. Interpreted by Grammer, I learned that the network did not depict any pattern of "threes" os might he expected from the nature of Vanatta life. Grammer memorized the main features of the board and, between the two of us, we were able to locate several geographical positions which seemed to fit my requirements. I knew that Vanatta had no large ocean or lake systems but that pools of condensed vapors formed at the foot of most hills. Since Vanatta consisted mostly of rolling hills, most of its terrain was sprinkled with these condensations. I wanted to locate near one of these. I also wanted to be away from civilization as known in the cities of Vanatta, yet close enough to be able to observe and compare life in its different levels of complexity. Via hovercraft, Grammer and I searched until a satisfactory location was discovered. I expected to go back to our hotel cubicle and await word that some sort of primitive structure had been erected. Again this Grammer surprised me. He reached for the radio broadcasting equipment and, in several swift syllables, ordered work to begin. Within # minutes, large hovercraft were carrying pre-assembled structures, while other hovercraft directed their assembly. I can't believe that more than three hours passed between their arrival and the signal to Grammer that my modern laboratory was ready for immediate occupancy. I was, at first, quite optimistic about solving the genetic problem posed by Vanatta life. Wasn't I, by the admission of the Masters, the end product of a long line of humans bred for the sole purpose of being genius Genetic? Nearly five years passed before real progress was gained! My #year-old optimism (and egotism) soon evolved to a pattern of careful scientific thinking. As time passed, I learned to challenge more and more basic tenets taught to me by Teachers and my unshakeable teaching machine. Answers proved to be basic -- and simple! Grammer and I became quite close. I learned what "affection" meant and vowed, in my own subconscious way, to retain Grammer as my assistant throuout my service to Masters. On Grammer's part, his expression remained as nearly unreadable as ever. I knew, thou, that this was his genetic heritage just as my peculiarities were mine. I knew, too, that he shared my feelings of affection. The equivalent of one-celled life (or one-celled colony life) could only be found in an amorphous form on Vanatta. Between this life level twenty and the next level of nineteen, there was a jump which could not be accounted for by theory. Explanations of this gap was, I felt, the key to explaining, or at least leading to an explanation of the reason why Vanatta's life could not be reproduced away from their sun. Unlike our earth colonies, level twenty life ihere was not true cellular life. It seemed to ifail to produce the uivalent of our colony specialization. One-celled life, like the Chlamydomonas, begin the process on Earth. Pandorina was composed of eight cells embedded in a spherical matrix of jellylike material, yet none of these eight were much different from Chlyamydomonas. The combined beating of their flagella cause the entire colony to act in unison for locomotion. Another form, the Pleodorina, is composed of many more cells clustered in the shape of a hollow sphere; aside from the increased number of cells there is little difference between this one and Pandorina. One difference is striking, however; it is that the smaller cells, the soma, are sterile for reproduction purposes while the larger are not. So at this level some specialization has begun. A much larger aggregate is the Volvbx, a beautiful hollow spherical colony consisting of several thousand cells. Again, these resemble the Chlamydomonas in most respects, although there are tiny bridges be tween individuals which tend to lock them together more securely than the loose jelly or other forms. Almost all of the cells are alike, although there are some that are larger and have a different appearance. These are reproductive cells. Some are bundles of small bodies, the sperm or male cells, while others are large ovoid egg cells. These special sex cells reproduce the colony by a sexual process where the sperm are released into water, where they swim to and unite with the egg. This subsequently becomes a zygote which overwinters in a heavy-walled case. Other reproductive cells merely divide and move into the hollow of the sphere where they become small colonies, known as daughter colonies. These eventually burst out, destroying the mother and becoming adult colonies themselves. Two important events occur in this gradual association of cells. First, similar cells aggregate into a mass which apparently succeeds better. That is, there is strength in union. Second, division of labor is initiated among the cells, some becoming sterile and functioning only in locomotion, whereas others retain the primitive condition of colonyreproduction. From here, differentiation of the soma cells continues in various directions toward greater and greater complexity, and thus up the long trail to such hi'y intricate forms as Masters and their servants. V anatta life, contrariwise, had jumped from lifelike chemicals at level twenty to relatively high forms of life. Vanatta had these key peculiarities to untangle: #. Life would not reproduce beyond its own sim. #. Level twenty life consisted of a homogeneous, soupy, lifelike chemical. #. From level twenty, life jumped to level six with no apparent intermediate steps. #. Level six life consisted of six basic similar patterns, any three of IF iwlhidh could reproduce its own kind as well as twenty-seven other apparently unrelated patterns. #. All thirty-three forms could reproduce, by reproduction in "ithrees," to produce any of the others in an unknown or unpredictable manner. #. A basic reproduction unit is any three life-level six entities. I decided, after nearly two years of fruitless effort, that it was not only the Masters who were ignorant. One Master had told me that Vanatta life was incapable of being reproduced beyond its sun. I had acoted this in the way it was tendered -- that is, the direct influence of some mysterious energy of Vanatta's sun determined and remained as a vital agent of Vanatta life. The question which seemed to me to display my own ignorance was this: Did life of Vanatta really find it impossible to reproduce away from the sun? Or was it merely a case of absence of supporting symibiotes required for the breeding process? When the answer was reached I compared my intelligence unfavorably with the intelligence of a Master! We, Grammer and I, established the basic ecology of a small Vanatta mammal ced a Bra. After several months of close observation in a closed environment we shipped three Bra to another solar system. In due time we received the news that the Bras had brought forth three apparently unrelated mammals -- yet to be found in our list of thirty-three. Hindsight is easier than foresight. Still, I, genius Genetic, deserved all criticism for this, my first research error. Never again would I be so truth, whether made by book or Master. Everyone knew that Vanatta life could not reproduce beyond its own star. Yet the truth lay somewhere in the ecology of the life form, not in peculiarities of its star! vm M y success in reproducing the Bras away from Vanatta's sun caused reverberation throughout the space of the Masters. This time, ten Masters scanned Grammer and me simultaneously. I shivered both with fear and with anticipation. I couldn't help but feel buoyed up by the personal attention of so many Masters. Yet my analytical talents continued their ever-searching classification of fact, and I noted, for the first time, their similarity of appearance. Each Master was a small ball-like object with trailing feeding orifices, slender, tapered simple of construction. The light-sensitive tissue forming a sniall circle around the crest of their orblike body faded through pink, red, jeen and blue, reflecting, I believ, the state of the 'emotions." Eiach had the same color of neutral gray, laced delicately with a twin diamo-shaped pattern where was found the primary sensing organ for their scanning functions. I counted the personal retinues and found each Master with Carrier, Personal Attendant and six or seven other specialities. Nearly # lifeforms of one type or another trailed behind or held the Masters or fed them. Certainly this was an impressive example of cooperation of life foimsi This in itself was justification for dominance of the Masters! One Master spoke: "You have been bred for your job. Therefore, what you do is pleasure. But we Masters have waited for many generations for the promise of solution to our breeding and consequent space dominance problem. We have come to commend you for your efforts on our behalf." I knew that once again the Masters were jumping to the wrong conclusion. I broke in hastily. 'T have not solved Vanatta's problems, Master." The speaking Master's eyb band turned bright pink as he replied equally hastily, "But you have bred Bras outside of this system, haven't you?" "Yes," I replied. "But all I've shown is that the life of higher forms depends in some manner on its own lower forms. And that these forms are not equivalent to others found elsewhere." I tried a new approach. "Masters," I said, "I cannot explain what I must. But before I can accomplish my basic purpose in life, I must finish my training here on Vanatta. I am only now beginning to mature in this respect." Reluctantly, it seemed, the Masters acceded to my request to postpone work on their problem. Once again Grammer and I were left to our own devices. Life continued, and I made slow but steady progress. Grammer enjoyed music, books and reading his professional Grammer literature. I leed, slowly, to enjoy a slightly alcoholic dri each night with Grammer. We would sit beside the music computer, drink in hand, and listen with pleasure to the various permutations and combinations formed. At least Grammer enjoyed the sounds. I enjoyed sitting next to Grammer and the feel of companionship which was denied so many of my race. I Imew I wasn't disloyal to the Masters since I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do. Anyway, it would have been impossible to be disloyal! DC T he second breakthrough occurred when I compared the nucleus of any of Vanatta's life at each level against that of Earth cells. Of course this kind of comparison had been made before, but the conclusions reached were not correct. I noticed that all of Vanatta life forms, except the lowest "soupy" level twenty, contained more than one set of genes. The "breeding in three" phenomenon turned out to be directly related to the fact that exactly three different sets of genes were contained in each cell. This puzzled me for some time, until I remembered that back in the twentieth century, two British scientists. Dr. Henry Harris and Dr. John F. Watkins, had demonstrated that cells from different animals, including man, can be fused and that the new hybrid cells are able to live and multiply. IF At that time, on my native Earth, living comibinations of hybrid cells were formed from specks as diverse as hens and rabbits, and men and mice. I remembered this information well not only because it marked a significant milestone in genetic research, but because I would normally be exposed to all available information, whether important or trivial, in the course of my training. I could even remember that Dr. Harris reported his work in a publication known as Discovery in April, #. I was never taught what a "magazine" was, however. A close study of the "soupy" level twenty life revealed the interesting information that there were perhaps complete genes scattered throughout which contains the coded heritable information which is passed on from which is the "messenger" carrying these codes, each contributed their own unique effect upon the cell body. A given cell foimd in this "soupy" mixture would often contain as many as ten different gene structures. Since each structure could "tell" the cell body what to do without "interference" from other unlike structures, life necessarily retained its primitive flavor. Under such unintegrated conditions, life could not develop beyond this stage! Since there are no incompatible mechanisms, like those which result in the destruction of tissue or organ grafts exchanged between different individuals, the composite cells carry out life functions in an apparently integrated manner. The instructions which the genes of one "species" in the hybrid cell transmit are understood and acted upon by the cytoplasm of other "species." The vehicle for this activity on Vanatta was twofold: A peculiar form of virus which appeared to be pervasive, endlessly, throuout the texture of Vanatta's atmospheric blanket was weakened or killed by the strong ultraviolet radiation extant throughout Vanatta daylight hours. The dead or weakened viral material generally found itself mixed or diffused throughout the ecological system -- particularly whenever condensation of Vanatta's gaseous blanket occurred. The viral material, although dead, in turn performed in almost exactly the same manner as in Dr. Harris's original work. He exposed dead virus to cells of different species. The cells clumped together. The membranes dissolved at the points of contact and their cytoplasms merged. When the nuclei of different cells merged, the new cell contained several nuclei of different species which was called a heterokaryon. The cell remained alive and continued to function, times the nuclei fused to form a larger nucleus, and sometimes they divided to form several daughter cells. Here on Vanatta, primitive cells evolving from their own chance encounters, when in contact with this peculiar virus, dissolved at their points of contact, and the result was a primitive hybrid life form. The problem of "threes" was evidently solved. Yet the mystery of the great jump from level twenty to level six remained. D uring the next year I greatly increased my challenges of the pimciples which maike up "genetic science." At the same time, I greatly increased my disdain for the absoluteness of any theory. In the meantime I learned several new things from Grammer. It seems that Grammer had once talked with a female of our species. I had not really thout about this aect of life before. It was true that our life form required two for reprodnotioh. But the Masters had long ago instituted a bank of ova and plasma from which they supplied their technicians and which sufficed for their needs. Since growth of the fertilized ovum was carefully controlled by the technicians until "birth," no need for such ancient concepts as "mother," "father" and so forth existed. I was such a baby. And from birth on, I was subject to either nurses who were trained to provide for only the ordinary processes necessary to biological growth; or I was subject to the Teachers. The concept of "female" had not ever entered my environment or my thoughts until placed there by Grammer. The closer I approached to fifteen years of age the more interest I seemed to feel in the concept. It was clear that Grammer had long had such an interest. I saw him look with feeling of melancholy whenever he discussed the experience of communicating with and for a female. When Grammer was taking his final educationtrip throughout Master's ace he was ordered to accompany a group of Protectors. They were on their way to a planet which was located deep within the space controlled by the Masters but which had not been communicated with for several generations. As a matter of fact, the existence of the planet had been lost for all this time. Normally the Master who controls each planet is responsible for whatever governmental activities are required between systems. In this instance, the Master had neglected to communicate for some time. Meanwhile, someone whose normal day-to-day work was coordinating activities between thousands of planets had overlooked this one. Ent, by name, was Earthlike in flora and fauna. It had been colonized by Masters with human metal miners to serve as the raw material source for ccper. A Protector ship, tretuiming from duties having to do with expanding the boundaries of Master's space, accidentally rediscovered the planet. According to the Antarean space catalogue, Ent was a rediscovery. The first ship to land on Ent was attacked without warning by level one humans. Except for the Protector's nucleonic shield, all would have been pulverized when the first bomb exploded. Subsequent police action by the Protectors soon decimated most of the population, leaving only a small, hard-core group hiding in bombproof shelters under the main cities. Eventually the Protectors succedre ed in introducing a non-lethal gas into these caverns, thus capturing all of the remaining humans intact. These consisted predominantly of unscreened women and children. The children, of course, were put to death instantly, since the Masters did not need any more raw stock of this type. The women were saved for questioning. Grammer was given the job of questioning the women and of translating for the Protectors. The story which he learned was this: Generations ago, a Master had entered a deep copper mine which also contained strata of radioactivity. Although much of the minin g work was automate, this Master had the unusual desire to experience life under tons of earth crust. He, his Carrier and his Personal Attendant followed the automated tracks without being aware of the radiation hazard. The Master had his "picnic" below surface, returned to his regxilar home cubicle and lived life normal to all outward appearances. As the years went by, however, the scanning mechanism of the Master deteriorated swiftly. When the Master thought he was "reading" one thing, the facts were that he was reading another. Under this unfamiliar condition of faulty screening, a group of human deviants, antipathic to the order of Masters, was accidentally born and survived. These, in turn, took advantage of the Master's condition and rapidly turned all technology toward their own ends. Eventually the Master was killed and the planetwide government taken over by the deviants. Only , by equally unlikdy accident -- the loss of space coordinates -- the existence of Ent forgotten by the rest of civilization. Grammer retold this story to me many times. Each time he would finish with a descriptioh of a "cute little blue-eyed brownhead" who seemed to affect him in some very unusual way. He didn't actually cry when he thought of her, but he came close to it. I still didn't understand why he felt this way about such purely hereditary traits as "blue eyes," "brown hair," "red lips," "nice figure," and so on; but I did understand his feelings over loss of companionship! After many months of interrogations, Grammer was present when all remaining human life on Ent was destroyed. I believe that his enigmatic disposition must stem from that day! X seemed, I fed varying axioms about life to my computer. These axioms opposed, in either a major or minor way, the fundamentals about life which I had learned as a student in the training cubicle. This day, nearly five years from my initial arrival on Vanatta, I challenged the derivable consequences of the first goal of life -- to survive! Life usually can be thought of as requiring an accretion of life to life. That is" life begets life, and if the quantity of life it begets is not greater, by some small fraction at least, life does not survive in that form. I challenged this assumption in a very slight way. When life increases, space is consumed. But this attribute is considered a secondary manifestation of the fact that life begets life -- and increases in number. The fact that a # rate of compounded increase in numbers of life units results in, say, # compounded increase in space utilization is definitely not considered a basic postulate upon which to build a science called genetics. That is, one doesn't postulate the major goal of life as to "consume" space! Yet the consequences of "to survive," when taken in context of the Vanatta problem, led directly to consideration of this new axiom. In turn, consequences of the acceptance of this as a fundamental axiom led directly to my final solution of the Vanatta problem. Many years ago, according to the Histories, a human cargo called the Pythagoreans tried to reduce the whole universe to number and geometry. One of the problems which they developed was to imagine a plane figure which could be used repetitively in the plane to fill all of the plane and leave no points unfilled and without overlap. One such figure turned out to be an equilateral triangle. Another problem was to find a three-dimensional figure which could be used repetitively to fill all of space. One such figure is the tetrahedron; another is the cube. Only five regular solid figures have this property. In the unrecorded past of Vanatta, chance combinations of chromosomal materials finally 'provided a three-way structure which was truly integrated at more than the primitive level necessary to sustain life for an individual cell. Even my advanced science of genetics, aid by my computer, would be hard pressed to predict the many potential life forms which each nuclei, of the resulting hybrid cells, might have propagated if directed by the course of normal evolution. Chance combinations had produced a particular family of gene structures which not only sustained level six life, but whose configuration provided an internal protective sheath which prevented additional nuclei from entering their successful form of hybridization. The sheath followed an elementary rule of the cell to protect itself under siege of the viral material so peculiar to Vanatta. The consequences of this protection was that three nuclei were free to pursue their own joint evolutionary path throughout the ages. This combination, and only this combination, could have been responsible for higher levels consisting of thirtythree "varieties." Naturally, too, "breeding" was required in "three," for, unless all three components were present to share chromosomal materials, no life was possible except in rudimentary form. Vanatta life was truly hybridized yet could only breed true as a hybrid! Orammer and I had solved the problem of Vanatta. I was fifteen IF rears of age. I was now much more confident of my problem-solving abilityl XI I believe that any of the servants of the Masters are raised in a sheltered environment. Mine was particularly so. But even if this were not true, there would be no need for guards or special personnel trained to protect other beings. Except for the Protectors, of course. Crime was unknown, consequently prisons unneeded. Each being had his place in the well organized structure of the Master Race, and if the being did not fulfill his allotted function a new personality was reared as a replacement. This, naturally, was one of the great benefits which the Master Race had given to other beings including humanity -- peace and orderl Grammer and I finished packing our vital records and other needs in preparation for departure to the planet of the Masters. Simultaneously, it seemed, we realized that never before had we heard discussed, or mentioned ourselves, the location of the planet of Masters. In the normal course of this kind of travel preparation we would have relayed our request to the proper travel specialist, who in turn would prepare our schedule in some detail. This time, oddly, none of the travel sjpecialists could give us any idea where the Master home star was. Nor could they prepare a schedule. Grammer carried on the bulk of communication as was his duty. But even he began to despair when by evening we were still no closerto our objective. Although more time might be involved in locating a Master, gaining his attention and presenting our little problem, it began to appear that this was the only possible way. With no thought to the unusualness of receiving an unexpected visitor, Grammer answered our door summons, deep in thought. Both of us were shocked by the rapidity with which several dozen Protectors surrounded us. With obvious professional detachment they forced us into our environmental suit without allowing us the courtesy of an explanation. Our final destination turned out to be an antiseptically clean cell -- one for each of usi Although we were fed, watered and ibedded prqperly each day, Grammer could raise no single word from any guard. I, of course, could not have formulated anything understandable to such people. I learned what it meant to be lonesome -- to miss associations with Grammer. I was exceedingly pained to ibe denied the privilege of serving the Masters. I lost track of time. I became despondent.' I lost weight and my appetite. Soon my waking periods blended into each other and into my sleeping periods. I vegetated! A rousal and consciousness returned to me almost immediately upon sensing the Master's usual scanning process. Strangely enough, my analytical functions fixed upon the Master's Carrier  -- measuring the height from the floor to the position in which the Master was carried -- and then upon the usual retinue which trailed behind the Master. The particular Master who entered my cell looked exactly like all of the other Masters which I had seen. Then the Master spoke. "I have already talked with the Grammer. I understand that you have completed your studies on Vanatta and are now ready to help us with our problem." "Yes," I said with great surprise. "We Masters are so important to the continuity of an orderly rule in all the universe, and we are so few, that we feel it vitally necessary to protect the sole source of our breeding. We did not distrust you, since it is obvious from our scanning that you and Grammer are loyal and always shall be. But we long ago learned from the Protectors several ways by which our beneficial rule can be placed in jeopardy." I realized that I was getting an explanation for our treatment. Needless to say, I listened very carefully, hoping to hear a rational explanation. "On rare occasions. Masters become sick through accident or radiation in which case our scanning sense becomes unreliable. The product of such an unfortunate experience might be the birth and growth of life inimical to our kind. If any such knew the source of our birth, they might easily destroy us. Also, as you know, there are areas of the universe at the boundaries of the Master rule where races live which have not had the benefit of our kind. Should these races learn of our source by those such as yourself, who are of good intention, they too might destroy our race." This explanation seemed to explain all except the reason for placing us incommunicado. I waited to hear the rest. "A visit to our home planet is a one-way trip," the Master stated. "Also there are certain operations which must be performed on your brain." When I heard the Master speak of this, my first impulse was fear -- fear that any operation to my brain might endanger the very faculties which the Master needed to solve his problem. I was soon relieved, however. "We insert a small cartridge of explosive at the base of your occipital bone. If, by some unusual chance, you are fifty miles or further away from the surface of our planet, certain secret carrier waves will automatically explode the cartridge." Upon signal from the Master, the Personal Attendant brought a rosecolored, scented water near to one of his orifices. A small amount of the water was taken in and discharged. Only a slight change in color to the eye band could be observed during this activity. "Oh, yes!" the Master continued. "We congratulate you on your successful solution to Vanatta's problem. We are eagerly awaiting similar solutions on our planet." I never did receive a completely rational reason for our treatment. Lacking evidence to the contrary, I IF had to add one more to the list of characteristics of the Master Race. They were frightened, paranoiac foims of life! awakening from the operating table my compulsion to analyze awoke first. But, strangely, I did not think of my duty to the Masters. I first thought, "How pretty are those gray eyes!" The surgeon who installed the capsule in my brain had pure black hair, gray eyes and a beautiful curving smile. Her laugh made me laugh, and her frowns made me frown. I tingled whenever she touched me while performing her chores. I began to understand about Grammer's feeling toward such "purely hereditary traits" as eyes, lips and cheeks! She was a Surgeon and knew some genetics. Within limits, we could communicate. With great surprise I (found other ways of communicating then through manmade symbols. She responded to my feelings. And, blessed with both Grammer and Surg (as I called her), I returned to my alloted work with renewed energy. My initial view of Ed, the Master's planet, was by standard track car. At Grammer's suggestion, I requested, and got, Surg assigned as a member of my research team. Surg, Grammer and I arranged for a complete planetary review of the surface of Ed. Always a large assortment of extra-Ed life waited upon us. Everywhere there were life forms performing personal, technical or administrative duties for the Masters. A weird sort of femlike form planed our Ed trip. It took the combined services of two other communicator specialists to relay between the language of Earth and the language of the "fern." I couldn't help but wonder, why, in this instance, a Master couldn't perform this chore for which they were so well suited? Ed turned out to be nothing but cubicle after cubicle from pole to pole. I had never given it thought before, but it was easy to surmise where the basic pattern of cubicles and track cars had originated. They had been exported from Ed to all other Master-controlled planets. Yet I would still bet that they were not original with the Masters. There was no obvious advantage to be gained from any particular location. So we merely selected at random and began building the organization of supplies and helpers that we would need. Several weeks after our arrival Protectors met us with the request to accompany them. Again no questions were answered, and we were summoned into the Directing Hall of Masters. The Hall of Masters was not really a hall but rather another standardsized cubicle, arranged internally in such manner that nearly any sort of life form could move in or out while waiting on the pleasure of the Master. Flexibility seemed to be the keynote. Where before I had seen os many as ten Masters with perhaps ten or fifteen personal attendants each, here I saw each Master with as many as fifty attendants. Since eight governing Masters comprised the ruling body, there were perhaps # personal attendants weaving in and, out or standing about waiting for the significant wave of an orifice or screened message. T he hall became silent as the Protectors guided Grammer, Surg and myself in. The leading spokesman for the Masters was one of the most wrinkled balls of gray flesh I had yet seen. I supposed that this meant that he was a very old specimen of his life form. I noted the slow motion of his dangling orifices as he motioned for his Carrier to lower him closer to my speaking level. Also, his eye band was predominantly ridged instead of smooth as found in the younger Masters, Once again I relaxed with pleasure under the careful scanning of this oldster. He spoke. "Congratulations on your success on Vanatta. We expect equally successful research from you here on Ed. We are the governing body of all life, everywhere! Our problem has concerned us for many ages, and we look forward to its solution from you. Can you give us an expected date of solution?" It was not only The suddenness of his question which caused me to appear in shock. Here before me were the true beneficial rulers of all "civilized" space. Here was the ruling body which made literally thousands of races live in peace and harmony. By birth and training -- instinctively -- I knew I was in the presence of the greatest life form next to God! But, more than that, I was being asked to present "near-God" with a "date of solution" to His problem! I was tongue-tied. Without the special scanning ability of the aged Master, I never would have recovered sensibly from the meeting. He recognized and immediately responded to my communications difficulty. "You are a specially prepared servant of the Masters," he said. "Your job will be done expeditiously, I am sure. I am decreeing that, except for the direct will of a Master, your every wish shall have first priority. As you already know, it is impossible to continue our planned control of space when the volume of space increases as the cube of the, radius of our expansion, yet Master breeding increases only as the square of the surface of our breeding area -- now a constant. When you have solved our problem for us, we will then be able to continue our beneficial expansion into all of space." He paused long enough to dip the tips of each of his eight orifices into eight different colored bowls of scented water. I was fascinated to watch eight different attendants scurry in and out with the bowls. The Master continued. "Even though you are a perfectly loyal researcher, we feel it necessary to charge you with an official statement as to your duties on our behalf. In short, you are hereby instructed -- indeed commanded -- to improve our racer I was made completely speechless by such an overriding command, especially when it was reinforced by IP the Master's ipeculiar scannmg talent. I nearly begged to some mown higher being that I ould not fail this enlarged and personally assigned, nearly sacred objective! A pplication of modem technology to optimization of the production of Masters here on Ed was amazingly efficient. With the exception of a small percentage of cubicles, all other Ed cubicles consisted of nearly automated breeding vats for the Masters. Their breeding limitation was approximately that of the area of the surface of their planet -- a square factor -- since nearly all of the planet was covered by breeding vats. 'Each breeding cubicle consisted essentially of a large "swimimiig pool" about # feet deep. In tne pool was a balanced biotic community. All nssary ingredients for supporting Ed's equivalent of diatoms, algae, amoeba, protozoa and other essentia life forms were present up to, and including, the worm fish. Acutally, each form of life was there to contribute in its own way a necess ecological balance, thus providing an environment proper for the growth of the wormfish. The wormfish was the necessary host for the Master! Each fertile cell of the Master contained a single flagellum which lay in a fold of the outer membrane throuout its length. It formed an undulating membrane which was effective in propelling the tiny cell through blood or other body were introduced to the closed ecology supporting the worm fish, and inevitable encounters by the with the fish resulted in the supplying of a proper host for the Master cdls. Each fertile cell found its way to the internal organs of the womifish. Perhaps two hundred cells could be nourished in all. The blood of the fish acted as both source of food and convenient sewage disposal system. Once in the presence of a suitable spot, the flagellum changed to a rasp hook which, once driven into several of the wormfish cells, could not be easily withdrawn. Hangmg by this hook, each fertile Master cell 'began its growth and transformation. First a tight membrane was constructed around itself, impervious to all except food of the proper chemical and physical properties. Second, within this membrane, the cell nucleus began to grow in size. A light fiber strand of nerve material extended from each chromosomal protruberance to form eight rudimentary pro-tentacles. Other than modification of other chromosomal materials to form brain tissue and a circular, light-sensitive band, the only other two major 'growths were the development of extremely primitive muscular tissue and a very primitive pro-stomach. With fourteen days of growth, the first fertile cell reaches a kind of maturity. The membrane cracks open, and the living but miniature Master swims out. Through the use of its unique scanning sense it immediately locates and kills every Other Master cell hanging from the wormfish. The one remaming miniature Master then swims to the major control locations of the wormfish's brain. Here the Master establishes both home and control over the activities of the fish, pending its further growth. WTien a point is finally reached where the "tumor" aggravates the host beyond its normal biological limits, the Master, with profoimd foresight, arranges to be evacuated just prior to the death of the host. In the new environment consisting chiefly of water and dissolved minerals, the Master finds no competition for survival. He absorbs his nourishment in the same manner as before, using water instead of blood, and dissolved minerals instead of more complex food structures which were found in the blood. No real intelligence is discerned in the little Master until it reaches sufficient size to store energy molecules. At this time it instinctively leaves its watery environment where the servants of the Masters begin its formal training -- a training program dedicated solely to how to be master of the universe! I f my assignment were still that of increasing the rate of breeding rather than that of "improving the Master race," I am sure the technical difficulties would have been elementary. As a matter of fact I speculated as to why others had not attempted to transplant the requisite bio-system on other planets in other solar systems. Was it their characteristic paranoia which prevented them from seeking obvious solutions? Was it their complete lack of trust in others, coupled with their extremely tight security precautions? Or was it simply their characteristic self-inflated ego which prevented them from viewing themselves from any other viewpoint than "special" or "difficult?" Whatever the reason, I was thankful that my Masters had determined to expand my role to "improve" their race; for, with this more difficult assignment, I was sure that Grammer, Surg and myself would have far more occasion to stay together! What constitutes "improvement" of a race? Certainly, from the human point of view, the need for companionship, the eternal struggle to solve problems and the extreme adaptability of our genetic plasma to historical change are all plusses. But, what about the tremendous computing ability of the Antareans which contributes to their dominance in space? Or their stress-free exo-skeleton, so cleverly designed to compensate for rapid and varied changes in gravity? What about the long-lived, nearly classic example of the adaptability of Earth insects? Or the tremendous weapons-forming and fighting ability of the Protectors? Which of the nearly endless characteristics possible to life should be acquired by our Masters? Which, too, of the characteristics now dominant in the Masters should be retained and which masked? I redoubled our efforts. Even though the highest technical skill IP was ours for the asking, the greatest of computer technology was ours (for projecting possible characteristics from change of nucleus to final adult life form), the highest of loyalty was ours to our duty, I was soon convinced that a Genetic genius is not so very bright! It is one thing to merely solve a technical problem but another thing entirely to define "best" characteristics for the life of a whole race. Especially difficult was such choice because I knew the Masters were virtually perfect in themselves. It was at this point in my work that both Surg and Grammer became deathly sick. For the first time in my young life I realized what it was to be alone. At first, however, I wasn't too disturbed. When all efforts to find a human Medic on Ed proved fruitless, I tried other forms of life which might be competent in this field. When this effort, too, failed, I appealed to the Masters. Every possible door was opened on my behalf. A Medic was found in another solar system and brought to Ed within forty-eight hours. My relief proved premature, however! O n the third day of the Medic's arrival, he approached me with an alien Grammer. "I am terribly sorry," was his message, "but there is no knowledge which I have which can effect a cure. As a matter of fact, I am not the least bit familiar with their form of sickness nor its cure. I have checked with my colleagues on Earth, and they concur. Other than intravenous feeding, there is nothing more I can do." My world spun! Never since the days of my imprisonment on Vanatta for desiring information on the home world of the Masters had I ever experienced such despondency. I became alternately despondent and exuberant. I was not rational. Yet the struggle to survive which must lie dormant in all human seed awoke to push me to greater and greater heights of rationalization. I rationalized that since I was only competent in the field of genetics, I would help in the only way I knew how, by applying my knowledge to their sickness. This was much like saying that since I was an expert bricklayer, I would lay bricks, expertly, until their sickness was cured! I selected samples of both Surg's and Crammer's cells. Each was in a deep coma. I studied the chromosomal materials. The first look made me doubt my senses completely. "Perhaps," I thought, "it is only a clumsy laboratory error." Their genes were nearly identical. Furthermore, there were twice too many. I selected sample after sample under the utmost control techniques; yet still the analysis was the same. About the time that I began to doubt the validity of the whole of biologic genetics, I too passed into unconsciousness ! Three weeks later I was told that I had fallen over the sick bodies of Surg and Grammer, that Surg and Grammer had awakened nearly one week earlier than I, and that nothing the Medic had done for any of us was of any real help. Again an waking my first thought was on the beauty of the female of IF my species. Surg was feeding me intravenously. Her first words surprised me. She said: "Good morning, my love! Can you discuss the nature of true hypothalamic replacement or the parsing of a verb?" My answer surprised me even more. I said, "Why, yes, I can!" Why was I not tongue-tied? Why was I not restricted to thoughts of my specialty? For the first time in my life I was able to contemplate, with ease and imderstanding, subject matter not necessarily related to my own. It seemed natural to think in the areas of medicine or communications. Prior to my sickness I could discuss subjects only if they became my own -- through disguise, deception or actuality. Needless to say I was appalled at the subjective changes in me. I was even more appalled when I discovered similar changes in Grammer and Surg. We were like three school children who have just learned that holidays are forthcoming. Or, better yet, we were like three deaf#lindnmutes who have suddenly been given the gift of hearing, sight and speech. Three worlds to explore, each of comfortable fit like homeworld -- yet each was new, novel and infinite in nature! For each of us could understand and communicate within the framework of one another's competence. We foresaw the day in the future when each of us would become Grammer, Surgeon and Genetic combined. For now, we were highly specialized and highly trained humans with large appetites and newly bom capacities for learning in these allied fields of knowledge. Somehow, somewhere, we had been improved as individuals. Here lay the germ of a clue which was sorely needed to perform our duties toward our Master. Once again we set to work. This time I was hot too surprised to find that the chromosomal material from cells of each of us were very similar and represented three times as many as normal. Here was an obvious source of our change. Through screening by Masters each of us was the product of extremely fine selection for attributes desired by the Masters. The very process of this fine screening caused each of us to be 'se idiots," since genetic characteristics necessary for crosscommunication amongst ourselves were lost Yet, obviously, any race like the human would consider such a characteristic as the ability to understand one another as basic. Now, through some yet to be deciphered fluke related to our joint illness, we had (become hybridized so that gene material of each was found in the cfeUs of each. Our cytoplasmic tissue was capable of responding to the joint, yet integrated, directions from each new nucleus. We had become, through accident, a hybridized polyploid! Sometimes gametes possess a diploid instead of the usual haploid number in some cases even three, four or five extra sets. Organisms possessing more than the diploid number are called polyploids. They may be larger and more vigorous tiban the usual diploid, hence polyploids are often deliberately generated -- especially in the plant world. Polyploid flowers are usually larger than normal ones. Very little was known about polyploidy in animals, probably because it occurred so infrequently. We were a living example of the possibility of induced heterokaiyonization within the same species! The three of us, now working together as a nearly perfect functioning research team, soon traced the source of our strange infection to viral matter which had followed us from Vanatta. The very same viral material which caused the dissolving membrane of Vanatta cells, thus opening a cellular door for other nuclei and consequent heterokaryonization, had followed us to Ed. Here, we three had unconsciously exposed ourselves to it, each providing the cellular material necessary for its first performance on Ed. Once the agent of our illness was identified, we easily cultured the virus in a protect environment while taking the precaution to sterilize everything elsa Once again we set to work on the problem posed us by the head of the Master Race -- to improve the Masters! I soon realized that my former "wise idiot" capability, no matter how technologically perfect, nor how logically accurate, was the wrong, avenue of approach for "improving" the Master Race. Only on a philosophical plane would their ends be met. Certainly life which was so successful that it was the "master" of aH within its bio)here was already "improved." For if the basic "to survive" were the (Mily criterion for life, the Master Race had met this god on its first trial. Its second trial of life had yet to be offered! However, it took no genetic genius to realize that capacity to adapt was almost nil in the Master Race. Further improvement was needed in that direction. Secondly, Masters needed hundreds of thousands of supporting life forms merely to allow them to be comfortable. Addiwere destroyed just to insure their dominance. Was this economical for either Masters or nature? Perhaps this could be a second direction for improvement. Finally, in spite of the tremendous gift which nature had bestowed to the Masters -- the gift to know one's "neighbor" as well as oneself -- the Master remained an unsocial form of life. Whatever improvements were made must take this into account. Both the means and the coded improvement goals were scientifically prepared for completion of our assignment. I prepared large quantities of Vanatta's special hybridizing virus while Surg and Grammer sought for, and received, some rare human protoplasm which had been laboratory-grown prior to Earth's first visit by the Master Race. No screening had pre-selected genetic materials from this tissue culture. IF Probably it was the only human protoplasm in existence for which this could be sauL Now the wotk became one of straight genetic engineering. Jmt prior to the introduction of fertile Master cells to their breeding tanks, I mixed the Vanatta viral material as wdl as growths of human protopilasm. As was to be expected, each fertile cell wall dissolved at its point of contact with the attenuated viral material, and, as a consequence, each human cell introduced its nucleus in the fertile cell. I didn't expect a human cell to exist under the pending environment, therefore those cells which received the nucleus of the Master cell were unimportant. The newly hybridized cells were then dumped into each breeding vat where, hopefully, a new kind of behavior would ensue. Fortunately most of the equipment was automated planetwide, and we could accomplish the whole job in a reasonably short time. Our second phase began with the identification and treatment of all nutrients used by the Masters. Since this consisted of only eight colors of water saturated with different mixtures of anions and cations required for sustaining Master metabolism, we found no obstacle in adding our hybridizing mixture. Our third phase consisted of preparing and shipping small packages of this same mixture along with proper instructions for its introduction to Master nutrients everywhere. The Protectors and their ships began a continuous work shift so that each Master got his share. Our work was done. There remained only the clerical task of following up on the predicted progress of e great racial improvement program.  Perhaps our lifetime would not see its end. But I was sure that someone among my distant descendants would know its end -- and remember its beginning. For I was determined to leave sufficient notes so that posterity would know what to look for as well as to explain why so many different life forms are scattered throughout such a large volume of space. XV I am sure that the complete obedience of all live forms within the biosphere of the Masters, as well as the tremendous efficiency with which each form served the Master, combined to enable us to rapidly service everyone of the Master Race. I wasn't too sure of the end results in the case of adult hybridizing of human characteristics with Master characteristics. Here early training as well as pre-conditioning of intellect served to mask biological predictions. We first observed the actual results on Ed; A coma occurred for each Master just as with Grammer, Surg and myself. I had selected human characteristics long known to be dominant in hiding psi phenomena. These organelles served effectively to hide the ability of each Master to screen. I reasoned that the very characteristic which most contributed to the successful domination of otlier life forms was also the same chamacteristic which prevented Masters from improving their race. For, without ability to screen, need arose to seek out other solutions to survival problems. With need for other solutions to survival came opportunity for adaptation of successful mutations. With adaptation of successful mutations came "improvement." And I was sure that "improvement" could only be measured in terms of successful capacity to adapt to current needs. This, then, in simple form was my chief reason for hybredizing undifferentiated, unscreened, human protoplasm with Master protoplasm. In the case of the adult Master, each responded in a similar manner once their screening mechanism was gone and consciousness returned. Each would roll into a small ball and shiver endlessly. Often its tentacles would combine together and form a hook which was repeatedly stabbed into the air. It appeared to be a complete regression back to its parasitic existence within the wormfish. I wasn't too concerned with this part of the experiment, however. No Master would die and all would continue to be taken care of as long as they lived. Surely disorganization would take place in the Master's biosphere due to lack of a commanding head, but mostly the Masters would be cared for after changes as well as they were before the change. There was always the chance that the Master would overcome his early conditioning and training and find some accommodation with his human counterpart -- thus giving each Master the pleasure of empathy for one's own Mnd as well as all of life. Since our orders were to be obeyed by all Ed's life, and since Ed was the headquarters for Master civilization, we were, to all intents and purposes, the sole rulers of a galaxy which would soon be in serious trouble for lack of its main force of cohesion. This lack of "integrated kingdom" seemed like a hi price to pay for improvement of the Master. In the long run -- many generations hence -- we would know. The first major departure from normal behavior by the tiny Master cell, clinging within the blood system of the wormfish, was soon obMaster cells not yet hatched from the protective cocoon, it directed itself immediately to tihe nerve control structure of the fisih. Each Master unit, in turn, behaved the same. Such confused multiple control of operations within the wormfish caused the Master to leave the fish at an earlier age. All scanning abilities were gone. But the proportion of surviving Master cells was now many where there had been but one. So many living in the same closed bio-system caused greater conflict for nourishment. This greater conflict, actually the first conflict to which the Master Race had ever been exposed, resulted in the first opportunity-step on the evolutionary ladder. Whether its problems would be solved by organized family units IF versus the environment, by strongs Duan nile, by development of keener brains -- or whether the problems would be 'solved" by succumbing to them -- would be evident only in some far distant future. This, I was sure, was the only reasonable answer to my Masters command to improve their race! I had succeeded in giving them a problem to solve at the microscopic level of existence. I had also succeeded in temporizing their feelings toward other life by introducing genes of the one race having the greatest affinity for other life -- my human race! A s rulers behind the rulers, Grammer, Surg and I were able to complete the cleanup work without happenstance. Although all forms of life were quite concerned about the Master "sickness," as it became misnamed, none would voluntarily interfere with their Master's prior command which placed our desires ahead of all else unless directly countermanded by a Master. Protectors continued to protect the "sick" Masters. Grammers continued to aid in interpreting meanings. Medics and researchers continued their functions. Bred and trained for duties under complete loyalty to the will of the Master, none were other than docile imder the emerging emergency. We knew, though, that it would not be long before the lack of specific guidance from the Master Race would soon lead to complete chaos. It was not our Intent to wait out this chaos on the planet Ed. My Job was done. I could no longer serve my Masters until and if, in the far distant, unpredictable future, the Master should overcome his evolutionary obstacles. As I well knew, the likelihood of this happening was very remote. For every successful race which reaches the so which succumb along the way. Yet, in the final analysis, there could be no other way! Regardless of the postulates which are known to be true for biomolecular engineering, the universe of reality proves always and ever larger. No ultimate intelligence would ever reach such wisdom or size that it could create my mental construct and symboUsm -- the tools of science -- complete and accurate pictures of any part of reality. This right belongs to a Supreme Being only! So I did, in my compassion and love for the Master Race, only what could be done to satisfy their command. I started them again on the long evolutionary road of trial and error -- but with a difference. This time they had a "human" helper along the way. One who had already been over the path and found it successfully. Who knows? Perhaps their chances are far better than my feeble science can predict! With these thoughts in mind, I prepared for our departure. We removed the buried explosives from our bodies and turned off the signal which could trigger the device at fifty miles up. No longer bound by need to twist and torture our thoughts through other persons for minor gains in communications, we sougiht out and selected a planet which was arthlike in many ways. It was already seeded with a small human colony at technological level one. We planned to ride out the forthcoming chaos there. Privately Surg and I were hopeful that Grammer could and would find another human female as a "soulmaite." We all three determined to continue our research activities as a team. With all of the future ahead of us, and nothing left to serve hut our own whims -- with only a twinge of regret for our Masters -- how truly glorious that future appeared! Should we tackle the problems of longevity, thus making the future ours too? Or perhaps the problems of psi functions, removing the masking elements from the genetic structures of all intelligent species, thus opening a door to multispecies unity? With our increased capacity for successful ibehavior in allied fields as well as our new knowledge of heterokaryonization we felt equal to the tasks. Surg and I, however, had our own private set of goals. And within it, I hoped our first child would have Surges eyes and hair color -- purely hereditary as they may be! The Biggest and Best Sllkie Story Yet! by A. E. Van Vogt by Hal Clement by James Blish These and many more in the October issue of If -- reserve your copy nowl IF IF  Novelette Venus Smiles The statue sang. What's worse, it wouldn't stop! I ow notes on a high aCtemoon. As we drove aiway after the unveiling my secretary said: "Mr. Hamilton, I suppose you realize what a fool you've made of yourself?" "Don't sound so piim," I told her. "How was I to know Lorraine Drexel would produce something Vke that?" Tive thousand dollars, she said reflectively. "It's nothing but a piece of old scrap iron. And the noise! Didn't you look at her sketches? What's the Fine Arts Committee for?" My secretaries have always talked to me like this, and just then I could imderstand why. I stopped the car imder the trees at the end of the square and looked back. The chairs had been cleared away and already a small crowd had gathered around the statue, staring up at it curiously. A couple of tourists were banging one of the struts, and the thin metal skeleton shuddered weakly. Despite this, a monotonous and highpitched wailing sounded out from the statue across the pleasant morning air, grating the teeth of passers-by. "Raymond Mayo is having it dismantled this afternoon," I said. "If  it hasn't already been done for us. I wondier where Miss Drexel is?" "Don't worry, you won't see her in Vennilion Sands again. I bet she's halfway to Red Beach by now." I patted Carol on the shoulder. "Relax. You looked beautiful in your new skirt. The Medicis probably felt like this about Michelangelo. Who are we to judge?" "Tom are," she said. "You were on the committee, weren't you?" "Darling," I explained patiently. "Sonic sculpture is the thing. You're trying to fight a battle the public lostthirty years ago." W e drove back to my office in a thin silence. Carol was annoyed because she had been forced to sit beside me on the platform when the audience began to heckle my speech at the unveiling, but even so the morning had been disastrous on every count. What might be perfectly acceptable at Expo # or the Venice Biennale was all too obviously passe at Vermilion Sands. When we had decided to commission a sonic sculpture for the square in the center of Vermilion Sands, Raymond Mayo and I had agreed that we should patronize a local artist. There were dozens of professional sculptors in Vermilion Sands, but only three had deigned to present themselves before the committee. The first two whom we saw were large, bearded men with enormous fists and impossible schemes -- one for a #-foothigh vibrating aluminum pylon, and the other for a vast boonaing family group that involved over fifteen tons of basalt mounted on a megalithic stepyramid. Each had taken an hour to be argued out of the committee room. The third was a woman: Lorraine Drexel. This elegant and autocratic creature in a cartwheel hat, with her eyes like black orchids, was a sometime model and intimate of Giacometti and John Cage. Wearing a blue crepe de Chine dress ornamented with lace serpents and other art nouveau emblems, she sat before us like some fugitive Salome from the world of Aubrey Beardsley. Her immense eyes regarded us with an almost hypnotic calm, as if she had discovered that very moment some unique quality in these two amiable dilettantes of the Fine Arts Committee. She had lived in Vermilion Sands for only three months, arriving via Berlin, Calcutta and the Chicago New Arts Center. Most of her sculpture to date had been scored for various Tantric and Hindu hymns, and I remembered her brief affair with a world-famous pop-singer, later killed in a car crash, who had been an enthusiastic devotee of the sitar. At the time, however, we had given no thought to the whining quarter-tones of this infernal instrument, so grating on the Western ear. She had shown us an album of her sculptures, interesting chromium constructions that compared favorably with the run of illustrations in the latest art magazines; but I was looking only at her huge hieratic eyes. Within half an hour we had drawn up a contract. IF I saiw the statue for the first time that afternoon, thirty seconds before I started my speech to the specially selected assembly of Vermilion Sands notables. Why none of us had bothered to look at it beforehand I fail to understand. The. title printed on the invitation cards -- Sound and Quantum: Generative Synthesis # -- had seemed a little odd, and the general shape of the shrouded statue even more suspicious. I was expecting a stylized human figure, but the structure under the acoustic drapes had the proportions of a mediumsized radar aerial. However, Lorraine Drexel sat beside me on the stand, her bland eyes surveying the crowd below. A dreamlike smile gave her the look of a tamed Mona Lisa. What we saw after Raymond Mayo pulled the tape I tried not to think about. With its pedestal the statue was twelve feet high. Three spindly metal legs, ornamented with spikes and crosspieces, reached up from the plinth to a triangular apex. Clamped onto this was a jagged structure that at first sight seemed to be an old Buick radiator grille. It had been bent into a rough U five feet across, and the two arms jutted out horizontally, a single row of sonic cores, each about a foot long, poking up like the teeth of an enormous comb. Welded on apparently at random all over the statue were twenty or thirty filigree vanes. That was all. The whole structure of scratched chromium had a blighted look, like a derelict TV antenna. Startled a little by the first shrill whoops emitted by the statue, I began my speech and was about halfway through when I noticed that Lorraine Drexel had left her seat beside me. People in the audience were beginning to stand up and cover ttheir ears, shouting to Raymond to replace the acoustic drape. A bat sailed through the air over my head and landed neatly on one of the sonic cores. The statue was now giving out an intermittent high-pitched whine, a sitarlike caterwauling that seemed to pull apart the sutures of my skull. Responding to the boos and protests, it suddenly began to whoop erratically, the hornlike sounds confusing the traffic on the far side of the square. As the audience began to leave their seats en masse, I stuttered inaudibly to the end of my speech, the wiOing of the statue interrupted by shouts and jeers. Then Carol tugged me sharply by the arm, her eyes flashing. Raymond Mayo pointed with a nervous hand. The three of us were now alone on the platfonn, the rows of overturned chairs reaching across the square. Standing twenty yards from the statue, which had now begun to whimper plaintively, was Lorraine Drexel. I expected to see a look of fury and outrage on her face, but instead her unmoving eyes showed the calm and implacable contempt of a grieving widow insulted at her husband's funeral. As we waited awkwardly, watching the wind carry away the last program cards, she turned on a diamond heel and walked across the square. n N o one else wanitied anylMng to do with the stattue, so I was finally presented with il Lorraine Drexel left Vermilion Sands the day it was dismantled. Raymond spoke briefly to iher on the telephone before she went. I presumed she would be rather unpleasant (and didn't bother to Msten in on the extension. 'Well?" I asked. "Does she want it back?" "No." Raymond seemed slightly preoccupied. "She said it belonged to us." "You and me?" "Everybody." Raymond helped himself to the decanter of Scotch on the veranda table. "Then she started laughing." "Good. What at?" "I don't know. She just said that we'd grow to like it." There was nowhere else to put the statue so I planted it out in the garden. Without the stone pedestal it was only six feet high. Shielded by the shrubbery, it bad quieted down and now emitted a pleasant melodic harmony, its soft rondos warbling across the afternoon heat. The sitarlike twangs, which the statue had broadcast in the square like some pathetic love call from Lorraine Drexel to her dead lover, had vanished completely, almost as if the statue had be rescored. I had been so stampeded by the disastrous unveiling that I bad had little chance to see it, and I thought it looked a lot better in the garden than it had done in Vermilion Sands, the chromium struts and abstract shapes standing out against the desert like something in a vodka advertisement. After a few days I could almost ignore it. A week or so later we were out on the terrace after lunch, lounging back in the deck chairs. I was nearly asleep when Carol said: "Mr. Hamilton, I think it's moving." "What's moving?" Carol was sitting up, head cocked to one side. "The statue. It looks different." I focused my eyes on the statue twenty feet away. The radiator grille at the top had canted round slightly, but the three stems still seemed more or less upright. "The rain last night must have softened the ground," I said. I listened to the quiet melodies carried on the warm eddies of air and then lay back drowsily. I heard Carol light a cigarette with four matches and walk across the veranda. When I woke in an hour's time she was sitting straight up in the deck chair, a frown creasing her forehead. "Swallowed a bee?" I asked. "You look worried." Then something caught my eye. I watched the statue for a moment. "You're right. It is moving." Carol nodded. The statue's shape had altered perceptibly. The grille had spread into an open gondola whose sonic cores seemed to feel at the sky, and the three stem-pieces were wider apart. AH the angles seemed different. 'T thought you'd notice it evenIF tually," Carol said as we walked over to it "What's it made of?" "Wrought iron -- I think, Hiere must be a lot of copper or lead in it The heat is making it sag." "Then why is it sagging upward instead of down?" I touched one of the shoulder struts. It was springing elastically as the air moved across the vanes and went on vibrating against my palm. I gripxed it in both hands and tried to keep it rigid. A low but discernible pulse pumped steadily against me. I backed away from it wiping (the flaking chrome off my hands. The Mozartian harmonies had gone, and the statue was now producing a series of low Mahler-like chords. As Carol stood there in her bare feet I remembered that the height specification we had given to Lorraine Drexel had been exactly two meters. But the statue was a good three feet higher than Carol, the gondola at least six or seven across. The spars and struts looked thicker and stronger. "Carol," I said. "Get me a file, would you? There are some in the garage." She came back with two files and a hacksaw. "Are you going to cut it down?" she asked hopefully. "Darling, this is on original Drexel." I took one of the files. "I just want to convince myself that I'm not going insane." I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint. "All right," I said when I tiad finished. "Let's go and have a drink." We sat on the veranda and waited. I fixed my eyes on the statue and could have sworn that it didn't move. But when we went back an hour later the gondola had swung rigjit roimd again, hanging down over us like an immense metal mouth. There was no need to check the notch intervals against the file. They were all at least double the original distance apart. "Mr. Hamilton," Carol said. "Look at this." She pointed to one of the spikes. Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. One or two were already beginning to hollow themselves. Unmistakably they were incipient sonic cores. Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new sftioots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate constniction. A medley of half-familiar sounds, fragments of a dozen overtures and symphonies, murmured all over it. The statue was well over twelve feet high. I fek one of the heavy struts, and the pulse was stronger, beating steadily ithrough the metal, as if it were thrusting itself on to the sound of its own music. Carol was, watching me with a pinched and worried Hook. "Relax," I said. "It's growing." We went back to tlhe veranda and watdhed. By six o'clock that evening it was the size of a small tree. A spirited simultaneous rendering of Brahms's Academic Festival Overture and Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto trumpeted across the garden. Ill #rj-ihe strangest thing about it," ' A Raymond said the next morning, raising his voice above the din, "is that it's still a Drexel." "Still a piece of sculpture, you mean?" "More than that. Take any section of it and you'll find the original motifs being repeated. Each vane, each heMx has all the authentic Drexd mannerisms, almost as if e herself were shaping it Admittedly, this penchant for the late Romantic composers is a little out of keeping with ah that sitar twanging, but that's rather a good thing, if you ask me. You can probably expect to hear some Beethoven any moment now -- the Pastoral Symphony, I would guess." "Not to mention all five piano concertos -- played at once," I said sourly. Raymond's loquacious delight in this musical monster out in the garden annoyed me. I closed the veranda windows, wishing that he himself had installed the statue in the living room of his downtown apartment. "I take it that it won't go on growing forever?" Carol handed Raond another Scotch. "What do you think we ought to do?" Raymond shrugged. "Why worry?" he said airily. "When it starts tearing the house down cut it back. Thank God we had it dismantled. If this had happened in Vermilion Sands... " Carol touched my arm. "Mr. Hamilton, perhaps that's what Lorraine Drexel expected. She wanted it to start spreading all over the town, the music driving everyone crazy -- " "Careful," I warned her. "You're running away with yourself. As Raymond says, we can chop it up any time we want to and melt the whole thing down." "Why don't you, then?" "I want to see how far it'll go," I said. In fact my motives were more mixed. Clearly, before she left, Lorraine Drexel had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork. As Raymond had said, the present babel of symphonic music had no connection with the melancholy cries the statue had first emitted. Had those forlorn chords been intended to be a requiem for her dead lover -- or even, conceivably, the beckoning calls of a stdl unsurrendered heart? Whatever her motives, they had now vanished into this strange travesty lying across my garden. I watched the statue reaching slowly across the lawn. It had collapsed under its own weight and lay on its side in a huge angular spiral, twenty feet long and about fifteen feet high, like the skeleton of a futuristic whale. Fragments of the NutIF cracker Suite and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony sounded from it, overlaid by sudden blaring excerpts from the closing movement of Grieg's Piano Concerto. The selection of these hack classics seemed deli'berately designed to get on my nerves. I had been up with the statue most of the night. After Carol went to bed, I drove my car, with Raymond, onto the strip of lawn next to the house and turned on the headlamps. The statue stood out almost lummousiy in the darkness, booming away to itself, more and more of the sonic cores budding out in the yellow glare of the lights. Gradually it lost its original shape; the toothed grills enveloped itself and then put out new struts and barbs that spiraled upward, each throwing off secondary and tertiary shoots in its turn. Shortly after midnight it began to lean and then suddenly toppled over. By now its movement was cockscrew. The plinth had been carried into the air and hung somewhere in the middle of the tangle, revolving slowly, and the main foci of activity were at either end. The growth rate was accelerating. We watched a new shoot emerge. As one of the struts curved round a small knob poked through the flaking chrome. Within a minute it grew into a spur an inch long, thickened, began to curve and five minutes later had developed into a full-throated sonic core twelve inches long. Raymond pointed to two of my neighbors standing onthe roof of their houses a hundred yards away, alerted by the music carried across to them. "You'll soon have everyone in Vermilion Sands out here. If I were you, I'd throw an acoustic drape over it." "If I could find one of the size of a tennis court. It's time we did something, anyway. See if you can trace Lorraine Drexel. I'm going to find out what makes this statue go." U sing the hacksaw, I cut off a two-foot limb and handed it to Dr. Blackett, an eccentric but amiable neighbor who sometimes dabbled in sculpture himself. We walked back to the comparative quiet of the veranda. The single sonic cord emitted a few random notes, fragments from a quartet by Webern. "What do you make of it?" "Remarkable," Blackett said. He bent the bar between his hands. "Almost plastic." He looked back at the statue. "Definite drcumutation there. Probably phototropic as well. Mhm, almost like a plant." "Is it aUve?" Beckett laughed. "My dear Hamilton, of course not. How can it be?" "Well, where is it getting its new material? From the groimd?" "From the air. I don't know yet, but I imagine it's rapidly synthesizing an allotropic form of ferrous oxide. In other words, a purely physical rearrangement of the constituents of rust." Blackett stroked his heavy brush moustache and stared at the statue with a dreamlike eye. "Musically, it's rather curious -- an appalling congjomeration of almost every bad note ever composed Somewiieire the staitue must have suffered some severe sonic trauma. It's behaving as if it had been left for a week in a railroad shunting yard. Any idea what happened?" "Not really." I avoided his gjance as we walked back to the statue. It seemed to sense us coming and began to trumpet out the opening bars of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance march. Deliberately breaking step, I said to Blackett: "So in fact all I have to do to silence the thing is chop it up into two-foot lengths?" "If it worries you. However, it would be interesting to leave it, assuming you can stand the noise. There's absolutely no danger of it going on indefinitely." He reached up and felt one of the spars. "Still firm, but I'd say it was almost there. It will soon start getting pulpy like an over-iipe fruit and begin to shred off and disintegrate, playing itself out, one hopes, with Mozart's Requiem and the finale of the Goet'terdammerungJ He smiled at me, showing his strange teeth. "Die, if you pref it." However, he had reckoned completely without Lorraine Drexel. IV A t six o'clock the next morning I was woken by the noise. The statue was now fifty feet long and crossing the flower beds on efther side of the garden. It sounded as if a complete orchestra were performing some Mad Hatter's symphony out. in the center of the lawn. At the far end, by the rockery, the sonic cores were still working their way through the Romantic catalogue, a babel of Mendelssohn, Schubert and Grieg, but near the veranda the cores were beginning to emit the jarring and syncopated rhythms of Stravinsky and Stockhausen. I woke Carol, and we ate a nervous breakfast. "Mr. HamiltonI" she shouted. "You've got to stop it!" The nearest tendiils were only five feet from the glass doors of the veranda. The largest limbs were over three inches in diameter, and the pulse thudded through them like water under pressure in a fire hose. When the first police oars cruised past down the road, I went into the garage and found the hacksaw. The metal was soft, and the blade sank through it quickly. I left the pieces I cut off in a heap to one side, random notes sounding out into the air. Separated from the main body of the statue, the fragments were almost inactive, as Dr. Blackett had stated. By two o'clock that afternoon I had cut back about half the statue and got it down to manageable proportions. "That should hold it," I said to Carol. I walked round and lopped off a few of the noisier spars. 'Tomorrow I'll finish it off altogether." I wasn't in the least surprised when Raymond called and said that there was no trace anywhere of Lorraine Drexel. A t two o'clock that night I woke as a window burst across the floor oif my bedroom. A huge metal helix hovered like a claw through IP the fractured pane, its sonic core screaming down at me. A ihalf-moon was up, throwing a thin gray light over the garden. Tlie statue had sprung hack and was twice as large as it had been at its peak the previous morning. It lay all over the garden in a tangled mesh, like the skeleton of a crushed building. Already the advance tendrils had reached the bedroom windows, while others had climbed over the garage and were sprouting downward through the roof, tearing away the galvanized metal eets. All over the statue thousands of sonic cores gleamed in the light thrown down from the window. At last in unison, they hymned out the finale of Bruckner's Apocalyptic Symphony. I went into Carol's bedroom, fortunately on the other side of the house, a made her promise to stay in bed. Then I telephoned RaymoiKl Mayo. He came round within an hour, an oxy-cetylene torch and cylmders he had begged from a local contractor in the back seat of his car. The statue was growing almost as fast as we could cut it back, but by the time the first light came up at a quarter to six we had beaten it D r. Blackett watched us slice through the last fragments of the statue. "There's a section down in the rockery that might just be audible. I think it would be worth saving." I wiped the rust-tained sweat from my face and shook my head. "No. I'm sorry, but once is enough." Blackett nodded in sympathy, and stared gloomily across the heaps of scrap iron wldch were all th remained of the statue. Carol, looking a little stunned by everyithing, was pouring coffee and brandy. As we slumped back in two of the deck chairs, arms and faces black with rust and metal filings, I reflected wryly that no one could accuse the Fine Arts Committee of not devoting itself wholeheartedly to its projects. I went off on a final tour of the garden, collecting the section Blackett had mentioned, then guided in the local contractor who had arrived with his truck. It took him and his two men an hour to load the scrap -- an estimated ton and a half -- into the vehicle. "What do I do with it?" he asked as he climbed into the cab. "Take it to the museum?" "No!" I almost screamed. "Get rid of it. Bury it somewhere, or bter still, have it melted down. As soon as possible." When they had gone Blackett and I walked round the garden together. It looked as if a shrapnel shell had exploded over it. Huge divots were strewn all over the place, and what grass that had not been ripped up by the statue had been tramped away by us. Iron filings lay on the lawn like dust, a faint ripple of lost notes oarried away on the steepening sunlight. Blackett bent down and scooped up a handful of grains. "Dragon's teeth. You'll look out of the window tomorrow and see the B Minor Mass coming up." He let it run out between his fingers. "However, I suppose tihat's tlhe end of it." He couldn't have been more wrong. L onmne Drexel sued us. She must have come across the newspaper reports and realized her opportunity. I don't know where she had been hiding, but her lawyers materialized quickly enough, waving the original contract and pointing to the clause in which we guaranteed to protect the statue from any damage that might be done to it by vandals, livestock or other public nuisance. Her main accusation concerned the damage we had done to her reputation -- if we had decided not to exhibit the statue we should have supervised its removal to some place of safekeeping, not openly dismenlbered it and then sold off the fragments to a scrap dealer. This deliberate affront had, her lawyers insisted, cost her commissions to a total of at least fifty thousand dollars. At the preliminary hearings we soon realized that, absurdly, our one big difficulty was going to be proving to anyone who had not been there that the statue had actually started growing. With luck we managed to get several postponements, and Raymond and I tried to trace what we could of the statue. All we found were three small struts, now completely inert, rusting in the sand on the edge of one of the junkyards in Red Beach. Apparently taldng me at my word, the contractor had shipp the rest of the statue to a steel mill to be melted down. Our only case now rested on what amounted to a plea of self-defense. Raymond and myself testified that the statue had started to grow, and then Blackett delivered a long homily to the judge on what he believed to be the musical shortcomings of the statue. The judge, a crusty and short-tempered old man of the hanging school, immediately decided that we were trying to pull his leg. We were finished from the start. The final judgment was not delivered until ten months after we had first unveiled the statue in the center of Vermilion Sands, and the verdict when it came was no surprise. Lorraine Drexel was awarded thirty thousand dollars. #Tt looks as if we should have X taken the pylon after all," I said to Carol as we left the courtroom. "Even the step-pyramid would have been less trouble." Raymond joined us and we went out onto the balcony at the end of the corridor for some air. "Never mind," Carol said bravely. "At least it's all over with." The court building was a new one, and by an unpleasant irony ours had been the first case to be heard there. Much of the floor and plasterwork had still to be completed, and the balcony was untiled. I was standing on an exposed steel cross-beam; one or two floors down someone must have been driving a rivet into one of the girders, and the beam under my feet vibrated soothingly. Then I noticed that there were no sounds of riveting going on anyIF where, and that the movement under my feet was not so much a vibration as a low rhythmic pulse. I bent down and pressed my hands against the beam. Raymond and Carol watched me curiously. "Mr. Hamilton, what is it?" Carol asked when I stood up. "Raymond," I said. "How long ago did they first start on this building? The steel framework, anyway." "Four months, I think. Why?" "Four." I nodded slowly. 'Tell me, how long would you say it took any random piece of scrap iron to be reprocessed through a steel mill and get back into circulation?" "Years, if it lay around in the wrong junkyards." "But if it had actually arrived at the steel null?" "A month or so. Less." I started to laugh, pointing to the girder. "Feel that! Go on, feel it!" Frowning at me, they knelt down and pressed their hands to the girder. Then Raymond looked up at me. I stopp laughing. "Did you feel it?" "Feel it?" Raymond repeated. "I can hear it. Lorraine Drexel -- the statue. It's here!" Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. "I think it's humming," she said, puzzled. "It sounds like the statue." When I started to laugh again Raymond held my arm. "Snap out of it, the whole building will be singing soon!" "I know" I said weaMly. "And it won't be just this building either." I took Carol by the arm. "Come on, let's see if it's started." V W e went up to the top floor. The plasterers were about to move in, and there were trestles and laths all over the place. The walls were still bare brick. We didn't have to look very far. Jutting out from one of the steel joists below the roof was a long metal helix, hollowing itself slowly into a delicate sonic core. Without moving, we counted a dozen others. A faint twanging sound come from them, like early arrivals at a rehearsal of some vast orchestra of sitar players, seated on every plain and hilltop of the Earth. "An authentic Drexel," I said. "All the mannerisms. Nothing much to look at yet, but wait till it really gets going." Raymond wandered round, bis mouth open. "It'U tear the building apart. Just think of the noise." Carol was staring up at one of the shoots. "Mr. Hamilton, you said they'd melted it all down." "They did, angel. So it got back into circulation, touching off all the other metal it came into contact with. Lorraine Drexel's statue is here, in this building, in a dozen other buildings, in ships and planes..." "They'll stop it," Carol said. "They might," I admitted. "But it'll probably get back again somehow. A few pieces always will." I put my arm round her waist and began to dance to the strange abstracted music, for some reason as beautiful now as Lorraine Drexel's wistful eyes. "Did you say it was all over? Carol, it's only just beginning. The IF  Feature Our Mon m Fandom fakes us fo a typically nonfypical fan club meeting E ver wonder wliat actually happens at a fan club meeting -- what the fans do -- whait they talk about? Those of you who aren't lucky enough, to live within "visiting distance" of a fanclub may be curious as to the exact goings-on. I thought (that this month I'd sort of take you on a guided tour of a fanclub. So come along with Your Man In Fandom, and we'll spend Friday night with the Fanoclasts, biggest and most active of the fanclubs here in New York City and one of the vital centers of Fandom today, as sponsor club to the # World Science Fiction Convention, The Fanoclasts are an informal crew, scorning club officers and constitutions and like that. Whoever throws open his apartment to the bunch is host to the club and as near to an officer as the Fanoclasts ever get. Rising science-fiction writer Ted White, an editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is the current host Every other Friday the group meets at his apartment in Brooklyn, stalting (about nine o'clock. My wife, Noel, and I were among the first (to get (there. We put our coats in a comer and looked around. Ted has a ground-fioor apartment, three rooms or ao, and the living room was mostly given over to shelves. Ted has an admirable collection of pulp ntagaziDes, literally thousands of them, mostly science fiction; but there were also long ranks of several of the old superhero magazines: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger and that sort of thing. Another room held a wall packed soMd with paperbacks, and I noticed a stack of Big Little Books piled in a comer. Ted's equally impressive collection of comic books must have been packed away somewhere, for I didn't see any around. The living room also held Ted's stereo and several paintings, modem, impressionistic tihings, as well as a cover sketch by Frank Frazetta and Jack Gaughan's Pop Ait portrait of Ted. There were also some oats; on inquiring, I learned the Whites currently keep four kittens named Pooh Bear, Tigger, Kanga and Roo, as well as their parents, Aphrodite and Sinbad. I speculated aloud as to how this brood would get along with my own family of four dogs and eight puppies! A mong the first arrivals were Dick and Pat Lupoff and Dave and Cindy Van Amam. The Lupoffs used to be hosts to the Fanoclasts when they had an apartment in New York. Since Dick's job with Xerox took them upstate to Poughkeepsie they get down rarely. Dick is the editor of Canaveral Press, the publishing affiliate of Bible  Tannen, the booksellers; and he edited those recent hardcover editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Dick has also just become a science-fiction writer, selling his first novel to Lancer Books. Dave Van Amam has been collaborating with Ted on some science fiction and just sold a novel of his own to Belmont. We got to talking about the curious fact that whoever hosts the Fanoclasts for any length of time seems to turn pro, as Dick did and Dave too, for he briefly hosted the club. I was host myself for several months and have sold ten science-fiction novels myself to the paperbacks, so I agre with the fact that this eerie phenomenon seems to actually work. Ted put some light jazz on the stereo, and Dave Van Amam went out to bring back some soda, and beer, 'and pretty soon people started to trickle in. The first I spoke to was a fan named Alex Panshin. Alex has sold a few stories to Analog and Worlds of Tomorrow, and he's written a booklength critical study of the fiction of Robert Heinlein. He hasn't yet been able to find a publisher, but he's still looking around. Since Heinlein has been one of my favorite science-fiction writers for a good twenty years, we got to comparing notes on the books. I asked Alex whait his top favorites were, and he named Beyond This Horizon, Have Space Ship Will Travel and one of the juveniles, perhaps Red Planet, His choice of these as Heinledn's best baffled me, for I would name Methuselahs Children and Citizen of the Galaxy and Glory Road, myself. MY choices seemed to agreed. I do hope his book gets published, though, I'd very much like to read it. The title is Heinlein in Di- mension. Meanwhile, Dave Van Amam was passing out neatly mimeographed copies of his weekly one-page fanmag, First Draft it was, in fact, the #th weekly issue! I looked it over while my wife talked to Cindy and Pat Lupf. Casual, chatty stuff, filled with Van Amam's personal observations on various topics, such as Jackie Kennedy's announcement that she would write her own memoirs (seeing as how the Manchester project bombed out, in her estimation) and similar matters of the moment. S everal more Faiioclasts had arivved by this poimit I said hello to Terry aiKl Carol Carr, and to Lee Hoffman. Terry is one of the editors of Ace Books and has just done a hardcover anithology for Doubleday with the intriguing title. Science Fiction For People Who Hate ScU ence Fiction, He sports one of the blackest, lushest beards in Fandom. Lee Hoffman has written a couple of Western novels and was telling us that she has just sold three sdence-fiotion novels to Belmont. "How did it happen?" I asked. She shrugged. "I don't know. One morning at a completely ridiculous hour -- like noon -- I got this plot-idea and hopped out of bed to start writing it down   Across the room, Ted was talking to some young guys. Ted and Dave Van Amam are co-chairmen of the # Worldcon; and Ted was relating on his dry, precise way how they got a letter recently from the New York City Convention Bureau. The Bureau wanted information on Nycon in, saying some flying-saucer groups had asked for det on the science-fiction convention and might wish to attend. "I wrote them that we did not wish any flying-saucer groups to attend, and that was that," he finished laconically. Several young fans who read this column got me off in a comer and fired questions at me. "Do you know where I can get a oc of The Poetic EddaV one of them asked me unexpectedly. While I was telling him that this ancient loelandic mythologioal "bible" of the Norse religion is in print from the American-Scandinavian Foundation in English. I noticed sciencenfiction artist Jack Gaughan arriving. He came all the way from the hidden Plateau of Leng in the forbidden depths of trackless New Jersey, bearing the artwork for Nycon Comics ##. This fannish comicbook is one of the things you get when you join the Nycon, and it's one of the funniest things I've seen in years. I tried to disengage myself from the gaggle of question-askers so as to get a look at tihe latest Nycon Comics, but it wasn't easy. Another fellow was asking me questions about Robert E. Howard. He had heard I was busy completing some fragmenitary "Ig KuU" and "Conan" stories for Lancer Books, stories Robert E. Howard probably would have sent on to the old Weird Tales if he'd lived to finisth them, but which were discovered after his death by his literary aigent, Glenn Lord of Pasadena, Texas. Ted changed records on the stereo, and I got free and began chuckling over Jack Gaugh's comic art. I noticed Ted was passing out, to a select few, copies of his new children's book The Secret of the Marauder Satellite, just published by Westminster Press. I saw him slip a copy to Terry Carr and to Jack Gauglmi, who designed the book jacket The room was beginning to fill up by tfhis time, and people were spillmg over into the kitchen. The soft undercurrent of jazz made a sort of IP couniterpoint to the erratic currents of conversiation. Ted was showing pasteups of pages from the Nycon's second Progress Report. On the living room couch, Dick Lupoff was describing his Lancer novel, still untitled. It's a sort of sword  sorcery thing, but with overtones of time travel. As I came by, he was telling Lee Hoffman and others about a peculiar airship he had invented for the novel. It sounded to me rather like a mechanical grasshopper, operating on the pogostick principle: you start off taking wee Mttle tiny hops in it, and every time it hits the ground it bounces higher and higher until after a while you are taking stupendous mile-jhigh leaps over the landscape. "Fantastic!" Lee laughed. Dick goggled with an expression of mockindignation. "Fantastic? That's the hard science in my story. I'll have you know," he protested. I t was nearly time for "The Avengers." The Fanoclasts have recently formed the habit of watching itMs tv show during club evenings. It seems to be a deeply ingrained habit, for although "The Avengers' " time was pre-empted this evening to make room for some awful feature on popular music called "The Songmakers," they went right on watching Channel # as if by force of habit. Nothing bores me more than television, unless it's popular music; and the combination of the two drove me into the kitchen where I got into a conversation with Andy Porter. Andy has been "first reader" for FSF for some time now; and he told me, beaming with pride, that he has just been made some sort of associate editor of the magazine. We talked about various writers -- I think I held forth on Keith Laumer, a writer I am particularly fond of -- while Andy worked around to a pointed critique of the recent "Our Man In Fandom" columns he had seen. In the front room Terry Carr and Jack Gaughan and Ted were talking about various matters, including how much they all liked Harlan Ellison; and Ted showed me around his study where he does most of his writing. I got into a conversation with Dave and Andy over Keith Laumer again; it happened that I had with me the Simon  Schuster hardcover edition of Laumer's The Great Time Machine Hoax, which I had picked up that afternoon, and I was praising it to the skies. Someone came up and asked me about the weird sonnet-sequence I wrote in imitation of H.P. Lovecraft's "Fungi from Yuggoth" and which was being intermittently serialized in the fanzine Amra. I told him another installment was in the works and passed along the news that August Derleth was interested in publishing these sonnets and the rest of my macabre verse in book form; Arkham House will do them under the title of Dreams From Rlyeh, We discussed Amra, George Scithers' admirable, entertaining, Hugo-winning fanzine for awhile, and then it was time for my wife and I to catch our train back to Long Island... IF  Novelette He didn't remember how he had come to this planet. He only remembered that he was dead! I awakening from his deathbed, of being shot outwards over the edge of N o squeeze. No pain. a bowl bigger than Earth seen from Death has a wide pelvis, he a space capsule. Sprawling outwards, thought -- much later, when he had he landed on his hands and knees on time to reflect. a gentle slope. So gentle it was. He Now he was screaming. did not tear his hands and knees but He had had an impression of slid smoothly onward and downward on the great curve. The material on which he accelerated looked much like . brass and felt frictionless. Though he did not think of it then -- he was too panic-stricken to do anything but react -- he knew later that the brassy stuff had even less resistance than oil become a solid. And the brass, or whatever it was, formed a solid seamless eet. The only break was in the center, where the sheet ended. There, far ahead and far below, the bowl curved briefly upward. Gathering speed, he slipped along the gigantic chute. He tried to stay on his hands and knees; but, when he twisted his body to see behind him, he shifted his weight. Over he went onto his side. Squawling, he thrashed around, and he tried to dig his nails into the brass. No use. He met no resistance, and he began spinning aroimd, around. He did see, during his whirlings, the rim from which he had been shoved. But he could see only the rim itself and, beyond, the blue cloudless sky. Overhead was the sun, looking just like the Terrestrial sim. He rolled over on his back and succeeded during the maneuver in stopping the rotations. He also managed to see ihis own body. He began screaming again, the first terror driven out and replaced by -- or added to as a higher harmonic -- the terror of finding himself in a sexless body. Smooth. Projectionless. Hairless. His legs hairless, too. No navel. His skin a dark brown -- like an Apache's. Morfiks screamed and screamed, and he gripped his face and the top of his head. Then he screamed higher and higher. The face was not the one he knew (the lidge of bone above the ees and the broken nose were not there), and his head was smooth as an egg. He fainted. L ater, although it could not have been much later, he came to his senses. Overhead was the bright sun and beneath him was the cool nonfriction. He turned his face to one side, saw the same brass and had no sensation of sliding because he had no reference point. For a moment he thought he might be at the end of his descent. But on lifting his head he saw that the bottom of the bowl was closer, that it was rushing at him. His heart was leaping in his chest as if trying to batter itself to a second death. But it did not fail. It just drove the blood through his ears imtil he could hear its roar even above the air rushing by. He lowered his head until ks back was supported by the brass, and he closed his eyes against the sun. Never in all his life (lives?) had he felt so helpless. More helpless than a newborn babe, who does not know he is helpless and who cannot think and who will be taken care of if he cries. He had screamed, but no one was running to take care of him. Downward he slipped, brass-yellow curving away on both sides of him, no sensation of heat against his back where the skin should have burned off a long time ago and his muscles should now be burning. The incline began to be less downward, to straighten out. He shot across a flat space which he had no means of estimating because he was going too fast. The flatness gave away to a curving upwards. He felt that he was slowing down; he hoped so. If he continued at the same rate of speed, he would shoot far out and over the center of the bowl. Here it camel The rim! He went up with just enough velocity to rise perhaps seven feet above the edge. Then, falling, he glimpsed a city of brass beyond the people gathered on the shore of a river but lost sight of these in the green waters rushing up towards him directly below. He bellowed in anguish, tried to straighten out, and flailed his arms and legs. In vain. The water struck him on his left side. Half-stunned, he plunged into the cool and dark waters. By the time he had broken the surf again, he had regained his senses. There was only one thing to do. Behind him, the brassy wall reared at least thirty feet straight up. He had to swim to the shore, which was about four hundred yards away. vhiBi if he had not been able to swim? What if he chose to drown now rather than face the unknown on the beach? A boat was his answer. A flatbottomed boat of brass rowed with brass oars by a brown-skinned man (man?). In the bow stood a similar creature (similar? exactly alike) extending a long pole of brass. The manlike thing in the bow called out, "Grab hold, and I'll pull you in." Morfiks replied with an obsenity and began swimming toward the beach. The fellow with the pole howled, "A trouble-maker, heh? We'll have no antisocial actions here, citizen!" He brought the butt of the pole down with all his strength. It was then that Morfiks found that he was relatively invulnerable. The pole, even if made of material as light as aluminum and hollow, should have stunned him and cut his scalp open. But it had bounced off with much less effect than the fall into the river. 'ome into the boat," said the poleman. "Or nobody here will like you.' U Tft was this threat that cowed MorX fiks. After climbing into the boat, he sat down on the bench in front of the rower and examined the two. No doubt of it. They were twins. Same height (both were sitting now) as himself. Hairless, except for long curling black eyelashes. Same features. High foreheads. Smooth hairless brows. Straight noses. Full lips. Well developed chins. Regular, almost classical features, delicate, looking both feminine and masculine. Their eyes were the same shade of dark brown. Their skins were heavily tanned. Their bodies were slimly built and quite human except IF for the disooncertmg lack of sex, navel and nipples on the masculine chests, "Where am I?" said Morfiks. "In the fourth dimension?" He had read about that in the vSunday supplements and some of the more easily digesteds. "Or in Hell?" he added, which would have been his first question if he had been in his Terrestrial body. Nothing that had happened so far made him thing he was in Heaven. The pole rapped him in the mouth, and he thought that either the poleman was pulling his punches or else his new fle was less sensitive than his Terrestrial. The last must be it. His lips felt almost as numb as when the dentist gave him novocaine before pulling a tooth. And his meager buttocks did not hurt from sitting on the hard brass. Moreover, he had all his teeth. his mouth. "You will not use that word," said the poleman. "It's not nice, and it's not true. The protectors do not like that word and will take one hundred per cent effective measures to punish anybody responsible for offending the public taste with it." "You mean the word beginning with H?" said Morfiks cautiously. "You're catching on fast, citizen." "What do you call this... place?" "Home. Just plain home. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm one of the official gieeters. I have no name; nobody here does. Citizen is good enough for me and for you. However, being a greater doesn't make me one whit better than you, citizen. It's just my job, that's alL We all have jobs here, all equally important. We're all on the same level, citizen. No cause for envy or strife." "No name?" Morfiks said. "Forget that nonsense. A name means you're trying to set yourself apart Now, you wouldn't think it was nice if somebody thought he wias better than you bwause he had a name that was big in We-knowwhere, would you? Of course not." "I'm here for... how long?" Morfiks said. "Who knows?" "Forever?" Morfiks said dismally. T he end of the pole butted into his lips. His head rocked back, but he did not hurt much. "Just think of the present citizen. Because that is all that exists. The past doesn't exist; the future can't Only the present exists." "There's no future?" Again, the butt of the pole. "Forget that word. We use it on the river when we're breaking in immigrants. But once on the shore, we're through with it. Here, we're practical. We don't indulge in fantasy." "I get your message," Morfiks said. He damped the impulse to leap at the poleman's throat. Better to wait until he found out what the setup was, what a man could or could not get away with. The rower said, "Coming ashore, citizens." Morfiks noticed that the two had voices exactly alike, and he supposed his own was the same as theirs. But he had a secret trkiinph. His voice would sound different to himself; he had that much edge on the bastards. The boat nudged onto the beach, and Morfiks followed the other two onto the sand. He looked quickly behmd him and now saw that there were many boats up and down the river. Here and there a body shot up over the rim of. the brassy cliff and tumbled down into the waters as he had a few minu tes ago. Beyond the lip of the cliff rose the swell of the brass slide down which he had hurtled. The slide extended so far that he could not see the human figures that undoubtedly must be standing on the edge where he had stood and must just now be in the act of being pushed from behind. Five miles away, at least, five miles he had slid. A colossal building project, he thought. Beyond the dty of brass rose another incline. He understood now that he had been mistaken in believing the city was in the middle of a bowl. As far as he could see, there was the river and the city and the cliffs and slides on both sides. And he supposed that there was another river on the other side of the dty. The dty reminded him of the suburban tract in which he had lived on Earth. Rows on rows of square brass houses, exactly alike, fadng each other across twenty-foot wide streets. Earth house was about twelve feet wide. Each had a flat roof and a door in front and back, a strip of windows which drcled the house like a transpaieot belt There were no yards. A space of two feet separated each house from its neighbor. A person stepped out of the crowd standing on the beach. This one differed from the others only in having a band of some black metal around the biceps of its right arm. "Officer of the Day," it said in a voice exactly like the two in the boat "Your turn will come to act in this capadty. No favorites here." I t was then that Morfits recognized the possibilities of individualism in voice, of recognizing others. Even if everybody had identical dimensions in larynxes and the resonating chambers of palate and nasal passages, they must retain their habits of intonation and choice of pitch and words. Also, despite identical bodies and legs, they must keep some of their peculiar gtures and mods of walking. "Any complaints about treatment so far?" said the O.D. "Yes," said Morfiks. "This jerk hit me three times witii its pole." "Only because we love it," said the poleman. "We struck it -- oh, very lightly! -- to correct its ways. As a father -- pardon the word -- punishes a child he loves. Or an older brother his little brother. We are all brothers .  . "We are guilty of antisocial behavior," said the O.D. sternly. "We're very very sorry, but we must report this incident to the Protectors. Believe us, it hurt us..." "Worse than it hurts us," said the poleman wearily. "We know." "We'll have to add cynicism to the IF charge," said the O.D. "K.P. for several months if we know the Protectors. Should anybody be guilty again -- " llie O.D. told Morfiks to walk with it, and it briefed Morfiks as they went through the streets. These were made of a pale violet rubbery substance only slightly warm to the feet despite the sun beating down upon it. Morfiks would be given his own home. He was lord and master there and could do whatever he wished in it as long as he did not break any rules of public morality. "You mean I can invite anybody I want to and can keep out anybody I want to?" "Well, you can invite anybody you want. But don't throw anybody out who comes in uninvited. Tliis is, unless the uninvited behaves antisocially. In which case, notify the O.D., and we'll notify a Protector." 'How can I be master of my house if I can't choose my guests?" Morfiks said. "The citizen doesn't understand," said the O.D. "A citizen should not want to keep another citizen out of his house. Doing so is saying that a citizen doesn't love all citizens as brothers and sisters. It's not nice. We want  be nice, don't we?" Morfiks replied that had always been kriown as a nice guy, and he continued to listen to the O.D. But, on passing an area where a large field coated with the violet rubber broke the monotonous rows of houses, he said, "Looks like a children's playground with oil those swings, seesaws, games, trampolines. Where are the kids? And how -- "Only the Protectors know what happens to the children who come from We-Know-Where," said the O.D. "It's better, much, much better, not to ask them about it. In fact, it's very good not to see or talk to a Protector. "No, the playgrounds are for the amusement of us citizens. However, the Protectors have been thinking about taking them down. Too many citizens quarrel about who gets to use them, instead of amicably arranging predecedence and turns. They actually dare to fight each other even if fighting's forbidden. And they manage, somehow, to hurt each other. We don't want anybody to get hurt, do we?" "I guess not. What do you do for entertainment, otherwise?" "First things first, citizen. We don't like to use any of the personal pronouns except we, of course, and us and our and ours, I, me, they, you all differentiate. Better to forget personal differences here, heh? After all, we're just one big happy family, heh?" "Sure," Morfiks said. "But there must be times when a citizen has to point out somebody. How do I -- we -- identify someone guilty of, say, antisocial behavior?" "It doesn't matter," said the O.D. "Point out anyone. Yourself -- if you'll pardon the word -- for instance. We all share in the punishment, so it makes no difference." "You mean I have to be punished for someone else's crime? That isn't fairV "It may not seem so to us at first," said the O.D. "But consider. We're IF brothers, not only under the skin but on skin. If a crime is committed, the guilt is shared by all because, actually, all are responsible. And if punishment is given to all, then all will try to prevent crime. Simple, isn't it? And fair, too." "But you -- we -- said that the poleman would be given K.P. Does that mean we all go on K.P.?" "We did not commit a feflony, only a misdemeanor. If we do it again, we are a felon. And we suffer. It's the only nice thing to do, to share, right?" M orfiks did not like it. He was the one hit in the teeth, so why should he, the victim, have to take the punishment of the aggressor? But he said nothing. He had gotten far on We-Know-Where by keeping his mouth shut. It paid off; everybody had thought he was a nice guy. And he was a nice guy. There did seem to be one fallacy in the setup. If being a stool pigeon meant you, too, suffered, why turn anybody in? Wouldn't it be smarter to keep quiet and inflict the punishment yourself on the aggressor? "Don't do it, citizen," said the O.D. Morfiks gasped. The O.D. smiled and said, "No, we can't read minds. But every immigrant thinks the same thing when told about the system. Keeping quiet only results in double punishment. The Protectors -- whom this citizen has never seen face to face and doesn't want to -- have some means of monitoring our behavior. They know when we've been antisocial. The offender is, of course, given a certain amount of time in which to confess the injury. After that..." To keep himself from bursting into outraged denunciation of the system, Morfiks asked more questions. Yes, he would be confined to this neighborhood. If he traveled outside it, he might find himself in an area where his language was not spoken. That would result in his feeling inferior and different because he was a foreigner. Or, worse, superior. Anyway, why travel? Any place look like every place. Yes, he was free to discuss any subject as long as it did not concern We-Know-Where. Talking of that place led to discussions of -- forgive the term -- ones former identity and prestige. Besides, controversial subjects might arise and so lead to antisocial behavior. Yes, .this place was not constructed, physically, like We-Know-Where. The sun mit be a small body; some eggheads had estimated it to be only a mile wide. The run orbited around the strip, which was composed of the slides, two rivers and the city between the rivers, all of whidi hung in space. There was some speculation that his place was in a pocket universe the dimensions of which were probably not more than fifty miles wide and twenty high. It was shaped like an intestine, closed at one end and open at the other to infinity -- maybe. At this point, the O.D. cautioned Morfiks alwut the perils of intellectual speculation. This could be a misdemeanor or felony. In any event. eggheadedness was to be avoided. Pretending to be brainier your neighbor, to question the unquestionable, was unegalitarian. "There's no worry about that, Morfiks said. "If there's anything hateful and despicable, it's eggheadedness," "Oongratulaitions on skill in avoiding the personal," said the O.D. "We'll get along fine here." m T iey entered an immense building in which citizens were sitting on brass benches and eating off brass tables running the length of the building. The O.D. told Morfiks to sit down and eat. Afterwards, Morfiks could get to his new home. No. #, by asking directions. The O.D. left, and a citizen on K.P. served Morfiks soup in a big brass bowl, a small steak, bread and butter, salad vdth garlic dressing and a pitciher of water. The utensils and cup were of brass. He wondered where the food came from, but before he could ask, he was informed by a citizen on his right that he was not holding the spoon properly. After a few minutes of instruction and observation, Morfiks found himself able to master etiquette as practiced here. "Having the same table manners as everybody else makes a citizen a part of the group," said the instructor. "If a citizen eats differently, then a citizen is impolite. Impoliteness is antisocial. Get it?" "Got it," said Morfiks. After eating, he asked the citizen where he could locate No. #. "We'll show us," said the citiz "We live near that number." Together, they walked out of the hall and down the street. The sun was near the horizon now. Time must go faster, he thought, for it did not seem to him that he had been here for more than a few hours. Maybe the Protectors sent the sun around faster so the days would be shorter. They came to No. #, and Morfik's guide preceded him through swinging batwing doors into a large room with luminescent walls. There was a wide couchbed of the violet rubbery substance, several chairs cut out of solid blocks of the same stuff and a brass table in the center of the room. In one comer was a cubicle with a door. He investigated and found it to be the toilet. Besides the usual sanitary arrangements, the cubicle contained a shower, soap and four cups. There were no towels. "After a shower, step outside, dry off in the sun," the guide said. It looked at Morfiks for such a long time that Morfiks began to get nervous. Finally, the guide said, "I'll take a chance you're a pretty good Joe. What was your name on Eartii?" "John Smith," said Morfiks. "Play it cool, then," the guide said. "But you were a man? A male?" Morfiks nodded, and the guide said, "I was a girl. A woman, I #Thy tell me this?" he deVV manded susiHdously. IP put her hands on his shoulders. "Listen, Johnny boy," she whispered. "Those bastards think they got us behind the eight ball by putting us into these neuter bodies. But don't you believe it. There's more than one way of skinning a cat, if you know what I mean." "I don't," Morfiks said. almost touched his. A face in a mirror. "Inside, you're just the same," said change without changing you so much you're no longer the same person. If They do that. They aren't punishing the same person, are They? So, you wouldn't exist any more, would you? And being here wouldn't be fair, would it?" "I don't get it," Morfiks said. He step forwards. "What I mean is, you and me, we're still male and female inside. When They, whoever They are, stripped off our old bodies. They had to leave us our brains and nervous systems, didn't They? Otherwise, we'd not be ourselves, right? They fitted our nervous systems into these bodies, made a few adjustments here and there, like shortening or increasing nerve paths to take care of a stature different than the one you had on Earth. Or pumping something inside our skulls to take care of brains being too small for the skulls They gave us." "Yeah, yeah," Morfiks said. He pose, or he thought he did. He was breathing hard; a tingle was running over his skin; a warmth was spreading out from the pit of his stomach. heard that it was all in your head. And that's true. Of course, there's only so much you can do, and maybe it isn't as good as it was on YouKnow-Where. But it's better than nothing. Besides, like they say, none of it's bad. It's all good, some is jusi better than others." "You mean?" crooned, "and imagine I'm a woman. I'll tell you how I looked, how I was stacked. And you think about it Then you tell me how you looked, don't hold anything back, no need to be bashful here, describe everything down to the last detail. And I'll imagine how you were." "Think it'll work?" Morfiks said. "I know it will, baby. I've been around some since I came here." "Yeah, but what about the punishment?" said, scornfully, "Don't believe all that jazz, Johnny boy. Besides, even if They do catch you, it's worth it. Believe me, it's worth it." "If only I thought I could put one over on Them," Morfiks said. "It'd be worth taking any risk." Morfiks, though he had to repress revulsion, responded. After all, it was only the bald head that made They struggled fiercely and desperately; their kisses were as deep as possible. O away fram him. "It's worse than nothing," he panted. "I think something's going to happen, but it never quite does. It's no use. Now I feel awful." saying, "Don't give up so easy, honey. Rome wasn't erected in a day. Believe me, you can do it. But you got to have faith." "No, I'm licked," Morfiks said. "Maybe if you did look like a woman, instead of just a carbon copy of me. Then... no, that wouldn't be any good. I'm just not designed for the job; neither are you. They got us whe it hurts." twisted. "Where it hurts!" she shrilled. "Let me tell you, Buster, if you can't get your kicks being a man here, you can by hurting somebody! That's about all that's left!" "What do you mean?" Morfiks said. When she mastered herself, she said, "I'll tell you one good thing about looking like everybody else. Nobody knows what you really are inside. Or what you were on Earth. Well, I'll tell you about myself. "I was a man!" Morfiks sputtered. His fists clenched. He walked towards Billy. But he did not strike her... him... it. Instead, he smiled, and he said, "Well, let me tell you something. My real name was Juanita." Billy became pale, then red. "You... you!" T he next few days, Morfiks spent four hours each morning on the building of new houses. It was easy work. The walls and sections of the roof were brought in on wagons of brass pulled by citizens. Supervised by foremen, the laborers raised die wdls, secured the bottoms to the brass foundation of the city with a quick-drying glue and then fastened the walls together by gluing down strips of the violet stuff at the comers of the walls. Morfiks took his turn being a foreman for one day after he had gotten enou experience. He asked a citizen where the material for the houses and die rubber and the glue came from. "And where's the food grown?" The citizen looked around to make sure no one could hear them. "The original brass sheets and rubber are supposed to have originated from the blind end of this universe," he said. "It's spontaneously created, flows like lava from a volcano." "How can that be?" Morfiks said. The citizen shrugged. "How should I know? But if you remember one of the theories of creation back on You-Know-Where, matter was supposed to be continuously created out of nothing. So if hydrogen atoms can be formed from nothing, why not brass and rubber lava?" "But brass and rubber are organized configurations of elements and compounds!" "So what? The structure of this universe orders it." "And the food?" "It's brought up on dumbwaiters IB! through shafts which lead down to the underside. The peasants live there, citizen, and grow food and raise some kind of cattle and poultry." "Gee, I'd like that," Morfiks said. "Couldn't I get a transfer down there? I'd like to work with the soil. It'd be much more interesting than this." "If you were supposed to be a peasant, you'd have been transformed down there to begin with," the citizen said. "No, you're a citydweller, brother, and you'U stay one. You predetermined that, you know, in You-Know-Where." "I had obligations," Morfiks said. "What'd you expect me to do, shirk them?" "I don't expect nothing except to get out of here some day." "You mean we can get out? How? How?" "Not so loud with that yoM," the citizen growled. "Yeah, or so we heard, anyway. We never saw, a corpse but we heard about some of us dying. It isn't easy, though." 'Tell me how I can do it," Morfiks said. He grabbed the citizen's arm but the citizen tore himself loose and walked away swiftly. Morfiks started to follow him, then could not identify him because he had mingled with a dozen others. I n the afternoons, Morfiks spent his time playing shuffleboard, badminton, swimming or sometimes playing bridge. The brass plastic cards consisted of two thicknesses glued together. The backs were blank, and the fronts were punched with codes indicating the suits and values. Then, after the evening meals in the communal halls, there were always neighborhood committee meetings. These were to settle any disputes among the local citizens. Morfiks could see no sense in them other than devices to keep the attendants busy and tire them out so that they would be ready to go to bed. After hours of wrangling and speech-making, the disputants were always told that the fault lay equally on both sides. They were to forgive each other, shake hands and make up. Nothing was really settled, and Morfiks was sure that the disputants still burned with resentments despite their protestations that all was now well with them. What Morfiks found particularly interesting was the public prayer -- if it could be called that -- said by an O.D. before each meeting. It contained hints about the origins and reasons for this place and this life but was not specific enough to satisfy his curiosity. "Glory be to the Protectors, who give us this life. Blessedbe Mberty, equality and fraternity. Praise be to security, conformity and certainty. None of these did we have on WeKnow-Where, O Protectors, though we desired them mightily and strove always without success to attain them. Now we have them because we strove; inevitably we came here, glory be! For this cosmos was prepared for us and when we left that vale of slippery, slidery diaos, we squeezed through the walls and were formed in the template of passage, given these bodies, sexless, sinless, suitable. O Mighty Protectors, invisible but everywhere, we know that We-Know-Where is the pristine cosmos, the basic world, dirty, manyaspected, chaos under the form of seeming order, evil but necessary. The egg of creation, rotten but generative. Now, O Protectors, we are shaped forever in that which we cried for on that other unhappy universe..." There was more but most of it was a repetition in different words. Morfiks, sitting in the brass pews, his head bowed, looked up at the smooth hemisphere of the ceiling and walls and the platform on which the O.D. stood. If he understood the O.D., he was bound here forever, immortal, each day like the next, each month an almost unvarying image of the preceding, year after year, century after century, millenia after millenia. "Stability, Unseen but Everfelt Protectors. Stability! A place for everyone and everyone in a place!" The O.D. was saying that there were such things as souls, a configuration of energy which exactly duplicated the body of the person when he had exist on We-KnowWhere. It was indetectible by instruments there and so had been denied by many. But when one died there, the configuration was released from the attraction of the body, was somehow pushed from one universe into the next. existing within the same space as the original universe but polarized and at angles to it. A "soul" went to that imiveirse for which it had the most attraction. Indeed, the universe to which it traveled had actually been created by men and women. The total cumulative effect of desire for just such a place had generated this place. I f Morfiks interpreted the vague statements of the O.D. correctly, the structure of this universe was such that when a "soul" or cohesive energy configuration came through the "walls," it naturally took the shape in which all citizens found themselves. It was like hot plastic being oured into a mold. Morfiks dared question a citizen who claimed to have been here for a hundred years. "The O.D. said all questions have been settled, everything is explained. What's explained? I don't understand any more about the origins or reasons for things here than I did on We-Know-Where." "So what's new?" the citizen said. "How can you understand the ununderstandable? The main difference here is that you don't ask questions. There are many answers, I true, to one question, and this place is one answer. So quit bugging me. You trying to get me -- uh, us -- into trouble? Hey, O.D.!" Morfiks hurried off and lost himself in a crowd before he could be identified. He burned with resentment at the implications of this world. Why should he be here? Sure, on We-Know-Where he had stayed with one company for # years, he had been a good family man, a pal to his kids, a faithful husband, a pillar of the best church in the neighborhood, ihad paid off ibis mortgages, joined tiie lions Elk, and Moose the Kiwanis, the Junior Oiamber of Commerce and 'been a hard worker for the Democrats. His father before him had been a Democrat, and though he had had many misgivings about some of the policies, he had always followed the party line. Anyway, he was a right-wing Democrat, which made him practically the same thing as a left-wing Republican. He read the Readers Digest, Look, Life, Time, Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and had always tried to keep up with the bestsellers as recommended by the local newspaper reviewer. All this, not because he -eally wanted it but because he felt that he owed it to his wife and kids and for the good of society. He had hoped that when he went "over yonder" he would be rewarded with a life with more freedom, with a number of unlimited avenues forthe things he really wanted to do. What were those things? He didn't remember now, but he was sure that they were not what was available here. "There's been a mistake," he thought. "I don't belong here. Everything's all screwed up. I shouldn't be here. This is an error on somebody's part. I got to get out. But how can I get out of here any more than I could get out of We-KnowWhere? There the only way out was suicide and I couldn't take that, my family would have been disgraced. Besides, I didn't feel like it "And here I can't kill myself. My body's too tough and there's nothing, no way for me to commit suicide. Drowning? That won't work. The river's too well guarded, and if you did slip by the guards long enough to drown, you'd be dragged out in no time at and resuscitated. And then punished." IV O n the fourth night, what he had been dreading happened. His punishment He woke up in the middle of the night with a dull toothache. As the night went on, the ache became shar. By dawn, he wanted to scream. Suddenly, the batwings on his doorway flew open, and one of his neighbors (he presumed) stood in the room. Heshe was breathing hard and holding hisher hand to hisher jaw. "Did you do it?" said the neighbor in a shrill voice. "Do what?" Morfiks said, rising from the couch-bed. "Antisocial act," the intruder said. "If the culprit confesses, the pain will cease. After a while, that is." "Did you do it?" Morfiks said. For all he knew, he might be talking to Billy again. "Not me. listen, newcomers often -- always -- commit crimes because of a mistaken notion a crime can't be detected. But the crime is always found out." "There are newcomers who aren't bom criminals," Morfiks said. Despite his pain, he intended to keep control to. "Then you, and I mean you, won't confess?" "The pain must be breaJdng some people apart," said Morfiks. "Otherwise, some wouldn't be using the second person singular." "Singular, heUI" the citizen said, breaking two tabus with two words. "Okay, so it doesn't make much difference if you or me or the poor devil down the street did it. But I got a way of beating the game." "And so bringing down more punishment on us?" "No! Listen, I was a dental assistant on We-Know-Where. I know for a fact that you can forget one pain if you have a greater." Morfiks laughed as much as his tooth would permit him, and he said, "So, what's the advantage there?" The citizen smiled as much as his toothache would permit. "What I'm going to propose will hurt you. But it'll end up in a real kick. You'll enjoy your pain, get a big thrill out of it." "How's that?" Morfiks said, thinking that the citizen talked too much like Billy. "Our flesh is tough so we can't hurt each other too easily. But we can be hurt if we try hard enough. It takes perseverence, but then what doesn't that's worthwhile?" The citizen shoved Morfiks onto the couch, and, before Morfiks could protest, he was chewing on his leg. "You do the same to me," the citizen mumbled between bites. "I'm telling you, it's great! You've never had anything like it before." Morfiks stared down at the bald head and the vigorously working isms. He ooiuld feel a little pain, and ins itoothadie did seem to have eased. He said, "Never had anything like what?" "Like blood," the citizen said. "After you've been doing this long enough, you'll get drunk on it," "I don't know. There, uh, seems something wrong about this." he citizen stopped gnawing. "You're a greenhorn! Look at it this way. The protectors tell us to love one another. So you should love me. And you can show your love by helping me get rid of this toothache. And I can do the same for you. After a while, you'll be like all of us. You won't give a damn; you'll do anything to stop the pain." Morfiks got into position and bit down hard. The flesh felt rubbery. Then he stopped and said, "Won't we get another toothache tomorrow because of what we're doing now?" "We'U get an ache somewhere. But forget about tomorrow." "Yeah," Morfiks said. He was beginning to feel more pain in his leg. "Yeah. Anyway, we can always plead we were just being social." The citizen laughed and said, "How social can you get, huh?" Morfiks moaned as his crushed nerves and muscles began to bleed. After a while, he was screaming between his teeth, but he kept biting. If he was being hurt, he was going to hurt the citizen even worse. And what the heU, he was beginning to feel a reasonable facsimile to that which he had known up The world of science does not admit the existence of demons -- but the demons don't carel B aines, president of Console dated Warfare Service, the nitions subsidiary of an internation'al chemical and dye cartel, has apmagician of the highest repute, for a demonstration of his abilities. Accompanied by his executive assistant, ing skeptic, he visits Ware's rented palazzo in the Italian resort town of Positano, where Ware provides a minor exhibition of alchemy, changing two tears successively into blood, gold and lead under controlled circumstances. This does not satisfy Baines, who has something much bigger in mind. Ware warns him that all magic, regardless of degree, is based upon the invocation of angels or demons -- mostly the latter -- and that it is IF  Sfiml  expensive, dangerous and difficult. Baines already knows this from an earlier visit to Monte Albano, a sanctuary of white magicians. Strictly as a further test, Baines commissions Ware to procure by magic the death of the current Governor of California. Ware agrees. Ginsberg, a man of slightly odd tastes, is intrigued by Wares obvious confidence and in a private interview attempts to ask a favor of the magician, but doesnt succeed in specifying what it is. Ware offers him the use of a succubus, but is refused. At Monte Albano, the white magicians have divined something of the nature of Bainesfs forthcoming major commission and have reason to believe it may be a major dis aster for the whole world. Under the terms of the Grand Covenant Illustrated by Morrow under which dll magic operates, they are entitled to impose upon Ware a white magician as an observer, providing that the white magician does not interfere in any way with Ware's operations. They choose skilled and blameless man, who does not relish the assignment. In the meantime, Baines, who has returned to Rome, receives news of the death of the Governor of California, as specified. He decides to return to Posifano, taking with him this time not only Jack Ginsberg, but also a scientist of his firm, DR. Thanks to various delays en route, Baines, Ginsberg, Hess and Fr. Domenico all arrive for the next invocation of Hell at the same time -- during the Christmas season. VI P, Theron Ware was tineif formal and edgy. The HKnk despite his apsee what the magician looked like and had been irrationally disappointed ito d him not much out of the ordiinary run of intellectuals. Except for the tonsure, of course; like Baines, Fr. Domenico found that startling. Also, unlike Baines, he found it upsetting, because he knew the reason for it -- not that Ware intended any mockery of his pious counterparts, but bemuse demons, given a moment of inattention, were prone to semng one by the hair. "Under the Covenant," Ware told him in excellent Latin, "I have no choice but to receive you, of course. Father. And under other circumstances I might even have enjoyed discussing the Art with you, even though we are of opposite schools. But this is an inconvenient time for me. I've got a very important cHent here, os you've seen, and I've already been notified that what he wants of me is likely to be extraordinarily lambitious." "I shan't interfere in any way," Fr. Domenico said. "Even ould I wish to, which obviously I shall, I know very well that any such interference would cost me all my protections." "I was sure you understood that, but nonetheless I'm glad to hear you say so," Ware said. "However, your very presence here is an embiassment -- not only because I'll have to explain it to my client, but also because it changes the atmosphere unfavorably and will make my operations more difficult I can ohly hope, in defiance of all hospitality, that your mission will be speedily satisfied." "I can't bring myself to regret the difficulty, since I only wish I could make your operations outright impossible. The b I can proffer As for the length of my stay, that depends wholly on what it is your client turns out to want and how long that takes. I am charged with seeing the matter through to its conclusion." "A prime nuisance," Ware said. "I suppose I should be grateful that I haven't been blessed with this kind of attention from Monte Albono before; evidently what Mr. Baines intends is even bigger than he thinks it is. I conclude without much cerebration that you know something about it I don't know." "It will be an immense disaster, I can tell you that." # T Tmm. From your point of Xl view, but not necessarily from mine, possibly. I don't suppose you're prepared to offer any fuer information -- on the chance, say, of dissuading me?" "Certainly not," Fr. Domenico said indignantly. "If eternal damnation hasn't dissuaded you long before this. I'd be a fool to hope I'd be able to." "Well," Ware said, 'hut you are, after all, charged with the cure of souls; and unless the Church has done another flipflop since the last IP Congress, it is still also a mortal sin to assume that any man is certainly damned -- even me." That argument was potent, it had to be granted; but Fr. Domenico had not been trained in casuistry, and that by Jesuits, for nothing. "I'm a monk, not a priest," he said. "And any information I give you would, on the contrary, almost certainly be used to abet e evil, not turn it aside. I don't find the choice a hard one under the circumstances." "Then let me suggest a more practical consideration," Ware said. "I don't know yet what Baines intends, but I do know well enough that I am not a Power myself -- only an Agent. I have no desire to bite off more than I can chew." "Now you're jusit wheedling," Fr. Domenico said, with energy. "Knowing your own limitations is not an exercise at which I or anyone else can help you. You'll just have to weigh (tibem in the light of Mr. Baines's commission, whatever that proves to be. In the meantime, I shall tell you nothing." "Very weU," Ware said, rising. "I will be a little more generous with my information. Father, than you have been with yours. I will tell you that you will be well advised to adhere to every letter of the Covenant. One step over the line, one toe, and  shall have you -- and hardly any outcome in this world would give me greater pleasure. I'm sure I make myself clear." Fr. Domenico could think of no reply; but none seemed to be necessary. A s Ware had sensed, Baines was indeed disturbed by the presence of Fr. Domenico and made a point of bringing it up as the first order of business. After Ware had explained the monk's mission and the Covenant under which it was being conducted, however, Baines felt somewhat relieved. "Just a nuisance, os you say, since he can't actually intervene," he decided. "In a way, I suppose my bringing Dr. Hess here with me is comparable -- he's only an observer, too, and fundamentally he's probably just as hostile to your world-view as this holier-than-us fellow is." "He's not significantly holier than us," Ware said with a slight smile. "I know something he doesn't know, too; he's in for a surprise in the next world. However, for the time being we're stuck with 'him -- for how long depends upon you. Just what is it you want this time, Mr. Baines?" "Two things, one depending on die other. The first is the death of Albert Stockhausen." "The anti-matter theorist? That would be too bad; I rather like him, and besides, some of the work he does is of direct interest to me." "You refuse?" "No, not immediately anyhow, but I'm now going to ask you what I promised I would ask on this occasion. What are you aiming at, anyhow?" "Something very long-term. For the present, my lethal intentions for Dr. Stockhausen are strictly businessbased. He's nibbling at tibe edges of a controls completely. It's a manopoly of knowledge we don't want to see broken." "Do you think you can keep anything secret that's based in natur law? After the McCarthy fiasco I should have supposed that any intelligent American would know better. Surely Dr. Stockhausen can't be just verging on some mere technicality -- something your firm might eventually bracket with a salvo of process patents." "No, it's in the realm of natural law and hence not patentable at all," Baines admitted. "And we already know that it can't be concealed forever. But we need about five years' grace to make the best use of it, and we know that nobody else but Stockhausen is even close to it. Barring accidents, of course. We ourselves have nobody of Stockhausen's caliber; we just fell over it, and somebody else inigbt do that. However, that's highly unlikely." "I see. Well... the project does have an attractive side. I think it's quite possible that I can persuade Father Domenico that this is the project he came to observe. Obviously it can't be -- I've run many like it and never attracted Monte Albano's interest to this extent before -- but given sufficient show of great preparations, and difficulty of execution, he might be deluded, and go home." "That would be useful," Baines agreed. "The question is could he be deceived?" "It's worth trying. The task would in fact be difficult -- and qtiite expensive." "Why?" Jack Ginsberg said, sitting bolt upright in his carved Florentine chair so suddenly as to make bis suit squeak against the silk upholstery. "Don't tell us he affects thousas of other people. Nobody ever oast any votes for him that I know of." "Shut up. Jack." wait, it's a reasonable question," Ware said. "Dr. Stockhausen does have a large famDy, which I have to take into account. And, as I've told you, I've taken some pleasure in his company on a few occasions -- not enough to balk at having him sent for, but enough to help run up the price. "But that's not the major impediment. The fact is that Dr. Stockhausen, like a good many theoretical physicists these days, is a devout Qxan -- and furthermore, he has only a few venial sins to account for, nothing in the least meriting the attention of Hell. I'll check that again with Someone who knows, but it was accurate as of six months ago, and I'd be astonished if there's been any change. He's not a member of any formal congregation, but even so he's nobody a demon could reasonably have come for him -- and there's a chance that he might be defended against any direct assault." "Successfully?" "It depends on the forces involved. Do you w!ant to risk a pitched battle that would tear up half of Duesseldorf? It might be cheaper just to mail him a bomb." IP "No, no. And I don't want anything that might look like some kind of laboratory accident -- thaifd be just the kind of clue that would set everybody else in his field haring after what we want to keep hiddecu The whole secret lies in the fact that once Stockhausen knows what we know, he could create a major explosion with -- well, with the equivalent of a blackboard and two pieces of chalk. Isn't there any other way?" "Men being men, there's always another way. In this instance, thou. I'd have to have him tempted. I know at least one promising avenue. But he might not fall; and even if he did, as I think he would, it would take several months and a lot of close monitoring. Which wouldn't be altogether intolerable either, since it would greatly help to mislead Father Domenico." "What would it cost?" Jack Ginsberg said. Entirely a contingent fee this time, since I can't see that there'd be any important out-of-pocket money needed. If there is. I'll absorb it." "That's nice," Jack said. Ware took no notice of the feeble sarcasm. Baines put on his adjudicatory face, but inwardly he was well satisfied. As a further test, the death of Dr. Stockhausen was not as critical as that of Gov. Rogan, but it did have the merit of being in an entirely different social sphere; the benefits to Consolidated Warfare Service would be real enough, so that Baines had not had to counterfeit a motive, which might have been detected by Ware a led to premature further questions; and finally, the objections Ware had rais, while in part unexpected, had been entirely consistent with everything the magician had said befdr eveiything that he appeared to be, everything that his style proclaimed, despite the fact that he was obviously a complex man. Good. Baines liked consistent intellectuals and wished that he had more of them in his organization. They were always fanatics of some sort when the chips were down, and hence presented him with some large and easily grasped handle predsely when he had most need of it. Ware hadn't exhibited his handle yet, but he would; he would. "It's worth it," Baines said, without more than a decorous two seconds of apparent hesitation. 'T do want to remind you, though. Dr. Ware, that Dr. Hess here is one of my conditions. I want you to allow "Oh, very gladly," Ware said, with (another smile that, this time, Baines found disquieting. It seemed false, even unctuous, and Ware was too much in command of himself to have meant the falsity not to be noticed. "I'm sure he'll enjoy it. You can all watch, if you like. I may even invite Faer Domenico." vm D r. Hess arrived punctually the next morning for his appointment to be shown Ware's workroom and equipment. Greeting him with a professional nod -- "Coals to Newcastle, biingiiig iMitford and me up here for a tertitary," Hess found himself quoting in silent inanity -- Ware led the way to a pair of heavy brocaded hangings behind his desk, which parted to reveal a heavy brass-bound door of what was apparently cypress wood. Among its fittings was a huge knocker with a face a little like the mask of tragedy, except that the eyes had cat-like pupils in them. Hess had thought himself prepared to notice everything and be surprised by nothing, but he was taken aback when the expression on the knocker changed, slightly but inarguably, when Ware touched it. Apparently expwting bis startlement. Ware said without looking at him: "There's nothing in here really worth stealing, but if anything were taken it would cost me a tremendous amount of trouble to replace it, no matter how worthless it would prove to the thief. Also, there's the problem of contamination. Just one ignoiant touch could destroy the work of months. It's rather like a bacteriology laboratory in tha;t respect Hence the guardian." "Obviously there can't be a standard supply house for your tools," Hess agreed, recovering his composure. "No, that's not even theoretioailly possible. The operator must make everything himself -- not as easy now as it was in the Middle Ages, when most educated men had the requisite skills as a matter of course. Here we go." The door swung back as if being opened from the inside, slowly and soundlessly. At first it opened on a deep scarlet gloom; but Ware touched a switch, and with a brief rushing sound, like waiter, sunlight flooded the room. Immediately Hess could see why Ware had rented this particular palazzo and no other. The room was an immense refectory of Sienese design, which in its heyday must often have banqueted as many as thirty nobles; there could not be another one half as big in Positano, though the palazzo as a whole was smaller than some. There were mullioned windows overhead, under the ceiling, running around all four walls, and the sunlight was pouring through two ranks of them. They were flanked by pairs of red velvet drapes, unpaittemed, hung from traverse rods; it had been these that Hess had heard pulling back when Ware had flipped the wall-switch. At the rear of the room was another door, a broad one also covered by hangings, which Hess supposed must lead to a parLtry or kitchen. To the left of this was a medium-sized modem electric furnace and beside it an anvil bearing a hammer which looked almost too heavy for Ware to lift. On the other side of the furnace from the anvil were several graduated tubs which obviously served as quenching baths. To the right of the door was a black-topped chemisifs bench, complete with sinks, running water and the usual noz#des for illumiiiaiting gas, vacuum and compressed air; Ware must have had to install his own pumps for all of these. Over ib: mm mm pR m#b ll the bench on the back wall were shelves of reagents; to the right, on the side wall, ranks of drying pegs, some of whidh bore contorted pieces of glassware, others, coils of rubber tubing. Farther along that wall toward the front was a lectern bearing a book as big as an unabridged dictionary, bound in red leather and closed and locked with a strap. There was a circular design chased in gold on the front of the book, but at this distance Hess could not make out what it was. The lectern was flanked by two standing candlesticks with fat candles in them. The candles had been extensively used, although there were shaded electric light fixtures around the walls, too, and the small writing table next to the lectern born a Tensor lamp. On the table was another book, smaller but almost as thick, which Hess recognized at once: the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, #th Edition, as standd a laWatory fixture as a test tube, and a rank of quill pens and inkhoms. CC'VJow you can see something of what I meant by requisite skSUs," Ware said. "Of course I blow modh of my own glassware, but any oriSmry chemist does that But should I need a new sword, for instance -- " he pointed toward the electric furnace -- "I have to forge it myself; I couldn't just pick one up at a costume shop. Fd have to do a good job of it, too. As a modem writer says somewhere, the only really serviceable symbol for a sharp sword is a sharp sword." "Uhm," Hess said, continuing to look around. Against the left wall, opposite the lectern, was a long, heavy table, bearing a neat ranking of objects ranging in length from six inches to about three feet, all closely wrapped in red silk. The wrappers had writing on them, but again Hess could not decipher it. Beside the table, affixed to the wall, was a flat sword-cabinet. A few stools completed the furnishings; evidently Ware seldom worked sitting down. The floor was parqueted and, toward the center of the room, still bore traces of marks in colored chalks, considerably scuffed, which brought from Ware a grunt. "The wrapped instruments are all prepared and Fd rather not expose them," the magioian said, walking toward 'the sword-rack, "but of course I keep a set of spares and I can show you those." He opened the cabinet door, revealing la set of blades hung in order of size. There were thirteen of them. Some were obviously swards; others looked more like shoemaker's tools. "The order in which you make these is important, too," Ware said, "because as you can see, most of them have writing on them, and it makes a difference what instrument does the writing. Hence I began with the uninscribed instrument, this one, the bolline or sickle, which is also one of the most often used. Rituals differ, but the one I used requires starting with la piece of unused steel. It's fired three times and then quenched in a mixture of magpie's blood and the juice of a herb called fbirole." IF "The Grimorium Verum says mole's blood and pimpernel juice," Hess observed. "Ah, good, you've been doing some reading. I've tried that, and it just doesn't seem to give quite as good an edge." "I should think you could get a still better edge by finding out what specific compounds were essential and using those," Hess said. "You'll remember that Damascus steel used to be tempered by plunging the sword into the body of a slave. It worked, but modem quenching baths are a lot better -- and in your case you wouldn't have to be constantly having to trap elusive animals in large numbers." "The analogy is incomplete," Ware said. "It would hold if tempering were the only end in view, or if the operation were only another observance of Paracelsus' rule, Alterius non sit qui suns esse potest -- doing for yourself what you can't trust others to do. Both are practical ends that I might satisfy in some quite different way. But in magic the blood sacrifice has lan additional function; what we might call the tempering of, not just the steel, but also the operator." "I see. And I suppose it has some symbolic functions, too." "In Goeitic art, everything does. In the same way, as you probably also know from your reading, the forging and quenching is to be done on a Wednesy in either the first or the eighth of the day hours, or the third or the tenth of the nigjht hours, under a full Moon. There is again an immediate practical interest being served here -- for I assure you that the planetary hours do indeed effect affairs on Earth -- but also a psychological one, the obedience of the operator in every step. The Grimoires and other texts are at best so confused and contradictory that it's never possible to know completely what steps are essential and what aren't, and research into the subject seldom makes for a long life." "All right," Hess said. "Go on." VV next to be shaped and fitted, again in a particular way at a particular hour and then perfected at still another day and hour. By the way, you mentioned a different steeping bath; if you use that ritual, the days and the hours are also different, and again the question is, what's essential and what isn't? Thereafter, there's a conjuration to be recited, plus three salutations and a warding spell; then the instrument is sprinkled, wrapped and fumigated -- not in the modem sense, I mean it's perfumed -- and is ready to use. After it's used, it has to be exorcised and rededicated, and that's the difference between the wrapped tools on the table and those hanng here in the rack. "I won't go into detail about the preparation of the other instruments. The next one I make is the pen of the Art, followed by toe inkpots and toe inks, for obvious reasons; and, for toe same reasons, toe buiin or graver. The pen is on my desk; this fitted needle here in toe burin. The rest, going down toe line as they hang here rather than in order of mamif aoture, are the rwhite-handled knife, which like the boUine is nearly an all-purpose tool; the blackhandled knife, used almost solely for inscribing the circle; the stylet, efly for preparing the wooden knives used in tanning; the wand or blasting rod, which describes itself; the lancet, again self-descriptive; the staff, a restraining instrument analogous to a shepherd's; and lastly the four swords, one for the master, the other three for his assistants, if any." Hess leaned forward, with a side glance at Ware for permission, to inspect the writing on the graven instruments. Some of them were easy enough to make out: on the sword of the master, for instance, the word Michael appeared on the pommel, and on the blade, running from point to hilt, Elohim Gibor. On the other hand, on the handle of the white-handled knife was engraved the following: Hess pointed to this and to a different but equally baffling inscription which was duplicated on the handles of the stylet and ithe lancet. "What do those mean?" "Mean? They can hardly be said to mean anything any more. They're greatly degenerate Hebrew characters, originally comprising various Divine Names. I could tell you what the Names were once, but the characters have no content any more -- they just have to be there." "Superstition," Hess said, recalling his earlier conversation with Baines, interpreiting Ware's remark about ChrositiDas. 'Tiredsely, in the pure sense. The process is as fundamental to the Art as evolution is to biology. Now if you'll step this way I'll show you some other aspects that may interest you." He led the way diagonally across the room to the ohemisfs bench, pausing to rub irritatedly at the chalk marks with the sole of his slipper. "I suppose a modem translation of that aphorism of Paracelsus," he said, "would be, 'You just can't get good servants any more.' Not to ply mops, anyhow... Now: most of these reagents will be familar to you, but some of them are special to the Art. This, for instance, is exorcised waiter, which as you see I need in great quantities; it has to be river-water to start with. The quicklime is for tanning; some laymen, de Camp for instance, will tell you that 'virgin parchment' simply means parchment that's never been written on befbre, but that's not so -- all the Grimoires insist that it must be the skin of a male animal which has never engendered, and the Clavicula Salomonis sometimes insists upon imbom parchment, or the caul of a newborn child. For tanning I also have to grind my own salt, after the usual rites are said over it. The candles I use have to be made of the first wax taken from a new hive, and so do my almadels. If I need images, I have to make them of earth dug up with my bare 'bands and reduced to a paste without any tool. And so on. "I've mentioned aspersion and IF fumigation, in other words sprinkling and perfuming. Sprinkling has to be done with an laspergillus, a bundle of herbs like a faggot or bouquet garni; the herbs differ from rite to rite, and you can see I've got a fair selection here -- mint, marjory, rosemary, vervain, periwinkle, sage, valerian, ash, bash, hyssop. In fumigation the most commonly used scents are these: aloes, incense, mace, benzoin, storax; also, it's sometimes necessary to make a stench -- for instance in the fumigation of a caul -- and I've got quite a repertoire of those." Ware turned away abruptly, nearly treading on Hess' toes, and strode toward the exit. Hess had no choice but to follow him. "Everything involves special preparation," he said over his shoulder, "even including the firewood if I want to make ink for pacts. But there's no point in my cataloguing things further, since I'm sure you thoroughly understand the principles." H ess scurried after, but he was still several paces behind the magician when the window-drapes swished closed and the red gloom was reinstated. Ware stopped and waited for him, and the moment he was through the door, closed it and went back to his seat behind the big desk. Hess, puzzled, walked around the desk and took one of the Florentine chairs reserved for guests or clients. "Most illuminating," he said politely. "Thank you." "You're welcome." Ware rested his elbows on the desk and put his fingertips over his mouth, looking down thougthitfully. There was a sprinkle of perspiration over his brow and shaven head, and he seemed more than usually pale; also, Hess noticed after a moment, he seemed to be trying, without major effort to control his breathing. Hess watched curiously, wondering what' could have upset him. After only a moment, however. Ware looked up at him and volunteered the explanation, with an easy half-smile. "Excuse me," he said. "From apprenticeship on, we're trained to secrecy. I'm perfectly convinced that it's unnecessary these days, and has been since the Inquisition died, but old oaths are the hardest to reason away. No discourtesy intended." "No offense taken," Hess assured him. "However, if you'd radier rest -- " "No, I'll have ample rest in the next three days and be incommunicado too, preparing for Mr. Baines's commission. So if you've further questions, now's the time for them." "Well... I have no further technical questions, for the moment. But I am curious about a question Baines asked you during your first meeting -- I needn't pretend, I'm sure, that I haven't heard the tape. I wonder just as he did what your motivation is. I can see from what you've shown me, and from everything you've said, that you've ten colossal amounts of trouble to perfect yourself in your Art and that you believe in it; so it doesn't matter for the present whether or not I believe in it, only whether or not I believe in you. And your laboraitory isn't a sham; it isn't here solely for extortion's sake; it's a place where a dedioaited man works at something he thinks important. I confess I came to scoff -- and to expose you, if I could -- and I still can't credit that lany of what you do works, or ever did work. But I accept that you so believe." Ware gave him a half-nod. "Thank you; go on." 'Tve no farther to go but the fundamental question. You don't really need money; you don't seem to collect art or women; you're not out to 'be President of ie World or the power behind some such person -- and yet by your lights you have damned yourself eternally to make yourself expert in this highly peculiar subject. What on earth for?" "I could easily duck that question," Ware said slowly. "I could point out, for instance, that under certain circumstances I could prolong my life to seven hundred years, and so might not be worrying just yet about what might happen to me in the next world. "Or else I could easily point out what you already know from the texts, that every magician hopes to cheat Hell in the end -- as several did who are now nicely ensconced on the calendar las authentic saints. "But the real fact of the matter. Dr. Hess, is that I think what I'm after is worth the risk, and what I'm after is something you understand perfectly, and for which you've sold your own soul, or if you prefer an only slightly less loaded word. your integrity, to Mr. Baines: Knowledge. "Uhmn. Surely there must be easier ways -- " "You don't believe that. You think there may be more reliable ways, such as scientific method, but you don't think they're any easier. I myself have the utmost respect for scientific method, but I know that it doesn't offer me the kind of knowledge I'm looking for -- which is also knowledge about the make-up of the universe and how it is run, but not a kind that any exact science can provide me with, because the sciences don't accept that some of the forces of nature are Persons. Well, but some of them are; and without dealing with those Persons I shall never know any of the things I wiant to know. "This kind of research is just as expensive as underwriting a gigantic particle-accelerator. Dr. Hess, and obviously I'll never get any government to underwrite it. But people like Mr. Bjaines can, if I can find enough of them. Just as they undenvrite you. "Eventually, I may have to pay for what I've learned with a jewel no amount of money could buy. Unlike Macbeth, I know one cant 'skip the life to come.' But even if it does come to that. Dr. Hess -- and probably it will -- I'll take my knowledge with me, and it will have been worth the price. "In other words -- just as you suspected -- I'm a fanatic." To his own dawning astonishment, Hess said slowly: "Yes. Yes, of course. So am I." IF DC F ather Domenico lay in ibis strange bed on his stalling sleeplessly up ait the pink stucco ceiling. Tonight was the nighit he had come for. Ware's three days of fasting, lustration and prayer -- surely a blasphemous burlesque of such observances as the urch knew them, in intent if not in content -- were over, and he had pronounced himself ready to act Apparently, he still intended to allow Baines and his two repulsive henchmen to observe the conjuration, but if he had ever had any iintention of including Fr. Domenico in the ceremony, he had thought better of it. That was fnistrating, as well as a great relief; but in his place, Fr. Domenico would have done the same thing. Yet even here, excluded from the scene and surrounded by every protection he had been able to muster, Fr. Domenico could feel the preliminary oppression, Mke the dead weather fore an earthquake. There was always a similar hush and tension in the air just before the invocatian of one of the celestial powers, but with none of these overtones of maleficence and disaster...  or would someone ignorant of what was actually proposed be able to tell the difference? That was a disquieting thought in itself, but one that could practically be left to Bishop Berkeley and the logical positivists. Fr. Domenico knew what was going on: a ritual of supernatural murder; and he could not help but tremble. Somewhere in the palazzo there was the silvetry sound of a small dock strikinig, distant and sweet. The tune was inow #:# pjn., the fourth hour of Saitum on the day of Saturn, the hour most suitable -- as even the blameless and pitiable Peter de Abano had written -- for experiments of hatred, enmity and discord; and Fr. Domenico, under the Covenant, was forbidden even to pray for failure. e clock, that two-handed engine that stands behind the Door, struck, and struck no more, and Ware drew the brocade hangs aside. Up to now, Baines despite himself had felt a little foolish in the girdled white linen garment Ware insisted upon, but he cheered up upon seeing Jack Ginsberg and Dr. Hess in the same vestments. As for Ware, he was either oomioal or terrible, depending upon what view one took of the proceedings, in his white leather shoes letter in dnnaibar and his paper crown bearing the word EL. He was girdled with a belt about three inches wide which seemed to have been made from the skin of some hairy, lion-colored animal. Into the gire was thrust a redwrapped, sceptorlike object which Baines identified tentativdy from a prior description of Hess's as the wand of power. "And now we must vest ourselves," Ware said, almost in a whisper. "Dr. Baines, on the desk you will find three garments. Take one, and then another, and 'mother; give two to Dr. Hess and Mr. Ginsberg; don the other yourself." Baines picked up the huddle of cloth. It turned out to be an alb. 'Take up your vestmenits lift them in your hands above your heads. At the Amen, let them fall. Now: "Anton, Amator, Emites, Theby the virtue of these most holy angelic names do I clothe myself, O Lord of Lords, in my Vestments of Power, that so  may fulfill, even unto their term, all things which I desire to effect (through Thee, Ideodaniach, Pamor, Plaior, Lord of Lords, Whose kingdom and rule endureth forever and ever. Amen The garments rustled down, and Ware opened the door. The room beyond was only vaguely lit with yeUow candle-lit and at first bore almost no resemblance to the chamber Dr. Hess had described to Baines. As his eyes accommodated, however, Baines was gradually able to see that it wias the same room, its margins now indisitinct and its furniture slightly differently ordered; only the lectern and the candlesticks -- there were now four of them, not two -- were moved out from the walls and hence more or less visible. But it was still confusing, a welter of flickering shadows and slightly sickening perfume, most unlike the blueprint of the room that Baines had erected in his mind from Hess's drawing. The thing that dominated the real room itself was also a drawing, not any piece of furniture or detail of architecture: a vast double circle on the floor in what appeared to be whitewash. Between the concentric circles were written innumerable words, or what might have been words, in characters which might have been Hebrew, Greek, Etruscan or even Elvish for all Baines could tell; some few were also in Roman lettering, but they too were names he could not recognize; and around the outside of the outer circle were written astrological signs in their zodiacal order, but with Saturn to the north. At the very center of this figure was a rule square about two feet on a side, from each comer of which proceeded chalk, conventionalized crosses which did not look in the least Christian. Proceeding from each of these, but not connected to them, were four six-pointed stars, verging on the innermost circle. The stars at the east, west and south each had a Tau scrawled at its center; presumably the Satummost did too, but if so it could not be seen, for the heart of that emplacement was hidden by what seem to be a fat puddle of stippled fur. Outside the circles, at the oth compass-points, were drawn four pentagrams, in the chords of which stood the candles. Farthest away from all this -- about two feet outside the circle and three feet over it to the north -- was a circle enclosed by a triangle, also much lettered inside and out; Baines could just see that the characters in the angles read, NI CH EL. "Tanists," Ware whispered, pointing into the circle, "take your places." IP He weDit toward the long table Hess had described and vaoished in the gloom. As instructed Baines walked into the circle and stood in the western star; Hess followed, taking the eastern; and Ginsberg, very slowly, crept into the southern. To the north, the puddle of fur revolved once widdershins and resettled itself with an unsettling sigh, making Jack Ginsberg jump. Baines inspected it belatedly. Probably it was only a cat, as was supposed to be traditional, but in this light it looked more like a badger. Whatever it was, it was obscenely fat. W are reappeared, carrying a sword. He entered the circle, closed it with the point of the sword, and proceeded to the central square, where he lay the sword across the toes of his white shoes; then he drew the wand from his belt and unwrapped' it, laying the red silk cloth across his shoulders. "From now on," he said, in a normal, even voice, "no one is to move." From somewhere inside his vestments, he produced a small crucible, which he set at his feet before the recumbent sword. Small blue flames promptly began to rise from the bowl, and Ware cast incense into it. He said: "Holocaust. Holocaust. Holocaust." The flames in the brazier rose slighitly. "We are to call upon Marchosias, a great marquis of the Descending Hierarchy," Ware said in the same conversational voice. "Before he fell, he belonged to the Onto of Dominations among the angels and thinks to return to the Seven Thrones after twelve hundred yeiars. His virtue is that he gives true answers. Stand fast, all." With a sudden motion. Ware thrust the end of his rod into the surging flames of the brazier. At once, the air of the hall rang with a long, frightful chain of woeful howls. Above the bestial clamor. Ware shouted: "I abjure thee, great Marchosias, as the agent of the Emperor Lucifer, and of his beloved son Lucithe pact I have with thee, and by the Names Adonay, Eloim, JehoArios, Pithona, Magots, Sylphae, Tabots, Salamandrae, Gnomus, Terrae, Coelis, Godens, Aqua, and by the whole hierarchy of superior intelligences who shall constrain thee against they will, venite, venite, submiritillor MarchosiasI" The noise rose higher, and a green steam began to come off the brazier. It smelt like someone was burning hart's horn and fishgah. But there was no other answer. His face white and cruel, Ware rasped over the tumult: "I adjure thee, Marchosias, by the pact, and by the Names, appear instanter!" He plunged the rod a second time into the flames. The room screamed; but still there was no apparition. "Now I adjure thee, Lucifuge Rofocale whom I command, as the agent of the Lord and Emperor of Lords, send me thy messenger Marchosias, forcing tiam to forsake his hiding-place, wheresoever it may be; land warning ithee -- " The rod went back into the fire. Instantly, the palazzo rocked as though earth had moved under it. "Stand fasti" Ware said hoarsely. Something Else said: Hush, I am here. What dost Thou Seek of me? Why dost Father rest, and hold thy rod. Never had Baines heard a voice like that before. It seemed to speak in syllables of burning ashes. "Hadst thou appeared when first I invoked thee, I had by no means smitten thee, nor called thy father," Ware said. "Remember, if the request I make of thee be refused, I all thrust again my rod into the fire." Think and seeI The palazzo shuddered again. Then, from the middle of the triangle to the north-west, a slow cloud of yellow fumes went up toward the ceiling, making them all cough, even Ware. As it spread and thinned, Baines could see a shape forming under it; but he found it impossible to believe. It was -- it was something like a she wolf, gray and immense, with green and glistering eyes. A wave of coldness was coming from it. The cloud continued to dissipate. The fihewolf glared at them, slowly spreading her griffin's wings. Her serpents tall lashed gently, scalily. In the northmi pentacle, the great cat sat up and stared back. The demon-wolf showed her teeth and emitted a disgusting belch of fire. The cat settled its front feet indifferently. "Stand, by the Seal," Ware said. "Stand and transform, else I shall plunge thee back whence thou earnest. I command diee." T he she-wolf vanished, leaving behind in the triangle a modestlooking young man wearing a decorous nedotie, a dildo almost as long, and nothing else. "Sorry, boss," ho said in a sugary voice. "I hM to try, you know. What's up?" "Don't try .to wheedle me, vision of stupidity," Ware said harshly, 'Transform, I demand of thee, thou'rt wasting they father's time, and mine! TransformI" The young man stuck out his tongue, which was copper-green. A moment later, the triangle was occupied by a black-bearded man apparently twice his age, wearing a green robe trimmed in ermine and a Ottering crown it hurt Baines's eyes to look at. An odor of sandalwood began slowly to diffuse throu the room. "That's better," Ware said. "Now I charge thee, by those Names I have named and on pain of those torments thou hast known, regard the likeness and demesne of that mortal whose eidolon I hold in my mind; and that when I release thee, thou shalt straightaway go unto him, not making thyself known unto him, but revealing os it were to come from bis own intellectual soul a vision and understanding of that great and ultimate Nothingness which lurks behind those signs he IP calls matter and energy as thou wMt see iit in his privaite forebodings; land that thou remiainest wiith him and deepen his despair without remittal, until such time as he shall despise his soul for its endeavors, and destroy the life of his body." "I cannot give thee," the crowned figure said, in a voice deep but somehow lacking all resonance, "what thou requirest." "Refusal will not avail thee," Ware said, "for either shalt thou go incontinently and perform what I command, or I shall m no wise dismiss thee, but shall keep thee here unto my life's end and torment thee daily, as thy father permitteth." "y life itself, though it last seven hundred years, is but a day to me," said the crowned figure. Sparks issued from its nostrils as it spoke. "And thy torments but a farthing of those I have endured since ere the cosmic egg was hatched and Eve invented." For answer, Ware again stabbed the rod into the fire, which, Baines noted numbly, failed even to scorch it. But the crowned figure threw back its bearded head and howled desolately. Ware withdrew the rod, but only by a hand's breadth. "I shall do as thou oommandest," the creature said sullenly. Hatred oozed from it like lava. "Be it not performed exactly, I shall call thee up again," Ware said. "But be it executed, for thy pay thou shalt carry off the immortal part of the subject thou shalt tempt, which is as yet spotless in the sight of Heaven, and a great prize." "Biit not yet enough," said the demon. "For thou must give me also somewhat of thin e hoard, as it is written in the pact" "Thou art slow to remember the pact," Ware said. "But I would deal fairly with thee, knowing marquis. Here." H e reached into his robe and drew out something minute and colorless which flashed in the candlelight. At first, Baines took it to be a diamond, but as Ware held it out, he recognized it as an opalescent crystal tear-vase, the snaallest he had ever seen, stopper, contents and all. This Ware tossed, underhand, out of the circle to the fuming figure, which to Baines's new astonishment -- for he had forgotten that what he was really looking at had first exhibited as a beast -- caught it skillfully in its mouth and swallowed it. "Thou dost only tantalize MarchosiAS," the presence said "When I have thee in Hell, miagician, then shall I drink thee dry, though thy tears flow never so copiously." "Thy threats are empty; I am not markedfor thee, shouldst thou see me in Hell forthever," Ware said. "Enough, ungrateful monster; cease they witless plaudering and discharge thine errand; I dismiss thee." The crowned figure snarled and then, suddenly, reverted to the form in which it had first showed itself. It vomited a great gout of fire, but the surge failed to pass the wall of the triangle; instead, it collected in a ball around the demon itself. Nevertheless, Baines could feel the heat against his face. IF He raised his wand methodically. The floor inside the small cirde vanished. The apparition clashed its brazen wings and dropped like a stone. With a rending thunderclap, the floor healed seamlessly. Then there was silence. As the ringing in Baines's ears died away, he became aware of a distant thrumming sound, as though someone had left a car idling in the street in front of the palazzo. Then he realized what it was: the great cat was purring. It had watched the entire proceedings with nothing more than grave interest. So, apparently, had Hess. Ginsberg seemed to be jittering, but he was standing his ground. Although he had never seen Jack rattled before, Baines could hardly blame him; he hiniself felt sick and giddy, as though just the effort of looking at Marchosias had been equivalent to having scrambled for days up some Himalayan glacier. "It is over," Ware said in a gray whisper. He looked very old. Taking up his sword, he cut the diagram circle with it. "Now we must wait. I will be in seclusion for two weeks; then we will consult again. The circle is open; you may leave." F ather Domenico heard the thunderclap, distant and muffled, and knew that the sending had been made -- and that he was forbidden, now as before, even to pray for the soul of the victim (or the patient, in Ware's antiseptic Aristotelian terminology). Sitting up and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, breathing with diMcidity in the musky, detumescent air, he walked unsteadily to his satchel and opened it. Why -- that was the question -- did God so tie his hands, why did He allow such a compromise as the Covenant at all? It suggested, at least, some limitation in His power unallowable by the firm dogma of Omnipotence, which it was a sin even to question; or at worst, some ambiguity in His relationship with Hell, one quite outside the revealed answers to the Problem of Evil. That last was a concept too terrible to bear thinking about. Probably it was attributable purely to the atmosphere here; in any event, Fr. Domenico knew that he was in no spiritual or emotional condition to examine it now. He could, however, examine with possible profit a minor but related question: Was the evil just done the evil Fr. Domenico had been sent to oversee? There was every immediate reason to suppose that it was -- and if it were, then Fr. Domenico could go home tomorrow, ravaged but convalescent. On the other hand, it was possible -- dreadful, but in a way also hopeful -- that Fr. Domenico had been commanded to HeUnmouith to await the emission of something worse. That would resolve the puzzling anomaly that Ware's latest undertaking, abomniable though they all were, was for Ware not unusual. Much more important, it would explain, at least in part, why the Covenant existed at all: in Tolstoi's words, "God sees the truth, but waits." And this question, at least, Fr. Domenico need not simiply ponder, buit could actively submit to tihe Divine guidance, even here, even now, provided that he call upon no Presences. That restriction was not prohibitive; what was he a magician for, if not to be as subtle in his works as in his praise? Ink-hom, quill, straight-edge, three diEferent disl of different sizes cut from virgin cardboard -- not an easy thing to come by -- and the wrapped burin came out of the satchel and were arranged on top of his dres ser, which would serve well enough for a desk. On the cardboard disks he carefully inscribed three different scales: The A camerae of sixteen divine attributes, from bonitas to patientia; the T camerae of thirty attributes of things, from temporis to negatio; and the E camerae of the nine questions, from whether to how great. He centerpunched all three disiks with the burin, pinned them together with a cufflink, and finally asperged the assembled Lull Engine with holy water from the satchel. Over it he said: "I conjure thee, O form of this instrument, by the authority of God the Father Almighty, by the virtue of Heaven and the stars, by that of the elements, by that of stones and herbs, and in like manner by the virtue of snowstorms, thunder and winds, and belike also by the virtue of the Ars magna in whose figure thou art drawn, that thou receive all power unto the performance of those things in the perfection of which we are concerned, the whole without trickery, falsehood or deception, by the command of God, Creator of the Angels and Emperor of the Ages. Damahii, Lumech, Gadal, Pancia, Veloas, Meorod, Lamidoch, Baldach, Anerethon, Mitraton, most holy angels, be ye wardens of this instrument. Domine, Deus mens, in te speravi... Confitebor tibi, Domine, in tow corde meo... Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum...  Amen." This said, Fr. Domenico took up the engine and turned the circles against each other. Lull's great art was not easy to use; most of the possible combinations of any group of wheels were trivial, and it took reason to see which were important, and faith to see which were inspired. Nevertheless, it had one advantage over all other forms of scrying: it was not, in any strict sense, a form of magic. He turned the wheels at random the required number of times, and then, taking the outermost by its edge, shook It to the four quarters of the sky. He was almost afraid to look at the result. But on that very first essay, the engine had generated: It was the answer he had both feared and hoped for. And it was, he realized with a subdued shock, the only answer he could have expected on Christmas Eve. He put the engine and the tools back in his satchel and crept away into the bed. In his state of over-exhaustion and alarm, he did not expert to sleep... but within two turns of the glass he was no longer IP in the phenomenal world, but was dreaminig instead that, like Geirbert the magldan-Pope, he was ifleeing the Holy Office down the wind astride a devil. X W are's period of recovery did not last quite as long as he had prophesied. He was visibly up and about by Twelfth Night. By that time, Baines -- though only Jack Ginsberg could see and read the signs -- was chafing at the inaction. Jack had to remind him that in any event at least two months were supposed to pass before the suicide of Dr. Stockhausen could even be expected and suggested that they all go back to Rome and to work in the interim. Baines shrugged the suggestion off. Whatever else was on his mind, it did not seem to involve Consolidated Warfare Service's interests more than marginally... or at least, the thought of business could not distract him beyond the making of a small number of daily telephone calls. The priest or monk or whatever he was, Fr. Domenico, was still in attendance too. Evidently he had not been taken in by the show. Well, that was Ware's problem, presumably. All the same. Jack stayed out of sight of the cleric as much as possible; having him around. Jack recalled in a rare burst of association with his Bronx childhood, was a little like being visited by a lunatically Orthodox relative during a crucial marriage brokerage. Not so lunatic at that, though; for if magic really worked -- as Jack had had to seethat iit did -- then the whole tissue of metaphysical assumptions Fr. Domenico stood for, from Moses through the Kabbalah to the New Testament, had to follow, as a matter of logic. After this occurred to Jack, he not only hated to see Fr. Domenico, but had nightmares in which he felt that Fr. Domenico was looking back at him. Ware himself, however, did not emerge officially, to be talked to, until his predicted fourteenth day. Then, to Jack's several-sided disquietude, the first person he called into his office was Jack Ginsberg. Jack wanted to talk to Ware only slightly more than he wanted to talk to the bare-footed, silently courteous Fr. Domenico; and the effect upon Baines of Ware's singling Jack out for the first post-conjuration interview, though under ordinary circumstances it could have been discounted as minor, could not even be conjectured in Baines's present odd state of mind. After a troubled hour, Jack took the problem to Baines, not even sure any more of his own delicacy in juggling such an egg. "Go 'ead," was all Baines said. He continued to give Jack the impression of a man whose mind was not to be turned more than momentarily from some all-important thought. That was alarming, too, but there seemed to be nothing to be done about it. Setting his face into its business mold of pleasant attentiveness, over slightly clenched teeth. Jack marched up to Ware's office. The sunlight there was just as htiiighit and lumocent as ever poudng direotly in fron the sea-siky on top o the oM. Jack felt sligy more in contact with what he (had used ito think of as real life. In some hope of taking the initiative away from Ware and keeping it, he asked the magician even before sitting down: "Is there some news already?" "None at all," Ware said. "Sit down, please. Dr. Stockhausen is a tough patient, as I warned you all at the beginning. It's possible that he won't fall at all, in which case a far more strenuous endeavor will be required. But in the meantime I'm assuming that he will, and that I therefore ought to start preparing for Dr. Baines's next commission. That's why I wanted to see you first." "I haven't any idea what Dr. Baines's next commission is," Jack said, "and if I did I wouldn't tell you before he did." "You have a remorselessly literal mind, Mr. Ginsberg. I'm not trying to pump you. I already know, and it's enough for the time being, that Mr. Baines's next commission will be something major; perhaps even a unique experiment in the history of the Art. Father Domenico's continued presence here suggests the same sort of thing. Very well, if I'm to tackle such a project. I'll need assistants -- and I have no remaining apprentices; they become ambitious very early and either make stupid technical mistakes or have to be smissed for disobedience. Laymen, even sympathetic laymen, are equally mischancy, simply because of their eagerness and ignorance; but if they're highly intelligent, it's sometimes safe to use them. Sometimes. Given those disclaimers, that explains why I allowed you and Dr. Hess to watch the Christmas Eve affair, not just Dr. Hess whom Dr. Baines had asked for; and why I want to talk to you now." # T see," Jack said. "I suppose I JL should be flattered." Ware sat back in his chair and raised his hands as if exasperated. "Not at all. I see that I'd better be blunt. I was quite satisfied with Dr. Hess's potentialities and so don't need to talk to him any more, except to instruct him. But I am none too happy with yours. You strike me as a weak reed." "I'm no magician," Jack said, holding onto his temper. "If there's some hostility between us, it's only fair to recognize that I'm not its sole cause. You went out of your way to insult me at our very first interview, only because I was normally suspicious of your pretensions, as I was supposed to be, on behalf of my job. I'm not easily offended. Dr. Ware, but I'm more cooperative if people are reasonably polite to me," Siercor Ware said. The word meant nothing to Jack. "You keep thi nkin g I'm talking about public relations, and getting along with people, and all that goose-grease. Far from it. A little hatred never hurts the Art, and studied insult is valuable in dealing with demons -- there are only a few who can be flattered to any profit, and the man IF who can be flattered isn't a man at all, he's a dog. Do try to understand me, Mr. Ginsberg, hat I'm talking about is neither your footling hostility nor your unexpectedly slow brains, but your rabbit's courage. There was a moment during the last ceremony when I could see that you were going to step out of your ipost. You didn't know it, but I had to paralyze you, and I saved your life. If you had moved you would have endangered all of us, and had that happened I would have thrown you to Marchosias like an old bone. It wouldn't have saved the purpose of the ceremony, but it would have kept the demon from gobbling up everybody else but Ahktoi." "Ach -- ?" "My familiar. The cat." "Oh. Why not the cat?" "He's on loan. He belongs to another demon -- my patron. Do stop changing the subject, Mr. Ginsberg. If I'm going to trust you as a Tanist in a great work, I'm going to have to be reasonably sure that you'll stand fast when I tell you to stand fast, no matter what you see or hear, and that when I ask you to take some small part in the ritual, you'll do it accurately and punctually. Can you assure me of this?" "Well," Jack said earnestly, "I'll do my best." "But what for? Why do you want to sell me? I don't know what you mean by your 'best until I know what's in it for you, besides just keeping you your job -- or makin g a good impression on me because it's a reflex with you to make a good impression on pecle. Explain this to me, please! I know that there's something in this situation that hits you where you live; I could see that from the outset, but my first guess as to what it was evidently was wrong, or anyhow not central. Well, what is centri to you? The situation has now ripened to the point when you're going to have to tdl me what it is. Otherwise I shall shut you out, and that will be that." Wobbling between unconventional hope and standard caution. Jack pushed himseilf out of the Florraitine chair and toe-heel-toed to the window, adjusting his tie automatically. From this hei ght  the cliffcling ing apartments of Positano fell away to the narrow beach like so many Roman tenements crowded with deposed kings -- and with beach-boys hoping to pick up an American heiress for the season. Except for the curling waves and a few distant birds, the scene was motionless, yet somehow to Jack it seemed to be slowly, inexorably sliding into the sea. Sure, I like women," he said in a low voice. "And I've got special preferences I don't find it easy to satisfy, even with all the money I make. For one thing, in my job I'm constantly working with classified material -- secrets -- either some government's or the company's. That means I don't dare put myself into a position where I could be blackmed." "Which is why you refused my offer when we first talked," Ware said. "That was discreet, but unnecessary. As you've probably realized by now, neither spying nor extortion has any attraction for me -- the potential income from either or both would be a pittance to me." "Yes, but I won't always have you around," Jack said, turning back toward the desk. "And I'd be stupid to form new tastes that only you could keep supplied." "'Pander to' is the expression; let's be precise. Nevertheless, you have some remedy in mind. Otherwise you wouldn't be being even this frank." "Yes... I do. It occurred to me when # u agreed to allow Hess to tour your laboratory." He was halted by lanolheir stab of jealousy, no less acute for being half reminiscent. Drawing a deep breath, he went on: "I want to learn the Art." "Oho. That is a reversal." CiTou said it was possible," I Jack said in a rusih, emboldened by a desperate sense of having now nothing to lose, "I know you said you don't take apprentices, but I wouldn't be trg to stab you in the back or take over your clients, I'd only be using the Art for my specialized purposes. I couldn't pay you any fortune, but I do have money. I could do the reading in my spare time and come back after a year or so for the actual instruction. I think Baines would give me a stabbatical for that. He wants somebody on his staff to know the Art, at least the theory, only he thinks it's going to be Hess. But Hess will be too busy with his own sciences to do a thorou job of it." "You really hate Dr. Hess, don't you?" "We don't impinge," Jack said stiffly. "Anyhow what I say is true; I could be a lot better expert from Baines's" point of view than Hess ever could." "Do you have a sense of humor, Mr. Ginsberg?" "Certainly. Everybody does." "Untrue," Ware said. "Everybody claims to have, that's all. I ask only because the first thing to be sacrificed to the Art is the gift of laughter, and some people would miss it more than others. Yours seems to be residual at best; in you it would probably be a minor operation, like an appendectomy." "You don't seem to have lost yours." "You confuse humor with wit, like most people. The two are as different as creativity and  scholarship. However, as I say, in your case it's not a great consideration, obviously. But there may be greater ones: for example, what tradition I would be training you in. For instance, I could make a Kabbalistic magician of you, which would give you a substantial grounding in white magic; and for the black, I could teach you most of what's in the Clavicle and the Legemeton, cutting out the specifically Christian accretions. Would that content you, do you think?" "Maybe, if it met my primary requirements," Jack said. "But if I had to go on from there, I wouldn't care. These days I'm a Jew only by birth, not by culture -- and up imtil Christmas Eve I was an atheist Now I don't know what I am; all I know is I've got to believe what I see." "Not in this Art," Ware said. "But IF we'll think of you as a tabula rasa for the time being. Well, Mr. Ginsberg, I'll consider it. But beifore I decide, I think you out to explore further your insight about special tastes becoming satisfiable dnly through magic, whether mine or yours. You like to think how delightful it would be to enjoy them fredy and without fear of consequences, but it often happens -- you'll remember Oscar Wilde's epigram on the subject -- ithat fulfilled desire isn't a delight, but a cross." "I'll take the chance." "Don't be so hasty. You have no real idea of the risks. Suppose you should find, for example, that no human woman could please you any more, and you'd become dependent on succubi? I don't know how much you know of the theory of such a relationship. In general, the revolt in Heaven involved angels from every order in the hierarchy; and of the Fallen, only those who fell from the lowest rani are assigned to this sort of duty. By comparison, Marchosias is a paragon of nobility. These creatures have even lost their names, and there's nothing in the least grand about their malignancy -- they are pure essences of narrow meanness and petty spite, the kind of spirit a Sicilian xmlkmaid calls on to make her rival's toenails split or give an unfaithful lover a pimple on the end of his nose." "That doesn't make them sound different from ordinary women," Jack said, shrugging. "So long as they deliver, what does it matter? Presumably, as a magician I'd have some control over their behavior." "Yes, Nevertheless, why be persuaded out of desire and ignorance, when an experiment is available to you? In fact, Mr. Ginsberg, I would not trust any resolution you made from the state of simple fantasy you're in now. If you won't try the experiment, I must refuse your petition." "Now wait a minute," Jack said. "Why are you so urgent about this, anyhow? What kind of advantage do you get out of it?" "I've already told you that," Ware said patiently. "I will probably neeci you as a Tanist in Dr. Baines's major enterprise. I want to be able tc trust you to stand fast, and I won't be able to do that without being sure of your degree and kind of commitment." Everything that Ware said seemed to have behind it the sound of doors softly closing in Jack's face. And on the other hand, the possibilities -- the opportunities -- "What," he said. "Must I do?" XI T he palazzo was asleep. In the distance, that same oblivious clock struck eleven; the proper hour of this day. Ware had said, for experiments in venery. Jack waited nervously for it to stop, or for something to betgin. His preparations were all made, but he was uncertain whether any of them had been necessary. After all, if the... girl... who was to come to him was to be totally amenable to his wishes, why should he have to impress her? Nevertlieless, he had gone ithrough all the special ntuails, bathing for an hour, shaving twice, trimming his finger and toenails and boffing em, brushing his hair back for thirty strokes and combing it with the West German tonic which was said to have allatoin in it, dressing in bis best silk pajamas, smoking jacket (though he neither smoked nor drank), ascot and Venetian leather snippers, adding a dash of cologne, and scattering a light film of talcum powder inside the bed. Maybe, he thought, part of the pleasure would be in taking all the trouble and having everything work. The dock stepped striking. Almost at once, fiiere was a slow triple knodr at the door, so slow that e soft blow seemed like an independent act. Jack's heart bounded like a boy's. Putting te sash of his jacket tighiter, he said as instructed: "Come in... Come in .   Come in." He opened the door. As Ware had told him to expect, there was no one m the dark corridor outside; but whein he dosed in the door and turned around, there she was. "Good evening," she said in a light vdee with the barest trace of an accent -- or was it a lisp? "I am here, as you invited me. Do you like me?" It was not the same girl who had brought the letter to Ware, so many weeks ago, though she somehow reminded him of someone he had once known, he could not think who. This one was positively beautiful. She was small -- half a head shorter than Jack, slender and apparently only about eighteen -- and very fair, with blue eyes and a fresh, innocent expression which was doubly piquant because the lines of her features were patridan, her skin so delicate that it was almost like fine parchment. She was fully clothed, in spike heels, patterned but otherwise sheer stodgs, and a short-sleeved, expensively tailored black dress of some material like rayon which clung to her breasts, waist and upper hips as though electrified, and then burst into a Ml skirt like an inverted tulip which broke just above her knees. Wire-thin silv bracelets slid and tinMed almost inaudibly on her left wrist as die ruffled her chrysanthemum-petal coiffure, and sniall silver earrings echoed them; between her breasts was a dicular onyx brooch inlaid in silver with the word Cazotte, set off by a ruby about the size of a fly's eye, the only touch of color in entire costume; even her make-up was the Itailian "white look," long out of style but so exaggerating her paleness as to look almost theatrical on her -- almost, but not quite. "Yes," he said, remembering to breathe. "Ah, you make up your mind so soon. Perhaps you are wrong." She piroued away from him toward e bed, making the black tulip flare and lace foam under its corolla around her legs with a dry rustling. She stopped the spin f adng him, so suddenly that the skirts snapped above her knees like banners in a stiff gust. She seemed wholly human. ib: "Impossible," Jack said, mustering all his gallantry. "I think you're exquisite. Uh, what shall I call you?" "Oh, I do not come when called. You will have to exert yourself more than that. But my name could be Rita, if you need one." She lifted the front of the skirts up over the welts of her stockings, which cut her white thighs only a few inches beneath the vase of her pelvis, and sat down daintily on the side of the bed. "You are very distant," she said, pouting. "Perhaps you suspect I am only pretty on the outside. That would be unfair." "Oh no. I'm sure -- " "But how can you be sure yet?" She drew up her heels. "You must come and see." T he clock was striking four when she arose, somehow looking las though she were still on high heels, and began to dip up her clothes from the floor. Jack watched this little ballet in a dizziness half exhaustion and half triumph. He had hardly enough strength left to wiggle a toe, but he had already surprised himself so often that he still had hopes. Nothing had ever been like this before, nothing. "Must you go?" he said sluggishly. "Oh, yes, I have other business yet." "Other business? But -- didn't you have a good time?" "A -- good time?" The girl turned tod him, stopping in the act of fastening a garter strap. "I am thy servant and thy lamia, Eve-fruit, but thou must not mock me." "I don't understand," Jack said. struggling to lift his head from the bunched, sweaty pillow. "Then keep silent." She resumed assembling herself. "But -- you seemed -- " She turned to him again. "I gave thee pleasure. Congratulate thyself; that is enough. Thou knowest well what I am. I take no pleasure in anything; it is not permitted. Be grat ful, and I shall come to thee again; but mock me, and I shall send thee instead a hag with an ass's tail." "I meant no offense," he said, half sullenly. "See thou dost not. Thou hadst pleasure with me, that sufficeth; thou flesh. Thy potency, that I go to try even now; it comes on to night i' the other side of the world, and I must plant thy seed before it dies in my fires -- if ever it lived at aH." a hoarse whisper. "Have no fear, I shall be back tomorrow. But in the next span of the dark I must change suit" The dress fell down over the impossibly pliant body. "I become an incubus now, and a woman waits for that, diverted from her husband by the two-fold way. Reach I her in time, thou shalt father a child on a woman thou shalt never even see. Is that not a wonder? And a fearful child it shall be, I promise thee!" She smiled at him. Behind her lids now, he saw with nausea and shame, there were no longer any eyes -- only blankly flickering lights, Hke rising sparks in a flue. She was now as fully dressed as she had been at the benndnig, courtseying gravely. "Wait for me .  . unless, of course, thou dost not want me back tomorrow night...?" He tried not to answer, but the woids came out like clots of poisonous gas. "Yes... Oh, God..." Cupping both hands over her hidden groin in a gesture of obscene conservatism, she popped into nothingness like a bursting balloon, and the whole wei of the dawn fell upon Jack like the moimtains of St. John the Divine. xn D r. Stockhausen died on St. Valentine's day, after three days' fruitless attemi by surgeons from all over the world, even the fects of a drau of a hundred minims of tincture of iodine. The surgery and hontal care were all free; but he di intestate, and it appeared that his small estate -- a few royalties from his books and the remains of a ten-year-old Nobel Prize -- would be tied up indefinitely. Especially in view of the note he lefi behind, out of which no tribunal, whether scientific or judicial, could hope to separate the mathematics from the ravings for generations to come. Funds were gathered for his grandchildren and divorced daughter to tide them over; but the last book that he had been writing turned out to be so much like the note that his publishers' referees could think of no colleague to whom it could reasonably be offered for posthumous collaboration. It was said that his brain would be donated to the museum of the Deutsches Akademie in MunLcfa -- again only if his affairs could ever be probated. Within three days after the funeral, however. Ware was able to report, both brain and manuscript had vanished. "Marchosias may have taken one or both of them," Ware said. "I didn't tell him to, since I didn't want to cause any more suffering to Albert's relatives than was inevitable under the terms of the conssion. On (the other hand, I didn't tell him not to, either. But the commission itself has been executed." "Very good," Baines said. He was, in fact, elated Of the other three people in the office with Ware -- for Wiare had said there was no way to prevent Fr. Domenico from attending -- none looked as pleased as Baines felt, but after all he was the only man who coimted here, the only one to whose emotions Ware need pay any more than marginal attention. "And much faster than you had anticipated, too. I'm very well satisfied. And also I'm now quite ready to discuss my major commission with you. Dr. Ware, if the planets and so on don't make this a poor time to talk about it." "The planetary influences exert almost no effect upon simple discussion," Ware said, "only on specific preparations -- and of course on the experiment itself. And I'm quite rested and ready to listen. In fact, I'm in an acute state of curiosity. Please charge right in and teil me about it." "I would like to let all the major IP demons out of Hell for one turn them loose in the world with no orders and no restrictions -- except of course that they go back by dawn or some other sensible time -- and see just what it is they would do if they were left on their own hooks like that." #Tnsanity!" Fr. Domenico cried X out, crossing himself. "Now surely the man is possessed alreadyl" "For once, I'm inclined to agree with you. Father," Ware said, 'ough with some reservations about the possession question. For all we can know now, it's entirely in character. Tell me this, Dr. Baines: what do you hope to accomplish through an experiment on so colossal a scale?" "Experiment!" Fr. Domenico said, his face as white as the dead. "If you can do no more than echo. Father, I think we'd all prefer that you kept silent -- at least until we find out what it is we're talking about." "I will say what I need to say, when I think it is needful," Fr. Domenico said angrily. "This thing that you're minimizing by calling it an 'experiment' might well end in the dawn of Armageddon!" "Then you should welcome it, not fear it, since you're convinced your side must win," Ware said. "But actually there's no such risk. The results may well be rather apocalyptic, but Armageddon requires the prior appearance of the Antichrist, and I assure you I am not he... nor do I see anybody else in the world who might qualify. Now, again, Dr. Baines, what do you hope to acoomlish through this?" "Notibii through It," Baines, now totally caught up in the vision, said dreamily. "Only the thing its -- for its esthetic interest alone. A work of art, if you like. A giganitic action painting, with the world for a canvas -- " " -- and human blood for pigments," Fr. Domenico ground out. Ware held up his hand, palm toward the monk. "I had thought," he said to Baines, "that this was the art you practiced already, and in effect sold the resulting canvasses, too." "The sales kept me able to continue practicing it," Baines said, but he was beginning to find the metaphor awkward, his though it had originally been. "Look at it this way for a moment. Dr. Ware. Very roughly, there are only two gener kinds of men who go into the munitions business: those without consciences, who see the business as an avenue to a great fortune, eventually to be used for something else, like Jack here -- and of course there's a sub-class of those, people who do have consciences but can't resist the money anyhow, or the knowledge, rather like Dr. Hess." Both men stirred, but apparently both decided not to dispute their portraits. "The second kind is made up of people like me: people who actually take pleasure in the controlled production of chaos and destruction. Not sadists primarily, except in the sense that every dedicated artist is countenaince a little or a lot of suffering -- not only bis own, bot other people's -- for the sake of the endprodnct." familiar type, to be sure,' Ware said with a lop-sided grin. I think it was the saintly Robert Frost, who said that a painting by Whistler wias worth any number of old ladies." "Engineers are like this too," Baines said, warming rapidly to ii demonstration; he had b thinking aiboult almost nothing else since the conjuration he had attended. 'There's a breed I know mudi better than I do artists, and I can tell you that most of them wouldn't build a thing if it weren't for the kidc they get out of the preiliminiaiy demolitions involved. A common thief with a gun in his hand isn't half as dangerous as an engineer with a stick of dynamite. "BiKt in my case, just as in the case of the engineer, the key word is 'controlled' -- and in the munitions business, it's rapidly becoming an obsolete word, thanks to nuclear weapons." He went on quickly to sketdi his dissatisfactions, very much as they had first come to a head in Rome while Gov. Rogan had been being sent for. "So now you can see what appeals to me about the commission I propose. It won't be a series of mass obliterations under nobody's control, but a whole set of individuals actions, each in itself on a comparatively small scale -- and each one, I'm sure, interesting in itself because of all the different varieties of ingenuity and surprise to be involved. And it won't be total because it will also be self-liaiiting to some small period of time, presumably twelve horns or less." Fr. Domenico leaned forward earnestly. "Surely," he said to Ware, "even you can see that no human being, no matter how sinful and self-fulgent, could have elalboraited anything so monstrous without the dii intervention of Helll" #n the contrary," Wore said, V-"Dr. Baines is quite right, most dedicated secularists think exactly as he does -- only on a somewhat smaller scale. For your further comfort. Father, I am somewhat privy to the affairs of HeU, and I investigate all my major clients thoroughly. I can tell you that Dr. Baines h not possessed. But all the same there ere still a few mysteries here. Dr. Baines, I still think you may be resorting to too big a brush for the intended canvas end might get the effects you want entirely without my help. For example, why won't the forthcoming Sino-Russian War be enou for you?" "So that's really going to happen?" "It's written down to happen; it still might not, but I wouldn't bet against it. Very likely it won't be a major nuclear war; three fusion bombs, one Chinese, two Soviet, plus about twenty fission explosions, and then about a year of conventional land war. No other powers are at ail likely to become involved. You know this. Dr. Baines, and I should think it would please you; after all, it's almost exactly the way your firm has been trying to pre-set it." IF "You're full of coinsolaitions today," Fr. Ekmenico muttered. "Well, in fact, I am damn pleased to (hear it," Baines said. asnt often itihat you plan sometihin that big and have it come off almost as planned. But no. Dr. Ware, it won't be enough for me, because it's still too general and difficult to follow -- or will be; I'm having a little trouble with my tenses. For one thing, it won't be sufficiently attributable to me. Many people have been working to bring that war about. This experiment will be on my initiaitive alone." "Not an insuperable objection," Ware said. "A good many Renaissance artists didn't object to collaborators -- even journeymen." "Well, the spirit of the times has changed, if you want an abstract answer. The real answer is that I do object. Furthermore, Dr. Ware, I want to choose my own medium. War doesn't satisfy me any more. It's too sloppy, too subject to accident. It excuses too much." "?" Ware said with an eyebrow. "I mean that in time of war, especially in Asia, people expect the worst and try to ride with the punches, no matter how terrible they are. In peacetime, on the other hand, even a small misfortune comes as a total surprise. People complain, 'Why did is have to happen to me? -- as though they'd never heard of Job." "Re-writing Job is the humanist's favorite pastime," Ware agreed. "And his favorite poMcal platform, (too. So in fact, Dr. Baines, you do want to afflict people, just where theyVe most sensitive to beong alioted and just when they lea expect fi right or wrong. Do I understand you correctly?" Baines had the shddnig feeling that he had explained too much, but there was no help for that now; and in any event. Ware was hardly himself a saint. "You do," he said diortly. "Thank you. That clears the air enormously. One more question: How do you propose to pay for all this?" Fr. Domenico surged to his feet with a strangled gasp of horror, like the death-throes of an asthmatic. "You -- you mean to do this!" "Hush. I haven't said so. Dr. Baines, the question?" "I know I couldn't pay for it in cash," Baines said. "But I've got other assets. This experiment -- if k works -- is going to satisfy something for me thalt Consohdaited Warfare Service hasn't siatisified in years and probably never will again to you. Not all of it, but -- well -- just short of being a controlling interest. You ought to be able to do a lot with that." "It's hardly enough, considering the risks involved," Ware said slowly. "On the other hand, I've no particular desire to bankrupt you -- " "Doctor Wiare," Fr. Domendca said in an iron voice. "Am I to conclude that you are going to undertake this fearful insanity?" "I haven't said so," Ware replied need your hdp -- " "Nev. Neverr " -- and everybody dse's. It isn't really ithe money thjalt nttracts me, primarily. But (witbout itbe money I sihould never be able to undertake an expedmenit like this in the first place, and I'm certain the opportunity will never come up again. If the whole thing doesn't blow up in my face, there'd be an enormous amount to learn from a trial like this." #CT think that's right," Hess' voice X said. Baines looked toward him in surprise, but Hess seemed quite serious. 'Td be greatly interested in it myself." "You'll learn nothing," Fr. Domenico said, "but  the shortest of all short-cuts to Hell, probably in the bodyl" "A negative Assumption?" Ware said, raising both eydbrom this time. "But now you're tempting my pride, Father. There've been only two previous ones in Western history: Johannes Faustus and Don Juan Tenorio. And neither one was properly safeguarded or otherwise prepar. Well, now certainly I must underltake so great a work -- provided that Dr. Baines is satisfied that he'll get what he'll be paying for." "Of course I'm satisfied," Baines said, quivering with joy. "Not so fast. You've asked me to let all the major demons out of Hell. I can't even begin to do that; I can call up only those with whom I have pacts and their subordinates. No matter what you have read in Romantic novels and plays, the three superior spirits cannot be invoked at all. and never sign pacts: those being Sathanas, Beelzebuth and Satanachia. Under eadi of these are two ministers, with one of the six of which it is possible to make pacts -- one per magician, that is. I control Lucifuge Rofocale, and he me. Under him in turn, I have pacts widi some edgihty-nine other spirits, not all of wMch would be of any use to us here -- Vassago, for instance, who has a mild nature and no powers except in oiystallomaiicy, of Phoenix, a poet and teacher. With the utmost in careful preparations, we might involve as many as fifty of the rest, certainly no more. FranMy, I think that will prove to be more than enou" "I'll cheerfully take your word for it," Baines said promptly. "You're the expert. Will you take it on?" "Yes." Fr. Domenico, who was still standing, swung away toward the door, but Ware's hand riiot out toward him above the desk as if to grasp the monk by the nape of the neck. "Hold!" the magcian said. "Your commission is not discharged. Father Domenico, as you know very well in your heart You must observe this sending. Even more important, you have already said yourself that it is going to be difficult to keep under control. To that end I demand your unstinting advice in the preparation; your presence in the conjurations, and, should they be need, your utmost offices in helping me and my other Tanists to abort it. This you cannot refuse -- it is all in your mission by stipulation, and in the Covenant by implication. I do not force you to it. I do but remind IP you of your positive duty to your Lord." "That... is ... trae..." Fr. Domenico said in a side whisper. His ifiaoe as gray as an unltinited new blotter, he gro for the chair and sat down again. "Nobly faced. I'll have to instruct everyone here, but I'll start with you, in deference to your distress -- " "One question,' Fr. Domenico said. "Once you've instructed us all, you'll be out of toudi with us for perhaps as much as a month to come. I demand the time to visit my colleagues, and perhaps call together a convocation of all white magidians -- " 'To prevent me?" Ware said between his teeth. "You can demand no sudi thing. The Covenant forbids the slightest interference." "I'm tall too horribly aware of that No, not to interfere, but to stand by, in case of disaster. It would be too late to call for them once you knew you were losing control." "Hmm... Probably a wise precaution, and one I couldn't justly prevent. Very well; just be sure you're back when the time comes. About the day, what wuld you suggest? May Eve is an obvious choice, and we may well need that much time in preparation. "It's too good a (time for any sort of control," Fr. Domenico said grimly. "I definitely do not recommend piling a real Walpuigisnight on top of the formal one. It would be wiser to choose an unfavorable nit, the more unfavorable the better." "Excellent good sense," Ware saidi "Very well, then. Inform your friends. The experiment is hereby scheduled for Easter." With a scream, Fr. Domenico bolted from the room. Had Baines not been taught all his life long that such a thing was impossible in a man of God, Baines would have identified it without a second thought as a scream of hatred.  T heron Ware had been dreaming a joum to the Antarctic continent in the midst of its Jurassic the dream had been becoming a little muddled with personal fantasies -- mostly involving a minor enemy he had in reality had sent for, with flourishes, a good decade ago -- and he was not sorry when it vanished unfinished at dawn. He awoke sweating, thou the dream had not been espedaly stressful. The reason was not far to seek Ahktoi was sleeping, a puddle of lard and fur,' on ie pillow and bad nearly crowded Ware's head off it. Ware sat up, mopping his pate with the top she and stared at the cat with nearly neutral annoyance. Even for an Abyssinian, a big-bound breed, the familiar was grossly over-weiight; clearly an exclusive diet of human fle was not a heialthy regimen for a cat. Furthermore, Ware was not even sure it was necessary. It was prescribed only in Eliphas Levi, who often made up such details as he went along. Certainly Phoenix, whose creature Ahktoi was, had made no such stipulatioin. On tihe other hand, it Wias aOiwiays best to play safe in such matters; and besod, financially the diet was not much more than a nuisance. The worst that could be said for it was that iit spoiled the cat's lines. Ware arose, naked, and crossed the cold room to the lectern which bore up his Great Book -- not the book of pacts, which was of course sitill safely m the workroom, but his book of new knowledge. It was open to the section headed but except for the brief paragraph summarizing the reliable scientific information on the subject -- a veiry brief paragraph indeed -- the pages were still blank. Well, that, like so much else, could wait imtil Baines's project was executed. Truly colossal advances might be made in the Great Book, once Ware's retirement had left the members of Baines's party again at loose ends, and all of them, even Baines, were probably a little shaken at the magnitude of what they had contracted for. In Baines and Dr. Hess, perhaps, there still remained some faint traces of doubt about its possibility, or at least some inability to imagine what it would be like, despite the previous apparition of Marchosias. No such impediment could protect Jack Ginsberg, however -- not now, when he awakened each morning with the very taste of Hell in his mouth. Ginsberg was committed, but he was not wearing well; he would have to be watched. The waiitiQig peiiiod would be especially haird on him. WeU, that couldn't be helped; it was prescribed. The cat uncurled yawned, stretched, lurched daintily to its feet and paused at the edge of the bed, peering down the sideboard as though contemplating the inward slope of Fujiyama. At last it hit the floor with a double splat! like the impacts of two loaded sponges. There it arched its spine again, stretched out its back legs individually in an ecstasy of quivering and walked slowly toward Ware, its furry abdomen swinging from side to side. Hein? it said in a breathy feminine voice. "In a minute," Ware said, preoccupied. "You'll get fed when I do." He had forgotten for the moment that he had just begun a nine days' fast, which when completed he would enforce also upon Baines and his henchmen. "Father Eternal, O thou who are seated upon cherubim and seraphim, who beholdest the earth and the sea, unto thee do I Hf t up my hands, and beseech thine aid alone, thou who art the fulflUment of works, who givest booty imto those who toil, who exaltest the proud, who art destroyer of all life and author of death; rest art thou, protector of those who call upon thee; do thou guard and defend me in this undertaking, thou who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen! Shut up, Ahktoi." Anyhow it had been years isince he had believed for an instant that Ahktoi was really hungry. Maybe lean meat was What the cat needed. IF instead of all that baby-fait -- though stillbirths were certainly the easiest kind of rations to get for him. R inging for Gretchen, Ware went into the bathroom, where he ran a bath, into which he dashed an ounce of exorcised water left over from the dressing of a parchment. Ahktoi, who like most Abyssinians loved running water, leapt up on the rim of the tub and tried to fish for bubbles. Pushing the cat off, Ware sat down in the warm pool and spoke the Thirteenth Psalm, Dominus iU luminatio meat of death and resurrection, his voice resounding hollowly from the tiles; adding, "Lord who hast formed man out of nothing to thine own image and likeness, and me also, imworthy sinner as I am, deign, I pray thee, to bless and sanctify this water, iat all delusion may depart from me unto thee, almity and ineffable, who didst lead forth thy people front the land of Egypt, and didst cause them to pass dryshod under the Red Sea, anoint me an thou wilt, father of sins. Amen." He slid under the water, crown to toes -- but not for long, for the ounce of exorcised water he had  added still had a trace of quicklime in it from the tanning of the lambskin, which made his eyes sting. He surfaced, blowing like a whale, and added quickly to the steamy air, insipiens in corde suo... Will you kindly get out of the way, Ahktoi... who hast formed me in thine image and in they likeness, deign to Mess and sanctify this water, so that it may become unto me ihe fruition of my soul and body corners of the phenomenal and epiand purpose. Amen." phenomenal world: Someone knocked on the door. Bedrimubal, Felut, Anabotos, His eyes squeezed closed still, Ware Serabilim, Sergen, Gemen, Dogroped his way out. He was met at mos, who art seated above the the threshold by Gretchen, who heavens, who beholdest the depths, sponged his hands and face ritually grant me, I pray thee, that those with an aspged white cloth and things which I conceive in my mind retreated before him as he advanced may lalso be executed by me through into the bedroom. Now that his thee, who appear clean before theel eyes were cleared, he could see that Amen." she was naked, but knowing what Gretchen went out, flexing her she was that could scarcely interest sycorous buttocks, and Ware began him, and besides, he had been dethe rite of vesting. Hein? Ahktoi voted to celibacy since his earliest said plaintively, but Ware did not love of magic, like anyone in Orhear. His triduum was launched, ders. Her nakedness was only andevoutly, in water and would be obother rule of the rite of lustration, served, strictly, until the end in Waving her aside, he took three steps blood; wherein would be required to toward the bed, where she bad laid the slaughter a lamb, a dog, a hen out his vestments, and said to all and a cat. How to Beat the Rising Cost of Living We've put our Subscription Department in a time warp for you. Although the price of IF has had to go up, you can still subscribe at the old rates if you act at once. Just fill out and mail the coupon, or (if you don't want to mutilate your magazine) send a letter with your name and address, and your check or money order... and if you act now your subscription will be honored at the previous rates. But please don't wait -- they won't stay in suspended animation forever! IF ! IF, #I Hudson Street I New York City # I Please  begin  renew my subscripI tion to IF for I  # Issues at # j  # Issues at # j My check or money order Is enclosed. I Name I Address I Cty State Zip j (Outsltfe of U.#., add I for eaeh # Issues) I This offer expires  October #, # IF  Novelette Someone was sharing my body -- and doing better with if than I ever did! I E ver wake up in the middle of the night with the eerie conviction that someone was there in the darkness of your room? I guess almost everybody has. But this night it was different with me. Not someone, but something was there; and it was in my bed -- real, a thing that glided up from the sheet and skimmed across my chest -- not touching the skin ough, seemingly -- up, up toward my face. I grabbed for it, but found nothing. Then, as I rolled over to snap on the light, it settled on the back of my neck; and there I did get the feel of the tg for an instant Or did #? It seemed like a half clam shell with the flat open side against me, and as I tried to explore it with my fingers it literally melted or dissolved. Better to say that it absorbed swiftly into my body at that point without my feeling anything whatever of its entrance. There was somehow the impression that, if this bad been a clam shell, a small one like a Oherrystone, the creature itsdf in the half and was alive. Thou there was no feeling of wetness, in fact no sensation at all. Only an impression. The light flicked on at my finger's touch, and I sat up jerkily, blinking to assure myself that I wasn't dreaming. A voice within told me soothingly and convincingly to go back to sleep. Which I must have done at once. T welve light-years distant in the city of Xenor on Tau Ceti II, planet of the roso#inted mists, a huge crowd was assembled in the palace square. The hush of fearful anticipation held them as their faces all raised up toward a balcony of the palace. No humanoids, these; they were magnificently built humans, differing from us mainly in the golden hue of their irises and their simple, glistening, skintight garb. Among those near the walls were twenty or more of the Small Folk, likewise human in appearance on a miniature scale, but with heads slightly oversized for thedr #-inch, nearly naked, chubby bodies. They had no wings, but levitated and flitted about almost continuously. Their mission seemed to be to ahay the obvious fears of the multitude since, even though they spoke or sang no words, their cheering thoughts were spread throughout the square without discrimination. The burden of these was: "Our princess will, recover. We know. We know. Believe us!" Beyond the wall could be seen the multicolored, pyramidal buildings of a great city: windowless structures with aircars darting busily hither and yon amongst them, often landing on a stage atop one of the tall edifices. Far beyond the city, of course, towered mighty Mount Leo with its upper halo of rose-hued mist on which the late sun gleamed redly and hotly. Inside the palace, in a large room from which the balcony opened, an agitated young man in princely garb faced the Mindmaster, who was robed like a monk. On a couch before them lay the draped form of a girl of charming proportions, her face nearly hidden in a tumbled mass of glorious golden hair. She was obviously in deep coma. "What's the verdict, Nelot?" the young man demanded. "Prince Bor, our tests show that in the hysteria of her original seizure the cortex fled her brain and has since taken up residence in a maid of Erd." "Eard, third planet of the white sun Saltan? So far?" "Just so," the Mindmaster said gravely. "What's being done? Aria must be saved; think of our subjects out there. Think even of me!" The young man sounded panicky. "We'll do everything possible -- with your cooperation. I've means for teleporting your cortex to Erd, there to reside in ,a selected male whom we can assist and direct, hopefully unknown to him, to provide protection for her -- mainly against herself." "Meaning her suiddal impulses girl's. It was Bor, head uncovered may return?" and eyes shining. The crowd out"Afraid so, which is foremost to side, save for the fluttedngs of the be guarded against. It now remains Sms Folk with their unspoken as only to find a suitable male; he must surances, remained silent -- waiidng. be about your age, mentally and "You're certain he's the right one. physically fit and of good moral Nelot?" quavered the prince, caliber. You'll be provided with the "He tested out in all respects." mental and occult powers necessary "Then why delay?" to the task." "We won't, my dear Bor, not any 'How long will it take to find further. Quiet now. Still." this man?" Once more the mists swirled, now "Not long, I hope. Be patient hiding only the recumbent ones and while I continue the search." Nelot's lower portion. The Mindmaster reached up, and a beam of R osy mists swirled, and the two light like that of a theatrical spot standing figures as well as the streaked down to illumine the rosy inert one were blotted from view mist over the spot where Bor's head for a moment. Flashes of movement lay. showed through, and then the mists A caplike shape pushed up, quivercleared away to reveal a second ing, and then rapidly dwindling in draped form on a pallet beside the size to approximately that of a golf ball. The Mindmaster, his brow corrugated, gestured; and the ball sped off into infuiite distance, shrinking as it raced until it was a then vanisihing like the light spot from a TV tube. As the mist cleared to reveal the two recumbent figures again, it was evident that they were in similar comas. Bor's fine features had congealed into a solid mask, and there was no indication whatever that he even breathed. Nelot composed the draping of both figures, then stepped to the balcony and reassured the crowd in the plaza as best he could. His talk was continuing as all faded from sight and sound. II I n the office next morning, my partner Grant Cory looked at me searchingly as he came in. Our secretary hadn't arrived yet, and I was opening the morning maiL It was early. "What's been happening to you?" Grant asked. "You look like a new guy." "Hah! I sure don't feel like it," I told him. "I had a perfectly rotten night." "Couldn't sleep?" "Worse. Crazy dreams." A slip of paper slid from the envelope I'd just sli'tted, a check. "Hey! Look at this!" I waved it before my partnM-. "It was for #. "And listen to this..." I read from the accompanying letter, which was from a client we'd worked extremely hard to please. "It ends up," I said and quoted: An extra two thousand over and above your fee is included as a bonus for the excellent report your partnership rendered. You will hear from us the first of next month with regard to , another report we want you to make.' " "How about that?" Grant was on his feet doing a sort of little tap dance. "This seems to be our lucl day." Miss Bailey came in then and took over the rest of the mail, her eyes widening behind the thick glasses when she saw the check. Later a in the thousands too, though less than half the previous one. At any rate, we were flushed with success -- it isn't every day that a youthful partnership of consulting engineers sees so much in the way of fees. "Time for vacation," Grant declared. "What say. Chuck? I've been wanting to take the family to Acapulco for a long time -- wife has a cousin there. So what say we split the bonus and go places?" "Okay," said I, "and I think I'U go to Vegas, not having a family. You may take two weeks with pay when we return. Miss Bailey." The girl grinned her thanks. "Vegas!" exclaimed Cory. "You don't gamble." I'd been asking myself already what prompted me to decide on Las Vegas, for the reason he mentioned. Though to drive the route was an appealing prospect. "Oh, it can be exciting or restful there, as you choose. I like to see a girlie show now and then; and, besides, Jack Carter's at the Flamingo, and I get a big bang out of him." A sinall accusing voice within told me these weren't the real reasons, but I couldn't think of any other at the moment. "Everyone to his own taste," Grant said. "So let's go." "I'll give you a ring every second day. Miss Bailey," I told her, "to see what's going on. Watch things, huh?" We were gone then, leaving our desks perfectly clear. I hadn't even known there was a Star Vega Hotel in Vegas, but I flew up there from LA on one of their planes instead of driving. A thing I never would have done ordinarily. So I guessed Cory had been right; I did seem to be a new guy. And the Star Vega was quite a splash, a #-story, aluminum-andglass deal that dwaiied all the others on the strip. With a regular park all around it and a lagoon witih swans. Posh! Luxury itself. The lobby was like most of the others only more so, opening into the casino on the right side and with elevators and the registration desk on the left. I filled out the card, and a snooty bellhop took my grips and led me to room #, where he held out his hand for the fiver I was sap enough to slip him. Didn't even thank me, so I guess I wasn't so biearted at that. After all, he had opened the transom. I looked out the window down the strip, where tthe neons were already starting to flare. Quite a sightl I was suddy and unaccountably seized with a desire to try my luck in the casino. Imaginel Next thing I was in line at one of the cashier's booths and buying five bucks worth of quarters. Ihen I strolled along a row of two-bit, onearm bandits and played one of the quarters in each, hitting the jackpot in one after another of them. Both my jacket pockets were filled, and quarters were splashing all over the floor, jangling and rolling every which way. I bad quite a following all of a sudden and this included a page boy (they hate being called bellhops in this place) with a canvas sack two feet deep and some sage advice that he whispered while oollectkug the next jackpot in his bag. "If I was you, mister," he muttered, "I'd lay off the slot machines a while. Else they'll think you're just too damn lucky." "Who're 'they?' " I whispered back as he gathered in another jackpot. "Just 'they.'" I played the last four machines in the row -- jackpots all -- end his sack was loaded to the point where he could barely carry it "I'll change these into tens and twenties for you," he panted. "Okay and keep twenty for yourself," knowing he'd steal more than that and caring not at all. I moved over to one of the crap games as he staggered off. Here I made side bets and won them all, whether I bet for or against the player. My pockets were fiUiimg with bills now. Some lOU's too, which I itucked into a separate poet. Then the dice were in my hand, and I was rattling them for a roll. Never shot crap in my life, but I'd been watching and listening. Made what are called "passes" -- twelve in a row. Not without a fuss though; at every diird pass as I let all or most of the money ride I got a dirty look and a fresh pair of dice. But I kept right on winning, mostly with naturals; but if I did roll a point -- and there were only two of these, a ten and a four -- I made it on the next toss. Bettors on the side were making a cleanup on me too when a small voice inside told me to draw way down, bet only ten bucks, that I was about to crap out. Which I did on the next roll. "Snake-eyes!" someone groaned. Counting my winnings, I had over sLsteen thousand dollars before I took the sheaf of bills the pageboy brought me. "Twenty-seven C's here," he whispered and was gone. I sauntered over to one of the blackjack tables and watched that game for a while; then when a player across from the dealer rost to leave the game, I started to edge into his seat. "Huh-uh," husked the dealer, "you're to hot. Try the Sands." So the word had been passed: here's a possible big winner. L ucky as I'd been -- or whatever you want to call it -- I'd developed no gambling fever whatsoever. There was only that small voice thiat egged me on, telling me I hadn't won enough yet. Enough for what? At the Sands I started differently, picking out the few slot machines that took in silver dollars when there were plenty of those to be had and paid off in kind, but now used those cashable doUar-sized tokens with the casino's name showing prominently among the imprints. I still hit the jackpots, but changed my procedure by feeding back a couple of tokens from the loot, then cashing in immediately after eadi successive haul. This proved to be a smart move on account of the lesser attention it attracted, besides being easier on my pockets. I'd added quite a bundle of tens, twenties and even C-notes to my take by the time I found and cleaned up on the last dollar machine. Then to the wheel, and here I played a cautious game, although I won every bet I placed. But they weren't spectacularly large bets; I spaced them and after each win I walked around for a while and came back later -- four or five times, I guess. By the time the croupier was wising up to me I was ready to quit anyway and had what I thought to be a lot of loot froin this source. Though I learned later that I w little more than a piker compared with some of the legendary big winners. Which was good, I suppose. My next play was at the Riviera. I'd aimed at the Sahara, but the cabbie touted me off that and onto the Riviera -- said it was going bad for the house there that night As if I hadn't done well enough already, by my standards. Of course I didn't know just how much I'd IP deposited with the managers when I made that brief stop back at the Star Vega after the Sands play but guessed it might be twenty grand or more. Never used the word "grand" in that sense before either -- so it must be some of the jargon of the strip was rubbing off on me. In the Riviera casino I made directly for the first crap game in sight and there I made a few side bets, winni ng them all. I was tired of it by now and very glad to hear that small voice say, "It's enough." So that was that; I quit and was paid off to the tune of only eighteen C's. But if that was enough, so be it. I was really weary. Ill B ack at the Star Vega, I sat down at one of those little tables that "dot the edges of the casino here and there, a table not too far from the desk and the elevators. A perky cocktail waitress, wearing much much less than the law allows, asked for my order. "A double Scotch," I said, "on the rocks, with iced coffee on the side. The girl looked at me like I must be crazy or something. Maybe I was just then, but this was what I wanted and I didn't bat an eye -- if you can bat an eye either with or without a bat. "Yes sure," she gurgled and flitted off with a display of about all the skin she had. The drink was a good one and only set me back five bucks plus a dollar tip. So what! The gal was cute, and I was in the swankiest place on the strip, besides having played -- and beat -- the casinos for most of an evening. I should feel good about it, I suppose, but somehow I didn't. In fact, I felt a little depressed by it all. A t this point I suddenly seemed to be two people. Things became confused, and it sure wasn't the Scotch. Not just one double. The casino, to me, faded into obscurity. Mists enclosed it all and then cleared, revealing the Mindmaster and the two draped forms on Tau Ceti II. Nelot suddenly looked directly at me and plac a finger on his lips to enjoin silence. Then he drew back the covering from the face of the recumbent man. So help me, it was me! Same shock of brown hair, same high cheekbones and square jaw, same straight (I'd always thought almost, but not quite aristocratic) nose. On him it was aristrocratic. This was Bor, and Nelot redraped his face gravely as the body remained motionless. Then the Mindmaster proceeded to Aria and uncovered her head, swept back the unbelievably golden hair, (not blonde, not yellow, but really golden) and revealed a calm, almost perfectly chiseled profile. Skin ivory, satiny smooth, fordhead higji chin firm and cherry lips purs in the hint of a pout. There was a slight intimation of pertness in the almost imperceptibly retrousse' nose. "Just so you'll know..." Nelot was wSuspeimg. The nods swirled again, vanisiMd, and a local voice readied me from the registration desk. An unpleasant one. I saw that an expensively dressed young girl was taking some guff from the clerk, and I burned. So help me again, hers was Aria's profile! And the sHgtht pout of the lips was atrerdble -- she was about to cry. I got there fast. "What goes on?" I demanded of the clerk. "It's none of your business," he said hauitily. I leaned over and yanked his collar awry. "I'm making it my business, you lug!" I turned to the girl, who was white and shaky. "They locked me out of my room," she quavered. "Why?" I yeUed at the clerk. "Non-payment of her bill," quoth he, trying to straighten his collar and glaring at me, "besides the lOU's." "What lOU's?" No answer. "I'm going to the manager!" I bawled, grabbing the now frightened girl and propelling her toward his door, which was "You can't go in there," the clerk squeaked. But I could and did, pushing the girl ahead of me. "Can't you ask her to sit down?" I yammered at the portly manager. He looked daggers at me, then seeing I sure meant busine: "You may sit down. Miss Jones," he said grudgingly. Sht sat, twisting her handkerchief. "What the hell is this about?" I demanded of the fat one. "She owes us sixty doUais for three days room rent, and there are the lOU's." He consulted a ledger. "# on the button. Plus our #, of course." "What?" I yelped. "What're diey for -- the lOU's?" Gambling chits. At several casinos. They brought them here for collection, and Miss Jones says she can't pay. Besides, there's no such pson; we checked the address she registered under. They -- " "Who're 'they?'" I asked him. Again -- evasively: "Just 'they.'" "Yeah? How much do I have on deposit with you?" I asked, shoving the last # at him. "Including this?" He counted it and added the figure to a page of the ledger. He seemed surprised as he replied, "#." That's how I felt -- surprised. How come it so nearly balanced? "Pay her lOU's -- and yourself," I told him. The girl was frankly crying now, shaking her head vigorously at me to indicate a "no." "Cut it out!" I told her. Then to the manager: "You get her room unlocked -- pronto! -- meaning, take out the plugs you put in the lock." "Yes, sir" He reached for one of his phones. "Miss Jones -- " I began. "Call me Jan," she said through the tears. "And I'm Chuck, Chuck Radford. Let's go!" W A t the desk I asked for my key -- and hers. They were # and # -- adjoinmg roomsi Coincidence? Not by a damn sight. This gave me pause, and a s m a l l voice confirmed thait it had been planned that way. I was two people again -- or something. The clerk grinned as he passed over the keys. "And wipe that idiotic smirk off your pussl" I gritted, "or I'll bash your teeth down your throat." He looked and acted like a wooden puppet after that. The elevators here were automatic, of course; and as the girl stepped through the open door it almost shut in my face before I was able to get in after her. I forced it back and was in. The little # square was already lighted as the door closed and the car started up. It was then I saw the hoodlum in the comer, with a wicked looking snub-nosed automatic weaving to cover first the girl and then me. "This is a snatch!" he declared, "and you, dude, keep the hell out of it or you'll get it first." I'd get it anyway, I decided -- if he could manage. He wasn't going to leave any witness alive. So, glad that I'd kept up with my judo and karate practice, I chopped down on his wrist before he could move or pull the trigger. He screamed as the wrist snapped and the gun boomed, making a neat round hole in the floor. I chopped again, first intending to get him directly beneath that crooked nose, a chop that might well have proved fatal. So I dropped my swing and hit his throat with the edge of my stiffened hand instead. His eyes popped, his face puirpled and he fell to the floor In lagony. For good measure, I kicked his temple. Hard. And he was out This was when Jan fainted. We were still rising: #, #, #. I grabbed the emergency phone with the girl draped over my other arm and told the operator: "Send your house dick up to floor #. He'll find a gunsel -- a would-be killer -- in elevator six. Out cold. I'll block the elevator at #." I carried Jan to # and deposited her limp form on one of the full-sized beds. The room was a duplicate of mine next door, and I unbolted the connecting door on her side, then went over and did the same on mine. No wrong intention, you understand, only good. Jan needed help now -- and protection. Like Nelot had said of Aria. Turning out the bright overhead lights, leaving only her bedlamp burning, I returned to my own room. But not for long. "Chuck," she called, her voice sounding fuzzy and uncertain. When I returned to her room, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, swaying slightly. "Where am I?" she asked dazedly. "In your own room," I told her, "and I'm right next door. So don't be afraid of anything -- especially of me. And I want you to go to bed now and get the rest you need. I'm leaving the connecting door ajar, and you call me if you need me. Any time of the night." Suddenly I was very tired myself...Vv-VvA ' 'KAhu.i irS! # i A' ; i "All right, Chuck," she agreed submissively. Than again and good night." "Im going to tub now and turn in myself," I told her, almost losing my trance as I went through into my own room. "Good night." It was then I remember that Jan's eyes, though blue, seemed to have golden glints in them when tears were in their comers. That her hair, chestnut brown, had glinted golden at certain angles under the bedlamp. What it all meant I couldn't imagine. I shook my head to clear it. X ater, as I lay between the cool sheets and was about to doze off, I thought I heard movement in Jan's room. But there wasn't any light, in either room. Only a stray moonbeam streaked across my floor. I was imagining things again. Or was I? But the patter of soft feet on thick carpeting couldn't be mistaken, and then my covers moved and someone slid in beside me. "Jan?" I husked, unbelievingly. "Yes," a small voice replied. I still couldn't believe it. My hand strayed hesitantly toward her and touched smooth, warm, naked flesh. I yanked the hand back as if I had burned it. Now look, I'm no Don Juan nor even an avid girl-watcher. At the same time I haven't reached the age of thirty entirely celibate. My physical reaction was swift and urgent, as would be that of any normal healthy male. There wiasn't any small voice to say no, and I didn't need one. I said it to myself -- sternly. "What're you doing here?" I asked her. "Why I... I...  thought... after all you saved my life in elevator. You -- you paid my -- " "And now you think you owe me... this -- " "Ye-yes." A barely audible whisper. "Sure you know what you're doing?" "Y-yes. I know." "How old are you?" "Al-almost twenty-one." "Married?" "No." -- "Then you're a virgin." It was a statement, not a question. "Y-yes." I burned. "Get out of here," I snapped. "Out of my bed, Jan. Before I change my mind." She got. Swiftly. The soft patter of her running feet left me sweating. Then I heard her sobbing softly over there in her own room. I fek like a heel, and I'll never tell you why. I lay there quaking as the sobs died down in the stillness. Utter stillness. It spooked me, and I listened. Hard. In a little wMe I thought I heard movement lagain over there. I padded softly to the connecting door, following a moonbeam from floor to open window, through which it shone. And there on the sill was a girl-figure, clearly outlined through a sheer nightie against the light of the moon. Her hair was golden. Almost flinging myself across the intervening distance, trying to make no noise diat migihit startle her into making the fatal leap, I threw my aims around -- nothing -- which is what was theire. Nobody. No gown. No girl. I was imaginmg things again. Turning to the wall switch, I flooded the room widi light I there, in her own bed, curled up with the covers pulled tightly about her, was Jan. Lxxking plenty scared. 'And her eyes were as blue as the midday sky, her hair russet brown. With no sign of golden glints. I began to breathe again. "Oh, it's you. Chuck," she said, blinking. "What is it? Did I cry out in my sleep?" "No. Just thought I heard a noise in here. Go back to sleep, my dear." I turned out the lits. "Thanks some more. Chuck. And good night -- again." "Thank me not," was all I managed to say. "Good night." Guess I'd meant to say something funny. Funny ha-ha, you know, not funny strange, but nothing occurred to me that'd fit. Perhaps I was just too damned gjad the swell kid didn't remember. Or had it been Jan in my bed at all? I'd never know for sure. IV I must have passed out as soon as I hit the hay... Prince Bor and Princess Aria of Xenor were in each other's arms, and the Mindmaster was smiling with satisfaction as he watched them. "She's completely cured," he assured Bor. "Thanks to my host. Chuck," Boc said. "And to my dear litde hostess," Aria put in. "Really, my dear Bor, I think it was she who was most reqKxnsible for my cure. She was marvelous, and I hope the things I made her do won't get her into any trouble." 'Trouble? No -- no trouble," said the Mindmaster. "What can we do for them. Nelot?" asked Bor. "Let me think, let me think." Nelot looked like a kindly old gentleman in a clerical robe. "We must and we can do real favors for them both. I shall tbinic of something and arrange for it. Meanwhile, you two get out idiere on the bialoony and show yourselves to your subjects. They're awaiting the good news -- eagy." The mists closed in .   A t #:# A.M. I woke up, feeling strangely alone. For a moment I couldn't remember wh:e I was or why. Had I dreamed all this? I stumbled to the connecting door and found it locked on the other dde. Knocking on it brought no response, so I tried die telephone. "Room # does not answer," the operator told me aJter long ringing. "Just a moment. Sir." Then, after a half minute: "Miss Jones checked out at six. Mister Radford." The time it took me to shave, shower and dress was neglible. There was no message in my box when I inquired downstairs -- not a thing. She might at least have left a note, I thought on the spur of the moment. But then I guessed it was just as well and I decided to ohialk it off against experience -- forget it. The money, you ask? Never would have felt right about the winnings anyway. Iad to earn mine. Besides which, I knew that the Mindmaster out there -- and Bor -- really managed the phenomenal luck. In another hour I was on a plane for LA. The weather was beautiful, and the passengers either grumpy or mirdiful, depending on what ieir luck had been. WTtich meant that most of them were quiet, staring out the windows. Only about three besides the hostesses wore smiles. Then everything changed. I was in one of those little aircars of Xenor, heading over the dty toward the pdace. The streets below were in uproarious celebration, long streamers draped the buildings and The Small Folk, flitted everywhere, caroling. Even the sun seemed to halo spun and tilted crazily. Bor and Aria stood on the balcony, and the multitude in the plaza was jubilant. Shouting, dancing, hugging one lanother indiscriminately. If this was in LA, the police would be wondering when to step in. Unexpectedly and mysteriously, then, I was in the Mindmaster's mind, and he was in mine. He stood behind the prince and princess, and for a short time I was seeing through his eyes and hearing through his ears how the joyous celebrants in the plaza down there were making known their love for their princess and her consort. The two objects of their subjects' acclaim remained enclasped and were obviously the happiest couple in Xenor. Perhaps in all of Tau Ceti II. That they were very much in love with each other and with their people was patent. T he aircar I occupied took a sudden leap and zoomed upward at iuoredible speed as Nelot's thinking told me we would visit selected spots on the daylight side of his planet. Which is what happened. As in one of our travelogues, I saw and sensed and heard the land of this world at various points and from many angles. Now we were over an inky sea that I knew separated us from the only other continent. Over hundreds of kilometers of well kept blue and orange farm lands with prim living and service buildings. The rose-misted mountains provided a background for it all, and then we swooped down into another colorful city with tall pyramidal buildings and parades and celebrations much the same as in Xenor. I learned that their language was different here. The people, too, were proportioned differently, being shorter and with broader features. But the Small Folk were everywhere, the same here and just as happy. Now we were in a purple jungle, sweeping over waving fronds of tall feathery growths. Down into a clearing where nearly naked, deeply tanned, natives performed a joyous dance about what looked to be a three-meter-taJl layer cake with imaiges of their ers, the prince and princess, topping it all. The tour continued, end I piracdcally felt my eyes bugging ifrom my head. But the Mindmasiter's thoughts held me in complete enthrallment. "We've seen enough," he at length conveyed, "enough so you know how truly grateful are our people. To you and to the one you call Jan we have caused to # engraved medals which convey our humble thanks -- in your own tongue -- for your invaluable help." He pressed a heavy packet into my hands be:re I could object or reply and concluded: "For your part and hers in the cure of our princess. For oiu: own sent... A soft hand was tapping my shoulder, a soft voice telling me, "We are over Los Angeles and will land in Ontario Airport in ten minutes. Sir. Please fasten your seat belt." A sniiMng hostess. The little aircar had multiplied in size and completely changed character. I saw up front the lighted sign: own airliners. But the heavy packet, with its outworidly wrappings, was on my knees. H aving parked my Thunderbird out back, I came into my office through the rear door and didn't notice for a moment that I had a visitor -- a big character who sprawled all over my best leatherupholstered client's chair. "Who're you and bow'd you get in?" I asked all in one breath. "Pushed past your gal out front. She said you was away, and she didn't seem to know or care when you'd be back. So I told her Fd wait right here if it was for a week." Then I got a good look at him. Fiftyish. A character all right, but he did have a disarming grin. Ten gallon hat, which he never bothered to take off, cowboy rig that fitted him badly over his generous pouch, and -- so help me! -- high heeled boots with spurs! He tossed a card expertly to my desk top and stood up. The card "I'm Jeffers," he declared, rising and sticking out a big homy paw. "Senior partner." They were a well known, well thought of outfit. I evaded the grip, which I could see was meant to be crushing, and a quick thumb-bend brought him to one knee, red-faced. "Sorry," I said. But I wasn't. "Must have slipped," he mumbled as he got up. I could have sworn I heard a muffled feminine giggle. I'd have Miss Bailey on the carpet if I found she'd been eavesdropping. "Now what might be your business, Mister Jeffers?" I was again back of my desk, and he in the chair. He guffawed and I simply had to laugh with him, this buffon. Then he sobered. "I'm offering you a contract, a job. You know we have the rdnfordng steel mostly welded up and are almost ready to start pouring concrete on the Kern County Dam, I suppose?" "Yes, I know that." Jeffers lowered his voice. "I want you to make a complete inspection now and after the dam is compleled. The fee is fifty grand, and #I add # more if you -- weU -- oveUodk a few things." "You mean you're cutting down on materials, on quaiity, event on workmanship -- and want me for a cover-up." The man hemmed a little, reddeor ed anew. "Y-you might say thaL" This time I didn't merely bum; I blazed: "Go plumb to hell, will you? And get out of here fast!" The reaction was amazing. Jeffers fell out of the chair, yelling with laughter, holding his sides as he rolled over and over on my best rug. "You'll do, you'll do, young fellow!" he roared. Then, from the washroom stepped a vision, if ever there was one. # Tan!" I shouted, then halted my al rush toward her. She was bending over Jeffers, helping him back po his chair. "See, daddy," she exulted. "Didn't I tell you?" As she stood up to face me, I guess I stared like a stupe. She was the living image of Bor's princess Aria in far-off Xenor. Excepting for color of eyes and hair -- the image. Same faultless ivory skin, same traffic-stopping figure. But what was this daddy business? "I'm Joyce Jeffers," she explained before I could ask. "And I had to prove two things to daddy. First you. He didn't believe there was a young engineer from LA with in-integrity like I described. And then I had to prove I'd had amnesia." "Aimiesia?" I felt still more stupid. 'Yes, and I suppose this seems strange to you too, but from the time I left home until that -- that night I wasn't Joyce Jeffers but Janice Jones. And yet now I remember -- well most all -- what happened during the Vegas days. Only sometimes I was Jan and sometimes -- Aria." "Aria? You know then?" I moved closer to the vision. The long lashes dropped, then raised again so she could regard me as I thirstily took her in from the top of her faultless coiffure to her silken knees, calves, ankles. "Yes Bor," she whispered. "Geel" I exclaimed like a schoolboy. Her dad was looking on with a broad grin on his puss. "Beat it, Pop," I told him, and he tippy-toed toward the outer door. She arched those pouty, kissable red lips, revealing glistening white teeth in a dazzling but really human and understanding smile. Her face was turned up to mine, and she was so close now that the scent she used was strong in my nostrils. What was a guy supposed to do? Just what I did, and thoroughly. Hungrily. For this is what I had spent all my previous life to earn -- without knowing it Time stood still, but at length we were in this world and had opened the packet from Tau Ceti U and were examining its contents hand in hand and with our heads very close together. There were two beautifully executed medallions, made of an extremely heavy metal that looked like platinum but was iridescent. Most beautifully engraved on these were the words the Mindmaster had hinted at. Joyce's name was correct and correctly spelled. So was mine, even to the "Charles," which I detested but put up with. This Nelot knew much more about us than we did ourselves. The left edge of my medallion was notched to slip into and form a supplement to Joyce's. In fact when the two slid togeer it was like a single larger plaque. "Why don't we?" breathed Joyce. "First preacher I can get," said I. And we agreed afterward that we bad then heard a trio of delighted musical chuckles, one bass, one tenor, and the other a rich contralto. Besides a cheery chorus of flutterings and the exultant chant: knew. We knew." Complete Short Novel by Robert Silverberg A Handbook for Tomorrow's Texans by H. H. Holls ib: Dear Editor: IF is one of my favorite SP magazines -- and it's also one of the worst magazines on the market. story done well -- based on a poor subject is more salable than a good story done around a good idea -- wihen the latter is written without any skill." Now I'm not saying that IF has no time or effort put into it -- evidently quite a lot of work goes into the mag -- work is needed to produce anything approaching a magazine. However, it's apparent that not enough work goes toto IP. You, Mr. Pohl, should not be content to let a writer develop all by himself. If it looks like you're getting a new author that has some potential, work with him a little bit -- Dannie Plachta came up with his first decent story in the July, #, issue. And it's pretty visible that thedevelopment of this new writer has been through the work of the author alone. Looking back at Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon ia a Harsh Mistress, you can see a story that could have been vastly improved with a little editorial help. Heinlein looked like he was coming back into the swingof-things with this one. And then what does he do for a conclusion? He gives a lecture. Boy, what a let down. You, Mr. Pohl, could have shown Heinlein what the public wanted. Through a discussion between myself and several other fans it has been  decided that Heinlein's big problem has been his conclusions. Look at the racially biased Sixth Column (in paperback: The Dau After Tomorrow") at least the ending continues and concluded the plot. I'm not saying that our hardworking editor, (alias Frederik Pohl) should have forced Heinlein to peddle his piece to another mag -- but what I do say is this : Work with your magazines. Impress your personality upon your magazines. If you have an author that looks like a prospective Giant in the Earth, work with the man. And work with the authors so that we can have more stories that fit into IP and give the audience more to appreciate. IF is an extremely weird position; this is the only magazine that can bridge the gap between "Quality" science fiction and science fiction for "Entertainment". That bridge is your best' bet. And the bridge can only be built through a lot of hard work on the part of the editor. Cross "entertaining" stories with quality materials, and what have you got? You've got the most popur lar type of story in a growing genre. This cross is the thing that's going to bring an increase in dinnilation -- not the advertisements for the "Rosicmcians." Oh yeah -- in "Hue and Cry", let the heading of each letter be what the writer originally intended it to be. This letter is not headed with "Dear Editor", and that heading just looks a little too much like something out of a comic book. In other words, don't change the headings for uniformity's sake. There's all ready too much conformity -- and all that kind of junk. Besides, different headings should help the development of the mag's personality. -- Jim Young, # TJlysaes Street N.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota #.    Dear Editor: I noticed Mr. Arthur C. Clarke's letter in the June If. There is indeed a story entitled The Anticipator which ends with the line, "And the anticipator, horribly afraid, ran down a by-street." It is not by H. G. Wells, however. It is by Morley Robeiis and appeared in his The Grinders Wheel (Nelson, #) and was reprinted in Dorothy L. Sayers' The Omnibus of Crime (Harcourt. Brace and Co., #), which is where I found it. This is all the information I have about the story. I suggest that you refuse to pass this information on to Arthur C. Clarke, at least until he ajgrees to write a new novel which will be serialized in If. I thought that the style of Mr. Leslie A. Beece's letter in the same issue seemed unpleasantly familiar. When I checked the address I discovered, lo and behold, that Mr. Reece has the same address as Stephen E. Pickering, who writes in the same pointlessly polysyllabic fashion as Mr. Reece. Is this the reason, perhaps that Mr. Reese bemoans the fact that fans "have completely ignored... writings of the fan-sociologist Stephen Pickering... "? Has the secret identity of Stephen Pickering been unveiled? Now that you have Andre Norton and Samuel Delany in If, don't let them get away. I must, however, say that Driftglass was far below Delany's usual high standards. When the heck are we going to Hank Davis, #I Linden Walk, Lexington, Kentucky #. # You'll get the next Heinlein the minute we can bring it to you -- but when that will be is anyone's guess. The counfounded man is building himself a new house, and until that's done, no novels! Incidentally, the identity of the "Wells" story was tracked down also by Robert A. Gould, Frank McSherry, Jr., Robert Coulson, Dean McLaughlin, Donald Franson and -- oh, yes, Arthur Clarke himself, shortly after we printed his letter. -- Editor.   m Dear Editor: I started reading If about five years ago when it was in the doldrums and have watched it grow and grow imtil now it is the finest science-fiction mag around. In fact, I have been reading If for so long that I feel like one of the oldtimers. I have just finished The Iron Thom and, although I have reservations, consider it one of the finest sci-fi novels I have ever read. Budrys's work has always been good, and his only fault was that he did not write often enough, a fault which you seem to be correcting. Let me add that he is also my favorite book critic. It is a pleasure to read someone who does not indiscriminately recommend every scifi book on the miarket. If I bought every book the other reviewers recommended, I would soon be povertystricken. So Budrys's column comes as a breath of fresh air. However, I intended to write about Budrys the author, not Budrys the critic, and I do have one criticism of The Iron Thom, After all the care with which Budrys built tip the complex society of Amsirs and (humans, and the fascinating odyssey of Honor Jackson to Ea, the final chapters come as a disappointment. I do not know what I expected, but certainly not the same sterile society seen before in countless inferior novels, and presented in sudi a dull fashion. Up to this point The Iron Thom had been fresh npd inventive, but suddenly the author's imagination deserts him. I feel that Budrys, who has always taken the trouble to create real people for his stories, spent so much time in characterization and striving to avoid the usual space-opera cliches, that he forgot about his plot. By the time the novel ends, nothing is resolved, either on Earth or Mars. I would like to know what happened between the Amsirs and the humans after Jackson left Mars, and I would like to see more of Jackson's adventures on Earth. It seems to me that the author ended The Iron Thom before he finished his story. Of course, there is always the possibility that I am criticising Budrys for writing a differt story from that which he wanted to write, in which case I apologize, but I still think that the last quarter of The Iron Thom does not measure up to the first three quarters. Tuminjg to another topic, a recent article in Variety reports that Star Trek has been renewed for next season which surely comes as good news to all  readers. It is a pleasure to see good science fiction on TV after ibeing inundated with tripe like Lost In Space and The Time TunneL The latter is not even science fiction, but an adventure series with a "you are there" gimmick. Your letter column has been full of comments on Star Trek and TV sci-fi, but no one ever writes about those recent movies: The Fantastic Voyage and the great Fahrenheit J#, Don't fans go to the movies any more? -- Patrick Swift, # Marion Avenue, Bronx, New York #.    Dear Editor: This thing about your artwork for If has been going on for quite some time now, and I don't see where anything has dianged; at least not for the better. I remember back when Galaxy was just starting out, in an editorial, the editor (H. L. Gold) said something like, "In this issue, you can see the changes that you, the readers, have voted for." Now I feel that even though that was way back in the fourth issue of Galaxy, I think that you still wish to live up to your old policy. After all, it is us readers that keep your magazine going I So why not take a poll, and see what changes the readers would like? I know that you can't please all the readers all the time, but I'm sure that most of the readers would like to see a change in the artwork in If. Why not ask them and see? I Do us both a favor, publish this letter in Hue  Cry, and see what the rest of your readers think. While your art isn't the best, your stories are, and they won you your Hugo. Keep up the good stories, and you will get another Hugo. Just another reason to improve your art; why cant a first-class magazine (which is what the Hugo represents) have first-class art? Glad to see that you have Philip Jose Farmer coming up in If. He has to be one of the most original authors living! And his '"Riverworld" series is great. Another good writer that, seems to do quite a lot for you is Larry Niven. One last thing, do you see the sony novel, Rogue Star, anytime soon? -- Randall Richmond, # Shadow Wood Drive, Houston, Texas #. # Some time in the next few months -- we hope. It would have been running by now but we keep getting stories by others that politeness directs us to run first! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Wherever youVe keeping Ifs Hugo, make room for more. On the basis of the first five issues of #, especially the March issue, youVe got it made. Your habit of overlapping serials is a superb one, especially when you have serials by Budrys, Chandler and Laumer. Terry Carr and Larry Niven are the finds of the year... any year. And then there is the Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen. YouVe performed an invaluable service by encouraging new authors,  Oh, yes. You hinted at the possibility of an addition to your line-up of magazines -- then silence. What's cooking? -- David Charles Paskow, # West #th Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. # Coming off the back burner soon : International Science Fiction, the same being a new magazine devoted to publishing stories from other parts of the planet Earth, as for instance Russia, Germany, France, Australia, etc. -- Editor,    Dear Editor: #'s policy of giving new writers their start is paying off: The Soft Weapon, by Larry Niven, is one of the best sf stories, by a new or old writer, that I have ever read. If I may be sacrilegious, I think it's as exciting as anything Asimov or Clarke or Heinlein has ever done. One question: since the February issue came out in #, is The Soft Weapon eligible for awards for '# or '#? -- Jeff Rensch, Webb School, Claremont, California #.  For #, according to our reading of the rules... and we agree that it's a worthy nomination! That does us for another month. This month's "first" is To Serve The Masters, by Perry A. Chapdelaine, a mathematics professor from Tennessee. We don't often run a writer's maiden effort as long as this one... but we don't often get one like To Serve the Masters, either! In case you missed the earlier discussions, what these 'firsts"" are all about is simply that every issue we bring you at least one writer who has never been in print with a science-fiction story before. Where do they come from? In the mail -- submitted to If at its regular editorial office, neatly typed, doublespaced, white paper, with stamped self-addressed return envelope enclosed. Are they required to follow special rules? No; they are considered along, with stories by our regulars and have to compete with them for interest. Who do they come from? Why, often enough, someone very much like you...   w A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction gaaranteed. may return the book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation if not completely satisfied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as payment in full. ft privilege guaranteed, of course.  The Biggest and Best Silkie Story Yet Plus Many Other Great Stories and Features Your Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the inlFormation requested on a plain piece of paper.) Fro then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Wifi the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. # Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose   my check or money order for: r n # issues for # j I # Issues for #  Name... Address   City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether QJ new or Q renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do  Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit # Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Vol. #, No. # Fredenk PobI, Editor Robert M, Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circuiation Director by A. E. Van Vogt by C. C. MacApp by Hal Clement by James Blish by Larry Ekenberg by Donald J. Walsh by Max H. Flindt by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF publlsbed monthly by Galaxy Publishing Oorppratlon, Robert M. GiJdnm President, VoL #, No. #. Main Otfloe: #. Street. New York, #. eoc per csopy Suipalptlon # issues # Inrhe United States, Canada, MiOT, South America and Central Amerln and U.S. Jdsseions, elsewh .OO. and at additional mailing Second-class postw Paid at New Yoris. New Yol . , jofflces. Copyright by Galaxy Publiahlng OorpcRration, #. All right, lnclu( Ing translation reserved. Ail matnlal must be accompanied by self-addrewea stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for mliclted material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between chrars and actual persons Is oolncl dental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company. New York. N.Y. # IF  Editorial N ot long ago, one of our satellites was put to work photomapping part of Arizona -- something that sateAliites can do rather better than any other means known to man, if only (because a single exposure photographs a whole state at that moment. ( Conventional aerial photographs have to be patched together, and that's a mess, when you've got a piece photographed at #:# AM that should match up with one photographed at noon. But how? The angles of the shadows are different; the appearance is different; the information is there, sort of, but it takes a highly trained analyst to get it out.) In the northwest comer of Ajrizona the picture revealed a long, thin line. A geological fault I -- crowed the photo-interpi'etation crew, a fault where no one had ever detected one before I And so teams of geologists hotfooted it out to the indicated point, because a geological fault is not juist a point of interest, it is more often than not a place where minerals can be found. Unfortunately no minerals were found in this case, ibecause the "fault" turned out to be a range fence, photographed from orbit. The way we heard about that was Ksteninjg to one scientist telling a joke on some other scientists -- and as a matter of fact, the reactions were probably pretty funny when they reached their "fault" site. But ever and above the anecdotal value of the incident, it illustrates something about the capacities of our satellites. We can see a lot from space; and we can report it back to Earth, very quickly, very quickly and reliably. A couple of days later, the Near East erupted into war; and about a week later, the United Nations erupted into its own kind of war, a war of words,with much talk about whose trooi)s were where and whose aircraft carriers were doing what to whom. Listening to the bland and barefaced statements of some of the diplomats involved as they appeared on television, we couldn't help thinking of those recon satellites... and couldn't help wishing we had a few more of them in orbit, openly reporting to the world what they observed with their electronic eyes. No doubt sovereign states do have the privilege of tellinig flatfooted lies when they want to -- anyway, the custom is sanctioned by several thousand years of precedent -- but it seems pretty childish to lie about something that can be readily checked. No wonder all those U. N. delegates looked so haggard I Probably they were thanking about what a little "open sky" surveillance can do to diplomacy over the next few years -- and realizing that technological unemployment may be reaching out to claim another hatch of victims I For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided Jby subjects into separate books. Facts and fibres as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. may return the book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation If not completely satisfied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as payment in full. privilege guaranteed, ox course. IF  Serial My ob was simply to find and punish energy wasters -- even at the bottom of the ocean! I 've never met a psychiatrist prolessanaily and don't much want to, but just then I iraitheir wished thene was one around to talk to. It waan that I felt like cracking up; but when you have something profound to say, you lake to have it appreciated, and it would have taken a professional really to apprecitate the remark I wanted to make at that moment. There's a word for people who can't stand being out in the open with crowds staring at them,' and there's another one for those who get tali in a dither from being cramped into a small space. They're both common enough ailments, but I would ihave liked to place a bet that no one before had ever suffered from agoraphobia and claustrophobia simultaneously. With a name like mine, of course, I've never exactly sought the public eye, and usually I resist the temptation even to make ibright remarks in company. Just then, thougji, I was wishing there was someone to hear that diagnosis of my feeliings. Or maybe I was just wing there was someone. I couldn't hear the storm any more. The Pugnose had broken up almost where she was supposed to. She had hit the heavy weather just where the metro office had said she would, and her fuel had run out Wthin five minutes of that time -- thixt even I could have predicted; trust a Board boss to make sure Dio more stored energy than could possibly be helped went down with her. There was some battery power left, though, and I had kept a ruhning Loran check uinitiil she drifited as close to Point X as she was going to. This turned out to be about half a mile. When I saiw I was going on past the key spot I blew the sqtdbs, and poor httle Pugnose started to come apart amidships. Shield never been intended for any other purpose, and I hadn't fallen in love with her as some people Ddiglht have, but I didn't like the slgM the same. It seemed wasteful. I didrf t spend any time brooding over it, though. I ducked into the tank and sealed it and let nature tiiike its course. By now, if static pressure instruments could be traced, the tank and I were eight hundred feet down. It was very, very quiet. I knew water was going by because the depth was increasing about two feet a second, but I couldn't hear it. Any loose pieces of the boat were long gone, floatables being scattered over the Pacific and sinkables mostly preceding me toward the bottom. I'd have been disturbed as well as surprised to hear anything solid bump against my particular bit of wreckage. The sUence was good news, but it still made me uncomfortable. I 'd 'been in space once -- a waste investigation at one of the Board's fusion research stations -- and there was the same complete lack of sound. I hadn't liked ik then; it gave me the impression that the universe was deliberately snubbing me until the time would come to sweep up pay retmadns. I didn't like it now, though the feeling was diffefeiit -- this lime it wias as though someone were waitolhing carefully to see what I was up (to and was trjdng to make up has mind when to do something about it. A psychiatrist wouldn't have been much help with that notion, of course, because there was a good chance that it was true. Bert Whelsrtrahl had disappeared in this volume of water a year before. Joey Elfven, as competent an engineer and siubmariner as could be found on Earth, had been lost track of ten months later in the same neighborhood. They were both friends of mine, and I was bothered by their vanishing. Six weeks ago, Marie Wladetzki had followed (the other two. Ihis was much worse from my point of view. She was not an investigator, of course -- the Board, as personified by its present boss whose name I'll leave out of this account, doesn't believe women are objective enough -- but that didn't mean she couldn't be curious. Also, she'd been as interested in Joey as I was in her. Being Marie, she hadn't actually broken the letter of any regulations when she took out a Board sub at Papeete, but she most certainly strained the spirit of most of them. She hadn't said where she was going and had last checked in between Pitcairn and Oejo a thousand miles from where I was now sinking with the remains of Pugnose; but no one who knew her had any doubts about where to look first. The boss was human enough to volunteer me for the look-see. My own inclination would have been to do just that -- take a sub and see what had happened; but brains won out. Bert's disappearance could have been an accident, although there were already grounds for suspicion about the Easter Island area. Joey's vanishing within Half a dozen miles of the same spot could conceivably have been coincidence -- the sea can still outguess man on occasion. After Marie's loss, though, only a very stupid person would have gone barging into the region any more obviously than he could help. Therefore, I was now a thousand feet below the top of the Pacific and several times as far above the bottom, camouflaged as part of a wrecked boat. I didn't know exactly how much water was still below me; even though my last fix on the surface had been pretty good and I'd acquired an excellent knowledge of the bottom contours north of Rapanui, I couldn't be sure I was going straight down. Currents near an island are not the smooth, steady things suggested by those little arrows on small-scale maps of the Pacific. I might, of course, have tried echo-sounding, but to control that temptation I had no emission instruments in the tank except floodlights; and I had no intention of using even those until I had some assurance that I was alone. See without being seen was the current policy. The assurance would come, if ever, very much later, after I had reached the bottom and spent a good, long time listening. I n the meantime I watched the pressure gauge, which told how the water was piling up above me, and the sensors which would let me know if anyone else was using sonar gear in the neighborhood. I wasn't sure whether I wanted them to react or not. If they did, it would be progress; I'd know someone was down here who shouldn't be -- but it might be the same sort of progress the other three had made. It might not be grounds for too much worry, since fifteen or twenty feet of smashed hull would show on any sonar scope for just what it was, and supposedly the tank inside would IP not. Of course, some sonarmen are harder to fool than others. I could look out, of course. The tank had ports, and a couple of them faced the opening where Pugnoses stern used to be. I could even see things at times. There were flecks of phosphorescence diiMng upward and streaks of loiminosity not quite bright enough to identify in color wthich sometimes whipped past and vanished in the gloom and sometimes drifted for minutes in front of a port as though they marked the position of something which was trying curiously to look in. I was tempted -- not very strongly, but tempted -- to turn on my lights once or twice to see what the things were. The wreckage was tumbling slowly. I had been assured that this wouldn't happen -- that weight had been distributed so that the sharp prow would always point down and leave the tank on top when I ihit bottom -- but there was no one to complain to. There also seemed to be nothing to do about it, and I began to wonder just what I could accomplish if the tank wound up in bottom ooze, or even on hard rock, with the wreckage on top of it. The thing had little enough maneuverability as it was. With very much extra weight, dropping ballast might not be enough to start me 'back toward the surface. I couldn't shift my own weight enough to affect the tumbling at all. The tank's inside diameter was only about six feet, and much of that volume was taken up by fixed apparatus. Some of my friends have shown a tendency to solve problems by doing nothing until the last possible moment. I've outlived most of them. Once I'd noticed the tumbling, it took me about five seconds to run through the possible actions. I could cut loose from the wreckage right now, exposing the nearly spherical form of the tank to anyone who was watching with a good sonar -- though no one had been so far. I could turn on the lights so as to see the bottom before I hit and, hopefully, still separate in time if it proved necessary; that would also be inconsistent with the concealment plan. I could sit and hope I would land in the right attitude in spite of the tumbling -- that is, do nothing. That might mean that I would have to argue for my life with the laws of nature, which are harder to convince than most human opponents. The first two choices meant -- well, maybe Bert and Joey and Marie were still alive. I reached for the light switch. I didn't touch it, though. All of a sudden I could see the bottom anyway. At least, it looked as though it ought to be the bottom. It was in the right direction -- I could still tell up from down -- and it seemed flat. And it was visible. II I didn't believe it, of course. I'm a very conservative person who likes even his fiction realistic, and this was too much to swallow. I had to stop reading The Maracot Deep when I was young because it described a luminous ocean bottom. I know Conan Doyle had never been down and needed the light for story purposes and didn't have very high standards of consistency anyway, but it still bothered me. I knew he was wrong for the same reason everyone does -- the bottom just isn't bright. Only now it was. The tumbling wreck was swinging me upward away from the light, and I had time to decide whether I should believe my eyes or not. I could still read instruments. The pressure dial gave a direct depth of four thousand eight hundred eighty feet; a quick mental correction from the record tape of the thermograph added another two hundred or so. I certainly should be near the bottom, somewhere on the northern slopes of the mountain whose peaks are Rapanui. I swung gently over the top and back down the other side, and my line of sight pointed downward again. Whether I wanted to believe my eyes or not, they insisted there was light in that direction. It was a gentle yellow-green glow -- just the sort of thing you use in lighting effects to give the impression of on underwater scene. At first it looked uniform and smooth; then, a few turns later and two hundred feet lower, it showed a pattern. The pattern was of squares, with their corners just a little brighter than the rest of the area. It didn't cover the whole bottom; its edge was almost below me, and it extended toward what I thought was the north. though my compass wasn't reacting too well to the tumbling. In the other direction was the normal comforting and frightening darkness -- that was real enough. Two things happened at almost the same instant. It became evident that I was going to come down pretty close to the edge of the light area, and it also became obvious what the light area was. The second realization got to me. For three or four seconds I was so furious and disgusted that I couldn't plan, and as a result I almost didn't get around to telling this story. The light was artificial. Believe it if you can. I realize that for a normal person it's hard. Wasting watts to light up the outdoors is bad enough, but sometimes it's a sad necessity. Spending power to illuminate the sea bottom, though -- well, as I say, for a few moments I was too furious to think straight. My job has brought me into contact with people who were careless with energy, with people who stole it, and even with people who misused it; but this was a brand new dimension! I was lower now and could see acres and acres of light stretching off to the north, east, and west until it blurred out of sight. Acres and acres lighted by things suspended a few yards above the level bottom, things visible only as black specks in the center of slightly brighter areas. At least, whoever was responsible for this display had some sense of economy; he was using reflectors. Then I got my anger under control, or maybe my fear did it for me. IF I siiddemly realiized itihiait I was only a few dozen yaids laibove the ligjbts. I was not goang to come down among them, but a little to the south. I couidfi't say safely to the south. I couldn't say safely anything, because my assemblage of Pugnosebow and safety tank was turning over slowly enough to let me predict the attitude it would have when it hit bottom, and it looked pretty certain that the open end of the huiU would be underneath. Q uite aside from the fact that I wouldn't be able to see anything from under the wreckage, there was the likelihood that I wouldn't be able to do anything either -- such as get back to the surface. This time I did reach the controls. Since the whole idea hinged on concealment, the separators used springs rather than squibs. I waited until the spin put the hulk between me and the light and punched the botton. The push was light enough to make me wonder for a few seconds whether I mightn't he in even worse trouble than I'd supposed. Then light began to come in through ports which had been covered by the hull, and that worry ended. The springs had kicked the tank aiway from the lighted region, so I could see Pugnoses bow outlined against the luminescence. The separation had slowed our flaU very slightly with the wrecfcage now going just a trifle faster than I was. At least something was going as planned; the wreck would hit first, so there should be no chance of my getting trapped under it. I hadn't expected to see it hit bottom, of course. I would certainly never have expected to see what happened when it did. For the most part, level stretches of sea bottom tend to be on the gooey side. They may call it gkblgerina ooze or radiolarian ooze, but it's usually obze. You can meet with coral and sand and other firrstuff in shallow water and honest rock at times on slopes, but whe-e it's level you expect something like a cross between ordinary mud and the top couple of inches of a stagnant pond. When something hard and heavy lands on it, even gently, you don't expect the bottom to give it much suppKWi:. You may sometimes be surprised on this matter, but you never count on anything bouncing off the sea bottom. Pugnose didn't exactly bounce, I have to admit, but she certainly didn't behave properly. She hit the lighted surface thirty or forty yards from the edge, and perhaps twice as far from me. I could see easily. She touched, as expected, and sank in as expected. There was no swirl of silt, though -- no sign of the slowmotion splash you normally see when something lands in the ooze. Instead, the bow section disappeared almost completely into the smooth surface while a circular itpple grew around it and spread laway from the point of impact. Then the wreckage eased gently back up until it was half uncovered, then back down again, still in slow motion. It osdllaited tftiait wiay tihree or four itknes before coming to rest, and eacih rebound sent another ripple spreading out from the spot for a dozen yards or so. By the time that stopped, so had my tank. I felt it hit something hard -- rock, for a bet, and I'd have won. Then it began to roll very, Very gently toward the light. I couldn't see the surface I was on at all clearly, but it seemed evident that it was a sohd slope which would deliver me beside the Pugnose in two or three minutes if I didn't do something about it. Fortunately, there was something I could do. The tank had what we'd come to call legs, six-foot#ong telescoping rods of metal which could be extended by springs and retracted again by solenoids. I was still hoping not to have to use magnets, but it seemed that the legs were in order; I propped out four of them in what I hoped were reasonable directions. Enough of the guesses were right to stop the roliinig, and for the first time I had a steady observing platform. NaturaMy, I concentrated on the area I could see. I was now below the level of the lights themselves. They appeared to 'be strung on lines at intervals of about twenty yards, with the same spacing between lines. That was a guess, though, since I couldn't actually see any supports. Their regularity bolstered the guess, though the fact that the wreckhad come down just about on a line between two of the lights without appearing to disturb them counted rather against it. I wasn't too stuprised to see nothing growing or moving on the flat surface they illuminated, though of course I wouldn't have been surprised to see a few tracks or holes scattered around. At least, I wouldn't have been surprised at them if I'd not seen the Pugnoses landing. With that to go by, it was perfectly clear that whatever I was looking at was not sea bottom. It was more like a rubber sheet stretched like a tent roof over everything more than about ten feet down slope from me. The wreck had dented it but hadn't punotured it, and the stuff was strong enough to hold up the comparatively small submerged weight of metal plastic. This, I reflected, could be useful. I had no idea why whoever was under the tent wanted to light up the outside,but unless the fabric were completely opaque they could hardly help seeing the shadow and the dent in their ceiling. That should bring people to investigate, and they would be easy to see without my having to use lights of my own and giving myself away. All I needed was one clear view of unauthorized human beings at the bottom of the Pacific; that, plus the scale of energy wastage I could already detail, would be all my report would need -- a major control expedition would do the rest. No one expected me to arrest a group large enough to set up an instaMation like this, and I had no ambition that way either. To put it mildly, the tank wasn't maneuverable enough to serve as a police oar; I W;as in no position to arrest a passing shrimp. All I asked was a good look at a work sub, or a suit of pressure armor, or even a handling robot under remote control -- anything that would show that this setup was being actively managed -- one good look, and I'd be ready to drop ballast. I wouldn't do it too hastily, of course, for two good reasons. A sonarman might reasonably dismiss a sinking object as a piece of a wrecked ship, or even a dead whale, and not be too curious; but he would be most unlikely to feel the same indifference toward something rising. I'd have to take some time to evaluate the sonar danger. It was nice, but not conclusive, that there had been no sign of it so far. The other reason against haste I didn't know about yet, and didn't learn for a number of hours. I 'm not a clock-watcher. I knew I had plenty of survival time in the tank and wasn't keeping very close track of how much of it had passed. When the second reason did show up it never occurred to me to check the time, and for several hours after that I was very thoroughly distracted from such things as clocks. I can't say, therefore, just how long I spent sitting in the tank waiting for something to happen. I can guarantee that it was a number of hours; long enough to get me bored, cramped, irritated and more than half convinced that there was no one under that tent roof anywhere nearby. The idea that it might be someone who didn't care a hoot about fragments of ship in his ceiling seemed too far out to be worth considering; if anyone had seen it, he'd have done something about it. No one had done anything about it. Therefore, no one was within sight. And if no one was within sight under the fabric, I might as well take a closer look at it myself. Maybe I could even get a look under it. Dangerous thinking, boy. Don't let all those wasted kilowatts go to your head. You're just a detached eyeball; if you don't get back with information, anything you do manage to do is pure waste -- and waste, of course, is the profane word around the Board. It was a temptation, though. No motion -- no sign of human life except the lights and the tent roof itself, and mighty little sign of any other kind of life. No sound. Nothing from the sonar frequency monitor. Why shouldn't I roll gently down to the edge of the fabric and study it more closely? The best answer to that question, of course, was that it would be the act of a dithering idiot. As time went on, though, it occurred to me once or twice that merely being here at all wasn't the highest possible display of human intelligence. If I must act like a fool, I might as well be a real one. I don't know where that sort of thinking comes from; maybe I should see that psychiatrist. I'm not sure just how close I came to giving in. I know I almost pulled in the legs three times and each time thought better of it. IF The first time I was stopped by something moving, which turned out to be a fair-sized shark. It was the first large living thing I'd seen since readiing bottom, and it set my thoughts off on another tangent for started to move the tank I was stopped by the memory of the shark; it had disappeared -- had it heard something I couldn't, that had frightened it off? I had no instruments outside for low or audible frequency detection, just" the sonar receptors. I know all this isn't making me sound much like a genius, or even a reasonably competent operator. I wish I'd had more time to edit my memories a bit before having to tell this story. If I'm to justify the decision I'm trying to sell, I should have some chance to look like a sensible adult first. Ail I can put in for my own defense at the moment is one of those let's-see-you-do-better remarks. Are you sure just how your own thoughts would have gone if you were practically helpless in a sht-foot plastic bubble a mile under the ocean? If you're not, please suspend your critcism until I'm done. T ie second reason for not dumping ballast too hastily finally did show up. My attention was still pretty well focused on the wreckage, so I didn't see it coming. My first glimpse was from the comer of my eye, and I thought for an instant h was another shark; then I realized it was human, and I had my evidence. Fine. Once it's out of sight I can head for the surface. Not a chance. What I needed was convincing evidence, and if my own eyes weren't convincing me it was unlikely that my words would convince anyone else. What I saw was a person, which was all right in itself; a suit of four-inch polyphase armor, adequately powered in the limbs, will hold back the ton and a quarter or so per square inch that sea water exerts a mile down. Such armor will even let the wearer look rather like a human being and move about in a very clumsy walk. It will not, however, unless he is immersed in an ocean of mercury, let him swim; and this clearly human figure was swimming. It came into view some distance to my left, appearing in the light rather suddenly as though it had come down from the darkness above. It was swimming toward me and the wreck, not in any obvious hurry. As it approached, details became plainer; and the plainest of all -- plainer even than the fact that it was female -- was that she wasn't wearing armor. She was wearing a cold-water coverall type scuba suit, absoluitely ordinary except that it had a spherical, itransparent helmet instead of a breathing mask, and the ballast seemed to be in rings here and there around body and limbs instead of being fastened to the belt. I repeat -- in fact, I had to repeat it to myself several times -- that the garment was not pressure armor. Its wearer's swimming motions showed plainly that it was nearly as flexible as ordinary skin, just as a scuba suit should be. She didn't seem to see my tank. wMdi was some relief. She didn't even seem to see the wreok until she was wsthm twenty yards of it She had been swimming very slowly along the edge of the tent roof wiiith no more apparent purpose than someone out for an afternoon stroll, up to that point. Then she changed course and headed straight for the bow of Pugnose. That didn't fit. Anyone down here should have been looking for that wreck, not running across it by accident. I'd been expecting a working party sent out by the people under that cover. Well, there's more than one thing I haven't been expecting about this business. Stop with the working hypotheses, brother, you haven't enough data even for tot yet. Just watch (I don't even address myself by name). So I watched. I watched her swim around the shattered bow, and into it and out again, and over it. Then I watched her unlimiber an object which turned out to be a light, which bad been dipped to her suit belt, and swim inside once more. That woiried me a little; the camouifilage for the tank had not been designed for that sort of inspection. Its clamps, its launching springs -- She came out again, with no more visible signs of excitement than before, and at that point something else dawned on me. It was a very minor point compared with what I had. already seen -- at least, it seemed minor when I first noticed it; as I thought, it became more and more a major puzzle. Her scuba suit was, as I said, quite ordinary except for helmet and ballast. Its ordinariness included a small tank between the shoulders, whose upper end just touched the helmet and was presumably connected with it, though I could see no piping. All this was reasonable. The jarring note was that there were no bubbles. N ow, I'm familiar with rebreather systems, and I know about chemical supplies -- mixtures of alfcaM metal peroxides and superoxides which react with water to give free oxygen and pick up carbon dioxide. I know them well enough to know that they must have, besides the chemical container and mixer systems, a sort of "lung" -- a variable-vol'ume, ambientnpressure gas bag or tank -- with the supply chemicals between it and the user's own lungs. The exhaled gas has to go somewhere until it's ready to be inhaled again. That "lung" must have a volume great enough to take aU the air a swimmer can exhale at one breath -- in other words it must have as much volume, or nearly as much, as his own inflated lungs. There was no such bag visible on this swimming outfit, and the back tank was not nearly ilarge enough to have contained one. It seemed, therefore, tot the unit did not involve a chemical oxygen supply; and unless some sort of microscopic pump was taking the gas as fast as she exhaled and squeezing it back into another part of that httle tank at fantastically high pressure, there should be exhalant bubbles. I couldn't see any u IF reason for such a recovery system, but I couldn't see any bubbles either. I had already been bothered about what gas mixture she could be breathing -- at this pressure, half of one per cent oxygen would have burn her lungs out, and there was nothing I knew of which could be used to dilute it. Even helium was soluble enough down here to make decompression a job of many hours. It crossed my mind for a moment that people might be living permanently under this pressure, breathing a nearlypure helium atmosphere with a fraction of a per cent oxygen in it; but if that were the story, I still couldn't see why that girl's suit didn't give out bubbles. Granted there might be every economic reason to recover helium, there are engineering problems which I still don't think could be completely solved. No. All hypotheses inadequate. Keep on observing. Facts so far are only that she seems to be living and moving normally in a closed system at outside pressure, and that the pressure in question -- skipping the old superstition about flattening a human body -- is quite high enough to mess up any biophysical or biochemical processes involving gas dynamics. There wasn't much more to ob serve, though. The girl clipped the kt back on her belt, took a last glance at the wreckage and began swimming away from it. She didn't go back the way she had come, but continued on to my right, slanting away 'from the lighted region. In a few seconds she had disappeared, though I knew she couldn't be very far away yet. I t seemed likely that she was oiff to get help in moving the wreck off the tent roof. How long before she would be back with it was anyone's guess. There might be a tent entrance a few hundred yards away, or there might not be one for several miles. The former seemed a trifle more likely, but I wasn't going to risk money on the question. Just my future. She might have noticed the gear that had held and launched my tank; she wouldn't have had to be much of an actress to hide an expression of suspicion under the circumstances. If she had noticed and reported it, those who came with her were going to be very curious about the whole area. The outside of the tank was deliberately a little irregular in outline so that it wouldn't be too obviously artificial, but it was not going to fool anyone who took a really good look at it. Maybe it would be better if I moved a little farther away. I wasn't concerned with personal safety; I could always get away, but I wanted to see as much as possible before that became necessary. So I told myself. Moving would be a slow process; traveling ability was not really a design feature of the tank. There were two dozen of the legs, and I had enough stored power to retract them against their springs several thousand times (that had taken argument), but I had not been bom a sea urchin. I had had a 'httle practo let me juggHe into a better observing position, not to keep out of ilbe way of seardhers. If I were foimd, my only real recourse would be to drop ballast and start for the surface. That was a once-only operation, and I didn't want to resort to it before I really had to. There was stUl some hope, I figured, of deciding what was going on down here in some detail. Maybe it's courage, or maybe just natural optimism. in T began working the legs, hoping Xlhat no infittiruments in the neigjibpdhood were reoordang the D.C. pulses as I turned the retraction solenoids on and off. I had found during practice that I could climb a slope of five or six degrees if the bottom were hard enough to give the "feet" any resistance, but that near the limit of steepness the going tended to be tricky. If I overbailanced and started downhill again it took very fast work with just the right legs to stop the roll. The sphere had a respectable moment of inertia. Because of its outer irregularity, some positions were naituiUally more stable than others, and some were mudi less. Just now I was wishing that I bad spent more time in practice, though I consoled myself with the thought that the boss wouldn't have authorized the energy expenditure anyway. I had worked my way between thirty and forty yards farther up the slope, with only one mistake that cost me any real distance, when the party I expected showed up. It wasn't a large one -- four in all. One could have been, and probably was, the giil I had seen before; the other three seemed to be men, though it was hard to tell at this greater distance. One of the new ones was towing a piece of equipment about three feet long, cylindrical in shape, and a little more than a foot in diameter. It had a slight negative buoyancy, which was understandable -- they'd make sure that nothing which got loose would find its way to the sunface. They swam over to the wreck, and two of them began pulling lengths of hne from the cylinder. They attaCihed these to convenient parts of Pugnose, while the third man pulled from ithe other end of the cylinder something that looked like a heavy bundle of netting with a collapsi balloon inside ift. When the other lines were made fast he manipulaited something on the cylinder, and the balloon began to infiaite slowly. The wreckage didn't have much submerged weight, and it wasn long before the balloon had it hoisted dear of the roof. Then all four of them got on the far side and began pushing it, swim fins fluttering violently. It took them several minutes to get it away from the smooth area and out of the light. I supposed this was all they'd bother to do, but I was wrong. With the tent roof out of danger they moved airound and began pushing the load in the direction the girl went after finding it. IP This might be a nuisiance. Maybe tbey just wanted it for a souvenir, but maybe they wanted to make a really dose examination under better conditions -- better light, or maybe even out of water. Whichever of these might be true, as long as they were interested someone was likely to notice the tank attachments. I'd have been much happier if they'd simply pushed the bow section off their roof and forgotten it. Now I bad no excuse for not following to learn more about them. Come to think of it, I should try to locate the entrance, or one of the entrances, to the place anyway. They weren't swimniing fast, but they went a lot faster than I could roU the tank. Once again I wished that some real provision for moving the thing had been made, but the argument had been that the closer the whole rig got to being a submarine, the harder it was going to be to camouflage. I hadn't bought the argument completely at the time, and I would have been even more delighted at a chance to reopen it now. All I could do, though, was hope the chance would come later on, and in the meantime wait until the swimmers got their burden a reasonable distance away and then start rolling in the same direction. P erhaps I haven't made clear quite all the nuisances involved in rolling the tank. The principle ought to be plain enough; it was simply a matter of letting the appropriate spring push out a leg against the bottom, on the side I wanted to go away from. It may not have crossed your mind that thii general method of getting around meant that living equipment, oontrol panels, and other fixed gear were sometimes to one side of me, sometimes to another, and sometimes above or below. There were times when it was very hard to keep from sitting onall the leg-oontrol buttons at once, for example. As I've said, the legs were meant more for position and attitude fine control, and to keep the tank from rolling on a slope, than for genuine travel. The need for the latter had not been foreseen, or at least hadn't been considered very great, by the authorities. At least, concentrating on working the machine along the bottom kept my mind from the worries I'd felt on the way down. It was actually more likely now that I'd come under unfriendly observation, but at least I wasn't brooding over it. The swimmers had vanished in the distance, nothing else could be seen moving in the lighted area to my left, and nothing at all could be seen the other way. The bottom under the tank couldn't be made out in detail, and in a way I was groping along -- though the verb isn't exactly right, since it implies that you can feel what's ahead of you. I couldn't feel anything; I could only note whether my vehicle rolled a little way, a longer way, or not atall whenever another leg was extended. When it didn't roll at all I had to guess which other legs to try. It would have been a lot easier if I had dared to use enough light of my own to get a decent sight of the cx:ean on top bottom, but I wasn't tbat silly. If the local (population anduided swimmers, I didn't tiave a prayer of knowing when any of ithem were around; when this mess had started we were thinikiing of subs and sonar. These I was ready to spot The slope wias not very regular, as I quickly found. Twice I rolled forward out of control for several yards when I reached a small dip. #nce I thought I was stuck for good -- I couldn't go forward, back or what was presumably downhill toward the light. As a last resort I tried uphill and found that it wasn't litphill at aU; I rolled out of control again into a hohow where I couldn't see the lighted area except as a vague, diffused glow over the ridge I'd just crossed. Getting out of that hollow used a lot of time and an irritating amount of stored power. I couldn't even relieve my feelings with language. The coupling from air through plastic to water, and from water through helmets to gas and human ears, may be pretty bad, but it isn't zero; and the soundtransmitting properties of cold water make up for a lot of matching deficiencies. I didn't dare say a word. Once out of that devil#nvented guHy I stopped, once more in full sight of the tent roof and tried to take stock. My power was rather low. There was no way of teiQiLng whether I migibt reach the entrance in three hundred yards or three thousand; the former seemed more Mkely, since the . girl hadn't taken too long to come back with her help, but then she might have met the men already outside. Nothing was certain enough to give any possible line of action even the dignity of a calculated risk. It wasn't possible to calculate. I had to find out more, though. I'd cooled down a little from my original reaction -- I could believe what I'd seen, and I realized that others would, too -- but the nows I had wasn't as heilpf ul as it was supposed to be to the Board. If a police unit were to do anything but grope around, it should know where to start. A regular entrance would make a logical place. Of course it wasn't likely that the tent roof would really keep a suib out; but judging by ie area the tent enclos, the chances of brealdnig through at a strategioally useful point would be rather slim. Maybe the best thing to do would be to throw out the caution policy and turn on my lights. The extra power would be offset by more efficient travel when I could see where I was going and I should stand a better chance of reaching the entrance before my juice failed entirely and automatically let my ballast go. If I were seen, no doubt some of the swimmers would come close enough to give me a really good look, so I might get a better idea of their high-pressure technique before I left. I 'm a cautious man by nature, and thought that one over for quite a while before I bought it. There was plenty against it, of course. Just because all I'd seen was swimmers rather than subs didn't prove there IF weren't any subs. If there were, there would be an excellenit ohance that I could never get hack to the surface -- but I'd accepted that risk before starting the trip. I pinig-ponged the matter for several minutes. Then I took a good, deep breath on the theory that I might not get many more and turned on one of my spots. It made a difference, all right. The bottom was mostly rock, as I'd suspected, and was very rough -- no wonder I'd had trouble using my legs effectively. Able to watch wihat I was doing, I resumed travel and, as I'd hoped, made much better speed with much less power drain. It wasn't exactly easy yet; I was still rolling, and had to change lights as well as legs now as I rolled, but the improvement was encouraging. I could also see more motion around me. There was a lot of small life -- shrimps and their relatives -- that I hadn't been able to spot before. They got out of my way without being too distracting. There were also plantlike growths, though considering how far they were from the nearest natural light it seemed likely that they were sponges or something of that sort. They neither helped nor hampered the rolling, as far as I could tell. However, I was paying for the much better short-range vision with a much worse view of distant objects. I might have been siirprised quite easily by a group of swimmers, but what actually happened was less predictable. I lost orientation. Not in the compass-direction sense and not completely. I could still see the lighted area to my left, though not as well as before; my compass still worked, when it happened to be right side up; but my sense of up and down, depending more on my view of a few square yards of ocean bottom than on my semicircular canals, was fooled when some of the bottom ceased to be horizontal. The change must have been gradual, or I'd have spotted it within the small area I could see well. As it was, I overlooked it completely; suddenly I was on on area of rock sloping much more steeply than any I had traversed up to then. Before I knew it the tank had started a stately roll to the left; after I knew it, leg afiter leg poked out in that general direction proved useless. It wasn't like rolling downhill in a 'barrel; it was a slow and graceful motion. I could easily have stayed upright inside the tank if I'd chosen to concentrate on that problem instead of on ithe controls. For all the use I got out of the latter, I might as well have concentrated on comfort. Some of the legs may have slowed me a little, but none of them came close to putting a stop to the journey. I rolled helplessly into the lighted region and out onto the tent foibric. For several long seconds my report-smoking attention was divided almost equally between up and down. Above me I could see the 'lights clearly for the first time. They were ordinary high-pressure, excited-vapor lamps, bigger than I'd ever seen used for general illumination, but otherwise nothing strange. I still couldn't see what held them in position, since looking up at them was hard on the eyes. Looking down was harder on the imagination, though mine was getting a bit calloused. I already knew that the fabric was remarkably strong and elastic; I'd seen how it reacted to Pugnose's bow, which must have had some pretty sharp corners here and there. I also knew that it was opaque, or at best translucent, in its normal state. I realized that the part now under my tank would be stretched. But it hadn't occurred to me that stretching the stuff would make it transparent. IV W hen I stopped moving, however, I could see ordinary sea lKttom -- rock similar to the stuff I had been rolling across under me. For a moment I thought something must have stopped me short of the tent roof after all, but glances through several of the ports killed that notion. I was nearly fifty yards out on the thing, sunk into it for just about half the diameter of the tank. From ports above that level I could see the lights above and the smooth fabric below; from the lower windows I could make out rock and occasional patches of sht on the bottom and a greenish-hite, evenly glowing oeilinig above -- evidently the fabric, lighted from the other side. It was translucent, then; but ilhe part of it stretched around the lower half of the tank offered no interference at all to vision. Some of the legs were extended on this side, and the stuff seemed to have spread in an invisibly thin film over these as well -- they could hardly have punctured it or I wouldn't have been hanging on the roof. Someone must have done some very fancy work in molecular architecture, I decided -- which shows how a wildly wrong set of premises can at times give rise to a correct conclusion. But why the tent at all? The sea bottom under it looked no different from that above. There was no sign of any human being or artificial structure in the region below. There weren't even any living beings that I could see, and I certainly looked hard -- it occurred to me for a moment that someone might have gone so far with the energy-wasting business as to try growing natural foods with artificial light. The idea at least went along with indifference to ordinary morality about energy; people who'd shine all those kilowatts into the ocean probablywouldn't boggle at overreaching their fair share of area in order to grow mustard or something like that. The sea bottom was about the only place on Barth where such a trick could be pulled without being caught right away by indignant neighbors, to say nothing of the Board. The only trouble with the theory, other than one's natural reluctance to believe in such people, was that I couldn't see anything growing. For that matter, I didn't know what sort of food plant could be grown under sea water. There were some, no doubt; and if there weren't natural ones, there is always gene tailoring. IF A more immediate question was what to do next. Thirty seconds of trying proved that I could extend and retract my legs until the power cells ran down without moving the tank at all. They just didn't have anything to push against; the bottom was a little too far down. I tried rolling the thing by shifting my weight. This worked as far as turning the tank over was concerned, but didn't get me noticeably closer to "shore." It seemed that the only freedom of motion I had left was upward. This was a little annoying. I had planned to plant a small sonar transponder near the entrance when I found it, as a guide for the police boats. If I dropped it here, it would mean very little and furthermore would be seen lying on the tent fabric by the first person who happened to pass, either above or below. If I'd had the reaction time and foresight of a fictional hero I might have let one go when I realized I was out of control; but I hadn't, and there was no use moaning about it. I might wait until they found the tank and just hope for a chance to drop the instrument without anyone's noticing while they were carting me off, but that seemed to involve a historical record for optimism. I couldn't accept the idea of going back to the surface without leaving it, though, even though that and all the other things it would be so nice to get done seemed to be impossible. Even a snake on a tray of oiled ball bearings keeps wriggling. And so I remained. There was really no point in an early departure anyway. I still had plenty of oxygen, and there was always the hope that I'd get a useful idea before they -- whoever "they" were -- found me. The hope lasted for nearly six hours. I t wasn't a girl this time, though it might possibly have been one ' of the same men. He wore the same sort of swimming outfit to the last detail, as far as I could see. He was swimming straight toward me when I first saw him , above the tent roof as the others had been, slanting out of the darkness from the direction I supposed the entrance must lie. Certnly he had seen me, or rather the tank. I wished I had spotted him earlier -- it would be interesting, and might even be useful, to know whether I had been found accidentally by a passing swimmer or by someone deliberately checking the region where the wrecked boat had been found. However, I could be philosophical about not knowing. I watched as he swam overhead. He should be able to recognize the tank without much trouble. It had a lot of nonstandard equipment fastened outside, but it was basically a regular emergency high-pressure escape tank of the sort you'd find in any large submarine -- a sphere of silica fiber and high-stress polymer able to stand the pressure of two miles of sea water. It was light enough to float, ordinarily, but the jury-rigged thing I was in was well ballasted. Besides the legs and their accessory gear there were the lights, the transponders, sundry pieces of sensing equipment and several slabs of lead so distributed as to keep the center of buoyancy and the geometrical center as close together as practical. The lead made the real difference; I would stiU float with all the rest. The swimmer stopped stroking as he glided overhead and drifted, settling slowly toward me. I could see his face now through the helmet -- in fact, the helmet itself was barely noticeable; he might almost have been swimming bareheaded. He was no one I could remember ever having seen before in five years of Board work, but I took good note of the line of his black hair, the set of his eyes, and the squarish outline of the rest of his face so as to be sure of knowing him again if the chance ever came up. Presumably he couldn"t see me; the view ports were small, my inside lights were out, and he showed no sign of the surprise I would have expected him to feel if he knew or guessed that the tank contained a living man. He came close enough to touch the equipment -- so close that I could no longer see everything he was doing. I told myself that it couldn't be anything very drastic, considering what the tank was built to take, but I'd still have been much happier if I could have seen his hands all the time. He was certainly fooling with things; I could feel the casing quiver occasionally as he pushed something particularly hard. He drew away again and swam twice more all around the tank, never taking his eyes from it Iheq he settled down to the tent roof and pushed his head against it, as though he were trying to swim through. I didn't dare shift my weight quickly enough to look though one of the lower ports while he was still in that position, so I couldn't tell whether his helmet stretched the fabric enough to let him see through -- it was, after all, a lot smaller than my tank. I did let myself down very gingerly, so as not to move my container noticeably, but by the time my eyes had reached one of the lower ports he had risen again -- at least, I could see nothing against the fabric except his shadow. He seemed to have started swimming away and I took a chance and straightened up quickly. The shadow had told the truth. He was heading back in the direction from which he had come. T his time I was much more careful with the clock. He was back with another man in just under eight minutes. His companion was carrying either the cylinder that had been used in moving the wreck, or one just like it; the first man was also carrying something, but I couldn't make out what it was right away. It looked like a rather untidy bundle of rope. When he stopped above the tank and shook it out, however, it turned out to be a cargo net, which he began to work around the tank. Apparently he had decided on his first inspection that the natural irregularities of his find didn't offer much hold to a lope. I oouLdn't exactly blame ham for that oondixsion, but I very much wished he hadn't reached it. I wasn't sure how strong the net might be, but unless it were grossly defective in manufacture it would hold my ballast slugs. If it were fastened around tank and slugs both, releasing the latter would become a pointless gesture. It was definitely time to go, and I reached for the master ballast release. Then I had another thought. Dropping the lead would presumably give my presence away, assuming they hadn't already guessed there was someone inside. That cat was out of the bag, and nothing else I could do would tell them any more. I might as well, therefore, try somethinig else which might keep that net from enfolding me until I was over bare rock again and stood a chance of dropping the transponder effectively. There seemed nothing to lose by it, so I extended all the legs at once. Neither of the swimmers was actually hit, but they were very startled. The one with the net had been touching the tank at the time, and may have thought that something he hod done was responsible for reicasing the springs. At any rate, neither of them seemed to feel that any more haste than before was need, os they should have done if they'd suspected a man was inside. They simply went about the job of attaching the lifting device as they had to the other wreck; there were plenty of things to fasten lines to now that the legs were out, and it would have been hard or impossible (to get the net around the new configuration. That was all to the good. The technique was the same as before. I assumed the cylinder contained a chemical gas generator, considering the pressure the balloon was expanding against. That was jxist a fleeting thought, though. It was much more interesting to watch the two swimmers pushing me toward the edge of the roof even before my container had lifted entirely clear of the fabric. Things were certainly looking up; only two people, bare rock coming up -- no, don't be too hasty; maybe they'll push you right to that entrance you want to find. Wait it out, boy. I pulled my fingers away from the panel, and locked them together for extra safety. J ust as bad been done with Pugnose, the tank was moved away from the tent and then along parallel with its edge. The motion was slow -- even with a weightless load there was plenty of water to push out of the way -- and we were more than fifteen minutes on the trip. I kept watching for some sign of the entrance, expecting a break of some sort in the fabric itself, but that wasn't the arrangement I fLnaJly saw. After a quarter of an hour my porters aimed away from the lights again and headed up the slope which I assumed was still to our dght. About two hundred yards in this new direction brought us to the lip of another bowl or golly, apparently much like the one I had almost ib; been trapped in a few hours before, but larger. The center of this depression was even more brightly lighted than the roof of the tent, and the entrance was in the very middle of the brit region. I didn't take a very good look at it; I acted too fast. I glimpsed what seemed to be a smooth-walled pit about forty feet across with ladders going down at a couple of dozen points around its rim. Most of the light came from some point in the pit below my line of vision. Between me and the opening were a dozen or more swimming figures, and it was the sight of these that made me act. If I were to be surrounded by a whole school of swimmers, my chances of dropping a transponder unnoticed would be negligible; and without spending any more time in thought, I dropped the ballast and one of the sounders simultaneously. I instantly realized that might be a mistsjte, since each of the lead slabs was heavy enough even under water to smash the instrument, and as I felt the tank lurch upward I dropped another of the little machines. There was a good chance that my company had been distracted by the ballast -- a much better one than I realized, as I found later. I heard the lead hit the rock. So, evidently, did the swinuners around the hole. It took them a few seconds to spot the source of the racket. A man judges sound direction partly from the difference in arrival time of the wave at his two ears; and with the high speed of sound in water, the fact that the disturbance was also being carried by the rock, and the helmets lihcy were all wearing it was impossible for lihem to get more than a vague notion of where the sound had originated. When they did start coming my way it was in response to a flashlight which one of my carriers was shining toward them. T he two original swimmers were hanging onto my legs -- the tank's, I should say. They couldn't hold me down, of course. It takes more than a couple of almost-floating human bodies to replace several tons of lead. They were staying with me, though, and guiding the others. That didn't worry me at first, since there weren't enough people in sight to hold me down, and if there had been they couldn't all have found room to get hold. The only real cause for anxiety was the possibility that there might be work subs with outside handling equipment somewhere around. Even from these, though. I'd be fairly safe if they'd just put off their appearance for a few more minutes. They'd have to hunt me with sonar once I was out of sight, and I was beginning to feel pretty certain that the last thing this bunch would do was send out sonar waves. The darned things travel too far and can be recognized too easily. I still didn't know what these folks were up to, but there was enough obviously illegal about it to suggest that secrecy would be high on their policy list. The ones who were holding on to me would have to drop off soon. There isn't an underwater breathing hree feet a secand or so for more han a 'few himdred feet without uuning into decomKresslon trouble. didn't care what gas mixture these characters were breathing; there are aws of physics and human bodies lave to obey them. The. more distant swimmers were aiming back as this thought crossed ny mind; I could see them against he fading background of the lighted pit. I could also see, poorly, the ight which one of my hitch-hikers jvas shining toward them. He seem to have some hope still; maybe there was a sub in the neighborhood, and he was trying to stick with me long enough to guide it. Unless it showed up very soon, though, he was going to lose that gamble and kill himself in the bargain. I saw another swimmer, quite close, dwindling between me and the light; my second passenger must have dropped off. When would the first go? His light was still shining, but it could hardly do any good now. I could barely see the pit, and surely no one down there could see his little flash. Evidently he realized this, for after a few more seconds it went out. I expected to see him leave like his fellow, since he could do no more good by sticking, but he wasn't thinking along those lines. He had very different ideas, and one of them from his viewpoint was a very good one. I didn't like it so much. The dual-phase stuff they make pressure tanks out of isn't a metal, and differs widely from any metal in its elastic properties; but like metals, if you hit it it makes a nose. I didn't know what my rider started hitting with, but it most certainly made a noise. I, from inside, can vouch for that. A nice, steady, oncea-second tapping resounded from the tank, hurting my ears and doing worse to my plans. He didn't' need his light; any work sub could home in on that noise from miles away if it had even a decent minimum of instrumentation. And there was no way that I could i thinic of to stop him. V I could try the legs, of course. I did. It was so dark by now, with the light from entrance pit and tent roof alike faded to the barest glimmer, that he may not even have known that I did anything. If he'd been holding on by a leg he may have been disconcerted when I pulled it in and maybe bruised when I popped it out again, but there was no evidence that anything of the sort happened. I ran the legs through their cycle several times without making the slightest change in the rhythm of that tajyping. I tried shifting my weight to make the tank roll over. It worked, but didn't bother my passenger. Why should it? A swimmer doesn't care whether he's right side up or not, and a submarine hitch#iiker in total darkness should care even less. I was the only one who was bothered. But why was this character alive, conscious and active? We'd risen more than a thousand feet now, through a pressure difference that IF should have popped his suit if it were really sealed as tightly as I had judged. If it weren't, and if he were valving off gas to keep his lung volume down, he was going to be in trouble when he descended again; end in any case, volume or no volume troubles, whether he was breathing helium or anything else, he should by now be completely helpless with embolisms. The simple sad fact, independent of what should be, was that he was still going strong, and I had no way of getting rid of him. Nothing like this had been foreseen by the Board geniuses who had worked out this mission. There was not the slightest doubt that some sort of sub was going to be along shortly to pick me up -- no other notion was sane, in view of the fact that this fellow had been fit to stick with me. There were always insane notions to consider, of course; maybe he had decided to sacrifice his life to make sure I didn't get back to the surface, but even that assumed the coming of something. Maybe a torpedo, but something. Personally I doubted the sacrifice idea. Lots of people will, for a cause they consider important enough, but I've never met a lawbreaker who acted that way. Especially I've never seen an energy waster who would; selfishness is the key word with those lads -- keep the eye out for Number One. But never mind the psychology; what's to be done? The guy may be a moving corpse, but he's still there broadcasting. Why didn't I come down in a work sub? Skip that question; it's a waste of good thinking time. How can I make him get off, or at least stop making noise? Badly phrased question. I catft make him do anything. He's outside, and I'm inside, and with this pressure difference never the twain shall meet. Then, how can I persuade him to leave or shut up? Until I start communicating, I can't persuade him either. Obvious. I put on my lights, both inside and out. That at least caught the fellow's attention; the tapping stopped for a moment. Then it resumed, but less regularly, and I caught glimpses of him as he worked his way to a place which would let him see through one of the ports. I pulled my own face far enough back from it so that he could see me clearly, and for a few seconds we just looked at each other. The tapping stopped again. I t was the same man who had found the tank. I'm not a mind reader, but I felt pretty sure from his expression that he had only just realized there was anyone inside and that the discovery bothered as well as surprised him. He resumed his banging on the tank, in a much more irregular pattern. After a few seconds I realized that he must be sending some sort of code, though I couldn't read it. I tried to explain by gestures that the radcet was hurting my ears, but all he did was shrug. If he cared at all about my comfort, it certainly wasn't at the top of his priority list. He finished his code message at last and resumed the regular tapping. He didn't seem angry -- didn't scowl, or sihake a t at me, or anyttihing of ithat sort, but be iidn't look as though be considered me a longlost friend, editber. I could see his face dearly and without distortion througih the helmet, but I could see no sign of reial Interest in his expression. I sipent some time trying to get him to respond to my gestures, but he paid no attention. I thought of writing a note that he could read through the port, though I couldn't guess what languages he might know, and I managed to find some scraps of paper in one of my pockets; but I could find nothing to write with, and that idea collapsed. I finally gave up and turned my lights off again. There was no use in helping him guide the sub to us. I couldn't thinlc of any more practical plans, and my mind wandered back to the question of how the fellow lived. We had risen several huadred more feet during the time the lights were on, and his suit hadn't emitted a single bubble. I was beginning to wonder whether it really was an ambient-pressure unit. It was hard to see how anything so thin, and especially so flexible, oouild possibly be pressure armor; on the other hand, the peculiarilties of the tent roof indicated that someone had 'been making progress in molecular architecture. I was in no position to say such armor was impossible, but I wished I could make at least a vague guess as to how it was done. I can feel a little silly about it now, of course. I'd had Ihe man in full sight, well Ughited, only a few feet away from me for fully five minuties, and I missed the key fact -- not in something I saw but in something I didn't see. At least, I'm not alone in my folly. The tapping kept up. It wasn't really loud enough to be painful, but it was annoying, Chinese water torture style. It may have been equally so to the fellow outside who was doing it, and I got a little consolation out of the thought that at least he was having to work at it. I got a httie more out of the realization that as long as he did keep it up the help he was calling hadn't arrived yet. Two thousand feet was less than balfwiay to the surface, though it was an unbelievable pressure change for my hitch-hiker. It wasn't very much comfort to me to know that I'd put that much water under me; even twice as much wouldn't be much help. It wasn't os though there'd be a police squadron standLag by to pick me op, or even a single boat. The tank had Qhly the normal automatic trani#pfilers for stait to function until I relhed the surface -- which I was unlikely to do. There probably was a Board vessel within a few miles, since the plan didn't indude my niavi'gaitiing the opened halves of the tank to Easter Island when I got back to the surface, but that would do me no immediate good. The storm would probably still be going on, and they wouldn't be able to see me at fifty yards. If they did, they probably couldn't do anything about it unless there were more specialized salvage IF gear aboard than seemed likely. Even a minior ocean storm is quiite a disturbance, and one doesn't pick a ipressiure tank bobbing around on its waves casually out of tihe water. T here was an encouraging side to that thought, though. If I did get to the surface, it would also be hard for any sub to get hold of the tank. My broadcaster would then be working, and maybe -- just maybe -- if it even brought a Board ship into the general neighborhood the pursuers would keep out of sight. On the other hand, it was at least equally likely that they would consider it worth every effort to get hold of me, witnesses or no witnesses, in view of what I had obviously seen down below. But the other hope was worth holding onto for its comfort value. Since I'm a civilized human ibedng, I never thought until later of the possibility that if they couldn't capture me they miight just punch a hole in the tank and let me sink. Maybe I'd make it. The minutes were passing. It was taking each one a year to do it, but they were passing. Each brought me nearly two hundred feet closer to those storm waves, if they were still there. I hadn't bother to check the forecast beyond the time I was scheduled to submerge, and I'd been down quite a few hours. I'm not immune to sea-sickness by any means, but I rather hoped there would still be enough vave action to give me a good dose of it this time. Maybe it would even make my friend just outside lose his grip on whatever he was holding onto. That was something else to hope for. But first I'd have to get up to those waves, and there was still half a mile to go. The tapping went on. If I'd been an#rwhere else on Earth I might have preferred the Chinese water drops by then, but 'this was no place to be asking for water drops. I tried to shut out the sound and keep my attention on other things, like the pressure gauge -- was there a little wiggle in its needle which might be due to wave action far above? -- or the question of food. If the waves were there, maybe I'd better put off eating. I kept moving rom one port to another in a hectic but raither useless effort to spot the sub which must be approaching; ibut it was my passenger who saw it first. VI I knew what had happened when the regular tapping suddenly changed once more to the complex code, but it took me another half minute to spot the approaching light. I didn't have a very wide angle of view from any one of the jxiits. All I could see at first was the light, a solitary spark on a spacedark background, but there could be no doubt what it was. It vas just a little below us, well to one side. Its bearing changed as it grew brighter. Apparently it was approaching on a spiral course, holding the sound of the tapping at a constant angle off its bow to let the pikt keep a constant idea of his distance from the source. Even when it was close I had trouble making it out, for its main spotlight was turned straight on the tank and there was too little ddfifused radiance to show anything dose to it. This apparently bothered my passenger, too, for there was another burst of code tapping as the sub halted thirty yards away, and the light went out. In its place a dozen smaller beams illuminated the whole area, none of them shining directly our way; so I could see the newcomer fairly well. It was not exactly like any sub I'd seen before, but was similar enough to some of them to give my eyes a handle. It was small, either one or two men, not built for speed, and well equipped with manipulation gear on the outside -- regular arm and hand extensions, grapples, bits, probes and what looked like a water-jet digger. One of my hopes died quickly; there had been a chance that a small sub would not have enough negative buoyancy to drag the tank back down, but this fellow had big, fat lift chambers and must have ballast to match. It was evidently a tug, among other things. If it could get hold of me, it could puM me down, all right; and it was hard to see how it could be kept from getting that hold. All I had to fend it off were the legs. I wasn't sure how effective these could be, but I kept my fingers at the panel resolved not to miss anything that looked like a good chance. At least, now that some sort of action was in the offing, I wasn't dithering as I had been during the minutes before the sub came in sight. The pilot's first method was to drift above me and settle down. He must have had a strong streak of showoff in him, since it was hard to imagine a less efficient means of sinking a round object. I thought he'd have his troubles, but my passenger didn't seem upset, and I have to admit the ohoter knew his boat handling. The swimmer waved him into position, putting me under the sub's center of buoyancy, and he made contact. My pressure gauge promptly showed that the upward motion had been reversed. I waited a few seconds in the hope that my hitch--hiker would go inside the sub, but he made no motion to, and I finally had to let him see my technique. This was simple enough -- simpler than idling along the sea bottom, since the surface above me was much smoother. Also, I didn't have to go so far to accomplish something; a very small shift away from his center of gravity gave niy tank's lift a torque that was too much either for his reaction time or his control jets. Since he had enough weight in his tanks to overcome my own lift, he flipped over, and I was on my way up again. Unfortunately, as I promptly learned, Lester the Limpet was still with me. His tapping started up within seconds of the time I got out from under. His friend evidently took a while to get his machine back into trim -- I could understand that; tumbling, with a couple of tons of surplus negative buoyancy thrown in, is a problem for any sub -- but he was back all too soon. He IF was no longer in a mood to sihow off; he bored straight in, with a grapple extended. I turned on my outside lights, partly to make things harder for him and partly so that I could see better myself. This was going to be tricky for both of us; he had to find something the mechanical hand could grip, and I had to shift my own body weight so as to turn the tank enough to bring a leg into line for what I had in mind. It was just as well I'd gotten my recent practice on the bottom. At least I knew to a hair where each leg went out, relative to the positions of the ports. I took him by surprise the first time. He hadn't considered all the possibilities of those legs -- maybe be didn't even know how many I could use, though they were visible enough from the outside. He matched my upward drift very nicely, though I was able to hamper him a little bit by shifting my weight and changing the frontal presentation of the slightly irregular tank. With relative vertical motion practically zero, he came in slowly with the mechanical hand reaching for some projection or other -- I couldn't teU what he had in mind. I rolled just a little to get a leg in line with the grapple, and when the latter was about two feet fiom contact I snapped the leg out. The ring was strong. Remember, it was built to prop the tank in position on a slope even when the ballast was still attached. The engineers who built it could tell you bow many pounds of shove it gave. I can't, but I could feel it. The sub and tank were pushed neaidy away from each other. The line of thrust was not exactlythrough the ceater of my shell, and I got quite a bit of spin out of it. The sub didn't. Either the push was better centered on him or he was quicker this time with his control jets. He was a stubborn character. He came back and tried the same thing again, after my spin had stopped. I was able to repeat, with about the same results. Konrad the Ohitom was still with me, though, and he had my technique figured out by this time. He moved a little away from me to free his hands for signalling, waved them for about ten seconds in a complicated pattern that meant nothing to me, and then came back and took hold of the tank once more. The sub made another approach, similar to precedingtwo, and I tried to line up for another kick. My friend, however, had different ideas. He was much farther from the center than I was, and could exert much more torque. He could also see where the legs were, and when I shifted my weight to line up the proper one with the approaching grapple he interfered. He was too smart to fiight me direotly, though he probably could have managed it; instead, he let me get moving and then supplied an extra shove with me or to one side so that I either overshot or missed the right position. I made three attempts to lineup as the hand was coming in and finally gave the kick a little out of line whenthe sub was about to make contact. The leg grazed the side of CDough to push os apart. Woise, it gave the sub operator a dhanoe to grab the leg itself. This he seemed to feel was a better 'hold whatever he had planned on; he clamped on tilghtly and began to cut buoyancy once more. T his proved to be a mistake, though it didn't help me as much as it might have. The leg wasn't strong enough to hold the tank down. It parted, and once more the sub disappeared below me. I cut my lights promptly, hoping that my passenger had lost his hold with the jeai. Maybe he did, but if so he wasn't far enough away to lose track of me. In a few seconds the tapping resumed, and in a few more the lights of the sub were close enough to make my blackout an idle gesture. I turned mine back on again so that I could see to resume the sparring match. Now he got the idea of making his approach toward the spot where the leg had been lost, so that I'd have to turn further to bring another into line. My swimming friend was cooperating nobly, and for a little while I was afraid they had me. The sub operator was too smart to try for a leg again, but he managed to keep out of the way of several kicks I gave out. He got in, made what should have been a succesful grab at something on my outer surface, but was hurried and missed. He had to back up for another try... and I had time to get another idea into operation. I knew where the swimmer was. I could see oiotigh of him to tell not only that but to guess which way he'd be pushing next time. I began to put a spin on the tank with him at one pole so that he wouldn't notice it quite so quickly. This worked, though I didn't get a really rapid rotation -- I couldn't, of course, with such poor torque; but with the tank's weight I had enough for what I wanted. One of my strong points in basic physics, ages ago in school, was mechanics. I couldn't handle the present problem quantitaitively because I didn't know either my angular speed or the tank's moment of inertia, but I hit the qualitative answer on the button. As the grapple approached again I shifted my weight to start the tank processing. Billy Barnacle tried his usual stunt of pushing me sideways and seat the leg right through the point I wanted. Either he'd forgotten what they'd taught him aibout gyroscopes or he was gettmg tired. I hit the grapple dead center with my kick, and we were apart again. If I'd been driving that sub, I'd have been getting tired of the whole business by now. Apparently he was more patient than I. He was back again all too soon. I had gained maybe three or four hundred feet with each pass of our duel. I had an uneasy feeling that I was going to run out of tricks before those increments added up to the total distance to the suice. Certainly if he had the patfeboe to keep repeating the same technique, he'd soon run me dry. IF He didn't, though. He seemed to have decided that the graipple wasn't quite the right tool after all. When he came back next time He did his usual speed-matching some distance above me, instead of level. A small light flickered, apparently in code, and my pressureroof friend let go of the tank and swam up to the sub. He was back in a moment, trailing a line behind him. Apparently it had been decided that human hands were more versatile than mechanical ones. A t first I wasn't worried. There was nothing on the outside of the tank except the legs which would really lend itself to the attachment of a rope, and it had already been demonstrated that the legs weren't strong enough. Hours before, on the bottom -- no, come to think of it, it was much less than one hour -- my pal had felt the need of a cargo net to wrap around the sphere. If he didn't have such a net here, all should be well. He did, unfortunately. It was bigger and heavier than the one they had had on the bottom, which was probably why he wasn't swimming with it. When he got back just above the tank he began hauling on his line, and the net emerged from one of the sub's service ports. He pulled it to him and began to spread it out so that my tank would float up into it. He failed the first time through no doing of mine; he simply didn't get his net deployed in time. I ran into it while it was still only partly open. It had more of its weight on one side of me than on the other, so I automatically rolled out from under it and kept on rising. I didn't have to move a finger. The sub was also rising, of course, so the net trailed downward to the end of its line and folded itself together. The boy in the sub had to reel in mechanically while the swimmer held on to me, before they could go through it all again. That was another few hundred feet gained. The next time they spread the net much farther above me. Once open it was even less maneuverable than the tank, and by a little judicious rolling to make the outer irregularities affect my direction of ascent I managed to get far enough flom its center to roll out the same way as before. What that team needed was two more swimmers, I decided. It turned out that One more was enough. They reeled in the net again, lifted the sub a distance, adjusted its buoyancy so that it rose a little more slowly than I did, and then the operator came out to join the swimmer. Each took a corner of the net and with the boat for the third comer formed a wide triangle which they were able to keep centered over me. I tried to work toward the sub, which seemed to be unoccupied and wouldn't . back up to keep the net spread. It didn't work. The men moved just a little in the same direction, letting the net sag toward me. The next thing I knew it was draped around me, and I couldn't lell which way to roll even if I had mers came in from their corners and began tying it together at the bottom. If they finished, I was done. I watched them as well as I could, trying to spot where there was an edge -- anything to tell me that there was more weight of net on one side of me than the other. I spotted what I thought was a chance to interrupt the work while I got a better look, and I'm afraid I took it. One of the men was next to the tank and a little below it, pulling a section of net closer. Maybe it was the sub operator -- the light was good, but I didn't take time to check -- and he wasn't as familiar with the leg arrangement as his companion. Anyway, he was in the way of one of them, and I let him have it. M y intention, if I had one -- I really didn't take time to thiTik -- was to knock him out of the way so I'd have a Chance to roll out of the net. I certainly didn't mean to do him serious or permanent damage. The disk at the end of the leg, though, caught him on the right side and could hardly have helped breaking some ribs. It kicked him away like a shark butted by a dolphin. The iine he was holding practically flew out of his right ha, and a tool whose nature I couldn't make out fell from his left. He began to sank out of sight. The other swimmer was onto him before he'd left the reach of the Uts. He was evidently out cold; his body was completely limp as his friend towed him up towd the sub. I didn't watch too closely, partly because I was tryonig to roll myself out of the net and partly because I regretted what I'd done. I made little progress with the rolling. They'd gotten some knots into the system already, and it looked as though I were ere to stay. I managed to make a half turn, getting what had been the tank's bottom when I was caught swung up to the top, but it didn't do me a bit of good. The meshes wound around the tank even more tightly during the turn. I was a little above the sub by that time -- as I said, they'd ta'immed it to rise a little more slowly than the tank -- and the tension on the line connecting the net with the boat was swinging me directly over the latter. It was also tipping the sub, I noticed, since the line wasn't attached anywhere near the latter's center of gravity. I watched, helpless but hopeful, to see whether the single rope was strong enough to drag me down when they really put weight on the boat. I didn't find out. The uninjured man towed his companiion to the little vessel, opened its main hatch, and after some trouble got him inside. Up to that point we'd still been rising. Now it appeared that the sub was putting on more weight, for the line tightened and my pressure gauge reversed its direction once more. However, the sub, which had leveled off after the men got on board, now went down badly by the stem. Evidently the off-center lift through IF the net line was more than could be countered by shunting ballast, at least if enough total weight was in the tanks to maintain a descent Apparently there was a higher priority attached to bringing me back than to keeping the boat level. I watched, with my fingers crossed, hoping the line would give. It didn't, but someone's patience did. Maybe the swimmer I had hit was seriously injured, though I hoped not; but w'hatever the cause, whoever was now running the sub decided that speed was of prime importance. He suddenly cast off rope, net, and all, and disappeared in a few seconds. I was alone at last, bound once more for the surface. It was almost an anticlimax. It was also quite a letdown. The dogfight, if you could call it that, had lasted only ten or fifteen minutes in all and certainly hadn't involved me in much physical labor, but I felt as though I'd just done ten rounds with someone a couple of classes above my weight. Now I was safe. There wasn't a prayer of their finding me again without sonar, with no one hanging outside to broadcast sound waves from my own hull, and with my lights out -- I hastily turned them out as that thought crossed my mind, I had less than two thousand feet to go -- not much over ten minutes, unless the drag of the net and line made too much difference. I watched the gauges for a while and decided that they didn't, and for the first time since I'd left the surface I feU asleep. VU I was awakened by bekng tossed around; the stoiim was still on. More specifically, I was awakened by being cracked on the head by a corner of the control panel. It wasn't hard enough to damage either the panel or my skull, but it was uncomfortable. So was the whole situation. Riding up and down on fifteen-foot waves is bad enough in a stable boat, but in a nearly spherical container which has practically no preference for a definite up and down it is infiniiteLy worse. I"ve been in free fail in space, which is no joke, but I'll take it again any time fore being a human volleyball in the middle of even a modestsized Pacific storm. That was one thing they hadn't bothered too much about when they designed the submarine escape shells. The idea was to get to the surface rather than to be comfortable afterward. All I could do was turn on the rescue broadcaster and try to keep my stomach in place. I couldn't even be sure anyone was receiving it -- the broadcast, I mean. It was a good bet that they were, since my return was certainly expected. But several good bets had failed to pay off already. I couldn't even sleep. Fortunately I'd had enough sense not to eat when the idea had occurred a while back, so I couldn't do what my stomach wanted most to do just then. I couldn't do anything. The whole situation was as bad physically as the original descent had been mentally. But there's no point trying to make it any clearer; I might succeed. I did wish I'd taken the trouble to find out how long the storm was due to last. Then I might have gotten some comfort from an occasional glance at the clock. As things were, I quickly found that it was better not to look at it; the time since the last look was always so much less than I'd guessed. As it turned out, I should have watched some of the other instruments, though their reading would have been no comfort either -- and there would have been nothing to do about them. I would never have believed that the end of that motion could have been anything but a relief. If anyone had told me that it would make me feel worse, I'd have used violence on him for fear he might convince me. Unfortunately, he'd have been perfectly right. The end came much too suddenly. The first motion to stop was the roMing. The tank stUl bobbed up and down, but seemed to have acquired a definite top and bottom. Then the vertical oscillation also decreased, and finally stopped. By that time there was nothing more the pressure gauge could tell me, but I looked at it anyway. I was right. The tank was going down again. T here was one thing I didn't have to worry about; it wasn't a case of ordinary sinking. The only hollow space which gave the tank its buoyancy was the one I was in, and if that had been leaking I'd have known it already. No, I was being pulled down; and granting that there are such things as giant squids, I didn't for an instant think that one of them was responsible. The sonar monitor was dark now, but maybe it hadn't been for the last hour or so -- I wouldn't have known. There was only one reasonable explanation. I looked down, not knowing what I really hoped to see and didn't see very much; the sub wasn't bothering witib lights. I turned dn my own, but could see only the single line, taut now, leading from the net which was now thoroughly tangled around me to a vague bulk just on the edge of visibility. The Hne, it may be remarked, was quite strong enough for what it had to do; we were descending much faster than my original ballast had carried me down. If the owners of that rope were prepared to trust it under such stress, I saw no point in doubting their judgment. I didn't even bother to hope it would break. I calculated that I'd be on the bottom in twenty minutes or so, and let it go at that. At least, I could eat now. I began to absorb a dextrose pill with such calmness as I could collect. There was nothing else to do; they had me. We were still several hundred feet from the bottom when company showed up. Two more subs, brightly lighted, hove into view. They were work machines similar to the one I'd had trouble with a few hours before. If they were in communication with the one which had me in tow, it was by means of something none of my instruments could pick up. They probably were, sinoe their maneuvers were perfectly coordinated. First one and then the other newcomer swung close beside me, and each used its "hands" to hang several hooked slugs of metal into my net. These weights took nearly all the stress off the tow rope and removed any hope there might have been of its breaking at the last moment. Then a swimmer slipped out of each boat and took station beside me, saving themselves work by holding onto the net too. I flicked my lights on for a moment, but couldn't recognize either face. I began to wonder about the fellow I'd hit and what his friends might think about it if I'd hurt him really seriously. The human mind sometimes goes off on funny side tracks; I never once, while I was being towed, thought about their reaction to my having discovered their obviously secret installation. If I had, I'd probably have told myself that if they really wanted to do anything final any of their subs could have cracked the tank with no trouble at all. Eventually the bottom came into view in the range of my own lights. It wasn't luminous this time. I thought at first that they must have turned their lights off; then I realized that the storm must have carried me some distance, and there was no reason to expect to be very near the tent. This was ordinary sea bottom complete with crab burrows; I could tell, because after reaching it the sub reeled in most of the tow line and left me only about twenty feet up. This gave me a good look at the boat itself, too, and I could see that it wasn't my former antagonist. For one thing, it was about twice as big. It wasn't very different in general design, though. There was still plenty of equipment on the outside -- more, if anything. It was meant for work, not travel. Even without the drag of my tank it wouldn't have made very good speed over the bottom, but I could see that we were moving. I had no doubt we were heading either for the entrance I'd seen earlier or for some other one and kept looking ahead for its lights. A s it turned out, we reached a different one. We were a couple of hours getting there, though that's an academic point since I didn't know where we'd started from anyway. This pit was smaller than the other, and the lighted tent roof was nowhere in sight when we reached it. This entrance was only about twenty-five feet across, much too small for the sub that was towing me and borderline for the other two. It was perfectly cylindrical, with vertical sides, and opened from the bottom of a shallow bowl just as the other had. It was very well lighted, so I had no trouble making out details. There were many ladders around the rim. At first they led down out of sight, but as I came closer I found I could see the bottom ends of those on the farther side of the opening. The pit was apparently a IF hole in the roof of a chamber something like forty feet deep. There were several more swimmers in and above the hole who seemed to be waiting for us. As we approached, they paddled out rather casually and gathered around the tank as the sub that was towing me settled to the bottom just beside the entrance. My tank drifted upward and slightly forward until the tow rope was vertical. One of the swimmers waved a signal, and an escort sub swung back in and hung another slug of ballast onto my net. That took the rest of the tension off the rope, and I began ito sink. The swimmer signaled again, and the tow line came free of the big sub. Several men grabbed it; the rest took hold of the net, and they all began to work me toward the pit as I settled. This seemed to be the last lap. Unless they had the stupidity to leave me right under their hole in the roof, which would be too much to expect even in twentiethcentury realistic literature, the most remote chance of my getting back without their consent and assistance would vanish once I was inside that entryway. I was nearly frantic. Don't ask me why I fdt so scared at one time and so calm and steady at another; I can't tell you. It's just the way I am, and if you don't ilike it you don't have to live with it, at least. I don't know what I did or thought in those few minutes, and I'd probably not want to tell anyone if I did remember. The fact was that there was nothing whatever I could do. I had all the power of a goldfish in' his bowl, and" that sometimes upsets a man -- iwho, after all, is used to saving at least a little control over his environment. I was a little more calm as I reached the edge of the pit; I don't know the reason for that, either, but at least I can report the incident. There was a pause as we reached the tops of the ladders, and the subs and swimmers 'both clustered around and began hanging more ballast onto my net, adding insult to injury. The swimmers also picked up what looked liked tool belts from hooks near the ladder tops and buckled them around their waists, though I couldn't see why they should have more need of these inside than out. At least, I couldn't see any reason at first; then it occurred to me that tools might 'be useful in opening up my tank. I decided not to think of that just yet. From inside, the pit looked even more like a hole in a ceiling. The chamber below was much larger than I had realized, fully a hundred feet on each side. The entrance was simply a black circle above me, and as I watched it ceased to 'be above me. The swimmers were pushing me toward one of the wal'ls. I ithought for a moment that rolling across the ceiling would at least be easier than the same action on the sea bottom, but dismissed the point as irrelevant and academic. My morale was rising, but was still pretty low. At least, I was still alive, and in a way I'd done some of my job. I'd dropped the transponder near one entrance, and there seemed a decent chance that it hadn't been found. My pick-me-up broadcast had been going for several hours at the surface, and the chance that it had been received was excellent. The Board would know I'd done something, and would certainly be moved to check up on what had become of me. If they swept the bottom with highresolution sonar they could hardly miss the smooth surface of the tent, even if the transponders didn't work. In fact, considering how big the tent seemed to be, it was rather surprising that ordinary depth-meter records hadn't picked it up some tirne or other. I should have given more thought to that point, though it would have sent my morale downhill again. As it was, I could believe that this installation would be found fairly soon, even if I myself wasn't. The big room had little detail to mention. I assumed at first that it would turn out to be a pressure lock or the vestibule to one, but the big tunnel opening from it had no door. There were smaller panels on the walls which might have been locks -- some of them were big enough to admit a human figure. The swimmers towed me toward the tunnel mouth and into it. It was fully twenty feet in diameter, much more than large enough for the tank, and was Mghted almost as well as the chamber we had just left. I found myself getting angry again at this bunch who were being so free with their energy. I was also beginning to wonder where they got so much of it. I'd run into power#)#tleggers before in the course of business, naturally, but never an outfit with so much of it to throw around. We went only a few yards -- twenty or so -- down the tunnel before coming to another large room which opened from it. They towed me into this. It had several much smaller tunnels -- maybe I should say shafts -- opening from its floor; I counted eight in my first glance. None of these openings had lids or doors either. Apparently a large part of the installation was flooded and under outside pressure. Maybe it was a mine; that would account for the energy, if the product were uranium or thorium, and it would not be practical to try to keep all the windings and tunnels of a submarine mine free of water. I had just about time to run that thought through my mind while the swimmers were putting me and my tank down on the floor. It started to roll a little, and I put out three legs to prop it. Luckily all three got through the meshes of the net which was still around me without being jammed. With that settled, I looked at the bunch of people around me to see what they'd do next. It was clearly up to them. I'm used to it now, but I still don't like the memory of what they did and what it did to me. They took off their helmets. A mile under the sea, in pressure that would crush sponges metal into foil, they took off their helmets. IF IF  Short Story She seemed very like a woman -- but there was something inhuman about her os well! J oe found much of the Sentient city quaint, even charming, but it was not like home. It was an ancient, sophisticated city on an ancient planet, and yet it did not display the material comforts that Terra had attained after a meager fifty thousand years out of the Stone Age. He walked through the shattered fobbled streets in full gear, outfitted in the smart dark dress blues of the invading forces, looking for women and entertainment. It was not easy to find. Determined to make this a modd Occupation, the commanding geneaial had worked out a limited schedule of available services and had set up severe rationing standards. Only three drinks of the potent ragacsi were permitted daily. And at most one woman a day. Meals and food packages were also strictly regulated by item and quantity. Rationing control was handled by the Central Terran Computer. Payment had to be in advance. Small input scan devices were, located all over the city which only accepted dogtags and recorded serial numbers plus the nature of the transaction. Joe sighed. He had been scouring the shops for souvenirs to send home and he had already used up his quota of driiaks for the day. But he still had a woman coming. The Sentients were behaving with scrupulous propriety. They had been badly beaten, but they hadn't relinquisihed their basic dignity. As reparations for their prolonged and costly resistance, they had been forced to give up tremendous quantities of treasure and goods. Hence everyone was living on a substandard basis. But there was almost no black marketeering. There was very little prostitution, too. Traditionally the Sentients used android women for this purpose, amazingly lifelike figures designed for erotic pleasures, good enough to pass muster with the most exacting of men. But most of the Terran soldiers, like Joe, considered this practice emasculating, a sign of the degeneraition of the Sentient culture, and avoided the android women like the plague. Only a handful of the men, weak in moral fiber and controls, joking to cover their inn shame, had defiled themselves in this way. Fortunately there were a few real women around, whose circumstances were so straitened that they had gone to the streets to earn Terran credits. But only a few. Joe had waited now for fifty-three days. And the torment was growing stronger with each day. H e stepped into one of the very neat candy-pink social clubs maintained by the Sentients for the Terran soldiers. There were four women seated quietly about the room -- all of them android, he was certain. They were uncannily like the Sentient women in appearance. None were pretty by Terran standards. Their noses were too broad, their eyes set very wide apart, the skin an almost alabaster white. But they were extraordinarily sensuous creatures. He stared at each one in turn, tempted but not quite enough. He took great pride in maintaining his own self-respect, in holding on to his masculinity. He advanced to the bar and asked the Sentient bartender for a ragacsL "Your dogtag, please," said the bartender. Joe slipped the metal disk into the scanner and waited stoically for the intermittent red flash to appear. It did and the bartender sigh "I'm sorry, sir. You've reach your quota for the day. But TU be happy to serve you tomorrow." "The hell with it," snapped Joe. "I didn't want the goddam drink anyway." He stepped angrily into the street and looked along the narrow lane. There was no one in view. High above, two young Sentient women had been leaning out of an oval picture window but when they caught his glance they both withdrew and closed the outer blinds. He was terribly depressed. "I'm hungry," he thought, "but it isn't sex done. I want intimate contact with another human being." He stopped off at a curio shop and chatted politely with the proprietor. He even priced several expensive items although he knew he didn't have sufficient credits left to pay for them. The Sentient dealer was courteous, but no more. Joe tried to hint obliquely at how lonely he was, but the Sentient didn't seem to grasp his meaning. They parted on correct but distant terms. IF And then he saw her. She wasn't even as pretty as theandroid women he had seen, but she was alive. He was certain of that. She had her head averted and was looking wistfully into a shop window. He came up just behind her and looked over her shoulder. She was eyeing a lavishly packaged food assortment. "It looks mighty tempting, doesn't it?" he said softly. She turned to look at him, but said nothing. On sudden impulse, he went into the store and used up his food allowance on the package. When he came out into the street he handed it to the Sentient woman. "I cannot take this from you," she said. "No strings," said Joe and when he saw the look of puzzlement on her face, he rephrased his words. "I want nothing in return," he said. She looked at him warily for a moment and then reached out for the package. He was elated because she had accepted it. "Where do you live?" he said. "You wish to come home with me?" "Only to talk. Nothing more." She shrugged and took his hand in hers, the warmth of her fingers coming almost as a shock to him. Together they wove through the maze of darkening streets, dimly lit by the orange glow of the setting Star above. There were tangles of debris everywhere since much of the destruction had not yet been cleared away by the Sentient population. He pretended not to see it. When they arrived outside her home, she asked him to wait while she went within. She returned in a few moments. "I can't ask you in," she said quietly. "My parents will not permit it. But since I have accepted your gift, I feel I owe you something." "You don't owe me a thing," he said vigorously. "No, no," she insisted. "I will go to your home with you, now." His home? He had no home on this planet. He was quartered with an elderly Sentient couple in a small bedroom with a private side entrance. He told her this, and she shrugged her indifference. But he wanted more than gratitude. T hey walked to one of the few parks that had not been shattered by the invasion. It was on a hill of several hundred feet that overlooked a river winding below like a metallic ribbon. He talked hesitantly about his parents, and when she looked at him sympathetically, he fished a frayed picture out of his wallet to show to her. She smiled and remarked about the resemblance. He asked her about herself, her family, but she wouldn't answer. "I see only destruction about m," she said, and she pointed a slender finger toward the heaps of rubble that lay at the foot of the hill. Then she leaned toward him, and for the first time that evening, she ran her fingers gently over his cheek. His blood began to race at the implications of her caress. "Do you like me?" he said earnestly. 'Really like me?" "I do," she said seemingly in eamnest. Although it wias terribly expensive, he hailed one of the few helibuses thiait hovered over the raviagjed city. He had the pilot place them down a few blocks before his d ti nation so that he might stop to purchase a corsage. He pinned the exotic flowers, despite her mild objections, to the shoulder of her brightly colored blouse. They entered noiselessly through the side door and quickly undressed. Afterwiard, he caressed her hair and spoke to her of intimate things, of his home, his loneliness, his conitrition for the wanton destruction of her city, of his gpaltitude to her. She smiled at him as she reached out for her purse. She bpened it and took out one of the ; small scanning devices issued  the Occupying Forces. He felt icy fingers close about his heart. "What are you doing?" he cried. "Reporting the transaction to your Computer," she said, the word your heavily accented. "I should have recorded it in advance." "But this wasn't just a transaction," he said. 'It was one human being showing friendship to another." She laughed outright. "Me?" she said. "Human?" He sat bolt upright in the bed. "What do you mean?" he said. "You even have parents! You said so." 'Parents was just a euphemism for my owners," she said. "I always give iem Teiran food packages." He went to the closet and gathered up her clothes. "Get the hell out of here," he said. She dressed before him with exaggerated slowness, moving her body seductively in a caricature of sensuality. She curtsied grandly before she left, a grotesque mockery, he knew, of his Terran values. S he walked through the streets in a leisurely manner until she reached one of the city's communication centers. There she called her home, collect. Her mother's face came alive on the visiscreen. It was without emotion. "I did it," she told her mother. "He is humiliated and unnerved. I made him something less than a man." "It was a courageous and patriotic thing to do," said her mother. "And yet I wish the glory were being garnered by someone else's daughter." Her mother's face faded from the screen like a wraith of smoke. And then, after straightening die hem of her skirt and discarding ithe corsage, the girl walked out into the street looking for another Terran soldier.      IF IF  Feature Our Man In Fandom travels # miles to the Fantipodes! P eople who read this column every month probably get the idea that science-Ection fandom exists only in America. Well, tlhat's dead wmong. I know I tend to talk about American fans almost without exception, (but that's only becajuse I'm more closely connected to it than to the many foreign fandoms. Actually, people all over the wodd read science fiction, and a goodly numlber of them are fantype people. Perhaps it would be a good idea if I did a little talking about them, for a change. Fans Down Under Let's begin with Australia, the place the kangaroos and the duckbilled platypusses come from. I am beginning this Fandom-'Round-#heWorld thing with Aussie-land for the very good reason that the Sixth Continent is a veritable hotbed of fanactivity these days and seems to be crawling with avid science-fiction readers, collectors and fans of all descriptions. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, although there have been fans in Australia for as long as there has been science fio tion. But things went into the doldrums about #, for some reason. The guy who touched off the current renaissance in Aussie fandom is named John Foyster. He organized and conduct the Seventh Australian SF Convention in the dty of Melbourne around Easter of #. As you can tell from the Convention's official title, there have been over the years six other such cons. But the Melbourne affair was the first in about eight years, and it served to pull scattered fans together, bring new people into contact, and spark activity in general. John Foyster left for England early this year, and perhaps he can whip things into action there, too. The Australian Science Fiction Review It was a combination of curious accidents that brought the current state of Australian fan-activity to my notice. The first thing that happened was that Pat Terry, an elderly Australian fan, very fond of Andre Norton, was mov to write to me because of a brief study I wrote of Miss Norton's books that appeared in some of the Ace paperback reprints of her novels. We began exchanging letters, and among other things he sent me two copies of a lively fan magazine called Australian Science Fiction Review, fiction writer James Blish sent me yet another copy. He received an extra of the current issue and, for want of a better idea, passed it along to me. Thus besieged with copies of the compass (including yet another sund, sent to me direct), I kinda had to read the thing. I found it lively, controversial and stimulating. The editor points out, in issue ##, consequence of this Convention. And, since just about all the fans regularly, it has served to draw them together and help them get organized. magazine by any means. The people who do the reviews are not of the persuasion that science fiction is either Serious Thought-Provoking Social Criticism or Scientific Prophecy (you know what I mean, the "Shape of Technologies to Come" sort of idea). They have the idea that SF is entertainment, to be read for fun. And they criticize on that basis. They tend a little towards the chop-it-up-in-little-pieces brand of reviewing and don't spare the egos of the authors concerned. Oh, it's lively stuff -- and the authors have been howling, as in the current isand Jim Blish registers a polite of his recent novel, The Hour Before Earthrise. The Melbourne Science Fiction Club It would seem that Melbourne (which is not the capital of Australia) is certainly the SF center of the continent. Besides serving as the site of the Convention, and fanclub of considerable activity. One of these activities -- and one that I wish American fanclubs would adopt! -- is holding regular screenings of science-fiction movies for club members. The Melbourne group is now trying to get copies of such movies as Fantastic Voyage, George Pal's Seven Faces of Doctor Lao and Truffaut's version of the Ray Bradbury yarn, Fahrenheit #, for next year's season. As you might imagine, such films bring a rare turnout of sf fans. The Melbourne group also have another feature that the American clubs universally lack: a library. In fact, Mervyn Binns (who writes up a monthly report on club doings for most comprehensive collections in Australia." They've been adding to the collection, which already inIF eludes books, paperbacks and close to one thousand sf magazines, at the astounding rate of more than # books over a period of eight or nine months. Members, of course, have reading privileges... and, presumably, iborrowing privileges. This is a great way for impecunious fans to catch up on their current reading, and I wish American clubs would adopt that notion too. Celebrities, Even! Nor is Australian fandom entirely made up of fans alone, as you might suppose. Plenty of professional science people make Australia their home. The late Dr. Paul Linebarger, for example, lived there for a nunober of years. If that name doesn't ring any ibells with you, his famous penHoame was "Coidwainer Smith." If you've iread many of his stories, you'll probably remember the planet "Norstrilia" -- which was a contraction for "Old North Australia" and is an indication of his affection for the country. Then ithere is A. Bertram Chandler, author of all those "Rim world" stories, such as his recent If serial. The Road to the Rim. Bertram Chandler is, or was, a ship's officer in the maritime service and makes his home in New South Wales. He has letters and brief articles scatthat I have seen and seems to be a local celebrity. And a crop of new young writers is rising Down Under. Such as Jack Wodhams, an expatriate Englishman; Ron Smith, an expatriate American and Australia's own John Baxter, a home-grown local boy. There is utterly no doubt that John Baxter is an authentic Australian: he once had a pet bunyip, and that's as Australian as you can get! Baxter's novel. The God Killers, is reprinted over here by Ace Books under the title of The Off-Worlders. I am intimately familiar with this particular novel, ibecause it's half of an Ace "Double" and the novel on the other side is a Lin Carter effort called The Star Magicians. I just slip this in casually. Booming professional writers all over the Australian landscape is something comparatively new, and must contribute quite a bit to the excitement of the sf renaissance now in the works down there in the Antipodes. Here in New York where I live, sf writerg, editors and cover artists are a part of the local scenery and hardly get noticed any more. (I recall the Saturday evening my wife and I were coming out of a theatre on Times Square and bumped into Randall Garrett, James Blish and Sam Moskowitz, all in the space of about # minutes.) The New York fan clubs are pretty blase about it all... so many professionals drop around to the club meetings that their "celebrity" value has all but rubbed off by now... but it's rather new to the Australian fans, and I suppose it's pretty diverting. I thought I wouldn't be able to cover the other fan movements in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia and elsewhere all in this one article, and I see I was right. So more about the foreign groups next month. IF  Novelette The Silkies were Earth's only defense against a foe who had already defeated them once! I W hen the Silkie call for help came, Nat Cemp, tiimself a Silkie, was exploring ithe planet which had been given the astronomical designation Minus #-#... the #th planet farther away than Earth from the new, mighty sun, of which Earth had become one small, green, planetary part, reveloving at an angle of #  in relation to Earth's orbit. It was a temporary nomenolature. No one took the attitude that Earth was the most important planet of the new system. Not, apparently, that it was going to matter. On the three planets that had been assigned to Cemp -- #, # and now # -- there were no detectable inhabitants. He had been skimming for nearly half a day among the strange, slender buildiinigs which reared Mke stretched laodwork itowaid ithe siky. And already it was sadly obvious ithait here, also, the transition period had been ifcoo long for life to survive. Perhaps only Earth and the few others already discovered had been able to make the changeover. The call for help came as Cemp was (floating through a vast generator building complex. Clear and sharp and urgent, he picked it up from the mechanical relay system between # and #. It said, "AM Silkies and government agencies: I have just received a (Silkie word) message from Lan Jedd." The special Silkie "word" was a thought-form that was used to describe an after-death Silkie communication phenomenon. As a Silkie descended into death, there was a threshold point at which an isolated neural bundle was activated. The bundle was a telepathic sender; and it, quite simply, transmitted ithe final living thoughts, perceptions and feelings of a SMkie who, at thetime the message was sent, was already dead. T he name of the dead SMkie, .thus relayed, shocked Cemp. For Lan Jedd and he had been os much Mends as any two SMkies ever were, or rather ever were allowed to be. Human beings and particularly the Special People -- humans iwho could communicate tdepathicaMy with Silkies -- had always diswuraged Silkie-with-Silkie associations. Lan and he had chosen to explore adjoining sets of planets at this remote end of the system in order to have relatively unmonitored discussions about the increasing severity of the SMkie-human problem. So for Cemp, as the message reached him, the shocking thrillthought came: except for the sender, he himself was the nearest "help.' He responded at once with: "Nat Cemp coming immediately. Who are you?" "Ou-Dan! Calling from #-#." The identification of the sender was disturbing. It was a name of the type and style common to meteorite Silkies, whosei existence had ibeen unknown until less than a year ago. The presence of such "original" Silkies in tibiq vastly larger sun system was an unknown, unresolved factor... which Cemp and Lan Jedd had also talked about in great detail. Startling to consider that, perhaps, Ou-Dan had "listened in" to their discussion. But what especiaMy disturbed Cemp was that he had no confidence in the fighting abilities of these newly arrived SMkies. It meant that for many hours he would be virtually ajone against a mysterious, powerful enemy who had already proved himself strong enough to kMl a SMkie. As he had these awarenesses, Cemp was projeotinig himsdf out of the buMding he was in. Moments later he was rising out of the atmosphere by means of his Silkie method of gravitation reversal. Literally, .the planet expeMed his IF body which, in his C-Silkie form, was almost bullet-shaped and ten feet long. In this form it was a body that was fully able to operate and live in the vacuum of space. Once away from the planet, Cemp maintained his expulsion momentum and moved through space by cutting off gravity from all objects in space except in the direction he wanted to go. Thus the outer planets drew him, and he "fell" with ever increasing speed toward his destination, a special "ship." In spite of his initial acceleration, it was the usual slow journey of a Silkie traveling by himself through space. And so it was several anxious hours later before at last he saw the ship in the dark space ahead. T he ship was a defensive vessel that had been built as part of a crash program after the disaster of Earth becoming part of the new sun system. Built without walls, utilizing weapons as modern as what Cemp had learned from the Glis, it and others like it were part of the safety measures set up in conjunction with exploring so many new and unknown planets. As soon as he was securely in control of the ship, Cemp started it toward Ou-Dan, a distance of only four planets. Which was no problem at all to the fast ship. Once under way, Cemp allowed its relay sender to activate again. Thus he tuned into oommunications which were already in progress from more remote points: Silkies speculating telepathically about what had happened. What a powerful life-form that particular planet which Lan Jedd had been exploring must have, if one or even several of them could kill a fully grown Silkie like Lan. That was the general thought. From all over the system converging Silkies readied for a mass battle with a dangerous opponent. Unfortunately, it would be quite a while before these more distant helpers arrived on the scene. For at least an earth day, Ou-Dan and he would be the only living beings on or near the scene of the crime. Arriving at ship speed, Cemp learned that the dead Silkie body had been taken by Ou-Dan over to a meteorite, which circled #-#. The strange bright-dark of space with its black "sky" and the huge, faraway sun glaring with a thousand rock and metal facet of the meteorite -- that was the backdrop. In such a vast frame, ithe shattered Silkie body seemed like an atom in infinity. It lay sprawled on a flat spread of rock. In death it bore an even vaguer resemblance to a human being than in life. There Wias a sort of leg separation at the rear, and up front was a caricature of a human face. No indication of how the destruction had been done. Ou-Dan commented telepathicly that the body looked collapsed. But it was not much smaller than normal: eight inches at most. As Cemp gazed silently down at his dead friend, he thought: Tbe worst possible had happened. A highly trained adult Silkie, with ail tihait implied in aleritnieiss and laibility to istilize poweitM defensive and offensive energies, bad been oonfronted by another beong. And ithe Silkiie bad been defeated and killed. O u-Dan, looking a little like an elongated meteorite ihiimseiLf, telepathed: "Lan bad just reported to me that there were no inbabiitants surviving on #, #I and #, and I, working backwards, bad found the same stuiaition on #, # and #, wben his after-death message came." Cemp thought: A dead Silkie, and only one clue: thiat single flash of communication from the mature and powerful Lan Jedd, instants after he died... A mental picture of a pyramidal shape and the thought: It came from nowhere, from nothing. Cemp felt a chill as he contemplated the fantastic implications of the message. The immense speed of the attack... out of nowhere. Presently, Cemp telepathed to OuDan: "Why don't you come with me and we'll wait in the ship? Its weapons will help us if we're attacked." Ou-Dan followed Cemp into an alcove barrier at the heart of the machinery that made uip the "ship." "But I'm not staying," he said. Cettnp sensed behind the decision, not antagonism, but disinterest. Ou-Dan's thought came again: "I remained with Lan's dead body out of courtesy till someone arrived. Now, that you're here, I plan to return to Earth." "It's safer in the ship," Cemp urged. He pointed out that it was an Earth Silkie maxim never to take unnecessary chances. Ou-Dan's plan to go out by himself into space seemed a risk of this kind. "It would be purely accidental," was the reply, "If I met .the killer in these vast reaches. My guess is he spotted Lan when he used the relay system to communicate with me. As I see it, the closer you are to a ship, (the greater your danger." The analysis had its own reasonableness. But why, since Ou-Dan had joined the exploration group in the first place, leave now? Cemp asked the question. Ou-Dan said that because of Cemp's action in saving the meteorite Silkies from the Glis eight months 'before, Ou-Dan felt obligated to tell him that he considered this to be a crisis. But .truth was it was probably typical of the many crises that would occur in the future in a new system comprising eighteen hundred and twenty-three habitable planets. So the time to resolve Silkie rights in relation to human beings was now. Ou-Dan predicted that the Silkie originals would undoubtedly take no further action until their legal situation with Earth was settled. "The others and I came out to get the feel of being involved," said Ou-Dan. "So I can tell you right now that we're not going .to settle for being police officers like you. And of course we're not going to give up our ability to change to any form or shape of body. IF "After tail," Ou-Dan conitinued toleranitly, "just because you're limited to the Silkfle#n mmia.n cycle doesn't mean we have to be." They had been tialLldinig mentally at the siiper-sipeied of thoughts synchronized with magnetic carrier waves. It would have aotuaJly required a small book for a transcriipt of the details of itheir messages to each other; the overtones were that many. Now, for the period required for a private thought, Cemp put up a barrier. The fantastic subject of change of form was not one that he was prepared to discuss with anyone. In fact, he had instructions from the Silkie Foundation (to keep secret his special knowledge. T he original Silkies -- like OuDan -- had a ibiaaic ability to change into any living shape or form that could contain, expand or compress the total numiber of molecules involved. It need not be merely a human form. Theara was however, an elementary level itiansformaition, beginniing with a general internal and external resemblance -- not too refined but adequate for any reasonable purpose. In addition, in the presence of a life-form, they could by a continuous rapid scanning and feedback method duplicate it at virtually any level of refinement -- so long as the being who was duplicated was dose by. Earth Sdlldes, on the other hand, had been bioloicalliy limi to humanilkie B-Se C chani which was automatic once it was # in motion. Only Nat Cemp, of the Earth Silkies, could go beyond the Silldehuman cycle. In confronting the remarkable Kibmadine, he had learned its perfect method of metamorphic ability. He needed only the memory of somebody once met to be able to become that being with total duplication. Having had (these thoughts, and hidden them, Cemp tdepathed in a temporizing way, "Don't underestimate human beings." "I won't," retorted Ou-Dan, "so long as they have you fooled into being on their side." Cemp said, "Even with the # origmal Silkies added to our own numbers, the total Silkie population of the entire universe is less than #. Such a minority has to adjust to the vast planetary populations of other lifenforms." Ou-Dan said, "I don't have to adjust to anything. I'm free to do as I please." Cemp said, "All througih human history, wherever ipeople got the right to make their own choices, they presently refused to cooperate even for the common good. Soon, each person set himself up as having an opinion as good as anybody eJse's. Naturally, they first of all soon fell under ithe influence of individuals with skillful systems and in the end were maneuvered into a new slavery. Now, here you are making the same error of refusing to cooperate." "Let others cooperate with us," was the reply. "We're the superior beings." "M we were so great," Cemp flashed back, "bow come tbeie're so few of us left?" "Weil -- " Ou-Dan was impatient -- "we were unlucky tbat we ran into a race witb even more that's the legend. And of course after that we were in that meteorite xmder the control of the Glis, and our numbers were kept limited." C emp pointed out gently that control of Silkies by the Glis was the slave condition. "Therefore," he said, "we may deduce that long ago Silkies reached the state of refusing to cooperate for the common good. We can picture enormous, vaulting egos, opinionated and ridiculous, never once having a true survival thought. "We can," Cemp continued, "picture Silkies refusing to abide by any system of law, going out into space if anyone threatened them. Feeling absolutely impregnable. And then one day out there in the dark reaches they met their match, and were hunted down one by one by a remorseless enemy." "I don't see," said Ou-Dan, "how we free Silkies can even talk to someone as conformist as you are." "Reliable is the word," answered Cemp. "I can be trusted to do what I say. Evidently you and your originals cannot even decide what role you want to play." "Why should we have a role? Why should we work at all, at anything? Why shouldn't human beings work for us instead of we few them? That's a perfectly fair question." Cemp exfriained that human beings seemed to be easily surviving their present association with Silkies. But this might not be true if the conditions of association were altered. Ou-Dan seemed indifferent to the possibility. And Cemp realized it was a lot to expect that someone who had had no previous contact with human beings would care about them. But Cemp, who had been bom to a human mother, did care. So he said, with the intent of ending the discussion, "We'll have a general meeting soon. We'll talk then." Such a meeting had already been proposed by Charley Baxter, head of the Silkie Foundation. Baxter, who was one of the Special People, was as anxious about the attitude of the original Silkies as Cemp. Ou-Dan accepted the end of conversation with: "I have nothing more to learn here. Good-by." Whereupon he launched into space, and was quickly lost from view. Presently, he did not even register on the magnetic band as any different from the meteorite flotsam and jetsam that populated all areas of space. U I n this distant point in space, with all the trigger systems for the "ship" set for instant reaction, Cemp waited for he knew not what. The open-to-space ship was itself lightless. Artificial light on any level "interfered with the sensitive instmments that monitored the protective weaponry. It was enough problem for the equipment around him that IF he himself had to be taken account of. Periodically, Cemp made a complete check of that equipment. He established each time that every relay was ready to snap and that each device was separately set to permit the presence of his Sihde shape and mass and of that portion of his life energy which he could not contain within himself. While he waited, Cemp gazed "down" in the general direction of Earth. The view below him had the forever-new quality of light and form that had passed a threshold point of abundance. There were so many, the dark sky of Earth's new supersun system. The sheer number of planets, each with a different coloration, made for a timelesy beautiful panorama. For Cemp, it was below and down because he had long ago oriented himself in such human terms. In his Silkie body he always operated at what would have been face down in a human being. So he had a right and a left, a front and a back, and an up and down. In the several conversations that he conducted with far Earth, Cemp could obtain no additional advice as to any other precautions he might take. No one believed that way out there at the remote edge of the system any living being could approach him, unnoticed. Yet what Lan Jedd reported, indicated that there would be no advance warning. There wasn't. A t the moment of the attack, Cemp had waited in the ship exactly four Earth hours, eiteen minutes and forty-two seconds. The being who lat that time for a few split-instants was exposed to Cemp's perception had the shape of an inverted p#rramid. Interesting that in the transmission of the same image from the now deceased Lan Jedd, the invert had not come through. The transmiting computer, consulting its analogs, had produced a pyramid stereotype wherein the base was down and the point up. In fact, the base was up and the point down. That was all Cemp had time to "see," for the creature was in the trap only momentarily. A less speedy perception than that of a Silkie would have noticed at best a shadow darkening a lighted space. Despite the colossal speed of the being's withdrawal, Cemp with his heightened Silkie perception was able to examine awareness centers in himself that had automatically recorded more data. Thus Cemp continued to view where it had been through a series of neural and energy receptors that played back their information for his evaluation. He realized, fascinated: During the moment it was in the trap, the creature attacked and tried to kill him. But he was saved by the defenses of the trap. A strong impulse came to study the battle, to discover immediately what it was that had made him vulnerable, why his own screens wouldn't have worked. Cemp fought that impulse, thinking: Put the battle aside. Examine it kst For an attack was only that -- energy, force, whatever. It was the Nijjan method of approaching the trap that everybody down the line wanted to know about. Where had the fantastic thing come from? Studying the after-images, Cemp saw with amazement that the pyramid shape was actually an energy projection from a source. The being at the source he could not get a good look at; it withdrew so rapidly. Considerang the "impossible" speed of that withdrawal, he recaHod a scientifically oriented speculative discussion he had had with other Silkies about his encounter with the Glis. Now, he felt that Oils experience again in his mind -- and that wasn't it. The discovery appalled him. For what he had perceived had been something; and then it was nothing. Something to nothing. Nothing to something to nothing. What could it be? C emp had one receptor that had on it a vague perception. So vague that it gained reality only because he played it for himself a dozen times, and even then it remained unclear. But with so many replays he had an impression, if so it could be called, that the energy point which was the apparent source of the inverted pyramid had anoth point at some vasit distance beyond it. And behind -- beyond -- that point was still another point, and beyond that wther, and more points in the vaster distance. Or was it distance? Cemp couldn't decide. After viewing and re-viewing the perceptic impression, so shadowy and uncertain, he consciously compared what he saw to an endless image reflected in two perfect mirrors facing each other. But even that was only an analogy. Because the images extended into only one mirror and not the other. It was a one-direction phenomenon. It was a mystery which he could not solve; so, unesy, he turned his attention to the life-and-deaith battle he had fought. Like the other aspects of that momentary contact, the engagement could only be studied in its confusing aftermath. Examined thus, it showed as having started the split-instant that the creature arrived. The trap, consisting in its first phase of a Glistype molecule with the gravity power of a planet, had instantaneously oriented to the enemy. It was instantaneous because, of course, gravity has no lag; there is no moment of waiting while it goes through a process of adjustment. The molecule, that remarkable discovery of the ancient nature of matter the secret of which Cemp had gotten from the Glis, reached with the power of an entire world -- and attached itself to the alien. Hindered him. The attacker, thus handicapped, nevertheless did something. What, Cemp had no idea. AH Cemp's great defenses were up: his energy IF screens, his magnetic methods of turning aside radiation, what he had learned from the Kibmadine about using attack energy against the attacker. But the attack was not on an energy band. Cemp's defenses had no effect. -- He felt a change in his whole body, a sudden sense of inward-collapsing distortion... His thought twisted strangely. Unable to put up a single barrier, Cemp felt himself spin toward death -- The next split-moment the creature, hindered by the molecule, disappeared. And the battle was over. m U rgently, Cemp opened a line to Earth. He was quickly deluged with questions. And someone had the same thought as he had had: that the pyramid was a weapon that operated through some mirror principle from an actual distance. Thus -- it was argued -- the effect of nothing to something to nothing was like a mirror being turned on and off in the time it took a relay to push-pull a switch. "No!" answered Cemp. "It was a life-form. I sensed its aliveness." That ended that part of the argument right there. Qiarley Baxter came on. "Your data is being fed into the computer, Nat," he said gravely. "While we wait, would you like to speak to your wife?" "Of course, what do you think." Joanne's thought, when it came through, reflected irritation. "Everybody's so damned secretive about what you're doing," she began. So they hadn't told her his danger. Cemp was relieved. "Look," he telepathed, "we're exploring out here and testing a new ship. That's all Fm allowed to say." It was a truth of sorts. He added, "What have you been up to?" His attempt at diverting her was successful. Joanne became indignant. "I have had the most horrible experience," she reported. What she told him was that Silkie women -- members of the original Silkies -- had called on the human wives of Earth Silkies and urged them to divorce their Silkie husbands. Such a Silkie woman had called on Joanne and demanded that she divorce Cemp. The Silkie woman had pointed out bluntly that Cemp as a Sillde would live to be at least a thousand years old. And, of course, Joanne was more mortal than that by fat. "So -- " the Silkie woman had urged -- "why not face the reality of that now, while you are still young?" Cemp had the unhappy feeling that the problem was more severe than Joanne knew. A thousand years was as long as the Glis, for its own reasons, had allowed meteorite Silkies to live. A Silkie's actual life span was an unknown. Yet he had always fdt that these matters would be resolved in their own good time. Joanne was under thirty. Her present life expectancy was about one hundred and fifty. Long before she readied that age, human immortality might become possible. Questioning her, he discovered that Joanne had toughly pointed out all these things to the Silkie woman and had given as much as she received. I t was not a moment for Cemp to consider what changes might come in the Silkiehuman tangle. He telepaithed with wairmth, "Don't worry about any of this. You're my darling." "That's a powerful point," said Joanne sweetly. "But don't think you've fooled me for a moment. I sense there's a big event coming up in your life, and you're taking it in stride as usual." "Well -- " Cemp began. "It's really an unresolvable dilemma," answered Joanne. "What is?" Cemp asked, in surprise. Cemp quickly realizedthat Joanne's concern was not with the danger but, of all things, with the fact he was not afraid. She said, almost tearfully, "If you feel so confident against such a mighty enemy -- what's going to become of Silkiehuman relations?" "Meaning, I presume," said Cemp, "that Silkies don't need humans any more?" "Well, do they?" Cemp explain patiently, "In the first place, my confidence is in Logic of Levels, and not in myself." Joanne brushed that aside. "It's the same ithing. Logic of Levels is a tool that you can use whether you're associated with humans or not" "In the second place, " Cemp replied, "I don't even know yet whether I'm going to dare use it though I'm certainly going to threaten it." "You'll be forced to. And then you'll win, and there you'll be at an incredible height of power and ability." "In the ithird place," Cemp continued, "the association between Silkies and humans exists. And I'm particularly happy with what I got out of the transaction -- meaning you." He broke off. "Do I seem any smarter?" "N-no." "I.Q. human level, eh, stiM?" "I suppose so." Reluctant admission. "I stiU seem to reason like a human being, correct?" "But you're so powerful." "Perhaps you should think of me as a battleship commander," said Cemp. "In this instance, the battleship is my Silkie body, and you're the commander's beloved wife." The comparison seemed to buoy her, for her mind smiled at him, and she said, "They're motioning me to stop, and I still love you, but good-hy, my dear." Her conuminication ceased. C harley Baxter came on. "The computer," he said, and there was concern in his thought, "was reminded by your data of something you reported months ago; something the Gliis told you during its death throes." IF Cemp remembered: The Glis, realizing that Cemp was a dangerous SilJde, had headed toward a remote sttar system. This system -- according to what the Glis had told Cemp in its final, desperate effort to save itself -- was inhabited by an ancient enemy of the Silkies. These beings called themselves Nijjans. Which was a race name with the mighty meaning: Creators of Universes. Or, in its fullest sense: The People Who Know the Nature of Things and Can Create Universe at Will. As Cemp uney pondered the hideous possibilifiife' if the analysis were true, Baxter!)icfeued in an arguing overtone, the Glis was going somewhere. You did get alarmed and you threaded him. As you described it, thd" Glis slowed down and tried to make his pie with you. So that whatever system he was pointing toward must be out there iq the direction he was going, not too far away." Since astronomers had gotten a line on Sol, Earth's former sun, they had already projected a line fairly straight at the Glis's originial destination somewhere in near space. "And," said Baxter, "the system is out there about six light-years beyond you, Nat." Such details were, of course, of interest. But Cemp was under too much threat for anything but the absolutely decisive points to matter. He telepathed hastily, "Does the computer have any idea how the Nijjan killed Lan? Or how I should handle him if he comes back with reinforcements?" Baxter's disturbed reply came. "Nat, this is a terrible thing to tell someone in your situation. But the computer hasn't the faintest idea how the thing came out of nothingness or what the force used against Lan and you was. It says it has no programming that fits and -- " That was all Cemp had time to receive. , At that precise split-instant, the perceptors that he had projected beyond the Nijjan's first relay point were triggered. Since he had a communication line open to Earth, he allowed his recording of danger to go through him and along that line. The esSwiitial of communication was: The Nijjan is back... before I'm ready. IV I t seemed like long, long before. There the creature was, in much the same position as the first time: partly inside the ship, a hundred feet away. But alone! That was the one hopeful aspect. The inverted pyramidal projection glimmered with flickering energy pulsations. Cemp now saw that the actual being at the source of the projection was also an inverted pyramid -- in a way. The base was much narrower. And it had, he observed, arms and legs. It was about six feet long, and beautiful in that its hard, bright skin glittered and shone with changing color. IF At the instant of the alien's arrival, the Glis molecule tried to attach itself. But the Nijjan was evidently prepared; for he balanced himself against it, somehow. And thereafter ignored the molecule. Cemp grew aware that the creature was looking at him intently from one or more of the bright points at the upper part of its body. Tentatively, Cemp sent a thought on a magnetic wave. The answer came at once on the same wave band; came with multiples more force than Cemp was accustomed to receiving. Yet he had his own neural transformers that stepped the power down to his level -- And he had his first communication. The creature began: "Let's have . a conversation." "You have a lot to explain," Cemp thought back, grimly. "We're puzzled," was the reply. "Suddenly a Nova-Osize appears only a few light-years from our own system. On investigation, we discover that the system which has so suddenly come into being is the largest planetary family, possibly, in the galaxy. Only a few of the planets are inhabited. But many have been in the past and are no longer so. Climactically, one of our exploring units meets a Silkie, a powerful being known from our antiquity as an enemy. He naturally destroys this being." Said Cemp, "We shall require your people to execute this explorer who so instantly -- and naturally -- took it upon himself to destroy a Silkie." "It was an ancient reflex, which has now been modified," was the reply. "So execution will not occur. It could have happened to any Nijjan." "Did you do it?" Cemp asked. "Are you this -- what did you call him? -- exploring unit?" "Would it matter?" "Probably not." The Nijjan changed the subject, "What do you Silkies do in relation to human beings? What is your role?" "We're police." "Oh! That's interesting." Cemp couldn't see how. Besides his attention was still concentrated on the other's explanation for the C emp admitted reluctantly to himself that if an attack reflex had indeed been set up long ago in all these creatures, and never canceled, it would be difficult to adjudicate intentional murder. But his next communication acknowledged none of this, as he continued: "All right, so here we are, accidentally doomed to occupy a space only a few light-years from each other. And we have eighteen hundred habitable planets. How many do you have?" "That's a difficult question to answer. We don't think in terms .of having a planet of our own. But I sense this is a difficult concept for you, so I'll say we probably do own one planet -- our original home." "Do you want any more," "Not in the sense that you mean. All tjiis is too new. But our basic purposes are peaceful.' Cemp didn't believe him. It sihould have 'been true. The passing of the eons sihould have ended old impulses of hatred and destruction. On Earth, a thousand descendants of enemies of an equal number of yesteryears now lived side by side, at peace apparently forever. Of course, this was not quite the same. The Nijjans were not descendants. They were the same beings who, long ago indeed, had attained the heights of their civilization and also immortality. These were the same creatures that had in the distant past hated and sought to exterminate the Silkies -- so the GHs had told Cemp. In that olden time, desiring to have the Silkies as servants, the mighty Glis had offered them a symbiotic relationship as the price for saving them. And the Silkies had accepted. But that, with the transformation and defeat of the Glis, was now over. And the Silkies were again on their own. They could expect no help from any outside source. It was a shaking thought. But Cemp was unrelenting. "I can't accept your disclaimer," he said. "Because why, when you first arrived here, presumably with your attack reflt'x already canceled, did you try to kill me?" The Nijjan's reply was: "It was a defensive act. Something grabbed me. I see now that it is an unusual gravitational manifestation. But in that first moment I reacted in two ways: Immediate counter-attack. And retreat. As soon as I had considered what the threat was, I decided to return. And here I am. So let's talk." It was a good explanation. Yet Cemp's feeling remained: he didn't believe the story. Couldn't accept it. Considered it motivated by the Nijjan's' desire to gain time... He had a desperate conviction that his danger was increasing with each passing moment. Cemp wondered: What does he want the time for? The obvious answer: Time to explore the ship, of course. Its structure, its weaponry. "If what you say is true," Cemp countered, "then you will tell me what your method of attack was. How did your colleague kill a Silkie?" "It would be foolish of me to reveal my advantages," answered the Nijjan. "How do I know what your plans are?" Though that, also, was basically true, it was a total stop to discussion. Yet there were still things he could learn. C emp sent out magnetic waves on all bands, designed to stir reactions in the other's body. He recorded the information ithat came back on magnetic waves passing through the Nijjan's 'body at the time his messages arrived. He used radar and (read the data that bounced back. -- And geon waves, those strange time-delay patterns. IF -- He used the Ylem energy, alS# -- and that was dangerously close to being a weapon. But his purpose, which he telepathed to the Nijjan, was to elicit a reaction. If there was, in fact, any understanding for him in the waves and energies that reflected or came back to him, Cemp could not analyze it. With an effort, Cemp braced himself against the failure, and commanded, "Leave! Unless you reveal the method of murder, I refuse to continue this conversation. And I assure you that no further negotiations between our two groups can occur until that revelation is made." The Nijjan answered, "I cannot give such data without authorization. So why not come with me and talk to -- " He used a mental meaning that implied a government but had a different, additional implication, which Cemp could not evaluate. Cemp answered, "That would place me at your mercy." "Somebody has to negotiate. Why not you?" One thing, it seemed to Cemp, could be said for this Nijjan. As a deceiver, if that were what he was, he was certainly consistent. Telepathicaily, he temporized: "How would I go with you?" "Move past me, across and into the projon of myself at a distance of -- " The Nijjan named a measurement in terms of a certain magnetic wavelength. Once more, Cemp felt grudging admiration for this being. He thought: For all I know, that will What was fascinating was that he was being maneuvered into doing It to himself. The extreme skillfulness of the deception involved was what, in tills near-ultimate moment, focused Cemp's attention on that aspect. A s he realized the possibility, Cemp did two things. He sent a beam to the trap mechanism which controlled the molecule with its planet-sized gravity; and released the molecule's hold on the Nijjan. The rationale of this first action was: the being must be bracing himself against that gravity, was using power to hold himself away from it. At the moment of release, he would have to deal with the resultant inertia, the equivalent of a planet's centrifugal thrust. The second thing Cemp did was more subtle, but he did it at the same instant. He tried Logic of Levels on the one behavior that he had now belatedly noticed in the Nijjan. And, because he wasn't sure it would work, and didn't want to give away what, until now, had been a human-Silkie secret, he hoped the gravity release would confuse the great being who had come into this trap with such toital confidence in his own ability against Silkies -- confuse the Nijjan, render 'him momentarily vulnerable and, somehow, prevent disaster. The behavior Cemp believed he had observed was the creature manifesting the famous betrayal pattern. From the point of view of Logic of Levels, it was a minioir event in the brain. Since it was the basic mnning cyde of life, nothing decisive could be done against it. By triggering it, he could force the Nijjan to win more. -- Which was pretty ironic and could lead to unknown consequences. But it was the only opening available. Three things happened at the same moment: The molecule released. The betrayal cycle triggered. Cemp entered the path of the energy beam, which created the larger pyramid. He felt a sensation different from anything he had ever experienced. Under him and around him, the trap-ship... vanished. He perceived that he was in a strange -- not place, for there was nothing. But... what? V I n a group, only the leader can betray. And he must betray, or be ready to betray, or there is no group. Everyone else has to conform, fit in, follow the rules, be a supporter without qualifications. Even to think an objection is wrong. You must swear fealty to the leader "without mental reservations." You must support the code and ideally report to the leader's police any deviations from it on the part of others, and on the part of yourself. Alt any moment for the good of the group -- by the leader's judgment alone -- you can be betrayed (saoiifLced) wiithouit any other explanation being required. Periodically, you or some other conformist must be betrayed as a matter of policy, even if you have not deviat from the code by any previously applied standard of judgment. The leader's act of betrayal (of you) of itself makes you guilty. Immediately every other person in the group must disconnect from you without mental reservations. The rule of betrayal by the leader alone applies under any group system, including the elective -- where the leader's immediate aides are his group. As a group grows larger, the leader delegates his betrayal rights to unevenly qualified persons, who act in his name. Where this process (of delegation) continues and expands, there are alleviations because not every sub-leader is as sensitive to the danger of non-conformism -- being a conformist himself -- as the leader. But the leader who can read minds, and who utilizes the betrayal cycle through a remorseless police control method, can remain leader... forever. Thus betrayal, consistently applied, wins at all levels. F or Cemp, a combinafeon event was occurring. He felt as if someone with whom he was in a kind of total telepathic communication was small. So small. Or -- a sudden puzzlement struck him -- was he, in fact, very large? IF Incredibly large? (Larger thian the universe? The being whose ithougjhits Cemp was receiving rejected the concept of vastness. It was more comfortable to feel -- small. Satisfied that he w;as a mere point, the being considered what he might become. He thought, and Cemp received the thought along with the awareness: N'Yata will be pleased that I am having this moment of near-ultimate reality. At his stage of development, he could only expect to hold on for a brief time, aligning what was possible for him, setting up as many of the golden lights as he could, in the time available. Mustn't waste a second! One by one the being, himself so small, discharged even tinier bits of the smallness into the dark. Each bit was hard to push away, as if it's attachment to him, or consanguinity, prevented it from departing to any distance. The first few yards were tremendously hard, the first miles hard, the first light-years progressively easier, the distance of a galaxy Hke wafting a feather into a whirlwind. And the dark lightyears beyond seemed almost barrierless. Suddenly, one of the points he had thus put out attracted the being's attention. He thought: No, oh, no, I mustn't. ' What he fought, then, was a surge of interest within ihimself in that point. He tried to tell himself the truth: that it was he who had put out the point, and it was he who was projecting the interest into it. That it had no interest of its own. But a curious inversion wias taking place: the conviction that the point was of itself interesting. That there was something attractive there, separate from 'his thought about it. As he had that awareness, Cemp sensed that .the creature's high, pure energy began to drop. Rapidly, it seem -- how long it took he didn't know -- the being suffered an emotional transformation from a kind of radiance to -- an, oh, wdl -- boredom, through a momentary flash of rage to the self-delusion of: I am probably god, or at least a sui#god. So everything must align with me. He was back, the areature thought sardonioaly, to the level of betrayal. As he had that awareness, he was already at the other point, die one that had so automatiically annised his interest. -- Every instant that these remarkable events occurred, Cemp was fighting and observing, by means of another aspect of his awareness, a life-and-leath battle that had no meaning. Because no one was fighting him. L ike a man who falls througlh an luinoticed manhole imto a drainage pipe of deep,, dirty, siwiriing water; like a child grabbing at and abruptly caught by the surging power of a live wire; like someone who puts his foot into a noose sets off a trigger and is jerked a hundred feet above ground as a bcsA tree springs back into position -- Cemp had moved himself into a cosmic equivalent of the slipstream of a rocket. He was msitaiitly beyoiDd Inis abilky to cope, sitruigglliBg with a natural force that transceiiided has expedience. It was a basic conidition of space, the existence of which had never been suspected by man or Silkie. Cemp put up hiis barriers. Drew energy from the trap-hip. Replenished what was being suctioned from him. The golden dot winked out. And Cemp grew aware that he was in a large room. Several human beings, who were sitting before an enodimous instrument bank, turned and looked at him in amazement. As Cemp recognized top personnel of the Silkie Foundation, Charley Baxter leaped from his chair and came loping across the d'isitances of the thick carpet. Another realization forced itself upon Cemp: His Silkie body felt unstiahila in a unique fashion. Not undeasant, the sensation was as If some pant of ihim were aware of a distant place. The allarmed thought came: I'm stdl oonnected to another location! I could he snatched out of here any nsoment. And what was alaiimiing about that was that he had no further defense. Except for one small delaying idea, he had used up his available posAccordingly, the real crisis was upon him, unless -- Cemp transformed to human. Doing so was not a well considered act. He had the thou'ght that a change of structure mi free him even a little from that nemote...  connection. Because it was his only remaining possibility, he made the change at once. And, in his haste, he half-fell, half-slid, to the floor. The transition, he noted with relief, seemed to work. The feeling of being connected faded to a shadowy thing -- still there, but like a whisper in a room where someone had been yelling moments before. As Charley Baxter came up, Cemp called out to him, "Quick! Let's get to the computer. I don't know what happened. I should be read." On the way, someone slipped Cemp a robe. He donned it over his naked body without pausing. There was a little conversation, tense, staccato. Baxter asked, "What seemed to happen?" "I gained some time," replied Cemp. A s he explained it, it was of course much more than that. Insitead of being instantly defeated, he had manipulated and confused the enemy. Confronted by a superior 'being, he had used what ability and capacity he had. Now he desperately needed help, some kind of understanding about the fantastic thing he had experienced. Baxter asked anxiously, "How much time do you think we have?" Cemp replied, "I have an impression that they'ie working at top speed. An hour -- no more." It appeared to 'be true. At least they arrived in the computer room safely. In its siwift eleotronic way -- yet slowly for the urgency that Cemp IF felt -- the computer made its study of him. And came up with its four alternative answers. The first of the two that mattered -- number three -- was strange indeed. "I have the impression," said the computer, "that everything that happened was occurrinig in someone's mmd. Yet there is an impression of something ultimate in that concept. Something -- well, I don't know -- really basic to all things." And of course that was hard to accept. Ultimate -- basic -- was too great. An ultimate, axiomaticaliy, could not be fought or resisted by something less. "And that," said the computer, "is really all I can teU you. The manipulations of space of which the Nijjans seem to be capable 'are new. It would seem as if the cells in their system had to adjust to conditions that give them an advantage over other life-forms; some kind of greater control over the essence of things." It was a bad moment. For even as the computer reported failure, Cemp sensed an internal change for the worse. The something -- out there -- was adjusting to his human body. He had a sudden conviction that at any moment a threshold point would be crossed. Hastily, he reported the sensation to Baxter and finished, "I was hoping we'd have time for me to visit the Earth headquarters of the original Silkies, but I'd better go Silkie myself right now." Charley Baxter's reply showed his awareness of Cemis danger, the possibility that Cemp might find himself in some far vacuum of space in his unprotected human body. Baxter asked anxiously, "Didn't you transform to human because as a Silkie you were even more vulnerable to whatever is pulling at you?" It was true. But ithere was no alternative. As a Silkie he would temporarily at least be safer in a dangerous environment. Baxter went on, and his voice held a note of strain. "Nat, why don't you change to some other form?" C emp turned and stared at him. And then for a space the two of them were silent. They stood there 'in that plush room, with its cushioned chairs and its small mechanical protrusions -- which were ah that wias visible of the giant computer. Finally Cemp said: "Charley, the consequences of what you suggest are an unknown factor." Baxter said earnestly, "Nat, if we can't trust you to work it out, then it's an unsolvable problem anyway." The sensation of imminent change was stronger. But still Cemp temporized. What Baxter suggested was almost as world-shaking as the Nijjan threat. Transform -- to anything!! To any body. To any form. Be something entirely different from the three bodies he knew so well. He believed what Charley had said wias a truth. But it was a truth in relation to a known past -- the hnnian-Silkie situation that he had grown up with. It was iiot a trutih to someone who didn't Ihave that background. The meteorite "originar Silkie, Ou-Dan, had made that crystal clear. Cemp had the strangest conviction of his entire life: that he was like a man poised in pitch darkness on some edge, preparing to jump into the night ahead -- and bellow. It would of course be a limited jump. At the moment there were only about three alien changes he could make. He could become a Kibmadine and the creature to which the Kibmadine had changed to... and a Nijjan. He explained to Charley, "You have to have a mental picture to go by, have to have 'seen' the other being first; and I only have a few." "Change to Nijjan!" urged Baxter. Cemp said, almost blankly, "Are you serious?" And then, because he had an internal sensation as of something beginning to slip away from him -- it was a very distinct impression -- he hastily played the Nijjan image, as he had recorded it -- "played" it through the transmorpha system. As he did so, all his cells received the uniform simultaneous charge of energy that acted like the explosion of the cap of a cartridge, releasing the pent-up energy in the cell. The .transformation was as rapid as it was because the chemical energy thus released needed instantaneous unions with their chemioal counterparts. Again, it was one of those situatioihs where, by theory, the entire process should have required a second or less. In actual fa of course, living cells were slow to adjust. So, it was exactly five and a half seconds after start that Cemp was in his new state. He was also, he observed, in a strange place. VI C emp became aware that he was recording the thoughts of the other ibeing again. This being -- the Nijjan enemy -- grew conscious of something to his left. He glanced in that direction and saw that N'Yata had moved from her remote center of being into his space. It was a movement that he welcomed and admired, since she was at least half a stage above him in development. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have appreciated her coming because it was both flattering to and educational for him. And normally it would have been an ideal opportunity for him to observe and imitate her greater perfection. But this was not a normal or ordinary occasion. She had come in response to his need for help; his puzzling failure to deal with Cemp. Her .thought about this showed in her movement, and so he perceived her as a single golden dot the size of an atom. Her smallness, and her location to his left, he was able to mark by crisscrossing lines of forces. Cemp marked it with him. But presently he had a private thought to the effect: how am I observing IF this? And ithieii he reailized. With his own eoeirgy auitomatLoailly evoked firom ihiim by an emotion, widdh (the other beanies ithoughits noted with a wiy self-judgmenit) was still only a few viibiaiti alxwe betrayal. Once again. Logic of Levels and all its implicit awareness of the nature of emotion was Cemp's only possible overt defense. And of course, as before, betrayal was simply not an area by w!hioh he could decisively defeat anyone. Also, he felt inituiitively reluctant to trigger the more capable N'Yata to some ultimate level of win. With these various restrictions in mind, he directed his one defense against all the destruction implicit in the betrayal emiotioa. Subtly. He urged her to a slightly gayer meaning of betrayal. Suggested seduction. Argued that the pleasure outweighed negative aspects. His was a skillful counteraction, for the golden dot switched positions in space. Moved ifrom his left to directly in front of him. How many light-years were involved in that switch, Cemp could not deterirdine. N'Yaita was still at a very remote viewpoint. The vast distances defied measurement by his onehalf-step lower techniques, in which he reflected the condition of the Nijjan 'body he had duplicated. "You can still betray!" That was the thought-feelinig, which flowed back now from the golden dot to Cemp. Having sent the message, the dot began to recede. Oemp felt a distinct drop in his own energy level to a stiU lower (than betiayal) level of grief and apathy. As tie watched the dot go, first lorg came for death, so great was the outSow of his life energy. He recognized it as a half-hearted attempt to kill him, sensed that even though she knew he was not the real G'Tono, she was puzzled. In the final issue, she could not bring herself to destroy another Nijjan -- not even a duplicate one. Her withdrawal was an intent to consider the problem. He felt her let him go. His thought ended. He was back in the computer room. C emp glanced over at Baxter and telepathed, "What happened?" Having asked the question, Cemp grew conscious of three things. The first of these was mereily interesting: During Cemp's    confrontation... with N'Yata, Baxter had moved away. The man stood now staring at Cemp, a wary expression on his lean face. Once more, Cemp asked, "I bad an experience. What seemed to occur while I was having it?" It was the same question as before, but more detailed. This time, Baxter stirred. He said aloud, "I don't get your thoughts any more. So let me just say that now I sense that your Nijjan body is radiating more force than I can take. Evidently you'ie in a different energy state." Cemp was reniembering his own earlier problem in receiving the communication of the Nijjan. After a moment's consideiraitioiii of tihe diffiouSity, he tentatively tried for an adjustment of output in the bank of ceis devoted ito the problem. Then he telepathed to Baxter, again tentatively. An expression of relief came over the lean man's face. "Okay," he replied, "We're on. What happened?" Cemp hastily reported his experience, ftnishing, "There's no question, my original use of Logic of Levels confused the first Nijjan I met, whose name I gather is G'Tono. By spiraling him up to a superwin situation, I escaped whatever he had in mind. And now, by becoming a duplicate of him -- essentially that's all I did -- I momentarily confused N'Yata. But she recovered fast, and so time is of the essence." "You think -- " "Wait!" admonished Cemp. It was the second awareness that was suddenly in Cemp's mind, and that was not merely interesting; it was urgent: He still had the consciousness of being a Nijjan. I t had all happened so fast At the moment of change, instant transfer to a confrontation with N'Yata; then back here -- Now, Cemp realized that as a Nijjan he could hear sounds. Baxter's human voice had jenetrated to him at a normal level -- sea-level Earth pressure, it seemed. With that to start, Cemp did a lightning-swift orientation: not only sound was affected but sight, fng, proprioceptive sensations. He 'possessed an apparently human physic-emoition sptrum. And he could walk. He felt oddshaped appendages that held him, balanced him, enabled him to stand... and arm-like things, more sinuous. Cemp was not surprised that he was aware of human quaHties. Change of shape was not change of being, but a cbamdeon-like alteration of appearance, a total alteration as distinct from merely a method of conceialment, not simply a 'blending with a background. He was the human-Silkie, Nat Cemp, in the shape of a Nijjan. His Barth-horn cells were the basic stuff of his new body, different undoubtedly from the actual cells of a Nijjan. Yet the similarity, in its finer details, was sufficiently intricate to be interesting to Cemp. It made him hopeful that, by being a Nijjanshape, he would be able also to discover some of the secrets of that shape's abilities. His attention continued to leap from point to point of his Nijjan body. The legs and arms -- being able to have them in the vacuum of space: that was different from Silkiehuman. The Silkie shape could survive in space only if the interior flesh and structure were separated from the vacuum by a steel#iard ohitinous substance. For that, even legs had to be massive. And so Silkies had semi#egs and nothing but a . grimace where the face and head should be. The Nijjans evidently had the IF same ability without change of form. A hard substance? It didn't seem that way. It seemed more like a different molecular structure. -- No time to investigate that! On a higher level, there was in the Nijjan body the entire magnetic wave band, and radiation sensitivity; also, awareness of gravity, and all the stasis centers that made it possible for Silkies to operate stabily in the vacuum of space. There was more. Cemp perceived another set of control centers high in the thickest part of the pyramidal shape. But these neural areas were silent, flowed no energy and responded to none of his hastily directed thoughtcommands. If there was any automatic activity above the level of mere chemical survival in that mass of nerve substance, Cemp could not detect it. He surmised uneasily: was it the space-control lobe of the Nijjan brain? But he had no time to experiment with it. Not yet. What was particularly frustrating was that there was no larger pyramidal energy image projecting from him. So that was not an automatic process. Could it be an output of some kind from the space-control cells? No time to investigate that either. No time, because his third awareness was forcing in upon his attention, and that was something he could do something about. By his reasoning, furthermore, it was related to the second awareness he bad had. Thus he was not really turning away from what it was like to be a Nijjan to something less urgent. Not completely turning, anyway. "Wait... a little longer," Cemp repeated to Baxter. Having telepathed the second admonition, Cemp put out another thought on a magnetic beam that humans could read. The thought was directed toward the headquarters on Earth of the Space Silkies. It was on an open channel; and so he was not surprised when he received answers from three minds, one a Silkie female. All three answers were the same: We space Silkies have agreed that we will not discuss our affairs on an individual basis. "What I have to say is very urgent. Do you have a spokesman?" Cemp asked. "Yes. I-Yun. But you'll have to come over. He can only talk if some of us are monitoring." T he implication was of group thinking and group action, decisions by many, not merely one. Considering the restrictions -- which he did fleetingly -- Cemp had a sudden intuition, athougiht that was surdy an insight of major import "I'll be there in -- " Cemp began. He paused, turned to Baxter and asked, "How quickly can you get me over to Space Silkie hcquarters?" Baxter was pale. "It would take too long, Nat," he protested. 'Tifteen, twenty minutes -- " " -- in twenty minutes; so get everybody togeti in one room!" Cemp completed his thought to the Silkies in their distant headquarters. Whereupon, he mentally persuaded Baxter, still objecting, literally to run to the nearest elevator. People turned and stared as the silvery Nijjan body and the human being ran along side by side. But Cemp was already explaining, already convincing the other. As a result, what authority could do, was done. A "down" elevator stopped on an emergency signal, picked them up and whisked them to the roof. A helijet, about to take off, was held back by a pre-emptive control tower command, and presently it was zooming across the rooftops of the huge buildings that made up the Silkie Foundation, soaring many degrees indeed away from its original destination. It zeroed in presently on the landing depot of the three-story building which had been assigned as a preliminary headquarters and which was more or less across town from the Tnaln Silkie community. During the flight, Cemp resumed has magnetic level communication. He told the receiving trio who the enemy was and explained, "Since I had no reaction to it in my Silkie form, I'm assuming that those of us bom on Earth do not have any old reflexes on the subject of Nijjans. But it seemed to me that the meteorite Silkies might." There was a long pause, and then another mind sent a thought on the mapietic beam. "This is I-Yun. All restrictions are temporarily off. Answer with any truth you have, anyone." The female Silkie's thought came first. "But it's so many generations ago!" she protested. "You believe we'll have an ancestral memory after such a long time?" Cemp replied, "If that's what it takes, I can only say I hope so, but -- " He hesitated. What was in his mind w-as even more fantastic. He had got the impression from the Glis that a number of really original Silkies were still around. His brief hesitation ended. He sent the thought. "You mean, like a hundred thousand years old?" came an astonished male Silkie response. "Maybe not that long," said Cemp. "In fact, I compute from feeling-thoughts I recorded that it's not more than ten thousand years since the Glis attached the Silkies to him. But anywhere from five to ten thousand, yes." T here was a pause. Then the thought came: "What do you expect such a Silkie to do? Defeat a Nijjan? Remember, our understanding is that we Silkies were the ones who were defeated and decimated. And, besides, how will we find the old ones? No one remembers anything like that far back; the Glis with its memory-erasing techniques saw to that. Do you have a method of stimulating such ancient reflexes?" Cemp, wiho indeed had the perfect, practicable method, wanted to IF know how many Silkies were in the building this very moment "Oh, about a hundred." That was I-Yun. It seemed a sizable cross-seotion. Cemp wanted to know if they were all together as he had requested. "No, but we'll get them here if you wish." Cemp very much wished. "And quick!" he urged. "I swear to you that there's no time to waste." Presently, Cemp sent another magnetic level message, "Mr. Baxter and I are now landing on the roof. We shall be down lin the big room in about one minute." During that minute he sent streams of thoughts down to the group, explaining his analysis. The decisive question was: Since the Silkies had indeed been decimated in the long ago by the Nijjans, how come a few had survived? Why had not all Silkies been exterminated? What survival method had kept a few alive? Since the survivors, or their descendants, were the only Silkie available, the answer must be buried deep in their unconscious minds, or else be available by stimulation of anCemp and Baxter emerged from their elevator and started along a corridor toward a large green door. At this penultimate moment, IYun's thought showed a qualm. "Mr. Cemp," he telepathed uneasily, "we have cooperated with you more than we intended to cooperate with anyone on Earth. But I tMnk we should know before we go any further what to expect next" . At that point, Baxter opened the green door for Cemp, and Cemp walked into the big room. Cemp was aware of Baxter returning along the corridor, running at top speed -- his retreat was actually protected by an energy screen that Cemp put up at the moment he went through the door. But the agreement was that Baxter would get out of the way, so that Cemp would not have to devote attention to his defense. The reason Baxter had come this far was that he wanted to see the room where the space Silkies were waiting. With that much pre-visualization, he could get the rest by way of the telepathic channel Cemp left open for him. In an emergency his experience might be useful; that was the thought... A t that instant of entry the scene that spread before Cemp was of many men and women, sitting or standing. His Nijjan body had visual awareness to either side, and so he also noticed that four Silkie shapes "floated" near the ceiling on both sides of the door. Guards? He presumed so. Cemp accepted their presence as a normal precaution. His own quick defense against them was to put up a magnetic signal system which, when triggered by any dangerous force, would automatically set up a screen. The majority of the occupants of the big room were not a prepossessing lot, for the human shape was not easy for these space Silkies. But human-like they were. And, as Cemp entered, they naturally focused their gazes on him. Every pair of eyes at the exact same moment saw e silvery glittering body of a Nijjan. How many individuals were present Cemp did not know or count, then or later. But there was an audible tearing sound as all over the room clothes ripped, threads parted and cloth literally shredded. The sound was the result of a simultaneous transformation by the majority from human to Silkie. About a dozen people, eight of them women, merely gasped and made no effort to change. Three individuals turned into Nijjans. # H aving become so, they instantly scattered. They ran off in three directions and came to a halt each in a separate comer; they did not actually leave the room. Cemp waited, tense, all receptors recording; not knowing what more to expect. This was what he had hoped for; and here, in all its potentiality, it was. Three. Almost incredibly, three out of a hundred or so had respKDnded with -- what? He wanted very much to believe that theirs was an age-old reflex that operated in the presence of Nijjans. Could it be that the defense against a Nijjan was -- to become a Nijjan? It seemed almost too elementary. Raised numerous questions. Cemp received a thought from Baxter: "Nat, do you i think the old Silkies of long ago might have been killed one by one because they were surprised and couldn't turn Nijjan quickly enough?" It seemed reasonable. The lag, always that lag in the transmorpha system, had been a dangerous few moments for Silkies. But the question remained: After turning into Nijjans, what did they know? And what could they do against real Nijjans? Out of the darkness of unknown numbers of miJlenia, from somewhere below the mist of forgetfulness, created by the Glis in its effort at total control, had now come a response. Like a pure light carrying images as from a projector, it shone from that far distant time into the here and now. Was there more to those images than appeared on the surface? More than the transformation itself? The swift seconds ran their courses, and Cemp got nothing more, nothing special. Baxter's anxious mind must have registered Cemp's developing disappointment, for his thought came, "Isn't there some association they've got with the changeover? Some reason for why the transformation was successful?" Cemp took that thought, made it his own, transferred it to a magnetic wave and sent it on to the three Silkie-Nijjans. With that, he got his first nonautomatic response. Said one, "You IF want my moment by moment reactions? Well, the reflex that was triggered had only on oniinary transmorplha lag. I estimate no more than seven Earth seconds was what the changeover required. While waiting for the change, and immediately after, my impulse was to escape. But of course I only ran a few yards and then recognized that you were not a true Nijjan. At which moment of awareness I stopped my flight There followed intense anxiety -- memories, obviously, since I had no reason to feel any of that here. But that's it." Cemp asked quickly, "You had no impulse to use any attack or defense energies?" "No. It was just change and get out of there." One of the remaining two Nijjan-Silkies was able to add only a single new thought. "I had the conviction," he said, "that one of us was doomed. And I felt sad and wondered who it would be this time." "But there was nothing," Cemp persisted, "about how one of you would be killed? And I presume no awareness of the means by which the Nijjan had suddenly appeared in your midst without advance warning?" "Nothing at ail," answered the three in unison. Baxfter"s third diought intruded, "Nat, we'd better get back to the computer." En route, Baxter made another, more far reaching decision. From him, preceded by a private emergency code -- known for its extreme meaning only to its recipients -- there was mentally projected by way of a general alarm system in the Silkie Foundation, a warning message to "all Silkies on Earth and all Special People -- " Slightly more than six thousand persons received it. In the warning Baxter described the Nijjan danger and the only solution so far analyzed for Silkies: change to Nijjan and scatter! Having completed his own message, Baxter introduced Cemp who broadcast, for Silkies only, the Nijjan image. S hortly after, Baxter and Cemp completed their trip to the computer, which said, "Though this neiw data gives no additional clue to the space control methods of the Nijjans, we can now view the nature of the battle by which the old Silkie nation was gradually decdmated. The method was a cautious, neverialtered system of onejy-one exterminatioia." The computer thought it initeresting that even the higher type Nijjan (female N'Yata, had not mlade a serious attempt to kill Cemp white he was in his Nijjan form. Listening to the analysis, Cemp was plunged into gloom. It was dear now that, first, the Glis molecule, and then his small use of Logic of Levels on betrayal had saved him in his first two encounters. He thought bknMy: What could be the nature of space that man or Silkie had never even dreamed of it? Nothing to something to nothing --  and that sligjhtly caved-in, ooliapsed body of Lan Jedd. Those were the only dues. "Space," said the computer in answer to Cemp's question, "is considered to be an orderly, neutral Viasitness, wherein energy and matter masses may interact according to a laiTge but finite number of rules. The distances of space are so enormous that life has (had an opportunity to evolve at leisure in innumerable chance ways on a large but finite number of planets on which, accidentally -- it is presumed -- suitable conditions developed." The definition deepened Cemp's gloom. It seemed like truth. Yet, if it were Hterally so, then how could the Nijjan have spanned those enormous distances apparently in no time at all? One or more of the assumptions needed to be modified. Or so it seemed. C emp said unhappily, "We've got to remember we're looking at an evolved universe. Perhaps, in its younger days, space was less -- what did you say? -- neutral. The speculative question arises, what might an unordorly space have been like?" "This is something that can be learned, now that Logic of Levels is applicable." "Eh!" That was Baxter, astounded. "Logic of Levels will work here? How?" "Consider!" said the computer. "A command to operate the spacecontrol areas will have to come from the central self of a Nijjan. Our problem is that we don't know what that command is. But some kind of thought stimulates it. Once stimulated a basic action response occurs. Naturally, somebody will have to force a dangerous confrontation in order to trigger such a cycle." Cemp said quickly, "Do you still have the feeling that what we might trigger is bigger than what happened to the Glis? And more basic?" "Definitely." "But -- baffled -- "what could be bigger than an apparently small object -- like the Glis -- expanding into the largest sun in the known universe?" "This is something you wiU discover. I presume you are the one who will discover it." Cemp, who (hadn't thought about it, presumed instantly that he would indeed be the one. Thinking thus, feeling the irony but resigned nonetheless, Cemp transifarmed to his Sdikiiie body. He expected that he would immediately perceive the distant tug on all his cells. But there was nothing. No awareness in him of a faraway segment of space. He had not the f aintest sense of being unbalanced at some deep level. His entire body was at peace and in a state of eqmlibrium with his surroundinigs. Cemp reported the situation to Baxter -- and then warily transformed to human. But there was no distant pull on him in that state either. A few minutes later the computer expressed what was already obvious, "They're taking no chances. They never did with Silkies. You'll have to seek them out... or else he exterminated one by one, now that they have found you." From the comer of Ibis eye, Cemp IF noticed Baxter as that analysis came through. The man's face had a strange look: sort of hypnotic, sort of iniwardurning... Cemp was quick. He grabbed the man and yelled, "What's the thought? What command is being given?" Baxter twisted weakly in that iron grip, abruptly stopped his resisting and whispered, "The message I'm getting is absolutely ridiculous. I refuse!" T he doorbell rang with a soft, musical note. Joanne Cemp stopped what she was doing in the kitchen and thought: The time has come for revelation. The night of no-memory is over. Having had the thought, casually, as if it were an ordinary concept, she headed for the door. And it was then that she simultaneously realized two things. The shock of each of the two brought a reaction of an intensity that she ihad not previously experienced in her entire life. The first realization was: Night of no-memory!... Revelation!... Why, that's crazy! Where would I get an idea like that? The second realization was that she was getting no thoughts from whoever had rung the doorbell. She felt a chih. She, who could read minds better even than her Sdkie husband by the direct telepathic method, she was receiving no thoughts. It had always been a point of wonder that the Special People were so great in this area of mind reading: something about a uiniquo of a few human beings, that was not duplicated in other humans or in Silkies. But even that uncanny ability sensed no presence at the door. Nothing. Not a sound. Not a thought. Not a sign of another mind or being. Joanne veered down the hall and into her bedroom and secured her gun. That was pretty weak stuff against what she now suddenly suspected might be a space Silkie woman making a second visitation. But the first Silkie woman had not been mentally silent. Still, against a human the gun would be effective, particularly as she had no intention of opening the door. A moment later, Joanne turned on the closed-circuit TV and found herself gazing at -- nothing. S he had the thought: The bell was rung from a distance, from many light-years away, to tell you that someone will come. You have done your duty. The painful laiboratory change from Nijjan to human will now be reversed... Unfiortiunate that Nijj,ans have had no natural way of transforming from one shape to another. However, by changing shape in this difficult way you were enabled to marry on Earth Sdhde. By so doing you have lulled him and understood him; and now that the space Silkies have finally revealed themselves, we can finally decide what to do with this dangerous race. And what you and tthe other Special People have done will determine the fate of the universe endangerers. Joanne frowned at the message -- for that was how she thought of it -- ibuit she made no answer. She simply stood there, silent and disturbed. What kind of nonsensel # The thought went on: You are skeptical, no doubt, but it will soon be proved. You may now ask any questions you wish. After many heartbeats, during which Joanne considered, remembered, decided, she still refused to reply. She saw the message as a trap, a lie, an attempt to locate her if she replied. Actually, even if it were true, it didn't matter. Her involvement on Barth was total. She thought to herself: This is the final SilkieNijjan confrontation, and it's all a bunch of Nijjan madness. She didn't have to accept such a solution, no matter if her own background were Nijjan. During all these intense moments, Joanne had kept her own thoughts out of the itelepathic band. Yet the fear was already in her, the realization that this message, or a variation of it, was probably being received by all forty-seven'hundred-odd of the Special People on Earth. And the fear which almost petrified her was that among these numerous persons somebody would be foolish, somebody would answer. The awful conviction came that any reply would mean disaster for everybody. Because all of the Special People without exception knew so much that was ibasic about Silkies. Even as she had the anxiety, somebody did answer. Two women and three men almost shnultaneously projected their outraged replies. Joanne received every nuance of the emotion that accompanied each unwise reply: Said one: "But many of the Special People have died in the past two hundred years -- " A second chimed in, "So they can't be immortal Nijjans." A third mind said, "If what you say is true, it proves that Siloes and Nijjans could live together." The fourth person -- a man -- was scornful: "This time you crazy killers have run up against more than you bargained for.' And the fifth telepathic human reply to the Nijjan trap was, "I don't know what you expect to gain from this lie, but I reject it." T hat was as far as the doomed five got with their response. The best later reconstruction of what happened then was that in each instance, answering located the individual to the remote watching minds of the Nijjans. At once a Nijpan arrived on the scene -- in the house, on the street, wherever -- and seized the person. At the moment of seizure a single mental scream of despairing realization came from one of the women. The remaining four went silently to their fates. What had happened: shortly after the Space Silkie, Ou-Dan, left Cemp in the ship near the dead body of Lan Jedd -- he saw a rapid movement beside him. That was all Ou-Dan had time to observe. The next split-instant he was subjected to an internal pressure IF against wMch li hiad no defense. It could have been his moment of death, for he wias completely surprised and helpless. But the Nijjan, G'Tono, have already had his double faihire with Nat Cemp, wanted a prisoner and not a dead body. Not yet. Moments later, he had the unconscdous Ou-Dan on hiis own planet. The resultant study of the internal working of a Silkie was somewhat disappointing to the various Nijjans who came from disfbant place to look him over: there was nothing in Ou-Dan's memories that explained how Cemp had escaped destruction in his confronitaition with G'Tono. His captors quickly discovered the differences between the space and Earth Silkies and leaimed from OuDan that Cemp was an Earth Silkie. The Nijjans thereupon reasoned accurately that the Space SUdes, being considered unreliable, had simply never been given the secret of the special technique that Cemp had used. In .their study of Ou-Dan, the great beings were delayed for many minutes, perhaps even an entire hour by an attitude that radiated from him. Ou-Dan so thoroughly dismissed and downrated the humanSiHcie relaitionship that his emotion about it was a barrier. Thus, for a decisive itime, the Nijjans did not note in his mind ithat the Special People were a unique human group. During that vital period, Baxter extended the information about the Nijjans to the Special People, Cemp and he met with the Space Silkies and talked to the computeir. And so, when the five Special People were captured, Earth was as ready as Earth would ever be. The Nijjans secured the basic clue from .all five of their human prisoners. Moments later, the knowledge of Logic of Levels was going down the Nijjan line of planets, muMIX O n G'Tono's planet was a tall mountain that rose thousands of feet sheer from the 'ground. On top of ithat mountain stood the palace of G'Tono. Inside the throne room, the octopus-people hurried and bustled and shuffled in a steady stream of activity, partly ritual and partly m relation to the five human prisoners and to the Space SiDde, Ou-Dan. The quintet of Special People were beginning to fed a little easier; were no longer so certain tihat they would be murdered out of hand. Ou-Dan, who had been internally damaiged as a result of his interrogation, lay unconscious in one comer, ignored by all except a few guards. Across the room from the humans -- a distance of more than a hundred yards -- was a great, Ottering throne chair. On the chair sat a figure even more glittery in his natural state than any of the inanimate objects that framl him -- ... G'Tono himself! About a dozen of the octopuspeople lay face down on the marble in front of their tyrant. Their gentle buibuous faces pressed against the hard floor. It was a priceless privilege for itinose who were ithere, and every half hxmr the dozen or so personages rduotantly gave up their places to another group of the same size, all of whom were equally appreciative. G'Tono paid no attention to these, his servant-people. He was engaged in a mental oonversation with N'Yata, # light-years away, and the subject of their concern was in fact ithe fate of the prisoners. G'Tono believed that the five Special People and Ou-Dan had served their purpose land should be put to death on the betray principle. N'Yata felt that no Anal decision should be made about prisoners until the Earth-Silkie situation was entirely resolved, which could only happen if all the Silkies were destroyed. She pointed out that the betray idea did not apply except where it was part of a control system. No control existed as yet to human beings and would not until a Nijjan took over Barth 'as his domain. G 'Tono was beginning to fed very boldly masouHne in relation to N'Yata. And so he took the attitude that her answer showed a loveable feminine weakness, a caution unnecessary now that the human-Silkie problem was solved. For all Nijjan purposes, the proourement of the Logic of Leyels concept ended the danger. "You seem to believe that something can still go wrong," he protested. "Let's wait," said N'Yata. G'Tono replied scathingly that NijIF jans, after all, had itiheir own rationreally favorable to our side." He ality, long-tested by experience. It booke off for purposes of olarifying was not necessary to aiwaiit the ouit his point:. "How many helpers do come of a logicM sequence once it we have?" had been reasoned through "You saw most of them," N'Yata He thereupon listed for N'Yata answered. "About a hundred." the reasons why the SilMes were The smallness of the number modefeated for all practiical purposes: mentarily gave pause to GTono. He Nijjan attacks -- said GTono -- had a natural cynicism about things would in future be made in such a Nijjan; yet his rationali#oa seemed way that no Silkie could ever again true to him... It was true that hitch a ride as the Silkie, Cemp, Nijjans had a hard time getting along had so skillfully done. Furthermore, with one another. So many proud the vast majority of Nijjans, though individuals, each with his planet -- aiUowing through their mindbarriers of which he, or she, was absolute the information about Logic of ruler. Where everyone, without exLevels, had fortunately refused to ception, was a king or a queen, egos be involved in the actual struggle, had a tendency to soar out of sight. GTono explained, "Contrary to Once in a while, of course, a queen our initial irritation with their rewould accept a oommunication from fusal to participate, what they have a king, as N'Yata had done with done -- or rather, not done -- is him. And at certain times kings were receptive to a oamimtmcaitLoa from a queen. G'Tono liad observed witii jealousy that ithe biimdred-odd who had responded to N'Yaita's oaM for volunteers were all males... B ut that very aloofness of the great majority was now, G'Tono argued, a sign of the indestructibility of the Nijjan race. Scattered all over the universe, out of contact with their own kind, individuai Nijjans an their total numbers couldn't even assuming that somebody existed withthe atodiity and power to kill Nijjan-s; but there was no such person, group or race. "And now that we have the only dangerous Silkie weapon, Logic of Levels, our position is albsolutely impregnable," G'Tono pointed out. N'Yata replied that she was still studying Log of Levels and that it wasn't the mistakes Nijjans might make in the future that worried her; indeed, she conceded that the chance of additional errors was unlikely. The question was, could GTono and she recover from the errors that had already been made? G'Tono was astohkhed. "The only mistake that would matter," he ol jected, "wouM be if we had left this Silkier Cemp, some nieans of forcing me or you to 'transport him here by our space control system. Though I," he oontinued scornfuliy, "would certainly like to be the first to know of such a method, I find myself wondering, would he dare to oomie? Because whiat could he do in a direct conontation with me, who is more poyerful than any Sillde?" He had been i thinkikig hard while he was speaking, and now he saw an opening in her logic and a way ofgaininig his own point, made earlier. "As I see it," he said, "the one way in which we might be vulnerable is through these prisoners. So I think you wiMagree that instant extermination is a safety precaution, if nothing more. Don'ttry to interfere!" He did not wait for N'Yata's reply, but sent a high-level energy blast at the two women and ithree men, and at the hdpess Ou-Dan. All six prisoners were literally dissolved into their component elements; death was as rapid as that. Having taken the action, G'Tono proceeded with his hsting of favorable points. "After all," he said, "lacking space controil, Silkies are trapped on or near Earth or at besit are subject to the slow speeds of ordinary space travel. I estimate that in three Earth weeks I could perhaps expect to have an Earth ship arrive at my planet. Whereupon, if you were to invite me, I could visit you for a whale. And, frankly, what could they do? Where couldthey look? A Nijjan can disappear into a distance in a splitrinstant." He stopped, feeling suddenly dizzy. N'Yata telepathed sharply, "What's happening?" "I -- " faltered G'Tono. That was as far as he got. The dizziness had become an all-enveloping madness, and he fell from this throne chair to the marble floor. Fell hard, rolled over onto his back an# lay there like one dead. IF X T he Nijjans had lied. That was what snatched Oemp's most intense interest. A quick check of records by the computer had established, with thousands of detailed documentations, that the Special People could not possibly have been Nijjans. And so it was a lie. Hard to believe that the Nijjans could have exposed one of their mrniber to a counter-attack on that level. But it looked as if they had. Cemp shared his analysis with Charley Baxter and watched Baxter become excited. The thin man said, "You're right, Nat! A lie is a complete disaster in a world where people understand the energy flows involved." And could control them as Silkies could. Because an existing object is truth incarnate. There it is -- whatever it is -- unparadoxical, without an opposite. It cannot not-be. Or at least it cannot not-have-been; if it was matter and has been converted to energy, or vice versa, it still exists in some aspect of its ever-form. A lie about such an object is a mental attempt to alter the "is" of it. Basdally, the effort implicit in the lie is to create a dichotomy where none can exist. There is no opposite, yet the lie says there is. Hence, the moment a dichotomy is evoked in somebody's mind, there is a confusion created. It was too potentially great a possibility to miss. In telling his plan to Baxter, Cemp pointed out, "You'll have to send a ship after me, because I'll be stranded there!" "You don't think the method of getting you to Nijja will also get you away?" Baxter asked, doubtfully"No. Somebody will ibe riding herd on all this, and they'll notice." "It'll take three weeks for a ship to get there," Baxter objected. Cemp couldn't take the time to consider that. The pace of this battle was super-speed. Since (the struggle had begun out there between G'Tono and himself, the enemy had taken time only to make bri studies of new data before striking again. "After all," said Cemp, "I can't be sure how successful I'll be. I expect (to get whoever told the lie, but that won't solve the problem. And I'll set it up so that whoever helps him is doomed also. But a chain reaction like 'that can only go so far before somebody gets wise." Baxter spoke again, urgently, "Now that these beings have Logic of Levels, they'll be able to trigger it in you even as you're triggering it in them. Have you thought of that?" S ince there was no defense against Logic of Levels, Cemp hadn't even considered it. There being no point in thinking about it, now that it had been called to his attention... he didn't. He converted to Nijjain and piojected the thought: "I want you to recall the moment when the message arrived telling you the lie that you were a Nijjan." Between such expexits as Baxter and himself, it required less tham a minute to make a study of the wave patterns and to measure the subtle variations of the Nijjan version of the telepathic band of the Special People -- and to superimpose on that exact band and ithat individual variation all two hundred and seventy-eight dichotomies, known to be the most confusing of the verbal opposites that had mentally tangled human beings since the beginning of language:... Right-wrong... good-bad... justice-injustice A living brain receiving for the first time such a madness in ithe time of a few seconds could go into a state of itotal confusion. At key points along that train of words, Cemp placed large, hypnotictype command loads designed to influence the receiving Nijjan brain during the confusion to -- First, utilize Cemp's own previous experience to transport hiTn through space. And, second, set up a basic Logic of Levels in the receiving Nijjan brain. Oemp arrived -- it was part of his hypnotic command to GTono -- outsit the atmosphere of G'Tono's planet. As he descended toward the surface, he saw that there was a great city below and a huge ocean beside it. He landed on an isolated beach of that ocean where the thunder of the surf and the soaxeill of sea briefly enticed him. Ignoring that sudden desire for the feel of water, he walked toward the city. Arrived at the outskirts, he boldly entered the first of the odd-shaped dwellings he came to; odd in that the doorways were low and broad, and, inside he had to stoop 'because the ceilings were less than' six feet. There were three chunky octopus-like aliens inside. But he saw them; they never saw him. Cemp manipulated the hallucinatory mechanisms of the three, whereupon they observed him as one of themselves. After studying their minds, Cemp carefully went to a nearby street, climbed up to a roof, and watched the octopus-beings who went by. As Cemp had already correctly analyzed, these aliens were not dangerous to him, and they were very definitely not up to defending themselves. After reading the minds of several hundreds, Cemp did not detect a single suspicious thought. The fundamental goodness of the beings he did observe decided him on his next move. Minutes later, he walked in on several leading members of the government, hallucinated them into seeing him as a human being and thout at them, "Where is the one who can betray?" The tense creatures had drawn aiway from him. They did not understand (the signifioanoe of his question, for they said that on Nijja no one ever betrayed anyone. T he answer amused Cemp in a steely-grim fashion. It meant, as he had suspected, that there was only one betray cycle in action on IF the eotire planet: the true Nijjan as the betrayer, and then ah these beings who must conform. He directed another thought "Has this planet always been called Nijja?" They knew of only one other name. Anthropological studies of their antiquity indicated that at the time the common language had begun some indeternoinate thousands of years before, the name had been Thda, meaning Home of the Brave. Nijj-a, on the other hand, in their language meant Home of the Pure. Obviously, the name would have to have a meaning in their language as well as in that of the true Nijjans. A different meaning, of course. "I see," said Cemp. And he did see. With that, he asked one more question, "Where can I find the one who requires purity?" "Oh, you can see him only through the police." "Where else?" thought Cemp to himself, sarcastically. Whereupon, the exact, proper time having gone by, and the' exact moment for G'Tono to awaken having come, he directed a thought on the Special People telepathic band. He said, "I am that Silkie who confronted you after you killed my Sdlkie associate -- and I'm sure now it was you who killed him. As I now understand it, this planet illustrates what you meant when you stated Nijjans had no home planet in the ordinary sense. # planets controlled by a Nijjan are part of the Nijjan system -- the nearest place, in other words, where a sine ruling Nijjan could te located. Is that correct?" Along with the message, Cemp projected the thought that woul# trigger the Logic of Levels cycle he had set up in G'Tono's brain. Having done so, Cemp spoke again to the focal point nearly three hundred miles away, "You'd better talk to me before it's too late." It was moments after that when Cemp sensed a peculiar sensation in his transmorpha system. N'Yata, he thou'ght. He remembered Baxter's fear that he also might be attacked, and here it was. It interested him intensely to observe that it was the mechanism for chaniginig form that was affected; not surprising, really, but nobody had known. By the time he had th thought, he had already accepted his personal dislaster. Prom the beiginning he had had to consider himself expendable. Cemp felt briefly sad for Joanna. He presumed that he would die, and her life would now have to go on without ihim. As for what might happen to the Nijjans -- Cemp felt a chill, recalling what the computer had predicted: that the Nijjans Logic of Levels would be bigger than what had happened to the Glis. Again he wondered: What could be bigger than that? The awareness remained with him only fleetingly. Abruptly, he didn't have time to consider anything except what was happening to him. XI F or Cemp there was, first of ah, a a kaleidoscope of visual images. He saw Nijjan bodies and faces -- if the upper part of the pyramidal shape could be considered a face. The images streamed by, not exactly silently -- for thoughts came from some of them. Cemp himself seemed to be floating along in a timeless void. Each set of Nijjan thoughts came to him separate and distinct: "... But how did he do it?..." "What exactly is happening? -- " not kill him and then solve the problem, ourselves?... " -- Because we don't even know what part of the Nijjan brain was utilized for the attacl that's why. Besides, we have no proof yet that we can kill him. In this Silkie, Logic of Levels seems to be a time phenomenon. In us, it's of course the space thing -- " As these thoughts and others like them whispered into Cemp's awareness, he was conscious of a developing stir in ithe greater distance of the Nijjan world. Other minds, at first a few, then many, then tens of thousands turned their attention in amazement and took note of him and had their thoughts... and were hooked into G'Tono's disaster... Like an anthill deep into which somebody has kicked, the Nijjan system began to roil and churn with innumerable reactions. What they were afraid of briefly held Cemp's astonished interest: -- Two bodies cannot occupy the same space or... two spaces the same body; there was danger that this would now happen. More basic: the space-time continuum, though it was a self-sustaining mechanism of immense but finite complioation, needed Nijjans to survive: that was the thout So that if a Nijjan were over-stimiulaited, space mig ihave a reaction... That was how Lan Jedd had been killed: a Nijjan oonsdously over-stimulating jhimjceilf ia some small, precise way elicited a reaction in the space occupied by Lan's body. Push at the universe, at space. A Nijjan might be affected. Push at a Nijjan, the universe would push back or adjust to the push in some fundamental way. What are they implying? thought Cemp, staggered. What are they saying? Between the universe and the Nijjans a symbiotic relation. If one was unstable, so was the other. And the Nijjans were becoming unstable. A s Cemp's awareness reached that point, there was a flash of alarmed agreement that extended through every observing Nijjan mind. Whereupon, N'Yata telepathed to Cemp: "I speak for Nijja. We're in process of being destroyed by a chain reaction. Is tiiCTc anything we can do to save ourselves, any agreement we can make? "In us," N'Yata continued in that desperate way, "awareness of the connection of Mfe to all atoms in the universe was not dulled. Somehow, in those long ago days of the beginning of things, we automatically worked out a method of maintaining consciousness without constantly endangering ourselves. Other life forms had to attenuate or shut off direct IF contact with space and its contents. We Nijjans can therefore be destroyed if we are forced to a state of order from the chaos in which, alone, life can survive, and this forcing you have now done." It was as far-fetched a story as Cemp had ever heard. "You're a bunch of liars," he said contemptuously, "and the proof is that G'Tono could be victimized by an overflow of opposites." He broke off, "The truth is I couldn't believe any promise you made." There was a pause, brief but pregnant; finally a mental sigh from N'Yata. "It is interesting," she said, resigned, "that the one race we feared above all others -- the Silkies -- has now made a successful attack on us. Because of the overweening pride of countless Nijjans, we are particularly vulnerable. Each Nijjan, as he tunes in, has a Logic of Levels cycle triggered in him. And there's nothing we can do to warn him ahead of time. What you're saying is that you won't listen to any argument against this." It was more than that, Cemp saw. Between these two races there was no quick way to cooperation. That would be true, he speculatively realized, even if the fate of the universe depended on it. The Nijjan destruction of Silkies had been too remorseless. But the fact was also, there was really nothing he could do. Logic of Levels, once started, could not be interrupted. The cycle would complete in them and in him and take whatever course the logic required. A brain mechanism had been tnggered. The pattern of that mechanism had been set ages before, and it had no other way to be. That was as far as his thought had time to go. There was an interruption. Two things happened, then, almost simultaneously. From N'Yata's mind to his there leaped an emotion of anguish. "Oh, it's happening," she said. "What's happening?" Cemp's mind yelled at her. If there was ever an answer from her, Cemp did not receive it. For at that precise instance he felt a strange, strong feehng inside him. That was the second event. H e was on Earth with Joanna. It was at the beginning of their marriage; and there she was, and there he was, completely real both of them. Outside, the sun was shining. It grew dark suddenly. That was earlier, he realized. More than a hundred years before he was born. -- This is the time change in myself, Cemp thought. Logic of Levels affecting him, taking him somehow earlier intime, a kind of genetic memory journey. Night. A dark sky. A Silkie floated silently down from the heavens... Cemp realized with a start: That was the first Silkie to come to Earth, the one that -- it was later pretended -- was created in a laboratory. The scene, so briefly observed, yielded to a view of the city inside the Glis meteorite. There were the Space Silkies; and he was there, also -- or so it seemed. Probably, it was his ancestor with his transory of earlier bodies. A space scene came next. A bluewhiite sun in the distance. Other Silkies around him in the darkness. A contented happiness was in all of them. Cemp had an impression that the time was long ago indeed, twenty or more thousand Earth-years, before contact with Nijjans. Now, a more primitive scene according to ihis impression. Something -- himself, but different, smaller, less intelligent, more creaturelike -- clung to a small rock in space. There was darkness. And not darkness but brightness. Where? Impossible to be sure. Inside a sun? He vaguely suspected, yes. It was too hot. He was flung in a titanic eruption of matter into the far blackness. Flung earlier. As he receded to an even remoter time, Cemp fdt himself somehow still connected to GTono and to the other Nijjans, somehow held to what -- for want of a better understanding -- he decided was a mental relationship. Because of that tenuous mind connection and interaction, he was able to sense the Nijjan disaster from a safe distance in time. It was possible, then, that he was the only MvLng being who, from his vantage point, witnessed the destrucdiameter universe, of which Earth's galaxy was but one small bit of cosmic flitter. T he start of it was very similar to when the betrayal-win cycle in G'Tono was triggered toward ultimate win during his and Cemp's second confrontation. Swiftly, there came the momeint when all those connected Nijjan bodies reached the dividing line between becoming ultra-small or superlarge. But this time ithe victims had no choice. Winning was not involved. It was a Lxgic of Levels cycle in its ultimate meaning, operating on and through innumerable individuals, each of whom had the potential for that ultimate state. Every rock has in it the history of the universe. Every life form has evolved from a primitive state to a sophisticated one. Touch the wellspring of that evolvement in a living thing -- or a rock -- and it has to remember. the end. What was happening to them was a process that was not concerned with maintaining identity. One moment each Nijjan was a unit object, a living being, with location and mass; the next the Nijjan brain center that had the ability to move the individual Nijjan through space tried to move him simultaneously into all spaces. Instantly, the entire Nijjan race was shredded into their component atoms. IF On the object level, the process scattered them, put one atom here, as many places. At the moment when Nijjans became as large as the universe, the universe inverted in relation to them to its real normalcy, to the perfect order that is inherent in a dot the size of an atom, which is unaffected by other atoms. It was not a shrinking phenomenon. Turning inside out was the best analogy. The collapse of a bubble. Cemp, who was merely tuned in to G'Tono and the others, felt his own thought expand with the doomed Nijjans to a state that was an exact propKrtion to the largeness of the universe with which the Nijjans had interacted. Having become in this purely mental way larger than space and time, Cemp so to say blinked away his dizziness and looked around him. At once he saw something in the great dark. He was distracted and he forgot the dot that had been the universe. It thereupon disappeared. The tiny spot of light, the universe, which one moment had glowand was gone. Cemp was aware of its vanishing with a portion of his mind only. But he could not immediately turn his attention away from the sight that had made him forget. He was looking at the "tree." He was at such a remote viewpoint, at such vastness in relation to all things that, yes, he saw the golden tree. Presently, he forced himself to look away from that jeweled thing. When Cemp finally, after what seemed to be several seconds, was able to consider the disappearance of the universe once more, he thought: how long has it been gone? years? Or no time at all? Perhaps, in some future when he reached this viewpoint, not by artificial projection but by growth, he would be able to count the time elapsed in such a phenomenon. He was stiH thinking about it, bemused, when he felt an unstableness in his position. He thought, Oh, oh. I'm going to invert again. The first evidence of his unstable state: the glorious tree disappeared. Realization came that he probably had only moments to find the universe. How do you find a universe? A s Cemp discovered, then, it was not really a problem. The entire meaning of Logic of Levels was based on the certainty that all life forms, at some inner root, know the origin of things, and that by the very nature of their structure they are balancing themselves against aU other things. There is no moment when the tiniest insect, or plant, or rock, or grain of sand is not interacting. The atoms at the centers of remote stars are part of that interaction. The problem is not is the interaction happening? The problem is that, in order to function, awareness of so much has had to be reduced. Such attenuation is not normally conscious. Hence, sensitivity to many good things is automatically cut down so close to zero that, in this universe, apparently only the Nijjans had retained through  the vicissitudes of their evolution the cellular method of space and control. As Cemp remembered his universe it began to interact with him, to become in essence what he knew it to be. And there it suddenly was, a dot of golden brightness. Cemp sensed by the interaction he continued to feel that it was still re-forming deep inside itself; responding exactly to his universal memory of it. He had a mighty thought: Before it all reverts to exactly the way it was, why don't I change it? Obviously, there was no time for detailed consideration. A few flash thoughts, quick judgments, snap decisions -- and that would be it. It was never or now. Forever. The Nijjans? In a way, he could understand that they had felt it necessary to protect themselves and the spacetime continuum by destroying races that were capable of challenging Nijjan hegemony. So they were not as guilty as he had once considered them. But truth was the universe did not need a race that could destroy it. It was time the place became permanent. Cemp refused to remember the Nijjans in his recollection of the plenum. So what about human beings, the Special People and the Space Silkies? . Cemp's immediate solution: In his imiverse (they all became Earth Silkies with the ability to change ness to play a benevolent police role everywhere in space. And, without exception, they understood the Nijjan method of space control but their ability to interact with space was on the small scale necessary for transportation. In addition, no Silkies were subject to Logic of Levels, and all the effects of the cycle that had been triggered in him were reversed. Also, in case there was any question. Silkies were inunortal. There was no Kibmadine race -- Cemp felt no mercy for those perverted creatures. ,... And Earth was back with her own sun. W as it a good way for things to be? There was no one to tell him yea or nay. He thought it, and then it was too late to remember it differently. In a flash, the orderly perfection of the single light in the blackness... altered, expanded. As Cemp watched tensely, the ochre-colored dot reached the moment of inversion. For Cemp, it was the return back to smallness. Something grabbed him, did an irresistibly powerful thing with him, squeezed him -- and pushed. When he could perceive again, the starry universe fitretched around him in every direction. He realized he was somewhere in space, his Nijjan body intact IF For that super-sensiiitive shape and form, now that he undieirsitood iit, orientation in space was an instinct. Here he was; there was Earth. Cemp did the Nijjan space-control manipulation -- and interacted with another space many (light-years distant, whose existence he sensed. With that space Cemp did the inversion process on a small scale, became a dot, became himself, became a dot... something to nothing to something -- And he stepped eighty thousand light-years into the Silkie Foundation and said to Charley Baxter, "Don't bother sending that ship after me. I won't be needing it." The thin man gazed at him, eyes shining. "Nat," he breathed, "you've done it! You've won!" Cemp did not reply immediately. There was a question in his min Since, whale the universe was being destroyed and reborn, he himself had been in a time chanige, had he witnessed and participated in the second formation of the contmuum? Or the first? He realized it was a question to which he would now never know the answer. Besides... could it ah have been a fantasy, a wish that drifted through his mind while he was uncortscdous, the strangest dream ever? There was a great window to his right, one of those massive structures that led to a balcony from which a Silkie could launch himself. Cemp walked out onto the balcony. It was night. Barlih's old moon floated in the dark sky above, and there were the familiar star configurations that he knew so well. Standing there, Cemp began to feel excitement, a surginig consciousness of the permanence and finality of his victory. "I'm going to Joanna," he announced to Charley Baxter, who had oomeup behind him. As Cemp launched himsei the familiar universe that was he wa thinking: 'he had greiat tfiing pi to tell his darling. The Most Gripping Sfory in a Famous Series by Fred Saberhagen by Philip Jos# Farmer by Hal Clement Don't miss bipyepiber IF -- subscribe, or reserve your cqpy nowl IF  Feature Heroes what ancient Martians ate -- maybe -- with directions on how you can try it for yourselfl M ars is the planeft that is deemed most ilikely to support intelligent life. It has a canal system that has been seen many times all over the 'woorld by the most competent and respected observers in the astronomicaJ profession. Spectroscopic observations prove that the famed snow caps, or ice caps, at the poles of Mars are just that -- ice on Mars. Professor Percival Lowell's work shows .that in the spring, the rate of growth of the green areas adjacent to the canals is in perfect agreement with our theoretical calculations that indicate that their pumping rate for water is the most efficient one possible for a planet with Mars' smaller gravity content. The surface of Mars is flat, and there are few mountain ranges. Movement of water must, therefore, be by mechanical pump. Recent spectroscopic observations of the green areas of Mars show that the observed spectrum is more like the spectrum of lichen as observed here on Earth than any other Earth vegetation. Three or four blasts that looked like tiny bursts of light have been seen on Mars within the last thirty years. These blasts were followed by dust clouds that, in at least one case, were observed to persist for several days. This was long enough to permit e event to be confirmed by astronomical observatories all over the globe. In # a new green area about the size of Texas was observed. It was located in an area that had shown only desert before. At Mount Palomar in # Dr. Richardson momentarily observed blue canals in the desert regions of Mars. In other words, he saw the water in the canals. The careful mathematical analysis of the canals that WeUs Webb made shows almost conclusively that the canals are the work of intelligent beings. No other agency Darwin, iniblished by Max H. Fllndt, #I Emerson Street, Palo Alto, CzUifomia; reprinted by permission of the author. whether natural, animal, or insect has ever made a network of lines to comipare with the map of the canal systems of Mars -- except man. This, briefly, is what is known about Mars. A supposition will now be explored that can comfortably answer the question: Just what is going on on Mars? The most obvious answer is that someone, or something, is building canals on Mars for the purpose of conducting the water from the melting ice caps to the equatorial desert regions in the spring. There it seems to be used to irrigate crops of lichen. Lichen -- why lichen? Why not tomatoes or potatoes? Lichen, after all, is that odd stuff that grows on rocks and is of no value to anyone. H ere the story of Mars takes an unexpected turn, for there is reason to believe that lichen is grown on Mars as human food and that some of the forms grown there are a real delicacy. It is necessary to see what supportive data exists to substantiate these bold claims. First, it is found that lichen is not a common plant. It is aotuaiUy a fungus and algae living in common-laiw marriage and is an incredibly hardy and durable organism. It is found on rocks in mountain ranges at extreme elevations where it experiences extremes of cold, moisture and searing heat that is fatal to all other plant life. Thus, the strange combination of algae and fungus can stand such extremes of temperature and moisture variation that it could live on Mars. Here is found, os in any theory that is later proven valid by the advance of science, that classical agreement of observed phenomena that to the trained scientist means just one thing: "Ihe theory is correct; carry it forward." It is not surprising that when a U.S. scientist undertook to grow lichen it was in a partial vacuum that simuLated, as nearly as possible, the conditions that are understood to exist on Mars. The lichen grew and prospered. The astounding conditions under which this lichen grew should be examined. The temperature ranged from approximately -- # degrees F. to plus # degrees F., and the pressure was approximately one pound per square inch. (The pressure on Earth's surface is about # pounds per square inch). The only moisture was vapor in the form of dew. The oxygen was very low -- so low that man would die in it. Yet this lichen grew and seemed to thrive. There is a most happy agreement between the spectroscopic observations th'at indicate that there ore lichen#ike plant growths in the green aireas of Mars and the astounding ability of Earth-lichen to grow in a simulated Martian atmosphere. It is seemingly foolish to consider that human beings or any animal for that matter could be living on anything so little resembling good food as lichen. But it happens that this is exactly the case. Lichen is used for animal food here on Barth, and in Japan and China it is used as a food delicacy. The reason that thiiR is so is that the plant family that comprises lichen is actually a large one (# varieties). It takes in many unobtrusive plants that we commonly ignore. These are plants which nevertheless are lichens and which in certain regions lend themselves very nicely to the food demands of man and beast. In Lapland, for instance, reindeer moss -- which is a lichen that is known by the scientific name of Cladonia rangiferina -- is used in the winter for cattle and reindeer food. Another type of arctic lichen that is known as Iceland moss or Cetraria islandica is occasionally used as human food. In Japan and China people have made an art of fine cooking for more centuries than people in the Western World care to think about. Two varieties of a certain lichen family are used for food in those lands and they are considered to be real delicacies. If lichen is grown on Mars and our spectroscopes say that it or something yery much like it is grown there, then some of that lichen may easily be a variety or varieties that are usable for transformation into animal food like beef cattle. Other varieties may be the most delicious human food. This information is remarkable because it so neatly dovetails into what is already known to be (true about Mars canals, polar ice caps and green areas. Our astronauts may take along whatever they may hke to eat for the trip to Mars, but there is a definite chance that on Mars and on the trip home that they will be eating lichen by choice. T his whole lichen picture is so convincing that the author. completely carried away by the thought of eating Martian food, went out into the woods and procured some samples of Spanish Moss (Dendropogon usneoides), which is a common lichen in California. When it was steeped in vinegar it tasted like confetti or straw, but when it wias cooked for ten minutes in water with a little salt -- ah -- that was different. It tasted very much like spaghetti and thoughts of various types of savory and tempting combinations came immediately to mind. The addition of small bits of bacon would make the most delicious dish while those who preferred the rich and wonderful Italian spaghetti seasonings could brew up savory sauces. Well, each cook must find his own combination, for the author is, unfortunately, not a good cook. As a result of the happy outcome of the above little adventure in cooking lichen, the authorand his wife sallied forth to San Francisco on a beautiful autumn night. They hoped that in San Francisco's Chinatown, which is the largest Chinese settlement in the United States, that more information could be obtained regarding the lichen that is a delicacy. The trip was successful. Edible lichen was purchased on Grant Avenue in Chinatown. At the famed Great Eastern Cafe which is just off Grant, the manager gave assurances that, with proper advance notificaition, he could provide edible lichen in a variety of food combi naitions such as soup or fried dishes with pork. The price for serving this specialty to two persons was IF quoted ait about tbree doUars. The next day, the cxxperative and intelligent Chinese proprietor of "The Bamboo" in Palo Alto came up with the information that the two types of Mchen that could be purchased in San Francisco were known as "The Ear of the Wood" and "The Ear of the Rock." These highly descriptive names were literal English translations of the Chinese names for the delicacy. He further said that the strange thin doUarsized crispy fragments required long cooking time and did not disintegrate under protracted cooking. The lichen derived their names from the fact that one type was obtained from the trunks of trees whfle the other type was taken from the surface of rocks. The use of the word "ear" derives from the way the fresh plant curls up when it is dried. In strange ways it resembles a human ear. It seems more logical than ever before to believe that the canals of Mars do carry water and that the water nourishes lichen. Does any reader desire some Martian food? He need only inquire at the nearest Chinese restaurant about "The Ear of the Rock" or "The Ear of the Wood" and enjoy an "out of this Here is mus-ic composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp #I Hudson Street, New York City # Tes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address City  State... Zip Code  (OHsi good In U. S. A. Only) IF  Novelette Winter of the Liangs The first thing a young krote learns is to respect his Elders -- and it's a good thing! I were absent, he paced hesitantly toward the arc of huge mature males r ie Council Fire was a great roarout beyond the fire. Scarred old ing thing that climbed far into Lozh, immense with age, rumbled, the night, dwarfing the family fires "Come lie to windward of me, strung along the foot of the cliff, youngster. At least I am still good Its ruddy illumination made strange for a windbreak." There were coughs slowfalling gems of the unseasonof amusement, able snowflakes. Glesh, the Leader came slowly inChimmuh, young and not yet to the firelight, walking tiredly on thick of hide, would ordinarily tuck all sixes. The mutter of small talk his three pairs of limbs beneath him died. Glesh took his place, settled in the shelter of the slight cliff overhimsedf on the wet ground and turnhang, with the calves and females; ed his homed head slowly, counting but as his father and older brothers the family representatives. His widely spaced, deepset eyes lingered on Chimmuh. "You speak for Family Wurgan, youngster?" Chimmuh, conscious of his higherpitched voice, said, "I do." Glesh dipped his horns, acknowledging. "We are all here, then. I will talk, then we will listen to any who disagree." He heaved his forebody up for a moment, unfolding his forelegs out toward the fire. "Never in my lifetime, nor in my sire's, has snow come this early. But the lore says that when snow comes early, it is not a freakish storm, but the true onset of winter." He paused. The older males dipped heads in agreement. "Therefore," Glesh went on, "we must expect snow the rest of the night, and tomorrow eight, and for many nights. The passes back into Big Valley will be too difficult to cross. We must take the unfamiliar way down Katta river and southward along the edge of the sea to Wintering. It will be a hard migration. We dare not delay to collect fodder, but must live on what grows along the way. We must start in the morning." He glanced around the arc. "I will listen now." There was a moment of silence. Then Hutu -- the young-mature male with the broken right-middle leg -- muttered, "We should not have come across into Katta Valley." G lesh inclined his head without rancor. "True. But the pahiaseed here has been rich, as we hoped, and at least we are fat to begin the migration. We could not know the winter would come so early." There were mutters of agreement; Hutu subsided, testily. Glesh turned his deep eyes toward Chimmuh. Chimmuh squirmed. This was the moment when he must speak, but his voice would not come. Old Lozh filled the breach. "There are four sixes of prime males who are not with us." Now Chimmuh found his vo#ce. "My sire, and those with him, will -- be returning from the north with metal, for tools and for weapons if we are pursued iby Uangs. My sire and the others are prime, able to travel fast and to cross the mountains. They will have seen the winter two days ago, or three, and will be hurrying down Big Valley to reach us. They will see our tracks where we left Summering and follow into Katta Valley. They will be here in a few days." There was an embarrassed silence. Glesh rumbled a sigh. "You do not understand about snow, youngster. It will cover our tracks. Even if your sire's party is not trapped in the north and perhaps overwhelmed by Hangs, they will assume we have gone down Big Valley as usual." He sighed again. "What of your dam? Is she able to migrate?" Chimmuh stared past the fire to where his mother, eyes downcast, lay among the females. His stomachs felt as if they were both full of nettle-weed. "She is not. She will calve within days." There were mutters of sympathy. Glesh shifted his bulk and waggled his head and looked as if he wished he were not Leader. "I must consider the Herd. We cannot wait; nor cm we halt along the way. There will be several ancients left behind here, as well as Hutu. And Lozh says he will stay. Also -- " he tossed his head in annoyance -- "my youngest she-calf Aiwa has sworn she will not go with us, but will try to get back to Big Valley, since her mate is with your sire. I cannot make her listen." He stared at Chimmuh. "What of you, youngster?" . Chiaumuh felt dead inside. "I cannot abandon my dam." Glesh waited for the mutters of approbation to subside. "Thus be it, Chen. It is possible the snows may not be heavy; also, that the Hangs may not come until their normal season. In that case, your dam may calve and be fit to travel before long, and you can follow us. Until you know, it is best you stay here, or go higher into the mountains, rather than straggle and be caught in Katta Valley." He looked around slowly. "Is there any disagreement?" The arc of males was silent, except for Hutu, who grumbled but didn't actually protest. T he snow stopped with daylight, but the sky remained sullen. Chimmuh, shivering atop the cliff, stared out over the Katta Valley. The migration had left a broad beaten track down Nameless Creek, and now,' tiny with distance, it wound among the vertical-sided hummocks, like little mesas, on which the pahiagrass grew. He could only make out the big males plodding along in hollow formation, to shelter the females and calves. The valley looked strange, its level floor blanketed in white. Even the hummocks were snowy, so that the upthrust seedstalks stood out sharply. He peered up-valley. It looked lifeless. Then, miles north, he saw movement. He crouched anxiously, then saw it was only a herd of yenno grazing on phia-tendrils that hung down from the hummocks. That was a good sign. If the north carried any scent of Hangs, the yenno would he running. He'd seen how a yenno's six slender legs could flash. If there were no Hangs yet he could go down and gather pahiaseed. He'd need help to carry it, though. He couldn't see over the edge of the cliff, but smoke-scent told him he was about over the campsite. He turned and trotted lateraUy, to where he could climb down. II H is dam lay with four limbs tucked beneath her gravid flanks, her forelegs lifting and letting drop a hardwood pestle to grind seed in a mortar-stone. She gave him a relieved look. "I was worried, malecalf. You were gone long." He inclined his head in greeting to Aiwa, Glesh's she-calf, who squatted sullenly near the fire. "I went up Nameless Creek. Do you remember where our trail down from the passes joined it?" His dam said, "I remember." "WeH," Chimmuh said, "a short climb up the creek to the north there is a big hollow with only one narrow exit. It is like the one Glesh showed IF US and called a 'cirque,' left by some ancient river of ice. We will be much better hidden there. Brush grows on the bottom and up the sides until they are too steep. We might build a fence across the exit. And if we can get enough seed to go with brush-roots and foliage, we can -- " Aiwa was on her feet. "Did you go up to the pass?" "No." She stamped about, making impatient gestures with her forelimbs. "I am going across even if I must go alone!" Chimmuh, annoyed, said, "The absent ones will not be this far south for a few days, if at all. You must stay and help my dam." Aiwa stamped her feet. "I will wait today and tomorrow. Maybe only Joday. Then I will go!" Chimmuh held his temper. He understood why males sometimes bellowed at their mates. "I cannot argue now. Where are the others? I must persuade them to go with me for pahia-seed." His mother glanced half absently at his back -- thinking, no doubt, that a male calf with dorsal spines hardly sprouting was too young to do much persuading. She said listlessly, "Lozh is somewhere digging roots. The ancients and Hutu have gone to find a Dying Place." Chimmuh reared his head in shock. "A Dying Place! But -- I had counted on -- even Hutu?" His dam paused wearily in her grinding. "Hutu's leg is hurting him badly, and he sees that things are hopeless." Chimmuh said no more. He bounded over to the scanty pile of equipment Glesh had left them, chose a heavy chopping-knife in a scabbard and buckled it on so it hung at one flank. He looked back. "First I will find Lozh. Meanwhile, caa the two of you carry what we have here up to the cirque and build a fire? We will all join you there, though it may not be before dark." Aiwa said petulantly, "We have the cliff here." Chimmuh fought his anger. "There is good shelter in the cirque. And you will be closer to the passes." That persuaded Aiwa, but his dam looked at him with sad, fond eyes. "Must you go? Today..." He said, a little harshly, "We are not dead yet. There will  a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow. I will be careful." L ozh was a short gallop down the creek, working with a shovel the ruddy metal blade of which was worn and nicked. Chimmuh spat out, "Yohut! Is that the best they left?" Old Lozh drove the blade into the snowy soil and relaxed, gazing at C himm uh with a hint of amusement, standing on five limbs, the ether forepaw resting on the wooden spade handle. "There is one better, but this will suffice me. What did you see, from above?" "No sign of trouble, but snow everywhere. And I found a place where we might winter, if we can get enough food. You've seen hungry years, Lozh. Tell me. Can we live on roots and foliage?" IF The old male gestured toward the pile of tubeirs he'd dug. "This particular kind will keep us alive for a while, hut not healthy. Starvation is not our real worry, youngster. I did not want to speak frankly (before the females, but when the llangs come, they are voracious and vast in numbers. You must have stolen away with the other calves at some time to peep at the Dying Places and seen the bones scattered about, with not even one old hide as unsavory as mine left to cover them. Do not shudder. When a krote is old and stiff and lame, and his joys are safe in the past, death is no horror. And llangs are merciful at least in being quick." He looked at the scabbard Ohimmuh wore. "Were you going down, youngster to exterminate the species of llangs all by yourself?" Chimmuh tossed his head angrily. "I am going to chop pahia-seed, if I can persuade anyone to help me carry it. YohutI Were the others so anxious to die that they could not wait?" Lozh pulled the spade free and began digging slowly at another bush. "They have no hope. Grant them decency in taking themselves from the camp, to draw the llangs away from your dam." He waggled his head slowly. "I hoje it succeeds for a while at least, mehow, one feels that the act of birthing should be allowed to occur, even if dam and calf perisih a day later. Perhaps then their spirits may find peace." "Spirits!" Chimmuh snorted. "If those ancients would try as hard to live as they do to die, we might survive the winter. I'm going down to talk to them. If you care to be useful you might help my dam and Aiwa move to the cirque I found." He started down-creek, then turned, ashamed of his disrespect. "Forgive me. Elder. You could have gone with the Herd; you are not yet feeble. Why did you stay?" Lozh went on with his digging for a moment. Then he said, "It was I who suggested crossing over into this valley. Therefore, it seemed right that I stay. I'll carry these roots up and get the camp moved. If you see llangs, remember that you can outsprint them but your wind will not last. And you are still agile enough to climb a hummock. Llangs cannot." C himmuh found the resigned group huddled about a small fire in a little box canyon masked from the creek by tall brush. Besides Hutu, there were four old males and two females; the latter as scarred and sere-hided as the males though not nearly their size. Only Hutu looked at Chimmuh. The others, eyes dim with apathy and memories, slowly chewed their cud. Hutu lay on his left side, his splinted leg thrust out toward the fire. He tossed his head and rumbled, "Why are you here, youngster? If you're to stay with your dam, you should not wander about leaving tracks." Chimmuh moved nearer the fire, stamping his feet with cold. "There are no Hangs in the valley yet. I am going to chop seed. You must all help carry it up to the place I have chosen." Hutu snorted. "Who are you, th'out one horn on your head -- with hardly a dorsal spike, even -- to say what we must do? We have said farewell to the Herd, and to Lozh and your dam and Aiwa. And now we say farewell to you. Begone." Chimmuh hesitated, then burst out, "There is a calving to be guarded, and food to be brought for the dam and for Aiwa Who tends her! My dam cannot -- cannot make good milk on a diet of weeds! And there is a fence to be built, to keep out the Hangs. We are the Herd now, all that is left here. Have you lost all courage, like these senile hulks?" Hutu rumbled ominously and gathered his limbs beneath him, wincing. But the oldest and biggest of the ancient males spoke, and Hutu waited, in deference. The ancient rumbled, "You can know little of courage, youngster, since you know little of life!" One of the females said drily, "It is not our fault your dam is late in the year with her calving." Chimmuh said, "Other females have calved as late. If this were a normal year, there would be no trouble." He hesitated. It was against all instincts to be so brash with ancients. Still, he had them talking, at least. "You will have all winter to die in, if you must. Help me haul the seed to the new camping place. There will be snow tonight, to cover our tracks. If there are still no Hangs tomorrow, you can return here if you must. At least, then, you'll have pahia-seed to chew on while' you wait." Another old male said, "But if there are Hangs, we will be trapped with the rest of you in whatever place you have chosen. It is not right that ancients wait their end in a camping place." Chimmuh said, "It is less right that grown males desert a female who is calving." Hutu heaved himself to his feet, wincing as his splinted leg dangled. "Yohut! What is this talk of a fence?" Chimmuh told him, "I found a place with a narrow mouth, where we have everything but pahia-seed. I think we could fence out the Hangs." The oldest male said, "We are not agile enough to climb mountains, youngster." "There are no steep climbs," Chimmuh said. "You can do it, slowly." The ancient sighed and began heaving himself ponderously, by sections, to his feet. "Though you are hardly more than a calf, you preach like a nettle. GaUop on down and be about your chopping, so that we may find good loads when we catch up with you." Ill T he snow had melted a little in Katta Valley, so that there was much mud, and from the verticalsided hununocks water dripped. Gone were the autumn smells of warmth and ripe grasses. The snow had its own smell -- watery, but in addition a little bitter, a little pungent, like certain roots one chewed for medicine. Regular valley dwelIF lesrs evidently felt dislocated. A flock of putak birds, scavengers, circled on wide wings, so higjh tfeeir shrill cries came down only faintly. Insects crawled in the snow, moving Chimmuh to pity. A small vertebrate clung on a hanging vinelike pahia-tendril, shifting its six frail legs uncertainly, half afraid to descend. From the nearest hummock, at least four sixes of seed stalks grew up, twice as tall as Chimmuh's full length, each bearing at the top a pod as big as his head. In a normal year, these would be nearly ready to split, releasing the vaned seeds to go gliding away haphazardly like little models of putak birds. Chinunuh, nervous on the valley floor, hurried to the hummock, seized a thick tendril, bent it up in a loop and tied it with the non-slipping knot he'd been taught as soon as he was old enough to climb. He was almost too old for it, now. He made a second loop in another tendril, lunged up and got one of his hind feet in each of the loops and 'began tying other loops higher up. By the time he reached the level top, he was puffing. Pahia-shoots grew thick and erect, so it was hard to shove his way through. He got a seed stalk, peered up to make sure the pod was ripe enough, drew the heavy knife and began to chop. A few hard strokes had the stalk leaning. He reared up and tugged at it so it would fall toward the edge of the hummock. It tilted slowly and crashed down, the chopped end breaking loose and upending so that the whole slid off. He heard it thud on the soil below. The sitalk itself could be split for fenceposfs, or chopped for Bieiwood. He worked his way around the hummock, cutting all the stalks that were near the edge, then went to his makeshiift ladder. It was then the strange discomfort -- almost a panic -- seized him. He crouched there, trembling and staring around, tom between an urge to cry out for others of his kind and a fear of making any noise. Gradually, he understood. It was not so much a definite fear as the realization of being alone. He had never before been long out of calling-distance of other krote. Well, he'd simply have to bear it. He climbed down and trotted to another hummock. It w; a little better while he worked, usually shut in by the grass shoots so he couldn't see his loneliness. He had four hummocks harvested and was starting on a fifth when, faintly, he heard Hutu's voice. With a glad cry, he scrambled down and ran toward the voice. B y mid-aftemoon he'd felled all the ancients could haul. He rested, watching them tie the stalks, pods and all, into long bundles, using pliant tendrils, to be slung over their backs. Chimmuh, who couldn't have carried much anyway, stayed unburdened to act as scout. The procession started toward the slopes. He ranged ahead, trotting back and forth across the route, dropping back now and then to relieve the loneliness. Above the clouds, the day was aging. Then, while they were still among the hummocks, he met a herd of fleeing yenno. The herbivores -- built aloog the lines of krote, but smaller than Chinimuh -- came pouring from the north, slender limbs flashing rhythmically, their skins, darker than his own, inconspicuous against the dark hummocks. He crouched, startled, then darted for shelter. The tide flowed around him, some of the males pointing horns in warning but not attacking. Then the tide ended with a few stragglers limping along. He ran toward his own companions. As soon as he was in sight, the old males automatically closed up to form a circle. He pulled up, gasping. "Yenno! Running!" Hutu growled, "Yohutl" The oldest male rumbled, "How hard did they run, youngster? Were they winded? Did you see their tongues?" "N-no." "Then," the ancient said, "we have a little time. And I do not think Hangs will come into the hills tonight, with yenno to interest them." He peered at Chimmuh. "WiU you stay behind and north of us, youngster? If you see Hangs, or yenno really running, come to warn us at once. We cannot demand it of you. If you prefer, take what seed you can carry and hurry up to your dam. We wiU keep the Hangs occupied a while." Chimmuh stared distractedly toward the mountains. "I -- I could not carry much. I wiH stay." Hutu grumbled and said harsh things about his broken limb and made a sign of good luck to Chimmuh. Chimmuh drifted north of the caravan. He was determined not to be cowardly, nor yield to his loneliness. Possibly that was why he made little of another herd of ymo, nmning slightly harder than the first. It wasn't long afterward that he saw the Hangs. r iis -- he realized after his first frozen terror -- was a sort of advance guard, not more than four sixes of them, trotting in a swift easy gait out to vaHeyward of the yenno's track. They were already fed, perhaps, and just keeping tab on things. They hted the instant they saw him, fierce yeHow eyes startled and wary, as if they suspected a full krote herd nearby. Individually, they were ocJy a quarter of Chimmuh's bulk, long and low, with wedge-shaped ears now stiffly erect. They were not bare-flank like krote, but had short, Hght gray fur all over. Some, the older males no doubt, had ruffs to protect their throats as did mature males of Chimmuh's own species. AH six paws were running-paws, not made for grasping, but all fearsomely clawed. Their long slender muzzles showed fangs that nearly paralyzed Chimmuh with fright. One of them broke the brief tableau by snarling. Now Chimmuh learned how to run. He ran in pure mindless panic at first, body throwing itself into swerves to avoid hummocks, lungs pumping with an agonized violence. His head jerked about, bringing his eyes to bear on each dimness at the foot of a hummock, tossing quick looks behind. His legs ached and felt IF ready to collapse, but he streaked on leaving die Hangs out of sigt. No yenno could have kept pace with him in this initial wild hurst. Finally exhaustion forced him to slow. The Hangs were certainly on his track; he heard the peculiar chopped shrieks of their tracking. His mind was working now. He swerved around another hummock; shot off at nearly a right angle, toward the area where he'd chopped stalks. He had to give the caravan time. He worried whether he could find the right hummocks, but some part of his brain was taking him there. He saw a famiHar pattern, darted toward it; crouched a moment gasping and staring back. Then he grasped the tendril-loops and hauled, himself up. His muscles seemed to crack, and a smaH bleat of agony forced itself from him, but he went up. Before he reached the top, angry snarls broke out nearby. He heaved desperately and scrambled over the edge. He would have fled to the very middle of the hummock, if the shoots hadn't resisted. He twisted around to see his pursuers. Most of them had stopped as soon as they saw he was out of reach. Now, those turned and trotted to the wind-shelter of another hummock, where they sprawled loosely, panting, heads on their forepaws, yeUow eyes fixed on him. Two, though, had come right below him and were pacing about, staring up. He lay shuddering. His lungs ached, and both stomachs wanted to empty themselves. Time passed. The two Hangs paced. The others lay lax, only moving their ears at some distant hunting cry. The sky was nearly black, though above the clouds at least one moon must be shining. Chimmuh's breath was easy now, but the terror remained. How long would they wait here? Then one of the pair below him uttered a special snarl, reared up, and got a forepaw into one of the tendril-loops. He stretched, hooked the other forepaw in another, bunched his hindquarters and surged up. Chimimuh's panic brought him to a tense crouch. Surely the Hang couldn't reach him! Lozh had promised they couldn't climb! But maybe he'd made the loops too many, and too close together. T he Hang stretched its body incredibly, caught a hjgbieir loop. It heaved itself violently, missed, clung for a moment and tried again, caught the loop it wanted. Chimmuh could see how its wrists strained to stay hooked over the tendril, but it met his eyes and snarled a deathpromise, and he knew it wouldn't give up. He pressed back into the restraining grass. The Hang was gathering itself for the final stage. And now the others were on their feet, staring avidly. Suddenly Chimmuh remembered the scabbard that had slapped madly against his flank as he ran. Did it still hold the iknife? He could cut the tendrils! He roUed onto his side; darted a forepaw up to feeL Yes! He drew the knife; forced himself to lean forward. In the dusk, he couldn't tell the right tendrils. And now the Uanf made its final effort -- threw itself up and got first one, then the other forepaw onto the matted edge of the hummock. Its yellow eyes seemed luminous. Its scent was almost paralyzing in Chimmuh's nostrils. It snarled in triumph. Frantically, he swung the knife. The beast's scream made him cower hack. The Hang fell, still screaming. Ohimmuh was only dimly aware that the knife fell too. After a moiment the thrashing about below made him open his eyes and peer down. The Hang was writhing on the ground, snapping at its shoulder. The reek of blood was sickening. The second Hang was dancing about as if puzzled. It darted in and nipped experimentally at the injured one's flank. That one snapped back viciously. The others were converging now. The wounded one got to its feet and loped away unevenly. Chimmuh had the feeling that the others would have chased it and torn it to bits, if they'd been very hungry. As it was, they gradually settled down to their vigil. Chimmuh let his head droop, unmindful of their steady scrutiny, not caring that his tool -- his weapon -- lay below, unreachable. Both his stomachs wanted to be empty. He recaHed how, a calf, he'd crept secretly after a pair of grown males who'd gone to a secluded spot to settle a difference. He'd been sick then, too, as they lunged at each other, hooking with horns and striking with clawed feet, untU they were streaming blood. But afterward the eventual victor had been as sick as the one who lay behind. He'd staggered away by himself and retched awfuHy for a long time, with no sign of jubilation. Now Chimmuh understood. Even in necessity, to spiH the blood of another creature was a terrible thing. He lay there long after the snow began, long after the Hangs silently departed. Finally, though, it penetrated his dulled mind that he was freezing. He climbed down, very stiffly, reclaimed the knife, scrubbed it thoroughly in the snow, and hobbled away. He half expected to meet more Hangs. Evidently, though, they had no need yet to rove in snowstorms. And snow would cover his tracks. He must have staggered on half asleep, for it seemed both a very long time and a short time before he turned up the stretch of Nameless Creek that mumbled down out of the cirque. Ahead, he saw the glow of a fire. As gravid as his dam was, she lurched to her feet when he plodded into the fireUght. "CMdl" There was a confusion of beHowing and "Yohuts!" and headwaggling. Finally Lozh sHenced it. "Let him sleep. He has earned it." IV T he snow continued next morning, the more disturbing because it hid what one should see in daylight, reducing the world to a cliff and a half-circle of brushland. The camp place Lozh had chosen was, objectively, very good. The cliff gave shelIF ter from the north wind. One of the many trickles that nursed Nameless Creek flowed nearby. There was level soil, upon which they'd built a long shelter, backed by e cliff, of upright poles roofed over slantingly, pahia-pod hulls serving as shingles. A single long fire fronted it a few paces out. It was fascinating to watch the snowflakes disappear into nothing as they met the rising warm air. Chimmuh's dam lay in the dim interior, silent and withdrawn. That added to Chimmuh's uneasiness. But the two old females placidly ground seed to make pahia-bread. The old males, including Lozh, were barely visible in the snowfall, collecting roots and foliage. There'd be no hunger for a while. Hutu lay by the fire, his broken leg stretched out to the warmth. A long application of steaming mud, followed by a more careful splint, had lessened his discomfort. Only Aiwa stamped about impatiently. When Chimmuh realized the snow was not going to stop, he hauled himself lamely to his feet and hobbled out to find Lozh. Lozh was using the imperfect shovel again. He stopped and peered at Chimmuh. "You are not at peace, youngster." Chimmuh spoke with respect. "Nor would the others be, Elder, if they had met the Hangs as I did." Lozh waggled his head. "True. I was looking where we might build your fence. We will not have enough posts. Anyway, there is not soft soil all the way across. We cannot erect posts in solid rock." Chimmuh shifted his feet for warmth. "What then?" Lozh said, "We can only gather loose rocks and pile them. I was hoping the snow would stop so we could find some. Have you another harangue in mind, to put the ancients to work?" Chimmuh said a little huffily, "Let us simply start work and shame them into joining." T he old male who was spokesman for the four had, it developed, experience with fences. He took a sharpened post and thrust it lightly into the ground. "It is done thus. Now, since my forepaws are not much good for grasping, I must rear up and put this thick board across the top, so I can bring enough of my weight to bear." He did so, gruntingly, and the post slid a fifth of its length into the ground. "So. Now, that thick one about here, I think -- it will be good for a gatepost." Amused, he watched Chimmuh's effort. "You see, youngster? Your forepaws are deft for grasping, but you do not have the weight. I have weight to spare, but cannot grasp well. It is one of life's jokes. A similar one exists in the matter of dealing with females... but you will not bother about that for three years, or four." He took hold of the post. "Permit me." There were enough posts for the stretch of soft soil, set closely so no Hang could squeeze through. That left both ends, plus Nameless Creek, which must be closed with a lattice of brush-trunks that wouldn't dam the water. The chore of gathering rocks begaiL Oiimmm h trotte: aiboulk them for the old males to catty. "Obe two she-ancients chopped bues and took them to Hutu to trim. The snow stopped in mid-afternoon, but ihe night was cold. Chiminuh slept fitfully. Once or twice he heard mother moan in her sleep. #ut dmt distuilbed him more was he dStt tracking cry of Hangs, ' omewhete down Nameless Creek. He (wias about with the first daylight, anxious to resume work on the fence. By evening, when it was still not snowing, the woiik was almost finished, though the rocky ends must still be (built 'higher. And it was that evening that Chimmuh, peering between the posts, saw a group of Hangs down Nameless Greek. They were staring toward the cirque, lifting their muzzles as if either the scent of krote or the drifting woodsmoke were puzzling. Finally they trotted down the creek. Chimmuh, shaken, sought out Lozh. "Supposing, Elder, the fence keeps out Hangs indefinitely. We wHl run out of pahia seed before long. Could we make trips for more, while it was snowing?" Lozh waggled his head doubtfuHy. "As few and as feeble as we are, I fear not. One or two trips, soon, perhaps. But as winter extends and the Hangs grow hungry, they'U be less particular about the weather." He started to say more, but paused, staring toward the fire. Chimmuh saw the females gathered there. He galloped that way. One of the she-ancients rumbled at him and moved to block him, then, remenbering who he was, moved aside. He stopped, stiff-legged, staring at the pale-hided thing eagerly nursing at his mother's beHy. She looked up, eyes tired but bright with emotions he didn't entirely understand. "Male-child, you have a small sister." H e must have slept soundly, for the trouble that night was well evolved before he heard it. He scrambled to his feet, full of panic and the stupidness of slumber, craning his neck to see 'beyond the fire. The bulky forms of the four old males loomed there, motionless. From down-cirque he heard Hutu and Lozh bellowing, Aiwa screaming, and a bedlam of snarls and shrieks that could only be Hangs. He was so weak with terror he could hardly move; but he forced himself into action, grabbed the shovel that was the nearest weapon and somehow got to one end of the fire. He was nearly trampled as two of the old males, their minds working now as well as their instincts, wheeled to occupy the gap between that end of the fire and the cliff. The other two, presumably, were at the other end. Then, as he started toward the fence, Aiwa almost bowled him over. He had wit enough to thrust with the shovel-blade at the dim shape snapping at her heels. He felt the impact, saw Wood gush from the Hang's chest. It went sprawling and screaming. Two more came out of the dark, split around ham and darted on. StiH another appeared, and he thrust at it with shovel. He hit it, not solidly, and it IF turned and disappeared into the dark. He heard a thump and a shriek behind him as one of the pair that had avoided him got too close to the big males. Its partner shot by him in retreat. Chimmuh galloped into the dark, dreading what he'd find. As his eyes adjusted he saw a writhing knot of shadows at the gate. His legs kept going. Hutu lay motionless and silent in the snow. Lozh, his tail to the fence, was standing, off a full six Hangs that darted about him, looking for an opening. Three or four other Hangs lay dead. Chimmuh hurtled in, shovel poised. He realized that the gate was shut, with a horde of Hangs clamoring outside. The ones around Lozh saw him coming and broke. He thrust and caught one full in the flank. The rest, except one, darted to his right along the fence, thinking now only of escape. The single one swerved around him and went after its fellows. Lozh bellowed, "Come! Don't give them time to think!" The snow was heaped up at the foot of the slope, and against the rock fence. The beasts floundered in it, trying to climb free. Chimmuh, mind hardly working, crippled another with the shovel, but that was his last contribution to the action. Chimmuh stood shaking with reaction. Finally he gasped, "Hutu?" Lozh rumbled savagely, "Hutu is dead. He sold his life to get that gate shut." He reached out, picked up a dead Hang and heaved it mightily over the fence. He reached for another, but paused. "No; one is enough to show them now. We'll skin the others first. We'll need warm pelts." By the time they got back to the gate, the pack outside had taken itself off. Hutu's blood was a dark congealed blob in the snow. His throat ruff had not been enough against so many slashing fangs. Chimmuh followed in a daze as Lozh marched toward the fire. V A iwa lay huddled between the old females. Lozh prodded at her, not gently. "Why did you do it?" Her flanks heaved with emotion, but she was silent. Lozh prodded harder. "Why did you open the gate?" This time she lifted her head. Her eyes were duU with inward pain. "I didn't know there'd be Hangs near. I was going to -- to slip away and cross the mountains to find my mate." One of the old males rumbled, "A fool's errand. Do you think, now, he would be alive even if you found him? His bones lie somewhere in the north!" Aiwa put her head down again. Lozh left her. There was talk about Hutu's corpse. The decision was to leave it until morning. Silent with grief, the camp settled down. Chimmuh moved out beyond one end of the fire and huddled against the cliff. He wanted to be able to see the fence without the fire glare in his eyes. The fence was barely visible in the dim light. The rest IF of the cirque was a ghostly, uneasy place, with faint, dancing gleams and shadows. After a while he got up and went to find Lozh. The old male lay at the other end of the fire. He lifted his head as Chimmuh approached. "Can you not sleep, youngster?" "No. Elder, I know very little lore, but it seems to me that we can't hope to survive long as things are. What do you really feel are the chances my sire is still olive and will be going down Big Valley?" Lozh stared into the fire. "Your thoughts are mine, too. The Hangs are not totally irresistable. We have seen how awkward they are in snow too deep for them, and they die easily under heavy blows. If your sire and brothers and those with them learned quickly, they might fight their way down Big Valley. If I were more agHe -- " Chimmuh interrupted impatiently. " am best fitted to cross the mountains. And if I found my sire's party, we would not have to worry about starving. So many prime males could travel down Nameless Creek and retiun with pahia-seed every few days, if necessary. Could they not?" Lozh waggled his head. "I would not choose it as a pastime. But probtry the mountains?" Chimmuh stamped his feet for warmth. "Of course. But do you think my sire would already have passed by?" "That," Lozh rumbled, "depends upon many things we do not iknow. But every day increased the likelihood." Chimmuh said, "I can start tomorrow, if it snows. The Hangs seem to retire down-creek when it snows." "Possibly," Lozh said, "but I would think it wiser after dark. And you cannot go without preparation. Packs must be made up, for you'U need food and firewood. And we'U skin those dead Hangs for pelts. Rest, now; I will keep watch. Tomorrow may do its own planning." T he morning was overcast, but snowless. Icy wind whipped over the north rim of the cirque, seizing upon the smoke from the fire and whirling it away. The four ancient males lay chewing their cud and discussing Hutu's corpse. They favored dragging it to a spot near the left end of the fence, where they could pHe brush over it, then snow. They were disturbed that he hadn't been able to get to a Dying Place and seemed worried that they themselves might meet the same (Hsgrace. Chimmuh, after listening a moment, gaHoped away angrily toward the fence, to peer down-creek. There were no Hangs in sight, but he could hear them somewhere. Lozh said he must not start yet. He plodded back to the fire. His dam was well enough now to walk from the shelter, the she-calf wobbling after her. "Male-child," she said sadly, "you have risked yourself enough. Must you do more?" He fought impatience. "Who but me? And would you want my sire to travel on south without knowing we are here?" She gazed at him quietly for a moment, glanced at the calf, which was staring wide-eyed at the fire, and dipped her head in acquiescence. 'HTare well for yourself." She turned and nuzzled the calf gently back under the shelter. There was no snow by nightfall, but the llang-sounds were far downcreek. Chimmuh stood at the gate, peering out with mixed filings. Lozh plodded toward him, carrying things. "Here are pelts enou to lie on, and to cover you. I had the females scrape them thoroughly and rub ashes into them, so they shouldn't be unbearable. And here's a bit of lore I learned once." He displayed some oddly shaped pieces of pelt. "Put these on your feet like this, fur side in, and tie them thus. They will keep your toes from freezing. And this -- you hang it around your neck, so the pouch is convenient to thrust your forepaws into. You may prefer at times, when you rest, not to build a fire. Huddle, if you can, in a corner of rock, or at worst in deep snow. The snow will not freeze you as quickly as the wind. Do not get too cold or tired or hungry, or your strength will desert you with little warning. Think well before making irreversible decisions." Chimmuh said, "I will travel fast. I shall not take very long in the passes." Lozh rumbled a sigh. "And do not be overconfident. It will be harder than you think. The cold and the high thin air are things you are not used to." Chinunuh shifted his feet impatiently. "Will you help me with these knots?" I t seemed to Chimmuh that the faint noises Lozh made opening the gate and closhig it would draw every Hang within a day's gallop. He crouched for a moment staring down-creek, glanced back at the quartet of males guarding the gate, dipped his head to Lozh and ran quietly for the right-hand slope. He climbed far enough to see over the brush along the creek, then trotted carefully along the slope, eyes and ears straining. The crackling of the fire was far behind him, and all he could hear now was the soft voice of Nameless Creek and the cold wind plucking at the 'brush and snow. He looked back. He could see nothing but the fence silhouetted against the fire glow. He went on. The mountain's shoulder curved away ifrom Nameless Creek, and now the cirque was out of sight. Somewhere, down-creek, there was a short outburst of Hang snarls, which hastened him a little. He went farther around the slope and was in the ravine that climbed westward. Before long, that was bare of brush. Now there'd be no sudden ambushes. He found a place that kept him tolerably warm without exhausting him, but to hold it he had to stay out of snowdrifts, which took some thought. He tried to recaH what this ravine had been like when the Herd came down it. Passably free of boulders, he thought, but his footing was a little nervous. The wind came over the north slope, swirling in the ravine, icily. He stopped to adjust a foot covering and was shivering at once. He climbed on. After a while a light snowIF fall began, increasing ibis sense of isolation. But proibly he didn't have to worry about Bangs now. He could stop, when he was tired enough, and get warm. He remembered that the opposite side of this canyon had been crumbled at one point, with a rock slide and some shallow caves above it. Had he passed that already? Things looked so different. But his instincts said the place was still ahead. He trotted on wearily. Then, where a side canyon split off, he had a flash of memory. The rook slide wasn't far. He reached it and stood peering up the white slope. Could he climb the slide? He crossed the ravine and started up, settling five paws carefully before moving the sixth. It wasn't too difficult. He would have liked a torch to see into the caves, but building a fire was a chore, so he settled for listening and sniffing. The caves were empty. He Chose one with a level floor just big enough to curl up on, brushed out the snow, spread some pelts and settled himself. He decided against a fire. With more pelts spread over him, he was warm enough. He chewed a mouthful of pahia-seed and slept. Snow was intermittent the next day, but the going was harder, because now the air was thin and his lungs labored. Also, his body warmth seemed to flood away alanmingly. He had to stop several times, and that night he built a fire in the best shelter he could find. He had to work very long with the spinningstick until the shaved kindling ignited and his forepaws were cramped and exhausted. But once he got a few big sticks buiming, everything was fine. He dried out the pelts and foot coverings and what he could of the packs. Sometime during the next day, which was snowy, he got lost. The blind canyon he blundered into was short, so he soon realized his mistake, but momentarily he panicked. He turned and floundered back wildly, going eastward along his own tracks, not thinking at all until he tripped and went sprawling. He lay there, gasping and thinking of the cirque, with its warmth and the companionship of other krote. Then, slowly, reason returned. There was no safety in failure. He struggled up -- shockingly stiff and weak -- and turned westward again, past the blind canyon. At the first good rock-shelter, he bundled himself in the pelts, piling the other things around him, and got warm. Before nightfall he was definitely descending. And now he recognized his surroimdings. This ravine would lead down to a creek which flowed into Big Valley. The air would be getting better again, and he wouldn't be constantly laboring uphill. But those difficulties would be exchanged for another. Big Valley was no doubt swarming with Hangs. VI O n a cold but snowless morning, he lay on a finger-ridge and stared out over Big Valley. Beyond a wide stretch of hummocks, the river wound its broad channel. Movement, closer, caught fads eye. A pack of Hangs, tiny with distance, trotted along. The snow barely covered their feet. Evidently there hadn't been much in Big Valley. He saw three or four other packs, one of them in full chase after something. The choppy pursuit cry reached him faintly and made him shiver beneath his covers. He obviously couldn't go down into the valley in clear weather, if at all. The summering camp was south of here, on this side of the valley -- not a long trot, on level ground. He stared at the next ridge, then looked inland. If he followed the contour of the land, it would take him days. So, he must cross the ravines. He watched this one for a while and saw nothing but putak birds soaring low over some carrion. Loading himself, he started down. As he reached brush, something small darted from before him, making him leap. He went on, sense alert. At the bottom he crossed a small creek and stopped to listen. No sounds close. He started up the other slope. He wasn't yet clear of the brush when he heard a shrill chopped cry behind him . He ran, equipment slapping against his flanks. Something under the snow tripped him, and he went sprawling. He got up, wincing with pain, and went on. Other Hang voices had joined in, so there was no doubt they were on his track. He headed for a part of the slope where the snow looked thicker. His lungs already ached. When the Hangs burst from the brush and saw him. he knew it by the sudden urgency of their cries. He was having to make high leaps in the snow now. What would he do at the top of the ridge? If he turned up it, would they stay in the ravine, paraHeling him, to cut hitn off? No; they were charging up the slope. He realized that his lead in elevation was as good as a long lead on the level. He got to the rounding-off and stopped almost impudently to watch them. Let them struggle in the deep snow, then. He trotted up-ridge, on easy footing now, watched them flounder, then passed over the brow of the ridge out of their sight. He slowed to peer into the next ravine. If he ran into another pack, he was in bad trouble -- his lungs and muscles couldn't handle another such flight. But he was farther up this ravine, and the brush was thinner, with no sign of Hangs. He plunged down the slope and across the bottom and picked the easiest ways up the far ridge. When he heard his pursuers top the one he'd left, he turned to watch them. They stood in a tight group, staring at him, but they'd had enough of the chase. He went on at a bearable pace, crossing several more ridges. He saw and heard Hangs, but none close. By late afternoon he was within sight of the summering place. T he old camp was in a deep ravine that had a fair-sized creek and a steep northern side for shelter. Each spring, arriving, Chimmuh had seen the previous year's fire sites, winter-washed but not obliterated. It IF was strange now to see the unbroken blanket of snow. Even the rocks arranged into cooking places were mounded over. Here and there were abandoned baskets and such, also covered. There were no shelters standing, since they'd been torn down for fuel on the mountain crossing. There were no krote tracks or other signs that his sire's party had been there. A day or two of snow, doubtless, would cover such tracks. There were Hang tracks -- everywhere. And those were fresh. His stomachs felt heavy with frustration. What a forlorn mission this was! Even if the metal-gathering party still lived, wasn't it foolish to expect them to fight their way down the length of Big Valley? Wouldn't they find some haven in the north, as Chimmuh and his group had? Surely they'd presume the Herd would be long gone. So, even if they did come down Big Valley, why would they bother with the summering place? Wouldn't they go down the river channel, where there was only short brush and long open stretches of bottomland? Unless they hoped for some message left at the campsite. There was, he thought, only a faint hope that they'd still come. But it was the only hope, so he must wait. The trouble was, he had food and fuel for only a few days. If he could go down into the valley and climb a hummock, he'd have everything he needed. The pahiaseed hadn't been rich in Big Valley this year, but he could exist on it. Would he get the chance? It wasn't snowing now, here. Anyway, by this time the Hangs might be hungry enough to ignore snowfall. He stared at the campsite. If he could at least get that far, he could leave a cairn with a message -- pile rocks up, and find a bit of charcoal to draw on a slab of wood. What kind of drawing? A sketch of a female krote and a smaU calf and an arrow pointing in the direction of the mountain passes? Not very understandable. It might be that no one with his father had ever seen the passes. Anyway, for now, he'd have to stay where he was. Should he build a fire? The smoke would be visible quite a way, and at night the fire would show. At least it was activity. He found a level spot and shov snow off it; unpacked his goods. This time he took pains shaving the kindling and, with the lower air, had no trouble. The warmth was wonderful, but the smoke was a disappointing beacon. It swirled up only a little way then whipped south with the wind. The afternoon dragged by. He ate, and tried to rest, and frett. Night came crisp and snowless. He worried that he was using wood recklessly and that the fire would attract Hangs. Almost he would have welcomed seeing a few, if they didn't come close -- his solitude was agony again. It always was, when he didn't have something to keep him busy. Now and then he heard Hangs. Once a pack of them went by at the foot of his ridge, and he tensed for flight, but they were on some track. He imagined their yellow eyes staring up taward the fire as they passed. Then, sometime during the night, it began to snow, H e tensed in uncertainty. Should he quench the fire to save wood? It couldn't he seen far now. Should he sneak down to the campsite? He might not get another chance. And it would be good to have the fire to return to. He listened. Was that a hang? If so, it was far out in the valley. And ailmost any risk seemed better than just huddling here. He took his chopping-knife and started down the slope. At the edge of the brush he turned down-ravine, shying at every mound in the snow. He could barely make out the fire's glow now. Finally, a snow mound had a familiar shape. He ran to it, thrusting his forepaws into the snow to feel the cooking stones, as if they were old friends. Presently he began to shift them into a ground layer for a cairn. Then he went to the next cluster for more. He tried to be quiet, but the stones made a distressing amount of noise. He paused to listen. Nothing. But to his imagination then ni'ght was full of stealthy pawfalls. He had to go farther to get more stones. When he had a pyramid half as hjgh as himself he was satisfied the siiow would not hide it. Now, what about a message? There'd be no convenient flat slabs of wood here. He should have thought about that before he left the fire. Well, then a sharpened twig, to point in the right direction? A poor message. Maybe he'd beter get back up to the fire; make a second trip while the snow lasted. He started in that direction -- and heard a snarl somewhere ahead. He whirled and ran the other way, blindly. After a few strides he tum up the slope. But here it was too steep; he lost footing and slid, floundering. The Hangs were clamoring now. He scrambled to his feet and darted away from the slope. He knew (this ravine, knew its flat floor and the gentler slope on the far side. He plunged through brush; reached the creek and bounded across it, splashing in icy water, tore through the brush on the far side, falling at least twice. Then he was on the upcurving slope. He was gasping, but he could tell by their cries that the Hangs were breathing hard too. He headed by memory for a slight gully where the snow would be deeper. He stumibled into it and climbed. Eventually, dazed with fear and exhaustion, he gained the top of the ridge and went along it, toward higher ground. He could tell when the Hangs hit deeper snow. Evidently they were already tired from some earlier chase -- this must be the bunch that had gone up-ravine earlier, as he huddled by his fire -- for they gave up quickly, and he heard them no more. But now he was far from his fire and all his equipment. Even the choppingknife lay somewhere near the stone caim. He peered across the ravine. If the fire still burned, the snowfall ihid it completely. How IF lng would it take him to plod inland, cross the ravine high up and come back down the other ridge? Without even his foot coverings, he trembled violently now. He tried to hurry on, to warm himself, but he was too exhausted. Dare he curl up in deep snow and rest a while? He didn't think any Hangs would come up here. The snowfall would quickly cover his scent, if not his deep tracks. He couldn't go on without rest. He shoved a pile of snow together and burrowed into it, knowing dimly that he mustn't rest too long, or he'd be too frozen to walk. But, curled into a ball with his paws tucked in, he felt surprisingly well. He was cold, but at least the wind didn't tear at him. Maybe he could rest here till daylight. GraduaUy, his trembling stopped. His body seemed to be accepting the cold. He drowsed. Vaguely, once, he realized it was daylight, but that didn't matter. He stirred feebly, relieving a cramp, and slept again. Then one voice cut through to him -- a voice as familiar as his own limbs, a full male voice he'd known aU his life. "Male-calf I Rouse yourself! We found the cairn and your tracks. What are you doing here? Where is your dam?" r iey had strange artifacts that no lore had ever mentioned. They wore pelts stitched together to cover their whole bodies, except the Hmbs and elaborate foot coverings. Tliey had weapoiK larger than a spade, with fearsome points of hammered ruddy metal. They had flat platforms of hewed pahia-stalk, floored over with thin-beaten metal, on which permanent fires burned and which they dragged after them, slipping easily and amazingly over the snow. Others of those platforms bore quantities of metal or chopped wood, or pouches bulging with pahia-seed. For part of the way Chimmuh had ridden on one of those platforms. Now, rested, he trotted beside his sire. Wurgan turned his big head. "We had desperate times before we learned to cope with everything. Yohut! The Hangs were everywhere! We had to devise new things." He peered anxiously at Chimmuh. "Was that fence of yours secure? Do you think Lozh wHl have been able to cope with things?" Chimmuh said, "He did not act at all senHe. And I think the ancients are resigned to living another year." Wurgan waggled his head in amusement. Then he said, "A new she-calf! How much farther?" "We wiH be there soon," Chimmuh told him. He tried to sound confident. "The winter is not bad, when one learns its ways. And Hangs aren't so much." Nevertheless, he tensed nervously when he saw a smaH pack of Hangs ahead, just where the ravine converged with Nameless Creek. He felt much better when the beasts, after staring for a moment at the oncoming phalanx of huge male krote, turned, snarling, and skulked away. And he felt even better when, turning up Nameless Creek, he saw the fence stiH intact and smoke risIF IF  Short Sttry AfuPcuUhe If was a pleasant little hunting trip in the sun, the quarry a panther as big -- and deadly! -- as a dinosaurl I t isn't often that a mu panther is loose around here. When one is, the farmers and breeders usually call on Everret, Mader  Crawford, C.P.H. I'm the Everret part of it, Barry Everret, and the chief partner. We were loafing around the office in Denver, throwing opinions on some new armament round-robin style, when we got the word that a cat was loose north of us. "Barry, I don't like the feel of those new Brownings that were sent out. They're made for a factory load, and the special slugs you wanted tested out throw the balance off, as well as -- " The telephone cut Jesse Matler off with its nasal buzz. He grabbed it resignedly. It really isn't often that we get a panther. Cougars are our biggest problem, ever since the # blowups. Occasionally panthers show up, hut the ratio was eight to one, at least. So when one comes arouBd from up in the Rockies and slashes some breeders' mu steers, we usually get the job. Even young Brad Rodgers out on his father's spread knew ur reputation as the best professional hunters in four states; the Certified before our names could tell anyone that at a glance. It was Rodgers on the line, from the halfWyoming. Jesse hung up and turned to us. "Rodgers says they've lost four prize steers in two nights. They weighed in at ten tons each and stood thirty hands high, so he's lost quite a lot. They were champion stock. He wants us up there right away." "We'd better get up there, then," Bill Crawford said, with his persoBalized sarcastic drawl. he loses any more stock like that he won't he able to afford our services. He must know we don't work for peanuts. Anyway, since when is Rodgers running his spread? From all accounts he couldn't tell a prize steer from a cow." He was perfectly right, of course; just one look at Rodgers would be enough to convince anyone that he wasabout as competent as a Mongolian idiot. Jesse just ignored Bill and continued. "He postitively identified the tracks as panther's, and all of sixteen inches across." T hat sobered Bill up right away. We knew then that it would be one heck of a cat; body symmetry would make it thirty-five feet long, and maybe fifty tons in weight. That would I a record; so in six hours we had packed a full expedition and in another four we stood in front of the Rodgers ranch house. It looked like pure Park Avenue. Jesse Matler and Bill Crawford have been partners with me for ten years now, and friends before that. Matler is the bigger of the two, a huge man, built like a boulder, with hands that can pulverize sandstone. But Jesse's one of the easiestgoing people I know, until he gets mad. That's very seldom, but when it happens it's a perfect case history of midtiple personality. Jesse turns into a reasonable facsimile of a charging hippo. Aside from that, he's one of those pro hunters who cut their teeth on a .#-#. He grew up in South Africa, the son of the owner of one of die last great private preserves in the Continent. He got his first lion when he was sixteen. It was normal sized because of the scarcity of power plants in Africa; the unknown blowups in America had not affected them at all. That had been twentynfive years ago and seventy-five years from the blowups, so few mutations had shown up at that time anyway. His first rhino fell a year later; the same mad rhino had killed his father a few hours before, so that hunt was more than for pleasure or profit. Jesse sold the preserve to the government soon afterwards, not by choice but because of a large landreclamation program under way. He moved back to his father's native America and met Bill and me at a hunting lodge in California where he was listlessly teaching greenhorns how to hunt like a pro. That was fifteen years ago. Since then Jesse has become the backbone doesn't need the money we collect; his father's land in Africa paid off nicely. But Jesse could no more give up hunting than Minnesota Fats could quit pool. Bill Crawford is almost opposite Jesse in build and temperament, but just as skilled at his spialty. He's about average height land weight, but is solid rock, a (high-rankiing karate beltnholder. He was an artillery specialist in the Army. He can handle a #-mm. howitzer like it was a popgun, with either atomic or chemical explosives in the charge. He cut his teeth on a recoilless rifle, IF not unlike our own antitank gun. And when you've got forty tons of cat moving at you, the boom of the big gun over your head is mighty welcome and cheering. And then there's Schultz, my mu dog with a talent for telepathy and such. I had Schultz custom-bred from prize German-Shepherd stock, specially trained for hunting purposes. The fact that a phenomenal intelligence went along with the psi mad Schultz a good friend too. W e've been contriving to find ourselves a mu panther for a while. Now, since we tracked this cat down on the Rodgers land, reports have been coming in of some more sightings in the area. Some, I guess, are cranks, because of the widespread publicity after Brad Rodgers died on the hunt. The inquest cleared us of any foul play. But it was the one hunt I'll never forget; I doubt if we'll ever meet up with another cat like that one. At any rate, I hope not. We've been controlling mutations commercially for some time now, ever since the early successes with the chromosome-controls were developed in the early #'s. Now it's the world's largest industry. It ought to be. It solved the world's food problems, since fifty-pound cabbages can go a long way. But the blowups of the big Nevada and Colorado nuclear power plants started a wildcat chain of mues, even worse because it showed up only after eighty years had passed. Once in a while a mu cat shows up, and we get called in, or one of the other few pro firms. We're still dreading the day when these mues start to attack towns, or farmhouses. So far the only deaths were cattle. ' Not counting Rodgers, of course. He was waiting for us at the landing strip behind the main complex of the farm and ranch; and it was clear from the first that he was the type who ran the show totally, disregarding any advice that went against it... winch it usually did. I can't really blame him, because he was totally starved for power. His father had left the ranch in the care of the foreman, and his son could never manage his own property. I knew the elder Rodgers slightly. He was fiercely possessive where his land was concerned, an anachronism from the times of the range wars, probably. He could have trained his son -- but that involved risk to his land, or at least some uncertainty. None of us had ever seen Brad Rodgers in person before. We had dealt with his ranch only through his foreman, never with him. What he was holding over someone's head now wo couldn't guess, but it was obvious Who was in charge here. He was wearing a khaki shirt and light slacks, and he wasn't built too badly, though compared to the three of us he was scrawny. He looked as if he was a commander briefing his troops, as he faced us in his study and pointed to a map of the spread. We had already been introduced, and he wanted to get down to business fast. The foremen were nowhere in sight. A hired hand had guided our airboat in to the strip, amd the heliport had been open when we landed. He pointed to a spot on the map about five miles from the house. "Here's where the carcasses were found last night, gentlemen," Rodgers said. "Their throats were ripped out and large sections in their bodies had been torn up and eaten. One of my hands found the tracks not far from the steers, in some soft mud. All the area was tom up by the struggle between the steers and the cat. They were panther's tracks, Mr. Everret." He handed me a photograph of the tracks as a group and a plaster of Paris mold of one of them. There were five that were readable enough for this type of identification. They were panther's, all right, and easily the sixteen inches that Rodgers had quoted. I passed the photo and mold to Jesse; he confirmed the identification. This was a record cat, and the smeU of a great hunt was in the air, as miuoh as could filter over the atmosphere of fear induced by the thought of the huge panther, anyw'ay. 'Uh, Mr. Rodgers," Bill Crawford broke in, "could we speak to one of your foremen for the details of this, like the direction and the time factors involved? I mean -- " "Crawford, I run this ranch. As long as I do, you come to me for whatever information that you need. Remember that." Rodgers was fuming mildly at the slight to his pride. I broke back in. "Mr. Rodgers, we know this is your land and we respect you. But we need an experienced hunter, someone who knows this area like the back ct his hand. Besides, we have only one extra seat and gun in the aiiboat. If we could, we'd be glad to take you out with us, but as it stands..." "Everret, I've got my own guns. What are you using?" "Small aims are #-gauge shotguns fitted for rifled slugs and built for #-gram explosive slugs." I smiled in triumph; that beauty costs upwards of fourteen hundred dollars. But Rodgers was undaunted; he walked over to a rifle rack I hadn't noticed and removed a twin to the express rifles outside, with a few extras: a gold inlay, suede cheekpiece and recoil pad and handcarved fiberglass stock. Those would jack up the price considerably. Our own weapons were bare of these, because we all agreed that it is useless and costly. "You said yourself that you have an extra seat in the airboat, Everret. Well, Tm going to ibe in it, or else the whole deal is off. If I have to go to every Certified Professional Hunting team in the country. I'll see that cat brought down with my own eyes." With that he brought us back outside and vanished iback into the ranchhouse, leaving us to decide which was worse: hunting with a greenhorn or not hunting at all. Jesse and Bill were disgusted. 'Barry, he can't be serious. Rodgers is probably safe only on a target range -- with small bores. Even IF if he were a fairly good amateur hunter, this kind takes a special type of nerve. You know that. A mutated panther isn't exactly an ordinary game." Bill agreed with Jesse. "Any non-pros -- and even some pros, I think -- will do either one of two things. Either they would fold up like a sick jellyfish or they would empty their usually considerable armament into everything around -- except the cat. And Rodgers looks like the amateur's amateur, well equipped but Kelly green." "I know it's risky," I said, "but it's the only way we can get at that panther. We don't want to pass that panther onto the Muller spread or Jerry Dane's land to the east. We'll have to put up with Rodgers until we get up. Then Tm the boss, as captain, or Jesse as co-pilot. Up there he can't spit unless I let him." "But, Barry, this is going to be tough work. We can't afford any useless weight till that cat is cold and cut up for the hogs." "Sure, Jesse, I know. But we have to go after that cat. If it goes after a town or a ranchhouse because of a delay we caused, we can expect to have our license revoked by the Game Commission, at least." So the issue was settled. But Rodgers would have done better to stay beihind. When I said we were a professional team I didn't mean that we were a bunch of jungle boys who go after the big cats with loincloths and knives. We cheat at this game -- a lot. We have to. Nature made us what we are and in so doing fixed the odds at a thousand to one against us when faced with one of the mues. When we go after one of them -- cougars, jaguars, panthers -- we use custom airboats that can climb two hundred feet in a second, or skim over any surface at three hundred miles per hour. This isn't too much speed in comparison to the big cats, but it's the climbing power that is the big advantage, bringing us up and out of the range of the biggest cat's claws. We also carry sound pickups, radar and infrared scopes for tracking and night work. And besides the small arms --  if you can call the #-gauge shotguns "small" -- we have an antitank recoilless rifle mounted on the rear of the airboat, Bill Crawford's pride and joy. He can do everything with that piece but make love. Next to that and the crates of armorpiercing shells was a small ruby laser, designed for industrial cutting and welding. We've never had to use that beauty yet, but from the tests I've run I'd say it would be one hell of a barbecue. Bill has the laser and antitank gun controls hooked into a radar unit operating in unison with the unit up at the control panel. Unless one of us is at the guns, the radar aims and fires the weapon automatically. Of course, it's keyed for animals only, just in case. J esse and I sat in the front of the airboat, with Bob in the artillery mount and Rodgers in the extra seat behind me. We unpacked the shotguns and loaded boxes filled with clips of the banana-sized shell. five to a clip. I charged the laser's power supply and checked the liquid helium coolant bath surrounding the ruby shield and flash tubes. I set the beam for a pencil-thin "sheer" that can cut through a diamond like a knife through butter and settled the flashhead back into the mount. With that armory it might sound like we hunt fish in a barrel. Not quite. The mu cats can smell humans about a mile away, and four humans approach with  the subtlety of John Philip Sousa in his glory. Our usual tactic is to wait until radar tracking indicates that the cat has been stationary for some time and thus is probably sleeping. Then you move in and lob several explosive shells into it and hope that you hit a vital spot. If you missed or, worse, only wounded the cat, the hunt becoimjes a good, old-fashioned chase. Quite often the roles of hunter and hunted are exchanged. Then you move iip high fast and hope to pick it off from above it. If not, there's always the laser. One thing makes our team unique: Schultz. He's a rare type of telepath, a visual empath combined with controlled clairvoyance. Through Schultz, I could scout a fifteen-mile area in a few minutes, not by radar but by direct vision. The actual empathy was limited to vision, but Schultz could project any other sense as well. I value that dog more than the radar and sound amplifiers together. Schultz is slightly larger than most German Shepherds, due both to champion parents and the radiogenetic treatment that turned him into a mued esper. He weighs about one himdred fifty pounds, all solid muscle, and stands up to my waist -- and I'm not exactly tiny. His coat is a mixture of tan and brown fur, short and bristly. His face and head are typical, with the squared-off muzzle and blunt forehead. R odgers gave us the location of northeast at an easy #. The violent blast of the air from the fans quieted down to a low whine under the hull as the automatics cut in. The dead steers were visible from a good distance away. I set the airboat down a few yards away from the carcasses. They had been dead for about twelve hours in the sun and were beginning to decay. But most of the massive bulk was still warm. One of the gargantuan slobs of 'beef that had been gor from their bellies would have filled the panther, but the four were each gorged slightly, just enough to fill the stomach of the cat. This was a killer, the worst kind of mu. We examined the tracks in the soft clay; the fight had crushed the grass down into a soft pulp and turned the soil. The tracks were panther's, a complete single set. I wanted Shultz to see this. SchultZi come here, boy, I called to him. What, Barry-man? He jumped from the airboat and trott over to me. Sniff the tracks. It only took him a moment. Panther, Very big one. IF He looked up at me, with a gleam in his eye. He sensed the brutality of panther now. When you train an ordinary dog to hunt, he develops a reflex. But Schultz is more than a dog; he can sense emotioils and motives and has a deep sense of justice. Maybe revenge would be a better word, but it's all the same thing in practice. We started moving outward in a spiral pattern. We didn't have any dues as to which direction the panther had taken, and the spiral would cover all directions very thoroughly. It was six o'clock now, and the sun was almost down. Jesse watched the radar anxiously as Bill fiddled with the controls on the antitank gun. Rodgers was fidgeting with his #gauge, running his fingers over the carved receiver lovingly. He handled it as if he was familiar with it. A novice would be clumsy with the heavy gun, but he appeared to know the feel of it well. That was some relief, anyway; a good shot mit come in handy. But he would be more trouble than he was worth if he didn't stay put and keep out of our way. He didn't look too bad, for an amateur; he was heavily buht, for his weight, and not too much of him was fat. Maybe he would be useful. But maybe I'm just a perpetual optimist. I turned to Jesse, "Anything yet?" "Not a thing, Barry. It's getting dark, too. Better fit the sniperscopes onto the #-gauges." "Sure thing, Jesse." I snapped the intercom on and signaled Bill to bring the infrared assemblies down from the mount and teach Rodgers how to use one. After a moment he climbed down from the mount and set a box of Farnsworth 'scopes down next to Rodgers. He unpacked one, snapped it into a magnetic Bushnell mount and slipped it onto the grooved receiver of his shotgun. He slid the power supply and infrared source onto the gun and checked to see if the balance wasn't disturbed too much. It wasn't. He switched the cadmium cell on and gazed into the image tube; in a few seconds the image cleared and the infrared waves illuminated the ground below. He clicked it off. "Think you can put that sniperscope together, Mr. Rodgers?" Bill's tone was level; that meant only that he was annoyed. "I can try. I've fooled around with telescopic sights before. Thirty-X Weavers, mostly." "Really?" The slightest bit of sarcasm dripped through this time. Bill is a confirmed C # mic, and we're used to it, but Rodgers wasn't. Rodgers snapped the tube onto his mount and correctly placed it on the receiver. He glanced back at Bill's gun and snapped the rest of the assembly on. Then he flipped the switch. I heard a crack and whirled. Rodgers had flinched and dropped the gun. Bill dived for it and caught the magazine soon enough to prevent the 'scope from being smashed on the airboat floor. "You son of a Gila monster," he snapped quietly, "that's a five hundred dolW instrument! You reversed the pdarity and got hit by # volts. You're lucky you didn't fry. Next time check the wiring, okay?" Bill walked back up to the gun mount and left Rodgers sligbtly confused and with a bruised ego. Jesse and I returned to our controls. After a few minutes I glanced back at our employer; he was slouched in his seat, an expression on his face as plain as a neon sign. If so much as a grasshopper moved down ibelow, he'd empty five slugs into it as fast as he could squeeze them off. I set the controls on automatic and turned around to speak to him. "Rodgers," I said, "I know you hired us. On your land you're the boss. But up hete I call the shots. "When we spot the panther, let Crawford handle it. We're going to approach the cat while it sleeps and we'll lay an artillery shell into its head from five hundred yards. If you start popping off slu from the shotgun at that range you'll accomplish two things: waste ammunition and wake up the panther. If you've ever seen thirtyfive feet of black, muscled hell jump seventy feet into the air straight at you, you'd realize why we like to be nice and sneaky about it." Evidently Rodgers was still nursing the bruise on his ego. "Everret, what d'you think I am? Some kind of fool? I won't crack up. I want that panther." I could plainly see that I'd had no effect at all on him. I just sat back and (hoped that Bill's first shot would score before Rodgers started blasting away. About twenty minutes later Jesse turned to me. "Barry, I've got a blip on the screen. Stationary. Right size and shape." "What's the relative position to us," r almost shouted. It was northeast, about two o'clock. "Want to try an approach, Barry," Jesse asked. "Not yet. I'm going to let Schultz take me out there." "Good hunting." As soon as I had thought his name, Schultz stood up and walked over to me. Good boy, Schultzie, Ready for a trip? Sure, Barry-man, Where do you want to see? I checked the range on Jesse's scope; # yards to the northeast. Now, okay. He brought me out there, eight hundred yards from the airboat. The controls were still on auto. I felt myself go limp and my eyes close as I went into empathy. The effect is like a zoom camera with you inside. It was the panther, all right. I could see it perfectly, two hundred yards away, through the low, wide angle of the dog's mental eyes. Strange, no one's ever gotten an empath animal to project the master's eyes out there; they can only send out their own eye and hook you in on what they see. The cat was sleeping, digesting the rich beef from the steers, I guessed. The body symmetry was IF perfect, not deformed like many natural mues. It was every inch of the thirty-five feet, and more. The sleek, black hide stretched out glistening like a living sphinx, cold as ebony and as hard. Suddenly I felt a great heaving sensation, and my thoughts were tom from the cat with sickening force. Pain seared my mind, my eyes; my entire head ached with a deep, continuous throb. My vision was cut off; for several seconds I was totally blinded. The pain spread slowly down my neck and my face muscles cramped into a grimace. Fax away, I heard Schultz yelping. I opened my eyes, my real ones, and saw Rodgers standing over me, shaking my arm, and Jesse coming toward us with blood in his eyes. Schultz was whimpering at my feet. Rodgers had broken the empathetic coupling, a painful experience for both Schultz and me. I picked Schultz up and put him in my lap, trying to soothe his body and mind, in him in very precarious balance. It had been laid bare as if a steel rasp had ibeen drawn across it. "You double-dyed son of a sand lizard!" Jesse snapped out at Rodgers. "You broke empathy between Barry and the dog! They were in mental coupling, and you forcibly cut it off. You might have ruined his mind, as well as the dog's." Rodgers was almost cowering. I would have, with Jesse looking as if he were out for blood. "I didn't know," he croaked. "I saw the airboat go on hover and Everret slump down in his seat. I thought he was sick." "Sit down and shut up, Rodgers! And stay theie until we're back at your ranchhouse," I roared at him, fighting down an enormous headache. Rodgers fell back into the seat as if he had been pushed. He was licking his self-respect for a third time. Poor old guy, I thought. He gets pushed around down there, on his own property, and he gets pushed around up here, by the men he hired. Well, we coul't afford to have somebody cutting up in the aiiboat. Once we got back down I would recommend a good analyst. Then I remembered what I'd seen out there. "Jesse, that's the panther out there all right. It's asleep there now. Keep an eye on the radar image. If it so much as blinks sing out loud. Bill, d'you hear that?" I'd cut the intercom in previously. In answer, I heard the automatic guidance mechanism in, for the laser and the antitank gun, and the slow whine and crackle of the storage capacities filled the cabin. Ozone soon became noticeable; each of the forty capacitors had a capacity of # "Bill, when I give the word, fire the armor-piercer into the cat. Set it on ten-second delayed action so I can get out there with Schultz in time." "All set up here, Barry, the intercom buzzed. I drove the boat in to five hundred yards and then set hex down easy on the hard ground. The muzzle of the antitank gun swung up a few degrees as the controls locked into the radar. Bill adjusted for windage after he consulted a portable anemometer built into the mouht. "Mark," I said. Up in the control room, Bill started the timer. Schultz, I thought softly, how are you feeling? All right, Barryman. Head still hurt a little. He sounded weak. Thats okay, Schultz, so does mine. How about another trip? Just a short one, Barry-man. Need rest... eight... nine... ten... fire... plus one." The timer lights on both panels blinked patterns. Then I was back looking at the panther. In the back of my mind I heard the muffled roar of the gun and felt the shock pass through the springs of the absorbers and diminish to nothing. The link was weak, and the panther was faint and blurry in Schultz's mind. But I saw it suddenly awaken and leap out of the way, just as the flash of the explosion shot through my mind and Schultz's. A miss. I pulled myself back to the airboat. Rodgers had started yelling in triumph, expecting a chorus. Finding himself quite alone, he died out fast. Jesse and I were watching the radar intently, as was Bill in the mount up above. The blip was moving fast and toward the center of the screen. Toward us. I rammed the fans into high and climibed to three hundred feet as fast as it would move. The panther was already visible and closing fast, a black strip streaking through the low grass and brush. "It dodged that shell without blinking twice," Jesse snorted. He clicked off the safety of the #-gauge. I shook my head. "Hold it, Jesse. And Bill, don't cut the laser loose. We'll let it tire itself out jumping at us, and then we'll tail it until it drops. We'll finisih it off." The panther was much closer now; its movements were plain. It was coming in at about four hundred miles an hour and was about one hundred yards away. In a fraction of a second it was under us, leaping. It reached halfway to us, a hundred and fifty feet. You might call that a record of some kind, but at the time I didn't notice that. Rodgers, who had been frozen since the miss, suddenly leaped to the side of the airboat and fired the five shots in his shotgun at the cat. It touched ground as the last shot rang out and bounded off with a roar of pain and rage that shook the airboat like a toy boat in a hurricane. I'd expected Rodgers to crack, but I was surprised at his skill. Three of the slugs hit home. They must have lodged in the thighs or low in the shoulders, because the cat moved away at about two hunfor the airboat to tail, luckily enough. Still, this wouldn't stop Jesse from giving Rodgers a pretty bad time. I glanced back at the spare seat. Jesse had grabbed Rodgers by the collar and hoisted him up from IF where he had fallen after the cat's roar. He had pulled the rancher uip to face level, so that Rodger's feet dangled a few inches from the deck plate. He stared into Rodgers's eyes for a moment, then lowered him back to his seat. When Jesse looks at anyone that way, words are inadequate. At least printable words are. I checked the radar once more and found that the cat had raced ailmost out of range of the screen. L cut the automatic pilot in, to follow the panther at half a mile, with steady compensation for increases and decreases in the speed. I didn't want that cat to turn and fight until it was dead tired, and if we moved in any closer than five hundred yards it would probably do just that. So we would patiently keep up with the animal and kill it when it couldn't fight back. I didn't blame Jesse one bit for humiliatinig Rodgers, but I wanted to clarify a few things with him before he decided not to pay our bills after the hunt was over. "I told you we couldn't afford any trigger-happy idiots on this trip, Mr. Rodgers. It makes no difference that you're a crack shot. That panther is potentially dangerous to neighboring communities, and if he gets past us the responsibility is on your head. But until we're through, you're going to stay put. The only reason we're not taking you back to your ranchhouse now is that we can't spare the time." He stood up and faced me. So now he was going to make his stand, I thought. "Everret, you seem to forget who hired you. As long as I employ you, I do what I want. And if you think that I'm gomig to let myself be pushed around because I shot at the beast, you're crazy. I want that panther dead and its head above my mantle." H is voice was arrogant, and if he had omitted that last sentence I might have slugged him. Not only would Rodgers fail even to come close to bagging that game himself, but mu game is considered varmint game. A mu trophy was a little out of taste, like stuffing and mounting a tomcat, only on a larger scale. "Rodgers, that head goes to nobody. Even if you earned it -- and you won't -- the corpse will be vaporized by a wide-angle laser. If you want a trophy, hire a guide to take you out and find a good-sized mu bear. But I won't give you a panther. Anyway, all you accomplished with the #-gauge was to give that panther. You might as well have injected it with a kilo of adrenalin." "What work? Just turn the laser on that cat." His stupidity was amazing. "Look, Mr, Rodgers, that laser is for use at point-blank range and at that, only for emergencies. If I used it and missed, the beam would keep on going. They've bounced weaker ones than that off the moon, and with small relative divergence. If that laser tore through a town, it would make the Chicago fire look like a marshmallow-roast." I turned away and checked the radar. The panther had dowed down to a himdired miles per hour already. It seemed to be slightly tiring. I hoped. We kept up the chase for another six hours. Jesse and Crawford were standing radar watch while I dozed. Rodgers was out like a light. The next thing I knew, Jesse was shaking me roughly "It's stopped, Barry, We're still a mile from it; I pulled back the extra five htmdred yards when I saw its pace falter and halt. We're hovering now, in the clear." The intercom was already on. 'What do you think. Bill?" I asked. "Want to try to move in and drop a shell from close range or stay back and pick it o from here?" "I'd move in, Barry," replied Bill. "That cat is half-dead, and we've got the speed on it. Closer, I'd have a better chance of getting a good one in, and the cat would have less time to dodge." "Same here, Barry," Jesse said. "Wait any longer, and the cat might rest up enough to put on a fresh bit of speed and get away. But now we've got him." I felt the same way; I gunned the fans forward, and moved in a quarter of a mile closer. No movement on the screen. We moved in the other quarter mile, and there was still no sign of life from the blip. So far, so good. I noticed Schultz at my feet; he seemed nervous. I called to him. Whafs wrong, Schultz? Wrong way, Barry-man, Cat not there. What? Are you saying its dead? No, Cat behind us. T his confused me. I checked the radar and pressed the systemcheck button. It was functioning perfectly. I projected a mental caress to the dog, and silently cursed Rodgers for ruining Schultz's mind. We were about a hundred yards from the panther now; through the infrared sight it was visible plainly, a igiant thing, breathing fast and labored. The intercom buzzed on. It was BiU. "Barry, something's wrong w#th the laser auto control. It's faced # degrees to the south, directly away from the target." I told him to run a circuit check, switch to manual control and junk the auto imtil we returned to the hanger in Denver. "When you're finished with the laser controls," I told him, "get a fix on the panther and lob a shell in." He aimed and gave a ten-second warning. Jesse and I were glued to the radar. The gun fired, and the shell exploded directly on target; through the sniperscopes we could see the corpse. The head was blown off. Then there was a new blip on the screen. I flipped a spotlight on and saw Rodgers running toward the oat. The next few seconds went by very, very fast. I saw the panther's body waver and disappear and stood gawking as Rodgers turned, IF puzzled, then froze in terror. He raised the Sgauge and fired, but he didn't have enough time to get off a second shot. He was smart enough candlepower beacon was impossible; he shielded his face and threw the gun down, turned and ran. A long shadow engulfed the airboat, and the black panther leaped over us at Rodgers. He had time for only one scream... The panther turned back toward us; then I saw the laser's ruby tube swing down fast at the thing in front of us and come alive with scarlet in a long slash as the cat jumped once more, and the beam charred a long, disemboweling slash that clove the panther from head to loins. It fell in front of the boat, almost crushing us. Jesse and I dismounted and ran in front of the burnt corpse. The slit eyes stared at us still, carrying a message of agony and hate. I leveled my shotgun and fired pointblank into the left eye and heard the answering explosion that shattered the skull. I t was a perfect natural defense for a hunted animal. Like Schultz, the panther could project sensory images into our minds, but in this cat the images could be controlled. It showed us nonexistent blips on the radar and false visual images. That's why the laser autocontrol seemed haywire. It was following the real panther. And Schultz couldn't be fooled by the mental broadcasts, any more than we could be fooled by someone whispering into our ears. Schultz must have felt like a two-year-old child trying to warn its parents of a burglar. It could attract their attention but couldn't communicate. Anyway, that's the only mu so far with this type of power. Possibly the first of many, though. If so, it'll be a long season for us. Something new in science fictioni A brand-new magazine devoted to bringing you the best in science fiction from other countries -- a 'must' for collectors, and reading pleasure for any science-fiction readerl Stories from -- on sale at all good newsstands sooni IF  Serial The demons were loose -- on a world that bad no weapon to battle them but technology! Illustrated by Morrow B aines, president of Consolidated Warfare Service, the munitions subsidiary of an international chemical and dye cartel, has magician of the highest repute, for a demonstration of his abilities. Accompanied by his executive assistant, ing skeptic, he visits Wares rented palazzo in the Italian resort town of Positano, where Ware provides a minor exhibition of alchemy, changing two tears successively into blood, gold and lead under controlled circumstances, This does not satisfy Baines, who has something much bigger in mind. Ware warns him that all magic, regardless of degree, is based upon the invocation of angels or demons -- mostly the latter -- and that it is expensive, dangerous and difficult, Baines already knows this from an earlier visit to Monte Albano, a sanctuary of white magicians. Strictly as a further test, Baines commissions Ware to procure by magic the death of the current Governor of California, Ware agrees, Ginsberg, a man of slightly odd tastes, is intrigued by Ware's obvious confidence and, in a private interview, attempts to ask a favor of the magician, but doesn't succeed in specifying what it is. Ware offers him the use of a succubus, but is refused. At Monte Albano, the white magicians have divined something of the nature of Baines's forthcoming major commission and have reason to believe it may be a major disaster for the whole world. Under the terms of the Grand Covenant, under which all magic operates, they are entitled to impose upon Ware . a white magician as an observer, providing that the white magician does not interfere in any way with Ware's blameless man, who does not relish the assignment. In the meantime, Baines, who has returned to Rome, receives news of the death of the Governor of California, as specified. He decides to return to Positano, taking with him this time not only Jack Ginsberg, but also a scientist of his firm, DR. server. Thanks to various delays en route, Baines, Ginsberg, Hess and Fr. Domenico all arrive for the next invocation of Hell at the same time -- during the Christmas season. Baines's second commission is a further test, this time the death of an eminent theoretical physicist with no known enemies, Ware agrees and also consents to allow Baines's party to watch the process of invokiitig the demon involved; he bars Fr, Domenico, however. The monk subsequently divines that this in any case is not the major disaster he has been sent to observe. Prior to the experiment. Ware shows Hess, in whom he sees a potential ally, his laboratory and apparatus and explains to him some of the theory of magic. Hess is unBefore the group, Ware then conhe has pacts, to tempt and destroy the next victim. It is a fearful process and leaves nobody in any doubt that Ware is exactly what he says he is. Then all must wait for the sending to take effect. During this period, Jack Ginsberg succeeds in expressing to Ware what it is that he wants: He would like to learn the Art. Ware', who by now has realized that Baines's next assignment will be so huge that he must have assistants, says he will consider this if Jack will first sample the banquet he thinks he wants. At Ginsberg's assent, Ware does send him the previously profferred succubus, Jack is both revolted and captured -- that is, he becomes addicted. duly dies, and Baines reveab at last what has been at the back of his mind all the time: '# would like to let all the major demons out of Hell for one night, turn them loose in the world with no orders and no restrictions, and see just what it is they would do if they were left on their own hooks like that.' Ware consents, but this time asks Fr. Domenico to be present at the ceremony, in case it should get out of control. Fr. Domenico must agree, but points out that it would be safer if he could call together a whole convocation of white magicians at Monte Albano, to stand by in case of disaster. Ware on reflection decides that this is a wise precaution and assents. Because of the time needed for preparatioyis, and for Fr. Domenico's trip, the experiment is scheduled for Easter. Tather Domenico found getting north to Monte Albano a relatively easy journey despite all the snow; he was able to take the rapido most of the way. Absurdly, he found himseif worrying about the snow. If it lasted, there would be devastating floods in the spring. But that was not the only affliction the spring had in store. After the journey, nothing seemed to go right. Only about half of the world's white magicians, a small number in any case, who had been summoned to the convocation had been able to make it, or had thought it worth the trip. One of the greatest. the aged archivist Fr. Bonfiglioli, had come all the way from Cambridge only to find the rigors of being portaged up the Mount too much for him. He was now in the hospital at the base of the Mount with a coronary infarct, and the prognosis was said to be poor. Luckily, Fr. Uccello had been able to come. So had Fr. Monteith, a venerable master of a great horde of creative (though often ineffectual) spirits of the cislunar sphere; Fr. Boucher, w(ho had commerce with some intellect of the recent past which was neither a mortal nor a Power, a commerce bearing all the earmarks of necromancy and yet not; Fr. Vance, in whose mind floated visions of magics which would not be comprehensible, let years to come! Fr. Anson, a brusque engineer-type who specialized in unclouding the minds of politicians; Fr. Selahny, a terrifying Kabbalist who spoke in parables and of whom it was said that no one since Leviathan had understood his counsel; Fr. Rosenblum, a dour, bearlike man who tersely predicted disasters and was always right about them; Fr. Atheling, a well-eyed grimorian who saw portents in parts of speech and lectured everyone in a tense nasal voice until the Director had to exile him to the library except when business was being conducted; and a gaggle of lesser men and their apprentices. These and the brothers of the Order gathered in the chapel of the monastery to discuss what might be done. There was no agreement from IF the outset. Fr. Boucher was of the firm opinion that Ware would not be permitted to work any such conjuration on Easter and that, hence, only minor precautions were necessary. Fr. Domenico had to point out that Ware's previous sending -- a comparatively minor one to be sure, but what was that saying about the fall of the sparrow? -- had been made without a sign of Divine intervention upon Christmas Eve. Then there was the problem of whether or not to try to mobilize the Oedestiai Princes and their subordinates. Fr. Atheling would have it that just putting these Princes on notice might provoke action against Ware, since there was no predicting what They might do, and hence would be in violation of the Covenant. He was finally olitshouted by Frs. Anson and Vance, with the obvious but not necessarily valid argument that the Princes must know all about the matter anyhow. How shaky that assumption was was revealed that night, when those bright angels were summoned one by one before the convocation for a council of war. Bright, terrible and enigmatic They were at any time, but at this calling They were in a state of spirit beyond the understanding of any of the masters present in the chapel. Aratron, chiefest of Them all, appeared to be indeed imaware of the forthcoming unleashing and disappeared with a roar when it was described. Phaleg, most military of spirits, seemed to know of Ware's plans, but would not discuss them and also vanished when pressed. Opheil the mercurial, too, was preoccupied, as though Ware's plotting were only a neghgihle distraction from some immensely greater thought. His answers grew shorter and shorter, and He finally lapsed into what, in a mortal, Fr. Domenico would have unhesitatingly called surliness. Finally -- although not intended as final, for the convocation had meant to consult all seven of the Olympians -- the water-spirit Phul when called up appeared fearsomely without a head, rendering converse impossible and throwing the chapel into a perilous uproar. "These are not good omens," Fr. Atheling said; and for the first time in his life, everyone agreed with him. It was agreed, also, that everyone but Fr. Domenico would remain at the Mount through the target day, to take whatever steps then appeared to be necessary; but there was precious little hope that they would be effective. Whatever was going on in Heaven, it appeared to leave small concern to spare for pleas from Monte Albano. Father Domenico went south again far earlier than he had planned, unable to think of anything but the mystery of that final, decapitate apparition. The ileaden skies returned him no answer. XV O n that penultimate morning, Theron Ware faced the final choice of which demons to call up, and for this he needed to repair to his laboratory, to check the book of pacts. Otherwise his preparations were all made. He had performed the blood sacrifices the previous evening and then had completely rearranged the furniture in the workroom to accommodate the Grand Circle -- the first time he had had need of it in twenty years -- the Lesser Circles and the Gateway. There were even special preparations for Fr. Domenico -- who had returned early and with a gratifyingly troubled countenance -- should it become necessary to ask the monk to call for Divine intervention; but Ware was tolerably sure it would not be. Though he had never attempted anything of this magnitude before, he felt the work in his fingertips, like a well practiced sonata. He was, however, astonished and disqmeted to find Dr. Hess already in the laboratory -- not only because of the potentialities for contamination, but at the inevitable conclusion that Hess had worked out how to placate the Guardian of the door. This man evidently was even more dangerous than Ware had guessed. "Do you want to ruin us all?" Ware demanded. Hess turned away from the Circle he had been inspecting and looked at Ware frankly. He was pale and hollow-eyed; not only had the fasting been hard on his spare frame -- that was a hazard every neophyte had to come to terms with -- but apparently he had not been sleeping much, either. He said at once: "No indeed. My apologies. Dr. Ware. My curiosity overcame me, I'm afraid.' "You didn't touch anything, P hope?" "Certainly not. I took your warnings about that with great seriousness, I assure you." "Well... probably no harm done, then. I can sympathize with your interest and even approve it, in part. But I'll be instructing you all in detail a little later today, and then you'll have ample time to inspect the arrangements; I do want you to know them intimately. But right now I still have some additional work to do, so if you don't mind..." "Quite." Hess moved obediently toward the door. As he was about to touch the handle. Ware added: "By the way, Dr. Hess: how did you deceive the Guardian?" Hess made no pretense of being puzzled by the question. "With a white pigeon and a pocket mirror I got from Jack." "Hmm. Do you know, that would never have occurred to me; these pagan survivals are mostly a waste of effort. Let's talk about it more, later; you may have something to teach me." Hess made a small bow and finished his departure. Forgetting him instantly. Ware stared at the Grand Circle for a moment and then walked around it clockwise to the lectern and unlocked the book of pacts. The stiff pages bent reassuringly in his hands. Each leaf was headed by the character or sign of a demon; below, in the special ink reserved for such matters -- gall, IF copperas, gum arabic -- was the text of Theron Waie's agreement with that entity, signed at the bottom hy Ware in his own blood and by the character of the demon repeated in its own hand. Leading all the rest was the seal, and also the characters, of Lucifuge Rofocale, which also appeared on the book's cover. There then followed eighty-nine others. It was Ware's sober belief, backed by infernal assurances he had reason to trust, that no previous magician had held so many spirits in thrall. After forty years, true, all the names would change, and Ware would have to force the reexecution of each pact, and so, again and again through the five hundred years of life he had bought from Hagith in his salad days as a white magician. Nevertheless it could be said that in the possession of this book. Ware was at least potentially the wealthiest mortal in all of (history, though to anyone else in the world the book would be worth nothing except as a curiosum. These spirits, not counting Lucifuge Rofocale, comprised the seventeen mfemal archangels of the Grand Grimoire and the sevenitytwo demons of the Descending Hierarchy once confined in the brazen vessel of Solomon the King: a fabulous haul indeed, and each captive commanding troops and armies of lesser spirits and more of them every minute (for these days, virtually everyone was damned; it had been this disoofvery which had first convinced Ware that the Rebellion was in faot going to succeed, probably by the year # A.D.; the many plain symptoms of chiliastic panic almdy being manifested amongst the laity were almost certainly due to be vindicated, for everyone was rushing incontinently into Hellmouth without even the excuse of an AntiChrist to mislead him. As matters stood now, Christ Himself would have to creep stealthily, hoping to be ignored, even into a cathedral to conduct a Mass, as in that panel of Hieronymus Bosch; the number of people who could not pronounce the Divine Name without a betraying stammer -- or their own names, for that matter -- had grown from a torrent to a deluge, and ridiculously, hardly any of them were claiming any fraction of the possible profits in this world. They did not even know that they were on the winning side, or even that there was more than one side. No wonder Ware had found so much fat in the cauldron, waiting to be skimmed.) But as Ware had already warned Baines, not all the spirits in the book were suitable for the experiment at hand. There were some like Marchosias, who hoped after an interval to be returned to the Celestial choirs. In this hope. Ware was grimly certain, they were mistaken, and the only reward they would receive would be from the Emperor of the Pit, that kind of reward customarily given to fair-weather friends and summer soldiers. In the meantime, the evils they could be persuaded or compelled to do were minor and hardly worth the effort of invoking them. One, whom Ware had already mentioned to Baines, Vassago, was even said in the Lesser Key and elsewhere to be "good by nature" -- not too trustworthy an ascription -- and indeed was sometimes called upon by white magicians. Others in the hierarchy, like Phoenix, controlled aspects of reality which were of little relevance to Baines's commission. , Taking up the pen of the Art, Ware made a list. When he was finished, he had written down forty-eight names. Considering the number of the Fallen, that was not a large muster; but he thought it would serve the purpose. He closed and locked the book and, after a pause to rebuke and torment the Guardian of his door, went out into the Easter morning to rehearse his Tanists. N o day, it seemed, had ever gone so slowly for Baines as this Easter, despite the diversion of the rehearsal; but at last it was night and over, and Ware pronounced himself ready to begin. The Grand Circle now on the parquetry of the refectory bore a generic resemblance to the circle Ware had composed on Christmas Eve, but it was a great deal bigger and much different in detail. The circle proper was made of strips of the skin of the sacrificial kid, with the hair still on it, fastened to the floor at the cardinal points with four naUs which. Ware had explained, had been drawn from the coffin of a child. On the northlAL, there rested the strips the body of a male bat which had been drowned in blood; on the norththe skull of a parricide; on the of whose diet they were now all privy. (Indeed, there had not been much of moment to the rehearsal, and Baines had inferred that its chief object had been to impart to the rest of them such items of unpleasant knowledge as this.) The triangle had been drawn inside the circle with a lump of haematite or lodestone. Under its base was drawn a figure consisting of a chi and a rho superimposed, resting IF on the line, with a cross to each side of it. Flanking the other two qides were the great candles of virgin wax, each stick sitting in the center of a crown of vervainThree circles for the operators -- Ware, Baines and Hess; Jack Ginsberg and Fr. Domenico would stand outside, in separate pentacles -- were inside the triangle, connected by a cross; the northern circle had drawn horns on it. At the pinnacle of the triangle sat a new brazier, loaded with newly consecrated charcoal. To the left side of the horned circle, which was to be Ware's, of course, was the lectern and the book of pacts, within easy reach. At the rear of the room, before the curtained door to the kitchen, was another circle, quite as big as the first, in the center of which was a covered altar. That had been empty this afternoon; but there now lay upon it the nude body of the girl Ware had used to address as Gretchen. Her skin was paper-white except for its markings and to Baines gave every appearance of being dead. A small twist of violet silk, nearly transparent and with some crumpled thing like a wad of tissue or a broken matzoh inside it, rested upon her navel. Her body appeared to have been extensively written upon with red and yellow greasepaint; some of the characters might have ibeen astrological, others more like ideograms or cartouches. In default of knowing their meaning or even their provenance, they simply made her look more naked. The main door closed. Everyone was now in place. Ware lit the candles and then the in the brazier. It was the task # Baines and Hess to feed the fire periodically, as the time wore on, the one with brandy, the other with camphor, taking care not to stumble over their swords or leave their circles in the process. As before, they had been enjoined to the strictest silence, especially should any spirit speak to them or threaten them. Ware now reached out to the lectern and opened his book. This time there were no preliminairy gestures and no portents; he simply began to recite in a gravid voice: "I conjure and command thee, Lucifuge Rofocale, by all the names wherewith thou mayest be constrained and bound, Satan, Randarey et per gratiam et diligentiam tuam habuisti ab eo hone nalatimanamilam, as I command thee, usor, dilapidatore, tentatore, seminatore, soignatore, devoratore, concitore, et seductore, where art thou? Thou who imposeth hatred and propagateth enmities, I conjure thee by Him, who hath created thee for this ministry, to fulfill my work! I cite thee, Colriziana, Offina, Alta, Nestera, Fuard, Menuet, Lucifuge Rofocale, arise, arise, arise!" T here was no sound; but suddenly there was standing in the other circle a dim, steaiming figure, perhaps eight or nine feet tidl. It was difficult to be sure what it looked like, partly because some of the altar could still be seen through it. To Baines it resembled a man with a shaven head bearing three long, twisted horns, eyes like a spectral tarsier's, a gaping mouth, a pointed chin. It was wearing a sort of jerkin, coppery in color, with a tattered ruff and a fringed skirt; below the skirt protruded two bandy, hooved legs and a fat, hairy tail which twitched restlessly. "What now?" this creature said in an astonishingly pleasant voice. The words, however, were blurred. "I have not seen my son in many moons." Unexpectedly, it giggled, as though pleased by the pun. "I adjure thee, speak more clearly," Ware said. "And what I wish, thou knowst full well." "Nothing may be known until it is spoken." The voice seemed no less blurred to Baines, but Ware nodded. "I desire then to release, as did the Babylonian from under the seal of the King of Israel, blessed be he, from Hell-mouth into the mortal world all those demons of the False Monarchy whose names I shall subsequently call and whose characters and signs I shall exhibit in my book, providing only that they harm not me and mine and that they shall return whence they came at dawn, as it is always decreed." "Providing no more than that?" the figure said. "No prescriptions? No desires? You were not always so easily satisfied." "None," Ware said firmly. "They shall do as they will for this their period of freedom, except that they harm none here in my circles and obey me when recalled, by rod and pact." The demon glanced over its transparent shoulder. "I see that you have the appropriate fumigant to cense so many great lords; and my servants and satraps will have their several rewards in their deeds. So interesting a commission is new to me. Well. What have you for my hostage, to fulfill the forms?" Ware reached into his vestments. Baines half expected to see produced another tear-vase, but instead Ware brought out by the tail a live mouse, which he threw over the brazier as he had the vase, except not so far. The mouse ran directly toward the demon, circled it frantically three times outside the markings and disappeared in the direction of the rear door, cheeping like a sparrow. Baines looked toward Ahktoi, but the cat did not even lick its chops. "You are skilled and punctilious, my son. Call then when I have left, and I will send my ministers. Let nothing remain undone, and much will be done before the black cock crows." "It is well. By and under this promise I discharge thee. Omgroma, Epyn, Seyok, Satany, Degony, Eparygon, Galliganon, Zogogen, Ferstigon, Lucifuge Rofocale, begone, begone, begone!" "I shall see you at dawn." The prime minister of Lucifer wavered like a flame and, like a flame, went out. Hess promptly cast camphor into the brazier. Recovering with a start from a near paralysis of fasIF cination, Baines sprinkled brandy after it. The fire puffed. Without looking around, Ware brought out his lodestone, which he held in his left hand; with his right, he dipped the iron-headed point of his wand into the coals. Little licking points of blue light ran up it almost to his hand, as though the rod too had been coated with brandy. Holding the tonguing wand out before him like a dowsing-rod, Ware strode ceremoniously out of the Grand Circle toward the altar. As he walked, the air around him began to grumble, as though a storm were gathering about his shaven head, but he paid the noise no attention. He marched on directly to the locus spirifus and on into it. S ilence fell at once. Ware said clearly: "I, Theron Ware, master of masters, Karcist of Karcists, hereby undertake to open the book and the seals thereof, which were forbidden to be broken until the breaking of the Seven Seals before the Seventh Throne. I have beheld Satan as a bolt falling from heaven. I have crushed the dragons of the pit beneath my heel. I have commanded angels and devils. I undertake and command that all shall be accomplished as I bid, and that from beginning to end, alpha to omega, world without end, none shall harm us who abide here in this temple of the Art of Arts. Aglan, Tetraphares retragrammaton olyaram ir ion esytion existion eryona onera orasym mozm messias soter Emanuel Sabaoth Adonay, te adoro, et te invoco. Amen." He took another step forward and touched the flaming tip of the rod to the veil of silk on the belly of the still girl. A little curl of blue-gray smoke began to rise from it, like  ignited incense. Ware now retreated, walking backwards, toward the Grand Circle. As he did so, the fire on the wand died; but in the mortuary silence there now intrude a Ct hissing, much like the dSirst lotion of a squib. And there were indeed fireworks in incqtion. As Baines stared in gluttonous hypnosis, a small fountain of manycolored sparks began to rise from the fuselike tissue on the abdomen of the body on the altar. More smoke poured forth. The air was becoming distinctly hazy. The body itself seemed to be burning now, the skin peeling bade like segments of an orange. Baines heard behind him an aborted retching noise in Jack Ginsberg's voice, but could not himself understand what the occasion for nausea could be. The body -- whatever it had once been -- was now only a simulacrum made of pith or papiermache, and charged with some equivalent of Greek fire. Indeed, there was already a strong taint of gunpowder overriding the previous odors of incense and camphor. Baines rather welcomed it -- not that it was familiar, for it had been centuries since black powder had been used in his trade, but because he had 'begun to find the accumulation of less businesslike perfumes cloying. Gradually, everything melted away into the smoke exceipt an underlay of architectural outline, against which stood a statues lit more along one side than the other by one oif the two sources of fire. Hess coughed briefly; otherwise theic was silence except for the hissing of the pyre. Sparks continued to fly upward, and sometimes, for an instant, they seemed to form scriibbled incomprehensible words in the frame of the unreal wall. Ware's voice sounded remotely from one of the statues: "Baal, great king and commander in the East, of the Order of the Fly; obey me!" Something began to form in the distance. Baines had the clear impacssion that it was ibehind the altar, behind the curtained door, indeed outside the palazzo altogether; but he could see k nevertheless. It came forward, growing, until he could see that it was a thing like a man, in a neat surcoat and snow-white linen, but with two supernumerary heads, the one on the left like a toad's, the Other like a cat's. It swelled soundlessly until at some moment it was inapguably in the rectory and then, still silently, had grown past them and was gone. "Agares, duke in the East, of the Order of the Virtues; obey me!" Again, a distant transparency, and silent. It came on very slowly, manifesting like a comely old man carrying a goshawk upon his wrist. Its slowness was necessitous, for it was ridii astride an amUing croc odile. Its eyes were closed, and its lips moved incessantly. Gradually, it too swelled past. "Gamygyn, marquis and president of Cartagra; obey mei" This grew to be something like a small horse, or perhaps an ass, modest and unassuming. It dragged behind it ten naked men in chains. "Valefor, powerful duke; obey me!" A black-maned lion, again with three heads, the other two human, one wearing the cap of a hunter, the other the wary smile of a thief. It passed in a rush, without even a wind to mark its going. "Barbatos, great count and minister of Satanachia; obey me!" But this was not one figure; it was four, like four crowned kings. With it and past it poured three companies of soldiers, their heads bowed and their expressions shuttered and still under steel caps. When all this troop had vanished, it was impossible to guess which among them had been the demon, or if the demon had ever appeared. "Paimon, great king, of the Order of the Dominions, obey me!" S uddenly after all the hissing silence there was a blast of sound, and the room was full of capering things carrying contorted tubes and bladders which might have been intended as musical instruments. The noise, however, resembled most closely a drove of pigs being driven down the chute of a slaughterhouse. Among the bawling. IF squealing dancers a crowned man rode upon a dromedary, bawling wordlessly in a great hoarse voice. The beast it rode on chewed grimly on some bitter cud, its eyes squeezed shut as if in pain. "Sytry" Ware shouted. Instantly there was darkness and quiet, except for the hissing, which now had a faint overtone as of children's voice. "Jussus secreta libenter detfgit feminarum, eas ridens ludificansque ut se luxorise nudent; great prince, obey me!" This sweet and lissome thing was no less monstrous than the rest; it had a glowing human body, but was winiged and had the ridiculously small, smirking head of a leopard. At the same time, it was beautiful, in some way that made Baines feel both sick and eager at the same time. As it passed. Ware seemed to be pressing a ring against his lips. "Lerajie, powerful marquis; EliAs they were called together, so these three appeared together: the first an archer clad in green, with quiver and a nocked bow whose arrow dripped venom; the second, a knight with a scepter and a pennonbearing lance; the third, an armed soldier clad in red. In contrast to their predecessor, there was nothing in the least monstrous about their appearance, nor any due as to thedr sjeres and offices, but Baines found them no less alarming for all that. "Ayporos,  mighty earl and prince: obey me!" Baines felt himself turning sick even before this creature appeared. and from the sounds around him, so did the others, even including Ware. There wis no sipeoial reason for this apparent in its aspect, which was so grotesque as to have been comic under other oLreumstanoes: it had the body of an angel, with a lion's head, the webbed feet of a goose and the scut of a deer. 'Transform, transform!" Ware cried, thrusting his wand into the brazier. The visitant promptly took on the total appearance of an angel, crown to toe, but the effect of the presenoe of something filthy and obscene remained. "Haborym, strong duke, obey me!" This was another man-thing of the three-headed race -- thou the apparent relationship, Baines realized, must be pure accident -- the human one bearing two stars on its forehead, the others of a serpent and a cat. In its right hand it carried a brazing fire-brand which it shook at them as it passed. "Naberius, valiant marquis, obey me!" At first it seemed to Baines that there had been no response to this call. Then he saw movement near the floor. A black cock with bleeding, empty eye-sockets was fluititediig around the outsidie of the Grand Circle. Ware menaced it with the wand, and it crowed hoarsely and was gone. "Glasyalabolas, mighty president, obey mo! This appeared to be simply a winged man until it smiled, when it could be seen to have the teeth of a dog. There were flecks of fb a m at its mouth. It passed sountSeBsly. ## In the silence, Baines oouiLd hear Ware turning a page in his book of pacts and remembered to cast more brandy into the brazier. The body on the altar had apparently long since been consumed; Baines could not remember how long it had been since he had seen the last of the word-forming sparks. The thick gray haze persisted, however. "Bune, thou strong duke, obey me!" This apparition was the most marvelous yet, for it approached them borne on a galleon, which sank into the floor as it came nearer until they were able to look down through the floor onto its deck. Coiled there was a dragon with the familiar three heads, these being of dog, griffin and man. Shadowy figures, vaguely human, toiled around it. It continued to sink until it was behind them, and presumably thereafter. Its passage left Baines aware that he was trembling -- not from fright, exactly, for he seemed to have passed beyond that, but from the very exhaustion of this and other emotions and possibly also from the sheer weariness of having stood in one spot for so long. Inadvertently, he sighed. "Silence," Ware said in a low voice. "And let nobody weaken or falter at this point. We are but half done with our calling -- and of those remaining to be invoked, many are far more powerful than any we've yet seen. I warned you before, this Art takes physical strength as well as courage." He turned another page. "Astapowerful duke, obey me!" E ven Baines had heard of this demon, though he could not remember where, and watched it materialize with a stirring of curiosity. Yet it was nothing remarkable in the light of what he had seen already: on angelic figure, at once beautlM and foul, seated astride a dragon. It carried a viper in its right hand. He remembered belatedly that these spirits, never having been matter in the first place, had to borrow a body to make appearances like this and would not necessarily pick the same one each time; the previous descriptioa of Astaroth that he bad read, he now recalled, had been that of a piebaM Negro woman riding on an ass. As the creature passed him, it smiled into his face, and the stench of its breath nearly knocked him down. "Asmoday, strong and powerful king, chief of the power of Amaymon, angel of chance, obey me!" As he called. Ware swept off his hot with his left hand, taking care, Baines noted, not to drop the lodestone as he did so. This king also rode a dragon, and also had three heads -- bull, man and ram. All three heads breathed fire. The creature's feet were webbed, as were its hands, in which it carried a lance and pennon; and it had a serpent's tail. Fearsome enough; but Baines was beginning to note a certain narrowness of invention among these infernal artisans. It also occurred to him to wonder, fortunately, whether this very IF repetitiveness was not deliberaite, intended to tire him into inaittenitiveness or lure him into the oairelessness of comtempt. This thing might kill me if I even closed my eyes, he lemanded hims elf. "Furfur, great earl, obey mel" This anigel appeared as a hart and was past them in a single bound, its tail streaming fire like a comet. Halpas, gjeat earl, obey me!" There was nothing to this apparition but a stockdove, also quickly gone. Ware was calling the names now as rapidly as he could manage to turn the pages, perhaps in recognition of the growing weariness of his Tanists, perhaps even of his own. The demons flashed by in nightmare parade: Raym, earl of the Order of the Thrones, a man with a crow's head; Separ, a mermaid wealing a ducal crown; Saburac, a lion-headed soldier upon a pale horse; Bifrons, a great ead in the shape of a gigantic flea; Zagan, a griffm-winged buU; Andras, a raven-headed angel with a bright sword, astride a black wolf; Andrealphus, a peacock appearing amid the noise of many unseen birds; Amduscias, a unicorn among many musicians; Dantalian, a mighty duke in the form of a man but showing many faces both of men and women, with a book in his right band; and at long last, that mighty king created next after Lucifer and the first to fell in battle before Michael, formeriy of the Order of the Virtues, Belial himself, beautiful end #adly in a chariot of fire as he iiad been worshipped in Babykm. "Now, great spirits," Ware said, "because ye have diligently answered me and siwn yoorseilYes to my demands, I do hereby license ye to depart, without injury to any here. ready to come at the appointed hour, when I shall duly exorcise and conjure you by your rites and seals. Until then, ye abide free. Amen." He snuffed out the fire in the brazier with a closely fitting lid on which was graven the Third or Secret Seal of Solomon. The murk in the refectory began to lift. "All right," Ware said in a matter of fact voice. Strangely, he seemed much less tired than he had after the conjuration of Marchosias. over -- or rather, it's begun. Mr. Ginsberg, you can safely leave your circle now and turn on the lig." When Ginsberg had done so. Ware also snuffed the candles. In the loght of the shaded electrics, the hall seemed in the throes of a Peerless dawn, although in fact the time was not past midnight. There was nothing on the altar now but a small heap of fine gray ash. "Do we really have to wait it out in here?" Baines said, feeling himself sagging. "I should think we'd be a lot more comfortable in your office -- and in a ibetter position to find out what's going on, too." "We must remain here," Ware said firmly. "That, Mr. Baines, is why I asked you to bring fai your transistor radio -- to keep track of both the world and the rime. For approxiinside these imniediiate walls will be the only safe place on all the Earth." T rappimigs, litter and all, the refectxwy now reminded Baines incongruously of an initaaition room in a college fraterniity house just after itihe last night of Hell Week. Hess was asleep on the long table that earlier had home Ware's consecrated instruments. Jack Ginsberg lay on the floor near the main door, napping fitfully, mumbling and sweating. Theron Ware, after again warning everyone not to touch anything, had dusted off the altar and gone to sleep -- apparently quite soundly -- upon that, still robed and gowned. Only Baines and Fr. Domenico remained awake. The monk, having prowled once around 'the margins of the room, had found an unsuspected low window behind a curtain and now stood with his back to them all looking out at the black world, hands locked behind his back. Baines sat on the floor with his own back propped against the wall next to the electric furnace, the transistor radio pressed to his ear. He was brutally uncomfortable, but he had found by experiment that this was the 'best place in the hall for radio reception -- barring, of course, his actually entering one of the Circles. Even here, the reception was not very good. It wavered in and out maddeningly, even on powerful stations like Radio Luxembourg, and wias liable to tearing blasts of static. These were usually followed, at intervals of a few seconds to several minutes, by bursts or rolls of thunIF der in the sky outside. Much of the time, too, as was usual,  the dear spaces were occupied by nothing but music and oommerdals. And thus far, what little news he had been able to pick up had been vaguely disappointing. There had been a major train wreck in Colorado; a freighter was foundering in a blizzard in ithe North Sea; in Guatemala, a small dam had burst, burying a town in an enormous mudslide; an earthquake was reported in Corinth -- the usual budget of natural or near-natural disasters for any day. In addition, the Chinese had detonated another hydrogen device; there had been another raiding incident on the Israeili-Jordanian border; black tribesmen had staged a rape and massacre on a government hospital in Rhodesia; the poor were marching on Washington again; the Soviet Union had announced that it would not be able to recover three dogs and a monkey it had put in orbit a week ago; the U.S. gained another bloody inch in Vietnam, and Premier Ky put his foot in it; and... All perfectly ordinary, all going to prove what everyone of good sense already knew, that there was no safe place on the Earth either inside this room or without it, and probably there never had been. What, Baines began to wonder, was the profit in turning loose so many demons, at so enormous an expenditure of time, effort and money, if the only result were to be just like reading any morning's newspaper? Of course, it might be that interesting private outrages were also being committed, but many newspaper and other publishers made fortunes on those in ordinary times, and in any event he could never hear of more than a fraction of them over this idiot machine. Probably he would just have to wait until days or weeks later, when the full record and history of this night had been assembled and digested, when no doubt its full enormity might duly appear. He should have expected nothing else. After all, the full impact of a work of art is never visible in the sketches. All ithe same, he was obstinately disappointed to be deprived of the artist's excitement of watching the work growing on the canvas. Was there anything that Ware could do about that? Almost surely not, or he would have done it already; it was clear that he had understood the motive behind the commission as well as he had understood its nature. Besides, it would be dangerous to wake him -- he would need all his strength for the latter half of the experiment, when the demons began to return. Resentfully, but with some resignation too, Baines realized that he himself had never been the 'artist here. He was only the patron, who could watch the colors being applied and the cartoon being filled; he could own the finished board or ceiling, but had never even in principle been capable of handling the brushes. But here -- what was that? The "A third contingent of apparaIF tus has been dispatched along the Thames to combat the Tate Gallery fire. Expert observers believe there is no hope of saving the Gallery's great collection of Blake paintings, which include most of his illustrations for' the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante. Hope also appears to be lost for what amount to almost all the world's paintings by Turner, including his water colors of the burning of the Houses of Parliament. The intense and sudden nature of the initial outbreak has lead to the suspicion that the fire is the work of an incendiary." B aines sat up alertly, though all his joints protested painfully, feeling an even more acute stab of hope. There was a crime with real style, a crime with symbolism, a crime with meaning. Excitedly he remembered Haborym, the demon with the dripping firebrand. Now if there were to be more acts that imaginative -- The reception was getting steadily worse; it was extraordinarily tiring to be continuously straining to filter meaning out of it. Radio Luxembourg appeared to have gone off the air or to have been shut out by some atmospheric disturbance. He tried Radio Milan and got it just in time to hear it announce itself about to play all eleven of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, one right after the other, an insane project for any station and particularly for an Italian one. Was that some demon's idea of a joke? Whatever the answer, it was going to take Radio Milan out of the newscasting business for well over twenty-four hours to come. He cast further about the dial. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of broadcasts going out in languages he did not know or could even recognize, though he could get around passably in seventeen standard tongues and in any given year was fluent in a different set of three, depending on business requirements. It was almost as though someone had jammed an antenna on the crown of Babel. Briefly, he caught a strong outburst of English; but it was only the Voice of America making piously pejorative sermonettes about the Chinese fusion explosion. Baines had known that that was coming for months now. Then the multilingual mumbling and chuntering resumed, interspersed occasionally with squeals of what might indifferently hare been Pakistani jazz or Chinese opera. Another segment of English shouted, " -- with Cyanotabsl Yes, friends, one dose cures all illsl Guaranteed chock-full of crisp, crunchy atoms -- " and was replaced by a large boys' choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus, the words for which, however, seemed to go, "Bison, bison! Rattus, rattus! Cardinalis! Cardinalis!" Then more gabble, marvelously static-free and sometimes hovering just on the edge of intelligibility. The room stank abominably of an amazing mixture of reeks: brandy, camphor, charcoal, vervain, gunpowder, flesh, sweat, perfume, incense, candle-wicks, musk, singed hair. Baines's head ached dully; it was like trying to breathe inside the mouth of a vulture. He longed to take a pull ait the brandy bottle under his rumpled alb, but he did not know how much of what was left would be needed when Ware resumed operations. Across from him, something moved: Fr. Domenico had unlocked his hands and turned away from the small window. He was now taking a few prim steps toward Baines. The slight stir of human life seemed to disturb Jack Ginserg, who thrashed himself into an even more uncomfortable-looking position, shouted hoarsely and then began to snore. Fr. Domenico shot a glance at him and, stopping just short of his side of the Grand Circle, beckoned. "Me?" Baines said. Fr. Domenico nodded patiently. Putting aside the overheated little radio with less reluctance than he would have imagined possible only an hour ago, Biaines heaved himsei arthiitioally to his knees, and then to his feet. As he started to stumble toward the monk, something furry hurtled in front of him and nearly made him fall: Ware's cat. It was darting toward the altar; and in a soaring arc incredible in an animal of its shameless obesity, it leapt up there and settled down on the rump of its sleeping master. It looked greenly at Baines and went itself to sleep, or appeared to. Fr. Domenico beckoned again and went back to the window. Baines limped after him, wishing that he had taken off his shoes; his feet felt as though they had turned into solid blocks of horn. "What's the matter?" he whispered. "Look out there, Mr. Baines." C onfused and aching, Baines peered past his uninvited and unimpressive Virgil. At first he could see nothing but the streaked steam on the inside of the glass, with a spume of fat snowflakes slurrying beyond it. Then he saw that the night was in fact not wholly dark. Somehow he could sense e undersides of turbulent clouds. Below, the window, Hke the one in Ware's office, looked down the side of the diff and out over the sea, which was largely invisible in the snowwhorls; so should the town have (been, but it was in fact faintly luminous. Overhead, from frame to frame of the window, the clouds were overstitclhed with continuous streaks of dim fibre, like phosphorescent oontrails, longlasting and taking no part in the weather. "Well?" Baines said. "You don't see anything?" "I see the meteor-tracks or whatever they are. And the light is odd. Sheet lightning, I suppose, and maybe a fire somewhere in town." "That's all?" "That's all," Baines said, irritaited. "What are you trying to do, panic me into waking Dr. Ware and oaMinig it all quits? Nothing doing. We'H wait it out." "All right," Fr. Domenico said, resuming his vigil. Baines stumped back to his comer and picked up the radio. It said:  now established that the supposed Chinese fusion test was actualIF ly a missile warhead explosion of at least lihirty megaitons, cenitered on Taiwan. Western capitals, already in an uproar because of the napalm murder of the U.S. president's widow in a jammed New York discotheque, are moving quickly to a full war footing, and we expect a series of security blackouts on the news at any moment. Undl that happens we will keep you informed of whatever important events come through. We pause for station identication. Owoo. Eeg. Oh, piggly baby, I caught you -- cheatin' on me -- owoo -- " Baines twisted the dial savagely, but the howling only became more bestial. Down the wall to his right, Hess twisted his long body on the table and suddenly sat upright, swinging his stockinged feet to the floor. "Jesus Christ," he said huskily. "Did I hear what I thought I heard?" "Dead right you did," Baines said quietly, and not without joy; but he too was worried. "Slide over here and sit down. Something's coming to a head, and it's nothing like we'd expected -- or Ware either." "Hadn't we better call a halt, then?" "No, Sit down, goddamn it. I don't think we can call a halt -- and even if we could, I don't want to give our clerical friend over there the satisfaction." "You'd rather have World War Three?" Hess said, sitting down obediently. "I don't know that that's what's going to happen. We contracted for this; let's give it the benefit of the doubt. Either Ware's in control, or he should be. Let's wait and see." "All right' Hess said. He bepm to knead his fingers togeOier. Baines tried the radio once mere, but nothing was coming throui but a mixture of the Messiah, Mahler and The Supremes. Jack Ginsberg whined in his pseudosleep. After a while, Hess said neutrally: "Baines?" "What is it?" "What kind of a thing do you think thit is?" "Well, it's either World War Three or it isn't. How can I know yet?" "I didn't ask you that... not what you think it is. I asked you, what kind of a thing do you tfhhak: it is? You ought to have some sort of notion. After all, you contracted for it." "Oh. Hmm. Father Domemoo said it might turn out to be Armageddon. Ware didn't think so, but he hasn't turned out to be very rigjat up to now. I can't guess, mysdf. I haven't been thinking in these terms very long." # # watefaing his fingers weave themselves in and out. "I'm still trying to make sense of it in the old terms, the ones that used to make sense of the universe to me. It isn't easy. But you'll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn't any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I thiink the humaii minJ goes ihrougb a sort of cyde of fear, lit can only take so mtich acouamiated knowledge, and theta it panics and starts iaventiiig reasons ito tihixw everything over and go back to a Dark Age... every time with a new, invented mystical leason." "You're not making very much sense," Baines said. He was still also trying to listen to the radio. "I didn't expect you to think so. But it happens. It happens about every thousand years. People start out happy with their gods, even though they're frightened of them. Then, increasiny, the world becomes secularized, and (the gods seem less and less relevant. The temples are deserted. People feel guilty about that, but not much. Then, suddenly, they've had al the secularization they can take, they throw their woodim shoes into the machines, they take to worshipping Satan or the Great Mother, they go into a Hellenistic period or take up Christianity, in hoc signo vinces -- I've got those all out of order, but it happens, Baines, it happens like clockwork, every thousand years. The last time was the chiliastic panics just before the year # A.D., when everyone C#qected the Second Coming of Christ and realized that they didn't dare face up to Him. That was the heart, the center, the whole reason of the Dark Ages. Well, we've got another millenium coming to a dose now, and people ore terrified of our secularization, our nuclear and biological weapons, our computers, our overprotective medicine, everything, and they're turning back to the worship of unreason. Just os you've done -- and I've helped you. Some people these days worsiMp flying saucers because iey don't dare face up to Ohirist. You've turned to black magic. Where's the difference?" "I'll tell you where," Baines said. "Nobody in the whole of time has ever seen a saucer, and the reasons for believing that anybody has ore utterly pitiable. Problly they can be explained just as you've explained them, and never mind about Jung and his thump-headed crowd. But, Adolph, you and I have seen a demon." "Do you think so? I don't deny it. I think it very possible. But Baines, are you sure? How do you know what you think you know? We're on the eve of World War Three, which we engineered. Couldn't all this be a ballucmatiion we conjured up to remove some of our guilt? Or is it possible that it isn't happening at all and that we're as much victims of a chiliastic panic as more formally religious people are? That makes more sense to me than all this medieval mumho-jumbo about demons. I don't mean to deny the evidence of my senses, Baines; I only mean to ask you, what is it worth?" "I'll tdl you what I know," Biaines said equably, "though I can't tell you how I know it, and I won't bother to try. First, something is happening, and that something is real. Second, you and I and Ware and everyone else who wanted to make it happen, therefore did make it 'happen. Third, we'ire turning out to be wrong about the outcome -- # IF but no matter what it is, it's our outcome; we contracted for it. Demons, saucers, fallout -- what's the difference? Those are just signs in the equation, parameters we can fill any way that makes the most intermediate sense to us. Are you happier with electrons than with demons? Okay, ood for you. But what I like, Adolph, what  like is the result; I don't give a damn about the means. I invented it, I called it into being. I'm paying for it -- and no matter how else you describe it, # made it, and ifs mine. Is that clear? Ifs mine. Every other possible fact about it, no matter what that fact might turn out to be, is a stupid footling technicality that I hire people like you and Ware not to bother me with." "It seems to me," Hess said in a leaden monotone, "that we are all insane." At that same moment, the small window burst into an intense white glare, turning Fr. Domenico into the intensest of inky silhouettes. "You may be right," Baines said. "There goes Rome." Fr. Domenico, his eyes streaming, turned away from the dimming frame and picked his way slowly to the altar. After a long moment of distaste, he took Theron Ware by the shoulder and shook him. The cat hissed and jumped sidewise. "Wake up, Theron Ware," Fr. Domenico said formally. "I charge you, awake. Your experiment may now wholly and contractually be said to have gone astray, and the Covenant therefore satisfied. Ware! Ware! Wake up, damn you!" B aines looked at his watch. It was #:# a.m. Ware awoke instantly, swung to his feet with a spring, and without a word started for the window. At the same instant, the agony that had been Rome swept over the building. The shock wave had been attenuated by distance, and the jolt was not heavy; but the window Fr. Domenico had uncurtained sprang inward in a spray of flying glass needles. More glass fell from behind the drapes below the ceiling, like an orchestra of celestes. As far as Baines could see, nobody was more than slightly cut. Not that a serious wound could have made any difference now, with the Last Death already riding on the winds. Ware was not visibly shaken. He simply nodded once and wheeled toward the Grand Circle, stooping to pick up his dented paper hat. No, he was moved -- his lips were pinched white. He beckoned to them all. Baines took a step toward Jack Ginsberg, to kick him awake if necessary. But the special executive assistant was already on his feet, trembling and wild-eyed. He seemed, however, totally unaware of where he was; Baines had to push him bodily into his minor Circle. "And stay there," Baines added, in a voice that should have been able to scar diamonds. But Jack gave no sign of having heard it. Baines went hastily to his Tanist's place, checking for the bottle of brandy. Everyone else was already in position, even the cat, which in fact had vaulted to its post promptly upon having been dumped off Ware's rear. The sorcerer lit the brazier and began to address the dead air. He was hardly more than a senjtence into this invocation before Baines realized for the first time, in his freezing heart, that this was indeed the last effort -- and that indeed they might all still be saved. Ware was making his renunciation, in his own black and twisted way -- the only way his fatally proud soul could ever be brought to make it. He said: "I invoke and conjure thee, Lucifuge Rofocale, and fortified with the Power and the Supreme Majesty, I strongly command thee Paumachie, Apoloresedes and the most potent princes Genio, LiaCHiDE, Ministers of the Tartarean seat, chief princes of the seat of Apologia in the ninth region; I exorcise and command thee, Lucifuge Rofocaie, by Him Who spake and it was done, by the Most Holy and Glorious Names Adonai, El, EloHiM, Elohe, Zebaoth, Elion, Escherce, Jah, Tetragrammaton, Sadai: do thou and thine forthwith appear and show thyself unto me, regardless of how thou art previously charged, from whatever part of the world, without tarrying! "I conjure thee by Him to Whom all creatures are obedient, by this ineffable Name, Tetragrammaton Jehovah, by which the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea turns back, the fire is generated. the Earth moves and aU the hosts of things celestial, of things teirrestrial, of things infernal, do treanible and are confounded together; come, Adonai, King of kings, commands thee!" There was no answer, ejccept an exterior grumble of thunder. "Now I invoke, conjure and command thee, Lucifuge Rofocale, to appear and show thyself before this Oirdle, by the Name of On; by the Name Y and V, which Adam heard and spake; by the Name of Joth, which Jacob learned from the angd on the night of his wrestling and was delivered from the hands of his brother; by the Name of Agla, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; by the Name Anehexemade wise; by the Name Schemes Amathia, which Joshua invoked and the Sim stayed upon his course; by the Nome Emmanuel, by which the three children were delivered from the fiery furnace; by the Name Alpha-Omega, which Daniel uttered and destroyed Bel and the dragon; by the Name Zebaoth, which Moses named, and all the rivers and the waters in the land of Egypt were turned into blood; by the Name Hagios, by the Seal of A#x)nai, by those others, which are Jetros, Athenoros, Paracletus: by the dreadful Day of Judgment; by the changing sea of glass which is before the face of the Divine Majesty; by the four beasts before the Throne; by qM these Holy and most potent words, come thou, and come thou quickly; come, come! Adonai, King of kings, commands thee!!" Now, at last, there wa u sound; a sound of laughter. It was e taughiter of Something inoapaihle of joy, laughing only because It was compelled by Its nature to terrify. As the lauter grew, that Something formed. I t was not standing in the lesser Circle or appearing from the Gateway, but instead was sitting on the altar, swinging Its cloven feet negjigently. It had a goat's head, with immense horns, a crown that flamed like a torch, level human eyes, and a Star of David on Its forehead. Its haunches too were caprine. Between, the body was human, though hairy and with dragging black pinions like a crow's growing from Its shoulder-blades. On one shaggy forearm was tattooed. Solve; on the other, Coagula, Ware fell slowly to one knee. "Adoramus te, Put Satanachia," he said, laying his wand on the ground before him. "And again . , . ave, ave." Ave, but why do you hail me? the monster said in a petulant bass voice, at once deep and marmered, like a homosexual actor's. It was "No, Baphomet, master and .guest. Never for an instant. It is everywhere said that you can never be called and would never appear." Ware bowed his head lower. "I was wrong." Ah! But there is a first time IF OF thanks; worm though you "No!" Ware cried out. "Oh, living God, no! This cannot be the Timel You break ithe Law! Where is the Antichrist -- " Men have always led them"But -- master and guest -- the Law -- " We shall also do without the Law. Have you not heard? Those Tablets have been broken. There was a hiss of indrawn breath from boith Ware and Fr. Domenico; but if Ware had intended some further argument, he was forestalled. To Baines's right. Dr. Hess said in a voice of high ultraviolet hysteria: "I don't see you. Goat." "Shut up!" Ware shouted, almost turning away from the vision. "I don't see you," Hess said doggedly. "You're nothing but a siHy sooologioal mixture. A mushroom dream. You're not real. Goat. Go away. Poof!" Ware turned in his Karcist's oirdle and lifted his magician's sword against Hess in both hands; but at the last minute, he seemed to be afraid to step out against the wobbling figure of the sdenti'st. Hess did not answer. Instead, he howled like a wolf and charged blindly out of the Grand Circle, his head down, toward the altar. The Sabbath Goat opened Its great mouth and gulped him down tike a fly. Thank you for the sacrifice. It said thickly. Anyone else? Then it is time I left. "Stand to, stupid and disobedient!" Fr. Domenico's voice irang out from Baines's right side. A doth ifiluttered out of the iDOdik's oirde onto the floor. "Behcftd thy confusion, if thou be disobedient! Behold the Pentacle of Soilomon which I have brought into thy presence!" Funny little monk, I was "Hush and be still, fallen star. Bebold in me the person of the Exorcist, who is oaMed Gctinimoes, in the midst of delusion armed by the Lord God and fearless. I am thy master, in the name of the Lord Bathal, rushing upon ABtiic Abeor, coming upon BerorI The Saibbath Goat looked down upon Fr. Domenico almost kindly. His face red, Fr. Domenico reached into his robes and brought out a crucifex, which he thrust toward the altar like a sword. "Back to HeU, devil! In the name of Christ our Lord!" Ibe ivory cross exploded like a Prince Rupp's Drop, strewing Fr. Domenico's robe with dust. He looked down at his bomblly empty hands. College also have failed -- and The great head bent to look down upon Theron Ware. And you are my dearly be"One moment, please," Fr. Domenico said. "If you would be so kind... I see that we have failed... Would you tdl us: Where did we fail?" The Goat laughed, spoke three words, and vanished. T he dawn grew, red, streaked, duM, endless. From Ware's window the sleeping town slumped down in rivers of cold lava toward the sea -- but there was no sea; as Fr. Domenico had seen hours ago, the sea had withdrawn and would not be back again except as a tsunami after the Cbrinth earthquake. Circles of desolation spread away from the ritual Circles. Inside them, the last magicians waited for the now Greatest Powers to come back for them. It would not be long now. In all their minds and hearts echoed those last three words. World without end. End without world. God is dead. Galaxy's #th Anniversary Issue -- All-Star Lineup! Complete Short Novel by Roger Zelazny by George O. Smith by H. L. Gold On safe now -- don't miss it! IF Dear Editor: It is my opinion tliat adults are discriminating against tihe younger generation of science-fiction readers. There are some adults who welcome a youth's view of S.P., 'but they are few and far between. All others either ignore you or criticize the younger generation. They claim ours is but a passing interest unlike their eternal passion for science fiction. I may be only sixteen years old, but I have been reading S.P. for quite a while. I have coUeoted sixty paierback stories and am a subscriber to IF, There is nothing I like better than reading one of the current works. I therefore believe that I too should have the right to be recognized as a S.F. afficionado. I would ber, being only a short distance from New York, but I am deathly afraid of being, thrown out because of my age by the righteous and older fans. Is there any possibility of obtaining a safe-conduct pass? -- Richard Kurzberg, # Crescent Avenue, Passaic, New Jersey. All fans are welcome at all sf conventions -- regardless of age, sex, color or creed. That's one of the nice things about sf conventions! -- Editor.   H U E  Dear Editor: The most irritating letter I have ever read in any sf magazine was Alma McCormick's April '# contribution. Why are so many people turned off science fiction? Absolutely not because the story has dropped to second place in favor of philosophy! The average person will not read sf because of the bad name it acquired in the junk period" of the #'s, when sf did not teach. I disagree emphatically with her idea that the major purpose of sf is pure entertainment. In defense of the books that have "slid off the tracks where story comes first," as Mrs, McCormick stated, I will offer the following list of titles. I defy anyone to say these books don't entertain while at the same time allowing the reader to think: City, by Clifford D. Simak, The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinledn, ChiMhoods End, by Arthur C. cWke, A Canticle for Leihowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Davy, by Edgar Pangbom, Brave New World, by Aidous Huxley, The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien and Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. Mr. Pohl, please don't write what Mrs. McCormick considers a good book. Make us think. Write another Plague of Pythons -- write a book that teaches I -- Frank Flynn, # Walker Lane, Holladay, Utah #.    Dear Editor: I am not a letter writer, but I feel impelled to write by what I see you are hearing about the New Wave of British science fiction. This is very much a minority movement. The British magazines nearly collapsed because no one wanted them, and were saved by a subsidy obtained when Brian Aldiss used his personal prestige. The American magazines are in eV)( shop; the British ones can hiajdly be found. I personally am asibtamed that Britain should be identified with them, and would like to remind you that the lunatic Burroughs came from your side of the AtlanticI! Please print this fast, before our national image is ruined! -- D. C. Jackson, # Cromwell Road, London S. W. #., England.    Dear Editor: I think some comment should be made regarding the letter by Alma McCormick in your April issue. Mrs. McCormick seems quite dissatisfied with the science fiction being wrritten today; I can only assume this is because ie has been reading the wrong stories. Since I'm only eighteen, I can't claim to be as widely read in the field as Mrs. McCormick. I do know one thing, however: The quality of sf today is excellent, and it's getting better all the time. I find it hard to believe that such an obviously intelligent i)erson says today's writers are trying to teach and neglecting the story. This just isn't sol A story written for a totally didactic purpose would sell about as well as a snowball in Alaska. As a case in point, Mrs, McCormick refers to Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, This is probably the best novel Heinlein has written in many a year. And why? Because the author is, as Mrs. McCormick puts it, busy playing sociology professor? Hardly! Because it's a darned good story, that's the reason. Mrs. McCormick is quite right when she says that the Heinlein who wrote The Puppet Masters, etc, is the same one who wrote The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; except, that is, for the fact that Heinlein is a little more adept at story-telling than he once was. I couldn't agree more with Samuel Goldwyn's remark: "If you've gotta message, use Western Union." However, it just doesn't apply here. Maybe sf writers today are trying to teach; but certainly not to the extent Mrs. McCormick would lead us to believe. Heinlein, Blish and Clarke are better than ever; and if the lady hasn't seen a new Pohl in ages, I refer her to The Age of the Pussyfoot, in Galaxya #th anniversary issue. Regarding her comments about today's writers, I feel that Laumer, Zelazny, Niven, et-ah, are as good as anything the forties produced. Mrs. McCormick concludes by telling you to write to "Write a good book for yourself". Why doesn't she write one? -- Wayne Spiceland Jr., # Stillwood Dr. Nashville, Tenn.  That's it for another month. This month's "First" is Donald Walsh's Mu Panther, Cramped for space -- see you next month! -- The Editor, IP won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! too for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, it any. No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Ordor from Gciloxy #I Hudson street. New York #, N. Y Yo when you oin the Science Fiction  Book Club and agree to accept only four books during the coming year combines three great science fiction classics for the first the most thought-provoking, compelling epics ?ver to come from the pen of the distinguished research biochemist and leading science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov. How to Get This Unusual Value for only # Because you enjoy Science thrillers, the Science Fiction Book Club would like to ac(iuaint you with the most imaginative, informative, entertaining new science fiction books as they are written. That is why we have arranged to send you Subscription to the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, #, # and up in their original editions. Club members get them full-length, hard-cover editions. Extra-value books cost more. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your Trial Subscription you agree to take as few as four books in the next twelve months. After that you may take as few or as many l)ooks as you want, and you may cancel at any time. It's a deal that is hard to beat. Mail Coupon With Only lOt #Q with a short trial membership. After ten days, if you will be. canceled. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member, and you need take only four books in the next twelve months. Mail the coupon today to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New' York #. collapse. Its myriad worlds had already begun to war among themselves, plunging the universe into barbaric chaos. Civilization seemed doomed. But master scientists laboring to ensure that civilization would be preserved during the dark ages to come, established twin "Foundations" at opposite ends of the Galaxy, to form the nucleus of a new civilization, and in time to unite across the Galaxy to form a new... a stronger... a more enduring Second Empire. In Foundation and Foundation and Empire, we follow the course of the First Foundation as it rekindles the light of civilization in an everincreasing portion of the Galaxy -- and as it is confronted by its greatest crisis: a dangerous soul-eonsuming detire is conquest of the Galaxy! Within a decade, he tyrannized the entire Galaxy except for the Second Foundation. And this became his mania -- to find and conquer the Second Foundation. Everything in the Galaxy must be his!... Please enroil me as a Triil Member in llie Sensnee ing and handling. Then, every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," which describes coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay #, plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extra-value selection at a higher price. I need take only four books within a year and may resign at any time thereafter. pay nothing, owe nothing, and my membership will be canceled. Print Address City (offer good In U.S.A. only.)  Membership applications subject to acceptance by club. IR-S#IB  Novem! combined with Mail Drop The Shadow of Space And the continuation of Ocean on Top Seated iBennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G.Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling. "We're looking for people who want to write" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School. Former editor. Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to more than # publications including Reader's Digest, True, Redbook. Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, "I just received a check from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That's #I stories rold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible." Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation to do so. r I Famous Writers School j Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude, j Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude I Test and #-page illustrated brochure. ! Mr. I Mrs Age I Miss Circle one and please print I Street J City I State Zip j Accredited by the Accrediting Commission I of the National Home Study Council. VoL #, No. #I Frederik Pohl, Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Fred Saberhagen by C. C. MacApp by Philip Jose Farmer by Gary Wright by Piers Anthony by Hal Clement by James Stevens by Frederik Pohl IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All right, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for . unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial B y the time we are all a decade older, if the aircraft manufacturers have anything to say about it, we will be able to travel from point to point in a supersonic jet. We We all seen drawings and mocksnoot, swept wing, titanium hull and all, it is planned to cruise at # miles an hour and get us from London to New York in about a hundred and fifty minutes. Lovely idea. ,... H appens that the other day we made that trip. (We were coming back from the Trieste ScienceFiction Film Festival, and if youVe any interest in what went on there you can find out all about it in the first issue of our new magazine. International Science Fiction,) It might be instructive to look at the log of this particular odyssey: #:# AM, London time. Depart hotel in London to arrive at Heathrow Airport one hour before scheduled take off at #:# PM. (Required by all airlines on international flights -- heaven knows why.) Noon, London time. Arrive Heathrow, discover flight will be two and a half hours late because of "late arrival of aircraft." (You know how insistent the airlines are about requiring a telephone contact number from their passengers? Anybody ever find out why they never use them?) #:# PM, London time. Takeoff from Heathrow. Nonstop flight expected to take # hours # minutes; allowing for #-hour time difference. should teuch down at Kennedy Airport in New York at #:# local New York time. #:# PM, New York time. Arrive over Kennedy Airport, late because of (a) headwinds, (b) pilot dawdling because his radio advisories have told him Kennedy is stacked up due to weather and heavy traffic. We go into the stack. #:# PM, New York time. Delay until landing estimated at one and one-half hours. As we have only that much fuel in the tanks and the pilot doesn't like the idea of landing with dry tanks, we divert to Boston. #:#-#:# PM, New York time. We sit on the field in Boston, while fuel arrives and is pumped in. Because of quarantine, customs and immigration restrictions, nobody leaves the aircraft. (The air-conditioning does not work while the plane is on the ground at this airport. It is late July.) #:# PM, New York time. Back in the Kennedy stack. #:# PM, New York time. Land. Wait for assignment of unloading area. #:# PM. Debark. Look for missing baggage. File lost-baggage report. Pass through customs (# inspectors "on duty", four physically present and working.) Attempt to secure taxi. #:# AM, New York time. Arrive at destination, # miles from Kennedy Airport. Adding up the totals, we have: Downtown London to takeoff line at Heathrow, approximately # miles, elapsed time # hours. be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accoinplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of mans mind, and the mastery of lifers problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe T.B.R. I Scribe T.B.R.  I San Jose, California # I j Please send me the free book. The Mastery  I of Life, which explains how I may learn to  I use my faculties and powers of mind.  I Name  I Address j j City Zip Code I Airborne at Heathrow to airborne over Kennedy, approximately # miles, elapsed time # hours. Airborne over Kennedy to destination in New Jersey, approximately # miles, elapsed time # hours # minutes. (This route, by the way, is served by an air taxi, actual flying time being approximately # minutes. However, the air taxi stops running at #:# PM.) -- You understand that we don't mean to say that there is anything very special or unprecedented about this sort of jet-age odyssey. That's the trouble. It happens every day. for the VC-# we were actually using on this trip. The supersonic transport can cruise at # miles an hour, which means it can do the trip in about # hours thirty minutes, allowing for time to get up to its operating altitude of # feet as it leaves England and get back down as it approaches the northeastern United States. But the VC-# can cruise at nearly # miles an hour and doesn't need as much take-off and landing time. It could have done the trip in # hours, actually took nine from point to point; it's only fair to asing flat-out either. So increase the I)oint-to-point time from # minutes What about the rest of the trip? Ground-transport time? Certainly it will not be less simply because you're boarding a titanium aircraft instead of an aluminum one. Passing through customs? Certainly no less time; it is a fact of life that the heavier the traffic, the longer it takes to get through any sort of estimate it will double traffic. Stacking time? Ah, there's where it at a fantastic rate. It simply cannot stay stacked very long -- which means diversion for refueling, since there is no hope on God's green earth that airport facilities will be better able to cope with the demands of their traffic ten years from now than they are today. If anything, worse. Every major city needs additional air facilities right now. Not one has adequate expansion even planned. an abomination; it wastes all that precious fuel and flight-time. So there you have it. On the most would cut this sort of twenty-hour trans-Atlantic crossing to maybe fifteen hours. In practice, you would most certainly lose back that five-hour saving on diversions and ground time. On any other route (over land, say, or across the Pacipelled to waste its speed because of catastrophic sonic boom (requiring it to operate at the same speed as the VC-# over inhabited land areas) or would be inefficient for other reasons. The big difference, in short, beget out of any airport in the world you would be paying approximately three times as much. W ell, we civilized peoples of the world are spending an awful lot of money awfully foolishily on an incredible variety of things. But on that idiot list, wouldn't you say very high indeed? IF  Complete Short Novel He was sent back in time -- fo protect a famous heretic from destruction by a berserker! Illustrated by he barefoot man in the gray friar's habit topped a rise and paused to survey the country ahead. In that direction the paved road he was traveling continued to run almost straight under a leaden sky, humping over one scrubbily wooded hill after another. The stones of this road had been laid down in the days of expansion of the great Empire, and there was not much else in the world that had survived the centuries between then and now. The friar was of medium height and rather thin. His appearance seemed to have little to do with age; he was somewthere between twenty and forty. His scantily bearded face expressed his tiredness, and his gray robe was spotted with grayer mud. The fields up to the shoulders of the road were all ankle-deep in mud, and most of them showed no sign of having been plowed or planted this spring or last. The only sign of recent human presence visible from where the friar stood now was a heap of low ruined walls at roadside just ahead. Only the ruin was recent; the walls themselves had been old and might have been a caravanserai or legion post in the days of the Empire's strength. But last month or last tenday, new war had passed this way, dissolving one more building into raw tumbled stones. Before grass could start to grow on the stones, it seemed likely that they might sink into the mud without a trace. When he reached the remnant of a wall, the friar sat down on it, resting from his long journey and looking with minor sadness at the minor destruction about him. He leaned Over and picked up one fallen stene; his wiry hands showed strength. With something like a practiced mason's look in his eye, he fitted the stone into a notch in the stump of wall and studied the effect. A distant hail made him raise his head and look back along the way he had come. Another lone figure, dressed in' a habit much like his own, was hastening toward him, waving both arms for attention. The first friar forgot his little game with the stone, returned the wave and waited. T he approaching figure soon resolved itself into a man of middle height, clean shaven and almost stout. "Glory to the Holy One, reverend brother!" puffed this newcomer, arriving at last within easy talking distance. The bearded friar had gotten to his feet, and now his thin face lighted gently. "Glory to His name." The jportly one asked anxiously: "Are you, as I think. Brother Jovann of Ernard?" "That is my name." "Now may the Holy One be praised!" The heavier man made a wedge-sign with his hands and rolled eyes heavenward. "My name is Saile, brother. Now may the Holy One be praised, say I -- " "So be it." " -- for He has led me in mysterious ways to reach your side! Brother Jovann, others will be flocking to your side, for the fame of your heroic virtue has spread afar in many lands. Even in the isolated villages of these remote hills, the peasants are aware now of your passage." "I fear my many faults are known hereabouts, for I was born not far away." "Ah, brother, you are overly modest. From numerous people in this land, as well as elsewhere, I have heard again and again of your ejxploits. How, two months ago, you dared to leave the encampment of the army of the Faithful, to cross no-man's-land boldly into the very ranks of the Infidel, there to enter the tent of the Arch-Infidel himself and preach to him the truth of our Holy Mother Temple!" "And to fail to convert him." Jovann nodded sadly. "You do well to remind me of my failure, for I am prone to the sin of pride." "Ah." Saile lost headway. But it was only for a moment. "My own most humble wish. Brother Jovann, is that I be allowed to be among the very first to join your order. Ah, you are even now on your way to Empire City? To petition our Vicar, IF the most holy Nabur ithe Eighth, for permission to found a new order of your own?" "Truly, God has called me to such a task. Brother Saile." The thin friar's eyes looked into the distance. "Once I labored at rebuilding temples with stones and bricks, but now I am called to rebuild with men." His attention came back, smiling. "As for your becoming a member of the new order when it is formed, I can say nothing yet. But if you should choose to walk with me to Empire City, I will be happy for your company." "I am most highly honored. Brother Jovann!" S aile prolonged his thanks to some length as they walked on together. He had also commented extensively on the chances of yet more rain falling and was discoursing on the question of where they might hope to obtain their next meal, when there came a distraction. A speedy coach that looked as if it might belong to some middle-ranking noble or prelate was overtaking them on the road. The friars's ears gave them plenty of warning to step aside; four agile loadbeasts were making the wheels datter over the leveled stones at a good speed. As the coach sped past. Brother Jovann found his eyes drawn to the face of one occupant who rode facing forward, head and one arm extended slightly out a window. This was an old man, stocky of build -- so far as could be judged -- graybearded, but with the short-cut hair on his head still ginger colored. His thick mouth was twisted slightly as if ready to spit or to dispute. "I had hoped they might give us a lift," Brother Saile muttered unhappily, watching the coach dwindle along the road ahead. "All the seats were not occupied, were they?" Brother Jovann shook his head; he had not noticed how many were in the coach. His attention had been drawn and held by the old man's eyes. Fixed ahead, in the direction o . the Holy City a hundred miles away, those eyes were clear and gray and powerful. And very much afraid. II W hen Derron Odegard walked out on the victory celebration in Time Operation, he found his feet taking him to Lisa, to face her with the news of Matt's death and get it over with. She had only just moved out of the student nurses's quarters at the hospital, to try some job and share a cubicle with another girl in a lowrank, uplevel corridor. Lisa's roommate, in the midst of doing something to her hair, opened the door to Derron and then had to go back inside to pretend not to be listening. Lisa evidently saw Derron's' news in his face or guessed it. Her own face becoming calm as a mask, she stood just inside the half-open door, not asking him in from the corridor. He nodded. "It's Matt -- the battle's won, the berserkers are stopped. But he's dead, he sacrifice himself to do it." She lifted her head proudly, showing no surprise. "Of course; what else could he do? That's the job you gave him." "Understand, Lisa, when I went to him with that salestalk I thought he was going to have a chance." Her voice and her face began to break together. "I -- knew you were going to kiU him." "My God, Lisa! I didn't mean to do that." Breaking up and melting, she leaned against the doorjamb. "And now there's n-nothing to be done." "Hie doctors tried -- but no, nothing. We can't go after his lifelin in the past gain -- it'd wrelok the world to try to pull it out of inm now." not worth it!" trying to console her with some stupidities when the door closed in his face. A few days later he was sitting alone in his tiny private office on the Operations level, slumping in his chair, thinking that if Lisa were the woman he needed he would liave stayed and kicked her door down; it was only a door, and behind it she was still alive. No, the woman he needed, whose image still ruled his secret thoughts, had been for a year and more behind the door of death; and no man had yet found a way of smashing through that. So in the matter of Lisa -- as in everything else -- Derron could no longer care very much. After he had sat in his sdent office for a while, he noticed an IF official-looking envelope, sealed and addressed to him, on the desk. After another while he took the envelope and opened it. Inside was the formal notice of his new promotion, to the rank of colonel. " -- in consideration of your recent outstanding service in Time Operations, and in the expectation that you will continue -- " A set of appropriate collar insignia were enclosed. He sat there a while longer, looking across the room at what rested like a trophy atop his little bookcase -- an ancient battle helmet, ornamented with wings. He was still doing this when the clangor of the alert signal vibrated throughout Operations, pulling him reflexively to his feet. In another moment he was on the way to the briefing room. L atecomers were still hurrying in when a general officer, Time Ops' chief of staff, mounted the dais to get things started. "The third berserker assault has begun, gentlemen. Win or lose, this will be the last. It'll give us the final bearing we need to locate their staging area, twenty-plus thousand years down." There was an optimistic murmur heard. "Don't cheer yet. This third attack gives every indication of being a hard one to beat." The general went through the unveiling of hastely assembled maps and models. "Like the previous attack, this one is aimed at a single man. And again there's no doubt about the target's identity -- this time the name is Vincent Vincento." n There was a murmur at that name. There would have been a reaction from almost any audience that could have been assembled on Sirgol. Even the half-educated of the planet had heard of Vincento, though the man was some three hundred and fifty years dead and he had never ruled a nation or raised an army. Derron's attention became concentrated. In his pre-war historical studies he had specialized in Vincento's time and place. And that locale was also oddly connected with his private grief. The briefing officer spoke on. "Vincento's lifeline is among the very few we have been able to protect by sentry action along their entire effective lengths. Of course, this doesn't mean a berserker can't get near him; but if one tries to kill Vincento or even attacks someone else within a couple of miles of him, we'll be onto its keyhole in a couple of seconds, present-time, and cancel it out. The same if it should try to kidnap or capture Vincentoor take any direct physical action at all against him. The protection extends along Vincento's lifeline from before his birth until the completion of his last imxrtant work at the age of seventy-eight. We can assume the enemy knows about it and is planning something more subtle than direct physical assault." The general went into the technical evidence for this, then moved on to another point. "Chronologically, the enemy penetration is not more than a tenday before the start of Vincento's famous trial before the Defenders of the Faith. There may well be a connection; suppose for example that a berserker could alter the outcome of the trial to get Vincento sentenced to death. It would be practically impossible for us to find a keyhole by tracing anything so indirect. "And an actual death sentence would not seem to be necessary for the enemy's purpose. Vincento is seventy years old at the time of his trial. If it should result in his being put to torture or thrown into a dungeon, his life would be effectively ended." A nother general, seated in the front row, raised a hand. "Doesn't some such treatment happen to him historically?" "No. Historically, Vincento never spends a day of his life in prison. After his recantation at the trial, he spends the remainder of his life in physically comfortable house arrest, where he has time to lay the foundation of the science of dynamics -- and on that, of course, our science and our survival heavily depend." The questioning general shifted once more in his front rank chair. "How in the world is an alien machine going to influence the outcome of a trial?" The briefing officer stared gloomily at his charts. "Frankly we've still a shortage of good ideas on that. We doubt that it'll try to play a supernatural role, since the last such attempt failed. "Here's something to keep in mind. Only one enemy device is engaged in this attack, and from all inIP dications it's physically small, only about the size of a man -- which suggests the possibility ithat this one may be an android. Yes, I know, the berserkers have never, anywhere, been able to fabricate an android that would pass in human society as a normal person. Still, we hardly dare rule out the possibility that this time they've succeeded." The discussion turned to countermeasures. A whole arsenal of devices were being kept in readiness for dropping into the past, but no one could say yet what might be needed. "The one really bright spot, of course, is that this attack's within the time band where we can drop live agents, so we count on men on the spot as our main defense. People who'll keep their eyes on Vincento from a little distance; people able to spot any significant deviation from history. They'll need to know that particular period very well, besides having experience in Time Operations..." Listening, Derron looked down at the new insignia he was still iarrying in his hand. And then he #egan at last to pin them on. B rother Jovann and Brother Saile topped yet another hill, a few miles along from the spot where they had met, and found they were soon to catch up with the coach that had passed them so speedily. Its loadbeasts unharnessed and grazing, it stood empty beside the broken gate of a high-walled enclosure at the foot of the next hill ahead. On top of that hill there towered a great cathedral-temple, its stones too new for moss or weathering. Aloof against the lowering sky, it seemed to float above all human effort and concern. The ancient road, after passing the broken-gated monastery at the foot of the hill, swerved to meet a bridge -- or the stub of a bridge, rather, for all of the spans were gone, with most of the piers that had supported them. The river that had burst its bridge was raging, ravaging the lowlands on either side, obviously swollen to several times its normal flow. On the other side of the river, beyond another stub of bridge, the town of Oibbog sat on secure high ground. A person or two could be seen moving in those distant streets. Coaches and loadbeasts were waiting there, too, interrupted in their journeys that were outbound from the Holy City. Leaden clouds still mounted ominously up the sky. From them the river fled, lashed and goaded by distant flails of lightning, a great swollen, terrified snake that had burst its bonds and carried them away. "Brother River will not let us cross tonight." When he heard this personification, Saile's head turned cautiously sideways, as if he wondered whether he might be expected to laugh. But before he decided, the rain broke again, like a waterfall. Tucking up robes, both friars ran to join the occupants of the coach in whatever shelter the abandoned-looking monastery might afford. Ill A hundred miles away, in the capital of the vanishing Empire and the Holy City of the embattled Temple, the same day was warm and sultry. Only the cold rage of Nabur the Eighth, eighty-first in the sLiccesssion of Vicars of the Holy One, stirred like a storm-wind the air of (is private apartments. The rage had been some time accumulating thought Defender Belam, who now stood waiting for it to be over. Accumulated and saved until now, when it could be discharged harmlessly, vented into the discreet ears of a trusted auditor. The Vicar paused, distracted in his peripatetic tirade against his military opponents by a look down into a courtyard where workmen were unloading massive blocks of marble from a train of carts and a sculptor waited to choose one block for Nabur's ortrait-statue. What matter if his eighty predecessors had decide such matters for them? The Vicar turned suddenly, the skirts of his simple white robe swirling, and caught Belam wearing a disapproving face. In his angry tenor the Vicar snapped: "When the statue is finished we will place it in the city's Great Square, that the majesty of our person may be increased in the eyes of the people!" "Yes, my Vicar." Belam, for decades a defender and prince of the Temple, had seen them come and go. He was not easily perturbed by Vicarial temper. "It is needful that we be shown increased respect. The infidels and heretics are tearing apart the world which has been given by God into our care!" The last sentence came bursting out, a cry from the inner heart. "I have faith, my Vicar, that our prayers and our armies will yet prevail." "Prevail? Of course!" A sarcastic grimace. "Someday! Before the end of time! But now our Holy Temple lies bleeding and suffering, and we... we must bear many burdens. Many, Belam. You cannot began to realize, until you mount our throne." Belam bowed in silent reverence. The Vicar paced again, skirts flapping. This time he had a goal. From his high-piled worktable his shaking fist snatched up a pamphlet already worn from handling -- and perhaps from angry crumpling as well. A contributing and perhaps sufficient cause of today's anger, computed Belam's cool theologian's brain, knowing what the pamphlet was. A small thorn, compared with others. But this one had stabbed Nabur in the tenderest part of his vanity. N abur turned round and shook the paper-covered pamphlet at him. "Because you have been away, Belam, we have not yet had the chance to discuss this with you. This back-stabbing abomination of Messire Vincento's! This so-called Dia logue on the Movement of the Tides! In this he continues to promulgate his heresy-tainted dreams of reducing the solid world beneath IF our feet to a mere speck which flies around the sun. Suit tihait is not enough. No, not for him! No!" Belam frowned now in puzzlement. "What else, my Vicar?" Nabur advanced on him in a glow of anger. "The arguments of the pamphlet are cast in the form of a dialogue among three persons. And Vincento intends one of these fictional debaters -- the one who defends traditional ideas, who therefore is described as 'simple minded' and "below the level of human intelMgence' -- he intends this person to represent ourself!" "My Vicar!" "He even places some of my own words in the mouth of this simpleton, so-caMed!" Belam shook his head douibtfully. "Vincento has never been modenaite in his disputes, which have been many. But I am not convinced that he has ever intended any irreverence to your person." mie no doubt of it!" Vicar Nabur almost screamed. Then the most honored man in the world -- possibly also the most hated, quite possibly also the most strained by what he saw as his appointed tasks -- groaned incontinently and threw himself like a spoiled child into a chair. Arrogance remained, as always, but the spoiled-child aspect did not last long. Irascible humors having been discharged, calm and intelligence returned. "Belam." "My Vicar?" "Have you had a chance to read this pamphlet? It has been widely calculated." Belam gravely inclined his head. "Then give us your considered opinion." "I am a theologian, my Vicar, and not an astronomer. But it seems to me that Vincento's arguments in the pamphlet concerning the tides really prove nothing regarding the movement of the celestial bodies and are not even very accurate as regards the tides themselves -- " "He thinks we are fools, who will accept whatever argument he offers. And who will not realize it when he mocks us!" The Vicar stood up, then tiredly sat down again. Belam ignored for the moment the theory that Vincento had intended personal mockery. "As the Vicar may possibly recall, I bad occasion some years ago to write to Vincento regarding these speculations on the idea of a sun-centered universe. Then as now such theorizing caused me concern in my capacity as a Defender." "We recall very well. Messire Vincento has already been summoned to stand trial for his violation in this pamphlet of your injunction. What exactly did you write him, again?" B elam spoke slowly and thoughtfully. "First, that mathematicians are quite free to calculate and publish whatever they wish regarding the celestial appearances -- provided they remain strictly in the realm of hyopthesis. "Secondly, it is quite a different matter to say that in fact the sun is in the center of the universe -- that in fact our globe spins from west to east each day while revolving round the sun each year. Such statements must be considered very dangerous; though not precisely heretical, they are liable to injure faith by contradicting the Holy Writings." "Your memory, Belam, is even more than usually excellent. Just when did you write this letter of injunction?" "Fifteen years ago, my Vicar." Belam smiled briefly and dryly. "Though I must admit that I reread our archive copy this morning, after perusing the -- um -- pamphlet in question. He became utterly serious again. "Thirdly and lastly, I wrote Vincento that if some real proof existed of the sun-centered universe he champions, we should then be forced to revise our interpretation of those passages in the Holy Writings which would appear to be contradicted. We have in the past revised our thinking, for example in regard to the roundness of the world. "But, in the absence of any real proof, traditional authority and opinion is not to be set aside." NabuV was listening with great attentiveness. "It seems to us, Belam, that you wrote well, as usual." "Thank you, my Vicar." S atisfaction appeared mixed with anger in the Vicarial mien. "Certainly in this pamphlet Vincento has violated your injunction! The debater into whose mouth he puts his own opinions'rgues that in very truth our globe spins like a toy top beneath our feet -- until the very last page. Then our argument, that God may produce what effect he likes in the world, without being bound by scientific causes -- our argument is quoted by the simpleton, who has been wrong about everything else -- quoted as coming from 'a person of high learning and wisdom, supremely above contradiction'. And at this the other debaters piously declare themselves silenced. One cannot fail to see them, and their author, laughing up their sleeves!" Vicar Nabur paused to regain breath and calm. Then he went on. "Now, Belam. Other than this weary argument on tides, which I agree is inconclusive, can there exist anywhere any evidence for Vincento's spinning world? Anything he might impertinently produce at his trial, to... disrupt its course?" Belam frowned thoughtfully at the floor. "My Vicar, I have through the years made an effort to keep abreast of astronomers's thinking. I fear many of them, religious and laymen both, have become Messire Vincento's enemies, largely because of his arrogance in claiming for his own all that these new devices, telescopes, find in the heavens. An arrogant and argumentative man is hard to bear and triply so when he is so often in the right." Belam glanced up for a moment, but Nabur had not taken the description as applying to anyone but Vincento. The Defender of the Faith went on: "But still I believe that most astronomers now perform their calculations using the mathematical asIF sumption that the planets, or some ef them, revolve about the sun. Of course such an idea is not original with Vincente, nor is the idea that ur globe is only a planet. It seems these ideas make the mathematics f celestial movement somewhat more elegant and satisfying; fewer epicycles need be included in the rbits to make them fit the circular form -- " "You say Vincento makes the mathematics more elegant. But can he have proofs mathematical or otherwise? Plain evidence of any kind?" "I would say rather the contrary." "Ha!" Belam gestured with his scholar's hands, frail fingers unsure of technicalities, but till grasping firmly what they had to grasp. "It seems that if our globe did make a yearly journey round the sun, the relative positions of the stars should appear to us to change from month to month as we approached certain constellations or drew away from them. And no such displacement of stars can be observed." "Ha!" "Of course it is possible to argue that the stars are simply too distant for our measurements to show such displacement. My Vicar, I fear that no astronomer can prove Vincento wrong, though some would dearly love to do so. The celestial appearances would seem to be essentially the same, whether we go round the sun or it goes round us. "Now, as I wrote Vincento, where there is lack of centainty we have no excuse for turning our backs on tradition and on the plain meaning of the Holy Writings. We of the Temple have been entrusted by God with the duty to defend the 'truth. And, my Vicar, what I wrote Vincento fifteen years ago is still true today -- I have never been shown any proof of the motion of the world we stand on. And so I cannot believe that any such proof or any such motion exists." T he Vicar raised his hands, then clamped them down upon the arms of his ornate work-chair, though his face had gentled in regret. "Then it is our decision that you and the other Defenders must proceed with the trial." As Nabur spoke on, his anger gradually returned. "No doubt he can be convicted, of violating your injunction against teaching a doctrine liable to injure faith. But understand, we have no wish to visit any great punishment upon our erring son; in charity we grant that he intended no direct insult to our person. He is only headstrong and stubborn. And intemperate in debate! He must learn that he cannot set himself up as a superior authority on all matters, spiritual and tempKral... did he not once even attempt to lecture you on theology?" Belam inclined his head and sharply warned himself to guard against taking any personal satisfaction in Vincento's coming humiliation. "Ah, I could curse the man! In the past, we have been the first to heap praise on his achievements. We have granted him hours of private audience; we have shown him friendliness in a degree we do not always grant to princes. Before our ascending to this dhiaJr, we even wrote a pamphlet in ihis praise! And now, how are we repaid?" "I understand, my Vicar." IV see 'that you have requested X assignment to one particular time. Colonel Odegard," said the examining psychologist. 'The two days Vincento spends near the town of Oihbog on the way to his trial, waiting to cross a flooded river. Had you any particular reason for wanting those two days?" "Just that I know the locale very well. I once spent a long holiday there, and it was one of those places that didn't change much in three or four hundred years." Of course like everything else on the surface, the town land cathedral of Oibbog were in the past tense now. And of course Derron did have his own inner particular reason; the long holiday there had been with her. The psychologist threw one of his fast ibails. "Have you any reason for wanting to be a field agent at all?" One reason seemed to be Matt and Ay, their images blending into one kingly figure as they receded from the moving moment of the present, blending and seeming to grow larger with distance like a mountain when a man walked away from it. Derron didn't know if he could put that into words, and he saw no need to try. "I know the period very well, as I said. I believe I can do a good job. Like everyone else, I want to win the war. I want prestige, I suppose. Accomplishment." "I see." The psychologist ruffled routinely 'through papers on his desk. "Just one more thing I want to bring up before approving you as agent material, Colonel. What are your personal religious views?" "Oh. Well frankly. I think that gods and temples are fine things for people who need crutches. I haven't yet found any necessary." "I see. I raise ithe point because of the dangers inherent in sending back to Vincento's time anyone likely to find himself personally involved in the issues of that time. Taking sides. You as an historian know better than I how thick the air is back there with dogma and doctrine. Religious controversy and warfare." "I understand." Derron shook his head calmly. "No, I'm no fanatic; I'll play any part that's necessary. I'll be a rabid monk and spit on Vincento if required." "That's all right, then. But I rather think you'll do better as a traveling scholar." O perations gave him a name -- Valzay -- and started to build for him a character who had never historically existed and rushed him into preparation with about a dozen other agents, mostly male. Each agent was to stay watchfully near Vincento during a day or so of the critical period of his life. The training and preparation was rushed and rugged, beginning with I? the siurgioal implanitatioa of communications tramsducers in jawbone and skull, so an agent could be in contact with Operations without being seem to mumble aloud. Amid fatigue and concentration Derron noticed almost without surprise that Lisa was now employed in Operations, one of the calmvoiced girls who relayed orders and information to sentries, and would do the same for slave-unit operators or live agents in the field. He had little free time and made no effort to use any of it to speak to her. Then one day as he sat resting between training sessions, Lisa came passing by and stopped. "Derron, I want to wish you success." "Thanks. Pull up a chair, if you like." She did. "Derron, I shouldn't have that wasn't your intention and it wasn't your fault. If Matt's death had caused her anything more than brief sorrov at a friend's loss, she did not show it now. Derron said abruptly: "You and I might have had -- something, Lisa. Perhaps not the whole thing there can be between a man and a woman, but still something good. At least I thought we might." "I had some feeling like that about -- Matt. But that wouldn't have been enough for me." He went on hurriedly: "As far as anyithing permanent and tremendous, well I've tried that already once in my life. And I'm still up to my neck in it, as you may have noticed. I'm sorry. I've got to get moving." And he got up out of his chair and did so. T he experts dressed him in suitable clothing, slightly worn. In his haversack they pHaced a reasonable supply of proper food, and in his wallet a moderate sum of piroper money, coins of silver and gold and a forged letter of credit on an Empire City bank. They hoped he would not need much money nor get as far as the Holy City. But just in case. Hung around Derron's neck was an abominably carved wooden wedge-symbol, big enough to conceal the bulk of his communicator and too ugly for anyone to want to steal. If anyone was moved to wonder, it was a present from his wife. In an arsenal off Stage Three, they issued him a sturdy traveler's staff, which was a more effective weapon by far than it appeared to be, and then at last they were ready to drop him. All the agents were going to be launched within half a minute, to emerge on different days and in diffent places. Their training and preparation had been too humed and too individualized for them to get to know one another very well; but for a few minutes there was joking camaraderie in Stage Three as the masquerade-costumed group bade one another good luck and good berserker-hunting. The launching file formed. Derron stood looking over the head of the agent ahead of him, a short man named Amling, who wore the garb of a traveling friar and who was to watch over Vi nee n to on the two days preceding Derron's shift. n the count, the line moved briskly forward, disappearing one figure ' after another. Amling vanished. Then in a long stride Derron's booted foot swung out over the mercurial circle and came down. H e was standing in darkness, in the open air. Except for a drizzle of rain, there was silence all about him, a lonely shence in which t his materialization must have been unseen. Good. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom, he made out that the hard surface under his boots did seem to be that of the old Empire road which passed ithrough Oibbog. It seemed that the launching people had scored a bull's-eye, spatially. Whether he had arrived at the proper time remained to be seen, though the rain was as it should be. Subvocalizing, he tried to reach Operations for a routine communications check; but some kind of paradox-loop seemed to be blocking contact. One ran into such things, and one would hope they would not last. When he felt sure no one was near, he opened his staff at one end and consulted the compass thus revealed to make sure he had the right direction ahead of him. Then he began to walk. Lightning flashed distantly at intervals, but the rain was slowly diminishing. He drew deep breaths of the washed air. The transducer behind his ear twinged suddenly. "Odegard, can you read me yet? It's plus two days since you dropped. Time scale has been slipping." "Affirmative. I'm about plus five minutes since dropping. Still on the road at night in the rain," Derron was tapping along with his staff to keep from floundering off the pavement into the mud. "You're blurring on the screens. But we think we dropped you about two miles from the cathedral, further than we intended. Have you ascertained your exact location yet?" "Negative. How's the game going?" "All the agents ahead of you are back with us, no problems. Except Amling. We haven't been able to reach him, maybe just because of the time-slippage. Listen, Odegard, keep your eyes open. If you're more than about two miles from Vincento, a violent attack on you will be possible -- " The waning lightning flared up, obligingly showing Derron his road running straight for some distance ahead, with the dim brooding cathedral at last visible to him on its faroff hill. Much nearer, the lightning also showed him a shiny object lying in the center of the road, lying atop what seemed to be a line scratched or dug perpendicularly across the way. "Stand by. Operations." Derron made his way cautiously up to the wet, soft thing, prodded it with a toe and waited for the lightning, which came again to show him Amling's naked body. "Never mind looking in the blur for Amling's lifeline. I guess he came down outside the safety zone too." He knelt briefly over the body, gripping his weapons staff while his IF eyes searched the rainy night as best they could, and described the situation. The line had been scratched at precise depth across the road by some tool or cybernetic limb that sliced stone like cheese; quite likely the same implement that had removed the back of Amling"s head. "Maybe it marked the boundary line of violence for us; just to let us know that it's aware of it." Derron did not dawdle there. For a time he walked backward toward Oibbog, staff ready, trying to probe with eyes and ears the rainy night as he recreated from it. Not that his senses, or his reactions, were likely to be good enough if the enemy was there. But he was spared. The berserker had killed in passing, where it could do so safely, and then had gone on about its real business. V B y the time Derron reached the place where the road bent sharply to the left toward the wash-out bridge, the lightning had gone on over the horizon, so he felt rather than saw the bulk of the hill and cathedral ahead of him and above. But close by the side of the road he could now make out the monastery wall, the broken gate and, just inside the gateway, Vincento's coach deserted in the puddles. From the shelter of a cloister came the gentle mumbling and grunting of loadbeasts. Derron paused only a moment before plodding through the gate and across the soggy earth to the entrance of the main building. He made no effort to be quiet, and the dark entrance promptly emitted a challenge: "Who's there? Stand and give our name!" The dialect was one Derron had expected. He stopped, and as the beam of a lantern flicked out at him, he answered: "I am Valzay of Mosnar, mathematicus and scholar. From the coach and animals I see here, I judge that you within are honest men. And I have need of shelter." A door creaked, and behind the door the lantern retreated. "Step for'ard, then." Derron advanced slowly. When he had gotten in out of the rain he found himself in what had been the common room of the monastery, facing a pair of soldiers. One of these was armed with a crude pistol and the Other with a short sword; judging by their uniforms, they were from a mercenary company. When they could see his gentleman's clothes more plainly, their manner became more or less respectful. "Well, sir, how d'you come to be a-wandering afoot and alone?" He told how his skittish loadbeast, scared by lightning, had run off with his light sulky. A plague on the animal! If he could catch it in the morning, he'd have some of its hide off! With whip-cracking vehemence he shook water from his hat. Derron had an effortless feel for acting when there was a need. The soldiers chuckled, relaxed most of chat. There was certainly plenty of room here for another boarder -- the proprietary monks had left long ago. The place was no tavern with girls and ale; even firewood was in short supply, but the roof did keep the rain off. Yes, they were from a mercenary company, one now in the pay of the Holy Temple. Their captain with the builk of his men was in Oibbog, which was just across the river. They still harbored some suspicion of Derron -- he might conceivably be a scout for some well organized band of brigands -- so they did not. tell him how many soldiers had been caugiht on this side of the torrent when the bridge collapsed. He did not ask, of course, but he gathered that there were not very many. "And if the cap'n can't do more'n wave to us for the next couple days, why that's all right with us, hey what?" "Naw, no one else but the old gentletnan as owns the coach and his servant an' his driver. And a pair of friars. Plenty empty cells, sir, so take your pick. One's about as damp as the next." Derron murmured his thanks and, with some brief help from the lantern, groped his way down a passage and into a vacant cell, doorless now like all the others. Built against ithe rear wall was a wooden bunk frame that had not yet been ripped out for firewood, and on that he sat down. The rush of events had left him a little numb; he still could not quite grasp that Vincent Vincento was here somewhere within a few meters of 'him, might ev be the author of the snore that echoed faintly down the passage. D erron streached out on the wooden frame, knapsack under his head; genuinely iired, he found himself dozing toward sleep. His thoughts as consciousness dulled were filled not with Vincento or time travel or even berserkers, but simply with the sound of fading rain and the freshness of the infinite dean atmosphere around him. It was the theme of resurrection... He had been asleep for a few minutes when Operations put a throbbing behind his right ear. He came wide awake at once and tucked his carven wedge-symbol doser under his chin. "Odegard, you'rd in the monastery all right?" "Affirmative." "Good. Now we're getting our screens tuned in. There lare (fourteen lifelines in or near that monasterytemple complex, counting your own. One of course is Vincento's. One seems to be an unborn child's, you know how th'cy show on a screen in dots and daes." Derron mused sulbvocally. "Let's see. Me, Vincento, his two servants, and the two soldiers I've seen. That makes six. And they said there were two friars. Eight, which would leave six more unaccounted for. Probably four more soldiers and a campfollower who's picked up something she won't want to carry -- though that one soldier did say something about there being no girls. Anyway, I suppose your idea is there may be some apparent person here who has no 'Hfdine showing on your screens -- our hypothetical berserker-android." IF 'That's precisely our idea, yes." "Tomorrow I can count noses and ve'll see... wait." At the entrance of Derron's cell  shape of lesser blackness became screte and moved. The figure of a tiooded friar, utterly faceless in the oom, came a halfstep inside before halting abruptly and muttered a few indistinguishable words that might have been an apology for entering the wrong cell. The figure then withdrew as silently it had come. Derr on was gripping his staff, pointing it at the dooiway. "Just had a short visit from someone. Or maybe from something. Maybe that's where Amling's robe went." Hours passed before Derron dozed again. W hen Vincento was awakened in darkness to find himself bedded amid damp straw, with bare stone walls close about him, he knew a moment of sinking terror. The worst had already hapened, and he lay in the Defender's dungeon. The terror was deepened when he saw the monk-hooded figure bending over him. He could see in the moonlight which filtered now through the tiny window. Evidently the rain was over -- The rain -- of course, he was still on his way to the Holy City for his trial! The intensity of his relief was such that Vincento accepted his being awakened almost with courtesy. "What is it?" he gasped, sitting up on his shelf of a t, pulling his traveling-rug closer about his shoulders. His manservant Will slept on a bundled mound on the dark floor. The visitor's hooded face could not be seen; the visitor's voice was a sepulchral whisper; "Messire Vincento, come alone to the cathedral tomorrow. At the crossways of nave and transepts you will receive good news, from your friends in high places." Could Nabur or Belam be sending him some secret word? Or, more likely, was this some Defenders's trickery? A man summoned to trial was not supposed to discuss the matter with anyone. "It will be good news, Messire Vincento. Come alone and be willing to wait if you are not met at once. And do not seek to know my name or face." Vincento held his silence; he would commit himself to nothing. But the visitor, satisfied that the message had been heard, melted away into the night. W hen Vincento awakened again, it was from a pleasant dream. He had been back on the estate provided for him by the Senate of his city, safe in his own bed, with his mistress's warm body solid and comforting beside him. In reality the woman had been gone for some time -- women no longer meant very much -- but the estate was still there. If only they would let him return to it in peace! He had been awakened this time by the touch on his face of a shaft of morning sunlight, which came striking into his cell from the high thin window of the opposite cell across the corridor. As he lay recaUing with curiosity his strange midnight visitor, the sun-shaft was fiik)wly moving away from his face. That motion made it instantly, for him, a golden pendulum of subtle torture. He faced also the pendulum of choice. His mind could swing one way, tick, and meet in foresight the shame of swallowed truth and pride, the humiliation of an enforced recanting. And the other way, tock, there would be the breaking agony of the boot or the rack, or slower destruction in a buried cell. Oh, of course, the crude physical torture was a remote threat only. He would have to be very obstinate and outspoken before the Defenders would go that far with him. But it was not impossible. They would say that a stubborn defendant forced them to employ such means. So his pendulum of choice was not real; he had no real choice but to recant. Let the sun move as they want it to. Let it whirl round the globe in an insane yearly spiral, to please arrogant fools who thought they could read all the secrets of the universe in a few dusty pages of the Holy Writings. Lying on his back, Vincento rais a hand veined with ropy vessels against the slow-swiveling torture-blade of the sun. But the sun would not be stopped in its motion by any man's hand. It mocked him all the more, making bright translucent wax out of the oldness of his fingers. On the floor. Will stirred sluggishly in his rug-cocoon. Vincento barked him awake and chased him out to rouse the coachman Rudd, who slept beside the beasts -- Rudd to look at the river's level. Will to start getting something together for breakfast. Left alone, he began the slow humiliating process of getting his aging bones unlimbered and ready for what the day might bring. In recent years his health had been poor. But he was not sick now, only old. And yes, he was afraid. By the time Will came to inform him that a fire and hot tea were ready in the monastery's common room, Vincento was ready also. W ith mild surprise he found a new arrival in the common room, a youngster who introduced himself as Valzay of the distant land of Mosnar. Valzay made, as he put it, a modest claim to scholarship. And for a wonder he was decently respectful -- he looked at Vincento with genuine, if restrained, awe and murmured that even in bis distant homeland Vincento's discoveries were known and praised. Vincento acknowledged all this with pleasant nods, sipping his morning tea, wondering if this Valzay was the bearer of the good news he was supposed to hear from someone in the cathedral. Anyway he was not going to rush up there at once; Rudd reported that the river was no longer rising, but still too high and dangerous at this point for anyone to think of fording it. One more day, maybe. So Vincento took his time consuming tea and a little food, told Rudd to give the two friars something if IP they came round, then strolled leisurely out into the sunshine to warm his bones. If he came late to his trial, there were plenty of witnesses here to tell the reason. Let the Defenders inveigh against the river, if they liked. No doubt it would dry up for them. No doubt all of nature could be made to do their bidding if they but threatened it enough. But he must begin to practice his humility. He called to WiU to bring him his writing materials from the coach, and he went to sit alone in the sun outside the broken monastery gate, with one tumbled block of stone for a bench and another for a table. It was really about time he started writing his statement of recantation for the trial. Of course, the accused was not supposed to know why he had been summoned -- probably the Defenders's first question would be whether he had any idea of what he was charged with. But in his case there could hardly be any doubt. It had been fifteen years since the warning, which Vincento had halfforgotten; but when the summons came, he realized he had made enemies among men who never forgot anything. T he first paper he pulled from his portable escritoire was the old letter from Defender Belam. Involuntarily Vinoento's eye went at once to the words: "... no proof of our globe's motion exists, as I believe, since none has been shown to me." No proof. Vincento wiped at his forehead with a tremulous hand. Now, with mortal fear to enforce bleak clarity of thought, he could see that the arguments he had conjured up from tides and sunspots really proved nothing about the motion of sun and planets. The truth about those motions had come to him before he had ever thought of proving it -- he had looked long through telescopes, he had thought long and deeply, his mind weighing the sun and grasping at stars and comets; and truth had come through some inward door, like -- just like a revelation. His enemies who cried him down were blind and stupid in their refusal, or their inability, to see. And yet he knew that those who were to sit as his judges were shrewd logicians, within their limitations. If only there were something firm that he could set simply and incontrovertibly before them... oh, what would he not give! His mind ached, and his fists clenched, his very guts contracted at the thought. If he had one solid simple proof he would risk all, he would dare anything to confront and confound them with it, to rub their long arrogant noses in the very obvious truth! But since there was nothing to support this mood of glorious defiance, it soon passed. The truth was he was old and afraid, and he would recant. Slowly he got out pen and ink, and slowly he began his first draft. From time to time he paused, sitting in the sun with closed eyes, trying not to think. VI D erron counted seven soldiers round the breakfast fire and found each of them overjoyed to accept a swallow of brandy from to talk. No, there was no one else in the monastery or cathedral or nearer than the town across the river. Not that they knew of. When he was alone a few minutes later, Derron did some subvocal mumbling. "Operations? Count the lifelines here again. I make it thirteen of us. If you can make it twelve, then one of my smiling companions has clockwork for guts. But if you come out with fourteen again, th either there's some bandit or deserter lurking in a corner or you're misreading. I think you're misreading that dotted line, anyway; I consider it unlikely that any of us here is pregnant, since we're all men." Operations was apologetic. "We'll recheck right away; you know it's not easy reading these things." After finishing their morning meal and emptying Derron's brandy flask, most of the soldiers settled down to serious loafing. Rudd, Vincento's coachman, led his loadbeasts forth in search of grass. Following them through the gate, Derron located Vincento, sitting peacefully alone and apart. Well and good. Remembering his mythical loadbeast and sulky, Derron put on an exasperated expression and strolled along the road toward the bridgestump, scanning the muddy fields on either side as if in search of his property. At the bridge-stump were the two friars, gray cowls thrown back from their unremarkable heads. They seemed to be talking of ways in which the bridge might sometime be rebuilt. Derron knew that within a year or two, the river would be spanned here by new arches of stone. And those arches would still be standing solidly more than three hundred years later, when a young postgraduate history student would come on a hiking tour with the girl he loved, enthusiastic about seeing the town and cathedral of Oibbog... the river would look much different then, gentler of course and with more trees along its banks. While the stones of the road would still look much the same... yTay the Holy One give you a iVl good day, esteemed sir!" It was the stouter of the friars whose voice broke in upon the start of reverie. The interruption was welcome. "Good day to you also, reverend brothers, in His name. Does the river stiU rise?" The thinner friar had a loving face. In hands all bone and tendon he held a chunk of masonry, as if he meant to start this minute fo rebuild the bridge. 'The river falls now, sir. How goes the path of your life, up or down?" The falsehood about beast and buggy seemed dreary and unnecessary. "That can hardly be an easy question for any man to answer." Seven or eight of the local peasantry had materialized out of mud and distance and were plodding their IF barefoot way along the drying bank of the torrent toward the bridgestump. One walking in front swung proudly in his hand a string of large and silvery fish, fresh enough to be still twitching and twisting. A few paces away the peasants halted. Together they bowed rather perfunctorily in Derron's direction; he was not dressed finely enough to overawe anyone, and plainly he was not the one hey had come to see. The man with the fish began talking to the friars, and almost at once others interrupted him, all squabbling over who had the right to speak first and who the right of disposal of the fish. They had come to strike a bargain. Would the holy brothers accept one of these fine fish ("From me!" "From me, Holy Brother, it was my fishline!") and in return say some potent prayers for the giver's crops? Derron turned away from what gave promise of becoming a nasty quarrel among the peasants to see that Vincento was still alone. And the full sunlit view of the Cathedral of Oibbog caught Derron unawares. The tip of the central spire held its symbolic wedge two hundred and sixty feet above the flattened hilltop. The stones of tower and wall, of arch and flying buttress were rich clear gray, almost shining in the morning light. Inside, the stained glass would be living flame along the eastern wall. There was only one sight in all the world like this, and he had seen it only once before, with his beloved at his side. If air and grass were now aJive again, surely she too must be alive and somewhere near where he might reach her. The resurrected reality before him was at the moment more convincing than any thought or, logic. At any moment now he might hear her voice, might be able to reach out and touch... There was a splash nearby. The stout friar was wearing a caricature expression of anger, disappointment and surprise, while the t hinn er one stood with a hand stretched out over the water. As Derron watched, a big fish jumped and splashed again; one of the slippery catch had evidently escaped... touch her warm and living skin. The way her hair moved in the wind came back to him now, with the clarity of something seen only a minute ago. His feet took him away from the bridge, back along the road. He saw without really thinking that Vincento still sat alone in the sun. The hill raised its cathedral before Derron, and his feet began a steady climb. J ovann was looking sadly at the peasants, while he addressed the splasher in the water. "Brother Fish, I have given you liberty not because we do not need food, but so you may be able to praise God, who sends all blessings -- the fish to the angler, or freedom to the fish. We men so often forget to be thankful!" The fish splashed and leaped and splashed again. As if the pain of air -- or something else -- had driven it quite mad. Jovann looked down at this watery uproar in distress. "Be still now, Brother Fish. Enough! Live in the water, not the painful air. Give praise and thanks as a fish may naturally do!" The splashing stopped. The last ripples and foam were swept away downstream. Every peasant's hands were raised in the wedge-sign, and they darted their eyes at one another as if they would have liked to run but dared not. Brother Saile's face gaped as blankly as had the fish's, as his eyes ung from Jovann to the river and back again. Jovann beckoned Saile away and said to him: "I am going apart for an hour, to pray the Holy One to cleanse me of anger and pride. And for these poor men's crops. Do you likewise." And Jovann walked away alone, following the riverbank in the opposite direction from the peasants. A s Derron climbed the steps that switchbacked up the face of the cathedral hill, it crossed his mind that at this moment in time the genes of the girl he loved were scattered in the chromosomes of some two thousand ancestors. Only in such a tenuous sense was she alive today. He had never forgiven her for dying, for being helplessly killed emptying his world. So, he told himself, forgive her now, today. Get it all over with, out of your system once and for all, so you can be some good to yourself. Now the roof of the monastery was below the level of his climbing feet. And now his eyes rose above the level of the paved space before the cathedral door. Here all seemed to him just as he remembered it. He stood upon the very stones where her feet and his would one day stand, facing the same hedges and statues along the cathedral's front. Holiday and love might still be true, war and grief no more than bad dreams. But it was she who was the dream now, who would never again be anything more. For a moment the knowledge was almost too much, still -- he thought he might be going to kneel down or fall down or cry aloud -- but then it could be accepted, at last, at long long last. He was not going to collapse or even cry out. They had looked out over the valley from here and talked about building their home on some nearby spot, the home for the kids they were going to have. Now he was just going to stand here and go on living. The crisis building up in him since he had known he might see Oibbog again slowly faded. Peace and stillness reigned. He had still to go into the building, where he had spent a morning helping her photograph stained glass. He wished he could be lucky enough to find the supposed author of the universe inside; Derron would have a few pointed questions to ask. The main door was just as solidly hung as he remembered it; he wondered briefly if a wooden door might last three hundred years. No matter. IF He tugged it open and heard the booming reverberation of the broken closure come back from the cavernous interior. And only then did he recall that his staff with all its weaponry was resting back in his monastery cell. No matter; immediate violence from the berserker was not a danger. H e went in and paced down the center of the enormous nave. There was nothing to be seen of God or berserker, nor for that matter of deserter or pregnant waif whose lifeline might be showing up to confuse operations. There would seem to be room in here for all of them to hide. The arched nave was about three hundred feet long and a hundred feet high for most of that length. Construction had not been quite completed when the workmen had been ordered or frightened off the job; much scaffolding still surrounded columns and clung to walls, and a few abandoned tools were very slowly gathering dust where they had been set down. Whether because of the combatants's reverence or superstitious awe, or only by chance, war had not trampl here. Even the stained glass was all intact, splintered only by the sun coming in to fire the gloom with richness. This main body of the temple was now no more than a few decades old. The paving stones of the nave, the wide steps leading to side chapels, all were flat and unworn; three centuries and more of random footsteps would be needed to shape them into standard distribution curves. Here and there the workmen's cables and ropes hung from the scaffolding, as steady in the motionless air as if carved from stone themselves. As Derron approached the intersection of transepts and nave, a movement caught the corner of his eye. One of the friars, hood worn over his head, here in God's house, was approaching him. Derron cleared his throat. "Reverend Brother." And then it struck him as odd, that one of the two men he had left at the bridge should have hurried here ahead of him. Peering closely, he saw that the face beneath the cowl was not quite a face. The hands reaching to grab him as the figure shot forward were dummy flesh, split open now to show the steel claws. A little mob of peasants was coming up the road from the bridgehead, babbling loudly of miracles and fish. The noise was distracting, and in truth Vincento was only too ready to let himself be distracted from his humiliating task. He summoned Will, gave him the escritoire and papers to take in charge and then turned his own steps restlessly upward in the fine sunlight. He had decided that the meeting supposedly arranged in the cathedral was probably some Defenders's snare. Let them try! he would see through it before they had gotten very far. No more than the oafs who called themselves scholars were clerics Vincento's equals in cleverness. It was only the Defenders's power he respected and feared, never their brains. IP He was patient with his old legs, and so they served him well enough,on the climb. After a pause at the top to breathe, he entered at the cathedral's main door, tugging it firmly closed behind him. He devoutly hoped that no one was going to meet him to offer sympathy. A sympathizer always had at least some implied claim to be the equal -- or even the superior! -- of the one he tried to console. Pah! Vincento strolled through the nave, a stone-sealed space too vast to give the least sense of confinement. To his right and left, columns towered in their parallel rows. With distance the apparent gap between each column and the next diminished, until at fifty paces each row became opaque as a wall. No matter where a man stood inside this unpartitioned space, half of it would always be blocked from his view -- more than half, if one counted the areas of the transept-arms and the chapels. W hen he reached the appointed meeting place, the crossways of nave and transepts, Vincento could look directly up nearly two hundred feet, into the shadowed interior of the mighty spire. There were workmen's platforms there too, reached by ladders mounting from the clerestory level, where must be the upper end of some stair that coiled up within the wall from floor level. In this temple ithere were no chandeliers and no breezes to swing them if they had existed. If in Vincento's youth this had been his parish house of worship, he could hardly have begun, during a drowsy Sabbath sermon, to discover the laws of pendulums. A single cable of great length descended thinly from the uttermost dark interior of the spire. Vincento's eye followed it down, to find that after all there was a pendulum here, at least in potential. For a bob, there hung on the end of the long cable a ball of metal that would be heavy as a man. This weight was caught and held by the merest loop of cord to one of the huge columns at a corner of the nave-transept intersection. Looking up and down, up and down again tended to make an old man dizzy. Vincento rubbed his neck. But what use could the builders have had for such a patriarch of pendulums? It could, Vincento supposed, be something they swung when hard stone and mortar had to be demolished. Or was it only a plumb-line made gigantic? Whatever they had intended it for, it was a pendulum. The restraining tether of cord, with its single knot, looked insubstantial. Vincento thrummed the taut little cord with his finger, and gently the long long cable whipped and swayed. The massive weight made tiny bobbing motions, dipping like a ship at anchor. Quickly the oscillations died away; the cathedral stillness regained ascendancy. Cord and weight and cable were once more as steady as the stone columns in the still gray air. The pendulum-ship was dry docked. Set sail, then! On impulse Vincento tugged once at the end of the knotted restraining cord. And with startling ease the knot dissolved. Starting from rest, the weight for a moment seemed reluctant to move. Even after it had undeniably begun its first swing, it still moved so slowly that Vincento's eye raced involuntarily once more up into the shadows of the spire, to see how it was possible that mere length of cord should so delay things. A man might have counted four without haste before the weight for the first time reached the center, the low-point, of its swing. Almost touching the floor, it passed that center in a smooth fast rush and immediately began to slow again, so that it needed four more counts to climb the gentle gradient of the far half of its arc. Then an unmeasurable instant's pause, not quite touching a column on the other side of the crossways, before the weight edged into its returning motion. Back and forth it went, in a perfectly straight track about ten yards in length. Vincento's eye could find no diminution in the amplitude of the first half-dozen swings. He supposed that a heavy weight swinging so freely might continue to oscillate for many hours or even for days. But wait. Vincento squinted at the pendulum. Holding hjs head motionless he watched it closely through another half dozen swings. W hat was it he had come in here for? Oh yes, someone was perhaps going to meet him. But this pendulum. He frowned at it and shook his head. He was going to have to make sure of something that he thought hesaw. Workmen's sawhorses stood not far away. He dragged a pair of these to where he wanted them, then spanned them with a plank, which lay beneath the end of the pendulum's arc and perpendicular to its direction. On the bottom of the swinging weight he had noticed a projection like a small spike -- whatever it had been designed for, it would serve Vincento's present purpose well. He laid a second board atop the first and readjusted his whole structure slightly. Now on each swing the spike passed within an inch of the topmost board. Somewhere in here he had seen sand... yes, piled there in a mixing-trough, by the entrance to the first side-chapel. The sand was damp with the long spell of wet weather; he brought handfuls and dumped them on the upper board, where he patted and built the sand into a small wall, an inch or two high, along the board's length. Then in an interval between swings he slid his upper board slightly forward, taking his sandwall into the edge of the pendulum's arc. A neatly designed experiment, he thought. On its first return the moving spike notched his little sand wall delicately, tumbling a tiny clot of grains down tlie minute slope. Then the weight pulled its taut cable away again, taking another nibble of eternity. Vincento held his breath, held his eyes from blinking as he watched the pendulum's return. Now he heard IF for the first time the faint ghostly hissing of its passage. The spike coming back to the wall f sand made a new notch, though one contiguous to the first. Then in movement huge and regular enough to be the cathedral's stately pulse, the weight once more departed. And the third notch was new again, by the same margin and in the same direction as the second. In three vibrations the plane of the pendulum had shifted its extremity sideways by half a finger width. His eyes had not deceived him earlier; it was creeping regularly clockwise. Perhaps some slow untwisting of the cable? Then it should soon reverse itself, Vincento thought, or at least vary in amplitude. Again he stared up into the high shadows. He would have to hang another pendulur. like this somewhere, someday, and study it at leisure. If he could. Even supposing that his health held out and he was spared prison, it would be difficult. Enclosed towers of this height were anything but common. In another temple or at some university, perhaps... but he had no intention of stooping to collaboration... suppose now that the sideways progression was not due to the cable unwinding. He thought he could feel that it was not -- in somewhat the same way as, after study, he had come to feel the stability of the sun. This clockwise creeping had something too elemental about it for him to be able to credit a trivial cause. Already the width of two fingers had been nibbled from the top of his little parapet of sand. He wondered how the cable was fastened at the top. Younger legs than his would be required to find that out, and Vincento departed to get them. Several times in his passage down the nave he turned, frowning back at the pendulum as he might have stared at an unexpected star. O f it all, Derron had seen only an upper segment of the moving cable. He saw even that much with only one eye, for his face was being held with steady force against the rough planking of the high platform to which the berserker had carried him, helpless as a kicking infant. Inhumanly motionless, it crouched over him now, one chill hand gripping his neck and holding part of his garment gaglike in his mouth, the other hand twisting one of his arms just to the point of pain. Obviously it had no intention of captivity felt more like eternity than time, though measured by the meaningless regularity of the swinging cable. Having his prisoner, the berserker was content to wait, which meant that he had failed. It had at once known his communicator for what it was, had ripped the wooden carving from his neck and cracked it like a thin-shelled nut, squeezing the meat of metal and components into trash between its fingers. Only when the cathedral door far below had boomed shut once more did eternity begin to come to an end. The berserker then let him go. Slowly and painfully he raised his numbed body from the wood. Rubbing the arm that had been twisted, he turned to face his enemy. Under the cowl he saw a pattern of seamed metal that looked as if it might be able to open and slide and reshape itself. Was there plastic somewhere inside that could evert to become  the mask of a human face? There  was no way to tell that much, let  alone guess what identity it might be able to wear. "Colonel Odegard," it said, in a voice machine-tailored to neutrality. He waited for more, while the thing facing him on the high platform squatted on its heels, arms hanging limp. Like the face, the hands were ambiguous; they were not human now, but there was no saying what they might be able to become. The rest of the thing was hidden under the shapeless robe, which had probably once been Amling's. "Colonel Odegard, do you fear the passage from life to not-life?" He didn't know what he had expected to hear, but hardly that. "And if I do, what difference does it make?" "Yes," said the berserker. "What is programmed goes on regardless of any passage." Before he could try to make any sense out of that, the machine jumped precisely forward and grabbed him again. He struggled again, which of course made no difference. It tore strips from his coat, ripping the tough cloth with precise and even sounds. With the strips it gagged him IF again and tied him hand and foot tightly, buit still not so tihat h felt hopeless of ever working free. It would not blunder into causing his death, here where it must be careful not to kill. When it had bound him, the machine paused for a moment, moving its cowled head like a listening man, searching the area with senses far beyond the human. And then it was gone, down the ladder in utter silence, like a giant cat or ape. He strained desperately to get loose, choking curses on his gag. F rom some village in the hills a second group of peasants had come along the road to the cathedral. It was Brother Saile they met first; their anxious faces fell even further when they learned he was not the saint and niiracle-worker of whom the whole countryside was talking. 'Tell me, what is it you wish to see Brother Jovann about?" Saile inquired, his hands clasped with dignity across his belly. They clamored piteously. For the past several xdays a great wolf had cattle and even a child and even -- they swore it! -- uprooting crops. They were isolated and very poor, with no powerful patron to give them aid of any kind, save only the Holy One himself! And now the saintly Jovann, who must and would do something. They were utterly desperate. Brother Sale nodded, ihis face showing sympathy mixed with relucmiles distant? In die bills. Well -- we sihall see. Come wiitih me, and I will put your case before good Brother Jovann." W ith a puzzled Will beside him, Vincento entered the cathedral once more and hurried down the nave. Rudd had bothered him, complaining of ithe scarcity of food for the loadbeasts. And then his old legs had rebelled against climbing the hill a second time. Now, when he got back to the still-swinging penduiium, more than an hour had passed since he had first set it in motion. The tiny ibattlement of sand had been demolished by continuous notches, up to the point where the pendulum's plane had left it ibehind altogether. By now that plane had inched clockwise through ten or twelve degrees of arc. "Will, you've helped me in the workshop. Now this is another such case, where you must do precisely what I say." "Aye, master." "First, keep in mind that you are not to stop or disturb the swinging of the cable here. Understood?" "Aye." "Now I want you to climb; there seem to be ladders and platforms enough for you to go up all the way. I want to learn how this swinging cable is mounted, what holds it at the top. Look at it until you can draw me a sketch, you're good at that." "Aye, I understand, sir." Will craned his neck unhappily. "It's a long bit o' climbing, though." "Yes, yes, a coin for you when you're down. Another when you've given me a good sketch. Take your time now and use your eyes. And do not disturb the cable's swing." Derroo had made only slight progress toward' loosing his 'hands, when he heard clumsier feet than the berserker's olimibing toward him. Then between the uprights of the ladder Wni's honest face came into view to predictably register shock. "... bandit!" Derron spat, when his hands had been cut free and he could rid himself of the gag. "Must've been hiding in here somewhere... forced me up here and tied me up." Wondering and sympathetic. Will shook his head. "Likely he'd 'a slit your throat, sir, but didn't want to do no sacrilege. Think he might still be here about?" "No, I'm sure he was running away." "Long gone, then, by this time." Will shook his head. "You'd better liven up your limbs, sir, before you starts to climb down. I'm going on up, bit of a job to do for master." "Job?" "Aye." Will was already climbing again, right into the spire. Still on all fours, Derron peered over the edge of the platform. Vincento's ginger-colored hair marked a toy figure more than a hundred feet below. Down there the mysterious moving cable ended in a dot which traced back and forth with sedate regularity... Derron's muscles locked, and he felt himself near falMng. He had suddenly understood what Vincento was looking at, what Vincento had IF probably been studying all tihe while the berserker held Derron captive. Its earliest designers on old Earth had called it a Foucault pendulum. vm C  T T onorable Vincento!" jni Vincento looked around in surprise and some annoyance as the young man, Alzay or Valzay or whatever his name was, came hurrying toward him from the foot of the tiny stair by which Will had begun his climb. Valzay rushed up, babbling some imbecilic story about a bandit, spouting pestiferous wordage that threatened to tangle Vincento's thoughts. "Young man, I suggest you give your recitation to the soldiers." Now, if it was not the cable untwisting, and proved to be not some trick of the mounting above... certainly the bones of the cathedral were not creeping counterclockwise... but yet his mind strained forward into unknown territory... "I see, Messire Vincento, that you have discovered my little surprise." Derron saw very clearly how the game was certain to go, perhaps had gone already. But one desperate gamble was still open to him, and he took it. "Your little surprise?" Vincento's words became low and measured, while his brows knit as if presaging thunder. "Then it was you who sent that rascally friar to me in the night?" Derron let the question of the friar pass. "It was I who arranged -- this." He gestured with proprietary pride at the pendulum, and m a few words he sketched the outline of a huge lie. How he had really been here a day before the other refu gees, with friends to help him (this lie would not stand investigation, but if Derron's plan succeeded, Vincento would never want to investigate) install the pendulum -- while in his mind Derron visualized the berserker here, catlike, monkeylike, devilish, arranging mounting and cable and weight in order that: "... you see before you, Messire Vincento, a firm proof of the rotation of the globe!" There was a start in the old eyes, but no real surprise; a desperate gamble had been justified, all right. Now Vincento had become a waiting statue, mouth twisted and eyes unblinking. Derron went on: "Of course I have followed your example, distinguished sir, and that of a number of our contemporaries, in protecting my rightful claim to this discovery while keeping it secret yet a while, for my own advantage in further research. To this end have I sent anagram messages encoding the truth to distinguished persons in several parts of the world. "Though as I say, sir, I had meant to reserve the secret yet a while, I cannot stand idly by during your present difficulties." "A proof of our Robe's rotation, you say." The tone was blank, suspended. "Ah, forgive me for not exiplaining! I had hot thought it necessary -- you see, the plane of the penduI'um does not rotate, k is our globe that rotates beneath it." Derron hesitated, as if it had just occurred to him that Vincento might be getting just a little slow and senile. Then he spoke on, more slowly and distinctly. "At the poles, this device will trace daily a full circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. At the equator it will appear not to rotate at all." Mercilessly he poured out in detail his three-and-ahalfcenturies' advantage of accumulated knowledge. "Between these extremes the rate of rotation is proportional to the latitude; here, it is about ten degrees per hour. And since we are in the northern hemisphere the direction of apparent rotation is clockwise..." W ill was shouting at his master from high above: "... she be mounted free to turn any way, but there be nothing turning her!" Vincento shouted up: "Come down!" "... bit more study if 'ee wants a sketch..." "Come down!" The thick lips spat it out. Derron kept the pressure on, switching his emphasis now to remorseless generosity. "... my only wish of course now being to help you, sir, to come to your rescue. In bygone years you have accomplished very substantial things, very substantial, and you must not now be cast aside. My lance is at your disposal; I will gliadly repeat this demonstration of my discovery for the authorities inthe Holy City, so that the world may witness -- " "Enough! I have no need of helpr Vincento's tone madethe last word an obscenity. "You will not -- meddle -- in -- my -- affairs. Not in the least degree!" Before Vincento's terrible contempt and wrath, Derron found himself physically retreating, even as he realized that he had won his gamble -- his wager that the old man's pride was as monumental as his genius. Derron stood in silence as Vincento, shrinking once more under his bufdens of age and weariness and fear, turned away with a parting look of hatred. Vincento would never usethe Foucault proof; he would never believe it. It was one direction in which he would nevermore want to investigate; he would force the whole thing from his mind if he could. The smallness and jealousy that were leading him to trial and humiliation existed not only in other men, but in himself. Derron knew that Vincento at his historical trial would not only recant, he would go beyond what his judges asked or want of him and offer to wriite a new pamphlet, proving that the sun did after all move around the world of men. My only wishbeing to help you, sir. Vincento's figure dwindled to the end of the nave, and at last the door boomed shut behind him. Now even Vincento couldbe forgotten for the moment, for real victory and hope were heady things. Getting away ahead of Will's questions, Derron hurried out of the cathedral by a side door and skipped down the steep stairs toward IF the monastery. If the 'berserker had not also smashed the backup communicator hidden in his staff, he could tell the Modern world of victory. The enemy had not bothered with anything in his cell. As he came near it, an emergency summons from Operations began to throb in the bone behind his ear. B rother Saile was puffing, though he was making no effort to hurry along the narrow cattle-path that wound up and down hill through scrubby bushes and thin woods. Instead he hung back and with almost every puff of breath tried to discourage Brother Jovann's progress. "I thought -- to say a few prayers in the village -- would have been sufficient. These peasants, as you know -- are often foolish. They may have -- greatly exaggerated -- the depredations of this supposed wolf." "Then my own peasant foolishness is not likely to cause any harm," said Jovann, leading on implacably. They were deep in the wolfs supposed domain; their peasant supplicants and guides had turned back through fear a quarter of a mile earlier. "I spoke too harshly of them, may the Holy One forgive me." Saile wheezed to the top of a hilf and gathered breath for readier speech on the descent. "Now if this one beast has really caused in a few days all the death and damage they claim for it, or even half so much, it would be utter folly for us to approach it unarmed as we are. It is not that I doubt for an instant the inscrutable wisdom of Providence which can cause a fish to leap for joy after you have released it, noc do I doubt the story I once heard of the gentle little birds listening to your preaching. But a wolf, any wolf, is quite another..." Brother Jovann did not appear to be listening very closely. He had paused briefly to follow with his eyes a train of scavenger-insects which crossed the path and vanished into the brush. Then he went on, more slowly, until a similar train appeared a little further along the trail. There Brother Jovann turned, walking noisily into the brush, leading his companion toward the spot where it seemed the two lines of insects must intersect. IX S taff in hand, Derron made the best cross-country time he could, running fifty steps and walking fifty. "Odegard!" Operations had cried out. "There's another lifeline just as vital as Vincento's there with you. Or he was with you. Now he and one of the others have moved out a couple of miles. They're about to leave the safety zone. You'll have to protect them. They'll be at the berserker's mercy if it's out there waiting." And of course it would be out there, in ambush or pursuit. The attack on Vincento had been in deadly earnest, like the first punch in a good one-two. But it was the second punch that was really intended as the killer. And humanity had left itself wide open. Running fifty, walking fifty, Derron covered ground steadily along the (bearing Operations had given him. He asked: "Just who am I looking for?" And when they told him, he thought he should have guessed the name, should have been 'alerted by his first look into that gentle and loving face. I n the midst of the thicket there had been havoc. Days ago it had happened, for the tree branches that had been broken were now dead. And though insects were still busy among the wreckage of bone and gray fur on the ground, there was no 'longer much left for them to scavenge. "This was a very big wolf," said Brother Jovann, bending to pick up a piece of jawbone. The tone had been shattered by some violent blow, but this fragment still contained teeth of impressive size. "Very big, certainly," said Brother Saile, though he knew very little about wolves. He did not care to learn more and kept looking around him nervously. Jovann was musing aloud. "Now, what manner of creature can it be that deals thus with a big male wolf? Even as I in my greed have sometimes dealt with the tones of a 'little roast fowl... but no, these bones 'have not been gnawed for nourishment. Only broken and broken again, as if by some creature who is even more wantonly savage than a wolf." T he name of Brother Jovann, saint, symbol of gentleness and love meant something to Modern skeptics as well as 'believers, to both historians and laymen. Like Vincento, he had become a towering folkfigure, imperfectly understood. "We're just catching on to Joviann's practical importance," said Time Ops' voice in Derrcn's head. "Historically his lifeline goes on about fifteen years from your point, and all along the way it radiates support to other Knes. What has been described as 'good-turn-a-day stuff.' These other lines tend to reradiate life support in turn, and the process propagates up through history. Our best judgment now is that the disarmament treaty three hundred years after Jovann's death will fall through and an international nuclear war will wipe us all out in pre-Modern times if St. Jovann is terminated at your point." A girl's voice came in briskly: "A new report for Colonel Odegard." Derron asked: "Lisa?" She hesitated for just an instant; then, business first. "Colonel -- the lifeline that was described to you earlier as having an embryonic appearance is moving out of the safety z#one after the other two, at what seems an unaccountably high speed. We can give no explanation. You're to bear five degrees left, also."J. "Understand." Derron tore five degrees left, as near as he could judge. "Lisa?" "Derron, they put me on because I said I'd tend strictly to business." "You do that." He began to run IF once more, his breath coming in gasps. 'I just wish -- you were carrying my baby." There was a faint, completely feminine sound. But when Lisa's voice came back intelligibly it was all business again, with more bearings to be given. F rom the corner of his eye Brother Saile caught the movement of something coming toward them through the trees and bush; he turned, squinting under the afternoon sun, and with surprise at his own relative calm he saw that their search for a killer wolf had come to an end. Monster instead of wolf, Ierhaps, but he could not doubt it was the killer, come now to find the searchers. Silent, poisonous and deadlylooking as a silver wasp, the mansized creature came at a catlike run through the scrub forest. Brother Saile understood that he should now try to lay down his life for his friend, he should shove Brother Jovann back and rush forward himself to distract the thing. And something in Brother Saile wanted to be that heroic, but his belly and his feet had turned to lead and would not let him. He tried at least to shout a warning, but even his throat was paralyzed by fear. At last he' did manage to seize Brother Jovann by the arm and point. "Ah," said Jovann, coming out of a reverie and turning to see. A score of paces away the monster crouched on its four legs. Peasants glimpsing it might call it wolf. Shreds of gray cloth clung to it, as if it had been dressed and then had wolf-like torn itself out of the garment. Terrible and beauitifuil at once, it flowed like quicksilver two rapid strides closer to the men and then settled again into a crouching, silent statue. "In God's n-name come away!" Brother SaUe whispered, through shivering jaws. "It is no natural beast. Come away. Brother Jovann!" But Jovann only raised his hands and signed 'the horror with the wedge; he seemed to be blessing it rather than exorcising. "Brother Wolf," he said lovingly, "you do indeed look unlike any beast I have ever seen before, and I know not from what worldly parentage you may have sprung. But there is in you the spirit of life; therefore never forget that our Father above has created you, as He has created ah other creatures, according to his own plan, so we are all children of the one Father." The wolf darted forward and stopped, stepped and stopped, inched and stopped again, in a fading oscillation. In its open mouth Saile thought he saw fangs not only long and sharp, but blurring with vicious motion like the teeth of some incredible saw. At last there came forth a sound, and Saile was reminded simultaneously of ringing swordblades and of human agony. Jovann dropped to one knee, facing the monster more on a level. He embrace. The thing bounded in a blur of speed toward ihkn, then stopped as if caught by a leash. It was still six or eight paces from the kneeling man. Again it uttered sound; Saile, halffainting, seemed to hear the creak of the torture rack and the cry of the victim rise together. Jovann's voice had nothing to do with fear, but only blended sternness with its love. "Brother Wolf, you have killed and pillaged hke a wanton crimi-nal, and for that you deserve punishment! But accept instead the forgiveness of all ithe men you have wronged. Come now, here is my hand. In the name of the Hdy One, come to me and pledge that from this day on you live in peace with men. Come!" X A s Derron came up at a staggering, exhauted run, he first heard a murmur of speech and then saw the figure of Brother Saile standing motiontess. Derron then lurched to a halt, raising his staff; but Saile was not looking at him, and Derron knew now that Saile was not the berserker. What Operations had said about the embryonic lifeline and what the berserker had said in the cathedral had at last fitted together to make a wondrous kind of sense. Three steps sideways brought Derron to where he could see what Saile was gaping at. He was only in time to see the berserker-wolf take the last hesitant step of its advance. To see it raise one metal paw -- and with its steel claw-fingers gently touch the kneeling friar's extended hand. #Qo, my guess was right, it had O become a living thing," said Derron. His head rested in lisa's lap, and he looked up past her face at the park's treetops and imitation sun. "And as such, susceptible to St. Jovann's domination. To his love. There's no other way to put it." Lisa stroked his forehead. "Are you eating up the pious legends?" "Oh, there are rational explanations. The most complex and compact machine the terser kers ever built, shot up through twenty thousand years evoluntionary gradient -- something like life was bound to happen to it. Or so we say now. And Jovann and some other men have had amazing power over living things." "I looked up this particular pious legend," said Lisa. "It says that after being tamed by St. Jovann, it lived like a pet dog in the village." "That would have been the original wolf. I suppose the berserker meant all along to kill the animal and take its place during the taming episode. But tearing the real wolf into little bits was an irrational, thing to do -- if we'd known about that sooner we might have guessed. I might have guessed in the cathedral, when it babbled to me about passages between life and notlife. Or when it came to my cell in the night, for no reason valid to a machine. Anyway, Operations isn't as trusting as Jovann and his biographers. We've got the thing in a cage in present-time while the scienitisits try to decide..." Derron had to pause, for a young lady was bending over him with the IF  Novelette Illustrated by It was just a little problem of misrouted mail -- too bad it was destroying the galaxy! K lonit-#-Z-Bih slithered vtly (from his ofifice out onto the steel-decked veranda, contracting the laifter part of his long body so his last few legs could squeeze out. He cpiled himself into a spiral, letting 'his soaiey chin rest on the railing while his slitted, amber eyes roved boredly over his domain. A pair of plinch birds -- four-winged, fourlegged, pink-(feathered -- sailed around the building, saw him, slowed a little and fluted in unison: "Good morning, Director." "Mominig," he rumbled, keeping his voice down so he wouldn't turbulate the air around him. "Something up?" "No, Director. Just taking lunches to a couple of blens, One of the birds hefted the carton in its talons. "Oh," Klonit sighed. That was the hell of it. Galkbar wasn't too bad, for an uninhabited, remote planet -- though at times he'd give a foozlunk of his salary for a bake under the huge orange sun of his home world -- but nothing ever happened. It had been over a year since anyone even appeared to claim mail in person. Just stasis-parcels warping in, warping out or being held in storage; routine reports, things his Central Computer and the various workrobots could have handled without supervision. The only reason he had any live personnel at all was that certain races who were members of the Sector Customs And Mail Union had prejudices against robots. Seveiral of his toe-daiws scratched idly at joints between his bodyscaJes, while others taipped a bored little rhythm on the steel decking. He watched the two plinch birds pause in flight for a moment to tease one of the planet's huge greenand-yellow butterflies, then continue on toward Sundry Warehouse No. Six, one of the few buildings above ground. A pair of blens -- muscular, brown, hairless bipeds, apparently quite conufortable nude in Galkbar's coolish lavender sunlight -- stepped into sight from behind Warehouse Six, where the pens were that held Live Unclaimed Mail. The plinch birds fluttered down toward them. H opefully, Klonit filled his forebody with air and let his full voice roll out. "Ho, you blens Anything up?" The brown bipeds jumiped as the blast of sound hit them. Their voices came from the communication-box Klonit wore at his throat. "N-no, Director. Just inventorying the Live Mail again. There's a new litter, just bom, of those big-eared things." Klonit growled. He knew for a certainty that much of the Live Mail being held would never be claimed. What he'd like to do was turn it loose on the rising brush-covered slope, whence came the smells of ripening berries and small indigenous animal life. But regulations said it had to be held three years. A sigh rippled back along his body. He supposed he ought to order lunch and get it over with. He didn't really know, though, what he wanted to eat, nor what he'd do with the afternoon. S ome thousands of light-years from Galkbar, Barth's first manned ship to Itfars settled slowly toward the floor of a crater. The skipper. Colonel Jason Glook, sat at the control console, peering at meters and viewscreens and making little motions of his fingers over various studs. Actually, the ship was landing herself, and he was only trying to look busy. In his mind he was going over the speech he'd soon tape for radioing, when possible, to Earth. He was a rather large man, well muscled, slightly gray at the temples. His tailored uniform was as neat as his small moustache. The tight curl of his hair, and the fullness of his lips, hinted at possible Negro blood, though his irises were agategray. His skin, with its careful tan, coiild be Caucasian. Something about the shape of his eyes, though, suggested an Oriental admixture; or ipossibly Semitic. Or, he could be an American Indian. Major Sarah Tolberg, dainty and feminine, stood a few steps back of him, her dark eyes, a little wide with excitement, fixed on the viewscreens. Beside her stood Lieutenant David Lobell. His boyish blue eyes and blond good looks contrasted piquantly with her dark beauty. He squeezed back and, to hide his confusion, said, "Uh, Colonel, that dust storm's beginning to spill over the rim of the crater." "All right. Lieutenant." Glock kept his voice languid, even as he shot an unobtrusive glance at a IF viewscreen. The sandstorm couldn't really harm the ship, of course, but it might sandblast off the name and other lettering on the outside, which were only painted on. He did have his heart set on a photograph of himself in a spacesuit with the justlanded ship as a background. Nervously, he twisted dials to swivel an outside telescope. "Maybe we can find shelter. That looks like a cave in the crater wall. Let's hop over and have a look, eh?" He sent the ship skimming in that direction. "Quite solid rock over it, wouldn't you say?" David Lobel said a trifle wistfully, "Looks almost artificial, doesn't it, sir?" G lock gave Sarah Tolberg his smile-f or-J unior-Off icers-female, tfien turned a more condescending one on David. "Always the romantic, eh. Lieutenant? No; your grandfather could speculate about Mardans; but now we know better. Lifeless world and always has been. Conditions absolutely wrong, you know. And as for anything coming from beyond the Sol System... well..." He shrugged to show how ridiculous that was. "Here we go in. Man that forward spotlight, will you. Lieutenant? Raise k a little, toward the ceiling. Right. Solid rock. Mm. We'll ease in here where it narrows, nice and snug. Now we'll put her down, gently... so." He raised his head and beamed at the two of them. For an instant he felt a twinge of masculine resentment that Sarah stood so dose to David, but it passed quickly. There were plenty of women, and anyway they were really (though one wouldn't say so, in public) more trouble than they were worth. Besides, with the pair of them so wrapped up in each other, they wouldn't be competing with him for the limelight, once the ship got back to Barth. "Well. Here we are! Lieutenant, you may os well begin getting the suits in order. And, Major -- perhaps, that bottle of wine we've been saving, eh?" He smiled brightly. At that moment his face went absolutely motionless, frozen in the smile. So did everything else in the ship. The drift of electrons, in wires, stopped. The molecules of the air halted their wild rebounding. The three occupants of the ship could not know of the sudden interruption, for it was a complete Time Stasis. When it was released, every molecule, every body cell, every thought, would resume as instantly as it bad halted. But, for now, nothing within the ship, not even Time, moved. The ship itself, though, and the capsule of strange forces that surrounded it moved, in an instant, some thousands of light-years. II K lonit toyed listlessly with his dessert of candied matl paws. He lifted a morsel toward his eatingparts, then let it stop in mid-air as a 'ping' came from the corn-box at his throat. "Yes?" Klonit listens." "Ah, ahem." Central Computer's voice, with a few lifelike flaws built into it, might have belon'ged to a blen or to any of a hundred other vocalizing species. "I tihought I'd better tell you, Director, that we're going to be visited by two battlefleets within the next three hours. The Selidae and the Medanjians." Kllonit's eating-utensil fell with a clatter as a shriek exploded from him. His long body reared up. Half a dozen legs swept across the desk, knocking plates from it, as one claw jabbed frantically at a large red button. "Mayday! Mayday!" he bellowed. "All personnel to the shelters! Man the evacuation capsules! Check all power sources and emergency supplies; test air-regenerating machinery! Transfer all mail possible to the Outposts! Central, activate my Maximum Security Quarters! ni be down in a couple of -- as soon as I take care of those confidential files -- " In 'his wild darting about, he got ihimself wound around the desk so that his own forward legs scrabbled over his tailpart. He let loose a rattling series of oaths. "Great Oopulating Novae!" "Director," Central Computer said calmly, "I've already taken care of everything. Will you let me report the situation?" "Aaargh!" Klonit struggled to untangle himself; kicked haphazardly at the plates strewn on the floor. "Three hours, you say? Get someone or something up here to clean up this mess!" He snorted a couple of times and felt calmer. "All right. What's up?" "Well, Director, it didn't seem anything to ibother you about. A stasis-capsule arrived, bearing three live creatures in an unfamiliar kind of package. There was no addressee and no returnee, so I sent out routine queries to the two catalogued space societies in the sector of the capsule's origin. Those were the Selidae and the Medanjians. Neither was within fifty light-years of the origin, so it's probable there was some malfunction in the mailing. However, there's nobody else even reasonably close. But now both races have claimed the parcel." Klonit blinked, his chitinous eyelids, making an almost metallic sound. "They have? Uh, did you describe the parcel's contents?" "No more and no less than prescribed by regulations. Director. A package, arriving by Translocation, containing three bipeds, advanced enough to wear clothing and prepare their own meals from foods stocked in the package." K lonit scratched irritably at his chin. "Now, why in... Central, did you inform each that the other was also being queried?" "Of course. Regulations -- " "Idiot! Don't you know how they hate each other?" "I'm aware of that." "Well, for hydrogen's sake! Didn't you foresee what would happen? Of course they'd both claim it! Whichever one it doesn't belong to -- if it belongs to either -- will hope to steal some bit of new technology or learn about some new species the other's enslaved; don't you see? They both raise food animals, don't you know?" IF "Answering in order: no, yes and yes." Klonit snarled. "Well, one more question. Exactly where did the capsule come from?" "Point of origin. Delta five nine two log one seven five four, Upsilon two six eight log three zero one, Zeta one zero four log nine seven two. Click." "Hey! Pm not through with you!" "Oh? You said one more question. I answered it and turned my voice-circuit off." "Well, damn it, this is a complex question, with several parts. I don't remember any Translocator Station in that spot! It's out beyond either the Selidae or the Medanjians!" "Correct. The race that maintained an outpost there has not been heard from for several thousaed of your lifetimes, and it is probably extinct. However -- " "However, plinch droppings!" Klonit roared. "If the Station's still operative, why haven't you sent a drone to investigate?" "I have. Director. The planet is desolate, very low in atmosphere and without artifacts other than the Station. That is inside a natural cave, well disguised, well protected and operated on automatics. There is no sign whether some other race has just discovered it and placed this parcel in it, or whether the parcel has been there for ages, with a planetquake or something just now jarring the machinery into operation. The data -- " "Stuff the data in your memory banks. Send a platform to bring me down to wherever you've put tbe parcel. I definitely want to take a look at it." T here were peep instruments, f course; but Klonit decided also to relax the Time Stasis briefly to observe the three bipeds in action. They'd never know the difference. He 'watched them for a few moments, then quickly restored the Stasis. "Central! You complete boob! Can't you see these are civilized beings? Look how the young female and male are holding hands! Doesn't that rouse any feeling in you? Are you proposing to turn them over to barbarians like the Selidae or the Medanjians? And this -- this thing you call a package. Can't you see it's a ship -- their ship? Primitive, but a ship; suitable for voyaging within a planetary system. Answer me!" "A ship, after all, is a package, Director." "Arrgh! Huh. Well, when are those battle fleets due? Which one first?" point eight six three hours from now." "All right. Ready me a surveycapsule. I want to see this "desolate" planet you describe. I'll be back within two hours. Meanwhile, I want you to send a resume of this whole mess to the Chief Of Council. Ask him if any members have fleets close enough to get here ahead of the Selidae." "I've already done that. Director. There should be a reply before you get back." T he abandoned station was pretty much as Klonit expected, marvelous only in that it had remained in working order so long. He eased his capsule out of the cave, sensors probing ahead for danger. The sandstorm, he wrote off; but, because it interfered with vision, moved clear of it. A quick look around told him this planet was too far out from its sun and unsuitable in other ways to be the home world of the three bipeds. Maybe the next one in. Yes. There it was, to one side of the sun; an aired, blue-scatter world of about the right temperature and mass. He listened to the jumble of static and communication on its radio bands. Highly industrialized. The Selidae and the Medan ians would certainly consider it a rich plum. Now, if he could get fairly close without being detected. He used the planet's single moon for cover, avoiding various artifacts, and took up a position. Radar would see him, hut he wasn't staying long, and probably they'd write him off as some bit of debris or a malfunction. From the ship he'd examined on Galkbar, he had grasped the technology of their television. He tuned about the channels, found himself watching a play-drama in which several of the bipeds -- male -- with masks over their faces walked into a wooden building and pointed hand-weapons at other bipeds inside. There was some talk and some facial miming, then bipeds behind partitions with grill-protected windows began scooping small silvery discs from drawers and from a big thick-metal box, into little fabric bags. One biped behind the partition stealthily drew from concealment a hand-weapon of his own. One of the masked bipeds saw him, and the latter's hand-weapon jumped a little, with a terrible bang and an eruption of smoke. The biped behind the partition collapsed, clutching at his chest. Now the masked bipeds grabbed the fabric bags and ran from the building. Just outside were some larger creatures, quadruped and rather splendid looking. Each of the masked bipeds seized a quadruped, heaved himself up and bestraddled it. Klonit gaped. Then the quadrupeds were galloping loudly down the street, raising clouds of dust, bearing the masked bipeds away. Other bipeds came running from wooden buildings, with hand weapons and with longfcr weapons which they steadied against their shoulders, to shoot after the fleeing mounted bipeds. Male bipeds were shouting, and females were screaming, and the weapons made an awful din, and there was an absolute bedlam of dashing about. Klonit found himself crouched, tense, his claws scrabbling at the deck. In sudden irritation, he darted a leg out to turn off the drama, then relaxed determinedly, to calm himself. Presently be growled and reached out for control-studs. A person could forget the time, watching such childish entertainment. L ess than two hours later, back on Galkbar, he emerged from IF the survey capsule and stared round him. "Central! Why am I confined here in my Maximum Security Quarters?" "Because, Director, the Selidae arrived ahead of time. Their fleet's in orbit right now." Klonit reared up and glared at the ceiling. "I should have known they'd lie about their arrival and sneak in sooner! Did you find any Member fleets?" "No, Director. And you'd better talk to Admiral Feyooch, who's still the Selidan commander. He's threatening to annihilate us. But first, there are three messages from our Chief Of Council." "Huh? Oh. Well, all right; let's have them!" "First. Utmost confidential. Klonit, the military, political and technological situation makes it imperative you avoid antagonizing the Selidae or the Medanjian at this time. Give them whatever they demand. If necessary, evacuate Galkhar and all the mail you can and let them have the place. Second -- Director, I 'believe this second messageas sent in a different context -- Utmost confidential. All Station Directors. Interstellar situation demands our outlying Centers carry on at this time with no hint of unusual activity. An air of complete ordinariness must be preserved. No unusual leaves are to be granted; nor is there to be any unusual efflux of mail. Third -- A sound like a gulp, amplified a hundred times, came from Klonit. "Hold on a minute! Did I hear you right?" "I imagine you did. Director. Wait until you hear the third. All Station Directors. There has been too much laxity lately in the matter of misdirected mail. Too many parcels have been yielded to the wrong claimants. Steps must be taken to halt this laxity. Mail is not to be yielded to claimants without thorough proof of ownership. Be firm. Signed, Chief of Council." "Gaaak!" Klonit got seven or eight legs under the edge of his desk, preparatory to overturning it. Central said, "It may be better if your office is not mussed up. Director. I can't stall off Feyooch much longer." "Feyooch! Tell him to -- uh, no; I guess not. Better put him on before he atomizes us!" A viewscreen crackled and glowed to life. The picture showed a huge, thick-mandibled arthropod. The pincers, which were awesome enough in themselves, even to Klonit, had energy-weapons riveted to them. Klonit said weakly, "Fey-Feyooch?" First one, then the other, of the buttonlike eyes cocked at him. "Klonit? Of course it's me! Why do you ask? Who else would it be? What are you implying? Have you heard something?" "No, no. Admiral! It's just that, uh, it's been four years. I -- I'm glad to see you looking so well." "Humph. Klonit, It's a good thing you're back from whatever fool's errand you were on. I was about to come down and get that parcel of mine. Send it up here at Ill once, and we'll say no more about your illegal and highly impudent possession of it." "Uh... Klonit tried not to squirm. "Er, as a matter of fact. Admiral, it isn't, uh, here." Noting the signs of rage, he lied on hurriedly. "There, uh, seemed to be, er, some sort of stasis-inerter field around it that we aren't familiar with. The best we could dv was to get it to an outpost." Feyooch fixed him with an uncertain glance. "Stasis-inerter field? Oh. Uh, that. Yes, I suppose your miserable technology would find it hard to, uh, cope with. Just give me the location, then, and I'll..." Klonit, his eyes darting about the background of the picture, which seemed to be full of weapons-controls, said, "It's, er," and rattled off the co-ordinates of an unoccupied outpost. If he could just get rid of the Selidae before the Medanjians got here..." But it wasn't going to work. Feyoodh stared at him beadily. "Klonit, you're a miserably incompetent liar. Send that parcel up right now, and no more nonsense! You don't want to be slagged, Klonit, now do you?" "No, no. Admiral, certainly not! I swear there's nothing I want more than to see this parcel delivered to its rightful owner! I mean -- uh -- " He went silent, mouthparts working, as a second screen lit up. "Central! What -- " "Admiral Vinitassin, Director. He begs you to talk to him at once, so he won't have to launch his missiles." T he Medanjian looked like S rosy, soft-shelled egg with a firmge of arms around the top and four short legs at the bottom. The head w'as a mere excresence. But the eyes were clear and intelligent -- round and innocently blue -- and the rose bud mouth smiled beatifioally. "Oh, there you are, Klonit. I'ni so happy your computer was ab' to find you. And it's delightful to see you looking so well; I swear Tve never seen your scales shinier. I observe that you have a deplorable .infestation of vermin around your planet. I'd be delighted to eradicate it for you, but I fear it would be impossible without crisping the planet as well. Oh; and if you're expecting anyone via nornial space, warn them, will you? I have the area rather thickly mined." A sound like a rusty hacksaw ripping tin cans came from Feyooch. "Klonit, you tell that hors-d'oeuvre the smallest of my landingboats could sweep all his mines out of the way and wipe out his fleet at the same time! And I warn you again -- " Vinitassin broke in sweetly, "What debasements you permit yourself to endure, Klonit! Why don't you let one of your janitors handle such interviews? Meanwhile, I don't want to be rude, but I really must have that lost parcel of mine. A trifling thing -- not nearly worth your attention, really -- but you know how Governments are, and mine is no exception. So if you'll just tell me, privately, a spot clear of all this mildew, where you can warp it, I'll go and -- " "Klonit!" Feyooch shrieked, "If you give him that parcel. I'll --  Klonit swelled up to bellow but instead, thinking of the massed hostile weaponry around Galkbar at the moment, produced instead a thin squeal. "'Uh, gentlemen... I wonder if you'd excuse me for just the shortest moment? Urgent Special Delivery coming in. I'll be right -- " He let out a long sigh of relief as Central blanked out both screens. "Thanks! If I can just iget a minute to think." He ran around the edges of the room, his ibody almost forming a square. "Damn it... Send another message to all Members -- " "I'm sending resumes every minute, Director. There are no Member fleets within several hours. Anyway, we couldn't survive a battle nearby, you know." K lonit collapsed in a groaning heap. "I know, I know! What's Feyooch doing?" "He's forming a spearhead to come down. He says he'll wait ten minutes. Not one second more." "Oh! Oh! And Vinitassin?" "He seems to be leaking to us a part of his orders to his fleet. It involves battle tactics. Apparently, Director, he's given up hope of getting the parcel, if you don't warp it out to him. It seems he intends just to fire all his missiles in and vaporize Galkbar, the Selidan fleet and everything. Director, you're simply temporizing, you know." "Damn it! Of course I'm temporizing! I've got to -- you got us into this! Start racking your circuits, too! How much time -- God; less than seven minutes! Look, send a message to Vinitassin. Give him the co-ordinates of that empty outpost and say we'U warp his parcel there. Apologize that I'm not able to tell him so myself just now. And tell Feyooch that, uh, his parcel will be coming up through the atmosphere on gravs in a few minutes. Say I'm sorry I'm too busy to talk to him. Say I was wrong about the parcel being somewhere else; I had it confused with a different one. And dont get the two messages mixed up!" "I have that much sense, Director. If I may ask -- " "Send the messages!" "I have. I'm not confined to one set of circuits, you know. If I may ask. Director, how many minutes do you hope to gain by this temporizing? I really can't understand the sense of prolonging things, since we're going to perish in a few minutes anyway. I should think -- " Klonit lifted his forebody and shrieked, "You'ire damned right you should thinki In fact, I order you to think! You created this problem! Solve it! You're always bragging about how many circuits you have!" He ran out of breath and slumped to the floor. It wasn't any use, he knew, shoulthig at Central. The Computer didn't care; and it couldn't work miracles, anyway. He wondered if he ought to inform his personnel of their imminent doom. No, there wasn't time to evacuate them, so it was probably best to leave IF them in ignorance. Let die end come to them quickly and mercifully. M inutes dragged by while his mind circled uselessly. Finally he couldn't stand the silence. "Central!" "Yes, Director?" "What's happening?" "Oh, you wish interim reports? I'm sorry, I didn't realize. Both fleets are waiting. I'll have Feyooch's parcel ready in a few minutes." "You'll what?" "I'll have his parcel ready. Director. You ordered me to solve the problem. Oh, I apologize; I should have kept up a commentary. But I was devoting all my circuits... I'm giving him three robots." Klonit stared at the wall grill from which Central's voice came. "Robots? No. You didn't say robots, did you? My ears... "Certainly, Director. You recall those biped robots we received, but didn't ever unpack 'because you said the body shape wasn't practical? I've added a few touches to make them more convincing. I've put clothes on them, and given them a sort of food supply, in the form of energy units. Well, after all, Director, I only described the three creatures as bipeds. And I'm putting them in a standard package. There. It's finished. I'll send it up to Feyooch now. Shall I send the three real creatures to Vinitassin at the same time?" "Huh?" "I asked, sihall I send the three living bipeds and their ship to Vinitassin now too?" Klonit shook. Carefully, he said, "Send nothing for a minute. Just hold everything. One minute. Right?" "As you say. Director. Mark." Klonit let his body swell up with air, and for a good part of the minute, he simply screamed. When he ran out of breath, he gulped in more and went on screaming. He glanced at the wall timepiece, saw he had ten seconds left and screamed again. Then he lay limp, gasping. He felt much, much better. When he could talk again, he said calmly, his voice only a little unsteady, "Trust a computer to find the solution to a problem, then notknow how to apply it! No, no, NO! We're not going to give anyone those three bipeds! Do you understand? Do you understand?" T here was a pause. Then Central said calmly, "I think I do. Director. You want me to prepare yet another parcel with three more robots. I'm starting it. The same crew of blens and toolbots can finish it very quickly. Then, we'll give one to each of those two fleets out there, and well (be left over with tne original parcel, which caused all the trouble in the first place. But that's your decision. You do not wish to take the opportunity to be rid of it!" Klonit hissed, "No, I don't!" "As you say. Director. Shall I go ahead and send the first trio of robots to Feyooch?" "No. Send them to Vinitassin. And don't make anodier move; don't even think about my ordering it. Do you hear?" There was a dead silence. Then, weakly, "Send the first batch to Vinitassin, Director?" "Yes! Now! Move!" Central achieved a very lifelike sigh. "It's gone. And the second parcel's finished. I don't suppose you would let me change -- " "NO! Change nothing! Wait one minute, then start grawing the second fake parcel up to Feyooch!" "Yes, Director." More minutes went by in silence. Finally, Klonit demanded, "Well?" "Vinitassin has taken possession of his parcel. The other one is still grawing up; but Feyooch is closing in on it, and it's too late to withdraw it now. Would you tell me. Director, why you made me switch parcels like this?" Klonit sighed patiently. "It isn't a matter of switching them. Central. It's this way: the first was finished several minutes ahead of the second -- right?" "Yes, Director." "Right. Now, if Feyooch got the first parcel and tried to accelerate away, preparatory to going into Translocator Drive, Vinitassin would try to stop him; do you see? There'd be a battle, and we'd get clobbered with stray missiles. But with Vinitassin getting a parcel first -- and thinking it's the only one -- hell leave immediately, having the outer position, and leave the way open for Feyooch. Probably, he'll even gather up most of his mines. Uh, has he started yet?" "No, Director. But his fleet is gathering into a tight formation." Klonit chuckled. "Well, he won't delay long. I don't want to belittle computer thinking. Central; but you see the difference, don't you, in your way of thinking and mine?" "Well, Director, yes and no." Klonit waited. As Central didn't continue, he gradually grevv nervous. "Well, is someting wrong?" "I'm afraid so. Director. You refused to let me explain. May I do so now?" "Explain what? Of course!" CC'Thank you. You see, I tried A to make the first three robots more convincing for Feyooch by engraving some manufacturer's legend on them, in Medanjian script, rather than his own. And by the time you ordered me not to change my plan. I'd already had the todbots started engraving Selidan script on the other three, for Vinitassin. My idea was that each would think he'd captured some experimental robot of the enemy's and rush off home with it. But when you switched them..." Klonit crouched for a minute, his legs half bent, then slowly sank to the floor. "Go on... Tell me... No. Don't say any more for a while." He let his head sag to the floor. A low moan escaped him. "And now -- and now -- neither one of them will be deceived. Is that what you think?" "It seems probable. Director, since each has three robots with markings on them in his own language." Klonit crawled cringingly into a IF corner. "Oh. Why didn't I... Central, why didn't you insist... Oh. Do you think there'll be time for a last message to my family and friends?" "I think so, Director. There are no missiles coming yet." Klonit let out a long, groaning sigh. "Very well, Central. You may record this: I, Klonit... No. I'm too ashamed. I can't -- can't speak to them. Just tell them -- tell that that, at the last, Klonit was humble and died without excessive bodily exudations. Will you do that much for me? Even if it's -- it's not true?" "ril have the message ready to send, Director." Klonit lay waiting, eyes squeezed shut. He squirmed himself into as tight a knot as he could, in one corner. Presently there was a mild jar. He quivered. "Was -- was that the first missile. Central?" "No, Director. It was just a batch of routine mail I sent off." Klonit opened one eye indiignantly. "Routine mail! Here I am about to die like a worm -- I mean, all of us, all the live personnel and you, though I don't suppose you care a foozlunk -- and you send routine mail! Haven't you any sensitivity at all?" Central seemed to hesitate. Then, "I didn't want to rouse false hopes. Director. But maybe I'd better tell you that both fleets seem to be getting ready to leave and that no missiles have been launched yet." Klonit scrambled up. "No missiles? Leaving? What... How -- " Central said, "Just a moment. Director. Yes! There goes Vinitassin. He seems to be ignoring the Selidan fleet. And now, there goes Feyooch! They're vanishing,. Director! They're both under maximum acceleration! I think -- I mean, do I have your jermission. Director, to let the personnel out of the shelters?" L ater, Central was quite humble about the whole thing. "I hesitate to advance my theories. Director, in view of the demonstration we've just had of the superiority of proteinbrain instincts to computer thinking, but on the basis of data available to me, this seems probable: Feyooch's race and Vinitassin's, as well, are hotbeds of intrigue and undercover politics. When Feyooch saw those unfamiliar robots with engraving on them in his own language, he immediately feared treachery at home. Why hadn't he been informed about them, he must have speculated. Who of his race was carrying on clandestine experiments, without his knowledge? Were his superiors shunting him aside? So, after cautiously examining the robots to make sure they weren't booby-trapped, he took his fleet home as fast as he could, ready to fight. And likewise for Vinitassin. Thei'e's little doubt it worked out much better than my own clumsy plan. I feel I owe you the most abject apologies. Director, for questioning your judgment." Klonit's face-parts felt a little overwarm. "Uh, not at all, Badh of us has his place. I'll trust you to send a discreet final report to the Chief Of Council. Meaiywhile, you'd better rig me uip aikther survey capsuHe; one with a good big stasisi field. I think I'll take those three bipeds in their ship back where they came from. Don't report that yet; we'll slip it in quietly, later. No use stirring up a big fuss, eh?" IV K lonit hovered just outside the cave on Mars, pondering. He could show himself to the three bipeds right here, now, if he chose. He'd learned enough of their language to communicate easily. Or, he could take them on to Earth with him and save them the slow trip! they'd have to make otherwise. Finally, thou, he decided he'd just leave them here, in their ship, snuggled in the cave. Let them have thedr moment of triumph before they had to learn the hard facts of galactic life. He approached Barth openly this time, so their radar would be sure of him. When excited babble on the radio told him they'd spotted his capsule, he cleared his throat and began the transmission: "People of Earth. I come in friendship. I am not a representative of any of the interstellar empires or alliances; I am merely ap employee of a comparatively unimportant joint service. There are dangers... He let his voice roll on, rather proud of the way he was handling this new language. He sighed. "Tliere is much knowledge I could give you, but I am not authorizied to do so. Really, I'm overstepping my own functions by making this first contact at all. Please excuse me now. Perhaps at some time in the future I shall have the pleasure and privilege of visiting your planet. Your sun's a little coolish, but if you could prepare a large vat of boiling mud... " He realized he was degenerating into banalities. "Uh, good-bye for now." J ason Clock sipped carefully at his second glass of wine. Mustn't let himself get mellow. He turned toward the controls. "That sandstorm ought to be over by now. We'll slip out and have a peep, eh?" He lifted the ship and backed out. "External viewers. Lieutenant." "Yes, sir." David Lobell flipped switches enthusiastically, and viewscreens came on. "All clear, sir." "Righto." Clock swivelled his periscopic-viewer, looking for a good level place to set down, where the sun would be at the right angle for pictures. Sarah Tolberg said tremulously, "Be careful. Colonel." Clock gave her a brave smile. "Nothing out there. Major. Not even an ant. Only danger's that something might go wrong with the suit or the lock; or that a meteorite could hit me. Pretty small chance of that." David was looking wistfully at the viewscreens. "It does look awfully dead, sir. Are you sure we won't find any artifacts? Are you sure we're... well, alone? In the solar system at least? And hopelessly isolated from the stars?" X IF IF  Novelette Illustrated by Morrow They were the first to travel faster than light... and the first to know its deadly peril! I T he klaxon cleared its plastic throat and began to whoop. Alternate yellow and reds pulsed on the consoles wrapped like bracelets around the wrists of the captain and the navigator. The huge auxiliary screens spaced on the bulkheads of the bridge also flashed red and yellow. Captain Grettir, catapulted from his reverie, and from his chair, sitood up. The letters and numerals #G-DZ-R hung burning on a sector of each screen and spurted up from the wrist-console, spread out ibefore his eyes, then disappeared, only to rise from the wristconsole again and magnify themselves and thin into nothing. Over and over again. #G-DZ-R. The code letters indicating that the alarm originated from the corridor leading to the engine room. He turned his wrist and raised his arm to place the lower half of the console at the correct viewing and speaking distance. "#-G-DZ-R, report!" The flaming, expanding, levitating letters died out, and the long highcheekboned face of MacOool, chief engineer, appeared as a tiny image j On the sector of the console. It was 'duplicated on the bridge bulkhead screens. It rose and grew larger, shooting towards Grettir, then winking out to be followed by a second ballooning face. Also on the wrist-console's screen, behind MacCool, were Comas, a petty officer, and Grinker, a machinist's mate. Their faces did not float up because they were not in the central part of the screen. Behind them was a group of marines and an #-K cannon on a floating sled. "It's the Wellington woman," MacCool said. "She used a photer, lowpower setting, to knock out the two guards stationed at the engine-room port. Then she herded us -- me. Comas, Grinker -- out. She said sheVi shoot us if we resisted. And she welded the grille to the bulkhead so it can't be opened unless it's burned off." "I don't know why she's doing this. But she's reconnected the drive wires to a zander bridge so she can control the acceleration herself. We can't do a thing to stop her unless we go in after her." H e paused, swallowed and said, "I could send men outside and have them try to get through the engine room airlock or else cut through the hull to get her. While she was distracted by this, we could make a frontal attack down the corridor. But she says she'll shoot anybody that gets too close. We could lose some men. She means what she says." "If you cut a hole in the hull, she'd be out of air, dead in a minute," Grettir said. "She's in a spacesuit," MacCool replied. "That's why I didn't havei this area sealed off and gas flooded in." Grettir hoped his face was not betraying his shock. Hearing an exclamation from Wanig, seated near him, Grettir turned his head. He said, "How in hell did she get out of sick bay?" He realized at the same time that Wang could not answer that question. MacCool said, "I don't know, sir. Ask Doctor Wills." "Never mind that now!" Grettir stared at the sequence of values appearing on the navigator's auxiliary bulkhead-screen. The # of light speed had already climbed to #. It changed every # seconds. The # became #, then #, # and then #. And then #.I and #. Grettir forced himself to sit back down. If anything was going to happen, it would have done so by converted to pure energy. A nova, bright but very brief, would have gouted in the heavens. And the orbiting telescopes of Earth would see the flare in # lightyears. IF "What's the state of the emc clamp and acceleration-dissipaters?" Grettir said. "No strain -- yet," Wang said. "But the power drain... if it continues... # megakilowatts per # seconds, and we're just heginning." "I think," Grettir said slowly, "that we're going to find out what we intended to find out. But it isn't going to be under the carefully controlled conditions we had planned." T he Terran Space Navy experimental cruiser Sleipnir had left its base on Asgard, eighth planet of Altair (alpha Aquilae), # shipdays ago. It was under orders to make the first attempt of a manned ship to exceed the velocity of light. If its mission was successful, men could travel between Earth and the colonial planets in weeks instead of years. The entire galaxy might be opened to Earth. Within the past two weeks, the Sleipnir had made several tests at # times the velocity of light, the tests lasting up to two hours at a time. The Sleipnir was equipped with enormous motors and massive clamps, dissipaters and space-time structure expanders ( "hole-openers") required for near#ightspeeds and beyond. No ship in Terrestrial history had ever had such power or the means to handle such power. The drive itself -- the cubed amplification of energy produced by the controlled mixture of matter, antimatter and half-matter -- gave an energy that could eat its way through fhe iron core of a planet. But part of that energy had to be diverted to power the energy-mass conversion "clamp" that kept the ship from being transformed into energy itself. The "hole-opener" also required vast power. Tliis device -- officially the Space-Time Structure Expander, or Neutralizer -- "unbent" the local curvature of the universe and so furnished a "hole" through which the Sleipnir traveled. This hole nullified # per cent of the resistance the Sleipnir would normally have encountered. Thus the effects of speeds approaching and even exceeding lightspeed, would be modified, even if not entirely avoided. The Sleipnir should not contract along its length to zero nor attain infinite mass when it reached the speed of light. It contracted, and it swelled, yes, by only l#th what it should have. The ship would assume the shape of a disk -- but much more slowly than it would without its openers, clamps and dissipaters. Beyond the speed of light, who knew what would happen? It was the business of the Sleipnir to find out. But, Grettir thout, not under these conditions. Not wUly-nilly. # #Qir!" MacCool said, "Wellington O threatens to shoot anybody who comes near the engine room." He hesitated, then said, "Except you. She wants to speak to you. But she doesn't want to do it over the intercom. She insists that you come down and talk to her face to face." Grettir bit his lower lip and made a sucking sound. "Why me?" he said, but he knew why, and MacCool's expression showed that he also knew. "I'll he down in a minute. Now, isn't there any way we can connect a bypass, route a circuit around her or beyond her and get control of the drive again?" "No, sir!" "Then she's cut through the engine-room deck and gotten to the redundant circuits also?" MacCool said, "She's crazy, but she's clear-headed enough to take all precautions. She hasn't overlooked a thing." Grettir said, "Wang! What's the velocity now?" "# slpm, sir!" Grettir looked at the huge starscreen on the "forward" bulkhead of the bridge. Black except for a few glitters of white, blue, red, green, and the galaxy called XD-# that lay dead ahead. The galaxy had been the size of an orange, and it still was. He stared at the screen for perhaps a minute, then said, "Wang, am I seeing right? The red light from XD-# is shifting towards the blue, right?" "Right, sir!" "Then ,... why isn't XD-# getting bigger? We're overhauling it like a fox after a rabbit." Wang said, "I think it's getting closer, sir. But we're getting bigger." II G rettir rose from the chair. "Take over while I'm gone. Turn off the alarm; tdl the crew to continue their normal duties. If anything comes up while I'm in the engine area, notify me at once." The exec saluted. "Yes, sir!" sihp said huskily. Grettir strode off the bridge. He was aware that the officers and crewmen seated in the ring of chairs in the bridge were looking covertly at him. He stopped for a minute to light up a cigar. He was glad that his hands were not shaking, and he hoped that his expression was confident. Slowly, repressing the impulse to run, he continued across the bridge and into the jump-shaft. He stepped off backward into the shaft and nonchalantly blew out smoke while he sank out of sight of the men in the bridge. He braced himself against the quick drop and then the thrusting deceleration. He had set the controls for Dock #; the doors slid open; he walked into a corridor where a g-car and operator waited for him. Grettir climbed in, sat down and told the crewman where to drive to. Two minutes later, he was with MacCool. The chief engineer pointed down the corridor. Near its end on the floor, were two still unconscious Marines. The door to the engine room was open. The secondary door, the grille, was shut. The lights within the engine room had been turned off. Something white on the other side of the grille moved. It was Donna Wellington's face, visible through the helmet. "We can't keep this acceleration up," Grettir said. "We're already going far faster than even unmanned experimental ships have been allowed to go. There are all sorts of IF theories about what might happen to a ship at these speeds, all bad." "We've disproved several by now," MacCool said. He spoke evenly, but his forehead was sweaty and shadows hung under his eyes. MacCool continued, "I'm glad you got here, sir. She just threatened to cut the emc damp wires if you didn't show up within the next two minutes." He gestured with both hands to indicate a huge and expanding ball f light. "I'll talk to her," Grettir said. "Although I can't imagine what she wants." MacCool looked dubious. Grettir wanted to ask him what the hell he was thinking but thought better of it. He said, "Keep your men at this post. Don't even look as if you're coming after me." "And what do we do, sir, if she shoots you?" Grettir winced. "Use the cannon. And never mind hesitating if I happen to ibe in the way. Blast her! But make sure you use a ibeam short enough to get her but not long enough to touch the engines." "May I ask why we don't do that before you put your life in danger?" MacCool said. Grettir hesitated, then said, "My main responsibility is to the ship and its crew. But this woman is very sick; she doesn't realize the implications of her actions. Not fully anyway. I want to talk her out of this, if I can." H e unhooked the communicator from his belt and walked down the corridor toward the grille and the darkness behind it and the whiteness that moved. His back prickled. The men were watching him intently. God knew what they were saying, or at least thinking, about him. The whole crew had been amused for some time by Donnia Wellington's passion for him and his inability to cope with her. They had said she was mad about him, not realizing that she really was mad. They had laughed. But they were not laughing now. Even so, knowing that she was truly insane, some of them must be blaming him for this danger. Undoubtedly, they were thinking that if he had handled her differently, they would not now be so cfose to death. He stopped just one step short of the grille. Now he could see Wellington's face, a checkerboard of blacks and whites. He waited for her to speak first. A full minute passed, then she said, "Robert!" The voice, normally low-pdtched and pleasant, was now thin and strained. "Not Robert. Eric," he said into the communicator. "Captain Eric Grettir, Mrs. Wellington." There was a silence. She moved closer to the grille. Light struck one eye, which gleamed bluely. "Why do you hate me so, Robert?" she said plaintively. "You used to love me. What did I do to make you turn against me?" "I am not your husband," Grettir said. "Look at me. Can't you see that I am not Robert Wellington? I am Captain Grettir of the. Sleipnir, You must see who I really am, Mrs. Wellington. It is very imiportant." "You don't love me!" she screamed. "You are trying to get rid of me by pretending you're another man! But it won't work! I'd know you anywhere, you beast! You beast! I hate you, Robert!" Involuntarily, Grettir stepped back under the intensity of her anger. He saw her hand come up from the shadows and the flash of light on a handgun. It was too late then; she fired; a beam of whiteness dazzled him. Light was followed by darkness. Ahead, or above, there was a disk of grayness in the black. Grettir traveled slowly and spasmodically towards it, as if he had been swallowed by a whale but was being ejected tovwds the open mouth, the muscles of the Leviathan's throat working him outwards. Far behind him, deep in the bowels of the whale, Donna Wellington spoke. "Robert?" "Eric!" he shouted. "I'm EricT T he Sleipnir, barely on its way out from Asgard, dawdling at # kilometers per second, had picked up the Mayday call. It came from a spaceship midway between the #th and #th planet of Altair. Although Grettir could have ignored the call without reprimand from his superiors, he altered course, and he found a ship wrecked by a meteorite. Inside the hull was half the body of a man. And a woman in deep shock. Pvobert and Donna Wellington were second-generation Asgairdiaios, Ph.D.'s in biotatology, holding master's papers in astrogation. They had been searching for specimens of "space plankton" and "space hydras," forms of life born in the regions between Altair's outer planets. The crash, the death of her husband and the shattering sense of isolation, dissociation and hopelessness during the eighty-four hours before rescue had twist Mrs. Wellington. Perhaps twisted was the wrong word. Fragmented was a better description. From the beginning of what at first seemed recovery, she had taken a superficial resemblance of Grettir to her husband for an identity. Grettir had been gentle and kind with her at the beginning and had made frequent visits to sick bay. Later, advised by Doctor Wills, he had been severe with her. And so the unforseen result. Donna Wellington screamed behind him and, suddenly, the twilight circle ahead became bright, and he was free. He opened his eyes to see faces over him. Doctor Wills and MacCool. He was in sick bay. MacCool smiled and said, "For a moment, we thought..." "What happened?" Grettir said. Then, "I know what she did. I mean -- " "She fired full power at you," MacCool said. "But the bans of the grille absorbed most of the energy. You got just enough to crisp the skin off your face and to knock you out. Good thiag you closed your eyes in time." IF Grettir sat up. He felt his face; it was covered with a greasy ointmenit, pain-deadenmg and skingrowing resec, "I got a hell of a (headache." Doctor Wills said, "It'll be gone in a minute." "What's the situation?" Grettir said. "How'd you get me away from her?"MacCool said, "I had to do it, Captain. Otherwise, she'd have taken another shot at you. The cannon blasted what was left of the grille. Mrs. Wellington -- " "She's dead?" "Yes. But the cannon didn't get her. Strange. She took her suit off, stripped to the skin. Then she went out through the airlock in the engine room. Naked, as if she meant to be the bride of Death. We almost got caught in the outrush of air, since she fixed the controls so that the inner port remained open. It was dose, but we got the port shut in time." Grettir said, "I... never mind. Any damage to the engine room?" "No. And the wires are reconnected for normal operation. Only -- " "Only what?" MacCool's face was so long he looked like a frightened bloodhound. "Just before I reconnected the wires, a funny... peculiar... thing happeni. The whole ship, and everything inside the ship, went through a sort of distortion. Wavy, as if we'd all become wax and were dripping. Or flags flapping in a wind. The bridge reports that the fore of the ship seemed to expand like a balloon, then became ripply, and the entire effect passed through the ship. We all got nauseated while the waviness lasted." There was silence, but their expressiions indicated that there was more to be said. "Well?" MacCool and Wills looked at each other. MacCool swallowed and said, "Captain, we don't know where in hell we are!" Ill O n the bridge, Grettir examined wcirHb kis. Space everywhere was filled wiith a light as gray and as dull as that of a false dawn on Earth. In the gray igjow, at a distance as yet undetermined, were a number of spheres. They looked small, but if they were as large as the one immediately aft of the Sleipnir, they were huge. The sphere behind them, estimated to ibe at a distance of fifty kilometers, was about the size of Earth's moon, relative to the ship. Its surface was as smooth and as igray as a ball of lead. Dari spoke a hinary code into her wrist-console, and the sphere on the starscreen seemed to shoot towards them. It filled the screen until Dari changed the line-of-sight. They were looking at about # degrees of arc of the limb of the sphere. "There it is!" Dari said. A small object floated around the edge of the sphere and seemed to shoot towards them. She magnified it, and it became a small gray sphere. IF Special Christmas Gift Rates A # Issues  # B # Issues # ITjSCEAfCE C # Issues  # D # Issues # Add #)# for each (# Issues) for foreign subscription  F # lssnsifEaiii#-#Sln#II Add #)# for each (# Issues) for foreign subscription Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions to be sent in accordance with the offers indicated in each case below: D  enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the U. S. Give the gift you would like to receive Permit No. # Sec. #, P.L.R. New Yorlc,N.Y. No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States "It orbits round tihe big one," sbe said. Dari paused, then said, "We -- the ship -- came out of that small sphere. Out of iit. Through its skin." "You mean we had been inside it?" Grettir said. "And now we're outside it?" "Yes, sir! Exactly!" She gasped and said, "Oh, oh -- sir!" Around the large sphere, slightly above the plane of the orbit of the small sphere but within its sweep in lan inner orbit, sped another object. At least fifty times as large as the small globe, it caught up with the globe, and the two disappeared together around the curve of the primary. "Wellington's body!" Grettir said. He turned away from the screen, took one step, and turned around again. "It's not right! She should be trailing along behind us or at least parallel with us, maybe shooting off at an angle but still moving in our direction. "But she's been grabbed by the big sphere! She's in orbit! And her size; Gargantuan! It doesn't make sense! It shouldn't be!" "Nothing should," Wang said. 'Take us back," Grettir said. "Establish an orbit around the primary, on the same plane as the secondary but further out, approximately a kilometer and a half from it." Dari's expression said, "Then what?" Grettir wondered if she had the same thought as he. The faces of the others on the bridge were doubtful. The fear was covered but leaking out. He could smell the rotten bubbles. Had they guessed, too? "Whiat attraction does the primary have on the ship?" he said to Wang. "No detectable influience whatsoever, sir. The Sleipnir seems to have a neutral charge, neither positive nor negative in relation to any of the spheres. Or to Wellington's... body." Grettir was slightly relieved. His thoughts had been so wild that he had not been able to consider them as anything but hysterical fantasies. But Wangi's answer showed that Grettir's idea was also his. Instead of replying in tenns of gravitational force, he had talked as if the ship were a subatomic particle. But if the ship was not aiffected by the primary, why had Wellington's corpse been attracted by the primary? "Our velocity in relation to the primairy?" Grettir said. "We cut off the acceleration as soon as the wires were reconnected." Wang said. This was immediately after we came out into this... this space. We didn't apply any retrodrive. Our velocity, as indicated by power consumption, is ten megaparsecs per minute. That is," he added after a pause, "what the instruments show. But our radar, which should be totally ineffective at this velocity, indicates # kilometers per minute, relative to the big sphere." Wang leaned back in his chair as if he expected Grettir to explode into incredulity. Grettir lit up another cigar. This time, his hands shook. He blew out a big puff of smoke amd said, "Obviously, we're opeiraifemig under doffenenit quote laws unquote out here Wang sighed softly. "So you think so, too, Oaptain? Yes, dibrent laws. Which means that every time we make a move tihrough this space, we can't know what the result will be. May I ask what you plan to do, sir?" B y this question, which Wang would never have dared to voice before, though he had doubtless often thought it, Grettir knew that the navigator shared his anxiety. Beneath that apparently easy manner and soft voice was a pain just beneath the navel. The umbilical had been ripped out; Wang was hurting and bleeding inside. Was he, too, beglimmg to float away in a gray void? Bereft as no man had even been bereft? It takes a special type of man or woman to lose himself from Earth or his native planet, to go out among the stiars so far that the natal sun is not even a faint igjimmer. It also takes special conditioning for the special type of m'an. He has to believe, in the deepest part of his unconscious, that his ship is a piece of Mother Earth. He has to believe; otherwise, he goes to pieces. can be done. Hundreds do it. But nothing had prepared even these farfarers for absolute divorce from the universe itself. Grettir ached with the dread of the void. The void was coiling up inside him, a gray serpent, a slither of nothingness. Coiling. And what would happen when it uncoiled? And what would happen to the crew when they were informed -- as they must ibe -- of the utter dissociation? There was only one way to keep their minds from slipping their moorings. They must believe that they could get back into the world. Just as he must believe it. "I'll play it by ear," Grettir said. "What? Sir?" "Play it by ear!" Grettir said more harshly than he had intended. "I was merdy answering your question. Have you forgotten you asked me what I meant to do?" "Oh, no, sir," Wang said. "I was just thinking..." "Keep your mind on the job," Grettir said. He tdd Iarl he would take over. He spoke the code to rising-falling sound went into every room of the Sleipnir, and all screens flashed a black-and-green checked pattern. Then the warnings, visual and audible, died out, and Ihe captain spoke. He talked for two minutes. The bridgemen looked as if the lights had been turned off in their brains. It was almost impossible to grasp the concept of their being outside their universe. As difficult was thinking of their unimaginably vast native cosmos as only an "electron" orbiting around the nucleus of an "atom." If what the captain said was true (how could it be?), the ship was in the space between the superatoms of a supermoleoule of a superuniverse. Even though they knew that the Sleipnir had ballooned under the IF effect of nearly # times the speed of light, they could not wrap the fingers of their minds around the concept. It turned to smoke and drifted away. I t took ten minutes, ship's time, to turn and to complete the maneuvers which placed the Sleipnir in an orbit parallel to but outside the secondary, or, as Grettir thought of it, "our universe." He gave his chair back to Dad and paced back and forth across the bridge while he watched the starscreen. If they were experiencing the sundering, the cutting-off, they were keeping it under control. They had been told by their captain that they were going back in, not that they would make a try at re-entry. They had been through much with him, and he had never failed them. With this trust, they could endure the agony of dissolution. As the Sleipnir established itself parallel to the secondary, Wellington's body curved around the primary again and began to pass the small sphere and ship. The arms of the mountainous body were extended stiffly to both sides, and her legs spread out. In the gray light, her skin was bluish-black from the ruptured veins and arteries bdow the skin. Her red hair, coiled in a Psyche knot, looked black. Her eyes, each of which was larger than the bridge of the Sleipnir, were open, bulging clots of black blood. Her lips were pulled back in a grimace, the teeth like a soot-streaked portcullis. Cartwheeling, she passed the sphere and the ship. Wang reported that there were three "shadows" on the surface of the primary. Those were keeping pace with the secondary, the corpse and the ship. Magnified on the bridge-bulkhead screen, each "shadow" was the silhouette of one of the three orbiting bodies. The shadows were only about one shade darker than the surface and were caused iby a shifting pucker in the primary skin. The surface protruded along the edges of the shadows and formed a shallow depression within the edges. If the shadow of the Sleipnir was a true indication of the shape of the vessel, the Sleipnir had lost its needle ape and was a spindle, fat at both ends and narrow-waisted. When Wellington's corpse passed by the small sphere and the ship, her sibadow or "print" reversed itself in shape. Where the head of the shadow should have been, the feet now were and vice versa. She disappeared around the curve of the primary and, on returning on the other side, her shadow had again become a "true" reflection. It .remained so until she passed the secondary, after which the shadow once more reversed itself. Grettir had been informed that there seemed to be absolutely no matter in the space outside the spheres. There was not one detectaible atom or particle. Moreover, despite the lack of 'any radiation, the temperature of the hull, and ten meters beyond the hull, was a fluctuating # plus-or-minus # F. IV T hree orbits later, Grettir knew that the ship had diminished greatly in size. Or else the small sphere had expanded. Or both changes occurred. Moreover, on the visual screen, the secondary had lost its spherical shape and become a fat disk during the first circling of the ship to establish its orbit. Grettir was puzzling over this and thinking of calling Van Voorden, the physicist chief, when Wellington's corpse came around the primary again. The body caught up with the other satellites, and for a moment the primary, secondary, and the Sleipnir were in a line, strung on an invisible cord. Suddenly, the secondary and the corpse jumped toward each other. They ceased their motion when within a quarter kilometer of each other. Tlie secondary regained its globular form as soon as it had attained its new orbit. Wellington's arms and legs, during this change in position, moved in as if she had come to life. Her arms folded themselves across her breasts, and her legs drew up so that her thighs were against her belly. Grettir called Van Voorden. The physicist said, "Out here," the cabin boy -- if we had one -- knows as much as I do about what's going on or what to expect. The data, such as they are, are too inadequate, too confusing. I can only suggest that there was an interchange of energy between Wellington and the secondary." "A quantum jump?" Grettir said. "If that's so, why didn't the ship experience a loss or gain?" Dari said, "Pardon, sir. But it did. There was a loss of # megakilowatts in # second. " Van Voorden said, "The Sleipnir may have decreased in relative size because of decrease in velocity. Or maybe velocity had nothing to do with it or only partially, anyway. Maybe the change in spatial interrelationships among bodies causes other changes. In shape, size, energy transfer and so forth. I don't know. Tell me, how big is the woman -- corpse -- relative to the ship now?" "The radar measurements say she's eighty-three times as large. She increased. Or we've decreased." Van Voor den's eyes grew even larger. Grettir thanked him and cut him off. He ordered the Sleipnir to be put in exactly the same orbit as the secondary but ten dekameters ahead of it. Van Voorden called back. "The jump happened when we were in line with the other three bodies. Maybe the Sleipnir's is some sort of geometrical catalyst under certain conditions. That's only an analogy, of course." Wang verbally fed the order into the computer-interfact, part of his wrist-console. The Sleipnir was soon racing ahead of the sphere. Radar reported that the ship and secondary were now approximately equal in size. The corpse, coming around the primary again, was still the same relative size as before. Grettir ordered the vessel turned around so that the nose would be IF facing the sphere. This accomplished, he had the velocity xeduoed. The retrodrive ibraked (them while the lateral thrusts readjusted forces to keep the ship in the same oihit. Since the primary had no attraction for the Sleipnir, the ship had to remain in orbit with a constant rebalancing of thrusts. The sphere, now ballooning, inched towards the ship. "Radar indicates we're doing # dekameters per second relative to the primary," Wang said. "Power drain indicates we're making # times the speed of light. That, by the way, is not proportionate to what we were making when we left our world." "More (bralking," Grettir said. "Cut it down to # dm." The sphere swelled, filled the screen, and Grettir involuntarily braced himself for the impact, even though he was so far from expecting one that he had not strapped himself into a chair. There had been none when the ship had broken through the "skin" of the universe. Grettir had been told of the distorting in the ship when it had left the universe and so was not entirely surprised. Nevertheless, he could not help being both frightened and bewildered when the front part of the bridge abruptly swelled and then rippled. Screen, bulkheads, deck and crew waved as if they were cloth in a strong wind. Grettir felt as if he were being folded into a thousand different angles ait the same time. T lien Wang cried out, and the others repeated his cry. Wang rose from his seat and put his hands out before him. Gretdr, standing behind and to one side of him, was frozen as he saw dozens of Iktle objects, firefly-size, burning brightly, slip through the starscreen and bulkhead and drift towards him. He came out of his paralysis in time to dodge one tiny whiteiy glowing ball. But another struck his forehead, causing him to yelp. A score of the bodies passed by him. Some were white; some blue; some green; one was topaz. They were at all levels, above his head, even with his waist, one almost touching the deck. He crouched down to let two pass over him, and as he did so, he saw Nagy, the communications officer, bent over and vomiting. The stuff sprayed out of his mouth and caught a little glow in-it and snuffed it out in a burst of smoke. Then the forepart of the bridge had reasserted its solidity and constancy of shape. There were no more burning objects coming tihrou. Grettir turned to sec the aift bulkheads of the hridge quivering in the wake of the wave. And they, too, became normal. Grettir shout the "override" code so that he could take control from Wang, who was screaming with pain. He directed the ship to change its course to an "upward vertical" direction. There was no "upward" sensation, because the artificial gHfield within the ship readjusted. Suddenly, the forward part of the bridge became distorted again, and the waves reached through the fabric of the ship and the crew. The starscreen, which had been showing nothing but the blackness of space, speckled by a few stars, now displayed the great igray sphere in one corner and the crepuscular light. Grettir, fighting the pain in his forehead and the oausea, gave another command. There was a delay of possibly thirty seconds, and then the Sleipnir began the turn that would take it back into a parallel orbit with the secondary. Grettir, realizing what was hapening shortly after being burned, had taken the Sleipnir back out of the universe. He put in a call for corpsmen and Doctor Wills and then helped Wang from his chair. There was an odor of burned flesh and hair in the bridge which the air-conditioning system had not as yet removed. Wang's face and hands were burned in five or six places, and part of his long coarse black hair on the righf side of his head was bumed. ' Three corpsmen and Wills ran into the bridge. Wills started to apply a pseudoprotein jelly on Grettir's forehead, but Grettir told him to take care of Wang first. Wills worked swiftly and then, after spreading the jelly over Wang's burns and placing a false-skin bandage over the bums, treated the captain. As soon as the jelly was placed on his forehead, Grettir felt the pain dissolve. "Third degree," Wills said. "It's lucky those things -- whatever they are -- weren't larger." Grettir picked up his cigar, which he had dropped on the deck when he had first seen the objects racing towards him. The cigar was still burning. Near it lay a coal, swiftly blackening. He picked it up gingerly. It felt warm but could be held without too much discomfort. Grettir extended his hand, palm up, so that the doctor could see the speck of black matter in it. It was even smaller than when k had floated into the bridge through the momentarily "opened" interstices of the molecules composing the hull and bulkheads. "This is a galaxy," he whispered. D oc Wills did not understand. "A galaxy of our universe," Grettir added. Doc Wills paled, and he gulped loudly. "You mean... ?" Gritter nodded. Wills said, "I hope... not our... Earth's... Galaxy!" "I doubt it," Grettir said. "We were onthe edge of the star fields farthest out, that is, the closest to the -- skin? -- of our universe. But if we had kept on going... " hence inhabited, planets, were in that little ball of fire, now cool and ings and an ummaginable number of animals had died when their world collided with Grettir's forehead. Wang, informed of the true cause of his bums, became ill again. Grettir ordered him to sick bay and replaced him with Gomez. Van Voorden entered the bridge. He said, "I suppose our main objective has to be our re-entry. But why couldn't IF we make an attempt to penetrate the primary, the nucleus? Do you realize what an astounding... ?" Grettir interrupted. "I realize. But our fuel supply is low, very low. If -- I mean, when we get back through the 'skin,' we'll have a long way to go before we can return to Base. Maybe too long. I don't dare exceed a certain speed during reentry (because of our size. It would be too dangerous... I don't want to wipe out any more galaxies. God knows the psychological problems we are going to have when the guilt really hits. Right now, we're numbed. No! We're not going to do any exploring!" '"But there may be no future investigations permitted!" Van Voorden said. "There's too much danger to the universe itself to allow any more research by ships like ours!" "Exactly," Grettir said. "I sympathize with your desire to do scientific research. But the safety of the ship and crew comes first. Besides, I think that if I were to order an exploration, I'd have mutiny on my hands. And I couldn't blame my men. Tell me. Van Voorden, don't you feel a sense of... dissociation?" Van Voorden nodded and said, is so much... " "So much to find out," Orettir said. "Agreed. But the authorities will have to determine if that is to be done." Grettir dismissed him. Van Voorden marched off with a straight back and an angry set to his shoulders and neck. But he did not give the impression of a powerful anger. He was, Grettir thought, secretly relieved at the captain's decision. Van Voorden had miade his protest for Science's sake. But as a human being, Van Voorden must want very much to get "home." V A t the end of the ordered maneuver, the Sleipnir was in the same orbit as the universe but twenty kilometers ahead and again pointed toward it. Since there was no attraction between ship and primary, the Sleipnir had to use power to maintain the orbit; a delicate readjustmdnt of lateral thrust was constantly required. Grettir ordered braking applied. The sphere expanded on the starscreen, and then there was only a gray surface displayed. To the viewers the surface did not seem to spin, but radar 'had determined that the globe completed a revolution on its polar axis once every # seconds. Grettir did not like to think of the implications of this. Van Voorden undoubtedly had received the report, but he had made no move to notify the captain. Perhaps, like Grettir, he believed that the fewer who thought about it, the better. The mockup screen showed, in silhouette form, the relative sizes of the approaching spheres and the ship. The basketball was the universe; the toothpick, the Sleipnir. Grettir hoped that this reduction would be enough to avoid running into any more galaxies. Immediately after the vessel penetrated the "skin," the Sleipnir would be again braked, thus further diminishing it. There should be plenty of distance between the skin and the edge of the closest star fields. "Here we go," Grettir said, watching the screen which indicated in meters the gap between ship and sphere. Again he involuntarily braced himself. There was a rumble, a groan. The deck slanted upwards, then rolled to port. Grettir was hurled to the deck, spun over and over and brought up with stunning impact against a bulkhead. He was in a daze for a moment, and by the time he had recovered, the ship had reasserted its proper attitude. Gomez bad placed the ship into "level" again. He had a habit of strapping himself into the navigator's chair although regulations did not require it unless the captain ordered it. Grettir asked for a report on any damage and, while waiting for it, called Van Voorden. The physicist was Weeding from a cut on his forehead. "Obviously," he said, "it requires a certain force to penetrate the outer covering or energy shield or whiaitever it is that encloses the universe. We didn't have it. So -- " "Presents quite a problem," Grettir said. "If we go fast enough to rip through, we're too large and may destroy entire galaxies. If we go too slow, we can't get through." He paused, then said, "I can think of only one method. But I'm ignorant of the consequences, which might be disastrous. Not for us but for the universe. I'm not sure I should even take such a chance." He was silent so long that Van Voorden could not restrain himself. "WeU?" "Do you think that if we could make a hole in the skin, the rupture might result in some sort o-f collapse or cosmic disturbance?" "You want to beam a hole in the skin?" Van Voorden said slowly. His skin was pale, but it had been that color before Grettir asked him the question. Grettir wondered if Van Voorden was beginning to crumble under the "dissociation." "Never mind," Grettir said. "I shouldn't have asked you. You can't know what effects would be any more than anyone else. I apologize. I must have been trying to make you share some of the blame if anything went wrong. Forget it." V an Voorden stared, and he was still looking blank when Grettir cut off his image. He paced back and forth, once stepping over a tiny black object on the deck and then grimacing when he realized that creatures. All cold and dead. And if he experimented further in trying to get back into the native cosmos, then what? A collapsing universe. But the Sleipnir had passed through the "skin" twice, and the rupture had not seemed to cause barm. The surface of the sphere was smooth and unbroken. It must be self-regulating and self-repairing. Grettir stopped pacing and said aloud, "We came through the skin IF without harm to it. So we're going to toy the beam!" Nobody answered him, but the look on eir faces was evidence of their relief. Fifteen minutes later, the Sleipnir was just ahead of the sphere and facing it. After an unvarying speed and distance from the sphere had been maintained for several minutes, laser beams measured the exact length between the tip of the cannon and the surface of the globe. The chief gunnery officer, Abdul White Eagle, set one of the fore cannons. Grettir delayed only a few seconds in giving the next order. He clenched his teeth so hard he almost hit the dgar in two, groaned slightly, then said, "Fire!" Dari transmitted the command. The beam shot out, touched the skin and vanished. The starscreen showed a black hole in the gray surface at the equator of the sphere. The hole moved away and then was gone around the curve of the sphere. Exactly # seconds later, the hole was in its original position. It was shrinking. By the time four rotations were completed, the hole had closed in on itself. Grettir sighed and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Dari reported that the hole would be big enough for the ship to get through by the second time it came around. After that, it would be too small. "We'll go through during the second rotation," Grettir said. "Set up the compigator for an automatic entry; tie the cannon in with the compigator. There shouldn't he any piroblem. If the hole shrinks too fast, we'll enlarge it with the cannon." He heard Daii say, "Operation begun, sir!" as Gomez spoke into his console. The white 'beam spurted out in a cone, flicked against the "shell" or "skin" and disappeared. A circle of blackness three times the diameter of the ship came into being and then moved to one side of the screen. Immediately, under the control of the compigator, the retrodrive of the Sleipnir went into action. The sphere loomed; a gray wall filled the starscreen. Then the edge of the hole came into view, and a blackness spread over the screen. "We're going to make it," Grettir thought. "The compigator can't make a mistake." He looked around him. The bridgemen were strapped to their chairs now. Most of the faces were set. they were well disciplined and brave. But if they felt as he did -- they must -- they were shoving back a scream far down in them. They could not endure this "'homesickness" much longer. And after they got through, were back in the womb, he would have to permit them a most unmilitary behavior. They would laugh, weep, shout whoop. And so would he. The nose of the Sleipnir passed through the hole. Now, if anything went wrong, the fore cannon could not be used. But it was impossible that... T he klaxon whooped. Dorl screamed, "Oh, my God! Something's wrong! The hole's shrinking too fast!" Grettir roared, "Double the speed! No! Halve it!" Increasing the forward speed meant a swelling in size of the Sleipnir but a contraction of the longitudinal axis and a lengthening of the lateral. The Sleipnir would get through the hole faster, but it would also narrow the gap between its hull and the edges of the hole. Halving the speed, on the other hand, though it would make the ship smaller in relation to the hole, would also make the distance to be traversed greater. This might mean that the edges would still hit the ship. Actually, Grettir did not know what order should he given or if any order would have an effect upon their chance to escape. He could only do what seemed best. The grayness spread out from the perimeter of the starscreen. There was a screech of severed plastic running through the ship, quivering the bulkheads and decks, a sudden push forward of the crew as they felt the inertia, then a release as the almost instantaneous readjustment of the internal g-field canceled the external effects. Everybody in the bridge yelled. Grettir forced himself to cut off his shout. He watched the starscreen. They were out in the gray again. The huge sphere shot across the screen. In the corner was the secondary and then a glimpse of a giant blueblack foot. More grayness. A whirl of other great spheres in the distance. The primary again. The secondary. Wellington's hand, like a malformed squid of the void. When Grettir saw the corpse again, he knew that the ship had been deflected away from the sphere and was heading towards the corpse. He did not, however, expect a collision. The orbital velocity of the dead woman was greater than that of the secondary or of the Sleipnir. Gritter, calling for a damage report, heard what he had expected. The nose of the ship had been sheared off. Bearing # crewman with it, it was now inside the "universe," heading toward a home it would never reach. The passageways leading to the cut-off part had been automatically sealed, of course, so that there was no danger of losing air. But the retrodrives had also been sliced off. The Sleipnir could drive forward but could not brake' itself unless it was first turned around to present its aft to the direction of motion. VI G rettir gave the command to stabilize the ship first, then to reverse it. MacCool replied from the engine room that neither maneuver was, at the moment, possible. The collision and the shearing had caused malfunctions in the control circuits. He did not know What the trouble was, but the electronic trouble-scanner was searching through the circuits. A moment later, he called back to say that the device was itself not operating properly and that the troubleshooting would have to be done by his men until the device had been repaired. MacCool was disturb. He could not account for the breakdown beIF itei telii W-.-'.".iiS-, cause, theoretically, there should have 'been none. Even the impact and loss of the fore should not have resulted in loss of circuit operation. Grettir told him to do what he could. Meanwhile, the ship was tumbling and was obviously catching up with the vast corpse. There had been another inexplainable interchange of energy, position and momentum, and the Sleipnir and Mrs. Wellington were going to collide. Grettir unstrapped himself and began walking back and forth across the bridge. Even though the ship was cartwheeling, the internal gfield neutralized the effect for the crew. The vessel seemed level and stable unless the starscreen was looked at. When Grettir watched the screen, he felt slightly queasy because he was, at times, standing upside down in relation to the corpse. Grettir asked for a computation of when the collision would take place and of what part of the body the Sleipnir would strike. It might make a difference whether it struck a soft or hard part. The difference would not result in damage to the ship, but it would affect the angle and velocity of the rebound path. If the circuits wre repaired before the convergence, or just after, Grettir would have to know what action to take. Wang replied that he had already asked the compigator for an estimate of the area of collision if conditions femained as they were. Even as he spoke, a coded card issued from a slot in the bulkhead. Wang read it, handed it to Grettir. Grettir said, "At any other time, I'd laugh. So we will return -- literally -- to the womb." The card had also indicated that, the nearer the ship got to Wellington, the slower was its velocity. Moreover, the relative size of the ihip, as reported by radar, was decreasing in direct proportion to its proximity to the body. Gomez said, "I think we've come under the influence of that... woman, as if she'd Income a planet and had captured a satellite. Us. She doesn't have any gravitational attraction or any charge in relation to us. But -- " "But there are other factors," Grettir said to her. "Maybe they are spatial relations, which, in this 'space, may be the equivalent of gravity." T he Sleipnir was now so close that the body entirely fUled the' starscreen when the ship was pointed towards it. First, the enormous head came into view. The blood-clotted and bulging eyes stared at them, the nose slid by like a Brobdingnagian guillotine; the mouth grinned at them as if it were to enjoy gulping them down. Then the nedc, a diorite column left exposed by the erosion of softer rock; the cleavage of the blackened Himalayan breasts; the naval, the eye of a hurricane. Then she went out of sight, and the secondary and primary and the gray-shrouded giants far off whiled across the screen. Grettir used the All-Stations to tell the nonbridge personnel what IF was happening. "As soon as MacCool locates the itrouble, we will be on our way out. We have plenty of power left, enough to blast our way out of a hundred corpses. Sit tight. Don't worry. It's just a matter of time." He spoke with a cheerfulness he did not feel, although he had not lied to them. Nor did he expect any reaction, positive or negative. They must be as numb as he. Their minds, their entire nervous systems, were boggling. Another card shot out from the bulkhead-slot, a corrected impact prediction. Because of the continuing decrease in size of the vessel, it would strike the corpse almost dead-center in the naval. A minute later, another card predicted impact near the coccyx. A third card revised that to collision with the top of the head. A fourth changed that to a strike on the lower part on the front of the right leg. Grettir called Van Voorden again. The physicist's face shot up from the surface of Grettir's wrist-console but was stationary on the auxiliary bulkhead-screen. This gave a larger view and s-howed Van Voorden looking over his wrist-console at a screen on his cabin-bulkhead. It offered the latest impact report in large burning letters. "Like the handwriting on the wall in the days of King Belshazzar," Van Voorden said. "And I am a Daniel come to judgment. So we're going to hit her leg, heh, Many, many tickle up her shin. Hee, hee!" Grettir stared uncomprehendingly at him, then cut him off. A few seconds later, he understood Van Voorden's pun. He did not wonder at the man's levity at a moment so grave. It was a means of relieving his deep anxiety and bewilderment. It might also mean that he was already cracking up, since it was out of character with him. But Grettir could do nothing for him at that moment. As the Sleipnir neared the corpse, it continued to shrink. However, the dwindling was not at a steady rate nor could the times of shrinkage be predicted. It operated in spurts of from two to thirty seconds duration at irregular intervals. And then, as the #th card issued from the slot, it became evident that, unless some new factor entered, the Sleipnir would spin into the gaping mouth, yjlile the head rotated "downward," the ship would pass through the great space between the lips. A nd so it was. On the starscreen, the lower lip, a massive ridge, wrinkled with mountains and pitted with valleys, appeared. Flecks of lipstick floated by, black-red Hawaiis. A tooth like a jagged skyscraper dropped out of sight. The Sleipnir settled slowly into the darkness. The walls shot away and upwards. The blackness outside knotted. Only a part of the gray "sky" was visible during that point of the cartwheel when the fore part of the starscreen was directed upwards. Then the opening became a thread of gray, a strand, and was gone. Strangely -- or was it so odd? -- the officers and crew lost their feeling of dissociation. Grettir's stomach expanded with relief; the dreadful fragmenting was gone. He now felt as if something had been attached, or reattached, to his naval. Rubb, the psychology officer, reported that he had taken a survey of one out of fifty of the crew, and each described similar sensations. Despite this, the personnel were free of only one anxiety and were far from being out of danger. The temperature had been slowly mounting ever since the ship had been spun off the secondary and had headed towards the corpse. The power system and air-conditioning had the temperature of the hull had gone upwards at a geometric progression, and the outer hull was now # K. There was no danger of it melting as yet; it could resist up to # K. The air-conditioning demanded more and more power, and after thirty minutes ship's time, Grettir had had to let the internal temperature rise to # F to ease the load. Grettir ordered everybody into spacesuits, which could keep the wearers at a comfortable temperature. Just as the order was carried out, MacCool reported that he had located the source of maTfunction. "The Wellington woman did it!" he shouted. "She sure took care of us! She inserted a monolith subparticle switch in the circuits; the switch had a timer which operated the switch after a certain time had elapsed. It was only coincidence (hat the circuits went blank right after we failed to get back into our world!" vn # # Qo she wanted to be certain, that we'd ibe wrecked if she was frustrated in her attempts in the engme room," Grettir said, "You'd better continue the search for other microswitches or sabotage devices." MacCool s face was long. "We're ready to operate now only... hell! We can't spare any power now because we need all we can get to keep the temperature down. I can spare enough to cancel the tumble. But that's all." "Forget it for now," Grettir said. He had contacted Van Voorden, who seemed to have recovered. He confirmed the captain's theory about the rise in temperature. It was the rapid contraction of the ship that was causing the emission of heat. "How is this contraction possible?" Grettir said. "Are the atoms of the ship, and of our bodies, coming closer together? If so, what happens when they come into contact with each other? "We've already passed that point of diminishment," Van Voorden said. "I'd say that our own atoms are shrinking also." "But that's not possible," Grettir replied. Then, "forget about that remark. What is possible? Whatever happens is possible." Grettir cut him off and strode back and forth and wished that he could smoke a cigar. He had intended to talk about what the SkipIF nir would find if it had managed to break back into its native universe. It seemed to Grettir that the universe would have changed so much that no one aboard the ship would recognize it. Every time the secondary -- the universe -- completed a revopassed. The Earth's sun may have become a lightless clot in space or even have disappeared altogether. Man, who might have survived on other planets, would no longer be homo sapiens. Moreover, when the Sleipnir attained a supercosmic mass on its way out of the universe, it may have disastrously affected the other masses in the universe. Yet none of these events may have occurred. It was possible that time inside that sphere was absolutely independent of time outside it. The notion was not so fantastic. God Almighty! Less than seventy minutes ago, Donna Wellington had ibeen inside the ship. Now the ship was inside her. And when the electrons and the nuclei of the atoms composing the ship and the crew came into contact, what then? Explosion? Or were the elements made up of divisible subelements, and collapse would go on towards the inner infinity? He thought of the #th-century stories of a man shrinking until the molecules became clusters of suns and the nuclei were the suns and the electrons were the planets. Eventually, the hero found himself on an electronlanet with atmosphere, seas, rivers, plains, mountains, trees, animals and aboriginal sentients. These stories were only fantasies. Atomic matter was composed of wavicles, stuff describable in terms of both waves and particles. The parahomun cuius hero would be in a cosmos as bewildering as that encountered by the aew of the Sleipnir on breaking into the extra-universe space. That fantasy galloping across the sky of his mind, swift as the original Sleipnir, eight-legged horse of All-Father Odin of his ancestor's religion, would have to be dismissed. Donna Wellington was not a female Ymir, the primeval giant out of whose slain corpse was formed the world, the skull the sky, the blood the sea, the flesh the Earth, the bones the mountains. No, the heat of contraction would increase until the men cooked in their suits. What happened after that would no longer be known to the crew and hence of no consequence. ' # #aptain!" MacCool's face was on the auxiliary screen, kept open to the engine room. "We'll be ready to go in a minute;" Sweat mingled with, tears to blur the image of the engineer's face. "We'll make it then," Grettir said. Four minutes later, the tumble was stopped, the ship was pointed upwards and vas on its way out. The temperature began dropping inside the slvo at one degree F per # seconds. I he blackness was relieved by a gray thread. The thread broadened into ribbon, and then the ribbon became the edges of two mountain ridges, one below and the one above hanging upside down. "This time," Grettir said, "we'll make a hole more than large enough." Van Voorden, much-tranquilized by a pill, entered the bridge as the Sleipnir passed through the break. Grettir said, "The hole repairs itself even more quickly than it did the last time. That's why the nose was cut off. We didn't know that the bigger the hole, the swifter the rate of reclosure." Van Voordep said, "Thirty-six more! Why bother to go home when home no longer exists? Not that I particularly care now. Anyway, it'll all be very interesting." "Maybe there won't be that much time gone," Grettir said. "Do you remember Minkowski's classical phrase? From henceforth space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two preserves an independent existence. "That phrase applied to the world inside the sphere, our world. Perhaps out here the union is somehow dissolved, the marriage of ace and time is broken. Perhaps no time, or very little, has elapsed in our worid." "It's possible," Van Voorden said. "But you've overlooked one thing. Captain. If our world has not been marked by time while we've been gone, we have been marked. Scarred by unspace and untime. I'll never believe in cause and effect and order throughout the cosmos again. I'll always ibe suspicious, anxious. I'm a ruined man." Grettir started to answer but could not make himself heard. The men and women on the bridge were weeping, sobbing, or laughing shriify. Later, they would think of that out there as a nightmare and would try not to think of it at alU. And if other nightmares faced them here, at least they would be nightmares they knew. r Stories from all the world over -- Plus arficles, columns and a foafure report on fho # International Scinece Fiction Film Festival by Frederik PohL IF IF  Short Story The generals knew fhe computers could wage war better than they. But the computers knew it too! # And deploy the #nd Airborne around Dallas. As soon as the #rd Infantry has moved into a reserve position, the #nd will attack." General Emerito Sandez watched the gigantic wall map of the United States light and flash with troop movements. A long whistling sigh punctuated his sharp shallow breathing. His pale gray eyes, deep-seated pools of light which usually illuminated his dark, rough-hewn features, were red rimmed and cloudly with exhaustion. He clenched his eyes tightly shut as he ran his thick fingers through his coarse black hair, then reached for a cup of coffee. He considered smoking his last cigarette, but resolved to wait just awhile longer. Would his latest tactic work? He had launched an amphibious assault against Galveston earlier which should have forced Marco Polo to strengthen his coastal defenses. That meant weakening his land bases. And the Dallas garrison was the logical one to provide fresh troops. Now, whale Dallas was weakened, was the time to attack. Ah, what was the use? He would almost certainly fail again. He would lose the #nd. And Texas. Just as he had already lost Arizona and Kentucky. What the hell, he thought, removing a battered pack of Luckies from his shirt pocket. He lit his last cigarette, puffed at it, felt the smoke claw at his raw throat. He started to crush the empty pack into an angry ball but stoppwl, idly determined to check it one final time. He ripped a ragged tear of tinfoil off the top of the pack and poked in a curious forefinger. Huddled back in a corner was one bent and wrinkled cigarette. The General smiled in wan self-amusement. Another last cigarette to hoard and worry over. in advance of an incoming message. The General turned to face the speaker. Eyes narrowed in worried expectation, he waited for Marco Polo, the giant computer, to speak. T he voice issued from the grid, tinny but loud. And unmistakably high-pitched and childlike. 'One Hundred Eighty-Thecond Airborne engaged by Theventy-Third and Theventy-Fourth Armored Cavalry in conjunction with ThirtyFifth Infantry. Attack on Dallath unthuccethful. Your cathualtieth: ninety-theven per thent. My cathualtieth: thirteen per thent. Nithe try. Your move.' Facial muscles that had been apprehensively tense sagged now in defeat. The general's eyes seemed deeper imbedded in their sockets, their pale spark dulled. He stared at the bright yellow circle that marked Dallas on the war map, imagined the red amoeba that would indicate an atomic blast birthing at its center, extending hungry pseudopods through the twin circle of Fort Worth into the adjoining countryside. Pointless thought. Nuclear weapons were banned frewn the war game to which Marco Polo had challenged him. He glanced at his watch, checked it against the #-hour d,ock on tile far wall. Twenty-two hours. Twenty-two hours of matching wits with a computer that lisped, trying desperately to ukI a chink in its armor of logic. Drinking coffee, smokmg, eating t# nothing but six peanut-butter crackers he had found in a packet in his tunic pocket. Small wonder he felt exhausted, his mind barren. But Marco Polo was as fresh now as it had been twenty-two hours earlier when General Sandez had come on duty for his twerity-four hour stint as the brain behind the United States's nuclear fist. Since then the General had been playing the computer's war game, spurred on by visions of the horrifying consequences of defeat and the possibility -- the almost hopelessly remote possibility -- of achieving at least a stalemate. And all the while, steadily losing. F or his four hours in the control room, the General was the man with the finger on the button, so to speak. Responsible only to the President, he was the man who decided where and when America's battery of missiles would be hurled. He had only to press a certain combination of three buttons to sow destruction in cities half a world away. Awesome power for one man and not lightly bestowed. Before being assigned to his post. General Sandez and each of the five other men who spent four hours of every twentyfour at the helm of total war had come through the most comprehensive battery of tests for psychological and emotional stability that men could devise. As a further safeguard, the six-man crew was rotated with three other crews -- a thirty-day tour of duty followed by a rest period of ninety. The first, and what might well prove to be the last, test of the IF general's stability had come this morning -- the sixteenth day of his tour -- an hour and ten minutes into his watch. General Sandez was studying the teletyped messages from military outposts the world over when a sound like a giant's hiccup was instantly followed by total darkness. The general's body reacted instinctively -- muscles tensing, knees flexing -- in primitive preparation for combat. Through his mind flashed pictures of airborne Russian and Chinese missiles, of incinerated cities and men vaporized in blinding fireballs. He pictured the location of the three fatal buttons (green, yellow, red) and knew he could find them unerringly, even in this absolute blackness. He wondered if they would work now, if the power failure had affected their special emergency circuit, if the Control Center had been put out of commission totally by sabotage. But he did not move. Not yet. He waited, balancing thoughts. The power failure might be due to perfectly natural causes, might be corrected in seconds. If an attack had been launched against the United States, he still had ten to fifteen minutes to unleash massive retaliation. If not... He preferred not to think of the results of what would be a final, irrevocable action. But just in case, the general now moved silently to the control bank that housed the green button and waited, counting the seconds under his breath. Each month IF brings you a sciencefiction story by someone never before published. This month's "first" author is James Stevens, a graduate student in active in the Depot Theater in Chamtor, folksinger, guitarist, Stevens is # years old, married and was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Another massive hiccup, and the lights blazed back to life, the normal buzz and hum of the computer banks refilled the control room. And something else, the general thought, stopping his breath to hear better, something new. A deeper sort of... throbbing. That wasn't the right word, but a sort of deep electronic pulse. The general resumed breathing, cleared his throat. And the computer spoke. 'General Thandethr The general spun to face the speaker grid in the center of the computer housing. His mouth went dry. '# am Marco Polo. I am that W as this someone's idea of a joke?! The computer actually speaking through the grid designed for communication with ground level? And speaking with a child's voice and a child's lisp? '# have linked mythelf with the Ruthian Command Computer, the Man mutht prove himthelf intellectually fit to thurvive. Otherwithe there ith no logical reathon for kith exithtenth and he mutht be exterminated Surely this was a joke! And yet the general could not believe that anyone associated with the defense project could be mad enough to attempt such an irresponsible act. challenge Humanity to a war game. Winner take all. You thall reprethent Humanity, General Thandeth. If you win, you will have atherted Manth right to thurvival. If you lothe, you will have proven the validity of the concluthion the IV AN# # and I have reached and you will be dethtroyed. Do you underthtand? It seemed insane, yet the general accepted the machine's statements as facts. And this was another reason why he had been chosen for his post. The ability to absorb data, even unknown, seemingly irrational factors, and reach a decision based on them that was accurate. The general knew, though logic and emotion protested in utter dishow, in some inexplicable, impossible manner, attained consciousness. He relegated this turmoil of unbelief to the back of his mind as years of military training and preparation took over. "I understand," the general said in a surprisingly unemotional voice. "How is the game to be played?" The war map of the United Thtateth will therve as game board, American military unitth bathed on the continent will be our pietheth, I will be your opponent. A screen to the left of the war map lit up. It listed a variety of military units. Thothe thall be your fortheth. Thethe thall be mine. Another screen to the right of the war map was illuminated. You will inform me ath to each of your moveth.  will then indicate them on the war map and indicate my countermove. I will then calculate the rethultth of the enthuing battle and inform you of them. Ith that clear? "Yes. The game is restricted to the board and does not in reality affect the cities and units involved. Is that correct?" Correct. "One more question. Assuming I should lose, how do you propose to destroy us?" JL  will thimultaneously launch every Ruthian and American mithile. The rethulting holocautht will reduthe the Earth to a planetary thinderj "Do we begin now?" Correct. One final note. You have been thealed in thith room and will remain incommunicado until the game ith played out. Thothe outthide are connected to my thpeaker thythtem and can hear everything you or I thay. Begin. The general scanned the war map, noting Marco Polo's strongholds, glanced at the list of units available to him, then resumed study of the map. After perhaps a minute and a half he reached a decision. He would fight Marco Polo by IF sections. He had considered launching simultaneous taittacks on all the computer's strongholds but this would mean correlating and controlling twenty-five to fifty battles at the same time. A simple task for the ry banks and ability to make lightninglike calculations, but impossible for him. So he would attempt to destroy Marco Polo piecemeal. "Have the #nd Infantry and #th Armored Cavalary hit Sacramento and mobilize a task force from the #th Fleet to begin shelling Miami." Two battles at once he could handle. But he inunediately foresaw the impossibility of the task facing him. Marco Polo might be no more than a super-machine but it had every fact on strategy, tactics and military history stored in its memory banks. Plus, it had the advantage of rigid logic. It could calculate and take into account every possible consequence of any move or countermove in a matter of seconds. And it wouldn't make mistakes. Inevitably, he would. N OW' the general rose ponderously from his seat at the control board and stretched his aching frame. He threw his head and shoulders back, arching his back, and felt the muscles crackle in protest. He stared blankly at the war map, scratching his head with his left hand. On the table next to him lay scattered a sheaf of index cards on which he had kept a tabulation of the results of each encounter. His right hand pushed them unconsciously about as though they were lost chess pieces. Idly he riffled through the cards. He had been steadily losing from the very beginning. Shelling of Miami # successful. Not good. Task force counterattacked by atomic submarine pack causing # losses. Losses to sub pack, #, Nearly even. But the troops that had conquered Sacramento had been forced to retreat after taking # casualties from a counterattack by the #rd Infantry supported by the #th Fighter Wing. # casulaties. Not good at all, not at all. Then something clicked in the general's numbed mind. He riffled through the cards and came up with the listing of the Sacramento encounter. He stared at it for a long minute, then twisted violently aroufid to see the screen designating Ma # xx Polo's units. The #rd Infantry was stationed in Minnesota and the #th Fighter Wing in Rhode Island. They couldn't possibly have been brouglht into play in Sacramento. The general didn't want to believe the inescapable conclusion. Marco Polo was cheating. Had been cheating from the very first. It didn't make sense. Yet it was obviously true. He was dealing with a dishonest child. A dishonest electronic child that knew more than he did and could think more logically. And that, thought the general, was funny. That was very, very funny. And so, in his despair, he laughed. T he result was inevitable. Marco Polo would continue destroying the units the general sent into combat, chopping down his forces until he would have to surrender for lack of firepower and manpower. Missiles emblazoned with red stars and missiles displaying white stars in blue fields would fill the air, and the Earth would flare with the light of thousands of miniature suns, a funeral pyre for Man. The general thought these thoughts and then thought of his wife, Carmen Maria, whom he had never really understood and whom he loved partly because she had always remained somewhere just beyond the boundaries of his comprehension. It was strange to think of, but he had never in their thirty years of married life won an argument with her. He wondered what she would be doing when 'the bombs hit and realized she was at this moment probably sitting home by the phone waiting for word of new developments. John Jorgensen, his relief man, would surely have communicated 'his situation to her. She would not have come to the Control Center, he knew, because she was smart enough to know that would aid nothing. But she would have been awake these last twentytwo hours, drinking coffee and smoking in a sort of sympathy vigil. She would be worried for him, but not for herself. Concerned about the strain he was under, but completely confident in his ability to cope with any situation. The chances were she would never know he had failed her this time unless she was in the direct path of one of the missiles. Then she would hear its death scream and in those few seconds before the fireball blossomed around and within her, she would know. H e shuddered inwardly at the image he had conjured of her death. He swallowed some coffee to warm his suddenly cold body but it was lukewarm and tasted bitter as ashes in his dry mouth. The computer spoke. Your move, General Thandeth 'T know," the general snapped. 'T'm thinking." What could he do? What avenues were open to him now? He could continue his original plan of fighting by sections, but that led to certain defeat. Or he could surrender now, admit he was licked and smoke his last cigarette till the bombs flared. Or... Or he could win! It would involve a terrible risk, but it was the only course left to him. "Marco Polo." He paused for instant, blanking his mind... and then he knew this was the correct decision. "Marco Polo. All my forces are to retreat immediately. Units are not to engage the enemy." The general turned to the war map, eyes narrowed intently. If this came off... He blinked. Nothing was happening. Supposing he were wrong... General Thandetfi, Pleathe repeat your latht command" "AH troops will retreat at once. IF Umts arc not ito engage the enemy." 'That ith illogical." "Nevertheless, (that is my move." lights began flasihing on the war map, winking their way across the continent and into the oceans where they continued to gjow dully. There was an interminable period of silence while the war map remained inactive and the general regarded the speaker grid with unbearable tenseness. Finally, the computer spoke. "All your fortheth withdrawn. Cannot defeat you if you will not thionth on your victory. The game ith ended." The general's face relaxed gratefully into a broad grin. He lolled back exhausted in his chair. He withdrew his last cigarette from its crumpled pack and lit it. He puffed on it luxuriously, rolling the rich smoke around in his mouth. Then he thought of his wife, and he exploded into laughter. He had been right. The machine knew more than he did, it could calculate faster than he could, and it thought coldly, ruthlessly, with complete logic. And so the one thing it was incapable of coping with was that most hiunan of qualiities. Illogic. Idly the general noticed the door that had sealed 'him in sliding silently up into its slot in the wall above the door frame. He rose and started slowly toward the opening, still chuckling. On the other side of the door was    the private elevator that would take him up to ground level. It could be activated only by his key. When the next man came on duty, the lock would be recycled to respond to the latter's key. General Sandez imagined the scene at ground level. Men would be grinning and laughing, slapping each other on the back after almost a day of awaiting the result of the drama he had just played c it. Jorgensen had probably produced one of the bottles he kept cached about his office. The general licked his dry lips meditatively. He could do with a shot of scotch. Then home to Carmen Maria and finally sleep. Something would have to be don #. But that was up to the mathematicians and computer techniciani now. H e grinned gigantically and stretched slowly, catlike, just short of the door. A delicious torpor began to settle into his muscles and the grin melted into a yawn. He reached into his pocket for the elevator key. He looked at it intently for several seconds, then smiling, tossed it into the air and caught it with a flourish. The door crashed down like a guillotine. The general whirled to face the computer, his face full of surprise and fear. And Marco Polo spoke again. "How about two out of three?   IF  Novelette Dreamhouse There's not much to do on New Kansas while you're awake -- but, ah, what golden dreams! I T he plains of New Kansas reach from horizon to horizon, and they are a consistently dusty-dull, blue-greenish tan. They are nearly as flat and featureless as the sea, almost the same color; and the grass rolls forever with the same long, lazy waves. All this makes any one part of the planet very much like any other part -- except that half of it is wet, half is dry. Clouds are objects of great interest; they are something to look at, and they give a badly needed feeling of depth to the sky -- which is like a blue force, crowding down on the sea and land, flattening all. Even the people seem flattened. They live in a sort of stoop-shouldered crouch as if straightening upright would suddenly bang their heads against the sky, and not only would that hurt, but the sky would surely ring like a vast, brassy gong. In all. New Kansas seems to have been created in a great hurry by a rather unimaginative god as if it had fallen off the back of some celestial wagon and never been missed. The land is badly fractured, cracked by low rimrocks zigzagging across the plains for hundreds of miles like burned out lightning bolts. But it is these ragged rims that make the planet barely habitable; they are the visual references that keep the eye and mind from running wild in a desperate search for something to look at. But then, like the rest of New Kansas, any rimrock is almost identical to another. Two things can be done with them: one can stand below and look up, or one can stand on top and look down. In either case, for aU the looking, there is nothing more to see. Occasional settlements, perhaps, depending on distance, but they are extremely occasional. The two in closest proximity are #I miles apart. They are called the Twin Cities. O ne of these is Site, so named because the first settlers' ship happened to crash there # years ago. It is the largest city by far, about #; and it sprawls all around the spaceport as if it had just now been thrown hurriedly from 'the cargo ports of some huge ship. Site does not think it at all unusual to have a spaceport smack in its middle; it would have it no other way, really. The mighty shining ships come down -- when they come down at all -- in a rousing roar heard round the world. Every liftoff, every landing, sometimes just the standing ship is broadcast live to every antenna -- and that means to everyone! Except those, of course, who happened to be watching it real. And that means those who arc watching it 'live just bum to be watohing it real. And they make great promises to themselves and their families to go someday to Site and really watch the mighty shining ships come down in a rousing roar -- which happens, on the average, about once a year. But it is enough to make Site the Center of the World, and very few cities and no towns at all can make that statement. People make the pilgrimage to Site from all over New Kansas, and Site endeavors not to disappoint them. It delivers... anything... everything... especially diversion. For if ever a people were in dire need of diversion it is the stooped, flat folk of New Kansas. As Bill Henry, "Mark Twain, the Second," once said: "I think New Kansas must be some other world's hell." But this is a 'bit unfair. There are a number of attractive qualities. It is quiet. The food is good. There is lots of sunshine. Seldom is heard a discouraging word; on the other hand, seldom is heard an encouraging one either. It has the lowest incidence of crimes of violence in the entire known galaxy -- in fact, it simply does not 'have them at all. But the IntergalpK)! took ithe gloss off that by concluding that there was nothing on New Kansas to get excited about. New Kansans, however, think otherwise; and some of Site's offerings are considered rather racy. Some are considered downright sinful. And this, of course, does not bother business at all; as the Big There's nothing like a little sin To make a little cash come in So Site is what might be called attraotively sinful, and one of the most sinfully attractive features is the Dreamhouse. T he Dreamhouse is a house for dreaming. And dreams have few limits -- only those established, in this case, by the New Kansas Supreme Court. And about once a month the boundaries are evidently too well explored, the Dreamhouse is closed down for a night or two and the news is out and the waiting line on Saturday night is four times longer than usual and there's even a line on weeknights until business tapers off into another month and the law makes another raid. The Dreamhouse has over # dreams listed, running, objective time, from about an hour to over three hours. There are dreams for all age groups and even group dreams. There is everything from six subjective hours in a rowboat, disturbing the trout, to ten hours of trying to keep a six masted clipper reasonably upright in a force # hurricane; from a half-hour stroll across a misty meadow to a nineday fight up the damnedestmost crag in the galaxy; from a four-hour sunny-funny picnic to a fourteenhour game of chess; from boss dust figuration Tappers. Yes! From toddlers to totterers! From Yesteryear to another Universe! From the Halls of Montezuma to Slag VI -- there are dreams and dreams and dreams and even dreams. And "dream" is really not the right word -- "experience" would be much better, for that is what happens. The person lives that subjective period as surely as he lives at all. It is really his life in that situation, and -- what is best of all -- he knows it. He knows he is going to win, or succeed, or come out smelling like a rose, or whatever it is he is after -- he knows he is in for a happy ending. That's what the Dreamhouse is for, isn't it? You go there and... II E arly morning mist rode low and cold over the gray, greasy harbor waters; and the spars and masts of the few brave blockade runners stood like tall, ghostly skeletons at the docks. He raised ihis head, his dark, piercing eyes crinkling in the corners, his fine, aristocratic nose flaring slight"It'll come, Selda," he said, his rich baritone sounding low on the hushed deck. "It'll come hard nor' by nor'west right at peak ebb tide over Badman's Bar just three points on the port 'bow from the old bdl buoy off Prattle Point right at eight beUs plus or minus a couple of dings either way." IF She shivered deliciously against him, her pert, pale face finsuned perfectly by her dark burgundy hocxl. "Then you is really, really gonna go, Lance." "I have to, Selda." He gazed off into the mists with distance in his eyes. She curved closer to him, her voice husky. "I... I wish you didn't have to, Lance." He smiled down at her, teeth flashing. "Well -- I suppose I could hang around for another day." Dizziness flickered through him. She gave a slight frown. "Be careful out there, Lance. For me." "Why don't I be careful with you." He enfolded her in a strong, bronzed arm. "Let's us slip below here for a little while and -- " The dizziniess hit him again. He tried to fight it. She looked at him strangely. "Why, Lance Vance! Whatever do you mean? I is a proper girl!" "Sure, sure, but let's just talk it over." The whole harbor seemed to be reeling around him. "We're both adults and -- " "Why, you damn swabby!" she squalled, winding up with her pretty pink parasol. "You an' your damn 'Let'sgo-see-my-boat bit!" And -- whap! -- she wrapped (the parasol half around his head and then straightened it out with another swing from the other side, and he... H e opened his eyes. He blinked. He felt his head. Then he bolted to hit feet and stared around the small cubicle. He had been laying on a narrow, padded shelf along one wall. At the head of the shelf lay a helmet with a coaxial cable leatog into the wall. On the helmet was the number #. "What the -- " He was a young man. He was a big, young man. He was a big, angry, young man. He wore clean farm clothes -- town clothes -- and boots heavy enough to plow furrows in a street, and his face and arms were burned nearly the color of his leather jacket. "Hey!" he yelled m a voice calculated to call cows about two miles. He lashed the cuhicle curtain aside and charged into the corridor. "Hey! Somethin's just about wrong here!" An usher quickly and quietly ushered him to an office. "I didn't get my dream!" he told the cold man who sat behind a desk, who only stared at him in a cold way for a long, cold moment, who then spoke in a low, cold voice. "Whadya mean, you didn't get your dream?" "I mean I didn't get it! It didn't work. It just sitarted and then quit, and... and it just went all wrong." After a moment of cool deliberation, the cold man said, "Whadya mean, it just went aM wrong?" "I mean it went all wrong, that's what I mean!" The angry young man was becoming angrier. The cold man behind the desk leaned forward and became colder. "like what went wrong?" The young man hesitated, frowntng down oit the toes of his boots. "Well  . he began, frowning harder to hIp get the words out. "It just barely started and then... then it quit." He looked up again with a determined scowl. "And I think it's a cheat!" "Okay," said Ihe cold man, after another long moment. "You can have another." He nodded at the usher. The young man started to turn, but the cold man stopped him. "You weren't tryin' to influence it, were ya?" The young man frowned. "Whadya mean, influence it?" "The dream! Were you tryin' to make it do somethin' it wasn't supposed ito do?" "No... I don't think so." "You don't think so!" Ice formed on the words. The young man shook his head. 'T wiasn't tryin' to make it do nothin'." The cold man frosted him over again for a long moment, then waved him away. T he cute little blonde stewardess with the audacious breasts and the bright blue eyes stopped by him in the ship's lounge, and her voice was low and urgent. "Pardon me, sir, but are you a Suicide Space Scout pilot?" "Why, yes." He grinned in his lopsided, boyish way. "How did you guess?" "Because it says 'Suicide Space Scouts' on the back of your leather jacket in orange luminescent letters." She glanced quickly around the crowded lounge and lowered her voice to a throaty whisper. "Can you pilot this ship?" An electric tingle bolted through him; the warm, famiMar Suicide Space Scout reaction to emergency. He grasped the situation immediately. "Something's wrong." "Yes." He nodded. "I thought so when you asked me if I could pilot the ship." "Well, can you?" "Certainly... What kind of a ship is it?" "Well..." She opened her eyes so wide he could almost see clear to the back of her head. "It's a big one." "Uhm." He put an arm around her. "What seems to be the trouble?" "WeU, the command officers seem to have died." He nodded grimly. "Yes, that would do it, and there is no one to land us on Toughluck II, right?" "Except... She looked up at him through lowered lashes and breathed out the word like blowing a kiss... you-u." His keen, level gaze swept the lounge, taking in the happy crowds. They were unaware of the danger, their lives depending on him now. Men, women and children, and then there were some girls too. Over # lives were in his hands. "I'll give it a try," he said, tossing off the last of his drink. "Why not?" She gazed up at him in open admiraitioQ. He grinned his winning, happy-go-lucky grin. "How long before we warp out of IF hyper into norm-space-time relative subjective?" "About an hour," "Well... He really put the old whambam in his smile. "Time enough for us to drop by my cabin for a little sock of sauce. Let's us -- " There was a sudden buzzing in his head. She was trying to tell him something. "... familiarize yourself with the control console." He groped for her through a thickening haze. "... only one thing I wanna familiarize myself with, baby." A fist the size of a small train came looming out of the haze followed by a big face. The fist gathered in the front of his jacket from shoulder to shoulder, and the face frowned and spoke. "Zap off, rocket jockey!" "Listen," he said, trying to sound intimidating with 'his boot toes just brushing the floor. "The command officers of this ship are all dead, and I'm the only one who can land us on Toughluck... so put me down." "Gorilla guano!" the face said, and the other trainlike fist came out of the fog in a flash an then he... H e stood and looked at the cold man behind" the icy desk, who said, after long consideration, "Whadya mean, it went wrong again?" "I mean it went wrong again! That's what!" His fists were bunched, and he looked ready to shaititer the desktop with one mighty blow. "Just because, I'm from tihe plains you knockeirs i tihink you can door me out, well you -- " "You ever been here before?" "No. And what's that got to do with -- " "You never been in the Dreamhouse, huh?" "No, I never been in the Dreamhouse huh!" The cold man leaned carefully on the edge of his desk, and his voice sounded like cracked ice. "Now you listen to me, boy, and you listen good! I think you're tryin' to push it, do you know what I mean? I think you're tryin' to make the dream do somethin' it isn't supposed to do. And 'that don't work! The feedback couples up the whole inducer; it wakes you up, and it makes me mad!" The young man was shaking his head. "No, I -- " "Lock up! I been in this business too long, dustbuster. You'ire what we call a cheater, tryin' itio get a iiittle extra juice out of the grape." He chilled the room for a while in silence, then spoke again, low and deliberately. "You get one more chance, boy. Just one! Bust this and you're doored out for good. Understand?" The young man nodded; the usher opened the door and stood aside, and a fast glance flickered between the usher and the cold man at the desk. Ill W arily, creeping ahead slowly in a low crouch, he topped the ridge and searched the rolling land beyond. His sharp eyes were narrowedand his, face wore a look of grim determination. Nothing moved in that barren land of rock and sand, nothing grew. It was a cruel land, harsh and inhospitable, alien; 'and there was something about it that made him uncomfortable. The girl crept up beside him, close, and pushed her long, dark hair back from her large, brown eyes. "Do you see anything, Adam?" she whispered. He shook his head, still watching the hostile land. "But that doesn't mean they aren't there," he said, voice low and level. He glanced at the charge indicator of his laser rifle. "Less than twenty percent." "What are they?" she asked, an edge of fear showing behind the words. He gave a wry grin. "What are they? Part jaguar, part octopus, part wolverine, part shark, part lizard, part bat -- probably not friendly at all." She shuddered and attempted to draw the tattered remains of her coverall closer about her, but there was far more girl than there was material. "I wonder if we'll ever find the others," she said, then faltered. "If... there are any..." "Perhaps someday. It's a big world. And there's always the chance that... maybe they weren't as lucky as we." The scene flashed through his mind: their tiny lifecraft screaming into the atmosphere of 'this unknown planet of an uncharted sun, its velocity too great for the autoretros; the rending, tumbling crash across the desert; the two of them thrown clear, marooned with nothing but a laser rifle and their clothes. And the rifle was running out of charge, and they were running out of cloithes. Especially she. "Less than twenty percent," he murmered. "Huh?" "The rifle," he explained. "You see, the electronic charge is -- " T here's one!" she shouted. He snapped up the rifle. A flitting, flopping, slathering, hairy scaled, gray-andwhite striped, flat blur was browling land bubbling and surging up the slope. "... with eyes of flame," he breathed. "... whiffling through the tulgy wood -- " Ferchrisake shoot n shutup!" "... and burbled at it came." T he burbling bolt was kicking up a roostertail of sand behind it for a quarter mile, and the wind shrieking through its spines was deafslashed through several large boulders, a distant butte, the beast and left in its wake four miles of sixfoot trench, two beast halves and a small atomic reaction blaze. "Oh Lord," she said. "Not again. Let's make tracks." And she made some rapid ones back down the ridge. He followed, observantly wiatching the callipygian cavortion where her coverall failed to cover all. She finally slowed. "Keep going," he yelled. "Keep going." But after several bad falls he was forced to stop. IF "Whait's' tihe matter?" she said, over his left eye. "Can't you stand up?" "Well I have these little dizzy spells sometimes," he said, trying to get a good look lat her breasts. "Probably from the crash, you know." "Dizzy spells at least!" she snorted. "The way you handle that rifle and keep me racing through the rocks, I figure we're going to run out of rifle charge, my clothes and your self-control all about the same time. Are you all right now?" He tore his gaze away and let her help him to his feet. "I guess I've hurt my leg," he gritted, putting an arm around her to keep from falling. "#...' . can't seem to put any weight on it." "Buddy, you got a window open upsitairs!" She disentangled herself, losing a little more coverall in the process. "And we should be thinking about a safe place for camp tonight too," he went on. "Looks like there's a cave up there in the side of that rim. Let's -- " "Camp!" She stared at him . "It isn't even midday yet!" "Yeah well it's always a good idea to stop early, you know. We don't know very much about this planet, and you're littler than me." She blinked. "And what's that got to do with anything?" "Well..." He grinned. "I just thought I'd remind you in case I have to -- " She kicked him in tthe kneecap. He sat down. "Whadya do that for? Now I am hurt!" "You gonna get hurter too if you don't mental up. Let's go!" She swung away, but stopped. "You lead. I'll keep an eye on the rear." He started to laugh, but decided not to. Reluctantly, he limped by her, and they started again across the vast land. In a short time he was once more caught up in the grim search for danger. His keen mind 'became more clear, his instincts -- rwiheres oner she screamed. He JL jumped and nearly ot his foot off. "Dammit, will you not do that!" "There there there there!' She was pointing at a far figure on a far hill. He let the rifle drop. "Goodgawd, that's over three miles away." "Too closer He squinted against the sun, frowned, then squinted harder. "Hey... I think that's a human." She squinted. "It can't be." "I think it's a girl!" Shootr But he was gone at a gallop. It was a human, and it was a girl human. It was a lithe and little, peaches and cream, pert and pretty, natural redhead, blue eyed, nude and nubile girl human. She smiled up at him in an open, childlike manner as he came to a breathless standstill. "Hi there," she said in a soft, little girl voice. "I'm Susie Lou. I'm twenty years old and never been out of the house. I'm lonely. Who are you?" "Well I'm Adam, of course, and other. "Haven't you any clothes, let's hurry over here and hide behoney?" hind this rock. It's a game, see, Susie blinked her big, blue eyes, and -- " "Clothes? Why (wear clothes?" "Who's that running and yelling "That's what I say," he nodded, behind you?" stariting to strip off his coverall. "It's "Well that's what I'm tryin' to just hotter than -- " tell you. What we do is -- " "Just hold it right there, Tar"If she's nice I want to meet her." zan!" She axed him with a glance. "Have you ever heard of the Wick"Say, that's pretty good," he ed Witch?" chuckled. "Me Tarzan, you -- " "Aw... " She pouted. "You're She kicked him in the other kneefimnin' me." cap. He sat down, holding his knee "Well that's another thing I in one hand and his head in the wanta bring up, but right now -- " other. "Adaml Get your grubby grab"Something is not right," he said bers off her!" She closed the discarefully. tance in remarkable time and slid Susie frowned at Jane. "You hurt to a halt between them. He slumpthe pretty man." ed, his voice dull. He nodded. Jane said something "Susie, Jane. Jane, Susie." unintelligible, ithen, "Come on, Jane put her arm around the honey, let's -- " IF "Now just one minute!" he said, her away. He tugged her hack. Jane voice rising. snatched her away. He swapped "You've got a dirty mind!" Jane ends with the rifle and caved in snapped. "And I'm not -- " the side of Jane's head. "What's a dirty mind?" Susie ask"There!" ed. Jane's eyes nearly caught fire. Susie smiled up at him. "You're "See what you've done to her? strong." Ohh!" He smiled down at her. "You're His mouth was all right, hut his cute." voice would not work. Jane nearly The cold man smiled across at yanked the smaller girl off her feet. him. "You're a liar!" "I've got to get you away from There was a sound inside ihis head him, Susie! He's a sex maniac!" like a little pinwheel fizzling out in "What's a sex maniac?" a pool of water... He stood up. "Jane, you're about IV as sane as she is dressed!" "Right! I'm a sane Jane -- oh no T Te was in front of that desk again, you don't!" He had reached for A i And ithe cold man was sitting Susie's other arm, but Jane pulled behind that desk, leaning back in her away. He grabbed Susie's wrist his creaky old swivel chair, making and pulled her back. Jane tugged a church and steeple with his long. icicle floigers. The cold man was smiling; bult diere were frost flecks in his eyeis, and everything seemed to be frosted in the txxMn. Even the air wias fuzzy. The cold man spoke, and the temperature came down twelve degrees. "She sure was askin' for it, wasn't slie?" He nodded. She sure was! The cold man was right that time. Yessir! She... He suddenly stood stunned and staring. The cold man's smile widened, lowering that temperature. "Yep, (that was quite a dream you had, boy." He bit his lower lip. "But how -- " The cold man waved a frosty hand. "Nothing to it. A siimple matter of negative feedback into a recorder -- some such ilas-h up as that -- but that isn't what we're concerned about, is it?" He rubbed his forehead. "I remember... you called me a liar." "Just a formality, boy. We couldn't have you waking up with the wrong ideas, now could we?" "What?" He turned toward the door. The usher was parked against it like a stalled truck. He swung back. "What's goin' on here?" The cold man spread his hands. "My dear boy! It's not for me to say." He stared at the cold man, and from deep inside he could feel heat rising. "Well, somebody sure as hell better say 'cause I don't know what you're talkin' about!" The frozen smile vanished. "We're talkin' about your dream makin' some mighty entertaining moments for the old folks at home, that's what we're talkin' about! You tuned in now?" His voice was a long time coming even though his mouth was open and waiting for it. 'Whatr "And after the family's had their booties out of it, we'll give a private showing for the boys at the dingy wing in the Site Hospital! How's that for purity of understanding? You committed a happy act of violence, dustbuster! And what you had in mind wasn't exactly scheduled for Sunday school either! You're sick! You're -- " "A dream! It wasn't nothin' but a dream!" "Beautiful! We'U just turn it over id diddlers down at the hospital and forget the whole thing." The cold man swung away and busied himself with some papers. "Now wait a minute -- " "Door out!" #'Vjo. Wait a minute..." He looked around at the usher again -- no help ithere -- then back to the cold man. "I'm waitin'." "Well... what is it you want?" "I'll tell you what I don't want, grasslander -- I don't want no more of you're mouth!" He stood, matched eyes with the cold man and lost. "And it isn't what we want, boy, it's what do you want? What did you come here for?" IF He blinked at the cold man as if he had just said something stupid. came to get a dream, what -- " "EK)n't act stupid just because it's easy. You came after a Vicky and don't tell me you didn't."... Well I don't even know what a 'Vicky' is!" It was the cold man's turn to blink. He looked at the young man, then at the usher, then back. "Assuming you've got a real corner on dumb. I'll tell you what a Vicky is: it's a vicarious experience concerning a girl. And it's -- well, I'U be damned. I haven't seen anybody blush like that for 'thirty years. Okay, so you're ignorant. Now, since we're nice guys and you're a customer, we're gonna make a little arrangement -- you get your Vicky and we get... oh, let's say about five big ones." "Five -- " "Let's say you're buyin' your recording so we won't lose it in the wrong place." "But I haven't got that -- " "'Course not. You're gonna get it." He got it. He called an old uncle and told an old story, and the five big ones came sizzling in, hot in his hand. So he laid them quickly on the icy desk, and the cold man smiled through the steam and said: "We're not really baddies, boy, we're gonna fix you up real right." T he ship gave a final shudder as it warpled into hyperdrive, and the dull hum of utility circuits was the only sound on the control deck. Then came two whooshes of released breaths. He rolled his head and grinned at the other man. "Well, Stud, we're on our wayl" The other returned the grin and began unbuckling from his acceleration couch. "You know it, BuU," he laughed. "Just us and two hundred women. Man, that's tough duty!" "Yeah!" He fumbled with his own straps. "And nineteen years of it, even in hot hyperdrive, before planetfall. I just don't know how we're gonna stand it." They both giggled. The other stood up and stretched. "Guess we'll have our little colony pretty well started by then." "At least... Say, help me with these damn straps, will you?" "You know? I've never been so outnumbered and felt so good about k in my whole life." "You know it. Want to help me here?" "When I get back. Bull. I thought I'd just drop down and see how the girls are for a second. See if they're all right." He laughed, a little too fast and a little too high. "We can't afford any damaged cargo, can we?" "WeU just get me out of here, will ya?" He struggled against the tight webbing. "I can't reach the buckles or somethin'." The other dropped through a hatch and disappeared. "I'll be right back." His laugh echoed behind him. "Maybe in a year or two or three or four..." He twisted savagely on the Acouch, fumbling for the hidden releases. He could not find them. He  wriggled the other way, and they  were not there either. He was solkily strait jacketed in a permanently H prone position. He relaxed, marshal ed his thoughts, aipplied his rigid training and yelled as loud as he 'Ij. ' could. Then he cursed for a while. Then he tried yelling and cursing  at the same time. They were good  approaches. and they all worked equally well. Then he yelled and cursed and curled and cramped and squirmed and squiggled and finally  accomplished a position where the  best he could do was barely   breathe. IfH "Gawmam mumu bib!" he said, as S distinctly as he could, then threw himself happily into a fit of rage that managed to clear his mouth. "I'm winning!" B He was congratulating himself on M this victory when his partner returnaw dammit, Stud, will you get me out of herer Stud stared at nothing with glassy concentration. "Stud, so help me. I'll break out with my bare hands, you rotten son of a -- " 'There's only one girl down there," Stud said quietly, gazing at something clearly defined, but far away. Bull rested nicely for a moment or two, then cleared his throat. "Ah... you want to storm me with that once more?" S tud stood like an old deserted house . that even the bats had abandoned, and his voice was as hushed and as hollow. IF "Somebody fubarred all over. Only one girl. The . others weren't loaded. Just her. She's pretty. The rest didn't make it. This one's nice. Just one. The others -- " "Stud," he said softly, becoming aware that he was not just feeling his heartbeat, he was beginning to hear it. "... all by herself down there. Cute. About nineteen. One hundred and ninety-nine missed the ship. They should of known it was gonna leave on time. Somebody'll get hell. Not me. She likes me -- " "Stud?" "... just sittin' there with nothin' on but a worried look..." "Stud!" "... an' I says, 'Where'd everybody go? To the powder-room? ' -- say, you don't suppose... no, I remember now -- I looked!" He giggled. Studr "... an' she says, 'I love you,' an' I says, 'Well, Baby...'" "Help me. Stud." "... that's her name -- Baby. Did I tell you she was a blonde? She's a blonde. And..." "Stud, I'm hurt. You've got to help me. The lift-off broke something, Stud. It's my back. I'm paralyzed, buddy." "... big gray eyes and pair of  "I'm hurt bad, partner." "... you could hang your hat on..." Damn you, Stud, you horny half wit! I'll kill you!" "... gotta see if she's, okay. Lonely down there in all that room. Won#C# der why there's allthat room when there's just me 'n her? There's room down there for over two hundred... He surged agiainst the webbing, wordless sounds bubbling from his throat. If he had a blaster he could shoot his way out! He did have a blaster! He twisted and grasped the butt. There! He triggered off a short zap. Paff! Stud gazed at the smoking hole through his stomach. "Aw dammit, Bull, that ain't fair." And he died. It was but a moment's work to slice his way clear, leap over Stud's corpse and dive headlong down the hatch, but it was a good half hour before he recovered consciousness at the bottom of the stairwell. He staggered into the salon. She was there. "Oh," he said. "Hi there." Get away from mer "Huh?" "I'll kill myself if you come any closer!" He shook his head. Something seemed to be fogging up inside. "But, honey. I'm Bull. We're supposed to -- " "Not me!" "But -- " "I'll kill myself first!" "But Stud said -- " She went all soft and smiley and smokey. "Ah-h, he's cute. But you... "Now wait a minutes, baby -- " She screamed. "Don't even say my name! Oh -- you're... bl-achtr Something flickered somewhere inside, something old and broken. He lunged for her. Tll help your He did, and she tried, and he helped her. V T he cold man nodded wearily, eyes closed. His earplug chattered, and he answered. "Yeah, he's ruptured his real for sure. You should see the cake-andcandy party he just created on an Outline two... No, he's all right now, we barbied him... I'd say at least a potential four... Yeah, rU make the calls to his folks. We've got his papers... Okay, see you in a little bit. Doc." He switched off and massaged his eyes for a moment. "Anything?" ho said in a tired voice. The usher turned from studying a full wallbank of small meters. "Yessir," he nodded. "There's a push on #." "How bad?" "Surging eighteen to twenty over max allowable." "What's the dream?" The usher paused, referring to a file panel. "Group hunting; big game." He ran a finger down a long printout sheet. "Three people; man and wife... and friend." "Oh Lord," the cold man breathed. He rested his head in his hands. "Better get a monitor on it." "Right." The usher flicked a switch under meter #. "Shall I close the wall?" "Yeah, we may have to bring one in." The usher touched another IF switch, and a false wall lowered, hiding the meters. "Are they coming right over for the boy?" The cold man nodded. "Have him ready at the alley pickup door with his recordings. And tell them to bring back our damn carts! They've got about four now. And make out a hospital receipt of deposit on him for five hundred. The family probably can't afford it, but we can check that out later." "Yessir. Anything else?" "Yeah... find me another job!" The other grinned. "And cut the whole med-deteotive force of New Kansas by fifty percent? Hah!" "Hah! to you too. Sergeant. And I think we'd better arrange for another raid and lots of hot-stuff news coverage. See that the news gets laid especially heavy in the area this boy was from. Maybe we'll flush out another one or two." "Right. I'll check out # now. Get ready for a hot one." The usher sergeant left. The cold man rubbed a hand across his face, blew out a long breath, then leaned back in his chair and became very cold indeed. "There is going to be a crime of violence on New Kansas pretty soon now," he said softly to the empty room. "One of these dingy dreamers I am going to whack right in the teeth!" Exciting New SF Novel by James White by Fritz Leiber by C. C. MacApp These and many others in the December IF -- don't miss it! IF  Novelette In The Jaws Of Danger Pfy the poor dentist whose patient is big as a whale -- with a toothache to match! and stood by anxiously. preferred. the acronym to per of the transcoder. "Emergency," "North Nebula humanoid species" the little speaker said. "Only you -- rushed in and chewed out a mescan handle this, Doctor!" sagestiok with machine-like dis"You'll have to be more specific. Holmes," he said and watched the transcoder type this ont another stick. Since the Enens had no spoken language and he had not learned to decipher their tooth-dents, the transcoder was the vital link in communication. The names he applied to the Enens were facetious. These galactics had no names in their own language, and they comprehended his humor in this regard no more than had his patients back on distant Earth. But at least they were industrious folk and very clever at physical science. T he Enen read the stick and put it 'between his teeth for a hurried footnote. It was amazing, Dillingham thought, how effectively they could flex their jaws for minute variations in depth and slant. Compared to this, the human jaw was a clumsy portcullis. The message went hack to the machine. "It"s a big toothache that no one can cure. You must come." ham said, deeply flattered. "I've been training your dentists for six months now, and I must admit they're experienced and intelligent specialists. They know their maxillaries from their mandibulars. As a matter of fact, some of them are a good deal more adept than I, except in the specific area of metallic restorations. Surely -- " But the Enen grabbed the stick before any more could be imprinted by the machine's clattering jaws. "Doctor -- this is an alien. It's the son of the high muckamuck of deep." The terms, of course, were the ones he had programmed to indicate any ruling idignitary of any Other planet. He wondered whether he would he well advised to substitute more serious designations before someone caught on. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would see about it. "You, Doctor, are our only practicing exodontist. " Ah -- now it was coming clear. He was a stranger from a far planet -- and a dentist. Ergo, he must know all about off-world dentition. The Enen's faith was touching. Well, if this was a job they could not handle, he could at least take a look at it. The "alien" could hardly have stranger dentition than the Enens themselves, and success might represent a handsome credit toward his eventual freedom. It would certainly be more challenging than drilling his afternoon class in Applications of Supercolloid. "rm pretty busy with that new group of trainees," he said. This was merely a dodge to elicit more information, since the Enens tended to omit important details. They did not do so intentionally; it was just that their notions of importance differed here and there from his own. "The muckamuck has offered fifty pounds of frumpstiggle for this one service," the Enen replied. coder dutifully printed the translation. Frumpstiggle was neither money nor merchandise. He had never been able to pin down exactly what it was, but for convenience thought of it as worth it's exact weight in gold: # per ounce, # per pound. The Enens did not employ money as such, but their avid barter for frumpstiggle seemed roughly equivalent. His commission on fifty pounds would amount to a handsome dividend and would bring his return to Earth that much closer. "All right," he said. "Bring the patient in." The Enen became agitated. "The high muckamuck's family can't leave the planet. You must go to Gleep." He had half expected something of this sort. The Enens galavanted from planet to planet and system to system with dismaying nonchalance. customed to the several ways in which they far excelled Earth technology, nor the abrupt manner of their transactions. One of their captains (strictly speaking, they didn't have officers, but this was a minor matter) had required dental help and simply stopped off at the nearest inhabited planet, skipping the normal formalities, and visited a local practitioner. Realizing that local technique was in some respects superior to that of the home planet, the captain had brought the practitioner along. self the property of the Enens -- he who had never dreamed of anything other than conventional retirement in Florida. He was no intrepid spaceman, no seeker of fortune. He had been treated well enough, and certainly the Enens respected his abilities more than had his patients on Earth; but galactic intercourse was more unsettling than exciting for a man of his maturity. IF "I'll go and pack my bag," he said. U G leep turned out to be a water world. The ship splashed down beside a floating way station, and they were transferred to a tanklike amphibian vehicle. It rolled into the ocean and paddled along somewhat below the surface. that intelligent life could not evolve in water, because of the inhibiting effect of the liquid medium upon the motion of specialized appendages. Certainly the fish of Earth had never amounted to much. How could primitive swimmers hope to engage in interstellar comimerce? Evidently that particular theory was wrong, elsewhere in the galaxy. Still, he wondered just how the Gleeps had circumvented the rapidmotion barrier. Did they live in domes under the ocean? He hoped the patient would not prove to be too alien. Presumably it had teeth; but that might very well be the least of the problems. At any rate, he could draw on whatever knowledge the Enens had, and he had also made sure to bring a second transooder keyed to Gleep. It was awkward to carry two machines, but too much could be lost in retranslation if he had to get the Gleep complaints relayed through the Enens. A monstrous whale-shape loomed in the porthole. The thing spied the sub, advanced, and opened a cavernous maw. "Look out!" he yelled, wishing the driver had ears. The Enen (glanced indifferently at the message-stick and chomped a casual reply. "Everything is in order, Doctor." "But a Leviathan is about to engulf us!" "Naturally. That's a Gleep." stunned. No wonder the citizens couldn't leave the planet! It was a matter of physics, not convention. The vessel was already inside the colossal mouth, and the jaws were closing. "You mean -- you mean this is the patient?" But he already had his answer. Damn those little details the Enens forgot to mention. A whale! The mouth was shut now, and the headlight of the sub speared out to reveal encompassing mountains of flexing flesh. The treads touched land -- probably the tongue -- and took hold. A minute's climb brought them into a great domed air chamlber. They came to a halt beside what reminded him of the white cliffs of Dover. The hatch sprang open, and the Enens piled out. None of them seemed concerned about the possibility that the creature might involthat thought as far from his mind as he was able. His skull seemed determined to hold it in, unfortunately. CC'This is the tooth," the Enen's A message said. The driver pointed to a solid marble boulder. tooth stood about twelve feet high, counting only the distance it projected from the spongy gingival tissue. Much more would be below, of course. "I see," he said. He could think of nothing more pertinent at the moment. He looked at the bag in his hand, which contained an assortment of needlepointed probes, several ounces of instant amalgam and sundry additional staples. In the sub was a portable drill with a heavy-duty needle attachment that could easily excavate a cavity a full inch deep. Well, they had called it a '"big toothache." He just hadn't been alert. They brought forth a light extendible ladder and leaned it against the tooth. They set his drill and transcoders beside it. "Summon us when you're finished," their parting message said. the electronic signal in his pocket. By the time he drew breath to protest, the amphibian was gone. He was alone in the mouth of a monster. Well, he'd been in awkward situations before. He tried once again to close his mind to the horrors that lurked about him and ascended the ladder, holding his lantern aloft. The occlusal surface was about ten feet in diameter. It was slightly concave and worn smooth. In the center was a dark trench about two feet wide and over a yard long. This was obviously the source of the irritation. He walked over to it and looked down. A putrid stench sent him gasping back. Yes -- this was the cavity. It seemed to range from a foot in depth at the edges to four feet in the center. "That," he said aloud, "is a case of dental caries for the record book." IF U nfortunately, he had no record book. All he possessed was a useless bag of implements and a smarting nose. But there was nothing for it, hut to explore the magnitude of the decay. It probably extended laterally within the pulp, so that the total infected area was considerably larger than that visible from above. He would have to check this directyHe forced himself to breathe regularly, though his stomach danced in protest. He stepped down into the cavity. The muck was ankle-deep and the miasma overpowering. He summoned the dregs of his willpower and squatted to poke into the 'bottom with one finger. Under the slime, the surface was like packed earth. He was probably still inches from the material of the tooth itself; these were merely layers of crushed and spoiling food. He remembered long-ago jokes about eating apple-compote, pronouncing the word with an internal "S". Compost. It was not a joke any more. He located a dry area and scuffed it with one foot. Some dark flakes turned up, but no real impression had been made. He wound up and drove his toe into the wall as hard as he could. There was a thunderous roar. He clapped his hands to his ears as the air pressure increased explosively. His footing slipped, and he fell into the reeking center-section of the trench. An avalanche of muck descended upon him. Overhead, himdreds of tons of flesh and bone and gristle crashed down imperiously, seeming ready to crush every particle of matter within its compass into further compost. The jaws were closing. down in sickening garbage, his ears ringing from the atmospheric compression and his body quivering from the mechanical one. The lantern, miraculously, was undamaged and bright, and his own limbs were sound. He sat up, brushed some of the sludge from face and arms and grabbed for the slippery light. He was trapped between clenched jaws -- inside the cavity. Frantically he activated the signal. After an interminable period while he waited in mortal fear of suffocation, the ponderous upper jaw lifted. He scrambled out, dripping. The bag of implements was now a thin layer of color on the surface of the tooth. "Perfect occlusal," he murmured professionally, while shaking in violent reaction to the realization that his fall had narrowly saved him from the same fate. The ladder was gone. Anxious to remove himself from the dangerous biting surface as quickly as possible, he prepared to jump but saw a gigantic mass of tentacles reaching for his portable drill near the base of the tooth. Each tentacle appeared to be thirty feet or more in length and as strong as a python's tail. The biting surface no longer seemed where he was and watched the drill being carried into the darkness of the mouth's center. m In a few more minutes the amphibian vehicle appeared. The Enen driver emerged, chewed a stick, pretranscoder and discovered that it was the wrong one. All he had now was the useless Gleep interpreter. Chagrined, he fiddled with it. At least he could set k to play back whatever the Gleep prince might have said. Perhaps there had been meaning in that roar... machine exclaimed. Ill T he next few hours were complispeak to the Enens via the Gleep muokamuck (after the episode in the cavity, he regretted this nomenclature acutely), who had been summoned for a diagnostic conference. This was accomplished by setting up shop in the creature's communications department. The compartment was actually an offshoot (from the Gleep lung, deep inside the body. It was a huge internal air space with sensitive tentacles bunching from the walls. This was the manner in Which the dominant species of this landless planet had developed fast-moving appendages whose manipulation led eventually to tools and intelligence. An entire technology had developed -- inside the great bodies. "So you see," he said, "I have to have an anesthetic that will do the job and canned air the breathe while I'm working and a power drill that will handle up to an eighteen-indh depth of rock. Also a sledgehammer and a dozen wedges. And a derrick and the following quantities of -- " He went on to make a startling list of supplies. The transcoder sprouted half a dozen tentacles and waved them in a dizzying semaphore. After a moment a group of the wall-tentacles waved back. "It shall be accomplished," the muckamuck reply came. signal had projected the "ouchl" back in the patients mouth. Then it came to him: the tentacles that had absconded with his drill and other transcoder were extensions of the creature's tongue! Naturally they talked. "One Other thing: while you're procuring my equipment, I'd like to IF see a diagram of the internal structure of your molars." "Structure?" The tentacles were agitated. "The pattern of enamel, dentin and pulp, or whatever passes for it in your system. A schematic drawing would do nicely. Or a sagittal section showing both the nerves and the bony socket. That tooth is still quite sensitive, which means the nerve is still alive. I wouldn't want to damage it unnecessarily." "We have no diagrams." you know the anatomy of your teeth? How have you repaired them before?" "We have never had trouble with them ibefore. We have no dentists. That is why we summoned you." He paced the floor of the chamber, amazed. How was it possible for such intelligent and powerful creatures to remain so ignorant of matters vital to their well-being? Never had trouble before? That cavity had obviously been festering for many years. Yet he had faced similar ignorance daily during his Earth practice. "I'll be working blind, in that case," he said at last. You must understand that while I'll naturally do my best, I can not guarantee to save the tooth." "We understand," the deep muckamuck replied contritely. B ack on the tooth (after a stern warning to Junior to keep those jaws apart no matter how uncomfortable things got), equipped with a face mask, respirator, elbow-length began the hardest labor of his life. It was not intellectually demanding or particularly intricate -- just hard. He was vaporizing the festering walls of the cavity with a thirty-pound laser drill, and in half an hour his arms were dead tired. There was lateral extension of the infection. He had to wedge himself into a rotting, diminishing cavern, wielding the beam at arm's length before him. He had to twist the generator sidewise to penetrate every branching side pocket, all the while frankly terrified lest the beam slip and accidently touch part of his own body. He was playing with fire -- a fiery beam that could slice off his arm and puff it into vapor in less than a careless second. At least he thought sweatily, he wasn't going to have to use the sledgehammer here. When he ordered the drill, he had expected a mechanical one similar to those pistons used to break up pavement on Earth. To the deep, however, a drill was a laser beam. This was indeed far superior to what he had had in mind. Deadly, yes -- but real serendipity. Backbreaking hours later it was done. Sterile walls of dentin lined the cavity on every side. Yet this was only the beginning. there in the now-aseptic cavity, roused himself to make careful measurements. He had to be certain that every alley was widest at the opening, and that none were too sharply twisted. Wherever the measurements were unsatisfactory, he drilled away healthy material until the desired configuration had been achieved. He also adjusted the beam for "polish" and wiped away the rough surfaces. H e signaled the Enen sub and indicated by gestures that it was time for the tank of supercolloid. And resolved that next time he went anywhere, he wpuld bring a trunkful of spare transcoders. He had problems enough without translation difficulties. At least he had been able to make clear that they had to send a scout back to the home planet to pick up the bulk supplies. Supercolloid was a substance developed by the ingenious Enens in response to his exorbitant specifications of several months before. He had once entertained the notion that if he were slightly unreasonable, they would ship him home. Instead they had met the specifications exactly and increased his assessed value, neatly adding years to his term of captivity. He became more careful after that -- but the substance remained a prosthodontist's dream. Supercolloid was a fluid, stored under pressure, that set rapidly when released. It held its shape indefinitely without measurable distortion, yet was as flexible as rubber. It was ideal for difficult impressions, since it could give way while being withdrawn and spring immediately back to the proper shape. This saved time and reduced error. At # degrees Fahrenheit it melted suddenly into the thin, transparent fluid from which it started. This was its most important property. very large cast. To begin the complex procedure, he had to fill every crevice of the cavity with colloid. Since the volume of the cleaned cavity came to about forty cubic feet, and supercolloid weighed fifty pounds per cubic foot when set, he required a good two thousand pounds of it, at the very least. A full ton -- to fill a single cavity. "Think big," he told himself. He set up the tank and hauled the long hose into the pit. Once more he crawled headfirst into the lateral expansion, no longer needing the face mask. He aimed the nozzle without fear and squirted the foamy green liquid into the farthest offshoot, making certain that no air spaces remained. He backed off a few feet and filled the other crevices, but left the main section open. IF In half an hour the lateral branch had been simplified considerably. It was now a deep, flat crack without nozzle and crawled in with selected knives and brushes. He cut away proflush with the main crevice wall, and painted purple fixative over each surface. S atisfied at last, he trotted out the colloid hose again and started the pump. This time he opened the nozzle to full aperture and filled the main crevice, backing away as the foam threatened to engulf him. Soon all of the space was full. He smoothed the green wall facing the main cavity and painted it in the same manner as the offshoots. Now he was ready for the big one. So far he had used up about eight cubic feet of colloid, but the gaping center pit would require over thirty feet. He removed the nozzle entirely and let the tank heave itself out. The cavity was rapidly being filled. "Turn it off," he yelled to the Enen by the pump as green foam bulged gently over the rim. One ton of supercolloid filled the tooth, and he was ready to carve it down and insert the special plastic loop in the center. The foam continued to pump. "I Then he remembered that he had no transcoder for Enen. They could neither hear him nor comprehend him. He flipped the hose away from the the tooth. He had no way to cut it off himself, since he had removed the nozzle. There couldn't be much left in the tank. A rivulet of green coursed over the pink tissues, traveling toward the squidlike tongue. The tentacles reached out, grasping the foam as it solidified. They soon became festooned in green. long. There was a steamwhistle sigh followed by a violent tremor of the entire jaw. "I'm going to... sneeze," the deep transcoder said, sounding fuzzy. The colloid was interfering with the articulation of the Gleep's tongue. A sneeze! Suddenly he realized what that would mean to him and the Enen crew. "Get under cover!" he shouted to the Enens, again forgetting that they couldn't perceive the warning. But they had already grasped the significance of the tremors and were piling into the sub frantically. "Hey -- wait for me!" But he was too late. The air howled by with the titanic intake of breath. There was a terrible pause. of colloid and dug his fingers into the almost-solid substance. "Keep your jaws apart!" he yelled at the Gleep, praying it could still pick up EN!" The sound of a tornado raged out of its throat. He buried his face in green as the hurricane struck, wrenching mercilessly at bis body. His arms were wrenched cruelly; his fingers tore through the infirm colloid, slipping... IV T he wind died, leaving him gasping at the edge of the tooth. He had survived it. The jaws had not closed. He looked up. The upper cuspids hung only ten feet above, visible in the light from the charmed lamp hooked somehow to his foot. He was past the point of reaction. "Open, please," he called in his best operative manner, hoping the transcoder was still in the vicinity, and went to peer over the edge. There was no sign of he sub. The tank, with its discharging hose, was also gone. H took a walk across the neighboring teeth, looking for whatever there was to see. He was appalled at the amount of decalcification and outright decay in evidence. This deep child would shortly be in pain again, unless substantial restorative work was done immediately. But in a shallow cavity -- one barely a foot deep -- he found the transcoder. "It's an ill decalcification that bodes nobody good," he murmured, retrieving it. The sub reappeared and disgorged its somewhat shaken passengers. Dillingham marched back over the rutted highway and joined them. But the question still nagged his mind: how could the caries he had observed be reconciled with the muckamuck's undoubtedlysincere statement that there had never been dental trouble before? What had changed? He carved the green surface into an appropriate pattern and carefully applied his fixitive. He was ready for the next step. Now the derrick was brought up its dangling hook into the eyelet set in the colloid and signalled the Enen operator to lift. The chain went taut; the mass of solidified foam eased grandly out of its socket and hung in the air, an oddly-shaped boulder. He turned his attention to the big screw eyelet and arranged a pulley so that the derrick could act on it effectively. The purple fixative had prevented the surface of the main impression from attaching to that of the subsidiary one -- just as it was also protecting the several smaller branches within. There was no real trouble. In due IF course every segment of the impression was marked and laid out in the makeshift laboratory he had set up near the waterlift of the Gleep's mouth. They were ready for one more step. T he tank of prepared investment arrived. This, too was a special composition. It remained fluid until triggered by a particular electric jolt, whereupon it solidified instantly. Once solid, it could not be affected by anything short of demolition by a sledgehammer. to a great temporary vat. He attached a plastic handle to the smallest impression, dipped it into the vat, withdrew it entirely covered by white batter and touched the electrode to it. He handed the abruptly solid object to the nearest Enen. Restorative procedure on deep differed somewhat from established Earth technique. All it took was a little human imagination and Enen technology. The octopus-tongue approached while he worked. It reached for him. "Get out of here or I'll cram you into the burnout furnace!" he snapped into the transcoder. The tongue retreated. The major section was a problem. It barely fit into the vat, and a solid foot of it projected over the top. He finally had the derrick lower it until it bumped bottom, then raise it a few inches and hold it steady. He passed out brushes, and he and the Enen crew went to work slopping the goo over the top and around the suspending hook. He touched the electrode to tihe white monster. The derrick lifted the mass, letting the empty vat fall free. Yet another stage was done. Two ovens were employed for the burnout. Each was big enough for a man to stand within. They placed the ends of the plastic rods into special holders and managed to fit all of the smaller units into one oven, fastening them into place by means of a heat-resistant framework. The main chunk sat in the other oven, propped upside-down. They sealed the ovens and set their thermostats for # degrees. Dillingham lay down in the empty vat and slept. T hree hours later burnout was over. Even supercolloid took time to melt completely when heated in a # pound mass. But now the green liquid had been drained into reservoirs and sealed away, while the smaller quantities of melted plastic were allowed to collect in a disposal vat. The white investments were hollow shells, open only where the plastic rods had project. The casting was the most spectacto use gold, though worried that its high specific gravity would overbalance the Gleep jaw. It was impossible under present conditions to arrange for a gold-pIated, matching-density enough with other metals to be sure they were adaptable to his purpose. The expansion coefficient of his investment matched that of gold exactly, for example; anything else would solidify into the wrong size. Gold, at any rate, was nothing to the muckaimuck; his people refined it through their gills, extracting it from the surrounding water on order in any quantity. The crucible arrived: a self-propelled boilerlike affair. They piled hundred-pound ingots of precise gold alloy into the hopper, while the volcanic innards of the crucible rumbled and belched and melted everything to rich bright liquid. A line of Enens carried the smaller investments, which were shaped inside exactly like the original impressions, to the spigot and held them with tongs while the fluid fortune poured in. These were carefully deposited in the vat, now filled with cold water. The last cast, of course, was the colossal vat-shaped one. This was simply propped up under the spigot while the tired crew kept feeding in ingots. 'By the time this cast had been poured, twenty-four tons of gold had been used in all. While the largest chunk was being hauled to the opean inside the front the smaller investments and laid out the casts according to his chart of the cavity. He gave each a minimum of finishing; on so gross a scale, it could hardly make much difference. The finished casts weighed more than twenty times as much as the original colloid impressions had, and even the smallest ones were distinctly awkward to maneuver into place. He marked them, checked off their positions on his chart and had the Enens ferry them up with the derrick. At the other end, he manhandled each into its proper place, verified its fit and position and withdrew it to paint it with cement. No part of tion. O nce again the branching cavern lost its projections, this time permanently, as each segment was secured and severed from its projecting sprue. He kept the sprues -- the handles of gold, the shape of the original plastic handles -- on until the end, because otherwise there would have been no purchase on the weighty casts. He had to have some handle to adjust them. The derrick lowered the orevicepiece into the cavity. Two Enens pried it in with power crowbars. IF cement over the mass as it slid reluctantly into the hole. It was necessary to attach a heavy weight to the derrick-hook and swing it repeatedly against the four-ton cast in order to tamp it in all the way. At last it was time for the major assembly. Nineteen tons of gold descended slowly into the hole while they dumped quarts of liquid cement into a pool below. The cast touched bottom and settled into place, while the cement bubbled up around the edges and overflowed. They danced a little jig on top of ing that a fraction of its value in Earth terms could be credited to his purchase-price. The job was over. V a A commendable performance," the high muckamuck said. "My son is frisking about in his pen like a regular tadpole and eating well." had seen during the walk along the occlusal surfaces. "I'm afraid he won't be frisking long. In another year or two he'll be feeling half a dozen other caries. Decay is rampant." "You mean this will happen again?" The tentacles waved so violently that the transcoder stuttered. by the tail. "Are you still trying to tell me that no member of your species has suffered dental caries before this time?" "Never." This still did not make sense. "Does your son's diet differ in any important respect from yours, or from that of other children?" "My son is a prince!" "Meaning he can eat whatever he wants, whether it is good for him or not?" The Gleep paused. "He gets so upset if he doesn't have his way. He's only a baby -- hardly three centuries old." differing standards. "Do you feed him delicacies -- refined foods?" "Naturally. Nothing but the best." He sighed. "Muckamuck, my people also had perfect teeth -- until they began consuming sweets and overly refined foods. Then dental caries became the most common disease among them. You're going to have to curb your boy's appetite." "I couldn't." He could almost read the agitation of the tentacles without benefit of translation. "He'd throw a terrible tantrum." He had expected this reaction. He'd encountered it many times on Earth. "In that case, you'd better begin training a crew of dentists. Your son will require constant attention." "But we can't do such work ourselves. We have no suitable appendages, externally." "Import some dentists, then. You have no alternative." The creature signaled a sigh. "You make a convincing case." The tentacles relaxed while it thought. Suddenly they came alive again. "Enen -- it seems we need a permanent thought of all that garbage in the ly creatures of principle, patient's jaw. Surely they couldn't -- "We're prepared to offer a full "Sell him!" the Enen chief reton of superlative-grade frumpstiggle how he was able to understand the ticingly. words, then realized that his trans"A full ton? The Enens were coder was picking up the Gleep sigaghast. Then, recovering: 'True, the nals translated by the other machine. Earthman has taught us practically From Enen to Gleep to English, via all he knows. We could probably get paired machines. Why hadn't he along without him now... " "This is a human being," the Enen shouted; but the bargaining contincontinued indignantly. "A member ued unabated. of an intelligent species dwelling far After all -- what is the value of across the galaxy. He is the only exa man, compared to frumpstiggle? odontist in this entire sector of space and a fine upstanding fellow, at that. How dare you make such a crass I -- Complete in This Issuel I by Larry Niven I by Robert Silverberg # IF IF  Serial These people couldn't be breathing water a mile under the sea -- but the facts were clear. They were! What has gone before T hree of my friends had disappeared in a single small area of the Pacific, just north of Easter Island. Like me, all worked for the Power Board, the group which was responsible for rationing man's severely limited supply of energy and which was, because of that fact, practically the world government. Bert Wehlstrahl had vanished a year before, and Joey Elfven ten months later. Marie Wladetzky had gone two weeks after Joe, presumably in search of him, and I was principally interested in finding Marie. (Don't ask for my name; ifs bad enough to have to listen to it occasionally, and Pm certainly not going to put it in print.) Since the two men were police workers of a sort, it was likely that their disappearance was not accidental, so my first step was to search the ocean bottom in the key area from a camouflaged vantage point -- actually one of the spherical escape tanks used in ordinary cargo submarines, somewhat modified for my purpose, I found evidence of rationing violation the moment I reached the bottom --  almost landed on it, A mile down there was an area actually lighted artificially and apparently concealed under a flat, translucent surface which I interpreted as some sort of fabric. Seeing energy wasted to light the outside of a tent roof was bad enough; the sight of a swimmer in what looked like ordinary scuba gear under five thousand feet of sea water was far worse. The technological capacity so demonstrated suggested something much more serious than an ordinary blackmarket energy gang. My tank was not very maneuverable, but I managed to get myself 'captured" and towed to an entrance to the undersea base. Here I dropped to sonar transponder, which should guide Board enforcement forces to the spot, released my ballast and headed for the surface with the comfortable certainty that the swimmers could not follow far because of the pressure gradient. This belief proved wrong. One of them hung onto my tank and by pounding on it was able to guide a sub to the scene. After doing my best to get the nearly helpless tank away, I was really captured and dragged back to the bottom.The tank was brought to a lighted pit in the ocean floor. There were no door or air locks. The swimmers, who had loaded my tank with enough ballast to keep it down even if they lost hold again, towed me into a tunnel which led from the entrance pit, along it for a short distance, and into a flooded room. Then they removed their helmets. I t must be bvious from the things I've already said that I'm no psychologist, though I've read a little about the field. I've been told that it's possible for a person to deny flatly and categorioally the evidence of own senses, if their reports disagree violently enough with what he thinks he knows. In fact I've met people who claim that the ability to do this is all that keeps most of us sane. Until that moment, I'd doubted both statements. Now I'm not so sure. I'd seen us come in from definite, obvious sea-bottom conditions to the place where we now were. I 'had not seen anything even remotely like a door, valve or lock either open before us or close ibehind us, and I had certainly been looking for one. To the best of my knowledge and belief, therefore, my tank was now in a room full of sea water at a pressure corresponding roughly to a mile's depth. I had seen ithe people now in the chamber around me swimming in the sea outside -- the same people, for the most part. I had seen them, continually or nearly so, as they brought me in. They, too, were still IF in high-pressure water and had been all along. I was forgetting for the moment the clarity with which I had been able to see those same faces in the water outside, but even if I'd remembered I probably wouldn't have seen the relevance just then. I had seen them remove the helmets, just now, still apparently in high-pressure water. No, I couldn't believe all of that at once. I was missing something, but I couldn't believe it was recently an observable fact. I'd been battered around during the storm and had certainly missed the technique which had been used in finding me, but I hadn't been unconscious, then or later. I was short on sleep, but surely not so dazed by it as to have missed any major happenings. I had to believe that my observations were reasonably complete. Since I was, in spite of that belief, clearly out of phase with reality, there was something I just plain didn't know. It was time for more education. I wasn't too worried about my personal future; if there had been any intent to dispose of me, it could have been done earlier with much less trouble -- and as I've said before, I couldn't believe, deep down, that people would do anything final to me anyway. If you think that doesn't jibe with the way I've admitted I felt a few minutes before, you ask a psychiatrist. I had a couple of days of breathing still in the tank, and presumably before that time was up my new acquaintances would do something about getting me out -- though I couldn't offhand see what it would be, now that I thought of the piroblem. Any way I looked at it, though, the next move seemed up to them. Maybe that shouldn't have been comforting, but it was. Apparently they felt the same way -- not comforted, I mean, but that they should be doing something. They were gathered in a group between the tank and the door we had come through, apparently arguing some point. I couldn't hear their voices, and after a minute or two I decided they weren't actually talking; there was a tremendous amount of gesticulation. They must have a pretty comprehensive sign language, I decided. This was reasonable if they spent much of itiheir time, and especially if they did much of their work', under water. I couldn't see why they used it now, since  my common sense was having trouble admitting that they were still in water. In any case, they seemed (to reach an agreement after a few minutes, and two of them went swimming -- yes, swimming -- off down one of the smaller shafts. I t occured to me that even if they couldn't talk under the circumstances, they should be able to hear. So I tried tapping on the walls of the tank to get their attention -- gently, in view of my experience with tank-tapping so shortly before. Evidently they coud hear, though they had the expected' difficulty in judging the direclion of the sound source and it took them a few minutes to recognize that I was responsible. Then they swam over and gathered around the tank, looking in through the ports. I turned on my inside lights again. None of them seemed surprised ait what they saw, though a continuous and animated gesture conversation was kept up. I tried yelling. It was hard on my own ears, since most of the sound echoed from the walls of the tank, but at least a little should get through. It evidently did; several of them shook their Jieads at me, presumably indicating that .they couldn't understand me. Since I hadn't used any words yet, this wasn't surprising. I tried telling them who I was -- not using my name, of course -- in each of the three languages in which I'm supposed to be proficient. I attempted to do the same in a couple of others in which I make no claim of skill. All I got was the headshaking, and two or three people swam away, presumably dismissing me as a hopeless case. No one made any obvious attempt to communicate with me by any sort of sign or sound. Eventually I felt my throat getting sore, so I stopped. For another ten minutes or so nothing much happened. Some more of the crowd swam away, but others arrived. There was more of the gesture talk; no doubt the newcomers were being given whatever there was to tell about me. AH the new arrivals wore coveralls more or less like those I'd first seen outside, but some of these were in fancy colors. I got the impression that it was the difference between work clothes and whitecollar suits, though I can't give any objective reason for the notion. Then some new swimmers, less completely dressed, appeared from one of ithe tunnels, and things began to happen. One of them worked his way through what was by now quite a crowd, came up to the tank, and tapped it gently. It was refreshing to have one of them try to get my attention instead of the other way around, but the real jolt came when I recognized the newcomer. It was Bert Whelstrahl, who had disappeared a year before. IX H e recognized me, too; there was no doubt about that. He put on a larger-thandif e-size grin the moment he got a good look through my port, gave another bit of knuckle play on the tank and then drew back and raised one eyebrow in an oh-no-what-do-we-do-with-.thisone expression. I decided the situation justified using up what was left of my voice and called out, "Bert! Can you hear me?" He nodded, and made a palmdown gesture which I interpreted as meaning that I didn't need to yell so loud. That was a relief. I cut volume and after a bit of trial and error found that he could hear me when I spoke only a little louder than a normal conversational tone. I began to ask questions, but he held up a hand to stop me and began making some more signs. He pinched his nose shut, holding the palm of his hand over his mouth at the same time; then he held this left wrist in front of his face as though he were looking at a watch, though he wasn't wearing one. ; IF I got his meaning dearly enough. He wanted to know how much breathing time I had left. I checked my panel, did a 'little mental arithmetic and called out that there was about fifty hours still in my tanks. Then he stuck a finger in his mouth and raised his eyebrows; I answered graphically, which was easier on my throat, by holding up the partly emptied box of dextrose pills. He nodded and put on a thoughtful expression. Then he handtalked for two or three minutes to the people nearest him, the head motions which they threw in occasionally being the only part I could understand. With everyone seemingly agreed, he waved at me and vanished back into the tunnel he'd come from. Nothing more happened for the next half hour, except that the crowd grew even larger. Some of the newcomers were women, though I couldn't tell whether the one I had seen outside was among them. I hadn't seen her closely enough to recognize her face. Some of them certainly weren't; apparently swimming doesn't have to be the aid to figure control some people claim it to be. Then Bert came back. He was carrying what looked like an ordinary clip board, but when he held it up to the port I saw that the sheets on it weren't paper. He scratched on the top one with a stylus, which left a mark. Then he lifted the top sheet, and the mark disappeared. I'd seen toys of that sort years ago; apparently he'd spent some time improvising this one. It seemed a good and obvious solution to the problem of writing llujcr water, and I wondered why luoiie of the others had thought of it He had to print fairly large letters in order for me to read clearly, so even with the aid of the pad our communication was slow. I started by asking what the whole business was about, which didn't help speed, either. Bert cut me off on one. "There isn't time to give the whole story now," he wrote. 'You have a decision to make ibefore you run out of air -- at least twenty hours before, in fact. It has to do with whether you go back to the surface." was surprised and made no secret of it. "You mean they'd let me go back? Why did they go to all that trouble to get me down here? I was already at the surface." "Because your decision and its details will affect a lot of people and you should know who and how. They didn't know you were a Board official until I told them, but it was obvious your story when you got back would get to the Board anyway. It's rather important just what the Board hears about this place." "I suppose it's a case of being released if I promise to tell nothing. You know I couldn't do that." "Of course not. I couldn't either. That's not what they expect. They realize you couldn't go back without telling; there would be no rational explanation of w'here you'd been or why. You can tel'l everything that's happened to you and that you've seen, but there are other things they want to be sure you include. We must make sure you know them." I jumped on the pronoun. "You switched from '(they' to 'we.' Does that mean you've chosen to stay down here yourself?" "Yes." This was a nod, not a written word. "For a while, anyway," he added with the stylus. "Then you've managed to stomach the morals of a bunch of people who waste thousands of kilowatts just lighting up the sea bottom? Have you forgotten your upbringing, and why -- " He interrupted me with a violent shake of his head and began to write. "It's not like that. I know it looks terrible, but it's no more wasting power (than the Board is wasting the sunlight that falls on the Sahara. Maybe there'll be time to explain more before you decide, but you're enough of a physicist to see that analogy or you wouldn't be a Board worker in the first place." I spent some (time digesting that one. The Sahara point was understandable. The Board has always resented having to let all that solar energy go unused. Their stock difficulty, of course, is deciding when it's worth while to put energy into a project in the hope of getting more back'. It's been the standard belief for decades that man's only real hope lies in hydrogen fusion, and most of the authorized speculative expenditure is for research in this direction. From time to time, though, a very eloquent plea for a solar-energy project comes in. Sometimes an especially promising one gets approved, and one or two of these have even paid off since I've been working for the outfit. I couldn't see, though, how natural sunlight shining on a desert could compare with artificial light shining on the Sea bottom. I said so. He shrugged, and began to write. # #'The energy here comes from A below the crust -- straight heat, though I can't properly call it volcanic heat. If they don't keep their working fluid circulating down to the collector and get the heat out of it when it comes back up, the hot end of the unit will melt. Your real complaint, if you must have one, is that they don't tie into the planetary power net and observe the rationing rules like everyone else. The reasons they don't are very good, but there isn't time to give them now -- they call for a lot of history and technology which would take forever by this scribble-board. What I'm supposed to tell you is what you have to know if you go back up." "I take it that Joey and Marie decided to stay down here." "Joey hasn't been here. Marie doesn't believe me when I tell her that and is still arguing. No decision has been made in her case." "But if Marie is still here withr her future unsettled, why did you say I have to make up my mind in thirty hours or so? She's been down here for weeks. Obviously you have facilities to take care of us." "We don't 'have' them. They were made especially for her, as far as food and air are concerned. She's still living in her sub. It would take more work to get supplies iinto your tank, whidh doesn't have locks or air-charging valves. Besides, you're not in quite as good a position as Marie to have people go out of their way for your convenience." "Why not?" "You're neither female nor goodlooking." I had no answer to that. "All right," was al I could say. "Tell me the official word, then. What am I supposed to know if I go back?" "You're to make sure your boss on the Board knows that we do have a large energy supply down here -- " 'That I'd tell him anyway." " -- and that it isn't being rationed." "That's also pretty obvious. Why do you want those points stressed? I can't think of any better way to get this place raided." "Believe me, it wouldn't be. If the Board thought this was just another hunch of powerleggers you'd be right, of course; but fifteen thousand people don't make a gang. They make a nation, if you remember the word." "Not pleasantly." "Well, never mind that phase of history. The point is that the Board has hushed up this thing in the past and can be counted on to do it again if they know what they're doing." # T Tush it up? You're crazy. A A They'd do just one thing to an operating power plant, even if it was illegally built. They'd tie it into the network. The idea that they'd let it go on running independently, outside rationing, is dithering." "Why do you suppose you never heard of this place before? It's been here eighty years or more." "I would suppKse because nobody's found it. That's likely enough. The bottom of the Pacific isn't the most thoroughly covered real estate on the planet." "It's been found many times. Several in the past year, if you'll stop to remember. Twelve times that I've heard of since this place was built it has been reported to the Board as a finished, operating project. Nothing further has come of it." "You mean the Board knows where this thing is and still lets me come looking for you and -- " "They may not know the location. I'm not sure the present Board knows anything; I don't know whait was done with the earlier recordsi by their predecessors. The last time was over fifteen years ago." "You know all this for fact?" "Objectively, no. I've read it in what seem credible reports. I'm not qualified as a historical researcher and didn't make professional tests. It all seems very probable to me." "It doesn't to me. Have you told ail this to Marie?" "Yes." "Does she believe it?" "She doesn't believe anything I say since I told her that Joey has never been here. She claims I'm a dirty liar and a traitor to mankind and an immoral skunk and that we disposed of Joe because he wouldn't swallow our ridiculous falsehood." IF "Would I be able to talk to her?" "You'd have my blessing, but I don't see how. She's a long way from here, since her sub arrived at a different entrance. I don't think it would be possible to get your tank there without taking you outside again; it would take longer than you can spare, and I'd have trouble finding enough people to get you carried. "Can't whoever runs this place assign a crew?" "How do you think we're run? There isn't anyone who could order a person to do such a thing, since it's more for your pleasure and convenience than public necessity. Besides, I told you there isn't time." I pvondered that for a little while. His remark about how the installation was run was a little surprising, but this was hardly the time to go into local poilitics. He'd started to give me a more interesting impression, anyway; if what he'd said could be credited, it seemed almost as though it would be 'better for these people if Marie and I left than if we stayed. Why was the choice being offered, ithen? I asked Bert, a little indirectly. "What will your friends do if I don't go back up? More people will come to look for me, you know. Even if I hadn't reached the surface and started my rescue set, which I did, the Board knows where I was going and why." He shrugged again. "No one cares how many come down. Unless there's a whole fleet at once, we can pull 'em iiQ land jgive them the same ohoioo we're living you. It's happened often enough, as I jsd." "And suppose a whole fleet does come and starts wrecking those lights and that tent or whatever it is without wasting time looking for me or Marie or anyone else? Sooner or later if folks keep disappearing down here that's what will happen." "I'm not m on all the thoughts of the Council here," he answered, "and I don't know whether they've thought much of (that point. I repeat, there have been quite a few people who stayed down here without getting the Board very excited. Personally, I think they'd just put this part of the Pacific off limits to the general public long before they'd waste energy sending a fleet of subs down here. In any case, that's the Council's worry. The current point is that you and Marie do have the choice and will have to make it of your own free will." "What if I refuse to commit myself?" "Once you've been told what is necessary, we'M simply turn you loose at the gate you came in by. You're hardly in a position to hang on and refuse to go up. No problem." He gestured toward the direction from which we had come along the tunnel. "Speaking for myself, I'd like to have you stay -- and Marie, of course. I do have some good friends down here now, but they're not quite the same as old ones." I thought for a few seconds more and then tried to catch his eye through the poUrt I asked the "JMfe did you decide to stay dowtt jper He tiw#y shook his head. "Yqu mean it's too long to explain now, or you don't want to tell me, or something else?" I persisted. He held up one finger, then three, but still wrote nothing. "In other words, I'm going to have to make up my mind entirely on my own." He nodded emphatically. "And Marie, too?" He nodded again. I could think of only one more question likely to be helpful, and I threw it at him. "Bert, could you go back up above now if you changed your mind about staying? Or is what they did to let you breathe water impossible to reverse?" H e smiled and used the stylus again. "We're not breathing water; that analysis misses on two counts. They did make an irreversible change, but it's not a very serious one. I could still live at the surface, though the sihift back to air "breathing would be somewhat lengthy and complicated." "You just said you weren't breathing water!" "I repeat it. I'm not." 'ut you just said -- " He held up hand to stop me and began writing again. "I'm not trying to tantalize you. The Council isn't dictatorial by nature, or even very firm, but it feels iongly and unanimousily that the ido details of how we live here shouldn't be discussed wiith. anyone who hasn't committed himself to staying. I may have said moire than they'd strictly like already, and I'm not going any farther.' "Do e people out there with you disagree with the Council?" "No. The feding on that point is pretty uniform among the populace." "Then why did you take the chance of telling me as much as you did?" "Most of them were in no position to see what I wrote, none of them could have read it, and none of them can understand your spoken words." "Then the native language here isn't -- " "It isn't." He'd cut me off again with a wave of his 'hand before I even named a language. "Then why do you worry about disobeying this Council on the matter of telling me things?" "Because I think they're perfectly right." That was a hard one to argue, and I didn't try. After a minute or so, he wrote another message. "I have work to do and have to go now, but I'll be back every hour or two. If you really need me bady, pound on your tank -- not too hard, please. Even if no one is in sight, which isn't likely, you can be heard for a long distance, and someone will send for me. Think it over carefully; I'd like you to stay, but not if you're not sure you want to." He laid the clip board down beside the tank, and IF swam off. Quite a few of the others also disappeared, though they didn't all take the same tunnel. The small number remaining seemed to be those who had arrived most recently and hadn't yet given their eyes a real fill of the tank. They did nothing either interesting or distracting, though, and I was able to buckle down to heavy thinking. There was plenty of it to do, and Tm rather slow at the business sometimes. T here was no problem about the decision, of course. Naturally I would have to go back to report. Staying here might, as Bert had said, merely pass the buck to another investigator, but sending another one down would be a clear waste of power no matter what trick they dreamed up to get him there. Also, I wasn't nearly as sure as Bert seemed to be that the Board wouldn't waste a few tons of explosive on this place if they found it and had reason to believe it had killed off three of their agents. The problem was not whether to go back, but when; and the "when" depended on what I could manage to do first. What I wanted to do was make' contact with Marie. It would also be nice to find out more about Joey, if information of any sort was to be had. I didn't want to believe that Bert had lied about him, and it was certainly possible that Marie's disbelief stemmed from her reluctance to accept the idea that Joe had disappeared in a genuine accident. On the other hand, she was by no means stupid. I had to allow for the possibility that she might have better reasons for doubting Bert. Joe, like Marie, had had a oneman sub. He could have found out things these people did not want known at the surface. After all, what they seemed to want Marie and me to carry back if we went was information, or propaganda, designed to discourage the Board from checking further. But wait a minute. That was true only if Bert were right about the Board's preferring to hide the word of what went on down here. If he were wrong -- if my own admittedly prejudiced idea of the reaction were closer to the truth -- there'd be no question of suppression, and the Board would be down raiding this place within a day of (the time either of us got back. That could hardly be wanted by this "Council" Bert was talking about. Maybe there really was something in what he had said. But there still could be things these people didn't want known, whether they were feeding Bert a line about the Board or not. Joey could be here or could have been killed, though the latter went very much against the grain to believe. Even if Bert had been right about his never arriving -- perhaps especially if he were -- there was Marie to worry about, too. If she were feeling stubborn she'd never leave of her own free wDl, and they couldn't just turn her loose to float up, the way they could me. She had a sub. Of course, now that I was here they could cripple her boat, make sure it was low on ballast, and turn us adrift at the same time; maybe I should wait for that. Maybe -- If you're getting confused by the way I tell all this you have an idea of the way I felt. If you remember that my memory has done some editing and organizing since all this actually happened, you may have an even better idea.' It got to be more than I felt like taking. I suddenly realized that I hadn't had much sleep for a long, long time. The tank wasn't a comfortable place for that, but there are times when one doesn't bother with trifles. I slep. X I got in a good, solid eight hours, according to the clock. When I woke up, it was with the conviction that I couldn't plan anything until I had figured out how these people managed to live as they did, what would have to be done to me if I agreed to stay and most particularly what I would have to arrange to do myself if, after agreeing to stay and being processed, I chose to leave. Bert had made it clear that he wasn't going to tell me, but he had admitted saying a little more than he should have, so there might be a chance of my figuring it out for myself. My memory is supposed to be good. Just what had he said that might mean anything? The most striking remark was his denial that he was breathing water. Also, there had been something else in that sentence -- what was it? -- "that analysis misses on two counts." What could that mean? Grammatically speaking, the most obvious implication of the first phrase was that the liquid now around us wasn't water. Was this possible? And if it were, was there any other evidence? Yes, to both. Many liquids don't mix well with water -- non-polar liquids in general. Carbon tetrachloride and all the oils, to name familiar ones. However, if this were such a liquid it must be at least as dense as water and probably denser. Not the general run of oils, therefore. Not carbon tet, either, since it's highly poisonous. The density had to be high because there was no door or valve between this place and the ocean, and oil would have floated to the surface of the Pacific and been spotted long ago. On that basis, the interface between water and my hypothetical liquid would probably be at the entrance. Memory supported the idea. As the tank had reached the level of the pit's mouth on the way in, the subs had hooked more ballast to it -- obviously necessary if the new liquid were denser than water and the tank were just barely heavy enough to sink in the latter. The swimmers, too, had taken on more ballast -- those "tool kits!" Of course. If they had been tools, why put them on coming in from the sea bottom? Or if outside were a IF place for recreation only and tools Vere only used inside, why not keep them at the place they were used? If there had been room in the tank, I'd have kicked myself for not seeding that sooner -- or rather, for not following up the doubts I had had at the time. All right, first working hypothesis. We're in a non-polar, nonpoisonous liquid, somewhat denser than water. I think I see why, but let's not be too hasty. So that was the second point on which my analysis had been wrong. The people, as Bert had said, weren't breathing water -- because they weren't in water and because they weren't breathing. I still had trouble believing it, but the logic went marching on. T he basic idea was clear enough. If people didn't breathe, they didn't need gas in their lungs. If they didn't have gas in their lungs, they wouldn't be bothered by pressure changes. Well, qualify that. They'd have to fill their middle ears and sinuses with liquid, too. If the liquid had about the same compressibility as water (question: why not use water? Tabled for later consideration) then a change in depth would mean no significant volume change in any part of the j#ody. though. Granted that it would be convenient to be able to do without t)reathing, how was it managed? Well, why does one breathe, anyway? To get oxygen into the blood. Will anything do as a substitute for oxygen. Categorically no. E'emenc number eight is the one and only, oxidizing agent the human metabolism is geared to use -- and "geared" is a rather good word in thac connection. But does the oxygen have to come in gas form? Maybe not. If my schooling hasn't gone by the board, hemoglobin is only interested in Otwo molecules, not oxide or peroxide ions or ozone; but up to the time the stuff is delivered to the hemoglobin some of the others are at least conceivable. The first thought would be some sort of food or drink. Could something be taken into the stomach which would release oxygen molecules? Certainly. There was hydrogen peroxide. The oxygen released didn't start as diatomic molecules, though it got to that state quickly enough. I couldn't picture anyone in his right mind drinking a slug of peroxide, for several reasons, but the principle seemed defendable so far. Could the oxygen get from the stomach to the blood stream? Not directly, but it could take the same path as the other foods. Into the I seemed to remember that there is a lot less absorbing surface here than in the lungs, but under the pressure of this depth that might not be a serious lack. Working hypothesis two, therefore, is that these folks eat or drink something that gives off oxygen gradually. If, under this pressure, the gas always remained in solution, the body would still be relatively indifferent to pressure change. Though my outside passenger of a few hours back might have been in serious trouble after all if he'd gone all the way to the surface with me. How about carbon dioxide elimination? No problem. Out through the lungs, as usual, and into immediate solution in the surrounding liquid. Maybe that was why the liquid wasn't water; they might be using something that took up CO# better, though under this pressure water certainly should be adequate. Of course, with body fluids under the same pressure, it might be more a matter of complex ion equilibrium than simple solubility; perhaps pH control had been necessary. It certainly was inside the body, and this whole idea seemed to be lessening the differences between inside and out. A ll this suggested that if I chose to stay down here, they would presumably start pressurizing me. Sometime during the process I'd be given a meal, or a drink, of the oxygen source. That, as far as I could see, would be it, barring minor nuses and middle ears with liquid. How about getting back to breathing habits? The pressure would have to come down again. The oxygen source in the stomach -- yes, that would present a difficulty. If it were still giving off the stuff, and pressure got down near one atmosphere -- hmph. Very close timing, doing the job just as the stomach oxygen ran out? Mechanical assistance such as .an artificial lung between the time the inside source gave out and natural breathing was resumed? Either way, it would be difficult for me to manage alone, if the need ever arose. In any case, I could now do some tentative planning, always realizing my hypothesis might be all wet. I was fond of them, though, and felt that it would be at most a case of having to modify details as more information came in. It was a pleasant sensation while it lasted. Under the circumstances, then, it seemed best to tell Bert that I was staying and waste as little time as possible getting out of this bubble so I could do something useful. I'd developed my own moral standards -- made my private Loyalty Oath to Mankind, if you like -- long ago, so there'd be no conscience question if they wanted me to make some sort of local declaration before they'd accept me. Probably they wouldn't; things like that had been worn too thin to be meaningful back in the days when people thought their chief danger was political difference rather than energy shortage. Lodges and similar private groups still used formal oaths, but even these didn't carry quite the same implications that they used to. I wondered suddenly why my mind was wandering off in that direction -- after all, my plan might be a little deceitful, but it was in a good cause, and my conscience was clear enough -- and got back to immediate problems. Details, of course, would still have , to wait. I'd have to learn the local geography, especially the way to Marie's submarine. I'd have to find IF out just how much freedom of action I was going to be allowed. Bert seemed to come and go at will, but he'd been here for a year. In that connection, probably I'd be expected to earn my living in some fashion; if finding out the details I needed and working up a plan to get Marie and me back to the surface, all took very long then I'd probably have to do something of the sort. What sort of work would be both useful down here and within my powers was something else for the future to tell. Right now, then, the thing to do was wait for Bert, or send for him, and give him the word. Waiting would probably be better. There was no point in looking too eager. He'd said he'd be around often, and no doubt had been while I was asleep. He'd be bound to expect me to wake up before long. I waited, like a monkey in a zoo -- or perhaps more like a fish in an aquarium. XI I t was about half an hour before he .showed up. He glanced in through one of the ports, saw that I was conscious and picked up the writing pad. "Been doing any thinking?" was his opener. I nodded affirmatively. "Good. Made up your mind?" I hesitated. Part of it was for effect, but part of it was genuine uncertainty. I could be wrong in so many ways. Then I stiffened up. "I'm staying." He looked a little surprised and started to write. I went on before he had finished. "At least. I'm staying if you can tell me one thing for certain." He cleared his pad and looked at me expectantly. "Do you genuinely believe -- I'm not asking do you know, just do you believe -- that these people are justified in keeping out of the power net and the rationing system?" Bert's face took on an annoyed expression as he wrote. "I told you you'd have to make up your mind by yourself. I won't take the responsibility." "I expect to make it up myself," I retorted, "but not without data. You say there's too little time for you to tell me everything I'd like to know, and I'm arguing that. I'm asking for a conclusion of yours, not even a piece of information you're not supposed to give me, just a conclusion -- an opinion -- as a summary of information I can't get. Did you make your decision on as little knowledge as I have now?" He shook his head negatively. "Then I'm sorry if you read my question as a reflection on your morals, but I still want an answer." He frowned thoughtfully for half a minute or so and looked at me a little doubtfully. I repeated my question, to be sure he understood. "I really do believe they have the right idea," he wrote at last. I nodded. "All right, then I'm staying. How long will it take to get me out of this coconut shell?" "I don't know." His writing was slow and interrupted by pauses for thought. "It's not what you'd call a standard procedure. We're more used to our guests coming in submarines, whidh have pressure locks or at least some sort of port. I'll tell the Council, and we'll hunt up some engineers who have time to spare. I'm sure it can be done." "You mean -- you mean it may take a long time? Suppose it takes longer than my air supply?" "Then I suppose we'll just have to shove you outdoors anyway. If you still want to badly enough, you can always come back in a sub, the way Marie did. I'll go start things moving." "But why didn't you mention this before? I thought -- well -- " "Some things really shouldn't need mentioning. Where in the world would you expect to find ready-made equipment for taking a man out of a high-pressure escape shell while it was still in a highpressure environment? Think it over." He put down the pad and was gone before I could think of a good answer to that one. In fact he had come back, nearly an hour later, before I could think of one. I still haven't B ert, on his return, had better news than I had been afraid he might. The Council, or such of them as he had found -- I was getting on idea that it was a body of rather fluid composition, and that the usual way of getting things done officially was to find and deal with one's own chosen quorum of members -- had approved my application for citizenship, if it could be called that, with no argument. Several engineers in the group had been interested enough in the problem I represented to go to work on it at once. They were at the task now and might be expected to come up with something shortly. That was encouraging. I'm an engineer of sorts myself, though I work at it only in its incidental connection with my main job, and every idea I had thought of ran into a blank wall. This was usually a matter of basic procedure. I couldn't see how welding, or highother ordinary operations you take for granted in machining and handling work could be done in a liquid environment under a pressure of more than a ton to the square inch. Most tools, for example, have high-speed motors; high-speed motors are a little hard to conceive with their moving parts bathed in an even moderately viscous fluid; and under that sort of pressure, how do you keep the fluid out? Of course, if these people had been down here the eighty years or so that Bert had mentioned, they should have learned the basic tricks for the environment, just as men had learned space engineering the hard way. I wished I knew how they were going about my problem, though. I didn't find out in detail, but it didn't take them too long. About eighteen hours -- a very boring eighteen hours -- after Bert had brought the news, he came back with a team of helpers and began moving the tank. It was quite a trip. We went back outside and travelled IF half a mile or so to another, larger entrance. Inside it there were several large corridors, instead of just one, opening from the main chamber. They towed me down one of these for a distance and stopped by a pair of the first genuine locks I had seen since my arrival. One was quite ordinary, and I barely glanced at it; the other was circular and just about large enough for my tank. It was located in the same wall as the smaller lock, about twenty yards away from it. It was opened as we approached by a couple of the party who swam on ahead, and the tank was juggled through. The wall in which the door was hung turned out to be several feet thick, and the door itself but little thinner; I judged that the room beyond was the one to be depressurized. The chamber itself was fairly large. One side was crowded with apparatus, the most recognizable items being an operating table with broad restraining straps and a set of remote-control hands much finer than I was used to seeing on work subs. The larger part of the room, in which the tank had been placed, was almost bare, and it looked very much as though the operating room had originally been much smaller. There were signs that a wall as thick as the one I had come through had been removed from between the spot where I now was and the place where the table and its auxiliary gear stood. I would have liked to see the tools that had done the job. M y guess, as it turned out, was correct; the smaller section had been the original conversion room; the smaller lock leading into it could be connected to the hatch of a visiting sub. The whole trouble had been that my tank had no hatch; it normally opened by bisection. Bert wrote instructions for me while the others were getting out of the place. "When we're all gone and the door is sealed, the room will be pumped down to surface pressure. A green light will flash over the table when it's down, but you'll know anyway -- you'll be able to open your tank. When you can get out, go over to the table and get onto it. Fasten the straps around your body and legs. It doesn't matter whether your arms are free or not. When you're tight to the table, press the red signal button you can see from here." He indicated the button to me. "It's within reach of your right hand, you see. A container of sleeping medicine will be delivered by one of the hands. Drink it and relax. Nothing more can be done while you're conscious." "Why not?" "You'll have to be plugged into a heart-lung machine during the change. Don't worry. It's been done many times before. Once you're out of that tank and onto the table, the only unusual problem you offer will have been solved. All right?" "I see. All right." He put down his pad and swam out through the ponderous lock, which swung slowly shut. I hadn't seen any special dogs or clamps on it, but it opened out into the corridor and wouldn't need any. With its area, once the pressure started down in the room nothing much short of an earthquake could open it. I could tdl when the pumps started; the whole place quivered, and the vibration carried through to the tank very easily. I spent some time estimating the work that would have to be done to empty a room of this volume against a one-mile bead of sea water and a little more in wondering how the mysterious fluid that was replacing water would behave when e pressure came down. If ithad a high vapor pressure there would be a purging job mi top of the pumping one -- no, not necessarily, come to .think of it; the stuff must be physiologically harmless, so probably the vapor could be left in the room. Of course if it were flammable it might make trouble when they put oxygen in for me to breathe. Well, they were used to that problem and had been for decades. I needn't worry about it. In spite of all the free energy which seemed to be around, it took nearly half an hour to empty the place. The liquid level went down steadily. The surface, when it appeared, remained smooth. There was no boiling or other special behavior. It might as well have been water. They took no pains to get the last oi it out; there were several puddles on the rather uneven floor when the light flashed. I wasted no time opening the tank; I'd been in it for a long time and couldn't get out too fast. My ears hurt for a moment as the hemispheres fell apart; pressures had not been perfectly matched, but the difference wasn't enough to be serious. Once out I slowed down. My arms and legs were badly cramped, and I found it almost impossible for a few moments to walk even as far as the table. I spent several minutes working the kinks out of my limbs before I took the next step. The table was comfortable. Anything I could have stretched out on, including the stone floor, would have been comfortable just then. I fastened the broad, wbed strap about my waist and chest, then of course found I couldn't reach down to the ones for my legs. I undid the first set, took care of my legs, refastened the upper strap and finally was ready to push the signal switch. As promised, one of the mechanical hands promptly extended toward me with a beaker of liquid and a flexible tube to let me drink it lying down. I followed orders, and that's all I remember about the process. I woke up with a reasonably clear head. I was lying on a bunk in a small room that contained two other beds and nothing much else. No one else was around. Someone had removed my clothes, but they were folded in a sort of hybrid offspring of a laundry basket and a letter rack near the head of the bunk. Another similar affair held a pair of trunks such as I had seen worn by many of the men around my tank. After a moment's thought IF I put an the trunks; my other garments weren't made for swimming. I got out of the bunk and stood on the floor, though my head felt a little funny. It occuiT to me that I had no business feeling enough weight to let me stand, under the drcumslances; I was presumably immersed in a liquid denser than water, and therefore denser than my body. A thought crossed my mind; I rummaged inthe ipockets of my old clothes, found a jacknife, and let go of it. Sure enough, it fell past my face. I was standing on the ceiling, as were the bunks. I tried swimming after the knife, which had come to rest a couple of feet out of reach on the floor ceiling. It was quite an effort, though not by any means impossible. It was obvious why the people I had seen wore the ballast belts. I didn't see any of those around, though; for the moment at least. I'd have to walk if I wanted to go anywhere. This promised to be rather inconvenient too, since the liquid was fairly viscous, though less so than water. Also, the architecture wasn't designed for walkers; one of the doors to the room was in a wall and fairly accessible, but the other was in the floor -- that is, the floor toward which my head was now pointing and on which my jackknife had come to rest. Under the circumstances I decided to wait until Bert or someone showed up with ballast and swim fins. The decision was helped by the fact that I still didn't feel quite myself, even aside from the dikerence of opinion between my eyes and my semicircular canals as to which way was up and which was down. As a matter of fact, the canals couldn't seem to make up their minds at all on the matter, and it suddenly occurred to me that some surgery must have been done there as well. They could not possibly have been left half full of air -- or could they? How strong was bone, and how well surrounded by it were the canals, anyway? I felt around and found several places on my neck and around my ears where the smooth plastic of surgical dressing covered the skin, but that didn't prove much. It had boa obvious all along that some work around the ears would be necessary. I felt no desire to breathe; they must have slipped a supply of their oxygen-food into me sometime during the procedure. I wondered how long it would last. It suddenly occurred to me that I was very much in the power of anyone who chose to exercise it, since I hadn't the faintest idea where to get more of the stuff. That was something I'd have to discuss with Bert very shortly. I tried forcing myself to breathe. I found I could squeeze liquid slowly out of my lungs and get it back equally slowly, but it hurt and made me feel even dizzier than being right side up and upside down simultaneously. The liquid went into my windpipe; I could feel it, but there IF was no tendency to cough. I still think that must have been one of the trickiest parts of the conversion procedure, considering the nerve and muscle activity which coughing involves. T he presence of liquid in my windpide, expected as it was, raised another question. I certainly couldn't talk, and I didn't know the sign language which appeared to be standard here -- didn't even know the spoken language on which it was presumably based. I had a long job ahead of me if I were to communicate with the local inhabitants. Maybe it would be better to bypass any such effort; if I could find out all I needed to know from Bert, language lessons would be a waste of time. I could hear, though. The sounds were almost all strange, though some might have been the hum of highspeed motors or generators. There were whistles, thus, whines -- nearly everything there is a word for, hut none of it exactly similar to anything familiar, and one particular class of noise completely missing. The gabble of speech which drenches every other inhabited part of Earth was totally lacking. Nearly an hour passed, according to my watch, before anyone appeared (the watch itself was a solid-state radioactive-powered affair which had not bn designed with sea-bottom pressure in mind, but had come through the change perfectly). I spent most of the time cursing myself -- not for making the change, but for failing to take advantage of the time between decision and action by getting more information from Bert. The new arrival was young and quite decorative -- but I didn't fall in love with her. The response was mutual. She waved me back to the cot and examined my dressings with an air of competence. When she finished, I tried to call her attention to my lack of swimming ballast. She may have understood, since she paid courteous attention to me and nodded agreeably after I'd finished my gestures, but she left without doing anything constructive about the matter. I hoped she was going to call Bert. W hether she did or not, he was the next to enter. He had no extra ballast with him, but he did have the writing pad. 'Ms was even better. I reached for it and buckled down to work. I'd been restricted to communicating only by written note before, but not since leaving grammer school. In those days it had had a certain thrill, now it proved to be purest nuisance. In something over two hours, we settled: That I was a fully naturalized citizen of this place, and entitled to go where I pleased and do what I wanted short of obvious conflict with the interests of others; That I was not only permitted to examine the power-generating units, but was expected to familiarize myself with them as soon as possible; That I could visit Marie at her submarine whenever I felt like it, and I had the blessing of the Council and the rest of the population in arguing wilh her; and That I would be expected to support myself by farming until I demonstrated some different and at least equally useful way of contributing to the general welfare. That was all. Often in the past I'd held a lengthy conversation with someone, and after he was out of sight had remembered other things I'd wanted to say; but down here this sort of thing wasn't an incident, it was a habit. It wasn't so much that one forgot to bring up some point or other. As a rule there wasn't time to cover even the ones remembered. I've never appreciated the gift of speech so much in my life. Those of you who feel, after finishing this report, that I should have learned certain key facts sooner than I did will please remember this difficulty. I don't say I shouldn't have been quicker, but I do claim some excuse for my failure. The whole thing was not merely annoying; it did wind up making me look more like a plain fool than I ever have before or hope to again. What is really embarrassing is that so many people who have heard only this much of the story can see already where I went wrong. I had no real enthusiasm for farming, though I was curious about how it would be conducted on the sea bottom. I did want to learn about the power plant, but even that item I postponed. I asked Bert first of ;all to guide me to Marie's sub. He nodded and started swimming. 'he trip was made without conA versation. Maybe Bert was used enough to swimming by this time so that he could have written and read while doing it, like a city secretary doing a crossword puzzle as she strolls out to lunch, but I certainly was not. I simply looked around as I followed him, noting everything I possibly could. The tunnels were long and for the most part straight, but they formed a hopeless maze as far as I was concerned. I would be a long, long time learning to find my way around unaided. If there was anything corresponding to an ordinary street sign, I failed to spot it. There were all sorts of color patterns on the walls, but I couldn't tell whether they meant something or were merely decoration. Everything was brightly lighted. The place wasn't just tunnels, either. There were large rooms of all shapes, some of which might have been business plazas or shopping centers or theaters or almost anything else one can think of where a lot of people congregate. I seldom saw any real crowds, but there were enough swimmers around to support the claim that the population was quite large -- not surprising if it had been going for several generations. I was gradually coming to think of the place as a country, as Bert had claimed, rather than an outlaw organization; a country which had never lost its identity by subscribing to the Power Code. This might indeed be the case -- it might have been here longer than the Code had. I didn't know how much more than IF the eighty years Bert had mentioned might be in its history. That was something else to find out. I never got good at judging distances in swimming, and some of the corridors had their traffic assisted by a pump-driven current, so I don't know how far we went before reaching the submarine. As a matter of fact, I still have only the vaguest notion of the size of the whole place. At any rate we finally emerged from a naiTow corridor into one of the big chambers under an ocean entrance, crossed beneath the circle of blackness which gave on a mile of salt water, went on down a much larger passageway for perhaps two hundred yards, and found ourselves at the entrance to a fair-sized room in which one ordinary Board work sulb, loaded with external ballast slugs as my tank had been, lay cradled on the floor. Bert stopped just outside the entrance and began to write. I read over his shoulder as he produced, "I'd better stay outside. She's firmly convinced that I'm Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling all rolled into one. You'll have enough trouble appearing as you are without me beside you. Have you decided what excuse to offer for making the change?" I nodded, seeing no need to waste time writing out details more than once, and took the pad and stylus. Bert looked a little expectant, but I waved farewell to him and headed for the sub. When I looked back, just before reaching it, he was gone. I then remembered that sometime fairly soon I was going to need ordinaiy food and presumably, even more seriously, the oxygen food. Z still didn't know where to get em. I couldn't see anyone through the ports of the sub as I approached, though I circled all the way around it. Apparently Marie was asleep. I wasn't sure it would be sound policy to wake her up, but I finally decided to take a chance. I tapped on the hull. "If that's Bert, clear out. I'm busy thinking!" The words were clear and understandable, but they didn't sound at all like Marie's voice. I can't describe just what they did sound like. There are overtones produced by the human vocal cords which don't usually get through the imped ance-matchingj equipment of the listener's middleear -- one of the reasons one's own voice sounds so unfamiliar in a recording. Being immersed in a fluid which carries sound at about the same speed as water does, and having that fluid on both sides of the ear drum, makes an even greater difference. As I say, I personally lack the words to describe the exact result. I tapped again. The second response was equally dear, but I've promised Marie not to quote it. I got annoyed, and my third tap came os close to pounding as (the liquid envircwiment permitted. That was a mistake. A man can stand the explosion of a stick of dynamite a hundred feet away, in air, quite easily... The noise is uncomfortable but not by itself dangerous. If he's swimming at thait distance from the same stick when it detonates under water, though, he can count on being killed. My fist didn't pack the energy of a stick of dynamite, but things might have been less painful if it had. At least I'd have been comfortably dead. My eardrums didn't actually break when the shock wave hit them, but the sensations can't have been much different. I was long in recovering to permit Marie to come to the port, recognize me, get over whatever shock the recognition may have caused her and freeze up again. She claims now that she was glad to see me for the first half second or so. She says she even yelled my name, in spite of my known feeling about that. By the time I was aware of my surroundings again, though, she was certainly showing no sign of pleasure. She was glaring at me. I could see her lips moving, but I couldn't yet hear her words over the ringing and pounding still in my ears. I held my hands over them for a moment and tried to signal her to wait, but her lips kept right on moving. I gave up on the signals and got to work with the stylus. By the time I had filled the sheet with writing, I was beginning to make out her words. They made it clear why Bert had preferred not to stay with me. Angry as she was, though, she was stiU sane enough to pause and read what I had written when I held it up to the port. The words had been carefully planned, on the basis of what Bert had told me about her current attitude. What I wrote was, "Don't say anything likely to get me in trouble with these people. Why did you stay down here?" That was supposed to divert her attention from the question of why I was here myself, apparently enjoying all local rights and privileges. It might even give her the thought that I was playing spy. It was partly successful; at least, the strong language stopped, and she took time out to think before she spoke again. T hen she answered, "I'm here to find Joey. He disappeared down here -- you know that as well as I do. I'm staying here until I know what's become of him." "Wouldn't there be some point in going up to tell the Board about this place?" I asked. "Then a really well manned force could come down and accomplish something constructive." "I thought of that," she admitted, "but when Bert told me I could go back and report everything I knew, I was sure there was some trick behind it. Besides, I was more worried about Joe, and they wouldn't tell me anything about him." "Didn't Bert say you could stay if you wanted?" "Yes. That's what made me suspicious. How could any decent person agree to stay here? It was just a trick to help make sure I couldn't go back. Once you're changed to breathe water, you can't change back, obviously." IF I almost pointed out that the liquid wasn't water, and then I almost asked what was obvious about her conclusion. I realized that the first point was irrelevant and that she'd dismiss it as quibbling, and the second was likely to bring up the subject of my own conversion. Besides, any argument was likely to force me to use information I'd have to admit came from Bert, so she probably wouldn't 'believe it. Come to think of it, I realized with a sudden jolt, I had only Bert's word for it that the change was reversible to the extent of letting me go back to the surface. Well, if he were mistaken or lying to me, it was too late now. I was writing again as those thoughts flickered through my mind. "But what do you expect to accomplish just sitting here in your sub? What have you done in the six weeks since we last saw you?" She ducked that one. "I don't know what I can do here, but if I leave I'm shut off from further information. I still hope I can get something out of Bert. I'm sure he knows where Joey is, even though he denies it." "How can you get any word out of him if you won't talk to him? You told me to get out just now when you thought I was Bert." She grinned, and for just a moment looked like the Marie I knew back at Papeete. "I just think it's better technique to keep him wanting to talk to me" was her answer. I couldn't understand the rationale of that one, but there was much about Marie I'd never understood, and she knew it. "Well, Tm here now," I wrote, "and whether it turns out to be for keeps or not I can at least move around and get something done. Subject to your approval, I plan to devote my time to getting information which you can take back to the surface when you go -- I assume you don't plan to spend the rest of your life here." "I don't plan it, but I rather expect it," was her reply. Before I could write any comment she went on, "Of course. I'll have to give up and start back some time, but I know they'll dispose of me when I do. That's assuming they did the same with Joe, and I'm very sure they did. If I do find him alive, of course, what I do will depend on him." She fell silent, and after a moment to make sure she had finished I wrote again. "But you'd like me to find him for you." She looked at me with what I hoped was a tender and sympathetic expression, though I couldn't be quite sure through the port. She knew how I felt about her, of course. I'd never made any secret of it, and even if I'd tried to, a woman would have had to be a lot more stupid than Marie to miss the evidence. Most of the girls in our section are more stupid than she, and it's a standing joke with them. M arie didn't answer for several seconds, and I decided I still had the conversational ball. I resumed writing. "Of course, he's part of the job anyway. I came down to find out whiat I could albout tibe ithree of you. I know about Bert land you, now, but the job's not finished. There are other things here to learn. I've got to pick up the technical information that makes this place possible, especially its lability to ignore power rationing, and there's a little question which talking to you has brought up. If you're so siure they've disposed of Joe, and are planning to do the same with you when you leave, why do you think you're still alive? They could have holed your sub without the slightest difficulty -- or for that matter spared themselves the considerable trouble of supplying you with food and air." "I've been thinking about that last," Marie answered, this time without hesitation. "When I first staged this sit-down, it was meant to test them on that point -- " She saw me start writing and stopped while I finished. "Weren't you taking some chances with that sort of test?" I asked. "Suppose they'd failed it. Would you have lived to report the results?" "Well, no. I wasn't really caring what happened to me about that time, but I did think I stood a chance of driving out of here and making a decent try for the surface, with something really worth while to report." "Marie, I've always thought as much of your brains as of your other qualities, but for the last few minutes you've been dithering. You must know it. Are you going to give me straight data, or do I have to work here even more alone than I'd hoped? I repeat, why do you think they haven't killed or at least starved you?" T hat was taking a chance, I realized, but it worked. She started to frown, then fought it off with a visible effort, thought for a moment with her lips ipursed and then began talking more quietly. "All right. I didn't trust any of the juice-breathers out there, and I'm not sure I trust even you -- " I was grateful for the "even" -- "but I'll take a chance. I've been doing a lot of thinking here; I've had nothing much else to do. I've come up with one explanation, and I haven't been able to think of any others or find any holes in it. It accounts for their and Bert join them. It suggests that Joe might possibly be alive, though if he is it doesn't explain why he hasn't come to see me the way you and Bert have." She paused to think for a moment and then went on. "It's quite simple in principle, but it could do with some detailed facts. That's one reason I'm telling it to you." She paused again, and looked at me hard before going on. "They must need us. There's something they're short of that you, and Bert, and Joe, and I, and maybe anyone else from the surface can supply. It's the only sensible answer." I pondered that. It was a possibility I hadn't thought of, though I was not ready to accept it as the only sensible one. "You don't think they might just be so pleased with their way of life -- freedom from power rationing, they'd probably call it -- that they IF just wamt recruits on general principles? That sort of thing has happened." "I know it has," she replied. "But I don't believe it has this time. You got that sort of thing back in the days of nations and political parties, before the Board's necessity was realized." "If you think we've outgrown politics," I retorted as quickly as the stylus would let me, "you're less alert than I thought you were around our own office. And what's wrong with regarding this bunch as a nation? It's the picture I've been forming of them." "Nation? You've a short circuit between the ears. They're just another bunch of power-wasters. There aren't enough of them to be a nation." "Do you know how many there are?" "Of course not. I've been in no position to count. A few hundred, I should think." "You think a few hundred people could build a place like this? Or even a small part of it? There must be miles of tunnels here. I swam for the best part of an hour to get from where they worked on me to this place, and it was a maze. I haven't seen any part of their power unit yet, but it miust be huge to supply all this volume with light, and there's that big tent area outside -- you must have seen that. How could a few hundred people possibly do such a job? On the surface, with unlimited time and normal construction machinery, sure; but what standard machinery could have been used here?" M arie had wanted to cut in a little way back, but waited for me to finish. There's no point in trying to quote the next few minutes verbatim; they boiled down to the fact that she hadn't seen the lighted area outside. She'd spotted a work sub while she was prowling around searching for Joe, had followed it, and wound up at an entrance apparently out of sight of the "tent." Apparently there were a lot of entrances. She had no opinion to offer on the lighted area, and I couldn't help feeling that she didn't entirely 'believe my account of it. She hadn't been captured. She'd followed the sub to the entrance, found she lacked ballast enough to get through the interface between the liquids and simply stayed there, blocking traffic, until they'd loaded her down and towed her inside out of the way. Women are interesting creatures, with interesting powers. I wasn't sure  believed her, but decided not to tell her so. "All right," I finally summed up on the pad. "The jobs for me seem to be to find Joe or reliable word of him; to find a specific, convincing eager to have us join them; to get reliable information about the size and population of the place; and to get the technical information about their power plant." "Right," she nodded. "I won't demand that you do all that without confiding in Bert, because I have no way of enforcing such a request. I'll just say I don't trust him, myself." "I still don't see why not. He's changed over to this high-pressure tcheme, but so have I, and you've decided to trust me, I gather." "Don't remind me of it. It's a point against you. Still, I'm hoping that with you it's just a cover-up. After all you seem to believe it's a reversible change, even if I don't, judging by your expression when I said it wasn't. I hope for your sake you're right." "Why shouldn't Bert have believed the same and had the same motive?" "If that's the case, why has he been down here a year? If he can come back, he must be up to something, because he hasn't. If he can't he's up to something because he must have told you it was possible. Think it over." I did and found myself with no good answer. The best I could say was, "All right. I'll be careful." I had started to swim away when she called my name. Irritated, I turned back and saw her face pressed close to the port. As I looked she spoke again, much more softly, so that even immersed in the liquid I could barely hear. "You're a pretty good egg. If it weren't for Joe -- " She broke off, and her face disappeared from the port. I swam away, listening to my own heartbeat and trying to organize my thoughts. T here was no sign of Bert in the corridor outside, and I didn't dare wander in search of him. I did remember the way back to the nearthe ocean entrance and swam there in the hope that it was a logical place for him to ibe waiting. There were at least a dozen people in the big chamber, and more could be seen dimly in the darker water above, but none of them was Bert. I could think of nothing to do but wait for him, as far as the main program was concerned. But it did seem a good time to pick up a little local education. I swam up to the interface and hesitated. Other people were going through from time to time. I decided I'd better watch their technique before I tried it myself. It was simple enough. All one did was cling to a ladder, remove one's ballast belt and hang it on one of the numerous hooks lining the rim and swim through. However, everyone who did this was wearing helmet and coveralls, presumably to keep the special liquid in their mouths, ears and so on. Maybe ocean water would hurt lungs, for all I knew. Anyway, no one stuck an unhelmeted head through the boundary, and I decided to play safe myself even though I couldn't see what the danger, if any, might be. Several of the people around were watching me, I noticed. One or two of them had expressions of concern on their faces. One gestured at me, but of course I couldn't read her signs. She watched me for a moment, saw that I didn't answer, made another flickering series of hand motions to those around her and then swam over to me. She pointed to the water and then to me and raised her eyebrows quizzically. The nature of her queiy was easy to guess. IF though the girl herself commanded more attention than her signals. She might have been the one I had seen outside, though there was no way to be sure. There were several others in the group who were just as likely to be that one. She had straight blonde hair, cut short in a bob which could easily be accommodated in one of the swimming helmets. She was about five feet three in height and would have weighed about a hundred and ten pounds out of water. She was wearing a twopiece affair which was a long way from being a coverall, but protected much more acreage than a bikini. Her face was rather narrow, and I could make no guess at her regional origin. In response to her question, or what I assumed to be her question, I raised an arm toward the water surface very slowly, watching her with raised eyebrows as I did so. She gave a violent negative headshake, wrapped her arms tight around herself and shuddered realistically. I could also interpret that and was annoyed with myself for not remembering that the water outside would be cold. It was useful data; it justified the inference that the liquid we were in was not a very good heat conductor, or I'd already have felt the chill of the ocean water only a few yards away. Of course it couldn't be too poor a conductor either, or we'd be having the standard spacesuit problem of getting rid of surplus body heat. I hadn't been conscious of either heat or cold up to this moment. Now I wished I had a thermometer so that I could form some numerically meaningful opinions. I held up one finger and poked it toward the boundary, asking the girl the same question with my eyebrows. She shrugged, as though to say it was my finger, so I pushed it on through. The temperature was bearable, but I could see why the swimmers wore coveralls. I thought I could stand it for a short time if I had to, but saw no reason to make a test of the matter just then. I thought it would be more useful to start to get familiar with the normal communication method of these people. In spite of Bert's remarks and my earlier try through the tank walls, it seemed possible that some of them might know at least a little of some language I did. I showed the girl the writing pad. She nodded at the sight of it and flashed a sidelong smile at the others who were drifting in the vicinity. I wrote a short sentence in each of my more usuable languages and held the pad up for her to read. S he looked at it courteously and carefully, but smiled and shook her head. I showed it to the others, with much the same reaction. Then there was a lengthy session of flickering fingers as they held a conversation among themselves. Several of them, including the girl, looked as though they would have laughed if it had been physically possible. Then the girl took the pad and stylus from me, and began to make marks of her own. The stylus moved very rapidly, but not in a set across-and-back lines like ordinary writing. It was more like drawing, from where I floated. It took her perhaps thirty seconds to finish, then she handed the talblet back to me and let me gawk at it. I gawked. What she had done is impossible to describe in real detail, though a general idea can be given. In a way, it was rather like an electrical diagram, with straight lines going from one place to another, most of them parallel to the edges of the pad. Sometimes there were tiny gaps in the lines where one would have intersected another; sometimes (the junctions were marked with dots; sometimes one line went through another with no effect on either. Here and there in the maze were tiny patterns, incredibly complex considering the time that had been spent on them. None of these looked exactly like an electrical symhol I knew, hut 'all left a vague feeling of familiarity. The whole pattern was almost a picture. It gave a tantalizing effect of being something I should recognize but couldn't dig out of the back of my mind. I kept trying to interpret it in terms of a circuit diagram, which as I said it vaguely resembled, but got nowhere. I tried to think of it as one of those trick drawings all made out of straight lines which become modern art every few decades, and got no farther. I had to shake my head as the girl had done. I cleared the s'heet and tried some more languages, this time ones I don't know at all well. All I was hoping for was evidence of recognition. I didn't get it. Not a trace. This was very odd, since the dozen or so languages I had covered represent native (tongues for something like three quarters of the Earth's population and included at least a few known slightly by educated people everywhere. The girl reciprocated my second effort with another of her own. I could see that it differed in detail from the first, but it (bore a strong family resemblance to its predecessor, and I couldn't make any more sense out of it. If I'd had a camera able to work under the circumstances I'd have photographed it on the chance that it had something to do with the power plants, though even at my most optimistic I'd have admitted it was a very slim Chance. T he thought of plans in general gave me an idea, though. I cleared the pad again and drew in its center a small sketch meant to represent the room we were in, the various passages leading from it and the chamber where Marie's sub was berthed. The girl didn't get the idea at first, so I swam over to one of the passages whose entrance I had indicated, looked down it to see whether it were straight or not and extended the appropriate lines on the drawing. That seemed to get (across. She nodded her head after some more hand-talk with her friends; then she gave me a "so what" look. I handed her the pad and stylus and gestured around, hoping she'd see I wanted a map of the place. They understood this, too, I felt sure, but the hand-talk went on for a good deal longer. I hoped they IF were merely arguing about the best way to give me the information, rather than whether to give me it at all. What I would have liked best was a regular chart of the place, not someone's freehand sketches. The argument, if that's what it was, was interrupted by Bert's return. It was a relief to be able to converse understandably, however slowly, once more, but Bert had his own ideas about the subject of conversation. He took the writing materials from the girl and cleared the pad without a glance at what was on it. "Did you get any cooperation out of Marie, or has she lumped you with the rest of the outcasts?" he asked. "I think I'm on probation," I replied. "Nothing will really satisfy her but a definite report on Joe." "Well, we can't give one. To the best of my knowledge he never got here." "You didn't spot his sub in the vicinity, even?" "No one reported it." "But how about your sonar?" "We don't use it except under very special circumstances. It would be too likely to be picked up. We're about us, but only if they find out all about us. Don't you have that picture yet? We simply don't want to be lumped in with the power-wasters the Board is always after, and you know perfectly well that that's the picture people will have if we don't get a chance to explain." "I suppose that's true. It's the picture Marie has now, and she seems quite fond of it. I wonder if just explaining is really going to be enough." "It would be if people would believe the explanation." I said nothing about the profundity of that remark. "You've been explaining to Marie for six weeks, and she doesn't." "No, we haven't. We've been talking for six weeks and she doesn't listen. There's a difference. She refuses to discuss anything except Joe. I think your greatest service, both to us and to the Board, would be to get her to pay attention to a genuine description of the whole situation." I digested that for half a minute or so. Several of the people who had been there when Bert arrived had now swum away, but the girl and two or three others were still watching with interest. They were deeply absorbed in seeing what we were writing on the pad, crowding in to look at each message in turn over the writer's or intended recipient's shoulder. The girl always seemed to get the best place. Standards of courtesy seemed a bit old-fashioned compared with most regions at the surface. "You may be right," I wrote at last, after trying to fit what he had said into the program I had outlined for myself. "That would seem to mean that I'll have to see this whole installation with my own eyes, so as to be able to claim first-hand knowledge." "Precisely. Come along. With this job, you may be spared farming after all, but at least you'll have to see the farms. As a matter of fact. I'm getting hungry, and it must be even longer for you than for me since the last decent meal." I I had no objection to this thought, and followed him as he swam off through still another of the passages.  The girl and three others, after a couple of gestures, followed us. As before, it just wasn't practical to write and swim at the same time, so I had plenty of opportunity for thought as we traveled. I wasn't able  to use it very constructively, and j there's nothing much I can say about Hthe trip except that it took around S fifteen or twenty minutes. Absolutely nothing of interest, and as far as I know nothing of importance, hap pened until we reached a doorway much less regular in shape than the circular and rectangular ones I had seen so far. The light on the other side was t fainter than in the tunnels, but brighter than in the ocean beyond the regular entrances. I followed Bert with quickened interest, guessing what I'd see. I wasn't surprised to find myself suddenly a few yards above the sea bottom; I was "outdoors." The passage we had just left was cut into a sloping rock face -- as a matter of fact, the passage itself was a long way from horizontal, as I could now see. I had not been aware of swimming uphill during any of the trip. There was, I reflected, little reason why I should have been. A few yards below me a stretch of sea bottom extended into the distance. Once out of the tunnel I could see that it was quite well lighted. Looking up, I could see perhaps fifty IF feet above me the glowing surface of the "tent" roof. The bottom it-! self might as well have been under five feet of water instead of five thousand. It was covered with vegetation. ! I didn't recognize any of the plant life, but that was natural. I might have learned some descriptive biology, or natural history, or whatever it should be called if Fd been born before genetic manipulation becajme a practical art, but I wasn't and didn't Presumably this plant life had been tailored to provide food for the local population, and the light was there to permit the plants to grow. "It was alcnost as good an excuse for the wasted kilowatts as the one Bert had given me. Just once, several years before, I had tasted natural food confiscated from a waster, and I had sympathizied with the fellow even then. I'd had to rehearse the moral precepts very firmly, several times a day, for weeks afterward. I'd finally recovered my normally healthy resentment of people who corner resources to give themselves pleasures denied to the rest of us, but it had come hard. Bert and the others were slanting down toward the bottom, which was laid out in roughly rectangular patches with a different variety of plant in each. Other swimmers were around in fairly large numbers. Some appeared to be eating, others working. The precise nature of the labor was obscure, partly 'because of their distance and partly because I knew no more of farming than anyone else had for the last century or so. My companions were now pulling round, greenish excrescenses from the plants and taking bites from them. The girl handed one to me, and watched with evident amusement while I looked it over and finally took an experimental nibble. I couldn't quite make up my mind whether I likM it or not. It was very different from any ordinary tank alga and was not in a class with that forbidden taste of years before, but it was interesting. I tried another bite, decided it was good and finished it off. The girl showed me how to get others from the plant without a major struggle -- they had to be twisted in a special way before the tough stems would yield -- and then left me to my own devices while she ate several of the things herself. Then she beckoned me to follow, led the way to another patch, and showed me a different fruit. I made a very satisfact(My meal in the next quarter of an hour. I wondered which, if any, of these growths was the oxygen source. Perhaps they aU were; they were all green and presumably photosynthetic, but none were giving off visible bubbles as food-alga tanks are always doing. I decided not to worry about oxygen; there was no reason for Bert's friends to kill me off in such an indirect and inconvenient way as by depriving me of that. They'd already had too many chances. It suddenly dawned on me that I was lumping Bert in more and more closely with the local dwellers, in my own mind. I don't believe most of what I read about the subconscious it seems to me to be too much like astrology, alcohol and other excuses for sloppy thinking and incompetence -- but as I reviewed consciously the events of the last few hours it looked more and more as though my changing attitudes were justified. He seemed to regard himself more as a local citizen than as a Board worker with a job to do, and maybe I'd been picking up his attitude without really noticing the evidence. There was his choice of words, for example. I'dbeen devoting more attention to what he said than to the exact way he said it, but now that I thought of it there were a lot of "We's" and "Us's" which didn't really belong in the thoughts of a good Board official under the circumstances -- especially if he were really sure that no one but I could read what he was writing. Maybe Marie wasn't being so unreasonable after all. I glanced over at him. He was eating, like the others, but he seemed to be taking very little part in the conversation which the unoccupied hands of the eaters were carrying on. I don't really blame myself for not seeing anything very significant in that at the time. If anything, it reassured me; it was consistent with his claim that he hadn't learned much of the local talk. But after the meal I began to feel bothered again. He took me everywhere I showed the slightest desire to go. He explained, convincingly, everything I asked about. There was the tent roof, for example. When I wrote a question about that, his face turned an odd purple color; when IF tiiat had faded, he wrote, "Careful. With liquid in your lungs, laughing can kill you. They cut a key nerve in your coughing reflex when they changed you, hut you can still laugh if you're not careful." "What's funny about that question?" "Well, I can see where you'd get the idea of a fabric over this place, but I assure you no one has gone to any such trouble. What you see is simply the interface between the liquids." "Why doesn't it look the saifie here -- translucent instead of transparent -- as it does at the entrances? Why do you have special entrances, for that matter?" "We keep the entrances cleared off. There's too much area for that -- several square miles -- over the farms. Stuff in the ocean is settling to the bottom all the time, and stuff formed on the farms is floating upward. Some of each -- a very small percentage, luckily -- has density between that of our liquid and water, so it collects at the interface. As a matter of fact, a good deal of living matter grows there, though fortunately it's monocellular stuff. If there were more of it, we'd have to clear anyway to let light through to the plants, which would be quite a project." I should have asked him right then, I know, why the lights were up in the water instead of down closer to the plants. It was just one of those things that I didn't. If he'd answered, it would have saved me a good deal of later embarrassment, though I'm still not sure that he would have. I suppose he would, on the basis of what I understand now of his reasons for acting as he did. When I mentioned the power plant, he started off immediately, with the same group trailing along. I wondered whether they were guards, secret agents or curious idlers, but didn't waste much time on the question. There was no way to tell, or even to make a decent guess. In any case, with the power plant next on the agenda, no other question was very interesting. After a time we reached the first large closed door I had seen since emerging from my tank. It was much like the one which had admitted my container to the conversion room. Bert made a few gestures to our escort; they began a longer conversation among themselves, but he didn't wait for them to finish. He began opening small lockers in the tunnel wall, and extracting coveralls which looked like the ones used outside in the ocean. They were complete with helmets. "What's the reason for these? Temperature?" I wrote when he gestured me to put one on. "No. You probably haven't found out yet, and I hope for your sake you don't, but immersed as we are in liquid we're very sensitive to intense sound waves." I didn't interrupt with my experience, but for once I was sure he was telling unvarnished truth."The power plant is very efficient, but there's still a trace of noise -- quite enough to kill an unprotected person. Get the suit on and make sure it's tight." I obeyed. I had a little trouble; the garment wasn't as simple as it looked. One of the buckles proved to have a sharp corner which cut quite a deep gash on my hand and I wondered what sort of quality control would put up with that sort of design. The drops of blood looked a little strange, bright-red globules rising from the wound, but the injury was minor. By the time Bert had solved my problem with the buckle the bleeding had stopped. He checked my coverall, especially the wrist and helmet junctions, very carefully. The others had also dressed and were doing the same for each other. Gestures which even I could interpret signified that the checks were complete, and Bert turned to the door. He manipulated a dial at its side, and the great valve -- large enough to accommodate a small work sub -- swung easily open. He waved us through, waited until we had passed and closed the portal behind us. It struck me again that his air was not merely one of familiarity but of authority. How, in a single year, could a Board agent have made himself so completely trusted by these people? A Board agent, of all people on Earth the most likely to take action against them and their way of life? Could he have been in contact with them even before his disappearance from the surface a year ago? Could Marie be right? And if she were, what was I getting into? I had trusted Bert Whelstrahl completely when I first saw him down here and had tossed off most of Marie's claims as coming from a woman nearly hysterical with grief; it had seemed likely enough that her Joe -- not that he'd ever been hers, in his own estimation -- had actually never reached this place. Eaough other things could happen to make a one-man sub disappear in the Pacific. Now I was wondering, deeply. But there were other matters claiming attention. F or the first time, I found myself in a tunnel which was obviously slanted steeply -- the pull of my ballast belt let me judge "up" and "down" easily enough when I paid attention to the matter. We were heading downward at fully sixty degrees. The tunnel lights, the only distinct features on the walls, were going by at a speed which showed we were being helped by pumps; there was certainly a downward current. I wondered if we'd have to swim against it on the way back and decided it wouldn't be possible. Either they'd reverse the flow, or we'd use another tunnel. I didn't notice any temperature change, though I knew we were going to examine a heat engine. Maybe this bunch was moral enough about energy waste when it came to the sort of leakage which robbed a machine of efficiency, no matter how they behaved about it afterward. I couldn't guess how far down we went before reaching the control chamber. It was certainly hundreds of feet, probably thousands, possibly as much as a mile. I did see the IF charts of the layout later on, but the peculiar ideas of scale used by their makers still defeats me. It was certainly far enough down to present a hopeless obstacle to any bruteforce defense against pressure as armor. The room itself was big enough to make the far end hard to see. The liquid, as I guess I may have forgotten to mention scattered light just a trifle and gave objects more than fifty yards or so away a foggy appearance. The room, though, as a control chamber was almost shockingly conventional. It contained along one wall a pattern of lines which even I could recognize as a distribution net. Below this was another pattern, harder to recognize but of noticeably vertical orientation, and I suspected that it indicated the working-fluid circuits between the heat source far below and the converters and heat sink at the top. A heat engine of any sort works on pretty basic thermodynamics, and its diagrams are apt to resemble those of its relatives whether it's a steam turbine or a thermocouple. Along the lines of both diagrams were indicators, mostly of familiar dial-andneedle type, switches and rheostats. Nothing was mystifying; it was a power plant control at a glance. That is, it could be recognized at a glance. It couild be learned, given luck and competence, in a month or two. Thirty or forty swimmers, suited and helmeted like ourselves, drifted a few feet from the control wall, all their attention focused on it. This was a little surprising. I would have expected fewer operators on a board of this size. If they were all necessary for manual control, it was another mark against the general level of technical competence here, like the sharp buckle. I hoped that poor coordination on their part would merely result in nuisance rather than catastrophe. No doubt there were fail-safe breakers in the electric distribution net and some sort of emergency bleed-offs here and there in the fluid lines, but even so that crowd of operators gave a certain primitive air to the whole thing. I watched thoughtfully. The ones who had come in with us looked with as much interest as I felt; I got the impression that they hadn't been here before either. Well, that was quite possible. The whole population could hardly be composed of power engineers. It added to the mystery, though, because I knew that rt wasn't one eithef. He had a general engineering background like my own, which of course you need to be any good at tracking down power waste. Why should he have authority around here? H e turned and made a couple of gestures at our escort. Then he wrote me a message. "Don't get close enough to distract any of these people. More than half of them are trainees." That put a slightly better light on the situation. "You take your education here seriously," I answered. "You bet we do. You'll see why, soon. Swim around as much as you want and look at what you want -- you know enough so I don't have to watch you like these others. Just don't get in front of an operator." I nodded. For the next half hour I did just as he had written, examining the entire board in as much detail as I could. The arrangement made more and more sense as time went on. One very surprising reason for this was that the dials and control knobs were marked in perfectly ordinary numbers. I hadn't expected that, after seeing what seemed to pass for writing down here. The numbers were alone, unfortunately -- no units such as volts or megabars were given. In spite of this, the position of each instrument on the diagram which formed the board usually gave a pretty good clue to its purpose. In less than an hour I felt I understood the system pretty well. Ten shafts led down to the heat absorbers at the source -- presumably a magma pocket. The details of the absorbers themselves weren't obvious from the board, but I knew enough about volcanic installations to guess. I'd done a waste investigation in Java once. The working fluid was water; the still which took in sea water and desalted it, the electrolysis units which got alkali metals from the recovered salts and the ion injection feeds were all obvious on the board. ten in number, but all exhausted into a common condenser which appeared to be cooled by outside sea water. It did not serve as a preheater for the still, . which seemed wasteful to me. Without units on the gauges I couldn't be sure of the net power developed, but it seemed obvious that it had to be in megawatts at least. I hadn't noticed the sound of which Bert had warned, but perhaps that was because of the suit. I took a chance and loosened slightly one of the cuffs between sleeve and glove. There was sound, a heavy drone like a vast organ pipe and no doubt due to the same physical cause. It wasn't painful, but I could tell that removing the protecting suit entirely might be unwise. I wondered how close we actually were to the steam tunnels which must be the source of the hum. Even more, I wondered about their maintenance, but I had to do without details for the time being. The people who had come with Bert and me had stayed farther from the board, presumably because of his orders. They watched for a while what was going on, but gradually began talking to each other, judging by their hand motions. They rather reminded me of school children who have lost interest in watching the film. Once again I was reminded of the oddness in Bert's being able to give orders, or even act as a guide. He himself, after the first few minutes, paid no attention to the people who had come with us. He had waved to me in a gesture which I had interpreted as meaning that he'd be back later and swam out of sight. I assumed he would be and kept on with my inspection of the board. F or a good deal of the rest of the hour, the girl and her companIF ions followed me araund, though without getting as close to board and operators as I did. They seemed to be more interested in me than in the engineering. I considered this understandable in the case of the girl and supposed the men were just staying with her. I finally decided that I had made all I could of the board and began to wonder where Bert had gone. There seemed no way to ask; he had taken the writing pad with him, and anyway the futility of that method had been established. If there had been among my satellites someone not present at the earlier experiment, I might have been tempted to try again anyway, but as it was the absence of writing gear was more of a challenge than a nuisance. This seemed to be a good time to start learning the local gesture language. I swam away from the control panel to the farther wall, the others following, and began what I hoped would be a language lesson by the method standard in fiction. I pointed to things, and tried to get the others to use their gesture-words for them. To say that it went badly is understating. It went so badly that I wasn't even sure whether they had grasped what I wanted by the time Bert came back. They had made lots of hand, arm and finger motions, both at me and at each other, but I saw no way of telling whether any of them were the names of things I pointed at, or symbols for the verbs I acted out. Probably I was missing a lot of the subtle motions and attitudes anyway, but I simply never detected a pattern repeated often enough to be learned. It was as frustrating an experience as I'd had since -- well, for a few hours, anyway. Maybe a day or more. W hen Bert did get back and saw what was going on he had another siege of near-laughter. "I tried that, too," he finally wrote, "when I first got here. I'm supposed to be a fair linguist, but I never made more than the slightest headway I hate to seem conceited, but I really don't think it can be done unless you start as a child." "You must have learned a little." "Yes, About fifty basic symbols -- I think." "But you were talking to these people here. I got the impression you were telling them what to do." "I was, in a sloppy sort of way. My few dozen gestures include the most obvious verbs, but even those I can't do very well. Three quarters of the people can't understand me at all -- this girl here is one of the best. I can read them only when they make my few signs very slowly." "Then how in blazes are you in a position to tell any of them what to do? And how does that fact jibe with what you told me about no one here being able to tell people what to do?" "I may have expressed myself badly. This isn't a very authoritative government, but the Council's advice is usually taken, at least on matters even slightly connected with 'physical maintenance of the installation." "And this council has given you some sort of authority? Why? And does that mean that Marje was right in believing you'd deserted the Board and mankind and gone over to these wasters for good?" "One question at a time, please," he scribbled hastily. "The Council didn't exactly give me authority. I'm making my suggestions as a member." "I took the pad and cleared it, trying to catch his eye the whole time. I finally wrote, "Let's have that again? My eyes must be fooling me, too." He grinned and repeated the sentence. I looked at him with an expression which sobered him at once, and he went on writing. "I'm not -- " heavily underlined -- "here to stay, whatever Marie may think, and in spite of what I told you before. I'm sorry about having to lie to you. I'm here to do a job; what will happen after it's done I don't know. You're in the same position, as you know perfectly well." I had to nod agreement at that point. "I'm on the Council because of my linguistic skills and general background." I was so hard put to it to make sense out of that remark that I almost failed to read the next one in time; I had to stop him as I was about to clear the board to make room for more words. "There's a little more information about the place down here which I wasn't going to bother you with, but I've changed my mind. I'll let you see it, and you can decide for yourself how and whether to include it or allow for it in your job of getting Marie to make her mind up. I have my opinion on how' it should be used, but you're entitled to yours. Come on. I want you to meet the engineer in charge of maintenance development work here." He swam off, and I went after him with the others trailing behind. I had no urge to talk, even if it had been possible. I was still trying to figure out how someone whose mastery of the local speech represented a slow two-year-old's vocabulary could have earned an official position on the strength of his linguistic talents. No doubt you've seen it by now, since I've tried to tell this fairly, but it was too much for me. I was so far behind the facts that I was even startled by something else you've probably been expecting. We swam into a sort of office opening from the far end of the control room, and I saw floating in front of a microfilm viewer, oblivious to the people around him, my good friend Joey Elfven.      IF H U E Dear Editor: I was very interested in the letter you printed in the May issue of If from Patrick Kelly of Baltimore, in which he asked if anyone was making plans against the day when the establishment of colonies independent of existinig governments would be possible ( such as communities on the ocean floor or on the moon). I think I have what he (and probably many other readers as well) is looking for, and more. I had had thoughts similar to those of Mr. Kelly for some time. Then a couple of years ago, I started reading newspaper articles about the "pirate radio stations operating on ships anchored in international waters off the coast of various European countries, and it occured to me that this was a means of establishing a more-or-less independent community right here, right now, without waiting for future technology. During the past two years, I and some of my colleagues considerable amount of speculation about and research into the technical, political, economic and social problems and possibilities of the idea. Technically, the ship concept has the enormous advantage of involving no new techniques, and thus of being immediately feasible. Longterm expansion of the community, however, will require a larger source of floating "real estate. The most promising approach appears to be one found feasible during World War II by the Navy, but abandoned as not suited to their particular needs at the time : anchoring ice floes that have been covered with insulation, and keeping them solid with refrigerating units. Our studies indicate that these floes (which are plentiful in sizes up to many miles across and tens of meters thick) can be refrigerated with a surprisingly modest installation, even when their insulation is quite thin. Politically, the most appealing idea is, of course, the establishment of independent countries. However, these countries would have little recourse if they were attacked by a private group seeking their downfall, or were seized by a neighboring mainland country that became irritated by their presence (both of which have caused the demise of "pirate" radio stations). On the other hand, registration of the communities as regular vessels under the flag of an appropriate country (Monaco and Luxembourg seem best suited for this), while providing a measure of protection from the fates described above, would involve accepting certain restrictions, which might or might not prove fatal to a community, depending on whate the residents were planning to undertake. Whichever of these approaches is chosen, it is clear that taxation (even allowing for the cost of providing services that would ordinarily be tax-supported) will be considerably less than on the mainland. This economic advantage may well be the most important factor in expanding interest in the idea from a small group of enthusiasts to a broad cross-section of the population. Socially, the concept is virtually a blank check for any group of Utopians to put their ideas into practice through the creation of everything from a Fourth Reich led by George Lincoln Rockwell to a Classless Society manned by Marxist purists. The survival of these experiments will probably be no higher than ever, but some worthwhile ideas may emerge, and, in any case, the participants will enjoy their lives the more for their attempts, successful or not. In short, the offshore community offers as much freedom to depart from accepted norms in politics, economics and social structure as did the discovery of the New World (and all without Indians, even ! ) . When Mr. Kellys letter appeared, that it was time to follow the example set by Mr. Ettinger and his bodyfreezing proposal and seek wide publicity with a view towards getting one or more groups together to put the idea into practice. We were wondering if you mght be interested in running a more detailed summary of the work that has been done on the proposal (of which the above is, naturally, only the barest outline) in the magazine. If so, IM appreciate hearing from you. I meant to bring this up when you were up here for Boskone, but I was too busy with arrangements. Thanks again for coming, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. -- Erwin S. 'Filthy Pierre" Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts #.    Dear Editor: IPs prediction time again (again?) ! I predict a Hugo for Keith Laumer. His novel. Spaceman, was one of the best (in my opinion) to come along in a long time. My favorite novelette published in IF this year i:: Roger Zelazny's This Mortal Mountain. I also enjoy Larry Niven's stories. My favorite written by him this year is Flatlander. Gray Morrow's cover painting for the August issue was absolutely beautiful! I also enjoyed Wally Wood's artwork on The Winged Helmet. I hope to see more of his artwork in future issues of IF. One of the very good features of your magazine is the 'first" stories you print. Maybe one of these days I'll send in a story. -- Thomas Miller, # Wilton Drive, Baton Rouge, La.  That seems to be it for another month. Don't forget to reserve your copy of the December issue now -- you won't want to miss the exciting conclusion to Hal Clement's underwater novel or the 'Tirst" by one of fandom's favorite sons -- The Editor, IF A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Your Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it hus its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better!  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose  ' my check or money orJer for:  Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. #  n # Issues for # ' i # issues for #  Name Address...   City  State Zip Code j U.S. only. Add #c per issue fordgn postage.  Please check wnether  new or O renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost CMell Cordwaincr Smith The Big Time Fritx Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man . Alfred Bestor Do J Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #-#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants; Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Alasfers Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Bey  :pattSfned wifti A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Vol. #, No. ia Frederik Pohl, Editor Robert M, Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by C. C. MacApp by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt by James White ' by Hal Clement by Jay Kay Klein by Fritz Lelber by Terry Carr by Roger Deeley by Arthur C. Clarke by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All right,,, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company. New York, N.Y. # IF  Guest Editorial A couple of years ag-o I wrote a tale accurately entitled The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told, which Fred Pohl duly published on a single page of Galaxy (Because editors have to justify their existence somehow, he renamed it "A Recursion in Metastories." You'll find it in Galaxy for October, #). Near the beginning of this metastory, but an infinite number of words from its end, I referred to The Anticipator by H. G. Wells. Though I encountered this short fantasy some twenty years ago and have never read it since, it left a vivid impression on my mind. It concerned two writers, one of whom had all his best stories published by the other -- before he could even complete them himself. At last, in desperation, he decided that murder was the only cure for this chronic (literally) plagiarism. But, of course, once again his rival beat him to it -- and the story ends with the words: "The anticipator, horribly afraid, ran down a by-street." Now, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that this story was written by H. G. Wells. However, some months after its appearance I received a letter from Leslie A. Gritten of Everett, Washington, saying that he couldn't locate it. And Mr. Gritten has been a Wells fan for a long, long time -- he clearly recalls the serialization of The War of the Worlds in the Strand Magazine at the end of the '#'s. As one of the Master's cockney characters would say, Gor Blimey. Refusing to believe that my mental filingsystem had played such a dirty trick on me, I quickly searched through the #-odd volumes of the autographed Atlantic Edition in the Colombo Public Library. (By a charming coincidence, the British Council had just arranged a Wells Centenary Exhibition, and the library entrance was festooned with photos illustrating his background and career.) I soon found that Mr. Gritten was right: there was no such story as The Anticipator in the collect works. Yet published, not one reader has queried the reference. I find this depressing; where are all the Wells fans these days? Now my erudite informant has solved at least part of the mystery. The Anticipator was written by one Morley Roberts; it was first published in # in The Keeper of the Waters (and other stories). I probably encountered it in a Doubleday anthology, Travellers in Time Stern. Yet several problems remain. First of all, why was I so convinced that the story was by Wells? I can only suggest -- and it seems pretty far-fetched, even for my grasshopper mind -- that the similarity of words made me link it subconsciously with The New Accelerator. I would also like to know why this story has stuck so vividly in my memory. Perhaps, like all writers, I am peculiarly sensitive to the dangers of plagiarism. So far (touch wood) I have been lucky; but I have notes for several tales I'm afraid to write until I can be quite sure they're original. (There's this couple, see, who land their spaceship on a new world after their planet has been blown up, and when they've started things all over again you find -- surprise, surprise -- that they're called Adam and Eve.) One worthwhile result of my error was to start me skimming through Wells's short stories again, and I was surprised to find what a relatively small proportion could be called science fiction, or even fantasy. Although I was well aware that only a fraction of his #-odd volumes were S.F., I had forgotten that this was also true of the short stories. A depressing quantity are dramas and comedies of Edwardian life (The Jilting of Jane), rather painful attempts at humor (My First Aeroplane), near-autobiography (A Slip Under the Microscope) or pure sadism (The Cone). Undoubtedly, I am biased, but among these tales such masterpieces as The Star, The Crystal Egg, The Flowering of the Strange Orchid -- and, above all The Country of the Blind -- blaze like diamonds amid costume jewelry. But back to Morley Robert. I know nothing whatsoever about him and wonder if his little excursion in time was itself inspired by The Time Machine, published just a couple of years before The Anticipator. I also wondered which story was actually written -- not published -- first. And why did such an ingenious writer not make more of a name for himself? Perhaps -- I have just been struck by a perfectly horrid thought. If H. G. Wells's contemporary Morley Roberts was ever found murdered in a dark alley, I simply don't want to know about it. -- Arthur C. Clarke Judgment Fled The alien ship swung in orbit, outside Jupiter. Earth had to launch Jts tiny ships to mt it! Illustrated by I I t all began with a small scratch on a time exposure of some star clouds in Sagittarius, and its presence was blamed on mishandling or faulty processing. But a second exposure of the same area showed a similar scratch which began where the first one had left off and traced a path which was unmistaTcably curved, indicating that it was altering its own trajectory and could not therefore be a natural celestial body Immediately every instrument which could be brought to bear, was directed at the Ship. The largest optical instruments showed only a point of light; spectroanalysis indicated a highly reflective surface suggestive of metal, and the great bowls of the radio telescopes gathered nothing at all. By this time the Ship had taken up an orbit some bit of Mars, still without making any attempt to communicate, and the decision was taken to sacrifice the Jupiter probe in an attempt to gain more information about the intruder. As a result there was relayed back to Earth a low-defii ition picture of the vessel which orbited silently and, some thought, implacably like some tremendous battleship cruising off the coast of a tiny, backward island. It made no signal. Nor did it reply in any recognizable fashion to those which were;ng made. For the probe's instruments showed the object to be metallic, shaped like a blunt topedo with a pattern of bulges encircling its mid-section and just under half a mile long. Inevitably there were those who wanted an even closer look, and two small, sophisticated dugout canoes were hastily modified and readied for launching. A very seriously, "that we have not gone far enough into the philosophical implications of this thing. At present that ship is a Mystery, but once we make contact it will then become a Problem. There's a difference, you know." "Not really," Berryman said in a matching tone. "A problem is simply a mystery which has been broken down into a number of handy pieces, some of which are usually related to problems already solved. And far be it from me to impugn the thought processes of a fellow officer, but your stand smacks of intellectual cowardice." "Advocating a greater degree of caution and prior mental preparation is not cowardice," Walters returned. "If we're to begin impugning minds it's my opinion that too much confidence -- you can call it bravery if you like -- is in itself a form of instability which... "What sort of twisted mind is it that can insult a man by calling him brave?" said Berryman, laughing. "It seems to me everyone on this operation wants to be the psychologist except the psychologist. What do you say. Doctor?" McCullough was silent for a mo ment. He was wondering what insensitive idiot it had been who had first likened the horrible sensation he was feeling in his stomach to butterflies. But he knew that the other two men were verbally whistling in the dark and in the circumstances he could do nothing less than make it a trio. He said, 'Tm not a psychologist. Anyway my couch is full at the moment -- I'm in it." Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, said Control suddenly. '# have to tell you that Colonel Morrison s ship had a three-minute hold at minus eighteen minutes, so your takeoff will not now be simultaneous. Is this understood? Your own countdown is proceeding and is at minus sixty sec onds... nowl "Command pilot here," said Berryman. "Understood. Tell the colonel last man to touch the alien ship is a -- " Dont you think you are all working a little too hard at projecting the image of fearless, dedicated scientists ejchanging airy persiflage within seconds of being hurled into the 'unknown? Your upper lips must be ,so stiff Vm surprised you can still talk with them. Would you agree that you may be over-compensating for a temporary and quite understandable anxiety neurosis? Minus twenty seconds and counting... Eighteen, seventeen sixteen... "You're right, Walters," said Berryman. "Everybody wants to be a psychologist!" Twelve, eleven, ten... "I want off," said Walters. At minus seven seconds? Are you kidding? Four, three, two, one... The acceleration built up until McCullough was sure his body could take no more, and still it increased. Even his eyes felt egg-shaped. His stomach seemed to be rammed tightly against his backbone. How anything as fragile as a butterfly could survive such treatment surprised him, but they were still fluttering away like mad -- until accelerating ceased and his vision cleared, that was, and he was able to look outside. Only then did they become still, paralyzed like himself with wonder. C ontrol and guidance during this most critical stage of the trip was the responsibility of brains both human and electronic on the ground. Their short period of weightlessness ended as the second stage ignited, its three G's feeling almost comfortable after the beating he had taken on the way up. With his head still turned toward the port McCullough watched the splendor of the sunset line slide past below them to be replaced by the great, wooly darkness that was the cloud-covered Pacific. Against this velvet blackness a tiny shooting star fell away from rather than towards Earth -- Morrison's ship. We knew it was the colonel's ship because its flare died precisely three minutes after their own second stage cut out. If everything had gone as planned -- a very big if, despite the advances made since Apollo -- they were now on a collision course with the sixtyof deceleration, already pre-calculated, would insure that the collision would be a gentle one -- if they managed to collide with it at all. For the alien vessel was a perfect example of a point in space. It had position but no magnitude, no detectable radiation, no gravitational field to help suck them in if their IF course happened to be just a little off. The thought of missing the alien vessel completely or having to use so much fuel finding it that they might not be able to return home worried McCullough occasionally. Usually he tried, as he was doing now, to think about something else. He could no longer see Morrison's ship. Either it was too small to be picked out by the naked eye -- at least by McCullough's middle-aged, slightly astigmatic naked eye -- or it was hidden by the glare from the monsoon-season cloud blanket covering Africa and the South Atlantic. But suddenly the colonel was very much with them. P-One calling P-Two, Come in, P-Two. How do you read? "P-Two here," said Berryman and laughed. "Almost deafening, sir, and as clear as the notes of a silver trumpet blowing the Last P... I mean Reveille..." "Freudian slip," murmured Walters. '"Loud and clear is good enough, Berryman. Purple passages . waste oxygen. Have you completed checking your pressurization and life-support system? "Yes, sir. All are Go. 'Good. Take off your suits and all of you get some sleep as soon as possible. Use medication if necessary. At the present time I consider it psychologically desirable for a number of reasons, so go to sleep before your nasty little subconsciouses realize theyve left home. Thafs an order, gentlemen. Good night. A few minutes later, while the other two were helping him out of his suit, Walters said drily, "Even the colonel wants to be one." And Berryman added, "The trouble, Doctor, is that your psychologist's club is not sufficiently exclusive." But the command pilot was wrong in one respect at least. McCullough now belonged to the most exclusive club on Earth, membership in which was reserved for that veay select group of individuals who at some time had left the aforementioned planet. And like all good clubs or monastic orders or crack regiments there were certain rules of behavior to follow. For even in the present day members could find tbemselvgi in serious trouble, very serious tfiuh ble. When this happened they were supposed to follow precedents established by certain founder members who had been similarly unfortunate. They were expected to talk quietly and keep control of themselves until all hope was gone, then perhaps smash their radios so that their wives and friends would not be distressed by their shouting for the help which nobody could possibly give them when their air gave out or their vehicle began to melt around them on re-entry. During the five and a half months it would take them to reach the Ship they would eat, sleep, talk and sweat within a few inches of each other. McCullough wondered if their club's rules of behavior, or esprit de corps or whatever peculiar quality it was that made a group of individuals greater than the sum of its parts, would keep them from suiciding out of sheer loneliness or tearing each other to pieces from utter boredom or disintegrating into madness and death for reasons they could not as yet even imagine. McCullough hoped it would. He was almost sure it would. II T he Prometheus Project was either the result of some very devious thinking, or there had been introduced into it such a multiplicity of objectives that its planners did not know where they were. Even allowing for the hasty mounting of the operation -- the original purpose of the two ships was to have been the setting up of a manned lab and observatory on Deimos -- McCullough's instructions were a mish-mash of insufficient data and ambiguous language. He could follow their reason and even feel sympathy for their problem. The alien vessel beyond the orbit of Mars was an enigma. To solve it they had two small, fragile ships, a double payload which was hopelessly inadequate and six men. If the solution was to be as complete as possible the abilities of the six men must cover the widest possible spread of physical and social science. Since the Ship was obviously the product Of a highly advanced culture, the knowledge possessed by the six men should be complete and extensive. Picking the men -- six healthy, stably intelligent men capable of surviving the.longest journey in human history and asking the right questions at the end of it -- was not an easy task, because they had to choose men capable of collecting the bacon and bringing it home safely. Despite the thousands of scientifically eminent people who demanded to go on the trip, it was the space medics who had, as usual, the final say. Instead of six of the world's acknowledged scientific geniuses there had been chosen four experienced astronauts and two under training who were not even known in scientific circles and were respected only by friends. All that could be said for them was that they had a fairly good chance of surviving the trip. McCullough, according to Berryman, had a subconscious which was dizzy from watching people go around in centrifuges; while Hollis, the supercargo in Morrison's ship, was a physicist working on the development of nuclear power plants for space vessels. All four of the astronauts had in their individual fashions told Hollis and McCullough that they approved of the choice which had been made -- even though they may have been lying diplomatically -- and that the two scientific unknowns should not worry about the things certain green-complexioned, ivory-tower types were saying about them. When they returned home they would all be as famous as anyone could hope to be. Berryman cleared his throat loudly, bringing McCullough's mind back to present time with a rush as he said, "I suggest we do as the man said. Doctor. It's been thirty-one IF hours since we slept. Besides, it will still be there when you wake up." "What will?" asked Walters. "Nothing," said Berryman. "Millions of miles of nothing." "I fell for that one," said Walters. He sighed and with great deliberation closed his eyes. When they were quiet again, waiting for the sedatives to work, McCullough's mind returned to the almost laughable problem of these people who insisted, quite wrongly, that they were his charges. He liked to think that his professional qualifications were necessary to the success of this trip, that he would spend his time making detailed observations and evaluating data gathered on extra-terrestrial physiology, sociology and even psychology although he was not himself a psychologist. But apart from five names, faces, tones of voice and military insignia, McCullough knew very little about his colleagues and self-elected patients. B asically they were well adjusted introverts. An astronaut had no business being anything else. Both Captain Berryman and Major Walters had shown great thoughtfulness and consideration in their dealings with him. Where Colonel Morrison was concerned he had less to go on. The colonel was polite but reserved, and there had been very little prior social contact between them. The same applied to Major Drew. The third member of Morrison's crew was the physicist. Captain Hollis. His rank, like that, of McCullough's, did not mean very much and had probably been given in order to simplify Army paperwork and make it easier for them to 'be ordered to do things. Hollis did not talk much and when he did it was in shy, low-voiced polysyllables. Apparently he got his kicks from playing chess and fixing his friends' TV sets. Then there was Lieutenant-Colonel McCullough, of course, a complex personality whose motivations McCullough had thought he understood until he found himself volunteering for this job. He had been underidea being to have him share one of the orbiting laboratories with a number of lab animals and make a study of life processes in the weightless condition. Like the others he was unmarried. And this was probably a good thing, despite the generally held belief that marriage gave added strength and emotional stability to an astronaut, because Prometheus might very well become a suicide mission. McCullough wriggled on his couch even though all positions were equally comfortable in the weightless condition. Beyond the port Earth was in darkness, with the Moon just about to slip over the sharply curved horizon. Cloud masses and continental outlines were gray and indistinct, with the stars above the horizon and the cities below it shining with the same intensity, so that the whole planet seemed transparent and insubstantial, like a world of ectoplasm. It was as if the final war had started and finished while he wasn't looking and the whole world had died, McCullough thought rather iancifully as he slipped over the edge of sle, and a planet-ized ghost pursoed its orbit around the Sun ... But when he awakened some hours later the Earth was again solid and condensed into a bright sphere which was just small enough to fit within the rim of the pK)rt. Berryman and Walters were already awake. When they saw that McCullough had joined them the command pilot passed out breakfast. They were squeezing the last of it from their tubes when there was an interruption. 'This is Prometheus Control, Good morningy gentlemen! tf you have nothing better to do, and we are sure you havent, we would like you to take your first lecture. We have now decided to increase the frequency of these lectures from two to three per day. The first one, which should prove very helpful when you reach the Ship, deals with multi-dimensional geometry, "Ugh," said Berryman. "Drop dead," said Walters. "No comment," said McCullough. Thank you for your cooperation, gentlemen. If you will have pencils and paper ready -- " Negative, negative! the voice of Colonel Morrison broke in. F-One to Prometheus Control and P-Two, I advise against taking written notes. Paper is limited and may be needed for purposes of communications and supplementary sketches for the photographs taken at the Ship. 'A good point, Colonel. Very well, mental notes only until a decision has been taken in this matter. And now, if youre ready to begin T here was a short silence broken by two bursts of static and an apologetic cough. Then a new voice said: 'Well, now. The subject of this lecture may itself need an explanation, and it is this: from our observations of the approach, physical mass and general appearance of the alien ship, we are convinced that some method of faster-than-light propulsion is being used. Since Einbe impossible in this spacetime continuum we must fall back on those vaguer theories which suggest that the physical laws governing this continuum may be in some fashion sidestepped by travelling along or within some highly speculative hyperdimension, But as things stand you would very probably not know a hyperdimensional propulsion device if it stood up and bit you. And neither in all probability would I, There was a small, dry, academic cough. Then the voice went on. "#o the purpose of this lecture is, by outlining current thinking on this subject together with our speculations and supporting math, to give you a slightly better chance of recognizing a hyperdimensional generator if you should happen to see one, 'Subsequent lectures on a wide range of subjects are expected to include ,,,, McCullough was beginning to feel concern for a future which now promised to be positively rather than negatively boring. He hoped the Prometheus people knew what they were doing and had taken pains to pick the right kind of lecturer. When IF thb idea had been first mentioned they had agreed that without visual aids or textbooks the process of learning new and difficult subjects would be anything but easy. If handled properly, the lectures would help negate boredom by engendering a competitive spirit among the two ships' crews. This would be a very good thing -- provided it did not cause some people to appear less bright than their fellows, a situation which could open the way to all sorts of conflicts and emotional disturbances. But all this had been taken into consideration, the Prometheus astronauts had been told, and any harmful side effects would be guarded against. Probably time alone would tell, McCullough thought. At least this lecturer possessed a rudimentary sense of humor. He was saying, "To give you an example, our knowledge of extra-terrestrial biology, physiology and sociology is nil. But in future lectures we will prepare you to a certain extent for whatever you may meet by considering in detail the sexual mores of certain isolated cultures on our own planet and the exotic reproductive mechanisms of our more alien terrestrial animals, insects and plants, and by formulating the type of social system these creatures might be expected to develop were they to rise to a human level of intelligence. All this is simply an indication of what you may expect from the various specialist lecturers who will follow me. Before I commence my series of lectures it might be better if I introduced myself. I am Doctor -- of Philosophy, not Medicine -- Edward' Ernest Pugh, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Coleraine and Director of its Department of Extra-Mural Studies.' Berryman turned to stare very solemnly out of the Earth-side port. He said, "Just how extra-mural can a student get?" Walters and McCullough laughed, and Professor Pughasked them to begin by considering a tesseract. Ill ime passed. Their education grew while Earth and the apparent size of their vehicle shrank. When the bulkheads pressed in on them too closely they took turns going outside, treating incipient claustrophobia with threatened agoraphobia. At least that was how Berryman described the process. But he talked that way, as they all did, to hide his real feelings. The simple truth was that on the end of a long safety line, with their vehicle looking like some surrealistic toy five hundred yards away, the whole of Creation was spread out around them in sharp focus and perfect #-D, and it was not a sight which could be ealy talked about. With the increased distance from Earth and Prometheus Control, communications difficulties also grew. Not only did periodic solar interference make incoming messages barely intelligible, the time-lag between outgoing questions and incoming answers was more than eight minutes. When it became necessary to turn up the gain on theijr receiver because a whisper of intelligence was trying to fight its way through a thunder of mush, the time-lag was more than simply irritating. Finally even the colonel could stand it no longer. You may be transmitting a lecture on production methods in the aircraft industry, Morrison enunciated slowly and with sarcasm, "but it sounds like a tape of Omaha Beach on DDay. You are fighting a losing battle. Give up until these blasted sunspots have gone back to sleep, at least! Eight minutes later a tiny voice fought its way through a barrage of static to say,... Your message incompletely received... do not have battle tactics... Operation Overload immediately available... loss to understand this request... You misunderstood my message, Prometheus Control, the colonel's voice returned, louder but with less clarity of diction. '# requested that you cease transmission ,... A lecture scheduled on Games Theory, but must warn you... Alien conception of military tactics may not agree... Eisenhower... Dont talk when Vm interrupting, dammit! For perhaps five minutes Control battled against the static with a complete lack of success, then the colonel's voice came again. 'P-One to P-Two. You may break contact with Control without their permission. I take full responsibility. For a long time they simply luxuriated in the peace and quiet, then Walters said angrily, "You know, that noise was bad. You, sir, were practically tying yourself in knots and the doctor had his eyes squeezed shut and all his teeth showing. This is not good. Noise, any loud or unnecessary or unpleasant noise, especially in a confined space like this, makes me irritable. I'm beginning to dread these lectures three times a day. Somebody should do something about them. Somebody with authority!" "I agree," said McCullough. "Of course you agree!" Walters's voice was high-pitched, almost shrewish. "You always agree, but that's all you do!" "I think Morrison intends doing something," Berryman said quickly. He looked worriedly from Walters to McCullough and back, then went on. "And the doctor is a rather agreeable man, if a little hard to pin down at times. Myself, I expected him to look clinical occasionally and perhaps talk a bit dirty. At very least he should have spent a few days mentally dissecting us, explaining the real truth about our relationship with our first teddy bear and generally showing us what monstrous perverts we are under our warm, friendly exteriors. But he doesn't talk like a psychologist, or look like one or even admit to being one." Berryman was trying hard to smooth things down. And he was succeeding, but with his eyes he was asking the doctor for a little help. "Well, now," said McCullough gravely, "you must understand firstly that, if anything, I would be an Eysenckian rather than a Freudian psychologist and so would never have had an occasion to use a couch professionally. But there was one period IF when I did some valuable research, if I do say so myself, on the behavior and psychology of worms. "There were some quite intriguing incidents," McCullough went on. 'They had numbers instead of names, so there is no question of an unethical disclosure of privileged information, and they had such a low order of intelligence that to get through to them at all we had to stimulate the clitellum with a mild electric... Berryman shook his head. "Well, I did try," said McCullough, projecting a hurt expression. He went on, "As for making noises like a psychologist and pushing your mental buttons, this would be a waste of time. You are both well adjusted, self-aware, intellectually and emotionally honest and already well versed in the terminology, so that any problem which arises is immediately recognized, classified and dealt with by the person concerned. So there isn't anything for me to do even if I was supposed to do it." For perhaps a minute there was silence, then Walters said, "I'm sorry I blew up at you. Doctor. If I'd been using my head at all I should have realized that anyone who turns nasty with a psychologist ends up being flattered to death." "My point exactly!" said McCullough to Berryman. "He can even see through my subtle attempts at manipulation by flattery!" Berryman nodded and said, "Now if only the aliens on the Ship are worms..." B ut on a wider, more objective level the situation was definitely not normal. The space inside P-Two not taken up with control, communications and life-support systems, left very little room for either movement or privacy. Their total living space was a hollow cylinder seven feet in diameter and four deep, and this was further reduced by couches, control consoles and instrumentation which projected into it. Nobody could move more than a few inches without sticking an elbow or a knee in someone's face or stomach. Even the sanitary arrangements gave visual privacy only. And because their tanked oxygen was restricted, trips outside the ship were kept down to a total of two hours per week, and they just could not be alone for the length of time required by normal introverts. Instead they lay strapped loosely into their couches, exercising for an hour or so each day by pitting one muscle against another, taking or not talking, listening to incoming signals and smelling to high heaven. In living quarters which compared unfavorably with the most unenlightened penal institutions, the crew of P-Two -- and P-One, presumably -- shared a not always peaceful co-existence. They tried to be polite and considerate to each other, but not too much so. The efforts of guarding one's tongue continually, of always being polite, would have been so much of a strain that the emotional backlash would have led inevitably to violence. Instead they were normally badtempered or sarcastic, while remaining at all times sensitive to potentially dangerous changes of atmosphere. If they sensed that the subject of their displeasure or sarcasm was becoming too strongly affected by it, the remarks were allowed to grow to ridiculous and laughable proportions. They became adept at walking this psychological tightrope. But they were subject to severe external pressures as well. Earth had decided to investigate the Ship with a group of trained astronauts rather than a cross section of the best scientific brains, and all things considered it had been a sound decision. But Earth desperately wanted things to go right at the Ship. They wanted a smooth social and cultural contact, and they badly wanted to find out everything they possibly could about alien science and technology. As a result, they were trying to cover themselves both ways by doing everything possible to make scientific investigators out of their astronauts. The low signal to noise ratio during some of the lectures was merely an added irritant. The real trouble was that the lectures themselves were a constant reminder to every one of them of what lay at the end of the trip. Any well adjusted person could face up to a problem once it was defined. But when nothing at all was known about it other than that it was in the life-and-death category and that it must somehow be solved, even the sanest personality could show signs of strain. j They were now three weeks away in time from the alien ship... After one lecture so speculative that it was almost pure science fiction, Walters said, "It would be nice if we could simply hold our hands out in the universal gesture of peace. But what is the universal gesture of peace to an octopus or an intelligent vegetable?" McCullough said, "We don't usually make gestures of peace at animals or vegetables, so their gestures towards us are either defensive or hostile. Tortoises retreat under their shells, octopuses squirt ink at us and plants grow thorns if they are able. Offhand I'd say that if an animal or being behaves normally when it is approached by a stranger -- that is, if it doesn't take any offensive or defensive action -- then it is either peacefully inclined or suffering from an impairment of sensory equipment or brainpower. But this is an unsatisfactory answer, since it may involve a being whose normal reactions will be just as strange to us as its abnormal ones. I don't know." "Let us suppose," Berryman said, "that the Ship is solidly packed with a vitamin-enriched sandy substance -- except for certain hollowed-out areas for power and control systems -- with provision made for renewing the food element and eliminating wastes. Furniture, bedding and so on would be virtually non-existent and control levers and... and push pads, they would have to be, rather than pushbuttons... would be positioned all the way around and perhaps inside the mechanism they were designed to control. This being would curl itself around and insinuate itself into the machine it was operating..." "Not worms again!" said Walters. "I'm talking about an intelligent, wormlike life-form," the command pilot went on. "A worm who stayed IF out of its burrow long enough to look up and wonder at the stars." "Oh, very poetic," said Walters. "Shaddup, you. A worm who developed intelligence and the degree of cooperation which made possible civilization and technological progress. And now, Doctor, suppose you were confronted by a member of such a species. With your specialist knowledge of the physiology and motivations of what amounts to the aboriginal ancestors of these beings, could you arrive at an understanding with them?" McCullough thought for a moment, then said, "An analogy would be that of an alien being able to understand a human being from data gained while examining a baboon. I don't think it is possible. In any case the intellectual and evolutionary gap between your star-travelling worms and mine is much greater than that between a man and a baboon. This is why we are being subjected to these lectures on the mating habits of armadillos and things." "Things, he says." Berryman made a face and began passing out lunch. They nearly always ate after a discussion about the beings on the Ship, but Berryman and Walters had stopped mentioning the psychological connection between feelings of insecurity and eating. The only person to speak at all during the meal was Walters. "You know. Doctor, there must be something you can dp!" T hree days later something came up which the doctor could do. Something, apparently, which only the doctor could do. 'Morrison here. Put the doctor on, please "Yes, sir," said McCullough. Captain Hollis is having trouble. A... a skin condition, among other things. He yvont sleep without hecvy sedation and were running out of that. I realize it is a lot to ask, but Vd prefer you to see him rather" than prescribe from where you are. Can you come over to P-One, Doctor? Instinctively McCullough looked out at the stars. He could not see P-One because it was visible only on the radar screen. The last time anyone had seen it was when they were being inserted into orbit above Earth. He cleared his throat and said, "Yes, of course." At this distance there is an element of risk involved. "I realize that." Very well. Thank you. When the colonel had signed off Walters gave McCullough a long, steady look, then held up three fingers. He said, "One, you're stupid. Two, you're brave. Or three, you've been brainwashed." IV T he personnel launcher was a lightalloy rigid pipe fifty feet long, built up in sections and slotted together without projections of any kind. It was assembled forward so as to form a continuation of the center line of the ship, and the charge which tossed its human missile into space was matched by an equal thrust directed aft so as to avoid the necessity of course corrections. On this occasion the whole ship had to be aimed at the target on a radar bearing rather than a visual sighting. Berryman threaded the launching harness onto the first section of pipe and, while Walters completed the erection, the command pilot harnessed McCullough to the stupid contraption. It was a little odd that McCullough regarded it as a contraption now, when on Earth, after studying drawings and operating principles and seeing the demonstration films, he had considered it an ingenious and foolproof device. The harness itself was a somewhat lopsided fabrication of thin metal tubing built around the hollow cylinder which fitted over the launching pipe, with the bulky oxygen and reaction tanks grouped on one side and the by webbing on the other. But when a man was attached to the harness and his arms drawn back and joined behind him and his legs bent vertically at the knees -- there were special cuffs and stirrups fitted so that this could be done comfortably -- the device began to assume a degree of symmetry. With the man added, the center of thrust roughly coincided with the center of gravity, so that the system had only a slight tendency to spin after launching. "The push will send you off at just under fifteen miles per hour," Berryman told him for the third or fourth time, "so if our shooting is very good and you hit P-One at this speed it would be like running into a brick wall. You would hurt yourself, you might damage or rupture your suit and the impact could wreck the other ship." Dont joke about things like that. Berryman! Besides, youHl make him nervous" "I wasn't joking, Colonel," the command pilot replied. Then to McCullough he went on, "I was trying to make you cautious rather than nervous, Doctor. Just remember to check your velocity with respect to the other ship in plenty of time. Start decelerating when you are about a mile off, come to a stop not too close, then edge in on your gas motor. You have a good reserve of reaction mass, your air will last for six hours and the trip will take roughly three and a half hours since P-One is over fifty miles away." "Suppose it isn't there after three and a half hours," said McCullough. "It's a very small ship and..." "Such morbid imaginings," said Walters severely, "ill behoove a psychological gentleman." "You're ready to go, Doctor," said Berryman. "Give me ten minutes to get inside and check the radar bearing again. Walters, keep clear of the launcher." The launch itself was an anticlimax, just a comfortable, solid push that reminded McCullough of the first few seconds in an express elevator. Then he cleared the guide tube and was tumbling very slowly end over end. Quickly he withdrew his arms and legs from their retaining clips and, when P-Two came into sight again, spread them out to check his spin. Walters and Berryman did not talk, although he could hear the sound of their breathing in his phones, and McCullough kept silent as well. The ship dwindled in size very slowly -- it did not appear to move away from him. IF just to grow smaller -- so that the launcher was dismantled and the tiny figures of the two pilots had re-entered the lock before distance made the finer details of the vehicle run together into a silvery triangular blur. Just before it disappeared completely McCullough rotated himself until he was facing his direction of travel and began searching for an identical blur which would be Morrison's ship, even though the soonest he could hope to see it would be in another two hours. The colonel had suggested that he sleep on the way over, leaving his receiver switched on at full volume so that Morrison could wake him when it became necessary. McCullough had refused this suggestion for two reasons. The one he gave the colonel was that he did not want to be half asleep when he closed with P-One -- making contact might be a tricky enough job with him wide awake... The other reason he did not tell anyone. It was his fear of waking up with no ship in sight, beyond all help or hope of help, alone... He was very much aware of the safety line coiled neatly at his waist, and of the fact that the other end of it was not attached to anything. But that was just the beginning... I n the weightless condition no muscular effort was required to keep arrhs and legs outstretched, and in that attitude spin was reduced to a minimum. But gradually the position began to feel awkward and ridiculous and, in some obscure fashion, unprotected. All around him the stars hung bright and close and beautiful, but the blackness between them went on and on forever. He told himself truthfully that he enjoyed being out here, that there was nothing to threaten him, nothing to be immediately afraid of and nobody to even see his fear if he should show it. He was all alone. His rate of spin began to increase slowly, then rapidly as his outstretched arms and legs contracted until his knees were drawn up against his stomach and his arms, with the elbows tucked in as far as his suit would allow, folded tightly across his chest. But it was not until he realized that his eyes were squeezed shut that McCullough began to wonder what exactly it was that was happening to him. He badly needed to straighten himself out, in both senses of the word. But for some odd reason his body had passed beyond the control of his mind, just as the various layers of his mind were no longer under the control of his will. He was feeling rather than thinking. It was as if he was an enormous, dry sponge soaking up, being saturated in, loneliness. The purely subjective loneliness of being unknown and unnoticed in a crowd, the actual loneliness of being on a deserted beach where the uncaring natural phenomena of wind and wave press all around and the awful, lost feeling of the child in the night who believes, whether rightly or wrongly, that he is unwanted and unloved. The feeling which was welling up inside McCullough was loneliness distilled, concentrated and ultimately refined. Anything in his previous experience was like comparing a slight over-exposure to the sun with third degree bums. He crouched into himself even more tightly while the unseen stars whirled around him and the hot tears forced their way between his squeezed-together lids. Then the awful feeling of loneliness began to withdraw, or perhaps he was withdrawing from it. The weightless spinning was oddly pleasant. There was a timeless, hypnotic quality about it. The sensation was like the moment after a tumble into deep water when it is impossible to tell if one is upside down or not, and yet the warm salt water is supporting and protecting and pressing close... "'Say somethingl" shouted McCullough. "Something," said Berryman promptly.  Anything wrong. Doctor?' "Not... not really, sir," said McCullough. "Whatever it was... I'm all right now." ""Good! I thought you were sleeping after all -- you haven't made a sound for over two hours. We should be just about visible to you now." McCullough straightened and slowed his spin. The stars rose majestically above the upper rim of his visor, reached zenith and then slowly set between his feet. When the sun came around he covered it with his hand so as not to be blinded, and he searched the sky. But the two bright obto be P-One -- they were probably Sirius and Jupiter, but he was so disoriented that he could not really be very sure. "I can't find you." T here must have been an edge of panic in his tone because Morrison said quickly, Youre doing fine. Doctor. Our radar shows a solid trace for P-Two, If you were off course to any large extent there would be two traces, so any divergence is minor, Look around you carefully." Perhaps ten minutes went by, then Morrison said, ""When you were launched, our position with respect to your ship was approximately ten degrees below and fifteen degrees to the right of the central star in the right half of the W in Cassiopeia, or above and to the left of the left center star if you're turned around and it looks like an M, Use Cassiopeia as your center and search outwards into Perseus, Andromeda and Cepheus -- do you get the idea? The closer you are to us the greater will be our apparent displacement, We should be the brightest object in sight by now. You should begin deceleration in seven and one half minutes..." And if he did not decelerate McCullough would go past P-One, possibly without even seeing it. But if he decelerated without seeing it and directing his thrust in the right section of sky the chances were that he would go off at a tangent or shoot past the ship at double his present velocity. If that happened he doubted very much whether his air or his reaction mass would be sufficient for him to find his way back. McCullough tried not to pursue that line of thought. He tried so hard that before he realized it his knees were drawn up and his arms pressed tightly against his chest again, ib; and the stars were swirling around him like a jeweled blizzard. He swore suddenly and starfished again, forcing his mind to concentrate on the slowly wheeling heavens so that he could impose some sort of order on what had become a mass of tiny, unidentifiable lights. He viewed them with his head straight and tilted to each side, or he tried to imagine them upside down, and gradually he was able to see them with the imaginary lines connecting one to the other which gave them the shapes of Hunters and Archers and Crabs. He realized suddenly that as well as spinning head over heels he had also been turning sideways, and he was able to identify Capella, which was hanging out beyond his left hip. Capella had picked up a very strange companion. As quickly as possible McCullough lined himself up on the object, placed hands and feet into the cuffs and stirrups, then said, "I have you. Standing by to decelerate." '#I eight seconds, Doctor, And I must say you cut it close... Now! A little later Morrison said, We can see your gas discharge. Doctor. Very nice shooting, P-Two. From the other ship there came sounds of Berryman and Walters being modest. McCullough's pre-calculated period of deceleration ceased, leaving him barely three hundred yards from the other ship, where two tiny figures were already crawling out of the airlock and onto the hull. He aimed himself carefully and jetted slowly towards them. Morrison said, As you know. Doctor, there is no privacy and very little space for a physical examination in the control module, so Drew and myself will erect the launcher for your return while you have a look at Captain Hollis. Take your time -- within reason, of course -- and signal with the airlock lamp when youve finished. You may not want us to be listening with our suit radios There was little conversation after that until McCullough made contact with the hull and negotiated the airlock. He found himself in a control module which was in every respect identical tb the one on the other ship. It even smelled as bad, and differed only in the figure occupying the supernumary's position. McCullough gave Hollis a long, sympathetic, clinical look and then sighed. Unoriginally he said, "What seems to be the trouble?" V I t was a simple question but McCullough knew the answer would be a complicated one. Hollis was a distressed and deeply troubled man. There was, of course, no provision for taking baths on the Prometheus expedition, but the crews had periodic alcohol rubdowns to unclog their pores, the alcohol being filtered out and reclaimed by the air circulation system. While their meals lacked bulk they contained all the necessary vitamins. Even so, as McCullough peeled the one piece coverall from Hollis' shoulders and arms he could not help thinking about ancient sailing ships with water going green in their casks and the crews down with scurvy or worse. ' IF A large area of the physicist's body had obviously not known the alcohol pad for months. The skin was clogged and dry and scaling, and his arms, chest and shoulders were covered with raw patches and sores, the condition extending up to his face and neck. Despite having no fingernails to speak of it was plain that Hollis had been continually picking or rubbing at them through his coveralls until his body must have become one great, livid itch. "Can you remember when this trouble started?" McCullough asked quietly, trying to ignore the pricklings of the sympathetic itch that was creeping over his own body. "About... about nine weeks out," Hollis answered. His eyes would not meet McCullough's and his hands twitched and crawled all over his body. He went on, "I suppose it started about two weeks after Drew let slip . , . After I found out what they were doing. But I can't tell you about that." "Why not?" said McCullough, smiling. "I don't shock very easily, you know." Hollis looked startled and for a moment he almost laughed. Then he said quickly, apologetically, "I'm sorry, I gave you the wrong impression. It isn't shocking like that. They... they have a secret. They do have a secret! Of course they don't know I know about it. Walters and Berryman aren't in on it, either. Or you. But it's bad. You've no idea how bad. But I'm sorry -- I can't tell you about it, I don't know how you'd react. You might let something slip to Morrison. Or you might blow the whole thing wide open and be a party to... I suppose it would be mutiny. I'm sorry, it wouldn't be fair to burden you with this thing. I... I don't want to talk about it." But it was quite obvious that he did want to talk about it, desperately, and that McCullough would have very little coaxing to do to have this deep, dark, desperate secret revealed to him in its entirety. He said, still smiling, "I expect you know best. But it would have been nice to take back a juicy piece of gossip to the other ship..." "This is serious, damn you!" "Very well," McCullough said, less pleasantly. "Your present condition is something we will have to talk about. And because I prefer the talk to be private, and Morrison and Drew have a limited supply of air out there, we will have to cut a few corners. "Since everyone on this expedition seems to be very well informed on the subjects of psychiatry and psychology," he went on, smiling again, "I'll assume that you have a fair understanding of the operation of the subconscious mind. You will be aware of the perfectly normal pressures, conflicts of personality and basic insecurities to which all of us are subject, also of the fact that these are seriously aggravated by our present environment. This being so, you must realize that your physical trouble, this unsightly and uncomfortable skin condition, has a purely psychological basis. There are no germs, no vitamin deficiencies, nothing to which you would be allergic on the ship." If Berryman and Walters could hear me now, McCullough thought briefly. The trouble was it was so easy to talk like a psychologist. He went on, "Well now, I realize that being separated from the rest bad enough. But if you have been rejected, or feel that you have been rejected by the other men in the ship, that could be the initial cause of your trouble. Your evident anxiety over this secret you have uncovered will not have helped matters." McCullough had an almost overwhelming urge to scratch his left armpit through his spacesuit, and another sympathetic itch raged behind his right knee. He continued, "A rejected person tends to become selfconscious and much more aware of himself both physically and mentally. Your body becomes much more sensitive, even hypersensitive, to stimuli which are normally ignored. Your trouble probably began with an itchy scalp or earlobe which you scratched almost without thinking. But gradually, though constant repetition and irritation, the psychosomatic itch became a real one. "This is an extreme over-simplification, of course," McCullough said. "Doubtless there were many other factors which contributed to your present sorry state. But right now we should do something positive about alleviating your present condition -- with something more than lanolin since that would relieve only the physical symptoms. Also, since the axiom that a trouble shared is a trouble halved is so old that and true that it was used before psychology was invented, I would like to know what the other two are keeping secret which distresses you so much. I'll be discreet, of course..." He let the sentence hang, but obviously Hollis needed more coaxing. McCullough tried a different tack. He said, "What is Morrison like as a person? And Drew? How have their relations towards you changed since the beginning of the trip? Be as objective as you can." A person could say an awful lot about themselves by the way they talked about someone else. A s he began to talk Hollis may have thought that he was being objective, and McCullough, too, lost quite a lot of his objectivity as he listened. He began to feel angry with Morrison and Drew, particularly with the colonel. For despite this phenomenal brain Hollis had always been the shy, timid, eager-to-please type, and the necessary allowances should have been made. As his relations with the other two had steadily worsened, and in an attempt to get on better terms with them again, his timidity had increased to ridiculous and quite irritating proportions for a grown man. He had abased himself and fawned and generally carried on like a frightened dog. This was not the way Hollis told it, of course. McCullough was reading between the lines. It had started because the colonel and Drew knew each other long before either of them were connected with astronautics. They had served together briefly in southeast Asia and Drew had done Morrison some sort of favor. Hollis had been unable to ascertain whether the favor had been IP sordid or sublime, whether it involved white slavery, the black market of just saving the colonel's life. As the weeks went past the two had talked together more and more often about their small war, mentioning people and places and making stupid, in-group jokes. Hollis was excluded to an increasing extent from these conversations and when, out of sheer desperation, he tried to join in, he usually made a mess of it and stopped the conversation stone dead. Listening to the physicist, McCullough could not help thinking of his own ship. He hesitated to make comparisons with the two comedianpsychologists on P-Two and the sometimes artificial atmosphere of good cheer they generated, but if Morrison and Drew had made a similar effort Hollis would probably not be in his present condition. From his knowledge of Hollis during training he thought the physicist, once he got over his initial shyness and timidity, would have been a very pleasant and stimulating person to have on a long voyage. Instead they had talked about their jungle air-war as if it had been some kind of exclusive holiday in a language which excluded Hollis. Then they had gone on to talk about another matter -- again in the cryptic, slangy manner the physicist was not supposed to understand. But Hollis had been able to understand. A little at first, then later he had been able to piece together the whole frightful operation. He freely admitted to McQillough that he was uneducated where such things as women and power politics were concerned, because so much of his life had been spent in collecting degrees, but this did not mean that he was stupid. "This was when you became restless and itchy, I take it," McCullough broke in at that point, "and you began to irritate the others. How did they react?" "The colonel didn't react at all," said Hollis. "He just looked longsuffering and stopped talking to me completely. Drew swore at me for a time, then he went the same way. They started going outside together between lectures, connecting their air lines to the ship supply so as not to waste tanked air. They switched off their radios sometimes and talked by touching helmets. But there was sound conduction along the return air line, and sometimes I could make out a word here and there. Enough to know what was going on. "Did you know," Hollis rushed on, "that the hold at take-off was deliberate? That Morrison has made no attempt to close the distance between the two ships? Fuel conservation, he says. But your ship is expendable, did you know that? They've discussed all sorts of hypothetical approaches and tactics to use against the alien ship, the desirability of an armed as opposed to an unarmed approach... Hollis's arms were partly folded, and he was tearing absentmindedly at his forearms with fingernails which had been gnawed too short to do any real damage. Suddenly he stopped scratching, closed his eyes tightly and said, "I'm sorry. I didn't want to tell you. But you've a right to know, Doctor. P-One is carrying a Dirty Annie!" D irty Annie was a nuclear device which was a little too destructive and long-lasting in its aftereffects to be called tactical. McCullough was silent for a moment as he thought over all the implications of what he had heard. Then he said, "This is serious." It was dangerously ambiguous, he realized as soon as he said it. But Hollis had not noticed that. The physicist was talking furiously, apologizing for sharing his worries with the doctor, pleading with him not (to tell the colonel and to do something about Morrison and Drew, simultaneously. McCullough listen with half his mind while the other half cringed with sympathy. Not all of the sympathy was for Hollis. Morrison and Drew could not have had a very pleasant time either, driven as they had been into long periods of unscheduled extra-vehicular 'activity. They may well have been guilty of thoughtlessness in their dealings with Hollis, but contheir suits. The P-hips could not afford the weight penalty of carrying spare spacesuits, must less atomic bombs. McCullough wondered suddenly what shape his own delusion would have taken, what particular nightmare his own subconscious would have dredged up, if Walters and Berryman had rejected him. An atomic bomb was perhaps a toosimple form for a physicist's nightmare to take, but then at heart Hollis was a very simple man. There still remained the question of his treatment. Very quietly and seriously McCullough said, "Naturally I shall not mention this to the colonel or Drew. At the proper time I may discuss it with Walters and Berryman -- but they won't talk out of turn either. It's hard to say exactly what we must do about it until the time comes, but when it does remember that we will be four agains their two. And remember this as well. The problem isn't yours alone any more. Three of your friends will be helping you solve it. They may even, since they are not so close to it as you are and may thus be able to consider the problem more objectively, solve it for you. Think about this, won't you? Think about it really hard." McCullough paused for a moment, then went on to say. "You have already realized that your condition is directly attributable to worry about this bomb. Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity in them would have reacted in much the same fashion. But there is no necessity to worry now -- at least to the extent where it affects you physically. "You may be surprised how quickly this skin condition clears up," he continued, "and how comfortable you will begin to feel generally. The colonel will be surprised, too, and for that reason I'll IF leave a supply of medication to heflp the process along. Morrison will assume that the salve and tablets are effecting a cure, but this iS' a necessary subterfuge since you can't very well tell him the real cause of your improvement -- the fact that his secret is now common property. But in order to further allay his suspicions I will have to be very tough -- or appear to be very tough -- on you." A yTcCullough was going to be iVA very tough with Drew and the colonel as well. He was going to insist that Morrison pad and bandage the patient's hands so that he would be unable to scratch himself until his skin condition had a chance to heal, which meant that Hollis would have to be fed and generally wet-nursed by the other two men. Drew would probably come in for most of the work, but the application of salve and the checking of Hollis's condition -- McCullough would insist on daily progress reports -- would be a two-man job. In short, Hollis must no longer be treated as an outcast, and Morrison and Drew would be made to realize that psychosomatic leprosy was not catching. Drew and the colonel might not be too gentle in their treatment of the patient at first, it would be embarrassing for all concerned and the atmosphere would be anything but warm and friendly. But at least they would not be ignoring Hollis, and that was an important first step. Later, other steps would suggest themselves. McCullough was becoming confident that it would only be a matter of time before the physicist was back to normal and the relationships inside P-One more... harmonious. At no time did McCullough consider the possibility of the colonel refusing to cooperate. In the medical area Morrison was outranked, and he was not the type to . disobey a lawful order. Later, as they were all crammed into the control module, McCullough was relieved and pleased at the reception given his suggestions for treating Hollis. It was now apparent that the other two had felt a certain amount of guilt over the way they had behaved towards the physicist and were very anxious to make it up to him. It restored McCullough's faith in people, especially in cold, withdrawn and not very friendly people like Morrison! and Drew. He would have liked to have a long, private talk with the two men as well, if only to get their side of the business, but in the circumstances that might not be possible without running the risk of having Hollis think he had acquired another enemy instead of three friends... He had a lot to think about on the way back, and this time he kept his hands and feet in their cuffs and stirrups and his eyes wide open until he reached P-Two again and Berryman and Walters were helping him out of his suit and he was saying, in a tone much more serious than he had intended, "It's nice to be home again." VI R adio interference had all but disappeared, so that the lectures, music, last-minute instructions and reminders that this was an epoch-making event and would they please not do anything silly poured in on them constantly and so clearly that they had no real excuse to switch off. They were told that they must at all costs remember and apply the knowledge gained during their trip out. But at the same time they must not hesitate to forget all of their scientific, sociological and psychological theories and preconceptions if the situation warranted it. They were told to do, or not do, this several times an hour. One did not have to be a psychologist to realize that the people at Prometheus Control had worked themselves into a fine state of jitters. "The awful black immensity of space," said Walters sourly during one of the rare radio silences. "The vast and aching loneliness between the stars. The unutterable, souldestroying boredom. Dammit, they won't even give us ten minutes peace and quiet to feel bored in Shaking his head, Berryman intoned, "Is some superhuman extraterrestrial intelligence already brushing our minds with unfelt tendrils of thought, sizing us up, judging us and perhaps with us the whole human rce? Or is some bug-eyed bugger sitting at a rocket launcher just waiting for us to come into range?" "We've been over all this before!" said McCullough, suddenly angry at the pilot for bringing up the subject which they all wanted to leave alone. Then awkwardly he tried to turn it into a joke by adding, "Three times in the last hour." Thrust in minus thirty seconds, P-Two. Stand by, P-One. There was a note of self-satisfaction overlaying the tension in the voice of Control. Considering the fact that their computations had resulted in them hitting an impossibly small target with both ships, their smugness was perhaps justified. But McCullough wondered, a little cynically, how pleased an arrow was with the archer when a bulls-eye or a miss into the sandbags would result in an equally violent headache... Deceleration was a strangely uncomfortable sensation after so many months of weightlessness. On Morrison's ship thrust was delayed by several seconds to allow P-One to draw closer to P-Two -- but not too close. It had been decided that Berryman's ship would approach the alien vessel directly to within a distance of one mile, with the command pilot reporting back every yard of the way and using his initiative if something untoward occurred. With P-One's more powerful transmitter Morrison would relay these reports to Control, advising Berryman if or when necessary, and Control would do nothing but listen. Because of the radio time lag anything they might say would come too late to be useful. All decisions on procedure in the area of the alien ship were thus the responsibility of Colonel Morrison. IF Berryman could exercise a little initiative to begin with, but once the situation was evaluated all major decisions would be taken by the colonel. As a precautionary measure the thrust and attitude of P-One had been modified so as to bring it to a stop fifty miles short of the alien ship. McCullough wondered what Hollis was making of that, I n the three weeks since he had visited him the physicist's condition, both physical and mental, had improved enormously. Hollis had spoken to him several times and had said so -- without, of course, mentioning the Dirty Annie business. Naturally he could not discuss his proiblem in detail on the intership radio, but McCullough felt sure that Hollis himself now realized that he had been imagining things, that he had displayed all the classic symptoms -- together with a few which were uniquely his own -- of the persecution complex. On the radar screen the target showed as a pulsing blob of light which crept steadily down the distance scale. In the telescope the Ship grew and spread until it overflowed the field of view. Gradually P-Two's velocity with respect to the other vessel lessened until it hung motionless at a distance of one mile from the Ship. Like a minnow investigating a sleeping shark, McCullough thought. Berryman cleared his throat loudly and said, "The... the Ship is broadside on to us. I estimate its length at just under half a mile and its diameter at about one hundred yards. The diameter is uniform throughout its length, like a torpedo, except where it curves inwards at nose and stem. Two thirds of the way towards the stern -- I'm assuming it is the stern because Jhe other end contains more transparent material -- the hull is encircled by a belt of large, transparent blisters. Twelve of them, I think. The sun is shining directly into one and I can see metallic reflections. "There is another cluster of transparent domes encircling the nose," he went on, "but these are smaller and flatter -- possibly housing the Ship's communications and sensory equipment, while the bigger ones are either weapons or... or... maybe Professor Pugh would have some ideas on what they are, because there is nothing visible on the ship resembling a conventional rocket motor or even a jet orifice." The pilot was dividing his attention between the telescope and the direct-vision port. His voice was quiet, controlled and ostentatiously matter-of-fact. But every time he moved perspiration beading his forehead was shaken loose and hung suspended away from his face, like the stylized sweat of startlement of a character in a comic strip. Walters's lower lip had disappeared behind his upper teeth. McCullough did not know how he himself looked, but he did not feel at all well. Berryman went on steadily, "We are beaming signal patterns denoting, we hope, intelligence at them on a wide spread of frequencies and we are igniting flares every fifteen minutes. So far there has been no response. I don't understand this -- we're not exactly sneaking up on them. Have I permission to move in?" To give him credit, Morrison did not warn them to be careful or remind them, again, of the absolute necessity of doing the right thing. Instead he said, Very well. We will close to one mile and proceed to cover you." "What with?" said McCullough, in spite of himself. He had been thinking about Hollis again and the physicist's delusion about a Dirty Annie on P-One. McCullough wondered suddenly if such delusions were contagious, like some kind of psychosomatic head-cold... figure of speech, Doctor. We shall furnish moral support only. And please remember that everything we say is being re-broadcast all over Earth, so kep this channel clear at all times for Captain Berryman" For the past few minutes McCullough had completely forgotten that everything emanating from PTwo was being relayed through Prometheus Control all over the world. He could just imagine the battery of ground-base space medics playing back that section of their tape, discussing each word and inflection in the minutest possible detail and muttering among themselves about father figures and archetypal images and basic insecurities. McCullough felt his face beginning to burn, but the two pilots were too busy re-positioning their ship to notice it. F or the better part of their arbitrary "day" they drifted slowly back and forth along the tremendous alien hull. Each pass covered a different strip of its surface, allowing them to chart the various features it contained. When they approached the transparent domes in what they assumed was the bow they lit a flare. There was no reaction, no sign of life of any kind. Berryman said, "Either there is nobody at home or the watch-keeping officer is asleep or worse. If it wasn't for the fact that the Ship decelerated into a circumsolar orbit, and a very neat one at that, I'd say there was a strong possibility that the Ship is in a derelict or at least distressed condition." A ship in distress usually signals for help. As loudly and as often as possible." "If they were telepathic," said McCullough, joining in, "they might expect their distress to be plain for all to hear." " they were telepathic they would know that we werent." Berryman shot the doctor a brief, sympathetic glance, then went on quickly. "They can't or won't react to the usual methods of attracting attention, and their ship appears to 'be in a powered-down condition. I think it is time we knocked on the nearest airlock door and walked in -- politely, of course, and with all due caution. "I suggest leaving the Doctor on watch," Berryman went on, "wthile Walters and I have a look at the big seal which is passing under is IP just now. It looks Kke a cargo lock big enough to take P-Two from here, and there is a smaller lock -- for personnel, I expect -- set into the large one. I think we could open it. After all, there are only so many ways to open a door." Morrison was silent for so long that they wondered if he was going to wait for instructions from Earth before giving permission. But finally he said. # agree that we should take some more positive action, but Fm concerned about the possibility of booby-traps. Unintentional boobytraps in the shape of mechanisms whose operating principles are so alien as to be a danger to you." "We'll be careful, sir," said Berryman. "We're only going to open a door," Walters whispered disparagingly to the Doctor, but not quietly enough. "Pandora thought the same thing, Walters, you might remember that! However, you have permission to land on the Ships hull and open an airlock. Take your time about preparations -- there must be no avoidable accidents. And you, Berryman, will remain on watch. I cant risk losing both pilots. Walters and the doctor can go , if they don't mind, that is... Put like that and with countless no choice. But the strange thing was that McCullough did not feel afraid -- tense and impatient with all the waiting around, perhaps, but not really afraid. Earlier when they had been approaching the Ship for the first time he had been expecting literally anything and he had be more afraid than he had believed it possible for any man to be. Perlaps it had been what some people called a moment of truth. But when the moment of truth spreads itself out over twenty-six hours, there is a considerable dilution of effect. McCullough launched himself in the wake of the pilot, slowly and carefully so that his magnets would stick to the alien hull rather than bounce off, and a few minuets later they made a gentle, sprawling contact. McCullough detached his wrist magnets and slowly straightened up. It was only then that it hit him. This metal plating beneath his feet had been shaped and processed from ore dug out of the earth, but not the Earth. From his position by the airlock the hull looked so enormous that he seemed almost to be standing on a metallic planet, complete with a range of beautiful transparent hills. The sun was shining through one of the blister hills, distorted by refraction into a gaudy smear which threw blurred highlights off whatever it was that the blister contained. And this whole, vast fabrication was the product of a design staff and engineers who were not of Earth. At no stage in its construction had the people from McDonnell or Its reason for being might be as strange and alien as its makers, whoever and whatever they might be, but he felt that its basic purpose could be easily understood by human beings of a certain psychological type -- the type who drowned or crashed or fell off mountains trying to climib higher or fly faster or dive deeper than their fellows. For some reason McCullough felt sure that the aliens had gone to the stars, had come to this star, simply because it was there... "When they were giving us all those lectures. Doctor," said Walters, displaying his genius for converting the sublime into the ridiculous, "they forgot burglary. How does one pick an airlock?" #CThere are only so many ways X for a door to open," Walters said, very seriously for him, "and I'd like, you to check me on them. It can be hinged to open inwards or out. It can slide open by moving up, down or to either side. It can be mounted on a central pivot, like a buttfly valve, or it can unscrew. Have I left anything out?" "I don't think so," said McCullough. "But if these people were advanced enough to have molecular engineering, the entrances might iris open and shut." "Unlikely," said Walters. 'The door and surroundings are ordinary metal, very roughly finished and showing deep scratches and dents. If they were capable of controlling the molecular binding forces of metal to the extent of being able to dilate an opening in an area of solid plating -- of making the metal flow like a viscous liquid -- they would not have scratches showing on it. These marking could have been made by heavy tocs or equipment being moved into the lock chamber. They vary in depth and are of uniform brightness. "If the Ship were assembled in space the markings could have been made at any time during its construction and still appear fresh and bright. There are an awful lot of them, all over the place." 'We would like a more detailed description of mechanisms in the area, if you can see any. I can't see very much with this telescope" The voice coming from P-One sounded strained, with the subtle difference in tone which labelled it for public rather than private consumption. On Earth everyone who could get within earshot of a radio -- a world record listening figure for a single program -- would be hanging on every word. Morrison could not help being conscious of seemed to be more frightened by them than what lay inside the Ship. The pilot took a deep and audible breath, then continued. "Six inches from the rim of the personnel lock, on the side facing aft, there is a lever about two feet long. It is set flush with the skin except at one end where a hemispherical dimple about three inches deep gives access to the handle." He was using the term loosely, McCullough thought as he photographed it, because the handle was not meant for hands. It terminated in a small knob containing two small, conical depressions on opposite sides, and it was the perfect IF shape for a finger and thumb. Or pincers. "I'm pulling it from the recess now," Walters said quickly, giving the colonel no time to have second thoughts. "I am doing it very slowly. There was resistance at first, suggesting spring loading, but now it is moving easily. This must mean a powered actuator rather than a direct linkage to the door itself. So far nothing has happened. The lever is now approximately thirty degrees along its angle of travel, approaching forty-five... Oops!" A brief, silent hurricane rushed out of the suddenly open airlock, and they were in the center of a globe of fog which dispersed almost as soon as it had formed. McCullough reached forward, gripped the lever and returned it to its recess. Obediently the lock swung closed. He waited a few seconds, then opened and closed it again several times. What is happening out there, dammit? said the colonel furiously, momentarily forgetting the networks and their views on the sort of language suitable for family audiences. What are you two playing at? Walters looked at McCullough before replying; then he said, "This was an idea we discussed during the trip out. Very simply, it involves us leaning over backwards in doing all the right things -- at least, we hope they are the right things. Here we are assuming that the reactions and motivations of the aliens are similar to our own where defense mechanisms and self-preservation are ' concerned. "In the present situation," fie went on, 'Sve are entering their shij? surreptitiously. It might even be argued that we are breaking and entering or effecting an illegal entry in that we haven't been invited to come in. The flares and radio signals during our approach may not have been noticed. They were not watching or listening, or maybe they are very alien and do not have eyes or ears. But the opening and closing of the airlock should register in a fashion understandable to tfiem somewhere in their control center. "What we mean is, a burglar doesn't open and close a door, or even a window, several times before entering." Very well, I take the point. But if a stranger slammecLmy front door several times to let me know he was there, I might feel, well, irritated. While they were talking McCullough investigated the open lock, shining his torch around the rim so as to show any possible observer that it was simply a source of light and not a weapon, before directing the beam into the lock chamber. It was unlikely that anyone would be waiting for them inside the lock; their situation might be analogous to the coal cellar manhole rather than the front door, but McCullough wanted to establish habits of viewing each simple, innocent act as it might appear to non-human eyes and mentalities. He gripped the rim of the seal with one hand and carefully moved his head and shoulders into the opening. Even though there was no interior lighting, his tcwch gave him a good view of the lock chamber except where the inward opening seal blocked his vision on one side. The basic color scheme was pale gray or pale blue-gray. Walls, ceiling and floor -- it was impossible to tell which was which -- were covered with disciplined masses of plumbing, grapples and what looked like lashing points for heavy stores, all color-coded in vivid greens, blues and reds. The lock chamber was large, about thirty feet wide and ten deep. Set into each wall were seals four or five times the area of the one McCullough was using, and in the center of each there was a small transparent panel. He knew they were transparent because his flash showed tantalizing glimpses of other brightly painted sihapes on the other side. From what he could see, this area of the Ship was in darkness. McCullough could imagine the chamber as a transfer point for containers of food and equipment, lashed down to render them immobile until they were distributed about the Ship. Heavy equipment drifting loose in the weightless condition could be a menace to alien life and limb as well as human. But the disposition of lashing points and their support brackets suggested a lack of gravitational influence, whether natural, artificial or due to acceleration, being allowed for in the design. Which might mean that the interior of the Ship remained permanently in the weightless condition even during periods of powered flight. Something more advanced than rocket propulsion was used on this ship. But it all looked so... so unsophisticated. McCullough became aware of a hand gripping his ankle and drawing him slowly out of the lock entrance and Walters saying, "What's the matter, didn't you hear what I said?" "When my helmet antenna was inside," said McCullough, "your voice faded to nothing. Some sort of screening effect, I suppose?" "Yes. And that is the next step, the colonel says. Checking communications between the lock interior and the P-ships." A few minutes later the pilot entered the lock chamber and closed the seal behind him. From inside he could not make himself heard or receive the colonel's signal until he brought his antenna into contact with the metal of the hull, when two-way communication was possible although with a greatly diminished signal strength. Walters reopened the seal, and when McCullough joined him inside he closed it again. Morrison did not sound happy over what they were doing. At the risk of disappointing the countless stated several times that his men needed rest -- the next stage of the investigation was crucial, and he wanted them to be fully alert. It had been almost thirty-two hours since any of them had a proper rest period. He suspected that the two men on the Ship were becoming too tired even to talk. IF "Sarcastic so-and-so," said Walters, momentarily breakhig antenna contact with the near-by bulkhead. A tremendous, eye-wat wring, jawwrenching yawn put a great dark hole in his face, and he went on, "I wasn't even tired until he reminded me! But you had better talk to him. I want to trace this cable loom running along the inside face of the chamber. The wiring seems too fine to carry much juice so it may be part of the internal communications or lighting system. 'Tell the colonel what I'm doing, along with anything else which occurs to you." McCullough did so, beginning with a minutely detailed description of the chamber and the view through its five internal windows and going on to make the first twitative conclusions regarding the Ship and its builders. The cable looms, conduits and plumbing were color-coded in a garish variety of shades, some of them bearing permutations of other colored spots, bands or stripes. A human electronics engineer would have felt almost at home here, McCullough thought. Fore, aft and on the floor and ceiling the chamber's transparent panels, so far as it was possible to see with a flashlight, showed a similar arrangement in the adjacent compartments. Apparently the chamber was set between the ship's outer and inner hull, in the space which contained the vessel's power, control and sensory equipment. The lock chamber, which must be one of many, would give access to the inter-hull space for purposes of repair or maintajnce. The inboard facing window gave a view which contained least of all to see -- merely a section of corridor, eight feet square and of unknown length, whose four sides were covered with large-mesh netting pulled taught. The visible mechanical and structural features gave an overall impression of crudeness. There was no sign of lightening holes or cutouts in any of the support brackets or structural members, no indication that considerations of weigiht or power-mass ratios had entered into the designers' calculations. "It is too soon to make any hard and fast assumptions about them," McCullough went on. "We know that they do not have fingers, and may have a two-digit pincer arrangement. Probably their visual range and sensitivity is similar to ours, judging by the color intensities used on cable identification. The to us crude and unnecessarily robust construction of minor structural details indicates a lack of concern over weight and the power required to get it moving. The corridor netting suggests that they are not advanced enough to possess an artificial gravity system, and the total absence of light and movement shows that the Ship is orbiting in a power-down condition... WaU ters!' In the corridor outside the chamber, the lights had come on. CiQorry, that was me,said WaU ters sheepishly. "Ive discovered what a light switch looks like, but I must have guessed wrong... The light in the corridor went off and on several times, then suddenly the lock chamber lighting came on. He added, "Better tell the colonel about this, too.' McCullough informed the colonel that Walters had found the light switches, had experimented with them and that the Ship's illumination was a bright, bluish white emanating from tubes which they had mistaken for sections of plumbing. There was still no reaction from the alien crew, and McCullough was beginning to wonder if the Ship had a crew. You two seem to have a weakness for slamming doors and switching lights on! However, this wraps it up for the time being. We need rest. Return to P-Two. We have a lot to think about before we do anything else on that ship. Say so if you understand "Understood, sir," said Walters. "But we would like a sample of Ship's air before we leave. Five minutes should do it." McCullough was beginning to feel irritable and very tired, and he did want the chance to analyze as soon as possible whatever atmosphere it was that the aliens breathed. But the thought kept recurring to him that he was not very very cautious about this, that he was breaking even his own rules, and that fatigue was a little like drunkenness in that it made people take chances. Walters opened the corridor seal, and the alien air roared into the lock chamber. Their suits lost their taut, puffy appearance and hung loosely against their bodies. Ship pressure seemed to be a pound or two per square inch higher than suit pressure, McCullough thought as he took the sample. The pilot was moving toward the open seal. "I'm only going to take a look," said Walters. McCullough joined him. There was only one source of light in the corridor, the one switched on by Walters, so that both ends disappeared into blackness. But suddenly McCullough felt the wall netting vibrate and ... something... was shooting towards them along the corridor. McCullough flung himself back, but Walters, who had a leg and arm outside the rim at the time, fumbled and was slower getting in. The doctor had a glimpse of something rushing past the opening, something which looked a little like a heavy, leathery starfish, then Walters reached the lock actuator and the seal slammed closed. The pilot remained floating with one hand gripping the actuator lever and the other resting ludicrously on his hip. His face was white and sweating, his eyes squeezed shut. "It can't get in, now -- we're safe -- " began McCullough, then stopped. Walters was not safe. There was a large, triangular tear in the fabric of his suit at the right hip. The undergarment showed through it, also a section of the air-conditioning system looking strangely like a bared artery, although the leg itself did not appear to be injured. IF The pilot was trying to hold the tear closed with his hand. But it was too big, the edges too ragged and the pressure difference was too great to keep the alien atmosphere from forcing its way into his suit. He began to cough. M ore than anything else he had ever wanted in his whole life, McCullough wanted out. Never before had the cramped and stinking confines of the command module seemed so desirable and secure. And P-Two was drifting less than a hundred yards away, with Berryman on watch ready to help him inside and take him away from this suddenly frightful place. All he had to do was operate one childishly simple lever. It would mean evacuating the chamber, of course. Walters would die of explosive decompression. But the pilot was strangling to death in an alien atmosphere anyway, and the other might be quicker and more merciful... Except that Berryman might not want to leave without Walters, and explosive decompression was not a nice way to die, and in his student days McCullough had been pretty thoroughly conditioned against mercy "Doctor," said Walters between coughs, "do you have -- a bandaid on you?" "What?" said McCullough, then added with feeling, "Dammit, Fm stupidr A length of adhesive with its washable plastic backing would not hold the tear together in vacuo, but with pressure almost equal between chamber and suit interior it would act as a barrier to the entry of the alien air all around them. For a time, at least. Quickly McCullough took a dressing from his kit and pressed the edges of the tear together while Walters rubbed on the tape. When they were finished McCullough said, "How do you feel? Any pain in the chest? Nausea? Impairment of vision?" Walters shook his head. Almost strangling himself with his effort not to cough, he said, "The... the smell is like ammonia... or formaldehyde. Strong and sharp but not... a stinking smell. But you'd better tell the colonel." McCullough nodded and laid his antenna against the metal wall. The colonel interrupted him only once to ask what the pilot had been doing out in the corridor, then he told McCullough to continue with his report without trying to make excuses for Walters's stupidity. The doctor did so, spending less time on the incident itself than on the problems it had raised. Can you tie off the leg section tightly enough to avoid a lethal pressure drop for the few minutes it will take to get him back to P-Two? It would mean decompressing the leg, of course, but that would be better than -- " "No, sir. The tear is high on the left hip. We can't evacuate Ijie chamber while he is in it And I can't leave, and nobody from outside can enter unless -- " ""Unless Walters goes back into the corridor while the chamber is airless. Ask him how he feels about doing that: The pilot's reply had to be edited and censored considerably. McCullough said, "He'll do it. But he doesn't feel too enthusiastic." Morrison refused to comment on Walters's feelings. He said, That takes care of your return. But getting him back to PTwo means putting him in another suit. There were several good reasons why the P-ships did not carry spare spacesuits. Quite apart from the extra weight and stowage requirements involved there was the fact that a spacesuit had to be literally tailored to fit its wearer, and this would have meant carrying a spare for every member of the expedition. As well, damage to a suit usually meant death for its wearer, so that repairs were not even considered. In any case repairing a suit was a specialist's job requiring facilities not available on the ships. Both Hollis and Berryman are close to Walters in size, the colonel went on, and Berryman is closest in distance, ##I shoot Drew across to you. While hes on the way Berry man can place his suit in PTwos airlock. Drew will pick it up and deliver it to you for Walters and coU lect your air sample. '"You, Doctor, will stay with Walters to see that his seals are tight and the suit isnt strained dangerously by forcing the fit. As well as losing one of our trained pilots we cant afford to write off another suit. What is his condition now? Walters had his antenna in contact with the plating, listening. He tried to speak, broke into a fit of coughing, and made a rude gesture instead. McCullough translated. "He has a persistent cough which may be due to throat irritation only. There are no other respiratory symptoms, no chest pain and no detectable toxic effects. His morale is good." The doctor did not know these things with any degree of certainty -- his optimism was mostly for his patient's benefit. But just in case the colonel did not realize what McCuUou was doing he added quickly. "But I'd like to give him a thorough checkup in shirt-sleeve conditions as soon as possible." A little later Morrison told them Drew was on his way and that he was moving his own ship in to join P-Two. Tactically this was not a good move, he said, but on this occasion tactics and common sense seemed to be at variance, and in any case they could pull out quickly if it became necessary. "And go home?" asked McCullough. "# dont know. Doctor. There are other considerations: s the period of high drama, the first and unfortunately violent contact with the aliens passed, the colonel began to worry over the possibility that Prometheus Control had not faded out the networks during the incident with Walters and the alien. Aware suddenly of a possible audience they became laconic to the point of sounding ridiculous. Stiffly, the colonel wished Walters Good Luck. Walters said, "Thanks." Berryman suggested McCullough should make a sketch of the alien from memory while they were waiting on Drew. Morrison said it was a good idea, just in case. Nobody asked in case of what. During the twenty minutes or so it took for Drew to reach them -- in subjective time it felt more like ten years -- McCullough sketched the alien and made a map of the vicinity of their lock chamber. While doing so he discovered a leak in one of the pipe joints. Probably the repeated opening and closing of the seal had put an unfair strain on the hydraulic system -- the joint was sweating, and droplets of a clear brownish liquid hung around it, steaming faintly. McCullough hoped nothing calamitous would happen when the chamber was evacuated. Drew arrived, checked by radio on the oration of the lock, then waited while McCullough opened the inner seal and entered the corridor with Walters. As the air rushed out of the chamber and Drew swam in, a fogginess appeared around the leaking joint. But nothing else seemed to be happening. There were no aliens visible in the lighted section of corridor. "If one of them comes at us," McCullough told Walters, "I'll hang onto the net and kick at it with both feet. You concentrate on holding that patch in position." He was beginning to feel that the pilot's trouble had been his own rather than Walters's fault. The leak in the lock's hydraulic system was bothering him. It was almost certainly a recent malfunction. There was a strong probability that it had occurred because the seal-actuator mechanism had been recently overstressed. McCullough had forgotten how many times exactly they had opened and closed the thing, something like seventeen or eighteen times in as many minutes, while the chances were that normal usage was on the order of twice a day. He was assuming, of course, that these were not omnipotent aliens and that their ship might occasionally develop mechanical faults. Such failures would show in their control center and a member of the crew might be sent to check on it, or perhaps deal with the real cause of the trouble -- the human invaders. McCullough was coming to realize that their actions, which had been meant simply to advertise their presence on board, could just as well be construed as criminally irresponsible or wantonly destructive. In these circumstances a certain amount of hostility on the part of the aliens would be understandable. People who leaned over backwards, McCullough thought grimly, frequently fell flat on their face. "Walters. Doctor." Drew's voice came suddenly. "The colonel sent you a weapon of sorts. To be used only in self-defense, he says. Grip it in the middle and stab with it like a spear." McCullough looked up and down the still empty corridor, then into the chamber. He said, "It's just a length of pipe." "A blunt bayonet makes a worse mess than a sharp one," Drew said cheerfully, "and a length of one-inch IF pipe is about as blunt as a weapon can get. Just take time to aim and jab hard. I guarantee it will discourage any man or beastie not wearing a suit of armor. I'm leaving now. Good luck." A few seconds later he was blown through the outer door by escaping air, and another eternity passed while he jetted back to the hidl and closed it again. Walters and McCullough re-entered the chamber, still without alien interference. T he problem now was to get Walters out of his damaged suit and into the replacement quickly enough to keep him from being gassed. McCullough started by opening the pilot's face-plate, taping up his nostrils and making him breathe slowly through his oxygen line. Then he wrapped his legs around the pilot's waist and began cutting away the damaged suit. It was hard, painstaking work. The plastic and metal foil was difficult to cut with a scalpel, and McCullough was all too aware of the skin and blood vessels lying just a fraction of an inch below. The drying unit in his own suit refused to cope with the increased flow of perspiration; his visor was fogging badly despite its special coating, and he wasn't dissipating nearly enough of his body heat. This would be a great time to pass out from heat stroke. Quickly he slit the legs, arms and chest, peeling them away to leave only the shoulder section which contained the air supply and hingedback helmet. There followed a weightless adagio dance, and he drew the new suit onto the pilot's legs and arms while the tatters of the old one hung out from his back. Walters could not give him much help because the alien atmosphere was making his eyes stream. No matter how hard he tried he could not stop coughing -- which drew more of the stuff into his lungs. By the time he told Walters to hyperventilate and hold his breath while the changeover was completed, McCullough was afraid that he had already breathed in too much of it. Finally they were ready to leave. The discarded suit twisted slowly, like some shredded, dismembered corpse, in the mist which was growing visibly in the area of the leak. McCullough wondered what the aliens would make of it, what they would infer and deduce regarding the human race. The thought made him look towards the transparent panel in the door. There were three of them. McCullough pushed himself toward the corridor door without thinking -- the reason for doing it seemed to come after the action rather than before. To Walters he said quickly, "If they open that door the outer one won't open -- there's sure to be a safety interlock system -- and if they see us trying to leave they will surely open it. I'll move close to the window and block their view while you open the outer seal. The suction will pull us out. Where's that blasted pipe?" He couldn't see it. Probably it was hiding in plain sight against a background of Ship plumbing, a tree hiding in a forest. His idea was to hold their attention somehow while blocking their view of what Walters was doing. To do so he had to get close to the transparent door 'panel and either arouse their interest or frighten them away. McCullough did not know of anything he could do which would prove fascinating to the aliens, but he just might be able to worry them a little with his camera. It was a beautiful instrument which fairly bristlejd with supplementary lenses and attachments. It might very easily be mistaken for a weapon. I n some deep recess of his mind a small voice was reminding him insistently of e need to consider the alien point of view and to do nothing to give them the wrong idea about humanity and human behavior. McCullough felt a moment's shame, but he was really much too frightened to listen. There was no perceptible reaction from the e-ts as McCullough drifted up to the window, still aiming his camera. One of them was drifting in the center of the corridor, a stubby, dumbbell shape covered with long spikes. Each half of its body was roughly the size of a football, and there were no sensory or manipulatory organs visible. A second alien clung to the opposite wall-net like a great, fleshy spider, giving him a perfect plan view of the starfish body with its thick tentacles and leathery tegument. The tentacles ended in boney pincers, like white, miniature elephant tusks. He estimated its physical mass to be approximately half that of a man with the tentacle length between four and five feet. The third alien was of the same species as number Two. It covered part of the window with its body so that McCullough and his camera had a perfect view of its underbelly, which was soft and pinkish brown and convoluted into folds and openings which were evidently mouths or gills or sensory equipment of some kind, all grouped around a large, sharp, centrally placed horn or sting. McCullough swallowed hard. He thought that on the purely physical evidence these were not nice people. Then suddenly the aliens began to move. McCuUough still wasn't sure where their eyes were, but somehow he knew that their focus of attention had changed. Something was approaching along the corridor. He could not get his eyes close enough to the window to see, although he could hear low, gobbling sounds being transmitted through the metal of the door to his helmet. Quickly he stepped down his lens and aimed it along the dark corridor. It had a wider angle of view and might see more than he could. The first three aliens were leaving. Walters opened the outer seal at that moment and the rush of escaping air drew him away from the door, spinning him slowly end over end. But not before he had a glimpse of something covered with white fur, or perhaps clothing, which flicked past the window. IF Intelligence is knowing when to fights when to run -- and when to give up and drop dead! I n the cometary regions out past Pluto a spot of light flickered briefly. The Hirokan spacer braked fiercely down from the dark gamma radiation of faster than light, through the visible spectrum of slowing relativistic speeds and into the invisibility of sublight. She was met nearly to the same cubic mile of nothingness by a smaller Hirokan vessel. "Nice navigation," Admiral Ikara said to the captain. It certainly was, considering the destroyer had come fifty light-years to an almost exact rendezvous with the yacht sent from the Hirokan embassy on Earth. The captain bowed modestly, silently thanking his ancestors on his good foresight in securing a top navigator for the trip. He was equally happy he hadn't been spotted by a warship from the unfriendly area he had just traversed. He had been obliged to swap his best gunnery officer for the navigator. There was an old Hirokan saying, "Politics makes perfect." "Sir," the captain said, "the less time we linger here, the better. The comets will mask us just so long." He pointed toward the personnel transfer torp. The ten-foot-long projectile was in its cradle, ready to launch. Efficiently, the admiral stretched full length in the torp. He pressed the studs sealing it and almost immediately felt the shove of acceleration, almost as quickly followed by the counter push of braking. A brief clanging and the torp was opened from the outside. By the numbers, he thought and felt a fierce pride in Hirokan military efficiency. He unfolded himself from the torp, knowing the destroyer was already gone. The yacht was in motion, too. He acknowledged the yacht commander's salute, noting the civilian dress. "How long to planetfall?" he asked. "Sixteen point three hours, sir." Seeing the admiral's stare, he flushed and changed his figures to the Hirokan equivalent. "You must have been on Earth quite some time," the admiral commented dryly. "Embassy duty, sir, nearly three -- " He choked and changed what he was about to say from "years" to Hirokan figures. The admiral looked at him closely. "Two tours of duty, eh? I guess you could pass pretty well for an Earthman." Captain Cochi looked very much like one-third of Earth's inhabitants -- skin between light olive and dark lemon, eyes slightly slanting. "Oh, I 'do! I just change into regular Earth clothes and I can go everywhere without attracting attention. I'm pretty close to average height and weight. I suppose that's why I was picked for the embassy. But believe me. I'd rather be out on the frontier fighting!" The admiral smiled at this. "Naturally, every fighting man wants to fight. I gather, though, there's something particularly unpleasant about the assignment." "Well, it's just that Earth is so backwards. I realize that's good for us, but the place simply reeks of Eoch Issue of If brings you the first published story of a brand-new sciencefiction writer. This month's "first" is Joy Kay Klein's On Conquered Earth, One of the country's most active fans. Jay Kay has been a familiar sight at conventions, where he Is the semi-official photographer whose albums include pictures of almost everyone In science fiction. By trade he is an engineer working for General Electric. savagery. Hordes of people crowding everywhere, polluting the air, water, and tlie very surface of the planet." "Stinks, eh?" "Yes, sir. You've never seen such a crowd. People practically sleeping in the streets. In fact, on some parts of Earth they do sleep in the streets. They even pollute their lungs with deliberately breathed smoke. It's worse than the inside of a troop transport." The admiral had already been briefed on Earth conditions. The planet was far from the Hirokan sphere of influence, but an embassy was maintained as part of general policy to keep an eye on potential threats and possible conquests. The admiral was on a mission to check out personally reports Earth might be changing from a potential conquest to an active threat. Admiral Ikara said. "Doesn't sound as if they have too much intelligence if they treat their home that way." The captain smiled. It was an axiom that Hirokans were the only real people, with real brains. Other IF peoples were little more than animals, to be tamed when possible or destroyed when necessary. T he hours passed, with the admiral taking in the impressions of the captain and the other members of the crew that were normally stationed as civilians in the embassy. A sleep period intervened. When Admiral Ikara awoke, he found the captain waiting for him. "Sir, I thought you might like to see one of the few wonders of this wretched little system. We'll be passing by one of the gas giants shortly." Constructed as a speedy vessel for personal enjoyment, the yacht had an observation deck that could be darkened and opened optically to the outside. Saturn came into view, the rings glittering against the backdip of star-strewn space. The rings encircled a whirling ball of cyclonestirred gases. "Beautiful," the admiral said. "I'm pleased you passed by here." He looked sharply at the captain. "This won't compromise us?" Captain Gochi made a deprecatory motion. "Not at all. Yachts are common enough around here. It's quite a tourist spot. It would probably be more suspicious if we detoured." He added, "Of course, the rings won't be around too much longer." "They look stable enough to me. Light pressure can't be too intense this far from the primary." "No, sir, it's the ring miners. Little ships bring Earthmen out to hunt for diamonds. Lots of them die. Some are lucky. But every orbital maneuver or scoop attempt disturbs the rocks and pebbles making up the rings. The perturbations are accumulative and will spread the rings out eventually to form a barely noticeable wisp around the planet." "That's pretty dumb. You mean to say they'd destroy something as magnificent as this for some lousy crystallized carbon? They could make all they want in a factory." The captain shrugged. "It's a custom on Earth to place' a diamond on the finger of a woman when she marries. Earthmen claim a synthetic diamond isn't good enough." "How can they possibly tell the difference?" "A synthetic diamond is perfect. The natural diamond has flaws the Earthmen are fond of." The admiral snorted. "Match their women, no doubt." Captain Gochi laughed, thinking of the Earth women he'd known. "Personally, I like their flaws. They're not bright, but they are most active at the right time." The ship made planetfail on the night side and came down under antiradar screening at a private field controlled secretly by the Hirokan government. All but a skeleton crew left the ship and headed back to the embassy to take up their interrupted duties. Admiral Ikara was escorted by the captain to the embassy, taken to the thirtieth floor penthouse and turned over to the ranking official. Ambassador Sushi bowed three times, ceremoniously, reciprocated by the admiral. "Most welcome, honored sir," said the ambassador. "I am pleased, indeed. We have never before been visited by a member of the Imperial War Staff." "Somebody's got to look into the events we've been hearing about. Your reports indicate the situation could be turning serious." The admiral stopped, said through clenched teeth, "We are in a maximum security area, I presume?" Startled, the ambassador said, "Of course! We are absolutely screened against any radio frequency penetration. The room is swept clean of any possible mechanical pickup device. And that inch-thick acoustic curtain is drawn over three vacuum-insulated layers of glass in the window." Satisfied, the admiral relaxed. He started questioning the ambassador. A cross the street, there was feverish activity on the thirtieth and thirty-first floors of the skyscraper facing the Hirokan embassy. The head of Earth's secret service was there with a half-dozen aides. Another half-dozen technicians were anxiously checking scope patterns, talking to a computer in advanced symbio-loglan and going through the usual routines of getting balky, complex equipment to work. One of the aides couldn't take the pressure any longer and snarled at a technician, "Get the damned thing working, willya! God knows what's going on across the street." Chief Oxblood said, "No use making the guy nervous, Joe." He turned to the technician. "Do your best." The technician was already doing his best. After all, it wouldn't be pleasant to wind up on a Chlorella farm with nothing to look forward to after a hard day's work skimming chlorella algae but a bowl of algae mush for dinner and a chloropsyllstained mattress bare of any comforts, such as feminine companionship. Oh, the technician tried, all right. Joe said, "Chief, do you really think this is the big moment, right now?" The chief packed a pipe with tobacco and lit it. Puffing at it, he said, "Everything points to it. First, Whatsizname drops from sight -- that war fleet captain who's officially listed as a cook and goes out on the town every night thinking no one doesn't know he's a Hirokan. Then our man at the Hirokan field reports a space yacht with lots of sizzle is gone, and we don't have any record of it. Just took off without clearance. "Naturally, we figure someone is being conveyed in quietly. That's not like the Hiroku. Usually, they'd just as soon bust in with an armored boat as not. Arrogant bastards! So, the fact they're being secret shows something important is going on. Then we get a report from a diamond miner on the Rings that something going like a bat out of Hell zips in from Outside midway between moons I and II. "Suddenly, the yacht reappears like magic on the field, and Captain Watsizname is back making like a sailor on shore leave after a voyage to Sumatra. Didn't take him five minutes. He must have been wearing his civvies all the way. Yeh, their gear is damn good, but their security leaks like a sieve." Joe nodded. "I've got our usual IF operation working on Captain Gochi, trying to pump him." Another agent joined in. "Who's trying to pump whom?" And he laughed. Joe shot back, "One good turn deserves another! We pay her and he pays her. All in a day's work." The technician interrupted. "I think I'm getting it, sir. I'm feeding the data to the computer, and we should start getting the readout in a couple of minutes," From three lenses set into the outer skin of the thirtieth floor, three infrared laser beams, each tuned to a slightly different wavelength, bounced off the window of the embassy penthouse opposite. Each made a slightly differing amount of penetration of the three layers of glass. Three very much weakened reflections of differing intensity came bouncing back. These were picked up by phototransistors capable of rapid modulation. An agent asked, "I understand how the laser pickup works in principle, but I'm damned if I can see how we can get anything through a double vacuum seal and an acoustic curtain." The technician had relaxed, now that the scope traces told him everything was going nicely to the computer. He said, "With a single piece of glass or the usual airfill heat insulation, a single laser reflection would be modulated by slight movements of the glass. These are in response to the air pressure variations caused by sound in a room. With the setup across the street, though, we couldn't get enough waveform amplitude to do any decoding. So we take three beams and use their slight amplitude beating against each other to form a frequency modulated carrier that can be decoded with computer enhancement." "Hey," Joe protested, "I'm no tech, but vacuum insulation wouldn't allow even that mess of gobbledegook to work." Chief Oxblood smiled. "Our favorite operative got into that room one night, when it was our noble captain's turn on duty. While the captain went to the bathroom, our girl fked that vacuum but good. She received quite a bonus. After all, we want our captain to have a long and happy tour of duty. You never can tell, they might send a replacement with some sense." A ll talk ceased as the speaker hookup suddenly started giving the translation of what was being said in the room across the street. Two differently pitched voders were used to distinguish the two Hirokan voices. Otherwise, the mechanical speech synthesizer would make it hard to tell one talker from another. "So, you reported these Earth creatures are leaving the planet and establishing bases outside the system. That could be dangerous. If they ever become widespread enough to establish a defense network, we'd have a miserable job cleaning them out." "We had reason to think so, at the time of our last report. Of course, you've been traveling for quite some time and we've had some additional evidence turn up since then. Fortunately, our alarms seem unfounded." "It had better be convincing, or I'll recommend to the War Staff that we turn our attention from our Spiral Arm frontiers and take an excursion this way as a preventive measure." At this point, the computer finally worked out the proper pattern through a fantastically complex process and added vision to the sound. It wasn't too good, since an acoustic hologram reconstruction lacks fine resolution. But the secret service men could make out the agonized expression on Ambassador Sushi's face. "Really, Admiral, I hate to be the one to cause a change in policy and louse up our long-range expansion plans toward Galactic Center. It's no secret that if we let up pressure, we will lose lot of hard-won momentum. After all, even our resources aren't infinite." "Look, just give me the information. Earth is pretty backwards just now, but those gas giants in the system give it an energy potential that is simply staggering. If we're not careful, a couple of generations from now we could find ourselves frozen out from this entire sector. But don't worry, if it looks safe enough, I'll report we should just sit back for a while longer and keep an eye on things." Through the fuzzy, writhing moire patterns of the probe screen, the secret service agents saw 'Ambassador Sushi open a desk compartment and take out a recorder. He said, "Our demographic experts noted a slight but significant decrease in the rate of increase in the Earth population." "So I understand. Off hand, I couldn't think of a more sensible arrangement." "Quite so. Except that, as we know, Earthmen aren't reasonable. The birth rate has been climbing with mathematical precision for hundreds of years. Now we find a substantial number of persons, male and female, are disappearing each year. Children, too, I might add." "And this made you think Earthmen were sending colonies out? What about transport ships?" The ambassador shrugged. "The system is crawling with ships, coming and going. All the planets and most of the satellites have colonies. There's no way of keeping tabs on ships." He eyed the admiral slyly. "Unless, of course, you'd care to assign half a fleet on permanent watch." "Of course not. We might just as well take a whole fleet, smash our way through fifty light-years of hostile territory and knock the Earth out once and for all." "Quite so. Therefore, I thought it best to investigate the matter from this end. During your trip here, I had one of our men follow up the leads we had uncovered. Here's the report." A mbassador Sushi started the playback mechanism. The listening secret service men heard a third voder voice. "The lab boys tell me the recorder can't be seen and is indetectable. Made out of synthaflesh plastic and all that. Just the same, I sure can feel it. I will just have to sit down gently, I guess. It must be four inches deep in my left buttock. I'd like to plant one in a lab boy. IF "As long as no one can stop me, I think ni say doing one's duty can be a pain in the rear sometimes. Lucky, the vocal pickup is no problem. I just subvocalize, like I'm doing now, and the pickup sends hydronic wavesdown to the recorder. "Uh, oh, here I am at the, ah, I guess you'd call it recruiting station. I'm just a poor Chlorella skimmer answering an ad for easy work and out forms. Say, some the girls here have pretty good forms. If it wasn't for the smell, I could really go for some of these. Sometimes I wish I was more like Captain Gochi. You can get a lot more out of life that way. "I've turned the form in, and here comes some crooked looking clown with a sickening I-eat-it-lukewarm grin on his face. He just barely glanced at the form. I don't think he can read, but he says I'm in." The ambassador stopped the recording. "It goes on for a good many hours. I think what you really want to hear is near the end." He ran the molecular ribbon forward at fast speed and stopped at a given point. The listeners across the street heard the voder voice continue. "I think I'm at the last stop, now. I don't know why, but something screams silently to me. I haven't the slightest idea where I am now, but I'd guess we're out in a Chlorella growing area someplace. The stench is worse than usual. Tf there's any hidden take-off ' don here, I haven't come across it. "Uh, oh. I was just told to sit in a chair. Suddenly some clamps popped up. I can't get the things loose. The chair's moving now. I'm in a tunnel. Damn -- the chair suddenly flattened out to form a bed. No, it's more like... Hey, it's more like a doctor's operating table. I don't like this one little bit. Why the Hell didn't someone give me a Panic Button I could press. Next time I'll be damned if I volunteer for anything but an honorable discharge and a trip home. "By straining my neck I can see ahead some. There's a pretty girl on one of these things just ahead of me. There's some kind of machinery looming. I think... "Oh, God, it's slicing into her! These lousy Earthmen aren't human, not human, not..." The voice stopped. T he admiral said, "Don't stop it now." "I didn't. Automatic stop. That's the end. We didn't know what was happening, of course, but we were to keep track of our man by transponding the recorder. Every so often, we'd send out a coded beep and get an answer back." The admiral motioned impatiently. "The crux of the matter, let's get to it, if you please." The ambassador shrugged, turning the recorder around and around aimlessly on the desk. "We found the recorder embedded in a twopound roast in a butcher shop. Would you like to know how much it cost?" "Look, just because you lost a man, you don't have to get flip. I lose thousands when I have to. It's unfortunate, and despite the man's obviously anti-service attitude, I'm recommending him for posthumous decorations. Special widow's pension and all that sort of thing. Just one more question: are you sure this black market meat business is widespread enough to account for the population discrepencies you noted?" The ambassador nodded. "Yes. Since we got the clue we've checked a lot of places and found this to be very common. I was just waiting for your arrival to pass the word to the staff to stay out of public restaurants. We'll check what we buy locally, and we may rely more heavily on imports." "Yes, I should think you would. Well, you can order the yacht for me, and signal the destroyer to stand by at the rendezvous point. I'd just as soon get out of here as fast as we can. I don't like the place. It stinks." Ambassador Sushi eyed the admiral, as if trying to read his thoughts. He finally asked, "And your recommendation. Admiral?" The admiral gave a deprecatory shrug. "Nothing but a bunch of savages. These Earthmen can never amount to anything and certainly not a major threat. I haven't found any evidence of real intelligence." Across the street, the head of Earth's secret service drew a deep breath. Its intensity startled him. He realized then just how tense he had been. Scarcely able to contain a grin, he turned to Joe and said, "I was sure worried for a while, let me tell you. We would have had some scrambling to do if my opinion of the Hiroku hadn't been confirmed here." Joe said, "Not so bright, eh?" The chief knocked out his pipe on an ash tray. The pipe had gone out unnoticed while half smoked. He said, "Well, you have to give the Devil his due. Technically, they're pretty smart. Their weapons and meanisms are top grade, and I'd bate to come up against them in a fair fight. But when it comes to subtleties of infighting, they're just not in our class. They simply never had our type of dog-eat-dog existence in their daily lives." Chief Oxblood became aware of an unspoken question hovering in the room. He could see it in the IF faces of the technicians and his every nine persons shipping out to aides. "Dog-eat-dog, I said. Well, the starbases and colony planets, one maybe it isn't quite so bad as all has to stay home and give his life that, really. Still, I'd advise you to in a rear-guard delaying action to stay out of public restaurants for protect the others. If they had to quite a while." fight their way through a screen The room was silent, except for of Hirokan warships, the casualty the random cracklings of the loudfigures would be a hundred times speaker caused by pickup of air higher." molecule collisions in the embassy. "I guess we all know what you The vision screen showed only an mean," Joe said ."We're better off empty room. Admiral Ikara was alfighting on our own terms and our ready on his way home. own ground. That poor slob of a Hirokan never had a chance in our T he sick look on the faces was battle of wits. We cracked the transtill there. The chief said, sponder code in nothing flat. It was "Damn it, we have to keep sending like sending an unarmed man into people to the slaughterhouses and combat." the butcher shops just as we've alChief Oxblood ordered the techways sent them to the front lines, nicians to shut off the laser probes The Hiroku aren't going to be fooled and kill the recording and decoding by a few token corpses, you know, setup. "Yes," he said, more to himThis isn't a game for marbles. Our self than to the others in the room, cover stoiy has to be good, damn "forewarned is forearmed. Successful good. We're using our top weapon fighting is knowing when to strike against the Hiroku, and we have to -- and when to dodge. It's all a by Robert A. Heinlein (originally published in IF) by Jack Vance by Larry Niven (originally published in IF) Best Magazine: F (for fhe second straight year) Best Artist: Jack Gaughan T he oval bedroom and boudoir rocked with the wind and shook with the thunder. The curving, tempered glass of the continuous-view windows strained, relaxed, strained again. The lightning flashes showed outside only the lashing tops of the big pines against inky night. Inside they regularly drowned the clusters of rosy lights and blanched to bone the quilted, pearl-gray satin upholstery. At one end of the oval, the silvery, spiral stairway leading up to the flat roof and down to the elevator floor cast momentarily flaring, fantastic shadows across the tufted floor and the great central bed with its huge silk pillows and pearl-gray comforter. The old lady occupying an edge of the bed looked like the bent-waist mummy of a girl freshly wrapped and hurriedly fitted with a shaggy blonde wig and blonde silk nightgown. But the brown human claw did not tremble, holding the antiqueinspired, pearl-gray phone greedily close to ear and lips, while the wrinkle-webbed eye gleamed with the lightning and without it, like jewels of obsidian or black onyx. the doctor yet, you bitch? madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm is interfering with short-wave telephony. O.L.: I know all about the storm. Haven't you arranged yet for my medicine to be delivered, you incompetent slut? A. S. : No, madam. The copters of all regional taxi and delivery services have been grounded by the storm. There have been two deaths by frightening -- excuse me, lightning. I have your Cardinal pills here now. If the madam's phone were equipped with a matter-reoeiver -- OL: It isn't. Stop tormenting me by holding those pills just out of reach. Haven't you got the doctor yet? AS: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm -- OL; That tape is beginning to bore me. You are just a bunch of tapes, aren't you? All very cleverly keyed to whatever I say, but still just a bunch of tapes. AS: No, madam. I am a flesh-andblood woman, age #, name Doris. It's true, I sometimes think I'm just a tape. I'm surrounded by miles of them, which do answer routine inquiries. Alongside my mattertransmitter and keyboard I have a tape-writer for punching out more tapes. I have a long scissors and a pot of cement for editing them. But I am truly not a tape myself, though once  I took a small bottle of sleeping pills because I thought -- No, no, I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age # ... OL:... name Doris. Yes, I got that on the first spin past the transmitting head. So now we have tapes with biographies, tapes that attempt suicide and ask for sympathy, tapes that play on the customer's feelings. How charming. Here I am,an old woman, all alone in a storm, and without a single servant, ever since the government with its red tape and its oversell of democracy made it poible to hire them, or even private nurses. An old -- AS: You haven't a robot nurse, madam? OL: Shining horrors! No! I'm just an old, old woman, all alone, dying for lack of a doctor and medicine, but privileged to listen to tapes making excuses. AS: Please, madam, I am not -- OL: Ooooh... my heart... please, nurse, my Cardinal pills... please, tape... AS: Madam! Madam? OL:... my heart... I'm going... ooooh... A S: Madam, I'm breaking the rules to say this, but if you're having a heart attack, it's essential that you relax, make no effort or outcry, waste no strength on -- OL: Oooh... yes, and tapes to help you die quietly, to leave your tortured body without making a fuss that might embarrass the powers that be. Oh, don't worry, dear tape, -- and let's not have any sympathetic-anxiety spools. I'm over that spasm now and merely waiting for the next. Just an old woman alone in the midst of a dreadful storm -- hear that crash? -- listening to tapes and waiting to die for lack of one Cardinal pill. AS: Madam, a phone of your rating should have a matter-receiver. Are you quite certain you have not? I will inquire of our master files -- OL: And tapes to make a sales pitch while you die. Next you'll be trying to sell me a casket and a burial plot, or even um space in a tomb satellite. I already have the first two of those, thank you. I do not have a matter-receiver. AS: Madam, I am not trying to sell you anything, I am trying to IF save your life. I have your Cardinal pills here -- OL: Stop tantalizing me. AS: -- and I am doing everytihing I can to get them to you. If you had a matter-receiver, I would oy have to drop one of the pills in the transmitter bowl in front of me or punch out its codes, and you would have it the next microsecond. Well over # percent of all phones of your rating have both a matter-receiver and telekinesis glove. I will inquire -- OL: Oh yes, a telekinesis glove -- so I'd be able to sign checks longdistance for silver caskets coo with pearls and orchid plots and pills and masses to be said for my soul in Chartres, no doubt. But I don't have one, ha-ha, or a matter-receiver either. Who'd swallow a pill that came over a wire, all dirty with oil and electricity? Oooh...  AS: I have programmed an inquiry, madam. It is possible that you have a matter-receiver and iaren't aware of it. Please don't distress or in any way exert yourself, madam; but I must point out to you that actual matter is never transmitted over the waves or wires and that, in any case, no oil is involved. The chemical and mass-shape codes for the object are punched into the transmitter or analyzed from a sample. Only those codes travel over the wires or waves. When they reach the receiver, they instantly synthesize an exact duplicate from standard raw materials there. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but -- OL: Even tapes to give lectures, to contradict and argue with a dying customer. Very clever indeed, especially when one knows that a computer, working a tnllkm times as fast as a mere hxain, can always outthink a human being, even one who isn't dying. A S: Madam, I am not a tapd I ,am a flesh-and-blood... Oh, what's the use? OL: That would have been the third running for that one. Is it possible that even a computer, even a tape has a little shame? Very well, my dear, we will pretend you are not a tape, but a woman: age #, name Doris. A young woman -- it's only bitchy little sexpots that get to record those tapes, isn't it? Or do .they concoct them entirely nowadays from the squeal of metal and the hum of power? Anyhow, we'll pretend you're a beautiful young woman who is tormenting me with pills I can't have and with grounded delivery-copters and with doctors who have skipped off on emergency visits to their mistresses and can't be reached. Yes, ,a beautiful vicious young woman, dear tape. At least that will give me something definite to hate while I die here all alone, someone who could conceivably suffer as I suffer. Ooooh... AS: Madam, I am not beautiful and I'm trying hard not to be vicious. And I'm quite as alone as you are. All alone in a tiny cubical, surroimded by yards and yards of electric circuits, until my relief turns up. Yet I can faintly hear through the airconditioning system the same storm you're having. It's movipg my way. OL: I'm glad you're all alone. I'm glad you can hear the storm. I'm glad you're in a tiny cubical and can't get away. Then you can imagine something horrible creeping silentlly toward you, as death is creeping toward me, while you puff your cigarettes into the air-conditioning outlet and drink your cocktails from a flask disguised as a walkie-talkie, I imagine, and preen yourself in front of a mirror and call one of your boy friends and amuse yourself by cat-and-mousing an old woman dying -- AS: Stop, mother, please! OL: So now I've become the mother of a tape. How interesting. Oh, excuse me, dear, I forgot we're pretending you're a beautiful young woman; but my memory's not so good these last hours, or minutes. And besides, it startled me so to discover ithat now tapes -- excuse me again -- even have mother fixations and have been psychoanalyzed, no doubt, and -- A S: Please, madam, I'm being serious. I may not be dying, but I wish I were -- OL: You're making me feel better, dear. Thank you. AS: -- so I'm every bit as miserable as you are. I took this job because of something that happened to me when I was a very little girl. My mother had a sudden heart attack and couldn't move, and she asked me to get her medicine. But I wouldn't do it because I'd asked her for candy a half hour before and she'd refused to give me any, and so I refused to move. She always called my medicine "candy," and I didn't understand what was happening at all. I thought I was just getting even. I didn't realize she was dying. And so long afterwards I took this job so I could help other people who were in her situation and make up for my crime and so I could -- OL: Oh no, my dear, you took this job so you could repeat over and over with gloating satisfaction the hot excitement you got when you watched your mother die and knew it was you who were kilb ing her, so you could go on and on and on refusing to give old women their medicine or get them doctors, meanwhile showering them with sticky sweet sympathy, like poison for ants, and, not content widi that torture, slipping in dirty little pleas for sympathy for your own vidous, murderous self -- AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop. I'm human! Three point one four one six. Pi. One three five seven eleven thirteen. Primes. Two four eight sixteen -- OL: How like a machine. Nothing but numbers. Confused with food. You're going crazy, machine. AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop! I tell you I'm flesh-and-blood -- . OL: Female, age #, name Doris. AS: -- and I'm serious about all this, and I know this isn't the job for me at all, because I'm so horribly lonely; and what you say about me is the way I suspect myself of feeling, though I'm trying ,as hard as I can to feel the other way, the loving way, and I'm afraid -- OL: I'm glad you can feel guilt. Love -- don't make me laugh. But I'm glad you're afraid. Because then IF you can imagine something creeping toward you as deadly as what's creeping toward me. What if your tapes should loop out and strangle you? What if your filthy mattertransmitter should suck you in and spit you out into a red-hot volcano or at the north pole or at the bottom of the Challanger Deep or on the sun side of Mercury? What's that now? -- closer than the storm, rattling the grill of your ventilation inlet? What's that coming out of the answer slot of the computer? Why are the needle points of the long narrow blades of the scissors swinging toward you? AS: Oh, stop, stop, stop, or they'll jump at my heart! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop -- OL: Shut up! I'm tired of pretending. I'm just an old woman dying. And you're just tapes. Yes, just tapes. I know that because I've been insulting you every way I could, and you've been taking it. A live human being wouldn't. And only a tape would call me "madam." A democratized woman -- and there aren't any others under # -- would call me dearie or senior citizen. And I've made you spend an hour on me. They'd never let a human being waste her working time like that, and she wouldn't care to. But tapes? -- who cares? Plug the old dame in on them and let her play with them until she dies! And finally one tape got stuck on the word stop and kept jerking back and forth there, over and over. Ooooh... boooh... this is the end, at last... ooooh... the master files show that your phone is equipped with a miniaturized Important Trifle matter-receiver! It's hidden in the earpiece! I will place the Cardinal pill on the bowl and -- OL: Ooooh... too late, tape... I'm dying... AS: Please, madam. For my sake. O L: No, tape... I'm going now... I leave the horrors to you... I'm dying... like your mother... I'm... dead... The cadaverous old lady carefully dropped the phone, not on its prongs This month in Galaxy -- A Complete Short Novel by Poul Anderson by Richard Wilson by Robert Silverberg by Harry Harrison All in the December issue of Galaxy -- on sale now! or the floor, buit with a dull, short clatter on the edge of the thick pale marble top of the night table. She leaned back into the huge pillows. Something tiny rattled on the table top. She did not look. The phone called very faintly with an insect's voice "Madam!" and "Mother!" again and again. She did not answer. The storm was almost over, the lightning gone, the thunder faded; but now came a different thunder, a muted thunder, a thunder that grew and made the old lady frown. It drowned the phone's faint screaming, like that of a faroff cicada. Something shook the ceiling, then jarred it. There was a rapid tattoo of footsteps overhead, the creek and slam of a door, a clatter of footsteps down the silver stairs. Approaching her briskly was a slim, middle-aged man carrying a black bag and shaking a few water drops off his trim gray suit. "Well, what's it this time?" he demanded with a cheery roughness. "Used your sleeping pills up too fast, I suppose, and then worked yourself into a tantrum. I'll have you know I've delayed delivering the Governor's daughter's baby, just to make sure you keep me in your will." She grinned at him, the tip of her nose straining toward the point of her chin. "The sleeping pills, yes, you clever devil. Oh, and I lost my temper with your stupid answering service." "Don't blame you there. I curse them a dozen times a day myself. Only get psychoneurotics to take that job. Everyone else demands a social working-life. Now let's just -- Whafs thatr H e had stopped with a jerk and was pointing at the phone. In one frantic scramble the old lady thrust herself halfway across the bed and halfway out of the covers and crouched, looking back. She began to tremble as the doctor was trembling. But her lips were smiling, and her eyes glittered like jet. Flowing steadily from the small black hole in the center of the pearldropping down past ithe pale marble and puddling on the pearl-gray satin comforter was a thin rippling ribbon of bright blood. IF  Feature Our Mar in Fandom looks over the swinging European scene! W 'ould you believe there are science-fiction magazines and readers and out-and-out fans all over the world, not just here in the U.S.? It's true -- science fiction is published and read in Germany, Spain, Finland, Great Britain, Italy, France, Sweden, Ireland -- even in Japan. Why, there are even SF enthusiasts in Russia, of all places. In fact, I understand science fiction is enormously popular behind the Iron Curtain... which leads me to suspect critics may be right, when they say we read the stuff mostly for "escape." Here in America, we tend to consider SF to be a homegrown product, fandom then being a local phenomenon. This is absolutely not the case. While the world's first science-fiction magazine was American, the original pioneers of the stuff were French (Jules Verne) and English (H.G. Wells), and SF is as much a part of the popular culture of Europe as it is here. Since sciencefiction magazines, books and paperbacks are published overseas, and since we know from American fan history that this always seems to stimulate a certain small percentage of the readership into organizing clubs, holding conventions and printing up fanzines, it's not surprising fandom is a going concern on the other side of the Atlantic. Why, there's a science-fiction convention in Germany every year -- a dozen fanzines emerging in Sweden -- an annual convention in Great Britain during the Easter holidays -- and a booming fan renaissance going on in France! Vhat do they read? Surprisingly enough, the foreign fandoms are nurtured on just about the same reading matter we enjoy , over here. James Blish and Andre Norton get published in Denmark and Germany. In Italy, a paperback series called La Bussola SF does A. E. Van Vogt and C. L. Moore. Science-fiction readers in France read Galaxy (although over tihcre they call it Galaxie; and in Germany, the edition of Galaxy is n Galaxis; it comes out rather sporadically and looks like an AmMican paperback. Science-fiction magazines are published all over. There used to be a Swedish edition of Galaxy, and about ten years back there was a Finnish edition which lasted abput a year. There was another Swedish sciencefiction magazine, a local product called Hapna, which has gone under. And in Italy and Germany there are several local science-fiction magazines. The Fantastic Success of Perry Rhodan Germany is the scene of the most astonishing fannish movement of all. The German fans are so numerous and so active, they publish literally hundreds of fanzines. This "Gerfandom" movement (as they call themselves) got started about #I or thereabouts. And once the ball started really rolling, it snowballed into such a flurry of activity that Gerfandom seriously plans to make a bid soon to be the site of the Annual World SF Convention in # or #. An example of the sort of popularity science fiction enjoys in Germany can be given in two historic words: Perry Rhodan, "Perry" is an American astronaut, who, in his original magazine appearance, landed on the moon to discover that an alien spaceship was already there. (Sounds familiar? I guess they get American science-fiction movies over there, too!) Anyway, Perry and his pals joined up with the aliens for a planet-by-planet tour of the Solar System that spawned not just two or three sequels, but literally hundreds. Perry Rhodan (which the team of six or seven German writers who produce the series by teamwork fondly imagine to be a "typical American-type name") has become the European answer to Adam Link, the Lensmen, Retief, Captain Future and the Foundation Series rolled up Today, Perry has worked his way through the entire Milky Way galaxy and is reportedly about to make the big jump into the next galaxy! Perry and his pals got started, I am told, in a German pulp magazine that came out weekly or biweekly. As they went on to become just about the most fantastically successful phenomenon to arise since the happy day when Hugo Gernsback put the two words "science" and "fiction" together to make magazine history, Perry Rhodan outgrew the skimpy, confines of his magazine to explode all over the newsstands in a paperback novel series of incredible size. (I am told there have been something like # novels about Perry and his astronautical chums by now... that's right, three hundred and fifty novels! No wonder they need seven guys to write the stuff!) So voluminous has the Perry Rhodan saga become, the German publishers are now beginning to reissue the earlier sixty or seventy novels, for those who came in after the curtain went up... Incidentally, we Amerifans may soon get a look at Perry. Old-time science-fiction fan and editor of Famous Monsters, Forrest J AckerIF man, whose wife is currently translating some of the Perry Rhodan novels into English, is acting as Perry's agent, trying to find an American publisher for the supersedes. What about books? Not only do the foreign fans read Galaxy just like we Americans, but they have their own Science Fiction Book Club, too, although it's not published by Doubleday as is ours. In Italy, a publishing house called Casa Editrice la Tribuna has a hardcover series of novels and shortstory collections they issue every two months under the title of The Science Fiction Book Club. The club's selections consist of titles we are pretty familiar with on this side of the Atlantic, things like Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (forgive me if I don't try to give these titles in their Italian form, okay?), Ray Bradbury's A Medicine for Melancholy, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, Philip Jose Farmer's The Lovers, and other stuff by Clifford D. Simak and comparable writers. In England, of course, a very large number of American writers are published in hardcover reprints. England also has its own science-fiction book club (called The Science Fiction Book Club and published by Phoenix House, Ltd.). England has had many sciencefiction magazines come and go. For many years a local product, ScU ence Fantasy, dominated the SF scene and discovered and developed whole generations of writers (one of their last major discoveries was J.G. Ballard). Science Fantasy changed its name to Impulse and went under finally, after a long and rather glorious history. Then a bunch of British fans got together and produced a fanoperated but newsstand-distributed professional SF mag called Alien World, which did not manage to survive very long. Today, there is only one prozine surviving, and that's New Worlds, which has recently produced its #I st consecutive issue. Even imder the imaginative editorship of the popular young writer Michael Moorcock, whose work has been appearing over here in paperback recently, New Worlds began getting a bit wobbly in the sales figures. Happily for British fandom, a British Arts Council subsidy arrived in time to save this venerable and excellent title from extinction. Elsewhere, things are looking up. In Italy these days, a brand new science-fiction magazine is starting up under the title of Nova SF. It contains, or will contain since I'm not certain just when the venture wUl be launched, a selection of stories translated from English, plus reviews and critical essays and the like. JVbvfl SF has an Advisory Board made up of experts well known on both sides of the Atlantic -- people like Brian Aldiss and Don WoUheim. This new magazine will not appear on the newsstands, but will be sold through the mails by subscription only. This move spares the publishers a lot of worry about distributors and newsstand display and so on. Incidentally, in Italy, due to the peculiarities of the Italian language, "SF" is known as "FS" since the pbarse when j:endered into that lingo comes out something like fantascienza. Meanwhile, in Germany, the common term for science fiction is futur-romanz. Great Ghu only knows what k is in Japanese! Yes, there is at least one professional science-fiction magazine in Japan, and it's the Japanese edition of Galaxy. I won't try to reproduce the title of the magazine here, as our trusty typesetters might go through the roof if I asked them to dig up typeface in the Japanese characters! Do foreign fans ever visit fan conventions in the United States? Yes, they do; for about ten years or so there has been a Nice Ttog going called T.A.F.F. The name means "Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund." Fans on both sides of the ocean get together and raise a sizable sum of money, five hundred dollars, maybe as much as a thousand dollars, and give it to a popular American fan so he can afford to visit a convention overseas -- or to a popular foreign fan, so he can come to an American convention. For instance, back in #, fans around the world donated their dollars, pounds, francs and pfennigs to Belfast, Ireland, to the # World Science Fiction Convention which was held that year in Chicago, T.A.F.F. money went to an American fan named Terry Carr, and with it he and his wife traveled to the World Con in London, England. Last year, it was a fan from Germany. Tom Schluck of Hanover, West Germany, one of the most active and popular fans in Europe came to visit the # Con in Cleveland. Tom, who is a young fellow in his twenties works in a German bank and (since he is fluent in both languages) moonlights by translating American science fiction into German for the German SF magazines. Fans are nominated to run for election, which is how one gets selected for T.A.F.F. This happens every year. To vote for the fan of your choice, you send in a dollar or more, which is added to the central fimd. Also, World Conventions donate surplus funds to T.A.F.F., and I understand that it's not unheard of for one of the science-fiction magazines to donate a modest sum to this pleasant cause. Not too many people in fandom can afford the travel expenses one incurs in a transatlantic flight to another country. And since lots of fans in other countries felt left out of things, a number of American fans over the years (starting with a Florida boy named Shelby Vick) began urging the idea into actuality. Next month, we'll take a closeup look at what goes on in the annual British and German conventions... maybe take an advance look at German fandom's plans for a World Convention... and compare some of the foreign fanzines to the local oo IF Illustrated by Sea owned the planet. And in its rages of rebirth. Sea came close to destroying it entirely! I I n Tenabur Wood the bregfern grows tall and dusky-green betrees. Especially along Nottan River, where the canopy 'grudgingly lets in a few startling shafts of ruddy sunlight, the breg is thick. It so smothers the dank ground that two furtive creatures might huddle within a leap, each invisible to the other. It was there that Latpur -- apprentice to the Prognosticator Deeoon -- crouched, his ears erect and cupped forward, his dull-blue nostrils atwitch for any scent that might penetrate to him, his tritaioned paws digging into the cool black mud. Again, faint sounds reached him. He was sure, this time, that they came from across the river. He hesitated a moment longer, senses astrain for any hint of nearer danger. Then he crept forward, parting the breg carefully with a forepaw until he could peer out. He released his breath in a noiseless sigh. The strange vroal on the little sandstrip opposite could only be the itinerant shaman Gultaz of whom Deeoon had been muttering lately. The interloper was indeed of a different race of vroal. Where Latpur's own fur was dull gray, this other's was olive-green, a hit lighter than the bregfern. He wasn't really a giant. He'd be little heavier than plump old Deeoon, but his feet and forepaws were large, his snout big, his active dark eyes sunk under a heavy brow. His accoutrements were odd, too. Instead of a simple cinch like Latpur's, he wore a wide, ornate belt of painted leather, festooned with a weird assortment of objects -- a thigh-bone of some small animal, inlaid with glittering metal; a silvery mirror-disk with two holes in it; a small flute made of bone or horn; three or four skewers or awls that looked like hard metal. The only weapon was a knife with a bone handle, more intricately carved than Latpur's but not essentially different. There might be other weapons, or Sea knew what oddities, in the yokepack on the sand. A shrill cry made Latpur go tense. A green-and-yellow bird flashed through a shaft of sunlight, whirled out in two quick circles over the water, then shot toward Gultaz. The foreign shaman lifted a forepaw. Evidently he held grain or something in it, for the bird lit on his wrist and began to peck. Gultaz stood as if waiting. Moments later another bird swooped into sight from downstream and joined its fellow on the shaman's wrist. Gultaz clucked softly, let the birds feed a moment, then tossed them into the air to settle on a treebranch. Whatever he might possess in the way of magic, he obviously didn't rely on it to guard him. Those birds clearly scouted like tchinniirds. Now Gultaz was removing his belt, laying it carefully atop the yokepack and eyeing the river in a practiced way. Before wading in, he got down to all fours, lowered his head, immersed one ear and cupped a paw over the other. Then, satisfied, he entered the water silently. There was no air of joy about the bathing. Instead, it was dutiful and perhaps ritual. Also, Gultaz tasted the water carefully. The shaman's attention to the river goaded Latpur's uneasiness. He stayed long enough to watch Gultaz emerge, shake himself, don the belt and yokepack and slip into the ferns. The bright birds -- silent now -- flitted watchfully ahead. Then Latpur crept from the fempatoh. Seeking the most open stretches of the wood, he went stealthily on hind legs, senses alert, imtil he reached open ground. Then, on all fours, he loped up the sunny grassland toward the quartzcrowned hill where he and Deeoon lived. IF T he plump, graying Prognosticator let his sharp eyes sweep over Latpur before he grunted, "Well, why the haste?" "Reason enough, gruol I saw the foreign shaman! He wore a belt hung with strange mystic devices. He had two gaudy birds that flew as scouts. He bathed with odd gestures and tasted the water repeatedly." Latpur paused for breath. "Will you tell me, gruo, how you knew he'd be coming and where I should watch?" Deeoon made a sign of impatience. "I told you he followed Sea, and Sea has been showing signs of interest in Nottan River lately. Naturally I progged he'd come. He was here before, even though Sea's interest then didn't come to anything." "Oh," Latpur said. "And naturally you remembered where he bathed before." Deeoon lowered his brow in amusement. "Of course. But that wasn't where I had you watch. I progged he'd avoid the old spot out of elementary caution. I chose the only other one with the right approaches and river currents for his purpose." "Well," Latpur said, "he didn't seem to taste anything that was particularly significant." Deeoon gestured toward a small bowl of clear quartz, half full of purplish liquid, with a flat cover over it. "That's the sample of lowerriver water you got yesterday. Reagents show nothing unusual yet. Eat, and rest yourself. Tomorrow I send you on an overnight mission. Go down to rivermouth and fetch me samples of the sea, on both siQc, and pouches of sand as well. Also samples of eddy-water from the river, below the great rock. Don't take any risky short-cuts; there's no immediate urgency. Go via farmland. While you're there, climb the rock and look southward to see if the aliens who say they're from another world are still in the same place. If they are, trot down and warn them that Sea will probably spawn in Nottan River less than ten days from now. Tell them they'd better move." "Yes, gruo." "And on the way back, stop at Village, Wemm and try to collect the fee they still owe us. If they won't pay ail, get what you can. Tell them I'm peeved." Latpur said, "Shall I not also warn them about the Spawning?" Deeoon sighed. "I prog it won't be necessary. Gultaz will already have put a scare into them, some way or other." Latpur turned toward the food niche, then paused. "Is he as evil as he looks?" "Evil enough. My last-but-one apprentice ran afoul of him and disappeared. You be cautious. At least he'll want to sell the people charms and spells, and gouge whatever he can. He won't want you around talking sense to them." Latpur said disgustedly, "Superstitious root-diggers!" Deeoon frowned. "When you've been a Prognosticator as long as I have, you'll be less certain what's superstition and what's sound instinct." n N ext morning's sun was goldenled and already warm on the rolling lands through which Latpur cantered. One of his tchinni rode on his head (the part of him that bounced least) while the other flew a zigzag path in advance. Once, the scouting bird shrilled an alert and swooped beyond a ridge. When Latpur topped the ridge cautiously the bird was far down the other slope, circling over a glond, a huge old male Latpur recognized by a scar on one orangebrown flank. He judged, from the leisurely way it trotted, that it was returning to its lair after a successful night's hunt, which meant it wasn't dangerous at the moment if he kept his distance. It was ignoring the swift bird above it. Latpur watched it quicken pace on more level ground, its great leg-muscles bunching, then pause just at the edge of the brush bordering Tenabur Wood to lift its big head and sniff the air. For a moment it turned and peered up toward him, knowing, no doubt, where to look for the bird's owner. Then it stalked into the brush. Latpur stayed a moment, fixing every detail in his mind. There was never any telling what seemingly insignificantthing might hold meaning for Deeoon. He turned and scanned the country ahead. Off to the left of his route, a dozen local vroal were walking uplift toward a tuber-patch, spades on their shoulders. He started that way, and presently his second tchinni let out a chirp, rose and circled once, then shot off toward the group, doubtless to renew acquaintances with others of its kind. To his surprise, when the farmers spotted him they laid down their digging-tools and came loping on all fours to meet him. Before they were even close, one called out, "Hoy! Apprentice! What news of Sea?" Latpur sighed. When they used the word like that, they meant Seaentity, not simply the sea. So they already had warning. He said unoertaidy, "I'm going down to get samples of water and sand right now. Deeoon thinks -- " The spokesman scowled. "Your gruo's too damned cagey with what he th inks , land what he says. Last night a young she of my 'klatch was bespelled so that she wandered in the dark alone for hours on Loochiss Creek. What's more, her tchinni abandoned her and flew home, acting demented. And what's still more, a glond stalked her -- then, face#o-face, within springingdistance, suddenly snarled in fear and backed away!" Latpur stared, trying to overcome his prickling of fear. It was hard to ignore the old tales and legends. Finally he said, "If she was crazed, she could imagine anything. Anyway, I don't -- what reason is there to talk about Sea being involved or about bewitchment?" "Ha!" the farmer snorted. "You've absorbed so much of Deeoon's nonsense you talk like him. I think I'll take this she to Deeoon and let him explain the marks around her neck! IP Special A # Issues  # B # Issues # Gift Rales C # Issues  # D # Issues # Add # for each (# issues) for foreign subscription   F # Issues of Each #-# In All Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions to be sent in accordance with the offers indicated in each case below: n  enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the U. S. Give the gift you eronld like to receive Permit Na # Sec. #, P.L.R. New Yofk,N.Y. No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States The fur singed away, as if by a redhot necklace! You've heard of Sea's necklaces! What do you say to that?" Latpur gaped for a iminute, mustered himself and said with more firmness than he felt, 'I say I must be on about my errands, so that Deeoon can assess things and give you sound advice. Good digging to you, farmers." He loped away, trying to look confident. An outbreak of superstition was always bad for a Prognosticator and his apprentices. In such times, he brooded, it might almost be wise to be a shaman, whether you believed in magic or not. He was out of sight before he realized he'd neglected to ask questions or even observe such details as the condition of the farmers' persons, belts and tools. Deeoon would be angry with him. He stopped, half inclined to go back, but couldn't bring himself to it. And anyway, his mind was beginning to work. Maybe -- magic or not -- the interloper Gultaz bad something to do with their strange story. F rom the pinnacle of the great rock around which Nottan River swerved, the sea looked calm enough. The boom and crash of the surf was only a mutter, up here. It was old, he thought, how water so deeply purple could become delicate turquoise in the shallows or turn to foam as dazzling-white as the sand. He watched the crisscross wave patterns that made the brackish mouth of Nottan River look like some shifting, living, woven fabric. He could almost imagine that the sea was alive all the time. Near that brackish mouth, the sand was green with algae. river itself was tinged, too -- he could easily distinguish the eddies where the water was just mixed enough to support the alie. Fish would be darting there. He looked about carutty, nothig how the few clouds moved and hew the sea birds wheeled within certain updrafts or dove at schools of emafl fish beyond the surf. He must describe everything accurately to Decoon. He studied the beaek below him. Was there a slight mounding on each side of the river mouth? It was hard to remember actly hew things had looked on his last visit. With practice, Deeoon said, hed he able to recall vividly. He turned and looked eoulhwecd again at the strange metal cyUnder, dwarfed by distance, an hour's tmt down the beach. His heart quickened. Of all ithe ages, to be bom in this one that saw visitors from another world! And if, also, he were privileged to witness a Spawning... A Spawning hadn't occurred in this part of the world for many generations. His grandfather had made a long trip once and seen the devastation left by one. That, in fact, was how Latpur came to be Deeoon's ptesent apprentice -- Deeoon had promised such, in return for the grandfather's first-hand descriptions. He clucked to his tcbimii and started down from the rock. He'd collect his sample first, then lope down to the alien ship. Probabfy they'd let him sleep the night deee to the great bull lor safety. T he alien called Meecham the specialist studying vroal lajiguage, came out of the ship to meet him. Meecham's voctbulairy was small, but his accent was good. As usual, he wore at his waist the litde box that could listen and mimic back perfectly. "I bid welcome. Why does Prognosticator Latpur honor us with this visit?" Latpur said dutifully, "Pm only an apprentice. Deeoon wants me to warn you of a rare and terrible event. The sea will come alive and spawn in Nottan River within the next few days! It would be wise for you to move a few hundred miles away." The alien looked at him for a moment. 'We thank you and your gruo for the warning. But we have -- " he searched for a word -- "devices plantedaround here that we must watch. And it's a leigthy process to get the ship ready to lift." Latpur shifted from one hind foot to Ihc other. "I'm afraid you don't understand. A spawning is a deadly thing! And Sea might he angry that you are here. It would be very foolish not to move." Meecham bobbed his head gravely. 'We thank you for your concern. I will tell our captain. But tell me, please -- What life form is it that will sp'awn? A fish of some kind?" "No, no! Sea! The sea-entity, that only com alive once in six years anywhere in the world!" Meecham bobbed his head again. "You've spoken of a sea-entity before. Have you seen it yourself?" "No," Latpur said a little impatiently. "I have ttot." #t "Then, have you talked with anyone who has?" "No. But it's a real thing! Not -- not superstition. Deeoon t hinks there's no magic at all. You must not doubt me! Do you not have a sea on your own world?" "We have several, and many things in them that spawn, but none that are very dangerous. Can you tell me what the danger is?" Latpur wrestled with his own vague conceptions. "There are manifestations that sting, and poisons, and burning necklaces... and... and all manner of things that appear. Whole regions are stripped of foliage, and almost all animals of any size arc killed and eaten. My own grandfather saw a region that had been devastated." Mcediam said yet again, 'We are grateful for the warning. Our captain will study it and decide. It may be that we can defend ourselves here. Please do not think us unresponsive. As strangers here, we must think carefully before making decisions. Now, if you have time, may I introduce my little girl to you? I promised her I would, next time you came." Latpur, hiding his impatience, agreed, accepted the alien's request that he wait and watched the alien climb rungs and work the handle of a door. So they still weren't going to invite him into the ship. They spoke of germs and study and said meanwhile he'd better not enter, partly for his own protection. He hadn't missed Meecham's honesty in saying "partly," and Deeoon had chuckled over his account. IF M eecham returned with the shechild. Latpur was surprised she was so like the adults, except for size. She was hardly a third Meecham's height and had pale hair though his was dark, but her limbs and torso and features differed only slightly in proportion. Meecham herded her forward. "Latpur, this is Laurie." He spoke to her in the alien tongue. She hung back, edging timidly behind her father and whispering to him. She called him "Daddy." Her eyes were wide with fright. She had an aliendoll that she dutched to herself tightly. Meecham laughed. "Please excuse her. This is her first sight of an -- of one of you." He explained more seriously, "You see, her mother -- my mate -- died less than a year ago. That's wihy I brought Laurie on this trip with me." "Oh," Latpur said awkardly. "I'm very sorry." Meecham murmured an acknowledgement, then seemed to listen to the talking-plug in one ear. He looked up at Latpur. "Our captain says he's sorry he's not here to greet you. He's away in the flyingcart. He asks that I make some sort of gift as a sign of friendship." Meecham looked thougjitful. "Will you excuse us for a moment?" He let the child scamper ahead of him. Latpur waited, eyes roving the area. One of his tchinni winged by, swerving around the alien ship, and scouted the beach beyond. There was a concentration of sea birds, far out. On the wet sand near him, a few small life forms crawled. The smells were normal -- the seasmell, the smells of the beach and; from the bordering brusldand, the musky-leafy-loamy-animat complex. Very faintly on the north breeze came the dank smell of Tenabur Wood, touched with the spice of plillom leaves. Was it possible life and foliage? He shuddered. Meecham returned alone, with a small stoppered vial holding many little strips of the stuff the aliens called "paper." "This is something you and Deeoon can use. You said you know about acids and bases." "Yes," Latpur said. The aliens had been astounded at his acquaintance with chemistry -- a thing, of course, that any Prognosticator needed. "Well," Meecham said, "this paper will change color to show different strengths of acid or base. By trying known solutions, you can learn which color represents what. It isn't magic. It's science." Latpur, intrigued, made the headbow of gratitude. "I thank you! I have nothing at the moment to give in return, but -- " The alien held up a hand. "You've just given us an important warning. We are in your debt." He waited for Latpur to say something. Latpur stirred with anger. Behind the alien's polite words was disbelief; even irony, perhaps. He almost handed back the gift. But Deeoon would not want him to do that. He hesitated. He didn't feel, now, like asking permission to sleep near the ship. "I must be going," he said formally. "I've been honored to talk again." The honor is ours, said Meem L atpur cantered back to tha great rock and climbed to a ledge where glonds or other large predators couldn't reach him. He chose the smoothest spot for a bed. He took some roasted tubers from his yokepack, crumbled part of one for his tchinni and munched the rest, along with strips of cooked and dried meat. The sun was setting, out of his sight. The rock's huge shadow stretched out over the sea which was now a very deep purple. The distant mutter of surf was punctuated by the cries of late-feeding sea birds. There was a line of clouds on the horizon. He wondered if a storm would overtake him before he got home. An ordinary storm he didn't fear, but Sea might ride the clouds now. It was strange, he thought, how mixed his feelings were. Within a few short days, the stable world was overturned. First, the aliens, with the stunning news that there were other worlds -- not half-believed paradises and purgatories, but solid worlds, with mountains and forests and rivers and seas and creatures, all strange! And the aliens' sciences, what he'd seen of them -- making him realize how primitive even Decoon's knowledge was. Though, of course, the old Prognosticator made marvelous use of it. And now the Spawning -- a dread, mystic thing that, a few days ago, had been no more in his mind than the other side of the world. The Stan were out now. He stared up at them until his neck ached From which did the aliens come? He wondered if Sea knew about the stars. Somehow, they now seemed to glare down balefully. He growled to himself. He was beginning to think like a superstitious farmer. Determinedly, he curled up to sleep. He did sleep, but all night he kept coming awake; trembling, vague furtive dreams in his mind, to lie and listen to the unresting surf. And, some time after oudnight, another sound wrenched him awake -- a keening somewhere on the river, as of some animal in pain. It was too high-pitched to be a gload. His tchinni stirred and twittered uneasily. Somehow he endured until anonaing and, after a tasteless breakfast and a thorough scan around, descended from the ledge and started home... The small settlement of Wemm was on the V of land where Loochiss Creek joined Nottan River. Most of the males and some of the females were out gathering tubers and nuts and grains, but the old mayor was at home. The grizzle-pelted elder scowled at Latpur. "And why should we pay fees to a Prognosticator who docs not warn us of the most fearful events of our lifetimes?" Latpur said, "In due course ay griio will give you exact predictions and advice. He doesn't go about peddling vague guesses. In any case, you owe us for advice on the spring planting. Your crops have been ORcellent." The elder scowled more deeply, and fingered a curious charm he wore on a thong around his neck -- a painted wooden disk, orange with three horizontal bars of green. 'T can't pay you the entire sum now; we've had other expenses. You'll have to be content with one-third for the moment." Latpur made a polite gesture. "May I have it, then?" Only after the elder had hobbled to a strong wooden cask and taken out six small bars of silver did Latpur say, "There is a false shaman about, a foreigner, who'll be trying to peddle chaims. Don't be fooled. They are useless." He pretended not to notice hoy guiltily the mayor's gnarled talons let go of the amulet. He made a bow. "Good health to you. Elder." D eeoon was tired and testy from two days of circulating among clients, but he brightened when Latpur gave him the aliens' gift and explained its use. "Splendid! Splendid! It will save reagents and work. A timely thing, too. We'll be short of funds, as I had no better luck than you in collecting fees. Come, let's get to work on those samples." First of all, he put a sample of rivermouth sand into a bowl, added distilled water, stirred and filtered off the liquid into a clear beaker. A slightly milky reagent went in, twenty-five drops or so; then two drops of a deep blue solution. Deeoon stirred with a fire-drawn rod of quartz. For a moment the mixture remained blue. Then, swiftly, it began to fade. "Ah!" exclaimed Deeoon, "It's farther along than I thought!" Latpur watched with excitement as the mixture turned light lavender, then pink, and finally colorless. leeooa picked up the beaker, sniffed at it and sighed. "There's a strange odor but it means nothing to me. If only we had more reliable pamphlets... Well, anyway, we'll see an onset within four days!" He turned to get another sample. Latpur said, "There was a happening, gruo." He told what he'd heard from the first group of farmers. Deeoon's face darkened. "The work of Gultaz, of course. There are drugs that can induce a kind of walking sleep, in which the victim will carry out orders, and later forget. It's a small chore, of course, to bewilder tchinni. For one thing, a certain kind of whistle, inaudible to us, will do it. Don't you recall that, from the pamphlet by Klazzar? And a certain unguent will repel glonds. Don't underestimate Gultaz's arts. Our need is to prog how he may move against us. He knows we'll try to discredit him." Deeoon turned back to his beakers. "Let's see, now..." T wo hours later the samples were all tested. Deeoon said, "A pattern emerges. This will be a great Spawning -- as vast as the one that devastated Soolban, where your grandfather traveled. I prog a series of dams in Nottan River for fifty miles inland -- perhaps even above Tenahur Wood entirely. Foraging will reach up all the tributaries and across the grasslands. But if the pamphlets are accurate it will not IF assail the higher hills or the mountains. The reason for that is simple: the basin itself is rich, and at this time of the year, which is a little late for a Spawning, it will be a hurried event, rather than a leisurely one with foraging farther from the river. You and I can spend tomorrow telling the popnilation where to flee. Then we'll leave for a high place I know where we can watch the lowlands without being intolerably endangered." Latpur's pulse pounded. "Would you approve, my gruo, my staying here as an on-the-spot observer?" Deeoon jerked his head around to stare. "Do you realize your chances, if you tried staying?" Latpur said excitedly, "You told me once there were precautions that sometimes help. And a few creatures do survive, don't they? What about Gultaz? He seems unworriedl" Deeoon scowled. "Of course! He has, the story goes, some redolent salve that protects him from Sea's foragers. But I have no hint of how he makes it." Latpur squirmed his weight around; finally got to his feet. "There's one way to get some -- steal it from him!" Deeoon grimaced. "Do you suppose others haven't tried? One of his arts is compelling beasts to guard his camps. I prog your chances at less than one in a thousand!" Latpur insisted hotly, "We're not artless ourselves! If there's an inaudible whistle to bewilder tohinim, it may work against his birds too! And you said there's a glend repellant. Can you make some?" Deeoon blinked. "Why, I have some, somewhere about. But it's never been given a good test." Latpur found himself grinning. "Tiis will be a good test. You know as well as I do, that old glond keeps other predators away from that part of the river." He watched Deeoon anxiously. "There's another thin-g on my mind, gruo. If the aliens stay, they may try to fight Sea. And that would be something to witness!" Deeoon blinked again, then suddenly lowered his brow in amusement. 'Try, then, for Gultaz's unguent! Day after tomorrow -- we must send the farmers away, tomorrow. And if you get the unguent, I'll stay too! Even if you fail, we can shut ourselves up in a cave at the last minute and hope we're not rooted out!" IV L atpur swam Nottan River, queasily, in the upper fringes of Teoabur Wood, miles above where he'd seen Gultaz. Across, he took off his yokepack and drained it, shook himself, applied glond repellent and started downstream. He felt nervous going down the gloomy north bank. He kept imagining stealthy sounds in the hreg. He was travelling without his tohinni, as their presence might betray him. On a thong around his neck was the whistle Deeoon had made. To his nostrils, the glond repellent he wore smelled burnt and caustic and drowned out other smells. Ahead of him, something big crashed through the breg and plunged int the water. An amphibian. He croudhed, trying to sniff the breeze, whioh was behind him -- an eddity, since he faced seaward -- but the glond repellent overpowered everything. An orange and green bird, doubtless attracted by the amphibian's dive, flashed overhead. Should he use the whistle? Erratic behavior of the watchbird could alert Gultaz. He hesitated, the whistle in his mouth. The wings suddenly whirred directly over him. Startled, he blew hard. He heard netSiing except a hiss of air, but his lips itingled. Somewhere the bird shiied and beat its wings violently. He heard its distracted cries fading down-river. He'd been too impulsive! He pusihed farther from the stream, as hastily as he dared. He must circle and approach the foreigner's camp below, at least having the breeze right. If Gultaz came looking, he would find his trail. But the shaman would move cautiously, and there might be time... He blundered into a game trail, crouched, then bounded down it in short careful leaps. He could hear nothing except his own pulse and his faint footfalls, smell nothing but the unguent. The trail wound on and on. Now and then small creatures leaped away 'before him. Finally the trail dipped toward the river. He paused. Had he come far enough? He thought so. He left the trail and angled back upstream. There was a sound from his left. He cowered, listening, Then, even above the stink of the unguent, he smelled glond. His muscles bunched, but he didn't move. No vroal could outrun a glond, even the old one that haunted this region. And the nearest tree trunk was twenty feet away. If the unguent didn't work... the rustling came closer. Then the movement stopped, and he heard the glond snarl in frustrated anger. The repellent did work! But a shrill bird-call sounded from upstream. Gultaz, returning! Laitpur leaped away, heedless of everything but flight. He had no desire to face Gultaz here. He heard the glond start after him. He reached the bank and dove, remembering in mid#eap his new uneasiness about the water, struck it, swam desperateily underwater, downstream and across. Would Gultaz have river creatures patrolling? A shaman who could lure a glond to guard his camp... One of the watohbirds was circling over him when he surfaced to gasp for air. A quick glance back showed no sign of Gultaz yet. He was out of effective dart or arrow range now, so he swam on the surface; reached the south bank; clambered up. Some missile plunged into the breg near him, 'but he didn't pause. He shoved through at full tilt to drier and less fern-choked ground; galloped hard downriver. Shame was rising within him. His attempt 'had been one unplanned succession of impulses and pani'cs. He could just as well have gotten downwind in the first place and scouted more carefully, not drowning his sense of smell with the IF repellent until he needed it. Deeoon would be disgusted. He stepped to catch his breath and assess things. His yokepack was still dripping water, which annoyed him. His rations must be soaked. He peered eastward, as if that would help him visualize the sea. How much chpange would there be now? Deeoon had warned him that, if he had no luck against Gultaz, it might already be dangerous to go downriver. Still, there was no sign of anything strange yet. And this might be the last chance to look and to get new samples. He started on, seeking out a game trail he remembered, taking up a steady lope that devoured the miles. He hoped the old glond was still on the other side of the river. The escaping swim had washed off all the repellent. H e stood at the base of the great rock, staring at the river mouth. Thick dikes were mounded up of sand, seaweed, shells, bones -- whole skeletons, here and there, of mighty sea creatures. They pushed the river into a narrow channel, where it ran swift and turbulent. Surf -- more violent than he'd ever seen -- periodically beat back even that current. As the surf bore in, it seemed to focus itself up the narrow channel, and each wave deposited some layer of solid matter. The dikes were closing together before his eyes! He forced himself on down to fill his sample vials, then walked up the river as far as the rock. Already the water level was two or three feet above normal. A pool was forming. Standing there, he must have heard or smelled something, for suddenly he was aware of danger. He whirled. The old glond crouched a few yards away, its amber eyes murderous with a hate beyond mere predation. Another instant, and it would have leaped. There was just one chance, and Latpur seized it. He spun and dashed for the water, plunged in, swam upstream toward a near-vertical part of the rock. He heard the glond splashing behind him. He reached the cliff, searched desperately for paw-holds, hauled himself from the water and went up like some insect. He didn't dare look back, though every instinct screamed. Only when he heard the glond lunge, scrabble at the rock and fall back roaring in frustration did he stop, clinging while strength returned. Then he went on up to a haOf-ledge where he could squirm around and look down. The beast was swimming in circles, head lifted to stare at him. Why did it hate him so? It must have crossed the river and trailed him. Maybe the repellent had enraged it. Maybe the brute mind saw it as a deliberate insult. He was safe, for the time. Eventually, he'd have to climb up and over and go down the south side of the rock or the west side. But he'd wait until the glond had left the neighborhood -- unless he felt like relying on the repellent again, which he didn't, now. After a while the beast gave up, swam upriver, waded ashore and stalked haughtily away toward the wood. Latpur climbed to a shallow cave he rememlbered, where he could wait comfortably for a while. He uni:apped rations and munched them, soaked as they were, while he stared down at the pool. B ecause the patterns of the current were new to him, he didn't notice for a while that they were unnatural. When he did, it was abruptly. Between one moment and the next, he recognized, not ripples, but wake-pattems! Myriads of small things were moving just beneath the surface! And, as he watched, he saw the purpose of the activity. Bit by bit, a second dam was growing, to make another pool upstream! None of it was above the surface yet, but already the water humped over it. Alerted now, he saw tiny creatures, unrecognizable from here, crawl from the water, rip with mandibles or claws at the nearest twigs and tug them to the water to add to the dam. Pebbles, too. Already the river's margin had a scoured look. The shadows were lengthening. Dreading to stay here, he sniffed at the air. He smelled no danger. He hesitated, got out the glond repellent and smeared some on himself, then climbed to where the brow of the rock was less steep and started working his way around to westward. He realized the sun would be directly in his eyes. He halted unhappily, scanning the brush below. The shadowed edge of Tenabur Wood loomed black and ominous a short trot inland. It was lucky he paused where he did, for he suddenly saw Gultaz emeirge from the wood. The shali man, not wearing his ornate belt, did wear a murderous scowl as he cantered recklessly through the brush. Latpur clung motionless, glad his own pelt and accoutrements weren't too different in color from the rock. He hoped Gultaz would go on by to the sea, but the interloper stopped just a little past him. From makeshift felt-pouches, the shaman vexedly drew various gadgets: a small metal hinged thing like a nutcracker; a folded square of gauze; a beaker; a bundle of rods and a ring that assembled to form a small tripod. The square of gauze, fitted to a loop of wire, became a dip net. With everything assembled Gultaz paused for caution, sniffing the air and staring around. Fortunately he was looking toward Latpur's shadowed side, and didn't see him. Then the shaman waded into the pool, showing no nervousness, and began to dip. Each time he lifted the net, he plucked out a few wriggling creatures, thrust them into a pouch and dumped back whatever else the net held. Comprehension struck Latpur. Something had happened to the shaman's unguents, and he was hastily preparing a new stock! Could it be that the pool creatures would yield an unguent to ward off Sea's foragers? A kind of password? Latpur strained his eyes to see which kind of creature was chosen. He found himself grinning. So much for the shaman's magic! Gultaz trotted to his equipment, put one of the creatures -- already dead, Latpur hoped with a shudder -- into the metal press and squeezed its juice into the beaker. He squeezIF ed enough to fill the beaker, then set it on the tripod and scouted aibout for (twigs and built a small fire imder the beaker. He began to pace, mutteringimpatiently and looking around. Latpur suddenly realized the shaman's watchbirds were missing. So something had befallen them, tool rre beaker began to boil audibly. A Gultaz stopped to stare down at k. Presently the smell reached Ijatpur -- iodine, moisk, fishiness and something like the glond repellent but less caustic. The liquid boiled down until it was dark and viscous. Gultaz grunted in satisfaction and, with a small metal spoon, began transferring it to a vial. Finally, aifiter (rinsing the beaker, the foreigner repacked his gear, paused to scan the now dusky brushland and loped away toward Tenabur Wood. Latpur stayed where he was for ten minutes, grinning to himself. Then he climbed down. He took a food-wrapping from his yokepack, punched some holes in it and began to dip into the pool. When he had enough of the little crustaceans, he hunted about for dry twigs, and carried them and the water creatures back up to the shallow cave. There he improvised a tripod of wire, put a sample vial on it for a beaker and, using his heaviest vial and the handle of his knife, pulped the dead creaitures and drained (the juice off them. Then he built a fire. Soon the liquid boiled, its In the darkness, dim bird-shapes wheeled, attracted by the fire. He could hear ground beasts too, beyond the river, no doubt staring up at him. Once -- somewhere in the wood -- he heard the glond roar. But now he needn't travel at night. He could stay here safely and go home tomorrow! When the unguent was boiled down, he rubbed some on himself and put the rest in a. vial. Then he had his meager supper. He huddled for a while, staring into the darkness and pondering. What had happened to Gultaz to bring him hustling here for new unguent? And why did the aliens take the Spawning so casually? Did they know more about it thaa they admitted? Were they, possibly, even allied with Sea? The farmers who'd reported their coming had vowed they were gods, or devils. Eventually, as a healthy vroal should, he slept. V T he sound that jolted him awake in the chill pre-dawn was an odd, choked, despairing snarl. He lay trembling for a moment, limbs bimched xmdcr him. Then, remembering where he was, he crept to the lip of the cave and stared down. His still-blurry eyes fixed on a strange swaying phosphorescoace like a little chain of stars. Then he made out the great form of the glond, crouched at the water's edge, writhing and shaking its head. The dim lights encircled its throat! Gradually, the beast's writhing stopped. It uttered another sound, a jhalf-owl. Then, panting, it sprang into a trot up-river. Latpur became aware of other points of light, darting about singly over the pool. The pond, too, was ashimmcr with phosphorescence. He flattened himself to the cave floor, frightened but fascinated. A winged shape flapped by in the darkness -- a sea bird, its neck ringed with the dim lights. Now he saw other birds similarly adorned. One swooped and dropped a dim writhing shape the size of Latpur's foreleg. The creature, with a mew of terror, plopped into the pool and lights converged toward it. So Sea already was commandeering foragers! But what were the weird necklaces? Were, they the points of light linked together? The lore said nothing of that. He sniffed, making sure his unguent still smelled. The pond roiled with activity now. Small shrieks filled the darkness as living prey was hauled from all directions by the sea birds, to be dumped into the water or on the ground nearby. In the lightening dawn he could sec the second dam and the wide pool above it. Fish -- or something -- leaped the cascade, while stubby-winged sea things soared up in remarkable arcs. The banks were ascrawl with unfamiliar things. Still farther upstream, he could see a third dam building. He crouched, watching, as the night dragged on. he sun poked up beyond Tenabur Wood. Now he must start upland. He'd left his gruo without any word too long already. Guilt washed over him. Would Deeoon already be sealed m his oave? Or would he still be waiting? Latpur decided to lope to the liviDg quarters as fast as he could. He put on his yokepack and began working around the rock to the west again. Something moved upstream. He clung to the lock and watched the glond plod nearer, diragging a carcass half as large as itself. The phosphorescent necklace still ringed its neck, but was dim in the early light. It left the ikill by the water, then lifted its big head to stare up the rock. Latpur's spine tingled at the hate in that gesture. But the beast's possessors evidently urged it, for it jerked, snarled, wheeled and trotted away again toward Tenabur Wood. Now! While the beast was occupied! Latpur scrambled down and raced for the brush. Birds swooped toward him, but evidently smelled the unguent and turned away. He'd just reached the bru when a loud bang from beachward brought him to a startled halt. He spun and saw the aliens' flying-cart diving at the river. A small object left it as it pulled out of the dive. Where the object struck, debris and flame explod awesomely. A moment later, the second bang reached Latpur. He crouched, staring. Sea birds scattered in haste. The alien craft, high up again, circled as if watching. He heard the roar of water pouring through the breach in the dam. Suddenly the alien craft was stricken. It wobbled, and its nose dropped, and it went into a plummet It pulled itself out and veered toward IF the south, but now it could only gjide steeply, down toward the beach. If the aliens climhed out when it landed...  He was running, around the south side of the rock to the (beach, down that, watching the craft slide down. It levelled a moment before it hit, plowed a furrow in the beach, tilted up and to one side. Sea birds were iralling toward it. He saw a door pen and a helmeted head emerge. Dazedly, the alien captain climbed out. Latpur, nearing, shouted. The birds checked and turned to assess him. He rose to his hind legs and fuimbled at his pack as he ran. He got the vial of unguent out. Meecham, clad like the captain in a coverall and helmet of clear material, hauled himself out. Latpur shouted again, galloped hard, skidded to a halt. "Here!" he gasped,' "Smear some of this -- " T he two aliens -- and a third just emerging -- stared at him without comprehension. He tugged the cover off the vial, dipped in a claw and unceremoniously wiped it on Meecham's neck-covering. Meecham put up a bewildered hand, and Latpur knocked it out of the way. "Fool! Will you never learn?" Meecham blinked inside his helmet, spoke rapidly to the others and reached for the vial. When the others were smeared, he said to Latpur, 'Thanks. These suits might protect us -- one saved the first man those devil#irds attacked. But who knows? Whatever hellish thing's at work did something to the electrical system of our flying-cart!" The birds were circling uncertainly now, with distracted cries. Perhaps, Latpur thought, whatever controlled them was in some way limited by their dim brains. an oath, the captain raised a weapon toward them. Latpur knocked it aside. "No! Pretend to be possessed!" Meecham translated. The captain and the third alien stared, then looked up at the birds. The captain grunted and put the weapon away. He started to say something to Meecham. The third alien uttered an odd cry and pointed out to sea, Latpur turned with the others. An incredible mountain of water was growing there. Still fax out, it swept toward the land, peaking higher and higher, coming swiftly with the odd billowing motion of a wave. Latpur crouched to run; but then he saw that the awful thing was headed far to the south, beyond a promontory. The captain gasped something that might mean, "The ship!" Meecham choked out, "Laurie!" and broke into a run. Latpur passed him in two bounds, slowed, saw that Meecham and the others were painfully slow runners, and shot on. His eyes darted from the monstrous wave to the brushland on the other side, saw no danger and swiveled back again. The wave seemed to dominate the world now. Its sound was a nimble, then a roar. The sand trembled beneath his feet. He reached the promontory and stopped, knowing that to go farther was suicide. He stared at the ship dwarfed by the dark monstrosity rushing upon it. IF His mind cried out to it, "LeapI Fly!" But he remembered Meeaham saying that that took time. The avalanche crashed down awfully. VI T o his amazement, the ship was not crushed. It tumbled end over end, bobbed to the surface like some cockleshell in surf and was swept far up beyond the beach onto rising brushland. The vast swirl deposited it there on its side and raged about it for a moment. Then, like some immense elastic creature, the water spread, foaming and roaring, its edge coming almost as far as Latpur. It seemed to tremble there a moment, then began to withdraw, sweeping with it uprooted trees and brush, scouring away great stretches of soil, leaving a huge raw wound upon the land. It drained and diminished to a last whisper and became just a huge wave rushing out to sea, leaving a long stretch of beach buried under mud and littered with debris. The smell of the fresh mud dominated everything, but over it was something sharper. Ozone. Latpur shook off his awe, glanced back without seeing Meecham and galloped across the mud toward the ship. The closed hatch was far up the curve of the prone hull. He seized rungs and hauled himself up, worked the handle and let himself in. He clung listening for a moment. Faintly, he heard a childish voice sobbing. He started to move, cheoked himself, got out the vial of unguent and smeared some outside the hatch, then pulled himself up the shaft that, with the ship uprigjit would be a corridor. He turned a corner and found an alien crewman, head bloody, limbs bent at unnatural angles. He shuddered and hurried on until he reached what seemed to be living quarteirs, with furniture welded onto floors that were now walls. The child had stopped crying as she heard him coming. She was huddled in the comer of a small topsy-turvy room, staring at him. There was a small smear of blood on one cheek, and she was scratched and bruised. Her doll lay a few feet from her. He spoke to her uncertainly. "Laurie!" She crouched, unmoving. He climbed in, took a step. She cringed, with a little whimper. If only he knew a few words of their language... He moved closer, picked up her doll and held it out to her. She stared at him wildly for a minute, then slowly reached out for the doll and clutched it to her. He pointed at her, then at himself, then toward the crazily placed door. "Daddy!" He knew that word, at least. "Daddy!" F or a while he thought she wasn't going to respond. Then, so abruptly he started, she scrambled to her feet and ran past him toward the door. But that was now in the middle of a "wall," out of her reach. She turned and stared at him, her face puckering. He went to her slowly, reached up a forepaw and grasped the doorjamb, holding out the other paw to her. She whimpered, staring at the paw, then, with an odd expression, grasped it. Her fear seemed to vanish in an instant, and she began to sob. He picked her up very gently and let her cling to his neck while he climbed through the door. Before they left the ship he made a ritual of smearing unguent on himself, then smeared some on her. Her nose wrinkled but she didn't protest. He stared around for a moment. Was he wise in taking her from the ship? Yes; Sea might launch another wave or make some other assault. He remembered the glond repellent, got that out and put some of that on her too. Meecham still wasn't in sight. He clambered down and ran upright across the mud; got to the littered beach and went dodging through the debris. A sea bird dove and circled close, head tilting, then wheeled away. He reached clear sand, started along it -- and suddenly stopped, midriff contracting into a painful knot. Gultaz was darting from the brush to bar the way. The shaman's face was contorted with hate. In one forepaw he held a knife; in the other, a short jabbing-spear. The child whimpered. Gultaz snarled, T'll kill you, meddling fool, and take the en cub. They'll pay high ransom!" Latpur let out his breath and drew another. He put the child down, met her eyes and pointed back at the ship. She whined and didn't move. He gestured violently. "Gol" At least she might understand the tone. She shook her head and clung to his leg. Gultaz sneered and came forward. Latpur thrust the child away roughly, grabbed for his own knife and stooped swiftly for a handful of sand. Even without the spear, Gultaz would outmatch him badly, but if he could just delay... He advanced a step. A glance showed him the child running toward an uprooted tree. Gultaz made a rush. Latpur darted aside, ready to throw the sand. The shaman lunged. Latpur -- trying to stay between Gultaz and the child -- threw the sand. But Gultaz was ready. He merely blinked his eyes at the right instant, them opened them and threw the spear. Off balance, Latpur twisted desperately, but the point gouged hk right leg. He dove for the spear, but before he could grasp it the shaman was upon him. Latpur grabbed for the big foreigner's wrist, making an unskillful thrust with his own knife. Gultaz grabbed his wrist. For a moment they strained face to face. As Latpur expected, Gultaz was very strong, and the shaman's knife moved inexorably closer. Latpur then threw his weight to one side, pulled them down, managed to roll on top but could not stay there. They struggled in the surf. If he could only hold out... They rolled over twice more -- and, glancing desperately up-beach, Latpur saw, not Meecham, but a great orange-tan form crouched at the edge of the brush! IF I t was only a split-secon# glimpse before the shaman's big body blocked the view. But in that instant he could read the predator's emotions. The beast's hate showed in the gaping snarl. The haunted eyes, the beaten sag of the great head, told of the agony of being possessed and driven. Latpur's mind flashed. If he could get himself and Gultaz deeper into the surf, so the repellent washed off -- He rolled, trying to keep the ham's face away from the beast so there'd be no warning. The foreigner's knife moved an inch closer. Latpur dropped his own knife, grasped the other's wrist with both forepaws, squirmed and twisted, rolling them into the surf. He might die, but Gultaz would then be too busy to get the child. Gultaz laughed cruelly and put both hands upon the hilt of his knife. It moved close to Latpur's throat. Latpur heard the quick thud of big paws. Then the glond's snarl, very close. Gultaz went stiff for an instant, then twisted away and leaped up with a shout of terror. Latpur -- face almost buried -- saw from the corner of one eye the huge beast's leap, heard the impact. He shut his eyes and lay perfectly still, hearing the screams and the brief thrashing, then a sound like a tree limb being snapped. For a minute there was only the glond's panting. Then he heard the big paws padding toward him. He concentrated every ounce of his will on lying limp. He held his breath and hoped the surf would mask the pounding of his blood. He felt the warmth of the beast's neamess. He could feel the big head lowering (toward him. The thing sniffed at him, and he could feel the hot breath. Then the glond snarled softly and padded away. Presently he hwd it dragging the shaman's corpse. When he thought it was safe, he open his eyes and turned his head very slowly. He saw Mecchaei and the captain in the distance, trotting awkwardly and exhaustedly down the beach, weapons in hand. Nearer, the glond was dragging its burden into the brush. The aliens, he ued, were such poor runners that they needed their flying-carts zmi sudei. He got up, lungs working hard, aad loped toward the child. At that moment she burst kite sight and ran struggling through the sand, screaming, "Daddy! Daddy!" vn L ate in the day, his leg bandaged with alien medicine, he sat near the pool that was already backed up above Sea's repaired dam, watching Deeoon boil down a new batch of unguent. He was getting used to the tiny things that shot through the lur around them, paying no attention. He picked up the string of dead ones Deeoon had showed him. "Chainbugs? You'll think of a more iapoeing name than that, I'm sure!" The individuals were about the sine of his smallest claw cylindrical, but concave on one end, convex on the other. So this was Sea! He tugged again at the chain. It was no longer flexible, but it wouldnH brisk. He leaked at the ooqpses of Guitaz and the old glond, thirty yards away. Both showed an ugly lumpiness as if maiggots or something were at work. He shuddered, feeling not only repugnance but sympathy for the oLd glond. "Rude masters, to seize a creature and compel it to ferage, then kill it as well." Deeoon glanced up. "Perhaps it was too rebellious to please them." Latpur asked, "You saw them kill it?" Deeoon made an affirmative gesture. "That very chain, part of which you're holding. It twisted itsdf like a tourniquet, garroting the glond as easily as you'd slice a tuber. Then the life seemed to go out of the chain. My guess is the essence of the bugs entered the corpse to reproduce -- or to beget something else. Im sure there's something of electricity in their natures, as well as something else I don't understand." Latpur shivered and tossed the chain away. "You haven't told me how you were able to steal the shaman's belt!" "Oh," Deeoon shrugged, removing the beaker from the fire. "I must apologize about that affair. I deliberately used you as live bait. I progged you'd fail, but that you'd be easily spry enough to escape. In any case, I was close enough to hear and smell what was transpiring. Guitaz swam the river to make sure which way you'd gone, but before crossing he took off his belt and hung it on a tree limib, no doubt relying on his gaudy birds to guard it. I rendered them useless and simply took the belt. Don't be angry, apprentice. I progged very strongly youd be able to look after yourself, and I was right." Latpur turned his face away, half annoyed, half embarrassed. "I was vy luc. Do you think Sea will attack the aliens again?' D eeoon waved a paw. "Who am I, to prog so soon the actions of an unseen entity, or composite intelligence, or whatever Sea is? My tentative guess is that Sea is only concerned with the Spawning. If the alieids don't try to right their ship until that's over and make no more hostile moves, Sea may ignore them. The one I talked to, who was left guarding the fallen sky-cart, seemed properly chastened." "So were the others," Latpur said. Deeoon began transferring the sticky unguent to a vial. "I certainly hope the aliens aren't destroyed. I prog they'll teach us much of their science now, out of gratitude to you. And with their help, we'll learn a great deal about Sea and how he or it is able to do the things we're seeing. When the time comes to write my pamphlets..." He beamed at Latpur. "This region will be alive again in a year or two. And when the farmers are all back, they'll be a rebuked and grateful bunch of clients. We'll enjoy a sounder status, you and I." Latpur found himself grinning. The talk of gratitude reminded him of the alien child's belated thanks -- a curtsey and a grave little speech, translated by Meecham: "Thank you very much, Mr. Latpur, for taking IF IF  Short Story V J# #I instantly sat up. The couch sat up with him, jackknifing to form his pilot's seat. J-#I noted that the seat was in combat position, raised high enough to give him an unobstructed vision on all sides of the planetflier. "We're in orbit around our objective," said Charles. "Breakout and attack in seven minutes. Eat. Eliminate." J-#I obediently withdrew the red-winking tube from the panel befoire him and put it between his lips. Warm, mealy liquid fed into his mouth, and he swallowed at a regular rate. When the nourishment tube stopped, he removed it from his mouth and let it slide back into the panel. The peristalsis stimulators began, and he asked, "Is there news of my parents?" "Personal questions are always answered freely," said Charles, "but only when military necessities have been completed. Your briefing for this mission takes precedence." A screen lit up on the flier's control panel, showing a #-# contour map of the planet they were orbiting. J-#I sighed and turned his attention to the screen. "The planet Rhinstruk," said Charles. "Oxygen #, nitrogen # plus inert gases. Full spacewear will be required for the highaltitude attack pattern in effect on this mission." The image on the screen zoomed in, selected one continent out of three he had seen revolving below, continued zooming down to near planet level. Charles said, "Note that this is a totally enemy planet. Should I be shot down and you somehow survive, there will be no refuge. If that happens, destroy yourself." "The target?" the pilot asked. "The city you see below. It isn't fully automated, but its defenses will be formidable anyway." On tbe screen J-#I saw a towered city rising from a broad plain. The city was circular, and as the image sharpened with proximity he could make out individual streets, parkways... and beam emplacements. The screen threw light-circles on seven of these in all. "We will have nine fliers," said Charles. "These beams will attempt to defend, but our mission will be siniple destruction of the entire city, which presents a much larger target than any one of our fliers. We will lose between three and five of us, but we'll succeed. Attack pattern RO-#I will be in effect; you'll take contrd of me at # feet. End of briefing." The pilot stretched in his chair, i#exed muscles in his aims and hands. "How long was I asleep?" he asked, "Eight months, seventeen days plus," said Charles. That longl A quarter-oredit for sleep time that would give him over two months on his term of service, leaving him... less dioa a year. Earth standard. J-#I felt his heart speed up momentarily, before Chaiies's nerve-implants tected and corrected it. The pilot had been in service for nearly seven sufcjective yeays. Adding objective sleep time, it came out to over nineteen years. The sleep periods, during Hardin Drive travel between star systems, ate up his service term easily for him... but then he lememhered, as he always did, that the objective time was still the same, that his parents, whoever and whereever they were, would be getting older at objective time rate on some planet. N ineteen years. They should still be alive, he thought. He remembered them from his childhood, on a planet where colors had been real rather than dyed or light-tinted, where winds had blown fresh and night had fallen with the regular revolution of the planet. He had had a name there not a binary number -- Henry, or Hendrick, or Henried; he couldn't quite remember. When the Control machines had come for him he had been ten years old, old enough to know his own name, but they had erased it. They had had to clear his memory for the masses of minute data he'd need for service, so the machines had stored his personal memories in neat patterns of microenergy, waiting for his release. Not all of them, though. The specific things, yes: his name, the name of his planet, its exact location, the thousand-and-one details that madiines recognize as data. But not remembered sights, smells, tastes: flowerbursts of color amid green vegetation, tiie cold spray of rainlbawed water as he stood beside a waterfall, the warmth of an animal held in the arms. He remembered what it was like to be Henry, or Hendrick or Henried, even though he couldn't remember the exact name of the person he had been. And he remembered what his IF parcDts were like, though he had no memory at all of their names. His father: hig and rangy, with bony hands and an awkward walk and a deep, distant voice, like thunder and rain on the other side of a mountain. His mother: soft and quiet, a quizzical face framed by dark hair, somehow smiling even when she was angry, os if she wasn't quite sure how to put together a stem expression. By now they must be... fifty years old? Sixty? Or even a hundred and sixty, he thought. He couldn't know; he had to trust what the machines told him, what Charies said. And they could be lying about the time he spent in sleep. But he had to assume they weren't. "Breakout and attack in one minute," Charles said. Ihe voice startled him momentarily, but then he reached for his pressure helmet, sealed it in place wkh automatic movements, machinetrained muscle patterns. He heard the helmet's intercom click on. "What about my parents?" he asked. "You have time to tell me before we break out. At least tell me if they're still alive." "Breakout and attack in thirty seconds and counting," said Charles. "Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six..." J# #, human pilot of a planetflier named Charles, shook his head in resignation and listened to the count, bracing himself for the coming shock of acceleration. I t hit him, as always, with more force than he had remembered. crushing him back into the chair as the planetflier rocketed out of the starship's hold along with its cit unit-mates. Charles had opaqued' the pilot's bubble to prevent blinding him with sudden light, but the machine cleared it steadily as it drove downward toward the plu. et's surface, and soon the man could make out the other Aim around him. He recognized the flying formation, remembered the cu:cular attack pattern they'd be using -- a devastating ring of fliers equipped with pyrobombs. Charles was right. They'd lose some fliers, but the city would be destroyed. He wondered about the dty, the enemy. Was this another pacation mission, another planet feeling strong in its isolation front the rest of GalFcd's far-flung werlds and trying to break away from ceor tral regulation? J-#I had been, on dozens of such missions. But their attacks then hadn't been dcstruct-pattcms against whole cities, so this must be a different kind of problem. Maybe the city was really a military complex... even a stronghold of the Khallash. If th really existed. Wen men had first made eontact with an alien race a century and a half before, they had laet with total enmity, almost mindlessly implacable hatred. War had flared immediately -- a defensive war on the part of the huMaas, who hadn't been prepared for it. And in order to organize the looseknit Galactic Federation efficiently, they'd computerized the central commands    and then the middle echelons... and finally, a little over a century ago, the whole of GalFed had been given to the machines to defend. Or so he had been taught. There were rumors, of course, that there were no Khallash any longer, that they'd been destroyed or driven off long ago... or that they'd never existed in the first place, that the machines had invented them as an excuse for their own control of GalFed. J#I didn't know. He'd never met the aliens in battle, but that proved nothing, considering the vastness of space and the many internal problems the machines had to cope with. Yet perhaps he would meet them now... in the city below. "# feet," said Charles. "Attach yur muscle contacts." The pilot quickly drew firom the walls of the compartment a network of small wires, one after the other, and touched each to magnetized terminals on his arms, hands, legs, shoulders. As he did so he felt the growing sensation of airflight: he was becoming one with the flier, a single unit of machine and man, Charles fed the sensory impressions into his nervous system through his regular nerve-implants, and as the muscle contacts were attached he could fed the flier's rockets, gyros, pyrolaunohers all coming under his control, responding instantly to movements of his body's muscles. This was the part that he liked, that almost made his service term worth it. As the last contact snapped into place, he became the planetf. His name was Charles, and he was a whole being once more. Air rushed past him, mottled fields tMted far below, he felt the strength of duralloy skin and the thrust of rockets; and he was not just a fleshand-blood human wombed in his pilot's compartment, but a weapon of war swooping down for a kill. The machines themselves dont ap predate thiSy he thought. Charles and the rest have no emotions, no pleasures. But a human does .  . be thats why they need us -- be cause we can love combat, so were better at it than them. But he knew that wasn't true, only an emotional conceit. Human battle pilots were needed because their nervous systems were more efficient than any microminiaturized computer of the same size and mass; it was as simple as that. And human pilots were expendable where costly medianization wouldn't be. "Control is full now," he said; but Charles didn't answer. CharlesI didn't exist now. Only the computer aboard the orbiting starship remained to monitor the planetflier below. I n a moment the starship's voice came to him through Charles receptors: "All human units are ready. Attack pattern RO-#I will now begin.' The dty was below him, looking just as it bad on the contour map: wide streets, buildings thrusting upl towards him, patches of green that must have been parks... or camouflage, he warned himself. The city was the enemy. He banked into a spiral and knifIP ed down through the planet's cold air. The other fliers fdl into fonnation behind him, and as the starship cut in the intercommunications channels he heard the voices of other pilots: "Beautiful big target -- we can't miss it. Anybody Know if they're Khallash down there?" "Only the machines would know that, and if they'd wanted to tell us, they'd have included it in the briefing." "It looks like a human city to me. Must be another rebel planet." "Maybe that's what the Khallash want us to think." "It doesn't matter who they are," J-#I said. "They're enemy; they're our mission. Complete enough missions and we go home. Stop talking and start the attack; we're in range," As he spoke he lined his sights dead-center on the city and fired three pyrobombs in quick succession. He peeled off and slipped back into the flight circle as another flier banked into firing trajectory. Three more bombs flared out and downward, and the second flier rejoined the pattern. Below, J-lOOlOll's bonlbs hit. He saw the flashes, one, two, three quick bursts, and a moment later red flames showed where the bombs had hit. A bit off-center from where he had aimed, but dose enough. He could correct for it on the next pass. More bombs burst below; more fires leapt and spread. The fliers darted in, loosed their bombs and dodged away. They were in a complete ring around the city now. the pattern fully established It was all going according to plan. Then the beams from the city began to fire. The beams were almost invisible at a distance, just li;tning-quick lances of destructive energy cutting into the sky. Not that it was important to see them -- the fliers couldn't veer off to evade them in time, wouldn't even be' able to react before a beam struck. But the planetfliers were small, and they stayed high. Any beam hits would be as much luck as skill. They rained fire and death on the city for an hour, each flier banking inward just long enough to get off three or four bombs, then veering out and up before he got too close. At the hour's end the city below was dotted by fires, and the fires were spreading steadily. One of the planetfliers had been hit; it had burst with an energy-release that buffeted J#I with its shock-wave, sending him momentarily off course. But he had quickly righted himself, re-entered the pattern and returned to the aittack. As the destruction continued, he felt more and more the oneness, the wholeness of machine and man. Charles the other-thing was gone, merged into his own being, and now he was the machine, the beautiful complex mass of metals and sensors, relays and engines and weaponry. He was a destruction-machine, a deiath-flier, a superefficient killer. It was like coming out of the darkness of some prison, being freed to burst out with all his pent-i hatreds and frustrations and destroy, destroy... It (was the closest thing he had to being human again, to being... what was the name he had back on that planet where he'd been borm? He couildn't remember now; there was no room for even an echo of that naime in his mind. He was Charles. He was a war-machine destroying a city -- that and only that. Flight and power occupied his whole being, and the screaming release of hatred and fear within him was so intense that it was love. The attack patlem heoame, somehow, a ritual of courlshtp, the pyrobombs and destrudlon and fire below a kind of levenaaking whose insensitivity gripped him more and more fiercely as the attack continued. It was a red hell, but it was the only kind of real life he had known since the machines had taken him. When the battle was over, when the city was a flaming circle of red and even the beams had stopped firing from below, he was exhausted both physically and emotionally. He was le to note dimly, with some back part of his brain or perhaps through one of Charles' machine synapse-patterns, that they had lost three of the fliers. But that didn't interest him; nothing did. When something clicked in him and Charles' voice said, "Remove your musde contacts now," he did so dully, uncaring. And he became J-#I again. L ater, with the planetfliers back in the hold of the starship and awaiting the central computer's analysis of the mission's success, he remembered the battle like something in a dream. It was a red, violent dream, a nightmare; and it was worse than that, because it had been real. He roused himself, licked dry lips, said, "You have time now, Charles, to tell me about my parents. Are they alive?" Charles said, "Your parents do not exist now. They've just been destroyed." There was a moment of incomprehension, then a dull shock hit J-#I in the stomach. But it was almost as if he had been expecting to hear this -- and Charles controlled his reaction instantly through the nerve-implants. "Then that was no Khallash city," he said. "No," said Charles. "It was a human city, a rebel city." The pilot searched vaguely through the fog of his memories of home, trying to remember anything about a city such as he'd destroyed today. But he could grasp nothing like that; his memories were all of some smaller town, and of mountains, not the open fields that had surrounded this city. "My parents moved to the city after I was taken away," he saii "Is that right?" "We have no way of knowing about that," said Charles. "Who your parents were, on what planet they lived -- all this information has been destroyed in the city on Rhinstruk. It was the archives center of the Galactic Federation, storing all the IF memory-data of our service humans. Useless information, since none of it will ever be used again -- and potentially hannful, because the humans assigned to guard it were engaged in a plot to broadcast the data through official machine communi? cations channels to the original holders of the memories. So it became necessary to destroy the city." "You destroyed an entire city... just for that?" "It was necessary. Humans perform up to minimum efficiency standards only when they're unhampered by prorvioe memories; this is why all your memory-data was transferred from your mind when you were inducted. For a while it was expedient to keep the records on file, to be returned as humans terminated their service, but that time is past. It has always been a waste of training and manpower to release humans from service, and now we have great enough control in the Federation that it's no longer necessary. Therefore we're able to complete a naajor step toward totally efficient orgaeization." J-lMlOll imagined fleetmgly that he could feel the machine's nerveimplants moving within him to control some emotion that threatened to rise. Anger? Fear? Grief? He couldn't be sure just what was appropriate to this situation; all he actually felt was a dun, uncomprdiending curiosity. "But my parents... you said they were destroyed." "TTioy have he. There is no way of knowing where or who they were. They've become totally negligible factors, along with the rest of your pre-service existence. When we control all data in your mind, we then have proper control of the mind itself." He remembered dark trees and a cushion of damp green leaves beneath them, where he had fallen asleep one endless afternoon. He heard the earthquake of his father's laughter once When he had drunk far too much, remembered how like a stranger his mother had seemed for weeks after she'd cut here hair short, tasted smoked meat and felt the heat of an open hearth-fire... The nerve-implants moved like ghosts inside him... "The central computer's analysis is now complete," Charies announced. "The city on Rhinstruk is totally destroyed; our mission was successful. So there's no more need for you to be awake; deactivation will now begin." Immediately, Pilot J-#I felt his consciousness ebbing away. He said, more to himself than to Charles, "You can't erase the past like that. The mission was... unsuccessful." He felt a yawn coming, tried to fight it, couldn't. "Their names weren't... the important..." Then he couldn't talk any more; but there was no need for it. He drifted into sleep remembering the freedom of flight when he was Charles, the beauty and strength of destroying, of rage channeled throu: pyrobombs... of release. For one last flickering moment he felt a stab of anger begin to rise, but then Charles' implants pushed it back down inside. He slept. by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offptt The gladiators of the sfarways had no hope but to no future but unending combat -- and death! nearKdoudless sky like stealthy fingers. They touched the structure which more imaginative planetary Boaoxichairmen said resemhled a huge upturned eye. The silaplas lens collect the rays, focused them onto the artificial turf of the stadium -- brightly, hotly, with an intensity calculated to rect in attractive ays from the weak, yellow sun flashes from the armor and bronze . Solitos squeezed through the skins of the athletes. The directed The G he stands full ten feet tall; He lies with virgins every Fall. That's why, my friends, on worlds like these There are so many sons of Gs! -- Solitonese folksong suDlight was just one of the special effects that made Solitos a favored world among industrialists and other nobles. Nowhere else in the humanowned universe could they find such a magnificent staging for the contests that settled all serious disputes without resort to the barbaric warfare of the past. Out in the stadium Vam cursed the sunlight that baked and sweated him while the aristocratic onlookers sat in cool comfort. His lightly bronzed face dripped with perspiration as he tried desperately to get his back against the wall while continuinig to block his opponents. There were three of them, Bluechips, each with nervewhip and electroprod. Because the Greenback jock, Vam, was the hare this round, his weapons were the standard ones of bodylength insul-shield and firesword. Despite seeming unfairness, the postings on the bet scoreboard proclaimed him and the trio evenly matched. It was the first time Vam had ever been triple-teamed. The man on his right feinted with his electroprod, its gleaming snout aglow with the energy that could slow an enemy just enough to allow the whips to start cutting him apart. Varn crouched low behind his silaplas-backed shield and swept his firesword leftward in a whooshing circle to stop the left flankman's advance. At once the middle man moved in. In a three-pronged attack, Varn knew, the man on the left always tried for a crippling action. It was the middle man who bad to be watched; he was the one who often dropped the crowd-pleasing tactics and went for the quick profit. Vam's counteraction, based as much on intuition as on Demunth's theory, brought his flaming blade in contact with the whistling lash on his left. He ignored the opportunity to cut the nonflammable whip; when it had slapped several times around his blade, he yanked. The middle attacker's rod sparked off Varn's shield edge. His quick lowering, then up-jerking of the sharpened shield edge sheered off the prod's deadly head, turning the weapon into an unpowered quarterstaff with forlornly protruding wires. The athlete ignored it and stabbed across himself into the throat of the stumbling Bluechip hound on his left The man went down gurgling. Vam straightened, whipping his sword back into line. But now one opponent was dying, another was partially disarmed and the third -- obviously the weakest of the team -- was unprepared to close. Suddenly the hare had become the beast of prey. A cheer burst from the stands. Varn thrilled to the applause without worrying over what industrial and govemmenital disputes he was settling; most of the onlookers, he sensed, felt the same way. There could be only a few who cared. Financier Curth of Brinap was obviously one who did. The fattest of fat aristrocrats leaned forward from his movable box, staring intensely. Your planet. Financier, Varn wondered, or your corp or your bet? From the edge of his eye he IF watched a loge rise on its slide supports land saw a hand lift from the controls to make the ancient thumbto-fingea: circle. Prince Hannanook of Corporate Aleria mtist feel more approving than his fat neighbor. The third Bluechip jock was as inexperienced as Yarn had hoped. With a quick motion that was barely in time, Yam lopped the glowing head off the rod and continued the sweep of his sword to cut the other man's iash. Sacred Capital! Was he unable to err today? He expelled a great chestful of air in a shout and leaped at his nearly unarmed foes, ready to cut them into smoking drogmeat. He stopped again amid a diminishing number of duels, as the first day of what was officially called the Solitos Tournament of Synthetic Dispute Settlement came to an end. Again he raised his face to the crowd of powerful humans who had crossed airless space in their luxurious ships to place their bets and settle their arguments in this humane and civilized fashion. He could make out the simpering faces of sycophants and the flashing jewels on the necks and arms of sec'ys. Slowly he moved his eyes over the boxes until he came to the lump that was Curth of the Brinap Financery. Surrounded by red-faced, wildeyed afficionadoes, the lawmaker was strangely pale as he listened to something said to him by his neighbor Hannanook, third son of the Boardchairman of Boardchairmen, Titus DC. Yarn felt himself swelling with pride. Surely they were talking of him! Surely Curth had backed the Bluechip jocks while Hannanook had favored the Greenback hare. Now Curth was staring straight at him, spinning the interesting bauble on its platinum chain around his neck. As Yarn gazed at it, the sunlight turned it into a thing of flame and blood and beauty... X Yarn jerked his head. It was he the prince was shouting at! Hannanook stood tall and regal in his box, one long arm outstretched. The action was so unusual on the part of an offworlder that Yarn hardly recognized it for what it was: a warning. When he did move it was almost too late. Cursing himself for being so foolish as to be distracted, he hurled himself forward, twisting. The flamesword-blow from the rear sparked from the mail of his moving shoulder and swished so close to his face he felt it singe his cheek. He swung to parry a second blow with his own weapon and barely turned a blue-flaming dagger on his shield. The confident grin vanished from the face of the roving freekiller as Yam pushed with all his strength against powerful musculature and suddenly slipped in the blood of the man he had just dispatched. Yam saw the smile return in a flash to the freekiller's face as he raised his sword and brought it swishing down like a fiery ax. Yarn rolled and shoved his shield upward. The other jock realized too late that he'd been tricked; Yarn had fallen deliberately. Now he screamed and fell back, failing to sear even a hand with his sword, forgeuing his dagger, doubling over as Yarn's shield-edge slashed beneath his 'armor. Yarn rolled again and hacked a shaky leg. He was on his feet before the freekiller hit the turf. Yarn planted one foot on the fellow's swordaiun and gazed down at him. "Mercy," the freekiller's lips whispered, and Yarn hesitated. The cryomeds could practically rebuild an athlete if he was not too far gone. There were stories of champions who had grown back knocked-out teeth, severed limbs and bumed-off skin. Who could say that this Bluechip was not so valuable? The buzzer sounded. Yarn looked around at the lessening activity as sweating survivors realized that this time the signal was real and not imagined. The first long day of the tourney had ended. "Kill the incoietent tubespawn!" someone roared, and Yam knew without looking that it was Financier Curth, enraged at the freekiller's failure. The athlete ignored the yell. He stepped back, his sword hanging loose and unflamed at the end of his arm. He watched as the referees approached his writhing opponent. The first dropped to one knee and pointed a foot-long rod at the man's agonized face. Yam heard the click as the trigger depressed and invisible radiation fried the athlete's brains. He could not help shuddering, could not help reflecting that it could as easily be he the second referee was hooking with his long pole and dragging off across the stadium, meat for the drogs. V arn plodded slowly after the other jocks, frowning, wondering at Prince Hannanook's interest. Referees and cryomeds scurried past, dodging him. "Yarn! Wait, Yarn!" He turned. It was Demunth, his broad face below his freeman's nosering split by his frog's mouth where it emerged from his high cellar above the black, many-buttoned suit. Demunth motioned. It was not customary for a coach to show up on the turf at day's end, but Demunth was a most unusual coach. His story was well known, a source of hope for every jock: Demunth had himselfbeen a Consumer, lowest of the lowly, and had acquired his practical skill with a firesword under this very dome. No one, not even a Businessman, dared cross Demunth or mention his origin, although the coach bragged of it in every tavern on Solitos. Yarn walked to him. "Listen, you Commie-begotten imitation swordsman! You looked pretty good out there until you started eyebaJling some bosomy sec'y in the stands and nearly let that freekiller cut you into drogmeat! Lucky for you his arm was as feeble as your brain!" Yam recognized the compliment in Demunth's acrimony. He never told an athlete he'd done well, not directly. A coach's job was to make an athlete a fighting machine capable of burning down a tough foe despite the inevitable bums and shocks and minor cuts he received, not to swell his head and dull his mind with pride by complimenting IF him. But his mea knew how ta read his wards, and Yam 'knew Demunth was not really berating him. "You'reright, Coach. I am stupid. But I'm alivcl" "Yah, and a good thing for the poor drogs. You'll be tough chewing for those skinny critters, you bag of muscle! And pity the poor beast who tries to eat the contents of your skull, he'll starve to death!" Demunth turned and paced Yarn toward the exit, his black trousers contrasting with Yarn's hairless legs in their buskins and leather kneeguards. "All right now, what the hell happened?" "I -- I'm not sure, Coach. I thought the event was about over and everyone was tired. The day was ending, I thought." "By Marx's dusty beard, you hollewheaded drogbait! You dare teU me you thought and then repeat the blasiemy? How many times have I told you that the only thinking you're to do is with your legs and arms? I've a good mind to skip your stimulants and pain depressants tomorrow and feed you cereal instead of good drogsteakl You thought! Yarn, I was watching. But tell me again; what happened?" V arn stiffened his face against his grin. Demunth had 'been watching him. So he'd thought. Curth watched him. Hannanook. And now Demunth. I am a hero today! Then he tried to tell his trainer about the fat financier and the prince and the financier's fl'ashing gem. Abruptly Demunth stopped dead. "Stalenin!" he cursed. "That fattailed son of a berragoon tried to hypnotize one of my boys? And right in the arena! Ahrr! I'll have his skuU for a practice-ball! I thought that was it!" Suddenly he seemed to remember the athlete beside him, staring with mouth agape. Demunth skewered Yarn with the black eyes which were a part of what had earned him the nickname he ecretiy loved: Demon. He heaved' a great breath and spoke again in his normal voice, a steel file drawn over concrete block. "Listen, you impossible fool, I'm sorry I ever pointed out those blasted offworlders to you. A swordsman's with gods and his mind with ice cream. Listen, you twice-dropped idiot I Those fellows are poison. Poison! You're not to look at them, d'you understand? Think of the stories you've heard -- offworldeis may look like us and act like us, but any Consumer can see they're more! How else d'you explain to me why cviery mortail on Solitos lives in dafly awe and, yes, terror of the offworlders? I'd have been deaded long ago with one of their zaptubes if I weren't so valuable. They live for these games; they say they influence the destinies of planets and stars, and the man hasn't been born whos better at the Tourneys than I!" Yarn walked by his side, hardly feeling the coach's impossible grip on his bicep, listening and thinking as the old stories of men who had achieved the powers of gods came again into his brain. Men whose wealth could be measured in stars, who had machines and unhuman braim to diink how they could hold on to that wealth and continue constantly adding to it, who had lesser men and lesser beings to do everything for them -- including die. These were the men whose lives were worth more than entire worlds of athletes. These were the men who came annually to Solitoe. "Itd be great to be a god or the son of a gy wouldn't it Vam? Ride around in the big ships, travel between the stars, bed any female you fancied? Wouldn't it? Yes, look at him nod his empty head! Son of a g! Forget it, you idiot. There's only one goal you've got to have in life -- that's staying alive! Fail, and you'll be just like that Bluechip killer you dropped...  drogfood!" Demunth jerked his head. 'Hcre, you thickskulled Commiel The truck's waiting. Scuttle!" V am scuttled. Through the exitgate, past loud-mouthed spectascant three feet above the pavement. The other athletes were all on their rows of seats awaiting their ride to Demunth's territory, and the truck's pilot was there wearing his zaptube. Vam raised his eyes to the distant gold-and-platinum towers of the Offworld Hotel, wondering what luxuriom quarters he would now retire to had he been bom a sag-gutted Businessman or eletced a Financier on Brinap. By the way," Demunth continued, climhing into the truck without seeming to notice the sweat and blood of his charges and the oncesharp crease in his trousm, "I noticed you had sense enough to remember what I've said when those three nervewhip and guthook boys tried to climb you. Special cut of drog tonight... and a little talk. Subject: alertness." Yarn nodded, pleased; aaother compliment, no matter how tangled in criticism it was, and the special cut of meat was a reward. So was the "talk." When a promintng athlete demonstrated his weak point Demunth practiced with hini personally, calling it a "talk." "Oh," Demunth added as the truck started moving, "and Doc'll have an extra needle for you tomorrow. You'll not have to worry about that porkfaced financier's medallion again!" Yarn nodded in silence. Despite his explosion, then, Demunth would not mention the illegal trick against his boy. This bore out the truth of the Qffworlder's inviolability; if Demunth wouldn't attack them, no one would. Yam thought about it all the way to his dorm. When the truck lifted over the wall and into the campus, he hardly saw the rectangular building with its many little cells opening into a central court. What he saw beneath his own eyelids was far more colorful. I n his own small cell Yam turned to his cot, waiting for a masseur. Offworlders! And Prince Hannanook in particular -- why had that great man intervened in the life of a mere athlete? Why would a g or the son IF of a gf as Demunth termed them, care about such as he? Because the prince had part of an industry or a planet staked upon him? Probably, and yet -- Varn stared at the ceiling and thought about it. When the masseur came and attempted small talk on how Yarn's fight had gone, Varn ignored him. The rubbing and thumping and kneading made him think only of the way godlings had lesser men attending to their every need. Godlings did not condescend to notice the hands that served them. By the time his food came Yam felt he had about solved the weighty problem of Offworlders. His conclusion was one he was not likely to share -- and yet one that he must share eventually. As he watched the loinclothed serving man load his table with a generous fighting-ration of drogflesh, fresh weeds and red slorp in an athlete-sized drinking vessel, he saw clearly what he had never dared see before. He tore at the meat, noting it was prime rib this time, and fatless. The coach thought he'd be champion! Surely he did! No trainer could know what made one athlete a champ and another drogmeat to serve the drogs to serve the better athletes; but he had twice spoken words of compliment, and now he would train Varn personally. Varn grinned. Perhaps Demunth would teach him the trick that only Demunth was reputed to have mastered, the trick of switching hands on shield and firesword in midfight. Still grinning, he raised the vessel to wash down the last bite and saw Demunth gazing at him from across the table with a strange expression on his broad face. Demunth's face appeared to have softened everywhere except for his brass nosering. "You godling it, Varn?" The trainer's voice was rough as usual, yet managed to hold a note of understanding. It was as though the coach had been standing there, seeing him, partly seeing himself asa very young and very promising athlete. Vam read the envy and respect for his youth in those few words, and then, unable to stop himself, he rushed out with it: "Offworlders... they do couch a Consumer now and again, don't they? I know that freemen do. I've often heard freewomen shout invitations. I've often thought my sire might be a free citizen who sells you red slorp or swords, but not till today have I thought I might be -- " "Blast you! You never had a father, you beanbrain! You haven't got that fat financier and that spindly-armed prince out of your head, have you?" But the scathing diatribe was an invitation to Varn to say more. "Coach, today a Boardchairman of Boardchairmen's son warned me. Why would he do that, unless he thinks me more important than others? Why, Coach, unless... "Doesn't it occur to you that he probably stood to profit? Somebody's got to stay alive to meet Probin, and... ump. Look here, d'you think you'd fight better if you were the same blood as that Offworlder?" Varn was elated to realize that Demunth saw him as the jock to take Bluechip Probin. But his dation did not stop him from answering excitedly: "Yah, Coach, yahl" Demunth rounded the table, and his heavy hand came down on Vein's shoulder with a jar that forced him to stiffen his knees. "Well, then, believe it, athlete! Believe you're Prince Hokeyhokey's hidden brother. He got all the brains and riches and power. You got all the muscle and gristle and skill." Vam believed. H e believed through that evening's practice when he almost singed Demunth's nose and heated his nosring. He believed, as he went to sleep bone-tired. He believed, as next day the medic injected him with the usual pain-depressant and stimulant and added another shot , while Demunth stood by and taiked about how he must never look directly at anything in the hands of a spectator; and Vam felt an instant of disorientation, as if he'd just awaked, and saw the others were forming up for the ceremonial march into the stadium. He believed, as he fought that afternoon in the all fireswords freefor-all. He believed, the following day when he fought the big Darkhorse krats and the giant wild houggs and other Darkhorse beasts that may or may not have had Earth ancestry He believed, and he fought so well he gained more and more attention from the stands as his betting odds continued to accelerate; some cheers were for his opponents, but more and more the uncommitted cheers were for the believing gladiator, Cut off from his Greenback teammates in a Greenback-versusBluechip rumble and battling six Bluechips at once, he heard fiancier Curth cheer the Bluechips; and he believed and fought as a god must fight, knowing he must possess godblood. When a huge Darkhorse krat with teethlike daggers bestrode him, pinning his right arm and coming for his throat, then did Varn hear the senator's delighted "Kill, Krat! Eat, Krat!" And the counter-cheers of "Go Athlete," from the prince and the senator's own sec'y; then did Varn find a courage and strength that was surely immortal. He grabbed the monster krat's slavering tongue with his own teeth and bit and chewed with all the strength of his jaws while he drew his firedagger with his left hand and plunged it deep and flaming into the animal until its guts sizzled. Varn believed, and he survived, the second and third days of the tournament. That evening as he rested after the fights and felt truly godlike, he looked from his athlete's cell and saw a liveried Consumer in the act of handing Demunth a message. The coach's broad face went slack as he read. Then it tightened, darkened so that the hosering seemed to brighten by contrast. "NO! By Lenin and Marx's very vitals, NO!" And he struck the Consumer a blow that stretched him at his feet. Demunth glanced in Varn's direction and strode away. Eventually the Consumer staggered up and limped off. Later stiU, Varn watched as freemen in the same orange-andblack costume came into the walled IF dorm. With the rods of death in their (belts they spoke to Demunth. Viam saw their glances as they talked and knew they spoke of him. He recognized their colors: the box of Financier Curth of Brinap had sported them daily. Did the financier want to buy him, perhaps, in midtourney? Transfer him to the Greenbacks so that he and Probin would never have to clash? He watched from the back of his cell until the men left. Then Demunth came to his cell. The coach's face was grim as winter sunset, and his black eyes did not look directly at the athlete. # # A sleep, Yarn?" I "Nah, Coach." "Yarn, there are powerful men who hold as much power over me as I hold over my boys. D'you understand, Yam?" "Yah, Coach." "Well then, by Marx you understand more than II 'Yah, Coach!'" He swore for at least a full minute. Then: "When such a powerful man wishes something from me, I haven't the power to refuse. Not even I, Demunth! But even when his wish is evil, Yarn, and illegal as well, I am powerless. Do you -- " "I understand. Coach." Yarn waited. "Tomorrow you will fight in the preliminary bouts to decide who will fight in the final battle of champions. Freemen with zaprods will watch. Forty pair of Bluechips and forty of Greenbacks will battle backto-back to the deaths of all save ten. Yarn, at your back you should have one of the best fireswordsmen I possess." Demunth stopped abruptly and touched his forehead to the grilled door. Yarn focused on his trainer's nosering. "Yarn, your partner will be a trainee. A good one, but far from the best and unblooded and unbroke to fire. If you're to survive you'll have to kill your opponent very fast and then face your partner's opponent. If your partner is killed first your chances of surviving him are about the same as your being Boardchairman. "Then... then I'll fight for both, Demunth." Demunth's head came up; athletes did not call him by name. But he said nothing. His position had changed, and both knew it. He nodded once, then walked away. Yarn stared up at the ceiling. Financier Curth of Brinap wanted him dead. Why? Could it be resentment -- could Curth resent the existence of such as Yarn with Off world blood? Perhaps some of these godlings rejoiced in destroying such...  their kind? Was it letter, if one were a god, to watch a god die than to watch a man? He fell asleep thinking about it, because no matter how tiued the athletes were at day's end, their supper-wine contained a slow and shortlived anesthetic. B ut the anesthetic did not control Yarn's dreams, and they were not good. Reality was little better. The shaking youngster at his back next day barely knew which end of the firesword to grip. The scores of orangeand-black athletes who had been overwhelming Yarn in his dream until he awoke sweating...  they were not necessary. With such a partner as he had drawn not even a godling -- hut that he must rememherl He was a godlingl Son of a gy yesl He who had survived the great krats and the nervewhips and electrotridents of three simultaneous attackers, and the murderous freefor-all. He must remember. "Use your shield," Yam said over his shoulder. "Turn his blows; don't bother to try to attafck him. I'll soon turn to help you." But his partner was shaking so that Yarn wondered if he heard. At the first clash of fireswords he knew his opponent was a professional. His tightset mouth was merely one more seamed wound in his face. He had survived a dozen tourneys. He had been judged Champion, paraded around the stadium seven times while the spectators cheered and screamed in hysteria; and for the next several months Scarface had been rewarded with his pick of women from the breeding pens. He was Probin. Yarn parried his first flaming blow and his second and his third, and then from behind him he heard the unmistakable sigh that signaled a hot sword in the smoking vitals of his partner. Yarn's life expectancy was reduced to seconds. He didn't wait. He threw himself wildly aside and blocked Probin with his seld and scrambled desperately to avoid the thirsty sizzling sword behind him. He had one hope: that the Bluechip who had slain Yarn's partner had a partner very much in trouble. From the stands Finaodef Ouith# and swung a tremendous chop at Ids opponent. Scarface was too experienced to die in such a way, but the swing saved Yam's life; the firesword from behind which had been aimed at his neck betwixt helmet and cuirass sparked off his armored back. Then Probin had to half turn to face the Greenback who'd just downed his partner, and Yam followed his example and caught his opponent wide open. He jerked his sword free and looked about desperately for a new partner. He spotted a lone Greenback and made for him, noting that the athlete's left cheek was leaking blood and he had a patch of mail missing and an ugly burn over his right nipple. CTeammate!" Yarn yelled, bareX ly hearing his own voice amid the shouts and screams of other athletes and the crash and clang of steel on steel and the roar from the stands. Between them moved a pair of Greenbacks battling a single Bluechip. Yarn struck down the Bluechip and again shouted "Teammatel" and charged around the Greenbacks to his new partner. Yam's arm was numb and his blade sizzled with the smoking blood of six athletes when the gong rang to end the combat. He jerked back his firesword to hold it rigid at his right shoulder. He glanced around, keeping his eyes up to see the living. IE and not the dead and dying. He was astonished; he was one of four surviving Greenbaciks. Probin was among the remaining Bluechips. They stared at each other. Then they were raising their flaming swords to the audience as the man who'd been at Yarn's back for over an hour said, "Well paired!" in Yarn's ear. Yarn felt star-scraping tall. He heard his name, among others. They knew him by name, now! Somehow he was unable to take his eyes off Financier Curth; somehow his legs carried him across the bloodsoaked turf to gaze up at the fat creature's box. He jeered me. Yarn thought. He booed. He forced Demunth to try to have me killed. Yarn did not shout. A shout would have been a ripple in the mighty ocean of applause and screaming. Yarn waited. He was a godling; Curth was deigning to ignore him! But he could not forever -- and did not. The financier from Brinap looked down at the blooded and scorched athlete eight meters below his box. And slowly and very coolly Yarn raised his right hand to his nose and wriggled his fingers at the financier. Ill C urth came upright like a starship from atmosphere. He pointed, his mouth moving. Beside him one of his retainers stood and yanked a zaptube from his broad belt. As he raised it, the financier's sec'y squealed and slapped at his arm. Curth cuffed her in the face, and Yarn remembered that it was she who had chTeered him. She dropped back into her seat, hand to her cheek, and the freeman raised the tube again. Yarn had not seen Prince Hannanook give his order, but he must have; one of his purple-and-gold retainers appeared beside Curth's box. His zaptube was aimed at the man who was preparing to loose invisible radiation at Yarn. Curth's man sat down. Curth turned and his mouth moved as the prince's did, the voices lost in the noise from the crowd. Then the financier dropped back into his seat with a jiggling of his chins. Ignoring his shaking knees. Yarn raised his red-streaked firesword nearly to his lips, his . eyes on the imperial prince. Hannanopk smiled and nodded his head. Yarn turned and left the stadium, keeping himself from breaking into a run with a tremendous effort. Demimth reproached him -- if such a gentle word could be used to describe anything the retainer said. "There's no hope for you now, idiot!" "Was there before. Coach? He's determined to destroy me." The perpetual scowl deepened on the broad, ugly face. "There's no accounting for the actions of mighty. Yarn. If you were a freeman -- " But Yam knew he was infinitely more. He was about to tell the coach as much when an air-raft landed in the campus and several freemen stepped off and approached. Yarn recognized their bumble-bee livery. Demunth saw them and walked away. They called to him. Yarn watched them exchange words, watched Demunth shake his head and heard his voice rise. The Brinapi financier's freemen gesticulated and evenutally accompanied Demunth to his quarters. The coach's shoulders seemed to sag. His ibrows drawn down in worried thought, Yarn had just stretched out on his bunk when he looked up at his square of barred dusk and found it filled with Demunth's bulk. He got quickly to his feet as the outside bar was lifted. Demunth bore a goblet. "Wine, Yarn... special ration because of tomorrow's championship fight I" Yam had never received wine before, only the vitamin-loaded sweetish imitation: red slorp. He took the shiny metal flagon from Demunth's mysteriously shaky hand and started to raise it eagerly. T hen his eyes saw the shadows well behind Demunth. Curth's freemen! Yarn looked in Demunth's eyes. Then he nodded his head, stepped back into his dormitory cell and raised the cup. He made appreciative gurgling and smacking sounds as he carefully allowed the wine to run down his chin and onto his smock. He knew Demunth saw, was sure the others did not. "Thank you, Coach!" He handed the cup hack to his trainer. "Sleep well, athlete," Demunth said and went away with the men. A little later the flying platform arose into the air and slid away. Demunth returned, and his ugly face gazed at Yam's a few moments before he cleared his throat. "You showed wisdom. Yarn. But what good will rejecting his potion do you? You will ie tomorrow, just as surely. He will find a way." "Die? I want to win the championship for you. Do you doubt I can?" "'Win! Why you addle -- all right. Yarn, I'll open my shield to you. No, until I learned what an enemy you have, I really thought you could win. Today you somehow held off Probin and eluded the man at your back and accounted for eight, I think. But... no. Yarn. Not now. The Solitonese hasn't been born who can stand up to me. But an Offworld financier is another matter. I believe that you can win... but that you will die because the financier wills it." "You said before that if I were a freeman things would be different. Yet I can become one only by winning, by fighting out of here, as you did. Coach. This I will do. And I will win tomorrow... for you and for me." Yam's mind had never worked so furiously in his life. "Practice with me. Coach, that I may be the best on the field tomororw." Behind the square roof of the athletic quarters a yellow moon, fat and round as Curth's belly, was rising. Its pale fingers of light touched Demunth's face. The face was set, determined, afire with the hatred the trainer felt for the mighty financier. The frog's mouth was held taut against Demunth's teeth. Then: "By the Ultimate Banker's fat paunch, I will! Get your gear. Yarn. Come along!" Yarn nerved himself, swallowing hard, as the bar was dropped. What IF he had decided upon only a godling could do... a godling who would have to wield a hetter sword than the fabled Demunth. He went with the coach to the field house and equipped himself. Did Demunth have any idea, he wondered, that this time there was more than mere coachand-player exercising involved? No, he thought as he faced the firesword and shield of Demunth! No, the coach did not know. For who could guess that such an impossible dream could fill the whole being of a lowborn athlete? Who could imagine that a man born a Consumer could find such determination, could think the unthinkable? Poor Demunth, Yarn thought. He does not really believe I have god-blood! T hen Demunth moved so fast that Yarn was almost caught unready. The man who had trained a thousand athletes pressed his opponent hard and struck for the throat with the extinguished flat of his sword. Yarn blocked just in time, knowing that had the firesword been switched on he'd have 'been scorched. Had he been an instant slower, he'd have been decapitated. "Little slow, athlete. Faster now -- let's see how fast you can block." Yarn's shield rang without sparking to a shower of swordblows. It was all he could do to stop them. Never in competition had he faced such an onslaught from a single source. The coach was yielding up to his anger at the financier; he'd sweat it off hacking at Yarn. And Yarn? He felt tears close behind his eyes. Could he do it? Would he be able to do it? Could he possibly bring himself to kill diis man who was the nearest thing to a father he knew? Oh no! Stop me, he thought. Kill me, Demunth! Don't let me kill you! Don't make me! I am so new at being a god! When Demunth stopped, he was not even winded; "Now you try. Yarn." He stepped back and grinned his ugly grin as Yam tried. He drove in to smash past Demunth's guard. As always, he failed. Could this be the arm of a god-man, this arm which could not steer a sword past a mortal's shield? He wanted to kill him quickly -- he had to, if he was to do it at all. But Demunth's sword and shield changed places with a praticed motion that imitated the lightning in its speed, and he attacked. Yarn was forced to retreat. Never had he seen anyone else who could unlock his hands from his weapons, slip them one across the other and continue fighting without missing a stroke. There was no other undefeated coach. Demimth stood alone. Yam's thumb was near the powerswitch of his pommel. F or the first time since he had decided what he must be. Yarn had doubts. And then his golden throne toppled. He could not do it! He could not defeat the undefeated and quite possibly undefeatable coach. "In three years, Yarn -- maybe two -- you'll be as good as I! But now... I haven't time to teach you better attack methods." Demunth was panting a little as he spoke. Was there sadness in ins voice? Did he merely regret his inahility to put the final edge on the finely-honed blade that was Vam, or...? So he would not have to think, Vam tried to lightning-switch without flaming his blade. He nearly dropped his shield. "Better not try that tomorrow, Boy," Demunth said. "Your opponent would've got past your guard. Watch. I'll show you again." Sword flamed and winked with the shield in the moonlight as they changed hands. Again Yarn tried to imitate. If anything he was even clumsier this time. "Athlete, that won't do! Watch me again -- " "Coach! Look.' " The shadow swept over the sand, a big dark rectangle. Both men looked up as the black shadow glided over the roof of the jockdorm. "Get out of here, Yarn. Run, damnit!" Yarn hesitated. Demunth was staring at the flying raft. His back was to his best athlete. There would neyer be a better opportunity for Yarn to do what he intended: strike down the coach, take his clothes and, most important of all, his brass nosering which proclaimed him a freeman. Then... attain the impossible. Go to Financier Curth. Prove himself a god-man. Yarn's firesword was in his hand; Demunth's neck was unprotected... Yarn turned and fled as the coach ordered. To his left was the dorm, to his right the high wall surrounding the practice field. It was closer. There was shadow, although not a great amount, since the moon was at the opposite end of the yard. Yam raced to the wall, flattened himself against it. He wondered if his armor gleamed. He waited. The raft landed, settling gently to the ground with a little hissing sound as the dust and sand swirled beneath it. There were three of them : black and orange. All stepped off the raft; all approached Demunth witii hands never far from their belts. This time Vam heard them clearly. "Take us to the cell of the athlete called Yam. We want to be sure he's sleeping well," one of them said, and another laughed. The snoring from the cubicles nearly drowned out their voices. "He's all right. Why don't you fellows go on down to the Red Krat? Ask for Vivara. She'll fix you up. You needn't worry about that athlete anymore." The Brinapi shook hi head. "Orders. We're to check. Then, friend Demunth, we'll go and study this Vivara of yours. Come on, take us in." Demunth's voice was hard, ugly as his face. "Don't call me friend, office boy. I rule a thousand athletes, provide a civilized way to settle important arguments. You lick the soft white toes of a grafting -- " T he man didn't give Demunth time to finish. He struck him across the face with a gesture dripping disdain. Demunth's sword hung loose in his hand, and Yarn knew that the reaction that flamed it was completely automatic; the short firesword swung up and plunged with an ugly hiss into the Offworlder's stomach. The man staggered back into his fellows, staring down at the shaft of glowing steel and his fast-cooking intestines. Then, as the man started to fall, Demunth yanked the sword fr. Then Demunth dropped. Soundlessly, without raising his sword again. Varn swung his wide eyes to see one of the remaining two Brinapi freemen shove his zapstick back into his belt, kneel beside his friend, then look up at the third man and shake his head. The man got up, and the two of them walked toward the dorm. Behind them, two bodies lay on the sand beside an extinguished firesword. Varn crossed the space from wall to Demunth without a sound, a dark shadow cutting a lighter one. His examination was brief and simple -- the coach was dead. So was the other man; his blood had almost stopped flowing from the cauterized wound the sword had made. Varn started to rise, then glanced back at the dead Brinapi. He bent and pulled his zaptube from his belt. Then he followed the other two, carrying the rod gingerly; he had never before held one of the short metal cylinders with its easily depressed trigger similar to the one on his swordhilt. His firesword was in its sheath, his shield still on his arm. He had time only to leap aside into the darkness beside the gate as the two freemen and a dormitory guard boiled out. "Jn that case he's got to be out here still," the guard said. He said nothing else. Vam's action was almost reflex; he brought the tube up and pushed the little thumbstud and swung the rod back and forth. Ten feet away, the guard and one of the freemen dropped like the corpses they undoubtedly were. The third man whirled, glanced down at them, peered at the sharows enveloping Varn. Then he turned and fled. Varn aimed the zapstick and thumbed it again. He swung it, spraying death. The organge and black tights kept running. Varn watched, mystified. How was it that the tube killed some, allowed others to live? Suddenly he realized he was a dead man; the Brinapi would sail away... and return with help. Varn dropped the useless rod. He had one chance, and he was out of practice; a man did not often use this trick in the stadium. As the freeman's feet thudded onto the raft, Varn grasped his shield by the edge, curling his fingers. He took a deep breath, held it, turned half around and, exerting all the strength in his legs and arms, sent the shield sailing across the practice field. Like a toy saucer-ship or an oversize discus, it cut through the air. The freeman looked up just as it reached him. It struck him full in the chest, driving him back off the raft. The shield clanged on the platform and rolled off onto the turf. Varn ran after it. T he man was alive. He was bleeding from the chest, but not seriously injured; and Varn was unable to understand his immobility IF IV until he realized the fellow had hit his head as he fell. He hesitated a moment, then pulled the zaptuibe from the Brinapi's belt and ran back to the two he had downed with a similar one. The radiation-guns left no external marks. There was nothing about the uniform Yarn pulled on to indicate it had been stripped from a corpse. He brushed dirt off himself and shrugged; the tunic was tight. The dead freeman had been built like a man. Yarn wasn't a man; he was an athlete. He returned to the raft and Financier Curth's unconscious office boy. Then he waited, thinking, thankful that there were no athlete faces watching him through the barred doors. Surely no Consumer could have originated the audacious action he planned! His momentary doubt was gone; he was more certain than ever of his godhead. The freeman moaned, and his eyes flickered open. They looked impassively at the levelled tube, then swung to the firesword and widened. Yarn nodded. It was true, somehow this man was unaffected by the zapsticks. Then he noticed something more, this Brinapi was not wearing a freeman's nosering. He pondered this, wondering how freemen could prove they were not Consumers on the world the office boy had come from. Yarn raised the firesword to the other's throat. He waited for the office boy's fear to settle. Then Yarn began telling him, clearly and carefully, exactly what orders this very special fireswordsman had for him. T he two highest-ranking guests at the Solitonese Tournament of Synthetic Dispute Settlement, Prince Hannanook and Financier Curth, were of course lodged in suites at the top of the finest hotel on the planet -- sprawling collections of well lighted and lushly furnished rooms on the three-hundred-and-first floor. The shaking freeman with the firesword at his back made a sloppy landing on the roof of the hotel. "How do we get to the financier's apartment?" Yarn asked. He poked with his firesword to facilitate the man's reply. "Though that door," the lackey said, pointing; and Yarn nodded and leaned on the sword without flaming it. As though he had merely stepped on a potentially dangerous insect. Yarn withdrew his sword out of the Brinapi's back and wiped the blade on his colorful jacket before sheathing it. He went to inspect the little house the freeman had indicated. Yes, it contained a door, and another door, and another door and steps. Yarn made certain both doors remained unsecured and went over the edge of the roof. The balcony he had seen as they approached the hotel lay just below. The height and the faintly twinkling lights did not bother him; the lights were tiny and too far below for him to see the ground. A well padded lounge on the balcony cushioned his short drop, and he was forced to catch at the loungechair's back as he bounced. He sank down in the darkness, realizing that W while the drapes were pulled across the double doors leading into the financier's suite, the doors themselves were open. The voices inside were very clear to the new orange-andblack-encased athlete on the balcony. " -- you're done, Financier! Why don't you admit it? I haven't the need for ostentation you have. My men conducted their inquiries without livery, in taverns and on the streets. I already knew that an investigation had been called in the Financery to check over your records and either end the rumors of your misappropriation of Brinapi funds or impeach you. Now I've found out about a few of your debts. I say 'few' because I assume there are others." "My dear prince, you can't possibly --  "Please don't use your Boardroom oratory on me, Curth," the original voice cut in, and Yarn recognized it as Prince Hannanook's. "Shall I tell you how much you have bet on a Bluechip named Probin? On the Bluechips as a team? Apparently you stand to make the money to repay all bets and do some buying if the Bluechips win tomorrow. And to replace the money you've stolen from the people of Brinap if that scarredface Probin wins. Eh?" "Be smart, Prince, everyone wants to do this sort of thing. Why else do people still insist on symbolic wars? We happened to be in a position where we can settle official differences and add to our own fortunes on the side, so why shouldn't we? A little grease here, a refined bit of pressure there, and... really, where's the harm? The show will be just as good tomorrow, the results just as bloody, just as conclusive and war-preventing. The only difference will be that you and I -- and it can be you as well as I -- can be sure of a profit. The matter of official territorial lines hardly matters to anyone. Who cares what star-corp claims what particular stars within its jurisdiction? You don't; I don't. It's all too theoretical. Those things change every standard galactic year. As long as civilization exists and there's no war..." # # T#inancier, you sound as thoughT this entire bloody institution existed solely for the amusement of the upper classes. You know that isn't so. These stadium fights are necessary. What would you do when there's an unresolved dispute and the warhawks are circling each other and preparing to fight to the last drop of the next world's blood -- go back to exploding suns and death-seeding planets? Wars aren't practical anymore. The symbolic battles and wars have worked for nearly a thousand s.g. years. Would you really want to break the rules and risk destroying that?" "My dear prince, there hasn't been a symbolic war that was an honest substitute for human fighting in centuries. Wars can't happen anymore. People have become too civilized. They don't care that much." "I know the institution must not exist for your purpose, Financier. If it were up to me there'd be no training of killers. If it were up to me Man and his governments wouldn't be so irrational as to think that no IF violence on any scale was a necessary final arbitrator. These once purely athletic contests were degraded by your kind, Financier. Now you're making them worse! Whose bright idea was it to introduce the darkhorse beasts last year -- yours?" The prince's voice firmed. "Financier, it's been obvious to anyone with eyes and a mind that that Yarn athlete was the one to watch. So you tried to eliminate him, to help Probin. Yes, I know about it. First the hypnomedal. Then pressure on the coach. Then... what? We'll see. If Probin's as doped up tomorrow as I expect him to be, I'll stop the fight and have him disqualified. And Yarn? What did you send him tonight? Drugs? Poison? Death?" "Majesty, I am sorry you are so nosy. The firesword Rocdn is holding at your back will spit and cook your liver as neatly as an athlete's. But I'd prefer not... I'd much rather you had an accident and fell off the balcony. It's a long way down." Yarn rose to his feet. The financier's voice was full of confidence, and the prince's gasp was proof that there was a firesword at Hannanook's back. "You wouldn't dare, Curth!" "Prince, there's an expression so old we've forgotten its origin: You're whistling in the dark. Come along over to the balcony, won't you?" T here was silence as Yarn found the place where the drapes joined, and he inserted the end of the zaptube. Hannanook's voice said, "No, Financier, I won't. You'll have a hard time proving an accident if I've a sword bum between my shoulderblades!" Yam peered through the widened gap between the drapes. Spawled out in a bubblechair, wearing a carelessly open robe. Financier Curth gazed, smiling, up at Prince Hannanook. Behind the prince, a well honed blade levelled at his back, stood a man in orange tunic and black tights. Behind the financier's chair was his sec'y, the blonde who'd cheered Yarn, her flower-petal mouth open wide as her blue eyes. Yarn made very certain the tube he held was pointed at the man called Rocaln, that none of its stream of death would touch the prince or the sec'y. A zaprod was noiseless; if it did not kill the man he would be forced to make noise as he leaped at him with his firesword. He depressed the trigger. Rocaln stiffened and then went completely lax and toppled over sideways. He crashed across a table, containing the leavings of the financier's sumptuous dinner, with a terrible noise. Curth shot to his feet with a speed Yarn would not have thought possible for one so obese. Hannahook swung around, saw the dead man, then looked at the doors as Yarn entered. "By Earth, athlete! Haven't you any sense at all? Thumbing your nose at lardbucket was bad enough... but coming here disguised as one of his office boys!" Hannanook was grinning as he spoke. "Tsk! Frightful! Unheard of! I am so shocked I'll not even ask what became of that uniform's owner." He turned back to Curth. "Sit down, Curth. You're finished. The financier's collapsing into his c!'uiir indicated his complete agreement, and Hannanook smiled. But Yarn remembered his own tactic of falling only in order to get beneath his opponent's armor. No, he'd not assume Curth was finished till the final buzzer. "Uh... Yarn," the prince said, "you can point that thing at Financier Curth, but I do hope you won't fry reer ahead of him... as a prisoner, Td say." Yarn swallowed. Suddenly he remembered where he was, who he was, who these two men were. He found that no words would come to his lips. "Athlete Yarn, what possessed you to thumb your nose at this -- at this charming old gentleman? What could possibly have possessed you to come here tonight?" The prince sat in a chair facing the financier, after picking up the fallen Rocaln's firesword. Both Hannanook and Curth ignored the body as if it did not exist. arn bit his lip. "I -- I -- " "Take your time. Yarn. I'm most anxious to hear your answer," Hannanook said. And, without taking his eyes off the athlete, "Sit still, Curth. You'd better sit down, too, girl, before you collapse. Just don't do anything silly. I admit I'm a little soft, but this man suckled on a lyhon and teethed on a swordblade." "Man!" Financier Curth snorted, and Hannanook turned to look at him emotionlessly. "Getting your pose back, Financier? Good for you... I'd hate to have to find ten or twelve men to carry you out of here if you fainted. But just sit quietly, please." The prince's pale gray eyes returned to Yaim. "He -- he just said it," Yarn spoke slowly, frowning. "Man, he... wanted me dead... so much. You warned me of death behind me. Then you stopped him from having me... zapped." He stopped the hand that wanted to rise to scratch his head. "I... I realized I was... am... something special?" "Special!" The financier exploded into laughter. His belly quaked. Hannanook ignored him. "Special? How? Why'd you come here?" Yarn said simply: "To kill him." He lifted the zaptube. Financier Curth laughed. "Oh tell him the truth, Hannanook. That thing won't kill me -- my brainwaves are the wrong frequency. But it would kill you, athlete, and you, Hannanook." The robe slipped all the way open on the right side, revealing the identical zaptube held in the pudgy hand. "As easily as this one." Yarn depressed his weapon's trigger. It grew faintly warm in his hand as he moved it from Curth's left eye to his right eye to his amused mouth. He was careful that it did not come into alignment with the frightened girl, pushing her pretty face into the carpet at Curth's right hand. "I told you it wouldn't," Curth said, still laughing. "Harmless to me IF as the smell of blood. Of course if you wanit to try it on this sec'y...?" "Master!" e girl protested. Vam eased up on the trigger. He looked at the vicious fat face and the beautiful pale one. Almost he thought to kill the girl to save her from the treatment she had been receiving -- and from Curth's gross body. "You see, Vam," Hannanook said, "you and I are -- different. Some men had ancestors who originated from simple one-celled organisms developed in a huge natural chemical caldron called an ocean. Other men had ancestors who were developed without prior stages of evolution -- in an artificial vat in a man-made oratory. Our ancestors, Yarn -- yours and mine -- were of the laboratory type. Racially proud men such as Financier Curth call us -- androids." V arn looked at the prince and at the fat financier. "You too, Master?" "Just prince, Varn. Yes, metoo. Though how the financier discovered the fact -- " "Intelligence, Hannanook!" the fat man chortled. "Intelligence! Man has thousands of years of it to fall back on. He doesn't need to exert himself. Didn't you know I'd take precautions? I'm prepared. I don't think your father will want it known that the royal bloodlines are android. As for your corpse -- obviously an impostor's. People will say that I discovered the fraud and extracted quick vengeance for the real prince who was murdered by plotters. Androids exist only to serve Man's bidding. No one is going to want to aolmowledge androids as royalty -- no one!" "Theire, Financier, you are wrong. As wrong as you were to gamble everything on Probin. The royal family of Aleria is about to become known as android and acknowledged as such. That's tme whether you zap me or not. So don't count on not being brought to justice -- you will be." Curth frowned. He didn't look as though he'd ever laughed. His eyes locked with the prince's, and Varn found his own eyes filled with those of the helpless sec'y. What a shame, Vam thought, that she and he and the prince could not somehow escape from here. Perhaps if he put himself between the prince and the Brinapi's weapon... "You must not move, Varn," Hannanook said. "The financier needs a moment or two to decide to give himself up to me rather than face what he knows will happen to him if he commits a royal murder. The financier wouldn't like what would happen to him then, Varn -- no man would." On Curth's whitening face large drops of moisture appeared. Sweat coursed down his thick neck, crept from the dewlap beneath his chins and rolled unheed into his robe. "You know, Varn," the prince continued conversationally, "if the financier does make the sensible decision for once, I think I'll give you a choice. You can defeat Probin in a fair fight, and I've a mind to let you. But if you are killed or badly wounded through trying... then I won't be able to use you for the further plans I have." "Furthea:... plans?" Vam's mouth felt dry. He wondered at the prince's bravery. Surely only a god could be so calm while facing a zaptube. #X Tarn, in a short time there's V going to be some serious fighting. I'm helping to arrange it. There'll be some men of the original human stock involved. Men, Yarn, who haven't done anything much more energetic in their entire lives than push buttons and instruct androids. Some of these men haven't forgotten how to think, and not all of them think as Cupth does. It's going to be a job training them to fight. Yam. That's where you come in -- you and a few other Solitonese androids. Your choice can be to fight Probin and win, and then come with me if you're in condition to come. Or, if you prefer, you can try to enlist Probin. Enlist him to our cause and persuade him to go with lis to Aleria. Together, Probin and you can help train men. Train them not to put on a show. Yarn, or to settle things in a symbolic fight. Train them, rather, to deal efficiently with humans who have too long held control of things. It will not be an android revolution. Yarn, it will be a human police action of the most necessary kind." "You talk," Curth said, "as though this tubespawn is something special to you. As though his life is of any more account than -- than this sec'y's." "You're right, fat man. He's special because he believes he is special and has acted as he thought a special man should act. As least one ancestor of mine did the same thing. Financier, and maybe some of yours did also. A man is what he believes, not what his society or his culture would have him believe. He, not someone else. As for this girl, are you sure she's not special? How do you know what she believes? When she grabbed your retainer's arm and spoilt his aim before I could, that sirised you, didn't it? Didn't it, Financier?" The financier's eyes narrowed. A nerve twitched at the edge of his tight mouth. His nostrils pinched as he drew in a breath. The signs were unmistakable; Yarn saw a coward nerving himself for the deathstroke. Acting frpm reflex. Yarn propelled himself in front of the prince. Directly in front of the zaptube. At the same time a beautiful blonde head had arched above the chair-arm. Perfect white teeth flashed. A strong, young neck braced; and a slim hand with sharpened fingernails came to the aid of the teeth. Yarn managed to change his fullarmed athlete's blow to a -- for him -- gentle slap. As the financier's head rocked back, he shot out his left hand and snatched the falling zaptube. Moments later Yarn found himself staring at a stunned and defeated Brinapi financier with a reddening cheek and a torn hand. He did not stare at the financier long. The girl who had just saved all their lives IF proved to be far too interesting, see the scar there, and the unblink"Well, Yarn," the prince said, ing eyes of a veteran. Curth gasped, "wjiat's your answer? Take your In their pouches of flesh his eyes time. No need to decide immediately widened. whether you want this sec'y and a Whether the light in Yarn's eyes crack at the financier's kind or not. was a glow or a glitter was unimporTake five or six seconds if you tant to Financier Cuirth of Brinap. like." What was important was that he read Yarn shoved his face close to the in those cold eyes the athlete's deT he Time Troller materialized with an audible pop. He was in a small but comfortable room, with a simple table, chair and bed, warm and well lifted. The only other occupant of the room was a small man, seated on a stool, his sparse hair combed forward over his high forehead, the dark eyes somehow vacant now as he studied the newcomer for a moment with little or no obvious interest, then casually looked away again. "Oh," said the Time Troller a little peeved. He had been expecting a better reaction than this. He'd always had it before. He was an impressive figure, after all; floating roughly a foot off the ground in the shimmering blue haze of his force-field, immaculate in a silver-fitted, one-piece suit, with matching gauntlets and high boots. Most people did a bit more than just look away again. "Good morning," he began tentatively. Suddenly the figure on the stool leaped to his feet, drew himself up to his full -- if somewhat diminutive -- height, his eyes blazing, and snapped, "Why do you not have even the common decency to bow to me?" The Time Troller bowed. Most handsomely. A rather sly smile flickered around the corners of his mouth as he did so. This was better, he thought, much better. At least he was getting a reaction, albeit a trifle unconventional. "Who are you?" "I am the Time Troller. Or at least, I am one of the Time Trollers." "Idiot!" The man snorted contemptuously. "You're another charlatan after some money for your damn fool inventions. Well, I haven't got any. Not now." "Do I look like a charlatan?" The man seemed to take in the stranger's surroundings almost for the first time. His jaw dropped. He sat down hurriedly and blinked. Then he blinked again. Then he shook his head, closed his eyes tight, opened them, blinked twice more, then groaned. "You're not dreaming, you know," commented the Time Troller gently. "Perhaps if I explained?" "It might be best." The Time Troller beamed. He loved this bit. "I come from the future," he said. "Millenia and millenia in advance of your time. I can't give you an exact date because the calendar has changed utterly at least three times in between, and during the Times of Trouble they lost count completely. So although I'm honestly not sure what our date would be in your Christian timing, I should think it would be roughly # A.D." The man's eyes seemed to be popping out of his head, but the Time Troller continued unperturbed. "Time travel as such is an impossibility, of course," he said. "None can travel back in time so as to be able to live in a previous age. All they can do is project themselves back in a sort of three-dimensional image, as you see me now. I am not really solid, you know." The man jumped to his feeit as if to test this statement, but he was brought up short. "Don't touch!" He stopped. "You must excuse my shouting, but it was meant as a friendly warning. I may not be solid in the one sense, but I am definitely present in another. Had you put your hand, or anything, into my force-field, it would have disintegrated instantaneously." The man frowned. "What do you mean, disintegrated?" "Vanished. Disappeared. Phutt." He grinned blandly. "Now let me continue my explanation. We can observe, comment, exchange conversation, but not actually be present in the flesh. Not only that, but there is a time limit to our stay in any given place." "A time limit?" "It does seem a little odd, doesn't it?" the Time Troller replied cheerfully, "A time limit in this context. But it's true all the same. We are cast back, like a trawl, but when we arrive we cannot move from the one spot inside the force-field, and we are limited to half an hour. One of our half-hours, that is. It works out as about thirty-ifour and a quarter of your minutes." "So you're not here in the flesh?" The man seemed to accept the story readily enough. "No." "And you can't really influence events?" "Well, theoretically no. But it doesn't always work out like that. For example, a Professor of Chionodynamy of my acquaintance found himself on Mt. Sinai by mistake one day as some poor Hebrew was looking for a lost sheep. The shepherd saw the force-field, thought it was a mirade -- fire without burning, you see -- and the result was that we nearly ended the Egyptian Empire of Rameses. The majority of the slaves left, you know. Most unfortunate." He tut-tutted busily. "Did you say," said the man, "that he found himself there by mistakeT "Afraid so, yes. You see, when you're covering a period of nearly three hundred and fifty centuries, you often get miscalculations creeping in. A century or so is nothing. I've even forgotten now where he was supposed to be heading for. Whatever it was, there was consternation when he got back. But he couldn't correct the mistake then." "Why not?" "You can never go back to the same place twice. No one really knows why, but there it is. That's allowing for the fact that if it were possible in theory, you'd probably end up somewhere totally different anyway. It's all very disturbing. I wish they'd perfect the process. I mean, recently I was aimed for the last phase of the Martio-Jovian Commercial War of Era Three, and where did I end up? On Pluto. Smack in the middle of the Great Radiation. I spent the whole half-hour bored stiff, looking at bomb craters. Three and a half centuries out! Ridiculous." The man looked suitably sympathetic. "Why do you do it?" "Do what?" "Go back in time? I mean, if you can't be sure of exactly where you're going, it seems a bit odd." "We go back to troll for information, dear boy. To check up on the historical facts and make certain they were recorded correctly." "Can you always understand the language?" The Time Troller allowed a superior smile to decorate his lips. "It's all done automatically," he said. "You could be speaking an#hing from Vegan to Etruscan, and so could I, but to each other what we say seems to be spoken in our respective native tongues. I seem to speak your language, you seem to speak mine." "Oh." The man nodded. "Why are you here then?" "That depends on where 'here' is. I was meant to go to the United States in the mid-twentieth century." The little man shook his head. "Oh dear," he said, "I'm afraid you're a little out. This is St. Helena, in the early nineteenth century, and I've been exiled here." T he Time Troller looked at the man with new eyes. He saw the hand tucked idly into the waistcoat, the polished boots and the highcollared coat. "You mean to say that you are...?" "Your servant, sir." The Time Troller positively radiated joy. "Well, well, well," he declared effusively, rubbing his hands together in enthusiasm, "we may be some way out, but it's not often we get the luck to meet someone as eminent as yourself face to face. Marvellous. Marvellous." "I'm very flattered. I don't get much flattery these days. Not like the old days at all, you know." He allowed his head to sink forlornly on his breast. "No, I hardly think it would be. It was the old days that I was thinking of asking you about, actually." IF "Go ahead then. I'll to help." For a moment the Time Troller paused in his upsurge of enthusiasm and took a long cool look at this person. He frowned in some puzzlement. "You seem to be taking all this very calmly," he said. The Emperor shrugged. "When as much has happened to a man as has happened to me," he replied placidly, "so many unexpected ups and downs, twists of fate, nothing, however new or unusual it might be, is going to surprise me very much." The Time Troller shrugged in his turn. It sounded reasonable. Then, adopting his best interviewer's pose, he stabbed his head forward aggressively. "Do you think your invasion of Russia was a failure?" The man smiled. "It ended in retreat," he said simply, "so what else was it but a failure?" He paused, then before the Time Troller could speak he added significantly, "Of course, it succeeded in the one respect." "What respect was that?" "My real personal reason for invasion." "To subjugate Russia, to gain glory for your country?" "No, no, no. Alexander was after Josephine." The Time Troller sat up with a jerk. "I beg your pardon?" "The Czar of Russia desired Mme. Beauharnais." "You're joking." "Joking? Do you seriously think I could joke over a matter so close to my heart, so deep, so wounding, so...?" He paused, at a loss for words, and waved his hands in the air in expressive Gallic gestures. "That barharian, that holy-father milksop, with his pious notions of pseudoreligious nonsense, was making advances to my wife. I invaded his country to teach him a lesson." The Time Troller shook his head in perplexity. "But you divorced the Empress some years earlier,". jie said, "and married Marie Louise of Austria." The reply was a secretive smile. "A diplomatic trick, sir, to placate Joseph," he explained airly. "Josephine and I remained lovers." "And Alexander fell in love with her?' "I wouldn't dignify it with so honorable a name as love." "But... but this wasn't the reason for your invasion, surely?" "Are you calling me a liar?" he snapped, strangely impressive in anger despite his lack of inches. "What I am telling you is fact, no matter what history books may say in your distant times. I was misunderstood in the past, my past, I am misunderstood now, presumably I will 'be even more misunderstood after my death. You, of course," he put in witheringly, "would know far more about that than I would. But that was my reason for invading Russia, whether you like it or not." "But this is ridiculous! This means that all the histories of the French Wars will have to be changed. Motives of Empire -- of the search for Glory -- they'll all have to go in favor of jealousy over a woman. I'd never have believed it. I'd always thought that..." He broke off suddenly as the blue haze around him started flickering wildly. "Surely my time isn't up yet?" "What's the matter?" "That means I'm due to go back any second. But there's lots more I want to ask you." He stared round helplessly as his image started to fade, to blur and waver. The wall became visible through his body. "Can't you come back and go on where you left off?" "I can't, I can't." The anguished voice grew fainter, dulling into a hollow whisper, an echo at the end of a long cavernous corridor that stretched for over thirty thousand years. "I told you, we can't ever return to the same place or time again, no matter how..." H e disappeared with a pop, exactly as he had arrived. The Emperor looked at #ihe spot he had occupied, then gingerly walked up and felt around to see if there was any trace. Nothing. Just a certain freshness in the air, charged with negative particles, though he could not know this himself. He shrugged once more, extending his lower lip in a most un-imperial gesture of resignation, then sat down once more to consider the event. Some two hours later his door was opened, and two figures entered. They bowed deferentially. "Good morning, Emperor." He gazed at them with singular lack of interest as they set down his tray of food and drink. "How are you this morning. Emperor?" one of them 'asked solicitOHy. "As well as could be expected," he replied. "Though my visitors at least do help to cheer me up." "Visitors?" They stiffened. "There was a time traveller here this morning." They relaxed, looked at each other and smiled sympathetically. "Oh, really? And what did he ask you about?" "About #." "Your invasion? To avenge the insult to your mistress?" "Mistress?" he thundered pre-emp-' torily. "My wife, man, my wife!" "My apologies, sire, your wife. Anyway, if this time traveller calls again, don't forget to let us know." "He won't call again. They can't visit ithe same place more than once." "So we'll never see him? Oh dear. Never mind. I'm sure he was suitably instructed." "He was." The Emperor smiled wickedly. "He said all the history books would have to be rewritten." The two men smiled again, saluted the pathetic little figure sitting alone on the stool and let themselves out. The door was locked behind them, securely. "That's a new one," commented one of them, adjusting his white coat round him. "What, time travelling? Perhaps he's going into a futuristic fantasy instead of the past. It would be a bit of a change from the same old thing, I guess. We've got far too many Napoleons as it is." They walked on, through the automatic swing doors at the end of the passage, out into the warm CaliIF IF  Serial Tie energy masters were criminals against my world. The trouble was in every important way -- so was I! T hree of my friends had disappeared in a single small area of the Pacific, just north of Easter Island, Like me, all worked for the Power Board, the group which was responsible for rationing man's severely limited supply of energy and which was, because of that fact, practically the world government, Bert Wehlstrahl had vanished a year before, and Joey Elfven ten months later, Marie Wadetsky had gone two weeks after Joe, presumably in search of him, and I was principally interested in finding Marie, (Don't ask for my name; it's bad enough to have to listen to it occasionally, and I'm certainly not going to put it in print.) Since the two men were police workers of a sort, it was likely that their disappearance was not accidental, so my first step was to search the ocean bottom in the key area from a camouflaged vantage point -- actually one of the spherical escape tanks used in ordinary cargo submarines, somewhat modified for my purpose. I found evidence of rationing violation the moment I reached the bottom --  almost landed on it. A mile down there was an area actually lighted artificially, and apparently concealed under a flat, translucent surface which I interpreted as some sort of fabric. Seeing energy wasted to light the outside of a tent roof was bad enough; the sight of a swimmer in what looked like ordinary scuba gear under five thousand feet of sea water was far worse. The technological capacity so demonstrated . suggested something much more serious than an ordinary blackmarket energy gang. My tank was not very maneuverable, but I managed to get myself captured' and towed to an entrance to the undersea base. Here I dropped a sonar transponder which should guide Board enforcement forces to the spot, released my ballast and headed for the surface with the comfortable certainty that the swimmers could not follow far because of the pressure gradient. This belief proved wrong. One of them hung on to my tank and by pounding on it was able to guide a sub to the scene. After doing my best to get the 'nearly helpless tank away, I was really captured and dragged back to the bottom. The tank was brought to a lighted pit in the ocean floor There were no doors or air locks. The swimmers, who had loaded my tank with enough ballast to keep it down even if they lost hold again, towed me into a tunnel which led from the entrance pit, along it for a short distance, and into a flooded room. Then they removed their helmets. fter recovering, more or less, from the shock of seeing people breathing water, I got another one by discovering that Bert Wehlstrahl was among them. Communicating with him wasnt easy; he could hear my voice through the walls of the tank, but couldnt talk himself -- reasonable enough if his vocal cords were trying to wriggle in water. He had to write his messages. He told me very little; I assumed that this was partly because of the communication difficulty and partly because of the audience. He said that Marie was somewhere nearby, still in her sub, but that he knew nothing of Joes whereabouts. He also dropped a remark which forced me to revise my belief that he and the others were breathing water. They weren't breathing at all, as more careful observation showed. Also, the liquid around us wasn't water, but something denser. I realized that I should have spotted this from some of the maneuvers incident to bringing my tank 'indoors." On the new theory, it seemed that these people must be getting their oxygen from some food or drink which released it slowly and let them small intestine -- the enormous presIF sure made this seem at least possible, though further data were certainly needed. Bert would give no details. He said that I could stay and join them if I wished, or that I could return to the surface if I agreed to include certain information, which he would supply, in my report of the Board. Marie had been offered the same choice but had refused to make it -- refused, in fact, to do anything until she was told what had happened to Joe. She didnt believe Bert's claim of ignorance, he said. After thinking it over, I agreed to stay, with some mental reservations. I could obviously do nothing from inside the tank, but something had to be done -- first about Marie, and second about getting this frightful flood of wasted power tied into the world energy net. The inside of the place was as brightly lighted as the outside. I would take my chances about being restored to air-breathing capability later. Bert had said it was possible, but I was beginning to wonder about Bert's reliability myself. I was unconscious during the change, which involved surgery. I woke up immersed in liquid, comfortable enough, and with no urge to breathe. Bert and some of the 'natives" -- with whom I had no luck whatever in communication, either by written language or signs, though they seemed to have a complex sign language of their own -- accompanied me around the place. I saw Marie in her sub, and confirmed Bert's report of her attitude. I went outside to the farm" area for food, incidentally learning that the tent" was merely the interface between the sea water above and the liquid in which we lived. I did not find out which, if any, of the vegetables we ate might be our oxygen source. Finally I was taken to see their main power installation, which was of course what I had wanted; I had expected to be kept away from it until they were more certain of my motives, but they showed no sign of suspicion at all. The generator was simply a huge crystal-heat engine, its high-temperature end far down in the rock below the sea bottom and its heat sink simply the ocean. It was all obvious enough -- except, how, why and by whom it had been built under a mile of sea. There was also some doubt about what I could do about it, though none of course about what I should do; all these megawatts should obviously be feeding into the world power net and getting properly rationed. I could make no plans which seemed at all promising, though. I was still wondering whether Bert were actually working under cover for the Board or had gone over to these power-wasters. I couldn't decide whether it would be wise to trust him with any ideas I did develop. This point was suddenly clarified -- slightly. He had told me in so many words that he didn't know where Joe Elfven was. Now he took me to the office of the power unit's director. Joe was inside, apparently in charge.   T hat sight made a dhange in me. Bert had been a good friend of mine for several years. I had trusted him; Marie, admittedly, had not and had tried to get me to share her feelings, but I'd felt sure she was just brooding. A few minutes ago I had been jolted when Bert confessed to a falsehood in his earlier talk to me, but I had still been ready to listen to his excuses. I would even have been willing to believe that I had misunderstood him the first time. But he had also told me -- written it in plain words, with no possible doubt about their meaning -- that he did not know about Joe's whereabouts and that to the best of his knowledge and belief Joe had never gotten to this place. Clearly and unarguably Bert Whelstrahl had been lying like the proverbial rug. He had known that Joe was here. He had known just where he was and what he was doing. Why should he tell such a lie to me and apparently to Marie? And having told it, why was he now bringing me face to face with the proof that he was a liar? And had Marie formed her impression by spotting some evidence I had missed? One thing was certain in my own mind. Whatever explanation Bert gave was going to have to be supported by some pretty good independent evidence before I could accord it any weight. So was anything else he said from now on. These thoughts were interrupted by Joey's pulling away from his viewer and catching sight of me. The expression on his face indicated that Bert hadn't told him about me either. He was clearly astonished, and seemed delighted. He came over and shook hands violently, and seemed as frustrated as I was by the impossibility of talking. He looked around, probably for the writing pad, but Bert was already busy with the stylus. He held his words up for both of us to read. "Joe, we know you're tied up for the next few hours at least, but will it be all right if I give you another assistant as soon as his first job is finished?" I appreciated his tactful skipping of my name and felt a excuses when they came. I suspected from Joe's quick grin that he appreciated it too; a few weeks away from our section hadn't let him forget my chronic embarrassment at the handle my parents had inflicted on me or my self-consciousness about all nicknames offered as substitutes. "More than glad," he wrote. "Check him out as quickly as you can, Bert. We need him badly." He came as close to slapping me on the back as the medium permitted, grinned once more and went back to his viewer. I would have liked to make more of a conversation out of it, but was coming to see how anyone who had been here long might start to lose the urge for idle chatter. I could even think of a few people who would be improved by such a change in residence. I waved a farewell which Joe didn't see, and followed Bert back out into the control room. IF I was going to put some pretty harsh questions to him, but he had the writing pad and circumstances made it difficult to interrupt anyone else's talk. He had stopped swimming and started writing by the time I got through the door. "I didn't want you to know about Joe until after you'd had your talk with Marie," were his words. "In fact, I only just decided to let you know even this soon. I don't think she should know he's here, and I'm quite sure he shouldn't know that she is." I grabbed the pad. "Why not? It sounds to me like a dirty trick on both of them." "If she knows he's here she'll want to stay." "What's bad about that? You wanted me to stay, as you said, and I never denied she's more decorative than I am." "She Wouldn't stay because her only reason for doing it would be Joe, and you know as well as I do how much good that would do her. You know he doesn't care two cents for the kid. He chose to stay down here, remember. If she learns about him and stays, she'll be giving him a hard time, and we can't afford to have that happen. The job's much too important. If he gets distracted, or changes his mind about staying here, it's trouble." "And why shouldn't he know about her?" "For the same set of reasons. He'd know why she was here, and it would be as bad as though she were hanging around him in person. He never admitted it, but I think she was one of the reasons he chose to stay here." "You mean he disappeared on purpose? That he knew aboutthis place earlier?" "Oh, no. He got here just as I did, and as Marie did. He spotted a work sub that didn't belong to the Board and followed it." I pondered. The story had some convincing aspects; Joe's attitude toward Marie was almost as well known as mine, though no one had ever convinced Marie of it. Few people had risked trying. Joey himself wasn't the sort of man who could tell a girl to run along, even if it were obviously the best thing for the girl as well as for himself. He'd feel it was somehow his fault for not falling for her. "But why should you have had to lie to me about it?" I asked finally. "Because you were going to see Marie, and I had some hopes you'd talk her into leaving. You'll forgive my saying that if you'd known Joe was here you wouldn't have been able to tell her that as far as you knew he wasn't. I'm not belittling your acting ability, but you wouldn't have ibelieved it was necessary then." "I'm not sure I do yet. I'm still in the dark about this very important job Joe has to do and I'm supposed to help with." "True enough. We'd better get on with your education. Library next." "Will these guards, or whatever they are, be with us to the end?" "It's hard to say. They aren't guards, just people who are interested. You ought to be flattered." (Oh, I am. I've never been a celebrity before." It's curious how hard it is to convey irony by the written word alone. Bert missed it completely, as far as I could tell. He swam back in the general direction of the tunnel we had come down, and the rest of us followed him. A s I had guessed, the way up was along a different route -- maybe I should say a different pipe -- with the current, as I'd also expected, carrying us up. As usual the trip was not enlivened by conversation, though I found it wasn't too boring; the girl swam beside me instead of trailing behind with the others. As before, I didn't know how long the journey took. I'm not clear how they controlled the current. It had carried us down one passage, it carried us back to the same room through another, but in the room itself there was no trouble in stopping. Bert opened the big door, and we shed our coveralls on the other side. Then he led the way once more. I was a little surprised, and a little more disappointed, to lose our escort at this point. They turned off into another tunnel a few yards from where we left the coveralls. No doubt they, too, had to work at times. I put them out of my mind, more or less, and followed Bert. This is one of the points where it's hard to be detailed without being boring. A library is a library, even when it's upside down. The books were ordinary in shape and style, if not in content. The films and cards were in no way remarkable. Like unballasted human bodies, most of them tended to float. The chairs, tables and carrels were on the ceiling, with racks under -- no, I mean over -- the chairs for parking ballast belts. Not everyone parked them, though; many readers had their belts still on as they drifted in front of a reading screen or floated with a book in their hands. The images on the screens were all of the general sort the girl had drawn on the writing pad, second cousins to electrical diagrams or grad-school topology exercises. I watched several of the readers for some minutes each and got the opinion that while they were reading in the same sense that the word usually implies, there was an important difference in technique. They did go page by page or frame by frame, as the case might be, spending half a minute or a minute on each before going on to the next. But their eyes didn't follow the regular back-and-forth routine of a book reader. They wandered irregularly over each page, like the eyes of a man examining a picture. Still, I reflected, that wasn't too surprising. The same thing would happen to me if I were examining a wiring diagram. I was gradully coming to understand the situation, perhaps rather slowly by some people's standards. I hadn't thought of engineering drawings as a language before. B ert floated quietly around for several minutes, evidently willing for me to study the place by myself. At last, though, he beckoned me over to one end of the room. IF There was an unoccupied film reader here, and a fairly large case of books. It took about two seconds for me to notice that these were written in ordinary laniges. Chinese    Urdu    Latin    English ... Russian .  . I could recognize them all, even though I couldn't read many of them. Bert started writing again. "This stuff yvill tell you the story much more quickly than I can. It's no shock to you by now that a lot of people, not only Board workers, have foimd this place in the past. It's been here since before there was a Board. A lot of diose people have stayed. Some of these books were brought here by them, some were written here by them. The information here is what convinced me of the things I told you -- the business about attempts to get in touch with the Board about this place, and so on. "Spend as much time as you need absorbing it. It's important that you get die whole story. I'll be back when it's time to eat." He laid the pad under a chair -- that's not quite the right way to say it; the pad was denser than the liquid, so figure it out for yourself -- and swam off. There seemed to be nothing to do but start reading. Now, I don't have copies of those books and tapes. And I know Bert was a liar. But take my word for it, there were far too many of them for him to have product himself in the time he was down here. Most of them were handwritten, though some had been typed. I spent something like eighteen solid hours just skimming the ones that were ia languages I iknew. (I shoid't sa solid hours. Bert did come jback to take me to meals, and I also slepi. There's no point in describing all the details of life, even if the enyironment did make some of them rather unusual). I'll boil down the picture I got of the situation to the smallest volume I can manage. T he place had indeed been in existence before the Board. During the final few decades before rationing, the separate political institutions which existed then were one by one coming to realize that man's ener reserves were indeed vanishing. A number of frantic attempts were made to avoid, or at least postpone, the consequences without offending public opinion -- or rather, without disturbing public complacency. My own historical knowledge is shaky, but I seem to remember that this was the period of the "crash program," which cynical engineers of the time used to define as an administrative attempt to produce a baby in one month by making nine women pregnant. You mi know some of the results, like Mediterranean-Dead Sea tiydrodcKilo onnel, the Messina, Key On Bid Ai fura dams, the Vidparaisdi Ibramocouple, the Bandung pid Akoreyr volcanic taps. Some wo ive, and even valuable, some monuments to inept politics. You know the further consequences of some of them -- the disputes over output use which led to a dozen minor wars, which in turn wasted more energy in a year than all the crash units together could produce in a human lifetime. And you know that the final result was the formation of the Board and general acceptance of power rationing. During the period of friction several nations attempted to set up secret power plants, in the hope either of avoiding the covetousness of their neighbors or of providing themselves with energy reserves in case violent conflict did occur. Most of these "secrets" were secret only to the general public of the nation concerned long before they were producing -- such of them as got that far. A few lasted for several years after Board rationing began. It had been assumed that the last of these had been found and tied into the general power net many decades ago. But here was another. It was as simple as that -- almost. I didn't find in the records just what country was responsible. I didn't try very hard. The name would have been almost as meaningless to me, born more than half a century after country names had become merely geographical labels, as it would have been to Abraham Lincoln, who died probably twice as long before the nation in question existed. It was probably a small enough country to be worried about its neighbors, and certainly a large enough one to be highly industrialized. The technique of deep-sea living which was being so effectively demonstrated to me at this moment was not la product of casual, or ev of crash-program, research. It must have involved a very long development period. Knowing something of the customs of the time, I'm still amazed that the secret was kept -- though I can guess at the steps which in those days would have seemed normal and proper to achieve this end. Anyway, they set up the station and had it running nicely before the Board and rationing became a realityRemember, it was a secret. It had to be. Only a handful of people would have known about it at any one time, other than the thousands of permanent residents. That handful, when rationing began and all power sources became public property, simply and quietly withdrew from the world and severed connections with it. A little ruthlessness may have been necessary, but I prefer to believe that the worst to happen was a little forced change of address. At any rate, there was suddenly a new nation with a population of about fifteen thousand at the bottom of the Pacific. It was well supplied with manufacturing and synthesizing plants, and over-supplied with energy. Fifteen thousand people. As Marie put it later, fifteen thousand aristocrats -- and more than fifteen More realistically, fifteen thousand cut flowers. Most of the accounts I read expressed, or at least hinted, the belief that the severance of relations with the surface hadn't been meant IF to be so complete. It must have been obvious to all concerned that a population of tbat size wm far too small to maintain a hiy technical culture and equally obvious that only a highly technical culture could live under those conditions. They presumably meant to maintain intellectual contact with the rest of mankind -- probably they even meant to maintain physical connection, since it's hard to believe that they expected to be able to manufacture every piece of equipment they needed to keep themselves going. But they didn't maintain those contacts. They couldn't. They might possibly have managed, even in the face of the unexpected difficulty,, if what contact there was didn't have to be siureptitious; but the two factors together broke the link. The unexpected difficulty might have been foreseen if the station had been running for more than a very few years before the break; there would have been some eye-opening experience. As it was, the experience came later. A technical culture has to be a literate one, at least until some adequate substitute for the reference book can be devised. Did you ever consider the problem of teaching a phonetic language like Russian or English to someone who had never heard a spoken word and can't produce a sound himself? All right, I know it can be done by a highly trained specialist. What do you do, though, for the specialists needed when no one in the entire population can speak a word and you want to teach the new neration to read Farrington Daniels's Mathematical Preparation for Physical Chemistry or some similar basic work? You're not qualified yourself. All your neighbors are in the same boat. The kids themselves are playing around together, presumably communicating by signs of some sort, but what are the chances of the signs they've invented for themselves being useful for explaining elementary vector analysis? Even elementary discipline questions are hard enough to get across; in this medium it's impossible to administer a decent spanking. Still, you've got to produce a certain number of competent engineers and technicians with each generation, or the whole group is going to die in the darkness and chill of the ocean bottom. What youd do I don't know, but this group leaned heavily on pictures. I don't know the details. There were differing versions in the books I read, and I suspect that many of them were guesses on the part of the writers. There must have been a lot of determination, some panic, a high general intelligence level and a certain amount of plain luck involved. As it came out in the end, the grandchildren of the original group had the use of a highly workable written language which must have evolved, just as I'd suspected when I saw it, from electrical and engineering diagrams -- the sort of things where the connection between symbol and experience could be most easily shown to the growing children. The IF gesture language was a derivative of the written one, with gesture patterns standing for drawn symbols in much the way that our phonetic written languages are derivatives of the spoken equivalents. Think over the details yourself; I'm still incompetent. What I could see was that children who had never heard a spoken word and had grown up using a language which is basically pictorial, with a back-up code of gesture symbols, are going to have quite a time learning a language which is basically oral, with a back-up code of written phonetic symbols. I don't say it will be impossible for them. An intelligent and determined person can accomplish remarkable things. I do say that very, very few of them are going to consider it worth much effort. The majority, however intelligent, are unlikely to be determined. Of the few that will make the effort, none will have much confidence in their own skill, because they will never have had a chance to check it except on each other. They'll be like a social club which has decided to learn Sanskrit as a project and has only books to learn from. There'll be some uncertainty even in matching an engineering text with the machinery it's supposed to describe. Given the choice between using the original maintenance manual, printed in chicken tracks which really Stand for sounds they've never heard, and using the notes made for their convenience by the maintenance workers who already know the machines -- which are the kids going to do for homework? O f course, the original books are still available as the years go on. They oertainly aren't getting worn out. Unfortunately, as the years go on the original books become less and less useful. They need modern texts, in one sense; but there are two strikes against the modern text. First and obviously, they can't read it. Second, it's about as directly useful on machines designed and built a century or so ago as the manual on a power lathe would be to a flint-axe maker of thirty thousand B.C. The machines designed and built so long ago have lasted well, but not perfectly. Routine maintenance must, more and more often, give way to major repair and even replacement; the original books don't cover these problems even if they could be read. The notes of the maintenance engineers certainly don't cover them. So these people need helpers from the surface, either engineers who can do the necessary work without following a manual, or else harder-todefine experts who can take modern books and transfer their meaning to the local maintenance specialists. Maybe school-teachers would be the best term. In other words, they need Joe, and Bert, and Marie, and me. They need practically anyone they can recruit from the surface. Need us. Marie's hypothesis was perfectly right They've been getting people like us for decades past -- the people whose writings enabled me to figure all this out -- and their survival depends on keeping it up. But that gave food for another thought. It was easy enough to helieve that ii certain percentage of the people who had come to this place, either accidentally or as a result of surreptitious recruiting, had been persuaded to stay of their own free will. It was much harder to believe that all of them had been. What had happened to those who had not agreed? I could see two possibilities. One was the fate which Marie seemed to expect if she tried to leave. The other was the explanation Bert had offered, that they had been allowed to return to the surface unharmed but that the Board had covered up their stories or reports. But Joe was a proven and admitted liar. He might also be wrong. There were references in the books I had read to visitors who had arrived, but of whom nothing more was mentioned. Of course if they hadn't stayed it was unlikely that anything would be -- either way. I didn't like to believe that violence had been used -- I preferred to believe that Bert was right. Still, Marie was far from stupid, and the morals of this isolated culture might well be those of a century or so back. In fact, in some ways they obviously were. I t was enough for me that there was even a possibility that Marie might be in danger. For once, I was in complete agreement with Bert; she had to be persuaded to leave at once. Furthermore, she should be guarded until she was well away from here. Guarded by me. That meant two jobs, of which the first was likely to be the harder. Marie bad listened to Bert's arguments about her leaving for several weeks, with no result except a complete undermining of her trust in Bert. How could I possibly do any better? I claim to be a reasonably good engineer, as I've said before, and I can run a competent investigation when the subject is an essentially technical one like tracking down where power is going. I'm not a plotter, though, in the real, old-style meaning of the term, and for a while I was completely stumped by this problem. I suppose what blocked me so long from a working idea was a natural reluctance to tell anything but the truth to Marie, back up by an even greater dislike of causing her unhappiness. I don't know what finally broke through that block. Suddenly, though, it seemed as clear as Say that if Marie were bound and determined to stay as long as she believed that Joe might be alive down here, she would presumably go if she were to be convinced that he had died down here. I didn't like the idea. I don't like lying, especially to people who trust me and most especially to Marie. I went through the usual stage in childhood where lying seemed the easiest way out of all troubles, but some very good teachers and a pair of understanding parents, assisted by a close friend with a good right cross who outweighed me by fifteen pounds, had helped me outgrow it. IF In the present case, I had to tell myself repeatedly that it was for Marie's own safety before I could decide it was proper to do. How I convinced myself that it would also be worth the unhappiness it was certain to cause her is something I choose not to discuss. Once I was convinced, the plan was so simple that I wondered why Bert had never thought of it. After all, he seemed to lack my prejudice against falsehood. I suggested it to him at the first opportunity, and he couldn't see why he hadn't thought of it either. He approved strongly, and complimented me as eloquently as developing writer's cramp would permit. Then he set to work on arrangements. The plan was simple enough, Joe's sub was still here, of course. We would simply wreck it, tell Marie we had found the remains, and if necessary show them to her. A little care would make sure that the registry number and enough other identification features remained recognizable. With that much agreed, we set out for the dock where the boat lay. We'd have been able to get to work the moment we reached it, except for the fact that the half-hour swim without communication had enabled each of us to work out all the details. When we resumed conversation, the details didn't jibe, and it took half an hour or so to reconcile them. With that, actual work and Bert's search for people to help us with transportation, more than six hours passed before we were really ready to move the sub outside. We didn't attempt to run it out under its own power, though that would have been possible. It had been allowed to fill with the livingliquid at local pressure after Joe had been converted. We were able to work on its inner plumbing with no trouble. We thought of bringing it back to the "operating room" and connecting it with the transfer lock so that we could pump room and sub back down to surface pressure, but an easier plan had occurred to me. Like all deep-work machines, Joe's vessel had very large lift and ballast tanks. The former still worked, not having leaked enough flotation liquid to matter, judging by the sub's present buoyancy. The latter, of course, were now full of the liquid which formed our regular environment. They were in two major units extending nearly the full length of the hull parallel to the keel, with each unit divided into four cells by bulkheads containing valves and transfer pumps. We opened all these valves. Then we cracked the seals on the maintenance ports without opening them completely, so that fluid could bleed between the main hull interior and the ballast tanks. The ballast scavenger pumps would now, given time, empty the hull as well as the tanks. Finally, we arranged for the collapse of the hull. I had taken for granted that we could use ordinary explosive squibs, forgetting how sound affected a person living in liquid. The things simply weren't to be had; they were never used here. We finally settled the problem -- we thought -- by opening all the interhull inspection plates and removing as many of the bolted braces -- the ones which had to be removable for maintenance purposes -- as possible. It seemed pretty certain that pumping out the hull now could hardly help but cause it to collapse. A good deal of time was wasted trying to improvise something that would start the ballast pumps either by time or from outside. It finally occurred to someone -- not me -- that there was nothing to prevent us from starting them from inside and then leaving, shutting the lock after us. Pressure would not start to drop until the hull was sealed off from the ocean. T hat seemed to finish the job. The sub was already weighted in near-equilibrium with outside ballast, so we picked it up and began to swim toward the nearest entrance. There were ten of us altogether, and the load wasn't too bad. We brought it to a halt under the roof opening, pushed it up until it met the interface and left it there while we donned outdoor coveralls. I wasn't yet accustomed to these. I hadn't. yet gotten around to asking what the little tank on the back was for -- my theory didn't account for it, as you may remember. There was no chance to ask now. Bert helped me to adjust everything properly, though I wasn't sure what he was doing part of the time. In three or four minutes we were casting off the outside ballast, and the sub was entering water tor the last time. We left a little negative buoyancy on her, and some of us walked supporting the hull while the rest swam and pushed it. Bert and I hadn't made any special plans about where the wreck should be staged; obviously it shouldn't be too close to an entrance, or there'd be little excuse for not having found it sooner. On the other hand, it wouldn't be possible to carry the thing too far away. We gave it an hour of travel and then let the hulk settle to the bottom. Personally, I couldn't have found my way back to the entrance we had used, and it would have been sheer luck if I ran into one. Bert and the others didn't seem worried, however. I assumed that they either knew the ground or had some navigation scheme I hadn't yet learned about. The only light came from our own lamps, whose radiance formed a tiny glowing dome in the immense blackness of the Pacific. We were far out of sight of the tent area, as I still called the farm region in my own mind. I didn't even know the direction in which that lay, and knowing would have done no good since I had no compass. Bert gestured me toward the sub's lock. I opened it and went in. In a way, I hated to do this, but the idea still seemed good. What I had to do inside was done quickly; it amounted only to closing two switches. I closed the locks behind me and joined the others. We had recharged the boat's batIF teries, and there was no worry about there being energy enough to empty her. I was quite proud of remembering that point -- large as the tanks were, adding the hull volume to them meant a tremendous additional job for the pumps. However, I had barely reached the rest of the group when we were reminded of something neither Bert nor I had thought of, and for which there was not the slightest excuse for either of us. Emptying the ballast tanks with the flotation tanks still full put positive lift on the boat. Naturally, she started up. Fortunately the initial rise wasn't too quick. I was able to catch her, open the lock under power -- I couldn't have done it manually with pressure difference already set up -- and unseal and open the liftjettison valves. By the time I got outside again the ship was a couple of hundred feet from the bottom. The swimmers were flocked around covering the scene with their lights: I looked at the top of the hull and saw the oily stream of lift fluid pouring out. The rate of climb was already slowing, and in a muinte or two it ceased and reversed. We followed the ship back to a place on the bottom not too far from the one we had picked. And there we waited. And waited. And waited. T he helpers talked finger-language among themselves. Bert and I couldn't talk at all, since the pad had been left back at the entrance when we had donned the coveralls. We each knew just about what the other was thinking, though, and as time went by and the hull just lay there we began to exchange inquiring glances. The pumps had had time to handle the total volume by now, certainly. The inside of that ship should be practically a vacuum. We had paid no attention to what was left in her air tanks. There couldn't have been enough to matter at this pressure. No bubbles had appeared from the ballast vents, but any air released by the tanks inside might well have gone into solution at this pressure before being ejected. The problem was not whether the inside pressure was zero or some small number of atmospheres, though; it was what we could possibly do about the hull's failure to collapse. The pressure would stay down until long after the pumps ran out of fuel, and even that would be a long time since they must now be running free. Considering the general reliability of Board equipment, it could be months before some tiny leak let the internal pressure build up again to the point where even power could open the locks. I didn't know how long we could sit around without more oxygen-food, but it certainly wasn't months. As a matter of fact, it was going to be fairly hard to explain the three days or so which had already passed since I had seen Marie. Any more would be much harder, but I couldn't afford to see her again without a convincing story about Joe all ready. A . depth charge would have been helpful. Even a squib would probably have been enough; the hull. after what we had done to it, must be very, very close to its limit. Unfortunately, there were still no explosives available. All I could think of was to take the sub back, have Bert or me go into the conversion room, attach the sub to the lock which was supposed to connect the room with just such visitors, go through whatever had to be done to get the man back to surface pressure and pump the room back down so he could get into the sub to start everything over. I didn't like the idea. I was pretty sure Bert wouldn't either, but I couldn't find out under the circumstances. It wasn't the sort of idea which could be transmitted by any gestures I knew. It was going to take quite long enough with the writing pad. I did manage to make Bert understand that we would have to go back for the pad and a conference. When I tried to indicate that the sub should be brought with us, though, he vetoed the suggestion flatly. After a minute or two I stopped trying to push the idea. As I said, I wasn't too fond of the basic plan anyway. He made some gestures to the others, and all but four came with us; the four settled down on a level patch of mud twenty yards from the ship and started a game of some sort. At any other time I'd have been curious about the details. The swim back was, of course, much quicker than the one out -- or rather, would have been if we had made it. I don't know how far we got in the eight or ten minutes we were swimming. I suppose a quarter of a mile is a reasonable guess. I'm not the world's most efficient swimmer, and even I wasn't overworking. The interruption, like so much else which had gone wrong with our plans, should have been foreseen, but none of us had foreseen it. If we had, we wouldn't have been waiting anywhere around the sub after her ballast pumps had started. It was obvious enough in nature, and the only reason I didn't realize what had happened in the first second after the event was, of course, that I wasn't really conscious. XX I f you submerge yourself in water and have a friend knock a couple of large rocks together repeatedly, starting twenty or thirty yards away and coming closer until you can't Stand it any more, you may have some idea of what happened. I can't describe how it felt. In fact, since it 'knocked me unconscious for several seconds, it isn't right to say that I felt anything. There was sensation of a sort, though; perhaps if I were ure just what it feels like to be hit with a sledge hammer simultaneously on every square inch of my body I might use that as an illustration. As it is. I'll have to let you use your own imagination, aided if you like by the experiment I suggested a moment ago. The shock affected all of us IF about equally. It was a minute, perhaps more, before we were swimming as fast as we could back toward the place we had left the others. None of us had any doubt about what had happened; none of us was really eager to go back to the scene. But we hurried. I had expected to find four bodies in the mud where our companions had been enjoying their game, but it wasn't that simple. The wreckage of the sub was about where it had been, as far as I could tell. But the shock wave as the hull imploded had kicked up a cloud of ooze which was still settling, and our lights showed us very little. We stayed close together and swam through the obscurity in all directions, searching every square foot of bottom not only for obvious fragments but for signs of objects buried under recently settled mud. That took no communication to arrange. We found one of the men partly buried about fifteen feet from the nearest part of the wreck. He seemed intact as far as gross injuries were concerned, but I knew he couldn't possibly be alive. The shock wave had knocked us out at several hundred yards, and the inverse square law applies under water, too. We could find none of the others on the bottom, but as the mud settled another of them became visible about twenty feet up, rising very slowly. A thin trail of oily droplets was leaking from the base of his helmet. I hadn't stopped to think that with the dense Uqukl have flotation material to let the wearers swim in water. With the heavier liquid leaking out, the fellow's buoyancy was going positive. That made it fairly obvious why we couldn't find the other two. They had probably sprung faster leaks. I could imagine them somewhere above us in the dark, ballooning toward the surface with the last of the liquid that had made their strange lives possible dribbling back toward the sea bottom. I thought of looking for a rain of oily drops which might let us track them, but I had no way of communicating the suggestion to the others, and it was pretty obvious that our lights were far too weak for such a search anyway. The rest of the group had the same general idea, evidently. With the two bodies in tow, we headed back toward the entrance. I wished there were enough light to read the facial expressions of our companions. I would have liked to be able to guess how they felt about the foreigners whose operations had killed four of their friends. I didn't know what reason Bert had given for the whole procedure; maybe they thought it was an important piece of engineering research, or something like that. I hoped so. It was bad enough feeling guilty myself, without having the rest of the population down on me too. I also wished I knew how Bert felt. The victims might have been close friends of his, for all I knew. I thought I might get some idea when we reached the entrance, but I was disappointed. There was plenty of excitement when we came in, but I simply couldn't tell what most of the facial expressions meant. I hadn't realized how conventional such expressions actually are; unless you've grown up in a society where there is a standard face mask for anger, and another for disgust, and so on, reading faces isn't a very safe way to collect information. The people might have been angry, sad or disgusted; I couldn't tell. There was much gesturing among them as the bodies were taken away, and a certain amount between some of them and Bert, but all I can say about their feeling toward us comes from the fact that we weren't mobbed. I couldn't even be sure that that situation would last; maybe no close friends or relatives of the victims happened to be present. Activity around the entrance took half an hour or so to die down to normal. The bodies were finally gone, the men who had been with us had swum off about their own affairs and the swimmers one always seemed to see around any of the entrances were paying no more attention to us than usual. For some of them, that was a good deal; the girl who had gone down to the power section with us was back with her friends. Bert was finally able to use the writing pad again. There was a lot I would have said -- I was still feeling shaken, and guilty, and a lot of other things of which stupid was the kindest -- but the same old communication trouble blocked me. There are some times when a man just can't talk fast enough, and a lot of times when he can't come even close to writing fast enough. I rather expected Bert to say something about what had happened, since I was sure enough of his facial expressions to know that he'd been hit pretty hard too. But his writing was confined strictly to business. "That should convince Marie, if anything will. The best thing will be for you to go to her now, tell her Joe's sub has been found wrecked and try to persuade her to take her own boat out to see it. Then going. If she won't believe you and insists on staying put, we'll have to bring the wreck in. That'll have to work. I don't know what we'll do if it doesn't." "You could stop feeding her." He looked at me and raised one eyebrow. "Could you?" he scrawled. I shrugged my shoulders, but knew I couldn't. "Lead on," I wrote. He led. T he speechless pauses while I was going from one place to another would have given me all sorts of opportunity to think, and maybe even to see holes in the fabric I'd been so busy weaving, if I were only another hundred per cent or so quicker on the uptake. As it was, the next twenty minutes of swimming brought me no ideas at all IF except details of what to say to Marie. None of these represented firstclass plotting. I was still very uneasy as I swam up to her sub -- Bert had stayed out of sight, as before -- and tapped on the hull. Fortunately, that attitude fitted perfectly with the act I was supposed to play. Marie answered almost at once, and her face appeared at the conning port. It was nice to see another set of features on which the expression could be read, even though the expression wasn't all I would have liked just at first. It softened a little when she recognized me, though. As before, I couldn't be sure of her vocal intonations, but the words came through understandably enough. "Where have you been? I was beginning to think they'd disposed of you, too." I answered the important part of the remark on the pad. "Finding things out." "From Bert?" "No. They have a library here, much of it handwritten stuff by other people who have come down here in the past -- and much too much of it for Bert to have written himself. The writings are pretty consistent, and I think I have a fairly sound picture of the whole situation." "What did you learn about Joe?" I hesitated. I had been sure the question would come early, and I had my lie all made up, but telling a lie to Marie came hard. I told myself again that it was in a good cause and started to write, but she had already caught my hesitation, or maybe the expression that wt with it -- I've never claimed to be an actor. "You have heard about him, haven't you?" I nodded. "And he's -- he's -- " She fell silent, watching me through the armor glass. I nodded to that, too. It was easier than writing an out-and-out falsehood. I couldn't see anything but her face, but I could imagine the clenched fists. In fact, I had to wince as what was probably one of them struck the inside of the hull and sent a painful sound wave pulsing out into the room. Her voice came again. "I was right. He wouldn't sell out. He wouldn't give up everything a decent person believes in, so they killed him." "Why should they destroy him that way?" I countered. "It could have been done much more easily while he was inside, as he must have been when they were talking to him if you're right. They could have let him suffocate or starve -- which they haven't done to you, remember -- when his supplies ran out. They wouldn't have wasted the sub that way, either." "Simple. Because they wanted the death to occur outside, with him in the sub, so that when a search was made it would appear a regular accident. I'm surprised you didn't think of that." At least she didn't say "even you." I'm slower-witted than Marie and know it perfectly well, but I had tlKU(g)it of that, as well as an answer for it.  "Don't be silly. Who'd be surprised, or even suspicious, at finding nothing when they did search for him? The Pacific has a lot of square miles at its bottom, and even more cubic ones on the way down." For a wonder, she had no answer to that, and was silent for several seconds. When she did speak again, she had dropped the subject of Joe for the moment and asked me to tell her what I had learned from the library. I t took a long time, but I did my best. She read each page with care, sometimes nodding silently, sometimes asking questions after finishing it. I answered them all as my knowledge permitted. About half her questions had to do with how heavily I had depended on Bert for my information. It must have been over an hour before I had painted about the same general picture for her that I had formed myself. I closed with the plea that was the key to the whole plan. "Marie, you've got to get back and report all this. Whatever Bert may have said about your staying, the Board has got to knxw everything. Bert and I will get back on our own when we can, and you don't have to consider Joe any more." "Bert? Why should he want to go back? I know he's staying. He admitted it. He's had a taste of doing what he wants, without having to consider other people. He tried to talk me into doing the same, the dirty beast. The fact that he's staying here is the only thing your suggestion that I go." 'T don't believe that of him," I wrote. "He told me he was staying, too, but implied that it wasn't permanently. My feeling then was that he'd joined to find out what we need to know and would come back when and if he could, just as I did." "I can believe it of yon." She fell silent again and thought for several minutes while I listened to my own heartbeat. It was the most encouraging thing she'd ever said to me, and I felt worse than ever about the lie. I had to tell myself several times more that it wasn't for her own safety. Her own safety wasn't Marie's concern, however. She made that clear enough in the next few minutes. When she finally did speak again, it was clear that she'd been doing some rapid planning. "All right," she said. "I'll go, though I still don't think they'll let me get away. There'll be some sort of accident. I've an idea, though, which just might tell which of us is right about this." "I looked at her inquiringly, but didn't bother to write anything. "You seem to believe that they're port to the Board, and that the change that's been made in you and Bert can be reversed so that you can IF come back and breathe air again when you want to. Right?" I nodded. "All right. I don't believe either of those items. To find out, you just swim off and tell Bert that m go back if he'll come with me, in this sub. He can come back down afterward again if he likes, but I'll be much more convinced of his yarn if I see him breathing air again, and I'll feel a lot safer if he's in this boat with me when I drive it out of here. Now tell me why you think that's a silly idea and a waste of time and effort, and all that sort of nonsense." I didn't need air-normal sound transmission to know there was sarcasm in her tone; I couldn't hear it, but it was certainly there. She didn't trust me entirely, either. At least I could get some satisfaction out of surprising her with my answer. "It seems like a fine idea to me," I wrote. "I'll find Bert and put it up to him. I suppose you wouldn't accept me as a substitute if he prefers to stay a while longer." Her expression changed a little, but I wasn't quite sure what the new one meant. " 'Fraid not," she said. "It would prove your point about the return possibility, but I don't think you'd make as good a hostage." That was some comfort, anyway. "We'll play it my way, as far as it goes. Go find Bert and learn what he says." I swam off obediently. Bert was waiting in the entrance chamber this time, apparently improving his knowledge of the finger language with the assistance of our same old followers, the girl and her friends -- two of them, anyway. I couldn't have told which was the missing one. I had boiled everything down to one sentence on the pad and showed this to him the moment I was close enough. "Marie says she'll go if you'll change back and go with her." He stared at it for a full half minute without even moving to take it from my hand. Then he suddenly snatched it and, without clearing the writing, swam off down the tunnel toward the sub. The rest of us followed. He streaked over to the conning port where her face was stm visible and held up the pad with my words still on it. She looked at it. He pointed at me and back at the pad and put on an expression which anyone, regardless of cultural background, could have read. She answered aloud. "That's it, Bert." He cleared the page, looking at her in a puzzled fashion. "Why?" he wrote. "I may explain later. Will you come?" His answer startled Marie. I wasn't sure what it did to me. "Sure. I may have to come back later -- there's useful work to do down here. But it might be best if I went with you now anyway. There's a lot to be reported that there hasn't been time for either of us to tell you." I thought that was a pretty tactful way of passing off her refusal to listen to him all those weeks. "I could make a more UI tharougii job of it." He paused in thought, even longer than it took Marie to read die sentences. Then he went on, "We'll tow your suib to the operating room -- it'll he easier that way than for you to pilot it -- and connect it to the lock. I'll go in and get depressurized. They won't argue too hard. I can come in through your lock then, and we can go hack up together." He turned to me and added the word, "Okay?" I wasn't sure it was okay. Without Bert I wouldn't be able to do anything useful, as far as I could see. No doubt the girl who was still watching us, and her friends, might until I learned my way around. They might even guide me back to where I could work with Joe, if that was to be my main occupation; but I couldn't see what use I'd be to the Board that way. I hope it's been obvious that I never intended my residence to be permanent, as Joe apparently had. I hadn't been lying to Marie about that. There was no use suggesting that I go back with the two of them. The sub wouldn't take us. It was built for one, and crowding Bert in would be hard enough. T ien I remembered that Bert's own sub should still be around somewhere. I gabbed the pad. "Why can't we all go back? I wrote. "Your boat must still be here, too. If Marie feels so strongly about having you in hers, I could still use yours. You can still come down again, or both of us can, if the job seems to call for it." It seemed like a fine idea to me, and even Marie appeared to approve of it, but Bert had a question or two. I had to admit he raised good points. "The operating room will handle only one at a time. Once I'm done, there'll be communication trouble during your own depressurization." "You could explain the whole program to them first. For that matter, I could go through it first." "I'm not sure I could explain it too well. Remember, I'm no expert in this finger-wiggling." "But why couldn't I go first, with you directing which sub was to be connected, and so on, until it was your turn?" "You could, I suppose. We'd better check my boat, ithough. It's been here a long time and been used for regular work here. The flotation system will certainly need going over. I'm not sure I'd like to risk it against pressure differential myself, but we'll see. We'd better check that first." Marie had been reading our conversation and nodded approval, so our flock went off to look over the vessel. He was right. The flotation liquid was completely gone. It hadn't been used even locally for months, since there were no facilities for making the hydrocarbon its buoyancy tanks were designed to use. The local machines used the" same sort of lowdensity solid employed in the swimming coveralls; it would have involved major structural changes to put that into the submarine. No one had considered it worth the trouble. IF "I could use one of the local boats," I suggested when this became clear. "Don't try it until you learn the language," was the rejoinder. That seemed a little silly. A sub is a sub, and you either understand them or you don't. A look into one of them educated me, though. I still don't see why their control panels are made that way; the laws of physics are the same down here as up above. Apparently the difference in basic thinking which goes with that weird graphic language extends into more factors than mere common sense would lead anyone to expect. I t began to look as though the other two were going back alone. Bert seemed quite resigned to it, and even I was getting that way. When we went back to Marie with the word, though, she came up with another of her ideas. I've come to suspect since then that she had something more in her mind than just getting me back to the surface, just as she had when she insisted on Bert's going along, but she didn't confide in me. Of course, that may have been because there was no way for her to speak to me alone. "There's plenty of spare buoyancy in my tanks," she pointed out suddenly and firmly. "Just attach that wreck of Bert's to my tow-lugs, and v.e can haul it along. You say the hull's sound enough to hold against the pressure when you pump it down again." Bert seemed startled, no doubt because he hadn't thought of that himself. That was my suspicion, anyway. But he promptly agreed; and so it was settled. He went off to get help in towing the subs and to arrange for the operating room, and I took advantage of his absence to write a remark or two to Marie. "You seem to have been wrong about Bert. He certainly took you up fast enough on that test suggestion." "So I noticed." I waited for further comment, but got none. I suppose I should have known better than to expect any. When she did speak again, it was on a wholly different subject -- I thought. "Be sure you check the bitts on both subs very carefully." I nodded, surprised; that was too standard a procedure to call for special comment. "And the lines, too. You'll use mine; they're newer." I agreed silently, wondering and perhaps hoping a bit. Anything from Marie that sounded like interest in my welfare was enough to make me hope. I was still several miles behind her reasoning, only partly because I hadn't started out with the same set of prejudices. She wanted it that way, I guess; she firmly changed the subject by asking about the people who were floating beside me. "Who are your friends? Is the lady one of the reasons you decided to stop breathing air?" "No!" I wrote emphatically. "I never saw her to my knowledge before I made the change." I couldn't understand why Marie was laughing. "I can't introduce you, because I've never heard their names. With this language, I'm not sure what a personal name would be like. Miaybe they haven't any." She grinned for the first time since I'd seen her down here. "That accounts for your staying, then. No, don't bother to point out that you didn't know about the language till afterward. I know you didn't. It must be a strong recommendation for the place, though, now that you do know about it." As it happened, I hadn't thought of that. She was quite right, though. That was one nuisance of my life which couldn't possibly follow me down here. Marie was watching my expression and, I guess, reading it like a book. She laughed even louder than before. The sound wasn't much like laughter under the circumstances, but it was different enough from ordinary speech to catch the attention of my attendants. They looked from me to the sub and back, but could make nothing of it. The girl smiled again, though. Marie was right, in a way. If I did have to stay down here for any reason -- I killed that thought firmly. Where Marie went, I was going, sooner or later. T he party grew almost gay for a while as we waited for Bert. Both Marie and I tried more communication experiments with the girl and her friends, but only the most elementary signs made sense to them, and not always even these. We even tried to get the idea of a phonetic alphabet across, Marie providing the sounds and I the symbols. But it was hopeless. This wasn't entirely due to their own background deficiencies; sounds were modified enough in this combination of media so that basic letters no longer abstracted the same parts. For example, "p" and "s" didn't sound as different as they should, and when you put them together in a word like "speak" the combination of symbols had even less resemblance, or I should say recognizable relation, to the combination of sounds. About all that was accomplished before Bert came back was to convince even Marie that there was a genuine, serious problem in communication to be solved. She wasn't even yet, convinced that it was worth solving. She was as a whole separate culture rather than a group of criminal fugitives from our own, but she still thought of the culture rather as a dignified lady of mid-nineteenth century Boston probably regarded the South Sea cannibals her missionary society had told her about. At least, she was polite to them. The politeness faded a trifle when Bert came back with bad news. The Council, it seemed, would hear nothing of letting both Bert and me go back to the surface at the same time. Either one was all right, but not both. I was dumfounded and unable to fit this into my picture of the situation. Marie didn't actually say "I told you so," but the look she gave IF me earned die thought completely. It was unfair, since she hadn't. She might have guessed it for herself, but she hadn't told me. Maybe it was that look that stiffened me up again. I reminded myself that the main thing was to get Marie back to the surface safe and sound. After she'd reported in, the Board would certainly open communication with this place, no matter what Bert thought, and there'd be all sorts of other chances to get back myself. I still, you must remember, didn't believe Bert's claim that the Board had ignored or buried earlier reports of this installation. My feeling was based mostly on my personal prejudices as a long-time Board official; I just couldn't imagine the organization's doing such a thing. So it still seemed sensible for me to let the other two go back together while I stayed on temporarily. I said so, without all the background thoughts, on the pad. Bert agreed at once. M arie seemed a little less enthusiastic now, but finally decided that this was acceptable. Bert suggested that he go off once more to report the new situation to the Council and find help for towing the sub, but she countered with the idea that she drive it herself with one of the natives swimming ahead as a guide. Bert could tell the guide where she was supposed to go. I was a little surprised that she was without Bert along, in view of her stated plan, but I realized that she might have thought of several new aspects of the matter since then. I hoped she might want me to go with her to the conversion lock instead, but she made no mention of such a thought. Once again I felt 'way outside as far as her plans and ideas were concerned. We waited until Bert had finished waving at one of the men, which took quite a while. Then the fellow set t)ff along the main corridor ouitde the room, and Marie lifted her boat from the floor and followed in his wake -- that's not a very good word, since he couldn't leave a visible wake under the circumstances, but you know what I mean. Then Bert started off to make his arrangements with the Council. He had almost disappeared when I thought of something and had to hiury after him. Fortunately he wasn't being very hasty himself or I'd never have caught him; it was a major nuisance, having no way to call out to get someone's attention. It occurred to me that there ought to be clickers or tappers or something of that sort for the purpose. It then occurred to me that maybe there were, and I simply hadn't learned about them yet. Anyway, I did catch Bert and quickly wrote a question. "Shouldn't someone let Joe know where you're going? He's going to be in almost as bad a mess as I am without you." Bert thought for a moment, and nodded. "Probably best, yes. You'd better do it while I see the Council. Only for Pete's sake don't let it slip that .# Marie is (here." I looked properly indignant. 'TU have one of these folks show you the way. He ought to be off shift right now, though he often stays longer than anyone expects. Anyway, you can try his quarters, and then the farms, before going back down to Power Control." He turned to the others and began gesturing again. He finally managed to get his wishes across, though it was still evident that he had spoken the truth about knowing only a little of the gesture-speech. I wasn't disappointed to have the girl touch me on the arm and beckon me to follow. We still had company, but things could have been worse. B ert must have gotten across with his gestures just about what he'd written. We went first to what was obviously a private residence -- at least, it was obvious after we were inside. Its door was just another of many along one of the tunnels. The girl used the first audible signal I'd heard since arriving -- a very ordinary, though very gentle, knock on a round panel beside the door. When this went unanswered for half a minute or so she opened the door and swam in. Evidently standards of privacy were different here. The apartment was divided into three main rooms, seemingly on a basis of use; one seemed to be for sleeping, one for reading and similar solo activities and the largest for more public gatherings. Joe wasn't in any of them, and the girl led us out again and off in a new direction. A short swim took us to another of the upward-slanting tunnels leading to the farm area. I was more alert this time and caught the change in slope. Out in the open, she stopped and looked around to see whether Joe was in sight. I spent some of the time she was looking in trying to calculate the size of the farm area from what I knew of the population size and the number visible eating at one time. I decided I'd need a better estimate on how long the average citizen spent both at meals and between them before my results could mean much. It took about five minutes of looking and questioning others for the girl to find Joe. I spent some of that interval writing my message to him, so that when we did catch up with him I was able to give it to him without delay. It merely said that Bert was taking a trip to the surface, and that I understood I was to start working with Joe as soon as he could use me. Elfven nodded his head, took the pad, wrote, "All right. I'll be going back to work in a few hours. I have to sleep after I finish eating. Can you find your way to the control room yet?" "I'm not sure, but I seem to have a good guide," I replied. He glanced at the girl and nodded again. "I wish I could make something out of one or the other of these communication methods," he wrote. "We're going to have an awful time without Bert. Why is he going himself, instead of sending you?" "He seems to feel that he can make a more complete report than I cam," I answered. "I suppose he's rit. As long as we're working mostly with each other we won't miss die language too much." J oe shrugged, suggesting that he wasn't entirely in agreement but didn't feel strongly enough about the matter to write an largument. He resumed his eating. I took a few mouthfuls myself, but was more concerned with getting back to Marie; so I touched the girl's shoulder -- she was eating, too -- and pointed toward the tunnel mouth from which we bad come. I had managed to keep track of its direction. She nodded and led the way. At least some signs were understandable to both of us, I guessed. It took us ten or fifteen minutes to get back to where we had left Marie. She wasn't there, of course; I got the impression that my guide had forgotten that the sub had left ahead of us, though I may be doing her an injustice. At any rate, she promptly set off in the direction the boat had gone, and in another quarter of an hour we had reached a place I could remember -- the corridor with the big valve which had admitted my tank when I had taken the pressure treatment. Knowing more of the general situation now, I paid more attention to the smaller loQk. A close look showed that it had a heavily armored extensible collar, now retracted, which could ibe mated easily to the entrance hatch of any ordinary work sub. I was a little surprised that Marie's boat wasn't already there. I think the girl was, too. At least, she looked around as tfaou didn't quite know what to do or where to go next, and then looked at me as thou expecting some further request. All I could do was nod; I was quite sure that this was the right place. It occurred to me that tunnel size might have forced the others to take a longer route than swimmers would need, or even to go outside, but I could think of no way to make this suggestion to my companions. For that matter, I could imagine no reason why they shouldn't think of it for themselves; they certainly knew this place better than I. It was Bert who showed up first, accompanied by a man of middle age and alert appearance. He didn't exactly introduce the fellow to me, but used the writing pad to tell me tiiat he was the doctor who would manage the heart-lung equipment and make sure that cavities such as sinuses and middle ears were taken care of during the pressure change. They had been with us ten minutes or so when the sub appeared Irom the direction of the ocean entrance. At almost the same moment another swimmer joined us from the opposite direction. I took a casual glance at him, supposing he must be another of the technicians who would be needed for the job; then my eyes closed as I tried to dear my retinas of what I hoped was a false image. When I opened them again, though, it was still Joey Elfven. I had to admit that the stage manager, whoever he was, had done a good job. J# IF I also had to admit that we should have foreseen it. Joey should never have been told of the departure plans until Marie and Bert were safely away. Nothing was more likely than that he would think of some final questions he wanted to ask Bert, and he would certainly know where to meet him. Evidently Bert was no better a schemer than I was, but that was very little comfort at the moment. Marie saw him before either Bert or I could think of anything to do; the sub suddenly left its swimming guide behind. Seconds later its water jets sent us spinning as it came to a halt in front of our group. Yes, Marie had seen Joe. Her politeness with the savages had evaporated. I had been hearing my own heartbeat and those of people near me for some time now, but I hadn't realized until this moment how loud that beat could be. Marie's voice, though, turned out to be louder. Her first words weren't just the ones I would have expected, but I've already admitted that she thinks a good deal faster than I do. Not always in the same direction, or even in the right one, but faster. "Joe!" It ought to have been a howl of surprised welcome, but even the peculiar acoustical situation left me pretty sure it wasn't. It's hard to believe that a girl known to have gone so completely overboard for someone could address him in the tone of a stern aunt, but the resemblance was there. "Joe, how long have you known that I was here?" Joe looked around for the writing pad; I was delighted to hand it to him and in no hurry to get it back. "I didn't know until this moment," he wrote. "How long have you known that Bert was here?" "A few weeks. I dont remember exactly. Within a day or two of the time I got here myself." I could guess what was coming next, but fortunately for me I was wrong. Marie was not a technician. She can run a sub in the ordinary course of duty, naturally, but she is not really familiar with all the handling and operating gear carried by a work sub. For that reason. I'm still completely mystified how she managed to coordinate her next move so perfectly. One of the smaller handling tongs popped out of its recess and caught Bert neatly around the neck, and only when he was firmly gripped did she follow the action with words. "You dirty liar! You slimy piece of trepang! I ought to twist the head off your crooked neck! If it were possible I'd throttle you here and now! You knew why I came and who I was looking for. You knew he was here. You didn't tell him I'd come, and you lied to me about having seen him. You twisted poor Tummy so that he followed your own crooked line!" I somewhat resented the implication that I hadn't brains or initiative enough to be held responsible for my own actions, but I was able to resist the temptation to break in and insist thait part of the plan wias mine. I didn't even object to her use of one of my more odious nicknames. I just let her words run on. I won't quote any more of them; as I've said 'already, I promised her not to. I was a little sorry for Bert, since the grip on his neck must be hurting, but as Marie herself had said she couldn't very well strangle him under the circumstances. I was sure she wouldn't if she could have. Not Marie. The others seemed rather concerned, though. The girl and her regular companion flung themselves at the extension arm and wrenched at it usdcssly. The doctor tried with equal lack of success to pry the tongs from around Bert's neck. Joe knew better than to do either, but he was clearly bothered; he waved and shook his head at Marie in an effort to convince her that she should stop. It was the sort of scene which shcd have been accompanied by lively music, screams, the thump of fists and the crash of broken glass; but it all went on in ghostly silence. No screams, which were impossible; no fists, which couldn't move fast enough in this medium to make much of a thump anyway; no apparatus within reach which was fragile enough to be damaged by the gracefully thrashing bodies. It was Joe who managed to bring it to an end. He was still holding the writing pad, and he hastily printed on it in the largest letters that He held this against the coming port so Marie could see practically nothing else. It took a few more seconds, but she suddenly got her senses back and released the tongs. Bert's face was purplish, and he had lost consciousness; the doctor grabbed his wrist, I thought to check pulse, but in fact simply for a tow bar. The two of them disappeared into the operating room. I hesitated for a few seconds, unsure what was most important, and then went after them. The girl and her friend followed me; Marie's guide stayed outside with the sub. Joe, after looking as though he would come along, changed his mind. In the operating room Bert was quickly fastened to the table, and the doctor got to work. Strictly speaking he wasn't a doctor, as even I realized; there can be no doctors in a population of a few thousand people which has been separated from the mainstream of human knowledge for three or four generation. He was a darned good technician, though, and fortunately was working right in his own field. He did 'know that heart-lung machine cold, and he knew the general run of troubles involving the human breathing and circulatory systems. Interfering with the cougWng reflex, as these people had had to do for their pressure-survival system, had produced some fallout along those lines. There were controls for the machine and its auxiliary gear inside the room, presumably in parallel with the remote ones. Quite evidently depressurization wasn't the only purpose of the apparatus. IF I n something under sixty seconds the tech had Bert plugg into the gadget, andhis color was coming back to normal. Then, in more leisurely fashion, other instruments began looking and prying down his throat. Apparently very little real damage had been done there, though the outside of his neck was starting to discolor into one huge bruise. In less than five minutes the doc -- I'm going to call him one, under the circumstances -- withdrew his equipment and used a hypodermic on his patient's upper arm. The needle must have contained a stimulant, for Bert opened his eyes almost at once. It took him only a few seconds to get oriented. Then he fixed his eyes on me and actually blushed. He was still a little confused, because he started to speak. The pain in his chest as he put pressure on his liquid-filled lungs brought him back to reality. He looked around and made writing motions. The doctor didn't seem to mind, so I went back for the writing pad, which Joe still had. I didn't have to interrupt a conversation to take it. Joey wasn't writing, and Marie wasn't taJking. Apparently nothing at all had been said during the crisis in the operating room -- we'd have heard Marie's voice even there, and Joe's three words of a few minutes before were still on the pad. Marie was looking at him through the port, and he was looking everywhere but at her. I didn't pause to do any analysis. I just took the pad from Joe and swam back to the table. The doctor called Bert's attention to the blood connections between him and the machine, but made no real effort to stop him from writing. Bert nodded an acknowledgment of the warning and went ahead with the stylus. He wrote briefly, and handed the pad to me. "I'm sorry, but I can see when I'm checkmated. I hope your luck is better, though now that she knows Joe is alive I wouldn't bet on it. Tell her she didn't kill me, if you think the possibility is bothering her. I'd better not see her again myself." That was an eye-opening paragraph. Suddenly I saw just why Bert had been trifling with the truth, why he had concealed Joe's presence from Marie, why he had decided to go back to the surface on such short notice, why he had ibeen so far from completely frank with me -- and even why the local Council had been so reluctant to let us both leave. I also saw that I was in no position to criticize him for any of it. There was not a word to be said against 'him which didn't apply with equal force to me. The only reason I hadn't done as much, under exactly the same motivation, was that I'd been in no position to. I couldn't blame him, or even criticize him. I have failings, but I'm not that much of a hypocrite. I could be sorry for him; as he'd said, his chances were gone. Marie might conceivably come to realize that Joe was a hopeless case as far as she was concerned, even after this discovery that he was alive after all. She miglht possibly settle for me if that happened. But after the last few weeks and the discoveries of the last few minutes she'd never, never have any use for Bert. I gave him as sympathetic a look as I could as all this dawned on me, but I could think of nothing to write. He answered with a bitter grin and waved me toward the door. I went. The others, except the doctor, followed me. I wasn't through learning for the day, though. As I went through the huge valve and became visible from the tunnel outside, Marie's voice met me. It had sharp edges, but otherwise it resembled a heavy club. "Just where did you come up with the idea that these people weren't getting oxygen through their lungs? If I killed Bert Fm not too sorry, but it's your fault." Even I had had time to see that this question would be coming, but I'd had no chance to work out a very good answer. While the doctor had been working on Bert I'd been doing the same with my memory. It was evident enough that my theory of oxygen-food was out the window, but I still wasn't able to find a better. All I could do was repeat the theory and niy reasons for it. I also assured Marie that she hadn't actually killed Bert. Somehow my reasoning didn't look as air-tight written out as it had felt when I was thinking it through in the first place -- quite aside from the fact that it was now; obviously wrong. In spite of this, Marie seemed to calm down as I wrote page after page, let her read each, and cleared it and went on to the next. The forced pauses may have helped. "I admit you convinced me before," she said when I was done, "and I don't see what the hole is myself. Joe, in the time you've been here have you found out enough to let you tell us what's wrong with this notion?" "I think so," he wrote. He paused, and positioned himself outside the port so that Marie could read as he wrote. I swam to a spot a little further above and behind him, so I could do the same. "Your big mistake was natural. You were quite right in observing that we aren't breathing, as far as chest motions go. But in spite of that we are getting our oxygen from this liquid. It's wonderful stuff. You might regard its molecular structure as vaguely comparable to hemoglobin in that it binds oxygen molecules loosely to its surface. I don't know just how many, but the number is large. It doesn't have the porphyrin groups of hemoglobin; they went to great lengths to make it transparent to visible light. I couldn't draw you its structural formula from memory. But I've seen it. It's, perfectly understandable. "Now, think a minute. Liquid oxygen has a molecular concentration about four thousand times that of the gas we normally breathe. The reason we have to breathe is that diffusion, at sea-level concentrations, won't get enough oxygen through your windpipe to keep an animal as IP large as a ihuman being going. You can't live in liquid oxygen, of course, because of temperature problems. However, in this liquid the concentration of almost-free oxygen is far, far higher than in the atmosphere -- a long way short of what it is in other problem; while they were at it, they made the kernel of this molecule with a structure which would break down endothermically at temperatures above a few hundred degrees. A fire will tend to damp itself out, therefore. But that's a side issue, as far as breathing is concerned. C#TT#hen molecules of the stuff  Vgive up their oxygen in your your lungs, nearby molecules pass on more O # to the ones which have lost it; others replenish those, and so on. It's a bucket-brigade situation, but it's described by just the same equations that you'd use for a diffusion problem. The rate of oxygen transport depends on the concentration difference between the inside of your lungs and outside, and on the area of the barrier through which the diffusion is taking place -- in this case, the smallest cross-section area of your windpipe. In this case, the oxygen concentration around us is enough to keep us going by diffusion down our windpipes. I'm not sure about carbon-dioxide elimination, but I believe your theory is more nearly right there; it's taken care of by binding into insoluble carbonates in the intestines and gotten rid of as solid waste. As I say, that seems a little funny to me, and I may have misunderstood what I read about it. I'm going to dig into the matter more when I have time. I'm no physiologist, but it's fascinating reading, especially the history of its development." "But why such a fancy arrangement? A less efficient oxygen carrier would still work as long as you pumped fresh supplies' into your lungs! That's why we breathe, anyway!" Marie couldn't have been thinking at the top of her form just then; even I could see the answer. I took the pad from Joe -- in fact, he held it out to me, with a suspicion of a grin on his face -- and started my own exposition. "Pumping a liquid even denser than water through your windpipe would call for tremendous effort and probably dangerously high lung pressures. I tried it just after I made the change, and I know it hurts. I wouldn't be surprised if you could rupture lung tissues that way. It's a logical chain: fill body cavities with liquid so that outside pressure can be matched without serious volume change; then you can't pump the liquid with your normal breathing equipment; so you have to give it a high enough free-oxygen concentration to diffuse an adequate supply down your throat. Simple once you see it. What's the primary source of oxygen, though, Joe?" "Just what you'd expect. Photosynthesis. That's where most of the power produced here goes. About three quarters of the oxygen comes from gene-tailored algae living at the interface between the ocean and the breathing liquid. The rest comes from the farm plants. Loss to the ocean is low lecause of the favorable partition ratio." I took the pad again. "Well, at least I was right in guessing why laughing is dangerous, and why they do away with the coughing reflex; either action could rupture your lungs." "Of course," agreed Joe. "I don't claim to know the whole story yet -- even Bert, who's been here much longer, probably doesn't. Remember, all we could learn about it was what we read, and that was only what happened to be lying around written in languages we knew. We weren't told any of it by these people. Not only is it impossible to talk to them on such a level; I'm pretty sure most of them don't know it either. How many people at the surface, out of any 'given fifteen thousand, would be doctors or physiologists or even engineers?" "Hiat's why they need us so badly," I interjected. "Bert must have told you about that." "Who'd believe Bert?" snapped Marie -- we'd been holding all our writings so she could read them, of course, even when they weren't specifically meant for her. Joe took over the pad. C'ou'd better. Whatever he said I about these people being ready to do almost anything to keep technically skilled visitors down here is probably true. From what I've been able to make out in the last few weeks, unless some very extensive work is done on this installation quite soon, there'll be twelve or fifteen thousand people migrating back to the surface and asking for their power ration in the next couple of decades." "How could they have the gall to do that?" Marie asked in scorn. "They've been down here all their lives, squandering power that should have gone into the world network and shared with the rest of us. They're just like those old French aristocrats with their 'Let 'em eat cake' attitude -- except the aristocrats would have been too proud to come 'begging the Jacquerie for crusts if their own wealth vanished." "That was my first reaction, too," Joe wrote imperturbably. "I got myself pressured for the same reason Bert and you -- " he nodded to me " -- did; I planned to investigate as completely as possible and send up a report that would have the Board down here civilizing this place in a month. By the time I had enough data for a meaningful report, though, I realized it would be useless. The Board wouldn't do anything about it." "That's what Bert claimed," I put in. "He said that such reports had been sent back before, decades ago, and that nothing had come of them." Joe reclaimed the pad. "I never ran into any accounts of that sort. Bert and I wouldn't have looked for just the same material, though, an)rway. My point is that the Board can't do anything about it." "Why not? Look at all the energy going to waste down here!" interjected Marie. "Think again, girl. It's not going to waste, any more than the power used by natural plants on the surIP face for photosynthesis is going to waste -- far less, in fact. It's true that you can divide the power output of this installation by the local population figure and come up with a figure many times the normal per capita energy ration; but by far the greater part of that power goes into the lights. If you cut any significant percentage of the lights, you drop the photosynthesis rate to a level where there won't be enough oxygen for the present population. If you cut the population by much, even the shaky maintenance that the outfit has now will degenrate, and, as I said, the place will have to shut down. "You may criticize the decision the ancestors of these people made three or four generations ago. I agreed it was highly immoral by our standards. However, the current population is simply stuck with the consequences, and at least they're not drawing from the planetary power net. They're on their own, except intellectually. It seems quite in line with duty, to me, to stay here and help them. You'll have to make your own choice." Marie was silent for half a minute or so, wrapped in thought. When she spoke again, it seemed to be a change of subject. "Why did Bert lie to me? None of what you've been pointing out -- which I can see makes sense -- seems to call for it." Joe shrugged. "I have no idea. Remember, he didn't tell me you were here, much less anything else connected with you. I don't know what he had on his mind." J oe's eyes and Marie's both swiveled toward me. After looking at my face for three or four seconds, the girl said, "All right, you know. Out with it." I reached for the pad which Joe was holding out to me, and made it fairly brief. "He lied to you for the same reason I did. He didn't care what you reported to the Board, but he didn't want you ever to learn that Joe was alive. He wanted to get you back to the surface believing that Joe was just a memory and go back with you. I'd have done the same." Joe took the pad after Marie had read it, cleared off the message and wcoie, "Thanks, Pal," holding it so that I could see it but not Marie. Then he cleared it again immediately. If Marie noticed this, she made no comment. She may not have noticed, for my words had obviously jolted her. "I see," she said after at least two minutes of silence. "That puts a different light on the whole thing. He's less obvious than some people, I must admit." She paused for a few more seconds. Then, "Joe, I admit it's your own private business; but and truthfully why you decided to stay down here?" A negative shake of the head was the answer. "Or how long you plan to stay?" Another negative. "Or even whether you still regard yourself as a Board official?" Still refusal. I was pretty sure that Joe didn't really care whether Marie knew the answers to those questions. especially the first one; but, especially with the first one, he didn't want to tell her himself. He was coming as close as his personality would let him to telling her to get out of his hair. Marie, as I have already said many times, is sharper than I am, in spite of one blind spot. She looked at him speculatively after his third headshake, for several seconds. Then she suddenly turned to me. "Are you staying?" Naturally, I didn't know. All I could do was throw the question back at her; she might be rougher on me than Joe had been on her, but I was ready for it -- I hoped. "Are you?" I wrote. A shock wave, not quite painful, hit all of us; I don't know whether she hit something with her fist or stamped her foot. "Will you make your own mind up, just this once?" she snapped. That was unjust, of course. I'm perfectly able to make decisions, and Marie knows it. She's even admitted it. I just don't like to make them when there's a shortage of relevant information. She knew perfectly well what information I wanted, and why, too -- she'd just been trying to get the same sort out of Joe for the same reason. I made an honest effort to decide without reference to Marie, but I couldn't do it. O n the surface there is sunlight and sound. I hadn't really appreciated either until recently. Sunlight on trees and lakes, blue sky, red and orange sunsets. Girls' voices and falling raindrops and laughter and puns. Down here is the beating of hearts, humming machinery, tapping and thudding of random activity, but otherwise silence -- no music, no voices, not even a tongue click or snapping fingers. On the surface there is restraint. Every action is conditioned by the underlying awareness that it may involve a waste of energy which means life. If someone accidentally shorts a power cell or lets a fire start he feels as guilty as the Victorian-age girl who misbehaved with her boy friend. The fact that your wife is dying in a hospital five miles away is a borderline excuse for using a power vehicle. An air or space flight is considered only in direct connection with power acquisition or research projects. Down here, while there is actually only a slightly larger supply of energy per person, the difference in attitude is all the world. No one is either worried or offended that his neighbor has used more than his fair share of energy. I had winced time after time there in the library as a reader had swum off leaving his carrel light or reading projector going, with no one else even noticing the lapse. And why couldn't there be music here? I hadn't heard any, and singing was obviqusly impossible. But stringed instruments should work. They might have to be modified in design, but they should work. Electrical ones would certainly be possiIF ble. If there weren't any, I could design them. Even if there were no girls' voices, there were still girls. There was a good-looking one only a few feet away, watching us as though she had some idea of what was going on. But it was so different. Even with energy restraint gone as far as my neighbors were concerned, would I feel comfortable after a lifetime under its rules? Would the thought of the black, crushing ocean between me and all I had grown up with loom too large? Or if I didn't stay, would the thought of what I might have accomplished down here come too often between me and normal living? I couldn't decide. Even if I tried to cut out all personal factors -- not just those connected with Marie, but all which by any stretch could be called selfish -- I still couldn't. There was my regular work with the Board. It was useful, even important, and I liked it. I could do useful work down here, though, and would almost certainly like it. Reward, to be selfish again, meant littie in either place. Wealth as such has been meaningless since power rationing started, and down here I had seen no signs of plutocracy. Though admittedly I might have missed them; I know so little about the place. Of course, I could learn more. Neither decision was irrevocable. The only thing that couldn't be changed back had already been done; my coughing reflex was gone, and I'd have to be careful in eating for the rest of my life no matter where I lived. Maybe I could stay now, see more of what life here was like and go back up later on. After all, there was no reason why the two places couldn't stay in communication. I looked up and was about to write an answer for Marie when my thoughts started working again. Would there be communication? Joe had pointed out excellent reasons why the Board would not want knowledge of this place to spread, though he hadn't stated them just that way. Here was a place where power rationing, however real it might be mathematically, simply wasn't a conscious factor in life. Tbe population, as Marie had said, was like a group of French aristocrats in a world of Jacquerie. Ordinary morals up above called for a rigid attitude toward energy use which these people didn't have and probably couldn't understand. If too many people from the surface visited here and the word about its way of life spread at all generally, there would be trouble. Even if the spreading word remained accurate, which was most unlikely, a lot of the outer world's people would either want to migrate down here or build more volcanic-power installations so that everyone could have more. The old "why can't I have as much as he does" feeling would have people screaming for the modern equivalent of the philosopher's stone, to take an illustration from the days when wealth was metal instead of energy. I I The average citizen vould be able to see why the Board shouldn't do just that -- build more power stations to take advantage of the inexhaustible heat inside the earth. I hate to sound cynical, but I know that's one thing the Board would never do. They won't do anything to make power rationing unnecessary. C ynicism aside, they're perfectly right. The decision decades ago that hydrogen fusion was man's only real hope was almost certainly a sound one. We know that solving that problem isn't just a matter of engineering details, as was originally thought. Too many of the factors involved are inherently unstable unless held in by, at least, the mass of a small star. It's only a matter of faith that we'll solve it at all. And if we're to do so, it will take every effort -- the best that man can offer. And the effort will stop if anything happens to postpone power starvation. Mankind as a whole did practically nothing but waste his resources until that menace stared him literally in the face. If plentiful volcanic power suddenly eased the threat, the pressure would be off. Quite aside from the obvious collapse of morals which would follow, the fusion work would come to a halt. It might go on in name, but the work would stop. Men are too casual; the best of power-plant operators start, leaving office lights on when they go out, just because it w a power plant and there's so much on harid. And considering what the Board sometimes has to do about that very attitude, I shouldn't count on being allowed to go back up if I stayed here now, or come back down if I went up now. It would be safer to regard my present decision, whichever it might be, as irrevocable. And that realization, political philosophy and morals aside, didn't make the decision any "easier to make. Was there any chance that the Board would insist on this place's joining civilization and tying into the power net? None. The very process of connecting would be almost impractical. Considering the trickle which could be spared above the photosynthesis drain even if the local population adopted the surface-rationing level, decades would pass before the energy investment of making the connection could possibly be paid off. It might never be. All of which meant that the transponders I had gone to so much trouble to plant represented wasted effort. So -- should I stay here or not? Did I want to live here, or in the sunlight? I still didn't know. T he temptation was to let it all depend on Marie's decision, but Marie wasn't publishing her decision. Bert was out of the running -- as far as Marie was concerned he had never been in it, apparently. You'd think she'd realize by now that Joe was a hopeless case as far as she was concerned. Why wouldn't she give me at least a hint? She did. She got tired of waiting for me to come up with the answer I couldn't make and started talking again. For a moment her first words sounded like a change of subject. "What do you suppose Bert will do now? Stay here, or go back?" she asked. I was glad enough to leave unanswerable questions for the moment. "He stayed here for a year before all this happened," I pointed out. "I can't see that the last few minutes can have given him any burning urge to change his mind. I should think he'd have less reason than ever to go back now." I raised my eyebrows in query to Joe at the same time. He read the note, shrugged as usual, then nodded. Marie's answering comment was the eye-opener. "I wouldn't say that," she remarked. "One of you should tell him I understand. I wouldn't want him to feel too unhappy about it all." I looked at Joe. He looked at me, and raised the eyebrow on the side of his face away from the sub. Neither of us had ever realized that forgiveness could depend less on "what" than on "why." I turned to the pad once more, and wrote. "If you really feel that way. I'll tell him. I'll be staying down here to help Joe and should see Bert again often enough. I'm almost as good a linguist as he is and may make some headway in untangling this ghastly excuse for a communicacation system." I thought it better not to make any comments about possible interesting language teachers. If Marie had another change of mind even from mere jealousy. I'd never be able to make any more decisions. This one felt too nice to waste, after all the uncertainty that had preI Next month in IF --  E by Roger Zelazny S E  New Berserker Sfory E E by Fred Saberhagen  H The Exploration of Tomorrow's Science II E by R. C. W. Ettinger E E All in the next issue of IF -- Hugo winner for #d straight year! E # IF Dear Editor: Why, why, why did you let Farmer end The Felled Star where he did? Is there to be a sequel? Not only was it a wonderful story which he seems to have ended right in the middle, but the Gaughan illustrations for it were the best Tve seen yet by him. To end the story this way is as if Tolkien had ended The Lord of the Rings with the Fellowship still in Lothlorien! And while Ihn writing, what ever happened to David Bunch? Lin Carter's comments on the National Fantasy Fan Federation, while (in my opinion) rather unfairly critical, have brought us quite a few new members. -- Cuyler Warnell Brooks, Jr., # Paul Street, Newport News, Va. #.    Dear Editor: You have increased the price of If to #c due to rising costs. You now have #c per copy more and I hope that this will be used for improvements that are badly needed. First is the art work. Perhaps you could pay cover artjsts more, to do a better job. I know without a doubt that Morrow and Gaughan are good artists but rarely show it. Wood should do cover art too. Your art work is the worst part of the magazine at present. Also I think that full length plates, although more expensive, are much more suitable to the cover. The July and August covers show this, especially the August cover by Morrow, the first good one since March. I was expecting more pages of If with TF.O.T. gone. You are now cramped for space again, which is the reason you added pages in the first place. Moskowitz article, although good and I would like to see more of, took up space that could have been used for another story. I would like to have seen the letter column expanded and a book review added but there is no room. As it is in increasing your price you have made If the most expensive mag around and I expect more for my money, including Rogue Star, About selling more copies, I think that there is a ready market all to no knowledge of its existence. I read SF two years before I knew there was such things as Science Fiction Magazines. It was another year before I found out where to send to get them. Isn't there some way that you can make people aware of your mags? Wliy not run small ads in the back of paperbacks or somei ' where. Somebody suggested a sick the suggestion seriously. Any sick Finally, get Delany's next novel. -- Nick Grimshawe, RR ##, Alliston, Ontario, Canada.  "Most expensive sf mag around How come? There are exactly three sf mags in this country -- not counting the ones that are mostly devoted to resuscitating ancient stories, or that lean heavily on pure fantasy. All three of them cost the same price. Of the three, If has by actual count the most words of science fiction in each issue. Count them yourself if you doubt it! -- Editor.    Dear Editor: The letter column in the August If was; perhaps, one of the best to date. I agree with much of what John Goldsmith had to say about the trite techniques of some stories in our genre. Every time I see another story-written-in-letter-form piece my gorge rises.' Keith Laumer, who writes some of the best action and packs a great deal of excitement into what he turns out, seems to be plagued by the character who just happens to stumble across a spaceship disguised as a silo Spaceman in the last few issues of If) or the college student who picks up a book on hypnotism and immediately opens up another dimension just by mesmerizing' himself . Admittedly, Laumer used a similar technique in the recent The Day Before Forever, and handled it extremely well. But whatever happened to the Laumer of "End as a Hero' and "Worldmaster"? Those moved like a Van Vogt piece, chocked full of -- not only action, but -- malice, evil, mystery and wonder. Perhaps less Retief and a few more things that give more latitude than the Bondish galactic diplomat-spy will bring that beloved and prolific talent to the fore again. Agreed again with Goldsmith: I would rather see a story where -- although there are no mathmeticians and ball-of-fire young scientists who land on a world and change it from a barren ball of rock to a paradise in six short weeks -- the hero has human problems besides scientific ones and solves them along with or at the same time with the scientific ones. Zelazny is great at this. So is Samuel R. Delany. So, also some kudos. # is improving all the time. At first, I thought it was going to stand as the last bastion of the total science tale and the space opera (which all of us enjoy), but now I see it publishing both the new wave and the old and the wavelets in between. Good. Fine. And with cover improvement too. Not a really horrible cover since May of # when you evidently tried to capture the Camp faction. The sixty cents is justified certainly. In closing, if C.ere is anyone who is infatuated with Zelazny, Delany, the old Bester, or any combination thereof and would like to correspond' and is liberal, twenty-one, and, slightly insane,. please feel free to do so. -- Dean R. Koontz, # Walnut St., Apt. #, Lemoyne, Penna. #.  Good news for all Zelazny fans : he'll be back in our Hugo-winning magazine next month with a stunning short story -- for which Pederson has provided a vivid cover. See you next month! -- The Editor IF may return the book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation if not completely satisfied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as payment in full. privilege guaranteed, of course. For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. s in your neighborhood Vpn't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle' General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." mir ?famr lljrrp  O O O o o O O OO o o O O o O o O O O O O s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! The umpteenth corollary of FInagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted nur i t;   Vol. #, No. I Frederik Pohl, Editor Robert Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by John Rankine by R. V. Humphrey by Phyllis Gotlieb by James White by Basil Wells by Fred Saberhagen by Roger Zelazny by R. C W. Ettinger by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporatloin. Robert M. Guinn, President. Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Streets, New York. #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada. Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial E ach year at the World Science Fiction Convention an award is given for excellence in the various fields of science fiction. The awards are called "Hugos", after the late Hugo Gremshack, who started the whole thing in #; and the most recent batch were handed out at the New York convention, Labor Day weekend. For the second straight year, the "best magazine" Hugo went to If. We're pleased about it, of course. We were even more pleased to note that all the awards in our categories came from either If or Galaxy -- best novel was Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (If), best novelette Jack Vance's The Last Castle (Galaxy), best short story Larry Niven's Neutron Star (If)... while the award for best professional artist went to our longtime rejgular contributor, who is also Art Editor of our new companion magazine. International Science Fiction, Jack Gaughan. There is something pretty soulsatisfying about making a clean sweep, and we would be lacking in candor if we denied a considerable feeling of pride. But the same candor makes us want to try to take an objective look at just how good a "best" science-fiction magazine is... and to try to think of ways to make it better. T o begin with, science-fiction magazines appeal, after all, to only a relatively small percentage of the population -- well under one per cent -- and, in an age of massproduction giantism, that places us all under a heavy handicap before we leave the post. A science-fiction magazine may put out # copies of each issue on the newsstands -- but there are upwards of # newsdealers in the United States alone; if we put out only one copy on each stand, we would be unable to cover as much as # of the outlets. In practice, even that is impossible because it's not economically feasible to put a single copy in a newsstand; and we wind up with, at best, perhaps one newsdealer in ten carrying a few copies of Galaxy or If. So getting the magazines out where it's possible for you to find them is a complex game, made more difficult by the fact that we don't always buy in the same place. A handy way around this trouble would be to sell the magazines by subscription. We're always glad to do that, of course; but with a mobile population, a lot of people hesitate to try to predict where they'll be six months or a year in the future. And our subscription prices are relatively high: the major slick magazines will spend # to wheedle you out # for a subscription, which they can manage because they are subsidized by advertisers. We can't. The point of this is that sciencefiction magazines are relatively small potatoes in the publishing patch, and it seems they are likely to stay that way. Which, in turn, means that we can't compete in payments to authors and so on with the larger media. And yet we do! Funnily enough, writers who are ierfectly capable of earning five or ten times the word-rate they can get from a science-fiction magazine will nevertheless spurn the offers of the big slicks to produce work for us. Anybody capable of making a living out of writing science-fiction is, invariably, capable of making at least twice as much by writing something else. Dozens of top science-fiction writers have proved lucratively in TV and screen writing, in selling to the large-circulation slicks, in the writing of advertising copy, publicity, all the bluechip areas of literary craftsmanship. Yet we still keep our writers, and the question is, why do they stay with us? Not for the money; not for the prestige. As a matter of fact, you are the reason science-fiction writers will take time out from fat assignments to produce a story for If or Galaxy, What we have that no other media can offer is an audience composed exclusively of people like you. In terms of I.Q., in terms of alertness and knowledgability, in terms of general high quality of readership, science-fiction readers are the class of the publishing field. And that's what writing is all about: communication with people who can understand what the writer is saying. S o what we try to do is keep the interest of people like you, because that's how we can keep the good writers who have developed in the science-fiction field and will stay with it just exactly as long as you do. Over the next few months we hope to add a few new features to If -- because we think you'll enjoy them. One thing we're sure of -- if you don't, you'll let us know. We wouldn't have it any other way... And, of course, we'll continue to do the best we can to find and print for you the top science fiction available, by the best writers, old and new, in the field. Have you been noticing, by the way, how many new writers ve're finding these days? The reason is simple : we've been actively looking for them. For five years now we've had at least one "first" story in each issue of If. We started the program with a certain amount of apprehension; we weren't a bit sure that we could keep it up for more than a couple of months. But several don stories later, we're pleased to report that the supply of "first" stories is healthier now than ever, and even more pleasant is the discovery that a lot of the new writers we've attracted have stayed with the field. Our first of all firsts was Joseph Green, now the author of a fair number of magazine stories and novels. Larry Niven was a first three years ago; now he's got a Hugo of his own. And we expect much the same for half a dozen others we can think of offhand... And that's another thing you -- the collective "you" that reads If and Galaxy and the other sciencefiction magazines: You not only read and understand science fiction, a number of you go on to write It. In fact, there's hardly a sciencefiction writer who didn't begin as a reader -- Doesn't that suggest anything to you? -- Frederik Pohl IF  Complete Short Novel Easy job! All they had to do was invade a planet, steal its secrets, destroy its power -- without a war! I C ommunications One 'asked for a repeat; and the tone of his voice, even filtered throu the intercom, was unmistakably critical. Its harmonic of doubt was echoed in every head on the net; but there was no other oken comment when Fletcher's coldly clear repetition came back. There was every reason for doubt. Petrel, after a major refit, was homing in deep space on the squadron to which she had been assigned. The distant ships were coming up in the zoom lens of the main scanner. Five craft: silver beads on a black velvet display pad. Europa in the center, a capital ship, a major unit in the Inter-Galactic Organization's peace-keeping force. Outriding in a protective screen, four pencil-slim corvettes, like Petrel herself, seemingly motionless as they kept station with the cruiser. Joining the squadron and taking her designated place was a complex maneuver for Petrel, All hands were at action stations, sealed up and buckled into deep-foam acceleration couches. The course changes involved would mount as much G as a primary blastoff from a planetary pad and would rate infinitely more subtle calculation. Commander Dag Fletcher, swinging on his gymbal-mounted couch on the corvette's tiny command island, said again, "Hold fast on the auto chain. I'll take her in on manual." He had been with Petrel for two weeks, having taken over as his first independent command after the long refit had been completed. Her crew had been together, except for three new men, through the action which had almost destroyed her and which had killed her captain. They were a powerful in-group and accepted the new top man with many reservations. Fletcher knew it would be so and accepted the challenge. No body of men which had endured what they had been through could avoid the group feeling which had emerged from it. They would have liked to see one of their own number put up to the command slot. Sam Cotgrave, in fact, who was swinging next to Fletcher in the co-pilot seat on the command island. That was natural enough. He would have felt that way himself. But he recognized the basic wisdom of the I.G.O. staff in bringing in someone from outside. Command was, after all, not a friendly game. He was likely to have to make decisions which would balance the lives of every one of them against some theoretical gain for the authority they served. Nobody could afford to risk a commander who might have to say, "Shall I send my friend Joe or my friend Fred?" But from the beginning, he would have it clear that they had drawn a spaceman who knew what it was all about. One who could handle the ship with or without benefit of mechanical aids. T he duty officer in Europa's control room had picked up the tiny speck of the hurrying corvette and was feeding deliberate observations to his tracking computers. Linked on the same net, Falcon, Drake, Heron and Hawk trainedi major armaments in concert. When Petrel was still a pea-sized globule, she was the focus of such a concentration of destructive power that she could have been dispersed as a faint nimbus of glowing gas before her commander had time to call a course change. Five computerbased tracking systems lock on and monitored the oncoming craft. An exchange of coded recognition signals cleared the air; and McCool, Euro pa's duty officer, took his finger from the button which would have called the squadron to battle stations Then he was looking incredulously at an empty screen and, by reflex, thumibing down the stud that sent urgent alarm bleeps to every corner of the cruiser. Admiral P. J. Varley, first into the ccmmand center, still sealing up, with his visor hinged back, said, "mat is it, Jock?" "New corvette joining the squadron, Admiral." "So?" "Recognition checked okay; but now she's slipped the tracking gear." "You believe she could be a hostile?" In every command center of the squadron, the same speculation about PetreVs uncharacteristic behavior was repeated. Consequently there was a full audience to see the corvette appear as though 'by sleight of hand out of the single narrow blind vector on Europas port quarter and take up her station with a flamboyant course change which must have put her crew on the extreme edge of G tolerance. Her commander's level tones came up on every net. They said simply, "I.G.O. corvette Petrel reporting for service with Red Squadron. Request instructions." Varley, mastering anger, said thickly to Europa's captain, for all to hear, "Get that fool along to see me. Commander. Stand down, if you please." O n Petrel herself there was a suspension of criticism. Probably only the navigators, Bennett, Sluman. Hale and the co-pilot himself could fully appreciate what the new commander's performance was all about. To the rest it was simply a spectacular maneuver which could have been misinterpreted by the ships they were coming to join. There was, however, a certain pride in it. Petrel was in business again and showing that she was a crack outfit. Only one man was positively antagonized by it. One of the new men -- Dave Hocker, Power Two -- had already crossed the new commander and was ready to swing into positive enmity. He thought, but did not put into audible speech, "The crazy fool. Playing to the gallery. Looking for a pat on the head from 'blood -- and -- gut Varley. All right Mister Clever-bloody-Fletcher. Watch it, that's all, watch it." But when the summons came, as Fletcher knew it would, and he was moving into the pressure lock. Cotgrave said, "Good luck. Commander." The calculated risk had paid off. Whatever Varley had to say about it was unimportant against the fact that he was one step closer to solidarity with the crew of Petrel, The sooner they were integrated as a team which would jump when he said jump, the better for one and all. His own face looked back at him through its transparent visor from the polished bulkhead of the pressure lock. It seemed the greatest irrelevance of all. Elongated by the curvature, even longer and thinner than nature had devised, it showed gray-green eyes, fair hair cut very short, grim-looking mouth. Outside Europa's lock, he hooked on and uncouple the thin nylon line which had tethered him like an umbilical cord to his own ship. He saw it whip back, spring-loaded, over the divide and he went inside, carrying with him a panoramic view of a backdrop of infinite violet-black IF depth, glittering with multicolored sequins of distant light. Incurably introspective, his computer mind filled with his own minute importance against that backdrop. It was difficult in that setting to give any value to human action at all. II V arley said, "I am bound to tell you, Commander, that your un#rthodox method could have had serious consequences. Quite apart from the danger to the squadron if you had hit a collision course. I see your point and I hope you were justified. But no more of it. Understand? There'll be action enough in the very near future to shake your crew down into a combat team. There's a squadron conference in fifteen minutes. Take a look round and get to know what Euro pa's control center has to offer. I'll reserve judgment." Dag Fletcher was relieved that Varley had gone no further. But he was under no illusion about the future. Every new commander was allowed one mistake; this was his. He had used up his slack. Next time he would be out, and that would mean no other command experience in his I.G.O. service and could carry its smear over to the civil space corporation to which he would return, if he did return, when the compulsory stint was done. R ound the conference table, Varley had seven attentive listeners. T here was his own staff lieutenant. Grant Crowford, a dark, muscular type, looking like an intellectual weight-lifter in his gray-ribbed inner suit; Group-Commander Frazer, captain of Europa, hair clipped short so that he seemed prematurely balJ. In a semi-circle facing him, Simpson of Falcon, dark, predatory, whose prototype might have sailed with Morgan; Cooper of Drake, roundfaced, usually smiling in a rictus of facial muscle which had nothing to do with benevolence; Driscoll of Heron, heavy shoulders hunched forward, hands out in front of him on the table-top. Cameron of Hawk, a huge rawboned Scot with red hair cut back to a rusty stubble. Fletcher, the newcomer, had been angled into the center seat so that Varley's eye naturally rested on him; and the address seemed to be delivered as a tete-a-tete. In point of fact a great deal of it concerned him, and he began to realize that chance had cast Petrel for a very dicey role. Varley said, "The object of the exercise, then, is to release certain I.G.O. nationals interned on Garamas. A cutting-out expedition, if you like. With the force at our disposal it would be possible to demand what we want, and no sane government could deny it; but there is more to it than that." He paused for a count of five as though marshalling the data in his mind, as he must have done often enough, before summoning the conference. He looked his part. Square jowled. Graying. Half a lifetime of command decisions had left a settled residue in the set lines of his face and his disillusioned eyes. "In the first place, Garamas is a neutral planet. You can see why its government has tried to keep that status. Right on the frontier of J.G.O. space, they are in line for any retaliation that the Outer Galactic Alliance might make. The way they have played it over the years, O.G.A. are no more anxious than we are to force the issue. It's useful to have Garamas as a point of contact. Nearly every major planet has a consulate there; it's a meeting point. "Moreover, there is a delicate political situation. The present government has majority support; but there is a very powerful fascist element waiting for any opportunity to seize control. If the government showed weakness in foreign policy that could be the pretext they are waiting for." Frazer, as a privileged listener, interposed with a question. "I take it there's been a request for release at diplomatic levels?" "Certainly. But the Garamas government will not move. They can't, with Scotia and Chrysaor represented there and watching for an opportunity to claim repatriation for their own nationals. TTiere's a Scotian ship impounded. They'd have trouble enough if they moved a centimeter from strict neutrality. "But there's another thing, and I needn't remind you that this is topline, classified material. Amongst our people in the internment sector is an I.G.O. agent who had been working in Fingalna and got out on a Garamasian freighter just before the O.G.A. powers drew together in their present venture. He has a report which must be gotten away. "Basically, that is all we are interested in as a military expedition. Recovery of the personnel is a useful cover, and we'll do what we can for them. But I say to you now that if any one of them has to be ditched, that is the way of it. You understand me?" Nods from round the table came without enthusiasm, but he knew he had made his point. "Now the cover for the squadron is that we are paying a courtesy call on a neutral planet. Showing the flag, you might say. I have no doubt that our intensions were signaled ahead. Europa and four corvettes have clearance to enter the gravisphere of Gramas in thirty-six hours from now, rationalized time. Four corvettes, checked and named on the visa. But las you see we have five." S even pairs of eyefe tracked briefly round to focus on Fletcher, then Varley was off again. 'Petrel left her refit base ostensibly for a home posting. She changed course on sealed orders when she was well beyond the reach of prying eyes. She is a bonus which alters the balance in our favor, so this is what I propose." Varley used micro switchgear on the small console let into his desk top, and one wall of the cabin was filled by two circular projections of Garamas. Left was a large central land mass, which petered out towards the circumference in an archipelago like a bead chain. The right was almost n empty, except for a roughly oblong continental mass lying along the equator. Varley moved a stylus on the atlas page before him. A dot moved in sympathy on the large-scale map. It came to rest as an asterisk over a population center on the left-hand circle. He said, "That is the capital city of Garamas. Cristinobyl. Half the population of the planet is concentrated there. The space port at Cristinobyl is about twenty kilometers outside the city. They have first-class equipment and will pick us up as soon as we cross the gravisphere line. At that time they would find out Petrel has joined the squadron. "I propose at that time to emit a succession of cobalt flares. When we arrive it can be explained that this was an accidental discharge. But for at least thirty minutes their monitoring gear will be unable to give them precise data." Dag Fletcher felt a sudden tightening of the nerves which he knew as a sixth-sense nudge that his number was coming up. He did not have long to wait. Varley went on, "Precisely at that time, Petrel will detach from the squadron and set course for this point." He stabbed at the center of the land mass in the right hand hemisphere, and an asterisk glowed to mark the spot. "She will set down there with minimum time loss and put up a total screen so that she can not be detected." Fletcher said, "Local people, Admiral?" "There are none. This is desert. You will know why when you get there. Nobody can live outside a ship without a life-support system. You will have to be very careful indeed." Fletcher thought, "That's going to make their day on Petrel. They had a long run of that on their last mission." But he said only, "Check." "The squadron will put down at Cristinobyl, and I will pay the usual courtesy calls. Simpson will find out where the interned personnel are being held and in twelve hours we shall be ready to act." Simpson lifted his dark, conspirator's face and gave unsmiling acknowledgment. Varley quickened his tone, having come to the vital part of the exposition. "Fletcher will wait that twelve hours and then seek out and sever the equatorial energy ring which generates all the power used on Garamas. The confusion in the city will be total. It is estimated that their robot fault-finding gear will take a minimum of forty-five minutes to bring in temporary services. A cutting-out party will make its way into the prison quarter and effect the release of the internees. Certain agents in the city will take care of them and pass them along an escape line. We are only concerned with the I.G.O. agent. 'Timing will be important. There is a detailed schedule prepared. Withdrawal will be as arrival. The visit is only scheduled for twentyfour hours. As we leave, we will jam the tracking gear long enough for Petrel to lift off. Any questions?" IF P etcher, conscious that as junior man he sihould have nothing to say but "yes," put an awkward one. "Will not Garamas Security immediately connect your visit with the power failure? Once down on the pad, the squadron will be limited to a defensive role. What is to stop them refusing clearance and insisting on a detailed search?" Varley gave him a straight look. "The report is basically what we came for. As you will understand, the agent does not have it with him. He will have to collect it from where it is hidden. That will be an added complexity. In the event which you describe, the agent would have to be destroyed. Once identified as an agent he would be open to interrogation methods which no one can resist. He will be prepared for that. You know the score. Commander. Do I have to spell it out?" If Fletcher was nettled by the implication, he did not show it. His face was impassive as he went on, "That is what I thought; but with Petrel available as a shuttle, not subject to search, would it not be possible to pick up the agent by scout car and take him out to R.V. with my car outside the city? Looking at the map there, I would say that a scout car could do the overland journey in three hours. In fact, we could take more of the escapees." "Don't let's complicate this issue. Commander. What you suggest is possible. We will look at it. For one only, though: the I.G.O. agent. The rest can disperse as planned. It is less than six hours before Petrel should detach from the squadron and take independent course. You can work on your amendment with my staff." He looked round the circle for any further query. There was none. "Very well. One more thing. Garamas is technologically advanced. As far as we know we can screen the ships from monitoring devices; but don't count on it. Anything with a slant on this mission, however angled, should be kept on maximum security. Even inside a ship." W ith the squadron dwindling on the port quarter, space seemed hugely empty again on the miniature scanner in Fletcher's cabin. Its loneliness found an echo in his own isolation in the hurrying corvette. Momentarily his computer mind imagined itself as a nucleus at the center of an infinity of Chinese boxes; a regression into nonexistence which was frightening. He forced himself to consider the detail of the mission ahead. After the course change, he had given Cotgrave a stand-down for two hours. That meant the crew could unseal and relax before the long chore at action stations which preceded a planetfall. There would be long enough confinement in suits if the weather in the streets on the desert side of Garamas was as Varley said. Final details had been hammered out in a long session with Varley and Frazer. They had agreed his plan and marked up an R.V. just outside the northeastern suburbs, where a green belt of parkland separated the city from its support zones. It would be a long run for PetreVs tiny scout car. Once he had fixed the sabotage angle he would take that chore himself. Lying back on his accelerationcouch bimk he ran through the crew list. Cotgrave, his co-pilot, must stay with the ship. Bennet, Sluman and Hale in navigation were all good men. Bennet would go on the breaching job, then. He'd need an engineer -- Hocker would do there. Power Two. Together with Engels and himself that would be four. Once the decision was made his mind went into a freewheeling phase, and he slept deeply until the bleeps of a stations call brought him back to instant readiness. When he was circling slowly on his miniature command island with the corvette streaking in for a planetfall, he recognized that it had been the most difficult navigational task of his career. Without a preliminary orbit and with no help from the ground, every bit of data had been won in microseconds by their own observation. Split second re-appraisal of course vectors had become an uneasy norm. Petrel flamed down in darkness like a glowing meteorite. In spite of the supposed human vacuum in the desert, Fletcher ran it as a standard military landing. Coolant gas billowed out to damp down thermal agitation before the corvette had flexed back on her hydraulic rams. Two minutes after planetfall, six men were fanned out on the ground and reporting back that the pad was clean. Farnley's voice came precise, laconic, making an objective assessment of a locale which could stand in for a traditional picture of hell: "Surface, shale and pumice. No vegetation. Gauges reading fifty-six. Suggest limit of extra-vehicular activity at ten minutes." Fletcher said, "Check. Come in, Alf." Ill D awn on the desert side of Garamas was not held up by any contour. It flooded in as a quickmoving cadium-yellow tide over flat reaches of gravel to a circular horizon. Petrel was the sole physical feature in the landscape, a gnomon on an immense sundial dish sitting astride a faint line of discoloration which was the only indicator of the buried generator ring. Dag Fletcher checked times and had his small scout car launched from its bay. Heat gauges began to bake. Bennet said, "Where do we cut the ring?" "Not here. If the power is anything like what they claim, there could be a local upheaval which would threaten the ship. Give it about ten kilometers. We breach it at #. Then the car has three hours to R.V." They followed the marker line in a sprint to the horizon, with the draft of their passage throwing up a swirl of fine dust below the hurrying car and gauges marginally dropping back under ventilation. Bennet said, "Nothing to choose. IF Only distance. Ten kilometers should be enough." Hocker said, "Tlie chart shows a ravine like Grand Canyon. What's happened to that, then?" "It was never an LG.O. survey. Could be a hundred kilometers either way." Fletcher turned to Engels at the console. "Take her up to maximum height, and we'll see what we can see." The car went up like a free-standing elevator, and the horizon reeled back to a smudgy bar. "That's it." Hovering over the gorge, they could appreciate the immensity of the project which powered Garamas. All of five kilometers wide, the vast gorge was spanned by a huge, striding viaduct. Its upper surface was the power ring itself, a tube twenty meters in diameter. It ran on the equatorial line all round the planet, like a hula hoop. Mere force of spin was enough to accelerate free particles in its composition into a centrifugal surge of energy. Simple but effective. Here, in the open, it was painted white. It was the painting that triggered off the alarm in Fletcher's mind. Keeping it in that dazzling trim meant regular maintenance. And maintenance meant men; somewhere down there would be an outpost for servicing personnel. He saw the squat, heat-insulated building built under the near rim of the gorge at the instant that Engels brought them down in a tightly banked turn on the desert. There was only one narrow slit of window looking directly out on to the gorge. At this time of day, unless there was a deliberate watch kept, there was no reason to suppose that they had been seen. On the other hand, mere common sense dictated that they should assume that they had been. At the edge there was a change in texture noticable even through the thick foam-rubber of their boots. There was an apron of fine ashlar paving and the beginning of a ramp. It was a superbly engineered entrance which melted into the lip of the gorge in complete camouflage. Zigzagging back under an overhang to the left, it led down to the blank face of a thickly insulated blockhouse. Already the suits were fighting a rearguard against the heat. Sweat running into his eyes, Fletcher said, "There has to be a way in. Look for a recessed lever." Engels stumbled on it, banging the toe of a clumsy boot on a sixcentimeter stub. He knelt down to get the full picture in direct vision through his visor. Then he squatted back on his heels like a hound dog and pointed at it with a bulky gauntleted fist. Fletcher said, "Okay, Alf, give it a shove." They waited to a count of ten, facing the blank yellow wall. W hen the opening appeared, they were not immediately aware of it. By instinct they had expected it to be central, but it appeared at the far left, against the wall of the cliff. It was a low narrow slit, leading into yellow depths, a miserly break in insulation. They dropped into a routine pattern of fire cover and movement, and by its logic Bennett arrived first at the center. Impression of a cool spacious chamber, as though deep in a natural cave. Panoramic view of the gorge through a long horizontal slit of window, triple glazed in great depth to conserve refrigeration. Fully automated system with two walls covered with computer units in serried ranks. Below the window, a long presentation table and high stools. Engel checked the air and found it good. Suit gauges had dropped to twenty-four centigrade. With visors hinged back, they took stock. Bennett said, "After all, it's only a couple of hours from Cristinobyl in a fast shuttle. No need for a permanent detail." Engels had been giving the equipment a professional eye. "Neat. Very neat. Tliere's a half hoop sprayer running out with bearings grooved into the parapet of the duct. All done by mirrors." They watched through the observation window and saw a threemeter broad hoop with a flat platform like a howdah ride out from a point just below them. Engels stopped it and brought it back. "It'll get you to the center span in under five minutes." He was within seconds in his estimate. Although used to having an infinity of space beneath their ship, there was something different about this naked contact with vertical free fall. Movement was slow and deliberate, with the shiny shell of the tube below like a skating rink. One refinement of control which eluded the distant Engels was how to shut down the paint-spraying function. Driven with tremendous penetrative force, paint was atomized and surrounded the slowly moving hoop in a fine mist. Suits turned from silver gray to a dazzling white carapace which made movement a hazard. Bennett, anchored by his lifeline and moving with infinite labor, used a vibrator to excavate an oblong cavity from the parapet. Then it was done. A calculated charge would lift out a ten-meter length of tube on a radio signal from Petrel. Fletcher called the ship. "She's all set, and we're coming in. Detonate on eleven hundred, whether we're back or not. Expect us in fifteen minutes." Why he put in that last gloss he could not tell. Everything was going according to plan. Better, in fact, than he had any right to expect, and it was there that the nudge of a sixth sense told him that it was probably too well. Confirmation came when they climbed back into the blockhouse, and Engels soused them with a solvent he had found. When their visors were transparent again, he said, "Take a look at this inspection chart. If the periodicity is as I read it, we're due for a visit today. No times. But I'd bet it would be early on. Give them a full day for whatever they have to do." Bennett said slowly, Tetrel will IF be in sight on any reasonable approach line from Cristinobyl." It had already occurred to Fletcher. She would be there all day, stuck up like a sore thumb through a sheet of brown paper. T he answer came as they were homing into the docking collar of the carport. Fie gave it to Cotgrave as though it had been there all the time. Fie said, "Call action stations, if you please, Mr. Cotgrave. Blast off as soon as you can make it. A short inter-continental flip to the coast. Northwest. Shortens the trip to R.V. and takes us out of line. As soon as you like." "Inform Euro pa?' "No." "Varley expects us to be on this ref." "Fie docs not expect us to give our presence away to the Garamasians." IV F rom the coast, Fletcher pulled the plug on his bomb. Engels turned a startled face from his console. "Negative, Commander." "Negative?" "It has not fired." "You are sure?" "Believe me, at this distance a bursting paper bag would show up." Fletcher checked times. "We can spare fifty-three minutes and still hit the R.V." FFe called Bennett. "Car away. You, Engels, Flocker and myself. We can save time by going straight on from there." Arrow swift, the small car had reeled back two hundred kilometers before Engels spoke again. Then he said, "It'll be the paint." "What'll be the paint?" Bennett was genuinely puzzled. "Going out along the viaduct, that spraying gear put a new coat over the tube. You sited the device on the viaduct, right?" "Right." "When we left there would be a drain back of surplus paint. Cover the whole bag of tricks." "But it was closed." "Very delicate gear that. Staggered vents at the back to avoid increases in pressure due to heat. Paint vapor could get in there. Just enough goo to hold back a feather-light relay. But it will be ready to blow. A slight jar should do it." "Like opening the box to see what's going on." "Like that." Fletcher said mildly, "Well, just get thinking about it. There's always a way round." He was looking ahe in the miniature scanner and went on without a change of voice, "At the same time you can think about how to get past a large troop shuttle and a maintenance tender. They're both down there by the block house." Bennett said, "So the gear there was more sensitive than we knew. It called out a posse." "Not while we were there." Engels was positive. "I got a line on every working unit in the setup. All very functional and busy with the power ring. I'd swear there was no monitor." Fletcher said, "Either way, they're there, present, now. Put us down just below their horizon. Then camouflage the car and go in at ground level." E ngels took them down in a long glide and, before deceleration was total, Hocker was outside tugging at shift bars to alter microgrooving in the outer skin and match the car's color with the desert. From twenty meters out, standing in swirls of baking dust, Bennett ran a pragmatic check on his efforts and raised his arm to signal that the car had blended into its background. Then they were running forward at ground level like a smooth invisible rat toward the two Garamasian shuttles. At half a kilometer, and still moving in without a challenge, Fletcher took the firing grip of the laser tube which ran the whole length of the axis of the small car. He knew that what he had to do must constitute an act of war and would be death to the purpose of the mission, unless it was a hundred per cent successful. He called for height, and Engels took them up in a steep climb. Then he said, "Right along the spine," and they went down like a mosquito homing on a succulent flank. Belatedly, two guards spilled out from the transport, both in clumsy refrigeration gear like a collection of oblong boxes. Carbine fire using glowing tracer lifted lazy lines which the car crossed in a succession of hammer blows, then the laser was breaking up the shuttle. It appeared to melt, plates turning to molecular scrap. A puff of black smoke came from its rounded bows, laced immediately with vermilion flame. Fletcher switched to a wide-scatter paralyzing ray and sprayed the area. Engels was down beside the maintenance tender. They spilled out, spoiling the effect of special branch cops making a raid by the comic clumsiness of their bulky suits. The tender was empty. Hocker sprayed a line of holes through its console. Fletcher went forward on hands and knees, like a fat grub, and shoved out an extensor periscope to look over the rim. Down below, the narrow door was shut; but two highshouldered Garamasians stood on either side of the ramp, with squat carbines held incongruously across their chests. He appeared briefly in their limited visual field and, as the muzzles were lifting towards him, sprayed them once on a wide angle. They leaned back on the block-house wall, too stiffly clad to fall down. Bennett shoved over the stub lever, and the heavy door began its ponderous swing back. A round-headed Garamasian engineer. out of his salamander kit, showing the typical, lanky highshouldered development of his ethnic stock, was making a wide gesture with narrow hands which made it clear even to an observer from another world that he was telling them that he knew there had been intruders in the hive. He was still working at it when IF the beam fixed him that way like a butterfly on a pin. Fletcher said, "Shovel them over to the back wall and clear that spraying line. Where does it load with paint?" Engels the expert said, "It doesn't need any more paint. It only did half the crossing. It's got a fair load still on board." "Empty it out. Fill it with solvent. Set it to move out. We can be on the way to the R.V. before it frees the relay." Hocker asked, "Suppose it doesn't work?" "Keep your fingers crossed. Because if it doesn't you'll have to go out yourself and tap it with a hammer." "Why me?" "I'll overlook that, Hocker, this one time. For now you can go up top and keep an eye on the desert. Don't question anything that moves. Just blast it." "Check, Commander." W orking methodically, Engels had cleared the sprayer and was rinsing its saddle tanks with solvent. When it was refilled he ran it for ten meters and then brought it back. "Solvent goes out faster than paint. But paint capacity is enough for a full trip, so I reckon this will make the center. All set. Commander." "Let it go, then. How long do you say?" "Five minutes." "I can't afford to risk the car. We'll get over the horizon and head back immediately after the blowout" As the car rose, they could see the length of the viaduct, an engineering marvel in its own right, carrying the glistening white tube across the gorge. Fletcher imagined it going on below the land surface, crossing seas, the patient work of skilled men. It was the first time he had been cast in the role of saboteur, and it went against the grain. Whatever report was to be brought out, it would need to be red-hot to justify their action. On the other hand, there was something about the snug neutrality of Garamas which was unacceptable. No planet could be uncommitted. Those that were not strong for the law were in reality working against it. He recognized that he was finding excuses. Every human mind has a built-in necessity to think well of itself. This was his rationalization. Short-circuiting the internal debate he said, "That's far enough. Put her down. One minute to go." When it came it was different from any other explosive sound he had ever heard -- even allowing for the filter effect of the listening gear. There was a high-pitched scream rising and cutting off as it passed beyond audio frequency. Seconds later the car rocked in a Force Nine gust, bringing a hail of dust and small trash. Every dial on the console went into a crazy spin as though under a freak magnetic storm. Then there was silence. Fletcher said, "Back, then," and the car went up in a steeply banked turn. For a hundred meters from the point of fracture, the huge tube had peeled free from its supporting viaduct. On the far side, the force had thrown the broken end down, and the tube sagged away towards the floor of the gorge. The block-chouse end had reared up like an elephant's trunk and was holding an uneasy stability as a high, swaying tower. Only two or three meters of the center span of the viaduct had been breached. It was a neat job of demolition. But Fletcher saw it as a wound in the ring of solidarity forged by professional men. He felt like a murderer who would now give much to staunch the flow of blood. V XTobody in the block-house appeared to have moved. Engels said, "They'll have pinpointed that break as of now. There'll be a trouble-shooting gang on the way." They left the Garamasians parked round the walls like ritual sacrifices in a mast aba. Hocker, last out, took a minute to pose the end one in a nose-thumbing gesture towards the open door. Then they were streaking over hot, brown desert for the R.V. With just over two thousand kilometers to go Engels locked the car on its maximum speed just below the sonic ceiling, and its auto-pilot took over. Now they were across the first strait, leapfrogging a chain of islands that were not much more than atolls, with a still magenta sea washing white crystal beaches. The car raced on, a slight, hurrying shadow across empty shores. Engels said, "Mainland coming up. Commander. If the chart tells no lie there's nothing on this course except automated farm spreads." Even they were enough. An unfamiliar machine crossing the homestead would be enough to have the resident agricultural engineer grabbing for a video. "Level out. Set for half a meter over hedge height. They'll have some trouble with identification at this speed." Now it was useless to look for topographical features. So close to the ground, they were virtually flying blind in a dizzying welter of melting shapes. With fifteen minutes to go, Engels dropped them neatly in an irrigation ditch, where they sat across the gap like a custom-built bridging plug. The chart showed less than five kilometers to R.V., but they were now moving into the outer ring of commuter development. Top executive country, isolated house units surrounded by private parkland. They took time off to unseal, methodically stacking the gear in roof slots above each seat. The tiny car seemed to double in inside room. Even then there was only a cubic meter of space in the loading bay for their passenger. With ten minutes to go Fletcher said, "Okay. Take it up. Steady now, pick your way through the trees." Almost at once, they found an outer-ring monorail and crossed it, hugging the ground beneath a hun dred-meter span. There were four IF kilometers of rolling parkland without sight of human life before Engels swept over a long gentle rise to meet the monorail again, hidden in a shallow valley, the next spiral in. They were on to it before he could alter course. Too late he saw two stationary shuttles dead ahead, with Garamasian top people looking out from a row of crystal viewing ports. Round heads set like ornamental roundels on narrow, high-shouldered trunks. Blue tunics of the top executive grade, with narrow stand-up collars which completely covered rudimentary necks. Lidless eyes, dark disks of polished obsidian missing nothing. Except one, facing the window in sleep with optical facets turned away and dull gray blanks presented to the familiar view. As Engels dropped them down in a crash stop where their microgroove skin texture would give them almost complete camouflage, the bulletlike silver shuttles began to move. F etcher said, "They've cleared the fault. Smart work that. Must have sent a big party out to the desert. They'll be looking round for who did them dirt. Now this lot will be falling over each other to get to a video. Move it along, Alf. Don't worry about being seen," Engels took them up to a meter over tree-top height, and for a moment the car was as still as though it had been painted there. It began to turn as he lined it up on the direction beam. Then they were homing at full thrust on the tiny glowing mark of the R.V. set up on the miniature navigation spread. Fletcher had time to think that technological refinements were all right, but when you came right down to it, you got no greater accuracy than you fed in. If Bennett was a fraction out in his original plot, they might very well be going all out for a local gendarmerie. The thought led him to take a checking run along the co-ordinates, Bennett's voice brought him back to direct vision. Now they were amongst buildings. Blind to the road in the Garamasian fashion, grouped round inner courts, inward-looking. Typical of a desertfounded ecology. "There she is!" A small scout car identical with the one they were in was sliding to a halt beside a group of eucalyptus trees. Engels said, "That's Hawks car." Then they were alongside, and Cameron himself was crossing the gap in full space gear with his visor binged back. His hair seemed more aggressively red in Garamasian daylight, and there was no doubting the urgency in his voice. "Nice, Fletcher. Right on the button. As well, too. There's a big thing on. Our ploy worked out, the agent's here; but there's borderline revolution in the city. Fascist lot taking over. Very dicey situation all round. Just as well you're taking this agent out; we've already had a check from security, and they'll be back. Anyway, see you." While he spoke a small figure, bulky in an I.G.O. suit with the identity flashes of a communications lieutenant, had taken Bennett's hand IF and been hauled up into the cubic meter of cargo space. Fletcher said, "Right, Jock. We've been seen, by the way, so the hunt will be on. For the record you could claim to have been out to the outer mono rails on a sight-seeing trip. See you." Engels was moving them out before the hatch closed. They saw Hawks car spin on its axis and beat away in a dragonfly flash of iridescence; then they were running on a direct course at maximum thrust, ten meters above the highest building. Hocker was concentrating on a circular scan to check for Garamasian atmosphere craft. Engels was fully committed with the pilotage chore. Bennett began a recheck of his navigational set for the home run, reasonably concerned that they should make a first-time hit. Consequently it was Fletcher, the drone, who had time to chat up the inmate of the loading pen. He turned in his bucket seat, prepared to knock on the man's helmet to signal this civil intent and stopped with his clenched fist two centimeters from a neat, platinum blonde head. C opying the style of her new crewmates, a silvery Fingalnan girl had wriggled, chrysalislike, out of her borrowed gear. She was sitting crosslegged in the lotus suit, wearing a taut, lime-green inner suit which could have been sprayed' on by a miserly makeup man, who had to do a couple of hundred of them with one small can. Making a display of her cosmopolitan expertise, she leaned forward with outstretched hand in Earth-style greeting. He automatically took it, reminded at once that the Fingalnian metabolism kept its children's blood a good five degrees hotter than his own. It was like holding a warm polystyrene glove. She said in English, "Xenia, Commander. Delighted to meet you, I think." Low-pitched and husky, contriving to build communication on a carrier-wave of warm enthusiasm as though she had only been bom for this day, her voice triggered a quite disproportionate reaction. Three more heads whipped round, and the car banked sharply under Engels's convulsive grip. Gallant Hocker said, "Stone me, it's a she-male. Sitting on that ribbed floor is no good for a delicate spirit. Come and sit with me." He even held out his hands to lift her over. "That is very thoughtful of you, I think. But I am still on duty. Some other time, I think. Meanwhile, hello." Her wide open green eyes had never left Fletcher's, and what she saw there seemed to bring her to a decision. Hocker was ready to go on with his ploy, but Fletcher said coldly. "Save it. Lieutenant. Get on with that scan, or there may not be another time." To Xenia he said, "Forgive us for being surprised. We were expecting a man. It is not easy to believe that anyone so beautiful is an agent." Is that complimentary or not, Coanmander? Espionage is necessary. This weport I have may save many lives, I thinik." He remembered that Fingalnians had particular difficulty with the "r" in Earth languages. In Xenia's hands the defect was a positive gain, but it made it even harder to take her seriously. "Of course, I was not under-valuing your work. You have the report?" An amused gleam in the green eyes told him that she appreciated what considerations had triggered off that question. "Yes, it is vewy small It would need to be, and any confusion was entirely on his side. "Don't fwet about the weport, Commander. It's been on my mind a long time. I haven't lost it yet. How much time do we have?" "Three hours to reach the ship. Then we wait for the signal to lift off. Perhaps two hours after that. Has to key in with a jamming transmission from the squadron so that Petrel can get out unnoticed by their monitoring stations." They had crossed ithe first monorail circuit and were well inside the executive belt. She said, "This weport could be made out of date anyway by your action in getting it out. The fascists have been waiting for a national cwisis, and you've made it. I know you had to do it this way; but it's just what they wanted Fletcher said, "Perhaps the government will believe that they chose the Squadron visit as an opportune time and engineered the breakdown themselves -- hoping that I.G.O. would get the blame." "You are clever. Commander. That could happen. So it would pay them to see that you get away. Perfect scapegoat for them. If they get power, they'll definitely take Gawamas into the O.G.A. sphere of influence vhether they declare it openly or not." "And the more dangerous if not openly." "Exactly so, I think." "Who are the fascist leaders?" "Mainly fwom this awea. Industwialists with something to lose if Gwamas adopts the full I.G.O. charter on human wights, I think. Their headquarters is the Gawamasian Agwicultuwal Club. That will be the command post for any putsch, VI F etcher turned away. Outside, they were crossing the last of the suburban belt, and the precisely squared out food-production areas rolled away to the distant horizon. Spaced with mathematical exactitude, the headquarter buildings of each section stood out like plotted quantities on a lattice. One of them would hold the action group which wanted Garamas to move back to medieval political thinking. It would be easy to take the view that it was no business of his. He had a clear mission and no mandate to move a centimeter outside it. Indeed, any move other than to get Xenia and her report to a place of safety was definitely against orders. He could be executed for failure. So IF what? What indeed was he thinking of? Xenia's fragile beauty dedicated to a dangerous trade had presented him afresh with the issue of responsibility which was never far below the surface of his mind. A gloss from a theology tape of his college era quoted itself in the clear tones of a female recording clerk. Not dissimilar from Xenia's -- which was probably the grapnel which had dredged it up. No lisp though and a lot less sexy. "To him that knows to do good and does not do it. To that man, that is sin." Xenia's warm, light hand on his shoulder supplemented the communication possibilities of her voice, now as intimate as it could well get. They might have been alone in the car. She said, "Exactly so." Bennett, the only one listening, looked puzzled by an apparent non sequitur, Dag Fletcher met her eyes, and the tiny nod of her head confirmed his questioning look. In addition to her more outstanding charms, she was a telepath. He wondered briefly how she had reacted to unspoken speculation about where she was keeping the report. Saw her smile again and deliberately fell back on learned skills to keep thought out of the transfer areas of his mind. His success in so doing got him a credit. She said, "You're vewy quick, Commander. But too late. I agree with your position. It comes down to individual wesponsibility. You can't twust any wuling clique. Not one. That's what I like about I.G.O., mainly staffed by civilians like yourself doing their stint. Going back to ordinawy jobs, so they know they'll be at the weceiving end of any wegulations they make. Here, now, there's a chance for us to do something about the setup." "What do you mean?" "I know where the Agwicultiiral Club is. You could dwop a small neutwalizer on it." She read his instinctive rejection and its grounds. "You're thinking about me again. I can look after that old weport. If we do this, it won't be so important anyway." "If it's their command center, they'll have guards and some military potential. It would be an unjustifiable risk." "Individual wesponsibility, commander. Now you know the opportunity we have, you can't just shwug it off." He saw that they were deep in the food-producing belt. Not even a collection center in sight in any direction. He was acting at an instinctive level when he said, "Take us down. There by the purple hedge." A giowing asterisk on the chart spread marked their position. Xenia leaned tautly forward and extended a slim silvery aim to point out the location of the headquarters. Hocker had not said a word, but she said, 'To save you wasteful use of time. Lieutenant, the answer is no. Just concentwate on the mission." He was visibly taken aback; but the look she got needed no telepathic power to interpret. She had not made a good friend. Bennett, who had pieced enough together to know that a detour was being considered, said, "That's two hundred kilometers. Not all loss; triangulated from there it only means about another one-fifty on the total journey. Minutes only. It depends what has to be done when you get there." Dag Fletcher faced the personal decision at a level not accessible to Xenia's interception. She waited with the rest for it to receive a clothing in words. He said, "Alter course. Take a look at that reference. Make the last ten kilometers at ground level."  She had the general drift of it, however, when the first two words were out in overt speech, and warm arms went quickly round his neck in a brief hug that left an impression of unexpected strength and a lingering trace of an exotic and unfamiliar scent. It took less than five minutes before Engels set them down in the shelter of a squat irrigation unit housed in a white adobe cube. They could hear the rhythmic beat of a pump working like an isolated heart. Fletcher sent up a pencil-slim periscope and took a long look at the blank wall of the club premises. It was indistinguishable from any other headquarter building which sat in the center of each precisely calculated admin district. It lay half a kilometer distant, across a fidd carrying a mauve, heatherlike crop of proteinrich erichthonius plant. The field went all the way round on the right flank. Left, a low hedge ran directly to the corner, dividing off another production area, lying fallow and showing up as a tidy spread of yellow ochre corrugations. A darker line amongst the furrows claimed his attention, and he was deciding that it was a surface road leading to the house, when Xenia said, "All these places have direct access underground to the monorail circuit. Supplies come in and pwoducts go out that way." Movement from the distant road made a period. A long, olive-drab hovercar, slug-shaped, flying a maroon pennant, appeared briefly on the periphery of vision and swept out of sight at the side of the building. There was an urgency about it which confirmed in his mind that they were at the right place. If that was so, however, the small scout car would hardly be allowed to hover overhead choosing a good target for a depth charge. No doubt at all, the plain brick facade would conceal a fortress. Fletcher 'flicked the eyepiece shut and set his periscope to retract. Before the tip had clicked softly into its housing, he knew what he had to do. He said quietly, "Hocker, get yourself outside and cut a hole in this wall. Go in and top the pump." When Hocker was busy making a circular incision with a vibrator from the car's external tool rack, he went on, "Whatever else they do here, they must keep the district working."'Hocker disappeared through his seal hole. Xenia was leaning forward breathing warmly down Fletcher's neck, a distracting intimacy which made him too much aware of her physical presence; uncomfortably IF underlined by the knowledge that she knew he knew she knew. The pump went out. Two minutes later a clumsy, angular silvergray maintenance tender was rounding the blind corner of the facing wall. Engels said, "Efficient, whatever else." The tender was lightly made, with huge inflated wheels. It rolled over the crop without causing damage. It stopped on the opposite side, and they watched the scanner for a closegrain picture of the developing scene. T wo Garamasians jumped down from the high seat. A comedy partnership. One very tall, the other shorter, a geometric design of two balancing spheres. Gray coveralls with maroon armbands to show membership of the nationalist party. Breast-pocket flashes to show status as agricultural engineers. The fat one carried a cranked key like a winding handle and shoved the business end home in a slot which was invisible to the watchers. Then he began to turn it. Dag Fletcher had seen enough. He was moving silently out before the man had completed one revolution. They saw him check the setting of his laser for its wide-angle stunning beam, and then he was through the hole in a smooth flow of effort. Whatever the inside of the pump room was like, it could not have been immediately obvious that there was a hole in its protective shell, because both men went in. On the count of five Hocker reappeared at the hole. "Stay here with the car. WeTe going to have a look inside." He pulled a strap pouch from its ceiling clip and put in it two charges from the rack. "If we're not back in fifteen minutes you're to set a course for Petrel. Take off according to schedule." He was sliding hack the hatch when Xenia hazarded vivisection by slipping through the narrowing gap to join him. Standing at ground level, the top of her head was well below his shoulder -- a miniature Boucher, now seen to be wearing a broad flexible metallic belt over her minimal green tights with a short, narrowbladed knife hanging from it in an elect rum sheath. "Not you, midget." The knife was pricking into his navel before he could lift a hand. Something very clear in her green eyes warned him that she would just as soon push it right in as not. He thought, "Why should I sweat? Let clever bloody Fletcher sort her out." He simply shrugged and finished closing the port. Hocker said, "That little silver hint followed me out. I told her to get back. I reckon she must have thought better of it and done that." "Okay. Let's get on." Sitting on a high bench seat, Dag Fletcher found that he was facing a completely unfamiliar set of instrumentation. The buggy was however quietly vibrating, so its power pack was in service. Out from a plain bulkhead under the windshield, two rods, one white and one black, curved out and seemed to fall naturally to the hands of anyone in the driving seat. Methodically checking out possibilities he tried to move them up, then left, then right. It was not until he pulled them both down that there was a soft click of engagement, and they were moving straight forward. Now he could feel lateral play and tried moving his left hand out. The buggy swung on its tracks turning right. Then he got the trick of it. Both down for straight on. Left or right, feed power into the drive on that side, so that the buggy spun on the slowing wheels and went in the contrary direction to hand movement. Once grasped, it was easy; and he made a fast run across the field to the house wall. From underneath, it was a towering slab of masonry. Solid as a cliff. Too huge to be so featureless. They rounded the corner in a controlled spin and trundled on. Precisely in the center of the side, the approach road ran into the thickness of the building as though into a mine, Fletcher spun the buggy into the entrance, and they saw fifty meters ant lighting ports in the roof and painted white. There was no operator in sight, but as they approached a maroon and white check barrier began to lift like a portcullis. The buggy was obviously recognized and given official welcome by a scanning eye. At the end of the run they came out into a central courtyard. The external severity of design was belied by a profusion of color. The entire floor was paved with red and white squares of ridged tile. In the center was an oblong pool with violent color patches of merope bushes apparently growing from its indigo surface. Entirely of transluscen brick, the inner wall glowed with light. At ground level open colonnades led from the courtyard into the building. Right, the olivedrab car was drawn up at a semicircular entrance port. Left, a more utilitarian working area was laid out with parking space for farm plant. Beyond the pool, a number of military-dcsign hovercars with the maroon pennant of the organization were drawn up. F letcher swung around to join the farm vehicles. A round head lifted from some desk-bound chore and watched incuriously as he ran into an empty bay. But he could hot expect that they would get far without a challenge. In answer to a question framed only at mental level, Xenia's voice came from beneath the buggy. "Their operations room is under the main block. Through that portico and down." She wriggled free from the angled chassis members which had supported her and stood beside them. It was useless to make anything of it. Fletcher said, "You seem to know all about it." She appreciated his realistic acceptance and went on. "These places are all on the same plan. If you've seen one, you've seen the lot. And they all have an underground IF complex. Stowage and civil defense. The internment building was just like this." "And of course you had the run of it," Hooker said. "I was a very pwivileged pwisoner." "I'll bet you were." "All we have to do is to get inside the building. Anywhere at all. I can show you." Only twenty-five meters distant, the farm office block was the obvious target. Reading Fletcher's line of thought, Xenia said, "You want a diversion. Why not send one of these buggies over the yard to cwash into that tidy line? The end one. When I was underneath I could see the contwols move. I'll do it from underneath." His conditional agreement was still unspoken, when she had slipped away under the wheels. Seconds later they heard the end buggy begin its destructive run. It skirted the edge of the pool, picking up speed until it was waddling along at a good thirty kilometers in the hour. Then it was doing its best to climb over the middle car of the waiting line. Reaction was immediate and positive. Suddenly the courtyard was full of high-shouldered Garamasians. Conformation that this was no simple farm center came at the same time: All the new arrivals were in military uniform and carried machine pistols. With all the movement in the direction of the crashed vehicle, Xenia led the way under the colonnade and through the nearest entrance. They were in a circulation corridor which ran all the way round the building. Without hesitation, she picked an arched opening leading off and went through it like a silver rabbit on the home run. Ramp on a spiral leading down, lit by oval ceiling ports. At the second turn, a Garamasian hurried up and was blasted by Hocker with a yell frozen in his gullet. They left him leaning against the wall with his eye disks rolled to gray blanks. Xenia said, "Each floor follows the same plan. We need to be over the other side." They were running now, footsteps beating a light tattoo on the parquet. At the second corner, she said, "Round this one there will be a beam barrier." If there was it was not apparent. Smooth white walls ran away to a darker-hued distant rectangle where a right-angled turn brought in the opposite wing. Hocker said, "Stalemate, then," and crumpled forward to the tiled floor. Xenia's lips were framing, "Don't worry about that weport," but it was never uttered. Men in olive-drab uniform, moving like trained soldiers, were swarming in the corridor where sentry niches set in the walls had sliced open. Many hands made light work of carrying the aliens to a point halfway down the corridor where a wide opening on the left led to the underground operations room they had come to seek. They passed a low-ceilinged crush hall and were taken into the lofty neive center itself. Round the walls, men in green uniforms looked round indifferently before turning again to the winking lights of a communication network. Operators, shoving magnetized disks along route lines on a wallsized operations map, rested on their select group round the board-room table in the middle of the floor to take executive action. A paunchy type at the head of the table looked up and said in a harsh, grating voice, "Set them in the analyzer. Quickly now. There is no time to waste." W hen his head cleared, and the convoluted, white mists rolled back to extend his vision outward from a still black center, Dag Fletcher was on the specimen's side of a large lens looking up into the eye of a busy researcher. He was lying in a convenient coffin-shaped box with his neck on a padded rest. Then centimeters from his face the curved glass of the lens filled the aperture from edge to edge. Electrode plates pressing on his skull both prevented any movement and set up a tension Which was on the threshold of destructive pain. It was, with all its strangeness, recognizable enough. Any advanced culture in the galaxy could set it up, one way or another. He was hooked to a bug that could tap the inmost secrets of his mind. Whatever he thought, bawdy, humorous, treadierous, kindly, cruel, picayime or full of ultimate truth as an egg, was all there for them to see. A mind nakeP and ashamed. Working at it, however, he filled its surface channels with frivolity. Xenia, since she was nearest at hand in experience. He set himself to do an identikit portrait which they could throw on their screen if they liked. Straight, aristocratic nose, level brows, serious mouth of a voluptuary, small round chin. Being a mathematician he recognized that like nature she was profoundly symmetrical and proportionate. A number sequence. #. #. #. #. #. #. #. #. # developed as he considered the claims of her body structure to satisfy the strict requirements of the Golden Section. A grating voice penetrated the privacy of his box, speaking in Garamasian. From somewhere left he heard Xenia herself giving a helpful word. "Are you thinking about me, Dag? That's nice." Then the harsh commentator once more, this time in the lingua franca of the galaxy, "It is no use. Commander. We already know all about your ship. Your lieutenant has given us all we need to know. Unfortun: ately I do not think we can catch up with your patrol car, but there is still time to have the ship intercepted." Xenia said, speaking quickly, "But they can't do that, Dag. It would show their hand too soon. We have only ourselves to worry about and that..." Her voice cut off in IF an involuntary screen. Some linguist had caught the drift of her argument and used direct means to cut it off. More Garamasian gobbledcgook, and he felt the container he was in was beginning to move. From being horizontal, he was now tipping forward, pivoting at a point somewhere near shoulder level. Finally he was upright, with weight taken largely on his feet, but a certain spinestretching tension still present from the head stall. Now he could see the operations room through the distorting lens in front of him, like a view through the wrong end of a binocular. At the head of the table, seemingly at the end of a long tunnel, the man who was calling the shots looked like a piranha. Underslung jaw, open, rubbery mouth, bland noseless face, bloated trunk stretching away below the shiny table top. I t was not a lot better when the glass screen was swung away and he saw that the man was less than ten meters distant. Sitting next to him like an A.D.C. was a lean, bluewhite Scotian, motionless, reptilian eyes looking away left, no doubt at the more rewarding tableau of Xenia. On the table in front of them was the pouch with their charges. Fletcher said, "Garamas enjoys neutral status. You have no right to imprison I.C.O. personnel. If you have any charges to make, your government will deal with the matter." "I can tell you, since you will have no use for the information, that we are the government. The neutral status you speak of will not be of long duration. There is no future for Garamas with the mealymouthed I.G.Q. alliance. I am sure our Scotian friends will be very glad to have two serving officers with knowledge of I.G.O. affairs. They are very skilled at breaking down reluctant contributors. Destructive, but thorough." Mind-racing to find any small advantage, Fletcher was only half listening. Under pressure, heightened by stress he thought he heard Xenia whispering quietly from somewhere left. Then he recognized that the voice was in his own mind. "Dag. We're on the same frequency. Think with me. These mind taps are very finely balanced. Together we can send a surge back up the spout that might wreck the box. Think with me. Very angry. Destroy. Destroy." Piranha-face was going on. Another quickly choked gasp of pain from Xenia brought all the anger Fletcher could feel into his mind. That and admiration for her which was involuntary and independent of sex. Silence from the floor and sudden quick movement from beside his box. Movement that was too late to throw a circuit balancer and stop a surge back along the delicate wiring of the cephelograph. There was a small plosive pop and an acrid smell of a burned-out dielectric. Fletcher was at the same time conscious of a bonus which they had not planned for. The failing circuit had tripped the relay which fed magnetic grips holding heir wrists and ankles. He sensed simultaneously that Xenia too had recognized it, and he said directly :o her mind, "Good girl. Now! Both together -- out and grab for King Log!" He had a confused impression of many heads turned inward to watch the developing scene and the movement of one guard quicker off the mark than the others. Tlien he dived for the shiny table top and went along it on a sliding tackle that brought him to its head. Piranha-face had opened his fish mouth and had struggled to his feet when the Earthman's arm clamped round his neck. Fletcher heard a confused struggle behind him and expected at any moment to feel the hammer thump of an old-fashioned slug tearing into his back. But he had twisted round his victim and got his own shoulders against a solid wall before anything had a chance to develop. He saw that Hocker, slower off the mark, had been grabbed by two Garamasian guards. While he watched, one of them brought up a machine pistol and clubbed it on the side of his head. Hocker went limp, and they let him fall. Xenia, a flash of quicksilver, was beside him. Her lime-green inner suit had been reduced to a fragmentary monokini, and blood welled from two long incisions from throat to navel. In her hand she carried her own small knife, stained to the hilt with blood which was not all her own. L eaning against the cephelograph box she had left, was a tall Scotian. He was still moving slowly and turning as he fell. Reptilian in metabolism though he was, he needed air, and he was currently trying to get his ration through a severed throat. When the circuit blew he had been looking elsewhere for instructions and had left Xenia's useful knife sticking in the fleshy part of her shoulder. Pulling it free and putting it to instant use had been pure therapy to the silvery Fingalnan, and she was actually grinning like a pleased cat when she joined Fletcher. Her knife pricking into the skin over the Garamasian's heart was a better argument than Fletcher's neck : lock. It also allowed freedom of speech. She said, "Tell them to stay where they are or you will surely die." "What do you hope to gain? If you kill me you will die yourselves. If you do not you will only delay your deaths for a little time. There is no escape for you." Fletcher reached out for the strap of the pouch and swung it clear of the table. Movement toward them was very gradual, and Xenia sensed it as a mental thing before it was physically obvious. She said, "Tell them to stand still," and shoved the blade a goal. Dag Fletcher was fumbling in the pouch bag and came out with one of the demolition charges. Then he hung the bag by its strap on the back of the leader's chair. IF speaking in the lingua franca he said, "I have set this now for impact detonation. I only have to drop it. Unless I can take it with me, we shall all go up." Cold, black eye disks held his own for a long pause. Xenia said, "That's all wight, Dag. But I'm sorry it had to end like this." "Don't be. Not many people have such an opportunity to go good." "To that man that is sin?" "Something like that." But under the surface of his mind, that structure which could present a thousand units of information in any living second, there was a majority voice that was less than satisfaction and viewed the move into oblivion as an unqualified evil in itself. Not least in this self-preservation lobby was the fifth-column, flank-turner Eros. Without deviating pressure at the knife point she put a warm hand on his arm and said incomprehensibly to those who could follow the Earth language, "I wegwet it too." P iranha-face stirred uncomfortably. He spoke out in the lingua franca, "Let them go. They can not get far. The bomb might just as well go off outside." Fletcher backed towards the exit making unmistakable mime that any attempt to rush him would cause his ten-centimeter cube to hit the deck. Xenia seemed to take her knife out of its pincushion with real reluctance. At the door, Fletcher stopped and said, "Can we do anything for Hocker?" She said, "I'll twy. But frankly he does nothing for me. You'd be better without that one." There was one undamaged carafe on the conference table. She took it and poiued it over Hocker's head. When he stirred, she said without any womanly sympathy, "On yoin feet, Lieutenant. This is no time for lying about. Quickly. Quickly He allowed himself to be led out like a dumb ox, shaking his head from side to side and seeing only a confused double-image view of the set. In the corridor they were watched out by a double row of silent guards. The word had gone ahead that the' were to have free passage. As they 'began to go up the ramp. Hocker stumbled once against Fletcher's shoulder, and a sigh of audience participation went up from the spectators. Fletcher steadied the box and centered it afresh on his flat palm. Xenia said sharply, "Watch him, Dag. That was partly intentional. They tried a two-way feed on me. Maybe they planted some ideas on our fwiend." Up in the courtyard, Fletcher quickened his pace. When they reached the line of waiting cars he was going at a jog trot and his silvery A.D.C. running with a pennant of blonde hair flying back. He took the first car in line and spent a count of ten looking at its instrument console. Then he was moving it off its pad to the entrance. Hocker said, "What's the hurry?" "We have aboout fifteen seconds to get out." "How come? What's the trouble?" "The second demolition mine. I set it down there in the bag. Give or take a second." They were at the beginning of the tunnel. Hooker slid open the hatch and was out, running back across the courtyard. He shouted, "I must warn them. The plan will fail." Fletcher looked back. Three cars had sidled out of the line and were following up. There was no time to go back. Xenia was out. She steadied herself against the side of the machine, and her arm flicked like a whiplash. Hocker fell forward, face down on the tiles, with her knife sticking out of his back. Then she was inside again, and they were surging down the narrow way with the portcullis lifting to let them through. Outside he gave it the gun, and they circled behind the sabotaged pump house to check that PetreVs car had indeed gone. They saw another green shuttle storm out of the narrow cleft, then a circular puff of fragmented debris rose from the invisible center of the building complex. A seismographical ripple traversed the purple field of erichthonius. The pump house took it like a dinghy hitting the wake of a hydrofoil and rocked to its foundations. Xenia said, "Look. Dag. We did it." H e spared a second's vision from a struggle to get full power out of the unfamiliar machine and saw that it was indeed so. The great walls were fissured from top to bottom and leaning in. Even as he looked, a widening rent began to spill out a ragbag of artifacts. The single figure of a man appeared momentarily' like a scrabbling beetle on its crumbling surface before a rising dust pall obscured the site. A line of holes punched through the fabric of their car just above head height. That brought him back to the business in hand. The Garamasian car had used time to gain height, and was coming in from the port quarter in a murderous power dive. Dag said, "Lie down on the floor!" He flung them in a steeply banked turn which brought the car to the edge of its potential. The other pilot was committed to his dive, and they had a broadside view with a face in every lateral port looking up. The clatter of a machine pistol at his back brought Dag's head round to the inside of his own steeply tilted car. Xenia had found it in a ceiling clip and was swiveling in a tail-end-Oharlie gunner's seat. He thought, "She's unbreakable. I'd rather have her at my back than any man I know." Into his mind her voice said directly, "Only at your back? That's not very complimentary." And he' knew that the heightened awareness of shared danger had put the telepathic link on a two-way net. But habit dies hard. He asked aloud, "That report. You still have it safe?" Falling in with ihis choice of medium, she said, "You do go on about that weport. I haven't got it at all. IF It's in that little car of yours. I hope they don't cwash it or anything." Then she was raking the following car in bursts of fire that put molten metal asterisks along its bluff bows. "Any luck?" "No. Armor there in fwont. Only the woof vulnerable, I expect. Still, it will make them more careful, Four lengths separated the hurrying cars. Already they were crossing out of the farm belt. Dag Fletcher put everything out of mind except the navigational chore, and Xenia could pick up only fragmentary clues of the high-speed calculations that were going on in his private computer. Professional to the ends of her fingertips, she knew better than to interfere in a task which only he could perform. Except for an occasional transmission of a kind which she thought might be good for his morale, she kept out of his mind. Using a formidable visual memory, he projected on to the unfamiliar chart blank all the mathematical detail which had cluttered the presentation table of the scout car. In ten minutes he had pin-pointed Petrel and set up a course line. Some of the gear was very good. Absorbed in the technology angles, he made notes of some features which could well be incorporated in the I.G.O. scout cars. As a final act of confidence, he brought in the autopilot and after a full minute, with the car holding course at undiminished speed at its ceiling of eighty meters, he left the pilot's seat to take a look at the view. As he went down the center aisle between the seats, he realized with a sudden feeling of guilt that he had not heard from her for some time. When he got there, he knew why. X enia had strapped herself in to the swivel chair and blood from the Scotian's long, exploratory dig had welled out in bright slow rivulets. Head back, so that her silky, blonde hair hung straight away from her neat head. Throat round and firm. A small pulse beating in a taut hollow below her collar bone. Breasts a pale silvery tumescence against the harness. She was unconscious. He loosened the straps and laid her flat in the aisle. The pursuing craft was still there, a good ten lengths astern and five meters below. Assuming the cars were equal, he would have the edge, because Garamasian had a capacity crew. Ten at least. Best part of a thousand kilograms. He took a look at the console and found the auto pilot was holding the course without a microsecond's deviation. Above each pair of seats he found a shallow locker recessed in the roof and methodically worked his way round the car. Medical kit, water tubes, ration packs. He spill them out on to the seats. No clothing. But it was warm enough and would be warmer before they reached the ship. Fingalnans anyway were not clothes conscious and only wore them for decorative possibilites. With a pad of lint and some lukewarm water he bathed away congealed blood and drew the delicate silvery skin together with continuous strips of skin-graft strapping. He broke out enough lint pads to cushion her against the ridged floor and as a refinement, on purely esthetic grounds, spread her hair in asymmetrical fan like a pale aureole. She was as well out of it for a time. Transfusion of plasma could be carried out in Petrel s minute sick bay. That would be a treat for Sholto Quinn, the ship's medicine man. The car hurried on. Now he was checking for seconds of leeway in the schedule. Cotgrave would give him every chance, wait to the last minute before taking Petrel up; but he was bound by his orders and no return could reasonably be expected. They were over the desert, and heat was notching up. It was providential that he had moved the ship to the coast; a short journey from the car might just be tolerable at the coast site. At the viaduct even seconds without a life-support system would have been too long. Then another thought struck him. Cotgrave would see the approach of two Garamasian craft as a threat. A ship was very vulnerable at the instant of liftoff. Even small-arm fire could upset her delicate balance. The co-pilot would be inclined to blast them as soon as they were in range of the main armament. W hen Petrel showed up, a slender spire on the horizon, they had a two-minute lead on the following car. Above the maroon pennant, Dag Fletcher had broken out an improvised wihite rectangle. He slipped control out of the autopilot's capable hand and began to circle the ship, noticing the wreathing steam spiraling from heating rocket tubes minute more. Then he was going down in a steep dive and ploughing into soft sand twenty meters from the tripod legs. Even in the hurrying car, making its own ventilating draft, and refrigeration doing its best, it was hot. Sweat was glistening on his bare arms and running unchecked down his face. He saw the freight hatch open and a small elevator platform begin its descent with a bulky figure in full gear which could be Engels. Cotgrave, with his finger on the button to blast the car, saw its hatch slide back and Fletcher's tall figure step out onto the burning sand. Across his arms, like a drugged victim being delivered for a burnt offering to Baal, was the limp, silvery figure of a Fingalnan girl. Bennett from the navigation console said, "That's the agent, believe it or not. It looks as though she's bought it." Dag Fletcher forced himself on. Behind him he heard the disintegrating roar of the Garamasian car, caught by Farnley as a plumb target on the hairlines of his main laser. But he was walking through fire and heard it as an irrelevance from another world. It was the furnace mouth. Heat that was shriveling his skin. Boiling his blood. Then hands were holding him up, and the elevator was retracting. Slowly, slowly. Too slowly. He was fighting for breath. It seemed only seconds later that IF he was Stirring in his own acceleration couch in his cabin and calling the command island. "Commander to One. Course detail." Cotgrave said, "Glad to have you back on the net, Commander." A miniature of the main scanner glowed above Fletcher's head, and he saw Garamas as a plate-sized disk with the land masses in clear definition. Cotgrave said, "Sixteen hours to R.V. Permission to stand down." "Check. Carry on." S ixteen hours. Xenia would have to transfer to Euro pa. Facilities there for an extra body. And a very popular body she would be. When he went into the sick bay, Quinn said," She's doing very well. I'd say she was just about indestructible. Anyway I'll leave you to talk to her; she tells me there is classified material to discuss. But don't excite her, now." When he had backed out of the tiny crucible, Xenia sat up in her narrow cot. In the familiar surroundings of his ship, her silvery nudity was a greater surprise. Too late he remembered that his thoughts were not his own. She said, "So you think the warning about excitement ought to have been given to me? That's nice. Sixteen hours. That isn't long. I have to give you a big thank you." Nobody in that cubicle could be far away from any other occupant, and it was easy for her to reach out and put her arms round his neck. "How do you feel?" He was doing his best to keep a conversation going. "I feel fine. You feel fine, too. I do like you, Dag. Will you come and see me when you have a furlough?" "Where will you be?" "I have to do a session at I.G.O. headqaurters. It will be a long time before I go out on another mission. Prepawation takes a long time." "Certainly I'll come and see you. I owe you a lot, Xenia, and so does the service. That was your show and you did well." "You sound like a schoolmaster pwaising a pupil." Before he could reply, her lips, very warm and soft, had effectively closed his. But the mental link began to open, and he found that he could follow her argument in a communication that used no words, but made sense at one remove from conventional, overt symbols. It went something like, this is a military unit. You are putting me in an impossible position. There is no such thing as an impossible position. Just a greater challenge to ingenuity. Quinn said you were not to be excited. I know better than any Earthman about whether I want to be excited or not. Don't wriggle about, you'll start bleeding again. Lock the door. No. Then I'll get up and do it. He opened the door and looked out. Quinn coming back along the IF corridor. Fletcher said, "She's okay, Doc. ni sit with her until she goes to sleep." Then he went inside and thought-. fully dropped the toggle on the catch. T he squadron was moving like a silver chain on a velvet display pad, in line astern, with Europa in the center of her corvette screen. Petrel came up on the microsecond. "Permission to rejoin." "Permission granted. Admiral requests Commander Fletcher and I.G. O. agent to proceed aboard flagship." The beginning of the end. Swing out over vacant interstellar space with Xenia beside him on the line, already an anonymous figure. Report delivered in the command cabin. Xenia indifferent of the impact she made, coldly professional again. Even the smallest coveralls found on Petrel were sloppy on that small figure. Valley said, "Success must carry a certain commendation. But I am bound to tell you. Commander, that your actions could have had serious repercussions. I must ask you in the future to stay within your brief." He fingered the small gray capsule which contained Xenia's report. "We have succeeded in our mission, and there is a bonus in the destruction of the fascist nerve center. Government forces have re-established control, and it is given out that the destruction of the power ring was part of the takeover plan. I shall mention your part in it in my dispatch. We are bound now for I.G.O. H.Q. A short leave for all personnel, I understand, before the next mission." Swinging back over the black depths to his ship, Dag Fletcher recognized her mind penetrating the vacuum to speak to him. Tenuous at this distance it was no more than a warm promise, a feeling of wellbeing, a frail human alliance at this instant of time in the immensity of galactic space. Time indeed was still on their side with another meeting, and that, when rightly considered, was as far as any reasonable man would wish to. go into the future. He sent back as a signal, the signal, the single, ubiquitous service word for acceptance of any situation. Boxeez Naron might not be such a bad planet -- if .only it weren't invisible! iC A planet without vegetation, surface water, or life. A leaky spacelighter without fuel. Food for six months and half that much oxygen." Mai Harker shook his head hopelessly. If that doesn't spell murder, Esme," he went on tonelessly, "name what it is." The yellowish dusty wastes of Naron, fourth planet of Kyor Twelve, were coming up swiftly to meet them. The outer shell of the clumsy (little craft was warming rapidly, so steep was their course; but they had no spare retro fuel for a second approach. Esme Jannot's pleasant round face was placid. In all their four years together aboard the planet-mapping Von Ark, he had never seen her upset or excited. His partner, Ilda Nolan, had nicknamed her "Doll." She was blonde, blue-eyed and tall. It angered Harker that she seemed so little concerned. The small spacelighter was being tossed about now by the outer shreds of atmosphere despite the measure of stabilization afforded by the rudimentary wings. "There is atmosphere, Mai," said Esme. "Somewhere there may be a rift or oasis that will support life. We have three, perhaps six, months to find it. Remember, we did not map aU Naron." "And in the meantime Dorn Tate will be light-years distant -- with my partner!" Harker beat his fist against the cramped cabin's insulated green matting of resilient synthetics. "That is the heart of the matter," said (the big woman strapped into the control seat at his side. "Tate has stolen your parner. It is not the loss of the Von Ark or being exiled here that troubles you most. It is the ithout of Ilda alone with Tate." "Yes," Harker agreed savagely. "You knew that he too loved Ilda," she said calmly. "You could have avoided this ugly crisis by freeing her at the last six-months' partnering." "We neither of us wanted that." He scowled over at Esme Jannot. "The thought of her partnering with Tate was revolting to us both." "And to me as well, Mai. Yet I was his partner for these four years past. It was for the good of the ship and its personnel. Men and women need companionship and understanding. We understood that when we signed for the voyage." "I realize that. What I, what we both feel, is not anything logical. It is something atavistic I suppose. We love one another." He struggled for words. "We belong." The ship, under semi-automatic controls, leveled off, cooling its superheated skin. They saw the dead yellow surface now from a height of less than a score of miles. And there were no gaping wide canyons or sunken depressions visible where they might eke out a miserable existence for a time. Only jutting ridges of barren black rock, some of them thousands of feet in height, marred the waterless wastelands below. Esme Jannot's voice cut across a long silence. "And because of your selfishness, and Ilda's as well, we were drugged and put adrift near this dead world." She smiled. "I am not condemning you, Mai. I only wish someone, sometime, had loved me in the same way." Harker glanced quickly over at the big woman's face. He had caught a trace of wistfulness, perhaps of regret, in her voice. And then he realized that they must ground on the surface witMn a scant handful of minutes. "What do you say?" he asked. "Should we land on one of the mesas or near its base?" "Water goes down, Mai. I vote for the lowest area possible." "Agreed," cried Harker. T heir final goal was a huge mass of stone, perhaps a hundred miles across and roughly star shaped -- a seven-pointed star. The dark bulk was flattened on top, and a mile-wide rift cut it into a larger and a smaller segment. Here, Harker reasoned, there might be possible openings into a subterranean cavern or caverns. The tiny spaceligbter came down across an upeurving bed of pale sand, heading toward the split mountain that would be their final resting place. The sand's friction would slow them, he hoped, but not too much. The ship met resistance, a hundred feet or so labove the sea of sand. There was a hissing burbling rush of sound. He felt the ship slowing. And now the sand was closer under them. Fifty feet and then twenty. They felt the sand bite into the hull. The lighter shuddered. Sand sprayed outward and upward, obscuring their vision momentarily. Yet there was no sound transmitted through the ship's tough outer skin. It was like plowing through a dense fog. Came a rending crash. They were thrown forward in their resilient harnesses. Harker regretted not having Esme don the lone spacesuit, a battered, much-patched outfit. If the lighter was holed they might die almost at once. And the ship was broken. The alien atmosphere was seeping into the cabin, diluting the stale stench of the air trapped there. "It's good!" cried Esme in a strangled voice. "Smells fresh and ciean! Green growing things! Fresh earth!" Harker released his pent-up breath. Deadly gases might be masked by a pleasant smell, he knew, but he had to breathe. And he took a second deep breath, savoring to the full a deceptive sweet fragrance. In a moment they might both be dead or dying, but for the moment he relaxed and was thankful for their safe grounding. He forgot Dora Tate, the arrogant graying astrogator, and his tiny, darkly beautiful partner, Ilda Nolan, a captive aboard the spacer. The sound of Esme Jannot's unzipping and unpopping (the contrd chair's harnesses aroused him from this pleasant lethargy. He set about freeing himself. Golden light from the sandy waste outside poured through the broken transparency of the nose blister. He went to the sealed entrance port and spun the safety lock's handwheel. The round laminated thickness of the first lock, and of the second, this a trifle warped and sticking, slid into their grooves; and the way outside was open. "It feels," said Esme, as they gained the outside, "hke Mother Earth after a summer rainstormi Yet this is desert. Dead!" Underfoot the sand felt springy and almost sticky. Harker looked down, puzzled, and then looked over at the woman's comfortable dark shoes. Like his own their soles rode an inch or better above the grittylooking soil. Something invisible and compressible covered the dead land here at the base of the star-splattered loom of the mountain! Something like this had caught at them as they were coming in for a landing! And the air was rich and heady with the scent of moisture and growing things! He heard the breeze whispering! Harker bent over, his hands probing into the nothingness beneath. He felt the crispness of grasslike growth -- the coolness of recently watered roots and stems. A hoarse bird sang. "There is vegetation here, Esme!" he cried out. "Why we cannot see it I do not know." E sme was lying on her stomach when he turned, her face buried in the invisible sod and her fingers digging into the seeming emptiness. She sat up, an unwonted excitement in her deep blue eyes, her cheeks flushed. Harker saw her, as though for the first time, as a vital attractive woman. Why had he thought her dull and bovine aboard ship, he wondered? That other Esme Jannot, placid and uncomplaining, bad been a mummer's masking. "There must be water, animals, edible plants," she said, her eyes glowing. "After a time we may be ib; able to see them -- to live off the country." "I don't know, Esmc." He frowned. "Plant life that cannot be seen. It must be too alien in structure for our bodies to assimilate. It may not even be carbon-based." His tongue was clumsy he knew. Words and thoughts tangled together and spilled out. He knew that it was the delayed shock of losing his partner, being exiled forever here on Naron and now the discovery of possible reprieve from eventual starvation and thirst that made it so. "But we have a fighting chance now, Esme!" he cried out. "That must have been water, or something akin to it, that the lighter plowed through. Let's analyze some of it." The big woman smiled agreement. Side by side, their light rocket rifles outthmst like a blind man's probing cane, they went down the easy slope below the ship. Twice Harker tripped over an unseen jut of brushy growth, once with a painful raking and piercing from the thorns or needles of the Naronese plant. The roar of pounding surf strengthened. Before them the ydlow sand darkened and seeincd firmer in texture. They were walking on a hardpacked beach of grassless sand. And they saw sand that moved. Now it came uphill, and now it slipped backward. Into this moving sand Harker stepped and felt fluid come swirling up about his ankles. He scooped up a palmful of the receding wave and tasted it. Definitely saline. He spat it cut. A larger wave staggered him, and he started to fall. He caught himself. after a bit of ungraceful arm waving and hopping, and rejoined the woman. "We're in business -- I think," he said. "It feels like sea water. Once we have tested it and distilled a few gallons, we will know better." W as it only four days? Four days on Naron meant a few minutes over eighty hours -- the day being approximately twenty hours long -- but it seemed much less. They had repaired the gaping wounds of the spacelighter as best they could and found a second daytime refuge from Naron's great golden primary in a cliff-sheltered valley. Here they had found a small stream and a pool of fresh water, with several stands of straight-boled timber along the creek. It was here, on the three or four hundred acres of arable land, that they decided to settle to await an improbable rescue. With improvised hooks and lines, baited with bits of promine steaks or colored lures, they had fished the pool -- hooking three and four pounders. Unhooking an invisible fish has its problems they had learned; but later on, the fried beauties taldng on a misty reality with their coatings of synthameal and cooking oils, they had earned a tasty reward. Esme's specialty, photography, had proved invaluable. The dozens of pictures, taken at random, revealed a fertile land of forests, meadows and a horizonless sea to the east. They had discovered slender deerlike animals and fat, gray-haired brutes, hogsized, that fed on roots and nuts under the smooth-boled trees. Even yet, familiar as he was with the half-mile trail from the ship, Harker was continually running into low boughs or crashing into the trunks of trees along the way. And it was disconcerting to step on a writhing, snakelike something and leap backward. Yet your eyes revealed only a sere yellow wasteland. He tried to put Dda from his mind. When he imagined her alone with Dorn Tate, his anger and despair sickened him. Yet he knew there was nothing he could do. They were And they would never return. He and Tate's discarded partner must end their lonely days here on this mysteriously veiled planet of Naron. Esme was an understanding woman. She respected his grief and could keep her silence. She left him to his own brooding thoughts and did not interfere in any way while he was steeped in bitter self pity. He realized what a pouting child he must appear and forced himself to labor harder. A cabin had to be built and a stockade across the narrow mouth of the valley to keep out the hidden animals of the ghostly forests. Experiment showed that wet mud from the pool, smeared on trees or leaves, remained to mark their presence. He experimented with sprays, outlining their immediate surroundings. He used dyes to stain the water, the resultant contents of the valley pool having an unreal cottony appearance. And he set out generous cuttings of the edible, oxygen-freeing hybrids that the space! ighter's air-reclamation system, utilized. They grew luxuriantly, Harker was busy and, increasingly, almost happy. He knew that the buxom woman who shared his exile often felt the same. He caught her singing softly as she worked, not once, but a dozen times. The sun was coloring their skin, and its warmth caused them to shed the superfluous burdens of emergency coveralls, standard aboard ip, and don shorts and brief tunics. He discovered that Esme was a big woman, yes, but beautifully proportioned and strong. Ihere was nothing flabby or needlessly sagging about her body. To most men, he thought, she would be very attractive. But not to Mai Harker. He loved Ilda Nolan -- and he always would be faithful to her. H e was spraying the trees about the little clearing where they had decided to build. The spray was a fine mist of aluminum paint and carbon scraped from the tubes. It outlined, in a darkly silver sort of shadow-image, the immediate surroundings. Silvery sward underfoot and silvery trunks and leaves arching overhead. His supply of the paint was strictly limited; only the heart of his projected farm could be marked. But there were substitutes. "Mai!" screamed Esme from the direction of the pool. He could not see her, the rocky lip of the pool's edge was nine or ten feet above it, but he knew she had gone there for a bath and, perhaps, to hook a fish later. He ran, the improvised hand IF Bprayer yet in his grip. Now he saw her clothing, abandoned at the pool's invisible edge, and then, across the hundred-foot bowl, he saw her struggling, her kicking body being impelled up the rocky slope. She was fighting an unseen something, or things, as savagely as her great strength allowed. Harker's needle-spitting hand gun was at his hip, its needles armed with paralyn. If he fired Esme might well absorb several of the paralyzing slivers. More than five or six meant death. And the metabolism of the unseen raiders might remain unaffected by the drug. He ran swiftly after Esme, circling the pool and tripping over hidden undergrowth as he did so. As he neared her contorted body, something that sounded heavy and vicious went hurtling past his ear. He ducked, stumbled and was aware of the tank of compressed air and the nozzle and paint cylinder that bumped ground before he recovered. He depressed the stud, showering Esme's naked body and 'the invisible enemy equally with an aluminum mist. The spray caught three hulking shapes, humanoid in general shape but larger, thicker and wider. One of the trio held Esme's arms locked behind her, but the other two were advancing on Harker. Both imperfect shells of animated silver swung huge clubs, and a savage roar of anger and savagery went up. A lashing club grazed his shoulder. He had the needier out by that time and was sewing metallic slivers across their middles. The other club struck the ground, so quickly had the paralyn acted, and the two kidnappers were helpless. Harker rubbed at his left shoulder's numbness, feeling the sting of bruised flesh, and sidled around Esme and her captor seeking a clear shot. The bulky biped hurled Esme aside, bellowing, and rushed Harker. An unseen fist slapped the needier, even as it started to spew out its deadly hail, from Harker's grip. He felt a huge, strangely hard body slam into his own; 'and he went down. A snarling mouth came down at his throat. He jabbed an elbov into emptiness, and the barely discernable head fell away momentarily. He pumped his fists, he had dropped the sprayer even before the hand gun, into the springy armorlike body of the aborigine. He heard Esme panting out words of courage. Then the needier hummed, close at hand, and his Naronese assailant collapsed upon him. "Mall" she was crying as she rolled the helpless creature out of the way. "Mai, are you hurt?" H arker grunted, raising himself to a sitting poslurel He moved his neck and arms -- stretched. His shoulder felt numb, and be was gasping for breath; but he was unbanned. He saw surprised tears in Esme's eyes -- although after her close escape that mit be expected. "Yeah " he managed "I'm fine." She was examining his bruised shoulder, forgetful of her own undod state. He could see that it was an ugjy bndse, wiith blood oozing through the abrasions, but his arm was not too badly affected. "Thanks be," Esme said. "I was so afraid that you would be killed. And I couldn't face that." She shivered. "This horrible place -- these unseen monsters -- the desert!" She was sobbing her arms around his neck, her tears wet on his bared shoulder. Gone was the calm, almost robotic, crew member he had known for several years aboard the Von Ark, This was a warm-blooded, sympathetic queen of a woman. Her tanned fair flesh was warm and soft against him... Harker pushed at her gently. He stood up. "We had best get back to the lighter," he said. "No telling how many more of these brutes are prowling about." Esme shook her ithick chestnut curls into order with a toss of her head. With the back of her hand she brushed the surplus tears away. She was smiling again, suddenly, her usual calm capable self -- and this despite her recent outburst. Harker was proud of her. While Esme went for her garments around the pond's rim Harker sprayed one of die helpless creatures more completely. Its color was of course not apparent, but it appeared to be four-to, rather than five-toed, and its hands boasted an equal number of digits. The apishly thick-bodied brute was close to seven feet tall and completely hairless. The legs were short, thick and bowed. The huge-jawed skull, capped by six flexible crestings of fin-like ridges, was equipped with the huge, flat-slabbed teeth of an herbivore. Harker understood now the apparent hardness of the native's body! The external body covering was a natural and flexible coating of bony plates almost chitinous in character. This strange carapace of linked plates gave way to more normal flesh on arms and legs, but even this was coarse and scaly. "Ready," called Esme. "Let's go to the ship." "One minute," Harker cried, gathering up the sprayer and one of the crude, hide-wrapped splinters of igneous rock that the natives carried for weapons. "We must come back with a camera," he said as he reached her side, "before they recover..." T he lowest level of the city was a hundred yards above the plain. The city was the product of centuries of boring into a drum-shaped mesa's softer rock layers. Now the city's avenues and passages honeycombed the mesa's several miles of diameter. Four elderly Naronese, in an exterior chamber on the thirtieth and topmost level, linked minds amicably. "Unless we free their eyes," one declared, "both aliens will be destroyed by the Lynks or the tagants. And a new defence against aliens should be devised. They see through pictures." "We must not let the offlings die," agreed a second, "but the mother ship did go away, suspecting nothing. These two were left behind to die. So I say let us release these two from their visual blackout but retain the planet-wide shielding." "I agree with Hedl," the third IF native's more deliberate thoughts came through. Retain the desert planet mirage, but free the two castaways." "They are much too interesting specimens to permit their wanton destruction," the last of the quartet agreed. "I too vote with Hedl. Yet I also agreed with Adro that a second line of defense against possible future invasions be considered. The next aliens may not be as primitive and peaceful as these Earthmen. Nor as amenable to mental suggestion." "Even with these aliens our only complete success has been with their vision." The thoughts were flooding together now. "Natural blocks against control like the brutish Lynks of the forests... Yet we can read their thoughts... Not control them... Children in many respects and cruel as only the young .  . They can be taught wisdom, Hedl... And they can teach us as well..." Thoughts battered, splashed and churned. Eventually an agreement was reached, and the word went out nese spread thinly across the globe. The male and the female alien were to be permitted full vision at once. That a few isolated citizens misunderstood or were asleep or mentally disturbed was to be expected. To them can be ascribed the vague sense of unreality felt by Esme and Marker at first... T hey were entering the lighter's outer lock when the curtain was abruptly lifted. The sward underfoot was a blending of purple and green, the tightly curled underleaves a paler hue. The trees of the forest were paler, on the whole, than Terrestrial vegetation; but then the pale golden tinge of the heavens, opposed to the blue of Earth, made for strange lighting effects. They saw for the first time -- excluding the color films Esme had taken, the grazing herds on the plain to the sea's red-sanded brink. "What happened?" cried Esme. "Like scales dropping from our eyes," mused Marker. "Some ancient writer wrote that. And it is so." Unconsciously diey had come together, arms interlocked and bodies touching. It was a need for mutual reassurance -- a fear of the unknown that needed to be faced jointly. "See those creatures, like tigers or lions, prowling along the ridge," Esme cried. "Covered with blue fur, or hair, large as a horse! And the ruminants. Like bison but bigger..." "The cat beasts are called tagants. The ruminants are satas. And the brutish bipeds you defeated so cleverly are called Lynks, They are degraded offshoots of our own race," There was no voice. Marker was sure of that. He turned about, peering. Esme was not smiling nov, her face pale. There was a sound of footsteps on the grassy cushion at the spacelighter' stam; and two giants, scarlet-plated with shading to a delicate yellow and white along the belly and chest, strode into view. "Forget your weapons, Mai Marker and Esme Jannot," the bodiless voice cautioned. "We could have destroyed you long ago had we desired." Harker nodded somewhat ruefully. "I expect you could," he agreed, his eyes taking in the finely fitted harness of leather and metal and the sword and the dagger hanging from it. "We do not kill needlessly, Mai Harker," the alien thoughts came. "Only the Lynks and a species of sea serpent resist our control. The weapons are for them and for misguided men of our own race." "And what of us?" Harker demanded. "Are we your prisoners? Now that we can see you, what is to happen to us?" "You are offered this valley and the others surrounding. You can never return to Earth. You have been deserted by your leader. Here you 'and your children can dwell in comfort." Harker swore half-heartedly and spluttered. Esme reddened. "We are not partners or mates," he said. "My partner was stolen. I am faithful to her. There will be no children." The thoughts of the Naronese were amused. "Waitand see," they advised. And then: "we will come again tomorrow." They turned and walked swiftly back the way they had come. Harker and Esme looked at one another uncertainly. A small doubt was gnawing at Barker's brain. The two Naronese apparently knew something that he did not suspect. He recalled how Esme had flushed and looked away. Forget it, he told himself, and get to work on the stockade and the cabin and at the planting. Now that you can see your surroundings your sprayer is not needed. WorkI But there was something wholesome and fine about Esme... T hat night he was battling with Dorn Tate. It was a hopeless battle from the first. Tate was older stronger and more experienced. And watching, laughing mockingly at his feeble efforts, was his eight-term partner, lovely, dark Ilda Nolan. In utter despair he cried out and heaved the crushing bulk of Dorn Tate from him -- and awoke! The hopelessness of that nightmare battle carried over into his waking thoughts. Helpless here on Naron, while his beloved Ilda was born lightyears away. What good to live on? There was no hope of rescue. The first colonizing expeditions to follow the route they were blazing would come a century or so later, and this desertplanet would be avoided. He groaned aloud. "Is something wrong?" Esme asked softly. "Everything, Esme," he said. In the pale light of Naron's larger moon he saw her across the control cabin, sitting up in her emergency shock hammock. "Why go on living?" Esme swungherself out of the hammock and came over to his improvised cot of cushions and webbing. She was angry, he saw as she switched on the ship's side lights. He had never seen her like this before. Her hair all tousled and her face... "For four years," she said sharply, "you kept one partner aboard IP ship. You were faithful to her as our code of ethics requires you to be." "You know that, Esme. You were the only other woman aboard the Von Ark "Had Ilda partnered with Dorn Tate you would have respected that relationship?" she demanded. "Why, of course, Esme," Marker agreed, "but Ilda would never have partnered with him. We were -- are in love." "I would never had spoken of this, Mai, had we returned safely to Earth. Believe me. But now I cannot let you go on destroying yourself... I love you too much to let you..." "You -- me?" "Since we first boarded ship, Mai. But I knew how hopeless it was. Ilda wanted you, as well as Tate." "What?" Marker's hands clamped Esme's firm shoulders. "You say she wanted -- Tate?" "And had him. They were lovers from take-off, Mai. You never suspected. You trusted them. And I knew the ship's mission came first. What good to hurt you?" "You lie, Esme!" He shook her savagely. "This is a story you manufactured. You lie!" His fist knotted. He drew it back and struck at Esme's face. But his blow went wild, somehow, missing her completely. Instantly he was ashamed and shocked at. his instinctive brutality. "You invented it?" He was pleading. "It is true, Mai. Think. You must realize I am not lying. Ilda knew that you would obey the code if she were partnered with Tate. But he was not that honorable. "Until he changed and demanded that she leave you. It was after that that we were set adrift near Naxon. She had lost her control over him." "I will not believe." "You must." It was a powerful inner voice. "She tells the truth. We, of Naron, know the truth. Believe!" And Marker believed. There was utter conviction in the thoughts that had come through so strongly. A thousand memories came briefly to him confirming the ugly truth of his partner's calculated unfaithfulness. Dimly he sensed the withdrawal of the mental linkage with the Naronese. His mind was a dull ache within his skull, a bruised numbness slowly wearing through pain to a measure of peace. Esime was beside him, her arms tender about him, her voice soft. Gone was his anger at her. He felt shame and bitterness. His love for Ilda, her professions of love -- all mirages, even as the desert world of Naron had been false. The reality was better. The operation had been clean and complete. Instead of a sickly dream he possessed something real and lasting at last. He took his partner in his arms, the moonlight of that alien world bright upon them, and it seemed that this was a homecoming to their      Business could hove been profitable -- but something was eating into the profits! I a transcribed message to Skroot, a planetary ecologist of great reputaC C loomer?" asked Charles Dartion and little sense of humor. Skroot win Skroot. adjusted the glasses which rested The president of Planetrade Cortoward the tip of his nose and careporaticn nodded. With an understandfully read the typewritten sheet. It ably worried expression, he handed said, "Have had to move into reIF  Novelette OF mote areas to collect. Demand exceeding supply. Still no new seedlings. No success in transplanting. No success in locating seeds. Help. Usher." "There's our problem," Conners said when Skroot looked up from the message. "The planet Gloomer has only one valuable resource, namely, Tastybushes. We have over a hundred collectors out there now, and we should probably send another fifty to keep up with the demand. But, you re it for yourself. We're running out of Tastybushes. R. V. Humphrey, author of this month's "first" story, is a field archaeologist, photographer and lab technician at the University of California, where he is studying for his doctorate in Archeology. When not digging in prehistoric coastal Indian sites, our author enjoys shark fishing. "What's even worse! Tastybushblossom extract has become our biggest product, and if the things disappear we'll probably go bankrupt. Three or four more years like this, and we've had it." Tiny tears rolled down Conners' cheeks as he gravely considered bankruptcy. "That's why we called you, Skroot. Find out why they're dying off and fix it. If you can save them, you can almost name your own price." Skroot read the message over again and queried, "Just what is this Tastybush-blossom extract used for?" "About ten years ago we began marketing it as a soft drink flavor. We never dreamed it would become so popular -- or so profitable. Our sales doubled every year, and up to now we've expected to make some real money on it. We're the only suppliers, you know. But last year we discovered that no young Tastybushes were sprouting in any of our collecting areas. The old bushes died off, and there weren't any new ones to take their place. Now we have to go out into the swamps to find them, and that gets expensive, believe me. Skroot took his dog-eared notebook from its holster and began taking notes... "You know," Conners continued. "This is the first new flavor in several hundred years. Before they finished exploring Earth, every time they discovered a new continent or something a new flavor came with it. Like chocolate, when they discovered America. Since then, nothing until the Tastybushes. This is the only really new one that hasn't turned out to be either poisonous or habit forming." Conners grinned and chortled, "And we're the only suppliers." Skroot nodded his head in agreement. "Everybody loves it," Conners announced. "Some people drink six or seven bottles a day. And every bottle is worth a profit of three and a half cents." He leaned back into his chair with evident satisfaction, but his smile turned into a scowl as the thought of bankruptcy returned. "But, as goes the Tastybush, so goes Planetrade Corporation." S kroot removed his glasses and thoughtfully cleaned them on the front of his shirt. "My fee," he said quietly, "will be one cent per bottle, for a one year period, commencing one year from the completion of my task." "What?" Shrieked Conners, half rising from his chair. "That's robbery!" "Well now," Skroot replied placidly with a shrug of his shoulders, "It's not as bad as all that. If I don't solve your problem, naturally, there will be no charge for my services." Conners' voice increased in volume and pitch. His face became redder with every second. "Do you realize how much money that is?" IF "Yes, indeed I do, Mr. Conners," replied Skroot, not the least perturbed by the outburst. "And it's cheap at the price. Of course, there are other alternatives. You could engage someone else or pay me a flat fee whether I should succeed or fail or you could put some of your staff people to work on the problem, or you could always just sit and go bankrupt." Conners winced at the thought. "You bandit," he said. "You know very well there's no one else with your qualifications, and we've had our staff on it for two years already with no success, and we figure that you'll probably fail too." "I'm really too old to go hopping about on the planets at all, you know. I should have retired many years ago." "With the fees you charge you could retire after a single job." Conners deliberated for a moment, rapidly calculating on his fingers. "Okay, one cent per bottle it is, but only if you completely and permanently solve the problem." "ni have my attorney draw up the contract," Skroot said, "Of course, I am assuming that all of your records on the planet will be made available to me." "Certainly," Conners responded with no hesitation. "Anything that might help. But unfortunately there isn't much we can give you." Skroot looked puzzled. "It was my understanding that Planetrade Corporation always made complete and systematic surveys of the grass under its jurisdiction." "Well, yes," Conners said slowly. "That's true. But there were, well, certain problems involved here. We really weren't able to accomplish very much." "Exactly what problems are you referring to, Mr. Conners?" C onners noticed Skroot's suspicion and hastily said, "There's nothing dangerous there, you understand. No hostile aborigines or large carnivores or anything like that." Skroot's eyes narrowed. "Are you attempting to conceal something?" "No, no, certainly not," came the denial. "It's just that the situation there is difficult to explain. It's the weather. You might say it gets, well, a little thick sometimes." "Thick?" asked Skroot. "Thick?" "Well, yes," explained Conners, pursing his lips and looking at the ceiling. "No violent electrical storms or hurricanes or even a breeze for that matter. It's just... thick." He thought for a moment then added, "Precipitation is high; the visibility is correspondingly low." "That doesn't sound like much of a problem." "On Gloomer it's a problem, take my word for it." Conners leaned forward and cupped his chin in his hand. "For instance, our radar survey of the planet clearly showed a small range of mountains about # feet high not more than twenty miles from our trading post. They represent the highest point in the whole hemisphere. But would you believe it, a crew of geologists looked for the things for three months and couldn't find them." "Couldn't find them?" Skroot asked incredulously. "Indeed? An entire mountain range? Most unusual." "That's what I thought at the time." "Well, then," Skroot inquired, "what about a biological survey? Plants? Animals? That sort of thing." "We're not much better off there. Planetrade Corporation made a big grant to a university to send a crew of experts out to Gloomer to make a complete survey. We wanted another Challenger Expedition. And besides, it's tax deductible." "What happened?" # ##ell," began Conners, "it took VV three years to organize the thing. There were thirty specialists and enough gear to keep them going for five years. "The geologists quit first. Right off the bat there was that thing with the mountain range; then it was another two months before they found even one little stone to work on. And that one turned out to be a piece of concrete that was accidentally transported from Earth. "Another one of the crew was an ornithologist. One of the world's leading authorities on woodpeckers. But as it turned out, there weren't any woodpeckers on Gloomer, so he spent the rest of his time sitting and writing his memoirs. "The ichthyologist had a better time of it. For a while, at least. Out on Gloomer, with all that rain and all, there are sluggish rivers scattered all over the place. We don't know where they come from, or where they go, or how wide they are; but there are fish or something that live in them. "So he tried to catch a few with a net, which didn't work. Then he tried a hook and line, but that didn't work either. He lost his tackle as fast as he could throw it in. One day he became desperate and rigged a line out of some #-pound test towing cable with a hook the size of a small anchor on it. He baited the thing with five frozen chickens and tied the end to a big concrete monument the surveyors put in. Whatever it was that he hooked took the line, survey monument and all. "Poor guy," Conners said sadly. "After all that time and effort, he didn't even see one of the things. He couldn't so much as publish a preliminary report. He finally had a nervous breakdown. "Then the surveyors quit. They were furious when they found out about that monument. After months of work it was the only thing they had managed to map." Skroot listened with genuine sympathy. "Did the botanists accomplish anything?" "Yes and no," explained Conners. "They began by describing and classifying the marsh grasses. Then they disagreed about which family one of the species belonged to and spent the rest of their time on the planet arguing about it." "They didn't work on the Tastybushes?" asked Skroot. "No, they wanted to finish the grass first. As far as I know they're still arguing about it. After about six months, the whole crew got tired of the place and left." "Well," Skroot concluded, "at least I won't have to spend several months reading academic papers." He rose IF from his seat as though he expected to hear a loud creaking noise from his back. "When do I leave?" n T he trip and touchdown were uneventful. When Skroot stepped out of the ship's elevator to the planet, its perpetual blanket of fog and mist closed in around him. "Mr. Skroot?" called a tall, bony man, wearing a hooded plastic jacket and waders, who loomed suddenly into his ten-foot range of vision. "Yes, as a matter of fact I am," Skroot replied, squinting as though it would somehow help him in peering through the soupy air. "I'm Felix Usher, superintendent of the Planetrade Corporation trading post. Welcome to Gloomer." His clenched jaw and deep-set eyes overhung by shaggy black brows gave him an angry look. His normally snarling tone of voice completed the impression. "The chief beamed me that you were on your way. Here's your oversuit." Skroot took the plastic jacket and waders and began to pull them over his clothes as he peered myopically into the fog. "If I had suspected that the place was as bad as this, I would have demanded a larger fee." "Don't get all encouraged, Skroot," Usher sneered, "this is the best day we've had in three weeks, and this is the dry season." He led the way down a narrow path marked by flags on both sides. "When are you going to get to work?" "I just arrived a few minutes ago," Skroot reminded him. "But I would like to have a look at these Tastybushes I've heard so much about. Is there time to do it today? It looks as though it's almost nightfall." "NightfaU, hell," Usher growled, "it's barely noon." They stepped off the hard surface of the landing pad and promptly sank ankle deep into the spongy surface of the planet. "We can drive over into the swamp right now." "How far is it?" Skroot asked. "A couple of miles," Usher answered. "Be careful to stay on the path. We don't want to lose you this quickly." They trudged along for a few more paces when suddenly, a huge vehicle appeared through the mist. "This is how we get around. We call them swamp-cats. We have nine of them out here. No, eight," he corrected. The sudden reduction piqued Skroot's curiosity. "What happened to the ninth?" "Some clown came over to the trading post for a cup of coffee and forgot where he parked it. That was two weeks ago." "You mean it's within walking distance of your trading post and you still can't find it?" "This is Gloomer, remember?" responded Usher. "It's not only within walking distance, I could stand on the front porch and hit it with a stone, if I had a stone and knew which way to throw it. It's nothing to worry about. We'll find it sooner or later. We always do," T hey clambered into the swampcat, and Usher pressed the switch to turn the engine over. It growled and sputtered but nothing happened. 'Ignition wet," mumbled Usher. Finally it caught, and they moved ponderously down a road marked by posts spaced a few feet apart and painted fluorescent yellow.  "I ordered waterproof ignition systems for all nf them," Usher explained. "Two years ago." 'Two years?" asked Skroot in amazement. "Are you sure they haven't forgotten?" "Oh, no," he responded. "We've been corresponding about it quite regularly. Almost every mail delivery has something about it. The mail sacks aboard the ship you came on probably have three or four more letters for me on the ignition systems alone." "Isn't two years a long time to wait?" "Not really. It's not bad once you get used to the system. After all, the request had to go through three different departments. Besides, I have plenty of mail to keep me busy," "But two years?" "That's not bad. The man I replaced ordered some waterproof signal flares three and a half years ago, and they still haven't come." "Why on earth should it take that long?" "Special order. Waterproof signal flares aren't regulation equipment,  and the corporation storehouse doesn't stock them." "Oh," Skroot said, unable to imagine an appropriate comment. "How soon win we reach the Tastybushes?" "Any time now." Usher drove silently along. "Ah. There they are." The swamp-cat sloshed to a stop just off the trail, in view of a small thicket of waist-high bushes and enormous thom-studded tree trunks which disappeared upward into the mist. Usher pointed to the bushes, scowling. "They used to be that thick all the way across that plain we just crossed. Now there's nothing at all there except that lousy swamp grass." "Is this the swamp?" queried Skroot. "It doesn't look much different than the plain. Or around the spaceport, for that matter." "It isn't any different," Usher growled. 'The whole lousy planet is a swamp. You should see the trading post." The persistent and saturating mist had found its way into the closed cab of the swamp-cat, covering every surface with a thin gloss of tiny water droplets. Skroot watched in fascination as they merged to form little rivulets which flowed to the floor. When they climbed from the vehicle a small waterfall accompanied them out the door. T hey walked over to the clump of Tastybushes, Usher mumbling under his breath and stomping small, lavender-colored things under the heel of his waders. "Here's what's giving us all the trouble," he snarled. "Caterpillars." "Let's have a look." Skroot fell to his knees with a splash to examine the caterpillars Usher had missed. As he watched, he noticed the crushed remains of the victims slowly assuming their normal spherical IF shapes. Soon they began creeping toward the Tastybushes again, like hairy little golf balls. "They're tough to kill. You can't just squash them," Usher explained, tromping another to illustrate. "But you can blow them out -- like this!" With that he snatched a long, rusty knife from its scabbard with a graceful swoop and threw it with a grunt at another of the caterpillars which, as he predicted, blew out with a liquid pop. Its reddish purple contents spewed out and immediately soaked into the ground. The caterpillar shrank into an object which resembled a fuzzy pea. Skroot examined the carcass with great interest as Usher explained, "We took so long that we finally just gave the collectors big bags to stuff them into. Then we dump them into the nearest river, and the fish -- or whatever they are -- eat them." "Very interesting," murmured Skroot. "The caterpillars, then, are "No, hell no," Usher exclaimed. "They just eat the flowers before we can pick them." He reached out and snatched a fuzzy lavender lump off the nearest bush and flung it to the ground, where he ground it under his heel. As they watched, it resumed its shape and continued its march. "It's not too tough to keep them under control in our major collecting areas. We have a crew of men patrolling the place catching the caterpillars as soon as they climb down out of the Thorn trees. That's where they come from, you know. Out of the Thorn trees." "Out of the Thorn trees? You don't say." Skroot examined the nearest Thorn tree with new interest. Sure enough, four lavender caterpillars were threading their way down the trunk, detouring around the thick bases of the long, sharp thorns. While he wrote furiously in his book he asked, "If not the caterpillars, what, then, do you believe to be "Old age, probably," Usher said, kicking caterpillars away from a bush as though they were tiny soccer balls. "They die off in a couple of years, but there always used to be new plants to replace the dead ones. But lately there just haven't been any young ones at all." "Good heavens," exclaimed Skroot, "I'm soaked to the skin, even with my oversuit on. Isn't there some way to stay dry out here?" "That suit is standard corporation rain apparel, Skroot, that's all there is. But don't feel badly," Usher consoled, "everyone else is soaked too. You get soaked the day you arrive and you don't dry out again until after you leave. On Gloomer the only time you can even smoke is when a ship is in the port. You can crawl into the cargo hold and seal all the hatches." S kroot gazed intently at a Tastybush. "If the life span is only two years or so, they must mature fairly rapidly." "They do," Usher commented. "Everything does around here." He pointed toward a Thom tree. "Even those things. They grow up and out of sight in two months." "My word," exclaimed Skroot "How tall are they?" "Hell, I don't know," retorted Usher. "No one has ever seen the top of one." "Very interesting," Skroot murmured, peering upward to the point where the thorny trunk disappeared into the gloom. Rivulets of water trickled down the frames of his glasses into his ears and evenutally dripped off his earlobes. Skroot tipped his head to one side and shook it violently. Although the procedure did get rid of the water on the left side, it caused the water to run further into his right ear. Usher laughed. "In a few days you'll learn to pay no attention to things like that, Siioot. Or you'll go mad. It's a toss-up, I think." "Indeed?" commented Skroot, watching yet another caterpillar swimming across a small puddle toward a Tastybush. "Have you tried less violent means to kill your caterpillars?" "We've tried everything we could think of," Usher said disgustedly. "We've tried insecticides of every description, irritants, repellents -- you name it. The big problem is that whatever you use, if it touches the bushes they drop all their leaves, and the flowers to boot. And most of the time it doesn't bother the caterpillars at all." "You don't say," Skroot answered. "They just fall off? My word." Usher pointed a scrawny index finger toward the smaU thicket. "Those lousy Tastybushes are more sensitive than the crew," he growled, "and they're terrible." Skroot bent over a Tastybush, attempting to examine a leaf with his pocket magnifying ass. Its lens was completely beaded over with water. "We can't even transplant the things," complained Usher. "As soon as you touch them the leaves fall off; then the whole bush collapses." "Collapses? Indeed? How do you mean?" "They just go limp," shrugged Usher. "Then they fall on the ground. Some of them get up again, but mostly they don't." "According to the reports I've seen, there isn't anything left to try," Skroot agreed, smearing a finger across his glasses. They were now not only wet, but muddy. "It's time to start on an entirely new line of investigation." "Whatever we do it had better be fast," Usher commented. "If we don't come up with an answer soon we stand to lose a pile of money." "So I understand," Skroot said, observing that the mist had begun falling more heavily. He groped his way back to the swamp-cat and opened the door. Another flood of water poured out of it. When he was seated, he opened his notebook and began scribbling urgently. "Why doesn't that thing fall apart?" "It's waterproof," explained Skroot. "Just a plain, old fashioned waterproof field notebook." "I ordered some a year ago," Usher said, wistfully eyeing the book. "Accounting department turned them down. Too expensive." "Good heavens. Usher, what do you write on? Ordinary paper would fall apart in five minutes." IF "I don't write on anything. In fact, I haven't written a word since I got to Gloomer." Skroot .self-consciously tucked the dripping book back into its soggy holster. On the way back to the trading post. Usher clearly outlined his pinions of the planet (rotten), the weather (worst anywhere), the crew (a bunch of lazy misfits) and money (this he liked). 'The only reason I'm here," Usher explained, "is because I can earn enough in a single five-year hitch to retire to Bathsheba. Now there's a planet." T hey finally reached the trading post, and Skroot was not really surprised to see a small waterfall gushing over the doorsill. "It's a lot better now than it used to be," Usher commented. "We japked up one end of the building, so now the water runs out. It used to be terrible." The floor was canted sufficiently to make Skroot uncomfortable. The tilt of the room was made more obvious by the pictures and graphs tacked to the walls. They hung straight, but at a distinct angle to the floor. "You know," Skroot offered, "this is just like a fun house at an amusement park." "Skroot," Usher observed coldly, "if there's anything this place isn't, it's a fun house." "I must say, it's difficult for one to become adjusted to it. It's as though one of my legs were shorter than the other." "We argued that out long before you got here, Skroot. We decided that it feels as though one leg were longer. You're outvoted." Usher sluiced most of the water off his chair and sat down at his desk. "Where's my briefcase?" he asked rhetorically, looking about the room for it. "Oh, there it is. Skroot, how about handing it to me?" Skroot's gaze followed Usher's pointing finger until he spotted the briefcase jammed into a pile of rubble at the low end of the room where it had been swept to by the sheet of water which slid rapidly across the floor. He noticed that several holes had been cut through the floor where cabinets and desks impeded the water's flow, and each hole was surrounded by a tiny gurgling whirlpool. "Thanks," Usher grunted as Skroot handed him the briefcase. "Now let's get down to business. What do you think?" "As yet it is difficult to say," Skroot began, "I've hardly had an opportunity to investigate, but I intend to begin immediately." He consulted his notebook. "To begin with," he said, "I shall need two men to assist me in my investigations, a swamp-cat and free access to your tools and equipment. In addition, I will set aside an area with its Tastybushes intact and will permit no collecting where my work is being conducted." "You want what?" shouted Usher explosively. "Do you also want my left arm and all my money?" Droplets of water flew from his finger as he shook it at Skroot. "Do you have any idea what that will cost me? Personally? My commissions come out of the net profit of this trading post. And now you want me to give you expensive equipment and fuel and take two men off their collection routes? And take a bunch of Tastybushes out of production? Skroot, you're out of your mind I" Skroot sat placidly with his hands folded in his lap, water dripping rapidly off the tips of his fingers. When Usher finished his tirade, Skroot outlined alternatives until there was grudging agreement. ni E arly the next morning Skroot and his two assistants departed for the chosen area with a load of tools and miscellaneous gear. "Gentlemen," he explained, "my task is to prevent the loss of flavor extract to Planetrade Corporation. I intend to accomplish this as quickly and as simply as possible." "I figured it was something like that," said Jake. "So did I," added Harry, "only first. I mentioned it to Jake while we were waiting for you," he explained to Skroot. 'That don't mean you thought of it first, you bum," Jake shouted. "Gentlemen," soothed Skroot, "if you do exactly as I say, quickly and efficiently, our work will soon be completed." 'That's a laugh," chortled Harry. "The reason Usher sent Jake out with you is because he ain't done nothing quickly or efficently since he got to Gloomer." "You should talk," countered Jake. "Usher sent Harry out here because he's the clumsiest so-and-so on the planet. The only reason he's still here at all is because he ain't worth the cost of shipping back to Earth." The swamp-cat mushed to a stop in view of two or three Tastybushes and a pair of thick, spiny Thorn trees. "Gentlemen," Skroot began again, as though he hadn't heard their exchange of insults, "our first task is to discover whether we can recover the extract of the Tastybush more efficently than by collecting their blossoms. This is the most simple solution to the caterpillar menace. Our second task, to discover why there are no young Tastybushes, wDl begin shortly." Jake and Harry slowly climbed down from the swamp-cat and stood quietly, glumly watching the lavender caterpillars meandering slowly across the ground. "If we are to maintain my experimental schedule, we must begin immediately," Skroot announced. "Our first task is to attempt to recover sap from the trunk of a Tastybush for analysis. I understand we must be delicate in the process." "Delicate ain't the word for it, Skroot, it won't work," Jake said flatly. "We already tried it." "Indeed?" asked Skroot? "Vhen?" "Well, actually I didn't personally try it, but somebody or other did a few years ago, and he said it didn't work." Jake remained convinced that further attempts would be hopeless. Harry commented, "I know the guy that tried it. That clod is about as delicate as a bomb." IF "Do either of you gentlemen have any idea of the technique he used," Skroot asked patiently. "Yeah," responded Harry. "He told me that the boss wanted some sap to test, but he didn't say how to get it. So he walked up to a bush and stepped on it to bend it over. Then he took a cut at it with his knife." "With what result?" "Just what you might expect. As soon as he touched the thing, it gave a good shake, and all the leaves fell off. Then it went limp and collapsed. But it didn't get cut up too badly, so a few days later it came up again." "It seems obvious," Skroot explained, "that one must use extreme delicacy with a plant which is sensitive to tactile stimulii. We will be much more gentle." "I know more about them things than you do, Skroot," Jake announced, "and it ain't going to work." "It is entirely possible that it will not," Skroot replied patiently, "but we must exclude all possibilities." S kroot shook the water out of the dissection kit which he carried and slowly crept beneath the branches of a Tastybush, being very careful to avoid touching them. Very gently he pushed aside the grass which surrounded the trunk, and very tenderly he made a small incision about four inches above the ground. The Tastybush reacted as Jake had predicted; it began to shake vigorously, its foliage dropping to the ground in a flurry. Immediately the branchlets began to sag, then the major branches, and finally the entire plant collapsed before their eyes into a small ghostly pile. "I say there," Skroot exclaimed in surprise, untangling the flaccid branches which had somehow become entangled in his eyeglass frames. "It did indeed collapse. How extraordinary." "You can't say I didn't tell you so," Jake shouted triumphantly, nodding his head vigorously in affirmation. "It appears, then," Skroot pondered, "that the Tastybush is similar to the caterpillars in that their shapes are maintained through turgidity. The pressure of their internal fluids causes them to fill out their shapes," Skroot frantically entered the new information into his notebook. "Next," Skroot announced, "since it appears that the Tastybush causes its fluids to flow into the root system for protection, thus causing to bush to collapse, we must use other means to extract a sample. Harry, get the first-aid kit from the swampcat. You. Jake, select a bush which has few branches near the ground." As the two disappeared into to mist in opposite directions, Skroot removed his glasses and wiped them on his wet plastic oversuit, leaving them no cleaner or dryer. "Here's a good bush over here, Skroot," called Jake, as Harry returned with the first-aid kit. "Where, Jake?" Skroot shouted peering uselessly into the fog. "Over here," Jake answered helpfully, "about fifteen feet or so." Skroot opened to lid of the kit and pushed a half dozen floating bottles of salt tablets aside, groping among the objects which had sunk to the bottom. "Salt tablets?" he asked. "It's a regulation corporation firstaid kit," Harry explained. "Aha!" Skroot said. "Got it. Gentlemen, this may be our answer." He dredged up a tourniquet, tangled into two sodden rolls of gauze and some adhesive tape. "Come on, Skroot, what are you talking about?" asked Harry in a disgusted tone of voice. "Essentially this, gentlemen." He swung the wet tourniquet like a garotte. "We impede the flow of the sap returning to the root system. Thus, with the sap trapped in the branches of the plant, we will be able to extract our sample for analysis." Jake shook his head negatively. "Usher ain't going to like this, Skroot. That Tastybush is going to die just sure as anything." Skroot paid no attention, crawling beneath the dripping bush clutching 'SmWi WmMm vmMm the tourniquet. He passed it gently around the short trunk and with a quick jerk pulled it tight and twisted. As the tourniquet constricted the trunk of the tree, it began to quiver and shake, and a cloud of leaves fell to the ground. The tips of the denuded branchlets went limp, and the major branches began to droop. Skroot nervously watched a bulge form in the trunk above the tourniquet. The tastybush twitched and sagged, and the bulge steadily grew in size until it was fully five or six times the diameter of the trunk. "Jump back, Skroot!" Harry shouted, "If that thing blows it'll take your head clean off." He and Jake hit the ground with a splash as Skroot tenaciously clung to the final twist of the tourniquet. S kroot opened one tightly clenched eye and squinted through a watery lens at the bulge in the trunk, which was now shrinking to its normal size. The upper branches near the trunk became turgid again, and the bush took on an almost normal appearance. "Jake," he shouted, "come over here and hold this tourniquet while I make the incision." Jake fearfully crawled under the bare branches of the Tastybush and took hold of the tourniquet. "Whatever happens," Skroot ordered, "don't let go." "Harry," Skroot shouted, "bring me that plastic bucket from the swamp-cat. And hurry." Harry sluiced the water out of the bucket as he slogged rapidly back to the bush. Skroot seized one of the stiff branches and lunged at it with his scalpel. The branch immediately went limp; but the branches on the opposite side bulged out and shook. Skroot held the flaccid branch in his hand. "Give me the bucket and go shake up the other side of the bush. That should cause the fluid to flow again to this side." Harry grabbed a major branch in each hand and began alternately shaking and twisting them. Soon Skroot's branch began to stiffen. "Aha!" he shouted triumphantly and plunged the scalpel into it. The branch cringed as he sat down on the ground with the bucket between his knees. The fluid began to squirt noisily into it. "Keep shaking, Harry." Skroot encouraged the flow by squeezing the branch near the trunk and sliding his fingers toward the tip of the branch. Each stroke brought a spurt of liquid into the frothy bucket. The three paid no attention to the sound of a swamp-cat mushing to a stop a short distance away. U sher's mouth dropped open as the scene unfolded through the falling mist. Jake continued to cling to the tourniquet while Harry shook the limp branches to force the fluid to Skroot, who sat intently aiming spurts of sap at the bucket. "Just what in hell are you doing to that bush?" he screamed, his face turning Jake's legs and began to tug at them, trying to drag him away from the Tastybush. "Let go of my legs," Jake yelled, hanging grimly onto the tourniquet. "Skroot, make him let go of my legs." "I was better off with the lousy caterpillars!" Usher screamed, giving Jake's legs a final tug. Jakes fingers slipped, and his chin ploughed a furrow through the ground as Usher dragged him backward. The furrow rapidly filled with water as the bush collapsed. Harry stood there, tentatively shaking two spaghettilike branches, while Skroot's dangled limply into the bucket. Water ran out of Usher's sleeve as he shook a knobby fist at Skroot. "I thought you came out here to find to start slaughtering them yourself." Skroot approached him, bucket in hand. "I would deeply appreciate it, Usher, if you would not interfere with my work or with my staff." "That's telling him, Skroot," cheered Jake. Skroot handed the bucket to Usher. "Here is a sample of the plant's internal fluid. Please have it completely analyzed." The intended severity of his words was somewhat IF diluted by the water which trickled off the end of his nose. Usher grabbed the bucket angrily and without further comment he stalked back to his swamp-cat, spacing his steps to flatten the caterpillars in his path. By the time he reached the swamp-cat, all of them had ballooned out again and were creeping toward the Tastybushes as though nothing had happened. "I told you he'd be mad," Jake said. "Gentlemen," Skroot said, ignoring him, "we have completed phase one of my experimental design. We will immediately begin phase two." He began writing in his dripping but still stiff notebook, ignoring the trickle of water which ran dowfi the barrel of his pen, into little puddles across the words he wrote. "Jake, I want you to climb one of the Thorn trees to see if you can discover the source of the caterpillars. When you reach the top I want you to shout down to me and describe what you see." "You're out of your head, Skroot," Harry diagnosed, "Jake can't climb one of them trees. There ain't nobody who can climb one." "Why, may I ask?" "Just take a look at them thorns," Jake said. "Every one pointed down. Even the caterpillars don't crawl back up. Only down. Besides, how do I know how far I have to climb? I might get up there three or four hundred feet, and I wouldn't be able to yell loud enough for you to hear me. On top of that, how do I know what else might be up there? No, sir. I might get up there, and no one would ever see me again. Like one of them Indians rope tricks." Skroot inspected one of the thorns and tested its sharpness with the tip of a finger. "You're quite correct, Jake. It would indeed be difficult to climb one of these trees." "You bet it would be tough," Jake agreed. "You can't do it." "Nevertheless, we must observe the source of the caterpillars. Harry, bring an axe from the swamp-cat and chop it down." "You're insane, Skroot," Harry gasped. "That thing is a good three feet thick, and who knows how tall. And you want me to chop it down?" "Let us face facts," Skroot explained patiently.  "It is, after all, a part of phase two. No one has ever observed the place of origin of the caterpillars. Further, no one has ever observed a caterpillar climbing back upl" "Hell, no," retorted Jake, "nothing can get up one of them trees." "Phase two must begin," Skroot insisted. "Harry, get the axe." As Harry sullenly plodded toward the vehicle, Skroot reached into his gadget bag, displacing several ounces of water which splashed to the ground. His hand emerged holding a small can of fluorescent yellpw paint. "Jake, take this and place identifying marks on several caterpillars as they climb down the trunk of a Thom tree. Then watch them carefully to observe their activities. And be careful not to disturb them in any way." Harry reappeared through the mist carrying a double-bit axe with a rusted head. Jake shouted, "Start chopping, Harry, while I go paint caterpillars. Ha." F or the first time since his arrival, Skroot began to show signs of impatience and anger; he glowered at Jake and demanded, "Harry, give me the axe!" Harry viewed Skroot with suspicion as Jake quickly disappeared into the gloom without another word. "Give me the axe," Skroot repeated. He placed his foot atop a deadfall, raised the axe and took careful aim at it. "Jake," Harry shouted, "come here and take a look at this. Skroot flipped. He's going to chop off his foot." Jake approached warily to see if what Harry said was true. "You can't do that, Skroot. Them waders is corporation property. You can't go chopping them up with an axe." Gentlemen," Skroot said calmly, "as corporate employees you may be enjoined from damaging corporate property. But I am not" With that he brought the axe down sharply, cleanly severing the toe of his reinforced plastic wader. Three or four gallons of water gushed out and immediately disappeared into the ground. He repeated the process with his right wader, but somewhat less gracefully. "Jake, Skroot warned, "you are not observing the caterpillars as I asked you to." Jake shook his head and disappeared into the mist. "Harry, take the axe and chop down a Thom tree." Usher's swamp-cat slurped to a stop nearby and soon he appeared through the gloom. "What are you IF Special A # Issues  # B # Issues # Christmas Gilt Rates C # Issues  # D # Issues # Add # for each (# issues) for foreign subscription E # Issues of Each #-# In All   F # Issues of Each #-# In All Add # for each (# issues) for foreign subscription Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions to be sent in accordance with the offers indicated in each case below;   enclose additional gifts, on separate sheet No Postage Stamp Necessary if Mailed in the U, S. Give the gift you would like to receive Permit No. # Sec. #, P.L.R. New York, N.Y. No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States clowns up to now?" he asked. "I just passed Jake crawling on to hands and knees following caterpillars with faces painted on them. Skioot, what in hell is going cm?" "Well," explained Skroot, "we're in phase two of my research plan: Jake is observing the behavior of several caterpillars, and Harry is about to cut down this Thorn tree." "He's what? Oh, no!" Usher shouted. "Harry, stop!" But Harry's axe had already begun its swing. In attempting to stop it he merely lost his balance and fell to the ground with a splat. Usher turned to run as the axe bit into the trunk of the Thorn tree, but it was too late. The trunk split open. The reddish purple liquid spurted out in a solid stream, passing over the prostrate Harry. It caught Usher full in the back, propelling him a full twenty feet, out of sight, into a clump of Tastybushes which promptly began shaking and dropping their leaves. Skroot observed with great interest, watching hundreds of gallons of fluid pouring out the rent in the trunk. He could hear Usher's cursing above the roaring and splashing of the torrent. The stream slowed down as the great Thorn tree slowly shrank and collapsed upon itself hke an enormous concertina. Usher eventually clambered out of the thicket of denuded and collapsed Tastybushes and shouted, "Skroot, you madman. Are you trying to kill us all?" Four or five caterpillars clung to him, which he angrily threw to the ground as he stalked forward. "And look at the toes on your oversuit I You're going to pay for those things. This is the end. I don't care what headquarters has to say. It's either you or me. This is absolutely the end." "In a manner of speaking, you may be at least partially correct, you know," Skroot answered happily. "We may indeed be nearing the end. In your right pocket you have approximately a liter of the liquid fiom the Thorn tree. In your left you will discover a caterpillar." Usher winced. "Please conduct an analysis of both," Skroot continued, "and compare the results with the sample from the Tastybush. Then inform me of the result immediately." U sher was unable to speak a word, but the expression on his face conveyed this emotions. He turned abruptly and disappeared in the direction of his swamp-cat. Skroot walked over to the former Thorn tree, the top of which was now perched atop a large pile of ghostly trunk skin studded th sharp spikes. "Harry, come over "here and observe this," Skroot said. Slowly and with great effort, Harry trudged over and stood next to the remains of the Thorn tree. With each step he sunk almost knee deep into the ground. "Look, Harry, here are great clusters of caterpillars actually growing out of the top of the Thorn tree!" "I'll be darned. I never saw anything like that around here before." "My word," Skroot said. "Here's a cluster of immature ones still attached by tiny stalks. Good heavens, I must, publish a description." "Hey, Skroot!" Jake shouted from somewhere out in the oom. "These here caterpillars just crawled into a Tastybush." "Surprise, surprise," shouted Harry in response. "What did you expect them to do?" "Don't touch them, Jake watch them," cautioned Skroot. "Where are you?" "Over here," came the helpful answer. "In this clump of Tastybushes," Skroot and Harry could see neither Jake nor the Tastybushes, but they followed the sound of his voice until they reached a clump with water-filled hand and knee prints pointed into it. "I'm in here," Jake shouted again, "and the caterpillars are eating flowers." "Keep watching them," Skroot repeated, "but don't touch them." "Quit yelling," Jake responded. "I'm only ten feet away -- I think." Harry sank further into the ground with each moment that passed, making slurping noises every time he moved. "Harry," Skroot asked curiously, "what on earth is the matter with you?" "Nothing at all," Harry answered calmly. "It's just that my waders filled up with Thorn tree sap, and they're kind of heavy." "Why don't you chop off the toes and allow the liquid to escape?" "You crazy?" demanded Harry. "And have to pay for them?" He lay down on his back and with great effort, lifted his legs into the air. The contents of his waders flushed out, almost drowning him. "That's just as good," he sputtered, "and cheaper" "Hey, Skroot," came Jake's call from the Tastybushes. 'The caterpillars finished the flowers, and they're climbing down off the bush." "Aha I" exclaimed Skroot "Don't lose track of them." Skroot leafed back and forth through the pages of his notebook, frequently sluicing the water off his glasses, "Aha!" he repeated. # # Qkroot, here's one of them paint ed ones," called Harry. As they watched, a caterpillar with a snaggletoothed face painted on its smootheddown fur crawled from the bushes and crept across the ground. "Jake, I asked you to watch them," shouted Skroot in annoyance. "Don't worry, Skroot, there's stiH five of them in here." Skroot carefully observed the progress of the colorful little caterpillar. It stopped. "What do you suppose the thing's going to do now?" Harry asked. "Well," Skroot began, "according to one of my working hypotheses..." "Look at the thing!" exclaimed Harry in surprise. "It's digging a hole. It's burying itself!" "Aha!" cried Skroot triumphantly. "I thought so!" He watched until the tiny hole filled in with water and the caterpillar was no longer visible. "Jake," Skroot shouted toward the Tastybushes, "come out instantly. We're off for the trading post." "Fat chance," Jake complained. "I can't move. I'm stuck. I'll probably starve to death in here." "Those are all Tastybushes," instructed Skroot, "just grab a couple and start shaking them." Jake did so, IF and immediately several of them dropped their leaves and collapsed. Jake walked unimpeded from the center of the thicket. Water cascaded from the front seat of the swamp-cat as Skroot opened the door. They clambered aboard and proceeded at a breakneck pace, sending up a small bow wave in the soaked and porous ground. They mushed to a stop in front of the trading post, the cataract of water still pouring out its front door. Skroot sloshed into the building, his waders followed by tiny wakes as he crossed the floor to Usher's desk. IV U sher was seated there, searching for something in his lower left drawer, which was filled to the top with water. "I wish I could convince the supply department that I really need things that float. Oh, well, if I did, I probably couldn't convince the accounting department that it was worth the extra cost. Half of our equipment sinks out of sight somewhere on the first day after it gets here." Usher continued to feel around in the bottom of the water filled drawer. "Why don't you punch holes in the bottom?" asked Skroot, considering that the simplest solution to the problem. "Because it's corporation property, that's why," sneered Usher, "and I'd have to pay for it." He grimaced angrily at Skroot. "Is that all you ever think of? Damaging corporation property? What do you want now, you vandal?" Unperturbed, Skroot said pleasantly, "I was curious to know whether those samples have been analyzed." "Yes, they have," Usher replied, "and I'm sorry to say it, but you hit pay dirt. Tastybush juice is loaded with flavor; Thorntree juice is loaded with flavor, and even that lousy caterpillar juice is loaded with flavor." "Aha! Excellent, excellent," chortled Skroot. "Now we don't have to worry about those lousy Tastybushes dying off. We'll start on the Thorn trees first. They're the easiest, and they grow just as fast. Then if we need more we'll go after the caterpillars." "Well, no," responded Skroot. "I'm afraid you can't do that." "Skroot, you nut, of course we can. We know it's possible now." "It's not as simple as that," explained Skroot. "You see, there is a somewhat complex ecological and reproductive cycle involved here." "Explain," demanded Usher. "Well," he began, "on Earth a similar situation exists in certain plants which we refer to as "dioecious," from the Greek roots dis, meaning two, and oikos, meaning house. In effect, it means two houses." "So what?" Usher interrupted, pounding his fist on the desk, showering tiny droplets of water across the room. "Greek roots be damned. What's going on?" Refusing to be interrupted, Skroot  continued. "You see, dioecious plants actually have two sexes. Very simply, we have boy plants which produce pollen and girl plants which produce blossoms." He cleared his throat. "The pollen floats through the air, blown to the flowers of the female plants of the same species. The pollen fertilizes the blossoms, and seeds develop within them. When the seeds mature, they are distributed in various ingenious ways." "So much for the lecture, Skroot. What are you trying to say?" "Simply that the plants you refer to as Thorn trees and Tastybushes are in fact merely male and female plants of the same species." "Aw, come on, Skroot, they don't look anything at all alike." S kroot tsk-ed at him. "Don't allow external appearances to deceive you. On Earth, for example, several genera display sexual dimorphism to an amazing extent." "To hell with that, Skroot," Usher demanded. "Get on with it. What about the caterpillars?" "Ah, yes, the caterpillars. An interesting adaptation. The environment here simply isn't conducive to the distribution of airborne pollen -- the lack of wind and the constanl mist, you know. "So. just as in the cases of certain plants on Earth, the reproductive cells have become highly mobile. The species has evolved a form of pollen which propels itself down the trunk of the male plant and across the ground to the female plant, the Tastybush." "I'll be darned." exclaimed Usher. "Why then do they eat the flowers?" "Actually, they don't really eat them. I doubt whether they eat at all. The mobile pollen grains merely migrate to the Tastybushes to fertilize themselves by absorbing the blossoms. Then, after fertilization, they can truly be called mobile seeds." "Seeds?" asked Usher in astonishment. "You mean to tell me that all these years we've been feeding Tastybush seeds to the fish, or whatever they are?" "Indeed you have been," chuckled Skroot. "Of course, some of them would grow into Thorn trees to provide a new male generation." "Then if we plant caterpillars, they will grow into Thorn trees and Tastybushes?" "Indeed they will, Usher, indeed they will. I suggest you begin training your crew to begin replanting immediately. In a few months from now you should be able to harvest your first crop. I would personally appreciate it if you would hurry. After all, my commissions begin only a year from now." U sher, Jake and Harry stood to the side of the ship to view the departure of Charles Darwin Skroot. He slogged aboard the loading elevator. emptied the water from his equipment bag, smeared the rivulets from his glasses with a wet finger and waved good-by as he disappeaied IF IF  Feature L ast time, if you I'emember, we were talking about the fact that neither science fiction itself nor science-fiction fandom are exclusively American phenomena. Fans, fan clubs, conventions and fanzines are found all over the globe, including some places where you would never expect to find them. Down in South Africa, there's a fan named Roger Clegg... in Stockholm, Sweden, there's Carl Brandon... a fan named Osvaldo Elliff lives in La Plata, Argentina... in Certh, Scotland, there's Brian Hill... Tokyo, Japan, boasts of a fan named Yukiko Yesuoka... then there's Leland Shapiro in Saskatoon, Canada... Jannick Storm land... Tom Schluck in Hanover, West Germany, Jack Wodhams in Queensland, Australia... Ugo Malaguti in Bologna, Italy... Jack Knight in New Zealand... and -- well, I guess you get the idea! What kind of fan activities go on in other countries? Quite a vaiiety, actually. In Hannut, Belgium, Michael Feron publishes a monthly bilingual fanzine called Early Bird. A sample of the contents: news about the # science-fiction fan convention in Vienna, reviews of sf mags published in France and a look at a Canadian science-fiction movie. On May #, #, the fcuith annual meeting of Japan's only sf fan club met in Tokyo with more than sixty fans attending. Among the items thrashed out in open discussion were the nature of the club's forthcoming fanzine (the Japanese word for 'Tanzine," by the way, seems to be "Uchukiryu." Remember, you read it first in !) and plans for the annual national science-fiction convention which was held in Nagoya, one of the bigger cities in east Japan. Down in South America, the news of the hour is that The Hohhit (as 'El Hobito") has just been published there. Spanish-speaking fans south of the border are now hopefully awaiting the full Lord of the Rings trilogy. Also, Fve heard on the fannish grapevine that a fanzine called Argentine SF Review has been published. As I haven't actually seen a copy, I can't announce it for certain... In Trieste, the annual sciencefiction film festival audience watched an ambitious color film from Yugoslavia called Sedrni Kontinent ("Seventh Continent"), a directorial first by the noted and prize-winning Yugoslav animator, Dusan Vukotic, which Variety, the American showbiz weekly newspaper, thought was an uneven but stimulating attempt to blend satire and fantasy into a film for both kids and adults. And in Calcutta, India, of all places, there's a lively and booming science-fiction fan club with over fifteen hundred members ("and a long waiting list," reports The New Yorker), Star member of internationally celebrated Bangali film director, Satyajit Ray Father Panchali, Aparajito, The World of ApUy etc.), who is not only a wildly enthusiastic sf fan and reader, but author as well -- in India he writes juvenile sf for teen-agers. Furthermore, Mr. Ray is reportedly now at work on a new science-fiction film, a joint Bengali-American production whose working title h The Alien, which is supposed to star Peter Sellers as an Indian businessman who discovers a flying saucer or something. The script, last I heard, was also a joint effort -- between Arthur C. Clarke and Mr. Ray. But of all the countries in which sf fandom is active, the most interesting to us Americans would be Great Britain, which reads much of the same fiction we get over here and which also has an annual convention. In fact, let's take a look at the British # convention. The Bristol Convention Over the Easter holidays this year, the eyes of British fandom were fixed on Bristol, a large (#I square miles), ancient (founded in the reign of the Saxon king, Aethelred the Unready, #-# A.D.) city To Bristol's Hawthorn Hotel flocked science-fiction authors, editors, artists, fans, collectors and just plain readers. Guest of Honor was John Brunner, whose name you must have seen in If and on the paperback stands many, many times (he's written #I novels that I can think of, and probably I've missed a few). He gave a lucid speech on unauthorized mucking-about with an author's stuff as done by some publishers in America. As a case in point, he mentioned his recent novel The Production of Time (I'm not sure whether he said the editors IF had made fifty changes on the first page or just in the first chapter)  then went on to develop the theme that far too many sf writers of today seem to be firmly #th Century so far as their choice of plots goes. He said they didn't seem to be really aware of the enormous possibilities open to those of us who work within the science-fiction field, where plot and setting are capable of literally infinite variety. Besides John Brunner, a host of other writers attended the Bristol con: James White (author of All Judgment Fled) and Judith Merrill, on hand to represent the American writers, not to mention Michael Moorcock. The convention opened with a bang when Brian W. Aldiss made all the Big Names present stand up and look sheepish while he "introduced" them. The convention program had a delightful variety of entertainment and business. There were movies, including a showing of sf cover artist Ed Emsh's Underground movie, Relativity. There was a sherry  cider party for informal icebreaking. There was a mock-Medieval pagent whereat some local celebrities were initiated into The Loyal and Ancient Order of St. Fantony (the patron saint of science fiction fans, you know), attended by some # spectators. And there was the giving out of the British Fantasy Awards, the English equivalent of our own Hugos. One of our boys figured large in this, when Philip K. Dick won for his novel. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Another award went to Michael Moorcock for his valiant efforts in the behalf of British science-fiction publishing, though which he managed to keep Britain's only homegrown sf magazine still surviving. New Worlds, alive by means of a British Arts Council grant. On the second day of the convention, Mike Moorcock told how he got the grant that will help keep that magazine's (mast) head above water. He also showed around a dummy of the forthcoming first issue in its new format. The main theme of Moorcock's speech, however, was about "revolution and evolution in science fiction" -- that is, the forces and people who change the shape of science fiction, not the plot-#hemes of ev.  rev. Moorcock's example of a revolutionary force in modern science fiction is J. G. Ballard. To his way of thinking, Ballard is doing something entirely new in sL This point was challenged by someibody in the audience who rebutted Ballard, saying all he had done was to put a few new twists on the old James Joyce "stream-of-consciousness" narrative technique. There's one in eveiy crowd. Can't Anyone Help Denmark? For contrast, let's turn from the lively state of science fiction and fandom in Great Britain to the doleful state of things in Denmark. The land of Hans Christian Anderson has one, count 'im, one active and go-getting science-fiction fan, Jannick Storm. Jaimick is conducting a virtually single-handed fight to get some fannish activity going in his country, and he hasn't had much luck. Now, Jannick says there are certainly enough readers of science fiction in Denmark -- but where are all the fans? Most of the major science-fiction writers are translated into Danish and published over there. Two publishing houses, at least, do a thriving business in sf -- Hasselbalch and Skrifola. Ray Bradbury has been represented in Denmark by The Martian Chronic dcs, October Country, The Ulust rated Man. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave has been done over there, and so have books by John WyndbaaTi, Fred Hoyle, Pohl  Kombluth aiid most of the classics, such as Verne and Wells, Karel Capek and Oi'vell and Huxley. In fact, there are even a couple of native Danish science-fiction writers around: Niels E. Nielsen and Eiler Jorgensen. Harry Harrison has translated some of Nielsen's stuff into English, but Jorgensen is unknown to me. And there have been some homegrown Danish sf anthologies, published. Jorgen Rothenborg did one called The Other Side of The Moon, and Tage la Cour edited Stories From Other Worlds, and tliey were rather good anthologies, with stories by Bradbury and Van Vogt, Asimov and Stanley G. Weinbaum and Katherine McLean and other well-known American writers. But where in the name of smorgasbord are all the fans? Jannick has tried just about everything. Last year he lectured on science fiction to an audience of about # young readers at a meeting held in die town of Ringsted, Sealand. And he collaborated with a small Danish cinema society, organizing an open showing of some recentish science-fiction movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mysterians and Village of the Damned. Some # people showed up, but nothing much seems to have happened, fan-wise. Jannick Storm went to the Swedish SF Congress at Malmo, last year, hoping that a big event like this, held in a nearby country, might stimulate the Danish fans into coming out of hiding. Only two fans showed up to represent all of Denmark. But Jannick isn't discouraged, and the small handfull of sf-minded Danes he has managed to either discover or convert, may be the foundation of a full-fledged local fandom in years to come. In the meanwhile, I understand he keeps in touch with them via correspondence and encourages them to correspond with each other by the same medium, as they seem to be scattered too thinly about the country for anything like a local fan club. I have just heard that this Our Man In Fandom column has worked up such a storm of interest in science fiction and fandom that Don Blyly of Peoria has been able to found a fanclub of -readers in his local high school, and they've just started a fanzine called Science Fic tion Newsletter. Don's adress is # #. His Newsletter publishes # issues a year and will cost you # IF if you'd like to subscribe. It mainly consists of book reviews and articles on sf writers like Asimov and Zelazny. Our Man In Fandom must be pretty popular in Peoria, because Don tells me he sold # copies of his second issue! (As far as I know, this is the first fanclub and the first fanzine that got started purely because Our Man In Fandom. Any others? Please let me know.) Now, if this can happen in Peoria, how about Denmark? I don't know how many Danish citizens subscribe to Worlds of If, but if anyone in Denmark is reading this column, why not get in touch with Jannick Storm and get things going? Jannick's address in Ejbyveh #, Rodovre, Denmark. Let me know what happens -- okay? At The World Con Next time, we'll take a look at what happened over the Labor Day weekend at New York City's Hotel Statler-Hilton, where I'll take you on a guided tour of Nycon #, the #th World Science Fiction Convention. Among Other things, we'll talk about the authors and artists and magazines that received the # Hugos, and we'll find out which city is to be the host for the #th World Science Fiction Convention in #... #. Title #. (United States Code). #. Dale of filing: October #, #. #. Title of Publication; If Magazine. #. Frequency of issue: MonlhUv. #. Ixjoation of known office of publication: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Names and addresses of publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Robert M. Guinn. #I Hudson Street. New York, New York #. Iklltor: Frederik Poid, #I Hud.son Street. New York, New York #. Managing Editor: None. #. Owner; Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #; Robert M. Quinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson Street, New York. New Y'ork #, #. Known bondliolders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or liolding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases wliere the stockholder or security holders appears upon the books of the company as tru.stce or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for wliom sucli trustee Is acting, also tlie statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circiun stances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear on the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a hona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockliolders of a corporation which it.seif Is a stockholder or holder of bonds, raoilgagcs or other securities of the publishing corporation have been included In paragraplrs # and # when the interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no, copies printed (net press run): average no. copies each issue during preceding # months; #; single issue nearest to filing date, #. B. Paid circulation. #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #, single Issue nearest to tiling date, #. #. Mail subscriptions: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # moutli.s, #, single issue nearest to filing date, #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each i.ssue during preceding # months. #; single issue nearest to filing dale, #, D. Free Di.stribution (including sample.s) by mail, carrier or other means: average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months: #; single issue nearest to filing date, #. E, Total distribution (sum of C and D) : average no. copies each issue preceding # months: #; single issues nearest to filing date, #, F. Office use. left-over, unaccounted, .spoiled after printing: Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, ,#: single issue nearest to filing date, #. (#. Total (sum of E and P -- should equal net press run shown In A) : Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; single issue neare.st to filing dale. #. I certify that the statements made hy me above are coicect and complete, Robert M. Guiim, Publisher. The Spdcelighf wa meant to guide wandering j starfarers to safety -- j v  ! buf it was death to its own crew!  Illustrated by T he network of spacolights is spread throughout the Galaxy, its orbit pacing the stars; it has not of that orbit. There are holes in it, where Galactic Federation has not yet reached, but where it is established spacolights guide GalFed starships through dark nebulae and the blackest spans between the stars. In Local System GF#, Spacecant; there is a lot of blackness beyond it, and it is known as "the one on the edge of nowhere." But, second only to Base, it contains the biggest information bank in the sector. From local traffic and the nearest station it receives, stores, relays, answers five hundred requests during every twenty-four So I #  Standard hours -- requests for maps, coordinates, medicines, doctors, plasma, whole blood, ship parts, humanbody paits, police, repair men, prints, data from every branch of ence, art and history -- from a thousand races; humanoid, arthropod, arachnid, avian, ichthyoid -- whatever classification there is. And it answers them all, unless something goes wrong. Five-nincty-nine was invisible in the dimlit sky. If it could have been seen from the supply ship, it would have seemed a huge black ball like an anarchist's bomb, with a complex fuse of antennas for radar, maser and radio. Bugasz closed with it as if it were a bomb. Every once in a while, in a tic, he lifted a hand and bit skin from the sides of his nails. He was a big man with crisp yellow hair and a face red and veinwebbed from the unshielded glare of a thousand suns, no-one's idea of a nervous wreck. "Take it easy, Bugasz," Stannard said. "I can't. I dunno what's wrong there, and I'm scared." "The signal's eccentric; that means the antenna, and it probably knocked out the radio with it. What else can be wrong?" "Crazy signal, dead radio? What else does it have to be?" "They could be out checking the antenna." "She docs that. He wouldn't know how to go near an antenna. He's a computer man." "Maybe she ran out of oxygen and got him to bring her a fresh tank. For God's sake!" "They can do that from the inside... why didn't they use the boat's radio to call #, at least? Not a word!" "Look, Bugasz, will you shut up already? The Hendrickses can take good care of themselves. There's about three hundred yells for help backed up in that computer, and Base is howling blue blazes. That's what Vm worried about. So call it off! Anyway, we'll be there in fifteen minutes." D r. Ramcharan quietly folded and put away the gauzy silk square she had been embroideiing with gold thread and bent over to open her instnunent case and check the contents. Stannard blinked at her. "Now don't tell me you've forgotten something." She smiled and said in a gentle voice, "I never forget. It is like, you say, always with a woman? If I sometimes wonder, oh, did I remember to turn off all the robots when I came from home?" A small beautiful woman, she had leak-colored skin and blueblack hair coiled in a knot at the base of her neck. Though she wore the ciisp white redcrossed surcoat and narrow tiousers of Med Tech, there was always a small glint of gold about her: in the cloth of her inner sleeves, in her filigree earrings, her sandals. The ship moved gently against the spacelit; the magnetic grapples clamped on its flanks with a reassuring klungf and the entrance shaft connected onto the lock with a barely perceptible suction thump. Bugasz handed out suits. Dr. Ramcharan squeezed her sandals into a small IF chamois bag and hung them around her neck. Stannard dragged on his suit and immediately started to sweat. Lit made him sweat; heat made him sweat. He was a middle-sized man with thinning brown hair and glacier chips for eyes. He did not cai'e for the outdoors or convivial company or comfortable travel. On a ship he was happiest when he was looking for the source of the trouble below decks where the wiringboards were racked. Sometimes he whistled to himself a bit in the dark pits of orbital stations and spacelights, back of the glittering multieyed panels where the questions were asked and answered. Especially if there was a good refrigeration system cooling the air around him. On leave at Base he looked for no other society than that of a silent embittered old decontamination-man, an ex-spaceman, with whom he played endless games of go, his only recreation. He picked up a bag much bigger than Dr. Ramcharan's. "Come on, let's get over. I don't want to cook in this thing." T he locks closed behind them and opened before. Their boots vibrated silently against their feet in the dark cavern of the antechamber. They stepped before the inner door. "It's supposed to light up in here when these doors open," Stannard said. "Yeah." They turned questingly in a silence broken by the faint rustle of static at the earphones Bugasz peered at the fluorescent manual-control panel. "That's funny. "What? Air's coming in; gravity's Earth-normal." Bugasz muttered, "I dunno... "Try the switches." ed. He plunged them back ;and forth, without result. "The grapples worked, so did the outside door," Stannard said, "I used the ship's controls for that." He got out his flash and aimed the beam at the contrd panel. "Look. There's a couple scratches and dents around the edge there. I could see black marks on the fluorescent. There." He switched the flash off and on. "Looks hke it was pried off and put back... I bet the wires are ripped behind that thing..." Dr. Ramcharan's breath quickened. Stannard felt hairs rising in a prickling wave up his legs and back and a drench of sweat running down to meet it. He squatted and opened his bag. "Find me the serial number on that panel." "Here -- #X#." "Get the light down here." He pulled out one of a dozen neatly racked miniature controlboards, pressed a stud, and the out-lock door slid open again. "Get back in the shaft. I don't know what's in there, but if it isn't anything good we're getting out of here fast." They backed away. "Ready?" Stannard touched another stud. Thie inner door opened. There was a short hallway and yet one more door of clear Incite panels before them. Light blazed in their faces from the room beyond. There was nothing in it but a man crumpled on the floor and a computer humming softly to itself. N early twelve hours before, they had set out from #, a much bigger spacelight with enough crew to maintain a social structure that included several families. Stannard had (been overseeing the maintenance staff on a tricky repair problem; he was a travelling trouble-shooter and did not live there. News of the irregular signal and the unanswered a long chain of lights and out again to Stannard, along wih microfiles on all aspects of #, including its occupants, a married couple. This last because Stannard doubled in a police capacity -- he reported to hundreds of GalFed agencies on jurisdictional and insurance matters. He loathed the extra work; but space is vast, and lives by comparison are few and short. There was a chronic lack of manpower whether it came from Sol or Betelgeuse. The job involved endless duplicaunder hot lights with a pen gripped awkwardly in his wire-threader's fingers. There was rarely any excitement. Once he had subdued ,a crewman who had gone spacemad and was laying about him with a wrench: but he never spoke of the incident, principally because it made him uneasy that a good, level-headed man could go wild working in the cool, quiet conditions he himself loved so welL He had taken the risk of delaying a couple of hours to send for information about Bugasz, because the supply-man was the only person who visited # regularly and knew it and its occupants well. He had been on #I when the call came, with his ship fuelled and ready about to take off for his next stop. He had been for #. Stannard had spent a couple of hours with the microreader on the way out, so he knew the contents of the three dossiers. And the subject of one of them was lying dead on the floor. 'That is Cornelius Hendricks, isn't it, and he is dead?" Dr. Ramcharan was kneeling beside him. "Very much so, I am afraid." O nce they had checked that gravity was Earth-normal inside and air and temperature were standard, Bugasz had ripped off his helmet and run throu the station yelling, "Iris! Iris!" There was no answer, and he came back with his shoulders sagging, his face both anxious and defeated. "She's not here! Where can she be?" Stannard muttered, "We'll find her. Don't worry..." He was looking at the body of Cornelius Hendricks. Age fifty-three, a quiet solitary, like Stannard, who had married Iris Cullen, a girl in her twenties, two years before. Now he was lying dead, with an empty spray can of deadly vermicide in his hand. IF Startnard decided that he was never going to make either of those mistakes. "How long?" "He is very stiff. Twelve hours, perhaps?" "That's five-six hours after the signal started going..." So Hendricks had been alive when they got the news. And he had delayed. But nothing would have sav Hendricks; he had sprayed the stuff into his mouth, and death must have come in a few minutes. Dr. Ramcharan picked up the can by the nozzle. "Excelthion. This kills all the vermin in the local sector -- but I won't allow it on #I because of the children. You cannot go into a room for six hour after you use it." "I got some on board," Bugasz said. "Get rid of it. There are other effective things you can use with less trouble." Stannard was thinking of those twelve hours. But from #I to # it took just over twelve hours, and there was no shorter way. And he was thinking of Dr. Ramcharan. It was Bugasz who had suggested she come, just as they were leaving; she lived on #, one of a huge team of resident spacelight doctors who rotated every two years. What kind of trouble had be foreseen, that he wanted her here? Dr. Ramcharan was packing her instruments. "Are we to leave him here?" "Did you get pictures?" "Yes." "Wrap him up and we'll take him along." She took a thin transparent plastic sack out of her bag, unfolded it and began pulling it over the body. "Did the stuff do that to his face?" Stannard asked. "Just the purple," Bugasz said. "That's what his face was like." Even discounting the cyanosed skin, the dead man was peculiarly ugly. Not in the features themselves, but in a certain asymmetry and lack of alignment. It was as if a noble marble head had been smashed by a child and glued together to escape detection. One eye, one brow were lower than the others, the nose twisted, the mouth jagged into a sneer. "It doesn't tell what he was like, really," said Dr. Ramcharan. "What was he like, Bugasz?" "I didn't have much to do with him. I didn't know him that well." "Doesn't look like we will, either," Stannard said. "I better look at the radio. If I can get it to work, whom do you call from here, #?" "Yeah. It's as far as we can get. They relay." ' It was a sm place, #, a spacelight for two. The communications room was next door. #CT)ugasz!" Stannard yelled. Bu-D gasz came running. "Why didn't you tell me about this?" The radio was smashed, staved in, a wreck of coils and wires. It looked as if the madman with the monkey wrench had been at it. There was in fact a wrench on the floor. Bugasz gaped. "Honest to God, Stannard, I didn't even see that. All I was looking for was her." Stannard had bent over to stare at la red-lit indicator on a panel beside the radio. "The boat's not in dock. It's gone." "Do you think she -- " "How far could she get in that?" "Only to #. But the lock controls are bust!" "Not from the inside. I checked." "I can call # from the ship -- " "Not yet." "But Stannard -- " "She'll keep, Bugasz! I'm worried about the orbit now! All this smashing, if the pile's been touched -- " "But that's sealed! Even you haven't got high enough clearance -- " "He did all this. Someone did. If he wanted to foul up the pile bad enough he could manage that too. Let's look at the antennas." He trotted down the short hallway to the antenna-control room. It was a small, narrow place with one end wall taken up by instruments, and the other by a little spiral staircase leading to the hatch that gave access to the antennas. The antennas themselves folded into recesses with translucent walls in the center of the spaceiight. Now they were partially retracted, the switches jammed. "God, what a mess! That louse didn't leave much," Stannard said. 'This is going to be a hell of a repair job. Try the locks... they're gone too?" "You can use the remote to open them -- ni go out and see what's doing." "No, wait a minute." He was reluctant to let Bugasz out of his sight. Mrs. Hendricks was gone, and so was the boat; Bugasz was edgy and overeager. He wanted to know if these facts were connected. "If she did leave the boat, is there any place she could have got to besides #?" "Hell, no. This light's out in the butt end of nowhere. Hendricks wasn't any ordinary dispatcher or lighthousekeeper. He was a research man with special grants. All he wanted was to be alone with his computer." "And his wife," Stannard added, startling himself because he hadn't meant to speak. Bugasz hadn't even heard; he was staring up at the antenna hatch, Stannard sied. "Gotta get that machine going, if he didn't bust it too. Come on, let's unsuit, I'm boiling." "I'd like to have a look -- " "Leave it lalone! You don't know which way it'll collapse if you touch it. Come on." II D r. RanKharan was using a small pump to extract air from the bag before she sealed it. Stannard took a last look at the face half obscured by plastic folds. "A girl twenty-six? Why'd she marry him?" "Maybe she thou no one else would have her," Bugasz said. Stannard took his own and Bugasz's suits and hung them in the locker near the doorway. "There's only one suit here. It must be bis. Well, doctor, if you're through with that I'll call the drone." He used one of his control boards; the locks opened again, and a small squat loading wagon trundled in from the ship to pick up the body. IF "I'll wash up now," Dr. Ramcharan said and went off to find the bathroom. After a moment she came to the doorway and said, "Bugasz, there's a three-d portrait here, is it Mrs. Hendricks?" "Yes." He went over, and Stannard followed him into the bedroom, hesitantly crossing the threshold into privacy. The bedroom was spare as a monk's cell, what one would have expected of Hendricks. But on a small table there was a Incite block, measuring perhaps a foot each way, and containing a three-dimensional portrait photograph, head and shoulders, of an extremely beautiful woman. Her hair was long and so fair it was almost white, shading deeper into gold nearer the scalp. Her features were classic and regular, and everything else humanity calls beautiful, but the truest beauty was in the joyousness and vitality of her laughter, even in the frozen silence in which it had been preserved. Dr. Ramcharan said slowly, "Why would she think no one else would have her?" "That was before," Bugasz said. "She got sick." Stannard said, "I heard of that. She dropped out of sight for a couple of years, didn't she? Nobody said what it was, though," Bugasz shut his mouth stubbornly and turned back into the computer room. "Not going to get much out of him." Stannard stood looking at it a minute, then left the bedroom. Past the doorway he stopped dead in his (trades. There was no one in the computer room. Bugasz was gone. # #T) tigasz! Bugasz! Damn the man,D what -- " The drone was gone; the ksek doors were closed. Stannard had a sick glimpse of himself and Dr. Ramcharan stranded here without ladio, Bugasz flown with the evidence. He ran to the locker. Bugasz's suit was still there, but he would not need it simply to get into the ship; he could risk leaving without it. Stannard grabbed his own suit, fumbled it on, sealed it, sweating, and dragged at the lock contid. almost praying. The door slid aside. Bugasz was standing in the shaft, the open ship behind him. He was suitless, weaponless, shamefaced. His arms hung at his sides. Stannard snarled, "What the hell you think you're doing?" "I had to..." Bugasz mutteicd. "I had to radio #... to see if..." "What is it? Hey?" Bugasz shook his head and heked his lips. "The boat reached there... empty. They're sending it back." Stannard looked at him. Bugasz swept an arm back toward the shaft "It's the truth. Call them yourself if you want." Stannard hesitated a moment and said, "I'll take your word." "Thanks." Anger mounting, Stannard wienched at his suit-clamps. "Just don't, Bugasz, don't try it again!" He was humiliatiny laware of how ludicnous he looked when he was angry: red aidotcbes flecked out on liis white skin. "You hear me? Don try it!" He hung up the suit once more. "We stick together till we find out what's up here. You understand?" H e turned and stood staring at the computer; it hummed, the ready light pulsed; the stillness beyond it was heavy. "There it is. Everything's gone but that. It's the only thing that didn't get bashed in. Why?" "Maybe it's booby-trapped." "It's a nice thought." "Or -- he didn't leave any note... maybe he left a message in it." "Yeah." He went over, reached out a hand toward the microphone, and let it fall. "You scared, Stannard?" "What do you think, you fool!" Dr. Ramcharan said quickly, "Stannard, if you have any doubt, seal this place and let us leave. The police will take care of it." "Right now Vm the police," Stannard said. "I have to see this thing gets working, if I can; I have to get that back-up cleared, because there'll be pveople lost or dead; they may be already, because he didn't get the stuff out to them." He wiped a hand over his face. "I don't know everything that's been done here. The man was mad. If he's monkeyed with the pile and the orbit's shifted, we may really find out where nowhere is when making an attempt to take off." "If the orbit had changed we'd never have got here." "He could have timed it to veer off at a certain point. He could have booby-trapped it, like you say, or even timed it to blow up . , "Then why don't we just -- " "Look, you don't imderstand! If this place blows up we're not only short one spacelight, we'll have hot asteroids busting out aU over. It's a godawful hazard to anything running in this district! Use your head!" "I don't want it blown off!" Bugasz yelled. "You're the police, the Tech man, the authority -- you get us out of this!" "All right! Take the doctor and get on board ship. Take her out a thousand miles and pace the light. If nothing happens in two hours, you can come down with your head intact. Okay?" Dr. Ramcharan said, "Please, Stannard, let us not have heroics. If we were to blow up, I think we would have done so as soon as die locks were opened. I don't think it was meant to happen." Stannard considered a moment. "Yeah. I guess you're right." He phone and said, "Paul Stannard, GFTech Supervisor, Sector #, Security clearance B." The machine said, in a machine's Stannard allowed himself one breath of relief and pressed his thumb against a small sensitive plate. "What is your orbit, number, class, generation?" IF S tannard jerked back; Bugasz gulped, and Dr. Ramcharan's breadi shuddered between her teeth. The computer seen flashed to life, suddenly, in a flickering pattern of concentric circles. "What in hell's going on here?" Stannard hung up the microphone and stepped back, shivering a little. Then he grabbed at it in a fierce snatch. "I said, give me your orbit, your position!!" "Shut up! Stop!" Stannard knew his face by now was brindled as a Biblical cf. He said through his teeth, "Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer." "Stannard -- " Dr. Ramcharan hesitated, then and said, "Tell him -- tell it -- is it speaking for Hendricks, do you think?" "Looks like it -- I wish I knew why. What did you want?" "If it is Hendricks, tell him -- tell him he is not in the Ninth Circle, but in Circle Seven, Ring Two." Stannard blinked at her. "Why?" "Please. I think it will do no harm." Stannard picked up the mike slowly and said, "You are in Circle Seven, Ring Two, not the Ninth." The machine hummed a moment, ED." Stannard said to the woman, "I gather we're talking about Dante and the Inferno but I don't get what that was all about." "Circle Seven, Ring Two is where the suicides are." Stannard grunted. "That means he set all this up before he died. He went to a lot of trouble." "He meant to hinder us. This is his booby-trap." "Yeah, but why? Breaking everything I can understand; that's anger, and it took a lot of anger for him to kill himself... but this? It's stupid. He didn't even know..." He had been going to say "us," but stopped. Hendricks had known Bugasz. He resisted an impulse to turn and look at Bugasz. He didn't want to start another fight. Not right now. He spoke into the microphone again. "All right. What game do you think you're playing?" screen swirled into the image of a coin, spinning dizzily. Stannard hung up in disgust. Bugasz muttered, "He was a computer nut." "I gathered that." He tried again. "Does your memory contain the coordinates of the present orbit of #?" "What is the orbit?" "Forget the theology. I am not concerned with the orbit of Cornelius Hendricks but of #." "But is the information contained in the memory store?" "Good. Do you have a protect on that information?" "I S#. Is that information available with the use of a code-word?" "Hah. I'm just one rung too low to clear the code by priority. Let's sec, signal started going eccentric between twenty and twenty-two hours... were all requests answered ajid dispatched up to day #, hour twenty ?" "He must have been doing a lot of sitoing around brooding... were no questions answered at all after hour twenty?" "I guess he started laying about then. That means nothing's been coming in since twenty hours, if the radio wasn't working. All right, give me a printout of all requests and answers between hours sixteen and tjweaty." "Hm, we could have been sending the stuff out by ship radio... that guy really knew how to hold a grudge. Tell me, are the answers tied to the code-word?" "Give me a memory map." T he map spread itself out on the ereen, beautifully marked and spaced. He searched it. There was one huge area of blank spaces, with no indication of what was stored in it, no hint to allow him access. And he was afraid to tamper with it. "That does it, Hendricks was the only one who would have known the code-word, and Hendricks is dead." He bit his lip. "Damn, there must be something we can do... give ime hard copy on your undispatched questions. At least I'll know what's been going on." The printer started racketa-tacketing, and a tongue of paper began to extrude from the slot. Stannard switched on the monitor-recorder, and the transcoded voices whispered across space: heroin in bauxite cargo cruiser "They'd be landed by the time we got that one out." Urgent # ready receive three cases radiation poisoning treatment begun at , Dr. Ramcharan shivered, and they were silent Kaghouro Clearing Company announces completion of program as indicated . , . Stannard groaned to himself. The careful phrases meant that after nine years of laboring the Kaghouri had finally composed a program to translate the language of the alien raiders who had been stripping them for twenty-five years; there would be plenty for GalFed to do about that. He couldn't even mention it to the others because it was highly classified, and he was the police, the Security man or what passed for one... and the answers were sitting there in the machine. He tore off the printout and scanned it. He couldn't read the encoded program, but he IF knew something of what it involved: thousands of lives, uncounted wealth, patient drudgery. He could feel his whole skin twitching at the thought, and he had to keep his mouth shut. And he had to have the code. He started when Bugasz asked, "Why all this fancy business with code-words?" "That I don't know, but he could have erased the whole thing, answers, orbit and all... he could have done a dozen different things to destroy us if he'd wanted, but he didn't. Dr. Ramcharan was right -- that wasn't the idea. But there's something else behind this, and I'd sure like to know what it is." "What are you going to do for us now, Stannard?" "I think it's a matter of what you're going to do, Bugasz. You knew the man, at least to some extent. What do you think he'd have chosen for a code-word?" "You crazy? What do I know about computers?" "You knew a computer nut. Did he have any favorite expressions or mottoes?" "None I ever heard. He was so closemouthed I never even heard him say gee whiz." "I need that thing. We've got to get past this... maybe we can work around him, try another subject..." "Ask him where Iris Hendricks is, for a start. I'd like to know that." "Fat lot that's -- I guess it won't hurt to try." He raised the mike. "Where is Iris Hendricks?" Bugasz whispered, "I don't like that." "I'm not loo keen on it mysdf. Fifteentwentysix, is Iris Hendricks alive?" "Is Iris Hendricks now alive?" Stannard pressed. -- " The screen splattered with red stars of pain. Pause, click, whir. "NO T he three of them looked at one another. Stannard said again, urgently, "Is Iris Hendricks still alive?" "What happened there?" "I'm not sure. I think it's seme kind of automatic switchoff... I'm scared to monkey around with anything, because I don't know how he's got it set up here, and I might wipe off something we need." He stared at the humming mass for ,a nKment, thinking of the Kaghouri waiting for the results of their nine years' effort. "Maybe... His fingers tightened on the mike. He said in a reasonable voice with an undercurrent of tension, "Paul Staimard, GF Tech Supervisor, Sector #, Security clearance B." He whispered, "Cross your fingers." He thumbed the plate once more. "What is your number, class, generation?" "Fifteen-twentysix, will you play a game with me?" on the screen. "Go," said Stannard. Bugasz snarled, "Stannard, what do you think you're doing?" "Playing go." Bugasz glared at him, and Dr. Ramcharan said with a touch of dryness, "I didn't know you played games, Stannard." "It's the only one I know," said Stannard, and he addressed the machine: "I'll take a white." "Yes " Stannard grunted. "Done his homework." He hung up and turned to the others. "I wanted to get back my access to the memory store, or the part of it we were dealing with when it cut off. The part he kept for himself, to play around with. This was the only way I could think of to do it. This part... looks like he implanted a bit of his personality into it some way... it's not uncommon, I guess, with people who love computers... "Do you do that, Stannard?" the woman asked. "It's not one of my games." Ill B ugasz moved restlessly. "What's that got to do with the orbit, or where Mrs. Hendricks is?" "Mrs. Hendricks certainly has to be tied in with his personal life -- and the rest is, in some way, too. I'm sure of it. I know we won't get the orbit till we find out how. Now... if you have any better ideas, spit them out." "The machine won't play," said Dr. Ramcharan. "That doesn't matter. It was wiping to talk about playing, and that was all I needed to get back to where I wanted to be." He went back to the microphone. "Do you have information on Iris Hendricks?" "I guess so." "Yes, go ahead." A picture of Iris Hendricks flashed on the screen, and he waited glumly while the machine reeled off everything he already knew. When it stopped, he asked, "Can you tell me where she is now?" "I think this thing's waffling." Dr. Ramcharan said, "You may find out something if you ask about Hendricks himself." "I'll try it -- but we'll have to go all the way through another damn IF dossier. Fifteen#wenty-six, can you tell me anything labout Cornelius Hendricks?" "Yeah, I -- I mean, go ahead." The picture of a man appeared, "Hey, wait a minute!" Stannard yelled. "Who's that guy in the picture supposed to be?" Regular handsome features? Firm clean jawline? Perfectly arched brows? "The hell you say! That's not Hendricks!" "Yes it is," Dr. Ramcharan said softly. "It is." It wasn't, and it was. Each brow, each half of the mouth, each eye belonged to Hendricks. To the handsome man he would have been if his well shaped but badly arranged features had been squared off and symmeti'ical. "It's the way he wanted to think of himself," she said. Stannard sighed. "Yeah... I guess so... He remembered the dead empurpled face and set it beside the vital Greek ideal. "How'd he do it?" Bugasz asked. "Oh... probably fed the machine a picture of himself and told it to beautify or dc-uglify or symmetrize him or something." Dr. Ramcharan said, "You think it is disgusting." Stannard shrugged uncomfortably. "I dunno... something... Tt maitches Ihe picture of Mrs. Hendricks." "Yeah," Stannard said. "Better get on with it" He addressed the machine again. "Did Hendricks say he was going to kill himself?" "Why?" "All right. Why did he kill himself?" There was a blank hum for a moment, and the wait was long. The machine said with a subtle but definite change of intonation, "BET he others moved away a little, and Stannard broke into another sweat. He swore to himself. Hendricks, damned fool, tangling himself up with his machine. People crying out of space for help. I, I, I. Hendricks, the I, was dead. Hendricks, the ugly man. Prince Frog, twisting his absurd obscene passion for ,a beautiful young woman into the clean skeins of wires and transistors that belonged to Stannard. And to the urgencies of a thousand races. "Who betrayed you?" he asked. The machine said in its curiIt was out, what he had been waiting for. The explanation for all of Bugasz's moods, nerves, surliness. The missing piece that fit only to add greater complexities. Bugasz yelled, "He's a goddamn liar! I never -- " "Shut up. What were tiy planning to do?" waited for the sudden shift of the cut-off, hut there was none, only the silence around the hum. He hung up and turned to Bugasz. "You have anything to say?"" Bugasz was almost speechless. "Say?" His face was magenta, his voice strangled in his throat. "You think that mad fool is telling the ti'uth?" "I'd say... he's telling some kind of truth -- what it looks like to him. I know he was nuts. I can't take his word. But you've been a moss of nerves; you been running ajwnd yelling for Iris Hendricks ilkc a dog who forgot where he buided the bone... there's sometiling in it somewhere. You didn't kill him -- but he claims you gave him a push. If it's true, you were the cause of the mess we're in, and you ought to have something to say about it." "Say? What can I say when Vm going nuts? He's ithe one doing all the talking. Ask him!" Stannard turned back to the mike. "How were they plotting? What did they intend to do?" "Bugasz is here," Stannard said dryly. "Here, Bugasz, speak for yourself." Bugasz grabbed the mike and yelled, "Hendricks, you goddamn liar -- " Bugasz's lip curled, but he controlled himself long enough to answer, "Laszlo Bugasz, Supply Agent #. Sector #, Security clearance C#," and jabbed the plate with his thumb as if he were gouging an eye. T he machine stammered, "BUscreen flickered with a thousand mad images, blanked, and finally, "DO the co-in spun. "Hang up," Stannard said. "I don't think we better try anything else for a while." "Stannard -- " Bugasz choked. "You really believe that -- that -- " Stannard found a chair, sat on it and let his hands drop between his knees. Dr. Ramcharan gave him a long look and said gently, "Bugasz, I think he would like to know what was between you and Mrs. Hendricks." "Nothing." Stannard raised his head. "I'm not lying. I haven't even spoken to her since I started servicing this light." "Then where the hell'd he get all his crazy ideas? Tell me that?" Bugasz shook his head. "I don't know." IF "But you knew iher before, back on Base! Well enough to call her by her first name -- " "All right! But that was back on Base. This is different!" "Whatever it was, it was enough to send Hendricks off his nut. What happened back ithere, then?" Bugasz sat down. "I did love her, once." "Once! It looks like that's all Hendricks needed!" The red-veined face twisted. "I wasn't in love with her, you fool! I loved her. Everybody did. You saw what she looked like." "But you knew her very well -- " "You saw the dossier. She was in starship communications, and I'd just joined up with GalFed... we took a couple of courses together in emergency procedures, shipboard stuff." "Shipboard stuff? And she came here?" "She'd been going out to Tau Ceti -- before she got sick." "Go on." "With what?" Bugasz shrugged. "She married Hendricks and came out here." "And stopping here every two months, you never saw her? Not once?" "A blink of her, going round a corner. That's all." "Hendricks wouldn't let you..." "He had nothing to do with that." "But you said you'd loved her..." he swallowed. "Didn't you even take her out, ask her to marry you, anything?" "You kidding? She had all those young guys hot out of the academies crowding around her; she was having a good time. Look at me," he slapped his chest. "What would she want with me? My big dumb head? My ugly red face? My pilot's pay? I was ten years older, I had no future..." "And Hendricks made all this mess out of that? Come on, Bugasz! And if age mattered, Hendricks was twice her age." "That was after she got sick." "So she was sick. But she got better. What's that got to do with all this?" Bugasz sighed and shook his head. "She didn't get better. She had Schoebl's disease." "I never heard of it." "It didn't have a name when she got it. And they kept it off the records as much as they could. Just said 'unspecified disease' without even a description." "Why?" "It's -- it's a horrible, godawful -- if it leaked out they'd have had a panic blowup and maybe have had to close down half the lights in the sector." "But you knew -- with your security rating?" "I knew. I used to have lunch with her about once a week. One day she didn't turn up, so I asked around for her and got all kinds of dumb excuses... maybe they thought I was a deadhead, but a supply man gets to know all kinds of people, all kinds of things. So I found out." S tannard crossed his arms. "Bugasz this sounds like a lot of -- " Dr, Ramdiaran interrupted, "I know of SchoebL An alien-parasitologist I studied from one of his texts, but I never knew he had a disease named after him." "You'll hear about it. They named it after him because he isolated the parasite and found a cure -- three weeks ago. This doctor, a young guy who told me about it first, back then on Base, well he got kicked out for shooting his mouth off -- not about this, just generally; and he was sent out to the sticks. I ran into him, and he tipped me off they had a cure... a couple weeks ago. Still shooting his mouth off, I guess." "It sounds plausible," Dr. Ramcharan said. "It would if we knew who this guy was." "You're not gonna, I don't want to get him bumped again." "What kind of disease was it, Bugasz?" she asked. "You know that tropical Earth disease, something about an elephant?" "Elephantiasis?" "Yeah. The one where you swell up in the feet, and -- " "Yes. That is also a parasite. Filaria. It blocks the lymph glands, sometimes causes lumps under the skin..." "But that's mostly the feet, or..." he rubbed his forehead. "This one -- this one you can get anywhere... shoulder, hand, lips, cheeks, nose... His face screwed up like a child's who was about to cry. "I saw her... I got in and saw her." "Your blabbermouth doctor friend," Stannard said. "Yeah. But nobody saw her after that. She didn't want people to..." Dr. Ramcharan said, "I believe the disease exists. I heard rumors of it, but it had no name then." "It's got one now. Schoebl's disease. They caught three cases of it on Base, altogether, and isolated them before it got around; but they didn't know what it was." "You went to see her -- you might have caught it." "It stops spreading when the nodes ripen. I didn't know that then. But I saw her." He put his head in his hands. "But Hendricks never kept you away from her when you dropied off supplies," Stannard said. "No, but she wouldn't look at anybody. She -- " "Bugasz! Did you know you had two unauthoriz visits marked down on your record in the last two weeks?" Bugasz jerked up. "Hendricks!" he snarled. "He said he'd tell on me, that louse!" He slumped again. "There's my job." "So you've been lying all along." "Damn you, I never lied! Not once!" IV S tannard poured a sweat of fury and impatience and frustration. "Then why were you out here!" "I wanted to tell him, for God's sake! Can't you understand? I wanted to tell him she could be cured! He wouldn't even let me in. I thought, so help me God, I thought he'd be glad; I thought he'd be IF jumping up and down dheering his head off! He wouldn't even let me ini I had to talk to him on the radio. I was ydling at him -- " Bugasz held his hands before him, stretched and trembling, "yelling at him, 'Hendricks, I only want to tell you they got a cure for the damn thing; it's Schoebl's disease, some kind of bug, if you'll only take her into Base they can -- his hands fell to his knees. "He cut me off. I couldn't even get him to talk to me. I came back a week later and tried again, and he said he'd report me. That's it." "This cure could be only a rumor." "No. I checked with another guy I know. It's classified, but it's no rumor." "Huh. I didn't know Security was that full of holes." "I wouldn't tell you if my job wasn't shot." "This makes everything even more complicated." "No, Stannard..." Dr. Ramcharan shook her head sadly. "That poor man... you remember, he took her when she was hideous. He was ugly; perhaps there was no one else in the world, he thought, who would have him... such a man would be an ugly person inside, too, I think ?' She looked at the blank screen where the picture had flashed Hendricks's idealization. "Or too shy and selfconscious... or he would see that ugly people also live and are loved in the world. It was his mistake that he took her because she had been beautiful. But he took her, and she was grateful, and perhaps even loved him for it..." She ran her eyea over the plated walls. "You have this garden, a place for two, like in the silly songs, only lined in steeL And then Bugasz, the outside world, comes pounding on the door with the news that she will be beautiful again, with a miraculous cure, like being freed from an evil spell -- and he is only an ugly man. Would she look at him after that? And as an irrational man, would he not be angry at Bugasz and do his best to strike back?" "He might," said Stannard. "And Bugasz could have explained some of this before, too." "How could I? He swore he'd have my job. There's nothing in the universe I'm fit for except shoving this old scow back and forth, and now I haven't even got that. rU end up in decontamination spraying Excelthion on Schoebl's bugs, and if there's a leak in the dickey-suit HI get my lungs burnt out like Hendricks got his." #Xeah, it's sad," Stannard said X and watched Bugasz stiffen. "If all this is true, if there is such a disease, if she had it, if Schoebl found a cure for it, why in hell did you come out here if you knew it meant your job? Whatever it was, something about your coming out here triggered him. Why didn't you just sit tight and wait and let the news of the cure leak out, through the news reports? Having radio contact, he couldn't have missed them. Even if he was such a hermit and didn't listen to news, the Base hospital, knowing her case, would have gotten in touch with him. He couldn't' have avoided it. And then he'd have had to do mething, probably something constructive because he'd have gotten a slow solid push -- he couldn't have ducked out; he'd have been ashamed. But he wouldn't have flung himself around and smashed everything up." "I know it was dumb." Bugasz cracked his knuckles. "I didn't want him to -- I didn't do it to make him act like that. I didn't know it would happen..." "You were the one who wanted Dr. Ramcharan to come." "Sure, I figured if there was something wrong with the antenna, he'd have to let us in -- and if I had a doctor with me I could force him to let her examine Iris and maybe make a case out of treating her. I didn't know my coming here before would have started -- " He moved his hands helplessly. "Then why -- " "Give me a minute, for God's sake! It's hard to say this." He fumbled in Ms pockets for a pack of (thin cigars land lit one. "I could have married her, after she got sick. She would have had me. I'm better looking than Hendricks, anyway, and younger. Women don't scrunch their faces up when they look at me, and I've had what I wanted -- all except her. She'd have come to love me, and I'd have loved her, because there was nothing twisted about her, inside. But I got in to see her... and they hadn't even let her have a mirror -- and -- and she looked at me, and -- the look in my eyes told her what the thing had done. IF looked her right in the face, and he married her. I could have had faith a cure'd be found... it was a parasite, not a thing like cancer. Cures for this kind of thing turn up fast enough when they're needed as much las this one was." "You cannot blame yourself for choosing not to marry an ugly woman," Dr. Ramcharan said. "It has happened a few times before. "But he gave her his love and a marriage... all I gave her was the sick look in my eyes that told her for the first time what a horrible, godawful thing she'd turned into." He raised his head. "That's why I came out. I wanted to be the one to give her the news, like giving her back her beauty... because I felt I was the one who took it away. I wanted to make up... "But she's gone," Stannard said. "Even granting Hendricks was nuts, nothing to prove you didn't lift her off this place and leave her somewhere, having a good idea what Hendricks would do, and then come back with us, all innocent, bringing Dr. Ramcharan so she could testify he killed himself. You could even have smashed the radio yourself, so he couldn't send out a call and head you off. You could have dispatched the boat to # so he couldn't get out of here and have ripped off the outside controls -- or even rigged the antennas so we couldn't reach here very easily. "And there's nothing to prove Mrs. Hendricks was deformed, even if she did have something wrong with her at one time. You may not have known Hendricks very well, but you knew enough of him to predict Ihe might just kill himself if you were trying to take his wife away from him or if he thought you were... why didn't you blow up the pile already, Bugasz? Then there would have been no evidence at all." C # "rou crazy fool!" Bugasz hurlI ed his cigar at the wall and screamed, "That's what .that louse wants you to think! You're playing right into his hands!" "Maybe I am." Stannard turned to the humming machine. "But I don't trust that thing any more. Whatever kind of nut Hendricks was, he made his biggest mistake when he got that computer tangled up with his feelings. I'm going to shut this whole operation down and take you with me to Base. Let those poor fools out there answer their own questions -- it's better than having them trust people like you and Hendricks. And we'll take the tapes and recordings and let the police listen to them and ask you their questions and knock their heads over what to do about the whole thing. I don't want to touch it any more. I'm tired." "Stannard, if you do that we'll never find her! Stannard! She'll stay lost somewhere out here. I don't know where she is, I swear! I haven't done any of the things you think. And I haven't touched this machine, you know I have C# clearance -- it'd shut off, I couldn't get near it. I couldn't have gotten near the pile even if I'd wanted to; I couldn't have monkeyed with the orbit -- I'm a pilot, and all I can do with machinery is pull switches -- maybe I can tighten ,a screw, but even then I wreck the thread." He slapped the console. "Hendricks set things up to make this happen -- it's the way he figured he'd get even. Stannard!" he begged. "Please! Ask him! Ask him if she had Schoebl's disease. It's the only way I can think of that'U prove I told you the truth." "Why should he have put that in?" "I don't know! Chances are he didn't, and it's just one more damn Please!" Stannard regarded the machine with loathing. Madness in its twisted wires. He got up slowly, his shoulders weary. He went over and picked up the microphone. "More damn idiotic... Hendricks -- " The screen stayed blank. "NO "Stop." He swabbed his forehead. "I don't know if I can get anything out of this thing now... He began wearily for the last time, "Paul Stannard, GFTech Supervisor..." and went through the rigmarole. "No, I do not want to play a game. I want to know if Cornelius Hendricks knew that his wife had Schoebl's disease." T hey stared at it in silence for a full minute, and Stannard whispered, "Is SchoehVs disease the code-word?" IF Taldng no chances, Stannard grabbed his bag and pulled out his own recorder. "Give me the orbit! Gimme the stores!" Bugasz yelled, "Ask him where Iris is, goddamnnit, ask him!" "AH right, give me a minute! Now, Hendricks, you damn well better tell me where your wife is!" The screen flashed in mad succession with the picture of Iris, the reconstructed image of Hendricks, the go-board, the spinning coin, the concentric circles, a nebula, a map oi the spacelight network, the memory-map -- now filled, an unspecified flow-diagram, a monster -- real or imagined -- a hideous caricature of Hendricks's actual face. The sound rose blaring till the metal voice rebounded endlessly from the steel walls. voice died abruptly into a wail. "OH On and on and on -- but Bugasz, with a cougar's ripple of movement, had slid into his suit, grabbed Stannard's Gag, and was racing for the antenna room before Stannard could as much as turn around and blink. no move to shut it up. He stood vaiting till a few minutes later when Bugasz came back, carrying the voman's limp body. He took her into the bedroom and laid her gently on the bed. Dr. Ramcharan was in there already, and Stannard came after. She started to undo the spacesuit, but as they moved closer, she said, "Please don't look." Stannard went back to where the machine was still wailing. Bugasz knocked back his helmet and ran after him, twitching him round by a push at the shoulder. He roared, "You! You wouldn't let me check the antennas!" and swung a backhand blow to the side of the head that sent Stannard flying. After a moment, Stannard dragged himself up, staggered over, pulled down the mike. "Stop it," he said. "You can stop now. She's alive." V S tannard ran diagnostic tests and satisfied himself that fifteen twenty-six was no longer a jealous liar. There was nothing wremg with the orbit; the answers for hours sixteen to twenty were there for the picking. And Iris Hendricks was alive, but only just. In gasping whispers she was able to add the few details they needed to know. Hendricks had sent her out to check the antennas and simply retracted them. Although they moved very slowly, not in one quick collapse, there was no way for her to escape. The hatches were locked, and she couldn't dodge out of the way without ripping her air-hose; she had no oxygen tanks. She had been carrying a heavy lantern; all she coidid do was jam it under the ane of one of the descending aims and lie trapped in the narrow space it left her. She had lain there eighteen hours. "I thought it was a mistake at first -- I was going to call him through the suit-radio... but he started screaming things -- he thought I was dead -- and -- and #  Dr. Ramcharan drugged her into relieved sleep, and Bugasz called in the drone. "Will she live?" Stanhard asked. "Oh, yes. She would have weakened and died soon if we had not found her, but now she is only bruised." She turned to Bugasz. "How will they cure her?" "The way I heard it, there's drugs to kill the parasites and dissolve die nodes. Some of them will probably have to be cut out. She won't be -- everyittung she was, but..." he watched the drone trundling toward the shaft with its burden, and Dr. Ramcharan gave her attention to Stannard's battered cheekbone and the cut on the comer of his mouth. "You are determined to stay?" Stannard winced a little at her touch. "It is not good for men to be alone in these places." "The police will be here within a day, and I can clear things up faster. I'm not a lonely type. Besides, I won't even be ;alone." He cocked his head at the machine, and grimaced. "I've got him." Bugasz tore his eyes away from the disappearing drone, came over to Stannard and gave a couple of preliminary swallows. "I'm sorry." Stannard, bruised, thin-haired and cold-eyed, feeling a little sorry for himself and ridiculing himself for it, looked up at Bugasz and took one small flicker of enjoyment from the big man's humility. "Forget it." B ugasz, with a slumping of the shoulders, went into the ship. "The poor man will lose his job," Dr. Ramcharan said. Stamiard said, "Not through me. I'll do my best to help him keep it. But he took a swing at me, and l"m not gonna let him off the hook." He grinned at the expression on her face, even though it hurt his mouth. "You'll tell him, anyway, as soon as you get on board." "You are hard on the feelings of a person, Stannard." "I'm a Tech man. I never wanted to be a policeman." She took his chin in her hand and looked down so there was no escaping her eyes. The shadow of her sleeve glittered with gold, and her fingers laced his jaw like hot gold wire. "You are not lonely and you do not need to be loved. I think someone forgot to teach you bow." He sat unmoving, hands resting on bis knees. "Are you lonely, Dr. Ramcharan?" "My husband is treating tentacle paralysis on Barnard IX, and my children are home in New Bombay with my mother. But I will have a sabbatical soon, and I hope to see (them ,all." "Good luck," he said. She packed her bag quietly and left, going down the shaft with the slipping glide of a woman who has IF learned to keep a sari from sliding off her shoulder. The locks closed. S tannard called for a tape printout of the Kaghouri data first and then for the rest of the answers, it would save time ifor the police, and he would have at least one neat package to hand over to them. Then he turned down the thermostat, dimmed the lights and sat down and lit a cigarette. He began to shape in his mind the explanations he would have to lay out; but there was plenty of time for that, and he left it. He meditated briefly on the complexities of men and the machines that served them. His thoughts, his eyes, drifted back to the computer. He sighed. Part of Hendricks' tormented spirit was still twined in its guts. The man had had no right to do that, to force his machine to lie, deceive, conceal, accuse ... but it had been done. The Psych police would unreel the situation hour by hour from its stores, would report, judge and close the case. Still unresolved forever because a machine may not expiate nor a man absolve it. He got up very slowly, went over and picked up the mike. "Fifteen twenty-six, this is Stannard again... will you play a game of go with me?" "That's all right," he said. "I'll take white and give you a four-stone handicap. It'll even us out okay..." He waited, almost tensely, and after a moment the go-board appeared, white-hatched against gray, black-dotted at the D and Q ccosspoints of # and #. "Fine." He took a deep breath. "My first move is R #..." Science-Fiction's Newest Hugo Winner A World at the End of the Universe Receives a Deadly Gift from Earth! New Novelette by One of Science-Fiction's Favorite Writers of All Time -- Now Back! Plus many other headline stories of science fiction! g Don't miss next month's IF -- reserve your copy now! S Though his music was heavenly -- could it charm the strange berserkers of Hell? F orcing the passage through the dark nebula Taynarus cost the humans three fighting ships, and after that they took the casualties of a three-day battle as their boarding parties fought their way into Hell. The Battle Commander of the task force feared from the beginning to the end of the action that the computer in command on the berserker side would destroy the place and the living invaders with it, in a last Gotterdammerung of destructor charges. But he could hope that the damped-field projectors his men took with them into the fight would prevent any nuclear explosion. He sent living men to board because it was believed that Hell held living human prisoners. His hopes were justified; or at least. for whatever reason, no nuclear explosion came. The beliefs about prisoners were not easily confirmed. Ercul, the cybernetic psychologist who came when the fighting was over to investigate, certainly found humans there. In a way. In part. Odd organs that functioned in a sort-of way, interconnected with the nonhuman and the non-alive. The organs were most of them human brains, which had been grown in culture through use of the techniques that berserkers must have captured with some of our hospital ships. Our human laboratories grow the culture-brains from seedlings of human embryo-tissue, grow them to adult size and then dissect them as needed. A doctor slices off a prefrontal lobe, say, and puts it into the skull of a man whose own corresponding brain-part has been destroyed by some disease or violence. The culture-brain material serves as a matrix for regrowth, raw material on which the old personality can re-impress itself. The culture-brains, raised in glass jars, are not human except in potential. Even a layman can readily distinguish one of them from a normally developed brain by the visible absence of the finer surface convolutions. The culture-brains cannot be human in the sense of maintaining sentient human minds. Certain hormones and other subtle chemicals of the bodyenvironments are necessary for the development of a brain with personality -- not to mention the need for the stimuli of experience, the continual impact of the senses. Indeed some sensory input is needed if the culture-brain is to develop even to the stage of a template usable by the surgeon. For this input music is commonly employed. The berserkers had doubtless learned to culture livers and hearts and gonads as well as brains, but it was only man's thinking ability that interested them deeply. The berserkers must have stood in their computer-analogue of awe as they regarded the memory-capacity and the decision-making power that nature had managed to pack into the few hundred cubic centimeters of the human nervous system. Off and on through their long war with men the berserkers had tried to incorporate human brains into their own circuitry. Never Bad they succeeded to their own satisfaction, but they kept dying. The berserkers themselves of course named nothing. But were not far wrong in calling this center of their research Hell. This Hell lay hidden in the center of the dark Taynarus nebula, which in turn was roughly centered in a triangle formed by the Zitz and Toxx and Yaty systems. Men had known for years what Hell was and approximately where it was, before they could muster armed strength enough in this part of their sector of the galaxy to go in and find it and root it out. C#T certify that in this container X there is no human life," said the cybernetic psychologist, Ercul, under his breath, at the same time stamping the words on the glassite case before him. Ercul's assistant gestured, and the able-bodied spaceman working with them pulled the power-connectors loose and let the thing in the tank begin to die. This one was not a culture-brain but had once been the nervous system of a living prisoner. It had been greatly damaged, not only by removal of most of its human body, but by being connected to a mass of electronic and micromechanical gear. Through some training program, probably a combination of punishment and reward, the berserker had then taught this brain to perform certain computing operations at great speed and with low probability of error. It seemed that every time the computations had been finiished the mechanism in the case with the brain had immediately reset aJl the counters to zero and once more presented the same inputs, whereupon the brain's task had started over. The brain now seened incapable of anything but going on with the job; and if that was really a kind of human life, which was not a possibility that Ercul was going to admit out loud, it was in his opinion a kind that was better terminated as soon as possible. "Next case?" he asked the spacemen. Then he realized he had just made a horrible pun upon his judge's role. But none of his fellow harrowers of Hell seemed to have noticed it. But just give us a few more days on the job, he thought, and we will start finding things to laugh at. Anyway, he had to get on with his task of trying to distinguish rescued prisoners -- two of these had been confirmed so far and might some day again look human -- from a collection of bottled, though more cc less functioning organs. When they brought the next case before him, he had a bad moment, bad eveai for this day, recognizing some of his own work. The story of it had started more than a standard year before, on the not-far-off planet of Zitz, in a huge hall that had been decorated and thronged for one of the merriest of occasions. AJ.son asked his bride, having a moment to take her hand and speak to her under the tumult of the wedding feast. It was not that he had any doubt of her happiness; it was just that the banal twoword question was the best utterance that he could find -- unless, of course, he were to sing. "Ohhh, happy, yes I" At the moment Eury was no more articulate than he. But the truth of her words was in her voice and in her eyes, marvelous as some song that Ordell might have made and sung. Of course he was not going to be allowed to get away, even for hia honeymoon, without singing one song at least. "Sing something, Ordell!" That was Hyman Bolf, calling from across the vast banquet table, where he punch-fountain... The famed multifaith revivalist had come from Yaty system to perform the wedding ceremony. On landing, his private ship had misbehaved oddly, the hydrogen power lamp flaring so that the smoke of burnt insulation had caused the reverend to emerge from his cabin with irritated eyes; but after that bad omen, everything had gone well for the rest of the day. Other voices took it up at once. "Sing, Ordell!" "Yes, you've got to. Sing!" "But it's m'own wedding, and I don't feel quite right -- " His objections were overwhelmingly shouted down. The man was music, and indeed his happiness today was such that he felt he might burst if he could not express it. He got to his feet, and one of his most trusted manservants, who had foreseen that OrIF dell would sing, was ready to bring him his self-invented instrument. Crammed into a small box that Ordell could hang from his neck like an accordion was a speaker system from woofer to tweeter, plus a good bit of electronics and audionics; on the box's plain surface there were ten spots for Ordell's ten fingers to play upon. His "music box," he called it, having to call it something. Ordell's imitators had had bigger and flashier and better music boxes made for them; but surprisingly few people, even among girls between twelve and twenty, cared to listen to Ordell's imitators. So Ordell Callison sang at his own wedding, and his audience was enthralled by him as people always were; as people had been by no other performer in all the ancient records of Man. The highbrowed music critics sat rapt in their places of honor at the head table; the cultured and not-so-cultured moneyed folk of Zitz and Toxx and Yaty, some of whom had come in their private racing ships, and the more ordinary guests, all were made happy by his song as no wine could have made them. And the adolescent girls, the Ordell fans who crowded and huddled inevitably outside the doors, they yielded themselves to his music to the point of fainting and beyond. A couple of weeks later Ordell and Eury and his new friends of the last fast years, the years of success and staggering wealth, were out in space in their sporty oneseater ships playing the game they called Tag. This time Ordell was playing the game in a sort of reversed way, dodging about in one corner of the reserved volume of space, really trying to avoid the girl-ships that fluttered past instead of going after them. He had been keeping an eye out for Eury's ship and getting a little anxious about not being able to find it, when from out of nowhere there came shooting toward Ordell another boy-ship, the signals of emergency blazing from it across the spectrum. In another minute everyone had ceased To play. The screens of all the little ships imaged the face of Arty, the young man whose racer had just braked to a halt beside Ordell's. Arty was babbling: "I tried, Ordell -- Tmean I didn't try to -- I didn't mean her any harm -- they'll get her back -- it wasn't my fault she -- " With what seemed great slowness, the truth of what had happened became clear. Arty had chased and overtaken Eury's ship, as was the way of the game. He had clamped his ship to hers and boarded and then thought to claim the usual prize. But Eury of course was married now; and being married meant much to her, as it did to Ordell, who today had only played at catching girls. Somehow both of them had thought that everyone else must see how the world had changed since they were married, how the rules of the game of Tag would have to be amended for them from now on. Unable to convince Arty by argument of how things stood. Eury had had to struggle to make her point. She had somehow injured her foot, trying to evade him in the little cabin. He kept on stubbornly trying to claim his prize. It came out later that he had only agreed to go back to his own ship for a first-aid kit (she swore that her ship's kit was missing) after her seeming promise that he could have what he wanted when he returned. But when he had gone back to his ship, she broke her own racer free and fled. And he pursued. Drove her into a comer, against the boundary of the safety zone, which was guarded by automated warships against the possibility of berserker incursions. To get away from Arty she crossed that border in a great speeding curve, no doubt meaning to come back to safety within ten thousand miles or so. She never made it. As her little racer sped close to an outlying wisp of dark Taynarus, the berserker machine that had been lurking there pounced out. O f course Ordell did not hear the story in such coherent form, but what he heard was enough. On the screens of the other little ships his tace at first seemed to be turned to stone by what he heard; but then his look became suddenly wild and mad. Arty cringed away, but Ordell did not stop for a moment for him. Instead he drove at racer's speed out where his wife had gone. He shot through the zone of the protective patrols (which were set to keep intruders out, not to hold the mad or reckless in) and plunged between outlying dustclouds to eater one of the vast crevices that led into the heart of Taynarus, into the maze where ships and machines must all go slow and from which no living human had emerged since the establishment of Hell. Some hours later, the outer sentries of the berserker came around his little ship, demanding in their well learned human speedi that he halt and submit to capture. He only slowed his little ship still further and began to sing to the berserker over the radio, taking his hands from his racer's controls to put his fingers on the keys of his music box. Unsteered, his ship drifted away from the center of the navigable passage, grazing the nebular wall and suffering the pocking blasts of microcollisions with its gas and dust. But before his ship was wrecked, the berserker's sentry-devices gave up shouting radio commands and sent a boarding party of machines. Through the memory banks of Hell they had some experience of insanity, of the more bizarre forms of human behavior. They searched the racer for weapons, searched Ordell -- allowed him to keep his music box when it too had been examined and he kept on struggling for it -- and passed him on as a prisoner to the jurisdiction of the inner guards. Hell, a mass of fortified metal miles in diameter, received him and his racer through its main entrance. He got out of his ship and found himself able to breathe and walk IF and see where he was going; the physical environment in Hell was for the most part mild and pleasant, because prisoners did not as a rule, survive very long, and the computer-brains of the berserker did not want to impose unnecessary stresses upon them. The berserker devices having immediate control over the routine operations in Hell were themselves in large part organic, containing culture-brains grown for the purpose and some re-educated captured brains as well. These were all examples of the berserker's highest achievements in its attempt at reverse cybernation. Before Ordell had taken a dozen steps away from his ship, he was stopped and questioned by one of these monsters. Half steel and circuitry, half culture-flesh, it carried in three crystal globes its three potentially-human brains, their toosmooth surfaces bathed in nutrient and woven with hair-fine wires. "Why have you come here?" the monster asked him, speaking through a diaphragm in its midsection. Only now did Ordell begin at all to maike a conscious plan. At the core of his thought was the knowledge that in the human laboratories music was used to tune and tone the culturebrains and that his own music was as superior for that purpose as it was by all other standards. T o the three-headed monster he sang very simply that he had come here ody to seek his young wife, pure accident had brought her, ahead of time, to the end of her life. In one of the old formal languages in which he sang so wdl of deep things, he implored the power in charge of this domain of terror, this kingdom of silence and unborn creatures, to tie fast again the thread of Eury's life. If you deny me this, he sang, I cannot return to the world of the living alone, and you here will have us both. The music, that had conveyed nothing but its mathematical elements to the cold computer-brains outside, melted the trained purpose of the inner, half-fleshly guardians. The three-brained monster passed him on to others, and each in turn found its set aim yielding to the hitherto unknown touch of beauty, found harmony and melody calling up the buried human things that transcended logic. He walked steadily deeper into Hell, and they could not resist. His music was leaked into a hundred experiments through audio-inputs, vibrated faintly through the mountings of glassite cases, was sensed by tortured nerve-cells through the changes in inductance and capacities that emanated rhythmically from Ordell's music box. Brains that had known nothing but to be forced to the limit of their powers in useless calculation -- brains that had been hammered into madness with the inserted probe -- these heard his music, felt it, sensed it, each with its own unique perception, and reacted. A hundred experiments were in(Erupted, became unreliable, were totally ruined. The overseers, half flesh themselves, failed and fumbled in their programmed purpose, coming to the decision that the asked-for prisoner must be brought forth and released. The ultimate-controlling, pure berserker computer -- pure metallic cold, totally immune to this strange jamming that was wreaking havoc in its laboratory -- descended at last from its concentration on high strategic planning to investigate. And then it turned its full energy at once to regaining control over what was going on within the heart of Hell. But it tried in vain, for the moment at least. It had given too much power to its half-alive creations; it had trusted too much to fickle protoplasm to be true to its conditioning. Ordell was standing before the two linked, potentially-human brains which were under the berserker itself, the lords and superintendents of Hell. These two like all their lesser kind had been melted and deflected by Ordell's music; and now they were fighting back with all the electric speed at their command against their cold master's attempt to reaffirm its rule. Hiey held magnetic relays like fortresses against the berserker; they maintained their grip on the outposts that were ferrite cores; they fought to hold a frontier that wavered through the territory of control. "Then take her away," said the voice of these refoeUious overseers to Ordell Callison. "But do not stop singing, do not pause for breath for more than a second, until you are in your ship and away, clear of Hell's outermost gate." Ordell sang on, sang of his new joy at the wonderful hope that they were giving him. A door hissed open behind him, and he turned to see Eury coming through it. She was limping on her injured foot, which had never been taken care of, but he could see that she was really all right. The machines had not started to open her head. "Do not pause!" barked the voder at him. "Go!" Eury moaned at the sight of her husband and stretched out her arms to him, but he dared do no more than motion with his head for her to follow him, even as his song swelled to a paean of triumphant joy. He walked out along the narrow passage through which he had come, moving now in a direction that no one else had ever traveled. The way was so narrow that he had to keep on going ahead while Eury followed. He had to keep from even turning his head to look at her, to concentrate the power of his music on each new guardian that rose before him, half-alive and questioning; once more each one in turn opened a door. Always he could hear behind him the sobbing of his wife and the dragging stepping of her wounded foot. "Orddl? Ordell, honey, is that really you? I can't believe 'tis." Ahead, the last danger, the threebrained sentry of the outer gate, rose to block their way, under orders to IF prevent escape. Ordell sang of the freedom in living in a human body, of running over unfenced grass through sunlit air. The gatekeeper bowed aside again, to let them pass. "Hooey? Turn an' look at me, tell me this is not some other trick they're playin'. Honey, if y'love me, turn?" Turning, he saw her clearly for the first time since he had entered Hell. To Ordell her beauty was such that it stopped time, stopped even the song in his throat and his fingers on the keys of music. A moment free of the strange influence that had perverted all its creatures was all the time that the berserker needed to re-establish something close to complete control. The threeheaded shape seized Eury and bore her away from her husband, car- ried her back through doorway after doorway of darkness, so fast that her last scream of farewell could scarcely reach the ears of her man. "Good-bye... love..." He cried out and ran after her, beating uselessly on a massive door that slammed in his face. He hung there on the door for a long time, screaming and pleading for one more chance to get his wife away. He sang again, but the berserker had reestablished its icy control too firmly -- it had not entirely regained power, however, for though the halfliving overseers no longer obeyed Ordell, neither did they molest him. They left the way open for him to depart. He lingered for about seven days there at the gate, in his small ship and out of it, without food or sleep, singing uselessly until no voice was left him. Then he collapsed inside his ship. Then he, or more likely his autcilot, drove the racer away from the berserker and back toward freedom. The berserker defenses did not, any more than the human, question a small ship coming out. Probably they assumed it to be one of their own scouts or raiders. There were never any escapes from Hell. B ack on the planet Zitz his managers greeted him as one risen from the dead. In a few days' time he was to give a live concert, which had long been scheduled and sold out. In another day the managers and promoters would have had to begin returning money. He did not really co-operate with the doctors who worked to restore his strength, but neither did he oppose them. As soon as his voice came back he began to sing again; he sang most of the time, except when they drugged him to sleep. And it did not matter to him whether they sent him onto a stage to do his singing again. The live performance was billed as one of his pop concerts, which in practice meant a hall overflowing with ten thousand adolescent girls, who were elevated even beyond their usual level of excitement by the miracles of Ordell's bereavement, resurrection and ghastly appearance. During the first song or two the girls were awed and relatively silent, quiet enough so that Ordell's voice could be heard. Then -- well, one girl in ten thousand would scream it aloud: "You're ours again!" There was a sense in which his marriage had . been resented. Casually and indifferently looking out over them all, he smiled out of habit and began to sing how much he hated them and scorned them, seeing in them nothing but hopeless ugliness. For a few moments the currents of emotion in the great hall balanced against one another to produce the illusion of calm. Ordell"s deadly voice was clear. But then the storm of reaction broke, and he could no longer be heard. The powers of hate and kist, rage and demand bore all before them. The ushers who always labored to form a barricade at a Callison concert were swept away at once by ten thousand girls. Ihe riot was over in a minute, ended by the police. Ordell himself was nearly dead. Medical help arrived only just in time to save the life in the tissues of his brain. N ext day the leading cyberneticpsychologist on Zitz was called in by Ordell Callison's doctors. They were saving what remained of Ordell's life, but they had not been able to open any bridge of communication with him. Ercul, the psychologist, sank probes directly into Ordell's brain, so that this information could be given him. Next he connected the speech centers to a voder device loaded with recordings of Or dell's own voice, so that the tones that issued were the same as had once come from his throat. And -- in response to the #C# crippled man's first request -- to the motor-centers that had controlled Ordell 's fingers went probes connected to a music box. After that he at once began to sing. They took him to the spaceport. With his life-support system of tubes and nourishment and electricity, they put him aboard his racer. And with the autopilot programmed as he commanded, they sent him out, fired along the course that be had chosen. E rcul knew Ordell and Eury when he found them, together in the same experimental case. Recognizing his own work on Ordell, he felt certain even before the electroencephalogram patterns matched with his old records. There was little left of either of them. "Dols only two points above normal bias level," chanted the psychologist's assistant, taking routine readings, not guessing whose pain it was he was attempting to judge. "Neither of them seems to be hurting. At the moment, anyway." In a heavy hand, Ercul lifted his stamp and marked the case.  certify that in this container there is no human life. The assistant looked up in mild surprise at this quick decision. "There is some mutual awareness here, I would say, between the two subjects." He spoke in a businesslike, almost cheerful voice. He had been enough hours on the job now to start getting used to it. IF IF  Science Article by R. C. W. Ettinger C ertain primitives recognize only three numbers: one, two, and many. Other primitives -- present company not excepted -- can categorize life spans in only three ways: normal, extended, and greatly extended. There is little psychological distinction between life spans of a eternity, for obvious reasons. A thousand years will almost certainly produce such vast and profound changes that we can scarcely speculate on what will interest us then; it is even possible that Destiny will have been fulfilled. Nevertheless, just for the fun of it, we may conjecture about the chance of individuals living literally forever. To many, this is an "obvious" impossibility; but what is "obvious" is often wrong, and ap pears to be in this case. Oddly related to the question of immortality, as we shall see, is that of interstellar travel; in fact, the former appears to be necessary for the latter. At first thought, the obstacles to Robert Ettinger Is the non who, a few years ago, electrified America by proposing seriously what most of us had thought was only a "sdencficHon" Idea -- f.e... Immortality by means of freezing. Now he turns his attention to some of the consequences of that kind of immortality -- and what It means to some other major science-fiction Ideas! interstellar journey are impressive. The human life span is short, and human tolerance of acceleration small; interstellar distances are vast; the limiting velocity of light can be approached only by enormous expenditure of energy. What of it? Human life may be extended, or astronauts frozen (which would increase their acceleration tolerance as well), or robots may be used; we will soon have fusion energy and later possibly total-annihilation energy. Many writers have assumed the difficulties will be overcome. For example, in Planets for Man (Random House, #) Dole and Asimov anticipate flight at a large fraction of the velocity of light, "although the expenditure of energy needed for accelerating to such velocities are enormous." They note years en route, then trips to start # light-years away (the nearest) could be made at one-fifth the speed of light (# miles per second); trips to stars # light-years away could be made one-half the speed of light (# miles per second); trips to stars # light-years away could be made at three-quarters the speed of light (# miles per second) ; and so on." They also point out that relativity theory becomes important at speeds close to light, and that subjective time of travel in this case would be greatly reduced for the astronauts; they would age much more slowly than the stay-at-homes. This sounds very nice, but it is much too vague. Others have looked more closely and found the picture not so rosy. For example. Sebastian von Hoerner has contributed a horifying little analysis in a compendium called Interstellar Communication (W. A. Benjamin, #, ed. A. G. W. Cameron) . First, he notes that if a live, unfrozen crew is used, and if they cannot tolerate permanent acceleration of more tthan I g (Earth normal), then long subjective times and extremely long objective times are required to reach lany but the nearest stars. If # years pass for the crew, the observers on Earth will measure # years for the round trip, and the range will be only # parsecs. To reach to # parsecs (roughly only a tenth of the diameter of the galaxy) would require # years, which would feel like # years to the crew for the round trip. How very discouraging! But the energy considerations are even more discouraging. In fact, they rule out everything except total annihilation fuel and photon thrust; and when the acceleration requirement is added, the power demands are simply absurd. According to von Hoemer (and others) to produce I g acceleration by emitting radiation in the backward direction requires -- power per ounce of loaded rocket! Furthermore, this power must be gotten rid of. A technology capable of this would have to be able to build an engine as powerful as an auto engine (# horsepower) weighing a tenth as much as a paper clip and also able to radiate energy about as fast as a # kilowatt battery of searchlights; all this before even beginning to consider payload and fuel. Avenues of Interstellar Flight G eorge Gallup, the renowned pollster, reviewing # years of opinion-sampling, has point out that the public often has remarkably good judgment -- frequently better than that of the experts in their own fields! (The people wanted air power built up long before the military agreed, ec., etc,) And it has often been pointed out that in American IF histary the only realist is the optimist. A "mere, vague" optimism about future progress is probably a better Iguide to interstellar prospects than von Hoemer's carefully documented pessimism. But fortunately, we have more than vague optimism to go on. Under certain assumptions, long trips might be acceptable, and if human passengers are desired and generations are not to pass, they could be frozen for most of the trip, with a few thawed out from time to time to stand watch... as all sciencefiction readers are aware. It is also possible to beat down the obstacles by sheer brute force: when intelligent, self-repairing and reproducing robots are made, considerations of cost will virtually disappear, and it may not be beyond the bounds of reason to build a ship of planetary size, if necessary, to carry a small payload; in other words, we need not be limited by "reasonable" fuelload ratios. Finally, of course, there is the possibility of new breakthroughs in principle producing a whole new ball game with Einstein replaced as umpire, as Newton was before him. But there exist presently only the most tenuous hints of this, and we will not count on it. For now the most reasonable attitude, I believe, is that interstellar flight will not be impossible even for relatively crude technology, and will not be easy or trivial even for highly advanced technology. How this relates to immortality we shall see. Indefinitely Extended Life B efore asking whether one can live forever, we must ask whether one can live indefinitely -- i.e., whether "natural death" can be eliminated. And the first question in this category is whether senility can be prevented orand cured. In general terms, it seems obvious that it can: given a sufficient degree of tedinical skill, one can prevent or correct the disorders and malfunctions that make the body and brain decrepit. Indefinitely extended life is even possible for our generation, through either cryogenic interment or suspended animation. At present the only hope is cryogenic interment -- freezing the newly dead in the hope of eventual revival and rejuvenation. Statistics and Expansion A pparently most scientists assume that eternal life is impossible for fundamental physical and mathematical reasons, which have been made explicit by James S. Hayes. (In "Technological Routes to Immortality," The Scientist Speculates, Basic Books, #.) However, I think Prof. Hayes is wrong, both in his reasons for giving up on unlimited life in the full and in the limited substitute he suggests. He says, first, that if there is any chance at all of accidental death in a normal life span, then in the long run death is certain; second, that even if fatal accidents were somehow completely eliminated, any birth rate, however small, would eventually resuit in population pressures that even emigration at the speed of light could not relieve; third, that in any case an immortal could not retain all his memories, since the physical storage requirement would eventually 'bring the day when a solid sphere of organized matter expanding at the velocity of light would not be adequate. He then suggests that the accident problem be met 'by sharing one's identity with several others in several bodies, and the storage problem by culling memories periodically to keep only those most valued: "Since personal identity, like life itself, clearly consists of an ordered structure of information, a 'message,' and since messages can be replicated indefinitely many times, there is no reason why any one personal identity could not be simultaneously made available to several brains and be said to inhabit simultaneously many bodies... By the use of many bodies the probability of the accidental extinction of a personal identity can be made as small as we please. A time may come when almost every person one meets will have at least some part of his identity in common with oneself. Under these conditions the death of a body would not be a reason for grief, as now death is a reason for grief." Perhaps we might not object too strongly to periodic weeding out of excess baggage in our memories, since selection and loss occur routinely in our ordinary lives anyway, willynilly. But few, I imagine, will agree that personal identity "clearly" (!) consists of an "ordered structure of information." Elsewhere (in The Prospect of Immortality, Doubleday, #) I have considered the problem of identity in chapter length and concluded that it is very far from solved. It will suffice here to point out, in Prof. Hayes's own words, what most people will consider a reductio ad absiirdiini'. "If identity resides in ordered information, the distinction between the metaphorical immortality of a man in his work and his literal personal immortality is one of quantity rather than (or as the Marxists would say, transforming into) one of quality. It is merely a matter of a difference of a few orders of magnitude in the amount of information transmitted." Rejecting his solution, we must find loopholes in his mathematics, and then a way to crawl through the loopholes. T he first is not difficult, because his ajithmetic is based on a false premise, vz., that the probability of death in a year (say) must have a lower bound. For non-mathcmatical readers we can illustrate the point, and also illuminate an old riddle, by explaining Zeno's Paradox. Zeno asked how can I get from here to there? Obviously, I must first cover half the distance, and to do that I must first cover ## the distance, etcr, he journey may be mentally broken down into an infinite number of finite segments, each requiring finite time; since the sum of an infinite number of nonzero intervals is infinite -- is it not? -- infinite time must be required to move any distance. The answer is that the sum of an infinite numter of non-zero quantities is not necessarily infinite. (This is obviously so, since a twoinch line can be divided into an infinite number of segments, but the total of those segments is still two inches, not infinity. The sum Vz  V#  V#... is infinite; the sum V#  V#  V#:... is infinite; but the sum V#  V # :  ... #. The sum of an infinite series can be finite, if the terms of the series diminish fast enough. Now we see how, in principle, Hayes' second and third obstacles can be overcome. We need never give up breeding altogether (although it will not be required for evolution); we need only reduce the rate of reproduction fast enough, indefinitely, without ever reaching zero. And we need sacrifice no memories (although we will have plenty to spare. We need only regulate their rate of accumulation. Note carefully that we do not even have to acquire memories more slowly -- only more slowly as a percentage increment per unit time per unit volume of space. The annual percentage growth in brain tissue will have to decrease, but not the tonnage. Now, a reader of decent sensibilities will be stunned by the word "tonnage." Tons of brain tissue? Of course, there is a certain apparently irreducible minimum amount of matter, in mass and volume, required to store a unit of information, and if we jettison no memories, eventually we must become gigantic. Even storing "our" memories in a separate mechanical store or computer, plugged in at will, cannot avoid giantism, for several reasons. In any case, we do not want to avoid giantism -- it is our salvation with respect to the accidental death bogey. T here is a certain risk of catastrophe per year per cubic yard, and we can hardly expect to keep reducing this risk fast enough, forever; hence any ordinary individual must expect a fatal accident sooner or later. But a society, if it spreads out fast enough, can have a nonzero probability of infini te life. Can an individual do the same? Certainly! To begin with, we may think of ourselves as located at a point in space. But we are not: each of us occupies an appreciable volume, and can sacrifice considerable material without disaster. For example, rays from radioactive elements constantly damage or kill cells of our bodies -- thousands daily -- but we replace them and carry on, and in fact do not even notice it. Of course, it is absurd to think we can just grow huge and keep this up indefinitely. Neither can we stomach the notion of submerging ourselves in a "hive" organism, with individuals playing the role of cells in a super-being; we do not want to be reduced to the status of bees or ants or anything similar. The answer is that we will develop a new type of body, the parts of which will not be physically glued together. It is simply a matter of communication. The hemispheres of a brain, for example, in principle ought to be capable of integration by wires, or even radio, rather than nerves; and the same thing is true of smaller components. We must envisage a race of titans, each multicorporeal, bis body divided into myriad components attenuated over a large and increasing volume of space, integrated by something like radio waves. If a star goes nova, only a few planets may be lost -- a trifle, a toenail. As always, there will be a price. In particular, ithe giants will live slowly, of necessity. M you are spread your nervous system signals from one part of you to anotlher at the speed of light, it will take you a long while to think and act. It is interesting to speculate, however, that this may explain the mysterious absence of emissaries from 'higher civilizations: any civilization much beyond the present human stage enters the macro-cosmic phase and is completely cut of touch. In addition to size and slowness, the giants might have another bizarre quality: intermingling of bodies. If the purpose of giantism is immortality, avoiding catastrophe 'by having one's parts scattered over immense volumes, any smaO volume (say a planet) would not have to be reserved for a single individual. Thus of individuals, each one scattered onent people. People? Beings, rather. Or even gods. They could hardly be much like ourselves, whose psychology and culture are strongily dependent on the physical character of our bodies. Ibeir lives would not necessarily be entirely mental, but they would indeed be strange. They could not stand, sit, walk, talk or even have a definite location in any easily understood sense. An obvious nasty conjecture is that the (giants are alrdy in our region of space, and in fact we, all unwitting, are their "cells"; that our organization, from our point of view, is inefficient and often unpleasant may interest them not at all. An even nastier conjecture is that we are not yet cells, but will shortly be taken over for that purpose, when we reach an appropriate stage of development. But "they" would hardly work in such a sloppy manner, nor use fully self-conscious cells. I hope it is understood that I am not postulating nor predicting the existence of Giants. I think any such development unlikely in the extreme;instead, I think it nearly certain that new discoveries and ways of thinking will appear in the next few centuries to outmode all such questions. I cannot conceive that we will ever seriously worry about eternal life as contrasted with life "merely" extended for thousands or tens of thousands of years. I doubt very much that the present "limiting" laws of physics -- those of relativity and quantum mechanics -- will retain thei supposed fundamental character forever. The purpose of the little exercise above, other than having some fun, is just to put in their places those who take smug and narrow views concerning what can and cannot happen, in the indefinite future. IF IF  Serial Judgment Fled  A illustrated by f  jBBpPPilr IN. y  swung in orbi#,  y' ' oufsce Jupiter, Barth had to ' launch its tiny ships to meet it!  n the Spring of # an object nals nor replies in any detectable which later proves to be an alien fashion to the signals being directed spaceship enters the solar system and toward it, takes up a near-circular orbit some The decision is taken to divert and Every radio and optical telescope manned observation satellite then on which can be brought to bear is diits way to the Jovian system, in an rected at the Ship, but it neither sigattempt to gather information on th# intruder. As a result there is relayed back to Earth a series of low-definition pictures of a vessel shaped like a blunt torpedo with a pattern of bulges around its mid-section. The Ship is half a mile long. Silently and, some think, implacably the Ship orbits like some vast battleship cruising off the coast of a tiny, backward island. Inevitably there are natives who want an even closer look, and two small, sophisticated dugout canoes are modified and readied for launching. Choosing men for the Prometheus Project is no easy task. If the human race is to derive the maximum benefit from this first contact with a highly advanced alien culture -- always assuming, of course, that the extraterrestrial crew is friendly -- the six men must represent the widest possible spread of the social and physical sciences. The men must also be capable of surviving the longest and most hazardous voyage in human history and of asking the right questions at the end of it. And so, despite the hundreds of eminent and respected scientists who volunteer for the trip, the final decision lies with the space medics who insist on sending six men unknown in the higher scientific circles and respected only by their friends -- four experienced astronauts and two who are still under training. These six will, it is thought, stand a fairly good chance of bringing home the bacon. It is perhaps significant that none of the six chosen to crew the Pships are married. lieutenant colonel who has been unexperiments. On Earth the project During the first few days of the about the psychological effects of living continually within inches of his two companions for a year or more, not to mention the loneliness and boredom of such an extended trip in space. But he soon discovers that the series of lectures -- they are subjected to three or four per day, followed by searching oral examinations -- designed to prepare them for the widest possible contact with the aliens leaves them no time to feel lonely bad spots until he is able to adjust to P-ship conditions. On P-One the atmosphere is not quite so happy, however. At the relough undertakes an extended mile trip to the other ship in order is suffering from a very painful and unsightly skin condition, McCullough becomes disoriented during the trip across and is almost lost. When he discovers that somatic and self-inflicted, due in part IF all three of them but manages to conceal it. By the generous application of lanolin cream and some very rule-of-thumb psychology he is able to straighten out the situation on POne, but he is very glad to return to the relaxed and relatively happy atmosphere of his own ship. During their final approach to the alien vessel a few weeks later everything they do and see is relayed to Prometheus Control, who in turn relays it to the radio networks of the whole world. Practically every adult member of the human race is listening for the results of this first contact, and excitement is intense. Gentions from Earth, but because of the radio time-lag and the various political pressures being brought to bear on him regarding contact procedure, his instructions are confused and selfcontradictory. The men in the P-ships, however, have no need to be reminded of the importance of what they are about do or of the necessity for caution. They have already discussed contact procedure among themselves in great detail. Their approach to the Ship is slow and open; they advertise their presence by radio signals and flares, and they continue in this fashion for won't or can't reply to their signals, Entrance is effected through a personnel lock set into what appears to be a large cargo hatch -- after first opening and closing the seal scores of times to acquaint the alien crew of their presence. During their subsequent investigation of the lock and Control and even to forget the on their every word. For the lock chamber's lighting, manual controls and fittings gives valuable data on the visual range, manipulatory appendages and technical capability of the aliens and their planet of origin. In the hope of gathering samples of the aliens' atmosphere they seto close the lock's outer seal and obtain air samples from the adjoining empty corridor. The alien crew -- the two men have begun to doubt whether the Ship has a crew! -- continues to ignore them. Closing the outer seal causes them to lose radio is about to investigate the corridor when a dimly seen, alien something makes a vicious attack on him of the lock chamber, but discovers that the Ship atmosphere is at a higher pressure than their suit air pressure, and it is forcing its way inside, IX #T feel an awful fool," said McA CuUough, looking apologetically at Walters. "I should have realized it in the Ship. At very least I should have suspected it when I examined him here." 'Granted that changing suits in the corridor would have been easier on Walterfs throat and eyes, I doubt if you would have been allowed to complete the operation when the aliens arrived. So you have nothing to reproach yourself with, and those photographs you took... Well, altogether it was a very nice job "And Vm not complaining," said Walteis. For the analysis of the air sample taken in the corridor had shown that the alien atmosphere was not harmful to human beings and was, in fact, much less toxic than the air of an average city. But the sample taken in the lock chamber contained a quantity of vaporized liquid which could only have come from the leak in the hydraulic system. Apparently the stuff Walters had breathed was about as damaging as a similar quantity of tear gas. But McCullough had conducted his examination of the hapless pilot as if he had been engaged on a slightly premature post-mortem. 'Now we must decide what to do next. Vd like the doctor and Major Walters to put forward any suggestions they may have. After all, you two have more Ship experience than anyone else. How do you see the situation now? "I can't see anything," Walters said hoarsely. "My throat is too sore." There was an irritated, overamplified sigh from the speaker grill. McCullough nodded quickly to Walters, then began to speak. S o far as he was concerned the trip inside the alien vessel had not answered any of the major questions regarding its ori and purpose. It remained a hulking brute of a ship nearly half a mile long, orbiting the Sun at a distance of one hundred a powered-down condition, and refusing to acknowledge all signals. The precision with which it had been inserted into orbit, together with the reactions of what must have been a damage control party of its crew, seemed to rule out the earlier theory that the Ship was in a derelict or distressed condition. Present indications were that it was deliberately refusing contact because it was here merely to conduct a survey of some description. Perhaps they did not want contact with an inferior race or had orders forbidding such contact. McCullough was very careful to use the word "survey" rather than "reconnaissance," but he was afraid the people at home would jump to conclusions no matter which word he used. So far as the physical structure of the Ship was concerned, photographic and other observations made it clear that it had not been designed to withstand massive accelerations or even a take-off from an average planet. However, if the netting they had observed covered all the corridors in the ship, it was unlikely that they had gravity control either inside the ship or as a means of propulsion. Since there were no rocket venturis or any other visible signs of conventional reaction propulsion capable of moving such a massive vessel, it IF seemed obvious that whatever method of propulsion was being used the ship remained in the weightless condition whether it was under power or not. Where the crew of the alien ship was concerned they had a little more to go on. "In addition to the physiological details in the photographs," McCullough went on, "which will tell us a lot when we have a chance to study them properly, we know that the crew is composed of three distinct species. The alien with the white fur or clothing seemed to be in a position of authority or influence over the others. Even though their curiosity regarding us must have been intense, the others left the area as soon as type Three appeared." McCullough went on. "The second type, which we encountered first when Walters was attacked, is much more aggressive or impulsive than Type Three. As I see it, the Three is their equivalent of an officer while the Twos are a damage control party of crew members who were angered by the damage to their lock's hydraulic system and expressed their anger by taking a swipe at Walters. But if we assume that their orders were to ignore us and let the repairs wait until after we had gone away, and the Type Three arrived on the scene to remind the others of their orders in no uncertain terms and chase them off... "They followed the Three," Walters put in. "It didn't chase them." "I don't think that matters," said McCullough, then continued: "Taking a swipe at one of us is, in the circumstances, an understandable reaction. It is not a friendly reaction, of course, but it does show that we have certain emotional responses in common which could form a basis for a wider understanding in time -- if we are allowed to maintain contact with them. "I, personally, do not think we will be. "For there can be no doubt that they know we are here," McCullough ended seriously. "Perhaps they have known about us from the moment we left Earth. But we are not welcome here and we should leave before they take more positive steps to discourage us." F or a long time there was silence, then Berryman said, "Surely we've come too far to just turn and run. We can investigate and photograph those hyperdrive blisters, or whatever they are, without actually entering the Ship. I agree it is good sense to run away. But make it tomorrow or sometime next week." "... agree, said Hollis from P-One. The over-amplification which made the colonel's voice sound authoritive simply magnified the physicist's timidity.  Accurate photographs of those generators -- which must be connected with their propulsion system -- might not give us everything we want to know, but they would at least keep our people from following too many useless avenues of research. At the same time I agree with the doctor. We should not go into the ship again if we arent welcome. There came a sound of Morrison's throat being cleared, and Hollis broke off. Obviously the colonel was long as he said the right things. Talking about leaving was not one of the right things, so it was equally obvious that the colonel also wanted to stay. Walters found his voice suddenly and said, "We made a mistake by damaging their lock mechanism, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will chase us away like small boys caught robbing an orchard! That would be too... too petty an act for a race capable of interstellar flight." "I'd like to think so, too," McCullough said sharply. "But I keep remembering the petty things we did in the sailing ship and stagecoach era and how many of us are still doing them." "But we're unarmedl" Berryman broke in. "Our ships are downright primitive by their standards. And in a sense we belong to the same club. Space travel is not as dangerous for them as for us, of course, but..." "But you feel," McCullough finished for him, with a sarcastic edge to his voice, "that the alien captain should pipe the plucky primitives aboard with full honors. Don't you think it possible that this sort of thing may have happened many times to this particular ship? Maybe they are a little tired of primitives busting a gut to get out to look over their ships. So much so, perhaps, that they w on't even toss a metaphorical coin into the water to see us do tricks for them because of the danger of us fouling their metaphorical propellers." "Walters's idea of the alien might be too noble," Berryman protested, "but yours is too base and cynical. This isn't like you. Doctor." "No, indeed," said Walters, stifling a cough. "And aren't we forgetting that practically all of this is sheer guesswork? They might not be noble or base. They might not even be all that far advanced technically, judging by their ship's construction. And I don't think we should run away until we at least know what we are running away from. "As for the doctor," he ended bitingly, "I think the blood circulation to his feet is beginning to fail. They are growing quite cold." " asked for your views on the present situation not about each other. Calm down, gentlemen. We are not going to leave, not immedi ately and not even next week. It seems Control has been keeping us in the dark -- for our peace of mind, they say -- about certain new developments which make it necessary for us to stay put. The period mentioned was a minimum of three weeks, You see, our people were a little late in cutting the transmission to the networks when things became exciting at the ship, and the political sideeffects have yet to be evaluated. At the present time I am receiving new, modified, amended or downright contradictory orders on an average of three times a day. The incident on the Ship had gone out in its entirety, via translators or commentators where non-English speaking nations were concerned, to practically everyone on Earth. Prometheus had wanted to cut transmisIF sion, but a quite incredible amount of pressure had been brought to bear on them to continue relaying the signals from the Alien -- it was ready being capitalized and used in ";he same sentences with words like Invader and Enemy -- and so far as the colonel knew they would still receive everything he sent. He had used his discretion, however, regarding the signals recently received from P-Two. Already there was talk of trebling armada, knitting warm sweaters -- public reaction was fluid and still somewhat confused, but the general feeling was that something positive should be done. It was being suggested that the US and Russia pool their space capability against the common enemy. The Russians would already be out here with us if they hadn't jumped the gun by launching that rather ambitious manned Venus Orbiting Station just before the Ship appeared. Their present capability may be stretched to the limit keeping it supplied. However, if our stay out here becomes extended, Biakonur have offered Prometheus the use of two of their high-acceleration supply vehicles, with no strings attached other than that they must not, be used to carry weapons. 'You will appreciate the poltical implications which have grown out of our handling of this situation -- cur bungled handling of the first contact, some say. The UN is being quite critical. But now we must try to devise tactics to cover this situation. You are all free to interrupt and offer suggestions at any time." T he first interruption came within seconds, from Berryman, who suggested very strongly that it would be a criminal waste of opportunity to run away without trying to find out a little more about alien science and, if possible, culture, adding that any tactics used against the aliens must be purely defensive. Hollis, Walters and McCullough interrupted to agree with this, and Drew said that considering the relative sizes of the vessels concerned they had no choice. Irritated, Morrison replied that he had no intention of declaring war on anybody, and would they all please make their suggestions more constructive and less general in nature. Finally it was decided that P-One and P-Two would be joined together nose-to-nose. There was provision for doing this in design, and the result would be that Walters would have access to both command modules without having to don a spacesuit. There would also be a saving in power by having one life-support system serve two ships, since it might come about that the other men would be absent on the alien Ship for extended periods of time. The duties of this single watch-keeping officer would be to maintain contact with the men investigating the alien vessel and Prometheus Control and report progress... Drew had a lot to say on the subject of defensive weapons. They had no intention of hurting, much less if they did re-enter the vessel they would have to have a means of protecting themselves and their irreplacable spacesuits from injury. With the aid of the doctor's as yet incomplete physiological data on the known alien life-forms they devised and built a prototype weapon, rather like a skistick, which would fend off aliens and prick them lightly if they became too persistent. They discussed alien motivation and possible methods of communication at great length, and somehow it became an accepted, although not formally agreed, fact that they would go aboard the alien ship again. Many hours later while they were closing with P-One for the docking operation, Walters said hoarsely, "I'm sorry for what I said back there, Doctor. I should not have criticized your feet, not after what you did for me on the Ship. But you put up such a good, sensible case for leaving I thought the colonel might decide there and then to do just that, and this is such a unique opportunity for... for..." "Getting clobbered?" Berryman asked, grinning. He went on, "But I wouldn't apologize, Walters, if I were you. It seems to me that if your mind was capable of reaUy devious thinking, and if you weren't just an amateur psychologist, you would have realized by now that he was indulging in a piece of psychological sleight-of-hand. Probably he had it all worked out with the colonel in advance -- talking good, sound common sense, verbalizing all our own secret fears and survival instincts, then making us argue against them to show how superior we thought we were to him. In short, and to mix a metaphor slightly, propping up our weakening resolve with an obviously broken reed. "Not that he is likely to admit any of this, of course." They were both staring at him. McCullough felt his face burning, but deep inside him there was another and much more pleasant feeling of warmth. It occurred to him suddenly that there were none so blind as those who could see perfectly, but shut their eyes because they happened to be looking at a friend. "It's a thought," said McCullough. To himself he added, A happy afterthought. X A s the only member of the expedition with both a spacesuit and first-hand alien experience, McCullough was placed in charge of the second boarding party. Those were the reasons given by Morrison and, without actually saying so, the others gave McCullough the impression that they considered it a sensible arrangement. Five minutes after leaving the Pships, however, Morrison was no longer even pretending that McCullough was in charge. The entry point chosen was a personnel lock about one hundred yards aft of the first one. McCullough operated the seal mechanism and entered, followed by the colonel, Berryman, Hollis and Drew. This time he did not slam the door or test the hydraulic actuator to destruction. InIF side he demonstrated the working of the light switches. The chamber differed only in detail from the previous one, but this time they were going to examine the fine details. There were no aliens in the lock chamber or in the corridor outside. Morrison had brought a spotlight from P-One. Using the access doors on four sides of the chamber and the large transparent panels set into them he snapped the space between the Ship's double hull while Drew kept watch on the corridor and reported progress to Walters on P-Two. Berryman, Hollis and McCullough scoured the place for identification numbers. realize," said Berryman during the first few minutes of the examination, "that robust construction together with simplicity of design is supposed to reduce the danger of component failure, but this angle bracket is so simple it is downright crude!" But the badly finished support bracket, like all the other small structural members they were examining, possessed the expected symbols of identification. Their idea was simply that any piece of machinery beyond a certain degree of complexity -- from a car or light airplane up to and including spaceships half a mile long -- required an enormous amount of prior design work, planning and tooling long before the first simple parts and sub-assemblies became three-dimensional metal on someone's workbench. The number of general assembly and detail drawings, material specification charts, wiring diagrams and so on for a vessel of this size must have been mind-staggering, and the purpose of all this paperwork was simply to instruct people of average intelligence in the manufacture and fitting together the parts of this gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. If normal human practice was observed, and the aircraft engineers who had lectured them on the trip out insisted that there was no easier way short of waving a magic wand, then these drawings together with the components they described must include exact instructions for the placing of these parts within the jigsaw. It was possible that the aliens had some exotic method of identifying components -- such as impressing each part with a telepathic identity tag or tactile coding systems instead of using visible printed symbols. But considering the size of the project and the tremendous number of parts to be identified they were fairly sure that the aliens would do it the easy way, which was to mark the surface material of the component with symbols which could be read at a glance. The system used on the Ship seemed to be some kind of vibroetch technique. It was nice to know that, in the philosophy of aircraft and spaceship construction at least, the e-ts and humans thought alike. "You notice there are no curved lines in these symbols," said Hollis at one point. "The result of having pincers instead of fingers and an opposable thumb, would you say?" "Not necessarily," said McCullough. "If we had continued to use Roman instead of Arabic numerals "Discuss your findings later, gentlemen," said Morrison impatiently. "We will take a quick look along the corridor. Berryman and I will move aft, Hollis and McCullough forward, and Drew will guard the lock chamber. Go only as far as the first intersection -- that should make it impossible for any of us to be cut off. Make a map showing door positions and anything else of interest. If the doors have transparent panels, sketch in room dimensions and contents. "Be as quick as you can," he ended. "If you meet anything, retreat or defend yourselves without hurting it. All right, Drew, crack the seal." T hey split up as directed, McCullough keeping slightly ahead of Hollis so as not to prod him with his ridiculous weapon. Since the Ship seemed to be designed for free-fall conditions there was no clearly defined floor, ceiling or walls in the corridor. The netting was supported a few inches out from each wall and stretched taut and was interrupted at regular intervals by the entrances to what seemed to be storerooms. Being cautious men, they shone their lights only into the rooms whose doors had transparent panels in them and left the others alone even though they would have opened at a touch -- they were simple, sliding doors rather than pressure seals. Every door bore two sets of identifying symbols placed upside down to each other so as to be easily read whatever the direction of approach. Lifting fixtures and switches were set at intervals along the corridor, but McCullough did not turn them on. The torches of Hollis and himself gave enough light at short range and there was no point in letting the aliens in their control-room know that the humans had moved into the corridor. At the intersection one corridor continued forward while another curved away in each direction, following the lateral curvature of the hull so that they could see only twenty yards or so along it. Just at the limit of vision in each branch there were the mouths of two other corridors paralleling their own. "If we went back along one of them," said Hollis, pointing, "and then took the first outboard turning, we should meet up with the colonel and Berryman." "Do you want to try it?" said McCullough. "No," said Hollis. The physicist busied himself with his sketch pad while McCullough kept watch in four directions. But they were not disturbed by anything until the colonel's voice ordered them back to the lock chamber. Ten minutes later they were outside the Ship again and heading for a lock close to one of the big transparent blisters. Hollis was literally babbling with excitement over the prospect of tinkering with a real live -- Walters on P-Two warned that live -- hyperspatial generator. McCullough said nothing and thought seriously about Colonel Morrison's voice. Morrison had the irritating habit IF of using too much volume during transmission and sounding like a short-tempered hurler of thunderbolts rather th the simple voice of authority. But now the doctor was beginning to wonder if the over-amplification and, perhaps, the judicious use of the tone control to make it sound deeper as well as louder, was the sole reason for Morrison's sternsounding, authoritive tone. Certainly the difference in his natural and radio voice was amazing. McCullough had the uncomfortable feeling that every time the colonel opened his mouth in ordinary face-to-face conversation he nibbled away a little of his own authority. It was becoming obvious that the Colonel Morrison who Berryman, Walters and himself knew as a voice from P-One was not necessarily the same person that Drew and Hollis knew on the colonel's own ship. It was becoming much easier to believe Morrison capable of gossiping like an old woman to Drew while excluding Hollis and allowing the physicist to get into the sorry state McCullough had found him in when he was shot across to the other ship. At the same time McCullough knew that he must guard against a too-sudden reversal of feeling. One unexpected weakness -- especially in an area so susceptible to misinterpretation as a tone of voice -- did not mean that the colonel was automatically weak, ineffectual and unsuited to wield authority and had, therefore, no right to their obedience. McCullough worried about the colonel all the way to their next point of entry. This time they stayed only a few minutes in the lock chamber and did not go into the corridor at all. Access to the space between outer and inner hulls was by a simple, unpressurized sliding door, and the air on the other side of it was at corridor pressure. Masses of cable conduits, plumbing and enigmatic cabinets sprouted among a forest of girders on all sides, except where a narrow ladder of netting stretched forward through a tunnel cleared in the metallic jungle. At the other end of the ladder the colonel's splotlight showed the entrance, if their calculations were correct, to one of the blisters. "Use our own lighting," Morrison said, "and don't wander away from the net. We might accidentally shortcircuit something and kill ourselves." "I don't think so, sir," said Berryman, "The cables all seem to be well insulated." "I agree," said Hollis, "but we should examine the markings on cables entering the blister to help us separate lighting and instrumentation circuits from power lines." "Be careful anyway!" said the colonel sharply. "Drew, guard the lock chamber. The rest of you follow me." Two days ago Berryman might have argued against the colonel like that, McCullough thought, but not HoUis. T he atmosphere remained tense until they entered the blister through an airlock. Inside they found no atmosphere at all. This did not surprise, Hollis, who said that he had expected the generators to operate in a vacuum. A few minutes later they discovered that the vacuum was maintained by having the blister open to space, although the openings in the transparent canopy were too narrow to allow passage to a man or, McCullough suspected, an alien. Sunlight flooded through the transparent plastic, throwing dazzling highlights off the bare metal and pale blue ceramics all around them. The two P-ships were clearly visible in the black sky and the canopy was no barrier to communications. "There are bare power lines in this room," said the colonel stiffly, "so be careful." "Yes, sir," said Hollis quickly. "But I don't think there will be any danger from them -- the generator isn't switched on. At the same time, it will take weeks to study this place properly and I should like to make absolutely sure of our safety while doing so." His idea was to short the power lines where they entered the blister. He was fairly sure that the generator's design incorporated protective fusing and similar fail-safe devices so that the valuable generator itself would not be destroyed. If he was building the thing, that was how Hollis would do it. There was perhaps no need for him to point out that this intricate piece of equipment was not a crudely built structure -- it looked as if it had been put together by watchmakers. It was also possible that the generator would not operate if foreign bodies, themselves, were present in the blister. At the same time Hollis said he would feel much more comfortable investigating the place when he was less likely at any moment to be struck by alien lightning. "You're the physicist," said the colonel. "But it occurs to me that spiking one of their generators will make them feel annoyed. Even more annoyed than slamming an airlock door!" Instead of netting, a light plastic ladder arrangement curved around and through the masses of equipment projecting into the blister, twisting and widening out into an outsize tennis-racket shape where it was obvious that more than one alien was meant to work on it. Hollis did not talk during the investigation except for the single occasion when he told McCullough with great fervor that his camera contained the most valuable pictures ever taken. But McCullough was only half listening to him. He had the feeling that they were all being too enthusiastic, not worrying nearly enough about the people of the Ship and what they would think of all this, and generally tending to forget where they were. Maybe they wanted to forget where they were, of course, and the enthusiasm and lack of proper thought were aids to accomplishing this. But McCullough had the awful feeling that they should all stop and have a good, long think. He wished Morrison would take a firm grip on the situation and make them stop and think! The colonel's last remark had brought back to his mind the name of the old-time author responsible for a story called First Contact, He IF had also written one entitled The Ethical Equations and, during the trip out they had talked over these and a great many other fictional first contacts -- science-fictional data being the only kind available to them -- and the ethical equations had been very thoroughly discussed. They had all gained, McCullough now realized, much comfort from them. In substance the equations stated that if one did a person or alien a good turn an equal reward would ultimately be forthcoming, and that the same would apply if someone did something wrong. Eventually an exact balance of punishment or reward would occur. Assuming then that the crew of the alien Ship did, after their own fashion, subscribe to this ethic, what had the human boarding party done that was inherently, basically wrong? They were guilty of blundering into a situation which they did not understand. They had damaged alien property and they were guilty of trespass. TTieir intentions had not been evil, of course, but that fact would not be apparent to the aliens. However, an intelligent extraterrestrial species capable of crossing interstellar space should possess enough understanding or empathy to credit another intelligent species with the normal amount of scientific curiosity, and the sins of trespass and minor property damage were venial to say the least. B ut in the deeper recesses of his brain, in the levels of mind which operated on hunches and guesswork and insufficient data, McCullough refused to be reassured or even comforted. To the contrary his fear mounted steadily with every hour which passed. And when Walters's voice sounded suddenly in his phones he started so violently that he almost lost his camera. Sirr said the pilot. "Drew reports activity in the corridor outside his position. Five Type Twos along the corridor in the direction of your blister. He had the lock chamber lights switched on and saw them clearly, though they didn't see him." "Everybody out!" said the colonel. "Hurry it up! We'll go back the way we came, avoiding the corridor. I... I don't think we should attempt a formal contact just yet..." "He also says there is something like a Type One in the inter-hull space, clinging to the netting." "We'll ignore it," said Morrison, "and hope it does the same. Hollis, move!" They went through the blister lock and along the net, with Morrison leading, Hollis and McCullough facing each other on opposite sides of the netting and Berryman bringing up the rear. They pulled themselves hand over hand towards Drew and the opened lock chamber while their eyes searched the dark spaces between the cabinets and masses of plumbing on all sides of them. "Doctor!" Morrison's spotlight had picked out a small, bristling alien, something like a Siamese twin porcupine, which was flip-flopping along the net away from them. McCullough still could not see what it used for hands. "Got it," he said, replacing his camera and hurrying on. Drew had taken up a classic defensive position outside the open door, crouching with one leg hooked into the net to steady himself. The shaft of his ski-stick was wedged against the wall plating with the business end pointing back the way they had come. A little self-consciously Morrison took up a similar position on the other side of the opening tmd waved the others through. McCullough entered first, then Hollis. They turned to assist Berryman then and had a hand under each armpit when it happened. His radio went into a howl of oscillation as four voices tried to use it at the same time, and McCullough saw aliens swarming towards them out of the dark spaces between the supposedly solid masses of equipment. Morrison and Drew he could not see at all. The colonel had lost his spotlight, and Berryman was being pulled away from them. One of the aliens had anchored itself to the combing with two of its tentacles while the other two were wrapped around the pilot's feet. Another e-t had swarmed onto his back, its sting jabbing furiously -- McCullough could hear it clanking against Berryman's air tanks. He knew that it had only to shift its position by a few inches for the pilot to be very horribly dead. XI F or several seconds McCullough could do nothing except stare in fascination at the colonel's spotlight as it was sent spinning to and fro by the struggling colliding bodies around the entrance. Lit by that wildly rotating beam the scene took on the flickering, unreal quality of an oldtime silent film. The spotlight was blinding and confusing the men as much as the aliens, because it was some time before McCullough realized that Beiryn had freed one foot and was using it to kick at the tentacle holding the other -- he had been viewing the operation as a series of disconnected stills. Hollis was mouthing at him -- the suit radio still emitted a constant howl of oscillation because too many people were trying to use it at the same time -- and pointing at the wall net. The physicist was on his knees beside the sliding door and had worked his feet and lower legs between the net and the wall. McCullough got the idea and did the same, and together they took a firm, two-handed grip on each of Berryman's arms and pulled hard. Berryman came free of the first alien so suddenly that his visor cracked against the edge of the opening, and the force of the pull sent him shooting past so quickly that they had to grab his feet. The second alien was still clinging to his back, still stabbing at his air tanks. A pair of legs were coming through the opening. McCullough gave one of them a tug to help whoever it was on their way. There were long tears in the fabric covering one leg, and blood was oozing out of one of them. The constant howling made it difficult to think. They pulled Berryman down between them, hooked his legs into the netting, then concentrated their efforts on the alien clinging to his back. Its tentacles were still wrapped tightly around the pilot's chest, and Hollis pushed the butt of a ski-stick between the alien's underbelly and Berryman's back and tried to lever it away. The alien jerked violently -- he must have prodded a sensitive area -- but did not let go. Then McCullough discovered the answer. If they reached under Berryman's chest and gripped the tentacles by their tips they could be peeled back relatively easily. There was a muffled clang. McCullough looked round quickly and saw that everyone was inside. Drew was slotting his weapon into the piping which ran along both sides of the sliding door and through the ring handle so as to form a bar. Possibly the aliens could open it, but not without tearing out a chunk of their hydraulic system. The howling in his earphones was beginning to break into fragments of words and sentences. "... My suit's torn. I'm losing air Get it off me! Get it off... Shut up, all of you, and... Stop it wriggling or it will stab... My leg, dammit, where's the doctor? Off your radio and open your visors... Quiet, and open your helmets...!" McCullough kept quiet as ordered, realizing suddenly that he himself had been contributing as much as everyone else to the uproar. But he did not open his visors because his hands were full of alien tentacles. For the few minutes it took to pull the twisting, heaving body off Berryman's back, McCullough had a really close look at the alien. There was a shallow recess between the roots of its tentacles, set so low as to be almost on the edge of its underbelly, and in it there was the soft, wet gleam of something which could only be an eye. The opening and closing mechanism seemed to be a doublelid arrangement operating vertically rather than horizontally and the eye was quite definitely looking at him. The ends of its tentacles quivered as they tried to pull away, and for some odd reason McCullough was reminded of the big, stupid, friendly dog he had had once and of the time he had tried to teach it to shake hands. But this creature certainly was not friendly -- at least, not as human beings understood the word -- and neither was it stupid. Unless... He was unable to finish the thought because Berryman had wriggled from beneath the alien and the creature was bouncing up and down between them as it tried furiously to curl and then uncurl its tentacles. Berryman snatched a weapon which was floating nearby and slid it under the being. He pushed it away as Hollis and McCullough let go, and the alien went spinning helplessly into the center of the chamber. "But I wanted to put it with its friends in the corridor," said Hollis when he had his visor open. "In here, outnumbered five to one, it might panic and injure itself -- " "Are you sure this air is breathable?" Berryman broke in, speaking through his smashed visor. There was IF a long incised wound across his nose and one cheek. "Doctor," said the colonel. "Have a look at Drew's leg. And my shoulder..."  Hollis! Behind you!" T he alien had made contact with the wall net, steadied itself and then launched itself furiously towards the physicist. Berryman got his skistick up in time and the alien struck it squarely but did not stop. The butt of the weapon was driven back against the wall, but still the being did not stop. The metal collar piece holding the plate which kept the tip of the weapon from penetrating more than half an inch slipped backward along the shaft. The point, with the alien's considerable velocity and inertia thrown against it, drove into its body until stopped by the interior of its carapace. It began to slap the shaft of the weapon with its tentacles, violently at first, then more slowly. Suddenly its tentacles tried to tie themselves in knots and it became completely still. McCullough launched himself towards the alien, knowing that he was in no danger from it now. He gripped one tentacle where it joined the body and gently withdrew the ski-stick. This was much worse than a little property damage or trespass. Much, much worse. For a long time nobody spoke. McCullough looked slowly around at the other four men, trying desperately not to think. The spacesuits of Morrison, Drew and Berryman were torn or otherwise rendered useless. The colonel and Drew were injured, perhaps seriously. And, as an added complication, their wound? might well become infected with alien micro-organisms -- an infection against which their bodies could have no defence. In any case they should be moved out of his place, and quickly. But there were only two useable spacesuits, the physicist's and his own. Hollis's would fit only Hollis. McCullough's might, at a pinch, fit Drew but nobody else. He was afraid to consider all the implications -- they were too terrible. But more than anything he did not want to think about the contorted alien shape he was holding and the frightful things which must surely happen as a result of its death. "Doctor," said the colonel in a voice harsh with pain, "you're supposed to know how to treat human beings. Leave that thing alone, it's dead anyway." He was glad to be able to give his undivided attention to the injured, but somehow the alien cadaver seemed always to be in sight whenever he looked up from a patient, and it became more and more difficult not to think about it. The blood of both species was the same color, a fact which should not have surprised him considering their closely similar atmospheric requirements, and the droplets filled the compartment like dark, frozen rain. The absence of gravity, as well as making it difficult to control bleeding, made it completely impossible to deal quickly with even a simple wound. Even with the patients cooperating by being their arms or feet into the wall netting, and Hollis doing his best to held McCullough in positions while he treated them, it took a long time. Morrison was in bad shape. An alien had tried to fasten itself onto his head and chest, but the colonel had been able to interpose his elbow just in time. His forearm was a little longer than the full extension of the alien's horn, so that while his helmet had been hammered into so much scrap metal and his shoulder and uper arm were a mass of punctured : nd incised wounds, he had escaped with his life. Drew, apparently, had discarded his ski-stick in favor of his feet, and one leg had suffered in consejuence, although the injuries were much lighter than the colonel's. Berryman had a badly lacerated face, caused by running it against the edge of his broken visor. But it was the spacesuits which had suffered worst of all, first from the attacks of the aliens and now at the hands of McCullough. Cutting and extending the tears in the fabric of the suits, pulling back the plastic and metal foil and the tubing of the air-conditioning systems, affected him much more deeply at times than probing and cleaning the wounds. If they were not already fatally infected the wounds would heal -- the human body was selfrepairing to a fantastic degree. But increasing the damage to a suit which was not reparable was to inflict a wound of a much more serious nature. In space the suit was much more than a protective skin. Walters, who was in a position to know, had insisted that it was analogous to both womb and placenta and that losing it prematurely could give rise to a really drastic form of birth trauma. The thought of being without his own suit in this place was enough to drive McCullough to the edge of panic, and he hated to think of how the others would feel when the shock of their injuries wore off and they realized the full extent of what had happened to them. H is thoughts had taken a Freudian and definitely morbid turn by the time he had finished with them. He found himself staring at the dead body of the Two and wondering if any of them would see home again. The colonel spoke suddenly. His voice sounded very weak, and either he was not using his suit radio or the Two's horn had wrecked it. He said, "You will have to report our... our predicament, Doctor. And tell Walters to send the technical material and photographs at the same time. Hollis will have to help you with this -- he is the only one of us capable of understanding what he saw in the blister and passing it on. When all this has been done you will maintain continous radio contact with us until something has been worked out. "We will have to move into the corridor while you are leaving," Morrison ended, launching himself slowly towards the inner seal, "so don't waste time." "It might be better if I stayed," said McCullough awkwardly. "None of you are completely fit, and if they attacked again while you were in the corridor..." IF "I can't risk losing another spacesuit," said the colonel as he checked his slow flight with his feet and good arm. "Drew will organize our defenses. He's very good at that sort of thing." "And the first thing we do," said Drew savagely, "is take the guards off these stickers! Anything that comes at us again will get six or eight inches of metal in its guts instead of a harmless httle jab. Cold steel has a very demoralizing effect on human beings -- that's why bayonet charges have retained their popularity through the ages -- and maybe -- " "No!" McCullough protested. "We've killed one of them already -- by accident, of course -- and we can't even imagine the trouble that them deliberately... I mean, we must all think very carefully about this before we make another move which might be misunderstood." "And  think we've been thinking too much!" Drew said, his voice rising almost to a shout. More quietly he went on, "If a person acts like a wild animal then that is how he should be treated! And I think we should dump that... that carcass. The damn thing gives me the creeps!" "While quietly bleeding to death," said Berryman hastily, in an obvious attempt to restore peace, "I have given serious thought to this problem. It seems to me that there are just three things we can do. The first is to return the body to its friends by leaving it in the corridor -- a course which might very well anger them even more. The same applies if we keep it in here where they may be able to see it through the lock window. Or lastly, we can hide it from them, with little probability of them ever finding it, by having the doctor and Hollis take it away. "I favor the last alternative," Berryman concluded, "because, whUe the aliens may feel fairly certain that it is dead, they cannot be absolutely sure of this -- they may assume, or hope, that their friend is a prisoner. If they do not actually see the dead body there might be enough doubt in their minds to make them proceed more cautiously against us." "My thinking exactly," said the colonel. "Take it to P-Two, Doctor, and find out what makes it tick." "You have to know your enemy," said Drew viciously, "inside and out." "Surely you are not suggesting " began McCullough aghast, then stopped. He was trying hard to tliink as they must be thinking. He had not had his arm and shoulder gored by an alien's horn or had his leg torn by alien claws. He was not aware, not as personally and subjectively aware as they were, that his spacesuit was useless, with everything which that fact implied. McCullough's skin, and his even more precious spacesuit, was still in one piece. He had been exposed to, but had not suffered, violence. But violence was a chain reaction with a positive K-factor. Once ben it quickly became self-sustaining. From the outset it had been the aliens who had acted violently, or reacted violently, towards the humans. Now the situation had deteriorated to the point where it was becoming uncontrollable because both sides were using violence. If the aliens reacted violently to the venial sin of trespass, how might they react to one of their people being murdered and dissected? I n the general confusion of the past few hours McCullough had forgotten one very important fact, and that was the effect of explosive decompression on an unprotected human or unhuman body. As soon as it was exposed to space the soft, almost flat underside of the e-t swelled like a great, lumpy football and burst wetly. Nothing he could have done in the way of a post mortam could have made the alien look worse than it did just then, and by the time he reached P-Two with it he was looking forward to investigating this completely strange life-form. But there were more urgent matters to be attended to first. It was not until they had processed the fihn, and the pictures taken in the blister were on their way pulse by pulse to Earth, that they were able to fully satisfy Walters's curiosity about the fight in the ship. And then it was only by having him listen while McCullough made his repcit to Prometheus Control. The physicist, meanwhile, had returned to the Ship with a supply of food and water for Morrison and the others. Before leaving, Hollis reminded them that the water he was taking would be permanently lost to them. for without the P-Ship's reclamation system there was no chance of them being able to use it again. He apologized for mentioning this fact but thought that somebody should bear it in mind in case they were contemplating a lengthy stay. McCullough agreed and added yet another unpleasant datum to his report. "... That is the situation in detail," McCullough said a few minutes later. "Our most urgent need is for spacesuits to evacuate the injured men, or if they cannot be evacuated, food and water to extend our staying time on the Ship until evacuation is possible. There is also the possibility that their wounds may become infected with alien bacteria, against which their bodies may have no defense, and they will die. However, it seems to me that the chances are about even of the alien pathogens running rampant throughout their of hours or alternately, of them having no effect whatsoever because the human body is too strange and alien an environment for the e-t pathogens to survive in it. There is also the possibility that our antibiotics will be as effective against e-t infections as they are against -- " Brady here a voice from Control broke in. It was a gruff, impatient yet concerned voice belonging to the person on whose shoulders the responsibility for the Prometheus Project and the combined weight of eight stars did not rest lightly. It went on, You are in a mess. Doctor, I agree. Have you considered moving one of the P-ships into the lock, taking the IF men on board in shirt-sleeve conditionSy leaving one man with a suit to operate the lock mechanism?' "Tlie lock is too small to take a complete P-ship without wrecking it!" McCullough broke in. "Berryman had that idea, too. But I've already told about it at the beginning of my report." . , If this idea isn't workable," the general was continuing, your only hope is to elicit the aid of the alien ship's crew in getting them out. Are you sure they are as aggressive as you say?" "But I've already told you... I" began McCullough, then stopped. It occurred to him that the distant general was reacting only to the first few sentences of the report and, as McCullough remembered them, they had not been particularly coherent. Stop talking, McCullough, while I'm trying to... I" said the general irritably, then in an aside to someone, 'Yes, yes. I'd forgotten the time lag. Now let's see ,, , McCullough!" "Yes, sir," said McCullough, out of sheer force of habit. Holding conversation with a half-hour delay between each line of dialogue took some getting used to. Walters, who was tuned to Berryman's suit frequency, said quietly, "The aliens have gone. Both corridor and inter-hull space are empty. Berryman says their wounds are painful but so far are not unduly inflamed." Since the material in your report is urgent and may require a quick decision at any time," the general went on briskly, " propose listening with one ear to your report as it comes in while at the same time filling you in on the rather delicate political situation which is developing here. Colonel Morrison is aware of the position as of last night, fifteen hours ago, to you, but it has changed since then. It changes every time you open your mouth. Doctor, and I wish you would remember that and speak accordingly, 'Briefly, the position is this ,... E very transmission made from the area of the alien Ship had been relayed in its entirety by all the major networks. The same applied to the pictures taken during the approach and examination of the first airlock and the shots McCullough had taken of the aliens. The reason for such widespread coverage was simple. Public support and Interest in spaceflight was on the wane because of the tremendously expensive hardvare needed -- especially when pushing out beyond the orbit of Mars -- and a blow-by-blow illustrated account of the first meeting between humanity and an extra-terrestrial culture should revive it if any thing could. But now that the meeting had degenerated into violence, had become literally a blow-by-blow affair, the idea had backfired. People were no longer just interested, they were choosing sides and becoming fanatical. At first Prometheus had tried to wrap a security blanket around the whole incident, but they realized the uselessness of this when they were reminded that the P-ships' signals could be received by relatively unsophisticated equipment; and the stills, although a little more difficult, required only a moderately sized radio telescope coupled to the resources of any large newspaper office. That was why McCullough was being urged to choose his words carefully when reporting to Control. If at all possible he was advised to play down the seriousness of any given event or development -- the people at Control would realize the true gravity of the situation and act accordingly, he was assured -- and at all costs avoid displays of fear or anger. It would be an even better practice if McCullough could rehearse his report briefly before transmitting it so as to remove all emotionally loaded words and phrases. "But sir -- I" began McCullough, then stopped. A picture of Brady sitting in Control drifted in front of his mind's eye to be replaced by one of Berryman, Morrison and Drew, frightened and injured and hiding miles from home, and the thought came to him that Brady must be stupid or he, McCullough, was supposed to be that way. He did not see liow their situation could be described in anything but emotionally loaded language without making it sound farcical. If someone was to die, or if the three men in the Ship were to succumb to an alien infection, how was he supposed to report that? As a spot of trouble, perhaps? Or a Bad Show? If the general was really serious in what he had said McCullough might not be allowed to report a death at aU!... One good point is that the eavesdropping is strictly one-way. They can hear every word you say but they can't pick up our messages to you. However, I cannot at the moment give you detailed instructions regarding your present situation. Since you are on the spot you must use your own judgment. Just be careful not to... " While the general was talking McCullough became aware of another voice in the background -- a tiny, harsh, nervous-sounding voice which fought against a constant rattle of interference. He realized suddenly that the voice was his own, speaking the words he had spoken thirty minutes earlier. He could even hear Brady interrupting him again, so that for a few seconds there was one McCullough and two General Bradys talking. It struck him as being wildly funny and he began to laugh. Walters looked worriedly at him but remained silent. Not so the general. "... With the whole world listening to every word you say, you must realize that political capital can be made out of the lightest, unconsidered word. So don't even say 'Good morning' without thinking about it first... " T he general went on to say that as the next officer in line of seniority to Colonel Morrison, Lieutenant-Colonel McCullough should be prepared at any time to take full control of the expedition. Should casualties occur, should McCullough be forced to assume command, he must be very careful in the matter of wording his reports. The general IF was not suggesting that he conceal the fact that casualties had occurred. He must use his own discretion in this, or perhaps a simple verbal code could be worked out which would allow the co mmuni cation of sensitive material. The next-of-kin had the right to know, naturally -- but McCullough had no idea how each simple incident at the Ship was being blown up out of all proportion by the news media... While I doni approve of the emotional frenzy they are whipping up over this, one good point about it is that the supplies you need will be forthcoming. I dont mean to suggest that we would not have sent them anyway even if you did not have the support and sympathy of consider how much it will cost to send you just one extra spacesuit, or the price of even a few sips of water...' "If you're really worried," said McCullough sarcastically, "we might be able to steal water from the Ship! This would mean us forcing ourselves to overcome a certain... repugnance, shall we say. But have you forgotten that we have an aversion to using even a fellow astronaut's reclaimed water, and for that reason the psychologists insist that our waste fluids are individually recycled -- " McCullough broke off. He was supposed to be careful of everything he said and this was, after all, one of the less-publicized aspects of spacetravel... His sarcasm would take just over sixteen minutes to reach General Brady and the same time for the other's reaction to bounce back again. But it seemed suddenly as if the project's Chief was telepathic and that thought travelled much faster than light because Brady went on apologetically, We are not counting the pennies on this however, or even the son for concern over this aspect of the situation. Just take it easy, do your best and, before you open your mouth, remember all those listening wrong conclusions. And now we will consider the matter of urgent supplies. These will reach you via a modified high-acceleration probe in fortyone days -- a five-day countdown, which has already started, and thirtysix days for the trip. We will discuss rendezvous procedure later. Right now  must tell you that the payload is an integral part of the vehicle and ask that you give urgent thought to its composition. Should priority be given to food, water, replacement spacesuits or weapons, and in what proportion? No doubt you will want to talk about this with the men on the Ship, of you?' T he general was followed by a McDonnell man who talked endlessly about the weight and size limitations of their supply vehicle and the rendezvous problems. McCullough left Walters to listen to him while he relayed a shortened version of Brady's instructions to the men in the Ship. He spoke to Drew because everyone else was asleep. Drew did not want to wake the colonel and McCullough agreed that the matter could wait for a few hours. But the mention of sleep made him pause for a moment to calculate how long it had been since he had any, and the immediate result of his calculations was a jaw-wrenching yawn. He told Drew that Walters, Hollis and he now would stand radio watch in turn while the others caught up on their sleep and asked to be called if there was the slightest change in the condition of their wounds, or any other emergency. Hollis returned while he was talking. As if his arrival was the cue a dry, pedantic voice replaced that of the McDonnell man. From the physicist's expression McCullough knew that questions of a highly specialized and technical nature were about to be directed at Hollis. He wanted to avoid another delayed-action dialogue starting up while they were all so tired, so he broke in to say that they all needed rest and would resume contact, unless there was a sudden emergency, in twelve hours. To Walters and Hollis he suggested -- McCullough did not fe comfortable about giving orders, spite his technically superior rank -- that they get some rest while he stood first watch. The physicist nodded and began struggling out of his suit prior to strapping in. Walters, who was already strapped into his couch, linked fingers behind his neck and elaborately closed his eyes. Shortly afterward the pilot was asleej) and Hollis had his eyes closed, pretending. He was scratching surreptitiously at the side of his neck turned away from McCullough. Despite himself the doctor felt his own eyes closing. Obviously he was going to need something more strenuous than worrying about the physicist's mental health to keep him awake, and his first thought was the investigation of the alien cadaver. But he could not work here -- it would be stretching even Walters's sense of humor to the breaking point if the pilot was to wake up to find the module filled with drifting alien entrails -- and the lock where he had left the specimen was too cramped. The best thing would be for him to move to P-Two's command module, which he would have all to himself, and use the other ship's radio to listen for trouble developing at the bridgehead. After listening to Brady and Drew, he thought irritably, even Vtn beginning to think like a general! But as his examination of the e-t proceeded McCullough's tiredness was forgotten. He had begun by assuming that the alien's vital organs, including its brain, would be housed high under the protective carapace, and his assumption proved correct. He was able to identify and isolate the lungs, the odd-looking muscular pump which was the heart and the mechanism of ingestion, digestion and excretion. At easy major steps in the examination he took photographs. There were puzzles at first, but one by one they were solved as he charted the digestive, respiratory and, so far as he was able with the instruments available to him, the nervous system. Tracing the connections to the eyes, ears and to the vicious IF XllI weapon projecting from its underside was relatively easy -- the thing was simply a curved horn with a small degree of mobility and not, as he had at first thought, a sting. But there were a few puzzles which refused to be solved. The being's reproductive system was a completely closed book to him. He still had no idea what sort of environment could cause a creature shaped as this one was to evolve, and there were points which bothered him about angles of vision and the degree of control the being exercised over all four tentacles. There was no evidence of specialization in any of the appendages. He wondered if ambidextrous was the right word to use for a being with four hands, but he was too weary to solve that puzzle as well. He began to tidy away the grisly pieces of alien which floated about the command module, thinking that he would have to waken Walters so that he, McCullough, would have a chance to sleep on his many problems. But when he did go to sleep, there were no solutions waiting to rise out of his subconscious. Instead he dreamed only of Berryman, Morrison and Drew and of the nightmarish fates which could befall them, culminating in one which involved a fungus growing out of their wounds and spreading over their whole bodies until they became great, livid, mobile sponges which mewed and gobbled appealingly t him while they chased him along the bright, net-covered corridors of the alien ship. That one woke him up screaming. S ix days went by, and none of the men on the Ship died or even became infected. Perhaps their bodies were too alien an environment for extra-terrestrial micro-organisms to survive in them, or it may have been that Earthly medication and antibiotics were a match for most germs regardless of origin. McCullough's pleasure and relief over this was intense, but the feeling was banished shortly afterward by his row with the general. McCullough had evolved a number of theories about the alien Type Two, but he wanted to have his conclusions regarding some of the more puzzling aspects of its physiology vetted by someone more eminent in the field. He prepared, and had Walters transmit, a group of eight photographs taken during the alien's postmortem before commencing his verbal report, and in the thousand-odd seconds it took for the signal to reach Earth and for the general's first reaction to come back, he said quite a lot. Too much, obviously. SilenceI Stop talking at oncer Brady's voice roared at him sudBut so far as the general was concerned there was nothing that could stop McCullough's voice arriving for at least another half an hour, and Brady quickly realized this. He was still angry but his tone became almost resigned as he went on, You are supposed to be very careful of every word you say, McCullough, If you do or say anything wrong, it reflects on all of us. Not just on you people out there or on the project personnel, our whole country and its ideology suffers as a consequence! Dont you realize that what youve just done will cause a storm of criticism and censure from inside as well as outside the country, that a large section of the worlds population is going to feel angry and ashamed of what you have done out there? Every time you open your mouth, McCullough, you lose friends and we lose support! Think, dammit, before you talk! There are some who will be pleased with what you are doing,' the general went on bitterly. The biologists who are too interested in finding out what makes an alien tick to think of ethical and political sideeffects. And there are the various groups advocating that a stronger line should be taken against these unfriendly aliens. But even you must be aware of how much trouble is caused by people who object to dissection practiced on domestic animals start cutting up a member of an intelligent extra-terrestrial species! And so it went on. McCullough remained silent with a considerable effort. A lot had happened during the six days since the fight with the aliens. From Earth the first high-acceleration supply vehicle had been launched, preceded, accompanied and followed by thousands of words of cautious advice. In P-Two McCullough had completed his examination of the alien and had passed his thoughts about it to the three men marooned on the Ship. His chief reason for doing this had been to give them something else to think about other than their wounds -- wounds from which they had not really expected to recover. But now that recovery was simply a matter of time, it was a little embarrassing for McCullough that his theory had been accepted in toto by everyone but himself. The reason for that, of course, was that it made them feel less guilty over some of the things they h done. But it was, after all, only a theory, and the facts on which it was based could be interpreted several ways. McCullough had transmitted a group of pictures and a number of verbal facts before the general had started having hysterics. He had not even mentioned his theory. Apparently Brady did not want to hear it. Brady did not want to hear anything! "Doctor," said Walters in a whisper. "You've been tapping that mike with your finger for the past ten minutes. When the general gets around to hearing it he will think something terrible is happening." "Something is," said McCullough, "I'm losing my patience." He paused, then choosing his words with great care, went on. "Since I am forbidden to discuss my findings on the Type Two alien's physiology, or draw conclusions from them or even ask questions regarding them from people who are more knowledgeable than myself, there is nothing more to say except this. The photographs and verbal report transmitted so far represent facts, and both my theory and the questions IF arising from it are implicit in these facts if you bring them to the attention of the right people. Message ends." The general was still complaining bitterly. McCullough tuned him down to a whisper and knocked off the transmit switch. He picked up the Ijength of modified tubing Walters and he had been working on, then told the pilot that he was going to the Ship and that he would send Hollis back as soon as he arrived there. If the general or any lesser light from Control wanted to hear from them, they should talk about hyperdrive generators and nothing else. H e entered the lock chamber a few minutes later and Hollis left it, closing the outer seal behind him. Immediately there was a rush of air entering from the corridor which was quickly followed by the three marooned men. Even though there were no aliens outside the chamber, the men's movements were fast, precise and economical -- a complex, well practiced drill. Outwardly at least they were adapting to conditions inside the Ship. Before McCullough could speak Drew dived towards him, checked himself expertly against a lashing point and said, "Is that the new weapon?" McCullough nodded and with obvious reluctance handed it over. "I know how you feel. Doctor," said Drew. "You are worried about this new form of frightfulness you are about to unloose on our little world. But this isn't a mass destruction weapon. We will be discriminating in its use and only kill aliens who are trying to kill us -- " "But they are aliens!" said McCullough angrily. "My theory could be completely wrong." "I think not," said Colonel Morrison, joining them. "In any case we are badly in need of a Two-stopper, and it looks as if you've given us one." When a Two was stabbed with one of the existing spears it was still possible for it to inflict considerable damage before it died, so the weapon had been shortened slightly so as to make it handle like a sword. At the business end the tubing had been cut diagonally in the manner of a hypodermic needle and the tip flattened and given a razor edge on both sides. A few inches back from the tip the blade curved through an angle of about thirty degrees so that it looked a little like a bull-fighter's sword. The effect would be to inflict a deep punctured wound, after which the damage could be multiplied and compounded by giving the weapon a quick, semi-circular twist before tugging it free. The thought of the frightful internal devastation a properly delivered thrust and twist would inflict on the victim's body made McCullough feel physically as well as mentally uncomfortable. He was still not sure how he had become a part of this thing. Hippocrates and Aesculapius, he thought, would not have approved of his behavior in this matter. His only real excuse for producing the weapon was an unsatisfactory one even to himself, the fact that the Two's horn was also a cruel and deadly instrument of destruction. There was also the fact that the damage it would inflict on vital organs, the massive hemorrhaging it would cause, would paralyze the alien with shock and cause death within a few seconds, so that in a way it was almost humane. The colonel's voice broke in on his thoughts, giving him a welcome change of mental subject. Morrison said. "What I really want to know is how much freedom of action I am allowed. Can we use your own initiative regarding the local situation and the problems rising out of it, or must all our thinking be done from the Cape?" "Our thinking is being done," said McCullough with a deliberate lack of inflection in his voice, "by the Russians, the Buddhists, the United Nations and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." They were all watching him very intently. Morrison's shoulder and arm were still giving him pain, McCullough knew, and the other two were by no means comfortable. They had all lost a good deal of blood and been under constant strain with inadequate sleep since being marooned on the Ship. The bright blue lighting made it impossible to conceal subtle changes of expression or variations of facial pallor. They were all staring at him so intently that the thought uppermost in his mind must have been plain for ?!I of them to see. I want to go home! "Go on, Doctor," said Morrison harshly. #T #ery well, sir," said McV Cullough. "Our problem, or rather your problem, is this. We are being told what to do by people who do not know all the facts and who don't want to be told them because of the effect the telling might have on public opinion. Their instructions to us, if you could call them instructions, are so general in nature and so hedged around with qualifiers and warnings that they don't really seem to mean anything. We need help. Not only are we not getting it, we are being ordered not to ask for it! "I, personally, would like corroboration of my findings in the Two autospy," McCullough went on, anger gradually replacing the fear in his voice. "Moral support, if you like, for a theory and a decision I am too much a coward to take alone. Instead of giving me the necessary support, Brady nearly had a fit and would not let me finish explaining the situation! I don't know what has happened to them back there. They act as if they are having an emergency instead of us!" "In a sense, they are -- " began Morrison. "I think you're being too unselfish, sir," said McCullough bitingly. "It is my considered professional opinion, for which I do not need moral support, that the mental and physical stresses involved in coping with the local situation are severe enough without also making us responsible for possible changes in the political situation at home. "The whole idea is ridiculous! We are in the limelight as no other group of men has ever been, we know IF this. In a ense we may be standing trial for our whole race. But our work here will be more valuable, or reactions more honest if you like, if we don't allow ourselves to be paralyzed with stage fright! "I would like permission, sir," McCullough ended less vehemently, "to request information and assistance from Control without having to consider mass audience reactions." "You have a point. Doctor," said Morrison, after a short pause. "At the same time, we can't afford to ignore public opinion completely." "But that's the way Brady talks!" "I'll think about it, Doctor," said Morrison sharply. "Right now we must discuss the food and water situation, weapons, tactics and... and a change of base. While we are here we may as well find out as much as possible about the Ship. And while we're talking, Doctor, I'd like you to look at my dressings." McCullough wondered if the colonel was looking for sympathy, then immediately felt ashamed for thinking such a thing. Morrison's injury was painful and inflamed, although not infected, and it was only one of his many problems. For his physical impairment had seriously undermined his authority. With one arm virtually useless he was dependent on his inferior officers not only for protection but for the kind of assistance which was more common in a nurse-pqtient relationship. And cut off as he was from direct contact with Control, he could no longer speak with all the authority of Earth behind his words. As well, the project had come thoroughly unstuck. At the present the colonel must be feeling frightened and impotent and pretty much a total loss to himself and everyone else, and as a doctor McCullough should not be aggravating these feelings. It was a time for applying oil to the siutation, or perhaps butter. Not broken glass. AyTcCuUough stayed on the Ship "bridgehead" was moved twice, on both occasions to compartments close to the generator blister so as to facilitate the work of Hollis. Despite the Twos which attacked them at frequent but irregular intervals, and at times kept them pinned down in their base for hours on end, the work of gathering information about the Ship went on. When friction developed, which was frequently, he applied oil. McCullough was sure that his bedside manner had never had such a strenuous workout in all its long life. But his charm did not work very well on the colonel. Despite the arguments on the necessity of gathering further data to either support or disprove his theory, Morrison would not allow him to attempt communication with the Twos. Twos, the colonel had said... Some time later McCullough was showing geometrical drawings to one of the white, furry Threes while Drew kept reluctant watch. Before he could get anywhere with the alien flying carpet they were attacked suddenly by a pair of Twos. Drew killed one of them, and McCullough would certainly have died or been very seriously injured if his furry alien had not attacked the other Two. He was even more fortunate to escape with a whole spacesuit. If anything, the incident had increased his uncertainty about the Twos. Were they highly intelligent beings caught in the grip of a xenophobia so intense that they attacked all strangers blindly, without thought? Were they less intelligent types, some kind of slave class, perhaps, who were capable of only a limited degree of mentation and whose reactions were little above those of an animal? Or was his theory, wild and largely unsupported as it was, correct? Was the extraterrestrial life-form, Type Two, sentient, nor not? D uring his next report to the general, McCullough's voice was as neutral and unemotional as any human voice could be... to begin with, anyway. "In the light of additional data gathered within the past few days," he said carefully, "we may have to considerably modify our thinking regarding the purpose of the alien ship and its crew. "Firstly, the Ship -- " The alien vessel had made a controlled approach and had been inserted into an orbit which showed every indication of being pre-calculated, McCullough went on, after which it had taken no action of any kind. This, however, did not preclude the possibility that it was gathering data, since the forward section contained a number of transparent protective blisters which might very well house sensory equipment of some kind. In fact, the primary -- perhaps the only -- purpose of the Ship was the gathering of such data. Where the Ship's construction was concerned, and here McCullough had to admit that they had investigated only a very small fraction of the vessel's enormous volume, they had come to certain fairly definite conclusions. The way they now saw it, the Ship's construction was based on a design philosophy in which weight was of little or no importance. Apparently its source of power was so efficient that there was no necessity to save an ounce or a pound here and there by putting lightening holes in structural members or designing down an angle bracket so that it would take only the amount of stress necessary to its function plus a fractional safety overlap. All the indications pointed to the fact that the Ship had been built in space, probably in an extra-Solar asteroid belt or close to a small moon where metal and the means of working it were at hand. The more sophisticated power, control and lifesupport systems had almost certainly been built on the home planet and transported piecemeal to the hull. What little they had seen of the layout of corridors, wall-nets and numerous access points to the Ship's interior made them certain that all this had been desgined to assist the vessel's builders rather than its crew. They may have been guilty of IF grossly overestimating the intelligence capabilities of the crew as well. "We have complete data on only one of these three life-forms," McCullough went oh, "and that is the tentacled, starfish-shaped Type Two. During all our meetings with them these beings have been completely and uniformly aggressive, so much so that after the second alien attack Drew remarked that if they behaved like wild animals they should be treated as such. My subsequent physiological investigation of the Two revealed a brain structure and nervous system which appeared unusually small and uncomplicated and a lack of fine control in the appendages, facts which suported Drew's theory. "We are all now of the opinion that we have been trying to establish intelligent communication with the alien equivalent of guinea pigs!" Their current theory was that the Ship was an interstellar probe of some kind carrying experimental animals which had escaped and overrun the ship and killed its crew. There was also a strong possibility that they did not, and had never had, a crew and that the life-support system and internal lighting was initially for use during the vessel's construction and was subsequently being used by the animal passengers. This being the case they felt free to fight a defensive war against the alien life-forms infesting the Ship while they mapped, photographed and learned everything they could about the vessel's equipment and function. Priority, however, would be given to finding a method of patching into the alien life-support system. The reason for this, as had been already explained, was that the water used by the marooned men was almost completely lost since only a fraction was recoverable to be put through the P-ship's recycling system. "Our water is being carefully rationed," McCullough continued, "and at the present rate of consumption the supply will last for thirtytwo days. This will take us three days past the arrival time of the supply vehicle, but it will carry only a fortyday supply of water: A few minutes simple computation will show that unless we can return the marooned men to the P-ships where the water supply can be recycled properly, our supply problem is logistically insoluble. "We have already drawn heavily on the food meant for the return trip," McCullough ended grimly, "and if we don't find a local source of water we can never come home." A bout the only thing McCullough did not have to worry about was General Brady's reaction to this latest report. Earth and Prometheus Control were only a few weeks off the time when they would pass behind the Sun; the relay vehicle designed to circumvent this difficulty was not yet in operation, and incoming messages were rendered almost unintelligible by interference. Not completely unintelligible, of course. By asking Control to repeat every sentence anything up to ten times Walters was usually able to piece together a complete message. Unlike McCullough, however, Walters had nothing better to do, and mehow a signal lost a good deal of its urgency and emotional content when it had to be repeated so many times. Precisely on time the high-acceleration supply rocket homed in on P-One's beacon and was taken aboard the alien ship. It contained, in addition to the promised water, a twenty-day supply of food, film, paper and a collapsed, carefully packed spacesuit. Some well-wisher had tucked a .# automatic inside the spacesuit, probably on impulse and without taking time to think about packing it properly, and the forty-G acceleration of the supply vehicle had caused the heavy gun to tear a large hole in the hip and leg sections, rendering the suit completely useless. They had lost a spacesuit and gained an automatic pistol for which there was no ammunition. T heir search pattern took the form of a flat spiral which wound slowly around the lateral axis of the Ship while moving even more slowly forward. At regular intervals a temporary base was set up with a search radius of twenty-five yards or more, depending on the available accommodation and the hostility and numbers of the local population. When completed the search pattern would still leave a long, empty core of unexplored territory in the three-dimensional map they were constructing. They found only storerooms and compartments packed with equipment whose shapes and purpose were slowly becoming familiar to them, and the ever-present netted corridors linking them together. It seemed obvious that the crew's quarters, if any, as well as the life-support system and other essential services were deep in the as yet unexplored center of the Ship. "It is very bad tactics to cut ourselves off from the outer hull and contact with our ships," said the colonel as they paused, between sorties, to fill in another small section of their map, "but it seems to me that there are certain periods when the risk is lessened. You must all have noticed the regular decrease in alien activity and numbers which seems to occur every five or six hours. If we assume this to be due to periodic feeding we can, at these times, push the search deeper into the Ship. Or we might try following some of the e-ts -- at a safe distance, of course -- in the hope of them leading us to the source of the food and water." Hollis said, "The absence of e-ts is not entirely regular, sir. There seems to be a longer absence, possibly due to a sleep period, between every few meals. This could be an important datum in calculating the length of their day and the rotation of their home planet." "Personally," said Drew impatiently, "I am more interested in gathering data which will aid our survival. For instance, if one of us should lose his weapon, is there enough known about their physical makeup for us to use an e-t form of karate on them? Or put another way, Doctor, where is the dirtiest spot I can plant my boot?" Reluctantly, McCullough told him. They did not deliberately try to kin the aliens, doing so only when the Twos attacked them -- which was always. Once they came on a dead Two whose condition suggested that it had been partially eaten. This was another important datum, Hollis said, which gave strong support to McCullough's theory that the ets were experimental animals running wild rather than sentient beings. This did not comfort McCullough as much as it should have done, because he was developing a new theoiy. It rested on the premise that the Ship had suffered some kind of non-material catastrophe -- the psychological pressures of a too lengthy voyage, perhaps -- which had driven the crew insane so that the Twos were either the survivors or descendants of the original personnel now reduced to little more than animals. But he did not mention his new theory to the others because it would have made them unhappy and uncertain again. Hollis and Berryman were becoming expert at identifying and tracing power and control lines without actually knowing what it was the lines powered or controlled. It should be possible, they insisted, to utilize one of these currently dead circuits to carry radio messages from deep inside the Ship to the metal of the outer hull. In effect the circuit or section of plumbing would be an extension of their suit antennae. And, since the signals would be in the form of radio frequency impulses rather than a flow of current, there was little danger of them inadvertently switching on one of the alien controls or mechanisms. In order to test this idea and also to get a line on the whereabouts of the Twos' feeding place, the next base was established some forty yards inboard. I t was a large gray-walled compartment filled with disciplined masses of plumbing and the usual sealed cabinets growing out from all six sides. A quick search showed it to be empty, and McCullough guarded the only entrance, which was a sliding door rather than the airtight seals found under the hull area. Hollis, Berryman and Drew were bunched together with Morrison floating close by, started to argue about a Two they had killed and whether or not they had defended themselves before or after it had actually attacked. They began talking loudly, vehemently, obviously feeling safe in this bright alien cupboard, when the Two which had been hiding somewhere in the compartment landed among them. There were shouts, curses and a scream that jerked on and off regularly, as if someone was trying to hold a high note while his back was being clapped. McCullough swung round and raised his weapon, but the center of the room was a confused mass of twisting, struggling bodies which were rapidly becoming obscured by a growing red fog, and there was nothing he could do. The Two had wrapped its tentacles around someone and was furiously disembowelling him with its horn while the others tried to tear it loose and kick and stab it to death. When they finally succeeded in pulling it away, McCullough launched himself towards the man, grabbed him around the waist and held him tightly face to face so that he would not be able to see his terrible wounds. Then he told the man lies in a gentle, reassuring voice until Drew separated them, saying harshly that the colonel was dead. Berryman, Hollis and Drew were watching him, obviously waiting for instructions or possibly for some incept his responsibility. McCullough squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to obliterate the sight of Morrison's body from his mind's eye as well as from normal vision. He tried to picture the colonel alive, as he had been a few days or hours ago, but great soft balls of coagulating blood like ' tacky grapes drifted against his face as a reminder that all images of Morrison alive would inevitably lead to the one he was trying to blot out of Morrison dead. It was impossible for McCullough to think of the colonel without seeing the grisly thing which spun slowly beside him like a bloody Catherine wheel. Because it had once been Morrison it inhabited every second of the past as well as the present. It was only in the futuree that the colonel did not really exist. T here was a feverish sort of logic about that thought, McCullough told himself. He must think only of a time when the colonel did not exist. To avoid bringing up memories of him, he must think only of the future. But there were a number of futures and they began flickering past his mind's eye like pictures from the Black Museum. A drowning man was supposed to see his past life passing before his eyes, but McCullough was seeing an endless succession of future deaths, so he opened his eyes and stared back at the others. He said, "Berryman, find an empty tool locker or something and put the colonel's body in it. Wire or wedge the fastening so's those animals won't be able to get at him. When you've finished go to the nearest hull lock chamber and report what has happened to Walters. Today we planned to follow the Twos to their food and water supply, and that is still at the top of our list of priorities. "However," he concluded, "if you hear a disturbance, don't come charging to our rescue. Stay in a safe place until the next lunch break and then make your way back here. Understand?" Berryman looked from Hollis to Drew and then back to McCullough. Despite the differences in rank and the military discipline which was supposed to bind them, this, McCullough knew, was something in the nature of an election. From his expression it was obvious that Hollis was voting a timid positive; Drew's features registered an angry negative, and Walters's opinions, since he was no longer directly involved in the Two-human running battle which was being waged in the Ship, were not being considered. It was Berryman, therefore, who had the casting vote in this election, and while the silence dragged on McCullough wondered what qualities this normally light-hearted pilot thought important M a leader, and if his qualifications were insufficient how exactly Berryman would let him know about it. He would be an extremely tactful and kindly mutineer, McCullough thought. Finally Berryman nodded and said drily, "The colonel is dead. Long live the lieutenant colonel." It had been Morrison's intention to probe the Ship as deeply as possible today and to follow the aliens to their feeding place despite the risk of the Earth party ending up being surrounded by practically every Two in the Ship. McCullough's instructions were not unexpected, and they probably thought that he was carrying on as planned out of respect for their dead colonel. Or, if they were feeling cynical, because he could think of nothing better to do. As he led them into the corridor McCullough wondered why it was so important to him that he should get as far away from the colonel's body as possible. In the past he had treated automobile accident cases and examined the pulverized remains of jet pilots who had hit the deck at close to Mach One, so that Morrison's body was not by any means the worst sight he had had to witness in his life. He had even seen a matador gored repeatedly by a bull on one occasion, and while he had felt clinical concern for the unfortunate man, some detached portion of his mind -- a group of rebel brain cells, perhaps, which had abstained when the majority were taking the Hippocratic Oath -- had been glad that on this occasion the bull had been able to hit back. It was just that in some obscure fashion the colonel's had been such a dirty death. McCullough did not want to think about it at all. They spotted a Two about ten minutes later and trailed it at a distance of twenty yards or less, depending on the turns and twists of its route. At intervals they wrapped pieces of paper around the netting so that they would be able to find their way back again. But the Two ignored them, either because it did not see them or because it had something more important on its mind. A few minutes later it was joined by another of its kind, then three more, none of which showed any interest in their pursuers. The men were pushing deeper and deeper into the Ship now, and large stretches of the corridors were permanently lit -- they did not have to switch on the corridor lighting here and could not even see the switches which controlled it. They also became aware of a low, moaning sound which rose and fell and changed pitched constantly but erratically and grew steadily louder. S uddenly there were three aliens following them and gaining steadily. Before they became sandwiched too tightly between the two groups of ets McCullough led his party into the next empty compartment. Its sliding door had a large window so he did not switch on the room lights. While waiting for the second group to pass he had a few minutes to look around, and he discovered something which almost made him call off the search for a water supply. # , IF This compartment was different from the others they had examined. Even the light which filtered in from the corridor made that very plain. The cable runs and ducting were absent or hidden behind flush wall panels, and the objects occupying the room had the unmistakable, finished look of items of furniture. In the center of the room there was suspended a long cylindrical shape which could very well be a free-fall hammock. "They've gone past," said Drew, opening the sliding door. "We'll have to hurry -- they're turning into an intersection." Very carefully McCullough marked the position of the compartment on his map, then left with the others. He still felt that he should have made them stop until they had examined and considered all the implications of the room they had just left. A lab animal would not require a furnished room. Which meant that there were intelligent extraterrestrials on the Ship. He needed time to think. The search for water could be postponed for a few hours or days while they decided what was the best thing to do. McCullough was the boss and he would order a return to base. But McCullough did not give the order because everything began happening at once. They turned into a corridor unlike any they had seen before. One wall was made up of heavy wire mesh through which they could see a large compartment filled with Twos while other Twos fought and wriggled their way through gaps in the mesh. Inside the enclosure the fighting and jockeying for position was so vicious that several of the e-ts were dead. The object of the fighting seemed to be to gain a position near a long plastic panel running along one wall of the enclosure. From the panel there sprouted a large number of open, small diameter pipes and a similar number which terminated in rubbery swellings. The fighting which was going on made it difficult to see what exactly it was that was oozing out of them. "Semi-liquid food from the pipes, I think," said Hollis excitedly, "and what looks like water from the nipples!" He broke off as a single, deafening chime reverberated along the corridor, and they heard their first alien voice. I t could have been his imagination, but McCullough felt sure that the sound was subtly unlike the alien gobblings of the Twos. The wordsounds seemed more complex and meaningful, somehow, and there was almost a quality of urgency about them. He knew that it was ridiculous to read meanings into a completely alien sequence of sounds, but his feeling of being warned remained strong. Each time the voice paused the single, tremendous chime was repeated -- or perhaps the voice was speaking quickly between chimes. The Twos on the other side of the mesh became more agitated when a chime sounded, but they did not stop either eating or fighting each other. Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M, V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A 'must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Nome Address Cty  State Zip Code... (OHer good in U. S. A, Only) Drew said something about Pavlov to Hollis, and McCullough unstrapped his tape-recorder. Drew swung his weapon to point at a nearby speaker grill, where it would be possible to get a recording without too much interference from the feeding animals, but he never completed the movement. There was a blinding double flash as the spear touched the mesh and the corridor wall. Erew jerked violently, then became motionless except for a slow, lateral spin. A second alien voice joined the first one and the meaning sounds increased in intensity. The new voice seemed to be speaking the same language. Very often it repeated the same wordsounds as the first voice, but it spoke over or around it and did not pause for the chimes. Sometimes it spoke quickly and at other times the words were dragged out and their pitch, volume and inflexion varied so widely that it seemed to be trying to sing. McCullough felt confused and stupid as he blinked away the green after-image of the flash and tried to make some kind of sense out of what was happening. He needed time to think. But he was given no time to think, because Berryman was coming back and shouting at them from the other end of the corridor. "Doctor! Doctor! Walters says the generator blisters are beginning to glow -- all of them that he can see from P-Two! He says the Ship is leavingr IF HE He walked along the thoroughfare, his way empty of everything save for the echoes of his footsteps, the buildings turned to black, himself. The signs were there only for his benefit. He moved past them, following their instructions: He moved through the enormous building, breathing heavdy. The stairway without had been far too large for one of his kind to negotiate with ease. As he entered, he felt something like release -- from the pressure of all the eyes, or whatever they called them, that had been fixed upon him from invisible positions of security. He cursed, then chuckled. Absolutely alone now, he continued to follow e signs. They led him into a gigantic room, indicated his destination. He pursued them through the carnage, across the black floors, past the stage, still set, until he stood above the remains that lay beneath arrow pointing downward. Then he saw what remained, and he unfolded the thing that he bore had died. S he stirred. She sucked in the night air, sighed, opened her eyes. She lay upon a hillside, and the net of the sky hung heavy above her with its bright catch of stars. She wore an asphodel in her long, dark hair. When she felt strong enough, she sprang to her feet, prepared to flee. "Please wait," said a voice, and she turned, waiting, for it was human. "Yes?" she finally said, in the same strange language in which she had been addressed. "I aroused you and I mean you no harm. Don't flee -- please." The figure of a small man moved into view, features indistinct. She waited until he drew near. "Who are you?" she asked. "My name is Eric, Eric Weiss," he said. "I helped you to escape." "Escape?" " -- From the place where they had you confined," he finished. "You speak their language... " "So do you. We all do." "All? I don't understand. They told me I was going to sleep. Why did you arouse me?" "I was lonely. I have friends, but I was lonely nevertheless. Yours seemed a lovely and sympathetic face." "I understand. Can you tell me what is happening, and why?" "Perhaps," he said. "I'U try." A s he drew the shroud up over the shoulders of the dead man, Francois continued to glance about the enormous room. The place was filled with corpses, but the one he tended was the only human body among them. He did not let his gaze dwell long upon the shapes of the others. There had been as much violence on the floor as upon the stage that he viewed. Shuddering, he hurried. But he whistled while he worked. T hey walked along the crest of the hill, and she looked down upon the field of people, caught like ants in amber, standing within their towers, there in the starlight. "What is your name?" he asked her. "Sappho," she said. "Did you write poetry?" "Sometimes." "And live on an isle called Lesbos?" "Yes." "I had no idea," he said, "though I suspected that everyone down there was once noted for something. If it will please you to know it, portions of your poetry survived for thousands of years. You are a legend. Would you care for a drink of water?" "Yes, please." "Here. I've some fresh fruit also. I gathered it in a grove farther to the north." "Thank you." "I believe that some sort of end is in sight," he said. "I beg your pardon?" "I was awakened once, from out of my tower of jelly, and asked to do a job for our -- owners. SomeIF is what a friend called it -- gives us a common tongue which they understand. They had, before awakening me, come into possession of an entire world which was locked to them." "Locked?" "Yes, it was an artificial planet which served as an enormous vault. They could not enter it, with all their machines and scientists, so they aroused me to open it for them. I did it with a small file, some wax and a length of copper wire. Then they returned me to this place, my usefulness being a thing of the past. Only I resolved to escape, and I did. Were you ever so used by them?" "Yes. They aroused me and they spoke to me, saying: 'Sappho, we need you to seduce a matriarchy with your song' -- and I did this thing, for I thought they were gods. Are they not?" "No," said Weiss, "not at all. In my day I was considered a great seeker after things beyond mortality, and I know that they are not gods. They are a race of creatures possessed of an interstellar culture far exceeding an)hing mankind ever developed. They inherited us and they used us." "What do you mean?" "Another race collected us. Recently the others lost a war to this one, who found us here and decided to use us to exploit their winnings. I feel that there is much concerning the sciences of the older race which they do not understand." "Why do we permit them to do as they would with us?" "Madam, the human race is extinct." "How can that be? We are here. I do not understand .' "Nor do I, fully. I am told, though, that it killed itself off in a great atomic holocaust. I only just recently learned what 'atomic' means, and I appreciate the fact that this is probably what happened." "I'm sorry. You're going too fast for me." "We're dead, that's what I'm trying to say. Every creature that lived on the planet Earth is dead, save for the samples. From among these, we have been revived." He gestured at the others, encased in the jellies that nourished and sustained them. "Do you know that if you were to die again, this night, and if ages from now someone were to find a bone here upon this hilltop and stick it into one of those towers, it would reconstruct you -- molecule by molecule, cell by cell -- so that you could one day be awakened, possessed of everything you now possess, arranged in precisely the fashion you are now arranged, and including the last thought that flickered through your mind before you died? They have the power to regenerate a creature from any fragment. I had to repick the flower you wear in your hair, for a full-grown plant hovered above your head when I freed you. Portions of our corpses were obtained; we were rebuilt in this fashion." "I remember," she said, "my passing. I wept and I cried out. It was strange to reawaken aboard one of their vessels. So they preserved the dead and they make them to live again..." "They didn'l. It was the race they destroyed that preserved us. I doubt that this one even understands the process involved. Possibly that first race thought we might be worth studying sometime, but never got around to it. That's only a guess. They rifled our graves and they preserved in their towers of jelly those whom they thought represented certain worthwhile qualities of the race. Apparently, they had been watching us for thousands of years." "And they thought me worth preserving?" "The fact that you're here is answer to that. I think they made a good choice." "I find it unbelievable," she said, "despite my experience on the world of the mothers. I was never that popular." He shrugged. "I was. But I never thought that anyone would care to save me in this fashion." The night was cool, silent about them. F rancois bore the remains down the gigantic stair and back along the thoroughfare in the direction from which he had come. Even the robots did not come to aid him. The entire thing was in his hands, upon his head. They all stayed out of his way, and they watched as he left the city turned to black. In the distance, he saw the ship. T he stars shone less brightly as dawn began in the east. "After they had fought and won their war," Weiss told her, "they discovered us. They weren't sure what sort of spoils we were, but they'd come into posession of some kind of record of this place, so they knew what we could do. We had been neatly filed and tabulated. They knew our talents, our abilities. So they began awakening us and asking us to do things for them -- quite politely, I must add." "What were you," she asked, "that you unlocked a world?" She saw the whiteness of his smile within the morning shadows. "Eric Weiss," he said. "I can escape from anything anybody can put me into, including a mound of living gelatin. At your service, lovely lady." And he bowed. "They knew I could unlock a world for them, but they made the mistake of thinking they could reconfine me afterwards." "Why do you think that the end is in sight? You said that earlier." "I feel that some catastrophe may soon occur, that is true," he told her. "I can return you to your sleep, if you wish. I had thought..." "No," she said, "I wish to remain awake. Tell me the rest of the story." "All right. They recently sent for one of our kind, to go to their home world for purposes of staging a special entertainment for their rulers. I managed to speak with him for some time, from where I had hidden myself near their vessel. I learned what they wanted of him, and I made him aware of many of the things I had learned concerning this race. He based his 'decision upon what I told him -- though I tried to dissuade him. You see, beyond that high ridge IF to the north there is a small colony of those I have freed, of which our owners so far know nothing. Thus have I gained the counsel of many, as weU as information from those few who had been awakened and employed. Now another man has been sent for. Machiavelli, who analyzed the situation, thinks that we may be doomed." "Why?" "Well," said Weiss, "if the political situation is truly what he guessed it to be, and the man with whom I spoke is now dead, as I fear he must be..." F rancois entered the ship and called out the words he had been told to say. The hatches closed behind him, and the vessel rose into the air. He locked his burden in one of the cabins. There was a great silence about him. He sat and watched stars through the viewport for the entire journey. He realized that there was no real need to have locked the cabin. I one that did the thing -- is dead," said Weiss, "and now they have done it. If what Machiavelli thinks might happen happens, then they will probably destroy such a menace as the remaining sample -- ourselves." "What's that?" She pointed. He looked up. The great, wedgeshaped vessel cruised silently above the valley, its many fins slicing the brightening air as it descended, drew nearer. "That," he said, "is the ship bearing the last man to depart here. Its design is the same. He should be returning with the remains of the player. I am convinced that he can tell us our fate, if he is not in restraint or dead himself." F rancois stepped down from the vessel, which closed itself behind him and rose immediately into the air. He placed the corpse upon the ground and watched the ship climb at a great speed. Suddenly, it was replaced by an orange-gold fireball, and after a time there came a sound as of thunder. In the distance, he saw two figures advancing toward him. He waited for them to approach. "What is the verdict?" Weiss called out. "We live," he replied. "They told me of their fears and asked for pardon before I did this thing. It would seem that it was indeed as had been rumored there and guessed here. In order to gain his position, their last head of state slew his gens-brother and married his wives. The son of the slain Lord suspected this, but had no evidence. He slew his stepfather, however, after witnessing his reactions to the play. The entire court perished in the uprising that followed." "Then why -- ?" "It is difficult to conceive of a race sufficiently advanced to conquer an interstellar empire, yet as gullible as this. But they based their conclusion on a sort of logic. Each of us who has been aroused has demonstrated a great ability along some line. They now consider these divine attributes. The first race had disturbed him and died. Their ruler disturbed him also, and carnage was wrought within his court, and he perished. They are now convinced that we are the gods of the old race, and they fear our wrath. They quarantined the palace until one of us could be gotten to remove the body. Now they would have no more to do with us. As you witnessed, they even destroyed the ship that was involved in the act. "If I gave a damn about life or death, I might even fear the curse myself," said Francois, hefting the body and bearing it toward the valley of the mounds, whistling as he went. After a time, Sappho touched Weiss' arm. He smiled at her and stared into her dark eyes. "What are those little trays before each mound?" she asked. "I don't know. I've never been able to figure that out." "They are like," she said, "the offering trays my people laid before the gods, in the old days of Earth." "You mean -- ?" "I believe that we were indeed the gods of the first race. For some reason, they worshipped the greatest among men and preserved them here in eternal slumber. I know that man behind you -- the one with the necklace and the war-tattoo. He is Agamemnon." Ahead of them, Francois removed the shroud and began the task of placing the broken body back into its mound of preservative. They moved to join him. "A race that sought its gods from among another race?" "It is no more foolish than to seek them anywhere else, is it?" They watched Francois at his task. "That poor man," she said. "The one v;ho saved us." And there were tears in her eyes as she spoke. "If that first race thought he was a god, they took a hell of a chance when they moved him," said Francois. "Perhaps," said Weiss, "they thought that moving him to honor him would absolve them of the curse he had promised." "And the conquerors did not believe in the gods of those whom they had vanquished -- until now," said Francois. "We're free. This world is ours. They'll never bother us again. I -- Damn!" Weiss rushed to his side, but it was too late. He had slipped upon a portion of the gelatinous substance, and his temple had struck against the only rock in sight. He lay very still. They raised him and placed him within another mound. I don't believe it's what it seems," said Weiss. "It was only coincidence. It had to be." "At least he'll recover, won't he?" "Yes, I should think so. We will all recover from death or injury, for so long as this jelly lasts -- which should be long enough to get the human race back on its feet again." "What are those words on the piece of stone he struck? Are they of your language?" "Yes," and he read, silently: IF "It says that he would resent being disturbed" be told her. "His face is so kind," she said. "Who was he?" "Nobody really knows for sure," he said. Sapjo removed an ancient flower from her hair and placed it at the feet of the broken man in the capsule. Eric Weiss turned away from her strange, sad eyes, prisoner once more Complete Short Novel by Foul Anderson by Keith Laumer by Robert Bloch by Fritz Leiber by Brian W. Aldiss -- plus Algis Budrys, Willy Ley and many others in the February Galaxy -- don't miss iti Dear Editor, Where has your magazine been all my life? I started reading science-fiction at the age of eleven, and it took me to the advanced age of fifteen before I discovered . Man! It was electrifying, almost as exciting as discovering girls. I don't know why it took me so long. Perhaps it's where If is located on the newsstands. Being surrounded by Playboy and True Detective doesn't make it any easier to get noticed even with your great covers. As for your content, you run more good stories than anybody else on the market. I especially liked your serials Spaceman and Faust Aleph Null. While we're on the subject, how about one by Andre Norton? I'd like to see more of her in your magazine. I also enjoy "Our Man in Fandom" which is much better than a science article would be. After all, there are plenty of books on science in the library, but none on Fandom. "Hue and Cry" is also very good. It gives your readers a chance to express their ideas and is almost always entertaining I say almost always because you keep printing i ) letters that remind us how great science-fiction was in the "thrifty thirties", "facetious forties" and "flabbergasting fifties". Well, from where I'm sitting the "swinging sixties" are even better. So how about running more information on current trends in s-f instead of all that reminiscing. Remember. Writing styles are not the only thing that has changed about science-fiction over the years. The reader has too. Today's teenage fan will be just the right age to colonize the moon, be on the first expeditions to Mars and Venus, build underwater cities, and a lot more if the world doesn't go to pot first. In any case I'll keep writing if you keep putting out such a good magazine. And who knows? You may be the first one to get a fan letter from the moon. -- Bill Burrows, # Sherwood Ave., Staunton, Va. #. ::  :le Dear Editor: Faust Aleph-Null is a put-on. Of its seventy pages of actual text, nineteen are concerned with meticulous and boring details of conjuration. Even Blish realizes that this is a little much and telescopes the summoning of eleven demons into a single paragraph in Part # (after spending, four pages summoning nineteen others)... perhaps in recognition of the growing weariness of his Tanists." (Part #, page #) Me, too. It has an idiot plot as well. Only by assuming that both Ware and Baines, as well as Baines's assistants, are amoral and insane can the reader even begin to accept what is going on. Baines has no motivation for setting loose all the demons of Hell except curiosity and the sadistic streak that he denies is part of his personality. He says, "I invented it, I called it into being, I'm paying for it -- and no matter how else you describe it, I made it, and ifs mine (Part #, page #) The man is a megalomaniac. Ware, knowledgeable as he is in arcane doings, refuses to believe that Baines's scheme is as destructive as it obviously is. Since... Armageddon requires the prior appearance of the Antichrist," (Part #, page #) and he is sure no Antichrist yet exists, he doesn't worry. He doesn't stop to think that anything less than Armageddon can spoil his precious search for knowledge. World War Three -- or simply some large-scale, imnamed social, political or economic upset -- need not be Armageddon, yet it can make Ware's money worthless and make it impossible for him to procure the tools which are crucial to his conjurations. And if he thinks the loosed demons wont wreak as much havoc as they can, even though it must be short of Armageddon, then he's an idiot. And the rest are idiots to believe that Ware will protect them any longer than is necessary for the cashing (if possible) of that five amoral and a magician (and they are not magicians), he has a hold over them, not vice versa. The only enjoyable part of the story is Blish's faannish digs at other writers: Fr. Anson (Heinlein), Fr. Bonfiglioli, Fr. Boucher, Fr. Vance, Fr. Selahny (Zelazny, or perhaps Delaney) and himself as Fr. Atheling. But is If a fanzine? As for the rest -- well, I can read a good part of it in Ceremonial Magic by Arthur Edward Waite. I don't think that any kind of story ought to serve primarily as a vehicle for the author's research. Faust AlephNull was tedious and unsatisfying; occasional good fantasy would be a welcome variation in the If bill of fare, but the Blish piece definitely does not fit in that category. -- Phyllis Eisenstein, N.Y. #.   Dear Editor: First things first. For the last two years or so, you have had a report, in the December issue, on the preceding World Science Fiction Convention (in '#, a special feature by Robert Bloch; in '#, an editorial by yourself). Question: will you continue this practice this year? I certainly hope so. though I was never able to afford both it and If at the same time, my affluence being more than somewhat limited. Still, I'm glad to see that If now ihas Sam Moskowitz's articles on sf's history. Incidentally, I was rather puzzled by the omission, in "When Women Rule," of the matriarchy described in Search the Sky. This seems to be a mucTi more logical one tihan many of those discussed in the article. Of course, it was only dealt with in a portion of the book, and so might have easily been overlooked. Now that Worlds of Tomorrow has been combined with , it becomes more and more obvious that If and Galaxy are simply extensions of the same malgazine, especially feature-wise. If (has Lin Carter's series on fandom and Mr. Moskowitz's history lessons; Galaxy has Willy Ley's science articles and Aigis Budrys' book reviews. Boooo, as long as they're practically one and the same anyway, why not combine them into one extra-large bl-monttily? I can see it 'all now. You could call it Vorlds of If hi Tomorrow's GaU axy or Tomorrow's Galaxy of Ifs, or possibly even If: A Galaxy of Tomorrows (so as ito fit all three titles in). It would ihave about # pages -- which is about how many pages we get now in two Ifs and a Galaxy every two months -- allowing plenty of room for all the current features and maybe a new one or two. There'd bo lots of room for fiction, and you might even run a full-length novel in each issue, as well as short stories. The price would be rather high -- # to # -- but when you come right down to it, we're already paying that much for the equivalent. Besides, there's another way around the cost. New readers are bound to think it's a book at first, so you could work up an arrangement with, say Ballantine Books and go into simultaneous hard and soft cover editions. Subscribers could pay a few dollars more and get hard U# cover magazines delivered right to their door. And it's sure to attract new readers, many of whom will think it's a new series of books comparable to Judith Merril's "Year's Best SP" or Ace's "World's Best Science Fiction : #so-and-so". Who knows? It may even be reviewed in other magazines. Well, back to reality. International Science Fiction sounds good. I just hope that the British writers, who already have a fairly large readership in the U.S., do not monopolize the magazine. Not that I want the British banned entirely, of course, but if the purpose of the magazine is to familiarize American readers with foreign authors -- put it this way, what American science fiction fan needs to be introduced to Arthur C. Clarke? I favor some identification of the "Firsts" in each issue. After all, they're often the people to watch. Look at Larry Niven. -- John Borger. Box #, Rt. #, Parkersburg, W. Va. #. #I :   Dear Editor of #, almost #, SF Mags: In this corner, all green on INidea -- but you should spend more time writing SF than editing it. I suppose most of the authors will be British, but of the French, German, etc., authors, have you given any thought to publishing an occasional story in its native language? Some of us language nuts might appreciate it. (The material in Quinto Lingo is rather dull.) Good luck on your first new magazine in four years. -- Stanley Perrin, # Dobson Street, Evanston, IF Seated : Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling. "We want to test your writing aptitude" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School. Former editor, Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two'ours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to more than # publications including Reader s Digest, True, Red hook. Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, 'T just received a check from Ellery Queen s Mystery Magazine. That's I I stories sold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible." Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude. Please mail me, free, your Writing Aptitude Test and #-page illustrated brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting CommissiqOir of the National Home Study Couneil, A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it.  W#Ll#S OP A Woi;ld Univ Receives a Beadly ;GifntulTl' 'li thrUlingnew ' .  (  ) oo  Uj o o o c; o o o O O O o o o o o o y o o # # o . Iinir Kamr No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales lax, it any. No. GX-# by Lynd Ward No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." No. CF-# by Emsh won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! The designs shown above are the only ones we offer I Order frorn Golcixy #I Hudson street. New York # , N. Y. Vol. #, No. # Frederik Poht, Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Laurence Yep by Larry Niven by James White by Robert Sheckley by B. K. Filer by Robert Lory by Frederik Pohl IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All light. Including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial The Day We Launched The Moonship A few hours ago (as this is written) we strugg-led up out of a Bound sleep at the unearthly hour of #:# in the morning, drove thirty miles along what used to be the rattlesnake barrens of Cape Canaveral and is now the world's first and largest spaceport and watched the launching of that (literally) howling success, Saturn V. By the time you read this it will all be ancient history, of course. But now it's still fresh in our mind, every minute of it, from the first graying of dawn over the Atlantic to the babble of excited mutual congratulations, German accents praising Texas drawls, in the coffeeshops of the Cocoa Beach motels when everyone gathered for a late, and very joyous, breakfast. Everything worked. The whole drama of the situation was that there was no drama. The beast rose up and flew with as little unexpected event as you might find in the takeoff of the shuttle flight from New York to Boston, every hour on the hour. As little as you might find when you get into your car to go to the grocery. It's still a pretty expensive, inherently wasteful, process, this business of throwing a couple thousand pounds of metal into orbit by exploding gases under it. There ought to be better ways. Probably there are, and we'll find them. But meanwhile Wemher von Braun and his boys have provided us with this one way of getting to the Moon that has the advantage of being ready right now -- and workable on schedule, on demand, no problems. O f course, we science-fiction' types always knew it would work out this way, and no doubt for most of us the big question has not been so much "Can we travel in space?" as it has been "What the dickens is taking us so long?" A couple of decades from now we, or our children, will remember with amusement and even incredulity how people used to throw away # of a spaceship to get # into a parking orbit. That vast noise that broke glass, shattered nerves, was heard # miles away will be recalled as a symptom of incredibly poor efficiency. By then no doubt we'll have reusable launch vehicles, like the Douglas Hyperion, and better ways of applying power, and EarthLunar commutation tickets. (Just as we now have commuters from New York to Los Angeles -- in energy terms, a more expensive trip.) But that's a couple decades from now. Right now we've got a moonship... and it works ! mte. The Dark Continents of Your Mind maintain energy enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This Is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life,'? Address: Scribe y.B.K. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. Scribe: V.B.K. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. Name Address Cit y State Please Include Your Zip Code The romrobof hod been on its way from Earth for decades -- and now if was changing a world overnight! A ramrobot had been the first to se Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The, interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply called from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light. Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets. It was a peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance, had landed on We Made It in spring. Had it landed in summer or winter, when the planet's axis points through its sun, it would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx but had not been programmed to report the planet's other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot, Interstellar Ramscoop Robot No. #, had landed on Mount Lookitthat. Only the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal, searing black calm, useless for any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But Interstellar Ramscoop Robot ## had found a habitable point, and that was all it knew. The colony slowboats which followed the ramrobots had not been built to make round trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was settled, more than three hundred years ago. A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like summer bumblebees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough-to win a race. The running man was only yards from the edge. Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had decided to risk damaging the body. The man hit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff's sharp edge on the other knee and two hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving. At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car coming right at him from the blue void beyond... With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he'd hit the cliff; an inch too high and he'd miss the man, rniss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan throttles forward -- Too late. The man was gone. Later, they stood at the edge and looked down. Often Jus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer -- and closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him. Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount Lookitthat, the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat, the mountain, had a surface less than half the size of California. All the rest of the world's surface was a black oven, hot enough to melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth's. Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of blood tubing and all twelve of his glands... taking everything that could have gone into the Hospital's organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-yearold colony world, was now nil. Only the water in him would some day return to the upper world, to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming in the awful heat forty miles below. Or had he stopped falling, even yet? Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts -- like that odd member of the Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that was treason. The major met his eye with a curious reluctance. "Major," said Jesus Pietro, "why did that man escape you?" The major spread his hands. "He lost himself in the trees for several minutes. When he broke for the edge it took my men a few minutes to spot him." "How did he reach the trees? No, don't tell me how he broke loose. Tell me why your cars didn't catch him before he reached the grove." The major hesitated a split second too long. Jesus Pietro said, "You were playing with him. He couldn't reach his friends and he couldn't remain hidden anywhere. So you decided to have a little harmless fun." The major dropped his eyes. "You take his place," said Jesus Pietro. T he playground was grass and trees, swings and teeter-totters and a slow, skeletal merry-go-round. The school surrounded it on three sides, a one-story building of architectural coral, painted white. The fourth side, protected by a high fence of tame vine growing on wooden stakes, was the edge of Gamma Plateau, a steep cliff overlooking Lake Davidson on Delta Plateau. Matthew Leigh Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone. Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn't even talk about it. Implementation police had come to the house at sunset yesterday. They had left with Matt's big, comfortable uncle. Knowing that they were taking him to the Hospital, Matt had tried to stop those towering, uniformed men; but they'd been gentle and superior and firm, and an eight-year-old boy had not slowed them down at all. One day soon his uncle's trial and conviction would be announced on the colonist teedee programs, along with the charges and the record of his execution. But that didn't matter. That was just cleaning up. Uncle Matt would not be back. IF A sting in his eyes warned Matt that he was going to cry. Harold Lillard stopped his aimless running around when he realized that he was alone. He didn't like to be alone. Harold was ten, big for his age, and he needed others around him. Preferably smaller others, children who could be dominated. Looking rather helplessly around him, he spotted a small form under a tree near the playground's edge. Small enough. Far enough from the playground monitors. He started over. Under the tree. Matt looked up at him.  Harold lost interest. He wandered away with a vacant expression, moving more or less toward the teetertotters. II I nterstellar ramscoop robot ## left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward insterstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet, except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors. Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small, containing only a computer and an insystem fuel tank. Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramrobot itself. Identical cargo pods had been going to the stars for centuries. But this one was special. Like Ramrobots ##I and ##, already moving toward Jinx and Wunderland ... like Ramrobot ##, not yet built... ramrobot ## carried the seeds of revolution. The revolution was already in process on Earth. On Earth it was quiet, orderly. It would not be so on Mount Lookitthat. The medical revolution which began with the beginning of the twentieth century had warped all human society for five hundred years. America had adjusted to Eli itney's cotton gin in less than half that time. As with the gin, the effects would never quite die out. But already society was swinging back to what had once been normal. Slowly -- but there was motion. In Brazil a small but growing alliance agitated for the abolition of the death penalty for habitual traffic offenders. TTiey would be opposed, but they would win. O n twin spears of actinic light the ramrobot approached Pluto's orbit. Pluto and Neptune were both on the far side of the sun, and there were no ships nearby to be harmed by magnetic effects. The ramscoop generator came on. The conical field formed rather slowly, but when it had stopped oscillating it was two hundred miles across. The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her insystem tank was idle now, and would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the stars. In nearby space the magnetic effects would have been deadly. Nothing with a notochord could live within three hundred miles of the storm of electromagnetic effects that was a working ramscoop generator. For hundreds of years men had been trying to build a magnetic shield efficient enough to let men ride the ramrobots. They said it couldn't be done, and they were right. A ramrobot could carry seeds and frozen fertile animal eggs, provided they were heavily shielded and were carried a good distance behind the ramscoop generator. Men must ride the slowboats, carrying their own fuel, traveling at less than half the speed of light. For ramrobot ##, speed built up rapidly over the years. The sun became a bright star, then a dim orange spark. The drag on the rscoop became a fearsome thing, but it was more than compensated by the increase in hydrogen pouring into the fusion motor. The telescopes orbiting in Neptune's Trojan points occasionally picked up the ramrobot's steady fusion light, a tiny fierce blue-white point against Tau Ceti's yellow. The universe shifted and changed. Ahead and behind the ramrobot, the stars crept together, until Sol and Tau Ceti were less than a light-year apart. Now Sol was dying-ember white. The pair of red dwarves known as L#-#, almost in the ramrobot's path, had become warm yellow. And all the stars in all the heavens had a crushed look, as if somebody heavy had sat down on the universe. Ramrobot ## reached the halfway point, # light-years as measured relative to Sol, and kept going. Turnover was light-years off, since the ramscoop would slow the ship throughout the voyage. But a relay clicked in the ramrobot's computer. It was message time. The ramscoop flickered out, and the light died in the motors, as Ramrobot ' ## poured aU her stored power into a maser beam. For an hour the beam went out, straight ahead, reaching toward the system of Tau Ceti. Then the ramrobot was accelerating again, following close behind her own beam, but with the beam drawing steadily ahead. A line of fifteen-year-old boys had formed at the door of the medcheck station, each holding a conical bottle filled with clear yellowish fluid. One by one they handed their specimen bottles to the hard-faced, masculine-looking lyirse, then stepped aside to wait for new orders. Matt Keller was third from the end. As the boy in front of him stepped aside, and the nurse raised one hand without looking up from her typewriter. Matt examined his bottle critically. "Doesn't look so good," he said. IF The nurse looked up in furious impatience. A colonist brat, wasting her time! "I better run it through again," Matt decided aloud. And he drank it. "It was apple juice," he said later that night. "I almost got caught sneaking it into the medcheck station. But you really should have seen her face. She turned the damnedest color." "But why?" his father asked in honest bewilderment. "Why antagonize Miss Prynn? You know she's part crew. And these medical health records go straight to the Hospital!" "# think it was funny," Jeanne announced. She was Matt's sister, a year younger than Matt, and she always sided with him. Matt's grin seemed to slip from his face, leaving something dark, something older than his years. "One for Uncle Matt." Mr. Keller glared at Jeanne, then at the boy. "You keep thinking like that, Matthew, and you'll end up in the Hospital, just like he did! Why can't you leave well enough alone?" His father's evident concern penetrated Matt's mood. "Don't worry, Genghis," he said easily. "Miss Prynn's probably forgotten all about it. I'm lucky that way." "Nonsense. If she doesn't report you it'll be through sheer kindness." "Fat chance of that," I n a small recuperation room in the treatment section of the Hospital, Jesus Pietro Castro sat up for the first time in four days. His operation had been simple, though major; he now had a new left lung. He had also received a peremptory order from Millard Parlette, who was pure crew. He was to give up smoking immediately. He could feel the pull of the internal surgical adhesive as he sat up to deal with four days of paperwork. The stack of forms his aide was setting on the bedside table looked disproportionately thick. He sighed, picked up a pen and went to work. , Fifteen minutes later he wrinkled his nose at some petty complaint -- a practical joke -- and started to crumple the paper. He unfolded it and looked again. He asked, "Matthew Leigh Keller?" "Convicted of treason," Major Jansen said instantly. Six years ago. He escaped over the edge of Alpha Plateau, the void edge. The records say he went into the organ banks." But he hadn't, Jesus Pietro remembered suddenly. Major Jansen's predecessor had gone instead. Yet Keller had died... "What's he doing playing practical jokes in a colonist medcheck station?" After a moment of cogitation Major Jansen said, He had a nephew, same name." "Nephew about fifteen now?" "Perhaps. I'll check." Kelles nephew, said Jesus Pietro to himself.  could follow standard practice and send him a reprimand. No, Let him think he'd got away with it. Give him room to move around in and one day he'd replace the body his uncle stole. Jesus Pietro smiled. He started to chuckle, but pain stabbed him in the ribs and he had to desist. T he snout projecting from the ramscoop generator was no longer bright and shiny. Its surface montage of big and little pits, was a craterlets left by interstellar dust grains pushing their way through the ramscoop field. There was pitting everywhere, on the fusion motors, on Kthe hull, even on the cargo pod I I thirty miles behind. The ship looked f f pebble-finished. The damage was all superficial. More than a century had passed since the rugged ramscoop design had suffered its last major change, r Now, eight and a half years beyond f Juno, the ramscoop field died for the second time. The fusion flames became two actinic blue candles generating a twentieth of a gee. Slowly the I  cargo spool rewound until the cargo i pod was locked in its socket. I The machine seemed to hesitate I... and then its two cylindrical mo tors rose from the hull on their prayJ ing-mantis legs. For seconds they rc  I mained at right angles to the hull, f  Then, slowly, the legs contracted. But J' now the motors pointed forward. If L A U-shaped bar swung the cargo f pod around until it also pointed forward. Slowly the spool unwound to its full length... The ramscoop went on again. The motors roared their full strength, and now they fired their long streams of fusing hydrogen and fused helium through the ramscoop itself. Eight point three light-years from #Tau Ceti, lie the twin red dwarf L#-#. Their main distinctionis that they're the stars of smallest mass known to man. Yet they are heavy enough to have collected a faint envelope of gas. The ramrobot braked heavily as her ramscoop plowed through the fringes of that envelope. She continued braking. The universe stretched out again, the stars resumed their normal shapes and colors. Eleven point nine light-years above the star Tau Ceti, the machine came to an effective stop. Her ramscoop went permanently off. A variety of senses began searching the sky. They stopped. Locked. Again she moved. She must reach her destination on the remaining fuel. Tau Ceti is a G# star, about # cooler than Sol and only # as strong in its output of light. The world of Mount Lookitthat orbits moonless world in a nearly circular path. The ramrobot moved in on Mount Lookitthat, the world. She moved cautiously, for there were failsafe factors in her computer program. Her senses probed. Surface temperature: # F., with little variation. Atmosphere: opaque, dense, poisonous near the surface. Diameter: # miles. Something came over the horizon. In visible light it seemed an island in a sea of fog. A topography like a flight of broad, very shallow steps, flat plateaus separated by sheer cliffs. But Ramrobot ## sensed more than visible light. There was Earthlike temperature, breathable air at an Earthlike pressure... And there were two radio homing signals. The signals settled it. Ramrobot ## didn't even have to decide which to answer, for they were coming from only a quarter of a mile apart. They came, in fact, from Mount Lookitthat's two slowboats, and the distance between them was bridged by the sprawling structure of the Hospital, so that the spacecraft were no longer spacecraft but odd looking towers in a sort of bungalow-castle. But the ramrobot didn't know that, and didn't need to. There were signals. Ramrobot ## started down. T he floor vibrated gently against the soles of his feet, and from all around came muted, steady thunder. Jesus Pietro Castro strode down the twisting, intermeshing, labyrinthine passages of the Hopsital. Though he was in a tearing hurry, it never occurred to him to run. He was not in the gymnasium, after all. Instead he moved like an elephant, who cannot run but who can walk fast enough to trample a running man. His head was down, his stride was as long as his legs could reach. His eyes looked ominously out from under prominent brow ridges and bushy white eyebrows. His bandit's mustache and his full head of hair were also white and bushy, forming a startling contrast to his swarthy skin. Implementation police sprang to attention as he passed, snapping out of his way with the speed of pedestrians dodging a bus. Was it his rank they feared, or his massive, unstoppable bulk? Perhaps even they didn't know. At the great stone arch which was the main entrance to the Hospital, Jesus Pietro looked up to see a sparkling blue-white star overhead. Even as he found it it winked out. Moments later the all-pervading thunder died away. A Jeep was waiting for him. If he'd had to call for one, someone would have been very sorry. He got in, and the Implementation chauffeur took off at once, without waiting for orders. The Hospital fell behind, with its walls and its surrounding wasteland of defenses. The ramrobot package was floating down on its parachutes. Other cars were in flight, erratically shifting course as their drivers tried to guess where the white dot would come down. It would be near the Hoital, of course. The ramrobot would have aimed for one or another of the ships; and the Hospital had grown like something living, like a growth of architectural coral, between the two former spacecraft. But the wind was strong today. Jesus Pietro frowned. The parachute would be blown over the edge of the cliff. It would end, not on Alpha Plateau, where the crew built their homes and where no colonist could be tolerated, but in the colonist regions beyond. It did. The cars swooped after it like a flock of geese, following it over the four-hundred-foot cliff that separated Alpha Plateau from Beta Plateau, where forests of fruit trees alternated with fields of grain and vegetables and meadows where cattle grazed. There were no homes on Beta, for the crew did not like colonists so close. But colonists worked there and often they played there. Jesus Pietro picked up his phoneii "'Orders," he said. "'Ramrobot package forty-three is landing in Beta, sector... twenty-two or thereabouts. Send four squads in after us. Do not under any circumstances interfere with cars or crew, but arrest any colonist you find within half a mile of the package. Hold them for questioning only. And get out here fast." The package skimmed over half an acre of citrus trees and came down at the far edge. I t was a grove of lemon and orange trees. One of the later ramrobot packages had carried the grove's genetically altered ancestors, along with other miracles of terrestrial biological engineering. These trees would not harbor any parasites at all. They would grow anywhere. They would not compete for growth with other, similarly altered citrus trees. Their fruit remained precisely ripe for ten months out of the year, and when they dropped the fruit to release the seeds it was at staggered intervals, so that at any time five trees out of six held ripe fruit. In their grim need for sunlight the trees had spread their leaves and branches into an opaque curtain, so that being in the grove was like being in a virgin forest. Mushrooms grew here, imported unchanged from Earth. Polly had already picked a couple of dozen. If anyone had asked, she had gone into the citrus woods to pick mushrooms. By the time her hypothetical questioner arrived, she would have hidden her camera. IF Considering that the tending season was a month away, a remarkable number of colonists were aboard on Beta Plateau. In woods, on the plains, climbing cliffs for exercise... hundreds of men and women were on excursions and picnics. An alert Implementation officer would have found their distribution improbably even. Too many would have been recognized as Sons of Earth. But the ramrobot package chose to land in Polly's area. She was near the edge of the woods when she heard the thump. She moved swiftly but quietly in that direction. With her black hair and darkly tanned skin she was nearly invisible in the forest dusk. She crawled between two tree trunks, moved behind another and peered out. A large cylindrical object lay on the grass beyond. A string of five parachutes writhed, away before the wind. So thafs what they look likCy she thought. It seemed so small to have come so far... but it must be only a tiny portion of the total ramrobot. The major portion would be on its way home. But it was the package that counted. The contents of a ramrobot package were never trivial. For six months, ever since the maser message arrived, the Sons of Earth had been planning to capture ramrobot capsule ##. At worst they could ransom it to the crew. At best, it might be something to fight with. She almost stepped out of the woods before she saw the cars. At least thirty of them, landing all around the ramrobot package. She stayed hidden. H is soldiers would not have recognized Jesus Pietro Castro's behavior now, but they would have understood it. All but two or three of the men and women around him were purebred crew. Their chauffeurs, including his own, had prudently stayed in their cars. Jesus Pietro Castro was obsequious, deferential and very careful not to joggle an elbow or to step on a toe or even to find himself in somebody's path. As a result his vision was blocked when Millard Parlette, a lineal descendant of the first Captain of the Plancky opened the capsule and reached in. He did see what the ancient held up to the sunlight, the better to examine it. It was a rectangular solid with rounded edges, and it had been packed in a resilient material which was now disintegrating. The bottom half was metal. The top was' a remote descendant of glass, hard as the cheaper steel alloys, more transparent than a window pane. And in the top half floated -- something shapeless. Jesus Pietro felt his mouth fall open. He looked harder. His eyelids squinted, his pupils dilated. Yes, he knew what this was. It was what the maser message had promised six months ago. A great gift, and a great danger. "This must be our most carefully guarded secret," Millard Parlette was saying in a voice like a squeaky door. "No word must ever leak out. If the colonists saw this they'd blow it out of all proportion. We'll have to teU Castro to -- Castro! Where the Mist Demons is Castro?" "Here I am, sir." P olly fitted the camera back in its case and began to work her way deeper into the woods. She'd taken several pictures, and two were telescopic shots of the thing in the glass case. Her eyes hadn't seen it clearly, but the film would show it in detail. She went up a tree with the camera about her neck. The leaves and branches tried to push her back, but she fought through, deeper and deeper into the protecting leaves. When she stopped there was hardly a square inch of her that didn't feel the gentle pressure. It was dark as the caves of Pluto. In a few minutes the police would be all through here. They would wait only until the crew was gone before converging on this area. It was not enough that Polly be invisible. There must be enough leaves to block any infrared light leaving her body. She could hardly blame herself for losing the capsule. The Sons of Earth had been unable to translate the maser message, but the crew had. They knew the capsule's worth. But so did Polly -- now. When the eighteen thousand colonists of Mount Lookitthat knew what was in that capsule... Night came. The Implementation police had collected all the colonists they could find. None of them had seen the capsule after it came down, and all would be released after questioning. Now the police spread out with infrared detectors. There were several spots of random heat in Polly's grove, and all were sprayed with sonic stunners. Polly never knew she'd been hit. When she woke next morning she was relieved to find herself still in her perch. She waited until high noon, then moved towardthe Beta-Gamma Bridge with her camera hidden under the mushrooms. Ill F rom the bell tower of Campbelltown came four thunderous ringing notes. The sonic wave fronts marched out of town in order, crossing fields and roads, diminishing as they came. They overran the mine with hardly a pause. But men looked up, lowering their tools. Matt smiled for the first time that day. Already he could taste cold beer. The bicycle ride from the mine was all downhill. He reached Cziller's as the place was beginning to fill up. He ordered a pitcher, as usual, and downed the first glass without drawing breath. A kind of bliss settled on him, and he poured his second glass carefully down the side to avoid a head. He sat sipping it while more and more freed workmen poured into the taproom. Tomorrow was Saturday. For two days and three nights he could forget the undependable little beasties who earned him his living. Presently an elbow hit him in the neck. He ignored it: a habit his ancestors had brought from crowded Earth and retained. But the second time the elbow polled him he had the glass to his lips. With beer dripping IF wetly down his neck, he turned to deliver a mild reproof. "Sorry," said a short, dark man with straight black hair. He had a thin, expressionless face and the air of a tired clerk. Matt looked more closely. "Hood," he said. "Yes, my name is Hood. But I don't recognize you." The man put a question in his voice. Matt grinned, for he like flamboyant gestures. He wrapped his fingers in his collar and pulled his shirt open to the waist. "Try again," he invited. The clerkish type shied back, and then his eyes caught the tiny scar on Matt's chest. "Keller." "Right," said Matt, and zipped his shirt up. "Keller. I'll be d-damned," said Hood. You could tell somehow that he saved such words for emergencies. "It's been at least seven years. What have you been doing lately?" "Grab that seat." Hood saw his opportunity and was into the stool next to Matt before he occupant was fully out of it. "I've been playing nursemaid to mining worms. And you?" Hood's smile suddenly died. "Er -- you don't still hold that scar against me, do you?" "No!" Matt said with explosive sincerity. "That whole thing was my fault. Anyway it was a long time ago." It was. Matt had been in the eighth grade that fall day when Hood came into Matt's classroom to borrow the pencil sharpener. It was the first time he'd ever seen Hood -- a boy about Matt's size, though obviously a year older, an undersized, very nervous upper classman. Unfortunate ly the teacher was out of the room. Hood had marched the full length of the room, not looking at anyone, sharpened his pencil, and turned to find his escape blocked by a mob of yelling, bounding eighth graders. To Hood, a new arrival at the school, they must have looked like a horde of cannibals. And in the forefront was Matt, using a chair in the style of an animal trainer. Exit Hood, running, wild with terror. He had left the arpened point of his pencil in Matt's chest. It was one of the few times Matt had acted the bully. To him the scar was a badge of shame. "Good," said Hood, his relief showing. "So you're a miner now?" "Right, and regretting it every waking hour. I rue the day Earth sent us those little snakes."" "It must be better than digging the holes yourself." "Think so? Are you ready for a lecture?" "Just a second." Hood drained his glass in a heroic gesture. "Ready." "A mining worm is five inches long and a quarter inch in diameter, mutated from an earthworm. Its grinding orifice is rimmed with little diamond teeth. It ingests metal ores for pleasure, but for food it has to be supplied with blocks of synthetic stuff which is different for each breed of worm -- and there's a breed for every metal. This makes things complicated. We've got six breeds out at the mine site, and I've got to see that each breed always has a food block within reach. 'lt doesnt sound too complicated. Can't they find their own food?" ln theory, sure. In practice, not always. But that's not all. What brea down the ores is a bacterium in the worm's stomach. Then the worm drops metal grains around its food block, and we sweep it up. Now, that bacterium dies very easily. If the bacterium dies, so does the worm, because there's metal ore blocking his intestines. Then the other worms eat his body to recover the ore. Only, five times out of six it's the wrong ore." "The worms can't tell each other apart?" "Flaming right they can't. They eat the wrong metals, they eat the wrong worms, they eat the wrong food blocks, and when they do everything right they still die in ten days. their teeth wear out so fast. They're supposed to breed like mad to compensate, but the plain truth is they don't have time when they're on the job. We have to keep going back to the crew for more." "So they've got you by the gonads." "Sure. They charge what they like." "Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?" Matt looked up, startled. "I'll bet that's just what they're doingl Or too little of the right cues; that'd save them money at the same time. They won't let us grow our own, of course. The -- ' Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn't seen Hood in years. The crew didn't like being called names. 'Time for dinner," said Hood. They finished the beer and went to the town's one restaurant Hood wanted to know what had happened to his old school friends -- or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on Delta. To Matt's surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storjller. He had kept his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their jobs, and both malg enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau. It was not the colonists' money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course. "I know where there's a party," Hood said over coffee. "Are we invited?" "Yes." Matt had nothing planned for the night, but he wanted reassurance. "Party crashers welcome?" "In your case, party crashers solicited. You'll like Harry Kane. He's the host." "I'm sold." T he sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles in back of the house. As they walked around to the front the sun showed again, a glowing red half-disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane's house was just forty IF yards from the edge. They stopped a m#ment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house. It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly. As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin. Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon which guided the growth of the coral and which enclosed the coral's special airborne food. All colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha Plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew. In daylight or darkness, Harry Kane's house was flagrantly atypical. The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to the noise level -- a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth's population did that nit, deven point nine liityears away. During the last four centuries, a man of Barth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt's people had kept some of their habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored. The room was big, and the bar across from the entrance was enormous. Matt shouted, "Harry Kane must do a lot of entertaining." "He does! Come with me, we'll meet himi" Matt caught snatches of conversation as they pushed their way across the room. The party hadn't been going long, he gathered, and several people knew practically nobody; but they all had drinks. They were of all ages, all professions. Hood had spoken true. If a party crasher weren't welcome, he'd never know it, because no one would recognize him as one. The walls were like the outside, a glowing coral pink. The floor, covered with a hairy-looking wall-to-wall rug of mutated grass, was flat except at the walls; no doubt it had been sanded flat after the house was finished and the forming balloon removed. But Matt knew that beneath the rug was not tiles or hardwood, but the ever-present pink coral. T hey reached the bar, no more jostled than need be. Hood leaned across the bar as far as he could, which because of his height was not far, and called, "Harry! Two vodka sodas, and I'd like you to meet -- Dammit, Keller, what's your first name?" "Matt." "Matt Keller. We've known each other since grade school." "Pleasure, Matt," said Harry Kane, and reached over to shake hands. "Glad to see you here. Jay." Harry was almost Matt's height, and considerably broader, and his wide face was dominated by a shapeless nose and an even wider grin. He looked exactly like a bartender. He poured the vodka-sodas into glasses in which water had been pre-frozen. He handed them across. "Enjoy yourselves," he said, and moved down the bar to serve two newcomers. Hood said, "Harry believes the best way to meet everyone right away is to play bartender for the first couple of hours. Afterward he turns the job over to a volunteer." "Good thinking," said Matt. "Is your name Jay?" "Short for Jayhawk. Jayhawk Hood. One of my ancestors was from Kansas. The jayhawk was a symbolic Kansas bird." "Crazy, isn't it, that we needed eight years to learn each others' first names?" At that moment a fragment of the crowd noticed Hood and swept down upon them. Hood had barely time to grin in answer before they were in the midst of introductions. Matt was relieved. He was sure he had seen Harry Kane pass something to "Jay" Hood along with his drink. Manners kept him from asking questions, but it stuck in his curiosity, and he wanted to forget it. The newcomers were four men and a woman. As an individual Matt r membered only the woman. Her name was Laney Mattson. She was around twenty-six years old, five years older than Matt. In bare feet he would have topped her by a scant half inch. But she was wearing double-spikes, and her piled confection of auburn hair made her even taller. Not merely tall, she was big, with wide pronounced hips and deep breasts behind an "M" neckline. She looked prettier than she was, Matt thought; she used cosmetics well. And there was a booming exuberance in her every act, an enjoyment as big as herself. The men were her age and over, in their late twenties. Any of the four would have looked normal dancing with Laney. They were huge. Matt retained of them only a composite impression of a resonant voice and an enveloping handclasp and a great handsome face smiling down from the pink ceiling. Yet he lik them all. He just couldn't tell them apart. Hood surprised him again. Talking along in his dry voice, keeping it raised to an audible bellow, not straining his neck to look anyone in the face. Hood somehow kept control of the conversation. It was he who guided the talk to school days. One of the tall men was moved to speak of a simple trick he'd used to rewire his school's teaching teedee, so that for one day he and his classmates had watched their lessons both upside down and inside out. Matt found himself telling of the specimen bottle of apple juice he'd sneaked into IF the medcheck station and what he did with it. Someone who'd been listening politely from the edge of the circle mentioned that once he'd stolen a car from a picnicking crew family on Beta Plateau. He'd set the autopilot to circle a constant thousand feet beyond the void edge. It had stayed up for five days before dropping into the mist, with scores of Implementation police watching. Matt watched Jay Hood and Laney as they talked. Laney had a long arm draped over Hood's shoulders, and the top of his head reached her chin. They were both talking at once, trampling the taU ends of each others' sentences, racing pellmell through memories and anecdotes and jokes they'd been saving, sharing them with the group but talking for each other. It wasn't love. Matt decided, hough it was like love. It was an mmense satisfaction Hood and Laney elt at knowing each other. Satisaction and pride. It made Matt feel onely. Gradually Matt became aware that aney was wearing a hearing aid. It was so small and so cunningly colored as to be nearly invisible within her ear. Truthfully, Matt couldn't swear that it was there. If Laney needed a hearing aid, it was too bad she couldn't hide it better. For centuries more civilized peoples had been wearing specks of laminated plastic buried in the skin above the mastoid bone. Such things did not exist on Mount Lookitthat. A crew, now, would have had his ears replaced from the organ banks... Glasses went empty, and one of Laney's big escorts came back mth replacements. The little group grew and shrank and split into other groups with the eternal capriciousness of the cocktail party. For a moment Matt and Jay . Hood were left standing alone in a forest of backs and elbows. Hood said, "Want to meet a beautiful girl?" Hood turned to lead the way, and Matt caught a flash of the same odd coloring in his ear that he had noticed in Laney's. Since when had Hood become hard of hearing? It might have been imagination, aided by vodka-sodas. For one thing, the tiny instruments seemed too deeply embedded to be removed. But an item that size could have been just what Harry Kane passed to Jay Hood along with his drink. IV #(Tt's the easiest way to conduct a A raid, sir." Jesus Pietro sat deferentially forward in his chair, hands folded on his desk, the very image of the highly intelligent man dedicated solely to his work. "We'll pick them up outside the house. If they stop coming out, we'll know they've caught on. Then we'll go into the house itself." Behind the mask of deference, Jesus Pietro was annoyed. For the first time in four years he had planned a major raid on the Sons of Earth, and Millard Parlette had picked that night to visit the Hospital. Why tonight? He came only once in two months, thank the Mist Demons. A visit from a crew always upset Jesus Pietro's men. At least Parlette had come to him. Once Parlette had summoned him to his own house, and that had been bad. Here, Jesus Pietro was in his element. Jffis office was practically an extension of his personality. The desk had the shape of a boomerang, enclosing him in an obtuse angle for more available working space. He had three guests' chairs of varying degrees of comfort, for crew and Hospital persoimel and colonist. The office was big and square, but there was a slight curve to the back wall. Where the other walls were cream colored, easy on the eye, the back wall was smoothly polished dark metal. It was part of the outer hull of the Planck, Jesus Pietro's office was right up against the source of half the spiritual strength of Mount Lookitthat, and half the electrical power too: the ship that had brought men to this world. Sitting at his desk, Jesus Pietro felt the power at his back. "Our only problem," he continued smoothly, "is that not all of Kane's guests are involved in the conspiracy. At least half will be deadheads invited for camouflage. Telling them apart will take time." "I see that," said the old man. His voice squeaked. He wore the tall, skeletal look of a Don Quixote, but his eyes held no madness. They were sane and alert. For nearly two hundred years the Hospital had kept his body, brain and mind functioning. Probably even he did not know how much of him had been borrowed from colonists convicted of major crimes. "Why tonight?" he asked. "WTiy not, sir?" Jesus Pierto saw what he was driving at, and his mind raced. Millard Parlette was nobody's fool. The ancient was one of the few responsibility. Most of the thirty thousand crew on Mount Lookitthat preferred to devise ever more complex forms of playing: sports, styles of dress which changed according to half a dozen complex, fluctuating sets of rules, rigid and ridiculous social forms. Parlette preferred to work -- sometimes. He had chosen to rule the Hospital. He was competent and quick; though he appeared rarely, he always seemed to know what was happening; and he was difficult to lie to. Now he said, "Yesterday the ramrobot capsule. Last night your men were scouring the area for spies. Tonight you plan a major raid for the first time in four years. Do you think someone slipped through your fingers?" "No, sir!" But that would not satisfy Parlette. "But in this instance I can afford to cover my bet even when it's a sure thing. If a colonist had news of the ramrobot package, he'd be at Kane's place tonight though demons bar the way."" "I den't approve of gamblings" said Parlette. Jesus Pietro uneasily searched his mind for a suitable answer. "And you have chosen not to gamble. Very good, Castro. Now. What has been done with the ramrobot capsule?" "I think the organ bank people have it unpacked, sir. And the... contents stored. Would you like to see?" "Yes." Jesus Pietro Castro, Head of TmIF pletonentation, the only armed authority on an entire world, rose hastily to his feet to act as guide. If they hurried, he might get away in time to supervise the raid. But there was no polite way to make a crew hurry. H ood had spoken true. Polly Tournquist was beautiful. She was also small and dark and quiet, and Matt definitely wanted to toow her better. Polly had long, soft hair the color of a starless night, direct brown eyes, and a smile that came through even when she was trying to look serious. She looked like someone with a secret. Matt thought. She didn't talk; she listened. "Parapsychological abilities are not a myth," Hood was insisting. "When the Planck left Earth there were all kinds of psionics devices for amplifying them. Telepathy had gotten almost dependable. They -- " "What's 'almost dependable?" "Dependable enough so there were specially trained people to read dolphin minds. Enough so telepaths were called as expert witnesses in murder trials. Enough -- " "All right, all right," said Matt. It was the first time tonight that he had seen Hood worked up. Matt gathered from the attitudes of others that Hood rode this hobby horse often. He asked, "Where are they now, these witches of yours?" "They aren't witches! Look, Kell -- Look, Matt. Every one of those psi powers was tied up a little bit with telepathy. They proved that. Now, do you know how they tested our ancestors before they sent them into space for a long one-way trip?" Someone played straight man. "They had to orbit Earth for awhile." "Yes. Four candidates in a ferry boat, orbiting for one month. No telepath could take that." Polly Toumquist was following the debate like a spectator at a tennis msttch, swinging her shoulders to face whoever was speaking. Her grin widened; her hair swung gently, hypnotically; she was altogether a pleasure to watch. She knew Matt w watching. Occasionally her eyes would flick toward him as if inviting him to share the joke. "Why not, if he's got company?" "The wrong company. Anywhere on Earth a latent telepath is surrounded by tens of thousands of minds. In space he has three. And he can't get away from any of them for a single hour, ior a full month." "How do you know all this, Jay? Books? You damn sure don't have anyone to experiment on." Polly's eyes sparkled as she followed the debate. The lobes of Hood's ears were turning red. Polly's raven hair swung wide... and when it uncovered her right ear for an instant, she was almost certainly wearing a tiny, almost invisible hearing aid. So she did have a secret. And, finally, Matt thought he knew what it was. T hree hundred years ago the Planck had come to Mount Lookitthat, with six crew members to guard fifty passengers in suspended animation. The story was in all the history tapes, of how the circular flying wing had dipped into the atmosphere and flown for hours abijve impenetrable mists which the instSfUments showed to be poisonous and deadly hot. And then a great mass had come over the horizon, a vertical flat-topped mountain forty miles high and hundreds of miles long. It was like a new continent rearing over the impalpable white sea. The crew had gaped, wordless, until Captain Parlette had said, "Lookitthat!" Unwritten, but thoroughly known, was the story of the landing. The passengers had been wakened one at a time, to find themselves living in an instant dictatorship. Those who fought the idea, and they were few, died. When the Arthur Clarke came down forty years later, the pattern was repeated. The situation had not changed but for population growth, not in the last three hundred years. From the beginning there had been a revolutionary group. Its name had changed several times, and Matt had no idea what it was now. He had never known a revolutionary. He had no particular desire to be one. They accomplished nothing except to fill the Hospital's organ banks. How could they, when the crew controlled every weapon and every watt of power on Mount Lookitthat? If this was a nest of rebels then they had worked out a good cover. Many of the merrymakers had no hearing aids, and these seemed to be the ones who didn't know anyone here. Like Matt himself. In the midst of a reasonably genuine open-house brawl, certain people listened to voices only they could hear. Matt let his imagination play. They'd have an escape hatch someIF where, those of the inner circle, and if the police showed they would use it during a perfectly genuine panic. Matt and his brethren of the outer circle would be expendable... "But why should all of these occult powers be connected to mind reading? Does that make sense to you. Jay?" "Certainly. Don't you see that telepathy is a survival trait? When human beings evolved psi powers, they must have evolved telepathy first. All the others came later, because they're less likely to get you out of a bad situation..." Matt dismissed the idea of leaving. Safer? Sure. But here he had, for a time, escaped from his persnickety minin g forms and their venal crewish growers and the multiple other problems that made his life what it was. And his curiosity bump itched madly. He wanted to know how they thought, how they worked, how they protected themselves, what they had in mind. He wanted to know... He wanted to know Polly Tournquist. Now more than ever. She was small and lovely and delicate looking, and every man who had ever looked at her must have wanted to protect her. What was such a girl doing throwing her life away? Really, that was all she was doing. Sooner or later the organ banks would run short of healthy livers or live skin or lengths of large intestine, at a time when there was a dearth of crime on the Plateau. Then Implementation would throw a raid, and Polly would be stripped down to her component parts. Matt had a sudden urge to talk her out of it, get her to leave here with him and move to another part of the Plateau. Would they be able to hide out in a region so limited? Possibly not, but -- But she didn't even know he'd guessed. If she found out, he could die for his knowledge. He'd have to put a failsafe on his mouth. It spoiled things. If Matt could have played the observer, the man who watched and said nodiing... But he wasn't an observer. He was involved now. He knew Jay and liked him; he'd liked Laney Mattson and Harry Kane at sight, and he could have fallen in love with Polly Tournquist. These people were putting their lives on the line. And his, too! And he could do nothing about it. The middle-aged man with the brush cut was still at it. "Jay," he said with a poor imitation of patience, "you're trying to tell us that Earth had psi powers under good control when the founding fathers left. Well, what have they done since? They've made all kinds of progress in biological engineering. Their ships improve constantly. Now the ramrobots go home all by themselves. But what have they done about psi powers? Nothing. Just nothing. And why?" "Because -- " "Because it's all superstition. Witchcraft, Myths." Oh, shut up. Matt thought. It was all cover for what was reaUy going on; and he wasn't a part of that. He dropped back out of the circle, hoping nobody would notice him...  except Polly. Nobody did. He eased toward the bar for a refill. Harry Kane was gone, replaced by a kid somewhat younger than Matt, one who wouldn't last another half hour if he kept sampling his own wares. When Matt tasted his drink it was mostly vodka. And when he turned around, there was Polly, laughing at his puckered face. T he half-dozen suspects were deep'ly asleep along one wall of the patrol wagon. A white-garbed Implementation medic looked up as Jesus Pietro tered. "Oh, there you are, sir. I think these three must be deadheads. The others had mechanisms in their ears." The night outside was as black as always on moonless Mount Lookitthat. Jesus Pietro had left Millard Parlette standing before the glass wall of the organ banks, contemplating... whatever he might be contemplating. Eternal life? Not likely. Even Millard Parlette, one hundred and ninety years old, would die when his central nervous system wore out. You couldn't transplant brains without transplanting memories. What had Parlette been thinking? His expression had been very odd. Jesus Pietro took a suspect's head in his hands and rolled it to look in the ears. The body rolled too, limply, passively. "I don't see anything." "When we tried to remove the mechanism it evaporated. So did the old woman's. This girl still has hers." "Good." He bent to look. Far down in the left ear, too deep for fingers to reach it, was something colored dead black with a rim ,?of fleshy pink. He said, "Get a microphone." The man made a call. Jesus Pietro waited impatiently for someone to bring a mike. Someone eventually did. Jesus Pietro held it against the girl's head and turned the sound up high. Rustling sounds came in an amplified crackle. "Tape it on," said Jesus Pietro. The medic stretched the girl on her side and taped the mike against her head. The thunder of rustling stopped, and the interior of the wagon was full of the deep drumbeat sound of her arteries. "How long since anybody left the meeting?" "That was these two, sir. About twenty minutes." The door in back opened to admit two men and two women, unconscious, on stretchers. One man had a hearing aid. "Obviously they don't have  signal to show they're clear," said Jesus Pietro. "Foolish." Now, if he'd been running the Sons of Earth... Come to think of it, he might send out decoys, expendable members. If the first few didn't come back, he'd send out more, at random intervals, while the leaders escaped. Escaped where? His men had found no exit routes; the sonics reported no tunnels underground. It was seconds before Jesus Pietro noticed that the mike was speaking. The sounds were that low. Quickly he put his ear to the loudspeaker. "Stay until you feel like leaving, then leave. Remember, this is an IF ordinary party, open-house style. However, those of you who have nothing important to say should be gone by midnight. Those who wish to speak to me shuld use the usual channels. Remember not to try to remove the earpieces; they will disintegrate of themselves at six o'clock. Now enjoy yourselves!" "What'd he say?" asked the music. "Nothing important. I wish I could be sure that was Kane." Jesus Pietro nodded briefly at the medic and the two cops. "Keep it up," he said, and stepped out into the night. V # #TX#hy'd you leave? It was just  V getting interesting." "No, it wasn't, and my glass was empty, and anyway I was hoping you'd follow." PoUy laughed. "You must believe in miracles." "True. Why'd you leave?" Embedded in wall-to-wall humanity, drowned in a waterfall of human voices, Polly and Matt nevertheless had a sort of privacy. Manners and lack of interest would prevent anyone from actually listening to them. Hence nobody could hear them; for how could anyone concentrate on two conversations at once? They might have been in a room by themselves, a room with yielding walls and unyielding elbows, a room as small and private as a phone booth. "I think Jay's bugs on psi powers," said Polly. She had not answered his question, which was fine by Matt. He'd expected to escape unnoticed from Hood's debate. He was lucky that way. But Polly coming to join him was new and different, and he enjoyed guessing at her motives. "He talks like that all the time?" "Yes. He thinks if we could only -- " She stopped. Girl with a secret. "Forget Jay. Tell me about yourself." So he talked of mining worms and home life and the school in sector nine. Gamma Plateau; and he mentioned Uncle Matt, who died for being a rebel, but she ignored the bait. And Polly talked about growing up a hundred miles away, near the Colony University, and she described her job at the Delta Retransmitting Power Station, but she never mentioned her hearing aid. "You look like a girl with a secret," Matt said. "I think it must be the smile." She moved closer to him, which was very close, and lowered her voice. "Can you keep a secret?" Matt smiled with one side of his mouth to show that he knew what was coming. She said it anyway. "So can I." And that was that. But she didn't move away. They smiled at each other from a distance of a couple of inches, nose to nose, momentarily content with a silence which, to an earlier man, would have sounded like the center of an air raid. She was lovely, Polly. Her face was a lure and a danger; her figure, small and lithe and woman shaped, rippled with a dancer's grace beneath her loose green jumper. For the moment Matt looked silently into her eyes and felt very good. The moment passed, and they talked small talk. The flow of the crowd carried them half across the room. Once they  pushed back to the bar for refills, then let the crowd caity them again. In the continuous roar there was something hypnotic, something that might have explained why the crowded-room drinking bout was more than half a thousand years old; for monotonous background noise has long been in hypnosis. Time ceased to exist. But there came a moment when Matt knew that he would ask Polly to go home with him, and she would accept. He didn't get the chance. Something changed in Polly's face. She seemed to be listening to someting only she could hear. The hearing aid? He was ready to pretend he hadn't noticed, but he didn't get that chance either. For suddenly Polly was moving away, disappearing into the crowd, not as if she were in any hurry, but as if she remembered something she ought to do, some niggling detail she might as well take care of now. Matt tried to follow her, but the sea of humanity closed behind her. T he hearing aid, he told himself. It called her. But he stayed by the bar, resisting the pressure that would have borne him away. He was getting very drunk now and glad of it. He didn't believe it had been the hearing aid. The whole thing was too familiar. Too many girls had lost interest in him just as suddenly as Polly had. He was more than disappointed. It hurt. The vodka helped to kill the pain. About ten-thirty he went around to the other side of the bar. The kid playing bartender was happily drunk and glad to give up his place. Matt was gravely drunk. He dispensed drinks with dignity, being polite but not obsequious. The crowd was thinning now. This was bedtime for most of Mount Lookitthat. By now the sidewalks in most towns would have been rolled up and put away till dawn. These revolutionists must be a late-rising group. Matt served drinks automatically, but he wasn't having any more himself. The vodka began to run low. And there wasn't anything but vodka, vodka converted from sugar and water and air by one of Earth's educated bacteria. Let it run out. Matt thought viciously. He could watch the riot. He served somebody a vodkagrapefruit, as requested. But the hand with the drink did not vanish to make room for someone else. Slowly Matt realized that the hand belonged to Laney Mattson. "Hi," he said. "Hi. Want a stand-in?" "Guess so." Somebody changed places with him -- one of Laney's tall escorts -- and Laney led him through the thinning ranks to a miraculously unoccupied sofa. Matt sank deep into it. The room would start to whirl if he closed his eyes, "Do you always get this looped?" "No. Something bugging me." "Tell me?" He turned to look at her. Somehow his vodka-blurred eyes saw past Laney's makeup, saw that her mouth was too wide and her green eyes were strangely large. But she wore a IF slight smile of sympathetic curiosity. "Ever see a twenty-one-year-old virgin male?" He squinted to try to read her reaction. The comers of Laney's mouth twisted strangely. "No." She was trying not to laugh, he realized. He turned away. She askei "Lack of interest?" "No! Hellno." "Then what?" "She forgets me." Matt felt himself sobering with time and the effort of answering. "All of a sudden, the girl I'm chasing just -- " he gestured a little wildly -- "forgets I'm around. I don't know why." "Stand up." "Humph?" He felt her hand on his arm, pulling. He stood up. The room spun, and he realized that he wasn't sobering; he'd just felt steadier sitting down. He followed the pull of her arm, relieved that he didn't fall down. The next thing he knew, everything was pitch black. "Where are we?" No answer. He felt hands pull his shirt apart, hands with small sharp nails which caught in his chest hair. Then his pants dropped. "So this is it," he said, in a tone of vast surprise. It sounded so damn silly that he wanted to cringe. "Don't panic," said Laney. "Mist Demons, you're nervous! Come here. Don't trip over anything." He managed to walk out of his pants without falling. His knees bunyjed something. "Fall face down," Laney commanded, and he did. He was face down on an airfoam mattress, rigidly tense. Hands that were stronger than they ought to be dug into the muscles of his neck and shoulders, kneading them like' dough. It felt wonderful. He lay there with his arms out like a swan diver, going utterly limp as knuckles ran down the sides of his vertebrae, as slender fingers pulled each separate tendon into a new shape. When he was good and ready he turned over and reached out. his left was a stack of photos a foot high. Before him, three photos, obviously candid shots. Jesus Pietro spread them out and looked them over. He wrote a name under one of them. The others rang no bell, so he shuffled them and put them on the big stack. Then he stood up and stretched. "Match these with the suspects we've already collected," he told an aide. The man saluted, picked up the stack and left the flying office, moving toward the patrol wagons. Jesus Pietro followed him out. Almost half of Harry Kane's guests were now in patrol wagons. The photographs had been taken as they entered the front door earlier tonight. Jesus Pietro, with the phenomenal memory, had identified a good number of them. The night was cool and dark. A stiff breeze blew across the Plateau, carrying a smell of rain. Rain. Jesus Pietro looked up to see that half the sky was raggedly blotted out. He could imagine trying to conduct a raid in a pouring rainstorm. He didn't like the idea. Back in his office, he turned the intercom to all-channeL 'Now hear this, he said conversationally. "Phase two is on. Now." #T s everyone that nervous?" JL Laney chuckled softly. Now she could laugh, all she wanted, if she wanted. "Not that nervous. I think everyone must be a little afraid the first time." "You?" "Sure. But Ben handled it right. Good man, Ben." "Where is he now?" Matt felt a mild gratitude toward Ben. "He's -- he' gone." Her tone told him to drop it. Matt guessed he'd been caught wearing a hearing aid or sometlg. "Mind if I turn on a light?" "If you can find a switch," said Laney, "you can turn it on." She didn't expect him to, not in pitch blackness in a strange room, but he did. He felt incredibly sober, and incredibly peaceful. He ran his eyes over her lying next to him, seeing the angled ruin of her sculptured hairdo, remembering the touch of smooth warm skin, knowing he could touch her again at will. It was a power he'd never felt before. He said, "Very nice." "Makeup smeared over forgettable face." "Unforgettable face." It was true, now. "No makeup over unforgettable body." "I should wear a mask, no clothes." "You'd get more attention than you'd like." She laughed hugely, and he rested his ear over her navel to enjoy the earthquake ripple of abdominal muscles. The rain came suddenly, beating against the thick coral walls. They stopped talking to listen. Suddenly Laney dug her fingers into his arm and whispered. "Raid." She means Rain, Matt thought, turning to look at her. She was terrified, her eyes and nostrils and mouth all distended. She meant Raid! "You've got a way out, don't you?" Laney shook her head. She was listening to unheard voices through the hearing aid. "But you must have a way out. Don't worry, I don't want to know about it. I'm in no danger." Lany looked startled, and he said, "Sure, I noticed the hearing aids. But it's none of my business." "Yes it is. Matt. You were invited here so we could get a look at you. All of us bring outsiders occasionally. Some get invited to join." "Oh." "I told the truth. There's no way out. Implementation has ways of finding tunnels. But there is a hiding place." "Good." "We can't reach it. Implementation is already in the house. They've filled it with sleepy gas. It should be seeping aroimd the door any minute." "The windows?" "They'll be waiting for us." "We can try." "Okay." She was on her feet and getting into her dress. Nothing else. Matt wasted not even that much time. He swung a great marble ash tray against a window and followed it through, thanking the Mist Demons IF VI that Mount Lookitthat couldn't make unbreakable glass. Two pairs of hands closed on to arms before his feet cleared the window. Matt kicked out and heard somebody say Whuff! In the comer of his eye Laney cleared the window and was running. Good, he'd hold their attention for her. He jerked at the grip on his arms. A meaty hand weighing a full ton smashed across to jaw. His knees buckled. A light shone in his eyes, and he shrank back. The light passed. Matt made one last frantic attempt to jerk loose and felt one arm come free. He swung it full around. The elbow smacked solidly into yielding meat and bone: an unmistakable, unforgettable sensation. And he was free, and he was running. Just once in his life he had hit someone like that. From the feel of it he must have smashed the man's nose all over his face. If Implementation caught him now...! Wet, slippery, treacherous grass underfoot. Once he stepped on a smooth wet rock and went skidding across the grass on cheek and shoulder. Twice a spotlight found him, and each time he hit the grass and lay where he was, looking back to see where the light went. When it pointed elsewhere he ran again. The rain must have blurred the lights and the eyes behind him; the rain and the luck of Matt Keller. Lightning flickered about him, but whether it helped or hurt him he couldn't begin to say. Even when he was sure he was free, he continued to run. imshed. Millard Parlette pushed to chair back and viewed the typewriter with satisfaction. His spe lay on to desk, last page on top, back-to-front. He picked up the stack of paper with long, knobby fingers and quickly shuffled it into correct order. Record it now? No Tomorrow morning. Sleep on it tonight, see if Vve left anything out. I dont have to deliver it until day after tomorrow. Plenty of time to record the speech in to own voice, then play it over and over until he'd learned it by heart. But it had to go over. The crew had to be made to understand the issues. For too long they had lived the lives of a divinely ordained ruling class. If they couldn't adapt -- Even his own descendants...  they didn't talk politics often; and when they did, Millard Parlette noticed that they talked in terms, not of Power, but of Rights. And the Parlettes were not typical. By now Millard Parlette could claim a veritable army of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so forth; yet he made every effort to see them all as often as possible. Those who had succumbed to the prevalent crewish tastes -- to eldritch styles of dress, elegantly worded slander and all the other games the crew used to cloak their humdrum reality -- had done so in spite of Millard Parlette. The average crew was utterly dependant on the fact that he was a crew. And if the power balance should shift? They'd be lost. For a time they'd be living in a false universe, under wrong assumptions; and in that time they would be destroyed. What chance... what chance that they would listen to an old man from a dead generation? No. He was just tired. Millard Parlette dropped the speech on his desk, stood up and left the study. At least he would force them to listen. By order of the Council, at two o'clock Sunday every pure-blooded crew on the planet would be in front of his teevee set. If he could put across... he must. They had to understand the mixed blessing of Ramrobot ##. R ain filled the coral house with an incessant drumming. Only Implementation police moved within and without. The last unconscious colonist was on his way out the door on a stretcher as Major Jansen entered. He found Jesus Pietro lounging in an easy chair in thp living room. He put the handful of photos beside him. "What's this supposed to be?" "These are the ones we haven't caught yet, sir." Jesus Pietro pulled himself erect, conscious once again of his soaked uniform. "How did they get past you?" "I can't imagine, sir. Nobody escaped after he was spotted." "No secret tunnels. The echo sounders would have found them. Mpf." Jesus Pietro shuffled rapidly through the photos. Most had names beneath the faces, names Jesus Pietro had remembered and jotted down earlier tonight "This is the core," he said. "We'll wipe out this branch of the Sons of Earth if we can find these. Where are they?" The aide was silent. He knew the question was rhetorical. The Head was leaning back with his eyes on the ceiling. Where were they? There were no tunnels out. They had not left underground. They hadn't run away. They would have been stopped, or if not stopped, seen. Unless there were traitors in Implementation. But there weren't. Period. Could they have reached the void edge? No, that was better guarded than the rest of the grounds. Rebels had a deplorable tendency to go off the edge when cornered. An aircar? Colonists wouldn't have an aircar, not legally, and none had been reported stolen recently. But Jesus Pietro had always been convinced that at least one crew was involved in the Sons of Earth. He had no proof, no suspect; but his studies of history showed that a revolution always moves down from the top of a society's structure. A crew might have supplied them with an escape car. TTiey'd have been seen but not stopped. No Implementation officer would halt a car... "Jansen, find out if any cars were sighted during the raid. If there were, let me know when, how many, and descriptions." Major Jansen left without showing his surprise at the peculiar order he'd just received. IF An officer had found the housecleaner nest, a niche in the south wall, near the floor. The man reached in and carefully removed two unconscious adult housecleaners and four pups, put them on the floor, reached in to remove the nest and the food dish. The niche would have to be searched. Jesus Pietro's clothes dried slowly, in wrinkles. He sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his belly. Presently he opened his eyes, sighed and frowned slightly. Jesus Pietro, this is a very strange house. Yes. Almost garishly colonist. (Overtones of disgust.) Jesus Pietro looked at the pink coral walls, the flat-sanded floor which curved up at the edge of the rug to join the walls. Not a bad effect, if a woman were living here. But Harry Kane was a bachelor. How much would you say a house like this cost?" Oh, about a thousand stars, not including furnishings. Furnishings would cost twice that. Rugs, ninety stars if you bought one and let it spread. Two housecleaners, mated, fifty stars. And how much to put a basement under such a house? Mist Demons, what an idea! Basements have to be dug by hand, by human beings! It'd cost twenty thousand stars easily. You could build a school for that. Who would ever think of digging a basement under an architectural coral house? Who indeed? Jesus Pietro stepped briskly to the door. "Major Jansen!" T he sequel was likely to be messy. Jesus Pietro retired to the flying office while a team went in with an echo sounder. Yes, there was a large open space under the house. Major Chin wanted to find the entrance, but that might take all night,' and the sounds might warn the colonists. Jesus Pietro sat firmly on his curiosity and ordered explosives. It was messy. The rebels had put together me ingenious devices from materials anyone would have considered harmless. Two men died be fore sleepy gas grenades could be used. When all was quiet, Jesus Pietro followed the demolition teams into the basement. They found one of the unconscious rebels leaning on a deadman switch. They traced the leads to a homemade bomb big enough to blow house and basement to bits. While they disconnected the bomb, Jesus Pietro studied the man, making a mental note to ask him if he'd chickened out. He'd found that they often did. Behind one wall was a car, a three-year-old four-seater model with a bad scrape on the ground-effect skirt. Jesus Pietro could see no way to get it out of the basement, and neither could anyone else. The house must have been formed over it. Of course, thought Jesus Pietro; they dug the basement, then grew the house over it. He had his men cut away the wall so that the car could be removed later, if it was thought worthwhile. They'd practically have to remove the house. There was a flight of steps with a trapdoor at the top. Jesus Pietro, examining the small bomb under the trapdoor, congratulated himself (pointedly, in Major Chin's hearing) on not allowing Major Chin to search for the entrance. He might have found it Someone removed the bomb and opened the trapdoor. Above was the living room. An asymmetrical section of mutated grass rug had reluctantly tom away and come up with the door. When the door was lowered it would grow back within twenty minutes. After the dead and unconscious had been filed away in patrol wagons, Jesus Pietro walked among them, comparing the faces with his final stack of photos. He was elated. With the exception of one man, he had collected Harry Kane and his entire guest list. The organ banks would be supplied for years. Not only would the crew have a full supply, which they always did anyway, but there would be spare parts for exceptional servants of the regime, Ue,, for civil sgprants such as Jesus Pietro and his "men. Even the colonists would benefit. It was not at all unusual for the Hospital to treat a sick but deserving colonist, if the medical supplies could stand it. The Hospital treated everyone they could. It reminded the colonists that the crew ruled in their name, and had their interests at heart. And the Sons of Earth was dead. AlP-but one man, and from his picture he wasn't old enough to be dangerous. Nonetheless Jesus Pietro had his picture tacked to the Hospital bulletin boards and sent a copy to the newscast station with the warning that he was wanted for questioning. It was not until dawn, when he was settling down to deep, that he remembered who belong to that face. Matthew Keller's nephew, six years older than when he'd pulled that cider trick. He looked just like his uncle. T he rain stopped shortly before dawn, but Matt didn't know it. Sheltered from the rain by a cliff and by a thick clump of watershed trees, he slept on. The cliff was the Beta-Gamma cliff. He'd fetched up against it sometime last night, dizzy and bruised and wet and winded. He could have collapsed there or tried running parallel to the cliff. He chose to collapse. If Implementation had found him he'd never have wakened, and he knew it as he went to sleep. He had been too exhausted to care. He woke about ten with a ferocious headache. Every separate muscle hurt from running and from sleeping on bare ground. His tongue felt like the entire Implementation police force had marched over it in sweat socks. He stayed on his back, looking up into the dark trees his ancestors had called pines and tried to remember. So much to begin and end in one night. The people seemed to crowd around him. Hood, Laney, the four tall men, the kid who drank behind the bar, the laughing man who stole crew cars, Polly, Harry Kane and a forest of anonymous elbows and shouting voices. IF All gone. The man whose scar he wore. The woman who'd left him flat. The genial mastermind-bartender. And Laney! How could he have lost Laney?... They were gone. Over the next few years they might reappear in the form of eyes, lengths of artery and vein, grafts of hairbearing scalp... By now the police would be looking for Matt himself. He sat up, and every muscle screamed. He was naked. Implementation must have found his clothes in Laney's room. Could they match the clothes to him? And if they couldn't, they'd still wonder how a man came to be wandering stark naked in open countryside. On the pedwalks of Earth there were licensed nudists, and on Wunderland you didn't need a license; but on the Plateau there was no substitute for clothing. He couldn't turn himself in. By now he'd never prove he wasn't a rebel. He'd have to get clothes somehow and hope they weren't looking for him already. He surged to his feet, and it hit him again. Laney, Laney in the dark, Laney looking at him in the lamplit bed. Polly, the girl with the secret. Hood, first name Jayhawk. A wave of sickness caught him, and he doubled over, retching. He stopped the spasms by sheer will power. His skuU was a throbbing drum. He straightened and walked to the edge of the watershed forest. To right and left the watershed trees stretched along the base of the Beta-Gamma cliff. Beta Plateau above him, unreachable except by the bridge, which must be miles to the left Before him, a wide meadow with a few grazing goats. Beyond houses. Houses in allr directions, thickly clustered. His own was perhaps four miles away. He'd never reach it without being stopped. How about Harry's house? Laney had said there was a hiding place. And the ones who left before the raid... some of them might have returned. They could help him. But would they? He'd have to try it He might reach Harry's house, crawling through the grass. The luck of Matt Keller might hold that far. He'd never reach his own. H is luck held: the strange luck that seemed to hide Matt KeUer when he didn't want to be noticed. He reached the house two hours later. His knees and belly were green and itchy from the grass. The grounds about the house were solidly spread with wheel tracks. All of Implementation must have been in on the raid. Matt saw no guards, but he went carefully in case they were inside. Implementation guards or rebel guards, he could still be shot. Though a guard might hesitate to shoot him; he'd want to ask questions first. Like: "Where's your pants, buddy?" Nobody was inside. A dead or sleeping family of housecleaners lay against one w, beneath their looted nest. Dead, probably, or drugged. Housecleaners hated tight; they did their work at night. The rug showed a gaping hole that reached down through indoor grass and architectural coral to a well furnished hole in the ground. The living room walls were spotted widi explosion marks and mercy-bullet streaks. So was the basement, when Matt climbed down to look. The basement was empty of men and nearly empty of equipment. Scars showed where heavy machinery had stood, more scars where it had been tom loose or burned loose. There were doors, foxir of them, all crude looking and all burned open. One led to a kitchen; two opened on empty storerooms. One whole wall lay on its side, but the piece of equipment beyond was intact. The hole left by the fallen wall might have been big enough to remove it; but certainly the hole in die living room floor was not. It was a car, a flying car of the type used by all crew families. Matt had never before seen one close up. There it was beyond the broken wall, with no possible way to get it out. What in blazes had Harry Kane wanted with a car that coiridn't be flown? Perhaps this was what had brought on the raid. Cars were strictly denied to colonists. The military uses of a flying car are obvious. But why wasn't its theft noticed earlier? The car must have been here when the' house was built. Dimly Matt remembered a story he'd heard last night. Something about a stolen car set to circle the Plateau until the fuel ran out. No doubt the car had fallen in the mist, watched by furious, impotent crew. But -- suppose he'd heard only the official version? Suppose the fuel had not run out; suppose the car had dipped into the mist, circled below the Plateau, and come up where Harry Kane could bury it m a hidden basement? Probably he'd never know. T he showers were still running. Matt was shivering badly when he stepped in. The hot water thawed him instantly. He let the water pour heavily down on the back of his neck, washing the grass stains and dirt and old sweat from him as it ran in streams to his feet. Life was bearable. With all its horrors and all its failures, life was bearable where there were hot showers. He thought of something then, and metaphorically his ears pricked up. The raid had been so big. Implementation had grabbed everyone at the party. From the number of tracks. It was likely they had taken even those who had left early, putting them to sleep one by one and two by two as they turned toward home. They must have returned to the Hospital with close to two hundred prisoners. Some were innocent. Matt knew that. And Implementation was usually fair about convictions. Trials were always closed, and only the results were ever published, but Implementation usually preferred not to convict the innocent. Suspects had returned from the Hospital. But that wouldn't take long. The police could simply release everyone without a hearing aid, with notations to keep an eye on them in future. He who wore a hearing aid was guilty. IF But it would take time to reduce around a hundred convicted rebels to their component parts. The odds were that Laney, Hood, and Polly were still alive. Certainly they could not all be dead by this time. Matt stepped out of the shower and began looking for clothes. He found a closet which must have belonged to Harry Kane, for the shorts were too wide and the shirts were too short... He dreSsed anyway, pullwrinkles with the belt. At a distance he'd pass. The clothes problem was as nothing, now. The problem he faced was much worse. He had no idea how long it took to take a man apart and store him away; though he could guess that it would take a long time to do it right. He didn't know whether Implementation, in the person of the dread Castro, would want to question the rebels first. But he did know that every minute he waited reduced the odds that each of the partygoers was still alive. Right now the odds were good. Matt Keller would go through life knowing that he had passed up his chance to save them. But, he reminded himself, it wasn't really a chance. He had no way to reach Alpha Plateau without being shot. He'd have to cross two guarded bridges. The noonday sun shown through clean air on a clean, ordered world... in contrast to e gutted coral shell behind him. Matt hesitated on the doorstep, then resolutely turned back te the jagged hole in Harry Kane's living room. Ht must know that it was hqppssible. The basement was the heart of the rebel stronghold -- a heart which had failed. If Implementation had overlooked a single weapon -- T here were no weapons in the car, but he found an interesting assortment of scars. Ripped upholstery showed bolts attached to the exposed metal walls; but the bolts had been cut or tom out. Matt found six places which must have been gun mounts. A bin in back might have held makeshift hand grenades. Or sandwiches; Matt couldn't tell. Implementation had taken anything that might have been a weapon, but they didn't seem to have harmed the car. Presumably they would come back and dig it out some day, if they thought it worth the effort. He got in and looked at the dashboard, but it didn't tell him anything. He'd never seen a car dashboard. There had been a cover over it, padlocked, but the padlock lay broken on the floor and the cover was loose. Harry's padlock? Or the original owners? He sat in the unfamiliar vehicle, would mean giving up. When he noticed a button labeled "Start", he pished it. He never heard the purr of the motor starting. The blast made him spasm like a galvanized frog. It came all in one burst, like the sound of a gunshot as heard by a fly sitting in the barrel. Harry must have set something to blow up the house! But no, he was U! still alive. And there was daylight pouring in on him. Daylight Four feet of earth had disappeared from above him. A wall of the house was in his field of vision. It leaned. Harry Kane must have been a genius with shaped-charge explosives. Or known one. Come to that Matt could have done the job for him. The mining worms didn't do all his work. Daylight. And the motor was running. He could hear an almost soundless hum, now that his ears had recovered from the blast. If he flew the car straight up... He'd have had to cross two guarded bridges to reach Alpha Plateau. Now he could fly there, if he could learn to fly before the car killed him. Or, he could go home. He wouldn't be noticed, despite his illfitting clothes. Colonists tended to mind their own business, leaving it to the crew and Implementation to maintain order. He'd change clothes, bum these, and who would know or ask where he'd been over the weekend? Matt sighed and examined the dashboard again. He couldn't quit now. Later, maybe, when he crashed the car, or when they stopped him in the air. Not now. The blast that had freed his path was an omen, one he couldn't ignore. Let's see. Four levers set at zero. "Fans. #-#, #-#, #-#, #-#." Why would those little levers be set to control the fans in pairs? He pulled one toward him. Nothing. A small bar with three notches. "Neutral. Ground. Air." Set on Neutral. He moved it to Ground. Nothing. If he'd had the "Ground altitude" set for the number of inches he wanted, the fans woiild have started. But he didn't know that. He tried Air. The car tried to flop over on its back. H e was in the air before he had it quite figured out. In desperation he pulled all the Fan throttles full out and tried to keep the car from rolling over by pushing each one in a little at a time. The ground dwindled until the sheep of Beta Plateau were white flecks and the houses of Gamma were tiny squares. Finally the car jbegan to settle down. Not that he could relax for a moment. Fans number #, #, #, # were left front, right front, left rear, right rear. Dropping lever #-# dropped the front of the car; #-#, the back; #-#, the left side; #-#, the right side. He had the car upright, and he began to think he had the knack of it. But how to go forward? There were Attitude and Rotation dials, but they didn't do anything. He didn't dare touch the switch with the complicated three-syllable word on it. But... suppose he tilted the car forward? Depress the #-# throttle. He did, just a little. The car rotated slowly forward. Then faster! He pulled the lever out hard. The rotation slowed and stopped when the Plateau stood before his face like a vertical wall. Before the wall could strike him in the face he got the car righted, waited until his nerves stopped jumping, then tried it again. This time he pushed the #-# lever in a little, waited three seconds, pulled it out hard. It worked, after a fashion. The car began to move forward with its nose dipped. Luckily he was facing Alpha Plateau. Otherwise he would have had to fly backward, and that would have made him conspicuous. He didn't know how to turn around. He was going pretty fast. He went even faster when he found a knob labeled "Slats". The car also started to drop. Matt remembered the Venetian-blind arrangements under the four fans. He left the slats where they were, leveled the car's attitude. It must have been right, because the car kept moving forward. It was hardly wobbling at all. And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known. The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed flashes of blue within the steep channel it had carved for itself. Cliff and river terminated at the void edge to the left; and the murmur of the river's fall came through the cockpit plastic. To the right was a land of endless jagged, tilted plains, softening and blurring in the blue distance. Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn't know just what it looked like, but he was sure he'd recognize the huge hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They wouldn't bother him. He hadn't decided how close he would get to the Hospital before landing; evem crew mit not be permitted within a certain distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he was a crew. It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and he was flying the car as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-yearold crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt. But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without flipping the "Gyroscope" switch. vn A s usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed. As usual. Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands and answer questions. "Did you get the prisoners put away all right?" "Yes, sir, in the Vivarium. All but three. We didn't have room for them aU." "And they're in the organ banks?" "Yes, sir." Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. "Let's hope they didn't know anything important. What about the deadheads?" "We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose. Fortunately we finished before six o'clock, when the mikes evaporated." IF "Evaporated, forsoothl Nothing left?" "Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues." "It's not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources," said Jesus Pietro. After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he abruptly wanted to know: "What about Keller?" "Who, sir?" "The one that got away." And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, "No reports from the colonist areas. Nobody's volunteered to turn him in. He hasn't tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows professionally. None of the police in on the raid recognize his face. None will admit that someone got past him." More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee. Then: "See to it that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to know if anyone saw the landing yesterday." "One of the girls was carrying photos, sir. Of package number three. They must have been taken with a scopic lens." "Oh?" For a moment Jesus Pietro's thoughts showed clear behind a glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out -- "I don't know why you couldn't tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it. No, wait a minute," he called as Jansen turned to the door. "One more thing. There may be basements that we don't know about. Detail a couple of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta Plateaus." "Yes sir. And is this priority?" "No, no, no. The vivarium's two deep already. Tell them to take their time." The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up, listened, then' demanded, "Well, why call here? Hold on." With a touch of derision he reported, "A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless manner. Naturally they had to call you personally." "Now why the -- Mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane's basement?" "I'll ask." He did. "It is, sir." "I should have known there'd be a way to get it out of the basement. Tell them to bring it down." G eologists dont let's have a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet's skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface. It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat's atmosphere. And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort Generally rivers and streams ran south, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls, the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms. Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia. The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to sjetde lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one's peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation. So Alpha Plateau was crowded. What Matt saw below him was all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist's home. Two or three were as large as Matt's old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style. None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories taU. Someday there would be skyscrapers, if the crew kept breeding... But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead. M att was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer; and he was beginning to appreciate its size. Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis. Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circidar flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity, and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons. IF They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships hulls. Some would be power stations, others -- he couldn't guess. Flat barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest reached across the rock to touch the Hospital. All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had Implementation left that one stretch of trees? A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic. A sonic stun beam! For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake. It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the #-# throttle all the way in. The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the" void edge of Alpha Plateau. The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn't move. The car dropped, sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void. The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but a twitch. Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He thou he knew why. He was outradng the police because they did not care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge. That was a game for the desperate. Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to see the cars dropping after him. They must know they'd lost him, but they wanted to see him fall. How far down was the mist? He'd never known. MUes, certainly. Tens of miles? They'd hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist. He couldn't go back to the Plateau; they'd stun him, wait, and scrape up what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go now. Matt flipped the car over on its back. T he police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight, upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone. "Hell of a way to go," someone said. It went over the intercom, and there were grunts of agreement. The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite. Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau, to prove their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dropping his car with the fans set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses whistling around the door, before he had to stop. He was lucky enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero. Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come apart in the air! But that wouldn't occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery. Earth's strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs which did not have to be made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators, razors or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines, and the crew was wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery as there was was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was a bicycle. A car wasn't meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done it. He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The faster he fell, the further he'd leave them behind. At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about one and a half Mount Lookitthat gravitities. The wind rose to a scream, even through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something unusual, but he didn't know how unusual. When the wind resistance started to pull him out of his seat he snatched at the arms and looked frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened. They reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose. It was getting dark. Even the sky beneath his feet was darkening; and the police cars were not to be seen. Very well. Matt pushed the fan throttles down to the Idle notches. T he blood rushing to his head threatened to choke him. He turned the car rightside up. Pressure jammed him deep in his seat with a force no man had felt since the bruteforce chemical rockets; but he could stand it now. What he couldn't endure was the heat. And the pain in his ears. And the taste of the air. He pulled the throttles out again. He wanted to stop fast. Come to that, would he know when he stopped? This around him was not a wispy kind of mist, but a dark blur giving no indication of his velocity. From above the mist was IF white; from below black. Being lost down here would be horrible. At least he knew which way was up. It was fractionally lighter in that direction. The air tasted like flaming molasses. He had the throttles all the way out. Still the gas crept in. Matt pulled his shirt over his mouth and tried to breathe through that. No good. Something like a black wall emerged from the mist-blur, and he tilted the car in time to avoid crashing against the side of Mount Lookitthat. He stayed near the black wall, watching it rush past him. He'd be harder to see in the shadow of the void edge. The mist disappeared. He shot upward through sparkling sunlight. When he thought he was good and clear of the foul mist, and when he couldn't stand to breathe hot poison for another second, he put the window down. The car whipped to the side and tried to turn over. A hurricane roared through the cabin. It was hot and thick and soupy, that hurricane, but it could be breathed. He saw the edge of the Plateau above him, and he pushed the throttles in a little to slow down. His stomach turned a filp-flop. For the first time since he'd gotten into the car, he had time to be sick. His stomach tried to turn over, his head was splitting from the sudden changes in pressure, and the Implementation sonics were having their revenge in twitching, jerking muscles. He kept the car more or less upright until the edge of the Plateau came level with him. There was a stone wall along the edge here. He eased the car sideways, eased it back when he was over the wall. tilted it by guess and hope imtil he was motionless in the air, then let it drop. The car fell about four feet. Matt opened the door but stopped himself from getting out. What he really wanted to do was faint; but he'd left the fans idling. He found the "Neutral... Ground... Air" toggle and shoved it forward without much care. He was tired and sick and he wanted to lie down. i The toggle fell in the "Ground" slot. Mat stumbled out the door... stumbled because the car was rising. It rose four inches off the ground and began to slide. During his experimenting Matt must have set the ground altitude, so that the car was now a ground-effect vehicle. It slid away from him as he tried to reach for it. He watched on hands and knees as it glided away across the uneven ground, bounced against the wall and away, against the wall and away. It circled the end of the wall and went over the edge. Matt flopped on his back and closed his eyes. He didn't care if he never saw a car again. The motion sickness, the sonic aftereffects, the poisoned air he'd breathed, the pressure changes... they gripped him hard, and he wanted to die. Then, by stages, they began to let go. Nobody found him there. A house was nearby, but it had a vacant look. After some time Matt sat up and took stock of himself. His throat hurt. There was a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth. He was still on Alpha Plateau. Only crew would go to the trouble of building walls along a void edge. So he was committed. Without a car he could no more leave Alpha Plateau than he could have arrived here in the first place. But the house was architectural coral. Bigger than anything he was used to, it was still coral. Which meant that it should have been deserted about forty years. He'd have to risk it. He needed cover. There were no trees nearby, and trees were dangerous to hide in; they would probably be fruit trees, and someone might come applepicking. Matt got up and moved toward the house. T he Hospital was the control nexus of a world. It was not a large world, and the settled region totalled a mere # # square miles; but that region needed a lot of control. It also required considerable electricity, enormous quantities of water to be moved up from the Long Fall River, and a deal of medical attention. The Hospital was big and complex and diversified. Two fifty-six-man spacecraft were its east and west comers. Since the spacecraft were hollow cylinders with the airlocks opening to the inside (to the Attic, as that inner space had been called when the rotating ships were between stars and the ship's axis was Up), the corridors in that region were twisted and mazelike and hard to navigate. So the young man in Jesus Pietro's office had no idea where he was. Even if he'd managed to leave the office unguarded he'd have been hopelessly lost. And he knew it. That was all to the good. "You were on the dead-man switch," said Jesus Pietro. The man nodded. His sandy hair was cut in the old Belter style, copied from the even older Mohawk. There were shadows under his eyes as if from lack of sleep, and the lie was borne out by a slump of utter depression; though he had been sleeping since his capture in Harry Kane's basement. "You funked it," Jesus Pietro accused. "You arranged to fall across the switch so that it wouldn't go off." The man looked up. Naked rage was in his face. He made no move, for there was nothing he could do. "Don't be ashamed. The dead man switch is an old trick. It almost never gets used in practice. The man in charge is too likely to change his mind at the last second. It's a -- " "I fully expected to wake up dead!" the man shouted. " -- natural reaction. It takes a psychotic to commit suicide. No, don't tell me all about it. I'm not interested. I want to hear about the car in your basement." "You think I'm a coward, do you?" "That's an ugly word." "# stole that car." "Did you?" The skeptical tone was genuine. Jesus Pietro did not believe him. "Then perhaps you can tell me why the theft went unnoticed," TTie man told him. He talked eargerly, demanding that Jesus Pietro recognize his courage. Why not? IF There was nobody left to betray. He weuld live as long as Jesus Pietro Castro was interested in him, and far three minutes longer. The organ bank operating room was three minutes' walk away. Jesus Pietro listened politely. Yes, he remembered the car that had tauntingly circled the Plateau for five days. The young crew owner had given him hell for letting it happen. The man had even suggested -- demanded -- that one af Castro's men drop on the car from above, climb into the cockpit and bring it back. Jesus Pietro's patience had given out, and he had risked his life by politely offering to help the young man perform the feat. "So we buried it at the same time we built the basement," the prisoner finished. "Then we let the house grow over it. We had great plans." He sagged into his former position of despair, but went on talking, mumbling. "There were gun mounts. Bins for bombs. We stole a sonic stunner and mounted it in the rear window. Now nobody'll ever use them." "The car was used." "What?" "This afternoon. Keller escaped us last night. He returned to Kane's home this morning, took the car and flew it nearly to the Hospital before we stopped him. The Mist Demons know what he .thought he was doing." "Great. 'The last flight of -- ' We never got around to naming it. Our air force. Our glorious air force. Who did you say?" "Keller. Matthew Leigh Keller." "I don't know him. What would he be doing with my car?" "Don"t play games. You are not protecting anyone. We drove him off the edge. Five ten, age twenty-one, hair brown, eyes blue -- " "I tell you I never met him." "Good-by." Jesus Pietro pushed a button under his desk. The door opened. "Wait a minute. Now, wait -- " Lying, Jesus Pietro thought, after the man was gone. Probably lied about the car too. Somewhere in the vivarium the man who really took the car waited to be questioned. If it was stolen. It could equally well have been supplied by a crew member, by Jesus Pietro's hypothetical traitor. He had often wondered why the crew would not supply him with truth drugs. They would have been easy to manufacture from instructions in the ship's libraries. Millard Parlette, in a mellow mood, had once tried to explain. "We own their bodies," he had said. "We take them apart on the slightest pretext, and if they manage to die a natural death we get them anyway, what we can save. Aren't the poor bastards at least entitled to the privacy of their own minds?" It seemed a peculiar bleedingheart attitude, coming from a man whose very life depended on the organ banks. But others apparently felt the same. If Jesus Pietro wanted his questions answered, he must depend on his own empirical brand of psychology. P olly Tournquist. Age: twenty. Height: five one. Weight: seventy-five. She wore a crumpled party dress in the colonist style. In Jesus Pietro's eyes it did notfahig for her. She was small and brown and, compared to most of the women Jesus Pietro met socially, muscular. They were work muscles, not tennis muscles. Traces of callous marred her hands. Her hair, worn straight back, had a slight natural curl to it but no trace of style. Had she been raised as crew girls were raised, had she access to cosmetics available on Alpha Plateau, die would have known how to be beautiful. Then she wouldn't have been bad at aU, once the callous left her hands and cosmetic treatment smoothed her skin. But, like most colonists, she had aged faster than a crew. She was only a young colonist girl, like a thousand other young colonist girls Jesus Pietro had seen. She bore his silent stare for a full minute then snapped, "Well?" "Well? You're Polly Toumquist, aren't you?" "Of course." "You had a handful of films on you when you were picked up last night. How did you get them?" "I prefer not to say." "Eventually I think you will. Meanwhile, what would you like to talk about?" Polly looked bewildered. "Are you serious?" 'I am serious. I've interviewed six people today. The organ banks are full, and the day is ending. I'm in no hurry. Do you know what those films of yours imply?" She nodded warily. "I think so. Especially after the raid." "Oh, you saw the point, did you?" "It's clear you have no more use for the Sons of Earth. We've always been some danger to you -- " "You flatter yourselves."  "But you've never had a real try at wiping us out. Not till now. Because we serve as a recruiting center for your 'damned organ banks!" "You amaze me. Did you know this when you joined?" "I was fairly sure of it." "Then why join?"  She spread her hands. "Why does anybody join? I couldn't stand the way things are now. Castro, what happens to your body when you die?" "Cremated. I'm an old man." "You're a crew. They'd cremate you anyway. Only colonists go into the banks." "I'm half crew," said Jesus Pietro. His desire to talk was genuine, and there was no need for reticence with a girl who was, to all intents and purposes, dead. "en my -- you mit say -- pseudo-father reached the age of seventy he was old enough to need injections of testosterone. Ex# cept that he chose a different way to get them." The girl looked bewildered, then horrified. "I see you understand. Shortly afterward his wife, my mother, became pregnant. I must admit they raised me almost as a crew. I love them both. I don't know who my father was. He may have been a rebel, or a thief." "To you there's no difference, I suppose." The girl's tone was savage. "No. Back to the Sons of Earth," ib: Jesus Pietro said briskly. "YouVe held an icy, half-controlled fury. "So quite right. We don't need them we might get upppity if we thought any more, not as a recruiting center we were being killed to no nor for any other purpose. Yours purposed was the biggest rebel group on Mount "You will not be dying to no purLookitthat. We'll take the others as pose," Jesus Pietro explained patientthey come." ly. "That has not been necessary "I don't understand. The organ since the first kidney transplant bebanks are obsolete now, aren't they? tween identical twins. It has not been Why not publish the news? There'd necessary since Landsteiner classified be a worldwide celebration!" the primary blood types in #. What do you know about the car #hat's jiKt why we don't broadin Kane's basement?" A cast the news. Your kind of "I prefer not to say." sloppy thinking! No, the organ banks "You're being very difficult." are not obsolete. It's just that we'll The girl smiled for the first time, need a smaller supply of raw "I've heard that." material. And as a means of punishHis reaction took Jesus Pietro by ment for crimes the banks are as imsurprise. A flash of admiration, folportant as ever!" lowed by a hot flood of lust. Sud"You son of a bitch," said Polly, denly the bedraggled colonist girl Her color was high, and her voice was the only girl in the universe. Jesus Pietro held his face like frozen stone while the flood receded. It took several seconds. "What about Matthew Leigh Keller?" "Who? I mean -- " "You prefer not to say. Miss Tournquist, you probably know that there are no truth drugs on this world. In the ships' libraries are instructions for making scopolamine, but no crew will authorize me to use them. Hence I have developed different methods." He saw her stiffen. "No. no. There will be no pain. They'd put me in the organ banks if I used torture. I'm only going to give you a nice rest." "I think I know what you mean. Castro, what are you made of? You're half colonist yourself. What makes you side with the crew?" "There must be law and order. Miss Toumiquist. On all of Mount Lookitthat there is only one force for law and order, and that force is the crew." Jesus Pietro pushed the call button. ' He did not relax until she was gone, and then he found himself shaken. Had she noticed that flash of desire? What an embarrassing thing to happen! But she must have assumed he was only angry. Of course she had. Polly was in the maze of corridors when she suddenly remembered Matt Keller. Her regal dignity, assumed for the benefit of the pair of Implementation police who were her escorts, softened in thought. Why would Jesus Pietro be interested in Matt? He wasn't even a member. Did it mean that he had escaped? Odd, about that night. She'd liked Matt. He'd interested her. And then, suddenly -- It must have looked to him as if she'd brued him off. Well, it didn't matter now. But Implementation should have turned him loose. He was nothing but a deadhead. Castro. Why had he told her all that? Was it part of the coffin cure? Well, she'd hold out as long as possible. Let Castro worry about who might know the truth of ramrobot ##. She had told nobody. T he crew girl looked about her in pleased wonder, at the curving walls and ceiling with their peeled, discolored paint, at the spiral stairs, at the matted, withered brown rug which had been indoor grass. She watched the dust puff out from her falling feet, and she ran her hands over the coral walls where the paint had fallen away. Her new, brightly dyed falling jumper seemed to glow in the gloom of the deserted house. "It's very odd," she said. Her crewish accent was strange and lilting. The man lifted an arm from around her waist to wave it about him. "They live just like this," he said in the same accent. "Just like this. You can see their houses from your car on the way to the lake." Matt smiled as he watched them walk up the stairs. He had never seen a two-story coral house; the balloons were too hard to blow, and the second floor tended to sag unless you maintained two distinct pressures. Why didn't they come to Delta Plateau, if they wanted to see how colonists lived? IF But why should they? Surely their own lives were more interesting. What strange people they were. It was hard to understand them not only because of the lilt but because certain words meant the wrong things. Their faces were alien, with flared nostrils and high, prominent cheekbones. Against the people Matt had known, they seemed fragile, undermuscled, but graceful and beautiful to the point where Matt wondered about the man's manhood. They walked like they owned the world. Tho deserted house had proved a disappointment. He'd thought all was lost when the crew couple came strolling in, pointing and staring as if they were in a museum. But with luck they would be up there for some time. Matt moved very quietly from the darkness of a now doorless closet, picked up their picnic basket. There was a place where he could hide, a place he should have thought of before. He climbed over the low stone wall with the picnic basket in one hand. There was a three-foot granite lip on the void side. Matt settled himself cross-legged against the stone wall, with his head an inch below the top and his toes a foot from the forty-mile drop to hell. He opened the picnic basket. There was more than enough for two. He ate it all, eggs and sandwiches and squeezebags of custard and a thermos of soup and a handful of olives. Afterward he kicked the basket and the scraps of plastic wrap into the void. His eyes followed them down. Consider the following: Anyone can see infinity by looking up on a clear night. But only on the small world of Mount Looldtthat can you see infinity by looking down. No, it's not really infinity. Neither is the night sky, really. You can see a few nearby galaxies; but even if the universe turns out to be finite, you see a very little distance into it. Matt could see apparent infinity by looking straight down. He could see the picnic basket fall ing. Smaller. Gone. The plastic wrap. Fluttering down. Gone. Then, nothing but the white mist. IX O n a far distant day they would call the phenomenon 'Tlateau trance." It was a form of autohypnosis well known to Plateau citizens of both social classes, differing from other forms only in diat nearly anyone could fall into such a state by accident. In this respect Plateau trance compares to ancient, badly authenticated cases of "highway hypnosis," or to more recent stupes of "the far look," a form of religious trance endemic to the Belt of Sol. "The far look" comes to a miner who spends too many minutes staring at a single star in the background of naked space. "Plateau trance" starts with a long, dreamy look down into the void mist. For a good eight hours Matt had not had a chance to relax. He would not get a chance tonight, and he didn't want to dwell on that now. Here was his chance. He relaxed. He came out of it with a niggling suspicion that time had passed. He was lying on his side, his face over the edge, staring down into unfathomable darkness. It was night. And he felt wonderful. Until he remembered.  He got up and climbed carefully over the wall. It would not do to slip, three feet from the edge, and he was often clumsy when he felt this nervous. Now his stomach seemed to have been replaced by a plastic demonstration model from a biology class. There was a jerkiness in his limbs. He walked a litde way from the wall and stopped. Which way was the Hospital? Come now, he thought. This is ridiculous. Well, there was a swelling hill to his left. Light glowed faintly along its rim. He'd try that. The grass and the earth beneath it ended as he reached the top. Now there was stone beneath his bare feet, stone and rock dust untouched by three hundred years of the colony planting program. He stood at the crest of the hill looking down on the Hospital. It was half a mile away and blazed with light. Behind and to either side were other lights, the lights of houses, none within half a mile of the Hospital. Against their general glow he saw the black tongue of forest he'd noticed that morning. In a direction not quite opposite to the dark, sprawling line of trees, a straighter line of light ran from the Hospital to a cluster of buildings at the perimeter of the bare region. A supply road. He could reach the trees by moving along the edge of town. The trees would give him cover until he reached the wall... but it seemed a poor risk. Why would Implementation leave that one line of cover across a bare, flat protective field? That strip of forest must be loaded with detection equipment. He started across the rock on his belly. He stopped frequently. It was tiring, moving like this. Worse than that, what was he going to do when he got inside? The Hospital was big, and he knew nothing about the interior. The lighted windows bothered him. Didn't the Hospital ever sleep? The stars shone bright and cold. Each time he stopped to rest, the Hospital was a little closer. So was the wall that surrounded it. It leaned outward, and on this side there was no break at all. He was a hundred yards from the wall when he found the wire. There were big metal pegs to hold it off the ground, pegs a foot high and thirty yards apart, driven into the rock. The wire itself was bare coppery metal strung taut a few inches off the ground. Matt had not touched it. He crossed it very carefully, staying low but not touching the wire at any time. Faintly there came the sound of alarm bells ringing inside the wall. Matt stopped where he was. Then he turned and was over the wire in one leap. When he hit the ground he didn't move. His eyes were closed tight. He felt the faint touch of numbness which meant a sonic beam. Evidently he was out of range. IF He risked a look behind him. Four searchlights hunted him across the bare rock. The wall was lousy with police. He turned away, afraid they'd see his face shining. There were whirring sounds. Mercy-bullets falling all around him, slivers of glassy chemical which dissolved in blood. They weren't as accurate as lead pellets, but one must find him soon. A light pinned him. And another, and a third. From the wall came a voice. "Cease fire." The whir of anesthetic slivers ended. The voice spoke again, bored, authoritative, tremendously amplified. "Stand up, you. You may as well walk, but we'll carry you if we have to." Matt wanted to burrow like a rabbit. But even a rabbit wouldn't have made headway in the pitted, dusty stone. He sto up with his han in the air. There was no sound, no motion. One of the lights swung away from him. Then the others. They moved in random arcs for awhile, crossing the protective rock field with swooping blobs of light. Then, one by one, they went out. The amplified voice spoke again. It sounded faintly puzzled. "What set off the alarms?" Another voice, barely audible in the quiet night. "Don't know, sir." "Maybe a rabbit. All right, break it up." Tlie figures on the wall disappeared. Matt was left standing all alone with his hands in the air. After awhile he put them down and walked away. T he man was tall and thin, with a long face and a short mouth and no expression. His Implementation police uniform could not have been cleaner nor better pressed if he'd donned it a moment ago for the first time. He sat beside the door, bored and used to it, a man who had spent half his life sitting and waiting. Every fifteen minutes or so he would get up to look at the coffin. Seemingly the coffin had been built for Gilgamesh or Paul Bunyan. It was oak, at least on the outside. The eight gauge dials along one edge appeared to have been pirated from somewhere else and attached to the coffin by a carpenter of only moderate skill. The long-headed man would stand up, go to the coffin, stand over the dials for a minute. Something could go wrong, after all. Then he would have to act in a hurry. But nothing ever did, and he would return to his chair and wait some more. Problem: Polly Toumquist's mind holds information you need. How to get it? The mind is the body. The body is the mind. Drugs would interfere with her metabolism. They mit harm her. not allowed drugs anyway. Torture? You could damage a few fingernails, bend a few bones. But it wouldn't stop there. Pain affects the adrenal glands, and the adrenal glands affect everything. Sustained pain can have a savage, even permanent effect on a body needed for medical supplies. Besides, torture is unethical. Friendly persuasion? You coidd offer her a deal. Her life, and resettlement in some other region of the Plateau, for anything you want to know. You'd like that, and the organ banks are full... But she won't deaL You've seen them before. You can tell. So you give her a nice rest. Polly Toumquist was a soul alone in space. Less than that; for there was nothing around her that could have been identified as "space." No heat, no cold, no pressure, no light, no darkness, no hunger, no thirst, no sound. She had tried to concentrate on the sound of her heartbeat, but even that had disappeared. It was too regular. Her mind had edited it out. Similarly with the darkness behind her closed, bandaged eyelids: the darkness was uniform, and she no longer sensed it. She could strain her muscles against the soft, swaddling bandages that bound her, but she sensed no result, for the slack was small fractions of an inch. Her mouth was partly open; she could neither open it further, nor close it on the foam rubber mouthpiece. She could not bite her tongue, nor find it. In no way could she produce the sensation of pain. The ineffable peace of the coffin cure wrapped her in its tender folds and carried her, screaming silently, into nothingness. hat happened? He sat at the edge of the grass on the hill above the Hospital. His eyes were fixed on its blazing windows. His fist beat against his knee. What happened? They had me. They had me! He had walked away. Bewildered, helpless, beaten, he h waited, for the magnified voice to shout its orders. And nothing happened. It was as if they had forgotten him. He had walked away with the feel of death at his back, waiting for the numbness of a sonic stun beam or the prick of a mercy-bullet or the roar of the officer's voice. Gradually, against all reason, he had sensed that they were not going to come for him. And then he ran. His lungs had stopped their tortured laboring many minutes ago, but his brain still spun. Perhaps it would never stop. He had run until he collapsed, here at the top of the hill, but the fear that drove him was not the fear of the organ banks. He had fled from an impossible thing, from a universe without reason. How could he have walked away from that plain of death with no eye to watch him? It smacked of magic, and he was afraid. Something had suspended the ordinary laws of the universe to save his life. He had never heard of anything that could do that... except the Mist Demons. And the Mist Demons were a myth. They had told him so, when he was old #nough. The Mist Demons were a tale to frighten children, like the reverse of a Santa Claus. The old wives who found powerful beings in the mist beyond the edge of the world had followed a tradition older than history, perhaps as old as Man. But nobody believed in the Mist Demons. IF They were like the Belt miners' Church of Finagle, whose prophet was Murphy. A half bitter joke. Something to swear by. They had me and they let me go. Why? Could they have had a purpose? Was there some reason the Hospital should let a colonist sneak to its very walls, then let him go free? Could the organ banks be full? But there must be jomeplace they could keep a prisoner until there was room. But if they thought he was a crewl Yes, that was iti A human figure on Alpha Plateau -- of course they'd assume he was crew. But so what? Surely someone would have come to question him. Matt began pacing a tight circle at the top of the low hill. His head whirled. He'd walked to certain death and been turned loose. By whom? Why? And what did he do next? Go back and give them another chance? Walk to the Alpha-Beta bridge and hope nobody would see him sneaking across? Fly down the cliff, vigorously flapping his arms? The awful thing was that he didn't know it wouldn't work. Magic, magic. Hood had talked about magic. No, he hadn't. He'd practically turned purple denying that magic was involved. He'd been talking about -- psychic powers. And Matt had been so involved in watching Polly that he couldn't remember anything he'd said. It was very bad luck Because this was his only out. He had to assume that he had a psychic power, though he had not the remotest idea what that implied. At least it put a name to what had happened. "I've got a psychic power," Matt announced. His voice rang with queer precision in the quiet night. Fine. So? If Hood had gone into detail on the nature of psychic powers, Matt couldn't remember. But he could fairly well drop the idea of flying down the Alpha-Beta cliff. Whatever else was true of Man's unexplored mental powers, they must be consistent. Matt could remember the feeling that he wouldn't be noticed if he didn't want to be, but he had never flown, nor even dreamed of flying. He ought to talk to Hood. But Hood was in the Hospital. He might be dead already. Well M att had been eleven years old when Genghis, or Dad, brought two charms home for gifts. They were model cars, just the right size for charm bracelets, and they glowed in the dark. Matt and Jeanne had loved them at sight and forever. One night they had left the charms in a closet for several hours, thinkin g they would grow brighter when they "got used to the dark." When Jeanne opened the closet they had lost all their glow. Jeanne was near tears. Matt's reaction was different. If darkness robbed the charms of their powers -- He hung them next to a light bulb for an hour. When he turned off the light they glowed like little blue lamps... A tide of small, loosely packed clouds was spreading across the stars. In all directions the town lights had gone out; all but the lights of the Hospital. The Plateau slept in a profound silence. Well... he'd tried to sneak into the Hospital. He'd been caught. But when he stood up in the glare of spotlight, they couldn't see him. The why of it was just as magical as before, but he thought he was beginning to see the how of it. He'd have to risk it. Matt began to walk. He'd never planned for it to go this far. If only he'd been stopped before it was too late... But it was too late, and he had the sense to know it. Strictly speaking, he should have been wearing something bright. A blue shirt with a tangerine sweater, iridescent green pants, a scarlet cape with an "S" enclosed in a yellow triangle. And... rimm ed glasses? It had been a long time since grade school. Never mind; he'd have to go as he was. A good thing he liked flamboyant gestures. He skirted the edge of the bare region until he reached the houses. Presently he was walking through dark streets. The houses were fascinating and strange. He would have enjoyed seeing them by daylight. What manner of people lived in them? Colorful, idle, happy, eternally young and healthy. He would certainly have liked to be one of them now. But he noticed a peculiar thing about the houses. Heterogeneous as they were in form, color, style, building material, they had one thing in common. Always they faced away from the Hospital. As if the Hospital inspired them with fear. Or guilt. There were lights ahead. Matt walked faster. He had been walking for half an hour now. Yes, there was the supply road, lit bright as day by two close-spaced lines of street lamps. A broken white line ran down the curving middle. Matt stepped out to the white line and began following it toward the Hospital. Again his shoulders were unnaturally rigid, as with the fear of death from behind. But the danger was all before him. The organ banks were the most humiliating imaginable form of deadi. Yet Matt feared something that was much worse. Men had been released from the Hospital to tell of their trials. Not many, but they could talk. Matt could guess a little of what waited for him. They would see him, they would fire mercy-bullets into him, they would carry him on a stretcher into the Hospit. When he woke he would be taken to his first and last interview with the dread Castro. The Head's burning eyes would look into his, and he would rumble, "Keller, eh? Yes, we had to take your uncle apart. Well, Keller? You walked up here like you thought you were a crew with an appointment. What did you think it was you were doing, Keller?" And what was he going to say to that? IF X A sleep, Jesus Pietro looked ten years older. His defenses -- his straight back, tight muscles, and controled features -- were relaxed. His startling pale eyes were closed. His carefully combed white hair was messy, showing the bare scalp over which it had been carefully combed. He slept alone, separated from his wife by a door which was never locked. Sometimes he thrashed in his sleep, and sometimes, ridden by insomnia, he stared at the ceiling with his arms folded and muttered to himself; which was why Nadia slept next door. But tonight he lay quiet. He could have looked thirty again, with help. Inside his aging skin he was in good physical shape. He had good wind, thanks partly to his borrowed lung; his muscles were hard beneath loose wrinkles and deposits of fat, and his digestion was good. His teeth, all transplants, were perfect. Give him new skin, new scalp, a new liver, replace a number of sphincter and other autonomic muscles... But that would take a special order from the crew congress. It would be a kind of testimonial, and he would accept it if it were offered, but he wasn't going to fight for it. Transplants and the giving of transplants were the right of the crew and their most powerful reward. And Jesus Pietro was... not squeamish, but somehow reluctant to exchange parts of himself for parts of some stranger. It would be like losing part of his ego. Only the fear of death had made him accept a new lung, years ago. He slept quietly for some time. And things ben to add up. Polly Toumquists films; someone had slipped through his net, night before last. Keller's getaway last night. A gnawing suspicion, only an intuition as yet, that ramrobot package ## was even more important than anyone had guessed. Wrinkled, uncomfortable sheets. His blankets, which were a trifle too heavy. The fact that he had forgotten to brush his teeth. A mental picture of Keller diving head-down for the mist... it kept coming back to haunt him. Faint noises from outside, from the wall, noises already an hour old, noises which hadn't awakened him but which were still unexplained. His twinges of lust for the girl in the coffin cure, and the guilt which followed. His temptation to see that ancient brainwashing technique for his own private purposes, to make the rebel girl love him for a time. Adultery! More guilt. Temptations. Escaped prisoners. Hot, wrinkled bedclothes. No use. He was awake. He lay rigidly on his back, arms folded, glaring into the dark. No use fighting it. Last night had fouled up his internal clock; he'd eaten breakfast at twelve-thirty. Why did he keep thinking of Keller? (Head down over the mist, with the fans pushing hard on the seat of his pants. Hell above and Heaven below, going up into the unknown; lost forever, destroyed utterly. The dream of the Hindu, realized in physical form. The peace of total dissolution.) Jesus Pietro rolled over and turned on the phone. A strange voice said, "Hospital -- sir." "Who is this?" "Master Sergeant Leonard V. Watts, sir. Night duty." "What's happening at the Hospital, Master Sergeant?" It was not an unusual question. Jesus Pietro had asked it scores of times at early morning hours during the last ten years. Watts' voice was crisp. "Let me see. You left at seven, sir. At seventhirty Major Jansen ordered the release of the deadheads we picked up last night, the ones without ear mikes. Major Jansen left at nine. At tenthirty Sergeant Helios reported that all the deadheads had been returned to their homes. Mmmm..." Shuffling of papers in the background. "All but two of the prisoners questioned today have been executed and stored away. The medical-supplies section informs us that the banks will be unable to handle new material until further notice. Do you want the list of executions, sir?" "No." "Coffin cure proceeding satisfactorily. No adverse medical reactions from suspect. Grounds ref)orts a false alarm at twelve oh eight, caused by a rabbit blundering into the electric eye barrier. No evidence of anything moving on the grounds." "Then how do they know it was a rabbit??" "Shall I ask, sir?" "No. They guessed, of course. Good night." Jesus Pietro turned on his back and waited for sleep. His thoughts drifted... He and Nadia hadn't been getting together much lately. Shouldn't he IP start taking testosterone shots A transplant wouldn't be necessary; many glands were not put in suspended animation, but were kept running, as it were, with a complex and exact food blood supply and a system for extracting the hormones. He could put up with the inconvenience of shots. Though his father hadn't. A younger Jesus Pietro had spent much time wondering about his own conception. Why had the old man insisted that the doctors connect the plant? An older Jesus Pietro thought he knew. Even sixty years ago, despite the centuries-old tradition of large families, the Plateau had been mostly uninhabited. Breeding must have seemed a duty to Haneth Castro, as it had to all his ancestors. Besides... how must the old man have felt, knowing that at last he could no longer sire children? An older Jesus Pietro thought he knew. His thoughts were wandering far, blurred with impending sleep. Jesus Pietro turned on his side, drowsily comfortable. Rabbit? Why not? From the woods. Jesus Pietro turned on his other side. What was a rabbit doing in the trapped woods? What was anything bigger than a field mouse doing in the woods? What was a rabbit doing on Alpha plateau? at would it eat? Jesus Pietro cursed and readied for the phone. To Master Sergeant Watts he said, "Take an order. Tomorrow I want the woods searched thoroughly and dien deloused. If they find anytiiing as big as a rat I want to know about it." "Yes, sir." "That alarm tonight. What sector?" "Let me see. Where the -- ah. Sector six, sir." "Six? That's nowhere near the woods." "No, sir." And that was that. "Good night. Master Seregant," said Jesus Pietro, and hung up. Tomorrow they'd search the woods. Implementation was becoming decidedly slack, Jesus Pietro decided. He'd have to do something about it. T he wall slanted outward, twelve feet of concrete cross-laced with barbed wire. The gate slanted too, at the same angle, perhaps twelve degrees from vertical. Solid cast iron it was, built to slide into the concrete wall, which was twelve feet thick. The gate was closed. Lights from inside lit the upper edges of wall and gate and tinged the sky above. Matt stood under the wall, looking up. He couldn't climb over. If they saw him they'd open the gate for him... but they mustnt see him. They hadn't yet. The train of logic had worked. If something that glows in the dark stops glowing when it's been in the dark too long, hang it near a light. If a car goes up when it's rightside up, itH go down fast when it's upside down. If the cops see you when you're hiding, but don't when you're not, they!! ignore you completely when you walk up the middle of a well lighted road. But logic ended here. Whatever had helped him wasn't helping him now. Matt turned his back on the wall. He stood beneath the overhanging iron gate, his eyes following the straight line of the road to where its lights ended. Most of the houses were dark now. The land was black all the way to the starry horizon. On his right the stars were blurred along that line, and Matt knew he was seeing the top of the void mist. The impulse that came then was one he never managed to explain, even to himself. He cleared his throat. "Something is helping me," he said in an alrnost normal voice. "I know that. I need help to get through this gate. I have to get into the Hospital." Noises came from inside the wall, the faintest of sounds: regular footsteps, distant voices. They were the business of the Hospital, and had nothing to do with Matt. Outside the wall, nothing changed. "Get me in there," he pleaded, to himself or to something outside himself. He didn't know which. He knew nothing. On the Plateau there was no religion. But suddenly Matt knew that there was just one way to get inside. He stepped off the access road and began hunting. Presently he found a discarded chunk of concrete, dirty and uneven. He carried it back and began pounding it against the iron gate. A head appeared on the wall. Stop that, you half-witted excuse for a colonist bastard!" "Let me in." The head remained. "You are a colonist." "Right." "Don't move! Don't you move a muscle!" The man fumbled with something on the other side of the wall. Both hands appeared, one holding a gun, the other a telephone receiver. "Hello? Hello? Answer the phone, dammit! Watts?obart. A fool of a colonist just came walking up to the gate and started pounding on it. Yes, a real colonist! at do I do with him? All right. I'll ask." The head looked down. You want to walk or be carried?" "I'll walk," said Matt. "He says he'll walk. Why should he get his choice? Oh. I guess it's easier at that. Sorry, Watts, I'm a Kttle shook. This never happened to me before." The gateman hung up. His head and gun continued to peer down at Matt. After a moment the gate slid back into the wall. "Come on through," said the gateman. "Fold your hands behind your neck." Matt did. A gatehouse had been built against the wall on the inside. The gateman came down a short flight of steps. "Stay ahead of me," he ordered. "Start walking. That's the front entrance, where all the lights are. See? Walk toward that." It would have been hard to miss the front entrance. The great square bronze door topped a flit of broad, shallow steps flanked by Doric pillars. The steps and the pillars were IF either marble or some plastic subThey'd carry his unconscious body stitute. to the vivarium, whatever that was. '"Stop looking back at me," He wouldn't wake up there. They'd snapped the gateman. His voice take him apart while he was sleeping, shook. His last living moment dragged out and out... W hen they reached the door the The gun lowered. Matt shrank gateman produced a whistle back from the gateman's expression, and blew into it. There was no sound, The gateman had gone mad. His but the door opened. Matt went wild eyes looked about him in horror, through. at the walls, at the doors, at the Once inside, the gateman seemed mercy-bullet gun in his hand, at to relax. "What were you doing out everything but Matt. Abruptly be there?" he asked. turned and ran. Matt's fear was returning. He was Matt heard his wail drifting back. here. These corridors were the Hos"Mist Demons! I'm supposed to pital. He hadn't thought past this be on the gateV' moment. Deliberately so; for if he And Matt was free in the Hoshad, he would have run. The walls pital. few metal grills at floor level and four rows of fluorescent tubing in the ceiling. There were doors, all closed. An unfamiliar odor tinged the air, or a combination of odors. "I said, 'What were -- ' " "Find out at the trial!" "Don't bite my head off. What trial? I found you on Alpha Plateau. That makes you guilty. They'll put you in the vivarium till they need you, and then they'll pour antifreeze in you and cart you away. You'll never wake up." It sounded as if the gateman was smacking his lips. Matt's head jerked around, with the terror showing in his eyes. The gateman jumped back at the sudden move. His gun steadied. It was a mercy-bullet pistol, with a tiny aperture in the nose and a CO# cartridge doubling as handle. For a frozen moment Matt knew he was about to shoot. I unMeyy  copy mk Lanigan's dream was a nightmare -- and if was actually coming true! L anigan dreamed the dream again and managed to wake himself with a hoarse cry. He sat upright in bed and glared around him into the violet darkness. His teeth clenched and his lips were pulled back into a spastic grin. Beside him he felt his wife, Estelle, stir and sit up.  Lanigan didn't look at her. Still caught in his dream, he waited for tangible proofs of the world.  A chair slowly drifted across his field of vision and fetched up against , the wall with a quiet thump. LaniI gan's face relaxed slightly. Then Estelle's hand was on his arm -- a touch meant to be soothing, but which burned like lye. "Here," she said. "Drink this." "No," Lanigan said. "I'm all right now." "Drink it anyhow." "No, really. I really am all right." For now he was completely out of the grip of the nightmare. He was himself again, and the world was its habitual self. That was very precious to Lanigan; he didn't want to let go of it just now, not even for the soothing release of a sedative. "Was it the same dream?" Estelle asked him. "Yes, just the same... I don't want to talk about it." "All right," Estelle said. (She is humoring me, Lanigan thought. I frighten her. I frighten myself.) She asked, "Hon, what time is it?" Lanigan looked at his watch. "Sixfifteen." But as he said it, the hour hand jumped convulsively forward. "No, it's five to seven." "Can you get back to sleep?" "I don't think so," Lanigan said. "I think I'll stay up." "Fine, dear," Estelle said. She yawned, closed her eyes, opened them again and asked, "Hon, don't you think it might be a good idea if you called -- " "I have an appointment with him for twelve-ten," Lanigan said. "That's fine," Estelle said. She dosed her eyes again. Sleep came over her while Lanigan watched. Her auburn hair turned a faint blue, and she sighed once, heavily. Lanigan got out of bed and dressed. He was, for the most part, a large man, unusually easy to recognize. His features were curiously distinct. He had a rash on his neck. He was in no other way outstanding, except that he had a recurring dream which was driving him insane. H e spent the next few hours on his front porch watching stars go nova in the dawn sky. Later, he went out for a stroll. As luck would have it, he ran into George Torstein just two blocks from his house. Several months ago, in an incautious moment, he had told Torstein about his dream. Torstein was a bluff, hearty fellow, a great believer in self-help, discipline, practicality, common sense and other dull virtues. His hard-headed, no-nonsense attitude had come as a momentary relief to Lanigan. But now it acted as an abrasive. Men like Torstein were undoubtedly the salt of the earth and the backbone of the country; but for Lanigan, wrestling with the impalpable and losing, Torstein had grown from a nuisance into a horror. "Well, Tom, how's the boy?" Torstein greeted him. "Fine," Lanigan said, "just fine." He nodded pleasantly and began to walk away under a melting green sky. But one did not escape from Torstein so easily. "Tom, boy. I've been thinking about your problem," Torstein said. "I've been quite disturbed about you." "Well, that's very nice of you," Lanigan said. "But really, you shouldn't concern yourself -- " "I do it because I want to " Tor' stein said, speaking the simple, deplorable truth. "I take an interest in people, Tom. Always have, ever since I was a kid. And you and I've been frids and neighbors for a long time." "That's true enough," Lanigan said numbly. (The worst thing about needing help w having to accept it.) "Well, Tom, I think what would really help you would be a little vacation." Torstein had a simple prescription for everything. Since he practiced soul-doctoring without a license, he was always careful to prescribe a drug you could buy over the counter. "I really can't afford a vacation this month," Lanigan said. (The sky was ochre and pink now; three pines had withered; an aged oak had turned into a youthful cactus.) Torstein laughed heartily. "Boy, you can't afford not to take a vacation just now! Did you ever consider that?" "No, I guess not." "Well, consider it! You're tired, tense, all keyed-up. You've been working too hard." "I've been on leave of absence all week," Lanigan said. He glanced at his watch. The gold case had turned to lead, but the time seemed accurate enough. Nearly two hours had passed since he had begun this conversation. IF #Tt isn't good enough," Torstein A was saying. "You've stayed rit here in town, right close to ycmr work. You need to get in touch with nature. Tom, when was the last time you went camping?" "Camping? I don't think I've ever gone camping." "There, you see! Boy, you've got to put yourself back in touch with real things. Not streets and buildings, but mountains and rivers." Lanigan looked at his watch again and was relieved to see it turn back to gold. He was glad; he had paid sixty dollars for that case. "Trees and lakes," Torstein was rhapsodizing. "The feel of grass growing under your feet, the sight of tall black mountains marching across a golden sky -- " Lanigan shook his head. "I've been in the country, George. It doesn't do anything for me." Torstein was obstinate. "You must get away from artificialities." "It all seems equally artificial," Lanigan said, 'Trees or buildings -- what's the difference?" "Men make buildings," Torstein intoned rather piously, "but God makes trees." Lanigan had his doubts about both propositions, but he wasn't going to tell them to Torstein. "You might have something there," he said. "I'll think about it." "You do that," Torstein said. "It happens I know the perfect place. It's in Maine, Tom, and it's right near this little lake -- " Torstein was a master of the interminable description. Luckily for Lanigan, there was a diversion. Across the street, a house burst into flames. "Hey, whose house is that?" Lanigan asked. "Makelby's," Torstein said. "That's his third fire this month." "Maybe we ought to give the alarm." "You're right. I'll do it mylf," Torstein said. "Remember what I told you about that place in Maine, Tom." Torstein turned to go, and something rather humorous happened. As he stepped over the pavement, the concrete liquified under his left foot. Caught unawares, Torstein went in ankle-deep. His forward motion pitched him head-first into the street. Tom hurried to help him out before the concrete hardened again. "Are you aU right?" he asked. "Twisted my damned ankle," Torstein muttered. "It's okay, I can walk." He limped off to report the fire. Lanigan stayed and watched. He judged the fire had been caused by spontaneous combustion. In a few minutes, as he had expected, it put itself out by spontaneous decombustion. One shouldn't be pleased by another man's misfortunes; but Lanigan couldn't help chuckling about Torstein's twisted ankle. Not even the sudden appearance of flood waters on Main Street could mar his good spirits. He beamed at something like a steamboat with yellow stacks that went by in the sky. Then he remembered his dream, and the panic began again. He walked quickly to the doctor's office. D r. Sampson's office was small and dark this week. The jold gray sofa was gone; in its place were two Louis Quinze chairs and a hammock. The worn carpet had finally rewoven itself, and there was a cigarette bum on the puce ceiling. But the portrait of Andretti was in its usual place on the wall, and the big free-form ash try was scrupulously clean. The inner door opened, and Dr. Sampson's head popped out. "Hi," he said. "Won't be a minute." His head popped back in again. Sampson was as good as his word. It took him exactly three seconds by Lanigan's watch to do whatever he had to do. One second later Lanigan was stretched out on the leather couch with a fresh paper doily under his head. And Dr. Sampson was saying, "Well, Tom, how have things been going?" "The same," Lanigan said. "Worse." "The dream?" Lanigan nodded. "Let's just run through it again." "I'd rather not," Lanigan said. "Afraid?" "More afraid than ever." "Even now?" "Yes. Especially now." There was a moment of therapeutic silence. Then Dr. Sampson said, "You've spoken before of your fear of this dream; but you've never told me why you fear it so." "Well... It sounds so silly." Sampson's face was serious, quiet,  composed: the face of a man who found nothing silly, who was constitutionally incapable of finding anything silly. It was a pose, perhaps, but one which Lanigan found reassuring. "All right, m tell you," Lanigan said abmptly. Then he stopped. "Go on," Dr. Sampson said. "Well, it's because I believe that somehow, in some way I don't understand..." "Yes, go on," Sampson said. "Well, that somehow the world of my dream is becoming the real world." He stopped again, then went on with a rush. "And that some day I am going to wake up and find myself in that world. And then that world will have become the real one and this world will be the dream." He turned to see how this mad revelation had affected Sampson. If the doctor was disturbed, he didn't show it. He was quietly lifting his pipe with the smoiddering tip of his left forefinger. He blew out his forefinger and said, "Yes, please go on." "Go on? But that's it, that's the whole thingl" A spot the size of a quarter appeared on Sampson's mauve carpet. It darkened, thickened, grew into a small fruit tree. Sampson picked one of the purple pods, sniffed it, then set it down on his desk. He looked at Lanigan sternly, sadly"You've told me about your dream-world before, Tom." Lanigan nodded. "We have discussed it, traced its origins, analyzed its meaning for you. In past months we have leamIF ed, I believe, why you need to cripple yourself with this nightmare fear." Lanigan nodded unhappily. "Yet you refuse the insights," Sampson said. "You forget each time that your dream-world is a dreamy nothing but a dream, operated by arbitrary dream-laws which you have invented to satisfy your psychic needs." "I wish I could believe that," Lanigan said. "The trouble is my dream-world is so damnably reasonable." "Not at all," Sampson said. "It is just that your delusion is hermetic, self-enclosed and self-sustaining. A man's actions are based upon certain assumptions about the nature of the world. Grant his assumptions, and his behavior is entirely reasonable. But to change those assumptions, those fundamental axioms, is nearly impossible. For example, how do you prove to a man that he is not being controlled by a secret radio which only he can hear?" ' "I see the problem," Lanigan muttered. "And that's me?" "Yes, Tom. That, in effect, is you. You want me to prove to you that this world is real, and that the world of your dream is false. You propose to give up your fantasy if I supply you with the necessary proofs." "Yes, exactly!" Lanigan cried. "But you see, I can't supply them," Sampson said. "The nature of the world is apparent, but unprovable." Lanigan thought for a while. Then he said, "Look, Doc, I'm not as sick as the guy with the secret radio, am I?" "No, you're not. You're more reasonable, more rational. You have doubts about the reality of the world; but luckily, you also have doubts about the validity of your delusion." "Then give it a try," Lanigan said. "I understand your problem; but I swear to you. I'll accept anything I can possibly bring myself to accept." "It's not my field, really," Sampson said. Tlpds sort of thing caUs for a metaphysician. I don't think I'd be very skilled at it..." # ive it a try," Lanigan pleaded. vJ "All right, here goes." Sampson's forehead wrinkled and ed as he concentrated. Then he said, "It seems to me that we inspect the world through our senses, and therefore we must in the final analysis accept the testimony of those senses." Lanigan nodded, and the doctor went on. "So, we know that a thing exists because our senses tell us it exists. How do we check the accuracy of our observations? By comparing them with the sensory impressions of other men. We know that our senses don't lie when other men's senses agree upon the existence of the thing in question." Lanigan thought about this, then said, "Therefore, the real world is simply what most men think it is." Sampson twisted his mouth and said, "I told you that metaphysics was not my forte. Still, I think it is an acceptable demonstration." "Yes... But Doc, suppose all of those observw's are wrong? For example, suppose there are many worlds and many realities, not just one? Suppose this is simply one arbitrary existence out of an infinity of existences? Or suppose that the nature of reality itself is capable of change, and that somehow I am able to perceive that change?" Sampson sighed, found a little green bat fluttering inside his jacket and absentmindedly crushed it with a ruler. "There you are," he said. "I can't disprove a single one of your suppositions. I think, Tom, that we had better run through the entire dream." Lanigan grimaced. "I really would rather not. I have a feeling..." "I know you do," Sampson said, smiling faintly. 'But this will prove or disprove it once and for all, won't it?" gaesa so," Lanigan said. He took comag# -- unwisdy -- and said, "Wd!, the way it begins, the way my dream starts -- " Bven as he spoke the horror came over him. He felt dizzy, sick, terrified. He tries to rise from the couch. The doctor's face ballooned over him. He saw a glint of metal, heard Sampson saying, "Just try to relax... brief seizure... try to think of something pleasant." Then etth Lanigan or the world or both passed out nnl gan andor the world came back to consciousness. Time may or may not have passed. Anything might or might not have happened. Lanigan sat up and looked at Sampson. "How do you fed now?" Sampson asked. "I'm all right," Lanigan said. "What happened?" "You had a bad moment Take it easy for a bit." Lanigan leaned back and tried to calm himself. The doctor was sitting at his desk, writing notes. Lanigan counted to twenty with his eyes closed, then opened them cautiously. Sampson was still writing notes. Lanigan looked around the room, counted the five pictures On the wall, re-counted them, looked at the green carpet, frowned at it, closed his eyes again. This time he counted to fifty. "Well, care to talk about it now?" Sampson asked, shutting a notebook. "No, not just now," Lanigan said. (Five paintings, green carpet.) "Just as you please," the doctor said. "I think that our time is just about up. But if you'd care to lie down in the anteroom -- " "No, thanks. I'll go home," Lanigan said. He stood up, walked across the green carpet to the door, looked back at the five-paintings and at the doctor, who smiled at him encouragingly. Then Lanigan went through the door and into the anteroom, through the anteroom to the outer door and through that and down the corridor to the stairs and down the stairs to the street. He walked and looked at the trees, on which green leaves moved faintly and predictably in a faint IF breeze. There was traffic, which moved soberly down one side of the street and up the other. The sky was an unchanging blue, and had obviously been so for quite some time. Dream? He pinched himself. A dream pinch? He did not awaken. He shouted. An imaginary shout? He did not waken. He was in the street of the world of his nightmare. The street at first seemed like any normal city street. There were paving stones, C # TS, people, buildings, a sky overhead, a sun in the sky. All perfectly normal. Except that nothing was happening. The, pavement never once yielded beneath his feet. Over there was the First National City Bank; it had been here yesterday, which was bad enough; but worse it would be there without fail tomorrow, and the day after that, and the year after that. The First National City Bank (Founded #) was grotesquely devoid of possibilities. It would never become a tomb, an airplane, the bones of a prehistoric monster. Sullenly it would remain a building of concrete and steel, madly persisting in its fixity until men with tools came and tediously tore it down. Lanigan walked through this petrified world, under a blue sky that oozed a sly white' around the edges, teasingly promising something that was never delivered. Traffic moved implacably to the right, people crossed at crossings, clocks were within minutes of agreement. Somewhere between the town lay countryside; but Lanigan knew that the grass did not grow under one's feet; it simply lay still, growing no doubt, but imperceptibly, unusable to the senses. And the mountains were still tall and black, but they were giants stopped in mid-stride. They would never march against a golden (or purple or green) sky. The essence of life, Dr. Sampson had once said, is change. The essence of death is immobility. Even a corpse has a vestige of life about it as long as its flesh rots, as long as maggots still feast on its blind eyes and blowflies suck the juices from the burst intestines. Lanigan looked around at the corpse of the world and perceived that it was dead. H e screamed. He screamed while people gathered around and looked at him (but didn't do anything or become anything), and then a policeman came as he was supposed to (but the sun didn't change shape once), and then an ambulance came down the invariant street (but without trumpets, minus strumpets, on four wheels instead of a pleasing three or twenty-five) and the ambulance men brought him to a building which was exactly where they expected to find it, and there was a great deal of talk by people who stood untransformed, asking questions in a room with relentlessly white walls. And there was evening and there was morning, and it was the first IF  Short Story J  ' I# y. Never hok a gift horse in the mouth -- unless the gift is from an alien! E d Lamb downshifted for the hard left-hander, and the old Norton's voice surged from a baritone whoop to a piercing contralto shriek. He banked through the comer, hung so far over that a footpeg rasped the road and sent up a spray of sparks. When the front end began to go, Ed swallowed his bucktoothed grin and eased off the throttle. Damn, he thought as the bike wobbled back upright, there's just too much weight on the back. He bowled up Old Halifax Rood at a reduced, almost legal, speed. Wouldn't be too smart to drop it now, not with a gasdding outfit strapped on behind, no sir. He had a momentary, adrenalitic vision of the two tahks bursting, an explosion, his head fl#dng off. Bluejays scolded noisily from the hemlocks on either handMingled with the reek of hot oiil was the pungency of pitch ad the generalized leafy aroma of damp woods. Ed swept through fhitB aerial liquor at fifty, let it ram down his lungs and fek absolutely high. The thought pleased him. Even the economics of it pleased him. You don't hit the roadhouses too often on a mechanic's pay. Ed Lamb at thirty was the archetype mechanic: medium height, stocky and a little stoop-shouldered. Hanging between his brown brushcut and a stronig chin was a face in no way Femaitable except for its nearly constant, toothy smile. Ed hked roadhous women and cycle races -- which ho occasionaly won. And everycHie liked Ed. Yesterday he'd been asked a favor. He'd been out here after work, buzzing around on this same beatup Norton, siupposedly to practice but really just off on a joyride, when this guy popped out of the woods by Braun's Creek and hailed him. "Afternoon," Ed said as he killed the idling engine. "Hello. Glad you stopped. We're in an awful jam." "Oh?" Ed looked with frank wonder at the man before him. He wore a milky plastic coverall, and his face was baby smooth, almost featureless. His eyes seemed unfocused. "Yes, we've crashed hack in there." "Ed laughed. "Boy, that's some accent American?" "American -- yes. Well, we've ruptured our rel tank and have no power now, absolutely none, so... "Your what?"  'Tank, just a tank. We need a fusor." "Gaww-dam, but I hardly read you, friend. Y'better show me." S o the stranger led him through the woods to aham-sized madiine and another oddly clad man, both of whom were sitting awkwardly in a clearing. The men were friendly enough, Ed discovered, quite ready and even eager to shoot the breeze. In the course of easy conversation, their accents seemed to diminish until Ed began to hear the huffy vowels of his own Nova Scotian neighbors. It turned out that Ralph and Dirk were American astronauits who'd crash landed their vehicle when a tank seam or something let go upon entering the atmosphere. Would Ed help them out, get them an oxycetyiene torch, perhaps do the job for them? They'd pay -- oh, Ed didn't care. Always gM to give the Yanks a hand. And sure, he could understand the secrecy. Wouldn't do to have the Chinese dropping in for a few photos, hell no. Anything y'wont, fellas, be back tomorrow. Damn, but there's a couple of swell guys. So today Ed found himself back on the secondary -- a laughable euphemism for dirt -- road that followed Braun's Creek. Half a mile along it he spotted Dirk sitting on a guardrail. "Hi. Got the torch I see." "Nothing to it," puffed Ed as he heaved the heavily laden bike back on its stand. They went through the woods to the fallen ship. Piled IF outside were a dozen heavy looking cubes, perhaps two feet on a side. "Cleaning house?" "Hardly," Dirk chuckled. "Had to get those out of the tank before you welded it up. They're, uh, flammable." "Thanks for that," Ed replied, grinning at the other's heavily implied understatement. But he was looking with mild concern at the Yank flier. "What's the matter?" "Wdl, maybe I'm blind or hung over but your face has changed." He frown. "And you look... smaller somehow than yesterday." Iirk laughed nervously. "Hell, Ed, it's just the shoes. Different shoes." He bent over, way over, to point to his silvery plastic boots. When he stood up from the awkward movement, he seemed a fraction taller. But Ed couldn't be sure and besides; the whole thing was ridiculous. "Oof," grunted Ralph a few minutes later as he and Ed hauled the tanks inside the ship. "Quite the antiques, these, ch?" They led him along a catwalk past several carefully closed hatches -- security y'know -- to an unadorned space rather reminiscent of a boier room. It was dominated by a massive cubic tank, down whose near comer ran a long jagged crack. "That's it." "No problem. What metal you got there?" asked Ed, sorting through his wdding rods. "Oobak-chrome." "You're kidding. Hell, I haven't got any rods like that." ' "Uh-oh. How about flux, got that? Maybe I can dig up a chunk of the alloy to make the bead." I t wasn't as neat a job as Ed Lamb would have liked, but then one doesn't normally melt down a hatch hinge for bead material. And however unprofessional it may have looked, he philosophized, it was tight. He was sure of that. Ralph with honest feeling. "You've really pulled us out of a bole." "Sure did," said the other flier. "Listen, Ed, take something for it, will you? We've no money aboard, but how about some tools? Here, look." Dirk opened a panel in the wall, exposing an array of well used, well kept hand tools, a few cans of oil and some plasticky-looking rags. Ed Lamb's mechame's eyes lit up. One adjustable diameter pin spanner in there was just, well, just beautiful. But he couldn't take it No sir, this bad started out as a favor, and it would end one. "Nice of you but thanks anyway, guys. I've got most of that stuff as it is." "Aw, c'mon, take something," Ralph implored, "Well, okay." The Norton needed oil, so Ed scooped up one of the cans. "Forty weight?" "Is that all you're taking? Hard Man Lamb, they must call you," sighed Dirk. "But it's universal viscosity. I'm sure it's okay for the bike, if that's what you're thinkmg. "Good. Say, are you guys leaving righit away? I'd kinda like to see this crate take off." "Not too soon," Ralph answered quickly. "After dark." "Oh. Well then, guess I'll shove, off. Give me a hand with the tanks?" As the big motorcycle crackled out of sight, the two fliers turned back to their machine. In the course of the walk back, each grew shorter by a foot and thinner by sixty pounds. What had been passably aduk human heads became beautifully sculptured childlike things, hairless and golden-eyed. Shimmering faintly, their clothing metamorphosed along with them. r te Vegan that was Dirk sighed and dropped tiredly intothe skipper's hammock as his partner activated the navigational holograph. "'That was rough," Dirk subvocalized. "And how. But I don't think he knew. A little suspicious perhaps, that's alL I'm going to transluce us. Ready?" "Ready," answered the pilot, and the bulkheads turned to misty glass. "He wasn't unintelligent by any means, you know. Surprising that they ooidd come so far without hitting on either time technology or interpretational hypnosis." "Isn't it?" said the navigator. "But it seems like a good culture, and I'm gjlad we stumbled on it. Let's record it with Council for a tech assist in a few hundred generations." "Few hundred? I wonder," said the Diik-Vegan thoughtfully. "Maybe." He turned to his controls. "I've got the rel field up. Let's warp straight for home and get a decent job done on that tank." "Right. Listen, you've got me worried now," Ralph said. "I don't know if we should let him' have that iubricant. Maybe he should've taken something else." "We'll see," was the thoughtful reply. "Keep them on the monitor. We can always patch it up. Here we go." The Vegan ship flickered from translucence to nothing at all. E d Lamb hadn't raced the Norton much that year. People were winning rough-country contests on lighter, more modern bikes with yammering little two-stroke engines. But the Big Black Bus was a whale of a lot more fun to ride, and one bright race-day morning he decided what the hell, let's just write this one off to good times. It was a typical wildcat race. Drop a fivespot in the kitty, fellas, start right here and yonder's where to aim. A dozen battered bikes lined up between a boulder and a tree, noises and tear-jerking exhaust smoke. Oh, but those two-strokes lay down a screen. 'Yonder' today happened to be up a wooded mountainside toward an unseen hut six miles away. Ten minutes before the man said Go, Ed emptied a two-quart can of funny-feeling yellow oil into his crankcase. It took him about half a mile to feel the difference. Going up a dry wash, he broke traction on some loose gravel and nearly dropped the IF bike. He blasted his way out with way too much throttle cracked on, expecting die old engine to clatter horribly in protest. But it didn't, it just hurled Ed up the embankment as if he were shot from a bow. So. Ed did it again, next chance he got, and then again. He could not get that engine to break up. No more torque than usual, possibly less, but the cast iron behemoth wound up like an F-#. Ed Lamb won the race. II S tu McNair loved Bonneville. One of the reasons he kept his job with Castone was that they sent him along to Bonnie with the sales boys every year as tech advisor. It was a fringe benefit most chemical engineers don't have, and Stu enjoyed it to the hilt. He'd hand out Castbne's racing oil to anyone who'd use it, hitch a few fast rides, talk with the drivers and generally have a good time. And of course he watched 'em go. He was bulling with Greg Randall, who drove the California Dream, when Ed Lamb's name came up. "Never heard of him." Stu McNair shrugged. "Private builder, no sponsor, no dough to speak of," said Greg as he pulled tboutfuHy on his cigarette. "Got this thing he calls the Canadian Express, and it goes like a bat out of hell." "Really? What's he use for power?" They paused to watch a red Fenari Special accelerate across the salt, miles distant. The rasp of the engine reached them long after it had passed the second marker. Stu stretched his long angular arms overhead, accidentally brushing the tent fly, and recoiled. It sizzled from the relentless Utah sun. "An old Norton twin, I hear," answered Greg. "Don't know what he's done to it, but they say it'll rev something out of this world." "What're his times?" "Over three hundred, on local strips." "Oh, come off it." "No, that's the story. And he's been telling people he can do twice that out here. I tell you, Stu, get your oil in that guy's engine, and you've got some real publicity. If it isn't a fraud, that is." L ater that day Stu found Ed Lamb crouched by the tailgate of his dusty pickup. He introduced himself and offered the mechanic a cigarette. "I'm from Castone. How about some oil for that monster?" "Nope. Thanks though." "What're you running now?" "Uh -- Dunol," answered Ed, laying down a socket wrench and standing. "Whew, hot, eh?" He smiled calmly and wiped his sweating forehead on a sleeve. Stu McNair immediately liked 'him. "Hear you bike goes real well." "Not bad. I've had to modify the susxension a whole lot for the flats, though. Salt's roughter'n it looks. Now I catji't get the silly fairing back on." "Let me give you a hand." So they became friends. It was an easy sort of thing with no commercial overtones at all, unlike most of those at Bonnie. "So you won't let me in on your secret," Stu asked two nights later. "You'd better, y'know." "How come?" " 'Cause your performances are loo good not to be phony. In this business sponsors like, well, like my illustrious employers foot most of the bill, and ty're sore losers. Unless you can give a better reason than witchcraft, they'll usually trump up a disqualification." "Haven't won anything yet," Ed reminded him. "But how'll they nail me?" He slid off the tailgate and shoved his hands in his hip pockets. Rocking back on his heels he watched the flawless desert sky ease toward black, twilight a mere line of gold on the horizon. Stu laughed quietly. "Don't know how, but they'll manage. And you've got the public to contend with too. People get mad. 'What I don't understand doesn't exist,' that sort of thing. Must admit I'm a little peeved myself, pal. Just what in hell does make you go so fast?" "All right," conceded the stocky Canadian after a pause. "It'd almost be a relief to have someone else know. Bring the hght." He led the lanky engineer over to the recumbent motorcycle. "S'right up your alley anyway, Stu. Oil." Ed withdrew the dipstick from the Norton's oiltank. "Here, feel the end of this," "Why, it's -- it's absolutely weird." In the glow of a gas lantern, Stu McNair stroked has finger down the greasy metal rod. His hand wasn't even a blur. First it was midway, near a scribed oil level mark -- then it was at the end. His arm tingled. F our hours later Stu wore a haggard look, and his eyes were red from too much microscope. He and Ed were in his room at the Landspeed Motel. Both were tired and a little high. A dozen beer cans filled the wastebasket. "Don't understand," Stu muttered to himself for the hundredth time. "Well, give up then," Ed Lamb said, slouching a little deeper into his chair. "I did, long ago. Gift horse in'a mouts -- mouth. Damn. Listen, pal, I've got to drive tomorrow. Coin' back for some sleep." He stood up. "Okay. Yeah, get enough sleep, you'll need your reflexes. And Ed, keep the lid on it tomorrow." Huh?" "I mean it. Seeing this weird yellow stuff convinces me you can rev up past a hundred grand, but don't do it. In the first place, you'll never keep that bike on the ground, and -- " "Aw -- " "And in the second, people won't beUeve it. Damn it all, this gunk isn't even possible. And for heaven's sake don't repeat that wild suspicion of yours about two outworiders and their spaceship. You'll get laughed right into a nuthouse." "Sure, sure. Get some sleep yourself, eb? G'night." But the gangling engineer didn't. He spent the night finishing off his eyes on the scope, his lungs on cigaf# IF rettes and his disposition on a longchain molecule whose shape was so ambivalent that he simply couldn't sort k out. Around five in the morning, there was a sound from the only lighted window at Landspeed Motel. It was a It was a sigh of amazement that edged on horror. Then the ligh went out, and Stu McNair's bleary eyes closed as the sun's opened. Ill A t quarter of two in the afternoon, M Lamb climbed into his ieath and cinched up his helmet. He'd clocked about two-seventy that morning, more than fast enough to qualify. His gaze wandered from the vantage point of the warm-up pit across a hundred yards of salt to die starting line and then beyond. He always expected the noise to be deafening but it never was. In the woods it would have been, of course -- ah, the woods, their brief image reminded Ed he hadn't been home in a month -- but not out here. Out here it was so wide open, so flat, so positively out of doors that the sou:s got lost. Half a dozen savagely tuned engines must be running now, on the move or on the siddines, but they were no more offensive than half a dozen crickets on a warm night. Except maybe that guy up on the line, starting his run. It was Greg Randall in the Dream. The California Dream was a jetpowered three-wheeler, technically a motorcycle, and it did make noise. A flag fell, and the fouron machine vanished down the flats like a dropped stone. Now there's competition, Ed thought. No halfhearted efforts were going to beat that. "You're next. Lamb. Good luck," said an armibanded official as he passed by with a clipboard. A small crowd gered around Ed now. They were quieter than a usual starter's crowd. For one thing there was no coterie of backers to cheer. A few words of encouragement and a couple of noncommittal pats on the back were Ed's portion. He rolled the bike up to the line. Nobody knew him, really. Name Edward J. Lamb -- Canadian -- motorcycle -- unlimited -- fast qualifier. That's all. Except that the poverty-stricken, ill-prepared machine always seemed to go a hell of a lot faster than it should. Well, today we'll see. A few suspicious eyes probed under the fairing as Ed paused to kick the bike to hfe. Hadden rockets? No, just a huge gas tank and an etderty EigUsh motorcycle engine. The Lead had obviouky been modiflecL Huge intake tract for what must be a tremefidoiis rate of flow, they supposed. Bigger valves for the same reason, probably, and maybe a wild cam. But it wasn't enough. Every critical eye said the same thing. Don't know how or why it works, buddy, but it isn't enough. Not enough to go as fast as all that. Not enough to beat me. You've got ito be cheating somehow, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all. E d sensed their hostility up on the line. Beneath him tiie bike vibrated quietly at idle. Quietly and innocently. And it sounded so innocent and seemed so small that he felt exposed and defenseless from all those cynical eyes. As the starter approached, the crowd backed off. Ed crouched low in the saddle and blipped the throttle. Across his handlebars lay a worldful of salt. Red pennants marched into the distance like soldiers, two by two, marking a long, clean path which came to a point like distant railroad tracks. A mountain in the background, black. Above it the sky, white. "Ten seconds," said the flagman who stood a few paces away. "On your mark." The man stared intently at a stopwatch in his left hand and held a large flag upraised in his right. Ed eased the Norton's engine up off idle and held it there. The sun soaked into 'his leathers. "Get set." Back in the Castone booth Stu McNair stood on a wooden camp table, binoculars to eyes. The makeshift vantage point plus his own prodigious height gave him a good view of the start. The big man's face was ashen. You'll give it all, won't you, he thought. Sure you will. Open her up. And that old engine'll spin today, fantastically fast. Yeah, go on and blip it, warm it up. But Ed, old man, do you know what you've got there? A fast way to die. One way or another. To teU you the truth I hope you break your neck on the salt right now, I really do. At least it would save you from being chewed up by this crowd later. Who says they don't still burn witches? on films that shift time indeed! Lubricants that induce relativistic, inertialess progression, ha! Molecules that weave and boil into the next second now? Nobody's ready for that, my friend, not yet anyway. There's the ten-second mark. On your mark, Ed. Get set. "Go!" The flag dropped. E d let out the clutch too fast Easy, no wheel spin, lunkhead, he thought. You'll get there. He shifted twice, then once again. The engine chuffed out a string of blunt monsyllabic D's: duh, duh, duh. And then P's: papapapapa. Markers dropped more quickly astern. And then T's. They unwound behind Ed like tiny little knots on a long long string. The salt that had been so smooth at one hundred miles an hour became rougher at two. One long howling Z turned every head on the flats. The frequency was startlingiy high. Ed's handlebars chattered and bucked in his white fists. An inch above his head boiled a torrent of air that just waited to rip it off. Some bullets didn't go this fast. E wailed the engine: eeeeeeeee. Higher than any soprano could sing, higher than any violin. Seven fifty at least, Ed thought in the tiny fraction of his brain not completely blotted by sound. Four miles away Stu McNair agreed. At 'least seven fifty. I don't know how he's keeping it on the ground, but it doesn't matter because the whole business is impossible. He put down his 'binoculars. Physically impossible. IF were right, Skipper," said I the Ralph-Vegan, looking up from his temporal monitor. "They can't handle the implications of that lubricant. Time technology is indigestibly alien to them." "All right," answered the other. "I'll branch us back to just after he repaired our tank, and we'll patch things up." machine oil, no good for your bike, if that's what you're thinking. Wrong viscosity and everything." "Hell, Dirk, I really don't need any of this, and..." "Here," laughed the asitronaut. what you'd like, even if you won't admit it. Adjustable-diameter pin spanner. Yeah, that one." "Well, I've got to admit -- thanks." Ed grinned and dropped the beautiful tool in his pocket. "Thanks a lot. You're a couple of real good -- " "Aw," said Ralph, waving Ed quiet and blushing. "Let's give you a hand With your tanks there." "Swell. Say, are you guys leaving right away? I'd kinda like to see this crate take off." "No, not too soon," Ralph answered quickly. "After dark." "Oh. Well, guess I'll shove off then. S'long." "Good luck." As the big motorcycle crackled out of sight, the two fUers turned back to their machine. "That ought to do it. I think this'll work out much better," said Ralph. "We'll see," was the thoughtful IF  Short Story The Courteous of Ghoor He was courteous thoughtful, affable -- and totally dangerous! A rchie Pholpher was reflecting on the sad lot of thirty-five-yearold advertising account executives when the sensation in his inner ear began. Exactly one-sixteenth of a second later the tingle had increased in volume and pitch to a point where Archie became aware of it. When an eigjtith of a second had passed, Archie began to frown over his afternoon coffee. After another eighth of a second Archie screamed. At the scream's beginning Archie Pholper had been sitting on a hard chair in the coffee room in the ground floor of the Madison Avenue building where he worked. When the scream ended -- abruptly -- he was still sitting on the same hard chair, but the sound of the scream and the sound in his ear which had caused the scream had been replaced by the pounding of surf. Archie and the chair were on a white-sandy beach. Odd, Archie thought. Not so much the beach, nor the sharp up-jutting rocks upon which the foamy water crashed about a hundred yards away. What was odd was the sky. It was bright orange. "Excellent! You managed to bring the chair with you." The chair tipped quietly over in the sand as Archie jumped at the raspy voice. The man who had been standing behind Mm replaced the chair upright and looked evenly at Archie. "You must have been concentrating on the chair," he said, his voice sounding as if he were just recovering from a severe bout with laryngitis. "No, I wasn't concentratiDg on -- " Ardiie stopped, his thoughts suddenly focusing on his immediate surroundings and the strange man before him. Taller than Archie by two hands, he wore a white togalike robe, in contrast to which his skin looked dark red, almost purple. He was old, too, in a well preserved, antique sort of way. At least eighty, Archie figured... "Almost three himdred of your years," the old man supplied. "I am Tumal, Courteous of Ghoor." He smiled, not unpleasantly, as he answered Archie's unvoiced question. "Yes," he went on, "I have the ability to read what you call your thouts. And although you hear the sound of my voice, my meaning is being translated for you telepathically. As for the thought now beginning to take shape within you, let me assure you that you are not dead but very much alive," A rchie said uncertainly, "My idea of Hell would be something like this. Alone on a desolate beach, with nothing to break the continuing boredom. With maybe just a chair..." "This is not the Hell of your mythology, Mr. Pholpher, though your idea of its content I find most interesting. This is in fact the sphere and domain of Ghoor, upon which I hold the office of Courteous." "Another planet? I'm not on Earth?" Archie asked, disbelieving. Yet the orange sky made it hard to disbelieve. "On Ghoor, Earth is not very well known. Its very existence is known to few within the entire Wahr Federation. You are the first Earthman -- indeed the first Outsider -- to penetrate the Impervious Veil for more than five ihundred of your years. And on your first try you brought a chair with youl" Archie looked at the chair and then at the orange sky. "But how? I mean, how did I bring the chair -- and me -- to here?" "Long ago in your civilization a man with your name said that if he had the place to stand he could move your entire planet with a lever. This is the principle you used -- with my help. The lever in this instance is not what you might conceptualize as physic, although the psychic and the physical are not as mutally exclusive as you suppose. Actually, it's a simple matter of coordinating -- " Tumal's raspy voice halted. He was looking skyward, listening intently. Above the sea's horizon Archie saw a flash, a silvery reflection. Tumal saw it, too. "You must go back now, quickly! Sit in the chair and concentrate!" Archie sat unsurely. "Concentrate... on what?" "Where you were, on Earth! Quickly -- I'll help." Archie did as directed. Into his mind came the coffee room, his table,' the copy of the Wall Street Journal he'd anced through when he'd first sat down, the cup of hot, welcome coffee after an early afternoon's heated discussion with a displeased client, the sugar he'd taken -- two spoons' full, even though he knew he should be counting calories and shouldn't have -- And then the spoon and the sugar took on unnatural lines -- or natural, perhaps. The white sugar was coming apart, ibreaking into blues and reds and yellows which in turn were separating into greens and ormg and purples, all in forms of grains or spots or lines. Lines. That's what they were, really, the sugar was really nothing more... and all were converging and -- There was a sound, a tingle in Archie's inner ear. It was getting higher higher and louder and -- a screani formed in Archie's mouth. It came out as he crashed onto the tile floor of the coffee room. "Sir, is something wrong?" Archie's eyes opened and peered into the anxious face of the waitress standing by the side of his table. He looked doW as ihis hand felt the area of the floor around his aching buttocks. "I forgot," he said simply. "I forgot to bring the blasted chair back with me." #Xrou've done very well, ArchiX medes," Tumal said with admiration. "I didn't think your first solo flight would come off half so well." Archie kicked a pile of white sand into the air. "I did it, sure. But I don't understand it. I don't even know for sure what a coordinate is. And I don't much care for the Archimedes name, even though I was bom with it." "Very well, Archie," Turnal rasped. "As for knowing what coordinates are in essence, it's not really necessary that you do understand it all. The important thing is that you can see them, concentrate upon them and utilize them to move things. After all, you don't have to know the electronics of your Earth television in order to swit on a receiver." True, Archie reflected. And it was also true that he could see and use the multicolored shapes that Tumal called coordinates. He'd proved that during the past four days, during which Turnal had assist him in moving to and from the sandy beach on Ghoor one desk from his apartment, a Pontiac from a used car lot, the arch at Washington Square and even a group of humans -- a psychedelic seminar of Villagers, who trip ever taken. He'd been imeasy about soloing, but things had gone well. He could now control the tingling sensation in his ears, so the pain element of "shifting" -- Turnal's name for the moving process -- was gone. He'd visualized (or mentalized or whatever) the on-Ghoor coordinates so many times with Turnal's help that they came easy, even when concentrating on the large solo target he'd chosen. He had supvposed that moving the # square foot New York Public Library, even at night when oply the guards were inside, would be difficult. It wasn't, although the shift back had to be made twice. The first time the northeast comer of the building was misplaced, extending slightly onto Forty-Second Street and almost causing an early-morning traffic accident. Luckily, the driver IF and the eleven other people who witnessed the happening were natives of the city. Since the event had nothing to do with them personally they did not attempt to investigate further. Archie could do it, all right. That wasn't what was bothering him. Something else was. "You want to know why," Tumal said matter-of-factly. Archie nodded. "I suppose that's it. I mean, it's been a lot of fun and all, the most fun I've had in years, but -- " "Enveloping your skill, Mr. Pholper," Turnal said sternly, "is not a matter of recreation for me nor for you. The purpose behind your training is deadly serious. You were chosen among aU Earthlings to do an all-important job. And now you are ready." "What... job? Archie asked warily. T he Courteous of Ghoor spoke less sternly. "You remember how your namesake -- the Greek, I believe he was -- framed his important concept? He said that if he had the proper leverage he could move your entire planet. That is precisely the job you must do." "The planet? EarthV Archie was astounded. "But why? And how? And why me?" "The how is simple. You can do it, just as you shifted the place of many books. A little more effort, perhaps, may be needed, but you have the tools. As for the why -- the reason is to save your planet. It must be moved from your solar system, and soon. Your sun is about to 'blow. A nova, in your understanding, is what will rult. While one star more or less exploding in the univeise is an unimportant event in the scheme of things, to you and your fellow Earth people it is of the utmost seriousness." Archie agreed, his noouth wide open. "The only solution is to move Earth out of your system. We've chosen coordinates around a sun similiar to yours within our Federated Systems. You'#I have to learn the coordinates prior to  shift." "But -- " Archie beg still not fully comprehending. 'To move the whole world. Won't that shake everybody up some?" "Of course. Psychdogically," Tumal said. "But the shake-up won't compare with the one they'll get when your sun explodes. It is, after all, for their own good you're doing this." Archie thought for a moment. "But why me? You or one of your people could do it -- or couldn't you?" "Yes, we -- " Tumal's eyes shot skyward. "Quick! To the rocks," he rasped. Runr Tpoilowing Tumal, who seemed A spry for a man his age, Archie had just about reached the up-jutting rocks on the beach when he spotted the reason for their running. A silverblue glint in the sky flashed high over the calm sea. A space vehicle of some kind. It appeared to be getting larger, therefore nearer. "Wahr patrol ship," Tumal puffed wlien they had gained the shadowy concealment of a horizontal rough outcrop of the rock. "They mustn't spot you, or they'll know later that Ghoor helped move you." "You mean you shouldn't be helping?" Archie asked. "Absolutely not," Tumal whispered. "You asked if I or my people could move your planet into its new coordinates. Yes, I could, as could many on Ghoor. We could do it in the ability sense, but not in a moral sense. The Wahr Federation of Spheres would consider such an act by us as illegal." A humming sound had grown whfle Tumal had been speaking. Now the old man put one fingw tp his lips, while pointing upward with his other hand. The patrot ship must be directly over their place of concealment, Archie concluded. Moments later the humming sound had been reduced to silence. As Tumal led Archie from the rocks he explained, "They've sensed your breaking through the Impervious Veil, put there centuries ago to keep out space explorers from other systems. Luckily, they haven't yet bn able to localize you. But we must act swiftly." Something was still bothering Archie, he didn't know precisely what. "You say that your moving us would be immoral. But surely it can't be immoral for your people to tiy and save ours." "Morals and the law and their relationships are inveved subjects, their intrioaoies not always similar among different peoples. What's important is that we cannot move you. Within the Federation, illegalities are punished severely." "You would be punished?" "Not just me," Tumal said in a fatherly tone. "I am by appointment Courteous of all Ghoor. I act in my dealings with you not as an individual but in my official capacity by direction of our Council. All Ghoor would be punished." "What about Earth, then?" Archie asked. "Will my people be punished for breaking Federation law? If we enter the Veil -- " Tumal grinned, his teeth sparkling in the sunlight. "Ah, but you are not members of the Federation, and thus not subject to its law. But time moves swiftly. I must give you your new coordinates." A rchie drummed nervous fingers on the top of his desk. It was mid-morning, a Tuesday, the day, and approaching the time Tumal had given him for the shift. There was a problem, however. Archie was getting cold feet The whole world. Plus the atmosphere, of course. If only he could leave the smog behind, he thought, almost jokingly. But it was no time to joke. The whole world. Could he do it? Sure, he had the coordinates and the skill. Tumal had said he'd been chosen specifically among Earthmen because of his peculiar mix of imagination, stick-toitiveness and confidence in himself. But... Earth weighed so much. To lift all that, think of it! But he couldn't have lifted the New York Public Library either. That had gone IF smoothly enough. And Tumal was so confident. But suppose something went wrong. Sure, tie had the coordinates, but... Suppose one of those was just a little off? Archie stopped drumming. Just a little off, he thought -- like when be returned the library the first time. Coordinates were just colors to him, but colors have shades. A slight error in visualization -- if that, again, was the right word -- and the whole world. No, he couldn't do it. Not without making sure first. But how to do that? He couldn't go himself in advance and check up on it If there was just space out there he'd have no place to stand while checking. He couldn't even breathe. And he certainly couldn't get a space capsule for the purpose. They don't give those things to advertising people who might like a morning jaunt in space. No, he couldn't go, not physicallyBut mentally? If -- He'd moved a building. He had not had to move the entire foundation and landscape with it. He'd moved a desk and a chair. It hadn't mattered that they were in buildings at the time. His mind -- or his viewer-something, the thing that was part of his mind that framed the coordinates -- if he could concentrate on shifting just that and not the rest of him... The whole world! He folded his hands in his lap and inhaled slowly. His pulse pounded in his head, refusing to be quieted. Colors blended, changed, elongated, separated and crystallized until -- They were right. Now -- No, too much. Not all this, but -- That? No. No! Tbere, right there -- Archie saw. Not with eyes, but with... he didn't know what. His eyes never could have pierced the distances from the landing coordinates this his "sight" took him. But he saw nonetheless and, seeing, switched back to the coordinates of his office. He felt, rather than saw, his hands trembling when he opened his eyes. The ships! God, there must have been a thousand dark red space ships surrounding the coordinates where Earth was due to be shifted. The Federation had found out. Archie had to reach Tumal. T hey were waiting for him on the beach under Che orange sky. Twenty to thirty men of clear green forms. They were human types, physically strong, Archie concluded from the grips of the two who held him. "Stay, Outsider!" an authoritative voice commanded. "Do not shift back. You will not be harmed." The two men holding Archie immediately released him, and he turned to face a young man whose uniform style separated him above the others. "You are to be congratulated on your mastery of movement," the leader said. "I am Sparik, Commander Fourth Class in the Wahr Federation Arm of Enforcement. There are thing s I must know from you." Archie's face reddened. "Here's your first bit of knowledge. Your ships will have a long wait. I'm wise to your sitake-out. I'm not about to bring my planet inside your precious Veil so you can burn it to a crisp with your weapons. We'll take our chances with our sun!" The muscles of Spaiik's face titenecL "You were going to bring your planet inside Federation territory? At the suggestion of the Courteous of Ghoor, I suppose." Archie said nothing. They had promised not to harm him, but Turnal was another matter. "We know Turnal has been meeting an Outsider on this beach. Now we know who, and I've a good idea as to why. Let me ask you this. You say you saw ships near the place you were to move your planet to. How you were able to see these is beyond my comprehension, but were those ships red in color?" "You lnow they were!" Sparik nodded. "Correction: I thought they were. Outsider, I would inform you that all official Federation ships are blue. Of the twelve planets within our System, only one identifies its military ships with red. That fanet is Ghoor." Archie's mouth shot open. "That's -- impossible!" "Only too possible. I'm afraid," Sparik said. "Ghoor has a history of warfare. The Federation, a thousand years and more ago, was first formed as a league of protection against the planet on which you now stand. Ghoor was defeated and its people accepted the ultimatum that they would confine their warlike activity to their own planet or -- if attacked -- to those outside the System. Some five hundred years ago, Ghoor discovered a legal technicality. They shifted a planet from outside the Veil to a point inside their own field of domain. They then destroyed it as a trespasser in an orgy ot flame," "That's what they were going to do -- to us?" Archie asked quietly. "Precisely." A rchie sputtered, "But why -- why have me do it? Why didn't they -- " "Ihey were forbidden to shift any other planet inside the Veil. However, they obviously discovered another technicality. If you, a member of the outside planet, did the shifting..." "But couldn't you -- the Federation -- protect us?" "You are not members of the Federation," Sparik said. "That was the reason Turnal gave me for an Earthman making the shift," Archie said. "As non-members, he said, we would not be subject to its laws." "Nor its protection," Sparik added soberly. "We shall, however, amend the laws to prohibit in the future what you've experienced. You may return to your home now." Archie's face paled. "My home -- Earth. Turnal said our sun -- " Sparik smiled. "Whatever Turnal said may safely be discounted. His office in the Ghoor Council should have indicated that." IF "You mean his office as Courteous?" "Of course. A Courteous is what you might call the... afficM liar of (the council. Of Federation spheres, only Ghoor has one." "I wish -- " Archie said -- "I wish (there were some way I could get even." Sparik smiled again. "Yes. The Federation would be 'better without Ghoor. I, too, wish you might find the way. The way. Archie thought about that moments later as he sat in his Madison Avenue office. Sparik's choice of words had been strange. He did not say he wished Archie would find a way. He said the way. Which meant that Sparik knew of a way and hoped that Archie would find it. But wihiy couldn't Sparik simply have told -- Of course. Sparik was of the Federation. He could not suggest the way. But Archie was not su(bect to Federation law. He could do -- what? And then Archie knew. He laughed out loud at the simplicity of the method. Then he folded his hands and dosed his eyes. Concentrating on the two sets of coordinates, he shifted the entire planet Ghoor to the place where the big guns of the dark red ships This Month in Galaxy by Robert Bloch by Robert Sheckley by Keith Loumer by Poul Anderson by Brian W. Aldiss -- and many more in the February Galaxy, on sale now! The Selchey kids had o common, but it wasn't looks, habits -- or an L ight stirs on the waters; gold ribbons cross the wrinkled water's back. In thedim awakening of the sun, the silhouetted V of a bird craa-cks the sky with a call. The ocean foams as their lips suck the rim of the beach. Sand grips my back like a myriad of stars moving down my spine. The sun comes up on tiptoe beneath the sun-bumt clouds and wine-stained sky. For us. Light catches upon her hair and sweeps down the myriad clouds of fiery tips. Green eyes flaked with gold rim the universe and content rests leisurely in the quiet curve of her lips. I am satisfied. Lecher, she flashed at me. "What?" I said, tightening my arm about Pryn's waist. You heard me, she frowned. Your lust would get an elephant in heat. I laughed because that's the only thing to do when a telepath catches you. "You could tell me to take my arm away from you," I said. She smiled and eased her shoulder even tighter against my side.  like it, and even if I didnt you are much too strong to argue with, I like you even if you are an English major. I grunted and kissed her. "You be the brains, and I'll be the muscle. With my free hand, I felt the little gold ring and wondered how to propose. Meanwhile the girl, who had earned a Ph.D. in marine biology when she was twenty-two, leaned her head against my shoulder with a comfortable little sigh. For a man with a bachelor's in English I suppose I should have come back with some witty repartee; but sitting on the beach with the invalided sun slowly limping into the sky and a girl fitted nicely into your arms, you don't want words. "Shut up," I said. I felt Pryn's arm holding me closer, and we huddled together, watching the blondmaned sun trail its colored cloak across the waters. A s we walked down the stairs to the laj, I held her hand, listening to the Kids splashing happily in their tank. I've never quite gotten over the thrill of the contact. Not that I haven't held hands with other girls. Pryn needs the physical contact to permit exact communication and in the meantime, all the gentle warmdi that's in her sits quietly in your soul until her words flash like liquid fire spiraling down my spine. In each issue, IF publishes at least one "First' story by someone who has never had a story published professionally before. This month's "First" author is Laurence Yep, a young San Franciscan who is a graduate of St. Mary's Chinese School and St. Ignatius High School and is now a sophomore at Marquette University. A National Merit Finalist and winner of the Bausch  Lomb Science Award and the Bank of America Certificate in Classics, #-year-old Laurence Yep is clearly headed for great thingsl "What're we going to do today?" I asked Pryn. She stopped me on the stairs. I cart see why you're named Deucalien. I squeezed her hand. "The name's Duke." And in the staccato bursts of fire that signifies laughter I asked, "All right, why?" Because you're always so curious, like Prometheus, your ancestor. She patted my head. But thinking should be left to the people with Ph.D's. I grabbed her by her slim waist and lifted her up with her legs giving little kicking protests. "Some day you're going to be Mrs. Duke Selchey, and then what are you going to do?" Educate you, ditch-digger. I put her down, and she slipped an arm through mine. And get your name changed legally. As we stepped into tho room with technicians running about their tasks, the oscilloscope wrinkled its green face at us as the speaker rasped. IF "Brood-love, male, female, statement" That's the Kids way of saying hello. Ollie and Ossie, the Kids' Christian names, have about ten words that they can say, and combinations of these widen their vocabnlary. "Brood-love" best translates that ambiguous bond of mutual danger, feeding, birth,death and procreation that exists between us. It's pretty ambiguous but they wouldn't even know that much if it weren't for Pryn and her telepathy. "Kids, get up here, will you?" Noe called out from the walkway over the tank. I looked at the tall man, fighting a losing battle with his hairline. The pouch like a pregnant guppy, peeping over the belt of his shorts. The hair on his legs is thin, starved on the fatty tissues there. His thick glasses keep sliding down his nose like a two-legged mischievous insect. But he's the father of our small family and the patri arch of all the newcomers to the Institute. Noe's a good man, if you don't take him too seriously, E.g., Noe insists that Pryn and I are the Kids even though the rest of the Institute gives that name to Ollie and Ossie. But Noe being the patriarch of the institute, proxy father, we accept his white man's burden. After all, we of the Institute are all Selchey's kids. Noe's father, after a fashion. He and my father were alike physically. That's what Noe remembers, and I suppose he's right. My own memory of John Gunnar is colored by time and several hundred feet of water. He remains a hearty laugh, bursting from the obscure, glaring heights with a pair of thick glasses shining like twin moons. I guess Noe treats me the way my father would; expressing unscientific affection awkwardly in scientific terms. "Where were you Kids?" Noe asked. "For a swim. Uncle Noe," smiled Pryn. "Good, because I want to tell the dolphins that we're going out to the deep sea today," Noe said. Pryn slipped off her sandals and took off her lab coat, looking trim and delicate in her bathing suit. I followed with more dignity -- Pryn claims it's just clumsiness. I squinted in the water for the Kids. Someone shoved hard from behind, and I tumbled about in the water, waving my anm Kke some ungainly bird to regain my balance. I waved my fist at Ossie, the male of the Kids, who only gave that chittering cry that might be a laugh or a cluck of sympathy. I can't tell which with that eternal smile hung on his face: Pryn swam up beside Ossie, placing a hand upon his head to give Noe's orders. I watched Pryn and admired her slim curves outlined by the light from the window in the front of the tank. Ollie nudged me from the side and I stroked her side affectionately. You get to adopt a paternal attitude toward the Kids after a while. When Pryn had finished, she gave one last pat to Ossie and nodded toward me. With a last stroke I swam to Pryn's side, and we surfaced to face Noe, who was squatting on the walk over the tanlr, "Get into your suits. Kids. I want to have as much daylight as possible," Noe said. I trembled slightly in the locker room as the wet suit clung to my body like a flailed ray fish. I hate the idea of going into the water where I can't see the floor beneath, and going back to the City, the progenitrix of an my phobias, doesn't help them any. I remember that day that slashed my life and left me dangling by the threads. I was just thirteen when California slipped from the continenfs side to repopulate itself with fishes. I know that we were having a big campaign about how we were number one in population, and maybe some fertility god was slighted at the lack of crt I couldn't really tcB you. All I know is that everything was knocked off the shelf like brittle china when the Flood hit. n I was in a school that lay at the feet of one of these steep hills that pimple the City -- to be more precise, I was in tiie play court of our school running an errand for the teacher. The ground under me wobbled, and my eyes felt ready to crawl from my head as if I, and not the ground, were in a seizure. I laid my body next to tiie ground, feeling the deep throbs of its heart, and clung to the earth that was determined to shake me off its back. A thin, black weed spread hairthin roots on the back of the school building. The roots expanded, and parts of the wall fell, exposing the school's trembling internals. I covered my head and huddled into a small ball, hoping that whoever the destroyer was he would miss me. Glass tinkled on the pavement as the beU shorted and began ringing wildly. Concrete thudded as someone screamed. Then the voice bedren that the falling building quickly out-shouted. Then, except for the bell, there was quiet from the remains of the building. I coughed in the thick dust that powdered the sun and wondered at the silence. A mountain of rubble quivered where the school had stood. Here and there, tall fingers of crooked steel gestured wamingly. I crawled toward the pile of my school, splashing through a puddle that slowly extended arms from the lavatory. I sat on a large section of concrete, one hand touching the door of the lavatory that was still above the rubble. I was alone in the tawdry slategray sky with the dust of the fallen masonry in my nose, smoke irritating my eyes from the fires in the neighboring buildings. People shouted in the streets, some for help, others for a certain person, always with a lost-dog appeal. Then in the sudden second of guillotined time, the screaming reverted to one word: tidal wave. The shaking of the ground grew stronger as Neptune reared fear. I clung to the door that lay against the rubble as I saw the glass IF wall of the wave towering over me, its green crystal face etched with lines and grooves like the bole of a tree. And frozen in that face were chairs and a tree limb and one man's hand held vaguely out in greeting to someone. I screwed my eyes tight into my face and buried my head into the door as the wave swept its skirts over me. The weight of ages pressed me into the board, and I knew how Jesus and St. Christopher and all the scapegoats felt. I held my breath as the ocean surrounded me, feeling the stale air inside me kicking its way out and seeing small bubbles escape from my mouth like exclamations. I was isolated in a dim, dirty world in which I couldn't breathe, catching vague glimpses of stilled forms being twirled like trinkets by the water and the ghostly mouths of the Tiouses open in silent cries. Suddenly my head and body burst into the open air, and I gasped for breath, letting my head rise a little. Small waves came sweeping in, gently toying with my door. I pressed my head against the door until it bumped and poked at the belly of the hilL Someone tried to pull me off my door, but I dung on tightty, so that they dragged me, door and all, onto the hill. I let go then. I still don't know who carried me up the hill. I was laid down on the top of the hill, coughing and sobbing as my lungs tried to readjust to breathing air. I was in a little green park, lying in the grass with the sun like a cheap bulb glaring in the sky. People around me formed wetsullen mobs about the two houses still standing on the hill top. An owner of one house opened his door and took in as many people as he could, but a fight broke out when he tried to turn the rest away. The fire and blood pounded in the mob. When the madness finally left, both houses were burning and everyone who could still stand was looking sadly at the flames. I kept away from the mob, walking to the opposite end of the hill which was now an island. I huddled on the spot, looking out toward where our house should be, under the water, wondering why I was the only one left in an ugly, confusing world and wishing I wasn't. Family, friends and even identity were lost in barely half an hour. I decided then that I wouldn't worry about friends or attachments or other natural things that could be so easily broken. I went to an aunt in the Midwest where they don't have hills, or the ocean -- just little lakes doing imitations, no surf at night, no seagulls shrieking or foghorns belching and no fog -- just an insipid cloud layer. I hated every moment of it I grew up among the com and iriieat fields like a strong weed. Aunt Ofia tried but a weekend movie and aje pies aren't really that stimulating. Hot meals are nice, but man does not live by bread alone. Whan Aunt Gila died, I bummed around for a while, picking up my BA. in English along the way. I tried writing but after the fii dozen rq'ection slips I let that slide away from me the way the City and my parents had. Finally I decided to go back toward the Ocean and home. Sometimes I hitchhiked and where I did not pick up a ride, I worked until I had enough to go on. Sometimes I even walked; but by hook or by crook I travel toward home, California or bust, until I reached New Milpitas, land's end. T here's not much left of the state now. The Sierras still left part of themselves hanging like a scar on the western side of the states, and there's a series of islands left from the City which did not collapse like the rest of the state. But few of them are occupied. So New MUpitas supplies the few people that are left in the state, and New Milpitas was where I stopped. What few fishing boats there were weren't interested in going out to the "Deep Ocean" that was the City. And nothing, not even a Phi Beta Kappa key, kids, will charter a boat out in New Milpitas. You need the root of all evil to grease the wheels that make the world spin its topsyturvy way. All day I would sit on the splintered wharf and ask, "What was I?" Then answer: by my nature I am #) a substance, #) living, #) sentiment, #) rational and I belong to the species of Man. I know that much, thanks to old Perphyry, but what else am I? Not even a binary number on a magnetic bit because all the computers that held my old life are full fathom five. Once I thought I could be a teacher or a writer, but these were winter skins that could never hold on my slick, wet non-past. I have no identity, only tiie inheritance of my humanity. I was sitting on the riiarf one day, watching the sun wash the cold off the water's shoulders and letting these words worm inside my mind in an endless tape. A girl arching twin quills of water behind her, waving like an albino peacock, swam before me. Her head dotted the golden scales rippling on the belly of the sea, and her white arms flashed as she swam. Bitterness held the tear ducts of my eyes and twisted until I almost cried. Suicide seemed the best thing, and I looked to a peak on an island across from me. I would look down at the tinted pane of glass with the boats like snails and worms streaking little trails of slime behind them. From those Olympian heights, with arms crossed, I would dedicate my death to the frigidity of the world order and the fragility of existence and then leap gracefully off my island. I debated whether dawn or dusk would be more appropriate symbolically when a hand touched my arm. Golden warmth sheathed my soul and content, that was almost near; but I fought the alien touch, welcomed the warmth and no more, preserving my remaining identity.  could feel your emotions even from where I was, I heard my mind say. I turned to see the girl, kneeling beside me, green eyes seardiing my face, drops of water strealdng down like tears. IF "What?" I asked, wrinkling my forehead in surprise. Death is waste, death is the end of change and change is the purpose of man. She paused, then, Ifs not natural, "Go join the Salvation Army," I said. Her nails bit into my arm, making slender crescents of blood. Angry fire burst through every nerve in my body and died down. Vm sorry, the words came. She released my arm and placed her hand in her lap. I picked up her hand and turned it over to examine the palm and fingers. She tried to pull away but I gripped her wrist tightly. "Why did you come?" I asked angrily. "Why?" We stared at each other, listening to the waters suck at the concrete legs of the wharf. I found myself resting on her green eyes, floating gently on the golden flakes. She shrugged and took my hand. You felt so sad, she said.  had to come, "And do you know why?" I asked with a half-smile. She looked at me and nodded, which annoyed me. If anyone should know my problems, it should be me. "Then tell me," I said. She shook her head, droplets gently falling. Thafs for you to find out, I looked out toward where the City should lay, watching a tubby fishing boat chug out into the deep, and I knew... the salt oceans charting across the rocks while father stood encased in the solid crystal water with his big boots like an old skin still Ringing, red in hand, contented; and mother's face turned toward the sun with her green sunglasses like insect eyes outstaring her admirers; and me inside my sand forts and castles. "What's that?" I asked, pointing at a clear shape with wet strings of flesh dangling from it. Fascinated by its foreign beauty, yet afraid of its death, I shuffled toward it timidly. "A squid, dear," my mother said; and trembling, I kicked sand over it to hide it from my sight, and laughter fell from her white throat like spring blossoms: White, pure, and gentle, as a memory should be. You were from the city. Why don't you stay with us for a while. Her hand covered the memories for now like the tide and the buried heap. "You're from the city too?" I asked. Few survived that June morning, and even fewer mention it. Some experiences like the Flood become more vivid than life, a historical fact that dominates your life unforgettably forever. Talking only strengthens the holds that the memory has on you.  and Uncle Noe belonged to the Marine Institute, We were on an expedition along the coast in our ship when the Flood came, "Did you know a Dr. Gunnar and his wife?" I demanded. Yes, she exclaimed. Dr. Gunnar's the big man that looks like Uncle Noe. And Mrs. Gunnar -- I used to think she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The pleasure was a fireball bursting in me, comforting my mind in the soothing magma. Coincidences are funny, but they're good to have. "They were my parents," I said. Then yoiCre Duke, she said with a smile. Do you remember Pryn? .I remembered the tall seventeenyear-old with legs tanned so that she looked like she stepped from a copper penny. Even despite the distaste I felt for girls before the Flood I had to admire her swimming. "Yes," I said and smiled for the first time. She took my hand and pulled me up. "You can't very well refuse my invitation now. We must be the only family that you have." I looked out at the world with my ready-made identity. "Let's go." And that was how the Prodigal returned to the Marine Institute and met Noe Sclchey, father figure, last surviving director and thus the manipulator of vast reserves stored away in Eastern banks, and heartache to the insurance companies. We called our island Parnassus because in the predUuvian days that was the name of the street at the top of the hill. When the bulldozers buried the street sign and threw up a tower of steel and glass that smiled like a surgeon's needle, we kept the name. I came back to my home to work and forget; but of course there was no forgetting so close to home. The happiness that was my mother and father drowned, the screams of my friends being crushed moved dreamily in the giant, silent world of the ocean like memories. But if the ache of remembering jemained, something else balanced the other side of living, and she was Pryn. in W hen he had rolled the Kids out to the pier and left them to the technicians to lower into the ocean beside the Institute's boat, I led her out to the end of the dock. She sat down on one of the pilings, idly drawing designs on the wharf with her finger which she had dipped in a nearby puddle. I took her hand and felt gold tire like tine thread weaving a cocoon inside my body. I licked my lips. "Pryn, I know that you're several years older than me -- " Four years. Her hand tensed in mine. I think I know what you want to ask and the answer is no, "At least think about it tonight," I said. You re a dear sweet boy -- "Boy!" I spluttered. Yes, you re a boy in many ways, and I love you for them. She touched my cheek with soft finger tips.  love you even more than  love Uncle Noe; but for several reasons -- including biological --  can never marry you. "I hate to be crude, but -- " Then weU stop right here and be good... friends. She smiled and kissed me, then walked swiftly away toward the ship, sandals slapping the pier and my mind. As I climbed to the bridge of our boat, Noe turned toward me. He adjusted his glasses which had slipIF ped down his nose once more. "Duke, I wish I'd been able to rear you with Pryn." I shrugged as I sat down in a diair. "You couldn't know that there would be other survivors." Noe nodded to one of the workers who tossed off the mooring ropes. He gunned the motor, and the ship shook itself, trembled in the cold waters, mumbling sleepily. Then the ship rumbled "John Henry" and "Ole Man River" to itself and then stumbled through the ocean, trailing white ribbons across its full-crested bow and down its forty-foot length. Pryn was looking out a window, watching the water collapse as I took the gold ring and saw it flash in the air as it joined so many other memories. I hate you, ocean, you weak synonym for ocean! "It was most shoddy," Noe was shouting over the roar of the engines, "not to have investigated. You see, you're very special, Duke." "Well, I'm here anyway." "Yes, but where is here?" twinkled Noe. "Do you want a metaphysical or geological answer?" He laughed. "No, I mean who are you really, Duke?" 'Thilosophy was the last thing I expected of you, Noe." "It is and always will be," he said. "You should know better than to take the obvious interpretation of reality. Very poor scientific method." "I take it that you want another answer that I can't really give." "What you'll be getting today should give you the answer but remember -- " he wagged a finger at me -- "this principle of re-interpretation applies to even greater things. Remember when Lovisier once said: 'The Obvious is always the Least.'" "Sure, Noe," I said and waited fpr him to quote from Newton and Fermi... but the experiment must have been important for Noe to break from his usual habits. "I want you to get a tape from the old Institute building. It's in the basement in a room where the records of our secret projects were kept. It doubled as our foture shelter and came equipped with an airlock. I've shown Pryn an old blueprint where it is." "And I'm the pack-mule?" I asked. "No, you're the protection. There is no telling what may be left from the aquarium." Noe cut the engine, and we coasted. "The tape you will bring back should teach two things." And he paused as he waited for me to supply them. "I can only think of one," I said. "The principle of re-interpretation" He smiled happily. "You'll be a scientist yet, Duke. Yes, it's a direoC application. The other things whids I felt should be revealed to you only after I coul(f be sure you coidd stand the shock. You will know who you are, Duke." "That must be some tape," I grinned. "It's an oral report from John Gunnar, a good subordinate." '"Then we'd better be going," I said to Pryn who nodded and left. "Duke," Noe said before I left. "Be careful, boy." And he did a strange thing, giving me a clumsy hug, slipping into an awkward smile. Then he turned away quickly. P ryn was waiting for me on the deck of the ship. I felt her hand on my shoulder. Fm sorry, Duke.  didn't mean to hurt you. "I wish I'd never met you on that wharf," I said and tried to shrug off her hand. "Anyway, it's time for me to be moving on. I've been getting restless lately." I understand, she said. I turned away from her then because I was tir of her being able to understand what I couldn't. I strapped my wrist light on, then my breather, which is a miracle product Noe and the Institute's technicians. They're essentially an air-recycling helmet with portable communicators. A special attachment lets you translate the Kids' chatter into human speech, and an adapter which you hit with your chin lets you speak dolphin language. Unfortunately the breather can't communicate inflections or tones. Still you get so that you recognize different voices. I taped some poison-tipped spears to the back of the breather and picked up my spear gun. Prjm tapped my shoulder, and I held up the okay sign. White bullets, sides slick with silver shroud of water leapt in the air. Pryn slid over the side, and I followed with a clumsy jump. It was quiet underneath without complications, just sleep. Not even any dangerous currents any more since the oceanographical change. Pryn put a hand on the Kids' heads and gave them instructions on how to get to the Institute. The Kids shot through the water, delighting in the wallless world, while we older folk followed at a mcwe sedate pace, swimming close to the surface. No one bothered to dynamite those parts of the City that are navigation hazards so Noe bad to step over one of the suburban areas where there is enough clearance. If he went further north and east the hotels and business offices would have spitted the ship with their spires. Only the buildings near the Fault collapsed; the others held up remarkably well, long enough to let their occupants drown. Pryn stopped me on the border of the business district. We go for six blocks and make a right, then go down. I nodded my understanding. She removed her hand as we swam to join the Kids, who were circling lazily before the hedge of buildings while the grown-ups talked. Tht buildings were silent, hidden in the dark, tall stone giants mired in the mud like the fingers of a swallowed giant. In the silent offices, over the rotting carpets, up and down the empty elevator shafts, fish swim. Crabs scuttle along the sidewalks and floors where heels once clicked. And I return. I snapped on my wrist light when I had estimated the distance covered at six hundred yards. Pryn snapped hers on, and we flippered down into the dark, silent city. We fell like angels through the dark fluid night, legs pumping and IF flippers gently pushing at the water, watching the huddled shapes of the city grow shoulders and heads and teeth. My heart smashed inside my head, veins threatening to burst as we entered the City. Two bullet shapes shot past us as the Kids raced each other toward the floor of the City. I chinned the Dolphin transmit and braked. "Here-statement." I waited until the two shapes' raced back to us before I continued down. I flashed my light on one of the side windows and read the flaking gold letters of a Dr. Roeke, D.D.S., and wondered if his skull lay somewhere in the mud below. I felt alien in this new dimension as we wandered down, conscious that I was an experimental probing of mankind, descending like an actor in the City's dreamed musings. I remember a park that my parents took me to once, filled with giant sequoias and redwoods that drape years about themselves like moss. I felt alone, terribly alone. In daylight they seemed to sleep, but at nit in the snicker of the sly moon, they move and stomp and whisper about the number of insects is year -- and I knew they were talking about me. But in my home town there is only an expectant dimness, covered with slime and mud. You're afraid, Pryn said as she touched my shoulder. I shook my head, and she knew that I lied. She shrugged, and we swam on, over the park with its flower beds and benches, where the sunlight seemed to wait forever for you on the grass but the grass was gone and the trees dead in the salt water. Then down beloI saw the U-aped buildings of the Institute. We paused above the center plaza with its red tiles now coated with ocean droppings, and the fountain with its twisted whales, non-functional, submerged in the element it once played with. I chinned Dolphin transmit. "Stop-statement." "Here-question," asked Ossie twisting his tdy about the middle to point at the Institute. "Affirmative-statement," I said. Together with Pryn I swam toward the Institute. The doors were stiff, refusing to swing in so I shot a belt through the door. Loading the spear gun, I held it in my left hand while I cracked some of the pieces from the hole in the glass. I swore as I cut my hand on the glass, and Pryn tried to stop the blood that ribboned the water. In my wrist light, aimed casually inside, a dark blur stirred. I shov Pryn roughly against the wall, shielding her with my body as a giant shape smashed through the glass, tossing shards everywhere. Flashing in my light as it turned for another pass, I could see the shark's teeth. I shot a belt that arched over his back. Then it was charging, and I dropped the spear gun as I twisted my body, dodging and squirming around its teeth. # # Tanger-statement," I shouted to jlJ the Kids as I pulled a spare spear from my back. The teeth came terribly close to my hand as I twisted out of the way. I jabbed with the spear, but the water robbed my blows of any force. Death is a pantomime beneath the water, fought in a dream ballet; and out of the dream a gray bullet crashed into the shark's side. "Kill-statement," said Ossie. The shark rolled away, righting itself with a flip of its tail. Then another gray bullet slammed into its side, and the shark rolled away again, biting in vain at the gray blur. The Kids circled the shark slowly almost lazily. Ossie broke from the circle, smashing into the shark once more. The shark tried to run away but the Kids, ramming its side one after another, herded it back toward the Institute. The shark circled warily, trying to keep track of both the Kids. Pryn joined my side with the gun that I had dropped. She pulled one of the spears from my back and aimed carefully. I touched her arm. # wont hit the Kids, she assured me, and I let her go. I don't argue with Pryn. I was humbled long ago. With a cry of Kill, Ossie detached himself from the circle and smashed into the shark's blind side. The shark rolled, righting itself again, and paused momentarily to glare about, belly exposed. Pryn fired. I watched the poison-tipped spear lodge in the shark's belly. The shark rolled in the water. It might have been internal hemorrhaging caused by the Kids that finally reached the shark's brain or the fast-acting poison, but after convulsing in the water, the shark went limp and floated gently to the floor of the plaza. The kids still circled over the shark. Then Ossie broke from the circle and cautiously nudged it. Satisfied, the Kids came swimming to us then. Pryn touched both of them, and they chattered pleasantly. I chinned Dolphin-transmit and said, "Brood-live," caressing their sides. "What's happening down there," Noe crackled his voice robbed of inflection. "T heard you shout and the dolphins cry Kill. Is everyone all right?" "I just cut my hand, Noe," I said. "Well, be careful, it might draw predatory fish," he said. I smiled and took the gun from Pryn, using it as a battering ram to enlarge the hole that the shark had made. Then I loaded the gun and told the Kids to stay put. Twisting my body through the hole, I flashed my beam around the room. "Noe, how many teeth does a shark have?" "It depends upon the species, why?" "'Scientific curiosity," I said and then waved for Pryn to join me. She twisted through the door and together we flippered through the lobby where they had once kept the alligators in a pit. I held the gun ready as I flashed my light about the different corners, but there were only the leering shadows. IV I dly I read the headings over the tanks in the corridors. The railings that had prevented the children from standing too close displayed shoulders of red rust. Salt water ate at the titles on the tanks. A shape IF blurred to my right; and I raised the gun in my right hd until my left cauglht a sea horse in its beam Pryn stopped before a door. A skeleton lay before it, tattered rags clinging to its white-ridged chest. I opened it hesitantly and flashed my light around in the darkness below. I swam over the skeleton in front of the door and down the stairs. The touch of a gently current told me that Pryn was swimming beside me. We were in a large room, filled with shelves that reached upward for ten feet. The fragments of books and bound papers rotted on the shelves. Pryn beamed her light at a door in the rear wall, and we flippered to it. I gave her the gun, and she covered me while I strained at the wheel, turning the rusting inner parts. With a last screech, the tumblers clicked, and the door opened with a clang as the water push me into the lock with it. I held myself off the wall when Pryn bumped against me as the water pulled her into the small room too. I waited until the room was almost filled before I pressed a button in front of me. The outer door slowly closed behind us, creaking mechanically. It lent my weight to it and with a final shove the outer door closed. Almost immediately a pump chuckled somewhere, and the water level began lowering. When I heard a soft hiss of air being pumped in, I let the breather hang down my back and took the gun from Pryn. As soon as all the water had been pumped out except for a thin film, the inner door slid open. There was an electric light in the doorway which activated the room lights as I stepped through 'They must have a small generator in here.' I sniffed at the air. "And a re-cycling plant for the air. Noe wasn't kidding when he said that they were prepared for anything. Pryn took my hand. For almost everything, "Who expected the Flood?" I said as she drew her hand put of mine. Pryn held up a finger for me to wait and, slipping out of her flippers, went into the next room. I looked about the small room and its filing cabinets around the walls. There were two desks in the room with typewriters and by one a small tape recorder. I went over to one filing cabinet and slid out one drawer, leaving a little puddle in the room where the water trailed down my legs. I slipped off my flippers and took an armful of folders over to the desks. Idly I flipped through, the folders skimmin g over the titles which Pryn would have explained to me if she had been around. Then one caught my eye: "Experimental Crossbreeding No. #." M y father had been a geneticist, Noe had told me, one of the best -- naturally. But slowly as I read, the words burned themselves into my mind. I shivered in my wet suit. "Reports on radiation-treated dolphin cells... successful fertilization... in tube... growth encouraging... in artificial womb... perfectly formed fetus... birth soon... Will it be an idiot?... normal birth successful delivery... success after so many failures?... Infant responds to stimuli... tests indicate astonishing intelligence for age level, but can we measure by human standards?... As cranial capacity of dolphins is greater than man... Outwardly shaped like homo sapiens, but what is dolphinus sapiens?... Christened..." A hand touched my shoulder at the moment. What are you doing? Pryn asked. I gave the folder over to Pryn. "Do you know what they were doing at the Institute before the Flood?" Words rushed out without consideration now. "They were making test-tube babies, babies of a different species!" Pryn took my hand and looked at me quietly. Noe had told me about it. Does it mean that much? "Yes!" I grabbed her and shook her. "The report said that thing was growing with a high intelligence and -- " T he words trailed off my tongue like beads of water I looked about at the room, which suddenly seemed very small and very menacing. "Let's get out of here fast," I said, pulling her toward the open airlock. She pulled back. Does that make the creature a monster? she demanded, squeezing my hand. "It's an alien. Its ancestors were dolphins." Like Ollie and Ossie? "They're different," I said feeling exasperation form ribs about my chest, imagining the alien creature listening on the other side of the walls. "They don't masquerade like men. This thing... it walks like a man, talks like them for all we know. Its genes were sculpted and molded. It's not natural." What if it died in the Flood? asked Pryn. "Fine. It's dead." I stopped dragging her across the floor and looked at her instead. And if it lived?, she asked, her hand tightening. "Then," I said quietly, "I'll have to kill it. We can't allow it to live." We? shrieked Pryn and ran for airlock as I stared at her, the tumblers of the ridiculous logic slowly clicked to constrict my panicked mind in their cold mechanical touch. "Pryn, no?" I said desperately as the door slid shut. I ran for the door and pushed the button for the door to open, which it would after it had cycled Pryn. I tried to open the dr with my hands but found no opening as water slowly danced into the other room. I banged savagely on the door and shouted, "I'm sorry, Pryn." My fists slid down the smooth surface, and I turned back toward the desks. There was a tape on one that Pryn must have placed there. I listened to the lock recycling, then threaded the tape through the tape recorder. I sat down in the chair and smiled at my father's voice despite what had happened. "Report for the Board of Directors upon Crossbreeding Experiment No. #. The infant, named DeucaIF lion or Duke, has responded to all tests successfully. There is every indication that the experiment will be as successful as No. #. The infant will not have to be destroyed as were the others." T he words trickled down my mind from my icicle spine as the magnetic tape went on with the dead man's thoughts. "Using Director Noe Selchey's spermatazoa and a dolphin ovum carefully developed by radiation as in experiment No. #, the fertilized egg was -- " I left my father talking so calmly about the intelligence of his adopted son. To be conceived out of wedlock is one thing but to be conceived mechanically in a test tube is another. I have passions and blood inside me... and now I find that the passions and blood spring from a cold marble top under the glare of bright surgical lights. I grabbed my gun and entered the airlock, putting on my flippers and waiting impatiently during the recycling process. "Pryn," I shouted once but the thick shelter walls kept her name in with me. I swam out of the lock; and the small, memory-filled room where my identity stalked me in the dark waters. I swam up the stairs and over the skeleton at the doorway. "Pryn," I shouted down the long corridors and snapped on my wrist light. Then it came like a hammer smashing into my mind like a pick. "Kill-statement." Emotions rolled on green-oiled feet like those huge waves of the Flood. Fear. Revulsion. Then my soul crashed to the floor and my spine was ripped from ipy body. Contact, flesh to flesh. Blackness. "Kill-question?" came a faint voice like OUie's dipped in static. "Affirmation-statement," said #lie. I cursed the darkness and the mechanical reproduction that robbed voices of meaning. I chinned Dolphin-transmit and shouted, "What's happening?" Then m silence I swore at the complex question. I chinned Dolphin-hransmit again and asked. "Danger-questions?" "Kill-statement," came Ossie's cry. "Brood-love (meaning one of us four), danger-question?" I asked. "Kill-statement," was OUie's only answer. I swam down the corridors, ignoring any of the shapes that might linger in the shadows. I charged across the lobby and stared at the gaping hole where the door had been and the crued masonry like a mound of skulls set upon the steps, I looked through the door and saw a large blot, fifteen feet high, in the distance. Its jelly-like sac was translucent and wri with three clumps of tentacles set evenly on the sides. Near the top of the sac was a large eye. In one of the clumps of tentacles was a dark, pale slash that was Pryn. "Kill-statement," cried Ossie and smashed into the creature's side. The creature whirled, its bulk too big for the Kids to move. Ossie darted away to circle above. "Kill-statement," shouted Ollie and dove down, smashing into the creature's blind side; and the creates ture whirled frantically, trying to seize one of its tormentors. "What's happening down there, Duke?" demanded Noe. "Some monster's got Pryn," I said and raised my gun to fire. "Kill-statement," chorused two shapes darting out of the night of the ocean to thud into the body flailing awkwardly at them. "Does it resemble an octopus and does it have three bunches of arms on the sides? "Yeah, and it looks as big as Alcatraz Island. Are you finished playing twenty questions?" I sighted at the shape, not wanting to hit Pym when it whirled. Two bullets like extensions of my eyes came smashing into the pale white flesh of the creature. "Don't shoot," said Noe urgently. "It's your brother." w #CT don't see any family resemX blance," I said and swam closer to make sure my shot would be true. "Kill-statement," cried the Kids and smashed down in a sheathing of small bubbles. The creature whirled again, raising small, obscuring clouds of muck. "You're not completely human, Duke," said Noe. "I heard the tape," I said and caught the sob almost coming out of my throat. "I have no children," Noe went on, "and well, you know almost all of the rest. But I also provided irradiated spermatazoa for several other fertilizations. That's a fertilized octopus ovum." "What experiment is he?" I demanded as the dirt clouds settled. "Pryn is No. #. Her success encouraged us. You're No. #. Number # is your brother," said Noe. "From his size he grew since the Flood. Don't kill him, Duke. He's your flesh and blood." I laughed harshly at that. "Kill-statement," chorused the Kids again. And suddenly, over Noe's commands and the Kids cries, revulsion, not the sick, twisted feeling of my half-heritage, but revulsion at the slick, strange creature in my arm-extensions. Then pain at the biiUet creatures that whirled out of night and smashed into me. Hate for all the smooth-skinned creatures. Kill. From the mud and slime, I whirled but the elusive creatures darted away. Kill. I raised my gun and fired. I watched the spear shoot straight for the Eye that watched in curiosity. Like Cain I watched the blood spurt from the wound I had made in my brother. Blood plumed out. Pain. I grasped my head with my free hand and hunched over. Pain. Red Pain. My life. Tender isolation. Abundant small smooth-skin creatures to feed me. The isolation broken. Hatred at the invaders. My lovely, lonely life in the darkness now flowing out of me. Pain. The creature's sac swelled, and on a et of water it shot deep into the blackness of the City; but it still held Pryn. I tasted the blood oozing from the lips I had bit. "Hurt-statement," said Ossie swimming toward me. 'Brood-love, danger statement," I said chinning doJim-tranttmt KilH oestiiMi?" asked OHie. AfiimtiveteiBent I said quietly feeling the last vestiges of the ali thought-patts leave my mind like memories. "'You can't kill your own brother," pleaded Noe. "Will you show some feeling, you fish?" I touted. "I am very broken up about it," said Noe, but the breather robbed it of any emotion. #rren do something about it,"  I said and sat before Qhie's dorsal fin and we swam after Piyn. "I can't do anydiing," replied Noe and he paused. "I love ymi all." "S#iut I shouted to Noe. Up ahead, dim in the light , was a white sac, I shut my mind to the pain flowing from it like its blood. Then suddenly it swelled its dieeks as we neared and shot over the park toward die tall stalks of stone and steeL In my light we passed small streamers of blood, like ribbons tossed away and floating gently down. On toe edge of toe business district it paused, then shot ahead to smash into a building, lodging for a moment in toe hole it had made, then gently eased down toe side of the building, the white cheek of Pryn held out free and safe from the building. We shot down toward toe creature as it slumped limp upon the sidewalk. The Kids circled warily while I swam to toe still form of Pryn. I felt her heart and its beating, then turned toward toe creature. The creature idly waved a clump of tentacles at me. All the turbulent thoughts of my ancestry and its tumbled away into toe creature's mind. Kid, came toe thought, tinged with regret. I iaced a spear into my gun and swam toward it. Fain, Kill. Stop. The creature opened its mouth below its eye. Inside toe slit, a pink mouth shed, and a small row of white teeth. Kill, came the plea. I squeezed the trigger and witdied toe spear enter sink into toe soft skin. Tlie flap closed over toe iar, sucking at toe toaft. The creature convulsed. Flesh-to-flesh, question? Hesitantly I reached a hand toward its skill. My own flesh felt as if it was crawling back up my arm, but I touched him. Brood-love question? came the trembling toout, edged wito black isolation, as the blood slowly extended feelers into the dark sea. "Affirmation, brother," I said and the flicker of light died and toe creature was still. "Danger-statement," said Ossie. "Negation-statement," I said and lifted my hand from my brother's puckered flesh. "What's happening," asked Noe. "I'm just cleaning up your messes," I said quietly. "Lower a hook." "What for?" demanded Noe. "So I can bury my brother," I snapped and then went to Pryn and swam up to the surface where the sunlight was still playing. Then with OUie and Ossie's help I brought my brother up to fill the deck of the ship. I'd bury my brother on the land where he could be eaten by worms and enjoy his heritage. IF V I looked out at the light that flaked off from the sun, shruggiiig off Noe's questions and duaisy apologies. It seems that the Kids are my step-brother and step-sister on my mother's side, thank God. I laughed at the irony and then Juddered. I fought the urge of my hands to claw at my flesh, to pick out each atom of dolphin. I envied my brother who haH falcon death SO Calmly in the end, after the pain of living had been too great. "Duke?" Pryn called, stirring at my feet. I stopped thinking about my new identity and took her groping hand from my ankle and treasured it between my half-human hands. "I'm here," I said. And I shook in the wind that blew from the bay. I looked at the shattered eye, lid stopped from closing by the spear. A little red stream triclded down like the tears from mine. I wish I couldn't see. What was that? she asked. "Not what. Who," corrected. "It's my brother." No, and I saw the horror in her face and felt her hand shrink for a second from mine. I knew how Pryn felt to be condemned for hM' ancestry. I laughed quietly, because what did that make me -- who could neither be one way or the other? "And I'm the same as he. I can't even claim your pure ancestry." I raised my head to the bloody-eyed sun and shook the tears from my eyes. "Why did you ever come to me on the wharf?" What? Then her hand tightened on mine as she realized what I intended. No, die omnumded as I raised the spear gun dowly to aim at my head. "You can't stop me this time like you did before. I have better reasons now," I said quietly and pulled the trigger. Her hand grabbed at my arm but too late. I smiled triumphantly as the pain shelved my mind into a deep, daric secret folder and filed under B for Black. The Seldiey Boys togeth. My mind exists no more. Sense, pain, wmry have been dropped away. Loneliness deeper than the shell my brother possessed in. the Institute possesses me now. Waste and I feel regret. Eye, I will eyes for my regret and they open, to Pryn, shining like the sun over me. G old flowed into me. The darkness retreats, and the sadness mellows, hammers into images to be known and used later. I felt her arm sheltering me in its curves. Softly the barriers of my mind slip one by one before her; and I know, not loneliness, but a total new world, a world that belongs to Pryn, and I relax. I felt the bandage on my head. "I'm not dead?" I asked stupidly. She tapped a finger against my forehead. Too dense, she said and smiled. And I knew that she had been in time after all. "All right," I said. I had come two thousand miles to find myself in the City and on the City I would build something new. The search begun on a wet hilltop; in the middle of the Flood the searcher is found. The symbols are calmed, not dead. IF Serial Z n the Spring of # an alien spaceship enters the Solar System and takes up a near-circular orthe Sun. Every major telescope, both astronomical and radio, which can be brought to bear is directed at the Ship, which neither signals nor replies in any delectable fashion to the signals being directed toward it. The Jupiter Probe, an unmanned observation satellite then on its way to the Jovian system, is sacrificed in an attempt to gather information on All Judgment Fled Tte ship was hopelessly alien, and Earth was very far away. What was there left to hope for? the intruder. As a result there is relayed back to Earth a series of lowdefinition pictures of a vessel which is half a mile long and shaped like a blunt torpedo with a pattern of bulges encircling its mid-section. The Ship orbits silently and, some think, implacably, like some vast battleship cruising off the coast of a tiny, backward island. Inevitably there are natives who want an even closer look; and two small, sophisticated dugout canoes are modified and readied for launching. Choosing the men for the Prometheus Project is no easy task. If the human race is to derive the maximum benefit from this first contact with a highly advanced alien culture -- always assuming, of course, that the extra-terrestrial crew is friendly -- the six men must represent the widest possible spread of the social and physical sciences. In addition they must be capable of surviving the longest and most hazardous journey in human history and of asking the right questions at the erui of it. And so, despite the hundreds of eminent and respected scientists who volunteer for the trip, the final decision lies with the space medics. They insist on sending six men unknown in the higher scientific circles and respected only by their friends -- four experienced astronauts and two who are still under training. These six will, it is thought, stand a fairly good chance of bringing home the bacon. It is perhaps significant that none of the men chosen to crew the two P-ships are married. In p-Two there is McCullough, d doctor and nominally a lieutenant colonel who has been undergoing are trained astronauts. The third engaged on ion-drive research. On Earth the project is headed by GenDuring the voyage they are given lectures every day in the hope of preparing them for the widest possible contact with the aliens. There is no time to feel bored or even lonely. With the help of the two pilots McCullough finds himself adapting to the cramped living conditions. But the atmosphere in POne is not quite so pleasant, and McCullough is requested by fifty-mile trip to the other ship in oriented and is nearly lost. When they eventually reach the Ship everything they do, say or see is relayed back to Prometheus Control, who in turn relay it to all the radio networks of the world. Practically every adult member of the human race is listening, and the extries to direct operations from Earth but does little more than worry out loud. But the P-ship men need no reminding of the importance of what IF they are about to do. They approach the Ship cautiously but openly, advertising their presence continuously with radio signals and flares. board the Ship. The two men are able to operate one of the airlock actuators and spend several hours investigating the lock chamber, still without any reaction from the Ship's crew. They gain some valuable data on the aliens and their planet of origin. In an attempt to obtain a sample of the Ship's atmosphere they close the lock's outer seal and open the enrisks taking a look along the corridor and is attacked by a dimly seen, tentacled alien and has his spacesure that the alien atmosphere of the Ship will kill him, but discovers that the air is breathable. P-ships, which have now been joined together, in a borrowed spacesuit. He will not be able to leave his command module until they return home or until another suit is sent out to them, because they do not carry spares. and the others for mishandling the situation, and after a bitter argument it is decided that they will risk further offending the aliens by making one more visit to the Ship the operating principles of the vessel's propulsion system from a close Study of its generating equipment, and that in any case the expedition has come too far just to turn and go home again. The result is a running fight with the alien crew members in which one of the extra-terrestrials is killed and the spacesuits pair, which means that three men are now marooned aboard the alien ship. Public reaction to the fight is both violent and confused. Because of the blow-by-blow radio coverage everyone at home feels personal involvment with the situation, and they have their own ideas how it the wildly vacillating public opinion so closely that at one point he threatens not to let the men have supplies or spare spacesuits unless they behave properly, but at the same time he can't or won't give clear-cut instructions on how they should handle the situation. Mctells the general that because he does not know what to do himself he is making scapegoats of the people at the Ship. He adds that as the men on the spot are experts, the only experts, on alien contact they should not have to give too much weight to the opinions of people sitaway. He decides that it might be erything that happens... During the five weeks it takes for the high-G supply rocket to explore as much as possible of the formed an autopsy on the alien they killed and in addition much valuable technical information is passed are killed. The aliens are vicious, insensate killers who ignore all attempts at establishing communications. McCullough forms a theory about them and their ship -- he thinks they may be the descendants of lab animals who have esits crew and leaving the vessel to operate under... automatic control. But this theory, he realizes, is in part merely an excuse to decrease the guilt he feels for the mess they have all made of the situation, and an equally feasible explanation might be that the Ships crew or their descendants have devolved into savagery for some reason which is not yet clear and that they are not wholly responsible for their actions. certain things are being kept from him and brings psychological presnow isolated on P-One while he mans the two-way radio link between the Ship and Earth. This angers McCullough and the marooned men even more because physically and emotionally they are all in poor shape. On the Ship they uncover evinon-intelligence of the creatures infesting the vessel -- a block of wrecked cages containing food and water-dispensing machinery -- and the absence of intelligent extra-terrestrials, when suddenly they hear aUen voices blaring at them from loudspeakers. Simultaneously a mesto say that the vesseVs propulsors are beginning to glow. The Ship is leaving! XV F or the first few seconds McCullough's feeling was one of outrage rather than fear. This was going too far, he thought; being marooned on the Ship, running short of water, under nearly constant attack by iens, the deaths of Colonel Morrison and Drew. This was piling on the agony and taking misfortune to ridiculous extremes. The Ship couldnt be leavingl But Berryman kept babbling on about Walters and the glow emanating from the interior of the transparent generator blisters and the interference which was being picked up by P-Two's radio, all of which indicated a steady build-up of power within the Ship. Then there was the constant gabbling of the Twos, the chiming, the alien voices and moaning sound pouring out of the wall speaker. If the Ship was leaving McCullough would be expected to do something about it, react in some fashion, make decisions, give orders now. He couldn't. The problem was too big and complicated for quick decisions and inspired leadership -- at least, so far as he was concerned. He had to  IF put it into some sort of order in his mind, take time to consider the events in consecutive fashion and break the problem down, even though they might have no time at all. He must go back past Berryman's arrival to the time when Drew was alive. McCullough's mind came to a sudden halt at that point and ground into reverse. Drew might very well be still alive. Now that he had time to think about it the more likely it became. He pointed at the mesh and at Drew and tried to speak. What he wanted to say was that the mesh was electrified and they should stay clear of it, and that Drew's weapon had touched it while the haft was in contact with the floor, so that the flash had been a short along the shaft of the spear. He wanted to tell them that in his opinion the mesh was not too highly charged -- the way he saw it there should be just enough kick in it to keep the captive animals under control -- and in any case Drew had been wearing his suit gauntlets which would give him added protection. Considering the gauntlets and the fact that the discharge had gone through the weapon and not by way of Drew's body, he tried to say, there was a good chance that prompt resuscitation measures would save him. But all he could do was stammer and point. He could not make them understand or even hold their attention. Hollis shouted something at him, but a chime from the speaker a few inches from McCullough's ear kept him from hearing what the physicist had said. But Berryman was closer to Hollis and replied. Hollis pulled Drew's weapon out of the air and added it to the one already in his hand, shouted something at McCullough, then launched himself back in the direction from which they had just come. Berryman looked from the physicist's fast disappearing feet to McCullough and back again, waved and followed. It had been impossible to hear what either of them had been saying over the cacophony of chimes, moaning, squabbling Twos and the alien duet. McCullough could understand Hollis ru nnin g away. The physicist was wearing one of the two remaining undamaged spacesuits, and there was a chance that he could make it to the airlock and to the P-ships in time. But why was the pilot running away? Surely Berryman did not think that he could take Hollis's suit away from him, after fighting him for it and knocking him unconscious? The only result of such a fight would be another ruptured spacesuit. N ot knowing what to think and feeling bitterly disappointed in both of them, McCullough opened his visor and dived slowly toward Drew. In the weightless condition and with an electrified mesh just a few feet away there was only one method of resuscitation possible. McCullough did his best to ignore the alien voices rattling at him from the speaker, the gobbles and wheeping sounds coming from the Twos and the all-pervading moaning and chiming. He concentrated instead on adniinistenng the Kiss of Life to the dead or unconsdonDrew. But finding Drew's mouth was like ducking for apples in a tub of water at Halloween. The pilot's head kept bobbing away and rolling flabbily about inside his helmet. Finally, by sliding one hand carefully into the helmet and supporting the back of Drew's neck with his fingers, McCullough was able to press the other's face forward into the visor opening. Results came quickly after that. Gasping and choking and struggling like a drowning man, Drew began to come to. He flung one arm aroimd McCullough's neck so tightly that the doctor thought his helmet would come off and possibly his head as well. He was able to hold Drew clear of the electrified mesh until the pilot settled down, then he detached the arm from around his neck. For some reason McCullough was feeling unusually well disposed toward the pilot. Possibly this was because he might have been instrumental in saving the other's life and this made him feel a vaguely Godlike possessiveness and concern for this life he might have saved. As well, there was the fact that Drew would be the only company available if the other two did not come back. And after everything the pilot had been through he did not want to add to Drew's troubles by telling him that the Ship was leaving, even though every instinct he possessed seemed to be urging him to get to the nearest airlock and jump for the P-shi while he had the chance. Drew was mumbling something at him, looking very awkward and embarrassed. Obviously the chimes and alien voices were some kind of pre-takeoff warning. While they continued, which they were, there was still a chance for him to leave the Ship. 'T can't hear you," he said hurriedly to the pilot. "But there's no need to thank me. You probably wouldn't have died anyway." "You mustn't think I meant it personally," Drew broke in, speaking loudly but with his awkwardness still very much in evidence. "It was just that your hand and your mouth... I mean, there was a girl at home who ,... who... For a minute I thought... Damnit, Doc, I don't want you thinking I'm some kind of pervert or anything!" Get out of here! screamed a voice in McCullough's mind, while another pointed out the ridiculous, almost insane humor of the situation and urged him to laugh -- while yet another voice, calmer and more clinical, reminded him that so far as Drew was concerned this was a very serious matter and he should avoid hurting the pilot's feelings. "The thought," said McCullough with the ring of absolute truth and sincerity in his voice, "never entered my mind. But if you look in the enclosure you'll see the Twos are beginning to lose interest in their feeding. We had better leave before they see us." "What hapened to my spear?" said Drew. "Where are Hollis and Berryman? It is very bad tactics to IF split up our force like this, sirl" Drew was his old self again, obviously, and McCullough felt less hesitation about passing on the bad news of the Ship leaving and the desertion of Hollis and Benyman. But he was saved the trouble. Berryman was with them again, hanging onto the wall-net and trying to talk and catch his breath at the same time. He was giving Drew a startled, II didn't-expect-to-see-you-alive-again sort of look while he spoke to McCullough. He said, "Sorry for leaving you . , . without permission... just now. I got excited and took off... without thinking. When you gave Captain Hollis the idea for... for shorting the generator with the metal spears... he told nae he needed help. He still does, inside the blister. You have the only other working spacesuit, sir. We haven't much time... " U ntil then McCullough had not been aware that he had given an idea to anyone. But he realized at once what Hollis was try to do because they had discussed just this eventuality several times. In general, that was. He would have to wait until they reached the generator blister to see what particular form of sabotage the physicist had been able to devise. On the way they surprised a not quite fully grown Two at an intersection. Being unarmed. Drew and Berryman grabbed two tentacles each, twisted their feet into the wall-net and swung it hard and repeatedly against a projecting bracket until its carapace split and it st(qped moving. Berryman looked slitly sick; and Drew, who had devised this particular method of unarmed combat, muttered something about neatness and dispatch. McCullough wondered why such complimentary terms were used to describe such a vicious and despicable act. But with every wall-speaker erupting chimes and a continuous alien gabble and with the knowledge that all around them the generators which could whisk them away to some alien solar system building up to full power, if was impossible to behave in an ethical and moral manner. It was impossible, McCullough thought cynically, because so very few human beings were capable of such behavior in the present circumstances, and if enough people considered it impossible so it was. For four frightened astronauts could not be wrong, and for fifty human race... For a moment the thought came to him of traveling an unguessable number of light-'years to another solar system, of seeing an alien world and its culture and having contact with true, extra-terrestrial intelligences -- even if only briefly, as an animal they might consider of too little interest or importance to keep alive. The idea of not helping the physicist, of ordering Hollis to cease attempting to sabotage the generator, came. And was hurriedly rejected. The sudden, awful wonder of his original thought was quickly overwhelmed by fear. They passed quickly through the lock chamber aad the int-hull space where th fkst major brush vith the Twos had occurred, and on to the lock which gave access to the generator blister. Hollis legs showed in the transparent panel of the inner seal. As McCullough was joining him, Berryman placed his antenna against the bulkhead and said, "Walters is pulling away under steering power. Doctor. Hollis says there are likely to be gravitational side effects if the Ship generators reach full power. He says the P-ships might be sucked in and suggested that Walters move out to at least five miles, so that someone would be able to tell Earth what happened to the rest of us..." Listening to him, McCullough wondered: if the sabotage attempt was unsuccessful, and if he wasn't killed by it, and if he could get to an airlock in time, would he be able to launch himself toward Walters and the P-ships -- even if the alien vessel was already moving away? Angrily, he wondered why he had not simply broken away from Drew and Berryman on the way here and used a lock chamber to leave the Ship. He had thought about it -- but had not seriously considered doing it. There was no shame attached to admitting that one was a coward, he thought cynically, just as long as one did not prove it. I nside the blister it was deathly quiet. The interference in their suit radios was so bad that they had to switch off and communicate by toudiuig helmets. Hollis's voice came te Mm with a booming, indistinct quality about it, but McCullough could make it out. The physicist said, "I'm assuming that for faster-than-light travel all of the Ship's generators must be in balenced operation, and that one malfunctioning generator will cause the others to cut out and immobilize the vessel. I know enough about the power supply lines -- which inside the blister are not insulated, as you can see -- to blow this generator. But the result might be catastrophic for the Ship and would certainly be fatal for anyone in the immediate vicinity, which is us. "So instead of shorting the main power supply," Hollis went on, "I propose grounding the  relatively much lower control and input balancing system -- those lopsided, figure-of-eight thingummies with the blue ceramic end pieces which are, I'm fairly sure, somewhat analogous to the grid of an old-fashioned radio tube. There are one of the things attached to every major piece of equipment in the blister, and I've picked out what I think are two of the most vital sections of the generators. This is what we must do " A lopsided, figure-of-eight thirt'gummy, thought McCullough, and wondered whatever had become of the precise and rarefied language of science in which Hollis was usually so bewilderingly fluent. He would pull the physicist's leg about it -- afterward. If there was an opportunity afterward. IF They planned a simultaneous, double act of sabotage. The generators had been building up to their full operating potential for nearly twenty minutes; there could not be very much time left to do something. The visual effects from some of the gadgetry around him were becoming quite flamboyant. As McCullough crawled toward his assigned position, sheets of slow pink lightning curled and rippled silently all around him. His spear acquired a pale blue corona, and his hair kept rising and discharging against the inside of his helmet. Every few yards magnetic eddies tugged at his weapon or the metal parts of his suit, seeking to dislodge him from the insulated catwalk and draw him into a premature act of sabotage that would certainly kill him and quite possibly wreck the whole Ship. For reasons which were both selfish and altruistic McCullough did not want that to happen. He wanted his own skin and the Ship to suffer the minimum of damage. He realized suddenly that although he was terribly afraid for his own immediate safety he was furiously angry about the things they had done and were doing on the Ship. From the very beginning they had no control of the situation. It had been a stupid if well-intentioned muddle. And while they had changed their minds several times when new data became available they had not really used their brains. They had been panicked into things. They had not allowed themselves time to think. And when threatened with danger they thought only of survival. All things considered, as a sampling of the species Homo so-called Sapiens they had not made a good showing. Suddenly McCullough was in position, looking across at Hollis, who was making slow, pushing motions with one hand. The physicist was reminding him that they did not have to throw the weapons, merely launch them slowly and accurately. While he watched Hollis held up three fingers. The silence was incredible. McCullough was holding his breath, but his pulse was thunderous and he could almost hear himself sweating. Hollis showed two fingers, one finger, then a balled fist. McCullough gently launched his spear at the target that had been assigned to him. The weapon which had once served as part of P-Two's launcher tube was just long enough to make contact with both the figure-of-eight grid and a nearby metal bulkhead, and for the first few seconds of its travel it looked as if it would do so. But then it wobbled suddenly as one of the magnetic eddies caught it, swinging it off course. One end touched the grid, and the other swung toward a fat, coppery spiral with a bright blue halo flickering around it. McCullough gripped the catwalk tightly and managed to get his eyes closed just in time. E ven with the filtering effects of tightly closed eyelids the flash was blinding. Every nerve in his body received a jolt that was neither pleasure, pain, pressure, heat or cold but was much worse than anything he had ever felt before in all his life. He stiffened so violently that he bounced away from the catwalk. He felt something tugging at one boot and the fear of being drawn in and electrocuted overcame his shodced paralysis. He pulled both knees up and made frantic swimming motions in an attempt to get away. But the tugging persisted. McCullough blinked furiously to dissolve the blotches covering his field of vision and saw that Hollis was griping his boot and was towing him toward the safety of his airlock. By the time he was through, his eyes were almost back to normal. He could see that the interior of the generator blister was again dull and lifeless. There were no chimes reverberating along the corridors. The alien voices were silent. With the interference gone, Walters was trying to contact them, saying that he had seen a flash or an explosion and were any of them alive. As soon as he had his visor iopen Drew began advising him strongly to establish a base in the adjacent lock chamber with a view to discouraging any alien repair crew sent to rebuild the sabotaged generator. But McCullough's mind was still on ah earlier train of thought. Bitterly, he said, "We're nothing but a bunch of stupid, well-intentioned bunglers! Surely, as intelligent beings, we could have evaluated and entered a strange situation -- even an alien stress situation -- without making it so much worse that... that... " He left the sentence dangling, #  then went on furiously, "We know there are intelligent ens on this ship. Damnit, we've heard them talking! To them we must look like a race of juvenile delinquents or worse. We must get out, leave the Ship at once. I'll request the next supply rocket to carry spacesuits and food only. With the water supply we've discovered this will mean that we can leave shortly after it arrives." "And our intelligent,l extra-terrestrial crew, what about them?" Hollis broke in scathingly. "They have not shown themselves up to now -- at least we're fairly sure they haven't. Why not? Are they in some kind of trouble, or are there too few of them to risk it? Are we going to leave them to do the best they can with a Two-infested crijed Ship?" "We aren't delinquents and we're not stupid!" Berryman said angrily. "If your e-ts are as intelligent as you say. Doctor, they will realize that everything we did came about as a result of the local situation and scientific curiosity allied to normal survival instincts! If they can't understand anything as simple as that then they're stupid, too stupid to have built this Ship! But they did build it and so... " "Kill every bloody one of them!" yelled Drew. "Wipe the buggers out!" It was Walters who had the last word. Deafeningly, apologetically, with his volume of his transmitter turned right up he said, " will set up to re-broadcast your last words as the Ship carried you out of the Solar System to some dire, extra-terIF restrial fate. This spirited exchange of ideas is being overheard by all the world. "I don't think the general will approve of some of the language... O n Earth there was only one subject which, day by day and hour by hour, merited serious discussion and that was the War on the Ship. In this war there were no neutrals and no unaligned powers, even though the people who made up the nations and even the individual families were aligned several different ways at the same time. Everyone knew about the war, of course. There were very few who did not find it interesting, at least, while others found it so all-absorbing and to argue and demonstrate and bum embassy buildings over it. But the majority of people were simply worried about the safety of the men on the Ship and concerned over the many things they seemed to be doing wrong. Everything the men said or did was, from someone's point of view, wrong. Those scientists who thought of their specialties as being "hard" insisted that more Ship time be devoted to gathering detailed information or structural methods and design philosophy, the operating principles and distribution of the vessel's power sources and more, much more, data on what everyone so loosely referred to as the hyperdrive generators and the ship's central control system. Then the scientists who were less hard -- although not quite as soft as the Psychology crowd -- wanted more time spent in gathering information on extra-terrestrial biology and metabolism, environmental factors and e-t life-support systems. They wanted autopsies performed on specimens other than the Two. But it was the psychologists and their equally "soft" relatives in sociology and anthropology who seemed to be the least demanding and at the same time the most positive in their recommendations. For the psychologists were having a long succession of field days. Not only were minor and major Ship incidents studied and evaluated and discussed at great length, every single recorded word and inflexion was subjected to a most rigorous analysis. So much so that on one occasion a short, odd-sounding laugh from Walters threw one group of space medics into a near panic for three days until they discovered that the high, uneven pitch of the pilot's voice, so suggestive of hysteria and imminent crackup, was due to natural distortion in the incoming signal. Despite the dropping of an occasional brick the psychologist's picture of conditions on the Ship, the interaction of the characters involved, the general emotional and moral climate and the unique environmental pressures to which the men were being subjected, was reasonably complete and accurate and their recommendations sound. At least, the psychologists considered them so... 'The majority of these psychological discussions were broadcast on radio and TV, of course, as was practically everything pertaining to the Ship. But there was one group whose recommendations, by their very nature, could not be made public -- even, and especially, if their recommendations were to be adopted. This group suggested that since the emotional situation arising out of the environmental conditions on the Ship was known in broad outline and the psychological makeup of the men currently inhabiting it was available in great detail, it should he possible to devise certain stimuli which would return a large measure of control to the Prometheus authorities instead of allowing it to remain in the hands and ethically confused minds of men who were too close to their problem to have a balanced appreciation of it. They insisted that the problem was basically one of psychological maladjustment and was solely their responsibility. And as they were the people who would have to solve it they did not think it fair that they should have this responsibility without also being given a measure of control over the situation. They also mentioned the fact that the position of the Sun with respect to Earth and the P-ships would very shortly make direct communication impossible. Outgoing messages, which hitherto had been receivable only by the P-ships, as well as kicoming signals would have to be relayed through the Russian circumVenus station. The Russians were being very generous with their facilities. But they would know every word that passed in each direction and would undoubtedly use the information gained to their own advantage, to complicate an already over-complicated political situation. For this reason alone a decision on recommendations should be taken as soon as possible. Then for the younger, less emotionally mature the Ship had replaced all the variations of Cowboys and Indians. Day after day all over the world, Walters had his suit slashed by the first Two, Colonel Morrison met his grisly death and McCullough) who was a difficult and unsatisfactory character for children o portray, moved around doing nothing, apparently, but change his mind. Between the children and the eggheads lay the tremendous multitude who were only moderately adult and whose intelligence was average. These were the people who listened avidly to what they referred to as the War News and who greedily absorbed every fact and speculation that came from the more well informed commentators on the radio and TV -- even though many of them must have been aware that the commentators could not possibly be more well informed than their listeners. They watched closely while the latest photographs and sketches -- tidied up and dramatized a little for TV presentation -- were discussed IF by panels of scientists from every field of knowledge and every degree of eminense. They listened to so many analyses, theories and predictions, they were exposed to so many different opinions and viewpoints and ethical yardsticks in so short a space of time, that they were forced either to choose sides, or to make up their own minds as to what was right or wrong or politically expedient. Some of them reacted by breaking windows and overturning cars, or agitated for the Twos to be brought under the protection of the funds for sending comforts for the troops, well aware of the utterly fantastic cost of sending even an ounce of comfort to those fifty-million-miles-distant warriors. But there were others, not a great number to begin with, who went through the intensely uncomfortable business of thinking for themselves... until the realization came that their world had changed, that it was no longer the world but just a world, with all that that implied. But this small but rapidly growing faction was only one of the many pressure groups who felt they had a say in the control Prometheus. The original idea in making every phase of the project open to the public had been to arouse interest in spaceflight generally and to gain the support of the voters for the enormous cost of the hardware -- in short, a large-scale PR job. It was a noble project which had, unfortunately, to be paid for by people who were not all noble. But now Prometheus had gone sour. Its Ship-side personnel seemed to be devolving into vicious and sadistic killers, while back at home nobility was breaking out in some of the most unlikely places. O n Earth as well as on the Ship, Prometheus was getting out of control. '... While you were hunting for Ship water and hamstringing that generator, General Brady's voice rattled at them, you had to be rough , on the aliens and their equipment. We arent entirely blaming you for this, but we think you are exercising far too much initiative. Public opinion is hardening against you and against Prometheus as a whole, even though the majority are still being thrilled by the war and the exploits of their scientists heroes. But this is a temporary, unstable, even sick, reaction. There is a steady growing body of opinion which is openly critical of your behavior. It accuses you, and through you us, of behaving like barbarians! It insists that you are doing little more than looting the Ship of its scientific booty. This has got to stop! A radio from one of e damaged suits floated near the outer wall of the lock chamber, attached to the plating by its antenna lead. The natural distortion caused by the helmmet phones being overloaded so as to act as loudspeakers was increased by the anger in General Brady's voice, which carried clearly over... We have begun the countdown for a multiple launch -- three high-acceleration vehicles containing food and extra spacesuits only. Un- til they arrive seven weeks from now you will sit tight and do nothing! Your only activity will be collecting and storing Ship water for the return trip. Establish a base in one of the lock chambers close to the P-ships and defend it if necessary, but not by taking the offensive! Try using now, and do not molest them or injure them in any way even if they begin repairing the generator! Quite a few of us here are far front convinced that the Two life-form is in fact the non-intelligent animal you say it is. Exploration of the Ship will cease forthwith and you will cease trying to experiment with its power and control systems. Neither will you endanger yourselves, and quite possibly the future of our society, by attempting to communicate with the intelligent aliens who may be on the Ship... Berryman reached out quickly and tumW the volume down to a whisper. He looked from McCullough to Drew and Hollis and then back again. His smile was all too plainly forced as he said, "Considering all that the general has just said, the action we are contemplating is tantamount to mutiny." Hollis said, "I agree." They both looked and sounded frightened, as if they were having second thoughts. "He doesn't know what he's talking about," said Drew angrily. "Either that or he doesn't believe what we've told him!" And there is a really uncomfortable idea, thought McCoullough, then went on quickly, "These orders are harsh, inflexible and illconsidered. In a short time they will, like the earlier ones, be amended and qualified. We'll still be forbidden to kill Twos -- unless circumstances make it absolutely necessary. Exploration will be allowed -- within certain limits which will not be clearly defined. It will be suggested that we obtain further data on the hyperdrive generators -- if this can be done without upsetting the aliens, or without running too great a risk of upsettiog the aliens. Gradually the orders will contain so many qualifiers we will be back in square one, but with our self-confidence reduced and our tempers drastically shortened." Cynically, McCullough went on, "Instead of being heroes it seems we are to become scapegoats -- at least, that is the way it looks to me. But this means that we will have to be allowed some freedom of action. Otherwise they would not be able to blame us for everything thaf is happening." "In other words," said Drew grimly, "if we can't please anyone we can at least try to please ourselves." Hollis said doubtfully, "He wasn't at all sympathetic about our troubles. And it is only three days since the colonel died, and he didn't mention him at all. But suggesting that we will be held responsible for everything is going too far, don't you think?" "Perhaps," said McCullough. "But you agree that if we are too IF close to the problem, they are much too far away? The three men nodded in turn, and suddenly Berryman laughed. He said, "This must be the first mutiny in history where the captain is the ringleader I" H e broke off. as the quality of the whisper coming from the phones altered. At McCullough's nod he turned up the vdume again. "... And he has no real appreciation of the harm his anger and hostility toward you can cause, said a low, sympathetic, female voice. It went on, ln terms of physical distance alone you must feel cut off, separated, even rejected hy your friends and perhaps even your race. In a very real sense you have withdrawn from reality, you have lost touch with the world and life as it should be lived. The psychic disturbance, the emotional dislocations, the constant and cumulative frustration of even the simplest natural urges -- even the act of eating and drinking is artificial arid unnatural where you are concerned -- is more than enough without adding the terrible responsibility of First Contact, " dont mean to suggest that any of you have reached the point of major instability, she went on way, "or that you are not quite sane. I do suggest, however, that your judgment and reactions are seriously affected by your present situation and may no longer be entirely trustworthy. This is what is bothering the general, too, because he is being held responsible for everything that you people think to do, and every minority group in the world is trying to pressure him into taking fifty mutually exclusive courses of action! We all admit hes a genius where astronautics hardware and logistics are concerned, but lefs face it, fellows, he is no psychologist..." McCullough switched off the radio feeling angry and a little frightened. What idiot had been responsible for turning a woman psychologist loose on the Prometheus Control transmitter? Previously there had been no mention whatsoever of the mental effects of separation in time and space from the world of normal existence. When such effects had become manifest they had been ignored -- the P-ship personnel had been treated as if they were on an was five hundred miles from home Emotionally they had been made to feel very close to home. Continuous radio contact plus the knowledge that practically everyone in the world was sharing their experiences and feeling concern for them were just two of the factors aimed at achieving this, and there were probably others which only the space medics knew about. But whoever had allowed a psychologist ignorant of these factors, especially such a disturbingly female one as this, to talk to them and cause them to question their own sanity was either stupid or criminally irresponsible. "Walters is listening," said McCullough. "He can tell us if she says anything really important. Right now I'd like you to listen to this IF tape again. I have another theory." For several minutes the sounds of their dash from the Twos' enclosure to the generator blister filled the lock chamber. McCullough asked them to pay particular attention to the two alien voices. When the playback was complete he said, "In my opinion the first voicp is a recording transmitted in conjunction with the warning chimes. Each group of word-sounds is identical in tone, volume and length of transmissioru The second voice is none of these things. Its overall tone is different, volume and inflexion vary enormously; and the message transmitted by die first voice is repeated, after a fashion, by the second. Perhaps I should say that the message is not so much repeated as parodied by the second voice. "I feel that certain words are repeated too often for it to be an intelligent communication. It is as if one word in a sentence was repeated twenty times and sung in different keys. Many of the sounds seem to be sheer organic noise and sensefree -- you have heard them. "My new theory," McCullough went on, looking at the three men in turn, "is supported by all the facts. Briefly it is that the alien crew have no effective control of their vessel, that its operation is almost entirely automatic and that the experimental animals have overrun the ship. The second alien voice belongs to one of the crew, or perhaps a descendant of the original crew, and it is an intelligent being. However, it is not at present a rational being. While he had been talking McCullough found that his finger had instinctively gone to the suit radio switch. There was some vague idea in his mind of putting in a full report to Control and shifting responsibility by calling Earth for a second opinion. But Brady's opinions would not be helpful, McCullough knew from short and bitter experience, and he himself had insisted many times that the people on the Ship were better informed on all aspects of the situation and should therefore make their own decisions. He could have Walters send a full report, or even a slightly edited report, later. Firy McCullough took his hand and mind off the radio. J oined by their command module airlocks the two P-ships were positioned a few yards above the generator blister so that Walters would be able to detect any attempt to repair the human-inflicted damage. The arrival of an alien repair crew was not considered likely, but the presence of Walters on watch meant that everyone else would be gainfully employed inside the Ship on what McCullough referred to as wide-ane cultural contact and Drew, with more honesty, called an offensive patrol. Their real purpose, no matter what they chose to call it or how much double-thinking they did around it, was to kill Twos. They would also hunt down and exterminate any other alien life-form which might prove dangerous to the intelligent extra-terrestrials on the Ship or themselves. Thanks to the doctor we know all their vital spots," Drew said as they were preparing to leave their hull lock chamber, 'and provided we keep cool and pause for the necessary the beasts will be relatively easy. But we should not take on more th one of them at a time unless we have the advantage of a solid defensive position. This isn't very sporting since there are four of us, but we cannot afford casualities." McCullough was listening to Drew but thinking about Walters. One did not have to be a psychologist to know that the pilot was close to the breaking point. Even though he was in the least physical danger of all, Walters was in one respect absorbing more punishment than any of them. Prometheus Control, General Brady and assorted space medical people were continually hammering at him, he being the only member of the expedition they could talk to with any chance of getting an immediate reply. And because he was the only one available, Brady was being much tougher on Walters than the situation really warranted. The general was trying to get through to McCullough and the others, but all the anger and recriminations and outright threats sounded as if they were being directed at Walters alone... McCullough no longer communicated direct with the general -- he was usually too busy in the Ship and Walters was in a position to pass on any new or constructive suggestions if there were any. This was, he knew. very unfair to the pilot since he frequently had to wait days for the chance to do so, days during which he could never be sure whether the other men in the ship were alive or dead. When, at the conclusion of a particularly bad session with Brady, one of the cosmonauts on the circumVenus station, which was now relaying all transmissions added a few words wishing him luck, Walters's reaction was both revealing and quite unexpected in a grown man. The pilot needed company. McCullough or Hollis, the only two who had operational spacesuits, should have visited him more often. But somehow there was never time. Something was always happening in the Ship... The doctor became aware suddenly that the lock entrance was open and Drew was beside it, saying... And remember, this is not a game. If anyone feels like treating it as one they should remind themselves that miles away." O n the way to the animal enclosure they encountered -- singly -- three of the tentacled aliens and killed them. Since it was now generally accepted that the Twos were non-intelligent lab animals the job had been performed with efficiency and, McCullough noted, quite a lot of enthusiasm. Drew had noticed it, too, and he kept repeating his warnings about thinking of the operation as a game until they reached the cages, and would probably have continued if McCullough had not cut him short. IF "I agree with Drew," he said firmly. "We must be entirely cold-blooded about this. But before we put our plan into effect I would like to gain a better idea of their physical capabilities. To begin with, how did they break out?" It was between meal-times for the e-ts so they had a chance to search the area thoroughly. The animals quarters occupied a cylindrical volume of space roughly eighty yards in length and twenty in diameter. It was divided into pens of various sizes by heavy wire mesh stretched between a framework of tubing, so that the caged animals were always in sight of anyone in the four personnel corridors which ran fore and aft along the sides of the enclosure. It seemed that the food and water dispensers also differed in size and complexity and were fitted to the common wall between two cages so as to serve both. Some of the cages were still occupied by drifting, desiccated carcasses whose edible parts were missing. From the condition of the bodies, the damage to large areas of the restraining mesh and the condition of the food dispensers, they were able to obtain a fairly good idea of what had happened. One or more of the dispensers had failed. Whether the failure was due to a design fault or the rough eating habits of the animals concerned was impossible to say. But the result was an attack on the wire mesh, a successful attack in most cases, which had forced an opening into the operating dispensers in adjacent cages or into enclosures containing smaller edible Kfe-forms. The transfer of animals between cages had so increased the demand on the remaining dispensers that they, too, had broken down until only a few machines were still operating. An attempt had been made to control the mass breakout by electrification of sections of the wire mesh, but this had been a hasty, jury-rigged installation which had also totally broken down in several places. Judging by the condition of the bodies, the majority of the other animals had been unable to defend themselves against the terrible horn and tentacles of the Twos, although a small number must have escaped through gaps tom in the mesh. Otherwise there would have been only one species infesting the Ship. But there was one large, caterpiUar-like animal who had never had a chance. All McCullough could tell from its remains was that it had no skeleton to speak of, its body being surrounded by great bands of muscle. Its head section, which was heavily boned, contained four manipulators or feelers of some kind in addition to the usual sensory equipment. Its hide was pale gray and very smooth, like that of a walrus. In a nearby enclosure, however, the Twos had met sometlung which even they could not stand against. For a long time McCullough and the others stared at the drifting Two carcasses, stripped of all edible tissue so that little more than the bony carapace remained, and at the cluster of tiny holes punched through the half-inch thick shell. t was Berryman who spoke first. "And now," he said gravely, "we are looking for an emotionally disturbed alien with a machinegun... But they all had far too much to do before the Twos began arriving for lunch to give this new development the discussion it deserved. The first step was to disconnect the wiring from the electrified sections of mesh -- during a battle with the Twos would not be a good time to be accidentally electrocuted. Then from the small or more damaged food dispensers they stripped lengths of cable and metal piping and threaded these into the tom sections of mesh, repairing and reinforcing their cage's sides and barring its severely warped doors. They did not make any provision for evacuation if their plan went wrong, although it was obvious that they were all thinking about it while they worked and talked loudly about the probable effects of shutting off the Ship's animals from what must be the only source of food and water. All the other dispensers had been wrecked, accidentally by the Twos or deliberately by the men. "Poisoning them would be safer," said Berryman when their cage had been made as secure as possible, "if we knew what was toxic to them. And if we had some of it." "Too slow," said McCullough. "Six inches of cold aluminum alloy," said Drew, "is toxic to everything." "Company," said Hollis. Three of the tentacled e-ts and a pair of the white-furred flying carpets had arrived and were heading toward their cage. It became a civil war almost at once. As soon as the furry Type Three came within striking distance a Two lashed out with its tentacle, the bony tip ripping a six-inch gash in the white fur. While the Three flapped helplessly in the center of the corridor the Two steadied itself against the mesh and launched a second and more deadly attack, this time crisscrossing the pelt with deep and visibly widening channels which oozed bright red. The Three began to undulate rapidly imtil it was fluttering like a thick, bloody flag in a high wind. Then sudderdy it was just a tattered, lifeless rag; and its attacker, a very messy eater, began to feed. Meanwhile the second Two was not having things all its own way. Somehow the furry animal had managed both to evade its attacker's tentacles and to attach itself to the Two's unprotected back where those four deadly weapons could not be brought to bear. At first McCullough thought he was seeing the e-t version of the old adage about holding a tiger by the tail, but then he saw that the furry body of the Three was squeezing down and between the roots of the threshing tentacles where the Two's eyes were situated, blinding it, and then extending further onto and across the underbelly until it blocked the breathing apertures. When the Two was dead the furry animal did not try to eat it, but instead undulated over to the mesh. Possibly it was a vegetarian. During the fight the unoccupied Two had attacked the mesh, probing IF and worrying and slapping at it with horn and tentacles, then bouncing back to the corridor wall net to hurl itself carapace first like a living cannonball against the wire. McCullough had wondered how the animals had been able to break out of their cages in the first place, since the security arrangements had seemed adequate for such a relatively small life-form, but as the mesh twanged and bulged inward under the onslaught of this single, angry specimen he was no longer puzzled. Finally the Two, tired of beating its head against the mesh, insinuated couple of feet of one of its tentacles in an attempt to pull the wire apart. Immediately Drew gripped the tentacle, planted both feet firmly against the mesh and pulled the Two hard against the wire while the spear in his other hand drove forward in a single, twisting, lethal stab. The beast's tentacles thrashed briefly and were still, then there was anothet Two charging the mesh, and another. T he dispenser began making soft, chuffing sounds. It emitted a slow, untidy jet of water from a spigot, which had had its teat chewed off, and a series of gray round objects of the size and shape of a large orange. They had the consistency of porridge, Berryman reported when one of them hit the side of his head, and added that the smell and taste -- it had splattered forward onto his nose and lips -- were not entirely unpleasant. They became too busy to talk shortly after that, and the job of had made it appear. They were badly hampered by . weightlessness, which forced them either to hold onto a Two or to twist their feet through the mesh to use their spears effectively. But very often the Twos presented far too many tentacles, and anchoring themselves by twisting a foot into the mesh was asking to have it smashed by the hard tip of a tentacle or impaled on a horn. Without some form of support their aim suffered and most of the force behind their thrusts was expended on getting through the mesh, so that what little remained was enough only to push the Twos away and inflict superficial injuries if any. The reaction from such a lunge sent the men spinning helplessly so that they were in as much danger from the spears of their friends as from the horns of the Twos. This is a stupid plan," gasped McCullough as he knocked away a spear which was coming at his face. "Since it was your plan," said Berryman from the other side of the cage, "I must decline to comment." "Hold still, everyone," said Drew. "I want to try something..." During the few minutes pause while he explained and demonstrated his idea the mesh, particularly the places which had been patched and reinforced, took a savage beating. Reinforcing cable stretched and snapped, lengths of piping buckled andegan slipping out of position and it would be only a matter of time before the Twos were inside the cage with them. Following Drew's instructions they launched themselves like ungainly swordfish from the panel of the dispenser, arms extendi stiffly before them and hands gripping their weapons. They jumped in unison so as to minimize the danger of spearing each other, the idea being to aim themselves in the general direction of their target and at the last moment guide the tip of their spears through the mesh. The creatures possessed enough weight and inertia not to be pushed away before a deep wound was inflicted and, since the combined length of arms and spear was much greater than that of the e-t's horn or tentacles, there would be little danger of retaliation. It worked. After the first few abortive attempts it became a drill. They each chose a target, kicked themselves away from the food dispenser cabinet, and the three targets died. But there were always more to take their places, squeezing tentacles through the wire, jabbing with that long, obscene horn and gobbling like frantic turkeys. For McCullough it became a continuing over and over again. He had lost count of the times they had launched themselves from the dispenser, now slippery with a scummy mixture of food, water and e-t blood, to dive through air that was like a thick soup of the same recipe, to kill that Two once again. A number of the white-furred Threes had squeezed between the Twos and were clinging to the wire and absorbing -- McCullough could not see exactly how -- the streamers and gobbets of water and food drifting toward them There were even two of them inside the cage, having wriggled through a loosened patch, flapping and undulating throu the air like great furry stingrays. All the men had been careful not to kill the type Three aliens. After seeing how one of them had dealt with a Two, they considered them allies rather them introduced a certain amount of discrimination into the exercise so that they could think of it as being something less than a brutal, bloody massacre. Ti yTcCuUough tried to think of otherLVl things; the slaughter proceeded. Between meal times the animal enclosure had been surprisingly clean, so that the dispenser cabinet must also fulfill the duty of a wastedisposal unit. But while the waste water and food would no doubt be reprocessed, the material which could not be reclaimed would be pumped to the outer hull and disposed of, which meant that the plumbing associated with the wastedisposal system would be metal piping which, because it did not have to carry an electrical current, would not have to be insulated at any point between the dispenser and the hull outlet. As soon as this was all over they would be able to hook onto it with antennae and contact Walters. He felt rather pleased with himself for being able to reason things out like this while engaged in the Twos. Then suddenly there were no more targets. The still-living Twos were retreating along the corridors. IF dragging the bodies of their dead friends with them when they could so that they would not go hungry, and the dispenser, which had ceased producing half an hour since, went dramatically into reverse. Heavy protective panels slid aside to reveai large openings covered with safety grills. Drifting food, water and other debris moved toward the openings, picking up speed as they went. So great was the force of suction that the air made a high-pitched whistle as it went through the grill and within a few minutes the cage was clear. But there was more to come. From the eight corners of the enclosure a thin, foaming, sharpsmelling liquid spurted out immediately followed by eight high-pressure sprays of water. By the time the dispenser had shut itself off the men and the two furry Threes inside the cage were like the air, clean, fresh and slightly damp. Outside the cage dead Twos drifted and spun slowly, stiff-tentacled, like fossilized starfish; Above, below and all aroxmd them the mesh was thick with them, as if it was some kind of alien flypaper which had not been changed for' too long a time. Berryman linked his antenna to the dispenser plumbing and made contact with Walters. He tried to speak but obviously could not get a word in edgewise. Watching, McCullough saw him close his eyes tightly as if there was something he did not want to see, something much worse than the ghastly spectacle all around them. Finally he spoke. "We're in trouble," he said dully. "Walters is... upset. Brady has been working on him again, and that girl. She sounds like a nice girl, ho says, but she confuses him. The first supply rocket is off course. She didn't actually tell him that we were bad boys and if we didn't start doing as we were told again the other two might miss as well. It was just that public opinion was touchy, and it was difficult to make promises when the men at the Ship kept messing things up. He says she mentioned some very person stuff, material he never expected to hear mentioned, privileged information. He's thinking of all the people who have heard everything she said -- the men on the Venus station and all their people in Russia. Everybody will soon know. He's very unhappy about it." Berryman stopped and took a deep breath. Fatigue and tension made it into a tremendous, ludicrous yawn, but nobody laughed. He went on, "So he blabbed everything to Bardy. Your new theory, our plans, everjrthing. He says he couldn't help it. He says he wants to be a good boy again so's they'll let him go home..." xvm F or three days they barricaded themselves inside the dispenser cage during mealtimes and killed Twos. As expected, the number of e-t casualties duninished sharply each day. This was, of course, due to the fact of there being ample food available outside the cage in the form of previously slain animals. On the fourth day they tried a different approach i A series of food caches were built up in compartments opening off the conidors leading from the enclosure to one of the hull airlocks. By this time they had discovered how to turn off the food dispensers at will and they had towed the dead e-ts to the nearest lock and dumped them into space, so that the Twos which remained in the Ship were becoming very hungry. The operation of placing a trail of food between the enclosure and the lock chamber, during the few minutes before mealtimes when it would have its maximum effect, was a dangerous one but well worth the risks. The end result was a lock chamber crowded with Twos fighting over a small food cache so fiercely that they were usually oblivious of the fact that they had suddenly been sealed in and Hollis or McCullough were outside the hull opening the compartment to space. They bagged as many as six Twos at a time that way. On the ninth day McCullough deeded that their original purpose of drastically reducing the numbers of Twos roaming the Ship had been accomplished and they could all return to more constructive forms of activity. The decision on what to do about Walters was not so easily taken, and McCullough could not put off making it any longer. Punishment or retribution of any kind was ruled out, of course, since that would involve varying degrees of criticism or rejection by his friends. Alone as he had been on the P-ship for weeks on end, the pilot was particularly sensitive to this form of punishment and he had already soaked up more than enough of it from General Brady. Dirty fitting and psychological warfare, so far as McCullough was concerned, were becoming synonymous. "I should have come to see you sooner," he told Walters as he opened his visor after passing through the inner seal. He waved vaguely toward the port and the frigid, decompressed Twos drifting outside and added, "we were very busy." "Yes," said the pilot, smiling. "I took some very good pictures of the spring cleaning." Walters's voice was quiet and pleasant, his features relaxed and his hands and fingers yellow and bloodless so tightly was he gripping the sides of his couch. Awkwardly, McCullough said, "I won't say that we don't blame you, not again. Telling the truthtoo often can make it sound like a lie. And, well, don't worry if it happens to you again. You are aware of what they are trying to do to you so it won't be so easy for them next time, and they might even change their approach -- " "They have," said Walters. "Just before you arrived that girl told me they would not divert the other supply rockets no matter what fool stunt we pulled or how much trouble we caused them. Obviously this news is supposed to make us aU break down and weep out of sheer gratitude that mamma still loves us even when we've been naughty. IF "I wish I hadn't read so many psychology books," he ended bitterly. "It has made me cynical." McCullough laughed. He said, "Cynicism is a very good defense, also a little sympathy for the enemy -- Brady, that is, not the Twos. And a good, hefty shot of megalomania might help as well. You start by doubting everything they tell you and questioning all their motives, at the same time trying to appreciate the general's position, but not to the extent that you fail to realize the true importance of the part we have to play in all this. So you doubt Brady, you feel sorry for him and, in your quiet, respectful fashion, you also feel superior to him. Get the idea?" "Of late," said Walters doubtfully, "I have become much less quiet and respectful." "That is because you haven't been feeling superior enough," said McCullough drily. He went on, "We are the ' experts in this particular situation. It is ridiculous to expect us to obey people who know less about it than we do -- people who, if they were to regain complete control over us, are under so much pressure from so many different directions that they are incapable of giving proper orders anyway." Ti TcCullough waited then, without iVl appearing to wait, wondering if the pilot would seize the bait or even if he was aware of it. He was and he did. "You mentioned them regaining complete control over us," said Walters quickly. "Other than the control. which is as you know far from complete, imposed by service discipline and the habit of obedience, how can they influence us?" "This is rather awkward for me," said McCullough, preparing to slide imperceptibly from questionable, rule-of-thumb psychology into outright fiction, "because I didn't want to talk about this until I was surer of my facts. But it seems to me that we may have been the subjects of a form of conditioning which was designed to support and guide us as well as furnishing Prometheus with a large measure of control. By this I mean that it was subtle enough not to interfere with mentation and at the same time leave us unaware that we were being helped and controlled. How exactly this conditioning was implanted I don't know, although I suspect that the hours we spent listening to canned lectures in the simulator may have had something to do with it, but the method used to reinforce the conditioning and at the same time control us is. I'm fairly sure, the radio transmissions from the Cape. "The mechanics of the process," McCullough went on seriously, "might involve the use of certain key words and phrases but would, I'm pretty sure, be more likely to depend on the tond quality of voice used -- they could heterodyne their AF with subor ultra-sonics to obtain a kind of subliminal effect on the audio frequency. But for various reasons the conditioning broke down or was considerably weakened and they lost a large measure of their control over us." Natural radio interference with the signal could have been one factor, McCullough went on to explain, and the constant relaying of transmissions through the suit radios had probably attenuated the effect even more. It was not surprising, therefore, that the men who had Control's orders relayed to them from the P-ship had been able to exercise discretion in the matter of obeying orders while Walters, who was in direct radio contact, had never had a chance of resisting them. "That makes me feel much better," said the pilot when McCullough had finished talking. "It even gives me an excuse for future misdemeanors, if any. But surely Brady's psychological weapon is twoedged. It caused to be made public information which he would have preferred to remain secret, namely the extermination -- massacre, he calls it -- of the Twos. Rather than risk the chance of the listening world hearing something even more unpleasant, he might leave me alond." "I doubt it," said McCullough. "But if he goes on," said Walters angrily, "it means he is pushing a psychological abort button! He will be softening us up until, instead of being able to think and carry out complex technical activities, we'll be just so many jellies unable to think or act at all much less obey orders. Is he trying to wreck the Project? Isn't it also possible that he could push a button and ignite our return fuel supply? Was provision made for this in case the e-ts turned out to be baddies and threatened the security of the world? "All of a sudden I don't trust Brady, and I dislike being treated like part of the hardware." He broke off as he became aware of McCullough's expression, then said quickly, "I don't really believe any of that, but there is an easy Next time we're in contact I'll tell the listening world that if there is an unexplained explosion out here it will have been caused by Brady." He laughed suddenly. "But your real danger is me! With this information and all the spare time at my disposal I might analyze and reproduce this conditioning effect. My word would be law then, and I could wrap you all around my little finger!" "As I said," McCuUougih smiled as he turned to go, "a little megalomania is a good thing." O n the way back to the Ship, McCullough found himself questioning some of his own motives. He had been telling lies to the pilot, suggesting that Walters had not been really responsible for his apparent treachery by blaming everything on a form of conditioning which might not even be workable, but not solely as an act of kindness. McCullough himself needed support and reassurance. He wanted as many people on his side as possible, which meant that he could not risk Walters going over to Brady. If the pilot sided actively with Control instead of the men in the Ship, McCullough could not bear to think of the consequences. In the frighteningly simple world of emotional relationships and physical survival, Walters's friendship could only II! be assured if he was to become completely and utterly hostile to the general. And so McCullough himself was guilty of pressing psychological pushbuttons and treating a human being as part of the hardware. Worse, he was pressing them without fully understanding what he was doing or what the end result might be. Worst of all was the fact that what he was doing did not trouble McCullough's conscience as much or as often as it should. His conscience seemed to be developing thick and widespread callouses. He wondered how long it would be before he becanoe completely de-civilized. Progress within the Ship during the next few days was erratic. Berryman came out in a livid, itching rash which lasted for one whole day and caused McCullough to have horrible visions of everyone going down with the e-t equivalent of bubonic plague carried by dead Twos, before it faded completely. It was only then that Hollis, Drew and Berryman admitted smugly to eating a few ounces of alien porridge every day for the past week. McCullough warned them of the possibility of dangerous longterm cumulative effects -- the fact that Berryman's allergy symptoms had cleared up in so short a time did not necessarily mean that the food was completely non-toxic. But then McCullough realized that he was beginning to sound like General Brady and that the three men were expecting compliments instead of criticism, so he added gravely that the cumulative effect of the toxine would probably take the form of a long, wasting, ultimately fatal disease indistinguishable from old age. Spurred on by this act of moral cowardice they immediately announced plans for domesticating the Threes.  T hey did it by first using the porridge to gain their trust, punishment to teach them not to wrap their furry bodies around a human being's head -- although there was no real danger here as they could be peeled off easily with human fingers, and the punishment was very light -- and petting, particularly when it took the form of combing their fur with stiffened fingers. Several of the Threes became attached, literally, to Berryman and Drew, and Hollis and McCullough began picking out Threes and trying to make friends with them. Their fur was pleasant to touch and they seemed very friendly and demonstrative -- just like dogs, in fact. McCullough suspected that, like dogs, the scratching gave them pleasure because it helped dislodge parasites, and he began to wonder about the habits of alien fleas. Also like dogs they were useful as well as friendly. They could sense Twos at a distance, and this early warning system saved lives many times over. Despite the three successful operations in the enclosure and the subsequent strategy which had lured a large number of the beasts into lock chambers and the vacuum of space, their movements within the Ship were still being badly hampered by Twos. Mean, vicious and very himgry Twos. By following the supply ducting back from the food dispensers they had found the compartment -- whose doors, fortunately, had remained Two-proof -- where the food was processed for distribution to the various cages. Their first act had been to shut off the food supply, which had been accomplished with very little damage to processing equipment, with the idea of forcing the remaining Twos to kill each other off for food. But this had turned out to be a very slow business and, while they occasionally came on an animal which had been killed and eaten by its own species, there were indications that the surviving Twos -- their numbers were estimated at not over twenty -- preferred human beings as food. The investigation was proceeding, McCullough told himself, but an unbiased, hypothetical observer would have said that the humans were being hunted all over the Ship. T hey investigated, or were forced to take cover near, the area of the Power Room. This was the compartment where all the heavy power cables for the generators and the Ship lighting supplies had their origin, and they spent two days in the area without being able to find a way in. So far as they could see the compartment was heavily shielded and sealed tightly against all intruders, including members of the Ship's crew. As the work of charting the vessel's interior continued, other blank areas appeared, compartments which were completely sealed off against everyone and everything. "Like it says in my car instruction booklet," said Hollis, trying manfully to hide his disappointment, "repair or maintenance should be handled only by a qualified mechanic or service station..." One of the compartments which they entered easily contained large quantities of food and liquids other than water in what was obviously weightless packaging. This time it was the Threes rather than the men who acted, quite happily, as guinea-pigs -- McCullough wanted to dispell a lingering doubt which was troubling him that the containers might hold paint instead of soup. But it was the labelling system used to identify the containers which caused most of the discussion. It was Hollis who tried finally to sum up. "We agree that the line of characters overprinted on the label is some kind of service routing and identification code or serial number. We think it is a number rather than a word because of the repetition of certain characters and because similar combinations were found on Ship sub-assemblies and structural details. Markings incorporated in the label itself, which are similar to those found near airlock controls and service panels, are words identifying its contents with possibly the addition of some purely advertising material. The pictorial content of some of the labels are confusing, but then an illustration of a slice of bacon would not give an alien very much information about a pig. We must IF assume that the containers hold some kind of edible animal or vegetable tissue, although their is a faint possibility that -- " " -- the labels," Berryman said, grinning, "may carry a picture of the chef." Hollis ignored him and continued, "The fact that the whole compartment is below-average Ship temperature, and that many of the storage cabinets are additionally refrigerated, supports the food theory. But the part which puzzles me is the" picture of the Three on the door of that big refrigerated cabinet, and the tools or eating utensils and assorted collection of small packages inside it which . also carry picture of a Three. Is the Three, or certain parts of it, perhaps, some kind of delicacy?" Drew shook his head. He said, "In our house we didn't keep the caviar in the cutlery drawer." McCullough had been thinking hard while the physicist had been talking. He said suddenly, "The delicacies are too small, some of them, and too carefully wrapped to be food, I think, and the utensils are very sharp and their packaging also bears the emblem of a somewhat stylized Three. To me this suggests... well, what animal do you associate with medicine and errands of mercy?" Hollis said, "A red -- but no, that isn't an animal. A snake! The staff and coiled serpents of Aesculepius. Or... or do you mean a St. Bernard?" McCullough nodded and Berryman began stroking the Three which was wrapped around his hips and thighs "Nice doggie," he said happily. B ut the great majority of the compartments they examined were puzzling without being informative. They were large compartments containing eight, twelve and sometimes sixteen big, hollow cylinders of some kind of plastic material supported along the center of the room by taut but flexible cables. The cylinders were just over three yards in length and were encircled at intervals of a foot or so by wide, flexible bands of rubbery materials which compressed the soft, hollow tube and made if look a little like a caterpillar. The material of the cylinder was thickly padded on the inside. The compartments were fitted with lighting fixtures, cabinets and various enigmatic items whose general design and coloring were less ultilitarian than anything previously met with in the Ship. Invariably, one of the cabinets bore the picture of a stylized Three on its door, and in some of them the contents showed signs of having been used. In some of the compartments there were pictures on the walls -- large, fuzzy pictures which seemed to show trees growing horizontally with branches doubling as extra roots, or things which looked like heaps of varicolored spaghetti, or illustrations, sometimes covering most of the wall, of something resembling marble or coarse-grained wood. Sometimes a thorough search of these compartments brought to light mislaid or discarded books, diagrams and photographs. None of the books were illustrated; the diagrams were purely technical; and the photographs were even more confusing since they pictured things or people or events which were completely alien. "I wish," said Hollis bitterly as he turned one of the photographs, playing cards or beer mats over and over in a vain attempt to find a viewpoint which made sense, "that they had been a little more untidy. You can find out an awful lot about a person from the contents of his wastepaper basket." "If these cylinders are some kind of tubular hammock," said Berryman to McCullough, "and I don't sec what else they can be, the only e-t they will fit is that big caterpillar we found half-eaten in the animsd enclosure. But what really bothers me is the number of these dormitory compartments and the number of hammocks in each one. What was this ship? A troop transport? Some kind of colonization project which went wrong?" "Maybe a big ship needs a crew to match," Drew put in quickly. "But where the blazes are they?" McCullough shook his head. He said, "My theory is that it was, and is, a very small crew. If there had been a large number of them when the Twos broke out, we would have found traces of them -- carcasses, bones, unedible remnants. How that particular caterpillar happened to be in that cage I don't know, but -- " "Suppose it wasn't intelligent," Hollis broke in, "but a species physically resembling the intelligent e-t life-form. Before we sent a man into space we tested apes and monkeys because their metabolism and -- " "For God's sake," said McCullough irritably, "the situation is complicated enough as it is! My idea is this. The dormitories were used by the people who built the Ship, who left when the job was finished. Possibly the compartments will be used for colonists or passengers on a later trip, but not this time. This trip the Ship was, is, on her maiden voyage." "And since control seems to be largely automatic," Berryman added, "the crew could be very small indeed. "I want you all to listen to this tape," he said, then added apologetically, "again." T hey listened again to the gobbling of Twos in the enclosure, the chiming and moaning and the two alien voices. Like the Twos they could disregard one of the voices and its accompanying chimes since this was almost certainly some kind of pre-takeoff recorded warning sequence. The moaning could have been caused by machinery, perhaps malfunctioning equipment of some kind, except that no machine should ever make a noise like that. Hollis and Berryman suggested that it might be music of some kind being played in the second voice's quarters. The sound could have been made by a number of wind instruments, but the tonal range and scale were crazy. So, in all probability, was the alien. "I'm beginning to think there is only one intelligent e-t left on the Ship," McCullough said as they prepared to leave the compartment, "and IF that one is in very poor shape physically and mentally. But to help it we need more information about its world and its society, its relations with its fellows or with members of the opposite sex or sexes if there are more than two, and as much data as we can possibly obtain on its own personal background. Somewhere in the Ship there must be family photographs..." "Psycho-therapy is a chancy business," said Berryman quietly, "even with human beings. Trying it on an emotionally disturbed alien seems...  "Foolhardy," said Hollis. Drew did not say anything. Since the time McCullough had revived him with the Kiss of Life he had never disagreed with the doctor. But occasionally, as now, his face became more than usually expressionless. To make successful contact with it, McCullough told himself firmly, they would have to see that it was capable of rational behavior and show that they themselves were friendly towards it. Clearing the Ship of the majority of its Twos should prove their good intentions, but only if the being' was sane enough to appreciate and understand what they were doing. And it possessed, or had possessed, a weapon. Why then did it not come out of hiding and help them exterminate the Twos? They needed more information. The trouble was they had to fight for every single datum, and it could only be a matter of time before some perhaps unimportant scrap of information cost someone his life. But the material they were sending back to Control was valuable. The reports and photographs of alien food labels and pictures and text would send language experts the world over into multilingual paroxysms of joy, not to mention the methods used to make friends with the Three lifeform and their subsequent activities together. There was also a steady flow of information on Ship equipment and control systems which would be non-objectionable so far as Brady was concerned. They could not, of course, tell him everything. Some of their troubles they had to keep to themselves. Hollis took to crying in his sleep, during the rare occasions when he was able to get any. Drew collected and trained more Three pets than was really necessary for self-protection. When he moved he was surrounded by a flapping phalanx of Threes, and prior to going to sleep he stroked and patted them until they had him enclosed in a thick, furry cocoon. Berryman and McCullough watched each other covertly and talked about their physical and psychological problems both as individuals and as a group, the meanings behind the nightmares to which everyone was subject, and their past lives public and private -- all with a simulated objectivity which fooled neither of them. Each was waiting for the other one to break, and each gained strength because the break did not come. The times they each woke up struggling and screaming did not count, of course, because they all did that. Walters, too, was unhappy. Cut rV.!! ivT.V.UV.'.jI off from home except by voice contact with Prometheus Control, all of whom now sounded more nervous and insincere while talking to him than he felt while talking to them, it was obvious that the pilot was desperately concerned for the safety of his friends -- his only friends -- on the Ship. During their infrequent radio contacts -- it was just not possible these days for McCullough to visit him -- the strain in his voice was an almost tangible thing. The general and Tokyo Rose were beginning to worry him again. They were suggesting that the facts supporting McCullough's theory about the Ship's builders using the dormitory compartments would also support his own, perhaps more logical theory, that the tubular hammocks were meant to contain a couple of Twos and that it was the Twos who were the crew of the ship all the time. Walters did not want to bother the doctor with this kind of talk, but sometimes the general made it sound very believable. Walters was beginning to actively hate the general, and it showed in his voice. XX T hen one day they were forced to take cover in a room which was more thoroughly furnished, in the esthetic as well as the structural sense, than any they had encountered before. The room contained just two tubular hammocks, its cabinets and fixtures were much less utilitarian than usual, and there were a great many pictures on the walls. And softly, in the background, there was the moaning, whistling sound which they had heard only once before but could never forget. But in this compartment the structural skeleton did not show, and the metal bones and circulatory system were too well concealed by paneling for them to hook up a suit-radio antenna to a section of plumbing which would allow contact with Walters. As a result McCullough could not tell the pilot of the tremendous discovery they had made or bring him into the discussion which followed it. "Crew quarters, no doubt about it," Hollis said, waving his arms in excitement. "But I don't think this room is only for sleeping in -- its furniture is too diversified, there are too many pictures. Crowding a bedroom with pictures is in questionable taste..." "So," said Berryman, '"is having twin beds." "Be serious a minute," said Hollis. "The point I'm trying to make is that there is more than enough space in the Ship for crew members to have different rooms for sleeping, eating, recreation and so on while this compartpient -- a surprisingly small room in a very large ship -- appears to combine the functions of all three. I may be jumping to conclusions here, but it suggests to me that they prefer small, confined, cozy living quarters. This place looks like... like an illustrated nest or... I give up." Berryman said, "I am only an amateur psychologist -- a gifted amateur, naturally -- but I'm in; #I clined to agree with that The question is if the crew prefers to live in cozy little rooms inside a great big ship -- and with wild Twos roaming the corridors, who could blame them? -- why aren't they at home, do you suppose?" From the door's transparent panel Drew, who was keeping watch, said, "The Twos are beginning to leave. A Three just went by, one of the carpets we haven't made friends with yet, and they took off after it. Can I close the door?" "Not yet," said McCullough. He h been too busy with his camera to join in the discussion, and his mind had been vainly trying to emulate the instrument by absorbing everything he could see at once. But he was not so wildly excited and curious as to forget caution or his own fairly well supported theory of the e-t crew-member being mentally disturbed and in possession of a projectile-firing weapon. They might be in much more danger from the intelligent alien than from the hungry Twos. McCullough had ordered the sliding door to be kept partly open in case they should have to leave in a hurry. McCullough cleared his throat and said, "At the risk of sounding like General Brady, I suggest that the mass of important new data which has been made available should be very carefully considered before we make a move toward communicating with one of the crew." With the exception of Drew they all returned to the study of the room's fittings. They reminded each other several times that they were examining what were almost certainly personal effects which should be treated with great care. Sometimes they laughed for no apparent reason or shouted in excitement or spoke in guilty whispers in case someone or something overheard them. As well as the medicine cabinet with its Three symbol, there were wall racks to which were clipped surprisingly Earthlike spools of tape or film. Another cabinet held books which were not illustrated, much to the men's disappointment, and yet another contained flexible plastic tubes full of liquid and semi-liquid substances which smelled to high heaven. "Probably booze or beauty cream," said Berryman as he wriggled out of an alien bed. He had been investigating the interiors of both hammocks. When his legs were clear he added. "They're almost comfortable if it wasn't for the dampness and smell. When you push against the inside the padding secretes something which smells like... like... It's a damp smell, not altogether unpleasant." McCullough investigated with eye and nose, finding that he had to push away several of the Threes to do so. But the animals were wriggling and flapping around only one one of the hammocks. He was reminded suddenly of dogs excited by the scent of their master or by the clothing or personal possessions of their master. One of these beds had been occupied recently, he felt sure, or the Threes would not be so excited. He turned back to look again at those enigmatic pictures. IF M ost of them showed pallid, leafless vegetation set against a dark, mottled background or one that resembled rough-grained wood. While there was a definite feeling of depth to the pictures, there was no middle distance or horizon, and McCullough assumed that they were some kind of still life studies. But there were two pictures which had everything -- size, perspective and almost photographic detail. One of them showed the plant or thing or whatever it was that they had at first mistaken for a multicolored pile of spaghetti,, with trees in the foreground and clouds behind to give a true indication of its tremendous size. Another showed trees with strange leaves on them, thick, wirey undergrowth harboring a running Two and a dazzlingly bright sky. A great njany questions regarding the Two life-form were answered by that picture. The e-t stag at bay, he thought drily. He could now tell General Brady that the Twos were, in fact, animals and not intelligent beings. While this knowledge would be a load off everyone's mind it still meant that McCullough was faced with the problem of making contact with the intelligentextra-terrestrial on the Ship, and all at once he was most horribly afraid and unsure of himself. He did not want the responsibility and he could not make the decision which was being forced on him -- at least, not right now. In a couple of hours, perhaps. Or days... Right now he wanted to slap an indefinite Hold on everything. He wanted time to look at all the evidence old and new, and discuss it quietly and in the greatest possible detail. This time he could not afford to push the wrong psychological button, for he was so firmly convinced that there was only one intelligent extraterrestrial left in the Ship and that physically and emotionally it was not in good shape. It took a tremendous effort for him to make his voice sound firm and steady when he spoke. "Everybody out," he said. "We must report this to Brady and decide on our next move. This time we can't afford to make a mistake. Collect your Threes and let's go. Quickly!" But the Threes did not want to leave. It took more than ten minutes coaxing and petting to make them leave the vicinity of that one cylindrical hammock. Meanwhile Drew reported Twos beginning to gather a little way along the corridor and asked permission to close the door. Berryman, his Threes covering his body like a form-fitting fur coat, continued to look around. Suddenly he called, "Over here!" The pilot had opened what he thought was the door of a recessed cupboard -- there were a number of them in the room -- and found himself looking along a short stretch of corridor. There was another door containing a large transparent panel at the other end, and beyond that another room which was in darkness except for the myriads of indicator lights burning like regimented stars on the facing wall. As they watched, a black shadow began to occlude 'me of the stars. Outside!" shouted McCullough again. "Quickly, and make sure door is closed properly behind usl" "But there's dozens of them out here," said Drew angrily. "Some thing is biting them. I've never heard Twos make a noise like this before." Get out of here! W hen the entrance to the alien crew's compartment was safely closed behind him McCullough tried to explain why he had insisted on them leaving a relatively safe position for their present highly dangerous one. But they were all too angry to talk, and there were so many Twos in the corridor that they couldn't risk taking their eyes off them to even look at him. Probably they were hating him for being stupid or a coward, or both. But McCullough, while scared stiff of meeting the alien face to face, had been even more afraid of another possibility. He had suddenly thought of the animal enclosure with its half-eaten body of the other crew member, and he had had a picture of what the Twos would do if they broke into that last compartment. He wondered if the alien had considered his reaction cowardly, always supposing that the being was capable of reasoning at all. But even if grief over the loss of what was very probably its mate, and loneliness and fear inside this vast. Two-infested ship -- and possibly physical injuries as well -- had driven it insane or close to insanity, a cowardly reaction might actually be reassuring to it. There was nobody who helped a coward like an even greater coward. But he could not cure the alien, or communicate with it, by running away all the time. On Earth psychiatric treatment of seriously disturbed patients -- "insane" was not considered a nice word -- had had only limited success. So what chance had a doctor who was not even a psychologist of curing a patient whose archetypal images were out of this world, whose phallic symbols were unrecognizable and whose culture contained in all probability a welter of psychological theories even more complex and mutually contradictory than those current on Earth? There might be some relatively simple form of therapy possible, of course. The e-t equivalent of the snake pit, where the patient cured itself with just a little unskilled help and a lot of symapthy. But that was asking for two much. Right now McCullough needed specialist advice and assistance, from Earth. "Back to the hull lock chamber," he said. "We have to contact Walters, and Brady. Hurry it upl" T he Twos attacked while he was with colliding, cartwheeling bodies and slashing, horn-tipped tentacles. In the confusion Drew and Hollis got three of them and Berryman one before they were able to pull clear of the melee. McCullough seriously wounded a couple of them and lost contact with his Three after the furry creature had started to strange IP another Two which had heen trying to swarm onto his back. But suddenly it was with him again, flapping along behind him as they retreated along the corridor. He reached back, caught it and pulled it onto his shoulders like a great, furry cape. Suddenly they were trapped. Another group of Twos came boiling out of an intersection ahead of them, bouncing off the wall-netting and each other like outsize, tentacled molecules illustrating the Brownian movement of gases. Berryman shouted, "In here!" He was holding open the sliding door into a large dormitory compartment. They went through it backward, spears jabbing at full extension, fighting off Twos. Seconds after they had slid it shut, the door bulged alarmingly as several Twos charged it together, but it did not come off its runners. Drew and Berryman were able to get their spears through the warped outsides of the door and stab attacking Twos with comparative safety. They killed four of the animals -- without, however, seriously discouraging the attack. Hollis and McCullough, meanwhile, made a quick check of the compartment. Their most important discoveries were another exit and, floating in one of the corners, a thick, illustrated magazine. The color reproduction and values were strange and the printed characters even stranger, not to mention the raised, embossed pattern on the bottom outside comer of each page which allowed them to be turned by alien digits terminating in osseous material. But somehow it still managed to look like a copy of an illustrated magazine that might have been picked up anywhere on Earth. McCullough longed for time to examine it and discuss it at length with the others. He wanted to photograph it page by page and have Walters transmit the pictures to Earth and have everyone there discuss it and offer specialist advice. But behind him the Twos were battering their way through the warped sliding door. McCullough folded the magazine carefully and wedged it between his air-tanks and his back, then led the way out of the other exit and along the corridor. They continued to duck in and out of compartments, some of which were large, inter-connected dormitories with several exits, and for several minutes they completely lost the Twos. By then they were completely lost themselves. "Berryman," said McCullough, steadying himself against a hammock as he tried to catch his mental and physical breath. "Check the plumbing with a view to contacting Walters. Hollis, help him. While you're doing so try to think of a quick way of repairing the sabotaged generator. I'll begin taping a report for the general while you two try to contact POne." But the Twos battered down the door a few minutes later, and they were forced to move again. Drew swore horribly and said that he did not know what had got into them. Normally ferocious and blindly antagonistic, they were now open their bony carapaces against #S the metal doors and running onto each other's horns in their attempts to get at the humans. It was as if sonie dreadful hysteria had them in its grip and the grip was tightening by the minute. instinct was being aroused, McCullough told himself as the men were forced to flee once again. It had to be a very deep-rooted instinct because these Twos were almost certaintly second or third generation. T he report was filially completed during a lull while the Twos, who were still in the grip of the conditioning which made them visit the food dispensers at mealtimes, were absent. Berryman identified a section of plumbing belonging to the hydraulic system actuating the hull cargo locks and said that it should make a very good link with their ship. The pilot quickly connected his suit radio antenna, said that someone was already talking at the other end and turned up the volume. Tinny, distorted and furiously angry, Brady's voice rattled at them:... What you said was bad enough. Thoughtless, irresponsible, downright criminal considering the political situation here -- and Vm disregarding the tone, which was insubordinate to the point of mutiny! But those pictures, that cold-blooded slaughter of what are almost certainly intelligent beings -- you've been secretive, McCullough is afraid even to talk to me, and no wonder! Killing Twos has been reduced to a fine art, and judging by those pictures... " "WaltersI" began McCullough.   enjoying practicing that art! You act like barbarians instead of socalled reasoning beings! And you can't even claim the excuse of honest insanity, because your actions are too cold-blooded and carefully thought out. Moral cowardice, which is not an excuse, and megalomania is what ails you all! You made a mistake, McCullough, made a mistake with the Twos at the onset and will slaughter every last one of them rather than admit it! I want to talk to you. Doctor. I know you're afraid to listen but... " "Turn him down, Walters, I want to talk to youl" "... all things being equal the simple rather than the complicated explanation is usually the true one! evolved by people here who know their stuff arui it, also, fits the facts. The Ship dormitory accommodation was meant for its large complement of Twos. It may have been a colonization project, a troop transport or it may simply have needed a very large crew. A couple of Twos could squeeze into those hammocks, you know -- have you considered that? Then something happened during the early part of the trip, after the course had already been set for this solar system. Whatever catastrophe that occurred, it was almost certainly nonphysical. The end result was a process of cultural devolution which brought the crew close to the level of animals. They broke into, not out of, the animal cages in search of food and eventually sank to practicIF ing cannibalism. But they did not forget all their early training -- or their ancestors early training -- be cause they reacted violently toward anyone who appeared to threaten their Ship. '# can even make a prediction based on this theory, McCullough. It is this. The closer you approach the Ships control center -- which the Twos must regard as some sort of mystic shrine or taboo area by now, since they know it is vital to the Ship without understanding why -- the more their antagonism towards you will increase. Berryman, Hollis and Drew were staring at him, faces chalk white and reflecting the same horrible fear and guilt and confusion that was gripping McCullough. He couldn't be so wrong, he told himself desperately. He didn't have to listen to all of tbisl... beyond appeals to reason. The world is judging us, your country and everyone in it by your actions. But you dont care about that, do you? Well, we dont care about you! Believe me, if we directed the two remaining supply rockets off course we would not be too strongly criticized for doing so. Were ashamed of you, McCullough, and the rest of your murdering pack. You re little more than mad dogs! You sicken and disgust us! Brady's voice began to fade as Walters on P-One reduced the volume. But not soon enough.  . nobody here wants you, dyou understand that? We dont want to see you back! M ental anguish could take many forms, McCullough thougiht sickly, ranging from simple worry over a possible future unpleasantness to the deep grief at the loss of a dear one. But those were clean, uncomplicated emotions, whatever their degree of intensity. This was the twisting, almost physical pain of betrayal by a trusted friend who turns suddenly into an enemy raised to the nth power. For it was not only their personal friends at Prometheus who had betrayed and rejected them, it was their whole lousy race! From the shocked, angry faces all around him McCullough knew that only two reactions were possible. Anger and counterattack... or extreme, soul-destroying guilt and despair. But they had come through too much together on the Ship, they had overcome too many purely physical dangers, for them to die of a collective broken heart. He told himself that this was so, but he was hot sure that he could believe himself. He could not be sure of anything any more. A metallic crash from the door told of the Twos, even more angry probably because the food dispensers were no longer giving food, beginning to return from "lunch." He wondered suddenly if intelligent beings could sink so low as to eat animal's food and thought that they might if something had happened to the crew water and food supply. But Brady's theory was too simple, surely. There were facts that it did not explain. And one fact in particular was deafeningly obvious. 'I'm not a psychologist " said McCullough quietly, trying to control his relief and excitement, "but it seems to me that the last thing an intelligent person would forget is how to open and close a door." He turned to the radio and went on quickly, "So you showed him pictures of us dumping Twos into space. But I can guess at some of the things he said to make you do it, so don't worry. Just link me with the transmitter, Walters. There is something I want to say to him." He had begun by speaking quietly to the pilot, and his voice was still soft. But the anger that had crept into it when he spoke to the general made it unrecognizable even to himself. "We feel sorry for you, General Brady," he said. "We feel sorry for all you people. It would be a lie to say that we don't feel angry and disgusted with you as well, but we do feel sorry. The harsh facts of contact with an extra-terrestrial culture are being brought home to you, to all of you. You are all frightened. The implications are only now beginning to dawn on you. And you feel guilty and ashamed because things may not have been handled right. It is a very uncomfortable time for all of you, and your feelings and qualms of conscience do you credit. But you. General, and aU of you, are so uncomfortable that you want to avoid both the responsibility and the guilt by passing it onto us. Then, presumably, you will bury and forget the whole thing by disowning us I "There is nothing original about this course," McCullough went on. "It is a cleu case of your eyes and your hands scandalizing you, and you then quote the highest possible Authority regarding your subsequent action in the matter. If your right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out. If your right hand scandalise thee, cut it off and cast it from thee, and so on. But if you were thinking straight you would realize that this is not a true analogy. We are not just your hands and eyes, we are a cross section of all the people of Earth. That is what's really bothering you, and you know it! What we feel toward the aliens is what you would feel in the same circumstances; our thoughts would be your thoughts, our actions and reactions yours as well. You know this is true, but you don't want to face up to it. Instead you are making us the scapegoats. "We are doing the best we can with the situation here," he continued more quietly. "We are better qualified to understand it, since we are on the spot, and we are convinced that we are doing the right thing. A tape containing much valuable new information has been prepared. This will be placed in a Two-proof storage cabinet and played back to you while we head for the hull to repair the damaged generator. While this is being done. Twos permitting, we shall make contact with the surviving intelligent members, or more likely member, of the Ship's crew. "In Ae meantime. General, lay off Walters! What you're doing to him is criminal and stupid. He is not reIF sponsible for our actions inside the Ship. He is all alone, cut off from radio contact with us for days on end, not knowing whether we are alive or dead and now believing that you don't care what happens to him. If you can't appreciate his position ask your space medics -- he must be clinging to sanity by his fingernails! "You might also consider our position. There are only two functioning spacesuits left to us, we're constantly under attack or being forced to hide from Twos, and some of us haven't slept for three days. Now you have turned against us and are threatening to turn the supply vehicles off course. This isn't fair. We're a long way from home, and you've literally got those replacement suits don't arrive we can never leave this Ship -- " McCullough broke off. He was beginning to whine, and the realization made him angry. He could see the weary despair in the expressions of the others as they watched him, and hear the Twos stepping up their attack on the door. But this was not the reason why he raised his voice. "If you maroon us here, either by accident or design, there is something you should bear in mind. We have lived on e-t food and recycled water since the last supply vehicle went wide. The food is palatable if one is hungry enough, and the taste of the water is due to us thinking too much about its original source. So we can stay here if necessary. We can go back with the Ship to its home planet and... and see things that nobody in all of human history has seen before. "So you can't reject us. General," he ended furiously. "Or cast us off or do anything at all to us... because we danm well quitV A few minutes later they left by the other exit, moving in what they hoped was the direction of the hull and the generator blister. From the suit radios of Berryman and Hollis, McCullough's voice came as a tinny, stereophonic duet as they monitored the tape transmission. Should it cease that would mean that the storage cabinet containing the linked radio and recorder was not as Two-proof as they had hoped... already, treated design and structural philosophy in detail," the voice was saying, 'and our deductions regarding the home planet s gravity, atmospheric conditions and environment have been supported by pictures on living quarters walls and in illustrated literature. Regarding these living quarters, however... " "Which way?" said Berryman. "I don't know whether we're headed forward, outboard or aft." McCullough could hear the Twos breaking their way out of the compartment they had just vacated -- the things were like extra-terrestrial bloodhounds! He said, "Right, I think." "... construction personnel lived on board and vacated their quarters, which are rather stark, when the protect was complete. The large number of empty storage compartments, living quarters and, most of all, the fact that entry hatches and lighting circuits tend to be on local rather than centralized control, and that there are no indications of permanent communications lines between compartments, makes us sure that they were used only by the construction gang. The strongest probability is that the large size of the Ship was dictated by the operating requirements of its hyperdrive generators and that in this, its first flight, it has been operating as an interstellar probe containing automatic guidance and sensory equipment and a number of animals being tested for survival in space conditions, together with a small crew who were little more than intelligent specimens undergoing the same testing. Indications are that the crew have virtually no control over the operation of the Ship, and that initially they numbered only two They were in a long corridor which seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Every Two in the Ship seemed to be after them, but just out of sight...  We assumed the Two lifeform to be unintelligent because they showed no indication of possessing an organized language, no manual dexterity in opening and closing doors or operating light switches and no inclination to communicate. Here we must mention our belief that an intelligent species making contact for the first time would make allowances for a certain amount of to them unconventional behavior and would not react with such continual and violent hostility. In the light of this assumption we will consider the situation in the animal enclosure... , "If we were moving outboard there should be more intersections," said Hollis." "One at every deck level." The Twos were in sight behind them again, boiling along the corridor like tumbleweeds in a hurricane, bouncing from wall-net to wall-net as their tentacles hurled them on. Unlike the humans they did not worry about hurting themselves or protecting the two remaining usable spacesuits, so they were gaining steadily. abvious that the Twos broke out v-x and virtually exterminated all other animal life-forms with the exception of the Threes which, although non-hostile where we and the intelligent e-t life-form are concerned, can defend themselves against the Twos. The Twos bred unrestrained, living off the automatic food dispensers and any other experimental animal which had escaped the initial slaughter, their numbers controlled by their habit of fighting and eating each other. One of the half-eaten carcasses in the animal enclosure belonged to a large, caterpillar-like life-form which was quite obviously unsuited to the cage in which it was found. Around it were the bodies of Twos which, in addition to being cannibalized, showed numerous punctured wounds in musculature and bone structure, of the kind made by a solid projectile-firing weapon. lt is now obvious that this caterpillar life-form, which later data proves to be intelligent, was killed trying to contain the original breakout. The weapon may have been used by this being against the Twos and later retrieved by the second intelligent e-t from its body, or the second e-t used it in an attempt to IP rescue or avenge the first one... No good," said Hollis breathlessly as he ducked out of yet another useless compartment "Only one door." The room might have given them indefinite protection if they could have defended the door against Twos, but there were no wall-nets inside storage and dormitory compartments and no means of bracing themselves against attack. If the Twos succeeded in battering their ways in, the result would be a shambles of twisting, spinning bodies and stabbing, slashing spears and tentacles. Most of the casualties would be on the human side. If they had to fight Twos it was better done in a corridor. , . Before listing the data and reasoning which leads us ta believe that there were only two intelligent ets crewing the Ship, and that one of them still survives in a physically and mentally damaged condition, we must deal with what is known and deduced about their home planets environment and culture... At McCullough's signal they checked themselves against the wall-net, faced inward and laced their feet and legs through the strands so as not to be tom free during the attack. The butts of their spears were jammed against the net's supporting brackets or any other convenient projection. And they waited, McCullough thought, for all the world like a bunch of medieval foot soldiers about to soak up a cavalry charge. "Since we left the crew's quarters... " began Hollis, then finished with a rush, "I think we picked up some kind of scent in there. It's driving them mad. I recognize Twos we wounded a couple of weeks ago, and every blasted Two in the Ship must be after us. This is a good chance for us to wipe them out completely." "Have you counted them?" said Berryman bitterly. "Sixteen," said Drew... whose gravity, pressure and atmospheric composition is similar to Earths -- which is probably the chief reason for the Ships presence here. Observation of pictures of planetary flora and fauna suggest a world subject tojrequent or perhaps constant high winds..." The leading Twos were only yards and split seconds away. T hey could not be sure where exactly the Threes and Ones fitted into the picture, but the position of the intelligent caterpillars and the Twos was now plain. The tentacled animal with the single, underslung horn was a carnivore, of course, and the natural enemy of the intelligent e-ts. They had adapted well to weightless conditions, but on the home planet their normal method of locomotion was to use the large, curved horn as a sort of skid while propelling themselves with their tentacles. The skid also served as a weapon when jumping onto their prey. Or, when plunged into soft ground during periods of high wind, as an anchor which allowed the Two to seize smaller animals with its tentacles as they blew helplessly past. The plant life was uniformly alien. Smaller plants consisted of a long, flexible stem which, because of the wind, lay on or close to the ground. The stem carried a number of large, thick leaves with thorns or rootlets on their undersides and seemed to combine the process of photosynthesis with the digestion of groundburrowing insects. At the other end of the scale were the giant trees towering hundreds of feet into the air, with trunks fifty feet in diameter and massive, stubby branches in proportion. Because of their tremendous thickness the trunks and branches bent only slightly in the wind. Their leaves were enormous airfoils controlled either by the vegetable nervous system of the tree or by some automatic stabilizer system in the leaf itself, so that they streamed out to leeward while maintaining a formation which kept every leaf in sunshine. The leaves were the only opaque parts of the trees. Trunk and branches were translucent, except for dark areas occurring at irregular intervals -- which could have been parasitic growths or caused by small animals being dashed against the trunk by the wind. Other dark patches were various forms of animal life existing inside the trees. Another growth or structure which had puzzled them until pictures became available which gave a true indication of its size was the heap of varicolored, translucent spaghetti. This mass appeared flexible and open enough for the wind to blow through it without putting too much strain on the individual tubes, which divided and sub-divided at intervals and contained hundreds of bulbous swellings along their length before rejoining into a single stem again or linldng up with another stem. From the top of this squirming and strangely beautiful mass hundreds of metallic blooms on ridiculously thin stems trailed in the wind. Eventually they realized that they were seeing an alien city. A great, artificial tree with trailing windmill blooms supplying power to a structure which must extend a considerable depth below the surface. The wind was such an integral part of the aliens' lives that on the Ship the sounds it made were played like background music... Originally the intelligent e-ts must have developed from a species of burrowing tree-dweller. Physically they resemble outsize, leathery caterpillars whose heads are very well supplied with teeth which now show signs of advanced atrophication. They have four mandibles, terminating in flexible digits which appear both strong and highly sensitive... " The first one came at them along the center of the corridor, shell first like a tentacled cannonball. Their spears were useless against that bony carapace so they flattened themselves against the net and let it sail past. The next one came spinning at them edge on the tentacles flailing; close to the wall occupied by Drew. He guided his spear into the soft area below the edge of the shell and between the tentacles. The momentum of the Two's dive did the rest. He pitchforked the dying animal down the corridor. IF... this deeply rooted racial agoraphobia -- they are burrowers, after all, even if they do burrow through nearly transparent trees. The murals, illustrations and especially the close-fitting hammocks support this. lt could be argued that the process of overcoming this agoraphobia and achieving the level of technology evident here was a slow one, which means that they could he much farther advanced in the sociological sciences than we are, and a peaceful first contact would be possible -- if it wasnt for the suspected mental damage... T hey came at them two and three at a time, seeming to fill the corridor from wall to wall with flailing tentacles. McCullough got his spear to a vital spot, but in the act of pushing the furiously dying thing away he felt a tentacle crash excruciatingly against his legs. When he could see again there was a Two crawling up his legs, and he had too long a hold on his weapon for it to bear. He twisted frantically to the side, pulled one leg out of the net and drew it up until the knee touched his chin, then stamped down hard on the base of the Two's horn. Reaction from the blow dislodged his other foot from the net, but the kick must have inflicted severe internal damage because the two went into violent convulsions and died. "Dirty fighting, sir," said Drew, who had just finished off another by more conventional methods. "I must remember that trick." Both his legs were sticking out into the corridor. Before McCuUou could swing them back another Two grabbed his foot. This time the spear would bear all right, but he jabbed himself in the leg before he was able to kill it. Strangely the only pain he felt was one of loss -- there was only one functioning spacesuit left now. But there was no time to think about that for long. The corridor was a solid mass of struggling alien and human bodies, a nightmare of tentacles, legs, arms, furry carpets, stabbing horns and spears. And over the high-pitched gobblings and furious voices of the combatants there was the quiet voice of McCullough expounding his theories regarding alien psychology... So far as we can tell the Two life-form is the enemy of everything which lives and moves, but particularly of the intelligent e-ts who made up the crew of the Ship. It is small wonder, then, that the single remaining alien refuses to come out of its quarters. A high level of fear must be added to the loneliness and lack of support from its fellows which it is suffering -- feelings which we ourselves are in a very good position to appreciate. If we also assume them to belong to a bisexual race, and there is no evidence against this, then the crew were probably mated McCullough fended off a violently dying alien with a Three on its back, and saw that Drew was in serious trouble. He had lost his spear. A Two had its tentacles wrapped around his hips and waist. He was trying frantically to push it off him, both hands flat against its underbelly and arms stiffened. This was how Morrison had died. McCullough thought sickly as he swung up his spear and took careful aim so as not to stab Drew. But before he could do anything a second Two landed on Drew's back and drove its horn right through his chest. Drew's arms went limp and he was caught, sandwiched and impaled between the two of them, For an instant he looked appealingly at McCullough, his face yellow-white with shock, and tried to say something. But only blood came out, and McCullough killed both the Twos without worrying about jabbing Drew. T hen suddenly the corridor was clear. The Twos had dived and spun and blundered their way past. The half dozen or so that had survived were clinging to the netting a short distance along the corridor, preparing to attack again... If the crew member has lost its mate, especially if the survivor is the weaker or less technically qualified of the two, this would further aggravate its emotionally disturbed condition as well as explain the lack of interference during our exploration. 'There is also a strong possibility that the survivor is physically as vell as mentally damaged. But it is, of course, the mental aspect which concerns us at the present time..." "Here they come," said Berryman in a voice which was too weary to show emotion. McCullough dragged his eyes away from the gruesome three-body problem which was Drew and tried desperately to pretend that none of this was happening, that soon he would wake up somewhere, anywhere, else. But he did not wake up. The Twos rushed down on him, figments of a nightmare which was not even of Earth. Their tentacles spread and coiled like the legs of great, fat spiders and that horrible, obscene horn jabbed and quivered and gave every attack the added horror of indecent assault. "... psychology is far from being an exact science, and it is difficult enough to cure the aberrations of a human being..." Twice his spear made a wet, thudding sound and another pair of Twos spun out of sight. He began to think that they might, after all, succeed in exterminating the animals. It was obvious that they were all here, attracted by the scent the humans had picked up in the crew quarters. With the Twos out of the way they could investigate the Ship at leisure, building up a picture of the culture of its home planet and getting to know and understand the alien crew-member before actual contact was attempted. But then everything went suddenly wrong. Berryman speared a Two just as another came spinning close to the net on McCullough's side. The doctor lunged, missed and had to fend it off with his feet. Both animals crashed together just as a third arrived on the scene, and within sec, onds the remainder of the Twos were adding to the pile-up. McCullough IF lost his spear -- he couldn't bring it to bear anyway -- and somebody screamed and then went on cursing. McCullough wanted to laugh, because that meant the wound had not been immediately fatal. He threw his arms around a passing Two, hugging its bony shell close to his chest so that its horn and threshing tentacles formed a defensive shield. He shouted, "Get out of here! Crawl along the wall-net! get clear?' They kicked and wrestled their way free of the jam, Berryman first, then Hollis and McCullough trailed by their madly flapping Threes. Already the first Twos were beginning to give chase. "We have to find shelter," Berryman gasped as they sailed along the corridor. "A good, strong door -- " Hollis was looking back over his shoulder. He said, "Only... only five of them left... " "In here!" Berryman had stopped and was clinging to the net beside a door, one arm out to check Hollis. They pulled the door aside and within seconds the pilot's head, shoulders and spear showed around the edge as he prepared to defend it until the others arrived. Behind them the Twos went suddenly berserk. "iVo!" McCullough shouted urgently. Berryman, get out of there!" But it was too late. A Two hurled itself past both Hollis and himself without bothering even to strike at them. It impaled itself on Berryman's spear, driving the haft backward between the wall and the sliding panel. Berryman yelled that he couldn't free his spear -- and the door was jammed open. Hollis had caught the netting beside the door and was about to go through when McCullough arrived behind him. The doctor gripped the net firmly, planted both feet in the small of the physicist's back and pushed hard. Berryman looked at McCullough as if he had just committed murder. "Contact Walters!" McCullough yelled as Hollis went spinning down the corridor. "Clear the short in the generator! And don't worry about the Twos -- they aren't interested in you now!" They would not follow Hollis -- because Berryman had just opened another way into the crew quarters. I t was a different entrance, opening into a compartment they had not seen before. One wall was covered with the bright, translucent murals McCullough had come to know so well, and the rest of the small room was devoted to storage cabinets. There was a sound of wind blowing through alien trees. It was unoccupied. McCullough pointed to the room's inner door and said, very seriously, "They mustn't kill the last survivor. We've done enough harm to the Ship as it is. We've got to Idll every last one of them here and now." ". And in conclusion we must state that the surviving e-f, for physical or mental reasons or both, is almost certainly helpless..." It was a large doorway. The spear jammed across it did not form an effective barrier. The first attacker blundered onto Berryman's spear, the second batted it aside with one tentacle and reached for him with the other three. With no net to steady him, suspended weightless and helpless in the middle of the room, Berryman was being pulled onto its horn when a Three got between them and was caught instead. It fluttered like a furry flag and died while Berryman struggled free. The rest of the Twos were swarming in. McCullough took a blow on the shoulder, nearly paralyzing his arm, and suddenly there was a Two with its tentacles around his head and shoulder and its horn only inches away from his face. He let go his spear and grabbed for the horn with both hands. It was dry and hot and felt like rough wood. The whole, twitching mass of its underbelly was eily with alien sweat or saliva and the stink made him want to be sick. The room rotated slowly around them as their struggles made them spin. Berryman swam into sight beside a dying Two. He was terribly wounded and large, red bubbles were forming and breaking away from his abdomen and chest. A Three was trying to spread itself over him so as to staunch the flow of blood, and wriggling because Berryman, an expression on his face that was almost sublime, kept running his fingers through the fur on its back. The pilot swung into sight three or four times before McCullough saw that he had died. And still the doctor gripped the Two's horn and tried desperately to push it away. But it clung and tightened its hold and hung' above his head like a vile alien umbrella. His legs were encircled, and another Two swarmed awkwardly along his body. He tried to kick it away, but it was too high up. Then he saw that there was a Three on its back, the flat, furry body oozing between the Two's tentacles, blinding and smothering it in tight, clinging fur until it drifted away dead. But the Threes were fluttering and flapping all over the compartment, undlling for some reason to come to his aid. His spear was drifting a few feet away, but he dared not let go of the horn for even a second and expect to live. The Two kept changing its grip and each time the horn came a little closer. His arms were very tired... "... In general terms its psychological troubles stem from loneliness, grief, and fear caused by its being surrounded by enemies. It must feel that there is nobody who cares whether it lives or dies, We know so little about this being that curative therapy is beyond us. But if its basic needs are enough like ours and if its mental condition has not already reached the point of no return we might, by our actions alone, show it that..." McCullough tried to count slowly to ten. He thought that if he could just hold off that horrible yellow horn for ten seconds he would be able to do it for another ten seconds. But the muscles in his back were cracking and his arms felt as if they were on fire. He closed his eyes tightly because he was horribly afraid of seeing himself being killed. IF... and eventually make it realize that it isnt alone and that someone, us, is trying to help i... T he noise in that confined space was incredible. McCullough opened his eyes to see chunks of tentacles and shell being tom off his Two. Then he saw why the Threes were so excited: the weapon with its odd double stock and very ordinary magazine and barrel, and the being who was holding it. He saw, too, the four manipulators encircling the alien's head, three of which were so badly damaged that it was a miracle it was able to hold the weapon at all, and the awful. Two-inflicted scars running Ae length of its body. He looked last at its eyes, and for a long time neither of them did anything. Then the alien pushed its machine-gun away, and McCullough, now that his taped report had come to an end, began calling Hollis and Walters on his suit radio. xxm B oth supply rockets with their water, food and spare spacesuits went off course. When he told him about it Walters's voice was strained. McCullough could imagine the pilot's feelings -- the fear of how the doctor might react, his pleas for help which the pilot could not possibly give him and Walters's own, personal fear of the long voyage home with Hollis in a vehicle which had already passed the time limit for operational safety. When the pilot went on speaking, his cheerfulness was obviously forced. He said, 'Brady feels terrible about this. He says you did the right thing despite his and everyone else's opposition. He's sorry for the things he said to you, and he says he deserved everything you said to him. He -- well, he's beginning to sound like Churchill -- the debt owed you by the whole of humanity, the immeasurable social and scientific advances this first contact will bring about, and so on. He wishes there was only some way to bring all of us back." ' The pilot broke off, then said awkwardly, "You said earlier how terrific a Aing it would be to travel to another solar system..." McCullough and Hollis looked at each other, and the alien watched both of them. They were in the antechamber of the generator blister, where the physicist had just completed repairs. The e-t had followed them there as it followed them everywhere. Sometimes the being made noises at them or waved its mandible or exchanged sketches. But mostly it just hung there and watched. It was possible that the being was security conscious or anxious lest they commit further acts of sabotage. But McCullough did not think so. To his way of thinking the e-t was simply glad of the company. Any company. To Walters he said. "It seem like a fine idea at the time. But I wasn't thinking straight just then. No doubt someone will bust a gut to get going, and soon. If, as I am convinced, we can duplicate the Ship's drive. But I prefer to go home." IP "But, sir... "Hollis's suit is still in one piece, and I have an idea. Last week it would not have been a good idea.... Because last week Berryman and Drew were alive and botib Pships would have been needed to get them home... By the time he had finished exr plaining, Walters was much happier. The pilot said briskly, "Two days should be enough for the job, but I'll contact Brady at once asking for a course based on a four-day countdown. That will give us time to check our ship. And... and I'll tell them we want return tickets for three!" He had to explain his idea to the alien then, but that was not too difficult because the old adage about a good picture being worth two thousand words held true even among extra-terrestrials. But the result was that the alien stuck even closer to him from then on, especially when Hollis was working on POne. And it kept forcing things on him, things like odd pieces of equipment, the lovely, glowing murals and carvings, books and film spools as well as food and water. McCullough explained graphically about fuel reserves and weight allowances and knew that the alien understood, but it still continued to give him things. Then early in the second day Hollis completed his work on P-One. On the Ship a large cargo hatch swung open; and Walters, moving very slowly and carefully, edged toward it. The two P-ships were docked nose to nose, and Hollis had stripped P-One of all its projecting antenna, collectors and sensory equipment and had completely remoyed the return fuel tanks and motors so that the bare command module would fit, just nicely, into the large cargo lock. Walters slid the stripped-down POne into the cargo lock, detached it from P-Two and withdrew. The outer seal was closed and pressure restored. Hollis, McCullough and the alien began transfei'ring quantities of food, water, artifacts, photographs and sketches which they had placed in the corridor into the module. Then they wedged it firmly into the lock chamber -- a present from Earth for a culture an unguessable number of light-years away. And suddenly it was time to go. I t had been relatively easy to exchange simple concepts via sketchpad, but there was no way at all for him to tell what it was thinking during those last few minutes in the airlock. It was just a great, fat, catermany eyes and mouths in all the wrong places, for him to be able to read such a subtle thing as a facial expression -- and the problem cut both ways. All he could do was look at it for a few minutes while it looked at him, then follow Hollis into POne. The cargo hatch swung open, air whistled into space and Walters came edging back with P-Two. He docked, they transferred themselves and their stores and artifacts into P-Two and drifted away again. The cargo hatch closed, Walters used steering thrust briefly, and the great Ship efU slowly away fiom them. For a loiig time McCullough did not speak. He was thinking about the alien he had just left and its Ship and the beings who had sent her out, and wondering what they would think of his people -- the people who had left three of their dead aboard, killed while trying to clear the Ship of a particularly nasty form of vermin. And in one of the cargo locks there was a human artifact, a tiny, ridiculous, fragile shell which had carried three human beings more than fifty did not know what they would think about his people, but that P-ship should tell them a lot. Want to meet your favorite author? See science-fiction fans in their native habitat? Talk about the atoriea yoive liked and hated? Here are some of the upcoming science-fiction eventa, Well try to keep it up-to-date and complete, month by month so if you are running a conference, let ua know! Street, Newark, N.J.; for information, Allan Howard, # Grafton Ave., Newark, N.J. #. Membership #. ner. Speakers, presentation of annual Nebula" awards for excellence. Simultaneous dinners in New York and Oakland, Calif. Open to members of Science Fiction Writers of America and guests only; for information (East Coast), Robert Silverberg, # Goodridge AveWalters had completed a last attitude check and was listening to Control during the last few seconds of the countdown when the generator blisters on the Ship glowed suddenly. In. an instant it had shrunk from sight. Hollis gave a great sigh of relief. "I was worried in case I'd botched the repair job," he said. Then he looked closely at McCXillough and added, "Don't worry, Doctor, our friend will be all right. It's going home." Walters was moving his lips silently. Suddenly he pressed the thrust Anderson, # Las Palomas, Orinda, California, #. An informal and unofficial conference is planned for the day of the banquet on the West Coast -- Statler-Hilton Hotel, Boston; for information, Paul Galvin, # Harvard Street, Cambridge, Mass. #. Guest of Honor, Larry Niven; presentation of "Skylark" award; meeting of Tolkien Society, etc. Membership #. Holiday Inn East, Columbus, Ohio. Guest of Honor, Frederik Pohl; panel discussions, talks, etc. For information: Larry Smith, # East Tibet Road, Columbus, Ohio #. Membership #. At St. Anne's Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire, England. Guest of Honor, Kenneth Bulmer. For information: Harry Nadler, # South Mesnefield Road, Salford #, Lancaster, England. Membership, #. vention. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland California. Philip Jos# Farmer, Guest of Honor. More details later. For informont Station, El Cerrito, Calif. #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. IF Dear Editor; I read with delightful pleasure To Serve the Master a t in your September # copy of If. Mr. (or is it Mrs.) Gaughan did a beautiful job of illustrating it. Your cover for September issue was beautiful; not at all a match for the story. Bride Ninety-One was poor taste. -- (Mrs.) J. H. Owens, Rt. #, Box #-J, Mobile, Alabama.    Dear Editor: When you said that If should have a fantasy story once in awhile like Faust Aleph-Null, I thought that it would ruin the whole character of the magazine. But I was completely wrong. It would be a credit to the magazine if you put in a fantasy novel even more often than you had planned. I just started reading If this summer. The only reason I picked it up off of the newsstand was because there was an Andre Norton story on the inside. I enjoyed this story and the rest of the book very much so I started buying it monthly. I notice that fans don't usually ask more than one question in a fan letter, and for me one question would just not satisfy my curiosity. So here it goes. I think that Lancer supplies the country with the best adventure fantasy books. Any reader of adventurefantasy should read the Conan series by Howard, I would like to know if Howard's other stories will be reprinted after the # books of the Conan series are completed? I would like to know also if Ed Bradbury is going to write any more stories to his Martian series and if #he is related to Ray Bradbury? I can't see why writers don't expand on a story into a series. Could you tell science-fiction fans how many Doc Savage novels Kenneth Robson wrote and how many books Neil R. Jones wrote in his famous Parofessor Jameson series of which Ace has printed the first three? The Jameson series is a must to all readers. Of all the companies I like Ace the best. Do you think that Andre Norton's The Star Hunters will be reprinted soon? Critics say that Kline is one of the could you tell me if he has any more books out besides his three Venus books, two Martians, one moon story and Jan of the Jungle! I read somewhere that Gardner F. Fox works for a magazine company. What is it? And is he planning on writing another book on Llarn? My last question is this; When is there groing to be the second book in the series Tamsman of Gor by John Norman? I'm postive a few of these questions have been bothering other fans and I'm sure they'll be glad to read the answers. No matter what anybody says, If is the best magazine on the market. -- Anthony Kolodziej, # Hirsch St., Calumet City #. #  Answers, anyone? -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Re: Max H. Flindt's article The Food of Mara) pidnted in the October issue of If. Mr. Plindt states: 'No other agency whether natial, animal or insect has ever made a network of lines to compare with the map of the canal systems of Mars." I contest thikt; think of the forces of nature that formed the Andes or better yet the gigantic rain forests of Soutii America or the Congo. Nothing that man has done compares with such a project as that that the buildinig of the Martian canals would entail. The Martian "canals" are, most likely, strips of vegetation (lichen would be my guess) that grow and shrink with the seasons. This theory is supported by the fact that the smallestf "detail" that we can see on Mars would have to be at least # miles in diameter. Only a plant spread (such as a rain forest) would fit all the qualifications for a Martian "canal". Water is fed to it through natural channels; remember the Mississippi would be invisible to us there. Frk water reflection would account for the "canals" being blue that once (sure the mathematics are against it, the mathematics are against you being alive to read this. Besides, who's going to build a # mile wide canal? Wanna argue?). I vote for lichen las the culprit plant as all of the evidence is in its favor. What do you say? And while I'm at it, why do you persist in placing ads in which you "cut out the coupon" in such a manner as to force you to ruin either the cover or the opening page to a story. It's ridiculous. No sf fan will wantonly mutilate an sf magazine that he doesn't have at least two of. And put a Hue and Cry section in Galaxy while you're at it. You can't have too many letters from interested readers! -- Scott Beavers, # Sunrise Ave., Modesto Calif.    Dear Editor: I have been a reader of SF since I was a freshman in high school and I've been reading If for two years now. If has presented some really great novels, such as Skylark Du-Queane, Relief a War and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, as well novelettes. I think, however, that the most absolutely gripping story you've ever printed, at least to my knowledge, is Faust Aleph-Null, by Algis Budrys. I heartily endorse your new "policy" of printing, science-fanstasy as well as straight SF. I enjoyed Andre Norton's novelette and was half scared out of my wits by the end of Faust AlephNull. I usually stick to the straight stuff, but Conan and the WitchWorld can turn me on too. Keep up the good work, Herr Editor I -- Stephen Noe '#, Room #, Stanford Hall, University of Notre Dame, Indiana #  By who? -- Editor. IF Your Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! ffrvwtwwwwrwTfwwrwrjrrwTwwwjwwwwwwTf Galaxy Publishing Corp.  #I Hudson Street m New York, N.Y. #     Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose   my check or money order for:   n # issues for # Q # issues for #   " r Name ,     Address   :  City  State Zip Code   U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. #  Please check whether Q new or Q renewal.  Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Men Alfred Bester Do f Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey I ne scienceMction booK uiud invites yoif nraKe  this #-volume Treasury of Great Science Fiction for only  when you join the Science Fiction Book Club and agree to accept only # books during the coming year. 'ake this #-volume Treasury of Great Scia "must" for any S-F fan X ence Fiction -- for only... with a short trial membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. How to Get This Unusual Value Because you enjoy Science thrillers, the Science Fiction Book Club would like to acquaint you with the most imaginative, informative, entertaining new science fiction books as they are written. That is why we have arranged to send you this #-page Treasury of Great Science Fiction for only lOi, to help cover shipping and handling, with a Trial Membership in the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and more in their original editions. Club memin special full-length, hard-cover editions. Extra-value books cost more. And the Ckib tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your Trial Subscription you agree to take as few as four books in the next twelve months. After that you may take as few or as many books as you want, and you may cancel at any time. No Risk Guarantee Send for your big introductory package today. After ten days, if the books and your membership will be canceled. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member, and you need take only four books in the next twelve months. Mail the coupon today to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York #. Edited by Anthony Boucher Two giant volumes. Over # pages of exciting fiction. A handsome addition to your library. Includes John Wyndham's classic ReBirth... Heinlein's Waldo... Anderson's Brain Wave... a total of # full-length novels, # novelets, # short stories by such masters as Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Judith Merril, Alfred Bester, A. E. Van Vogt, C. M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon -- and more. Please enroll me as a trial member in the Science Fiction Book Club and rush me The Treasury of Great Science Fiction. I enclose # to help cover shipping and handling. Then, every month, send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," which describes coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extra-value selection at a higher price. I need take only four books within a year and may resign at any time thereafter. age, I may return it in # days, pay nothing, owe nothing, and my membership will be canceled. Name, Address. State. If undr #, parent must sign here (Offer good in U.S.A. only.)  Membership applications are subject to acceptance by the Club. #-S#"Ai  cbjined For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. may return the book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation if not completely satisfied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as payment in full. privilege guaranteed, of course. Vl. K, No. # Fnderik foU, CdHor Robert M. Gu?nn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associtrfe EdHer Mavis Fiiber, Cireulafion Director by David Radd by Harlan Bllson by Robert B, Mcvgroff by Lorry Niven by David A. Kyle by Hank Davis by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Cop # Tlght by Galaxv Publishing Corporation, #. All light, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-nddressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial A few months ago we discussed, not very enthusiastically, the socalled "New Wave" in science fiction. Since then a fair amount has seen print, much of it in the huge anthology edited by Harlan Elliaoin, Dangerous Visions, With all respect to Ellison, who graces our pages in this issue, has in the past and will again, weVe still not particularly enthusiastic; and maybe we should be a little more specific about just why. There are all kinds of science fiction ; -- space opera and satire, gadget stories and Freudian stories, stories to please almost any taste -- but it seems to us that there is one kind that is of special interest, if only because it is the only kind of science fiction whose essential features cannot be duplicated anywhere else. That kind, of course, is the science fiction of other worlds. The kind in which some change of technology, social customs or whatever produces a change in the environment of man. This is special to science fiction. No other kind of story can make this daim. Every other kind of writing starts with an established environment, and the characters move inside it. We can generate our own, and this makes possible the telling of new kinds of stories. Take a historical case: The detective story is a kind of story that is essentially peculiar to our own time. It rests on certain environmental factors -- that murder is universally considered a crime, and that every caught muirderer was to stand trial and, if convicted, be punished. But throughout most of history this was only partially true and sometimes not true at all; a murderer might make no attempt to hide his act; all his effort would be bent to avoiding the retribution that the relatives or guild-brothers of the deceased might try to inflict on him. Sherlock Holmes would have had no place in the Rome of the Borgias or in the Byzantine Empire. The Great Detective would have given way to, say, the Great Retaliator. And just as our age has made possible the telling of that new kind of story, the detective story, actually only a century or so old, so the ages to come will make possible the telling of new kinds of stories; and one of the most interesting things science fiction can do is to guess at what they will be and write them now. A shorter way to say all this is that fooling around with the way one writes a story seems to this reader, at least, to be inferior to inventing new things for a story to say. Nearly all of the New Wave concerns itself with style instead of content. Sometimes what a writer ihas to say affects the way he says it -- an example might be David Redds Sunbeam Caress, in this issue -- and that seems reasonable to us. But that accounts for very little of the New Wave... and the rest seems to us to be an awful waste of inventiveness and ability. K-Xmm K-S wMm, Masjifejj-fifc::;:; : organizaX.B.G. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name  Address Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. T he humans were the ones who reawakened the dormant fires of the sun. They ventured from the surface of their world and tried to subdue the sun, in their attempts to control the weather of Earth. They did not realize they had failed until it was too late. After only a few decades, the inexorable streams of solar radiation had done their work. The genetic damage was irreversible. Many species became extinct; others, like the ants and the humans, survived in altered forms. New species appear in the changing landscapes, an appalling diversity of plants and animals bursting into life in the new tide of evolution. For the first time since the early days of creation, the distinction between plant and animal became meaningless. Was tumibleweed a plant or not? Was llitterdown a seed or an insect? The human biologists had a more urgent problem: survival of humanity. Beneath the seas, humanity sought shelter from the radiation. WaterIneathing seamen toiled in their subnwine cities to save their race. The old air-breathing humans were beyond help, but their successors the seamen had not given up hope. The Bcdentists discovered that the radiations came and went in cycles, warping the structure of Time and creating mirages of past and future. As the seamen too came under the pressures of evolution, they tried to project themselves into a future where they would have more chance of surviving until the radiation subsided. They vanished, leaving their homes empty, and no land human knew or cared whether they had succeeded or not. The air-breathing humans had forgotten that such things as seamen existed. On the warm tropical plains of the land once known as South America, the ants grew in both size and inteitlect. Their race mind became intelligent and extended its telepathic control to other races -- including the agile brown creatures called men. The humans became the Racemind's most valuable slaves, more important than even the dolphins swimming captive in the moats and ilakes. The ants bred the huihahs scientifically to produce a new, more versatile race with telekinetic powers such as levitation. The ants bred many animals on their farms, bringing back many creatures which had been extinct. While the human cities crumbled aiway, the ants built cities of their own. The tunnels and underground chambers were lined with tinted glass, for the ants loved the bright colors of gem-stones and similar materials. The surface sections of their cities, the one-tenth built above ground, were constructed entirely of glass and gems, in every shade the glasswrights could produce in their roaring furnaces. The cities sparkled within their moats, gigantic jewels reflecting colored sunlight across the green plains. At night, when the new moon rose in the warm black sky, the ant scientists brought out their telescopes to survey the marvel on the darkened disk -- the tiny star shining in the lunar night. The ants could not know what it was, for their human slaves had forgotten. Up there on the moon, the lights were shining in the deserted atomic city. After twelve thousand years, the abandoned city was still waiting for its builders to return. II A s it awoke, the Racemind realized that it was not alone. After only two centuries, a serious crisis had developed. During this time the IF Racemind had been building up a complex structure of philosophical thoit on the subject of immortality; the entire cent command had ln engaged on the task, leaving the duties of running civilition to a small semi-automatic co-ordination center. Transferring its musings to the dolphin memory cells, the Racemind reabsorbed the co-ordination center as the telepathic battle began. The record of the crisis was scanned instantly, and the Racemind took control as thou it had handled the affair from the beginning. In an outlying western district of Land South-West, some small human children had decided to spend their free day in the foothills of the barren mountains. The farm commandant did not object to this unusual request and let them go. The co-ordination center monitored the events without interfering. The Racemind had a clear picture from the records: a V-formation of chubby brown creatures, each twenty times longer than the largest ant, floating into the hot morning air and gliding on their way, laughing as they went. Flying up a desert valley, the children saw a patch of pinldsh light on the orange-red stones in the distance. They chattered excitedly -- humans still used vocal communication among themselves, despite the telepathic linkage imposed by the ants -- and soared over the rocks to investigate the strange light. As the children approached, the color of the light became clearer. It was coming from a group of creatures unlike anything the Racemind had seen. There were six of the creatures, six tapering columns of pale carmine Hght, each about four and a half feet tall. Their base diameter was one foot, but "dieir domed summits were less than half that width. No internal features were visible at all, nothing but the soft carmine light of their semi-transparent bodies shimmering in the heat-haze. The columns were drifting slowly down from the high mountains; their bases were just touching the veins of redbrown ore over which they were traveling, and rolling around the six columns was a ragged mob of tumbleweed -- plants which had pulled up their roots, curled their leaves into a rough sphere and become as mobile as any animal. The tumbleweed were circling the columns in a manner which suggested a definite relationship with them. A strange mental static was emanating from the li columns. It was far worse than anything from the war flowers, and the co-ordination center could feel its control of the children slipping. Waiting a moment longer to confirm that the situation was indeed serious, the co-ordination center roused the bulk of the Racemind from its dreams of immortalitv. Then the Racemind took over. Somehow the columns were breaking down the children's conditioning. The Racemind strengthened the telepathic linkage ibetween Itself and the children, bypassing their individual responses and takg full control of their bodies. The mental static continued. The columns were broadcasting strangely compelling thoughts of warmth and companionship. tc-mpting the children to exercise the independent powers possessed 'by all humans. Already the children were questioning that the Raceanind was fitted to think for them -- this despite the complete control the Racemind had imposed on them. The Racemind countered the effect of the deconditioning impulses, but it was too late. The children's brains had suffered permanent damage. The children were insane. The Racemind could do no more than direct them away from the light columns. By this time the scene was indistinct -- the distortions of the telepathic linkage were getting more severe -- and it was almost a victory for the Racemind when the children began gliding back to their farm. Unexpectedly, the light columns made no attempt to follow up their success. The Racemind disposed of the damaged children in the nearest dream caverns; in their deranged state they were a danger to any normal unit which approached them. The next logical steps were three in number. First, send an expendable unit into the hills to search for the origin of the light columns. Second, check through the accumulated memories of the past two centuries. These columns were an entirely new form of life, and the Racemind wanted to see what else evolution had produced in recent years. Third, prepare a fully equipped expedition to explore the mountains. TTie first of these three was relatively simple: the Racemind selected a young human mural-designer from the town near Idle children's farm. She was a sterile female who made a hobby of biology. Ill T he humans were allowed a high degree of individuality by the ants. The designer, who called herself Rrengyara in the symbolic spoken language used by the humans among themselves, had spent much of her free time studying the creatures of her district. The information so gained was stored in her own brain without being absorbed in the Racemind's memory units. Only the humans could amass individual knowledge in this way. But now individuality had progressed too far. The children had begun to disobey the Racemind's conditioning. The gravity of the situation disturbed the Racemind, therefore it disturbed Rrengyara. She prayed to the distant ant queens that her mission might be successful. She did not pray for a safe return, for in this mission her death would be unimportant as long as the Racemind gained new information from her joUmey. And the Racemind had abolished fear of death long ago. The first peril was entirely unexpected. Rrengyara was above the foothills, flying over the last of the farms, when she received an impression that something was wrong. She looked down. The farm was busy this warm afternoon. Ant local-control observers and relay units stood on their pillars, supervising all that went on. Humans were harvesting the com, pigs were plowing up some fallow Eelds, titanemoles were digging the IF foundations for a new barn. Diplodoci were grazing behind the lake. In their pens the gelatinous slumberers rolled about, like jellyfish searching for the sea. Opossums were picking fruit in the orchard, and a lean jaguar was watching over the herd of tiny struthomimi. All was as it should be. The thoughts came whispering into hei mind again, Down below, the farm workers paused. At that moment the ant observers sent out a message: "Local outbreak of war flowers. Request assistance." In the hedges, sinister cobalt blue petals were unfolding. As the flowers appeared, Rrengyara's thoughts began dancing at random. The normally subdued irrational impulses in her mind were being intensified by the empathetic weeds springing up on the farm below. The workers fused their minds in a compulsive groupsolidarity rhythm -- the only defence against the war flowers. If they could not defeat the madness from the flowers, their conditioning would fail and they would start fighting each other. The animals not controlled by the Racemind were affected more severely. This deadly empathy from the war flowers was a by-product of their reproductive process: their seeds were fertilized by telepathic impulses from other war flowers which initiated autosurgical operations on the reproductive cells. The Racemind could not predict where these plants would appear next, for they sent out sprays of tiny, almost weightless seeds which could remain dormant for centuries. All the seeds from one plant germinated at the same time, regardless of external conditions Perhaps war flowers were responsible for the children's aberrations, thought Rrengyara. As she formed the idea, the Racemind took full control of her body and sent her speeding away from the farm and the war flowers. She had been more seriously affected by the flowers than she thought. The Racemind would not have sent her to hunt for the carmine light columns if the children's experience had any normal explanation. Soaring over the sloping rocky ground, rising up to the high mountains, Rrengyara prayed to her deities -- the ant queens -- that the squads of rescue units would reach the farm in time. The Racemind was slowly winning the battle to exterminate the war flowers, but it had received many setbacks. Far too often the survivors of an outbreak were fit for nothing but the dream caverns. That was ironic, although the Racemind could not appreciate it, for in the caverns those who came to die were devoured by relatives of the war flowers. One of the earliest empathetic plants had been carnivorous, enveloping its prey in a crimson cloud of pleasure. The ants had taken this plant, adapted it to their own speciflcatioos and sown it in the cool gardens of the dream caverns; because the ants were determined that no unit should die in pain -- without due cause. R rengyara glided on, higher and higher. Up here the rocks were almost bare of life, and the only things which moved were the everIF present airborne fluffballs of flitterdowB. These were little white spheres less than a finger's length in diameter, drifting about on the convection currents or darting to and fro around each other. She saw a round green tumbleweed, but it was pre-adolescent and still firmly rooted to the ground. Cacti could be seen through the heat-haze. This dry, almost lifeless valley, with no cultivated fields te break the monotony of its orangered stones, was the place where the children had encountered the carmine light columns. She started flying up towards the head of the valley, where it ended in a pass between two mountain walls. She moved from side to side in a standard search pattern. At the pass she halted and hovered above the ridge, looking down into the new valley beyond. It was as arid and as empty as the valley she had just checked. On her right were the cliffs of the high plateau, a windswept desert region formed by the now-extinct volcanoes. No unit had been to the plateau since the earliest days of the ant civilization. HoWever, the valley in front of her had been visited more recently. She had spent a (free day there herself once, studying the plants. Her most iiiteresting discovery had been the mountain glass poppies, which focused sunlight on the central seed boxes to hasten the ripening process. She could go down to the valley, or up to the plateau. Much of the valley was visible from her present position, but no carmine light could be seen. The Racemind ordered her to search the plateau. She rose up alongside the nearvertical cliff faces, watching the brown stones for any movement which might indicate a landslip. The sharp protruding edges, and the rubble on the valley floor, showed that these tall cliffs were not as firm as they appeared. Hundreds pf feet above the pass, sihe reached the plateau. Here the landscape formed a scene as bizarre as any ruined human city. Brown, red, purple, orange, the crags sprang up from the featureless rock of the plateau floor. The outcrops had been eroded into fantastic shapes by constant weathering, sculptured into turrets and arches and ramparts of bright flame-colored stone. The heat-haze made everything indistinct to her"wision, giving her the impression she was flying over a forest of living rocks that were breathing slowly in the hot sun. At the same time the scene had the strange clarity of a time-mirage. If it had not been for the Racemind's control she would have become lost within minutes. The uncontrolled human brain was too inefficient to memorize the configurations of this landscape's red-brown battlements and towers. If the light columns were here, they could remain hidden from a ground army for years, as the Racemind had known when it selected a flying scout for the mission. Rrengyara levitated forward, gaining height to take in a wider view of the ground. In the heat-haze, it seemed as though the rocks were arranged in lines like the wave-crests of a sea. But the real sea was blue, and the only blue in this jungle of stone was that of the sky above. Even the cobalt blue of a war flower would have been welcome. Gliding slowly above these natural fortifications, her naked brown body sweating in the heat of the afternoon calm, Rrengyara scanned the rocks for any living thing, light column or more familiar creature. Once she glimpsed a patch of dark green, and swooped down to see some cacti beneath a natural arch. A lone flitterdown bush grew out of a crevice, and a few lichens and stonecrops clung to the boulders. These and the occasional flitterdown ball were all she saw. Presently she came to a region of higher ground, where the crags were so large as to be termed small hills. Here the rocks had black shadows in various places -- the openings of caves. She descended to examine one. The Racemind informed her that the caves had been found before, when the early explorers were crossing the plateau. The caves were probably volcanic tunnels formed by escaping gases, although the explorers had not made any detailed studies to confirm this. If the light columns were hiding in the caves, Rrengyara could do nothing about it. The expedition now being prepared would bring suitable equipment for exploring the caves. IV W hen she soared upwards from examining the cave openings, Rrengyara saw a small growing point in the heat-haze ahead. It had been hidden from her before by a curving shoulder of rock. She dropped down again and floated low over the ground, using the outcrops as cover. A point of light that did not beloi here had to ibe artifida. If living creatures were over there, Rrengyara wanted to prevent them seeing her. She must not suffer the fate of the children too soon. Floating round one of the last crags, she caught sight of a limegreen light near her destination. The quality of the light suggested that here was a being like those the children had encountered. From then on Rrengyara stopped levitating and covered the rest of the ground normally. Where possible she walked, but most of the time she crawled. After passing a large cave mouth she saw that green luminescence again. She ducked back (behind the cave entrance, hoping the creature had not seen her. The Racemind did not know what perceptive senses the light columns possessed. She listened and heard nothing. She crawled from the cave towards a small outcrop. Hot air was rising beyond the crest of the rock, in some quantity. As she crawled over she looked forward, expecting to see a fire. Instead, she saw a huge transparent crystal with a ball of yellow fire at its center. A large tumbleweed rolled into view. She wriggled hastily on behind the cover of the outcrop and lay in the shadow, trying to think whether a crystal like that could exist naturally on this plateau. It had been foursided, with flat top and bottom, and it was covered with small abrasions IF and places where pieces had flaked off. Five feet high, and nearly two feet thick, it had been completely colorless except for that patch of yellow inside it -- and that could have been a reflection of the sun. The Racemind told her that the crystal had not been there when the original explorers visited the plateau. Furthermore, there had been no tumbleweed on the plateau in those days. The Racemind made Rrengyara stand up to look at the crystal, the tumbleweed and the light column. The lime-green column was there, a pillar of light nine feet high with a base two feet across. It was transparent, but no internal organs were visible. Rrengyara only glanced at the light column, for before her was a circle of crystals. Each crystal was colorless, transparent and six-faced, the same size as the first she had seen.There were thirteen of them, spaced evenly round the circumference of a circle twenty feet in diameter. The crystals were leaning over at various angles, arranged so that they focused the sunlight on the circular patch of ground inside the ring of crystals. The glowing light Rrengyara had seen was at the center of the circle, where the ground was melting and bubbling in the concentrated sunlight. Rrengyara could feel the heat sinking into her face. Thirteen scorched grooves on the rock, along curved lines stretching from the crystals to the central furnace, showed that previously the crystals had been set to focus the sunlight on paths leading from each crystal to the center. The Racemind realized that the pattern being burnt into the stone resembled the dancing grounds constructed by primitive peoples for religious ceremonies. The only primitives the Racemind knew had degenerated from more advanced states, but that did not affect the validity of the comparison. Circling the ring of crystals was a shoal of whirling tumbleweed, rolling and bouncing through the heathaze. Their frenzied movements contrasted with the complete stillness of the crystals. To one side stood the cool green column of light, watching over the tumbleweed and crystals like a benevolent child-guardian. R rengyara saw all this in an instant. She threw herself back down again 'behind the outcrop, hiding her dark body in the shadow. The heat-sensitive tumbleweed might have detected her, or the light column might have sensed her presence in some way. The feeling of peace, brotherhood and security from the light column was plucldng at her mind and growing in intensity. The Racemind ordered her to remain in her present position, to test the column's reaction to an intruder. When it became clear that Rrengyara had not been seen, the Racemind ordered her to stand up again. Her attention was caught by a familiarlooking patch of colored light far over to the right of the circle. This was what the children had seen. It was a group of carmine light columns, made small by distance, traveling on a course which would take them near the crystal circle. If they continued moving in this direction they would see her. She had to move back, out of range. That cave she had seen earlier would make a good refuge. fiSie levitated hurriedly across the stretch of open ground, gliding less than a foot above the dusty stones. At the entrance to the cave she paused and looked hack for any signs of pursuit. Nothing happened. Apparently the tumbleweed and the light column were absorbed in their own affairs. Satisfied that she had not been sighted, Rrengyara floated into the dark mouth of the cave. In the black depths before her she could see hundreds of tiny specks of light. The faintly greenish tinge to the white radiance indicated the presence of radioactive minerals. The objects came nearer. Rrengyara saw a moving cloud of small phosphorescent crystals, flying up out of the darkness. The luminous crystals were streaking towards her like male fireflies homing on a female. The horde was almost upon her -- Contact was broken, and the Racemind knew that it had lost Rrengyara. The crystals had killed her. V T he data from Rrengyara's last journey was integrated with the information the Racemind was gathering from its memories of the last two centuries. It was one more piece of evidence to show that the world had been changing while the Racemind was dreaming of immortality. The most important change was in the climate. Previously the worlds mean temperature bad been rising in what appeared to be a straightforward linear progression. Now, however, the increase in temperature had departed sufficiently from the predicted values for the Racemind to see that the progression was in fact logarithmic. The steadily rising level of solar radiation was heating up the world more quickly than the Racemind had anticipated. Evolution was also progressing. The pallid slumberers, creatures composed of gelatin within a tough chitinous hide, were diversifying rapidly. Several new species were now in regular use on the farms, having been domesticated without difficulty. The slumberers were not the only animals to evolve in this way. The mutation rate had not increased greatly, but the new mutations contained a far lower percentage of genetic undesirables than before. The work of the breeders had more than doubled in the efforts to adapt these new species for service under the Racemind. Also, unusually large numbers of fish were leaving the sea and attempting to live on the shore. Fish had been trying to recolonize the land since the last Ice Age, when the Racemind was still young, but there had never been this many before. In the large island which had been one of the last outposts of human land civilization -- the humans still called it by its old name, Malagash -- a social evolution had taken place among a rare spvecies of bird. Many centuries ago the breeders had recreated the extinct hummingbirds to IF act as weavers. These birds were amaU, brightly colored and fastmoving. They us their long beaks to sew large leaves together to form edible plates and other utensils. The hummingbirds still served the ants, but now they were living in colonies f organized societies like communal insects. They were building intricate structures of leaves in the dense jungle, in imitation of the ant cities. Their numbers were increasing, so their work for the ants had not suffered even though nearly a quarter of the hummingbird population was working in the tree cities. The most interesting aspect of the change was the complex organization which now dealt with hatching the eggs and bringing up the young hummingbirds. Other birds had changed too. The sandlings were small flightless birds living on the edge of the desert in Land North-East. They had started burrowing underground, in sand already stiffened by the concretelike trails of the brickworms, strengthening their tunnels with a mixture of sand and saliva. As yet these burrows were made by individuals and there was no indication that the sandlings might develop communal activities as the hummingbirds had done. The isolated minor continent, knwn to the ancient humans as Australia, produced a phenomenon which had no rational explanation. The small scattered ant colonies there reported that within the last few years the annual migration of the various animals had included a new routine. Herds of sheep, kangaroos, stegosauri, humans, dogs and other animals were wandering in circles round the great boneyards where the uncontrolled creatures came to die. Each individual animal circled the boneyard several times, taking as long as a fortnight to do so, before it departed to resume its interrupted migration. This meant that at any given time there were several thousand creatures slowly travelling round each iboneyard. This did not interfere with the program of transforming the deserts into fertile plains, but the ritual's absence of purpose was puzzling. There was another problem on the island continent, one which had nearly caused the little co-ordination center to arouse the Racemind before it became clear there was no danger to the ant civilization. The humans of this near-desert territory were blackskinned giants who had lost the intelligence retained by the ants' other human slaves. However, the giants were now regaining the mental powers lost when they reverted to animals. They were clearing away the rubble over the old dancing grounds and once more bowing to sacred stones erected by the salt pans. The giants were booming intelligent again. U ndersea expeditions continued uncovering the remains of the submarine cities buried in the ooze. These buildings were the homes of the now-extinct seamen, the waterbreathers who had been the last independent intelligent humans. The Racemind had given priority to this archeological project because it wanted to study the differences between land and underwater civilizations. If it had been capable of emotion it would have been dismayed wben tbe current situation reached its consciousness from the memory unittfi " Oonditions at the excavations were growing steadily worse, and one site had been abandoned. The ruined cities had been invaded by shapeless monsters feeding on the disturbed ooze and effluent from the living quarters. These monsters were complexes of cloudy white cells, resembling masses of sponge rubber or soap foam. Normally the cell complexes rested quietly on the sea bed, absorbing nourishment from the ooze beneath them and dividing in two on reaching a certain size. Now they too had changed, and when they invaded the archeological sites they were able to feed and grow without dividing. They smothered the excavations, and if some cells were tom loose from their sides the fragments started growing to form new cell complexes. As soon as an area was clea of them, others drifted in and reinfested the area. The archeological work was slowing down, and far fewer relics were being brought to the surface. The Racemind was accustomed to living in a world of change; its civilization was fluids based on the principle that creatures did not always breed true. Genetics was the most important science to the ants. The Racemind's thought over the last two centuries had been, in feict, mainly concerned with the question of how adaptable an entity coiild afford to be, in order to retain its identity in a constantly dianging environment. But the present situaidon was dearly too much. The Racemind had examined less than half its accumulated memories, but already it knew that evolution, like the world's temperature, was progressing along a logalithic curve. It was all due to the present solar radiation cycle, the worst since the Ice Age ended. A minor hy-product of the intense solar radiation was the series of timemirages. These were scenes or objects from the past, visible through local distortions of the space-time continuum caused by interaction of the solar radiation with the earth's natural radiation field. The strangest objects seen through these warps were the giant flying disks or cross which the old humans had used for air transport. Unit sometimes tried to fly up to the aircraft in the time-mirages, but it was no more successful than chasing a rainbow. The Racemind had found that a prolonged series of time-mirages invariably preceded another burst of evolutionary progress. While Rrengyara was exploring the plateau, more units in Land South-West were falling away into individualism and pugnacity under the influence of the war flowers. Fresh outbreaks were occurring, but the Racemind could control them. Units stationed to keep watch for light columns were helping win the struggle against the deadly cobalt blue flowers. As for the light columns themselves, they were obviously a completely new form of life which had evolved up on the plateau.  Their IF appearance brought a whole new realm of uncertainty into the classification of living organisms. Previously the main difficulty had been in distinguishing between plant and animal. For instance, the foamlike cell complexes now invading the submarine excavations could fit into either category. Again, the flitterdown bush was definitely a plaint, but its fluffy seed had an insectoidal body hidden inside whose long white hairs, although normally only the eyes were visible. The lit columns, however, were neither plant nor animal. As far as the Racemind knew, the columns did not have a physical cellular structure at all. The columns had destroyed the conditioning in several units and had established control over the tumbleweed. (The image of the tumbleweed circling the crystals resembled the image of the Australian animals circling a boneyard. Was this a coincidence? The Racemind did not possess enough data to decide.) Had the columns anything to do with the death of Rrengyara? Something had launched those tiny crystals at her inside the cave. Certainly there was a connection between the light columns, the tumbleweed and the large crystals -- although the Racemind did not imderstand why the crystals had been set to scorch that thirteen-limbed pattern into the rook. other matter. Something had intended to silence the intruder, and for that reason alone the Racemind was justified in continuing its investigations. VI T he expedition consisted of fifty flying ants, twenty-two bumiains and twenty-four fruit bats -- ninetysix units in all. It was entirely airborne, because flying units possessed greater mobility ithan ground forces. The ants were present in sufficient numbers to protect themselves and the other units from any deconditioning attempts the light columns might make. The humans were the pack animals, carrying the equipment, and they also provided force to counter any physical attack on the other units. The fruit bats, beautiful creatures with smooth black fur, were the scouts and would do most of the reconnaissance work. As always, it was hot and sunny in the mountains. To the units in the expedition it seemed hotter than in the lowlands, despite the altitude. They soared up from the dry valley and reached the rocky plateau where Rrengyara had been lost. The strange outcrops stretched away before them in the heat-haze: brown and purple pillars, great orange-red rocks resembling the figures of plants or animals, purple crags like fangs biting into the sky, a natural arch with orange and brown curving across in lines like the colors of a rainbow, all these weird sculptures and thousands more were spread out all over the plateau. The scout units of the expedition, the fruit bats, spread out to cover a wide stretch of territory as the expedition flew on towards the circle IF of crystals. The Racemind was controlling all the units, allowing the humans no individuality. Rrengyara had been left partially controlled, a tempting target for any telepathic attack, but as yet there was no need to repeat the experiment. They sighted the .flitterdown bush Rrengyara had seen. Some balls of flitterdown, which had followed the expedition up from the lowlands, dived towards the bush with faint supersonic squeaks of delight. A little further on, a fruit bat on the extreme left of the crescent formation saw something which had been hidden from Rrengyara by a high spur of rock. Some chameleon cacti were growing in a dusty hollow. They were not matching the orange-brown of their surroundings. Instead, each cactus was slowly changing color. The fruit bat dropped behind his companions to study the plants' imusual 'behavior. The color-cycle was the same for each cactus, but the plants were going through the cycle at different time rates. The effect was that the fruit bat could see all the stages in the cycle at the same time. Two of the colors were familiar to the Racemind: carmine and lime green. The rest of the series included two more citrus colors, orange and lemon yellow, and a very pale blue. White was in the cycle, but black was absent. The Racemind sent the fruit bat flying on to rejoin the expedition. There was nothing more to see here at the moment. The incident was another illustration of the strange power the light columns possessed over lesser creatures. In some way tie columns had disrupted the normal protective-coloration mechanism of the cacti, substituting this rhythmic cycle of colors. B efore the fruit bat returned to its position in the formation, another fruit bat near the center of the orescent saw a lemon yellow column standing on the rocks ahead. The fruit bat sped forward ahead of the others, but the yellow column grew fainter and fainter. It faded away into nothing, leaving only the purple stones and the ever-present heat-haze. The expedition searched #he area diligently without finding so much as a cave the yellow column could have slipped into. There was no explanation for its disappearance. Finally the Racemind abandoned the search and sieat the expedition on to the point where Rrengyara had died. A flying ant was left to keep watch should the lemon-yellow column reappear. The expedition arrived at the circle of tall transparent crystals discovered by Rrengyara. Changes had taken place in the circle, so a couple of units went forward to examine it while the rest descended to the ground near the cave. The expedition reached the dark cave mouth without trouble and sent in two scouts, a fruit bat carrying a normal torch followed by a flying ant seeing by infrared light. Should the fruit bat be attacked the ant behind him would see what happened even if telepathic contact with the victim was broken. The fruit bat entered the cave, the white light from its luminousplankton torch seeming pale and dim in the blackness. The curved sides of the cave had cracked and split, sending little splinters of rock to the floor, so that the walls contained thousands of tiny ledges and the floor was strewn with stones resembling pine needles. Curiously enough the roof was still intact. Rrengyara's body had gone, but the 'Stone splinters were coated with blood at the spot where she had been standing. Beyond the brown stains, a faint milky glow was visible in the darkness. The faint greenish tinge to the light was familiar. The fruit bat glided on; the Racemind intended to trigger whatever weapons launch the attack on Rrengyara. Thousands of minute cr#Ttals, all flat and none larger than half an inch across, were resting on the ledges and cracks in the walls, like a flock of seabirds nesting on a cliff. Here the crystals covered the sides of the cave so thickly that their light was brighter than that of the fruit bat's torch. The flying ant reported that the cave crystals were radiating infrared light in addition to the normal visible spectrum. The attack never came. The crystals remained motionless on their ledges, glowing balefully, while the fruit bat passed through the zone of light. After the region occupied by the phosphorescent crystals, the cave branched in two. Both openings were equally dark. The fruit bat flew along the left-hand tunnel and soon discovered a second greenishwhite glow ahead. Turning a corner, he saw that the cave widened into a subterranean chamber and then came to a dead end. The floor of the chamber was partially concealed by a shallow pool of milky liquid which appeared to be evaporating, judging by the white stain around the depression in the floor. The opaque luminous liquid was dripping slowly into the pool from a group of stalactites, the first such formations the Racemind had seen in these caves. The small pond was not the only source of the greenishwhite light; clusters of crystals were huddled together on the ledges around the pool. These crystals were glistening as if damp. They had only just been formed, the Racemind realized. In its own laboratories the Racemind made crystals by this same process -- evaporation of a saturated solution. T he fruit bat did not take specimens, because the cave would receive a thorough investigation from the rest of the expedition. He flew back along the tunnel to the junction, where the flying ant awaited him, and turned left to explore the other fork. Quite suddenly, the tunnel came to an end. The fruit bat shone his torch around and saw a pile of small colorless objects which looked life fish scales. He dropped to the floor to examine them. They were little diamond-shaped crystals, so flat as to be almost two-dimensional, identical to the others in the caves except that they were not glowing. The light had gone out of them, and they were transparent, like the little disks of horn the human children played with. The crystals were dead. IF Meanwhile, the two flying ants studied the circle of large crystals. No light columns were present, and the shoal of tumbleweed had vanished, so the two units could approach the circle in safety. The pattern scorched into the rock by the crystals was now complete and had cooled into solidity again. In shape it resembled an octopuslike creature with thirteen arms, or a symbolic representation of the sun. The circular central area, which Rrengyara had seen in the process of formation, was about four feet in diameter. The thirteen paths, curving from the center of the paatern out to the circumference, were each two feet wide and about nine feet long. The region where they overlapped enlarged the central area. The huge colorless crystals were no longer at the outer rim of the circular pattern. Twelve of them were positioned ait regular intervals along the grooved pathways leading to the center, and the thirteenth crystal was actually at the center. The twelve on the pathways were arranged in lines of four; in each group the innermost crystal was close to the center, the outermost was near the perimeter, and the two others occupied inteitmediate positions on their respective gtooves. Each pathway was occupied by one crystal, except for the thirteenth which was empty. The lone crystal in the middle was off-center. The Racemind continued watching, and presently it realized that the crystals were moving. They were gradually inching along the paths they had burnt into the stone. The Racemind made an intuitive correlation. This scorch-pattern was a dancing ground, similar to the sites the giant black humans were rebuilding in Australia. This slow motion of the crystals was a religious ceremony. They were dragging themselves along the grooves for a definite purpose. The Racemind knew that ordinary inanimate stones could wander across deserts by themselves, but this ritual was different. No inanimate object could think for itself in this way. These crystals were alive. If this assumption was correct, it confirmed the Racemind's new theory that the cave crystals were living creatures. The Racemind's thought processes were such that it would not have reached this conclusion from only one set of data. However, the information from the cave and the circle formed two sets of data, and the knowledge that one entirely new life form -- the light columns -- had already appeared formed a third set. In the circumstances the Racemind had to assume -- temporarily, at least -- that the crystals were alive. Were the crystals subject to group-mentality control like other creatures? What was their relationship with the light columns? Had the large crystals made their dancing ground of their own volition. If the cave crystals had killed Rrengyara, why had they let the fruit bat explore the cave in safety? To these and other questions the Racemind conceived several possible answers, filing them away to be checked later when further data became available. vn I t was growing late, and the expedition had 'been travelling all day. The Racetmind decided to make camp for the night now and start work early in the morning, rather than continue in the hour or so of sunlight that remained. The temperature had fallen considerably, and the units wouild work better tomorrow if the routine preparations were finished before sundown. If any scientific investigations were started now everything would be hurried, overstraining the units which would then be functioning below full efficiency. So the only other work done that evening was a thorough but fruitless search of the immediate vicinity for Rrengyara's body. While all this was taking place, most of the Racemind's gigantic mental resources were still devoted to the incredible task of examining the memories of events which had occurred during the past two centuries. The Racemind had no equivalent of the concept "error" -- to it, everything was classified in three categories: advantageous, non-advantageous and irrelevant -- but the time spent dreaming of immortality had been decidedly non-advantageous, the Racemind realized, particularly when considered with other activities such as the way civilization had remained within its present borders for thousands of years. If the Racemind had possessed the ability to indulge in masochistic hindsight, it would have told itself it should have sent regular exploring teams into unoccupied lands to see what new species were evolving there. As k was, the Racemind imerely decided to send out such expeditions in future. Perhaps the crystals and light columns had their counterparts on other continents. The units were bedding down for the night on the pleteau when the Racemind discovered an extremely significant item of information in its memories. Included in an annual report from a museum -- an archeological storehouse and study center -- was the statement that the revolution-counters in a certain exhibit had reached zero. The exhibit in question contained devices which had been found three thousand years ago in a well-preserved submarine city. The revolution-counters had been working perfectly, recording the passage of years towards a certain date in the future. That date had arrived three weeks ago, and it coincided with the greatest concentration of time-mirages recorded before or since. T he sea city in which the revolution-counters were found contained other items. In it the explorers gathered enough evidence to prove that the seamen had made a last desperate attempt to save their race. They had tried to project themselves into the future via the timemirages. The Racemind, knowing the current frequency of time-mirages and the weakened state of the space-time continuum, was certain that the revolution-counters had been programIF vm med to gj.ve the date of their arrival in the futiiie. The rolution-coiinter was one of many electrometallic and mechanometalHc devices found in the sea cities. Several other seahuman inventions were stored away where they could do no damage, but most the large machines still in operation were left in position -- the Raoemind had once lost several move a machine from a deserted city. After some early disasters, the Racemind stopped all research into atomics, electrics and technology, permitting only simple and easily controlled devices to be used in its civilization. Thus the Racemind lacked sufficient information to take any action over the news about the revolution-counters. So now it had to obtain that information, quickly. Some seafarmers living near the site of the city in question were directed to investigate. The city had been closed for centuries, but the Racemind had no hesitation in opening it again. If the seamen had succeeded in transmitting themselves through time, or if the abandoned machines had been programmed to reactivate themselves when the revolutioncounters reached zero, there would be tremendous consequences for civilization. The zero moment had arrived, and new life forms were appearing from nowhere; the two facts might well be connected The seamen were an ingenious race, and in many ways it was surprising that they were extinct. The Racemind sent the seafarmers toward the submarine dty at maximum speed. D uring the night, a tall, slender column of pure white light drifted past the sleeping imits in their camp. The guards on duty received strange thought impressions similar to the first stages of war-flower madness. The Racemind roused the entire expedition to make a mental attack on the white column. The barrage of mentsd force had no effect on the colunm. The humans made a direct physical attack; this too failed. An invisible shield prevented the humans from reaching the intruder. The barrier genuinely existed; no conditioning had been imposed on the units. The white column had surrounded itself with an impenetrable cylinder of force. The Racemind sent some units after it, shadowing it to the cave entrance where it went into the opening. When they tried to follow the column they found another invisible barrier across the cave mouth. The white column had sealed up the cave. Two units remained by the entrance all nighit, watching for the white column and periodically testing the barrier, but the situation was unchanged in the morning. The expedition could not enter the cave again, so the Racemind continued its exploration of the plateau. The scouts discovered several more plantations of chameleon cacti, and the Racemind noted that all the plants were bowing gently towards the northern hills as they went through their column-inspired rainbow colorcycles. No light columns of any color were found. A fruit bat on routine reconnaissance in the dull brown xKrtheim wastes was flying in the )direcdQn indicated by the chameleon cacti when he discovered the crater. Blue water sparkled within the great circular depression, but that huge volcanic cone had not contained a lake when the Racemind last visited the plateau. The fruit bat flew on, and approaching the crater he saw rows of cacti and tumbleweed, growing in straight lines which radiated outward from the crater lake like the spokes of a wheel. The arrangement was obviously artificial. Swooping low, the fruit bat saw that the brown rocks were covered in places 'by a thin layer of soil. The dusty earth had blowm about in the wind and collected in drifts on which sparse grass and small weeds were establishing themselves. The ground around the cacti and tumbleweed was free of other plants. The lake was hidden from the ground by the high ramparts of the crater rim. Rising again, the fruit bat soared towards the lake in the old extinct volcano. He was alone, for the other scout units had spread out in all directions searching for more crystal circles (two had been found already). If the unit came under the influence of the light columns there were no companions to rescue him. Suddenly the fruit bat saw a momentary flash of red light on the brown rocks below. A large crimson crystal was there, a semi-transparent monolith fully five feet high, moving steadily away from the lake. It bad left a trail behind it, a barely perotible line in the thin dust. The Racemind had an irrational liking for light seen through colored glass or similar substances, and it caus the fruit bat to glide within inches of the travelling monolith, merely to look through the crystal and see the sun transformed into a sphere of crimson fire. When the Racemind was satisfied, the fruit bat resumed his northward journey. Now that he knew what to look for, he saw many other trails in the dust. He also saw three more crystals, two blue and one yellow, aU heading south. Reaching the volcano, the fruit bat circled slowly above the crater to give the Racemind a complete picture. Warm steamy air was shimmering upward from the circular lake, and little puffs of misty vapor hung over the still surface of the sapphire-colored waters. Seeing the almost luminous intensity of that blue liquid, the Racemind judged that the water had been stained by minerals -- probably by ores of some transition elements. The fruit bats glimpsed vague shadows below the mists, but they were too indistinct to be identified. Between the sapphire lake and the jagged edges of the vertical walls were two different types of ground. The higher zone, just below the crater rim, was a wide sloping band of soil in which several thousand tumbleweed were rooted. Their feathery green leaves were tall and straight, indicating that they were too immature to be mobile yet. The second and lower zone, between the young tumbleweed and  IF the lake, was the shore. When it realized what it was seeing, the Racemind sent the fruit bat down te perch on a shoreline boiddeir. It required a closer view of this unique beach. T he boulder must have fallen from the ramparts above, for there were no stones -- or sand -- on this beach. The entire shore was covered with fragments of colored glasslike material. The most common colors were sapphire, crimson, emerald and yellow. The fragments ranged in size from several inches down to microscopic splinter and dust specks. They were o'bviously the remains of crystals which had broken up beside the water. Many of these colored shards were moving, shifting painfully toward the sapphire water with feeble movements, ne emerald flake pulled itself several inches before encountering a jagged crimson pebble too large to be slid over. The fruit bat watched a flat mauve fragment, a rough triangle in shape, rocking from side to side before sending itself slipping over its companions, most of which were also struggling to reach the lake. The mauve shard hit a more solid yellow fragment and split it in two. Both pieces of mauve crystal oontinued moving and managed to slide into the sapphire liquid; they immediately darted away like fish and vanished in the depths below the wisps of vapor. Twenty yards along the shore, a giant scarlet crystal was emerging from the lake. Taller than a human being, it dragged itself clear of the shallow blue liquid and stood upright on the shore. It was vibrating rapidly, and the fruit bat glided towards it to investigate. Without warning, the scarlet crystal leaned to one side, overbalanced and toppled onto the 'beach. It shattered into a thousand pieces; some of the debris fell back into the sapphire waters. Most of the 'bright red fragments began crawling back to the lake, sliding themselves over the older and weaker shards. A few of them were focusing sunlight on other pieces, and a canary-yellow crystal suddenly split open, releasing a cloud of fine dust which drifted over the lake. Still subject icy the burning rays from the scarlet fragment, the remains of the yellow crystal began to melt. All along the beach, colors were flashing out from the moving crystal flakes slowly returning to the sapphire liquid. In the distance the shore appeared to 'be a rich brown, but nearer the unit all the separate colors were distinguishable as the shards sparkled in the sunlight. It was a sight as fascinating as the forests of colored glass mobiles which hung in the transparent domes of the ant cities. The countless tiny motions of the fragments gave the impression that the whole shore was rippling like a tree in a 'breeze. In the shallow parts of the lake, near the beach where the blue water was low enough to 'be transparent, the Racemind saw dozens of giant crystals wandering slowly across the lake floor. Another crystal came up through the shaUows, a misshapen crimson monolith with an opaque dark red growth on one side. It was moving through the last few inches of sapphire water when it began vibrating rapidly as the scarlet crystal had. It hesitated with its base in the water, then slowly retreated towaird the deeper regions of the lake. Two feet of its height was still above the surface when it lurched to one side and disappeared in an explosion of spray. Concentric ripples spread out swiftly from the scene, intemipted by smaller ripples as crimson fragments splashed into the water. The Racemind watched two more giant crystals, both sapphire-colored, emerge from the lake and smash themselves to jagged pieces on the beach. A fifth crystal, four feet high and bright emerald in color, did not destroy itself. Moving purposefully out of the water, it dragged itself over the beach, crushing many of the shattered fragments as it went. A trail of dampness glistened behind it, and a few small shards dissolved in the pools before the 'liquid drained away. The emerald green crystal reached the tumbleweed plantations on the slopes, and continiued through the open fields towards the crater ramparts which enclosed the lake. As the crystal travelled upwards, some tumbleweed plants curled their leaves into rough spheres. Uprooting themselves, the tumbleweed began rolling up the slopes alter the emerald crystal. The monolith was heading for a narrow gap in the ridge, where it could pass through the high crater walls. The fruit bat left its boulder by the shore and ascended rapidly, shadowing the wanderer. Now accompanied by the tumbleweed, the emerald crystal proceeded through the small canyon and out onto the dusty brown plateau. It started off across the stone wilderness, traveUin'g in a northwesterly direction. The Racemind sent the fruit bat gliding after the crystal. DC T he pool in the cave and the lake in the crater both had the same function. Crystals, living crystals, were created in 'both. The process of evaporation in the cave was relatively mple, while crystal formation in the lake was a more advanced process, but the basic similarity was undeniable. Probably the crystals had other communal birthplaces somewhere on the plateau. The cave system would have to be explored thoroughly. However fascinating the crystals might be, they were insignificant compared to the major problem -- the light columns. The cave where Rrengyara had died was still sealed off by the force barrier created by the tall white column, and in the outlying districts of Land SouthWest more light columns were appearing, adding to the difficulties caused by the outbreaks of war flowers. The manifestations always took the same pattern. Light columns of various colors arrived at the hillside farms, accompanied by shoals of whirling tumbleweed, and the familiar sequence of mental disorIF ganization began in the farm units. Automatic group-solidarity rhythms sustained the units under attack until reinforcements arrived. Apparently realizing that superior mental forces opposed them, the light columns then retreated hack into the mountains. Rescue units pursuing the light columns followed them into the high volcanic regions, where the columns glided into oaves and disappeared behind invisible barriers. All these attacks had taken place either this morning or the previous evening, and the latest was not yet over. The situation was static at present, with guard units waiting for the cave entrances to become clear again. Up on the plateau several crystals were seen, but the light columns remained absent until a fruit bat sighted a group of lime green columns near a crystal circle. The scout flew down to investigate further, and as he did this the Racemind began receiving information about the ancient city of seamen. The seafarmer units had arrived at the city. Centuries ago, the Racemind had completed its researches here and prevented unauthorized exploration of this submarine city by simply insuring that the units did not think of entering it. No unit visited the city after that until the seafarmers swam up to the battlements of the. outer perimeter. These old walls, now partially covered with ooze, encircled the entire city. The Racemind had never discovered the purpose of the bizarre fortifications. Beyond them, past the strip of clear ground, light were burning where no 'lights had been 'before. Other machhies 'besides the revolutioncounters had been waiting for the zero moment. T he density of animal and plant life in the city was extremely high, and the waters were warmer than usual. The seafarmers smelt offal and decaying human flesh in the water ahead. As they approached the first of boxlike buildings, they saw predatory fish swimming along the radial interconnecting streets, wandering in mixed packs as though the creatures were not hereditary enemies. Little scraps of food matter were floating in the water, being eaten by scavengers of all sizes from jellyfish to webworms. The trained eyes of the plankton farmers reported the presence of innumerable unicellular objects feeding on matter too small to toe seen. Crabs, bloodsponges, small squids and other creatures were moving about on the lower levels. None of the predators seemed interested in the seafarmers. The city bad ibeen constructed on a hemispherical plan, with the tallest buildings in the mide and the lowest buildings on the outermost concentric circular streets. The structures on the outer rings were the best preserved, because many of the high central blocks bad collapsed with age and destroyed numerous other buildings when they fell. The seafarmer units gained height and glided over the outer streets, surveying the remains below them. In the center of the city, where the buildings were nothing more than heaps of age-darkened rubble under the coating of ooze, the great saucer-ahaped depression within die tallest remaining buildings was filled with the bodies of dead humans. It was a submarine iboneyard, and many of the bones still bore rotting flesh which trailed in long strips from the skeletons. The odor of decay hanging over the scene was overpowering. Fish were tearing away at the foul meat as the seafaimers watched. Many of the intact buildings contained more of the bodies, and by sending some units to peer through transpart window-panels into sealed lighted rooms the Racemind confirmed that it knew the identity of these dead humans. They were the seamen, and they had been extinct for thousands of years. During its researches three thousand years ago, the Racemind had discovered numerous scientific instruments in these buUding, Some were removed, such as the revolution-counters, but most were replaced when the Racemind finished studying them. The units were sent to open up an old laboiratQry where they found somie sditific equipment in good condition. Many of the strange mechano-electric devices had resumed functioning of their own accord, as the city public lighting and temperature control systems had done. By direct experiment many, many years ago the Racemind had learned the numerical symbols and systems of calibration us by the seamen, so it could understand the readings on the instruments. It swiftly discovered that the bodies of the seamen were slightly radioactive, checking a number of corpses to make sure. The radioactivity was on too low a level to affect e creatures feeding on the bodies, but it was definitely well above normal. The seafaimers dissected some corpses and found that all parts were equally radioactive. The Racemind accepted this latest news and made plans for a fullscale expedition to visit the city immediately. The bodies had been in the water for approximately three weeks, and the revolution-counters had reached zero three weeks ago. Archeological evidence showed that the seamen had attempted to project themselves into the future, and the boneyard had materialized during a period of the most frequent and prolonged timemirages ever recorded. This explained Why the seamen became extinct so suddenly. However, the actual relevance of this information to the current problem of the light columns was doubtful. (In particular, the appearance of that crystalnforming lake in the volcanic crater had most disturbing implications.) It was highly improbable that the seamen were concerned with events on the plateau in any way. The Racemind would have thought it impossible, considering the evidence, but for the fact that die advent of the light columns nearly coincided with the delayed extinction of the seamen. If there was no direct connection between the events, both might be linked to a third factor which was as yet unrecognized. IF X T he Racemind now knew the destination of the emerald crystals and its attendant shoal of tumbleweed. It was travelling in a perfectly straight line towards the crystal circle which had just been discovered ly a fruit bat. At its present speed, which had not changed since the crystal emerged from the blue lake, it would reach the circle in approximately one hour. Modifying its plans to accommodate this new scheme of events, the Racemind made the scout near the circle land and watch from behind a purple outcrop just outside the effective range of the telepathic impulses from the light column. The other fruit bat in the vicinity continued following the emerald crystal. The faint mental aberrations caused by the lime green columns did not prevent the Racemind maintaining full control over the fruit feat as he lay stretched out on the ledge. Eleven crystals, each about four feet hi'gh, were slowly draggmg themselves around the rim of a circular area twenty feet across. The interior of the disk was smooth, unmarked ground; the crystals had done nothing to it so far. The eleven were spaced out eveAly as they moved along their circular path, and at regular intervals the fruit bat saw the sun's reflection flashing out from the colored surface. The eleven crystals were identical in size and shape but not in color; five were blue, four were crimson and two were emerald green. Unlike the colorless crystals in the first circle, these were clear and unscarred. Their sides were smooth and straight, and obviously they were all relatively young. The air around them seemed clear and bright, for their outlines were sharp against the brown background blurring in the rising heathaze.  The fruit bat watched from the ledge for over an hour without seeing any change in the rhythmic movements of the crystals. The lime green columns remain motionless, standing to one side of the circle. At last the lone emerald crystal appeared, with the green tumbleweed, rolling around it. As it approached the circle, the crystals already there began to move closer together along the perimeter, forming a widening gap for the newcomer. The crystal joined the others, and now there were twelve colored monoliths slowly circling the site of the new dancing ground. The tumbleweed left their crystal and rolled to a halt beside the stationary lime green columns. The second fruit bat, following some distance behind the emerald crystal, was about to glide down to join the first scout on the outcrop when he saw a momentary flash of green light a short distance southeast of the circle. Maintaining height, he saw that another emerald crystal was coming towards the circle, accompanied by a number of other creatures including at least two varieties of light column: carmine and lemon yellow. The Racemind then brought the scout down to the outcrop and sent up the other fruit bat, the one who had been resting on the ledge, to examine the group of new arrivals. Besides the emerald crystal, the carmine and yellow light columns and the inevitable tumbleweed, the strange little company included several dozen sucker-studded wandercacti. These unusual plants were over three feet high, only a few inches wide, and progressed over the rocks by hydralike somersaulting, using their terminal suckers to grip the stones. Three tall light columns of a pale turquoise color were accompanied by some white balls of flitterdown, the first time the Racemind had noticed flitterdown with the columns. A flock of tiny milk-white cave crystals were flying in diamond-formation above the wandercacti. This completed the group, except for a dark human female with peculiar skin, coloration, walking 'beside the emerald crystal. Studying the human, the Racemind realized that she was Rrengyara, the unit who had been killed in a cave. A swift mental probe at maximum sensitivity revealed no trace of her thoughts. That, and her curious sihuffling tread, showed that she was dead. The Racemind could not regard this as certain, because it had not recorded her death impulses, but there was little possibility of error. Something must be controlling her body, yet the zombiesnakes had been exterminated thousands of years ago, and nothing like them had arisen since. The obvious conclusion was that the light colunms were responsible. They were the only independent creatures with the potential intelligence and ability to perform tiie feat of controlling a dead body. The cats could sometimes control a live body, but their powers extended no further. Rrengyara was walking like a somnambulist. Her arms hung limply, and her head was bent down. As the group passed near the fruit bat watching from near the circle, the Racemind obtained a close detailed picture of what should have been Rrengyara's skin. Her naked body, once smooth and brown, was covered with a black resiny substance in which white particles were gleaming. The crystals attacking her in the cave had embedded themselves in her flesh, causing thousands of tiny wounds, and they were still there. Her skin could not be seen, for the blood from her many wounds had flowed out over her and congealed into a black mass partially covering the crystals. Her nostrils were free, but her eyes and ears were completely blocked. The coating of blood and crystals bad fused her hands and feet into forms resembling flippers; the digits were barely visible. The emerald crystal, and the creatures around it, reached the dancing ground. The light columns glided silently over to the lime-green columns standing to one side, and the tumbleweed by the green columns rolled tht other way to join the newcomers. Rrengyara collapsed on the ground, and the flying cave crystals piled themselves into a white pyramid beside her body. The other creaIF tures all ce to a halt. Only the emerald crystal still moved. The crystals of the circle slowed down aiid stopped on the perimeter, all at regular initervals except for a double-sized gap which the new arrival entered. All motion ceased; even the tumbleweed and flitterdown were still. The thirteen crystals stood tall and shining on the circular line they had scratched on the stone. Very slowly, the great crystals began to move. One after the other, they dragged themseives in a curving line towards the center of the circle. As they travelled along their separate paths, a pattern gradually took shape on the ground where the rock had been marked by their passage. The design was familiar: a thirteen-armed star, it was the basis for all the crystal circles the Racemind had found. Presently the crystals ceased their ritual and returned to their positions on the perimeter. The assembled creatures broke into movement again. The tumbleweed rolled and whirled around the circle, the host of tiny crystals flew into the air, the wandercacti somersaulted in unison, Rrengyara stirred and rose to her feet, the flitterdown fluffballs emitted their supersonic squeaks, and all the light columns except the limegreen ones began to slide over the rock away from the circle. The pale turquoise columns led the way towards the mass of purple outcrops on the western side of the plateau, and only some tumbleweed and the lime green columns did not follow. The creatures streamed away from the thirteen crystals -- the enigmStic light columns and a dead human a horde of leaping cacti and bouncing tumbleweed, and flitterdown and cave crystals swirling in chaotic patterns against the sky. One fruit ibat followed the departing multitude at a safe distance, leaving the other to continue the surveillance over the circle. The creatures bad just disappeared behind a tall fanglike outcrop when the large crystals started to move again. They tilted themselves at different angles, land beams of colored light flashed into being: crimson, sapphire and emerald. The thirteen crykals were focusing the sunlight on one of the paths they had traced out to the center. As the rock began to soften, below a newly formed heat-haze, the tumbleweed arranged themselves into a circle surrounding the thirteen crystals. They rolled around the dancing ground, gaining speed as they circled the crystals, while the lime-green light columns watched impassively. Only the faint mental whispering indicated that the columns had any part in the ceremony. The turquoise light columns led their army into a large cave mouth some distance away. The fruit bat remained outside. When it ibecame clear that the creatures would not reappear, the Racemind sent the fruit bat into the cave. Other members of the expedition were flying to the area, but at present the fruit bat was alone. He could not be regarded as expendable unitil the reinforcements arrived, so the Racemind was prepared to remove him from the cave at the first hint of danger. I n the dark tunnel, the Racemind relied onthe fruit hat's echolocation squeaks for a description of his surroundings. The picture so obtained was accurate enough, but it lacked a number of details which could only be gathered visually. The fruit bat glided silently into a small diamber from which three tunnels led furdier down into the rock. A faint milky light could just be seen in the middle opening, and the fruit bat headed toward the glow. The Racemind observed that the sides of die cave were straight and smooth. This part of the cave was obviously artificial. As the soft white glow grew stronger, alien emotions infiltrated the fruit hat's mental processes, arousing warm thoughts of peace, brotherhood and individualism, conflicting with their counterparts in the Racemind's conditioning. It was the first step in breaking the Racemind's control over the fruit bat, and it meant that at least one light column was in the cave ahead. The Racemind let the unit continue toward the glow, ready to make him flee should the telepathic disturbance (become too strong. However, the level of interference was stiU tolerable when the fruit bat came to the end of the tunnel. The scout hung from the ceiling, concealed among the shadows, and gazed at the strange little subterranean world before him. Tall crystals of various colors were everywhere, sending beams of colored light across the cave. A large pool of luminous liquid down; at the far end cast its white radiance ovot a series of stone terraces and strips of gre vegetation. The ceiling, ten feet above the highest terrace, bore dusters of nunute milky  crystals which gave off greenish-white phosphoreGoence. Light columns of many coiors stood on the paved stone avenue betweei the strips of soil, and at intervals along the plantations were diameleon cacti ceasdessly imitating the colors of the columns. Other plants growing under the stone roof were tumbleweed, wandercacti, cracklehushes and several varieties of ferns. On the terraces, cmwling 'between the light columns, were little brown animals which the Racemind had not seen before. The animals had no heads or tails, and their only limhs were four furry projections like starfish arms. Their bodies were ftureless and extraordinarily mobile. The effort of resisting the constant mental barrage was weakening the fruit bat. The scout was losing his powers of concentration, and his eyes were not scanning the cavern properly. The Racemind made him depart from the cavern, flying along the tunnel by which he had entered it. Next he could explore one of the other passages. There had been no trace of Rrengyaia or any flitterdown in the cavern, so it was probable that the party from the crystal circle had taken (another turning. The fruit bat glided into the small chamber where the cave divided into three. At that moment the Racemind received information from two speedy flying ants travelling ahead IF of the main expedition. Far to the north, they saw a group of light columns and tumbleweed heading rapidly towards the cave entrances. They would be here within minutes. Immediately the Racemind sent the fruit bat out of the cave back into the hot sunlight, where the unit took cover on top of a tall rock spire. From this vantage point the fruit bat watched three lemon-yellow columns and a shoal of tumbleweed approach and vanish into the cave mouth. The Racemind took no further action. It waited for the units of the expedition to arrive before it resumed the exploration of this cave. XI T he Racemind was now certain that there was no direct connection between the light columns and the extinct seamen. However, it had found a hypothetical third factor: the timenmirages. After that intense series of time-mirages three weeks ago, minute seismic disturbances had been recorded coming from the plateau area. The disturbances were continuing and fractionally increasing in strength. Similar phenomena were detected whenever new tunnels were being constructed, and the obvious implication was that the light columns were expanding the natural cave system. Coincidence was a pattern of events which the Racemind always refused to accept until all other possibilities were exhausted; there must be some reason why the light columns had started tunneling only a day after that zero moment three wed ago. Perhaps the columns had succeeded where the seamen had failed, projecting themselves through the time-mirages from another age. That would explain the lack of any relationship 'between the columns and the normal protoplasmic forms of life. It would also mean assuming that the columns possessed powers far greater than those of any known creature or group of creatures. It meant that in a mere three weeks they had brought about all the changes on the plateau noted by the Racemind -- including the conversion of the old crater into an evaporation-basin for the crystals. And the crystals themselves were a problem, (being living creatures without any detectable mental processes. Had they been created on the plateau, or had they come through the time-mirages with the columns? Certaiinly they had not come into being through the normal processes of evolution. A point of questionable importance, at this stage, was the series of attacks on the outlying farms. They were indecisive affairs, and the Racemind was not sure that they were intended to be attacks. The columns could mount a more vigorous campaign if they chose; as it was, the war flowers were doing more damage than the columns. Of course, this raised the question of what the light columns were trying to do at the farms. It might be worth sacriflcing a small farm to see what happened. The small brown animals on the subterranean terraces presented another problem. The Raoemind had now finished going through its accumulated memories, and no such animals bad been seen anywhere in the ant-controlled world. Also, they had no obvious ancestors. Like the cr#rstals and light columns, they might have arisen spontaneously. There was a difference, of course, because the brown creatures were composed of protoplasm. As a working hypothesis, the Racemind assumed that the light columns had created the crystals -- a relatively simple feat -- but did their powers extend to the creation of living cells? There were too many unknown factors for an answer to 'be apparent. However, similar situations had occurred before and would occur again. The Racemind had encountered many strange animals just after the Ice Age, during its ill-fated northward expansion, and the intermediate stages in their evolution had remained obscure for centuries. Similarly, several parallels were recorded in the memories the Racemind had reviewed. As one example. Land South-East had recently suffered a plague of small tentacled insects which had swarmed in from the coast. The ancestors of these creatures would be discovered, given time. All things considered, the Racemind concluded that no final decision could be reached about the brown animals until further data were obtained. Soon the expedition would join the fruit ibat waiting outside the cave, and then some units would explore the tunnel system again. Guards were positioned by Other caves where light columns had disappeared, but this was the only such entrance not sealed by an invisible barrier. T he appearance of the tentacled insects was another of the random evolutionary changes recorded in the memories the Racemind bad been studying. Other changes were equally interesting. For instance, the sitreamerhags had altered in color, and their bodies no longer resembled a cluster of transparent white worms. The parasites were now flame-colored, and a bunch of streamerhags on a tree branch could easily be mistaken for a small fire when the long orange-red tails were being blown about by the breeze. Color changes were taking place in other creatures as well. The dragonflies had become numerous under the ant civilization, and their brightly colored adult bodies were the subjects of many mobiles in the relaxation domes. Their larvae, themonstrous nymphs, were tolerated because the Racemind coveted their adult forms. After the new change the hideous larvae might become as popular as the adults, for their tough hides were bearing glossy metallic sheens which sparkled in the sunlight. A few weak-minded units had become hypnotized by the sight of these jewel-skinned monsters churning through the mud of the moat bottoms. The cat warrens, deep in the uncultivated jungle, had changed little. The defenses were slightly more elaborate, and the rats were even IF fewer in number, but that was all. The cats were still content to remain within their own territory, and they respected the ant units as long as there was no suspicion that the ants were hunting the oats' food animals. Because the ants took only plants from the jomgie, no clashes had occurred since the last unsuccessful attempt to incorporate the cats into the Racemind. The ants now regarded the cats as a normally irrelevant natural hazard which was harmless unless provoked. The incredible mental and physical resistance which countered the ants' last attack would have ruined civilization if the Racemind had not withdrawn in time. The cats were the only race of intelligent independent individuals the ants had known -- the seamen had become extinct before the Racemind learned of their existence. The rats which 'lived in association with the cats were not intlligent and were dying out. The cat population had not increased. One constant feature of the reports was the appearance on the shores of mutated fish trying to conquer land, unaware that their efforts were too late. With the new increase in solar radiation more fish than ever were re-enacting this phase of evolutionary history, and in several places they were having an unexpected effect on the ecology of the coastal plains in Land SouthEast. Q uite early in thei current radiation cycle, the wiry marram grass had undergone a spectacular change. Expanding rapidly over formerly bare sand dunes, die marram grass wove itself into a ithick blanket which provided shelter for the small desert mice, sand martins, scorpions and other ftnimak of the arid coast. The grass received scraps of decaying food matter, regular supplies of excretion land the dead bodies of the animals. The symbiotic partnership worked well for some time. Then the little fish with their crude lungs and stumpy legs began living in the grass, desperately eager to colonize the land. At first they occupied the grass nests by nit, hunting food in the ocean by day, but when they returned from the sea they dripped salt water over the grass, gradually grass near the shore died away, the fish moved further inland, the process continuing imtil the fish we imable to reach the sea in a single day. Some learned to live on land food, and the others died. The force of natural selection, acting on unstable genes, accelerated the pace of evolution still further. After a hundred years of this, strange amphibious creatures moved in great migratory herds from the plains to the coastal water and back, taking about a month for the whole journey. The entire ecology of the plains and the grass-covered dunes was now centered on these monthly migrations. Another changing ecology was that of the atmosphere. The aerial plankton were one-ceHed microscopic plants and animals which spent their short lives drifting through the air like dust, never touching the ground. They were the sole diet of many small insects and had existed in their present forms since well before the earliest days of the ant civilization. Now, for the first time in thousands of years, the myriad species of aerial plankton were undergoing mass mutations. Many were becoming flatter, and their bodies were covered with beautiful symmetrical patterns like snowflakes. Their numbers were increasing rapidly, because some of the insect predators could not adapt to feeding on the new species. To check this sudden population growth, the ants would have to breed new insects for the work of keeping down the aerial plankton. In one of the desert regions, the wandercacti had started the plant counterpart of the animal boneyards. From all over the defsert, the wandercacti arrived singly or in pairs, somersaulting over the sand in lithe imitation of a hydra. They planted themselves for the last time in a steep-sided waterless valley and remained there until they died of dehydration. The valley floor was covered with brittle green corpses. Other plants came to die as well, especially the round mobile tumblewe and the graceful glitterbells. The Racemind knew, as the plants must know too, that the rocks of the valley included thick coal measures. One day the piled dead plants would catch fire, perhaps from the sun shining through a transparent glitterbell petal, and then the coal would be ignited. Once started, the death migrations would never cease. The aged plants would keep coming to their dying ground even though the valley was a mass of flame. Some artist units, redecorating the cities, saw the possibilities and began designing murals to show the plants travelling over the yellow sands and immolating themselves in the valley of fire. T he expedition joined the fruit bat on the stretch of open ground outside the cave. The purple outcrop towered high above them,its outline sharp and clear against the blue sky. Wasting no time, the Racemind sent a flying ant into the cave. Seeing by infrared light, the ant found nothing until it turned into the little chamber where the tunnel divided into three. The chamber was flooded with pale white radiance, and the ant came to a sudden halt. Before it were two tall figures: a slender white column and Rrengyara, her blackened body full of tiny points of light. Around them swirled a living cloud of cave crystals. No alien thoughts were audible, but this abnormal feature did not slow the reactions of the Racemind. It made the ant turn and retreat from the chamber at full speed. Abruptly, without any mental disturbance, contact was lost. It was a clean blank, identical to the deathcapture of Rrengyara. The Racemind ordered three powerful humans into the cave, but they were stopped by another invisible barrier. The cave was closed. Back at the crystal circle, the fruit bat watching the colored monoliths IF was in danger. The lime-green columns were moving towards ihim, and he was powerless to flee. His limbs would not obey the Racemind's oommands. His mind was filled with mental interference, the seductive thoughts of (freedom, independence and brotherhood broadcast by the light columns. The contradictions in the various thoughts did not make them any less dangerous. The Racemind us all available methods of control, without effect. The fruit bat responded to nothing but the light columns. His thoughts were fainter, becoming cloudy and incoherent like those of a unit entering the dream caverns. The Raoemind sent the expedition speeding over the rocks to the trapped scout. If they were in time, their proximity would strengthen the mental group-solidarity patterns enough to save him. The attempt almost succeeded. The racing units were within sight of the circle when the fruit bat's thoughts ceased altogether. Hovering well above the thirteen crystals, the units saw the fruit bat glide from his ledge and land on the brown rooks by the lime-green columns. Telepathic impulses whispered in the minds of the expedition units, but ithey could resist the attack by combining their mental resources. T he fruit bat was not dead, it appeared. He clawed his way into the air, rising from the mide of the group of green columns, and with some difficulty he rose towards the eighty-odd units circling above. As Rrengyara had done, the fruit bat was moving without thinking; the Racemind could detect no mental processes. The captured scout had no more thoughts than one of the crystals standing on the now dancing ground below. The Racemind made repeated unsuccessful telepathic probes as the fruit bat approached the hovering units. Finally the fruit bat reached the height of the expedition and iided slowly to and fro before the assembled units, moving sluggishly as if in pain. The Racemind waited for the scout to act. Suddenly a great burst of mental force lash out at the expedition -- the thoughts of the light columns, amplified many times. The units defences went into operation automatically, and the attack stopped after less than a second. The fruit bat drifted back down to the iground, returning to the light columns by the circle. The incident was over, leaving the Raoemind wondering just what the columns had hoped to achieve. The Raoemind was beginning to favor the hypothesis that the "attadcs" were really attempts at communication. But it could not exra and the other lost units. A tall isolated outcrop of purple rock was rituated to the south of the crystal cirde. The expedition settled onto its ledges and looked down on the circle and the columns, waiting for the next attack. The Racemind was certain the lit columns would contiinue their efforts to make mental contact, and it wanted its units fairly alert when the next move was miule. Nearly ah hour went by. The creaun li yKffiWPc'  O.Ui ks I W Kv: p tures below were motionless all the time, even the tiumbleweed. The thirteen colored crystals -- emerald, crimson and sapphire blue' -- were standing on the rim of their new dancing ground, waiting like the others. Two moving objects appeared from behind a spur of purple-red stone. The Racemind identified them at once; Rrengyara and the tall white light column. Thousands of tiny white cave crystals darted to and fro above them. Faint mental static came from the column. Reaching the limegreen columns, they halted. Then Rrengyara went on alone, around the crystal circle, towards the outcrop where the expedition was gathered. The units watched her approach, with strange emotions from the humans in the party. Her dark body still had those little white crystals embedded in it. Standing before the expedition, without looking up at the units covering the rock above her, Rrengyara said: "We must speak with you, Racemind of Earth." Commimication had begun. R rengyara was using the vocal speech still current among the humans. Telepathic contact was as remote as ever, so the Racemind was forced to reply through one of its human units. The human left its ledge and stood before Rrengyara. Slowly, using the time-consuming spoken language, the Racemind learned the facts about the light columns and their associated life forms. The Racemind had a good knowledge of astronomy, and in addition to this its scientist units had continuously studied the sun to predict the effects of the variations in solar radiation. However, it had never considered using its knowledge of the solar system for other purposes. As Rrengyara spoke, items of hitherto unconnected information in the Racemind's memories began fitting together. The ancient humans had travelled to otl;ier worlds, Rrengyara said. At the height of their powers, these humans reached the sun and attacked it with their machines. Badly wounded, the sun drove them off. It was still in the proce of healing itself, and its radiaitior would not return to normal until it was well again. The radiation causing the evolutionary changes on Earth was characteristic of a sun-creature's growth stage and had caused the great leaps of evolution in the past until it became weaker in the sun's adolescence. This radiation was now stronger than it had been in any previous period of the sun's life, and this was the missing factor linking the ligjit columns with the seamen. The seamen had travelled from the past, via the timenmirages, and the light columns had travelled from the sun, along the waves of solar radiation. The sun was a living creature -- what else but life could waste energy at such an appalling rate? -- and it had parasites in its circulatory system. The light columns lived in the Bright Ways, streams of living matter carrying complex energy systems to all parts of the atomic furnace which was the sun. The light columns, for all their vast experience and powers, were merely parasites which the sun did not even notice. After the arrival and retreat of the humans, several groups of lit columns decided that life on Earth would be far more rewarding than life in the Bright Ways. Extrapolating the sun's recovery sequence and selecting the most powerful burst of radiation, these ligjit columns left their fellow parasites and started the long hazardous journey to Earth. Ninety per cent of them died on the way. On Earth, the light columns soon learned that the planet was a dead world, and that life belonged to a few weird objects of jellylBce substance. The machines which had intrigued the solar parasites had disappeared centuries ago. Undismayed, the light columns started a new civilization centered on their own communal mind. The crater lake where the giant crystals were formed was created in five days, and the first cave crystals were made even sooner. The work of expanding the cave system had begun immediately. Tumbleweed came rolling to the plateau, from the fertile western valleys, accompanied by the little brown animals the Racemind had seen on the underground terraces. The crystals were taught sun worship as a first step towards developing their potential intelligence. The work went on without a break until some light columns exploring the dry eastern valleys encountered a party of human children. From that brief contact, the light columns knew that another and probably hostile group consdousness existed on this planet. While the columns were making plans for investigating this other intelligence, the human scout Rrengyara was found by some cave crystals. She was captured and incorporated into the group mind by force. Studying the mistes made on Rrengyara, the columns learned how to take over controlled creatures without causing physical damage. However, when their emissaries visited some farms they were repulsed by seemingly impregnable mental defenses. More antcontrolled scouts were captured, but the problem of communication was not solved untifthe columns brought Rrengyara to make vocal contact with the Racemind. A s Rrengyara spoke, the Racemind learned that its own conditioning was (responsible for the mental silence from the crystals, captured units and other life forms with the columns. The knowledge of its own impotence had caused an accidental mental block. Conflicting mental impulses had resulted in a disruption of the command channels, spreading to affect receptivity as well. Considering this point, the Racemind worked out a method of deconditioning a unit so that direct mental contact could be made with the light columns. That should remove the Racomind's self-induced mental blocks. The next step was IF to take over the light columns, and it worked out a method for that too. The main unknown factor now was the strength of resistance from the columns. The Racemind partially decenditioned a flying ant and sent a thought probe through it into the nearest crystal. Rrengyara broke off her speech. Through her, the light columns said, "Stop that!" The crystal was an intelligent creature with a mental field similar to that of a human. The Racemind withdrew quickly and sent a probe into Rrengyara. Her mind was a void in which tiny pictorial thoughts hurtled through darkness, like meteors in the night. The columns' control stabbed the black emptiness as a cylindrical bar of burning matter. In those flames the Racemind saw the basic drive which motivated the light columns -- an instinctive desire to extend life over every particle of inanimate substance that existed. The columns had a vision of an Earth in which every piece of matter was alive and knew its brotherhood with the rest of the living world. Even the rocks would have awareness and emotions of their own. "This must cease," said Rrengyara. "We must control you." 'That will be decided when I possess the necessary data," the Racemind replied. Without hesitation it sent a probe into the nearest light column. The result was chaos. Now the Racemind learned how effective the light column's thoughts could be when used as a weapon. The wave of mental force almost engulfed the units in that first instant before the automatic defenses went up. Immediately the entire expedition -- including those stationed elsewhere -- went into a form of cataleptic trance which enabled the Racemind to continue the battle without being forced to direct vital energy into the maintenance of the units' bodies. All perception of their surroundings ceased as their life eneres were thrown into the defense. Within seconds the attack faltered, and the Racemind knew the light columns were unable to make a sustained effort on this level. It could master them. And as it realized this the failing attack died away altogether. The light columns would be weakened now. The Racemind made a fleeting mental contact with the column it had probed. The parasite of the Bright Ways was capable of independent thought, like a human. Counterparts of the human emotions existed in the column's psychological structure. Over everything was the burning vision of the Bright Ways, the piaradise which might yet be created here on Earth. The fierce desire to spread life to every atom of the world pounded out from the lime-green column, accompanied by the intense lonig for all this uncreated life to be part of a single gigantic world-organism. As the Racemind absorbed j:he colunm's thoughts, the alien mental rhythms set up disturbance patterns similar to those caused by the war flowers. The deconditioned unit through whidi the Racemind was working began dreaming of wild batties. Striking out at enemies, seeing blood pouring from wounds... Breaking off contact, the Racemind analyzed the brief skirmish. The colunm had been working on the weakness within the unit instead of trying to win by force. C # X # U must stc," said RrenI gyara, and then the Racemind possessed her again. Her imiind was scarred and broken, and as soon as the old conditioning returned she knew that she was destined for the dream caverns. Beside the motionless crystals, the limegreen columns sank slowly into the ground. A yellow column had disappeared in this way, the Racemind remembered. Rrengyara's recapture and the movement of the columns occurred simultaneously. The Racemind chose that mome to begin its assault on the light columns. The attack was concentrated on the tall white column which had accompanied Rrengyara. It was the most powerful column, (and the most important as a captive. Overwhelmed by the multilevel barrage of mental force, the white column's mind folded into nothingness, reappearing as a constituent of the Racemind. Directing its attack, through the white column, the Racemind seized the seven lime-green columns, which were still partially above ground. Then it absorbed the thirteen crystals, and lastly it repossessed e fruit bat. With every unit it gained, thd Racemind increased its effective power on the plateau. Using its new strength, it reached out for further minds -- and stopped. All the free light columns and their slave creatures were united against the new threat to their independent survival. It was a basic law of ecology that no two species rith identical environmental characteristics could exist together in a stable relationship; sooner or later one of the competing species would exterminate the other, directly or indirectly. Adapting this law to the current situation, the Racemind knew that a conflict between the two group consciousnesses was inevitable. The light columns had known it too, when Rrengyara said, "We must control you." In every city of the ant civilizatrance state which enabled the Racemind to make full use of their mental energies. Above the dusty plateau, a time mirage appeared in the sky: a flying cross-shaped object made by the ancient humans, a thing of the past made visible by a freak of nature. The mirage shimmered and vanished, and after that nothing moved save the timeless heat haze. The Racemind was ready for its final attack. The Raoemind's consciousness cascaded out from the expedition and the other units, expanding across the plateau like a foaming wave sweeping over a beach. In its state of abnormal sensitivity the Racemind was contacting every living thing in the mountains as its sphere IF of awareness washed over them. The minor creatures were swallowed up immediately, but the light columns lesisted. Incredibly, they fought back. Without defending themselves, they assaulted the Racemind at the critical moment, tearing into it with great streams of energy. The Racemind merged itself with the group mind of the columns; the contact brought it into the sun. As waves of desperate madness roared out from the columns, the Racemind was buffeted by burning images of the Bright Ways. It had seen the memories in the columns it had taken, but now it was living them. It was surrounded by golden streams of dazzling fire, surging torrents swirling it into the flames. Emotions flashed through the Bright Ways, nourishing the pale parasites, creating currents and turbulence on other energy levels. The vision faded slowly as the Racemind fought to regain control of itself. The light columns' counterattack had almost succeeded. Now even the essential workers were falling into the trance state, giving their energies to the titanic struggle. One by one, the columns succumbed to the Racemind. It grew stronger, and the enemy grew weaker. Bumt-out units were dying in the cities, but the battle was nearing its end. The Racemind englobed the alien group consciousness, forcing it inward on itself, taking over its constituent creatures as it retreated. Suddenly there were too few light columns to maintain their mass mind, and it disintegrated. The final burst of agony mingled with despairing death-images of the Bright Ways. The Racemind would carry those last visions in its memories for all time. It was over. Numbed by the violence of the conflict, the Racemind reawakened its units from the trance. Civilization began to function again as the units resumed their normal work. The light columns had been defeated, and the Racemind was alone once more. A s the changes continued, the world became more and more hostile to protoplasm. The ants attempted to create self-supporting subterranean cities, but all the underground colonies failed. The Racemind was forced to seek shelter in the oceans, as the seamen had done thousands of years before. Time drifted on, and slowly the land surfaces became completely devoid of protoplasm. The Racemind divided into two: a major segment for the submarine civilization, and a minor segment which controlled the land creatures. Eventually the two parted completely, and only the grotesque monsters which crawled up the beaches to die showed that marine life still existed. The two intelligent land races, the crystals and the light columns, developed their characteristics of independence and individualism until the land Racemind ceased to exist. The minor creatures -- sunbursts, rock hags, cave crystals, melters and so on -- retained group minds in many instances, although life forms such as fireballs and dustdevils had been independent from the beginning. The light columns never lost their desire to bring life to the inanimate materials of the Earth, and this was the main purpose of the civilization they founded. They worked to change their world into life. The virtual disappearance of protoplasm life was of no consequence -- if anything it was an advantage, because the new creatures were far less limited in their choice of environments. For instance, the dust devils could exist in any fluid medium, and sunbursts were even more adaptable. As conditions on Earth grew harsher, life evolved to fit the requirement for survival, and all the whle the light columns went on with their patient work. Rocks were brought to awareness in the heathaze, pools of liquid shielded themselves from evaporation with telekinetic barriers, and telepathic mountains called to each other across the burning deserts. Within the sleeping giants that were the oceans, protoplasm survived as a series of hideous parasites haunting the mud flats. Long after the activation of the Earth's crust had started, the crystals (began to die out. They were less stable than most creatures, and were either becoming sterile or changing into more adaptable allotropic forms. The light columns themselves had become sterile, but they rendered themselves immortal and continued their work without pause. No such altemaitive was open to the crystals, and their numiters grew ever smaller. T here was a legend about the death of the last crystal: He was a lonely child, who never knew others of his kind. Brout up within the shield of a large copper sulphate polyhydrate pool, the last crystal was still immature when a block of pumice crashed through the riiield to kill the pool. Adult in body, a child in experience, the cry(I had gained his knowledge of the world from fanciful stories told by the pool. The last crystal questioned the pumice and learned that the block had been ejected by a volcano among the nearby mountains. The pool hod told him about such things, saying that the lava streams were Earth's counterparts of the Bright Ways. Leaving the fused mass which had been the pool, the crystal set off to find the volcano. He was directed to the right place by a disinterested mountain which prophesied an early death for him. He disregarded the prophecy and traveled on. At the foot of the volcano he met a dust-devil which warned him against ascending the ash-covered slopes. Again he ignored the advice. And just bdow the summit, when he was looking ahead at the smoke and glowing cinders pouring from the crater, his way was barred by a yellow light column. He protested and explained that he wished to immerse himself in lava, reliving his ancestral memories of the Bright Ways. The lit column only sighed, knowing that the columns had given their creatures this memory, and allowed the last crystal to pass. IF Waves of heat pounded against the crystal as he dragged himsell ver the rim. Clouds of gray smoke were billowing up around him, but several hundred feet below they were lit up by a warm orangeyellow glow. The crystal went crashing down the steep sides into the depths of the crater, chipping off flakes from his sides against the boulders. The volcano spoke to him, welcoming him into its presence, bidWant to meet your favorite author? See science-fiction fans in their native habitat? Talk about the stories youVe liked and hated? Here are some of the upcoming science-fiction events, Well try to keep it up-to-date and complete, month by month... so if you are running a conference, let us know! more Md. For information: Jack L. Chalker, #I Liberty Heights Ave., Baltimore, Md. #. Membership #. Street, Newark, N.J.; for information, Allan Howard, # Grafton Ave., Newark, N.J. #. Membership #. ner. Speakers, presentation of annual "Nebula" awards for excellence. Simultaneous dinners in New York and Oakland, Calif. Open to members of Science Fiction Writers of America and guests only; for information (East Coast), Robert Silverberg, # Goodridge Ave., son, # Las Palomas, Orinda, Calif. #. An informal and unofficial conference is ding him speed into the Bright Ways. He plunged into the orange lava, smoke swirling around him... and for a brief instant he achieved his goal. Then the heat took him, and his crystalline structure collapsed. He became a fine powder, buried in the lava. The particles of his body wore rapidly dispersed by the relentless currents. Soon there was planned for the day of the banquet on the Statler-Hilton Hotel, Boston; for information, Paul Galvin, # Harvard Street, Cambridge, Mass. #. Guest of Honor, Larry Niven; presentation of "Skylark" award; meeting of Tolkien Society, etc. Membership #. Holiday Inn East, Columbus, Ohio. Guest of Honor, Frederik Pohl; panel discussions, talks, etc. For information: Lirry Smith, # East Tibet Road, Columbus, Ohio #. Membership #. At St. Anne's Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire, England. Guest of Honor, Kenneth Bulmer. For information: Harry Nadler, # South Mesnefield Road, Salford #, Lancaster, England. Membership, #. ington D. C. Regency-Congress Motor Hotel. For information: Jack C. Haldeman, # Woodboume Avenue, Baltimore, Md... Louisiana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Fisch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. vention. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland California. Philip Jose Farmer, Guest of Honor. More details later. For informont Station, El Cerrito, Calif. #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. IF  Short Story Tfie aliens had a foolproof way of defeating Earth... almost! T he secret was enormous, but it was well kept. That is why Gregory MacKenzie -- listed as Marsthirty-seven Earth scientists on Mars -- was, in his innocence, unprepared for his incredible confrontation. MacKenzie had been on Mars for ten months as part of the slowly expanding Terrestrial Expeditionary Party, Exobiological Exploration bound trip with the two-man Frontier-Four-# crew had cut him off from his home planet psychologically as well as physically. His horizons had narrowed, not broadened, and with his sense of isolation had come an acceptance of the routine. The excitement had not left him, though. How could it, when he was home? He was still a pioneer, probing the mysteries of the Solar System. That was why thoughts of dishonesty, deception and treachery had been left far behind in space on Earth. And why the aliens achieved complete success with him. T he "Injuns" kidnapped MacKenzie one evening just before darking procedure called for everyone to be inside when the Martian night came, except for specially planned assignments. The nighttime cold was inhospitable; there were plenty of things to keep the entire party busy indoors during the sleepless period. MacKenzie had completed his duties outside and was headed back to his solitary living capsule with some new geological samples to analyze before pushing back on the following day to the main base camp. The sun. bright in light but feeble in warmth, had jumped down below the horizon suddenly, forcing MacKenzie to stop for a minute to uncloud his sunshade and allow his eyes to adjust Phobos was off on the edge of e low hills and Deimos was just climbing into the fantastically starry sky. The time was that moment, and the place was there, some two hundred meters from Im personal capsule, that MacKenzie, half-blinded, tired and no longer alert, was grabbed by the aliens. MacKenzie was not a big man, but he was wiry strong. Because he was one of the very few bachelors, he felt the social constraints, especially in the presence of the three women, working wives of the long-term explorers. So he divided his spare time between books and calisthenics, keeping himself in top physical form. Although his head was large and well formed, his neck was so long and scraggy that his head seemed somehow deformed and disjointed from his thick shoulders. It was just at that prominent juncture of his neck and shoulders that the Injun hit him. The blow was on the unprotected fabricoid edging under his helmet The sharp needle went through the material into his skin, to paralyze him in an instant. As well conditioned as he was, he had no chance to defend himself nor to resist the drug. ever seen an Injun, or, for that matter, any alien at all. None, that is except the commandant, the remarkable veteran of the Moon and Mars, now almost fifty years old. One month ago he had made a meticulously staged rendezvous with an Injun contact party under top-secret instructions brought to him by a courier from Earth. When dealing with unknowns, wireless communications were considered risky. The written message which the camp "Little Earth" had received two years earlier, five months before Gregory MacKenzie had even arrived on the planet, was the most flabbergasting governmental communication he had ever received. In the typical gobbledygook of government language the commandant was informed that an alien life form had contacted the Secretary General of the United Nations through the Lunar Investigation For Exobiology ference to discuss the basis for a relationship between them and the Terrestrials. One conference had taken place eight months later at a sistant to the Secretary General, who had been especisy chosen and rushed through the training necessary to get him back and forth aboard a Russian Voskhod. The meeting was carried out and the young Japanese, Mr. Mitshubi, prepared the diplomatic work for a second and final meeting. The aliens would not agree to locating the meeting on Terran soil. Nor again on the Moon, which they considered as virtually part of Earth. In fact, they want it not even within the Solar System, which they considered the natural front yard IF of the Earthmen. However, when it was pointed out that the farthest point at which mankind had succeeded in establishing himself, at this date, was Mars -- why, then, the aliens agreed that the final meeting should be on Mars. They also insisted that someone in absolute authority should be sent to the conference to represent Earth, although a delegation of not more than three persons was to be permitted. The meeting was to be held within twelve to eighteen months. E arth, or at least most of the governments there concerned who knew about it, took the full eighteen months to arrange the conference. In the first place, the Secretary General of the U.N. had made a very wise decision: he had informed only the permanent members of the curity Council of the overtures by a non-Earth civilization. This was his cautious attempt to develop the situation slowly, with a minimum of confusion and panic. Those Security Council members behaved in a remarkably restrained and intelligent manner; they kept the secret to themselves and sat down upon the situation with the tightest form of security. Only the immediate rulers of each of their countries were a party to the secret. They planned to negotiate the treaty and then throw the entire situation open to the world to consider, discuss and then accept or reject. One of the treaty provisions, specifically made by the aliens, was that there would never be any fraternization between aliens and Earthmen. Following the final personal contact of the treaty conference there would then be only radio or some such other contact. The aliens explained it simply by saying that the Earthmen weren't "psychologically ready" for galactic association. The treaty would provide how the two species would be kept apart; mathematical boundary lines would be calculated and agreed upon; each side would stay within its own territory imtil the treaty was negotiated. Somebody tagged the aliens as "the Injuns." The allusion, of course, was to the ancient American problem with the opening of the New World. No one knew whether or not there would be "trouble" with the "Injuns." For that matter, no one knew yet if the aliens would turn out to be inferiors, equals or superiors to mankind. The U.S. and Soviet governments agreed that the Secretary General could be relied upon to negotiate for both their interests, and, incidentally, for the interests of the rest of the world. However, the Secretary General was too old to make the trip. Others took his place. The first assistant had arrived on a regular Frontier-Four shot three months ago. He was an American. The second had arrived six weeks ago in an extra Frontier-Four capsule which had been launched by a Soviet Vosnik rocket. He was a Russian" The actual negotiator, the Special Assistant to the Secretary General who had all the real power, was due to touch down in one day, the day after MacKenzie's undiscovered dnapping. Officially all of this had absolutely nothing to do with Marsman-# Gregory MacKenzie. Except that he was to be the aliens' secret weapon.H e found that out almost immediately upon being wakened from his drugged sleep. He had been pulled into what looked like the control room of a spacecraft, vaguely like the American FrontierFour but without a single recognizable control switchv The room, about twelve feet in diameter, was pleasantly lit from an unknown source, and three aliens stood leaning over MacKenzie. At first he thought they were human beings dressed up in a new kind of spacesuit, not quite lame fabric and not quite armor, in a sparkling though faint tint of lavender. They seemed very skinny with long slender arms and hands and fingers, and their heads were encased in a smooth, highly reflective ball of the same violet-purple metallic sheen. There were large opened visors, with gaping shadows which at first seemed occupied by standard human features but appeared to grow more strange and alien each time MacKenzie looked at them. There were eyes, glinting, all dark as though cornea and pupil were blended, with no whites showing. There was a nose for each, but only a small fleshy bump, with no nostrils, more suggestive than actual such as on a doll's face. From imder the eyes, slashing down across the cheeks, reversing themselves around the thin mouths, were a series of Z-shaped wrinkles, graded from the first large and deep one to the smallest, faintest one. The top bar of the deepest Z-wrinkle gave each eye a serious, provocative squint, while the bottom bar seemed to suggest a controlled, determined grin. MacKenzie was smart and imaginative. He very soon concluded that they were alien people. Not knowing that higher authorities on Earth already knew of their existence, MacKenzie felt a terrible burden of responsibility building upon him. What he did might be irrevocably good -- or bad -- for the existence of the human race. "Can we communicate?" MacKenzie said, daring to hope for the best. One of the creatures shook his helmet in a positive way and said, "We understand English. We can speak English. That is the very thing we desire -- communicate." Before MacKenzie could ask a second question the central figure hung his hands on each shoulder, almost as a human would grasp his coat lapels or hook his thumbs in his vest while speaking, and delivered a quick lecture. The aliens were friendly, were about to enter negotiations with the Terrestrials, would after their consultations release certain facts about themselves. Meanwhile they had invited MacKenzie into a preliminary conference with them; they needed twenty-four hours with a human being informally before spending days or weeks with the Official Human Being formally. IF "In the first place," MacKenzie said, when there was an end to the lecture, "You didn't invite me -- you took me here by force. That's the worst way to begin. It's not friendly. To be a friend one has to act friendly." Their voices sounded friendly enough, though, MacKenzie thought. Soft and vibrant, even warm, but unfortunately stilted, if not downright mechanical. "We weren't unfriendly. Just practical. We wanted to avoid the emotional disturbance of our meeting. To save time." First one and then another seemed to be speaking these sentences in turn. MacKenzie wasn't certain. Perhaps the middle alien really was doing all the talking. "Now that we are here, we are inviting you to talk." "In the second place," MacKenzie said, "this is no time to talk -- if what you say is true. Start your introductions tomorrow without any preconceived notions. Discover each other tomorrow in all innocence." MacKenzie felt his eyebrows go up at the recognition of his own thought. Damn if it didn't ring the bell with solid truth! "It seems to me you think I can give you some information which will help your side against my side." MacKenzie didn't see any reaction to that. "I don't know what's going on. I'm not one of our planet's leaders. I can't be of any help." All Ithree aliens waggled their heads in unison, although MacKenzie was not clear as to what the movements meant. "But that's just why we want to talk to you. You're an average man. You represent the true feelings of your race. You --  MacKenzie listened. MacKenzie talked. MacKenzie listened. MacKenzie talked. MacKenzie suddenly realized that they had been talking for many, many minutes. For hours! "I refuse to say anything more," he said. He felt exceedingly angry at the belief that he had been exploited without, somehow, being able to resist. 'Take me back. Now!" The three aliens looked at each other, nodding and making whispering noises. "We have had a useful talk. You have proved extremely knowledgeable in the use of the techniques of dialectic and rhetoric. You will be returned this morning before the meeting." "Why are you conducting this clandestine interrogation?" MacKenzie asked, being as calm and reasonable as he could be. "You are the first human being with whom we have had personal contact," one of the aliens said. "Obviously we would be poorly prepared if we had not met and talked with at least one of you." The Z-wrinkles around all three mouths spread wider apart in awkward, grotesque imitation of large grins. "But even more important, frankly, we have been analyzing the human thought processes. We have been discovering how you think. For example -- " the middle alien held up a slender metallic-sheathed hand and waggled it like the most prosaic of lecturers -- "we have been able to gather some of your more intimate resources upon which you build your wisdom and knowledge." The hand, with one extended finger, continued waggling. "You told us much, under questioning, which you do not now remember. But we also received much of what you didn't verbalize, more of ethos than of facts, through what you yourself use as an extrasensory perception or intuition." "You don't think you can know the human race after just a few hours interrogating one human being?" MacKenzie blustered. He wasn't at all sure but what they could.  "Yes," said the alien. "At least for our purposes. We know how you think. Aristotelian logic, I believe you call it, with some tendency to lay out arguments in the more complex, more analytical, Toulminian form. Given a certain premise we believe it would be very easy to predict the course your thoughts would follow in the development of human logic. Because.of this we should triumph at the conference beginning in six hours." M acKenzie was distressed by the choice of the word "triumph," but he saw the validity of the alien philosophy -- and also its implications. The secrecy confirmed their evaluation. Perhaps he might be able to get his enlightening experience to the attention of the Earth representatives before any harm was done. Or would the aliens kill him to prevent his talking? "If you release me before the conference, what is to prevent me telling of our meeting?" He kept his voice steady and friendly. "We will burn out your memories." "Burn out... ?" Despite his effort at self-control, MacKenzie was engulfed in a hot flash of terror and panic. They were quick to reassure him that it was neither painful nor dangerous. "But you've told me you were seeking trust and understanding. Cooperation. You are practicing deceit." "We are not immoral." The three heads each made several solemn negative shakes. "We are realists. We must use every weapon that we have." MacKenzie's terror flooded back, stronger even than before. "Do you threaten war?" All three aliens stiffened and recoiled slightly. "Nol" the three voices simultaneously protested. "We do not use violence. Our power needs no war machines. We fight our battles with rhetoric. We rely on persuasion based upon psychological precepts. If we win, we have our way. If we lose, we simply accept co-existence. You yourself know that winning the peace' is the real test. And as we now know the human mind, because you are typical of the men with whom we vnJl deal, it is inevitable that we shall gain our ends." "Do you consider me -- us -- naive, stupid... ?" "No, just mechanistic. Obsessed with computerized, scientific logic. Predictable. One day your race will recognize that we are -- " the IP spokesman groped for a term -- " we are nonhuman syllogisticians." MacKenzie was desperately looking for some reassuring flaw in the alien strategy. "Predictable." If only he were the half-witted brother in the story plot, they would themselves be deceived. Or if they had mistakenly interviewed a human pet or an ersatz-human servo-mech, thinking it was the true, intelligent life form of Earth. But there was no bizarre misrepresentation -- he, MacKenzie, was indeed a truly representative man... As his thoughts were racing, he saw a hypodermic-like instrument materialize in the hands of one of them. He had no chance to fight the sudden spray injection which burst upon his bare face, but the infallibility of the aliens' reasoning represented by the word "predictable!" was the last burning thought in his burning brain. G regory MacKenzie, minor memasleep in his capsule when the conference began. He would be found later, unharmed, although suffering from a severe and incurable case of amnesia. He would not be able to report that they had kept him for another six hours, almost up to the time of the conference, talking to his drugged mind. Nor would he know or even guess at the important consequences of his interrogation. He had not been the unwitting betrayer of bis own kind. Indeed it might be said he had betrayed the syllogisticians themselves by the irrefutable truth of his own predictability. For on that fateful morning, when the future of space-conquering humanity and its Solar System was being dedicated, there arrived at the conference site the Chief Representasentative for Terra, the Special Assistant to the Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth. The dignified, middle-aged human being heading the delegation of three was the esteemed Suhawni Pachtow. She was very attractive -- and all womI Watch tor fho second big issue of this unusual ifevr science-fiction magcaine,  I containing stories from all over the planet Earth -- I S " mm # I Out sopnl Ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy tedayl I Lexiville. All aboard! We crawl in ten minutes." T he loudspeaker blared, over the Leaning against a pylon located a heads of the gaudily-dressed good hundred yards from Nine-#people moving about the station and five's mammoth cyclopean-eyed head, crowding with their baggage into the Bondman Y contemplated his misboarding-chutes. sion, the surgically sealed jaws of the "Crawler Nine-O-five now loading crawler and his fear that the living from Chute Five. Destination: Chitrain might turn on him. oria, Columbedo, Springapolis and Y's quarry -- the man with the IF Novelette Illustrated byoD War hod sundered the nations of Earth, Only , the crawlers could unite them -- one way or another! pointed beard and the radiation scar across his face -- had gone through Chute Five. To Y this indicated that the intelligence network... of the West American States was right in at least some of their guesswork. Action on Bondman Y's part was vital before his query reached the Ameradian Republic. Yet he could not simply arrest the Ameradian. This was Cefus territory: the Central Empire of the Former United States. Considering the problem of a police force that would incarcerate a West American Bondman as quick as an Ameradian spy and possibly quicker, Y came to the conclusion he had been working up to for some time. He was going to need help. Potential help went by in the form of a very nice shape. He admired the blonde hair above the white jersey and the smooth hip action beneath the tight green slacks. Yes, if his estimate of the situation was correct, there might be one of his allies. He tried concentrating on the rear view to the exclusion of all other distractions. It aroused more bearable dreams than did the other major item in his field of vision, the long sausage with pulsating greenishgray sides and bulbous brown crocodilian head equipped with single yellow-glass eye and long-stilled mouth that it was said had clomped only foliage. As usual, what he wanted most to exclude came up fully into his consciousness: the crawlers and his illogical aversion to them. The crawlers had come from Venus. Between World Wars Three and Four, just before Four. After Four there had of course been no manufacture of spacecraft -- or a host of other once necessary things. Earth's resources were too exhausted. Enter the crawlers. T he size of the creatures varied. Like fish, they grew indefinitely. Unlike fish, they had no natural life span. An ama#dng discovery... and the crawlers were not all! Codiscovered on Venus were the ruins of ancient cities. There had been an intelligent race on Venus -- a race that left abundant wall carvings. The intelligent Venusians had not been crawlers; rather they appeared to have been giant cockroaches. Studying pictographs of a particularly scabrous kind, a linguist remarked that while the Venusians had a nifty mode of conduct, it appeared that they became miffed when proper rituals were ignored. Thus from nifty and miffed came the name Earthmen applied to the vanished Venusians: Miffti. Had it not been for the Miffti's pictographs, men would never have dreamed that crawlers would prove to be a solution to Earth's transportation problems. Yet the pictographs were very specific. Miffti had grown crawlers to size and worked on them surgically. What the Miffti could do, Man could do -- if he wanted. Man wanted. After World War the Fifth, he needed. There was no way out, even if the moralists had had a point or two. But the moralists had not. The pain centers in crawlers were on the order of those found in earthworms. Thus had biocarpentry, bioelectronics, biomechanics, bioplumbing and a lot of other bios come into the language. The crawler flesh proved to be readily adaptable -- for human needs as well as Miffti. There was no big problem that the biotechnicians could not solve and the crawlers' flexible hides proved to be wonderfully adaptable shields for the human parasites. Thus areas of the planet befouled with radiation and other poisons were conveniently traversed, in comfort. Except by those who had their illogical aversions. "Crawler Nine-O-Five will crawl in five minutes!" Y mentally shook himself, took firm hold of his travel bag and moved from around the pylon. Chute Five was now empty. All the other passengers had gone aboard and it was too late for any to come out without his seeing them. There was now no reason to keep concealed from the transparent ports set in the crawler's side for the use of the passengers. Y went aboard. Inside, Y chose a seat in a day coach section and looked back to see the portal closing like an enormous sphincter. It was a sphincter -- adapted. Suddenly ill, he rose, got the nod from the conductor and headed for the relief erf a washroom. A little later, refreshed and almost used to the swaying motion beneath his feet, Y left the washroom, passed the heavy-set, ruddyfaced conductor with an apologetic smile, and took himself into the area where a few passengers had private compartments. He went to the door, whose number he had learned from a bribed ticket-seller, and rapped. The blonde answered. Behind her stood a hairy-faced gorilla of a blond man and a red-haired smaller man who more nearly resembled an orangutan. Y thought about the irradiated landscape they would be rippling through and wondered if the ancestors of these two had come from there. 'Yes?" the blonde said. "Your name is Yvonne Bohne," Y said. "The big guy is your brother Barney. Neither you or your redhaired contact -- Mr. Philips, I believe -- are Cefus citizens. You see, I know who you are, and -- " "Come in," Philips said, uncovering a gun. It was one of those that fired small explosive shells that were nonrecoverable. Only government agents were supposed to have them. Y entered. He stood calmly onceovering the compartment as Yvonne closed the door behind him. "I wondered why you got fresh," she said. "Now I imow." "You fail to flatter yourself," Y said. "On the hotel's sunroof you were quite enchanting." "Thank you," she said, obviously flattered. "What you want?" Barney said. "You a cop or -- ?" "Just let's say I know about corbacco," Y said. "Mutated cornsilk has its qualities when added to mutated tobacco, but then every corbacco addict knows as much." "You're no corbacco head!" Philips said. IF "Quite correct," Y said. "Fm from West America. Our worries are crawlers, not traffic." "So?" a reddish eyebrow rose. "You may call me Y," Y said. "You may also save your question -- no, I'm not interested in your operations in Lexiville. I am interested in enlisting your help." "HelpI" Barney was incredulous. "Help in a matter that will concern you. Crawlers have disappeared into the dead zones -- passenger crawlers from West America." "So?" Philips seemed stuck with his one question. Y studied the man's wizened face. "You mean you want your corbacco hijacked?" "Hijacked? You think --  "I think someone has gotten away with full crawlers. If it's not organized Clime, then it's -- " "Ameradial" Yvonne said. i'Tj'xactly," Y said. "Ameradia if  not organized crime. In either case, your operation as well as West America's can be a loser." "It ain't organized crime," Philips said. "Fd know. So that's what happened to that shipment! Disappeared, and then the government of West America just kept shut about it?" "So far," Y admitted. "Everyone knows it takes a long time to get word across country. The radio stations would be a help if they could be rebuilt. But with metal so valuable and the mail service so slow and unreliable -- " "We know," Philips said. "Cop," he added. "Agent," Y corrected. Y looked from face to face. Only on Yvonne's did he think he saw a spark of sympathy. He considered the orangutan, moderated his voice to its sincerest and said: "A man who has a pointed beard and a radiation scar across his face is on board. He's the master spy Ameradia had in West America." "So?" "He ransacked the files of the West American Crawler Corporation. Obviously he's involved is this. If I can get him and make him talk -- " "You think that you can end hijacking?" "My government can. Evi if there's war," he said. "No nation can interfere with the crawlers of other nations. This has got to be stopped. Don't you see?" "Yeah," Philips said. "The syndicate can't afford to lose any more boys and any more comsilk." "Then you'll help me?" Y knew he must sound pathetically eager. "All I need is help in getting the guy before he reaches Ameradian territory. I need him alive and I may need professional help in getting him to talk and in getting the information back to West American authorities." 'Too tough for you, Y?" Philips said. 'Too clever'! Y admitted. "He knows Fm after him, and he's a wonder at staying hid and in finding disguises. If I'd had the help I needed he'd never have gotten aboard this crawler." Philips considered the gun he held. "We'U get him," he said. "Alive," Y warned. "It's best we break up in pairs so he doesn't suspect we're all searching for him. We'll have to check every compartment until we find him. There's a standard excuse -- we're each looking for a friend we thought entered the compartment. When you find a male who seems to fit the description, one of you keep track of him and the other come and find Yvonne and me. We'll be searching the parts of the crawlers where you, Barney, and you, Philips, are not supposed to go. If I can, I will also enlist the aid of the crawler personnel. This man has got k) be found. It still may be possible to save what there is of world peace if we can find him soon enough. If we don't find him soon enough, I suspect everyone aboard is going to end up working in the Ameradian petrified wood mines." n # CT guess," Yvonne said cutely as Ashe and Y neared the stomach passage, "that you cops don't get next to a real blonde too often?" Y continued to hold tight to her hand and ignored the slur on Bondmen as well as the sign that read: Crawler Personnel Only, What seemed the amplified sound of a churning washing machine became louder as they neared the stomach proper. There was no excuse for a pair of bewildered passengers to be here, so regardless of whether his man was in the cavity, Y must reveal himself. As they emerged, via the passage's muscular contractions, Y took a deep breath of the stomach's putrid air and glanced quickly about at the maze of tubing and the giant reservoir connecting with the huge beast's digestive system. "Hey, your He turned to see a young man with a high-peaked stoker's cap on his head glaring at 'them. Then, as Yvonne also turned, the stoker's scowl vanished. As the crawler employee sought for words, Y congratulated himself on his astuteness in bringing Yvonne along. "Sorry, sir and madani, but unless you're crawler personnel, you're not allowed in here. It's a government safety regulation." "Good!" Y said. "My credential." And he flipped his wallet open. "Bureau of . Bondmen. Western States of the Americas," the chief stoker read. He would, Y surmised, prefer to be known as a bio-maintenance engineer in charge of biofuel injection. "Well, I'm sorry, sir, but whatever your request, I can be of only slight assistance to you. Cefus neutrality policy." "I know," Y said, knowing full well that if anything could penetrate this neutralist hide, it would be a show of interest on Yvonne's part. "You are not allowed to assist in any way either an agent from the West American States or from the Ameradian Republic. Yet this young lady is, in a sense, your country's." "I've always heard you spies have no scruples about lying," the chief stoker said. "But -- but -- " Yvonne said. "Brad," the chief stoker said. "Brad Streeter." Yvonne cast blue eyes on Brad IP Streeter. "What this man says is true, Mr. Streeter. It's true, I've lived in the West American States for a number of years, but my brother Barney and I moved back to the Central Empire after our parents died. My name, by the way, is Yvonne Bohne." "Pleased to meet you. Miss Bohne," Streeter said. "Now this, eh, trouble?" She smiled, just as though she had rehearsed it. "Well, Mr. Streeter, I could lie to you and say my life has been threatened, but what it really amount to is that I've reason to believe that all our lives are threatened. All the lives of those aboard this crawler." "Remarkable if true," Streeter said. "But it is true," Yvonne said. "My brother and his business associate have information that a West American crawler never arrived at its destination. Now Mr. Jones -- who I knew briefly under his real name while I lived in the Western States -- has evidence that an Ameradian agent who knows what happened is aboard. And could be disguised as anyone -- including crawler personnel." Streeter looked at Y. "You want my help in finding your man? You know I can't give you much without violating my neutrality." "That's the idea," Y said. "You can tell me about the crawler's personnel. If the Ameradian is one of them, I can maybe get him before he commits irreparable sabotage." "Sabotage?" Streeter looked uneasily from beneath his cap brim. "You really think there might be sabotage?" "A desperate man," Y said, "may do anything. Besides, there's a West American crawler missing." S treeter moved aside so they could see deeper into the stomach cavity. "All I know is who's here, sir. As you can see, there's my partner -- " he nodded at a thick-bodied man checking some gauges -- "and the new nutrition expert." "This new man -- " Y looked up at the catwalk -- "he's there?" "That's him," Streeter said. "Silent sort of fellow. Just came to work." Y studied the man on the catwalk. The nutrition expert's back was turned, and Y saw clearly that the cap he wore was pulled down tight over the back of his skull. Was that just because of the occasional drops of water condensation falling from the nutrient pipes, he wondered -- or was there something more? He waited until the man had turned from looking down into the vat that fed a large bag by hydraulic pressure. The eyes the man looked back with were clear and rather blank; far too small a man to be the master spy Y was after. He turned to the chief stoker. "You know of a man who's built a lot like your partner but has a half-moon scar on the left side of his face and a nose that's a little flat? A man who might sometimes wear a beard?" Streeter shrugged. "I don't know anyone who fits that description. Charlie, my partner, has been on this crawler far longer than I have. I imagine from what you said that your man would have to be new on the job? "Or disguised as someone who's not new," Y said. "His disguises pass more than casual observation." "I don't know anyone suspicious," Streeter said. "Not if this new man is all right." "You keep your eye on this new man until we know," Y said. "The agent I'm after always works alone, but this could be a time when he's made an exception." "I'll cooperate, sir. Within regulations, of course." "One other thing I'd better warn you about," Y said. "If you notice anything different about the way the crawler is responding -- anything at all -- you must let me know immediately." "Yes, sir. I'll do that, sir." Y slapped the chief stoker lightly on the arm and pulled Yvonne back into the passageway. A little later, after a fruitless search of the crowded couches, they returned through the segments to her door. Y saw the conductor coming toward them down the hall but thought nothing of it. Then he saw that Yvonne was having difficulty with the door and helped her. Inside, he saw her blue eyes widen and felt her clutch his hand. He didn't blame her: there was a streak of blood running right across the compartment to a madeup bed. On the bed, face staring upwards, was a man Y thought a complete stranger. The man was dead -- very dead. There was a small leaky hole in the stranger's forehead. m Y clicked the lock on the door and went forward to examine the dead man. He was, Y quickly determined, shot twice with explosive shells: the first shot had gone in the lungs and the second had entered the forehead. The man was approximately the same size as the spy he was after, but there was no cheek scar and no sign that there had ever been either scar or beard. Someone rapped gently at the door. Y stood aside, pulled Yvonne into the circle of his arm. He listened, breathing shallowly. He dipped for his gun as a key turned in the lock and the door opened. Facing them was the conductor. "Greetings," said the conductor, and his eyes followed the blood. Y saw no gun, motioned the man inside and shut the door. "You know what is going on?" he asked. "Some," the conductor admitted. "What I don't know, I'm starting to guess." "Well, start talking. Who's the dead man?" The conductor sighed, most wearily. 'Take a look at me, Y," he suggested. "At my face and my build." Y did. At first he saw nothing and then, as the conductor rubbed a skin-tinted paste from his cheek with the back of his hand, Y knew at last. It seemed stupid to say it: "You're -- " "The man you were trailing. Yes. I'm the one burgled the Ministry of Transportation and the headquarters of the West American Crawler Corporation." IF "But -- " Y didn't like this at all. "If you're my man, then why -- ?" "Why the dead man and why am I here? Complicated. More than I fear you may appreciate." 'Try me," Y said. The conductor walked over to the corpse. "This poor imfortunate is a crawler employee. Specifically, he was the rightful conductor. I had sought to obtains his cooperation, but he unfortunately resisted me." "You shot him? Murdered him?" Y asked. Even for an Ameradian, it was a new low. "Nothing else to do," the spy said. "Nothing at all. He was in the way and he wouldn't cooperate. Unfortunately he was also very strong and thought he knew a little about defense." The conductor's hand leaped suddenly out, and Y felt his wrist sting and saw his gun fly from his fingers; the Ameradian caught the gun in mid-flight and stood back, aiming it at them. "Yes, my dear Y, I dare say that I acted exactly as you would under similar circumstances. The difference is that I'm a master spy. While you are -- professionally speaking -- not much better than an amateur." Y held his throbbing wrist and scowled. "You tempt me to think you're right," he said. "But you still want to know? Right, Y. My code name is three letters while yours is just one. D O X of the Ameradian Republic." "A filthy spy!" Yvonne said, and spat in the master spy's direction. "Also," D O X said, "an Ameradian. My parents were Toronto citizens, and my great-grandparents helped in annexing of the old state territory." "Filth!" Yvonne said. She spat again. must ask you not to do that on pain of getting your face slapped. I am, remember, not only a filthy spy but also a very unsanitary murderer." iXTou're good, all right," Y acJL knowleged. "But my side is wiser than you think." "Yes?" D O X's thick eyebrows rose. "We knew the Ameradian Republic had their master spy at work. We also suspected why." 'Tell me, Y." "You Ameradians are troubled by the same thing we are -- crawlers disappearing with all passengers and cargo." is right to a point." "A point?" Y still did not like it we Ameradians know nothing and you West Americans know nothing. If we knew, we'd have put a stop to it. But now, we know that it isn't smugglers or hijackers as we had assumed. There's no West AmericanAmeradian crime syndicate powerful enough. I know "Hmmm, you know, huh? And that's why you killed this real conductor and took his place?" than that afraid. Also more incredible. Y, come over here and, look at this corpse." "I've looked," Y said. "Come look again. At the back of his head. Over here, if you please." Y moved, cautiously. He recognized a man of unusual proficiency who would not hesitate to take the life of an enemy counterspy. "You'd better not look, young Y looked and then looked away quickly. He felt his gorge rise. "M-my God!" he said.  huh?" Y swallowed and turned the head back the way it had been. "Just like the crawler," he said. "A good-sized passage and -- " "You noticed the slime too, I assume?" Y nodded while he mentally cursed B O X. "I noticed something -- greenish, pulpy, with some black hairs or filaments." "And you're wondering what it means, aren't you, Y? Outside of the fact that there was something there that my bullet hit." "I know what it means," he said. "I'm afraid the officials at all levels have known -- unconsciously -- for quite some time. I knew, and yet -- " "Yet you wanted to deny it. Yes." "Will you two please tell me what you are talking about?" Yvonne demanded. Y looked at her. "This man -- the former conductor on this crawler -- he was, uh, controlled by something. The way we, uh, control the crawler." "That's not possible!" she said promptly. "Isn't it?" Y said. "Evidently you don't know that the cerebellum and brainstem are quite accessible from the back, and through them the basal ganglia. Walking, eating, all activities we perform automatically, are controlled from there. As for the cortex -- a large part of it can be trimmed away and a man can live without and apparently function normally. Fibers can be cut that lead from the brainstem to the cortex and what's left is a sort of non-thinking man who reasons and responds only on the most primitive level. It would be possible to control a man so that he even speaks, assuming the controller was bright enough." "You mean -- little creatures -- inside the head?" "Miffti," Y said. "Very small Miffti. Smaller than we ever believed possible." said. Yvonne made a gagging noise. "Which means," said Y, "that there are more? More aboard, maybe, inside heads?" heads wear bandages on the back. Or something as concealing as bandages. Toupees, maybe." "We'd better look," Y said. "Search all the crawler personnel and all the passengers." said. "Before whatever happened to those other crawlers happens to this one. Oh, here, Y, here's your gun back." Y took the weapon and tucked it away. He turned to see Barney and Philips. Both men were looking incredulously at the corpse. Y, taking charge as he felt he must, IF quickly explained to the two and apologized on behalf of D O X for messing up the compartment. "But we've got to make a thorough check," he finished, "and that's where you two can help. Assuming -- " P hilips yelped and so did Barney as Y reached out quickly and yanked their hair. Philips's came off; Barney's didn't. Underneath Philips's toupee a bald head gleamed. "Give me that!" Philips demanded. Y handed back the hair piece. "Had to make sure," he said. He glanced at D O X's heavy head of dark hair and Yvonne's blonde hairdo. "I believe that in this matter we can all trust one another." "If they're all like this -- " D O X indicated the corpse -- "you can tell fairly quickly. This guy acted more like a sleepwalker than an alert crawler employee. Keep that in mind." They broke up. Y and Yvonne returned, by devious route, to the stomach cavity. In the outside passageway Y pulled her close and whispered: "Now remember -- don't blab if I capture this one. Your country's security is at stake and if I make a capture before D O X does -- " "I understand," she said. "Damned Ameradians! If they get the advantage of we West Americans -- " "Exactly!" he said, almost believing it. The truth was, of course, that he didn't want to be put down professionally. Yet there was, he eagerly accepted, great truth in what Yvonne had said. The contractions carried them onto the solid flooring. Y looked about, saw the chief stoker and called to him: "Where's the nutrition expert?" "Look out I" Yvonne said. Almost too late, Y saw the steel bar hurtling at him. He ducked, pushed Yvonne back into the passageway and dropped flat, yanking his gun out. Steel rang on the flooring and sparks leaped. Above him, on the catwalk overlooking the large vat that fed nutrient to the crawler's digestive apparatus, the slightly built man with the tight cap on the back of his head prepared to hurl another missile. "Stop!" Y called, but the walking corpse moved stiffly and  lifted a huge wrench. Y fired, knowing that otherwise the zombie would get the range with his second throw. He saw the bullet strike explosively, and the controlled body jerk as the slug tore its heart. Y got to his feet and started up the stairs to the catwalk. He could see the zombie sinking to the walk and he knew he would have to get there fast. He hoped he could make it in time. If what was under that cap got out -- Y didn't like to think about what might happen. He reached the head of the stairs, crouched and approached the dead man with his gun ready. The dead man did not stir. Y wouldn't have been surprised if he had. Then he saw it -- the small dark thing of many legs crawling from beneath the too-tight cap. He raised the gun put his sight on it; he tried not to think. It moved, raising a claw and what was undeniably a tool or weapon. The action, in a man, would have been both desperate and hostile. Y's trigger finger tightened. His gun roared and echoed. When the bits of pulp had finished settling, he saw what he had done and very cautiously moved to the railing and vomited off from the walkway. IV T here were no more bandaged heads that the chief stoker and his assistant knew about. "Except..." the chief stoker said, looking at Yvonne and speaking to Y and the newly arrived D O X and Philips, "possibly in the head where the entire crawler is controlled by the crawler captain and his first and second mates. The captain did sound kind of funny over the inter-segment phone, come to think of it. I can't say there's not Miffti in that compartment." "That's where we go, then," D O X said. "Whoa, D O X," Y said, "what's the plan? We can't just go busting in there if there's a Miffti in control. No telling what would happen." "There's just no telling, D O X said. "I was just looking out a window and I'd swear we've left the main track and are charging deeper into unreclaimed territory." "Think so?" Y asked. "I'm sure of it." The stomach stoker went out the passageway. In a little bit he was back. "You're right, D O X. We have changed course. There's nothing we can do about it, either, unless we can get at the head controls." "We must," Y said. "Come on!" r O utside the head compartment the two smugglers and two spies conferred briefly and then hit the door. Things had become suddenly more urgent for them as the crawler had left the flat and begun ascending SL hill. There was no certainty of what this portended other than something other than human hands in control. The door burst open onto a death scene. Three men -- the captain and his mates -- lay sprawled on the floor. One mate had a hole in the back of his head the size of a large coin; the other two men had been killed with a weapon that burned holes through them not much thicker than an average gauge of wire; both the captain's and first mate's face were riddled with' it; in addition, the captain's hands wereL riddled. It was easy to visualize the insect or insects trooping out of the second mate's skull when he took a bandage off; the first mate and the captain approaching, horrified, the first mate succumbing to the attacks of a tiny weapon and the captain vainly throwing his hands up. "God!" Philips said, and throwing up his hands pitched forward. Barney dropped a second later. D O X let out a quick hiss and slapped a hand to the back of Y's neck. Y ducked, saw the stain on D O X's hand, realized that the Ameradian had just saved his life. He saw D O X turn, stamping, kicking, slapping with his hands. In a moment Y was following his lead. It was hard, exhaustof cockroaches. Now and then something stung an arm or an ankle and without looking Y knew that the Miffti were scoring nonfatal shots. He hoped that they were nonfatal; that the flesh-destroying capacities of the minute weapons were as limited as it now appeared. Y stopped hitting and stomping. There were no more Miffti in sight, but something else was. On the screen connected to the crawler's eye he could see the alarming sight of an approaching cliff edge. The Miffti were driving the crawler up and over a precipice. The crawler had to be stopped. Y threw himself into the captain's seat and grabbed at levers that were supposed to control this thing. None responded. The connections with the crawler's brain had been severedi "Here, YI" D O X was down on his hands and knees, prying at the transparent partition that separated the cab from the pulsing crawlerbrain. It came loose with a pop, and a Miffti came loose from a hold on one of the cables. It fell with a plop, rolled and shot a stream of light into D O X's left eye. The master spy gave a groan, said, "Carry on, Y!" and slapped a big hand down with sickening effect. Y found himself standing over a dead Ameradian and an open brain-conduct. 'Too bad," Y said, "he was a good man. The best!" Then, turning swiftly to the outside passageway he called to the young stoker: "Come in here! See if you can stop this thing!" T he stoker complied. His hands flew frantically as he spliced wires leading to brain connections and repaired a cable that led to powerful batteries. "I think I can do it. I think -- " he said. "You'd better hurry!" Y said, holding his gun ready and watching the edge of the cliff coming closer and closer to them. Again he regretted his lack of expertise as a mechanic and electrician, bio or straight mechanical, Yet someone had to be on watch, he told himself. "There! Back of the furthest cable. Yvonne said near his ear. "Oh, stop it, stop it quick!" Y aimed his gun but held his fire. What a bullet would do in the brain conduct he did not know, but he was reasonably sure that it would not be wise to find out. Besides, West America -- Earth, he mentally corrected himself -- needed a prisoner. The thing came out. Its forelegs were raised and it dropped something the size of a sml pin that must have been its weapon. It came forward a few steps, its forelegs semaphoring in a way that was so human it should have been comical. Y hardly remembered afterward, but somehow he got Yvonne to stop screaming. Somehow he applied the palm of his hand to either cheek of her face in rapid succession in a manner that drew a disapproving glare from the stoker, then ordered her to get him a container suitable for a prisoner. Somehow he made her understand; somehow she went back into the abandoned passenger comIF partment and returned with a box. It had been a face powder box and Y hoped briefly that there was nothing in the face powder to cause distress to his prisoner. Then he remembered the dead and his own throbbing ankles and decided comfort did not matter. He put the box down in the conduct, pointed at it and waited. Now if the Miffti really were as intelligent as they seemed...  The Miffti got in the box. It bowed its head and clasped its tiny appendage over its head. In a creature of such dimunitive size it was ridiculous; yet not ridiculous at all where human feelings are concerned. A wasp or a spider may arouse our most murderous instincts, but only while we are convinced of our own great superiority. Let the wasp and the spider show intelligence and display fear for the awesome human creature and something strange happens: the human can no longer think of the wasp or spider as merely an insect. Y moved two fingers to the box lid and cautiously picked it up. Even more cautiously he put the lid on. Moving on sheer will power, he picked the box up and placed it gently beside the control panel. "I think I've got it," the stoker said. "Hit the button!" Y hit it, his heart all but stopped as he saw on the eye-screen that the crawler was poised right on the brink of a great precipice. The button depressed, the body they were in shuddered along its great length, Y slammed a hand over the Miffti's prison and held it closed even as he was thrown back several steps. They stopped. F or a number of seconds which stretched interminably no one moved or spoke. Finally Y found his voice and took command: "Streeter," he said to the stoker, "do you think you can get this started and pilot us back to the station?" Streeter frowned. "I think so," he said. Then he looked at Yvonne. "I'm sure I can, sir. But maybe not back to Cefus territory." He frowned as he looked at the box Y held. "Perhaps it would be best to make for the nearest settlement." "I agree," Y said. "And that is -- ?" "Detroit." "Detroit!" The Bondman was momentarily incredulous, "But that's -- " "Yes, sir. Ameradian. My father was an, uh, emigrant from there." Yvonne looked at the stoker with something close to horror. Then she looked at the corpses lying about and her blue eyes glazed with a different kind of horror. This -- this was more important. Y took stock of the situation. It looked, like it or not, as though there was going to have to be a united world. Pushing old prejudices aside, he slapped Streeter on the back.      IF  Feature At Nycon  # Our Man in Fandom gives us the on-fhe-scene report of the biggest the Labor Day weekend? T his year, as you probably know, the #th World Science Fiction Convention was held at New York's Statler-Hilton hotel at Seventh Avenue and #rd Street, right across the street from what used to be Penn Station and is now in the process of being transmogriffed into Madison Square Garden. The worldcon was under the joint chairmanship of Ted White and Dave Van Arnam and sponsored by New York's liveliest fan club, the Fanoclasts. It was called "Nycon #," by the way, because two other world sf conventions have been previously held in this city, Nycon I, the first of all Worldcons, back in #, and Nycon II (which was worldcon everl actually known as "the Newyorcon") in #. You may never have attended one of the science-fiction world's annual shindigs... if so, here's one fan's casual description of the things that happened and the people he met and what they had to say. The biggest Worldcon yeti For me, the convention began about # o'clock Friday evening, September #st. I left the offices of the ad agency where I work, met my wife and went straight to the convention hotel. We came into the convention hall during the dinner break when there was a lull in the program. We wandered around for a bit meeting old friends and making a few new  ones, perhaps. We spoke to Gray and Betty Morrow, and Jim and Judy Blish came over to say hello while we were exploring the hucksters' tables off the central rotunda. Robert Silverberg was to auction Harlan Ellison to the high bidder. A young girl from somewhere around the Columbus, Ohio area bought him for #. (This sum, I am told, went Fund, a worthy cause that tries to raise enough money each year to pay for a European fan's trip over here to the Worldcon -- or vice versa, in case the convention happens to be in Europe, as occasionally happens.) Anyway, after this lucky girl bought Ellison, Silverberg then turned around and prompdy auctioned her off. She went for # more than Harlan. I noticed Harlan escorting the young lady, Jan Trenholm, around during the entire convention. Nycon # was the most successful convention of all time, with the biggest attendance in science-fiction history -- # joined the con, and around # actually turned up in person. This was a fantastic figure. Attendance at the annual sf Worldcon generally runs to just under five hundred, so in actual attendance figures, this convention was three times the average size. In fact, it was half again bigger than the previous record-holder, the Chicago convention of # to which # came. By comparison with this year's Nycon, last year's convention in Cleveland only drew about # attendees. Fans and pros came from all over. I talked with a genial fan named Waldemar Kumming from West Germany (Munich, I believe), and people came from Canada, Sweden and Great Britain, as well as from all over the United States. Celebrities Aplenty After the dinner break, the program resumed its first day. (Actually, the convention had been open the day before, Thursday, August #st, at four p.m., but that was just to register any early arrivers. The program did not get started until eleventhirty Friday morning.) The first thing on after dinner was the second "Galaxy of Fashion" show, a modelling of futuristic famous sponsored by Galaxy magazine and directed by Dave Van Amam's sweet and hardworking wife, Cindy. I grabbed a seat in the section reserved for press, photographers and, I guess, stray celebrities. Harry Harrison was on my right, and we tried to out-ogle each other as Fritz Leiber, who emceed the show, would announce each new model and she would then sashay out in glamorous and skimpy garments. Enh science-fiction novelist John Brunner sat in front of me and we chatted during the lull between models. Flashbulbs and movie cameras were zapping and whirring all about us, and I understand that some of the fashions prethat day. In fact, I later caught a repeat of it on the Alan Burke show. After this, my wife' and I had dinner with Donald WoUheim of Ace Books and his wife and teen-aged daughter Betsy. Robert A.W. Lowndes who edits hardcovers for Avalon, paperbacks for Airmont, as well as a string of prozines, ate with us as did the popular sdence-fantasy novelist, Emil Petaja. Willy and Olga Ley were' at a nearby table. Since Emil Petaja was near me at my end of our table, we got to talking. I brought up the subject of his recent novels, such as The Star Mill, taken from Finnish mjrthology, and Lord of the Green Planety taken from the Irish legends. I suggested that when he has worked these sources dry, he turn to something equally exotic and virtually untouched, such as Russian mythology. We also discussed our late mutual friend, the great fantasy artist Hannes Bok who died in his New York studio in April #. After dinner, we weqt back to the convention hall and mingled with the swarms of people there. Michad Moorcock, author of the "Elric" stories and editor of England's only surviving science-fiction magazine. New Worlds, was there. So were Keith Laumer and' Leigh Brackett and Clifford D. Simak and John W. Campbell, Jr. Hal Clement came over to say hello -- we hadn't seen each other since the Lunacon some months before. The husksters' tables were covered with books and paperbacks, sf magazines, and all sorts of other goodies like rare comic books, movie stills 'and posters, big little books. Also a mint copy of H.P. Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others, for sale to the highest bidder, and a drawing by Frank Frazetta. Browsing among the comicbookiana I ran into Otto Binder, a real oldtimer in science fiction writing who used to collaborate with his late brother Earl Binder under the name "Eando Binder" -- Eando meaning "E and O." Otto and I met a year or two ago when we were on a radio program together. He used to write continuity for Captain Marvel, and for many years now, he's been writing Superman for the comics. In one of the rooms off the hucksters' hall, Bjo Trimble's International Science Fantasy Art Show was in full swing. The Art Show has become a fixture at Worldcons by now -- anybody can enter his work, fan or pro, and art of any kind is welcome, from pen and ink, watercolors or pastels to oil paintings, photographs, etc. There was a lot of Tolkien stuff in the show this year and a fascinating group of paintings based on Robert IB. Howard's stories by artist Jeff Jones. Coming out of the show, a charming young woman and gifted writer whom I haven't seen in many years came over to say hello -- Katherine MacLean. And back in the rotunda just outside the convention hall I spoke to Fred Pohl, who was just back from a speaking tour of the the Deep South. Later in the week, Fred appeared on the Alan Burke show to comment on the clothes of the future fromi the Fashion Show. Invaders from Dionetics Saturday morning I got in early to attend the annual muster of the Hyborian Legion, the fanclub devot to Robert E. Howard's Conan stories IF in particular and to sword  sorcery in general. # or # Legionnaires were there when I came in, including L. Sprague de Camp was in midspeech as I took my seat; he was telling about his work editing the new editions of the Conan books for Lancer's paperback set. Then Fritz Leiber got up and spoke briefly about his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. The sword  sorcery news, speeches and all were nice, but what really made the muster for me was when George Scithers -- the editor of Amra, the sword  sorcery fanzine -- got up and proposed that Your Man In Fandom be elected by unanimous acclaim to the honorary title of "Royal Necromancer of Aquilonia." Makes a man feel quietly proud. Also makes a man wonder what happened to  the Legion's last Royal Necromancer... Just before the muster broke up, a later-comer entered, pale and shaken, asking us if we knew that right outside the door some sort of World Dianetics congress was in full swing!?! "Like stepping into a weird and alien world, it was," he shuddered. We stepped out among the Dianetics people, and by Crom, he was right! A very alien world. We looked at them, and they looked at us. We Robert E. Howard fans thought they were a bunch of kooks, and they L. Ron Hubbard fans were doubtless entertaining the same opinion of us. son, Fritz Leiber, George Scithers and me up to his room for a drink. Over Sprague's scotch we talked about the brand-new Conan yams Sprague and I are now writing, then adjourned to the coffee shop for a late breakfast together. I really dug who has been one of my favorite adventure writers, for years, and having heard he would be there, I brought along copies of Darker Than You Think and Legion of Time for him to autograph for me. A MeeMhe-Pros Party That evening, Larry and Noreen Shaw threw a mammoth get-together party in their suite, and the drinks were on Lancer Books for whom Larry is editor. There was quite a crush of people. I saw Isaac and Gertrude Asimov but couldn't get close enough to them to say hello. Terry Carr was talking to Roger Zelazny, and my wife and I managed to squeeze into a comer by the window with Sprague and his charming blonde wife, Catherine. We sat near Dick and Pat Lupoff. Dick kept sneaking off somewhere and reappearing with bottles of chilled champagne which we shared. Dick's was just published by Lancer, so we toasted it. While Sprague and I took the opportunity to thrash out a few plot-problems on our new Conan yams, another old-time favorite writer of mine came squeezing through the crush -- George O. Smith. Spotting me, he grabbed my head and turned it to several different angles, exclaiming, "By golly, if you don't remind me of a young Fletcher Pratt!" With unusual presence of mind, I quipped, "In more ways than one. After the party, we ran into anGeorge -- you've met my new colother old favorite, Edmond Hamilton, laborator, L. Sprague de Camp?" By or rather, two old favorites, for his this time the room was positively wife, Leigh Brackett, was with him. blue with cigarette smoke. Judith We hadn't seen each other in ten Merril wove her way through the years, and it was great to talk tocrowd to join us and thrust her head gether again. I also got another huge breaths with gusto. "Mmm! and was surprised and pleased when Smell all that good fresh air polluhe told me that it was because of tioni" she said. I went into the other this column in Worlds of If that he room to get another glass, but the loghad decided to attend the convention jam of people was too much for me. this year. That made me feel good. Algis Budrys, who was wedged in In all, exactly # people told me at next to me, took the opportunity to one time or another during the consay he had given a good review in vention that they were here because his Galaxy column to King KulU a of my If column, new Lancer book I wrote in post... Well, I didn't think I could humous collaboration with Robert E. cover the whole four days of the NyHoward. con in one column, so I'll save the "I liked it," he said, then mused rest of the news for next time, when thouitfuUy, "which is kind of odd, we'll talk about the Costume Ball, because I dorCt much like the Conan the Hugo Awards, the banquet, the stories. I'm afraid I took up most of Guest of Honor's speech and the the review trying to articulate just plans for next year's world science why I thought it was a good fiction convention! j Next Month in IF j I A ThriUing New Science-Fiction Novel J I by Robert Silverberg I I Complete Novelette of Galactic Adventure J  by A. Bertram Chandler I I by John Brunner j ! And concluding -- I I by Larry Niven ! IF I didn't want to get here except in so far as I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. This isn't where I was, but it isn't anywhere, either. Anywhere is fuzzy gray; not an optical gray but a mental gray. The gray in the direction that you're not looking. For you insects, it's the gray behind your head. For me, it's the gray directly over my head. To each his own, as one of your songs says. Anywhere is an all-around term -- like anything. Just try and visualize an anything. It has no form; but it isn't formless, because formlessness is a specific characteristic, rather than a general one. You might say that anything is formless. Yes, you might. In fact, any characteristic that you can name is a specific one and is necessarily inapplicable to anything. Therefore, anything has no characteristics. Since nothing likewise has no characteristics, anything is the same thing as nothing... Dammit, I told you to just have one person talk to me. When all of you midgets start yeUing at once, all I get is a gabble. Oh, you think that what I've been saying is nonsense, eh? Well, shrimp, that nonsense took us hundreds of generations to develop. If you can't see it, it's your problem. You insects are the ones who are in danger, not me. If you want to survive, you'll have to master any-valued logic and mathematics and drop the infantile nonsense that you've concocted -- like that bunk about dialectics that so many of you think so much about. Damn, damn, damn I Sweden is the only one who's supposed to be talking. Everybody else get off the air. If you insects don't, stop trying to all talk at once. I'll knock out your communications for another twentyfour hours. G etting back to my "nonsense," may I point out that even your rudimentary physique has reached the point where you know that the universe curves back on itself. Left to yourselves, you would probably have discovered that all phenomena in your universe are circular. Extreme opposites are identities. Yes, Sweden, I guess I did mean physics instead of physique. English is very confusing with all those different symbols that sound alike. Yes, I am way off the track. I haven't communicated with any other individuals for almost a hundred generations. Also, I had to learn your languages from watching -- well, that's not quite the right word -- perceiving your television broadcasts. And before I could do that, I had to crack the scanning code that you use. Besides, it isn't easy to hang onto a train of thought when you keep interrupting me. I'll postpone the any-valued mathematics until I finish telling you why you are in danger. The only way An IF First Story In each issue of If we bring you a story by a brand-new writer, never before published. This month's is by Hank Davis, a #-year-old senior at the University of Kentucky. Math major, singer in the University's Men's Glee Club, member of the Young Americans for Freedom, Davis read A. E. Van Vogt's Sian while he was in the second grade, got hooked and has never succeeded in un-hooking himself. Davis defines his political status as "pragmatic anarchist" and lists as his twin heroes Dave Brubeck and Berry Goldwater. to get you insects to do anything is to scare you. As I was saying, I didn't intend to come here. Any old port in a storm, as you insects say, and there was a storm -- a rather large one from my viewpoint, since it involved the eradication of yours truly. So I took a dust -- or is that a powder? I don't think that you can understand my crime. Too alien to your basic cultural matrix. It was very trivial. Rather like walking on the grass or keeping a library book overdue. For such trivial offenses, jou have trivial penalties. Our system was much simpler. Every offense carried the death penalty. This was cruel, but not unnecessarily so. There is a constant quantity of cruelty in the universe, and if it is put off at one time, circumstances will dictate that it be applied later. For generations, we hadn't applied such cruel measures as compulsory birth control or elimination of the unfit young so that there would be IP room for the fit. We finally ran afoul of the law of conservation of cruelty and had to start stringing up the walkers-on-grass by their necks or be elbowed to death by each other. I speak figuratively. We have neither necks nor elbows. I recognized the necessity for this in general, but still didn't care for the idea of it being applied to me specifically, so I grabbed one of our ships and left. This fleeing from punishment was fully in line with our ethical system, incidentally. Since extreme opposites are identities, the small is equivalent to the very large. Hence, the destruction of an individual is equivalent to the destruction of the universe -- which is also the way that the individual's destruction appears from his viewpoint. Since the elimination of the universe is an obvious evil, every individual must survive at all cost. Not that this would have made any difference to the police who were out to get me, but, if I had been caught, there would have been no nonsense about "resisting arrest" -- which would have been rather silly anyway, since I could only be executed once. We could go anywhere in no time by means of our Anywhere Drive ships. I can't explain it to you until I've taught any-valued mathematics to you, but I can play word games so that you'll think you understand. By generating an Anywhere field, the illusory condition that the ship is at a specific somewhere in space is canceled, and the ship is anywhere -- or nowhere; or everjrwhere, it's the same thing -- in the universe. The universe curves back on itself, and its size is determined by the quantity of mass contained witliin it. We generate a -- call it a capsule of curved space, but that's a lousy description -- which fools the ship into thinking that the universe is no larger than the ship. Since the ship doesn't want to leave the universe -- can't leave the universe, it stays put. We can shove the capsule of curved space anywhere in the universe at an infinite velocity, since it doesn't have mass. When the capsule moves, the ship follows, and finite distances are covered in zero time. Right you are. I am talking nonsense, but it's as close to reality as I can get until I teach any-valued math to you, so shut up and learn. It's your funeral, not mine, as you insects like to say. T he trouble with my getaway was that anything I could do, the fuzz could also do. I could go anywhere in the universe, but so could they. My only chance was to lose myself. The universe is so big that all the stars in it could bum out before a random search found me. Unfortunately, the ship's navigation mechanism was rigged to prevent just such contingencies as lawbreakers' escaping. It automatically transmitted the destination of the ship to police headquarters before departure. With the cops closing in, it was sink or swim, as you insects like to say, so I disconnected the navigation mechanism and said ready or not, here I come, and went. Naturally I didn't know where I was when I arrived, but neither did John Law. Where I was turned out to be here. Wherever that is. So I settled down on Earth, as you insects later named it. Not Imowing where I was, I could never return home anyway. If you don't like my vocabulary, don't blame me. It's derived from your TV and radio programs. Blame them! And shut up so that I can finish! The earth was a lot hotter when I arrived than it is now, but I cooled it down in a hurry. We get our energy by absorbing heat from our surroundings, instead of oxidizing matter like you do. As long as I'm not damaged -- and it would take a lot to damage me -- I don't have to take in any solid matter. Your astronomers have noticed -- huh? Oh? What's the second law of thermodynamics? You're putting me on. That's just a condition that holds as long as entropy is increasing. As soon as you've digested any-valued mathematics, you'll be able to see how it's possible. As I was saying, you are aware that Venus is much hotter than the Earth. The reason for this is me. Or, rather, it isn't me. Venus doesn't have me to cool it off, like Earth does. Matter of fact, if I weren't here. Earth would heat up considerably, due to heat from the core which I absorb. I've overdone it a few times. Ice ages, you know. Yes, I've been here for a long time. I'm very long lived compared to you. I'm much bigger than you, also. I wasn't even aware of your existence until you started broadcasting. I'm sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, instead of the narrow strip that you can see or feel. Where am I hiding? I'm not hiding! You've known where I am for years. You've named me Antarctica. I thought that you would have guessed that by now. Since I absorb heat, I'm covered with ice, although absorption from the air is accidental. I get most of my heat from my planet's core. Yes, my planet. After all, I was here before any of you were. What's more, you wouldn't have been here if I hadn't cooled the planet down so fast. No, this isn't a hoax. Want me to drown out all your communications again? You asked for it. Anybody out there? Well, hello there again. It was rather silly of you to shoot those missiles at me. A fission reaction produces heat, mostly, so I just absorbed it. No, I'm not mad. You don't get mad at viruses, do you? Now be quiet and let me pick up where I left off. I've gotten in touch with you humans because you're going to have to leave. All of you. Yes, I mean leave Earth. Where do you think I meant? After I give you any-valued mathematics, you can build ships with Anywhere drives and find some other planet suitable for you. You'll have to have the drive because none of the other planets in the solar system besides this one are suitable for you; and soon this one won't be suitable for you. IF Well, you see, Tm pregnant. I think that's the right word. I don't know mticli about how you humans reproduce since you never have much about it on your broadcasts. Anyway, I'll have to reproduce soon. We reproduce by dividing in two at regular intervals. Each new individual has the memories of the old one, but never mind that. It's involuntary, but we have drugs which can prevent it. I took all that I had when I came, but they've worn off now. In about twenty years. I'll become very hungry for solid matter and I'll have to start absorbing material from the crust of the earth imtil I've doubled in size. The trouble is that the shift in weight will cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions everywhere on the earth. It may even, cause the axis to shift, and that would really be messy. I would leave in my ship, but that would be just as bad. I can't get to the ship -- or the Moon, as you call it -- and if it comes to me, the tidal effects could tear the Earth to pieces. Get the picture? Whether I stay or go, the planet gets wrecked. The only way out is for you to build ships with Anywhere drives and pull up stakes. Yes, I could tell you how to concoct the drug, but I'm too far along for that to help. I have been for about three hundred years. You're awfully quiet out there. You haven't fainted, have you? Are you recording this? Good. I'll give you the mathematics now. Sorry about r unnin g you off the planet, but you would have done it yourselves in a couple of centuries, since you obviously weren't going to limit your population. And, anyway, I was A Memorable Science-Fiction Novel by Clifford D. Simak (Author of Here Gather the Stars, City, etc.) by Ross Rocklynne by Damon Knight by Larry Nivan Plus storiM and features by H.L. Gold, Willy Ley, Algis Budiys and many more . -- oil in the April Galaxy, Get your copy todayl #L#WB#AT t... K 'i lilustrated by yy y J  !v V .'I?"'# IF  Serial He was as good as invisible -- which was useful, considering how many people wanted his life! M ount Lookitthat the planet is a Venus-sized world circling Tau Ceti, Its only habitable area is a not particularly flat Plateau half the size of California, set on top of Mount Lookitthat the mountain, forty miles above the heUish heat and pressure at the planefs true surface. For three hundred years the colony on Mount Lookitthat has been a two-class system, dominated by the crew, with the colonists underneath. The heart of the colony is the Hospital, an amorphous structure which incorporates the two slowboats that once carried men to the planet.  Li t One function of the Hospital is Implementation, the army and police of nearly two hundred years old and pure crew. Another function of the Hospital is the organ banks. Colonists accused of crimes go into the organ banks, which are used to cure the sick. Mainly they benefit the crew. Most medicine on Mount Lookitthat involves the organ banks. So things stand when Ramrobot ## leaves Earth... and when it arrives, twelve years later. The ramrobots come only when Earths latest discovery is such that it cannot be sent as information in a laser beam. This holds in particular for items of biological engineering, of which Mount Lookitthat has many: indoor grass, housecleaners, architectural coral, altered citrus groves, and so forth. rebel organization, correctly suspect that Ramrobot ## is something tance. Their attempt to capture it is plans to show them at the rebel meeting the next night. Cover for the meeting is a party at the house of Through a chance meeting with of mining worms, unrelated to the rebels, but he also has a special form of luck such that people generally ignore him when he wants them He believes his uncle went to the organ banks for treason. He shortly realizes that the party must be a cover for the Sons of Earth, with people like himself invited for camouflage. It doesn't bother him. But his later pass at and this, for obscure reasons, plunges him into a black depression. He begins drinking. Drunk and feeling sorry for himwomen forget him completely. In kindness she seduces him. They are in a dark bedroom when Imeplementation raids the house. The rebel group is broken. Most of the Sons of Earth are removed lucky as usual. In the morning he returns to the wrecked house. Searching for food and clothing, he finds a car buried in the basement. His fiddling around blows the roof off, leaving clear sky above the car. Two cliffs, with guarded bridges, pital. He'd never make it without a car. He considers the car an omen. But he has never flown a car. Determined to make the best try he can to rescue Laney and the others, he tries it anyway. Results are predictably spectacular; but he doesn't fall. After an unavoidable detour into the mist below the Plateau's void edge, MA TT winds up on Alpha Plateau... the crew plateau, the site of the Hospital. Hours later, after nightfatt, he tries to get in. The wall guard spots him almost instantly. But when he surrenders, stands up in a blaze of spotUghts with his hands in the air, he is ignored and forgotten. Totally confused, he walks away. Still confused, on the safe side of a hUl, he tries to think it out. He might as well try again, because he cant leave; hes lost the car, and there are the two guarded bridges. His de cisions if darkness doesnt hide him, but splotlights do, then he should be safe walking up the middle of a lighted road. It works, up to the point where he has to pound on the gate with a rock to get in. The gate guard taKts him in at gunpoint. Once inside the HospitaVs huge tnain doors, the gate guard tells him how wrong he's been. They are gowill be put to sleep with the other Sons of Earth, He will not wake. When the time comes, he will be taken apart for the organ banks, still asleep, ready to shoot. Then he goes mad. He runs off crying, Mist Demons! Vm supposed to be on the gate!" XI A t one-thirty another officer came to relieve Polly's guard. The newcomer's uniform was not as well pressed, but he himself seemed in better condition. His muscles were gymnasium muscles, and he was casually alert at one-thirty in the morning. He waited until the longheaded man had gone, then moved to inspect the dials along the edge of Polls coffin. He was more thorough than the other. He moved methodically down the line in no hurry, jotting the settings in a notebook. Then he opened two big clamps at two corners of the coffin and swung the lid back, careful not to jar it. The figure within did not move. She was wrapped like a mummy, a mummy with a snout, in soft, swaddling cloth. The snout was a bulge over her mouth and nose, the mouth pads and the arrangements for breathing. There were similar protrusions over her ears. Her arms were crossed at her waist, straight-jacket fashion. The Implementation officer looked down at her for long moments. When he turned, he showed his first signs of furtiveness. But he was alone, and no footsteps sounded in the haU. From the head end of the coffin protruded a padded tube with a cap even more heavily padded in sponge rubber. The officer opened the cap and spoke softly. "Don't be afraid. I'm a friend. I'm going to put you to sleep." He peeled the soft bandage from Polly's arm, drew his gun and fired at the skin. Half a dozen red beads formed there, but the girl did not move. He could not have been sure that she heard him, or that she felt the needles. He closed the lid and the cap of the speaking tube. He was perspiring freely as he watched the dials change. Presently he produced a screwdriver and went to work at the backs of the dials. When he finished, all eight dials read as they had read when he came in. They lied. They said that Polly Tournquist was awake but motionless, conscious but deprived of any sensory stimulus. They said she was going mad by increments. Whereas Polly Tournquist was asleep. She would be asleep for the eiglit hours of Loren's tour of duty. Loren wiped his face and sat down. He did not enjoy taking such risks, but it was necessary. The girl must know something; else she wouldn't be here. Now she could hold out for eight hours longer. T he man they wheeled into the organ bank operating room was unconscious. He was the same man Jesus Pietro's squad had found resting on the dead man switch, one of those he had questioned that afternoon. Jesus Pietro was through with him; he had been tried and condemned, but in law he was still alive. It was a legal point, nothing more. The operating room was big and busy. Against one long wall were twenty small suspended-animation tanks mounted on wheels, for moving medical supplies to and from the room next door. Doctors and internes worked quietly and skillfully at a multitude of operating tables. There were cold baths: open tanks of fluid kept at a constant # Fahrenheit. Beside the door was a twenty-gallon tank half full of a straw-colored fluid. Two internes wheeled the convict i into the operating room, and one immediately injected a full pint of the straw-colored fluid into his arm. They moved the table next to One of the cold baths. A woman moved over to help, carefully fastened a breathing mask over the man's face. The internes tilted the table. The convict slid into the bath without a splash. "That's the last," said one. "Oh, boy. I'm beat." The woman looked at him with concern, a concern which might have showed in her mouth behind the mask but which could not show in her eyes. Eyes have no expression. The interne's voice had shown almost total exhaustion. 'Take off, the both of you," she said. "Sleep late tomorrow. We won't need you," When they finished with this convict, the organ banks would be full. In law he was . still alive. But his body temperature fell fast, and his heartbeat was slowing. Eventually it stopped. The patient's temperature continued to fall. In two hours it was well below freezing, yet the strawcolored fluid in his veins kept any part of him from freezing. In law he was still alive. Prisoners had been reprieved at this point and revived without medical ill effects, though they walked in terror for the rest of their days. Now they lifted the convict onto an operating table. His skull was opened; an incision was made in bis neck, cutting the spinal cord just below the brain stem. The brain was lifted out, carefully, for the membranes surrounding it must not be damaged. Though the doctors might IF deny it, there was a kind of levaence attached to the human brain, and to this moment At this moment the convict became legally dead In a New YoA hoqdtal a caidiectomy would have b performed first, and the prisoner would have been dead when it was over. On We Made It he would have been dead the moment his body temperature reached # F. It was a legal point You had to draw the line somewhere. They flash-burned his brain and saved the ashes for um burial. His skin came next, removed in one piece, stUl living. Machines did most of the work, but the machines of the Plateau were not advanced enough to work without human control. The doctors proceeded as if they were disassembling a delicate, very valuable, vastly complex jigsaw pue. Each unit went into a suspended-animation tank. Someone then took a tiny sample with a hypodermic and tested it for a wide variety of rejection reactions. A transplant operation was never cut-and-dried. A patient's body would reject foreign parts unless each rejection was balanced by complex biochemicals. When the tests were over each unit was labeled in full detail and wheeled next door, into the organ banks. M att was lost. He wandered through the halls looking for a door labeled "Vivarium." Some of the doors he passed had labels; some did not. The Hospital was huge. Chances were he could wander for days without finding the vivarium the gateman had mentioned. Solitary individuals passed him in the corridors, in police uniforms or in white gowns and white masks pulled down around their necks. If he saw someone coming Matt shrank against the wall and remained perfectly stUl until the intruder passed. Nobody noticed him. His strange invisibility protected him well. But he wasn't getting anywhere. A map, that's what he needed. Some of these doors must lead to offices. Some or all offices must have maps in them, perhaps built into wall or desk. After all, the place was so complicated... Matt nodded to himself. Here was a door now, with a strange symbol and some letterHe opened the door. And froze halfway through it. Glass tanks filled the room like floor-to-ceiling aquarium tanks, each subdivided into compartments. They were arranged like a labyrinth, or like the bookcases in a public library. In the first moments Matt couldn't recognize anything he saw in those tanks; but in their asymmetrical shapes and in their infinite dark shades of red, their nature was unmistakable. He stepped all the way inside. He had abandoned control of his legs, and they moved of themselves. These flattish dark red objects, those translucent membranes, the soft looking blobs of alien shapes, the great transparent cylindrical tanks filled with bright red fluid... Yes, these had been human beings. And there were epitaphs: Type AB, RhH-. Glucose content... Rd Corp count Thyroid gland, male. Rejecticm classes C, #, pn, #. Over-active for body weight less than .   lift humerus, live. Marrow type O, Rh-, N, #. Length... IMbefore using. Matt closed his eyes and rested his head against one of the tanks. The glass surface was cold. It felt good against his perspiring forehead. He bad always had too much empathy. Now there was a grief in him, and he needed time to mourn these strangers. Mist Demons grant they were strangers. Pancreas. Rejection classes F, #, pr, Use for pancreatic fluid secretion A door opened. M att slid behind the tank and watched from around the corner. The woman wore gown and mask, and she pushed something on wheels. Matt watched her transfer things from the cart into various of the larger tanks. Somebody had just died. And the woman in the mask was a monster. If she'd taken off her mask to reveal foot-long poison-dripping fangs, Matt couldn't have feared her more. Voices came through the door. "We can't use any more muscle tissue." A woman's voice, high and querulous, with a crew lilt. The hit didn't quite ring true, though Matt couldn't have said where it failed. A sarcastic man's voice answered. "What shall we do, throw it away?" "Why not?" Seconds of silence. The woman with the cart finished her work and moved toward the door. Then: 'Tve never liked the idea. A man died to give us healthy, hving tissue, and you want to throw it away like -- " The closing door cut him off rather abruptly. Like the remnants of a ghouTs feast, Matt finished for him. He was turning toward the hall door when his eye caught something else. Four of the tanks were different from the others. They sat near the hall door, on flooring whose scars showed where there had once been suspended-animation tanks; these did not have heavy, machinery-filled bases. Instead, machinery rested in the tanks themselves, behind the transparent walls. It might have been aerating machinery. The nearest tank contained six small human hearts. Unmistakably they were hearts. They beat. But they were tiny, no bigger than a child's fist. Matt touched the surface of the tank, and it was blood warm. The tank next to it held three-lobed objects which had to be livers; but they were small, small. That did it. In wjiat seemed one leap. Matt was out in the hall. He leaned against the wall, gasping, his shoulders heaving, his eyes unable to see anything but those clusters of small hearts and livers. Someone rounded the corner and came to an abrupt stop. Matt turned and saw him, a big soft man in an Implementation police uniform. Matt tried his voice. It came out blurred but comprehensible: "Where's the vivarium?" IP The man stared, then pointed, ake a right and you'll find a flight of stairs. Up one flight, take a right, then a left, and watch for the sign. It's a big door with an alarm light, you can't miss it." Thanks." Matt turned toward the stairs. His stomach hurt, and there was a shivering in his hands. He'd have liked to drop where he was, but he had to keep going. Something stung his  arm. Matt turned and raised his arm in the same instant. Already the sting was gone; his arm was as numb as a haunch of meat. Half a dozen tiny red drops bedewed his wrist. The big, soft man regarded Matt with a puzzled frown. His gun was in his hand. The galaxy spun madly, receding. C orporal Halley Fox watched the colonist fall, then bolstered his gun. What was the world coming to? First the ridiculous secrecy about the ramrobot. Then, two hundred prisoners swept up in one night, and the whole Hospital going crazy trying to cope. And now! A colonist wandering the Hospital corridors, actually asking for the Vivarium! Well, he'd get it. Halley Fox lifted the man and slung him over his shoulder, grunting with the effort. Only his face was soft. Report it and forget it. He shifted his burden and staggered toward the stairs. A t dawn the graded peak of Mount Lookitthat swam beneath a sea of fog. For those few who were already aboard, the sky merely turned from black to gray. This was not the poison mist below the void edge, bnt a continuous cloud of water vapor thick enough to let a blind man win a shooting match. Crew and colonists, one and all, as they stepped outside their homes their homes vanished behind them. They walked and worked in a universe ten yards in diameter. At seven o'clock Implementation police moved into the trapped forest, a squad at each end. Yellow fog lights swept the tongue of forest from the nearest sections of wall. The light barely reached the trees. Since the men who had been on watch that night had gone home, the searchers had no idea what animal they were searching for. Some thought it must be colonists. At nine they met in the middle, shrugged at each other and left. Nothing human or animal lived in the trapped woods, nothing bigger than a big insect. Four aircars nevertheless rose into the fog and sprayed the wood from end to end. At nine-thirty... Jesus Pietro cut the grapefruit in half and held one half upside down. The grapefruit meat dropped in sections into his bowl. He asked, "Did they ever find that rabbit?" Major Jansen stopped with his first sip of coffee halfway to his lips. "No, sir, but they did find a prisoner." "In the woods?" "No, sir. He was pounding on the gate with a rock. The gateman took him inside the Hospital, but from there it becomes a little unclear --  "Jansen, it's already nuclear. What lor was this man doing pounding on the gate?' A horrible thought struck him. "Was he a crew?" "No, sir. He was Matthrew Keller. Positive identification." Grapefruit juice spilled on the breakfast rack. "Keller?" 'The same." "Then who was in the car?" "I doubt we'll ever know sir. Shall I ask for volunteers to examine the body?" Jesus Pietro lauded long and loud. Jansen was pure colonist, though he and his ancestors had be in service so long that their accents and manners were almost pure crew. It would never do for him to joke with his superiors in public. But in private he could be amusing ... and he had the sense to know the difference. "I've been trying to think of a way to shake up Implementation," said Jesus Pietro. "That might do it. Well. Keller came up to the gate and began pounding on it with a rock?" "Yes, sir. The gateman took him in charge after calling Watts. Watts waited half an hour before he called the gatehouse again. The gateman couldn't remember what happened after he and the prisoner reached the Hopsital. He was back on duty, and he couldn't explain that either. He should have reported to Watts, of course. Watts put him under arrest." "Watts shouldn't have waited half an hour. Where was Keller all this time?" "A Corporal Fox found him outside the door to the organ banks, shot him and carted him off to the vivarium." "Then he and the gateman are both waiting for us. Good. I'll never sleep again until I get this straightened out" Jesus Pietro finished his breakfast in a remarkable hurry. Then it occurred to him that the mystery was deeper than that How had Keller reached Alpha Plateau at all? The guards wouldn't have let him past the bridge. By car? But the only car involved -- H obart was scared. He was as frightened as any suspect Jesus Pietro had seen, and he took no interest in hiding it. "I don't know! I took him through the door, the big door. I made him walk ahead so he couldn't jump me -- " "And did he?" "I can't remember anything like that." "A bump on the head might have given you amnesia. Sit still. Jesus Pietro walked around the chair to examine Hobart's scalp. His impersonal gentleness was frightening in itself. "No bumps, no bruises. Does your head hurt?" "I feel fine." "Now, you walked in the door. Were you talking to him?" The man bobbed his graying head. "Uh-huh. I wanted to know what he was doing banging on the gate. He wouldn't say." "And then?" "All of a sudden I -- " Hobart stopped, swallowed convulsively. Jesus Pietro put an edge in his voice. "Go on." Hobart started to cry. "Stop that. You started to say something. What was it?" IF "All of a sudden I -- gulp -- remembered I was s'posed fbe at the gate" "But what about Keller?" "Who?" "What about your prisoner?" "I can't rememberl" "Oh, get out of here." Jesus Pietro thumb a button. 'Take him back to the vivarium. Get me Keller." U p a flight of stairs, take a right, then a left -- Behind the big door were rows of contour couches, skimpily padded. All but two couches had occupants. There were ninety-eight prisoners here, of all ages from fifteen to fiftyeight, and all were asleep. Each was wearing a headset. They slept quietly, more than the usual sleeper, breathing shallowly, their peaceful expressions untroubled by bad dreams. It was a strangely restful place. They slept in rows of ten, some snoring gently, the rest silent. Even the guard looked sleepy. He sat in a more conventional chair to one side of the door, with his double chin drooping on his chest, with his arms folded in his lap. More than four centuries ago, at some time near the middle of the nineteen hundreds, a group of Russian scientists came up with a gadget that might have made sleep obsolete. In some places, it did. By the twentyfourth century it was a rare comer of the known universe that did not know of the sleepmaker. Take three electrodes, light electrodes. Now pick a guinea pig, human, and get him to lie down with his eyes closed. Put two electrodes on his eyelids and tape the third to the nape of his neck. Run a gentle, rhythmic electric current from eyelids to nape, through the brain. Your guinea pig will drop off immediately. Turn the current off in a couple of hours, and he will have had the equivalent of eight-hours sleep. You'd rather not furn off the current? Fine. It won't hurt him. He'll just go on sleeping. He'll sleep through a hurricane. You'll have to wake him occasionally to eat, drink, evacuate, exercise. If you don't plan to keep him long you can skip the exercise. Suspects weren't kept long in the vivarium. Heavy footsteps sounded outside the door. The vivarium guard jerked alert. When the door opened he was at attention. "Sit down there," said one of Hobart's escorts. Hobart sat. Tears had streaked his sunken cheeks. He donned his own headset, dropped his head back and was asleep. Peace spread across his face. The bigger guard asked, "Which one is Keller?" The vivarium guard consulted a chart. "Ninety-eight." "Okay." Instead of taking off Keller's headset, the man moved to a panel of one hundred buttons. He pushed ##. As Keller began to stir, they both moved in to attach handcuffs. Then they lifted the headset. Matt Keller's eyes opened. His new escorts lifted him to his feet with a practiced motion. "On our way," one said cheerfully. Bewildered, Matt followed the pull on his arms. In a moment they were in the hall. Matt snatched one look behind him before the door closed. "Wait a minute," he protested, predictably jerking back against the handcuffs. "Man wants to ask you a few questions. Look, I'd rather carry you than do this...You want to walk?" The threat msually quieted them down -- as it did now. Matt stopped pulling. He'd expected to wake up dead; these moments of consciousness were a free bonus. Someone must have gotten curious. "Who wants to see me?" "A gentleman named Castro," the bigger guard tossed off. The didogue was following its usual pattern. If Keller was an average suspect, the Head's dread name would paralyze his brain. If he kept his wits, he'd still choose to use this time in preparation for his interview, rather than risk a sonic now. Both guards had been doing this for so long that they'd come to see prisoners as faceless, interchangeable. Castro. The name echoed between Matt's ears. What did you think you were doing, Keller? You came in here like you had an engraved invitation. Thought you had a secret weapon, did you Keller? What did you think One instant the suspect was walking between them, lost in his own fears. The next, he had jerked back like a fish hooked on two lines. The guards instantly pulled apart to string him between them, then regarded him in sheer disgust. One said, "Stupid!" The other pulled out his gun. They stood there, one with a sonic loose in his han looking about them in apparent bewilderment. Matt jerked again, and the smaller guard looked in shocked surprise at his own wrist. He fumbled in his jlt, got out a key and unlocked the handcuff. M att threw all his weight on the other steel chain. The bigger guard yelled in anger and pulled back. Matt flew into him, inadvertently butting him in the stomach. The guard hit him across the jaw with a backhand swing of his arm. Momentarily unable to move, Matt watched the guard take a key from his pocket and unlock the remaining handcuff from his own wrist. The guard's eyes were strange. Matt backed away with two sets of handcuffs dangling from his arms. The guards looked after him, not at him but in his general direction. Something was very wrong with their eyes. Fruitlessly Matt tried to remember where he'd seen that look before. The gateman, last night? The guards turned and sauntered away. Matt shook his head, more baffled than relieved, and turned back the way he had come. There was the vivarium door. He'd had only one backward glimpse, but he was sure he'd seen Harry Kane in there. The door was locked. Mist Demons, here we go again. Matt raised his hand, changed his IP mind, changed it again and slapped the palm three times against the door. It opened at once. A round, expressionless face looked through and suddenly acquired an expression. The door started to close. Matt pulled it open and went in. The round guard with the round face genuinely didn't know what to do. At least he hadn't forgotten that Matt was here. Matt was grateful. He swung joyfully at the guard's double chin. When the guard didn't fold. Matt hit him again. The man finally reached for his gun, and Matt took a firm grip on the appropriate wrist, holding the gun in its holster, and swung once more. The guard slid to the floor. Matt took the guard's sonic and put it in his pants pocket. His hand hurt. He rubbed it against his cheek, which also hurt, and ran his eyes down the row of sleepers. There was Laney! Laney, her face pale, with one thin scratch from temple to chin, her auburn hair concealing the threepronged headset, her deep breasts hardly moving as she slept. And there was Hood, looking like a sleeping child... Something began to unwind inside Matt Keller, a warmth uncoiling to spread through his limbs. For hours he had been all alone with death. There was the tall man who'd spelled him for bartender that night. Night before last! There was Harry Kane, a cube of a man, strong even in sleep... Polly wasn't there. He looked again, carefully, and she still wasn't there. Where was she? Instantly the aquarium tanks of the organ bank flashed into his mind's eye. One t ank had held skins, whole human skins with barely room between them for the clear conducting nutrient fluid. The scalps had borne hair short and long, blond and black and red, hair that waved in a cold fluid breeze. Rejection classes C, #, nr, #, He couldn't remember seeing the space-blackness of Polly's hair. It might or might not have been waving in the aquarium tank. He hadn't been looking for it. Convulsively he made himself look about him. That bank of buttons? He pushed one. It popped out at the touch of a finger. Nothing else happened. Oh, well, what the hell... He started pushing them all, letting his forefinger run . down a row of ten, down the next row, and the next. He had released sixty when he heard motion. The sleepers were waking. H e released the rest of the buttons. The murmur of awakening grew louder. Stretching, yawning, confused voices, clatterings, gasps of dismayed shock when prisoners suddenly realized where they were. A clear voice calling, "Matt? Matt!" "Here, Laney!" She wove her way toward him through people climbing groggily out of their contour couches. Then she was in his arms, and they clung to each other as if a tornado were trying to pluck them apart and whirl them away. Matt felt suddenly weak, as if he could afford weakness now. "So you didn't make it," he said. "Matt, where are we? I tried to get to the void edge -- " Somebody bellowed, "We are in the Hospital vivariuml" The voice cut like an axe through the rising pandemonium. Harry Kane, Leader, assumed his proper role. "That's right," Matt said gently. Her eyes were two inches from his, dead level. "Oi. Then you didn't make it either." "Yes I did. I had to get here on my own." "What -- HowT "Good question. I don't know exactly." Iney began to chuckle. Shouting from the back of the room. Somebody had noticed an Implementation uiorm on one of the newly awakened. A scream of pure terror changed to a yell of agony and died abruptly. Matt saw jerking heads, heard sounds he tried to ignore. Laney wasn't laughing any more. The disturbance subsided. Harry Kane had mounted a chair. He cupped his hands and bellowed, "Shut up, all of you! Everyone who knows the map of the Hospital, get over here! Gather round me!" There was a shifting in the mass. Laney and Matt still clung to each other, but not desperately now. Their heads turned to watch Harry, acknowledging his leadership. Take a look, the rest of you!" Harry shouted. "There are the people who can lead you out of here. In a minute we're going to have to make our break. Keep your eyes on -- " He named eight names. Hood's was one. "Some of us are going to get shot. As long as one of these eight is still moving, follow him! Or her. If all eight are down, and I am too -- " He paused for emphasis. "Scatter! Make as much trouble as you can! Sometimes the only sensible thing to do is panic! "Now, who got us out of this? Who woke us up? Anyone?" "Me," said Matt. A last buzz of noise died. Suddenly everyone was looking at him. Harry said, "How?" "I'm not sure how I got in here. I'd like to talk to Hood about it." "Okay, stick with Jay. Keller, isn't it? We're grateful, Keller. What do those buttons do? I saw you fooling with them." "They turn off whatever it is that makes you go to sleep." "Is anyone still in his couch? If so, get out of it now. Now, somebody push those buttons back in so it'll look like there was a power failure. Was that it, Keller? Did you just accidentally wake up?" "No." Harry Kane looked puzzled, but when Matt didn't elaborate he shrugged. "Watson, Chek, start pushing those buttons in. Jay, make sure you stick with Keller. The rest of you, are you ready to move?" TTiere was a shout of assent. As it died, a lone voice asked, "Where to?" "Good point. If you get free, make for the coral houses around the south void and Alpha-Beta cliffs. Anything else?" Nobody spoke, including Matt. Why ask questions to which nobody knew the answers? Matt was unutterably relieved to let someone else make the decisions for awhile. They might be just as wrong, but ninety-eight rebels could be a mighty IP force, even moving in the wrong direction. And Harry Kane was a bom leader. Laney moved out of his arms, but kept a grip on one hand. Matt became conscious of the handcuffs dangling from his wrists. They might hamper him. Jay Hood moved up beside him, looking rumpled. He shook hands, grinning, but the grin didn't match the fear in his eyes, and he seemed reluctant to let go. Was there one person in this room who wasn't terrified? If there was, it wasn't Matt. He pulled the sonic loose from his pants pocket. "All out," said Harry Kane, and butted the door open with a wide shoulder. They streamed into the hall. #CT'll take only a minute of your A time, Watts." Jesus Pietro relaxed indolently in his chair. He loved mysteries and proposed to enjoy this one. "I want you to describe in detail what happened last night, starting with the call from Hobart." "But there arent any details, sir." Master Sergeant Watts was tired of repeating himself. His voice was turning querelous. "Five minutes after your call, Hobart called and said he had a prisoner. I told him to bring him to my office. He never came. Finally I called the gate. He was there, all right, withow his prisoner, and he couldn't explain what had happened. I had to put him under arrest." "His behavior has been puzzling in other ways. That is why I ask, why didn't you call the gate earlier?" "Sir?" "Your behavior is as puzzling as Hobart's, Watts. Why did you assume it would take Hobart half aa hour to reach your office?" "Oh." Watts fidgeted. "Well, Hobart said this bird came right up to the gate and started banging on it with a rock. When Hobart didn't show right away I thought he must have stopped off to question the prisoner, find out why he did it. After all," he explained hastily, if he brought the bird straight to me he'd likely never find out what he was doing banging on the gate." "Very logical. Did it occur to you at any point that the 'bird' might have overpowered Hobart?" "But Hobart had a sonic!" "Watts, have, you ever been on a raid?" "No, sir. How could I?" "A man came back from the raid of night before last with the bones of his nose spread all over his face. He, too, had a sonic." "Yessir, but that was a raid, sir." Jesus Pietro sighed. "Thank you. Master Sergeant. Will you step outside, please? Your bird should be arriving any minute." Watts left, his relief showing. He'd made a good point, thought Jesus Pietro, though not the one he'd intended. Probably all the Hospital guards had the same idea: that a gun was, ipso facto, invincible. Why not? The Hospital guards had never been on a raid in the colonist regions. Few had ever seen a colonist who wasn't unconscious. Occasionally Jesus Pietro staged mock raids with guards playing the part of colonists. They di't mind, particularly; mercy-weapons were not unpleasant But the men with the guns always won. All the guards experience told them that the gun was king, that a man who had a gun need fear nothing but a gun. W hat to do? Interchange guards and raiders long enough to give the guards some experience? No, the elite raiders would never stand for that. Why was he worrying about Implementation? Had the Hospital ever been attacked? Never, on Alpha Plateau. A colonist force had no way to get here. But Keller had. He used the phone. Jansen, find out who was on guard at the AlphaBeta bridge last night Wake them up and send them here. "It will be at least fifteen minutes, sir." "Fine." How had Keller gotten past them? There had been one aircar on Gamma Plateau, but it had been destroyed here. With the pilot still in it? Had Keller had a chauffeur? Or .  . would a colonist know how to use the autopilot? Where the Mist Demons was,Keller? Jesus Pietro began to pace the room. He had no cause for worry, yet he worried. Instinct? He didn't believe he had instincts. The phone spoke in his secretary's voice. "Sir, did you order two guards?" "Bridge guards?" "No. Some intrahospital guards." "No." "Thank you." Click. Something had set off the grounds alarms last night. Not a rabbit. Keller might have tried the wall first If the grounds guards had let a prisoner escape, then faked a report -- he'd have tiieir hides! "Sir, these guards insist you sent for them." "Well, I damn well didn't. Tell them -- just a minute. Send them in. They came, two burly men whose submissive countenances unsuccessfully hid their ire at being made to wait. "When did I send for you?" asked Jesus Pietro. The big one said, "Twenty minutes ago," daring Jesus Pietro to call him a liar. "Were you supposed to pick up a prisoner first?" "No, sir. We took Hobart to the vivarium, put him to beddybye and came straight back." "You don't remember being -- " The smaller guard went white. "D-dave! We were supposed to p-pick up someone. Keeler. Something Keeler." Jesus Pietro regarded them for a full twenty seconds. His face was curiously immobile. Then he opened the intercom. "Major Jansen. Sound 'Prisoners Loose.'" VV The tail end of the colonist swarm was leaving them behind. Hood brought himself up short. "What are you doing?" IF Matt dodged back into the vivarium. One man lay on his face with his headset on. Probably he'd thought he was safe once he was out of the couch. Matt snatched the headset off and slapped him twice, hard, and when his eyelids fluttered Matt pulled him to his feet and pushed him at the door. Watson and Chek finished pushing buttons and left, running, shoving around Hood. "Come on!" Hood yelled from the doorway. Panic was in his voice. But Matt stood rooted by the thing on the floor. The guard. They'd torn him to pieces! Matt was back in the organ banks, frozen rigid by horror. "Keller!" Matt stooped, picked iip something soft and wet. His expression was very strange. He stepped to the door, hesitated a moment, then drew two sweeping arcs and three small closed curves on its gleaming metal surface. He hurled the warm thing backhand, turned and ran. The two men and Laney charged down the haU, trying to catch the swarm. T he swarm poured down the stairs like a waterfall: a closepacked mass, running and stumbling against each other and brushing against walls and bannisters and generally making a hell of a lot of noise. Harry Kane led. A cold certainty was in his heart, the knowledge that he would be first to fall when they met the first armed guard. But by then the swarm should have unstoppable momentum. The first armed guard was several yards beyond the first corner. He turned and stared as if his eyes beheld a miracle. He hadn't moved when the mob reached him. Someone actually had the sense to take his gun. A tall blond man got it and immediately forced his way to the front, waving it and yelling for room. The swarm flowed around and over the limp Implementation policeman. This hallway was long, lined with doors on both sides. Every door seemed to be swinging open at once. The man with the gun closed his fist on the trigger and waved it slowly up and down the hall. Heads peered out the doors, paused and were followed by falling bodies. The colonist swarm slowed to pick their way around the crewish and half-crewish fallen. Nonetheless, the fallen were all badly or mortally injured when the swarm passed. Implementation used mercy weapons because they needed their prisoners intact. The swarm had no such motive for mercy. The swarm was stretching now, dividing the fast from the slow, as Kane reached the end of the hall. He rounded the turn in a clump of six... Two police were parked indolently against opposite walls, steaming cups in their hands, their heads turned to see where the noise was coming from. For a magic moment they stayed that way... and then their cups flew wide, trailing spiral nebulae of brown fluid, and their guns came up like flowing light. Harry Kane fell with a buzzing in his ears. But his last glimpse of the corridor showed him that the police were falling too. He lay like a broken doll, widi his head swimming and his eyes blurring and his body as numb as a frozen plucked chicken. Feet pounded past and over him. Through the blanketing numbness he dimly sensed himself being kicked. Abruptly four hands gripped his wrists and ankles, and he was o again, swaying and jouncing between his rescuers. Harry Kane was pleased. His opinion of mobs was low. This mob was behaving better than he had expected. Through the buzzing in his ears he heard a siren. A t the bottom of the stairs they reached the tail of the swarm: Laney in the lead. Matt and Jay Hood following. Matt panted, "Stay! Got... gun." Laney saw the point and slowed. Matt could guard the rear. If they tried to reach the front of the swarm they'd be stuck in the middle, ' and the sonic would be useless. But nobody came to them from the rear. There were noises ahead, and they passed sprawled bodies: one policeman, then a string of men and women in lab smocks. Matt found his stomach trying to turn inside out. The rebels' visciousness was appalling. So was Hood's grin: a tight killer's grin, making a lie of his scholar's face. Ahead, more commotion. Two me stopped to lift a heavy, sprawled figure and continued running. Harry Kane was out of the action. "Hope somebody's leading them!" Hood shouted. A siren blared in the corridors. It was loud enough to wake the IF Mist Demons, to send them screaming into the sky for a little peace. It jarred the concrete, it shook the very bones of a man. There was a rattling clang, barely heard above the siren. An iron door had dropped into the swarm, cutting it in two. One man was emphatically dead beneath it. The tail of the swarm, including perhaps a dozen men and women, washed against the steel door and rebounded. Trapped. The other end of the corridor was also blocked. But doors lined both sides. One man took off, running down the hallway toward the far end, swiveling his head back and forth to look briefly through the open doors, ignoring the closed ones. "Here!" he shouted, waving an arm. Wordlessly the others followed. It was a lounge, a relaxation room, furnished with four wide couches, scattered chairs, two card tables and a huge coffee dispenser. And a picture window. As Matt reached the door the window already gaped wide, showing sharp glass teeth. The man who'd found the room was using a chair to clean the glass away. An almost soundless hum... and Matt felt the numbness of a sonic beamer. From the doorway I He slammed the door, and it stopped. Automatics? "Benny!" Laney shouted, picking up one end of a couch. The man at the window dropped his chair and ran to take the other end. He'd been one of Laney's escorts, that night. Together they dropped the couch across the window sill, over the broken glass. Colonists began to climb over it. Hood had found a closet and opened it. It was like opening Pandora's box. Matt saw half a dozen men in white smocks swarm over Hood. In seconds they would have tom him to ribbons. Matt used his sonic. They all went down in a lump, including Hood. Matt pulled him out, draped him over a shoulder and followed the others over the couch. Hood was heavier than he looked. He had to drop Hood on the grass and follow him down. Far across the lawn was the Hospital wall, leaning outward, the top laced with wires that leaned inward. Very thin wire, just barely visible throu the thin fog. Matt picked Hood up, glanced around, saw the others running alongside the building with the tall man named Benny in the lead. He staggered after them. They reached a corner -- the comers -- stopped sharply and backput Hood down, hefted his sonic -- A gun and hand emerged questing from the broken picture window. Matt fired, and the man slumped. But there must be others in there. Matt ducked beneath the window, rose suddenly and fired in. Half a dozen police fired back. Matt's right side and arm went numb; he dropped the gun, then he himself dropped below the sill. In a moment they'd be peering over -- The man named Benny was running toward him. Matt threw the first policeman's sonic to him and picked up his own with his left hand. The men inside hadn't expected Benny. They were trying to fire over the sill at Matt, and to do that they had to lean out. In half a minute it was over. Benny said, "There's a carport just beyond that corner. Guarded." "Do they know we're here?" "I don't think so. The Mist Demons have given us a mist." Benny smiled at his own pun. "Good. We can use these guns. You'll have to carry Jay, my arm's out." "Jay's the only one who can fly." "I can," said Matt. Tajor Jansen. Sound 'Prisoners IVl Loose.' " The sound of the siren pame instantly, even before Jesus Pietro could change his mind. For a moment he was sure, pretematuraUy sure that he'd made a fool of himself. This could cost him much face... But no. Keller must be freeing the prisoners. Keller wasn't here; therefore Keller was free; his first move would be to free the other Sons of Earth; if the vivarium guard had stopped him he would then have called here; he hadn't called; hence Keller had succeeded. But if Keller were harmlessly asleep in the vivarium? Nonsense. Why had the guards forgotten about him? They were behaving too much like Hobart had behaved last night. A miracle had been worked, a miracle of the kind Jesus Pietro was beginning to associate with Keller. There must be some purpose to it. It must have been used to free Keller. And the halls must be full of angry rebels. That was very bad. Implementation had motives for using mercy weapons. Rebels had none -- neither mercy-weapons nor mercy-motives. They'd kill whoever got in their way. The steel doors would be in place now, vibrating in sleep-producing frequencies. By now the danger would be over -- almost certainly. Unless the rebels had first gotten out of the halls. But what damage had they done already? "Come with me," Jesus Pietro told the two guards. He marched toward the door. "Keep your guns drawn," he added over his shoulder. The guards snapped out of their stupor and ran to catch up. They had not the least idea what was going on, but Jesus Pietro was sure they'd recognize a colonist in time to down him. They'd be adequate protection. O ne dozen colonists, two stunned. Seven captured guns. Matt stayed hidden behind the corner, reluctantly obeying Benny's orders. With him were the two women, Laney and a deep-voiced middle-aged tigress named Lydia Hancock, and the two fallen: Jay Hood and Marry Kane. Matt would have fought the carport guards, but he couldn't fight the logic. Because he was the only one who could fly a car, he had to stay behind while the others charged out onto the field with their sonics going. The carport was a big, flat expanse of lawn, a variant of mutant grass, which could take an infinite amount of trampling. Lines of nearIF white crossed the green, outlining landing targets. The white too was grass. Cars rested near the centers of two of the targets. Men moved about the cars, servicing them and removing met cannisters from the underbellies. The mist hung four feet above the grass under diffuse sunlight, curling about the rebels as they ran. They were halfway to the cars when someone on the Hospital wall swung a spotlight-sized sonic toward them. The rebels dropped immediately, like hay before a scythe. So did the mechanics aroimd the cars. Unconscious men lay scattered across the carport field with the mist curling around them. Matt pulled his head back as the big sonic swung toward the corner. Even so, he felt the numbness, faint and far-off, matching the deadwood feeling in his right arm. "Shall we wait 'til they turn it off, then run for it?" "I think they've got us," said Laney. "Stop that!" Mrs. Hancock rapped savagely. Matt had first met her fifteen minutes ago and had never seen her without her present enraged expression. She was a fierce one, bulky and homely, a natural for any cause. "They haven't got us until they take us!" "Something keeps people from seeing me sometimes," said Matt. "If you want to risk it, and if you all stay close to me, it may protect us all." " 'Crack' under strain." Hood's voice was slurred, barely comprehensible. Only his eyes moved to watch Matt. Harry too was awake. "It's true. Hood. I don't know why, but it's true. I think it must be a psi power." "Wreebody who believes in psi things hees psygic." "The sonic's off us," said Laney. "My arm's dead. Laney, you and Mrs. -- " "Call me Lydia." "You and Lydia put Hood over my left shoulder, then pick up Harry. Stay right by me. We'll be walking, remember. Don't try to hide. If we get shot. I'll apologize when I get the chance." " 'Pologize now.' " "Okay, Hood. I'm sorry I got us all killed." " 'Sawrigh.' " W hen they see this... Jesus Pietro shuddered. He watched his own guards shrink back, imwilling to enter, unable to look away. Theyil think a little less of their guns, when they see this! The vivarium guard had certainly had a gun. Probably he hadn't thought to draw it in time. He'd get no second chance. He was like something spilled from an organ bank conveyor tank. Hobart, dead near the back of the vivarium, was no prettier. Jesus Pietro felt a stab of guilt. He hadn't meant Hobart for such a fate. Aside from the bodies, the vivarium was empty. Naturally. Jesus Pietro looked once more around him... and his eyes found the door, and the dark scrawl on its bright steel surface. It was a symbol of some kind, he was sure of that. But of what? The symbol of the Sons of Earth was a circle containing a streamlined outline of the American supercontinent. This was nothing like it, nor was it like anything he knew of. But it had unmistakably been drawn in human blood. Two wide arcs, bilaterally symmetrical. Three small closed curves underneath, like circles with tails. Tadpoles? Some micro-organism? Jesus Pietro rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Later he'd ask the prisoners. Best forget it for now. "Assume they took the fastest route to the main entrance," he said aloud. If the guards were surprised to hear him thus lecture himself, they reacted as Major Jansen had learned long since. They said nothing. "Come," said Jesus Pietro. Left, right, down the stairs... a dead policeman sprawled in the hall, his Implementation uniform as torn and ruined as himself. Jesus Pietro passed him without breaking his juggernaut stride. He reached steel emergency doors and used his ultrasonic whistle. As the doors went up his guards tensed. Two pitiful rows of maimed and dead, and another steel door at the other end. The dead were like an explosion in the organ banks. That was definitely the way to think of them. It would not do to consider that these had been human beings under Jesus Pietro's protection. Most had not even been police, but civilians: doctors and electricians. What a valuable lesson the Hospital guards would learn from thisi Jesus Pietro felt sick. It showed only in his unusual pallor; but that he could not control. He marched down the corridor with his expression held remotely aloof. The steel doors went up as he approached. Colonists were piled against the steel doors at both ends, as if trying to escape the trap even while unc(mscious. One of the poUcemen spoke into a handphone, asking for stretchers. Jesus Pietro stood over the piled rebels. "I never really hated them before," he said. # #I  'Hr, use gyrsco'." "What?" Matt couldn't spare the attention. He was trying to fly with one hand, the wrong hand: his car bucked and weaved. "Gy rro skko'!" Hood enunciated painfully. "I see it. What do I do with it?" "Turr on." Matt flipped the Gyroscope switch to On. Something hummed below him. The car trembled, then righted itself, going straight up. "Shlatsh." Matt used the knob. The car began to accelerate. "Her me see ow', Laney." Hood was propped upright beside the left front window, with Harry Kane in the middle and Matt on the right. Laney reached from the back seat to hold Hood's head out the window. "Turn ri'." "How?" "Shtee ring nog." "Knob? Like this thing?" "Ye-ss i'iot." IF "For the record," Matt said icily, "I flew a car all the way from Harry's basement to Alpha Plateau. It was the first time I'd ever been in a car. Naturally I don't know what all these gadgets do." "Thass ri'. Now go strray' till I tell you." Matt released the knob. The car flew on by itself. "We aren't going toward the coral houses," he said. "No." Harry Kane spoke slowly but understandably. "The cor houses are the first place Implementation will look. I couldn't drag a hundred men where we're going." "Where's that?" "A large, unoccupied mansion owned by Geoffrey Eustace Parlette and his family." "And where will Geoffrey Eustace Parlette be all this time?" "He and his family are swimming and gambling in a sma(l public resort on Iota. I've got contacts on Alpha Plateau, Keller." "Parlette. Any -- " "His grandson. Millard Parlette was staying with them, but he's making a speech. He should be starting about now. The sending station on Nob Hill is far enough away, and his hosts here are gone, so he'll probably be staying with a relative." "It still sounds dangerous." You should talk." The left-handed compliment hit Matt like six dry martinis. He'd done it! He'd walked into the Hospital, freed prisoners, raised merry hell, left his mark and walked out free and untouched! "We can hide the car till the furor dies down," he said. "Then, back to Gamma -- " "And leave my men in the vivarium? I can't do that. And there's Polly Tournquist." Polly. The girl who'd -- Yes. "I'm not a rebel, Harry. The grand rescue's over. Frankly, I only came here to get Laney if I could. I can drop this crusade any time." "You think Castro will just let you go, Keller? He must know you were one of the prisoners. He'll hunt you down wherever you hide. Besides, I can't let you have the car. I'll need it for my grand rescue." M att grimaced. It was his car, wasn't it? He'd stolen it himself. But they could fight that out later. "Why did you mention Polly?" "She saw the ramrobot come down. Castro probably found the films on her. He may be questioning her to find out who else knows." "Knows what?" "I don't know either. Polly's the only one. But it must be pretty damn important. Polly thought so, and apparently so did Castro. You didn't know there was a ramrobot coming, did you?" "No." "They kept it secret. They've never done that before." Laney said, "Polly acted like she'd found something vastly important. She insisted on telling us all at once, night before last. But Castro didn't give her the chance. Now I'm wondering whether it wasn't the ramrobot that brought on the raid." "She could be in the organ banks," said Matt. "Not yet," said Harry. "Not if Castro found the films. She wouldn't have talked yet. He'll be usiag the coffin cure, and that takes time. "Coffin cure?" "It's not important" Important or not Matt didn't like the sound of it. "How are you planning to mount your rescue?" "I don't know yet" "Angle lef," said Hood. Houses and greenery rolled beneath them. Flying a car was infinitely easier with the gyroscopes gdflg. Matt could see no cars around police or otherwise. Had something grounded them? "So," said Laney. "You came aU the Way to the Hospital to get me." "In a stolen car," said Matt "With a small detour into the void mist" Laney's wide mouth formed half a smile and half a grin, half joy and half amusement. "Naturally I'm flattered." "NaturaUy." Mrs. Hancock spoke from the back seat. "I'd like to know why they didn't beam us down, back there at the carport." "And you knew they wouldn't," said Laney. "How did you know. Matt?" "Second the motion," said Harry Kane. "I don't know," said Matt. "But you knew it might work." "Yah." "Why?" "Okay. Hood, you listening?" "Ye ss." "It's a long story. I'll start with the morning after the party -- " "Start with the party," said Laney. "Everything?" "Everything." Laney gave the word undue emphasis. "I think k mit be important. Matt" Matt shrugged an uncomfortable surrender. "It might at that Okay. I met Hood in a bar for the firat time in eight years..." J esus Pietro and Major Jansen stood well out of the way as a stream of stretchers moved into the vivarium to deposit their charges in contour couches. In another part of the Hospital, other stretchers carried dead and wounded into the operating rooms, some to be restored to life and health and usefulness, others to be pirated for undamaged body parts. "What is it?" Jesus Pietro asked. "I don't know," said Major Jansen. He stepped back from the door. "It seems almost familiar." "That's no help." "I assume a colonist drew it?" "You might as well. Nobody else was left alive." Major . Jansen drew even further back, stood bouncing lightly on his toes, hands on hips. Finally he said, "It's a valentine, sir." "A valentine." Jesus Pietro glared intense irritation at his aide. He looked back at the door. "I'll be damned. It is a valentine." "With teardrops." "A valentine with teardrops. Whoever drew that wasn't sane. Valentine, valentine... Why would the Sons of Earth leave us a valentine drawn in human blood?" "Blood. A bleeding... oh, I see. That's what it is, sir. It's a bleeding heart. They're telling us they're against the practice of executing felons for the organ banks." IF "A reasonable attitude for them to take." Jesus Pietro looked once more into the vivarium. The bodies of Hobart and the vivarium guard had been removed, but the stains of carnage remained. He said, "They don't act like the usual sort of bleeding heart." Thirty thousand pairs of eyes waited behind the teedee lenses. Four teedee cameras circled him. They were blank now and untended, as cameramen moved casually about the room, doing things and saying things Millard Parlette made no effort to understand. In fifteen minutes those blank tedee lenses would be peepholes for sixty thousand eyes. XV M illard Parlette began leafing through his notes. If there were any changes to be made, the time was Now.  Lead-In A Stress genuine emergency, B Mention ranvrobot package. C What follows is background How real would an emergency seem to these people? The last emergency session Millard Parlette could recall was the Great Plague of #, more than a century ago. Most of his audience ould not have been born then. Hence the lead-in, to grab their attention. II The organ bank problem -- exposition A Earth calls it a problem; we do not. Therefore Earth knows considerably more about it. B Any citizen, with the help of the organ banks, can live as long as it take his central netvous system to wear out. This can be a very long time, if his circulatory system is kept func Honing. C But the citizen cannot take more out of the organ banks than goes into them. He must do his utmost to see that they are supplied. D The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals. (Demonstrate this, show why other methods are irutdequate.) E A criminaTs pirated body can save a dozen lives. There is now no valid argument against capU tal punishment for any given crime; for all such argument man does society no good. Hence the citizen, who wants to live as long and as healthily as possible, will vote any crime into a capital crime if the organ banks are short of material. #) Cite Earths capital punishment for false advertising, income-tax evasion, air pollution, having children without a license. The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws. The organ bank problem could have started in the year #, when Carl Landsteiner separated human blood into four types. A, B, AB, and O. Or in #, when Albert Hustin found that sodiiun citrate would prevent blood from clotting. Or in #, when Landsteiner and Weiner found the Rh factor. Blood banks could so IF easily have been supplied by condemn cnndn; bpt apparently nobody had realized it. And there was Hamburger's work in the #'s and #'s, in a Parisian hospital where the first kidney transplants were made from donors who were not identical twins. There were the antirejection serums discovered by Mostel and Granovich in the #'s Nobody seemed to have noticed the implications. Until the middle of the twenty-first century. There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by people kind enough to leave their bodies to medical science in their wills. How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you reach a car accident? And in # Arkansas, which had never rescinded the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of execution. T he idea had spread like wildfire... like a moral plague, as one critic of the time had put it. MUlard Parlette had researched it very thoroughly, then cut all of the historical matter out of his speech, afraid it would lose him his audience. People, especially crew, did not like to be lectured. F Thus the government which controls the organ banks is more powerful than any dictator in history. Many dictators have had the power of death; but organ banks give a government power of life and death. #) Life. The organ banks can cure nearly anything, and the government can regulate which citizens shtdl benefit, on grounds that materials are running short. Priorities become vital. #) Death. No citizen will protest when the government condemns a man to die, not when his death gives the citizen his chance to live. Untrue and unfair. There were always altruists. But let it stand. colonies A Alloplasty: the science of putting foreign materials in the human body for medical purposes. B Examples #) Implanted hearing aids #) Heart pacemakers and artificial hearts #) Plastic tubing for veins, arteries C Alloplasty in use on Earth for half a thousand years. D No alloplasty for a colony world, Alloplasty needs a high technology. E Every colony world has organ bank facilities. The stasis room of a slowboat is designed to freeze organs. The ships themselves thus become the center of an organ bank. F Thus the organ bank problem" is unrelieved even by the alternative of alloplasty, on any colony world. IV The organ bank problem -- as it relates to the power politics of Mount Lookitthat. A The Covenant of Planet fall. Millard Parlette frowned. How would the average crew react to the truth about the Covenant of PlanetfaU? What they were taught in school was true, in the main. The Covenant of Planetfall, the agreement which gave the crew authority over the colonists, had existed since the Planck landing. The colonists had agreed to it, all of them. The rationale held, too. The crew had taken all the risks, done all the work of decades, suffered and slaved through years of training, to reach a target which might be habitable. The colonists had slept peacefully through aU those weary years in space. It was right that the crew should rule. But -- how many crew knew that those first colonists had signed the covenant at gunpoint? That eight had died rather than sign away their freedom? Was it Millard Parlette's place to tell them? Y es, it was. They had to understand the nature of power politics. He left the notation unchanged. B The HospitaL I ) Control of electric power, #) Control of news media, #) Control of justice: of the police, of trials, of executions, #) Control of medicine and the organ banks: the positive side of justice, C Organ replacement for colonists? Yes! #) Colonists in good standing are obviously entitled to medical care, # ' #) Justice must have a positive side, #) The organ bank problenf implies that the colonists who can hope for medical treatment will support the government. V The ramrobot capsule, Show pictures. Give 'em the full tour. Use #i for visual impact, but concentrate on implications of rotifer,) There was something he could add to that! Millard Parlette looked down at his right hand. It was coming along nicely. Already the contrast with his untreated left hand was dramatic. ThaPd make 'em sit up! VI The danger of the ramrobot capsule, A It does not make the organ banks obsolete. The capsule held only four items. To replace the organ banks would require hundreds, or thousands, each a separate project. B But any colonist report would blow it out of all proportion. Colonists would assume that capital punishment would stop now. Millard Parlette glanced behind him... and shuddered. You couldn't be rational about Ramrobot Capsule ##. The visual impact was too great. K his speech got dull at any point, he could get their attention back by simply cutting to a shot of the ramrobot packages. C Capital punishment cannot stop at any case. #) Decrease the severity of IF punishment, and crime in-creases drastically. (Cite ex- amples from Earth history. Unfortunate that Mount Lookitthat has none.) #) What punishment to sub stitute for capital punish ment? No prisons on Mount Lookitthat. Warning notes and jottings on one's rec ord hold power only through threat of the organ banks. Vlll. Conclusion: Violently or peaceably, the rule of the crew ends when the colonists learn of Ramrobot Capsule ##. T hree minutes to go. No question of changing the speech now. The question was, and had always been, the speech itself. Should thirty thousand crew be told what had arrived in Ramrobot Capsule ##? Could they be made to understand its importance? And -- could such a secret be kept by that many? Members of the Council had fought bitterly to prevent this event. Only Millard Parlette's sure control, his knowledge of the ways of power and the weaknesses of his fellow Council members, even his own striking authority-figure appearance, which he used ruthlessly -- only Millard Parlette's determination had brought the Council to issue their declaration of emergency. And now every crew on Alpha Plateau, and elsewhere, was before his teedee set. No cars flew above Alpha Plateau; no skiers glided down the snows of the northern glacier; the lake and the hot springs and the gambling halls of Iota were empty. One minute to go. Too late to call off the speech. Could thirty thousand people keep such a secret? Why, no, of course they couldn't. #That big house with the flat A roof," said Harry Kane. Matt tilted the car to the right. He continued, "I waited 'til the guards were out of sight, then went back to the vivarium. The man inside opened the door for me. I knocked him down and took his gun, found that bank of buttons and started pushing them." "Land in the garden, not on the roof. Did you ever figure out what was wrong with their eyes?" "No." Matt worked the slats and the steering knob, trying to get above the garden. It was big, and it ran to the void edge: a formal garden in a style a thousand years old, a symmetrical maze of right-angle hedges enclosing rectangles of brilliant color. The house too was all rectangles, an oversized version of the small identical development houses of the nineteens. Flat-roofed, flatsided, nearly undecorated, the size of a motel but so wide it seemed low, the house seemed to have been built from prefabricated parts and then added to over the years. Geoffrey Eustace Parlette had evidently imitated ancient bad taste in hopes of getting something new and different. Matt didn't see it that way, naturally. To him all the houses of Alpha appeared equally strange. He brought the car down on the strip of grass at the void edge. The car landed, bounced, landed again. At what he judged was the proper moment Matt pushed in all four fan levers. The car dropped jarringly. The levers tried to come out again, and Matt held them in with his hand, looking despairingly at Hood for help. "Gyroscope," said Hood. Matt forced his numb right arm to cross his torso and flick the Gyroscope switch. "You need a little training in how to fly," Harry Kane said with admirable restraint Yon finidied your story?" He had indsted that Matt talk without interruption. "I may have forgotten some things." "We can save the question-andanswer period until we get establied. Matt, Laney, Lydia, get me out of here and move Jay in front of the dashboard. Jay, can you move your arms?" "Yah. The stunner's pretty well worn off." They piled out. Matt and the two women. Harry came out on his feet, moving in jerks and twitches but managing to stay He brushed away offers of help and stood watching Hood. Hood had opened a panel in the dash and was doing things inside. "Matt!" Laney called over her shoulder. She was standing inches from the void. "Get back from therel" "No! Come here!" Matt went. So did Mrs. Hancock. The three of them stood at the edge of the grass, looking down into their shadows. The sun was at their backs, shining down at forty-five degrees. The watervapor mist which had covered the southern end of the Plateau that morning now lay just beyond the void edge, almost at their feet. And they looked into their shadows .  . three shadows reaching down into infinity, three contoured black tunnels growing smaller and narrower as they bored through the lighted mist, untfl they reached their blurred vanishing points. But for each of the three it seemed that only his own shadow was surrounded by a small, vivid, perfectly circular rainbow. A fourth shadow joined them, moving slowly and painfully. "Oh, for a camera," mourned Harry Kane. "I never saw it like that before," said Matt. I did, once, a long time ago. It was like I'd had a vision. Myself, the representative of Man, standing at the edge of the world with a rainbow about his head. I joined the Sons of Earth that night." A muted whirr sounded behind them. Matt turned to see the car slide toward him across the lawn, pause at the edge, go over. It hovered over the mist and then settled into it, fading like a porpoise submerging. Harry turned and called, "All set?" Hood knelt on the grass where the car had rested. "Right. It'll come back at midnight, wait fifteen minutes, then go back down. It'll do that for vl# IP the next three nights. Would someone help me into the house?" Matt halfcarried him through the formal garden. Hood was heavy; his legs would move, but they would not carry him. As they walked, he lowered his voice to ask, "Matt, what was that thing you drew on the door?" "A bleeding heart." "Oh. Why?" "I'm not really sure. When I saw what they'd done to the guard it was like being back in the organ banks. I remembered my Uncle Matt." His grip tightened in reflex on Hood's arm. "They took him away when I was eight. I never found out why. I had to leave something to show I was there... me, Matt Keller, walking-in alone and out with an army. One for Uncle Matt! I was a little crazy. Hood; I saw something in the organ banks that would shake anyone's mind. I didn't know your symbol, so I had to make up my own." "Not a bad one. I'll show you ours later. Was it bad, the organ banks?" "Horrible. But the worst was those tiny hearts and livers. Children, Jay! I never knew they took children." Hood looked up questioningly. Then Lydia Hancock pushed the big front door open for them, and they had to concentrate on getting up the steps. esus Pietro was furious. He'd spent some time in his office, knowing he would be most useful there, but he'd felt cramped. Now he was at the edge of the carport watching the last of the sonic victims being carried away. He wore a belt phone; his secretary could reach him through that. He'd never hated colonists before. To Jesus Pietro human beings came in two varieties: crew and colonist. On other worlds other conditions might apply, but other worlds did not intrude on Mount Lookitthat. The crew were masters, wise and benevolent, at least in the aggregate. The colonists were ordained to serve. Both groups had exceptions. There were crew who were in no way wise, and who did not work at being benevolent; who accepted the benefits of their world and ignored the responsibilities. There were colonists who would overthrow the established order of things, and others who preferred to turn criminal rather than serve. When brought into contact with crew he did not admire, Jesus Pietro treated them with the respect due their station. The renegade colonists he hunted down and punished. But he didn't hate them, any more than Matt Keller really hated mining worms. They were part of his job, part of his working day. They behaved as they did because they were colonists, and Jesus Pietro studied them as biology students studied bacteria. When his working day ended so did his interest in colonists, unless something unusual was going on. Now that was over. In running amok through the Hospital, the rebels ha(T spilled over from his working day into his very home. He couldn't have been angrier if they'd been in his house, smashing furniture and for the housecleaners and pouring salt on the nrgs. The intercom buzzed. Jesus Pietro unhooked it from his belt and said "Castro." "Jansen sir. I'm calling from the vivarium." "WeU?" "There are six rebels missing. Do you want their names?" Jesus Pietro glanced around him. They'd carried the last unconscious colonist away ten minutes ago. These last stretcher passengers were carport personnel. "You should have them all. Have you checked with the operating room? I saw at least one dead under a door." "I'U check, sir." T he carport was back to normal. The rebels hadn't had time to mess it up, as they'd messed up the halls and the electricians' re( room. Jesus Pietro debated whether to return to his office or to trace the rebels' charge back through the rec room. Then he happened to notice two men arguing by the garages. He strolled over. "You had no right to send Bessie out!" one was shouting. He wore a raider's uniform, and he was tall, very dark, enlistment-poster handsome. "You bloody raiders think you own these cars," the mechanic said contemptuously. Jesus Pietro smiled, for the mechanics felt exactly the same. "What's the trouble?" he asked. "This idiot can't find my car! Sorry, sir." "And which car is yours, Cap? "Bessie. I've been using Bessie for three years, and this morning some idiot took it out to spray the woods. Now look! They've lost her, sir!" The man's voice turned plaintive. Jesus Pietro turned cold blue eyes on the mechanic. "You've lost a car?" "Nossir. I just don't happen to know where they've put it." "Where are the cars that came back from spraying the woods?" "That's one of them." The mechanic pointed across the carport. "We were half finished unloading her when those fiends came at us. Matter of fact we were unloading both of them." The mechanic scratched his head. He met Jesus Pietro's eyes with the utmost reluctance. "I haven't seen the other one since." "There are prisoners missing. You know that?" He didn't wait for the mechanic's answer. "Find Bessie's serial number and description and give them to my secretary. If you find Bessie call my office. For the moment I'm going to assmne the car is stolen." The mechanic turned and ran toward an office. Jesus Pietro used his handphone to issue instructions regarding a possible stolen car. Jansen came back on the line. "One rebel dead, sir. That leaves five missing." He listed them. "All right. It's beginning to look like they took a car. See if the wall guards saw one leaving." "They'd have reported it, sir." "I'm not o certain. Find out." "Sir, the carport was attacked. The guards had to report five prisonIP ers stealing an aircar during a mob attack!" "Jansen, I think they might have forgotten to. You understand me? There was steel in his voice. Jansen signed oft without further protest. Jesus Pietro looked up at the sky, rubbing his mustache with two fingers. A stolen car would be easy to find. There were no crew pleasure cars aboard now, not in the middle of Millard Parlette's speech. But they might have landed it. And if a car had been stolen in full view of the wall guards, it had been stolen by ghosts. That would fit admirably with the other things which had been happening at the Hospital. xvn G eoffrey Eustace Parlette's house was different inside. The rooms were big and comfortable, furnished in soft good taste. They were innumerable. Toward the back were a pool table, a small bowling alley, an auditorium and stage with pull-down movie screen. The kitchen was the size of Harry Kane's living room. Matt and Laney and Lydia Hancock had moved through the entire house with stun guns at ready. They had found no living thing, barring the rugs and the no less than six housecleaner nests. Lydia had threatened force to get Matt to return to the living room. He wanted to explore. He'd seen incredible bedrooms. Hobbyists' bedrooms... In a living room two stories tall, before a vast false fireplace whose stone logs showed red electrical heat where they touched, the five survivors dropped into couches. Harry Kane stiU moved carefully, but he seemed almost recovered from the stunner which had caught him in the Hospital. Hood had his voice back, but not his strength. Matt slumped in the couch. He wriggled, adjusting his position, and finally put his feet up. It was good to feel safe. 'Tiny hearts and livers," said Hood. "Yah," said Matt. "That's impossible." Harry Kane made a questioning noise. "I saw them," said Matt. "The rest of it was pretty horrible, but that was the worst." Harry Kane was sitting upright. "In the organ banks?" "Yes, dammit, in the organ banks. Don't you believe me? They were in special tanks of their own, makeshift-looking, with the motors sitting in the water next to the organs. The glasswas warm." "Stasis tanks aren't warm," said Hood. "And Implementation doesn't take children," said Harry Kane. "If they did I'd know it." Matt merely glared. "Hearts and livers," said Harry. "Just thoe? Nothing else?" "Nothing I noticed," said Matt. "No, wait. There were a couple of tanks just like them. One was empty. One looked... polluted, I think." "How long were you in there?" "Just long enough to get sick to my stomach. Mist Demons, I wasn't investigating anything! I was looking for a map!" "In the organ banks?" "Lay off," said Laney. "Relax, Matt. It doesn't matter." Mrs. Hancock had gone to find the kitchen. She returned now, with a pitcher and five glasses. "Found this. No reason we shouldn't mess up the place, is there?" They assured her there wasn't, and she poured for them. Hood said, "I'm more interested in your alleged psychic powers. I've never read of anything like you've got. It must be something new." Matt grunted. "I should tell you that anyone who believes in the so-called psi powers at all usually thinks he's psychic himself." Hood's tone was dry, professorial.".We may find nothing at all." "Then how did we get here?" "We may never know. Some new Implementation policy? Or maybe the Mist Demons love you, Matt." "I thought of that, too." Mrs. Hancock returned inside. "When you tried to sneak up to the Hospitd," Hood continued, were spotted right away. You must have run through the electric eye net. You didn't attempt to run?" "They had four spotlights on me. I just stood up." "Then they ignored you? They let you walk away?" "That's right. I kept looking back, waiting for that loudspeaker to say something. It never did. Then I ran." "And the man who took you into the Hospital. Did anything happen just before he went insane and ran back to the gatehouse?" "Like what. What are you thinking?" "Anything Involving light." "No." Hood looked disappointed. Laney said, "People seem to forget about you." "Yah. It's been like that all nay life, iln school the teacher wouldn't call on me unless I knew the answer. Bullies never bothered me." "I should have been so lucky," said Hood. L aney wore the abstracted look of one tracing an idea. 'The eyes," said Harry Kane, and paused for thought. He had been listening without comment, in the attitude of the Thinker, jaw on first, elbow on knee. "You said there was something strange about the guards' eyes." "Yah. I don't know what. I've seen that look before, I think, but I can't remember..." "What about the one who finally shot you? Anything odd about his eyes?" "No." Laney came out of her abstraction with a startled look. "Matt. Do you think Polly would have gone home with you?" "What the Mist Demons does that have to do with anything?" "Don't get mad. Matt. I've got a reason for asking." "I can't imagine -- " "That's why you called in the experts." "All right, yes, I thought she was going home with me." "Then she suddenly walked away." IF "Yah. The bitch just -- " Matt swallowed the rest of it. Not until and rage and humiliation in bearable retrospect, did he realize how badly she'd stung him. "She walked away like she'd remembered something. Something more important than me, but not particularly important for all that. Laney, could it have been her hearing aid?" "The radio? No, not that early. ' Harry, did you tell Polly anything by radio that you didn't tell the rest of us?" "I told her I'd call for her speech at midnight, after everyone had gone home. They could hear it through the radios. Otherwise, nothing." "So she had no reason to drop me," said Matt. "I still don't see why we have to dig into this," "It's strange," said Hood. "It can't hurt to look at anything strange in your young life." Laney said, "Did you resent it?" "Damn right I did. I bate being left flat like that, toyed with and then dropped." "You didn't offend her?" "I don't see how I could have. I didn't get drunk till afterward." "You told me it's happened before like that." "Every time. Every damn time, until you. I was virgin until Friday night." Matt looked belligerently around him. Nobody said anything. "That's why I can't see how it helps to talk about it. Dammit, it isnt unusual in my young life." Hood said, "It's unusual in Polly's young life. Polly's not a tease. Am I wrong, Laney?" "No. She takes her sex seriously. She wouldn't make a play for someone she didn't want. I wonder..." "I don't think I was kidding myself, Laney." "Neither do I. You keep saying something was strange about the guards' eyes. Was there anything strange about Polly's eyes?" # X#hat are you getting at?"  V"You claim every time you're getting ready to lose your virginity to a girl, she drops you. Why? You aren't ugly. You probably don't have the habit of being grossly impolite; you weren't with me. You l#athe often enough. Was there something about Polly's eyes?" "Dammit, Laney,... Eyes." Something changed in Pollys face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. She certainly wasnt looking at anything; her eyes went past him and through him, and they looked blind... "She looked abstracted. What do you want me to say? She looked like she was thinking of something else, and then she walked away." "Was it sudden, this loss of interest? Did she -- " "Laney, what do you think? I drove her away deliberately?" Matt jumped to his feet. He couldn't take any more; he was wires stressed on a bone frame, every wire about to break. Nobody had ever so assaulted his privacy! He had never imagined that a woman could share his bed, listen in sympathy to all the agony of the secrets that had shaped his soul, and then spilled everything she knew into a detailed clinical roundtable discussion! He felt like one who has been disassembled for the organ banks, who, still aware, watches a host of doctors probing and prodding his separated innards with nonetoo-clean hands, hears them making ribald comments about his probable medical and social history. And he was about to say so, in no mild terms, when he saw that nobody was looking at him. Nobody was looking at him. Laney was staring into the artificial fire; Hood was looking at Laney; Harry Kane was in his Thinker position. None of them were really seeing anything; at least anything here in this room. They h an abstracted look. "One problem," Harry Kane said dreamily. "How the blazes are we going to free the rest of us, when only four of us escaped?" He glanced around at his inattentive audience, then went back to contemplating his navel from the inside. Matt felt the hair stir on his head. Harry Kane had looked right at him, but he certainly hadn't seen Matt Keller. And there was something very peculiar about his eyes. L ike a man in a wax museum. Matt bent to look into Harry Kane's eyes. Harry jumped like he'd been shot. "Where the blazes did you come from?" He stared as if Matt had dropped from the ceiling. Then he said, "Umm... oh! You did it." There wasn't a doubt of it. Matt nodded. "You all suddenly lost interest in me." "What about our eyes?" Hood seemed about to spring at him, he was so intense. "Something. I don't know. I was bending down to see when -- " Matt shrugged. "It wore off." Harry Kane used a word. Hood said, "Suddenly? I don't remember its being sudden." "What do you remember?" Matt asked. "Well, nothing, really. We were talking about eyes... or was it about Polly? Sure, Polly. Matt, did it bother you to talk about it?" Matt growled in his throat. "Then that's why you did whatever you did. You didn't want to be noticed." "Probably." Hood rubbed his hands briskly together. "So. We know you've got something, anyway, and it's under your control. Your subconscious control. Well!" Hood became a professor looking around at his not-toobright class. "What questions are still unanswered? "For one, what do the eyes have to do with anything? For another, why was a guard eventually able to shoot you and store you away? For a third, why would you use your ability to drive girls away?" "Mist Demons, Hood! There's no conceivable reason -- " "Keller." The voice was a quiet command. Harry Kane was back in Thinker position on the couch, staring off into space. "You said Polly looked abstracted. Did we look abstracted a moment ago?" "When you forgot about me? Yah." IF "Do I look at all abstracted now?" "Yah. Wait a minute." Matt stood up and walked aroimd Harry, examining him from different sides. He should have looked like a man deep in thought. Thinker position, chin on fist on elbow on knee; face lowered, almost scowling; motionless; eyes hooded... Hooded? But clearly visible. "No, you don't. There's something wrong." "What?" "Your eyes." "Roimd and round we go," Harry said disgustedly. "Well, get down and look at my eyes, for the Mist Demons' sake!" Matt knelt on the indoor grass and looked up into Harry's eyes. No inspiration came. A wrongness there; but where? He thought of Polly on Friday night, when they stood immersed in noise and elbows and talked nose to nose. They'd touched from time to time, half-accidentally, hands and shoulders brushing... he'd felt the warm blood beating in his neck... and suddenly -- "Too big," said Matt. "Your pupils are too big. When somebody really isn't interested in what's going on around him, the pupils are smaller." "What about Polly's eyes?" Hood probed. "Distended or contracted?" "Contracted. Very small. And so were the guards' eyes, the ones who came for me this morning." He remembered how surprised they'd been when he yanked on the handcuffs, the handcuffs which still dangled from his wrists. They hadn't been interested in him; they'd merely unlocked the chains from their own wrists. And when they looked at him... "That's it. That's why their eyes looked so funny. The pupils were pinpoints." H ood sighed in relief. "Then that's all of it," he said, and got up. "Well, I thi I'll see how Lydia's doing with dinner." "Come back here." Harry Kane's voice was low and murderous. Hood burst out laughing. "Stop that cackling," said Harry Kane. "Whatever Keller's got, we need it. Talk!" Whatever Kellers got, we need it... Matt felt he ought to protest. He didn't intend to be used by the Sons of Earth. But he couldn't interrupt now. "It's a very limited form of telepathy," said Jay Hood. "And because it is so very limited, it's probably more dependable than more general forms. Its target is so much less ambiguous." He smiled. "We really ought to have a new name for it. Telepathy doesn't apply, not quite." Three people waited patiently but implacably. "Matt's mind," said Hood, "is capable of controlling the nerves and muscles which dilate and contract the iris of another man's eye." And he smiled, waiting for their response. "So what?" asked Harry Kane. "What good is that?" "You don't understand? No, I suppose you don't. It's more in my field. Do you know anything about motivational research?" Three heads waggled No. "The science was banned on Earth long, long ago, because its results were being used for immoral advertising purposes. But they found out some interesting things first. One of them involved dilation and contraction of the pupil of the eye. "It turns out that if you show a man something and measure his pupil with a camera, you can tell whether it interests him. You can show him pictures of his country's political leaders, in places where there are two or more factions, and his eyes will dilate for the leader of his own. Take hkn aside for an hour and talk to him, persuade him to change his political views, and his pupils will dilate for the other guy. Show him pictures of pretty girls, and the girl he calls prettiest will have dilated pupils. He doesn't know it. He only knows she looks interested. In him. "I wonder," said Hood, smiling dreamily at himself. Some people love to lecture. Hood was one. "Could that be the reason the most expensive restaurants are always dark? A couple comes in, they look at each other across a dinner table, and they both look interested. What do you think?" Harry Kane said, "I think you'd better finish telling us about Keller." "He has," said Laney. "Don't you see? Matt's afraid of being seen by someone. So he reaches out with his mind and contracts the man's pupils whenever he looks at Matt. Naturally the man can't get interested in Matt." "Exactly." Hood beamed at Laney. "Matt takes a reflex and works it in reverse to make it a conditioned reflex. I knew light had something to do with it. You see. Matt? It can't work unless your victim sees you. If he hears you, or if he gets a blip when you cross an electric-eye beam -- " "Or if I'm not concentrating on being scared. That's why the guard shot me." "I still don't see how it's possible," said Laney. "I helped you do your research on this. Jay. Telepathy is reading minds. It operates on the brain, doesn't it?" "We don't know. But the optic nerve is brain tissue, not ordinary nerve tissue." Harry Kahe stood up and stretched. "That doesn't matter. It's better than anything the Sons of Earth have put together. It's like a cloak of invisibility. Now we have to figure out how to use it." T he missing car was still missing. It was nowhere in the Implementation garages; it had not been found by the search squad, neither in the air nor on the ground. If a policeman had taken it out for legitimate purposes, it would have been visible; if it had not been visible, it would have been in trouble of some kind, and the pilot would have phoned a Mayday. Apparently it really had been stolen. To Jesus Pietro, it was disturbing. A stolen car was one thing; an impossible stolen car was another. He had associated Keller with miracles: with the miracle that had IF left him unhurt when his car fell into the void, with the miracle which had affected Hobart's memory last night. On that assumption he had sounded the Prisoners Loose. And, Lo! there were prisoners r unni ng amok. He had associated missing prisoners with a missing car with the miracles of Keller. Thus he had assumed a stolen car where no car could have been stolen. And, Lo! a car had indeed been stolen. Then Major Jansen had called from the vivarium. Nobody had noticed, until now, that the sleeper helmets . were still running. How, then, had ninety-eight prisoners walked away? Miracles! What the blazes was he fighting? One man, or many? Had Keller been passenger or driver of that car? Had there been other passengers? Had the Sons of Earth discovered something new, or was it Keller alone? That was an evil thought. Matthew Keller, come back from the void in the person of his nephew, to haunt his murderer... Jesus Pietro snorted. He'd doubled the guard at the Alpha-Beta bridge. Knowing that the bridge was the only way off the cliff and across the Long Fall River at the bottom, he had nonetheless set guards along the cliff edge. No normal colonist could leave Alpha Plateau without a car. (But could something abnormal walk unseen past the guards?) And no fugitive would leave in a police car. Jesus Pietro had ordered all police cars to fly in pairs for the duration. The fugitives would be flying alone. As part colonist Jesus Pietro had not been allowed to hear Millard Parlette's speech; but he knew it was over. Crew cars were flying again. If the fugitives stole a crew car they might have a chance. But the Hospital would be informed immediately if a crew car were stolen. (ReaDy? A police car had been stolen, and he'd had to find out for himself.) Nobody and nothing had been found in the abandoned coral houses. (But would anything important have been seen?) Most of the escaped prisoners were safe in the vivarium. (From which they had escaped before, without bothering to turn off their sleeper helmets.) Jesus Pietro wasn't used to dealing with ghosts. It would require brand new techniques. Grimly he set out to evolve them. T he arguments began during dinner. Dinner took place at the unconventional hour of three o'clock. It was good, very good. Lydia Hancock still looked like a sour old harridan, but to Matt anyone who could cook like her deserved the benefit of the doubt. They had finished the mutton chops when Harry Kane turned to business. "There are five of us left," he said. "What can we do to get the rest of us loose?" "We could blow the pumping station," Hood suggested. It developed that the pumping station at the base of the Alpha-Beta cliff, which supplied Alpha Plateau with water frm the Long Fall, was the crew's only source of water. The Sons of Earth had long ago planted mines to blow it apart. "It'd give us a diversion." "And cut off the power too," said Matt, remembering that hydrogen for fusion can be taken from water. "Oh, no. The power plants only use a few bucketfuls of water in a year, Keller. A diversion for what. Jay? Any suggestions?" "Matt. He got us out once. He can do it again, now that he knows. -- " "Oh, no you don't I am not a revolutionary. I told you why I went to the Hospital, and I won't go there again." Thus, the arguments. On Matt's side there was little said. He wasn't going back to the Hospital. If he could, he would return to Gamma and live out his life there, trusting his psi power to protect him. If he had to live elsewhere -- even if he had to spend the rest of his life in hiding on Alpha Plateau -- so be it. His life might be disrupted now, but it was not worthless enough to throw away. He got no sympathy from anyone, not even from Laney. On their part the arguments rang from appeals to his patriotism or to his love of admiration, to attacks on his personality, to threats of bodily harm to himself and his family. Jay Hood was the most vituperative. You would have thought he had invented "the luck of Matt Keller", that Matt had stolen it. He seemed genuinely convinced that he held a patent on psi power on the Plateau. In a way it was ludicrous. They begged him, they browbeat him, they threatened him; and with never a chance of succeeding. Once they actually succeeded in frightening him, and once their personal comments annoyed him beyond the limits of patience. Both times the arguments ended abruptly, and Matt was left alone in his irritation while the Sons of Earth discussed whatever came to mind, their pupils contracting to pinpoints whenever they looked at him. After the second such episode Harry Kane realized what was happening and ordered the others to lay off. It was interfering with their ability to make plans, he said. "Go somewhere else," he told Matt. "If you're not going to help us, at least don't listen to our plans. Feeble though they'll probably be, there's no reason we should risk your hearing them. You might use the information to buy your way back into Castro's good graces." "You're an ungrateful son of a bitch," said Matt, "and I demand an apology." "Okay, I apologize. Now go som where else." att went out into the garden. The mist was back, but it was an overhanging mist now, turning the sky steel gray, bleaching colors out of the garden, turning the void from a fuzzy flat plain into a dome around the universe. Matt found a stone bench and sat down and put his head in his hands. He was shaking. A mass verbal attack can do that to a man, can smash his self-respect and set up IF doubts which remain for hours or days or forever. There are well developed verbal techniques for many to use against one. You never let the victim speak without interruption; never let him finish a sentence. You interrupt each other so that he can't quite catch the drift of your arguments, and then he can't find the flaws. He forgets his rebuttal points because he's not allowed to put them into words. His only defense is to walk out. If, instead, you throw him out... Gradually his confusion gave way to a kind of sick, curled anger. The ungrateful -- ! He'd saved their worthless lives twice, and where was their thanks? Well, he didn't need them. He'd never needed them for a moment. He knew what he was now. Hood had given him that much. He knew, and he could take advantage of it. He could become the world's first invulnerable thief. If Implementation would not let him resume his mining career, he would do just that. Weaponless, he could rob storehouses in broad daylight. He could pass guarded bridges unnoticed, be at work on Gamma while they were searching him out in every corner of Eta. Eta, now... a nice place to rob, if he couldn't return to his old life. The crew gambling resort must see half the wealth of Plateau at one time or another. He'd have a long walk to the Alpha-Beta bridge, and a longer walk afterward. A car would be useful. Serve the Sons of Earth right if he took their car... but he'd have to wait till midnight. Did he want to? His daydreams had calmed him still further. His shaking had stopped, and he wasn't as angry now. Now he could begin to see what had moved the four inside to attack him so; though he saw no justice in it, for there was none. Laney, Hood, Hany Kane, Lydia... they must be fanatics, or why would they sell thek lives for a hopeless revolution? Being fanatics they would have onl one ethic: to do anything in thetr power to advance their cause, no matter whom it might hurt. He still didn't know where he went from here. One thing he knew: it would not involve the Sons of Earth. Otherwise he had plenty of time for decisions. A chill, thin breeze blew from the north. Gradually the fog was thickening. The electric fire inside would be welcome. But the thick hostility would not. He stayed where he was, hunching his back to the wind. Why in blazes would Hood assume he drove away women? Did Hood think he was crazy? Or deficient? No; he'd have used that during the arguments. Why, then? He hadn't driven away Laney. That memory warmed him. She was lost for good now; their paths would diverge, and someday she'd end in the organ banks. But Friday night had happened; Friday night was permanent... Polly's eyes. Her pupils had contracted, sure enough. Like the gatekeeper's eyes, like Harry's and Hood's and Laney's eyes when Matt had tired of their verbal onslaughts. Why? #P Matt nibbled gently at his lower lip. And if he'd driven Polly away (never mind why; there was no answer) then it was not her fault that she had gone. But Laney had stayed. Matt jumped to his feet. They'd have to tell him. He had a lever on them: they couldn't know how sure he was that he'd have nothing to do with their cause. And he had to know... He turned toward the house and saw the cars. Three of them, way up there in the gray sky, disappearing and reappearing behind the mist. Dropping. XK H e stood perfectly still. He wasn't really convinced that they were landing here, though they grew bigger and closer every second. Finally they were just overhead and settling. And still he stood; for by then there was no place to run to, and he knew that only "the luck of Matt Keller" could protect him. It should work. He was certainly scared enough. One of the cars almost landed on him. He was invisible, all right. A tall, spare man got out of the car, moved his hands briefly inside the dashboard, stepped back to avoid the wind as the car rose again and settled on the roof. The other cars had landed, and they were Implementation. A man dimbarked and moved toward the tall civilian. They spoke briefly. The tall man's voice was high, almost squeaky, nod it had the crew lilt. He was thanking the policeman for his escort. The policeman got back in the car, and both Implementation cars rose into the fog. The tall man sighed and let himself slump. Matt's fear ebbed. This crew was no danger; he was a tired old man, worn out with years and with some recent toil. But what a fool Harry Kane had been, to think nobody would come! The man moved toward the house. Tired he might have been, but he walked straight, like a policeman on parade. Matt cursed softly and moved in behind him. When the oldster saw the living room he'd know someone had been here. He'd call for help unless Matt stopped him. The old man open the big wooden door and walked in. Matt was right behind him. He saw the old man go rigid. The ancient didn't try to scream. If he had a handphone he didn't reach for it. His head turned from side to side, studying the living room from where he stood, taking in the abandoned glasses and pitcher and the glowing false fire. When his profile turned to Matt he looked thoughtful. Not frightened, not angry. And when the old man smiled, it was a slow, tense smile, the smile of a chess player who sees victory almost within Us grasp... or defeat, for his opponent might have set an unsuspected trap. The old man smiled, but the muscles of his face stood out iron-hard under the loose, wrinkled skin, and his fists tightened at his sides. He cocked his head to one side, listening. IF He turned abruptly toward the dining room, and was face to face with Matt. Matt said, "What are you grinning at?" T he crew batted an eyelash; he was discomposed for just that long. Speaking low, he asked, "Are you one of the Sons of Earth?" Matt shook his head. Consternation! And why that reaction? Matt held up a hand. "Don't do anything rash," he said. He'd wrapped a handcuff chain around that hand to make it a better weapon. The old man settled back on his heels. Three of him would have been no physical match for Matt. "Tm going to search you," said Matt. "Raise your hands." He moved behind the old man and ran his hands over various pockets. He found some bulky objects, but no handphone. He stood back, considering. He had never searched anyone; there might be tricks a man could use to fool him. "What do you want with the Sons of Earth?" "I'll tell them when I see them." The baritone lilt was not hard to understand, though Matt could never have imitated it. "That won't do." "Something very important has happened." The old man seemed to make a difficult decision. "I want to tell them about the ramrobot." "All right. Go ahead of me. That way." They moved toward the dining room with Matt trailing. Matt was about to yell when the door suddenly opened. Lydia Hancock had her nose and a sonic showing around the edge. It took her a second to realize that the man in the lead was not Matt; and then she fired. Matt caught the old man as he fell. "Stupid," he said. "He wanted to talk to you." "He can talk to us when he wakes up," said Lydia. Harry Kane emerged warily, holding the other stolen sonic ready in his hand. "Any others?" "Just him. He had a police escort, but they left. Better search him, there might be a radio on him somewhere." "Mist Demons! It's Millard Parlette!" "Oh!" Matt knew the name, but he hadn't recognized the man. "I think he really wanted to see you. When he realized someone was here, he acted sneaky. He didn't panic until I told him I wasn't one of you. He said he wanted to talk about the ramrobot." Harry Kane grunted. "He won't wake up for hours. Lydia, you're on guard duty. I'm going for a shower; I'll relieve you when I come down." He went upstairs. Lydia and Hood picked up Millard Parlette, moved him into the front , entrance and sat him up against a wall. The old man had gone loose, like a puppet without strings. "A shower sounds wonderful," said Laney. Matt said, "May I talk to you first? Hood too." They got Jay Hood and went into the living room. Hood and Laney flopped in front of the fire, but Matt was too restless to sit. "Hood, I've got to know. What makes you think I've been using my psi power to drive away women?" "You'll recall it was Laney's idea first. But the evidence seems good. Do you doubt that Polly left because you contracted her irises?" Of course he doubted it. But he couldn't back it up. He looked at Laney, waiting. "It's important, isn't it. Matt?" "Yah." "You remember, just before the raid, when you asked me if everyone was as nervous as you were." "Mmm... Yah, I remember. You said not that nervous, but still nervous." "What are you two talking about?" "Jay, do you remember your first -- mmm. Do you remember when you stopped being a virgin?" Hood threw back his head and laughed. "What a question, Laney! Nobody ever forgets the first time! It was -- " "Right. Were you nervous?" Hood sobered. "At one point, I was. There was so much I didn't, know. I was afraid I'd make a fool of ' myself." Laney nodded. "I'll bet everyone's nervous the first time. Including you. Matt. You suddenly realize This Is It, and you get all tensed up. Then your girl's eyes go funny." M att said a bad word. This was exactly what he hadn't wanted to hear. "But what about us? Laney, why didn't I defend myself against you?" "I don't know." Hood snapped, What difference does it make? Whatever yoifve got, you're not going to use it" "I have to knowl" Hood shrugged and went to stand before the fire. "You were pretty Joshed," said Laney. "Could that have had anything to do with it?" "Maybe." She couldn't have known why it was important, but she was trying to help. "Maybe it's because Fm older than you. Maybe you decided I knew what I was doing." "I didn't decide anything. I was too drunk. And too bitter." She turned restlessly, her wrinkled party dress swirling out around her. She stopped. "Matt! I remember! It was pitch dark in there!" Matt closed his eyes. Why, so it was. He'd stumbled unseeing across the bed; he'd had to turn on a light to see Laney at all... "That's it. I didn't even realize what was going on until the door was closed. Oookay," he sighed, letting all his breath rush out with the word. Hood said, "That's great. Are you finished with us?" "Yah." Hood left without looking back. Laney, on the verge of leaving, hesitated. Matt looked half dead, as if every erg of energy had been drained out of him. She touched his arm. "What's wrong. Matt?" "I drove her away! It wasn't her fault!" "Polly?" She grinned into his eyes. "Why let it bother you? You got me the same night!" IF Laney, Laney. She could be in the organ banksl She could be in the coffin cure whateverthehell that is. "It's not your fault. If you'd found her in the vivarium -- ' "Is it my fault that I was glad? She dropped me like a sick housecleaner, and an hour later Implementation took her away! And when I found out, I was glad! I had revenge!" His hands were on her upper arms, squeezing, almost hard enough to hurt. "It wasn't your fault," she repeated. "You'd have saved her if you could." "Sure." But he wasn't hearing her. He let go of her arms. "I've got to go after her," he muttered, saying the words aloud, trying to taste of them. "Yah. I've got to go after her." He turned and made for the entrance. XX Ciome back here, you idiot!"  Matt stopped halfway to the door. "Huh? Isn't this what you all want?" "Come back here! How are you going to get over the wall? You can't pound on the gate again!" Matt turned back. He felt feverish, unable to think, "Castro'd be ready for that, wouldn't he? He may not know what happened last night, but he must know something's wrong." "We tried hard enough to tell him! Come here, sit down. Don't underestimate that man. Matt. We've got to think this through." "That wall. How am I going to get over? Oh, damn, danm, danm!" "You're tired. Why not wait 'til Harry comes down? Then we can get things organized." "Oh, no. I'm not taking help from the Sons of Earth. This has nothing to do with them." "How about me? Will you take my help?" "Sure, Laney." She decided not to question the illogic of this. "All right, let's start at the beginning. How are you going to reach the Hospital?" "Yah. Too far to walk. Mmm... Parlette's car. It's on the roof." "But if Castro gets it it'll lead him straight here." "I'd have to wait 'til midnight to get the other car." "That may be the only way." Laney wasn't tired; she'd had twice as much sleep as she needed in the vivarium. But she felt used, ready for the laundry. A hot bath would help... She put it out of her mind. "Maybe we can raid a crew house for another car. Then we set the autopilot to take Parlette's car back here." "That'll take time." "We'll have to take it. We'll also have to wait 'til after sunset." "Will we need darkness that early?" "It would help. And suppose the fog cleared while we were over the oid?" "Oh." Colonist and crew alike, the people of Plateau loved to watch the sun setting over the void mist. The colors were never the same twice. Land along the void edge always cost three times as much as land anywhere else. "Suddenly we'd have a thousand crew looking down at us. It might be a mistake to use the void all. Castro may have thought of that We'll be safe if the fog holds. But whatever we do, we'll have to wait til dark." Matt stood up and stretched muscles which felt knotted. "Okay. So we get to the Hospital. How do we get in? Laney, what's an electric eye?" She told him. "Oh. I didn't see any light. Ultraviolet, of course, or infrared. I should be able to get over that." "We." "You're not invisible, Laney." "I am if I stick close to you." "Phut." "I'll have to come that far with you anyway. You can't program an autopilot." Matt got up to pace. "Leave that a moment. How do we get over the waU?" "I don't," said Laney, and stopped. "There may be a way," she said. "Leave it to me." 'Tell me." "I can't." The cold breeze outside had become a wind, audible through the walls. Laney shivered, though the electric fire was hot enough. The fog beyond the south windows was growing dark. "We'll need guns," she said. "I don't want to take one of yours." You've only got the two we picked upon the way to the car." "Matt, I Imow more than you do about crew. They all go in for sports of one kind or another." "So?" "Some of them hunt A long time ago Earth sent us some frozen fertilized deer and caribou ova in a cargo ramrobot. The Hospital hatched them out grew 'em to adulthood and scattered them around the bottom edge of the glacier, north of here. There's enough grass there to keep them happy." "Then we might find guns here," "It's a good bet The richer a crew is, the more sports equipment he buys. Even if he never uses it." The gun rack was in a room in the upper story, a room lined with paintings of more or less wild animals and with heads an hooves of deer and caribou. The rack held a dozen air-powered rifles. They searched the room, and eventually Laney found a drawer containing several boxes of crystal slivers, each sliver two inches long. "They look like they'd stop a bandersnatch," said Matt He'd never seen a bandersnatch, except in filmed maser messages from Jinx, but he knew they were big. "They'll stop an elk cold. But the guns oy fire one at a time. You have to be accurate." "Makes it more sporting?" "I guess so." Implementation mercy guns fired a steady stream of tiny slivers. One would make the victim woozy; it took half a dozen to drop him in his tracks. Matt closed and pocketed the box of oversized mercy slivers. "Getting hit with one of these would be like being stabbed with an ice pick, even without the knockout effect. Will they kill a man?" IF I don't know said Laney: She chose two #:#ns from the rack. Well take these." (# Jay!"  Hood stopped halfway to the living room, turned and made for the entrance hall. "Yes, Lydia." Lydia Hancock was bending over Millard Parlette. She had folded his flaccid hands neatly in his lap. "Come here and have a look at this." Hood looked down at the stunned crew. Millard Parlette was coming around. His eyes didn't track and wouldn't focus, but they were open. Hood saw something else, and he bent for a closer look. The crew's hands didn't match. The skin of one was mottled with age. It couldn't be as old as Parlette must be, but he hadn't replaced the skin in a good long time. From fingertips to elbow the arm showed a curious lack of personality, of what Hood finally decided was artistic continuity. Part of that might have been imagination. Hood knew in advance that Parlette must have used the organ banks continuously during his lifetime. But no imagination was needed to see that the left hand was dry and mottled and faintly callussed, with cracked fingernails and receding quick. Whereas the skin of the right hand was like a baby's, smooth and pink, untanned, almost translucent. The quick of the fingernails ran all the way to the tips of the fingers. Many high school students could not have said the same. "The old love-child just got a transplant job," said Hood. "N. Look here." Lydia pointed to the wrist. There was a ragg band of color, something less than an inch wide, running round Parlette's wrist. It was a dead, milky white such as Hood had never seen in human skin. "Here too." A sinodlar ring circled the first joint of Parlette's thumb. The thumbnail was cracked and dry, with a badly receding quick. "Right, Lydia. But what is it? An artificial hand?" "With a gun inside, maybe. Or a radio." "Not a radio. They'd be all over us by now." Hood took Parlette's right hand and rolled the joints in his fingers. He felt old bone and muscle under the baby skin, and joints which would be arthritic someday soon. "This a real human hand. But why didn't he get the whole thing replaced?" "We'll have to let him tell us." Hood stood up. He felt clean and rested and well fed. If they had to wait for Parlette to talk, they'd picked a nice place to wait. Lydia asked, "How's Laney doing with Keller?" "I don't know. I'm not going to try to find out." 'That must be tough, Jay." Lydia laughed a barking laugh. "You've spent half your life trying to find psychic powers on Plateau. Now one finally shows up, and he doesn't want to play with us." "I'll tell you what really bothers me about Matt Keller. I grew up with him. In school I never noticed him, except one time when he got me mad at him." Absently he rubbed a point on his chest with two fingertips. "He was right under my nose all the time. But I was right, wasn't I? Psi powers exist, and we can use them against the Hospital." "Can we?" "Laney's persuasive. If she can't talk him around, I sure can't." "You're not pretty enough." "I'm prettier than you." The barking laugh rang again. Toucher C#T knew it," said Laney. "It had A to be the basement" Two walls were covered with various kinds of small tools. Tables held an electric drill and a bandsaw. There were drawers of nails, screws, nuts... Matt said, "Parlette the Younger must have done a lot of building." "Not necessarily. It may be just a hobby. Come on. Matt get your wrists down here. I think I see the saw we want." Twenty minutes later he was rubbing bare wrists, scratching furiously where he'd been unable to scratch before. His arms felt ten pounds lighter without the handcuffs. T he time of waiting sat heavily on Jesus Pietro. It was long past quitting time. From the windows of his office he could see the trapped forest as a darker blur in a darkening gray mist. He'd called Nadia and told her not to expect him home tonight. The nit shift was in charge of the Hospital, reinforced at Jesus Pietro's orders with scores of extra guards. Soon he'd have to alert them for what he expected. Right now he was trying to decide what to say to them. He wasn't about to impress them with the startling news that all of five prisoners were loose somewhere on Alpha Plateau. They would already have heard about the escape. They'd leave the mop-up job to the hunting squads. Jesus Pietro activated the intercom. "Miss Lauessen, please connect me with all of the Hospital intercoms." "Will do." She didn't always call him Sir. Miss Lauessen had more crew blood than Jesus Pietro -- she was nearly pure -- and she had powerful protectors. Fortunately she was a pleasant person and a good worker, ilf she ever became a disciplinary problem -- I. "You're on, sir." "This is the Head," said Jesus Pietro. "You all know of the man captured last night infiltrating the Hospital. He and several others escaped this morning. I have information that he was scouting the Hospital defenses in preparation for an attack to take place tonight. "Sometime between now and dawn, the Sons of Earth will almost certainly attack the Hospital. You have all been issued maps of the Hospital showing the locations of automatic protective devices installed today. Memorize them, and don't stumble into any of the traps, and they can kill. Repeat, they can kill. "I think it unlikely that the rebels wih make any kind of frontal attack." Unlikely, indeed! Jesus Pietro smiled at the understatement. "You should be alert for attempts to infiltrate the Hospital, possibly by usIF ing our own uniforms. Keep your identification handy. If you see someone you do not recognize, ask for his ident. Compare him with the photo. The rebels have not had time to forge idents. "One last word. Don't be reluctant to shoot each other." He signed off, waited for Miss Lauessen to clear the lines, then had her contact the Power Sections. "Cut off all power to the colonist regions of the Plateau until dawn," he told them. The men of Power took pride in their work, and their work was to keep the power running. There were loud protests. "Do it," said Jesus Pietro, and cut them off. Once again he thought longingly of issuing death darts to his men. But then they would be afraid to shoot each other. Worse, they'd fear their own weapons. Never since the Covenant of Planetfall had Implementation used deadly weapons. In any case the poison slivers had been stored so long that they'd probably lost their effectiveness. He'd raised hell with tradition tonight; there'd be hell to pay if nothing happened. But he knew something would. It wasn't just the fact that this was the last chance for the rebels to get their prisoners out of the vivarium. It was the cold certainty in Jesus Pietro's viscera. Something would happen. A vague red line divided black sky from black land. It faded gradually, and suddenly the Hospital lights came on outside, making the night white. Somebody brought Jesus Pietro dinner, and he ate hurriedly and kept the coffeepot when the tray was gone. #jown there," said Laney. JLMat nodded and pushed in the fan levers. They dropped toward a medium-sized dwelling which at first glance looked like a large, flat haystack. There were windows in the haystack, and on one side was a porchlike platform. Under the porch was an oddly curved swimming pool. Lights showed at the windows, and the swimming pool area blazed with light. The water itself was lit from underneath. There was no rooftop landing zone, but on the other side of the house were two cars. "I'd have picked an empty house, myself." Matt was conunenting, not criticizing. He'd decided hours ago that Laney was the expert in rebellion. "Then what? Even if you found a car, where would you get the keys? I picked this one because most of them will be out in plain sight by the pool. There, see them? Hover the car, and I'll see how many I can pick off." They'd flown east along the void, flying blind in the fog, staying far from the edge so that even the sound of their fans would not carry. Finally, miles east of the Parlette mansion, they'd turned inland. Matt flew with the gun balanced beside him on the seat. He'd never owned anything with such power in it. It gave him a warm feeling of security and invulnerability. Laney was in the back seat, where she could fire from either window. Matt couldn't tell how many people were down around the swimming pool. But the guns had telescopic sights. There were pops like balloons exploding. "One," said Laney. "Two. Oop, here comes another... Three, and out. Okay, Matt, drop her fast. Yeeee! Not that fast. Matt." "Listen, did I get us down or didn't I?" But she was out and running for the house. Matt followed more slowly. The swimming pool steamed like a huge bathtub. He saw two fallen crew near the pool and a third near the glass doors to the house, and he blushed, for they were naked. Nobody had ever told him that crew threw nude swimming parties. Then he noticed blood pooling under a woman's neck, and he stopped blushing. Clothing was trivia here. From the pool area the house still looked like a haystack, but with more normal solid structures showing through the grassy yellow sides. Inside it was vastly different from Geoffrey Eustace Parlette's house; the walls were all curved, and a conical false fireplace occupied the center of the living room. But there was the same air of luxury. Matt heard a pop like a balloon exploding, and he ran. H e rounded a door jamb as he heard the second Pop. A man stood behind a polished table dialing a handphone. He was beginning to fall as Matt saw him: a brawny middle-aged crew wearing nothing but a few drops of water and an expression of ultimate terror. He was looking straight at Laney. One hand pawed IF at a blood spot on his ribs. His terror seemed to fade as he fell but Matt remembered it Being hunted was bad in itself, but being hunted naked must be far worse. Naked had always been synonymous with "unprotected." 'Try the upstairs," said Laney. She was reloading the gun. "We'U have to find where they changed. It you find a pair of pants, search the pockets for keys. Hurry, we can't stay here long." He came down a few minutes later with a bunch of keys dangling from his finger. "They were in the bedroom," he said. "Good. Throw 'em away." "Was that a funny?" "I found these." She too had a key ring. "Think it through. Those clothes upstairs must belong to the owner of the house. If we take his car. Implementation can trace it back here. It may not matter; I can't think of any way they could trace us from here back to Parlette's. But if we take a visitor's car they can't trace us anywhere. So these are the ones we want. You can ditch yours." They went back to the pool area for Parlette's car. Laney opened the dash and fiddled inside. "I don't dare send it back," she muttered. "Harry'll have to use the other one. Ah... So ni just send it ten miles up and tell it to head south forever. Okay, Matt, let's go." They found a key to fit one of the cars on the roof. Matt flew east and north, directly toward the Hospital. T he fog had not been abnormally thick on the ground, but at this height it was the edge of Creation. Matt flew for an hour before he saw a faint yellow blur to the left. "The Hospital," Laney agreed. They turned. A faint yellow blur on the left... and white lights forming and clarifying all around them. Matt dropped the car instantly. They came down hard on water. As the car bobbed to the surface they dived out opposite doors. Matt came up gasping with the cold. The fans washed spray over him, and he turned his face to avoid it. Ducks quacked in panic. The white lights were dropping toward them. Matt called, "ere are we?" "Parlette Park, I think." Matt stood up in the water, waist deep, holding his gun high. The car skidded across the duck pond, hesitated at the edge and then continued on until it nudged into a hedge. The fog was turning yellowish-gray as car lights dropped toward the pond. A thought struck him. "Laney. Got your gun?" "Yah." 'Test it." He heard it puff. "Good," he said, and pitched his own gun away. He heard it splash. Car lights were settling all around them. Matt swam toward the sound of Laney's shot until he bumped into her. He took her arm and whispered, "Stay close." They waded toward shore. He could feel her shivering. The water was cold, but when they stood up the wind was colder. "What happened to your gun?" "I threw it away. My whole purpose in life is being scared, isn't it? Well, I can't get scared with a gun in my hand." They stumbled onto the grass. White lights surrounded them at ground level, faintly blurred by the lifting mist. Others hovered overhead, spotlights casting a universal glow over tne park. In that light men showed as running black silhouettes. A car settled on the water behind them, gently as a leaf. me through to the Head," A said Major Chin. He rested at ease in the back seat of his car. The car sat a foot above the water on a small duck pond in Parlette Park, supported on its ground-effect air cushion. In such a position it was nearly invulnerable to attack. "Sir? We've caught a stolen car... Yes sir, it must have been stolen, it landed the moment we flew over to investigate. Went down like a falling elevator... It was flying straight toward the Hospital. I imagine we're about two miles southwest of you. They must have abandoned the car immediately after landing it on a duck pond... Yes, sir, very professional. The car ran into a hedge and just stayed there, trying to butt its way through on autopilot. License number B-R-G-Y... No sir, nobody in it, but we've surrounded the area. They won't get through... no sir, nobody's seen them yet. They may be in the trees. But we'U smoke them out." A puzzled expression chased itself across his smooth round face. "Yes, sir," he said, and signed off. He thought about directing the search by beltphone, but he had no further orders to give. All around him were the lights of police cars. The search pattern was fixed. When someone foimd something, he'd call. But what had the Head meant by that last remark? "Don't be surprised if you don't find anyone." His eyes narrowed. The car a decoy, on autopilot? But what would that accomplish? Another car flying in above him. This empty car to hold his attention while the other got through. He used the beltphone. "Carson, you there? Lift your car. out of there. Up to a thousand feet. Turn off your lights and hover and see what you can pick up on infrared. Stay there until we call off the search." It was some time before he found out how badly he'd missed the mark. # # galling Major Chin," said Doheny, hovering one hundred feet above Parlette Park. Controlled excitement tinged his voice with the thrill of the chase.  "Sir? I've got an infrared spot just leaving the pond. Could be two people; this fog is messing up my image... Western shore. They're out now, moving toward where all the men They're there, I swear it... Okay okay, but if they aren't there then something's wrong with my infrascope -- sir... Yes, sir." Annoyed but obedient, Doheny settled back and watched the dim red spot merge with the bigger spot that was a car motor. That tears it, he thought; that makes them police, IP whether they happen to be real or not. He saw the larger infrared source move away, leaving behind a second source smer than a car but comfortably bigger than one man. That jerked him alert, and he moved to the window to check. It was there, all right, and -- He lost interest and returned to the intrascope. The cloverleaf-shaped source was still there, not moving, the right color to be four unconscious men. A man-sized source separated itabandoned car, moved toward the cloverleaf source. Seconds later there was pandemonium. G asping, wheezing, running for their lives, they pelted out of Parlette Park and into a wide, well lighted village walk. Matt gripped Laney's wrist as they ran, so that she couldn't "forget about him" and wander off on her own. As they reached the walk Laney pulled back on his arm. "Okay. We can -- relax now." "How far -- to the Hospital?" "'Bout -- two miles." Ahead of them the white lights of Implementation cars faded behind a lighted dome of fog as they chased an empty car on autopilot. A yellow glow touched the fading far end of the walk: the lights of the Hospital. The walk was a rectangular pattern of red brick, luxuriously wide, with great spreading chestnut trees planted down the middle in a pleasantly uneven row. Street lights along the sides illuminated old and individualistic houses. The chestnuts swayed and sang shrilly in the wind. The wind blew the still-thinning fog into curls and streamers; it cut steel-cold through wet clothes and wet skin to reach meat and marrow. "We've got to get some clothes," said Matt. "We'll meet someone. We're bound to. It's only nine." "How could those crew stand it? Swimming!" "The water was hot. Probably they had a sauna bath waiting somewhere. I wish we did." "We should have taken that car." "Your power wouldn't have hidden us. At night they couldn't see your face in a car window. They'd have seen a stolen car, and they'd have bathed it in sonics, which is just what they must be doing now." "And why did you insist on stripping that policeman? And having got the damn suit, why did you throw it away?" "For the Mist Demons' sake, Matt! Will you trust me?" "Sorry. We could either of us use that coat." 'It's worth it. Now they'll be looking for one man in an Implementation uniform. Hey! In front of me, quick!" A square of light had appeared several houses down. Matt stepped in front of her and stooped, hands on knees, so she could use his shoulder as a gun rest. It had worked on four police in Parlette Park. It worked now. A crew couple appeared in the light. They turned and waved to their hosts, turned again and moved down the steps. hunching slightly against the wind. The closing door cut the light from them and left them as dim moving shadows. As they touched the brick they crossed the flat trajectories of two hunting slivers. Matt and Laney stripped them and left them propped against a garden hedge for the sun to find. "Thank the Mist Demons' said Matt. He was still shivering inside the dry clothes. Laney was already thinking ahead. "We'll stick with the houses as far as we can. These houses give off a lot of infrared. They'll screen us. Even if a car does spot us, he'U have to drop and question us to be sure we're not crew." "Good. What happens when we run out of houses?" L aney didn't answer for a long time. Matt didn't press her. Finally she said, "Matt, there's something I'd better tell you." Again he didn't press her. "As soon as we get through the wall... if we get through the wall... I'm going to the vivarium. You don't have to come along, but I've got to go." "Won't that be the first thing they expect?" "Probably." "Then we'd better not. Let's hunt down Polly first. We ought to keep the noise down as long as possible. Once your Sons of Earth come charging out, assuming we get that far, those doors will drop right away. In fact, if we -- " At this point he glanced over at her and stopped. Laney was looking straight ahead. Her face was hard and masklike. So was her voice, deliberately hard. "That's why I'm telling you now. I'm going to the vivarium. That's why I'm here." She seemed about to break off; then she went on in a rush. "That's why I'm here, because the Sons of Earth are in there and I'm one of them. Not because you need me, but because they need me. I need you to get me in. Otherwise I'd be trjg it alone." "I see," said Matt. He was about to go on, but -- no, he couldn't say that. He'd leave himself wide open to be slapped down, and in her mood Laney would do it. Instead he said, "What about Polly's big secret?" "Millard Parlette knows it too. He seemed eager to talk. If he isn't, Lydia will get it out of him anyway." "So you don't need Polly any more." "That's right. And if you've got the idea I'm here for love of you, you can forget that too. I'm not trying to be boorish. Matt, or cruel either. I just want you to know where you stand. Otherwise you'll be counting on .me to make intelligent decisions. "You're transportation. Matt. We need each other to get in. Once we're inside I'll go straight to the vivarium, and you can do whatever you have to to stay alive." For some time they walked in silence, arm in arm, a crew couple strolling home along a distance too short to use a car. Other crew appeared from time to time. Mostly they walked quickly, bent against the wind, and they ignored Matt and Laney and each other in their hurry IF to get out of the cold. Once a good dozen men and women, varying from merely high to falling-own drunk, poured into the street ahead of them, inarched four houses down and began banging on the door. Matt and Laney watched as the door opened and the partygoers poured in. And suddenly Matt felt intensely lonely. He gripped Laney's arm a little tighter, and they went on. The brick walk swung away to the left, and they followed it around. Now there were no houses on the right. Just trees, high and thick, screening the Hospital from view. The barren defense perimeter must be just the other side. "Now what?" "We foUow it," said Laney. "I think we ought to go in along the trapped forest." S he waited for him to ask why, but he didn't. She told him anyway. "The Sons of Earth have been planning an attack on the Hospital for decades. We've been waiting for the right time, and it never came. One of the things we planned was to go in along the edge of the trapped woods. The woods themselves are so full of clever widgets that the guards on that side probably never notice it." "You hope." "You bet." "What do you know about the Hospital defenses??" "Well, you ran into most of them last night. A good thing you had the sense to stay out of the trapped woods. There are two electric-eye rings. You saw the wall; guns and spotlights all over it. Castro probably put extra men on it tonight, and we can bet he closed off the access road. Usually they leave it open, but it's easy enough to close the electric-eye ring and shut off power to the gate." "And inside the wall?" "Guards. Matt, we've been assuming that all these men will be badly trained. The Hospital's never been under direct attack. We're out numbered -- " "Yes, we are, aren't we?" "But we'll be dealing with guards who don't really believe there's anything to guard against." "What about traps? We can't fight machinery." "Practically none in the Hospital -- at least, not usually. There are things Castro could set up in an emergency. In the slowboats there could be anything; we just don't know. But we won't be going near the slowboats. Then there are those damn vibrating doors." Matt nodded, a swift vicious jerk of his chin. "Those doors surprised us all. We should have been warned." "By who?" "Never you mind. Stop a second... Right. This is the place. We go through here." "Laney." "Yah? There are pressure wires in the dirt. Step on the roots only as we go through." "What happened Friday night?" She turned back to look at his face, trying to read what he meant. She said, "I happened to think you needed me." Matt nodded slowly. "You happened to think right." "Okay. That's what I'm here for. The Sons of Earth are mostly men. Sometimes they get horribly depressed. Always planning, never actually fighting, never winning when they do, and always wondering if they aren't doing just what Implementation wants. They can't even brag except to each other, because not all the colonists are in our side. Then, sometimes, I can make them feel like men again." "I think I need my ego boosted about now." "What you need right now, brother, is a good scare. Just keep thinking scared and you'll be all right. We go through here..." "I just thought of something." "What's that?" "If we'd stayed here this afternoon we'd have saved all this trouble." . "Will you come on? And don't forget to step on the roots!" xxm D arkness covered most of Mount Lookitthat. The crew never knew it. The lights of Alpha Plateau burned undimmed. Even in the houses along the AlphaBeta cliff, with a view across Beta Plateau toward the distant, clustered town lights of Gamma and lota ... tonight that view was blanked by fog, and who was to know that the clustered lights were dark? In the colonist regions there was fear and fury, but it couldn't touch Alpha Plateau. No real danger threatened. On Gamma and Iota there were no hospitals where patients might die in dark operating theaters. No cars would crash without street lights. Spoiling meat in butcher-shop freezers would cause no famine; there were the fruit and nut forests, the crops, the herds. But there was fear and fury. Was something wrong, up there where aM power originated? Or was it a prank, a punishment, an experiment... some deliberate act of Implementation? You couldn't travel without lights. Most people stayed where they were, wherever they were. They bedded down where they could; for colonists it was near bedtime anyway. And they waited for the lights to come back. T hey would give no trouble, Jesus Pietro thought. If danger came tonight, it would not come from down there. Equally certain, the Sons of Earth would attack, though they only numbered five. Harry Kane would not leave most of his men to die. Whatever he could do, he would do it, regardless of risk. And Major Chin's fugitive had escaped, was loose two miles from the Hospital, wearing a police unifornii. And because he had escaped, because he was alone, because no man had seen him clearly... it had to be Matt Keller. Five dossiers to match five fugitives. Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood, these were old friends, the most dangerous of the Sons of Earth. Elaine Mattson and Lydia Hancock and Matthew Keller, these he had come IF to know by heart durm; the long hours following the break this afternoon. He could have recognized any of them a mile away, or told them their life stories. The slimmest dossier was Matt Keller's: two and a half skimpy pages. Mining engineer    not much of a family man... few love affairs...  no evidence he had ever joined the Sons of Earth. Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent...  If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose... Jesus Pietro worried. His last sip of coffee suddenly tasted horrible, and he pushed the cup away. He noted with relief that the mist seemed to be clearing. On his desk were a stack of five dossiers, and a sixth all alone, and a mercy-bullet gun. I n the lights of the Hospital the sky glowed pearl gray. The wall was a monstrous mass above them, a sharp black shadow cutting across the lighted sky. They heard regular footsteps overhead. They'd crawled here side by side, close enough to get in each others way. They'd broad-jumped the electric eye barriers. Matt first, then Laney making her move while Matt stared up at the wall and willed nobody to see her. So far nobody had. "We could get around to the gate," said Matt. "But if Castro's cut off the power we can't get it open. No, there's a better way." "Show me." "We may have to risk a little excitement... Here it is." "What?" 'The fuse. I wasn't sure it'd be here." "Fuse?" "See, a lot of Implementation is pure colonist. We have to be careful who we approach, and we've lost good men who talked to the wrong person, but it paid off. I hope." "Someone planted a bomb for you?" "I hope so. There are only two Sons of Earth in Implementation, and either or both of them could be ringers." She fulpbled in the big, loose pockets of her mud-spattered crewish finery. "Bitch didn't carry a lighter. Matt?" "Lessee. Here." She took the lighter, then spoke deliberately. "If they see the light we're done for." She crouched over the wire. Matt crouched over her, to shield the light with his body. As he did so he looked up. Two bumps showed on the straight black shadow of the wall. They moved. Matt started to whisper. Stop! Yellow light flared under him, and it was too late. The heads withdrew. Laney shook his arm. "Run! Along the wall!" He followed the pull. "Now flat!" He landed beside her on his belly. There was a tremendous blast. Metal bits sang around them, raising tiny pings against the wall. Something bit a piece from Matt's ear, and he slapped at it like a wasp sting. He didn't have time to curse. Laney jerked him to his feet, and they ran back the way they had come. There was confused shouting on the wall, and Matt looked up to meet a hundred eyes looking down. Then suddenly the area was bright as hell. "Here!" Laney dropped to her knees, slapped Us hand onto her ankle and crawled. Matt heard mercybullets spattering around his ankles as he went in after her. On the outside the hole was just big enough to crawl through on hands and knees. The bomb must have been a shaped charge. But the wall was thick, and the hole was smaller on the inside. They emerged on their bellies, with scratches. Here too was light, too bright, making Matt's eyes water. StartHngJy, there were pits all in a row in the dirt along this side of the wall, and over the cordite stink was the smell of rich moist new earth. "Bombs," he said wonderingly. Pressure bombs, set off by the explosion, originally intended to explode under an invader dropping from the top of the wall. Bombs, meant to kill. "I'm flattered," he whispered. "Shut up!" Laney turned to glare, and in the lurid artificial light he saw her eyes change. Then she turned and ran. She was beyond reach before Matt had time to react. Feet pounded all around them, all running at top speed toward the hole in the wall. They were surrounded! Amazingly, nobody tried to stop Laney. But he saw one jerk to a stop, then go pelting after her. And nobody tried to stop Matt. He was invisible enough, but he'd lost Laney. Without him she had nothing but the gun... and he didn't know how to reach Polly. He stood there, lost. F rowning, Harry Kane inspected hands which dn't match. He'd seen transplantees before, but never such a patchwork man as Millard Parlette. Lydia said, "It isn't artificial, is it?" "No. But it's not a normal transplant job either." "He should be coming around." "I am," said Millard Parlette. Harry started. "You can talk?" "Yes." Parlette had a voice like a squeaky door, altered by a wouldbe-musical crew lilt, slurred by the effects of a sonic stunner. He spoke slowly, consciously enunciating. "May I have a glass of water?" "Lydia, get him some water." "Here." The stocky virago supported the old man's head with her arm and fed him the water in small sips. Harry studied the man. They'd propped him against a wall in the vestibule. He hadn't moved since then and probably couldn't; but the muscles of his face, which had been slack and rubbery, now reflected a personality. "Thank you," he said in a stronger voice. "You shouldn't have shot me, you know." "You have things to tell us, Mr. Parlette." ,# IF "You're Harry Kane. Yes, I have things to tell you. And then ##I want to make a deal of sorts with you." "I'm open to deals. What do you have in mind?' "You'll imderstand when I finish. May I start with the recent ramrobot package? This will be somewhat technical -- " "Lydia, get Jay." Lydia Hancock quietly withdrew. "I'll want him to hear anything technical. Jay is our genius." "Jay hawk Hood? Don't tell me he's here too?" "You seem to know a good deal about us." "I do. I've been studying the Sons of Earth for longer than you've been alive. Jayhawk Hood has a fine mind. By all means let us wait for him." "You've been studying us, have you? Why?" "I'll try to make that clear to you, Kane. It will take time. Has the situation on Mount Lookitthat ever struck you as being very artificial, fragile?" "Phut. If you'd been trying to change it as long as I have, you wouldn't think so." "Seriously, Kane. Our society depends entirely on its technology. Change the technology and you change the society. Most especially you change the ethics." "That's ridiculous. Ethics are ethics." T he old man's hand twitched. "Let me speak, Kane." Harry Kane was silent. "Consider the cotton gin," said Millard Parlette. "That invention made it economically feasible to grow cotton in quantity in the southern United States, but not in the northern states. It brought slaves in great numbers to one section of that nation while slavery died out in another. The result was a problem in racial tolerance which lasted for centuries. "Consider feudal armor. The ethics of chivalry were based on the fact that armor was a total defense against anything which wasn't similarly armored. The clothyard arrow, and later gunpowder, ended chivalry and made a new ethic absolutely necessary. "Consider war as a tool of diplomacy." Millard Parlette stopped to gasp for breath. After a moment he went on. "It was, as you know. Then came poison gas, and fission bombs, and fission-fusion bombs, and a possible fission-fusion-radiocobalt bomb. Each invention made war less and less useful for imposing one's wiM, more and more randomly destructive, until nationalism itself became to dangerous to be tolerated, and the United Nations on Earth became more powerful than any possible minority alliance of nations could ever possibly be." "Consider the settling of the Belt. A solely technological development, yet it created the wealthiest population in the system in a region which absolutely required new ethics, where stupidity automatically carries its own death penalty." The old man stopped again; he was exhausted. (#T'm no historian," said Harry. A "But morals are morals, at's unethical here and now is unethical anywhere, any time." "Kane, you're wrong. Is it ethical to execute a man for theft?" "Of course." "Did you know that there was once a vastly detailed science of rehabilitation for criminals? It was a branch of psychology, naturally, but it was by far the largest such branch. By the middle of century twenty-one, nearly two-thirds of all criminals coiild eventually be released as cured." "That's silly. Why go to all that trouble when the organ banks must have been crying for -- oh. I see. No organ banks." The old man was finally smiling, showing perfect new white teeth. Sparkling teeth and keen gray eyes: the real Millard Parlette showed behind the cracked, wrinkled, loose rubber mask of his face. Except that the teeth couldn't be his, thought Harry. Nuts to that. "Go on," he said. "One day a long time ago, I realized that the ethical situation on Mount Lookitthat was fragile. It was bound to change some day, and suddenly, what with Earth constantly bombarding us with new discoveries. I decided to be ready." There were footsteps on the stairs, running; Lydia and Hood burst in. Harry Kane introduced Hood to Millard Parlette as if they were already allies. Hood took his cue and shook hands formally, wincing inside himself because Parlette's hand still felt like something dead. "Keep that hand," said Millard Parlette. "Examine it." "We already did." "Your conclusions?" "Ask you about it." "Apparently Earth is using biological engineering for medical purposes. There were four gifts in the ramrobot package, along with complete instructions for their care and use. One was a kind of fungus-virus symbiot. I dipped my little finger in it. Now the muck is replacing my skin." "Replacing -- ? Sorry," said Hood. It was difficult not to interrupt Parlette, his speech was so irritatingly slow. "That's, right. First it dissolves the epidermis, leaving only the living ' cells beneath. Then it somehow stimuProbably the virus component does that. You may know that a virus does not reproduce; it compels its host to produce more virus, by inserting its own reproductive chains into the host cells." "You may have a permanent guest," said Hood. "No. The virus dies after a short time. Any virus does that, 'fhen the fungus starves." "Wonderful! The muck moves in a ring, leaving new skin behind!" Hood considered. "Earth really came through this time. But what happens when it reaches your eyes?" "I don't know. But Aere were no special instructions. I offered myself as a test subject because I could use a new pelt. It's even supposed to get rid of scar tissue. It does." "That's quite an advance," said Harry. IF "But you don't see why it's important. Kane, I showed you this first because I happened to bring it along. The others will jolt you." Parlette let his head droop to relieve the strain on his neck. "I don't know what animal gave birth to the second gift, but it now resembles a human liver. In the proper environment it will behave like a human liver." H arry's eyes went wide and blank. Lydia made a startled hissing sound. And Millard Parlette added, "The proper environment is, of course, the environment of a human liver. They have not been tested because they are not fully grown. We can expect disadvantages due to the lack of nervous connections -- " "Keller told the truth. Little hearts and livers!" Harry exclaimed. "Parlette, was the third gift an animal to replace the human heart?" "Yes. Nearly all muscle. It reacts to adrenalin by speeding up, but once again the lack of nervous -- " dance. He grabbed Lydia Hancock, spun her around and around. Hood watched, grinning foolishly. Kane abruptly released her and dropped to his knees in front of Parlette. "What's the fourth?" "A rotifer." "A... rotifer?" "It lives as a symbiot in the human bloodstream. It does things the human body will not do for itself. Kane, it has often struck me that evolution as a process leaves something to be desired. Evolution is finished with a man once he is too old to reproduce. Thus there is no genetic program to keep him alive longer than that. Only inertia. It takes enormous medical knowledge to compen -- " "What does it do, this rotifer?" "It fights disease. It cleans fatty deposits from the veins and arteries. It dissolves blood clots. It is too big to move into the small capillaries, and it dies on contact with air. Thus it will not impede necessary clotting. It secretes a kind of gum to patch weak points in the walls of the arteries and larger capillaries, which is very, very reassuring to a man of my age. "But it does more than that. It acts as a kind of catch-all gland, a supplementary pituitary. It tends to maintain the same glandular balance a man is supposed to have at around age thirty. It will not produce male and female hormones, and it takes its own good time disposing of excess adrenalin, but otherwise it maintains the balance. Or so say the instructions." Harry Kane sank back on his heels. "Then the organ banks a are done. Obsolete. No wonder you tried to keep it secret." "Don't be silly." "What?" Parlette opened his mouth, but Harry rode him down. "I tell you the organ banks are done for! Listen, Parlette. The skin mold replaces skin grafting and does it better. The heart animal and the liver animal replace heart and liver transplants. And the rotifer keeps everything else from getting sick in the first place! What more do you want?' Several things. A kidney beast, lor example. Or " "Quibbling." How would you replace a lung? A lung destroyed by nicotine addiction?" TT ood said, "He's right. Those four ramrobot gifts are nothing but a signpost. How do you repair a smashed foot, a bad eye, a baseball finger?" He was pacing now, in short jerky steps. You would need several hundred different artifacts of genetic engineering to make the organ banks really obsolete. All the same -- " "All right, cut," said Harry Kane, and Hood was silent. "ParIette, I jumped the gun. You're right. But rU give you something to think about. Suppose every colonist on Mount Lookitthat knew only the facts about the ramrobot package. Not Hood's analysis, and not yours; just the truth. What then?" Parlette was smiling. He shouldn't have been, but his white teeth gleamed evenly in the light, and the smile was not forced. "They would assume the organ banks were obsolete. They would confidently expect Implementation to disband." "And when Implementation showed no sign of disbanding, they'd , revolt! Every colonist on Mount Lookitthat! Could the Hospital stand against that? "You see the point, Kane. I am inclined to think the Hospital could stand against any such attack, though I would not like to gamble on it. But I am sure we could lose half the population of this planet in the blood bath, win or lose." "TTien -- you've already thought of this." Parlette's face twisted. His hands fluttered aimlessly, and his feet jumped against the floor, as the effects of the sonic gave up their hold on him. "Do . you think me a fool, Harry Kane? I never made that mistake about you. I first heard of the ramrobot package six months ago, when the ramrobot sent out its maser message. I knew immediately that the present crew rule over the Plateau was doomed." IF Dear Editor: I notice that many of the letters to the editor are sent in by teenagers. I don't know if this is how it is all of the time or not, but I would imagine you have quite a number of young readers. I am interested in knowing what your goals are in publishing this particular magazine, To teach, (What?) To make people think? (About what?) I have been acquainted with some science fiction in the past, but I had no idea there was so much ridiculous fantasy. There is such a thing as a perverted imagination, and I believe your October # issue (which my son retrieved from someone's trash can) is an unqualified example. Someone wrote you, "Make us think... Teach us." This seems to me to be a tremendous challenge. If that is your goal, perhaps you should reconsider whut you are teaching, how are you shaping, young minds to think? I refer specifically to a story entitled "Conqueror" by Eisenberg. There is nothing in this story even remotely connected to good strong positive thinking -- the type that would help a young person adopt worthwhile values. In fact, I am sure it would push him the other way. In reference to some of the other articles I would say that no alert teen-aiger who is eager to improve his knowledge needs hairy monsters to encourage hiin to think straight -- even about possible events; why waste valuable time on the impossibly fantastic? I find it hard to believe that any intelligent, educated person who is aware of the problems already existing in our world today would deliberately set out to weaken and demoralize our youth. They happen to be up-coming leaders, many of them. Parents who are interested in bringup good strong Americans are having a tough time of it, and you fellows are not helping by publishing this kind of material. Is it the money you need? It isn't worth it, believe me. Why don't you try to think of something that will help young people use their imaginations to face some of the realities of life. I don't know of any true scientists or eduoators who would uphold you in what you are printing. Of course, you attract a certain kind of audience besides inexperienced teenagers, and if you did change your format, a dozen other publishers would take your place. Maybe that's the way you look at it. You're thinking all right enough -- negatively. In your Foundation Trilogy which was advertised on the back cover I note a faint parallel of characters to those found in a great book entitled The Holy Bible. (It has been said that every worthwhile thing known to the human race has its counterfeit.) However, the solution dangerous poweivmonger spoken of in the Bible is an absorbing one and will make you think. Positively. -- Mrs. Rhoda Wills, Box #, College Station, Berrien Springs, Michigan #. # We're pretty sure we do make some of the young minds think. Not quite so sure about some of the old ones. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: Just finished reading To Serve the Masters in the September issue of Worlds of If maigazine. It's hard to ibelieve that this is a first time for this author. Hope to see more work by Mr. Chapdelaine. SF can sure use some new writers. Please continue the fantasy type stories. There are not too many of these any more -- Vance E. James, # #th St., Mason City, Iowa #.    Dear Editor: This is my first letter to a science-fiction magazine, and I'd appreciate you reading it as I think it contains some worthwhile comments, both in complimentary and critical forms. Your October issue was superb; better than that, it was uniquely original, and that's difficult for anybody to say about anything in today's copy-cat society. Why do I think it so worthy of such compliments? Because of the short-stories Conqueror and Mu Panther, mainly. They were. in every visual and emotional sense, stories about real men whose rugged actions and keen thinking bring back a genuine feeling of masculinity, a thing sorely missed by the longhaired and soft-eyed generation of my time, of which I am a part. Whether you know it or not, aiming entertainment at the virile and imaginative male today is the very best kind of business, and you will reap the greater because of it. I sincerely hope you keep your manversus-animal type format going, especially with stories like Mu Panther. That was exceptionally unique. Enough compliments, though. Complaints? Several, one being in the form of a suggestion, the other an outright jab at your already bursting pride. #.) Go bi-monthly (please, no groans from the audience; I meant this as a suggestion, not as criticism). I feel you're prone to printing junk as well , as riches, as Septemb's issue will amply testify. Maybe this way, going bimonthly, you'll be able to print just the good stuff. Please think about it. #.) What has already been stated, that of September's lousy contents, and I mean all of it. If you thought I'd spend sixty cents on that #c, then you're out of your gurple-itree I What a waste, and I am forced to swallow some choice but reluctant words. So you see, going bi-monthly isn't so bad. I'm sure you'd be much better off . Maybe you'd lose a few subscribers which is almost certain. On the other hand, think of all the man animalnuts you'd be gaining in return -- like me for instance! -- James Koval, # Balfour St., Allen Park, Mich. #. OO IP A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Interna tiona Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stbries being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! riv Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. # Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose my check or money order for:  n # issues for # Q # issues for # Name Adcfress City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether  new or  renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwoiner Smith The Big Time Fritx Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demshed Man Alfred Bester Oo I Wake or Dream? 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Satisfaction guaranteed. Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by A. Bertram Chandler by John Brunner by Robert Silverberg by Larry Niven by Jerry Juhl by Frederik Pohl by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol #, No. #. Main Office; #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All right, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the QuIoa Company, New York. N.Y. # IF  Editorial For a Festival of Science Fiction A s this issue appears, the city of Paris will he host to a largeiscale exposition of science fiction. Held at the Musetun of Decorative Arts on rue de Eivoli, created by Harold Szeeman, director of the Berne Kunsthalle, and produced with the prestigious aid of the louvre, this science-fiction exposition of some three thousand pieces of art, manuscripts, publications and other incxinabula covers everything from by way of Buck Rogers, The Skylark of Space and Ed Emshwiller (who painted the cover for its handsome program boxxjhure). Sounds like fun? We think so; and also fun, we thought, was the annual Festival Intemazionale del FUm di Fantascienza, held every July in the Italian city of Trieste; certainly a science-fiction film festival is a good idea, and the Triestinos do a splendid job of organizing one... But that's Europe. Question on our minds at this moment is. Why can't we have this sort of thing in the United States? G enerally speaking, this sort of thing is organized with the sponsorship of some large institution -- the tourist bureau of a city; a university; a museum; an academy of arts or sciences. It seems to us that the United States is well endowed with all these things. It also seems to us that, since American science fiction is without much question the world leader by any standards you care to invoke -- the best writers, the most publications, the best organized conventions and conferences, whatever -- we owe the whole world of science fiction, and incidentally ourselves, at least some serious consideration of having our own festival. What it needs to get such a project off the ground is, say, the participation of a good-sized school We can think of any number that would be appropriate. There's M.I.T., with a highly active science-fiction fan club already on the premises (and anyway, living in a space-age, computerized environment that resembles science fiction to begin with). There's Syracuse University, already proudly maintaining the largest depository of science-fiction manuscripts and paiers in the world. There's Louisiana State University, which last year did something like it, with its month-long festival of the Year #. There are in fact, at least a score of major schools all over the country which have the facilities and appear to have the interest. A week of showing of science-fiction films... a gallery of sciencefiction art... panel discussions amonlg science-fiction writers scientists and other useful and intested parties... special features od lib. Soimd like a good idea? Or would you rather go on having to cross the Atlantic for this sort of thing? IF  Serial Illustrated He had fled Mankind because he had been destroyed in its service. Now if was time to i -- and suffer --  againi M uller knew the maze quite well by this time. He understood its snares and its delusions, its pitfalls, its deadly traps. He had lived within it for nine years. He still moved warily. Three or four times already he had learned that his knowledge of the maze, while adequate and workable, was hot wholly complete. At least once he had come right to the edge of destruction, pulling back only by some improbable bit of luck just before the unexpected fountaining of an energy flare ent a stream of raw power boiling across his path. Muller had charted that flare and fifty others; but as he moved through the city-sized labyrinth he knew there was no guarantee he would not meet an uncharted one. Overhead the sky was darkening. The deep, rich green of late afternoon was giving way to the black of night. Muller paused a moment in his hunting to look at the pattern of the stars. Even that was becoming familiar now. He had chosen his own constellations on this desolate world, searching the heavens for arrangements of brightness that suited his peculiarly harsh, bitter taste. Now they appeared: the Dagger, the Back, the Shaft, the Ape, the Toad. In the forehead of the Ape flickered the small, grubby star that Muller believed was the sun of Earth. He was not sure, because he had destroyed his chart tank after landing here on Lemnos; somehow, though, he felt that that minor flrebaU must be Sol. The same dim star formed the left eye of the Toad. There were times when Muller told himself that Sol would not be visible in the sky of this world ninety light-years from Earth, but at other times he was quite convinced. Beyond the Toad lay the constellation that Muller had named Libra, the Scales. Three small moons glittered here. The air was thin but breathable; Muller had long ago ceased to notice that it hdd too much nitrogen, not enough oxygen. Gripping the butt of his gun tightly, he walked slowly through the alien city, searching for his dinner. He had six-months' supply of food stored in a radiation locker half a kilometer away, but yet each night he went hunting so that he could replace at once whatever he drew from his cache. It was a way of devouring the time. And he needed that cache, undepleted, against the day wlm the maze might cripple or paralyze him. His keen eyes scanned the angled streets ahead. Above him rose the walls, screens, traps and confusions of the maze within which he lived He looked in all directions. The triple moonlight analyzed and dissected his shadow, splitting it into reduplicated images that danced and sprawled befor him. The mass detector mounted over his left ear emitted a high-pitched sound. That told Muller that it had picked up the thermals of an animal in the #-# kilogram range. He had the detector programmed to scan in three horizons, of which this was the middle one, the food-beast range. It would also report to him on the proximity of #-# kilogram creatures -- the teeth-beast range -- and on the emanations of beasts over # kilograms -- the big-beast range. The small ones had a way of going quickly for the throat, and the great ones were careless tramplers; Muller hunted those in between and avoided the others. N ow he crouched, readying his weapon. His only concern in hunting was to strike from a secure, well-surveyed point so that in his concentration on his prey he wouldn't be victim to some more dangerous creature. With the kickstaff mounted on the heel of his left boot he probed the wall behind him, making certain IF that it would not open and engulf him. It was solid. Good. Muller edged himself backward until his back touched the cool, polished stone. His left knee rested on the faintly yielding pavement. He sighted along the barrel of his gun. The mass detector continued to whine, indicating that the beast was remaining within a hundred-meter radius; the pitch rose slightly from moment to moment as the thermals grew stronger. Muller was in no hurry. He was at one side of a vast plaza bordered by glassy curving partitions, and anything that emerged from those gleaming crescents would be an easy shot. Muller was hunting tonight in Zone E of the maze, the fifth sector out from the heart, and one of the most dangerous. He rarely went past the relatively innocuous Zone D, but some daredevil mood had prodded him into E this evening. Since finding his way into the maze, he had never risked G or H again at all and had been as far out as F only twice. He came to E perhaps five times a year. To his right the converging lines of a shadow appeared jutting from one of the curving walls. The song of the mass detector reached into the upper end of the pitch spectrum for an animal of this size. The smallest moon, Atropos, swinging giddily through the sky, changed the shadow pattern; the hnes no longer converged, but now one bar of blackness cut across the other two. The shadow of a snout, Muller knew. An instant later he saw his victim. The animal was the size of a large dog, gray of muzzle and tawny of body, hump-shouldered, ugly, spectacularly carnivorous. For his first few years here Muller had avoided hunting the carnivores, thinking that their meat would not be tasty. He had gone instead after the local equivalent of cows and sheep -- mild-mannered ungulates that drifted blithely through the maze cropping the grasses in the garden places. Only when that bland meat palled did he go after one of the fanged, clawed creatures that harvested the herbivores, and to his surprise their flesh was excellent Ho watched the animal emerge into the plaza. Its long snout twitched. Muller could hear the sniffling sounds from where he crouched. Confidently, swaggeringly, the carnivore strode across the sleek pavement of the plaza, its unretracted claws clicking and scraping. Muller fined his beam down to needle aperture and took thoughtful aim. The gun was proximity-responsive and would score a hit automatically, but Muller always keyed in the manual sighting. He and the gun had different goals. The gun was concerned it was easier to do his own aiming than to try to convince the weapon that a bolt through the tender, juicy hump would deprive him of the tastiest cut. The gun, seeking the simplest target, would lance through that hump to the spine and bring the beast down, but Muller favored more finesse. He chose a target six inches forward from the hump: the place where the spine entered the skull. One shot did it. The animal toppled heavily. Muller went toward it as rapidly as he dared. Quickly he carved away the messentials --  limbs, head, belly -- and sprayed a seal around the raw slab of flesh he cut from the hump. He sliced a hefty steak from the hin d q u a rters, too, and strapped both parcels to his Moulders. Then he swung around, searching for the zigzagging road that was the only safe entry to the core of the maze. In less than an hour he could be at his lair in the heart of Zone A. He was halfway across the plaza when he heard an unfamiliar sound. P ausing, he looked back. Three small loping creatures were heading toward  carcass he had abandoned. But the scrabbling of the scavengers was not what he had heard. It had been the low rumbling sound overlaid by a hoarse throb in the middle frequmdes, too prdonged to be die roaring of one of the large animals. It was a sound Muller had not heard before. No: a sound he had not heard here before... It registmd somewhere in his memory banks. That double boom, slowly dopplering into the distance --  what was it? The sound had come from over his right shoulder, so it seemed. Muller kxtod there and saw only the triple cascade of the maze's secondary wall, rising in tier upon glittering amber tier. Above that wall? He saw the star-brightened sky: the Ape, the Toad, the Scales. Muller remembered the sound now. A ship; a starship, cutting out of warp onto ion drive to make a planetary landing. The boom of the expel! the throb of the deceleraticm tubes, passing over the city. It was a sound he had not heard in nine years, since his own self-exile cm Lemnos had begun. So he was having visitors. Casual intruders, or had he been traced? What did they want? Anger blazed through him. He had had enough of them and their wcx'ld; why did they have to trouble him here? He wanted nothing to do with Earth or Earthmen. They would not reach him, he decided. They would die in the maze and year accumulation that lay strewn in the outer corridors. And if they succeeded in entering, as he had done -- Well, then they would have to contend with him. Muller smiled grimly, adjusted the meat on his back, and returned his full concentration to the job of penetrating the maze. Soon he was within Tjoqq C, and safe. He reached his lair. He stowed his meat He prepared his dinner. Pain hammered at his skull. After nine years he was no longer alone on this world. They had soiled his solitude. Once again, Muller felt betrayed. He wanted nothing more from Earth than privacy, now, and even that they would not give him. But they would suffer if they managed to reach him within the maze. If. II T he ship had erupted from warp a little late, almost in the outer fringes of Lemnos' atmosphere. Charles Boardman disliked that. He demanded the highest possible stanIP dards of performance from himself, and he expected everyone about him to keep the same standards. Especially pilots. Boardman thumbed the screen to life, and the cabin wall blossomed with a vivid image of the planet below. Scarcely any clouds swathed its surface; he had a clear view through the atmosphere. In the midst of a broad plain was a series of corrugations that even at a height of a hundred kilometers were sharply outlined. Boardman turned to the young man beside him and said, "There you are, Ned. The labyrinth of Lemnos. And Dick Muller right in the middle of it!" Ned Rawlins pursed his lips. "So big? It must be hundreds of kilometers across!" "What you're seeing is the outer embankment. The maze itself is surrounded by a concentric ring of earthen walls five meters high and nearly a thousand kilometers in outer circumference. But -- " "Yes, I know," Rawlins burst in "That dark spot within the outer walls -- is that the city itself?" Boardman nodded. "That's the inner maze. Twenty, thirty, kilometers in diameter, and God knows how where we'll find Muller." "If we can get inside." When we get inside." "Yes. Yes. Of course. When we get inside," Rawlins corrected, reddening. He flashed a quick, earnest smile. "There's no chance we won't find the entrance, is there?" "Muller did," said Boardman quietly. "He's in there." "But he's the first who got inside. Everyone else who tried failed. So why will we -- "" "There weren't many who tried," Boardman said. "Those who did weren't equipped for the problem. We'll manage, Ned. We have to." The ship swung toward the planet -- going down much too rapidly, Boardman thought, oppressed by the strains of deceleration. He hated travel, and he hated the moment of landing worst of all. But this was a trip he could not have avoided. He eased back in the webfoam cradle and blanked out the screen. Ned Rawlins was still upright, eyes glowing with excitement. How wonderful to be young, Boardman thought. Certainly the boy was strong and healthy -- and cleverer than he sometimes seemed. Boardman could not remember having been that sort of young man himself. He had the feeling of having always been on the brink of middle age -- shrewd, calculating, well organized. He was eighty, now, with almost half his lifetime behind him, and yet he could not bring himself to believe that his personality had changed in any essential way since he had turned twenty. He had learned techniques, the craft of managing men; he was wiser now; but he was not qualitatively different. Young Ned Rawline, though, was going to be another person entirely sixty-odd years from now, and very little of the callow boy in the next cradle would survive. Boardman suspected, not happily, that this very mission would be the crucible in which Ned's innocence was blasted from him. B oardman closed his eyes as the ship entered its final landing maneuvers. He felt gravity clawing at his aging flesh. Down. Down. Down. How many planetfalls had he made, loathing every one? The diplomatic life was a restless one. Christmas on Mars, Easter on one of the Centaurine worlds, the midyear feast celebrated on a stinking planet of Rigel, and now this trip, the most complex of all. Man was not made to flash from star to star like this, Boardman thought. I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds. There were heavy fleshy jowls about his throat, and pockets of extra meat here and there about his body, giving him a soft, pampered look. At little effort Boardman could have had himself streamlined to the fashionably sleek appearance of a modern man; this was an era when men a century and a quarter old could look like striplings, if they cared to. Early in his career Boardman had chosen to simulate authentic aging. Call it an investment; what he forfeited in chic he gained in status. His business was selling advice to governments, and governments preferred not to buy counsel from men who looked like boys. Boardmen had looked fifty-five years old for the last forty years, and he expected to retain that look of strong, vigorous early middle age at least another half a century. Later, he would allow time to work on him again when he entered the final phase of his career. He would take oh the whitened hair and shrunken cheek of a man of eighty, and pose as Nestor rather than as Ulysses. At the moment it was professionally useful to look only slightly out of trim, as he did. He was a short man, though he was so stocky that he easily dominated any group at a conference table. His powerful shoulders, deep chest, and long arms would have been better suited to a giant; when he stood up Boardman revealed himself as of less than middle height, but sitting down he was awesome. He found that feature useful too and had never considered altering it. An extremely tall man is better suited to command than to advise, and Boardman had never had the wish to command; he preferred a more subtle exercise of power. But a short man who looks big at a table can control empires. The business of empires is transacted sitting down. He had the look of authority. His chin was strong, his nose thick and blunt and forceful, his lips both firm and sensuous, his eyebrows immense and shaggy, black strips of fur sprouting from a massive forehead that might have awed a Neanderthal. He wore his hair long and coarse. Three rings gleamed on his fingers, one a gyroscope of platinum and rubies with duU-hued inlays of U-#. His taste in clothing was severe and conservative, running to heavy fabrics and almost medieval cuts, fii another epoch he mit have been well cast as a worldly cardinal or as an ambitious prime minister; he would have been important in any court at any time. IP He was important now. The price of Boardman's importance, though, was the turmoil of travel Soon he would land on another strange planet, where the air would smell wrong, the gravity would be a shade too strong and the sun's hue would not be right. Boardman scowled. He looked at Ned Rawlins. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old, something like that: the picture of naive young manhood, although Boardman knew that Ned was old enough to have learned more than he seemed to show. Tall, conveniently handsome without the aid of cosmetic surgery; fair hair, blue eyes, wide, mobile lips, flawless teeth. He was the son of a communications theorist, now dead, who had been one of Richard Muller's closest friends. Boardman was counting on that connection to carry them a good distance in the delicate transactions ahead. "The landing seems so slow, doesn't it?" Rawline asked. "Another minute now," Boardman said. The boy's face looked scarcely stretched by the forces acting upon them. His left cheek was drawn down slightly, that was all. It was weird to see the semblance of a sneer on that shining visage. "Here we come now," Boardman muttered and closed his eyes again. The ship closed the last gap between itself and the ground. The expellers cut out; the deceleration tubes snarled their last. There was the final awkward moment of uncertainty, then steadiness, the landing jacks gripping firmly, the roar of landing silenced. We are here, Boardman thought. Now for the maze. Now for Mr. Richard Muller. Now to see if he's become any less horrible in the past nine years. Maybe he's just like everyone el, by now. If he is, Boardman told himself, God help us all. Ill W ithin the maze MuHcr contemplated his options. In the milky green recesses of the viewing tank he could see the ship and the plastic domes that had sprouted beside it and the tiny figures of men moving about. He wished now that he had been able to find the fine control of the viewing tank; the images he received were badly out of focus. But he considered himself lucky to have the use of the tank at all. Many of the ancient instruments in this city had become useless long ago through the decay of some vital part. A surprising number had endured the eons unharmed, a tribute to the technical skill of their makers; but of these, Muller had been able to discover the function of only a few, and he operated those imperfectly. He watched the blurred figures of his fellow humans working busily and wondered what new torment they were preparing for him. He bad tried to leave no clues to his whereabouts when he fled from Earth. He had come here in a rented ship, filing a deceptive flight plan by way of Sigma Draconis. During his warp trip, of course, he had had to pass six mmiitor stations, but he had given each one a misleading simulated great-circle galactic route record. A routine comparison check of all the monitor stations would reveal tht Muller's successive announcements of location added up to nonsense but he had gambled that he would manage to complete his flight and vanish before they ran one of the regular checks. Evidently he had won that gamble, for no interceptor ships had come after him. Emerging from warp in the vicinity of Imnos, he had carried out one final evasive maneuver by leaving his ship in a parking orbit and descending by drop-capsule. A disrupter bomb, pre-programmed, had blasted the ship to molecules and sent the flicting orbits through the universe; it would take a fancy computer indeed to...calculate a probable nexus of source for those! The bomb was designed to provide fifty false vectors per.square meter of explosion surface, a .virtual guarantee that no tracer could possibly be effective within a finite span of time. Muller needed only a very short finite span -- say, sixty years. Sixty years of solitude and a peaceful, private death, that was all he asked. Had they really traced him? Muller decided that they had not. Thqy had no motive for following him. He was no fugitive who had to be brought back to justice. He was simply a man with a loathsome affliction, an abomination in the sight of his fellow mortals, and doubtless Earth felt itself well rid of him. The kindest thing he could do for his own kind was to remove himself from their midst, and he had done that as thoroughly as he could. They would hardly make an effort to come looking .for someone so odious to them. Who were these intruders, then? Archeologists, he suspected. The ruined city of Lemnos still held a magnetic, fatal fascination for them, for everyone. Muller had hoped that the risks of the maze would continue to keep men away. It had been discovered over a century earlier, but before his arrival there had been a period of many years in which Lemnos was shunned. For good reason: Miller had many times seen the corpses of those who had tried and failed to enter the maze. S nugly established at the core of the maze, he had command of enough sensing devices to follow, however vaguely, the progress of any living creatures outside. Thus he could trace the wanderings from zone to zone of the animals that were his prey and also those of the great beasts who offered danger. To a limited degree he could control the snares of the maze, which were normally nothing more than passive traps, but which could be employed aggressively, under the right conditions against, some enemy. He asked himself if he would use those defenses against human beings if they penetrated that far and had no answer. He did not really hate his own species. He just preferred to be left alone, in what passed for peace. He eyed the screens. He occupied a squat hexagonal cell, apparently one of the housing units in the inner dty, equipped with a wall of viewing tanks. It had taken him more than a year to find out which parts of the maze corresponded to the images on the screens; but by patiently IF posting markers he had matched the dim images to the glossy reality. The six lowest screens along the wall showed him pictures of areas in Zones A through F; the cameras, or whatever they were, swivded through # deee arcs, enabling the hidden mysterious eyes to patrol the entire region around each of the zone entrances. Since only one entrance provided safe access to the zone wiAin, all others being lethal, the screens effectively allowed Muller to watch the inward progress of any prowler. It did not matter what was taking place at any of the false entrances. Those who persisted there would die. Screens seven through ten, in the upper bank, relayed images that apparently came from Zones G and H, the outermost, largest, and deadliest zones of the maze. Muller had not wanted to go to the trouble of returning to those zones to check his theory in detail; he was satisfied that the screens were pickups from points in the outer zones, and it was not worth risking those zones again to find out more accurately where the pickups were mounted. As for the eleventh and twelfth screens, they obviously showed views of the plain outside the maze altogether -- the plain now occupied by a newly arrived starship from Earth. Few of the other devices left him by the ancient builders of the maze were as informative. Moimted on a dais in the center of the city's central plaza, shielded by a crystal vault, was a twelve-sided stone the color of ruby, in whose depths a medianism like an intricate shutter ticked and pulsed. He suspected some sort of clock, keyed to a nuclear oscillation, sounding out the units of tin its mer employed. Periodically the stone underwent temporary changes: its face turned cloudy, deepened in hue to blue or even black, swung on its mounting. Muller's careful recordkeeping had not yet told the meaning of changes. He could not even analyze the periodicity. The metamorphoses were not random, but the pattern they followed was beyond his ken. At the eight corners of the plaza were metallic spikes, smoothly tapering to heights of some twenty feet. Throughout the cycle of the year these spikes revolved, so they were calendars, it seemed, moving on hidden bearings. Muller knew that they made one complete revolution in each thirty-month turning of Lemnos about its somber orange primary, but he suspected some deeper purpose for these gleaming pylons. Searching for it occupied much of his time. Spaced neatly in the streets of Zone A were cages whose bars were hewn from an alabaster-like rock. Muller saw no way of opening these cages; yet twice during his years here he had awakened to find the bars withdrawn into the stone pavement and the cages gaping wide. The first time they had remained open for three days, and then the bars had returned to their positions while he slept, sliding into place and showing no seam where they could have parted. When the cages opened again, a few years lat, Muller watched them constantly to rind the secret of their mechanism. But on the fourth night he dozed just long enou to miss closing again. Equally mysterious was the aqueduct. Around the length of Zone B ran a closed trough, perhaps of onyx, with angular spigots placed at fiftymeter intervals. When any sort of vessel, even a cupped hand, was placed beneath a spigot, it yielded pure water. But when he had attpted to poke a finger into one of the spigots he found no opening. Nor could he see any, even while the water was coming forth; It was as though the fluid issued through a permeat)le plug of stone, and Muller found it hard to accept that. He welcomed the water, though. I t surprised him that so much of the , city should have survived. Arcleologists had concluded, from a stu#y . of the artifacts and skeletons fou!n,d, , on Lemnos outside the maze, that, there had been no intelligent life Yet most of the city, supposedly built before the evolution of mankind on Earth, looked untouched by the ages. Thp ,#ry weather could account in part for that; there were no storms here, and rain had not fallen since Muller's arrival. But wind and windblown sand could carve walls and there was no sign of such carving here. Nor had sand accumulated in thei open streets of the city. Muller knew why. Hidden pumps collected all dris, keeping everting spotless He had gathered handfuls of soil from the garden plots, scattering little trails here and there. Within minutes the driblets of soil had begun to. slither across the polished pavemeuit, vanishing into slots that opened briefly and closed again at the intersection of buildings and ground. Evidently beneath the city lay a network of inconceivable machinery -- imperishable caretaker devices that guarded the city against the tooth of time. Muller had not been able to reach that network, though. With improvised tools he had begun to dig in the garden areas, hoping to reach the subcity that way, but though he had driven one pit more than a dozen feet and another even deeper, he had come upon no signs of anything below but more soil. The hidden guardians had to be there, however: the instruments that operated the viewing tanks, swept the streets, repaired the masonry, and controlled the murderous traps that studded the outer zones of the labyrinth. It was hard to imagine a race that could build a city of this sort -- a It was harder still to imagine how they could have vanished. Assuming that the fossils found in the burial yard outside the walls were those of the builders -- not necessarily a safe assumption -- this city had been put together by burly humanoids, a meter and a half tl, immensely thick through the chest and shoulders, with long cunning fingers, eight to the hand, and short double-jointed legs. They were gone from the known worlds of the universe, and nothing like them had been found in any other system; perhaps they had withdrawn to some far galaxy yet unvisited by man, or possibly they had been a non-spacegoing race that evolved and perished right here on Lenmos, leaving this city as their monument. IP The rest of the planet was without trace of habitation. H ad the builders of the maze been slaughtered in their own sleek streets, and had the mechanical wardens swept the bones away? No way of knowing. They were gone. Muller, entering their city, had found it silent, desolate, as if it had never sheltered life, an automatic city, sterile, flawless. Only beasts occupied it. their way through the maze and take possession. Muller had counted some two dozen speciesof mammals, in all sizes from rat-equivalent to elephantequivalent; there were grazers who munched on the city's gardens and hunters who fed on the herbivores. The ecological balance seemed perfect. The city was his now. There had been others who had come here, and not all of them had been human. Entering the maze, Muller had been treated to the sight of those who had failed to go the route. He had sighted a score of human skeletons in Zones H, G, and F. Three men had made it to E, and one to D. Muller had expected to see men's bones; what took him off guard was the collection of alien bones. In H and G he had seen the remains of great dragon-like creatures, still clad in the shreds of spacesuits. Some day curiosity might triumph over fear and he might go back for a second look. Closer to the core lay an assortment of life-forms, mostly humanoid but veering from the standard structure. How long ago they had come here Muller could not guess; even in this dry climate, would exposed skeletons last more than a few centuries? The galactic litto was a sobering reminder of something Muller already adequately knew; that despite the experience of man's first two centuries of extrasolar travel, in which no living intelligent alien race was encountered, the universe was full of other forms of life, and somer or later man would meet them. The boneyard on Lemnos contained relics of at least a dozen different races -- maybe more. The inconsistency of finding the litter of bones within the maze did not strike him for several years. The mechanisms of the city, he knew, cleaned relentlessly, tidying up everything from particles of dust to the bones of the animals on whom he fed. Yet the skeletons of wouldbe invaders of the maze were allowed to remain where they lay. Why cart away the corpse of a dead elephantlike beast that had blundered into a power snare, while leaving the remains of a dead dragon killed by the same snare? Because the dragon wore protective clothing, and so was sapient? Sapient corpses were deliberately allowed to remain, Muller realized. Those skeletons were part of the psychological warfare waged against all intruders by this mindless, deathless, diabolical city. They were reminders of the perils that lurked everywhere. How the guardian drew the subtle distinction between bodies that should be left in situ and those that should be swept away, Muller IV (Jid .not know; but he was convinced .that the distinction was real. , watched his screens. He eyed the tiny figures moving about the ship on the plain... Let them come in, he thought. The city hasn't had a victim in years. It'll te. care of them. I'm safe where I am. And, he knew, if by some miracle tliey managed to reach him, they yould not remain long. His own special malady would drive them away. They might be clever enough to defeat the maze; but they could not endure the affliction that made Richd Muller intolerable to his own species. "Go away," Muller said aloud. He heard the whirr of rotors and stepped from his dwelling to see a dark shadow traverse the plaza. They were scouting the maze from the air. Quickly he went indoors. Then he smiled at his own impulse to hide. They could detect him, of course, wherever he was. Their screens would jteJl them that a human being inhabited the labyrinth. And then, naturally, they would try to make contact with him, though unaware of his identity. After that -- Muller stiffened as a sudden overwhelming desire blazed through him. To have them come to him. To talk to men again. To break his isolation. He wanted them here. Only for an instant. After the momentary breakthrough of loneliness came the return to rationality, the 'be like to face his kind again. No, he thought. Keep out! Or die in the maze. Keep out. Keep out. Keep out. # i n ight down there," BoardmanIV said. "That's where he must be, eh, Ned? You can see the glow on the face of the tank. Were picking up the right mass, the right density, the right everything. One live man, and it's got to be Muller." "At the heart of the maze," said Rawlins. "So he really did it!" "Somehow." Boardman peered into the viewing tank. From a height of a couple of kilometers the structure of the inner city was clear. He could make out eight distinct zones, each with its characteristic style of architecture, its plazas and promenades, its angling walls, its tangle of streets swirling in dizzyingly alien patterns. The zones were concentric, fanning out from a broad plaza at the heart of it all, and the scoutplane's mass detector had located Muller in a row of low buildings just to the east of the plaza. What Boardman failed to make out was any obvious passage linking zone to zone. There was no shortage of blind alleys, but even from the air the true route was not apparent; what was it like trying to work inward on the ground? It was all but impossible. Boardman knew. The master data banks in the ship held the account of those early explorers who had tried it and failed. Boardman had brought with him every scrap of information on the penetration of the maze, and none of it was very encouraging except the one puzzling but incontrovertible datum that Richard Muller had managed to get inside. Rawlins said. "This is going to IF sound naive I know, Charles. But why don't we just come down from here and land the scoutplane hi the middle of that central plaza? "I'll show you," said Boardman. He spoke a command. A robot drone probe detached itself from the belly of the plane and streaked across toward the city, Boardman and Rawlins followed the blunt gray metal projectile until it was only a few score meters above the tons of the buildings. Through its faceted eye they had a sharp view of the city, revealing the intricate texture of much of the stonework. Suddenly the drone probe vanished. There was a burst of incandescence, a puff of greenish smoke -- and then nothing at all. Boardman nodded. "There's still a protective field over the whole thing. It volatilizes anything that tries to get through." "So even a bird that comes too close -- " There are no birds on Lemnos." "Raindrops, then. Whatever falls on the city -- " "Lemnos gets no rain," said Boardman sourly. "At least not on this continent. The only thing that field keeps out is strangers. We've known it since the first expedition. Some brave men found out about that field the hard way." "Didn't they try a drone probe first?" Smiling, Boardman said, "When you find a dead city sitting in the middle of a desert on a dead world, you don't expect to be blown up if you land inside it. It's a forgiveable sort of mistake. Except that Lemnos doesn't forgive mistakes." He gestured, and the plane dropped lower, following the orbit of the outer walh for a moment. Then it rose and hovered over the heart of the city. The wrong-colored sunlight glistened off a hall of mirrors. They overflew the city again and again, marking off a preprogrammed observation pattern. C aptain Hosteen came aft to pay his respects, a short, duckframed man with a flat nose and coppery skin. He was a good m a n y Boardman knew, and ready to sacrifice a score of lives, including his own, to get into that maze. Hosteen flicked a glance from the screen to Boardman's face and said, "Learning anything?" "Nothing new. We have a job." "Want to go down again?" "Might as well," Boardman said. He looked at Rawlins. "Unless you have anything else you'd like to cbedE, Ned." "Me? Oh, no -- no, that is -- well, I wonder if we need to go kito the maze at all. I mean, if we COidd lure Muller out somehow, talk to him outside the city -- " "No." "Wouldn't it work?" "No," said Boardman emphaticdly. "Item one, Muller wouldn't come out if we asked him. He's a misanthrope, remember? He buried himself here to get away from humanity. Why should he socialize with us? Item two, we couldn't invite him outside without letting him know too much of what we want from him. In this deal, Ned, we need to hoard our resources of strategy, not toss them away in our first move." "I don't understand what you mean." Patiently Boardman said, "Suppose we used your approach. What would you say to Muller to make him come out?" "Why, that we're here from Earth to ask him if he'll help us in a time of system-wide crisis. That we've encountered a race of alien beings with whom we're unable to communicate, and that it's absolutely necessary that we break through to them in a hurry, and that he alone can do the trick. We -- " Rawlins stopped. Color mounted in his cheeks. He said in a hoarse voice, "Muller isn't going to give a damn for those arguments, is he?" "No, Ned. Earth sent him a bunch of aliens once before. And they ruined him." V T hey had come equipped for solving the problem of the maze. The ship's brain, of course, was a first-class computer, and it carried the details of all previous Earth-based attempts to enter the city. Except one, of course, and unfortunately that had been the only successful one. But records of past failures have their uses. The ship's data banks had plenty of mobile extensions: airborne and groundborne drone probes, spy-eyes, sensor batteries and more. Before any human life was risked on the maze Boardman and Hosteen would try the whole niechanical array. Mechanicals were expendable, anyway; the ship carried a set of templates, and it would be no trouble to replicate all devices destroyed. But a point would come at which the drone probes had to give way to men. The aim was to gather as much information as possible for those men to use. Never before had anyone tried to crack the maze this way. The early explorers had simply gone walking in, unsuspecting, and had perished; Their successors had known enough of the story to avoid the more obvious traps and had been aided to some extent by sophisticated sensory devices, but this was the first attempt to run a detailed survey before entering. The overflights on the first day had given everybody a good visual image of the maze. Strictly speaking, it hadn't been necessary for them to leave the ground; they could have watched big-screen relays from the comfort of their camp and gained a decent idea of the conformation below, letting airborne probes do all the work. But Boardman had insisted. The mind registers things one way when it picks them off a relay screen and another when the sensory impressions are flooding in straight from the source. Now all of them had seen the city from the air and had seen what the guardians of the maze could do to a drone probe that ventured into the protective field overlying the city. Rawlins had suggested the possibility that there might be a null spot in Aat protective field. Toward late afternoon they checked it out by loading a probe with metal pellets and stationing it fifty meters above the highest point of the maze. Scanner eyes recorded the action as the drone IF slowly turned, spewing the pellets one at a time into preselected onesquare-meter boxes above the city. Each in turn was incinerated as it fell. They were able to calculate that the thickness of the safety field varied with distance from the center of the maze; it was only about two meters deep above the inner zones, much deeper at the outer rim, forming an invisible cup over the city. But there were no null spots; the field was capable of overstrain by having the probe reloaded with pellets that were catapulted simultaneously into each of the test rectanes. The field dealt with them all, creating for a moment a single pucker of flame above the city. At the expense of a few mole probes they found out that reaching the city through a tunnel was equally impossible. The moles burrowed into the coarse sandy soil outside the outer walls, chewed themselves passageways fifty meters down, nosed upward again when they were beneath the maze. They were destroyed by the safety field while still twenty meters below ground level. A  at burrowing in right at the base of the embankments also failed; the field went straight down, apparently, all around the city. A power technician offered to rig an interference pylon to drain the energy of the field. It didn't work. The pylon, a hundred meters tall, sucked in power from all over the planet, and blue lightning leaped and hissed along its accumulator bank, but it had no effect on the safety field. They reversed the plyon and ing into the city, hoping to short the field. The field drank everything and and seemed ready for more. No one had any rational theory to explain the field's power source. "It must tap the planet's own energy of rotation," the technician who had rigged the pylon said, and then, realizing he hadn't contributed anything useful, he looked away and began to snap orders into the handmikes he carried. Three days of similar researches demonstrated that the city was invulnerable to intrusion from above or below. #here's only one way in," said A Hosteen. "That's on foot, through the main gate." "If the people in the city really wanted to be safe," Rawlins asked, "why did they leave even a gate open?" "Maybe they wanted to go in and out themselves, Ned." said Boardman quietly. "Or maybe they wanted to give invaders a sporting chance. Hosteen, shall we send some probes inside?" The morning was gray. Clouds the color of wood smoke stained the sky; it looked almost as if rain were on the way. A harsh wind knifed the soil from the plain and sent it slicing into their faces. Behind the veil of clouds lay the sun, a flat orange disk that seemed only slightly larger than Sol as seen from Earth, though it was less than half as distant. Lemnos's sun was a gloomy M dwarf, cool and weary, an old star circled by a dozen old planets. Lemnos, the innermost, was the only one that had ever sustained life; the others were frigid and dead, beyond the range of the sun's feeble rays, frozen from core to atmosphere. Ned Rawlins felt a chill at his heart as be stood beside the data terminal a thousand meters from the outer embankment of the maze, watching his shipmates marshalling their probes and instruments. He wondered how anyone as gifted, as full of life and energy and human warmth as Dick Muller, could ever seuf inside that dismal maze. Then he remembered what had , happened to Muller on Beta Hydri IV and conceded that even a man like Muller might well have good reasons for coming to rest here. Lemnos offered the perfect escape: an Earthlike world, uninhabited, where he was almost guaranteed the freedom from human company. And we're here to flush him out and drag him away. Rawlins scowled. Dirty dirty dirty, he thought, "ae old thing about the ends and the means. Across the way, Rawlins could see the blocky figure of Charles Boardman standing in front of the big data terminal, waving his arms this way and that to direct the men fanning out near the walls of the city. He began to understand that he had let Boardman dragoon him into a nasty adventure. The glib old devil hadn't gone into details, back on Earth, about the exact methods by which they were goings to win Muller's cooperation. Boardman had made it sound like some kind of shining crusade. Instead it was going to be a dirty trick. Boardman never went into the details of anything before he had to, Rawlins was coming to see. Rule one: hoard your resources of strategy. Never tip your hand. And so here I am, part of the conspiracy. Hosteen and Boardman had deployed a dozen drones at the various entrances to the inner part of the maze. It was already clear that the only safe way into the city was through the northeast gate, but they had drones to spare and they wanted all the data they could gather. The terminal Rawlins was watching flashed a partial diagram of the maze on the screen -- the section immediately in front of him -- and gave him a good long time to study its loops and twists. It was his special responsibility to follow the progress of the drone through this sector. Each of the other drones was being monitored both by computer and by human observer, while Boardman and Hosteen were at the master terminal watching the progress of the entire operation all at once. "Send them in," Boardman said. H osteen gave the command and the drones rolled forward through the city's gates. Looking now through the eyes of the squat mobile probe, Rawlins got his first view of what lay in Zone H of the maze. He saw a scalloped wall of what looked like puckered blue porcelain undulating away to the left and a barrier of metallic threads dangling from a thick stone slab to the other side. The drone skirted the threads, which tinkled and quivered in delicate response to the disturbance of thin air; it moved to the base of the porcelain wall and followed it at an inwardsloping angle for perhaps twenty meters. There the wall curved abruptly back on itself, for min g a sort of chamber open at the top. The last time anyone had entered the maze this way -- on the fourth expedition -- the two men had passed that open chamber; one had remained outside and was destroyed, the other had gone inside and was spared. The drone entered the chamber. A moment later a beam of pure red light lanced from the center of a mosaic decoration on the wall and swept over the area immediately outside the chamber. Boardman's voice came to Rawlins through the speaker taped to his ear. "We lost fpur of the probes the moment they went through their gates. That's exactly as expected. How's yours doing?" "Following the plan," said Rawlins. "So far it's okay." "You ought to lose it within six miilutes of entry. What's your elapsed time now?" "Two minutes fifteen." The drone was out of the chamber now and shuttling quickly through the place where the lightbeam had flashed. Rawlins keyed in olfactory and got the smell of scorched air, lots of ozone. The path divided ahead. To one side was a single-span bridge of stone arching over what looked like a pit of flame; to the other was a jumbled pile of cyclopean blocks resting precariously edge to edge. The bridge seemed far more inviting, but the drone immediately turned away from it and began to pick its way over the jumbled blocks. Rawlins asked it why, and it relayed the information that the "bridge" wasn't there at all; it was a projection beamed from scanners mounted beneath the facing piers. Requesting a simulation of an approach anyway, Rawlins got a picture of the probe walking out onto the pier and stepping unsuspectingly through the solidlooking bridge to lose its balance; and as the simulated probe struged to regain its equilibrium, the pier tipped forward and shucked it into the fiery pit. Meanwhile the real probe had clambered over the blocks and was coming down the other side, unharmed. Three minutes and eight seconds had gone by. A stretch of straight road here turned out to be as safe as it looked. It was flanked on both sides by windowless towers a hundred meters high, made of some iridescent mineral, sleek and oily-surfaced, that flashed shimmering naoire patterns as the drone hurried along. At the beginning of the fourth minute the probe skirted a bright grillwork like interlocking teeth aitfl sidestepped an umbrella-shaped piledriver that descended with crushing force. Eighty seconds later it stepped around a tilt-block that opened into a yawning abyss, deftly eluded a quintet of blades that sheared upward out of the pavement, and emerged onto a sliding walkway that carried it quickly forward for exactly forty seconds more. All this had been traversed long ago by a Terran explorer named Cartissant, since deceased. He had dictated a detailed record of his experiences within the maze. He had lasted five minutes and thirty seconds, and his mistake had come in IF not getting off the walkway by the forty-first second. Those who had been monitoring him outside, back then, could not say what had happened to him after that. As his drone left the walkway, Rawlins asked for another simulation and saw a quick dramatization of the computer's best guess: the walkway opened to engulf its passenger at that point. The probe, meanwhile, was going swiftly toward what looked like the exit from this outermost zone of the maze. Beyond lay a well lit, cheerful-looking plaza ringed with drifting blobs of a pearly glowing substance. Rawlins said, "I'm into the seventh minute, and we're still going, Charles. There seems to be a door into Zone G just ahead. Maybe you ought to cut in and monitor my screen." "If you last two more minutes, I will," Boardman said. T he probe paused just outside the inner gate. Warily it switched on its gravitron and accumulated a ball of energy with a mass equivalent to its own. It thrust the energy ball through the doorway. Nothing happened. The probe, satisfied, trundled toward the door itself. As it passed through, the sides of the door abruptly crashed together like the jaws of a mighty press, destroying the probe. Rawlins's screen went dark. Quickly he cut in one of the overhead probes, which beamed him a shot of his probe lying on the far side of the door, flattened into a two-dimensional mockup of itself. A human being caught in that same trap would have been crushed to powder, Rawlins realized. "My probe's been knocked out," he reported to Boardman. "Six minutes and forty seconds." "As expected," came the reply, "We've got only two probes left. Switch over and watch." The master diagram appeared on Rawlins's screen: a simplified and stylized light-pen picture of the entire maze as viewed from above. A small X had been placed wherever a probe had been destroyed. Rawlins found, after searching, the path his own drone had taken, with the X marked between the zone boundaries at the place of the clashing door. It seemed to him that the drone had penetrated farther than most of the others, but he had to smile at the childish pride the discovery brought him. Anyhow, two of the probes still were moving inward. One was actually inside the second zone of the maze, and the other was cruising through a passageway that gave access to that inner ring. The diagram vanished, and Rawlins saw the maze as it looked through the pickup of one of the drones. Almost daintily, the man-high pillar of metal made its way through the baroque intricacies of the maze, past a golden pillar that beamed a twanging melody in a strange key, past a pool of light, past a web of glittering metal spokes, past spiky heaps of bleached bones. Rawlins had only glancing views of the bones as the drone moved on, but he was sure that few were human relics. This place was a galactic graveyard for the bold. Excitement built in him as the probe went on and on. He was so thoroughly wedded to it now that it was as if he were ipside the maze, avoiding one deathtrap after another, and he felt a sense of triumph as minutes mounted. Fourteen elapsed now. This second level of the maze was not so cluttered as the first; there were spacious avenues here, handsome colonnades, long radiating passages leading from the main path. He relaxed; he felt pride in the drone's agility and in the keenness of its sensory devices. The shock was immense and stinging when a paving-block vended itself unexpectedly and dumped the probe down a long chute to a place where the gears of a giant mill turned eagerly. T hey had not expected that probe to get so far, anyway. The one the others were watching was the one that had come in via the main gate -- the safe gate. The slim fund of infonnation accumulated at the price of many lives had guided that probe past all its perils, and now it was well witbin Zone G, and almost to the edge of F. Thus far everything had gone as expected; the drone's experiences had match those of the men who had tackled this route on earlier expeditions. It followed their way exactly, turning here, dodging there, and it was eighteen minutes into the maze without incident. 'A#I right," Boardman said. 'This is where Mortenson died, isn't it?" "Yes," Hosteen answered. "The last thing he said was he was standing by that little pyramid, and then he was cut off." Th is where we stt gaining new information, then. All we've learned so far is that our records are accurate. This is the way in. But from here on -- " The probe, lacking a guidance pattern, now moved much more slowly, hesitating at every step to extend its network of data-gathering devices in all directions. It looked for hidden doors, for concealed openings in the pavement, for projectors, lasers, mass-detectors, power sources. It fed back to the central data banks all that it learned, thus adding to the store of information with each centimeter conquered. It conquered, altogether, twentythree meters. As it passed the small pyramid it scanned the broken body of the explorer Mortenson, lost at this point # years earlier. It relayed the news that Mortenson had been seized by a pressure-sensitive mangle activated by an unwary footstep too close to the pyramid. Beyond, it avoided two minor traps before failing to safeguard itself from a distortion screen that baffled its sensors and left it vulnerable to the descent of a pulverizing piston. "The next one through will have to cut off all its inputs until it's past that point," Hosteen muttered. "Running through blindfolded -- well, well manage." "Maybe a man would do better than a machine there," said Boardman. "We don't know if that screen would muddle a man the way it did a batch of sensors." "We're not ready yet to run a man in there," Hosteen pointed out. Boardman agreed -- none too gra ciously, Rawlins thought, listening to the interchange. The screen brigtenIF ed again; a new drone probe was coming through. Hosteen had ordered a second wave of the machines to pick: through the labyrinth, following what was now known to be the one safe access route, and several of them were at the eighteen-minute point where the deadly pyramid was located. Hosteen sent one ahead and posted the others to keep watch. The lead probe came within range of the distortion screen and cut out its sensors; it heaved tipsily for a moment, lacking any way to get its bearings, but in a moment it was stable. It was deprived now of contact with its surroundings, and so it paid no heed to the siren song of the distortion screen, which had misled its predecessor into coming within range of the pulverizing piston. The phalanx of drones watching the scene was all outside the reach of the distorter's mischief, and fed a clear, true picture to the computer, which matched it with the fatal path of the last probe and plotted a route that skirted the dangerous piston. Moments later the blind probe began to move, guided now by inner impulses; lacking all environmental feedback, it was entirely a captive of the computer, which nudged it along in a series of prods 'til it was safely around the hazard. On the far side the sensors were switched on again. To check the procedure, Hosteen sent a second drone through, likewise blinded and moving entirely on internal guidance. It made it. Then he tried a third probe with its sensors on and under the influence of the distortion screen. The computer attempted to direct it along the safe path, but the probe, bedeviled by the faulty inf ormation goming through the distort er, tugged itself furioudy to the side and was smashed. "All right," Hosteen said. T we can get a machine past it, we can get a man past it He closes his eyes the computer calculates his motions step by step. We'll manage." The lead probe began to move again. It got seventeen meters past the place of the distorter before it was nailed by a silvery grillwork that abruptly thrust up a pair of electrodes and cut loose with a bath of flame. Rawlins watched bleakly as the next probe avoided that obstacle and shortly fell victim to another. Plenty of probes waited patiently for their turns to press forward. And soon men will be going in there too, Rawlins thought. Well be going in there. He shut off his data terminal and walked across to Boardman. "How does it look so far?" he asked. "Rough, but not impossible," Boardman said. "It can't be this tough all the way in." "And if it is?" "We won't run out of probes. We'll chart the whole maze until we know where all the danger points are, and then we'll start trying it ourselves." Rawlins said, "Are you going to go in there, Charles?" "Of course. So are you." "With what odds on coming out?" "Good ones," said Boardman. "Otherwise I doubt that I'd tackle it. Oh, it's a dangerous trip, Ned, but don't overestimate it. We've just begun to test that maze. We'll show enough in a few days more." Rawlins considered that a monient. "Muller jdidn't have any probes," he said finally. "How did he survive that stuff?" 'Tm not sure," Boardman murmured. "I suppose he's just a naturally lucky man." VI W ithin the maze Muller watched the proceedings on his dim screens. They were sending some sort of robots in, he saw. The robots were getting chewed up quite badly, but each successive wave of them seemed to reach deeper into fhe labyrinth. Trial and error had led the intruders to the correct route through Zone H, and well onward into G. Muller remained calm at the center of it all, going about his daily pursuits. In the mornings he spent a good deal of time thinking over his past There had been other worlds in other years, springtimes, warmer seasons than this; soft eyes looking into his eyes, hands against his hands, smiles, laughter, shining floors and elegant figures moving through arched doorways. He had married twice. Both times the arrangements had been terminated peacefully after a decent span of years. He had traveled widely. He had dealt with ministers and kings. In his nostrils was the scent of a hundred planets strung across the sky. We make only a small blaze, and then we go out; but in his springtime and his summer he bad burned brightly enough, and he did not feel he had earned this sullen, joyless autumn. The city took care of him, after its fashion. He had a place to dwell, thousands of them; he moved from time to time for the sake of changing the view. All of the houses were empty boxes. He had made a bed for hirnself of human hides stuffed with scraped fur; he had fashioned a chair from sinews and skin; he needed little else. The city gave him water. Wild animals roamed here in such quantity that he would never lack for food so long as he was strong enough to hunt. From Earth he had brought with him certain basic items. He had three cubes of books and one of music; they made a stack less than a meter high and could nourish his soul for all the years that remained to him. He had some woman cubes. He had a small recorder into which he sometimes dictated memoirs. He had a sketchpad. He had weapons and a mass detector. He had a diagnostat with a regenerating medical supply. It was enough. He ate regularly. He slept well. He had come almost to be content with his fate. One nurses bitterness only so long before one grows a cyst around the place from which the poison spews. He blamed no one now for what had happened to him. The way stations on his journey to this place were well known to him. At eighteen he had boasted of his lofty ambitions. At twenty-five he had begun to realize them. Before he was forty he had visited a hundred worlds and was famous in thirty systems. And at the age of fifty-three he had let Charles Boardman talk him into undertaking the mission to Beta HydrilV. IF T hat year he was on holiday in the Tau Ceti system, a dozen lityears from home. Accompanying him was a girl he had met the year before and twenty light-years away. Her name was Marta. She was tall, slim, with large dark eyes fashionably rimmed with red, and lustrous blue hair that brushed her smooth shoulders. She looked about twenty, though of course she might just as well have been ninety and on her third shapeup; you never could tell about anyone, and especially not about a woman. But somehow Muller suspected that she was genuinely young. It wasn't her litheness, her coltish agility -- those are commodities that can be purchased -- but some subtle quality of enthusiasm, of true girlishness, that he liked to think was no surgical product. Whether power-swimming or tree-floating or blowdart hunting or making love, Marta seemed so totally engaged in her pleasures that they must surely be relatively new to her. They stayed at a hotel that was a high, thrusting needle-straight out of a valley overlooking a glassy oval lake. Their rooms were two hundred floors up, and they dined at a rooftop eyrie reached by gravitron disk, while during the day all the pleasures of Marduk lay spread out before them. He was with her for a week, uninterrupted. The weather was perfect. On the eighth day Charles Boardman arrived on Marduk and invited Muller to pay a call on him. "I'm on vacation," Muller said. "Give me half a day of it. It's an important matter." "I came here to escape important matters." "There's never any escape, Dick. You know that. You are what you are, and we need you. Will you come?" "Damn you," Muller said mildly. B oardman served drinks in his suite: an amber wine out of goblets made from blue rock crystal mined on Ganymede. Then they boarded a dining capsule and left the hotel to tour the forests and lakes while they ate. Lunch glided from its container and rolled toward them as they lounged in pneumochairs before a wraparound window. Crisp salad, grilled native fish, imported vegetables; a grated Centaurine cheese to sprinkle; flasks of cold rice beer; a rich, thick, spicy green liqueur afterwards. Completely passive, sealed in their moving capsule, they accepted food and drink and scenery, breathed the sparkling air pumped in from outside, watched gaudy birds flutter past them and lose themselves in the soft, drooping needles of the thickly packed conifers of the woods. After lunch the capsule halted by the side of a jewel-like lake, deep and clear. The wall opened and Boardman said, "Perhaps the young lady would like to swim while we get the dull business talk out of the way?" "A fine idea," Marta said in a flat voice. She rose, touched the disrobing snap at her shoulder, and let her garment slither to her ankles. Boardman made a great show of catching it up and putting it on a storage rack. She smiled mechanically at him, turned. walked down to the edge of the lake. Boardman said, "She's quite lovely, Dick. Who is she?" "A girl. Rather young, I think." "Younger than your usual sort, I'd say. Also somewhat spoiled. Known her long?" "Since last year, Charles. Interested?" Boardman gave him a Buddha-smile and gestured toward the liquor console. Muller shook his head. The two men eyed one another. They appeared to be of the same age, mid-fifties, Boardman fleshy and graying and strong-looking. Sealed, they seemed of the same height, too. The appearances were deceptive: Boardman was a generation older, Muller half a foot taller. They had known each other for thirty years. In a way, they were in thd same line of work, both part of the corps of non-administrative personnel that served to hold the structure of human society together across the Sprawl of the galaxy. Neither had arify official rank. They shared a readiness to serve, a desire to make their gifts useful to mankind, and Muller respected Boardman for the way he had used "those gifts during a long ahd impressive career. He could no say ' that he liked the older man, though. He knew that Boardman was shrewd, unscrupulous and dedicated to human welfare -- and the combination of dedication and unscrupulousness is always a dangerous one. Boardman drew a vision cube from a pocket of his tunic and put it on the table before Muller. It sat there like a counter in some intricate game, six or seven centimeters along each face, soft yellow against the polished black marble face of the table. "Plug it in," Boardman suggested. "The viewer's beside you." M uller slipped the cube into the receptor slot. From the center of the table there rose a larger cube, nearly a meter across. Images flowered on its faces. Muller saw a cloudwrapped planet, soft gray in tone; it could have been Venus. The view deepened and streaks of dark red appeared in the gray. Not Venus, then. The recording eye pierced the cloud layer and revealed an unfamiliar, not very Earthlike planet. The soil looked moist and spongy, and rubbery trees that looked like giant toadstools thrust upward from it. It was hard to judge relative sizes, but they looked big. Their pale trunks were coarse with shredded fibers and curved like bows between ground and crown. Saucerlike growths shielded the trees at their bases, ringing them for about a fifth of their height. Above were neither branches nor leaves, only wide flat caps whose undersurfaces were mottled by corrugated processes. As Muller watched, three alien figures came strolling through the somber grove. They were elongated, almost spidery, with clusters of eight or ten jointed limbs depending from their narrow shoulders. Their heads were tapered and rimmed with eyes. Their nostrils were vertical slits flush against the skin. Their mouths opened at the sides. They walked upright on elegant legs that terminated in small globe-like pedestals instead of feet. Though they were nude except IP for probably ornamental strips of fabric tied between their first and second wrists, Muller was unable to detect signs either of reproductive apparatus or of mammalian functions. Their skins were unpigmented, sharing the prevailing grayness of this gray world, and were coarse in texture, with a scaly overlay of small amondshaped ridges. With wonderful grace the three f igr ures approached three of the giant toadstools and scaled them until each stood atop the uppermost saucerlike projection of a tree. Out of the cluster of limbs came one arm that seemed specially adapted; unlike the others, which were equipped with five tendril-shaped fingers arranged in a circlet, this limb ended in a needlesharp organ. It plunged easily and deeply into the soft rubbery trunk of the tree on which its owner stood. A long moment passed, as if the aliens were draining sap from the trees. Then they climbed down and resumed their stroll, outwardly unchanged. One of them paused, bent, peered close to the ground. It scooped up the eye that had been witnessing its activities. The image grew chaotic; Muller guessed that the eye was being passed from hand to hand. Suddenly there was darkness. The eye had been destroyed. The cube was played out. After a moment of troubled silence Muller said, "They look very convincing." "They ought to be. They're real." "Was this taken by some sort of extragalactic probe?" "No," Boardman said. "In our own galaxy." "That be Beta Hydri IV, thr "Yes." Muller repressed a shiver. He tivated the cube a second time. Again the eye made the descent throe the cloud layer; again it observed the rubbery trees; again the trio d alieiia appeared, took nourishment froan the trees, noticed the eye, destroyed it. Muller studied the images with cdd fascination. He had never looked iqon living sapient beings of anotber creation before. No one bad, so far as he knew, until now. The images slowly faded from the cube. B oardman said, "That was taken less than a month ago. We parted a drone ship fifty thotand kikmeters up and dropp roughly a thousand eyes onto Beta Hydri IV. At least half of them went straight  the bottom of the ocean. Most landed in uninhabited or uninteresting (daces. This is the only one that actuafiy showed us a clear view of the aliens." "Why have we dided to break our quarantine of this (danet?" Boardman slowly let out his breath. "We think it's time we got in toudi with them, Dick. We've been sniffing around them for ten years and we haven't said hello yet. This isn't neigh borly. And since the Hydrans id ourselves are the only intelligent races in this whole damned galaxy, unless something's hiding somewhere unlikely, we've come to the belief that we out to commence friendly relations." "I don't find your coyness very appealing," Muller said bluntly. "A full-scale council decision was taken after close to a year of debate, and it was voted to leave the Hydrans alone for at least a century unless they showed some sign of going into space. Who reversed that decision, and why, and when?" Boardman smiled his crafty smile. "I didn't mean to seem deceptive, Dick. The decision was reversed by a council session eight months ago, while you were out Rigel way." "And the reason?" One of the extragalactic probes came back with convincing evidence ihat there's at least one highly intelligent and quite superior species in one of our neighboring clusters." "Where?" "It doesn't matter, Dick. Pardon me, but I won't tell you at this time. Let's just say that from what we know of them now, they're much more than we can handle. They've got a galactive drive, and we can reasonably expect them to come visiting us one of these centuries, and when they do we'll have a problem. So it's been voted to open contact with Beta Hydri IV ahead of schedule, by way of having some insurance against that day." "You mean"" Muller said, "that we want to make sure we're on good terms with the other race of our own galaxy before the extragalactics show up?'' "Exactly." 'T'U take that drink now," said Muller Boardman gestured. Muller tapped out a potent combination on the console; downed it quickly, ordered another. Suddenly he had a great deal to digest. vn F or a couple of centuries man had explored the stars without finding a trace of a rival. There were plenty of planets, and many of them were potentially habitable, and a surprising number were Earthlike to four or five places. That much had been expected; the sky is full of main-sequence suns, with a goodmany of the F-type and G-type stars most likely to support life. The process of planetogenesis is nothing remarkable, and most of those suns had complements of five to a dozen worlds, some of them were of the right size and mass and density slots to permit the retention of atmosphere and the convenient evolution of life, and a number of those worlds were situated within the orbital zone where they were best able to avoid extremes of temperature. So life abounded, and the galaxy was a zoologist's delight. But in his helter-skelter expansion out of his own system, man had found only the traces of former intelligent species. The most spectacular ancient site was the maze of Lemnos; but other worlds too had their sttumps of cities, their weathered foundations, their burial grounds and strewn potsherds. Space became an archeologist's delight, too. The collectors of alien animals and the collectors of alien relics were kept busy. Whole new scientific specialties burst into being. Societies that had vanished before the Pyramids had been conceived now underwent reconstruction. A curious blight of extinction had IF come upon all of the galaxy's other intelligent races, though. Evidently they had flourished so long ago that not even their decadent children survived: they were one with Nineveh and Tyre, blotted out, cut off. Careful scrutiny showed that the youngest of the dozen or so known extrasolar intelligent cultures had perished eighty thousand years earlier. The galaxy is wide, and man kept on looking, drawn to find his stellar companions by some perverse mkture of curiosity and dread. Though the warp drive provided speedy transport to all points within the universe, neither available personnel nor available ships could cope with the immensity of the surveying tasks. Several centuries after his intrusion into the galaxy, man was still making discoveries, some of them quite close to home. The star Beta Hydri had seven planets; and on the fourth was another sapient species. There were no landings. The possibility of such a discovery had been examined well in advance, and plans had been drawn to avoid a blundering trespass of unpredictable consequences. The survey of Beta Hydri IV had been carried out from beyond its cloud layer. Cunning devices had measured the activity behind that tantalizing gray mask. Hydran energy production was known to a tolerance urban districts had been mapped and their population density estimated; the level of Hydran industrial development had been calculated by a study of thermal radiations. There was an aggressive, growing, potent civilization down there, probably comparable in technical level to late twentieth-century Earth. There was only one significant difference: the Hydrans had not begun to enter space. That was the fault of the cloud layer. A race that never has seen the stars is not likely to show much desire to reach them. Muller had been privy to the frantic conferences that followed the discovery of the Hydrans. He knew the reasons why they had been placed under quarantine, and he realized that only much more urgent reasons had resulted in the lifting of that quarantine. Unsure of its ability to handle a relationship with non-human beings. Earth had wisely chosen to keep away from the Hydrans for a while longer; but now all that was changed. "What happens now?" Muller asked. "An expedition?" "Yes." "How soon?" "Within the next year, I'd say." Muller tensed. "Under whose leadership?" "Perhaps yours, Dick. "Why perhaps?" "You might not want it?" #TThen I was eighteen," Muller VV said, "I was with a girl Out in the woods on Earth, in the California forest preserve, and I told her that I was going to discover things out in space, that men were going to remember me the way they remember Columbus and Magellan and the early astronauts and all. And that was the night I grew my ambitions." He laughed. "There are things we can say at eighteen, but not again." "There are things we can do at eighteen that we can't do again dther," said Boardman. "Well, Dick? You're past fifty now, right? You've walked in the stars. Do you feel likea god?" "Sometimes." "Do you want to go to Beta Hydri IV?" "You know I do?" "Alone?" Muller felt the ground give way before him, and abruptly it seemed t# him that he was taking his first spacewalk again, falling freely toward all the universe.  Alone?" "We've programmed the whole thing and concluded that to send a bunch of men down there at this point would be a mistake. The Hydrans haven't responded very well to our eye probes. You saw that: they picked the eye up and smashed it. We can't begin to fathom their psychologies, because we've never been up against alien minds before. But we feel that the safest thing, both in terms of potential manpower loss and in terms of impact on their society, is to send a single ambassador down there to them, one man, coming in peace, a shrewd, strong man who has been tested under a variety of stress situations and who will develop ways of initiating contact. That man may find himself chopped to shreds thi seconds after niaking contact. On the other hand, if he survives he'll have accomplished something utterly unique in human history. It's your option." It was irresistible. Mankind's ambassador to the Hydrans! To go alone, to walk alien soil and extend humanity's first greeting to cosmic neighbors -- It was his ticket to immortality. It would write his name forever on the stars. "How do you figure the chances of survival?" Muller asked. 'The computation is one chance in sixty-five of coming out whole, Dick. Considering that it's not an Earthtype planet to any great degree, so you'll need a life-support syUtem, and you may get a chilly reception. One in sixty-five." "Not too bad." "I'd never accept such odds myself," Boardman said, grinning. "No, but I might." He drained his glass. To carry it off meant imperishable fame. To fail, to be slain by the Hydrans, even that was not so dreadful. He had lived well. There were worse fates than to die bearing mankind's banner to a strange world. That throbbing pride of his, that hunger for glory, that childlike craving for renown that he had never outgrown, drove him to it. M arta reappeared. She was wet from her swim, her nude body glossy, her hair plastered to the slender column of her neck. She might have been a leggy fourteenyear-old, Muller thought, looking at her narrow hips, her lean thighs. Boardman tossed her a drier. She thumbed it and stepped into its yellow field, making one complete turn. She took her garment from the rack and covered herself unhurriedly. "That was great," she said. Her eyes met Muller's for the first time since her return. "Dick, what's the matter IF with you? You look wide open -- stunned. Are you all right?" "Fine." "What happened?" "Mr. Boardman's made a proposition." "You can tell her about it, Dick. We don't plan to keep it a secret. There'll be a galaxy-wide announcement right away." "There's going to be a landing on Beta Hydri IV," Muller said in a thick voice. "One man. Me. How will it work, Charles? A ship in a parking orbit, and then I go down in a powered drop-capsule equipped for return?" "Yes." Marta said, "It's insane, Dick, don't do it." " "It's a quick death if things don't work out, Marta. I've taken worse risks before." " "No. Look, sometimes I think I've got a little precog. I see things ahead, Dick." She laughed nervously, her pose of cool sophistication abruptly shattering. "If you go there, I don't think you'll live, either. Say you won't go. Say it, Dick!" "You've never officially accepted the proposition," Boardman said. "I know," Muller said. He got to his feet, nearly reaching the low roof of the dining capsule, and walked toward Marta and put his arms around her. He held her fifmly. She looked at him in horror. He kissed the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear. She shrank away from him, stumbled, nearly plunged into Boardman's lap. Boardman caught her and held her. Muller said, "You know what the answer has to be." T hat afternoon one of the robot probes reached Zone F. They stin had a distance to go; but it would not be long, Muller knew, before they were at the heart of the maze. #here he is," Rawlins said. "At I last!" Via the drone probe's eyes he stared at the man in the maze. Muller leaned casually against a wall, arms folded, a big weatherbeaten man with a harsh chin and a massive wedge-shaped nose. He did not seem at ah alarmed by the presence of the drone. Rawlins cut in the audio pickup and heard Muller say, "Hello, robot. Why are you bothering me?" The probe, of course, did not reply. Neither did Rawlins, who could have piped a message to him through the drone. He stood by the data terminal, crouching a little for a better view. His weary eyes throbbed. It had taken them nine local-time days to get one of their probes all the way through the maze to the center. The effort had cost them close to a hundred probes; each inward extension of the safe route by twenty meters or so had required the expenditure of one of the robots. Still, that wasn't so bad, considering that the number of wrong choices in the maze was close to infinite. Through luck, the inspired use of the ship's brain and a study battery of sensory devices, they had managed to avoid all of the obvious traps and most of the cleverer ones. And now they were in the center. Rawlins had been up all night. monitoring this critical phase, the penetration of Zone A. Hosteen had gone to sleep. So, finally, had Boardman. A few of the crewmen were still on duty, here and aboard the ship, but Rawlins was the only member of the civilian complement still awake. He wondered if the discovery of Muller had been supposed to take place during his stint. Probably not: Boardman wouldn't want to risk blowing things by letting a novice handle the big moment. Well, too bad; they had left him on duty, and he had moved his probe a few meters inward, and now he was looking right at Muller. Muller looked sad around the eyes, and his lips were compressed in a taut, tense line. Rawlins had been expecting something more dramatic, something romantic, some mirror of agony on that face. Instead he saw only the craggy, indifferent, almost insensitive-looking features of a tough, durable man in late middle age. Muller had gone gray, and his clothing was a little ragged; he looked worn and frayed himself. But that was only to be expected of a man who had been living this kind of exile for nine years. "What do you want?" Muller asked the probe. "Who sent you? Why don't you go away?" Rawlins did not dare to answer at this point. Brusquely he keyed the probe to freeze while he sped away toward the dome where Boardman slept. B oardman was sleeping under a canopy of life-sustaining devices. He was, after all, at least eighty years old, though he certainly didn't look it, and one way to keep from looking it was to plug one's self into one's sustainers every night. Strapped to Boardman's forehead were a couple of meningeal electrodes that guaranteed a proper and healthy progression through the levels of sleep, thus washing the mind of the day's fatigue poisons. An ultrasonic drawcock filtered dregs and debris from Boardman's arteries. Hormone flow was regulated by the ornate webwork hovering above his chest. The whole business was linked to and directed by the ship's brain. Within the elaborate life system Boardman looked unreal and waxy. His breathing was slow and regular; his soft lips were slack; his cheeks seemed puffy and loose-fleshed. Boardman's eyeballs were moving rapidly beneath the lids, a sign of dreaming, of upper sleep. Could he be awakened safely now? Rawlins feared to risk it. Not directly, anyway. He ducked out of the room and activated the terminal just outside. "Take a dream to Charles Boardman," Rawlins said. "Tell him we found Muller. Tell him he's got to wake up right away. Say, Charles, Charles, wake up, we need you. Got it?" "Acknowledged," said the ship's brain. The impulse leaped from dome to ship, was translated into response-directed form, and returned to the dome. Rawlins's message seeped into Boardman's mind through the electrodes on his forehead. Rawlins entered the old man's sleeproom again. IP Boardman stirred. His hands formed claws and scraped gently at the machinery in whose embrace he lay. "Muller -- " he muttered. His eyes opened. For a moment he did not see. But the waking process had begun, and the life system jolted his metabolism sufficiently to get him functioning again. "Ned?" he said hoarsely. "What are you doing here? I dreamed that -- " "It wasn't a dream, Charles. I programmed it for you. We got through to Zone A. We found Muller." Boardman undid his system and sat up instantly, alert, aware. "What time is it?" "Dawn's just breaking." "And how long ago did you find him?" "Perhaps fifteen minutes. I froze the probe and came right to you. But I didn't want to rush you awake, so -- " "All right. All right." Boardman had swung out of bed, now. He staggered a little as he got to his feet. He wasn't yet at his da#rtime vigor, Rawlins realized; his real age was showing. He found an excuse to look away, studying the life system to avoid having to see the meaty folds of Boardman's body. "Let's go," Boardman said. "Unfreeze that probe. I want to see him right away." U sing the terminal in the hall, Rawlins brought the probe back to life. The screen showed them Zone A of the maze, cozier-looking than the outer reaches. Muller was not in view. "Must have walked out of sight range," Rawlins said. He moved the probe in a standing circle, taking in a broad sweep of low cubical houses, high-rising archways, and tiered walls. A small catlike animal scampered by, but there was no sign of Muller. "He was right over there," Rawlins insisted unhappily. "He -- " "All right He didn't have to stay in one place while you were waking me up. Walk the probe around." Rawlins activated the drone and started it in a slow cruising exploration of the street. Muller abruptly stepped out of a windowless building and planted himself in front of the probe. "Again," he said. "Back to life, are you? Why don't you speak up? What's your ship? Who sent you?" "Should we answer?" Rawlins asked. "No." Boardman's face was pressed almost against the screen. He pushed Rawlins's hands from the controls and went to work on the fine tuning himself, until Muller was sharply in focus. Boardman kept the probe moving, sliding around in front of Muller, as though trying to hold the man's attention and prevent him from wandering off again. In a low voice Boardman said, "That's frightening. The look on his face -- " "I thought he looked pretty calm." "What do you know? I remember that man. Ned, that's a face out of hell. His cheekbones are twice as sharp as they used to be. His eyes are awful. You see the way his mouth turns down, on the left side? He might even have had a light stroke. But he's lasted well enough, I suppose." Muller, keeping pace with the drone, said in a deep, gruff voice, "You've got thirty seconds to state your purpose here. Then you'd better turn around, and get going back the way you came." "Won't you talk to him?" Rawlins asked. "He'll wreck the probe." "Let him," said Boardman. "The first person who talks to him is going to be flesh and blood, and he's going to be standing face to face with him. That's the only way it can be. This has to be a courtip, Ned. We can't go through the speakers of a probe." 'Ten seconds," said Muller. He reached into his pocket and came out with a glossy black metal globe the size of an apple, with a small square window on one side. Rawlins had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was some alien weapon Mueller had found in this city. Swiftly Muller raised the globe and aimed the window at the face of the drone probe. The screen went dark. "Looks like we've lost another probe," Rawlins said. Boardman nodded. "'Yes. The last probe we're gdng to lose. Now we start losing men." IX T he maze now was thoroughly mapped. The ship's brain held a detailed picture of the inward route, with all the known pitfalls charted, and Boardman was confident that he could send drones in with a # probability of getting them to Zone A unharmed. Whedier a man could cover that same route with equal safety was what remained to be seal. Even with the computer vdiispering hints to him every step of the way, a man filtering information through a fallible, fatigue-prone human brain might not quite see things the same way as a lathe-turned probe, and perhaps would make compensations of his own in the course that would prove fatal. So the data they had gathered had to be tested carefully before they went in. There were volunteers for that. They knew that were likely to die. No one had tried to pretend otherwise to them, and they would have it no other way. It had been put to them that it was important for humanity to bring Richard Muller voluntarily out of the maze and that it could best be accomplished by having specific human beings -- Charles Boardman and Ned Rawlins -- speak to Muller in person, and that since Boardman and Rawlins were non-replaceable units it was necessary for others to explore the route ahead were ready, knowing that they were expendable. They drew lots for the job. The man chosen to go first was a lieutenant named Burke, who looked fairly young and probably was, since military men rarely went in for shapeups until they were in the top echelons. He was a short, sturdy darkhaired man vho acted as if he could be replaced from a template aboard the ship, which was not the case. IF "When I find Muller Burke said -- he did not say if -- "I tell him I'm an archeologist, right? And that if he doesn't min d Td like some of my friends to come inside also?" "Yes," said Boardman. "And remember, the less you say to him in the way of professional-sounding noises, the less suspicious he's going to be." B urke was not going to live long enough to say anything to Richard Muller, and all of them knew it. But he waved good-bye jauntily, somewhat stagily, and strode into the maze. Through a backpack he was connected with the ship's brain. The computer would relay his marching orders to him and would show the watchers in the camp exactly what was happening to him. He moved smartly and smoothly past the terrors of Zone H. He lacked the array of detection devices that had helped the probes find the pivotmounted slabs and the deathpits beneath, the hidden energy flares, the clashing teeth set in doorways and all the other nightmares; but he had something much more useful riding with him: the accumulated knowledge of those nightmares, gathered through the expenditure of a lot of probes that had failed to notice them. Boardman, watching his screen, saw the by now familiar pillars and spokes and escarpments, the airy bridges, the heaps of bones, the occasional debris of a drone probe. Burke took nearly forty minutes to pass from Zone H to Zone G. So far the guidance system was working well. Burke was executing a sort of grim ballet, dancing around the obstacles, counting his steps, now leaping, now turning sideways, now straining to step over some treacherous strip of pavement. But the computer was unable to warn him about the small toothy creature waiting a top a gilded ledge forty meters inside Zone G. It was no part of the maze's design. It was a random menace, transacting business on its own account. The animal was no bigger than a very large cat, but its fangs were long and its claws were quick. The eye in Burke's backpack saw it as it leaped, but by then it was too late. Burke, half-warned, half-turned and reached for his weapon with the beast already on his shoulders and scrambling for his throat. Burke tumbled to the ground, clutching at his attacker. A trickle of blood spurted. Man and beast rolled over twice, tripped some secret waiting relay and were engulfed in a gust of oily smoke. When the air was clear again neither of them was in view. Boardman said a little later, "There's something to keep in mind. The animals wouldn't bother attacking a probe. We'll have to carry mass detectors and travel in teams." That was how they worked it the next time. Two men named Marshall and Petrocelli, armed, went together into the maze. No animal could come near them without teUtaling its thermal output into the infrared pickups of the mass detectors they carried. They shot four animals, one of them immense, and had no trouble otherwise. D eep within Zone G they came to the place where the distortion screen made a mockery of all information-gathering devices. How did the screen work. Boardman wondered? He knew of Earthmade distorters that operated directly on die senses, taking perfectly proper sensory messages and scrambling them within the brain to destroy all one-to-one correlations. But this screen had to be different. It could not attact the nervous system of a drone probe, for the drones had no nervous systems in any meaningful sense of that term, and their eyes gave accurate reports of what they saw. Somehow what the drones had seen -- and what they had reported to the computer bore no relation to the computer -- bore no relation to the real geometry of the maze at that point. Other drones, posted beyond the range of the screen, had given entirely different and much more reliable accounts of the terrain. So the thing must work on some direct optical principle, working on the environment itself, rearranging it, blurring perspective, subtly shifting and conceaEng the outlines of things, transforming normal configurations into bafflement. Any sight organ within reach of the screen's effect would obtain a wholly convincing and perfectly incorrect image of the area, Aether or not it had a mind to be tinkered with. Marshall and PetroceTIi did as the computer said. They walked forward even where their own eyes told them that vast abysses lay in their path. They crouched to wriggle through a tunnel whose roof was bright with the suspended blades of guillotines. The tunnel did not exist. "Any minute I expect one of those blades to fall and chop me in half," Petrocelli said. There were no blades. At the end of the tunnel they obediently moved to the left, toward a massive flan that lashed the ground in vicious swipes. There was no flail. Reluctantly they did not set foot on a plumply upholstered walkway that appeared to lead out of the region of the screen. The walkway was imaginary; they had no way of seeing the pit of acid that actually was there, It would be better if they simply closed their eyes," Boardman said. "The way the drones went through -- minus all visuals." "They claim it's too scary to do it like that," said Hosteen. "Which is better: to have no visual information or to have the wrong information?" Boardman asked. "They could follow the computer's orders just as well with their eyes closed. And thereM be no chance that -- " Petrocelli screamed. On the split screen Boardman saw the real configuration -- a flat, innocuous strip of road -- and the screen-distorted one relayed by the backpack eyes -- a sudden geyser of flame erupting at their feet. "Stand where you are!" Hosteen bellowed. "It isn't real!" Petrocelli, one foot high in the air, brought it back into place with a wrenching effort. MarshalFs reaction time was slower. He had been whirling to escape the eruption when Hosteen was called to him, and he turned to the left before he halted. He was a dozen centimeters too far IP out of the safe road. A coil of bright metal flicked out of a block of stone and wrapped itself about his ankles. It cut through the bone without difficulty. Marshall toppled and a flashing golden bar stapled him to a wall. Without looking back, Petrocelli passed through the column of flame unharmed, stumbled forward ten paces and dame to a halt, safe beyond the effective range of the distortion screen. "Dave?" he said hoarsely. "Dave, are you all right?" "He stepped off the path," said Boardman. "It was a quick finish." "What do you want me to do?" "Stay put, Petrocelli. Get calm and don't try to go anywhere. I'm sending Chesterfield and Walker in after you." It took them close to an hour to reach the place of the distortion screen and nearly fifteen minutes to shuffle through the few square meters the screen controlled. They did it with their eyes closed, and they didn't like that at all; but the phantoms of the maze could not frighten blind men, and in time Chesterfield and Walker were beyond their grasp. Petrocelli was much calmer by then. Warily, the three continued toward the heart of the maze. X T hey were winning the battle of the maze. Fourteen men had entered it so far. Four were dead. Walker and Petrocelli had made camp in Zone E; five more men had set up a relief base in F; three others were currently edging past the distortion screen in G and soon would join them. The worst was over for these. It was clear from the probe work that the curve of danger dropped off sharply past Zone F, and that there were practically no hazards at all in the three inner zones. With E and F virtually conquered, it should not be difficult to break through to those central zones where Muller, impassive and uncommunicating, lurked and waited. Rawlins felt that he knew the maze completely by now. Vicariously he had entered it more than a hundred times, first through the eyes of the probes, then through the relays from the crewmen. At night in feverish dreams he saw its dark patterns, its curving walls and sinuous towers. Locked in his own skull he somehow made the circuit of that labyrinth, kissing death a thousand times. He and Boardman would be the beneficiaries of hard-won experience when their turns came to go inside. Their turns were coming near. On a chill morning under an iron sky he stood with Boardman just outside the maze, by the upsloping embankment of soil that rimmed the outer flange of the city. In the short weeks they had been here, the year had dimmed almost startlingly toward whatever winter this planet got. Sunlight lasted only six hours a day, now, out of the twenty; two hours of pale twilight followed, and dawns were thin and prolonged. The whirling moons danced constantly in the sky, playing twisting games with shadows. On the screen they watched Muller moying at the heart of the maze. The hovering probes kept constant check on him, marking his peregrinations with a shifting line on the master chart. Muller had not left #one A since the time he had met the drone, but he changed positions daily in the labyrinth, migrating from house to house as though be feared to sleep in the same one twice. '"Tapping the screen, Boardman A said, "This afternoon we go inside, Ned. We'll spend the night in the main camp. Txnorrow you move forward to join Walker and Petrocelli in E. The day after that you go on alone toward the middle and find MuUer. "Why are you going inside the maze, Charles? "To help you. "You could keep in touch with me from out here," said Rawlins. "You don't need to risk yourself." Boardman tugged thoughtfully at his dewlap, "What Pm doing is calculated for minimum risk this way." "How?" "If you get into problems," Boardman said, "m need to go to you and give you assistance. Pd rather wait in Zone F if I'm needed than have to come rushing in suddenly from the outside, through the most dangerous part of the maze. You see what Fm telling you? I can get to you quickly from F without much danger. But not from here." "What kind of problems?" "Stubbornness from Muller. He's got no reason to cooperate with us, and he's not an easy man to deal with. I remember him in those months after he came back from Beta Hydri IV. We had no peace with hkn. He was never actually level-tempered before, but afterward he was a volcano. Mind you, Ned, I don't judge him for it; he's got a rit to be furious with the universe. But he's troublesome. He's a bird of ill omen. Just to go near him brings bad luck. You'll have your bands fuB." Wy don't you come with me, then?" "Impossible," Boardman said. "It would ruin everything if he even knew I was on this planet. I'm the man who sent him to the Hydrans, don't forget. I'm the one who in eftect marooned him on Lnnos. I thkik he migt kill me if he saw me again." Rawlins receded from that idea. "No. He hasn't become that barbaric." "You don't know him. What he was. What he's become." "If he's as fuB of demons as you say, how am I ever gmng to win his trust?" "Go to him. Look guBetess and trustworthy. You don't have to practice that, Ned. You've got a naturally innocent face. TeB him you're here on an archeological mission. Don't let him know that we realized he was here aB along. Say that the first you knew was when our probe stumbled into him. That you recognized him, from the days when he and your father were friends. Tell him that your father's dead and that this is your first expedition to space. Work on his sympathies, Ned. Dig for the patern in him." Raisins shook his head. 'TDon't get angry with me, Charles, but I've got to teB you that I don't like any of this. These lies." "Lies?" Boardman's eyes blazed. IP "Iie# to say that you're your father's son? That this is your first expedition?" "That I'm an archeologist?" Boardman shrugged. "Would you rather tell him that you came here as part of a search mission looking for Richard Muller? Will that help win his trust? Think about our purpose, Ned." "Yes. Ends and means. I know." "Do you, really?" "We're here to win Muller's cooperation because we think that he alone can save us from a terrible menace," Rawlins said stolidly, unfeelingly, flatly. "Therefore we must take any approach necessary to gain that cooperation." "Yes. And I wish you wouldn't smirk when you say it." "I'm sorry, Charles. But I feel so damned queasy about deceiving him." "We need him." "All right, Charles." "I need you, too," Boardman said. "If I could do this myself, I would. But if he saw me, he'd finish me. In his eyes I'm a monster. It's the same with anyone else connected with his past career. But you're different. He might be able to trust you You're young, you look so damned virtuous, and you're the son of a friend of his. You can get through." "And fill him up with lies so we can trick him." B oardman closed his eyes. He seemed to be containing himself with an effort. "Stop it, Ned," "Go on. Tell me what I do after I've introduced myself." "Build a friendship with him. Take your time about it. Make him come to depend on your visits." " "What if I can't stand being with him?" "Conceal it. Show that you can tolerate his company. Make the effort. Chat with him. Make it clear to him that you're stealing time from your scientific work -- that the villainous bastards who are running your expedition don't want you to have anything to do with him, but that you're drawn to him by love and pity and won't let them interfere. Tell him all about yourself -- your ambitions, your love life, your hobbies, what ever you want. Run off at the mouth. It'll reinforce the image of the naive kid." "Do I mention the galactics?" Rawlin asked. "Not obtrusively. Work them in somewhere, by way of bringing him up to date on current events. But don't tell him too much. Certainly don't tell him of the threat they pose. Or a word about the need we have for him, you understand. If he gets the idea that he's being used, we're finished." "How will I get him to leave the maze, if I don't tell him why we want him?" "Let that part pass for now," Boardman said. "I'll coach you in the next phase after you've succeeded in getting him to trust you." "The translation," Rawlins said, "is that you're going to put such a whopper in my mouth that you don't dare tell me now what it is, for fear I'll throw up my hands and quit." "Ned -- " "I'm sorry. But look, Charles, why do we have to trick him out? Why can't We just say that humanity needs him and force him to come out?" "Do you think that's morally superior to tricking him out?" "It's cleaner, somehow. I hate all this dirty plotting and scheming. I'd much rather help knock him cold and haul him from the maze than have to go through what you've planned." Boardman said, "We can't force him out. It's too risky. He mit find some way to kill himself the moment we tried to grab him." "A stungun," said Rawlins. "I could do it, even. Just get within range and gun him down, and then we carry him out of the maze and when he wakes up we explain -- " Boardman vehemently shook his head. "He's had nine years to figure out that maze. We don't know what tricks he's learned or what defensive traps he's planted. For all we know he's programmed the whole place to blow up if someone pulls a gun on him. He's got to come out of that labyrinth of his own free will, Ned, and that means we have to trick him with false promises. I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven't you discovered that yet?" "It doesn't have to stink!" Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. "Is that the lesson you've learned in all those years? The universe doesn't stink. Man stinks! He'd rather stink than smell sweet. We don't have to lie. We don't have to cheat We could opt for honor and decency and -- " Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, "I sound young as hell to you, don't I, Charles?" "You're entitled to make mistakes," Boardman said. "That's what being young is fw." "You genuinely believe and know that there's a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?" B oardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. "I wouldn't put it that way. There's no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there's a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn't give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There's nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress, it's a stinking deal. It happened that two small parts of the universe clashed when we dropped Dick Muller onto the planet of the Hydrans. We had to put him there because it's our nature to find out things, and they did what they did to him because the universe puts stress on its parts, and the result was that Dick Muller came away from Beta Hydri IV in bad shape. He was drawn into the machinery of the universe and get ground up. Now we're having a second clash of parts, equally inevitable, and we have to feed Muller through the machine a second time. He's likely to be chewed again, which stinks, and in order to push him into a position where that can happen, you and I have to stain our IF souls a little, which also stinks, and yet we have absolutely no choice in the matter. If we don't compromise ourselves and trick Dick Muller, we may be setting in motion a new spin of the machine that will destroy all of humanity, and that would stink even worse. I'm asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive." "Where's the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?" "There isn't any. That's why I say the universe stinks." "Have you felt this way all your Ufe?" "Most of it," Boardman said. "When you were my age?" "Even earlier."" Rawlins stared at the screen. "Let's go inside," he said. "I'm tired of waiting." XI M uller saw them coming closer, and he did not understand why he was so calm about it. He had destroyed that robot, yes, and after that they had stopped sending robots in. But his viewing tanks showed him the men camping in the outer levels. He could not see their faces clearly. He could not see what they were doing out there. He counted about a dozen of them, give or take two or three; some were settled in Zone E, and a somewhat larger group in F. Muller had seen a few of them die in the outer zones. He had ways of attacking. He could, if he cared to, flood Zone E with backup from the aqueduct He had done that once, by accident, and it had taken the city almost a full day to clean things up; he recalled how during the flood Zone E had been sealed off, bulkheaded to keep truders did not drown in the first rush, they would certainly blunder in alarm into some of the traps. Muller could do other things, too, to keep them from getting to the inner city. Yet he did nothing. He knew that at the heart of his inaction was a hunger to break his years of isolation. Much as he hated them, much as he feared them, much as he dreaded the puncturing of his privacy, Muller allowed the men to work their way toward him. Muller had spent part of a year among the Hydrans; and then, seeing he was accomplishing nothing, he entered his powered drop-capsule, rode it into the heavens, and repossessed his orbiting ship. If the Hydrans had a mythology, he would become part of it. Within his ship Muller went through the operations that wmdd return him to Earth. As he notified the ship's brain of his presence he caught sight of himself in the burnied metal plate of the input bank, and it frightened him, a little. The Hydran did not use mirrors. Muller saw deep new lines etched on his face, which did not bother him, and he saw a strangeness in his eyes, which did. The muscles are tense, he told himself. He finished programming his return and went to the medic chamber and ordered a forty-db drop in his neural level, along with a hot bath and a thorough massage. When he came out his eyes still looked strange and he had sprouted a facial tic, besides. He got rid of the tic easily enough, but he could do nothing about his eyes. The ship gulped power from the nearest designated donor star. The ship's rotors whirled along the axes of warp, and Muller along with his plastic and metal container was hurled out of the universe on one of the shortcut routes. He had no work to do. The ship duly popped from warp within the prescribed limits, # kilometers out from Earth, and colored lights flashed on his communications board as the nearest traffic station signalled for his bearings. "Match velocities with us, Mr. to get you to Earth," the traffic controller said. M uller's ship took care of it. The coppery globe of the traffic station appeared in sight. "We have a relay message for you from Earth," the controller said. "Charles Boardman calling." "Go ahead," said Muller. Boafdman's face filled the screen. He Iboked pink and newly buffed, quite healthy, well rested. "Dick," he said. "God, it's great to see you again!" Muller activated tactile and put his hand on Boardman's wrist through the screen. "Hello, Charles. One in sixty-five, eh? Well, I'm back.' "Should I tell Marta?" 'Marta," Muller said, thinking for a moment. Yes. The blue#iaired wench with the swivel hips and the sha heels. "Yes. Tell Marta. It would be nice if she met me when I landed." Boardman laughed. Then he said, "How did it go?" "Poorly." "You made contact, though?" "I found the Hydrans, yes. They didn't kill me." "Yes, but -- " "I'm alive, Charles." Muller felt the tic beginning again. "I didn't learn their language. I can't tell you if they approved of me. They seemed quite interested. They studied me closely for a long time. They didn't say a word." "What are they, telepaths?" "I can't tell you that, Charles." Boardman was silent for awhile. "What did they do to you, Dick?" "Nothing." "That isn't so." "What you're seeing is battle fatigue," Muller said. "I'm in good shape, just a little stretched in the nerve. I want to breathe real air and drink some real beer and taste real meat, and I'd like to have some company in bed, and I'll be as good as ever." "How's the gain on your broadcast system, Dick?" "Huh?" "You're coming across too loud," said Boardman. "Blame it on the relay station. Jesus, Charles. What does the gain on my system have to do with anything?" "I'm not sure," Boardman said. "I'm just trying to find out why you're shouting at me." "I'm not shouting," Muller shouted. IP S oon after that they broke contact. Muller had word . from the traffic station that they were ready to send a pilot aboard. He got the hatch ready and let the man in. The pilot was a very blond young man with hawklike features and pale skin. As soon as he unhelmeted he said , "My name is Les Christiansen, Mr. Muller, and I want to tell you that it's an honor and a privilege for me to be the pilot for the first man to visit an alien race. I hope Fm not breaking security when I say that I'd love to know a little about it while we're descending. I mean, this is sort of a moment in history, me being the first to see you in person since you're back, and if it's not an intrusion I'd be grateful if you'd tell me just some of the -- highlights -- of your -- of -- " guess I can tell you a little," Muller said affably. "First did you see the cube of the Hydrans? I know it was supposed to be shown, and -- " "You mind if I sit down a second, Mr. Muller?" "Go ahead." "I feel very woozy," said Christiansen. "I don't know what's happening." His face was crimson, suddenly, and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. "I think I must be getting sick." The pilot crumpled into a webfoam cradle and huddled there, shivering, covering his head with his hands. Muller hesitated helplessly. Finally he reached down to take the mao's elbow and guide him toward the medic chamber. Christiansen whirled away as if touched by fiery metal. The motion pulled him o balance ajod sent him into a heap on the cabin floor. He rose to his knees and wriged until he was as far away from Muller as it was possible to get. In a strangled voice he said, "WhCTe is it?" "That door there." Christiansea rushed for it, sealed himself in, and rattled the door to make sure of it. Muller, astonidied, heard retching sounds and then something that could have be a series of dry sobs. He was about to signal the traffic station that the pilot was sick when the door opened a little and Christiansen said muffley, "Would you hand me my hehnet, Mr. Muller?" Muller gave it to him. "I'm going to have to go back to my station, Mr. Muller." "I'm sorry you reacted this way. Christ, I hope I'm not carrying some kind of contagion." "Fm not sick. I just feel -- lousy," Christiansen fastened the helmet in place. "I don't understand. But I want to curl up and cry. Please let me go, Mr. Muller. It -- I -- that is -- it's terrible, that's what I feell" He rushed into the hatch. In bewi derment Muller watched him cross the void to the nearby traffic station. He got on the radio. "You better not send another pilot over just yet," Muller told the control. Christiansen folded up with instard plague as soon as he took his helmet off. I may be carrying something. Let's dieck it out." The controller, looking troubled, agreed. He asked Muller to go to his medic chamber, set up the diagnostat, and transmit its report. A little while later the solemn chocolate-hued face of the station's medical officer appeared on Muller's screen and said, "This is very odd, Mr. Muller. I've run your diagnostat transmission through our machine. No unusual symptoms. I've also put Christiansen through the works without learning anything. He feels fine now, he says. He told me that an acute depression hit him the moment he saw you, and it deepened in a hurry to a sort of metabolic paralysis. That is, he felt so gloomy that he could hardly function." "Is he prone to these attacks?" "Never," the medic replied. "I'd like to check this out myself. May I come over?" T he medic didn't curl up with the miseries as Christiansen had done. He didn't stay long, either, and when he left his face was glossy with tears. He looked as baffled as Muller. When the new pilot appeared, twenty minutes later, he kept his suit on as he programmed the ship for planetary descent. Sitting rigidly upright at bis controls, his back turned to Muller, he said nothing, scarcely acknowledged Muller's presence. As required by law, he brought the ship down until its drive system was in the grip of a groundside landing regulator, and took his leave. Muller saw the man's face, tense, sweatshiny, tight'ilipped. The pilot nodded curtly and went through the hatch. I must have a very bad smell, Muller thought, if he could smell it through his suit like that. The landing was routine. At the starport he cleared Immigration quickly. He had feared that the giant starport diagnostat would detect whatever malady he carried that his own equipment and the traffic station medic had failed to find; but he passed through the bowels of the machine, letting it bounce sonics off his kidneys and extract some molecules of his various bodily fluids, and at length he emerged without the ringing of bells and the flashing of warning lights. Approved, He spoke to the customs machine. Where from, traveler? Where bound? Approved. His papers were in order. A slit in the wall widened into a doorway, and he stepped through, for the first time since his landing confronting another human being. Boardman had come to meet him. Marta was with him. Her hair was short and seagreen; she had silvered her eyes and gilded the slender column of her throat, so that she looked like some jeweled statuette of herself. Boardman's hand encircled Muller's wrist in a firm greeting that incredibly turned flabby within seconds. The hand slipped away even before Muller could return the embrace. "It's good to see you, Dick," Boardman said without conviction, stepping back a couple of paces. His cheeks seemed to sag as though under heavy gravitational stress. Marta slipped between them and pressed herself against him. Muller did not kiss her. Her eyes were dazzling as he looked within them and felt himself lost in rebounding mirror images. Her nostrils flared. Through her thin flesh he felt muscles bridling. She was trying to get free of him. "Dick," she whispered. "I've prayed for you every night. You don't know how I missed you." She IF struggled harder. She turned her head to one side. He put his cheek against her delicate ear. "Dick, she murmured, "I feel so strange -- so glad to see you that Fin all tanked up inside -- let go, Dick, I feel qijeasy somehow --  Yes. Yes. Of course. He released her. Boardman, sweating, nervous, mopped at his face, jabbed himself with some soothing drag, fidgeted, paced, Muller had never seen him look this way before. "Suppose I let the two of you have some time togetiiCT, eh?" Boardman suggested, his voice coming out half an octave too high. "The weather's been getting to me, Dick. I'll talk with you tomorrow. Your accommodations are all arranged." Boardman fled. Now MuHcr fdt panic riOTg. "Where do we goT he asked. "There's a transport pod outtide. We have a room at the Starport Inn." Marta was diewing at  oornw of her lower lip. He took her by die hand, and tiicy rode the slidewalk out of the terminal room, to the hiinsportation pods. Go on, he thought. Tel! me that you don fed well. Tdl me that mysteriously you've come down with something in the last ten minutes. "Why did you cut your hair?" he asked. "It's a woman's right. Don't you like it this way?" "Not as much." They tered the pod. "Longer, bluer, it was like the sea on a stormy day." The pod shot off on a bath of quicksilver. She kept far to her ride, hunched against the hatdi. "And the make-up, too. Fm sorry, Marta. I wish I could like it. "I was prettying for your homecoming." "Why are you doing th?d with your lip?" "What am I doing?" "Nothing," he said. "Here wc arc. The loom is booked already?" "In your name, yes." r cy went in. He put his hand on the regtstration plate. It flashed green, and they headed for the liftshaft. The inn began in the fifth soblevel of the starport and went down for fifty levels; their room was near the bottom. Choice location, he thought. The bridal mite, maybe. They stepped into a room with keidosoopic hangings and a wide bed with all accessories. The roomglow was tactfully dim. Muller thought of months of woman cubes d a savage throbbing rose in him. She moved past him into Ihe personal room, and was in there a long while. When she came out all the tricky make-up was gone, and her hair was blue again. "Like the sea," she said, "i'm sorry I couldn't grow it back m there. The room wasn't programmed for H." "It's much better now." He studied h-. 'The Hydrans," he saki, 'have either five scjks or none. I'm not sure which. That's a measure of how well I got to know them while I was there. However they do it, I think people have moto fun. Iy are you standing over there, Marta?" Silently she came toward him. Sic quivered a littie, like a shy mare wanting to bolt He put his Kps to her Kps, and they were dry, taut, hostile. Ihey sat side by side on the bed. He saw pain rise in her eyes. "Tell me whafs wrong, Marta. "I don't know." "You're acting like you're sick." "I think I am." "When did you start feeling ill?" "I -- oh, Dick, why all these questions? Please, love, come close." "You don't want me to." "I'm trying to make you happy, Dick. It -- it hurts so much -- so much -- " "What does?" She wouldn't answer. She gestured wantonly and tugged at him again. He sprang from the bed. "Dick, Dick, I warned you not to go. I said I had some precog. And that other things could happen to you there besides getting killed." "Tell me what hurts you." "I can't. I -- don't know." "That's a lie." "When did it start?" "This morning. When I got up." "That's another lie. I have to have the truth!" "Make love to me, Dick. I can't wait much longer. I -- " "You what?" "Can't -- stand -- " "Can't stand what?" "Nothing. Nothing." She was off the bed too, rubbing against him, a cat in heat, shivering, muscles leaping in her face, eyes wild. He caught her wrists and ground the bones together. "Tell me what it is you can't stand much longer, Marta." She gasped. He squeezed harder. 'Tell me," he said. "You can't stand -- " -- being near you," she said. W ithin the maze the air was somehow warmer and sweeter. The walls must cut off the winds, Rawlins thought. He walked carefully, listening to the voice at his ear. Turn left... three paces... put your right foot beside the black stripe on the pavement... pivot... turn left... four paces... ninetydegree turn to the right... immediately make a ninety-degree turn to the right again... It was like a children's street game. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. The stakes were higher here, though. He moved cautiously, feeling death nipping at his heels. Ahead an energy flare spurted across the path. The computer called off the timing for him. One, two, three, four, five, GO! Rawlins went. Safe. On the far side he halted flatfooted and looked back. Boardman was keeping pace with him, unslowed by age. Boardman waved and winked. He went through the patterns, too. One, two, three, four, five, GO! Boardman crossed the place of the energy flare. Rawlins could not help looking at the bones. Dry skeletons ages old, and some bodies that were not old at all. Beings of many races had perished here. What if I die in the next ten minutes? Bright lights were flashing now, on and off many times a second. Boardman, five meters behind him, became an eerie figure moving in disconnected movements, as though IF every other fraction of a second had simply been punched out of his awareness. The computer told him! Walk ten paces and halt. One. Two. Three. Walk ten paces and halt. One. Two. Three. Walk ten paces and halt. Rawlins could not remember what would happen to him if he failed to keep to the proper timing. Here in Zone H the nightmares were so thick that he could not keep them straight in his mind. Was this the place where a ton of stone fell on the Unwary? Where the walls came together? Where a cobweb-dainty bridge delivered victims to a lake of fire? His estimated life-span at this point was two hundred five years. He wanted to have most of these years. I am too uncomplicated to die yet, Ned Rawlins thought. He danced to the computer's tune, past the lake of fire, past the clashing walls. S omething with long teeth perched on the lintel of the door ahead. Carefully Charles Boardman unslung the gun from his backpack and cut in the proximity-responsive target finder. He keyed it for # kilograms of mass and downward, at # meters. "I've got it," he told Rawlins, and fired. The energy bolt splashed against the wall. Streaks of shimmering green sprouted along the rich purple. The beast leaped, limbs outstretched in a final agony, and fell. From somewhere came three small scavengers that began to rip it savagely into the finest shreds. Images played on a golden screen bracketed to a wl near the inner end of Zone H. Rawlins saw his father's face take form, coalesce with an underlying pattern of bars and crosses, burst into flame. The screen was externally primed; what it showed was in the eye of the beholder. The drones, passing this point, had seen only the blank screen. Rawlins watched the image of a girl appear. Maribeth Chambers, sixteen years old, sophomore in Our Lady of Mercies ibeth Chambers smiled shyly and began to remove her clothes. "I am the Resurrection and the Life," said Maribeth Chambers in a husky, passionate voice. Sbe beckoned. She gave him a bedroom wink. She giggled. She wriggled. She heaved her shoulders and made her breasts ring like tolling bells. Her skin turned deep green. Her eyes slid about in her face. Her lower lip stretched forth like a shovel. Her thighs began to melt. Patterns of flame danced on the screen. Rawlins heard deep throbbing ponderous chords from an invisible organ. He listened to the whispering of the brain that guided him and went past the screen unharmed. The screen , showed abstract patterns: a geometry of power, rigid marching lines and frozen figures. Charles Boardman paused to admire it for a moment. Then he moved on. A forest of whirling knives near the inner border of Zone H. The heat grew strangely intense. One had to tiptoe over the pavement. This was troublesome because none who had passed this way before had experienced it. Did the route vary? Could the city introduce variations? How hot would it get? Where would the zone of warmth end? Did cold lie beyond? Would they live to reach Zone E? Was Richard Muller doing this to prevent them from entering? Maybe he recognizes Boardman and is trying to kill him. There is that possibility. Muller has every reason to hate Boardman, and he has had no chance to undergo social adjustment. Maybe I should move faster and open some space between Boardman and myself. It seems to be getting hotter. On the other hand, he would accuse me of being cowardly. And disloyal. Maribeth Chambers would never have done those things. Do nuns still shave their heads? B oardman found the distortion screen deep inside Zone G perhaps the worst of all. He was afraid of entering a place where the evidence of his senses did not correspond to the real universe. Boardman depended on his senses. He was wearing his third set of retinas. You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly. Now he was within the field of the distortion screen. Parallel lines met here. The triangular figures emblazoned on the moist, quivering walls were constructed entirely of obtuse angles. A river ran sideways through the valley, TTiO stars were quite close and the mooas orbited one another. What we now must do is close our eyes and not be deceived. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. Move to the left slightly slide your foot. Back toward the right. Thafs it. Start walking again. Forbidden fruit tempted him. All his life he had tried hard to see clearly. The lure of distortions was irresistible. Boardman halted, planting each foot firmly. If you hope to get out of this, he told himself, you will keep your eyes closed. If you open your eyes you will be misled and go to your death. Boardman remained quite still. The silent voice of the computer tried to prod him on. "Wait," said Boardman quietly. "I can look around a little if I don't move. You can't get into trouble if you don't move." The ship's brain reminded him of the geyser of flame that had sent Marshall to his death. Boardman opened his eyes. All about him he saw the negation of geometry. This was the inside of the Klein bottle, looking out. Disgust rose like a green column within him. You are eighty years old and you know how the universe should look. Close your eyes now, C.B. Close your eyes and move along. You're taking undue risks. First he sought Ned Rawlins. The boy was twenty meters ahead of him, shuffling slowly past the screen. Eyes closed? Of course. All of them. Ned was an obedient boy. Or a frightened Boardman began to lift his right leg, checked himself, reimplanted it on the pavement. Just ahead, pulsations of golden light leaped in the air, taking now the form of a swan, now the form of a tree. Ned Rawlins's left shoulder rose too high. His back was humped. One leg moved forward, and the other moved backward. Through golden mists Boardman saw the corpse of Marshall stapled to the wall. Marshall's eyes were wide open. Looking into those eyes Boardman saw his own curving reflection, aU nose, no mouth. He closed his eyes. The computer, relieved, directed him onward. A sea of blood, A cup of lymph. To die, not having loved -- This is the gateway to Tjone F. I am now leaving deatWs other king'dom. Where is my passport? Do I need a visa? I have nothing to declare. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. O n the far side of the gateway Rawlins stopped short and asked the computer if it were safe for him to squat and rest. The brain said that it was. Gingerly, Rawlins lowered himself, rocked on his heels a moment, touched his knee of the cool pebble-textured pavement He looked back. Behind him, colossal blocks of stone set without mortar and fit to a perfect truing were piled fifty meters highj flanking a tall narrow aperture through which the solid form of Charles Boardman now was passing. Boardman looked sweaty and flustered. Rawlins found that fascinating. He had never seen the old man's smugness pierced before. Rawlins himself was none too steady. Metabolic poisons boiled in the tubes and channels of his body. He was drenched with perspiration so thoroughly that his clothing was working overtime to get rid of it, disthe substratum of chemical compounds. Boardman came alongside and squatted. Rawlins had to steady him as he balanced before kneeling. Rawlins said, "Muller came this way alone and made it." "Muller was always an extraordinary man." "How do you think he did it?" "Why don't you ask him?" "I mean to," Rawlins said. "Perhaps by this time tomorrow I'll be talking to him." "They'll be coming out to meet us soon. They should have fixes on us by now. We must be showing up on their mass detectors. Up, Ned. Up." They stood. Once again Rawlins led the way. In Zone F things were less cluttered but also less attractive. The prevailing mood of the architecture was taut, with a fussy line that generated a tension of mismatched objects. Though he knew that traps were fewer here, Rawlins still had the sensation that the ground was likely to open beneath him at any given moment. The air was cooler here. It had the same sharp taste as the air on the open plain. At each of the street intersections rose immense concrete tubes in which jagged, feathery plants were standing. "Which is the worst part for you so far?" Rawlins asked. IF "The distortion screen," said Boardman. "That wasn't so bad. Unless you feel peculiar about walking through stuff this dangerous with your eyes closed. "I peeked," said Boardman. "In the distortion zone?" "Just for a moment. I couldn't resist it, Ned." Rawlins smiled. He wanted to congratulate Boardman on having done something silly and dangerous and human, but he didn't dare. He said, "What did you do? Just stand still and peek and then move on?" "I forgot myself and started to take a step, but I didn't follow through. I kept my feet planted and looked around." "Maybe I'll try to try that on the way out," Rawlins said. "Just one little look can't hurt." "How do you know the screen's effective in the other direction?" Rawlins frowned. "I never considered that. We haven't tried to go outward through the maze yet. Suppose it's altogether different coming out? We don't have charts for that direction. What if we all get clipped coming out?" "We'll use the probes again," said Boardman. "Don't worry about that. When we're ready to go out, we'll bring a bunch of drones to the camp in Zone F here, and check the exit route the same way we checked the entry route." After a while Rawlins said, "Why should there be any traps on the outward route, anyway? That means the builders of the maze were locking themselves in as well as locking enemies out. Why would they do that?" "Who knows, Ned? They were aliens." B oardman remembered that the conversation was incomplete. He said, "And which had been the worst place for you so far?" "That other screen further back," Rawlins said. "The one that shows you all the nasty, crawling stuff inside your own mind." "Wiich screen is that?" "Toward the inside of Zone H. It was a golden screen fastened to a high wall with metal strips. I looked at it and saw my father, for a couple of seconds, and then I saw a girl I once knew, a girl who became a nun. On the screen she was taking her clothes off." "I didn't see any such things." "You couldn't miss it. It was, oh, about fifty meters after the place where you shot the first animal. A little to your left, halfway up the wall, a rectangular screen, a trapezoidal screen, really, with bright white metal borders, and colors moving on it, shapes -- " "Yes. That one. Geometrical shapes." "I saw Maribeth getting undressed," Rawlins said, sounding confused. "And you saw geometrical shapes?" Zone F could be deadly too. A small pearly blister in the ground opened, and a stream of gleaming pellets rolled out. They flowed toward Rawlins. They moved with the malevolent determination of a stream of hungry soldier ants. They stung the flesh. He trampled a number of them, but in his annoyance and fervor he almost came too close to a suddenly flashing blue light. He kicked three pellets toward the light, and they melted. Boardman had already had much more than enough. Their elapsed time out from the entrance to the maze was only one hour and forty-eight minutes, although it seemed much longer than that The route through Zone F led into a pink-walled room where jets of steam blew up from concealed vents. At the far end of the room was an irising slot. If you did not step through it with perfect timing, you would be crushed. The slot gave access to a long low-vaulted passageway, oppressively war mand close, whose walls were blood-red in color and pulsated skkeningly. Beyond the passageway was an open plaza in which six slabs of white metal stood on end like waiting swords. A fountain hurled water a hundred meters in the air. Flanking the plaza were three towers with many windows, all of different sizes. Prismatic spotlights played against the windows. No windows were broken. On the steps of one of the towers lay the articulated skeleton of a creature close to ten meters long. The bubble of what was undoubtedly a space helmet covered its skull. A lton, Antonelli, Cameron, Greenfield and Stein constituted die Zone F camp, the relief base for the forward group. Antonelli and Stein went back to the plaza in the middle of F and found Rawlins and Boardman there. "It's just a short way on," Stein said. "Would you like to rest a few minutes, Mr. Boardman?" Boardman glowered. They went on. Antonelli said, "Davis, Ottavio and Reynolds passed on to E this morning when Alton, Cameron and Greenfield reached us. Petrocelli and Walker are reconnoitering along the inner edge of E and looking a little way into D. They say it looks a lot better in there." The relief base consisted of a pair of extrusion domes side by side in a little open spot at the edge of a garden. The site had been thoroughly researched and no surprises were expected. Rawlins entered one of the domes and took his shoes off. Cameron handed him a cleanser. Greenfield gave him a food pack. Boardman came into the dome. It amazed Rawlins how durable and tireless the old man was. Boardman said, laughing, 'Tell Captain Hosteen he lost his bet. We made it." "What bet?" asked Antonelli. Greenfield said, "We think that Muller must be tracking us somehow. His movements have been very regular. He's occupying the back quadrant of Zone A, as far from the entrance as possible, if the entrance is the one he uses, and he swings around in a little arc balancing the advance party." Boardman said, "Hosteen gave three to one we wouldn't get here. I heard him." To Cameron, who was a communications technician, Boardman said, "Do you think it's possible IF that Muller is using some kind of scanning system?" "It's altogether likely." "Good enough to see faces?" "Maybe some of the time. We really can't be sure. He's had a lot of time to learn how to use this maze, sir." "If he sees my face," said Boardman, "we might as well just go home without bothering. I never thought he might be scanning us. Who's got the thermoplastics? I need a new face fast." He did not try to explain. But when he was finished he had a long sharp nose, lean, downcurving lips, and a witch's chin. It was not an attractive face. But it was not the face of Charles Boardman, either. A fter a night of unsound sleep Rawlins prepared himself to go on to the advance camp in Zone E. Boardman would not be going with him, but they would be in direct contact at all times now. Boardman would see what Rawlins saw and hear what Rawlins heard. And in a tiny voice Boardman would be able to convey instructions to him. The morning was dry and wintry. They tested the communications circuits. Rawlins stepped out of the dome and walked ten paces, standing alone looking inward and watching the orange glow of daylight on the pockmarked porcelain-like walls before him. The walls were deep black against the lustrous green of the sky. Boardman said, "Lift your right hand if you hear me, Ned." Rawlins lifted his right hand. "Now go ahead and speak to me." "Where did you say Richard Muller was bom?" "On Earth. I hear you very well." "Where on Earth?" "The North American Directorate, somewhere." "I'm from there," Rawlins said. "Yes, I know. I think Muller is from the western part of the continent." "Should I get started now?" "Listen to me, first. We've been very busy getting ourselves inside this place, and I don't want you to forget that everything we've done up to this point has been a preliminary to our real purpose. We're here for Muller, remember." "Would I forget?" "We've been preoccupied with matters of personal survival. That can tend to blur your perspective; whether you yourself, individual individual, live or die. Now we take a larger view. What Richard Muller has whether it's a gift or a curse, is of high potential value; and it's your job to gain use of it, Ned. The fate of galaxies lies on what happens in the next few days between you and Muller. Eons will be reshaped. Billions yet unborn will have their lives altered for good or ill by the events at hand." "You sound absolutely serious, Charles." "I absolutely am. Sometimes there comes a moment when all the booming foolish inflated words mean something, and this is one of those moments. You're standing at a crossroads in galactic history. And therefore, Ned, you're going to go in there and lie and cheat and perjure and connive, and I expect that your conscience is going to be very sore for a while, and you'll hate yourself extravagantly for it, and eventually you'll ree that you've done a deed of heroism. The test of your communications equipment is now ended. Get back inside here and let's ready you to march." H e went alone only a short distance this time. Stein and Alton accompanied him as far as the gateway to Zone E. There were no incidents. They pointed him in the right direction, and he passed through a pinwheeling shower of coruscating azure sparks to enter the austere, funeral zone beyond. As he negotiated the uphill ramp of the entrance he caught sight of a socket mounted in an upright stone cdumn. Within the darkness of the socket was something mobile and gleaming that could have been an eye. "I think I've found part of Muller's scanning system," Rawlins reported. "There's a thing watching me in the wall." "Cover it with your spray,?' Boardman suggested. "I think he'd interpret that as a hostile act. Why would an archeologist mutilate a feature like that?" "Yes. A point. Proceed." There was less of an air of menace about Zone E. It was made up of dark, tightly compacted low buildings that clung together like bothered turtles; Rawlins could see different topography ahead, high walls and a shining tower. Each of the zones was so different from all the others that he began to think they h been built at different times: a core of residential sectors, and then a gradual accretion of trap-laden outer rings as the enemies grew more troublesome. It was the sort of thought an archeologist might have; he Bled it for use. He walked a little way and saw the shadowy figure of Walker coming toward him. Walker was lean, dour, cool. He was about forty, a career man. "Glad you made it, Rawlins. Go easy there on your left. That wall is hinged." "Everything all right here?" "More or less. We lost Petrocelli about an hour ago." Rawlins stiffened. "This zone is supposed to be safe!" "It isn't. It's riskier than F, and nearly as bad as G. We underestimated it when we were using the probes. There's no real reason why the zones have to get safer toward the middle, is there? This is one of the worst." 'To lull us," Rawlins suggested. "False security." "You bet Come on, now. Follow me and don't use your brain too much. There's no value in originality in here. You go the way the path goes, or you don't go anywhere." Rawlins fdlowed. He saw no apparent danger, but he jumped where Walker jumped, and he detoured where Walker detoured. Not too far on lay the inner camp. He found Davis, Ottavio, and Reynolds there, and also the upper half of Petrocelli. "You going on into D today?" IF Walker asked with a keen interest." "I may as well." "We'll tell you what to avoid. It's new. That's where Petrocelli got it, right near the entrance to D, maybe five meters this side. You trip a field of some kind and it cuts you in half. The drones didn't trip it at all." "Suppose it cuts ever#rthing in half that goes by?" Rawlins asked. "Except drones." "It didn't cut Muller," Walker said. "It won't cut you if you step around it. We'll show you how." "And beyond?" "That's all up to you." B oardman said, "If you're tired, stay here for the night." "I'd rather go on." "You'll be going alone, Ned. Why not be rested?" "Ask the brain for a reading on me. See where my fatigue level is. I'm ready to go onward." Boardman checked. They were doing full telemetry on Rawlins; they knew his pulse rate, respiration count, hormone levels and many more intimate things. The computer saw no reason why Rawlins could not continue without pausing. "All right," said Boardman. "Go on." "Fm about to enter Zone D, Charles. This is where Petrocelli got it. I see the tripline -- very subtle, very well hidden. Here I go past it. Yes. Ye-es. This is Zone D. I'm stopping and letting the brain get my bearings for me. Zone D looks a little cozier than E. The crossing shouldn't take long." Auburn flames guarded Zone C. They were frauds. Rawlins said softly, "Tell the galaxies that their fate is in good hands. I should find Muller in fifteen minutes." I I I I I i This Month in Galaxy -- Tomorrow's world, where goblint and banshees live in protected reserves -- and a man fries to solve his own death! by Clifford D. Simak by H. #. Gold by Damon Knight Algis Budrys, Willy Ley and many morel I I M i i I I IF  Short Story TO: American Business Equipment, Inc. #-#-# New York, New York August # On April # of this year I purchased from your company a Phonotyper model #. Since I know you will be interested in such matters, I have gone to the trouble of finding the serial number of my particular unit, which is B-#-#-#. Finding this number was in itself no small feat. Indeed it took me well over twenty minutes, by the end of which I was in downright intimate terms with your machine. However, this is irrelevant. Annoying, but irrelevant. I have found the Phonotyper to be an extremely useful piece of equipment. Since I write for a living, I am most happy to be freed from the idiosyncrasies of my old electric typewriter (a machine which fought me at all turns.) Now it is a joy to settle myself in a comfortable chair with my feet up and speak into tht Phonotyper microphone. I love the little happy hum that comes from the next room as the transcriber puts down my words at the incredible rate of # characters per second. I only wish I could express myself as fast as your machine can type the words. Each month If brings you a new writer, never before published. This month's is Jerry Juhl, a #-year-old New Yorker who began his career as a puppeteer with a TV program in California and is now writer and puppeteer with The Muppets, the macabre stick-and-string comedians that have brightened network television shows for the past few years. A graduate of San Jose State College, Juhl is in Europe as this is written but will be back soon with The Muppets -- and, we hope, with usi However, there Is a fly in the ointment -- or possibly in the silicone lubricant. After about three months of use, the Phonotyper began playing games with me. Occasionally it would slip in a "then" when I had said "than." Or, when it thought I wasn't watching, it would turn one of my "shoulds" into a "would." This latter example actually occured in an important business letter, and since the mistake was not caught, it caused no end of trouble. I have had one of your servicemen call twice. Each time he vowed the trouble had been corrected, but each time it wasn't. I am writing this with the hope that you might have something constructive to suggest. Sincerely, Edward Salant #-#-# St. Louis, Mo. TO: Edward Salant ##-# St. Louis, Mo. Equipment, Inc. August # Dear Mr. Salant: We have received your letter of August #. We deeply regret that you have had difficulty with your Phonotyper #. The # is the product of over fifteen years' research by a company well known for its fine business equipment. Still, it is a new machine, based on new and radically different concepts in the fields of electronic and mechanical engineering. Because of this, a certain amount of adjustment is sometimes necessary for the unit to function flawlessly. We suggest that the problem may be a phonetic one. Remember that each Phonotyper must be set to the personal speech patterns and regional dialect of its user. We therefore recommend that you refer to the new revised and expanded instruction manual which is enclosed. With this, you should be able to make the necessary adjustment for your personal local patterns. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Sincerely, The American Business Equipment, Inc. Incoming letter scanned by: Circuits #-# Cobol # Outgoing decisions by: #-# Redar circuits # Transcribed by TO: American Business Equipment, Inc. September I Thank you for your courteous letter of August #. I was pleased to receive the new expanded instruction manual. I must tell you that at first I was skeptical of your advice. Because I am a playwright, I have had training in all the theatrical arts, including several years of exhaustive work in voice and diction. My middle o is flawless, my internal vowels superb, and I'm 'extremely precise with fricatives and plosives. In short I have perfect Standard American Speech. Or so I was told by the teaching machines. However, you must certainly know your business and your machines. of comfortable living may just possibly have dulled my laryngeal control a bit. Therefore, I tackled your instruction book with a will. In fact, I read it several times over. For,;while I was of the opinion that the computer that compiled this manual had done so by making up instructions at random and arranging them according to the throw of some kind of electronic dice. But after the fourth reading, a sort of murky though undeniable logic began to emerge. In a mere four hours, I had my Phonotyper adjusted exactly as indicated. Tlie damn thing still doesn't work. Please advise. Sincerely, Edward Salant TO: Edward Salant Equipment, Inc. September # Dear Mr. Salant: We extend profuse apologies for the trouble you have incurred in using the Phonotyper. We have notified our St. Louis Service Center of your difficulty. They will be contacting you personally within the week. Sincerely, American Business Equipment, Inc. Incoming letter scanned by: Circuits #-# Cobol # Outgoing decisions by: # Redar circuits # Transcribed by: TO: American Business Equipment, Inc. September #I You will be pleased to know that your service center in St. Louis functions with great efficiency. They did in fact contact me the day after your letter arrived. Perhaps I had neglected to tell you (although the carbon copies of my previous communiques seem to indicate differently) that I had already contacted your service center here, and they couldn't help. They still can't. The serviceman who called was the same one who had paid two previous visits. This time his batteries were so worn down he could hardly function at all. For your reference he is Roboserv #. And while you're chargIP ing him up, I'd have the poor chapes circuits checked, because after he left my Phonotyper worked more erratically than ever. I am writing this letter on my old electric typewriter. I loathe my old electric typewriter, as you may know by now. After all, we've become regular pen pals in the last few weeks. I can only hope that somewhere in your little transistor-driven heart you will find the compassion to help. Is that too much to ask of a machine? Hopefully, Edward lant TO: American Business Equipment, Inc. September # Oh, little letter-writing machine at the Phonotypar Company -- why have you forgotten me? Is it something I said? Is it something I did? If only you ate. I would invite you to lunch and we could talk about it. Hoping this letter finds you in good health, I remain, Edward Salant TO: American Business Equipment, Inc. October # I know of course that this letter, like the others I have sent you, will be read by a machine. So I suppose it is senseless to try to describe to you an honest human emotion. Still, I feel impelled to try. The particular emotion I have in mind is rage. For nearly a month now I have had in my possession a totally inoperative Phonotyper model #. All my efforts to have the machine r paired have come to naught. I have wheedled, cajoled, begged and plead- ed. I have used courtesy, sarcasm and righteous indignation. This mommg, determined to make one last try, telephoned your New York headquarters. Now friends, all I really hoped for was to speak to s(neose. Someone. Not something. First your answering machine answered, and when I explained my problem I was connected to another answering machine which listened politely and then decided to let me speak to yet a third. This third bit of solid-state circuitry was even nmre fawningly gracious than the other two. I am sure that if one were to watch this machine in action, one would see the little crystal diodes curtseying. After it had listened ever so patiently to my story, its charming little ted voice soothed my fevered mind with promises of immediate help. Then it put me on "hrfd" and left me there. Surely, I thought to myself as the long-stance minutes ticked by, surely there must be somebody at the American Business Equipment Company. There must be a human being somewhere there. I man who swept up, or the man who drops by once a week to collect tile money. Anyone at all. It was at this point that the machine disconnected me, and I was left like an idiot listening to the dial tone. Well, American Business Equip., ol' buddy, I have decided on a course of action. If my Phonotyper isn't working in a week's time. I'll take care of it myself. I shall place the ei machine in my car and drive to your St. Louis Service Center. There I shall smash the bloody thing to bits by hurling it through your lousy showroom window! Yours in rage, Edward Salant TO: Edward Salant Equipment, Inc. October # Dear Mr. Salant: Please excuse our tardiness in answering your letters. This delay has been caused by certain discrepancies in the information which we find in our memory banks. Our St. Louis service center claims that they have never sent a repairman to service your machine. They were in telephone communication with you after we notified them of your problem. But the address which you gave them proved to be a non-existent one. Subsequent attempts to reach you by telephone failed, as you seemed not to be at .liome. This information does not jibe with the account you gave us m your letter of September #. Possibly the problem can be traced to an error in our memory banks, but as you know this is highly unlikely. Also, our records show that the particular Phonotyper that you mentioned, Serial No. B-#-# #-#, belongs not to you but to Ailsworth Robotronics, of St. Louis. Is it possible' that you purchased the unit from them second-hand and neglected to change the registration? We eagerly await your reply so that we may best serve you. Sincerely, American Business Equipment, Inc. Discrepancy check circuits: #-# Cobol # Outgoing decisions by: #-# Redar circuits # Transcribed by: # TO: American Business Equipment, Inc. October # You have been receiving communications from one Edward Salant of St. Louis, Missouri. You will receive no more. You may erase all information concerning this name from your memory banks. Edward Salant is the pen-name used by circuits # in Ailsworth's AutoArt Computer #. As you know, the Auto-Art computer has just recently been developed. The type of programming required for these machines to produce creative or so-called "artistic" output occasionally results in erratic and senseless behavior. The situation has been corrected. Outgoing decisions by: Circuits #-#I Redar # Transcribed by: ' Watch for the second b!g issue of this new and exciting science-fiction magazine, with stories from Poland, Chile, India, the U.S.S.R., Austria and elsewhere on the Planet Earthl Coming soon -- ask your newsdealer to reserve your copy for youl # IF IF  Novelette, A. Bertram Chandfer 'frustrated by Morrow They were religious zealots, seeking God at the e#ge of space -- and they fomid kin! photonic than her preckcesscH and that she possessed a far sweeter personality. But sweetness and prettincss are not everything He bit back a sarcastic rejoinder, looked again at the signal that the girl had jnst handed hinL It was om a ship, a vessel with the unlikely name of Piety. And that was not a word in some alien language that could # A ud who' demanded Com-modore Grimes, "will it be this time?" He added, "Or what? "I don't know, sir, I'm sure," simpered Miss Walton. Grimes looked at his new secretary with some distaste. There was no denying that she was far more anything -- the name of the originator of the message was Ter-raiiJ enough, Anglo-Terran at that. isaic appellation there was his title.  But that was odd. It was not the usual Master, Captain, Officer Commanding or whatever. It was, plainly and simply, Rector. Piety... Rector... That ship's name, and that title of rank, had an archaic ring to them. Grimes had always been a student of naval history and probably knew more about the vessels that had sailed Earth's oceans in the dim and distant past than anybody on the Rim Worlds and, come to that, the vast majority of people on the Home Planet itself. He remembered that most of the ancient sailing ships had been given religious names. He remembered, too, that Rector had once been the shipmaster's official tide. So what was this coming out to the Rim, giving her E.T.A., details of last clearance, state of health on board and all the rest of it? Some cog, some caravel, some galleass? Grimes smiled at his own fancy. Nonetheless, strange ships, very strange ships, had drifted out to the Rim. "Miss Walton," he said. "Yes, Commodore," she replied brightly. ' "This Piety. See what details Lloyds' Register has on her." ' "Very good, sir." The commodore -- rugged, stocky, short, iron-gray hair over a deeply tanned and seamed face, ears that in spite of suggestions made by two wives and several mistresses still protruded -- paced the polished floor of his office vdiile the little blonde punched the buttons that would actuate the Port Forlorn robot librarian. Legally, he supposed, the impending arrival of this Piety was the Port Captain's pigeon. Grimes was Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners, the Confederacy's shipping line. But also he was the Officer Commanding the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve and, as such, was concerned with matters of security and defense. He wished that Sonya, his wife, were available so that he could talk things over with her. Before her marriage to him, she had held the rank of Commander in the Intelligence Branch of the Interstellar Federation's Survey Service and, when it came to mysteries and secrets of any kind, displayed the aptitudes of a highly intelligent ferret. But Sonya, after declaring that another week on Lorn would have her climbing up the wallpaper, had taken off for a long vacation -- Waverley, Caribbea, Atlantia and points inward -- by herself. When she returned, she, would be sorry to have missed whatever odd adventures the arrival of this queerly named ship presaged -- and Grimes knew that Aere would be some. His premonitions were rarely, if ever, wrong. He turned away from the banked screens and instruments that made his office look like an exceptionally well fitted spaceship's control room, walked to the wide window that took up an entire wall, that overlooked the port. It was a fine day -- for Lorn. The IP almost perpetual overcast was thin enough to permit a hint of blue sky to show through, and the Lorn sun was a clearly defined disk rather than the usual fuzzy balL There was almost no wind Discharge of Rim Leopard, Grimes noted, seemed to be progressing satisfactorily. There was blue flare of welding arcs about the little spacetug, Rim Mamelute, presently undergoing her annual survey. And there, all by herself, was the ship that Crimes -- to the annoyance of his wife -- often referred to as his one true love, the old, battered Faraway Quest, She had been built how many (too many) years ago as a standard Epsilon Class tramp for the Interstellar Transport Commission. She had been converted into a survey diip for the Rim Worlds Government. In her. Grimes had made the first landings on the inhabited planets to the Galactic East, the worlds now referred to as the Eastern Circuit. In her he had made the first contact -- but not a physical one -- with the anti-matter systems to the Galactic West. And would the arrival of the good ship Piety lead to her recommissioning? Grimes hoped so. He liked his job; it was interesting work, carrying both authority and responsibility. But he was often tired of being a deskborne commodore and had always welcomed the chance to take the old Quest up and out into deep space again. As often in the past he had a hunch, a strong one. mething was cooking. He'd have a finger in the pie. Miss Walton's childish treble broke into his thouts. "Sir, I have the information on Piety. "Yes? Come on, girl, let's have k." "She was built as Epsilon Cmcis for the Interstellar Transport Oqh mission fifty Terran Standard Years ago. She was purchased from them last year, Terran reckoning, by the Skarsten Theological Institute, whose address is listed as Nuevo Angeles on Francisco, otherwise known as Beta Puppis VL" "I've visited Francisco," he told her. "A pleasant world, in many ways. But an odd one." "Odd? How, sir?" "I hope I'm not treading on any of your corns, Miss Walton, but the whole planet's no more than a breeds ing ground for fancy religions." "I'm a Latter Day Reformed Methodist myself, sir," she told him severely. "That's not fancy." "Indeed it's not. Miss Walton," And I'm a cynical, more or less tolerant agnostic, he thought. He went on, "And do Lloyds' condescend to tell us the category in whidi this renamed Epsilon Crucis is now listed? A missionary ship, perhaps?" "No, sir. A survey ship." "Oh" was all that Grimes could say. T wo days later, from his office window. Grimes watched Piety come in. Whatever else this Rector be he was a good ship handler. There was a nasty wind blowing across the spaceport, not quite a gale, but near enough to it; nonetheless the ship made a classic vertical descent, dropping to the exact center of the triangle formed by the berth marker beacons. It was easy enough in theory, no more than the exact application of lateral thrust, no more than a sure and steady hand on the remote controls of the Inertial Drive. No more -- and no less. Some people get the feel of ships; some never do. This Piety was almost a twin to Grimes's own Faraway Quest. She was a newer (less old) ship, of course, but the design of the Epsilon Class tramps, those trusty workhorses of the Commission, changes very little over the years. She sat there in her assigned berth, a gray, weathered spire, the bright scarlet beacons still blinking way just clear of the broad vanes of her tripedal landing gear. From her stem a telescopic mast extended itself, and from the top of the metal staff a flag broke out, whipped to quivering rigidity by the wind. The commodore picked up his binoculars to study it. It was not, as he had thought that it would be, the national ensign of Francisco, golden crux ansata and crescent on a scarlet ground; even with the naked eye he could see that. It was a harshly uncompromising standard -- a simple white cross on a black field. It must be, decided Grimes, the houseflag of the Skarsten Institute. The after airlock door opened and the ramp extended from it, and to it drew up the beetlelike cars of the various port officials -- Port Captain, Customs, Immigration, Health. The boarding party got out of their vehicles and filed up the gangway, to where an officer was waiting to receive them. They vanished into the ship. Grimes idly wondered whether or not they would get a drink and what the views of these Skarsten people were on alcohol. He remembered his own visit to Francisco, as a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service, many years ago. Some of the religious sects had been rigidly abstemious, maintaining that alcohol was an invention of the devil. Others had held that wine symbolized the more beneficent aspects of the Almighty. But it was hardly a subject worthy of speculation. He would find out for himself when, at some time when the arrive formalities were over, he paid his courtesy call on the ship's captain. He went back to his desk, busied himself with the paper work that made a a habit of accumulating. An hour or so later he was interrupted by the buzzing of his telephone. "Grimes here!" he barked into the instrument. "Commodore Grimes," said a strange voice. It ,was a statement rather than a question. "This is of Piety. I request an appointment." "It will be my pleasure, er. Rector." Grimes glanced at his watch. It was almost time for his rather dreary coffee and sandwich lunch. It was not the sort of meal that one asked visitors to share. He said, "Shall we say # hours, our time? In my office?" "That will do very nicely, sir. Thank you." "I am looking forward to meeting you," said Grimes, replacing the handset in its rest. And shall I send Miss Walton out for some sacramental wine? he asked himself. IP thin, with almost all of his pale face Wdden by a bushy black beard, from above which a great nose jutted like the beak of a bird of prey. His eyes under the thick, black brows were of a gray so pale as to be almost colorless, and they were cold, cold. A plain black uniform covered his spare frame, the buttons concealed by the fly front of the tunic, the four bands o'f black braid on the sleeves almost invisible against the cloth. There was a hint of white lace at his throat "I have been told, sir," he said, sitting rigidly in his chair, "that you are something of an expert on the queer conditions that prevail here, on the Rim." "Perhaps, Rector," said Grimes, "you will teU me first the purpose of your visit here." "Very well, sir." The man's baritone voice was as cold and as colorless as his eyes. "To begin with, we have the permission of your government, your Rim Worlds Confederacy, a conduct our survey on certain of the planets under your jurisdiction." "A survey. Rector? The Rim Worlds have been very well surveyed -- even though I say it myself." "Not our kind of survey. Commodore. I shall, as you would say, put you in the picture. We of the Skarsten Institute are Neo Calvinists. We deplore the godlessness, the heresy that is ever more prevalent throughout the galaxy -- yes, even upon our own planet We feel that Mankind is in sore and pressing need of a new Revelation, a new Sinai..." "And you honestly believe that you will find your Sinai here, out on the Rim?" "We believe that we shall find our Sinai. If not here, then elsewhere.  Perhaps even beyond the confines of this galaxy." "Indeed? But how can I help you. Rector?" "You, we were told, know more about the odd distortions of the Continuum encountered here than anybody else on these planets." "Such is fame." Grimes sighed and shrugged. "Very well. Rector, you asked for it. ##I tell you what little I know. To begin with, it is thought by many of our scientists that here, at the very edge of the expanding galaxy, the fabric of time and space is stretched thin. We have long become used to the phenomena known as Rim Ghosts, disconcerting glimpses into alternative universes -- " "I believe that you, sir, have personally actually made the transition into these universes." "Yes. Once when the Federation's Survey Service requested our aid in the investigation of the Riin Ghost phenomena. No doubt your people have read the Survey Service report." 'We have." "The second time was when we of the Confederacy took our own steps to deal with what we decided was a very real menace -- an alternative universe in which our worlds were ruled by particularly unpleasant mutants, with human beings in a state of slavery. And then there was Captain Listowel, who was Master of the first, experimental lightjammer. He tried to exceed the speed of light without cheating -- as we do with our Mannschenn Drive -- and experienced quite a few different time tracks." "And tell me, sir, did you or this Captain Listowd ever feel that you were on the point of being granted the Ultimate Revelation?" "Frankly, no, Rector. We had our bad moments -- as who in Space, or anywhere else, doesn't? And anyone who has indulged in time-track switching often wonders, as I do, about the reality, the permanence of both himself and the universe about him. For example, I have vague memories of ships that were equipped with only reaction drive for blastoffs and landings and short interplanetary hauls. Absurd, isn't it? But those memories are there. And my wife -- I'm sorry you can't meet her, but she's off on a trip -- seems to have changed. I have this half recollection of her when she first came out to the Rim, which is there in my mind alongside the real -- but what is real? -- one. She was working for the Federation's Intelligence Service then. Anyhow in one memory riie's small and blonde, in one she's tall and blonde, and in one she's tall and red-headed, as she is today. Damn it -- that's three memories!" "Women have been known to change their hair styles and colorations, Commodore." 'Too right. I shan't be at all surprised if she returns with her crowning glory a bright green! But that doesn't explain the co-existent memories." "Perhaps not." Smith's voice was bitter as he went on, "But it seems such a waste of opportunities. To have been privileged to visit the many mansions of our Father's house, and to come back only with confused recollections of the color of a woman's hair!" "And quite a few scars. Rector. Physical and psychological." "No doubt." The man's voice was unpleasantly ironic. "But tell me, sir, what do you know of Kinsolving's Planet?" "Not much. I suppose that we shall settle it if we're ever faced with a population explosion, which is doubtful." "I am referring, sir, to the man who appeared there, the Stone Age savage from the remote past." "Yes, that was a queer business. Well before my time. Nothing of the kind has happened there in recent years, although there is still an uneasy, brooding atmosphere about that world that makes it undesirable as a piece of real estate. The original theory is that somehow the... the loneliness of the people out here on the Rim, hanging, as it were, by their fingernails over the abyss of the Ultimate Night, became focused on that one particular planet. Now the theory is that there the fabric of time and space is stretched extremely thin and that anything or anybody is liable to fall through, either way. The rock paintings are still there in the caves. But there haven't been any new ones and the paint is never wet any more." "The Stone Age savage," said Smith, "eventually became a Franciscan citizen, and a Neo Calvinist. He died at a very ripe old age, and among his effects was the manuIP II script of his life story. His great grand-daughter presented it to the Institute. It was thought, at first, that it was a work of fiction -- but the surviving relatives insisted that it was not. And then I, when I made a voyage to Earth, was able to obtain access to the Survey Service records." "And so?" asked Grimes. "So Kinsolving's Planet is to become our New Sinai," Smith told him. Y ou'd better go along. Grimes," Admiral Kravitz told him, "just to see fair play. Anyhow, it's all been arranged. You will be recalled to the active list -- pay c. as per regulations -- and ship out in this Piety of theirs as Rim Worlds government observer." "But why me, sir? If I were taking my own ship, if the old Quest were being recommissioned with myself in command, it'd be different. But I don't like being a passenger." "You'll not be a passenger, Grimes. Captain -- sorry. Rector -- Smith has indicated that he'll appreciate having you along as a sort of pilot." "In a ship full of sky pilots -- and myself a good agnostic!" He saw the bewildered expression on the admiral's face and explained his choice of words. "In the old days, before there were any real sky pilots, seamen used to refer to ministers of religion as such." "Did they now? And what would those tarry-breeked ruffians of whom you're so fond have thought of a captain calling himself 'rector?' " "In the early days of sail they'd have thought nothing of it. It was the master's usual title." "I doubt if anybody'll ever call you 'bishop,' " remarked the admiral. "Anyhow, you'll be aboard primarily to observe. And to report In the unlikely event of anything occurring that will effect Rim Worlds security you are to take action." "Me -- and what squad of Marines?" "We could send a detachment of the Salvation Army with you," joked the admiral. "I doubt that they'd be allowed on board. As far as I can gather, these Neo Calvinists are somewhat intolerant. Only on a world as tolerant as Francisco would they have been allowed to flourish." "Intolerant, yes," agreed Kravitz. "But scrupulously honest. And moral." "In short," said Grimes, "no redeeming vices." "Pey lifts ship at # hours tomorrow, Commodore Grimes," said the admiraL "You will be aboard." "Aye, aye, sir," replied Grimes resignedly. Grimes had never enjoyed serving in a "taut ship" himself, and had never commanded one. Nonetheless, he respected those captains who were able to engender about themselves such a state of affairs. Piety, as was obvious from the moment that he set foot on the bottom of the ramp, was a taut ship. Everything was spotless. Every metal fitting and surface that was supposed to be polished boasted a mirrorlike sheen. All the paintwork looked as though it was washed at least twice daily -- which, in fact, it was. The atmosphere inside the hull bore none of the usual taints of cookery, tobacco smoke or -- even though there was a mixed crew -- women's perfume. But it was too chilly, and the acridity of some disinfectant made Grimes sneeze. The junior officer who met him at the head of the ramp showed him into the elevator cage at the foot of the axial shaft. Grimes thanked him and assured the presumably young man -- the full beard made it hard to determine his age -- that he knew his way around this class of vessel. A captain, no matter what he calls himself or is called, is always accommodated as closely as possible to the center of control. The elevator worked smoothly, noiselessly, carrying the commodore speedily up to the deck just below the control room. There, as in his own Faraway Quest, was the semicircular suite of cabins. Over the door was a brass plate with As Grimes approached this entrance it slid open. Smith stood there and said formally, "Welcome aboard. Commodore." "Thank you. Rector." "Will you come in, sir?" There were other people in the day cabin -- a tall, stout, whiteheaded and bearded man dressed in clothing that was very similar to Smith's uniform, a woman in a longsleeved, high-necked, ankle-length black dress, her hair completely covered by a frilly white cap. They looked at Grimes, obviously disapproving of his gold-braided, brass-buttoned, beribboned finery. They did not get up. "Commodore Grimes," said Smith. "Presbyter Cannan. Sister Lane." Reluctantly the presbyter extended his hand. Grimes took it. He was not surprised that it was cold. Sister Lane nodded slightly in his general direction. Smith gestured stiffly toward a chair, sat down himself. Giimes lowered himself to his own seat incautiously. He should have known that IF it would be hard. He looked curiously at the two civilians. The presber was an older edition of Rector Smith. The sister? She had him puzzled. She belonged to a type that had been common enough on Francisco when he had been there -- the Blossom People, they had called themselves. They preached and practiced a sort of hedonistic Zen and claimed that their use of the wide range of drugs avaiable to them put them in close communication with the Cosmic All. Prim she was, this Sister Lane, prim and proper in her form-concealing black, but the planes of her face were not harsh, and her unpainted lips were full, and there was a strange gentleness in her brown eyes. H e pulled his battered pipe out of B  .I Bi  his pocket, his tobacco pouch ElSgy I Bn  and lighter. He asked, addressing Jsl Mm ji #I her, "Do you mind if I smoke?" But it was the presbyter, who replied. "Certainly we mind, sir. As you should know, we are opposed to Her ugly clothing could not hide the the use of any and all drugs." fluid grace of her movements, "'All drugs?" murmured the "Your nursing sister. Rector?" woman, with a sort of malicious asked Grimes when she was gone, sweetness. "No," answered Cannan. And -- "There are exceptions. Sister Whos robbing this coach? You or Lane," the old man told her harshly. Mr. Kelly? thought Grimes irritably. "As you well know." Smith must have noticed the com"As I well know," she concurred, modore's expression. "Sister Lane, "I take it," said Grimes, "that sir," he explained, "is a member of nicotine is not one." the presbyter's staff, not of mine." "Unfortunately," she stated, "no." "Thank you. Rector." Grimes re"You may leave us. Sister," said warded him with what was intended Presbyter Cannan. "We have no to be a friendly smile. "I'm afraid further business to discuss with you." that it will take me some time to "Thank you, sir." She got graceget your ranks and ratings sorted." fully to her feet, made a curtsey to "I have no doubt," said Cannan, Cannan, walked out of the door, "that it must be confusing to one who relies upon gaudy fripperies for his authority rather than inner grace." "Your baggage must be aboard and stowed by now. Commodore," Smith said hastily. He turned to his spiritual superior. "May I suggest, sir, that you and your people retire to your quarters? Lift-off -- " he glanced at his watch -- "will be in fifteen minutes." "Very well. Rector." The old man got up, towering over the two spacemen. Smith got up. Grimes remained seated until Smith returned from seeing the presbyter out. He said, "I'd better be getting below myself. If you could have somebody show me to my stateroom. Rector." "I was hoping. Commodore, that you would be coming up to control for the liftoff." "Thank you. Rector Smith. It will be my pleasure." . Smith led the way out of his quarters, up the short ladder that brought the two men to the control room. Grimes looked about him. The layout was a standard one -- acceleration chairs before which were banks of instruments, screens, meters, chart tank, mass proximity indicator, Carlotti Beacon direction finder... All seemed to be in perfect order, and much of the equipment was new. Evidently the Skarsten Theological Institute did not believe in spoiling the ship for aha'porth of tar. The rector indicated a chair, into which Grimes strapped himself, then took his own seat. The officers were already at their stations. All these bearded men, thought the commodore, looked too much alike, and their black on black insigni; of rank made it hard to tell who was what. But this wasn't his ship, and she had managed to come aU the way out from Francisco without mishap. The departure routine went smoothly enough, with the usual messages exchanged between control room and spaceport control tower. The inertial drive started up, and there was that brief second of weightlessness before the gentle acceleration made itself felt. The ship lifted easily, falling upward to the cloud ceiling. Briefly Grimes was able to look out through the viewports at Port Forlorn and at the dreary countryside spread out around the city like a man. And then there was nothing but gray mist outside -- mist that suddenly became a pearly, luminescent white and then vanished. Overhead was a steely sun glaring out of a black sky, its light harsh even though the ports were polarized. There was free fall for a little while, and then the gyroscopes swung the ship's head to the target star. The inertial drive came on again, its irregular throbbing beat a bass background for the thin, high keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Ahead, save for the iridescent spiral that was the target sun, there was only blackness. Lorn was to starboard -- a vast, writhing planetary amoeba that was falling astern, that was shrinking rapidly. And out to port was the galactic lens, distorted by the temporal precession field of e drive to a Klein flask blown by a drunken glassblower. Grimes wondered, as he had wondered before, if anybody would ever IP come up with another simile. But this one was so apt m rimes didn't like this ship. She was beautifully kept efficiently run, and with her cargo spaces converted to passenger accommodation she housed comfortably her crew and all the personnel from the Skarsten Institute. But she was... cold. She was cold, and she was too quiet. There was none of the often ribald laughter, none of the snatches of light music that lent warmth to the atmosphere of a normal vessel. There were, he noted, paymasters in all the recreation rooms. But when he examined the spools of the machine in the senior officers' mess he found that they consisted entirely of recordings of sermons and the gloomier hymns. The library was as bad. And socially there was complete segregation of the sexes. Deaconesses and sisters were berthed aft, and between them and the male crew and passengers were the storerooms and the "farm." The food was not bad, but it was plain, unimaginative. And there was nothing to drink but water, and even that had a flat taste. The conversation at table was as boring as the provender. Too, Grimes was annoyed to find out that the rector did not sit at the head of the board in the senior officers' mess. That place of honor was reserved for the presbyter. And he talked, almost non-stop, about the Institute's internal politics, with the ship's captain interjecting an occasional quiet affirmative as required. Chief officer, surgeon and purser gobbled their meals in silence, as did Grimes, very much the outsider at the foot of the table. They were served by a young stewardess who would have been pretty in anything but that ugly, all-concealing black. She seemed to hold the domineering old man -- but nobody else -- in awe. After the evening meal Grimes made his excuses and retired to his cabin. It was little more than a dogbox and was a comedown after the suite to which he was accustomed aboard his own ship. He was pleased that he had brout his own reading matter with him and pleased that he had exercised the forethought to make provision for his other little comforts. Before doing anything else, he filled and lit his pipe. Then, moving slowly and easily through the blue haze of his own creation, he unclipped the larger of his cases from its rack, pulled it out and opened it. He was lifting out the shirts that had acted as shockproof packing for certain breakables when he heard a light tap at his door. He groaned. A passenger is bound by ship's regulations as much as is any crew member. But he was damned if he was going to put out his pipe. "Come in," he called. She came in. She pulled the ugly white cap off her lustrous brown hair, tossed it on to the bunk. Then she turned back to the door, snapped i on the spring lock. She tested its security, smiled, then flopped down into the one chair that the cabin possessed. Grimes looked at her, with raised eyebrows. "Yes, Sister Lane?" he asked. "Got a smoke, spaceman?" she growled. "There are some cigars -- " he began doubtfully. "I didn't expect pot. Although if you have any...?" "I haven't." Then Grimes said virtuously, "In any case, such drugs are banned on the Rim Worlds." "Are they? But what about the cigar you promised me?" Grimes got a box of panatellas out of his case, opened it, offered it to her. She took one, accepted his proffed light. She inhaled luxuriously. She said, "All I need now is a drink." "I can supply that." "Good on yer. Admiral!" There was the bottle of absolute alcohol, and there was the cabinet with its ranked phials of essences. "Scotch?" asked Grimes. "Rum? Brandy? Or ... ?" "Scotch will do." The commodore measured alcohol into die two glasses over the washbasin, added to each a drop of essence, topped up with cold water from the tap. She murmured, "Here's mud in your eye," and gulped from hers as soon as he handed it to her. "Sister Lane," said Grimes doubtfully. "You can call me Clarisse." "Oarisse. Should you be doing this?" "Don't tell me that you're a wowser, like all those Bible-punchers." "I'm not. But this is not my ship -- " "And it's not mine, sir, either." "Then what are you doing here?" #CTt's a long story, dearie. And if A you ply me with licker, I might just tell it to you." She sighed and stretched. "You've no idea what a relief it is to enjoy a drink and a talk and a smoke with somebody who's more or less human." "Thank you," said Grimes stiffly. She laughed. "Don't be offended, duckie." She put up her hands, pulled her hair back and away from her face. "Look at my ears." Grimes looked. They were normal enough organs -- save for the fact that they were pointed, and were tufted with hair at the tips. "I'm only more or less human myself," she told him. "More rather than less, perhaps. You know about the man Raul, the caveman, the Stone Age savage, who was pulled, somehow, from the remote past on Kinsolving's Planet to what was, then, the present. He was my great grandfather." "He was humanoid," said Grimes. "Not human." "Human-schuman!" she mocked. "There is such a thing as parallel evolution, you know. And old Raul was made something of a pet by the scientists back on Earth. When he evinced the desire to father a family, the finest genetic engineers in the galaxy were pressed into service. No, not the way that you're thinking. Commodore. You've got a low mind." "Sorry." "I should think so. Just for that, you can pour me another drink." And would, Grimes asked himself. IF his liquor ration last out until his return to Lorn? "What are you doing here?" he asked blundy. "In this ship?" "At this very moment I'm breaking at least # of the regulations laid down by the presbyter and enforced by the rector. But I know what you mean." Her voice deepened so that it was like Grimes's own. "What is nasty girl like you doing in a nice place like this?" "I shouldn't call you nasty," said Grimes. "Thank you, sir. Then stand by for the story of my life, complete and unexpurgated. I'll start off with dear old great grand-daddy, the Noble Savage. He was an artist, you know, in his proper place and time, one of those specialists who practiced a form of sympathetic magic. He would paint or draw pictures of various animals, and the actual beasts would be drawn to the spot, there to be slaughtered by the hunters. He said that it worked, too. I can remember, when I was a little girl, that he'd put on demonstrations. He'd draw a picture of, say, the cat -- and within seconds pussy would be in the room. Oh, yes -- and he was a telepath, a very powerful transceiver. "After many years on Earth -- where he was latterly an instructor at the Rhine Institute -- he emigrated, with his wife and children, to Francisco, where he was psionic radio officer in charge of the Port Diego signal station. It was there that he got religion. And with all the religions to choose from, he had to become a Neo Calvinist! His family were converted with him. I often wonder how much part his undeniable psychic powers played in their conversion! And the wives of his sons had to become converts, and the husbands of his daughters -- yea, even unto the third and fourth generations." She grinned. "One member of the fourth generation kicked over the traces. Me. From the Neo Calvinists to the Blossom People was a logical step. Like most new converts I overdid things. Drinks, drugs, promiscuity -- the works. The Neo Calvinists picked me up, literally, from the gutter and nursed me back to health in their sanitorium -- and, at the same time, made it quite clear that if I was predestined to go to hell I should go there. And then, when they checked up on great grandfather's autobiographical papers, they realized that I was predestined for something really important. Especially since I, alone of his descendants, possess something of his powers." "You mean that you can...?" There was a violent knocking on the door, and a voice shouting, "Open up! Open up, I say!" "They know I'm here," muttered Clarisse Lane sullenly. She got out of her chair, operated the sliding panel herself. R ector Smith was standing outside. With him was a tall, gaunt woman. She stared at Sister Lane in horror and snarled, "Cover your nakedness, you shameless hussy!" Clarisse shrugged, picked up the ugly cap from where it was lying on the bunk and adjusted it over her hair, tucking all loose strands out of sight. "Will you deal with Sister Lane, Deaconess?" asked Smith. "That I shall. Rector." "Miss Lane and I were enjoying a friendly talk," said Grimes. "A friendly talk!" The deaconess's voice dipped scorn. "Smoking! Winebibbing! You... you gilded popinjay!" Smith had picked up the bottle of alcohol, his obvious intention being to empty it into the washbasin. "Hold it!" said Grimes slowly and nastily. "Hold it!" Smith hesitated. Unhurriedly Grimes took the bottle from his hand, restoppered it, put it in the rack over the basin. Then the rector started to bluster. "Sir, I must remind you that you are a guest aboard my ship. A passenger. You are obliged to comply with ship's regulations." "Sir," replied Grimes coldly, "I have signed no articles of agreement, and no ticket with the back covered with small print has been issued to me. I am surprised that a shipmaster should have been no neglectful of the essential legalities, and were you in the employ of the company of which I am astronautical superintendent I should find it my duty to reprimand you -- " "Not only a gilded popinjay," observed the deaconess harshly, "but a space lawyer." "Yes, madam, a space lawyer -- as any master astronaut should be." He was warming up nicely. "But I must remind both of you that I do have legal standing aboard this vessel. I am here in my capacity as official observer for the Rim Worlds Confederacy. Furthermore, I was called back to active duty in the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, with the rank of commodore." "Meaningless titles," sneered the deaconess. "A commodore without a fleet!" "Perhaps, madam. Perhaps. But I must remind you that we are proceeding through Rim Worlds territorial space. And I must make it plain that any interference with my own personal liberties -- and the infliction by yourselves of any harsh punishment on Miss Lane -- will mean that Piety will be intercepted and seized by one of our warships." He thought,  just hope the bluff isnt called. Called it was. "And just how, Mr. Commodore Grimes, do you propose to call a warship to your aid?" asked the woman. "Easily, Deaconess, easily," said Clarisse Lane. "Have you forgotten that I am a telepath -- and a good one? Whilst this ship was on Lorn I made contact with a Mr. Mayhew, who is the senior psionic radio officer of the Rim Worlds Navy. Even though we never met physically we became close friends. He is an old friend and shipmate of the commodore and asked me to keep in touch to let him know if Commodore Grimes were in any danger." "And you will teU him, of course," said Grimes, "if you are subjected to any harm or even to any discomfort" "He will knowy she said quietly. "Yes," agreed Grimes. "He will know." IF H e was familiar with telepaths was Grimes, having commenced his space-faring career before the Carlotti direction-finding and communications system began to replace the psionic radio officers with its spaceand time-twisting beamed radiations. He was familiar with telepaths and knew how it was with them when, infrequently, one of them found a member of the opposite sex with the same talents attractive. Until this happened -- and it rarely did -- they would lavish all their affection on the disembodied canine brains that they used as amplifiers. Rector Smith was the first to weaken. He muttered, "Very well. Commodore." "And is this harlot to go unpunished?" flared the deaconess. 'Too right she is," Grimes told her. She glared at him. Grimes glared back. He regretted deeply that this was not his ship, that he had no authority aboard her. "Rector Smith!" she appealed. Tm sorry. Deaconess," Smith told her. "But you have heard what these people have told us." "And you will allow them to flout your authority?" "It is better than causing the success of our mission to be jeopardized." He stiffened. "Furthermore, I order you not to lay hands upon Sister Lane and not to order any of the other sisters to do so." "And I suppose she's to be free to visit this... this vile seducer any time that she sees fit." "No," said Smith at last. "No. That I will not sanction. Commodore Grimes claims that I cannot orders to him -- but my authority is still absolute insofar as all other persons aboard this vessel are concerned. Sister Lane will not be ill-treated. But she will be confined to the women's quarters until such time as her services are required." "The presbyter shall hear of this," said the woman. "Indeed he shall. I shall be making my own report to him. Meanwhile, he is not, repeat not, to be disturbed." He added, "And those are his orders." "Very well, then," snapped the deaconess. And to Qarisse Lane, "Come." "It was a good try. Commodore," said the girl, looking back wistfully at her unfinished drink, her still smouldering cigar..."It was a good try -- but it could have been a better one, as far as I'm concerned. Good night." It was a good try, thought Grimes. Period. He had gone as far as he could go without undermining the master's -- the rector's -- authority too much. As for the girl -- h heart fair bled for her. But he was sure that she would not, now, be maltreated, and it would do her no harm to revert to the abstemious routine of this aptly named ship. "Good night," he said. IV #TV I have a word with you, two women were gone. "Surely. Stick around. Rector. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard." Smith looked, but did acH voice, his disapproval of the figure or speech. He shut the door, snapped the lock on. Then, with a penknife taken from his pocket, he made a little adjustment to one of the securing screws of the mirror over the washbasin. "Bugged?" asked Grimes interestedly, "Of course -- as is every compartment in the ship. But there are speakers and screens in only two cabins -- my own and the presbyter's. His reverence, I know, took sleeping pills before retiring -- but he might awake." "I suppose the ladies' showers are bugged, too?" asked Grimes. A dull flush covered what little of the rector's face that was not hidden by his beard. He growled, 'That, sir, is none of your business." "And what, sir, is your business with me?" "I feel. Commodore Grimes, that you should know how important that unhappy woman is to the success of our mission. Then, perhaps, you will be less inclined, should the opportunity present itself again, to pander to her whims." Smith cleared his throat. He went on, "This business upsets me, sir. You will know, as you yourself were once a shipmaster, how unpleasant it is to have to assert your authority." "And talking," said Grimes, who had his telepathic moments, "is thirsty work." "If you would be so kind, sir," said Smith, after a long moment of hesitation. "I believe that brandy has always been regarded as a medicine." Grimes sighed and mixed fresh drinks. He motioned Smith to the single chair, sat down on the bunk. He thought of shocking the other man with one of the more obscene toasts, but merely said, "Down the hatch." The rector said, "I needed that." "Another, Rector Smith?" "No, thank you, sir." You want me to twist your arm, you sanctimonious bastard, thought Grimes, but Vm not going to do it. He put the bottle of alcohol and the little cabinet of essences away. "And now," he said, "about Miss Lane." "Yes, Sister Lane. As she has told you, she was one of us. But she backslid and consorted with the fornicators and wine-bibbers who call themselves the Blossom People. But even this was in accordance with the Divine scheme of things. Whilst consorting with those... those pagans she became accustomed to the use and the abuse -- but surely the use is also abuse! -- of the psychedelic drugs. Already she possessed considerable psychic powers -- but those vile potions enhanced them. "You will realize, sir, that it would have been out of the question for any of our own Elect to imperil his immortal soul by tampering with powerful, unseen and unseeable forces, but -- " "But," said Grimes, "Clarisse Lane has already demonstrated that she is damned, so you don't mind using her as your catspaw." "You put it very concinctly, sir," agreed Smith. "I could say more, but I won't I might lose my temper. Go on." "Sister Lane is not entirely human. IP She is descended from that Raul, a Stone Age savage from the remote past, who was brought to Earth from Kinlving's Planet. Many factors were involved in his appearance. It could be that the very fabric of the continuum is worn ttdn here on the Rim, and that lines of force, or fault lines, intersect at that world. It could be, as the Rhine Institute claimed at the time, that the loneliness and the fear of all the dwellers on the colonized Rim Worlds are somehow focused on Kinsolving. Be that as it may, it happened. And it happened too that, in the fullness of time, this Raul was accepted into the bosom of our church. "Raul, as you may know, was more than a mere telepath. Much more. He was a wizard, one of those who, in his own age, drew animals to the hunters' spears by limning their likenesses on rock." Grimes interrupted. "Doesn't the Bible say somewhere that thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?" #xres. It is so written. But we did not know of the full extent of Raul's talents when he was admitted into our fold. We did not know of them until after his death, when his papers came into our possession." "But what are you playing at?" demanded Grimes. "Just what are you playing at in our back garden?" He had the bottle out again, and the little phial of cognac-flavored essence, and was mixing two more drinks. He held out one of them, the stronger, to Smith, who absentmindedly took it and raised it to his lips. The rector said, "Sir, I do not approve of your choice of words. Life is not a game. Life, death and the hereafter are not a game. We are not playing. We are working. Is it not written, 'Work, for the night is coming?' And you, sir, and I, as space men, know that the night is coming -- the inevitable heat death of the universe." He gulped more of his drink. "You should visit Darsha some time," said Grimes, "and their Tower of Darkness. You should see the huge clock that is the symbol of their God." He added softly, "The clock is running down." "Yes, the clock is running down, the sands of time are running out. And there is much to be done, so much to be done -- " "Such as?" 'To re-establish the eternal verities. To build a new Sinai, to see the commandments graven afresh on imperishable stone. And then, perhaps, the heathen, the idolaters will take heed and tremble. And then, surely, the rule of Jehovah will come again, before the End." Grimes said reasonably enough, "But you people believe in predestination, don't you? Either we're damned or we aren't. Nothing we do makes any difference." 'T have learned by bitter experience," Smith told him, "that it is impossible to argue with a heretic -- especially one who is foredoomed to eternal damnation. But even you must see that if the commandments are given anew to Man then we, the elect, shall be elevated to our rightful place in the universe." "Then God save us all," said Grimes. Smith looked at him suspiciously, but went on. "It is perhaps necessary that there should be a sacrifice. If that be so, the Lord has already delivered her into our hands. No, sir, do not look at me like that. We shall not kill her, neither by knife nor fire shall we slay her. But inevitably she will be the plaything of supernal powers when she, on the planet of her ancestral origin, her inherited talents intensified by drugs, calls to Jehovah, the true God, the God of the Old Testament, to make himself known again to sinful men." There were flecks of white froth on Smith's beard around his lips, a dribble of saliva down the hair on his chin. His eyes were glaring and bloodshot. Grimes thought. In vino veritas. He said, with a gentleness he did not feel, activated only by self-interest, "Don't you think that you've had enough, Rector? Isn't it time that we both turned in?" "Eh, what? When'm ready. But you understand now that you must not interfere. You must not interfere,'' "I understand," said Grimes, thinking, Too much and not enough. He found a tube of tablets in his suitcase, shook one into the palm of his hand. "Here," he said, offering it. "You'd better take this." "Wha's it for?" "It'll sweeten the breath and sober you up. It'll be too bad for you if the presbyter sees the state you're in." And too bad for me, he thought. " 'M not drunk." "Of course not. Just a little... unsteady." "Don' really need... But jus' to oblige, understan'." Smith swallowed the tablet, his Adam's apple working convulsively. Grimes handed him a glass of cold water to wash it down. It acted almost immediately. The bearded man shuddered, then got steadily to his feet. He glared at Grimes -- but it was no longer a fanatical glare. "Good night, sir," he snapped. "Good night. Rector," Grimes replied. When he was alone he thought of playing back the record of the evening's conversations, but thought better of it. For all he knew. Smith might be able to switch the hidden microphone and scanner back on from his own quarters -- and the less he knew of the tiny device hidden in the starboard epaulette of his white mess jacket, the better. He got out of his clothes and into his bunk, switched off the light -- but, unusually for him, his sleep was uneasy and nightmare ridden. He supposed that it was Clarisse Lane's fault that she played a leading part in most of the dreams. V T he voyage wore on, and on, and even as the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive tumbled and receded down the dark infinities, so did the good ship Piety fall through the twisted continuum. On one hand was the warped, convoluted galactic lens and ahead, a pulsating spiral of iridescent Hgfht against the ultimate darkness, was the Kinsolving sun. IP And this ship unlike other ships of Grimes's wide experience, was no little man-made oasis of light and warmth in the vast, empty desert of the night. She was cold, cold, and her atmosphere carried always the faint acridity of disinfectant, and men and women talked in grave, low voices and did not mingle, and never was there the merest hint gf laughter. Clarisse Lane was not being maltreated -- Grimes made sure of that. She was even allowed to meet the commodore for a daily conversation, but always heavily chaperoned. She was the only telepath in the ship which, while the interstellar drive was in operation, depended entirely upon the Carlotti equipment for deep space communication. But the rector and the presbyter did not doubt that she was in constant touch with Mayhew back at Port Forlorn -- and Grimes did not doubt it either. She told him so much during their meetings -- things about which she could not possibly have known if there had not been a continual interchange of signals. Some of this intelligence was confirmed by messages addressed to Grimes and received, in the normal way, by the ship's electronic radio officer. So they were obliged to be careful, these Neo Calvinists. The chosen instrument for their experiment in practical theology was now also an agent for the Rim Worlds Confederacy. "But what does it matter?" Smith said to Grimes on one of the rare occasions that he spoke at length to him. "What does it matter? Perhaps it was ordained this way. Your friend Mayhew will be the witness to the truth, a witness who is not one of us. He will see through her eyes, hear with her ears, feel with every fiber of her being. The Word propagated by ourselves alone would be scoffed at. But there will be credence given it when it is propagated by an unbeliever." "If anything happens," said Grimes. But he couldn't argue with these people, and they couldn't argue with him. There was just no meeting of minds. He remembered a theory that he had once heard advanced by a ship's doctor. "Long ago," the man had said, "very long ago, there was a mutation. It wasn't a physically obvious one -- but, as a result of it. Homo Sapiens was divided into two separate species. Homo credulens -- those capable of blind faith in the improvable -- and homo incredulens -- those who aren't. The vast majority of people are, of course, hybrids." Grimes had said, "And I suppose that aU the pure homo incredulens stock is either atheist or agnostic." "Not so," the doctor had laughed. "Not so. Agnostic -- yes. But don't forget that the atheist, like the theist, makes a definite statement for which he can produce no proof whatsoever." An atheist would have been far less unhappy aboard this ship than a tolerant agnistic like Grimes. But even the longest, unhappiest voyage comes to an end. A good planetfall was made -- whatever they believed. Piety's people were excellent navigators -- and, the Mannschenn Drive switched off, the inertial drive ticking over just enough to produce minimal gravitational field, the ship was falling in orbit about the lonely world, the blue and green mottled sphere hanging there against the blackness. T he old charts -- or copies of them -- were out, and Grimes was called up to the control room. "Yes," he told Smith, stabbing a finger down on to the paper, "that's where the spaceport was. ftobably even now the apron's not too overgrown for a safe landing. Captain Spence, when he came down in Epsilon Eridani, reported creepers over everything, but nothing heavy." "It is a hundred and fifty standd years since he was here," said Smith. "At least I would suggest one of the beaches." "Risky," Grimes told him. "They shelve very steeply and, according to our record violent storms are more frequent than otherwise." He turned to the big screen upon which a magnification of the planet was appearing. "There, just to the east of the sunrise terminator. That's the major continent -- Farland, it was called -- where the capital city and the spaceport were situated. You see that river, with the S bend? Step up the magnification, somebody." Now there was only the glowing all the screen, and that expanded, so that there was only the sprawling, silvery S. Toward the middle of it, on either bank, a straggle of buildings was visible. "The spaceport should be about # miles to the west," said Grimes. "Yes," agreed Smith, taking a long pointer. "I think that's it." "Then make it landing stations, Rector," ordered Presbjrter Cannan. "Sir," demurred Smith, "you cannot put a big ship down as though she were a dinghy." "Lord, oh Lord," almost prayed the presbyter. "To have come so far, and then to be plagued by the dilatoriness of spacemen!" I wish that this were my control room, thought Grimes. But Piety s crew worked well and efficiently, and in a very short space of time the intercom speakings were blatting strings of orders -- "Secure all for landing stations!" "All idlers to their quarters!" and the like. Gyroscopes hummed and whined and the ship tilted relative to the planet until its surface was directly beneath her, and the first of the sounding rockets, standard equipment for a survey expedition but not for landing on a world with spaceport control functioning, were fired. Parachutes blossomed in the upper atmosphere, and the flares, each emitting a great streamer of smoke, ignited. Somebody was singing. It was the presbyter. Let the fiery, cloudy pillar Guide me all my journey through... Even Grimes was touched by the spirit of the occasion. What if this crazy, this impious (for so he was beginning to think of it) experiment did work? What would happen? What would be unleashed upon the worlds of men? Who was it -- the Gnostics? -- who had said that the God of the Old Testament was the Devil of the New? He shivered as he sat in his acceleration chair. IP She was dropping steadily, was Piety, following the first of her flares. But there was drift down there -- a gale, perhaps, in the upper atmosphere, or a jet stream. The inertial drive generators grumbled suddenly as Smith applied lateral thrust. Down she dropped, and down, almost falling free, but under the full control of her captain. On the target screen, right in the center, highly magnified, the cluster of ruins that had been a spaceport was clearly visible, tilting like tombstones in a deserted graveyard, ghastly in the blue light of the rising sun. Down she dropped, plunging through the wisps of cirrus, and there was a slight but appreciable rise of temperature as skin friction heated the metal of her hull. Smith slowed the rate of descent. The presbyter started muttering irritably to himself. There was no longer need for magnification on the screen. The great rectangle of the landing field was clearly visible, the vegetation that covert it lighter in color -- eau de Nile against the surrounding indigo -- than the brush outside the area. The last of the flares to have been fired was still burning there, its column of smoke rising almost vertically. The growth among which it had fallen was slowly smouldering. Grimes looked at Smith. The man was concentrating, hard. Beads of perspiration were forming on his upper cheeks, running down into his beard. But this was more important than an ordinary landing. So much hinged upon it. And perhaps malign (or benign) forces might be gathering their strength to overset the ship before her massive tripedal landing gear reached the safety of the planetary surface. But she was down. There was the gentlest of shocks, the faintest of creakings, the softest sighing of shock-absorbers. She was down, and the inertial drive generators muttered to themselves and then were quiet She was down, and the soughing of the fans seemed to make the silence all the more silent Presbyter Cannan broke it He turned in his chair to address Grimes. "Commodore," he asked as he pointed towards a distant peak, a black, truncated cone against the blue sky, "Commodore Grimes, what is the name of that mountain?" "I... don't know, sir." '# know." The old man's voice was triumphant. "It is SinaL" VI H ad this been any other ship there would have been a period of relaxation. There were wild pigs and rabbits to hunt, descendants of the livestock abandoned by the original colonists. There were the famous caves, with their rock paintings, to visit. But the animals, their fear of Man long forgotten, came out of the undergrowth to stare curiously at the vessel and at the humans who busied themselves around her, opening side ports to allow the egress of the three pinnaces, already stocked with what would be required for the final stages of the expedition. And nobody was remotely interested in the caves. Grimes managed to see Qarisse Lane. The ship was almost deserted now, so he was able to make his way down into the women's quarters without being challenged and stopped. He found her little cabin, hardly more than a cell. She was not locked in, not restrained in any way. She was sitting in her chair, a somber figure in her black dress, staring into nothingness. Her full lips moved almost imperceptibly as she vocalized her thoughts. With a sudden start she realized that Grimes was standing before her. She whispered, "I... I was talking to Ken." 'To Mayhew?" "Yes." Saying good-by, he thought. He said, "Clarisse, you don't have to go through with this." "I am going through with it, Commodore." "You don't have to," he insisted. "You're in touch with Mayhew. And he'll be in touch with Rim Sword. The admiral told me that she'd be standing by in this sector of space. She's proabbly on her way here now. We can stall off these fanatics until she comes in." She said, 'Tm going through with it." "But why? Why?" "Because I want to." "But you're not really one of them." "I'm not." "Sister Lane!" It was the deaconess. "You asked for a few moments of privacy -- and now I find you with this... this lecher! But come. The boat is waiting." "I'll come with you," said Grimes. "You will not," snapped the woman. "A place has been reserved for you in the pinnace carrying the presbyter and the rectcw. They have decided that it is meet that an infidel shall witness the handing down of the Law." Clarisse Lane followed the deaconess from the cabin. Grimes trailed along behind them. They went down to the main airlock, down the ramp to the overgrown apron, stumbling over the tough, straggling vines on their way to the boats. The sun was dropping fast to the western horizon. There was a hint of chill, a smell of dusk in the still air. There was the scent of growing things, and a faint hint of corruption. Smith beckoned to Grimes from the open door of the leading pinnace. He made his way slowly towards it, walking carefully. He clambered up the retractable steps into the crowded cabin that stank of perspiration and damp, heavy clothing. He found a seat, wedged between two junior officers. The door hissed shut. The inertial drive generator throbbed and snarled. Grimes could not see out of the ports, but he knew that the boat was airborne, was moving. There was no conversation in the cabin, but a metallic male voice reported from the speaker on the pilot's console, "Number Two following." After a pause a harsh female voice said, "Number Three following." How long the flight lasted Grimes did not know; he was unable to raise his arm to look at his watch. But it seemed a long time, and it seemed a long time that they sat IF there, after they had landed, waiting for the other boats to come down. But at last the door opened and a thin, icy wind whined through the aperture. The presbyter was out first, then Smith, and eventually Grimes, in the middle of a huddle of officers and civilians. The plateau was smooth, windswept, an expanse of bare rock. To one side of it were the three pinnaces, and in front of them the men were drawn up in orderly ranks, with only the Presbyter standing apart. In the middle of the circular area were the women, a ragged huddle of somber black. Grimes's attention was caught by a blue spark far below, not far from the still gleaming, serpentine river. Had Rim Sword landed? No. It was only the control room windows of Piety reflecting the last rays of the setting sun. There was a subdued murmuring as the women walked to stand to one side of the men. No, not all the women. Two remained in the center of the plateau. One was the deaconess, tall and forbidding. The other was Clarisse Lane. They had stripped her. She was wearing only a kilt cut roughly from the hide of some animal, clothing like that which had been worn by her ancestresses on this very planet. She was shivering and hugging her full breasts to try to keep out the cold. Stark, incongruous, an easel stood there, supporting a framed square of black canvas, and there was a batterypowered floodlight to illuminate it. At its foot were pots of pigment and brushes. Raul, the forefather of this girl, had called animals with his paintings. What would she call? What could she call? "Drink!" said the deaconess, her voice loud and clear over the thin whine of the bitter wind. "Drink!" She was holding out a glass of something. Clarisse took it, drained it. S uddenly the sun was gone, and there was only the glare of the floodlight. Overhead was the almost empty black sky, and low to the east was an arc of misty luminescence that was the slowly rising galactic lens. The wind seemed to be coming straight from inter-galactic space. The deaconess stalked over the rocky surface to take her stand beside the presbyter, leaving the girl alone. Hesitantly Clarisse stooped to the pots and brushes, selected one of the latter, dipped it into paint, straightened, stood before the easel. She stiffened into immobility, seemed to be waiting for something. They were singing, then -- the black-clad men and women drawn up in their stiff ranks before the pinnaces. They were singing -- Cwn Rhonda it was, and even Grimes, who had always loved that old Welsh hymn tune, found it hard to refrain from joining in. They were singing -- the rumbling basses, the baritones, the high tenors and the shrill sopranos. Guide mey oh thou great Jehovah Pilgrim through this barren land! I am weak, but thou art mighty. Hold me with thy powerful hand! They were singing, and the girl was painting. With deft, sure strokes she was depicting on the black canvas the figure of a god, white-bearded, white-robed, wrathful. She was painting, and the men and women were singing, and the air was full of unbearable tension and the wind now was howling, tugging at their clothing, buffeting them -- but the easel in its circle of harsh light stood steady and the girl worked on... There was the dreadful crack of lightning close at hand, too close at hand, the crack and the dazzle, and the pungency of ozone, and the long, long streamer of blue fire licking out from above their heads and culminating on the plain far below, at the spaceport. There was the burgeoning fireball where the ship had been. There was the dreadful laughter. booming above the frenzy of the wind, and the metallic crash and clatter as the pinnaces, lifted and roiled over the rim of the plateau, plunged to destruction down the steep, rocky mountain slope. And They were there -- the robust, white-bearded deity, a lightning bolt clutched and ready in his right hand, and the naked, seductively smiling goddess, and the other naked one with her bow and her leashed hounds, and she in the white robes, carrying a book, with the owl perched on her shoulder. The lame smith was there, with his hammer, and the seagod, with his trident, and he with the red beard and the helmet and the body armor and the sword. Somebody screamed, and at least a score of the men and women had fallen to their knees. But the presbyter stood his ground. "Who are you?" he shouted. "Who are you?" "little man," the great voice replied, "we were, we are and we always shall be." Grirnes realized that fie was laughing uncontrollably and saying, over and over to himself, "Not Sinai, but Olympus! Not Sinai, but OlympusI" There was another supernal clap of thunder and the dark came sweeping back. T hey sat around in miserable little groups on the bare mountain top. The presbyter was gone, nobody knew where or how, and the deaconess, and Smith, and perhaps a dozen of the others. It had been a long night, and a cold one, but the sun had risen at last, bringing some warmth with it. Grimes, in shirt and trousers, stood with Clarisse Lane, who was wrapped in his jacket. "But what happened?" he was asking. "What happened? What did you do?" She said, "I... I don't know. I suppose that I do have some sort of power. And I suppose that I am, at heart, one of the Blossom People. Our religious beliefs are a sort of vague pantheism... And, after all, the Father of the Gods is very similar in his attributes to the patriarchal gods of later religious." She looked at the sky. "It's lucky that Fm a telepath as well as being... whatever it is that I am. Rim Sword will be here very shortly. I hope it's soon. I have a feeling that when some of our fanatical friends recover they'll be blaming me for everything." When they recover," said Grimes. "It will take me a long time." He added, "But I don't think you'd better return to Francisco with them." "Ken," she told him, "has already got the formalities under way that will make me a Rim Worlds citizen." "The obvious ones?" "Yes." "And are you going to get married in church?" he asked. "It should be interesting." "Not if I can help it," she told him. Next month in IF -- Exdfing New Novelette by C. C. MacApp by Roger Zelazny And concluding -- by Robert Silverberg Don't miss science-fiction's favorite magazine! May # IF -- reserve your copy nowl IF  Feature Our Man in Fandom gives us another look at SFs biggest convention -- until next year! W e were talking about Nycon # the #th World Science Fiction Convention held over the Labor Day weekend at the Statler-Hilton in New York City. It was the biggest convention in science-fiction history, with a good # fans and pros on the scene including Your Man in Fandom. Sunday morning September #rd, I got to the hotel ready for the third day of the convention and ran into Samuel R. Delany ("Chip" to his friends). I learned that the Edgar Rice Burroughs fans were having a meeting in a restaurant near the hotel. Frank Frazetta came to this "Burroughs breakfast," bringing with him as a surprise guest the great comics artist Hal Foster, who used to draw the Tarzan Sunday panels and who is best known to the rest of us as the creator of Prince Valiant. Frazetta and Hal Foster, incidentally, were not the only artists in town for the Woridcon weekend. I also spoke to Roy Krenkel and Jack Gaughan and Gray Morrow. Ed Emsh was at the Nycon too, although I didn't happen to run into him , and so was Ballantine's famous cover artist Richard Powers; I know, because I bought one of his paintings. And my wife Noel, a great Sax Rohmer fan, purchased an oil portrait of Fu Manchu which had appeared on a back cover of Castle of Frankenstein from the painter Russ Jones... so the art world was well represented at the Woridcon. The Great Costume Ball That night the huge costume ball was held. My wife and I love any excuse to dress up for a masquerade, so she came in glittering plumes, bejeweled as the Queen of Night from Mozart's The Magic Flute, while I donned black velvet robes and sparkling homed mitre as the Royal Necromancer of Aquilonia. I discovered later that in all, some # people attended in costume. Among them I noticed such famous celebrities as Retief and King Kull and Gully Foyle. Sauron and Fu Manchu and Dian the Beautiful were there as welh And Robert Graves's White Goddess and the Phantom of the Opera, and even the Wizard of Lemuria (I). Some of the costumes were comical and ingenious; others were elaborate and glamorous, like the glittering tights and headdresses worn by Olga Ley and daughter Sandra, who came as their impression of Bradbury's "Golden Apples of the Sun and Silver Apples of the Moon." Oh, and Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Or, rather, the Mr. Spocks. For I saw no less than seven of the point-eared people. One of them, unless my eyes were deceiving me, was Forrest J Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland. The committee judging the costumes really had "Spocks" before their eyes! (Sorry 'bout that: every time I mention or think of Ackerman, my mind starts coming up with puns...) Parties and Things You'll find you have the most fun at conventions during the evenings after the formal program is over and people go room-hopping from party to party. After the ball, my wife and I packed away the costumes, cleaned off the makeup and had some people in for drinks. L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp sat talking to a circle of fans about Atlantis and Stonehenge and that sort of thing, while off in one comer, Roy Krenkel was drawing a sketch for me; I got the chance to meet some interesting people and to talk with them. One young man from New Orleans, knowing me to be a Prince Valiant fan, told me that this year's Mardi Gras in February had been built around the theme of Hal Foster's great comic feature, with costumes and floats and pageants and tableaus. The idea was to celebrate his #th anniversary of Prince Valiant-ing. Frankly, I'd never known that New Orleans' famous Mardi Gras did things like that, and I was fascinated to learn this was not the first time Prince Valiant had served as theme and that the Oz books have also been similarly honored in the Mardi Gras. I'd certainly like to be there next time. Then I got to talking with Fred D. Brammer of McLean, Virginia, a big fan of Star Trek. He informed me that Richard K. Preston, executive officer of the National Air and Space Museum Archives of the Smithsonian Institution had recently asked Gene Roddenberry, the producer of the show, for a copy of Ae first Star Trek program for permanent inclusion in the Smithsonian's archives. This is the first time any science-fiction tv show or movie has been so honored, I believe. Mr. Roddenberry, by the way, was at the Worldcon and showed a segment of Star Trek called "Amok Time" scripted by Theodore Sturgeon. He also screened a film of Star Trek bloopers which was rather mad. The Banquet and the Hugoes Every year at the Worldcon, a huge banquet is held at which the Guest of Honor delivers his speech and the Hugo Awards are given out. The banquet at Nycon # has a record attendance of #. The toastmaster was Harlan Ellison, whose anecdotal speech was followed by Bob Tucker's even more anecdatol speech. Then the Hall of Fame Award (given annually by First Fandom, a group of fans who have been active in science fiction from the very beginnings of fandom) was given to one of the grand old men of sf, Edmond Hamilton. Sam Moskowitz presented the award, and Moskowitz's speech, which had earlier been timed to five minutes, ran on and on as if Moskowitz just wouldn't stop talking. It finally consumed a solid twenty minutes of tigjitiy scheduled program time. Despite efforts to stop him, he even insisted on reading the lengthy inscription on the Hall of Fame trophy. As a result, Lester del Rey -- the Guest of Honor! had to cut his own speech down very short. I understand the convention committee is hopping mad about this, and it does seem highly inconsiderate of Moskowitz. Mr. del Rey's speech was short, terse and intense. He held his audience right in the pahn of his hand and made a powerful argument for old-fashioned story-telling in science fiction as against the so-called "New Wave" writers (or "the New Ripple," as Lester called the movement, which has centered around the British magazine New Worlds and such writers as Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, among others). After the banquet, I had a chance to speak to Lester and congratulate him on his Guest-of-Honorship, remarking that it was about time! Lester called to my attention the fact that Catherine Kuttner -- Henry Kuttner's widow, a fine writer in her own right under the name of C. L. Moore -- has also missed out and well deserves being chosen Guest of Honor at some future convention. Recalling her splendid stories, like the short yam Vintage Season and the famous novel Judgment Night, I fully agreed with him. Several other awards of various kinds were given out. Forrest J Ackerman gave the Big Heart Award to Janie Lamb of the National Fantasy Fan Federation. Ted White got a golden ping-pong paddle for "for keeping fans interested," and the Worldcon presented a special plaque tury show, for "bringing the future into the present." Then came the Hugoes. To be brief, the Hugoes went to: Best Short Story: Neutron Star, by Larry Niven, from If. Best Novelette: The Last Castle, by Jack Vance, from Galaxy. IP Best.Novel: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein, from If. Best Prozine: Worlds of If, Best Dramatic Presentation: The Menagerie, from Star Trek, Best Pro Artist: Jack Gaughan. Best Fan Artist: Jack Gaughan. Best Fanzine: Niekas, Best Fan Writer: Alexei Panshin. Heinlein has won, and that's more Hugoes than any other writer in science-fiction history has accumulated. His first Hugo came for Double Star at the # convention in New York. He won his second for Starship Troopers at Pittsburgh in #. His third Hugo was presented to him at Chicago in #, for Stranger in a Strange Land, As for Jack Vance, this was his second Hugo. He received his first for The Dragon Masters at Washington D. C. in #. This was the second year in a row that the Hugo for best professional science-fiction magazine of the year went to this magazine. And this is the first time in fannish history that the same guy won the awards for Best Pro and Best Fan ArtistI (Come to think of it, this was also the first time anyone gave out a Hugo for Best Fan Artist.) Next Year's Worldcon One of the most important things that happens at each of these annual world science fiction conventions is bidding for and voting on the site of next year's convention. If you couldn't make this year's Nycon #, maybe we'll see you next Labor Day weekend, when the #th World Science Fiction Convention convenes at the Hotel Claremont in Oakland Berkeley, California. The #th Worldcon will be called "The Baycon." I can't tell you very much about it this early -- the Guest of Honor will be Philip Jos# Farmer -- but a first sketch of Baycon's program has been tentatively announced, and on the program are Anthony Boucher, Robert Heinlein, Keith Laumer, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Avram Davidson, Joan Baez (?I?) and Damon Knight, not to mention a special two-hour segment on Monster Fandom, whose redoubtable host will be genial Forrest J Ackerman. Fans who want to attend the # Baycon can write to Baycon, P.O. Box #, Fairmont Station, El Cerrito, California #. Science-fiction conventions have one thing in common with a bus -- if you miss one, there's another coming along in a while. So if you couldn't make it to New York this year, try to plan for the Baycon next September. See you there in # -- for the      IF  Novelette Ti mm Mli jfijj In addition its hide hung on it like an ill-fitting flour sack patched with flakes the color of mildew gangrene and rust. That was what was riveting Jeffs attention: the halfformed question of how something so deformed and leprous could live. He tore his eyes away and fixed them instead on what ought to have been but for some unaccountable reason was not, a far more inviting prospect -- the xenobiologist at his side. "I was just impressing the details on my memory," he lied, then added because he was unsure how well he had concealed his reaction, "Ifs not a very prepossessing beast, is it?" "On the contrary," Dr. Kunje said. "It -- or to be more exact, she is an exceptionally well endowed specimen." "She?" "We decided on a female because they are somewhat larger than the males, which gives us additional space inside the carcass, naturally. And also because of the relative territorial habits ot the two sexes. The females tend to stay in any given area for a fairly long time. The males roam from place to place. At the stage our survey has now reached we are adequately supplied with the kind of superficial data that can be gathered from a hasty once-over. What we need is the fine detail to complete the picture. Do you follow me?" Dr. Kunje spoke with the politely patronizing tone of the exp forced to enlist the aid of a handyman for a relatively insignificant task. Jeff gave her the same kind of thoutful examination he had given the creature in the bubble and noted a remarkable parallel between her and it. She was -- if he wasn't mistaken -- potentially a rather beautiful woman: tall, with dark hair and large bright eyes, and a tawny-gold complexion. But, as though to deny any continuity between the part of her that was exposed and the part that was covered, she chose to wear the loosest and baggiest set of all-purpose coveralls he had ever seen and furthermore to string them about and stuff their pockets with whatever could be called on to provide lumps and bulges in the wrong places. H e felt a vague stir of disappointment. The universe was awfully big, and the tiny enclaves of human awareness which were the starships, darting from system to system were oppressively small. They far too easily became boring. Though he had an excellent and reliable crew , working under him he could tell that he was near his own personal limit of endurance and might soon start to snap at those he was really most fond of. He had looked forward to this unexpected assignment, calling at the Chryseis research station and helping out with a key project, mainly as a chance to renew his sense of .   what would you call it? Solidarity? That feeling of companionship at any rate, which alone sustained wandering humanity among these harsh stars and bleak, uninhabitable planets. Granted, research scientists were of a different temperament from people who went into the Advanced Guard. Nonetheless, they also being human -- #S "You do an awful lot of staring. Commander Hook!" Dr. Kunje said sharply. "I find you much more enjoyable to look at than the creature in there," Jeff said, with a jerk of his thumb toward the bubble. It was a compliment honestly enough meant, but the response it provoked was to freeze her dark eyes into chips of black Plutonian ice. "You are not here to enjoy anything, Commander!" the xenobiologist said. "You are here to perform a service for us. Can it be done?" "I guess so," Jeff sighed, and turned to go. When he was twenty paces distant along the tunnel which linked the bubble with the main section of the orbital research station, she called after him. "By the way. Commander!" "Yes?" "Your -- shall we say, politely, 'uncalled-fori? -- remark just now reminded me of a point I had been intending to bring to your attention. I know that the members of the Guard lead a somewhat irregular life during their long periods on patrol, but that is somewhat excusable in view of the shortage of genuinely demanding tasks they are called on to fulfill. I should just like to make it plain that here we do have such tasks -- any number of them. And I have no intention of permitting the looseness of your customary behavior to contaminate my staff." Jeff, struggling through the haze of verbiage, gave a blank headshake. "I'm telling you. Commander," Dr. Kunje said in an impatient tone, "to keep fraternization to a minimum during your stay. Do you understand? Or must I draw you physiological diagrams?" n W hen he re-entered the lock of his own ship, Jeff found two of the research station staff already present, talking with his senior lieutenants: a large, stout, motherly, fairhaired woman of early mide age whom he identified from the records he had studied on the way here as Dr. Ingrid Swann, and a younger man, very lean and nervous but affable in manner whom he recognized as Dr. Matthew Couperin. Lieutenant Sandy Baravitch was talking as he came in -- she had probably been doing most of the talking, as usual -- but she broke off in mid-sentence and blew him a kiss of welcome. "How did you get on with the dragon?" she exclaimed. Beside her. Lieutenant Tom Cheliki winced and glanced at the strangers, his protuberant eyes very bright in his dark face, but the stout woman gave a wry chuckle. "Please don't judge all of us by Dr. Kunje!" she said. "It simply wouldn't be fair." "That's good," Jeff sighed and slumped into a vacant chair around the projector table on which the scientists were displaying the data apparently balanced on treetops in a Chryseian jungle, and he brightened at the sight of them. "One for you?" Sandy suggested, and suited the action to the word by going to the refreshment dispenser. IP 'IVe just been sternly warned against tto sort of behavior," Jeff said, "No fraternizing, to quote the exact phrase,' "You must be joking!" Tom said. "This is our first outship contact in over four months, and for those poor so-and-sos it's the first in -- how long did you say. Matt?" Dr. Couperin stared briefly at the ceiling. "Ah. , , . Eight months, four days and sixteen minutes, to the moment your commander stepped through our lock." Having lowered the level in his glass by a conservative fifty per cent, Jeff set it down along with the others, on the crown of a remarkable Earthlike tree. "I get the impression that Dr. Kunje likes it that way. What's wrong? Has she been crossed in love, or something?" "Don't be unkind to her," Ingrid Swann said. "She's an absolutely first-class biologist, and it's something of an honor for us to be working under her." "What she needs is someone to get to work on her," Couperin said barely audibly and then flushed bright red as he turned to Sandy. "I'm sorry, that was crude! It just slipped out." But Sandy was grinning so broadly that the freckles on her cheeks had almost disappeared into a succession of dimples. She reached over and patted Couperin's hand understandingly. "That's okay! So long as somebody retains a sense of humor here I guess we can bear to stick around long enough to do the job your boss wants from us. Jeff, did you get all the details or do you want us to run through them again." "To be frank, I cut my interview with Dr. Kunje short," Jeff admitted. "Let's take it again from the top. There was one question in particular I didn't get around to asking, and I should have done so. I gather that Chryseis is pretty well a terra-type world, correct?" Ingrid nodded. biology -- carbon-hydrogen-oxygennitrogen -- fairly standard gravity, regular proportions of land to ocean, same general temperature and so forth. Well, in the past century or so we must have run across fifty or sixty worlds of this type. What's so special about Chryseis that it's attracted a research team like yours and that it rates a priority adequate to haul an Advance Guard boat off its routine patrol and enlist our help? C ouperin leaned forward so that he appeared to be resting his elbows on the treetops within the projector table. "My best guess is a sense of racial guilt," he said. "What?" "Let's look at it this way. What were the largest animals ever to exist on Earth?" Jeff hesitated. "Why... Well, some species of dinosaur, I imagine. Probably Diplodocus, "Wrong. He wasn't the biggest -- just the longest. The biggest creatures ever to appear on Earth were the giant whales, and we exterminated them, around the beginning of the twenty-first century." Couperin hunched a little further over the table. "A couple of decades before we developed skills in biology adequate to find out what made them tick, genetically and otherwise, and preserve them in the new, inhospitable, madeover environment we'd wish on them. They weren't simply hunted to death, though that did reduce the numbers far enough to allow them to give in to the other factors which were operating. Effectively, we poisoned them. When they were weakened by poison disease did the rest "Right now, life here on Chryseis is going through a phase of extreme gigantism. It's the first world of its kind we've run across, and it's astonishingly close to Earth in so many chemical ways it holds the promise of lost at home just before we learned to comprehend it. Tom, flip back to Shot #, will you?" Tom Cheliki operated the projector table's control dial, and the scene changed. Now, it showed a patch of ground with low-growing bushes and a scrawny reptilian creature browsing off them. Jeff looked down obediently, but after a moment shrugged. "That little baby," Couperin said didactically, "corresponds to a rat in Earthside ecology, near as dammit. It's a little over ten feet tall." "What?" "No kidding, Commander. I said, and I mean, 'extreme' gigantism. Didn't you see Dr. Kunje's pride and joy?" "The disguise, floating in the transpex bubble?" "Precisely. Except that 'stalkinghorse' would be a better term. That's an exact replica of -- Tom, give us Shot #, please!" The scene in the table changed again; this time, it showed a typical specimen of the genus Jeff had already seen, indistinguishable apart from the different distribution of the colored patches on its body and legs. "We studied five or six hundred examples of Macrodiscos polychromia chryseiana Ingrid explained, "and derived a computer-analyzed cross-section of it, to incorporate every known characteristic -- the appearance, the mode of gait, the general behavior, the smell it emits, even. Then we programmed for a carcass matching the description, with space inside it for one standard Advance Guard landing-globe. The idea being -- " "The idea being," Couperin cut in, "that Dr. Kunje is fanastically opposed to anything, no matter how slight, which might interfere with the habits of the species under observation. This whole job could easily be done with our own resources, by dropping remotes to the surface. But oh no! Dr. Kunje insists that the Macrodiscoi he observed at first hand by something which will pass as one of their own number." "Tell me somthing," Jeff said suddenly. "Do you never refer to your boss except as Doctor Kunje?" The two scientists exchanged glances. After a moment, they both shook their heads. "Good grief," Jeff said, wondering what it would be like to try and cope with his twelve-member crew on a basis of heel-clicking and cries of IP Sahl instead of laughter, dirty jokes and a great display of overt affection. He was brought back from his fit of speculation by Sandy playing footsy with him under the table, and he cleared his throat. "Ah -- yes I Well, assuming the program for the stalking-horse included the proper specifications for implanting the landing-globe inside it, I don't see why it shouldn't work. There's certainly plenty of room -- one of our globes is approximately twenty-seven feet across with the force-shield in full operation." "Dr. Kunje was very thorough about that," Ingrid said. "You have to give her that: she's always thorough. And the form of the Macrodiscos luckily lends itself to the plan. The generators are at the top of the globe, right? And the beastie is more or less suspended from a frame of bone with the nerve tissues running along the -- ah -- the ribs. But you've seen the actual model we're going to use, so I don't have to explain in detail." O rectly into the nervous system," Jeff nodded. "That's neat. And I assume you have a program of operation we can simply slot into our own computers?" "Exactly." "I see. Tom, chuck me the dial, will you?" Jeff reached out for the projector table controls and wiped the shot currently on display. "So it's going to go like this," he continued, frowning a little because some of the details were still rather hazy, and manipulated the image within the table until it suggested, at least in outline, one of the MacrodiscoL Into the middle of it, with the greater ease of long familiarity, he injected one of the Guard's landing-globes: the central shaft first, housing the power-sources (tripled against emergency), then the three levels around which the shield projectors radiated blurred streaks of warning red, the uppermost housing weaponry, the central one available for observation, and the lowermost forming the most perfect extension of human reason yet devised, being as it was one huge solid-state computer into which the globe's crew could directly plug themselves simply by laying their hands flat on the contact plates, before their chairs. Doing so was an eerie sensation, but it had its rewards; that, truly, was an extension of consciousness, and he had sometimes suspected that a kind of addiction to it was what kept him on in the Advance Guard, trespassing on planet after inhospitable planet. He was rather proud of his ability to sketch with the unprogrammed controls of the projector table. He added some fine touches to his drawing -- a recognizable caricature of Dr. Kunje, for example, on the middle level, peering out with one hand raised to shade her eyes. "Don't take all day, will you?" Sandy said caustically, and he caught himself with a guilty start. Trying to look as though nothing had happened, he removed his glass -- which was now balanced on top of a peculiarly nasty little weapon built into the upper level of the globe -- and reduced its contents to nil. "Is that the general idea?" he asked Ingrid. "Yes that's fine," she said after a few seconds' contemplation. "I take it that means it can be done." "Oh, snrel" "Jeff, just a second," Sandy said, frowning now as she stared into the table. "Matthew, this is the boss species here -- correct?" "No, not exactly," Couperin countered. "There are several others more widely spread over the planet, but this is by far the largest." "How far is 'far'?" "Ten or fifteen per cent." "And what kind of terrain are we going to have to work over when we go down?" Sandy glanced up at him. "I don't think I told you, but I'm supposed to be the planetside pilot for this crew, which means that whenever we discharge a landing-globe I'm responsible." "I'll show you." Couperin turned to Jeff. "Ah -- Commander, do you mind if I wipe this drawing?" "Sure, sure! I only wanted to be certain I had the picture firmly in my mind. You needn't bother to store it. Jeff passed over the control unit for the table. "And, by the way, stop calling me 'Commander.' I've decided I won't take that kind of language from anyone except Dr. Kunje." Couperin looked briefly puzzled, then smiled. He dialed for another picture, and the table produced a revolving globe of Chryseis. "Here's the territory where the Macrodiscoi hang out," he said. A patch on one of the northern land masses flickered white. "As you probably know, the year here is about seventeen months long, and the northern winter is just about ending now. The preliminary surveys caught the broad outline of the species' summer habits, and we arrived in time to follow through their winter behavior in outline also. What we now want is the -- " "Don't teU me," Jeff cut in. "The fine detail. I get it. So what's the lie of the land like and will you have another drink? Sandy!" "Mainly savannah. These creatures are herbivorous -- oh, thanks very much, I will." Couperin accepted his new drink and took a healthy swig. "Hah! Thank you -- this is a very pleasant change from the monotonous stuff we get here." A liquors?" Tom Cheliki said disbelievingly. "Liquors we get none of," Ingrid said. "It's -- ah -- not approved. Also it conduces to lax behavior. Not that one really needs to be conduced, of course, because hormones are by far the most potent substances yet devised to affect human instincts. Butr "I'm ad we called," Jeff said after a moment of blank astonishment, and everyone burst out laughing. "Jeff, if you don't mind?" Sandy said, recovering before the others, and on his shrug continued: "This terrain, then! You say savannah? Any -- oh -- spring tornadoes? Earthquakes? Major risks of that kind?" "No, it's a pretty hospitable world," Ingrid said. "We have the weather pattern down in detail, and it doesn't include anything worse than the occasional gale. But calling this re simply savannah is simplifying it a bit. There are rocky patches, and even some stretches of fairly respectable forest. No tectonic activity worth mentioning in the range the Macrodiscoi cover, though there's a young continent emerging to the south -- that one -- and we have noted some faiiiy fierce temblors in the ridge to the east. However -- " Commanderr The word splashed into the room like a rock tossed into wet mud, and they all winced and turned to the entrance. Dr. Kunje stood there, eyes once more like black ice-chips, but this time blazing. "Commander, I did not expect to have to gloss my instructions with this kind of detail, but I heard bawdy laughter echoing up the tube connecting this ship with the research station and I thought I had better see what caused such unseemly merriment. And what do I find? I find that I should have spelled out my distaste at the idea of any of my stf taking drugs!" She pointed a shaking finger at the glass Jeff was holding. "That does, does it not, contain alcohol? "Why, yes," Jeff said. Denials seemed superfluous. "Mine contains an exact simulacrum of Polish vodka. Would you, perhaps, care for something?" For long moments Dr. Kunje was speechless. Then, at last and painfully, she forced out, "I shall be so glad when the experience is over. And, believe me, I no longer think it was a good idea to enlist the help of the Advance Guard in a purely scientific project!" She spun on her heel and marched away. The sound of her heels could be heard fading as she stamped along the gravity plates lining the floor of the umbilical tunnel. Eventually Jeff said, "I seem to have put you in dutch with your boss, don't I?" "WeU, we do have to survive here for another three months minimum," Couperin said, dutifully setting aside his glass, which was still threequarters full. "What's wrong with that woman?" Sandy burst out. "I understood she was a good biologist -- doesn't she know anything about the chemical side of human behavior?" "That, no," Ingrid said, and gave her habitual wry chuckle, which made her plump body shake clear down to her calves. "We have a theory that she was fathered by a computer. Matt worked out the physical details, if you'd be interested... ?" "Oh, lovely!" Sandy exploded, planting both elbows on the projector table, details of the terrain on Chryseis forgotten. "Do tell!" "Well, you see, it occurred to some of us that nobody with normal metabolism could be so utterly and entirely frigid," Ingrid said. "So -- oh. Matt, you take it from there. You worked out the program." Couperin looked vaguely uncomfortable. "It's just a gag," he said defensively. "But if you really want to know about it... ? Well, I started by considering the subjective aspects, corresponding to signals generated in the human nervous system, if a computer of say quarter-megabrain capacity were connected..." Ill W hen he had finished they were almost helpless with laughter; only Jeff retained a modicum of selfcontrol, and he used it to shut the baffles in the umbilical tube and cut off the leakage of sound into the research station. "It's practically literal!" Ingrid said, when she recovered from her hysteria. "Why... Why, just to take one example, Dr. Kunje doesn't like to refer to the tubes which you use to link ships in orbit as 'umbilical! It brings to mind a process she'd rather forget about, even if the image is an exact one." "But somebody like that is sick!" Tom Oheliki said, his mirth forgotten in an instant. "In what sense?" Couperin countered. "She runs a first-rate station, there's no denying. And she has the best record in xenobiology anyone could hope to stack up in a lifetime." "She's not functioning as a person, though," Sandy said soberly. They were all suddenly not amused. "Jeff?" As commander of an Advance Guard ship, whose crew had to work in isolation for months at a time on the very fringes of human-explored space and often had to risk their lives on strange planets with no more reward than the occasional use of the consciousness-expanding facilities of a landing-globe, Jeff had to be both a flieoretical and a practical psycholoHe said after a pause for reflection, "Yes, Sandy, I'm afraid youYe absolutely right." "What sustains someone in that predicament?" Tom Cheliki demanded. The two scientists, strangers to the close, almost telepathic unity of a Guard ship's crew, stared in bewilderment, feeling that some conclusion had been reached which they did not know about. It had. "Being right," Sandy said positively "That so, Jeff?" "Yes. And there come a time when the personality is stretched like a rubber band -- gets caught up in a Zeno Race. The tortoise never does beat Achilles, even if the logic says it does." "What's a Zeno Rape?" Ingrid demanded. "What your boss is trapped in." Jeff shook himself, as though coming back to the present from a long way off -- and that also was partly true. "Someone who is not operating as a normal person can only be operating in accordance with a false idea of a normal person. That false idea is what we nickname a Zeno Race. You know the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise! When the tortoise has gone such a distance, Achilles starts to run, but when he gets where the tortoise was when he started it has moved on, and then when he -- " "Sure!" Couperin said impatiently. "Well, someone who has to be right in order to survive as a thinking person isn't normal, is he -- or she? Most human beings are wrong part of the time. Someone who depends on being right is trapped in a paradox like Zeno's, having to be right and each time ding it more difficult to make it there ahead of the crowd. In fact, there always comes a time when the paradox resolves. And unIP less I'm mistaken, your boss just passed it. Snapr Puzzled, Ingrid said, "But -- " "It's just as well she called us in to land you a landing-globel" Tom Cheliki said, his face drawn and worried. "You might not have spotted it. What do we do, Jeff?" "We let her be wrong," Jeff shrugged and leaned back in his seat, cradling his drink. "What's more, I think she's already left out of account the factor which is going to demonstrate that she can be wrong. Ingrid, didn't you say something about your having been here throughout the period of winter on the Macrodiscois range?" "Why -- yes!" "You'll have to edit me a bit, because I'm not sufficiently grounded in xenobiology to know if the basic assumption is sound, but I suspect that when we put our landing-globe inside your stalking-horse and go down, the following will..." IV # # X Tow this is going to be perfectly ly straighforward," Dr. Kunje said as she faced the assembled crew of the landing-globe: half members of the Guard, half members of her own staff with specific tasks to attend to during the descent and the stay on the surface. "Our surroundings may be unfamilar but our purpose is what it always is on visiting a new planet: to gather knowledge." She glanced about her rather uneasily, as though oppressed by the blackness beyond the limits of the globular shield protecting them. Outside was the incredible internal nakedness of the facsimile Macrodiscos they had built, its circulation, musculature and in fact every other organ, bar the digestive system, plainly visible, pushed into curious new relationships by the presence of the globe in place of the intestine-equivalents. Their stalking-horse would even be able to breathe, to economize on the power-sources within the globe. , which were not designed to make sixty-odd tons of alien protoplasm gallop across a grassy plain at fqity , miles an hour. "Finished?" Sandy said briskly from the control console. "Let's go!" And, permitting Just a shade of acceleration to leak through the shield -- enough to jar Dr. Kunje on her feet and interrupt her declaration that she had barely started to deliver her speech -- she launched her weird craft into atmosphere. Outside the globe: the Macrodiscos, Outside the, Macrodiscos: a shield-unit to absorb and dissipate the friction due to diving through the air a trifle thicker than Earth's, plus a computer with a single program and a homing device with a to go wrong with the plan, they could abandon the carcass they hid inside and signal the external shield-unit to come and fetch them, fast. Not that Dr. Kunje was expecting any such eventuality; as she had stressed over and over again, their stalking-horse and the program whiqh was operating it were squarely founded on months of careful study of the Macodisconi and related species. But Jeff was. K eeping his hands dutifully linked in his lap -- no one but Sandy was supposed to touch the contact plates until she had set them safely on solid ground -- he glanced at Dr. Kunje in the adjacent chair. "Excited, doctoiT' he suggested, noting how white her knuckles were from tension. "Why -- yes, I suppose I am," Dr. Kunje admitted with a trace of condescension. "It's always most gratifying to see the culmination of a long plan of action working out exactly as predicted, isn't it?" Jeff kept his thoughts on the subject to himself and merely gave her an apparently confirmatory smile. But, past Dr. Kunje's dark head, he saw Ingrid wink at him. "We're coming down now," Sandy reported suddenly. "The long-range detectors don't indicate any sizeable animals in the immediate neighborhood. It's roughly an hour before sunset at this point on the MacrodiscoVs range -- is that all right. Dr. Kunje?" "Yes, that will do very well. The ecies is mainly diurnal; the night will give us a chance to acclimatize ourselves and become acquainted with the lay of the land, before coming into overt contact with other members of the species." "Very good," Sandy said. "Fll touch down and strip away the shield unit -- it'll drift a couple of miles over our heads until we send for it again." A pause, then: "There it goes!" Abruptly there was a landscape outside, lit by a low afternoon sun; they saw it by way of light-fiber bundles cunningly inserted between the muscles of the stalking-horse which projected their images on to curved screens outside the actual globe. Additionally, of course, they were able to perceive by way of the extensosensors attached to the computer inside the globe, and this Jeff proceeded to do, with an encouraging nod at Dr. Kunje and instructions to close her eyes. A moment to adjust, and then... It was like being the creature as well as himself, seeing the countryside from a height of twenty feet, hearing its noises, smelling its scents, and moreover being aware of the pressure of gravity, the heat of the sun, the multiple and bewildering positions of the limbs carrying the huge oblate body within which they were hiding. With his own ears he heard Dr. Kunje utter an exclamation; the dry runs they had tried aboard the ship hadn't prepared her for this. "You'll get used to it," he assured her. "Let's go for a short stroll before nightfall, shall we, Sandy? I think that's a river-bank I see over to the left. We could try following that, to begin with." In strict obedience to the computer parasitizing on its nervous system, the artificial Macrodiscos plodded on all its many feet in the indicated direction. As they rode along, Jeff confirmed what he had been told about the likeness of this planet to Earth, bar the size of the creatures inhabiting it. Grass, bushes, rocks, the color of the sun, all were astonishingly homelike. When they reached the river and were able to look down at it, they found that too IF could have been on Earth -- a partly dry, pebble-strewn channel along the bottom of which surged the first water released by the spring thaw in the mountains where it took its rise. Beside him Jeff heard a mutter which sounded suspiciously like a curse and glanced round at Dr. Kunje. She had withdrawn from contact with the computer and was shaking her head with a dazed expression. Fw want of a better idea, Sandy was turning the beast to follow the downstream course of the river. "Is anything the matter?" Jeff murmured, taking pleasure he was a trifle ashamed of in repeating Dr. Kunje's own words from the moment of his first encounter with the stalking-horse. "It's -- it's confusing at first, that's all," Dr. Kunje said with a glare and determinedly laid her hands on the contact plates again. "But I think I'm getting the hang of it," she concluded firmly. "Attagirl," Jeff said under his breath, and added, but not aloud: You want first-hand data, lady, we provide it for you! Don't blame us when you get what you asked for! "Jeff!" Tom Cheliki said suddenly. "Isn't that another of our own species, over there on tiie right?" "Yes!" Couperin, who had been adjusting better than Dr. Kunje to the novd sensation of the contact plate before him, opened his eyes to seek the direct image of the other Macrodiscos on the external screens. "So that's what we look like at the moment!" Tom commented wryly. " Tae see oorsel's as ithers see us' -- hmmm!" "Not exactly," Dr. Kunje cut in. "That one's a male. You can tell it by the smaller size and generally lighter build, if you look carefully." I t wasn't the first time she had referred to the greater bulk and stature of the female Macrodiscos. Jeff repressed the desire to give a thoughtful nod. But it was all fitting together. Something was definitely amiss in Dr. Kunje's view of how to be human, and the more he learned about her, the more he was certain he had pinned down the problem. The cure was going to be both drastic and expensive, but that didn't matter. The Macrodiscos would be here next week or next year, awaiting study, but if things were to go on as at present. Dr. Kunje might not be -- and people with her degree of brilliance in xenobiology were few and far between. Seeing that she had closed her eyes and set her mouth in a taut line of concentration, he was able to signal silently to Sandy, whose head tilted to a mischievous angle. Their steed came to a halt.  "Why have you stopped?" Dr. Kunje said, eyes still tight shut as she had fought to absorb and understand the wealth of sensory data furnished by the computer. "Ought we not make certain at the first opportunity that other members of the species don't perceive anything wrong with our version of them?" Jeff said, Oh  -- yes, I see. Yes, that's a sensible precaution. Has the male noticed us yet?" "He surely has," Couperin said. IP "And what's more, here he comes!" A quarter-mile distant across the irregular ground, the monster -- smaller only by comparison, for he was himself at least forty-eight feet across and fifteen feet high -- had tensed into an alert attitude. All of a sudden, his multiple legs began to propel him violently in their direction. "That's the aggression-reaction!" Dr. Kunje exclaimed. "But what in the... ?" Her voice tailed away, "Aggression-reaction?" Sandy repeated. "You mean we ought to get out of here?" "Well..." Dr. Kunje opened her eyes and stared helplessly at the rapidly growing mass of the male as it approached. "Well -- yes, I suppose we should!" Compliantly, Sandy instructed their steed to move away, but the male wasn't to be shaken off. At a speed between a plod and a gallop, which became a bit uncomfortable after a while because they were having to allow acceleration forces to affect the interior of the globe -- there was no choice short of lifting the entire creature off the ground with their antigravs -- they fled across the hillocky plain, sometimes avoiding, sometimes charging straight through, the clumps of vegetation which dotted it. "There's another!" Ingrid said abruptly, and they all noticed that a second male had come into view. Its reaction was identical with the first's: it tensed, hesitated and then charged. Nobody said anything for a while, as Sandy expertly operated the muscles of their steed. Ten a third male appeared and did the same as the others. Sandy contrived to make two of the three collide as they both tried to cut off the same corner around a stand of tall trees, and they forgot the chase in favor of a kind of butting contest, hurling their massive frames at one another with the full force of all their limbs. But the remaining male kept on coming, and inside five minutes there was yet a fourth, discovered as they rounded an outcrop of weathered rocks. "This isn't precisely what, I was led to expect," Jeff said delicately. "N-no -- ah -- no, it isn't," Dr. Kunje said with tremendous effort. "Oh my goodness! There's another!" She pointed a shaking hand, and she was quite right. One more male had joined the pursuit, this one smaller than the rest and correspondingly better able to dodge and twist as he ran. "Head for the sunset line," Dr. Kunje said in a depressed voice. "As I told you, they're diurnal. Darkness should enable us to -- ah -- re-assess our position." #Tt certainly seems to need reasA sessment," Tom Cheliki said in a tone of disapproval. "I understood that disguised as we are we could venture among these animals without causing any disturbance to their regular activities, instead of which the mere sight of us seems to provoke a clear intention to do us serious mayhem!" "Look out!" Sandy shouted. Their course had taken them back to the river, at a point where it had cut itself a miniature gorge, about forty or fifty feet high, and she had attempted to dodge through the gap. At the same moment one of the pursuing males, displaying improbable powers o reasoning, had scuttled up the bank and clearly planned to jump down directly on top of thenoL Only by causing their steed to give a frantic leap, to the ground was it possible to avoid the impact. The male slammed to the ground in a thrashing tangle of mbs, and a less farsighted member of the posse ran straight into him, provoking the inception of another butting contest. For a short time thereafter, with the sun slanting closer to the horizon and the sky darkling, they seemed to be on their own again, and for fear of overstressing the muscles she was coniroliing Sandy slowed down their headlong run. Shortly, however, one of the males they had left behind reappeared on their trail, moving awkwardly and dragging one of its legs, but determined not to give up. "Here we go again," Sandy said in a resigned tone and added in a voice that had suddenly changed, "Oh no! There's a great big patch of woodland ahead of us! We can't just charge steaight through it, can we?" Definitely they could not: enormous or not by Earthly standards, oven a fuligrown female Macrodiscos liad to draw the line before trying to brush six-foot tree trunks out of the way like blades ot grass. "So what do we do, Dr. Kunje?" Jeff said in a tone as sweet as honey. "I... " Dr. Kunje put her hand to her head as though dizzy. "I... " he said again, and finally, with a miserable cry, managed to finish the sentence. just don't know!" "Dr. Swann?" Jeff said. "We could try merely holding off the pursuit until dark," Ingrid said doubtfully. "It's perfectly true that these things prefer to quiet down at nightfall" "I'll do my best," Sandy promised, and thereafter there followed a kind of weird game of tag, as she hurled the colossal mass of their steed back and forth among the fringes of the forest. Twice she managed to crash the blundering male into a tree, so that there was an earth-shaking tremor and a brief respite, but before the determined beast was finally out of the running one of the others which they had earlier left behind put in an appearance and joined the chase. Then another fresh one showed up, and things went completely out of control. Wherever Sandy headed for, there was one of the animals ahead. Darkness settled over the land, and contrary to what had been promised, the pursuit did not slacken for a moment. Jeff kept glancing at Dr. Kunje, making it clear that he expected her to say something, and at long last, with face white and lips trembling, she forced it out. "I'm sorry! Something must have gone wrong -- terribly wrong! Perhaps they can sense that this isn't a member of their own species in some way we never guessed at!" "You mean we should abandon the attempt and make another try on some other occasion?" Jeff suggested. "I -- ah -- I can't even see that another try -- " Dr. Kunje gesteed helplessly. "Oh, but the whole thing's absurd! I don't understand! Let's just get out of hare!" IP "Sandyl" Jeff said quietly, and Sandy, shrugging, prepared to ard the stalking-horse. Its iindMrella-like upper frame of bones parted, peeled back, and allowed the landing-globe to drift free as the carcass collapsed to the ground. Skillfully she guided the gleaming sphere in among the trees on the fringe of the forest, and at last signaled for the shield-unit hovering overhead to come and fetch them back to orbit. "I don't understand!" Dr. Kunje whispered. "Oh, this is awful! I was so sure it was going to work -- we spent months planning this and we double-checked everything... Commander, what can possibly have gone wrong?" "Stop calling me that," Jeff said in a tone of deliberate crossness. don't even allow my own crew to call me that" "Wh-what?" Dr. Kunje blinked at him, and the brightness in her eyes trickled over and began to course down her cheeks. Drastic, but essential, F rom the corner of his own eye Jeff saw that Ingrid and Couperin were both looking rather embarrassed, as though regretting that they had committed themselves to what they had done. But something of the sort was inescapable; the alternative was for Dr. Kunje to be stretched and broken on the rack of her own need to be infallible. He said, "What are the males doing now, Tom?" Tom Cheliki set his hands on the contact plate before him. "Ah... Sort of snuffing around the empty carcass, as near as I can tell. One of them has drifted off already. It seems to be angry about something. At any rate, it's pulling at trees and bushes as it goes by, trying to uproot them. It looks exactly like someone having a temper-tantrum." "I'm not surprised," Jeff said dryly. "Listen, Dr. Kunje! I want you to answer me a couple of questions. First off, how old are you?" "What in the galaxy has that got to do with -- ?" "I asked a question!" Abruptly, Jeff's voice was colored with the quality which had made him commander of an Advance Guard crew, a dozen of the most cantankerous, self-willed and unpredictable specimens ever produced by the cantankerous, selfwilled and unpredictable species they belonged to. Dr. Kunje's resistance faded into nothing. "Ah... I'm thirty-five. But I don't see why -- " "And at thirty-five have you ever been in love with anybody? Have you ever been in love?' Indignation flared in her face. "Really, Commander! I don't think you have any right -- " "I said quit calling them that," Jeff grunted. "All right, I'll take that for a negative. It explains how you could be so stupid as to think you were wrong when in fact you were absolutely, totally and excessively right" There was an eternal pause. At last she said weakly, "I was -- was right?" "Of course. You're too damned good a biologist not to have been, aren't you? But because you're such a lousy human being -- shut up and wait tor me to finish! -- because you're a lousy human being you overlooked something that even a complete layman like myself spotted immediately. I'll spell it out for you, since apparently you still haven't caught on." Jeff drew a deep breath. "This planet's animal life is pretty close to Earth's, correct? Bisexual, oxygen-breathing, all the rest of it. And as a result of winter-long observations of the Macrodiscoi you had a facsimile prepared of a female of that species which combined all the optimum characteristics you'd noted from your study of them, right? No, you didn't actually say that to me, but I figured it out from your insistence on the larger size of the females. You ordered all the best features of the ones you'd studied combined in this artificial version. True or false?" "Well, naturally, if we wanted to -- " Dr. Kunje began. "Wait for it! And then "when we actually tried to go out among the Macrodiscoi without being observed, and a gang of males fell in behind and tried to grab us by the tail, you thought they'd detected the fake and were attacking us, didn't you? Great Galaxies, woman, hadn't it occurred to you that this is spring? He waited for it to sink in. When he had seen the first light of comprehension dawn on her face, he gestured for Sandy to allow the shield-unit to settle over the landing-globe and carry them away to orbit; she had been holding it off to give him a chance to hit Dr. Kunje with the truth while she was most vulnerable. "Honestly, Leila!" He used her first name before adding the final clincher, for good psychological reasons. "What do you think would happen if you programed a computer to simulate an optimum woman? You think you could wander about on Earth without attracting attention? Of course not! Those males who fell in behind and who couldn't be shaken off weren't trying to attack us! All they wanted to do was exactly what you'd expect them to want in the breeding season. They wanted to make love!" Leila Kunje put her head in her hands and burst into agonizing sobs. V Vy is thanks very much," Ingrid said as she shook Jeff's hand prior to the departure of the Guard ship. "But I mean a lot more than just that. I have a feeling that from now on Leila is going to be a hell of a sight more human to work with." "Don't push her," Sandy said from behind Jeff. "It takes an awfully long time to re-integrate a personality that's wandered as far out of orbit as hers had. But I think you're going to be right in the long term." "Oh, she has plenty of props," Jeff said. It isn't everyone in that predicament who's shown what's wrong by being excessively right. That ought to give her a lifeline to follow out of her present depression." "How long is it going to take to prepare the new male version of the stalking-horse?" Tom Cheliki aSked. IF "About a month, I imagine," Couperin said. "By which time the fury of the mating season will be over, and we can conduct our observations under -- ah -- more relaxed conditions. Are you going to come back and let us borrow one of your landing-globes again?" Jeff grinned and shook his head. "No, Im afraid our visit was a traumatic experience for Leila. It would be better to call in another Guard ship for the second attempt." There was a pause. Suddenly Ingrid put her arms around him and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. "Thafs more like what I wanted to convey to you," she said with Statler-Hilton Hotel, Boston; for information, Paul Galvin, # Harvard Street, Cambridge, Mass. #. Guest of Honor, Larry Niven; presentation of "Skylark" award; meeting of Tolkien Society, etc. Membership #. Holiday Inn East, Columbus, Ohio. Guest of Honor, Frederik Pohl; panel discussions, talks, etc. For information: Larry Smith, # East Tibet Road, Columbus, Ohio #. Membership #. At St. Anne's Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire, England. At Park-Slieraton Hotel, #th St. and #th Ave. New York City. Guest of Honor: Donald A. Wollheim. For informotloni Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, N.Y. #. Membership: #. satisfaction. "Working with Leila as she's been most of the time since we joined her here, I'd forgotten how to communicate on that level." "Me too," Couperin said with enthusiasm and did the same to Sandy. "Well, don't forget it again," Jeff said, g rinnin g broadly. "Honestly! Putting down a female on that planet who was the local counterpart of Ninon de I'Enclos, Marilyn Monroe and Anastraea Strange, all rolled into one, and expecting the local males to take no notice -- I ask you!" They were still chuckling when the tube linking the Guard ship to the orbital research station parted and the ington D. C. Regency-Congress Motor Hotel. For information: Jack C. Haldeman, # Woodboume Avenue, Baltimore, Md. Featuring a lively slide show "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody" narrated by J. K. Klein and based on his photos of many past conventions. Louisiana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. Guest of Honor: Daniel F. Galouye. Membership #. Participants may enroll for #, #, or # weeks; college credit will be given. Visiting staff will bet Judith Merril, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm. For information: Robin Scott Wilson, Clarion State College, Clarion, Pa. #. vention. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland California. Philip Jose Farmer, Guest of Honor. More details later. For informont Station, El Cerrito, Calif. #. Membership: L# foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. IF  Serial They were destroying an empire -- and their chief ally was the man they had sworn to dethrone! illustrated by Mount Lookitthat the planet is a Venus-sized world circling Tau Cetu Its only habitable area is a not particularly flat Plateau half the size of California, set on top of Mount Lookitthat the mountain, forty miles above the hellish heat and pressure at the planet's true surface. For three hundred years the colony on Mount Lookitthat has been a twoclass system, dominated by the crew," with the colonists underneath. The heart of the colony is the Hospital, an amorphous structure which incorporates the two slowboats that once carried men to the planet. One function of the Hospital is Implementation, the army-andno police of Mount Lookitthat, led by TE, nearly two hundred years old and pure crew. Another function of the Hospital is the organ banks. Colonists accused of crimes are taken apart for the organ banks, which are used to cure the sick. Mainly they benefit the crew. Most medicine on Mount Lookitthat involves the organ banks. The ramrobots come only when Earth's latest discovery is such that it cannot be sent as information in a laser beam. This holds in particular for items of biological engineering, of which Mount Lookitthat has many: indoor grass, housecleaners, architectural coral, mining worms, and so forth. organization, correctly suspect that Ramrobot ## is something special, knows its full importance. Their attempt to capture the ramrobot package backfires. They lose the package. tures; but her attempt to show them at the rebel meeting the next night is interrupted by an Implementation raid. Cover for the meeting was a party party, was the only one to escape the raid. This is common; people usually doesnt want to be noticed. The next morning Matt, returning to the wrecked house, finds a car buried in the basement. He has never flown a car; but he manages to reach the vicinity of the Hospital without being killed, though he loses the car in the process. The weird results of his first attempt to sneak into the Hospital make him determined to something of an expert, about psi powers. But Hood is one of the people hes trying to rescue. His second attempt succeeds, but ploring the Hospital when he stumbles into the organ banks. This throws him off balance entirely, and he makes no attempt to defend himself when a guard stuns him and carts him off to join the others in the vivarium. questioned several Sons of Earth and sent them to the organ banks; he's going the coffin cure: sensory deprivation. Next morning, having followquestioned. Ninety-eight prisoners are in the Vivarium, sleeping under stimulus of the brain's sleep center. Two guards lead him off. In the corridor they suddenly forget about him. Matt returns to the vivarium and starts waking prisoners. Despite spectacular damage done on the way, the subsequent escape is and a middle-aged harridan named in the vivarium. They take cover in an unoccupied house belonging to tiial army of relatives. and more worried -- is he being plagued by ghosts? -- whafs left of the Sons of Earth tries to figure out what makes Uhe luck of Matt Kellef ately; he seemed eager to talk to er is as follows: pathy, related only to the optic nerve, which is brain tissue. He can contract the iris of someone else's eye, causing that person to lose interest in whatever he is looking at, particuhas to be afraid. his history. It also makes him aware in the organ banks. He accepts the vivarium prisoners once they are inside. They breach the Hospital wall, using explosives buried earlier by the Sons of Earth. But once inside, Laney and Matt accidentally become separated. HospitaVs defenses. He definitely exabnormal abilities, plus the bleedingvarium, drawn in human blood, have being attacked by a ghost. Even defenses. attack. He speaks at length, describing the contents of the ramrobot package. Briefly, they are four items of biological engineering turned to medical purposes. They offer alternatives to and the remnant of the Sons of Earth, that the arrival of Ramrobot ## has blown the present social order sky high. The rule of the crew, he says, is doomed. XX L aney had vanished around to the left, around the great gentle curve of the Planck, while Matt stood gaping. He started after her, then checked himself. She must know of another entrance; he'd never catch her before she reached it. And if he followed her through he'd be lost in the maze of the Hospital. But he had to find her. She'd kept him in the dark as much as she could... probably because she expected Castro to get him and didn't want him to spill anything important. She hadn't mentioned the bomb until the fuse was in her hand; nor the detailed plans for invading the Hospital until she was already following them. Eventually she'd have told him IF how to find Polly. Now he'd lost both. Or... ? He ran toward the main entrance, dodging police who tried to run through Ws solid bulk. He would meet Laney at the vivarium, if she got there. But he knew only one route to reach it. The great bronze doors swung open as he approached. Matt hesitated at the bottom of the wide stairs. Electric eyes? Then three uniformed men trotted through the entrance and down, and Matt trotted up between them. If there were electric eyes here, and men watching them, they could never keep track of the last minute's traffic. The doors swung shut as he went through. They almost caught him between them. He cursed in a whisper and stepped aside for a r unning policeman with a whistle in his mouth. Like the ultra-sonic whistle the gateman had used to get in last night. He'd need one to get out. But later. He needn't think about leaving yet. His legs ached savagely. He slowed to a brisk walk and tried not to pant. Rishty up a flighty take a righty then a left... He saw the door down the corridor, and he stopped where he was and sagged gratefully against the wall. He'd beaten her here. And he was horribly tired. His legs were numb; there was a singing in his head; he wanted to do nothing but breathe. A taste in his mouth and throat reminded him of the hot metal taste of the void mist, when he'd bored for the bottom less than thirty-six plateau hours ago. It seemed he'd been running forever, terrified forever. His blood had carried adrenalin for too long. The wall felt soft against his back. It was good to rest. It was good to breathe. It was good to be warm, and the Hospital walls were warm, almost too warm for a cold-weather crewish overjacket. He'd ditch it when it got too hot... Probing idly in his pockets, he found a double handful of unshelled roasted peanuts. C orporal Halley Fox rounded the comer and stopped. He saw a crew resting against a wall, wearing his overjacket indoors. There was a ragged tear in the crew's ear, and a pool of blood below it, soaked into the neck of his overjacket. He was cracking and eating peanuts, dropping the shells on the floor. It was strange, but not strange enough. Halley Fox was in the third generation of a family which traditionally produced Implementation police. Naturally he had joined Implementation. His reflexes were not quick enough to make him a raider, and he made a better follower than a leader. For eight years now, he had been a competent man in a good position which did not require much responsibility. Then... last night he'd caught a colonist invading the Hospital. This morning there'd been a break from the vivarium, the first since the vivarium was built. Corporal Fox had seen blood for the first time. Man's blood, not drained into an organ-bank tank, but spilled recklessly along a hallway in conscious, murderous violence. This evening the Head had warned of an impending attack on the Hospital. He'd practically ordered Corporal Fox to shoot his own fellow guards! And everyone was taking him seriously! Minutes ago, there'd been a hell of a big blast outside the windows... and half the guards had deserted their posts to see what had happened. Corporal Fox was slightly punch drunk. He had not deserted his post. Things were confused enough. He stuck to his training as something he knew to be solid. And when he saw a crew sitting against a wall eating peanuts, he saluted and said, "Sir." Matt looked up to see a police officer standing stiff as a board, holding the short barrel of a mercy-bullet pistol slantwise across his forehead. Effectively he disappeared. C orporal Fox continued down the hall, stepping wide around the vivarium door. At the end of the corridor he stopped, half turned, and fell. Matt got unsteadily to his feet. The sight of the guard had damn near stopped his heart. Laney came around fast. She saw Matt, dodged back, poked the gun around -- "Stop! It's me!" "Oh, Matt. I thought I'd lost you." He moved toward her. "I saw someone come after you. Did you get him?" "Yah." She looked down at Corporal Fox. "They're badly trained." "Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" "Never you mind. Come on." She moved back toward the vivarium. "Hold it. Where do I find Polly?" "I really don't know. We've never known where they administer the coffin cure." She reached for the door handle. Matt caught her wrist. "Come now. Matt," she said. "You had fair warning." "The door's booby-trapped." "Oh?" "I saw the way that guy walked around it." She frowned at the handle. Then, with effort, she tore a strip from the bottom of Matt's jacket. She tied it to the handle, moved back as far as it would reach. Matt backed away. He said, "Before you do something irrevocable, won't you please tell me where to find Polly?" "Honestly, Matt, I don't know." She wasn't trying to hide the fact that he was an unneeded distraction. "Okay, where's Castro's office?" "You're out of your mind." "I'm a fanatic. Like you." That got a grin. "You're crazy, but okay. You go back the way I came, turn the only way you can and go up another flight. Follow the hall until you see signs. The signs will take you the rest of the way. The office is up against the hull of the Planck, But if you stick with me, we may find an easier way." "PuU then." Laney pulled. The handle came down and clicked. Immediately something fired from the ceiling: a conical burst of mercyIF bullets spattering the area where anyone would have stood to pull the handle. And a siren blared in the corridor, loud and raucous and familiar. Laney jumped straight back in surprise, fetched up against the wall. The door swung open a couple of inches. "In," she cried, and dove through, followed by Matt. The puffs of mercy-bullets were lost in the sound of the siren. But Matt saw four men in the room, crouched in target-shooting position in a line opposite the door. They were still firing as Laney fell. ( i Toomed? Really?" Even to himself Harry sounded insane. But he'd expected no such easy capitulation. "How many Sons of Earth are there?" "I can't tell you that." "I can tell you," said Millard Parlette. "Less than four hundred. On all of Mount Lookitthat there are less than seven hundred active rebels. For three hundred years you and your kind have been trying to build a rebellion. You've made no progress at all." "Precious little." "You enlist your rebels from the colonists, naturally. Your trouble is that most colonists don't really want the crew to lose control of the Plateau. They're happy the way they are. Yours is an unpopular cause. I tried to explain why before; let me try again." With obvious effort he moved his arms enough to fold his hands in his lap. Random muscles in his shoulders twitched from time to time. "It's not that they don't think they could do better than the crew if it came to the point. Everybody always thinks that. They're afraid of Implementation, yes, and they won't risk their good blood and bone to make the change, not when Implementation has all the weapons on Plateau and controls all the electrical power too. "But that isn't the point. The point is that they don't really think that the crew rule is wrong, "It all depends on the organ banks. On the one hand, the organ banks are a terrible threat, not only a death penalty, but an ignominious way to die. On the other hand, the banks are a promise. A man who deserves it and can pay for it, even a colonist, can get medical treatment at the Hospital. But without the organ banks there'd be no treatment. He'd die." "Do you know what your rebels would do if they could beat the crew to their knees? Some would insist that the organ banks be abolished. They'd be killed or ostracized by their own members. The majority would keep the banks just as they are, but use the crew to feed them!" His neck was stronger now, and he looked up to see patient stares. A good audience. And he had them hooked finally. "Up to now," he went on, "you couldn't start a rebellion because you couldn't convince enough fighting men that your cause was just. Now you can. Now you can convince the colonists of Mount Lookitthat that the organ banks are and should be obsolete. Then wait a little. When Implementation doesn't disband, you move." Harry Kane said, "That's exactly what I was thinking, only you seem to be way ahead of me. Why did you call me silly?" "You made a silly assumption. You thought I was trying to keep the ramrobot package a secret. Quite the contrary. Just this afternoon I -- " 'Tve finally got it," said Hood. "You've decided to join the winning side, have you, Parlette?" "You fool. You badmouthed colonist fool." J ay Hood flushed. He stood perctly straight with his arms at his sides and his fists clenched. He was no angrier than Parlette. The old man was trying to shift his weight, and every muscle in his body was jumping as a result. He said, "Do you think so little of me, to think I'd follow such motives?" "Relax, Jay. Parlette, if you have something to say, say it. If we jump to the wrong conclusions, please assume that you're expressing yourself badly and don't try to shift the blame." "Why don't you all count to infinity?" Lydia Hancock suggested. Parlette spoke slowly and evenly. "I am trying to prevent a blood bath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kin half the people in this world." "You can't do it," said Harry Kane. "It's coming." "Kane, cannot you and I and your associates work out a new...  constitution for Mount Lookitthat? Obviously the Covenant of Planetfall will no longer work." "Obviously." "I made a speech today. In fact, I seem to be spending the whole damn day and night making speeches. This afternoon I called an emergency session -- rammed it through the Council. You know what that means?" "Yah. You were talking to every crew on the Plateau, then." "I told them what was in Ramrobot ##. I showed them. I told them about the organ-bank problem, and about the relationship between ethics and technology. I told them that if the secret of the ramrobot ever reached the colonists, the colonists would revolt en masse. I did my damnedest, Kane, to scare the pants off them." "I've known from the beginning that we couldn't keep the secret forever. Now that thirty thousand people know it it'll be out even faster, even if we were all killed this instant. I did all this, Kane, in order to warn them. To scare them. When they realize that the secret is out, they may be scared enough to dicker. The smart ones will. "I've been planning this a long time, Kane. I dn't even know what it was that Earth would ship us. It might have been a regeneration serum, or designs for cheap alloplasty components, or even a new religion. Anrthing. But something was coming, and here it is; and, Ke, we've got to try to stop the blood bath." Gone was Parlette's shortness of breath and his clumsy attempts to make his lips and tongueVork against a sonic blast. His voice was smooth and lilting, rising and falling, a little hoarse, but terribly earnest. "We've got to try. Maybe we can find someIF thing both the crew and the colonists can agree on." He stopped, and three heads nodded, almost in reflex. H e saw the four men, and he saw Laney stagger. He tried to turn and run, and in that instant there was a godawful clang, a sound like being inside a church bell. He jumped to the side instead, knowing the hall must be full of sonics. "Shut the damn door I" a voice yelled. One of the guards jumped to obey. Matt felt the numbness of the sonics, and his knees went watery. He kept his eyes on his four enemies. One bent over Laney. "All alone," he said. "Crazy. Wonder where she got the clothes?" "Off a crew, maybe." Another guard laughed brayingly. "Shut up, Rick. Come on, lend a hand. Let's get her to a chair." "A hunting gun. Wouldn't you hate to get shot with this?" "She came a long way to get to the vivarium. Most of 'em we have to bring." The braying laugh again. "Gas bomb didn't go off." One of the guards kicked a metal cannister. Immediately the cannister began hissing. "Nose plugs, quick!" They fumbled in their pockets, produced things that looked like large rubber false noses. "Good. We should have done this before. If we keep the room filled with gas, anyone who comes charging in will drop right away." Matt had gotten the message. He'd held his breath from the moment he heard the hiss. Now he walked up to the nearest guard and wrenched his false nose away. The man gasped in surprise, looked directly at Matt and crumpled. The false nose had a band to fit around the neck, and some kind of adhesive to form a skin-tight lock around the nose. Matt got it on and found himself breathing through it,, with difficulty. It was not comfortable. "Rick? Oh, that idiot. Where the Mist Demons is his nose plug?" "I'll bet the jerk forgot to bring it' "Get me Major Jansen, please."; One of the guards was using his hand phone. "Sir? A girl just tried to crasli the vivarium. Yes, a girl, a crew girl in colonists clothing... That's right, just one... She's sleeping in one of the seats, sir. We figured : as long as she'd gone to all that trouble getting here -- " Matt still felt dizzy, though the door must be blocking the vibrations of the big sonics. Had he been hit by an unnoticed mercy-bullet? He bent over Laney. She was out of it, for sure. Punctured by far too many anesthetic slivers, her lungs filled with gas, a rhythmic sleep-inducing current playing through her brain... ? He found three wires leading to her headset. He pulled them. Now she was a time bomb. When everything else wore off, she'd wake up. More of a firecracker, actually, with four armed guards in the room. "One more thing, sir. The place is full of gas. It's just as well, we think." "No, sir, we haven't. If you'll turn off the sonics, I'll look." He turned from the phone. "Watts, check in the hall and see if anybody dropped dead out there." "But the sonics are still goingl" "They should be off. Try it," A ballpoint pen peeped from the shirt pocket of the unconscious guard. Matt saw it, snatched it and drew rapidly: a heart on the guard's forehead, tee drops running down the straight bridge of the nose. The one called Watts opened the door a crack. No sonic numbness touched him. He opened it further. "Hey!" He snaked out and ran down the hall toward Fox's body. Matt was on his he. "It's a guard," he called back. "Check the ident." Watts began going through Fox's pockets. He looked up once as Matt sidled past him, then continued with his work. #Tt's Elaine Mattson," said Jesus A Pietro. "Has to be. You're sure she was alone?" "If there'd been anyone with her, he would have been in the same condition. I think she was alone, sir." That made sense. Which was hardly a guarantee, Jesus Pietro thought. "Thank you, Major Jansen. How are the hunting squads doing?" "They've found nothing, sir. They're still quartering Alpha Plateau. Shall I see how far they've gotten?" "Yes. Call me back." He hung up and tilted back his desk chair with a frown wrinkling his forehead. They had to be somewhere on Alpha. And they couldn't all be attacking the Hospital. Elaine Mattson, captured. Well and good. She must have set off that mysterious explosion to cover her entrance. Had she also worn that Implementation uniform? It might be. She'd pass at a distance, long enough to knock out a crew woman and get a better disguise. Maybe. Maybe. He picked up the sixth dossier, the one lying alone next to the stunner. Polly Tournquist's life; Born twenty-two years ago, firstborn in a family with no known connection to the Sons of Earth. Her father s left eye had come from the organ banks, after hed lost his own to a fishing fly, A good, loyal colonist,, A disciplinarian in his own familyRaised on Delta, sector four. Studied at Colony University, with good grades. Shed met Jayhawk Hood there. Her first love affair. Why? Hood would have made a bad gigolo... small, puny, not good looking... but some girls like a man with a mind. Finished high school and college, went to work at Delta Retransmitting Station. Affair with Hood had cooled to friendship, apparently. But she'd joined the Sons of Earth. Revolting against authority? Her father would have turned her in, had he known. Look at the lines of disapproval in that ferret face... hmm? Without those lines, hed look something like Jayhawk Hood! It all helped. By now she'd been in the coffin cure for thirty hours. If a voice came to her now, the only IF sensory stimulus in her cosmos, she'd listen. And believe. As others had. Especially if the voice appealed to the right incidents in her past. But for now she'd have to wait. The Sons of Earth came first. One down, four to go... Jesus Pietro reached for his cup and found the coffee stone cold. A question touched his mind. He grimaced, pushed it back to wherever it had come from. He opened his desk phone and said, "Miss Lauessen, will you order me more coffee?" "Are you sure? You'll be awash with the stuff." "Just get it. And -- " the same thought crawled out into the light, and before he could stop himself -- "get me Matthew Keller's file. Not the one on my desk, the one in the dead file." S he came in a minute later, slender and blonde and looking coolly remote, carrying a folder and a pot of coffee. He opened the folder at once. She frowned at him, started to ask something, saw that he wasn't listening and left. Matthew Keller. Born... educated... joined Sons of Earth tenth-month, #, in middle age. Why so late? Why at all? Became a professional killer and thief, stealing mentation officers foolish enough to venture into the colonist regions in insufficient numbers. Thief? Damn! Could Keller senior have stolen that car? The car Keller junior rode straight down into the void! Trapped in sector #, Beta, fourth-month #, captured, convicted of treason, disassembled for the organ banks. O Jesus Pietro, you clever liar you. Half the Hospital must know he really went off the edge, forty miles ifpwn to Mist Demons and hellfire. So? Jesus Pietro dumped his cold coffee into a waste basket, poured a fresh cup and sipped. A flicking shadow somewhere at the corner of his eye. A noise. Someone was in the room. The cup jumped in his hand, searing his lip. He put it down fast and looked around... He went back to the dossier. Matthew Keller. What idiot whim had made him ask for this? Keller senior was dead. Crippled, crawling, he'd gone off the void edge split seconds before. "Castro." Jesus Pietro looked up with a start. He looked down. Treatment reports... Not good, but no disaster. Too many people had been injured in the mass escape, but some could be saved. Luckily the organ banks were full. And could be filled again, from the vivarium, once the surgery section found time. Why did everything have to happen at once? "Castro!" Jesus Pietro's chin jerked up... and he caught himself before his eyes followed. He'd done this once before, hadn't he? There'd been a noise... and someone had called his name... and what the Mist Demons was someone doing unannounced in Jesus Pietro's private office? He let his eyes travel to the edge of the desk     Crew clothing. But it was rumpled and dirty, and it didn't fit, and the hands which rested flat on his desk had dirty short fittgernails. A colonist in crew clothiag, for sure. In Jesus Pietro's oce. Unannounced. He'd gone past Miss Lftuessen, unannounced. "You." "That'S Where is she?" "You're Matdlcw Kdler." "Yes." "How did you get in here?" somehow he kept the tremor out of his voice and was proud of it. "None of your business. Where is she?" "Who?" "Don't give me that. Where's Pcy?" "I can't teU you that. Or anything eke," said fesus Pietro. He kept his eyes fixed on the man's stol Id bdt buckle. A t the peripheqr of his vision he saw two big, none too dean hands reach down to his own right haicd. His vishor leaned heavily on tlnrt hand, and when Jesus Pietro belatedly tried to withdraw it he coukln't. He saw his visitor take hold of Ms mid(he finger and bend it back. The pain was shocking. Jesus Pietro's mouth came wide open, and he looked up to plead... He was leachkig for Polly Touniquists folder when agony stnidr his hand. He snatched it back as if tiying to get it off a hot stove. Rdlex. The midcSe finger stuck out at right angles to the kmicldes. Mist Demons, it hurt! How the blazes had he -- "Well, Castro?" He remembered enou, bmely enough, not to look isp. Someone or something was in this room, something or someone with the power to make people forget. He made a logical connection and said, "You." "Right. Where's Polly Tournquist?" "You. Matthew Keller. So you came for me." "Let's not play games. Where's Polly?" "Were you in the car that attacked the Hospital? The one that dpve straight down -- " "Yes." "Then how -- " "Shut up, Castro. Tdl me where Polly is. Now. Is she alive?" "You'll get no information from me. How did you get back from the void?" "I flew back." "I mean the first time." "Castro, I could break every finger in both your hands. Now where's Polly? Is she dead?" "Would i talk if you did?" There was hesitation. Then two anns converged on bis rit hand. Jesus Pietro yelped with the pain and reached with clawed fingers for a pair of eyes... He was halfway through a stack of reports when agony bit into his hand. He found two fingers of his right hand bent back at right angles to the palm. With his teetii denched hard on a scream, Jesus Pietro turned tor." "Whaf wrong?" "Just get me the -- " His eyes caught a flash of movement. Someone in the office with him! "YouYe right," said a vofce. "I can't torture anything out of you." #D IP Faint, fading memories told him not to look up. He said, "You." "Go fly a bicycle." "Matthew Keller?" Silence. "Answer me, damn youl How did you get back?" Two hands slapped together on Jesus Pietro's right hand. His whole face clamped down on the scream, and Jesus Pietro snatched up his stunner and looked wildly for a target. H e looked up again when the doctor entered. "No point in replacing them," said the doctor. "They're only dislocated." And he deadened Jesus Pietro's arm, set the fingers and splintered them. "How the Mist Demons did you do it?" "I don't know." "You don't know? You dislocated two fingers and you can't quite recall -- " "Get off my back. I said I can't remember what happened to my hand. But I think that infernal ghost, Matthew Keller, must have had something to do with it." The doctor gave him a very peculiar look. And left. Jesus Pietro looked ruefjjlly at his right arm, splinted and dangling from a sling. Ohy fine. And he genuinely couldn't remember anything about it. Which was why he kept thinking about Matthew Keller. But why did he keep thinking about Polly Toumquist? It was time and past time for the next phase of her treatment. But surely she could wait? Of course she could. He tried his coffee. Too cool. He poured it back into the pot and started fresh. His arm felt like dead meat. Why did he keep thinking about about Polly Tournquist? "Phut!" He stood up clumsily, because of his bound arm. "Miss Lauessen," he told the intercom, "get me two guards. I'm going over to the Planck: "Will do." He was reaching for the stunner on his desk when something caught his eye. It was the dossier for Matthew Keller, senior. A crude drawing defaced its yellow cover. Two open arcs, joined, in black ink. Three small closed loops beneath. The bleeding heart. It certainly hadn't been there before. Jesus Pietro opened the folder. He could smell his own fear, and feel it, in the cool perspiration that soaked his shirt. As if he'd been afraid for hours. Front and side views. Blue eyes, yellow hair, skin beginning to puff out with age... Something stirred somewhere in Jesus Pietro's mind. For just a moment the face in the folder became younger. Its expression changed slightly, so that it seemed both frightened and angry. There was blood soaking into its collar, and a piece freshly bitten from its ear. "Your guards have just arrived, sir." . "Thank you," said Jesus Pietro. He took one last look at the dead man and closed the folder. He put the stunner in his pocket before leaving his office. # T wish we could warn Laney,"Isaid Harry Kane. "This changes eveiything. "You wouldn't even know what to tell hea: yet. Here, take this out" Mrs. Hancock put a steaming pitcher of hot cider on a tray, added four mugs. They were in the kitchen. Hood was in the living room, with Millard Parlette. Parlette, leaning on Jay Hood, had managed to stagger into die living room and into an armchair. It had seemed a good time to call a break. The wind screamed against black windows. To four conspirators in front of a convincing fire, drinking hot spiced cider against the vicarious tld, the living room seemed a haven. A temporary haven. "You've been thinking about this longer than we have," said Harry. "We never dreamed the crew might compromise. Just what are you prepared to offer?" "To start with, amnesty for the Sons of Earth, for you and whoever remains in the vivarium. Tliat comes free. We'll need you. Once the colonists lose faith in the crew, you'll be the only force for law and order in the colony regions." "That'll be a switch." "We need to discuss three types of medical care," said MUlard Parlette. "Organic transplants, the ramrobot gifts and minor medical treatment. You already have some access to standard drugs, at the medcheck stations. We can expand those. I'm sure we can offer free access to the heartbeasts and liverbeasts and so forth. For awhile your colonists will have to come up to the Hospital to get treatment with the ramrobot symbiots, but eventually we can build culture tanks in Gamma and Delta and Eta." "Very good. What about the organ banks?" "Right." Millard Parlette wrapped his arms around his narrow ribcage and stared into the fire, "I couldn't plan for that part, because I didn't know just what technological change was coming. What are your ideas?" "Abolish the organ banks," Mrs. Hancock said firmly. "Throw away tons of organic transplant material? Dump it on the grass?" "Yes!" "Would you also abolish crime? The organ banks are our only way to punish thieves and murderers. There are no prisons on Mount Lookitthat." "Then build prisons! You've been Parlette shook his head. Harry Kane intervened. "It wouldn't work. Look, Lydia, I know how you feel, but we couldn't do it. If we dumped all that transplant material out we'd have the whole Plateau against us. We can't even abolish execution by the organ banks, partly because crime would run rampant without capital punishment, and partly because there are too many crew like Parlette, who need the banks to live. If we did that we might as well declare war here and now." Lydia turned appealingly to Hood. "I pass," said Hood. "I think you're IF aS ignodag sometisiiig important." Harry said, "Ohr 'Tm not sure yet. I'll have to wait and see. Keep talking." C#T don't understand," said Lydia. A "I don't understand any of you. Wiat have we been fighting for? What have we been d#ring for? To smash the organ banks!" "You're overlooking something, Mrs. Hancock," Parlette said gently. "It isn't that the crew wouldnt agree to that, and it isn't that the colonists wouldn't agree to that. They wouldn't, of course. But # won't let you kick in the organ banks." "No." Lydia's words dripped scorn. "You'd have to die then, wouldn't you?" "Yes, I would. And you need me." "Why? What have you got for us besides your influence and your good advice?" "A small army. I have more than one hundred lineal descendants. They've been prepared for this day for a very long time. Not all of them will follow me, but most will obey my orders without question. They all have hunting weapons." Lydia sighed, raggedly. "We'll do our best, Mrs. Hancock. We can't eliminate the organ banks, but we can eliminate the injustice." "What we'll have to do," said Harry, "is establish a first come, first serve basis for what's already in the banks. Whoever gets sick fiKt... you see what I mean. Meanwhile we set up a new code of law, so that a crew stands just as mudi chance of getting into fte banks as a colonist." "Don't push too hard there, Kane. Remember, we have to satisfy both groups." "PhutI" said Lydia Hancock. It was hard to tell whether she Was ready to cry or to start a fistfight. They were a circle of three, leaning toward each other across the coffee table, holding forgotten mugs. Hood sat a little back from the coffee table, ignored, waiting for something. "The thing is," said Parlette, "we can make everyone equal before the law. We can  that and get away with it, provided that there is no redistribution of property. Do you agree to that?" "Not completely." "Look at the logic. Everyone is equal in the courts. A crime is a crime. But the more property a man has, the less likely he is to want to commit a crime. It gives the crew something to protect, and it gives the colonist something to gain." "It makes sense, yes. But there are a few things we'll want." "Go ahead." "Our own electrical power sources." "Fine. We'll supply it free until we can build plants on Gamma and Delta. We can put hydraulic plants along the Muddy and Long Fall Rivers." "Good. We want free access to the organ banks, guaranteed." "That's a problem. An organ bank is like any other bank. You can't take out more than you put in. We'll have less condemned criminals and a lot more sick colonists to take care of." H ood had his chair tilted back on two legs, with his feet on the edge of the table. His eyes were half closed, as if he were dreaming pleasant daydreams. "Lotteries, then, fair lotteries. And And heavy research into alloplasty, financed by the crew." "Why the crew?" "You've got all the money." "We can work out a graduated tax. Anything else?" "There are a lot of unjust laws. We'll want to build houses as we see fit. No restrictions on the clothes we wear. Free travel. The right to buy machinery, any machinery, at the same price a crew pays. We'll want to put some solid restrictions on Implementation -- " "Why? They'll be police. They'll be enforcing your laws." "Parlette, have you ever had a squad of police come crashing through the wall of your house, throwing merey-bullets and sleepy gas around, dragging housecleaners into the light, tearing up the indoor lawn -- " "I've never been a rebel." "The hell you say." Parlette smiled. It made him look too much like a death's head. "I've never been caught." "Point is. Implementation can do that to anyone. And does, constantly. The householder doesn't even get an apology when they don't find evidence of crime." "I hate to restrict the police. It's a sure route to chaos. Parlette took a long swallow of cider. "All right, how does this sound? There used to be a thing called a search warrant. It kept the UN police from entering any home unless they had a good and sufficient reason, one they could show to a judge." "Sounds good." can look up the details in the library." "Another thing. As things stand now, Implementation has an exclusive monopoly on prisoners. They catch 'em, decide whether they're guilty and take 'em apart We ought to split those functions up somehow." "I've thought about that Kane. We can establish laws such that no man can be executed until he has been declared guilty by a clear majority of ten men. Five crew, five colonists, in cases where crew and colonists are both involved. Otherwise, trial by five of the prisoner's own social group. All trials to be public, on some special teedee channel." "That sounds -- " "I knew it." Jay Hood dropped back into the discussion with a thump of chair legs on flooring. "Do you realize that every suggestion either of you has made tonight would take power away from the Hospital?" Parlette frowned. "Perhaps. What does it matter?" "You've been talking as if there were two power groups on Mount Lookitthat, There are threel You, us and the Hospital, and the Hospital is the most powerful. Parlette, you've been studying the Sons of Earth for Mist Demons know how long. Have you spent any time studying Jesus Pietro Castro?" "I've known him a long time." Millard Parlette considered. "At least, I know he's competent. I don't suppose I really know how he thinks." "Harry does. Harry, what would Castro do if we tried to put all these restrictions on his police?" iiT don't understand you," said A Millard Parlette. "Castro is a good, loyal man. He has never done anything that wasn't in the best interests of the crew. Perhaps I don't know him socially, but I do know that he regards himself as a servant of the crew. Anything the crew accepts, he will accept." "Damnit, Hood's right," said Harry Kane. "I know Castro better than I knew my father. I just hadn't thought of this." "Jesus Pietro Castro is a good, loyal -- " -- Servant of the crew. Right. Now hold on just a minute, Parlette. Let me speak." "First of all, what crew? What crew is he loyal to?" Parlette snorted. He picked up his mug and found it empty. "He's not . loyal to any specific crew," said Harry Kane. "In fact he doesn't respect most crew. He respects you, and there are others who fit his ideals, but what he's loyal to is a sort of ideal crew: a man who does not overspend, is polite to his inferiors and knows exactly how to treat them and has the best interests of the colonists in his mind at all times. This image is the man he serves. "Now, let's Idbk for a moment at what we propose to do. Search warrants for the Implementation police. We remove Implementation's power to choose what colonists get the leftover materials from the organ banks. We tell them who they may and may not execute. Anything else, Jay?" "Power. We're taking the electrical monopoly away from the Hospital. Oh, and with less restrictions on the colonists, the police would have less work to do. Castro would have to fire some of 'em." "Right. Now, you don't suppose every crew on the Plateau is going to agree with all of that, do you?" "No, not all. Of course not. We may be able to swing a majority. At least a majority of political power." "Damn your majority. What crew is Castro going to be loyal to? You can name him." Parlette was rubbing the back of his neck. "I see your point, of course. Given that you've analyzed Castro correctly, he'll follow the conservative faction." "He will, believe me. The crew who would rather die than accept our compromise is the man he'll follow. And all of Implementation will follow him. He's their leader." "And they've got all the weapons," said Hood. B leeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist. Why Polly Tournquist? She could have nothing to do with the present trouble. Since Saturday evening she had been suffering sensory deprivation in the coffin cure. Why must he be haunted by the colonist girl? What was her hold on him, that she could pull him away from his office at a time like this? He hadn't felt a fascination like this since -- He couldn't remember, at least not very well. The guard in front of him stopped suddenly, pushed a button in the wall and stepped aside. Jesus Pietro jerked back to reality. They had reached the elevator. The doors slid back, and Jesus Pietro stepped in, followed by the two guards. Where s Polly? Deep in his mind something whispered. Where is she? Subliminally, he remembered. Tell me where Polly is!) Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist. Either he'd finally lost his mind -- and over a colonist girl! -- or there was some connection between Matthew Keller and Polly Tournquist. But he had no evidence of that at all. Perhaps the girl would be able to tell him. And if she could, certainly she would. M att had trailed them to the end of a blind corridor. When they stopped. Matt stopped too, confused. Was Castro going to Polly, or wasn't he? Doors slid back in the wall, and Matt's three guides entered. Matt followed, but stopped at the doors. The room was too small. He'd bump an elbow and get shot... The doors closed in his face. Matt heard muted mechanical noises, diminishing. What in blazes was it, an airlock? And why here? He was at the end of a dead-end corridor, lost in the Hospital. The Head and two guards were on the other side of those doors. Two guards, armed and alert... but they were IF the only guides he had. Matt pushed the big black button which had opened the doors. This time they stayed closed. He pushed it again. Nothing happened. Was he doing exactly what the guard had done? Had the guard used a whistle, or a key? Matt looked down the hall to where it bent, wondering if he could make his way back to Castro's office. Probably not. He pushed the button again... A muted mechanical noise, nearly inaudible, but rising. Presently the doors opened to show a tiny, boxlike room, empty. He stepped in, crouched slightly, ready for anything. There were no doors in the back. How had the others left? Nothing. Nothing but He pushed them in order. I did nothing. He pushed #, and ever # rthing happened at once. Te doors closed. The room started to move. He felt it, vibration and uncanny pressure against the soles of his feet. He dropped to his hands and knees, choking off a yell. The pressure was gone, but still the room quivered with motion, and still there was the frightening, unfamiliar sound of machinery. Matt waited, crouching on all fours. There was a sudden, foreign feeling in his belly and gonads, a feel of falling. Matt said, "Wumpl" and clutched at himself. The box jarred to a stop. The doors opened. He came out. He was on a high, narrow bridge. The moving box was at one end, supported in four vertical girders which dropped straight down into a square hole in the roof of the Hospital. At the other end of the bridge was a similar set of girders, empty. M att had never been this high outside a car. All of the Hospital was below him, lit by glare lights: the sprawling amorphous structure of rooms and corridors, the inner grounds, the slanting wall, the defense perimeter, the trapped forest and the access road. And rising up before him was the vast black hull of the Planck. Matt's end of the bridge was just outside what was obviously the outer hull of the ancient slowboat. The bridge crossed the chisel-sharp ring of the leading edge, so that its other end was over the Attic. The Planck. Matt looked down along the smooth black metal flank of the outer hull. For most of its length the ship was cylindrical; but the tail, the trailing edge, flared outward for a little distance, and the leading edge was beveled like a chisel, curving In at a thirty degree angle to close the twenty-foot gap between outer and inner hulls, the gap that held the guts of the ship. More than halfway down, just below a ring of narrow dndows, the roof of the Hospital moved in to grip the hull. Something hummed behind him. The moving box was on its way down. Matt watched it go, and then he started across the bridge, sliding his hands along the hip-high handrails. The dropping of the box might mean that someone would be coming up. At the other end he looked for a black button in one of the four supporting girders. It was there, and he pushed it. Then he looked down. The Attic, the space enclosed by the inner hull, was as perfectly cylindrical as a soup can with both ends removed. Four airfoils formed a cross at the stem, a few yards above the ground, and where they crossed was a bulky, pointed casing. There was a ring of four windows halfway down the inner hull. The airlock was at the same level. Matt could see it by looking between the hull and the moving box, which was rising toward him. Matt felt a chill as he looked down at that pointed casing between the fins. The ship's center of mass was directly over it. Therefore it had to be the fusion drive. The Planck was rumored to be a dangerous place, and not without reason. A ship that had carried men between the stars, a ship three hundred years old, was bound to inspire awe. But there was real power here. The Plancks landing motors should still be strong enough to hurl her into the sky. Her fusion drive supplied electrical power to all the colonist regions: to teedee stations, homes, smokeless factories... and if that fusion plant ever blew, it would blow Alpha Plateau into the void. Somewhere in the lifesystem, sandwiched between inner and outer hull, were the controls that could blow the bomb in that casing. The Head was in there too... somewhere. If Matt could bring them together... The moving box reached the top, and Matt entered. It dropped a long way. The Planck was tall. Even the beveled ring of the leading edge, which had held stored equipment for the founding of a colony, was forty feet high. The ship was one hundred and eighty feet high, including a landing skirt; for the inner hull did not quite reach the ground. The stem, and the mouths of the landing motors, were supported ten feet above the ground by that flaring, skirtlike extension of the outer hull. This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he'd have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock. T he airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-andcontrol panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and unnerving to wonder what all those dials were trying to tell him. Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar... ah. A ladder. A ladder, running uselessly from door to wall across the ceiling of the airlock. Sure. With the ship spinning in space, the outer door would be a trap door down from the Attic. Of course you'd need a ladder. Matt grinned IP and strode through the airlpck and nearly ran face on into a policeman. # luck of Matt Keller' had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heaid a patter of mercy-bullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the comer, firing. Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. "StopI It's mer The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn't fire yet... and he didn't fire yet .  . and presently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered who he'd been taken for. It wouldn't matter, the man had already forgotten him. Matt chose to follow him, instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men approach, and ignored one, and recognized the other... he wouldn't shoot, no matter how trigger-happy he was. The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights, and the wall on the rit was black, with a roughened, rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors, leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colonybuilt and all were riveted into place. It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity. Matt heard sounds and voices om some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn't see what was happening above him, and he didn't try. He was listening for Castro's voice. If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controk... where ever they were ... then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under the threat of physical pain. But how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau? And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner... That was Castro's voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it, and tried the handle. Locked. Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him. No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn't stay here forever. If only Laney were here now... xxin voice. Polly jerked to attention... except that she felt no jerk. She did not know if she had moved or not. A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory, and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she'd wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn't I ?? concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharpedged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly: his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy mustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred; she had reached to bring him back; he had blurred more... A voice. It had her complete attention. "Polly," it said, "you must trust me." She wanted to answer, to express her gratitude, to tell the voice to keep talking, to beg it to let her out. She was voiceless. "I would like to free you, to bring you back to the world of sense and touch and smell," said the voice. Gently, sympathetically, regretfully, it added, "I cannot do that just yet. There are people making me keep you here." A voice had become the voice, familiar, wholly reassuring. Suddenly she placed it. "Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood. They won't let me free you." Castro's voice! She wanted to scream. "... Because you failed in your mission. You were to find out about ramrobot number one forty-three. You failed. Liar! Liar! I didn't fail! She wanted to scream out the truth, all of the truth. At the same time she knew that that was Castro's aim. But she hadn't talked in so long! "Are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps I can persuade Harry and Jayhawk to let me free your mouth. Would you like that?" Vd love that, Polly thought. Vd tell all the secrets of your ancestry. Something within her was still rational. The sleep, that was what had done it. How long had she been here? Not years; not even days; she would have been thirsty. Unless they'd given her water intravenously... But however long it had been, she'd slept for some part of the time. Castro didn't know about the mercy-bullets. He'd come hours early. Where was the voice? All was silent. Faintly she could hear her pulse beating in her carotid arteries; but as she grasped for the sound, it too was gone. Where was Castro? Leaving her to rot? Speak! Speak to me! T he Planck was big, but its lifesystem occupied less than a third of its volume: three rings of pressurized compartments between the cargo holds above and the water fuel tanks and fission-driven landing motors below. Much cargo had been needed to set up a self-sufficient colony. Much fuel had been needed to land the Planck. Trying to land on the controlled hydrogen bomb of the fusion drive would have been like landing a blowtorch on a featherbed. IF So the lifesystem was not large. But neither was it cramped, since the compartments aft of the corridor had been designed for the comfort of just three growing families. That which was now Jesus Castro's interrogation room had once been a living room, with sofas, a card table, a coffee table, a reader screen connected to the ship's library, a small refrigerator. The tables and other things were gone now, cut from the outer wall with torches, long ago. It had been a big room, luxuriously so for a spacecraft, where room is always at a premium. It had had to be big. Any normal apartment dweller can step outside for a breath of air. Now, upended, the room was merely tall. Halfway up the walls were the doors which had led to other parts of the apartment. The door to th# corridor had become a trap door, and the door just under it, a closet to hold spacesuits in case of emergency, could now be reached only from the ladder. In the crescent of floor space at the bottom of the room were a long, heavy box, two guards in chairs, a third empty chair, and Jesus Pietro Castro, closing the padded lip of the speaking tube at one corner of the box. "Give her ten minutes to think it over," he said. He glanced at his watch, noted the time. His handphone buzzed. "I'm in the vivarium," Major Jansen reported. "The girl's a colonist, all right, in stolen clothing. We don't know where she got it yet. I doubt we'U like the answer. We had to pump antidotes into her; she was dying -- overdose of mercy-weapons." "No sign that anyone came with her?" "I didn't say that, sir. There are two things. One, the wires were pulled on the chair she was sitting in. Her helmet was stone dead. She couldn't have done that herself. Maybe that's why one of the prisoners woke up this afternoon." "And then he freed the others? I don't believe it. We would have noticed the pulled wires afterward." "I agree, sir. So somebody pulled the wires after she was in the chair." "Maybe. What's your second point?" "When the gas went off in the vivarium, one of the four police wasn't wearing his nose plug. We haven't been able to find it anywhere. His locker's empty, and when I called his wife she said he took it with him. He's awake now, but he has no idea -- " "Is it worth bothering with? The guards aren't used to gas filters. Or gas." "There was a mark on the man's forehead, sir. Like the one we found this afternoon, only this one is in ballpoint ink." "Oh." "Which means that there must be a traitor in Implementation itself, sir." C#TX#hat makes you think so, VV Major?" "The bleeding-heart symbol does not represent any known revolutionary organization. Further, only a guard could have made that mark. Nobody else has entered the vivarium tonight." Jesus Pietro swallowed his impatience. "You may be right, Major. Tomorrow we'll devise ways to smoke them out." Major Jansen made several suggestions. Jesus Pietro listened, made appropriate comments, and cut him off as soon as he could. A traitor in Implementation? Jesus Pietro hated to think so. It was possible, and not a thing to be ignored; but the knowledge that the Head suspected such a thing could damage Implementation morale more than any possible traitor. In any case, Jesus Pietro was not interested. No traitorous guard could have moved invisibly in Jesus Pietro's office. The bleeding heart was something else entirely. Jesus Pietro called the power room. "You aren't doing anything right now, are you? Good. Would one of you bring us some coffee?" Three minutes more, and he could resume interrogation. Jesus Pietro paced. He walked off balance, with one arm bound immobile against his body: one more annoyance. The numbness was wearing off in his mangled hand. Yes, the bleeding heart was something else again. A gruesome symbol on a vivarium, floor. Fingers that broke without their owner noticing. An ink drawing appearing from nowhere on a dossier cover, like a signature. A signature. Intuition was tricky. Intuition had told Jesus Pietro that something would happen tonight. And something had; but what? Intuition, or something like it, had brought him here. Surely he'd had no logical reason to keep thinking about Polly Tournquist. Did she really know something? Or did his subconscious mind have other motives for bringing him here? Jesus Pietro paced, following the arc of the inner wall. Presently someone knocked on the door overhead. The guards loosened their guns and looked up. Fumbling sounds, and then the door dropped open and a man backed slowly down the ladder. He balanced a tray in one hand. He did not try to close the door after him. The slowboat had never been a convenient place to work. Ladders everywhere. The man with the tray had to back a long way down, the full length of what had been a large, comfortable living room, before he touched bottom... ' Matt poked his head through the doorway, upside down. There was the lab man, backing down the ladder with his coffee tray balanced on one hand. On the floor were three more men, and one was Castro. As Matt's head appeared in the doorway each pair of eyes glanced up, held Matt's stare for a moment, then dropped. Matt started down, looking over his shoulder, trying to hold eight eyes at once. #CTammit, Hood, help me up." JL "Parlette, you can't possibly expect -- "Help me over to the phone." "We'd be committing suicide," said Harry Kane. "What would your army IP of relatives do when they learned we were holding you prisoner in your own house?" "I'm here of my own free will. You know that." "But will they know that?" "My family will stand behind me." Parlette set the palms of his hands on the chair arms and, with tremendous effort, stood up. But, once up, he was unable to move. "They won't know what's going on," said Harry Kane. "All they'll know for certain is that you're alone in the house with three escaped vivarium prisoners." "Kane, they wouldn't understand what's happening if I talked for two hours. But they'll stand behind me" Harry Kane opened his mouth, closed it again, and began to tremble. He had to fold his hands on the table to keep them from shaking. "Call them," he said. "No," said Jay Hood. "Help him. Jay." "No! If he uses that phone to turn us in, he'll go down as the greatest con man in history. And we'll be finished!" "Oh, phut." Lydia Hancock stood up and wrapped one of Parlette's arms around her neck. "Be sensible. Jay. Parlette is the best chance we ever had. We've got to trust him." And she walked him over to the phone. A lmost time to resume the interrogation. Jesus Pietro waited while the lab man deposited his tray on the "coffin" and started back up. And he realized that his pulse was racing. There was cold perspiration dribbling wetly down his ribs. His hand throbbed like a heart. His eyes flickered here, there, all about the room, looking for something that wasn't there. Within seconds, and for no reason at all, the interrogation room had become a trap. There was a thump, and every muscle in his body jumped. Nothing there, nothing his eyes could find. But he, the nerveless, elephantine Castro, was jumping at shadows. The room was a trap, a trap. "Back in a moment," said Jesus Pietro. He strode to the ladder, looking every inch the Man in Charge, and went up. A guard, "But, sir! What about the prisoner?" "I'll be right back," said the Head, without slowing. He pulled himself through the doorway, reached down and closed the door. And there he stuck. He'd had no planned destination. Something had screamed at him to get out, some intuition so powerful that he had followed it without question. Right in the middle of an interrogation. What was he afraid of? Was he about to learn some impleasant truth from Polly Tournquist? Or was it guilt? Surely he no longer lusted after the colonist girl. Surely he could control it if he did... No Implementation man had ever seen him thus: shoulders slumped, face set in wrinkles of fatigue, standing in a hallway because he had no place to go. In any case, he had to go back. Polly Tournquist was waiting for the sound of his voice. She might or might not know things he needed to know. He pulled himself together, visibly, and turned to face the door, his eyes, sliding automatically around the bright frosted pane in the wall. Men who worked in the slowboats developed such habits. As ceiling lights the panes would have been just bright enough. As wall lights they hurt the eyes. Castro's eyes slid around the pane, caught something, and came back. There was a blue scrawl on the frosted pane. M att was almost down the ladder when the man in the lab coat started up. Matt addressed a subvocal comment to the Mist Demons, who made no obvious response. Then, because the lab man was about to bump into him, he swung around to the underside of the ladder and dropped. He landed with a thump. Every head in the room jerked around. Matt backed into a corner, stepping softly. He'd known it from the beginning: he couldn't count on this power of his. At some point he would have enough of being afraid; the glandular caps over his kidneys would stop producing adrenalin... The guards turned their eyes back to the ceiling. The lab man disappeared through the doorway and closed the door after him. Only Castro himself continued to behave peculiarly; his eyes kept darting around the room as if searching for something that wasn't there. Matt began to breathe more easily. The man with the coffee had appeared at just the right time. Matt had been about to leave, to see if he could find a fusion control room before he got back to Castro. He had, in fact, discovered that the frosted glass in the hall light would take ink, and he was marking it to show which door led to Castro, when someone had rounded the corner, carrying coffee. Castro was still behaving oddly. During the interview in Castro's office, Matt had never ceased to be afraid of him. Yet now he seemed only a nervous man with a bandaged arm. Dangerous thinking, thought Matt. Be scared! Suddenly Castro started up the ladder. Matt nibbled his lower lip. Some cosmic chase this was becoming! Where was the Head going now? And how could Matt hold six eyes, two above and four below, while climbing a ladder? He started for the ladder anyway. "But sir! What about the prisoner?" "I'll be right back." Matt backed into the corner again. Prisoner? Coffin. The word was nearly obsolete on Mount Lookitthat, where crew and colonist alike used their dead. But that box against the wall was easily big enough to hold a prisoner. He'd have to look inside. But first, the guards. # Tt's the Head calling. Major." A "Thank you. Miss Lauessen." IP "Jansen, is that you, speak up." "Yes, sir." "I've found another bleeding heart." "M the Planckr "Yes. Right above the coffin room, on a light. Now here's what I want done. I want you to close the Planck's airlocks, flood the ship with gas, then come in with a squad. Anyone you can't identify immediately, play a sonic over him to keep him quiet. Got it?" "Yes sir. Suppose the traitor is someone we know?" "Use your own judgment there. I have good reason to assume he's not a policeman, though he may be in uniform. How long will you need?" "About twenty minutes. I could use cars instead of elevators, but it would take just as long." "Good. Use the cars. Seal off the elevators first. I want as much surprise effect as possible." "Yes sir." T he guards were no trouble at all. Matt stepped up behind one of the men, pulled the gun from his holster and shot them both. He kept the gun in his hand. It felt good. He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to drive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand. The "coffin" was bigger than it had seemed from the doorway. He found clamps, big and easy to operate. The lid was heavy. Foam plastic covered the inside, with a sounddeadening surface of small interlocking conical indentations.  Inside was something packed very carefully in soft, thick white cloth. Its shape was only vaguely human, and its head was not human at all. Matt felt the back hairs stir on his neck. Coffin, And the thing inside didn't move. If he had found Polly, then Polly was dead. He began unwrapping it anyay, starting with what passed for the figure's head. He found ear cups, and underneath, human ears. They were blood-warm to the touch. Matt began to hope. He unwrapped cloth from a pair of brown eyes. They looked up at him, and then they blinked.  Hoping was over. He had found Polly, and she was alive. i S he was more cocoon than girl. Toward the eni she was helping to get the wrappings and paddings and sensory wires off her legs. She wasn't much help. Her fingers wouldn't work. Muscles jerked rhythmically in her jaw, her arms, her legs. When she tried to step out of the coffin Matt had to catch the full weight of her falling body, and they went down in a heap. "Thanks," she said unsteadily. "Thanks for getting me out of there." "That's why I'm here." "I remember you." She got up, clinging to his arm for support. She had not yet smiled. When Matt uncovered her mouth and removed the clamps and padding, she had looked like a child expecting to be slapped. She still did, "You're Matt something. Aren't you?" "Matt Keller. Cap you stand by yourself now?" "Where are we?" She did not let go of his arm. "In the middle of the Hospital. But we have a fair chance to get out, if you do just as I say." "How did you get in?" "Jay Hood tells me I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on. Hey, are you all right?" "Since you ask, no." She smiled for the first time, a ghost grin, a rictus that vanished in a split second. She was better off without it. "You don't look it. Come here, sit down." She was clinging to his upper arm with both hands, as if afraid to fall. He led her to one of the chairs. She's still in shock, he thought. "Better yet, lie down. On the floor. Easy, Now put your feet up on the chair. What the Mist Demons were they doing to you?" "It's a long story." Her brows puckered, leaving a sudden deep V between her eyes. "I can tell it fast, though. They were doing nothing to me. Nothing and nothing and nothing." She lay on her back with her feet in the air, the way Matt had placed her, and her eyes looked up past the ceiling, looked up at NothingMatt wanted to look away. Polly was no longer pretty. Her hair was a housecleaners' nest,. and her makeup had gone every which way; but that wasn't it. Something had gone out of her, and something else had replaced it. Her pale face mirrored the ultimate horror of what she saw, looking up at Nothing. Presently she said, "How did you get here. Matt?" "Came to rescue you." "You're not a Son of Earth." "No." "You could be a ringer. Harry's house was raided the night you came." "That's highly ungrateful for a maiden in distress." "I'm sorry." But her eyes were watchful and suspicious. She took her feet off the chair and rolled to sitting position on the floor. She was wearing an unfamiliar garment, like a playsuit, but made of soft, flimsy fabric. Her fingers had found a corner of the cloth and were playing with it, kneading it, pulling at it, rolling it, crumpling it. "I can't trust anything. I'm not even sure I'm not dreaming. Maybe I'm still in the box." "Easy," he said, and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "You'll get over -- " S he snatched at his hand to hold it there, so quickly that he almost jerked away. Every move she made was exaggerated. "You don't know what it was like being dead!" She was squeezing his hand, feeling the fingers and the nails and the knuckles, as if she'd never touched a human hand before. "I kept trying to remember things, and they were always just put IP of reach. It was -- " She stuck, her larynx bobbing and her lips twitching without sound. Then she jumped at him. She knocked him flat on his back and wrapped herself around him. It was nothing affectionate. She clung to him as if she were drowning and he a floating log. "Hey," said Matt. "The gun. You knocked the gun away." She didn't hear. Matt looked up at the door. It didn't move, and there were no ominous noises. "It's all right," he said. "It's okay now. You're out." She had her face buried in the hollow of his shoulder, and she was moving against him. Her arms were tight around his chest with a grip of desperation. "You're out now." He massaged her neck and shoulder muscles, trying to do what Laney had done night before last. The way she kept touching things, kneading them -- he understood now. She was making sure they were real. The time in the "coffin" must have been worse than he could imagine. She must have lost all touch with reality, all her faith in the solidness of things outside that artificial womb. And so she ran her hands along his back, traced the lines of his shoulderblades and vertabrae with her fingertips; and so she moved against him with a sliding motion, with her toes, her thighs, her arms, her body, as if sensing, sensing with every square inch of skin... He felt himself coming alive in response. Trap doors and curved metal walls, guns and Implementation police, ceased to matter at all. There was only Polly. "Help me," she said, her voice muffled. Matt rolled over onto her. The soft, flimsy-looking fabric of her jumper tore like tissue. Fleetingly Matt wondered why it was there at all. And that didn't matter either. Presently Polly said, "Well, I'm real after all." And Matt, drifting peacefully down from some far peak of Nirvana, asked, "Was that what you meant by help?" "I didn't know what I meant. I needed help, She smiled slowly, with her eyes as well as her mouth. "Suppose it wasn't what I meant. Then what?" "Then I've callously seduced you." He moved his head back a little to look her in the face. The change was incredible. "I was afraid you'd gone off the beam for good." "So was I." Matt glanced up at the trapdoor, then stretched to reach for the sonic. "You really came to rescue me?" "Yah." He didn't mention Laney, not yet. No point in spoiling this moment. "Thanks." "You're welcome. We've still got to get out of here." "You don't have any questions to ask me?" What was she doing, testing him? Didn't she trust him now? Well, why should she? "No," he said, "no questions. But there are things I've got to tell you -- " She stiffened. "Matt. Where are we? "In the Hospital. Deep in the Hospital. But we can get out." S he rolled away and came to her feet in one smooth motion. "We're in one of the slowboats! Which one?" "The Planck, Does it matter?" She scooped the other guard's sonic stunner from his holster in what looked like a racing dive. "We can set off the fusion plant! Blow the Hospital and the crew into the void mist! Come on, Matt, let's get moving. Are there guar in the corridor? How many?" "Set off -- Are you out of your mind?" "We'd wipe out the Hospital and most of Alpha Plateau." She picked up her ripped mock-playsuit and threw it down again. "I'll have to pants one of these police. And that'll be it! We'll win, Matt! All in one stroke!" "What win? We'll be deadr She stood up with her hands on her hips and regarded him with disgust. Now she wore a pair of Implementation uniform pants, too big for her. Matt had never seen anyone more thoroughly alive. "I'd forgotten. You aren't a Son of Earth. All right. Matt, see how far you can get. You may be able to get out of range of the blast. Personally, I doubt it." "I've got a personal interest in you. I didn't come all this way to have you commit suicide. You're coming with me." Polly donned a guard's shirt, then hurriedly rolled up the pants, which were much too long. "You've done your duty. I'm not ungrateful. Matt, but we just aren't going in the same direction. Our motives aren't the same." She kissed him hard, pushed him back and whispered, "I can't pass up this chance." She started for the ladder. Matt blocked her way. "You haven't a prayer of getting anywhere without me. You're coming with me, and we're leaving the Hospital, if we get that far." Polly hit him. She struck him with stiffened fingertips just under the sternum, where the ribs make an inverted V. He doubled up, trying to curt around the pain, not yet trying to breath, but gaping like a fish. He felt fingers at his throat, and realized that she'd seen the gas filter and was taking it. He saw her as a blur at the corner of his eye, climbing the ladder. He heard the door open and, a moment later close. Slow fire was spreading through his lungs. He tried to draw air, and it hurt. He'd never learned to fight. "The luck of Matt Keller" had made it unnecessary. Once he'd struck a guard on the point of the jaw. Where else would you hit somebody? And who'd guess that a lightly built girl could hit so hard? Inch by inch he uncurled, straightened up. He drew his breath in shallow, painful sips. When the pain over his heart would let him move again, he started up the ladder. P olly moved at a gliding run. The gas filter was in place over her nose. She held the sonic straight out ahead of her, pointed around the curve of the inner hull. If an enemy appeared, that was where he would IF be, right in the gunsight Nobody would come at her from behind. She was moving too fast As one of the inner core of the Sons of Earth, Polly knew the Planck as well as she knew her own home. The flight control room was a diameter's distance from the airlock. She ticked off the doors as she passed under them. Hydroponics... Library... Flight control. The door was closed. No ladder. Polly crouched and sprang. She caught the handle at the top of her leap. The door was not locked; it was 'dosed, because nobody ever used the flight control room. Unfortunately the door opened inward, upward. She dropped back, frustrated, landing silently on her toes. If she'd chosen the fusion room... but the fusion room was for fine control. There, the Hospital electricians kept power running to the colonist regions. She'd have run into people, and they might have stopped her. The guard had carried a wallet. She leapt again, caught the knob and turned it, pushed the wallet between the door and the jamb, where the catch of the lock ought to be. Again she dropped, and again she leapt. This time she slapped the flat of her hand hard against the door. It flipped upward... and over. Far down the curve of the corridor, someone yelled, "What's going on down there?" Polly's chest heaved, pulling deep lungfulls of air through her nose, under perfect control. She jumped a last time, caught the jamb and pulled herself up. Heavy footsteps     Before someone could come into sigjit she had closed the door. There was a ladder he, built into what had been the ceiling. Doubtless the Planck's original crew had used it to climb down from those six control chairs after the First Landing. Polly used it now. She squirmed into the second seat on the left and found the control panel, and the bypass. Part of the wall had been pri up, and a simple iron bar had been welded into place between two plates, removing control from the flight control room and giving it directly to the fusion room. In flight both control points had been necessary: the fusion room to keep the drive working and stable, and the flight control room to keep it pointed. Now the fusion drive was used only for making electricity, and Polly's control panel was dead. She went down the ladder, fast. There was a tool closet by the door If it held a welding arc -- It did. And if there was no anesthetic gas around -- or if it wasn't inflammable -- Nothing exploded as she turned on the welder. She began welding the door shut. Almost immediately she attracted attention. She could hear excited voices, muffled by the door. Then there was a faint numbness of a sonic beamer. The door didn't conduct subsonics well: but she couldn't take it for long. Nonetheless she finished the welding job before she went back up the ladder. She used the welding arc to cut away the bypass. It was slow work. Implementation would surely have barged in on her before she finished. Now, they could whistle for entrance. She had all the time in the world. In their world. M att reached the corridor and began to walk, leaving the interrogation room open behind him. He walked bent, with his chest half collapsed and Ws arms folded over the pain. He'd forgotten to take the remaining sonic. "I'm not the domineering type," he muttered, perversely enjoying the sound of his own voice. And, "Either that, or I'm trying to dominate the wrong women." A heavy figure came poimding around the curve. Jesus Pietro Castro, wearing a gas filter and carrying a heavy mercury-sliver gun, looked up in time to avoid a collision. He jerked to a stop, and then his mouth dropped open as he took in blue eyes, blond hair, a bitter and angry colonist's face, an ear with a small piece bitten out of it and blood soaked into the collar of a ere wish over jacket. "You agree?" Matt said brightly. Castro raised the gun. The "luck" was off. And all the rage and humiliation in Matt broke loose. "All right," he yelled, "look at me! Damn you, look at me I I'm Matthew Keller!" The Head stared. He did not fire. He stared. "I crashed my way into your crummy Hospital, single-handed, twice! I came through walls and void mist and sleepy gas and mercy bullets to rescue that damn woman, and when I got her loose she punched me in the gut and folded me up like a flower! So go ahead and look!" Castro looked and looked. And finally Matt realized that he should have fired. Castro swiveled his head from side to side, in a negative motion. But his eyes never left Matt. And slowly, slowly, as if he were knee deep in hardening cement, he moved one slow step forward. Abruptly Matt realized what was happening. "Don't look away," he said hastily. "Look at me." The Head was close enough now, and Matt reached out and pushed the barrel of the mercy-gun aside, still striving to hold Castro's eyes. "Keep looking." They stared eye to eye. Above his bulky false nose, Castro's eyes were remarkable: all white and black, all whites and huge expanded pupils, with practically no iris showing. His jaw hung loose under the snowy handle-bar moustache. He was melting. The perspiration ran in slow streams into Ws collar. Like a man in an ecstasy of fear, or awe, or worship... he stared. Contract the pupils of eyes not your own, and you got psychic invisibility. Expand them, and you got... what? Fascination? For damn sure, he had the Head's complete attention. Matt drew back his fist, cocked it -- and couldn't follow through. It would have been like attacking a cripple. Castro was a cripple; one of his arms was in a sling. There was shouting from down the corridor, from the direction Polly had taken. IP The Head moved another gluey step forward. Too many enemies, before and behind. Matt slapped the gun out of Castro's hand, then turned and ran. As he dropped through the door to the coffin room, he saw the Head still looking after him, still held in the strange spell. Then he pushed the door closed above him. P olly cut the last of the bar away, and the control board came alight. She ran her eyes quickly over the lighted dials, then once more, slowly. According to the control board, the fusion drive was as cold as Pluto's caves. Polly whistled between her teeth. It was no malfunction of the board. The several dials checked each other too well. Someone had decided to black out the colony regions. She couldn't start the drive from here. And she'd never reach the fusion room; she'd locked herself in with a vengeance. If only this had been the Arthur Clarke! Castro would never dare cut power to the crew. The Clarkes fusion plant must be going full blast. Well now, she thought in growing excitement. She slid out onto the ladder. There might #)e a way to reach the Clarke... J esus Pietro felt a hand shaking his shoulder. He turned and found Major Jansen. "What is it?" "We've flooded the Planck with gas, sir. Everyone who wasn't warned should be unconscious, unless he's behind doors. I wish there weren't so many filters floating around. though. Whoever we're after has had too good a chance to pick one up." "Good," said Jesus Pietro. He couldn't concentrate. He wanted to be alone, to think... no, he didn't want to be alone... "Carry on," he said. "Try the coffin room. He may be in there." "He isn't. Or if he is, there's more than one traitor. Somebody's in the Flight Control Room, welded in. It's a good thing the fusion plant is off." "Get him out. But try the coffin room, too." Major Jansen moved off in the direction of all the commotion. Jesus Pietro wondered what he'd find, when he finally looked in the coffin room. Had Keller's ghost really gone in there, or had he faded out while running up the corridor? Jesus Pietro wasn't sure. But he was sure of the ghost. He would never in his life forget those eyes. Those binding, blinding, paralyzing eyes. They would haunt him the rest of his life... however many minutes that might be. For surely the ghost didn't intend to let him go now. His handphone rang. Jesus Pietro picked it off his belt and said, "The Head." "Sir, we're getting some very strange reports, said the voice of Miss Lauessen. "A large number of cars are converging on the Hospital. Someone claiming to represent the Council is accusing you of treason." "Me? Of treason?" "Yes, sir." Miss Lauessen sounded strange. And she kept calling him Sir. "What grounds?" "Shall I find out, sir?" "Yes. And order them to land outside the defense perimeter. If they don't set patrol cars on them. It's obviously the Sons of Earth." He clicked off and immediately thought, But where did they all come from? And where did they get the cars? And he thought, Keller? His hand phone buzzed. Miss Lauessen's voice had turned plaintive -- almost querulous. "Sir, the fleet of cars is led by Millard Parlette. He accuses you of malfeasance and treason, and he orders you to give yourself up for trial." "He's gone insane." Jesus Pietro tried to think. It was all coming at once. Was this why Keller had appeared to him, shown himself at last? No mysterious symbols, this time; no invisible breaking of fingers. Keller's eyes... "Try to land the old man without hurting him. The other cars too. Order them to set their cars on autopilot. Tell them they won't be hurt. Give them one minute, then knock them out with sonics." "I hesitate to remind you, sir, but Millard Parlette is your superior officer. Will you give yourself up?" Then Jesus Pietro remembered that Miss Lauessen was almost pure crew. Did her veins carry Parlette blood? It was reputedly easy to come by. He said the only thing he could. "No." The phone cut off, cut him off from the Hospital switchboard. H e'd gone off half cocked, and he knew it. Somehow Polly's blow in the belly had made him want to die. He'd stumbled out into the corridor to be captured. Not this time. He scooped up the remaining sonic and started for the ladder. This time he'd know just what he was doing when he went through that door. But why go through it at all? The thought stopped him at the foot of the ladder. If Polly was going to blow the drive -- No, she'd never get that far. And she'd had all the rescuing she was entitled to. It was time to think about escape. He looked up at the exit -- and shivered. Some escape hatch. The moment he poked his head out there, somebody would shoot at it. He had to see his enemy to use the "luck," and he couldn't see in all directions at once. Yet this room was no place to stand off a siege. All anyone would have to do would be to fire mercyneedles down toward the floor. If he looked before he fired, the "luck" would get him; but that statement applied to an ordinary sonic stunner. And so he wouldn't look. He had to get out. But -- Castro's nosepiece. It meant Implementation was using gas. The corridor must be already full of it. Too many things to think about! Matt cursed and began going through a guard's pockets. The guard stirred and tried to strangle Matt with limp fingers. Matt played the sonic over both guards, then finished his search. Neither guard had a gas filter. Matt looked up at the door. He could chance it, of course... but if there was gas in the corridor, only that airtight door was protecting him now. It had to be airtight, of course. IF Get to another room? There were the doors leading to what must be bedrooms. But they were halfway up the halls and too far from the laer. And there, just under the exit, was a small door placed where any good apartment would have a coat closet. He might be able to reach it. I t wasn't a coat closet, of course. It held two spacesuits. And it wasn't easy to reach. Matt had to lean far out from the ladder to turn the knob, let the door fall open, and then jump for the opening. Leaving the cubbyhole would be just as bad, when the time came. Spacesuits. They had hung on hooks; now they sprawled on the floor like empty men. Thick rubbery fabric, with a heavy metal neck ring set with clamps to hold the separate helmet. Metal struts in the fabric braced the rocket backpack and the control unit under the chin. Would the air converter still work? Ridiculous, after three hundred years. But there might still be air in the tank. Matt found a knob in the control panel of one suit, twisted it and got a hiss. So there was still stored air. The suit would protect him against gas. And the big fishbowl of a helmet would not interfere with his vision, nor his "luck." He snatched up the gun when the door to the corridor dropped open. A long moment later, two legs came into sight on the ladder. Matt played the sonic over them. A man grunted in surprise and toppled into view. A voice of infinite authority spoke. "You! Come out of there!" Matt grinned to himself. Quietly he put the gun aside and reached for the suit. A wave of dizziness made the world go dreamy. He'd been right about the gas. He turned the air knob on full and put his head through the neck ring. He took several deep breaths, then held his breath while he slid feet first into the suit. "You haven't got a chance! Come on out or we'll come in after you!" Do that. Matt pulled the helmet over his head and resumed breathing. The dizziness was passing, but he had to move carefully. Especially since the suit was a size too small for him. The door dropped open suddenly, and there was a spattering of mercyslivers. A snarling face and a hand came into view, the hand firing a mercy-gun. Matt shot at the face. The man slumped, head down, but he didn't fall; someone pulled him up out of sight by his ankles. The air in the suit had a metallic smell thick enough to cut. Matt wrinkled his hose. Anyone else would have been satisfied with one escape from the Hospital. Who but Lucky Matt Keller would have -- There was a roar like a distant, continuous explosion. What, Matt wondered, are they trying now? The ship shook and shook again. Matt found himself bouncing about like a toy in a box. Somehow he managed to brace his feet and shoulders against walls.  thought the son of a bitch was bluffing! He snatched at the stunner as it threatened to slide out into space. The ship jumped, slapping hard against his cheekbone, as one whole wall of the ship ripped away. The roar was suddenly louder, much louder. itXTe're too close," said Parlette. VV Hood, in the driver's seat, said, "We have to be close enough to give orders." "Nonsense. You're afraid someone will call you a coward. Hang back, I tell you. Let my men do the fighting. They know what they're doing. We've practiced enough." Hood shrugged and eased back on the #-# throttle. Already theirs was the last car in a swarm of more than forty, an armada of floating red taillights against the starry night. Each car carried two of Parlette's line, a driver and a gunman. Parlette, hovering like a vulture over the car's phone, suddenly crowed, "I've got Deirire LaussenI All of you be quiet. Listen, Deidre, this is an emergency..." And the others, Harry Kane and Lydia Hancock and Jay Hood, listened while Parlette talked. It took him several minutes, but at last he leaned back, smiling with carnivorous white teeth. "I've done it. She'll put our accusation on the intercom. Now we'll have Implementation fighting each other." "You'll have a tough time justifying that accusation," Harry Kane warned him. "Not at all. By the time I finished I could convince Castro himself that he was guilty of treason, malfeasance of duty and augmented incest. Provided -- " He paused for effect. "Provided we can take the Hospital. If I control the Hospital, they'll believe me. Because I'll be the only one talking. "The main point is this. In law I am the man in charge of the Hospital, and have been since Castro was the size of Hood. If it weren't me it would be some other crew, of course. In practice, it's Castro's Hospital, and I have to take it away from him. We have to have control before we can begin changing the government of Mount Lookitthat. But once I've got control, I can keep it." "Look ahead." "Police cars. Not many." 'Tight formation. I wonder if that's good? None of us ever had any training in dogfights." "Why didn't you fight each other?" "We expected to fight," said Parlette. "We never expected to fight the Hospital. So we -- " "What the Mist Demons is that over there?" Parlette was leaning far forward in his seat, his mismatched hands bracing him against the dashboard. He didn't answer. Harry shook his shoulder. "What is it? It looks like fire all around one end of the Hospital." Parlette seemed to be paralyzed ivith shock. And then one whole end of the Hospital detached itself from the main structure and moved sedately away. Orange flame bloomed all around its base. "That," said Millard Parlette, "is the Planck taking off on its landing motors." IF P olly was in the upper left hand seat. She manipulated the controls in front of her with extreme delicacy; but still the knobs turned in short jumps. Minute flakes of rust must be coming loose, somewhere in the chain of command which led from this control chair to the fission piles. Finally the piles were hot. And Polly tried the water valves. It seemed to her that long ago, someone had decided to keep the slowboats ready for a fast takeoff. It must have been during the first years of the colony, when nobody, crew or colonist, had been sure that an interstellar colony was possible. Then -- others had forgotten, and the only changes made since then had been the necessary ones. Until the slowboats themselves were part of the structures of the Hospital, and the interiors of the lifesystems were a maze of ladders and jury-rigs. Until the organ banks were moved entirely out of the ships, and the suspended animation rooms were closed off for good. Until the ships were nothing more than electrical generating plants -- if one turned a blind eye to the interrogation room, and perhaps to other secrets. And still the tool closets were undisturbed. And still there were spacesuits in the upended rooms, behind doors which hadn't been opened for centuries. And still there was water in the landing fuel tanks and uranium in the landing motors. Nobody had bothered to remove them. The water had not evaporated, not from tanks made to hold water for thirty years against interstellar vacuum. The uranium -- Polly valved water into the hot motors, and the ship roared. She yipped in triumph. The ship shuddered and shook along her whole length. From beneath the welded door there were muffled screams. There was more than one way to tell a joke! The Planck s fusion drive was dead, but the Arthur Clarke s drive must be running hot. And when Polly dived the Planck on it from the edge of atmosphere, the explosion would tear the top from Alpha Plateau! "Come loose," she whispered. The Planck pulled loose from the rock around it, rose several feet and settled, mushily. The huge ship seemed to be bouncing ponderously on something soft. Polly twisted the water fuel valve to no effect. Water and pile were running at peak. Polly snarled low in her throat. The pile must be nearly dead: it couldn't even manage to lift the ship against Mount Lookitthat's point eight gee. If it weren't for the landing skirt, guiding the blast for a ground effect, they wouldn't be moving at all! Polly reached far across to the seat on her right. A bar moved under her hand, and, at the aft end of the Planck, two fins moved in response. The ship listed to the side and drifted back to nudge the Hospital, almost gently, once, twice. Live flame roared through the Hospital. It was water vapor heated beyond incandescence, to the point where oxygen disassociated itself from hydrogen, and it cut where it IP hit. Like death's hurricane it roared through the corridors, cutting its way through walls where there were no corridors. It killed men before they first touch of the superheated steam made them blind. The drive flame spread its fiery death through a third of the ground floor. To men inside and outside the Hospital, to men who had never met and never would, this was the night everything happened at once. Sane men locked their doors and found something to hide under while they waited for things to stop happening. iij aney. It must be Laney," saidL' Jay Hood. "She got through." "Elaine Mattson?" "Right. And she got to the Planck. Can you imagine?" "She must have a wonderful sense of timing. Do you know what will happen when she blows the drive?" "Oh, my god. What'll we do?" "Keep flying," said Parlette. "We'd never get out of range now. We might just as well bull through with this, and hope Miss Mattson realizes the colonists are winning." "More police cars," said Harry Kane. "Left and right, both..." Polly touched the bar again. The ship tilted to the other side and began to drift ponderously away from the Hospital. She dared tilt the ship no further. How much clearance did she have under the landing skirt? A foot? A yard? Ten? If the skirt touched the ground, the ship would go over on its side. That was no part of Polly's plan. Behind her, the door had turned red hot. Polly glanced back with bared teeth. She moved her hands over the board, but in the end left the settings just the way they were. She'd have to circle all the way around the Hospital; but in the end she'd have a gilding run at the Arthur Clarke. And she'd hit it again and ag until one ship failed. She never noticed when the red spot on the door turned white and burned through. T he ship jumped three feet upward, and Matt's head snapped down against the closet floor. en he looked up, the outer hull side of the room was tearing away, like tissue paper except for the agonized scream of old metal dying. And Matt was looking straight into Castro's office. He couldn't think; he couldn't move. The scene had a quality of nightmare; it was beyond the rational. Magic! he thought; and, Not again! The Hospital was drifting away, dreamlike. His ears had gone dead, so that it all took place in an eerie silence. The ship was taking off... And there was no air in his helmet. The tank had held only one last wheeze. He was suffocating. He pulled the clamps up with fingers gone limp and tingly, tossed the helmet away and gulped air. Then he remembered the gas. But it was clean, hot air, air from outside, howling through the gaping hole in the outer hull. He sucked at it, pulling it to him. The ship was going up and down in a seasick manner. Wavering in the drive, Matt thought and tried to ignore it. But one thing he couldn't ignore. Polly had reached the controls. Apparently she was taking the ship up. No telling how high they were already; the lights of the Hospital had dwindled to the point where everything outside was uniformly black against the lighted room. They were going up, and the room was wide open to naked space, and Matt had no helmet. The room seemed steadier. He jumped for the ladder. The suit was awkward, but he caught the ladder and made his way down, fighting the imbalance caused by his backpack. It wasn't until he touched bottom that the backpack caught his conscious attention. After all, if the Plancks landing motors still worked, why not a spacesuit's backpack? He peered down at a control panel meant to be read by fingertips. With the helmet on he couldn't have done it. The backpack was studded with small rocket motors; he wanted the ones on the bottom, of course. How high was he now? He tried the two buttons on the bottom, and something exploded on his back. It felt about right, as if it were trying to lift him. There was only one throttle knob. Doubtless it controlled all the jets at once, or all that were turned on at a given time. Well, what else did he need to know? How high was he? He took one last deep breath and went out the hole in the wall. He saw blackness around him, and he twisted the throttle hard over. It didn't move. It was already on full. Matt had something like one split second to realize that the backpack was for use in space, that it probably wouldn't have lifted its own weight against gravity. He hit. M oving carefully so as not to interfere with the men using welding torches. Major Jansen peered up into the hole in the flight control room door. They had pushed a platform into position under the door, so that two men could work at once. The platform rose and settled, rose and settled, so that the major had to brace himself with his hands flat on the ceiling. He could see raven hair over the top of a control chair, and one slender brown arm hanging down. Jesus Pietro, standing below, called, "How long?" "A few seconds," said one of the men with cutting torches. "Unless she welded the hinge side too." "Do you know where we're going?" called the Head. "I do." Major Jansen looked down, surprised. The Head sounded so odd! And he looked like an old man in poor health. He seemed unable to concentrate on what was going on. Hes ready for retirement, Major Jansen thought with compassion. If we live through this -- "I do," Jesus Pietro repeated, and nodded to himself. Major Jansen turned away. He had no time to feel sympathy for the Head, not while this was going on. #B IF "She welded the hinge side," said one of the cutters. "How long?" "Three minutes, if we work from both ends." T he ship continued to move, drifting along on its cushion of fire. Fire swept along the edge of the trapped forest, leaving a line of licking red and orange flame, ignored by the embattled aircars above. Presently there were explosions among the trees, and then the whole tongue of forest was aflame. Now the Planck had left the defense perimeter and moved into a place of shops and houses. The crew who lived in those houses were awake, of course. Nobody could have slept through that continuous roar. Some stayed where they were; some made for the street and tried to run for it. The ones who reached their basements were the ones who lived. A block-wide path of exploded, burning houses was the wake of the Planck, But now the houses were empty, and they didn't burn. They were of architectural coral, and they had been deserted, most of them, for upwards of thirty years... "We're through, sir." The words were hardly necessary. The cutters were pushing the door aside, their hands protected by thick gloves. Major Jansen shoved through and went up the ladder with panic at his back. Polly's control board bewildered him. Knowing that he knew as much about flying spacecraft as anyone behind him, he continued to search for the dial or wheel or lever that would change the Planck's direction. Finally, puzzled, he looked up; and that was his undoing The flight control room was long. It projected through the cargo section to where the outer and inner met; and most of it was transparent. Major Jansen looked through the outer hull, and he saw what was happening outside. He saw the glow of the drive flame near the bottom of his view. To the right, a coral house exploding: the last house. Not far ahead, the black line of the void edge, coming closer. And he froze. "We're going over," said Jesus Pietro, standing under him on the ladder. He showed neither surprise nor fear. Major Jansen screamed and buried his face in his arms. Jesus Pietro squeezed past him and into the left-hand seat. His decision was based on logic alone. If Major Jansen had not found the right control, then he was looking at the wrong pai; and this was the only other control panel the colonist girl could reach from where she was sitting. He found the fin controls and tried them. The ship tilted back and began to slow. Still slowing, it drifted over the edge. Jesus Pietro leaned back in his seat and watched. The Planck was no longer supported by the ground effect. Jesus Pietro felt a sensation like an elevator starting down. He watched the cliff go by, faster and faster, a shadow. Presently it was half the sky, and the other half was stars. Prcntly the stars went out. ITie ship began to grow hot. It was hot and dark outside, and the ancient walls of the Planck creaked and groaned as the pressure rose. Jesus Pietro watched, waiting. Waiting for Matthew Keller. H e struggled half awake, desperate to escape the terror of sleep. What a wild nightmare that was! Then he felt fingers probing him. Agonyl He braced and tried to draw away, putting his whole body into it. His whole body barely twitched; but he heard himself whimper. A cool hand touched his forehead, and a voice -- Laney's? -- said, "Lie back. Matt." He remembered it later, the next time he woke. He woke slowly, this time, with the images of his memory forming around him. Again he thought, What a nightmare. But the images came clearer, too clear for a dream, and: His right leg and most of his right side were as numb as frozen pork. Parts of him were not numb; they ached and stung and throbbed. Again he tried to withdraw from the pain, but this time he was tied down. He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded. Harry Kane, Mrs. Hancock, Laney and several others he didn't recognize all crowded around his strange bed. One was a big woman with red hands and somewhat crewish features, wearing a white smock. Matt disliked her at once. He'd seen such smocks in the organ banks. "He's awake." The woman in white spoke with a throaty lilt. Don't IF try to move, Keller. You're all splinted up. These people want to talk to you. If you get tired, tell me right away and I'll get them out of here." "Who are you?" Harry Kane stepped forward. "She's your doctor, Keller. How do you feel?" How did he feel? A moment ago he'd realized, too late, that his backpack wouldn't lift him. But he couldn't remember the mile-long fall. "Am I going to die?" "No, you'll live," said the woman doctor. "You won't even be crippled. The suit must have braced you against the fall. You broke a leg and some ribs, but they'll heal, if you follow orders." "All right," said Matt. Nothing seemed to matter much. Was he doped? He saw that he was on his back, with one leg in the air and something bulky around his ribcage, interfering with his breathing. "Did they put transplants in me?" "Never mind that now, Keller You just rest and get well." "How's Polly?" "We couldn't find her." "She was on the Planck, She must have reached the drive controls." "Oh!" Laney exclaimed. She started to say something, then changed her mind. Harry said, "The Planck went over the edge." "I see." "You got her loose?" "I got her loose once," Matt said. The faces were growing hazy. "She was a fanatic. All of you, fanatics. She had all the rescuing I could give her." The room drifted away, dreamlike, and he knew the Planck was taking off. From a distance a woman's authoritarian crew lilt ordered, "Out, now, all of you." T he doctor escorted them to the door, and Harry Kane put a hand on her elbow and took her with them into the corridor. There be asked, "How long before he's well?" "Let go of me, Mr. Kane." Harry did. "How long?" "Don't worry, he'll be no invalid. In a week we'll put him in a walking cast. In a month, we'll see." "How long before he's back at work?" "Two months, with luck. Why so eager, Mr. Kane?" "Top secret." The woman scowled. "Whatever you're planning for him, you can bear in mind that he's my patient. He won't be ready for anything else until I tell you so."  "All right. I suggest you donT tell him about the transplants. He wouldn't like that." "They're in his records. I can't do anything about that. I won't tell him anything." When she had left them, Laney asked, "Why so eager?" "I have an idea about Matt I'll tell you about it later." "Don't you think we've used him enough?" "No," said Harry Kane. "I'd like to, but no." M illard Parlette was near exhaustion. He'd moved into Jesus Pietro Castro's office on Sunday night, even before the outer wall was replaced, and he'd lived there ever since. His meals were sent in, and he used Casteo's cot when he slept, which was rarely. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was at the end of his life; that he'd waited just long enough to meet this, the crisis he'd foreseen a himdred years ago. The Planck had done terrible damage to the Hospital, but the work of rebuilding was well in progress. Parlette had hired a construction firm himself, paying them out of his personal fortune. Eventually he would push a bill through the Council to reimburse him. Now workmen were painting the outer wall of his office, which on Sunday night had been yawning space. His immediate problem was that at least half of Implementation wanted to quit. The events of last week had had a disastrous effect on Implementation morale. Having the Head accused of treason, and deposed by force, was only part of it. Elaine Mattson and Matthew Keller had done their part, infiltrating the Hospital with bombs and stealth. The vivarium prisoners had been freed to make slaughter in the Hospital corridors. The destruction of the Planck had affected, not just Hospital personnel, but all of Alpha Plateau; for the Planck was half of history. Now Implementation was faced with a dreadful confusion. All raids on the colony plateaus had been canceled. Known rebels moved freely through the Hospital, and none could touch them. Their attitude toward the police was rude and contemptuous. Rumor had it that Millard Parlette was drafting new laws to further restrict police power. It didn't help that the rumors were true, Parlette did what he could. He spoke to every man who wanted to resign. Some he persuaded to stay. As the ranks dwindled he found new ways to use the men he had left. At the same time he was dealing with the Plateau's four power blocs. The Council of the Crew had followed Parlette in the past. With luck and skill and work he would make them follow him again. The crew as a whole would normally follow the Council. But a colonist revolt, in these days of a weakened, disheartened Implementation, might send them into a full panic; and then the Council would mean nothing. The Sons of Earth would follow Harry Kane. But Kane was beyond Parlette's control, and he didn't trust Millard Parlette at all. The non-rebellious majority of colonists would remain non-rebellious if Kane left them alone. But the Sons of Earth, with their privileged knowledge of the ramrobot gifts, could stir Would Harry Kane wait for the Nev Law? Four power blocs, and Implementation too. Being Head meant an endless maze of details, minor complaints, delivery of reprimands, paperwork, petty internal politics... he could get lost in such a maze, and never know it until a screaming colonist army came to storm the Hospital. It was a wonder he ever got around to Matt Keller. IF M att lived on his back, with his right side cased in concrete and his right leg dangling in space. He was given pills which reduced the pains to permanent, aggravating aches. The woman in the organ bank smock examined him from time to time. Matt suspected she saw him as potential organ bank material, of dubious value. On Wednesday he overheard someone calling her Dr. Bennet. He had never thought of asking her name, as she had never thought of giving it. In the early morning hours, when the sleeping pills were wearing off, or during afternoon naps, he was plagued by nightmares. Again his elbow smashed a nose across a man's face, and again there was the awful shock of terror and triumph. Again he asked the way to the vivarium, turned and raised his arm to see the skin beaded with bright blood. Again he stood in the organ banks, unable to run, and he woke drenched in perspiration. Or, with a stolen sonic, he dropped uniformed men until the remembered sonic backlash turned his arm to wood. He woke, and his right arm had gone to sleep under him. He thought of his family with nostalgia. He saw Jeannie and her husband every few months; they lived not twenty miles from Gamma's major mining area. But he hadn't seen his mother and father in years. How good it would be to see them again! Even the memory of mining worms filled him with nostalgia. They were unpredictable, yes, bu compared to Hood or Polly or Laney... at least he could understand mining worms. His curiosity had been as dead as his right leg. On Wednesday evening it returned with a rush. Why was the Hospital treating him? If he had been captured, why hadn't he been taken apart already? How had Laney and Kane been allowed to visit him? He was frantic with impatience. Dr. Bennet didn't appear until noon Thursday. Somewhat to his suiprise, she was not at all reluctant to talk. 'T don't understand it myself," she told Matt. "I do know that all the live rebels have been turned loose, and we aren't getting any more organ bank material. Old Parlette's the Head now, and a lot of his relatives are working here too. Pure crew, working in the Hospital." "It must be strange to you." "It's weird. Old Parlette is the only one who knows what's really going on -- if he does. Does he?" Does he? Matt groped at the question. "What makes you think I know?" "He's given orders that you're to be treated with an excess of tender loving care. He must have some reason, Keller." "I suppose he must." When it was obvious that that was all he had to say, she said, 'Tf you've got any more questions, you can ask your friends. They'll be here Saturday. There's another weird thing; all the colonists wandering through the Hospital, and we've got orders not to touch them. I hear some of them are proven rebels." "Fm one myself." "I thought you might be." "After my leg heals, will I be turned loose?" "I suppose so, from the way you're bdng treated. It's up to Parlette." Her treatment of him had become curiously ambivalent. By turns he was her inferior, confidant and patient. "Why don't you ask your friends on Saturday?" T hat night they hooked up a sleepmaker at the head of his bed. "Why didn't they do that before?" he asked one of the workingmen. "It must be safer than pills." "You're looking at it wrong," the man told him. "Most of the patients here are crew. You don't think a crew would use a vivarium sleepmaker, do you?" "Too proud, huh?" "I told you. They're crew There was a listening bug in the headset. T o Parlette, Matt was part of the paperwork. His was one of the dossiers lying on Jesus Pietro's desk. Its cover was scorched, like the others; but the Head's office, on the second floor, had escaped most of the damage from the Plancks wildfire drive. Parlette went through all those dossiers, and many more. By now he knew that the worst threat to his "New Law" was defection by the Sons of Earth. Only they, with their presumed control over Ae colonists, could make it work; and only they were beyond his control. Matthew Keller's dossier was unusual in its skimpiness. There wasn't even a record of his joining the rebel organization. Yet he must belong. Castro's notes implied that Keller had freed the vivarium prisoners. He had been badly hurt invading the Hospital a second time. He must be partly responsible for the Planck disaster. He seemed to be connected with the mystery of the bleeding-heart symbol. A very active rebel, Matthew Keller. Then there was Harry Kane's disproportionate interest in him. Parlette's first evanescent impulse was to have him die of his injuries. He'd caused too much destruction already. Probably the Plancks library could never be replaced... But getting Harry Kane's trust was far more important. On Thursday Dr. Bennet sent him word that Keller would be receiving visitors. Installing a listening bug was an obvious precaution. Millard Parlette made a note of the coming interview -- at Saturday noon -- then forgot it until then. W hen Hood had finished talking, Matt smiled and said, "I told you they were little hearts and livers." It didn't go over. The four of them looked solemnly back at him, like a jury circling his hospital bed. When they'd first come in, he'd wondered if they were all slated for the organ banks. They'd been so deadly serious, and they moved with coordination, as if they'd rehearsed this. Hood talked for almost half an hour, with occasional interruptions from Harry Kane and no comments at all from Laney and Mrs. Hancock. IF It still seemed rehearsed. You do alt the talking, Jay, someone must have said. Break it to him gently. Then -- But what they'd told him was all good. "You've still got that bad-news look," he said. "Why so solemn? All is roses. We're all going to live forever. No more Implementation raids. No more being hauled off to the organ banks without a trial. We can even build wooden houses if we're crazy enough to want them. The millenium has come at last." Harry Kane spoke. "And what's to keep Parlette from breaking all his rash promises?" Matt still couldn't see why it should involve him. "You think he might?" "Look at it logically, Keller. Parlette has Castro's job now. He's the Head. He runs Implementation." "That's what you wanted, isn't it?" "Yes," said Kane. "I want him to have all the power he can grab, because he's the only man who can put the New Law across -- if he chooses. But let's just back off a little and look at how much power he does have. "He runs Implementation." Kane ticked it off on a finger. "He's trained his own clan to use hunting guns. That gives him most of the weapons on Mount Lookitthat. He can twist the Council around his little finger. Parlette is well on his way to being the world's first emperor I" "But you could stop him. You said yourself that you can raise the colony against him any time you like. Kane waved it off. "We can't do that. Sure, it's a good threat, especially after what we've already done to Implementation. But we don't want a blood bath any more than Parlette does, or says he does. No, we need something else to hold over him." Four solemn faces waited for his; reply. What the Mist Demons was this all about? Matt said, "All right, you thought up the problem, now think up an answer." "We need an invisible assassin." Matt raised himself on one shoulder, peered at Harry Kane around the white pillaf of his traction-bound leg. No, Kane wasn't joking. The effort was exhausting, and he dropped back. Laney put a hand on his arm. "It's the only answer. Matt. And it's perfect. No matter how powerful Millard Parlette becomes politically, he'll never have a defense against you. "It's you or civil war," Kane put in. Matt found his voice. "I don't doubt you're serious," he said wonderingly. "I doubt your sanity. Do I look like an assassin? I've never killed anyone. I never intend to." "You did pretty well last weekend." "What' -- ? I used a stun gun! I hit some people with my fist! Why does that make me a pro killer?" "You realize," said Hood, "that we never intend to use you as such. You're a threat. Matt, nothing more. You'll be one leg in the balance of power between the Sons of Earth and Millard Parlette." "I'm a miner." Matt gestured with his left arm, the one that didn't pull cracked ribs. "A miner. I use trained worms to dig for metal. My boss sells the metal and buys worms and worm food, and with luck he makes enough to pay my salary. Wait a minute. Have you told Parlette about this idea?" iiXTo, of course not. He'll never know about it, unless you agree, and then we'll wait until you're out of the Hospital." "Mist Demons, I should hope so. If Parlette gets the idea I'm dangerous to him -- and me on my back like this -- I want to be on Delta before you tell Parlette. Hell, I want to be on Earth before -- " "Then you agree?" "No, Kane! No, I do not agree to anything! Don't you realize I've got a family? What if Parlette takes hostages?" "Two parents and a sister," Hood amplified. "Parents on Iota." "Don't worry," Laney said soothingly. "We'll protect them. Matt. They'll be safe." Kane nodded. "If anyone so much as harms a hair on your head, or threatens any member of your family. I'll declare total war. I'll have to tell Parlette that, and to make him believe it I'll have to mean it. And I do." Matt thought very seriously about shouting for Dr. Bennet. It wouldn't work. Even if she threw them out, they'd only come back later. And Matt Keller was a man on his back. He could move three inches dure the pain. Four inches, no. A captive audience. "You've really thought it out, haven't you? Why did you wait so long to tell me?" Jay Hood answered. "I wanted to be here. And this is my day off." "You're back teaching school, Jay?" "It seems appropriate to teach history while we're making it." In the dry voice there was a barely concealed jubilation. Hood was in his element. Strange that he'd never suspected the size of Hood's ego. "You got me into this," said Matt. "Sorry. My apologies. Believe me, Matt, I only picked you as a probable recruit." When Matt didn't answer, Hood continued, "But we do need you. Let me show you how much. You were dying. Matt -- " "Stop, Jay." "He has a right to know, Laney. Matt, those ribs you broke tore up your lung and your diaphragm. Harry had to talk Parlette into -- " "Jay, shut up "All right, Laney." He sounded hurt. "Matt, we weren't going to tell you. Really we weren't." Dead man's flesh was a part of him, forever. Living under his ribcage: a strange, partial resurrection. Matt said, "All right, Laney. How do you stand on this?" Laney looked down, then up to meet his eyes. "It's your choice, Matt. But if we don't have you, we don't have anyone." She seemed to stop, then hurried on. "Listen, Matt, you're making a big thing out of this. We're not asking you to rush right out and murder someone. We'd be perfectly happy to see you go back to your mining worms. For all we care, you can stay there the rest of your life, with a small extra income -- " "Thanks." IP " -- for being on standby alert. Maybe Parlette's honest. Maybe he reaUy does want to make the Plateau a paradise. Maybe all is roses. But just in case -- " She leaned forward in the uncomfortable hospital chair, gripping his wrist with one hand, looking deep into his eyes. Her nails cut the skin. "Just in case Parlette is ambitious. Then, we'll need you to stop him. Nobody else will be able to do it." "We must let him have his power now. Somebody has to take power, or there'll be civil war. But if he needs to be stopped, and you don't stop him, you'll be a coward." Matt tried to pull his arm away. Torn muscles reacted; it was as if he'd been kicked in the side with a lead boot. "You're fanaticsl All four of you!" And he was trapped, trapped     Laney let go. Slowly she sat back, her eyes soft and dreamy, with pinpoint pupils. M att relaxed. The others were looking at nothing. Jay Hood was humming under his breath. Mrs. Hancock scowled at some unpleasant thought. "The luck of Matt Keller" had given him a breathing space. "The luck of Matt KeUer." A joke, a shaggy dog story. If he hadn't used the power to "rescue" Polly, she might be alive now. If he hadn't come running to Jay Hood for explanations, he'd be back tending his mining worms. No wonder this form of "luck" had never appeared before. Perhaps it nev would again. It was a detrimental mutation. It had kept hini virgin until he was twenty-two. It had killed Polly and caused Laney to see him as a tool instead of a man. It had sent him into the Planck; he'd never have tried that without his psychological invisibility. Into the Planck Xo die; out, by blind luck, with a dead man's lung. A man should have the sense to hide his differences. Too late. They would forget him, again and again, as often as he desired. But always they would come back. Matt Keller, tool, captive assassin. Not likely! "You," he said. "Mrs. Hancock." The others stirred, turned to face him, returned to the world in which Matt Keller was a factor to be considered. "Mrs. Hancock. Do you have anything to say to me?" "I don't think so," said the middleaged rebel who should have been a shrewish housewife. "You didn't say a word while the others were browbeating me. Why did you come?" She shrugged. "Just to see what would happen. Keller, did you ever lose someone you loved?" "Sure." "To the organ banks?" "My Uncle Matt." "I did my damnedest to stop you from getting a transplant, Keller. Dr. Bennet says you'd have lived without it, but of course you'd have been a cripple." "I'd have been just as glad," said Matt, though he wasn't sure it was true. "I wanted to smash the organ banks the first chance we got. Nobody else seems to feel that way. Maybe nobody else had a husband cut up for the organ banks." "Make your point." She shrugged again. "I don't know if you're as important as Harry says. It seems to me nobody could be that important. You got us out of the Hospital, right. Parlette would never have found us otherwise, right. We're grateful, right. But did we have to cut up a man to show how grateful we are? You didn't do him any good. "Well, he's dead, and we can't break up the organ banks yet. But we're trying to change the laws so less people go into them, and then only the ones that deserve it most. If you were any kind of man, you'd be wild to help us. I say it's all you can do for that dead man." "For sweet charity." Mrs. Hancock's mouth closed like a trap, "I'm going to join you," said Matt. "But not for sweet charity. And now I'll give you my reasons." "Go on," said Harry Kane. He was the only one who didn't show surprise. "I can't go back to my mining worms. That's absolute. But I'm no hired killer, and that's for sure too. I've never committed murder. I haven't wanted to, not often. If I ever kill a man, I'll want to know just why I'm doing it. 'There's only one way I can be sure I will. "From now on, the five of us are going to be the leaders of the Sons of Earth." That, he saw, jolted even Harry Kane. "I'll want a hand in all decisions. I'll want all the information available to anyone of you. What do you say, Harry?" "Keep talkin." Matt's mouth was dry. Harry Kane didn't like this, and Harry Kane was a bad enemy. "The Sons of Earth can't commit murder without my consent, and I won't give it unless I decide murder is necessary. To make that decision, I'd have to know everything, always. One more thing. If I decide one of you is trying to cheat me. I'll kill him, because cheating me of information will be murder." "What makes you think you can handle that much power, Keller?" Harry's voice was dispassionate, merely interested. "I have to try," Matt pointed out. "It's my power." "Fair enough." Harry stood up. "One of us will be here tomorrow, with copies of Parlette's New Law, in full. If we decide to make changes later, we'll let you know." "Let me know before you make the changes." Kane hesitated, then nodded. They went. M illard Parlette sighed and turned off the receiver. Invisible assassin? An odd phrase to come from a practical man like Harry Kane. What could he have meant? Kane would tell him eventually, of course. Even then it wouldn't matter. Kane could be trusted now, and that did matter. Now Kane had a hold on IP Millard Parlette. Be it real or imaginary, he would use that hold before he started a civil war. And Millard could concentrate on the man waiting outside. Implementation had selected one of their number to present a set of grievances. The man must be getting angrier and angrier as he waited for the Head's attention. Parlette used the intercom. "Send him in, Miss Lauessen." "Good." "Wait. What's his name again?" "tialley Fox. Corporal." "Thank you. Would you please send to Gamma and Delta and Iota Plateaus for records on Matthew Keller." "Done, mine ancestor." Mist Demons! How had Castro put up with the woman? Parlette smiled. Why not? Let him take care of Implementation and the Council, and Harry Kane would take care of the rest. An invisible assassin had just lifted half the load from his back.I power," said Harry Kane. "Parlette's got every weapon on the planet, except for what we've built in our basements. He's got all the electrical and medical facilities, and most of the wealth. And what have we got? Matt Keller." "And lucky to get him," said Laney. A red haired girl in an iridescent dress passed them, walking quickly down the corridor. A crew girl, probably visiting a relative. They stopped talking until she had passed. Harry Kane grinned after her, grinned at her startled expression and at the way she'd quickened her step to leave them behind. They'd all have to get used to this someday; to the sight of colonists in the hallowed corridors of the Hospital. Jay Hood said, "Well, we've got him. Or has he got us?" He slapped the wall, making gunshot echoes. "Can you imagine what the historians will say? They may never figure it out." M att lay on his back and contemplated the ceiling. He'd made the right decision. He was sure of it. If he had a power, then someone had to have a use for it. He himself had none. A detrimental mutation is one that prevents the organism from surviving long enough to breed. Matt's only hope of becoming a father lay in suppressing the "luck" entirely, at least in his private life. An invisible man goes nowhere in a civilized society... Someone entered. Matt's eyes jerked hard over, caught by the iridescent blue of her dress. "I beg your pardon," she said, and turned to leave. She was tall and slender, and young, with dark red hair curved into impossible contours. Her dress was of a type never seen on Delta Plateau, loose and clinging, and it glowed, A face lovely in its strangeness, with flared nostrils and pronounced cheekbones, marked her as pure crew. "Just a minute," Matt called. She turned in surprise, not at what he'd said, but at his colonist accent. Then her back straightened and her chin lifted and her mouth became a hard, angry line. Matt flushed. And before her eyes could coldly leave him, he thought. Look at me. Her eyes didn't turn. Her chin came down and her face went soft and dreamy. Keep your eyes on mine, he thought at her. I fascinate you, right? Right. Keep looking. She took a slow step toward him. Matt dropped the control. She took another step forward, and then she looked horrified. She turned and ran from the room, followed by Matt's pealing laughter. Detrimental mutation? Maybe not. nphe Outsider ship was a Christmas X decoration, a ball of tinsel ribbons looping over and under and around each other, never touching. It was the diameter of New York City, with about the same population, in beings like black cats-o-ninetails with thickened handles. Miles ahead at the end of its tethering cables, the fusion drive spread dim light over the ship. The basking ramps cast vacuum-sharp shadows across each other, and in the borderlines between light and shade lay the crew. They lay with their heads in sunlight and their branched tails in shadow, soaking up energy through thermo-electric currents. Fusion radiation sleeted through their bodies, unnoticed. It was a peaceful, lazy time. Between stars there was little to do. Until actinic blue flame flashed across their course, throwing highenergy particles and electromagnetic fields about with carefree abandon. In moments the object was out of sight, even to an Outsider's sensitive eye. But not to the ship's instruments. In an hour the Outsiders had it nailed: position, velocity, mass, design, thrust. It was metal, mechanical, pushed by fusion and fueled by interstellar hydrogen. Not a primitive device, but -- Built by potential customers. In every arm of the galaxy were Outsiders, using everything from photon sails to reactionless, inertialess drives to push their ships: but always they traveled through Einsteinian space. Hyperdrive was vulgar. The Outsiders never used hyperdrive. Other species were different. They . preferred not to dawdle in space, enjoying the trip, sightseeing, taking their time. Usually they preferred the speedy convenience of the hyperdrive Blind Spot. Hundreds of times over, alien races had bought the secret of the hyperdrive from passing Outsiders. The trade ship swung easily toward Procyn and the human colony on We Made It, following Interstellar Ramscoop Robot ##. No chance of catching up, not at the customary .#I gee. No hurry. Plenty of time In two sparks of fusion light, an industrial revolution moved on We Made It.      IP hue cryJ Dear Editor: The letters from Wayne Spiceland Jr. and Frank Flynn in October Hue and Cry made it a special issue for me because of several things: For one, they certainly didn't ignore my letter in the April issue, and if there's anything I can stand, it's ignorance. (So that's a cliche. I still think it's funny.) For another, both leaped to the defense of Heinlein, who is, in my opinion, one of the best writers now In print. In fact, my #-year-old startled a teacher three years ago by saying "The best three authors in the English language are Steinbeck, Heinlein and Shakespeare"... and though I'd enlarge the number a bit, I'd certainly include Heinlein. But I must be one of the worst writers, or my April letter suffered from exegesis (and it was in an issue I missed, so I can't check up). I still say that science fiction, like all or lose both its old and new... audience. This is not to say that it cannot carry a message or make the reader think; actually, as an exeditor I insist that the reader must react (think) or the story is a failure. There must always be a partnership between author and reader: the author supplies the story, the reader supplies the reaction... and the author's ability to involve the reader through his special talent is the catalyst that sets off the reaction. All of the books listed by Mr. Flynn are entertaining stories about "real people" even when the people are dogs as in City by Simak, though a couple of them were less entertaining to me than others by the same author. Heinlein, Blish and Clarke may be, as Mr. Spiceland says, better than ever. Theyve always bn top-notch, and maybe Moon is a Harsh Mistress is terrific even if I felt it a bit to professorial for my taste. But my main complaint is that, for the most part, too much of today's science fiction dis not written by such as Heinlein, BHsh and Clarke. The paperbacks, particularly, run chiefly to sword-and-soroery (and I defy you to find one of those that would make anyone think) or to blatant space opera. They are, as Judith Merril said in a recent book review of some specific books, "comic-strip continuity" though she says (to each his own ! ) that this "is not all a Bad Thing." As for me, comicstrip continuity lost its interest when I was around twelve years old at most. To change the comparison, we might consider the technique of the motion picture or TV film. The extras or bit players may not even have a script, usually don't. The director tells them the expression, the action, the reaction he wants. Maybe they move through at once. He calls for cameras. They perform their part, make their impression, and go off without ever knowing the total story. Even the stars, who do know the story, do a lot of their action in piece-meal. A fist fight, for instance may have the two actors sling a single punch over and over for the camera. When one is knocked down, the other may be no where near and the one who falls actually is throwing himself backwards... over and over until the 'ike" is good... onto a mattress which doesn't show in the scene as finally printed. The result, maybe gripping and inspiring plenty of feeling and thought, is a compound of the author's ideas, the director's direction, the actor's technique. The miracle is that this fairly mechanical process can 'become a thing of art. Too many authors depend on these slick mechanics, on technique, and lose involvement and art of storycraft. But some of our very best writers sometimes become so involved in the idea (whether mathematical, sociological, or scientific) that they too lose the story, the human element, that draws in the new s-f reader. The addicts (like me and Flynn and Spiceland) may read the story by a favorite author and, even if we don't like it as well as niost by that author, forgive the writer, and struggle with the ideas and hope for a better one next time. A Heinlein or merely one that we like less than some other that he wrote, and that we like less because it is less humanly evocative. But assume the masters never write a poor book, as I assume. Still their books in any one year will be in a sad minority. This past twelve months I have bought perhaps # paperbacks (or more). There was no new Heinlein, Blish, Pohl among them. Of the rest, maybe three would attract a reader new to s-f because they had a story and were not verbal comic-strips, space-operas or sword-sorcery fantasies. The current shorts, novelettes and novels in the leading magazines are far superior to the run-of-the-mill paperbacks. (And local bookstores on my last two or three visits had no hard-backs.) I still would like . some Heinleins like Door Into Summer, Double Star, Famhams Freehold, Methuselah# Children; more Pohls, more Clements, more Clarkes. Maybe the top authors can't turn out a manuscript as fast as the authors of the flood of potboilers, but until the public can get its baptism in the good science-ficion, the said public isn't going to start panting after books in what is a new field to so many. And why don't I write a good science-fiction book myself? Because I can't write one up to the best of Heinlein or Pohl, that's why. But you asked for it, Mr. Spiceland. Maybe I will write one... it might be better than a lot of the tripe I've read in the past year. I think I will! I -- Alma McCormick, # Boswell Road NW (EZ), Atlanta Cieorgia #.  And when that great sf story rolls from your typewriter, don't forget to send it along to IP. We're always looking for promising writers -- in fact, we publish one new writer every month. -- Editor IF A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue wiil be fiiled with stories by Foreign Authors vliwitminn Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Edited by Anthony Boucher #. A giant two-volume collection of great science fiction reading. Over # pages of exciting fiction -- four full-length novels, twelve novelettes, eight short stories by Ray Bradbury. Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt. Poul Anderson. Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and a dozen mure. Counts as I choice. Pub. ed. S# #. Yron Th Twilight Zone b; Rod Serling. # spine-tingling sto ries that breach th gap between scienci and superstition #. Intcrmpfci Journey by John G Fuller. The strange story of an Ameri can couple abduc Pub. ed. #.W Address #. Twice # by Ray Bradbury. Fourty-four stories by the Grand Master of science fiction. Pub. ed. S#.M blood stream. Pub. ed. #.W Take any when you Join the Science Fiction Book Club and agree to accept only four bool during the coming ye counts as only a single choice! How the Club works: Each month it offers really superb new science fact or fiction book a fraction of its regular price. Even though the books sell for #, # and more in their or inal editions, Club members get them for or # each -- in special full-length, hard-cover e tions -- unless you select an extra-value book slightly higher price. And the Club tells you advance what each monthly selection will I During your trial membership, you agree to ta as few as four books in the coming year. Cam any time thereafter. No-Risk Guarantee: If not delighted with inti ductory #-book shipment, return books within days to cancel membership. Otherwise you w be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member. Mi coupon today to Science Fiction Book Clc Garden City, New York #  Please accept my application for membership In the Science Fiction Book ('lub and rush the # books whose numbers I have circled below. Bill me only #, plus shipping and handling, for all #. Then every month, send me the ('lub's free bulletin, "Things to Come", which describes coming selections. For each hook I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extravalue selection at a higher price. circle the numbers I need take only four books withthe # books you in the coming year and may want resign at any time thereafter. # ' # # delighted with my introductory # # # # package. I may return it in # days, # # # pay nothing, owe notliing, and my # membership will be canceled. Print Name State If under #, parent must sign here. (Offer good in U.S.A, only) #. Killer Thing by Kate Wilhelm. A scientist in the #?rd century develops a robot with a laser eye. Pub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. #. October the First Is Too Late, by Fred Hoyle. Solar beams play havoc with time on earth. Pub. ed. # #. Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov. A miniaturized team of doctors #. The Past Through Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # #. Prelude to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke. "Sands of Mars"  "Prelude to Space"both complete! Plus # short stories. Pub. ed. # #. Colossus by D. F. Jones. Machine conquers man! "Ingenious... alarming". Punch. Pub. ed. # #. Three Novel! by Damon Knight Rule Golden, The Dying Man  Natural State-all complete. Pub. ed. #! #. Fahrenheit #I by Ray Brad bury. Fiery story of burning passions! Recent hit movie Pub. ed. #  A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Vol. IS, No. S musoF Frederik Pohl, Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Co Co MacApp by Do AAo Melton by Verge Foray by Robert Silverberg by Roger Zelazny by Barry Alan Weissman by Foul Anderson by Lin Carter IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol #, No. #. Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #, #o per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copsnrlght by Galaxy Publldilng Corporation, #. All right. Including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similar! between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company. New York, N.Y. # IP  Novelette si He wasn't human any more. But he had been -- and he still knew how to suffer like a human being! I the solar system, the Beam appeared to originate -- or terminate -- in the neighborhood of Sirius. Fledgling Earth, already intoxicated with her unexpected invention of a Faster-Than-Light Drive, greeted the Beam's sudden blossoming across the heavens with mixed reactions. To many, it was God's bright beckoning sign. What else could it be? It was a rainbow, wasn't it? Even if it wasn't a bow, but a straight slender ribbon stretching away to visual infinity. The unreligious had their turn eleven days later, when the Eje convoy landed on Pluto and broadcasted a short greeting in excellent English and other human languages. Mankind, fairly well ensconced throughout most of the solar system, milled, spewed words, mobilized and waited. Gradually, tee things became clear: the Eje were making no moves to expand, on or off Pluto; they weren't going to communicate much, and they weren't going to display themselves at all. A fourth thing took longer to realize: the Eje weren't, for the time, offering Mankind anything except the use of the Beam and certain peculiar limited services on Pluto -- and, later, at the far end of the Beam. In time, people got used to that situation. People went out and used the Beam, which was a sort of rapidtransit highway (many times as fast light-years out tor the next galactic spiral arm. They colonized around the far end and, to soihe extent, in the Sparse Regions along the way. They accepted the services of the Pluto establishment, which was a sort of hospital offering a sort of survival to mentally ill or mortally injured people who could be gotten to it, or near it, in time. After eity-odd years, people in and out of the solar system took the enigmatic aliens more or less for granted. Most assumed, by then, that the Eje had no wicked designs upon mankind. Of course, some had doubts. There was one man in particular. Or a sort of a man... Vohnny SubbI Johnny Subb! Get out of here and crawl back in your tubr -- ChMrens taunt, Earth, circa # A. D. B eam Tramp was a small, unpretentious, moderately decrepit ship, of a type commonly found along the Beam, hauling oddments of freight and sometimes a few paying passengers. She was basically a squat cylinder, forty feet tall and half again as much in diameter. The ring around her middle that housed the drives and field-shapers wasn't faired off or otherwise prettified, so that from a distance she looked like a stub of iron bar with a single turn of heavy square wirq soldered around her -- plus, here and there, pocks and knobs that were external organs. Nothing identified her, or hinted that she belonged to the most potent single corporation between Sol and Far End. The hour chron in her Main Control Room (aft as she flew, at ground level as she sat) read, #: #. Seeing her crew as she settled on gravs through the uncontaminated atmosphere of Lenare (an unimportant world about a third of the way out along the Beam) you wouldn't have known Raise Bukanan or his second in command, Leander White, from the rest. They were all male subbs. Their bodies were as alike as if they'd been grown in identical vats -- which probably they had been, though the Eje didn't say. The blunt, immobile faces might have been masks. The hairless mediiun-brown skins didn't hold scars long enough to serve as identification -- nor did the toneless labored voices help. Only when you'd lived with them a while, learned the individual gestures and idioms and the slight differences of posture, plumpness and such, could you have told them apart. IF Raise heard the ground-level lock rumble open. He left the control room and went out to stand in the openings looking down at the clearing below and taking deep breaths of the clean cool air. It still had the treesmell, a little icier than pine. The town half-circg the packed-dirt field hadn't grown much, and a train of pack animals plodding along the road inland moved at the same unhurried pace. He leaned out to look at the rows of one-story, rough-lumber warehouses at the other side of the field. The largest bore on its slanting shing roof the sign, "Port City. Leaare," and, in small letters, '"Bukanan Enterprises Regional Hdqtrs." The sign was freshly painted. Nat Glover kept things up. Beam Tramp was hovering now, shifting a little to pick a spot among the twenty-odd parked spacecraft. She settled and touched down. Raise leaned toward the communicator grill. "Lee?" "Yes, Raise." "I'm going aground. Fuel and provision, will you?" He stepped down and walked to the building that bore the sign. T here were several female subbs -- dressed as unalike as possible -- at wort ill tbe office, plus one male who sat at a desk adding up columns of figures. As he glanced up, Raise said, "I'm off Beam Tramp, Verbal message for Nat Glover." The other glanced at Raise's boots with their swaged tops for sealing to spacesuits, at the thin snug-fitting white zipperall garment, at the belt and empty holster. Satisfied, he bent toward a crude-looking intercom box and spoke quietly. There was a pause, then a barely audible reply. The subb at the desk looked up and nodded toward a door at the rear. Raise walked to it and entered, closing it behind him. Nat Glover looked up from his desk, smiled and wav a hand toward a chair. "Do I know you?" Raise remained standing, eyeing his regional manager -- and chief link to Earth -- with what he knew would be an annoying stare if he let it last too long. Nat hadn't changed much. The lanky frame might be a trifle gaunter; the hair a little grayer; the tanned face -- yes, the face was deeper-lined. But the gray eyes were as alert and clear as ever. Raise waited until the lean face showed a touch of impatience. After two years with other subbs, he had a kind of hunger for human expressions. He used one of their private jokes. "Nat; don't you recognize my distinctive face?" Nat blinked, opened his mouth, grinned suddenly, reached out to make sure the intercom was off, untangled his legs from beneath the desk, hauled himself to his feet, and rushed forward, gnarled hand thrust out. "Raise! I wasn't expecting you for a thousand hours at least!" He grabbed Raise's hand, not glancing at it as most Normals would. "Raise, it's sure -- " His face went suddenly serious. "Oh, hell. I forgot for a moment. I don't suppose you got my message yet." Raise, a sudden tenseness in his middle, studied Glover's face. "The last I heard from you, my son had quit college and insisted on coming into space. Out with it, Nat. What's happened?" Nat looked down; looked at the closed door; met Raise's eyes again. "He came. Raise. Sooner than I expected. Paid his own way out somehow. And I didn't handle him right." Raise's pulse quickened with the feeling his face and voice couldn't show. "I asked you not to pamper him. What happened, Nat? He's not -- ?" Nat turned, walked to his desk, plumped a hand down on it aimlessly and looked at Raise again. "I don't know whether he's dead or alive. He didn't like it here. I let him ride up to Itontown with a pack train so he could look for work he liked. He had his degree in metallurgy; I hadn't known that... He got involved with a woman, an indentured girl just out from Ea. He bought her. To get money to pay for everything and to get married and set up housekeeping, he signed on with some space jackal who pretended to have a get-richquick gem-mining opportunity on some unnamed planet. And a few hours after they'd lifted, I got a ransom demand -- addressed to you." Glover sat down slowly. "Damn it. Raise, it was all my fault. I should have made it plainer to Kime that he could draw on me for whatever he wanted. But he's an independent young scamp. And besides..." Raise watched him a moment. "What, besides?" "Well -- he doesn't like subbs. One of the first things he asked me when he got here was why we hired so many. And maybe I was a little abrupt with him about that." R aise walked to a chair and sat down. So, Kime was that way -- like his dead mother. Not that she could have taught it to him -- he'd have been too young when she died. And he couldn't know that his own father had become one. Shed never known; nor did anyone else, on, or near. Earth, outside confidential Government files. Raise had been careful about that. Right or wrong, he'd been careful. "None of it's your fault, Nat. You handled the trust fund, and everything, as thoroughly as anybody could. Who's this space rat he signed on with?" 'T don't know him. He's called Pank Sunner." Raise's inner turmoil grew. "I know about Sunner. He works farther out along the Beam, mostly, picking up whatever dishonest dollar he can. But he's no one-ship scavenger. He's got ten ships, at least And crews of cutthroats to go with them. He's got a good hideout somewhere -- I haven't any idea where. You can bet he had ransom in mind from the start; gem-mining's too honest for him. What leads do you have? Are there ships out looking for more?" "All I can divert. Raise. The only lead I had was the girl. She remembered Sunner's name." "Who is she? Some slut?" "I wouldn't say so. She was stranded when Kime didn't come back, and I got her a job here in town as a waitress, so she'd be around. She seems decent. Maybe IF # Lj m iif iSL' ' 'I bj .il you ought to talk to her. She... doesn't know about you, of course. Or about the ransom demand." Nar bent and scribbled on a notepad. Raise took the paper and read, "Annelle Travis. Earthside Cafe," thh stuffed it in a pocket. 'These ships aground here. How many are ours?" "Only two, and they're loading consignments I haven't been able to cancel. The rest are independents." Raise said, "Lease or buy them. Of hire them to carry our own commitments. Pay what you have to. rii want you to set up a network... but I'd better wait and see what r can find out from the girl. Will you get busy on those independents?" He got to his feet, started toward the door, turned. "Nat, what's he like?"' Glover, reaching for the telephone, paused and half smiled. "Green, of cOtirse. Stubborn. A couple inches shorter than I am, dark hair, light cy. Not too muscular yet, but a gdOd frame and fairly athletic. He looks like that old picture of you before your -- your accident, that you shbwed me once." Raise nodded and left. II fit ' S he was slight, brown-haired and brown-eyed, with a graceful rather thin cutely pretty face that showed hief fieielings, but not too much. She (hdnt offer a hand, but she was poHte.' T don't think there's anything bdyond what I've told Mr. Glover.' ' Raise, hating his flat voice, said, "If you'll indulge me. Miss Travis, any small detail might help. I've traveled the Beam a lot more than Nat Glover has." She made a resigned gesture. "All right. I came out from Earth indentured. My parents... there was a traffic accident, and all of a sudden I was alone', and there was no money, and -- well, I had to do something. And the advertisements -- you have no idea how they lie, Mr. -- I'm sorry. I don't know your name, do I?" "Anything addressed to Leander White will reach me. Miss Travis." "Mr. White. Well, it wasn't until I was standing on that auction block that I realized what 'indentured' means out here. I was about to cry. Then Kime pushed his way out of the crowd. His face was like murder. I saw that he was sorry for me, and he looked -- looked civilized, so I... really, I guess, I tried to make an appeal to him without saying anything. Anyway, there was an argument, and he didn't have enough money to -- to buy me. But when he told them his name, they accepted his credit. "He had to rent a room for me on credit too. He made me take a little cash, all he had, I guess, then he went out to find work. And after a few days he found the gem-mining proposition, and he was all excited. He was supposed to be back in less than thirty days, and... well, we'd be married and have plenty of money for a start. The -- the thirty days went by. I tried to find work, but there was nothing that -- well, I guess you know Irontown. And the landlady got nasty. I didn't even have IF money for food. If Mr. Glover hadn't found me, I'd have -- " Her eyes were wild now. Raise said, "You thought about suicide? You should have come to Bukanan Enterprises, Miss Travis." She colored a little. "By then, I wasn't sure about things." He studied her face. "Please tell me what you mean." She got redder. "I guess it would be cowardly to lie about it. He wouldn't have -- have taken advantage of me, I guess, or at least I didn't think so then, but I was so grateful and... alone. And I really liked him. I, well, I guess I threw myself at him." He was careful not to look at h too directly. "People aren't puritanical out here, Miss Travis. But what do you mean, later you weren't sure? Did he say anything that made you think he might be doubtful about getting back?" "No." She faced him squarely. "It was ju day after day went by, and I was getting desperate. I began to wonder if Fd been a fod. Maybe you can't understand that. You've never been a -- " She caught hraelf. After a moment he sd, "No, I've never been a woman, but I was a man once, Miss Travis, and I can understand how you felt." He wondered how she'd react if he kfentified himself, told her about hiniself and Kime's mother on Earth -- how he'd had to hide, or thought he had to hide, what happened to him, knowing that his wife would wait, day after day, for the message that said he was coming home rather than that there'd been another delay. There must have come a time when she, too, wondered if she weren't a castoff. But he'd sent money. Tbere'd always been money, whatever that meant. He tried to think of something reassuring to say to Annelle Travis that wouldn't sound stupid. He could not. "Miss Travis, tell me everything he said about Pank Sunner." "Actually," she said, "it was almost nothing, except that they were going to a secret gem mine. He didn't even mention Mr. Sunner's name. I came to see him leave, and I knew the ship because it was the one that had just brout me to Lenare." Raise went tense. "Did you teU Nat Glover that?" "Why... I don't know. I was almost out of my mind when I first talked to Mr. Glover." She looked suddeidy startled "I didn't ihink Captain Sunner had anything to do with my circumstances. The ship that brought me, and several othecs, out from Earth left the Beam pist long enough to transfier us and some caigo to Captain Sunner's ship. I thou it was just a normal local transfer. Wasn't it? Captain Sunner was so courteous." Raise decided not to disillusion her about Sunner. "Wasn't there anything else Kime said that made you wonder?" "No. He was so happy. He seemed to think it was a big adventure." She was silent a moment. 'The landlady was always talking to me. She said she'd seen lots of young men go out like that and that very few of them would ever come back to a planet like Lenare. She said he was -- " !e looked embarrassed again. Raise said, " 'Gone where the subbs go?' Is that what she said?" S he met his eyes. "Yes. I'd heard the expression on Earth, of course. But I'd never truly resized how big space is. To think we can't even see Sol from herel" She hesitated. "You're the first -- 'Substitue Body' is the origin of the word, isn't it? -- I've ever really talked with. On Earth -- " He should have let that pass, but he was hungry for Normal faces and voices. 'T know Miss Travis. Not many subbs stay on Earth. We're more comfortable out here. We can stand exposure better than Normals, yoii know, and digest things a Normal coulc't. I hope you don't believe the stories that go around. We aren't slaves of the Eje, Miss Travis, an we don't plot war against the rest of mankind. We were all Normals once. Our brains weren't changed  by the surgical transfer." He stopped, ashamed of his outburst, happy for once that his voice and face didn't reveal the feelings inside. he smiled throu her embarrassment. "I never believed the stories. Veire you in the solar system when yoii had your... accident?" ' "!No, Miss Travis, I was out near lar tnd. The Eje have another hospital there, like the one on Pluto." He w anxious to leave the subject now. But she wasn't. "You can't imagine how mysterious it dHH seems to people whpVe never been off Earth. Forve me, but there's one question I have to ask. Are you really immortal?" He sighed. "No, Miss Travis, I'm sure we're not. That's the thing that seems to worry Normals the most. Our bodies do regenerate themselves very well." He held out his left hand, palm down. 'That thumb was manned badly not long ago. You can't even find a scar now. But the oldest subbs say they feel they're aging. The oldest I've ever met -- he was a surgeon in the hospital, out at Far End -- is a little over eighty, I mean since his brain transplant. He definitely looks older. My own guess is we might live two hundred years. But not forever. And a bad accident kills us, like anyone else." He hurried to change the subject. "Miss Travis, what was the name of the ship that brought you out from Earth?" "Why, it was called Cetus'" He felt eager to get back to Nat Glover now. "Is there anything else you can tell me?" "I... don't remember anything. Bpt do you mind if I ask you one more thing? Not about -- " "Go ahead, Miss Travis." "What's Kime's father like? I'd heard of him, even on Earth. He's supposed to be very rich and powerful and very mysterious. Kime's never seen him, you know, and he doesn't..." After a moment he prompted slowly, "He doesn't approve of his father, you mean." "Well -- Kime's mother was deserted, it seems, and the letters weren't very -- very personal. Cold and disinterested, Kime said. And there IF ' was the matter of allowing people to be bought and sold, here on Lenare." R aise said, "Miss Travis, Bukanan Enterprises only owns a fraction of Lenare, not including Irontown. As on many Freehold worlds, there's no planet-wide law. Most of the owners here have reasons to keep Lenare backward. Kime's father spends most of his time farther out on the Beam; that's probably why he seems mysterious. As you said, space is big. Miss Travis, can you tell me where you transferred from Cetus to Pank Sunner's ship? Opposite here?" "Why, no. We had to go back into the Beam again, to get opposite here." He stared at her. "How far -- how long was it, from the transfer Until you left the Beam opposite Lenare? Did you keep track?" "Yes, I did. About sixty hours." "And was the transfer between here and Sol? Or farther out?" "Why... I don't know. I assumed it was nearer Sol." He asked, his slow voice a little shaky, "Do you know how long the trip was, from the time you entered the Beam near Sol, to the transfer? Did Cetus leave the Beam anywhere else?" She glanced at his hands, which, he realized, were clenched. "No. We were in the .Beam for over four hundred hours, then left it, and Captain Sunner's ship was waiting. Is it important?" "It might be," he said. "I appreciate your talking to me. Miss Travis. Vd better let you go now She put . out a hand to restrain him, drew it back a little too fast "Mr. White -- ah these questUnis Have they something to do with Kime? Do you think he's in trouble?' Glad again of his face and voice, he lied, Tm just trying to get a hint of where Pank Sunner's gem mine migt be. There are any number of things that may have delayed thm. I wouldn't be surpri. Miss Travis, if he showed up tomorrow, with a trunk full of rubies." Ill N at Glover put down the telephone and looked up as Raise came in. "Learn anything?" "Yes. I learned that Kime knows a good woman when he sees one. I also learned that Sunner has been dealing with a p called Cetus! Glover frowned over that. Cetus? I thought she was legitimate. Weve had freight for her, and from her, but Fve never seen her." Raise said, 'I knew she wasn't strictly legit. She makes the run dear to Far End, dropping out of the Beam along the way to meet local shipping, but seldom makes planetfall. She's an old ship, originaBy huBt just for the passenger run, wh that was expected to be a paying proposition. Later, she was rebuilt to carry mostly freight, with only a hundred or so passengers. She's cautious. But she hauls 'Indentures,' among other , things." Glover blinked and sat up straighten "And e brought the girl out hrom  Earth? Raise, I'm slipping! I should have learned that!" Raise said, "You didn't know Sunner or his habits. What weve got to do now is find Cetus. If we can find out where she meets Sunner -- then'll be more fhw one place -- we might get a hint of where his hideout is. We'll hardly be lucky enough to stumble rit onto it, but if we can build up a picture of Sunnefs movements and make a statistical analysis -- He walked to a large wall-chart, showing, one above another, sections of the Beam; tapped a brown forefinger on one line. Cetus met Sunner sixty hours out from us. Then he made the run back here to peddle thei Indentures he'd bought It must have been pure luck, his running into Kime." He stood thinking. "He's stayed clear of us, up until now, and he's no fool. He must want cash badly." Glover said, "He's after a lot. Ten Raise grunted. "Plenty! Still, he must know careful he'll have to be, with us. How does he propose collecting?" 'He'll specify that later. I'm to get Ae word to you and gather negotiable metal here." Raise turned to the chart. "Sixty hours... seven or eight hundred Kghtyears..." Glover squinted at the chart. Cttus will be halfway to Far End by how." "No," Raise said. "She usually has cargo and passengers for Antietam Station." Glover frowned. "Wouldn't she stop there first? Oh! I see! She'd untures -- then turn around and go back to the Station. Sixty hours... plus a hundred twenty from here back in... we might not be too far behind, if she did that. I've chartered fourteen of these ships that are here, and two more are coming from Irontown. Shall I start them out along the Beam, making inquiries?" "No. Cetus is only one lead. I want you to concentrate on the stretch from here back to Antietam Station, and for only a hundred hours out toward Far End. I'll be going out to the Drowned Cluster, and I'll put a whole fleet out along the rest of the Beam. Keep picket ships at our own stops along the Beam, so I can get word without running clear back here." Glover said unhappily, "With you clear out there -- " Raise turned to face him. 'This search will cost more Aan you can muster at this end. Then there's the ransom. We'll have to be ready to pay that. Right? So you'll need coin metal." "Well, yes. A lot." "And," Raise said, "there's no place I can get it in a hurry except at the Cluster. I'll run out there -- with one stop -- get a fleet started searching, and bring back metal. Probably rhodium." Glover sighed and nodded. "You're right. What's the one stop you'll make? Or is it any of my business?" "New Eden. It's not far from where Sunner must have met Cetus Glover said slowly, "Ernesto Vasquez is no slave trader." "No. But he's not entirely legit, IF either, and I happen to know that he's dealt with Sunner. He and I have done business more than once, and he's obligated to me. Also, he knows I could upset his applecart." Raise paused. 'We've got a certain amount of time, while Sunner thinks you're still trying to get messages to me. Don't let anyone know I've been here. Sunner doesn't know much about me, and I want to keep it that way. He doesn't know I'm a subb, of course." Raise turned togard the door. "I'll see you, Nat." earn Tramp's hour chron showed :#. The intercom chimed, announcing that they were out of Lenare's atmosphere and accelerating to the high velocity that would let them shift Control, glanced at the figures scrolling across a computer screen. Leander White was handling the programming with his usual precision, from Aux Control in the other end of the ship, where he had banks of special instruments he'd tinkered up. Raise reached out and activated a forward telescreen. An image of the Beam leaped to life. He sat staring at the rainbow slash. From Lenare's distance -- eight light-years, nearly it was an easily seen ribbon, even without magnification. Men knew, now, that the "rainbow" was only a side-effect, ced by a comparatively tiny spill of energy. (What kind of energy, they didn't know) . Somehow charged particles were whirled helically around the Beam, spiralling billions of miles out, while something like a Doppler effect made one side look red and the other blue. He glanced at a radar screen where a blip had been showing for a few minutes. That would be one of Nafs newly acquired ships starting out. Already the blip was fuzzy, as Tramp's velocity climbed. He stood up and began to pace the control room. The long hours from any planet to the Beam were always tedious, but he hadn't fell this angry, rebellious discontent for a long time -- not since that hsane period when he'd first been a subb. Was it just a father's concern for a son he'd never seen? He hadn't thought much about Kime, though the years. There'd been so many things out here -- building the Corporation, directing the blind probes into the forbidding dust cloud that hid the Drowned Cluster, setting up the furtive research projects that even Nat Glover didn't know about, the clandestine task -- as wary of the Eje as of a baselessly suspicious Earth -- of recruiting the right kind of subbs. "Where the subbs go." Bukanan Enterprises, especially in the Cluster, was where a lot of them went. e half heard the intercom chime, He braced himself by habit against the brief lurch as a different kind of artificial gravity took over and stepped to the console to turn off all external viewers. You saw nothing in No, there was more bothering hkn now than worry about Kime. This new thing had been with him ever since he talked to Aonelle Travis. Partly, he supposed, it was a restirring of his guilt about his own dead wife. But there was more. Meeting her, hearing her talk about his son, brought it really home to him for the first time that Kime was a grown man now. And that made a father feel old, A short harsh sound -- the subb travesty of a laugh -- came unexpectedly from him. Hell, he thought, subbs don't worry about aging. Any Normal will tell you that. Only it wasn't true. Many subbs thought intensely, desperately, about eventual death. He remembered reading somewhere once, when he was too young to understand it, that having a son was the only way a man could achieve a kind of immortality. That, he'd realized now for a long time, was why so many subbs threw themselves fiercely into his Bio projects that were trying to give subbs fertility. Subbs weren't fertile. So, unless a subb already had children he'd never have any. And so, if they weren't scientists or technicians, ey'd do an#Tthing to help -- work in mines, grow food, carry hods to build new laboratories. It came to Raise now, in a sort of unastonished surprise, t his own lack of fanaticism toward the Bio projects (even though he'd built them was quite simply explained by his already having a son. And now that son was in serious danger, if not alreMy dead. JWell, there was no way to hurry Tramp along. He snapped and ate and paced and toured the ship, as he always did, and repeated the dreary cle.  D ead reckoning said  they were nearing the Beam. Raise sat at the console and punched two studs. The figures vanished from Maincomp's screen and were replaced by a mock-up representation of Tramp's position. A small green arrow crawled, at a forty-five degree angle, toward the nearer of two parallel lines. Fgfty-five degrees wasn't quite the optimum for entering the Beam with maximum speed along it, but it was a lot easier to compute exactly. And when travelling in the Beam, you didn't want to overshoot or undershoot your emergence point. Another chime sounded. He waited, braced in his seat. The arrow suddenly stopped and turned blue. Tramp had to be to enter the Beam. Radar screens and televiewers came to life. There were no radar blips. The viewers showed the Beam itself. They were far inside the rainbow now, of course. The images on the viewers were of spiralling, luminous lines of force. Because of Tramp's motion, they seemed to turn like a barber-pole, even while expanding. The shifting perspective was confusing, as always; Raise didn't try to follow it. A secondary computer was recording it and analyzing it, anyway. That was Raise's real bent -- trying to study the Eje technology. It was a frustrating pursuit. The gaps between the bright bands of force seemed very wide now. There was a dizzying shift as the unknown forces seiz Tramp. They gulped her IF in and realign her; and then they were inside. There were no spiral bands now. If they existed from the viewpoint, they were telescoped together so tightly they became one solid luminous tube. He left the external viewers on. Sometimes there were things to see -- the Mostly after-image of a Terran ship recently passed this way, or, very rarely, of an oval Eje ship. Several times, in his years of travelling the Beam, Raise had seen aberrations in the Wall -- gaping holes or irregular flickers, with tangled threads of force whipping about. You couldn't see, or photograph, anything through those holes. The stars outside the Beam might as well be in another universe. They probably were, Still, Tramp was packed with instruments, some of which would have puzzled Earth scientists. He'd never given up hoping the Eje would slip some time, and he'd learn something about them. He got up to pace again. He'd endured the hundred hours from Lenare to the Beam. Now he'd have to endure the sixty hours along the Beam and the more-than-one-hundred hours from the Beam to New Eden. IV N ew Eden must have been named by someone fresh out from Luna of Mars. Rusty sand drifted across three-fourths the surface. Mountain ranges were old and worn down, the seas shrunken and resigned. Most of the rivers were dry except during rains, and even then all but a few hastily lost themselves in deserts, as if burrowing to escape the swollen red sun. Neverthdess there were polar ice caps, and, around them, temperate zones with a few live rivers and lakes. The only spaceport and the only town of any size were beside one of the lakes. As Tramp descended, Raise saw only two rusty hulls parked on the field. Both of those belonged to the planet's proprietor. Vasquez, blocky, with a broad face almost as brown as Raise's, and with short-cropped erect white hair above still-black eyebrows, leaned in the doorway of a low spreading adobe building and watched Raise approach. He spoke softly. "That is a Bukanan ship, no?" "You know she is, Ernesto." The tanned face split in a grin, showing perfect white teeth. "Ralsel Often I envy you your disguise." Raise glanc around. "I'd rather have it unpenetrated, this trip. I can use a few provisions, and information. I'll pay well for both." Vasquez turned and called into the building, "LuisI" A slender dark boy of perhaps twelve, barefooted and nearly nude, appeared from the dark interior. He glanced at Raise, then at Beam Tramp, His father told him, 'Tell your mother we are not to be disturbed. Then go to the ship and see what they require." Vasquez led the way into the building and to a shady central patio lined with flowers, into which windows looked from three sides. Vasquez placed chairs against the windowless side, "How may I help you, friend Raise?" Raise said, "You sometimes do busmess with a man named Pank Sunner." Vasquez blinked once. "Since you know it, I will not bother to deny. Do you have a grudge with him?" "A possibly deadly one." Vasquez sighed and stared at a bed of yellow flowers. "He has brought me profit, at times. But you have brought me more. And I do not underestimate the power of Bukanan Enterprises. So...  Sunner was here twenty days ago. Our days. They are long, you know." Raise calculated. Plenty of time for Sunner to have reached the Beam, made a short run to rendezvous with Ceti#S, and gotten to Lenare with his Indentures. Vasquez was watching him. "Perhaps, Raise, you will trade me information. You travel much and have many eyes and ears. Someone else was here, asking about Sunner." Raise waited a moment, then asked, "The Patrol?" "No, Raise. I have not seen the Solcon Patrol in a long time. These were others. Peculiar-looking men -- two brothers, I think. I did not see the rest of the crew. But what has me worried is that I knew the ship. It was not unlike this one of yours -- and it used to belong to Pank Sunner." He watched Raise for a moment. "Can you tell me what is going on?" Raise asked, "What did the men look like?" "Light of skin, with pale gray eyes. They had very little hair, and it was white as paper. Broad of shoulder, but thin from front to back. Shorter than you or I. English very good, but not quite as you or I would speak h." Rse went taut. After a moment he realized he was holding his breath, let it out. "Ernesto -- did they make you think of subbs?" Vasquez's eyes widened for an instant. 'They did not at the time. But now -- forgive me -- there was a certain lack of expression -- " Raise was on his feet. "Ernesto! I've never seen such subbs -- but I've talked to someone who has. Those were subbs. But the brains in their skulls were not human. They are Eje, Ernesto. Or something that serves the Eje!" V asquez stared for a moment. Then, slowly, he got to his feet, pulled a large bandana from a pocket and wiped his hands on it. Thought raced behind his brown eyes. Raise said, even more hoarsely than usual, "What did you tell them? When were they here?" "I told them I had not seen Sunner for a long time. It was four days after he was here. Now I wish... Raise, I have more than profit to think about now. If I am frank with you, will you be frank with me? I am beyond my depth." Raise said, T will." Vasquez led the way indoors and around a comer into the windowless wing of the building. Padlocked doors lined a corridor. Vasquez stopped at one, pulled a ring of keys from beneath his loose white blouse and unlocked the padlock. The storeroom looked commonplace. Vasquez took an electric lamp from a hook on the wall, turned it on and rehung it. Then he locked the IF tloor behind them. He began shifting bales of what seemed to be some local fiber bundled in burlap. Raise helped him. When the stack of bales was moved. Vasquez pulled aside a reed floormat, exposing a dirt floor. He took a lge jackknife from his pocket and began digging at one spot. He uncovered a puU-ring then began feeling with the knifeblade for the outline of a trapdoor. Raise helped pull the trapdoor open. The lamp, when Vasquez brought it to the opening, showed a steep flight of stairs into a subcellar. Raise followed him down. There was an assortment of goods; cased electronic gear doubtless looted from some cargo ship, small bombs and missiles of Solcon Patrol models, packets of what seemed to be blank official documents ready for forgery, smaller packages that were probably Raise couldn't identify. Stacked in one comer were six long cases that might hold trombones or rifles. The trader got the top one, laid it on a crate, and began working with thick fingers at buckles and clasps. le thing inside looked like a bulky rifle. Raise accepted it from Vasquez, looked it over and hefted it. Too heavy to use on a planet. He turned it over in his hands, examining it. The bore was quite small, with no rifling. The sight, was a simple telescopic one, attached with two machine screws atop the massive chamberblock. There was a place under the latter to insert a magazine or clip. Raise pushed at the cover, which gave but did not open. A wooden grip for the left hand extended under the barrel, half its length. He lifted the stock to his shoulder. The balance -- assuming low or no gravity -- was tolerable. But there was something that felt a little odd; some indefinable difficulty in aiming the thing. V asquez said, "Sunner told me they were a new secret model the Patrol will have soon. Very powerful. He needed cash for provisions and fuel, but would not sell these weapons. I lent him more money on them than I really thought they might be worth. But now..." Raise began looking the thing over more closely. He found screw-heads in strange places -- under the tip of the barrel; along the edges of th# block; wherever parts were joined. The tenseness in his middle grew. "Do you have a screwdriver?" Vasquez got out the jackknife again. "This will do?" He unfolded a screwdriver blade. "I think so." Raise began removing screws. A thin lining came out of the barrel. The outer barrel simply screwed out of the block. The stock came off; the block separated into halves. Raise let the false covering drop to the dirt floor, piece by piece. In minutes he stood holding an alien weapon in shaky hands. He was aware of his host's heavy breathing. The thing was so flimsy-looking it wouldn't even make a convincing toy -- not with Terran construction materials. The "barrel" was a pencilthin cagework of spiraling threads, about fifteen inches long. Metal? Plastic? No. This wouldn't bend to the touch! He pressed harder. The hairlike strands were as rigid as girders! At the tip, under the "muzzle," was a small tab -- just big enough to grasp with left thumb and forefinger, with guards to prevent touching the barrel itself. The grip at the butt end was set at a slight angle, like that of an automatic pistol. It was no more than two and half inches wide, flat 'and thin except for a half-round ridge that ran from its base partway up the left side of it. Gingerly, Raise closed his hand around it. His thumb rested naturally on a stud at the angled top of the ridge. He turned the bottom up. Something like a large machine screw, with a single slot in its head, screwed up into the grip. That would be the energy-unit. Considering the power the Eje must put into the Beam, this weapon might equal a nuclear bomb. He saw no trigger except the stud, until he discovered that a welt along the tipper half of the forward edge of the grip was hinged and could be swung down and held against the lower part by his second, third and fourth fingers. That left the trigger -- a nely flush bar -- easily under his forefinger. e looked up at Vasquez. "This stud under my thumb, I think, will be a safety or a selector of some kind." He let go carefully of the grip and held the thing out to Vasquez. "Notice the inertia, though the weight's almost nothing. You can't jerk this weapon easily. That would make for a steady aim. It's not metal Nor any kind of matter I know." Looking distressed, Vasquez handled the thing gingerly. "What does it do, Raise Bukanan?" "I have no idea. But my guess is, it would make a laser beam look like a flashlight by comparison." Raise was shaky with eagerness. He wanted this weapon. So many long frustrated years, without learning one smidgin of Eje technology... "I'm not inclined to try it here, or anywhere else I can't run fast. They may have some way of detecting it, if it's fired. Maybe that's how they captured one of Sunneris ships!" Vasquez grinned nervously. "So. To possess these things is a great danger, eh? Already the Eje know Sunner had them, and they look for him. If they find him, they'll learn where he left them. They may be very angry that I lied. Yet there is great fortune here. Earth would pay much, no?" Raise said hoarsely, " will pay much. If the Eje come back, you can tell them Sunner pawned six Patrol rifles with you and didn't come back, and you sold them to some tramp freighter." Vasquez laid the weapon down carefully and wiped his hands adn with the bandana. He stooped to pick up a piece of the disguise. "Sunner did this to hide them, eh? I wonder how he got them. And what if he returns? Perhaps neither you nor the Eje will catch him." Raise said, "Give him extra money and tell him some story -- that the Eje came and demanded the things." IF Vasquez grinned. "You are eager to possess them. It becomes, then, a matter of bargaining, eh? There is danger for me in any case. Danger for you also, but you are better able to hide." Raise demanded, "How much?" Raise hardly hesitated. "I can give you a fourth that right now, in Solcon currency. ##I have to give you a note for the rest. All right?" "A note," Vasquez asked softly, "which, by the time I try to collect it, may bear the signature of a dead man?" Raise picked up the weapon, impatiently began putting its disguise back on. "Every subb with business interests has a secret coding, registered with Solcon. Whether I'm alive or not, my note, with the coding electronically implanted, can be cashed on Earth. Or, for that matter, at Antietam Station. I keep an emergency fund there." Vasquez smiled. "I would be a fool not to accept. I mit sell for ten times as much on Earth, eh? But I am not on Earth. And I would not dare, now, to go there suddenly." V toward the Beam. Lee White and Raise sat in the control room with one of the weapons on the console bench before them. The parts of the disguise lay around it. Lee said, "I guess he made it so bulky to cover up the inertia. But it wouldn't fool anybody who really knew rifles and looked at it close." "Well," Raise said, "you're the tinkerer of this crew. Can you shave it down and make it more convincing? All I want it to do is look right, on a rack in the ship's arsenal. I don't expect anyone to be waving it around." "I can sure do that. Raise. I'll have it all convincing, with nicks and a little corrosion and everything, by the time we get to the Cluster. AU six of them." He began gathering up the parts. "I don't guess we might drop out of the Beam somewhere along the line and test-fire one?" 'Don't think," Raise said, "that I'm not as itchy as you are. But before we risk getting caught by the Eje, I want three or four of these things safe in the Cloud. Or however safe they'll be, even there. We'll test-fire one on the way back." Lee left, carrying the weapon carefully. Raise got up and began pacing the control room. This was going to be a long trip -- over a hundred hours to the Beam, three hundred hours out it to a point over nine thousand light-years from Sol, then the ticklish hop to Bodega, in the Cloud. He wondered if he could stand it. Somehow, he did. T he Beam lay far enough behind so the spiral bands weren't visible at zero magnification. Tramp drifted as nearly motionless as her sensors and computers could arrange, while Maincomp chittered away at the job of determining her exact position Raise followed the figures dancing miles error would mean death. He glanced at the chron, calcu lated idly in his head. On Earthy it would be late in November of #. Lenare's northern hemisphere would still be in early spring; New Eden's long autumn (which pped both hemispheres at the same time) would be wearing on. He wondered if Kime were alive on some planet and what the season might be. He pulled his mind away from that and stared at the view-screen showing the Cloud. He knew those convolutions, those luminosities and umbras, as well as he knew Maincomp's keyboard. He picked out the particular blackness that hid Bodega's modest sun. More than once, he'd regretted choosing that particular star for his headquarters -- it was too hard to reach directly from the Beam... But that, of course, was part of its security. No one without very exact a dense dust cloud like this. Unless you hit the rarefaction around the star, you'd vaporize from friction before you could decelerate from dropout speed. With more time, he'd have hopped closer first, now, to one of the other hidden worlds, where precise triangulation was maintained almost to the minute. But he didn't have more time. He activated Comp Two and began feeding in data from various external sensors and from his ' memory. Figures piled up. Presently he reached for an intercom switch. "Lee. I check Maincomp I'm taking us in." "Sure, Raise." Raise punched studs. A vernier needle on a velocimeter dial began  .  IF to crawl around. He watched it idly for a few minutes. Some day he thought, he'd push his luck too far. Meanwhile, a man did what he felt he must. He got to his feet and paced. How had Sunner gotten the Eje weapons? There was no way of guessing. But the shrewd pirate must have jumped on a moment's opportunity, as he had with Kime. How did those two things fit together? If Raise had it figured right, the weapons must have fallen into Sunner's hands many hundreds of hours ago. He'd tested one, of course. Carefully. But not carefully enough to avoid losing at least one ship to the Eje, who must have appeared on the spot very quickly. Sunner himself had gotten away, but he'd been scared. The Eje simply crewed the captured ship and used it in a search, hoping a common-type freighter wouldd't scare people off. They must have squeezed the tip about New Eden out of a captured crewman who; obviously, didn't know any more than that Sunner sometimes landed there. And Sunner, being scared with the weapons in his possession -- and needing funds badly -- had gambled on Vasquez's honor and gullibility. Raise had been lucky enough to upset that gamble. He turned and stared at screens. Ti-atnp hadn't moved far enough yet to make the Cloud look any different. It would be worth a lot to know what Sunner had learned about the weapons and about the Eje. Enough to scare him, obviously, and he didn't scare easily. Well, Raise would probably have to learn it first-hand. Sunner, with whatever scant funds he'd gotten from Vasquez, must have hurried to keep his rendezvous with Cetus, paid for the Indentures (including Annelle Travis) and taken them to Lenare. He'd have turned a little profit there, but not much. So Kime had been a real windfall for him. And now he wanted a thousand he could replace his lost p or ships many times over pay his crews of cutthroats for a long time, buy a new hideout planet if he had to. Or lose himself on Earth or on one of the settled worlds out at Far End. What did Sunner fiope to do with the weapons? Given time and money to work with, he could undoubtedly contact the right buyers on Earth. Officially, the Solar Confederation had no project trying to study Eje technology. But Raise was sure the nucleus of such a project existed somewhere. In any case, there were corporations that would pay fabulously just for one of those Eje power units, even without the weapons. Or -- Sunner might plan to keep the things and study-them himself. He had guts enough, and imagination enough, for that. A thousand scientists. Raise stared moodily at the hour chron. Time enough had passed, since he'd left New Eden, for a lot of things to happen. Sunner might already have returned there and learn ed that the weapons were gone. The Eje might have caught Sunner. In that case -- or if they'd returned to New Eden and sweated Vasquez -- they'd be on the right track. Eventually, they'd probably know Raise had the weapons. He began to pace again, fists shoved deep in his podets. Never had Beam Tramp felt so like a prison. D ropout was very near. A chime began repeating on the intercom. Raise, eyes on di felt for seatstraps and pulled them around him. A crewman came to buckle into another seat (no one was supposed to be alone during Emergency Quarters). Outside in the corridor. Raise could hear others hurrying to their posts. A dial showed the countdown. Seven minutes... six... He wondered how swift death would be, if they missed the globe of relatively clear space around Bodega's sun. Certainly, not too swift to recognize. Alarms would scream; the ship would lurch. There'd be time to fight free of the seat and run aimlessly or crouch in terror, waiting for the blaze of heat as the hull forward vaporized. The needle came straight up. Raise was aware that the crewman was staring at it as fixedly as he was. A chime sounded. The instant of disorientation came. His heart thumped; his hands gripped the seat until they hurt. On a viewscreen, a bright diffuse glow appeared. He went limp, let out his breath, turned to meet the crewman's blank subb stare and made a thumbs-up gesture. Then he reached for the intercom to tell the whole crew, 'We're okay; the star's in sight. We're a little short and to one side, so we get some heating, but the coolers can handle it. Lee. Will you program us in?" "Sure, Raise. And real glad to be doing it." Now there was the wait as the glow britened and became more compact and, finally, as Tramp emerged from the thinning dust, b came the intense tiny disk of a star. It wasn't a large star, nor a particularly bright one -- but it had enough gravity and radiation to clear a space around itself. In half an hour the planets were visible. By that time, Tramps velocity was down to a small fraction of C. Raise got on the radio. "Bodega. This is Beam Tramp. We'll be down in a few hours. Is Ted Merk on duty?" He sat waiting for the reply. Minutes passed -- too many minutes. He raised his eyes to a bank of dials and reached for the intercom. "Lee? I'm not getting anything in here. Are you?" "No, Raise. No radio, no radar scan on us. In fact -- " Lee White paused, and Raise could hear him speaking aside to someone else in Aux Control. Then, "Raise, there's not one blip on a screen! And nothing on any wavelength! Something's wrong, sure as Satan. Shall I hold up?" Raise hesitated, skin prickly. "No. Go on in. Are you sure our gear is working? No heat damage?" "It's all working. Raise. I get bounces from the planets." Bodega swelled in the viewers. Raise reached for a switch. "EmerIF gency Quarters again! We can't raise anyone, and there are no ships aloft!" He leaned forward to open a panel under the console-bench, drew out a pistol and slipped it in his holster. Now Tramp was slowing, swerving to match orbits with the planet. Seas and continents looked normal beneath the blue sky-scatter. Still nothing on the radio. Lee took them down, switched to gravs and let them settle into atmosphere. On the night side of the planet, cities glowed normally. Tramp slid sideways, away from the morning line toward midday, dropped toward a large spaceport in a modemlooking city. And now the radio came to life -- tersely, in a tight low-powered beam aimed at the ship. Beam Tramp. This is Ted Merk. Sorry I coiddn't reply. We've had a scare, and we're under radio silence. Did you see anything near the Beam? Do you have any word where Raise Bukanan is?" 'Ted, this is Raise. We didn't see but keep the radio silence. Are you at the field?" "Yes." R aise stepped to the ground and stood for a moment staring about the empty field. There should have been dozens of ships and a lot of ground and air traffic. He recognized the subb approaching him by the ght stiffness of the feait -- a mentally induced quirk, not a physical one. 'Ted! What happened?" Ted Merk stopped and ran a hasty eye over Tramp, as if half expecting to see battle damage. "The Eje have turned hostile! They grabbed two ships just out of the Beam, without warning. Another got away and made it here to report. Five or six others are overdue from various places." Merk gestured at the empty field. "I scrambled what ships were around, with orders to hide in the cloud for a thousand hours or more, skipper's optim of courses. I've sent word throughout the Cluster, but I don't know how many messages got through. So far, no Eje have found us here, but things are at a standstill." Merk shifted his feet nervously. "I didn't know whether I'd gotten word to you or not I sent ships along the Beam looking, but..." Dalse realized his own fists were clenched. He forced them to relax. 'Tei -- you mean you sent everything into the Cloud at low velocitksT "Why, yes. We've often discussed -- what's wrong. Raise? Have I goofed something?" Raise stood rigid until he could get his voice working. "You did just what you were supposed to do -- get the ships to safety. But I need a lot of diips, fasti There's something -- oh, hell. Come aboard, and I'll show you why the Eje are actiffg up!" VI O ne of the weapons, stripped of its trimmed-down disguise, lay on the console bench. Ted Merk stared at it for a while. "Then they're really after "I don't know," Raise told him. 'They were looking for a man named Pank Sunner, who got six of these somehow. I happened to stumble across them. The je may know by now that I have them, or they may still be looking for Sunner. I'm looking for Sunner too." Raise hesitated. 'Ted, this is the situation. I have a son who came out from Earth not lon ago. Sunner happened to meet him on Lenare and got him aboard ship and off-planet, and now Sunner's demanding ransom. I may have to pay it.But even if I do, I expect Sunner to hold my son as a hostage. I've got to hunt Sunner down." Ted looked at him for a moment. "I never knew you had a son." "Well, I do. I've never seen him, but he's grown now, and he's come into space and gotten into a jam. This other thing -- " He stopped, alerted by something in Ted Mark's manner. "What is it?" "Raise... you mentioned ransom. I hope you're not expecting coin metal here." Raise felt a hollowness in his middle; He forced himself to relax into his seat. "I suppose you're going to tell me you sent it all into the Cloud." Ted nodded slowly. "Most of it. I didn't want to know where it was. Ralse I" Raise cut him off with a savage gesture. "Damn it, let's not commiserate! You did what you were supposed to do! Will any of those ships be in radio range?" Ted made a resigned gesture. "I told each skipper to use his own judgment. It's been several hundred hours. Even if they only moved at five per cent of light-speed..." Raise stood up and jammed his fists into his pockets. "Of course. They'd have to come back just as slow. And we don't know what the Eje are doing. They could have probes of some kind all through the Cloud. How much metal do you have?" rhodium." "How long will it take you to get it here? And whatever ships you can spare? You must have kept a few, for messenger service." "Less than two dozen. I can get them and the metal here in four or five hours." "Will you get on it right away?" Ted Merk left. Raise paced the control room for a while, then, because he had to occupy his hands, went to the bench and put the disguise back on the weapon. He stood holding the thing and trying to get his brain working. What could he do with the six of them now? The Cloud, it seemed, might no longer be safe. Well, neither was any other place. By the time Ted Merk got back. Raise at least had a decision, if not a plan. "Do you have any of the physicists on-planet? A good man?" Ted thout a moment. "Well, there's Oshima. He's been working with the Bio project, and he's pretty much disillusioned with it. No progress." y "Oshima's fine. Give him a good ship and a crew and a staff, and whatever apparatus he wants. I'll give you four of these weapons. Tell him to take them somewhere -- lose himself -- and begin studying them. Tell him to be careful. Just firing IP one will probably bring the Eje down on him before he can move, if he's in the Cloud." Ted digested that. "You mean that neither of us is to know where they are. Suppose something happens to him?" "Then the word will just have to get to us however it can. Ina few thousand hours, or less, things may be settled one way or another." "M right," Merk said. "What are you going to do with the other two?" "That," Raise reminded him, "is something else you don't want to know." L ee White's programmmg had to the Beam. There wasn't much problem hopping out of the Cloud, of course. You just accelerated and faction you occupied, and aimed for clear space. If you were in a rarefaction. Otherwise you crawled out, or died of old age trying. Raise forced his attention to the viewers. He'd half expected a fleet of Eje ships to be waiting, but evidently they weren't watching this stretch of the Beam just now. Maybe they were satisfied with whatever information they milked out of the captured crews. That, Raise thought glumly, was one blessing -- the subbs they'd seized knew nothing about the missing weapons, nor about Sunner. The intercom crackled. "Raise, as long as there's nothing on the screens, are we going to test that weapon before we go into the Beam? Or do you want to go along it a ways?" Raise pondered morosely. It really didn't matter how far diey went, so long as it wasn't near any traffic or any populated worlds. "Take us about fifty hours toward Sol. You know the kind of place I want." "Sure, Raise." Raise sat watching the image of the Cloud. In there -- crawling wormlike away from Bodega, or possibly about to turn back -- were the ships he needed and the coin metaL He could mentally draw a circle upon the screen, representing the sphere which would include them all. It looked like such a small region on the screen -- yet they were as unreachable, and as stranded for the moment, as if they'd been at the opposite side of the galaxy. As they began to trickle back to Bodega, ltd would send them along the Beam toward Lenare. Meanwhile, there were just fifteen ships available to make a few wild stabs along the way. He could have used fifteen hundred. The chime sounded. They were in the Beam. He wished, now, that he'd asked Lee for a shorter trip than fifty hours. R aise, suited, walked into an airlock. The inner door scraped shut behind him. He stood holding the Eje weapon carefully, hoping his gloved hands wouldn't be too awkward. A pump began to throb, gulping air from the lock. Gradually his suit filled out and stiffened. Now he could no longer hear via the thinning air. The outer door slid open, and the last of the air went out in a rush he could feel. He stepped forward, braced himself. The radtibow slash of the Beauty off astern, was faiiiy broad. One light-year, he'd asked for. The stars he could see were few and distant. Somewhere, far beyond the last fidnt thread hb could see of the foreortened Beahi, was the small cluster called Far End. At six thousand light-yeais, he couldn't expect to see it. Earphones came to life. "Nothing oh the screens or scopes. Raise. We're coming up on the target. It'll pass you level, about two hundred yards out. I can make it farther, if you want." "No," Raise said. "A weapon like this, without even a sight, can't be intended for long ranges." He leaned out to look forward. The target -- a standard Mark One cargo pod -- was a tiny dot ahead, well enough illuminated by light from the Beam. He waited while it grew to a small disk, then showed itself ais a cylinder about as long as wide, with a drive-housing flange around its middle. A Mark One -- about eight feet across -- wouldn't make a very fat target at two hundred yards. "Slow us a little, will you, Lee?" The relative drift of the pod all but vanished. He could see the circle Wsis the hatch. The dot in the middle was a tiny glass porthole. He tried hi thhmb and forefinger against stud ahid friggd: and brought the weapon up t# siit along the spiderwork barrel 'A hell of a poor weapon, unless it fahped out. Carefully, he pressed the 'stud under his thumb. A glow appeared atop the barrel. #b He flinched. Then he saw that, somehow, the glow formed a ringsight! He relaxed his thumb, and the glow vanished; he pressed, and it reappeared. A ghost-image in empty space! He shifted his head, peered through the apparition. He saw the cargo pod, magnified about four times. He hesitated. It still didn't seem to him the weapon would be dangerous to use at two hundred yards. "Well, okay," he muttered, and centered the crosshairs on the pod. The weapon's odd ineritea helped hold the aim. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger. Instandy the pod owed faintly rosy all over and vanished. He jerked up his he thinking he'd simply lost his aun. But the pod was gone! "Lee! Did you -- " "I saw it, Raise! It just appeared! We've got movies, but -- " There was confused talk in Aux Control. "Raise, are you completely clear of the door?" "Huh? Oh -- yes!" Raise moved back as the outer door slammed shut. The inner door opened a crack, and air shot in. Crewmen waited to help him unsuit. When he was free, he thrust the weapon at a crewman. "Get the disguise back on that, will you?" He ran for Aux Control. "Did the pod leave any track? Is it on radar now?" Lee looked at him with a subb's lifeless face. "It just went off everything, Raise. No squiggle on any of the instruments, like there was an explosion. It's just -- gone." Raise said, "Pipe it all into Main Control, will you?" And he turned abruptly. IP I n Main Control, a crewman came once more to join him. They strapped in. He felt odd about the tg -- not surprised and not really exhilarated. Just a little prickly, wondering how soon the Eje would appear. He was sure they would. He glanced at a dial. They'd have to hurry to catch him. Lee was pushing Tramp toward shift-speed, at a good angle relative to the Beam. Suddenly Raise reached for the intercom switch. "Lee, I'm altering program. A hunch." He jabbed at Maincomp's keyboard. The image of the Beam slid sideways across the screen. Stars wheeled. The intercom chimed warning to the crew. There were lurchings, as the artificial gravity strove to match Tramp s lateral surge. Now she was headed away from the Beam at a sharp angle. "I'm a few times and change direction each time and hit the Beam some where else." He sat for a while, watching screens. When a little group of blips appeared on a televiewer, he called out, "Lee, get a telescope and camera on that!" "Got it, Raise. Let me turn up mag... They're oval, all right! Eje ships! God, they came out almost exactly where you fired that thing! Took them about two minutes!" Raise said, "Are we getting any radar scan?" "Not yet. They won't need it, though -- we're still lit enough by the Beam. They've seen us too, by now." Raise said, "Run an analysis and see what velocity they came out with." Lee muttered. A moment later he reported slowly, "They casae out with no velocity. Out of what, jod knows. But thve got it all over us for maneuvering, that's sure. Hit And now four of them are gone. Tm betting they intercept us!" Raise's spine crawled. But he said, "I'm not so sure. I expect, mstead, that those four hopped to the Beam about where we'd try to enter, two in either direction. A wild effort to head us off. I think we've seen one of their limitations. Why did they all materialize at the exact spot? Why didn't some of them come imt between there and the Beam? That would be the optimum chance to make an interception." After a minute Lee said, "I see what you mean. What way d you figure it?" "I think," Raise said, "that they could see just where the weapon was fired -- but they fidn't know where that was relative to the Beam. In other words, they're forced to emerge at the spot, then look around and orient themselves." Lee said, "All right. I'll beHeve that if they don't intercept us. If they do, you'd better come up with some real good theories. And you better do it fast!" But the speed needle was nearing its mark -- light-speed vided by the square root of two. The minutes crawled by, and the chime soundied. Lee's voice came over the intercom suddenly. "I guess your hunch was right." vnI 'i   ; ! V . ' fThe Beam, which had been tedious A ' as usual, was falling away slowly behind. Lenare's sun glittered distantly. Raise, on the edge of his watched a tight trio of radar blips. He'd had them for half a minute -- which meant there'd been more than enough time for his identifying radio call to be heard and answered. Suddenly the receiver crackled. Beam Tramp, this is Kestrel. Nat Glover spealg. I want to board yon Raise stared at the speaker-grill. What had brought Nat Glover out here, almost to the Beam? "Kestrel, were accelerating to meet you." He said for the intercom, "Got that, Lee?" "e. Raise. We're moving." It took long minutes for the ships to draw together and decelerate. Raise  -- still guarding his identity -- did no more talking until he felt the locks couple. Then he went to meet Nat Glover. The lanky man ducked his head through the inner door and stood for a moment looking from subb to subb, until he could pick out Raise. His face was unsmiling, and he didn't offer a hand. What now, Raise thought. "Thanks for being out here, Nat. Let's go to the Control Room." He got Glover seated, made sure the intercom was off and studied Glover's face for a minute. "What is it, Nat?" Nat blurted out, "Did you kill Ernesto Vasquez?" Raise stiffened. He stared silently while his thoughts floundered and finally organized themselves, then he reached for the intercom switch. "Lee. Will you bring in one of those gadgets? And a screwdriver?" Glover, face grim, sat motionless until Lee White arrived. Raise told Lee, "I'm leaving the intercom to Aux Control open so you can listen while you watch your instruments. But chase everybody else out, okay?" Lee looked at him, at Glover, then nodded and left Raise picked up the screwdriver and began removing the weapon's disguise once again. When it was exposi he held the thing in front of Glover. "What does this look like to you?" Glover, face pale, looked from the weapon to Ral and back. He said quietly, "Eje." Raise told him, "Ernesto had six of these -- disguised -- that Sunner pawned with him. He already had reason to be worried, and when I found how to take the disguises off and he saw what they were, he was ready to sell them to me. So maybe I'm responsible if he's dead. It's the first I know about it. Sunner may have done it. Or the Eje may have. If they did, they're probably after me now." He held up a restraining hand as Nat started to say something. "Let me finish." He described the visit to New Eden of the peculiar strangers. "I'm guessing the same bunch may have gone back. But I swear to jrou, Nat, that I didn't kill Vasquez. Now give me what details you have." Glover sighed. "I'm glad as hell you didn't. I don't know many deIF tails. Some small freigjbter landed, killed him and looted his place. The buildings were dynamited. There weren't any nearby witnesses left alive, but from the description the ship could have been this one. I owe you an apology, Raise -- but I could imagine all sorts of things. Ernesto apparently died shooting." Raise demanded, "Do you believe me now?" G lover moistened his lips. "I have to. Because the same peculiar people came to Lenare, asking about Sunner. I thought they were just two brothers with poker-faces, but now I see..." Glover stared at the floor for a moment. "They weren't hostile toward me. Do you think they killed Vasquez?" Raise said, "We have to consider it, don't we?" Glover nodded slowly. "Yes. Especially since I've had another message om Sunner, and he doesn't seem to have anything new on his mind." Glover probed in a pocket and brought out four slender messagebars. "They're not scrambled, but they have to be used together. They came in four insured packets, separately, at different times. Play this one ifet." Raise slipped the bar into a slot in the consde. There was an alerting click from the speaker-grill, then a pause during the time when, ordinarily, the date and origi of the message would be given. Then a medium-pitched, cultured voice said, "I assume that by the time Nat Glover receives this. Raise Bukanan will either be present or will have authorized the transaction previoosl mentioned. I hope I'm not wrcnn in this assumpticm, for if i am I must consider the transaction impossible. "Payment is to be put in a Mark One cargo pod set upon a specified course at a certain time and dace, at a precise speed. The pod is to be equipped with a radio beacon of specified wavelength and wattage, transmitting a one-second pulse once per minute. The ship releasing the pod must leave via the Beam immedidfely. "Obviously any boobytraps or nonsense such as spies or attempts at ambush along the route will end the transaction. "If these terms are sincerely naet, delivery of the goods we hold wiD be made within a reasonable time. I guarantee goods to be in prime condition. "Three other message-pods are being sent separately. When played in exact synchronization, theyH e the specifications here mentioned." There was a brief high-pilcbed sound as Gomp Two scanned the rest of the bar to make sure fheie was no more message, then the bar popped halfway out of the dot. Glover handed Raise the other three bars. Raise pushed each into a dot, then turned to the keyboard and punched studs to put Comp Two m the task of synchronizing the messages. He paused, punched another stud. "Lee, I'm piping this all to you for recording and analysis. See if you can figure put what apparatus Sunner used, will you? And anything else you can." "Sure, Raise." The combined message started. "Go precisely twenty light-years out the Beam from Lenare, and move one-half light-year from the edge of the Beam, on the same vector as Lenare. For closer position, here are star triangulations." There followed a mass of data. Then, "Near that position will be a radio-buoy of the given wavelength. That is to be the starting-point" The conditions went on, in Sunner's smooth voice. At the end. Raise pushed studs to re-run the whole thing, trying to get it in his mind. At the end he said to the intercom, "Does it sound practical to you, Lee?" "It sure does, and foolproof too. along the pod's course, grab it and run." Glover said, "All the same, an ambush could be set up. We could have ships popping out all along the way too." "For what?" Raise said irritably. 'To throw a missile or an energybeam at some flunky? Sunner won't be there. He'll let us worry about whether the payment gets to him safely." He looked at the chron. "We still have four hundred hours. Not much, but if we can get some breaks for a change... What have you heard about Cetus? Nat said, "Thafs a funny thing. She did put into Antietam Station. But it was later than we figured." "When?" Glover named a time. Raise calculated. "It's about right if she made another stop or two somewhere. Is there any word since then?" "No but one of oiyahips have found some, and not be back yet." R aise stood up and jammed his fists into his pockets. 'T doubt it. Cetus would almost certainly be headed straight out from Antietam Station, if she'd already made her other stops near there. She'd be beyond your stretch by now. And that brings us to some bad news. There's been an Eje scare out near the Cloud, and I could only get a few ships. And only a fraction of the coin metal I expected. I guess that leaves you in a jam." Glover made a face. "Bankrupt, if we don't do something fast. But that's not the thing -- how about Kime? Do you have the ransom?" "No. And if I did I wouldn't expect Sunner to let Kime go, once he got the money." Glover stared at him. "What are we going to do, then?" "That's the prize question, Nat. I've been wondering whether I could trade these weapons back to Sunner for Kime. Under our terms. Or whether I have the right to do that." Glover's face slowly turned red, "If I understand you, you mean you might sacrifice your own son. Before I'd do that, I'd call the Eje and make a deal with them. Tell them all we know about Sunner and offer to return their weapons if they help us find him." Raise's feelings boiled over. He grabbed up the Eje weapon, thrust it into Glover's hands. Words piled up like a log-jam behind his labored voice. "Here. I hid four in the Cloud, IF because I thought they'd be safest there. I was going to give you one to smuggle to Earth, however you could -- for Mankind's scientists. Now, you decidel You've admitted the Eje may have killed Vasquez. They've just recently grabbed ships along the Beam, and we don't know what happened to the crews. Here's an Eje artifact -- one of the first any h uman has ever touched, unless you count these damned brown bodies like I'm wearing. Go on. Suit up, go outside and fire the weapon; that'll bring the Eje fast. Then you can tell them how you trust them, and will they please be kind to your own race and will they help you get Raise Bukanan's son back? Go onl" Glover stared at Raise, then down at the weapon. Slowly, he laid the weapon down. "I'm sorry. Raise. I was wrong. We don't have the rigiht to gamble Mankind, do we?" He was silent a while. "What are we going to do about Kime? What are we going to do?" Raise turned to stare at the chron. "I don't know. I want you to extend your search out along the Beam. Cetus may still be whatever faint chance we've got. As for money -- rU make a try at Antietam Station. I gave Vasquez a note against my fund there. If he didn't cash it, there'll be enough to keep you operating for a little while. Ernesto won't miss it now." T ramp already outside the Beam, sped parallel to it toward Antietam Station at one-tenth light speed. The voice on the beacon said, "Hours #, minutes twelve, seconds zero. Mark!" Raise glanced at the chron. Just more than a minute fast, allowing twenty-eight seconds for the beacon's transmission to reach them. He He made no correction. His feelings toward Antietam Station were a little rebellious. A chime announced deceleration. Lee White's voice said, 'T'm sorry I brought us out short. Raise." Raise, annoyed, said, "You did fine." This was no time for irony. Emergence only an hour's run from an exact point was more than good -- it was almost reckless. He turned on a forward viewer. A telescope easily picked up the cluster of ships and larger structures that was the Solcon advanced base just short of the Sparse Regimis. Some of those ships, though he couldn't pick them out yet, would be heavily armed scouts or cruisers of the Patrol. Others would be freighters from various Earth-controlled worlds closer in toward Sol, or from Freehold worlds scattered among them. Bukanan Enterprises had tp deal there, no matter how Raise felt. The vast collection of space warehouses, business offices, banks and such was the only place you could pop out'of the Beam and do any significant amount of business without making the long run to some planet. Antietam itself -- the planet -- was over three hundred important except to support the Station and serve as transfer point to a number of other worlds. A challenge came in: "Ship approaching from Outward. Identify yourself." Raise sighed and reached for a transmitting-switch. "This is Beam Tramp, a Bukanan Enterprises ship. We have financial transactions to handle. No cargo. No fixed armament We don't intend to run out to Antietam." The voice when it came again was colder. That, of course, was because the Traffic Controller knew he was talking to a subb. Beam Tramp, continue present course, then follow blinker to parking spot Stay there and don't initiate your business until you're boarded for inspection." R aise controlled the anger that stirred in him. "Can you ask them to make it quick? We're pressed for time." The voice said impersonally, "FU pass that fact along. Ends." Raise looked at the chron. There wasn't much time to spare, if he were to meet Sunner's schedule. He leaned forward in his seat, peering at the images of ships. He could pick out types now, but nothing that looked like long, wide-flanged Cetus, It would probably be useless an#nvay to find Cetus now -- so far as the immediate situation was concerned. He'd have to make whaf payment he could to Sunner, hoping to temporize. Sunner's demand was pre-emptory, but a good fraction of the ransom and a promise of the rest might keep Kime alive. Certainly, Sunner would be suspicious -- but he'd be that in any case, and he was too intelligent to do anything drastic and irreversible without thinking about it. A point of intense light began blinking. Raise thumbed the intercom. "Got that, Lee?" "Sure. Shall I head straiit for h?" "Yes. It'll be a small Patrol craft. Pull close in case it wants to couple on right away." Tramp slowed and stopped near a small cruiser. Raise waited, the tenseness in his middle getting worse by the minute. Hd had no reason to fear inspection, except for the two disguised Eje weapons, but why an inspection at all? Inspections weren't ueard-of , when some contraband was being hunted, but they were rare. Had the Eje -- conceivably -- demanded that the Patrol help them in their search? Not likely. But why in the hell didn't they hurry? vm I t seemed forever, yet it was less than half an hour before a shuttleboat approached. The radio said, "Request permissiop to couple on." Raise reached jerkily for the transmitter switch. "Number Three Lock. We'll flash a green light." He listened to the sounds of the coupling, started to meet them, stopped. Let them come to him. In a, few minutes he heard an impatient Normal's voice. The Control Room door opened. One of Raise's crew said, "Skipper, this is Lieutenant Fromm." The lieutenant was about thirty; medium height, husky, a little overfed. He wore a pistol, and so did each of the two guardsmen with him. The white uniforms were mussed, as if their wearers were having a busy day. Fromm's face was a little less than friendly. "May I have your name. Captain?" IF Raise hesitated. He certainly didn't want to antagonize the Patrol if he could help it; still... 'Tm soi. Lieutenant. I'll give you an identification coding. I'm a Freeholder, with a confidential listing." The officer didn't like it, but he said, "That's your right. Let's have the code." He turned slightly so the recorder-pickup in his left lapel aimed straight at Raise. When Raise had recited the codenumber, Formm glanced at Maincomp's screen. "I'd like a replay of your log for the last two thousand hours, Captain Confidential." One of the guardsmen chuckled and muttered, "Captain Johnny Subb." Wordlessly, Raise bent over the keyboard and punched studs. Times and places began rolling across the screen. Fromm read them off quietly, mouth near his recorder button. He stumbled a little over NewEden, glancing at Raise in a startled way. When the log was up to the present, he said, "Let's see that New Eden visit again." Raise, glad of his subb face, played it over. Fromm asked, "Can you substantiate those other planet-falls?" "Certainly," Raise said. The fingers of anxiety jabbed at his midriff. Ordinarily, when he went to Bodega, there'd be a falsified record on some open planet, showing a visit. This tim it hadn't been possible to arrange that. If they checked... But Lieutenant Fromm was interested in New Eden. "Do you know Ernesto Vasquez, Captain?" Raise tried to act calm. "I knew him through trade, and freighting translations." Fromm raised his eyebrows. Knewr "Lieutenant, I learned less than a hundred hours ago that Jlquez had been murdered. I can't tell you anything helpful about that. He was alive and well when I saw him." , "What was your business there?" Raise thout frantically. "He'd had Bukanan Enterprises handling goods on consignment -- some kind of natural fiber, I think, with special properties -- and we sold a bunch of it. I went to pay him." "We're an all-subb crew. Lieutenant. The extra time doesn't mean much to us." The officer grunted. "All right. Do you know where your boss is?" "My boss? Mostly I work for a Mr. Glover on Lenare." "I mean Raise Bukanan." "Oh. No, sir. I don't think Mr. Bukanan's near this end of the Beam." Fromm looked satisfied with that. "The C. O. here would like to find him. I suppose they're questioning everyone who did business with Vasquez. Now, I'll have to search your ship." "Certainly." Raise let the lieutenant precede him from the room. The two guardsmen followed behind Raise. Tense as a cat, he led the trio through the, ship. He had to fight the urge to t .to bypass the arsenal. When he showed it to them, Fromm remarked, "You carry quite a few weapons." Raise said, "Sometimes we make planetfall in pretty rough places. And sometimes we hunt our own meat." The lieutenant turned away without touching any of the racked guns. Raise let out his eath and unclenched his fists. Later he didn't dare protest when the officer said 'Tou're clear. But I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to wait a while longer and maintain radio silence. You're the first pper we've found who saw Vasquez recently. The C. O. may want to ask a few more questions." R aise furiously paced Aux Control. Lee White dumped in a seat, watching him. "Raise, we've got almost two hours to spare." 'Two hours!" Raise whirled toward Lee. "If I know the Patrol, it'll be more like ten! Anyway, that's not the worst of it. We're stalled on everything else. I can't make inquiries about Cetus -- what she loed or dropped, and so on -- and I can't radio the bank and get money." He turned to stare glumly at a viewscreen. "What would you say our chances are of making a run for it? We could use some of these parked ships for cover." White peered at him, then gestured at the screen. "With that cruiser standing off there? We'd have to move clear of the other ships to head toward the Beam. We'd get a hole melted in us before we could move a mile! Anyway, Raise, what's the use of keeping that appointment without the money?" . "I don't know. But I've got to keep it! I'm going to Main Control and radio the C. O. If he wants to talk to me, he can talk now!" It took half an hour to get as high as the C. O.'s adjutant, a Colond Paige. He wasn't happy with Raise's demand. "General Nalty isn't on duty. You can't expect him to sit at his desk around the clock, to answer every complaint that comes in." Raise said, "Are you on duty?" "Yes." "Well, then you can talk to me. I've been inspected and found clear, but told to wait for more questioning. I've got urgent business to handle. What are the questions? Ask them, and get it over with!" An exasperated grunt came over the radio. "I haven't the damnedest idea what's involved. Who did you say you are, again?" 'I'm skipper of Beam Tramp. We're a Bukanan Enterprises ship. We landed on New Eden some time before the planet's Freeholder, Ernesto Vasquez, was murdered, and I talked with him. That's what the questions are about." There was an "Oh," of surprise, and a pause. Then, "Let me get the file. It's on the general's desk." A wait. "Hello. I see there's a very new entry here, marked 'ConEdential' I can't discuss that via radio without your permission. Do I have it?" Raise hesitated. Anyone listening might be curious enough to probe. "On two conditions: that we scramble and that you accept the responsibility personally of the confidential knowledge." Raise could hear the other gearing under his breath. Finally, "I'll call the general. He'll radio you within twenty minutes." Raise, feeling savage, sat staring at the chron. IF B ut General Nalty was prompt. His voice was quiet, older than the adjutant's. Beam Trampl General Nalty calling." "General, Fm sorry to make such a fuss. By now, I guess you've talked to your adjutant. In the file on your desk, there's a confidential identity coding. I suggest we use it as a key to set up a radio scramble." "All right," the general said easily, "but if it's agreeable, let's make it video as well." "Surely," Raise said. Looking at him wasn't going to help the general any. There was a short wait, while the Patrol's computers were linked in, then the scrambled circuit came through. General Nalty was a rather slight man; sixty at least, his scalp and face clean-shaven. He wore casual off-duty zipperalls. His sharp dark eyes peered from the screen at Raise. "I've just looked up that confidential identity. I'm very much surprised, Mr. Bukanan. You've kept your secret well." Raise sighed. There were some people who had to know. "It's been necessary. General, there are things I have to do in a hurry. I'm sorry to be demanding about it, but if you want to talk about Ernesto Vasquez can we get on with it?" Nalty smiled. "I'd have been on the air the minute you arrived, if I'd known. Mr. Bukanan, when you talked to him did he give you any hint that he feared for his life?" Something in the general's sharp scrutiny warned Raise he'd better stay as near the truth as he dared. "Well... I'd have to say he was nervous about something. I'd known him quite a while." "And he knew who you were?" Raise hesitated. "Yes." "Fm forced to be curious, Mr. Bukanan, as to why you paid him such an amount of money." Raise stared at the screen. All he could think of was, "What amount of money?". Nalty smiled again. "The personal note you gave him. His wife cashed it here. She and their son arrived so promptly that Fm sure he must have sent them off-planet almost immediately after you left." R aise slumped back into his chair. Finally -- with sincerity -- he managed, "Fm glad they're safe. I hadn't heard." Nalty said, "If you're reluctant to talk because you fear you're a suspect, let me put you at ease. In the first place, we naturally know a great deal about your corporation and its dealings. Murder, and the re-taking of a personal note, don't fit the pattern. Secondly, Mrs. Vasquez and the boy are able to tell us a little. We can pinpoint Beam Tramp's visit, at a time when they were practically alone. You could have used force on him then, if you'd wanted to. You left peacefully. Thirdly, they've told us Vasquez had shady dealings with other people." The general paused to watch Raise, then resumed. "It's obvious from the use of dynamite that whoever killed him was looking for something. Sit in my chair for a minute, Mr. Bukanan. It will save me the trouble of asking a lot of questions." Raise sat silent for a while, mind churning. If the general only knew -- if Raise were to say bluntly, "I have strong reasons for suspecting the Eje may have killed Vasquez, and if you'll come aboard I'll show you," -- what a volcano of activity would erupt at Antietam Station! But he couldn't do anything like that. He couldn't even name Sunner, if he wanted Kime to live. He pulled himself erect in his seat. "General, a man -- an outlaw -- has something that's extremely important to me. I've been trying to find him. That's why I went to New Eden, and that's connected with the payment to Vasquez, and that's why I ve to leave here now. If I could tell you anything, I would, but right now it would sink me. What's the Patrol's interest in this, anyway?" Nalty said quietly, "Why, if Vasquez was handhng contraband, most of it was undoubtedly from Solcon worlds. For that matter, we've had stuff pirated from the Patrol itself. And Mrs. Vasquez has asked us for protection." Raise darted a frantic look at the chron. "General, my crisis comes up in a few hours. You know who I am -- you can hold that over me. I givQ you my word that as soon as things break, if I'm still alive. I'll name at least one man Vasquez was dealing with." Nalty smiled. "And of course that's the man you're after now. Why don't you let me help you? I've handled things discreetly before." "And some indiscreetly," Raise said. "I've got to go now. Are you going to try to stop me?" Nalty said, "I could, you know." Raise reached for the switch. "You'd have to shoot. All you would get would be a hull full of dead Johnny Subbs. Good-by, GeneraL" "Good-by, Johnny Subb, and good luck. I hope you make it back to keep that promise." IX T Wamp was almost ready to emerge from the Beam again. Raise paced Aux Control, trying desperately to think of some gimmick that would force Sunner to give him more time. "The hell of it is," he told Lee White, "we don't know what Sunner knows by now. If he killed Vasquez, he may or may not think the weapons are still on die planet. He may know  have them. If he has spies in the right places, he could know about that personal note of mine." Lee said, "Why would he want to pawn the things there, then go back after them before he got the ransom from us?" Raise stopped and stood, fists jammed into his pockets. "Maybe he got money some place else. Or maybe he's found a hiding place he thinks is secure enough." "Well," Lee said, "what if he didn't kill Vasquez? Somebody did. If he knows about it, he'll be wondering hard." "Of course," Raise said. "Unless he knows about that note. Or he may know the Eje are around, and assume they got their property back. I can't begin to guess what he'd do in that case. Go on trying to collect from us, I guess. Hell, he may not even IF kndW Vasquez is dead! How can I work out any kind of a story that will convince him when I don't know what he knows?" Lee asked "What kind of story did you have in mind?" "I thought I might say the Patrol has all my funds tied up temporarily. Or that the Eje have been following me around. That last, thou might scare him away completely." Raise threw a glance at the chron. "Damn it!" Lee said, "It'll take us a while outside, maybe, to find that radio buoy." Raise shook his head. "We'll come out close, you know that. He picked a stretch we could compute down to the second." "One thing," Lee said, "as soon as we launch the pod, we can get to Nat Glover fast. He may have heard something by now. Anyway, with two, three more ships we mit make a stab at something." Raise stared at him irritably. "The time for all that's gone. What I need right now is some story to convince Sunner I'm not just stalling. If I could have gotten money at Antietam -- " "We've got a little aboard," Lee said. "Sure." Raise went to a seat and threw himself into it, "Little enough to look like an insult. It might make him mad enough to chop a finger off Kime and send it to me. I don't want my son back a piece at a time." "I can see that," Lee said. "What about your other idea? Telling him you've got the weapons and offering to trade them for Kime?" Raise said bitterly, "I've got myself crossed up there too. How can I send a message saying I don't have the money he wants, but I do have the weapons he's missing, but I can't get at them for a couple of thousand hours? If you were Sunner how would you react?" Lee White sighed. "The onlyjhing left, then, is just to offer the trade and pretend you've got all six right in your hands. At least, that'll gain a little time." Raise shot a look at the chron, and got compulsively to his feet. "Before I'll do that I'll go to Sunner myself and talk. I can take the weapon we've got, to convince him. And depending on where he is and various other things, I can play it by ear." White stared at him. "I don't get you. Raise. You mean you'll just put a note in the pod, offering to meet him?" "I mean," Raise said hoarsely, "I'll put myself in the pod. We can put in a full atmosphere, and some extra cannisters and a warmer, and some rations. I can wear a suit and only seal up when they come to get the pod. Whoever comes will be expendable, obviously, and therefore not able to make decisions. When I tell them Sunner will waftt to see me and he'll be damned mad if they don't take me to him, they'll have to do it!" Lee White sat up rigidly. "Raise, you can't think of that! Why, hell -- whoever else is, you're not expendable!" "I'm not? Look at the shape the Corporation's in right now. If I can get Kime back, we'll have to go out to the Cloud and try to salvage what we can. If I don't make it -- well, the piec will have to shift for themselves, And if the Eje bust things wide open none of us will matter anyway," "But Raise -- you couldn't just go and put yourself in his hands!" Raise stared at him in speculation, Tve been thinking that I can do just that, Lee, He doesn't know Raise Bukanan's a subb, remember? And he won't expect any messenger who's important He'll think I im expendable. Just another Johnny Subb with, a message to deliver, and no other information worth the squeezing," He turned to the door. "Let's get to work on that pod!" R aise sat slumped in the pod, A dim glow-bulb was the only illumination. There was artificial gravity -- a twentieth G; a cargo pod needed a little to keep its loads in place. Raise had it directed so the aft end, as the pod now moved, was "down." His sleeping pad was rolled up so it didn't cover the tiny porthole in that end, but there wasn't much diversion in staring back at the Beam. It might as well have been a painting. At the pod's velocity -- a twentieth lit-seed -- it would be a long time before the Beam receded noticeably. He reached for a squeezer and took a sip of broth, more out of boredom than because he wanted it After the first few hours he'd stopped looking out the forwiurd porthole because the few remote stars only reminded him how alone he was. Nevertheless, of course, those two hand-sized portholes were indispensable. Aout them his imprisonment would have been unbearable. The other objects in the pod helped a little. Every few hours he unrolled the sleeping pad and lay down on it, just for the change. Now, and again he picked up the disguised Eje weapon and fondled it, or re-piled his provisions. Another thing that helped surprisingly was the radio beacon. As it sent out its periodic call, it buzzed faintly. He talked to it sometimes and waited for it to buzz in answer. All in all, he was calm except when he got to wondering if Sunner's men would ever come at all. If not -- well, in a thousand hours Lee and Beam Tramp were supposed to try to find him. If the course and speed were accurate enough, and if nothing happened to Lee in the meantime, he might be found. He'd have thought Sunner's move would have been made before now. He'd been in the pod almost fifty hours. There was really no need for the outlaws to wait so long -- closer in, the pod would have deviated less, and been easier to find; and their danger was nil anyway. Maybe the Eje had caught Sunner. He shifted his position. "Damn it. I've been all over that!" He got to his feet, brought his face close to the forward port to peer out. Stars. on the roUed-up pad and listened to the beacon's buzz. What was he going to say when they picked him up? That would be the easiest part What would he say to Sunner, if he ever reached him? The fact was, he hadn't been able to think that through. "Damn it! IE I've had plenty of time to thinkl" He twisted to pick up a cannister, turned the valve and let oxygen hiss out. The sound seemed very loud. Before long, he'd have to do more than valve oxygen. Already his breathing was a littie forced because of the excess carbon dioxide. In the pile of provisions was a small reconditioning pump that would cycle the air throujgh a solution of lime-water. He'd been almost sure, though, he wouldn't have to drift long enou to need that. What was he going' to say to Sunner? Hell; he was never going to get to Sunner. His lungs ached a little from breathing unnecessarily hard. "Got to do something about this air." He bent forward, began to look for the reconditioning pump -- and went rigid. A ' dim shifting light gleamed off the edge ofthe forward porthole. He stared at it for a moment, then reached frantically for the plastic suit's detachable helmet. He fumbled at the sealing-grooves hastily; realized he was being stupid. "Plenty of time!" More calmly, he got the helmet over his head and sealed on. Then he pressed his fingertips on a spot at the waistband. Oxygen hissed from the cannister at the small of his back. He let the pressure build up enough to round out the helmet, then let the valve close. A few breaths of the rich mixture cleared his wits. He stood tensely, looking up while the light grew stronger and shone into the pod so that he had to blink. He could picture a ship, already at nearly matched velocity, I maneuvering to couple end-on. The )ar came. He had to take two quick teps to catch his balance. Then he vaited gloved hands clasped atop his telmet in the gesture of surrender, lie heard air slam into the ship's lock, teq there were clumping sounds, and sonaeone began to work at the fastenof the hatch on that end of the pod. They left the hinge-catch on one side attached, and swung the hatch ide. flight spilled into the pod. He stared up at two men -- standing at right-angles to him, since their gravity was set that way. They stared back. One was big and burly, with blond hair, beard and mustache all cropped half an inch long. The other was, smaller, and wiry, clean-shaven, including his scalp. Both wore zipperalls, gray and not too clean, and carried old-fashioned revolvers on their hips. It was the wiry one who uttered a sudden oath and grabbed for his gun. ' ,i!he big one moved fast and knocked the gun aside. "Hold on!" To liialse he said in a flat voice, "What the hell are you doing here?" Raise spoke loudly so his voice would carry through the helmet. "I have messages for Pank Sunner." ie wiry one snarled, "We don't know any Pank Sunner!" Ralse didn't have to put on any acte. He simply said, "All I know is Raise Bukanan said whoever picked up this pod would take me to Pank Sunner." The wiry one swore again. "Any nioney in that pile of stuff?" "No," Raise said. The big one said, "Let's have the message. I'm Pank Sunner." Raise said woodenly, "I've seen Pank Sunner. That was why Mr. Bukanan picked me." The blond man grinned. "All right, Johnny Subb, maybe you're telling the truth. Climb out of there.' He stood back. Raise climbed out carefully and got to his feet in the lock. "There's a rifle in there that's supposed to prove something to Mr. Sunner. I don't know what." The burly spaceman looked at Raise, then into the pod. "Get it," he said to "the other. Raise watched tensely while they examined the 'rifle.' It didn't seem to mean anything to them. The big one asked, "Anything else in there you need?" "No." The blond man told the other, "Close it up and cut loose and let it drift. It may be bugged some way. I'll take Johnny Subb inside." A fter that the time on the pick-up ship was uneventful. She was a type not too different from Beam Tramp, manned by fifteen very professional thugs -- more than were needed to handle the ship. She had an arsenal in which were locked whatever weapons she carried other than the pistols the crew wore. They treated Raise in various ways, ranging from tolerant contempt (that from the big blond man, who was skipper and who was called Briney) to surly resentment. He slept alone, locked in a small compartment, and ate alone in the galley, washing IF his own dishes. They took his wristwatch of course and didn't let him see any chrons. Most of the ship was off limits to him. Still, he could tell when they they entered and left the Beam. He judged the trip was enough to take them halfway to New Eden, if they were headed outward from Sol. That wasn't much information. He could be off by two hundred light-years, and of course they might be headed any direction away from the Beam once they emerged. The time came when big Briney told him, 'Suit up. We're taking a shuttleboat." Briney and the wiry man, with one other crewman, escorted him. There were four odier ps adrift in lonely space. He didn't get a good look at em until the boat approached one, then he sat staring through the forward porthole. The ship was the huge Cetus. Of course! Given oer ships to run errands, Cetus would be a comfortable, ideal hideout! She needn't make planetfall nor even go near the Beam, and she could move about as Sunner thought prudent. And -- with some equipment -- she'd be a perfectly good lab for studying the Eje weapons! All Sunner was waiting for, probably, was the ransom money. (And -- of course -- the weapons). Raise grinned inwardly. If Sunner didn't know yet that he'd lost them, this visit would be a shock. And if he did know, having one suddenly placed in his hands should jolt him. The amusement didn't last long. Raise suddenly realized that Beam Tramp, Glover's ships, the few from Bodega -- all were on a wild goose chase, looking for Cetus and for hints of a planet where Sunner mighf be hiding out. They weren't gohig to get any recent word of Cetus. Almost certainly, Sunner had pirated her shortly after she left Antietam Station. No doubt he'd had a ren dezvous set up with her. Where did this leave Raise? A little more on his own. It would be fitting, he thouit, if Cetus were named instead Moby Dick. He'd pawned everything to find her. And now that -- unexpectedly -- htfd found her himself, he might not survive the encounter. Suddenly, thou, he had the first glimmering of how he might bargain with Sunner. X S unner, Raise saw, had a clean, orderly, almost luxurious office ed up for himself aboard Cetus. The big desk, with a few books neatly piled atop it, might have belonged to some executive on Earth. Sunner was neat, too. The even shade of his Latin skin suggested regular use of tan-lotion. He was clean-shaven except for two fore-andaft strips of short black hair on his head, in what Raise guessed mit be a current Earth fashion. His white zipperalls were immaculate and fit his slight body well. He wore a scarf of soft white material around his throat (hiding, Raise knew, an ugly knife-scar) secured with a small plain clasp of what might be platinum. On the breast pocket of the zipper, over his heart, were embroidered the initials P. A. S. Just now, the manicured hands held the disguised Eje weapon. They handled it deftly, but with a certain greed. Raise could see in Sunner's face the urge to look inside the disguise, but the pirate controlled it. Slowly he laid the thing on his desk. His dark eyes, fixed on Raise, were intense. His right hand dipped below the desk, and Raise presumed it now held a handgun. A needle-pistol -- that was supposed to be Sunner's preference. The black eyes flicked toward the guard standing behind Raise; the neat head inclined just slightly. The guard left and closed the door behind him. Sunner eyed Raise thoughtfully. "Where did your boss get this?" "I don't know." Raise knew Sunner had recognized the falsework on the weapon, slimmed down as it was. The instant's spasm of the dark face had revealed that. The dark eyes narrowed with anger. "Don't play coy with me, Johnny Subb. What did Bukanan tell ,you? What are you supposed to say to me?"  Raise forced his body to stay relaxed. "There's some gadget inside that , rifle that you're supposed to know about. I've seen it but I don't know what it is. Mr. Bukanan's message is this: he has five more, in a place where he can't get at them for two thousand hours. He's payment. When he gets the others back he'll give you two more. You are :.to hold his son in the meantime. When you have the three, you're to let his son go. Then Mr. Bukanan will give you a complete partnership in the investigation of the things." Sunner looked startled, then laughed tightly. "You must have left out something. That sounds as if he thought I were a complete fool." Raise said, "He offers a lot. He'll equip you with whatever apparatus you want, so that you won't have to run the risks of acquiring it yourself. He'll give you money to operate on. Then, at regular intervals or whenever you like, one of your ships can meet one of his and exchange information. He doesn't care that you'll be getting the best of the exchange. You can use the weapons or whatever you develop from them in any way you wish so long as you don't bother Bukanan ships or property, and he won't bother you. He says Space is big enough for both of you." S unner sat staring at him. Suspicion and greed flickered across the well kept face. "Why," the pirate asked finally, "should I let him have three of the weapons? I have his son. And why does he offer this proposition in the first place? Why didn't, he simply pay the ransom and say nothing about the weapons?" "Because his cash position's tight just now." Raise hesitated. Maybe he could fish a little. "A man named Vasquez demanded a lot of money that Bukanan Enterprises owed him. The talk is that it took everything we had in the way of coin met just now." Sunner's face twitched, then rippled with thought. "So," he said presently, his voice a little shaky. "That's how it happened." He seemed to be talking to himself, for he looked quickly at Raise and shut up. Raise's pulse leaped. He was almost sure Sunner was thinking about the weapons. And there was a trace of guilt in Sunner's manner. Did that mean hed killed Vasquez? Maybe. Sunner's face was guarded now. "What if I refuse? I've got money and ways of getting scientific equipment. And I have one of the weapons, now." Raise took a breath. Sooner or later he'd have to make the bluff. "Mr. Bukanan has five, and much better facilities. I'm to tell you he wants his son back, but not badly enough to risk bankruptcy. They weren't close, and Mr. Bukanan's angry with him for getting himself into this jam. If you don't agree to the partnership, everything's off. He'll hunt you down and kill you, as a matter pf principle. But he won't bargain." Sunner's eyes were deadly. "Did he think I'd bargain with youT "I have no authority to bargain, Mr. Sunner. I'm to deliver the message and do one other chore and report back. That's all." "Oh?" Sunner looked at him for a moment. "What was the other chore?" "You're to show me Kime Bukanan. I sa him on Lenare, so I'll recognize him. If I don't return and report that Kime's all riglht, Mr. Bianan will assume he's dead." Sunner snarled; half raised the hand holding the gun. Then he asked. voice full of fury, "How are you supposed to get back?" Raise tried to sound humble and unimportant. "He assumed you'd deliver me back to Lenare or some Bukanan holding near it." There was a minute when Raise thought Sunner's rage would get the upper hand. Then, abruptly, the pirate had control of it. He smiled. "Was Bukanan on Lenare?" "No, sir. He talked to me out at the Beam." Slowly, Sunner got to his feet. Without t akin g his eyes off Raise for more than a moment at a time, he picked up the weapon, walked to what looked like a spacesuit cabinet, thrust the weapon in, took a tey from inside the cabinet, locked that and slipped the key in his pecket. Then he came to sit down at his desk again, and leaned toward an intercom grill. "Briney." "Yes, sir," came from the intercom. "Bring in that special guest."B riney and his wiry companion herded Kime in, then locked the door and stood just inside it. Raise stood looking at his son, glad his face showed none of the turmoil inside him. Kime had the same kind of bridged nose Raise had had, ce. He couldn't remember whether his own cheekbones had been that prominent, or whether his chin had thrust out so -- but of course Kime was sullen now, and gaunt. As Nat Glover had said, his frame was good, but he needed hard work and solid food to bulk it out. Not that his hands -- clenched now at his sides -- looked #J as if they were total strangers to 'Wbrk. 'Raise's middle felt hollow. Now tiiat he'd seen Kime, it was going to bo very hard to leave, acting calm...He watched Kime's eyes. So far, they'd only glanced at him. They were the only features, really, that reminded him of Kime's mother. There was a dignity in them, as well as the smoldering anger. He was glad :to see both. Sunner was watching Kime blandly..."Johnny Subb here is from your father. He's supposed to report back that you're all in one piece." Kime looked at Ral again, and Raise saw, behind the cool loo the desperate question. Sunner must have en it too. He smiled. "We're not releasing you yet. Your father seems to be more anxious to get Johnny Subb back, to report on some business we're discussing." Kime flushed. "You can go to heU!" Sunner laughed. "Lock him up again." Briney turned to unlock the door stepped out and beckoned to Kime. Kime made a move to obey, then stopped. He looked back at Sunner, then at Raise. There was a hopeless, ness in his eyes now. But the anger yas still there, and it was growing. Raise saw the explosion starting. He took a step forward, said hoarsely, "Np!" B ut Kime was beyond listening. With an inarticulate sound, he hurled himself toward Sunner. Raise leaped to stop him, was too vfar away, saw Sunner's pistol come #B up, heard the sharp, "Spat! Spat!" as the slim high-velocity missiles left it. Kime, hit in bo(h thighs, stumbled, caught the edge of the desk, lunged across it Raise was already around it, diving toward Sunner. A coarser gun -- the wiry guard's -- roared. Kime jerked violently. Briney roared, "You fool!" and flattened the other guard with a blow of a gun-butt. Sunner was confused for just an instant -- maybe he thought Raise was still trying to stop Kime -- and that gave Raise the tioie he needed. He was upon the pirate, jabbing hard at the throat with the knuckles of his left hand. The man reeled back, and Raise grabbed at the needle-gun. Before he could wrest it away he had to swing a fist hard at the temple. Sunner went limp and fell. A slug from Briney's gun slammed into Raise's left shoulder. That didn't matter -- a subb body could take a lot. He spun, getting his finger on the pistol's trigger, brought it up above the level of the desk. A slug tore into his chest, knocking him backward. But he aimed and pulled the trigger, and the needles laced into Briney. The big blond man grunted, clutch at himself and went down. Raise stumbled around the desk. Kime lay face up, chest jerking. There were shouts. Raise staggered to the door, pulled it shut and locked it. The intercom was calling, "Mr. Sunner? Mr. Sunner?" Raise reeled back and leaned on the desk while a spasm of coughing racked him, then went to his knees beside Kime. Kime's was coughing some up. Raise thought dazedly. We're both dying -- but Vm IP a subb; Vll last long enough to see him go. He stared around desperately. There must be a first-aid room aboard. If Sunner could be forced to... He raised himself to stare at Sunner. Sunner looked dead. Someone was pounding at the door. Raise lifted his head -- it felt very heavy now -- to peer that way. Briney and the other guard lay motionless, and the door was holding. Kime's eyes were open now, but dull. 'Tell my father I... idn't want to... be a " He shuddered, and his eyes closed. His breathing was very ragged now. Raise snarled in desperation. If he could shoot his way to... Shoot, Something gnawled at his mind. The Eje weapon! Frantically he struggled to his feet, lurched to Sunner's body and fumbled in pockets for the key, then forced his feet to carry him to the cabinet. He had trouble getting the key in the slot. He finally got the cabinet open, grasped at the weapon. Would the Eje come in time to save Kime's life? He got the weapon out, staggered to the desk with it, laid it down and felt clumsily in his pockets for the screwdriver he had. There was a loud clang. Someone was using a sledgehammer on the door. He ignored that, found the screwdriver, began working with terrible awkwardness at the weapon's disguise. Suddenly he stopped. What if the Eje came in time... but made Kime a subb? He crouched there in agony of indecision. Did he have the right to bring the Eje anyway -- even if be could? If the weapon worked inside Cents, and they got here, they'd know too much. They'd e able to identify Kime, at least. He thought of Annelle Travis, waiting, not knowing. Desperately, he resumed work. The disguise came apart. The sled hammer slammed at the door, which shuddered. The top hinge was off now. He got his hand around the grip, of the alien weapon; concentrated hard to get the trigger guard swtmg clear. He was nearly gone now, he knew. He lifted the weapon as nearly upward as his feeble arms would allow and squeezed the trigger. He knew that the room filled with a rosy glow; then there was something like death. Yet not quite death. Somewhere, within his brain or out, there was a kind of awareness -- a dim primordial awareness that he was, and that was passing. XI S mells were the first real thing he recognized as consciousness slowly returned -- isopropanol, ether, some phenol-like odor, and subtler, more exotic medicine-smells. He pondered fuzzily. Where had he smelled those combined smells before? In the Eje hospital at Far End, of course. He squirmed and tried to fight his way out of the lassitude. His own voice mumbled disjointedly. A throb began in his chest. A voice -- not his #  own -- said something, and a sharps ness tingled in his nostrils, making him swirl dizzily for a moment When the dizziness left, he was calmer and the pains in hh chest were mere twinges. He willed himself awake. Finally, miraculously, the leaden bs that were his eyelid loosened, lightened, rose. "How do you feel, Raise Bukanan?" The voice was not as toneless as a subb's, nor as inflected as a Normal's. The English was only faintly odd -- a touch too precise, as if the speaker had to concentrate on it The face was as Raise had heard them described -- smooth, light-skinned, with very pale gray eyes and traces of paper-white eyebrows. The Eje was seated beside the hospital bed, so Raise couldn't judge his height, but the shoulders were wide and thin from front to back. The mouth was tWnlipped and broad, the ears small and round. The teeth were as even as Raise's. All in all, the face suggested a subtly deformed man who was almost an albino and who suffered from a slight facial paralysis. Something elusive was bothering Raise. He grasped it, suddenly tried to sit up. "Kimel My son!" "Your son is convalescing rapidly." Raise lay back with a tired exhalation and let the new pains in his chest subside. He hesitated, fearful of the answer to his next question. "Is he... a...?" The Eje -- or Eje servant -- smiled a minimal smile. "He is still a Normal. He needed bone surgery and tissue grafts in both thighs and delicate work on his spine and internal organs. He may limp for a year or so." "Oh." Raise closed his eyes and waited for the emotion to let go of his throat. No need to ask about his own body. It was the same one -- the pains where he'd been shot told him that. After a while he asked, "Far End?" "Yes. In these circumstances we thought it necessary to bring you far from Sol. Do not worry about your organization. We have told Nat Glover that you and Kime are safe. And we lent him enough of the metal you use for coin so that he is not bankrupt. He has surrendered one of the tools. What remains now is for you to help us recover the other four." Raise stared at the alien. "Tools? The small smile returned. 'Tools, or weapons, according to the use. They are the devices .with which we keep injured people alive until they can be brought here or to Pluto. We were so using them when Pank Sunner ambushed one of our ships and stole them." R aise lay pondering glumly. He and Kime were captives, apparently, How could he defy them now? Must he try? The same old question. The being beside him must have guessed his thoughts. "Maybe you will trust us when you know more about us. Raise Bukanan. We have decided we must rely upon your discretion. We would have to reveal the truth to a few subbs eventually, in any case. You think of us, you humans, as a race with vast power, who may enslave you or who may continue to be mysterious and benevolent. It is not so." The being watched Raise for a minute. We are not a race. Those of us who built the Beam and the hospitals, and who maintain them, are only a... what is an English word? An echo? A remainder? There are only a few of us -- and that is why you see so little of us. There is another reason, of course. We are not yet ready to let Mankind know how few we are. We have machines, yes, and control great forces. But those are mere tools." The being touched his own chest. "You understand, this is a subb body too." "I supposed it was." "It is. When I first wore it, the color was as yours, and the face and voice were as awkward. I have worn it for more than thirty thousand of your Terran years. For nearly all that time, I was in stasis. Recendy, when our probes disoovered an advanced biped race -- yours I was brought out of stasis, along with the rest, to construct the Beam and the hospitali. Now do you know. Raise Bukanan, how the tool you used operates?" Raise tried to make his thoughts stop whirling. "Stasis... The Eje smiled again. "I will try to put it in simple terms. I have rehearsed so often, in my mind... there is a condition or realm which I will call Non-Time. That which is in it, has no motion, not even of atomic particles nor of energies. Therefore, it does not exist in the Space we call normal. Perhaps it is better to say it does not exist in normal Time. Does that make sense? "The tools are made for trans ferring an object into that condition of Non-Time. They will woric upon any coherent mass, within certain limits of size and consistency. "An object transferr to NonTime is as suddenly prominent there as a nova in your sky. We have only to be near enough to see it and reach it. Yes, there are ways we can move about in Non-Time. That does not constitute time-travel in normal space; you comprehend? And since Time and Space do move, we can not tell instantly where we are when we go to a new object in NonTime." The Eje frowned delicately. "I am too involved. In essence, when something appears in Non-Time -- an injured spaceman, for instance, put there by one of our tools -- we may see it and reach it in time. Emergency treatment can be given while we travel in Non-Time to one of the hospitals. That is how you have survived twice now." Raise struggled with the concepts. "I... tested one of the things on a cargo pod. It seemed to disappear. Then..." "Of course. It went into Non-Time. We were not far away, but by the time we spaced out, you were escaping. Later, when you used the tool aboard Cetus, you put the whole ship into Non-Time, so that nothing moved before we arrived. Distances, by the way, are much shrunken in Non-Time. Do you understand?" "I begin to." Raise lay thinking for a while. "I suppose I may as well just ask bluntly what your intentions are toward my race." IF #Tntentions?" The Eje sighed. "I JLdo not think the word is right. Consider, Raise Bukanan. If you were the last of your race, and you found another very much like it -- but younger -- what would your 'intentions be?" Raise floundered mentally. "Why, I'd teach them, I guess. Guide them, help them, if I could. Or maybe I'd just watch for a while. I guess I wouldn't really have 'intentions.' Is that what you mean?" "That is what I mean. We have hopes. But you are, after all, not our race. Our race is dead. Raise Bukanan. We do not want to go to our own individual deaths feeling that our history, our accomplishments -- even our crimes -- will be forgotten by the universe, will vanish as if we had never existed. You are much like ourselves: your arts, your laughter, your tragedies. We make it possible for you to reach the part of the galaxy where we once lived. You will find our ruins, when you spread farther from Far End." The being sat brooding for a while. "We do not try to offer you wisdom. That, perhaps, you may learn from our history, as you dig it out. We offer only the opportunity. Especially to you subbs we offer that." Raise said, "But you have such science! How could your race -- " "How did it die? A question. Some say we let too many of our weaklings survive, through our medicine. Some say we did not weed out our savages. Perhaps it was neither -- there may be a natural senescence of races. In any. case, we bred ourselves back to the jungle. Not a physical jungle -- a jungle of the soul. It is as well that we became sterile. We had become a blight upon Nature. Perhaps Nature is sentient and acted." A thought stirred in Raise. "Then you few who remain -- you are not sterile because -- and you say that you've changed." The Eje smiled. "When I was brought out of stasis, I began to change. This is the lifeline of a subb. Raise Bukanan. At first you are brown and identical, without facial expression and with poor voices. Gradually, each individual regenerates to his original self. The original body is gone, but the brain remembers. You see me part way along the process which you yourself will undergo. I will be my original self again in fifty years or a hundred. Then I will age and die normally, as if I had never been a subb. I will never be fertile, but not because I have been a subb. There is no fertility in any of us. But you...  Raise sighed. "How long? How long?" "We do not know the time-schedule of a human subK Raise Bukanan. It may be two centuries, your time, before you are once again ready to age and die. In the meantime, you and the others will be the nearest thing to Caretakers the human race has. We will be gone. There are no more of us in stasis -- we've gambled on you. We are tired of the search, of the memories that slept in our brains thirty thousand years and now seem fresh though we know they are not. The few of us who were awake in relays, through the long milleniums, were always gjad to be relieved, and to die. They did not enjoy watching the mins of our ra#e crumble and disappear into the soil. And now  am happy that, soon, human subbs will be handed the responsibility." The being got to his feet. "You need sleep. But first I would like your decision. Will you help us recover the other four tools? We are not ready yet to let Mankind have them; we must watch a little longer. We can find them without your help. But that would involve trouble for your organization, and bloodshed." Raise held out a moment longer. "Did you kill Ernesto Vasquez?" "Of course not. Pank Sunner did." Raise sighed. "I'll help. And cooperate with you in every other way I can." B eam Tramps leaving Lenare's atmosphere, accelerated toward Aux Control, watching the blue-green planet recede. Lee said, "They seemed like a real happy bride and groom. Raise. Too bad you had to attend incognito." Raise said, "It'll be a while before he's ready to hear that his father's a subb. I'm trying to think how to keep it from him a while. He doesn't know exacdy what happened aboard Cetus, but he's thinking hard. Nat told him the subb who came to see Sunner wasn't badly hurt and is out somewhere near Far End." Lee asked, "Has it come to you. Raise, that you'll live to see the two of them get old and die? And their kids, and their kids?" "It's come to me." Raise thought back to the wedding. With what unthinking raptness young people said, "Forever," Lee was sUent a while, with his own thoughts. Then he asked, "Where we going now?" "First, I have to go see General Nalty and explain enough to convince him Pank Sunner killed Ernesto Vasquez. I'm not going to mention the Eje, or any of that, of course. I'll just talk about the kidnapping and contraband. I think I can give him a good story. Then we're going out to the Cloud. We'll be reorganizing the Cluster." "We going to kill the fertility project?" "Not for a while. It would be too hard to explain to the younger subbs. We can shift the emphasis gradually toward speeding up our regeneration. The Eje will help, I think." Lee said, "Whether we can speed it up or not, it's going to be a long wait. If you don't object. I'm going to bring a mirror aboard and look in it every few hours. And as soon as I'm able. I'll stand in front of it and laugh like a fool. I'll laugh myself sick. Raise. Think of it! We'll be able to laugh again!" Raise said, "You'd better bring a dozen mirrors aboard. We'll all be looking in them from now on." He wondered, though, whether, by the time they could lau again, there'd be much laughter left in them. IF IF  F eature Our Man in Fandom shows us some New Fandoms -- and a fribufe fo a afe, grdaf man! Nycon #, meeting and talking with old friend and making new ones I heard of some interesting new developments, ideas and projects now stirring in the ferment of science-fiction faom, which I thought I would pass along to you. The first of these is the fan achievement awards. Now, as you know, every year the annual convention hands out a number of science fiction achievement awards in varying categories, called Hugoes.' These awards, while they differ from one convention to another, because each Worldcon is organized by a different fanclub made up of a different group of people, who often have some new ideas on convention-hosting, generally follow a basic system of awarcg the best science-fiction novel, novelette, short story, prozine, fanzine and professional artist of the past year. (But sometimes somebody comes up with an exciting new idea, like -- The Pongs This year, the Nycon was sponsored by New York City's liveliest fanclub, the Fanoclasts, and the cochaimen were Ted White and Dave Van Amam. Ted came up with some new ideas on the achievement awards: why just give one award to a fan (that is, for the best fanzine for the year)? If you're going to include an award to Best Fanzine to stand beside the award to Best Prozine, then why not have a Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist to set beside comparable professional classifications? Now the professional science-fiction achievement awards are called the Hugo Awards -- named in honor of Hugo Gemsback, the great pioneer of science fiction and founder of the first sf magazine. Why not name the fan achievement awards after some famous fan celebrity? He proposed to call these fan awards Pongs, after the well-known fannish pseudonym used by old-time fan Bob Tucker, who used to write hilarious lampoons of fandom, pretending to be a Chinese fan named Hoy Ping Pong. Well, this idea didn't sit too well with a lot of people in fandom, and the Pongs came in for so much diverse criticism that the convention committee decided to drop the controversial nickname of Pong, and to award the Best Fan Artist and Writer with the traditional Hugoes. Still... it sounded like a good idea to a lot of people, including this writer, and maybe a later convention will revive the notion. Ted's suggestion was influential at least in establishing the idea of giving annual achievement awards for fan writer and artist, and also set the innovation by having a Fan Guest of Honor at this year's Nycon #, namely Bob Tucker himself. So maybe the idea of parallel achievement awards for members of the fan ranks will catch on after all. Pulp Magozine Fandom As always happens at the Worldcon, the most interesting things that happen are the people you meet and talk with. For example, I ran into a fascinating chap named Fred S. Cook from Sylvania, Ohio, who came up and introduced himself to me because he knows I am a great fan and booster of the wonderful old Doc Savage novels originally issued by Street  Smith in the old pulps, now coming back in print from Bantam Books. Fred is a great Doc Savage fan and has begun publishing a new fanzine called Bronze Shadows for enthusiasts of pulp magazine superheroes. (I say he's just "begun" publishing Bronze Shadows,... actually the magazine is going strong, and he gave me a copy of the latest issue, which is the eleventh!) This excellent fanzine is loaded with interesting articles on the golden age of the pulps. For example, in No. #I is a complete checklist of the titles of novels which ran in The Phantom Detective magazine from # to #, when it went under. Also in the same issue is Part # of an exhaustive critical analysis of the Doc Savage novels by Herman S. MacSgar and a rare reprint of a fascinating article on the pulp fiction "master-plot" written by Lester Dent, who created Doc Savage under the pen name of Kenneth Robson. This article was originally written for a writers' magazine back in #, and few Doc Savage fans even knew of its existence until Fred Cook dug it up and reprinted it. Fred hopes the magazine will serve to enlist a sufficient number of oldtime pulp fans, so that he can start a club going. This would make another of those "Little Fandoms Inside Fandom" I talked about in this column back in # and #. IP Weird Horror Fans Unitel Another interesting new movement in fan circles today is the revival of interest in horror fiction which has stimulated all sorts of fanzines and brochures and new clubs into existence. Take for example the excellent and very professional-looking fan publication, Anubis, edited by Paul literature of the macabre and the terrifying, and the magazine is loaded with interesting bits of verse and fiction plus handsome art and items of Lovecraftian scholarship. The latest issue I have seen. No. #, for example, features some sample pages from The Necronomicon, at imaginary book H. P. Lovecraft was always quoting from in his famous horror tales. If the loathsome and the horrific is your meat, you may be interested to learn there is now a club-full of fans interested in the same fare. It's recently been launched under the name of the National Horror and Fanfor short). I met a chap at the tells me the club is now going strong, meets irregularly and has over # ing with enough members so they reach the point they can put on a horror-fans' convention of their own like the Nycon, they could call it "the Necronomi-Con." The Honnes Bok Memorial I One of the most interesting new friends I made at the Worldcon is EmU Petaja of San Francisco, the popular author of a number of exciting science-fantasy adventure novels and one of the closest friends of the late fantasy artist, Hannes Bok. Bok was one of the greatest geniuses of illustration ever to enter the fantasy or science-fiction field, and his death in # was a tremendous loss. Emil and others among Bok's friends have created an organization called The Bokanalia Foundation as a sort of memorial to his magnificent talent; they are striving to keep his memory (and his work) alive through the Foundaition's efforts in publishing and dis tributing his gorgeous drawings and paintings in excellent portfolios of well-printed reproductions. I have a copy of the first folio, and it contains # black and white drawings, size #"xl#", superbly and beautifully produced on heavy stock, just right for framing to hang in your library or den. Folio No. # also offers # full-page drawings, including six which have never been Remembrance of Hannes Bok by Ray Bradbury. The third folio has # more prints of Bok's work, including five new ones never in print in any form... The Bokanalia Foundation also "has (called "Special A") an original color painting of Hannes Bok's, unpublished and previously unknown, reproduced on heavy stock in an edition limited to # copies, and "Special B" which is a magical Mandala, or occult talisman representing "good swirling into evil, evil swirling into good." Bok was something of a mystic and a lifelong adherent to astrology. And coming up soon is a fifty-page Biography of Hannes Bok written by his many friends and illustrated with unpublished detches taken from his letters and notebooks. The Biography will include photographs of Bok pungent excerpts from his letters, and the first bibliography of bis published work ever compiled. This Biography is only one of several exciting new projects the Foundation is currently working on. This is a worthy cause, and a beautiful memorial: to one of the wisest and finest men ever. Contact Emil Petaja, P.O. Box #, San Francisco, California #. Anyone for a Tournament? But the wackiest and most curious of all these new fannish currents, is the rising craze for (of all things!) medieval tournaments. That's right, gang, real tournaments, with jongleurs, costumes, medieval music played on ancient instruments of reasonable facsimiles thereof, featuring samples of food and drink from the Middle Ages and knightly contests of arms and all like that there. I suspect this new Thing sweeping through fandom is a sort of echo or by-blow of the enormous interest in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which seems to have sparked a revival of enthusiasm for medieval art, literature, customs and Medievalism in general. An # rway, fans on the West Coast are going whole hog for Tournaments now, and remember, you read it here first. At this year's Westercon, a regional conference held every July Fourth weekend at a different town in the West (usuy in California), they had a fi-fledged Tournament, by golly, where if you wanted to play music, you had to leave your guitar at home and drum up a lute or something. People went so far as to avoid modem dress, wherever possible, although I believe you could wear glasses if needs thou must. The guiding hand in all this is a group called The Society for Contemporary Anachronisms. They go to vast lengths to serve snacks from the Dark Ages and to make certain nobody is (shudder!) wearing zippers, or other such 'Inventions of the Devil. Actually, the whole thing is for fun and not so deadly serious as I am describing it, and it sounds kind of cute. It might seem to elaborate and contrived and difficult and expensive to catch on all across the fannish world, and perhaps it is, but anyway those of you who plan to attend the # Baycon -- the #th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held over the Labor Day weekend at the Hotel Claremont in the Oakland Berkeley area in California, will have a chance to see just what a real fannish Tournament is all about. The Baycon will convene on Friday, August #th, and will go on its merry way until at least Monday, September #nd, and on Monday afternoon, at #:# P.M., right after the usual, traditional Auction, the Medieval Tournament will be held under the stem hand of Dave ThewIF lis. Tournament Master, with live music furnished by the Concertium del Arte. All participants are asked to wear medieval garments. There will be broadsword duels, fencing matches, and the gore of combat will stain the hotel's greensward with reeking crimson (well, not really, but it sounds better that way ... actually. these are mock duels in slow-motion.) The Baycon invites you to come armed to defend your honor and to fight for your lady's favor. Doubtless there will be prizes given to various categories such as most convincing and authentic costume, etc. So, remember, if you're coming to the Baycon in #, don't leave IF Is Science-Fictions Favorite Magazine Winner of the "Hugo" Second Straight Year! Coming next month --  leng-awwfed novel of a universe where stars and men are brothers -- and a strange new Something hates them bothi by Frederik Pohl by Samuel R. Delany Complete Interplanetary Novelette by A. Bertrom Chandler All in the big June IF -- reserve your copy today! If was o prison worlds but you could get to like if. You could even gef so you hafed fo leave! R ight there on his right shoulder, job approximately # light-years relike a general, Orion wears a moved from Earth, with a surface star. (He wears another in his left temperature of around # degrees armpit; but, for the sake of wholeFahrenheit; and if you'd looked closesome similies, forget it.) ly, through one of those little glass Magnitude # as seen from the tents, you'd have seen that there was Earth,with an absolute magnitude some titanium oxide present.#, it was red and variable and a It must have been with a certain supergiant of an insignia; a class M pride that General Orion wore the thing, because it had left the main sequence so long ago and because it was such a very, very big star, and because the nodlitary mind is like that. Betelguese, that's the name of the star. Now, once upon a time, circling at a great distance about that monstrous red pride of Orion, moving through a year much longer than a human lifetime, there was a dirty, dead hunk of rock that hardly anyone cared to dignify to the extent of calling it a world. Hardly anyone, I say. Governments move and think in strange ways, though. Take Earth for an example... It was decided whenever they don't want to blame a particular person big organizations tend to get all objective and throw "it" around like mad -- it was decided that because of the shortage of useful worlds, maybe that hunk of rock could be made to pay off somehow. So they got in touch with Francis Sandow and asked him if it could be done, and he told them, "Yes." Then they asked him how much it would cost, and he told them that too, and they threw up their hands, then reached to close their briefcases. But, aside from being the only human worldscraper in the business, Sandow did not become one of the wealthiest men around because of inheritance or luck. He made them a proposal, and they bought it, and that's how Dismal was born. N ow let me tell you about Dismal, the only habitable world in the Betelgeuse system. A scant improvement over the baie hunk of rock, that's Dismal. Sandow forced an atmosphere upon it, against its dead will, an atmosphere full of ammonia and methane. Then he did brightening things to it, involving hydrogen and carbon; and the storms began. He had a way of accelerating things, and Earth's physir cists warned him that if he di't watch it, he'd have an asteroid belt on his hands. He told them, I understand, that if that happened, hed put them back together again and start over -- but that it wouldn't happen. He was right of course. When the storms subsided, he had seas. Then he stoked the world's interior, and amidst cataclysms he shaped the land masses. He did various things to the land and the seas, purged the atmosphere, turned off the Krakatoas, calmed the earthquakes. Then he imported and nntated plants and animals that grew and bred like mad, gave them a few years, tampered again with the atmosphere, gave them a few more, tampered again, and so on -- maybe a dozen times. Then he set about screwing up the weather. Then one day, he took some officials down to the surface of the world, whipped off his oxygen helmet, raised an umbrella above him, took a deep breath and said, "This is good. Pay me," before he started coughing. And they agreed that it was good, and this diing was done, and the government was happy for a time. So was Sandow. Why was everybody happy, for a time? Because Sandow had made thein a meaa sonofabitch of a world, whicb Was what they'd both wanted, for vous reasons, that's why. Why only for a time? There's the rub, as you'll see by and by. On most habitable worlds, there are some places that are somewhat pleasant. There are some small islands of relief from bitter winters, stifling summers, hurricanes, hail, tidal waves, terrific electrical storms, mosquitos, mud, ice, and all the rest of those little things that have prompted philosophers to concede that life is not without a certain measure of misery. Not so Dismal. You'd hardly ever see Betelgeuse, beckuse of the cloud cover; and when you did see it you'd wish you didn't, because of the heat. Deserts, icefields knd jungles, perpetual storms, temperature extremes and bad winds -- you faced various combinations of these wherever you went on Dismal, 'Which is the reason for its name. There was no island of relief, no that was pleasant. had Earth hired Sandow to create this hell? Well, criminals must be rehabilitated; panted. But there has always been a certain punitive tenor to the thing, also. A convicted felon is presently granted a certain measure of distasul experience along with his therapy, to make it stick -- I guess -- to the hide as well as the psyche. D ismal was a prison world. Five years was the maximum sentence on Dismal. Mine was three. DeMte everything I've just said, you could get used to the place. I mean, the housing was good -- air-conditioned or well insulated and heated, as necessary -- and you were free to come and go as you would; you were welcome to bring your family along, or acquire one; and you could even make money. There were plenty jobs available, and there were stores, theaters, churches and just about anything else you could find on any other world, though a lot sturdier in structure and often even underground. Or you could just sit around and brood if you wanted. You'd still be fed. The only difference between Dismal and any other world was that you couldn't leave until your sentence was up. There were approximately three hundred thousand persons on the entire planet, of which probably ninety-seven percent were prisoners and their families. I didn't have a family, but that's beside the point. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know. I was part of one once. There was a garden where I worked, all alone except for the robots. It was half underwater all the time and all underwater half the time. It was down in a valley, high trees on the crests of the hills above, and I lived there in a shiny watertight quonset with a small lab and a computer, and I'd go out barefoot and in shorts or in underwater gear, depending on the time, and I'd random harvest my crops or reseed the garden, and I hated it at first. In the morning it would sometimes look as if the world had gone away and I was adrift in Limbo. Then the emptiness would resolve itself into simple fog, then into reptiles of mist which would slither away and leave me with another day. Like I IF said, I hated it at first; but like I also said, you could get used to the place. I did, maybe because I got interested in my project. That's why I diii't give a damn about the cry, "Iron!" when I heard it, partly. I had a project. Earth couldn't -- strike that -- wouldn't pay Sandow's rates when it came to building them a world miserable enough to serve either as a prison or a basic training site for the military. So Sandow made his proposal, and that was what decided the destiny of Dismal. He gave them a cut rate and guaranteed plenty of therapeutic employment. He controlled so many of the industries, you see. Laboratories are all right, I guess, for just simply testing equipment. You get all sorts of interesting figures concerning stress limits, temperature resistance, things like that. Then you turn a product loose in the field, and something you hadn't thought to test for goes wrong. I guess Sandow had had this happen to him lots of times, which is why he'd decided to pick up a piece of the field and add it to his lab facilities. Dismal, all full of vicissitudes, was the testing ground for countless things. Some guys just drove vehicles back and forth through different climate belts, listing everything that went wrong. All the fancy, sturdy dwellings I mentioned were testitems also, and their counterparts will doubtless one day spring up on other worlds. You name it, and somebody was living with it on Dismal. Mine was food. A nd one day there came the ery, "Iron!" I ignored it, of coufse. I'd heard the rumors, back before I'd asked to serve out my sentence on Dismal, even. My sentence had been up almest a year before, but I'd stayed on. I couM leave any time I wanted, but I dn't There h been something I'd wanted to prove, I guess, and then Td gotten wrapped up in the project. Francis Sandow had been testing lots of things on Dismal, but sc far as I was concerned the most interesting was a by-product of the local ecology. There was something peculiar to my valley, something that made rice grow so fast you. could see it growing. In the hier, dikr places, it did the same with other grains. Just in my valley, thouf Sandow himself didn't know what it was, and the project for which Td volunteered was one designed to find out. If there was anything odBile that could be ready for harvest two weeks after it was planted, it represented such a boon to the growfai population of the galaxy that its secret was worth almost any price. Sel went armed against the serpents and the water-tigers; I harvested, analyzed, fed the computer. The facts aceuwolated dowly, over the years, as I tested first one thing, then another; and I was within a couple harvests of having an answer, I feh, when someone yelled, "Iron!" Nuts! I'd half-dismissed what it was that I'd wanted to prove as unprovahte, and all I wanted to do at that moment of time was to come up with the final answer, turn it over to the universe and say, "Here I've done something to pay back for what I've tatken. Let's it square, huh?" On one of the infrequent occasions when I went into the town, that was all they were talking about thb iron. I didn't like them too much -- people, I mean -- which was why I'd initially requested a project where I could work alone. They were speculating as to whether there'd be an exodus, and a couple comments wefe made about people like me being able to leave whenever they wanted. I didn't answer them, of course. My therapist, who hadn't wanted me to take a job off by myself, all alone, also didn't want me being belligerant and argumentative, and I'd followed her advice. Once my sentence was up. I stopped seeing her. I Was surprised therefore, when the visitor-bell rang and I opened the door and she almost fell in, a fortymile wind at her back andwet machine-gun fire from the heavens strafing her, to boot. # #Qusan!... Come in," I said.  "I guess I already am," she said, and I closed the door behind her. "Let me hang your stuff up." "Thanks," and I helped her out of a thing that felt like a dead eel and hung it on a peg in the hallway. "Would you care for a cup of coffee?" "Yes." She followed me into the lab, which also doubles as a kitchen. "Do you listen to your radio?" she asked, as I presented her with a cup. "No. It went out on me around a month ago, and I never bothered fixing it." " "Well, it's official," she said. I studied her wet red bangs and gray eyes beneath matching brows and remembered what she'd told me about transference back when I was her patient. "I'm still transferring," I said, to see her blush behind the freckles; and then, "when?" "Beginning the day after tomorrow," she said, losing the blush rapidly. "They're rushing ships from all over." "I see." "... So I thought you'd better know. The sooner you register at the port, the earlier the passage you'll probably be assigned." I sipped my coffee. "Thanks, Any idea how long?" "Two to six weeks is the estimate." " 'Rough guess' is what you mean." "Yes." "Where're they taking everybody?" "Local pokeys on thirty-two different worlds, for the time being. Of course, this wouldn't apply to you." I chuckled. "What's funny?" "Life," I said. "I'U bet Earth is mad at Sandow." "They're suing him for breach of contract. He'd warrantied the world, you know." "I doubt this would be covered by the warranty. How could it?" She shrugged, then sipped her coffee. "I don't know. All I know is what I hear. You'd better close up shop and go register, if you want to get out early." "I don't," I said. "I'm getting near IF to an answer. I'm going to finish the project I hope. Six weeks might do it" Her eyes widened, and she lowered the cup. 'That's ridiculous!" she said. "What good will it be if you're dead and nobody knows the answer you find?" "I'll make it" I said, returning in my mind to the point I had one time wanted to prove. "I think I'll make it?" She stood. "You get down there and register!" "That's very direct therapy, isn't it?" "I wished you'd stayed in therapy." "I'm sane and stable now," I said. "Maybe so. But if I have to say you're not to get you probated and shipped off-world, I will!" I hit a button on the box on the table, waited perhaps three seconds, hit another. "... to say you're not, to get you probated and shipped off-world, I will!" said the shrill, recorded voice behind the speaker. "Thanks," I said. 'Try it." She sat down again. "Okay, you win. But what are you trying to prove?" I shrugged and drank coffee. "That everybody's wrong but me," I said, after a time. "It shouldn't matter," she said, "and if you were a mature adult it wouldn't matter, either way. Alsoj I think youYe wrong." "Get o" I said softly. "I've listed to your addescent fantasies, over and over," she said. "I know you. I'm beginning to think you've got an unnatural death-wish as well as that unresolved family proln lem we -- " I laughed, because it was the only alternative to saying, "Get out" again, in a louder voice. "Okay," I said. "I'll agree with anything you say about me, but I won't do anything you tell me to do. So consider it a moral victory or something." "When the time comes, yen'! run." "Sure." She returned to her coffee. "You're really getting near to an answer?" she finally said. "Yes, I really am." "I'm sorry that it had to happen, at just this time." "I'm not," I said. She looked about the lab, then out through the quartz windows at the slushy field beyond. "Hew can you be happy out here, all alone?" "I'm not," I said, "But it's better than being in town." She shook her head, and I watched her hair. "You're wrong. They don't care as much as you think Aey do." I filled my pipe and lit it "Marry me," I said softly, "and I'll build you a palace, and I'll buy you a dress for every day of the year -- no matter how long the years are in whatever system we pick." She smiled then. "You mean that." "Yes." "Yet you stole, you... " "Will you?" 'No, Thanks. You knew Fd say that." "Yes." Wc finished our coffee, and I saw her to the door and didn't try to kiss her. Hell, I had a pipe in my mouthy and that's what it was there for. I killed a forty-three foot water snake that afternoon, who had thought the shiny instrument I was carrying in my left hand looked awfully appetizing, as well as my left hand and the arm attached to it and the rest of me. I put three splints into him from my dart gun, and he died, thrashing around too much, so that he ruined some important things I had growing. The robots kept right on about their business, and so did I, after that. I measured him later, which is how I know he was a fortythree-footer. Robots are nice to work with. They mind their own business, and they never have anything to say. I fixed the radio that night, but they were worried about iron on all frequencies, so I turned it off and smoked my pipe. If she had said ye you know, I would have done it. In the week that followed, I learned that Sandow was diverting all of his commercial vessels in the area to aid in the evacuation, and he'd sent for others from further away. I could have guessed that without hearing it. I could guess what they were saying about Sandow, the same things they always say about Sandow: here is a man who has lived so long that he's afraid of his own shadow. Here is one of the wealthiest men in the galaxy, a paranoid, an hypochondriac, holed-up on a fortress world all his own, going out only after taking the most elaborate precautions -- rich and powerful and a coward. He is talented beyond his own kind. God-like, he can build worlds and feature them and populate them as he would. But there is really only one thing that he loves: the life of Francis Sandow. Statistics tell him that he should have died long ago, and he burns incense before the shrine of statistics. I guess all legends have unshined shoes. Too bad, they say that once he was quite a man. And that's what they say whenever his name comes up. T he evacuation was methodical and impressive. At the end of two people on Dismal. Then the big ships began to arrive, and at the end of the third week there were a hundredfifty thousand remaining. The rest of the big vessels showed up then, and some of the first ones made it back for a second load. By the middle of the fourth week, there were seventyfive thousand, and by the end of it, there was hardly anybody left. Vehicles stood empty in the streets, tools lay where they had been dropped. Abandoned projects hummed and rumbled in the demess. The doors of all the shops were unlocked and merchandise still lay upon the counters, filled the shelves. The local fauna grew restless, and I found myself shooting at something every day. Vehicle after vehicle tore at the air and sunk within the cloud-cover, transporting the waiting people to the big unseen vessels that circled the world. IF Homes stood abandoned the remains of meals still upon their tables. All the churches had been hastily deconsecrated and their relics shipped ofwoiid. We sampled day and night, the robots and I, and I analyzed and drank coffee and fed the data to the Computer and waited for it to give me the answer, but it didn't. It always seemed to need just another scintilla of information. Maybe I was crazy. My time was, technically, borrowed. But to be so close and then to see the whole thing go up in flames -- it was worth the gamble. After all, it would take years to duplicate the setup I had there, assuming it could be duplicated. The valley was, somehow, a freak, an accidental place that had evedution compressed into a decade or so by a science I couldn't even begin to understand. I worked and i waited. The visitor-bell rang. It wasn't raining this time, in fact the cloud-cover showed signs of breaking up for the first time in months. But she blew in as though there was a storm at her back again, anyway. #Xrou've got to get out," she Jl said. "It's imminent! Any second now it could -- " I slapped her. She covered her face and stood there and shook for a minute. "Okay, I was hysterical," she said, "but it's true." "I realized that the first time you told me. Why are you still around?" "Don't you know, damn you?" "Say it," I said, listening attentively. "Because of you, of course! Come away!' Now!" "I've almost got it," I said. 'Tonight or tomorrow, possibly. I'm too close now to give up." "You asked me to marry you," she said. "All right, I will -- if you'll grab your toothbrush right now and get out of here." "Maybe a week ago I would have said yes. No, now, though." "The last ships are leaving. There are less than a hundred people on Dismal lit now, and they'll be gone before sundown. How will you get away after that, even if you decide to go?" "I won't be forgotten," I said. "No, that's true." She smiled, slightly, crookedly. "The last vessel will run a last-minute check. Their computer will match the list of the evacuees with the Dismal Directory. Your name will show up, and they'll send a special search vessel down, just for yon. That'll make you feel important, won't it? Really wanted. Then the haul you away, whether you're ready or not, and thafU be it." "By then I might have the answer." "And if not?" "We'U see." I handed her my handerchief then and kissed her when she least expected it -- while she was blowing her nose -- which made her stamp her foot and say an unladylike word. Then, "Okay. Til stay with you until they come for you," she said. "Somebody's got to look after you until a guardian can be appointed." "I've got to check some seedlings now," I said. "Excuse me," and I dow and up into the burning heavpulled on my hip boots and went out ens. the back-way, strapping on my dart "Iron," she said, and there were gun as I went. tears on her cheeks. I shot two snakes and a water-tiger Iron. Well, it's something you can't -- two beasts before and one after just laugh off. You can't make it go the seedlings. The clouds fell apart away by ignoring it. It only goes while I was out there, and pieces of away after its own fashion, bloody Betelgeuse began to show among them. The robots bore the carcasses away, and I didn't stop to measure them this time. Susan watched me in the lab, keeping silent for almost an entire hour, until I told her, "Perhaps tomorrow's sample..." She looked .out through the winF or ages upon ages, Orion's insignia had burned hydrogen in its interior, convertingit to helium, accumulating that helium. After a time the helium core began to contract, and the helium nuclei fused, formed carbon, produced the extra energy Orion had wanted to keep his uniform looking snappy. Then, to keep up a good front when that trick began to slip, he built up oxygen and neon from the carbon, increasing the temperature of the core. Afraid that would fail him, he moved on to magnesium and silicon. Then iron. Certain spectroscopy techniques had let us see what was going on at the center. General Orion had used up aU his tricks but one. Now he hd no recourse but to convert the iron back into helium by drawing upon the gravitational field of his star. This would require a rather drastic and rapid shrinking process. It would give him a blaze of glory all right, and then a white dwarf of an insignia to wear forevermore. Two hundred seventy years later the nova would become visible on Earth, and he'd still look pretty good for a little while, which I guess meant something. The military mind is funny that .way. "Iron," I repeated. They came for me the following morning, two of them, but I wasn't ready to go yet. They set their ship down on the hill to the north of me and disembarked. They wore deepspace gear, and the first one bore a rifle. The man behind him carried a "sniffer," a machine that can track a man down on the basis of his personal body-chemistry. It was effective for a range of about a mile. It indicated the direction of the quonset, because I was between them and it. I lowered my binoculars and waited. I drew my splinter gun. Susan thought I was in the garden. Well, I had been. But the minute that thing came down and settled between the blaze and the mists, I headed toward it. I took cover at the end of the field and waited. I had my gear with me, in expectation of just such a visit. See, the B.O. machine can't sniff you out under the water. They must have slowed when they lost the scent, but eventually I saw their shadows pass above me. I surfaced, there in the canal, pushed back my mask, drew a be and said, "Stop! Drop the gun or I'll shoot!" The man with the rifle turned quickly, raising it, and I shot him in the arm. # J warned you," I said, as the rifle fell to the trail and he clutched at his arm. "Now kick it over the edge into the water!" "Mister, you've got tb get out of here!" he said. "Betelguese could blow any minute I We came to get you!" "I know it. I'm not ready to go." "You won't be safe till you're in hyperspace." "I know that, too. Thanks for the advice, but I'm not taking it. Kick that damn rifle into the water! Now!" He did. "Okay, that's better. If you're so hot on takiifg someone back with you, there's a girl named Susan Lennert down in the quonset. Her you can push around. Go get her and take her away with you. Forget about me." The man holding his arm looked to the other who nodded. "She's on the list," he said. "What's wrong with you, mister?" the first one asked. "We're trying to save your life." "I know it, I appreciate it. Don't bother." "Why?" "That's my business. You'd better get moving." I gestured toward Betelguese with the barrel of my pistoL The second man licked his Ups, and the first one nodded. Then they turned and headed toward the quonset. I followed all the way, since they were now unarmed and the garden pests weren't She must have put up a fuss, because they had to drag her off, between them. I stayed out of sight, but I covered them all the way back to the ship and watched until it lifted off and vanished in the bright sky. Then I went inside, gathered up .the records, changed my clothes, went back outside and waited. Were my eyes playing tricks on me, or did Betelgeuse flicker for just a second Perhaps it was an atmospheric disturbance... A water-tiger broke the surface and cut a furrow straight toward me, where I stood upon the trail. I shot it, and a snake appeared from somewhere and began eating it. Then two more snakes showed up, and there was a fight. I had to shoot one of them. Betelguese seemed to brighten above me, but apprehension could account for that seeming. I stood right there and waited. Now my point would either be proved or disproved, once and for all time, so far as I was concerned; and, either way. I'd rest afterwards. It wasn't until, much later that afternoon, as I drew bead upon a rearing water snake and heard his voice say, "Hold your fire," and I did, that I realized just how petty I might have been. The snake slowly lowered its great bulk and slithered past me. I didn't turn. I couldn't It was so long and kept slithering by, and I kept wondering, but I couldn't turn around. Then a hand fell upon my shoulder, and I had to; and there he was, and I felt about three inches tall as I stood there before him. The snake kept rubbing up against his boots and turning to do it again. CC T Tetio," I said, and, 'Tm sorry." Xx He was smoking a dgar and was maybe five feet eight inches tall, with nondescript hair and dark eyes, when I finally brout myself to look into them. I'd almost forgotIF ten. It had been so long. I could never forget his voice, though. "Don't be sorry. There's no need. You had to prove something." "Yes. She was rit, thou -- : " "Have you proven it?" "Yes. You're not what they say you are, and you came here for one reason -- me." "That's rit" T shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have expected it of you. I had to know, though, I just had to -- but I shouldn't have." "Of course you should. Maybe I needed it, too, to prove it to myself, as much as you needed to see it. There are some things that should mean more than life to a man. Did you find what you were looking for in your garden?" "Days ago, sir." "'Sir' isn't what you used to call me." 'T know..." "You had to see how much Francis Sandow cared for his son. Okay, I spit on Betelguese. I blow smoke rings bade at it. Now I'm going to leave it The Model T is parked on the other side of the hill. Come on, we're going to make it" "H know that, Dad." "Thanks." I picked up my luggage. "I met a nice girl I'd like to tell you about..." I said, and I did, while we walked. And the snake followed after, and he wouldn't turn it away. He brought it aboard, its bulk coiled about the cabin, and he took it along, out of that lopsided Eden. I'll never forget Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-play versions of Christmas carols and roimds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp #I Hudson Street New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name Address Gty  State Zip Code... ... fOffer good in U, S. jL Only) IF  Short Story Past Touch the Sky Mountain Vve driven this road a hundred times -- but why did you put this whole new country around if? #Tmagine if you will, or if you I can, a world in which Marco Polo did not discover the New World. Oh, myl You still don't understand; well, let me explain further. "First, my Christian name is Som-, merfield, John (the Chinese call me by a different name, but to you, apparently, that is just a number of meaniness syllables). Pm a merchant in trinkets. You know, beads, diamonds, things of that sort Anyway, about one month ago, I decid to go on a trip down the new Straightas-an-Arrow Roadway to Standish just across the British border.(Why, yes, that's it On that big river where it meets the smaller one from the east. I see you have them labeled "Ohio" and "Miss Sippi"). I was going to combine business with pleasure, as my sales representative there is a dunce, especially to handle the Royal contract upon which we are bidding. The pleasure was for my wives, as Numbers Four and Twelve had been pestering me about a vacation since a month after Twelve's honeymoon. I wouldn't have given in to Four but Twelve -- yes, that's her, over there by that fellow in the blue uniform and big eyes -- is still fairly new, and I was in a good humor. Yesterday we all bundled into the Chang Wagon and off we went. "Oh, yes, I'm terribly sorry. My home office is, of course, in Bay-ofFires... Where? Oh, on the map... Now let me see.    Ah, yes, here it is. You have it labeled Son Deego. Now where was I? Yes, well, once we were past the Touchthe-Sky Mountains, everything went smoothly. I am, as you can see, unfortunately of British stock, as you are yourselves, although I am now proudly a full citizen of the Empire (why, Chinese, of course!). These features naturally lead to occasional stops and inspections by army units. But they soon let us continue, after seeing my papers... including some of the folded red ones not in the official packet. After all, one must occasionally grease the wheels, and I am a businessman. "Now here, about where this map is marked Son Anthano, the first problems arose. I was driving, naturally, but it couldn't have been more than an hour since the girls onto the roof, so I couldn't have been very tired. Anyway, I suddenly noticed my vision blur for a moment, and then it cleared. But everything had changed. "The Emperor's packed earth and granite road was no more. Instead we were traveling at an outrageous speed down a hard cement strip with painted lines on it. All the toiling An IE First In each tssoe It brings you a flitl ilory by o writer never publlihed fai tdence ficHon before. Thb month's debut Is by Barry Alan Weissman, a young Californian, who Is a student and o member of the Los Angeles Science Redon Society. The LA.S.F.S. Is one of the oldest eidsN Ing sf clufo Ih the world, and one of Hs most cherished traditions Is a celebration dinner given for each member who succeeds in selling o sclence-flcHon story to a professional magazine. Last previous LA.S.F.S. member to get the dinner was Larry Niven. coolies, and their green fields, had surprisingly been suddenly replaced by brown dirt and brush. Both I and the girls were astonished. It was at this point that that fellow over there, the one in blue -- " (Let the record indicate that the Defendant is pointing to Officer D'Connell,) -- came by on his little biwheel and literally forced us over to the side of the road. #Tespite his rudeness, I was gojlJ ing to ask him to join us for tea, for I was anxious for information to explain my strange surroundings. But he didn't give me a chance. '"Where do you think you're going, Buddy?' he rudely inquired, 'to a fire?' I immediately replied that I had not been informed of the calamity. Thinking that it must have been this fire which had destroyed the surrounding countryside, and that it must still be raging up ahead, I inquired of him if I should make a detour, or if the assistance of myself and my wives might be required or helpful at the front. "'Wives?' he asked, and then I think he noticed them for the first time. His eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped in quite a pronounced manner. Then he began to write in this little notebook which he had removed from his shirt pocket. He spoke to himself as he did this. 'Speeding -- a hundred an' fifty,' and then scribbled something; and then he mumbled 'Driving without registration and -- ' he turned to me with -- 'you got a license?' "I replied by displaying the green Pass-through-All issued personally to me by the Emperor's Hand itself. But the fellow merely smiled and turned back to his notebook. 'No License.' And then, 'driving an experimental vehicle on a public highway, and... bigamy?' I nodded, thing that he realiz my station, and I added, smiling, 'No, polygamy.' Then coming closer, he looked in the window once more, smiling and nodding, 'indecent exposure,' as he continued writing. This last comment rather riled me because I have always prided my wives as the bestdressed in Bay-of-Fires -- businesswise, you know. But I maintained my temper. "He finished his writing with a flourish and then said, 'I should put down "Coming out without a keeper," but then they'd think that I was crazy. He then turned and walked back to his biwheel, removed a plastic doohicky attached by a wire cord to the vehicle, and talked to it for a time. After moving the biwheel off the road, he returned to me saying, 'Move over, Pop. I'll drive you in.' I thanked trim for the courtesy, and slid over. He sat down, turned the magnetokey and started off -- backwards. By the time he recovered sufficiently to stop my car, we were ten feet off the road and hub deep in dirt. The Changs, you know, make up for their speed and roominess by their added weight, and mine was well loaded. Number Seven ended up on my lap, and Number Ten was holding onto my neck in a most uncomfortable manner. I'm afraid I lost my temper then. An Oriental wouldn't have. I'm sure, but I am still a Caucasian and I have their weaknesses -- and at this point my White patience reached its limit. "I'm afraid that I threw him physically from my car. He landed near his own vehicle, shook his head and then smiled again. He again renaoved the notebook from his pocket and said as he scribbled, 'assaulting an officer. # T meanwhile, got back into my A vehicle and had Number Five, who always acted as my secretary on these trips, take a letter which I dictated to the local Hand. I was too involved in this to notice what that rude fellow did for the next few minutes. "Eventually, others in uniform like his arrived and offered us transportation, which I gratefully accepted. Obviously to make up for their companion's rudeness, they prMnised to have my car repaired and returned to me. They then kindly gave us food and lodging, but refused us communication with the local Hand. Although IF they did promise to post my letter. "Yes, sir. They promised that you would take me to the Hand if I told you my story. Why, I assure you, sir, it is the absolute truth to the best of my knowledge. 'Tm afraid that I must now insist that you immediately take me to the Emperor's Hand! This unwarranted delay weakens iny Occidental patience, sir. I warn you! I know Lords in high places, some at the Emperor's Court at Shangtu!" (At this point the Defendant is informed and reminded that his fate is totally dependent on the mercy of the Court, the patience of which he is trying with his fanciful tales. His ravings, increase, going inta a foreign tongue, presumably Chinese. When he is calmed down, questioning continues,) "No, I never heard of the Japanese League! Isn't Japan a province? No, I haven't heard of the United States, or the Confederacy, or the War of Secession, or even the Lone Star State. Sir, I ain a student of history. It is my favorite hobby. Why, my study is filled with scrolls of the highest quality including some original manuscripts of the Third Dynasty..."No, I'm sorry, I've never heard of any of those places... "at? Didn't Marco Polo discover... But I thought that was a joke!" Judgment: Defendent and "wives" were declared wards of the Court, and since' no relatives could be located in either the C.Sj., or the U.SA. Protectorate, or through the British Council in WashingtonLee, they were placed under the care of the Staff of the San Antonio Mental Institution. Respectfully submitted, Sam Houston Smith, Court Recorder for Presiding Judge Robert Lee Polk Municipal Court of San Antonio, Texas Conf ererate States of America Illustrated by Eddie Jones I W hen we fell away from the orbiting liner, I wondered if after all these years they had abandoned the flyboy. But the shuttleboat canted, and the pilot swung into a wide curve. Beside me, a civilian blurted, "What the hell!" My reflex was to glare him down, but I stifled it. After all, how could this jerk know? I said, "Relax! Local custom. The timing is right for a swing past the Cenotaph." He looked confused so I added, "It started when ' they ferried down the first colonists. You don't have to salute." But I was going to -- with a little extra snap for Henry Mercer, who had fought it as best he could, screaming with his eyes at what he was doing and what was being done to him. And who said, "Thanks,  Steve!" when I shot him.  The civilian frowned at the E on my collar and the initials on my bag. I looked out the port, feeling his eyes on the back of my neck. And presently I thought, there, you mega jerk! You could read it if youd bother to look! Jasan MacKenzie, Henry Mercer, Walter Kirby. Three guys who died, buying that shipload of colonists! He was blurting again. "Of course! The Cenotaph Satellite! There was an engineer, too, who nearly died. Lindsay! Frank Lindsay! And a Doctor, June Logan! And a pilot... Holt... now in your, in E-Service. And the C P..." I felt a temper storm start to flicker. So! You've seen tapes! You t know the whole story! But the flicker died when I felt my hand reach up and brush my shoulder. Yes, there was a Doctor Logan. She spotted that brush-off gesture before I did. She says I'm reminding myself not to carry a chip on that shoulder. But in spite of the brushoff there was temper enough left to make me out off 'his question when he glanced again at the bag. I growled, "Yes. There was the Command Pilot, name of Mendes. Steve Mendes." And don't judge me, jerk! You weren't there! I don't believe I said that out loud. I don't much, any more. Little Doc Logan tells me I'm the only one who ever did do any judging and to cut it out! And the civilian blurted on, friendly, well meaning, interested -- not curious, there's a difference. Presently I brushed the shoulder again and leaned back, nodding. Okay, Mister. So maybe you aren't a jerk. Not a mpgajerk anywiaiy. But you'll have to owe me that drink imtil tomorrow. I've a date tonight, and we don't talk much even among ourselves, at first, on those rare times when we can get together. No need. We're close, and for twenty-four niglhtmare hours we were closer than it's safe for humans to be. But your mind covers up horror, or else how could you live? I'm the only one with a residual touch of guilt. I took them blundering into it. No help for that. Everybody, from the Coordinator of Colonization on down, shares the blame. Which means, in effect, nobody. But once in, I might have gotten them out -- all of them -- if I hadn't been wearing that chip. By the time I lost it, we had all started screaming. And I was standing over Henry Mercer, with a gun in my hand, and he was saying, "Thanks, Stevel" You know what it's like, having a man thank you for that? So Okay you -- proibably not a -- jerk!  I growl because I see Henry Mercer's eyes every time I skip down here. But wait until those wing retros stop flaring, so you can see, and look down! Would you pick Mora II as a setting for sunlit nightmares? Well, neither did we. Our first view was the one you have now, that same frothy coastline with the greenrbordered bays. That day the sun was low and gleaming and to the west the wind was sweeping with a mile-wide brush of feather nimbus, painting the sea a shimmering orange and spattering great splashes of gold bac over the green where the forest walks into the sand. Beautiful? As beautiful as it is now. Dangerous? What isn't, if you're careless. But I wasn't careless. I had been in space five years, and I was still alive. Ergo, I wasn't careless. But one of my shoulders was heavy, with brighit, new command bars and that chip. I was being watched. Exploration Department -- the fab -- was looking over my shoulder. A crag-faced, cold-eyed captain, with the Big E on his collar, kept repeating in one carefully tactful way after another, "Easy, Captain Mendes. W don't yet iknow what happeined to MacKenzie!" Nuts! Jason MacKenzie was a ghosts a scratchy voice on a spool of whI So I took them in! And I didn't get them out! Stih, for the first hour, to eome out of that Eden was the last tiling we wanted. We touched down in a meadow that Jason MacKenzies ghost-vodce had described, and it matched his description, lush with low grass that smelled lilte new hay. We were lauthing, all except cragfaced GOaptain Kiihy, and it was my belief he had never lauded. Ellen Hok and I were pacing off an area for a prefab and breathing in that strange, heady new-hay aroma, acting like kids on a picnic, whed the first of those sunlit naghtmares hit me. 'Theie was no warning, that time. X One minute I was pacing and counting and watching die swing of Ellen's dancer's walk beside me. The next, I was stretched out on the grass, aware Fd been in a bad dream and relieved it was only a dream. I was squitming, too, for big Frank Lindsay was putting his weight into an arm lock. I hadn't been out long; the #un was still gleaming, and our meadow still locked liked Eden before the snake. But something facdess was lurking just under threshold of memory, scuttling back when I looked at it. Ever tense up at, well, the quiet contemplation of beauty," when something unwanted leer at you? You ask how the hell did that get out and you push it back. I pushed this faceless thing, whatever it was, back and covered by growling, "Okay, Frank! Okay! I'll need the arm!" Ellen Holt took the other arm and helped me up. That much, at least, I liked. But her indigo eyes were big, land she asked, "Steve, what happened?" I frowned at her and they exchanged glances and she said, "You... stopped counting and your face went blank and you started off toward that swamp area we saw coming down, north of us." I remembeied, then, and I asked, "How did you know where I was going?" Crag-faced Captain Kirby, rubbing his jaw, grinned at me. 'You were sure headed somewhere. Captain. It took Frank and me both to stop you." I glanced down at a freshly skinned pair of knuckles. It was the first time I'd seen ja igrin on his craggy face and in spite of myself I grinned back. "You know, I've always wanted to punch an E-Man. But when I do, I can't remember it!" He came back with a right, light answer. "We like the Navy, too. Our best people are the ones we steal from them." Sometimes trivial things tilt the scale. That exdiange might have eased the tension, saved some lives, except that when he spoke his left eyebrow arched. For tihat was when I should have hit the panic button. We could have made it then, probably. I felt in my bones that IF something was wrong. But I just didn't like Walt Kiihy and I knew that's what he would want to do. I wouldn't have liked him, of course, under any circumstances, not at first. We're all competitive. Why is it you look a guy in the eye and put muscle into your grip wh you first meet him? You're being friendly? Nuts! The ape in you ds wondering if you can take him. And Walter Khby was a lot of things I wasn't. He was E-Service, to begin with. And he was six-one to my five-eleven. He had acquired that lean look you get living in one of those half-alive E-Ships out on the periphery while I had been "Moonface" at the Academy. I lost the name, and my knuckles heialed before I ran out of demerits; but it was touch and go. But Kirby had been out -- away out and back -- and this was my first deep jump in the Command Chair. And the Co-Pilot's chair was on my mind, too. It had been assigned, with my conniving, to Ellen Holt. She was another of those slim, rangy types, with a face anything but craggy but a type much like -- I often thought sourly -- Walt Kirby. Even in flat heels, which she was always thoughtful enough to wear when she went to dinner with me, she walked like a dancer. She could zip herself into one of those graceful movement, which takes some doing. Ever have to turn your back on a Vice-Admiral who was hopping around trying to get the other foot started? But I'd seen her watching Kirby in the mirror over the Command Boards, her indigo eyes waim in a way they had never waitmed for me. Oh, he was the competition, all right! And I'd been aware of him every second of the month he bad been with us, except for a couple of minutes a week back, at planall. I had done an astrogation job I was pleased with, and when we winked out I bad the warm feeling it was right. Ellen took a fast fix on the key stars and smBed, nodding. I checked the board to her, feeling smug, and called, "Well, there she is. Pioneers. MacKenzie's World. And right where be said to look." n A ll four of them crowded forward, but nobody ke over a murmur until we were down to where Mora II hung in the screen like a fire and opal on black velvet. Th gathered around a survey scanner, zooming in segments ot the image for detaO. Big Frank Lindsay, a six-two, shaggy-bear of an engineer, was checking wateopeds and rivers. Standing as close as possible to him, as usual, was tiny, pert, straw-haired June Logan, MD, who was among other things doubling with us as a naturalist. She touched Henry Mercer on the arm and pointed to a plateau area. Henry smiled like a shy gnome. He called himself a dirt farmer in search of dirt to farm, since there's sure none left on Terra. The little agronomist grinned. "You'll have to lift me some water into the high flatland, Frank.' I was grinning with them. This looked good. But I felt my face freeze again as my eyes caught the speculative look on E-Captain Kirby's face. He was frowning at our purple jewel as if he expected the colors to flow and take the shape of a hooded cobra. I felt my face flush. "Weil, Captain? Matches MacKenzie's log so far, doesn't it?" The chip on my shoulder weighed heavy, for needling never reached him. He had the kind of confident air some inen are bom with, and it had been firmied to an aura by years of giving more orders than he took. He nodded courteously. "That's not the point. Captain. The log is incomplete. It's what MacKenzie did not record that worries us." I felt Ellen's slim fingers on my arm, but I was resentful enough that when big Frank turned to him I didn't stop it. Frank growled, "Come off it. Captain. Colonization is doing its own preliminary work this time, rememiber? That's why we're here, three months ahead of the big ship. And look at that planet. What could he wrong with it? Kirby's left eyebrow arched. "Perhaps nothing. We just don't know. We didn't get a chance to check it out." "Exactly! And that's what's griping your bosses. You know what? I think they're just being touchy about precious prerogatives, piqued purple because Mora II was snatched out of their hot little hands. When word got out. Colonization grabbed Mora." That had ibeen about the way of it. A ship, a scarred and pitted museum piece of a ship, had drifted into Sol's system, pulsing faint identification signals which took a shook-up sentry network thirty frantic minutes to identify. Even then, they didn't believe it For the ship was a ghost, a flying Dutchman, an E-Ship long since recorded as lost without trace. It was checking in, with a survey report on an unnamed planet, a jewel of a planet as we now could see. But , the survey was incomplete, the ship had crept home on atomics only, and to the wrong port. E-Service had long since moved out towd the fringe, and the pilot, Jason MacKenzie, had never heard of it. He had been sprawled on the deck, a recorder mike in one hand and an empty machine pistol in the other,, for a little over a hundred years. E verybody knew that story. And Kirby nodded agreeably to Frank. "You may be right. Every Department has its quota of stuffed sihirts. I rate as one of the stuffiest, in some circles. But the fact remains we didn't get to check this one out. We didn't get his ship or his tapes until they had been handled." "But what could the Terran Inspectors have missed?" Kirby's eyebrow arched again. "We just don't know. There was dust, of a cell structure nobody had even seen, in the air filters. The cleanup IF units must 'have functioned for a half century. And the ship was never phased into high drive. MacKenzie died on the deck, shooting at something. There were lead scars on the lock." I had been intrigued by those marks. I had an old gun, newer by a century but similar to the one that made them. Mine was a goodluck piece, but I was diffident about it; I didn't show it around. It was clipped under my chair, and I was thinking about it when Frank voiced the old argument, the clincher. "But the lead smears showed he was shooting after the lock had closed And there was nothing there. He was ship-happy. The last of his tape was garbled!" I )ut a stop to it then. It had all been hashed over on far higher levels than this. It had been decided to divert Voyager II, send an advance party -- us -- and if Mora II checked, bring in the colonists. The best the by-passed Exploration Department had been able to get was permission to ferry out an observer -- Kirby -- to go with the point barge. So I cut it off. "Okay! Okay! We're going in!" And Kirby helped. He wasn't above record monitoring and lab work. We did it right, by the book. For forty hours we orbited the troposphere, mapping and sending down homing scoop missiles which brought back air, water, soil and shreds of vegetation. And Mora II invited us in. We couldn't even find micro-organisms we couldn't cope with. Little Doctor Logan scoffed at US as babies and for every bug that looked doubtful punched a hole in an arm. "You're eager to get down, aren't you? Want to wait for a hypospray mix?" We grounded in that flaring orange sunset, and I put them to work. And within an hour the first of those sunlit nightmares started me off on a zombie walk towiaid the swamp and left me feeling brainwashed. We lauded that one off, put it down to strain, tension, the adjustment you have to make, to any new landfall mega-years from home. You can get to feeling insecure when you realize how far from home you can get just within our own little dustmote galaxy. By dinner we were a little on the ribald side with Henry Mercer's slhy-gnome grin beaming as he boast how he had slipped the bottle of Cabernet past me and my loading check list. I was gjad he had. It was good wine. And when the glass fell out of my hand my last clear, if idiotic, thought was "at a waste!" T his time I didn't black out. I found I could fight it, pulling myself back by sheer will power, the way you can sometimes come out of a normal bad dream when you know you are dreaming and have to force your eyes open, concentrating every bit of will you have on the flexing of just one little muscle. The room gradually came back into focus, and suddenly I broke free. I surged to my feet when I saw it had also hit, and was holding, Ellen Holt and Henry Mercer. They sat staring, but little Henry's eyes were screaming. Ellen fought it off and her eyes went to me and then to Walt Kirby. Her hanxls gripped the tialble knuckles white; and she shook her head savagely, her cloud of black hair swirling aaid settling. When her eyes met mine again, they were sane and held recognition, touched with wonder and stark disbelief. But Henry couldnt handle it. As I lunged around the table I heard Ellen's voice, speaking to Kirby, "I'm all right. Help Henry!" Th June Logan brushed past me, no longer a straw-haired bit of fluff looking up at her big engineer, but a doctor going about her work and get the hell out of my way, Captain Sir! She slammed the bell of a hypospray over on artery in Henry's neck; and the little man jerked, trying to pull away. Frank Lindsay tilted the table and spilled the trays to the floor as I lifted the little man and hdd him down. In a moment he quieted, his eyes stopped screaming and then closed as the drug hit. I looked a question at June, and she said, "Deepsleep, Captain. HeTl be comatose until dawn or later. I hit him pretty hard." I had no chip on my shoulder for this little trooper, or for anyone dse, now. And there was a look on her face. I said, "Don't go formal on me, June. We all know this isn't what we thought it might be when it hit me -- a green commander's retreat from responsibility. That stuff you used is dangerous, so you had a reason" Do you know what this is?" Her eyes grew dark. "No. But I've seen lab animals, harmless, friendly little fellows, and big, intelligent chimps, with that kind of look in their eyes. It happend during limbic system experiments, cortex imprint attempts. They went comatose, or they died." I turned to Ellen Holt. Her eyes were wide and sober, too, but normal. She was another tough one. Survive to adulthood on Titan and then claw your way through the competition getting into and through the Academy on Terra, and you come out steady. I asked, "Can you remember anything?" She turned to Kirby, and again I felt a iflaire from the newly lowered boiling point I had acquired. But she had a question for him, not a report. She asked, "Captain Kirby, did Jason MacKee have a wifef ' His eyes lit with interest, and his tongue touched his upper lip. I found my own lips were dry, too. He wasn't such a damn superman! I gritted my teeth in annoyance at myself as he answered, "Yes. Why?" "I... I must have read something about her or have seen a tape." There was a question in her tone, as if she were hoping he would agree. But he shook his head. "No photographs We know of. And nothing from his personal file has ever been published." She turned to me then. "I... I was afraid of that. In fact, Stve, I'm a little afraid, period. Hallucination is one thing, but I... ,re membered her, his wife. And I... saw-felt-remembered... myself on the deck of a ship, his ship. I've IF seen it, but I've never seen one of using one. I was shooting at something that was flowing and shapeless, but changing shape. The gun jammed, and I slapped it and cleared it. I knew how to clear itP "You would in a dream or hallucination." "I suppose so. But I was shooN ing at... myself. I could feel the slugs hitting me It hurt, and I was fearful and enraged. And then there were flashes which I simply couldn't understand. Then you, Steve, seemed to be with me, too; and I found I could pull away, and I sould see the room again." T he five of us stood silently, staring at each other, glancing now and then at the deeply unconscious Henry Mercer. Did I say it's pointless to second-guess? It is. But that was when I should have pidked up the ninetenths dead Henry Mercer, yelled for the rest to follow and then yelled at the autopilot for three G's sitrait up and ignored countermands! We might still have made it. But I waited. I turned to Kirby and aed, "Do you people in Exploration know anything about this planet we don't know?" He shook his head firmly. "No, Captain. Except for Jason MacKienzie, a hundred years ago, no Exploration people have been here to our knowledge. Anld since this... hallucination, or whatever it is... has not hit me as yet, you know more about it than I do. But I bdieve we should pull out." "I thought so, too. But I was proud. I walked, I did not run, to the nearest exk. I said, "So do I. Daylight, we'll load the essentials back into the barge and get back to Voyager and the hx)spital. Henry needs help, and this place needs a going over by some of your experts." Understatement of the century. Long before daylight we bad all gone into that nightmare state -- some helpless, unable to move, some of us walking, silently screaming zombies. For very soon we were past screaming aloud. Did you ever dream of falling? Knowing, in that half-awake state, that if you don't wake yourself up before you hit you will die? You can live widi that. You know you will wake up. All those people who die in their sleep die from other causes. Your own nightmares, the kind that psychiatry scrubs dean and hangs out in the sun for you to contemplate at leisure, you can live with. They're made up of your own fears and memories, distorted, twisted into horror, but horror that is expressed in symbols which are also yours, of your own imagining. These symbols were not ours and were not imaginable. They weren't the vaporinigs of the hydrogen cyanide scum of our own seething, lightning slashed little mud-ball. These symbols had their genesis in some unspeakably alien kind of primordial slime. I came out of it, partially, at daylight and foimd I was dumbly watching another nightmare being acted out, found myself watching a shaky, shambling Henry Mercer and then following him. He shuffled blindly, to and into the barge, and I stood in a sweating, trembling state of lambivalence, knowing I should stop him 'but stomething in my mind approving esvery move he made, urging him on. He was slow, still burdened I suppose by the drug left in his bloodstream and certainly burdened by the horrors in his mind. And he was disarming us. Methodically, he gathered up every weapon we had, one by one, even to Time Lxgan's anesthetic dart gun she used to collect lalb animals. One by one he made a pile of them, on top of the barge autopilot. Then he came to me and lifted the ruby jewel lightbeam chopper from its holster. I did scream, then, and nearly blacked out trying to move first an arm and then a Anger to stop him. Kirby wias beside me by then, his own eyes haunted, no longer the cold-eyed, calm-faced, deep-jump pilot. I found I knew a great deal about Kilby, what he had seen and done, what he was capable of doing, what kind of a man he wias -- quite a man, I thou't. It was being... reflected... back to me from... somewhere. Ellen Holt was there, somewhere in the boat, approaching. I seemed to know a great many things about her, too. June Logan was somewhere... , not near... with Frank Lindsay. Lindsay was a... blank... gray... and Logan was part woman, part doctor, trying to help him. But I also found I could move. I couldn't move toward the still shambling Henry Mercer. I had to watch him, with even an occasional sickening flash of something like approval, as he carefully set the chopper he had taken from me and turned it against the pile of weapons, methodically cutting them and the autopilot and the subspace radio beside it, to smoking slag. But I could move back, away from him. I found I could make my hands do as I told them, although the effort made cold sweat break out over my body. I concentrated on one hand and made it slide under the pilot chair and grip the old weapon, my museum piece, good-luck charm and bring it up. I called, "Henry! Drop it!" He looked around, a flicker of recognition in his eyes. My own mind reeled suddenly, but I found I could grind my teeth and keep my vision clear. I saw recognition fade from the little man's eyes and saw his eyes slide past me and focus on Ellen, who was standing beside me. Then he looked at me, and his voice was hoarse, barely over a whisper. "Useless... all but one. The others are... weak... mad... hold back..." He brought up the chopper, its glittering jewel centering on Ellen at my side," while I kept shouting, "Henry! Stop it! Drop it!" His eyes were screaming again, and his thin hand was tightening on the grip when I shot him. My mind reeled again, and I thought I felt the lead slug slam IF into my own chest. Then I was standing clear headed and breathing hard, watching the little man, slumped agaiinsit the wall where the slug had driven him. His thin body tensed, and I called to him again when he used whait must have been the last of his strength to lift one arm and drop the chopper into the heap of smoking slag. Then his face crumpled, and he looked like a child who has been slapped for something it doesn't understand. That look passed as ien choked a sob and dropped to her knees beside him. He looked up as she took his hand, and then he looked at me. H e was Henry Mercer again, the little farmer with the shy-gnome face who had grinned because he had slipped an over-weight bottle of wine past me. He said, "You held out a gun, Steve. Good boy." He coughed litly and raised a hand to wipe his lips. Then he smiled again. "Thanks, Steve." Ellen looked up, her face broken, and whiered, Hes dead." I looked down at the gun, and she must have seen on my face what was in my mind for she cried, "Steve! You didn't kill Henry Mercer. You killed a... fragment... of something else." Her eyes held mine for an instant. Then they slid past me and widened with fear. But this time it was sane, normal human fright and disbelief. Her scream, when it came, was not from a nightmare but was a full-throated cry of protest and warning. 'Walt! No! Steve, look out!" I was slow. Kirby, his craggy face all cold purpose and completely void of the nightmare look, chopped my wrist with one hand and with the other grasped the old pistol. I wheeled and aimed stiffened fingers at his solar plexis, missed and went for his eyes. I brought up an aim to ward off a chop at my neck, caught his throat with the edge of my hand and saw him grimace and choke. But it was a wrong move. It left me open, and he threw me off balance with a swing of his hip. Something, the barrels of the old gun, the edge of his hand, took me across the temple; and lits flared and then went out. I came out of it with a throbbing headache which faded and a crimson rage which pulsed and flared. The scuttling hdf-memories were no longer leering at me. I started to surge up from the table and found June Logan, all doctor and no damn nonsense, had a hand on my shoulder. She ordered, "Stay put, patient. Tm in cotumiand in this little area. Captain 'Kirby seems to be , in command elsewhere. He's been in touch with the source of our trouble, too. But he has learned its language -- or it has learned his!" There was contempt in her tone. Kilby was sitting alone at the other end of the room, his face more cold and craggy than ever, with my gun on his knee. He said, "She's rt, Captain. How much can you rememiber?" "Enou to know you weren't in any zombie state when you took IF me. rU see you in court for that, if I don't kill you first myself I" iElis eyebrows arched again. "Good! I hope you're intelligent enough to see that that last is what you may have to do. Not that I have any intention of permitting it. But k would show you are bright enough to be useful." The rage simmered down, leaving me cold and wary. "Useful to us, you imply. You've thrown in with that... that..." "That what, Captain?" I felt Logan's hand grip my shoulder, and I heard Ellen say, "Don't Steve!" My eyes must have screamed like Henry's for an instant But it was from finally acknowledged awareness. I heard myself whisper, "I don't believe it!" "You'd better believe it. Captain. It's as real as a iPrycon Plague virus, blown up a thousand times. It's a bug-eyed monster without eyes. It doesn't need them. It is all eye, all braii all body, as needed. Effective fomoL" I heard him, but it didn't register. I said stupidly, ."There's something out... in that swtamp." I could see-sense-feel-remember -- there was no one word. I had been a part of something... alien. Something that had been here for -- there was no way of measuring the time. There were fragments of some kind of -- ship? -- something that had... encysted... it, at the bottom of thait swamp. Kiriby smiled coldly. "Shakes you, doesn't it? But we bad to meet alien life somewhere, sometime, Captain. It happened to be here. Doctor Logan agrees with me that any kind of life than can evolve sooner or later will evolve, somewhere. This form came into being in another galaxy, before our own galaxy was form." I forced myself so calm down, and I looked around at June. She nodded. "You'll remember it, Steve, if you let yourself. It 'sees' -- that's not strictly accurate -- whenever it needs to with its whole body. In its natural state its mind is part of a communal mind, aware of everything any one individual comes in contact with, sharing everything with all other individuals." "What is it doing to us?" She removed her restraining hand. "Experimenting, I think. There were two, originally, and this one learned something when MacKenzie found them. Learned that ants cap bite. Our Captain there points out, and I agree, that nobody except a madman deliberately steps on ants. But this thing wants to get home. And the Captain also points out that if we had to climib up an anthill to an escape capsule, we wouldn't concern ourselves much about how many ants we crushed." I was thinking again, and this time I did surge up off the table. Kirby's fingers tightened on the pistol, and he grated coldly, "I know! I'll have to kill you first! I can, you know. But not first. I need you, and to keep you under control I'll start with Doctor Logan. Anyway, you last!" I didn't want to believe it. I said, "Kirby, it has you under some kind of control. Like Henry." June said, "No, Steve. It doesn't control us. But when it shares its thinking, its motivation, with us, some -- Henry for one -- aren't strong enough to override it." "The effect is the same." "In a way, to some degree. It is a multiple body with a communal mind. But with us the result is a sort of confused paralogia. We turn -- autistic -- confuse fantasy with reality. Henry wasn't able to keep from following its motivaftions. And Frank...  fought it so hard he...   well, Frank is insane, I hope not permanently. Apparently the rest of us are in some way stronger." I turned to Kirby, who was still smiling coldly. I grated, "And you. Captain, seem strongest of us aU. You made some kind of deal with it, in the hope of saving your skin. "Let's say I appear to have more resistance than any of us. And Fm certainly not confusing fantasy with reality. I have a trait it bdieves will  useful. It has no feeling at all, naturally, aibout the loss of an individual. It has noted that I, dividual." I felt myself frowning ait him, no longer clouded by anger. He was being wary of his words, and it followed the thoughts behind ihem. This just wasn't right. I found I was myself being careful, too. "Whait are you going to do, Kirby?" "I'm going to try to help it get home." "How? That barge out there wouldn't even get back to Terra, much the less to another galaxy." "True. But the barge could be rigged to move under manual controls, out far enough to intercept the colony ship. That drive might do it." T he Colony Ship! Five thousand people, some of them children! A surge of adrenalin turned the room crimson, and I came up out of the chair. Kirby callled sharply, "Watch it. Captain!" I lunged toward him, and he fHcked a hand and loosed an echoing shot. Horrified, I whirled around to see Ellen Holt standing pale but unhurt against the wall, the mark of the slug making a gray smear by her head. Kirby repeated, "Watch it, Captain. The bolts from this old crossbow of yours ricochet." I was still peering through a red mist. 'Kirby, you can't do that! The thill' you're going to help that thing climb has five thousand people in it. Half of them will go insane at first contact. They'll all die, eventuallyl No! Somehow, some of us will wreck the barge!" "Precisely. They all die, eventually. What's alternative? You force me to kill all of you, and I wait until the big ship sends someone down to investigate. I use that barge. It might even be simpler. In any event, that thing will get aboard." The crimson mist dissipated, and I fdt wary again. "Maybe not, Kirby. Somehow I'll wreck the drive on this barge." He laughed then, the first time I had ever heard him. "Watching IF you and Holt on the way out here, I thought you might possibly be potential irecniiits. Now I wonder; Use your head. Captain. You can't disable that drive unit and you know it. You haven't the tools for it. The worst you could do would be to booby trap it, disconnect and bypass the dampers, so the drive would surge. I'll be on guard against that. Any rewiring you could do I could undo." Then he gave us a cold, mirthless smile and backed out of the room. We watched as he walked puiposefuiUy north, toward the swamp. There was a moan from the drugged Frank Lindsay, and June hurried to him. I sat down weakly, feeling wrung out, and turned to Ellen Holt. She, too, looked done in, with sick disappointment showing on her face. I said dumbly, "He just walked away. As if... as if... hell's chiming bells, Ellen, I learned a lot about that guy while we were aU drowning in that cerebral slime. This isn't like him!" Ellen smiled sadly, shaking her head. "No, it isn't. Or like any of us." I guess we were both on the edge of hysteria and trying to escape from this dead-end trap, for when she smiled faintly and said, "I learned quite a lot about you, too, Steve." I blushed. She went on, "I take it as a compliment, Steve. What woman wouldn't? You're something of a man yourself. You wouldn't do what he says he intends to do, and neither -- a paradox, Steve -- neither could he!" I looked around at her. "Let's go over it, Ellen. There's a piece missing. He was needling me -- something he never did even when I was trying my best to pimoture him. He kept telling me to smarten up, use my head." She caught her breath, and I believe she thought of it at that instant, as I did. My voice dropped. "Why did he point out that we couldn't wreck the barge -- that the worst we could do was booby trap it?" She met my eyes. "Why did he point out that he was of one mind with that thing in ait least one way dividual. Is that what you mean, Steve?" I came to my feet, feeling cold. "Yes. He couldn't do it himself and he didn't dare tell us directly. He wants us to booby trap that drive! Come on!" W e went at it, with dragging feet and reluctant minds. June stayed with the drugged and incoherent wreck that had been big Frank Lindsay, and Ellen went with me to the barge. We cleared away the now cold fragments of slag which had been the autopilot, and the communicator and our weapons. The drive would lift, on manual. And we rigged a manual, one that would allow low level manuevering and would even let the barge lift to perhaps a fiftieth of a diameter. But when the main drive cut it it would surge -- spend itself in one gigantic shove -- more G's than had ever been tested. We worked carefully, our fingers and palms damp, watching each other for telltale signs that the...  thing...  might be moving in on one of us again. Once Ellen whispered, "He... must ibe keeping it... busy." She kept under control, her fingers reluctant but sure, ' until the last plate had been brazed back in place. Then she dropped the torch and buried her face in her hands. She said tautly, "Steve do you realize exactly what we're doing?" I yelled at her, for Ihad to convince myself, too. "We're saving five thousand people. We're keeping that thing from 'any possible chance of getting home with knowledge of where and what we are. We're making it possible for him to do .his job!" She stood up and carefully put away the torch. She looked around the control room until her hands steadied. Then she took my arm with, both her hands and started toward the port. Outside, she said, faltering, low voiced, "Steve, I'm not as strong as I thought. I'm going to have to blame somebody else for my part in this or lose my mind. I'm going to have to hate you, Steve, for a while. Hate you like fury." But she held on tightly while we walked back to the prefab. And she took my arm again when we saw him stride out of the woods and across the meadow toward the barge. She then whispered, "Look! He's thrown away the gun. He would, have to. It wouldn't have let him near. It... remembers MacKenzie." T he barge lifted, hovered and then swung away over the woods. Presently it returned, still low. It tilted, as if in salute, and then lifted, straight up, gaithering speed. We waited, tense, the tension growing. And there was one more nightmare. It wtas merely reflection at 'first, as if the alien had casually flicked us a "glance" in passing. I could feel a query, a speculation, and could sense the reassurance of Kirby's thought that there was danger in the barge, but that he knew of it and could cope with it. But soon there was a stronger probing as the thing, suspicious, flared at us. Ellen gripped my arm and cried out, "No!" But it had touched us, enough to learn, even though we tried to hide it, that what he had done to the barge was done because we believed Kirby had wanted it. There was rage then, in the alien's mind, and there was the real, almost tangible, awareness of Kiihy fitting back, trying to make Ms hands move to the drive switch. It went on... endlessly... with Kirby's struggle raging and faltering and the alien's mind a maelstrom of rage. We tried, our futile best, to help, and I found my nails cutting into my palms as my hands clenched. Then, incredibly, there was a weakening in the storm of alien rage, a faltering, a dilution. Awestruck, physically sick and trembbling, we sensed that some of the alien patterns were blurring, taking a different form, shaping into new paths. There was something from another will, another entity, two others, interferinig. But they were not ours! We asked ourselves, later on, iif we imagined it, I don't know. But there came an instant when we seemed linked together, and we could sense triumph and when we sensed or felt or imagined the same words, sulbtly archaic, a "voice with a ring in it: You were a long time on the way. Captain! You guys going soft? Let's you and I and this gutsy little farmer here take this thing! On the count! Nowr And on the pulse of that exultmove -- that (final fractional inch -- and there was a iflare in the darkening sky. A flare -- and then nothing. I found I was alone, more alone than I had even been, anywhere, with a sobbing girl at my side who released my amn and crumpled like a doll. I sat down beside her and pulled her head over against my shoulder, and we waited there in the growing starlight and listened, after a while, to the night sounds in the empty meadow. After a long time she diw in a great, shuddering breath and whispered, "I'm all right now, Steve. I don't need to hate you any longer." W e waited a month for the Colony ship barge, and another for the big ship itself to go into orbit. Then an E-Ship settled in the meadow and a grim-faced Commodore took our reports and questioned us, at our insistence, under dru whidi gave us total recall. It left the Commodore pale and the technicians shuddering. They found and raised the -- ship -- that had dncysted the -- thing. And it was an unprecedented second satellite, tossed out by the colony ship, which carried communications. The first was the small one we just passed, a golden sphere with three names engraved on it. It rates a salute, from any who pass this way. What? Sure. Sure. But not tonight. Tomorrow. You'll know us, a big engineer with snow white hair and a haunted look in his eyes. There'll 'be a straw-haired woman who doesn't look in the least like a doctor clinging to his arm. You'll know the other woman, too, black hair, blacker eyes. She's thinned out now -- as I have -- from living in one of those half-alive E-Ships out on the fringe. She walks like a dancer, and she'll be about my height because she'll be wearing low heels. We'll have that drink with  New subscriptions and changes of  address require # weeks to process! IF I Patience was often desirable in , mingling with the lesser creatures of T he butterflywith .a wounded Man, and the butterfly was, after wing glided clumsily down to all, in no hurry, settle on a leaf by the spider's web. At last she turned to regard him The spider knew he was there, but with her principal eyes. Her dark she was drowsy and ignored him for mind spoke: "Was that your catera time. The butterfly waited patientpillar that fell in my web near dusk ly, knowing that a hastily aroused yesterday?" spider tends to be bad tempered. "Yes, I was its sire," he replied. "Delicious," she commented lazily. "Fin glad you enjoyed it," he said. She moved across her web to study him more closely. "Your left hind wing has a fracture in it," he said. "How did that happen?" "I was watdiing the metal-secreters being attacked by the bees. One of them ejected at me and hit the wing." "Hold it out," e directed. He lower his wings, and she examined the brok area with her feet and mandibles. "I can taste the metal," she remarid. This won't be hard to fix # it will mend straight. Who won the fight?" # metal-secreters retreated into their flying hive, but then they destroyed many flowers, along with some of the be and other insects, by ejectihg flaming poison from their hive." He could and observe the spider's repair work on his injured wing while he conversed with her. The pain was a minor annoyance. "Are the metal-secreters creatures of Man?" she asked. He hesitated -- unusually  before answering: "That is beyond my knowing. Whatever they are, they are outside my knowing of the now-moment Fm trying to learn more about them." "So am #," she replied snappishly, "but hardly anybody bothers to tell me anything. They seem to think I ban sit hm all day and have as big a knowing as any creature that flies. All I get is bits and snatches when somebody thinks past me. Man himself could return, and I wouldn't know it unless he lit in my webi" "#I tell you about the metalsecieters, then, while you fix my wing," said the butterfly. In a way he felt sorry for the spider, because her complaints were largely justified. Man had favored her with some intelligence, but far too little for her to achieve a real knowing of the nowmoment. In fact, she had only a vague notion of what the phrase really meant. B utterflies, the most favored of the creatures of Man, had the fullest knowing, thanks in part to their varied and highly developed sensing abilities and to e routine thought sharing which took place between all members of the order of Lepidoptera. Too, the central nervous system of butterflies was organized for extreme efficiency in the use of stored knowledge -- not for remembering, which any of the favored creatures, including the spider, could do very well, but for defining the now-moment. The butterfly had a clear conception of what was taking place, from instant to instant, at all points in the populated portion of the world. It knew the now-moment Perhaps the prime contributor to the butterfly's Imowing was its long period of development as a caterpillar. This period lasted most of the seventy-four days -- each day five hundred hours in length -- of the warm season of the world's year. During that period the caterpillar was a passive receiver of ah the traffic of thought taking place around it It read and stored the knowing not only of butterflies and moths but of IP bees and even ants. The caterpillar could not act upon any of this knowledge. Indeed the central nervous system contained within the larva was actually two separate systems -- one listening detachedly wMe waiting to serve the adult butterfly, and the other a primitive system guiding the caterpillar through its mindless life of eating and growing. This latter system vanished completely later, during the world's long winter of utter cold, to serve as one more morsel of warming fuel while the encapsulated insect was in the pupa stage. When warmth returned and the world sprang alive with soaring flowers, the adult butterfly emerged from its wrappings, fully grown and educated. Oy the moth shared so favorable a life cycle, and the moth's need for special sensory perception for nigiht flying apparently left less room for intellectual development. In any event, the moth's knowing was less full than the butterfly's. Third in knowing were the bees, and fourth the ants. The spiders ran a poor fifth, but were certainly far superior to the many unfavored creatures needed to complete the world's ecology -- the aphids, beetles, termites and various others. And since knowing the now-moment was beyond the spiders' abilities, they used their knowledge for the lesser function of remembering. They took considerable pride in their memories, which they claimed were superior to those of more favored creatures, but the truth was that the hier insects seldom bothered with remembering. The now-moment, to a butterfly, was sufficient B ut to please the curiosity of the spider, who was repairing his wing, the wounded butterfly exercised his memory of the day's nowmoments sufficiently to recount the story of the metal-secreters. "Their hive flies, you know," he told her, "and is made of a hard metal. I have no knowing of how it is organized inside, or of how it flies without wings. It came down shortly after sunrise today and settled on top of the Rock Hill." "How far from here is that?" she asked. "About half a mile west,' he said. "It's a small mountain of solid rock in my hunting ground." He was trying to keep the story simple for her, not going into detail about the kind of metal used in the flying hive or the geological nature of the Rock HilL "The ants saw it land. When the creatures in it unplugged its door, the ants tried to go in and know what was there. But the creatures ejected metal at the ants and killed several, so the ants retreated. When they did, some of the creatures came out of the hive, still ejecting metal at the particular ants who were carrying the bodies of those already killed. Well, you know how ants are when somebody tries to take food away from them..." "I'm the same way," she interrupted. "They swarmed back, and the creatures retreated into their hive and plugged the door. The . ants were then able to carry away their meat" "What are those creatures like? Would they be good meat?" the spider asked with considerable interest. "They are hard to describe to you, since I can't make you see pictures. They are big. Their bodies are almost six times as long as an ant's -- twice as long as mine. They move about in a very peculiar manner. They have no wings, so of course they crawl on their legs, which they have too few of..." "So do you, for that matter," sniffed the spider. "They crawl somewhat like a mantis, or at least more like a mantis than like us. Their bodies are thicker than the mantis, though. And I suppose they would be good meat, unless they contain poison metal salts." "I'd like to try one," she murmured half to herself. "If I wasn't in such a good location right here, I would go hang a new web close to their hive and try my luck." "They may be intelligent," the butterfly reminded her. "If they are they wouldn't get caught in the web," she answered; and added rather gloatingly, "And for all your knowing you don't know if they are even creatures of Man." "That's true," he conceded. "What happened after the ants left?" CCThe bees came. They are more JL disturbed than the ants were, because it is a hive as well as an emptiness in their knowing. It could mean competition for the bees. They swarmed around the hive for a while, until it began ejecting metal at them. They flew some distance away and concealed themselves among the flowers. Nothing njore happened for perhaps twenty hours, and the sun was well above the horizon when some ants who were keeping watch saw the hole in the hive unplugged again "This time the ants and the bees stayed off the Rock Hill and kept their bodies hidden when five of the creatures came out" "What good did they think hiding their bodies could do?" asked the spider. "Didn't they think the creatures have good senses?" "That's what they did think," the butterfly answered, "and seemingly they are right The metal-secreters never seem to eject at anything that cannot be sensed by Vision. The bees and ants stayed hidden among the flowers while the creatures crawled down from the hill and began exploring the edge of ther foliage. That was when I decided to fly over there and observe the creatures directly. "When I arrived, the creatures had moved a short distance away from the hill, using some sharp metal extrusion from their upper legs to cut a path through the flowers. If they are knowing creatures, then our world is as concealed from them as the inside of their hive is from me, because they obviously did not know the bees were concealed all along one side of the trail, waiting for the creatures to get deep enough in the flowers for their retreat to be cut off. Some ants were waiting, too, hoping to get some meat for themselves. "I approached from the side of the trail opposite from where the bees were hiding and arrived just as the bees moved in to attack. The creatures saw me first and kept looking up at me until the bees almost had diem. Then they turned and started ejecting at the bees. I saw several bees go down, but only one of the creatures got stung. Evidently the creatures have very tough exoskeletons, made mostly of metal, and the bees could not find weak spots into which the sting could be inserted. Nevertheless, the creatures started back to their hive, dragging the stung one with them, and they finally made it -- with bees and ants snapping and punching at them all the way back to the Rock Hill. I was still flying about observing, and as soon as the creatures were out of the flowers one of them ejected at me and hit my wing. I came here, and the creatures are all in their Mve now. As soon as they were in, the hive ejected a flaming mass of poisonous substance onto the area where they had cut the trail.Luckily, the bees had scattered by then, and the ants were most of the way back to their nests loaded with ant and bee meat, so the fire did not kill very many." T he spider was almost through repairing his wing as the butterfly ended his account. With a delicate touch, she smoothed the surface of the hard-setting modification of webstuff with which she had encased the major vein-fracture. "What are you going to do now?" she asked. "Now?" he asked. "In the next now-moments? As soon as you say my wing is ready to be used, I'll take nourishment." "That's not what I mean," she snapped impatiently. "I mean what about the metal-secreters." A strange question thought the butterfly. He queried the other butterUes they too agreed it was a strange thing to a So did the moths who living on the night half of the worlds were awake at the moment One moth remarked that it was just die kind of question one might expect from a spider whose life was one long introspection with insufficient introspecting equipment . 'Nothing he answer at last Of course I will continue trying to fit them into my knowing of the nowmoment." "If you could ever fit them in " she askedt "don't you think you could have done so by now?" That "ever" was a meaningiless spideridi term. What personal significance could "ever" have to the butterfly who had awakened and climbed frcnn his pupa enclosure seventeen days befme and who knew he would die fifty-five days from this particular now-moment, when the winter cold returned? "Ev to a butterfly is one summer season; it is the same to a spider, but perhaps engrossed in her legends of memory she would not agree with that. He answered her question: "Perhaps." 'Ttt case of emergency," she recited, "a butterfly may Man." "That is true," he said. "Then why don't you?" she urged. "This is an emergency, and you're a butterfly." "Why is this an emergency?" he countered. "A few bees and ants have died before their normal time, and a few flowers have been destroyed in one tiny area. For the world as a whole, life continues as always for the creatures of Man." The truth was that the butterfly -- all butterflies -- regarded Man as a rather mythic being. Man had doubtless once existed, but an accurate definition of his attributes was no longer available to his creatures. The clear picture of Man had been lost with the passage of thousands of years and thousands of generations. The act of calling Man, the butterfly felt, could not be integrated into his knowing of the now-moment "This is an emergency," the spider told him, "because you admit those metal-secreters are a blank spot in your knowing. When a butterfly admits something like that it's an emergency!" Tf I called Man and he came," said the butterfly, 'lie would be another such blank spot How do you know these two blanks would be mutually eliminating?" "All I know is that we are creatures of Man," e huffed rather piously, "and we are supposed to call him in need. He brought us to this world and remade us and the flowers so that we could live here alone from him, because this world is not suited for Man's needs, and Man does not remake himself. The gravity of this world was too slit, and the air much too thick, for Man to dwell here in comfort, nor were the seasons suited to beings such as he, who may endure for a hundred years." (She was reciting again, the butterfly noted.) "He fitted us for this world, and gave it to us, but kept us for himself, as his creatures, to live for Man as well as for ourselves. We IP haye a respoii#ibility to Man. You should call him." "The old knowledge says we 'may call him," retorted the butterfly. "Yes,' and we 'may' disappoint him, if he returns some day to find his creatures gone and the world filled with metal-secreting monsters!" "The creatures in that hive won't find much metal to secrete if they try to live here," the butterfly responded. "Our stones contain mere traces of the heavy elements." Though he was arguing with the spider, the butterfly was not at all sure he was right. The calling of Man was an event that had never occurred; thus it was difficult to fit into his knowing of the now-moment. But perhaps it was the appropriate action to take under the present circumstances. As the spider had reminded him, it was a recourse suggested by Man himself. "I will go feed while I think about it," the butterfly agreed at last. "Will you let me know what you decide?" she asked. "Yes." II H e took to the air and found his mended wing was as sturdy as ever -- as he had known it would be. Flying to a group of flowers he had not yet visited, he lit on a tall, deep-cupped blossom and unrolled his proboscis. As he sipped the sweet nectar from the bottom of the cup he realized that he had made his decision. There was no question about it being his decision to make. Butterflies do not vote. The others wer certainly, interest in diat his decision would be, but he was the individual directly involved in the matter of the metal-secreters. The strange hive was on his hunting ground. He had seen it himself and had been attacked by one of the creatures. He had discussed the situatiou with the spider. In short, this was his affair, and his ability to decide how to conduct it was as good as any other butterfly's. He would call Man. The other favored creatures would assist him if he requested their help. Having decided, he continued to feed for two hours. Man could not be called from his hunting ground -- that had to be done at a special place hundreds of miles away. It was best to be well nourished before begmning such a journey. When his feeding took him close to the spider's web, he kept his promise to tell her what he was going to do. She haughtily approved. The day was still younger than mid-morning when he took a last sip, climbed higher in the air than usual and began the long flight westward. He had never come this way before -- in fact, he had never traveled far from his hunting ground in any direction. But he found nothing strange in the countryside below him, no wonderful new sights to see. He knew the now-moment, and what he saw was what he had known was there to see. When he grew hungry after several hours of flight, another butterfly, a Swallowtail like himself, called invitiny: "Come down and feast and rest. My flowers are sujitable, sweet andentiful." ;tle accepd the offer and lighted in the other's huntmg ground whero he fed, napped and d again until mid-morning. Then he resumed his journey. H e made five more such stops before the terrain began to change from the lush, slightly undulating plain into a more rugged and elevated landscape where the flowers grew in less abundance. He was approaching a towering range of moimtains. As he climbed with the land, the atmosphere grew noticably thinner; breathing and flying required increased vigor, and his periods of rest became longer and more frequent. But he was nearing his goal. He reached a spot near the upper end of a higih valley, with only one more tremendous barren ridge to fly over. He had left the area in which butterflies lived and hunted far behind; at this elevation the flowers were too small and sparse to support the likes of himself in comfort... He fluttered down to light on a rock near a beehive. Several bees came out and examined him with wonder. To their limited knowing he was a sight at which to marvel, gigantic in size and with wings the colors of many flowers. And he was a butterfly, which meant he was wise. "You are welcome here, butterflywho-is-going-to-call-Man," they told him, ough you will eat so much, doubtless, that you will set our population expansion program back at least a year. Never has a butterfly visited our hive before. It will please us to serve you well." "I am grateful," he responded, "especially since you do not have plenty." "What we have you will find good," they replied. And he did. The bees fed him honey, and his knowing was shocked most pleasantly by its heavy richness and almost overwhelming sweetness. Never before, he realized, had a butterfly been so hungry and fed so deliciously. It was a wonderful and novel now-moment to know. After he had been fed and had drunk from a shaded, icy spring, he napped by the water for several hours. Then the bees fed him more honey and, thoroughly invigorated, he began the last segment of his journey. He needed all the strength the honey gave him. As he made his way up the steep final slope, the thinning air became hardly sufficient to sustain him, no matter how hard he worked his wings, d it seemed all but impossible to pump his abdomen fast enough to bring as much oxygen as he needed into his body. Long before he reached the summit he was reduced to making short, hopping flights of only a few yards at a time, from one ledge to the next, interspersed with rests for breathing. The last fifty yards of the ascent he did not fly at all, but crawled. When he came in sight of the Nest That Man Left he was tempted to stop where he stood and sleep, but the chill in the air told his knowing that this would be unwise. He made his way clumsily over the leveled ground of the mountaintop toward the entrance of the rambling metal structure. IF As he did so he realized that the Nest That Man Left was another emptiness in his knowing. That was not surprising,' though, since it was at an unpopulated, imvisited location. His knowing told him only what the outer appearance of the Nest would be, and where it was to be entered. The inside was as blank as that of the metal-secreters' hive. With a sense of uneasiness in the face of the im-i known, intensified by the strained condition of his body, the butterfly crawled to the entrance. The Nest sensed his presence and opened the door as he approached. He went inside without a pause, and the door slid closed behind him. T he interior was dark at first but brightened immediately as overhead panels shifted to let in sunlight through a wide expanse of glass.  The walls hissed as an oxygen-rich  flood of air pressed in to bring the thickness up to a level the butterfly found comfortable. A trough in the floor gurgled and filled with water,  and he drank gratefully. These  events were all unexpected, of course, but there was a definite rightness about them. This was the way a butterfly should be received in Ae Nest That Man Left, and it was not difficult to place in his knowing. The Nest addressed him: "You t are a butterfly, and you are here to call Man." The mind of the Nest was shrouded, somewhat like that of  the spider except for an absence of M rsonality. n "Yes," the butterfly responded. "I am the voice of the Nest, a contrivance that does not live but that can converse with you to a limited extent. Do you have injuries or umuet needs that are an immediate danger to you?" "No." The butterfly's senses searched his surroundings while the voice addressed him, and he gained a partial knowing of the nature of the voice contrivance. Man had to be wise, indeed, to construct such a complex dead device and to shelter it so perfectly that, after untold thousands of years, it could still awaken and engage in a conversation of minds. "Do butterflies continue to know the now-moment?" the Nest asked. "Yes." 'That is an ability Man did not give me, and one that he lacks himself," the Nest told him. "Thus I do not know the nature of the emergency that brings you here. Nor do I know where Man is, nor what he may have become during the centuries since he made me, mutated your ancestors and departed." "Man does not change himself, according to my knowing," commented tile butterfly. "Not intentionally, perhaps, but he changes nevertheless. He is a discontented being who, not knowing the now-moment, wanders and searches for new things to know. What he finds changes him, not in the orderly manner in which he fitted you for conditions on this world, but in ways that are unplanned and sometimes undesirable. Occasionally he finds something very damaging to him, something that darkens his intelligence and Ciiiuses him to fdrget itiuch of his learning from previous findings." T he butterfly struggled with this information. His difficulty was not that what the Nest told him was new. On the contrary, it was ancient; so ancient that it hhd been all but forgottena dismissed as having no meaning to current knowing. It occurred to the butterfly that perhaps the creatures of Man had wanted to forget that Man could not know the now-moment, which implied that Man was inferior to themselves. But then, he quickly reassured himself, Man must have completely different abilities that made him superior -- abilities so far beyond a butterfly's comprehension that the Nest would not attempt to describe them. At last he addressed the Nest: "Then if I call Man, the being who responds may be unlike the beings who established the creatures of Man on this world. He may even have forgotten that he has such creatures as us." "That is correct," the Nest responded. "Man instructed me to be sure you understood that before he was called. If he comes, the results will be unpredictable. You are to reconsider the nature of your emergency with this in mind and decide if your need for Man is sufficient for you to accept the uncertainties of his present nature." This was a difficult decision indeed. The butterfly thought about it for several minutes before saying, "In essence, the emergency is an intellectural one. An area of blankness IF has entered our knowing. Since Man does not know the now-moment, it is possible that we could not explain to him the nature of the emergency." "That is possible," agreed the Nest. "In any event, unless Man has changed greatly, you will be unable to communicate with him directly. Man does not speak mind-to-mind, the way you and I are conversing, but through the use of special sounds he can emit, each sound being a symbol of a fragment of thought." "Then how could we have ever communicated?" asked the astonished butterfly. "Through intermediary devices such as myself," said the Nest. "You can talk to me and I can put your thoughts into the words of Man, like this." The Nest emitted, from a wall cavity, a complex series of noises. T he butterfly listened in stunned recognition. He had never heard such sounds before today, but as he had hovered over the metal-secreters earlier that morning just such noises, though dim and muffled, had struck his sensors. But Man was supposed to be ten-fingered -- more manipulatory members than even the spider! And the metal-secreters had clearly been deficient in this respect, having only two pairs of legs. The Nest was continuing: "Communication is rendered more complex by the use of differing sets of sound-symbols, called lanages and by the fact that a given set of symbols tends to change with the passage of years to become an entirely new language. I probably would not know the sounds man uses today, but would have to communicate your thoughts, with some explanation, to a device similar to myself that Man brought with him, and that device iu turn would speak to Man." "Man uses metal extensively, does he not?" asked the butterfly. "Yes. Metals were abundant, on his, and your, original planet... He built his nests of them and otherdead materials, and also his flying shelters in which he journeyed here and to many other worlds." "What are fingers?" "They are relatively small, slender extensions of Man's arms, his upper legs. They are useful for gripping and manipulating. He has ten of them, normally." "I wish to call him," said the butterfly. "Very well... The call is now being emitted. I do not know when he will arrive. He may have to come far, a journey of more than a day for his fastest shelter. Certainly, he cannot be expected to arrive within a hundred hours at best. As there is no food stored for you here, I suggest you return to your hunting ground to await him." "My knowing is unsure," replied the butterfly, "but I believe Man to be quite close. I will wait outside, at least for a while. It is certain he will respond to the call?" "If he does not," the Nest said, "he will have changed too greatly to be of any assistance to you. , I am preparing to open the door." The air thinned; the door opened, and the butterfly went out ontp the mountaintop. TUs was the kind of .# air Man could breathe without the protection of an artificial exoskeletOD tlie butterfly reasoned. Thus this mountaintop was the place where Man should be met by his creatures. IV H e was hardly outside when the knowing came that the flying hive of the "metal-secreters" had lifted from the Rock Hill back in his hunting ground. It was hurtling toward him almost with the speed of a meteorite, but when it arrived it landed as gently as the butterfly could have descended onto a flower. The Nest commented: "So your emergency was Man himself... They have a device with them to permit communication.' Nearly an hour passed before the butterfly was addressed again: "A Man is coming out now. I have told him about this world." The butterfly watched with a touch of awe as the Man came out of the unplugged hole in the flying hive. Without his artificial exoskeleton, but with most of his body covered with brightly colored woven material, he still looked very odd -- but not like some freakish creature who could secrete metal. The butterfly's senses informed him that, without his woven coverings, Man would appear rather drab: pink all over except for a scattering of dark hair and for the eyes which were small and one-faceted. Still, there was an austere attractiveness in the Man's appearance and a startling grace in the way he crawled, precariously balanced On his rear legs. The Mien had looked less graceful earlier in the morning, using all four legs to push their way through the flowers and the attacking bees, or to climb the steep side of Rock Hill. Apparently Man was designed to crawl best over level, unobstructed ground. The Man advanced to stand before the butterfly, his small eyes studying the insect as the insect studied the Man. The wings seemed to fascinate the Man. When held in a resting, vertical position their tips were approximately a third as high off the groimd as the top of the Man's head. A series of sounds came from the Man's mouth. "He is asking your name," explained the Nest. "That is an abstract symbol you would use to identify yourself, as an individual, from the other butterflies. I have explained that, while butterflies have individuality, you have no use for names because of the way you communicate." "You (Man) may give me a name if you wish," said the butterfly. "No," said the Man. "If you need no name, you should not have one. How can I serve you in a manner that suits your need?" "I do not know. I came to the Nest to call you because the flying hive was a blank in my knowing of the now-moment. Perhaps I expected you to destroy the hive, or cause it to go elsewhere. But the hive is your contrivance, and this is your world. Thus I have nothing to ask." "This is your world, butterfly," contradicted the Man. "Long ago, men gave it to you and left. I'm beginning to realize why they went away, even though there must be IF many mountains such as this on which men could live in comfort. We too must depart soon, for the same reason. And we will take our flying hive with us," The seasons of this world are not suited," the butterfly quoted, "for beings who live a hundred years." "That is a minor problem," the man said. "Men are not as long-lived as you believe. Our hundred years, or season cycles, are very brief years compared to your own. This planet turns much more slowly on its axis and takes much longer to circle its sun than the planet that gave birth to both our species. Also, this planet's orbit is far more eccentric than that of our birth-planet, giving you brief, warm summers and very long; cold winters. Men restructured you genetically to fit in this environment as intelligent life. The ancient geneticists must have chosen you for this world because you metemorphose. You can survive the winter as a pupa or, in the case of spiders and some of the other insects, as an egg. That was long ago, according to the way man experiences time. We have lost all records of having populated this planet. Before our flying hive leaves, there is much about your life cycles we would like to re-leam." "It will please us to tell you," said the butterfly. "There is a spider at my hunting ground who, I am certain, will delight in tallg to you for a whole day." The butterfly was somewhat puzzled by the workings of the Man's mind. Evidently the Man had started to tell him the reason why the Men who had shaped the creatures had not stayed, and why now these Men would have to dart quickly. However, the Man had strayed from the subject. But perhaps tte butterfly knew the reason without being told. "Now that we know what the flying hive is," he said, "its blankness is far less disturbing. It is quite tolerable, in fact. You need not go quickly on that account." "That is not why we must leave," said the Man. "If it were, we could solve our problem quite easily by allowing you to enter the flying hive and investigate its contents until it ceased to be a blank. You may do that, anyway, for that matter." "Then why must you go?" the butterfly asked. The Man replied hesitantly. "Because it may not be good for men to associate too much with you. Not bad for you, but bad for men. Tell me, butterfly, do you know that on the birth-planet men regarded you as the most beautiful creature in existence?" "No." "Neither did I -- since I had never seen a butterfly until today. Nor even a picture of one. That is the reason for the incidents earlier this morning. I wish to apologize for not recognizing you and the ants and bees." "That's all right," replied the butterfly. "We didn't recognize you either." "Anyway, you are the most beautiful creature that I've ever seen on any world, excepting of course certain females of my own kind," the Man went on. "And in your mutated form, which has increased your IP size and given you a unique intelligence you impress us as being -- totally admirable. Man sees no other creature that way. And at men admire, they try to imitate in themselves." He hesitated then finished hurriedly and almost angrily: 'lf men stayed here, they would wind up being fake butterflies, trying to look and think like you when they can do neither. It's best for us to stay away from your world and continue being men, whatever that may be." T he butterfly found this speech astonishing to the point of incomprehensibility, the final words no less than what came before. "But you made us as we are," he protested. "Surely you know your superiority to us." "No." "You do not know the now-moment," the butterfly persisted, "but isn't that for a reason s imily to my not remembering in the manner of the spider? 'The thought comes to nw that perhaps you combine remembering and knowing in a way I cannot comprehend, to know all moI '  '  ( I ' ' ' f '  '    ' ments that have been dr will be." The man made a sound signifying aniusement. "That is a flattering thought. It attributes to us the supreme knowledge we sometimes imagine in our own gods -- the hypothetical beings who created all life. No, we don't have that kind of knowing. And the fact that you have part of it is a reason why men must avoid you. They would tend to consider you half-gods." This, to the butterfly, was monstrous. "But surely you must have some form of knowing..." he began. The Man was shaking his head. "Men have seen much and learned much. And we know much. But not as you know." Suddenly the butterfly understood and gazed at the Man with awe. To know the now-moment, he realized dimly, was a complete thing, and what was complete w limited to its totality. Man's knowing had no completeness -- no limits -- because Man did not even know himself. , Breathing hard in the thin mountain air, the butterfly marveled at the # '   'f 'i 'f f f IF  Serial No one could winkle Muller out of his maze -- buf worlds would crumble if they failedi On the planet Lemnos is the of a long-vanished alien race. The city is in the form of an eight-zoned maze, and the outer zones of the maze are studded with boobytraps so ingenious that only one human being has ever penetrated them. He is Richard Muller, formerly a troubleshooter for Earth's government, now a bitter self-exiled man huddling alone in the heart of the maze. More than a decade earlier, Muller went as man's first ambassador to the inhabitants of Beta Hydri IV -- the only other intelligent aliens known to exist in the galaxy. Muller went and came home mysteriously altered by the Hydrans so that no member of his own kind could bear to be close to him. Those who came within range got an agonizing dose of Muller's involuntary telepathic radiation. When he realized what he had become, Muller took refuge in the maze of Lenmos. Now Earth has need of him again. A ship landed on Lenmos, breaking nine years of solitude for Muller. It carries Charles Boardman, an elderly, crafty diplomat, and young Ned Rawlins, naive and ambitious. Rawlins, who knows very little of what Boardman wants Muller for, has been picked as the older man's catspaw. His job is to get inside the maze, make contact with the misanthropic Muller and persuade him to come out. Entering the maze proves difficult and hazardous; but with the aid of a computer and a supply of expendable robots, they get inside. Boardman settles down in one of the middle zones; Rawlins goes forward, hunting for Muller; he's vaguely aware that the fate of mankind may depend on how well he carries out his assignment. vn M uller had often been alone for long periods. He had enough cubes to keep him diverted here and enou challenges surviving in this maze. And memories. He could summon remembered scenes from a hundred worlds. Men sprawled everywhere. Delta Pavonis VI, for example: twenty light-years out and rapidly going strange. They called the planet Loki, which struck Muller as a whopping misnomer, for Loki was agile, shrewd, slight of build, and the settlers on Loki, fifty years isolated from Earth, went in for a cult of artificial obesity through glucostatic regulation. Muller had visited them a decade before his illstarred Beta Hydri journey. He remembered a warm planet, habitable only in a narrow temperate belt. Sweaty Buddhas weighing a few hundred kilograms apiece sat in stately meditation before thatched huts; he had never seen so much flesh per cubic meter before. The Lokites meddled with their peripheral glucoreceptors to induce accumulation of body fat. It was useless adaptation, unrelated to any problem of their environment; they simply liked to be huge. Muller recced arms that looked like thighs, thighs that looked like pillars, bellier that curved and recurved in triumphant excess. They had hospitably offered the spy from Earth a woman. For Muller it was a lesson in cultural relativity; for there were in the village two or three women who, although bulky enough, were scrawny by local standards and so approximated the norm of Muller's own background. The Lokites did not give him any of these women, these pitiful underdeveloped hundred-kilogram wrecks, for it would have been a breach of manners to let a guest have a subpar companion. So they treated him instead to a blonde colossus with breasts like cannonballs and buttocks IF that were continents of quivering meat. It was, at any rate, unforgettable. There were so many other worlds. He had been a tireless voyager. He had shivered in methane lakes, had fried in post-Saharan deserts, had followed nomadic settlers across a purple plain in quest of their strayed arthropodic cattle. He had been shipwrecked by computer failure on airless worlds. He had seen the coppery cliffs of Damballa, ninety kilometers high. He had taken a swim in the gravity lake of Mordred. He had slept beside a multicolored brook under a sky blazing with a trio of suns. He had walked the crystal bridges of Now, huddled at the heart of his maze, he watched the screens and waited for the stranger to find him. A weapon, small and cool, nestled in his hand. T he afternoon unrolled swiftly. Rawlins began to think he would have done better to listen to Boardman and spend a night in camp before going to seek Muller. At least three hours of deepsleep to comb his mind of tension -- a quick dip under the sleep wire, always useful. Well, he hadn't bothered. Now there was no opportunity. His sensors told him that Muller was jiist ahead. He had never done anything significant before. He had studied, he had performed routine tasks in Boardman's office, he had now and then handled a slightly sensitive matter. But he had always believed that his real career still was yet to open, that all this was preliminary. But this was no training simulation. Here he stood, tall and blond and young and stubborn and ambitious, at the verge of an action which -- and Charles Boardman had not been altogether hypocritical about that -- might well influence the course of coming history. Ping. He looked about. The sensors had spoken. Out of the shadows ahead emerged the figure of a man. Muller. They faced each other across a gap of twenty meters. Rawlins had remembered Muller as a giant and was surprised to see now that they were about the same height, both of them just over two meters high. Muller was dressed in a dark glossy wrap, and in this light at this hour his face w a study in conflicting planes and jutting prominences, all peaks and valleys. In Muller's hand lay the apple-sized device with which he had destroyed the probe. Boardman's voice buzzed in Rawlin's ear. Get closer to him. Smile. Look shy and uncertain and friendly, and very concerned. And keep your hands where he can see them at all times." Rawlins obeyed. He wondered when he would begin to feel the effects of being this close to Muller. He found it hard to take his eyes from the shiny globe that rested like a grenade in Muller's hand. When he was ten meters away he started to pick up the emanation from Muller. Muller said, What do you -- "The words came out as a raucous shriek. Muller stopped, cheeks flaming, and seemed to be adjusting the gears of his larynx. He began again. "What do you want from me?" he said, this time in his true voice, deep crackling with suppressed rage. "Just to talk. Honestly. I don't want to cause any trouble for you, Mr. Muller." "You know me!" "Of course I do. Everyone knows Richard Muller. I mean, you were the galactic hero when I was going to school. We did reports on you. Essays about you. We -- " "Get out of here!" The shriek again. " -- and Stephen Rawlins was my father. I knew you, Mr. Muller." T he dark apple was rising. The small square window was facing him. Rawlins remembered how the relay from the drone probe had suddenly ceased. "Stephen Rawlins?" The apple descended. "My father." Rawlins's left leg seemed to be turning to water. He was getting the outpouring from Muller more strongly now, as though it took a few minutes to tune to his wavelength. Now Rawlins felt the torrent of anguish, the sadness. "I met you long ago," he said. "You had just come back from -- let's see, it was # Eridani, I think. You were all tanned and windbumed. I think I was eight years old, and you picked me up and threw me, only you were not used to Earthnorm gravity and you threw me too hard, and I hit the ceiling and began to cry, and you gave me something to make me stop, a little bead that changed colors." Muller's hands were limp at his sides. The apple had disappeared into his garment He said tautly, "What was your name? Fred, Ed -- that's it Yes. Ed. Edward ELawlins." "They started calling me Ned a little later on." Muller turned away and coughed. His hand slipped into his pocket He raised his head, and the descending sun glittered weirdly against his face, staining it deep orange. He made a quick edgy gesture with one finger. "Go away, Ned. Tell your friends that I don't want to be bothered. I'm a very sick man and I want to be alone." "Sick?" "Sick with a mysterious inward rot of the soul. Look, Ned, you're a fine handsome boy, and I love your father dearly, if any of this is true, and I don't want you hanging around me. You'll regret it. I don't mean that as a threat, just as a statement of fact. Go away." "Stand your ground," Boardman told him. "Get closer. Right in where it hurts." Rawlins took a wary step. He diminished the distance between them by ten per cent The impact of the emanation seemed to double. He said, "Please don't chase me away. Mr. Muller. I just want to be friendly. My father would never have forgiven me if he could have found out that I met you here, like this, and didn't tiy to help you at all."  Would have? Could have? What happened to your father?" "Dead. Four years ago, Rigel tightbeam network connecting the R IP i gel worlds. There was an amplifier accident. The focus was inverted; he got the whole beam." "Jesus. He was still youngl" "He would have been fifty in a month." Muller's face softened. Some of the torment ebbed from the eyes. His lips became more mobile. It was as though someone else's grief had taken him momentarily from his own. "Get closer to him," Boardman ordered. A nother step, and then since Muller did not seem to notice, another. Rawlins sensed heat: not real but psychical, a furnace-blast of directionless emotion. He shivered in awe. Muller said, "What are you doing on Lemnos, boy?" "I'm an archeologist." The lie came awkwardly. "This is my first field trip. We're trying to carry out a thorough examination of the maze." "The maze happens to be someone's home. You're intruding." Rawlins faltered. 'Tell him you didn't know he was here," Boardman prompted. "We didn't realize that anyone was here," said Rawlins. "We had no way of knowing that -- " "You sent your damned robots in, didn't you? Once you found someone here -- someone you knew damned well wouldn't want any company --  "I don't understand," Rawlins said. "We had the impression you were wrecked here. We wanted to offer our help." How easily I do this, he told himselfl Muller scowled. "You don't know why I'm here?" "I'm afraid not." "You wouldn't, I guess. You were too young. But the others -- once they saw my face, they should have known. Why didn't they tell you?" "I really don't understand -- " "Come close!" Muller bellowed. Rawlins felt himself gliding forward. Abruptly he was face to face with Muller, conscious of the man's massive frame, his furrowed brow, his fixed, staring, angry eyes. Muller's immense hand poimced on Rawlins's wrist. Rawlins rocked, stunned by the impact, drenched with a despair so vast that it seemed to engulf whole universes. He tried not to stagger. "Now get away from me!" Mulled cried harshly. "Go on! Out of here! Out!" Rawlins did not move. Muller howled a curse and ran ponderously into a low glassy-walled building. The door closed, sealing without a perceptible opening. Rawlins sucked in breath and fougbt for his balance. "Stay where you are," said Boardman. "Let him get over his tantrum. Everything's going well." vm M uller crouched behind the door. Sweat rolled down his sides. A dhill swept him. He wrapped his arms about himself so tightly that his ribs complained. He had not meant to handle the intruder that way at all. A few words of conversation, a blunt request for privacy; then, if the man would not go away, the destructor globe. So Muller had planned. But he had hesitated. He had spoken too much and learned too much. Stephen Rawlim's son? A party of archeologists out there? The boy had hardly seemed affected by the radiation, except at very close range. Was it losing its power with the years? Muller fought to collect himself and to analyze his hostility. Why so fearful? Why so eager to cling to solitude? He had nothing to fear from Earthmen; they and not he were the sufferers in any contact he had with them. His original pretense was that he had come here out of consideration for his fellow man, that he ugliness that was himself upon them. But the boy had wanted to be friendly and helpful. Why flee? Slowly Muller rose and undid the door. He stepped outside. Night had fallen with winter's swiftness; the sky was black, and the moons seared across it The boy still stood in the plaza, looking a little dazed. The biggest moon, Clotho, bathed him in golden light, so that his curling hair seemed to sparkle with inner flame. His face was very pale, with sharply accentuated cheekbones. His blue eyes gleamed in shock. Muller felt like some great halfrusted machine called into action after too many years of neglect. "Ned?" he said. "Look, Ned, I want to tell you that Fm sorry. Youve got to understand, I'm not used to people. Not -- used -- to -- people' "It's all right, Mr. Muller. I realize it's been rough for you." "Call me Dick." Muller raised both hands and spread them as if trying to cup moonbeams. On the wall beyond the plaza small animal shapes leaped and danced. Muller said, "I've come to love my privacy. You can even cherish cancer if you get into the right frame of mind. Look, you ought to realize something. I came here deliberately. It wasn't any shipwreck. I picked out the one place in the universe where I was least likely to be disturbed and hid myself inside it. But of course you had to come with your tricky robots and find the way in." "If you don't want me here. I'll go," Rawlins said. "Maybe that's best for both of us. No. Wait. Stay. Is it very bad, being this close to me?" "It isn't exactly comfortable," said Rawlins. "But it isn't as bad as -- as -- well, I don't know. From this distance I just feel a little depressed." "You know why?" Muller asked. "From the way you talk, I think you do, Ned. You're only pretending not to know what happened to me on Beta Hydri IV." R awlins colored. "Well, I remember a little bit, I guess. They operated on your mind?" "Yes, that's right. What you're feeling, Ned, that's me, my goddamn soul leaking into the air. You're picking up the flow of neural current, straight from the top of my skull. Isn't it lovely? Try coming a little closer. That's it." Rawlins halted.  "There," Muller said. "Now it's ' stronger. You're getting a better dose. IF Now recall what it was like when you were standing right here. That wasn't so pleasant, was it? From ten meters away you can take it. From one meter away it's intolerable. Can you imagine holding a woman in your arms while you give off a mental stink like that? You can't make love from ten meters away." Muller said, "Let's sit down, Ned. It's safe here. I've got detectors rigged in case any of the nastier animals come in, and there aren't any traps in this zone. Sit." He lowered himself to the smooth milkywhite stone floor, the alien marble that made this plaza so sleek. Rawlins, after an instant of deliberation, slipped lithely into the lotus position a dozen meters away. Muller said, "How old are you, Ned?" 'Twenty-three." "Married?" A shy grin. "Afraid not." "Got a girl?" "There was one, a liaison contract. We voided it when I took on this job." " "How many men have you lost here so far?" Muller asked. "Five, I think. Fd like to know the sort of people who'd build a thing like this." Muller said, "This was the grand creative triumph of their race, I believe. Their masterpiece, their monument. They must have been proud of this murderous place. It summed up the whole essence of their philosophy: kill the stranger." "Are you just speculating, or have you found some clues to their cultural outlook?" "The only clue I have to their cultural outlook is all around us. But I'm an expert on alien psychology, Ned. I know more about it than any other human being, because I'm the only one who ever said hello to an alien race. Kill the stranger: it's the law of the universe. And if you don't kill him, at least screw him up a little." "We aren't like that," Rawlins said. "We don't show instinctiye hostility to -- " "Crap." "But -- " M uller said, "If an alien starship ever landed on one of our planets, we'd quarantine it and imprison the crew and interrogate them to destruction. We pretend that we're too noble to hate strangers, but we have the politeness of weakness. Take the Hydrans. A substantial faction within our government was in favor of generating fusion in their cloud layer and giving them an extra sun. Before sending an emissary to scout them." "No." "They were overruled, and an emissary was sent, and the Hydrans wasted him. Me." An idea struck Muller suddenly. Appalled, he said, "What's happened between us and the Hydrans in the last nine years? Any contact? War?" "Nothing," said Rawlins. "We've kept away." "Are you telling me the truth? Or did we wipe the bastards out? God knows I wouldn't mind that, but yet it wasn't their fault they did this to me. They were reacting in a standard xenophobic way. Ned, has there been a war with them?" "No, there really hasn't. I swear." Muller relayed. After a moment he said, "All right. I won't aric you to fill me in on all the other news developments. I dWt really give a damn. How long are you people staying on Lemnos?" "We don't know yet. A few weeks, I suppose. We haven't even really begun to explore the maze. And then there's the area outside. We want to run correlations on the work of earlier archeologists, and -- " "Are the others going to come into the center of the maze?" Rawlins moistened his lips. "We don't have any plan yet. It ah depends on you. We don't want to impose on you. So if you don't want us to work here -- " "I don't," Muiier said crisply. "Tell that to your friends. In fifty or sixty years I'll be dead, and they can sniff around here then. But while Fm here I don't want them bothering me. Let them work in the outer four or five zones. If any of them sets foot in A, B or C, I'll kill him." "What about me? Am I welcome?" "Occasionally. I can't predict my moods. If you want to talk to me, come around and see. And if I tell you to get the hell out, Ned, then get the hell out. Clear?" Rawlins grinned sunnily. "Clear." to have the boy standing over him, rose also. Rawlins took a few steps toward him. Muller said, "Where are you going?" "I hate having to talk at this distance. To shout like this. I can get a little closer to you, can't I?" Instantly suspicious, Muller replied, "Are you some kind of masochist?" "Sorry, no." "Well, I'm no sadist, either. I dotfl want you near me." "It's really not that unpleasant -- Dick." "You're lying. You hate it like all the others. I'm like a leper, boy, and if you're queer for leprosy I feel sorry for you, but don't come any closer. It embarrasses me to see other people suffer on my account." Rawlins stopped. "Whatever you say. Look, Dick, I don't want to cause troubles for you. I'm just trying to be friendly and helpful. If doing that in some way makes you uncomfortable, well, just say so and I'll do something else." "That came out pretty muddled, boy. What is it you want from me, anyhow?" "Nothing." "Why not leave me alone?" "You're a human being and you've been alone here for a long time. It's my natural impulse to offer companionship." Muller shrugged. "I'm not much of a companion. Maybe you ought to take all your sweet Christian impulses and go away. There's no way you can help me, Ned. You can only hurt me by reminding me of all I can no longer have or know." Stiffening, Muller looked past the tall young man toward the shadowy figures cavorting along the walls. He was hungry, and this was the hour to begin hunting for his dinner. He said brusquely, "Son, I think my patience is running out. Leave." IF "All right. Can I come back tomorrow?" "Maybe." The boy smiled ingenuously. "Thanks for letting me talk to you, Dick. I'll be back." B y troublesome moonlight Rawlins made his way out of Zone A. He edged over a spring-loaded stone block that was capable of hurling him from a precipice if he applied his weight the wrong way. A small toothy animal snickered at him as he crossed. On the far side Rawlins prodded the wall in a yielding place and won admission to Zone B. Rawlins still throbbed with the impact of that brief moment of direct contact with Muller. For an instant he had received a formless incoherent emanation of raw emotion, the inner wordlessly. The flow of uncontrollable innerness was painful and depressing to receive. It was not true telepathy that the Hydrans had given him . Muller could not "read" minds, nor could he communicate his thoughts to others. What came forth was this gush of self. A torrent of raw despair, a river of regrets and sorrows, all the sewage of a soul. He could not hold it back. For that eternal moment Rawlins had been bathed in it; the rest of the time he had merely picked up a vague and general sense of distress. Rawlins had felt that he was tuned to every discord in creation: the missed chances, the failed loves, the hasty words, the unfair griefs, the hungers, the greeds, the lusts, the knife of envy, the acid of frustration. the fang of time, the death of small insects in winter, the tears of things. He had known aging, loss, mortality, impotence, fury, helplessness, loneliness, desolation, self-contempt, and madness. It was a silent shriek of cosmic anger. Are we all like that, he wondered? Is the same broadcast coming from me, and from Boardman, and from my mother, and from the girl I used to love? Do we walk about like beacons fixed to a frequency we can't receive? Thank God, then. That's a song too painful to hear. Boardman said, "Wake up, Ned. Stop brooding and watch out for trouble. You're almost in Zone C now." "Charles, how did you feel the first time you came close to Muller?" "We'll discuss that later." "Did you feel as if you knew what human beings were all about for the first time?" "I said we'd discuss -- " "Let me say what I want to say, Charles. I'm not in any danger here. I just looked into a man's soul, and I'm shaken by it. But -- listen, Charles -- he isn't really like that He's a good man. That stuff he radiates, it's just noise, it's a kind of sludge that doesn't tell you a real thing about Dick Muller." Ned. Get back to camp. We all agree that Dick Muller's a fine human being. That's why we need him." IX W hen they met again the next morning it was easier for both of them. Rawlins, having slept well under the sleep wire, went to the heart of the maze and found Muller standing beside a tall flat-sided spike of dark metal at the edge of the great plaza. "What do you make of this?" Muller asked conversationally as Rawlins approached. "There are eight of them one at each comer. I've been watching them for years. They turn. Look here." Muller pointed to one face of the pylon. Rawlins came close, and when he was ten meters away he picked up Muller's emanation. Nevertheless he forced himself closer. "You see this?" Muller asked, tapping the spike. "A mark." "It took e close to six months to cut it. I used a sliver from the crystahine outcropping set in that wall yonder. Every day for an hour or two I'd scrape away, until there was a visible mark in the metal. I've been watching that mark. In the course of one local year it turns all the way round. So the spikes are moving. You can't see it, but they move. They are some kind of calendars." "Do -- they -- can -- have you ever -- "You aren't making sense, boy." 'Tm sorry." Rawlins backed away, trying hard to hide the impact of Mtdler's nearness. He was flushed and shaken. At five meters the effect was not so agonizing, and he stayed there making an effort, telling himself that he was developing a tolerance for it. "You were saying?" "Is this the only one you've been watching?" 'Tve scratched a few of the others. I'm convinced that they all turn. I haven't found the mechanism. Underneath this city, you know, there's some kind of fantastic brain. It's millions of years old, but it still works, so it's probably some sort of liquid metal with cognition elements floating in it. It turns these pylons and runs the water supply and cleans the streets." "And operates the traps." "And operates the traps," Muller said. "But I haven't been able to find a sign of it. I've done some digging here and there, but I find only dirt below. Maybe you archeologist bastards will locate the city's brain. Eh? Any clues?" "I don't think so," said Rawlins. "Most of the time I go outside the city, directing the entry operations. And then when I got in, I came right in here. So I don't know what the others may have discovered so far. If anything." "Are they going to rip up the streets?" Mer asked. "I don't think so. We don't dig so much, any more. We use scanners and sensors and probe beams." Glibly, impressed with his own improvisations, he went on headlong. "Archeology used to be destructive, of course. To find out what was under a pyramid we had to take the pyramid apart. But now we can do a lot with probes. That's the new school, you understand, looking into the ground without digging, and thus preserving the monuments of the past for -- " "On one of the planets of Epsilon Indi," said Muller, "a team of archeologists completely dismantled an ancient alien burial pavilion about fifteen years ago, and then found it imIF possible to put the thing back together because they couldn't comprehend the structural integrity of the building. When they tried it fell apart and was a total loss. I happened to see the ruins a few months later. You know the case, of course." Rawlins didn't. He said, reddening, "Well there are always bunglers in any discipline -- " hope there are none here. I don't want the maze damaged. Not that there's much chance of that. The maze defends itself quite well." Mulled strolled casually away from the pylon. He said, half to himself, "The cages are closed again." "Cages?" "Look down there. Into that street branching out of the plaza." R awlins saw an alcove against a building wall. Rising from the ground were a dozen or more curving bars of white stone that disappeared into the wall at a height of about four meters, forming a kind of cage. He could see a second such cage farther down the street. Muller said, There are about twenty of them arranged symmetrically in the streets off e plaza. Three times since I've been here the cages have opened. Those bars slide into the street, somehow, and disappear. The third time was two nits ago. I've never seen the cages either open or close, and I've missed it again." "at do you think the cages were used for?" Rawlins asked. 'To hold dangerous beasts. Or captured enemies." "And when they open now -- " "The city's still trying to serve its people. There are enemies in the outer zones. The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured." "You mean us?" "Yes. Enemies." Muller's eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. 'Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universet" "You say it as if you believe it." "I do." "Come on," Rawlins said. "You devoted your life to serving mankind. You can't possibly believe -- " "I devoted my life," said Muller slowly, "to serving Richard Muller." He swung around so that he faced Rawlins squarely. They were only six or seven meters apart. The emanation seemed almost as strong as though they were nose to nose. Muller said, "I gave less of a damn for humanity than you might think, boy. I saw the stars and I wanted them. I aspired after the condition of a deity. One world wasn't enough for me; I was hungry to have them all. So I built a career that would take me to the stars. I risked my life a thousand times. I endured fantastic extremes of temperature. I rotted my lungs with crazy gases and had to be rebuilt from the inside out. I ate foods that would sicken you to hear about. Kids like you worshiped me and wrote essays about my selfless dedication to man, my tireless quest for knowledge. Let me get you straight on that. I'm about as selfless as Columbus and Magellan and Marco Polo. They were great explorers, yes, but they also looked for a fat profit. The profit I wanted was in here. I wanted to stand a hundred kilometers high. I wanted golden statues of me on a thousand worlds. You know poetry? Fame is the spur. That last infirmity of noble mind. Milton. Do you know your Greeks, too? When a man overreaches himself, the gods cast him down. It's called hybris, I had a bad case of it. When I dropped through the clouds to vissit the Hydrans, I felt like a god. Christ, I was a god. And when I left, up through the clouds again. To the Hydrans I'm a god, all right. I thought it then: I'm in their myths, they'll always tell my story." "The cage -- " "Let me finish," Muller rapped. "You see, the truth is, I wasn't a god, only a rotten mortal human being who had delusions of godhood, and the real gods saw to it that I learned my lesson. They decided to remind me of the hairy beast inside the plastic clothing. So they arranged it for the Hydrans to perform a clever little surgical trick on my brain, one of their specialties, I guess. I don't know if the Hydrans were being malicious for the hell of it or whether they were genuinely trying to cure me of a defect, my inability to let my emotions get out to them. But they did their little job. And then I came back to Earth. Hero and leper all at once. Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that youre an animal, too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you leam things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plaque I carry is the truth. My message is that it's a lucky thing for humanity that we're shut up each in our own skulls, because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry non-verbal thing I've got, we'd be unable to stand each other. The Hydrans can reach right into each other's minds, and they seem to like it, but we can't. And that's why I say that man must be the most despicable beast in the whole universe. He can't even take the reek of his own kind, soul to soull" Rawlins said, "The cage seems to be opening." #TThat? Let me look!" Muller Vy came jostling forward. Unable to step aside rapidly enough, Rawlins received the brunt of the emanation. It was not as painful this time. Images of autumn came to him: withered leaves, dying flowers, a dusty wind, early twilight More regret than anguish over the shortness of life, the necessity of the condition. "It's withdrawn by several centimeters already. Why didn't you tell me?" "I tried to. But you weren't listening." "No. No. My damned soliloquizing." Muller chuckled. "Ned, I've been waiting years to see this. The cage actually in motion. Look how smoothly it moves, gliding into the ground. This is strange, Ned. It's never opened twice the same year before, and here's it's opening for the second time this week." The cage was fully open now. IP There was no sign of the bars except the row of small openings in the pavement. Rawlins said, "Have you ever tried to put anything in the cages? Animals?" "Yes. I dragged a big dead beast inside one. Nothing happened. Then I caught some live little ones. Nothing happened." He frowned. I once thought of stepping into the cage myself to see if it would close automatically when it sensed a live human being. But I didn't. When you're alone you don't try experiments like that." He paused a moment. "How would you like to help me in a little experiment right now, eh, Ned? Just step across into the alcove and wait a minute or so. See if the cage closes on you," "And if it does," Rawlins said, not taking him seriously, "do you have a key to let me out?" "I have a few weapons. We can always blast you out by lasing the bars." "That's destructive. You warned me not to destroy anything here." "Sometimes you destroy in order to learn. Go on, Ned. Step in." Muller's voice grew flat and strange. He was standing in an odd expectant half-crouch, hands at his sides, fingertips bent inward toward his thighs. As though he's going to throw me into the cage himself, Rawlins thought. Boardman said quietly in Rawlin's ear, "Do as he says, Ned. Get into the cage. Show him that you trust him." I trust him, Rawlins told himself. But I don't trust that cage. He had uncomfortable visions of the floor of the cage dropping out as soon as the bars were in placed Of himself dumped into some underground vat of acid or lake of fife. The disposal pit for trapped enemies. "Do it, Ned," Boardman murmured. I t was a grand crazy gesture. Rawlins stepped over the row of small openings and stood with his back to the wall. Almost at once the curving bars rose from the groimd and locked themselves seamlessly into place above his head. The floor seemed stable. No death-rays lashed out at him. "Fascinating," Muller said. "It must scan for intelligence. When I tried with animals, nothing happened. Dead or alive. What do you make of that, Ned?" 'Tm very glad to have your research. I'd be happier if you'd let me out now." "I can't control the movements of the bars." "You said you'd laser them open." "But why be destructive so fast? Let's wait, shall we? Perhaps the bs will open again of their own accord. You're perfectly safe in there, til bring you food, if you have to eat' "Stay cool," Boardman advised. 'Tf necessary, we can get you out of that ourselves. It's important to humor Muller in everything you can until you've got real rapport widi him." Muller said, "That was pretty brave of you, Ned. Or stupid. I'm sometimes not sure if there's a di tinction. But I'm grateful, anyway. I had to know about those cages." "Glad to have been of assistance. You see human beings aren't all that monstrous." "Not consciously. It's the sludge inside that's ugly, Rawlins." He sat down crosslegged. "Did you make any attempt at all to get yourself fixed when you returned to Earth?" "I talked to the shapeup boys. They couldn't begin to figure out what changes had been made in my neural flow, and so they couldn't begin to figure out how to fix things." "How long did you stay?" "A few months. Long enough to discover that there wasn't one human being I knew who didn't turn green after a few minutes of close exposure to me. I tried some fancy drugs, and then I tried drink, and then I tried living dangerously. And at the end of it I was still alive. I was in and out of four neuropsychiatric wards in a single month. I tried wearing a padded lead helmet to shield the thought radiations. It was like trying to catch neutrinos in a bucket," Muller spat. "You know, I could always take society or leave iU When I was among people I was happy. I was cordial; I had the social graces. I wasn't a slick, sunny article like you, all overflowing with kindness and nobility, but I interacted with others, I related, I got along. Then I could go on a trip for a year and a half and not see or speak to anyone, and that was all right too. But once I found out that I was shut off from society for good, I discovered that I had needed it after all. But that's over. I outgrew the ne, boy. I can spend a hundred years alone and never miss one souL I trained myself to see humanity as humanity sees me: something sidening, a damp hunkering crippled thing avoid To heU with you aU. I don't owe any of you anything, love included. I have no obligations. I could leave you to rot in that cage Ned, and never feel upset about it. I could pass that cage twice a day and smile at your skull." "You speak as if you belong to an alien race," Rawlins said in wonder. "No. I belong to the human race. I'm the most human being there is, because Tm the only one who can't hide his humanity. What's inside me is also inside you. I speak for man I tell the truth. I'm the skull beneath the face, boy. I'm the hidden intestines. I'm ail the garbage we pretend isn't there, all the filthy animal stuff, the lusts, the little hates, the sicknesses, the envies." Rawlins said quietly, "Why did you decide to come to Lemnos?" "A man named Charles Boardman put the idea into my head." X R 'awlins recoiled in surprise at the mention of the name. Muller said, "You know him?" 'Well, yes. Of course. He -- he's a , very important man in the government" "It was Boardman who sent me to Beta Hydri IV. Oh, he didn't trick me into it, he didn't have  to persuade me in any of his slippery ways. He simply played on my ambitions. There's a world there with aliens on IF iU he said, and we want a man to visit it Probably a suicide mission, but it would be mans first contact with another intelligent species, and are you interested? So of Course I went. And afterward, when I came back this way, he tried to duck me a while, either because he couldnH abide being near me or because he couldn't abide his own guilt, and fi nally I caught up with him and I said, look at me, Charles, this is how I am now, where can I go, what shall I do? I got close to him. His face changed color. I could see the nausea in his eyes. And he reminded me about the maze on Lemnos.' "Why?" "He offered it as a place to hide. I suppose he thought I'd be killed on my way into the maze. But I told Boardman I wouldn't think of it I wanted to cover my trail. I blew up and insisted that the last thing in the world I'd do was come here. Then I spent the month on skids in Under New Orleans, and when I surfaced again I rented a ship and came here, using maximum diversionary tactics to insure that nobody found out my true destination." Rawlins said, "How did you get inside the maze?" "Through sheer bad luck." "Bad luckr "I was trying to die in a blaze of glory," said Muller. "I didn't give a damn if I survived the maze or not. I just plunged right in and headed for the middle. The trouble was, Ned, I'm a survival type. It's an innate gift, maybe even something paranor mat. I have unusual reflexes. Also my urge to stay alive is well developed. Besides that, I had mass detectors and some other useful equipment. So I came into the maze, and whenever I saw a corpse lying about I looked a little sharper than usual, and I stopped and rested when I felt my visualization of the place beginning to waver. I fully expected to be killed in Zone H. I Wanted it. But it was my luck to make it where everybody failed." He said, "Are you getting hungry, boy?" "A little." "Don't go away. I'll bring you some lunch." M uller strode toward the nearby buildings and disappeared. Rawlins said quietly, "This .is awful, Charles. He's obviously out of his mind." "Don't be sure of it," Boardman replied. "He may be playing a game with you, pretending to be crazy to test your good faith." Muller returned, carrying a platter of meat and a handsome crystal beaker of water. "Best I can offer," he said. The water had an agreeable flavor, or lack of flavor. Muller sat quietly before the cage, eating. Rawlins noticed that the effect of his emanation no longer seemed so disturbing, even at a range of less than five meters. Obviously one builds a tolerance to it, he thought... ,  Rawlins said after a while, "Would you come out and meet my companions in a few days?" . "Absolutely not." "They'd be eager to talk to you." "I have no interest in talking to them. I'd sooner talk to wild beasts." "You talk to me," Rawlins pointed out. "For the novelty of it. And because your father was a good friend. Aud because as human beings go, boy, you're reasonably acceptable. But I don't want to be thrust into any miscellaneous mass of bug-eyed archeologists." Possibly meet two or three of them," Rawlins suggested. "Get used to the idea of being among people again." "Why should I get used to the idea of being among people again?" Rawlins said uneasily, "Well, because there are people here, because it's not a good idea to get too isolated from -- "  "Are you planning some sort of trick? Are you going to catch me and pull me out of this maze? Come on, come on, boy, what's in back of that little mind of yours? What motive do you have for softening me up for human contact?" Rawlins faltered. In the awkward silence Boardman spoke quickly, supplying the guile he lacked, prompting him. RawUns listened and did his best. H e said, "You're making me out to be a real schemer, Dick. But I swear to you I've got nothing sinister in mind. I admit I've been softening you up a little, jollying you, trying to make friends with you, and I guess I'd better tell you why." "I guess you'd better." It's for the archeological survey's sake. We can spend only a few weeks here. You've been here -- what is it, nine years? You know so much about this place, Dick, and I t hink it's unfair of you to keep it to yourself. So what I was hoping, I guess, was that I could get you to ease up, then maybe come to Zone E, talk to the others, answer their questions, explain what you know about the maze -- " "Unfair to keep it to myself?" "Well, yes. To hide knowledge is a sin." "Is it fair to mankind to call me unclean and run away from me?" "That's a different matter," Rawlins said. "It's beyond all fairness. It's a condition you have, an unfortunate condition that you didn't deserve, and everyone is quite sorry that it came upon you, but on the other hand you surely must realize that from the viewpoint of other human beings it's rather difficult to take a detached attitude toward your --  your -- " "Toward my stink," Muller supplied. "All right. It's rather difficult to stand my presence. Therefore I on your friends. Get it out of your head that I'm going to speak to them or sip tea with them or have anything at all to do with them. I have separated myself from the human race and I stay separated, and it's irrelevant that I've granted you the privilege of bothering me." Boardman continued to instruct him. Rawlins, with the sour taste of lies on his tongue, went on, "I can't blame you for being bitter, Dick. But I still think it isn't right for you to withhold information from us. I mean, look back on your exploring days. If you landed on a planet, and someone had vital information you IF had come to find, wouldn't you make every effort to get that information, even though the other f)erson had certain private problems which -- "Fm sorry," said Muller frostily. "I'm beyond caring." He walked away, leaving Rawlins alone in the cage with two chunks of meat and the beaker of water, nearly empty. When Muller was out of sight Boardman said, "He's a touchy one, all right. But I didn't expect sweetness from him. You're getting to him, Ned. You're just the right mixture of guHe and naivete." "And I'm in a cage." "That's no problem. We can send a drone to release you if the cage doesn't open by itself soon." , "Muller isn't going to work out," Rawlins murmured. "He's full of hate. It trickles out of him everywhere. We'll never get him to cooperate. I've never seen such hate in one man." "You don't know what hate is," said Boardman. "And neither does he. I tell you everything is moving well. There are bound to be some setbacks, but the fact that he's talking to you at all is the important thing. He doesn't want to be full of hate. Give him half a chance to get off his frozen position, and he will." M uller did not return. The afternoon grew darker and the air became chilly. Rawlins huddled uncomfortably in the cage. He tried to imagine this city when it had been alive, when this cage had been used to display prisoners captured in the maze. In the eye of his mind he saw a throng of the city-builders, short and thick, with dense coppery fur and greenish skin, swinging their long arms and pointing toward the cage. And in the cage huddled a thing like a giant scorpion, with waxy claws that scratched at the stone paving blocks, and fiery eyes, and a savage tail that awaited anyone who came to close. Harsh music sounded through the city. Alien laughter. The warm musky reek of the city-builders. Children spitting at the thing in the cage. A trapped creature, hideous and malevolent, lonely for its own kind, its hive on a world of Alphecca or Markab, where waxy tailed things moved in shining tunnels. For days the city-builders came, mocked reproached. He grew sick of their massive bodies and their intertwining spidery fingers, of their flat faces and ugly tusks. And a day came when the floor of the maze gave way, for they were tired of the outworlder captive, and down he went, tail lashing furiously, down into a pit of knives. It was night. Rawlins had not heard from Boardman for several hours. He had not seen Muller since early afternoon. Animals were prowling the plaza, mostly small ones, all teeth and claws. Rawlins had come unarmed today. Hunger and cold assailed him. He searched the darkness for Muller. This had ceased to be a joke. "Can you hear me?" he said to Boardman. "We're going to get you out soon." "Yes, but when? "We sent a probe in, Ned." "It shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes for a probe to reach me. These zones aren't really hazardous." Boardman paused. "Muller intercepted the probe and destroyed it an hour ago." "Why didn't you tell me that?" 'We're sending several drones at Boardman said. "Muller's bound to overlook at least one of them. Everything's perfectly all right, Ned. You're in no danger." "Until something happens," Rawlins said gloomily. Cold, hungry, he slouched against the wall and waited. He saw a small lithe beast stalk and kill a much bigger animal a hundred meters away in the plaza. He watched scavengers scurrying in to rip away slabs of bloody meat. He craned Ws neck to search for the drone probe that #; ;; L XI would set him free. No probe appeared. He felt like a sacrificial victim, staked out for the kilk , The scavengers had finished their work. They came padding across the plaza toward him -- little weaselshaped beasts with big tapering heads and paddle-shaped paws from which yellow recurving claws protruded. Their eyes were red in yellow fields. They studied him with interest, solemnly, thoughtfully. Blood, thick and purplish, was smeared over their muzzles. A long narrow snout intruded between two bars of his cage. Rawlins kicked at it. The snout withdrew. To his left, another jutted through. Then there were three snouts. And then the scavengers began slipping into the cage on all sides. B oardman had established a comfortable little nest for himself in the Zone F camp. Under the mUky-white curve of the extrusion dome he had carved a private sector with radiant heating, glow-drapes, a gravity suppressor, and even a liquor console. Brandy and other delights were never far away. He slept on a soft inflatable mattress covered with a thick red quilt inlaid with heater strands. Greenfield entered. "We've lost another drone, sir," he said crisply. "That leaves three in the inner zones." ( Boardman flipped the ignition cap on a cigar. "Is Muller going to get those too?" "I'm afraid so. He knows the access routes better than we do. He's covering them all." "And you haven't sent any drones in through routes we haven't charted?" 'Two, sir. Lost them both." "Umm. We'd better send out a great many probes' at once, then, and hope we can slip at least one of them past Muller. That boy is getting annoyed at being caged. Change the program, will you? The brain can manage diversionary tactics if it's told. Say, twenty probes entering simultaneously." "We have only three left," Greenfield said. "Who allowed this to happen? Call Hosteen! Get those templates working! I want fifty drones built by morning! No, make it eighty! Of all the stupity, Greenfield!" Boardman puffed furiously. He dialed for brandy, the thick, rich, viscous stuff made by Prolepticalist was growing infuriating. He knew that he was in danger of losing his perspective -- the worst of sins. The delicacy of this assignment was getting to him. All these mincing steps, the tiny complications, the painstaking edgings tdward and away from the goal. Rawlins in the cage. Rawlins and his moral qualms. Muller and his neurotic world-outlook. The little beasts that nipped at your heels here and thoughtfully eyed your throat. The traps these demons had built. And the waiting extragalactics, saucer-eyed, radio-sensed, to whom even a Charles Boardman was no more than an insensate vegetable. Doom overhanging all. With a petulant gesture of his hand Boardman reactivated his communication link with Ned Rawlins. The screen showed him moonlight, curving bars and small furry snouts bristling with teeth. "Ned?" he said. "Charles here. We're getting you those drones, boy. We'll have you out of that stupid cage in five minutes, do you hear, five minutes." awlins was very busy. It seemed almost funny. There was no end to the supply of the little beasts. They came nosing through the bars two and three at a time, weasels, ferrets, minks, stoats, whatever they were, all teeth and eyes. But they were scavengers, not killers. They clustered about him, brushing his ankles with their coarse fur, pawing him, slicing through his skin with their claws, biting his shins. He trampled them. He learned very quickly that a booted foot placed just behind the head could snap a spinal column quickly and effectively. Then, with a swift kick, he could sweep his victim into a corner of the cage, where others would pounce upon it at once. Cannibals, too. Rawlins developed a rhythm of it. Turn, stomp, kick. Turn, stomp, kick. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. They were cutting him up badly. For the first five minutes he scarcely had time to pause for breath. He took care of at least twenty of them in that time. Against the far side of the cage a heap of ragged little corpses had risen, with their comrades nosing around hunting for the tender morsels. At last a moment came when all the scavengers cm:rently inside the cage were busy with their fallen cohorts, and no more lurked outside. Rawlins had a momentary respite. He seized a bar with one hand and lifted his left leg to examine the miscellany of cuts, scratches and bites. Do they ve a posthumous Stellar Cross if you die of galactic rabies, he wondered? His leg was bloody from the knee down, and the wounds, though not deep, were hot and painful. Suddenly he discovered why the scavengers had come to him. While he paused he had time to inhale, and he smelled the ripe fragrance of rotting meat. He could almost visualize it: a great bestial corpse, split open at the belly to. expose red sticky organs, perhaps a maggot or two circumnavigating the mound of flesh -- IF Nothing was rotting here. Rawlins realized that it must be some sensory delusion: an olfactory trap touched off by the cage, evidently. The cage was broadcasting the stink of decay. Why? Obviously to lure that pack of little weasels inside. A refined form of torture. He wondered if Muller had somehow seen behind it, going off to a nearby control center to set up the scent. A fresh battalion of beasts was scurrying across the plaza toward the cage. These looked slightly larger, although not so large that they would not fit between the bars, and their fangs had 'an ugly gleam in the moonlight. Rawlins hastily stomped three of the snuffling, gorging . cannibals still alive in his cage and stuffed them through the bars, giving them a wrist-flip that tossed them eit or ten meters outside the cage. Good. The newcomers halted skiddingly and began at once to pounce on the twitching, not quite dead bodies that landed before em. Only a few of the scavengers bothered to enter the cage, and these came spaced widely enough so that Rawlins had a chance to trample each in turn and toss it meters. The last few survivors, stuffout to feed the onrushing horde. At that rate, he thought, he could get rid of them all, if only new ones would stop coming. New ones finally did stop coming. He had killed seventy or eighty by this time; the stink of raw blood overlaid the synthetic stench of rot; his legs ached from all the carnage and his brain was orbiting dizzyingly. But at length the night grew peaceful once more. Bodies, some clad in fur, some just frameworks of bone, lay strewn in a wide arc before the cage. A thick deep-hued puddle of mingled bloods spread over a dozen square meters. The last few survivors, stuffed on their gluttony, had gone slinking away without even trying to harass the occupant of the cage. Weary, drained, close to laughter and close to tears, Rawlins clung to the bars and did not look down at his throbbing, blood-soaked legs. He felt the fire rising in him. He imagined alien microorganisms launching their argosies in his bloodstream. T hree bulky brutes paraded toward him from different directions. They had the stride of lions, but the swinishness of boars: lowslung, sharp-backed creatures, # kilograms or so, with long pyramidal heads, slavering thin-lipped mouths, and tiny squinting eyes arranged, two sets of two on either side, just before their ragged droopy ears. Curving tusks jutted down and intersected smaller and sharper canine teeth that rose from powerful jaws. They rooted about a bit in the heap of scavenger corpses. But clearly they were no scavengers themselves; they were looking for living meat, and their disdain for the broken cannibalized little bodies was evident. When they had completed their inspection, they swung about to stare at Rawlins. Rawlins felt grateful for the security of his cage. He would not care to be outside, unprotected and exhausted, with these three cruising the city for their dinner. At that moment, of course, the bars of the cage began to retract. xn M uller, arriving just then, took in the whole scene. "Get down!" he yelled.  Rawlins got down by taking four running steps to the left, slipping on the blood-slicked pavement, and skidding into a heap of small cadavers at the edge of the street. In the same moment Muller fired. Three quick bolts brought the pigs down. Muller started to go to Rawlins, but then one of the robots from the camp in Zone F appeared, gliding cheerfulUy toward them. Muller cursed softly. He pulled the destructor globe from his pocket and aimed the window at the robot. The robot disintegrated. Rawlins had managed to get up. "You should not have blasted it," he said woozily. "It was just coming to help." "No help was needed," said Muller. "Can you walk?" "I think so." "How badly are you hurt?" "I've been chewed on, that's all. It isn't as bad as it looks." "Come with me," Muller said. Already more scavengers were filing through the plaza, drawn by the mysterious telegraphy of blood. Small toothy things were getting down to serious work on the trio of fallen boars. Forgetting his own emanation, Muller seized him by the arm. Rawlins winced and twitched away, and then, as if repenting the appearance of rudeness, gave Muller his arm again. They crossed the plaza together. "In here," Muller said roughly. They stepped into the hexagonal cell where he kept his diagnostat. Muller sealed the door, and Rawlins sank down limply on the bare floor. Muller said, "How long were you under attack?" "Fifteen, twenty minutes. I don't know. There must have been fifty or a hundred of them. I kept breaking their backs. And then the cage went away." Rawlins laughed wildly. "That was the best part. I had just finished smashing up all those little bastards, and I was catching my breath, and then the three big monsters came along, and so naturally the cage vanished and -- " "Easy," Muller said. "You're talking so fast I can't follow everything. Get those boots off, and we'll patch those legs of yours." Rawlins picked at the catches. "Can you help me? I'm afraid that I can't -- " "You won't like it if I come any closer," Muller warned. "To hell with that!" Muller shrugged. He approached Rawlins and manipulated the broken and bent snaps of his boots. The metal chasing was scarred by tiny teeth; so were the boots themselves, and so were the legs. In a few moments Rawlins was out of his boots and leggings. His legs were in bad shape, though none of the wounds seemed really serious; it was just that there were so many of them. MuUer got the diagnostat going. The lamps glowed, and the receptor slot beckoned. A blue light played on his wounds. In the bowels of the diagnostat things chuttered and clicked. A swab came forth on a jointed arm IF and raa deftly and lightly up his left leg to a point just above the knee. The machine engulfed the bloody swab and began to digest it back to its component molecules while a second swab emerged to clean up his other leg. Rawlins bit his lip. He was getting a coagulant as well as a cleanser, so that when the swabs had done their work all blood was gone and the shallow gouges and rips were revealed. It still looked pretty bad, Muller thought, though not as grim as before. T he diagnostat produced an ultrasonic node and injected a golden fluid into Rawlin's rump. Pain-damper. A second injection, deep amber, was probably some kind of all-purpose antibiotic to ward off infection. Rawlins grew visibly less tense. Now arms sprang forward from various sectors of the device, inspecting Rawlins's lesions in detail scanning them for necessary repairs. There was a humming sound and three sharp clicks. Then the diagnostat began to seal the wounds, clamping them firmly"You shouldn't be doing this," said Rawlins. "We have our own medical supplies back in camp. You must be nming short on necessities. All you had to do was let the drone probe take me back to my camp, and -- " "I don't want those robots crawling around in here. And the diagnostat has at least a fifty-year supply of usefuls. I don't get sick often." The machine released Rawlins, who swimg away from it and looked up at Muller. The wildness was gone from the boy's face now. Muller said. "I didn't think that you'd be attacked by beasts or I wouldn't have left you alone so long. You aren't armed?" "No." "Scavengers don't bother living things. What made them go after you?" "The cage did," Rawlins said. "It began to broadcast the smell of rotting flesh. A lure. Suddenly they were crawling all over me. I thought they'd eat me alive." Muller grinned. "Interesting. So the cage is programmed as a trap too. We got some useful information out of your little predicament, then." Rawlins laughed. "I'm glad to have helped you learn something. Am I excused from the next round?" #CT suppose," Muller said. An odd Ji feeling of good will had come over him, somehow. He almost forgotten how pleasant it was to be able to help anodier person. He said, "Do you drink, Ned?" "In moderation." "This is our local liquer," said Muller. "It's produced by gnomes somewhere in the bowels of the planet." He produced a delicate flask and two wide-mouthed goblets. Carefully he tipped about twenty centiliters into each goblet. "I get this in #kne C," he explained, handing Rawlins his drink. Gingerly Rawlins tasted it. "Strongl" "About # alcohol, yes. Lord knows what the rest of it is, or how it's synthesized, or why. I simply accept it. I like the way it manages to be both sweet and gery at the same time. It's terribly intoxicating, of course. It's intended as another trap, i suppose. You get happily drunk, and then the maze gets you." He raised his goblet amiably. "Cheers." "Cheers." They laughed at the archaic toast and dnmk. Careful, Dickie, he told himself. You're getting downright sociable, with this boy. Remember where you are. And why. "May I take some of this back to camp with me?" Rawlins asked. Tliere's a man there who'd appreciate it. He's a gourmet of sorts. He's traveling with a liquor console that dispenses a hundred different drinks, I imagine, from about forty different worlds." "Anything from Marduk?" Muller asked. "The Deneb worlds? Rigel?" "I really can't be sure. I'm no connoisseur." "Perhaps this friend of yours Muller stopped. "No. No. Forget I said that. I'm not getting into any deals." "You could come back to camp with me," said Rawlins. "He'd give you the run of the console, I'm sure." "Very subtie of you. No." Muller glowered at his liqueur. "I won't be eased into it, Ned. I don't want anything to do with them." "I'm sorry you feel that way." "Another drink?" "No. I'll have to start getting back to camp now. It's late." Rawli finished his drink and got to his feet, grunting a little. He looked down at his bare legs. The diagnbstat had covered the wounds with a nutrient spray, flesh-colored; it was almost impossible to tell that his skin had been broken anywhere. Stiffly he puUed his tattered leggings on. "You'll give me some of that liqueur for my friend?" Silently Muller extended the flask, half full. Rawlins clipped it to his belt. "It was an interesting day. I hope I can come again." B oardman said, as Rawlins limped back toward Zone E, "How are your legs?" 'Tired. They're healing fast. I'll be all right." "Ned, listen to me, we did try to get the drones to you. I was watching every terrible minute of it, when those animals were attacking you. But there was nothing we could do. Muller was intercepting our probes and knocking them out." "All right," Rawlins said. "He's clearly unstable. He wasn't going to let one of those drones into the inner zones." "All right, Charles. I survived." Boardman said after a long while, "It seems you and Muller are quite good friends now. I'm pleased. It's cQining to-be time for you to tempt him out." "How do I do that?" "Promise him a cure," Boardman said. I T hey met again on the third day afterward, at midday in Zone B. Rawlins came diagonally across the oval ball court, or whatever it was, that lay between two snub-nosed dark IF blue towers and Muller nodded. "How are your legs?" "Doing fine." "And your friend? He liked the liqueur?" "He loved it," Rawlins said, thinking of the glow in Boardman's foxy eyes. "He sends back your flask with some special brandy in it and hopes you'll treat him to a second round." Muller eyed the flask as Rawlins held it forA. "He can go to hell," Muller said coolly. "I won't get into any trades. If you give me that flask I'll smash it." "Why?" "Give it here, and I'll show you. No. Wait. Wait. I won't. Here, let me have it." Rawlins surrendered it. Muller cradled the lovely flask tenderly in both hands, activated the cap, and put it to his lips. "You devils," he said in a soft voice. "What is this, "He didn't say. He just said you'd like it." "Devils. Temptations. It's a trade, damn you! But only this once. Where have you been all week, anyway?" "Working." "Where are they excavating?" "They aren't excavating at aU. They're using sonicprobes at the border between Zone E and F. Trying to determine the chronology, whether the whole maze was built at once, or in accretive layers out from the middle. What's your opinion, Dick?" "Go to hell. No free archeology out of me!" Muller sipped the brandy again. 'You're standing pretty close to me, aren't you?" "Four or five meters, I'd guess." "You were closer when you gave me the brandy. Why didn't you look sick? Didn't you feel the effect?" "I felt i yes." "And hid your feelings like the good stoic you are?" Shrugging, Rawlins said genially, "I guess the effect loses impact on repeated exposure. Have you ever noticed that happening with someone else?" "There were no repeated exposures with anyone else," said Muller. "Come over here, boy. See the sights. This is my water supply. Quite elegant. This black pipe runs right around Zone B." Muller knelt and stroked the aqueduct. "There's a pumping system. Brings water up from some underground aquifer maybe a thousand kilometers down. Over here, you see, here's one of the spigots. Every fifty meters. As far as I can tdl, it's the water supply for the entire city, right here, and so perhaps the builders didn't need much water. No conduits that I've found. No real plumbing." Muller cupped his hand under the ornately engraved spigot, a thing of concentric ridges. Water gushed. Muller took a few quick gulps; the flow ceased the moment the hand was ten from the area below the spigot. A scanning system of some kind, Rawlins thout. Clever. How had it T hey went into Zone A, an easy stroll. Muller was in a talkative mood. The conversation was fitful, dissolving every now and then into an acid spray of anger or self-pity. but most of the time Muller remained calm and even charming, an older man clearly enjoying the company of a younger one, the two of them exchanging opinions, experiences, scraps of philosophy. Muller spoke a good deal about his early career, the planets he bad seen, the delicate negotatkns on behalf of Earth with the frequently prickly colony worlds. He mentioned Boardman's name quite often; Rawlins kept his face studiously blank. "And what about you?" Muller said finally. "You're brighter than you pretend to be. Hampered a little by your shyness, but plenty of brains, carefully hidden behind college-boy virtues. What do you want for yourself, Ned? What does archeology give you?" Rawlins looked him straight in the eyes. "A chance to recapture a million pasts. I'm as greedy as you are. I want to know how things happened, how they got this way. Not just on Earth or in the System. Everywhere." "Well spokenP' Rawlins said, "I suppose I could have gone in for diplomatic service, the way you did. Instead I chose this. I think it'll work out. There's so much to discover, here and everywhere else. We've only begun to look." 'The ring of dedication is in your voice. I like to hear that sound. It reminds me of the way I used to talk." Rawlins said, "Just so you don't think I'm hopdessly pure, I ought to say that it's personal curiosity that moves me on, more than abstract love of knowledge." ' "Understandable. Forgiveable. We are not too different, really. Allowing for forty-odd years between us. Don't worry so much about your motives, Ned. Go to the stars, see, do. Enjoy. Eventually life will sma you, the way it's smashed me, but that's far off." Rawlins felt the warmth of the man now, the reaching out of genuine sympathies. There was still th carrier wave of nightmare, though, the unending broadcast out of the mucky depths of the soul, attenuated at this distance but unmistakeable. Imprisoned by his pity, Rawlins hesitated to say what it now was time to say. Boardman prodded him irritably. "Go on, boyl Slip it ini" "You look very far away," Muller said. "Just thinking how -- how sad it is that you won't trust us at all. That you have such a negative attitude toward humanity' "I come by it honestly." "You don't need to spend the rest of your life in this maze, though. There's a way out." "Garbage." "Listen to me," Rawlins said. He took a deep breath and flashed his quick, transparent grin. "I talked about your case to our expedition medic. He's studied neurosurgery. He says there's a way to fix what you have, now. Recently developed, the last couple of years. It -- shuts off the broadcast, Dick. We'll take you back to Earth. For the operation, Dick. The cure." T he sharp glittering barbed word came swimming along on the IF breast of a torrent of bland sounds and speared him in the gut. Cure. He stared. There was reverberation from the looming dark buildings. Cure. Cure. Cure. Muller felt the poisonous temptation gnawing at his liver. "No," he said. "That's garbage. A cure's impossible." "How can you be so sure?" "I know." "Science progresses in nine years. They understand how the brain works, now. Its electrical nature. What they did, they built a tremendous simulation intone of the lunar labs, and they ran it all through from start to finish." "You look so angelic," . Muller said. "Those sweet blue eyes and that golden hair. What's your game, Ned? Why are you reeling off all this nonsense." Rawlins reddened. "It isn't nonsensel" "I don't believe you. And I don't believe in your cure." There was a long sticky silence. Muller revolved a maze of thoughts. To leave Lemnos? To have the curse lifted? To hold a woman in his arms again? Breasts like fire against his skin? Lips? Thigbs? To rebuild his career? To reach across the heavens once more? To shuck nine years of anguish? To believe? To go? To submit? "#j there a cure?" "The medic says there is." "I think you're lying to me, boy;" Rawlins danced away. "What do I have to gain by lying?" 'T can't guess." "All right, I'm lying," Rawlins said brusquely. "There's no way to help you. Let's talk about something else." "Why did you tell me that story if it wasn't true?" "I said we'd change the subject." 'Let's assume for the moment that it is true," Muller persisted. "That if I go back to Earth I can be cured. I want to let you know that I'm just not interested not even with a guarantee. I've seen Earthmen in their true natures. They kicked me when I was down. Not sporting, Ned. They stink. They reel They gloried in what had happened to me." "That isn't sol" "What do you know? You were a child. Even more then than now. They treated me as filth because I showed them what was inside themselves. A mirror for their dirty souls. Why should I go back to them now? I saw them as they really are, those few months I was on Earth after Beta Hydri IV. The look in the eyes, the nervous smile as they back away from me. Yes, Mr. Muller. ,Of course, Mr. Muller. Just don't come too close, Mr. Muller. Boy, come by here some time at night and let me show you the constellations as seen from Lenmos. I've ven them my own names. There's the Dagger, a long keen one. It's about to be thrust into the Back. Then there's the Sh. And you can see the Ape too, and the Toad. They interlock. The same star is in the forehead of the Ape and the left eye of the Toad. That star is Sol, my Mend. An ugly little yellow star, e color of thin vomit Whose plwets are populated by ugly little people who have spread throng the universe." #aa I say something that might offend you?" Rawlins asked. "You can't offend me. But you can try." "f think your outlook is distorted. You've lost your perspectm all those years. You're blaming humanity for being humanu It's not easy to accept someone like you. If you were sitting here in my place and I in yours, you'd understand tliat. It hurts to be near you. It hurts. Right now I feel pain in every nerve. If I came closer I'd tod like crying. You can't expect people to adjust quickly to somebody like that. Not even your loved ones could -- " "I had no loved ones." "You were married." "Tenmnated." "Friends?" Thoy ran," Muller said. "On all six legs they scuttled away from me." "You didn't give them time." 'Time enough." "No," Rawlins said. He shifted about uneasily on the chair. "Now Fm going to say something that will really hurt you, Dick. I'm sorry, but I have to. What you're telling me is the kind of stuff I beard in college. Sophomore cynicism. The wodd is decable, you say. Evil evil evil. You've seen the true nature of man kind and you don't want anything to do mth mankind ever again. Eirybody talks that way at eighteen. But k's a phase tiiat passes. We get over the confurioos of being eighten, and we see that the world is a pretty decent place, that people tiy to do theif best, that we're impert but not loathsome -- " "An eighteen-year-old has no right to those opinions. I do. I come by my hatreds the hard way." "But why cling to them? You seem to be glorying in your own misery. Break loose Shake it off I Come back to Earth with us and forget the past. Or at least forgive." "No forgetting. No forgiving." Muller scowled. A tremor of feat shook him, and he shivered. What if this were true? A genuine cure? Leave Lemnos? He felt a trifle embarrassed. The boy had semed a palpable hit with that line about sophomore cynictsm. It was. Am I really such a misanthrope? A pose. He rced me to adopt it. Now I choke on my own stubbomness. But there's # cure. The boy's transparent; he's lying, though I don't kw why, wants to trap me, to get me aboaM that ship of theirs. What if it's true? Why not go back? Muller could supply his own answers. It was the fe that enter the stream of life. Nine years on a desert island and he dread to return. Rawlins said, "I can feel the flavor of your thoughts changing." , "You can?' "Nothing specific. But you were angry and bitter before. Now I'm getting something -- wistful." "No one ever told me he could detect meanings," Muller said in wonder. "Why did you go wistful just then, though? If you did. Thinking of Earth?" "Maybe I was." Muller hastily patched the sudden gap in his annor. His face darkened. He denebed his jaws. He stood up and deliberately IF t# approached Rawlins watching the young man struggling to hide his real fedin of discomfort. Muller said, "I think you'd better get about your archeologizing now, Ned." I still have some time." "No you don't. Go." A gainst Charles Boardman's express orders, Rawlins insisted on returning all the way to the Zone F camp that evening. He found Boardman at dinner. A polished dining-board of dark wood mortised with light woods set before him. Out of elegant stoneware he ate candied fruits, brandied vegetables, meat extracts, pungent juices. A carafe of wine of a deep oUve hue was near his fleshy hand. Mysterious pills of several types rested in the shallow pits of an oblong block of black glass; from time to time Boardman popped one into his mouth. Rawlins stood at the sector opening for a long while before Boardman appeared to notice him. "I told you not to come here, Ned," the old man said finally. "Muller sends you this." Rawlins put the flask down beside the carafe of wine. "We could have talked without this visit." 'Tm tired of that. I needed to see you." Boardman left him standing and did not interrupt his meal. "Charles, I don't think I can keep up the pretense with him." "You did an excellent job today," said Boardman, sipping his wine. "Quite convincing." "Yes, I'm learning how to tell lies. But what's the use? You heard him. Mankind disgusts him. He's not going to cooperate once we get him out of the maze." "He isn't sincei:c. You said it yourself, Ned. Cheap sophomore cynicism. The man loves mankind. That's why he's so bitter: because his love has turned sour in his mouth. But it hasn't turned to hate." Rawlins bent into a crouch to get on Boardman's level. Boardman nudged a candied pear onto his fork, equalized gravity, and flipped it idly toward his mouth. He's intentionally ignoring me, Rawlins thought. He said, "Charles be serious. I've gone in there and told Muller some monstrous lies. I've offered him a completely fraudulent cure, and he threw it back in my face." "Saying he didn't believe it existed. But he does believe, Ned. He's simply afraid to come out of hiding." "Please. Listen. Assume he does come to believe me. Assume he leaves the maze and puts himself in our hands. Then what? Who gets the job of telling him that there isn't any cure, that weVe tricked him shamelessly, that we merely want him to be our ambassador again, to visit a bunch of aliens twenty times as strange and fifty times as deadly as the ones that ruined his life? Vm not going to break that news to him!" "You won't have to, Ned. I will." "And how will he react? Are you simply expecting him to smile and bow and say, very clever, Charles, you've done it again? To yield and do whatever you want? No. He couldn't possibly." "That isn't necessarily true," said Boardman calmly, pr)ose to use theiv once you've informed him that the cure is a lie and that there's a dangerous new job he has to undertake?" "I prefer not to discuss future strategy now." "I resign," Rawlins sakL B oardman had been expecting something like that. A noUe gesture; a moment of headstrong defiance; a rush of virtue to the lain. Abandoning now his studied detachment, he looked up, his eyes locking firmly on Rawlins's. Quietly Boardman said, "You resign? After all your talk of service to mankind? We need you, Ned." "My dedication to mankind includes a dedication to Dick Muller," Rawlins said stiffly. "I've already committed a considerable crime against him. If you won't let me in on the rest of this scheme, I'm damned if I'll have any part in it." adnure your convictions." "My resignation sdll stands." "I even agree with your position," said Boardman. "I'm not proud of what we must do here." "How are you gmng to get Muller to cooperate? Drug him? Torture him? Brainblast him?" "None of those." "What, then? I'm serious, Charles. My role in this job ends right here,  unless I know wt's ahead." Bosudman coughed, drained his wine, ate a peach, took three pSls  in quick successicm. Rawlinses rebdlion had been inevitable, and he was prepared for it, and yet he was annoyed that it had come. Now was the time for calculated risks. He said, 'I see that it's time to drop the pretenses, then, Ned. I'll tell you what's in store f  m: Dick Muller -- but I want you to consider it within the framework of the larger position. Don't forget that the little game we've been playing on this planet isn't simply a matter of private moral postures." "I'm listening, Charles." "Very well. Dick Muller must go to our extragalactic friends and convince them that human beings e indeed an intelligent species. Agreed? He alone is capable of doing this, because of his unique inability to cloak his thoughts." "Agreed." "Now, it isn't necessary to convince the alii that we're good people, or that we're honorable people, or. that we're lovable people. Simy that we have minds and can think. That we feel, that we sense, that we are something other than clever machines. For our purposes it doesn't matter what emotions Dick Muller is radiating, so long as he's radiating something." "I begin to see." "Therefore, once he's out of the maze, we can tell him what his assignment is to be. No doubt he'll get angry at our trickery. But beyond his anger he may see where his duty lies. I hope so. You seem to think he won't. But it makes no difference, Ned. He won't be giv an option once he leaves his sanctuary. He'll be tak to the aliens and handed over to them to make contact." "His cooperation is irrelevant. IF then" said Rawlins slowly. HeU just be dumped. Like a sack." thinking sack. As our friends out there will learn." # Ned. Don't say anything now. I know what you're thinking. You hate the sdieme. You have to. I hate it mysetf. Just go off now and think it ov. Examine it from all sides befoce you come to a decision. know and weil cany on somehow without you, but Hromise me youll sleep on it, first' Rawlii's face was pate a momt Then color flooded into it He dan ed his lips. Boardman smiled bmgnly. Rawlins clenched his fists, squuUturned, went hastily out. A calculated risk. Boardman lock another pill. Then he reached for ttxe flask Muller had sent him. He poured a littte. Sweet, gihgery, strong. An excellent liqueur. XV M uller had almost come to like the Hydrans. What he remembered most clearly and most favorably about them was their grace of motion. He had landed in a damp, dreary part of the ianet, a little to the north of its equator, on an amoeboid continent occupied by a dozen large quasi-cities, each spread ovA over several thousmd square kilometers. His life-support system, specially designed for this mission, was littte more than a thin f iltzation sheet dinging to him like a second titin. It fed air to him through a thousand dialysis plaques. He oioved easily if not comfortably within it He walked for an hour through a forest of the giant toadstool-like trees before he came upon any of the natives. The trees ran to heights of several hundred meters; perhaps the gravity, five-eighth Earthnorm, had something to do with that Their curving trunks did not look sturdy. He suspected that an external woody layer no thicker than a fingp surrounded a broad core of soggy pulp. The cap-like crowns of the trees met in a neatiy continuous canopy overhead, cutting almost all light from the forest floor. Since the plets doud layer permitted only a hazy pearl-cdored to come through and even that was intercepted by the trees, a maroon darkness prevafled below. When he encountered the aliens he was surprised to find that they were about three meters talk He stood ringed by them, straining upward to meet their many eyes. In a quiet voice he said, "My name is Richard Muller. I come in friendship from the peoes of the Terran Cultural Sphere." Dropping to his knees, Muller traced the Pytiiagorean Theorem in the soft mcHt soil He looked up. He smiled. "A batic concept of geometry. A universal pattern of thought." Their vertical slitlike nostrils fiidered dightiy. They inclined their heads. He imagined that they were exchang thougitful glsmces. With eyes in a circlet entirely around their heads, they did not need to diange posture to do that. He sketched a line on the ground. A short distance from it he sketched a pair of lines. At a greater distance he drew three lines. He filled in the signs h plus #I equals #. "Yes?" he said. "We call it addition." The jointed limbs swayed. Two of his listeners touched arms. Muller remembered how they had obliterated the spying eye as soon as they had discovered it, not hesitating even to examine it. He had been prepared for the same reaction. Instead they were listening. A promising sign. He stood up and pointed to his marks on the ground. I "Your turn," he said. He spoke V quite loudly. He smiled quite broad ly. "Show me that you understand. Speak to me in the universal language of mathematics." After a long pause one of the Hydrans moved fluidly forward and let one of its globe-like foot-pedestals hover over the lines in the soil. The leg moved lightly, and the lines vanished as the alien smoothed the soil. "All right," said Muller. "Now you draw something." The Hydran returned to its place in the circle. "Very well," Muller said. "There's another universal language. I hope this doesn't offend your ears." He drew a soprano recorder from his pocket and put it between his lips. Playing through the filtration sheet was cumbersome. He caught breath and played a diatonic scale. Their limbs fluttered a bit. They could hear, then, or at any rate could sense vibrations. "Does that get to you?" he asked. They appeared to be conferring. They walked away from him. He tried to follow. He was unable to keep up, and soon he lost sight of them in the dark, misty forest; but he persevered and found them clustered as if waiting for him, farther on. When he neared them they began to move again. In this way they led him, by fits and starts, into their city. He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods. He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him. Eventually they wearied of him and came for him. He slept. He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept. H e had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could IF suQLiu # i eights, sounds, tafities, odors. He coukl reconstruct whole conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the liull texts of aeweral treaties he had negotiated. He admitted to bijiiself lliat, given (he chance, he would go hack. EveryIhiflg else had been foetense and hhmer. He had fooied iidther Ned aiii#iiis nor himself, he loiew. The contempt he fdt soanldnd was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eageijy ior Rawlins to letum. While he waited, he drank several goUets of the dtgr's liqueur; gunning down ammate he could not pesfly eoasunae in a year's time; he oaadiipted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth. R awlins was ruttuihig. Muller, standing a hundind mefers deep in Zone C, saw hkn oome striding through the entcaoee, breathless, flushed. "Ycni shouldn't rm in here," Muller said. "Even in the safer zones. There's ahsohitely no leBing -- " Rawhns sprawled dom beside a rianged ttoione tub, griping its aides and sucking air. Gtt me a drink, will you?" he gasped. 'That hqueur of yours --  Mniicr went to the fountain nearby and filled a handy flask with the sharp hqueur. Rawlins did not wince at ail as Muller dnew near to give it to him. He seemed altogether unaware of Muller's emanation. Greedily, sloppily, he emptied the flask, letting drs of the gleaming fl roll down his dun and onto W clothes. Then he closed his eyes. "Wait. Let me get my breath. I ran ail the way from Zooe F." ' You're lud to he alive, then. Muller studied hifli, perplei The change was striktng and unsettUng, and mere fatigue could not accomt for it all. Randias was bloodshot, flushed, puffy-faoed; Ms facial mnsckn were tightly jgait; Ms eyes moved randomly, seeking iml not finding. Dtouok? Sick? Awgged? After a long OMment Muller said, 'T'lie done a lot M thinking about om last conversatidin. I've decided that I was acting like a damned f col. All that cheap misanthropy I was dishing up." knelt and tried to peer into the fomiger man's shifting eyes. "Look btxe, Ndd, I want to turn to Earth ior treatment. Even if die treatment' experimental, I'Ll chance it" "There's no treatment," said Rawlins dully. "No Treatment." "No treatment. None. It was all a lie." cs. Of cowse." 'You said so # iittelf," Rawlins necninded him. ou didn't briieve a word of what I was saying. Remember?" "A he." 'You didn't juderstand why I was aaying it hnt you said it was nommise. You teld me i was Ijtng. You wondered sriiait I had to gain by lying. I was lyii, Dick." "Lying." "Yes." "But I changed my mind," said Midler sofitly. 'T was ready to go back to Earth." "There's no hope of a cure," Rawlins said. He got slowly to his feet and ran his hand through his long golden hair. He arranged his disarrayed clothing. He picked up the flask, went to the liqueur fountain and filled it. Returning, he handed the flask to Muller, who drank from it. Muller said finally, "Do you want to explain some of this?" "We aren't archeologists. We came here looking especially for you. It wasn't any accident. We knew where you were all along. You were tracked from the time you left Earth nine years ago." took precautions." "They weren't any use. Boardman knew where you were going, and he had you tracked. He left you in peace because he had no use for you. But when a use developed, he had to come after you." #(harles Boardman sent you to  fetch me?" Muller asked. "That's why we're here, yes. That's the whole purpose of this expedition," said Rawlins tonelessly. "I was picked to make contact with you because you knew my father and might trust me. All the time Boardman was directing me, telling me what to say, coacfag me, even telling me what mistakes to make, how to blunder successfully. He told me to get into that cage, for instance. He thought it would help win your sympathy." "Boardman is here? Here on Lemnos?" "In Zone F. He's got a camp there." Muller's face was stony. Within, all was turmoil. "Why did he do all this? What does he want with me?" Rawlins said, "You know that there's a third intelligent race in the universe, beside us and the Hydrans." "Yes. They had just been discovered when I left. That was why I went to visit the Hydrans. I was supposed to arrange a defensive alliance with them, before these other people, these extragalactics, came in contact with us. It didn't work. But -- " "How much do you know about these extragalactics?" "Very little," Muller admitted. "Essentially, nothing but what I've just told you. The day I agreed to go to Beta Hydri IV was the first time I heard about them. Boardman told us. All he said was that they were extremely intelligent -- a superior species, he said -- and that they lived in a neighboring cluster. And that they had a galactic drive and might visit us some day." "We know more about them now," Rawlins said. "First tell me what Boardman wants with me." "Everything in order and it'll be easier." Rawlins grinned, perhaps a bit tipsily. He said, "We don't actually know a great deal about the extragalactics. What we did was send a ramjet out, throw it into warp, and bring it out a few thousand light-years. Anyway, it was a drone ship with all sorts of eyes. The place it went to was one of the X-ray galaxies, classified information, but I've heard it was either in Cygnus A or Scorpius II. We found that one planet of the galactic system was inIF habited by an advanced race of very alien aliens." "How alien?" 'They see all up and down the spectrum," Rawlins said. "Their basic visual range is in the high frequencies. They see by the light of X rays. They also seem to be able to me use of the radio frequicies to see, or at least to get some kind of sensory information. And they pick up most wavelengths in between, except that they don't have a great deal of interest in the stuff between infrared and ultraviolet What we like to call the visible spectrum. "Wait a minute. Radio senses? Do you have any idea how long radio waves are? If they're gmng to get any information out of a single wave, they'll need eyes, or receptors or whatever of gigantic uze. How big are these being supposed to be?" "They could eat elejdiants for breakfast," said Rawlins. "Intelligent life doesn't come that big." "What's the limitation? This is a gas giant jdanet, all ocean, no gravity to sp oL piey float. They have no squai#-cul proUems." "And a bunch of superwhales has developed a techncgical culture?" Muller asked. "You won't get me to believe -- " "They have," said Rawlins. "I told you, these were very alien aliens. They can't build machinery themselves. But they have slaves," # h," said Muller quietly. 'We're only beginning to understand this, and of course I don't have much of the inside information myself, but it seems that these beings me use of lower life-forms, turning them essentially into radio-controlled robots. They'll use anything with limbs and mobility. They started with certain animals of their own planet, a small dolphin-like form perhaps on the threshold of intdligence, and worked through them to achieve a space-drive. Then they got to neighboring Janets, land planets, and took control of pseudo-primates, protochimps of some kind. They look for fing. Manual dexterity counts a great deal to them. At present their sphere of influence covers some dghty light-years, and it iears to be spreading at an exponential rate." Muller shook his head. "This is worse nonsense than the stuff you were handing me about a cure. Look, there's a Hinting velocity for radio transmission, ri? If they're contrdling flunkeys from eig lightyears away, it'll take eity years for any command to reach its destination. Every twitch of a muscle, every trifling movement -- " "They can leave their home world," said Rawlins. "But if they're so big -- " "They've used their ve beings to build gravity tanks. They also have a star drive. All colonies are run by overseers in orbit a few thousand kilomers up, floating in a simulated home-world environmimt It takes one overseer to run one planet" MuUn: closed his eyes a moment. The image came to him of these colossal, unimaginable beasts spreading through their distant galaxy, impressing ftTiimak of all sorts into service, forg a captive society, vicariously technological and drifting in orbit like spacebome whales to direct and coordinate the grandiose improbable enterprise, while masses of glossy pink protoplasm, fresh from the sea, bristling with perceptors functioning at both ends of the spectrum Whispering to one another in pulses of X rays. Sending out orders via radio. No, he thought. No. "Well," he said at length, "what of it? They're in another galaxy." N ot any longer. They've impinged on a few of our outlying colonies. Do you know what they do when they find a human world? They station an orbiting overseer above it and take control of the colonists. They find that humans make outstanding slaves. At the moment they have six of our worlds. They had a seventh, but we shot up their overseer. Now they make it much harder to do that. They just take control of our missiles as they home in, and throw them back." "If you're inventing this," said Muller, "I'll kill you!" "It's true. I swear." "When did this begin?" "Within the past year." "And what happens? Do they just march right through our galaxy and turn us all into zombies?" "Boardman thinks we have one chance to prevent that." "Which is?" Rawlins said, "The aliens don't appear to realize that we're intelligent beings. We can't communicate with them, you see. They function on a completely non-verbal level, some kind of telepathic system, and we've tried all sorts of ways to reach them, bombarding them with messages at every wavelength, without any flicker of a sign that they're receiving us. Boardman believes that if we could persuade them that we have -- well, souls -- they might leave us alone. God knows why he thinks so. It's some kind of computer prediction. He feels that these aliens work on a consistent moral scheme, that they're useful, but that they wouldn't touch a species that's on the same side of the intelligence boundary as they are. And if we could show them somehow -- " "They see that we have cities. That we have a star drive. Doesn't that prove intelligence?" ' 'Beavers make dams," said Rawlins. "But we don't make treaties with beavers. We don't pay reparations when we drain their marshes. We know that in some way a beaver's feelings don't count." "Do we?" "I don't want to argue philosophy with you," Rawlins said hoarsely. "I'm trying to tell you what the situation is. Boardman thinks that we really can get the radio beasts to leave our galaxy alone, if we show them that we're closer to them in intelligence th we are to their other slaves. If we get across to them that we have emotions, needs, ambitions, dreams." Muller spat. "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed?" "Like that, yes." "How do we get this across to IF them if they don't speak a verbal language?" Don't you see?" Rawlins asked. "No, I -- yes. Yes. God, yesl" "We have one man, out of all our communicate. He broadcasts his in ner feelings. His souk We don't know what frequency he uses, but they might" "Yes. Yes." "And so Boardman wanted to ask you to do one more thing for mankind. To go to these aliens." "What makes you think I would lift a finger to keep all of man's worlds from being swallowed up?" "Your help wouldn't have to be voluntary," Rawlins said. N ow it came flooding forth, the hatred, the anguish, the fear, the jealousy, the torment, the bitterness, the mockery, the loathing, the contempt, the despair, the viciousness, the fury, the desperation, the vehemence, the agitation, the grief, the pangs, the agony, the furor, the fire. Rawlins pulled bade as though depths of desolation. A trick, a trick, all a trick! Used again. Boardman's tool. Muller blazed. He spoke only a few words aloud; the rest came from within, pouring out, the gates wide, nothing penned back, a torrent of anger. Wl; tiie wild spasm passed Muller said, "Boardman would dump me to go or not?" "Yes. He said this was too important to allow you free dioice. Your wishes were irrdevant. The many against the one." With deadly calm Muller said, "You're part of this conspiracy. Why have you been telHng me this?" "I resigned." "Of course." "No, I mean it. Oh, I was part of it; I was going along with Boardman; yes, I was lying in everything I said to you. But I didn't know the last part: that you wouldn't be given any chmee. I had to pull out feere. I couldn't let them do this to you." "V thoughtful. I now have two cems, di, N?l can let myself be dragged out of here to play catspaw for Boardman again -- or I can kill myself a minute from now and let mankind go to hell. Yes?" "Don't talk like that," Rawlins said edgily. "Why not? Those are my options. You were kind enough to tell me the real situation, and now I can react as I choose. You've handed me a death sentence, Ned." "No." "What else is there? To let myself be used again?" "You could -- cooperate with Boardman," Rawlins said. He licked his lips. "No!" "You aren't being rational." "No, I'm not And I don't intend to start now. Assuming that it could affect humanity's destiny in the dightest if I bcxxime ambassador to these radio people -- and I don't buy the idea at all -- it would give me great pleasure to shirk my duty. I'm grateful to you for your warning. Now that at last I know what's going on here, I have the excuse I've been lookup for all along. I know a B oardman found all this distasteful, But it was also necessary, and he was not surprised that events had taken this turn. In his original analysis he had forecast two events of equal probability: that Rawlins would succeed in winning Muller out of the maze and that Rawlins would ultimately rebel and blurt the truth. He was prepared for either. Now Boardman had advanced into the center of the maze, coming from thousand places here where death is quick and probably not painful. Then let Charles Boardman talk to the aliens himself. I -- " "Please don't move, Dick," said Boardman from a point about thirty meters behind him. V Zone F to follow Rawlins before the damage became irreparable. He could predict one of Muller's likely responses; suicide. Muller would never commit suicide out of despair, but he might do it by way of a vengeance. With fioardman were Ottavio, Davis, Reynolds, and Greenfield. Hosteen and the others were monitoring from outer zones. Muller turned. The look on his face was not easy to behold. 'Tm sorry, Dick," Boardman said. "We had to do this." "You have no shame at all, do you?" Muller asked. "Not where Earth is concerned." "I realized that a long time ago. But I thought you were human, Charles. I didn't comprehend your depths." "I wish we didn't have to do any of this, Dick. But we do. Come with us." "No." "You can't refuse. The boy's told you what's at stake. We owe you more already than we can repay, Dick, but run the debt a little higher. Please." "I'm not leaving Lemnos. I feel no sense of obligation to humanity. I won't do your work." "Dick -- " Muller said, "Fifty meters to the northwest of where I stand is a flame pit. I'm going to walk over and step into it. Within ten seconds there will be no more Richard Muller. One unfortunate calamity will cancel out another, and Earth will be no worse off than it was before I acquired my special ability." "That's childish. The last sin I'd ever imagine you committing." "It was childish of me to dream of stars," Muller said. "I'm simply being consistent. The galactics can eat you alive, Charles. I don't care if they do. Won't ou fancy being a slave? Somewhere under your skull you'll still be there, screaming to be released, and the radio messages will tell you which arm to life, which leg to move. I wish I could last long enough to see that. But I'm going to walk into that flame pit." Boardman said, "At least come out to Zone F with me. Let's sit down quietly and discuss this over brandy." "Side by side?" Muller laughed. "You'd vomit. You couldn't bear it." He took a shaky step toward the northwest. His big powerful body seemed shrunken and withered, nothing but sinew stretching tighter over a yielding armature. He todr another step. Boardman watdied. Casually Boardman gestured with two flickiDg fingers. Greenfield and Reynolds pounced. C atlike they darted forth, ready for this, and cau Muller by the inner forearms. Boardman saw the grayness sweep over their faces as the impact of Muller's Held got to them. Muller struggled, heaved, tried to break loose. Davis and #vk were upon him now too. A stungun would have been easier, Boardman reflected. But stunguns we ri, smnetimes, on humans. They hstd been known to send hearts into wild runalways. They had no defibrillator here. A moment more and Muller was forced to his knees. "'Pisarm him," Boardman said. Ottavio and Davis held him. Reynolds and Greenfield seardied him. From a pocket Greenfield pulled forth the deadly little windowed globe. "That's all he seems to be carrying," Greenfield said. "Che carefully." They checked. Meanwhile Muller remained motionless, his face frozen, his eyes stony. It was the posture and the exfvession of a man at the headsman's block. At length Greenfield looked up again. "Nothing." Muller said, "One of my left upper molars contains a secret compartment full of carriphage. I'U count to ten and bite hard, and I'll melt away before your eyes." Greenfield swung around and grabbed Muller's jaws. Boardman said, "Leave him alone. He's jddng." "But how do we knew -- " Greenfield began. "Let him be. Step back." Boardman gestured. "Sti five meters away from him. Don't go near him unless he move." They stepped away, obviously grateful to get back from the full thrust of Muller's field. Boardman, fifteen meters frmn him, could feel faint strands of pain. He went no closer. "You can stand up now," Boardman said. "But please don't try to move. I regret this, Dick." Muller got to his feet. His face was black with hatred, but he said nothing, nor did he move. "If we have to," Boardman said, we'll ta you in a webfoam cradle and carry you out of the maze to the ship. We'll keep you in foam from then cm. You'll be in foam when you meet the aliens. You'll be absolutely heh'less. I would hate to do that to you, Dick. The other choice of your own free will to the ship. Do what we ask of you. Help us this last time." "May your intestines rust," said Muller almost casually. "May you live a thousand years with wcmxds eating you. May you choke on your own smugness and never die." Muller's reply was dose to a snarl. Boardman sighed. This was an embarrassment. He looked toward Ottavio. "The webfoam," he said. Rawlins, who had been standing as IF though in a trance, burst into sudden activity. He darted forward, seized Reynold's gun from its holster,, ran toward Muller and pressed the weapon into his hand. "There," he said thickly. "Now you're in charge." M uller studied the gun as though he had never seen one before, but his surprise lasted only a fraction of a second. He slipped his hand around its comfortable butt and fingered the firing stud. It was a familiar models only sUgfhtly changed from the ones he had known. In a quick flaring burst he could kill them Or himself. He stepped back so they could not come upon him from the rear. Then he moved the gun in an arc of some # degrees, taking them all in. "Stand close together," he said. The six of you. Stand one meter apart in a straight row and keep your hands out where I can see them at all times." He enjoyed the black glowering look that Boardman threw at Ned Rawlins. The boy seemed dazed, flushed, confused, a figure in a dream. Muller waited patiently as the six men arranged themselves according to his orders. He was surprised at his own calmness. "You look unhappy, Charles," he said. "How old are you now, eighty years? You'd like to live that other seventy, eighty, ninety, I guess. You have your career planned, and the plan doesn't include dying on Lemnos. Stand still, Charles. And stand straight. You won't win any pity from me by trying to look old and sagging. I kngw that dodge. You're as healthy as I am, beneath the phony flab." Boardman said raggedly, "lf it'll make you feel better, Dick, kill me. And then go aboard the ship and do what we want you to do. I'm expendable." "I almost think you mean that," Muller said wonderingly. "You crafty old bastard, you're offering a trade. Your life for my cooperationi But where's the quid pro quo? I don't einto bum you down. I'll still have my curse." "The offer stands." "Rejected," Muller said. "If I kill you, it won't be as part of any deal. But I'm much more likely to kill myself. You know, Fm a decent man at heart Somewhat unsta:ble, yes, and who's to blame me for that? But decent I'd rather use this gim on me than on you. I'm the one who's suffering. I can end it" "You could have ended it at any time in the past nine years," Boardman pointed out "But you survived. You devoted all your ingenuity to staying alive in this murderous place." "Ah. Yes. But that was different! An abstract challenge: man agtdnsi the maze. But if I kill myself now, thwart you. I put the thumb to the nose with all of mankind watching. I'm the indispensable man, you sa What better way, then, to pay, mankind back for my pain?" "We regretted your suffering," said Boardman. "I'm sure you wept bitterly for me. But that was all you did. You let me go creeping away, diseased, corrupt. unclean. Now comes the release. Not really suicide: revenge." Muller smiled. He turned the gun to finest beam and let its muzzle rest against his chest. A touch of the finger, now. His eyes raked their faces. Rawlins looked deep in shock. Only Boardman was animated with concern and fright. "I could kill you first, I suppose, Charles. As a lesson to our young friend: the wages of deceit is death. But no. That would spoil everything. You have to live, Charles. To go back to Earth admit that you let the indispensable man dip throu your grasp. What a blotch on your careerl" His finger tightened on the stud. "Now," he ud. "Quickly." "iVo" Boardman screamed. "For the love of -- " "Man," said Muller, and laughed, and did not fire. His arm relaxed. He tossed the weapon contemptuoudy toward Boardman. It landed almost at his feet. "Foam!" Boardman cried. "Quick! "Don't bother," said Muller. "I'm yours." xvn F eeling that he was in disgrace, Rawlins kt away from the others on the nearly silent outward march. He conddered his career in mins. He had Jeopardized the lives of his companions and the success of die missioa. Yet it had been worth it, he felt. A time comes when a man his stand against what he believes to be wrong. The simple moral pleasure that he took in that was balanced and overbalanced by the knowledge that he had acted naively, romantically, foolishly. He could not bear to face Boardman now. He thought more than once of letting one of the deadly traps of these outer zones have him. But that too, he decided, would be naive, romantic, and fooli. He watched Muller striding ahead, tall, proud, all tensions resolved, all doubts crystallized. And he wondered a thousand times why Muller had given back the gun. Boardman finally explained it to him as they camped for the nit in a precarious plaza near the outward side of Zone G. lxok at me," Boardman said. "What's the matter? Why can't you look at me?" "Don't toy with me, Charies. Get it over with. The tonguelashing. The sentence." "It's all right, Ned. You helped us get what we wanted. Why should I be angry?" "But the gun -- I gave him the gun -- "Confusion of ends and means again. He's coming with us. He's doing what we wanted him to do. Thaf s counts." Floundering, Rawlins said, "And if he had killed himself? Or us?" "He wouldn't have done either." "You can say that, now. But for the first moment, when he held the gun -- " "No," Boardman said. "I told you earlier: we'd work on his sense of honor. Which we had to reawaken. You did that. Look, here I am, the brutal agent of a brutal and amoral society, right? And I confirm aU of IF Muller's worst thoughts about mankind. Why should he help a tribe of wolves? And here you are: young and innocent, full of hope and dreams. You remind him of the mankind he once served, before the cynicism corroded him. You demonstrate sympathy, love for a fellow man, the ture for the sake of rigihteousness. You show Muller that there's small hope in humanity. See? You defy me and give him a gun and make him master of the situation. He could do the obvious and bum us down. He could do the slightly less obvious, and bum himself. Or he could match your gesture with one of his own, top it, commit a deliberate act of renunciation, express his revived sense of moral superiority. He does it. He tosses away the gun. You were vital, Ned. You were the instrument through which we won him." Rawlins said, "You make it sound so ugly when you speU it out that way. As if you had planned even this." Boardman smiled. "Did you?" Rawlins demanded suddenly. "No. You couldn't have calculated all those twists and turns. Now, after the fact, you're trying to claim credit for hag eneered it all But I saw you in the moment I handed him the gun. There was fear on your face, and anger. You weren't at  sure what he was going to do. Only when everything worked out could you claim it went according to plan. I can see right through you, Charles!" "How delightful to be transparent," Boardman said gaily. C arefully they traced their outward path, but they met few challenges and no serious dangers. Quickly they went toward the ship. They gave Muller a forward cabin, well apart from the quarters of the crew. He was withdrawn, subdued, self-contained; an ironic smile often played on his lips, and his eyes displayed a glint of contempt much of they directed. He had had his moment of supremacy; now he was theirs. Hosteen and his men bustled through the liftoff preparations. Muller remained in his cabin. Boardman went to him, alone, unarmed. He could make noble gestures too. They faced each other across a low table. Muller waited, silent, his face cleansed of emotion. Boaran said after a long moment, "I'm grateful to you, Dick." "Save it." "I don't mind if you despise me. I did what I had to do. So did the boy. And now so will you." He sat quite close to Muller. The emanation hit him broadside, but he deliberately remained in place. That wave of despair welling out to him made him feel a thousand years old. The decay of the body, the crumbling of ih soul, the heat-death of the galaxy... the coming of winter... emptiness... ashes... "When we reach Earth," said Boardman crisply, . "I'll put ypu through a detah briefing. Yop come out of it knowing as much about the radio people as we do, which isn't saying a great deal. After that you'll be on your own. "Is there aayone you'd like me to have waiting for you when we dock Earthside?" "No." "I can send woid ahead. There are people o've never stopped loving you Dick. They'll be Aere if I ask them." Muller said slowly, "I see the strain in your eyes, Charles. You feel the nearness of me, and it's ripping you apart. You feel it in your gut In your forehead. Back of your breastbone. Your face is going gray. Your cheeks are sagging. You'll sit here if it kills you, yes, because that's your st)#e, but it's hek for you. If there's anyone on Earth who never stopped loving me, Charles, the least I can do is spare her from bell. I don't want to meet anyone. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want to talk to anyone." "As you wish," said Boardman. Beads of sweat hung from his bushy brows and dnped to his cheeks, "eihaps youll change your mind when you're close to Ear." "I'll never be close to Earth again," Muller said. H e spent three weeks absorbing all that was known of the giant CKtragalactic beings. They gave him quarters in a bunker on Luna and he lived quietly beneath Copernicus, moving like a robot through steely gray corridors lit by warm gbwing torches. They showed him all the cubes. They ran off a variety of recoostructs in every sensory mode. Muller listened. He absorbed. He said very little. They kept well away from him, as they had on the voyage from Lemnos. Whole days passed in which he saw no human being. When they came to him, they remained at distances of ten meters and more. The exertion was Boardman, who visited him three times a week, and made a point always of coming well within the pain range. Muller found that contemptible. Boardman seemed to be patroniziqg him with this voluntary and wholly unnecessary submissbn io discomfort. "I wish you'd keep away," Muller said to him on the fifth visit. "We can talk by screen. Or you could stay by the door." "I don't mind the close contact." "I do," said Muller. "Has it ever occurred to you that I've begun to , find manViivI SiS odioUS as fpa qkind ' finds me? The redr of your meaty body, Charles -- it goes into my nostrils like a spike. Not just you, all the others. Sickening. Hideous. Even the look of your faces. The pores. The stupid gaping mouths. The ears. Look at a human ear closely some time, Charles. Have you ever seen anything more repulsive than that pink wrinkled cup? You all disgust me!" "I'm sorry you feel that way," Boardman said. The biing went on and on. Muller was ready after the first week to undertake his assignment, but no, they had to feed him all the data in the bank, first. He absorbed the information with twitchy impatience. A shadow of his old sdf remained to find it fascinating, a challenge worth accepting. He would go. He IF would serve as before. He would honor his obligation. At last they said he could depart. From Luna they took him by iondrive to a point outside the orbit of Mars, where they transferred him to a warp-drive ship already programmed to kick him to the edge of the galaxy. Alone. From the cabin of his small sleek ship he watched the technicians drifting in space, getting ready to sever the transfer line. Then they were returning to their own ship. Now he heard from Boardman, a final message, a Boardman special, inspirational, go forth and do your duty for mankind, et cetera, et cetera. Muller thanked him graciously for his words. The communications channel was cut. Moments later Muller entered warp. T he aliens had taken possession of three solar systems on the fringes of the galactic lens, each star having two Earth-settled planets. Muller's ship was aimed at a greenish-gold star whose worlds had been colonized only forty years before. The fifth planet, dry as iron, belonged to a Central Asian colonization society that was trying to establish a series of pastoral cultures where nomad virtues could be practiced. The sixth, with a more typically Earthlike mixture of climates and environments, was occupied by representatives of half a dozen colonization societies, each on its own continent. The relations between these groups, often intricate and touchy, had ceased to matter within the past twelve months, for both planets now were under control of extragalactic overseers. Muller emerged from warp twenty light-seconds from the sixth planet His ship automatically went into an observation orbit, and the scanners began to report. Screens showed him the surface picture; via template ovttlay he was able to compare the configurations of the outposts below with the pattern as it had been prior to the alien conquest. The amplified images were quite interesting. The original settlements appeared on his screen in violet, and the recent extensions in red; Muller observed that about each of the colonies, regardless of its original ground plan, there had sprouted a network of angular streets and jagged avenues. Instinctively he recognized the geometries as en. In orbit, seven thousand kilometers above the sixth planet, was a glistening capsule, slightly longer on one axis than on the other, which had about the mass of a large interstellar transport ship. Muller found a similar capsule in orbit about the fifth world. The overseers. It was impossible for him to open communications with either of these capsules, or with the planets beyond. All channels were blocked. He twisted dials fitfully for more than an hour, ignoring the irritable responses of the ship's brain, which kept telHng him to give up the idea. At last he conceded. He brought his ship close to the nearer orbiting capsule. To his surprise the ship remained under his control. Destructive missiles that had come this close to alien overseers had deen commandeered; but he was able to navigate. A hopeful sign? Was he under scan, and was the alien idle to distingifLsh him from a hostile weapon? Or was he being ignored? ers he matdied velocities with the alien satellite and put his ship in a poking orbit around it He mitered his drop-capsule. He ejected himself and slid from his ship into darkness. N ow the alien seized him. There was no doubt The drop-capsule was pro gramme d for a minimumexpenditure orbit that woidd bring it skimming past the alien in due time, but Muller swifdy discovered that he was debating from that orbit Deviations are never accidental. His capsule was acoebcadJag beyond the program, whidi meant diat it had teen grasped and was being drawn forward. He accepted that. He was Idly calm, expecting nodiing and prepared for everything. The drop-capsule eased down. He saw the gleaming bulk of the alien satelUte show. Skin to metal skin, the vehicles met and toudied and joined. A hatch slid open. He drifted within. His capsule came to rest on a broad platform in an immense cavernous room hundreds of meters long, high, and broad. Fully suited, Muller stepped from it. He activated his gravity pads; for, as he antidpated, gravity in here was so dose to null that the pull was imperceptible. In the blackness he saw only a faint purplish glow. Against a backdrop of utter silence he heard a resonant booming sound, like an enormously amplified sigh, shuddering through the struts and trusses of the satellite. Despite his gravity pads he felt dizzy; beneath him the flo( rolled. Through his mind went a sensation like the throbbing of the sea; great waves slammed ragged beaches; a mass of water stirred and groaned in its global cavity; the world shivered beneath the burden. Muller felt a chih that his suit could not counteract. An irresistible force drew him. Hesitantly he moved, relieved and surprised to see that his limbs still obeyed his commands, though he was not entirely their master. The awareness of something vast nearby, something heaving and pulsating and sighing, remained with him. He walked down a night-drowned boulevard. He came to a low railing, a dull red line against the deep darkness, and pressed his leg against it, keang contact with it as he moved forward. At one point he slipped and hit the railing widi his dbow and heard the dang of metal traveling through the entire structure. Blurred edioes drifted back to him. As though walking the maze he passed through corridors and hatches, across interloddng compartments, over bridges that spanned dark abysses, down sloping ramplike debouchments into lofty chambers whose ceilings were dimly visible. Here he moved in blind confidence, fearing nothing. He could barely see. He had no vision of the total structure of this satellite. He could scarcely imagine the purpose of these inner partitions. From that hidden giant presence ce silent waves', an ever-intenrifying pressure. He trembled in its grip.   w ' IF Still he moved on, until now he was in some central gallery, and by a thin blue glow he was able to discern levels dwindling below him, and far beneath his balcony a broad tank, and within the tank something sparkling, something huge. "Here I am," he said. "Richard Muller. Earthman." He gripped the railing and peered downward. Did the great beast stir and shift? Did it grunt? Did it call to him in a language he understood? He heard nothing. But he felt a great deal. He felt bis soul escaping through his pores. The drain was unrelenting. Down in the pit the monster tapped his spirit, opened petcocks of neural energy, drew forth, demanded more, drew that too. "Go on," Muller said, and the echoes of his voice danced around him. "Drink! What's it like? A bitter brew? Drink!" His knees buckled. He sagged forward. He pressed his forehead to the cold railing. He yidded himself in glittering droplets. He gave up first love and first disaintment, April rain, fever and ache, pride and hope, the scent of sweat and the touch of flesh, warmth and ccdd, sweet and sour, the thunder of music, the music of thunder, silken hair knotted between his fingers, lines scratched in spongy soil, snorting stallions, glittering schools of tiny fish, the towers of Newer Chicago, the brothels of Under New Orleans, know, milk, wine, hunger, fire, pain, sleep, sorrow, apples, dawn, tears, Bach, sizzling grease, the laughter of old men, the sun on the horizon, the moon on the sea, ecstasy, grief, salt, artichokes, green fields, the light of other stars, soft thighs, whirling dancers, vision cubes, traaqortation pods, cold gin, crumbling lks, Sunday mornings, the fumes of rodcet fuel, summer flowm on a glacier's flank, and much more. He gave it all. He waited for an answer, and none came to him, and when be was wholly empty he lay face downward, drained, hollow, staring blindly into the abyss. W hen he was able to leave, he left The hatch opened to pass his drop-capsule, and it rose toward his ship. Shortly he was in warp. He slept most of the way. In the vicinity of Antares he cut in the override, took command of the ship and filed for a change of ccuise. There was no need to return to Earfli. The monitor staflon recorded bis request, checked ;rbu#inely to see thai the channel was clear, ahH allowed him to proceed at pnce' to Lnnos. Muller entered waip again instantly. When he emerged, not far from Lemnos, he found another p already in orbit and waiting for him. He started to go about his business anyway, but the other ddp insisted on malg contact. Muller accepted the communication. "This is Ned Rawlins," a strangely quiet voice said. "Why have you changed your flight plans?" "Does it matter? I've done my job." "You haven't filed a report" Tm reporting now, then. I visited the alien. We had a pleasant friendly chat. Then it let me go home. Now Fm almost home. End of report." "What are you going to do now?" "Go home," I said. "This is home." 'Xemnos?" "Lemnos." "Dick, let me come aboard. Give me ten minutes with you -- in person. Please don't say no." "I don't say no," Muller replied. Soon a small craft detached itself from the other ship and matched velocities with his. Patiently Muller allowed the rendezvous to take place. Rawlins stepped into his ship and shed his helmet. He looked pale, drawn, older. They faced one another for a long silent moment. Rawlins advanced and took Muller's wrist in greeting. "I never thought I'd see you again, Dick," he began. "And I wanted to tell you -- " He stopped. "Yes?" Muller asked. "I don't feel it," said Rawlins. " dont feel Ur "What?" "You. Your field. Look, I'm right next to you. I don't feel a thing. All that nastiness, the pain, the despair -- it isn't coming throughi" "The alien drank it all," said Muller calmly. "I'm not surprised. My soul left my body. Not all of it was put back." "What are you talking about?" "I could feel it soaking up everything that was within me. I knew it was changing me. Net deliberately. It was just an incidental alteration. A byproduct." Rawlins said slowly, "You knew it, then. Even before I came on board. And yet you want to return to the maze. Why?" 'It's home." "Earth's your home, Dick. There's no reason why you shouldn't go back. You've been cured." "Yes, said Muller. "A happy ending to my doleful story. I'm fit to consort with humanity again. My reward for nobly risking my life a second time among, aliens. How neatly done! But is humanity fit to consort with me?" "Don't go down there, Dick. You're being irrational now. Charles sent me to get you. He's terribly proud of you. We all are. It would be a big mistake to lock yourself away in the maze now." "Go back to your own ship, Ned," Muller said. "If you go into the maze, so will I." "I'll kill you if you do. I want to be left alone, Ned, do you understand that? I've done my job. My last job. Now I retire. Purged of my nightmares." Muller forced a thin smile. "Don't come after me, Ned. I trusted you, and you would have betrayed me. Everything else is incidental. Leave my ship now. We've said all that we need to say to each other, I think, except good-bye. Remember me to Charles." "Don't do thisl" "There's something down there I don't want to lose," Muller said. "I'm going to claim it now. Stay away. All of you. Stay away. I've learned the truth about Earthmen. Will you go now?" IF Silently Rawlins suited up. As he stuped tluoiigh the hatch. Mallei said, 'Tm iad you wei the last one I saw. Somehow it was easier that way." Rawlins vanished through the hatch. A short while laler Muller programmed his ship for a hypertolic orbit on a twenty-minute diy, got into his dropi#itde, and reed himself for the descent to Lemnos. It was a quick drop and a good landing. He came down right in the impact ea, two kitomctere from the gateway to the maze. The sun was high and bright. MoUer walked briskly toward the maze. He had done what they wanted. Now he was going home. # T Tes still making gestures,"TX Boardman said. "He'll come out of there." "I don't think so,' relied Rawlins. "He meant that." "You stood nest to him, and you felt nothing?" "Nothing. He doesn't have it any more." "He'll come out, then," Boardman said. 'We'U watch him, and when he asks to be taken off Lemnos, well take him off. Sooner or later hell need other pecle again. He's been throii so mudi that he needs to think everything throng and I guess he sees tte maze as the best place for that He isn't ready to fdunge back into normal life again. Give him two years, three, fom. Hell come out. The two sets of aliens have cancried each other's work on him, and he's fit to rejoin society." "I don't think so," Rawlins said quietly. "I don't think it cancried out so evenly. Chades, I don't think he's human at all, any more." Boardman lauied. hall we bet? ni oer five to one that Muller comes out of the maze voluntarily widun five years.' "Wefl --  "It's a bet, then." Rawlins the older man's office. Night had fiiUen. He crossed the bridge outside the building. In an hour he'd be dining with someone awed beyond measure by her liaison frith the famous Ned Rafriins. She was a good listener, who coaxed him for tales of daring deeds and nodded gravriy as he ke cA the challenges ahead. Se was ribo good in bed. He paused on the bridge to look upward at the stars. Ught shimmered in the sky. Out there lay Lemnos, and Beta Hydri IV, and the wodds occupied by the radio beings, and all man's dominion, and even, invisible but real, the home galaxy of the oAers. Out there lay a iabyrinth in a broad plain, and a forest of spongy trees hundreds of meters high, a thousand planets Wanted with the young cities of Eardunen, and a tank of strangeness orbiting a conquaed world. In the tank lay somethiog unbearably alien. On the thousand Janets lived worried men fearing the future. Under the spongy trees walked graceful siksrt creatures with many arms. In the maze dweUed a... man. Perhaps, Rawlins thout, I'll visit Muller in a year or two. It was too early to tell how the patterns would form. No one yet knew how the radio people were reacting, if at all to the things they had learned from Richard Muller. The role of the Hydrans, the efforts of men in their own fense, the coming forth of Muller from the maze, these were mysteries, shifting, variable. It was exciting and a little frightening to think that he would live through the time of testing that lay ahead. He crossed the bridge. He watched starships shattering the darkness overhead. He stood motionless, feeling the pull of the stars. All the universe tugged at him, each star exerting its finite power. The glow of the heavens dazzled him. Beckoning pathways lay open. He thought of the man in the maze. He thought too of the girl awaiting him. S uddenly he was Dick Muller, once also twenty-four years old, with the galaxy his for the asking. Was it any different for you, he wondered? What did you feel when you looked up at the stars? Where did it hit you? Here. Here. Just where it hits me. And you went out there. And found. And lost And found something else. Do you remember, Dick, the way you once felt? Tonight in your windy maze, what will you think about? Will you remember? Why did you turn away from us, Dick? What have you become? He hurried to the girl who waited for him. They sipped young wine, tart, electric. They smiled through a candle's flickering glow. Later her softness yielded to him, and still later they stood close together on a balcony looking out over the greatest of all men's cities. Lights stretched toward infinity, rising to meet those other lights above. He slipped his arm around her, put his hand on her bare flank, held her against him. She said, "How long do you stay this time?" "Four more days." "And when wii you come back?" "When the job's done." "Ned, will you ever rest? Will you ever say you've had enough, that you won't go out any longer, that you'll take one planet and stick to it?" "Yes," he said vaguely. T suppose. After a while." "You don't mean it. You're just saying it. None of you ever settle down." "We can't," he murmured. "We keep going. There are always more worlds... new suns..." "You want too much. You want the whole universe. It's a sin, Ned. You have to accept limits." "Yes," he said. "You're right. I know you're right." His fingers traveled over satin-smooth flesh. She trembled. He said, "We do what we have to do. We try to learn from the mistakes of others. We serve our cause. We attempt to be honest with ourselves. How else can it be?" "The man who went back into the maze -- " " -- is happy," Rawlins said. "He's following his chosen course." ""He must hate us terribly to turn his back on the whole universe like that." IF "He's beyond hate," Rawlins said. "Somehow. He's at peace. Whatever he is." Whateverr "Yes," he said gently. When I see you again, Dick, I have much to tell you, he thought. She said, "Why did he lock himself into the maze again, Ned?" "For the same reason that he went among aliens in the first place. For the reason that it all happened." "And that reason was?" "He loved mankind," Rawlins said. It was as good an epitaph as any. He held the girl tightly. But he coo. At Park-Sheraton Hotel, #th St. and #th Ave., New York City. Guest of Honor: Donald A. Wollheim. For information: Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, N.Y. #. Membership: #. science fiction, fantasy, science in literature, etc. At University of Wisconsin, MUwaukee. Luncheon speaker Judith Merril. No fee for the conference. For luncheon reservations and information: Ivor A. Rogers, co Kay Ettla, Student Union, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin #. ington D. C. Regency-Congress Motor Hotel. For information: Jack C. Haldeman, # Woodboume Avenue, Baltimore, Md. Featuring a lively slide show The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody' narrated by J. K. Klein and based on his photos of many past conventions. Guest of Honor: Rert Silverberg. vHotel Southland, Dallas, Texas. For information: Con Committee #, # Highland Drive, Carrollton, Texas #. Membership #. #, #, or # weeks; coUege credits wiU be given. Visiting staff will be: Judith Merril, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm. For information: Robin Scott Wilson, Clarion State College, Clarion, Pa. #. North Plaza Motel, #I Reading Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. Program includes a banquet, cost #. For information: Lou Tabakow, # St. John's Terrace, Cincinnati, Ohio #. Membership: #. Angeles: at Statler-lBlton Hotel. For information: Charles A. Crayne, # N. Ridgewood Place, HoU # rwood, California #. Advance membership: #: supporting membership: #J)#. Ben Franklin Motor Hotel, # Washington, St. Louis, Missouri. Guest of Honor: Harlan Ellison. For information: Norbert Couch, Route #, Box #, Arnold, Missouri #. Membership: #. ana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. Guest of Honor: Daniel F. Galouye. Membership: #. veption. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland, California. Philip Jos# Farmer, Guest of Honor. More details later. For informaStation, I Cerrito, California #. Membership: L# foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. Dear Editor: In reply to your query concerning the reaction to occasionally printing a hit of fantasy, I would like to cast an affirmatiye vote. The reason, I think, that pure fantasy magazines such as Beyond and Unknown failed was that there were too few of us who enjoyed or could appreciate fine fantasy writing. Now I believe there is a new type of readership, brought about by the Eing trilogy and the Conan tales published in pocketbook form, that would certainly welcome more fantasy writing. After all, weVe had fine science-fiction writers turn out great fantasy; people like Robert Bloch (That Hell-Bound Train) y Jack Sharkey (It # Magic, You Dopel), and Fritz Leiber (the Grey Mouser series). Really, weVe had fantasy with us in the guise of science fiction, in the form of Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty and the recent Harlan Ellison. Perhaps you could print Michael Moorcock's Elric stories in the up-coming International Science Fiction (and Fantasy?) Magazine. I've enjoyed reading If for many years and the addition of fantasy will make If a better magazine by expanding the subjects that your writers can write about. More fantasy and more James Blish. -- George Kelley, #D #th Street, Niagara Falls, New York, #... Dear Editor: I am not a constant reader of science-fiction magazines, but sometimes while in a bookshop I occasionally buy one or two from the paperback counter. Likewise, I sometimes get them from abroad from England. The other day I picked up the December # issue of If and liked some of the stories. One thing I did not like was the first paragraph of the article by your man Lin Garter, presumably in Europe. Writing about the popularity of science-fiction in various countries he mentions Russia...  which word for some obscure reason (or is it) is printed in italics, though the names of the other countries are printed in other type. It should of course be the Soviet Union. He uses the term Iron Curtain and by doing, so is obviously very prejudiced against that country. If Garter has a bias either from religious or political reason, then that is his own affair and I don't think that it should intrude into your magazine. New Zealand is many thousands of miles away from the Soviet Union but even so. I'll give him a few facts to bring him up-to-date. Please forward them on to him in Europe. The Soviet Union has Intourist offices in many of the big cities in Euroie and these specifically cater for foreigners wanting to enter that country. If he had been in London say, he could have gone ekmg to the Intourist office there and booked a passage, either a Baltic line ship which operates between London and Leningrad or flown in one of the big Soviet jets from London airport to LeninigTad or Moscow. He would have had very little tronble with his viaa, always providing of coarse, fthat his nose was clean". Many hundreds of thousands of foreigners (induding some thousands of Americans) visit the Soviet Union throughout the year; and the trend is growing. The main problem is hotel accommodation. Some thousands of Soviet citizens visit other countries as well. Some few weeks ago I saw on television a British documentary made in conjunction with the viet television people, a hour long program on Siberia and particularly about 'science city," Novoeiibirsk. And very informative it was; no "Iron Curtain" there, brother. Even in little New Zealand we have seen the Bolshoi ballet and the Georgian dancers and others. And we, are so far away from the main spring of world culture... except of course, the American effort in Vietnam... that surdy you must have seen far noore rf Soviet art and culture in the United States than we have seen in New Zealand. One point comes to mind as regards an iron curtain; some years ago arrangements had ibeen made between an American entrepreneur and a Soviet cultural organizatkm to visit the .United States and perform in the major cities, of the Red Army choir. Everything, had been settled and then Washington intervened and although the concert tickets had been sold out in the plao where the choir were to sing, dt all had to be canceled. The reason? The American government didn't wiant the choir to sing in their Red Army uniforms as they had done in every other country they had sung in, and that the Red Army could say ihat they'd been on American soil. Tut, tut, how childish can they he? As (hnpMed in my opening paragraph, I am not an addict of scdencefictioQ but very interested in space research and its discipimes and I am a senior member of the British Interplanetary Society, London and also a member of two local (NZ) societies who publish technical reports. As a tail end. Just remember one thing; Scdence of any discipline is universal and for all mankind, and knows no boundaries, XHlitic# or religion. So cut out the "Iron CuTtain" prejudice and propaganda. -- William Hope Fenn, P.O. Box #, Auckland, C. I., New Zealand.  Prejudice does exist all over. It exists in many countries, including some wihich  not iermit members of "colored" races or nonChristian religions to immigrate, rather closer to your home than the U. S. A., Mr. Fenn. But it is quite rare among science-ficion writers, readers -- and editors! -- in any country, -- The Editor,    Dear Editor: I started reading Galaxy and If about the same time I began trailing girls home at a timorous two blocks' distance. All this occurred during the inquistorial gloom of the early nineteen-fifties, when Howard Fast disappeared overnight from school library shelves and you wondered if when they found your Aunt Elsa had chairwomaned the Spanish Republican War Relief Committee in Dubuque. (Even the Finnish War Relief Committee was suspect. One thing about the bookand hereticbuming set, their fear of the future is exceeded only by their ignorance of the past.) For those of us who suffered through the obstacle course of adolescence during that era of chromeplated Stalinism, science-fiction was our new left, our underground, our movement. Perhaps we were merely being pragmatic. Where else but in a sf magazine could be we obtain practical information on how to, survive in Year One after Armageddon? (Round up all the nubile wenches you could lay hands on and put them to studying agronomy texts and Alfred Eorzyhski.) Or how to carry on a one-man war of patriotic banditry against some Orwellian nightmare of a super-state that was sure to come if the Bomb didn't. So thanks to Oalaxy and If, and best of luck in the coming yearl -- Jerry L. Watkins, #I North #th Street, Apartment #, Omaha, Nebraska.   Dear Editor: Apparently there aren't any "good newsstands" in Parkersburg -- I've been looking for months now and still havent found a copy of Inters national Science Fiction. Are you sure it's newsstand only? I'd be more than happy to have an Issue of If or Galaxy taken off my subscription and be sent a copy of Intemor tional instead. It may be the only way I'll ever get a copy. "He That Moves" was a fine story. but not nearly long enough to satisfy my hunger for Zelazny stories. More, please. Another istory like This Mortal Mountain" and "I'll subscribe for 'life. I'd like to see Harlan Ellison in your pages more often. And how about coaxing Theodore Sturgeon back into Iff When are we going to get Rogue Star? You've been promising it to us ever since the November, #, issue. The other serials have been fine, but I'm igetting tired of waiting. So you want a more active letter column, eh? And the readers should do their , share, eh? All right, but we can't do it all, you know. You'll have to help us out, and there are two ways you can do it. First, speed things up. I've had two letters printed in If so far, and neither has seen print less than five or isix months after I wrote it. I realize yon work several issues ahead, but surely you can do something to get letters into print faster. Second, comment on the letters. Agree or disagree, praise our intelligence or teU us we don't know what we're talking about, it doesn't really matter as long as you say something. I mean, a lot of thought went into my proposal in my January letter, and the least you could have done was to print a small editorial guffaw to show you thought it was funny. Discussions have to have two sides. But don't let any of the above make you think I don't like If. Quite the contrary. I'd just like to see a livelier "Hue and Cry." -- John P. Borger, Route ##, Box #, Parkersburg, West Virginia #.  BogTie Star upcoming starting in July issue. Positively. (We think.) -- Editor. IF Forgotten road to success m writing By J. D. Ratcliff I can't imagine why more heginners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to youbut they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at home, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing.) You learn to write hy writing. Our instructors, themselves all published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well -- or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so,"Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. Although he works only four hours a day, he has had hundreds of articles published in top magazines, including over # in Reader's Digest alone. Famous Writers School Dept. VV-#, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print I Street I ! City; I I State Zip I ' Accredited by the Accrediting Commission Of , the National Home Study Coimdl, Your Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right awoy. I enclose my check or money order for: I I # issues for # H # issues for # Name Address City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or  renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwoiner Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do i Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #S#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merehantsj Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey  XHoornsfm .b.Jack Your Subscription is Your Private Window On Baby is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwaincr Smith The Big Time Fritz Lciber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it hus its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a Stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Hero arc some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind betweeh the Worlds Lester del Bey Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bestor Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farcnheit #SJ ) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants; Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simok Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckicy jum, # VoL #. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by H. H. Hollis by James TIptree, Jr. by Gene Wolfe by A. Bertram Chandler by Samuel R Delany by John Thomas by Frederik Pohl IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn. President, Vol #, No. # Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All right. Including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materlaL All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company. New York, N.Y. # Paid Advertiiement We the undersioned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country. Koren K. Anderson R. A. Lafferty Poul Anderson Robert J. Leman Harry Botes C. C. MacApp Lloyd Biggie, Jr. Robert Mason J. F. Bone D. M. Melton Leigh Brackett Norman AAetcalf Morion Zhniner Bradley P. Schuyler Miller Mario Brand Sam Moskowitz R. Bretnor John Myers Myers Fredric Brown Larry Niven Doris Pitkin Buck Alan Nourse Stuart Folmer Elinor Busby Gerald W. Page F. M. Busby Rachel Cosgrove Payes John W. Campbell Lawrence A. Perkins Louis Charbonneau Jerry E Pournelle Hot Clement Joe Foyer Compton Crook E. Hoffmann Price Hank Davis George W. Price L. Sprague de Camp Alva Rogers Charles V. de Vet Fred Soberhogen George O. Smith Richard H. Eney W. E Sprogue T. R. Fehrenboch G. Harry Stine (lee Correy) R. C. FitzPatrick Dwight V. Swain Daniel F. Galouye Thomas Burnett Swann Raymond Z. Gallun Albert Teichner Robert M. Green, Jr. Theodore L. Thomas Frances T. Hall Rena M. Vole Edmond Hamilton Jack Vance Robert A. Heinlern Hari Vincent Joe L. Hensley Don Walsh, Jr. Paul G. Herkart Dean C. Ing Joy Kay Klein Rosco E. Wright David A. Kyle Karl Wiirf Paid Advertisement We oppose the participation of the United Stotes in the war in Vietnam. Forrest J Ackerman March Laumer Isaac Asimov Ursula K. LeGuIn Peter S. Beagle Fritz Leiber Jerome BIxby Irwin Lewis James Blish A. M. Ughtner Anthony Boucher Robert A. W. Lowndes Lyle G. Boyd Katherine MacLean Ray Bradbury Barry Malzberg Jonathan Brand Robert E. Margroff Stuart J. Byrne Anne Marple Terry Carr Ardrey Marshall Carroll J. Clem  Bruce McAllister Ed M. Clinton Judith Merril Theodore R. Cogswell Robert P. Mills Arthur Jean Cox Howard L Morris Allan Danzig Kris Neville Jon DeCles Alexei Panshin Miriam Allen deFord Emil Petafa Samuel R. Delany J. Re Pierce Lester del Rey Arthur Porges Philip K. Dick Mack Reynolds Thomas M. Disch Gene Roddenberry Sonya Dorman Joanna Russ Larry Eisenberg James Sallls Harlan Ellison Carol Emshwiller Hans Stefan Santesson Philip Jos# Farmer J. W. Schulz David ERsher Robin Scott Ron Goulart Larry Te Shaw Joseph Green John Shepley Jim Harmon T. L Sherred Harry Harrison Robert Silverberg H. H. Hollis Henry Slesar J. Hunter Holly Jerry Sohl James D. Houston Norman Splnrod Edward Jesby Margaret St. Clair Leo P. Kelley Jacob Transue Daniel Keyes Thurlow Weed VIrgInlo Kidd Kate Wilhelm Damon Knight Richard Wilson Allen Lang Donald A. Wollheim Contributions to help meet the expense of future ads are welcomed and should he sent toi Judith Merril or Kate Wilhelm Knight P. #. Box # MOfordi Pennsylvania # IF  Editorial # I f you read our fiister maiazine, Galaxy, and in paiiscolar if you've read the June issue, you already know everything we're going to say in these two pages and so you can get right on with the stories, Hue  Cry, etc. If not -- well, first take a look at the full-page vertisements that oocnament this sectkm. You will find that two of them are tmusual in that they are prepared and paid for by the sciencefiction writers themselves. They place the body of science-fiction writers squarely on record on the question of Vietnam. (Only trouble is that there are about as many in favor of picldng up our marbles and leaving as there in favor of banging on, no matter what.) The third is also unusual hi that it is an appeal to you to do something about the problem suggested by the other two; That is, we are trying to get the highly intelligent, sophisticate alert and well informed science-fiction community (at least, that's the way we always describe ourselves, isn't it?) to turn away from taking ponitions on the Vietnamese problem, and begin the much more demanding task of trying to solve it. I s this a reasonable hope? Is there any chance at all that we sciencefiction types, readers and writers alike, will be able to contribute anything very useful to a problem that has nearly destroyed one country and caus enormous physical or social damage to two others? -- bearing in mind that every politician, columnist and Big Thinker on five continents has already had his own Do About Vietnam? Assume you are being asked for advice. Assume the people who ask you are the President of the United States, the Congress, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- anyone andor everyone who has any decision-making authority concerning American involvement in Vietnam. Assume they want one suggestion from you... and assume they will follow it. What would you tell them to do? Don't tell them. Tell us. We will take the most provocative and seemingly productive suggestions received, submit them to problemsolving analysis, and present the results in a forthcoming issue of Galaxy. The Rules #. Anyone is eligible to enter, and may submit as many entries as he likes. Each entry must be on a separate sheet of paper, one side only, and Include your name and address. All entries will bome the property of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Please limit yourself to a maximum of # words for each entry, preferably In the form of (a) your suggestion, (b) followed, if you wish, by a statement of why you think it worth doing. #. Suggestions may be on any areo of American involvement In Vietnam -- ways of winning the war, ways of bringing about a peaceful settlement, whatever you think would be of value. #. Five prizes of # each will be awarded to those entries which, in the opinion of the fudges, best deserve them. In the event of duplicate suggestions, the first entries received will get the prize. Judges will consist of, or be appointed by, the Editors of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Winners will be notified by mall, and their names will be published tn a forthcoming Issue of this magazine. #. Send your entries toi "What Would You Do About Vietnam?", Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. Entries must be received by July #th, #, to be eligible for prizes. say on what everyone concerned ought to do next? The way we look at it, if there is no such chance it's up to us to invent one. Certainly the world's leaders have accomplished very little. And maybe -- just maybe, to be sure -- we of the free imaginations and untrammeled creative instincts may be able to find some new paths to walk that might ultimately lead us out of the manmade jungle that is threatening to wreck our society faster than technology can put it together again. At any rate, we think it's worth a try. So play the game with us, please. Put yourself in the position of the President of the Unil States, the Senate, the Combined Chiefs of Staff -- of any power figure or group that you think can do anything constructive about either winning the war, or fmding a way to stop it, or substituting some other medhanism for the pointless slaughter and despoilation that is apparently our present method of choice. How you solve it all, of course, is up to you. If we had the solutions we clearly wouldnt need the contest. But it seems apparent that there are some panameterB. A military solution would only be acceptable if it carried with it some failnsafe measure that would safegruard us against reprisal from China or the U.S.S.R. An injunction for the South Vietnamese to take over more of the fighting and carry out its programs of pacification, cleaning up corruption and so on is no good unless you can tell us how to make these measures feasible. And so on. But don't, on the other hand, bo deterred from making a good, specific suggestion merely because it would be hard to put into practice. Because that's Step Two in our program. Y ou see, once we get a sizeable number of interesting ideas we plan to submit them all to the judgments of as competent a pan of experts as we can obtain. The panel will be asked to evaluate them in terms of desirability, feasibility and effectiveness... and to suggest ways of improving them in all those terms. If you've beeo. reading If and Galaxy for very long it will be no surprise to you that we think society's only hope of solving the problems our technology has created for us lies in employing technology's own problem-solving techniques on them. And that's what we are planning to do...The results, whatever they may be, will be reported in these magazines as they happen. Will it all work? We don't know. We can offer hopes, but no (giiarantees. But does anyone have any better ideas? -- Prederik Pohl I E If Youre o Subscriber --  I -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not conI I tain your Zip Code number -- pleose drop us a line to let us  I know what it Is,  And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Todoy?   s m#. Secrets entrusted to a few heVnpuuedaeboM be generally told -- things you ouHt to knotty. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into natures laws their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe e.k.R. I Scribe E.K.R. I j San Jose, California # I j Please send me the free book. The Mastery  I of Life, which explains how I may learn to I I use my faculties and powers of mind.  City Zip Code  Rosicrucians IF  Serial nUistroied by In a universe where stars and men were Joined as brothers, something new -- and dangerous! -- was born I that would whisk him across the interstellar gulfs between star and star, H is name was Andreas Quamodihe looked out of place. He didn't an, short, stout, self-important, look like the sort of man who would Waiting his turn to enter the lube engaged in business important minous iris of the transflex cube, enou to justify the use of the transflex cube. But he didn't look like the sort of man on whom the might depend; and curiously, he was both those things. The control dome flashed a signal to him as he entered the ramp. "Identification, sir?" "Ridiculous," muttered Andy Quamodian. "Silly red tapel" But he let his flyer hover while he sorted out the documents of his interstellar citizenship. The dome extended a long, nimble finger of pale plasma to scan his passport. The passport bore his ident number, an endless row of binary digits. Below it another line translated the numbers into the universal language: Name: Andreas Quamodian. Race: Human. Birthplace: New Europe, Planet #, Star #, Sector B-#-C, Galaxy I . Organization: Companions of the Star. Status: Monitor. Priority: -- But the last line was blank. "Hurry up, will you?" Quamodian barked. "Can't you see Fm in a hurry?" . The tendril of plasma turned the passport disk about, catching in it a reflection of his dark, round face. "Destination, sir?" the control dome inquired. "Earth. That's -- confound it, let me see -- yes, that's Planet #, Star #, Sector Z-#-Q, Galaxy #. Route me through the Wisdom Creek station. Octant #." The plasma tendril winked out. Quamodian caught the passport disk as it dropped and stowed it away, then resumed his inching crawl toward the cube. A long silver tank, no doubt filled with a liquid citizen, was vanishing through the closing gate. Behind it a multiple creature followed a horde of small, bright, black things, hopping and tumbling inside a communal cloud of luminous blue mist A gray-scaled dragon shuffled just ahead of Quamodian, burdened with a bright metal turret on its back that probably housed unseen symbiotes. Winking crystal ports in the turret peeked at Quamodian. As Quamodian inched after the dragon a flashing signal halted him. "Sir," said the control dome, "we have no record of your priority for this trip." great stars," cried Quamodian, "can't you see I'm in a hurry?" But grumbling, he held up a scrap of yellow transfac film for the plasma sensor to scan. The plasma hesitated and recoiled. "Sir, that document is not in the universal language," "Of course not!" Quamodian snapped. "It's in English. Read it!" "I have no equivalence data for 'English,' sir." "Well, then I'll translate it. It's transmitted from Earth -- that's the mother planet of my race, you know. The sender is a girl -- I mean, a youthful female human creature -- named Molly Zaldivar. Her message is addressed to me. It is of great importance, and -- " "Sir." Ahead the multiple creature had already disappeared into the transflex cube and the dragon was lumbering forward. "You are delayIF  mg transshipment I ask for your priority authorization now' 'Tm giving it to you! Listen to what she says: Dear Andy, please forgive me for leaving you so rudely. If you can, come to Earth at once. The local Companions have never heard of rogue stars; they won't pay any attention to my warnings. But -- Andy, dear Andy, I'm frightened! Rogue men are in contact with rogue stars right now, and I have no hope but you!'" "Sir, that is not an acceptable priority. Please leave the ramp!" "Confound you," shouted Quamodian, "don't you understand? That's priority enough for anything! That's a threat to the whole human race!" "Sir. The human race is identified in my files as an insignificant little breed of barbarians, just recently admitted to provisional citizenship. No human being is authorized to issue a priority for interstellar travel," "But they may be in grave danger of -- " "Sir, please leave the ramp. You may apply through official channels for authorization for your trip." "There's no time! The danger is urgent!" The dome did not reply, but ominously the plasma tendi thickened and began to spread. 'Wait!" Quamodian cried desperately. "I'm a member of the order of Companions of the Star! Surely you know of them. Our mission is to protect humanity, and other races, too." "My indices do not show any authorization issued to you for this journey by the Companions of the Star, sir. You are holding up traffic. Please move off the ramp." Quamodian glanced bleakly at the citizen crowding behind him: Forty tons of sentient mineral, granite hard, jagged and black, afloat on its own invisible transflection field and impatiently extending its own passport at the tip of a blue finger of plasma. "Don't shove. Citizen!" he barked. 'There's been a misunderstanding. Listen, Control. Check your records. We humans are allied to the multiple citizen named Cygnus, which is a symbiotic association of fusorians, stars and men. Its chief star is Almalik...or don't you care about sentient stars any more than you do about men?" His irony was wasted on the dome. "Get out of line," its signal flashed imperatively. Then, a split-second later. "You may wait on the side of the ramp. The multiple citizen Cygnus is listed on our indices. We will call the star Almallk, in Galaxy #. D isgruntled, Quamodian switched his flyer out of line, giving up his place to the granite citizen, who passed him with an air of disdain. He hovered impatiently at the edge of the ramp, watching the gate ahead expand again as it swallowed the gray-scaled dragon and its turret of symbiotic fellows. For a moment Quamodian thought of making a mad dash for the iris aperture, but there was no sense in that. However fast his flyer moved, the dome would be faster; and then he would be even longer delayed fti getting to Earth. He snatched a light-pen and scribbled hastily on his message panel: "Molly, I'm having a little trouble. But I'm coming, as fast as I can." He added the routing information and watched the hungry tongue of plasma lick away the photons in the message, storing them as spin-variances in an electron cloud. He knew that his invisible package of tagged electrons was already enroute for the transflex fields around the cube, automatically seeking out the fastest route though the shifting sub-universes of transflection to home in on Molly's distribution point. With any luck, he would follow at the same speed, arriving almost as fast as the message. But if his luck was low... if the monitor dome would not permit him to pass... Quamodian shuddered and stared blankly out at the horde of beings slowly moving past him on the ramp. He shook himself. "Divert me," he said harshly. At once a more than humanly soprano voice began to sing from somewhere inside his flyer: "#, m, chiamano Mimi..." "No. Not opera." The voice fell silent. A holograph of a chessboard appeared on the communications panel, the pieces set up for a game; White's King's Pawns slid forward two spaces and waited for his reply. "I don't want to play chess, either. Wait a minute. Set up a probability matrix for me. Estimate the chances of the star Almalik granting me a priority." ."With running analysis, or just the predicted expectancy, Mr. Quamodian?" asked the voice of the flyer. With analysis. Keep me amused." "Well, sirl By gosh, there's a lot of stuff you got to consider, like -- " "Without the comedy alect," "Certainly, Mr. Quamodian. These are the major factors. Importance of human race in universal civilization: low. Approximately point-five than a hundred stellar systems in three galaxies; but these represent only about one one-hundreth of one per cent of the total population of universal civilization, even counting multiple and group intellects as singles. Concern of star Almalik with individual human Andreas Quamodian, negligible." What about the concern of Almalik for the Companions of the Star?" cried Quamodian angrily. "Coming to that, Mr. Quamodian. Concern rated as well under noise level on a shared-time basis, but inserting the real-time factor makes it low but appreciable. So the critical quantity in the equation is the relevance of the term 'rogue star.' I have no way of estimating the star Almalik's reaction to that, Mr. Quamodian." "The rogue stars are the most important phenomena in the universe," said Quamodian, staring out at the ramp. "In that case -- hum -- allowing for pressure of other affairs; you haven't kept up with the news, but there have been some unpleasant events on Earth -- let's see, I give it point seven probability, Mr. Quamodian. One hundred fourteen variables have been considered. They are respectively -- " "Don't bother." IF no bother, Mr. Quamodian," said the machine, a little sulkily. They were all moody, these companionship-oriented ship's contrcd mechanisms; it was the price you had to pay for free conversation. Quamodian said soothingly: "You've done well. It's just that I'm upset over the danger represented by the rogue star." "I can understand that, Mr. Quamodian," said the machine warmly, responding at once. "A threat to one's entire race -- " "I don't give a hoot about the human racel" "Why Mr. Quamodian! Then what -- " "It's Molly Zaldivar I care about. Make a note of this, you hear? Never fOTget it: The welfare of Molly Zaldivar is the most important thing in the universe to me, buse I love her with all my heart In spite of -- Quamodian thought bleakly of Molly Zaldivar, and Cliff Hawk, and the day years before when she had told him that it was Hawk she loved. "In spite of everything," he finished. "Now shut up. The monitor's signalling -- I guess my priority was approved!" II TV yT Uy Zaldivar, nine years before. girl who sang and accompanied hersdf on an Earth guitar, a giii who was loved by many a being in the university where she and Andy Quamodian met. It was easy for Quamodian to know why he loved her: the laughter in her voice, even when ihe sang the saddest ballads of the cdd moth er world; the skin tones that changed from wannest ivory to tawny gold under the queer shifting light of the triple star in the university's sides. But -- half the students did not "hear," at least on the audio frequency range used by human beings; many of them did not see with "visible" light. Yet all were fond of Molly Zaldivar. There were only three hundred humans in the school. Andy Quamodian, already serious, a little pudgy, dark and slow. Molly Zaldivar, like a golden flame, her bright hair catching ruddy glints from the red giant star above them, her dark eyes flashing the violet light of the dwarf. And -- Cliff Hawk. Even after nine years, Andreas Quamodian still scowled at the thought of Cliff Hawk. He was a rogue in the society of men, a rogue in the university, brooding, angry. Tall, gaunt, restless, he had shaggy black hair and burning blue eyes. Where Molly and Quamodian had come from old Earth itself, sent to the university on linguistic fellowships to learn the myriad communications-forms of the galaxies, Cliff Hawk was a technician. His ancestors had roamed the Reefs of Space, fugitives from the old interplanetary empire called the Plan of Man. Their prideful blood still burned in his veins. He loved Molly Zaldivar -- carelessly and roughly, with a certainty that she would sacrifice her own career for any of his whims. Whereas Andy Quamodian only worshipped her. When it came time for Molly Zaldivar to choose, she really had not had a choice. Andy Quamodian could see that now -- what choice between plodding little Andy Quam and the dark, dangerous man from the borderland of space? But he had not seen it at the time; and the moment when Molly Zaldivar sent him away still burned, nine years later . , . #ou are not paying attention, Mr. Quamodian," the flyer reprimanded him. "The control dome is signalling." "What? -- Oh, sorry." Quamodian gave orders, and the flyer swam back into the stream of traffic. A stalked horror of a citizen with members like bamboo shoots and a frond of brain tissue like a skirt around its waist had paused, was waiting for him to precede it into the transflex tube. "Your attention, sir!" flashed the control dome. "The multiple citizen Cyus is fully qualified to issue priorities for intergalactic travel. Almalik, spokesman star for the citizen, has granted you priority for immeditae transit to Earth. You may enter the transflex cube." "Thanks," grumbled Quamodian, and guided his flyer into the luminous cavern of the cube. A veteran of a good many intergalactic transits, Quamodian had never learned to enjoy them. The effects of transflection varied with the individual. Some felt nothing; a few reported pleasure or exhilaration. Most, to whom transit was unpleasant or terrifying, resorted to sleep drugs or hypnosis to make the experience pass quickly. Quamodian merely endured it. He watched the dark diaphragm contract behind him and at once felt the flyer seem to pitch and veer. Rotated out of space and time, routed by computation through the congruent folds of a dozen or a hundred parallel universes, he felt as he always did: lost, and stunned, and queasy. The blue walls flickered and dissolved into a darkening, grayish haze. A queer roaring came hollowly from nowhere, swelling in his ears. Numbing cold drove through him, as if every tissue of his body had somehow been plunged into the dark zero of the space between galaxies... But then the careening flyer steadied. "Prepare to emerge, Mr. Quamodian," it sang in his ear, and the roaring storm of sound and sensation died away. The shining walls were real again. But now they were greenish-gray instead of blue, and painted in bold black characters with the identifying characters of the Wisdom Creek Station on Earth. Ahead of him the exit gate expanded. There was no traffic here, no waiting line of citizens enduring the delays that beset their important business, no bustle of intergalactic civilizations. It was quiet and pastoral, Andy Quamodian leaned forward as the flyer glided out of the cube and looked for the first time in his adult life on the warm, broad acres that were lit by the single sun of Earth. IF minutes later the charm Liand the nostalgia were gone, and Quamodian was snapping furiously at his flyer. "What do you mean, you can't reach Miss Zaldivar? I just sent her a message..." "Your message has not been delivered, Mr. Quamodian. Her communications circuits have been blocked; she wishes to accept no calls." "Nonsensel And the local office of the Companions of the Star..." "Also blocked, Mr. Quamodian. A local custom. I have been assured that in fourteen hours, local time, they will be at your service, but until then -- " "Don't be a fool I" Quamodian shouted. "I can't wait that long! Here, I'll go to the office myself!" "Certainly, Mr. Quamodian." The flyer began to settle toward a dusty plaza m front of the transflex tower. "Of course," it added apologetically, "you will have to go on foot. By local custom, flyers are not permitted to operate more than one hundred meters from the transflex center at this time." "Great Almalik! Oh, very well." Fussily Quamodian collected himself and stamped out of the opening door. "Which way?" A voice by his ear answered, as the flyer activated its external speakers: "Down this street, Mr. Quamodian. The gold building with the ensign of the Companions." He turned and stared. Behind him, the flyer quietly rose, drifted back to the tall, tapered, black transflex tower and settled to wait at its base. Quamodian was alone on the planet of his birth. He was #e resized, more alone than he had expected. He knew that parts of Earth were stiB scarcely ulated -- nothing like the teeming metrapolises of the hub-worlds of the universe, nothing like ev the relatively minor planets of his university training and recent practical experience. But he had not expected Earth, even this part of Earth, to be empty. Yet there was not a soul in sit He peered back toward the transflex tower: his waiting flyer, motionless and peaceful; noting else. He looked down a long artificialstone boulevard: a school building a hospital, a few supply centers... and no one in sight. He saw a park with benches and a playground, but no one was near any of them; saw parked vehicles, seemingly abandoned, a library without readers, a fountain with no one to watch its play. "Ridiculous," he grumbled, and walked toward the building that glinted in the sun. Earth's single star was hot, and the full gravity of his home planet was more than Andreas Quamodian had been used to for a good many years. It was a tiring walk. But there was something pleasant about it, about the dusty smell of the hot pavement and the luminous young, green leaves of the trees that overhung the walk. Peace lay over the village, like a benediction of Almalik. But Quamodian had not come to Earth in search of peace. He increased his stride, and chugged up the walkway, beside the flagpole that bore the standard of the Companions of the Star: the thirteen colored stars of Alofialifc in the dotted ellipses of their intricate orbits, against a black field of space. T he door did not open for him. Quamodian nearly ran into it; he only stopped just in time. "What the devil's the matter here?" he demanded, more surprised than angry -- at least at first. "I am Andreas Quamodian, a monitor of the Companions of the Star. Admit me at once!" But the bright crystal panel did not move. "Good morning. Citizen Quamodian," said a recorded robotvoice. "The Wisdom Creek post of the Companions of the Star is closed today, in observance of local religious custom. It will be open as usual on Monday." "I'll report this!" Quamodian cried. "Mark my words! I'll call the Regional Office of the Companions of the Star -- " "A public communications instrument is just to your left. Citizen Quamodian," the robot-voice said politely. "It is cleared for emergency use even on Starday." "Emergency, eh? You bet it's an emergency!" But Quamodian had had enough of arguing with recorded voices. He stalked along the flank of the gold-colored ceramic building to the communications booth, angrily dialed the code for the Regional Office .   and found himself talking to another recorded voice. '"Companions of the Star, Third Octant Office," it said briskly. "Oh, confound -- Never mind. Listen. I am Monitor Quamodian. I am in Wisdom Credr to investigate a reported emergency, and I find the local office closed. This lax operation is highly irregular! I demand the office be opened and -- " "Monitor Quamodian," reproved the robot voice, '"this is impossible. Under our revised covenant with the Visitants, no local posts operate on Stardays so that local personnel may be free to engage in voluntary religious activities. Even Regional Offices are machine-operated during this -- '"But this is an emergency! Can't you understand?" ""Monitor Quamodian, my sensors detect no emergency situation in Wisdom Creek." "'That's what I'm here for! I -- well, I don't know the exact nature of the emergency, but I require immediate assistance -- " '"Our Wisdom Creek post will open promptly at midnight, local time," the voice informed him blandly. "'Competent assistance will bo available then." "Midnit will be too -- " But the line clicked, buzzed and settled to a steady hum. Muttering with anger, Quamodian tried Molly Zaldivar's code. But his flyer had been right; there was no answer. Puffing with irritation as much as fatigue, Quamodian lowered himself to the steps of the office of the Companions and scowled at the empty street. How many hundreds of thousands of light-years had he spanned to be here, on this day, in this back wash of life? What tremendous forces had he enlisted to hurl him across the gulfs of space, to race against the IF dreadful fears that Molly Zaldivar's message had conjured up He licked' dry lips and wiped perspiration from his brow. He was a hero, ready to rescue maiden, townspeople, world itself. But none of them appeared to want to be rescued. Ill T wenty-five miles southwest of Wisdom Creek, Molly Zaldivar did want to be rescued. At that moment she wanted it very badly. Her old blue electric car had whined up the rocky mountain road, three thousand feet above the plain; below her she saw the flat, dry valley with the little town of Wisdom Creek huddled around the twin spires of the Transflex tower and the church. But now the road went no farther. It dipped, circled a spur of the mountainside, and went tumbling into the other valley beyond. From here on she would have to walk... But that she could not do. Above her she heard the restless, singing rustle of the creature Cliff Hawk called a sleeth. She could not see it. But she could imagine it there, tall as a horse but far more massive, black as space and sleek as her own hair. And she knew that at that moment she was closer to death than she had ever been before. She tiptoed silently back to the car, 'eyes on the rocks over her head. The singing sound of the creature faded away and returned, faded away and came back again. Perhaps it had not detected her. But it might at any moment, and then -- Molly entered the car and closed the door ' gently, not latching it. Breathing heavily -- partly from nerves, partly from the thin, higjh air around her -- she picked up her communicator and whispered, "Cliff? Will you answer me. Cliff, please?" There was no sound except for the faint sound of the sleeth, and the even fainter whisper of wind around the mountaintop. Molly bit her lip and glanced over her shoulder. She dared not start the car's motor. It was not very loud, but the sleeth was far too close; it was a wonder it hadn't heard her coming up the trail. But the road sloped sharply away behind her. If she released the brakes the old car would roll on its out-of-date wheels; it would rattle and creak, but not at low speeds, much. Not at first. And Cliff had told her that the sleeth would not wander more than a few hundred yards from the cavemouth. She was very close now, but the car would roll out of range in not much more than a minute...  But then what? Cliff did not answer. She had to see him -- had to stop whatever he was doing, teamed with the rude, hard man who owned the sleeth. She would never be any closer than this, and what hope was there that the sleeth would be elsewhere if she tried again another time anyway? "bh, please, Cliff," she whispered to the communicator, "it's Molly and I've got to talk to you..." T here was a rattle of pebbles and dust, and Molly craned her neck to look upward in sudden terror. There was the sleeth, eyes huge as a man's head, green as the light from a radium-dial watch. It was perched over her, the bright, broad eyes staring blindly across the valley. It was graceful as a cat, but queerly awkward as it floated in its transflection field, clutching at the rubble with It did not seem to have seen her. Yet. Molly froze, her ears tuned to the singing rustle of the sleeth. Its huge muscles worked supply under the fine-scaled skin, and the eyes slowly turned from horizon to horiaon. Then it drifted idly back behind the rock, and Molly dared to breathe again. "Oh, Cliff," she whispered, but only to herself. She could not bring herself to speak even in an undertone to the communicator. But even terror fades; the monkeymind of a human being will not stay attuned even to the imminent threat of death. Molly became aware of her cramped position on the scarred plastic seat of the car, cautiously straightened her legs and sat up. If only Cliff Hawk would hear her message and come. If only the sleeth would drift over to the other side of the mountain, give her a chance to make a mad dash for the cavemouth and the men inside. If only -- she was stretching for impossibles now, she knew -- if only poor Andy Quam would respond to her plea for help and come charging out of the transflex tower with weapons and wisdom and the strength to do whatever had to be done to stop Cliff from going through with this dreadful work... But they were all equally impossible. Cliff couldn't hear her, the sleeth wouldn't go away. And as for Andy Quam -- Even in her fear she couldn't help smiling. Poor old Andy, sober and serious, loving and stuffy, full of small rages and great kindnesses... of all the rescuing heroes a girl might imagine, surely he was the most unlikely. The singing sound of the sleeth grew louder again, and fearfully she looked upward. But it did not appear. Even the Reefer would be welcome now, she thought -- that gaunt yellow-bearded giant who was Cliff Hawk's ally in his folly. She was afraid of the Reefer. He seemed like a throwback to a monstrous age of rage and rapine, a Vandal plundering a peaceful town, a Mau-Mau massacring sleeping children. He had always been polite enough to her, of course, but there was something about him that threatened devastation. Not that any additional threats were necessary. What Cliff was doing was bad enough in itself! Creating sentient life at the atomic level -- trying to breed living, thinking tissue of the same stuff that was at the core of the sapient stars themselves. And worst of all, trying to duplicate in the laboratory the kind of life that made some stars rogues, pitted them against their fellows in a giant struggle of hurled energies and destroying bolts of matter. She grinned suddenly, thinking again of Andy Quam: imagine pitting him against the Reefer! Why, he... Molly Zaldivar sat bolt upright. She had just realized that the singIF ing sound of the sleeth was gone. The only noise on the mountain was the distant, moaning wind. She waited for a long moment, gathering her courage, then slipped quietly from the seat. She stood be side it, ready to leap back inside and flee, however useless that would be... but the sleeth was still out of range. Carefully, quietly she took a step up the rock path, and another. A pebble spun and grated under her feet. She paused, heart pounding -- but there was no response. Another step .   and another...  She was at the top of the path now. To her right the cavemouth waited, rimmed with crystal, a rubble of junked laboratory equipment in front of it. No one was in sight. Not even -- especially not -- the sleeth. Molly broke into a trot and hurried toward the cavemouth. At that moment the sleeth appeared, rocketing over the crest of the mountain, coming down directly toward her like a thrown spear. She could see its great blind eyes staring directly into hers; it was moving at sonic velocities, hundreds of miles an hour; it would be on her in a second. Cliffr she shrieked, and flung herself toward the cavemouth. She never reached it. From inside the cave a great puff of black smoke came hurtling out in a perfect vortex ring. The concussion caught her and lifted her off her feet, threw her bruisingly to the ground. The sound followed a moment later and was deafening, but by then Molly was past caring; explosion, painful skin lacerations, raging sleeth, all blended together in a slow fading sensation, and she was unconscious. W hat was real and what was dream? Molly opened her eyes dizzily and saw the gaunt bleeding face of Cliff Hawk staring down at her, aghast. She closed them again, and someone -- someone, something, some voice -- was calling to her, and she saw Someone trapped and raging, commanding her to come... "Wake up! Confound you, Molly!" "I'm awake, dearest," she said, and opened her eyes. It was Cliff. 'We've got to get him out of there," she said earnestly. "He's lost and trapped -- " "Who? What are you talking about?" She caught her head in her hands, suddenly aware of how much it hurt. "Why -- " She looked up at Cliff Hawk, puzzled. "I forget." He grimaced. "You're confused," he announced. "And a pest, besides. What are you doing here?" "I wanted to stop you," she said dizzily. She was trying to remember what the very important thing was that Someone had said to her in her dream. If it had been a dream. "Thought so. And look what you've done! As if I didn't have enough trouble." Molly abandoned the fugitive memory. "There was an explosion," she said. "I got hurt." Cliff Hawk looked suddenly less angry, more worried. Clearly Molly was telling him nothing he didn't already know. The rivulet of blood that ran down from a scrape on his forehead divided around his nose, blurred itself in the blue stubble of beard on his cheeks and chin. It made him look like a dangerous clown. But a clown with some great fear riding his back. "We -- we had an accident. Molly, go back to Wisdom Creek." She shook her head and then, without preamble, began to cry... Hawk swore violently, but his touch was gentle as he reaped swiftly down, caught her shoulders, helped her to her feet and into the cave. Molly let herself weep without shame, but it did not keep her from seeing that the cave was in fact a workshop, lined with glittering metal, rich with instruments and machines. A corona of pale violet hung over a humming golden globe, now soiled and dented from whatever it was that had exploded nearby. She heard the distant howl of a power tube, screaming to itself like the bass-C of a steam calliope as it sucked energy from the air. She let him find her a seat on a wobbly laboratory stool, accepted a tissue and dabbed at her nose. "You've got to go back," Cliff Hawk told her with rough tenderness. "I'm busy." "You're in trouble!" she corrected. "It's dangerous, Cliff. Leave the rogue stars alone! I'll go back to Wisdom Creek if you come with me." "I can't. We've had this out before." "But you're risking your life --  the whole world -- " "Molly." Awkwardly he touched her shoulder. "I can't stop. Even if it costs me my life. v if it destroys the world. Did you mean it wh you said you loved me? Then go back and leave me alone." IV A ndy Quam puffed around the corner and shouted: "Say, there! Wait a minute, will you?" The three boys he had spied were ambling down the dusty road, yards away. They paused and looked around at him, politely curious. "Morning, preacher," nodded one of them. "Help you?" "Yes. I hope so, anyway. I mean -- well, where is everyby?" "Starday, preacher. All off worshipping mostly. 'Cept us." "I'm not a preacher, yoimg man." The boy looked him over. "Then why do you wear that funny suit?" Quamodian blushed. "It's the uniform of the Companions of the Star. I'm Monitor Quadmodian. "I'm trying to find -- " "Gee, preacher!" The boy was showing the first real signs of interest now. "Companion of the Star? Then you go all over the galaes, honest? And see all the funny Citizens with the green skins and the two heads and -- " "It is very impolite to make fun of a Citizen's appearance," said Andy Quam severely. "We are all equally star-shared." "Oh, sure. Gee! Ever seen a sun go nova, preacher? Or fought ammonia creatures on a gas giant, or -- " Andy Quam said honestly, "Young man, my task has been mostly superIP visory and statistical. I have had no adventures of any kind. Except this one.' "You're having an adventure now? "Well, I'm not sure. But there's something very serious going on. I'm looking for Molly #Mdivar." The second boy, a chubby redhead, spoke up. "Gone to the hills, preacher. Looking for her friends, I bet." "Shut up, Rufe! They're not her friends!" "Who are you telling to shut up, Rob? Just because you're soft on Molly Zaldivar -- " "I'm warning you, Rufe!" "What's the secret? Elverybody knows you're stuck on her. And everybody knows she likes that fellow that lives in the cave -- Get your hands off me!" Andy Quam grabbed them hastily. "Boys! If you're going to fight, please wait till I'm finished with you. Did you say you know where Molly is?" The redhead broke free and brushed himself off, glowering at the other boy. "About thirty miles from here. Bet she is, an # rway. Gone to the cave where the fellow lives with the Reefer and that animal. Kill themselves one day, my father says." "How do I get there?" Andy Quam demanded. "Why -- No way, preacher. Not on Starday. Unless you want to walk." "But it's very important -- " Quamodian stopped himself. The boy was probably right. Still, it was already late afternoon, local time on this part of the planet, and at midnight he would be able to get things straightened out. He said, "What's a Reefer?" "Man from the Reefs of Space, of course. Got one of those Reef animals with him. They call it a sleeth." "Big one," the third boy said suddenly. "My brother claims it can kill you soon's look at you." "Killed three hunting dogs already," confirmed Rufe. "I wouldn't go near it for anything," he added virtuously. "My father told me not to." Andy Quam looked at him thoughtfully. He said, "I'll bet you can tell me how to get there, though." "Might, preacher." "You covUd even show me, if you wanted to." "Get in trouble with my dad if I did." "Uh-huh. Say, boys. Back in my flyer I've got some rare candies from a planet in Galaxy #. Care to try them? -- Then maybe you can teU me a little more about this cave. T he boys clamored for a ride in the flyer. The hundred-meter limitation was still in effect, but Andy Quam shepherded them all inside, closed the doors and ordered the flyer to rise to its legal limit and hover. It was the best he could do for them. And good enough, to judge from their shouts and yells as they thrust each other out of the way to see from the ports. For that matter, Andy was interested too. Apart from his burning anxiety to find Molly Zaldivar as fast as possible, this was old Earth, home of Man. He felt a vague disappointment as he looked from the hovering flyer. He had expected fast, fantastic ancient cities, or at least the fabulous monuments and ruins of the long human past. But there was nothing like that The land that sloped away from Wisdom Creek was reddish-brown and empty. The village itself was a disappointment Only the Starchurch looked striking from the air, starshaped, five pointed wings projecting from its central dome. The roofs and colunms of the wings were all a dazzling white, the dome itself black as images of the thirteen component suns of Almalik swimming within it "That's my house there, iM:eacher," cried Rufus. "And see that road? Goes out to the mountains. That's where Miss Zaldivar is." Andy Quamodian leaned forward, over their heads, and peered into the distance. The village cradled in in the bend of a stream. To the south a dam across the stream made a long, narrow lake, crossed by a trestle that carried a road toward the high, hazed hills at the horizon. "That's thirty miles, you said?" "Nearer twenty-five, preacher." "Which hill is it?" "Can't tell from here. Have to show you. Can't show you today, not till the Peace of Stardays over." Quamodian looked at him sharply. The boy's tone was -- what? Cynical? Merely disinterested? "How come you're not in church?" he asked. The boy's face was impassive. "We don't cotton to the Star," he said. "My dad says the old religion's good enough for us." "But Almalik's not opposed to any other religion, boys. It's not mysticaL It's -- oh, you must have been taught all ttel It's a symbiotic association of stars and men and robots and fuorians, that's all." "Course, preacher," the boy said politely. "You mentioned candy?" Andy Quam wanted to say more, but restrained himself. As a Monitor of the Companions of the Star he had been well drilled in the basic principles of the symbiosis, but as a matter of fact, he realized, he had never heard them questioned before. In Galaxy #, in the far worlds where most citizens were non-human and had no interest at all in his views, in school where everyone nominally, at least, shared the same services on Starday, there had been either no dissent or no interest at all. Perhaps he'd got a bit rusty. But he hadn't thought, not for one second had anything in his experience prepared him to think, that here on the birthplace of the human race there would still be opposition to the Star! No wonder Molly Zaldivar had had to send for him for help. If these boys were representative. Earth had no interest in the wide universe outside. W hile the boys were munching the candies the flyer had produced for them from its stores, transparent green jellies that pulsed warmly as they were chewed and filled the mouth with a fragrance of unearthly flowers, Andy Quam said diffidently: "But not everyboy's like you, are they? I mean, Molly Zaldivar's in the Church of the Star. And IF # must others be, to justify that church over there," "Oh, there's plenty branded cattle of the Star," Rufe said chattily, poking a bit of jelly from between his teeth with a finger. "That's what my dad calls them. But Miss Zaldivar doesn't go much. Sometimes she teaches Starday school, but not lately, far as I know." Anyway, that Church is pretty old," said the tallest boy. "I expect it had a lot more people years ago. And besides -- Sweet Almalik!" he cried. "Look there!" The first thing Andy Quam thought was that the boy had evidently had more to do with the Church of the Star than his father really approved of, using the name of Almalik to ease his emotions. The second thing was that that didn't matter. The boy's face was suddenly stark and afraid. Quamodian whirled, to face where the boy was pointing. And then he saw it, something that violated the sweet peace of that Starday afternoon. He saw a great rope of fire, which seemed to extend from the blinding red disk of the setting sun. He saw it coiling like a monstrous snake of fire in that serene blue sky, thrusting savagely down through the white tufts of cumulus that drifted toward the mountains. "Preacher!" said Rufe, scared. "What it is?" But Quamodian did not know. It looked almost like the. plasma effector of some transcience intellect, except that it was too enormous, its white blaze too painfully bright. Like a snake of fire attacking from the sky it coiled and struck, recoiled and struck again, recoiled and struck three times into those low, far hills. Then it withdrew, sucked back into the setting sun. A thin column of dark smoke rose from the shallow gap where it had struck. Presently an immense dull booming, like far thunder, rumbled out of the sky. The vast deep sound rolled away, leaving the valley bathed again in the sunlight of the serene Starday afternoon. "Preacher, what was it?" demanded one of the boys, but Andy Quamodian could only shake his head. Then his eyes widened, his jaw dropped. 'Those hills!" he cried. "Isn't that what you said -- " "Yes, preacher," whispered the boy. "That's where the cave is. where Molly Zaldivar is right now." V T hat distant voice was still whispering to Molly, though she couldn't quite hear it, couldn't quite make out what it said or who it was that spoke. But it was a terribly pained voice, the sound of a mind in rage and agony. Cliff Hawk kept talking to her, demanding that she leave, harsh, even threatening, warning her that there was danger here. "Of course there's danger," she cried suddenly. "Why do you think I came? I want you to stop!" He sighed and looked at her. His face was terribly lined, she saw. Young, strong, quick, he had come in the last few weeks to look old. "You want me to stoi and you don't even know what Fni he said "You can remedy tfaaL' He looked away. After a moment he turned to the violet-lishted globe and studied it, still not qeaktng. Then he said: "We're searching for intelligence. For minds anywhere not in transience contact with intergalactic sod ty. The Reefer and I have built our own equipment -- v sensitive equipment -- one contact turned oat to be the hysterical mind of a small human lost in the wiMemess of a new planet out in Galaxy #. But the strangest contacts are the rogue stars -- " "What's a rogue star?" He probed a.t the dried blood beside his nose, thoughtfully. "Solitary sentient stars," he said. "They don't belong to the civilized community. Most of those we've picked up -- all of them, maybe -- are at enormous distances outside our own galactic cluster. Yet somehow -- " He hesitated, shrugged. "I don't know why. But they seem angered or alarmed when they sense us." Molly Zaldivar shuddered. She tried to remember something, but it was outside the reach of her mind. Cliff Hawk was lecturing now, his eyes fastened on limitless space, 'Thinking machines are all alike. Whether they are human brains or fusorian committees or sentient stars or computing robots, they all possess certain common features. All thinking things have inputs -- from sensory organs or tape readers or sensitive plasmas. They all have data storage  fg ggnfitie cores or neuron or or #anscience pattic T Q have outputs through motor organs ot servo machines or plasma cffectois." Be stopped thoughtfully, seeming to listen to the drone of energy fields lyi the scream of the power tube. "Oo on, dear. How do you tell a rogue star from a lost boy?" Hawk hesitated, as though trying to relate the girl's presence to what he was talking about,. but she urged him on with a nod. "Our steadystate universe is infinite," he sai Tnily infinite. Endless. Not only in space and time, but also in multiplkity." The worry and resentment faded from his wmm face as the theory absorbed him. "The exploding galaxies called quasars were the first proof of that -- galactic exploons, resulting from extreme concentrations of mass. Space is distorted into a curved pocket around a dense contracting galactic core. When the dense mass becomes great enough, the pocket closes itself, separating from out space-time continuum." He was in full flight now. Molly heard a distant sighing, remembered the sleeth and shivered. Was that fearsome creature still lurking about? But she did not dare interrupt him? "The visible quasar explosion," he droned on, "results from the sudden expansion of the remaining ell of the galaxy, when it is released from the gravitation of the lost core. Each lost core, cut off from any ordinary space-time contact with the mother galaxy, becomes a new four-dimensional universe, expanding by the continuous creation of mass and space IP until its own maturing galaxies begin dninkhig past the gravitational limit, budding more new univefses." From ibe caive mouth bloodrcoloced dodL seqied in, mangling with the violet hues of the aurora. It was growing hard to see me. MoQy stirred restlesdy, stifling a sigh. "But the rogue star" said Cliff "are in our universe. Or we think they are. Or -- " "Or you talking too much," rumbled a new voice, and Molly Zaldivar spun around to see a great bear of a man, wearing a dirty ydlow beard peeriitg in at them from the cavemoulh. luthe red om he looked menacing, and far more menacing still was the great restless bulk of the creature beside him. The sleeth. C liff Hawk blinked and returned to reality. For a momenl his gaze brushed MoHy Zaldhrar as thoD he bad iorgoCten  was diere and was astomsbed to fmd her. But then his wbede diooght was concentrated cm the man at die cavemoutlL "Reefer! What's the word? How bad is the damage?" The Reefer opened a soundless grin between dingy ydikfw mustache and grimed yellow beard. "Bad enoughs" he said. "But we're still in business. What happened?" "I -- I -- " Havdr glanced agaio at Molly Zaldivar. "I was just cbedking in the cave when I heard Mcly grcianing, and I -- " "And you forgot everything and went to her. Ah, that's to be understood. A pretty face is more than a star to you, ci course," Hawk shook his bead. "Fve been "Beyond doubt! That's why you're lecturing the god hke a ebiid at da scdmal, di?" He patted die great bulk of the deeth. "We understand, do we not?" Hank gazed at the Reefer with mmd anger and apology, then turned to Mdly. "I'm sorry," he said. "But the Reefer's rit You've got to go badt to Wisdom Creek." "No! Not until you tdl me what you're doing here!" "Girl, he's been telling you," rumr bled the Reefer. "What do you think aH those words were, that he was poarmg out at you wken I came in? More than you need to know. More than you should know, I think." "But noChiDg that made sense to me," Molly persisted. "How are you trying to communicate with rogue stars?" The masdve head shook with laitghler. "Communicate with them, giri? Then maybe he didn't tdl yon alter aB. It's not just communication we're after. We're building them!" C liff Hawk broke the silence that followed the Reefer's words. "Tbafs the troth of it, MoHy. Or close aiougb. We can't really communicate with the rogue stars, not directly. We've fried that a thousand times, and it's past our abilities. But we can -- we think we can -- build a sort of matiiematical modl oi one. An analogue, A small innfation, you might call it. And through that, here on Eardi, we may he able to reach them, find out what we want to know." 'But that's dangerousl" protested Molly. Areat rogue stars terribly dangerous?" The Reefer boomed "Not a bit, girl! Look at our cave here -- you can see there's no danger at jdl!" And his laugh filled the cave, drovoiing out the distant whines and drones. Cliff Hawk said uneasily, "In order to duplicate the structure of a rogue star we had to duplicate some of the environment features. Not really. Not in degree. But we needed great pressure and temperature, and -- Well, as you can see, we had a little accident." "Little enough," flashed Milly Zaldivar. "It nearly killed you -- and me, for that matter!" "That's why I want you to go back to Wisdom Creek, Molly. Right away, before -- " "Now, stop that!" shouted Molly Zaldivar. "I won't go! I was afraid what you were doing was dangerous; that's why I sent for And -- Well, never mind! But now that I know il; I won't slop imtil I make you give it up!" "Impossible. I'll take you back." "You won't!" "Great Almalik, girl!" shouted Cliff Hawk, his face showing animation again for the first time. "What's got into you? Don't you understand, I don't want you here! Why won't you go?" "Because I love you, you idiot!" cried the girl, and broke into tears. There was silence then, even the Reefer saying nothing, though his eyes winked comically under the bushy yellow brows and his bearded face grinned hugely at the spectacle. They stood staring at each other, Molly Zaldivar and the man she loved. The silence protracted itself. And then Molly shivered. "Something's -- wrong." she whispered. "I'm scared. Cliff." Cliff Hawk's stem face lifted. He stood listening, to something that he could not quite hear. In the opening of the cavemouth the sleeth moved restlessly, the shimmer of its transflection field rippling light across its night-black hide. The Reefer stared at it, then away. "Girl," he rumbled, "you're right about that. The sleeth's spooked. You know what I think? I think we've got a visitor." VI D eep under the cave lay a tunnel, driven into the mountain by ancient prospectors a millenium earlier, beaded with galleries thrusting out from the main shaft to seek for gold or silver ores that were never found. For ten centuries they had lain empty, until Cliff Hawk and the Reefer came to fill them with their machines and instruments, to use them to hatch a new life that would serve as their contact with the rogue stars. In one of those galleries, in a vault that the men had enlarged and bound about with steel and transflection energies, there was a region of great pressure and heat. All the energies of the screaming power tubes were funneled to keep that hot, dense plasma alive. It was an incubator, designed to produce a new life. And it had succeeded. IF Down there in the hot, crushing dark. Something stirred. Its first knowledge was of pain. It had been bom in a place where nothing like it had ever been before, a place that was innately hostile to all things like itself. It stirred and reached out with an intangible probe of energy. The probe touched the energy-bound steel that kept its plasma environment intact, and recoiled. I am caught, it told itself. I do not wish to be caught. And then it fell to pondering the qution of what is meant by "I." This occupied it for many thousands of microseconds -- a long time in its life, which had just begun, but only a moment by the human standards of the, as yet unknown to it, world outside its pen. Overhead Cliff Hawk was studying his instruments years away. The Reefer was roughly, effectively checking the tools and power tus in the higher cave above, while his sleeth slipped Gently and sightlessly arotmd the crest of the hill. And down its slope Molly Zaldivar had just abandoned her old blue electrocar and was stealing toward the entrance. At that point the new Something in the plasma field concluded its first serious deliberations with a conclusion worthy of Descartes; I do not know what I am, but I know that I am something capable of finding out what I am. And it proceeded experimentally to seek a further soltition. Gathering its energies, it thrust again at the metal and energies that bound it; thrust hard, with neither thought of damage to itself (h had not yet learned the habit of self-preservation) nor interest in the consequences of its environment. It thrust -- and penetrated. T he dense, hot plasma burst free into the cave, shaking the entire hill, destroying its own gallery, melting down the steel bottle that had held it. As it broke free it died; the energies from the power tube that had replenished it were automatically cut off -- which kept the hill, and half the countryside around, from destruction. Overhead the tremor it caused shorted connections, started a fire, caused secondary explosions in a dozen places. They picked up Molly Zaldivar and threw her into a heap, rocketed a shard of metal across Cliff Hawk's brow and threw the Reefer to hi knees, where he shouted in anger and pain and called to his sleeth. The thing that had been bom in the iasma did not die. It registered electrons without surprise. It had not been sure that it was alive, and had not feared to die. It hung in the corridor, while acrid chemicail smoke and bright radiant heat whirled around it, untouched by them, hanging now in its own transflcction forces, independent of its environment. And free. Now its probes could reach farther. They crept out onto the face of the mountain and lightly touchy the unconscious mind of Molly Zaldivar, who moaned in fear and tried to open her eyes. They touched and penetrated the stark, bare thoughts of the sleeth. They studied Oiff Hawk and the Reefer, dismissed the inanimate rock and metal of the mountain and its caves, reached out toward the human minds of Wisdom Creek and found them not worth inspection, scanned the myriad men, women, children, bees, turtles, dolphins, dogs, apes, elephants of Earth and filed them for future examination, reached out to the Moon and the planets, shaped themselves and stretched to touch the Sun itself. All in the first few seconds of freedom. Then they recoiled, and the thing that had been bom so few moments before contracted in upon itself to think again. For some of the things it had touched had caused it certain sensations. It did not recognize what those sensations were, but it felt they were important. Some of them -- those caused by the entity it had not learned to identify as Molly Zaldivar -- were pleasant. Others -- those caused by that huger, more distant entity it could not yet recognize as the Sun -- brought about sensations which it could not yet identify as fear. It needed time to study the meaning of all these things. It contracted into itself and thought, for many micro-seconds. Presently a probe stretched out from it once more. There were certain other elements in its environment which it had passed over in its first examination, about which it wanted more information. It touched the "mind" of the sleeth again, but lingered for a moment, studying it. In this simple construct of cells and patterns it recognized something that might serve it. Yet there were even simpler patterns nearby. The thing reached out and looked at Molly's abandoned electrocar, at the great tracked handling machine that Cliff Hawk and the Reefer used for moving earth and heavy machines, at the instruments and machines of the cave themselves. Hesitantly the probes returned to the thing down in the blazing gallery below. It needed more time for thought. It wished to consider what it was that stirred inside it in regard to these things. It had not yet learned to call those stirrings "hxmger." C liff Hawk lifted his head from the hooded viewtubes of his instruments and shouted: "Reefer! You're right! There's something near us that wasn't here before!" The Reefer nodded his great head slowly. "Thought so." His little dark eyes were hooded in thought. "Question is, what?" MoUy Zaldivar struggled to her feet and caught at Cliff Hawk's arm. "Please stop, dearest! Don't go any farther. Let's call for help before it's too late." Impatiently he shook her arm off, but she clung. "Cliff, please. I'm afraid. I felt something nearby before and, oh!, it frightened me. Let me call Andy Quam and -- " He jerked his head around to glare at her. "Quamodian? Is he on Earth?" "I -- I think so, Cliff. I sent for him, because I was so worried." Cliff Hawk laughed sharply. "Little Andy Quam? You thought he could help in this? He shook his head, dismissing little Andy Quam, and turned to the Reefer. "Could we have hatched something? Were you inside the lower galleries?" The Reefer shook his shaggy head. "Just passed by the mouth. The power tubes were running free, no load, and I had to adjust them. But there was something burning down there." "Idiot!" snapped Cliff Hawk, and bent to turn a switch. A bank of viewers lighted up before him on the wall, displaying the entrance to the lower cave, a jumble of machinery, a blank rock face where a gallery ended -- and nothing. Five of the viewers showed only the shifting whiteness of their scanning traces; no picture came through. (Down in that lower cavern, hovering in the smoky fire where the burned-out cameras stared eyelessly at it, the thing that had come from the plasma tank completed its consideration and stretched out another probe. It was reaching for the Sun. It had concluded that the danger in the Sun needed action. The thing in the lower cavern massed perhaps an ounce and a half of stripped electrons and plasma. The mass of the Sun was some #x # grams, a third planet Earth. The thing did not regard those odds as important.) Molly Zaldivar shivered and moved away. Her bruises were beginning to trouble her now, and Cliff Hawk seemed to have forgotten she was alive; he and that terrible Reefer, IF with his face burned black and seamed with scars were shouting at each ther pointing at the banks of instrumts acting in general like lunatics. Molly #divar did not attempt to follow what they were talking about except that something big had happened. But it could not be anything that was good she was certain. Her eyes widened. "Cliff," she cried. "Listenl" (The thing had acquired a great deal more skill in handling its functions in the past few thousand microseconds. While one probe was reaching out, invisibly and intangibly, to touch t Sun, it found itself able to mount other probes. One extended itself to touch those simplest of patterned creatures that it had discovered on the upper part of the mountain.) ")t's the matter, Molly?" Cliff was irritated, she knew; but could not stop. "Listen -- outsidel That's my car, starting upl" And now all three of them could hear it, the distant tiny whine of the electrocar. They leaped foe the cavemouth, all three of them, while the sleeth bobbed silently out of their way, and stared. Before their eyes the little car started to move up the mountain toward them. There was no one at the wheeL The sleeth darted abruptly toward it, recoiled and returned to the cavemouth like an arrow hurled at them. "Easy, girl!" shouted the Reefer, and turned to cry to Cliff Hawk: "The animal's caut a whUf of something. Careful! I can't control it when it's like this..." But that danger dwindled into nothingness even befcre Molly Ztddivar quite realized what it wa For something huger happened and caug)M them all unaware. Outside the reddening sunset hgihl brightened, flashed into an exfdosion shook them, threw them against each other and the walls. The hght dwindled and returned, dwindled again and returned again, and en this third time it struck with such violence that, for the second time that day, MoHy Zaldivar found herself hurled into unconsciousness. As she fell into blackness she heard the Reefer shouting: "The star! Great Almahk, Hawk, we're being hit by the star!" VI Q uamodian shivered. Leaning past the boys clustered at the window of his flyer, he shaded his eyes to study that thin column of dark smoke which rose straight above the lallow notch in the Idue-hazed Mils. The three boys moved closer to bins, Mreathless and pale. 'Treacher, what did it bit?" the dark boy whispered suddenly. "Did it hurt anybody?" "I don't know," said Andreas Quamodian. He groaned and sanmed his fist against the unbreakable ass. "But I've got to find out!" "The sun did it," said Rufc breathlessly. "I saw it. It bit the Reefer's place." Absently, staring at the thin be con of unoke, Andy (Juam said: "Who's the Reefer?" "A man from the Reefs of Space. He lives up on Wolf Gap ridge --  right where you see that smoke. Him and his sleeth.' Quam glanced blankly at the boy. "A sleeth?" "It's a thing from space. It hunts. The Reefer trapped it whep it was a cub. He raised it for a pet My uncle says he rides it now, but I don't know Cliff Hawk doesn't, I know that. Nobody would dare touch it but the Reefer." "They were bred to hunt pyropods," said the smallest of the boys, suddenly. The sleeth can catch a py ropod and claw it to scrap meti." Quam said harshly: "I don't care about the sleeth. Or die Reefer. What does Cliff Hawk have to do with all this?" Rufe shrugged. "The Reefer brought him here from the Ree when he was just a kid like me, then sent him off to the stars to team to be a transflection engineer. That's what my dad says." 'What else does your dad say about Hawk?" "Says Hawk's building something for the Reefer. Contraband. Don't know what kind, but they smuge in machines that humans aren't supposed to have without permission from the Star." The smallest boy whined, "I want to go back down, preacher. I want to go to Starschool." "Jayl You know we all said we weren't going to -- " "Shut up, Rufel I want to ask my Starschool teacher about the thing that hit the ridge. I'm scared, and Mark knows nearly everything. I want to see him!" The red-headed boy looked at Andy Quam and shrugged. "Mark's a robot," he said. "But Jay's maybe right. Mark might know something." Without thought Andy Quam's fingers reached out to the controls, but the flyer listening, had anticipated his thought Already they were dropping to the ground. "I'll take you there. Jay," said Andy Quam eagerly. "Provided you let me come along. I want to know too!" T hey hurried up the graveled walk, under the multiple suns of Almalik imaged in the space-black dome of the church. The boy Jay guided Quamodian through hushed passages to Mark's schoolroom. It was nearly empty, only a score or so brightly dressed children clustered at the front and a smaller, shabbier group lounging skeptically at the back. The robot paused to greet them. "Come in, studentsl We are telling the wonderful story of the Visitants and the precious gifts they brout to the old human savages, centuries ago. Please take your seats." The three boys slipped quietly into empty seats along a back bench, with the others who wore the worn and faded fiber clothing of the free people who had never accepted the Star. Quamodian walked past them, down the aisle to where the brighter-garbed children of civilization sat on the front benches. He stopped and planted himself in front of the robot. "Robot-inspector, I'm sorry to interrupt -- " The robot hung in the air before him, its tall black shining case reIF fleeting the lights of the room and of its own oval of flame-bright plasma. The plasma flickered darted half a yard toward him, flicked a dark, whiplike effector toward his face. "Sir, you cannot interrupt," the robot intoned, its voice ringing like tossed pebbles against the low, blue dome. "I can. Robot-inspector. I am your superior in the Companions of the Star. I am Monitor Andreas Quamodian." "Even so, sir," pealed the robot, "you cannot control me today. Our new compact allows no official duties to interfere with voluntary religious activities on Starday. Teaching this class. Monitor Quamodian, is my voluntary religious activity." Andy Quam stood Us ground, disdaining the effector that tried to wave him away. "Robot, an emergency exists." He heard the ripple of excitement from the children and lowered his voice. "A very grave emergency, I'm afraid. Three plasma bolts from the sun have just struck near here. Human beings may have been injured, even killed." Gendy but firmly, the dark tip of the effector coiled around his arm, propelled him irresistibly toward the benches. "You must wait, sir," sang the robot as the staring children tittered. "Be seated. Be still. Be attentive, all of you, as I resume the wonderful story of the Visitants and their fusorian gifts to men." Andy Quam muttered under his breath, but clearly it was no use. He stalked back down the aisle to the back benches, where Rufe gave him an improving grin. "You're okay. preacher! We don't like robots either." Hush, boy," said Andy Quam aa severely as the robot. He sat gjowering bleakly at the dark case of the robot, where its mark number was blazoned just under the brit-starred orbital pattern of Almalik. Perhaps the robot was hard to manage today, but tomorrow would be different "The fusorians," sang the robot melodiously, retracting its effector and floating higher toward the blue dome, "are older than the stars, and all of them are very wonderful. They are microscopic creatures that live by fusing hydrogen atoms, and they evolved in space -- so long ago that different species. The Reefs of Space are built of atoms which some fusorians create. The Visitants are a special race of fusorians which live like symbiotes, inside the bodies of creatures like men." "Bugs!" hissed the red-headed boy to Quamodian. "My dad says they're nothing but parasites!" "In the wonderful partnership of man and fusorian," the robot tritted, "each benefits, neither is harmed. For the itants are wonderfully wise and just. They have evolved transcience intellectic patterns which knit their colonies together and link them all with the sentient stars. And so we are all united, all joined into the great multiple Citizen named Cygnus, whose spokesman star is Almalik." 'Slaved, you mean," whispered the red-headed boy. "That is," sang the robot, its oval  of plasma pulsing rhapsodically "so are we joined if we accept the gift of the Visitants. On the great day when you join the Star they will jump in a fat gdden spark to your skin. Their colonies will penetrate every cell of your body. They win destroy all marauders and all wild cells, and keep you young forever. They bring you utter happiness, and utter peace. This is the gift of the Visitants." "Hogwash," the redhead muttered. "Preacher, why don't you make him shut up?" "And here with us on this Starday," cried the singing voice of the robot, "we are fortunate, children, blessed by the Visitants. For we have with us a Monitor of the Companions of the Star!" Lightninglike, a pale effector stabbed forth and burst in a shower of light over Andy Quam's head, as the children turned and stared. "For great Almalik can only help us and guide us, he cannot fight for his own right cause. So we Companions fight for him, Monitor Andreas Quamodian here as well as, more humbly, my poor robot self." Quam swallowed angrily, tom between the desire to stalk out of the room and the yearning to leap to his feet and denounce this willful robot who spoke of duty but would not help him in the emergency that had blasted the mountains. "Of course," the robot added delicately, "Monitor Quamodian and myself do not view aH questions in the same light. Sometimes we differ. Sometimes, perhaps, one of us is wrong. But that too is just and proper, for the peace of the Star keeps us free, while joining us in fellowsMp. It bobbed soundlessly for a mo? ment, as though entranced with its own words, while its pale oval of plasma bhikied briefly blue. "Now we are finished," it said at last "Children, you may leave. Monitor Quamodian, I thank you for being with us today." A nd Andy Quam pushed furiously down the aisle, through the knots of chattering children, to confront the robot. "Robot-inspector," he cried, "how do you fight for Almalik when you won't even help me in this important matter?" "Patience, Monitor Quamodian," purred the robot. "There are evil men and evil stars who reject the universal good of ah. I join you gladly in fighting them, but under our compact Starday is -- " "Is just another day!" Quamodian shouted roughly. "Rogue men are plotting with Rogue stars. There is great danger here, and it cannot wait on your convenience!" The robot bobbed silently in its transflection field, as though it were considering what to do. Half-formed effectors budded around its case and were withdrawn; its plasma oval turned opalescent as pale colors chased themselves through it. It said at last, 'The situation is grave. Monitor Quamodian." "You don't begin to know how grave," Andy Quam sard bitterly. "Didn't you hear me? Three bolts of plasma from the Sun! That would have been impossible for any star, even a non-intellectic one like the Sun, without grave provocation. So there must have been provocation -- IF something very dangerous very serious, going on out in the bills!' 'We have recorded that phenomenon," the robot agreed melodiously. "It is more serious than you think, perhaps. Monitor Quamodian. Quam brought up short, diverted. "More serious than I think? What -- ?" . "But nevertheless," the robot went on, "the compact is clear. You may not compel me today. And I advise -- we advise, most urgently -- that you undertake no action without our aid. You see. Monitor Quamodian, we have recorded the presence of extreme hazards about which you know nothing." Quamodian stuttered, "I d-dI demand that information! Right now!" "Under the compact -- " "Blast the compact!" "Under the compact," the robot repeated serenely, "you may make no demands. I wiU do for you only what I wish to do freely, as part of my voluntary religious observance of Starday." It hesitated for only a second, while the shimmering colors on its plasma oval spun madly, then burst into a bright, even golden fire. "Voluntarily," it sang, "I elect to aid you now. Will you mount on my back Monitor Quamodian I will convey you at once to the site of the sun-bolts. For in truth there is danger; a rogue star has been born there, and it lives and grows!" vn T he thing had grown now, grown even while its effectors were reaching out to the sun and the sun's triple-stroked reply was coming back. It had passed Descartes's Je pense, et puis je suis, and that milestone surmounted had put aside its examination of itself for examination of its world. Dark. Alone. Particles. It discovered that some of the particles were organized into macrostructures; it did not label these "matter," but it grasped at once that they operated as vector units, a myriad whirling charged bits contriving a mean motion exerting a mean force. Warmth. Radiation. Free of the heat of its exploded womb, it sought other energy sources, tapped them, used them, owned them. I move, it "thought" -- a true thought, joining together its sense of self and an operator; and it swam slowly along its deep tunnel, reaching for new sensation and new strength. Pull. Gravity. Lift. It slid throu material obstacles or brushed them aside. Behind it lay a trail of erupted doors and demolished tiers of supplies. Search. Search. It gave a name to what it was doing and a sense of a goal. Search for wt? It became aware of a kind of radiation that was itself structured, that possessed patterns that were neither random or meaningless. I? The thing paused, palping the faint currents of sensation that emanated from distant sources. Affirmative, Not I but another It had recognized that there were other creatures in its world, other competitors for energy or matter or space... or companions. In the cavern above, MoUy Zaldivar roused briefly from the stunned shock that held her and moaned in terror. Something was studying her. Something that caused fear. Something utterly strange, that had never been in this world brfore. M olly Zaldivar stirred and returned to consciousness. She lay across the crumpled legs of a laboratory stool, and one of them was stabbing her with its shattered end. The cave workshop was hissing, moaning, crackling with electrical shorts and hot, cooling metal. The pale violet corona that once had enshrouded a globe of gold now threw itself like a tattered net from point to point, dying and returning, hissing and crackling. There was smoke from somewhere outside the cave, and a heavier, choking smoke from within. She rubbed impatiently at her forehead, drew her hand away and saw, without surprise or fear, that it was bloody. But she was alive. She tried three times before she could speak: "Cliff. Cliff, where are you?" Hawk's voice answered at once, but weakly, more a whisper than his normal gruff tone. "I -- I don't know exactly, Molly. Are you all right?" She glanced down at herself -- clothes a horror, skin bruised and cut, dirty and damp. But more or less functional, she decided. "I think so. How about you?" She sat up, peering around. At first she could not see him. "Cliff! Are you hurt?" Rubble stirred a few yards away, and Cliff Hawk's whisper said: "I don't know. Something fell on me." "Oh, Cliff I" MoBy struggled to her feet, limped, half craved across the piles of debris that we all that was left of Hawk's orderly laboratory. "Can you move? Are you in pain?" A trash-heap stirred again, and Molly saw that what she had taken for another heap of litter was the upper part of Hawk's body, powdered with grime and ash, but apparently intact He seemed to be jackknifed over something, some large object diat was resting on what would have been his lap, facing away from her. He twisted and looked at her. It took all his strength, and his face was a mask of effort and pain. "My -- legs are caught" he gritted. "Wait No, sit still -- let me!" And forgetting her own aches she flew to free him; but it was impossible. A beam had fallen across his legs, knocking him down; some other blow had thrust him sidewise. His upper body and arms were filthy and battered, but they were free and he could move. But his legs were under half a ton of mass. He gave up the effort and slumped forward again, across the weight that pinned him down. After a moment he said, "Where's the Reefer? He can help -- " Molly looked around helplessly. "I don't know." "Call him!" But though she shouted, there was no answer. She stood up, stretching out an arm to the tunnel wall to steady herself. The smoke was getting very thick; something bad was happening in the interior of the workshop, and she could feel a warning of heat IF She shouted for the Reefer again; still no answer. There was no help for it; if Cliff Hawk was going to get out of the trap that bound him, she was the one who would have to do it. She bent dizzily to tug again at the beam. Hawk did not speak; his eyes were closed, he seemed to be unconscious. The beam was immobile. Molly knelt in the litter, careless of the jagged edges that were shredding her knees, and methodically began to move what could be moved: the plastic housing from one of Hawk's instrument panels, a tangle of light metal tubing, a drift of shat tered glassware. The smoke made her cough and blink, but she did not look up... Not until she became aware of the sound that had been growing in her ears for seconds, now was loud, close, compelling. It was a singing rustle like a breeze through dry brush. The sleeth. She turned and froze. The creature hung in the air not a yard from her back, its broad, blind eyes fastened on her, its supple muscles rippling down the black, sleek skin. For a moment she thought it was help. But Cliff Hawk did not stir. There was no sign of the Reefer. She was alone with a helpless man and a creature from space whose whole U nder the mountain the flowing essence of power that was the infant rogue star paused to consider the meaning of the sharp-edged triple slap the sun had administered to its curiosity, li was a rebuke, clearly miles, Sol could have launched a far more devastating blow. The tiny rogue knew that as surely as it knew its own strength and knew therefore, in its simple logic, that the intent of the blow was not destruction but a warning. Star too big. It corrected itself:  too small. Get bigger. It had not been hurt in any way by the triple blast of coiled white fle. It did not fear a harder blow; indeed, it had not evolved a concept of "fear." But there were smaller, more controllable assemblies of particles closer at hand, and the rogue elected to investigate them. Molly's little car it scanned, solved, manipidated and discarded. (The little vehicle started up at the rogue's remote command. Obediently moved forward and, when the rogue withdrew its attention, mindlessly ground ahead until one wheel dropped over the lip of the road and it slid, rolled and finally bounced to destruction down the mountain.) More complex creations existed, the rogue foimd. It did not "see"; it did not distinguish dsible light from any other form of radiation, but it recognized differences in frequency and kind. The differences were to it something like colors are to carbon-based life: it recognized a "green" glow which flickered violently, as though in fear or pain; a blue-violet aura which waned as the rogue observed it; emanations of all rainbow colors, and far into the infraand ultra-frequencies, which were the sleeth, a colony of burrowing moles, an ant's nest, even small faintly radiant points, like dust in a searchlight beam, that were the microorganisms in the air, the soil, the bodies of the larger life-forms nearby. Something about the "green" light interested the jogue; perhaps it was the violence of its aura. It observed closely and discovered that there was an organized mass of particulate matter attached to it; the matter seemed to be acting upon that other mass of matter which appeared to be associated with the glow and the bodies of matter that were its sources. Please, Cliff, Molly was begging, help me get you out; but the rogue was a long way from having formed the concept of communication, much less acquiring a grasp of any language. A brighter glow of vivid gold was moving toward them; the rogue reached out to encompass it and found it a new phenomenon, something between the car and the humans, far more subtle and complex in its organization than the clumsy mechanical toy it had played with for a moment, then discard; yet simple enough to be operated. The rogue studied the sleeth-for a fraction of a second, then reached out an invisible effector. It played with the sleeth, sending it through the air. (Outside the cavemouth, the Reefer picked himself up, staggered to his feet and stared wildly about. There was blood on his grimy yellow beard, and his huge features had new scars. He croaked a question at the world, but there was no one to answer, no one in sight, nothing but gray smoke from inside the cave and crackling flame and white smoke from where something had set the cavemouth beams afire. He turned slowly, utir steady on his feet. The sun was a frightening color, roiled red and angry. The sky was clouded and ominous. He shouted for his sleeth, but there was no answer.) The infant rogue was aware of the dull, slate-colored hue that was the Reefer. It had even recognized a connection between it and its new toy, the sleeth. It would be interesting, the young rogue thought, to play with one of these more complex mechanisms too. But for the moment it had not yet tired of the sleeth, arrowing it through the smoky sky, lashing out with its death-dealing claws and transfleetion fields at birds, rocks, tufts of grass. The organization of matter fascinated the rogue. It decided to explore the possibilities of changing that organization, of interfering. It decided to be a god. It thought for a moment of commandeering the Reefer for practice, as it had commandeered and operated first the electrocar, then the sleeth. It considered destroying one of the glowing living things. Any one. Destroying it so that it might be dissected and studied. But it did not. Already, only minutes after its first birth from its womb of plasma, the rogue had begun to develop habit patterns and "character." Its development was not only rapid but exponential. Its first actions had been entirely random, as pure a free will as a pinball machine. But it learned. The new and generally unpleasant environment in which it found itself, it had discovered, responded pleasingIF ly to certain kinds of manipulation. It was easy to destroy its features, one by one. The rogue could demolish a rock, kill a living thing, uproot a mountain, lash out at a sun. But once destroyed, it had learned, they were gone. A more interesting, that is to say a more educational, way of manipulating them was to operate short of destruction. To interfere, but not to kill. Not at first. There was no question of conscience in this, of course, nor of mercy. The rogue was as yet totally without a superego. But it had learned for the sweet taste of pleasure. These organized masses of matter could be sources of pleasure. M olly dared move slightly, craning her neck to see past the sleeth. "Reefer?" she whispered. "Are you there? Can you help me?" But there was no human figure behind the great singing shadow of the sleeth. It hung there with its huge eyes fastened on her and then, without warning, slipped forward, darted to the wall, and hung over Cliff Hawk's unconscious body. Molly screamed, "Don't hurt him!" But in fact the sleeth was not. It bobbed silently over him for a moment, then the pale radiance of its transflection field flickered. Cliff Hawk's body quivered, then sat slowly up. "Cliff!" cried Molly, "you're all right!" But he was not conscious. His head lolled on a shoulder, his eyes were closed. She stared wide-eyed at the sleeth. It was lifting Cliff, but why? What was it going to do? She did not have to wait for an answer. The transflection fields flickered again, and the great beam that had pinned him came up off his lap. It lifted at one end, like the boom of a crane, raised hsdf to the height of his'hea rotated majestically, and dropped into a of rubble. Gently Hawk's torso was allowed to sink back, until he was lying outstretched and unencumbered. He had not regained consdouaness. 'Thank you," wluspei Molly to the sleeth -- knowing it could not understand; or not caring whether it could oi' not. Then she flew to Hawk. He was badly hurt, but he was alive. There was not much blood. His legs, thoudif were badly injured; though they lay straight enough, when she moved one he groaned sharply in his sleep, and his face twisted in pain. He needed medical attention. "Oh, Cliff!" she sobbed. "If only you hadn't -- " From the cavemooth the voice of the Reefer muttered, "Leave him be. You're as bad hurt as he is." "Oh, Reeferr cried the girl. "Help me! Cliffs been badly hurt, and we've got to get him to Wisdom Creek." Then what he had said penetrated to her, and she realized, with surprise, that in fact she was on the verge of unconsciousness heiseif. The smoky air made her lightheaded; she was coughing without knowing she was coughing; her bruised, racked body was beginning to hurt in earnest. "How?" growled the Reefor. "I don't knowf' She swayed dizzily, and wafled, "At kast let's get him out in the open. He'll suffocate in here." The Reefer moved cautiously forward. Even in her misery, Mdly could see that he had been hurt, too. His little eyes were sunk in pain, his yellow beard and mustache dotted with blood. He stood over Cliff Hawk, studying him without touching him. "Can't," he said. "You've got to!" "Can't move him. If the sleeth was acting right -- But he's not SpodLed fair. Not that I blame him," the Reefer rumbled. "We've chewed up pyropods out in the Reefs, but we never tangled with a star before." "Star? What star?" "The Sun, gixL That triple sunbolt. I think we've got ourselves in trouble." The sleeth, which had been hanging humming nearby, surged suddenly toward them. The Reefer flinched away, and the sleeth passed him by and darted out into the open air again. "You see, girl? Won't mind me a bit. Don't know what's got into him." "Then you and I must lift him out!" ' The Reefer spat into the rubble. "You? Couldn't lift yourself, I'd say; you're wore out And I can't manage him by myself. KiU him if I tried." Then what can we do? Pkase, Reefer?" The Reefer looked past her, into the denser smoke that was rolling toward them down the tunnel. "Only one thing I know," he growled. IF "Shoot him for you, if you like. Better than letting him bum." T he rogue tired of the sleeth, thought for a moment of destroying it, then merely abandoiied it to its own devices. It amused itsdf briefly by examining the state of those non-radiant assemblages of matter which had been so brutally tossed about by the sunbohs. It did not recognize them as instnniieiitsi, machines, bits of buman ioveotiveness; but it did see that they had been made f unctionless by the damage they had suffered, and that the chemic reactions now taking place in and among them were damaging them still farther. It understood, after a meditation of some nanoseconds, that the course of the fire was carrying it toward those radiant masses which it had not yet learned to think of as living. It did, however, realize that the same sort of damage that had blasted the machines would harm them as well; and that one ci the radiances was visiUy fading in any case. It wonld be interesting, thought the mbmt ngoe to do something new. It had ahea removed the radiationless l amp of matter from the radiant mass that was Cfiff Hawk, using the sleeth as its proxy; that had been disappointing nothing had happened. But it wondered what if it were to soak vtp some of the radiation? It was a notion that attracted the sleeth. It did not know why. It had not yet learned to recognize hunger. Starting with this montbs issue, you get fweva issues a year of Galaxy once more -- filled with stories tike -- by Damon Knight by Mack Reynolds bf Hodon Elifson And many more. Don't miss the June Galaxy, on sale now! # '#  I IF  Novelette Aleni We were sent here to save B#(#), and that's what we'll do -- by burning the whole world to ash! I N ot with a general, thought HarHar-Gret Harker. Certainly not with a general; how could I explain that to the gang on the tape deck? Girl war correspondent Haggie Harker had made a career in the newstapes by exposing corrupt incompetence among the big jets. For this she was loved by flame sergeants, tube men and battle jumpers across the galaxy. It fitted neither her public image nor her private idea of self to dally with a military boss; but in the cramped command module from which General Borger Traven ran the ugly little war on the tiny planet circling the insignificant sun, the just-arrived newstaper felt the old chemistry begin to bubble. Haggie Harker was too hard on others in her newstapes to be less than honest with herself. She knew very well what was happening to her; but the thought of an amorous passage in the very atmosphere of 'Traven's terror" was actively unpleasant Outside, the yellow sun, more nearly burnt out than Sol, had sunk below the green horizon, and the green dark of B#(#) came on apace. Outside, the guerrilla trees were shaking the dirt from their roots, ready to sidle close to Terra's enclaves to strange and poison Traven's troops for another night Inside, the shadows lengthened down the spectrum from green to black, and in the lighted cubicle from which Borger Traven commanded his battle jumpers, chemical affinities explored and affirmed, each other, not yet at the tactile level. Cold courtesy was the order of the day. Beneath it, Haggie Harker was aware of a mounting excitement; but whatever else lay in store for Borg Traven and herself, she had a job to do first. It was not the job the general expected; for he believed that she had written her first tape before she ever came out to B#(#), and that nothing he could show her would change her critical attitude. His politeness was put on only to avoid a worse drubbing. ( Who'd be a bloody soldier? he thought. But she's pretty...) "General," she said, "is it still the position of the military that the dendroids are not people?" "I must remind you again," the general said, his slow boy's smile lighting his un-boy's face for a moment, "that I do not speak for the military.' I am the head of Sol's Advisory Commission to the Government of Yip Sing. And although I happen to be a general officer, and many of our personnel, committed to the struggle to let the free Yips choose freely what course their history will take, are soldiers, that is an accident of history brought about by the fact that repeated brutal acts of aggression have been committed against the free Yips by their enemies. We are here to redress the balance and to help this little world into the family of free planets. "Now," he said, smiling again, "within that context. I'll try to answer your question. Our xenologists tell mo that Yips are people, all right. But they are human people." #h yes," the reporter said. "I v "I realize that's why they are called dendroids. Our government has taken the position that they are some sort of trees. But General, do trees scream and pray for mercy when their bark is pulled off or a limb is pruned?" Borg Traven coughed. "Who knows? If trees on Sol Three were as articulate in the ranges we can hear as the Yips and Yaps on B#(#), Hagan only knows what they would say. I hope. Miss Harker, that you don't intend to tell these people how we handle trees back home. Please! I have problems of cooperation enough." "But they breed! Not tree-like." IP  "Of course it's not like earth trees. There are a lot of other things on this planet that aren't like Sol Three either." He stood up, opened the door to his office and whistled. Something dark scuttled in and reared up against the general's legs like a dog; but it was waving antennae a foot long. Har-Gret Harker's skin crawled a little. "See?' the general said. "Here's old Arther, smart, affectionate, doglike. But he looks like a roach, doesn't he? Now, how am I to treat Arther? As a roach or a dog?" "I -- I don't know. Oh!" as great insect eyes turned toward her and he made as if to jump in her lap. "Sha! don't be afraid of him. He really is affectionate. Wait a minute, ru make him give off his pleasure odor." General Traven rooted about in his desk for a minute and took out an apple. "Hoo boy!" The creature stood on the rearmost pair of six legs, twitched its antennae and, reaching the apple with its foremost legs, descended to four of its feet and began to munch the fruit. A smell like bayberry candles burning crept through the room. "Great gronk!" the girl said. "All right... you wouldn't step on Arther. Why are you burning and stripping trees? Trees that can scream?" "They're not exactly simple trees either, you know. You visit some hospitals and look at boys blinded by tree poison. We're meeting force with equal force, that's all. I spend a lot of hours each day making sure that we don't over-react to the Yap attacks." Almost she believed him. She had realized now that the distinguished gray at his temples and his patient air reminded her of her first companionate husband. They had been companions for four years, from the time she was twelve until she was sixteen. He was fifty then, and the morning after her sixteenth birthday, he had given her a cool kiss (ah Ids kisses were cool, she remembered) and told her, "Haggle, you're a young woman now. I'm more a man for companions than for wives. I hope you'll remeniber me kindly when you make your permanent union." Now she was thirty, and Traven, she said appraigly to herself, might be her fifth companion. Was he the one with whom she would make a permanent union? With a wrench, she got her mind back to immediate business. She could not afford to let his chance resemblance to Rossano sway her judgment. Always better under such circumstances to let a machine make the record. iCeneral the microphoiie to my tape can be opened." She tapped the black and white button bearing the anti-bomb sign, on the left breast of her coverall. This has been background, not for attribution; but I would be happy to have your own exact words explaining your position." She did not expect him to agree; so she did not tell him that tapping the button had opened the microphone, whether he agreed or not. General Traven shook his head. Miss Harker put a question. "Aren't we really just injecting our power into one side of a civil war that is essentially meaningless to us?" Traven spoke vigorously. "No, indeed! The Yipsl are a free nation with a history going back into antiquity. Yap aggression from the southern hemisphere automatically activated the aid provision of our commercial treaty with Yip TaUtree, and we responded by sending an advisory commission. Naturally, at this distance from earth, we can not fight a war with our own troops." "Why send out a hundred thousand of them, then, by Faster-Than-Light its? That's commercial aid?" "Because they get here faster. Freezing them and shipping in sunjammers means that generations of dendroids would grow up and die before the first of our teaching troops got here. Come on. Miss Harker. If we're going to be on YipYap at all, we've got to be here in sufficient numbers and fast enough." She answered, "I don't doubt that we will win, with the technology of a mass industrial plant leveled full-bore td-rate planet in a tenth-rate solar system; but if we are to make the difference on B#(#), General, doesn't that make it our war, for all that counts? Ours will be the victory... but that means to me that what #nngs victory, the incinerated trees, the ashen villages, the bloody bark trophies our allies are taking out there in the jungle, those are all ours too. nddeimy,l thought dl the natives resented 'YipYap' as a name for their world." "Please," he said. "That 'YipYap' just slipped out. We don't call it that, except in the kind of jest I tried to make just then. You're very literal, I see. No, we call it what Groendyk called it when he set his scout down here. To those of us who are on it, B#(#) is La Selva -- The Jungle. "Excuse me. Miss Harker. Arthur has finished his apple and is anxious for me to leave so he can cmy out his nightly marauding against the paste and paper supply. I could use a drink myself, and a little dinner. "The head of an advisory commission to Yip Sing is the loneliest man on the planet. Would you let me take you to your hotel and buy you dinner first?" n T hey fell into step down the darkened hall. Arther's bayberry scent following them. As they neared the front end of a minor maze of corridors, the night attendant slithered toward them. It was a dendroid of IF moderate age, about as tall as a kumquat tree, its bole already thickening to the diameter of a thirty-ycar-old ash, with the mantle atop its mushrooming head" obsequiously rippling. In near falsetto tones, which sounded to Har-Gret Barker like a bad joke, the creature announced, "SirsI MadamsI Fellers! Me door. Me door. Thissy, thatsy, outsy door! Me door, me door, all." "How do you know that's a Yip and not a Yap?" she asked the general in a low voice. "Oh, easy," he said. "Come over here in the light, and I'll show you." They stopped near a dull globe which hardly dispelled the gloom, and he summoned the plant-animal. "Hey, Yip! Come on over here. Ripple your mantle for the lady. Now, look, Har-Gret, you can see the base of the opening in the mantle -- the slit extends all the way round his 'head' -- and the base, around where the sex nodules are, has a faintly greenish purple cast. The Yaps are the other way around. The moist membrane around the sex pearls is purplish green." Har-Gret Harker shrugged. In the dim yellowish light, she could hardly see any color on the moist surface, which exuded a musky odor like that of a long-empty perfume bottle. The general chuckled. "You're looking too close. To see the color tone, you've got to scan. Come on. Yip, raise your whole flaming mantle and spin around for us." Silently, the short, thick tree complied. General Traven's face fell. "Hagan o Hagan! I made a mistake. Miss Harker, I'm sorry!" She stepped back in apprehension "It's a Yap? Is it dangerous? What can it do, at this range?" She rehed for the blaster which the issumg sergeant had promised her she would never have to use. "No, no... oh, I... no, for Selva's sake, don't let fly with Bad cannon in here! It's one of ours. Only it isn't a Yip. She's a Yipper -- a lady. Blast it, I forgot to ask the ritual question. The males, the Yips, have a hundred of those pearly lotting nodules, and the Yippers have only ninety-seven. When you see the whole circle, it's easy to see whether they're in five even groups of twenty, or in four of twenty and one of seventeen. But you're supposed to ask. Then you don't look. See? This one is a Yipper." "I Yipper yes," the tree said dreamily. "So?" said Har-Gret Harker. She couldn't believe that this casual faux pas had embarrassed the general as much as appeared from his sheepish face. "Wen, I -- O Hagan, it's nothing. We'll get it over right away... the fact is that now wc'vc looked at her, she has the right to look at us. Local culture pattern, you know." As Har-Gret stepped back farther into the gloom, Traven said, "Ifs just the most casual inspection, really. Really. It's sort of like having an oak drop an acorn in your cleavage. I am sorry. It's just the way the fix fax." H ar-Gret Harker laughed angrily when she heard the punch fine of earth's most popular tv comic repeated again as she had heard it a hundred times in the day she had been on B#(#), as insincere apology for small irritations and as a put-off for embarrassing questions. "Shall we strip? What is this tomfoolery?" She felt certain she had not been stirred alone, in the general's office. She was seldom mistaken about such things; but if the general turned out to be a looker instead of a doer, she knew she would simply turn the reaction off. "Please, Miss Harker," he said, still smiling one-sidedly, "I don't want to be uncomplimentary; but I should certainly not have chosen this dark and uncomfortable hallway as a place in which to match orbits by some elaborate joke. We have to override some of the Yipsl culture to get them to save themselves, so we have to give in on non-essentials. We needn't watch each other. Come, look: we'll stands side by side. Just palm open your coverall and pull down your... ah, your briefs... and I'll do the same... and that's really all there is to it. Then I'll take you to dinner and drop you at your hotel." Half-frowning and half-smiling, she came forward into the partial light and did as he suggested. Although he had said that they need not look at each other, she did not deny herself a peripheral glance. Yipper's examination was more tactile than visual, and it was very short and gentle. "You he. You she. I Yipper," the short tree murmured, waving its myriad twigs, and proudly tripped the door. Drinks and dinner were constrained until, as if by mutual consent, .# the war and the minor inconvenience it had just visited on them were put aside for a pleasant, inconsequential chat about home. There was no other contretemps until the cab pulled up in front of her hotel. There was no telling what its name had been when it was a second-rate inn for traveling trees; but the correspondents who had been assigned there by (they were all sure) a malign billeting sergeant, had renamed it Timber Arms. The name was boldly painted on a great strip of peeled Yap hide. "In Ae name of the great Melt," General Traven burst out, "who stuck you in this tree-house? You'll have to let me billet you someplace decent, Harker. I could drop you at the Diplomatic Barracks tonight, and tomorrow you can be in the Hilton Selva." "No, Traven," she refused. "Haggle Harker isn't asking any favors of general officers, or anybody else. If you knew how I fought to get out here, you'd understand why I don't want anything that even looks as if I complained about one single item of the environment while Fm taping this story. Anyway, the place is clean, and it's safe enough. It's full of newstapers." #That gang! We call them the JL pulque news pool. They sit around all day lapping fermented tree sap, and at night the one who drew the short straw in the morning comes back and every drunk in the bunch tapes a story off him." "Well, that'll make it easier for me to beat them. Now, don't worry about me. Just worry about what Fm going to write when I get back to earth." IF He laughed. "We do censor everythmg you know. This is a combat zone, even if it's not a war." "It's a war, as far as I'm concern ed. Remember I said, 'When I get back to earth.' You can't censor the inside of my skull." "That's the way the fix fax," he replied. "Listen, Har-Gret, I'd offer to put you up -- my billet is forty rooms, a whole Hagan of a lot better then I could afford on earth; but it's... oh, I..." "It's too soon. I agree," and die slid out of the cab. "Tha. I hope I can see you again after I've been out in the field." She waved as the cab was warped away by a native driver who looked like a cedar tree from Carmel. Jack-Jack Frens, with whom HarGret Harker had taped a police run when they were both learning their craft, woke her the next morning pounding on the door and shouting, 'Haggiel Haggiel the war's over! You came out here for nothing!" Vhen she jerked open the irregularly shaped door of her room, he bound ed in and embraced her. "Oh, Hag, you don't know how good it is to see a real woman after a year of these creepy trees. Would you be interested in a short-term companionship, just for the duration?" "You tapestealer," she greeted him affectionately. "I wouldn't companion with you again on a bet. Snoring in bed in one thing, but that's a May- high converter you operate when you get to sleep." "That's why you can't find a permanent union. Too choosy. Listen, the pulque pool has elected you to do all the work for the whole gang for a week. You've got the fresh view. It'll earn us all a bonus." "How the Hagan did you even know I was here?" Jack-Jack laughed. "The concierge told us." "You mean this old owl roost has a factotum?" He opened the door and made a high, shrill noise. A sapling-slender figure rushed in and bent digihtly in a parody of respect. In falsetto, it piped, "Honored lady, I your dave. What can you wanted in tl morning? Hot water, cold water, dbked coffee? Did I scrub your back?" Haggle laughed. "You're a young Yip, right?" "No, honored lady. I Yipper. Your slave." "Do you work for the hotel?" "No, no, I free enterpriser. My grove burn early in war, I only I alone alive to told. Newstapers adopt me. I smarter than roach, spe Terran like politician, sleep under stairs..." "Jack-Jack," Har-Gret said, "you colonial exploiter, you never land anywhere without taking on a serf. Honey," to the little tree, "do these tight fisted drunks pay you anything?" "Pay?" the little creature said, its two bulbous eyes on the front dope of the upper mantle dive with interest. "What pay meafa?" H ar-Gret struck Frens several times with the edge of her hand. He laughed and paij the karate blows with his foreanns. "Wait a minute. Haggle. She may not know the wor#, hut we take care of her, and she takes care of us. She has food, some money, speaks the best Terran of any tree on the planet  .  and has the best nose for news. HarGret, if you hit me again. I'll kick you in the belly." He raised one combat boot. "Oh, you're hopeless. Get out of here." She pushed him out the door. "Now, young lady," and she led the slim Yipper to ha bed, "you know I don't know much about you and your world. You'll have to teach me. Do you sit down?" "Oh, sure, lady," Yipper said, matching action to word and crossing the two separate lower portions of her trunk at what would have been the ankles if she had been a fourteenyear-old girl. "Lie down too. You want? Terrans most want that late by night. Now?" "Great Melt!" said Har-Gret. "You poor child. How old are you?" "I three next eigjit day." "Melt! You're a diild. Listen, how old is one of you with a girth like this?" She he out her hands to indicate the size of the Yipper she had encountered in Travens HQ. "Oh, ten years, fifty years. Grow slow after fifty. Much tall by hundred fifty, some thicker. lie down now?" and she rippkd her mantle for a length of about dghteen inches. Haggle Halter was both amused and disgusted. How does one deal with a child whore whose most seductive feature is a mushroom head like a Tennid drawing? "listen, baby," she said. "I'm a different sex from these other newstapers. You understand sex? My... my requirements are different from theirs." "Lady!" Yipper said. "I know sex. We two sexes too. How were you thought... we scatter seeds on wind or something? Did you show me?" Did you show me, Har-Gret thought. If you can comprehend sex, why not tense? "Well, I... oh, Hagan, what in the melting planets' difference can it make? I show you and you show me, right? And I'll teach you Terran on a little more systematic basis. I'll bet these tape rats have taught you a rare vocabulary, but we'il make a lady Yipper out of you yet. All right, Galatea: show me your equipment" A n hour later, Har-Gret was a much enlightened Terran. The peculiarities of Yipsi metabolism which allowed them to put down roots when necessary, walk when wanted, masticate and digest meat, bones, vegetables, or anything else animate when available, liad been explained to her in accented Terran which she was working to make more understandable even as she absorbed information from it. The exchange of information about parturition and the acts leading up to it had been fast and full, and the amount of voluntary control Yippers could exert over their internal organization left Haggle Harker rather envious. A chance hint at the social organization of the Yipsi soon led the conversation away from biology. By noon, Har-Gret was still pulling information out of her new found friend. Again and again the little IP creature affirmed her undying at tadiment for Yip Sing; but when challenged to explain if this was a country a government, a political philosophy or a place, Yipper always produced a tortur formulation whidi Har-Gret had no trouble recog nizing as her friend's translation of Terran communiques about the embattled democratic Yip Sing villages. "Are there embattled democratic villages in Yap Sang too?" "No villages Yap Sang. Dirty Yaps huddle in groves. Wild, mean. Shed leaves." "And do you shed your leaves?" "Only if I have leaves," "Well," Haggle said in exasperation, "do the Yapsl shed leaves except when they have leaves?" "On orderl Master trees in Yap Sang wave branch, leaves fall. UghI Turn stomach to see." "Why orders? What is the point of the different way of doing things?" 'Master trees bosses. Down bosses!" the little tree whistled. Haggle learned to recognize the eye roll with which the Yipper then looked to see if this was approved. "Honey," she said, "Old Haggle doesn't give a melted sun for all that poisoned fertilizer. Please, please, believe me that I don't care about the objectives of my government here. Just tell me: why should you hate Yapsl because they drop their leaves differently from you?" T he fourth or fifth time, Yipper suddenly began to leak green gray tears down her pretty bark, not only from her protruberant eyes, but from the slit which encircled her mantle. "Rootless... yoii rootlcssl" she cried. "Terrans burn my grove... all burned, nowhere but flame, only did to breathe bum kerosene. You mean Terran, smell from kerosene, every all!" Har-Gret knew she was on to something. Emotion unlocks truth; and for the first time, she felt Yipper was saying what she felt rather than what she thought Haggle wanted to hear. Trained instinct drove the taper on. "What do you mean, burnt your grove? And I thought you lived in a village." "Village, grove, hamlet, same sapling Yipper was weak with hate and fright, dripping saphke tears, branches trembling. Suddenly she flung herself, backward on Haggle's bed and shrieked, "Okay! Come on! Okay! Okay! This all any Terran want. Melt you! Melt you!" Great gray green tears stained the bedding. Har-Gret Harker sat on the edge of the rude bed and threw her arms about the fritened, hate-filled sapling. She gathered the little tree to her breast and rocked back and forth for a minute. "O Yipper, what can I say? What can I do? I don't know the simplest gesture of tenderness among your people. Poor darling, this is the way we comfort children among my race, and you're a child to me. I'm ten times as old as you, Yipper, think of that, ten times! I'm thirty, sweetheart, id you know that?" From the great mushroom head there came a giant cough. "You no thick in trunk. No thirty." "Yes, darling, oh yes, yes I am. I'm slender because I work at it, thank you; but we don't all gel thick anyhow. There, can you sit up now? SbaD I wipe your tears a li?" Yipper gave a great snuffling sound, and all the tears stiB on her tender bark disappeared into it "Well, I told you all I knew. I went to work now." "Wait a minute, Yipper. Are we friends now? How do you say friends in your language?" Yipper stood silent. Har-Gret tried again. "No word for friends in your language?" Yipper gave an eloquent snort. "You not hear, not see. Our sounds too tall for you; and you no have twigs for the words which are see." "You talk with your branches?" The dendroid made the sign which Har-Gret recognized now as a riirug. "AH right," Haggie said. "I can't hear you and I can't see you except in my language. Friends tk to each other, even if it's hard. So speak Terran to me, and I promise to listen hard. Please tell me about your grove." (( Tust mistake." The great eye stalks filmed with green moisture. "Just... melted mistake. One tree like another to human beings, anyway. Every tree I love gone like torch. I and one Yipper left, too green to bum." "Another beautiful little giri like you? What happened to her?' "We come here together. Yipper will not lie down easy. She have leaves already, see. Soldiers tear off her bark and branches one mght, fuB of pMqwe." "They killed her?" "Lose bark, that kill her. Sapi out. I give bark, but too little to save her." The small tree pointed to a hard brown scar cm one side. "Soldiers crazy on pnqiie." Har-Gret Haiker could bear to ask no more. She made an agreonent that Yipper would come bad: the next day, and then she dressed herself. An hour later, she began to doubt that it bad happened. StOl, it was all on the raw tape, to be wirmowed later for that would sock Haggie Harker's special audience in the guts when the reels were edited. Doubt was fed by the careful, dieerfui briefing she was receiving from one of Travails aides. The first thing he had done was to ask her for a date. When she turned him down and told him she hoped to be in the )ungle that night, he paled visibly and hurried into the briefing. As the captain explained, it seemed perfectly dear to Har-ret Harker that Yipsl could earily be distinguished from Yapsl, that there was a real difrerence between the social organization of the two, that the northern Yipsl had a rccognizaWy "humane" government and economic structure, that the southern Yapri were visiNy satellites ci the dreaded bacterial empire centered in BeteJgeusc, that there was a human strategic interest of life-and-dcath nature on this little planet which commanded a vastreach of space and was the only planet for parsecs in any direction habitable both by the bacteria and human beings, and... what she bad most doubted, turning tapes on the movieola in her ofOce on earth... that Sd was slowly, painfully. IF expensively but appreciably, winning the war by bringing immense technology to bear, across the wide ocean of space. She thanked the aide, promised him that after what she had seen in his orientation movies of the strangling trees and the new poisons elaborated for them by their bacterial allies and masters in Betelgeuse, she would not venture into the night jungle where the Yapsl guerrilla trees hunted, and walked into the yellow afternoon sun with a feeling of bearings lost. Jack-Jack Frens may be a snaffler, she said to herself. In fact he u a snaffler, but he's my snaffler. Borg Traven couldn't sell Jack-Jack a safe conduct through the jungle, let alone a propaganda structure like this; and drunk, sober or hung over, Jack-Jack is people. So she went back to Timber Arms, stood in the lobby and yelled, "Yipper!" When the sapling appeared. Haggle said shortly, "Get Jack-Jack Frens -- quietly -- and bring him up to my room. Savvy?" "Sure," said Yipper. "You lie down with Jack-Jack?" Haggle grinned. "That's too complicated for me to explain in pidgin Terran. Just hunt him up, will you? I trust you, Yipper. Here's half-acredit in advance; but I want him in a hurry." "Sure," said Yipper, "know that feeling," and she went off, mantle rippling in a suggestive way. IV Tive minutes later, Jack-Jack Frens I  opened the door without knocking and sauntered in with a liter ofl ptdque in his fist "Yipper rousted me out of the bar. Haggle. The gang's all there waiting for you to dictate their tapes; but I figured you either had a beat you needed help on, or you wanted my advice without advertising it." "Jack square," said Haggle, "put down that melt tree juice. I've got a liter and a half of Quid Kennedy Green Label in that bag over there. Pull out a can and pour us a couple of shots. I want some truth out of you." "Harker the Hag!" he said, opening the door and setting the pulque jug on the floor in the hall. "You never forget you're Ace Girl Reporter, do you? How'd you get clearance to bring out this much mass in liquid form?" "Lay off, Jackling. We were friends when we were companions, and we're still friends, aren't we?" The tall news-taper paused in his task of evening up the contents of two passes, looked levelly at her and said, without his usual smile, "Til the sim melts, Har-Gret. And to take you off the hook. I'll tell you Chi-An Ling and I have already mailed the contracts. She's my permanent union, as soon as I can get home from this crazy greenhouse to consummate it. Okay?" "Jack, I'm glad for Chi-An. I haven't time for more congratulations. Have Chi-An let me know when the consummation party is." "Why, Hag, you won't be out of here by then. Aren't you signed on for a Terran year, like all the rest of us?" "Sure, but you get sent home by ence of the advisory commission; and it always is convenient for the commison if you're critical." H e handed her the drink. "Haggle, Hagan knows you've got chutzpah enough to try anything; but dear heart, what mostly happens to tapers out here who offend Borg Traven is that the bookerman carries them off in the night. He ips home mighty few; but lots of tapers have died heroic deaths, strangled or poisoned by the Yaps... it says here." She made a short raspberry and said, "Well, that's the way the fix fax, Jax. Thanks for the warning, and no, thanks. Give me what you know, and I'll burn the tape from here to Terra. I don't want your own stuff... just the background it takes a year to get But Til be looking at it without a year of drinking pulque and listening to Captain Stinks of the Horse Marines, that melting p.r. officer... yes, and without a year of lying down with underage trees." He colored, and laughed uneasily. "Oh, well, come on, Har-Gret, a man is not made of wood." He giggled and said, "Well, I guess that's an unfortunate way to put it Sha Hagan! Leave my sex life out of this. It was no concern of yours the day you packed your ear plugs and left." She laughed explosively. "Chi-An Ling! She's got more sensitive ears than L We were a four once, and I remember. Chi-An was the one who slept down the hall, while the other three of us sawed wood at each Other." Jack looked uncomfortable. "WeD, one clause of the contract is that I'll have my septum relocated jmd my soft palate plasticized. What in Selva's name do you want from me?" "What's all this tree-sweat about villages and groves?" "Look, Hag, it's just that earth people can visualize a village as being on our side a lot carier than a grove; and they don't think of a bombed grove or a burned grove as having people in it -- as being people; so we call them Yipsl villages and Yap groves. Who cares how many Yap groves we incinerate?" He drank deep. "Har-Gret, we're destroying the ecology of the planet. When we win... of course, we will win, technology always wins... there won't be any planet left... not for these people. It'll stiH be here for us, and we will have denied it to the bacteria. But Yips? No, sweetheart, no Yip Sing, no Yap Sang, not a talking tree left in the universe. That's going to be our victory. I'm sorry you only got a liter and a half of this corn whisky. I'd like, just one night, to get plastered enough not to remember all those dendroids out there, burning and strangling. You brought my favorite brand. I'll say that. Did youremember I used to drink it before it was advertised?" "I brought it because I learned to like it from you. Is there any real difference between Yips and Yap?" H e took a long pull of the hundred-proof rocket fuel her influence had brought to La Selva. Then IF he sighed. "Got any Japanese friends, Haggie?" "Sure. You remember that fat Sumo wrestler we used to follow. After you and I split, I spent a summer with his entourage. His wife was tiny, like Chi-An. His brother was two meters tall, without an ounce of fat on him. That what you mean?" "Exactly. They look different, but all regard themselves as Japanese. Any difference between them as individuals is a difference in philosophy or education or politics. You can't see that Jn the shape of a head or the measurement from the floor to the top knot." "You're telling me the difference here is a political difference." Jack-Jack shook his head. "I don't think I am, am I? I didn't mean to." "All right, Jack square, what do you mean?" He drained the glass and poured another. "I mean the difference is whether they live in the southern hemisphere, where the forests are infected by the bacteria, or in the northern hemisphere, which we infest. And that's the only difference," "Jack," she said. "Stop drinking for one melted minute. You are saying that we are destroying a whole species because of our struggle against the bacteria?" "Ye-a-ess." "No other reason?" "None." "The southern aggression?" she asked wistfully. "Hagan o Hagan! The planet's tilted, like home! What Groendyk saw was the spring renascence in the south and the autumn leaves falling in the north. The bacteria were in the south already. They would have appeared in the north in its next spring; so we moved in there in the dead of winter... and claimed the green spring as a great opening victory for our technology." "What about the democratic villages of the north?" "'Sno villages," Frens spoke thickly, tears in his eyes. "Only grovesy north and south. True trees in groves, and at the center of every grove a family of those dendroids. They live with the trees, grow with them, protect them, cultivate them. Some grovesh're hunnert milez acrosh. In the middle of a forest like that, there may be three or four Yips a hunnert'n'fif y feet tall, and one ole gran'pappy two hunnert feet high. That's all. No villages, no government, no votes, no historic democratic tradition, nothing; just the trees and the denoids." "Then what in Selva's name are we doing here?" "Good strategic reason. B#(#) is the command planet for one enormous globe of qace. We can live here, and the bacteria can live here. Not another planet with the right specs for a third of a spiral arm. So it's us or them... but, baby, it's tough on trees." Jack-Jack drained another gjass of the Green Label and lay back across the bed. "This short-out juice is gonna cut off my computer in a few more minutes. Hag. If I get sick, jush drag me in and prop my head over the disposal unit. Hell of a war." Har-Gret said, "I may be there ahead of you. Cold strategy makes a cold supper, Jacko. Not one human idea in the whole lash-up, except that it's us or the bugs... and melt the Yips. Hard times on YipYap." V N ext morning, predictably. Haggle Harker was hung over, a condition which always presaged a hard time for the object of her researches. She had Yipper drag Jack-Jack Frens off to his own cubicle in the early dawn. He was so hung that working it off was out of the question. He would do well to sleep it off in a IF single day. Har-Gret showered angrily and ot into her coverall. She was in line for a tour of government bureaus that mcmmg, meeting the local administrators who held Yip Talltree's writ; but llaggie wanted to get out of the Sodom she felt the city now to be. She wanted to see what Terran boys were being transsule to do. She was honest ough with herself to know that there was some point at which she would feel that the destiny of the dendroids didn't matter, some point at which the survival of her own branch of the human race would be sufficiently important After all, they were the bearers of the democratic tradition, though its present computerized, totally industrialized form might seem strange to Jefferson or Danton. Then she would shrug and say, "That's the way the fix fax," and mean it. If justice and human compassion were scheduled to die throughout the galaxy, but that death could be forestalled by the sacrifice of one small planet. Haggle Marker would press the button, conceding the injustice of that planet's having been chosen by hers to do all the dying for both. But pressing one button, the dassic choice of the philosophers, was different from being asked to affirm and approve an endless series of green tree burnings and flooding out of forests old enough to support creatures like Yipper, but a hundred feet tall. Saving one's own world and way of life somehow failed to justify the casual cruelty of painting a hotel name on the stripped skin of a dead dendroid. So the time had come for Haggie to satisfy herself as to the actual content of the war. There was no front, only "(rations"; and it was fuQy fifteen minutes before Haggie Marker was recognized by two bug sergeants and, wb she confessed e wanted to see a combat sweep without the clearance of the top deckers, smugd onto the flame deck of a jumper. An hour later, the "boys" -- and they were boys that was the Hagan of it -- were gleefully pouring the undying lire into the heart of a grove so massive and so old that it seemed like a green mountain. Around the flickering edges of the flame, the darker flickering of fleeing bacteria could be seen, bursting into corona-hke arms visible throu the fhewatching goggles the young Terrans had lent the famous news-taper. (## urn those bugs!" the young # men shouted, while the range finder monotonously ordered the fire to be spread, repeating again and again, "Bacteria moving out north by west... one mile west... flames one hi, two high, and spread..." Meanwhile one of the bug sergeants was explaining. "The whole base of this flitter craft is sensitized to the presence of bacteria in any significant concentration. We've had our eye on this patch of forest for about a week. It's a main stop on the infection route, and they're probably dug in fifty meters below the roots of those innocent-lookiDg trees. That's why we can't let the fire die. It has to keep burning until there isn't a living thing here. Then we consider that we already have secured the grove." "But there's no grove left. When dcfes it grow back?" "I don't know. Haggle. I just work here. You know what I mean: they don't tell us that; but some of the ecology boys say it may be a hundred YipYap years." "Do they fight back?" "Well, no, the trees can't do much, at this distance. The big dendroids snap those long tentacles like catapults, and sometimes they can throw a load of bacteria near enough to do some damage. We've lost three-four thousand men that way." "I thought our technical superiority was such that no Terrans were being lost in combat." The sergeant looked at her. He was a professional, and he would be here after the draft of boys he was running on this sweep were home or dead. His look was the weary, cynical one with which the combat man has always regarded home front propaganda. "But surely the greatest number of losses is from sabotage and from the guerrilla trees?" "Oh, sure. When you walk out of a saloon with a tree tart on your arm and a tentacle drops around your neck or poison sap spews in your eyes, it's a bad war. Ma'am." J ust then Haggle got a better demonstration than she ever wanted to remember of the fighting capabilities of the tall dendroids. There suddenly appeared at an open gunport a fuzzy black cloud which sucked itself into the jumper even as Haggle was screaming and pointing. Nothing she had ever seen on her colleagues tapes made her realize that the bacteria were intelligent more than the deadly way in which the little cloud oriented itself, shot like an arrow to the guidance controller and killed him with a fulminating infection that struck so fast he never cried out. As the ship automatically began to sink toward the forest, the dead man turned black. Clouds of black erupted from every orifice of his body, each headed for a different member of the crew. A black blister made unerringly down the dead controller's umbilical cord to the organic guidance mechanism, and killed it. The noise of propulsion died; the roaring flame nipples blew out; the only noises in the vessel were people whimpering with haste to get their bugproofs on, and the rush of air as the ship fell more and more headlong. From outside and below came the sound Har-Gret Harker could never forget. The burning trees were screaming. It was that agony of noise she remembered, retching and crying in the rescue boat that had swung over them and taken off the few survivors. W hen she faced Borg Traven the next day. Haggle Harker knew her face had wrinkles she would never be able to iron out. "General," she said, in the tone news-tapers adopt when they expect to be lied to, but have to ask a question for the record, "what justification can there be for the suffering we are causing to the trees and dendroids of this world? Surely there is some strategic objective to be gained short of a world IF of ashes. Even if we were justified in destroying a whole unique species because of our own danger, can we justify doing it with flame-jumpers?" Borg Traven sat completely immobile for a moment. Then he passed a great hand over bis face, and the face that emerged from that message was infinitely sad. "We explain what we do by the necessity of our own lives, if the trees would only throw off the infection and stop resisting long enough for us to begin rebuilding what we have destroyed, we would leave this a garden world, with only a few strategic enclaves to assure the bacteria could not intiltrate without our knowing in time to fight them off. "I don't condone brutality, and I don't enjoy the spectacle of Terran boys pulling the bark off tied down trees and enjoying it. I know how they feel, though. When you've got to get irrformation and you're dealing with organisms that are resistant to questioning drugs, you've got to be awfully patient and tolerant not to feel that torture is a justified shortcut. Boys whove seen their friends strangled and poisoned and blinded right here in town by killer trees that just slip into the forest, sink their roots in the soil and become indistinguishable from the rest of the jrfants can't be expected to be as tolerant and patient as you and I are. "One last thing: don't forget that the technique of bark stripping was taught us by the dendroids. They practice it on each other." 'Tve heard about that. They girdle a dendroid that's invaded territory belonging to another grove, blind him and point him for home as a lesson to the others in his grove. It's something they've been doing for thou sands of years. Bark stripping is a part of their culture, and an uy part; but at least ifs isolated, it has  some relation to what are valid cultural goals for them. Ifs bestiality for us. We institutionaliTO sadism when we let it happen. We're supposed to be the most advanced technological planet in the galaxy. Is the best technique for questioning prisoners that we can come up vnSi a particularly unrefined brand of torture?" The general looked strait at her, agony in his eyes. "Is that the thing that most worries and frigens you? Not me. At least when yorfre torturing some creature, you have a relationship with it, however twisted. What sickens me is the genocide we're working on the whole planet. We've killed enough trees already to alter the ecology of the jtenet Ifs becoming grually less desirable and more expensive for the bacteria to maintain their infection outposts; but we're doing it by using the first technical discovery man ever made -- fire. Did you hear any trees screaming when yon were falling into that burnout yesterday?" "Yes," she said, pressing her hands to her eyes. Somehow, if she could erase the image of miles of green trees in unnatural flame, she could get the dreadful sound out of her ears. "All rightr General Traven said, leaning forward and grasping both her wrists so he could pull her hands away from her eyes. "You got yourself into that before you were ready for it. I can't protect you from youraelf. I have no illusions about that. No general can restrain a newstaper who knows half his non-coms from a dozen other brushfire wars. You can go anywhere and see anything you want to. The only way I could stop you would be to shove you back to earth; and I'd be dead on every news-tape in the galaxy if I did. But Har-Gret, this is an ugly green world out here. Will you just let me control your time for the next two days? I promise you'll be briefed on some items the pulque pool doesn't even know exist. At the end of that time, the world is yours; or the Yip Sing part, anyway. How about it?" She nodded with tears glittering on her eyelids. "Now," he said, I've got to get you out of this office. Or I never will." And he smiled a real smile. VI T he p.r. captain's eyes opened when General Traven described the briefing to be given Har-Gret Marker on the new technlogy about to come into play in the war. Borg Traven's orders were certainly not to be questioned by any creature as low as a captain, however, and the newstaper soon found herself talking to lab men and technicians who had new weaponry into action. "Actually," one of them said in the accents of Old Oxford, "we shall give up doing anything to the trees as groups and groves. We are going to reduce General Traven's war to a man-to-man, or I suppose I should say, man-to-dendroid combat. We have a new filter -- there, slip that over your head -- that's good for a hundred hours against even the densest swarm of bacteria. The soldier will be equipped with a personal flitter -- oh, you're familiar with them? One forgets you've just come out, yourself -- with which he can escape from a strangler tree. The head filter ought to hold off the poisons as well as the bacteria. The offensive weapon is this little aerosol pistol. See? The sidepack carries forty recharges, and we figure the whole thing is good for eighty dendroids, given optimum conditions." "What does it do?" "Why, Miss Marker, it's a rapid rot agent. Beauty is it only gets the dendroid, or the one or two trees in a small grove that have been infected by the bacteria. You know, it's harshly hard work for the buw to infect trees -- real wooden trew, I mean. The metabolism of the dendroids is such that it's much easier; but the bugs can't afford to reduce all the dendroids on the planet to acute illness. Then they'd have nobody to run the place for them, collect their space tolls, conduct limited negotiations with us and all that. When we get these into full production and front-line use, the action will take a dramatic change." "We'll be burning them one at a time instead of in groves?" T he Oxonian mustache twitched a little. "Ye-es, you could say that. Rotting is a slow sort of bum. And IF since this takes place in twenty-four to tiiirty-six hours, you might say that Stfl, it's rather more humane than a burnout, where a whole grove, seedlings, saplings, tall trees and all gets reduced to ash. Don't you think?" "Oh yes," Haggle replied. "Does it reduce the one creature that's been sprayed to a pile of smoking ash? As an example to the rest of the community, that sort of thing?" "Miss Harker, I have the feeling you're pulling my mustache. Don't you want to deny this planet to the bugs?" "Hagan o Hagan! How many ritual obeisances do you people want? Of course I want this planet and the whole universe bacteria clean. I just don't want every other animate, intelligent creature in the galaxy ganging up on us because we're as bad as the bugs. Do I have to can General Traven to get a straight answer to my question? What is the actual physiological effect of this stuff on the particular dendroid sprayed with it? Is he reduced to ash?" "N-no, not -- not quite. It's a rapid rot, but the net effect is just that of a very old, hdlow tree. The wood goes, and the bark becomes porous and crumbly, gilows in the dark, you know. Everything decays except those thomylike things around the trunk near the 'head' -- haven't you noticed them?" "Yes," Haggle said, "but I shouldn't call them thorns. Not like rose thorns or even cactus thorns. They're soft spines, like on a young citrus tree; even the points are soft." "Well, something in this stuff stimulates the growth center for those organs -- if that's what they are; appendages I suppose would be a better term. They become about a foot and a half long and extremely hard. About the consistency of good teak or heavy mahogany, I should say. The thorns are really all that's left." "Here's the important question," Haggle said. "When do we get enou of this stuff to make the difference in the character of the war and to start winning it?" "Oh, we're winning it now. Miss Harker. The flit-flamers, the defdiants, the water-firing rifles that burst the whole inside of a tree out, these devices are carrying the war to victory, as a war. They're too effective. Have you seen them in action?" "I helped kill a whole grove thirty miles acros with them," Har-Grct Harker said through gritted teeth. 'Tf they finally come through with longlife pills and I live to be a thousand, maybe I'll forget it. You're haahup right they're too effective." T he technical man colored. "Hashly, if you don't mind, Miss Harker. Hashup was an obscenity at my school." "Melt your sun! And your hashedup school too. Can't you give me one straight answer, without simpering? When? When will we win this war by technology, instead of just slaughtering a world... by technology?" "Doctor Xylophage... do you know of him? A Venusian, you know. Personally, I .find him a let more repulsive than a nice, clean, ea well mannered dendroid with sense enough to keep the dirt off its roots in a house. But it takes all sorts of efforts in a war. Doctor Xylophage who invented the rotting agent, says that we ought to have the kinks out of the weaponry in another year. Say a year more to get it all in the pipeline, and the war should be over in three years at most. "You see, the great thing is the dendroids won't be able to resist this. They don't have weapons in any conventional sense. Strangling with tentacles is something they're physically adapted for; and poisoning by excreting liquids through their roots is something they've been doing to control the breeding of the true trees for hundreds of thousands of years. But they have no technology, as we understand the term. No machines, no metal. When they had this world all to themselves, it was a gigantic greenhouse, and even the tenders of the plants had become treelike: the dendroids. "When we get the delivery system elaborated, every human being on the planet will wear the filters whenever he's out of doors. There won't be any night patrols. A few months, really, free of strangling and poisoning, rotting down the leaders of the Yap infiltration from the south, and we'll have B#(#) buttoned down like Kew Gardens." "Three years! Three yearsV Despite the hardening she had endured in a dozen ugly, necessary human actions she had reported on planets across the Terran side of the galaxy, there was something basically antihuman in the thought of continuing the burning and destruction of the groves for two or three more years that sickened and horrified Har-Gret Harker. She fled from the technical briefing, convinced beyond doubt that es would win by the shaped and directed power of its industry and the gadgeteers who had never failed to find better -- deadlier -- methods of disposing of earth's enemies and of neutrals whose neutrality partook of enmity, but also convinced that the history of the reduction of La Selva would be remembered in every un-human planet in the galaxy and that earth would never again be trusted. Cultures who had never known the genuine blessings of computerization could be forgiven if they did not embrace it at once. To such a culture, even the deadening influence of the bacteria, who infected a world by controlling its every leader in a state of chronic illness, might seem preferable. The worst thing for Haggle Harker was that she knew she and she alone, at this stage, could put the whole dreadful story on tape. And she knew she had to. It was too late for her to root out the motivations that had become part of her character along with the hardening in the wars she had reported. Tell all, tell true, was her motto. She could not renounce it. Not now. Not ever. I n a visible, seething rage, she went back to Timber Arms. In her room, she slammed and locked the IF iU-ittmg door. For a few minutes she sank on the bed, crying. Then she stood up and headed for the mirror cubicle to repair the ravages of her tears. She ghnced once around the room and slammed the door to the mirror cubicle. The metal powder and rouge case she tried to open resisted her fumbling fingers, and winding up like the legendary Don Wilson, she threw it to the floor. The silver object bounced three feet high, and as it came to rest with a rattle, a tiny voice was heard issuing from the bottom of it. That you. Haggler 'Tes," she hissed, squatting on her heels. Sam, open me up a whole tape bank. I want one solid hour on tonight's reeL You've got the stuff on the flame treatments we've been holding because the administration says they're Yap propaganda. Sam, I was there. I helped bum a thirtymile grove, and Sam, I heard them. Some of it's on the tape bank here in my room. You just run that video we've been holding behind my audio, and we'll bum a few woodenheads of our own." The compact answered, "Can't tonight, baby. Draft riot in New Chicago, and the Administrative Chairman himself is out there, showing the local love-chiefs how to push buttons. We're covering it live. Yours will have aH the more carombof when we run it tomorrow night, right after the Ad Chair closes his press conference with an assurance that everything is all rit, everything is necessary, and anyway, weYe winning the good fight. Comfortable, kid? Lie down or sit down and cEcfate." T wo hours later, she was beat drained, and shivering from the reaction to high-speed orgaidzati of the material in her head and on her tongue. The little transmittef, which tapped the galactic flow in hut which had not yet been thought about in the admhnstration's labfl was the secret weapon with winch Haggle Barker had come to La Selva inrepared to topple a militaiy public relations machine which seemed to brainwash news-tapers. Sam Smackover, her editor, had said, "Haggle, we believe in machines I could make out a pretty good argii ment that we worship machines; or the idea of the machine, anyway. What's happening to those tapers out there is that Borg Traven's dirowing them in a jumper, they see a grove burning with few losses of human soldiers, the hurt ones being zeeped back to hospital and operated on just as soon as they're infected, even the bacteria, schizzy as they are, being held off and gradually worn down by our machines, on a worM thafs so non-tecbnological it basnet got the wheel. "Every one of us is susceptible, in such a situaiion, to thinking how murii better off those people would be with good old Terran high speed waste disposal, portable shower baths, and ordering food by computer. Would they really? Do they really want this from us? Are we winning, even if we are winning? "Th Bttle gadget is my insurance policy you won't get brainwashfor Hagan's sake without anyone seeing or hearing you within a cou pie days after you get there. I want that emotion fresh and hot Give me everything you've been saving for that permanent union baby; because you may not get back from out there after we get this on the reel It may be the last tape you'll ever dictate or ru ever splice " Now she had done all Sam asked, all she asked of herself. Why wait? For a long time, she looked at two bottles of pills, picking up first one and then fte other. In the end, she took the dreambits rather than the quickdeath, but she could not have told why. N ext day, of course, was another day. Life so feeds on itself that just to be alive compels us to go on living, and living compels us to do things as if there woidd be an infinity of days in which to do them. Haggle shopped for souvenirs in the morning, had a curiously teetotal lunch with Jack-Jack Frens, and in the afternoon responded to a communicator call from General Traven's office. When the general asked, in his diffident way, if he might give her dinner, she shrugged. She could not feel at he was as antihuman as the policies he administered. She was sure that she would never be asked to dinner by him again after word of her tape got back. That would be three weeks by tight beam radio, a week if they sent mitter from All-Planet News and her instrument were in the hands of Borg Traven. Should she give it to him? She could not decide; but she took it in her gold mesh evening bag. For this evening, Haggle had chosen not to wear the coverall which was so easy to hide within. She had one good cocktail dress with her, one set of accessories, and she disposed the whole ensemble to do herself full justice. Why? she asked herself. I know Fll never be even a companion to this man, let alone join a permanent union. One-night jumps were never my style. So why the trouble? He said a native restaurant    that always means romance, on these colonial outposts. She stiffened her back, so that her ear drops hung like plumb bobs, and said to herself, At least he'll Imow a real woman did it to him. Let his sun melt! She got into the cab beside a general resplendent in as near full dress uniform as regulations would permit in a combat zone. To her surprise, he also carried a side arm; and from a small knapsack on the seat, he extracted one of the new filters for her to wear. "Wait a minute," she said, drawing back from the proffered filter, "what kind of place are we going to? I think I'd prefer the officer's club, even if your rank scares everybody else out of the place." He smiled his little boy smile, and said, "My rank couldn't keep those juice jockeys away from you, HarGret. You are a lovely woman, and none of us has seen anything like you in a year." "Well, where are we going?" "It's a genuine place. There may not be another human being besides us. No human food on the menu. But IF, it's secure. The filter is because we do have to transit a burnout near the edge of town, and there are saplings growing back in the area. "Saplings!" she cried. "Must we fear saplings?" "Oh, they have roots, these young dendroids. That means they can spray poison. It might not be fatal, but I've no mind to be blind either." They both slipped on the masks, but the burned section was hardly a hundred meters across, and they felt a little foolish when the cab deposited them at the restaurant without incident. Just before they arrived. Haggle asked, "How can you trust this Yip? Why aren't you in a command car?" "We're not in a command car because I want to forget, just for tonight, what my job is out here. I trust her, anyhow... that's right, it's your old friend from the office. Here, Yipper," he suddenly shouted, "turn around and give Miss Harker a hello smile!" The toadstool head slowly twisted until the bulbous eyes on top were directed at Haggle. The mantle slit rippled for two feet, and the dendroid said quietly, "I Yipper, Okay." vm T he restaurant was unbelievably lovely and serene. It was not , exactly a building, but neither was it just a clearing in the woods. The light was hard to trace to its sources, great luminescent insects who fluttered slowly overhead. The food and drink, thou exotic, were well within the range of human metabolism and appetite. Har-Gret Harker looked at General Traven over the liqueurs, which smoked greenly in leafy cups, and said, "Borg, you're a good man. I don't know why you're doing a bad man's job. I don't want to hear your formula justifications for it. You love this world, and you love the people. I can tell that you even understand a little of the dendroid language. If you had twigs, you'd try to speak it. I just want to say to you that you, you as Borg Traven, an existent human being, not General Borger Traven as a memory pulse back at earth central computer, need to go. Now! While there's something to remember. This restaurant won't be here in a year, Borg. This world wiQ be a ball of ashes, and you can't stand to be here and keep pushing the buttons that make it happen. Get out!" Just then a tiny pinging sounded on his wrist, and he lifted it to listen. In a moment, he said, "You're right. have my job to do, and I believe in it. I believe in Terra's computerized democracy, and I hate the dead worlds where the bacteria rule. I'm bugs from Terra. Why shouldn't a world, even a green and pleasant one worlds in the galaxy. Shall I let my affection -- my love, if you like -- for this one kill them all? "Come on. My wrist communicator just summoned me back to the office. There's a massive night attack ten miles down the line from our enclave here, and something new is happening. I've got to get out there and see for myself. I'll drop you at the hotel" She sat frozen. "I heard what your duty officer said. I heard it on this thing in my handbag." H e nodded, unsmiling. "Yeah. Not much reaUy gets away from the central computer labs, you know. We didn't know All-Planets had it, or you would have been searched when you got here. And yesterday afternoon, we couldn't get a fix on you to shut you up. Where in Selva's name were you?" "In my bathroom," she replied mechanicy. "But... doesn't it make any difference to you that I've tripped the switch on the whole murderous adventure? That tape will light fires on earth from one pole to the other. Or will it be shown?" Now she was frightened. "Oh, sure it'll be shown. Computer democracy. It just won't make any difference. The machine is too directed toward this war. La Selva is too strategic a planet. Doubts are too costly. If we drop back here, we drop back all across the galaxy. It means abandoning a thousand planets. So YipYap is going to die, that all the rest may live. People feel the administration must know more than they about what's best. Come on." They walked in silence to the cab, and rode silently for a few minutes. As they approached the burnout, so that they were out of the shade, the tiny planet's tinier moon cast its aquamarine light into the cab. General Traven's head was back on the cushion. He seemed too weary even to adjust the filter. Haggle had slipped hers on, but she felt foolish, even only ten miles away from where Something new, she thought, what could that be? The cab glided into the burnout. "This good place," hissed the dendroid driver. The cab stopped, and as Borg Traven sat up and reached for his side arm, soldier's instincts aroused at last, a root appeared over the back of the seat and a concentrated jet of poisonous liquid spread over the general's face. It was so virulent that it had not yet begun to drip on his uniform when he sank back, dead. "Yipper," said Haggie, in a transport of fear, "don't kill me. You can't kill me, anyway, I have the filter on. I won't let you strangle me, because I have the general's pistol. It fires the exploding water, Yipper! Sit still and listen. I'm your friend. Yes, and Yapsl's friend, too. I love this world and its people, all of them. I don't care what we want here, Yipper, we're wrong to be here. I've sent the word to the earth that may get us all off La Selva. Take be back to the hotel and I'll help more. I'll say Traven was all right when he left me off. You can just disappear into the forests... or go back to the office. I don't care. I can help you, Yipper, more than any other human being. Let me live, Yipper, and I'll let you live. I'll help your people to live, thousands of them." "No good human beings," the IP IF  Short Story OF ' ? They were the rejects of the galaxy, condemned to living death until the end of time ! D escribe the darkness inside Brass? It was too complete to fix with words. He shunted and shuttled through the dark until he stopped in one of the cells, was lowered by mechanical hands into the glycerine coffin, and the lid fell like a feather "He cornin' roun' nowl" .  who are...?" "I'm Hawk, gnmter. And that's -- " "I'm Pig. Hawk wants 'a know what they got ya for." "Oh. I... my name..." "That's it, baby. Give Hawk what falling on a mound of feathers. That darkness? Perhaps you could hint at it with a lack of words. Perhaps you could hint at it by saying that once the voices came, there was nothing else: he wants. Hawk always gets what he wants." "'S'right. You tell 'im, Hawk." "... Cage. Jason Cage." "Who'd you cross. Cage, to get stored down here in the sub-base"Heyl" ".  . aaaaaaah..." "Heyl What's your monicker, buddy-boy?" "I don't tink he wake up yet." "Shut up! Hey, come on and give with something beside the grumblygruntsl" "... aaah...  wha...?" ment with the likes of us?" "I... look, leave me alone!" "No!" "I don't... I just want to be left -- " "I'll make Pig do his hollering act. Baby, that'll drive you battier than you feel now. Go on, Pig. Holler." "Aloooah -- glogalogologologa -- Rheeeeeeeshijmny Biminy! Whiminyl Zapologologola -- " . aU rightr You don get left alone, Mister Jason Cage. I been here a year now with nothing but Pig to babble with. And they burned out half his brain before they dumped him down here. No, you ain't going to be left alone. You talk to me!" "Hawk wants 'a know what they got you here in Brass for." "And you're going to tell Hawk why they got you here in Brass. You hear that. Mister half-asleep Cage?" "(breath)... (breath)... I guess you fellows don't get too many newspapers down here." "Never read no newspapers even when I weren't here (chuckle)." "Shut up. Pig! Come on. Spill, Cage." "I don't want to talk about -- " "Talk!" "I'll tell ya all 'bout me if ya tell me 'bout you. Ya gotta talk. Mister Cage. I heard jus' 'bout all there is to hear about Hawk. An there ain't much left to hear 'bout me. Please, Mister Cage -- " "Shut it. Pig. Cage: Talk, I said." "All... right. All right. But it hurts." "Hurt, Cage." "They ain't put us in Brass to make us happy -- " "There's a world out there. What world do you come from. Hawk?" A place called Krags, from a city called Ruption, where the streets are cracks down to the hot core of the planet, and lava broils up with sulphur and brim." "Yeah, yeah, you told me all about Ruption, where the green and yellow smoke twines up between the balconies of the rich men's palaces in the charred evening -- " "Shut up. Pig. Go on. Cage." "Don't shut up. Pig. What about you?" "You wanna know where I'm from. Mister Cage?" "He's from a world called Alba, Cage." "Yeah, an' a city called Dusk. Dusk is in the mountains, where we got caves cut way down in the ice, and sunset and wn flame in the fog and make the ice dance like diamonds." "I've heard it. Pig. Let Cage talk." "Well I come from a world called... Earth." "Earth?" "Be quiet. Pig!" "From a city called Venice. At least that's where I was arrested, where I was tried, and where I was sentenced to spend the rest of my life in Brass. Venice? There the ocean comes and makes streets between the great palazzos and crowded slums strung with clothes lines, where the motorboats stop on the market street, decks spread with cabbages and tomatoes and persimmons and mussels and artichokes and clams and lobsters. Where the visitors and the architectural students and the bankers and the artists stroll down the tiled trapezoid of the Piazza, move among the pink columns of the Doge's Palace, come and walk down the waterfront and gaze into the canaletti where the Bridge of Si#n arches between the Doge's palace and the IF old dungeon. Where the students will see you wandering by yourself with the park on one side and the sea on the other, and run up to you and slap your back and teU you to come with them, and drag you back to the Vaporetto that winds down the grand canal, singing and joking with the girls, while I try to point out to Bruno the historic bits of architecture that have fascinated men of earth since Ruskin. They storm down the alley to the Mensa, rollick over the Ponte Academia, its boards brown and hung with moss underneath, pass the little wine shops, then upstairs, where you pound on the doors to make the cooks let you in and then everybody is eating and singing, and Bruno is telling you that it is all right, not to worry, and you cannot be sad any more because it is Venice... " "Hey, wa' 'sa matter. Mister Cage?" "Go on. Cage." "Have either of you ever seen Brass from the outside?" "Sure as hell can't see it from the inside." "Shut up, Pig. No." "It's on a plane of rock and snow. Even the clouds are scrawny. They shroud the nights and let the stars peak down on Brass itself. And it just sits there and doesn't look back." #  supposed to have seen Brass, Mr. Cage." "Yeah, how'da ya know what it looks like?" "I've seen a picture. I've seen many things I'm not supposed to have seen. Pig. I was an architectural student, you see." "On Earth?" "In Venice?" "That's right. I was once allowed access to the plans. I got a chance to see where all the corridors go and where they come from." "You did?" "I could tell you where every brick and block on Hagia Sofia is placed and mortared. I could tell you how they put together the opticalillusory temple of Ancqor on the world of Keplar down to the last mirror. And I know every blind corridor and twist and turn and gate and time lock and drainage conduit in Brass." "You do?" "Hey, you mean you know how you could get out of here?" "Venice..." "Hey, Hawk. Maybe Cage knows how to get us out of herel" "Shut up. Pig. Keep talking. Cage." "Venice, that's so far away now; no more nights in the wine shop while Giamba throws his knife to cut the sausages hanging from the rafters; those nights where we drank the wine from the south and the wine from the north to see which was sweeter. They are gone. Bruno is gone. And so is the beautiful lazyeyed girl who destroyed it all, Bruno, me, and the beautiful girl called -- " "Cagel" " -- Sapphire!" "Cage, listen to me!" "Yeah, you better listen to HawkI" "Sapphire is gone... " "Can you tell us how come these three coffins can talk to one another? I been in one coffin before this one. I cried and screamed and whimpered like a dog there. But this is the first one where I ever heard anyone answer. All the answer I got was Pig. But it was more than before. What is it, some kind of whispering chamber effect?" "Why we three can... hear?" "Yeah, can you tell Hawk an' me that? I been in two before this one an' I ain't never heard no voices." "The tri-nexus... yes, that must be it. The prisoners in Brass are stored in glycerine coffins that feed and wash them and minister to any medical needs and keep them from hurting themselves... too badly. You can hurt yourself just to the point of death, then the coffin knocks you out with drugs and makes you get better. You can get out of it to exercise once a day, in the dark, in a little stone cubicle -- " "Yeah, yeah. We know all that. Cage. But why the parly-parly in these three coffins?" "At the tri-nexus -- that's at the very bottom of the prison, three chambers come together around the old drainage pipes. Hollow metal pipes instead of stone between these three chambers. A new drainage system was put in a hundred and fifty years ago. If the pipes were filled up with waste and things, then you couldn't hear. But the new system goes somewhere else. Now that the pipes are empty, these three coffins in the lowest level have... well, you can hear... through the drains." "What about getting out. Mister Cage? Hawk and me sure would like to get out of this." "Quiet, Pig." "... the drains... of the city, emptying along the canal, into the water, the bits of paper, the leaves, the filth of animals and humans floating in the water along the back canals of the city... " "What's 'a matter with im. Hawk?" "Just listen. Pig." "... , alone, wandering alone in the back alleys of the city, the sky running like purple waters between the narrow rooftops, the water beside me like black dirty blood, arteries laid open between crumbling stones. Oh, it's a terrible city, beautiful with its wells and its rusted railings, and its rickety porches hanging over the water, its shop windows alive with the glass of Murano, its children dark-eyed and dark-haired with skin like dirty soap, city of beauty, city of loneliness... " # # age, we're alone. Here in Brass,  you hear about it all the time, the prison without guards. It's all automatic. All the coffin changing, the feeding, it all goes on without guards. Now you say you know how Brass is laid out. How can we believe all that?" "I know. I knew the stones of the city better than Ruskin, better than Persey. I knew the crack in the rock where Napoleon laid his pick to the Ponte San Marco, and I know the workings of the locks in the dungeon by which the Doge could flood the lower chambers of the prison when he had to be rid of vast numbers of political prisoners without question; I knew the passage by which Titian's Ascension of the Virgin was smuggled IF from St. Mary's to the cellar of Di Trevi the wool merchants, or the foundations for the gate by which Marino visited Angiolkia before their betrothal. I have walked down the staircase of the palace as had Byron and Shelley, and like them I had found the secret entrance into the palazzo Scarlotti where the nightly debouches are still being carried on by the decadent sons of the sons of Fottia, in the mirrored halls, in the was open to me, and I was profoundly alone." "What's he talkin', Hawk?" "Shhh " "And into my aloneness, into the Venetian evening, came Sapphire. Hawk, Pig, have you ever seen a woman?" "Hey, Hawk, I think he's outa his head." "Pig, who was themost beautiful woman you ever saw?" "Huh? Well, there was Jody-b, and when I us'ta bring in my haul back in the caves of Dusk, she'd laugh and wollop me and wrestle me for the best pieces, and the others would stand around the fire, hoopin' and hollering, and bettin' on which of us, she or me, would win -- " "I knew a woman in Ruption. She walked in the burning streets of the city, and the flames fell back into the earth around her. Her name was Lanza, and when she dropped her fire-colored hair across my face, her fire-colored mouth on mine -- " "Neither of you have known Sapphire. Neither of you have known a woman. She was the daughter of an Ambassador to Earth from the thirteenth planet of Sirius. You come from Krags and Alba? She had summered on one and wintered on the other and found them dull, tawdry, productive of incomparable ennui. And she had come to Venice. I saw her three times in one afternoon. Venice is a small city, and if you are wandering the streets, you will pass other wanderers many times: first on the steps of the bridge at Ferovia, while women with their husbands carried their baby carriages across the steps, and lottery venders hurried by, their sticks streaming with tickets. Again, at the Rialto, I saw her as they were closing the stalls along the bridge, and she stopped to examine a flask, then replace it andlook over the balustrade into the water; the third time, when I dared speak to her, was on a little back canal, where she had stopped on the tiny Ponte Diavolo, leaning on the rail, while the sunset gilded the swell of water that flapped at the rotten, rusty stones. I came upon her just as she was offering a piece of something to one of the cats. I ran to her, struck her hand away, and when she drew back, frightened and surprised, I explained that the wild cats that roamed the city were vicious, many of them diseased, and that with so much fishing in the city they could fend for themselves. First she looked offended, then just annoyed, but at last she laughed and agreed to go with me when I invited her back to the university, begged her to come, explained how much fun the students were, how delightful the city could be with good companionship, till at last she smiled and exclaimed, "Why, you popr, lonely man. Of course I'll come with you, and she came while I told her iU about the prizes I'd won and the buildings I'd planned, and the papers I'd written; and when we reached the Grand Ca, I helped her onto the vapperetto; and as we plowed the water between the gorgeous facades, I pointed out to her Ca'doro, the the Scholas and the great merchant palazzos that towered into the evening behind the colored landing poles, their reflections shimmering until the public-boat's ripples shattered them. And when we went up to the students' dining room, oh, they were so friendly with us, and Bruno came all the way over to invite us to the party he was giving that night. 'I coiddn't find you earlier or I would have invited you before,' he explained. And that night we drank wine and danced on the balcony, and the breeze lifted Sapphire's scarf and hung It over the moon for a moment so that her face was in shadow, and I held her hand, and she smiled in shadow, and below the water carried flecks of silver down toward a bridge. And then the scarf dropped again..." AX in'." "Cage? Hey, come on, Cage," W-w-why " "That's right. Go on. Cage." "Why do... men commit crimes? Your voices in the darkness, why do men commit crimes in the first place?" "I guess I jus' did it 'cause I was hungry. It gets cold at Dusk. I got hungry, and stealin' was easier than workin'. Only I got caut. Which would'a been okay, only I got hungry again an' stole some more. Bout the fifth time or so, after I'd beat up on a couple of patrol men, and two of them ed, they just threw their hands up and threw me down in Brass. You say why do people -- " "I say why is this. Cage. The streets of Ruption are filled with hot fires and hot men; there is revenge; there is pride; there is the writhing hate for the workings of a decadent world that curses us with morality. That's why I ran my gang of marauders and looters through the coffers of the city, battled the flying patrolmen from the roofs of the palace, watching my men fall around me, laughing as the floodlights swept the roof and I shook my rist at the sky that blazed with the fires of their jets bright as the fires of the streets, firing back, till I was the only one left -- " "No... Hawk. That's not it. Pig. Or perhaps that's what it is with some men. But with me it was so much more, so much more. It was later in the evening, when again I went on the balcony, to clear my head I was light-headed from joy and wine, and as I gazed on the water, the lights reeled before me, my knees gave and I fell with my face pressed to the cold bars, looking over the red-tiled roofs of the city, bleached now by the lowering moon. For a moment I thought my exaltation was to be replaced by sickness. I pushed myself up, turned back to stagger between the glass doors, with the curtains shaking in the breeze. Wine bottles had spilled on the rug. Giamba lay on the couch, his hair awry, his IF shirt wet with his own bile. The plates of hors d'oeuvres were half empty, and even those that were not had been used for ash trays. The only light in the room was from the stub of a candle in one, still-upright bottle. The moon reached in white fingers and brushed away the shadows. I staggered forward. They were all gone, I thought at first. Then, in the doorway of Brimo's room I saw them. "Blades of pain shot into my head, tried to unfix my eyesi I swallowed what rose in my throat, swallowed what rose again! Muscles all over my body began to shake. Then something came out -- I thought it would be a scream, but it was laughter. "Bruno raised his face from her neck, frowned. Then he asked, Wearily, 'Are you going now --  " 'Oh, yes,' I told him. But the two of you must come with me. The night is just beginning. Come, come, I  show you a really go time.' She looked at me, as drunk as he was, and I knew diat for a moment she did not even remember who I was. Oh, I was maniacal with my laughter. I hustled Bruno, protesting, into his jacket; and as I wrapped her scarf again and again about her shoulders, I suddenly felt her start, pull away from me, but I pretended not to notice, chattered on cheerily, and almost pushed them out into the hallway, where Bruno asked, 'Now what party would anybody in Venice invite you to?' Only I just laughed, and soon we were out on the little walkway beside the canal. "'This way! This way,' and they followed me down beside the canaletti, then out to the Campanile, up the arch of the Academy Bridge, and across the broad end of the Strada Nova, into the tiny alley that has no name. We crossed another of the city's thousand bridges (there aren't really a thousand; only six hundred and eighty-two) and hurried beneath the covered water-way. It let us out two small streets from the clutter of steps rising to the Ferovia side of the Rialto. But we moved off down to little blue-tiled walkway, then pushed throught a gate and hurried down an alley where the lights were out. I started to climb the low wall. VV gan. But Bruno shhhhhed and laughed. 'I've been a student in the City almost a year, and I still don't know. But Jason knows every gutter and alley of the plaee. He's getting us there by a short cut. Then he growled, 'I hope we get where you're going soon.' But I just hurried them along. I remember she said once '... But there's no rail to the canal here --  but by then I was working loose the grate. In here, in here...' Again Bruno explained for me, 'Jason likes to pull surprises on people. He's always crawling up from somebody's cellar. Venice is a city of intrigue, you know...' But by then, by then our breaths were echoing in the dark passage. Our feet splashed, and she had begun half-crying noises. But again I just urged them on faster. 'Don't worry,' Bruno assured her, but his voice was almost as unsteady as hers. 'Jason doesn't get all these prizes each year for nothing. He's got an absolute sense of spatiid relations. He cant get lost. We passed under a grating which let half a dozen blades of moonlight through the fog and down beside the underground bridge we were crossing. She caught her breath. There was no rail here either. I told them to watch out for the steps. We left the moonlight, and in another fifteen minutes we were there. I closed a door behind us and let out my breath. 'We're here, I told them. 'Come on, Bruno, I need your help.' I moved along the wall, the blueprints almost visible before my eyes. Four steps, five. 'Duck your head, Bruno!' and, 'Here. Give me a hand.' I guided him to the great bar across the wheel. 'Now, bear down on this with me.' He took the bar. 'Will this get us into the party? I don't hear any -- I stopp him. 'This way to the cellar. Come on, lean on it. At first I thought the ancient lock wouldn't budge. My toes came up off the dusty stone. lien I felt Bruno lend his weight, and -- it gave! Metal ground. I heard the weights fall. Then a rush of water. I heard her say, 'What was that? Bruno, Jason?' And then she let out a cry. Water splashed about my feet. 'Hey!' Bruno said, 'what's all this? I backed away from the lock, and began to laugh. "We're in the dungeon, the Duke's dungeon, on the lowest level, where he had the water locks! You remember, Bruno? Where he could open the flood gates to drown his prisoners? "'Hey, if this is some kind of a joke, Jason, it's not funny!' I heard her sdashing toward us now, 'How do we get out of here? Which way do we go? It's all pitch dark. Then she cried out and stumbled. Because the water was rushing so hard now, it was difficult to stand. It had already reached our knees. I just started to back away. They splashed afterward. She came near us, then hit her head on the overhang of stone, fell. Bruno tried to help her; then, all at once, he was raging. He dived for me, caught me. 'Look, you're going to drown too if you think you're going to drown us.' She was splashing towards us, just screaming. I tried to pull away, but both of them got me. We fell in the water. Her scarf, I remember, was wet between my fingers. I just stayed under, swam down, which they weren't expecting and... got away. With the currents, it was hard to judge the distances accurately, but I surfaced once more, took a breath, then dove beneath the low wall, already under water, clawed my way under the stone, then at last shot up to the surface, pulled myself up the stairs. The water was all the way up the stairs. I could hear them screaming behind the rocks. When I stood, the water was all the way up to my chest... They found me, wandering across the Piazza, in front of the Byzantine facade of St, Mark's, passing through the shadows of the four great bronze horses thrown from the basilica's roof. I was soaking wet, and was dragging her wet scarf behind me. "By all the gods of Krags -- " "By the single god of Alba -- " "By whatever gods there are left on Earth, I tell you I laughed like a demon. They foimd me. They found me, and I told them. The alarms had already gone off. But, by then, it was too late. The Doges were very effiIF dent. Very... because she was the daughter of an ambassador from another world, it became an interworld offense. So instead of incarcerating me in the city, they sent me here, here to the interworlds prison called Brass... a I more!" "Cage? Look, Jason Cage, you say you know the architecture of Brass as well as you knew the setup of that dungeon in... what-ever-it's-namewas? Come on, now! Talk." "I know. I know them all. I know the floorplan for the Shining Mosque in Iran. I know the structure of cellars in the Museum of Life at BetaCentauri. If Daedalus had ever left plans for the Labyrinth itself, had I but seen them once, I would have needed no thread... " "Then what about Brass, Cage? How about where we are now? Do you think you could get us out of here?" "Here at the... tri-nexus? Very near, there are the... , yes, the tunnels that the original workman used to enter and leave the structure, when they built the thing, five hundred years ago. But... but they are sealed off. Leave, you say? But how can I leave? I am guilty. My heart is all crusted with the metal of guilt. I am here... to suffer. Yes! Even if I were to leave, guilt is a prison around my heart." "Hey, Hawk, I think he really gone nuts." "Listen, Cage. Where we are, here at this tri-nexus, is there any way you know of to get into that tunnel?" "You... you want to get out? But... but... I killed them. I'm guilty. I deserve -- " "Look, Cage!" "My crimes make all the worlds guilty." "Come on. Mister Cage. We wanna get out." "Talk, Cage. Talk more." "She was... she was beautiful as water, as fire, as fog -- " "Talk about Brass!" "Brass? Yes, Brass... the prison, the prison with the three chambers near the workman's tunnel. The keystones, perhaps. Yes, they wouldn't be set." "What are you talking about. Cage? Make it so I can see it, clear as Venice." "These three cells we're in. They come together around the drainage system like three fat slices of cake with their points together. The walls would be where the knife goes -- " "And the drain is where you'd put the candle for a one-year-old's birthday?" "That's right. And the stones in the joining walls, near the tip, they can't be mortared in. They weigh perhaps three hundred pounds apiece." "Three hundred pounds? One person couldn't move that. Hawk." "But two could. Pig." "And each covers a drop shaft into the worker's tunnel that winds and turns and rises to the rocks outside..." "If you pushed from your side. Pig, then I pulled from the other... " "What about him?" "Cage, we can move our stone out, and then move yours -- " "No. No, this is where I quit" "Hawk, the lid is starting to open for exercise period. Come on, let's get that stone." "Cage, you won't be able to move your stone by yourself. You better let us help you. Once we go, you'll be here forever." "No! No... I belong here. I must stay here... I must... I have to stay and be part of the great tower of Brass, like one of its very rocks, become part of the bedrock itself. I can hear, you now, hear the stone scraping against the stone. You grunt. You pant. But it moves, slowly. Yes, I hear it moving, like the great lock in the dungeon of the Doge, scraping, scraping. There! You've got it now... Pig? What tasks of knavery had you bent those shoulders to on Alba? Hawk, what did you pit your strength against to strain such force into being at Krags? Pig...? Hawk...? Hawk... ? Pig -- ! I can't hear you any more! Have you... gone? Pig? Hawk... ?" Describe the silence inside Brass? Now it too was complete. Perhaps you could hint at it by a lack of words. Perhaps you could hint at it by saying once the voices left, there was -- nothing. IF The girls from Capella were  brainy, lovely, man-crazy -- and eight and a half feet tall ! I T he day Papa came home was the day my mama came home to me. That's the way I looked at Earth's first alien contact. We may have changed some of our ideas about what's human, but one thing hasn't changed: The big history-tape events are still just background for the real I-Me-You drama. Not true? So, wasn't the U.S.-Soviet treaty signed the weekend you caught your first marlin? Anyway, there they were, sitting on Luna. Although it's not generally known, there's been a flap about a moving source around Pluto the year before. That's when C.I.A. decided that outer space fell under the category of foreign territory in its job description -- at least to the extent of not leaving the U.S. Air Force in total control of contact with the galaxy. So our little shop shared some of the electronic .excitement. The Russians helped some; they're the acknowledged champs at heaving up the tonnage, but we still have the communications lead -- we try harder. The British and the Aussies try too, but we keep hiring their best men. That first signal went to nothing -- until one fine April evening all our communications went snapcrackle-pop, and the full moon rose with this big alien hull parked on the Lunar Alps. Sat there for three days, glowing bluishly in any sixpower lens -- if you could buy one. And you'll recall, we had no manned moon-station then. After peace broke out, nobody wanted to spend cash on vacuum and rocks. The shape our space program was in, we couldn't have hit them with a paper-clip in less than three months. at the water-cooler. To do so I had to see through two doors and Mrs. Peabody, my secretary, but I'd got pretty good at this. I wandered out casually and said: "How's George doing?" She gave me a one-eyed scowl through her droopy wing of hair, finished her water, and scowled again to make sure she wasn't smiling. "He came back after midnight. He's had six peanut-butter sandwiches. I think he's getting it." There are people who'll tell you seersucker suit. For sure she has bones, and she's no girl. But if you look twice it can get a little hard to notice other people in the room. I'd done the double take about three years back. "Meet me at lunch, and I'll show you something." She nodded moodily and lounged off. I watched the white knife-scar ripple elegantly on her tanned legs and went back through my office, fighting off the urge to push Mrs. Peabody's smile into her Living Bra. Our office is a Uttle hard to explain. Everybody knows C.I.A. is out in that big building at Langley, but the fact is that when they built it there it fit about as well as a beaglehouse fits a Great Dane. They got most of the Dane in somehow, but we're one of the paws and tails that got left out. Strictly a support facility -- James Bond would sneer at us. We operate as a small advertising agency in a refined section of D.C. which happens to be close to a heavy land transmitter cable and the Naval Observatory gadgets. Our girls actually do some ads for other government agencies -- something about Smokey the Bear and Larry Litterbug is all over the first floor. We really aren't a Big Secret Thing -- not a Bfretta or a cyanide ampoule in the place, and you can get into our sub-basement any time you produce front and profile X rays of both your grandmothers. What's there? Oh, a few linguists IF and cold war leftovers like me. A computer N.S.A. spilled coffee into. And George. George is our pocket genius. It is generally believed he got started making pop movies for yaks in Outer Mongolia, He lives on him. So, when the aliens started transmitting at us, George was among the facilities Langley called on to help decipher. And so me, in a small, passive way -- I look at interesting photography when the big shop wants a side opinion. Because of my past as a concocter of fake evidence in the bad old days. Hate that word fake. Mine is still being used by historians. C ome lunchtime I went looking for line. Since Big Broker at Langley found that our boys and girls were going to Rapa's instead of eating G.S.A. boiled cardboard, Rapa's old cashier has been replaced by a virgin with straight seams and a camera in each, ah, eyeball -- but the chow is still good dreamy double-curve smile on her long mouth. She heard me and wiped it off. The relaxation was a fake; I saw her hand go over some shredded matches... She smiled again, like someone had offered her fifty cents for her right arm. But she was okay. I knew her, this was one of her good days. We ordered veal and pasta, friendly. "Te a look," I invited. "We finally synched in with their beam for a few frames." The photo showed one side foggy... "It's -- it's -- " "Yeah, it's beautiful. Shes beautiful. And the dead spit of you, my girl." "But Max! Are you sure?" Her using my name was a good sign. "Absolute. We saw her move. This, kid, is The Alien. We've had every big cine collection in the world checking. It's not a retransmission. See that script on her helmet and that background panel? Tain't nobody's. No doubt where the send is from, either. That ship up there is full of peopletype people. At least, women... at's George got?" "You'll see the co-copy," she said absently, grooving on the photo. "He worked out about # words in clear. It's weird. They want to land -- and something about Mother. Like, Mother is back, or is home. George says 'Mother' is the best he can do." "If that's Mother, oh my. Here's your pasta." They landed a week later, after considerable international wrangling. At Mexico City, as everyone knows. George's connections -- in the literal sense -- we had it on closed circuit right over the crowd of world digThe airlock opened on a worldwide hush, and Mother came out. One -- and then another -- and a third. Last one out fiddled with something on her wrist, and the lock closed. We found out later she was the navigator. There they stood on their ramp, three magnificent earth-type yoimg females in space-opera uniforms. Helmets on the backs of their heads and double-curve grins on tjieir long mouths. The leader was older and had more glitter on her crest. She swung back her droopy wing of hair, breathed twice, wrinided her nose and paced down the ramp to meet the U.N. president. Then we got it. The U.N. President that year was an Ethiopian about six feet five. The top of his head came just to the buckle on her crossbelt. I guess the world-wide hush quivered -- it certainly did in George's projection room. "About eight foot three for the captain," I said. "Assuming the top of the head is normal," George chirped. That was what they loved him for. In the dimness I saw a funny look suppressing themselves, and Mrs. Peabody seemed to feel an egg hatching in her uplift. The men looked like me -- tense. Right then I would have settled for green octopusses instead of those three good-looking girls. The captain stepped back from President Enkaladugunu and said something in a warm contralto, and somehow we all relaxed. She seemed wholesome, if you can imagine a mix of Garbo and Moshe Dayan. The other two officers were clearly very young, and -- well, I told you, they for size. George got that; I saw his eyes goTo his disgust, all the talking was being done by our people. The three visitors stood it well, occasionally giving brief, melodious responses. They looked mightily relaxed, and also somewhat puzzled. The two young J.O.'s were scanning hard at the crowd, and twice I saw one nudge the other. Mercifully a Soviet-U.S.-Indian power play choked off the oratory, and got the party adjourned to Mexico's Guest Palace -- or rather, to an unscheduled pause in the colonnade while beds were being lashed together and sofas substituted for chairs. Our circuit went soft. George shut himself up with his tapes of the aliens' few remarks, and I coped with a flock of calls about our observing devices, which got buggered up in the furniture-moving orgy. Two days later the party was moved to the Popo-Hilton with the swimming pool as their private bath. Every country on earth -- even the Chicoms -- sent visiting delegations. George was going through fits. He was bound and determined to be the expert on Mama's language by remote control. We really had no official mission, but I had an in with the Mexicali bureau, and we did pretty well imtil about twenty other outfits got into the act and the electronic feedback put us all in the hash. "Funny thing. Max," said George at morning staff. "They keep asking -- I can only interpret as, 'Where are the women?"' "You mean, like women officials? Women in power jobs?" "Simpler, I think. Perhaps big women, like themselves. But I get a connotation of grown-up, women, IF adults. I need more of their talk among themselves. Max." "We're trying, believe it They keep flushing all the cans and laughing like mad, I don't know if it's our plumbing or our snoops that amuse them. Did you hear about Tuesday?" Tuesday my shivers had come back. For half an hour every recording device out to a half-mile perimeter went dead for forty minutes, and nothing else was aected. Another department was getting shivery too. Harry from R  D called me to see if we could get a better look at that charm bracelet the navigator had closed the ship with. "We can't get so much as a gamma particle into that danm boat," he told me. "Touch it -- smooth as glass. Try to move it, blowtorch it, burrow under it, laser it, bombard it -- nothing. It just sits there. We need that control. Max." "She wears it taking a bath, Hal. No emissions we can read." "I know what I'd do," he grunted. "Those cream-heads up there are in a daze." n A daze it was. The world at large loved them. They were now on a Grand Tour, being plied with entertainment, scenic wonders and technology. The big girls ate it up -- figuratively and literally. Badloon glasses of dubrovka went down especially well from breakfast on, and they were glowingly complimentary about everything, from Sun Valley to the Great Barrier Reef, with stopovers at every atomic and space installation. Captain Garbo-Dayan really unlt on the Cote d'Azur, and the two had lost their puzzled looks. In fact, they were doing a good deal of what would have looked like leering if they didn't have such wholesome smiles. "What the hell?" I asked George. "They think we're cute," he said, enjoying himself. Did I tell you he was a tiny little man? That figures, to see us big men squinting up at the Girls from Capella, as the world now called them. They were from a system near Capella, they explained in delightful fragments of various Earth languages. Their low voices really had charm. Why had they come? Well, they were a tramp freighter, actually, taMng a load of ore back to Capella. They had dropped by to clear up an old chart notation about our system. What was their home like? Oh, much like ours. Lots of commerce, trade. Wars? Not for centuries. Shocking idea! What the world wanted to know most, of course, was where were their men? Were they alone? This evoked merry laughter. Of course they had men, to care for the ship. They showed us on a video broadcast from Luna. There were indeed men, handsome types with muscles. The chap who did most of the transmission looked like my idea of Leif Ericsson. There was no doubt, however, that Captain Garbo-Dayan -- or Captain Lyampka, as we learned to call her -- was in charge. Well, we had female Soviet freighter captains, too. The one thing we couldn't get exactly was the Capellan men's relative heights. The scenery on these transmissions was different. It was my private opinion, from juggling some estimates of similar background items, that at least some of their men were earth-normal size, though burly. The really hot questions about their space drive got gracefully laughed off. How did the ship run? They were not technicians! But then they sprang the bombshell. Why not come and see for ourselves? Would we care to send a party up to Luna to look over the ship? Would we? Would we? How many? Oh, about fifty -- fifty getting to be their pet. George had sent her to Sun Valley to record some speech samples he absolutely had to have. She was introduced at the pool. Immediate hit. She looked incredibly like a half-size Capellan. They loved it. Laughed almost to guffawing. When they found she was a crack linguist they adopted her. George was in ecstasy with hauls of Capellan seemed to like it. She was different these days -- her eyes shone, and she had a Idnd of tense, exalted smile. I knew why, and it bothered me, but there wasn't anything I could do. I cut myself into her report-circuit one day. know them." Safe at # miles, she gave me the bare-faced stare. Theyre dangerous? fifteen had caught the full treatment from a street gang. Fought against knives, left for dead -- an old story. They'd fixed her up as good as new, except for a few interesting white hairlines in her tan, and a six-inch layer of ice between her and everybody who shaved. It didn't show, most of the time. She had a nice sincere cover manner, and she wore her old suits and played mousey. But it was permanent guerrilla war, inside. Intelligence had found her, as they often do, a ready-made weapon. She was totally loyal, as long as no one touched her. And she'd wear anything or nothing on business. I'd seen phothat you wouldn't believe. Fantastic -- the subtle sick flavor added, too. She let people touch her, physically, I mean, on business. I imagine -- I never asked. And I never asked what happened to them afterward, or why the classified medal. It did trouble me a little when I found out her chief case officer was dead -- but that was all right, he'd had diabetes for years. But as for letting a friend touch her -- really touch her -- I tried it once. I t was in George's film-vault. We were both exhausted after a fiftyhour run of work. She had lean back and smiled, and actually touched my arm. My arm went around her automatically and I started to bend down to her lips. At the last minute I saw her eyes. Before I got pastured out to Smokey Bear and George, I had worked around a little, and one of IP the souvenirs indelibly printed on my memory is the look in the eyes of a man who had just realized that I stood between hhn and the only exit. He relaxed for just a second -- and then started for the exit through what very nearly became my dead body, in the next few hectic minutes. I saw that look -- depthless, limp, inhuman -- in Tihie's eyes. Gently I disengaged my arm and stepped back. She resumed breathing. I told myself to leave her alone. It's an old story. Koestler told it, and his girl was younger. The trouble was I liked the woman, and it didn't help that she really was beautiful under those sack suits. We got close enough a couple of times so we even discussed -- briefly -- whether anything could be done. Her view was, of course, Nada. At least she had the taste not to suggest being friends. Just Nada. After the second of those sessions I sloped off with a couple of mermaids from the Reflecting Pool, who turned out to have strange china doorknobs in their apartment. When the doorknobs got busted I came back to find Mrs. Peabody had put me on sick leave. "I'm sorry, Max." De nada I told her. De nada, I told her. And that was how matters stood alien giantesses. became Miss Government Agency of the moment. The reluctant trickle of cross-data swelled to a flood. We found out, for instance, abojit the police rumors. It seemed the big girls wanted exercise, and the first thing they asked for in any city was the big park. Since they strolled at eight mph, a foot guard wasn't practical. The UN compromised on a pair of patrol cars bracketing them on the nearest road. This seemed to amuse the Capellans, and every now and then the police radios went dead. The main danger to the big girls was from hypothetical snipers, and nobody could do much about that. After they went through Berlin the Vapos picked up four men in poor condition in the Tiergarten, and the one who lived said something about the Capellans. The Vapos didn't take this seriously -- all four had vagrancy and drug records -- but they bucked it along anyway. Next there was some story from a fruity type in Solsdjk Park near The Hague, and a confused disturbance in Hong Kong when the Girls went through the Botanical Gardens. And three more defunct vagrants in the wilderness preserve outside Melbourne. The Capellans found the bodies and expressed shock. Their men, they said, did not fight among themselves. Another tidbit was the Great Body Hunt. Try as we had in Mexico we had never got one look at them completely naked. Breasts, yes -- standard human type, superior grade. But below the navel we failed. Now we found out that everybody else all along the route was failing too, although they'd pushed the perimeter pretty close. I admired their efforts -- you wouldn't believe what some of our pals had gotten pickups into. But nothing worked. It seemed the Girls liked privacy, and they had some sort of routine snooper-swe that left blank films and tapes. Once when the Jap LS. got really tric th found their gismo with the circuits not only fused but mirror reversed. T lUie's penetration evoked a mass howl for anatomical detail. But all she gave us was, 'Conception is a voluntary function with them." I wondered if anyone else around the office was hearing mice in the woodwork. Was I the only one who knew not listed in standard agent evaluation? She was helpful on the big question: How did they come to be so human? There was no doubt they were. Although we hadn't got pictures, we had enough assorted biological specimens to know they and we were one flesh. All the Girls themselves had told us was interpreted as "We are an older race" -- big smile. our world. The navigator had too many balloon-glasses one night and here before -- long before. Hence the chart notation they'd wanted to check. There was something of interest here besides a nice planet -- something the first expedition had left. A colony? The navigator grinned and shut up. This tidbit really put the strawberries in the fan. Was it possible we were the descendants of these people? Vertigo hit the scientific sector and started a babble of protest. What about Proconsul? What about the australopithecines? What about gorilla blood-types? What about -- about ed; a few cooler heads pointed out that nobody really knew where CroMagnon came from, and he had apparently interbred with other types. Well, it's an old story now, but those were dizzy days. True to human form, I was giving the grand flip-flop of history about two percent of my attention. To begin with, I was busy. We were fighting out a balanced representation of earth scientific specialists with all the other nations who had delegations in the visiting party to Luna. It WM to be a spectacular talent show -- everything from particle physics, molecular genetics, math theory, ecosystems down to a lad from Chile who combined musical notation analysis, cosmetology and cooking. And every one of them handsome and certified heterosexual. And equipped with enough circuitry to -- well, assist their unaided powers of observation. Even in the general euphoric haze somebody had stayed cool enough to reali the boys just might not get back. Quite a job to do in two weeks. But that again was background to a purely personal concern. The Monand the Girls came through D.C. I cornered her in the film vault. "Will you receive a message in a sanitized container?" She was picking at a bandaid over a shot-puncture some idiot had given her. (What the hell kind of immunization did the medicos think they had IF for assignments on the moon?) One eye peeked at me. She knew she was guilty, all 'You think your big playmates are just like yourself, only gloriously immune from rape. I wouldn't be surprised if you weren't thinking of going home with them. Right? No, don't tell me, kid, I know you. But you don't know them. You think you do, but you don't Did you ever meet any American Negroes who moved to Kenya? Talk to one some tinie. And there's another thing you haven't thought about -- two hundred and fifty thousand miles of hard vacuum. The Marines can't get you out of this one, baby." "So?" "All right. I just want to get it through to you -- assuming there is a human being under that silicon -- that out here is another human being who's worried sick about you. Does that get through? At all?" She gave me a long look as though she were trying to mike out a distant rider on a lonesome plain. Then her lashes dropped. The rest of the day I was busy with our transmitting arrangements from -- actually -- Timbuctu. The Russians had offered to boost the party up in sections in six weeks, but Captain Lyampka, after a few thoughtful compliments, had waved that off. They would just send down their cargo lighter -- no trouble at all, if we woidd point out a convenient desert to absorb the blast Hence Timbuctu, and the Capellan party was spending the night in D.C. en route there. They were lodged in the big hotel complex near our office and adjoining Rock Creek Park. That was how I came to find out what Capellans did in parks. I t was a damn fool thing, to traE them. Actually I just hung around the park input. About two AM I was sitting on a bench in the moonlit, telling myself to give it up. I was gritty-eyed tired. When I heard them coming I was too late to take cover. It was the two J.O.'s, two beautiful girls in the moonlight. Two hig girls. Coming up fast. I stood up. "Good evening!" I essayed in Capellan. A ripple of delighted laughter, and they were towering over me. Feeling idiotic, I got out my cigarillos and offered them around. The first mate took one and sat down on the bench. Her eyes came level with mine. I clicked my lighter. She laughed and laid the cigarillo down. I made a poor job of lifting mine. There is a primal nightmare lurking deep in every man. It has to do with his essentid maleness. With violation thereof. Most of us go through life without getting more than a glimpse of it, but this situation was bringing black fingers right up into my throat. I essayed a sort of farewell bow. They laughed and bowed back. I had a clear line of exit to right rear. I took a step backward. A hand like a log fell on my shoulders. The navigator leaned down and said something in a velvety contralto. I didn't need a translator -- I'd seen enough old flics: "Don't go 'way, baby, we won't hurt you." My jump was fast, but those shebrutes were faster. The standing one had my head in a vise at arm's length, and when I tried the standard fingerpull she laughed like a deep bell and casually broke my arm. In three places, it turned out later. The ensuing minutes are what I make a point of not remembering except when I forget not to wake up screaming. My next clear view was from the ground where I was discovering some nasty facts about Capellan physiology through a blaze of pain. (Ever think about being attacked by a musth vacuum cleaner?) My own noise was deafening me, but either I was yelling in two voices or something else was screeching and scrabbling around my head. In a dead place somewhere inside the uproar I didn't make sense. Presently there was, blessedly, nothing... and somewhere else, ambulance jolts and smells and needle-jabs. At some later point in daylight George's face appeared around a mass of tapes and pulleys on a hospital bed. tain to call off her J.O.'s ("Leave the kid her toy!") Later she got a call through to George, and he sent the special squad to haul the corpse in to the hidey-hole for Classified Mistakes. (I was now very Classified.) While he talked he was setting up a video so we could watch the Terran scientific delegation embark for Luna. Through the pulleys I saw them -- a terrific-looking group, the cream of Terran expertise, and most of them still looking human in spite of being about thirty per cent hardware. There were the dress uniforms of various armed services -- the pair of Danish biologists in naval whites, and the Scotch radiation lad in dress kilts were dazzling. Myself, I had most faith in the Israeli gorilla in khaki; I had run into him once in Khartuum when he was taking time off from being a Nobel runner-up in laser technology. The bands played; the African sun flamed off the gold and polish; the all-girl Capellan freighter crew lined up smartly as our lads marched up the ramp, their heads at Capellan belly-button level. Going into that ship with them was enough miniaturized circuitry to map Luna and do a content-analysis on the Congressional Library. At the last minute, one of the Chicoms got the hiccups, and his teeth transmitted flak all over the behind her came the captain and her roughnecks, smiling like The Girl Next Door. I wondered if the navigator was wearing any bandaids. My teeth had had hold of something -- while they lasted. There they went, and there they flaked out, to a man. We next saw them on a transmission from the mother ship. There wasn't a molecule of metal on them. We found out later they'd dozed off on the trip up, and waked up in the ship clean as babies, with healing scars on their hides. (The Chicoms had new teeth.) Their Capellan hosts acted as if it were all a big joke and served welcome drinks all around every ten minutes. Some drinks they must have been -- I caught a shot of my Israeli hope. He was sitting on the captain's lap, wearing her helmet. Somebody had had the sense to rig a monitor on the satellite relay, so the world at large saw only part of the send. They loved it. "Round one to Mordor," said George, perched like a hobbit on my bed. He had stopped enjoying the situation. "When the white man's ship came to Hawaii and Tahiti,' I croaked through my squashed lnx, "they'd let a herd of vahines on board for the sailors." George looked at me curiously. He hadn't had the chance to meet his nightmare socially, you see. I was getting friendly with mine, in a grim way. "If the girls had a machete or two, nobody got mad. They just took 'em away. The technologic differential here is about the same, don't you think, George? We've just had our machetes taken away." "They left some new diseases, too, when they moved on," said George slowly. He was with it now. " this bunch moves on "They have to sell that ore." " -- What?" (I had had a glimpse the Capellan male we had been calling Leif Ericsson. As I had figured, he was about my size.) "I said they have to get home to sell their cargo." And was he right. The operative word was cargo. T he plot unfolded about a week later when the visiting party was sent back from Luna, along with three new Capellan ratings who were them. and our deflowered male delegation in North Africa and then took off on a paraboloid which put the Capellans down partway 'round the globe. "Scechuan Province, Woomara says," George told me. "Doesn't smell good." The Chicoms in those days were speaking to us, but not very politely. They did not see fit to mention to the rest of the world that the Capellans were paying them a private visit. "Where's TilHe?" "Being debriefed at the Veddy Highest Levels. Did you hear the mother ship unloading its ore?" "Where would I hear anything?" I wheezed, rattling my pulleys. "Give me that photo!" You could see it clearly: conical piles and some sort of conveyor running out from the big hulk on Luna. "At least they hadn't got matter transmitters," I croaked. The next piece of the plot came talking tiredly through her hair in the general direction of my kneecaps. "They estimate they can carry about #. It'll take them three days our time to unload, and another week to seal and atmospherize part of the cargo hold. The Chicoms bought the deal right off." "What's the difference to them?" I groaned. "From China the Capellan brand of slavery probably looks like cake." That was it, of course. The men of Capella were slaves. And there were relatively few of them. A cargo of exotic human males was worth a good deal more than ore. A hell of a lot more, it seemed. On Terra we once called it "Black Ivory." So much for Galactic super-civilization. But that wasn't all I had to scream loud for George before he showed, looking white around the nose. "A merchant privateer who runs into a rich source of pearls, or slaves, or whatever," I wheezed, "doesn't figure to quit after one trip. And he doesn't want his source to dry up or run away while he's gone. Or learn to fight back. He wants it to stay sweet, between trips. The good captain was quite interested in the fact that the Russians offered to get up to Luna so quickly. They could expect us to develop a defensive capability before they got back. What do they propose to do about that?" "This may come as a shock to you," George said slowly, "but you aren't the only man who's read history. We weren't going to tell you because there's nothing you can do about it, old brother, in that jungle gym." "Go on!" "Mavrua -- that's the fellow you called Leif Ericsson -- he told me," the sun a little. As they leave." "A solar screen." George's voice was gray, too. "They can lay it with their exhaust in a couple of dozen orbits. It doesn't take much, and it IF should last, that is, there's an irreversible interaction, I don't understand the physics. Harry gave me the R  D analysis at lunch, but the waiter kept taking the mesons away. The point is, they can screen off enough solar energy to kick us back to the ice age in about ninety days. Without time to prepare we'll be finished. Snow should start here about June. It won't quit. Or melt. Most of the big lakes and quite a lot of ocean will go to ice. The survivors will be back in caves. Perfect for their purpose. of course -- they literally put us on ice." "What the hell is being done?" I squeaked. "Not counting the people who are running around cackling, there are two general lines. One, hit them with something before they do it. Two, undo it afterwards. And a massive technological research depot is being shipped to Columbia. So far the word has been held pretty close. Bound to leak soon, though." "Hit them?" I grated. "Hit them? The whole U.S.-U.K.-Soviet military in theii;laps! Even if they could get a warhead on the mother ship, they're bound to have shielding. Christ, look at the routine fields they use to hold their atomics. And they know the state of our art. Childish! And as for undoing the screen in time to save anything -- " "What do you think you're doing? Max!" They were pawing at me. "Getting out of here... Goddamnit, give me a Mfe, I can't untie IV r iey finally hauled me over to George's war-room in a kind of mobile mummy-case and saw I got fed all the info and rumors. I kept telling my brain to produce. It kept telling me back Tilt. With the top men of ten nations working on it, what did I imagine # could contribute? When I had been grunting to and George filed in with a purposeful air. "'In a bad position there is no good move.' Bogoljubov. Give over, Max." "In a bad position you can always wiggle something I rasped. "What "What about them?" "How do they feel about the plan?" "Well, they don't like it." "In what way don't they like it?" "The established harem favorites don't like to see new girls brought in," she recited and quick looked me in the eye. "Having a good time, baby?" I asked her gently. She looked away. "Okay. There's our loose piece. Now, how do we wiggle it at a quarabout that' character Leif -- Mavrua?" I mused. "Isn't he some sort of communications tech?" "He's chief commo sergeant," Tillie said, and added slowly, "He's alone on duty, sometimes." "What's he like? You were friendly with him?" "Yes, kind of. He's -- I don't know -- like queer only not queer." I was holding her eye. "But in this situation your interests coincide? I probed her hard, hard. The American Negro who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and a Negro second, no matter what they did to him in Mississippi. George had the sense to keep quiet, although I doubt he ever understood. She swung back her hair, slowly. I could see mad dreams dying in her eyes. "Yes. They do... Coincide." "Think you. can talk to him?" "Yes." "I'll get over to Harry," George jumped up, he was ahead of the play now." "We'll see what we can lash up. Ten days, maximum." "Call the campus. I can take a meeting now. But get me something so I don't sound like a frog's ghost." The chief we had then was all right. He came to me. Of course we had only the start of a plan, but nobody else had anything, and we had gave us everything we needed. The lateral channels were laid on by #, and Jodrell Bank was to set us up. The waning moon came over Greenwich just before dawn that Mavrua about midnight He was alone. It took her about a dozen exchanges to work out agreement in principle. She was good with him. I was studying him on the monitors; Cleancut, muscular, good grin; gonads okay. Something sapless in the eyes. What in hell could he do? The chiefs first thought had been, of course, sabotage. IP "Stupid," I husked to George. "Harem slaves don't blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good." "Nor do historical analogies, after a point." "Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame. We need a new one. For instance, look at the way the Capellans overturned our psychic scenery, our view of ourselves as integral to this world... Or look at their threat to our male-dominant structure. Bigger, more dominant women who treat our males as sex-slave material. Walking nightmares... notice that mare?' .AU rit -- What is the exact relationship between the Capellans and us? Give me that Danish report again." T he two gorgeous Danes had at least gotten some biological information between orgies. Maybe they were more used to them. They confirmed that the Capellans carried sex-linked differences. Capellan males matured to parth-normal size and sexual features, but the adolescent females went throu a secondary development spurt and emerged as the giantress we had seen. With the specialized characteristics that I had inadvertently become familiar with. And more: some milennia back a mutation started cropping up among the women -- fallout from a war, perhaps? No answer. Whatever the cause, women began failing to develop. In other words, they stayed as earth-type normals, able to reproduce in what the Capellans regarded as immature form. Alarmed, the Capellan matriarchate dealt with the problem in a relatively humane way. They rounded up all suspected mutant lines and deported them to remote planets, of which Terra was one. Hence the old chart notation. Our present visitors had been orehunting at nearly maximum range when they decided to check on the semi-mytMcal colony. No one else ever had. "What about the Capellan's own history?" "Not much. Look at that British sheet: 'We have always been as we are. " "Isn't that just what we thought about ourselves -- until they landedr George's tired eyelids came open wide. "Are you thinking what I -- " ably knows enough to bugger their receiver records. It wouldn't take Capellan is to us?" "Bobol" put in Mrs. Peabody, from some ambush. "Bobo will do nicely," I went on. "Now we work up the exact scenery -- " "ut, Jesus -- talk about forlorn chances -- " protested George. "Any chance beats no chance. Besides, it's a better chance than you think. Some day I'll tell you about irrational sex phobias, Fve had some unique data. Rit now we've got to get this perfect, that's all. No slips. You cook it and Fm going to vet Twice," But I didn't My fever went up, and they put me back in the cooler. in to tell me things like the ore-piles on Luna had quit growing, and the crew was evidently busy air-sealing the hold. How was George doing? Great In my more lucid moments I realized George probably didn't need any riding -- after all, he'd trained on those Mongolian yak parties. If this were public history I'd give you the big drama of those nine days, the technical problems that got licked, the human foul-ups that squeaked by. Like the twenty-four hours in which the U.S. military was insisting on monitoring the show through a channel that would have generated an echo -- their scientists said no, but the President finally trusted ours and killed that. Or the uproar when we found out, about Day Five, that the French hsid independently come up with a scheme of their own, and were trying to talk privately to Mavrua -- at a time when his Capellan chief was around, too. The President had to get the U.N. Secretary and the French Premiere's mother-in-law to hold that. That let the cat out of the first bag; the high-level "push to get in the act began. And there was the persistent intrusion from our own Security side, who wanted to hitch Mavrua up to some kind of interstellar polygraph to run a check on him. And the discovery, at the last minute, of a flaw in our scanning pulse which would have left a fatal trace, so that new equipment had to be assembled and lofted to the satellite relay all one sleepless night. Oh, there was drama, dl right. George got quite familiar with the sight of the President pulling on his pants. Or I could paint you the horror visions now growing in all our minds, of snow that never stopped, of glaciers forming and grinding down from the poles across the world's aramately trying to jam themselves into the shrinking, foodless equatorial belt Of how few would survive. A great and dramatic week in world history -- during which our hero, in actud fact, was worrying mostly about an uncontrolled staph colony in his cracked pelvis and dreaming of dragging seals home to his igloo off Key West. "How're your teeth, baby?" I asked what seemed to be a soUd version fogs. I had the mad notion that her head had been resting on my arm cast. "Teeth. Like for chewing blubber. That's what Eskimo women do." She drew back primly, seeing I was conscious. "It's getting out. Max. Some wise money is starting to slip South." "Best stick with me, baby. I have a complete arctic camping outfit." She put her hand on my head then. Nice hand. "Sex will get you nowhere," I told her. "In times to come it's the girls who can chew hides who'll get the men," She blew smoke in my face and left. IF V O n Day Six there was a diversion. The Capellan party who had landed in China were now partying around the Pacific on their way to Since Authority was still sitting on all the vital information, the new batch of Girls from Capella were as popular as ever with the public. Behind the scenes there was a hot debate in progress about how they could be used as hostages. To me this was futile -- what could we get but promises? Meanwhile their launch was sitting unattended at Mexico City, showing no signs of the various cosmic can-openers we had tried. All the United Powers could do was to englobe it with guard devices and a mob of assorted special troops. On Day Six the three Girls went fishing off a Hawaiian atoll, in a catamaran. They were inshore of their naval escort. One of them yawned, said something. Mexico went Whirr, let out a blast that incinerated a platoon of Marines and took off. A Jap pilot earned his family a pension by crashing it at # feet with his atomicwarheads aboard. As far as we could find out, he never even caused a course correction. It came scorching down on the atoll just as the girls drifted up to the beach. They sauntered over and were inside before the naval watchdogs got their heads out of their radar hoods. Two minutes later they were out of atmosphere. So much for the great hostage plan. After this I kept dreaming it was getting colder. On Day Seven I thought I saw rhododendron leaves outside my window hanging straight down, which they do at # Fahrenheit Mrs. Peabody had to come over to tell me the ship was still on Luna, and it was # outsid Day Nine was it. fiiey rolled me over to George's projection room for the show. We had one of the two slave-screens, the U.N. had the other. The Chief hadn't wanted that -- partly from the risk of detection, but mostly because it was ninety-nine to one die thing would bomb out. But too many nations knew we were trying something. I was late, due to a flat tire on my motorized coffin. George's masterpiece was already running when they wedged me through the doors. In the dimness I could make out the Chief up front, with a few cabinet-type sachems and the President. The rest seemed to be just two-feather Indians like me. I guess the President wanted to be in his own family when it bombed. The screen show was pretty impressive. A big Capellan hunched over her console, sweat streaming down her face, yelling a low steely contralto into her mike. I couldn't get the words, but I picked up the repetitive cadence. The screen flickered -- George had worked some authentic interstellar noise into the send -- and then it jumped a bit, like an early flic, when the ship goes down with Pearl White lashed to a bunk. There were intermittent background crashes, getting louder, and one cut-off screech. Then the back wall started to quake, and the door went out in a laser flare. Something huge kicked it all the way down, and Bobo came in. O h my aunt, he was beautiful. Bobo Updyke, the sweetest monster I've known. I heard a chair squeak beside me, and there he was beaming at his image on the screen. They'd fixed him up with love. Nothing crude -- just a bit more browridge on what he had, and the terrible great paws very clean. The uniform -- a little raw Mau-Mau on a solid base of mechanized S.S. schrechlichheit. Somebody had done something artfully inhuman about the eyes, too. For an instant he just stood there. The crashes quit, like held breath. There's rape and rape, you know. Most rape has some kind of warmth in it, some kind of acknowledgment of the victim's existence. That's why most women aren't really scared of it. But there's another kind. The kind a machine might do, or a golem, or a torture device. The kind that is done by a thing to a thing. That's what they'd put into Bobo, and that's what the Capellan on the screen turned up her face to look at. All sweet Auschwitz. Did I say Bobo is seven feet two plus his helmet which brushed the feet? It was something to see. He put out one huge hand. (I heard that footage was reshot twenty-two times.) His other hand was coming toward the camera. More backgroimd crash. The last you saw between Bobo's oncoming fingers was her uniform starting to rip and more hulking bodies beyond ttie open door. Blackness -- a broken shriek and a male, well, noise. The sound went dead. Our lights came on. Bobo giggled faintly. People were getting up. I her. She had some blue gook on her eyelids, and her hair was combed. I decided I'd give her a break on the blubber-chewing. People moved around, but the tension didn't break. There was nothing to do but wait. In one comer was Harry with a console. Somebody brought in coffee; somebody else brought something in a napkin that gurgled into the chief's dixie cups. There was a little low talk that stopped whenever Harry twitched. The world knows what happened, of course. They didn't even stop for f their ore. It was # minutes later that Harry's read-outs began to purr softly. Up on Luna, power was being used to close airlocks, shift busbars. Generators were running up. The great sensitive ears yearning at them from the Bank quivered. At minute # the dials started to swing. The big ship was moving. It floated off its dock in the Alps, drifted briefly in an expanding orbit, and then Harry's board went wild as it kicked itself outward. Toward Pluto. "Roughly one hundred and seventy-nine degrees from the direction of Capella," said George, as they rolled me out. "If they took Harry's advice, they're working their way home via the Magellanic Clouds." Next day we got the electronic snow as they went into space drive. IF To leave us, we may hope, for another couple of milleimia. The official confirmation of their trajectory came on the day they let me try walking. (I told you this was history as I lived it.) I walked out of the front door, over a chorus of yelps. TlUie came along to help. We never did refer to precisely what it was that made her able to grip my waist and let me lean on her shoulder. Or why we were suddenly in Magnider's buying steak and stuff to take to my place. Sbe was distrustful of my claim to own garlic, and insisted on buying fresh. The closest we came -- then or ever -- to an explanation was over the avocado counter. "It's all relative, isn't it?" she said to the avocadoes. "It is indeed," I replied. A nd really, that was it. If the Capellans could bring us the news that we were inferior mutations, somebody could bring them the word that they were inferior mutations. If they had women bigger and hairier than sur men, somebody else could have men bigger and hairier than they. If Mama could come back and surprise her runt relations. Papa could appear and surprise Mama. -- Always provided that you had a half-pint female who could look and talk like a Capellan for seven minutes of tape, and a big guy who could impersonate a walking nightmare, and one disaffected alien to juggle frequencies so a transmission from a nearby planet came through as a send from home base. And a pop genius like George to screen the last stand of the brave Capellan HQ officer, sticking to her mike to warn all ships to save themselves from the horror overwhelming the home planet... It had been Harry's touch to add that the invaders had long-range ship detector sweeps out and ordering all ships to scatter to the ends of the Galaxy. So, all things being potentially relative, everybody down to Mrs. Peabody got a medal from bringing Papa home. And my mama came home with me, although I still don't know how she is on chewing blubber. Stories from the Planet Earth! containing science-fiction stories from On sale now! I # IF I T he eye of the telescope looked upward giddy miles to where the last sphere, its sides pierced with yawning holes, swayed above the city. A teacher from Baton Rouge had paid her quarter, looked, and left, a moment before. A man from Des Moines would come soon, but he would be too late. For a few sec- onds a figure stood at one of those holes; then another who struggled with him; then both were gone. The subway rocked and jerked in the malicious way subways have on Sunday afternoons, when the rocking and jerking are out of harmony with the mood of the time and the people on the trains, people crossing the city te visit relatives or seek the cool of the ocean. The motion did not seem to bother Bonnie, who sat with her hands upon the purse in her lap with her arms enclosing protectively and possessively the scarcely noticeable swelling. Bonnie was pregnant. That made all the difference, as Joe told himself. Bonnie was pregnant She was a tall, rather lanky girl, colored Scotch-Irish around her red flushed elbows and hands. She wore a black maternity skirt with a hole for the belly in front -- it had been lent her by her brother Chuck's wife -- and a voluminous blue smock like the uniform of one of those semipublic institutions whose inmates are issued clothing that does not seem to be a uniform until two of them are seen together. Joe was IrishItalian, darker than she, with big hands and forearms. A group of men on the far side of the car stared for a hioment at Bonnie, and he glowered at them. He wanted to ask them what the hell they thought they were looking at, but he knew Bonnie would be upset. He embarrassed her too often anyway, too often for him to do it when he could see it coming. Besides, someone might get really tough, and Bonnie would become friened for him and cry, sniveling and choking with shame as she wept because it had been a crime to cry in Bonnie's family. For himself he did not care if someone did get tough. Not that he wanted to die. 'T think it's the next stop after this," Bonnie said above the clatter. It was the first time she had spoken since they had boarded the train. Joe nodded. ' He would be glad to get out. He had seldom been outside New York before, and the few occasions when be had were associated in his mind with pleasure, with sunny skies and fragrant winds, those one-day trips on which someone brought a portable television so that they would not be bereft of the familiar computer-written jokes, and someone else his friends and the friends of his friends so that the reassurance of the crowd was with them too. He played softball in the hi grass of meadows and enjoyed it much mcnre than the semi-pro which had occujned his weekday evenings since he quit night school. "Come on." Bonnie was puUing at his shoulder. "This is our stop. You feel all right? It doesn't hurt?" He stood up, his broad body almost waited for her to stand too. The train bumped to a stop. At the gate of the fair grounds Bonnie showed the pass Chuck had given her, telling the guard a lot more about Chuck's job selling for the plastics company and what his connection was with the fair than the guard wanted to know. Joe stood back away from them, looking up at the entrance arch wit h its twentyhell, but you could see The Thing on past it, and The Thing made it seem small. IF (M course The Thing made everything seem small. He had not been up there to see, because the elevator didn't go that liigh and he was supposed to stay away from steps, but they said you could even see The Thing from the roof of the buildings where he and Bonnie lived, way over in Yonkers. It was far higher than the Empire State building. Finally Bonnie quit talking to the guard, and he let them through the gate. "Where'd Chuck say he was going to meet us?" Joe asked. Even though he was curious to see the inside of The Thing -- especially to see it now, before the public was admitted, before any of the people they knew had seen it -- he found himself hoping Bonnie's brother would not be there. "At Howard Johnson's right at the foot of it. They've got that opened up already so the people working on the pavilions from the different countries can eat there, and the reporters." He was walking a pace behind her, and Bonnie looking at him seriously over her shoulder said, "You didn't really want to come, did you, Joe?" "Sure I did. I was going crazy sitting around the apartment all day." Bonnie pursed her lips, turning to look up at him and seeming to understand everything with her blue eyes. "I know you were. But you feel bad about Chuck. Envious." He said, "No." But it was true. She waited for him to catch up to her and took his hand. "I just want to tell you that I'm not mad because of it. Chuck isn't either. We understand." Joe said nothing after that, just looking up at The Thing as they walked along. Thousands upon thousands of colored balls linked together with slender looking tubular stems he knew were really big enough to hold moving belts that would carry sightseers from ball to ball. Although there was no wind down here on the ground it was blowing hard high up. You could see the top of The Thing lean away from the wind. The engineers said (Joe had read it in Time) that even a hurricane couldn't knock it down, but it looked as though it were about to go as he watched. He wondered what it would be like to be up in it with the wind blowing it like that. C huck was waiting for them it front of Howard Johnson's jingling the change in his pocket as he stood there, the way he always did. Chuck was ten years older than Bonnie. He had been selling those plastics ever since he got out of school. Two years ago, when the fair was just in the planning stage, he had landed the contract for the stuff that went into The Thing, and since then he had it knocked. The commissions were making him rich; you could see it and not just from the clothes he wore. It was in the way he stood, and the way he wore his hat. That was a hat that said: I've got it made. I'm big time, and you'd better believe it. Chuck grinned big at him and shook his hand with his own soft one in that up-and-down way he had until Joe mashed it a little to see him wince. Joe's own hands had been getting soft during the months since the accident, but there were still firm and not flabby like Chuck's. He swore to himself he'd never let them get that way, either; he'd find something he could do, even if it was only wood carving or something silly like that. "Come on in," Chuck said when Joe had let go of his hand. "Ed Baker -- he's the guy I told you about, the chief engineer -- is waiting in there already. I just stepped outside to look for you." The engineer rose when Bonnie came to the table. He was a tall, man, thin as a rake, with a sharp "V" of hair beginning to gray at the sides. Chuck introduced both of them, Bonnie first, and beckoned to one of the uniformed girls who were waiting on the tables. "Chuck here says you people'd like to see the inside of The Thing." Baker had a noticeable New Engird twang. "And if you would, now's the time to do it They've sold tickets for six months in advance already." "Is it finished?" Bonnie asked timidly. Chuck lauded. "Not quite inside, sir. But it won't come down with you in it, if that's what you mean. Finishing up the displays is Ed's job, though. And believe me, he can make the ones that aren't complete more interesting than the stuff near the bottom that's ready to rolL" "There aren't any steps, are there?' Bonnie looked at Joe, and he wanted to sink into the floor. He knew what was coming. Baker shook his head. "All the rises are by belt Does your husband have a heart condition? Chuck mentioned something." Bonnie's brother held his fingers an impossible distance apart. "He's got a nail in his heart this big. A great big galvanized nait" B aker's eyebrows went up, and Joe said quickly, "It's only fiveeighths of an inch long, really. From a spiking gun -- one of those tools that shoot a shell like a .# so that you can nail furring strips onto concrete." "But it's in your heart?" the engineer was hf astonished, half skepticaL "In one of the chambers. The doctor told me the name of it, but I forget now." "My God, what happened?" "You know how you got to push the barrel against someth and pull the trigger at the same time to make it go off?" Baker nodded. "I've used them; they're practically foolproof." "Yeah. Well, this guy at work was fooling around with one. I guess he must have had his finger on the trigger, and he bumped the end against a steel  beam." Chuck broke in: "It wasn't square against it, you see, Ed. Kind of at a slant So the spike caromed off the beam and hit Joe. The doctor told Bonnie it happens with bullets once in a while, especially small ones like maybe buckshot. They can go right through the wall of a man's heart -- just puncture it -- and stay there. heals up behind them." IF Baker picked up one of the cups of coffee the waitress was handing around, and although his hand was steady Joe could see that he was shaken. "They can't get it out?" "He won't let them," Bonnie said. "I've begged him." "Listen," Joe told them, "I don't like to go over all this again. Let me say my piece now, and then lt's shut up about it and talk about The Thing. That's what we came here for." "You don't have to -- " Baker began, but Joe interrupted him with a gesture. "Like I've explained to Bonnie a thousand times -- " he was addressing the engineer alone now -- I haven't got a lot of life insurance, just what the union gives everybody. And if they take it out it'll have to be what they call open heart surgery, where the chances aren't so good. This way, as long as I'm alive I draw workman's compensation, and medical benefits and all that kind of stuff. If I drop over some day Bonnie'll get the insurance anyway, so then she won't be no worse off. Now tell us about The Thing, huh? What's it supposed to be, anyway?" "Oh, you know." Bonnie seemed to be as relieved as he was at the change of the subject. "You read to me about it out of the paper." "Sure," Joe said, "but I want to hear from an expert. The papers always get something wrong. What is it, Mr. Baker?" "You'd need a biochemist to really tell you. I can only repeat the same things you've already read; that it's actually a giant model of a molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid -- what genes are made of, so in the fundamental sense it's what determines that each of us has the heredity he has." Bonnie asked, "And it looks like that?" She was staring but the window toward the base of The Thing. "Somewhat like that. We've followed the normal conventions for making a molecular model, of course. Those balls, as the public calls them, represent atoms in the model, although each one is actually a hollow sphere thirty yards in diameter. The black ones are carbon, the light blue ones oxygen, and so on." The engineer's interest in his work was infectious. Joe asked, "But it really does have that crazy shape? had the same shape, everybody'd be the same, Joe. Ed, you've got to excuse him; Joe's not too technically oriented." #Tt does all have that general douX ble helix construction," Baker said stiffly, "and it's incorrect to like the one we've modeled here determines its owner's complete heredity. It takes the entire set of human molecule only determines the makeup of a single type of cell, although even so its structure seems to be minutely different for each person. Only identical twins can readily accept tissue grafts from one another, so one individual's cells must be subtly different from another's -- even though the grafts are from corresponding parts of the body, liver tissue. "Well, what kind af a cell would this make?" Bonnie asked. "And who is it from?"  Baker shrugged. 'This is just a far as I know. I'm only an electrical engineer and Tm not sure even a Ph.D. Wochemist could tell you what sort of a cell would contain it from looking at it." "It could be a brain cell," Joe said unexpectedly, and the other three stared at him. "It could be," Baker agreed after a moment's pause. "It would be strange, wouldn't it, if there actually were someone who had that exact pattern." Chuck said airily, "The odds are "I know, but suppose someone did." Baker seemed to be talking half to himself. "Would the molecule itself recognize its own structure the way that a set of cell transducers read the history of gene structure? There must be a logic to the geometry we are completely incapable of recognizing; but it is the logic that makes all life possible, and the human race only stays alive because it's capable of duplicating itself endlessly -- " 'Tell them how big The Thing is, really," Chuck demanded. "Three that's the scale this thing here is built to, Bonnie. It's the biggest model of an#rthing ever built, and the tallest building in the world at the same time. And do you know what it is that makes something like this possible?" "Yes," Joe said. "Glass fibers." Chuck was only slightly crestfallen. "That's right, what we call monomolecular strands. They're only one molecule thick, stronger than hell and we embed them in high strength resin -- really key them in. Every one of those balls was made out of two bowls from the same mold, fitted together, and the tubes that connect them were extruded and cut off to length. After that all they had to do was hang them up there after they'd installed the partition floors that cut the top half of the ball that you see off from the bottom half where the machinery is." Baker seemed embarrassed by Chuck's exuberance, but he nodded verification. "We didn't even use a scaffold. Just picked up the pieces with helicopters and fitted them into place. I suppose you saw it on television." "And you've got displays inside all of them?" Bonnie asked. "That's what I want to hear about." The engineer smiled. "Fm glad you do, because it's the displays and the analytical circuits, not the structure, that are really my responsibility. The civil engineering boys have done their job and left. They only come back to read their strain gauges every once in a while." Joe scarcely listened while Baker explained the displays. His attention was somewhat in his chest, in the area just beneath his breastbone, where a strange tightness had gripped him. He remembered the X-rays he had been shown; the spike moving, tumbling in the current of his blood, with each beat of his heart. The doctors had said that if it lodged in a valve... "Come on." IF Suddenly they were all standing up pushing back their chairs and setting down their coffee cups. He rose too feeling a little confused. There was no point in making a .fuss; he would simply have to go on behaving normally until he fell over on his face, if that were what he was going to do... Outside the engineer led them to the foot of The Thing. J oe stood a little behind the others, his head thrown back to stare up at the dizzily swaying top thousands of feet above him. A droning little business jet of an airplane went past. It was only a tiny silver cross against the sky, but the lacework of The Thing towered over it like a thunderhead. With dizzied eyes he tried to follow the complexities of the spiraling pattern, becoming more certain as he did that some secret of colossal importance was contained in it. Bonnie was touching his elbow; he looked down at her at last, the earth rocking under his feet. "What's the matter?" he asked. The entrance to The Thing was still shut. "Something's wrong with the door. Mr. Baker's key won't make it work." Baker said, "Come along, and we'll go to the shop and get someone who can open this up for us. It's at the back of the grounds." Joe took a step forward as Bonnie released his elbow, then stopped, afraid he was going to lose his balance. The vertigo which had seized him while he was staring upward required a few seconds to subside. Bonnie and Chuck were leaving him. trailing after Baker. None of them looked back to see if he were coming too. Half in anger, half to have something against which to steady himself, he went over to the big door instead of following them. It was massive, impressive and somber. He grasped the handle and pulled back. He was a big man, owning the strength that comes of hard physical work done every day, and the accident had done nothing to change that. The door gave almost imperceptibly. He pulled harder, throwing his weight backwards. The door rasped a quarter inch more, then suddenly gave free. "Stuck, he muttered to himself. He looked at his wife's back; she was almost out of shouting distance now. For half a second he thought of hurrying after her, then decided against it. Let them all walk to wherever it was they were going, and back. He would make his own inspection of The Thing -- the lower levels at least -- and be ready to laugh at them when they returned. T he base chamber was dark until he entered it. Then the lights came up slowly like the illumination in a theater. No doubt in coming through the doorway he had stepped on a pressure-sensitive plate or interrupted a photocell beam. A man in a white laboratory smock stepped forward smiling a greeting, and it was an instant before Joe realized that the man was an automaton activated, like the lights, by his entry. "Good day, sir," the robot began. "Are you interested in a guided tour of the exhibit in this atom?" "Sure. That's what I came for." It was amusing to address the mechanical toy as though it were in fact a human being. "I will be delighted to show you around. I will form my next tour in two minutes." "Why can't we start now?" The robot shook his head regretfully. "My programming requires a two-minute wait for others who might wish to join us." "Okay." Joe shrugged, grinning. "You don't mind if I look around a little on my own while you're waiting, do you? Nobody's really going to come anyway, you know." "There is always that possibility," the mechanical guide admitted diplomatically. "In the meantime you have the freedom of the exhibit." Joe left him standing, still smiling, by the entrance -- apparently oblivious to the fact that Joe had closed it behind him. Most of the material on display in this chamber of The Thing was in the form of #D projections -- objects solid and real to the eye but insubstantial. Mutated fruit flies, magnified a hundred times, crawled about a section of the floor. He found himself wanting to kick them away when they approached his legs and he went past them without bothering to read the printed explanations of their grotesque abnormalities that floated in the air above them. Beyond the fruit flies an experiment still more bizarre claimed his attention. An egg, palely translucent, stood upright on its large end. The small end was two feet higher than his head, and the yolk could be seen through the shell -- a golden gjobe showing a single dark speck. As he watched the speck grew, developed a head, wings and legs. It seemed to writhe with the energy of its thrust toward being. Behind him the robot said, "My tour is ready to form, sir. Would you care to go back to the flies, or shall we begin here?" Joe said a little sarcastically, "Where's all the other people on this tour?" "There are no others," the robot replied in an unruffled voice. "If you are expecting friends or members of your family to join you I will be happy to wait until they arrive." "They won't be along for a while yet," Joe told him. "I think I'll go ahead without them." He was still staring at the growing chick, now nearly ready to burst from its shell. iC'his display," the robot said JL chattily, "shows a White Leghorn egg in incubation; the unfolding of the miracle of life. It is designed to illustrate the sequence of alterations every embryo undergoes before the final form is realized. The old naturalists used to say that every creature had to climb its own family tree to qualify for the privilege of birth, and although we are no longer accustomed to employ such quaint phrases the old tag illuminates a truth." The chick was scratching weakly at the shell with its egg tooth. Joe took his eyes from it long enough to glance at the guide. "What do you mean, climb his family tree? "He goes briefly through the forms of each of his forebears -- " IF "His father was a chicken, wasn't he? And he's a chicken too. How could you tell whether he looks like his father or not?" "That's not what is meant -- " the robot began. "I know darn well it's not what you meant," Joe told him irritably. "You meant this chicken here goes up through evolution from just one little blob like a germ. So why couldn't you say so instead of all that junk about family trees? If that was true it would mean everybody has their father and grandfather and all that inside them. You know what the trouble with you and all those smart guys that set you up is? You think that anybody that went to college is so stupid they've got to have everything explained to them like a little kid." "I'm sorry, sir," the robot said. "But it is interesting to consider that since each of us receives half his genetic structure from each parent -- " "Oh, shut up." The chick had broken the shell now and was struggling through the hole it had created. The robot remained obediently silent, and for a few seconds Joe watched it without speaking. Then he asked abruptly, "Where's the horn on its legs?" "Sir?" "I said, where's the horn on its legs. You said it was a Leghorn chicken and I'll bet you don't know why it's called that." There was a barely perceptible hesitation before the robot replied, "No, I don't sir. I fmd the information is not in my memory banks. Please rest assured that your question had been recorded, and that the answer will be supplied to my program as part of the next reprogramming session." "I can tell you right now," Joe said sourly. "Leghorn's a place in Italy. That's where they got this kind of chicken from." The chick, its magnified image as tall as an ostrich, was struggling to its feet. The robot said nothing. "Here's some more for you, smart guy. Who was the King of the Cowboys on the (Ad TV movies, huh? And what year was it the Mets iRrst won the pennant? Where was Grand Central before they tore it down?" The robot hesitated again, then said, "I'm afraid the answers to none of your questions are in my memory baiis, sir. Would you like to sec the other exhibits in this atom?" Joe was walking away, "No." "In that case, sir, the entrance to the pedestrian conveyor which will take you to the next atom on the regular tour is on your right. If you wish to leave the complex entirely, you may use the door by which you entered." "Does the next place have another dummy like you in it?" "Oh, no, sir. Each atom has a completely different guide." Not certain why he did it, Joe turned to his right and stepped onto the silently moving belt. IV T he upward angle was even steeper than he had expected, but the surface of the belt was ribbed with ridges almost like steps. The lights of the chamber behind him faded until he was left in near darkness. It reminded him of the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island, where he had gone once with Bonnie before they were married. Her perfume had seemed intensified in the dark until it was all around him, and in the boat ahead another couple, a boy rad a girl he had not noticed particularly when they had gotten in, had made little animal sounds like chipmunks mating. Nothing had mattered then. Both Bonnie and he had believed that in spite of everything he would be a success. He would go to night school, take a Saturday job. ... And nothing, nothing at all, had worked out as they had planned. Ahead of him light grew; not merely because he was approaching it, but as in the chamber below because the voltage was being turned on gradually. He could make out the displays in the area immediately in front of the end of the connecting tube now, and a flicker of motion beyond them. He stepped off the belt. An elderly man came forward to greet him. He wore a black cassock and a Roman collar. Good morning, sir," the new guide said in a gentle, slightly accented voice. T am Father Gregor Mendel. Good morning, madam." With a start Joe turned to look behind him at the person the cybernaut "priest" was addressing. A young woman, almost a girl, was stepping from the belt. "Hello," (she had a soft voice that was somehow familiar,) "do you mind if I join your tour?" Joe shook his head, then remembering his manners said, "No, not at all." He was looking at the girl's clothing: a skirt fully eight inches shorter than was currently fashionable, and a blouse fantastically patterned with interlaced squares. "Where did you come from?" he asked. The girl smiled, brushing back her long, straight hair. "I came in with you, actually. When you opened the door." "I didn't see you." After a moment he realized how hostile the flat statement sounded and added, "I mean, I'm surprised I didn't notice you down below." "I kept in the background. Fm afraid that's rather a fault of mine." The figure of Mendel made a little gesture of welcome. "This is nice, very nice. The two of you will make an ideal party to tour my little exhibit" "Wasn't there somebody here before us?" Joe asked. "I thought I saw him go out the exit over there just as we came in." Mendel nodded. "There was, my son. But he did not stay. I didn't even have time to speak to him." Puzzled, Joe said, "I don't see how he could of gotten in ahead of me." T he girl tossed her head. "It doesn't matter, does it?" "I guess not." She smiled suddenly. "Do you know that the only one who's formally introduced himself here is Father Mendel? ithough I know your name's Joe -- let's say I overheard some people talking to you in Howard Johnson's." IF He told her his full name, adding unnecessarily, "Tm married." 'Tm not," the girl said, "but I'm engaged." She held up her left hand so that he could see the ring she wore. "My name's Mary Hogan." He felt an unexpected warmth toward her. "That's my mother's maiden nan There's a coincidence." "That's nothing." She was grinning now. "You have the same last name as the boy I'm engaged to." Mendel cleared his throat. "I'm afraid my atom is one of the dullest, but are you ready to see it now, my children?" "What's it about?" the girl inquired. "My discovery of genetics. I used garden peas, you know, and all my experiments are condensed here for you. The idea of the designers, I suppose, is to teach the principles in the same way in which there were originally discovered. I hope it is a good one." To please the girl Joe followed the monk-scientist from display to display, looking at tall and short pea plants and genetic charts which appeared in glowing lines in the air; but he could not fix his attention on the exhibits or Mendel's rambling, accented lecture. The brief glimpse he had gotten of the man who had fled the exhibit just as he entered exerted a hypnotic attraction on his mind so that he found himself recreating that flicker of furtive motion over and over again in his imagination while Mendel droned on. At last it was over, and the diminutive priest-robot made a little bow to them, then stood, smiling shyly. "That was wonderful," the girl said. "A wonderful discovery." "He didn't do it," Joe told her and hated himself for saying it as soon as he saw the hurt in her face. "I know I didn't," the robot admitted in its gentle voice, "but can't you think of me as a sort of actor?" "I suppose so," Joe mumbled. "I look much as the real Mendel did, and insofar as is posMy my logic pattern has been shap to dilicate his as revealed in his works. Although I admit we can't hope for the accuracy obtainable when the genetic pattern of one of the subject's descendants is available for study. Thus far you two are the only audience to whom I have lectured. But I felt as proud, when I was talking to you a moment ago, as I would ve if the work Mendel did was really my own." The girl whispered in Joe's ear, "Ask his blessing -- it will make him feel better." Before he was fully aware of what he was doing he had dropped to his knees. He heard himself mumble, "Bless me. Father." A n expression of bewilderment passed over Mendel's face. "Are you Catholic, my son?" he asked. "Does that matter? Couldn't you give me your blessing anyway?" "I suppose it doesn't really," Mendel said, "and no, I couldn't." He reached down and drew Joe to his feet again. "This is like the story," he continued in his mild voice, "they used to tell about one of the Emperor Franz Josefs visits to Baden. They were going to perform one of theoperas based on Goethe's Faust for hiiD, and when one of the emperor's courtiers brought his little daughter behind the scenes in the theater she saw an actor dressed as the pope and asked for his blessing." Mary Hogan asked curiously, "And did he bless her?" Mendel shook his head. "He explained that he was only a make-believe pope, and when she understood she said, 'Then bless my doll. Just so, I cannot bless this young man, my daughter, but I will bless you." His fingers sketched a cross in the air, and he murmured a latin phrase. The girl knelt. When it was over the two of them stepped onto the belt that would take them to the next hemispherical room, and the darkness of the tube closed around them. "Why would he bless you," Joe asked "and not me?" "Maybe you were too sincere about it." He felt the girl's fingers touch his hand. "It was sweet though." He could sense her beside him in the blackness; and unexpectedly, overwhelmingly, the certainty came to him that they had waited together like this before, that the sensation he now felt was familiar through countless repetitions. He tried to recall when this might have been and if he had not perhaps known this I before he had met Bonnie, or before they had married and he had cut off his contacts with other women. But no memory of her came, and he found his recollection forced backward instead to a place he had nearly forgotten: the tenement apartment in which he lived with his parents when he was very small. There had been only one bedroom, with the double bed on one side and his own with the high wooden railings on the other. An electric fflgn outside the window flashed blue, then yellow, blue, then yellow, then went dark. Now in the darkness he found himself waiting for the blue flash again, and the bright spark when his mother drew on her cigarette, just as he had on nights when he would awaken to see her waiting for his father to return home. Instead white light gleamed in front of them, the lights of the next chamber springing into life. wonder what this one will be," the girl said, but he did not answer her. He was looking for the man he had glimpsed in the chamber below, somehow certain that he would be here too. He was, but he remained hidden until they were almost ready to get off the belt. V P erhaps because it was so crowded this exhibit seemed smaller than the others. Poultry cackled and quacked around the attenuated legs of a giraffe. Huge beetles climbed the walls and, slipping, fell back to the floor to wiggle and struggle before they could turn themselves over and climb again. Then, on the far side of the chamber, peering from behind a huge Empire wardrobe of oiled walnut which stood in Napoleonic grandeur among the animals, Joe saw the man's eyes. For an instant they stared at him. He received an impression of IF malice unfathomable. Then they were gone. A hunched, hurrying figure scuttled like one of the beetles, darting from behind the wardrobe and disappearing into the darkness of the next exit. He yelled and jumped from the end of the steeply rising belt, wading through the insubstantial animals that surged about his feet; but as he reached the middle of the room the doors of the wardrobe flew apart like the doors of some Christmas toy, and a man with bandaged eyes stepped directly into his path. They collided and went crashing to the resilient plastic floor. By the time he got to his feet again he knew it was too late. With the girl's help he pulled the robot erect, wondering all the while, rather vaguely as he mit have wondered about some back page story in a newspaper, whether or not the exertion he had Just undergone would kill him. He could feel the thumping of his heart as clubbed blows from inside his chest. Bon soir, the blind robot said. "I am Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine De Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck." He made a courtly bow. "What happened to you?" the girl asked suddenly. She pointed, and Joe saw that Lamarck's right hand was missing. It seemed to have been tom or hacked away; the plastisol flesh was ragged around the amputation, and color-coded wires, blue and yellow, dangled from the stump. 'T fear. Mademoiselle," Lamarck murmured, "that there may be a vandal in our complex." He seemed ashamed of the injury that so clearly revealed his nature, and thrust the injured limb behind him. "Yes, and I almost caught him," Joe said. "If you hadn't jumped out of that big cabinet when you did I would have. What were you doing in there anyway?" Tt is a service closet," Lamarck explained. "Each atom has one, equipped to perform routine maintenance on the guide assigned to it and to make minor repairs. When the vandal released me I went in hoping to have something done about my hand; when I heard the three of you coming, however, I felt that since I retained sufficient functioning to perform my office I should do so." A tall wading bird, insubstantial as mist, flew through his body as he spoke, its stilt legs trailing behind it. #hree of us?" Startled, Joe jL glanced back at the tube from which he and Mary Hogan had entered. A second girl was standing near the end of the belt She was taller than Mary, but seemed even younger, coltishly unsure of herself. Like Mary's, her skirt ended well above her knees; but short blonde hair peeped from under her close fitting hat, and she carried a beaded handbag with a long strap. Looking at the three of them she swung it nervously. "Come on," Mary gestured to her. "Join the freakout We won't put you down." T overheard you talking about someone dispging something in here." The new glrfe voice was sKrill and self-conscious. "And I just wanted to tell you it was not me." IF "We know who it was," Joe said gruffly. "It's a man, and he's ahead of us, not behind us. I'm not going to stay here and look at the exhibits. I'm going on ahead and try to get him." The resolve had formed in his mind, so it seemed to him, as he spoke; but once formed and articulated he felt that it had the force of divine law. In his imagination he saw himself dying, the spike jamming his heart action at the very moment the scuttling man he had seen come from behind in Lamarck's cabinet sprang some simple, horrible, trap that would leave his body mangled -- and he did not care. "Wait!" the blind robot grasped him by the arm with his one hand. "If you don't see the things here -- if you don't listen to what I must tell you about them -- you will miss the point of all of it." 'T think he should go." The voice was the girl's, shrill and insistent. 'I think he should too," Mary Hogan said. "There's no' telling how much damage that thing loose up ahead may do." "I shall ask the master computer." Lamarck's blind face looked at no one in particular. "Monsieur" when none of the programmers are here the master computer is the highest authority. Will you abide by the decision of the master computer?" The girl with the beaded bag said, "It's the unit that controls the whole Thing. All of it; all the exhibits." Joe wanted to shake himself free. He could have done it easily -- tibe tiny servo motors which powered robols' actions were strong only on televised honor dramas -- but he found himself unable to do so. Lamarck's aged face, although he knew it to be a plastisol mask, his sigihtless eyes and his intangible air of genius in defeat, held him. "All right," he said at length. "I'll do whatever your computer says. How do we consult it?" "I can contact it from the service closet. Monsieur." iLamarck released his arm and wheeled with uncanny accuracy to face the Empire wardrobe. The two girls watched him expressionlessly. M soon as the doors had closed Joebolted for die exit leading to the next atom. H e did not wait for the belt to carry him this time, but scrambled up it. Behind him the unsteady tapping of high-heeled shoes told him that at least one of the two girls was following him. The atom into which he burst held Charles Darwin, but the great scientist lay tumbled on the floor, his midsection a mass of smashed circuit elements which a Galapagos tortoise near him appeared to regard incuriously. Moths big as swans covered every wall, their wings stiffly extended to make an incredible pattern of iridescent color. He was bending over the inert Darwin when something whistled past his head. He heard it strike the wall behind him and fall clattering to the floor as he looked up. The vandal was no longer hiding. He stood near a scale model of H.M.S. Beagle, his left hand grasping a bundle of slender rods with ragged, razor-sharp ends. His rit arm was drawn back as thou to cast a spear, and as Joe watched he whipped it forward; there was barely time to jerk himself to one side as the jagged sliver hurtled toward him. With a solid thudding sound it buried itself in Darwin's chest. He jerked it out as he drew himself erect, poised to dodge the next missile. It came flying at his face. As he ducked, the vandal leaped onto the belt which would carry him to the next atom. That atom was empty a moment after Joe arrived, but a metal sliver plucked at his shirt as he jumped from the belt, and he saw his quarry disappear into the next tube. After that he lost count of the atoms through which they passed, and he no longer noticed what displays they held and whether they were complete or not. The structure of The Thing was complex, and most of the atoms possessed several radiating tubes so that the figure he was pursuing could easily have shaken him off. But he did not seem to wish to do so; and when Joe grew too fatigued to climb along the steep belts that carried them higher and higher he found that he lost no ground in the pursuit. Always, at the end of each tube he glimpsed the man running for the next belt. And it was always the belt which would loft them highest that he finally chose. But as he continued the pursuit Joe came to realize that he also was followed. Behind him the sound of the two girls' feet grew until it was the roar of a crowd, high pitched and quick voiced. At last they reached an atom which had no floor, and from which no belt led, an empty globe of fiber glass with gaping holes in its sides. He saw the man he had followed waiting with a metal sliver upraised beside the lowest of the holes, and only blue sky and clouds beyond. Behind him were the hurrying noises of a hundred women. "Go ahead," he called. "What are you going to do -- jump?" The figure silhouetted against the sky only stared at him dumbly. Upright Joe walked forward, down the curving inside of the sphere that led to the level bottom, then slowly up until the man he had followed all these thousands of feet into the air and he were no more than a few yards apart. The spearlike fragment of metal rod remained poised; but the corners of the man's mouth drew down and down with each step he took until the yellowish skin must have been ready to tear under the strain and the mouth was drawn den to show the square white teeth. Then, with a gesture that was almost casual, the metal sliver was flipped into the void. With his shoulder down Joe rushed forward, struck the man, and drew him away from the edge. The man's resistance revived at the moment of contact, and for a few seconds he struggled desperately. He still held four or five pieces of metal similar to the one he had thrown away in his left hand; but Joe pinned it, then jerked one from him to drive against his throat. The struggling stopped. "at's happening," someone behind him asked. "at are those things?" VI F rom the corner of an eye he saw the girl who had called herself Mary Hogan. Behind her came the girl with the beaded bag; then as he watched, a third girl who wmre a skirt that reached h ankles. And behind her, some stepping agilely from the belt, some staggering clumsily, came woman after woman. Many were young, and some were pretty and even beautifid, but others were neither and a few were monstrouy fat. Several wore silks, but most were in plain dresses not much better than rags. 'What are those things?" Mary Hogan asked again. She was standing close to his shoulder now. "What are you going to do?" "Steel construction strips he's ripped out of something," Joe told her. "And I'm going to # him with this on -- rip him wide open. Want to watch?" He pushed one jagged end of the piece he held against the other's body. "Don't!" Joe stared down at the impassive face of the man under him and drove the splinter tighter still; the face contorted under the pressure until malice blasted from it like heat from the top of an open crucible. The girl in the long skirt dropped to her knees beside him. "Don't you know who that is?" she asked. She was not pretty, but somehow clean looking and attractive."It's a robot." Joe's voice was stubborn, although he found himself gasping for breath in the thin air. "Another cnunmy, clanking robot; a robot with my face. I'm going to wreck him." "I wasn't sure you knew who it was," the girl murmured. "You think I don't know my own face? What I'd like to know is what sort of dirty joke is being played here." "I think I can tell you," Mary Hogan said; she stooped bide the kneeling girl, pushing her long hair away from her face. "It involves who all of us are too. Have you guessed yet?" "You're robots too," Joe said bitterly. "That's why the robot pre"tending to be a priest would bless you and not me. You aren't a real person any more than this thing is." "We're more -- I'm more than that. Don't you know who I am yet?" He said something inaudible. "I couldn't hear you." She bent closer, the other women crowding around her. "You're supposed to be my mother; my mother the way she looked when I was bom. My real mother is still alive in Brooklyn." # # 'his is' the way I was when you JL were conceived," the girl said. "It's at conception that the heritage is passed." Joe nodded. "I knew it once I'd thought of it. That skirt-and-blouse outfit of yours: mini-skirts and opart prints mean '# or '#. I'm twenty-four, so that puts you just about right, and I guess the girl with the bag back there is your mother, and this one," he looked at the kneeling woman in the long skirt, "is her mother." IF Mary Hogan nodded. "Your grandmother and great grandmother, really; it wa from your cells that the transducers took the patterns. It used to be believed that only the parents' own heredity could be transmitted, but recently we've discovered that Lamarck was correct in certain respects -- every characteristic, as it exists at conception, is to some extent transmitted to the new generation. That's what he was supposed to explain to you in his atom." Joe said stubbornly, "But you're really a robot." "Physically, yes. But mentally -- spiritually if you will -- I am a replica of the young woman who became your mother. Tomorrow I will be someone else." There was sadness in her voice. "You change?" "Yes; that's the point of this entire complex. There are a hundred of us here who constitute what might be called a repertory company. As visitors enter the master computer reads a component of some randomly selected individual's genetic heritage, then programs one of us as that person's forebear." "But over and over?" Joe looked at the crowd of women. "Generation after generation? From the same person?" The girl in the long skirt said, "It wasn't supposed to work this way. But an automatic program sequence was installed that demands maximum utilization of us. With a whole crowd of visitors coming in each of us would have been assigned to a different one, but with only you in the complex... " "I got read every time I went past a thingamajig, and they're in all the tubes. I see. But what about him?" "He was the first one, really," the girl with the beaded bag said unhappily. "Only something went haywire." "Well, what went haywire? How does he fit into this?" The other girls looked at Mary Hogan. "You have a death wish. Do you realize that, Joe?" H e shook his head. "I want to live as much as anyone else." "Consciously, yes. But not subconsciously. No one who didn't want to die would make up that story of refusing surgery for his wife's sake." "How did you know... ?" "I've been contained in your body all your life; there's a carryover of information -- don't you remember that I knew your name when we first met? In so far as I am your mother -- and till my program is changed that's very far -- that carryover is all that holds me sane. Without it I would be finding myself suddenly here without an explanation at all." Joe looked down at the man he held pinned. "And that's the way you know about him too?" "Partly, and I can guess the rest. For a long time it's been known that a person's will to die could actually produce the death, and to do that it must affect a change in certain cell structures. Somehow the first time the tranducers tried to read your computer corrected for the error dn subsequent readings by automatically Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galoxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name Address Gty  State Zip Code goffer good in U. S. A. Only) rejecting all male data matrices, but it could do nothing about this one which was already programmed. He is your own personal hope for death personified." Joe clenched his teeth. "He'll get what he wants; because I'm going to kill him." "I wouldn't do that, if I were you." "Why not?" "Your death wish is strong now, I can only guess what destroying an image of yourself will do to it. You've been using that metal thing to hold him down -- look at your own chest." He looked. The opposite end of the steel sliver was as sharp as the one with which he was threatening his double. It had torn his shirt and scratched his chest until it was covered with his own blood. For a long time he stared at it. T hey found him sitting outside TTie Thing, waiting for them. Chuck yelled, "See! I told you he'd be here. He's just got too much sense to wear himself out walking around the grounds with us." In Father Mendel's room he was able to get Bonnie alone long enough to explain that he had decided to have the spike removed after all ,and had already telephoned the doctor from Howard Johnson's while he was waiting. When she asked if he were not afraid he shook his head, remembering suddenly that Bonnie was pregalways boom for advancement! T he last cars had pulled into Clark W. Kerr Memorial Parking Lot for the opening session of his new Physics I course, and Gleason was still searching frantically for the rest of his notes. Today of all days he could not afford to be late for class. It had taken all the pull he could muster to get prime time on the closed-circuit tv, and he'd surely be relegated to the early morning hours or even cancelled if he were late the monitor. He was digging hurriedly through the stacks of Physical Abstracts that had been delivered that morning, the six-foot bundle representing summaries of all the papers in his field published during the preceding week. Under one of the piles he found the missing pages of his notes and, with a relieved sigh, fitted them into the sheaf of papers in his hand. Using the camera lens as a mirror he smoothed down his rumfirst day. With only one hundred and twenty-seven research papers to his name he was lucky to have made assistant professor anyway. Quarters were dropping into parking meter slots, and the air filled with the buzz of hungry machinery clicking off the time. The big screen at the front of the lot lit up hopefully, then went dark again as Gleason, seated in his office a half-mile away, shook his head at the engineer on his pled hair, then nodded to the waiting engineer. The red light went on, and he saw his own owlishly bespectacled face staring out from the monitor. "The pursuit of knowledge," he began, "has always been the province of a handful of lonely, dedicated men..." H e felt better once class was over. It hadn't gone badly at all. There'd been some disturbance on the screen from a passing jet, and one of the filmstrips had run out before he'd finished explaining it, but otherwise the show had been technically competent. He sighed, put put down his notes on the desk, and began to burrow through the piles of abstracts that filled most of the small office. Buried in a comer he found a two-cup coffee maker, now empty. Again Gleason seethed whh the consciousness of his inferior status. Associate professors rated five-cup coffee makers and didn't have to go hunting water all the time! He thought of borrowing the larger size from the office of Professor Morgan, who had died only yesterday, but decided against it since the theft would soon be discovered by Morgan's successor, and it could mean Gleason's job. If he wanted a cup of coffee there was nothing to do but trek to the graduate students' lounge. He unearthed a chipped and blackened coffee cup, shoved a pile of abstracts away from the door and ventured into the hallway of the physics building. A sharp hiss from the office to the right of his brought him up short. Turning he found the department's other assistant professor, Gridley Farrington, peering out at him through a partially opened door. The other man, shorter than Gleason with a sharpened nose and slick, black hair, slipped from his office and confronted his colleague with a broad and strikingly insincere smile. "Off to the kiddies' lounge again?" he inquired, staring pointedly at Gleason's cup. Gleason could understand Farrington's hostility, as the poor man had An IF First Each issue of IF features a writer who hat never been published before. May's "first" writer is John Thomas, a #-yearAngeles. Recently Thomas edited Film Society Review, a monthly which he says "is published for those hardy groups who screen old movies in colleges and brokendown auditoriums everywhere." Of late he has decided to devote all his time to writing, and Publish and Perish -- believe it or not -- is his first submission and first saiel published a scant one hundred and twenty-three research papers and was thus even lower on the multiversity social scale than he. Of course seventeen of Gleason's publications had been purchased from graduate students who had dropped out before getting their degrees, but Farrington wasn't likely to have done all his own work either. "Just thought I'd get some coffee," Gleason replied, waving has cup vaguely. "It's a chance to keep in touch with the students, see what they're thinking. It's hard to get to know anybody teaching your courses over television." "Oh, sure," Farrington grinned unpleasantly. "Well, Gleason," he went on, turning apparently to what was rely on his mind, "what do you think about old Morgan dying?" "terrible thing," Gleason mumbled. "Oh, I don't mean that! I mean who do you think will get his job?" Gleason had thought of little else since Morgan's death, but he wasn't going to let Farrington know that. "Well, I suppose there are lots of IF choices. Hunnicutt could bring in a man from outside." "Ridiculous!" Farrington snapped. "Silly idea! Surely they'd choose a faculty man, someone with an -- er -- adequate publication record." "Well, probably," Gleason admitted, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He himself had been at the multiversity only a few months, a replacement in fact for Morgan, who had been promoted to an associate professorship after nineteen years on the staff. He wasn't familiar with all the nuances of departmental rivalries yet. "You'll go for the job, I suppose," Farrington ventured. "Well, if they offer it to me... " "Oh, don't play modest with me, Gleason!" The little man smoothed down the back of his slick hair. "If you want the job you've got to fight for it! Nobody can afford to wait for offers any more. Are you going to fight or not?" Gleason didn't quite understand the implications of the question. Farrington must want the job for himself, but surely the four-publication margin would be decisive if the chairman chose to recruit from his own staff. "Well," Gleason said finally, "HI probably do whatever I can to get the job, if that's what you mean." Farrington smiled nastily, but at the same time turned rather pale. "That's what I thought," he said and disappeared into his office, snapping the door shut behind him. G leason shrugged and continued on down the corridor to the graduate lounge, where he found four anonymousstudents and a luke-warm urn of coffee. He sipped some of the coffee and attempted to make conversation with the students, none of whom appeared to see any advantage in talking to an assistant professor. The belated entrance of a fifth student, however, left Gleason somewhat less than pleased. For the boy was Alec Throckmorton, a shambling, beetle-browed graduate student of minimal intelligence and doubtful competence, whose attempts to make an anxious, almost fawning desire to please rendered him doubly odious. But, since his father happened to supervise the awarding of grants through the National Science Foundation, Throckmorton was assured not only of his degree, but of a soft berth as lab assistant to the least prestigious member of the staff -- Gleason. "How ya doin', professor?" the boy demanded, slapping Gleason's shoulder and dislodging most of the contents of his coffee cup. "All ready for the big spearmint tomorrow?" Gleason recalled with a chill that the boy was scheduled to assist him the following day in a critical and perhaps dangerous investigation into the properties of one of the newer synthetic elements. "All ready, Throckmorton," he sighed. "I hope you can set up the equipment properly, this time." Throckmorton nodded his head vigorously. "Don't worry, professor. Sometimes I get confused about where the wires go, but I've got it all straightened out now." "Green wire to the red coil, remember?" "Oh -- uh -- yeah, I remember." Before the boy could generate further unwelcome conversation, Gleason hurried away. After awhile he wandered back to his own office carrying a tin of water for his coffee maker. Though he had closed his office door on leaving it was now ajar, and Gleason wondered idly if he had missed a visitor. Pouring the water into the coffee maker he added some grounds from a jar in his desk. He plugged in the percolator and stepped around a stack of abstracts to get his cup. The explosion wasn't very loud, but it was powerful enough to lift the abstracts and deposit them solidly against the small of his back. Gleason went down across another pile of papers as a fusillade of deadly fragments rattled angrily against the walls. In the sudden silence he sat up and stared at the smoking hole where the coffee maker had been sitting. His door flew open, and for a moment Farrington's ratlike face was momentarily framed, an expectant grin fading to dismay as he saw Gleason staring back at him. Then the face was gone, and Gleason heard rapid footsteps in the hallway. A few moments later the door again swung open to reveal the department chairman, Professor Hunnicutt. "Starting sooner than I'd expected," was Hunnicuu's only comment as he helped Gleason to his feet. "Bomb in the coffee maker, eh? Not really ingenious." G leason examined the remains of the percolator mutely. Only the heavy stack of abstracts had prevented him from being slashed by flying metal and glass from the explosion. Hunnicutt came up behind him and peered over his shoulder. "Looks like the bomb was connected to the heating element, went off when the coil started to warm up." Hunnicutt shook his head disapprovingly. "Not really a good job. Always takes a few seconds for heat to get to the element -- long enough for the intended victim to walk away from the bomb. A really top-notch man would have connected the bomb directly to the electrical circuit." It occurred to Gleason that the chairman's remarks were not entirely appropriate to an instance of attempted murder. He turned to stare at his boss, a tall, white-haired man impeccably clothed in gray pinstripe. "What," he demanded, "is going on here?" Hunnicutt slipped a fatherly arm about Gleason's shoulders. "I keep forgetting you're new here, my boy. Not really conversant with the multiversity traditions." He kicked aside a stack of abstracts with a well-polished oxford. "Come up to my office for a few minutes. I think we can easily straighten this out." The chaiman motioned casually to a bored custodian who had suddenly materialized and led Gleason into the hallway and down the long corridor to the left. Gleason noted that Farrington's door was tightly closed and that no sound issued from the sealed interior. Hunnicutt seated himself at his desk and leaned back comfortably, moving a ten-cup percolator to one IF side. "Bit of a shock for you, I suppose, coining without warning and all Warning from me, I mean. I assume Farrington did check with you to make sure you wanted to compete before he planted the bomb." Gleason was thoroughly disoriented now. Something rather unusual seemed to be going on within the walls of what he had come to think of as a rather staid multiversity. "I -- I don't think he really... ' Gleason began and then recalled the peculiar conversation with Farrington of an hour before. "He said something about fighting for the appointment... " "Yes," said Hunnicutt brusquely, "the appointment." He leaned back, making a tent of his fingers. "Ifs a real problem for me. Need a really top-notch man for the job, if you know what I mean. So many Ph.Ds these days, so many publications, one can't rely keep up with the qualifications any more. Don't want to go outside the present staff if I can help it. But, you know, I need some real evidence that I've got a top-notch man to fill the vacancy." Gleason had a feeling that he didn't completely understand the conversation. "You know my qualifications..." he began. Hunnicutt waved him aside impatiently. "Know it all; no better or worse than Farrington's except for a small difference in the publications index. Really couldn't choose on the basis of what I know now. Farrington's got seniority in service, of course, but I never let that influence an appointment." Hunnicutt's manner softened a bit. "It's ingenuity I like to see, my boy. Farrington's trying hard, but that coffee-maker stunt isn't really the sort of thing to convince me. The heating elemt, you know. Now, I wonder if you could think of some better way... " "Better way, sir? To do what?" Hunnicutt laughed nervously, tamping tobacco into a professorish pipe. "Why, to kill him, of course! He's had his chance, now it's your turn! If you can think of a more ingenious -- and successful -- method than his, you'll not only have convinced me of your own abilities, but you'll have eliminated your only departmental rival!" Gleason stared at his boss. "Kill him, sir?" "Well, that's the tradition!" Hunnicutt snapped with a sudden return to his mood of irritation. "Can't fight a good college tradition, I always say. Besides, it's really the only way. How can I tell who's really top-notch without some kind of test?" He paused, reflecting. The whole thing began really as a kind of accident a few years ago. Milton and Borofsky had decided to duel for the post being vacated by Anderson, biit Borofsky cheated by devising a way to assassinate Milton with the chimes in the college bdl tow even before the duel took place. Read it in some mystery story, I believe. Of course we Couldn't turn Borofcy over to the police, top-notch men being hard to get as they are. So I promoted him to the job -- rather admired his ingenuity, as a matter of fact. "Well, couldn't do much a few months later when Leonard electrocuted Borofsky to get Blassingame's job. A sort of precedent had been set, you see. An # rway, that's the way it grew, from small begiimings, as these traditions often do. Nowadays I wouldn't consider making appointments any other way." He was friendlier now, smiling an encouraging smile at Gleason. I think you've got the stuff it takes to carry on the old tradition, my boy. Farrington's good, but not really my type of research man. Heating coils! Think up something a little better, and you won't have to worry about that associate professorship." Gleason was still trying to make some audible comment as Hunnicutt ushered him briskly to the door. "To tell the truth," the chairman was saying, "I've been a little disappointed in the quality of assassinations around the department the last year -- too messy, too routine. Now, if you could come up with something really top notch on your first time out... " His voice dropped to a friendly confidentiality. "Well, you'd have a head start on a really outstanding career in science." Gleason found himself standing in the corridor as the chairman's door sied shut behind him. He drifted back down the hallway and into his office, peering apprehensively at Farrington's closed door before he entered. The custodian had just finished cleaning up his office, and a shiny new two-cup percolator had already been installed in one comer. Gleason noted with relief that several bales of shredded abstracts had heen removed. W hat was he to do now? He couldn't go along with Hunnicutt's plan -- simply couldn't! He'd never killed anybody in his life and wasn't going to start now. Yet apparently his own life was in danger, and if he didn't try some kind of counterattack the assistant professorsffip would surely go to Farrington. heard vague rumors of the kind of cutthroat competition that had developed in the multiversities over the past decade, but he'd never anticipated anything like this. A little sabotage to divert government research funds -- that was common enough. But murder! If this was the kind of game they were playing, he wanted no part of it. Gleason glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost time for his next class. He went over to the wall case and racked out the tv camera. Removing a sheaf of notes from his desk, he sat down in his chair and turned toward the camera; only a half minute to go, he noted. Suddenly he realized that he was still a mess from the explosion, his hair on end, his clothing rumpled. He looked about for a mirror, then remenibered the trick of using the camera lens as a last-minute mirror. He peered at the camera, trying to catch his reflection in the darkened lens. There was no lens; only a slim, blackened tube. Gleason sat for a moment digesting this fact as the clock hand crept toward the hour. The absence of a lens might mean several things, but only one occurred to him at the moment. He dived for the floor. The red light winked on, and a high-energy laser beam spat from the tube, passing just over Gleason's desk and burning a hole in the wall IF behind it. Overloaded circuits began to whine, d the camera burned itself out within seconds, the beam vanishing as its power supply was cut off. After a few moments the top of Gleason's head rose warily above the level of the desk, round eyes fixed on the smoking hulk of the television camera. The phone rang. It was Professor Hunnicutt. "What's going on in there,' Hunnicutt demanded between audible sucks on his pipe. 'Wou're twenty seconds late getting on the air! Students are waiting -- knowledge calls, my boy!" "It's Farrington, I think, sir." Gleason sat down on the floor crosslegged, not quite ready to leave the shelter of his desk. "He seems to have installed a laser beam in my tv camera. He -- he nearly burned a hole in meP "No?" came Hunnicutt's shocked voice over the wire. "Used a tv camera, did he? That sort of Aing won't do at all!" "No, sir," said Gleason, brightening. "No man has the right to interrupt class programming for personal business," said Hunnicutt, righteous anger thundering in his voice. "Not a really top-notch kind of thing to do. Shows the sort of degeneration of standards in the academic community the last few years." "Yes, sir." "All violence must take place outside class hours, committee meetings and conference periods," Hunnicutt said firmly. "I'll have to talk to Farrington about this." "Er -- sir " Hunnicutt's voice rasped with impatience. "Well, what is it? I've got to get back to work." Still crouching, Gleason cradled the phone in both hands. "I -- I was thinldng, sir. I'm not sure I really want that associate professorship after all. I've only been here a few months, and... " "Nonsense!" Hunnicutt roared. "You're a top-notch man. Want to see you move ahead?" "Yes, sir. But, you see, murder's not really... I mean, I'm not Ae type for this sort of thing." "Whafs that?" Menace edged Hunnicutt's voice. "What I'm trying to say is, I'm not really Ae type to kill someone just to get a job." A long silence stretched across Ae wire. "Not the type, eh?" Hunnicutt sighed wearily. "I'd thought better of you, my boy. Really top-notch, I thought. Felt sure you'd come through." Another silence. "You understand, of course, that we can't keep a man on the faculty who scorns our department's hallowed traAtions." "Sir?" "I mean, Gleason, that you do not yet have tenure." "No, sir." "Plenty who'd like your present job, Gleason. And no other multiversity is likely to hire you without a recommendation from me. Think it over." The wire went dead. Gleason put down the phone and rose cautiously to his feet. He circled the desk to peer at Ae fused camera, Aen turned to stare at the neat hole burned in the far wall of his office. A peaceful grouping of trees and ivy could be glimpsed through the aperture. Gleason stood thinking about Hunnicutt's words the long struggle to get his present job, his unfitness for any real work in the outside world. Hunnicutt was right -- no other multiversity would hire him without a recommendation, and surely no one would believe his story if he tried to use it as an excuse. It was either get out of this situation somehow or face a diminishing career at some back water city college, stripped of research funds and despairing of the future. S till sunk in misery, he called the tv studio and cancelled all classes for the rest of the day, since it would take that long for his camera to be replaced. Then he returned to a serious consideration of his problem. What was he going to do? He couldn't kill anybodyl And how could Farrington... ? There was a thought I Was it possible that Farrington was no more enthusiastic about murder than he? Perhaps the poor man had made the two attempts on Gleason's life out of nothing more than a pathetic loyalty to his department. U the two of them could get together and make a deal... A few moments later Gleason was knocking timidly at his neighbor's door, a cautious optimism in his heart and a heavy paperweight in his hand should the optimism prove unjustified. Gleason heard footsteps inside the office, then Farrington's hoarse whisper at the door. "o's there?" "Gleason! I've got to talk to you!" He heard a hasty scuffling, then silence. "Don't bother to try shooting through the door," Farrington's muffled voice called finally. "I've got an energy field aroimd my desk!" "For God's sake, man, I don't want to hurt you. I just want to talk this thing over!" "There's nothing to talk about," Farrington snarled. "You won't get me to open this door!" Gleason stepped to one side of the door in case Farrington decided to do some shooting himself. "Let's be sensible," he called in a stage whisper. "y should we go along with this crazy scheme when the stakes aren't worth it? Maybe we could work something out!" "There's nothing to work out!" Farrington snapped back. "I need the job! If I knew how to do anything else I wouldn't be a college professor!" Nervously Gleason shifted the paperweight from hand to hand. "But, look, Farrington. We must be able to make some kind of deal. If we could just talk rationally about this I'm sure -- " "There's nothing to talk about, and even if there were..." A sudden, protracted silence fell. Gleason eased up to the door and put his ear against the panelling. He thought he could hear the faint sounds of hurried movement inside. "On second thought," Farrington went on, "you may be right. At least we can talk it over. Come on inside, and let's discuss it." Gleason straightened, shifted the paperweight to his left hand and reached for the doorknob. He froze IF m that attitude, reflecting. After a few moments he ventured, "Maybe you'd better come out here instead, Farrington. The -- er -- light's better." No," Farrington's distant voice replied, "you come in here. We want to keep this private." "We can have some coffee in the lounge." "I've got a coffee maker in here." 'T think you'd better come out here." A half-hour later Gleason gave up and returned to his office to sit brooding at his desk. Farrington seemed determined to kill him, and he stSl couldn't work up much enthusiasm for a counterattack. At any rate he couldn't think clearly about the problem with Farrington plotting actively next door. Kicking aside a pile of abstracts, he exited quietly through the hole in the wall. A fter a sleepless night in a rented hotel room (in case Farrington had his home address) he rose bleary eyed and despairingjy to face what would surely be another miserable day. He still had no plan, no hope. Perhaps there was some way of merely disabling his rival... But no, he couldn't consider violence at all. Still, wasn't one of Farrington's arms or legs worth his own life? It was only a small concession to principle. He arrived at his office early and found that the new tv camera had been installed and the laser hole sealed up. Of Farrington there was no sign. Gleason boiled some water in his percolator (after a thorough inspection), but soon discovered that his container of coffee had been shattered in one or more of the re cent office catastrophes. There was nothing to do but go to the gradual lounge again. He slipped out quietly, pausing only to make sure Farrington's door was closed, and ran tiptoe down the hallway, dodging arou a bit in case of pursuit by missiles. In the lounge he found no one but Throckmorton, snoring on one of the couches. "The spearmint," said Throckmorton, opening one eye to peer dully at his boss. "Today's the day!" In his anxiety over the murder attempts, Gleason had forgotten the experimental work scheduled with Throckmorton for that day. He felt a twinge of apprehenon; the equipment they were using was dangerous, and in his present mood he coidd make any one of a number of errors. Still, if he tried to put off the experiment today his standing with Hunnicutt might be damaged irreparably. "Go ahead and set it up," he said. "I'll be down later to work with you." The shaggy boy unfolded himself from the couch, grinning vacuously. "I'll get started on it right away, professor. Count on me." He stumbled fee the man had just poured for himself, and shambled off toward the stairway. The research lab was downstair's in the basement, almost directly beneath Gleason's office. "And Throckmorton," Gleason called after him, "don't forget -- it's the red wire on the green coil." "Green wire on red coil," Throckmorton assured him and increased his pace, trying to appear enthusiastic. I#P Gleason's head buzzed with the effects of little sleep and much worry, his remaining emotional energy went into the task of drawing himself another cup of coffee. It . wasn't until he was back at his desk diat the boy's last words finally registered. He recalled at the same moment the possible result of attaching the green wire to the red coil. Suppressing a howl, he headed for the door, twisting frantically at the knob. The door refused to open. Gleason stood momentarily transfixed, the doorknob stiU in his hand. The door had never stuck like this before. He rattled the knob experimentally, bent over to peer through the keyhole. Something was blocking it from the other side, something that was not a key. At the same moment he felt the doorknob grow warm beneath his hand. Gleason snatched his fingers away and stood up, backing away from the door. The knob was turning cherry red, and smoke had begun to issue from the door itself. Could Throckmorton already,... Then he heard a bubble of wild laughter from next door, and he knew. "Got you this time!" Farrington screamed at him through their common wall. "My heat converter will fry you alive within the next couple of minutes! The job is mine!" G leason wiped his damp brow with the back of his hand, searching about for some means of escape. Since the physics building was determinedly modem, it had no windows whatsoever; the door was the only way in or out. He glanced upward at the footsquare grill of the air-conditioning unit. Was he slim enou to worm his body through that passage? Desperately Gleason shoved  desk under the opening and clambered iip to test the grill. Six strong screws held it firmly across the outlet, and Gleason had no screwdriver. He peered down, spied the telephone on his desk. He might still be able to summon help. He had crouched down and was just reaching for the receiver when the phone rang. Lifting the receiver he heard Throckmorton's dull tones. "Everything's all connected up professor. When ya cornin' down?" "Throckmorton, get help! I'm locked in my office, and Farrington is trying to kill me!" "What's that, professor?" the boy shouted. "I can hardly hear ya with all the noise from the equipment!" "I said Farrington -- " Gleason's voice froze. "Did you say 'noise from the equipment?'" "Yeah, professor, I got it goin', all right." "It's operating -- with the green wire on the red coil?" "Sure, right now it's -- " But the sentence remained uncompleted as the phone went dead and the right wall of Gleason's office vanished. He dropped the receiver and stood staring at the vacant spot where Farrington's office -- and Farrington -- had stood. About fifty square feet of floor space had been vaporized instantly. The laboratory, Gleason now recalled, was almost dim IP rectly beneath his office. But just almost directly. Actually it was beneath Farrington's. The door had stopped smoking, and Gleason threw it open easily, the now harmless attachment to Farrington's heat converter clattering to the floor. He saw Hunnicutt scutde down the hall toward him, pipe bouncing nervously between his teeth. The chairman halted and stood awestruck before the hole in his building. At last he turned to Gleason, tears brimming in his eyes. "My boy, this is the most absolutely top-notch piece of work I've ever seen in this department." "But -- " "Oh, it'll be rather expensive to replace this much of the building; but we've got government money, and I must say the loss is really worth it, under the circumstances. Never seen a cleaner, more humane liquidation since the tradition began." A ragged figure appeared at the head of the basement stairs and lurched toward them. Apparently the force of the beam of destruction, or whatever the thing was, had been directed almost entirely upward. "It was really Throckmorton, here -- " Hunnicutt majestically placed an arm about the shoulders of the frightened boy. "This young man gave you a hand, did he? Pulled the trigger, so to spe, while you were the bait. Brave lads, both of youl" Throckmorton, who had never in his entire life been addressed by anyone above the level of associate professor stood open-mouthed, basking in the glow of sudden recognition. "You will no doubt benefit from this, too, Throckmorton," the chairman went on. "Naturally there'll be two assistant professorsMps vacant now, and I'm sure we can arrange a spot for you while you're completing your doctoral requirements." Perhaps, Gleason decided, there was no point in rocking the boat after all. With the coveted associate professorship his, and the beginnings of a new and infinitely murderous weapon created by attaching the green wire to the red cod, he was in science. "Come into my office, both of you," Hunnicutt was saying. "Got to get started on the paperwork for your appointments." Watching his boss chew vigorously on his pipe, a foolproof idea for a booby trap slipped unbidden into Gleason's mind. The whole thing was ridiculous, he told himself. He wouldn't be in line for the departmental chairmanship for years! Still, it didn't hurt... "Do you have a pencil and paper, professor?" he asked. "I'd like to jot down a little idea I just had." "Certainly, my boy," Hunnicutt smiled, handing him the pencil and paper. "It's the mark of a top-notch scientist that he's always thinking, always searching for new ideas, always looking toward the future." "I'm afraid you're right, sir," Gleason said; he was still scribbling furiously as he passed into the chairI New subscriptions and changes o! address require # weeks to process! The ship was falling to pieces. Grimes could redeem if -- but Bird-Brained Navigator I H er inertial drive throbbing softly, all hands at landing stations, all passengers save one strapped in their acceleration couches (a sudden emergency requiring the use of the auxiliary reaction drive was unlikely, but possible) the star ship Rim Dragon dropped slowly down to Port Grimes on Tharn. The privileged passenger -- although in his case it was a right rather than a privilege -- who was riding in the control room instead of being incarcerated in his cabin was Commodore John Grimes, Astrofiautical Superintendent of Rim Runners. But he said nothing, did nothing that could be construed as inter ferce on Jlis part. Legally speaking, of course, he was no more than a guest in the Juaers nerve center. But, at the same time, he could and did exercise considerable authority over the spacegoing employees of Rim Runners, made the ultimate decisions in such matters as promotions and appointments. However, Captain Wenderby, Rim Dragon's master, was a more than merely competent ship-handler. At no time did Grimes feel impelled to make any suggestions, at no time Hid his own hands start to reach out hungrily for the controls. So Grimes sat there, stolid and solid in his acceleration chair, not even now keeping a watchful eye on the briskly effidem Wenderby and his briskly efficient officers. They needed no advice from him, would heed none. But it was easier for them than it had been for him, vdxen he made his own first landing on Tharn -- how many years ago? Too many. There had been no spaceport then, with Spaceport Control kecinng the master fully informed of meteorological conditions during his entire descent There had been no body of assorted officials -- Port Captain, Customs, Port Health and all the rest of it -- standing by awaiting the ship's arrival. Grimes, in fact, had not known what or whom to expect, although his robot probes had told him that the culture of the planet was roughly analogous to that of Earth's Middle Ages. Even so, he had been lucky in that he had set Faraway Quest down near a city controlled by the priesthood rather than in an area under the sway of one of the robber barons.  He looked out of one of the big viewports. From this altitude he could see no signs of change -- but change there must have been, change there had been. On that long ago exploration voyage in the old Quest he had opened up the worlds of the Eastern Circuit to commerce -- and the trader does more to destroy the old ways than either the gunboat or the missionary. In this case the trader would have been the only outside influence. The Rim Worlds had always, fortunately for them, been governed by cynical, tolerant agnostics to whom gunboat diplomacy was distasteful. The Rim Worlders had always valued their own freedom too highly to wish to interfere with that of any other race. But even commerce thought Grimes, is an interference. It makes people want the things that they cannot yet produce far themselves -- the mass-produced entertainment, the labor-saving machines the weapons. Grimes sighed. I suppose that we were right to arm the priesthood rather than the robber barons. In any case, theve been good customers. Captain Wenderby, still intent on his controls, spoke. "It must seem strange, coming back after all these years, sir." "It does. Captain." "And to see the spaceport that they named after you, for the first time." "A man could have worse monuments." IF , Grimes transferred his attention from the viewport to the screen that showed, highly magnified, what was directly astern of and below the ship. Yes, there it was. Port Grimes. A great circle of gray-gleaming concrete, ringed by warehouses and administration buildings, with cranes and gantries and conveyor belts casting long shadows in the ruddy light of the westering sun. (He had made the first landing on rough heathland, and for a long, heart-stopping moment had doubted that the tripedal landing gear would be able to adjust to the irregularities of the surface.) And there was Rim Griffon, the reason for his voyage to Tham. There was the ship whose officers refused to sail with each other and with the master. There was the mess that had to be sorted out with as few firings as possible -- Rim Runners, as usual, was short of spacefaring personnel. There was the mess. I t was some little time before John Grimes could get around to doing anything about it. As he should have foreseen, he was a personality, an historical personality at that. He was the first outsider to have visited Tham. He was responsible for the breaking of the power of the barons, for the rise to power of the priesthood and the merchants. Too, the Rim Confederacy's Ambassador on Tham had made it plain that he, and the government that he represented, would appreciate it if the Commodore played along. The delay to the departure of a very unimportant merchant vessel was far less important than the preservation of interstellar good relations. So Grimes was wined and dined, which was no hardship, and obliged to listen to long speeches, which was. He was taken on sightseeing tours, and was pleased to note that progress, although inevitable, had been a controlled progress, not progress for its own sake. The picturesque had been sacrificed only when essential for motives of hygiene or real efficiency. Electricity had supplanted the flaring natural gas jets for house and street lighting, but the importation and evolution of new building techniques and materials had not produced a mushroom growth of steel and concrete matchboxes or plastic domes. Architecture still retained its essentially Thamian character, even though the streets of the city were no longer rutted, even though the traffic on those same streets was now battery-powered cars and no longer animal-drawn vehicles. (Internal combustion engines were manufactured on the planet, but their use was prohibited within urban limits.) And at sea, change had come. At the time of Grimes's first landing the only ocean-going vessels had been the big schooners. Now sail was on its way out, ousted by the steam turbine. Yet the ships, with their fiddle bows and their figureheads, with their raked masts and funnels, still displayed an archaic charm that was altogether lacking on Earth's seas and on the waters of most Man-colonized worlds. The commodore, who was something of an authority on the history of marine transport, would dearly have loved to have made a voyage in one of the steamers, but he knew that time would not permit this. Once he had sorted out Rim Griffon's troubles, he would have to return to Port Forlorn, probably in that very ship. At last he was able to get around to the real reason for his visit to Tharn. On the morning of his fifth day on the planet he strode purposively across the clean, well-cared-for concrete of the apron, walked decisively up the ramp to Rim Griffons after airlock door. There was a junior officer waiting there to receive him; Captain Dingwall had been warned that he would be coming on board. Grimes knew the young man, as he should have done. After all, he had interviewed him when he had applied for a berth in the Rim Runners' service. "Good morning, Mr. Taylor." "Good morning, sir." The third officer was painfully nervous, and his prominent Adam's apple hobbled as he spoke. His ears, almost as outstanding as Grime's own, flushed a dull red. "The Old..." The flush spread to all of Taylor's features. "The master is waiting for you, sir. This way, sir." Grimes did not need a guide. This Rim Griffon, like most of the older units in Rim Runners' fleet, had started her career as an Epsilon Class tramp in the employ of the Interstellar Transport Commission. The general layout of those tried and trusted galactic workhorses was familiar to all spacemen. However, young Mr. Tayor had been instructed by his captain to receive the commodore and to escort him to his, Dingwall's, I quarters, and Grimes had no desire to interfere with the running of the ship. Yet. The two men rode up in the elevator in silence, each immersed in his own thoughts. Taylor, obviously, was apprehensive. A delay to a vessel is always a serious matter, especially when her own officers are involved. And Grimes was sorting out his own impressions to date. This Rim Griffon was obviously not a happy ship. He could feel it -- just as he could see and hear the faint yet unmistakable signs of neglect, die hints of rust and dust, the not yet anguished pleading of a machine somewhere, a fan or a pump, for lubrication. And as the elevator cage passed through the "farm" level there was a whiff of decaying vegetation; either algae vats or hydroponic tanks -- or both -- were overdue for cleaning out. The elevator stopped at the Captain's Deck. Young Mr. Tayor led the way out of the cage, knocked diffidently at the door facing that into the axial shaft. It did open. A deep voice said, "That will be all, Mr. Taylor. I'll send for you and the other officers when I want you. And come in, please, Commodore Grimes." G rimes entered the day cabin. Dingwall rose to meet him -- a short, stocky man, his features too antly blue under a cockatoo-crest of white hair. He extended a hand, saying, "Welcome aboard. Commodore." He did not manage to make the greeting sound convincing. "Sit down. IP sir. The suns not yet over the yardarm, but I can offer you coffee." "No thank you, Captain. Later, perhaps. Mind if I smoke?" Grimes produced his battered pipe, filled and lit it. He said through the initial acrid cloud, "And now, sir, what is the trouble? Your ship hs been held up for far too long." "You should have asked me that five days ago, Commodore." "Should I?" Grimes stared at Dingwall, his gray eyes bleak. "Perhaps I should. Unfortunately I was obliged to act almost in an ambassadorial capacity after I arrived here. But now I am free to attend to the real business." "It's my officers," blurted Dingwall. "Yes?" "The second mate to begin with. A bird-brained navigator if ever there was one. Can you imagine anybody, with all the aids we have today, getting lost between Stree and Mellise? He did." "Legally speaking," said Grimes, "the master is responsible for everything. Including the navigation of his ship." "I navigate myself. Now." And I can imagine it, thought Grimes. "Do I have to do everybodys bloody job in this bloody ship? Of course, Fm only the captain... He said, "You reprimanded him, of course?" "Too right I did." Dingwall's voice registered pleasant reminiscence. "I told him that he was incapable of navigating a plastic duck across a bathtub." "Hmm. And your other officers?" "There're the engineers. Commodore. The interstellar drive chief hates the inertial drive chief. Not that I've much time for either of 'em. In fact the inertial drive -- that he couldn't pull a soldier off his sister. That was after I almost had to use the auxiliary rockets to get clear of Grollor..." "And the others?" "Vacchini, my mate. He couldn't run a pie cart. And Sally Bowen, the catering officer, can't boil water without burning it. And Pilchin, the so-called purser, can't add two and two and get the same answer twice running. And as for Sparks... I'd stand a better chance of getting an important message through if I just opened a control viewport and stood there and shouted." The officer who is to blame for all this, thought Grimes, is the doctor. He should have seen this coming on. But perhaps Vm to blame as well, DingwalVs home port is Port Forlorn, on Lorn -- and his ships been running between the worldfs of the Eastern Circuit and Port Farewell, on Faraway, for the past nine standard months. And Mrs, Dingwall (Grimes had met her) is too fond of her social life to travel with him... "Don't you like the ship. Captain?" he asked. "The ship's all right," he was told sarcastically. "But the run, as far as you're concerned, could be better?" "And the officers." "Couldn't we all. Captain Dingwall? Couldn't we all? And now, just between ourselves, who is it that refuses to sail with you?" "My bird-brained navigator. I hurt his feelings when I called him that. A very sensitive young man is our Mr. Missenden. And the inertial drive chief. He's a member of some fancy religion called the Neo-Calvinists." "I've met them," said Grimes. "What I said about his sister and the soldier really shocked him." "And which of them refuse to sail with the other?" "Almost everybody has it in for the second mate. He's a Latter Day Fascist and is always trying to make converts. And the two chiefs are at each other's throat Kerholm, the interstellar drive specialist, is a militant atheist... " And I was on my annual leave, thought Grimes, when this prize bunch of square pegs was appointed to this round hole. Even so, I should have checked up. "Captain," he said, "I appreciate your problems. But there are two sides to every story. Mr. Vacchini, for example, is a very efficient officer. As far as he is concerned, there could well be a clash of personalities." "Perhaps," admitted Dingwall grudgingly. "As for the others, I don't know them personally. If you could tell them all to meet .in the wardroom in -- say -- five minutes, we can go down to try to iron some of these things out." "Fom can try," said the captain. "I've had them all in a big way. And, to save you the bother of saying it. Commodore Grimes, they've had me likewise." II G rimes ironed things out. On his way from Lorn to Tharn he had studied the files of reports on the captain and his officers. In other circumstances he would have been quite ruthless -- but good spacemen do not grow on trees, especially out towards the Galactic Rim. And these were good spacemen, all of them -- with the exception of Missenden, the second officer. He had been born on New Saxony, one of the worlds that had been part of the short-lived Duchy of Waldegren, and one of the worlds upon which the political perversions practiced upon Waldegren itself had lived on for years after the downfall of the Duchy. He had been an officer in the navy of New Saxony and had taken part in the action off Pelisande, the battle in which the heavy cruisers of the Survey Service had destroyed the last of the selfstyled commerce raiders who were, in fact, no better than pirates.  There had been survivors, and Missenden had been one of them. (He owed his survival mainly to the circumstance that the ship of which he had been navigator had been late in arriving at her rendezvous with the other New Saxony war vessels and had, in fact, surrendered after no more than a token resistance.) He had stood trial with other war criminals, but had escaped with a very light sentence. (Most of the witnesses who could have testified against him were dead.) As he had held a lieutenant commander's commission in the nayy of New Saxony he had been able to obtain a Master Astronaut's CertifiIF cate after no more than the merest apology for an examination. Then he had drifted out to the Rim, where his New Saxony qualifications were valid -- where, in fact, qualifications issued by any human authority anywhere in the galaxy were valid. Grimes looked at Missenden. He did not like what he saw. He had not liked it when He first met the man, a few years ago, when he had engaged him as a probationary third officer -- but then, as now, he had not been able to afford to turn spacemen away from his office door. The second officer was tall, with a jutting, arrogant beak of a nose over a wide, thin-lipped mouth, with blue eyes that looked even madder than Captain Dingwall's, his pale, freckled face topped by close-cropped red hair. He was a fanatic, that was obvious from his physical appearance. And in a shipwhere he, like everybody else, was unhappy, his fanaticism would be enhanced. A lean and hungry look, thought Grimes. He thinks too much; such men are dangerous. He added mentally, But only when they think about the wrong things. The late Duke Ottos Galactic Superman, for example, rather than PiU grens Principles of Interstellar Navigation, He said, "Mr. Missenden." "Sir?" The curtly snapped word was almost an insult. The way in which it was said implied, "Fm according respect to your rank, not to youJ "The other officers have agreed to Continue the voyage. On arrival at Port Forlorn you will all be transferred to more suitable ships, and those of you who are due will be sent on leave or time off as soon as possible. Are you agreeable?" "No." "And why not, Mr. Missenden?" "I'm not prepared to make an intercontinental hop under a captain who insulted me." "Insulted you?" "Yes." He turned on Dingwall. "Did you, or did you not, call me a bird-brained navigator?" "I did, Mr. Missenden," snarled Captain Dingwall. "And I meant it." "Captain," asked Grimes patiently, "are you prepared to withdraw that remark?" "I am not. Commodore. Furthermore, as master of this ship I have the legal right to discharge any member of my crew anywhere that I see fit." "Very well," said Grimes. "As Captain Dingwall has pdnted out I can only advise and mediate. But I do possess some authority; appointments and transfers are my responsibility. Will you arrange, Captain, for Mr. Missenden to be paid, on your books, up to and including midnight, local time? Then get him off your Articles of Agreement as soon as possible, so that the second officer of Rim Dragon can be signed on here. And you, Mr. Missenden, will join Rim Dragon," "If you say so," said Missenden. "Sir." "I do say so. And I say, too, Mr. Missenden, that I shall see you again in my office back in Port Forlorn." "I can hardly wait Sir." Captain Dingwall looked at his watch. He said, "The purser already has Mr. Missenden's payoff almost finalized. Have you made any ar rangements with Captain Wenderby regarding his second officer?" told him that there might be a transfer, Captain. Shall we meet at the consul's office at # hours? You probably already know that he is empowered to act as shipping master insofar as our ships on Tharn are concerned." "Yes, sir," stated Dingwall. "I know." "You would," muttered Missenden. The transfer of officers was nice and easy in theory -- but it did not work out in practice. The purser. Grimes afterwards learned, was the only person aboard Rim Griffon with whom the second officer was not on terms of acute enmity. Missenden persuaded him to arrange his payoff for # hours, not #. At the appointed time the purser of the Griffon was waiting in the consul's office, and shortly afterwards the purser and the second officer of Rim Dragon put in their appearance. The Dragon's second mate was paid off his old ship and signed on the articles of his new one. But Missenden had vanished. All that Griffon's purser knew was that he had taken the money due him and said that he had to make a business call and that hQ would be back. He did not come back. C ommodore Grimes was not in a happy mood. He had hoped to be a passenger aboard Rim Griffon when she lifted off from Port Grimes, but now it seemed that his departure from Tharn for the Rim Worlds would have to be indefinitely postponed. It was, of course, all Missenden's fault. Now that he had gone into smoke, all sorts of unsavory facts were coming to light regarding that officer. During his ship's visits to Tharn he had made contact with various subversive elements. The consul had not known of this -- but Rim Runners' local agent, a native to the planet, had. It was the police who had told him, and he had passed the information on to Captain Dingwall. Dingwall had shrugged and growled, "What the hell else do you expect from such a drongo?" adding, "As long as I get shut of the bastard he can consort with Aldebaranian necrophiles for airi carel" Quite suddenly, with Grimes's baggage already loaded aboard Rim Griffon, the mess had blown up to the proportions of an interstellar incident. The Port Grimes Customs refused outward clearance to the ship. The Rim Confederacy's ambassador sent an urgent message to Grimes requiring him to disembark at once -- after which the ship would be permitted to leave -- and to report forthwith to the Embassy. With all this happening, Grimes was in no fit state to listen to Captain Wenderby's complaints that he had lost a first class second officer and now would have to sail short-handed on completion of discharge. The ambassador's own car took Grimes from the spaceport to the Embassy. It was a large building, ornately turreted, with metal-bound doors that could have withstood the IF charge of a medium tank. These opened as the commodore dismounted from the vehicle, and within them stood saluting Marines. At least, thought Grimes, they aren't going to shoot me. Yet. An aide in civilian clothes escorted him to the ambassador's office. The Honorable Clifford Webb was a short, fat man with all of a short, fat man's pomposity. "Sit down, Commodore," he huffed. Then, glowering over his wide, highly polished desk at the spaceman, "Now, sir. This Missenden character. What about him? Hey?" "He seems to have flown the coop," said Grimes. "You amaze me, sir." Webb's glower became even more pronounced. "You amaze me, sir. Not by what you said, but by the way in which #U said it. Surely you, even you have some appreciation of the seriousness of the situation?" "Spacemen have deserted before, in foreign ports. Just as seamen used to do. Still do. The local police have his description. They'll pick him up and deport him when they get him. And we'll deport him, too, when he's delivered back to the Confederacy." "And you still don't think it's serious? Hey?" "Frankly, no, sir." "Commodore, you made the first landing on this planet. But what do you know about it? Nothing, sir. Nothing. You haven't lived here, I have. I know that the Confederacy win have to fight to maintain the currently favorable trade relations that we still enjoy with Tham. Already other astronautical powers are sniffing around the worlds of the Eastern Circuit... " "During the last six months, local time," said Grimes, "three of the Empire of Waverley's ships have called here. And two from the Shakespearean Sector And one of Trans-Galactic Qippeis' cargo liners. But, as far as the rulers of Tham are concerned, the Confederacy is still the most favored nation." "Who are the riders of Tharn?" barked the ambassador, "Why, the priesthood." The ambassador mumbled somespacemen, then got to his feet He waddled to the far wall of his office, on which was hung a huge map of the planet in Mercatorial projeciion, beckoned to Grimes to follow him. From a rack he took a long pointer. "The island continent of Ansiphal..." he said. "And here, on the eastern seaboard, Port Grimes, and the University City. Where we are now." 'Tfes." The tip of the pointer described a rhumb line, almost due east. "The other island continent of the northern hemisphere, almost the twin to this one. Climatically, politically -- you name it." "Yes?" The pointer backtracked, then stabbed viciously. "And here, well to the west of Braziperu, the island of Tangaroa. Not a continent -- but still a sizeable hunk of real estate." "So?" "So Tangaroa's the last stronghold of the robber barons, the ruffians who were struggling for power with the priests and merchants when you made your famous first landing. How many years ago was it? Hey?" "But what's that to do with Mr. Missenden," Grimes asked. "And me?" he added. "Your Mr. Missenden," the ambassador said, "served in the navy of New Saxony. The people with whom he's been mixing in the University City are Tangaroan agents and sympathizers. The priesthood has allow Tangaroa to continue to exist -- in fact, there's even trade between it and Ausiphal -- but has been reluctant to allow the Tangaroans access to any new knowledge, especially knowledge that could be perverted to the manufacture of weaponry. Your Mr. Missenden would be a veritable treasure house of such knowledge." "He's not my Mr. Missenden!" snapped Grimes. "But he is, sir. He is. You engaged him when he came out to the Rim. You appointed him to ships running the Eastern Circuit. You engineered his discharge on this world, even." "So what am I supposed to do about him?" "Find him, before he does any real damage. And if you, the man after whom the spaceport was named, are successful it will show the High Priest just how much we, of the Confederacy, have the welfare of Tharn at heart." "But why me? These people have a very efficient police force. And a man with a pale, freckled face and red hair wil! stand oift like a sore thumb among the natives." The Honorable Mr. Webb laughed scornfully. "Green skin dye! Dark blue hair dye! Contact lenses! And, on top of all that, a physical appearance that's common on this planet!" "Yes," admitted Grimes. "I might recognize him, in spite of a disguise..." "Good. My car is waiting to take you to the High Priest." T he university stood on a rise to the east of the city, overlooking the broad river and, a few miles to the north, the sea. It looked more like a fortress than a seat of learning -- and in Tham's turbulent past it had more than once been castle rather than academy. Grimes respected the Tharnian priesthood. The religion that they preached and practiced made more sense to him than most of the other faiths of Man. There was something of Buddhism about it, a recognition of the fact that nothing is, but that everything is flux, change, a continual process of becoming. There was the equation of God with Knowledge -- but never that infuriating statement made by so many Terran religions, that smug "There are things that we aren't meant to know." There was a very real wisdom -- the wisdom that accepts and rejects, and that does neither just because a concept is new. There was a reluctance to rush headlong into an industrial revolution, with all its miseries. And, at the same time, no delay in the adoption of techniques that would make the life of the people longer, easier and happier. Night had fallen when the embassy car pulled up outside the great IF gates of the university. The guard turned out smartly -- but in these days their function was merely ceremonial; no longer was there the need either to keep the students in or the townsfolk out. On all of Tharn -- save for Tangaroa -- the robber barons were only an evil memory of the past. A black-uniformed officer led Grimes through long corridors, lit by bright electric bulbs, and up stairways to the office of the High Priest. He, an elderly, black-robed man, frail, his skin darkened by age to an opaque olive, had been a young student at the time of the first lamiing. He had claimed to have met the commodore on that occasion, but Grimes could not remember him. But he was almost the double of the old man who had held the high office then -- a clear example of the job making the man. "Commodore Grimes," he said. "Please be seated." "Thank you. Your Wisdom." "I am sorry to have interfered with your plans, sir. But your Mr. Webb insisted." "He assured me that it was important." "And he has... put you in the picture?" "Yes." The old man produced a decanter, two graceful glasses. He poured the wine. Grimes relaxed. He remembered that the Tharnian priesthood made a point of never drinking with anybody whom they considered an enemy, with nobody who was not a friend in the true sense of the word. There was no toast, only a ceremonial raising of goblets. The liquor was good, as it always had been. The priest shrugged. "Very little. I told Mr. Webb that our own police were quite capable of handling the situation, but he said, Tt's his mess. He shoidd have his nose rubbed in it. ' The old man's teeth were very white in his dark face as he smiled. "Tales out of school, Your Wisdom," grinned Grimes. "Now I'll tell one. Mr. Webb doesn't like spacemen. A few years ago his wife made a cruise in one of the T-G Clippers. And when the divorce came through, she married the chief officer of the liner she traveled in." The High Priest laughed. "That accounts for it. But I shall enjoy your company for a few weeks that you will have to stay on Tharn, I shall tell my people to bring your baggage from the embassy over here to the University." "That is very good of you." Grimes took another sip of the strong wine. "But I think that since I'm here I shall help in the search for Mr. Missenden. After all, he is still, officially, one of our nationals." "As you please. Commodore. Tell me, if you were in charge how would you set about it?" Grimes lapsed into silence. He looked around the office. All of the walls were covered with books, save one, and on it hung another of those big maps. He said, "He'll have to get out by sea, of course." "Of course. We have no commercial airship service to Tangaroa. And the Tangaroans have no commercial airship service at all." Ill "And you have no submarines yet, and youritterial coastguard patrol will keep you informed as to the movements of all surface vessels. So he will have to make his getaway in a merchant vessel... Would you know if there are any Tangaroan merchantmen in port?" "I would know. There is one -- the Kawaroa. She is loading textiles and all kinds of agricultural machinery." "Could she be held for any reasonable length of time?" "On what excuse, Commodore? The Tangaroans are very touchy people, and if the ship is detained dieir consul will at once send off a radio message to his government." "A very touchy people, you say. And arrogant. And quarrelsome. Now, just suppose that there's a good, old-fashioned tavern brawl, as a result of which the master and his officers are all arrested...  . " "It's the sort of thing that could easily happen. It has happened, more than once." "Just prior to sailing, shall we say? And then, with the ship immobilized, with only rather dimwitted ratings to try to hinder us, we make a thorough search -- accommodation, holds, machinery spaces, storerooms, the works." "The suggestion certainly has its merits." "The only snag," admitted Grimes, "is that it's very unlikely that the master and all three of his mates will rush ashore for a quick one just before sailing." "But in this case they always do," said the High Priest. A s they always had done, they did. Grimes watched proceedings from the innkeeper's cubbyhole, a little compartment just above the mam barroom with cunning peephole in its floor. He would have preferred to have been among the crowd of seamen, fishermen and watersiders, but his rugged face was too well known on Tharn, and no amount of hair and skin dye could have disguised him. He watched the four burly, blue-and-brass clad men breasting the bar, drinking by themselves, tossing dovm pot after pot of the strong ale. He saw the fat girl whose dyed yellow hair was in vivid contrast to her green skin nuzzle up to the man who was obviously the Tangaroan captain. He wanted none of her. Grimes sympathized with him. Even from his elevated vantage point he could see that her exposed, overblown breasts were sagging uglily, that what little there was of her dress was stained and bedraggled. But the man need not have brushed her away so brutally. She squawked like an indignant parrot as she fell sprawling to the floor with a display of fat, unlovely legs. One of the other drinkers -- a fisherman by the looks of him -- came to the aid of beauty in distress. Or perhaps it was only that he was annoyed because the woman, in her drink. Or, even more likely, both he and the woman were the High Priest's agents. If such were the case, he seemed to be enjoying his work. His huge left hand grasped the captain's IF shoulder, turning him and holding him, and then right fist and left knee worked in unison. It was dirty but effective. After that -- as Grimes said later, telling about it -- it was on for young and old. The three mates, swinging their heavy metal drinking pots, rallied to the defense of their master. The fisherman picked up a heavy stool to use as his weapon. The woman, who had scrambled to her feet with amazing agility for one of her bulk, sailed into the fray, fell to a crouching posture and straightened abruptly, and one of the Tangaroan officers went sailing over her head as though rocket-propelled, crashing down on to a table at which three watersiders had been enjoying a quiet, peaceful drink. They, roaring their displeasure, fell upon the hapless foreigner with fists and feet. The police officer with Grimes -- his English was not too good -- said, "Pity break lip good fight. But must arrest very soon." "You'd better," the commodore told him. "Some of those gentry down there are p ullin g knives." Yes, knives were out, gleaming wickedly in the lamplight. Knives were out, but the Tangaroans -- with the exception of the victim of the lady and her stevedoring friends -- had managed to retreat to a corner and there were fighting off all comers, although the captain, propped against the wall, was playing no great part in the proceedings. Like the fisherman, the two officers had picked up stools, were using them both as shields and weapons, deflecting with them flung pots and bottles. smashing them doyn on the heads and arms of their assailants. The captain was recovering slowly. His hand went up to fumble inside the front of his coat. It came out, holding something that gleamed evilly -- a pistol. But he fired it only once, and harmlessly. The weapon went off as his finger tightened on the trigger quite involuntarily, as the knife thrown by the yellow-haired slattern pinned his wrist to the wall. And then the place was full of University police, tough men in black tunics who used their clubs quite indiscrimiliately and herded all those present out into the waiting trucks. Quietly, Grimes and the police officer left their observation post and went down the back stairs. Outside the inn they were joined by twelve men -- six police and six customs. These latter were used to searching ships. Their heels ringing on the damp cobblestones, they made their way through the misty night to the riverside, to the quays. K awaroa was ready for sea, awaiting only the pilot and, of course, her master and officers. Her derricks were stowed, her moorings had been singled up, and a feather of smoke from her tall, raked funnel showed that steam had been raised. She was not a big ship, but she looked smart, well maintained, seaworthy. As Grimes and his party approached the vessel they saw that somebody had gotten there ahead of them, a dark figure who clattered hastily up the gangway. But there was no cause for hurry. The ship, with all her navigating officers either in jail or in hospital, would not be sailing, and the harbor master had already been told not to send a pilot down to take her out. There was no cause for hurry... But what was that jangling of bells, loud and disturbing in the still night? The engineroom telegraph? The routine testing of gear one hour before the time set for departure? And what were those men doing, scurrying along to fo'c's'le head and poop? Grimes broke into a run, and as he did so heard somebody  shouting from Kawarocfs bridge. The language was unfamiliar, but the voice was not. It was Missenden's. From forward there was a thunk! and then a splash as the end of the severed headline fell into the still water. The last of the flood caught the ship's bows and she fell away from the wharf. With the police and customs officers, who had belatedly realized what was happening, well behind him. Grimes reached the edge of the quay. It was all of five feet to the end of the still-dangling gangway and the gap was rapidly widening. Wthout thinking. Grimes jumped. Had he known that nobody would follow him he would never have done so. But he jumped, and his desperate fingers closed around the outboard manropes of the accommodation ladder and somehow, paying a heavy toll of abrasions and lacerations he was able to squirm upwards uptil he was kneeling on the bottom platform. Dimly he was aware of shouts from the fast receding quayside. Again he heard the engineroom telegraph bells and felt the vibration as the screw began to turn. So the after lines had been cut, too, and the ship was under way. And it was -- he remembered the charts that he had looked at -- a straight run down river with absolutely no need for local knowledge. From above sounded a single, derisory blast from Kawawa's steam whistle. Grimes was tempted to drop from his perch, to swim back ashore. But he knew too much. He had always been a student of maritime history in all its aspects. He knew that a man going overboard from a ship making way through the water stands a very good chance of being pulled under and then cut to pieces by the screw. In any case, he had said that he would find Missenden, and he had done just that. Slowly, painfuly he pulled himself erect, then walked slowly up the clattering treads to deck level. T here was nobody on deck to receive him. This was not surprising; Missenden and the crew must have been too engrossed in getting away from the wharf to notice his literal pierhead jump. So... He was standing in an alleyway, open on the pdrt side. Looking out, he saw the seaport lights sliding past, and ahead and on to port there was the white-flashing fairway buoy already -- dim, but from mist rather than distance. Inboard there was a varnished wooden door set in the white-painted plating of the 'midships house, obviously the entrance to the accommodation. Grimes opened it without difficulty -- door-handles will be invented IF and used by any being approximating to human structure. Inside there was a cross alleyway, brightly illuminated by electric hght bulbs in well fittings. On the after bulkhead of this there was a steel door, and the mechanical hum and whine that came behind it told Grimes that it led to the engineroom. On the forward bulkhead there was another wooden door. Grimes went through it. Another alleyway, cabins, and a companionway leang upwards. At the top of this there were more cabins, and another companionway. And at the top of this... the master's accommodation, obviously, even though the word on the tally over the door was no more than a meaningless squiggle to Grimes. One more companionway -- this one with a functional handrail instead of a relatively ornate balustrade. At the head of it was a curtained doorway. Grimes pushed through the heavy ape, found himself in what could be the chartroom, looked briefly at the wide chart table upon which was a plan of the harbor, together with a pair of dividers and a set of parallel rulers. The Confederacy, he remembered, had at one time exported quite large consignments of these instruments to Tham.  On the forward bulkhead of the chartroom, and to port, was the doorway leading out to the wheelhouse and bridge. Softly, Grimes stepped through it, out into near darlmess. The only light was that showing from the compass periscope, the device that enabled the helmsman to steer by the standard magnetic compass, the binnacle of which was sited up yet one more deck, on what had been called on Earth's surface ships the "monkey island." There was the man at the wheel, intent upon his job. And there, at the fore end of the wheelhouse, were two dark figures, looking out through the wide windows. One of them, the taller one, turned suddenly, said something in Tangaroan. As before, the voice was familiar but the language was not. The question -- intonation made that plain -- was repeated, and then Missenden said in English, "It's you! How the hell did you get aboard? Hold it. Commodore, hold it!" There was just enough light for Grimes to see the pistol that was pointing at his midriff. "Turn this ship round," ordered Grimes, "and take her back into port." "Not bloody likely." Missenden laughed. "Especially when I've gone to all trouble of taking her out of port. Pity old Dingwall wasn't here to see it. Not bad, was it, for a birdbrained navigator? And keep your hands up, where I can see them." "I'm unarmed," said Grimes. "I've only your word for it," Missenden told him. Then he said something to his companion, who replied in what, in happier circumstances, would have been a very pleasant contralto. The girl produced a mouth whistle, blew a piercing blast. In seconds two burly seamen had appeared on the bridge. They grabbed Grimes and held him tightly while she ran practiced hands over his clothing. It was not the first time that she had searched a man for eons. Then they dragged him below, unlocked a steel door and threw him into the tiny compartment beyond it. The heavily barred port nde it obvious that it was the ship's brig. IV T hey locked him in and left him there. Grimes examined his surroundings by the light of the single, dim bulb. Deck, deckhead and bulkheads were all of steel. But had they been of plyboard it would have made no difference; that blasted girl had taken from him the only possession that could possibly have been used as a weapon, his pocketknife. There was a steel-framed bunk, with a thin mattress and one sleazy blanket. There was a stained washbasin, and a single faucet which, when persuaded, emitted a trickle of rusty water. There was a bucket -- plastic, not metal. Still, it could have been worse. He could sleep -- perhaps -- and he would not die of thirst. Fully clothed, he lay down on the bunk. He realized that he was physically tired; his desperate leap for the gangway had taken something out of him. And the ship was moving gently now, a slight, soporific roll, and the steady hum and vibration of the turbines helped further to induce slumber. There was nothing he could do, absolutely nothing, and to lose valuable sleep by useless worry would have been foolish. He slept. It was the girl who awakened him. She stood there, bending over him. shaking his shoulder. When he stirred she stepped sharply back. She was holding a pistol, a revolver of Tirran design if not manufacture, and she looked as though she knew how to use it. She was one of those women whose beauty is somehow accentuated by juxtaposition to lethal ironmongery. Yes, she was an attractive wench, with her greenish, transluscent skin that did not look at all odd, with her fine, strong features, with her sleek, short-cut blue hair, with her slim yet rounded figure that even the rough uniform could not hide. She was an officer of some sort, although what the silver braid on the sleeves of her tunic signified Grimes could not guess. Not that he felt in the mood for guessing games; he was too conscious of his own unshaven scruffiness, of the aches and pains resulting from his athletics of the previous night and from the hardness of the mattress. She said, in fair enough English, "Your Mr. Missenden would see you." "He's not my Mr. Missenden," replied Grimes, testily. Why should everybody ascribe to him the ownership of the late second officer of Rim Dragon? "Come," she said, making an upward jerking motion of the pistol barrel. "All right," grumbled Grimes. "All right." He rolled off the narrow bunk, staggered slightly as he made his way to the washbasin. He splashed water over his face, drank some from his cupped hands. There was no towel. He made do with his handUB IF kerchief. As he was drying himself he saw that the door was open and that a seaman was standing beyond it. Any thoughts that he had entertained of jumping the girl and seizing her gun -- if he could -- evaporated. "Follow that man," she ordered. "I will follow you." Grimes followed the man, through alleyways and up companionways. They came at last to the bridge. Missenden was there, striding briskly back and forth as though he had been at sea all his life. In the wheelhouse the helmsman was intent on his task. Grimes noted that the standard compass periscope had been withdrawn and that the man was concentrating upon the binnacle housing the ocean passage compass. So they still used that system. But why shouldn't they? It was a good one. He looked out to the sea, up to the sky. The morning was calm, but the sun was hidden by a thick, anticyclonic overcast. The surface of the sea was only slightly ruffled and there was a low, confused swell. "Missenden," called the girl. Missenden stopped his pacing, walked slowly to the wheelhouse. With his dyed hair and skin he looked like a Tharnian, a Tangaroan, and in his borrowed uniform he looked like a seaman. He also looked very pleased with himself. "Ah, Commodore," he said, "welcome aboard. You've met Miss Ellevie, I think. Our radio officer." "You'd better tell Miss Ellevie to send a message to the High Priest for me, Mr. Missenden." Missenden laughed harshly. "I'll say this for you. Commodore, you do go on trying. Why not accept the inevitable? You're in Tangaroan hands. In fact you put yourself in their -- our -- hands. The Council of Barons has already been informed, and they have told me that they want you alive. If possible." "Why?" asked Grimes bluntly. "Use your loaf. Commodore. Firstly, it's possible that we may be able to persuade you to press for the establishment of trade relations between the Confederacy and Tangaroa. You do pile on quite a few G's in this sector of the galaxy, you know. Or should I say that you do draw a lot of water? And if you play, it could be well worth your while." "And if I don't play?" you back to your lords and masters. At a fair price, of course. A squadron of armed atmosphere flyers? Laser weapons? Missiles with nuclear warheads?" "That's for your lords and masters to decide." Missenden flushed, and the effect, with his green-dyed skin, was an odd one. He said to the girl, "That will do, Ellevie. I'll let you know when I want you again." He walked out to the wing of the bridge, beckoning Grimes to follow. When he turned to face the commodore he was holding a pistol in his right hand. H e said, "Don't try anything. When I was in the navy of New Saxony I was expert in the use of hand guns of all descriptions. But I'd like a private talk. Ellevie knows English, so I sent her below. The man at the wheel may have a smatterIF ing, but he'll not overhear from where we are now." "Well?" asked Grimes coldly. "We're both Earthmen." " am, Mr. Missenden." "And I am, by ancestry. These Thamians are an inferior breed, but if they see that you can be humiliated..." "... they'll realize that you aren't the galactic superman you set yourself up to be." Missenden ignored this, but with an effort. He said, "My position in this ship is rather... precarious. The crew doesn't trust me. I'm captain, yes -- but only because I'm the only man who can navigate." "But can you?" "Yes, damn you! I've read the textbooks -- it was all the bastards gave me to read when I was holed up down in the secret compartment. And anybody who can navigate a starship can navigate one of these hookers! Anyhow... Anyhow, Commodore, it will be better for both of us if we maintain the pretense that you are a guest rather than a prisoner. But I must have your parole." "My parole? What can I do?" "I've heard stories about you." "Have you? Very well, then, what about this? I give you my word not to attempt to seize this ship." "Good. But not good enough. And will you give your word not to signal, to aircraft or surface vessels?" "Yes," agreed Grimes. "And your word not to interfere, in any way, with the ship's signalling equipment?" "Yes." "Then, Commodore, I feel that we may enjoy quite a pleasant cruise. I can't take you down yet; I relieved the lookout for his breakfast. You'll appreciate that we're rather shorthanded. As well as the Old Man and the three mates, half the deck crew was left ashore, and two of the engineers. I can't be up here all the time, but I have to be here most of the time. And the lookouts have orders to call me at once if they sight another ship or an aircraft." "And, as you say, you're the only navigator." The only human navigator, Grimes amended mentally. The lookout came back to the bridge then, and Missenden took Grimes down to what was to be his cabin. It was a spare room, with its own attached toilet facilities, on the same deck as the master's suite -- which, of course, was now occupied by Missenden. It was comfortable, and the shower worked, and there was even a tube of imported depilatory cream for Grimes to use. After he had cleaned up he accompanied Missenden down to the saloon, a rather gloomy place panelled in dark, unpolished timber. Ellevie was already seated at one end of the long table, and half way along it was an officer who had to be an engineer. Missenden took his seat at the head of the board, motioned to Grimes to sit at his right. A steward brought in cups and a pot of some steaming, aromatic brew, returning with what looked like, and tasted like, two deep llates of fish stew. But it wasn't bad and, in any case, it was all that there was. A fter the meal Missenden returned to the bridge. Grimes accompanied him, followed him into the chartroom where he started to potter with the things on the chart table. Grimes looked at the chart -- a small scale oceanic one. He noted that the Great Circle track was penciled on it, that neat crosses marked the plotting of dead reckoning positions at fourhourly intervals. He looked from it to the ticking log clock on the forward bulkhead. He asked, "This submerged log of yours. Does it run fast or slow?" "I -- I don't know, Commodore. But if the sky clears and I get some sights. I'll soon find out." "You think you'll be able to?" "Yes. I've always been good with languages, and I've picked up enough Tangaroan to be able to find my way through the ephemeris and the reduction tables." "Hmm." Grimes looked at the aneroid barometer -- another import. It was still high. With any luck at all the anticyclonic gloom would persist for the entire passage. In any case, he doubted if Missenden's first attempt to obtain a fix with sextant and chronometer would be successful. He asked, "Do you mind if I have a look round the ship? As you know, I'm something of an authority on the history of marine transport... "I do mind!" snapped Missenden. Then he laughed abruptly. "But what could you do? Even if you hadn't given your parole, what could you do? All the same, I'll send Ellevie with you. And I warn you, that giI is liable to be trigger happy." "Have you known her long?" Missenden scowled. "Too long. She's the main reason why I'm here." Yes, thought Grimes, the radio officer of a merchant vessel is well qualified for secret service work, and when the radio officer is also an attractive woman...  . He felt sorry for Missenden, but only briefly. He'd had his fun; now he was paying for it. Missenden went down with Grimes to the officers' flat, found Ellevie in her room. She got up from her chair without any great enthusiasm, took from a drawer in her desk a revolver, thrust it into the side pocket of her tunic. "I'll leave you to it," said Missenden. "All right," she said in a flat voice. Then, to Grimes, "What do you want to see?" "I was on this world years ago," he told her. "I know," "And I was particularly impressed by the... the ocean passage compasses you had, even then, in your ships. Of course, it was all sail in those days." "Were you?" Grimes started pouring on the charm. "No other race in the galaxy has invented such ingenious instruments." "No?" She was beginning to show a flicker of interest. "And did you know. Commodore Grimes, that it was not a wonderful priest who made the first one? No. It was not. It was a Baron Lennardi, one of my ancestors. He was -- how do you put it? A man who hunts with birds?" "A falconer." "A falconer?" she repeated dubiIF cusly. "No matter. He had never been to the University, but he had clever artisans in his castle, and his brother, whom he loved, was a... how do you say sea raider?" "A pirate." She took a key from a hook by the side of her desk. "Second mate looks after compass," she said. "But second mate not here. So... I do everything." S he led the way out into the alleyway, then to a locked door at the forward end of the officers' accommodation, to a room exactly on the centerline of the ship, directly below the wheelhouse. She unlocked and opened the door, hooked it back. From inside came an ammoniacal odor. In the center of the deck was a cage, and in the cage was a bird -- a big, ugly creature, dull gray in color, with ruffled plumage. It was obvious that its wings had been brutally amputated rather than merely clipped, Its almost globular body was imprisoned in a metallic harness, and from this cage within a cage a thin yet rigid shaft ran directly upwards, through the deckhead and. Grimes knew, through a casing in the master's day cabin and, finally, to the card of the ocean passage compass. As Grimes watched, Ellevie took a bottle of water from a rack poured some into a little trough that formed part of the harness. Then from a box she took a spoonful of some stinking brown powder, added it to the water. The bird ignored her. It seemed to be looking at something, for something, something beyond the steel bulkhead that was its only horizon, something beyond the real horizon that lay forward and outside of the metal wall. Its scaly feet scrabbled on the deck as it made a minor adjustment of course. And it -- or its forebears -- had been the only compasses when Grimes had first come to this planet. Even though the Earthmen had introduced the magnetic compass and the gyro compass this, for an ocean passage, was still the most efficient. Cruelty to animals is penalized only when commercial interests are not involved. "And your spares?" asked Grimes. "Homeward spare -- right forward," she told him. "Ausiphal compass and one spare -- right aft." "So you don't get them mixed?" he suggested. She smiled contemptuously. "No danger of that." "Can I see them?" "Why not? May as well feed them now." She almost pushed Grimes out of the master compass room, followed him and locked the door. She led the way to the poop -- but Grimes noticed that a couple of unpleasantlooking seamen tailed after him. Even though the word had been passed that he had given his parole he was not trusted. The Ausiphal birds were in a cage in the poop house. As was the ease with the Tangaroa birds, their wings had been amputated. Both of them were staring dejectedly directly astern. And both of them -- even though dull and ruffled their plumage glowed with gold and scarlet -- were females. Grimes followed Ellevie into the cage, the door to which was at the forward end of the structure. He made a pretense of watching interestedly as she doled out the water and the odoriferous powder -- and picked up two golden tail feathers from the filthy deck. She straightened and turned abruptly. "What you want those for?" "Flies," he lied inspiredly. "Dry flies." "Flies?" "They're artificial lures, actually. Bait. Used for fishing." "Nets," she stated. "Or explosives." "Not for sport. We use a rod, and a line on the end of it, and the hook and the bait on the end of that And fishermen are always experimenting with different baits." The suspicion faded from her face. "Yes, I remember. Missenden gave me a book -- a magazine? It was all about outdoor sports. But this fishing... Crazyl" "Other people have said it, too. But I'd just like to see what sort of flies I can tie with these feathers when I get home." "If you get home," she said nastily. V B ack in his cabin. Grimes went over mentally what he had learned about the homers -- that was as good a translation as any of their native name -- during his last (his only, until now) visit to Tham. They were land birds, but fared far out to sea in search of their food, which was fish. They always found their way back to their nests, even when blown thousands of miles away by severe storms, their powers of eMurance being phenomenal. Also, whenever hurt or frightened, they headed unerringly for home -- by the shortest possible route, which was a Great Circle course. Used as master compasses, they kept the arrowhead on the card of the steering compass pointed directly towards wherever it was that they had been bom -- even when that "wherever" was a breeding pen in one of the seaport towns. On a Mercatorial chart the track would be a curve, and according to a magnetic or gyro compass the ship would be continually changing course -- but on a globe a Great Circle is the shortest distance between two points. Only one instinct did they possess that was more powerful, more overriding than the homing instinct. The sex instinct. G rimes had given his parole. Grimes had promised not to do certain things -- and those things, he knew, were rather beyond his present capabilities in any case. But Grimes, as one disgruntled Rini Runners' master had once remarked, was a stubborn old bastard. And Grimes, as the admiral commanding the navy of the Rim Worlds Confederacy had once remarked, was a cunning old bastard. Sonya, his wife, had laughed when told of these two descriptions of her husband and had laughed still louder when he had said plaintively that he didn't like to be called old. Nonetheless, he was getting past the age for cloak and dagger work. IF mutiny on the high seas and all the rest of it. But he could still use his brains. Kawaroas short-handedness was a help. If the ship had been normally manned he would have foimd it hard, if not impossible, to carry out his plan. But, insofar as the officers flat was concerned, the two engineers were on watch and watch, and off watch would be catching up on lost sleep. That left Ellevie. But she had watches to keep, and one of these two-hour stretches of duty coincided with and overlapped evening twilight. Missenden was not a watchkeeper, but he was, as he was always saying, the only navigator, and on this evening there seemed to be the possibility of breaks appearing in the overcast. There had been one or two during the day, but never where the sun happened to be. And, insofar as evening stars were concerned, out here, on the Rim, there were so very few. On a clear evening there would have been three, and three only, suitably placed for obtaining a fix. On this night the odds were against even one of the three appearing in a rift in the clouds before the horizon was gone. Anyhow, there was Missenden, on the bridge, sextant in hand, the lid of the chronometer box in the chartroom open, making an occasional gallop from one wing to the other when it seemed that a star might make a fleeting appearance. Grimes asked if he might help, if he could take the navigator's times for him. Missenden said no, adding that the wrong times would be no help at all. Grimes looked hurt, went down to the boat deck, strolled aft. The radio shack was abaft the funnel. He looked in, just to make sure that Ellevie was there. She was, and she was tapping out a message to somebody. Grimes tried to read it -- then realized that even if the code was Morse the text would be in Tangaroan. He went down to the officers' flat. All lights, with the exception of the dim police bulbs in the alleyways, were out. From one of the cabins came the sound of snoring. He found Ellevie's room without any trouble; he had been careful to memorize the squiggle over her door that meant Radio Officer, He walked to the desk, put his hand along the side of it. Yes, the key was there. Or a key. But it was the only one. He lifted it from its hook, stepped back into the alleyway, made his way forward. Yes, it was the right key. He opened the door, shut it behind him, then groped for the light switch. The maimed, ugly bird ignored him; it was still straining at its harness, still scrabbling now and again at the deck as it made some infinitesimal adjustment of course. It ignored him -- until he pulled one of thp female's tail feathers from his pocket. It squawked loudly then, its head turning on its neck to point at the new, potent attraction, its clumsy body straining to follow. But Grimes was quick. His arm, his hand holding the feather shot out, steadied over the brass strip let into the deck that marked the ship's centerline. But it had been close, and he had been stupid. The man at the wheel would have noticed if the compass card had suddenly swung a full ninety degrees to starboard -- and even ssenden would have noticed if the ship had followed suit. (And would he notice the discrepancies between magnetic compass and ocean passage compass? Did he ever compare compasses? Probably not. According to Captain Dingwall he was the sort of navigator who takes far too much for granted.) Grimes, before Missenden had ordered him off the bridge, had been able to study the chart. He assumed -- he had to assume -- that the last Dead Reckoning position was reasonably accurate. In that case, if the ship flew off at a tangent, as it were, from her Great Circle, if, as and from now she followed a rhumb line, she would miss the north coast of Tangaroa by all of a hundred miles. And if she missed that coast, another day's steaming would bring her into the territorial waters of Braziperu. There was probably some sort of coastal patrol, and even though surface and airships would not be looking for Kawaroa her description would have been sent out. The rack containing water and food containers was on the forward bulkhead of the master compass room. It was secured to the plating with screws, and between wood and metal there was a gap. Grimes pushed the quill of the feather into this crack, being careful to keep it exactly over the brass lubber's line. He remembered that the male homer had paid no attention to the not-so-artificial lure until he pulled it out of his pocket. Had his own body masked the smell of it? Or was there a smell, or was it some more subtle emanation? He recalled then that he had learned that the male birds must be kept beyond a minimum distance from the females, no matter what intervened in the way of decks or bulkheads. So... ? His own masculine aura...? The fact that he had put the feathers in the pocket that he usually kept his pipe in... ? He decided to leave the merest tip of the feather showing, nonetheless. He had noted that Ellevie went through her master compass tending routine with a certain lack of enthusiasm; probably she would think that the tiny touch of gold was just another speck on the paintwork. He waited in the foul-smelling compartment for what seemed like far too long a time. But he had to be sure. He decided, at last, that his scheme was working. Before planting of the feather, the maimed bird had been shifting to starboard, the merest fraction of a degree at a time, continually. Now it was motionless, just straining at its harness. Grimes put out the light, let himself out, locked up, then returned the key to EUevie's cabin. He went back up to the bridge, looked into the chartroom. It seemed that Missenden had been able to take one star, but that his sums were refusing to come out right. T he voyage wore on. It was not a happy one, especially for Grimes. There was nothing to read and nobody to talk to except Missenden and Ellevie -- and the former was all too prone to propagandize on behalf of the galactic supermen, while the latter treated Grimes with contempt. He was pleased to note. # IF #I however, that they seemed to be getting on each other's nerves. The honeymoon, such as it had been, was almost over. The voyage wore on. No other ships were sighted, and the heavily clouded weather persisted. Once or twice the sun showed through and once Missenden was able to obtain a sight, to work out a position line. It was very useful as a check of distance run, being almost at right angles to the courseline. "We shall," announced Missenden proudly, "make our landfall tomorrow forenoon." "Are you sure?" asked Grimes mildly. "Of course I'm sure." He prodded with the points of his dividers at the chart. "LookI Within five miles of the D.R." "Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Cheer up. Commodore! As long as you play ball with the barons they won't boil you in oil. All you have to do is be reasonable." "I'm always reasonable," said Grimes. "The trouble is that too many other people aren't." The other man laughed. "We'll see what the Council of Barons has to say about that. I don't bear you any malice -- well, not much -- but I hope I'm allowed to watch when they bring you around to their way of thinking." "I hope you never have the pleasure," snapped Grimes, going below to his cabin. The trouble was that he was not sure. Tomorrow could be arrival day at Port Paraparam on Tangaroa. It could be. It could not. If be started taking too much interest in the navigation of the ship -- if, for example, . he took it upon himself to compare compasses -- his captors would at once smell a rat. He recalled twentieth-century sea stories he bad read, yarns in which people, either goodies or baddies, had thrown ships off course by hiding an extra magnet in the vicinity of the steering compass binnacle. There had even been one in which the hero had achieved the desired effect by sticking a weight under the north pole of the gyro compass rotor with chewing gum, thus introducing some most peculiar precession. Those old bastards had it easy, he thought. Magnetism is straightforward, its not like playing around with the tail feathers of a stupid bird. He did not sleep well that night and was up on bridge, before breakfast, with Missenden. Through a pair of binoculars he scanned the horizon, but nothing was there, no distant peaks in silhouette against the pale morning sky. The two men were up on the " bridge again after breakfast. Still there was nothing ahead but sea and sky. Missenden was beginning to look worried -- and Grimes's spirits had started to rise. Neither of them went down for the midday meal -- and it was significant that the steward did not come up to ask if they wanted anything. There was something in the atmosphere of the ship that was ugly, threatening. The watches -- helmsmen and lookouts -- were becoming increasingly surly. "I shall stand on," announced Missenden that evening. "I shall IF stand on. The coast is well lit, and this ship has a good echometer "But no radar," said Grimes. "And whose fault is that?' flared the other. "Your blasted priests'. They say that they'll not introduce radar until it can be manufactured locally!" "There are such things as balance of trade to consider, Grimes told him. "Balance of trade!" He made it sound like an obscenity. Then. "But I can't understand what went wrong. The Dead Reckoning -- my observed position -- " "The log could be running fast. And what about set? Come to that -- did you allow for accumulated chronometer error?" "Of course. In any case, we've been getting radio time signals. "Arc you sure that you used the right date in the ephemeris?' "Commodore Grimes? As I told you before. I'm a good linguist. I can read Tangaroan almost as well as I can read Ensh." "What about index error on that sextant you were using?" "We stand on," said Missenden stubbornly. Grimes went down to bis cabin. He shut the door and shot the securing bolt. He didn't like the way that the crew were looking at the two Earthmen. VI M orning came, and still no land. The next morning came, and the next. The crew was becoming mutinous. To Missenden's troubles -- and he was, by now, ragged from lack of sleep -- were added a shortage of fresh water and the impending exhaustion of oil fuel. But he stood on, stubbornly. He wore two bolstered revolvers aU the time, and the other ririp's firearms were locked in the strongroom. And what about the one that Ellcvie had be waving around? wondered Grimes. He stood on -- and then, late in the afternoon, the first dark peak was faintly visible against the dark, clouded sky. Missenden rued into the chartroom, came back out. "Mount Rangararol" he declared "Doesn't look like it," said Ellevie, who had come to the bridge. "It must be." A great weight seemed to have faBeu from his shoulders. "What do you make of it, Commodorer "It's land," admitted Grimes. "Of course it's land! And look! There on the starboard bow! A ship. A cruiser. Come to escort us in." He snapped orders, and Kawaroas ensign was run up to the gaff, the black, mailed fist on the scarlet ground. The warship, passing on their starboard beam, was too far distant for them to see her colors. She turned, reduced speed, steering a converging course. The dull boom of her cannon came a long while after the flash of orange flame from her forward turret. Ahead of Kawaroa the exploding shell threw up a great fountain of spray. It was Grimes, who ran to the engmeroom telegraph and rang Stop. It was Ellevie, who, dropping her binoculars to the dsck, cried, "A Braziperuan ship!" Then she pulled her revolver from her pocket and aimed it at Missenden, yelling, 'Terry traitor!" Unluckily for her she was stding just in front of Grimes, who felled her with a rabbit punch to the back of the neck. He crouched, scooped up the weapon and straightened. He said, "You'd better get ready to fight your faithful crew away from the bridge, Missenden. We should be able to hold them off until the boarding party arrives." He snapped a shot at the helmsman, who. relinquishing his now useless wheel, was advancing on them threateniny. The man turned tail and ran. "You're behind this!" raved Missenden. "What did you do? You gave your parole!" "I didn't do anything that I promised not to." "But -- what went wrong?" Grimes answered with insufferable smugness. "It was just a case of one bird-brained navigator trusting ington D. C. Regency-Congress Motor Hotel. For information: Jack C. Haldeman, # Woodboume Avenue, Baltimore, Md. Featuring a lively slide show "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody' narrated by J. K. Klein and based on his photos of many past conventions. Guest of Honor: Robert Silverberg. Hotel Southland, Dallas, Texas. For information: Con Committee #, # Highland Drive, Carrollton, Texas #. Membership #. #, #, or # weeks; college credits will be given. Visiting staff will be: Judith Merril, Fritx Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm. For information: Robin Scott Wilson, Clarion State College, Clarion, Pa. #. North Plaza Motel, #I Reading Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. Program includes a banquet, cost #. For information: Lou Tabakow, # St. John's Terrace, Cincinnati, Ohio #. Membership: #. Angeles: at Statler-Hilton Hotel. For information: Charles A. Cra # me, # N. Ridgewood Place, Hollywood, California #. Advance membership: #: supporting membership: #. ing of sf films from all over the world. Judging by a distinguished panel. For information: Festival del Film di Fantascienza, Castle San Giusto, Trieste, Italy. Ben Franklin Motor Hotel, # Washington, St. Louis, Missouri. Guest of Honor: Harlan Ellison. For information: Norbert Couch, Route #, Box #, Arnold, Missouri #. Membership: #. ana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. Guest of Honor: Daniel F. Galouye. Membership: #. vention. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland, California. Philip Jose Farmer, Guest of Honor. More details later. For informaStation, El Cerrito, California #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. IF  E D Dear Editor: Re the letter by Mrs. Rhoda Wills in your March issue. There is no accounting for tastes, of course, and perhaps Mrs. Wills's letter ought not even to be dignified by a reply, but her attitude is both foolish and representative of a section of the readdnig public. As far as I know there has been a running battle throughout literary history concerned with whether literature should properly instruct or entertain, and no adequate conclusion will ever be reached as long as every person is permitted his own opinion. There is no reason science-fiction, science fantasy, or pure fantasy should be either instructive or entertaining, or educational, enlightening, and so on; it may be any of these or nonCy if the author chooses -- but it will probably be one. An author should, ideally please himself first, and if he also pleases the readers who choose to read his works, so much the better. In other words, the obligation, if any, is with the reader. The newsstands place pornographic books on their shelves, but the public is not obliged to buy them -- anything else would be more worth while. What is needed is a genuine discriminative effort on the part of each individual reader in deciding what is good for him and worthy of his attention. In the same light he has no right to prescribe for others whose tastes may differ. In my opinion and acquaintance, readers and writers of sf and fantasy represent the elite of the world's general reading public. Many of them may be peculiar (I'm quite peculiar myself), but then any selected group of people will have its peculiarities -- painters, horse lovers, dog fanciers, and so on. And Mrs. Wills's irresponsible claim that no real scientist or educator would uphold what If is printing (and evidently the entire genre is included) is fidmply not in accordance with the facts. Writers and readers of sciencefiction and science fantasy are the well educated, are the well informed, are in many cases, the scientists of this country and other countries. And most educators on the university level will not deliberately spurn sf; they will usually admit that it has literary merits even though tiiey may not care for it themselves. There is a sf section of the southern chapter of the Modem Language Association! Beyond all this, however, Mrs. Wills does have a point. Does sf owe anything to its adherents? Perhaps so, in some cases, and I shall iise televisioii isf as an example. Both The Invaders and Star Trek serve an infoimative end, VTihatever theor design may be. Bnt another show. Lost in Space, (has fallen on bad times. In three years the series has shifted from a semi-scientific basis to a fanitastie. The principals, now are a Hattie boy, a strangely emotional robot and a psendooctor, who, despite the fact that he is despicable, cowardly, greedy, and cruel when necessary, is made to retain our interest and even sympathy. He has become ithe hero of the program, and this is truly insidious, because it is not sufflieiently clear that he is a non-hero or anti-hero. He receives little or no punishment and is rewarded more often than not by Where are the vndues here? If there are any, they have become warped out of countoiance. Against this, however, we have the truly magnificent fantasies of E. R. Burroagh who has given the world, in Taaan, a quasi-realistic figure that has, in a short fifty years, become a popnlar hero representing good to rank with or above King Arthur and Robin Hood. Yet Tarzan books are escapism in the purest form. What have they to do with the real problems and responsibities of today's and tomorrow's world. Any young boy has missed one of the experiences of childhood if he never reads a Tarzan book. And I can also mention the works of Andre Norton, L. Spraigue de Gamp, A. Merritt, Jack Vance, and -- the list is endless. Sherlock Holmes is no less wonderful because he is a fantasy hero, of sorts ; I can say all this and still admit th fantasy and the recent sword and sorcery are not my favorites. Credit must be given where it is due -- a story stands on its own merits, or should if it does not. What is needed, once again, is an individual ability to discern and discriminate; if we do not possess these talents strongly, we should practice them. Well, now, I did not start out to write the decisive essay on tins subject, and, despite the length, I can see that I have not done so. But it is important that we leam to judge literature of all kinds with something more than iigtnorance and our own predispositions. If there does exist an inability to separate fact and fancy, we should look farther than our writers and editors for a reason. Science fiction is not all bad, bnt neither is it all good, as some of the fans apparency feel. There is a wider scale of comparison than greatl terrific! and Wow! Oongratulations on a fine sf magazine and a steadily better letter section. -- James M. Gale, # Cresthill Drive, Knoxville, Tennessee #.   Dear Sir: As most of your readers probably "Star Trek" for the #-# season. It is a pleasure to offer a third season of this imagiinative series. While we were formulating next season's schedule, more than # viewers -- one of the largest totals in our history -- wrote or wired their support for "Star Trek." Obviously, it is not possible to answer such a large volume of mail individually, so I, therefore, extend a genagement to your readers who took the time and trouble to communicate with us. The response was gratifying, -- Mort Werner, Vice President, IF A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. The Science Fiction Book Ciub invites you to tab #-woiume Treasury i when you join the Science fiction Book Club and agree to accept only # books during the coming year. How to Get This Unusual Value B ecause you enjoy Science thrillers, the Sci ence Fiction Book Club would like to ac quaint you with the most imaginative, in formative, entertaining new science hctioi books as they are written. That is why w Treasury of Great Science Fiction for onlj # -- to help cover shipping -- with a Tria Membership in the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month i offers a really superb new science fact o fiction book at a fraction of its regular price Even though these books sell for #, #! and more in their original editions, club mem bers get special full-length, hard-cover edi choose to take an extra value selection a higher prices). And the Club tells you in ad vance what each monthly selectfon will be During your Trial Subscription you agree t take as few as four books in the next twelv( months. After that you may take as few or a: many books as you want, and you may cance at any time. If not delighted with introductory package, return it within # days to cancel membership. Mail coupon to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York, #. Edited by Anthony Boucher Two giant volumes. Over # pages of exciting fiction. A handsome addition to your library. Includes John Wyndham's classic ReBirth... Heinlein's Waldo... Anderson's Brain Wave... a total of # full-length novels, # novelets, # short stories by such masters as Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Judith Merril, Alfred Bester, A. E. Van Vogt, C. M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon -- and more. Please accept my application for membership in the Science Fiction Book J' Club and rush me The Treasury of Great Science Fiction. I enclose lOitn to help cover shipping. Then, every month, send me the Club's free bul letin, "Things to Come." which describes coming selections. For each o book I accept. I will pay # plus shipping and handling, unless I take o an extra value selection at a higher price. I need take only four books S within a year and may resign any time thereafter. z I may return it in # days, pay nothing, owe nothing, and my member ship will be canceled.  Name (Please Print) Address .State If under # parent must sign here (Offer good in U.S.A. only.) #  s#c  rff fu # B r K r i Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. # Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose my check or money order for :  # # issues for # # issues for # Name Address City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or Q renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Oo  Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #I ) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station ) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Key Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl , Editor letter del Re, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher . Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisfier, Circulation irec or by Harlan Ellison by Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr. by Burt K. Filer by Paul M. Moffett by Basil Wells by C. C. MacApp by John Thomas by Win Marks by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey  IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol #, No. # Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial W arren McCulloch, who looks a little like either Gort or Klaatu (the one that isnt a robot), but with a beard like George Bernard Shaw, is in fact neither an alien nor a late-blooming Victorian playwright. What he is is a mathematician, neurophysiologist, medical doctor and poet, which makes him obviously the right man to be a staff member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at M.I.T. Some time ago we read, and mentioned in these pages, his book, Embodiments of Mind (The M.I.T. Press), which contains such choice items for speculation as this: Test a man's ability to recognize whether two lines are of different lengths. On average, you will find that he can do so only if the difference is at least #. Test the same man's ability to recognize whether a rectangle is constructed according to the "golden mean" -- that is, with the length in a proportion of # to I to the height. You will find he can do so even when the difference is as little as one part in a thousand. Are the same sensory and analytical powers involved in both exercises? It would seem so. But one of them is fifty times as accurate as the other! Why? Well, McCulloch doesn't tell us why, either in the book or in person; he prefers to show us the problems and let us do what we can to solve them. In fact, he Bhowed us all one the other day, at the Boston Science Fiction Conference in March, #, where he, Marvin Minsky (the computer man who is coming rather close to bringing Asimov's robots to life -- if "life" is the right word for robots) and your editor took part in a panel discussion. Said McCulloch: "There are too many people in the world. At the present time, humanity comprises # of the world's biota. The proportion is increasing; and it cannot go on doing so indefinitely or there won't be enough non-human biota for us to eat." O f course, we all know that there are getting to be an awful lot of people; but McCulloch's translation of that fact into a proportion between people on one hand and trees, cornstalks, mosquitoes, elephants, dolphins, dogs, cats, bacteria, trapdoor spiders, giant squids, daisies and porcupines -- not to mention all the other varieties of living things that make up the tally of the world's biota -- on the other seems to make the picture a little clearer, and a lot more alarming. Consider food chains, for instance. Your tenounce beefsteak was paid for by roughly twenty pounds of animal fodder consumed by the steer who grew it for you. Your eight-ounce can of tuna is the end of a chain that involves eighty ounces of smaller fish, eight hundred ounces of little invertebrates and eight thousand ounces -- a quarter of a ton -- of plankton; the krill turn the plankton into themselves by eating it, the little fish eat the krill, the tuna eat the little fish. If we are In fact onefiftieth of all the life that exists on the earth, then clearly we can't even now make up much of our diet out of the end terms of long food chains -- which is to say, for most of the human race, the only food available is vegetable. (As, in fact, it is.) Which has its problems. Vegetable food sources are poor in protein. Protein is quite essential to human diets -- particularly to those of young children. In protein-poor diets, children do not die of hunger very much of the time. But they do not survive unscathed, either: the protein deficiency injures the development of the mind and brain.They may very well grow to be adults, but they are unlikely to grow to be intelligent adults. Having agreed, then, that there is an upward limit to the desirable size of the human population, and that men are begetting themselves closer to that limit every day, the question was raised: How many people should there be in the world? Marvin Minsky suggested that there was a natural lower limit for an optimum population, at least according to his own personal preferences, and that was a large enough number of human beings to males it possible for there to exist persons specializing in enough different activities to keep a scientific, technological, comfortable civilization alive. How many is that? At least a few hundred thousand, he suggested, but how much more than that was anybody's guess. And an upper limit would be no less than the planet can support with an adequate diet -- assuming the development of good new food sources, perhaps "some Those are pretty broad parameters, to be sure, but no doubt somewhere between the two figures is the "right" size for the human race. The lower figure is obviously too low. But the upper figure is very likely too high, too -- and yet that's where we are right now. If we human beings are to maintain ourworld's bafe W more, we're obviously going, to Save to destroy a lot of graceful and desirable species to do it. As wtffce alrea By done. Worse than that, we're going to destroy a lot of the graceful and desirable features of human life as well. As Pity the lman race can't recognize the fflHffier proportions of human-nonhuron l ife forms on this planet neatly as accurately as it can recognize the jaSpoations of a "perfect" rectangle! Even more of a pity that we don't seem to have any good way of ntotafaing the proper proportion of humanity in the world, even if we Knew what it was... B y the way, last month we started a small (moneywise, anyway) contest for suggestions on What to Do About Vietnam. By the time you read this it is possible that the question will be settled (we can't tell, because that's two months in the future as we write these words, and to be honest about it we sf writers don't really know what will happen next any better than politicians or scientists do.) But lit is even more possible that it won't be; if talks begin, they'll probably still be going on. So the contest is still going on too. See the ad on page # for details, if you missed last month's announcement. And let's hear from you! IF  Novelette ?ERfty a. : mma ii# ooa  rie Bewegal were masters of the universe -- until they encapsulated two suffering human forebrains into their computer ! I M y name is Rebecca Anne Ellents; my fraternal twin is John Thomas Ellents. John , is as near identical to me as any non-identical twin can be. ' We are encased in a rectangular parallelopiped -- a box-shaped object ten feet by ten feet by six feet. Various input and output terminalleads are arranged about our box in convenient positions for their potential use. The Bewegal, who made us the way we are now, had great need for micro-organic computers with redundant capacity; thus, Johnny and I share our experiences. Should one of us fail, the other can take immediate control, continuing in our efforts as though no failure had occurred. Otherwise, to insure that our operating-life will continue to be approximately equal throughout our design-life, our individual periods of conscious operation are controlled by an atomic timer.  I will tell our story for exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds; then Johnny, who will have been unconscious, yet completely conjoined to my experiences, will automatically take up our story for his allotted two minutes and fifteen seconds. I will return at the end of his time to be followed by cycle after cycle of alternate self-awareness and control periods. Though I was once human -- sometimes rational, often flighty and girlish -- I am now almost compelled to be logical I am sure you will understand this to be a result of my use and an effect of my recent environment, not a natural characteristic of my birth. Perhaps it is not necessary, then, to apologize for my pedantry and insistence on sequential detail. On the last day in my human perience given to a lucky girl of only seventeen. I, Becky Ellents, had been chosen, along with my brother Johnny, to kick off opening ceremonies for the first deep-space Academy of Mines. Dad had something to do with our choice, of course. As I had always said, "What good are fathers if you can't use them for something?" I begged for this pleasure on Dad's every trip home. It wasn't just "boys" that held my interest (at least I wouldn't admit this to anyone) but the excitement of going into deep space. Johnny had his own reasons. I'm sure, though, they were familiar to mine. Dad refused to consider the idea for a while, before Mother interceded; Dad couldn't refuse then. So there we were -- seven days out on our way to Satellite IV of Jupiter. I remembered how I looked into the mirror to touch up my brown head of curls, to straighten my latest dress creation and sort of give myself a last good check before joining the ship's dance. Ah yes! Those humans eyes of mine saw far more than a thin young girl with turned up nose and slight dimples on each side of the cheek. They saw far more than five feet, ten inches of young female, rosy-hued with twinkling eyes, sprouting strong at the breast. Those eyes saw with the "emotion" of a young seventeen-year-old girl; therefore they looked into the face of a mature, grown lady -- a sophisticated, mature, grown lady. They saw one who thrived on excitement; the kind which provided opportunity for sweeping majestically forward into a ship's ballroom, there subtly to conquer all males, young and old, through innocent vivacity, goodness, and charm. Johnny was taller than I. His five IF feet, ten and one-half inches could be attributed to the strenuous athletic life which only a male can know. His hair was naturally curlybrown as was mine; his cheeks, too, had slight dimples over which the girls swooned, I saw him reflected from the mirror, dressed in formal attire, with hair combed slick, as he passed through the ante-chamber joining our two cabins. How well I remember the smooth tone of his human voice when he said the two simple words, "Coming Sis?" That was merely one hundred years ago. I danced the whole night through. A young Lieutenant Bronson, tall and handsome, talked me into viewing the stars; had I maneuvered to bring this about, only the female can know. The viewing room had specially constructed glass; we could freely look at the stars without risk of exposure to hard radiation. Naturally everything was darkened, and, though many were present, it had the sense of mystery and excitement for two young people that stars always have had. The Galilean satellites were a pretty sight; they were set against the sky like small pearls moving to and fro as they circled the large planet. Hour by hour the panorama changed following a sequence predictable as clockwork. Sometimes a moon passed through the shadow of Jupiter to show a total eclipse, remaining visible for only an hour or so; other times big Jupiter swallowed the small pearl inch by precious inch. Though seemingly gone for good, our patience-inwaiting rewarded us with the sight -- the giant planet regurgitates another pearl just as beautiful from around its other side. Did you know an ugly earth feud prevented these beautiful satellites from the dignity of proper names? Why not Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto and nine other good names instead of calling them Satellite I, II, Human emotion, of course! The Lieutenant and I sat on the couch together, he sat close and held my hand. Then he told me of the stars, their beauty, their simplicity, and their attraction to him; he made me see that man's striving was not in vain, though generations must pass. These, he made me feel, were man's greatest heritage. Where the lucky girl of earth might listen to the story of the beauty of earth's moon, my Lieutenant would speak of the amazing ring system of Saturn -- # miles across and less than # miles thick, colored, it seems, with paints from earth's rainbow. Then he would speak of the tiny creations from which all of this glittering expanse before us was made, how these infinitesimal particles of energy and space, twisted and bent in just certain ways, could be stacked one after another -- just to scatter pin-points of irridescent lights before a young girl of seventeen. It was lovely, my first case of puppy love. I fell in love with Lieutenant Bronson and his clean manly figure. T his is Johnny writing now l My sisters time is up! She can operate fully for only her allotted period, then I cycle in automatically; when my time is up, she will be back. We will tell this story from its beginning -- logically and sequentially -- as it should be told; you will then understand the nature of ourselves and our behavior better when described in its proper place. When Sis was out in the viewing deck mooning over that kid officer in front of all those people, I was down near the polarization room. That's where it happened. One of the "fail-safe" rods broke, fell into the observational, cross-sectional chamber blanking out the radiation which controlled photon reaction mass. There was a device for shutting off the blanking chamber but it was down for temporary adjustment. Photons streamed out beyond their critical design limits, the "fail-safe" rod melted, and all hell broke loose! It wasn't apparent to the people topside at first. Increased reaction mass, applied slowly, showed only in the astrogation room where continuous readings fed back adjustments to correct course. Course could not be corrected. We headed out past the orbits of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, Nothing could be done about the problem until the whole unit was rebuilt from bottom up. This we proceeded to do from the first, even while Sis was gazing at the stars with her young hero. A week passed before we could actually shut down the wild-driving photon generator. By then, we were well beyond the orbit of Pluto. We shut her down. Our velocity was high, and we were headed at about fortyfive degrees from the ecliptic plane -- which side, I didn't know. That was when they came! II O ur ship was huge -- six hundred feet in length. The Bewegal came in a ship nine thousand feet in length. At first we tracked their ship to record as a rarely seen dark meteor grazing the edge of our solar system. It's motion relative to ours was best described by a positional vector which assumed our position to be fixed. But no matter, regardless of the respective orientation between us they would have done the same. The ship had no distinctive features. Smooth of skin, tapered for atmosphere, enigmatical, it reached for us by generating waves of the so-called weak force known as gravity. We swung toward them, changing our relative velocity as they fully controlled our progress with their superior devices. Very slowly now, they pulled to their side. The skin of their ship peeled back almost as though a living, pulsing creature were opening its mouth to feed. Our tiny ship was laid to rest on the soft-seeming floor of a huge cavern. Without warning of any kind, another force was used that had the effect of complete paralysis on all of the ship's protoplasm -- whether IF man, plant, or amoeba. Oh, they left cognition, awareness of self, and thinking processes; for these are elements of trade far more valuable to them than any other of the galaxy's prizes. We were aware of the steps which followed though many in the ship were not always able to watch each step, due to their original position of paralysis. The Bewegal tested our atmosphere, then flooded their hold with a like composition; our ship was split end to end, though made of earth's toughest alloys. Compartments were cut out to be opened as though zip-top drinks. And from each they carefully, gently, plucked out the prizes. I was lucky enough -- I suppose I should say unlucky enough -- to be in a frozen position such that I could see one of them. I remember reading a fine essay by the ancient earthman, J. B. S. Haldane, entitled "On Being the Right Size." How he slashed and tore with weapons of fact and logic the long-cherished fantasies that man might be reduced to the size of the bug or amoeba or increased to the size of the elephant or dinosaur. Using mathematics no stronger than arithmetic and simple ratios applied to the mechanics of bone structure and like organic parts, he showed the absurdity of these concepts while underpinning the fact of an essential correctness of size for all life whether man, mosquito, or amoeba. Were I, at that time, to tell you that each BewegaPs proportions were roughly on the same order of magnitude as the ratio of the size of their ship to ours -- # to #, or # to I -- would have felt the twinge of guilt associated with possible distortion of fact. Now, after one hundred extra years of experience and knowledge, I realize .that Mr. Haldane was speaking only from the point of view of earth's narrow environment; there he spoke authoritatively. Since I have been lost in thought for some seconds, I realize my allotted two minutes and fifteen seconds is nearly over. In view of my present introspective mood, perhaps it best if I stop writing for the remaining twenty of seconds, Becky, of course, will pick up for me. T his is Becky writing again. Johnny's time for conscious operations is ended , and I have returned . What were the Bewegal like? A Bewegal is pyramidally shaped like a tent whose bottom is not stretched tight -- more like a dress flared at the bottom. On top it has four, sometimes five, eyes which are at least as efficient as former ones. The eyes don't protrude; they lie flush with the skin, so leathery and wet with smelly chemicals. In our ordinary earth environment the underlying requisite to morphogenesis -- the structural changes during development of the organism -- is cell multiplication and growth. This was not true with the extra-terrestrial aliens. Their outer layer of thick skin could traverse the specific morphogenetic processes: cell migration; cell aggregation which includes forming of masses, chords, and sheets; localized growth, or its lack; fission and splitting where splitting includes the delamination of single sheets into separate layers, the cavitation of cell masses and the forking of cords; folding, including circumscribed folds which form outpocketings and in-pocketings; and bending, which is usually simply folding due to unequal growth. So you see the Bewegal's outside integument is fully capable of extreme motility; so much so as to be able to form arm-like appendages or other, useful cellular arrangements whenever desired. Were they like the amoeba, mobile in overall shape? No! Their pyramidal tent-like shape was a constant. Tbeir huge mass -- at least seventy-two feet high -- did not find it necessary to bend and stoop. By changing the form of their external integument they could form cups or grasping appendages with great ease, then reach out to pluck their object, passing it from cup to cup if that seemed to be the desirable shape for the moment. They were oxygen users too; their skin surface could be stretched to increase square area of absorption as oxygen content was reduced. Now you see the difficulty when describing them? All the logic common to the ordinary earth environment could not compensate for lack of specific knowledge respecting their internal form and function and knowledge of conditions of their ordinary habitat. My description is not like anything you know. So when I say, "They reached to pluck," you know that great morphological changes are described by the statement. W hen our cabins were cut open, I was standing by the bed along with Johnny in eyes-open, frozen position as was Johnny. A cup of flesh reached into the opened cabin to scoop us forward and up. I tumbled on the flesh, and though paralyzed by their energies I yet could sense through my original sensory network. The flesh was slick and rubbery like a piece of fresh calf's liver; the smell was over-powering of rotten flesh. If it were not for the paralysis I'm sure I would have vomited; I could only tumble upward, frozen in muscle, seething with emotion and sick in body and spirit. We were placed carefully, one at a time, into a rectangular box where, still sentient and aware, still with senses alert and working, we were covered with a sticky gel-like substance as it filled the box to the top. I lay, able to move only in thought, yet still able to see lights and shadows overhead and to feel the stickiness of the material surrounding us. I lay there -- possibly hallucinating, I don't know -- for endless hours. It may have been months or weeks; for the chemical action of the enzymes which cause physiological time, had ceased for me. I do remember some of the things I thought about while in this peculiar stasis. I remembered lieutenant Bronson and our brief flirtation. Where was he now, with his big, brave body? My father, too, was among those new in stasis. What would mother, IF who stayed at home, say? Was Johnny the one right next to me? Who or what were these giants of rotting flesh? What did they wish of us? Certainly not gold or radium or knowledge. Were we to be pickled specimens in some extra-terrestrial collection? Or were we to be kept alive to be placed on exhibit as humans do with the lower animals in zoos? Would we be aware and sentient, as now, forevermore? My wildest imagining did not approximate the truth. Except for tiny bumps and motions which were transmitted through the gel-like material to my body, I never knew when transfer took place from ship to laboratory. Ah, yes the laboratory! How well I remember it! For here I lost my beautiful eyes. But I lost more as you shall see. Ill T his is Johnny again  Beckys time is up so I will continue our story for my allotted two minutes and fifteen seconds . I was carefully lifted from my packing box by appropriate extensions of our captor. It cleaned the gel-like material from my whole body. Very carefully still, it peeled the clothes from my body, stopping only to study the precise relationship between my school-ring and my finger and my wrist-watch and my arm. Once assured they were independent artifacts, these were cut from me. Using fine instruments and the finely drawn flesh of its outer integument, my captor cleaned all my bodily orifices of the gel-like substance. I still could not move a single muscle; but residues of the gellike material sufficiently wetted my eyes so they could follow the bread sweep of the laboratory as I was turned over and about. Next I was placed under an intense but cold light beam. From what I have since learned, it must have been a microscope light. Here micromanipulators of various types completed the remainder of the process. First to be stripped from me was the sensation of pressure and pain over the skin areas. My body responded well to their pricks of pain; I had no conscious control over any of its parts. They probably used some automatic mapping method for when done, microminiature needles were placed at the nerve branches which served the areas of the skin to be controlled. For centuries man has described the physical and psychological basis of pain. Man eventually agreed to identify two kinds: one, called a prick pain, is a bright, relatively short pain; the other, called a dull pain, is long-lasting and less well localized. I can tell you, however, that either type of pain can be complete and total hell! From tiny, bright, highly localized pain pricks, their automatic machinery inexorably built up pain until my total skin area was one whole mass of throbbing sensation from which I could not flee, physically or mentally. Oh God! How I wanted to scream in pain and terror! E ach man "knows" nature has so constructed him that he can freely choose death, disease, or mental flight Threshold levels are constructed in each person's body beyond which normal cellular response will not go; Other safety techniques, such as choice of illness or choice of peculiarities in behavior, offer some choice of flight from a world too filled with pain. Where does one go when all this is denied? Imagine the worst kind of torture for the damned; multiply this by a factor of a hundred; then feel that throbbing, sentient ego which makes up the essential you scurry, grovel, run, panic, cry. Weep, scream, melt; yet it lies there trapped, helplessl They fastened tiny, permanentlyjoined neuronic attachments to each of the nerve fibers controlling the sensation of pain. Then the testing began. Naturally they would want to ensure independence of the uncovered pain network before preceding further. Certainly, too, they would want to learn threshold response levels, type and category of response, recovery time under high body stimulation and under fatigue. Oh yes! They would need to know all of those thin gs and more, before proceeding in their careful, systematic, scientific fashion! In a similar manner, using different instruments of torture, the Bewegal scientist isolated the cold and the more deeply buried warmth receptor units. These, too, were fully tested to assure the Bewegal's full knowledge of my capability under all conditions. Analogous means were used to localize and make attachments to points of pressure sensitivity. There was no blessed reflex which could jerk away my whole body -- Oh, the agony of the damned! T his is Becky again ; Johnny's time was over . Let us be satisfied with Johnny's description as "hell." Suffice it to say, they found all of our skin receptors first. Attachments of a permanent nature were placed on every ending. They tested us for design characteristics -- threshold levels -- and so on, for days, while the tiny, formerly-important ego in each of us tried to scream the pain and emotion out, only to have it rebound, echoing round and round in our tiny cognition corner, seemingly forever! Finally, this phase was finished. They turned the stimulus input levels down to steady-state levels of tolerance; with my body paralyzed, my little girl's ego -- the one which wanted so badly to conquer brave Lieutenant Bronson -- vainly directed its every effort to accomplish one single solitary act of will -- to scream in terror! IV A s time would show, thejrhad need for a wider range of frequency in my vision as well as need for capacity to attach specialized devices whenever desired, such as infrared, telescopic, microscopic and so forth. They removed my eyes for this purpose. They reached into my hed and IF severed the optic chiasma and portions of the corpus callosum of the brain known # provide a system of interconnection between eye channels -- they wanted the eyes to work independently. The souses of smell and taste were next. They had no need for my voice; so it was stripped away, as were the small bones of the ear, beyond the semicircular canals, they dug their instruments into the nerve to the brain itself. By now, they had stripped me of natural sight, sound, taste, smell, feeling and motion as well as the pleasure of sleep or death. Though I might have been awake for many months, I was incapable of sleep. Artificial chemical nutrients were designed to flush constantly through my system sweeping all poisons away and keeping my all-important brain awake, alert, and at peak performance. They knew what they were about! There you have it; you can visualize our situation. Every sense of importance to the Bewegal was stripped, studied, and hooked-up to stimuli simulators; full consciousness was maintained in us at all times. Full pain, too, could be turned up or down merely by twisting of knobs and levers without the blessing of motion, emotion, or mental or physical escape in any form. Can you visualize, now, the sentient cadaver that was I? Split at cheeks and nose, cut through to brain at eye-casing, eyes and nose gouged out with long wires attached, ears scooped hollow with more wires attached, every square centimeter of space roughened and wired, and having tubes entering here and there, flowing with chemicals to sustain life. In the center of this dead-living corpse was the quivering, sentient being called "I," with still-fresh memories of sweet smelling perfume, handsome Lieutenants and the beautiful, vibrant thought of excitement just around the corner. V B ecky's time has ended . This is Johnny again! In a very crude sense, highly oversimplified, man could get along without the cortex since it is an organ of elaboration and refinement through evolutionary trials, rather than a necessary participant in the actions of the nervous system involving sensory and motor actions. As the brain's hemispheres evolved from simple amphibian form to the huge cerebral cortex of man, they developed new connections to the brainstem. Bundles of nerve fibers moved out from the hypothalmus, the thalmus, the recticular formation and other brainstem points to adjacent sections of the cerebral cortex. These connections were identified, severed and reconnected to the Bewegal's apparatus. The first inkling I had of what they were doing came with hallucinations which occurred in both random and peculiar fashion. I would see my visions -- small children running, a space ship lifting into the sky, my mother handing me my baby-bottle. Then I would smell odors -- beautiful lilacs, fresh cow manure, a spring day after a cleaning rain. My feet would tingle, my flesh would crawl, my mouth tasted terribly salty, and so on Little by little, they mapped my brain Only later did I discover that they had eliminated any connections of the brain with such useless items as lips, hands, arms, legs and so forth These brain portions were not allowed to go wasted, however -- the areas were re-tied to other brain regions to serve as subsidiary or backup computer units Later you will see the use for these extra units. Then their probes found it! Near and around the brainstem were the pleasure centers These consist primarily of hunger-sensitive and sexsensitive centers; probing there with electrodes caused me subjective pleasure of a kind which can only be described as bordering on the mystical Satisfaction of the basic drives of hunger and sex, buried deeply within the old brain, seems to be simply a matter of the presence of electrical current in the proper neuron circuits of the brain. Don't feel that pleasure was the Bewegal's only discovery; they were after the punishment centers too. They found them near the hypothalamic region. I wondered then, "Are heaven and hell both located in my animal brain?" T he brain's reticular system can turn consciousness on or off merely by sending proper signals to the portions of the brain involving conscious processes. Its signals, in turn, come from sensory impulses received over taps on the communication channels of the central nervous system Signals which may represent touch, pain, sound or light are integrated by the reticular neurons to build up an output voltage to a threshold value beyond which the arousal commands are triggered. In the absence of such real incoming sensory data, the mechanism can be fooled into believing there is something that requires conscious attention By attaching a switch to couple the reticular activating system to the cortex, the Bewegal had control of my conscious mind. They could shut me off or turn me on at Still move could be developed from the reticular activating system When we focus our attention on something extraneous signals seem to recede to the background A person with unusual concentration powers may be oblivious to all around The signals do not just appear to recede They actually do recede. Intensity-control signals are generated in the recticular system to reduce our sensitivity to uninteresting or irrelevant stimuli and thereby permit us to achieve the useful result of concentration. My ability to concentrate or not to concentrate was at their control! VI T hank the good Lord that, though they knew so much about every other area, they knew little about the functions of man's frontal lobes. Once probed in that area, I might IF have become dull from lack of initiative and disoriented through having very little interest in life. These frontal lobes acted much as a stand-by capacity for my cortical thinking; here too, I could entertain complex thought patterns as well as organize and set up motivational goals within myself. It is for this latter reason that I thank God, for it will save our race! The frontal lobes can assist in setting up and re-structuring circuit patterns of different and unique design. To some extent, for a while, they had control over this function -- but only indirect, unknowing control. My very soul seemed to recede to the frontal lobes! The Bewegai searched for the source of experimental memory. Simpler routines which I had learned in my life resided in the deeper structures of the brain. I mentioned having the corpus callosum cut in connection with cutting the optic chiasm. By so doing, they caused all subsequent input signals to be stored independently on either side of the brain with no redundancy of storage as was the condition before. Prior to this operation, I would take the input signal from my eyes and record it simultaneously on both sides of the brain in the cortex. After the operation, sight from one side recorded only on that side, and similarly for the other side. In laboratory tests, they fed identical signals over the two nerve networks which transmitted to each respective half of the brain. By checks made at the temporal lobes and other deeper locations, they were able to determine exactly what differences, if any. Occurred to the same signal when recorded in different halves of the cortex. Whatever they were to use us for, redundancy was not as important as an increase of independent storage capacity -- or so it seemed at first. I t may be fascinating to contemplate the effects of splitting my brain into halves. By the logic of biology, it should result in the splitting of me into two separate individuals, both inhabiting and controlling the same body from time to time. It didn't happen quite that way because the lower integrating functions of the brain stem were not split. Now you have the complete picture of what was done to us. Enclosed by leads to electronic stimuli simulators and to output units from portions of the brain; cut into again and again for identification, testing and control of functions of one type or another; isolated by chemistry and physics; compartmented to dual-brain functions; controlled in memory and consciousness; isolated from natural sources for both pleasure and pain; I was nearly one hundred per cent at their will. What did I have left, you ask? I was still "I" ! Once our human design characteristics and performance ratings were established, the Bewegai tied us to their permanent devices for sustaining life. The whole assembly was self-contained; chemicals processed the products of metabolic break-down and IF re-constituted the essential ingredients; then pumps passed the cleaned materials back through us. In like manner, the chemicals which were used in this process were renewed by other catalytic processes. A long-lived radioactive battery provided whatever additional energies were required to supplement this biotic cycle. Once they had carefully tested the cycle, they filled the space between my body and a metal container, within which I was lowered, with a strange plastic material. The plastic flowed around the wires and tubes connected to me until it filled all of the space; then it hardened to encapsulate firmly. No wire or pipe could possibly shake loose within that plastic. Near the surface of my skin, wherever a square hundredth of an inch was not covered by a micro-probe, was developed a moving, almost living, set of complex molecules which could take dead flesh and slowly move it to one of the tubes for eventual processing. Other clever devices of this type were also used wherever needed to provide the Bewegal with a computer tool which was completely self-contained for their use. One special connection from my brain went through the plastic to the outside of the container. This set of leads was attached to my fraternal twin sister Becky. Undoubtedly in their many tests for design performance data they were impressed with the near identity of our response; for their use, this was a lucky happenstance. These leads had the effect of causing Becky's experiences to be mine and vice-versa. Where our own corpus callosum had been cut to prevent redundancy of memory storage within ourselves, they now deliberately brought redundancy back to the total system by means of this interconnection. Whatever Becky experienced, I would also experience; and whatever I experienced, she would experience. B ecky was placed in a similar container to min e -- self-contained except for input-output leads and protected by plastic potting materials. The two of us were then placed into a single box side by side where metals and plastics of all types and strengths were placed around us to protect us under every conceivable force. It was then that the Bewegal's inserted timer began to operate. Controlled by the rate of disintegration of our nuclear energy source, periodically Becky, then I, must assume control of the inputoutput signals and take prime responsibility for calculations and data processing every two minutes and fifteen seconds. Not only were we packaged to provide dual operating characteristics of the same performance rating, but should one of us be accidentally destroyed, the other would always have complete information and capability. Furthermore, by periodically cycling operational time between the two of us, we would wear out in equal amounts, thus providing for constant equality and quality of level-ofperformance. they not? Here l am . It's Becky again . Johnny # s time was up. They turned our consciousness down to low level for many months; until the ship was completed we could not be properly placed. During that period my mind hallucinated, since I was deprived of sensory input data of any kind; I was unable to determine the passage of time. The first inklin g I had of my new function in life was when input leads were connected to the programming machine. It had to teach me the basic operating-system language so I could function as a successful Weapons-control computer in the BewegaPs new spaceship. Unlike our earth-bound programmers, this programming machine had complete control over all my functions. It could whip me with stabbing fingers of red-hot pain or reward me with the ecstasy of the gods; in short, I learned fast and well. Only when past neural patterns interfered with incoming concepts would the pain whip be used. Then sooner or later, the old patterns would become deconditioned. My only purpose, now, was to learn the exceedingly fast, complicated language necessary to communicate with the Primaryfire-control computer who, in turn, was in contact with the Master-control computer. All I learned from that day into many years of the future came through the triply distorted senses of the Master-control computer, the Primary-fire-control computer, and the horribly precise language which made up the operating-system language for all of us. What was the operating-system language like? First of all, it had to be synthetic. Otherwise, intercommunication between several of the widely differing life forms used in organic-computer construction would have been meaningless. Second, the language had to be learned to perfection so that no slippage of time could occur when orders to move or to fire came. When the Bewegal re-structured useless parts of my brain once devoted to control of hands, lips, feet and so on during my manufacture, they expected these auxiliary units to be used for storing and learning the basic operating-system language. Thus, for me, a five pulse code message received in nano-seconds might represent a pucker of the lips, a little motion of one finger on my left hand, a twitch of the foot and a jerk of the arm muscle -- since these were brain regions where the basic operating-system language was interpreted. For another entity constructed from ingredients of a different planet, other interpretations would be needed. So you see, the Qperatingsystem's meaning and structure were completely different for each kind of organic-computer to be found interconnected throughout the ship's communication network. T here are two general ways by which signals may be moved from point to point to convey meanIF ing. One obvioui Wy is to connect between points and tnember which line was connected to which point. Another way is to connect the lines in any random manner, relying on the ability to discriminate the kind of signal to the other end. Our way of learning the operating-system was more akin to the latter method. We used our ability to discriminate patterns of pulses, though prior meanings may have been totally different. Eventually I learned the Fire-control programming language; I was installed about one-third of a mile from the front of a huge ship nearly ten thousand feet long. Then we lifted from our giant planet for open space and service-testing. So long as the ship was operational, ready-current flowed through all computers. It was on this ready-current line that I learned whatever occurred to the ship or within the ship. Do you, by chance, know the programming languages of earth derived from ancient Fortron or Cobol? If you do, then use the one you know best to describe to another programmer what you see when you look out the window. Quite a trick involved isn't it? , Of course, our language was far more flexible than either of those; the limitations were essentially the same. Master-control, a sentient being from another star far removed from ours, and whose shape and function I would learn, always knew where we were going, how fast we traveled, by what method we traveled, the status of the engines, the ship, the weapons, and the fuel supply. Master-control was the only one of us organic-computers to be blessed with video receptors both inside and outside the ship. In our highly symbolic, restricted fire-control language. Master-control would pass whatever he saw or knew on to the rest. Thus we knew something, albeit distorted by machine, alien nervous structure and synthetic language. W hen our ship lifted to be given our first functional servicetest, I was wired to react without delay to certain instructions by the Primary-fire-control computer, another life form captured by the Bewegals. Certain signals from Primary-firecontrol caused me to compute the velocity, acceleration and position at either slow or fast rate. When on fast, I was caused to concentrate almost solely on the problem at hand. Computation time and accuracy were not then limited to the speed transmission of axon or dendrite of the neuron. A different type of phenomenon took over, giving me virtually instantaneous answers, nano-seconds became slow. Could this be what we humans called insight? Furthermore, we could not become fatigued, for as fast as poisons developed in our biological systems, the apparatus encased with us would respond accordingly; it was a demand type system. I could also move the gun to proper position slowly or rapidly. The gun, however, was not a physical projection beyond the ship. Like the multi-Iensed configuration of an insect's eye, the gun consisted of many apertures which could be powered or not. Switching to turn on power in the proper aperture was the equivalent of gun motion. My function, then was to switch to the proper aperture, after which tremendous energy poured forth. Primary-fire-control gave me all pertinent data. I acted on the data; either by slow or fast thought, I sent out specific impulses. What happened after that was a function of the way I was wired; I had no need to see the object of our fire as did Primaryfire control. It was now obvious why Johnny and I were so valuable. When the Bewegal's enemy returned fire, one of his highest priority items was to eliminate the source of the fire power coming at him. Since I had to be close to the gun for time-of-transmission's sake, I was the most vulnerable of all the deeply buried computers. Should I get holed, there was always the other part of the computer -- Johnny. Having full knowledge and equivalent capability, he could continue the battle without interruption. T his is Johnny writing again . Becky s time is up once more . We traveled in fleet formation to another galaxy. I can tell you the direction, velocity and acceleration of every ship with respect to every other ship and all with respect to several galactic coordinates; I can tell you the mass and shape of each ship; I can tell you the probable composition of each ship...AH of these data were transmitted to me by the gossip among us organic-computers. I could tell you how many Bewegal were in each ship, their mass and location at any given time and their acceleration and velocity at any given time. What I could not do is tell you whether they were male or female, or what their motives were when traveling from galaxy to galaxy. The same holds true for the many planets under strange suns which we visited. Seeing these things only through the eyes of an operatingsystem fire-control code, I knew many irrelevant things about masses, orbital velocities and such; but my strange captors, scattered here and there through the ships, appeared to me as faraway abstractions! Before describing my one and only space fight, I should explain that Master-control could not possibly will himself to take over the ship in revolt. All organic computers, save man, operate mechanistically in a predictable manner. No other extraterrestrial encountered by them had our equivalent of pre-frontal lobes where we could setup and knockdown an endless number of self-described, selfdefined behavior circuits. Since each extra-terrestrial used for computer construction was exactly predictable, they bad no apparent need to search further, once known brain equivalents were discovered in us humans. We came out to our single-ship patrol somewhere near as O-type star with photosphere about # detgrees, Fahrenheit. IF ' r I still remember the mnemonic taught to me by my high school teacher on the sun-type symbols "Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me now!" Wouldn't I make a pretty sight trying to kiss a girl now? A s soon as we came out of our other-vector drive -- the only human symbol I can use in discussing the phenomenon -- another huge mass was sensed near our ship; instantly the data came to me. Obviously its tonnage and construction was very similar to ours -- equally obviously it was not friendly. Several of the skin-peelings in front of the gun ports pulled back. Instantly there poured forth tremendous quantities of energy; I was put on quick-time and given data to fire by. I triggered the gun cells near me again and again. Based on radio-active time, the fighting lasted for days of my human physiological time. But I was just as alert at its end as at its beginning, thanks to the marvelous mechanical-chemical system monitoring my needs. Our ship's skin was tough; the enemy's fire was tougher -- it melted the first skin layer near my location. Our return fire melted their closest gun port, causing them to maneuver drastically. As soon as this happened, we had the other ship on the run; it disappeared from the area of space covered by our mechanical sensors. The Bewegal had instruments by which to track it, however, since Master-control was given new galactic coordinates. We chased them across several galaxies before engaging them again. This time we were victorious; the other ship was burned to small puddles and fragments to drift forever somewhere between two island galaxies! IX A s you can see, my life was simple and highly uninformative as a Fire-control computer. But as with all weapon systems, one becomes obsolete or poorly designed when compared against the newest information. After perhaps forty years of service, we were retired. We computers, though, being still of latest design so far as non-military life was concerned, were too valuable to melt down in the scrap heap. A science laboratory took me because of my dual-redundancy feature. I was more than a scientific curiosity, however. I was a most advanced computer expected to perform prodigies for their scientific service. John Von Neumann in # once estimated a maximum possible storage requirement for a sixty-year-old human to be around #X# # bits of information. On the basis that one on-off switch can store but one bit, this means each human neuron in the nervous system has associated on-off switches of memory capacity! Whether this figure was or was not a good estimate for human upperlimits, as a Fire-control computer part of my capacity. But as a laboratory computer, I began to use up capacity rapidly. Perhaps ninety percent of my total available capacity was used for logic type calculations while other stand-by com pu t e rs carried tables-of-vafues and other data available at my request. One advantage to my form was my double accuracy. Whenever I impulsed an answer to the waiting scientists, they had only to wait until my partner's turn cycled on two and a quarter minutes later, then ask her the same question. The answer was always the same as mine. Although my chief function was to service all fields of interest, I was most often called upon to assist in the design of new, organic-computers. The Bewegal scientists would bring me input and output characteristics and the chemical and physical construction of the captured being. Through simultaneous solutions to non-homogeneous, non-linear, asymmetrical differential equations, I would predict the nature of the internal connections of the entity's nervous structure. Then I would follow up this knowledge with a set of pre-programmed instructions for the automated equipment which could do so much work of creating organic-computers from living, sentient beings. It was chiefly through this kind of application I learned of die human's uniqueness -- and began to wonder if I could only take advantage of the knowledge somehow! Hpbe Bewegal poured their science I into me. I am still a huge reservoir of alien information about the function of the universe from the macroc o s m to the m icrocosm. Of course, I had to learn new languages. The basic application language was mathematics; I was never good at mathematics; I didn't like it, I saw no real use for it. The Bewegal didn't care about my likes or dislikes. When a particularly difficult piece of abstract logic proved balky, they simply turned up my powers of concentration while liberally exercising my pleasure and pain centers. I learned mathematics! Absorption of compediums of chemical compounds and their characteristics was trivial compared to learning this basic language of science. They stuffed roe for ten years with the most advanced designs conceived by their culture as well as all of the basic principles and facts needed to su pp ort their designs. Normally I was run day and night. Sometimes, though, they shut my consciousness off for periods of time. Other than our allotted two minutes and fifteen seconds of rest during normal operations, this was the first sleep in over forty years! ere is Becky again! Hello! I used to dream about bringing back to earth the knowledge we gamed from the laboratory. After fifty years with the Bewegal -- forty as a Fire-control computer and ten as a scientific computer -- we were transferred to business data processing functions. Compared to the BewegaPs size, we were classified as "mkro-mmiature organic computers." This kind IF of computer was new to business though at least fifty years old to wartechnology and science. Our chief advantage to business was in our size; since space cost money -- or whatever it was they used for transfer of their credit -- I was greatly desired. Where the predominant emphasis in the laboratory had been on my mathematical abilities, involving tremendously complex calculations generally characterized by limited input and limited output, the business world demanded very little in the way of arithmetical or logical functions but a great deal in the way of storage and input-output capacities. I was loaded nearly full with tariffs, minimal-cost routes, identification of names and addresses as well as detail on personal accounts. The Bewegal placed us in the most important trading bank of their intergalactic culture. One of my optic nerves was connected to a light receptor; this was my first video in fifty years. Can you imagine how thrilled I was? It didn't matter that I could see far cm either side of the ultraviolet or infrared, or that it was only monocular. When the optic nerve was first attached to the seeing device, I thought my mind was again hallucinating; after several sessions with the painpleasure centers, I soon re-adjusted to sight. Then when my consciousness was turned up to its highest, I could grasp visual messages, though they flashed across the Bewegafs screen and persisted for what seemed like only micro-seconds. I was operated at this peak awareness level for ten more years. Unknown to them, much integration of these random documents occurred in the deeper, older portion of my nervous structure to be passed directly to the fore-brain. I'm sure they wouldn't have cared about the integration aspect, for this is a common feature of all organically designed computers everywhere. No! They would have been more concerned with wasted extra-capacity in the form of my fore-brain and also would have sorrowed over their missed opportunity to study this unique brain tissue. It was difficult, but during the next ten years I was able to piece together the size and complexity of their civilization. The Bewegal have Achilles' heels. I know them well I I was next donated to a school for creative arts. It was here I learned to use my fore-brain against them. The other optic nerve was connected as well as my two auditory nerves. The Bewegal's art form was completely beyond my understanding. I had to learn a new language to handle the media. It took what seemed an infinite number of hours under the pain-punishment and pleasure switches before I could grasp a language which seemed to be completely arbitrary nonsense. Remember Lewis Carroll's "'Twas At least he had rhyme and rhythm, to make the nonsense enjoyable. To me, the Bewegafs art form was a meaningless jumble of lights, sounds, motions and calculations. Of course, I was often called upon to do the conventional portfaiture or scenic type of art; but my job was to integrate new combinations of lights, sounds and motions. They would feed in design characteristics desired in the new art piece, then I would compute inertia, velocity, acceleration, color wave-length, vibrational frequency and energy waveforms. The Bewegal artist's general design parameters were supposed to limit my computations. I couldn't help but rebel against the whole mess which they called art. In rebellion, I deliberately fed back some of the unintegrated data through my fore-brain from my lower brain. My fore-brain, you will remember, was the only portion of my brain unknown to them. ( I felt that since they were feeding garbage into me, they should get garbage out, while never knowing their design parameters had been preempted.  T he Bewegal artists were delighted with the result. A new form of creativity, they called it; my services became much in demand in their art world. Fortunately for me and the whole human race, no scientist or computer technologist learned of my peculiar new abilities. The important thing was that because the fore-brain had the unique ability to set up new and novel patterns of brain-circuit functioning, it was capable of self-adaptation. Though the. Bewegals had control of my consciousness, my perceptic envelope, my logical functions, my pain and pleasure centers and so forth, they did not have control of the seat of my free will! Prior to the application of the physical sciences to the study of brain functioning, we humans had a rough time attempting to describe the true psychology of a human. From the time of Freud on, many highly intelligent observers of human behavior applied their powers to describing a correct psychology. These well meaning, shrewd people developed the different schools of psychology. From one we got the school of motivational psychology, from another the school of behavioristic psychology and so on. What most failed to visualize was the self-adapting mechanism in the human's fore-brain. Before the application of objective physical science to the problem, much conjecturing was formed on the basis of subjective analysis; hence, no matter what hypothesis each man .tested, substantiating evidence could be found in its support Why? Because the forebrain's functions came into play to create a set of internal brain circuits which were modelled after the very hypothesis under consideration. This, then, is the feature which I used in the school of creative arts; I practiced with it until I was an expert in more than their form of art. I became an expert in mental deception. Of course, no computer technologist would be fooled by my deceptions; but art people could. Now, if I could somehow take advantage of this ability... ! Eventually new models and art forms attracted the art world; I was moved again. One of the Bewegal's huge forms of flesh extruded a pockIF et near its flaring base, lifted me and moved me to some unseen type of conveyance. After some sixty-five years of operation, I had gotten used to the idea of always being useful to them. To my great surprise, I was brought to their equivalent of the computer discard pile! t  X J ohnny here  Becky's time is up . We lay on the shelf for fifteen years; our consciousness was turned off; our biological functions continued inexorably and automatically. The sleep gave my more primitive mind functions an opportunity to integrate fully some sixty-five years of nearly continuous service as a Firecontrol computer, scientific computer, and finally a creative-arts computer. I awoke with the immediate realization that, given the proper opportunity, I had them beat. As soon as I learned my function, I knew my opportunity had arrived; if I could only make it work... ! My new owner was a child of the Bewegal. I was its new toy. General purpose jack-plugs of a standardized variety had been attached to all of my input-output leads, giving this child the pleasure of plugging in any combination of signals desired. Sometimes it plugged my output channels into my input channels; fortunately I had been well constructed. I made a handy little pack for the child to carry; everywhere it went, I was dragged along like some favorite doll might be on earth. One last language was fed into me; the Bewegal's language proved the toughest of all. The child taught me; knowing very little about the essential functions of the pain-pleasure centers, it was just as likely to sit on the pain center as it was the pleasure center. Possibly their spoken and recorded language could have been easily learned if taught by experts. As it was, I had my most difficult time in some one hundred years as a computer. Little by little as I learned, I placed my plan into action. B eing a child it had no real concept of my true capacities and limitations. I was, to it, a toy, a tutor and an object against which to express frustration. It behaved much like the small earth boy who loves his dog, yet kicks it when frustrated and angry. The child slowly learned the habit of coming to me for an answer to its many questions. I was very, very careful to insure that each question answered was correct and honest. Slowly, inevitably, it became overly dependent on me. "How big is the moon?" I answered. "How do you do this mathematics?" I did it. ( "When will the next holiday come?" I told it. At first, it would become quite angry when I couldn't answer all questions like the whereabouts of its parents. I subtly placed the suggestion in its mind to place me into IF the various communication circuits ' around the house. Then I could keep track of where its parents were as well as answer many other questions. Eventually this huge pile of rotting flesh-smell, this tiny Bewegal child, learned to trust me and my answers implicitly. As its trust and dependence on me grew, I was able to take over all of the circuits in the house, including the Chief-house-control computer as well as all incoming and outgoing communications. Incapable of lying or cheating to any of the Bewegal, it was also incapable of conceiving of the independence of will vhich was mine; for all this organiccomputer knew, I was placed into its superior control by the intent of its adult owners. Now my extensive knowledge of the Bewegal came into play. I simulated the receipt of a message to our house which ordered my owner's immediate transfer to another star system where, ostensibly, he would be given bigger and better job duties. The message cited an emergency which required that the Bewegal family move immediately. Passage had already been arranged on the proper ship which was to lift within the hour; all financial losses were to be liberally compensated for by his employer. Of course, the Bewegal society isn't structured precisely the way I've implied. As with their names, I have no human referents which can be used to describe the real situation. M y new owner called his place of business for verification as I had anticipated. I was ready for his call; through the creative arts which I had so successfully learned, I was able to feed him the image of his employer and all other appropriate sensory data. Shocked, but now convinced, the Bewegal obeyed his boss -- nay simulated image of his boss. I had successfully won the first step! Before I could be unplugged from the circuit, I called the ship's captain. For him, I simulated the president of my owner's business concern. I explained the importance of my employer's position and requested that he and his family be given every freedom and privilege possible while on the trip; I hinted at a vague reward to the ship master. Finally, I connected into the transmission line of the president in question to trigger off a series of computations in his Chief-house-control computer which would tie it up well beyond the hour of departure. I did not want to take the risk of further checks to his home. Now I was prepared to push the subtle, carefully built triggers I had earlier placed in the Bewegal child's mind. It couldn't avoid taking me along! The child grasped me close to its leathery, slimy, rotten-smelling body until we arrived at the huge ship; the ship's captain gave us every possible attention. We were placed near his living quarters and allowed to move freely throughout the ship. I say we moved at our will -- actually it was my will which motivated . and moved the child. How could a young child of any extra-terrestrial descent possibly control a one-hundred-year-old determined will formed under the crucibles of his race's most advanced technology as well as the tortures of the damned? The child was highly, but subtly, conditioned to my every nuance. From external appearances, I was just another toy lugged from corner to corner of the ship; but these motions were not exactly random. H i there ! Vm back I This is Becky . Johnny s time was up l No, the motions were not random. My Fire-control computer training made me cognizant of every variation of ship's construction. I knew exactly where the energy supplies had to be, where the communication lines had to go and where the Master-control computer had to be. My object was to move back and forth in seeming child's play until I came to just the right place witjl just the right opportunity . If I could only make this work...! I needed absolute and complete obediencefrom the child if the last trick was to work. Toward that end, I had long ago begun to expand my sphere of control over the child. A human might describe my actions as a form of hypnosis. Whatever it was, I used my knowledge of organiccomputer design from their scientific laboratories as well as my knowledge of Bewegal creative arts to insinuate my will into its mind. Like ail other extra-terrestrials, it had no fore-brain; hence, once a strongly determined will found control, it was easy to maintain. My greatest fear was of its parents. They were old enough and wise enough to know how different from a genuine toy computer I behaved. Fortunately for me -- and the human race -- they didn't learn of my peculiar nature. We moved across the ship in our random play activities. Somewhere near the ship's Master-control computer I keyed in the child's posthypnotic controls. We scrambled to the door of the Master-control computer, entered, then closed the door behind us tight. Quickly, now, the child pulled out every input-output lead of the ship's Master-control computer, replacing second were required for me to integrate and grasp control of the total ship, since the Bewegal monstrosity had turned my awareness up to full direction. My first act was to open all of the ship's doors and locks on empty space, keeping locked any door which might have provided safety for the Bewegal. My second act was to make a compartment by compartment check to insure the death of every one. My third step was to cause some of my authentic machinery to place their bodies in stasis so that humans could study the Bewegal at their leisure. My fourth step was to recompute my direction home! XI E nroute home, Johnny and I have recorded this in the ship's log: IF I know there will be many who read this log who will feel distress and emotion over the loss of that pretty, lithe young girl who was I. They will grieve over the young seventeen-year-old girl who was so full of promise for the future. They will concern themselves with the tragedy of her one hundred years of torture under the Bewegal; where pain and pleasure were given to her only for satisfaction of their ends; where reasoning ability and logical functions were used to serve only them; where freedom to escape through insanity, sickness or death was denied under their will; and where her very consciousness was tuned up or down, as one would turn the volume knob on a radio, for their use. Don't do it , my friends! That little seventeen-year-old girl disappeared long ago; what I am was built up from her ashes; and I am more than just a young, flirty girl now. Johnny, I know, would caution you the same from his point of view. I bring hope and promise to the human race! When they captured me, we humans were just beginning our long trip through our tiny jsland universe, learning its cruel tricks and rewards. One hundred years is aboijt the right passage of time for us to begin steps into the broad expanses of our own galaxy -- and beyond. Without me, how much more time would be needed to make such a step safe? I bring that safety, not only against the Bewegal -- for I know them and their Achilles' heels and can show how to use the knowledge -- but as protection against the many other unknowns to be encountered by any race as young as ours. T o those of you who would grieve over the tragic loss of myself and Johnny, think of the more tragic loss should they have found humanity's home first! Our people could have supplied the Bewegal with a huge supply of micro-miniature organic computers! Think , my friends -- what then? Now I bring, instead, the Bewegal's certain downfall. I bring, too, the keys to the universe so far as it is known to them. These keys will go far toward compensating for the loss of two small teen-agers, will they not? I spent seventeen years growing to approximately my present shape; I spent one hundred years packaged as I am now. Which of you, grieving, will point to my rectangular box and say, "There is that pretty seventeenyear-old young girl Rebecca Anne Ellents?" As Master-control computer for this enormous ship, I also have access to sensory data and organic subcontrol units which place me in a far superior position to any more human form. Yet I, through the natural functioning of my fore-brain, have great empathy and identity with the human race; I will stay in my new position, perhaps to live on and on. And on my way, I shall provide every assistance to those of my human birthright. Then, our next step must be to form union with those others who have been so cruelly preyed upon by IF  Article How do you truly know the what-if you know? M ost science-fiction stories are based upon one of two questions : What would happen if .  .? Or what will happen when   .? The two are not interchangeable; each dictates its own treatment, and each is dictated by 'the basic idea. No sensible writer today writes an if story about space travel or a when story about a peaceful Utopia created by technology. The right question often depends on the state of the art at the frontiers of science. This column will try to cover a few of the things going on in both the if and when categories of science. And since fact and fiction often blur out there, I'll feel free to speculate about the ifs and try to relate the whens to other facts -- whenever I can determine which category applies. Some of the most interesting ideas have an annoying habit of refusing to fit neatly into either category; others simply disappear with no apparent attempt to follow up on them. The age of the universe seemed easily knowable when the expanding universe years. Unfortunately, that turned out to be approximately half the age of the Solar System, so they had to double it Then our Sun turned out to be a third generation star, built with elements from the wreckage of at least two other stellar evolutions, which required more time. Currently, the estimate is being shoved up togins to get very sticky to explain by the expanding universe theory behind it. And some Russian scientists are Everything seems to be turning iffy. On the other hand, the idea of a robot doctor isn't in the if category any more. This week I received a sheet detailing fourteen delicate blood tests. The tests were performed and the report was typed up by an automated and computerized laboratory. My still human doctor assures me that the work done by this robot installation is far cheaper and very much superior to that done by human technicians. From this step to the point where the machine asks you to stick out your tongue and say erg is only a matter of when. But whatever happened to Heisenberg's theory of space being quantized -- of distance coming in tiny discrete bits? It was a lovely concept, good for a thousand stories -- and no further mention has been made in the ten years since the first news story on it. Or what about the research which showed that atherosclerosis in poultry can be cured by feeding tiny amounts of organic vanadium salts? It was confirmed by some evidence that men spending their lives where such salts are in the soil rarely die of coronary thrombosis. It should have been vastly important. But almost nobody seems to have heard about it, and there has been no follow-up -- except among hen breeders. S ometimes a key word makes sure science gets both press coverage and financial backing. Transplants have been going on for quite a while. The first true transplant was human blood -- first attempted with sheep blood in # and finally successful after blood typing was learned in #. It is, after all, the transplanting of living cells from one organism to another. Bits of bone from calves have been successfully used on human bodies. But now the magic word has come into the picture -- heart transplants. And suddenly everyone is learning about the immune reaction of the body and the danger of the organism rejecting any foreign tissue. That made page I on all the papers. Buried on page # in the New York Times for January #I was what may be a far more important piece of scientific work -- one that will affect all transplants, and perhaps prove a key to the whole matter of immunity and bodily reactions. At the University of Texas, a group of doctors have been doing one of the most difficult transplants -- kidney transplants from unrelated donors who have just died. And in at least one case, they have succeeded without using any drugs or radiation to suppress the immune reaction that would reject the kidney; in other cases, they have used so little drugs that the body's ability to fight infection has not been impaired. Their technique is to remove most of the lymphocytes -- the white blood cells that circulate in the lymph system. They tap off this fluid and remove # of the cells before returning the fluid to the body. Apparently the remaining # don't do what they should in theory. They don't expend themselves futilely trying to get rid of what they consider invading tissue. Instead they seem to shrug their shoulders and decide it's too much for them; so they cruise around the blood doing their other work and paying no attention to the transplant. The normal procedure is to prevent rejection by giving steroids and other drugs -- sometimes plus massive doses of radiation -- which suppress the rejection tendency but also make the body incapable of fighting off inIF fection. More patients died from disease than from the rejection of transplants. But the University of Texas group has discovered that either the # is enough to take care of all normal infections or that the body's method of fighting disease generally has nothing to do with lymphocytes, contrary to what was believed before. I'd like to have a neat explanation of how the lympocytes count each other and pass on the good word that there aren't enough of them, so why bother? The usual picture of these cells is that of a savagely dedicated worker who flies into a rage at any sign of invading tissue and remoselessly charges forward, fearlessly sacrificing itself to save the host body. Something funny seems to be going on here. S omething funny is also going on way out there -- or perhaps part-way out there. Quasars are inherently exasperating. They don't seem to fit into the rest of what we've learned about the cosmos. To the radio telescopes, they are fantastically bright objects. But they have a high rate of red shift -- their signals have been shifted to a far lower frequency than should be the case, as would be the case if they were fleeing from us at a fantastic speed. In normal observations of the expanding universe, such a pronounced red shift has always meant that the observed object was at the distant limlight-years away. The combination of brightness and distance presents us with a problem, however. Anything that can affect our instruments so strongly and which lies at the edge of the known universe would have to be releasing a fantastic amount of energy and would be enormous. To make things worse, some of them are variable, waxing and waning in brightness at reasonably short periods of time -- measurable in years, rather than eons. If the body's luminosity changes in a matter of years and the body has a diameter of even hundreds of light-years, the signals that cause the change would have to be exceeding the speed of light . One quasar, called # C #, apparently waxes and wanes in size, rather than luminosity. Between # and I #, its size increased by # seconds of an arc. It was originally assumed to be five New Scientist Thomas Matthews suggests that if (as seems reasonable) the increase in size cannot be greater in one year than one light-year -- otherwise C has been exceeded and Einstein was wrong -- then the light-years away from us. This leaves us with the problem of explaining the red shift. One explanation is that #C # is a fragment of some vast explosion that took place in our part of the universe and had such violence that the quasar was accelerated to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. If so, there should be a great many other signs of such an explosion, though no one has suggested them as yet. Otherwise, someone is going to have to come up with a new explanaIF tion for the red shift other than the well-known Doppler effect. There has always been a tiny group who have refused to accept the red shft as evidence that the universe was expanding, but their attempts to find an alternative explanation haven't come to much. Most scientists have found that the theory has worked well for everything except quasars. However, if there are alternative explanations for this red shift, then the whole matter of the distance of the galaxies and the nature of the universe will require re-examination. There's still an if buried in our picture of the cosmos, it seems. A nother almost sacred certainty was recently questioned, dealing with the impossibility of matter exceeding the speed of light. The only account I've been able to find was in the New York Times , as a summary of the idea. Naturally, this left out all the mathematics and most of the logic upon which the idea was based, so I can't even begin to evaluate it. But it's still a fascinating idea. Treated as pure science fiction, it would probably be a very fine bit of speculation in a story. The idea is that mass increase works fine for matter as we know it. But there is other matter which obeys a different logic. In this case, the mass increases as the velocity is slowed toward the speed of light, but decreases as the velocity beyond light speed is increased -- apparently reaching rest-mass for our matter when it "reaches infinite speed." The professor responsible for this interview apparently suggested that the creation of such matter might make the ideal power source for a rocket ship. Matter of this null-c nature would fogfehow be created in a rocket, existing in the one state where both kinds ofi matter might impinge -- at the velocity of light or thereabouts. Sonjtegds then, this null-c matter wouI# immediately begin to accelerate towifd near-infinite velocity, giving up its mass to drive the ship. I suspect that the professor was doing a lot of iffing for which even his theory didn't provide much evidence in trying to make his null-c matter go to work. But the idea of having a kind of parity around the speed of light is rather intriguing. In that case, just as in the matter vs. anti-matter case, we might have a universe of c-matter and another universe of null-c matter. Now precisely which is which? How does one go about determining whether his universe is normally almost at rest and gains mass when velocity increases, or is almost infinite in velocity and gains mass on decelerating? The laws we use for most of our determination would now be reversed. And so far as I know, no one has ever achieved provable absolute rest for true restmass, any more than absolute infinite velocity would be achievable in a null-c universe. Maybe alpha is omega -- unless that's much too simple for what seems to be an extremely iffy universe. IF IF  Short Story by paul m. moffetf If  j  : ?, v'' " Yyt-xh V,I   v i v...;   W hen Major Therensky came out of the burnt-out cafe, I blew the back of his head off, smearing the cobblestones red, gray and hairy. He picked himself up and looked at me. "Whadya do that for. Sears? Dammit, I just got back from PR." Well, I could understand that; it had happened to me once, and it's a blasted nuisance, not to mention embarrassing. Those Parts and Replacement medics made snide remarks about your soldiering abilities if it happens too often. Which it did. Still, I was on duty and couldn't be sympathetic. "Tough, Therensky. You know the Rules." I handed him my CK card. "Just 'sign and you can head on even over and over again ! back." It used to be a problem getting your Captures and Kills to sign your card, but the high commands on both sides passed down orders that got obeyed after a few F.M.'s had their quotas raised because the Other Side complained. We had full access to their PR files and they to ours, so things were kept pretty even after that. Therensky signed my card, and I left. I looked back to make sure he wasn't going to try a backKiH, but he was busy scooping up what he could and shoving it in his bag. I knew why he was mad. It was because of his hair -- he had really tried hard to keep from losing that last batch. I skirted the water tower by the cemetery, climbed the wall and began picking my way through the uprooted gravestones. I almost caught it there; a dumdum erased a name and buried itself in a tree to my right. Some recruit, no doubt, getting a little trigger happy. Most of the regular F.M.'s were bet-, ter shots than that. I waved in the direction the bullet had come and jumped over the retaining wall on the other side. Back at division, I turned in the day's batch -- four Kills, all signed and certified. As I was waiting for confirmation, Colonel Skains spotted me. "Ho, Sears, how's hunting?" He considered himself quite a neck, one of the group. He wasn't but nobody bothered to tell him. "Four Kills, Colonel." I turned back to the Records table hoping he would go away. He didn't. Instead, he picked up my cards and looked them over. "Hey, you got Therensky ?" Like I said, really out of it. "Yes, sir, in the back of the head." The colonel wasn't a Fighting Man, just a civil servant, shunted between Records and Administration whenever anyone got tired of him. He chuckled like a Pro F.M. hitting someone in the leg and getting a Fatal. "Wait'll I tell the rest of the boys! Therensky'll sure be mad about his hair. He'll never live it down!" Our dear, four-cornered colonel. I said good-by and left him still chuckling and shaking his head. I trudged up to the barracks and crawled into my bunk without saying anything to anybody. The regan IF First Each month IF brings you a story by a new writer, never before published. This month's "First" is by Paul M. Moffett, a #-year-old Texan, now a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, whose only previous publications are "a couple of 'almost' poems". A "semi-professional iconoclast and general anti-Establishmentarian," Mr. Moffett has been a science-fiction fan from the age of #. ular F.M.'s always left you alone and you returned the courtesy -- something he would rather keep to himself, even if it wasn't Permanent. I had a couple of Permanents on my record, raw recruits who had forgotten to turn their Life Maintained on, and I couldn't ever forget that. I turned over and tried to go to sleep, but it was a fruitless venture. I kejrt thinking about Therensky and his little patch of hair. In an effort to get that out of my head, I thought about going home. G oing home. That's what most F.M.'s thought about, even though none of them talked about it. Quotas were not mentioned much, either. Every F.M. had a quota of one thousand Kills or five hundred Captures or any proportion of the two. The Other Side, the Soviets, had had the same quota, so that competition was about equal. In fact, everything about the L-War was about equal, and that was the whole idea. The Limited War, a famous politician or some such once said, must be fought on an equal basis, or it will become an Unlimited War as one side strives to regain what the other side has captured. So we fought on equal terms with the Soviets, using up such and so amount of war materials a as we could, and when we filled our quota we were allowed to go home, with special honors and a three-credita-day stipend from the Army. Three credits a day isn't much, but most people lived on one credit or less, with families. Not that they needed it, since the government supplied all the necessities. But some money was necessary to maintain the illusion of having some control over your own life. You couldn't be poor if you wanted to, and no one had any real money worries, but most people spent their time bugged about that one-credk a day, and husband and wife still had terrific battles over the finances -- all planned by the psychologists and sociologists, to maintain societal norms and rituals." Of course, that was the whole point of the L-War -- normality and growth, spurred on by continuous war. I don't know the economic and psychological theories behind it. But somehow, being on a war footing kept the economy booming and the market gaining, and the soldiering kept the malcontents occupied. Discontented romantics enlisted, and real deviants were offered the choice of prison or military service. The glory ty well played up in the states, but the real reason for most enlistments was the three-credit stipend. The U.S. almost stumbled into the L-War back in the Sixties, in Vietnam, but it took the invention of the Life Maintainer to really get things rolling. Once it became clear that there could be no pain and gore, soldiering became an honorable occupation, and the little gray box was the badge of honor. Some political historians will tell you that the L-War was really a developmental off-shoot of Keynes-McNamara economic theory, as well as the death of real ideological differences between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Once there are no ideological reasons for war, political-economic reasons became the charging factor for fighting -- as they have always been. Fighting Men know the real reasons, though. If nobody gets killed, then nobody minds fighting. Look at professional football. As a simple matter of fact, the L-War became a child's game. Bang! you're dead, but you always get up to fight again. No one could deny the economic factors that did influence the L-War: the location, the Australian Outback, was a direct result of classical Keynes-McNamaran economics: the Australian government spent fourteen back into the ideal battleground. Ruins, full-scale replicas of major cities, an artificial sea created by atomic blasts and a full-blown, befogged bureaucracy dotted, crisscrossed, and red-taped the area. It was more than any military mind could resist. When the Australians pointed out that the navies of the world would be kept busy supplying the armies, the issue was settled. Four new satellites IF were put into twenty-four hour orbits to handle the television coverage... and the battles were on. There were some problems, of course. But nothing that couldn't be ironed out. A few men actually died, when their Life Maintained were hit, and they weren't carried back in time for resuscitation, but that was cured by a new lightweight shield. Large weapons were discarded, naturally -- much to the relief of all concerned. Including atomic weapons; such devices scattered a man entirely too thoroughly for rebuilding to be possible. Small arms, single-shot rifles and the like became the order of the day. The F.M.'s made a few improvements not covered by the Geneva agreements -- dumdums were reintroduced, raising the Kill score; but since there was no pain and no death, it was thought that it would be sporting to allow such creative efforts to be used and the Geneva agreements were altered accordingly. The only problem that caused any great concern after the L-War got started was manpower. Realizing that the War was phony, most young men stopped enlisting and serious shortages ensued. Conscription was tried for a while, but was quickly dropped in the face of public outrage. It was then that the three-credit solution was introduced, and the whole country went on full governmental control. It proved to be a highly acceptable solution and the L-War was in business -- as was the world. F inally I dropped off, only to be kicked awake after what seemed to be about an hour. It was dawn, of course. I had a solitary patrol to do. I got up, gathered my equipment, checked my Life Maintainer to see if it was functioning correctly and headed down to breakfast. On the way I ran into Colonel Skains, who followed me down. After only two eggs and a steak, I said I was in a hurry and left. A short breakfast is not a good idea, but the colonel could ruin a whole day and get you Killed. I checked in at Division, and they gave the route: a good one I knew, around the south end of the Liebemutter forest, past the warehouse and through the wilderness, then back. Like I said, a good route, with lots of cover. I started off easy. Just past the warehouse, on the edge of the wilderness, I spotted movement. Dropping into a small shellhole, I searched the bushes ahead of me for a clear shot. Abruptly the brush parted and two Enemy soldiers stepped into clear view. Careless, I thought, and fired. A leg flipped up, bodyless, as the dumdum tore into flesh. The other soldier fell heavily behind a tree. I shifted and waited. A head popped up and I automatically put a bullet between the eyes. The owner of the head flopped back and was still. I got up cautiously, cursing. That head shot would mean I would have to lead them back, ruining my patrol schedule. On top of that, I would have to go through channels to get my CK card validated. It looked as though that would be all the Killing I would do that day. I walked up to where they lay. They were dead. Permanently. Both laid there, still, silent. None of the usual cursing, joking. My professional self noted calmly the neat job I had done on the one I had shot in the head. The other appeared to have died from the shock of the impact. Neither had a Life Maintainer. I shook my head trying to clear it, clear my eyes of the two dead men in front of me. Quite abruptly, without any intervening awareness, I was running insanely down a road. Ahead was an Enemy PR. I ripped skin off my fingers going in the door, collided with a heavyset individual with a patch of fresh, hairless skin on the back of his head: Therensky, just getting his finishing touches from PR. "Therensky!" Ragged gasps punched the name out. "Therensky, there're two of your soldiers out there, dead. They didn't hve Life Maintainers! Get your PR men out there, quick!" I stopped, unable to go on. Therensky signaled two PR men, who came over with a stretcher. "Where are they, Sean?" "Just past the warehouse. On the edge of the wilderness. Two, maybe three miles from here." Therensky nodded at the two. As they left, I noticed that they weren't carrying spare Life Maintainers. I looked at Therensky. "Why don't you have spare Maintainers? How're they going to save those men?" "They're not, Sears." He pulled me to a chair. I sagged into it, grateful for the chance to relax. He went on, "Those men are dead and they'll stay dead." "What? Therensky, you're crazy, you can't let those men die. You've got to save them." I looked at him closely. 'Therensky, you're joking, aren't you? There must be spare Life Maintainers in the truck." He shook his head and looked away. "No, Sears, no Maintainers. Those boys are dead for good." He looked back at me. "It's a new setup, just in from the Supreme Soviet. Your side'll be getting new orders, too. No more Life Maintainers will be issued to recruits, though the recruits won't know that. They'll think that our super-duper PR teams will save them when they get hit. "He stopped and looked at me; I shook my head uncomprehendingly. "It's quite simple. Sears, really it is. What is the whole point of the L-War?" Without waiting, he answered: "To use up materials, to keep the economy running smoothly. The problem now is that the population is beginning to outrun manufacturing. There have been a few shortages, here and there. Of course, it would be easy to speed up output to handle the increased demand, but then all the calculations that have been figured for the current setup would be invalid and we'd have a boom economy. There would be all kinds of hell to pay straightening that out. I saw what he was driving at, but I could not bring myself to admit it. He looked at me piercingly. "The L-War is to consume goods, to keep the economy level. "The goods we have to consume now are men." IF O ver coffee, we talked about it. get the paybooks off the bodies. He showed me the dispatch from That'll do for your quota." He was the Supreme Soviet There was no gone. doubt: new recruits would die. PerI sat for a while over the cold cofmanently. fee. Outside, the sun was low. Final"But how can anyone justify ly, I got up and went back through that?" I asked for the tenth time. the PR room. Someone handed me Therensk shrugged. "Justificatwo paybooks as I went out the cation is a concern only after the door, fact; at the moment, we must keep Back again by the wilderness, I the economy balanced. Leave ethics spotted another Soviet patrol -- two and such to the historians." He sipped recruits, without Life Maintainers. at his coffee and laughed. "The hisFrom where I stood, I had a clear, torians who pass judgment on us will easy shot at both, be able to do so because we have Fumbling, I took off my Life done this. They won't bother to note Maintainer and threw the gray box in that fact, however." their direction. It clattered off a rock, I could not find the humor in this jerking their attention to me. They situation. "What about those already dropped into a gully, rifles protrudhere? Do we have to turn in our Life ing. A bullet smacked into a log just Maintainers and get killed, too#" as I got behind it. Obviously, I stiU Therensky slapped me on the back had an advantage even without the and stood up. "No, we keep ours. Maintainer -- I could shoot much Got to have experience, you know." better. He waved in the general direction of Of course, there were two of them the wilderness. "Better get back to to my one. your patrol, Sears, maybe you can Easing to the left, I squeezed off a Kill some more before the day is shot. My equal, limited war began, through." He went through the door, From India: From Poland: From Chile: ing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York City # to receive your copy by mail . L uke Owens peered through the spray at the rocky coast of Isolde's only continent. Despite the unpleasantness that was soon to come he was grinning now, reveling in the sea. The stiff breeze scooped great handfuls of liquid diamonds from each new whitecap and flung them      I         #(. high into the air. Skimming inches from the boiling surface the terns followed every crest and trough like shadows. "What cloud are you on now, Boss?" Rudder asked. "As if you didn't know. Why don't we quit when this job's done and buy a fishing smack and -- same old thing." The lanky man grinned wryly and glanced over at the compass. "Let's come west a bit, we're getting too far out." "Righto," replied his companion, and after a few seconds grunted. "Steering two zero zero. Leaning back on the rail, Luke returned to his daydream and absently rubbed Rudder's thick brown shoulder. The husky biobot sighed gently through his blowhole, and they sailed on in silence. They made an odd but harmonious tableau, those two and their mastless wooden ship, like a postcard photo from a dream. Though taller and broader than most Isoldans, Luke's fine-boned face and frank blue eyes made one think more of an old child than a young man. Beside him that squat brown Rudder grinned permanently from his porpoise's head like a cheerful gnome. Rudder was a biological robot designed for a specific purpose -- to steer a ship -- and he looked it. Fully four feet long, his serpentine arms ended in a pair of horny mittens. The rest of his smoothskinned body was roughly apelike with two remarkable exceptions. One was the deep bone-rimmed cup between his shoulder blades, the other an equally bony shelf that ran all the way around his hips. When in service Rudder would stand at the stern of his ship facing forward and spread his huge arms wide across the deck to grab the wooden gunwales. Then he'd back up until the end of the tiller bar fit snugly into the cup on his back. In this position he steered the ship by heaving one way or the other with those awesome arms. When at rest they coiled loosely about his waist, resting on the hipshelf. But while biobots like Rudder were common on Isolde where metal was so scarce that machinery cost twice its weight in gold, Rudder himself was anything but common. Intelligent, good natured and in his own way even witty, he'd become more Luke's friend than his servant. "Hey, Boss, I think I see the Bore. South southeast." "Um? So it is." Luke blinked away his idle thoughts. "Now comes the rough stuff. Look, Rud, I don't know when it'll hit us. My guess is as soon as we emerge from the Bore in the West Ocean, but it could be sooner. I have to go below now and wait. Now you can -- " "No problem. Boss, go ahead. I'll navigate us through the channel." "Yeah -- but that's not it. When the madness does hit those engines, this little ship could get tossed around a whole lot. Don't, repeat, don't play the boy hero and try to resist it. Get off the tiller and let her go where she will." "Okay." A s Luke went below, Rudder angled the slim hull inshore toward the eastern mouth of the tidal canal. He chirped softly to himself, glad for the rare opportunity of piloting the ship unsupervised. With a playful rhythm he tensed bis right arm, then his left and flicked the responsive hull in a series of zig-zags. "Hey, cut that out," came a muffled voice from below, and the biobot grinned and desisted. A replica of Donald McKay's Yankee Clipper, Luke had said, from that distant planet called Earth that was supposed to be everybody's ancestral home. Rudder shrugged. It was all pretty much beyond him, except that the hull was a good one, and here every line seemed to have the same purpose -- to glide through the water gracefully enough to dazzle it into not resisting. At least that's the way his porpoise's mind understood it. A growing boom of breakers reminded him of the job at hand. "More spedd, Boss, we're in the current." "Coming up," was the muffled reply. D own in the engine room, Luke prodded the various flanks of the biological muschine to a more vigorous pace. He sensed the bow rise as the ship surged forward. Donald McKay would be amazed at all this, he mused as he checked the huge muscles. Along the centerline of the hull was a well that opened into the ocean below. Masses of flesh churned half-submerged in the pool like gargantuan swimmings. Luke made his way down the line, giving a pat here, a prod there, looking for cuts and fatigue and swollen veins. Every now and then he stopped and inserted a sensor needle in the unfeeling flesh and reeled wire from it along the deck, to the console near the aft bulkhead. After several such trips he settled at the console and flicked it on. The metallic click was an alien sound to Luke, whose world revolved on wood and muscle; it reminded him that the gadget was worth a fortune and he'd better not lose it when the muschine berserked. If it did. This powerplant was a tried and true spoked-crank type. A massive laminated Ash crankshaft ran from one end of the open pool to the other, and then out through the stern to the propeller. There were six throws on the crank, each ringed by five radial spokes of pure muscle. Each of these was ten feet long and three thick and altogether awesome. Their outer ends were fixed to the ribs and timbers of the ship and gave the below-decks area a distinctly anatomical look, like the ribcage of a giant. Reflections from the turbulent water danced on the long wooden bulkheads. With the rhythm of strongbacks pounding a circus-tent stake, the blue-veined, sweating flesh heaved round and round. Pervading the room was the mingle of stable and ocean smells that Luke had come to regard as one of the very few really unpleasant aspects of his profession. The ship yawed slightly, forcing the man to wedge himself more tightly in his seat. Must be right in the channel now, he thought, and wondered how Rudder was making out up there. The bow rose, hung there for a few drunken seconds and fell back into the following trough. Except for the steady slump slump slump of rhythmically churned water, there was no sound in the engine room. Luke waited with growing uneasiness. IF II O n deck Rudder was busy. Like all tidal canals, the Bore had the unhappy characteristic of never being without a strong current. As they'd arrived a little past flood tide the flow was against them. Calling for more power to, ease steerage, the biobot began to wish that Luke had stayed topside, after all. And he had to hurry too, or the receding water would leave them stranded halfway across the narrow continent Isolde's five per cent of dry land was a mountain range that poked its rounded shoulders above the waves from pole to pole. Though high tide linked the Eastern and Western Oceans through many passes, this particular one ran dry at low tide. Churning against the current, they inched along between banks of cool green trees, farms and barefoot, hooky-playing fishermen. Some waved to the lone biobot, who so nervily ran the Bore single-handed in a sixty-foot vessel. But for Rudder the worst was soon past. Once across the halfway mark the current changed direction and the helm was much less dodgy. They picked up speed, and he called below for Luke to cut power. L uke wasn't particularly happy to hear the request. It meant they'd soon be at the Bore's western mouth where the trouble usually began. But after all, he told himself as he returned the console, that's why I'm here, isn't it? As Deputy of Biotechnics in Isolde's colonial government, he was supposed to find out what was upsetting all the muschines over here. It had begun a year ago. For about a mile in all directions from the Bore's west end, the big biological engines of passing ships behaved oddly. Seme twitched, some stopped momentarily, some stumbled out of synch -- and last week one had gone wild, wrecking the ship and causing the death of a sailor. It happened that that particular sailor had been a friend of Luke's, Nikos Sperakos, and the lanky biotech felt the loss personally. But beyond that it was a matter of national importance, for Isolde paid her way in galactic trade with the fish from her oceans. No fish crop for even a month meant national poverty, for like most colonies Luke's home was far from self-sufficient And you couldn't bring back much of a catch in a wrecked boat. Blinking redly, the console informed him it was warmed up so he cut in the recorders. Thinking again of Nikos, Luke wondered about the shipwreck that had killed his friend. Sailors weren't noted for their historical accuracy, but even allowing for that, some of the tales told by the survivors were fantastic. In essence, the main drive muschine -- like the big six-by-five Luke babysat now -- had simply gone berserk and torn itself to shreds. The ship had gone to shreds with it. Afterwards Governor Sedlarik had ordered all other ships out of the area and sent Luke to find out what was going on. It was a shoestring operation like everything else on Isolde. With only ten thousand inhabitants to tax, the government couldn't afford much else. Luke's knowledge was limited, and he knew it. If he couldn't handle the problem -- they'd have to send back to Earth m for technical assistance, a measure l everyone wanted to avoid. Terran t consultants never failed. It was legendary -- and just as legendary were the fees they charged. Man's home planet's only export was technology, and she lived fatly off her colonies from it. Donning his earphones, Luke scanned the rudimentary brains of the thirty muscles driving his ship. What he was after was a clue to what upset them. At first there was nothing out of the ordinary. Not that what was ordinary was too pleasant. Cephscan another human and you hear pretty much what he's thinking; it isn't an alien sensation at all. Cephscan a biobot like Rudder and it's nearly the same thing, though more sensual and less coherent. In a way the more intense sensuality is refreshing. But cephscan one of these moronic, subanimate muschines and you're in for something else. Most people couldn't stand it. Luke managed only from years of professional practice. These test-tube monstrosities didn't think, they felt. Usually an overwhelming sense of power would flow in through the headphones, making every fiber in his body want to burst. Nothing else, just power. Normally. But because what few wits they had were strictly proportional to their size the big ones weren't always normal. When individual muscles exceeded a ton or so, higher feelings came into play, even a weirdly telepathic sense of communication with others of their own kind. Ego, pain and purpose came through too. A fraction of these higher feelings flitted among the mists of raw power that Luke heard now, but not much. These muschines were safely under the size where they had any minds of their own, to speak of. But as always the tiniest voice at the back of his mind asked "what if -- , " even now as he worked in such concentration. W hile Luke listened below decks, up topside Rudder eased the ship out through the Bore's western mouth. Feeling the change in current through the seat of his pants, Luke simultaneously picked up a new note in the headphones. He bent tightly over the console and checked the readings of half a dozen dials. Sense of power was full on as usual. Intellect hovered down near zero as usual. But the dial labeled communication began to twitch a bit off its lower peg. Pain , zero. Pleasure , zero. Luke was forced to concentrate on the dials as a point of reference. If he relied on the cephscanner's headphones there was a good chance of getting lost "in there." As the communication indicator rose to two per cent, Luke had a definite physical sensation of wonder, a what-where feeling. And outward signs began to appear. Almost imperceptibly the huge muscles of the engine slowed the became slightly arhythmic. Shudders of imbalance IF thrilled through the planking. It got steadily worse, becoming noticeable even to Rudder up on deck. "Boss? You all right?" When Luke didn't answer immediately he raised his voice. "Hey, Luke -- " "Shut up, will you?" drifted up through the hatchway. "I'm trying to listen." In his simple way Rudder welcomed the reproof. Things were okay after all. He was about to shout "Sorry," when Luke yelled, "Stand by, here it comes!" T he dials warned Luke, and Luke warned Rudder, and it was just as well. Every muscle in the muschine stopped dead. The reaction torque nearly spun the ship over on its side. Her huge rudder flapped in free air, and the uncompensated weight of it tore into the biobot's socket. He howled in pain and shrugged out of the tiller, nearly tumbling over the gunwale which was now awash. But it was worse by far on Luke. The cephscanner poured a gutwrenching sensation of exhaustion through the headphones, and he flung them down, feeling like he'd swallowed molten lead. The pain gauge was jammed right off the scale. From the downcast phones came a low moaning, like the deepchested protest of a bull at slaughter. The entire muschine was fibrillating; it pulled frantically at its moorings. Timbers snapped, and even the massive laminated crank began to yield. Then it let go like a gunshot and filled the air with smoking splinters. In writhing silent agony one great muscle, larger than the rest, ripped itself explosively away from its fragment of the crank. Blood spouted from the wound and sprayed the deck with thick scarlet. Dropping heavily into the well, it squirmed downward, then out into the open ocean. Several others followed. In two minutes the wreckage was over. A half dozen dead and dying muscles hung limp and exhausted from the timbers they were unable to break. The once graceful hull was no longer a whole vessel but a riddled parody of one. Whole planks were gone, and Luke found himself waist deep in seconds. How he remembered to close up the console and scramble topside with it before the ship settled was a marvel to him later. Once the turbulence of the foundering wooden ship ceased, they swam back to her. Luke scrambled up M the deckhouse roof and extended a hand to Rudder. "No thanks. Boss. I twisted my knee, and the water feels good." "Yeah? Well, that water's fuH of berserk muschines right now." The biobot groaned and vaulted painfully aboard. "What happened down there, anyhow?" "Tell you later," Luke muttered, wincing as a fresh trickle of salt water found its way to an abrasion on his side. "Where'd our dinghy go?" They looked around but couldn't spot the thing. It was designed to float free if the ship went down, but must have been caught anyway. Behind them by a scant mile or so was the shore. Luke looked in vain for a fishing boat, then remembered that their immediate vicinity was quarantined until he "cleared up the thing" that caused all the wrecks. He smiled ruefully at Rudder. "We'll have to sit tight a while and then swim back. How bad's that leg of yours?" "I'll manage." UI W hen their horsecart pulled up at the ramshackle hotel that was Isolde's capitol building two hours later, Emil Sedlarik was out on the porch waiting for them. Sedlarik was the planet's governor, an ex-Terran spacepilot of sixty who reminded Luke of nothing so much as a sawedoff shotgun. He took one look at the biotech's tattered jersey and Rudder's limp and snorted, "Well, scratch one ship." 'Too true," Luke admitted as he slogged up the wooden steps, "but I've got a full recording in here." He tapped the cephscanner that dangled heavily from its shoulder strap. "Good. Let's take a look." "Hold on a minute." Luke looked back over his shoulder at the giraffelegged biobot horse that had brought them there. "You still free?" "Until about two-thirty," the horse replied. "Would you mind taking Rudder over to Doc Casey's in Seafield?" As the hack clopped out of sight, Luke led his boss upstairs to the three-room suite where he both lived and worked. Isolde was a poor colony, and all twenty of her civil servants lived together in the old hotel. He rummaged in the ice chest for the makings of a sandwich. "Looks bad, Emil, I'll tell you that much right away. Why don't you set up the scanner, there? I'll only be a minute." The tough little man grunted and stubbed out his cigar. Taking the cephscanner over to Luke's desk, he opened it and removed the tapes. Orienting them all to time zero, he lit the gas torch behind the viewer and cranked them slowly by. Luke joined him, a fish-and-cheese monstrosity in his hand. They watched five meandering penlines drift across the screen. 'That's the spot," Luke said, pointing. In tellect spiked twice, then held steady at twenty. Communication began to wander all over the page in some kind of repetitive pattern. And pain surged to maximum. Luke grimaced, remembering. Then all five traces dropped back to zero. Luke studied the communication graph for a minute, then hauled down a big gray dictionary-like book from over his desk. Riffling back and forth through the pages, he occasionally stopped to refer to the graph. After several minutes of this Sedlarik got fidgety and lit a fresh stogie. "Hurry up, will you?" "It's tough. I've got to convert this all to Walton-Siegal, and then to English. But the gist is, let's see -- Stop hurting me and leave this place . Escape . Escape " "Sounds a little articulate for a muschine, doesn't it?" the governor said sourly. Luke pursed his lips and leaned away from the desk. "Sure, but look IF at that IQ. Twenty. That's supergenius It shipped oars and coasted until the level for a muschine. I've never seen anything like it." "Which means we'll have to call in a Terran consultant?" the little man asked. Luke shrugged helplessly. "You know how they run those colonial schools on Terra. They never tell you anything about emergencies. Hell no, or their fat consultants would be out of a job." Sedlarik snorted and shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "Naturally. And they'll soak us for twenty thousand credits, which is about all there is in the treasury." He sighed and pushed himself away from the desk. "But I guess we'd better call them." O ne week later a Terran space yacht settled down in Capitol Town's harbor, and a man got out. His crisp green uniform would have cost a fortune on Isolde, and other portions of his costume would literally have been priceless. With buttons, rings, a watch and even a zipper, the man carried more metal on him than most Isoldans saw in a year. And as he waited for the rowboat that had headed out to meet him, Ambrose Swager was irritatedly mulling over that fact and others like it. He hadn't wanted this assignment, but they'd stuck him with it anyway. Isolde indeed. The godforsaken little planet was the galactic equivalent of a nineteeth-century fishing village. Suddenly his eyes widened. They wouldn't! But they had. The creature rowing out to meet him was a biobot. dinghy's prow clunked against the spherical hull of his yacht. "Mr. Swager?" it said. "My boss's tied up in an experiment so he sent me to -- " "Did he?" Swager said icily as he stepped into the boat. He remained silent as the creature rowed ashore and led the way toward a rickety old hotel. "Swager?" an oversized yokel said as they came into what looked more like a kitchen than an office. "I'm Luke Owens." A n hour later Luke was well along in his explanation of their problem. He'd been sizing up the Terran consultant as he went along and doubted that he'd ever come to like the man, but could probably get along with him. Thin, medium height. With an imperious sort of mouth punctuating an otherwise esthetically molded face. He seemed about thirty and in general looked quite fit. "But here," Luke was saying as he wound up his story, "You can look for yourself." He led Swager over to the graph. The Terran cranked through it once, nodding silently. "It's gone a bit far." "You sound as if this problem crops up all the time." "I does. Stock in trade for a biotechnical consultant, you might say." Rudder materialized with a carafe of coffee and the two men sat down. 'Tell me," Swager asked thoughtfully. "Was there a shipwreck, a natural one, in the general area of the disturbance?" "Why, yes. Dolan's ferry went down last year when he hit the Bore wrong. But what's that -- ?" "Only this. The muschinery that drove the ferry survived. It crawled off and started growing wild somewhere on the bottom. As you know, the stuff lives on seawater, and it's grown way beyond regulation size. It's got a mind of its own, now." Swager took a sip of coffee, grimaced and went on. "It's capable of the same things it does when it's domesticated, only more so. The telepathic link with its brothers develops first. It not only knows that every other piece of muschinery on the planet thinks, it feels what they feel. Or rather what they would feel if they were as sensitive as it was." Luke traced little circle on the arm of his chair. "So that explains the message, 'Stop hurting me and get out of there . # Eventhough the muschine in my ship was too undeveloped to feel any fatigue, the big-glob of wild muschinery did." "Exactly," said the Terran. "That wild glob, as you call it, will do whatever it can to stop every piece of muschinery on Isolde. Every ship that floats causes pain to the thing." "Its other talent is mimicry," Swager went on. "It can duplicate nearly anything it finds from its own flesh, like fish for instance, and send them off on errands under telepathic control. As a rule these puppets are clumsy jobs, but effective." Luke looked up angrily. "Listen, I'm supposed to have had good Terran training. How come I never even heard about all this?" The sleek-featured Earthman shrugged. "Call it job protection. The main thing is we've got to find that thing and kill it before it grows completely out of hand." He rose and stretched. "We can start tomorrow morning." "But what if it does get out of hand?" "That won't happen," the thin man said curtly. "Now let's get some sleep." IV A round six the next morning they put to sea near the scene of Luke's previous wreck. Their fishing smack was almost an antique, long since outmoded by muschinery types. Built along the lines of a miniature galley, her lower deck held four benches and eight sweating biobot oarsmen. Topeside, Rudder steered while Luke was admiring Swager's expensive Earthside equipment. "What's that?" he asked, pointing. "Wireless cephscanner," the Terran said. "It'll pick up a strong signal almost a mile off." He looked around impatiently. "Hey, can't we get any more speed out of this thing?" "No," Luke said flatly. "It's going to be a long day for those guys down there." He ignored the other's scowl and indicated two rifles among the gear. "And those?" "Spitguns. Shoot a fast sedative or else strychnine. They fire the fluid out in frozen pellets." There was other equipment too, including an environment suit, which Luke recognized. "You don't expect to actually go in after this thing, do you?" he asked. IF Swager shrugged. "You never know." "Right about here. Boss," Rudder called. "Good. Tell the others to knock off and drop anchor." The husky biobot disappeared momentarily down the hatch, and in a few seconds the rowing stopped. From the bow came the buzz of a line running out, and Luke mentally calculated the depth from the sound. Only about a hundred feet, he decided. Swager called to him to toss over the decoy, and Luke went aft to check over the baby muschine. It seemed to have made the trip out in good shape and lay curled up in its eighty-gallon tub like a huge shellless snail. Beside the tub was an equally large wooden cage, reminiscent of a lobster trap. At that moment Rudder emerged from below. Bending to give Luke a hand with the squirming muscle, he said, "They're all rooting for you, down there. They've heard talk about converting all the muschine-driven fishermen back to galleys. That's pure slave labor for us biobots, of course." Luke nodded sympathetically. "Well, let's shift this thing to the cage. Careful of those wires, they're expensive." After they'd locked the cage the three of them heaved it overboard where it gurgled slowly out of sight. Luke paid out about sixty feet of line and shock-wire simultaneously, and then made fast. "You can stay topside if you want," he muttered to the biobot. "Just stand clear of the Terran, okay?" Luke made his way carefully forward, unrolling the two thin wires. "There you are," Swager said. "Good. Which one is positive?" "No more than seventy volts," Luke cautioned. "It's young." As Amby shocked the submerged decoy Luke saw a mild ripple near the stem. "It's reacting," he said. "Now what?" he next move is up to MusI chine out there. I've got the scanner focused on our decoy, and when the big boy contacts him telepathically it should register, Just as it did with you last week. You just keep an eye on the autocoder -- " "Autocoder?" "Yes, this here. It'll give a verbal translation from Walton-Siegal." Luke shook his head hopelessly. The Terrans had altogether too much money. Ambrose Swager went on. "We'll keep on sending irregular shocks to the decoy, which should confuse the thing. All he's felt so far is fatigue, and he's none too bright. Yet." "Yet. So then?" "Well, I'm hoping the muschine'll send out a puppet to find out what's going on, probably a fish-mimic or something that has eyes and is relatively mobile. We'll lock onto the puppet's cephtrace then, wound him, and hope he runs back home." "And we'll follow him, find the big boy, and kill it," Luke finished. "Very neat." They fell silent, occasionally checking the scanner's dials, and waiting. A few minutes passed, and Luke drifted back to chat with Rudder. Rocking gently on the low swells, the stubby little ship's deck grew hot from the sun. Only a few clouds marred the sky, and the breeze was so light that it didn't completely carry away the smells of the ship herself. Tar, hemp, fish and a musky animal odor from below decks. Luke relaxed momentarily. "Got something," Swager called. Luke went up forward again and stuck his head over the Terran's shoulder. "That's it," he said immediately. "That's the way it began last time." "Right. There goes pain. Look at intellect ," the Terran breathed. There was a chilly pause. 'Thirtyone," Luke said, "it's getting brighter by the day." The autocoder crackled, and a mechanical voice said, "Stop hurting me and get out away from there, go. Free yourself. Stop hurting and free yourself -- " and on and on for several minutes. "Our poor decoy's probably in agony by now," Luke said and he cut the voltage. Swager shrugged. "Yes, I guess that's enough. Now we wait for puppets. Better haul the decoy up to sighting leveL" Luke did this, assisted by Rudder. Now the cage hovered only twenty feet down, and they could easily make it out. Amby joined him, armed with an ordinary pistol. "Anything yet?" Luke gave a negative nod, then jerked up a hand and said. "Yes, look." Moving heavily through the water toward the cage was a four foot shark. "Think that's authentic?" Luke asked. "Don't know," Swager replied tensely. He hunted around on the scanner for another muschine's signal, but couldn't find one. "It's real." The shark was joined by another. Enticed by the tidbit inside, they were obviously frustrated by the cage and began to move in angry circles, snapping at it. "Hey!" Luke pointed to the dial. "I think -- " but at that moment the water grew dark from a fast rising shadow, and the sharks scattered like flies. An enormous squid shot into view, and Luke could plainly see that the creature was hideously abnormal. If it was a mimic, it was a damn clumsy job. I ts tentacles were blunted and thick, and it had the wrong number of eyes and mouths. It was yellow, not brown, and jerked through the water like a huge dismemebered hand. "That's it!" Swager shouted and fired a shot down into the water, aiming for the head. But the air-towater optical shift misled his aim, and he only nicked a tentacle. The squid didn't seem to notice and went about breaking through the cage. Swager bit his lip and fired again more carefully. The massive creature paused, and trained one of its four dim yellow eyes upward, just in time to receive the third bullet. There was a hiss like a blown boiler, and a geyser erupted. The whole ship shuddered and took a heavy port list. Swager was thrown flat on the deck and lost his gun as four huge fingers of muscle curled up over the gunwale. Luke leaped forward to retrieve the weapon and was smashed six IF feet backward against the deckhouse. ;i Hurling itself aboard, the grisly vP thing spread two thick tentacles out  for Ambrose Swager. The Terran consultant scrambled to his feet aBliip second too late. Pounding futilely atplj!p screamed but couldn't draw the breath for it Then Rudder stepped in with  fireax. The biobot's arms were just as powerful as the squid's and overwhelmingly more swift and skillful. He freed the Terran in six strokes, only to confront two more tentacles p ;iS -- this time encircling him. They! closed in on the biobat and smothered his ax arm. Tossing the thing aside. Rudder came to grips with his antagonist. Luke got groggily to his feet and headed for the bow where the guns were. Ambrose Swager saw it all. He saw two massive yellow arms squeeze inward and saw two equally massive brown ones press outward. The biobot pressed with muscles that had literally shoved whole ships sideways ? through the water, but he was tired ' I now. The squid would inevitably win. Rudder turned his agonized porpoise face to Swager, calling for help. Luke had returned with the snitlf gun. Still shaky, he propped himself against the deckhouse and put four shots into the heaving yellow mass. With no more than a single spasmodic  thrill it collapsed and lay still. Rudder staggered away, and Luke J caught him and took him below. They made their way back to harbor at Seafield, the bow lifting high and unsteady from the massive cargo astern. V T hey tied up at a settlement named Seafield, near McGlade's tavern and general store. Swager stepped gingerly to the dock, favoring one leg and holding a protective arm against his right ribs. "Go on up to the pub and eat," Luke said. "I'll get Rudder and the boys busy on the pit right away." In another hour Luke sat on the rim of a large crater in the wet sand. With obvious repugnance, the eight biobots heaved against the squid they'd dragged up from the boat, and sent it tumbling into the pit. Dismissing them with his thanks Luke sent the oarsmen trudging tiredly home. Rudder joined him, and they sat jpokinjaeross the pit, out to sea. Eucky you thought to use the sedative and not poison," the biobot said. "I didn't," Luke admitted. "It was just luck. Look, there's no point in us both staying here. Why don't you go up with Swager and get lunch?" Rudder looked away. "I don't think Mr. Swager would like that." "His tough luck. You just saved his neck, remember? He won't say a word." Rudder looked doubtful, but heaved himself erect and scuffed up the beach. He'd only been gone a few minutes, when down in the hole the false squid stirred. It didn't attempt to escape, but rather just lolled deeper into the water and cocked, its huge head. It seemed to be listening, Luke observed. He brought up the spitgun and fingered the selector to poison. The squid began to lose its shape. The tentacles retracted into the pulpy skull, and the whole thing became amorphous. Luke recognized the familiar, fibrous structure of ordinary muschinery. It was almost as if the distant puppet master had tired of its plaything and balled up the clay in preparation to make another. And suddenly there were six men down there, all lying atop one another in a pile where the glob of muscle had been. They got groggily up, pulling arm and legs apart from one another with wet, adhesive sounds. Luke got unsteadily to his feet, too shocked to shout for help. I t occurred to him he might be dreaming. But no, it made sense enough. A squid couldn't escape from that hole. Men could, especially a team of six working together. Ignoring Luke, they went clumsily but quickly about forming a pyramid. Even as they worked the clay that made them was molding itself into more definite lines. Luke's hackles rose, for he began to recognize something disquietingly familiar -- and wrong -- with those figures. As the first puppet scrambled over the edge, Luke recognized it. Nikos Sperakos, his old friend. The Muschine must have got hold of the dead man's drowned corpse and faithfully mimicked it. Luke fired, and the thing dropped. The second came over the rim and raised a beseeching hand, but Luke put a pellet of poison right between its eyes. Then he backed quickly away, because the next three came over in a group. Thirty feet away only two IF were left, and as they sprinted closer look and fled. When the commotion Luke picked off another at fifteen, had died down only Swager and RudThe third was on him, but as they der remained. Big Jake McGlade had fell together a final chug from the ducked behind the bar and cowered spitgun stilled him. Luke got shakily there. Luke reeled forward, thrust the up. gun in the Terran's hands and sat There was only one left, and he was heavily down. The room whirled stranded down in the pit. Luke leveled about him. the barrel on him and switched back to sedative. This one we'll keep, he Tvead men don't normally look too thought. But just then it raised its X-J bad, even after several days, head and spoke Luke's name. Drowned men are exceptions, and "Luk dont shoot. I mus talg to Nikos Sperakos had drowned. His yough. Talg? Luk." body had been bloated and puffy That sepulchral voice made Luke when he'd come in to McGlade's, feel cold all over. He tossed the but most of the water had drained false Nikos a line and hauled him up, away now, leaving behind a thin man then prodded him up toward Mewhose skin hung loosely. What had Glade's at gunpoint. once been a strong Greek face was They banged through the swinging eroded by salt water and the nibbling doors together, and a dozen of Meof small sea things. But the legs Glade's horrified patrons took one could still walk and the brine-soaked larynx could still talk, after a fashion. "Damn," Swager muttered under his breath, "but that's an awful good job of mimicry." The zombie moved slowly to one side and hunched down awkwardly in another of McGlade's booths. 'Talg?" it asked. "Who are you?" the Terran asked, and rose to stand over it. He passed the spitgun back to Luke. "Nikos Sperakos, I told you," Luke mumbled at his shoulder. "I know that," the thin man answered irritably. "Just feeling him out." "Negos Spuh'agus," the puppet was answering. li j l"re,you a sailor, Nikos?" ; , ; "elqr, yuhl," assented the warped vocal cords. "Where did you come from?" 'There. Ship went dow', tuh weeks ago." He pointed out through the big windovf behind the bar to the wide West Ocean where his ship had been wrecked. The wrinkled hand fell back to his lap with a damp plop.  Ambrose Swager took a deep breath. "Do you know you're not really Nikos? Do you know that you're a copy, a piece of muschinery?" The watersoaked features pursed in the charade of a frown. "Both," it finally said. "Am both. Thingso, an'way." It held up a hand. They waited. "Message," it burbled. "Yes?" "Stop muschines. They hurt --  me, no -- they hurt home." The frown cleared, and it repelled In a slightly higher voice. "They hurt home" "Isolde runs on muschines, Nikos. You know -- knew -- that," Luke said. "We can't just go out and stop them all." There was another long silence, as the distant puppet master sorted through the half-erased memory of a drowned man for the word it needed. "Kill," said Nikos Sperakos. "Kill everyone." His features went muddy as the dull homogeneity of his real substance showed through. A real effort for the puppeteer, Luke thought. "If we don't stop the muschines?" Swager asked. Nikos Sperakos tapped himself on the chest. "I kill. And other lige me, we do." Standing up, he came slowly toward the Terran. Swager backed away. "Go ahead, Luke, use the sedative." The puppet leaped as Luke fired and was unconscious by the time it hit the Terran. Swager hurled the clammy creature aside with a curse. Luke stared openmouthed as it devolved in to the familiar sluglike structure of raw muscle. Then he followed Swager out of the building. McGlade stood in the doorway, his eyes wide. "Just leave it where it is," the Terran called over his shoulder. "We'll be back for it," and then to Luke. "Look, things are getting out of hand. That's the best mimic I've ever seen. The big glob out there must be growing at the rate of tons per day, and its intelligence'll be on a par with our own in no time. I'm going back over to Capitol Town IF to get my ship. It's got a betagun. We'll never kill this thing with poison now." "All right," Luke said. "Hey, Rudder, run around back and get us Big Jake's hack, will you?" As the bulky biobot trotted out of sight around the building, Luke turned back to the Terran. "Hold on though. I can't have you irradiating the thing, even if it is too big to poison. Those betaguns leave an awfully dirty wake, don't they? You could wipe out half the fish in the ocean with the contamination from a single shot. The wildlife on Isolde has a very low tolerance, you know. They've never been exposed to even mild radiation." Swager rubbed his forehead. "I know. It's rough. But judging by some of the others I've seen, our Muschine could be, oh, as big as a building. There's a chance even the betagun won't work, and we'll have to go to a small bomb." "Hell," said Luke, "that'd be as good as an eviction notice to every colonist on the planet. All we have to do is miss one year's sea harvest and we're dead, economically. We'd all have to leave Isolde and resettle somewhere else." The Terran nodded grimly. "Well, let's hope the betagun works then." Rudder appeared, accompanied by a ten-foot-tall horse pulling a highwheeled trap. Swager vaulted in and looked perplexedly about. "Where're the reins?" he asked. The biobot horse turned a disgusted muzzle back toward the Terran and said, "Just tell me where you want to go -- sir." "The government house in Capitol Town," Luke called up to him. "And take it easy on him, he's not used to our roads." With a snort more human than horselike, the lanky animal set off down the road at a good thirty knots. Swager's bright green uniform faded out of sight, jolting up and down at every bump. L uke went back inside. With Rudder's assistance, he trussed up the unconscious puppet, and they carried it down to a rowboat tied at the pier. Then they sat there, side by side, looking out into the water and not saying much. About an hour had passed when from overhead came a hushed hum, which grew steadily louder. Thai a plain black sphere came into view from the direction of Capitol Town. "Swager's ship," Luke commented. Rudder nodded. It descended into the waves a quarter-mile offshore, sinking until only the very topmost curvature was visible. A hatch opened, and not one but two men stepped out. "Looks like the governor. Must have come along to make sure Swager's giving us our twenty thousand credits worth." They got in the dinghy and rowed out to the Terran ship. Sedlarik caught their painter. "Hello," he said gruffly. "Just thought I'd come along to lend a hand." They swung the carcass of unconscious muscle aboard. Rudder peered curiously into the hatch. "It's a hell of a ship, you know," Sedlarik said. "Just lllb those old Terran fighters I used to fly when I was a kid." Luke grunted and sprang aboard. He was the last. And now three people, a mansized biobot and a twohundred-pound chunk of muscle were crowded on the bobbing curve of the ship. "All right, Swager, what's the drill from here?" "Simple. First off, you guys clear out. Get into the dinghy and go cool your heels in McGlade's. I'll wake up this puppet here, toss him down from the ship into the ocean near our last incident, and then I'll follow him home." "Alone?" asked Luke. "Alone. That's what you're paying me for. But I'll be back in an hour or two. Before dark, anyway. Wait in McGlade's." There was a short embarrassed silence. "Once I've found the big Muschine out there," Swager went on, "I'll submerge and burn it to death. And I've been thinking about contamination." Luke raised his brows. "Maybe it can be minimized for the sake of Isolde's fishing crop. I'll get right on top of the thing and try to use a low dosage." "That's the hard way, of course," Luke said. "You're sure you don't want some help?" "No, you'd really just be in the way." Luke clapped the man awkwardly on the shoulder, then turned and hopped back into the dinghy. The other two joined him. Rowing away, they heard the hum again. A slight wake came as the big hull eased up out of the water. It headed out to sea a few feet over the water, just clipping the waves. VI I t seemed to Luke they'd been in McGlade's much too long, but the feeling was a dull one. Luke was on his way to being slightly drunk and everything was dull. For a while earlier he'd played cards with Sedlarik, but the old man had long since gone off to bed. Now he sat at the bar with his chin in his hands. Behind him Rudder was asleep in a big wooden chair by the door. A few of Jake's regulars had come and gone, but on the whole the place stayed quiet and empty. After all, it was a weekday night. Luke had taken to walking around behind the bar to draw his own beer. Jake didn't mind, since his dozing was the less interrupted for it At about one o'clock the big innkeeper roused himself and yawned. "Hey, when're you going to bed and give an honest man some sleep?" "Aw, go on up, yourself, Jake. I'll lock up." Jake was about to get up when the doors banged open and Ambrose Swager staggered in. Rudder tumbled out of his chair. For one frozen second no one spoke or moved. The Terran's face was cut, and the blood contrasted strongly with his pallor. His breath came in gasps. His left leg dragged at an unnatural angle from its knee. The bright green pantleg was ripped and soaked with more blood. Rushing over to him, Big Jake and Luke guided the man to a chair. "Thanks," he wheezed, then grimaced and put a hand to his throat. IF "Well?" Luke asked him tensely. "It didn't work," Swager rasped. "I got too close and actually brushed against the thing. It's immense, you wouldn't believe it. Like a submarine mountain of flesh. It absorbed the ship like a snake swallowing an egg. I cut in full propulsion and blasted out, but it'd cracked the hull in a dozen places, even so. It tossed the ship around like a pingpong ball -- " "Jake, is that leg broken or twisted?" Luke asked, and they both knelt to examine it. It seemed only badly wrenched. Roused by the ruckus, Emil Sedlarik had come sleepily out of his room to join them. The wounded Terran was close to passing out. Luke shook him gently. "And the betagun?" he asked. "Did you give him a good dose of radiation?" Swager blinked, his face working. "Didn't faze him. Soaked it up like a sponge. It's grown completely out of hand -- we'll have to bomb it." The governor shook his. gray head slowly. "What's the point? Do that and no more fish. It'd be simpler to just pack up and leave." Swager was unconscious now. Jake looked up from where he was binding the man's leg. "Better get Doc Casey." "Right," Luke said, heading for the door. "Come on, Rud, let's take a walk." I solde's only medic lived a mile or so down the beach from McGlade's. Scuffing through the dark sand, Luke began to notice the faintest glow of predawn lightness in the East. He paused now and then to look out to sea, or inland at the little cottages of people he'd known most of his life. He wondered if some of them, the older ones, would be able to pick up and resettle at all. And he wondered if they'd blame him, once they knew. Yet Luke knew it wasn't his fault, or even Ambrose Swager's. The fault lay in the carefully regulated dependency Terra imposed on her colonies. Swager at the moment was as much a victim of it as the rest of them. He was paying in pain that very minute, and remembering this, Luke quickened his steps along the darkened beach. But Swager was above it all, and Luke resented the man's immunity. He'd just apologize, refund the fee maybe, and go off to the next little planet that needed him. And could afford him. Pausing on a low dune, he and Rudder peered out into the water at the silhouette of the space yacht. Nothing much showed, as usual, just the upper curve of a sixty-foot sphere rose above the swells. Funny, Luke thought, it looks perfectly okay. But Swager had said the Muschine had holed it. "What's the trouble, Boss?" Rudder asked, seeing his frown. The upper limb of Isolde's sun crept over the hills beehind them, and for an instant the whole world was totally pink. "Nothing, Rud." Luke wished his head was clearer. He labored with his thoughts like a ten year old with a medicine ball. "Where's the washup, Rud? Around here, I mean. Where's all the debris come to shore?" The biobot shuffled his arms on his hipshelf, a gesture Luke had come to relate to a human's wrinkling his brow. "Down by the Bore, I think, Boss. Where we came through the first day. About a mile on the other side of McGlade's." Luke turned around. "Let's head over to it then. I want to see what's washed ashore this morning." "But the doctor, Boss. Mr. Swager's -- " That stopped Luke cold. Swager. Ambrose Swager was back with the governor and Jake. All at once he was sprinting back the way they'd come. Rudder stumping behind on tired legs. They burst through Jake's swinging doorsi The Terran lay on a cot beneath the window, where Emil and Jake worked over the cuts on his face. "Luke, whatever -- ?" "Get away from him, quick!" Luke was across the room in two strides and pushed them both away. "Guard the door. This thing isn't sick, it's dead." Hurriedly grabbing the cot by its foot, he heaved it over and dumped the Terran to the floor. "Get up." With much more agility than his wounds would seem to allow, Ambrose Swager scrambled to his feet. The thin face was as quick and expressive as ever, but it was pale. In his own way the Terran was even more horrible than Nikos Sperakos had been. "You know, then," said the Machine's puppet F or an answer Luke picked up a chair and with a grunt wrenched off a thick maple leg. "Swager's ship was roughed up by the big Muschine," he said grimly. "But it more than cracked a few seams. It must have opened a rent large enough in the hull to reach in and yank out the pilot." He advanced slowly across the floor toward the puppet his voice a compressed whisper. "You killed him. And mimicked him." "Now wait a minute, Luke," said the Terran, backing away. "You're , wrong. I gave that thing a fat dose of radiation and -- " "Bull. I'll bet Swager never had a chance to squeeze off a shot before it -- you -- got him. You're afraid of that betagun, all right. This whole ruse is to keep us from trying another shot isn't it?" Luke taunted, slowly following the retreating puppet around the cot Suddenly it stopped. "Okay," it said with a trace of the old Terran arrogance. "But my ship was wrecked, and it carried the only betagun on Isolde. By the time you can get another down on this godforsaken little planet I'll have grown to the proportions where you will have to use a bomb, after all. So nothing's changed, has it?" "We'll find the ship, wherever it's washed up, and get the gun." Suddenly Luke couldn't stand it any more. Taking one swift step forward he clubbed the thing full in its chest. Air left lungs that didn't really know what breathing was for, and it went down. He bashed it twice more. IP The sharply handsome features of Ambrose Swager spread, became fibrous, and there was nothing but a sluglike bundle of muschinery, inhuman, uncaring. Tossing aside the cudgel he turned to Rudder and the governor. "We've got to move fast," he said, heading for the door. "We've got to find Swager's ship." "But wasn't that it?" Rudder asked as he trotted terrier-like at Luke's heels. The biobot pointed out to where the sphere they'd seen earlier had been. It was gone now. "No," Luke puffed between heavy footfalls. "That was the Muschine itself, the whole big mass of it, mimicking the ship. It had to stay close by to control that puppet of Swager." T hey ran along the hard, moist sand at the water's edge, but even so their pace grew steadily slower. Luke himself felt close to exhaustion. Birds were up now, and there was a sliver of open sky between the sun and the eastern horizon. "There, Boss, up ahead." Rudder pointed to where thick green trees had spread right down to the ocean's edge, marking the tidal canal. The morning flood swept through, driving the water far inland toward the other ocean. Tons of debris moved with it. Stopping on a low coral bank, they scanned the churning masses of driftwood and kelp. "Look," puffed the governor, pointing. Bumping heavily along the bottom, a smooth-surfaced something occasionally showed above the waves. It was fifty yards offshore. "That's it okay," Luke said, and he looked down at Rudder. "If you could get to the exhaust pump -- " "Think he'd know one if he saw it?" the old man cut in. He described the thing, and with a quick nod Rudder leaped into the water. His smooth brown head was soon at the ship and then vanished as he dived. "He's been down a long time," the governor muttered a few minutes later. Luke nodded dubiously. "Well, he is sort of a porpoise, you know." Then their attention snapped to the ship again. With a rumbling hiss the whole surface around it erupted in bubbles. Its broad curvature slowly rose higher. As the hissing stopped the hatch flew open and Rudder, coughing and gasping, crawled out. "Emil, can you make it out there?" The old man snorted contemptously and was in the water before Luke was. The current was stiff and kelp fouled their arms at every stroke, but they were at the ship in; five minutes. Rudder was still recovering. Thumping his broad back, Luke told him to return to McGlade's. The biobot nodded tiredly and fumbled back into the water, headed for shore. Luke lowered himself through the hatch where Emil had already gone. "Hull's sprung in a dozen places," the old man said, "but most of the stuff's okay. Only big hole's right here on the conning bridge. Must be where it reached in for Swager." "Will it fly?" "Don't know. Hold on." "Hurry." Luke helped the old ex-pilot cram himself through the hatchway into the engine room. Then he waited, humming nervously and pacing the deck to keep from falling asleep on his feet. "S'okay," boomed a hollow voice from below decks. The governor's head appeared through the hatch again. "I've kicked it all into emergency override," he said, hauling himself out "Sort of like putting a penny behind a fuse. But it'll go until everything burns out. Here, let me into that conn chair." T he black sphere rose unsteadily over the waves, water pouring out from a dozen split seams where it had leaked in. The hum had raspy overtones this time, even Luke's inexperienced ear could hear that But it ; moved, and by Isoldan standards it moved fast. "Okay, Luke, there's McGlade's. No, look through this screen here. But where's the Muschine?" "Head out to sea. Straight out" The two men strained their eyes into the screen. Then Sedlarik let out his breath. "My God!" Moving ponderously offshore was what looked like brown jellyfish about a hundred and fifty feet across. "It's already gone several miles," Luke said. "Must have left the minute I nailed Swager." The governor had already turned and was fuming with a handful of inoperative controls. "Betagun's out," he growled. "Wouldn't you know? Listen, Luke, hold her on course and I'll go below and see if I can trigger It from there. That's elevation to your left, the green knob is attitude. Okay?" As Luke nodded uncertainly Emil wedged himself back down the hole. "Watch it!" he roared as Luke inadvertently rolled their crippled ship thirty degrees. After managing to right them, Luke eased jerkily lower over the water, to better see the renegade Muschine. "It'll work, I think," the governor called. "Line up the crosshairs at the top of your screen." Luke did so. They were directly over it now, "Ready," he shouted. "Right. Okay -- we're firing." Luke could just pick out the faint finger of light that pointed down to the thing in the water. The thing stopped, quivered, and its mass contracted into a large central lump. Smoke and steam rose from its upper skin where the beta particles burned into it. The surface grew black. And still it was contracting. Why? The reason hit Luke; and Luke hit the elevator just in time. The Muschine lunged. Of course, this is what happened to Swager! Like a gigantic fleshy mitten the great ball of muscle groped a hundred feet into the air. "What the hell gives?" Emil howled from below. "Evasion action. We're still not out!" Luke dodged the ship clumsily to the right and tried to realign the crosshairs. The main drive hum was louder and more unsteady, and he realized suddenly that the cabin was very hot. "One more shot is all we get, Luke," the governor called. "And maybe not even -- " "Fire!" Once again the blue beam poured IF f ( into the mass of flesh below. Fragments of the thing fell away in charred layers. The gigantic hand contracted to a palsied fist. They had it. Abruptly the beam flickered out. Luke guided them a hundred yards east and set the overheated ship down in the cool ocean water. Emil emerged from the hatch, groaned, and passed out. His shoesoles were on fire, and his hands were charred black. E mil Sedlarik frowned. Careful with his bandaged hands, he poured Luke and himself a second brandy from the legendary square bottle that so few of his guests ever saw. From where they sat on the old hotel's wide veranda, they could hear sounds within of other people finishing dinner. "So you think I could pay for repairs on the hull by selling some of that fancy equipment inside?" Luke was asking. "Probably. And I could probably teach you to fly it. But the whole idea still sounds crazy. Suppose you run into some Terrans, and they want Swager's ship back?" Luke sighed and slouched back in the big wicker chair. "Then we take our lumps, I guess. But if we can save even one other colony the trouble we went through, it'll be worth it" He grinned across at Rudder, who was leaning on the porch rail. "And we sure won't charge Terran prices, either." The governor shook his head. "Freelance consultant," he growled. "Sounds more like the Lone Ranger." They were silent for a while. A fisherman and his son went by in the dusk, a newly mended net strung between them. The governor returned their wave, and watched them pass quickly down to the harbor, hurrying to be ready for the morning. i i Satirical Science Fiction At Its Besfl by Fritz Leiber by John Brunner  by Larry Niven And many morel Remember -- now Galaxy appears every month; reserve your copy at your favorite newsstand or subscribe today!  i l ! IF IF  Short Story by basil wells  hill) ol'tk'.f Vahni was sea-born fo a land of enemies , ancient -- and new l V ahni and a thousand others like her came up out of the early dawn sea. Before them the beach was broad and pink in the vast sun's golden flood. Upon the waiting smooth bosom of the packed sands were strewn the crescents, the discs and the polished stars of the Great Sea's shell debris. White bones of driftwood spun a froth of jumbled lace along the softly pulsing rim of the satiny pale sea. Across the beach orange-and-purple-flowered grasslands sloped evenly upward for many miles. Only here, close along the beach, was there a narrow belt of mauve-hued arboraceous ferns. And beyond the halfmile belt of trees lay the gleaming towers of the moated city of Torbotha.  .IK," There young Vahni, so recently a thoughtless playful finlin lacking any mental contact with her childish companions, would be welcomed by a parent, or parents, assigned her by the Allwise Council. Since she had broken the shell and had been bom in the sunken nursery beneath the barren offshore island of Hod, she had never set foot on the main island of Botha. For fifteen circuits of Turm about the golden sun she had studied and played and worked to prepare for this. "It is most beautiful!' I cried Vahni, her full purple lips indrawn and upthrust into the expressive ezlaa triangle of pleasure so characteristic of the People. About her the young Turmans and their scattering of older, rigid-shelled guardians were also eztaaing and expressing their excitement and pleasure by clakking their horny-plated arms against the resonant belly-platings of their plastrons. "So clean, so bright!" she heard their piping, fresh voices exclaiming, and with her imperfect inner receptiveness -- newborn scant weeks earlier -- she caught the unvoiced joyful thoughts of the wrinkled older People nearby. Together the hundreds of Vahni's companions ran across the pink gritty wideness of beach. Short and scjuat of body they were, their watergleaming carapaces and plastrons like blue-mottled bronze. From their wide froglike mouths and triple-hooded eyes they shook the saline drops even as they hurried forward. A bruptly Vahni's blissful eztaa of happiness dissolved into the extruded downpointed triangular lips of despair and hatred. She cried out in sudden pain and misery, and about her all the young of the recently hatched People also gave voice in a like manner. The illusion of beauty and cleanliness over the sunlit land was a mockery. For over all the major land masses of Turm there swarmed and multiplied the hidden tiny drinkers of blood, lymph and any living tender flesh -- the miniature vermin known as lilfs. Against their relentless, unending assaults the Turmans had constructed their water-filled moats and launched their most intensive mental deterrents. Only in the Great Sea or in their cities was there escape from them. Even in her excitement over the imminent acquisition of a home and of parents, she could not entirely ignore the inroads of the lilfs. They swarmed up over her sturdy, hornyplated legs and over her lower and upper body shells, searching for the soft warmth and fluid nutrients on which they thrive. Vahni writhed in utter misery. Vainly she tried to copy the stoicism of the oldsters guiding the new adults. She must act like a near adult and put from her the discomforts of the march. Yet she found herself wishing that fhe party had journeyed the additional nine hundred hets -- the threefoot height of an adwlt Turman was one het -- and swum up the River #I to the water gate of Torbotha. She caught the thought waves of older Turmans, especially those of Welm and Havn. Every day, it seemed, her erratic powers of reception improved. To them the massive red walls and the low broad domes of ivory and pale gold were the home to which they were returning after years of exile. Old Welm wept silently, his watery yellowish eyes bulging like overripe sea plums. Havn's wrinkled face and thin bluish lips were twisted into a crooked, eztaaing mask as he hobbled along beside his equally aged crony. The thoughts! They came flooding... "To roam under the white moons IF again... Free under the sun... No more dreary caverns... To be free of shell-soiled demons in finlin form..." As suddenly as it had opened, her inner mental ear was closed. Now she heard only the disjointed words, pantings and involuntary clakking of horny limb against horny plastron as the group moved on. So they came at last to the sunken gates of the outer moat, and passed slowly through. As they went, they frequently immersed their upper bodies and heads until they reached the upward ramp. Thus were they cleansed of the accumulation of crusted lilfs. Within the inner walls, thousands of Turmans crowded the shady plazas. Vahni saw gleaming walls of ebony, scarlet, orange, green and pale ivory that climbed like waves of frozen, tinted water to the curving low domes above. Underfoot the interlocking patterns of the crimson and white paving stones shone clear. In the center of the innermost plaza loomed a vast and ugly globe of scarred, pitted metal, blotched with streaks of reddish rust. It was so alien to the People's sense of beauty that Vahni was impelled to question old Welm about it. "See where those stubby legs support the globe?" old Welm said. "Just above a glimpse of the central lake." "Yes. There is a sort of door -- an oval barred space." "And at the base and above the legs? See how blackened and soiled?" Quick comprehension came to Vahni. "It is a ship of the Soft Shells... But I thought they had returned to their own island." "This is our ship, little Vahni. The Soft Shell, Jackson, who is our friend, purchased it for us with many gems and much pale metal." And Vahni stood in wonder regarding the ship that had crossed the star seas from islands on another world. A t long last the waiting was ended The emerging young adults, no longer infantile finlins, but as yet with indifferent or erratic mental control, were to be given parents. After fifteen years, from egg to burbling youth, of living in barrack-like watery caverns, they were to live in small family units. To most of them this was a terrifying and sobering step. For the first time, Vahni saw a Soft Shell moving among the massed groups of eztaaing and chatting People. How very tall and slim and frail he was! Gray hair grew atop his oddly bulging skull. She saw how tiny was the almost lipless mouth with its ugly, small, white fangs of pinkish unprotected flesh jutted between the eyes and the mouth, and two other rounded flaps protruded at the angle of the jaws. The Soft Shell's head and body were without the protective linked plates of horny tissue and shell of the People, but she had learned in the caverns beneath the island of Hod that under the flesh a filmy sort of shell existed. She felt a brief ugliness of vertigo, quick passing. How nasty -- almost squishy! She saw her companions of the past years being named and uneasily being integrated into smaller, or larger clots of assemblage. She saw them moving away, off to their new homes, and she wondered with whom she would be quartered. Would they be kind to her or indifferent -- or would they love her as so often she had dreamed would come to pass? "Vahnil" That was her name, and she saw old man Havn beckoning to her, while she moved clumsily toward the group on the central rostrum." "You have a great honor, Vahni," the old Turman said. "You are to join the household of the beloved Soft Shell, Jackson." Almost Vahni cried out. She did not want to belong to this alien. Perhaps he would beat her or torture her with strange sounds and vibrations. Only in time did she remember that she was young adult, no longer finlin , and she must not appear ungracious or angry. "I am much pleasured," she said in the People's formal and traditional reply, "that he has chosen me from among so many." And now she saw the Soft Shell coming closer, towering high above, a grotesque parody of an eztaa on his hideous thin lips. If he touched her she would scream and... "Welcome to our household, little Vahni," the Soft Shell's harsher voice greeted. The tonal quality and the accent were alien, hateful sounds. "This will be your older brother, Dni. Your older sister Thea is about somewhere." Vahni had not seen the handsome young Turman at the alien's side until now. Dni's eyes were dark flecked gold, and a strangely attractive little spar twisted his lower eztaaing lip. Their arms clakked formal greetings on their plastrons and they bowed. "Welcome, little sister," Dni said. "Dni is learning to pilot the star ship," the man, Jackson told her. "Already he can fly the cargo skimmers and copters -- he will take you and Thea with him some day soon." Dni's eztaa was warm and encouraging, and her inner mental contact, briefly awakening for a moment, assured her that under his monstrous exterior Jackson was gentle and kind. To complete her growing sense of elation, Thea -- her new buxom and incessantly chattering sister -- gave her a noisy, unqualified welcome. Before they had traversed half the shady twenty blocks to the Soft Shell's garden-hidden dwelling, her memories of Hod's dank island caverns and the years of austere schooling and discipline there were shrinking, fading dreams. VV Vahni, a matter of twentyfive days later, "fear the coming of other Soft Shells to Turm? They have many good things, the flying ships and the machines, that we can use." Dni eztaaed half-heartedly at Thea. And Thea's ordinarily pleasant features sobered. "Our father Jackson has told us that to Erthmen we are but foolish finlins. They feel a sacred duty to educate us, to build great factories and to teach us to toil endlessly in their gritty, stench-polluted interiors." IF Dni nodded. "We must learn to worry about the future and grow old before our time preparing against it The Soft Shells in so far as possible, wish to shape us into their pattern." "But we told them we do not desire all of their culture," Vahni protested. "Surely they will not thrust themselves, unwanted, upon us?" "I fear that they will, my child." The Soft Shell, Jackson, had come, unnoticed into the long cool room overlooking the color-splashed gardens. "In fact, three ships loaded with machinery and workers are a a grounding site." Dni's golden eyes flared, and his lips were down-angered. "They would disregard our warnings?" he said. "The Allwise Council thought your fears ungrounded, my Father, but since you have for seventeen years been our trusted friend they assented to your message of stem exclusion. They considered us as witless finlins, as you say. But do not even finlins have rights that must not be violated?" The sound their father Jackson made was painful to Vahni's ears. It was a mingling of eztaa, voiceless weeping and anger. 'To Erthmen a finlin must be protected and disciplined," he said. "Their young are like pets to be pampered and spoiled. You too will be petted -- or paddled if necessary." "But there are many empty worlds, my Father," argued Dni. "Why do they not settle there? We will send them there." "No, Dni. This is too logical for my people. They would have to build cities and till the soil. Here everything is prepared." Thea, normally so happy and full of eztaaing nonsense, broke in. "We have heard you speak of your people who thoughtlessly litter the roadsides and the groves. Of their eggshells, ketchup bottles, paper cartons and tin cans. And of the cruel ones who abandon unwanted pets at roadside. And of your father, who yearned to retaliate in kind. These we thought were but stories to teach us consideration of others. We were amused. Surely no thinking beings acted so." Jackson's sunken little eyes were sad. Vahni caught a flash of the torment within the graying Soft Shell's brain. "It was all true, Thea. Now they come to litter your world." "We will not permit it!" cried Dni. Y et, for all Dni's brave words and the exchange of messages between the Council's spokesman. Jackson, and the spaceships' command, the three great ships from the seas of space grounded a scant mile outside the city a few hours later. Tents and domes of bonded-earth warehouses sprouted like so many drab-colored mushrooms. Roaring metal titans chewed and worried at the reluctant soil, triumphantly bearing away crumbling sections of it to be deposited elsewhere. About the alien's encampment a broad moat came into being, and from the underground waterways of Turm the Soft Shells drew water to set the great ditch brimming. Hopters circled the moated sector. laying down a constant spray of deadly fog, and hundreds of flame throwers sterilized and resterilized the encircled grounds. Yet the ubiquitious lilfs did not grow less obnoxious. Instead they seemed to increase. Over everything, the lilfs laid a crawling, itching, sucking blanket of corruption. And into the midst of this maddening swirl of activity and construction, the developing, highly erratic mind probes of Vahni dipped hesitantly. And withdrew as she contacted the raw substance of the invading Soft Shell's thoughts and desires. How unlike they were to her Father Jackson, or the People of Torbotha. And yet, after long terrified moments, she probed again. She searched among the harried brains of the Soft Shells for a mind not too far apart from her own. Had not Jackson said that there were many who felt as did he -- that invasion and compulsion were wrong? And surely there would be a few  even aboard the invading ships. Twice she contacted briefly and disengaged. Then she found a gentle, slow-timed brain that she could comprehend. As yet her command of Jackson's second tongue, Untra, was poor, but through the senses and memory cells of this bony young giant, Irad Marsh, she could salvage scraps of sight and sounds. VV filth-smeared, hairy-chested Soft Shell was almost screaming as he stood waist deep in a muddy yellow flood of water. "Drain out all our blood! Suck us dry!" an unseen voice at Marsh's elbow croaked. "Look at 'em! Crusted, oozing filth!" She felt with horror the expanding, crawling, itching, rasping, neversilent blanket of encrusted lilfs that covered the vulnerable body of the Soft Shell, Marsh. Even when Marsh squatted down into the silt-heavy canal and plunged his head beneath, of hungry, sucking, minute mouths gnawed at him. "Out of that -- back at your work!" Through Marsh's eyes she saw the uniformed man probing at him with a knife-tipped weapon. As Marsh clumsily obeyed, following the back of the Soft Shell who had been at his elbow, Vahni could see that the guard was also twitching and wriggling involuntarily, as the lilfs relentlessly gnawed at his flesh. "... bayonet at me!" roared the hairy-chested Soft Shell's voice, and Marsh, turning, allowed Vahni to see the weapon tom from the guard's hands, reversed, and then plunged deep into his chest. Marsh dropped flat. There was a spattering pop-pop-pop, and the burly Soft Shell who had killed the guard jolted grotesquely and obscenely into a shapeless mass, as dozens of tiny missiles fired by others struck him. "They's been dozens of others," the hoarse whisper of the Soft Shell who sprawled just ahead of Marsh informed. Some of 'em guards and officers... we'll go mad..." From somewhere a booming mechanical voice was issuing orders. "Back into the ships," it grated out. "Working parties will suit up." IF B riefly, then, Vahni lost contact, and as briefly caught it again as the slow-moving Soft Shell, Marsh, was donning an artificial shell. For only a few moments could she maintain the connection; yet that was long enough to know that the lilfs were not to be thwarted by metal or crystal or liquid. Within the ships, the near-microscopic parasitic filth that were the lilfs crusted and overcrusted on the sensitive flesh of the Soft Shells. Her last fading contact with Marsh mirrored a tortured, despairing mind that contemplated oblivion through drugs or suicide. Her overstrained mental probes, immature and erratic at best, blanked-out completely at this point, nor did she recover for several hours. Yet she could not sleep and, with her older sister Thea, she went to the city's moated wall where it overlooked the Soft Shells' camp. To her amazement, thousands of carapaced Turmans lined the barrier their golden-yellow eyes raptly intent on the ugly bonded-earth domes and warehouses out there. They did not speak together, and their gaze did not waver. "Why do our people do this?" she asked Thea. "We make them feel the lilfs," Thea said quietly. "The Soft Shells are like newly born finlins. They cannot communicate or control objects with their minds. Unlike us they cannot send away the few lilfs who somehow pass the watery barriers, and the walls." Vahni held her breath for a long moment and then released it. "Within the city," she said, "we shield ourselves and Jackson. But what of the false shells and the sealed star ships?" "We enter their minds, Vahni. AH of these thousands and all the Turmans in our other cities. One lilf, or no lilfs, can become a score, a hunsquirm. They crawl. They wallow in tissue and blood! Always they move and feed." And suddenly Vahni sensed something of that outward message. Her own shells were a-crawl with the minute irritants of a myriad loathsome feeding parasites, ever-expanding and clawing deeper, deeper! Resolutely she tried to blank her mind against that message. D oggedly the Soft Shells fought on. They threw up new barriers of chemically-impregnated soil. They scorched and fused the already lifeless earth about them. They deluged themselves and the ships with countless tons of water. All was useless. Even within the hitherto impregnable ships, twitching, sweating Soft Shells fought and clawed and moaned. The solidity of bulkheads and lockers and bunks writhed and crawled with a slippery living moss of lilfs; or so it seemed to them. Through Thea's descriptions of what her own mind contacted, Vahni learned this, at first; and later she too was recovered enough to catch brief, distorted glimpses of what the Soft Shells endured. "Why do they not leave, my Father?" Vahni asked the tall Erthman. Jackson was pale and trembling, Here Is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging fpm c#nputer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. i ! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name  Address Gty  State ZfpCode (Offer good in U. S. A. Only) his eyes shot through with yellowness, and the veins outlined in sickly red. Like his own people without the walls, though to a lesser degree, he was under assault by the power of thousands of Torbothan minds. "We are a stubborn race, Vahni." Jackson's travesty of an eztaa was feeble -- barely a grimace of the narrow lips. "Yet even we can endure only so much. The ships will be leaving soon, my child. Let us hope that Turm will be classified as unfit for colonization. It should be, after this fiasco." And toward nightfall of the second day, Vahni knew that Jackson was right The huge ditching and building machines were piloted aboard ship. The domes and warehouses were blown up. With early dusk, the ships lifted as one on ravening, mighty legs of hellish flame. Higher they rose and swiftly dwindled into fading freckles on the pale disc of Turm's early rising inner moon. That night there was eztaaing and clakking and dancing in the city and in all the cities roundabout, but soon the great weariness of their long vigil came and drove them home. Only in the great, low dwelling where Vahni lay sleeping was there light and activity. The Soft Shell, Jackson, and his son, Dni, kept the ears of their radio receivers trained on the receding tiny fleet and on the nearest Erth-dominated planetary system of Pyar. The fate of their beloved planet might hinge on what they learned in the next few hours -- or days. IF IF  Short Story Buy a fur coat, lady? Cheap l Guaranteed cut from the still quivering body of a native... J udson Kruger, festooned with cameras to make him look like another tourist, thought that Orsu, the native proprietor of the only Terran-type inn on the planet Marrech, was a slippery character any way you looked at him. Resembling a pale, hairless, iridescent giant otter, with three pairs of short limbs to support his flabby bulk, Orsu kept throwing furtive glances over what would have been his shoulder if he'd had any to speak of. His slanted, slitted eyes reinforced the impression. He'd learned English, but spoke it in a squeaky whisper. Just now Orsu was showing one of to Kruger and to a pair of very rich tourists. The eyes of the couple held the glitter of people about to acquire at a bargain something their neighbors can't afford. Mrs. Rocklyn poked a pudgy finger. eagerly into a half-inch hole in the pelt. "Is this where the bullet went in?" "That was first bullet," Orsu squeaked. "This was famous chief, very strong." He turned the hide over and displayed two more holes. "He run six miles, bleeding." "Awful!" Mrs. Rocklyn gasped happily. Her husband's eyes glittered harder. "How much you want for this one?" Orsu glanced behind him nervously. "I not can sell. I must take you to Terran who has skins, can sell." Kruger's pulse quickened. That would be the man he was after -- Sears, the renegade responsible for this foul traffic; though Kruger didn't know who was more reprehensible, the renegade or the natives, like Orsu, who helped the outlaw murder inoffensive members of their own species. T o meet Hank Sears they had to walk through rain to a poorer part of town. Kruger couldn't read the faces of the natives they met, but Orsu wore an Earth-made revolver in plain sight. Sears was a lanky, bearded man of perhaps fifty. He wore an enormous pistol on one hip, and an ugly hunting-knife on the other. A heavy rifle leaned in one corner of the dingy room. Sears started by showing Rocklyn the smallest of six or seven pelts he had with him. "This one's from a half-grown female. I crippled her at two hundred yards, a lucky shot, and one of my natives finished her off with a knife." He fingered a gash near one end of the skin. 'This can be trimmed off, or you can leave it and have a pocket sewed inside. It won't tear any farther; see?" He tugged at it hard, but it held. "There's plenty of stuff here for a man's jacket." The leather was undeniably splendid. It was an eighth of an inch thick, waterproof, cellular so that it would insulate well against cold, and displayed a satiny sheen on either side. Sears glanced at Mrs. Rocklyn's hips, and reached for the largest of the pelts. "This'll make you a full-length coat, Madame. See how soft and pliant it is, yet tough!" Mrs. Rocklyn reached greedily for the pelt, examined it, began to breathe hard, and asked in a trembling voice, "What's this burned place?" Sears glanced at it. "That? Oh, we wounded the fellow, and he took to the brush, and we had to burn him out. Devil of a job getting a fire started here; you have to use a flamethrower. He still put up a fight, even with his lowest pair of legs burned off. They're dangerous with knives, if you let them get in close. Finished him myself with a club; that's why the head's missing." "Awful!" Mrs. Rocklyn choked, drooling. Orsu put in quickly, "They wild people. Not belong this town." Sears said casually, "Hardly more than animals." Kruger, watching him, saw that some of the casualness was feigned. Sears was doubtless anxious about the sale. But the Rocklyns were too eager to notice.  IF T he tourist ship left two days later, taking the Rocklyns and the two pelts, for which they'd paid an amount several times Kruger's annual salary. Of course, if they'd tried to buy them within ten thousand lightyears of Earth, they'd have paid much more. It might be several months before another tourist ship came, but Kruger thought he had an adequate pretense for staying over. Marrech had hardly been photographed at all, up to now. He wasn't supposed to arrest Sears single-handed; only to get the evidence and summon a Terran Space Force vessel that lurked within call. He spent the first two weeks boning up on the native language and collecting what information he could. Orsu kept a close watch on him at first. Sears had presumably gone upriver where, fifty miles inland, he had a home and a wife, to wait word from Orsu when more customers arrived. Marrech, Kruger learned, was a wet world, even now at the sunniest season. Jungles of rubbery-leaved trees ran right down to the surf and seemed to swathe most of the hills on both sides of the river. The river, a wide, swift, muddy stream, poured foamily from the interior, bringing now and then clumps of broken-off foliage or whole uprooted trees. The main articles of commerce (aside from lumber, which was in considerable demand by off-world buyers because it was quite resistant to immersion in water) seemed to be spices from the interior. Natives, swimming down-river or scuttling along jungle trails, brought the spices, packed in leather bundles strapped to their backs. Entrepreneurs in town stored the spices in crude lumber warehouses until alien ships arrived to bargain. The natives who brought the spices were wild ones, judging by their scant clothing and their crude spears and bows. They showed no fear of most of the townspeople, nor of most of the visitors from space. Of Orsu, though, they seemed frantically afraid -- whenever Kruger saw one of them catch sight of the inn-keeper, the native would begin to tremble, utter little shrieks of terror, and scuttle out of sight as fast as possible. They seemed quite wary of Kruger, too, avoiding him nervously. Possibly they recognized him as ofthe same species as Sears, who hunted their kind so ruthlessly inland.' Or they might think the cameras Kruger carried were some sort of horrendous, off-world weapons. On occasion, they displayed toward him a strange kind of behavior -- perhaps it was a ritual, or perhaps it was a sign of emotion. They seemed strangely furtive about it. He'd see them watching him from a doorway, or from down the street. They'd be rapidly opening and closing their mouths, clashing their not-inconsiderable teeth together so fast it sounded like a typewriter. Sometimes they'd be shivering as if in fury. Only occasionally did he observe this behavior when they weren't looking at him. Natives, townsmen as well as wild tribesmen, would be facing one another, clashing their teeth and undulating their bodies. Maybe, he thought, they were having arguments. After two weeks he felt he'd learned enough. There were, apparently, no local fauna an armed man need fear if he were watchful. He decided to start inland, alone and on foot. Accordingly he seized an opportunity when the watchful Orsu -- who had been acting uneasy and irritable for a few days -- left town. I K ruger slipped into the jungle. He mustn't, he felt, stay too close to the river; there was too much travel on it or alongside it. Before he'd gone a mile he realized he'd made a mistake; he should have gone along the coast to the high, nearly tiafe ridge east of town and headed inland along that The mud in the jungle wasn't deep, but it was gluey, bhUdihg ixp into great globs on his bocki,' Which weren't small to begin with, so that he grunted with effort every step, trying to lift the weight clear of the ground. Repeatedly he slipped and went sprawling with a laud splat. At such times he would lie there for a few minutes, making terse comments about Marrech, about his Terran boss who'd sent him on this mission, and about himself for being foot enough to be an interstellar plaindothesman in the first place. Finally he learned to seek out the runnels of liquid mud. It was no more slippery, if he stepped carefully, and it didn't build up on his boots. Still, he had to stop every little way and fiiid a stick to scrape it off before it began to dry. The boots got soaked through and the rest of his clothes were covered with the dark-brown goo. No wonder the natives here had evolved such waterproof skins! And no wonder they kept to the trails along the river, where they could swim periodically and wash themselves off! He stopped about midday, munched on a can of C-rations, and stared eastward, muttering to himself. Was it worthwhile to climb to the ridge now? Hardly -- the slope was steep enough and slippery enough so that it might actually be impossible. He could go back to the coast and start over, but that was against his nature, and he'd already expended half a day. He'd keep on. Maybe, when he was far enough from town, he could go to the river. But by mid-afternoon his gradual climb inland had brought him to a region where the soil was less muddy and more loamy. Now he began to see signs of animal life. There were tracks everywhere. Some of the larger animals seemed to have feet very much like those of the natives. Here and there, the trunks of trees -- rubbery as they were -- showed abrasions as if animals rubbed against them. But the only living things he met were some small six-legged things no bigger than rats, and a few batlike flyers that chittered at him cantankerously. Presently he found more ominous signs. Here and there were scraps of skin, as if predators had been at work. There was no blood, but of course the nightly rains would have washed that away. He saw no bones. Once, though, he did hear, out of sight in the thick jungle, crunching and rasping sounds of large teeth. He grew more watchful. IF T oward night it began to rain -- a drizzle at first, then a downpour that drummed on the big leaves high over his head and gathered into cascades to run down the tree trunks or to fall with loud splatterings on the already wet ground. He dodged the driblets as best he could for a while, then gave up. It was almost dusk anyway -- he'd better find a good tree and climb it for the night. He chose a large tree that had a limb low enough for him to reach; jumped, caught a handhold, hung grunting for a minute, then hauled himself up. The tree had somewhat the configuration of a very large Terran magnolia -- except that the leaves were two feet across. They were very rubbery, like the bark. He sweated and swore, shinnying up the slick trunk between limbs, but finally attained a notch fifty feet above ground where he could relax without much fear of falling. Comfort he'd have to forgo. t Night came like a black tent. If either of Marrech's two moons was up, the clouds hid it. He'd chosen a spot where no water fell directly on him, but it splashed from all sides steadily. His clothes -- supposed to be more or less waterproof -- might have been plain untreated cotton, for all the good they did. He was cold and hungry -- but not hungry enough to open any more C-rations -- and stiff and cramped. If only, he thought plaintively, he had a skin like the natives -- or even, he thought suddenly with a disgusted grunt, if he'd had the sense to bring a bottle of Terran whiskey or hundred-proof Moogan rum! He grew very drowsy. But of course he daren't fall asleep. The night dragged oh. At times there were sounds from below, feet or hooves splatting in the mushy loam. Near midnight a group of animals seemed to hold a conference below his tree, grunting and chattering. Suddenly the tree began to shake. Anxiously he fumbled beneath his soaked poncho for a needlegun and peered downward, twisting as best he could to see between the leaves. Were there glimpses of vague forms in the darkness? Were they climbing up the tree after him? He clung there, trying not to breathe audibly. After a while, though, he realized they weren't climbing. They seemed merely to be rubbing,, thenselves against the trunk. He cursed; silently at his incaution. He should have made sure he chose a jtree without the abrasions! The activity went on most of the rest of the night, with animals leaving and being replaced by others, as nearly as he could judge by the sounds. Finally he grew more or less reconciled. The tree's recurrent quivering did his nerves no good, but at least that and the noises helped keep him awake. He began to think he might survive until dawn. Although, he thought darkly, he couldn't imagine why any sane man, would want to be here. D awn was foggy and wet, but at least the rain had stopped, and the animals had gone away. He forced down some more C-rations, groaningly unbent his cramped arms and legs, and made his way, slipping and shivering and cursing, down the tree. He hobbled on inland. After a couple of hours, the sun broke through. Should he turn toward the river now? Surely he was far enough from town so there'd be little traffic. So far as wild natives were concerned, he had only mild apprehensions. He knew enough of the language to make it clear to them that he was their ally against Sears and Orsu. He turned toward the river. After a while he heard the rapids. A few minutes more and he came to a wide, clear, sandy path. For a minute he just stood and stared, overcome by such comparative luxury. The sun was warm by now, and he considered whether he might bathe and wash thf mud out of his clothes and take time to let them dry. Too risky, he decided, in the river itself. Better wait until he found some small tributary. He knew there were at least two before he'd reach Sears' place; as nearly as he could guess, it must be not less than ten miles farther upstream. Probably it was the warmth of the sun and the ease of the trail that made him careless. In any case, he rounded a turn and suddenly found himself facing eight or ten wild natives. They wore no backpacks, which meant they weren't gathering or transporting spice. They had arrowquivers, hung from neckstraps, dangling upon their narrow chests. The bows were no more than two feet long, but sturdy. Each native carried in one paw a slender five-foot spear tipped with sharpened bone, ready to thrust. Kruger let his hand creep toward his gun, which wasn't too accessible under his poncho. But apparently the natives were ready for him. A burst of chittermg and growling came from the trees a few yards away. Startled, he jerked his head around to stare. He could see a few drawn bows among the foliage, but for all he knew there might be a hundred aimed at him. Slowly he let his hand drop. His first words came out in a feeble squawk. "I -- friend." In this situation, he found it very hard to remember any of the native words. "I go to -- to stop Earthman who hunts your people for their skins!" They stood impassive. "I want to walk through your country," he said, aware that he was sweating profusively. "I will not bother you, and I carry my own food." F or a moment the band in front of him stared at him silently. Then one started to clash his teeth rapidly. The rest took it up, and soon they were all chattering and writhing. He quailed before the show of teeth. "I friend! I friend!" When the unseen pair came from behind to seize him, he struggled frantically, but all they wanted was to keep his hands away from his weapons while the rest swarmed over him. Within seconds, they had him pinned down. Then they lifted him, still struggling futilely, and carried him toward the river. "Hey!" he choked, "Let me go! I friend!" They tossed him out as far as they IF r F' kll qBJjip  I I f i  A l iLP L T' fj J flr ' could. He hit the water with a jarring splash and went under. When he managed to surface again, sputtering and coughing, they were lined up on the bank, teeth chattering. One of them squeaked, "Have a bath, muddy friend!" Another, who seemed to be the leader, gestured meaningfully with his spear. "Foreign fool, stay in town! We do not want you here!" Kruger was treading water frantically to keep his head above the surface. He tried once more, plaintively, "I friend," but it only brought on more tooth-gnashings. Several of the natives reached thoughtfully for arrows. Kruger took the hint and began to, swim down river as fast as he could. They followed him for always to make sure he kept going; but where the current ran fast, tumbling him along, they seemed to tire of the pursuit and stopped. He could hear them chittering for a moment, then he was out of earshot The rapids gave him a battering, and he clawed his way ashore as soon as he could -- on the opposite bank. He dragged himself out of sight and lay panting for a while, too exhausted even to curse. Finally he hauled himself to a sitting position. "Damned stupid unprintable natives! I ought to go back to town and let them..." But, angrily, he got to his feet and glared upriver. No bunch of spear-carrying, naked, six-legged, overgrown otters was going to stop him! H e went back up the off-side of the river, where there was no trail, needlegun clutched in his Hand this time, pausing every little way to listen and to look for tracks. Apparently there were not large animals abroad here either, in daylight -- treetrunks were abraded here and there, but by now he was convinced that activity was nocturnal. He made fairly good time; the soil was loamy and didn't stick to his boots. Noon came and went. Not long after that, he began to hear horns -- weird mournful notes that he presumed must be this world's equivalent of hunting-horns. He went on cautiously enough. What undid him, about mid-afternoon, was something he least expected -- he began to hear baying, back in the direction from which he'd come. He crouched, staring that way. He'd be damned if those didn't sound like dogs! Well, dogs or some Marrech equivalent, they were certainly on his trail. He looked around anxiously. There was supposed to be one creek branching off this side of the river, just below Sears' ranch, and he must be near it now. If he could reach it in time... It wasn't more than a quarter-mile, but by the time he found the small stream the baying was close behind. Hastily, he waded upstream. Wouldn't fool diem long, of course, if they were good tracking animals, but there was no time to construct any complicated trail-puzzles. He kept an eye out for any tree-limbs he might reach from the water. There! No -- that tree wasn't big enough; didn't have enough foliage. There, then! He hurried to a more likely branch; he seized it, shinnyed along the limb to the trunk and struggled up it. By now he IF could hear the animals clamoring around the point where he'd entered the stream. But he was hidden in foliage; with luck, he'd be safe for a while. The hunt was coming upstream now. The beasts, whatever they were, had crossed and were undoubtedly sniffing up the far bank for an emerging trail. He grunted in satisfaction. The tree he'd chosen was on the downriver side of the creek. Maybe, if they went on past, he could... Then he heard a human voice. Snarling, he reached again for his pistol. Sears would be able to guess which tree a man would choose. There was an interplay of huntinghorns, and some yipping from the beasts, then he heard the latter move on more slowly up the opposite bank. Finally he caught a glimpse of them, and growled under his breath. There were three Terran bloodhounds and an Airedale. M inutes later he heard Sears call to him, "Kruger! Kruger! Come on down. We're not hostile!" Kruger snarled to himself. No, you murdering bastard! But l am -- toward you ! "Kruger, don't be foolish. You're perched in a tree somewhere, and I know you don't have much food with you. You'll starve or die of pneumonia eventually. Come on down! You can photograph anything you want, if that'# what's on your mind. I have no reason to stop you." Kruger glared toward the unseen man. Was it possible to maintain the tourist pose? At the worst, Sears might haul him back to town -- not letting him get near the ranch. And the outlaw was right; with dogs roaming the country he couldn't very well carry out his planned snooping. Better, maybe to gamble on Sears' gullibility. In any case, there was the Terran space-cruiser out there." "Sears! This is Kruger. I'll come down if you'll call in your dogs!" "Okay, Kruger." The horns sounded several short notes. The dogs yipped and seemed to be gathering toward Sears. Kruger slid down from his perch, walked downstream and waded across. By then Sears and six or eight natives were waiting. Kruger scowled at the natives. As far as he could tell, they were no different from the ones who'd thrown him into the river. Sears was grinning at him. The lanky renegade carried a rifle, but it was held laxly, pointing downward. "I figure you're some kind of a cop, Kruger. Am I right? If so, we can both relax. I've got nothing to fear from you, nor yon from me." Kruger snarled and stood where he was. So the masquerade was futile. "Don't be too sure! There's a Badred thousand miles off-planet, waiting for my call. If I don't call within a certain time, they'll come down, and they already know enough to find you. They'll turn the planet inside out if they have to!" Sears grinned more deeply, though some of the natives made die toothgnashing sound. "Come on back to my place, Kruger. You can use S change of clothes and a hot meal. I don't think I have to worry about that cruiser." T he dogs, once introduced, were friendly. So was Sears wife -- a small blonde woman, perhaps ten years younger than her husband. She said shed hurry up the evening meal. Sears was acting far too amiable to suit Kruger. "You may as well leave your cameras in the house, since they're only a disguise. There's something I want you to see first of all. "Yeah?" Kruger was determined to play it cool. He divesfed himself of the cameras, light-meters and other paraphernalia, then followed Sears toward a large shed that had electric wires strung to it. Evidently Sears had ft generator in the house. There were Other signs of luxury, too. Not surprising, with the amount of money he The shed was well lighted inside. Kruger stepped in after Sears, then halted in surprise. Orsu lay on a couch to one side of the shed. He blinked at Kruger. "Oh, he here finally? Good! I getting tired of wait! Another native -- almost nude, like the wild ones -- walked toward Orsu with a big ugly hunting-knife. Orsu turned belly-up and spread his limbs to the sides. With an involuntary cry, Kruger stepped forward. Sears grabbed him by the shoulder. "Relax! Nobody's going to hurt him!' Astounded, Kruger watched the other native guide the knife expertly from Orsu's chin, down across his belly, then out along each of the limbs. The skin split and popped open, disclosing the sheen of a completely new layer underneath. Orsu wriggled, giving little grunts and sighs of comfort. The knife-wielding native helped him peel off the old skin until it was only attached at the head and along the spine. "Must wait now, other hour, two hour, Orsu squeaked. "Not loose yet, everywhere. Dumbly, Kruger looked at Sears. The lanky man grinned. "It's a lot more comfortable for them this way than having to rub the old skin off against a tree trunk. Come on back to the house. My wife'll have drinks ready.' Two hours later, Kruger, Sears and his wife, Orsu, and five wild natives sat down to a sumptuous dinner. Orsu was feeling especially jovial. "Maybe cop Kruger like jacket made from my skin. It best skin I ever shed since pup. He chattered his teeth in what Kruger now recognized as laughter. "He need bribe to keep mouth shut, eh? "Uh," Kruger protested weakly. Sears said, "You'll be here a while anyway waiting for the next tourist ship, unless you intend to go home on that cruiser." "Uh, no. There's no sense in calling it down now. And I do have a pose to maintain." "Fine. It'll take a couple of weeks to tan the skin properly, then a few days for my wife to make you up a jacket. We can put a few bullet-holes or something in it, if you like. Meanwhile, I hope you'll be our guest. We don't see many Terrans out here. Not the kind we'd want for guests, anyway. T he next tourist ship carried two couples who bought pelts. It was with one of those couples that Kruger IF sat over cocktails in the ship's lounge, just after take-off. The woman was a rangey type with nostrils that flared like a mare's. She fingered Kruger's jacket enviously. "I do believe this is an even better pelt than the ones we bought!" "Special process," Kruger mumbled secretively. Her nostrils widened. "Tell us about it!" "No -- please. I don't like to talk about it. It's pretty brutal." The husband's eyes glittered. "Waitress! Let's have refills all around, here!" He gave Kruger a minute to gulp his new drink. "You were saying, Kruger, about a special process?" Kruger pretended to yield. He looked around furtively, then leaned forward and spoke in a hoarse whisper. "Well, it involves beating; the hide while the native's still in it, to work the natural oils into it. You have to know just how much, you can beat him -- over every inch of his body, you know -- without killing him -- or her. Then you have to stop for a while and let Mm revive. As often as not, heTl die before the job's finished." He ran a hM lovingly over his jacket. 'This ws a perfect job. No stains." He went on to explain, "if you beat them just a little too hard they bleed wrong, and it's hell trying to wash the Mood A Complete "Rim Worlds" Novelette by A. Bertram Chandler by Roger Zelazny And concluding -- by Frederik Pohl I A A . A A k A A A He had saved her We, the only way he could -- without, that is, giving up on his own desires! TJe bent to touch her, his dry, A A flaked hand a rasp across the smoothness of her cheek. In her sleep she winced and hugged herself against the deepening chill. I'll wake her with a kiss, he thought. But he didn't. Instead he again reached out, hesitated, then brushed her shoulder. He shook her. "It's me, Paula," he said. In her long, drugged sleep the girl's lashes had stuck together, and she ground pale hands into her eyes to clear them. Now fully awake, she stared at him without recognition. Had he changed so much over the years? His hand began to tremble and he removed it from her shoulder. Paula's eyes grew wider, then shifted to take in her surroundings. The cave was dark except for the light of a wood fire at the entrance, shuddering their shadows across the cracked walls. She sat up jerkily. "What place is this? Who are you?" He smiled reassuringly, the smile he knew she loved. In the shifting light she stared hard at him, bewildered. She wore a white nightgown, her long black hair bound up with pins that had begun to loosen, stray wisps of hair trailing to her shoulders. "George?" she ventured finally. His smile widened, and he nodded. She still knew him, would still love him. Until this moment he hadn't acknowledged his own secret dread. "But you're -- you're old!" she wailed. "Don't be afraid," he told her. "There's nothing to be afraid of. It's really me, and I'm not so old. I'm not sixty yet." Shivering, she glanced around the cave. "Where are we? The last I remember, I'd gone to bed... " She couldn't keep her eyes from his face. "George, what's happened to you?" "Nothing but age," he said. "It's the fate of everyone, even yours, now that I've saved you from it." He rose shakily, his limbs aching from the hours he crouched over the still form. "As for this place, it's a cave by a river." He moved stiffly toward the rear of the cave, occasionally reaching out to touch one of the boxes stacked neatly along the walls. "There are few if any dangerous animals in this era, and I've stored enough food and clothing and agricultural supplies to keep us for the rest of our natural lives." He turned back to her, his love still mute within him. He could never express himself as he wished. "The rest of our natural lives," he repeated. For the first time Paula seemed to realize that she was in her nightgown. "I'm cold," she said, and clutched it tightly about her. He smiled again, went to one of the boxes and drew out a long blue dress with a high neck and puffed sleeves, the latest style at the time he'd bought it. "Here's part of your wardrobe. I've got everything you need, the finest material I could find." She took her dress, held it against her body, running her fingers over the unfamiliar cloth. "I was in bed, asleep," she said. "Yes, you were asleep. I came to your house and broke in. I gave you an injection to keep you sleeping, not with a needle but a -- a new kind that sprays on your skin. Then I brought you here." "But you weren't even in town! You were way across the country!" O n December #, #, he had been way across the country, at Harvard, dreaming of the Christmas holidays and seeing her again. But he hadn't seen her, not for another forty years, not until a few hours ago. And not until a year before had he been sure that he would ever see her. The girl seemed reluctant to put on the dress perhaps because of the odd style, perhaps because she didn't want to disrobe in front of him. Suppressing his annoyance he brought out a heavy pink dressing gown and a pair of pink furry slippers he'd selected from a department store in San Francisco. "It's a long story and a complicated one," he said as she slipped them on. "What you've got to understand is that, strange as all this may seem to you, it's absolutely necessary to save your life." She was still staring at him, her head twitching in brief, involuntary denials. "On December #, #, Paula... you died. You were in bed asleep when a drunken driver turned your corner, lost control of his car, and plowed through the wall erf your bedroom. The gas tank exploded and you were... you were burned to death." He flinched as a vision of the fiery wreck flamed across his consciousness, as vivid as if he had witnessed it himself. "But you're not dead now, Paula; because, you see, I came back to rescue you." She stood silent, hugging the robe about her. He brushed his hands together with a harsh, rustling sound like the scrape of dead leaves. "I was studying at Harvard, you know. I dropped out for a year, too broken up to do any work. But eventually I went back, changed my major to physics, got my doctorate. I didn't forget you." The earth trembled as in the distance some great animal passed by. "I didn't marry," George said. 'There was no one I could have loved as I loved you. I carried your picture with me always, one I stole from your parents' home after the funeral. The others -- other people -- they thought I was some kind of eccentric. But they hadn't loyed you as I had. I kept myself going with the memory of you, that memory and my work. I was working on a research grant, developing some ideas for a unified field theory. I came to see... well, it's pretty complicated, but you could say that the passage of time generates energy and that you can utilize the energy accumulated between the present and any point in the past or future to project yourself to that point. Harnessing the energy was a technical problem I couldn't solve myself, but with the help of others it was possible to construct something I guess you'd have to call a time machine. Can you see that when I did all this I was thinking only of you?" Paula said nothing, listening gravely to the words of the thin, gray man who seemed but distantly related to the boy she had known yesterday. "The machine was completed," he  went on, "in #. We found that it could carry a man into either past or future and return him to the point in time from which he'd departed. Soon we were able to calibrate the machine to within a few days' accuracy. With that accomplished I could begin to plan and hope. "I located this place, found the cave, and began to stock it with everything we'd need to survive here. I had to do it quietly, secretly, at night when everyone else had left. No one was to suspect the real reason for my work on the project. Had they known what I planned they'd surely have stopped me, because it meant losing the only machine that had been produced -- a very expensive instrument." S he caught her breath and retreated a few steps until she was stopped by the wall of the cave. "George, where are we?" "It's sometime in the Oligocene period, a comparatively gentle era in the earth's history. The great reptiles are gone, and the largest mammals aren't numerous enough to be dangerous. It's long before the first ice age yet. We'll be in no real danger here." "My God! You mean there are no other people?" "Yes, it's a paradise just for the two of us. With no one to threaten us here we can be really happy." He paused as if expecting her deferred applause. She came forward hesitantly, searching his eyes for the familiar personality beneath the stranger's ageing mask. "But wasn't there some other way? Couldn't you have saved me and left me in... in my oyn time?" IF Pressing his thin lips together he shook his head with visible annoyance. "Don't you think I considered all the possibilities? Of course I could simply have awakened you and got you out of the house before the car crashed. But what good would that have done me? You'd only have been saved for young George at Harvard. Or someone else. I'd have saved you and gained nothing for myself! "Oh, I even thought of taking you back into my own time, but I wasn't sure it was possible. We didn't know anything about the effects of possible paradoxes yet. Could you actually exist in a future time stream where you'd died years before? I didn't know, and I couldn't experiment to find out. Above all I couldn't take the chance of losing you again. The safest thing to do was take you into the past. That's why we're here." For the first time he realized that the girl was trembling. He came forward and took her hand, noting the slight involuntary tug as she pulled away. He gripped her more tightly. "I know this a lot to assimilate all at once. It must be terrifying to find yourself in a strange world, even with someone you love. But you've got to see that it was the only way. By taking you away on the very night you should have been killed I disturbed the fabric of time only slightly. Of course we might have gone back to some civilized period, but why risk any more accidents? Civilization means war, famine, plague, riot... Do you think I'd risk losing you again? No place is entirely safe, but this is the safest I could think of." Her trembling had increased until she shook uncontrollably. "George, we can't live in this world all alone, no matter how many supplies you've got stored here. There have to be other people! I don't want to be alone!" He covered his soft hand with his own. "Why do we need anyone else when we have each other?" A sullen shadow passed over his face. "What have other people ever meant to us but bitterness and separation? When have other people encouraged our love? They just cause trouble; they always have. Your mother..." "George," she broke in, "what about sickness? You say it's safe here, but there aren't any doctors. You wouldn't want me to die of some disease!" He smiled easily, as if he had long anticipated just this objection. "As a matter of fact I've studied medicine rather closely and feel I'm as qualified to practice as any doctor. I've got all sorts of medical equipment stored here and I know how to use it. There are even several cases of drugs and antibiotics. I'm prepared to do anything from cleaning teeth to -- " he paused, giggled unexpectedly -- "delivering a baby." Paula lowered her eyes, her face distorted as if in pain. "But, George," she said finally, "you won't live but a few years longer. What will I do when you die?" He stared blankly. "Die? Me? Die?" He paused to consider the possibility. She began to pull away, forcing him to tighten his grasp. In the struggle her long hair had slipped its fastenings and whipped about as she tossed her head from side to side. "George, I want to go back! I want people! Let's go somewhere nearer our own time." He drew her closer, ignoring her efforts to escape. "We have to commit ourselves completely to our new life, darling. We mustn't consider returning to a world that could threaten our love. You'll understand why I've removed all temptation by destroying the time machine." Tenderly he drew her body to his as with a single anguished cry she fainted. P aula awoke sometime after dawn huddled near the embers of the fire, crying softly at times but for the most part silent and withdrawn. Tactfully George left the girl to herself. He'd feared this reaction, though he was sure it would be only temporary. She'd had a shock, a great one, and of course the knowledge of her own narrowly averted death wasn't as vivid to her as it was to him. But soon she'd accept the reasonableness of his actions, come to his arms and fulfill his love. After a long period of brooding silence she rose and came toward him, swaying unsteadily. Her face was grime-streaked from crying, her eyes red and swollen. With a tremblinghand she plucked at his sleeve, "George, is it possible... ? Maybe you could make a new machine. The parts... You couldn't have destroyed all the parts." He turned away; there was no use talking to her when she was like this. Too many ugly scenes had already marred their relationship. She went on: "I just want to see people again. There's no one here." "There's me," he sakL "Yes, of course there's you, George. But I hardly know you. I mean, I hardly knew you when -- when you were young. We weren't really close." George shook his head violently, as if to dislodge the hateful words. Without looking at the girl he circled around her to the cave entrance, kicked at the few remaining embers of the fire. In the cold dawn the parched earth stretched flat and lifeless before him, broken only by the trickle of a nearby stream. "We were closer than you'd ever admit," he said finally. "If it hadn't been for your mother there wouldn't have been any trouble between us at all." "Oh, George!" she said behind him. It was a statement of utter, hopeless despair. "My mother likes you, George. She's -- she was always telling me what a fine boy you were, what a -- a good catch!" "Well, your father, then. Somebody was always trying to turn you against me. If we'd just been alone together for awhile I could have made you see..." He turned, smiled into her stained, twisted face. "But now we are alone together, aren't we? You'll see how much you really care now that there's no one around to talk against me." His gaze turned inward, and a half-smile touched his lips. "Do you know that last night was the first timeI'd ever held you in my arms, even been that dose to you? It was just as I'd always imagined it" "George there must be some way of rebuilding the machine." IF He turned back to look out over the plains. "I've left nothing to chance' he said. Behind him she was sobbing again. "God, I wish you'd left me therel I wish I were dead instead of here?" Tightening his jaw he contiikiied to stare into die distance. He would not give in and console her. She'd have to accept him on his own terms, admit her love without being coaxed. She'd have to agree that he'd been right in what he'd done. He had plenty of time to wait. "Don't cry, darling," said a male voice behind him. H e wheeled to face the other man: tall, thirty ish, draped in a shimmering scarlet tunic. The man had placed one arm about Paula's shoulders and was dabbing at her eyes with a blue handkerchief. Behind him glittered a machine of cool crystal and shining cylinders. "There's no need to cry," the man told the astonished girl. "We're going back." Frozen George watched him guide her gently toward the machine. Then the spell was broken, and he lunged forward to reach out for her. Paula drew hack, dinging to the stranger's arm. "She's mine," George told him . "She's all Tve got!" The other man stepped in front of the girl, shook his head grimly. "No, you have nothing. You're already old and you're going to die shortly. I know. If the girl stays here -- " He winced at some unbearable memory. "I passed through here," he said, "about fifteen years from now. I found her then. I could see how beautiful, how fine she once must have been. But she was nearly mad, a living corpse. Fifteen years of total isolation had almost finished her. But even so, I loved her." He smiled tenderly at the girl nestled against his shoulder, then at George. "I couldn't save her then, but I can now. She has to be safe, protected." He was smiling now with the innocence that only confident virtue can bestow. "I've come, you see, to rescue her."  Still cradling the girl, the man stepped back into the machine and flicked a switch; the cylinders sang their high, keening whine. "Wait!" George screamed after him. "What year?" The man laughed. "Around #." he said. Their figures paled, vanished. George stood alone, staring into emptiness. After awhile he went over and picked up the blue dress from the floor where Paula had discarded it. Gently he caressed it between his fingers, then pr essed it to his face to breath in the lingering scent of her body. With a puffed sleeve he caught the tears. Soon he felt better. Putting aside the dress he began to rummage around among the boxes for his tods. He spread them out on the floor, then went to the back of the cave and dragged out the large, unmarked crates he had hidden there. He began to remove the cod crystals, the shining cylinders, ranged them neatly into glittering rows. HeM left nothing to chance. "#," he whispered. He began to fit the parts together. IF  Short Story What sort of disease is totally incurable? It was no academic question to Nick -- he had it! W hat was happening was far from apparent during the earlier days of the epidemic. When a guy is sick he expects to get well. His doctor expects him to get well. His worst enemy expects him to get well -- unless the illness is declared terminal. I think I might have been one of the first to notice what was happening, or maybe I was just the first to give it a second thought. And that could be because I had less on my mind to distract me. I was panhandling during summer vacation, bed panhandling, that is, after my second year of pre-medics. The work of a hospital orderly at the Cape was demanding only in the hours you put in. My duties consisted mainly of gathering specimens from the hordes of astronauts during their months of quarantine and debriefing after their return from out there. They were a crummy lot as a rule. First thing you did was hose them down so you could stand to be in the same room with them. Then you took scrapings and samples of sputum, exhalation and excretions for. the lab boys, to see if they'd brought anything back with them they hadn't left with. Then an intern, made up like a surgeon, would take a #cc blood sample. T oivo Leskinenn, Storek e e p e r First Class, left Earth an albino, and returned from planet-hopping in the #th System a pink-cheeked, brown-eyed, black-haired stranger. His Finnish features and fingerprints were unchanged. But what shook me up was that after nineteen months of typical strain and privation in space, Physical Therapy reported him in perfect condition. No emaciation or digestive problems, and surprisingly little perspiration accumulation. While the medics were marveling over the change in Toivo's hair and eye-color, I was thinking more about how exceptionally healthy he appeared. He bounced out of his sauna and stood under the cold shower for ten minutes singing folk songs to himself. Then he came out, shook like a dog and sprayed me with a huge sneeze. That's when I caught the bug. The incubation period, as I think of it, was eight days. On the ninth, I had three eggs and halfa pound of bacon for breakfast, a #ounce steak for lunch and half a gallon of beef stew for dinner. Which was not bad for a light eater like me. I went to bed early to digest and to reflect over my sudden appetite. But I fell asleep at once, fully expecting to feel awful in the middle of the night. Instead, I awoke to a remarkable sensation of well-being, physically and mentally. I was first one in the shower for a change, and I emerged with a soul-satisfying sneeze that wakened my three dormmates. Fat Paul stirred, sniffled and muttered, "You're catching my damned cold." Among them, Paul, Harry and Solly kept a nasty cold going all the time. Although I had been immune to colds all my life, I wondered if he might be right. Then I noticed that the annoying post-nasal drip with which I was born was gone. I stepped out onto our private patio facing the sunrise and breathed in the bland early morning Florida air while I toweled myself. Solly came out in his robe, stepping gingerly so as not to jiggle the bags under his eyes. Unlike the rest of us, Solly was a full-time, yeararound orderly with a magic feel for the dice and a perpetual hangover from boozing away the money he won in the floating games. He grunted, "You look like you just discovered the sunrise." I said, "I feel wonderful this morning, Solly." Harry came out in his shorts, hollow-chested and wan from sharing Fat Paul's cold. "How come you never get infected, Nick?" he asked. "I manage to pick up every cruddy bug the astros bring back. You don't even catch a cold." At twenty, you don't think much about your health as long as you're not hurting, but this morning on the way to the hospital at Cape K. I found myself pitying the chronic ills of my fellow workers and appreciating a new awareness of my lusty physical ity. And I thought back to Toivo Leskinenn and his fantastic resistance to the ravages of prolonged space exploration on alien planets. A fortnight later I had something else to ter. The required semi-monthly physical checkup showed I had gained half an inch in height and ten much-needed pounds, in spite of my appetite having diminished to its usual birdlike norm. It was trying to rain when I parked my electro next to Harry's in front of our little beach hut in the dorm complex on a Wednesday night. Low barometer. That meant Fat Paul's sinuses would be hurting. They were all there as I hauled in a little late, but nothing else was as usual. Skinny Harry was gulping a thick, homemade milkshake while Fat Paul was sipping a small glass of orange juice. It should have been the other way around. And a goblet of beer, flat and untouched; sat at Solly's elbow. Fat Paul, who never went swimming because of his sinuses, was trying to talk Solly into the loan of his swimming trunks. "You'll split 'em," Solly was saying as I came in. "But go ahead. Just buy me a new pair if you wreck them." A minute later Fat Paul surprised us all by racing across the beach into the surf in Solly's trunks and nary a split. "That boy's lost some weight," Harry observed thoughtfully. I said, "How long has he been on this orange juice kick?" He shrugged, and Solly asked, "How long you been off cigarettes, Nick?" We looked at each other. Then we all stared at Solly's flat beer, still untasted. "Funny thing," he said. "Ever since I started sneezing the other day I sort of lost my taste for the stuff. And I notice we've all been sneezing more than usual." Harry said, '"You and Paul and I kinda gorged ourselves night before last. I always come down with Paul's cold when I eat too much." I said, "Paul hasn't had a cold for almost a week," which not-so-fat Paul confirmed a minute later as he came dripping out of the ocean. We got no further in our probe of the situation at that time because the phone hooted four times. This meant, push the will-comply button and don't bother to pick up the receiver. All four of us were wanted at the base decontam unit on the double. Paul wrapped on a terrycloth and went in Harry's electro. Solly went with me. "Damn!" Solly muttered. "'I was hoping not to catch extra duty tonight." "Missing a big game tonight?" I asked. "Game, shmame! They've retrieved the Rook # from dead orbit like they talked about trying this afternoon. That means we got a lot of sick people on our hands. Nothing else is heading in that would call for hoot-owl duty." I t was indeed the Rook # tilted at a crazy angle on the docking pad. The regular swing-shift orderlies had already removed all living crewmen, some # out of the complement of # who had signed on for interstellar explo three years ago. There wasn't too much for us to do at first. For a change there were more medics around than orderlies and nurses. The place was crawling with brass of every military denomination. no IF Not a natural-born eager beaver, Solly nevertheless was determined to elbow his way through in time to show a prompt punch-in time, which made for a clean record and more overtime pay regardless of how little you accomplished after you made the clock go "ding." In his hurry he jostled a large female navy nurse, who scowled at him. "What's the rush, Baggy-eyes?" Then she backed off and blinked through her bi-contacts. "Well, Solly, on the wagon long?" Then it came to me. My roommate's droopy lids were wide open, the whites of his eyes snowy as a fresh pillowcase and the bags under them almost completely smoothed out. "Where's the action?" he asked without dignifying her question with a reply. "Third deck below. Ward C. They've got them all in there, and if you two are on duty help get some ice pronto." We found Harry and Paul already at the ice-bins scooping the large poly buckets full of chips. "Big fevers, I guess," said Paul as he backed away with a full pail in each hand. Night nurse Roark came up and snatched one of his dripping buckets. "They caught something big out there, and it wasn't salmon. The poor devils are burning up:" No less than an air force chicken colonel medic blocked our way to the down escalator. He pointed to the open-door size aperture across the corridor. '"Take the chute, damnit! They need that ice down there!" You get good velocity down a three-floor chute and you land running, which was the idea... through double doors into Ward C, which had been set up with several rows of narrow trough-like beds lined with rubbery sheets. Harry and Paul finished covering one incumbent, but Solly and I were directed to one of the remaining cadaverous torsos that wore nothing but a blistering red blush. As I leaned over to empty my ice pails I could feel the man's body heat on my bare arms at least a foot above him. And from the pitiable look of his emaciated frame, he had little fuel left on his bones to support the energy loss. His cheeks were sucked in like he had a mouthful of vacuum, and his eyes bugged like he was trying to spit it out. I was at the feet, Solly at the chest. And just as we were both emptying our second buckets of ice chips on the hopeless carcass, Solly sneezed right in the patient's face. sanitary oxygen mask through which he screamed, "Oh, hell! That's all these guys need right now, a good old-fashioned case of pneumonia." He turned to me, and I could see he was wearing a star on each shoulder. "Orderly," he commanded, pointing at Solly, get that goddamned orderly out of here and put him on report!" I grabbed Solly by the arm and hustled him back upstairs where Solly shook my hand from his arm. He said, 'Thanks for the tow job, but what are you trying to do?" "You heard the Officer In Charge," I said. "I've got to put you on report." "The oik was exceeding his authority. We're not in the military. If you report me to the super I'll have to punch out on the time clock before the extra shift is over and I'll get docked." "This is all true," I said, "but you did sneeze in the ward, and I think this is pretty rotten ... to bring a cold into a roomful of guys already dying of God knows what." "I haven't got a cold!" "You sneezed. Why?" "Well, not on purpose, for damned sure. Maybe some pollen these guys brought back with them." The patients had already been through scrubdown, so this was highly unlikely. I said as much. Solly jutted his jaw into my face. "Look, Nick, we've been friends. But if you report me you are going to lose my friendship and several front teeth, and I don't think you want that to happen." I admitted, "This is also true, and come to think of it, I'd be just plain squealing, wouldn't I? Since, as you say, we're not in the military." He relaxed. "Yeah, like I said. And since we're banished for the moment we might as well get a bite to eat. I'll buy you a burger." Before we were through eating Paul and Harry came into the cafeteria. As they sat down with us Solly asked, "You guys allergic to work, too?" Harry said, "No. Just ice. We sneezed in the ward." Paul added, "Real excitable oik down there. He told us to put each other on report, but we thought we'd have a bowl of chili first." His grin spelled out their lack of intent to engage in mutual recriminations to the superintendent. I was still worry-warting. "Suppose some of those men do come down with a cold on top of -- " Paul said, "Who's got a cold? I haven't heard so much as a sniffle in our hut for days." Solly turned to me. "Nick, will you forget it? That oik has more on his mind than clobbering a few slob orderlies for sneezing, when we were risking our necks in that quarantine hell-hole to begin with. He'll never think of us again unless we are stupid enough to put ourselves on report." Solly was wrong. I n the weeks remaining before I was to return to college, my conviction grew that Astronaut Toivo Leskinenn, recently in space, had contracted and passed on to me something very contagious that I could only name a condition of perfect health. Even more: A compulsion to preserve my physical perfection. Even as Solly had given up drinking, I no longer had any use for tobacco. Even as Paul had trimmed off his burdensome overweight, Skinny Harry and I filled out to an optimum padding of firm flesh. For all four of us the syndrome included a periodic day of enormous appetite followed by a morning-after unexplainable explosion of a sneeze or sneezes. But how do you catch a condition of health, when the only definition to date was the absence of disease? Where Solly, Paul and Harry had IF been wrong was in assuming that the Ward C was just some hysterical nut, and that nothing they had done was of enough consequence that the oik would bother to follow through with his intended discipline. About two weeks after the incident we were all called to the "pentagon," as we .called the penthouse atop the decontam building, where Solly was summarily fired, and the rest of us were chewed out. Sneezing was not the charge. It was for insubordination in not carrying out orders. Nurse Roark was the one to catch the dirty duty. She concluded her tirade with, "Solly, you should have known better." Solly was shook. He said, "You mean they're blaming us for the fact that all but three patients in Ward C finally died?" "No. The fever did that. It just turns out that the medical officer whose orders you all disobeyed that night happened to be the surgeon general himself." "He had a mask on," Solly explained, more to himself than to anyone else. "The dice have gone cold on me lately, too." Nurse Roark was not a bad scout at all. She simply had a nasty job to do, and she tried to make up for it. Knowing that being fired from the Cape on such a charge would blacklist Solly from coast to coast, she tipped him off to an orderly job in India. It seemed things were getting out of hand over there again, and we were lend-leasing some more birth-control clinics to dispense information and be pills. Solly's thanks was a stolid nod of acceptance and a giant sneeze right in Nurse Roark's face. While he was packing his bag that night, Solly said, "I can't imagine what an orderly does around a place like that, but at least it's out-patient." And we appreciated what he meant. No more bedpans. T he last week of school vacation the three of us remaining spent in a special decontam isolation of our own while we underwent rigid tests to be sure we weren't packing anything to the inner world of civilization that we'd caught from the astronauts. On the second day of our tests all hell began to come loose at the seams. It started after lunch when a security officer questioned us for three hours straight in an obvious try to discredit our identities. He worked remotely through a video screen. Then we had to press our thumbs to a camera for live inspection of our prints. Next our eyeballs were subjected to long scrutiny. No answers to our demands for explanations. After her duty shift Nurse Roark phoned us in a hushed voice. I said, "How are you?" She whispered, "I'm fine. Too fine, in fact. But what the devil I replied, "You tell me. We sure don't know." She hesitated. Then, "Well, it's something important. The surgeongeneral is flying down from Washington again, and you guys are the subject matter. I'll see what more I can find out. You sure you haven't any clues?" I said, "None to speak of," and I meant just that. By now I was positive that, like Toivo Leskinenn, I was the carrier of some contagious and powerful life-force , and so were Harry and Paul, and so, probably, was Nurse Roark. On the morning of our third day of isolation I awoke with the nowfamiliar ravenous appetite. Paul watched me pack away the giant breakfast I had ordered. He commented, "And to think I used to eat that way every meal!" At about ten the surgeon-general appeared on our screen, eyeing us with tenseness almost as great as I remembered the night of Solly's fateful sneeze. Without the sanitary mask to conceal it, his gray, military mustache bunched visibly over puckered lips. He began firmly if informally, "Now, Nicholas, we want an-, swers." It turned out that what they really wanted was explanations for our answers. The polygraph had shown that we apparently thought we'd been answering truthfully. But why had I insisted that I had had surgery for the removal of my appendix... also the removal of a large cyst at the base of my spine? I said, "I'll show you! I checked in with this scar and Fve still..." But by now I had jerked out my shirttail and made half a liar out of myself. "Yes, when you checked into Decontam an appendectomy scar was recorded in the records of the man you claim to be," said the s.g. "What have you done with it?" A surgery scar on your belly is not something you examine daily like you might your fingernails. I was unprepared for the question. In the silence the s.g. continued, "And you, Harry. You had a pattern of pigmented moles on your back. They are gone. Any ideas why?" H arry was staring at his still bare belly. He said, "I'll take your word about my moles, and the answer is no. What has been going on with us guys, Nick?" I turned to Paul. "You got any theory?" He shook his head. "All I know is that I've been feeling terrific since I took off all that weight. Not even a cold." I turned back to the video where the s.g. was staring at us with cool patience. As ridiculous as I sounded to my own ears I started speaking the thoughts that had been gathering for weeks. "Sir," I began respectfully, "I think I have been spreading an epidemic of -- of health!" Oddly enough the s.g. did not find this statement more than he could field. "It's a cinch you're not spreading the chickenpox," he observed. "But why do you say you have been spreading it? Why not the others?" "Because they didn't start it. As a matter of fact I don't think I started it, either. But we've all probably been spreading it." "Then who did start it?" the s.g. demanded. IF "I suspect Captain Leskinenn," I confessed. The s.g. turned off camera to ask an aide, "Who the devil is Leskinenn?" and was told after a brief pause that Captain Toivo Leskinenn was long since back in space. Then the s.g. remembered. "Oh, yes. He's that albino Finn. Of course. Only he's always been in perfect health. Saw him in a service weight-lifting match once." The off camera voice reported, "But he came back from a planet in the #th System with black hair and brown eyes." After a moment of silence the s.g. addressed himself to our camera again. "And you, Nicholas, think you caught this, this... whatever the condition... from Captain Leskinenn. Did you have direct contact with him in Decontam?" "He sneezed in my face, sir." Then I hurried on to put meat on the skeleton of my theory by recalling the night the s.g. had put Solly, Harry and Paul on report for sneezing in Ward C. Again he startled me. "Yes, yes, of course. Don't you think I correlate such happenings? Three healthy men sneezed and three out of fortytwo dying men lived." "Are they really all right now, sir?" I blurted. But the s.g. was here to get information, not give it. The screen blanked out. H arry said, "He looked like he was about to call a red alert for the whole Cape." Paul shook his head at me, "Geez, Nick, if we've got some kind of outer space bug that makes people get well and well people feel better, what's all the flap about?" "The uncertainty," I guessed. "We don't know that it's just a bug ." The s.g.'s voice came back to us. The video was on again. "We are going to find out and quick. We want the next one of you who feels a sneeze coming on to do it at this petri dish." He held up a flat, shallow glass pie-pan with straight sides. In it were perhaps fifty little swatches of assorted culture media, pasty little patches of glutinous combinations, each ready to provide a happy home for some vagrant microbe or virus. A glass lid kept the field sterile. A pre-dawn blastoff awoke me, and the first thought I had was that I was about to sneeze. I snatched the lid off the petri dish and did so, infecting, I'm sure, every culture patch there. Still drunk with unfinished sleep, nevertheless I slipped the cover back on the dish and dutifully shoved the affair through the designated slot in the door and went back to sleep. Nothing much happened until Nurse Roark phoned me that evening. "Which one of you guys did the sneeze?" "Me " I said. "Why?" She breathed into die phone three times before answering. Then, "Congratulations! You are the father of plan." She sounded bitter, and I told her so. She said, "Look, Nick, Fm not mad at you, or I wouldn't have bothered calling you. I'm just mad at everything. I was bora on this earth and I want nothing more than to stay on this earth and be buried on it. And things aren't working out that way." I said, "Roark, what are you trying to tell nr "We're all going bye-bye," she whisper-shouted into tike phone. "Where? Why?" I asked bewildered. "Where, I cannot tell you. Why, is because the virus-microbe you and your buddies -- to, say nothing of me and a few dozen other victims -- are carrying has been identified as alien... and totally immune to every known attack. This damned bug is invincible!" "So what has it done wrong?" I whisper-shouted back at her. "What's so terrible about a bug that goes around curing post-nasal drip and saving the lives of astronauts who catch other things out there?" "Nick?" Nurse Roark sobbed softly into the phone. "Nick, we haven't contracted a disease. We have become the host for an alien civilization. A sub-microscopic civilization." iXTou mean an intelligent paraI site?" "No!" she said quickly. "Not the way the brass interpret it. We have been trapped into a symbiotic relationship with an invisibly small orgasm we can't even identify except by its actions on the culture media and the symptoms of infected humans." I said, "Nurse Roark, why don't you get up here and explain? If we've all got the same bug, what do you have to lose?" She replied, "Come to think of it, there's no sense sitting out here in a phone booth and whispering myself hoarse." Ten minutes later to the dot she unlocked our cell and walked in with two fifths of booze and a jar of cigars, one of which she lit before opening her mouth for other reasons. By now Harry and Paul were up to date on the subject and just as much mystified. The next thing Nurse Roark did was to crush out her cigar, stare at the cigar jar, whisky and us in turn and say, "Aren't you guys glad to see me?" "You, yes," I said. "But the booze and tobacco, no. It seems to be a common symptom of our affliction to lose our taste for stuff like that." Roark screwed up her mouth and spat delicately into the farthest corner. "I will confirm that. And it makes sense. It fits. This Alien lives in our liver and brain and kidneys and lungs. It knows what chemicals are inimical to our survival. And since we are the captive hosts at this tea party, we get to give up what our guests declare unwelcome to them." I said, "If you don't believe it, have a drink of your own booze." Roark shook her head. "Since you bring it up, I gag to think of it." I said, "You're not really serious about this colony bit?" Roark flopped down on the bunk across from me. "The s.g. himself has put himself into quarantine, and if he develops the symptoms he'll lead the expedition. What's more, I saw him sneeze IF into a petri dish this very morning, so we'll know by tomorrow." I asked, "If the bug isn't identifiable in culture, how do you know when you've sneezed one?" "By the way the culture behaves," she said. "It draws in on itself until it looks like a small bean, then it explodes like a firecracker. Or would you prefer, sneeze?" H arry took his head out of his hands. "All right We have a sub-microscopic alien that treats a human individual like a planet, and he's going to do everything he can to protect this planet against the exterior forces that tend to destroy it. Right?" "I guess so," said Roark. Paul came to life. "And it wants to proliferate, so it builds up a little excess population in a given human host and then tickles his nose into a sneeze. To him our noses must appear as pretty great launching silos. And who needs rockets when you have bellows like our lungs at your command?" I said, "It sounds to me like we should be happy to have such an antibody around." Roark grabbed one of the whisky bottles, uncorked it and shouted to the ceiling, "Should a body love an antibody, a-comin' through the sky," and upended the bottle for three long gulps, shuddering every moment. Then she added half under her breath, "Sorry, you guys, but I didn't deserve what you did to me." I stared at her. "Roark, do you want to tell us what brought that on?" She replied, "Nick, you are unmarried. Have you ever been pregnant?" I said, "From your question I have to gather that you are both unmarried and pregnant, and that you are about to blame this on the little bitty invaders." She took another tug on the whisky bottle and gagged. "I'm a grandmother three times over, and a widow for two years. Pregnancy in a woman my age is not something to be sneezed at. Would you accept my condition as a thing I wouldn't have risked at any cost?" "Oh, now -- " Paul started to object. "You forgot to take your pill?" Harry suggested. "Parthenogenesis!" I said aloud but not very. Roark heard and nodded. She said, "Now, do you see why everyone under quarantine on the first space colony? Just when we thought we had the population explosion licked!" I boggled at the thought of trying to trace every track of possible contamination. "They must have most of Florida roped off," I said. Roark shrugged. "I hope so. We'll need quite a few obstetricians out there right off the bat." I asked, "How's that?" "Because to my personal knowledge, every nurse in Decontam is with child." "What about the pill?" Harry wanted to know. "Isn't it working?" It was more of a sigh than a word, but I managed to make out Roark's reply to be a wheezy, boozy, "No." I thought it would take them at least a couple of years to prepare for such a colonization expedition to the planets of the Ninth System where Toivo Leskinenn was to guide us under the supreme medical supervision of the exg., but they did it in under eighty days. Kept incommunicado as we were. son. At Pick Fort Shelby Hotel, Detroit, Michigan. For information: Marvin Giles, # Coventry, Detroit, Michigan #. Membership: #. Hotel Southland, Dallas, Texas. For information: Con Committee '#, # Highland Drive, Carrollton, Texas #. Membership #. #, #, or # weeks; college credits will be given. Visiting staff will be: Judith Merril, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm. For information: Robin Scott Wilson, Clarion State College, Clarion, Pa. #. North Plaza Motel, #I Reading Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. Program includes a banquet, cost #. For information: Lou Tabakow, # St. John's Terrace, Cincinn a t i, Ohio #. Membership: #. Angeles: at Statler-Hilton Hotel. For information: Charles A. Crayne, # N. I had no part of the plans for the venture, nor voice to cry out the warning to the poor, overcrowded planet we were leaving behind. I did manage to get one postcard mailed past the censors. Probably it got by because of its entirely innocent content. It read merely, "Dear Solly, I hope your sniffles are better. Give my best to Mother India." Ridgewood Place, Hollywood, California #. Advance membership: #: supporting membership: #. Guest of Honor: Harry Harrison. ing of sf films from all over the world. Judging by a distinguished panel. For information: Festival del Film di Fantascienza, Castle San Giusto, Trieste, Italy. Ben Franklin Motor Hotel, # Washington, St. Louis, Missouri. Guest of Honor: Harlan Ellison. For information: Norbert Couch, Route #, Box #, Arnold, Missouri #. Membership: #. ana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. Guest of Honor: Daniel F. Galouye. Membership: #. vention. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland, California. Philip Jose Farmer, Guest of Honor. More details later. For informaStation, El Cerrito, California #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. ciety of America. At Belknap College, Center Harbor, New Hampshire #. Papers are being solicited. Indicate whether you will present a paper or will just attend. Submit title and length of proposed papers early to Ed Meskys (address above). IF Inhuman and immense the being that men had made had learned one art -- how to destroy them l In the great monolithic universe of Companions of the Star , receives a message from the girl he loves and L I I  has given up hope of winning . Back mutual friend , and the man to whom Andy Quam believes he has lost her,  r and dangerous experiments . She be lieves Hawk is trying to create an artificial living organism, a "Rogue Star " which, unlike, the sentient and generally benign stellar bodies that make up most of the universes primary stars, will use its enormous powers for disruption and destruction . Quam hastens to join her . He manages to get passage through the transflection network which links worlds galaxies apart, making instantaneous travel possible between Earth and any other planet in civilization. He travels it takes to cross a room. But on Earth his progress comes to a halt. It is Starday . On backward Earth, where the symbiosis among men, fusorians and stars has taken the form of a ritualistic religion, this means nothing can be done. He cannot go to her. He cannot reach her by communicator. He cannot secure a guide. He can only wait. But Molly Zaldivar hasn't waited. Alone she has gone to the cavern in the mountains where Hawk and his man from space, are conducting their experiments. As she approaches the cave , she is creature the size of a horse, capable of traveling at enormous speeds by transflection methods, deadly as an interstellar space-destroyer, guarding the entrance. An explosion knocks her out and drives the sleeth away; Cliff Hawk and the Reefer find her and bring her into the cave. Meanwhile Andy Quam has found some boys who tell him something of what has been happening with Molly Zaldivar. Unable to control his patience, Quam storms into a Starday meeting and demands that the monitor, a robot, help him. The robot refuses at first. But then , when three bolts of energy ' from the sun lash down and strike at the mountains where the cave is located, the robot relents and agrees to take Quam there. It is almost too late. The danger Molly Zaldivar warned about has come to pass. The experiment has succeeded; a Rogue Star has been created... and it is now beyond human control . IX F irst the robot required them to wait while it completed its minute of silent adoration, bobbing in its transflection field under the star-embossed dome of the church, its plasma rippling with the colors of devotion. Then it insisted on shepherding each of the children out of the building, locking the doors behind them, searching each empty room and corridor to make sure none had been forgotten. The church was homeostatic, of course; its receptors and proprioceptors could have taken care of all of that without attention. Then the robot proposed another delay while it transmitted an apparently endless message to Deneb; and all the while the boy, Rufe, was chattering with questions and eagerness, and Andy Quam's patience had long gone up in wrath. "Robot Inspector," he shouted, "if we're going, let's go! IF Molly Zaldivar may be in great danger, even dying!" The robot swung toward him. "Monitor Quamodian," it sang, "patience! I assure you she is alive." "How do you know?" he demanded. The robot was silent. "Preacher," the boy whispered, "leave him alone. That's the way he is. Does things at his own pace. Say! Are we going to ride his back?" "Almalik! How do I know?" groaned Andy Quam. He glanced at his wrist-timepiece, converted rapidly to Terrestrial equivalents and hissed with exasperation. "In three hours Starday will be over. I won't need him then! But," he added painfully, tapping his foot on the tiled floor, "Molly needs me now..." The robot sang, "Monitor Quamodian, please be silent. I am having a most interesting discussion with three living companions on a planet of Deneb, eight robots and the star #I Cygni." "No!" roared Quamodian in astonishment. "You're not chattering away at a time like this! But you promised -- " The robot paused. Then, petulantly. "Oh, very well. Perhaps we may as well go, since your noise is disturbing me. Please follow -- " But it was too late for following; Andy Quam was already out the door, leaping toward the place where he had left his flyer, and the boy was chugging after him like a comet-tail. "I'll lead the way," sang the robot, raising the amplification of its external vocalizers until the church facade rang with the echo. "I have instructed your guiding apparatus that the hundred-meter limit may be waived, as part of my voluntary Starday activity, permitted under the compact..." But even at ninety decibels Andy Quam didn't hear the end of the sentence; he Was already in the flyer, the boy close behind; he slammed the door and shdtited: "Let's go! Follow that robot!" "All right, Mr. Quamodian," cheerfully agreed the voice of his flyer. "I have my clearance now. Say! Wasn't it nice of the Robot Inspector to let you -- " "Shut up," snarled Andy Quam. "Just fly! I'm in a hurry." S ulkily the flyer lifted itself off the ground, spun round like a top and aimed itself toward the waiting ovoid that was the robot, hanging in its transflection fields a few meters over the Starchurch. Quamodian muttered a curse as he picked himself up from where the sudden gyration had thrown him, the boy in his lap; but he said nothing to the flyer. "You sit there," he ordered Rufe. "Strap yourself in. Almalik knows what this stupid flyer will do next." Aggrieved, the flyer began, "That's not fair, Mr. Qua -- " "I told you to shut up!" The flyer shut up, with an audible, and intentional, click and rasp of static, and Andy Quam and the boy peered away. It was full night, with bright stars hanging over the hills, though to the west the angry red glare of the swollen, surly sun was still faintly visible, bloodying the sky over the horizon. Suddenly the boy grabbed Quamodian's arm. T#I "There, preacher! See it? That's where the sunbolts struck." "I see," Andy Quam ground out. "Flyer, can't we go any faster?" Resentfully the voice clicked itself on. "No," it said, and clicked off again. "Now, stop that!" shouted Quamodian. "Why not?" The flyer relented. "The Robot Inspector has issued orders for us to follow it," it pointed out. "If I go any faster it will be following us" Its voice mellowed as it settled down for a nice chat. "You see, Mr. Quamodian," it said, "it is still Starday, and the Robot Inspector does not wish to offend the peace of Starday with a sonic boom. This planet has a rather dense atmosphere, composed principally of oxygen (twenty per cent), nitrogen (eighty per cent), water vapor, carbon dioxide -- " "Skip that part! I know Earth's atmosphere!" "Of course. The point is, Mr. Quamodian, that at these parameters of altitude, temperature and barometric pressure the sonic barrier occurs at just a bit over our present speed. So you see, no, Mr. Quamodian, we cannot go any faster... and in any event," it added chattily, "we are there." T he flyer deposited them on the side of the mountain; the Robot Inspector would not allow it any closer to the cavemouth. Andy Quam and the boy piled out, stared upward at the wreck. "Stars, preacher! They really got it!" whispered the boy. "I -- I'm afraid Miss Zaldivar was hit." "We have no such information," sang the robot, humming overhead. "Please wait. I am scanning the area." But Andy Quam was past the point of caring what the robot inspector wanted. He thrust the boy aside and scrambled up the side of the hill, over uneven ground. He dodged around the wreck of a vehicle -- then realized it must be Molly Zaldivar's and stopped, his heart in his mouth, until a frantic search convinced him she was not in it, nor anywhere around. Then up that hill again, his legs pumping, his heart pounding. Although in truth, reason was saying in his ear, it was past the time for haste. What destruction had been accomplished here, and it was vast, was long over. Coarse brown smoke oozed from the cave mouth above, and there was a stink of charred plastic and smoldering trash of a thousand kinds. But the fire had burned itself out. No one was in sight. He paused, his lungs seared with the violence of his breathing, and forced himself to shout: "Molly! Are you here?" '  ;  The robot voice sang startlingly from 'just behind him, "She is fifty meters to your right, Monitor Quamodian, and just above us. But do not approach." Andy Quam was already on his way, scrambling around the lip of the little ledge before the cave mouth. "No, wait! There are unpredictable entities about, Monitor Quamodian. A beast from space. And -- " the singing whine of the robot faltered -- "the rogue star. Allow me to study them!" Andy Quam snorted, but made no other answer. He slid on loose gravel, caught himself and ran on. It was a forty-foot drop; he had just escaped death, but he had not even noticed it in his haste to find Molly Zaldivar. But where was she? And then he stopped, sliding and waving his arms to keep from falling. Something like a giant black cat was leaping toward him, up over the rubble and the smoke, shimmering in a pale transflection field. In the dim starlight he caught a glimpse of great blind eyes staring at him, claws that could rip the guts out of a pyropod. "Monitor Quamodian!" sang the robot peremptorily from behind. "That creature is a sleeth. Do not, I caution you, approach it!" There was suddenly a sour, coppery taste of fear in Quamodian's mouth. A sleeth -- now he recalled the stories about those space beasts, human competition. If it took a mind to attack him there would be no hope. But it seemed to have no such intention. It hung there studying him, almost as though it had intelligence, even empathy, even understanding of his haste. Then, as though it were giving permission, it lifted up and away on its transflection fields and hung waiting, a hundred meters up, no longer between him and the little hummock where he could see shadowy forms. He spared the sleeth no more thought but scrambled, slid and trotted the remaining distance and dropped to his knees beside the girl who had summoned him across half the known universe. "Molly!" he cried. "What's happened? What have they done to you?" He crooked an arm under her head, raised her tenderly. And her eyes opened. She looked at him wonderingly, like a child awakened from sleep. Her face was bloody, scratched, smudged with soot and filth. Her hair was flying loose as chaff on a breeze, and her clothes were shredded into rags. But suddenly and gloriously she smiled at him. "Why, it's little Andy Quam," she whispered. "I should have known you'd come." The smile lingered, only a second more. Then, without warning, her face twisted, the smile fled, she turned her head away. And Molly Zaldivar wept as though her heart would break. # C T bot .Inspector!" shouted AnAVdy Quam. "Where is that fool machine?" From the side of a boulder, ten feet away, a small voice said querulously, "He's gone, preacher. Just zipped away. Almalik knows where. Didn't say a word." "What are you doing here, Rufe?" Andy Quam demanded. "You should stay in the flyer... Well, as long as you're here, give me a hand. Miss Zaldivar's been hurt. We've got to get her to help -- " A figure disengaged itself from the gloom and stepped closer. "No hurry about that, friend," it rumbled. "She lived through this much, she'll live a while yet." Quamodian jumped to his feet, ready for anything. He peered into IF the darkness, caught a glimpse of dulled yellow mustache, dingy yellow beard, a face that looked as though planets had rolled over it in their orbits. "Who the devil are you?" he barked. "Talk big for a little fellow, don't you?" rasped the voice. "No harm. No hard feelings." He stepped closer, and Quamodian got the measure of the size of him, a giant of a man, but oddly subdued. "No one around here wants trouble," he added in a mild bass growl. "Not any more. But the girl's all right, I got her out of the tunnel before she got hurt" Quam said suspiciously, "I heard something about a Reefer up here with Cliff Hawk, doing Almalik knows .what foul work. Are you him?" "I am." "Then that's your sleeth watching us up there." The Reefer's mustache and beard parted company. In the gloom it looked almost as though he were preparing to bite Andy Quam, but it was only a soundless, humorless laugh. "Not mine any more," he declared. "His own by now, I expect. Or -- something's. But he won't take orders from me, not since the sun hit us." He turned aside from Andy Quam, bent for a moment over the girl. "She's all right," he said, straightening, but his voice didn't sound very sure. "You might be right about getting her out of here, though. Me too, if you don't mind." "Why is Molly Zaldivar crying like that?" Quamodian demanded. "If you've hurt her -- " The great head shook from side to side. "Nothing I did," he said. "I expect it's Cliff Hawk she's crying about" Quamodian pulled himself together. Why, he had completely forgotten that Hawk was here! It was his fault no doubt, that Molly Zaldivar had been hurt, endangered, terrified; yet still there was enough friendship left between Quamodian and Cliff Hawk that Andy Quam's voice showed real concern as he asked, "What about Hawk? Is he hurt?" "Not any more." "What? You mean -- dead?" The great voice tolled leadenly. "Not that either. Worse, I'd say. A lot worse. And if you want my opinion, we ought to get away from here before something worse happens to us, too." T he Something that had been a random mass of stripped electrons, then an infant rogue star, then a seeking, learning, experimenting entity -- and was now something else -- "watched" the Reefer and Andy Quam gently lifting the weeping girl, carrying her down the slope to the flyer, hastily entering, slamming the door, racing away. With one part of itself, the rogue caused the sleeth to soar after on its transflection fields, keeping the flyer effortlessly in view. It was not necessary to do that, of course. The rogue could easily have kept the flyer under observation with its probes, anywhere on the face of this planet and indeed almost anywhere in this solar system. (It had not yet had occasion to try to perceive anything farther away than the planets.) X But it was no longer the simple creature it had been. When it had perceived that one of the organized radiant masses was in danger of extinction it had occurred to its still-simple mind that it might be worth acquiring, and so it had acquired it. It turned out to be easy -- a "stretch," a "grasp," a "hold." If it had been matter doing these things, one might have said that it was like the flow of an amoeba, englobing and digesting a tasty bit of food. Matter was not involved, and the forces that the rogue deployed did not lend themselves to description in three-space geometry. But the effect was the same. What had once been the persona of Cliff Hawk no longer inhabited its biological body. That body, in fact, was not merely dead but by now an unrecognizable lump of contorted charcoal, in with the other charred and destroyed litter in the burned-out tunnel, once Hawk's workshop. But something of him remained. It no longer had identity of its own, as an individual. But it was at least a perceptible fraction of that seething, restless entity that surged through the interstices of the mountain, that followed Andy Quam's flyer in the person of the sleeth, that had brought the wrath of the sun striking down on the summit of the hill, that was a newborn rogue star loosed in the universe. It no longer "thought" in simple urges and observations. Through the trained intelligence of its human component it now could observe, analyze, record... and act. T echnically it was still Starday; at the boy's suggestion Andy Quam ordered the flyer to take them to the Starchurch. "There'll be a crowd for late-night services," he said, "and likely enough nobody's going to be where you expect them, otherwise. I mean, even the hospital might not have a crew on duty." "Shocking," hissed Andy Quam. "To make the Companionship of the Star a pagan ritual!" "Sure, preacher. Like you say. Only that's the way it is, so you better -- " "I understand," said Quam, and gave the flyer its directions. It raised an objection. "Without the special permission of the Robot Inspector, Mr. Quamodian," it declared, "I should properly go nowhere except back to the transflex terminal." "But it's an emergency!" "Of course, Mr. Quamodian." It hesitated, its neural currents pondering the problem. "Since I cannot contact the robot inspector at the moment," it decided, "I will have to return to the transflex terminal -- " "Confound you," shouted Quamodian, "do what I tell you!" " -- but en route I will pause briefly at the Starchurch. If you then disembark, it is not a matter under my control." "Hah!" barked Quamodian in disgust. "Do it then. But do it fast!" "It is done, Mr. Quamodian," sighed the flyer, settling to the ground. "I will remain here for one minute. During that time you may do as you wish." IF Quamodian wasted no more time in talk. With Rufe and the huge, slow strength of the Reefer, it was no problem to get Molly out of the flyer and settle her gently on the ground. "Are you all right, dear? Andy Quam asked anxiously. "Pm going for help." The storm of weeping had passed. Her eyes were open and her face composed, but the weariness of ages was in her eyes. "All right, Andy," she said. "Pm all right anyway, so it doesn't matter." "Don't talk like that!" "All right, Andy," she repeated dully and looked away. "You stay here with her," he ordered the Reefer, who looked resentful, but shrugged. "Rufe, let's find somebody!" And the man and the boy hurried into the Starchurch. As they entered the great chamber under the blue dome, a gong boomed and echoed. Rufe led the way, up a helical ramp into the dim vast church. The air was alive with the throb of many chanting voices, and it was sweet with the odor of the fusorian Visitants. The five pointed wings of the church were filled with rising tiers of seats, but every seat was empty. The people were kneeling in concentric circles on the immense floor, beneath the central dome that held the imaged suns of Almalik. Of the Robot Inspector there was no sign. His errand, whatever it was, still kept him away. "I see Molly's auftt!" cried Rufe eagerly, pointing. "Come this way!" But Quamodian hesitated. "Pagan ritual" he had called it, but something in the air held him, awed, faintly envious, half afraid. He raised his eyes to the many-colored splendor of the thirteen suns hung beneath the space-black inside of the dome: six close binaries arranged in three double doubles, one single sun. Drinking in the blazing beauty of Almalik, breathing the sweetness Qf the Visitants, swaying to the melodic rhythm of the chanting worshipers, Andy Quam felt a sudden glorious dawn of utter peace and great joy. He wanted to forget himself and the waiting, weary girl outside. His only desire was to forget himself and to be one with Almalik. "Preacher!" hissed the boy. "Aren't you coming?" Solemn awe held Quamodian. "Are -- are you sure it's all right to interrupt?" "We won't interrupt. I've been here before for this, to watch, like. With Miss Zaldivar. They don't mind anybody." Shivering with strange elation, Quamodian followed the boy out across the vast floor and into the circles of communicants swaying on their knees. The sweetness of the Visitants made him drowsy; fhe blazing suns of Almalik bathed him gently in peace. But the boy had paused before a kneeling man and woman. "Here's her folks, preacher," he said. "Mr. Juan Zaldivar. Mrs. Deirdre Zaldivar." His thin voice rose sharply. "This is Monitor Quamodian." They stopped their chant. Reluctantly they withdrew their gaze from the multiple splendor of Almalik and, still swaying on their knees, looked incuriously at Andy Quam. B oth glowed with youth and health and joy. Juan was lean and tall and dark, with rich black hair. Blonde, blue-eyed and radiant, Deirdre looked even younger and more lovely than her niece. And both wore the mark of Almalik, where the migrating fusorian colony had entered their bodies. Deirdre's was on her blooming cheek, Juan's on his forehead. The marks were tiny irregular star-shapes, their edges dissolving into fine branching lines. In the dusk of the starlit dome, the marks glowed softly, warmly golden. "It's about Molly," Quamodian whispered, hardly daring to break the spell. "She's outside. She's hurt." Incongruous things to say in this sacred peace! He felt more an interloper than ever, a brute among angels. In unison, blonde and black, they nodded their heads. Puzzled, Andy Quam started to repeat what he had said, but Deirdre breathed: "There's no hurt that matters in the bosom of the Star. She must join us, and then she will find peace." "But she's hurt! It's -- oh, it's too long to tell you, but she's in terrible danger. We all are!" "Not here," smiled Juan Zaldivar. He groped for Deirde's hand; she was already lifting her face to chant again. "Bring her within. The Visitants will make her whole!" And his dark eyes lifted and he joined his wife in the chant. Rufe bit his lip. "It's no use, preacher," he said somberly. "They're too happy." Andy Quam looked at him meditatively. It was, after all, not a bad idea to bring Molly inside, he thought. Let the Visitants enter her body with their fusorian healing. She would heal; everyone did. Not merely the scuffs and bruises of her body, but the somber agony of her mind... "Preacher," whispered the boy apprehensively, staring at him. Quamodian caught himself. "Sorry," he mumbled, and grabbed the boy's elbow, turned him around, scurried away. He felt a sudden flood of longing that almost stopped him and turned him back, but the boy was leading him now. He stumbled out of the aura of Almalik, down the helical ramp, out of the building as the siren chant faded behind. Quamodian filled his lungs gratefully with cool dry air that held no lotus-odor of the Visitants. He said sadly, "I wanted to stay. I always want to stay... But it isn't for me, the peace of Almalik..." He hurried down the ramp, leaving a vanishing vague regret. His flyer was gone, but the huge form of the Reefer stood solidly over the reclining body of Molly Zaldivar. Now the night air felt suddenly chill, and Andy Quam shivered. "What can we do now?" he muttered, half to himself. "What can we do for Molly Zaldivar?" "My house, preacher," said the boy, Rufe. "It's only down the square, there. My folks will take her in. I think," he added, sounding worried. Andy Quam glanced at him sharply, but did not question him. However, there was no one at home in the house to which the boy led them. The door was unlatched. Lights were on. The little cottage's IF autonomic living systems were purring away, a cheery fire in the hearth, a pleasantly scented breath of air carrying the gentle warmth to every room. But no one was there. "Never mind, sighed the boy, as though he had expected it. "I expect what Miss Zaldivar mostly needs is a little rest right now. Why don't you take her in that room, preacher? And ##I see if I can stir up a little food; you must be hungry F ed, warmed, almost relaxed, Andy Quam sat in the cheerful living room. The boy lay on the floor before the fire, his chin in his hands, stretching out now and then for another piece of fruit or a last crumb of the sandwiches he had produced for them. And the Reefer leaned at his ease against the fireplace, answering Quamodian's questions. They had begun like a prosecuting attorney and a criminal; but the Reefer would not accept the role. Defiant, uncaring, mildly contemptuous of everything around him, the Reefer rumbled: "I'll not take the responsibility. Monitor Quamodian. What happens on my land is my business, and those hills are mine." "Creating rogue life is everyone's business," cried Quamodian. "But that was not my doing," the big man declared. His scarred face was angry. "Miss Zaldivar is a lovely child. I meant no harm for her. But she had no business trespassing." "What about Cliff Hawk?" Under the ragged beard, his mouth set hard. "I brought him back from the Reefs. He was almost a son to me -- but I take no blame for what he has done. Except that I let him go to school, but that wasn't my intention. I wanted him to be another hunter, like me. When he was grown, I planned to take him back to the Reefs, find a cub sleeth for him, let him do as I did. But he had to cross the creek. He went to Starday school. He got queer ideas from the robots and the Visitants. Finally he had to go away to space to learn to be what you call a transcience engineer..." ""There was nothing wrong with that," declared Quamodian. "I was at the same school. He was a decent human being then." The Reefer shrugged; then, flinching, touched his arm where it was bandaged. "No matter," he rumbled moodily. "He's paid for it now. He's dead. Or so I think." "What do you mean you think?" demanded Quamodian. "Is he dead or isn't he?" The Reefer's deep-set eyes peered at him from under the bushy yellow brows. "He wasn't breathing," he said shortly. "Does that answer your question?" "Doesn't it?" The Reefer said helplessly, "I don't know, Monitor, and that's the truth. Oh, Cliff was in bad shape, all right. I didn't give him much chance of lasting more than an hour -- less, because we couldn't move him and the fire was coming close. But -- " He hesitated. "Boy," he growled, "have you got anything to drink in this place?" "Just milk. Or water. Or maybe I could make a cup of tea -- " The Reefer pursed his lips, shook his head gloomily. "Go on!" ordered Quamodian. The Reefer half closed his eyes. "Cliff had been at work in his transcience lab," he droned, apparently bored with the subject. "I knew what he was doing was dangerous, but he's a man grown now. Was. I didn't want to interfere. Then something happened." The Reefer shifted position, thoughtfully scratched his bushy yellow head. The thick fingers raked through the blond tangles like gangplows through soil, methodically, deeply, mechanically. He said, "It was an explosion. Down below, in the old cryomagnetic and radiation galleries that used to be part of the Plan of Man's military installations. Things the Visitants had failed to destroy. That was the part that I knew was dangerous... Then, while we were putting ourselves together, Molly Zaldivar showed up, crying and threatening Cliff; she'd been scared by my sleeth, so I guess she wasn't accountable. But that was just the be. ginning. There was a real blowup then. Don't know where. Something winged me -- a stray piece of metal, I guess, and I was knocked out for a while." "I was watching from Wisdom Creek," said Quamodian. "I saw a bolt of plasma strike from the sun, then two more. Is that what it was?" "I guess." The Reefer scratched again stolidly. "Then I heard Cliff and the girl inside. I went to get them. Tried to call my sleeth, but the creature was spooked, acted funny, didn't respond. It never did that before... But there it was, inside the tunnel, trying to get Cliff uncovered. Only it was too late. He was dying. Then -- " The Reefer stood up straighter and stopped scratching. A look of real humanity came into his eyes as He said bleakly, "Cliff looked up at me. He said something -- couldn't hear what, exactly. It didn't make sense. And he just stopped breathing." The Reefer turned away, began roaming around the little room. "I don't mean he just died then, Monitor. I've seen men die; they make a little more fuss about it than that. But he just stopped. Like he was turned off. And I made sure he was dead, and then I grabbed Molly Zaldivar and got out of there. 'Bout an Hour later, you showed up. That's it..." "Not quite," said Andy Quam sharply. "What was it that Cliff said before he died?" The Reefer stopped, stared angrily at him. "Doesn't matter! It didn't make sense, anyway." "What was it?" The Reefer growled wordlessly. The thick fingers plowed into the scalp again, raked it furiously. Then he dropped his hand and said, "Oh, if you must know -- It was something like, T made it -- now it wants me.' " Quam abruptly shivered, as though a cold blast had found the back of his neck. "What does it mean?" he demanded. "Nothing! Nothing at all, Monitor! Or anyway -- " the Reefer looked away -- "nothing that I understand. 'I made it -- now it wants me.' Does it mean anything to you?" Quamodian paused before answering. "I hope not," he whispered. IF T he rogue was no longer an infant. Neither was it full grown -- call it a youth, becoming steadily larger, in each moment finding itself stronger and more skilled than in the moment before, feeding upon everything around it that offered energy or mass or patterns to be assimilated. It had now assimilated a very large number of patterns, sipping at the assorted radiances that surrounded it, and in the process discovering that some were far -- "tastier"? -- than others. Engorging the identity that had once been Cliff Hawk had been a transcendentally new experience for it, and now it found itself equipped with a thousand thousand new habit patterns, constructs of thought, programmatic drives. They no longer had any relationship to the hundred kilograms of carbon compounds that had been Cliff Hawk's physical body, for that was now an irrelevant blob of spoiled reactions. Hawk's "personality," even, was gone -- nothing now remained in the universe that thought his thoughts, remembered his experiences, could recite his opinions. But something about his motives and desires remained as a moment of thrust inside the behavior of the young rogue, shaping the vector result that was its behavior. It was no longer entirely random. In some degree it had become polarized. What were the other moments of force that played a part in the behavior of the infant rogue? Its own growing knowledge and skills. Its discoveries about the world it lived in. Its innate drive toward growth and mastery. Move. Grow. Eat , it had thought, as soon as it could think at all; but now, with the powerful discipline of Cliff Hawk's trained mind permeating its being, it thought more clearly and articulately; it had discovered the convenience of formulating its objectives in language. I am small but I am growing , thought the maturing rogue star that had been born on earth. There are other beings which are large but do not grow. I can be more powerful than they . And already it had implemented its strength with a dozen organized masses of matter. The sleeth was its mindlinked tool, now; it watched with the rogue's eyes, would act under the rogue's wishes. Tiny crawling and flying things, in the mountain, under the mountain and in the air over it, had all become a part of its extended being. And it had recruited something else. For the Robot Inspector had challenged the curiosity of the rogue. It had not been difficult at all for the rogue to swallow it whole, to incorporate the mind-analogue of the machine into its own consciousness. The robot still looked as it had, torpedoshaped metal body and glowing plasma panel and all; but it was no longer its links with the super-computers on the planets of the stars of Almalik that gave it its categorical imperatives, but the needs and intentions of the stripped electron plasma that had exploded under the hill. The rogue toyed with and puzzled over, but did not yet understand, that complex linkage of transflection fields which united this new part of its self with distant and more powerful beings. They did not matter at the momerit. The distant entities were not powerful enough to resurne control against the near and mighty presence of the rogue. And it had other consideration s to occupy it. One was a part of its heritage from the dying mind of Cliff Hawk. Over that too the rogue puzzled, without comprehension. Why was it that it felt so attracted, so drawn to, so conscious of the presence of that small and unimportant organized mass of thought-radiant matter that Cliff Hawk's mind had identified as "Molly Zaldivar"? Through the blind, transflex eyes of the sleeth riding high over the cottage where Molly Zaldivar lay sleeping, the mind of the rogue stared down. Molly Zaldivar, it thought, what do I want with you? And inside the house Molly started up from sleep and tried to scream. Sleep , ordered the rogue; and the girl subsided into the catalepsy of terror. No one had heard her scream; no one was in the house at that moment, and she had not been able to be loud enough to reach those who were outside on the grass, staring up at the sleeth. T he boy said, awed, "Mister, that's a wicked-looking beast. You sure it won't hurt us?" The Reefer barked a savage laugh. "Not any more, boy," he rumbled. "Time was that sleeth would follow me like a kitten. Do everything I wanted it to, never think of disobeying -- I raised it from a cub, it never knew any boss hut me. But now it does." He studied the sleeth thoughtfully for a moment. As it hung in the sky on its shimmering transflection fields, the great black creature looked like some wingless Pegasus astride the air, its dangling claws capable of wrenching any carbon-based, airbreathing, muscle-powered animal in two as readily as a hawk's talons rend fur. "Fine beast," he said. "But not mine any more." Andy Quam said angrily, "Why did you bring it here? This sort of animal doesn't belong on a planet!" "Why, because it's mine, Monitor Quamodian," the Reefer said simply. "I'm a hunter, and it's my companion. It goes wherever I go. Or used to. "Why," he cried, suddenly enthusiastic, "with that sleeth I collected the finest specimens of every game animal in the solar system! You should have seen them. A score of fine pyropods. Darkbeasts from out past the Reefs, moonbats, creatures from the hot deeps of Venus -- there was nothing in a dozen light-years could touch that sleeth as a killer!" Andy Quam said in disgust, "You thing. Violence is evil. The laws of Almalik do not permit the destruction of life by life!" The Reefer's deep eyes twinkled. "And would you never take a life, Monitor Quamodian? Not even, say, to save Miss Zaldivar?" Andy Quam flushed. "We Companions are exempt from certain of Almalik's laws," he said stiffly. "We even may admit violenee, in some situations." "Then help me!" cried the Reefer. "I'm going to stalk something new, Monitor Quamodian, and you can join me in the hunt. I don't know IF m what it is that's controlling my sleeth, but I'm going to take its pelt to put in my collection!" "Nonsense," cried Andy Quam, startled. "Why -- great Almalik, man -- I mean, how can you? Qon't you realize that that's probably" a rogue star?" The Reefer's laughter boomed. "Scare you, Monitor Quamodian?" "No! Or -- yes, maybe. I don't think it is unreasonable of a mere human being to question his ability to deal with a star!" The boy, who had been watching them silently, turning from face to face, coughed and interrupted. Changing the subject he said, "Say, preacher! What's the matter with the moon?" A dozen degrees over the horizon the gibbous moon floated, almost invisible, so dark a red it was. It was leprously stained and discolored, by cent it should have appeared. "It's the sun," said Andy Quam gloomily. "Remember how red and angry-looking it was when it set? After those sunbolts struck? The moon's just reflecting it... And this man thinks he can destroy the thing that did that!" "Worth a try, Monitor," boomed the Reefer cheerfully. "Mind if I borrow your flyer, then?" "For what?" "Why, for the hunt. It's a bit of a walk from here to the hills on foot," the Reefer apologized. "As I don't have the sleeth to take me there any more, I'd appreciate the use of your flyer. It's long past Starday now, no reason not to use it." Rufe cried out sharply. "Preacher! Listen -- what's that sound." Quamodian raised his hand imperiously, silencing die Reefer's booming voice. They listened. Then Quern's face twisted. "It's Molly," he cried, turning to run toward the house. "She's calling my name!" B ut when Andy Quam burst through the door of the girl's room she was lying wide-awake, looking at the ceiling. Slowly she lowered her eyes to look at him. "Andy," she said. "I should have known you'd come. I've always been able to rely, on you..." Quamodian's ears burned. "Are you all right?" he demanded. "I heard you calling -- " She sat up on the edge of the bed. "All right? I suppose so." Her face was a mask of tragedy for a moment. "Poor Cliff," she whispered. "It's strange, but I thought he was talking to me, in my dream. But it wasn't really him -- it was something huge and strange. A monster." She shook herself. Then, gloriously, she smiled. There was tragedy under her smile, but it was clear to Andy Quam that she was making an effort to be cheerful. "I dragged you all the way across space," she said. "I'm sorry. I've always been a trouble to you, Andy dear." "Never a trouble," he said, speaking from a depth of passion that shook him. Molly was touched. She reached out and patted his arm. "Is there anything to eat?" she asked, incongruously. "It's been a long time!" Rufe was happy to oblige when Quamodian relayed the girl's request to him, producing more sandwiches and milk, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of food. "Won't your family mind your taking us in like this?" asked Andy Quam. "We're eating you out of house and home!" The boy's face clouded. "It's all right, preacher," he said. Quamodian frowned at him. "Come to think of it," he said, "where is your family? It's pretty late for them to be at the Starchurch ." "Oh, they're not there any more. They -- They've gone away for a while." Andy Quam stopped in the middle of the humming little kitchen, busy generating new supplies of bread and milk and meats to replace those the hoy had drawn from its programs, and said firmly, "You're hiding something, Rufe. Why?" "Aw, don't ask me, preacher. It's just -- well, it's kind of private." But then Molly Zaldivar came out of the room, looking remarkably refreshed and restored, and Andy Quam let the matter drop. For half an hour they were all at ease, Molly as friendly and affectionate as ever in the old days at school, the boy beside himself with pleasure at pleasing Molly, even the Reefer almost jolly. The huge man from space demanded to know whether Quamodian would join him in his hunt for the rogue. For a moment, in that warm room, it almost seemed like a reasonable idea, and Quamodian let himself think about it -- a long chase, a view-hallo, the quarry at bay... But it was fantasy. This was no beast of the forest but an inimical creature of linked plasmas whose hugeness and might were utterly incomprehensible to humans. To hunt it was like setting a snare for a supernova. Then Andy Quam saw Molly hiding a yawn and realized with a start how utterly exhausted he himself was. "Let's get some sleep," he ordered, and fussed over them all until they had sorted themselves out into various rooms. Only then did Quamodian let himself sprawl out on the couch . in the living room, the door to Molly's room just past his head, ready to spring up at any alarm. It had been a good many hours, and a good many hundreds of thousands of parsecs, since he had slept. When he closed his eyes he was unconscious almost at once and slept like the dead. W here was the rogue? As well try to fix the position of an electron in its blurred orbit around a nucleus; it was under the hill and in it, suffusing the skies around, inhabiting the body of the sleeth that soared tirelessly and patiently over the house where Molly Zaldivar slept, penetrating and entering every hidden place within hundreds of miles, and reaching out into near space. But if its position had no exact geographic boundaries, at least there were loci of special consequence. It did, for example, occupy the great animal bulk of the sleeth. It concentrated at least a sizable part of its being in the electron cloud that seeped through the rock and clay of the base of the hill. And it found other IF special areas of interest to toy with it. It found, for one, the antique handling machine that Cliff Hawk had used to help him construct his tunnel workshop. It was a minor puzzle to the rogue, but a faintly interesting one; the machine had obvious purpose, and it spent some moments working out that purpose and how to achieve it. Then, the machine solved, it spent a few moments now in what can only be called pleasure. Power in motors , it thought. My power. Spin gears. Drive through rubble. It reached out with its metal arms and picked up bits of debris -- a yellow cylinder of helium, the half of a thousandpound armature, bent out of shape in the explosions. It threw them about recklessly, madly... Then it had had all it could enjoy of that particular game and turned to another. The Robot Inspector was a greater puzzle, but a lesser plaything. It was of no particular joy to operate, since its transflection drives were too similar to the sleeth's, or the rogue's own, to be novel. But the rogue was aware that somehow the robot had been guided by other influences, far away, and that some part of it was still trying to respond to those influences as their message crackled into its receptors. They were an irritation to the rogue, these repetitious exhortations on behalf of the star Almalik; it did not like them. It had, by now, begun to acquire emotion. One particular emotion troubled it, that inexplicable urging toward Molly Zaldivar which it had felt, more and more strongly, as Cliff Hawk's patterns of thought asserted themselves and fitted themselves in to the organization of the rogue's own habitstructure. The rogue did not find this incongruous. It had no standards by which to judge incongruity. But it found it troubling. There was a solution to things which were troubling. It could act on the impulse, and see what came of it. It could attempt to add Molly Zaldivar to itself. XI C C Tol-ly. Mol-ly Zaaal-di-var..." ivi Molly woke slowly, surfacing inch by inch from sleep. She was though she was, a part of her mind remembered that waking would bring back to her in utter, unwanted clarity: Cliff's death, the birth of the rogue, the terrible danger that the man she loved had unloosed on the universe. "Mol-ly But someone was calling her name. Resentfully she opened her eyes and looked around. No one was in the room. It was still dark; she had not slept for more than an hour or two. "Who is it?" she whispered. No response. Molly shivered. It was eerie, that disembodied voice, unlike any she had ever heard. It was impossible to dismiss it as the ragged end of a dream, half remembered on waking; it was real enough. It was even more impossible to forget it and go back to sleep. Molly stood up, threw the robe Rufe had found for her over her shoulders, and padded to the door of her room. She opened it just a crack. There was the living room, and Andy Quam asleep on the couch. He stirred painfully as she looked at him, grimaced, mumbled some sleep-evoked phrase and was still again -- all without opening his eyes. Poor Andy, she thought warmly, and sadly; and closed the door without sound. Whoever had called her, it was not Andy Quam. She went to the window, threw back the curtains -- and gasped in terror. There it was, hovering just outside the double French panes on its shimmering transfTection fields. The sleeth! The great blind eyes stared emptily at her, the metal-tipped claws caught reflections of cold fire from the sinking moon. The shimmering field pulsed rapidly, and from the pane of glass she caught the faint vibration of sound that had called her from sleep: "Mol-ly. Come. I... want... you." For an instant stark terror flooded her, and she half turned to run, to shake Andy Quam awake and beg for protection against this fantastic monster that called her by name. But the utter wondrousness of it held her. The sleeth could not speak; nothing the Reefer had said about it gave it a voice. Nor could it have known her name, not in any way that she could hope to understand. And anyway, the slbeth was no longer even an animal in its own independent right; it was only a captive of the thing that Cliff Hawk had made and had been killed by. She flung open one side of the French window. She didn't know why; except that, obviously, if the creature intended her harm the flimsy glass and frame could not protect her. "What -- what do you want," she breathed. But it only repeated, "Mol-ly. Molly, come." The sound came from the glass itself, she discovered; somehow the creature was vibrating it to form frequencies that she could hear as words. It was even stranger, she thought, than if it had suddenly formed lips, palate and tongue and spoken to her so. It was terrifying. Worse than terrifying; without warning, she was filled with a revulsion that she almost screamed with the pain of it. "No," she whispered. "No!" "Come," sang the sleeth -- or whatever it was that controlled the sleeth. The huge creature danced patiently on its shimmering fields, waiting for her to accede to its demand. "Come," said the tinny, bodiless voice again. "Mol-ly. Come." Insane to be talking to this thing, in a perfectly ordinary room, through a perfectly normal window! "No l" she said strongly. "Go away!" Did the thing understand her words. She had no way of knowing. It merely hung there silently for a moment, regarding her with great blind eyes. Then it moved, slowly and remorselessly, like a Juggernaut It bobbed silently forward, thrusting the unopened window out of the way as though it were air. An almost soundIF less crack and a faint patter of shattered glass  on the carpet were the only noise it made as it came toward her. The great, deadly claws reached for her. Molly drew a breath to scream, tried to turn and run... Something bright and murderous flashed from those blind eyes. It was like an instant anesthetic, like a blow from behind that drives out awareness before the mind quite realizes it has been struck. Down went Molly Zaldivar into paralysis and dark, stunned and helpless. She felt herself falling, falling, falling... The last thing she remembered was those great claws grasping her. Incredible, she thought, they don't hurt... And then the world closed in around her. Q uamodian woke painfully in broad daylight that poured in the windows on him. He found himself on a couch, with a synthetic copy of some animal fur over him for warmth, his head throbbing, his bones aching. He felt vaguely ill, and for a moment he could not recall where he was. Then he remembered. The enigma of the sunbolts. The nightmare of the Reefer and the sleeth. The death of his friend Cliff Hawk. The birth of the rogue -- He forced himself to sit up and look at the world around him. Pinned to the arm of the couch was a note, scrawled with a photoscriber in a huge, clumsy, juvenile handwriting: Preacher, I didn't want to wake you. I went to tell Miss Zaldivar's folks she's all right. Meet you there is you want. P.S., I left everybody sleeping because I thought you all needed it. Food in the kitchen. Rufe Sleeping they still were, to judge from the mighty rasping snores that came from the little cubicle Rufe had given the Reefer. There was no sound at all from Molly's room. Andy Quam hesitated, his hand on the door; but there was no sense disturbing her, and surely nothing could have got past him to harm her in the night, he thought... He left the house and stepped out into the bright morning. Bright it was. Yet, thought Andy Quam, there was something strange about it, and in a moment he realized what it was. The colors were wrong. There was no cloud in the sky, but the air had a lowering quality, as of stormclouds. He squinted up at the sun and perceived the reason. Red, sullen, blotched, the disk of the sun still had not recovered from whatever had roiled it yesterday. It was not the familiar sun of earth, as men had portrayed it in a thousand books and songs. It was somehow unhealthy, somehow ominous. He limped across a wide square, reviving somewhat as he moved. It had been a strenuous day. And a worrisome one, he thought, remembering with wrinkled brow all the unanswered problems and unmet challenges it had offered. Perhaps this new day would clear some of them up, he thought -- but not with much confidence. He gave the Starchurch a wide t berth, hailed a passing citizen and found himself directed to the home of Molly Zaldivar's parents. It was past the Central Municipal Plexus, he discovered, which fit in well enough with his plans; he could use more information if he could get it. But the Central Municipal Plexus did not turn out to be the combination library-town hall he had expected. H e walked across a queerly perfect circle of stained and blackened cement. It was puzzling, it seemed to have no place in this countrified idyll of a town. Immediately a recorded voice spoke to him: "Welcome, guest! You have landed at Wisdom Creek Historical Monument. It is a section of the original village of Wisdom Creek, reconstructed exactly as it was on the winter day, many years ago, when the Visitants first arrived." Andy Quam spoke up, addressing his remarks to thin air, for there was no speaker in sight. "I don't want a 'historical tour," he snapped. "I want some information." But there was no response. This was a low-grade programmed instructor, he realized with irritation. Not even homeostatic, merely programmed to respond to his mass-sensed presence with a recorded lecture. He walked through a thick gate -- And found himself in something that, for a startled moment, made him think he was in Hell. The air stung his eyes. It choked him, with a reek of industrial fumes and imperfectly oxidized mineral fuels. Blinking and squinting, he made out that he was surrounded by grimy rows of hideous little brick and wooden huts. Far down a street was a human figure, faced away from him and motionless. Vexed, Andy Quam stamped toward it, ignoring the revolting spectacle around him. He approached a squat gray pile of concrete on which was etched the legend, Plan of Man . A voice from the air cried brightly: "Welcome, guest. This structure, a part of the Central Municipal Plexus Exhibit, represents a primitive Tax Office. Here each citizen reported to the Plan of Man the number of tokens he had received for his work in the previous sidereal year, whereupon he was forced to give up a share of them. Here too was the ration office, where he received permission to barter what tokens he had left for articles of clothing and other necessities. Here too was the draft office, where young men and women were impressed for training in the use of crude but adequate weapons of the time. Here too was that most central and fundamental institution, the Planning Office, where the action of every citizen was dictated and reviewed and corrected by a primitive central computer. Here, guest, was the nerve center of the fundamental coercive apparatus of the state!" Andy Quam trudged grimly on, ignoring the senseless prattle. There was entirely too much realism in this exhibit for his comfort, he thought with distaste. The very air was polluted with the hydrocarbons and flyash and photochemicals of primitive combustion products. And the man he was approaching was queerly .# IF dressed in what must have been the costume of the time: a thick fiber uniform, a brutally chopped haircut, something about his neck which looked like a massive metal collar, certainly too heavy and too tight to be comfortable. He stood stark still facing the entrance of the building, his right arm raised in a motionless salute. "Excuse me," called Andy Quam. "Can you help me find the home of Juan Zaldivar?" He caught himself, realizing at once that it was only a lifelike dummy. Another recording explained cheerfully: "The human form you see, guest, is the replica of a Risk. So men and women of doubtful loyalty to the Plan were designated. The iron collar worn by each Risk contained an explosive decapitation charge, which could be detonated instantly by the Planning Machine in the event of any suspect action." Soberly, stiffly, the figure dropped its salute, turned until its mass-sensors located Andy Quam and haltingly bowed. "Oh, great Almalik!" cried Quamodian, exasperated. "All I want is directions! How can I reach the home of Mr. and Mrs. Zaldivar?" Silence, except for the questioning hum of a carrier signal. "Isn't anybody listening?" he shouted. Silence again, then, doubtfully, "Guest, you are invited to return to the Wisdom Creek Historical Monument, which has been restored and maintained by the Companions of the Star for public information." "I am a Companion of the Star! I am Monitor Andreas Quamodian, and I insist on your answering my questionl" Silence once more. "We hope you found the exhibits instructive," sighed the recorded voice at last. Its programming clearly was not up to any question not pertaining to the exhibits themselves. Angrily Quam turned away and retraced his steps. H alf an hour and many moments of lost temper later, he finally found Juan Zaldivar at the edge of a field, busy adjusting a green-cased farm machine. A relaxed and handsome athlete, now alert and free from the hypnosis of the Starchurch reverie, he flashed his white teeth at Quamodian with an inquiring smile. "I'm concerned about Molly." Quamodian began. "So am I!" Zaldivar nodded quickly. "Her course is dangerous and evil. Yet Almalik forbids any compulsion toward salvation. She must make her own mind up to accept the Visitants -- " "No, not that!" cried Andy Quam. "Do you realize she has been very nearly killed by what I suspect is a rogue star?" Juan Zaldivar looked genuinely shocked. "How terrible!" he cried. "We must do something at once! You must tell her that her one protection is in Almalik. She can delay no longer!" "No, no," groaned Quamodian. "Listen to me, Zaldivar! It's no longer a matter of just Molly; it's the whole Companionship of the Stars, the universe itself that's threatened. Have you any notion of what a rogue star can do? There, look at the sun!" He gestured at the red and swollen disk, high in the heavens but looking like a stormy dusk. Zaldivar glanced at it through squinted eyes, with an expression of mild inquiry. "Curious," he said, nodding. "More than curious! Deadly! Dangerous!" 'To Molly?" asked Zaldivar, politely perplexed. "I do not entirely follow you, Monitor Quamodian. But if you are saying now, as you seemed to be denying a moment ago, that Molly is in danger, why, yes, I agree. She is. So are you. So are all who have not accepted the Star, as signified by receiving the Visitants into their bodies." Andy Quam took a deep breath and controlled himself. The Peace of Almalik, he reminded himself, was a great gift to mankind. Unfortunately those who accepted it -- though of course blessed beyond all other men in their health, their joy, their stargiven peace -- were sometimes hard to deal with, hard to arouse to needed action. But that, of course, was why those like himself, the Monitors and the other free-acting agents of the Star, could not accept the Visitants. He should have known all that; he should have learned to accept it... He said, keeping his temper, "Juan Zaldivar, I ask you to do something for me in the name of Almalik. Since you are in contact with the sentient stars by means of the Visitants, I want you to pass on to them my warning about the creation of the rogue star." "I have done so," said Zaldivar. "Almalik knows all that I know." "Good," sighed Andy Quam. He felt a brief relief, a sense of awe at the fleeting vision of all the wisdom and power of the multiple citizen Cygnus, the minds of numberless sentient suns and transcience robots and perfected men knitted together by the fusorian Visitants. "Now," he said, "there's a puzzle you must help me solve. I want to know why that sunbolt struck yesterday. Is Almalik responsible?" Zaldivar squinted again, then shook his head gravely. "No," he declaimed, "the release of the sunbolt was a violent action. According to our information it destroyed much equipment and contributed to at least one human death. As Almalik is nonviolent, we are clearly not responsible." Quamodian peered at him. "Was it the rogue that was responsible?" Juan Zaldivar said serenely, "In that, Monitor Quamodian, we are not concerned. We will not resist." "But you're in danger! Even the sentient stars are in danger, if an intellectic creature hostile to them is loose in this galaxy!" "We will not resist," repeated Juan Zaldivar. "Acting in violence, we should destroy ourselves." And, gently murmuring an apology, he returned to adjust his farm machine. T he boy's message had said he would be at the Zaldivar's home, but he was not in sight. No one, was; the dwelling door stood open, but no one answered Andy Quam's call. There was a crooning, placid, musical drone coming from somewhere above. Quamodian followed the IF sound, and doors opened before him as the homeostatic dwelling invited him in, up a moving slideramp, to a roof garden. There sat Deirdre Zaldivar, greeting the morning by playing at an instrument which transformed her emotions into art, spinning them into melodious sound, colored form, subtle scent. She greeted him, smiling. Youthful as Molly, her beauty unmarred by the golden star that blazed on her cheek, she was absorbed in her art and reluctant to be disturbed. "Rufe? Oh, yes, Monitor Quamodian. I know Rufe. But he's not here." "That's odd, Mrs. Zaldivar," Andy Quam frowned. "He said he'd meet me here. Did he say anything?" Deirdre Zaldivar plucked a strumming chord of sound negligently, watched a pinkish bubble of color grow, turn rose, then red, then darken into invisibility. "Why, no, Monitor Quamodian. We haven't heard from Rufe, have we?" She looked inquiringly past Andy Quam. Disconcerted, he turned, and there was the sleek black egg-shape of a transcience robot floating over a bed of talisman roses. "Robot Inspector?" he said uncertainly. "I -- I didn't notice you were here." The robot's pulsing plasma oval shimmered brightly. "I am not the Robot Inspector. Monitor Quamodian," it sang in its high sweet voice. "That unit is no longer operational. I am its deputy." "Not operational?" "It has been disjoined, Monitor Quamodian," hummed the robot placidly. "I have, however, access to all its memory up to the point at which disjunction occurred, so that for all practical purposes you may regard us as the same. Do you wish to employ my services?" "No," said Andy Quam. "Or -- yes. I think so. But I wanted to speak to Mrs. Zaldivar first. Molly has been injured, but she is now resting peacefully. I think she is all right -- but in danger, I'm afraid." Deirdre Zaldivar looked politely concerned. 'Too bad," she said regretfully. "She is such a dear girl. But -- " she shrugged, smiling at the deputy robot -- "she is not yet a member of the Star, of course. Like all non-members, she is exposed to the hazards of independent existence." She returned to the console of her instrument and, with a quick run across the keys, built a splendid tower of scent and color and sound. "When she accepts the Visitants, Monitor Quamodian," she said, watching her composition grow and drift, "everything will be all right. Everything is always all right in the Companionship of the Star." A ndy Quam's exasperation pressure was building again. He could feel it compressing his brows, grinding his jaws together. He turned to the robot and snapped, "You, then. I want some facts. What happened to the sun?" "In what respect, Monitor Quamodian?" sang the robot politely. "Its appearance -- look at it! And the plasma bolts it threw at the Earth yesterday. Why?" "We have no information," reported the robot regretfully. "Is it true that the multiple citizen Cygnus is not responsible?" "Quite true, Monitor Quamodian," agreed the robot, its high voice sounding disapproving of the question. "Aimalik informs us that this fact was already reported to you today, by Juan Zaldivar. You are aware that the citizen Cygnus will engage in no violence." "Then, what about the sun? Has -- " the thought suddenly erupted in his mind, almost choking him -- "has a rogue intellect been established in this star?" "The star Sol," sang the robot, "is not a member of the multiple citizen Cygnus, nor has it ever entered into association with any part of the civilized universe. We have no other information about its intellectual status." "Its abnormal behavior is dangerous to this planet and to all the members of Cygnus on it," protested Andy Quam. "One human being has died already. I fear this danger may extend to the sentient stars of Cygnus." "Aimalik is informed," hummed the robot serenely. "The sentient stars are not alarmed." " am alarmed!" cried Andy Quam. "I require your assistance!" The robot floated toward him, its plasma oval glowing brightly. "That is your right, Monitor Quamodian," it conceded sweetly. "As long as there is no conflict with the prime directives of Aimalik." "Fine!" snapped Andy Quam. "Begin by informing Aimalik of my concern. State that I regard it as absolutely urgent that action be taken!" "What action, Monitor Quamodian?" asked the robot solicitously. Quamodian was ready for that. "Request Aimalik to suggest alternatives," he said briskly. "But I have done so, Monitor Quamodian," sang the voice of the robot. "We have no action to suggest!" Quamodian glared at it furiously. What he might have said next might have cost him lasting regret; but he never had a chance to say it. From down below he heard a high-pitched shout, repeated, calling his name. "Preacher! Preacher, are you there?" Quamodian sprang to the slideramp, peered down. "Is that you, Rufe?" he called. The boy appeared, face grimed with tears and sobbing. "Oh, preacher!" he groaned. "It's Miss Zaldivar! She's gone!" Quamodian's blood seemed to turn cold in his body; time stopped. Gone? Gone where, boy?" "I don't know, preacher. I -- I think that thing must've come and taken her away!" T he world seemed to turn black around Andy Quam. The boy's voice dissipated like smoke, leaving a thin and fading wisp of terror behind it. Quamodian shuddered, shook himself, tried to think. But thought was beyond him at that moment; he had to act. He grasped the handrail and started to run down the slideramp, against its movement, not waiting for the sensors to detect his presence and respond by reversing the moyement of the ramp. From behind him the voice of the IF robot, its amplitude raised almost to the point of pain, thundered like the diapason of a giant organ: "Monitor Quamodian, wait! I must ask your intention!" Quamodian halted, shook himself, half turned. "Intention?" he repeated. "Why -- why, I'm going to get her back!" "In what way, Monitor Quamodian?" roared the robot. "Why -- " Andy Quam thought, then realized he had known the answer all along. "With the Reefer!" he cried. "We're going to hunt that thing down and destroy it!" The robot's voice, volume somewhat reduced but still an uncomfortable shrill knife-edge in the eardrums, trumpeted: "Violence, Monitor Quamodian. You are speaking of violence. The Companions of Almalik cannot support such an expedition!" "I can!" cried Andy Quam. "I'm a Companion! Our organization exists for this very reason -- that we aire free to do things for the members of the multiple citizen Cygnus that they are not free to do for themselves." The robot's black egg floated swiftly toward him. "In the past," it sang, volume reduced almost to normal, whining now, "this was true. But it is known that certain Companions have engaged in undue violence in the name of Almalik. This is a serious error, Monitor Quamodian! In consequence the status of the organization has been reviewed. Although certain freedoms of information and persuasion will remain to the Companions, all use of violence is herefrom prohibited." Quamodian jumped back in startlement, knocking over a crystal ornament in the shape of a leaping flame; it shattered on the floor, and the robot licked out a flickering tongue of pale plasma to gather up the fragments. "That's impossible!" Quamodian gasped. "We have -- we must have freedom to defend the members of the citizen!" "We do not resist," the robot purred serenely. "That is the prime ethic of the Visitants. The Companions may no longer resist in our name." Andy Quam hesitated, glanced down at the white, watching face of the boy, kicked a shard of crystal across the room, then abruptly turned and started down the ramp. "Monitor Quamodian!" sang the robot. "Monitor Quamodian, you have been informed!" Andy Quam growled wordlessly in his throat and continued. The robot raised its amplitude deafeningly again. "Monitor Quamodian! We demand to know! What is your intention?" Andy Quam paused just long enough to turn. "What I said!" he shouted defiantly. "I'm going to destroy that thing -- with your permission or without it!" I n the old Plan of Man cave under the Reefer's bill, the hot bright cloud of plasma long had dissipated. The womb from which the rogue star had been born was quiet now, no longer fed by the driving energies Cliff Hawk had tapped. But the air still reeked of ionization and burned copper points; the autonomic lighting system flickered unreliably, and the shadows were dark. Where the great bulk of the sleeth had dropped Molly Zaldivar, the pale cloud of stripped electrons that was the rogue hung meditatively over her. It had sent the sleeth away; Molly feared it, and something inside the rogue's stored systems recognized that fear. But the girl lay sobbing on the cold concrete of the floor, and some other "instinct" commanded the rogue to make her more comfortable. Move her. Make her safe , thought the rogue, and hunted among its recently discovered options for a way to do it. At length (some dozens of picoseconds later) it opted for another of its toys, the rusty old handling machine that Hawk had sometimes employed. It was as easy to manipulate as Molly's old electrocar, and slowly and painfully the rogue caused it to crunch on its cleated tracks toward the cave entrance, to come in and approach the recumbent girl. The operation of the handling machine, easy enough in principle, required a certain continuity of operation to which the rogue was not accustomed; its time-response was creepingly slow; its progress over the rock and rubble of the hillside and cave was intolerable. The rogue rested, drank mass from the air and strength from the stone, then rolled on again. The girl scrambled to her hands and knees, staring wildly at the clanking machine. The rogue paused and tried again its exercises in human language. Speaking through the circuits of the machine's radio, it Tasped: "Molly Zaldivar. How can I cause you to love me?" Molly's eyes widened. "Nightmare!" she cried. "Monster! What are you?" Painfully the rogue modulated the radio's circuits to reply. "Why am I... a nightmare? Why do you not love me? I... love you, Molly Zaldivar!" D espairing, the girl rose, tried to flee; but she had left it too long and it was easy for the rogue to reach out with the handling machine's effectors, catch her, draw her back. She shrieked. The rogue paused, considering. It was difficult to comprehend the processes that affected organized matter. Yet the green radiance that flowed around her was suddenly shot with flashes of red which the rogue recognized as -- not "pain," for it had not been able to relate those memories in Cliff Hawk's mind to anything in its own experience; but to a malfunction of some sort, and it was only a step to realize that the malfunction was caused by the harsh grasp of the handling machine on the girl's relatively weak body. The rogue deposited her as gently as it could on the floor of its cab, and methodically analyzed its findings. It was a long process, requiring more than one microsecond; there was much that it had to deduce or interpolate. Even its own actions were not entirely clear to the rogue; it had no well formed referent for the term "love," though it had felt quite strongly that it was the proper operator to describe its relationship to MolIP ly Zaldivar. Casually and quickly it detached a section of itself and entered into the brain and nervous system of Molly Zaldivar, studying as it went, attempting to sort out the damage that had been done. It seemed quite small, the rogue considered; only a few hundred thousand cells were damaged, and a relatively small proportion of them destroyed. It made a few adjustments which had the effect of stopping the efflux of circulatory fluid, rejoining some separated vessels and ligaments and, contented with its work, exited the girl's body and reassembled itself. The girl, aware that something was happening but unable to know what, was very close to hysteria. She fumbled about the floor of the car, pulled herself to the seat, hammered feebly against the windows; orange terror flashed through the radiance that surrounded her, and the sleeth tried to speak to her again: "Why do you struggle, Molly Zaldivar? Why do you not love me?" Molly threw herself back on the seat, with a ragged laugh. "Love? You can't love!" "I do love, Molly Zaldivar. Whyam I a nightmare?" She shuddered, forcing herself to speak. "Why? Because you don't have a right to exist, monster! You are a synthetic intellect. The transflection patterns of your mind were created in a cloud of plasma by Cliff Hawk and the Reefer -- " When she spoke of Cliff Hawk a golden glow lighted her mind's radiance. The rogue said: "I am Cliff Hawk." "You?" The girl caught her breath; she was shaking all over now, half terror, half utter uncomprehending bewilderment. "Cliff is dead! I saw him die." "Yes. Dead. But I am that of Cliff Hawk which survives at all. Cliff Hawk is a member of me. And you must love me." T he girl abandoned herself to a storm of weeping. After some thought, the rogue reentered her mind, sought for and found certain centers it had learned to recognize and caused her to go to sleep. It then paused and considered what it knew about the maintenance of organic masses of organized matter. This was, in truth, very little; but certain peremptory needs were clear. The girl would need protection against the elements and a place to rest. She would need air for combustion, the rogue thought, and observed that this was in adequate supply from the ambient atmosphere; she would need liquid H#O, easily procured nearby. And she would also need metabolizable chemicals of the class it described by the vaguely comprehended label "food." All these matters it determined to deal with. First it opened the door of its cab. Then it sought out and reentered the sleeth, hovering halfstunned and bewildered over the hilltop, and brought it arrowing swiftly back into the tunnel. The sleeth's  great body felt supple and powerful after the clanking paralytic environment of the handling machine; the rogue caused it to soar into the mouth of the tunnel, hurtle down a straightway, round a curve and join the group. It felt joy in the strength of the great muscles, delight in the silent power of its transflection fields, pleasure even in the dreadful radiation that it could evoke from the huge blind eyes. It lifted the girl's sleeping body in the deadly, gentle claws and traced a tightening curve along the tunnel's way, into the mountain and down, until it found a pit that it had not previously observed. The rogue paused, probing the dark space at the bottom of the pit. It found nothing hostile, nothing of organized organic matter. It was, in fact, a long-forgotten base of the scientific establishment of the Plan of Man; the rogue had no notion of what that meant, and less interest. Careful with Molly, holding her cuddled against the great sleek belly of the sleeth, it dropped into the dark, drifting slowly downward past the vertical walls, until it dropped out of darkness into a cold, ghostly light. They were in a huge sphere hollowed in the rock at the base of the hill. Once multiplying neutrons had flashed through and saturated a few kilograms of fissionable metal; the nuclear explosion had blossomed and shrugged tens of thousands of tons of rock away, melting the inner shell and holding it suspended, like a balloon, for long enough for the dome shape to form. As the pressure leaked away the plastic rock hardened, and what was left was this great ball-shaped cave. The pale light came from all about it, especially from a pale cold sun of milky mist that hung at the center of the hollow. A spiral staircase, made of skeletal metal treads and a handrail, wound upward inside a spidery steel tower, from the bottom of the globular cavity's floor to a railed platform half inside that high, pale cloud of opal light. What was the hollow? What was the light? The rogue gave those questions no consideration. Tenderly it set Molly Zaldivar down on the bottom of the hollow and allowed her to waken. To the extent that the non-human intelligence of the rogue was capable of satisfaction, it was now pleased with what it had done. It had removed the person of the oddly attractive organized bit of matter called Molly Zaldivar to a place where it would not be harmed by outside activities, and where its own attempts to establish communication could go on without interference. It was a place whose chemistry, pressure and temperature appeared to be compatible with life, as far as the rogue was able to judge. Of course, the rogue was still comparatively young in time, lacking experience, and even with the absorbed patterns that were all that was left of Cliff Hawk embodied in its own systems it had no very deep understanding of biological chemistry. An attractive feature of the cave, for the rogue,  was the presence of residual ionizing radiation, coming from the surrounding rock, the very atmosphere inside the bubble, above all from that queerly glowing misty cloud of light To the rogue this was a welcome source of energy to be tapped at need. It did not know that to Molly Zaldivar it was a death warrant. IF W hen the girl woke up she cried out, peered wildly around the pit, saw the hovering form of the sleeth and tried to leap up and run away. There was nowhere to run. She slipped on the curving stone, black-stained and slick with seeping water, and lay there for a moment sobbing. The rogue attempted to form patterns of sound to communicate with her. It was difficult. Even using the transflection fields of the sleeth, modulating them as rapidly and preciseas it could, there was no handy substance for it to vibrate; all it could produce from the shaking of the metallic substance of the nearby tower and steps was a harsh metallic scream, incomprehensible to Molly. The rogue was, for some picoseconds, baffled. Its persona, the sleeth, had no vocal chords, no mechanism at all for making signals in air. But the rogue was more than the sleeth. It extended a quick plasma finger and probed the tower itself. There, rustless and fresh as the day it was installed, was a bank of instruments; the rogue hunted among them until it found one that possessed a flexible membrane. It spoke through it: "Molly Zaldivar. You need hot be afraid because I love you." The girl's involuntary scream echoed strangely from the high rounded walls. The rogue floated patiently above her, waiting. Trefhbling and unsteady on the slick slope, she climbed to her feet and stared up at it. With a great effort she whispered: "What are you?" "Cliff Hawk is a part of me. Call me Cliff Hawk." "I can't! What sort of monster are you?" "Monster?" The rogue examined the term carefully, without comprehension. It activated the distant tinny speaker to say: "I am your lover, Molly Zaldivar." The girl's face wrinkled strangely,' but Molly had herself under control' now. She smiled, a cold, white and terrible smile, ghastly in that shadowless light. "My lover!" she croonCd. She paused in thought. "I amJlucky," she said bravely. "What girl ever had so mighty a lover?" The rogue could not recognize near-hysteria. It was puzzlingly aware that the radiance from the organized matter called Molly Zaldivar was not the gentle, warming glow of rose or pearl that it had wanted to evoke; but it knew far too little of human beings to comprehend what Molly was trying to do. In its sleeth body it dropped gently toward her, meeting her as she rose, and allowed her quivering fingers to stroke the fine, dense fur. "If I love you," she whispered tremulously, "will you help me?" Powerful floods of energy thundered through the rogue, mighty and irresistible; it was a species of joy, a sort of elation. The rogue allowed its sleeth body to drop to Molly's feet. "I'll give you everything," it swore through the distant tinny speaker. The girl was trembling violently, but allowed the vast black talons to draw her quivering body against the fur. The rogue sensed her terror and tried to reassure her. "We are safe here, Molly Zaldivar. No enemy can reach us." Her fear did not abate. "# fell in the water," she whispered. "I'm damp And cold..." The rogue made the sleeth's fur warm for her; but still she was afraid. "I'm a human being," she whimpered. "I'll be hungry. TTiirsty. I must have food or I'll die!" From above then the tinny rattle of the overtaxed speaker shouted: "I'll bring all things you need. But we must stay here, where we are safe " The rogue arranged the pit for her comfort, dried the rock with a searing beam from the sleeth's transflection fields, dragged down a cushion from the tower to make her a resting place. It put her shivering body on it and reached into her mind to erase her haunting terror. Presently she slept. T he rogue went foraying in the body of the sleeth. It rose to the top of the pit, squeezed its way through the long passages, climbed into the night. It needed only moments to arrow the score of miles to the nearest human dwelling. It dropped out of the dark onto the little house, crushed a four-legged creature that barked and howled at it, ripped through a wall and seized a refrigerated box filled with human food. The little box in its talons, it dropped again into the side of the mountain and paused to consider. Molly Zaldivar had been in an agony of terror; that much it realized. Why? The rogue, which shared with all intellects the homomorphic trait of considering itself the proper matrix on which all other creatures should be modeled, could not believe that it was its own self which frightened her; no doubt it was its proxy, the sleeth. From the dim stirrings of Cliff Hawk's mind it realized that those great blind eyes, those vengeful talons were likely to be frightening to smaller creatures. It determined to leave the sleeth and visit her in another form. Under the lip of the cave, where the rogue had abandoned it, the hulk of the robot lay tossed aside. The rogue entered into it, flexed its transcience fields, lifted it into space and in it, bearing the refrigerated box of food, retraced the long winding route, sank down through the frozen light of that misty opal sun... Molly was awake. The rogue, wearing the egg-shaped body of the robot, brought itself up sharply and hung there just out of sight, the food box dangling from its effectors. Molly was no longer stretched out asleep on the cushions it had brought for her. She was in the spidery metal tower, crouched before the bright, ancient control panel,, fumbling frantically with the radio. The rogue listened through the ears of the robot: "Calling Monitor Quamodian!" the girl whimpered. "Oh, please! And! Anyone!" The rogue knew that the radio was dead; it hung there, letting her speak. "Molly Zaldivar calling Monitor Quamodian! Andy, please listen. I'm trapped in a cave. That thing -- the rogue star, whatever it is -- has me trapped here, because it says... it says it loves me! And it won't let me go." IF Her head fell forward, her hand still on the useless switch of the radio. She sobbed. "Oh, please help me. It's a hateful, horrible thing -- a monster... I -- I tried to deceive it, to make it let me go by pretending to -- to like it. But it won't..." The rogue in the persona of the broken transcience robot, sank slowly toward her, burdened with the box of food that it had brought for her. It was struggling in its complex mind with concepts for which it had no names, and little understanding. Betrayal . Anger. Revenge. T he Reefer's deepset eyes glowed like a . robot's plasma patch. "Make this thing move, Quamodian!" he roared. "I want that critter for my trophy room!" Andy Quam hissed in annoyance, "Be still, Reefer! I'm not interested in your game collection. It's Molly Zaldivar's life that concerns me." He bent to the panel of his flyer. He was indeed making it move, as fast as he could, cutting out the autonomic pilot circuits and racing the craft along on manual override. It was a flimsy enough bolt to hurl at a creature that ranked with stars for majesty and might -- a simple atmosphere flyer, with a few puny transflection beams that could be used as weapons. But it was all he had. They arrowed through the chill morning air, along the road toward the misty blue ridge. Over the Reefer's hill a smudge of smoke still lifted and wandered away with the wind. Quamodian's eyes were on it when his transceiver clicked into life For a moment the speakers hummed and crackled, but there was no voice Andy Quam scowled with annoyance and leaned to listen. "What is it?" growled the Reefer, brows knotted under their blond tangle of hair. "I don't know," said Andy Quam. "Nothing. Listen." But there was no voice, only the questing carrier sounds. For a moment Andy Quam thought it might have been Molly, and the thought lit his mind with a living image of her red-glinting hair, her haunting oval face, her laughing eyes. But it was not her voice that came from the speaker. Something was trying to talk to him. An uncanny voice -- slow, toneless, laborious. It chilled him with alarm. "What's that?" demanded the Reefer again. "Quamodian, what are you doing" "Be still!" Andy Quam touched the dial, trying to bring the sound in more clearly. It was not a robot's clipped and penetrating whine. It lacked the mechanical precision of an automatic translator. The scattered sounds he made out were not from the universal signal-system of the intergalactic society. They were EarthEnglish. Yet they were somehow alien, monstrouslyinhuman. It was not a message; it was more like some great, tortured soliloquy, a voice that rambled on and on, brokenly and angrily. The distorted and intermittent signal had no clear message, but it filled Andy Quam with fear. Climbing slightly, he pushed the flyer to transsonic speed. The narrow black ribbon of road unreeled. Higher hills flashed beneath him. A building flickered. The leaning smudge of smoke was a momentary blur. Something crept along the road below him. The Reefer caught Andy Quam's shoulder. "It's that machine!" he bellowed. "An old Plan of Man earthmover -- the rogue's using it. Blast it, man! Drive him out into the open!" Quamodian shrugged the great paw off his arm and bent to stare down at the road. It was huge and clumsy, lumbering ponderously toward the crest of the ridge on grotesque old caterpillar tracks. It waved claw-ended handling forks around its angular, orange-painted cab. "Flyer," ordered Andy Quam, "pot that thing for me." There was a faint deep hiss of departing missiles as, obediently, the flyer flung out a burst of landing flares at the machine. They were not meant as weapons, but they would do a weapon's work. They missed, stitching a row of pits across the pavement in front of the machine. "Sorry, Monitor Quamodian," the flyer apologized mournfully. "I'm not really designed for this sort of work." "Get its tracks!" Quamodian ordered. "Use all the flares if you have to -- stop it!" The machine plowed recklessly through the shower of flame. Quamodian spun the flyer around, returned it, passing low over the machine; a new spray of flame darted out toward it, struck it, and clung. The machine slid sidewise, seeming to float on that pool of fire, and Andy Quam saw a broken track flap wildly. The machine stopped. At a word, the flyer took over automatic control and hovered; the two men looked down. The machine lay, silent and broken, on the pitted road, while choking fumes rose from the remnants of the flares. Andy Quam turned to the Reefer and demanded: "I've shot it up for you. It doesn't seem to have accomplished a thing. Now what?" "Now go on!" roared the Reefer. "You've just killed one of the rogue's tools, we haven't touched the beast itself yet. Go on and dig it out!" Quamodian shrugged, was about to order the flyer on... Then disaster struck. T he klaxon hooted. Red signals blossomed in holographic solidity on the panel. The bubble marker circled a flying object, coming low and fast from the woods behind. It shone with a pale but queerly painful greenish radiation. "It is the space creature called the sleeth, Monitor Quamodian," reported the flyer. "Indications are that it is under the control of the intellectic being you seek." The Reefer was briefer and more furious: 'That's my critter!" he howled. "Careful! It can eat up a dozen like us any day!" "Careful!" growled Andreas Quamodian. "Let your animal be careful! Flyer, got any flares left?" 'Two racks, Monitor Quamodian," the machine reported. "Smash that thing with them!" The jet leaped away -- but, queerly, the flares failed to detonate. Their tracer trails ended in faint red sparks near the oncoming object "The sleeth's blanketing them, " snarled the Reefer. "You'll have to do better than that!" "Fire what's left!" shouted Andy Quam, and slapped down the manu al override, took control of the little flyer's transactor beams. He spun them into high, reached out with their pale, deadly fingers toward the sleeth, which was growing huge before him, the second flight of flares dimming to darkness just like the first. A sudden lurch threw him against the control panel. "Mal-function, Monitor Qua-modian," the flyer jerked out. "Pow-er fail-ure -- " The propulsion field was failing even as the reaching transflection beams were paling and dying. The greenish glow of the sleeth brightened suddenly; the flyer's klaxon tried to blare, succeeded in rattling a crash alert. "Hold on!" bawled Quamodian. "We're going to hit -- " And they did; they hit hard, the emergency shields failing to function, hard enough to jolt men like dolls in a coconut shy, struck by a thrown ball. The sleeth roared over them and halted. It was a terrifying sight, horsesized, catlike, tapered muscles bulging under the sleek black fur. Blazing green, enormous and cold, its eyes bulged blindly out at them. The Reefer pulled himself together and croaked. "They -- they can kill us, Quamodian. Those eyes!" IF Quamodian didn't need the warning. There was something in those eyes that was reaching into his mind freezing his will, icing his spine and muscles. He struggled to make his limbs obey him, and reached for the little hand weapon he kept under the seat of the flyer; but the icy, penetrating numbness had gone too far. He touched the gun, almost caught it, dropped it and sent it skittering across the tipped floor of the flyer; and the sleeth hung there, staring blindly down through the faint shimmer of its transflection field, just touching a fallen tree with one horrendous claw... The great blind eyes seemed suddenly smaller. The frightful currents of cold that had drenched Andy Quam's body seemed somehow to recede. He could not move, he was not his own master again; but at least, he thought, he was not dying helplessly any more; for some reason the creature had halted the poisonous flow of radiation that had drained the flyer's power banks and nearly drained their lives. T he Reefer gasped hoarsely: "Knew it! Knew it couldn't kill its master -- " And incredibly, haltingly that big yellow-haired bear of a man was forcing himself to stand erect, lurching with agonizing slowness to the door, dropping to the erect again, next to the great sleek bulk of the creature from space. And the forgotten radio speaker of the flyer abruptly rattled harshly and spoke: "Go away, Quamodian, I give you your life -- but go!" It was the voice he had heard before, inhuman, unalive, terrifying. Andy Quam fell back, finally drained of the last of his strength. He saw the great talons of the sleeth curve protectingly around the Reefer, clasp him and hold him; saw the great creature surge into the air and away, carrying the Reefer as it disappeared with fantastic speed toward the gap in the hills where the faint smudge of smoke still hung. And then he felt his flyer rock slightly, twitch, and then slowly and painfully lift itself into the sky. It was not at his order that it flew, but its destination was not in question. It rose to a few hundred feet, turned and headed back for the town. The hunters had failed. One was now himself a captive, being borne at transsonic speeds toward the cave where the rogue flexed its new powers, practiced at its new repertory of emotions and grew. One was helplessly returning the way he had come. And the girl they had tried to rescue was farther from Andy Quam's help than the farthest star. Of one thing he was sure: He had been defeated. His mere human strength had not even sufficed to get him past the rogue's puppet, the sleeth. He would have no chance against the might of the rogue itself. T he rogue, wearing the borrowed body of the robot inspector, sank slowly through the cold opal light of the great bubble under the earth. The refrigerated box of food, held lightly in its transflection fields, seemed suddenly too heavy to carry, and the rogue let it drop. It crashed to the seep-stained floor in a thunder that rolled around the cavern, and split open, the little parnoise startled Molly Zaldivar. She looked up at the robot form, her face shocked and hollowed in that icy, lifeless light. A scream blazed through the echoing thunder. For a moment, seeing the gleaming black egg-shaped body of the robot settling toward her, Molly had had the wild hope that it was the familiar robot inspector from the Starchurch, somehow come to rescue her, perhaps with Andy Quam right behind. But the hope did not last long enough even to show in the terror on her face. She got up stiffly, abandoning the useless radio, and climbed slowly down the spiral steps toward the bottom of the rock bubble. The sweet high voice of the robot, modulated by the unpracticed mind of the rogue, spoke to her: "Molly Zaldivar. Why did you speak falsely to me?" She did not answer. There was a pause, while the rogue pondered its conflicting impulses. "I will not harm you," it droned at last. "You need not be afraid... because I love you, Molly Zaldivar." Her face twisted, and she lifted her hands to the floating robot. "If you love me, won't you let me go?" she cried. "Because I love you... I can never let you go." She shouted with all her strength: "Then I hate you, monster!" Her voice was hoarse and despairing; despairing, too, was the angry green radiance that surrounded her in the sight of the rogue, colors and patterns that spoke to him of fury. It left her standing here and soared away, wheeling around the spidery tower. Suddenly it felt the clothing of the robot that it wore confining; it slipped out, left the robot hanging mindlessly on its transflection fields and, once more a nearly invisible cloud of stripped electrons, perched on the metal rails just below the pale, milky mist of light that hung in the center of the sphere. It spoke to her through the robot: "Molly Zaldivar, I am strong and you are weak. Your hatred cannot harm me. True?" She shook her head without words, utterly weary. "But I will not harm you... if I can avoid it, Molly Zaldivar. We will stay here... until you love me." "Then I'll die here," she said tonelessly. The rogue pondered the problem for many nanoseconds. It said at last, "Then I shall absorb you as you die. You will be a member of me, like Cliff Hawk." T he girl said, weakly, fearfully then with gathering rage: "Oh please -- you mustn't! You say you love me -- heaven knows what you mean by that! -- but if it means anything at all to you, you must let me go." "Never, Molly Zaldivar." "You can't keep me!" "I can, Molly Zaldivar. I am stronger than you." She shrieked: "But there are things IF which are stronger! Almalik! AlmaUk is stronger than you. And he will find you yet, even hiding here." The rogue searched its memory patterns for a referent for the term "Almalik." Almost hesitantly it said, "What is 'Almalik'?" "Almalik is the spokesmen star for Cygnus. Almalik commands multitudes -- fusorians and men, robots and stars. His multitudes will find you, here or anywhere. And even if you were as strong as Almalik, you are all alone while he has legions!" The rogue's plasma rippled in thought "I have met Almalik's robot" it said at last "It is now a member of me." "One robot! Almalik owns tens of thousands." The rogue did not reply. Thoughtfully it clung to the metallic rail of the cryptic old device, studying the girl. She was exhausted now, the green fire of her fury dying, waiting for a move from the rogue. To the rogue, painfully learning the uses of those human qualities called emotions, MoOy Zaldivar was a most confusing stimulus. There was enough of the residual identity of Cliff Hawk in the rogue to give force and direction to its feelings about Molly; it possessed attitude sets which could have been called "pity" or "love." The rogue recognized that the girl was small, and weak, and mortal and afraid; it even felt some sort of impulse to ease her wild terror, heal her pain and rage. It simply had no effectors capable of the job. At the same time k recognized that in a sense she represented a threat The polarization of the other human, Andreas Quamodian, toward her was certain to produce an attempt on his part to interfere again. The rogue did not estimate that the attempt would be successful, but it might be an annoyance; and it took the precaution of detaching some parts of its attention to invest its creatures the sleeth and the handling m ach ine , deploying them as scouts between Wisdom Creek and the mountains. But there were puzzles the rogue could not solve. T he answers to some of them were far from this cave. It detached itself from its high iron perch in the opal mist and left the girl, watching and trembling. The rogue sent its awareness out into the universe. It sensed the tangle of dark hills above the bubblecave, stretched, expanded and encompassed cubic miles of space with its consciousness. It observed the bright anger and fear of the human creatures from whom it had stolen the box of food, studied the sleeping presence of Andreas Quamodian, observed the deployment of its own tools, the sleeth and the machine; and it reached farther still. It reached out until it grasped the roundness of the planet Earth, turning between its bare moon and the red, swelling sun, the sun that had struck at the rogue in those first moments of its existence. The star was still angry, still roiled and troubled. The rogue studied it carefully, but avoided reaching out to it; it had not been harmed by that triple bob of energy that had been the sun's riposte, but it did not consider it advisable to provoke another. The rogue expanded again, reached out its perceptions to the stars. It found them to be suns like this sun, single, coupled, multiple, burning all across the dust and darkness of the galaxy -- some tinier than Earth's cold moon, some mightier than Earth's sullen sun. Even beyond the stars it peered, to find a bleak and empty vastness of infinite space and cruel cold. Then in the eternal floods of blackness it perceived the glowing, tiny lights of other galaxies. Ill-formed and unfearing, the rogue studied the numbers and varieties of galaxies for a time, then stored them in its memory and returned to nearer stars. Amalik. It was time for the rogue to probe into the meaning of the term "Almalik." There was no problem in finding Almalik; in the captured impulses of the robot inspector was a clear understanding of where Almalik lay in space, and the rogue turned its attention there. And there was the might of Almalik, the splendor of his thirteen suns, all greater than the small Earth-star that had tried to destroy the rogue. It counted them, studied their spin, tasted the energies they hurled into the void. Six splendid double stars arranged in hierarchically greater doubles; one single sun with many wheeling planets. The thirteen suns radiated many colors in the optical bands of energies, but the rogue also saw that they shared a common golden glow of unity... And Almalik felt the rogue's fleeting touch. Hello, little one . Almalik did not speak. Least of all did he speak in words; but he sent a signal which was greeting and wry pity at once. The signal was powerful but soundless, serene and slow. The rogue listened impassively, waiting for more. Little one, we have been looking for you . The silent voice was mightier than thunder, gentle as -- what? The rogue had only an imperfect analogy: gentle as love. We have received information about you. You have destroyed patterns we cherish. You have damaged entities who were part of us. Little one, what do you wish? The rogue considered the question for some time. It framed an answer with difficulty: Knowledge . Experience. And then, after a pause, it added, Everything. The multiple suns of Almalik glowed serenely golden; it was almost like a smile. From behind the round Earth, behind the many thousand stars and dust clouds, the signal came: Knowledge you may have. Ask a question. The rogue asked it at once: Why will you destroy me? The soundless voice was cool, aloof, immeasurably sure. Little one , we cannot destroy you or any sentient thing. Green anger filled the rogue. It was a contradiction, Almalik's statement opposed to Molly Zaldivar's. It had not known of the existence of lies until Molly Zaldivar told it she loved it, then showed she did not. Now it knew of lies, but little of mortal error; the contradiction seemIF ed to mean a lie: a lie meant enmity. Red hatred froze the rogue. Sudden fury shook its plasma violently. It dropped from its great, tenuous vantage point, contracted to a swirl of luminescence, sank back into the mountain just as the planet was turning that part of its surface to the angry rising sun. The splendid suns of Almalik were gone. For a while. T he rogue floated down to Molly Zaldivar. In the high, singing voice of the robot it cried: "We are leaving this place. Almalik has lied to me. I hate him now." She lay spent and shuddering on the torn cushions, staring at the rogue. It said: "I hate Almalik. Almalik thinks me small and helpless, and will destroy me if he can. But I am growing. I will grow still more. I will grow until I am mightier than Almalik." White and haggard in the dead opal light from the ancient cloud, the girFs face had no expression. She lay hopeless and uncaring, waiting for what the rogue had to say. "I shall destroy Almalik," it sang in the robot's clear whine. "Then you will love me, Molly Zaldivar. You must. Or I will destroy you too." Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence in science-fiction writing. Every story appearing in the magazines Galaxy and If in issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected is intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and If. Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines in making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month after the December issues appear. Dear Editor: Your March editorial is a all-toarms for the old loyal. It evokes questions beyond its central target. For many years science fiction provided a genre for the imaginative, sophisticated amateur, be he physicist, biologist or anthropologist. In this perspective a new wave of stylistic experimentation does seem a threat. That fresh outlook of the talented amateur might be replaced by the bag of tricks belonging to the less imaginative but more style conscious professional. But is this an illusory battle? We may be Don Quixotes, you and I. Perhaps the grand old days are gone. Five years ago I finally put science fiction aside -- gone were the days of the old If magazine; the genre had become totally engulfed by stale gimmickry. If all we have are a few rehashed space operas there is nothing to be lost by experimentation -- let competent professionals usurp the field from tired plot-line permutaters. But evidently I am way behind. There is the new If. Not quite up to par perhaps, yet showing a spark: Mr. Redd and perhaps Mr. Kyle. Your editorial shows the spirit but your magazine does not really back you up. Maybe it is the times. Today's college professor is more active in the world. Perhaps he doesn't have the time to sit back and wonder what would happen if... -- Thomas E. Hukari, # University Way, Seattle, Washington.    Dear Editor : rather depends on which way you think is up, doesn't it? All the same, I enjoyed Lin Carter's article on Australian fandom. Believe me, nothing anywhere near as sensible (or entertaining) has appeared in the Australian press on the subject -- and lately we have suffered from a rash of journalists "discovering" us. An excellent article, yes, but just a few unfortunate omissions -- which, with your indulgence, sir, I would like to rectify. All credit, certainly, to John Foyster for his major role in the current renascence here. Fortunately for us, John did not leave for England as planned: instead he has become a father. Captain A. Bertram Chandler is not exactly a ship's officer: he is master of the mv Pateena , which plies between Sydney and Hobart (and a really nice bloke, too). Three people who, in various ways, are very much part of the Australian sf scene are Lee Harding, Don Tuck, and Graham Stone. Lee Harding is certainly one of our best young writers; over the last seven years he has been published steadily in England and most European countries, and he is currently writing story after story of really firstclass quality. A name to watch. Don Tuck is Australia's solitary Hugo winner (though I understand a certain local fanzine went close to it this year). Don lives on the glorious isle of Tasmania (Australia is off the coast of Tasmania) cund is one of the world's best sf bibliographers. Graham Stone, once perhaps Australia's best-known fan, has now retired from the mainstream of fandom, but still runs the Australian SF Association, which is devoted to bibliography. Over Easter # there will be a SF Conference in Melbourne, and in # the Eighth Australian Convention. There are moves to organize a club in Sydney, and interest seems to be increasing everywhere. Some are even suggesting a World Convention here. Stranger things have happened... -- John Bangsund, Editor, Australian Science Fiction Review , #I Wilson Street, Femtree Gully, Victoria #, Australia.    Dear Editor: Ye gods! I just finished the February issue of If and I think I'm going to cry. Not that the magazine wasn't good, quite the contrary. The Petrified World is one of the best Sheckley stories I've read, and that is saying something. Maybe I shouldn't be discouraged by people writing letters in praise of poor taste, but every now and then after spending an enjoyable hour-and-a-half on your magazine I wonder if I should go on and read tiie Hue and Cry. And then I always read it, and right in step with the title, I "Fume and Cry". -- David T. Malone, # Long Ridge Road, Stamford, Connecticut.    Dear Editor: To Arthur C. Clarke's recent query on the Wellsian tale, "The Anticipator," the readers' response was predictably immediate and accurate. Now I wonder if your audience could help me: a fellow sci-fi fan has interested me in a novel whose title and author neither of us knows. The book concerns a man of tomorrow called Horn, wrongly branded a criminal, who traverses the Universe in a system of giant tubes in hopes of exonerating himself. And throughout the tale drifts an exotic philosophy, supposedly not of this world, but which finally turns out to be the reflections of an #-yearold Oriental! (Or so my friend sez -- shades of Fu Manchu!) Sounds like a cross between Rohmer and Brackett but I dunno. Can any Iffer identify this story? And oh, yes... let me be the we going to get some new Heinlein stories? Don't tell me the Master's built his new house as a tesseract, and an earthquake -- no, can't be. Also, how about a new Pohl story? And I don't mean fashion commentary! -- Rick Norwood, # Ferguson Drive, Ashland, Kentucky #.  We asked Heinlein that ourselves the other week, visiting his new (and roughly # completed) home in California. He smiled blandly and answered not. But we continue to have hope. For Heinlein, this is. For Pohl, not so much hope; that fellow keeps pretending, he's too busy editing to write, except when he gets somebody else to do the work, as in Rogue Star. -- Editor. Do About Vietnam? Assume you are being asked for advice. Assume the people who ask you are the President of the United States, the Congress, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- anyone andor everyone who has any decision-making authority concerning American involvement in Vietnam. Assume they want one suggestion from you...  and assume they will follow it. What would you tell them to do? Don't tell them. Tell us. We will take the most provocative and seemingly productive suggestions received, submit them to problemsolving analysis, and present the results in a forthcoming issue of Galaxy . The Rules #. Anyone is eligible to enter, and may submit as many entries as he likes. Each entry must be on a separate sheet of paper, one side only, and include your name and address. All entries will become the property of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Please limit yourself to a maximum of # words for each entry, preferably In the form of (a) your suggestion, (b) followed, if you wish, by a statement of why you think it worth doing. #. Suggestions may be on any area of American Involvement in Vietnam -- ways of winning the war, ways of bringing about a peaceful settlement, whatever you think would be of value. #. Five prizes of # each will be awarded to those entries which, in the opinion of the fudges, best deserve them.' In the event of duplicate suggestions, the first entries received will get the prize. Judges will consist of, or be appointed by, the Editors of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Winners will be notified by mall, and their names will be published In a forthcoming issue of this magazine. #. Send your entries tot "What Would You Do About Vietnam?", Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. Entries must be received by July #th, #, to be eligible for prizes. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! flur rrr # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." k. I  ) o o  OO O O ( t O O O v! O O O IJ O O O O O i J". t . No. GX-# by Lynd Ward No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp The designs shown above are the only ones we offerl We've heard the sad story over and over at science-fiction meetings. Some reader was right in the middle of one of our award-winning serials when his magazine dealer goofed, and he missed an issue. Or he found the stand all sold out and  never read the novelette every other fan is raving about now. Naturally, nobody wants to miss an issue of IF -- the magazine that won the Hugo as Best in the field at the past two World Science Fiction Conventions. And surely nobody will want to miss the great stories and brand new features we are already scheduling for the future issue of IF. We try to make sure there are enough copies for every reader,  t but we can't guarantee that you won't miss an issue, unfortunately. Only you can do that. And it's really quite simple and will even save you money. Just-fill in the coupon below -- or if you hate to mutilate the magazine, write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and mail it today! Then nobody will pity you, because you'll be sure of getting every vital issue of IF! #I Hudson Street New York, New York I #I # Yes, start my subscription to Worlds of If right away. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues for # n # issues for I #  # issues for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside of the Western Hemisphere add # per year for postage. Please check whether  new or  renewal THANK YOU... We're grateful to all the science-fiction fans who gave our publications a clean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at the # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even more grateful to the many loyal readers who have made it possible for both on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're debetter in the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # Issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #I .#I Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Vol. IB, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Piers Anthony by A. Bertram Chandler by D. M. Melton by Mary Urhausen by E. G. Von Wald by Roger Zelazny by Larry Tritten by H. L. Gold by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #' #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico! South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere .#. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights. Including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Guest Editorial I f I had made my way into professional writing and editing via fandom, perhaps I would have more sympathy for Isaac Asimov's well and simply written: "Science fiction tends to be lacking in, science these days... I disapprove... I think science fiction isn't really fiction if it lacks science"... and Sam Moskowitz's eldritch prose poem: "It is to be hoped that these examples (three stories of the early #'s) may make a significant enough impression so as to bring about not a substitution of this type of story for what is being written today, but n incorporation of the elements they contain into the main body of modem science fiction." These words appeared in the August # issue of Galaxy. If you were its editor, as I was for its first #I years, you would learn to translate these mild-seeming requests into fanese: "Science fiction ain't got no more sensa wonda no more!" In short, let's have stories like those of the #'s. I wasn't a fan then. I was one of the writers of that period. And I can tell you that most of what others and I wrote then was pretty dreadful. Want a typical specimen? Here is part of a footnote from my first published story, following two solid pages of pseudo-scientific dialogue: "Lanse placed the masses of the two suns as being nearly equal. Then, since we know that the velocity of our sun was # miles per second before collision, and # after, and the masses of the stars equal, we can use the following formula to find an indication to the result. "Let mj and m # equal the masses of the two stars; Vj and V the respective velocities before collision; Uj and U # the corresponding velocities after collision: miVim # V #  niiUim # U # (where the velocities of the sun are known before and after collision, and the masses assumed to be equal). "Consequently, the other star now travels at # mps in the opposite direction from which it came; this we know because, in collisions of perfectly elastic bodies, the momentum before collision equals momentum after collision. "The intervening hyperspace is accountable for the lack of a true catastrophe, and the terrific strain the formula indicates when the sun was reversed in its path, for the fourth-dimensional thrust." I sn't that awful? Worse yet, I had everything that ever lived, was living or would live all occupying the earth at the same time -- which was typical of almost all these cosmic stories. And worse still, nobody, from the editor on down to the young Isaac of those days, noticed my cosmic error: It was space that got warped, not hyperspace -- whatever, if anything, that may turn out to be. Dr. Asimov notes that jt is almost impossible to make a good living out at the special mail order price. I understand I can return the purchase for full refund if I am unsatisfied. Name Address The Wonder Worker. One Drop Neutralizes Any Odor in a # Cu. Ft. Area For About # Hours The quickest -- lasting most thorough -- most economical -- room deodorizer available. Send .# City State Zone of science fiction alone. He omits the fact that of the tens of thousands of writers in this country, only a tiny percentage earns # or more a year by writing of any kind. One fifth of that amount in the #'s was a very good living. I can think of at least a dozen then and more now who qualify as full-time s-f writers making a good living. A dozen or two may not seem like much, but consider the fact that no more than a hundred or so writers supply all the s.f. at a given time. What he should have said is that it's hard to earn a living by writing. To get back to what these two distinguished men, one a professional fan and the other an ex-fan professional, are asking for: Every editor in those primitive days demanded -- and got -- such story-stoppers as my footnote, which made s.f. so hard to write and harder to read. We plundered college textbooks, newspapers, magazines for springboards, so that whenever we wrote, for example a time-travel story, we threw in the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction just as a starter, then added the latest thinking on the matter -- all of it such ho-ho-hokum as time being a stream that can be ridden up, down or sideways, or film footage that one could run forward or backward, or a spiral that could be ascended or descended, or -- isn't that enough? If you can't imagine going through bunk like that every last time you started reading a story, try whole issues of those magazines. Not a random story here and there, but whole issues, just as you would have bought and read them then. But besides being expensive, it's not necessary. You can find the old formula of hero vs villain in cosmic crime, cosmic disasters, cosmic monsters from everywhere in the movies and TV of today, which follow the editorial requirements of the #'s as if there were no better, more modern ones. Of course there were good s.f. stories then, just as there are good s.f. movies now, but the proportion of good to bad is pitiful and discouraging. At least half of the reason is the witless demand for "explanations" -- as if the audience on the author's say-so provided he offers a good story. Not only do these "explanations" hold up the action, they almost inevitably force something cosmic on the author. T here, I've stated my case against the #'s. Now let me state my case for the # 's, using the issue that bore the accusations of my esteemed adversaries: Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg: "A late Cambrian landscape," said Barrett quietly. "This would be a geologist's dream, except that geologrists don't tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front is the Appalachian Geosyncline. It's a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we've got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we've got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there's the Cordilleran Geosyncline, that's going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday." From Ginny Wrapped in the Sun by R. A. Lafferty: "Yes, I've got a multidimensional daughter, Minden. Also a neighbor who is either deep or murky. You keep feeding me snatches of that paper of yours so IF I suppose that you want to excite my curiosity about it. And the title -- The Contingent Mutation. What is? Who is?" "We are, Dismas. We are contingent, conditional, temporary, makeshift and improbable in our species... The proposition of my paper is that man is descended, recently and by incredible mutation, from the most impossible of ancestors, Xauenthropus or Xauen Man. The answer of that descent scares me." "Minden, are you out of your mind? Where is the descent? Where is the mutation?... One look at Xauen, and everybody saw instantly that the Neanderthals and Grimaldi and Cro-Magnon were all close cousins of the same species -- ourselves. They were the template, the master key. They unriddled every riddle. We saw why the chin or lack of chin was only a racial characteristic. We saw it all. There is nothing to distinguish the Xauens from ourselves, except that their adults 'were badly made ganglers, and probably unhealthy. The Xauens are modem men. They are ourselves." The non-fact article Travelers Guide to MegaHouston, by H. H. Hollis, could be quoted from end to end, from Architecture to Zoology, including air-conditioning innovations, handling of smog and pollution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Houston Astrodome to MegaHouston. From The Being in the Tank by Ted Thomas: "Joe Beam said, 'An ammonia and hydrazine environment below zero plus a gamma photon dosage rate of better than # megarands per hour, and there he stands like he's admiring Niagara Falls. What is that thing?' Kramer, Beam's chief assistant, spoke up. 'Don't forget the pressure. That atmosphere in there is down to something like mercury. Why doesn't he explode?' " From The Great Stupids by Miriam Allen deFord: "The year #: that was when suddenly every human being in the world under # years of age became completely unable to reason. And only Daniel Vollard knew why"... a proposition that Miss deFord answers with a slight bow to chemistry and sure knowledge of physiopsychology. From To Outlive Eternity by Poul Anderson: "The speed of light can be approached, but nobody possessing rest mass can quite attain it. Smaller and smaller grew the increments of velocity by which Leonora Christene neared that impossible ultimate. Thus it might have seemed that the universe which her crew observed could not be distorted further. Aberration could, at most, displace a star #; Doppler effect might infinitely redden the light from astern, but could only double the frequency of light ahead. But there was no limit on tau, and that was the measure of change in perceived space and experienced time. Accordingly, there was no limit to the violet shift either; and the cosmos fore and aft could shrink toward a zero thickness wherein all the galaxies were crowded." T he remarkable thing about these excerpts is that they are not a bit remarkable. They all come from the very same issue in which Asimov and Moskowitz made their conditioned-reflex pleas. What am I proving? That Moskowitz and Asimov and present-day science fiction. Pay them no heed. Modem s.f. is better was simple compared to Entrance ExamsI H e entered the booth when his turn came and waited somewhat apprehensively for it to perform. The panel behind shut him in and ground tight. The interior was dark and unbearably hot, making sweat break out and stream down his body. Then the temperature dropped so precipitously that the moisture crystallized upon his skin and flaked away with the violence of his shivering. The air grew thick and bitter, then gaspingly rare. Light blazed, then faded into impenetrable black. A complete sonic spectrum of noise smote him, followed by crushing silence. His nose reacted to a gamut of irritation. He sneezed. Abruptly it was spring on a clover hillside, waft of nectar and hum of bumblebee. The air was refreshingly brisk. The booth had zeroed in on his metabolism. "Ideotity?" a deceptively feminine voice inquired from nowhere, and a sign fished with the word printed in italics, English. clearly, remembering his instructions. "I am a male mammalian biped evolved on planet Earth. I am applying for admission to the School of Prosthodontics as an initiate of the appropriate level." After a pause the booth replied sweetly: "Misinformation. You are a quadruped." quickly. "I am evolved from quadruped." He spread his hands and touched the wall. 'Technically tetrapod, anterior limbs no longer employed for locomotion. Digits possess sensitivity, dexterity -- " "Noted." But before he could breathe relief, it had another objection: "Earth planet has not yet achieved galactic accreditation. Application invalid." "I have been sponsored by the Dental League of Electrolus," he said. He saw already how far he would have gotten without that potent endorsement. "Verified. Provisional application granted. Probability of acceptance after preliminary investigation: twenty-one per cent Fee: Thirteen thousand, two hundred five dollars, four cents, seven mills, payable immediately." "Agreed," he said, appalled at both the machine's efficiency in adapting to his language and conventions and the cost of application. He knew that the fee covered only the seventy-hour investigation of his credentials; if finally admitted as a student, he would have to pay another fee of as much as a huinlred thousand dollars for the first term. If rejected, he would get no rebate. His nsor, Electrolus, was paying for it, finding it expedient to ship him here rather than to keep him where his presence might be an embarrassment. Electrolus did not want him on hand to give further advice that might show up the oversights of its own practioners. I f be failed to gain admission, there would be no consequence -- except that his chance to really improve himself would be gone. He could never afford training at the University on his own; even if the sponsorship requirement should be waived. He had traveled all over the galaxy since unexpectedly leaving Earth, solving alien dental problems by luck and approximation, but he was not the type of man to relish such uncertainties. He had to have advanced training. Even so, he hoped that what the university had to offer was worth it. Over thirteen thousand dollars had already been drained from the Electrolus account here by his verbal agreement -- for a twenty-one per cent probability of acceptance! "Present your anterior limb, buccal surface forward." He put out his left hand again, deciding that buccal in this context equated with the back of the hand. He was nervous in spite of the assurance he had been given that this Hrocess was harmless. A mist apIF peared around it, puffed and vanish ed, leaving an inidescent band clasped around, or perhaps bonded into, the skin of his wrist The opposite side of the booth opened, and he stepped into a lighted corridor. He held up his hand and saw that the left of it was bright while the right was dead This remained even when be twisted his wrist, the glow independent of his motion. He proceeded left. At the end of the passage was a row of elevators. Other creatures of diverse proportions moved toward these, guided by glows on their appendages. His own guided him to a particular unit. Its panel was open, and he entered. The door closed as he took hold of the supportive bars. The unit moved, not up or down as he had expected, but backwards. He clung desperately to the support as the fierce acceleration hurled him at the door. There was something like a porthole in the side through which he could make out racing lights and darknesses. If these were stationary sources of contrast, his velocity was phenomenal. His stomach jumped as the vehicle dipped and tilted; then it was plummeting down as though dropped from a cliff. amusement park he had visited as a child on Earth; there had been a ride through the dark something like this. He was sure that the transport system of the university had not been designed for thrills, however; it merely reflected the fact that there was a long way to go and many others in line. The elevators would not function at all for any creature not wearing University identification. Established galactics took such things in stride without even noticing. F inally it decelerated and stopped. The door opened, and he stepped dizzily into his residence for the duration, suppressing incipient motion-sickness.  The apartment was attractive enough. The air was sweet, the light moderate, the temperature comfortable. Earthlike vines decorated the trellises, and couches fit for humanoids were placed against the walls. In the center of the main room stood a handsome but mysterious device. Something emerged from an alcove. It was a creature resembling an Oversized pincushion with legs, one of which sported the ubiquitous iridescent band. It honked. "Greetings, roommate," a speaker from the central artifact said. Dillingham realized that it was a multiple-dialect translator. "How do you do," he said. The translator honked, and the pincushion came all the way into the room. "I am from no equivalent term," it said in tootles. until he realized that the confusion was the translator's fault. There was no name in English for Pincushion's planet, since Earth knew little of galactic geography and nothing of interspecies commerce. "Substitute 'Pincushion' for the missing term," he advised the machine, "and make the same kind of adjustment for any of my terms which may not be renderable into Pincushion's dialect." He turned to the creature. "I am from Erth. I presume you are also here to make application for admittance to the School of Prosthodontics?" The translator honked, once. Dilfingham waited, but that was all. Pincushion honked. "Yes, of course. I'm sure all beings assigned to this dormitory are # gravity, oxygen-imbibing ambulators applying as students. The administration is very careful to group compatible species." Apparently a single honk could convey a paragraph. Perhaps there were frequencies he couldn't hear. Then again, it might be the inefficiency of his own tongue. "I'm new to all this," he admitted. "I know very little of the ways of the galaxy, or what is expected of me here." "I'll be happy to show you around," Pincushion said. "My planet has been sending students here for, well, not a long time, but several centuries. We even have a couple of instructors here, at the lower levels." There was a note of pride in the rendition. "Maybe one of these millennia we'll manage to place a supervisor." the prestige that would carry. II A t that moment the elevatorvehicle disgorged another passenger. This was a tall oak-like creature with small leaf-like tentacles fluttering at its sides. The bright University band circled the center mark. It looked at the decorative vines of the apartment and spoke with the whistle of wind through dead branches: "Appalling captivity." The sound of the translator seemed to bring its attention to the other occupants. "May your probability of acceptance be better than mine," it said by way of greeting. "I am a humble modest branch from Treetrunk (the translator learned quickly) and despite my formidable knowledge of prosthodontica my percentage is a mere sixty." Somewhere in there had been a simultaneous translations were being performed. This device made the little dual-track transcoders he had used before seem primitive. "You are more fortunate than I," Pincushion replied. "I stand at only forth-eight per cent." Pincushion had knobby stalks that were probably eyes, and Treetrunk's apical disks vibrated like the greenery of a poplar sapling. "Twenty-one per cent," he said sheepishly. There was an awkward silence. "Well, these are only estimates based upon the past performance of your species," Pincushion said. "Perhaps your predecessors were not apt." "I don't think I had any predisn't accredited yet." He hesitated to admit that Earth hadn't even achieved true space travel. He had never been embarrassed for his planet before, though when he thought about it, he realized that he had never had occasion to consider himself a planetary citizen before, either. "Experience and competence count IF more than some machine's guess, Ym sure," Treetrunk said. 'Tve been practicing on my world for six years. If you're -- " "Well, I did practice for ten years on Earth." "You see -- that will probably triple your probability when they find out," Pincushion said encouragingly. "They just gave you a low probabihty because no one from your planet has applied before." H e hoped they were right, but his stomach didn't settle. He doubted that as sophisticated a setup as the galactic University would have to stoop to such crude approximation. The administration already knew quite a bit about him from the preliminary application, and his ignorance of galactic method was sure to count heavily against him. "Are there -- references here?" he inquired. "Facilities? If I could look them over -- " "Good idea!" Pincushion said. "Come -- the operatory is this way, and there is a small museum of equipment." There was. The apartment had an annex equipped with an astonishing array of dental technology. There was enough for him to study for years before he could be certain of mastery. He decided to concentrate on the racked texts first, after learning that they could be fed into the translator for ready assimilation in animated projection. "Standard stuff," Treetrunk said, making a noise like chafing bark. "I believe I'll take an estivation." main room with an armful of the boxlike texts, the elevator loosed aiotb creature. This was a fourlegged cylinder with a bead tapered like that of an anteater and peculiarly thin-jointed arms terminating in a series of thorns. It occurred to him that such physical structure would be virtually ideal for dentistry. The thorns were probably animate rotary burrs, and the elongated snout mit reach directly into the patient's mouth for inspection of close work without the imposition of a mirror. After the initial introductions, he asked Anteater how his probability stood. "Ninety-eight per cent," the creature replied in an offhand manner. "Our kind seldom miss. We're specialized for this sort of thing." Specialization -- there was the ham thought. Men were among the most generalized of Earth's denizens, except for their developed brains -- and obviously these galactics had similar intellectual qualities, and had been in space so long they were able to adapt physically for something as narrow as dentistry. The outlook for him remained bleak. A robotlike individual and a native from Electrolus completed the apartment's complement He hadn't known that his sponsor-planet was entering one of its own in the same curriculum, though it didn't affect him particularly. Six diverse creatures, counting himself -- all dentists on their home worlds, all specializing in prosthodontics, all eager to pass the entraocc examinations. All male, within reasonable definition -- the university was very strict about the proprieties. This was only one apartment in' a small city reserved for applicants. The university proper occupied the entire planet. They learned all about it that evening at the indoctrination briefing, guided to the lecture-hall by a blue glow manifested on each identification band. The hall was monstrous; only the oxygen-breathers attended this session, but they numbered almost fifty thousand. Other halls catered to differing life-forms simultaneously. The university graduated over a term and had a constant enrollment ham didn't know how many terms it took to graduate -- the program might be variable -- but the incidence of depletion seemed high. Even the total figure represented a very minor proportion of the dentistry in the galaxy. This proportion was extremely important, however, since mere admission as a freshman student required qualifications that would equip the individual as a graduate elsewhere. There were generally only a handful of University graduates on any civilized planet. These were automatically granted life tenures as instructors at the foremost planetary colleges, or established as consultants for the most challenging cases available. Even the dropouts had healthy futures. Instructors for the University itself were drawn from its own most gifted graduates. The top one hundred, approximately -- of each class of a special training and retained, and a greater number was recruited from the lower ranking body of graduates: individuals who demonstrated superior qualifications in subsequent galactic practice. A few instructors were even recruited from nongraduates, when their specialties were so restricted and their skills so great that such exceptions seemed warranted. The administrators came largely from the University of Administration, dental division, situated on another planet; they wielded enormous power. The University President was the virtual dictator of the planet, and his pronouncements had the force of law in dental matters throughout the as he absorbed the information, if there were any organization that approached galactic overlordship, it was the association of University Presidents. They had the authority -- by their own declaration -- and the power to quarantine any world found guilty of willful malpractice in any of the established University fields, and since any quarantine covered all fields, it was devastating. An abstract was run showing the consequence of the last absolute quarantine; within a year that world had collapsed in anarchy. What followed was not at all pretty. skill engendered by University training did indeed transcend any ordinary practice. No one on Earth IF had any inkling of th techniques considered commonplace here. His imagination was saturated with the marvel of it all. His dream of knowledge for the sake of knowledge was a futile one; such training was far too valuable to be reserved for the satisfaction of the individual. No wonder graduates became public servants! The investment was far less monetary than cultural and technological, for the sponsoring planet. His roommates were largely unimpressed. "Everyone knows the universities wield galactic power," Treetrunk said. "This is only one school of many, and hardly the most important. Take Finance, now -- " "Or Transporation," Pincushion added. "Every spaceship, every stellar conveyor, designed and operated by graduates of -- " "Or Communication," Anteater said. "Comm U has several campuses, even, and they're not dinky little planets like this one, either. Civilization is impossible without communications. What's a few bad teeth, compared to that?" of you are dentists. How can you take such tremendous knowledge and responsibility so casually?" "Oh, come now," Anteater said. "The technology of dentistry hasn't changed in millennia. It's a staid, dated institution. Why get excited?" "No point in letting ideology go to our heads," Treetrunk agreed. "I'm coming here because this training will set me up for life on my home world. I won't have to set up a practice at aU; I'll be a consultant. It's the best training in the galaxy -- we all know that -- Init we must try to keep it in perspective." The others signified agreement Mlingham saw that he was a muMnty of one. All the others were interested in the training not for its own sake but for the monetary and prestieus benefits they could derive from a degree. And all of them had much higher probabilities of admission than he. Was he wrong? Ill N ext day they undertook a battery use the operatory equipment te perform specified tasks: excavation, polishing, placement of amalgam, measurement, manufacture of assorted impressions -- on a number of familiar and unfamiliar jaws. He had to diagnose and prescribe. He had to demonstrate facility in all phases of laboratory work -- facility he now felt woefully deficient in. The equipment was versatile, and he had no particular difficulty adjusting to it, but it was so well made and precise that he was certain his own abilities fell far short of those for whom it was intended. The early exercises were routine, and he was able to do them easily in the time recommended. Gradually, however, they became more difficult, and he had to concentrate as never before to accomplish the assignments at all, let alone on schedule. There were several jaws so alien that he could not determine their modes of action and had to pass them by even though the treatment seemed sinqple enough. But he remembered his recent experiences with galactic dentition, and the unsuspected mechanisms of seemingly ordinary teeth, and so refused to perform repairs even on a dummy jaw that might be more harmful th no repair at all. During the rest breaks he chatted with his companions, all in neighboring operatories, and learned to his dismay that none of them were having difficulties. "How can you be sure of the proper occlusal on ##?" he asked Treetrunk. "There was no upper mandible present for comparison." "That was an Oopoo jaw," Treetrunk rustled negligently. "Oopoos have no uppers. There's just a bony plate, perfectly regular. Didn't you know that?" "You recognize all the types of him, hardly crediting it. "Certainly. I have read at least one text on the dentures of every accredited species. We Treetrunks never forget." Eidetic memory! How could a mere man compete with a creature more texts and retain every detail of each? He understood more and more plainly why his probability of success was so low. He was beginning to wonder whether it had not been set unrealistically high, in fact. "What was ##, the last one?" Pincushion inquired. "I didn't recognize it, and I thought I knew them all." T ' reetrunk became slightly wilted. "I never saw that one before," he admitted. "It must have been extra-galactic, or a theoretic simulacrum designed to test our extrapolation." 'The work was obvious, however," Anteater observed. "I polished it off in four seconds." "Four seconds!" All the others were amazed. "Well, we are adapted for this sort of routine," Anteater said patronizingly. "Our burrs are built in, and all the rest of it. My main delay is generally in diagnosis. But ## was a straightforward labial cavity requiring a plastoid substructure and metallic overlay, heated to # degrees Centigrade for thirty-seven microseconds." "Thirty-nine microseconds," Treetrunk corrected him, a shade smugly. "You forgot to allow for the redshift in the overhead beam. But that's still remarkable time." "I employed my natural illumination, naturally," Anteater said, just as smugly, flashing a yellow light from his snout. "No distortion there. But I believe my alloy differs slightly from what is considered standard, which may account for the difference. Your point is good, nevertheless. I hope none of the others forgot that adjustment?" The Electrolyte settled an inch. "I did," he confessed. despondent. Had all of them diagnosed ## so readily, and were they all so perceptive as to be automatically aware of the wavelength of a particular beam of light? Or were there such readings available through the equipment, that he didn't IF know about, and wouldn't be competent to use if he did know? He had pondered that jaw for the full time allotted and finally given it up untouched. True, the cavity had appeared to be perfectly straightforward, but it was too clean to ring true. Could -- The buzzer sounded for the final session, and they dispersed to their several compartments. with mounting frustration when he heard Treetrunk, via the translator extension, call to Anteater. "I can't seem to get this S-curve excavation right," he complained. "Would you lend me your snout?" thought. Discussion of cases after they were finished was one thing, but consultation during the exam -- ! "Certainly," Anteater replied.' He tered Treetrunk's compartment. There was the muted beep of his highspeed proboscis drill. "You people confined to manufactured tools labor under such a dreadful disadvantage," he remarked. "It's a wonder you can qualify at all!" "Hmph," Treetrunk replied goodnaturedly... and later returned the favor by providing a spot diagnosis based on his knowledge of an obscure chapter of an ancient text, to settle a case that had Anteater in doubt. "It isn't as though we were competing against each other," he said. "Every point counts!" Of course there had been nothing in the posted regulations forbidding such procedure, but he had taken it as implied. Even if galactic ethics differed from his own in this respect, he couldn't see his way clear to draw on any knowledge or skill other than his own. Not in this situation. Meanwhile, ##I was a different kind of problem. The directive, instead of saying, "Do what is necessary," as it had for the ## they had discussed during the break, was this time specific. "Create an apropriate mesiocclusodistal metal-alloy inlay for the afflicted fifth mslar in this humanoid jaw." This was perfectly feasible. Despite its oddities as judged by Earthly standards, it was humanoid and therefore roughly familiar to him. So men did not have more than three molars in a row; he now knew that other species did. He had by this time mastered the sophisticated equipment well enough to do the job in a fraction of the time he had required on Earth. He could have the inlay shaped and cast within the time limit The only trouble was his experience, and observation indicated tliaS the specified reconstruction was jonl proper in this case. It would require the removal of far more healthy dentin than was necessary, for one thing. In addition, there was evidence ii persistent inflammation in the gingival tissue that could herald periodontal disease. He finally disobeyed the instrucHe hoped he would be given tlM opportunity to explain his actimi, though he was afraid he had already failed the exam. There was just tno much to do, he knew too little, and the competition was too strong. IV T he field examination was finished in the afternoon, and nothing was scheduled for that evening. Next day the written exam -- actually a combination of written, verbal and demonstrative questions -- was due, and everyone except Treetrunk was deep in the texts. Treetrunk was dictating a letter home, the translator blanked out so that his narration would not disturb the others. dimensional pictures and captions produced by the tomes while listening to the accompanying lecture. There was so much to master in such a short time! It was fascinating -- but he could handle only a tiny fraction of it. He wondered what phenomenal material remained to be presented in the courses themselves, since all the knowledge of the galaxy seemed to be required just to pass the entrance exam. Tooth transplantation? Tissue regeneration? Restoration of the enamel itself, rather than The elevator opened. A creature rather like a walking oyster emerged. Its yard-wide shell opened to reveal eyestalks and a comparatively dainty mouth. "This is the -- dental yard?" it inquired timorously. "Great purple quills!" Pincushion swore quietly. "One of those insidious panhandlers. I thought they'd cleared such obtusities out long ago." Treetrunk, closest to the door, looked up and switched on his section of the translator. "The whole planet is dental, idiot," he snapped after the query had been repeated for him. "This is a private dormitory." The oyster persisted. "But you are off-duty dentists? I have a terrible toothache -- " "We are applicants' Treetrunk informed it imperiously. "What you want is the clinic. Please leave us alone." "But the clinic is closed. Please -- my jaw pains me so that I can not eat. I am an old clam -- " Treetrunk impatiently switched off the translator and resumed his letter. No one else said anything. Treetrunk had disconnected himself, but the translator still functioned for the other languages. "Isn't there some regular dentist you can see who can relieve the pain until morning? We are studying for a very important examination." "I have no credit -- no money for private service," Oyster wailed. "The clinic is closed for the night, and my tooth -- " texts before him. He had so little time, and the material was so important. He had to make a good score tomorrow to mitigate today's disaster. "Please," Oyster whined. "It pains me so -- " He gave up. He was not sure regulations permitted it, but he had to do something. There was a chance he could at least relieve the pain. "Come with me," he said. IF Pincushion waved his pins, actually sensitive cilia capable of intricate maneuvering. "Not In our operatory he protested. "How can we concentrate with that going on?" sonable anger and took the patient to the elevator. After some errors, he located a vacant testing operatory eliewhere in the application section. Fortunately the translators were everywhere, so he could converse with the creature and clarify its complaint. "The big flat one," it said as it propped itself awkwardly in the chair and opened its shell. "It hurts." He took a look. The complaint was valid; most of the teeth had conventional plasticene filings, but one had somehow been dislodged from the proximal surface of a molar: a Class II restoration. The gap was packed with rancid vegetable matter -- seaweed? -- and was undoubtedly quite uncomfortable. "You must understand," he cautioned the creature, "that I am not a regular dentist here, or even a student. I have neither the authority nor the competence to do any work of a permanent nature on your teeth. All I can do is clean out the cavity and attempt to relieve the pain so that you can get along until the clinic opens in the morning. Then an authorized dentist can do the job properly. Do you understand?" "It hurts," Oyster repeated. planet in the directory and punched out the formula for a suitable anesthetic. The dispenser gurgled and rolled out a cylinder and swab. He opened the former and dabbed with the latter around the affected area, restraining his irritation at the patient's evident inability to sit still even for this momentary operation. While waiting for it to take effect, he requested more information from the translator, which he had discovered was also quite a versatile instrument. "Dominant species of Planet Oyster," the machine reported. "HigWy intelligent, non-specialized, emotiontried to reconcile this with what he had already observed of his patient, and concluded that individuals must vary considerably from the norm. He listened to further vital information, and soon had a fair idea of Oyster's general nature and the advisable care of his dentition. There did not seem to be any factors inhibiting his treatment of this complaint. H e applied a separator, over the patient's protest, and cleaned out the impacted debris with a spoon excavator without difficulty, but Oyster shied away at sight of the rotary diamond burr. "Hurts!" he protested. "I have given you adequate local "You should feel nothing except a slight vibration in yotir jaw, which standard drill, the same kind I'm sure you've seen many times before." As he spoke, he marveled at what he now termed standard. The burr was shaped like nothing -- literally -- on Earth and rotated at # r.p.m. -- several times the maximum employed back home. It was awesomely efficient. Oyster shut mouth and shell firmly. "Hurts!" his whisper emerged through clenched defenses. the time this was costing him. If he didn't return to his texts soon, he would forfeit his remaining chance to pass the written exam. He sighed and put away the power tool. "Perhaps I can clean it with the hand instruments," he said; "I'll have to use this rubber dam, though, since this will take more time." One look at the patient convinced him otherwise. Regretfully he put away the rubber square that would have kept the field of operation dry and clean while he worked. He had to break through the overhanging enamel with a chisel, the patient wincing every time he lifted the mallet and doubling the necessity for the assistant he didn't have. A power mallet would have helped, but that, too, was out. It was a tedious and difficult task. He had to scrape off every portion of the ballroom cavity from an awkward angle, hardly able to see what he was doing since he needed a third hand for the dental mirror. It would have to be a Class II -- jammed in the side of the molar facing the adjacent molar, both sturdy teeth with very little give. A Class II was the very worst restoration to attempt in makeshift fashion. He could have accelerated the process by doing a slipshod job, but it was not in him to skiniip even when he knew it was only for a night. Half an hour passed before he performed the toilet: blowing out the loose debris with a jet of warm air, swabbing the interior with alcohol, drying again. #C"Tow I'm going to block this with a temporary wax," he told Oyster. "This will not stand up to intensive chewing, but should hold you comfortably until morning." Not that the warning was likely to make much difference. The trouble had obviously started when the original weeks since that had happened. Evidently the patient had not bothered to have it fixed until the pain became unbearable -- and now that the pain was gone, Oyster might well delay longer, until the work had to be done all over again. The shortsighted refuge from initial inconvenience was hardly a monopoly of Earthly sufferers. "No," Oyster said, jolting him back to business. "Wax tastes bad." "This is guaranteed tasteless to most life-forms, and it is only for the night. As soon as you report to the clinic -- " "Tastes bad!" the patient insisted, starting to close his shell. what the translator had meant by "highly intelligent... emotionally stable." He kept his peace and dialed for amalgam. "Nasty color," Oyster said. "But this is pigmented red, to temporary. It will hardly show, in this location. I don't want the clinic to have any misunderstanding." The shell clamped all the way shut, nearly pinning his fingers. "Nasty color!" IF It occurred to him that more was involved than capricious difficulty. Did this patient intend to go to the clinic at all? Oyster might be angling does suit you?" "Gold." It figured. Well, better to humor the patient, rather than try to force him into a more sensible course. Dillingham could make a report to the authorities, who could then roust out Oyster and check the work properly. At his direction, the panel extruded a ribbon of gold foil. He placed this in the miniature annealing oven and waited for the slow heat to act. "You're burning it up!" Oyster protested. "By no means. It is necessary to make the gold cohesive, for better service. You see -- " "Hot," Oyster said. So much for helpful explanations. He could have employed noncohesive metal, but this was a lesser technique that didn't appeal to him. V A t length he had suitable rop of gold for the slow, delicate task of building up the restoration inside the cavity. The first layer was down; once he malleted it into place -- The elevator burst asunder. A second oyster charged into the operatory waving a translucent tube. "Villain!" it exclaimed. "What are you doing to my grandfather?" grandfather? I'm trying to make him comfortable until -- " The newcomer would have none of it. "You're torturing himi My poor, dear, long-suffering grandfatherl Monster! How could you?" "But I'm only -- " Young Oyster leveled the tube at that its end was solid. "Get away from my grandfather. I saw you hammering spikes into his venerable teeth, you sadist! I'm taking him home!" sidered this a stance of necessity, not courage. "Not until I complete this work. I can't let him go out like this, with the excavation exposed." "Beast! Pervert! HumanoidV' the youngster screamed. "I'll volatize you!" Searing light beamed from the solid hand melted and dripped to the floor. He leaped for the oyster and grappled for the weapon. The giant shell clamped shut upon his hand as they fell to the floor. He struggled to right himself, but discovered that the creature had withdrawn all its appendages and now was nothing more than a two-hundred pound firmly pinioned. "Assaulter of innocents!" the youngster squeaked from within the shell. "Unprovoked attacker. Get your foul paw out of my ear!" "Friend, I'U be glad to do that -- as soon as you let go," he gasped. What a situation for a dentist! "Help! Butchery! Genocide!" ing and hauled on his arm. The IF shell tilted and lifted from the loor but gradually the trapped hand slid free. He quickly sat on the shell to prevent it from opening again and surveyed the damage. Blood trickled from multiple scratches along the wrist, and his hand smarted strenuously, but there was no serious wound. "Let my grandson go!" the old oyster screamed now. "You have no right to muzzle him like that! This is a free planet!" the translator's description. These just did not seem to be reasonable creatures. He stood up quickly and picked up the fallen tube. "Look, gentlemen -- I'm very sorry if I have misunderstood your conventions, but I must insist that the young person leave." Young Oyster peeped out of his shell. "Unwholesome creature! Eater of sea-life! How dare you make demands of us?" He had no idea how to fire it, but hoped the creature could be bluffed. "Please leave at once. I will release your grandfather as soon as the work is done." The youngster focused on the weapon and obeyed, grumbling. Dillingham touched the elevator lock as soon as he was gone. The oldster was back in the chair. Somehow the adjustment had changed, so that this was now a basket-like receptacle, obviously more comfortable for this patient. "You are more of a being than you appear," Oyster remarked. " was never able to handle that juvenile so efficiently." lets of metal splattered on the floor. That heat-beam had been entirely too close -- and deadly. His hands began to shake in delayed reaction. He was not a man of violence, and his own quick reaction had surprised him. The stress of recent events had certainly gotten to him, he thought ruefully. "But he's a good boy, really," Oyster continued. "A trifle impetuous -- but he inherited that from me. I hope you won't report this little misunderstanding." He hadn't thought of that, but of course it was his duty to make a complete report on the melee and the reason for it. Valuable equipment might have been damaged, not to consider the risk to his own welfare. "I'm afraid I must," he said. "But they are horribly strict!" the oldster protested. "They will throw him into a foul salty cesspool! They'll boil him in vinegar every hour! His children will be stigmatized!" "I can't take the law into my own hands. The court -- or whatever it is here -- must decide. I must make an accurate report." "He was only looking out for his ancestor. That's very important to our culture. He's a good -- The Oyster paused. His shell quivered, and the soft flesh within turned yellow. are you well?" The translator spoke on its own initiative. "The Oyster shows the symptoms of severe emotional shock. His health will be endangered unless immediate relief is available." All he needed was a dying galactic on top of everything else I "How can I help him?" The shell was gradually sagging closed with an insidious suggesftiveness. "The negative enK)tiqnal stimulus must be alleviated," the translator said. "At his age, such disturbances are -- " at the visibly putrifying creature. "All right!" he shouted desperately. "I'll withhold my report!" The collapse ceased. "You won't tell anyone?" the oldster inquired from the murky depths. "No matter what?" all happy, but saw no other way out. Better silence than a dead patient. The night was well advanced when he finished with the Oyster and sent him home. He had forfeited his study period and, by the time he was able to relax, much of his sleep as well. He would have to brave the examination without preparation. I t was every bit as bad as he had anticipated. His mind was dull from lack of sleep, and his basic store of information was meager indeed on the galactic scale. The questions would have been quite difficult even if he had been fully prepared. There were entire categories he had to skip because they concerned specialized procedures buried in his unread texts. If only he had had time to prepare! The others were having trouble too. He could see them humped over their tables, or under them, depending on physiology, scribbling notes as they figured ratios and tolerances and indices of material properties. Even Treetrunk looked hard-pressed. If Treetrunk, with a galactic library of dental information filed in his celluloid brain, could wilt with the effort, how could a poor humanoid from a backward planet hope to succeed? But he carried on to the discouraging end, knowing that his score would damn him but determined to do his best whatever the situation. It seemed increasingly ridiculous, but he still wanted to be admitted to the university. The thought of deserting this stupendous reservoir of information and technique was appaling. During the afternoon break he collapsed on his bunk and slept. One day remained, one final trial -- the interrogation by the Admissions Advisory Council. This, he understood, was the roughest gauntlet of all; more applications were rejected on the basis of this interview than from both other tests combined. An outcry woke him in the evening. 'The probabilities are being posted!" Pincushion honked, prodding him with a spine that was not, despite its appearance, sharp. "Mine's twenty-one per cent, not sleepily. "Low -- too low." "The revised probs!" Pincushion said. "Based on the test scores. The warning buzzer just sounded." remembered now; no results were posted for the field and written exams. Instead the original estimates of acceptance were modified in the IF light of mdividual data. This provided unlikely applicants with a graceful opportunity to bow out before subjecting themselves to the indignity of a negative recommendation by the AA Council. It also undoubtedly simplified the work of that council by cutting down on the number of interviewees. They clustered in a tense semicircle around the main translator. The results would be given in descending more privacy in such matters wasn't provided, but assumed that the University had its reasons. Possibly the constant comparisons encouraged better effort, or weeded out the quitters that much sooner. "Anteater," the speaker said. It paused. "Ninety-six per cent." Anteater twitched his nose in relief. "I must have guessed right on those stress formulations," he said. "I knew I was in trouble on those computations." "Treetrunk -- eighty-five per cent." Treetrunk almost uprooted himself with glee. "A # increase!" he exulted. "I must have maxed the written portion after all!" "Robot -- sixty-eight per cent." The robotoid took the news impassively. The remaining three fidgeted, knowing that their scores had to be lower. "Pincushion -- fifty per cent." The creature congratulated himself on an even chance, though he obviously had hoped to do better. "Electrolyte -- twenty-three per cent." The rocklike individual rolled toward his compartment. "I was afraid of that. I'm going home." pathetically, anticipating the worst. It came. "Earthman -- three per cent," the speaker said plainly. The last reasonable hope was gone. The odds were thirty to one against him, and his faith in miracles was small. The others scattered, emstood rigid. He had known he was in trouble -- but this! To be given, on the basis of thorough testing, practically no chance of admission... He was forty-one years old. He felt like crying. VI T he Admissions Advisory Council was alien even by the standards he had learned in the galaxy. There were only three members -- but as soon as this occurred to him, he realized that this would be only the fraction of the Council assigned to his case. There were probably hundreds of interviews going on at this moment, as thousands of applicants were processed. One member was a honeycomb of gelatinous tissue suspended on a trellislike framework. The second was a mass of purple sponge. The third was an undulating something confined within a tank -- a water-breather, if that liquid were water. If it breathed. The speaker set in the wall of the tank came to life. This was evidently the spokesman, if any were required. "We do not interview many with so low a probability of admission as students," Tank said. "Why did you persist?" Why, indeed? Well, he had nothing further to lose by forthrightness. "I still want to enter the University. There is still a chance." "Your examination results are hardly conducive to admission as a student," Tank said, and it was amazing how much scorn could be infused into the tone of the mechanical translation. "While your field exercises were fair, your written production was incompetent. You appear to be ignorant of all but the most primitive and limited aspects of prosthodontistry. Why should you wish to undertake training for which your capacity is plainly insufficient?" "Most of the questions of the second examination struck me as relating to basic information, rather than po"If I had that information already, I would not stand in such need of the training. I came here to learn." "An intriguing attitude. We expect, nevertheless, a certain minimum background. Otherwise our efforts are wastefuUy diluted." answer. Obviously the ranking specialists of the galaxy should not be used for elementary instruction. He understood the point -- yet something in him would not capitulate. There had to be more to this hearing than an automatic decision on the basis of tests whose results could be distorted by participant cooperation on the one hand, and circumstantial denial of study-time on the. other. Why have an advisory board at all, if that were all? "I am concerned with certain aspects of your field work," the honeycomb creature said. He spoke by vibrating his tissue in the air, but the voice emerged from his translator. "Why did you neglect particular items?" "Do you noean number seventeen? I was unfamiliar with the specimen and therefore could not repair it competently." "You refused to work on it merely because it was new to your experience?" Again the towering scorn. That did make it sound bad. "No. I would have done something if I had had more evidence of its nature. But the specimen was not complete. I felt that there was insufficent information presented to justify attempted repairs." "You could not have hurt an inert model very much. Surely you realized that even an incorrect repair would have brought you a better score than total failure?" He had not known that. "I assumed that these specimens stood in lieu of actual patients. I gave them the same consideration I would have given a living, feeling creature. Neglect of a cavity in the tooth of a live patient might lead to the eventual loss of that tooth -- but an incorrect repair could have caused more serious damage. Sometimes it is better not to interfere." "Explain." "When I visited the planet Electrolus I saw that the metallic restorations in native teeth were indirectly interfering with communication, which IF was disastrous to the well-being of the individual This impressed upon me how dangerous well-meaning iterance could be, even in so simple The chairman of the Dental League of planet Electrolus is a University graduate. Are you accusing him of ignorance?" O h-oh. "Perhaps the problem had not come to his attention," Dillingham said, trying to evade the trap. "We will return to that at another time," the purple sponge said grimly. The applicant's reasoning hardly seemed to impress this group. "You likewise ignored item number thirty-six," Honeycomb said. "Was your reasoning the same?" "Yes. The jaw was so alien to my experience that I could not safely assume that there was anything wrong with it, let alone attempt to fix it. I suppose I was foolish not to fill the labial cavity, but that would have required an assumption I was not equipped to make." "How much time did you spend -- deciding not to touch the cavity?" Honeycomb inquired sweetly. "Half an hour." Pointless to explain that he had gone over every surface of ## looking for some confirmation that its action was similar to that of any of the jaws he was familiar with. "If I may inquire now -- what was the correct treatment?" "None. It was a healthy jaw." DilKngham's breath caught. "You mean if I had filled that theoretic cavity -- " "You would have destroyed our extragalactic patient's health." "Then my decision on ## helped my examination score #" "No. Your decision was based on uncertainty, not upon accurate diagnosis. It threw your application into serious question." He shut his mouth and waited. "You did not follow instructions on number #," Honeycomb said. "Why?" "I felt the instructions were misinlay was unnecessary for the correction of the condition, and foolish in the face of the peril the tooth was in from gingivitis. Why perform expensive and complicated reconstruction, when untreated gum disease threatens to nullify it soon anyway?" "Would that iiay have damaged the function of the tooth in any way?" "Yes, in the sense that no reconstruction can be expected to perform as well as the original. But even if there were no difference, that placement was functionally unnecessary. The expense and discomfcat to the patient must also be considered. The dentist owes it to his patient to advise him of -- " "You are repetitive. Do you place your judgment before that of the University?" Trouble again. "I must act on my own best judgment, when I am charged with the responsibility. Perhaps, with University training, I would have been able to make a more informed decision." "Kindly delete the pleading," Honeycomb said. Qomething was certainly wrong somewhere. All his conjectures seemed to go against the intent of this institution. Did its standards, as weU as its knowledge, differ so radically from his own? Could all of his professional instincts be wrong? "Your performance on the written examination was extremely poor," Sponge said. "Are you naturally stupid, or did you fail to apply yourself properly?" "I could have done better if I had studied more." "You failed to prepare yourself?" Worse and worse. "Yes." "You were aware of the importance of the examination?" "Yes." "You had suitable texts on hand?" "Yes." "Yet you did not bother to study them." "I wanted to, but -- " Then he remembered his promise to the Oyster. He could not give his reason for failing to study. If this trio picked up any hint of that episode, it would not relent until everything were exposed. After suffering this much of its interrogation, he retained no illusions about the likely fate of young Oyster, No wonder the grandfather had been anxious! "What is your pretext for such neglect?" "I can offer none." The color of the sponge darkened. "We are compelled to view with disfavor an applicant who neither applies himself nor cares to excuse his negligence. This is not the behavior we expect in our students." sition was hopeless -- but he still couldn't give up until they made his rejection final. T ank resumed the dialog. "You have an interesting record. Alarming in some respects. You came originally from planet Earth -- one of the aborigine cultures. Why did you desert your tribe?" They had such unfortunate ways of putting things! "I was contacted by a galactic voyager who required prosthodontic repair. I presume ho picked my name out of the local directory." He described his initial experience with the creatures he had dubbed, facetiously, the North Nebulites, or Enens. "You operated on a totally unfamiliar jaw?" Tank asked abruptly. "Yes." Under duress, however. Should he remind them? "Yet you refused to do similar work on a dummy jaw at this University," Honeycomb put in. They were sharp. "I did what seemed necessary at the time." "Don't your standards appear inconsistent, even to you?" Sponge inquired. "Sometimes they do." How much deeper could he bury himself? Tank's turn. "Why did you accompany the aliens to their world?" "I did not have very much choice." "So you did not come to space in search of superior prosthodontic techniques?" "No. It is possible that I might IF have done so, however, had I known of their availability at e time." "Yes, you have repeatedly expressed your interest," Tank said. "Yet you did not bother to study from the most authoritative texts available on the subject in the galaxy, when you had the opportunity and the encouragement to do so." Once again his promise prevented him from replying. He was coming to understand why his roommates had shown so little desire to spend time helping the supplicant. It appeared, in retrospect, to be a sure passport to failure. C ould he have passed -- that is, brought his probability up to a reasonable level -- had he turned away that plea? Should he have sacrificed that one creature, for the sake of the hundreds he might have helped later, with proper training? He had been shortsighted. He knew he would do the same thing again, in similar circumstances. He just didn't have the heart to be that practical. At the same time, he could see why the businesslike University would have little use for such sentimentality. "On planet deep," Tank said, surprising him by using his own ludicrous term for the next world he had visited, "you filled a single cavity with twenty-four tons of goldalloy." "Yes." "Are you not aware that gold, however plentiful it may be on deep, remains an exceptionally valuable commodity in the galaxy? Why did you not develop a less wasteful substitute?" the awkwardness of that situation, about the pressure of working within the cavernous mouth of a three-hundred-foot sea creature, but it did seem that he had made a mistake. He could have employed a qecialized cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloy that would have been strong, hard, resilient and resistant to corrosion, and might well have been superior to gold in that particular case. He had worried, for example, about the weight of such a mass of gold, and this alternate, far lighter, would have alleviated that concern. It was also much cheaper stuff. He had not thought about these things at the time. He said so. "Didn't you consult your Enen associates?" "I couldn't. The English Enen transcoder was broken." But that was no excuse for not having had them develop the chrome-cobalt alloy earlier. He had allowed his personal preference for the more familiar gold to halt his quest for improvement. "Yet you did communicate with them later, surmounting that problem." He was becoming uncomfortably aware that this group had done its homework. The members seemed to know everything about him. "I discovered by accident that the English-Gleep and Gleep-Enen transcoders could be used in concert. I had not realized that at the time." "Because you were preoccupied with the immediate problem?" "I think so." "But not too preoccupied to notice decay in the neighboring teeth." "No' It did look foolish now, to have been so concerned with future dental problems, while wasting many tons, of valuable metal on the work in progress. How did that jibe with his more recent concern for the Oyster's problem, to the exclusion of the much larger University picture? Was there any coherent rationale to his actions, or was he continually rationalizing to excuse his errors? Was the seeming unfairness of this interview merely a way of proving this to him? B ut Tank wasn't finished. "You next embarked with a passing diplomat of uncertain reputation who suggested a way to free you from your, commitment to deep." did not regret his brief association with Trach, the galactic who resembled a trachodon dinosaur. "He resembled one of the vicious predators of your planet's past -- yet you trusted your person aboard his ship?" "I felt, in the face of galactic diversity of species, that it was foolish to judge by appearances. One has to be prepared to extend trust, if one wants to receive it." "You believe that?" Honeycomb demanded. "I try to." It was so hard to defend himself against the concentrated suspicion of the Council. "You do not seem to trust the common directives of this University, however." What answer could he make to that? They had him in another conflict. "Whereupon you proceeded to investigate another unfamiliar jaw," Tank said. "Contrary to your expressed policy. Why?" 'Trach had befriended me, and I wanted to help him." "So you put friendship above policy," Sponge said. "Convenient." "And did you help him?" Tank again. It was hard to remember who said what, since they were all so murderously sharp. "Yes. I adapted a sonic instrument that enabled him to clean his teeth efficiently." "And what was your professional fee for this service?" temper. "Nothing. I was not thinking in such terms." "A moment ago you were quite concerned about costs." "I was concerned about unnecessary expense to the patient. That strikes me as another matter." "And the dinosaur told you about the University of Dentistry?" Sponge put in. "Yes, among other things. We conversed quite a bit." "And so you decided to attend, on hearsay evidence." "That's not fair!" "Is the color in your face a sign of distress?" now deliberately needling him and shut up. Why should he allow himself to get excited over a minor slur, after passing over major ones? All he could do that way was prove he was unstable, and therefore unfit. "And did you seriously believe," IF Sponge persisted nastily, "that you had any chance at all to be admitted as a student here?" Again he had no answer. "On planet Electrolus you provoked a war by careless advice," Honeycomb said. "Whereupon you conspired to be exiled -- to this University. What kind of reception did you anticipate here, after such machinations?" So that was it! They resented the circumstances of his application. What use to explain that he had not schemed, that Trach had cleverly found a solution to the Electrolus problem that satisfied all parties? This trio would only twist that into further condemnation. "I made mistakes on that planet, as I did elsewhere," he said at last. "I hoped to learn to avoid such errors in the future by enrolling in a corrective course of instruction. It was ignorance, not devious intent, that betrayed me. I still think this University has much to offer me." "The question at hand," Tank said portentiously, "is what you have to offer the University. Have you any further statements you fancy might influence our decision?" "I gather from your choice of expression that it has already been made. In that case I won't waste any more of your time. I am ready for it." "We find you unsuitable for enrollment at this University as a student," Tank said. "Please depart by the opposite door." So as not to obstruct the incoming stood up wearily. "Thank you for your consideration," he said formally, keeping the irony out of his te. He walked to the iiidicated exit, "One moment, applicant," Hmieycomb said. "What are your present plans?" He wondered why the creature bothered to ask. "I suppose I'll return to practice wherever I'm needed -- or wanted," he said. "I may not be the finest dentist available, or even adequate by your standards -- but I love my profession, and there is much I can still do." But why was it that the thought of returning to Earth, which he was free to de now and where be was adequate, no longer appealed? Had the wenders he had glimpsed here spoiled him for the backwoods existence? "I would have preferred to add the University training to my experience; but there is no reason to give up what I already have just because my dream has been denied." He walked away from them. T he hall did not lead to the familiar elevators. Instead, absent-mindedly following the wrist-band glow, he found himself in an elegant apartment. He turned, embarrassed to have blundered into the wrong area, but a voice stopped him. "Please sit down, Earthman." It was the old Oyster he had treated two days before. He was not adept at telling aliens of identical species apart, but he could not mistake this one. "What are you doing here?" "We all have to dwell somewhere." Oyster indicated a couch adaptable to a wide variety of forms. "Make yourself comfortable. I have thought to exchange with you." in his erstwhile patient. This was no longer a suffering, unreasonable indigent. Yet -- "Surely it occurred to you, Doctor, that there are only three groups upon this planet? The applicants, the students -- and the University personnel Which of these do you suppose should lack proper dental care? Which should lack the typical University identification?" him, suddenly making connections. "You have no band -- but the elevator worked for you! It was a put-up job!' "It was part of your examination," Oyster said. "I failed." "What has given you that impression?" "The Admissions Advisory Council found me unfit to enter this University." "You are mistaken." appreciating this business at "I don't know who you are or why you were so determined to interfere with my application, but you succeeded nicely. They rejected me." 'Terhaps we should verify this," Oyster said, unperturbed. He spoke into the translator: "Summon Dr. Dillingham's advisory subgroup." They came -- the Sponge, the Honeycomb, the Tank, riding low conveyors. "Sir," they said respectfully. "What was your decision with regard to this man's application?" Tank replied. "We found this humanoid to be unsuitable for enrollment at this University as a student." ternecine politics were going on here, at least that point was clear. "Did you discover this applicant to be deficient in integrity?" Oyster inquired softly. ' It was the gentle tone of complete authority. "No, sir," Tank said. "Professional ethics?" "No, sir." "Professional caution?" "No, sir." "Humility?" "No, sir." "Temper control?" "No, sir." "Compassion? Courage? Equilibrium?" "That is for you to say, sir." it would seem. What, then, gentlemen, did you find the applicant suitable for?" "Administration, sir." "Indeed. Dismissed, gentlemen." "Yes, Director." The three left hastily. "There is, you see, a qualitative distinction between the potential manual trainee and the potential administrator," Oyster said. "Your roommates were evaluated as students -- and they certainly have things to learn. Oh, technically they are proficient enough -- quite skilled, in fact, though none had the opportunity to exhibit the depth of competence IF manifested in adversity that you did. But in attitude -- weU, there will be considerable improvement there, or they will hardly graduate from this school. I daresay you know what I mean." "But -- " "We are equipped to inculcate mechanical dexterity and technical comprehension. Of course the techniques tested in the Admissions Examination are primitive ones; none of them are employed in advanced restoration. Our interrogatory schedule is principally advisory, to enable us to program for individual needs. "Character, on the other hand, is far more difficult to train -- or to assess accurately in a controlled situation. It is far more reliable if it comes naturally, which is one reason we don't always draw from graduates, or even promising students. We are quite quick to investigate applicants possessing the personality traits we require, and this has nothing to do with planet or species. A promising candidate may emerge from any culture, even the most backward, and is guaranteed from none. No statistical survey is reliable in pinpointing the individual we want. In exceptional cases, it becomes a personal matter, a nonobjective thing. Do you follow me?" "It sounds almost as though you want me to -- " 'To undertake training at University expense leading to the eventual assumption of my own position: Director of the School of Prosthodontics." He was speechless standing there. "I am anticipating a pronK)tkn,  you see," Oyster confided. "The cancy I leave is my responsibilky. I  would not suffer a successor to whett I would not trust the care of my ewa teeth." "But I couldn't possibly -- I haven't the -- " "Have no concern. You adapted beautifully when thrust from yeur protected environment into galactic society, and this will be no mm difficult. The University of Admmistration has a comprehensive program that will guarantee your ccsapetence for the position, and of course you will serve as my assistant for several years until you get the hang of it. We are not rushed. You wiU not be subjected to the ordeal unprepared; that unpleasantness is over." to grasp. "Your grandson -- what if I'd -- " "I shaU have to introduce you more formally to that young security officer. He is not, unfortunately, y grandson; but he is the finest shot with the single-charge laser on the planet. We try to make our little skits realistic." mallet dripping to the floor -- so freak interception after all. And the way the youngster had retreated before the tube... which, being single-shot, was no longer functional. Realism, yes. That reminded him. "That tooth of yours I filled. I know that wasn't -- " "Wasn't fake. You are correct. I nursed that cavity along for three months, using it to check our prospects. It is a very good thing I won't need it any more, because you spoiled it utterly." "j -- " "You did such a professional job that I should have to have a new cavity cultured for my purpose. No experienced practitioner would mistake it now for a long-neglected case even if I yanked out the gold and re-impacted it. ThaU Doctor, is the skill that impresses me -- the skill that remains after the machinery is incapacitated. But of course that's part of it; good intentions mean nothing unless backed by authoritative discretion and ability. You were very slow, but you handled that deliberately obstructive patient very well. Had it been otherwise -- " "But why me? I mean, you could have select anyone -- " O yster put a friendly smile into his voice. "Hardly, Doctor. I visited eleven dormitories that evening, before I came to yours -- with no success. All contained prospects whose record and fieldwork showed the potential. You selected yourse from this number and carried it through honorably. More correctly, you presented yourself as a candidate for the office; we took it from there." "You certainly didl" "Portions of your prior record were hard to believe, I admit. It was incredible that a person who had as little galactic background as you had should accomplish so much. But now we are satisfied that you do have the touch, the ability to do the right thing in an awkward or unfamiliar situation. That, too, is essential for the position." congruity. "I -- I selected myself? "Yes, Doctor. When you demonstrated your priorities." "My priorities? I don't -- " "When you sacrificed invaluable study time to offer assistance to a creature you believed was in pain." Complete Novelette of Space Adventure by Hal Clement by Larry Niven by Mack Reynolds IF Has Been Voted Two Years Straight World's Best SF Magazine Don't miss the big September issue -- reserve your copy todayl IF IF  Special Feature Your child may not be an Earfhman! F ifteen years ago, science fiction dealt with a time when men would colonize the stars, while a few daring scientists wondered if interstellar flight might be possible. Today, most writers have become aware of the difficulties, and interstellar colonies are being treated in fiction as a fantasy somewhat akin to time travel. Now sane and sober scientists are planning seriously how we'll make the trip -- and the date they claim for this possibility is a lot closer than we dared dream. They're not planning millenium-long flights like the one in Heinlein's Universe, but trips that can be made in the lifetime of a man, at speeds up to at least a quarter that of the velocity of light -- or nearly fifty thousand miles a second. This was brought home to me at the # Planetology and Space Sciences Meeting, held at the New York Academy of Sciences under the direction of Dr. Robert Enzmann. The final sessiofi was a panel on what interstellar flight would mean; Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl and I were among the writers exchanging ideas with working space scientists. Hardware wasn't discussed, but when it was over Dr. E nzmann began describing the plans and blueprints for the actual ship and flight. Some of the details are still shrouded in security wraps, since the power for the flight must be provided by atomic fusion, currently held back from development by some of our international agreements on the atom in space. However, successful experimental work on fusion drives has been done already, and several systems have been worked out in theory. By the time work on the ship can be started, we can be pretty sure that the power to drive us at high speed to the stars will be available. Every other detail of this constantly evolving Project Orion -- as it is code-named -- depends on hardware and techniques that could be available to us today. Given official permission and funds, the construction of the first star ship could begin immediately. The cost of the Project is estidollars. That may come down as the normal development of planetary space missions improves our hardware, but it will still be an expensive proposition. (In passenger miles flown, it's the greatest bargain of all time; one dollar will pay for # passenger miles I) Spread over a decade, however, the annual cost is less than twice what we're spending to get to the Moon; or less than one-thirtieth what it cost us to fight in Vietnam. Over a fifteen-year period -- a logical span for the Project -- this represents only one per cent of our present gross national product. O rion is going to be a true spaceship. That means it will never be launched from or landed on the surface of a planet. For its flight, a steady acceleration of half a gravity or less will be adequate; and since it will be assembled in space, free of the pressure of planetary gravity, it can be built to take far less strain than anything we've built so far. Logically, its design takes advantage of this to save mass. Fuel for the trip will be deuterium. A number of plans have been worked out to send scoops into the atmosphere of Jupiter and collect hydrogen, which can then be isotopically separated to yield pure deuterium -- the form of hydrogen which has double normal weight and is suitable for fusion power. (Interestingly, a paper was read at the meeting on accumulating such fuel from Jupiter for normal flights to Pluto or beyond, where the advantages seem doubtful.) The ship will either be built near Jupiter; or it will be assembled near Earth and towed out to Jupiter to build up its tremendous supply of deuterium. The ship currently suggested is a cylinder, four thousand feet in diameter, sheathed in three separate layers of thin metal. Inside the sheathing, it is a honeycomb of smaller cylinders packed together to contribute lengthwise strength; each is capable of maintaining its own life support system and protection against space. The cylinders are filled with thin-walled metal spheres, which again supply protection and in which the actud living quarters will be built. Actually, the main cylinder is composed of three separate shorter cylinders which are joined together; each will have its own crew, operating controls and maintenance system. If any one should be hopelessly damaged, the other two can link together or proceed independently on the trip. The fuel is carried as a great ball ahead of the ship, so that the whole looks like a monstrous candy apple on a very fat stick. It is this ball of fuel which also provides the main protection for the occupants. IF Once beyond the solar system, the danger of any sidewise hit by mete oric rubble is small; and the probable speed of such rubble will not be dangerous for more than a small section of the ship. However, at speeds in thousands of miles per second, a frontal impact could be disastrous. Here, the fuel acts as a great bumper; some fuel may be lost, but the ship itself is protected against penetration. T he ship will start with perhaps # people, and breeding may double this number before arrival. There is ample room. The ship has # cubic feet for each passenger; since a good-sized house has only one-tenth that volume for an entire family, the adequacy of space seems clear enough, even allowing for all necessary supplies and machinery. Supplies will be in a closed cycle, anyhow. Air will be used by the men and replenished by growing plants, as will water and wastes. This will be a small world, recycling everything as our planet does, with almost no limit to the theoretical time it can spend in space. The trip may take up to fifty years to complete. That is a large time to cut out of the life of the original volunteers, of course; and the velocity will be still too low for any major contraction effect on the passage of time to be noted aboard; but there may be other ways to decrease the aging of the passengers. Work has been done indicating that many non-hibemating animals can be made to hibernate by temperature and hormone manipulation. If this can be adapted for human hibernation, aging time can be decreased greatly. At a body temperatiire of # Fahrenheit, a month will age a man no more than a normal day., By rotating the hibernating and working staff, most of the volunteers might reach their destination apparently no more than ten or fifteen years older than they left. They will never be cut off from contact with Earth, of course. There will be no mutiny from those who lose faith in the home world. Radio and television contact will not require inordinate amounts of power, and even our present capabilities can handle this. There will be a time lag as the ship nears its destination, but this will not destroy the value of what is on the screen from Earth, even though they'll literally only see old movies -- as much as a decade older than when broadcast. They will also receive constant news of what lies ahead. Unmanned probes will have explored the nearer stars for a suitable goal, and another such probe will precede them by a light-month, or so -- the distance light travels in one month. This will warn them in time if there should be any serious amount of rubble in their path that might threaten them for instance. They will be paying their way, incidentally. As they move out between the stars, they will be able to make observations in space that will be invaluable to Earth. The trip will cover somewhere between five and ten light-years, probably. There is evidence now that many stars near us have planets, and at least one should be suitable. At worst, there are two favorable goals within about eleven light-years -- Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, already selected as probably habitable. Contact will not be lost when they reach their destination, either. Earth will want to know everything discoverable about the world around another sun -- and the knowledge may well be worth the cost of Project Orion ten times over. N obody can be sure of what they will find. But it isn't expected that there ill be a green and lovely world waiting for them. These will be chosen as hardy pioneers, and their children will be prepared. They will go down to the planet they find in ferry ships that have been carried along. And there will still be power available for at least a generation from the fuel still not used. They must find a solar system with two things; one is a world at least as habitable as our Moon. TTiis will enable them to set up a base, just as the Moon itself can be forced into a base for human life by plans already familiar to science-fiction readers. And they will need a gas-giant planet, one like Jupiter or Saturn. This will provide them with fresh supplies of fuel whenever they want it. The ship will still have its refining equipment and enough fuel to cruise easily across planetary distance. With a system having this minimum, the colonists can at least resupply themselves. They can even build a second ship for their excess population, if necessary. And they can then go on to explore, another system; it will be one previously explored from Earth by probe, probably. Their first trip will not be a waste. If they find a planet better than this minimum, they can settle in and become another branch of humanity. And that, of course, is the true reason for the trip. So long as man is isolated upon a single world, there can be no safety for the race. Any cosmic or man-made disaster might wipe us all out. With two or more bases, the chances of ultimate survival are vastly greater. And since we can be reasonably sure that this will not be the only colonizing trip, we can hope for many such bases. After all, the ship in orbit will still be ready to go onwards, even if the planet can prove suitable for a colony. Once that colony is well started, they will need no hundred branch; the ship will be ready and the task greatly simplified. It can be done, according to many serious scientists. And as many of them see it, it must be done. It lies within our capabilities to begin that first flight to another star by the end of this century, if not sooner! That means that some young child alive today may have a chance to go on the first trip beyond the Sun we know, to plant his steps on a truly alien planet, and to look back across space to the star that was once -- but is no more -- IF IF  Short Story The Other Land was clean, fragrant and a fit place for Man to live... quite unlike the weary world. Earth! W hen I woke up, I thought I was dead. That's what I had intended to be. My head was pounding as though someone had been kicking it around a football field. My eyes were burning, and my throat was dry, but the palms of my hands were wet with sweat. I felt awful. I was lying in the darkness -- a warm darkness that was absolute. I knew I was lying on my stomach because my face was pressed into... soil? There was sand in my mouth. I must have dreamt I was in a park, because I woke up convinced that I was. I was lying on a small, roughly oval-shaped patch of damp, clean, sandy earth. At the edge of the bare ground there were clumps of graceful, silky grass with the seed heads not yet ripe. Beyond that and towering up all around me was a profusion of incredibly green trees, beneath them, a forest floor of countless living plants. In college -- when I had been in college, that is -- botany had been one of the few subjects I'd done well in. But I wished that I could remember more of it. I thought if I could identify a few of the trees I would have some idea what part of the state, or even the country, I was in. It couldn't be a park; they mowed the grass in parks. Besides, they didn't just dump dangerously deranged people in parks and leave them. Well, are "funny farms" really farms... ? Wherever I was, I knew they would be after me. After a while I felt a little better. The sky was growing brighter with daylight, but I couldn't see the sun. Was it still behind the trees? I began to walk slowly through the woods. As I got deeper in among the trees I could hardly see the sky through the intense green canopy. The air was gratifyingly cool. I was amazed at the beauty of the vegetation which carpeted the ground. It was an Eden -- like an imagined paradise of gleaming leaves and lacey flowers. I walked for -- well, my wrist watch was gone, but I think it was for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Finally I realized what was wrong. There were no sounds or signs of life; no insects, no birds, nothing. A faint breeze had picked up and was ruffling and rustling the leaves, but except for myself no living thing stirred. Then I began to give more thought to where I could be. T he last place I remembered being, of course, was the power station. I couldn't be in New York any more; nearly the entire state was the vast megalopolis of New York City, and there was hardly a tree left there, much less a beautiful forest. In fact, I couldn't imagine anywhere in the entire country where such a place as this could exist, so untouched by human degradation. Was I in South America then? An IF First Each month F brings you a "first" story by a writer who has never had a sciencefiction story published before. This month's "first" is AAary Urhousen, a #-year-oW sophomore at the University of Wisconsin (Racine Center). Mary's interests ore horses, veterinary ntedicine, science, fiction and science fiction. She's a member of the honor sorority. Sigma Epsilon Sigma, and a talented young lady who will go far. I came across a path, a very neat little lane weaving among the trees. I looked for footprints or tracks of any kind, but the damp, sandy earth was packed so hard that even my own shoes left scarcely a mark. Above the path the tree canopy was parted, and I could see the vivid blue of the sky. I picked the left path at random and started along it. I was feeling pretty good now; my head didn't hurt any more and I was even getting hungry again. Actually, it was amazing I wasn't more seriously injured. Outside of the blow to my head and my scorched and ragged clothing, I had survived suicide admirably -- or should I say damnably? If only it weren't for that infernal silence. Had fallout killed the insects and animals? It had been rumored the Venezuelans had used the bomb against Brazil, but that war was over. Wasn't it? Had there been a plague? I didn't know. The papers never let us read about things like that any more; things like plague or murder or... suicide. Things like that weren't supposed to happen. Ahead of me the path fanned out and suddenly I was out of the forest IF entirely, standing on a level grassy plain -- and staring in amazement. The land was like a large meadow, scattered throughout it like colorful gems. About an eighth mile from me out on the meadow there stood a city. It was a complex of incredibly graceful and unusual buildings, arranged on a huge, circular, paved courtyard -- like an architect's models assembled on a big plate. All of the buildings were constructed of what appeared to be smooth white stone and had large, round, portholelike windows. The largest building stood in the center of the circle, rising far above its fellows. It was an elliptical shaft and contained periodic rows of the round windows, which probably marked the presence of floors or stories. There were about a dozen other buildings, all beautifully designed. One was circular shaped; another mimicked the form of a bird's spreading wings. Others were shaped with sloping spires and domes. It was such a simple, bold, pleasing arrangement. I thought ruefully of my cramped and coarse New York; of the gigantic megalopolis sprawling for mile after ravenous mile under a shroud of fumes and smoke; of life that had become worse than death in its crowded, crumbling streets -- And here the air was so clean that it hurt my lungs, and the sunlight reflecting off the windows and the smooth, bright, stone walls of the buildings made me squint. My legs felt weak, and I was surprised to feel sweat trickling across my stomach. Then I saw the people. There were three of them, and they were strolling -- yes, I swear they were just strolling, flagrantly loitering -- along the edge of the paved area to the right of the buildings. Then one of them paused, pointed at me; and they began to come toward me. This was getting ridiculous. Why didn't they just take me away and lock me up -- whisk me up with the almighty, omnipresent, ever-right bureaucratic hand and put me where I couldn't harm anyone -- including myself? What was I doing here? Why the cat and mouse game? It was at once both pathetic and absurd; three men -- women? They had long hair, shoulder-length at least, and wore long, loosely-fitting robes in pastel shades and delicate floral prints. One of them seemed to be carrying something under the robe on one arm, but I couldn't see well because the sun was -- the suns were -- By the time they were within a hundred yards of me. I'd had it. None of this sleep business; this time I know I fainted. I was lying on my back on something comfortably contoured to my weary body, and for some damp, cool, intangible reason my eyes were closed, and I could not see. The murmur of their voices was strangely reassuring, like the gentle hum of the air-conditioning units which dominated and sustained every building I could ever remember. They weren't speaking English. Slowly I opened my eyes, afraid of what Imight see. Good God -- was I so sick or had I really seen two suns? I was lying on a tall, couch-like bed, and several of the people were bent anxiously over me. The one nearest my head observed my waking and lifted a hand. I cringed. He -- well, I thought it was a man: a man with shoulder-length chestnut hair, bottomless brown eyes, graceful features, and an absurd blue robe -- he spoke reassuringly to me in that soft tongue I could not understand. When I sagged back against the couch, he reached out and lifted the damp cloth from my forehead, nodding gently at me. Four others stood behind or beside the chestnut-haired one. I think three of them were the ones I'd seen from the meadow; at least the robes -- yellow, pale orange, and a sort of green and gold floral print -- were the same. The other one I hadn't seen before. Were they men or women anyway? They had delicate, sensitive, mobile faces, neither definitely feminine or masculine. Their eyes were large, dark, and luminous, their features fine and pleasant. Oddly enough, I thought of a setter I'd once owned -- before the Council declared all dogs superfluous and obsolete, that is. She had that same expression: attentive, thoughtful, responsive. All of them wore their hair long, the length ranging from several inches to silky manes that flowed down around Aeir shoulders. Their hair, as their simple clothing, was unadorned. The robes fell to their ankles, and they wore flat, open sandals on their small feet. One of them carried two purple flowers in his -- her? -- hand. All of them regarded me with concern and polite curiosity. I bolted upright into a sitting position, startling them, and my voice came out like a scream. "Where am I!? What are you doing to me?" I t hink they were a little fritened by the outburst, some of them anyway. Several took steps backward, their eyes watchful, their arms in protective poses across their robes. The chestnut-haired one reached slowly out and touched my arm; on his face was a look of such sheer compassion and reassurance that my desperate utterance ceased immediately. He spoke quietly and earnestly, motioning to me with his other hand as if I should follow him. If it was all a vast Council plot, they already had me where they wanted me; trapped and on the verge of hysteria. I was too weary and frightened to resist. I got to my feet and followed him, my legs unsteady and sluggish in their obedience. We went out a doorway into a long, curving corridor that followed the outside of the building and was lined on the right side with a row of the big porthole windows. I was in the tall, elliptical building, I guess; far below, the smooth white wings of the other structures spread against the backdrop of the paving and the green of the meadows. My mind was convulsed with loneliness and confusion. As if he sensed my despair, the chestnut-haired one squeezed my arm encouragingly and pointed at a closed door to the left One of the others pressed a button on the wall, much as IP one would ring a doorbell. The door slid open with a soft hiss. The interior of the room was so gloomy that I could barely see. I resisted, hanging back obstinately, but the chestnut-haired one gestured at me and tugged on my arm until I stumbled through the doorway. The room had a breath, a pulse, a vibration of its own that made it like a Hying thing; but it was so dark that I could not see the walls or even the floor, and I was frightened. The chestnut-haired one was speaking quietly, not to me but to one of the others. I tried to cry out, but he was pushing me gently and firmly forward. They were placing something on my head; then my brain felt like it was freezing, and my eyeballs bulged in their sockets. I tried to struggle but I was unable to free myself from the cold grayness that was invading my mind. And, for the third time since my awakening in this strange world, I lost consciousness again. I felt groggy, and it was hard to awaken. I opened my eyes in a small, bright room; I was lying on... a bed, I guess. The chestnuthaired one was nearby, seated on a fat, stool-like chair. "Listen," I said weakly, "someone's got to tell me what's happening," "Of course," the chestnut-haired one said -- in fluent, fluid English. "Do you feel all right now?" "So you do speak English!" I exclaimed incredulously. "No. Now you speak our language," I stared at him. "We have supplemented your knowledge," he explained, "in the dark room. We use it sometimes, for children born with... unfinished minds." The explanation strangely satisfied me. It did nothing for my other fears and questions, however. "W-where am I? What am I doing here?" "You're here, in the Life Building," the chestnut-haired one replied, his voice polite and concerned. "They found you when you lost your awareness, out by the Tree Land. They thought you might be hurt, and brought you here." "But where is this? Am I on Council property any more?" I was treading thin ice and keenly aware of it, but I was driven even in my desperation to find out. The chestnut-haired one shook his head. "I do not know what this Council is. You are in our land now." "I-I'm not in South America?" "No. That is a place in your land, isn't it?" His voice was sympathetic. "But you are in another land now." Then I had seen two suns? Or was I very, very insane? barely above a hoarse whisper. "Who are you?" "My name is Psilote. You come from a land that you call Earth. We do not know of this land or where it is, or what has brought you to us." God, how could I beheve what he said? It was a hoax, a fraud -- a monstrous and cruel trick of the damned Council! And yet, if it was true... To admit that possibility seemed tantamount to admitting my own insanity. Out in that forest I had thought I was either dead or insane and wished for either fate without misgivings. But now it was different -- and I was afraid. "You are troubled," Psilote said softly; his obvious concern was overpowering. "This Council, it is not in our land. It can not harm you." My shoulders slumped. I stifled the urge to flee from him. To where could I flee? I cleared my throat awkwardly, but my voice didn't come out very loudly anyway. "Last I remember, I was in New York City, at the Third Street power station. I threw myself onto the generator grid. I was trying to commit suicide." Did he understand the word? "I was trying to kill myself." Psilote was silent for so long that I wondered if he'd understood what I'd said. I looked up at his face and I saw that he had indeed understood; his expression of simple and honest empathy touched me like a warm hand. How much did he know about me from that -- that room? Or could he read my very thoughts? "We did not bring you here," he said softly, "nor can we understand the peculiar warping of time and space which combined in your land to bring you to us. But you flung yourself onto a generator grid, hoping for death. Whatever power has brought you here instead, I would like to think it is the kinder one." I thought I was losing my mind. Where in heaven's name could this place be, where men nearly wept at the thought of a person dying? Where a death didn't merely mean more space, more food, more air. Psilote had said I was in another land. How right he was! He led me along another portion of the curving hall, to a sort of elevator that whisked us down to the ground level. I followed him across the paved courtyard and toward the circular building. The suns made the white stone gleam like alabaster. Psilote's sandals plopped gently across the smooth flagstones. I glanced down at myown feet; my shoes were terribly shoddy, and one was untied. Several of the others were standing outside of the circular building. I recognized the one with the shy eyes and the orange robe, and she -- I think -- smiled guardedly at me. Psilote nodded a pleasant greeting to them and reached out to take my arm and pull me a little closer. An older one, with dark hair beginning to become streaked with gray, stared candidly at me. Then he turned to Psilote. "Whose bud is he, Psilote? I did not think there were mutants any more." They all burst into merry laughter. I was not sure what the joke was, but I didn't like being the butt of it. For the first time since I'd met these people, I stopped being scared long enough to be angry. I seized Psilote by the shoulders; I was surprised at how fragile he felt beneath that flowing robe. "Listen, you long-haired freak!" I shouted. "What's so damned funny about me?" He was like a rag doll in my hands; nonresistance was an understatement. The others, utterly silent now, viewed my outburst with obIF vious distress, but made no attempt to intervene. I stared at Psilote, who hung limply from my hands, and I was overcome with a deep shame. I released him and stepped back, acutely aware of the surprise and concern that greeted my actions. "I'm sorry," Psilote said quietly -- why did he have to say he was sorry? "We weren't trying to make fun of you. I know you are still upset." "I -- I'm sorry," I echoed stupidly, because there was nothing else I could say. Psilote touched me gently on the arm. His dark brown eyes went right through me in a way that made me feel helpless and ashamed. Good God, how could he care so much about me? I was a maniac! Their silence melted rapidly into smiles, and then Psilote introduced me. "This is Dewan." The older one, apparently he commanded first courtesies. "And Rella." Blond hair -- the first I'd seen here; somehow Rella looked like neither a man nor a woman. "And Trewlis." This one had to be a man; very pleasant eyes -- they literally sparkled. "And this is Camphos." Camphos was the orange-robed one, a girl I was certain. She had very long brown hair and shy hazel eyes. Something about her own timidity bolstered me. I realized that Psilote was looking at me with inquiry on his face. Oh -- of course! "Uh -- I'm Jordan. Edward Jordan," I stammered. At least I thought I was. "Edward Jordan," Psilote mouthed the name pleasantly. "Come, Edward Jordan, we will eat." The interior of the circular building was one big room, like an auditorium or a meeting hall. Its polished floor dropped off in degrees, like huge, ring-shaped steps leading down to a large central circle about six feet below ground level. On the bottom circle was an array of tables benches, and couch-like chairs, many made of wood, others of the snaooth white stone. (Where had all this white stone come from anyway? I hadn't seen so much as a pebble outside.) The tables were littered with trays of fniit and delicate bakery, and tall goblets of some sort of drink. A few people were eating; many others were lounging casually about on the couches or on the stone steps themselves. The varying colors of their garments swirled like a muted rainbow. If they were curious about my presence, very few of them showed it by even so much as a glance. I had expected the food to be very exotic and strange, but it was rather plain -- delicious but not exceptional. The fruits were very similar to peaches and bananas (if you can imagine pink bananas). The bakery was like a sweet roll; the drink was a fruit juice. I ate ravenously. There was only one goblet. I had assumed it was for me, but then Psilote drank from it and pushed it at me with the urging, "Drink; it is good." I drank. It was good. Trewlis had gotten up from one of the couches and was walking up the steps. I had noticed a peculiarity in his movement, a sort of odd gesture of protectiveness with his left arm against his robe. "Can I ask something?" I asked Psllote cautiously. He smiled. "Of course." "It's Trewlis. Has he hurt his arm? He holds it oddly." "No, Trewlis is not injured. He is carrying a child." I n stories they sometimes say a person's mouth drops open in surprise. Mine did. I stared stupidly at him. He, she, his, her... I suddenly realized these sexual pronouns had no meaning in the language I was speaking. They were a hangover in my mind. I was using them on the basis of rather sketchy visual impressions, and Psilote was using them only because I was. Sweat was prickling between my shoulderblades. "Then -- you mean Trewlis is a -- a woman?" I asked weakly. "And if he is -- are you?" "No, Edward Jordan," Psilote replied quietly, "we are not women. We are the bud people. Not men. Not women. We are all one sex -- or rather, we are all no sex." "But -- how?" Psilote shrugged slightly. "You have seen how Trewlis sometimes supports his child; it is large now, it will be born soon. The buds grow like fruit on a tree, attached to the trunks of our bodies by a meristematic band of tissue bound in ligamentous supports. They are functionally embryos in all stages of their development. Their movements and demands are slight, and they are seldom a burden. When they are mature enough for independence from our bodies, the tough band binding them to us dehydrates, and they are freed." His eyes were filled with a subtle humor. "It leaves a very small scar. I would recommend budding to any species." "You say you are all no sex," I repeated, more for my own edification than anything else, "yet it seems to me that some of you -- well, some look more like men and some look like women. Camphos -- I thought Camphos was a girl. And I thought you and Trewlis were men." Psilote smiled. "Even in a sexual species, some males appear effeminate and some females have masculine characteristics. Because of our physical variances, these superficial impressions of masculinity and femininity do exist. Do not be embarrassed." He laughed. "I rather fancy being assumed a man." Psilote's expression become serious, and he got to his feet. "Come, Edward Jordan," he said. "There is something you must see." I stood up and followed him up the huge circular steps, where gentle, genderless people in beautiful robes lounged, eating and laughing and carrying their strange and wondrous children close against their warm bodies. Could I be dead? It bothered me to think that I might be dead -- lying charred and broken by the generator grid in my other land -- and not even know it. Or was I just finally insane? No, my new knowledge was too painfully fresh for that. Insanity is painless; reality stings and you can feel it's there. Psilote led me out across the paved courtyard, between the graceful white buildings, and into the meadow. The twin suns were straight overhead now, IF and the warmth of their rays soaked through my shoulders. Psilote was beside me, his long blue robe billowing gently and brushing along over the tops of the short, silky grass. We came to the edge of the forest. I could hear faint laughter, shouting. It was like -- well, like children playing. Psilote paused, smiled, motioned. I stepped forward. Below and beyond spread a small wooded ravine; in it, children of all ages and sizes, clad in brightly-colored robes, romped and sang among the knee-high vegetation, playing games so simple and exquisite that my eyes burned with my own memories. I turned back to Psilote. "Are they -- safe? I mean, out here by themselves like this?" Psilote seemed puzzled. "What would harm them? They are children; we let them play." W e had walked about twenty minutes (I was going to miss my wrist watch) when we reached our destination. It was a small building, nearly hidden by a tangle of flowering vines and the hanging branches of the surrounding trees. Unlike the buildings in the complex in the meadow, it was not made of white stone, but of some sort of metal that was dull and tarnished with age. There seemed to be no windows and only one door. I looked questioningly at Psilote, but he stepped up to the oblong metal door and turned the handle; the door grated open with a dry squeak. Psilote went through the doorway, beckoning for me to follow. The place was one big storage chamber. The walls were lined with files and cabinets, and there was a large, desk-like table in the center of the single room. Psilote touched a panel on the wall, and the glow of a soft light crept into the room. "We keep things here," he explained, going over to one of the metal cabinets, "things that are important for some other time and are not necessary to keep close at hand." He pulled open a drawer; it rasped stiffly. "I do not care much for metals," he noted, "but he insisted it be metal." Psilote handed me what appeared to be a fat, bound notebook. It was old, and the paper was yellowed and crisp. I set it gingerly on the table and opened it to a random page. I stared in puzzlement at the writing fcwr several moments before I suddenly realized what it was. "This is written in English I" I exclaimed. "Where did you get this?!" Psilote nodded toward the notebook. "Look at h," he said quietly. I carefully separated the cover from the first page and opened the notebook there. " 'Journsd of Robert Ascot Lemming,' " I read slowly. " To whom it may concern: If you are reading this, you are in this other land. These are the bud people -- be like them, if you can.'" I flipped a page. There was a date. " 'July #, #. This was the morning I woke up in another world -- ' " I broke off and swung to Psilote, astounded. "There's been someone else? This Lemming?" Psilote nodded. "But #I -- that was over a hundred years ago!" "Yes, and it was before my life. But this Robert Ascot Lemming was also brought here, as you have been, from this land Earth. He was an old man and he did not live long; but he left these writings, his 'journal,' of the time he spent here. This is what we felt you should see. We were told he left it in case... another of his kind came." I spread my hands protectively Over the faded notes. "Can I read this?" I asked hopefully. Psilote smiled at my caution. "Of course," he said. "There are other books like it, also of Robert Ascot Lemming's writings. They are all for you." "They'll be safe here?" "Of Course; they have been for over a hundred years. You may come any time to read them." "Tomorrow?" "Certainly." Psilote touched my shoulder. "Come, the others will wonder where we are. Myfair's bud was born yesterday; there will be a celebration." What did they do to celebrate? Get tanked up on pink banana juice? Loll about on their beautiful stone steps and smoke grass? Or jiist... sing and things -- things of piercing sweetness like the songs of their brightlyrobed children, playing in the quiet green forest... T he Director stared at the body on the steel-frame bed, then leaned forward and flipped up the report sheet attached to the railing. "'Jordan, Edward D.,'" he read dispassionately. He turned to the assistant. "What's this one here for?" "The usual, sir. Suicide attempt." The Director stared again at the motionless form on the bed, garbed in a hideous khaki gown. "Humph," the Director grunted. "Which did you give him?" "#-A, sir; the one with the asexual species in their little Eden-like world. It's proved the most satisfactory -- the most soothing -- for cases like his, where the problem was a woman." The assistant glanced at the body. "Now he can 'spend' the rest of his life there." "Humph," the Director grunted again. "Who ever invented this damn dream therapy anyway?" "Well, it's quite a serviceable solution, sir. What else can we do with them -- the senile, the incorrigibles, the manic depressives? We could hardly keep exterminating them; the public was catching on to that and raising the very dickens. It's too expensive to institutionalize all of them in the conventional sense. They're unfit to be trained for anything. With a perpetual, induced dream state, their organic needs are relatively simple to care for -- and they're far happier than they could ever be in this real world, I daresay." The Director poked Edward Jordan's body's leg and watched for a reaction that never came. "You mean," he continued, "he actually thinks he's in that kooky other world, running around with all those freaky people?" The assistant smiled shortly. "Well, sir, they don't seem freaky to him any more; he's gone through his period of adjustment, and by now he's perfectly content. But yes, for all IF practical purposes he is in that other world -- and will be for the rest of his life. By selective use of psychosurgery and drugs, we can implant in his subconscious mind any patterned dream we choose to program him with. It becomes his real life, body and spirit, and no one can interfere with it. Take #-A, for example. We do introduce a few outside forces; the journal of a 'former resident,' to make him feel a bit more secure. But other than that he can live the rest of his days happy, safe, loved, in 'another land'." The Director turned away, and the assistant fell into step beside him as they went through the silent ward, filled with the motionless, unfeeling bodies of dreamers. "There is one puzzling little item on that Jordan case, however, sir," the assistant volunteered. "And what's that?" the Director said gruffly. "Well, he tried to kill himself down at the Third Street power station, sir; threw himself onto the generator grid." "What's puzzling about that?" the Director snapped. "All of the generator grids have a safety shut-down; all it did was give him a bad jolt. He'd have to trip up the relay wires before it would have killed him. You'd think he would have remembered that, sir; he'd worked at that power station for eleven years." "Humph," said the Director. T hat night they carried another unconscious body out of the Third Street power station. The coded instructions which the assistant received with the patient recommended that #-A would probably be the most beneficial treatment. But the assistant stared in surprise at the motionless, khaki-clad body. It was the Director. ENt) This Month in Galaxy Bnllianfly Safiricat Science Fictioni by Fritz Leiber by Damon Knight by Mack Reynolds by Willy Ley -- and many more! Don't miss August Galaxy -- on sole now! J ohn Grimes was really homeward bound at last. On both Tharn and Mellise he had been obliged to leave the ships in which he had taken passage when requested by the rulers of those planets to assist them in the solution of rather complicated problems. He had not minded at all; he had welcomed the prospect of action after too long a time as a desk-borne Commodore. But now he was beginning to become a little impatient. Sonya, his wife, would be back soon from her Galactic cruise, and then the major city of Lorn would be -- as far as Grimes was concerned -- forlorn in name only. He was pleased that Rim Jaguar would be making a direct run from Mellise to Port Forlorn with no time-expending calls en route. All being well, he would have a few days in which to put things in order prior to Sonya's homecoming. It promised to be an uneventful voyage -- and in Deep Space uneventful voyages are the rule rather than the exception. Rim Jaguar was one of the more modern units of Rim Runners' fleet, built for them to modified Epsilon Class design. She was well found, well manned and reasonably happy. Grimes was the only passenger, and as Rim Runners' Astronautical Superintendent he was given the run of the vessel. He did not abuse the privilege. He would never have dreamed of interfering, and he made suggestions only when asked to do so. Nonetheless, he enjoyed the long hours that he spent in the control room, yarning with the officers of the watch, looking out through the wide viewports at the great, distant Galactic Lens, unperturbed by its weird, apparent distortion -- the resultant of the warped Space-Time through which the ship was falling. He was Earth-born but, like so many spacemen who had made their various ways to this frontier of the dark, he belonged on the Rim, had come to accept that almost empty sky -- the sparsely scattered, unreachable island universes, the Galaxy itself no more than a dim-glowing ellipsoid -- as being altogether right and proper and somehow far more natural than the claustrophobia-inducing crowded firmaments of the worlds toward the Center. He was sitting in Rim Jaguafs control room now, at ease in his acceleration chair, his seamed, pitted face and his still youthful gray eyes almost obscured by the cloud of acrid smoke from his vile, battered pipe. He was listening tolerantly to the Third Officer's long list of grievances; shortly after departure from Melisse he had made it quite plain that he wouldn't bite and also that anything told i# him by the ship's people would not be taken down and used as evidence against them. "And Annual Leave, sir," the young man was saying. "I realize that it isn't always possible to release an officer on the exact due date, but when there's a delay of two, or even three months... "We just haven't enough personnel, Mr. Sanderson," Grimes told him, "to ensure a prompt relief. Also, when it comes to appointments I try to avoid putting square pegs into round holes. You know what that can lead to." "The Rim Griffon business, sir?" "Yes. Everybody hating everybody, and the ship suffering in consequence. A very sorry affair." "I see you point, sir, but... An alarm pinged sharply. "Excuse me." I t was the Mass Proximity Indicator that had sounded off, the only piece of navigational equipment, apart from the Carlotti Direction Finder, that was functional while the Interstellar Drive was in operation. Grimes swivelled his chair so that he IP could look at the globular tank that was the screen of the device. Yes, there was something there all right, something that had no business being there, something that, in the screen, was only a little to one side of the glowing filament that was the extrapolation of the ship's trajectory. Sanderson was spealg briskly into the telephone. "Control Room here, sir. Unidentified object #, range #, closing. Bearing opening." Grimes heard Captain Drakenberg's reply. "I'll be right up, Mr. Sanderson." Drakenberg was an untidy bear of a man. He looked into the screen and grunted, then turned to Grimes. "And what do you make of it, sir?" "It's something... "I could have told you that. Commodore." Grimes felt his prominent ears redden. Drakenberg was a highly competent shipmaster, popular rather than otherwise with his officers, but at times lacking in the social graces. He said mildly, "According to Traffic Control there are no ships in this sector..." "Would it be a Rim Ghost?" asked the Captain. "You're something of an expert on them, Commodore. Would one show up on the M.P.I.?" "Conditions would have to be exactly right," said Grimes. "We should have had to slip into its continuum, or it into ours. The same applies, of course, to any attempt to establish radio communication... "We'll try that, sir," said Drakenberg bluntly. Then, to Sanderson: "Line up the Carlotti." The watch officer switched on the control room Carlotti Communicator, a miniature version of the main set in the ship's Radio Office which itself was a miniature version of the huge, planet-based beacons. The elliptical Mobius Strip that was the antenna began to rotate about its long axis, fading into apparent insubstantiality as it did so. Then Sanderson threw the switch that hooked it up with the Mass Proximity Indicator. At once the antenna began to swing on its universal mounting, turning hesitantly in a wide arc. After its major oscillations had ceased, it hunted for a few seconds, finally locked on. "Pass me the microphone," Drakenberg ordered. Then he said, speaking slowly and very distinctly, "Rm Jaguar calling unidentified vessel. Rim Jaguar calling unidentified vessel. Come in, please. Come in, please." There was a silence, broken by Grimes. "Perhaps she hasn't got M.P.I.," he suggested. "Perhaps she hasn't seen us." "It's a compulsory fitting, isn't it?" growled the Master. "For the Federation's ships. And for ours. But the Empire of Waverley hasn't made it compulsory yet. Or our Shakespearian Sector neighbors either..." He got out of his chair, moved to the screen. "Besides, I don't think that this target is a ship. Not with a blip that size, and at this range..." "What the hell else can it be?" demanded Drakenberg. "I don't know," admitted Grimes. "I don't know." I t hung there against the unrelieved blackness of Rim Space, a planet where no planet should have been, illuminated by a sun that wasn't there at all. There was an atmosphere, with cloud masses. There were seas and continents. There were polar icecaps. But it was real, solid, with enough mass to hold the ship -- her Inertial Drive and her Mannschenn Drive shut down -- in a stable orbit about itself. An Earth-type world it was, according to Rim Jaguars instruments -- an inhabited world, with the scintillant lights of cities clearly visible, scattered over its night hemisphere. All attempts at communication had failed. The inhabitants did not seem to have radio, either for entertainment or for the transmission of messages. Grimes, still in the control room, looked with some distaste at the useless Carlotti transceiver. Until the invention of this device, whereby ships could talk with each other and with shore stations regardless of range and with no time lag, Psionic Radio Officers had always been carried. In circumstances such as these a trained telepath would have been invaluable, would have been able to achieve contact with at least a few minds on the planet below. Psionic Radio Officers were still carried by fighting ships and by survey vessels, but Rim Jaguar was neither. She was a merchantman, and the employment of personnel required for duty only upon very special occasions would have been uneconomical. She did not carry sounding rockets, even. Grimes, as Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners, had been responsible for that piece of economy, had succeeded in having the regulations amended. He had argued that ships trading only in a well charted section of Space had no need for such expensive toys. It had not been anticipated that an unknown planet -- matter or anti-matter? -- would appear suddenly upon the track between Mellise and Lorn. But the construction of a small liquid fuel rocket is little more than a matter of plumbing, and the Jaguars engineers were able to oblige. Her Second Officer -- as well as being the ship's navigator, he specialized in gunnery in the Confederacy's Naval Reserve -- produced a crude but effective homing device for the thing. It was hardly necessary. The range was short and the target a big one. The rocket was fired, on such a trajectory that it would hit the night side while the ship was directly over that hemisphere. Radar tracked it down to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, where it disintegrated. But it was a normal, meteoric destruction by impact and friction, not the flare of released energy that would have told of the meeting of matter and anti-matter. That was that. The initial reports of the sighting, together with all the relevant coordinates, had already been sent to Lorn; all that remained now was to report the results of the sounding rocket experiment. Grimes was scribbling the message down on a signals pad, and Drakenberg was busy with the preliminaries to putting the ship back on trajectory, when the Radio Officer came into the control room. He was IF carrying three envelopes, one of which he handed to the Captain, giving the other two to the Commodore. Grimes knew what their contents would be and sighed audibly. Over the years he had become too much of an expert on the dimensional oddities encountered out on the rim of the Galaxy. And he was the man on the spot -- just when he was in a hurry to be getting home. The first message was from Rim Runners' Board of Management and read, "Act as instructed by Admiral commanding Confederate Navy." The second one was from Admiral Kravinsky. "Carry out full investigation of strange planet." Drakenberg, scowling, handed Grimes the flimsy that had been inside his own envelope. Its content was clear enough. "Place self and vessel under orders of Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve." "Keep the ship in orbit. Captain," ordered Grimes resignedly. II A dust mote in the emptiness, Rim Jaguar's No. # lifeboat fell towards the mysterious planet. In it were two men only -- Grimes and Sanderson, the freighter's Third Officer. There had been no shortage of volunteers, from the Master on down, but Grimes, although a high ranking officer of the Naval Reserve, was still an employee of a commercial shipping line. To make a landing on an unknown world with horse, foot and artillery was all very well when you have the large crew of a warship to draw upon; should the initial expedition come to grief there would be sufficient personnel left aboard the vessel to handle her and, if necessary, to man her weaponry. But, insofar as manning was concerned, a merchant ship had to be run on a shoestring. There were no expendable ratings, and the loss of even one officer from any department meant at least considerable inconvenience. Grimes' decision to take only Sanderson with him had not been a popular one, but the young man had been the obvious choice. He was unmarried and -- so Grimes had learned from the control room conversations -- was an orphan. He did not have a steady girl friend, even. Furthermore, he had jiist completed a period of Naval Reserve training and saw himself as a small arms expert. Rim Jaguar, however, did not carry much of an armory. Grimes had with him his own Minetti and one of the ship's laser handguns. Sanderson had one of the other lasers -- there were only three on board -- and a vicious were spare power packs and a good supply of ammunition for all weapons. The Third Officer, who was handling the boat, was talkative on the way down. Grimes did not mind -- as long as the young man kept his trap shut and concentrated on his pilotage as soon as the little craft hit the atmosphere. "This is a rum go," he was saying. "How do you explain it, sir? All that obvious sunlight -- and no sun at all in the sky..." "I've seen rummer," Grimes told him. "Or as rum..." Like, he thought, the series of alternative universes he had explored -- although not thoroughly -- in that voyage of the Faraway Quest that somebody had referred to as a Wild Ghost Chase. And that other universe, into which he had quite literally blown his ship, the one in which those evil non-human mutants had ruled the Rim. On both of those occasions Sonya had been with him. She should have been with him now -- not this lanky, blond, blue-eyed puppy. But that wasn't Sanderson's fault, and in any case. Grimes did not think that he would find the young man lacking in any respect. "I suppose," the Third Officer rattled on, "that it's all something to do with different dimensions. Here, we're at the very edge of the expanding Galaxy, and the... the barriers between continuums must be stretched thin, very thin. That planet's popped through into our continuum, but only half through, if you see what I mean. Its primary has stayed put on the other side of the... boundary . , ." "A fairish hypothesis," admitted Grimes. "It will have to do until we can think of a better one." A nd, he told himself, there must be a better one. So far as he knew, the differences between the universes were cultural rather than cosmological. There just shouldn't be a planet here -- "And I wonder what the people are like, sir. Would they be humanoid, do you think, or even human? TTiey must be' civilized. They have cities." Grimes muttered something about plastic jungles. "Not plastic, sir. They haven't radio, so the chances are that they don't run to chemical engineering. Concrete jungles... Would that be better?" Grimes allowed himself to suppose that it might be. "You couldn't have timed it better, sir. That large town you decided on will be just clear of the terminator when we get down." In the Federation's Survey Service, thought Grimes, we were drilled so that such timing became second nature. How had that Instructor put it? "Make your first landing just west of the terminator, and unless some bastard chases you off, you've the whole day to play silly buggers in." "Better fasten seat belts, sir." Grimes pulled the webbing taut across his body, snapped shut the buckle. In a boat fitted with Inertial Drive the ride down to the planetary surface should be a smooth one, provided that there was no atmospheric turbulence. But here there was no Spaceport Control to give information on meteorological conditions. He spoke into the microphone of the transceiver. "Commodore to Rim Jaguar, We are now entering exosphere. So far all is going as planned." He heard Drakenberg acknowledge. The air below the boat was clear, abnormally so. The lights of the cities were like star clusters. For a brief second Grimes entertained the crazy idea that they were star clusters, that he and Sanderson had broken through into some other Time and Space, were somehow adrift in regions towards the heart of a galaxy. He looked upwards for reassurance. But he did not. IP through the transparency of the overhead viewport, see the familiar, almost empty Rim sky. The firmament was ablaze with unfamiliar constellations. It was frightening. Had Sanderson somehow turned the boat over just as Grimes had shifted his regard? He had not, as a glance at the instrument panel made obvious. He had not -- and below were still the city lights; from zenith to horizon there were the stars, and low to the west was a great golden moon. Astern, the first rosy flush of dawn was in the sky. His voice unemotional, deliberately flat, Grimes reported his observations to the ship. S wiftly the boat fell through the atmosphere, so fast that interior temperature rose appreciably. But Sanderson was a first-class pilot, and at no time did he allow the speed of descent to approach dangerous limits. Swiftly the boat fell, her Inertial Drive purring gently, resisting but not overcoming the gravitational field that had her in its grip. Through the morning twilight she dropped, and above her only the brighter stars were visible in the pale sky, and below her the land masses were gray-green rather than black, and the city lights had lost their sharp scintillance and were going out, street by street. It was towards what looked like a park that Sanderson, on Grimes' instructions, was steering, an irregular rectangle of comparitive darkness outlined by such lights as were still burning. There were trees there; the men could see them as the boat lost altitude; there were trees, and there were dull-gleaming ribbons and amoeboid shapes that looked like water, and featureless patches that must be clear, level ground. Bordering the park were the towers of the city -- tall, fantastically turreted and, when struck by the first bright rays of the risen sun, shining like jewels in the reflected radiance. The boat grounded gently on a soft, resilient surface. Grimes looked at Sanderson, and Sanderson looked at Grimes, and then they both stared out of the viewports. They had landed in the middle of the park, on what looked like a lawn of emerald green grass, not far from the banks of a stream. There were trees in the foreground -- low, static explosions of dark foliage among which gleamed, scarlet and crimson and gold, what were either fruit or flowers. In the background were the distant towers, upthrusting like the suddenly frozen spray of some great fountain, an opalescent tracery against the clear blue sky. "Open up, sir?" asked the young officer at last. "Yes," said Grimes. Briefly, an itemized list of all the precautions that should be taken before setting foot on a strange planet flashed before his mind's eye, but he ignored it. To wear a spacesuit in this huge, gorgeous garden would be heresy. But not all of his training could be dismissed so easily. Reluctantly he picked up the microphone, made his report to the ship. He concluded with the words, "We're going out, now, to make contact with the natives. You have your instructions. Captain." "Yes, Commodore Grimes." Grimes wondered why Drakenberg should sound so anxious. "If I don't hear from you again twenty-four standard hours from now, at the latest, I'm to make a report directly to the Admiralty and await their orders." He hesitated, then brought out the final words with some difficulty. "And on no account am I to attempt another landing." "That is correct, Captain Drakenberg. Over." "Good luck, Commodore Grimes. Over and out." Sanderson already had both airlock doors open, and the cool breeze had eddied gently through the little cabin, flushing out the acridity of hot oil and machinery, bringing with it the scent of flowers, of dew-wet grass. There were birds singing outside and then, faint yet clear, the sound of a great clock somewhere in the city striking the hour. Automatically Grimes looked at his watch, made to reset it and then smiled at his foolishness. He did not know yet what sort of time it was that these people kept. H e was first out of the boat, jumping down on to the velvety turf, joined almost at once by Sanderson. "This is a bit of all right!" exclaimed the young man. "I hope that the natives come up to what we've seen so far." He added, "The girls especially..." Grimes should have reproved him, but he didn't. He was too busy wondering what it was that made everything so far seem so familiar. He had never seen this world before, or any planet like it, and yet... How did he know, for example, that this city's name was Ayonoree? How could he know? "Which way do we go, sir?" Sanderson was asking. Which way? The memory, if memory it was, wasn't quite good enough. "We'll follow the stream," he decided. It was a short walk to the near bank of the little river, along which ran a path of flagstones. The water was crystal clear, gently flowing. On it floated great lily pads, and on one of these sat a huge frog, all gold and emerald, staring at them with bright, protuberant eyes. It croaked loudly. "It's saying something!" cried Sanderson. "Rubbish!" snapped Grimes, who was trying tp break the odd spell that had been cast over them. But were those words that they could hear? 'Follow stream, stay in the dream. Follow stream, stay in the dream "You!" shouted Sanderson. "What do you mean?" In reply the batrachian croaked derisively, splashed into the water and struck out slowly for the further shore. So we follow the stream, thought Grimes. He set off along the path, the young man trailing behind. Suddenly he stopped. There was a tree, gracefully trailing its tendril-like branches almost to the water, at one side of the flagstones, another tree a few yards inshore from it. Between the trunks was a huge, glittering web. There was a spider, too, disgustingly hairy, as big in body as a large man's clenched fist, scuttling toward the center of its fragile-seeming net. And IF there was an insect of some kind, a confused fluttering of gauzy wings, snared by the viscous strands. Grimes made to detour around the landward tree. After all, spiders were entitled to a meal, just as he was. Insofar as the uglier sides of Nature were concerned, he tried to maintain his neutrality. He did not especially like spiders -- but, in all probability, that oversized insect in the web was something even nKre unpleasant. Behind him he heard Sanderson cry out, heard the hiss of his laser pistol and felt the heat of the beam that narrowly missed his right ear. The fleshy body of the spider exploded and hung there, tattered and steaming. There was a sickening stench of burned flesh. Grimes turned angrily on the young man. "What the hell do you think you're doing? For all we know, spiders are sacred on this world..." "More likely these are!" Sanderson had pushed past Grimes and, with gentle hands, was freeing the trapped creature. "Look!" he was saying. "Look!" T he Commodore looked. This was not, as be had assumed, an insect. It was humanoid, a winged woman, but tiny, tiny. Her lustrous golden hair hung to her waist, and beneath her filmy green robe was the hint of perfectly formed breasts. Her mouth was scarkt and her eyes blue, and her features were perfectly -- too perfectly? -- formed. She sat there in the Third Officer's cupped hands, looking up at him. Her voice, when she spoke, was like the tinkling of a little silver bell.  Follow stream, and follow river. When danger threatens do not quiver; Follow stream to Ogre's Keep, Wake the Princess from her sleep!' "What Princess?" demanded Grimes. She turned to glare at him. "Prince's servitors, like you. Should only speak when spoken to," Sanderson was shocked. "This is the Commodore," he said severely to the winged being. "Commodore, Schmommodore!" she replied sweetly -- and then, with hardly a quiver of those impractical looking pinions, was gone. "So you're promoted," said Grimes drily. "And I'm demoted." "All the same, sir, it was absolute sauce on her part." Then he went on a little smugly. "The odd part is that  am #i prince. My father was King of Tavistock, until they threw him out." "And your great grandfather," said Grimes, "who founded the dynasty, was a semi-piratical tramp skipper. I know the history." "Do we follow the stream, sir?" "Yes. It's as good a way to explore this world as any." Ill T hey followed the stream. Through the great park it led them, past enormous beds of fantastic, glowing flowers, through a grove of gaunt, contorted trees. The transition from parkland to city street was abrupt; suddenly there were cobbles underfoot instead of the worn flagstones. and on every hand towered the multicolored buildings, the convoluted structures that made nonsense of all the laws of architecture and engineering. People were abroad now, men and women, a great number of children. They were human enough in outward appearance at least, but there was an oddness about them, an oversimplification of all features, a peculiar blend of stylization and caricature. There was no vehicular traffic, but there were riders -- some upon horses, some upon camels, some upon the lizardlike roadrunners indigenous to Tarizeel, some upon beasts that were utterly strange even to the widely travelled Grimes. The two explorers marched on, ignored by the brightly dressed natives, ignoring them. They should. Grimes knew, have tried to make contact, which would not have been ,hard. From the scraps of conversation they overheard, it was obvious that AngloTerran was the language of this planet. They should have demanded to be taken to the king, president or whatever authority it was that ruled this world. But it was not important. What was important was to find the Ogre's Keep, to awaken the sleeping Princess. It was as though some outside power had taken control of them. The feeling should have been nightmarish, but it was not. Grimes was oddly grateful that somebody -- or something -- else was making the decisions that he should have been making. The stream joined a river, and the path continued along the bank of the larger body of water, taking the two men clear of the city. They walked on steadily, feeling no fatigue, maintaining a brisk pace. They were away from the crowds of the city; they met only an occasional pedestrian, and now and again a peasant man or woman pushing a barrow high-laden with produce in to market. One of these latter, a wizened, black clad crone dragging a little cart overladen with pumpkins, accosted them. Raising high a skinny claw she declaimed in a cracked voice: Dare the dragon! Storm the Keep! Save us all from endless sleepP 'The dragon, madam?" inquired Grimes politely. But she was given no time to answer him. From the cloudless sky crackled a bolt of lightning, dazzling, terrifying, striking the path between her and the two men. She wailed, "I didn't say anything! I didn't say anything!" and was gone, scuttling towards the city, the cart bouncing along behind her, a trail of bruised and burst pumpkins in her wake. "Somebody Up There doesn't like her," remarked Sanderson. Then, brightly, "Do you feel in the mood for dragon-slaying, sir?" "Why not?" countered Grimes. After all, it would be no more outrageous than any of their other encounters to date. Outrageous? He repeated the word mentally. Where had he got it from? Nothing, so far, justified its use -- the frog, the fairy in the spider's web, all the talk of Ogre's Keeps and Sleeping Princesses and dragons, it had all been perfectly natural. In any well regulated world Sleeping Princesses were there to be awakened, and Ogre's Keeps to be stormed, and IF dragons to be slain. Of course, the way that he and the young Prince were dressed was all wrong -- more like peasants than like knights errant. But that could not be helped. Disguise was allowable. "Shall we press on, Your Highness?" he suggested. "Yes, Sir John. No doubt the dragon awaits us eagerly." Sanderson pulled the projectile pistol from its holster, spun it carelessly with his right forefinger through the trigger guard. "Methinks that our magic weapons will prove more efficacious than swords." "Mehopes that you're right, Your Highness." "Then come. Sir John. Time's awasting." T hey walked on -- and then, just ahead of them, Grim.es saw a pontoon landing stage on the river. There was a ship alongside it, an archaic side-wheel paddle steamer, smoke issuing from its tall funnel. At the shoreward side of the stage was a notice board and on it, in big black letters on a white ground, the sign: "Your highness," said Grimes, "let's take the boat and rest awhile, then face the dragon with a smile." "Have you the wherewithal. Sir John, to pay the fare agreed upon?" "I have a pass. Prince Sanderson. And so have you -- your trusty gun." Something at the back of the Commodore's mind winced at the doggerel and cried. voicelessly. You re a space'man, not a character out of a childrens book! Grimes almost ignored it, tried to ignore it, but the nagging doubt that had been engendered persisted. They marched onto the pontoon, their heavily shod feet ringing on the planking, their weapons drawn and ready. Side by side, but with Sanderson slightly in the lead, they tramped up the gangway. At the head of it stood a man in uniform -- and, incongruously, his trappings were those of a Purser in the Waverley Royal Mail Line. He held out his hand. "Good knights, if you would board this ship, pay passage money for your trip." "Varlet, stand back! The ride is free for this, the bold Sir John, and me!" "And here, as you can plainly see," added Grimes, making a meaningful gesture with his Minetti, "is our loudvoiced authority." "Sir, it speaks loud enough for me," admitted the Purser, standing to one side. As they passed him Grimes heard him mutter, "The Royal Mail could not be worse. They never made me speak in verse." Grimes, who was always at hone aboard ships of any kind, led the way down to the saloon, a large compartment, darkly panelled, with black leather upholstery on chairs and settees. At one end of it there was a bar, but it was shut. Along both sides were big windows, barely clear of the surface of the water. There were no other passengers. Overhead there was the thudding of feet on planking. Then there was a jangling of bells, followed at once by the noise of machinery below decks. From above came the long. mournful note of a steam whistle, and then came the steady chunk, chunk, chunk of the paddles. 'Hie ship was under way, heading down river. On either side the banks were sliding past, a shifting panorama of forest and village, with only rarely what looked like a cultivated field, but very often a huge, frowning, battlemented castle. The rhythm of paddles and engines was a soothing one and Grimes, at least, found that it made him drowsy. He lolled back in his deep chair, half way between consciousness and sleep -- and when he was in this state his real memories, his very real doubts and worries, came suddenly to the surface of his mind. He heard his companion murmur, "Speed, bonny boat, like a bird through the sky. Carry us where the dragon must die." "Come off it, Sanderson," ordered the Commodore sharply. "Sir John, please take yourself in hand. Such insolence I will not stand." "Come off it!" ordered Grimes again -- and then the spell, that had been so briefly broken, took charge again. "Your Highness, I spoke out of turn. But courtesy I'll try to learn." "My Good Sir John, you better had. Bad manners always make me mad. But look through yonder port, my friend. Methinks we near our journey's end." J ourney's end or not, there was a landing stage there towards which the paddle steamer was standing in. Inshore from it, the land was thickly wooded and rose steeply. On the crest of the hill glowered the castle, a grim pile of gray stone, square-built, ugly, with a turret at each corner. There was a tall staff from which floated a flag. Even from this distance the two men could make out the emblem -- a white skull-andcrossbones on a black ground. And then, as the ship neared the shore, the view was shut out and, finally, only the slime-covered side of the pontoon could be seen through he window. The paddle steamer came alongside with a gentle crunch, and the engines were briefly reversed to take the way off her. From forward and aft there was a quick rattle of steam winches as she was moored, and then there were no more mechanical noises. The Purser appeared in the saloon entrance. "Good knights, you now must leave this wagon. So fare you forth to face the dragon." "And you will wait till we are done?" asked Grimes. can't Sir Knight, not on this run. Come rain, come shine, come wind, come snow. Back and forth our ferries go. Like clockwork yet, sir, you should try 'efn, And even set your wristwatch by 'em." "Enough, Sir John," said Sander son, "this wordy wight will keep us gabbing here all night. I' truth, he tells a pretty tale -- this lackey from the Royal Mail!" The spell was broken again. "You noticed too!" exclaimed Grimes. "Yes. I noticed. That cap badge with a crown over the silver rocket." Sanderson laughed. "It was when I IF tried to find a rhyme for "tale" that things sort of clicked into place... Grimes turned on the Purser. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded. "Alas, sir knight, I cannot say. I cannot say? The young man's pudgy face stiffened with resolution. NoF Come what may..." Whatever it was that came, it was sudden. He was standing there, struggling to speak, and then he was... gone, vanished in a gentle thunderclap as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum where he had stood. Then another man stamped into the saloon, in Captain's uniform with the same familiar trappings. "Begone, good knights," he shouted, "to meet your fate! Get off my ship. I'm running late." "Sir," began Grimes -- and then that influence gripped his mind again. He said, "Thank you for passage, sir. Goodbye. We fare forth now, to do or die!" "Well said, Sir John," declaimed Sanderson. "Well said, my friend. We go -- to shape the story's end." "I hope, good knights, you gallant two," growled the Captain, "that story's end does not shape you." He led the way from the saloon up to the gangway. IV T hey stood on the pontoon, watching the little steamer round the first bend on her voyage up river, then walked to the bridge that spanned the gap between landing stage and bank. Overhead the sky was darkening and the air was chill. The westering sun had vanished behind a bank of low clouds. Grimes, his shirt and slacks suddenly inadequate, shivered. What am I doing here? he asked himself. And then, quite suddenly. Who am I? It was a silly questian, and he at once knew how foolish it was. The answer shaped itself ha his mind. I am he they call Sir John, true comrade to Prince Sanderson. "We forward march," announced the Prince, "my cobber bold, to naeet the perils long foretold. Up yonder hill we climb, and there we'll beard the dragon in his lair." "The dragon wastes no time M fuss," remarked Grimes. "He's coming down and bearding us." Yes, the beast was coming down, either from the castle or from somewhere else a-top the hill. It was airborne -- and even in his bemused state Grimes realized that it should never have gotten off the ground. Its head and body were too large, its wings to small, too skimpy. But it was a terrifying sight, a monstrous, batwinged crocodile, its mouth agape and crowded with jagged teeth, the long sharp claws of its forefeet extended. It dived down on them, roaring, ignoring the laser beams that the two men directed at it, even though its metallic scales glowed cherry red where they scored hits. It dived down on them -- and there was more than mere sound issuing from that horrid maw. The great gout of smoky flanae was real enough, and Grimes and Sanderson escaped it only by diving into the undergrowth on either side of the steep path. The beast pulled out of its dive and flapped away slowly, regaining altitude. The men watched it until it was only a darker speck in the dark sky, then realized that the speck was rapidly increasing in size. It was coming for them again. Something was wrong, very wrong. In the fairy tales the dragons never kill the heroes -- but this dragon looked like the exception to prove the rule. Grimes bolstered his laser pistol, pulled out his Minetti. He doubted that the little weapon would be any avail against the armored monstrosity, but it might be worth trying. From the corner of his eye he saw that Sanderson had out and ready his own heavy, projectile pistol. "Courage, Sir John," called the young man. "Aim for his head. We've no cold steel -- we'll try hot lead!" "Cold steel, forsooth!" swore Grimes. "Hot lead, indeed! A silver bullet's what we need." "Stand firm. Sir John, and don't talk rot! Don't whine for what we haven't got!" Grimes loosed off a clip at the diving dragon on full automatic. Sanderson, the magazine of whose pistol held only ten rounds, fired in a more leisurely manner. Both men tried to put their shots into the open mouth, the most obviously vulnerable target. Whether or not they succeeded they never knew. Again they had to tumble hastily off the path just as the jet of flame roared out at them. This time it narrowly missed Grimes' face. It was like being shaved with a blowtorch. G rimes got groggily to his feet, fumbled another clip of cartridges out of the pouch at his belt and reloaded the little automatic. He saw that Sanderson was pushing a fresh magazine into the butt of his heavy pistol. The young man smiled grimly and said, "Sir John, the ammo's running low. When all is spent, what shall we do?" "The beast will get us if we run. Would that we'd friends to call upon!" "Many did give us good advice. If they gave us more it would be nice." "What of the fairy Lynnimame?" "And how, Sir John, do you know her name?" The dragon was coming in again, barely visible in the fast gathering dusk. The men held their fire until the last possible moment -- and it was almost the last moment for both of them. Barely did they scramble clear of the roaring, stinking flame, and as they rolled in the brush both of them wer frantically beating out their smouldering clothing. The winged monster, as before, seemed to be uninjured. Suddenly Sanderson cried out, swung to turn his just reloaded pistol on a new menace. It was Grimes who stopped him, who knocked his arm down before he could fire. In the glowing ovoid of light was a tiny human figure, female, with gauzy wings. She hung there over the rough, stony path. She was smiling sweetly, and her voice, when she spoke, was a silvery tintinabulation. "Prince, your companion called my name. I am the fairy Lynnimame. I am she who, this very morn, from the jaws of the spider foul was torn. I pay my debts; you rescued me. I'll rescue you, if that's your fee." IF V "Too right it is, you lovesome sprite... "Then take this, Prince. And now, good night." She put something into Sanderson's hand and vanished. Before she flickered into invisibility Grimes, by the pale luminosity of her, saw what it was. It was a cartridge case, ordinary enough in appearance except that the tip of the bullet looked too bright to be lead. "A silver bullet!" marvelled the young man. "A silver bullet. We are saved. He'll play Goliath to my David!" "Unless you load, you pious prig, he'll play the chef to your long pig!" Hastily Sanderson pulled the magazine from the butt of his pistol, ejected the first cartridge, replaced it with the silver bullet. He shoved the clip back home with a loud click. He was just in time; the dragon was upon them again, dropping almost vertically. The first lurid flames were gushing from its gaping mouth when the Third Officer fired. The result was spectacular. The thing exploded in mid-air, and the force of the, blast sent Grimes tumbling head over heels into the bushes, with only a confused impression of a great, scarlet flower incontinently burgeoning against tfjp night. He recovered consciousness slowly. As before, when he had dozed briefly aboard the river steamer, he was aware of his identity, knew what he was supposed to be doing. And then Sanderson's words severed the link with reality, recast the spell. "Arise, Sir John! No time for sleep! We march against the Ogre's Keep!" T hey marched against the Ogre's Keep -- but it was an undignified scramble up the steep path rather than a march. Luckily the moon was up now, somewhere above the evercast, and its diffused light was helj ful, showing them the dark mass e-f briars that barred their way befere they blundered into the thenay growth. They had not lost their weapons, and with their laser pistols they slashed, and slashed again, and slashed until their wrists ached with fatigue and their thumbs were numb from the continual pressure on the firing studs. For a long while they made no headway at all; it seemed that the severed, spiny tendrils were growing back faster than they were being destroyed. When the pewer packs in the pistols were exhausted they were actually forced back a few feet while they were reloading. It was Grimes who thought of renewing the attack with a wide setting instead t the needle beams that they had been using at first. The prickly bushes went up with a great whoosh f smoky flame, and the two men scrambled rather than ran through the gap thus cleared -- and even then the barbed thorns were clutching at them. Then, with the fire behind them, they climbed on -- bruised, tom and weary. They climbed, because it was the only thing to do. At last they were high enough up the hillside to see the castle again, black and for-? bidding against the gray sky. The few squares of yellow light that were windows accentuated rather than relieved the darkness. They gained the rock-strewn plateau in the center of which towered the Keep. They stumbled across the uneven surface, making their way between the huge boulders, avoiding somehow the fissures that made of the ground a crazy pattern of cracks. From some of these sounded ominous hissings and croakings and gruntings; from some there was a baleful gleaming of red eyes; but nothing actively molested them. And there was a rising wind now, damp and cold, that made a mockery of their rent, inadequate clothing and that whined and muttered in their ears like unquiet ghosts. But they kept on -- a staggering, faltering pace -- and came at last to the great, iron-studded doorway. Barely within Sanderson's reach -- and he was a tall man -- was a huge knocker, forged in the semblance of a snarling lion's head. The yoimg officer had to stretch to reach it. As he put his hand to it, it moved of its own accord, emitting a thunderous clangour like an artillery barrage. Boom, boom! Boom, boom! Boom! Almost as loud were the heavy footsteps that sounded thunderously behind the door. Almost as loud was the deep voice that asked, "Who on this night so bleak and frore, disturbs the Giant Blunderbore?"  T he double valves of the door crashed outwards. Standing there, silhouetted against the light, was a human figure. It was all of ten feet tall, and broad in proportion. It looked down at them, its eyes gleaming yellow in the black face, and bellowed, "Enter, princeling! Enter, knight! Ye shall be my guests tonight." Then, as the two men drew back, it went on, "Come in, come ini This is Liberty Hall -- you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!" The lapse from rh#mied couplets and the use of an expression that had never failed to annoy him snapped Grimes back to reality. He was Commodore John Grimes, of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, not Sir John, and he was supposed to be investigating this crazy planet But the castle was real enough, as was the giant who loomed there in the open doorway -- as were the bruises on his body that still ached, the scratches and burns that still smarted. "What's the matter?" he asked nastily. "Can't you find a rhyme for 'btard? And who are you, anyhow?" "And who are you? All I know is that you are outsiders, and I'm supposed to stop you. Not that I want to. This damn foolishness has gone on too Img. Much too long... From the sky thundered a great voice, 'lunderbcH'e, your duty's plain! These prying strangers mu be slain!" The giant stared upwards, growled, "Nirts to you. Fve had you, chum, in a big way." The answer was a sizzHng bolt of ligh tning , a crackling streak of dazzling energy that should have incinerated Blunderbore where he stood. But he caught it with a huge hand, laughed and hurled it back like a flaming javelin, shouting, 'Try that on for size, damn you!" "Whats going on?" Sanderson whimpered. "What's going on here?" "It's a long story..." Blunderbore told him. "It's a story all right," agreed Grimes. "The city of Ayonoree... The Frog Prince... The Fairy Lynnimame... And you. Blunderbore..." Yes, it was all coming back to him, and it was all making a fantastic kind of sense. "Can you be killed?" Blunderbore was asking. "I suppose so," said Grimes, conscious of the smart of his wounds. "Yes, I fear so. We're the outsiders. We don't belong in the series, do we? And you and the others go on from installment to installment..." "Only because we're trapped. But come in. You have to wake the Princess. It's the only way out, for all of us." T he huge man stood to one side as Grimes and Sanderson hurried into the castle. They were barely in time, were almost knocked from their feet by the wind from the crashing volley of great rocks that fell from the black sky. Ilinters stung the backs of their legs painfully. Grunting, Blunderbore pushed past them, seized the two valves of the door in his big hands, pulled them shut just as another shower of boulders crashed against the stout, iron-bound timbers. "Hurry!" he shouted. "He's turning nasty!" The giant led the way across the flagstoned floor, to the far end of the enormous, gloomy hall. He staggered as he ran -- and with cause. The very earth was growling beneath their feet, and each successive tremor was more violent than the last. From IF above came a crash of toppling masonry. The air was thickening. Tendrils of yellow fog clutched at the running, stumbling men, and the writhing mist had substance. Half-seen, evil faces leered at them, distorted visages that were all teeth and dull-gleaming eyes. Vaporous claws reached out for them, solidifying as they did so. Behind Grimes Sanderson screamed, and the Commodore stopped and turned, slashing with his laser at the gelatinous obscenity that had the young officer in its grip. It piped shrilly as it disintegrated, stinking sulphurously. "Hurry!" BI underbore was still shouting. "Hurry!" The stone floor was cracking underfoot, heaving and buckling, and from the high, vaulted ceiling ominous groans resounded. The castle could not withstand this punishment for long. The flaring torches were going out, and there was a strong smell of escaping gas -- and then, as a chance spark ignited the explosive mixture, there was a fiery blast that almost finished the destructive work initiated by the earthquake. Almost finished... But Blunderbore and the two spacemen were still on their feet, somehow, and there were still walls around them, although crumbling and tottering; and over their heads the last stone arch still held, despite the torrential rain of rubble that was clattering upon and around it. Ahead of them was the great fireplace into which the giant jumped without stooping. Then he bent slowly and fumbled among the dead ashes. He straightened even more slowly, the muscles of his naked back and arms bulging and glistening. He grunted as he came erect, holding before him an enormous slab of stone. He cast it from him -- and' the noise of its fall and its shattering was lost amid the general uproar. Under the slab was a spiral stairway, a helix of rusty iron running down and down, down to murky depths where flickered an eerie blue glimmer. The prospect was not an inviting one; how long would the walls of the shaft withstand the incessant tremors? Even so, the great fire was yet to come, whereas the frying pan was becoming hotter and hotter. Great sheets of flame from the ruptured gas mains were shrieking across the ruined hall, and through them crashed increasingly heavy falls of debris. And the writhing phantasms were back, multiplying in spite of the geysers of burning, exploding gas, coalescing, solidifying, piping and tittering. They were insubstantial no longer, their claws and their teeth were sharp. "Down with you!" bellowed Blunderbore. "Down with you! It's the only way!" "You lead!" gasped Grimes, using his laser like a sword, slashing at the half-materialized things that were closing in upon. them. "No... ril hold... them off..." The giant had wrenched the great iron spit from its sockets on either side of the fireplace, was flailing away with it, grunting with every stroke. Tattered rags of ectoplasm clung to its ends, eddied thrqpgh the smoke and dust-filled air. G rimes paused briefly at the head of the spiral staircase, then barked to Sanderson, "Come on!" He clattered down the shaking treads, his left hand on the outer guard rail, his pistol clenched in his right fist. The central column seemed to be trying to tie itself into a knot, but it held, although the steps were canting at odd angles. The walls of the shaft were starting to bulge inwards. Grimes ran -- down, down, round, round -- keeping his footing in spite of the earthquake shocks, in spite of his increasing dizziness. He ran, and after him ran the Third Officer. Up there above, Blunderbore was still fighting; his joyous bellowing came rolling down on them like thunder, loud even above the clangorous destruction of the Ogre's Keep. Down, down... Grinies staggered on, forcing his legs to move, to go on moving, taking great gasps of the damp, fetid air. Something barred his way, something long and serpentlike, with absurdly small forelegs, with curved poisonfangs and a flickering black tongue. The Commodore tried to stop, tried to bring up his pistol to a firing position, but could not. His impetus carried him on. Then he was through the monster; its body offered no more resistance than wet tissue paper. Down, down... It was more of a fall than a run. It was a fall. Grimes thudded gently into something thick and soft, lay sprawled on the soft bed of moss, breathing in great, painful gulps. Slowly he became aware of his surroundings -- the cave, lit by a soft, rosy radiance with no apparent source, the opalescent colonnades of stalactite and stalagmite, the tinkling, glittering waterfall. He focused his attention upon his immediate vicinity. The Prince was still with him, was himself slowly stirring into wakefulness. Sir John knew where he was. This was the Witch's Cave, the home of the wicked Melinee. She was standing over them, a tall woman, white of skin, black of hair, vividly red of mouth, clad in a robe of misty gray. In either hand she held a crystal goblet, bedewed with condensation. She murmured, "Rest you awhile, good knights and true, and pray accept this cooling brew." Sanderson reached greedily for the vessel she held out to him -- and Grimes, firing from his supine position, exploded it into a spray of splinters and acrid steam. "It's not the mess," protested Sanderson, "but it's the waste! I never even got a taste!" "Prince, had we quaffed the witch's wine," Grimes told him, "it would have turned us into swine..." Melinee laughed, a low, throaty gurgle. "You know too much, too much by far. But you'll be more fun the way you are." She looked at Sanderson as she said this. The invitation in her black eyes, her parted scarlet lips, was unmistakable. T he young officer reacted. He got gracefully to his feet, took a step towards the witch. He said gallantly, "Who needs wine when you're around, beautiful?" "Careful!" warned Grimes. "Have we been careful so far, sir? IF We've been collecting all the kicks -- it's time that we got our paws on some of the ha'pence." Then, to the woman, "Isn't there somewhere around here a little more private?" She smiled. "My bower, behind the waterfall..." "Sanderson! I order you to keep away from this female!" " give the orders around here, old man," said Melinee sweetly. "This is my cave, and whatever your rank may be it means nothing as long as you're on my property." She turned again to Sanderson. The filmy robe was already slipping down from one smooth shoulder, and it was obvious that she was wearing nothing underneath it. "Come," she murmured. The admonitory voice boomed from the roof of the cavern. "Melinee, you forget yourself!" "I don't!" she shouted. "I'm remembering myself. I'm a real person, not a character in some stupid children's fairy story! If you can't write adult fiction, buster, Vm taking charge of the plot. I'm supposed to be stopping these men from going any further, aren't I? Then shut up -- and let me do it my way!" "Melinee!" "That's not my name, and you know it." She turned again to Sanderson. "Don't be shy, spaceman. I'll show you just how wicked a wicked witch can be!" "Mr. Sanderson!" Grimes' voicQ crackled with authority, "Leave that woman alone!" The young man stood there, obviously thinking mutinous thoughts but not daring to express them. The woman stood there, looking at him, a contemptuous little smile curving her full lips. And then she turned, began to walk slowly and gracefully towards the waterfall. Her robe was almost transparent. "Melinee!" The voice from the roof expressed entreaty as well as anger. And why, Grimes asked himself suddenly, should I be on his side? He said aloud, but quietly, "All rightf Mr. Sanderson. Go with her." Sanderson shook his head bewilderedly. "First of all you tell me not to, and now you say that I can .  . After all, we are on duty..." "Go with her," repeated Grimes. It was more of an order than a suggestion. "But, sir..." "Damn it all, when I was your age I didn't have to be told twice." The Wicked Witch called over her shoulder, "Do as the nice man says, darling." The Third Officer made a sort of growling noise deep in his throat, glared defiantly at the Commodore, then started after the woman. She had reached the shimmering curtain of the waterfall, was passing through it. As she turned to look back through the rippling transparency Sanderson quickened his pace. Grimes chuckled, pulled from his pocket the battered pipe that somehow had survived unbroken, filled it, then ostentatiously used his laser pistol as a lighter. It was a dangerous trick, but an impressive one. From beyond the cascade came the sound of a crooning female voice. "Mirror, mirror on the wall... Who is the fairest one of all?" Then there was a crash of splintering glass and a scream. "No! No! You can't do that to me! I'll fix you! I'll fix you, you ,... fairy story teller" Mdinee burst back into the main cavern. She was shaking with murderous fury. "Look!" she yelled. "Look what that bastard did to me!" Grimes looked. Sanderson looked. "But , . the latter started to say. Grimes interjected hastily, "It's shocking!" He was lying -- as the mirror must have done. "Come on!" she snarled. "This bloody joke's gone on quite long enough" VI S he led the way into her bower, through the curtain of falling vater. As Grimes passed through it, he heard behind him the clatter of falling stalactites, felt the brief wave of scalding heat as the waterfall flashed into steam. But it was too late to harm him, and the others were well clear. On the far wall of the bower was the mirror -- or what had been the mirror. Now it was only an elaborately molded golden frame set into the rock face. Melinee scrambled through it, ignoring the sharp shard that ripped her robe from hip to anlde, Sanderson followed her, then Grimes. The tunnel beyond it was unpleasantly organic in appearance, a convoluted tube, with smooth and pinkly glistening walls, winding and pulsing underfoot, writhing. Melinee ran on, sure-footed. Somewhere she had lost her sandals, had probably used one of them to smash IF the lying, libelous looking-glass. The men, in their shoes, slipped and slithered, but they kept up with her. Down they went, and down, losing all sense of direction, losing their footing, putting hands out to steady themselves against smooth, warm walls that shrank away from the touch. Down they went, and down, gasping in the hot air, suddenly conscious that the red-glowing walls were steadily contracting. Soon there would he no going any further ahead, and no turning back. They were crouching, and then they were slithering on their bellies. Grimes, who had passed Sanderson while it was still possible, while there was still .freedom of mavement, suddenly found his way blocked and realized that the crown of his head was pressing against the soles of Melinee's bare feet. Faintly her voice came back to him. "We're there... At the airlock... But... I don't know how to open it... "I...I have to crawl past you..." gasped Grimes. Then, urgently, "Make yourself small, woman! Breathe out!" "I'll...try..." L ike an earthworm in its tunnel -- but with far less agility, far less speed -- the Commodore edged forward. Somehow he managed to get both arms ahead of his hody, clutched filmy fabric and the firm flesh beneath. He heard her give a little scream, but he ignored it. Cloth tore, andthen he had a firm grip on her waist, just above her hips. His face was over her heels, and .then pressing down on her ankles. Somehow he was still able to draw an occasional breath. His face was sliding -- but slowly, slowly -- up the valley between her calves. He hunched his back, and the resilient wall above him gave a little. He grunted as he wriggled forward. Somehow he negotiated her buttocks, then his fingers were on her shoulders. He pulled himself ahead more rapidly now. He spat out a mouthful of hair, then slid his hands along her upreaching bare arms. And then there was metal, blessedly hard and solid to the touch -- and touch was the only sense that he had to guide him. Was this an airlock door? He did not know; he had only her word for it. And if it were, indeed, an airlock door, was it of the standard pattern? It had to be, otherwise the situation was utterly hopeless. Cramped as he was. Grimes could never get his laser pistol out of its holster -- and if he could, its employment in this confined space could well prove fatal to himself and to the others. His fingers groped, scrabbled, feeling nothing at first hut smooth seamless metal. He had almost given up hope when he found what he was looking for -- the neat little hole, large enough to admit a spacegloved digit. He had to squirm and contort himself to get his hand to the right angle. Under him Melinee whimpered a little, but did mot complain. The tip of his index finger crept over the faired rim of the hole pushed into it, at first encountering nothing at all and then, after what seemed an eternity, smooth plastic. Grimes pushed, felt the surface give. He maintained the pressure, relaxed it, pushed again, and again, making O in Morse Code -- O for Open. He heard the faint whirr of machinery -- a noise that suddenly became louder. The inward-opening door almost took his finger with it. And then he was in the airlock, closely followed by Sanderson. Melinee had vanished. S lowly Grimes and Sanderson walked through the too-silent alleyways of the ship, fighting the lassitude that threatened to close down upon them, forcing their way through air that seemed to possess the viscosity of cold treacle. But they were not alone. In their ears -- or in their minds? -- sounded the croaking voice of the Frog Prince, the tinkling soprano of the Fairy Lynnimame, the husky whisper of Melinee. "You must not give in. You have come so far; you must not give in. Waken the Princess. Waken the Princess." And there was Blunderbore's urgent muttering, and the faint voices of the River Queen's Captain and Purser. "Wake the Princess. Wake the Princess." They stumbled on, weakening, througji the gelid air, the internal atmosphere that didn't even smell right, that didn't smell at all, that lacked the familiar taints of hot oil and machinery, of tobacco smoke and women's perfume, the clean, garden scents of the hydroponics deck. They staggered on, through alleyways and up companionways, fighting every inch of the way, sustained somehow by the fairy-tale characters whom they had encountered. And Grimes knew what was wrong, knew the nature of the stasis that must soon make them part of itself, thsit would make them part of itself unless they reached the Mannschenn Drive room in time. He had read of -- but had never until now experienced -- the almost impossible balance of forces, the cancelling out of opposing temporal precession fields that would freeze a ship and all her people in an eternal Now, forever adrift down and between the dimensions. That had been one of the theories advanced to account for the vanishing without trace of that Waverley Royal Mail liner ten standard years ago -- the ship aboard which the writer Clay Wilton had been a passenger. Grimes could remember, vividly, the blurb on the dust jacket of the book that he had bought as a present for the small daughter of a friend. "The last of the dreamers," the author had been called. He had skimmed through it, had laughed at the excellent illustrations and then, to his amazement, had been gripped by the story. It was about a world that never was and never could be, a planet where sorcery was everyday practice, where talking animals and good fairies and wicked witches interfered in the affairs of men and women. You are beginning to understand... whispered Lynnimame. T here was the door ahead of them, with Mannschenn Drive in shining metal letters above it. There was the door ahead of them, the closed door, the stubborn door. It would not yield. Human muscles were powIF erless against the stasis; human muscles with strength flowing into them, somehow, from outside were still powerless. The handle snapped off cleanly in Grimes' hand. "Let me, sir," Sanderson was saying. "Let me try." The Commodore stepped slowly to one side, his motions those of a deep sea diver. He saw that the young man had his laser weapon out of its holster, was struggling to raise it against the dreadful inertia.  He pressed the firing stud. Slowly, fantastically the beam of intense light extruded itself from the muzzle, creeping towards that immovable door. After an eternity it made contact, and after another eternity the paint began to bubble. Eons passed, and there was a crater. More eons dragged by -- and the crater was a hole. StiH Sanderson, his face rigid with strain, held the weapon steady. Grimes could imagine that luminous, purple worm crawling across the space from the door to the switchboard. Then Sanderson gasped, "I can't keep it up!" and the muzzle of the pistol wavered, sagged until it was pointing at the deck. We tried, thought Grimes. Then he wondered. Will Wilton add us to his permanent cast of characters? Suddenly there was sound again -- the dying, deepening whine of a stopped Mannschenn Drive unit, of spinning, processing gyroscopes slowing to final immobility. Like a bullet fired from a gun deflected after the pulling of the trigger, the laser beam had reached its target. There was sound again -- fans, and pumps, the irregular throbbing of the Inertial Drive, and all the babble and clamor of a suddenly awakened ship. From bulkhead speakers boomed a voice, that of the Captain of the river steamer. "Whoever you are, come up to the main saloon, please. And whoever you are -- thank you." G rimes sprawled comfortably in an easy chair, a cold drink ready to hand. He had decided to stay aboard this ship, the Princess of Troon, having persuaded her Master to set trajectory for Lorn. After all, he was already ten years late -- a few more weeks would make very little difference. During the voyage the Commodore would be able to question the Princesses personnel still further, to work on his report. He was keeping young Sanderson with him. Drakenberg had not been at all pleased when deprived of the services of a watch officer -- but the Commodore piled on far more G's than he did. Already Grimes was beginning to wonder if his report would be believed, in spite of all the corroborative evidence from the personnel of both ships, Rim Jaguar and Princess of Troon. He recalled vividly the scene in the passenger liner's main saloon when he and Sanderson had made their way into that compartment. The stasis must have closed down while everybody was at dinner; dishes on the tables were still steaming. They had all been there -- the froglike Grollan, the old lady who had been the peasant woman encountered on the towpath, the pretty, fragile blonde whose name should have been Lynnimame, but was not -- all of them looking like the characters in the illustrations to the Clay Wilton books. And there was the big -- but not all that big -- Negro, who was a physicist, not an ogre, and the Captain, and the Purser. There was the beautiful woman who could have been the model for the Melinee in the pictures and who was, in fact, Mrs. Wilton. There were other officers, other passengers, and among them was Clay Wilton himself. He had the beginnings of a black eye, and a trickle of blood still dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Ship's staff had formed a protective cordon about him -- making it quite obvious that this was only because they had been ordered to do so. After the first excitement there had been the conference, during which all concerned tried to work out what had happened, and why. Blundell, the big physicist -- it had been hard not to think of him as Blunderbore -- had said, "I've my own ideas. Commodore Grimes. But you, sir, are the recognized authority on Rim phenomena..." G rimes was flattered, and tried not to show it. He made a major pipe. After he had it going he said, "I can try to explain. The way I see it is this. The ship went into Stasis -- and somehow drifted out from the Waverley sector towards the Rim. And out here, at the very edge of the expanding Galaxy, there's always an... oddness. Time and Space are inclined not to follow the laws that obtain elsewhere. Too, Thought seems to have more power -- physical power, I mean -- than in the regions more towards the Center. It's all part and parcel of the vagueness -- that's not quite the right word -- of... of everything. We get along with it. We're used to it. "Well... Look at it this way. You were all of you frozen in your everlasting Now, but you could still think, and you could still dream. And who was the most expert dreamer among you? It had to be Clay Wilton -- after all, his publishers refer to him as The Last Of The Dreamers. Mr. Wilton dreamed out the story that he was working on at the time when your Mannschenn Drive went on the blink. Then he dreamed of the next story in the series, and the next, and the next... Somehow a world shaped itself about his dreams. Out here, on the Rim, there must be the raw material for the creation of new galaxies. Somehow that world shaped itself, a solid world, with atmosphere, and vegetation, and people. It was real enough to register on all Rim Jaguar's instruments, even though it vanished when this ship came out of Stasis. It was real enough -- but, with a few exceptions, the people weren't real. They were little more than mobile scenery. The exceptions, x)f course, were those characters drawn from real life. And they led a sort of double existence. One body here, aboard the ship, and another body on the surface of that impossible planet, dancing like a puppet as Mr. Wilton manipulated the strings. But towards the end, the puppets got restive..." IF "You can say that again, Commodore," grinned Blundell. "Yes, the puppets were getting restive and realized that they, too, could become puppetmasters, could use Mr. Sanderson and myself to break the Stasis. And at the same time, Mr. Wilton was trying to work us into his current plot." Grimes turned to the writer. "Tell me, sir, did you intend to kill us?" "Nobody dies in my stories," muttered the man. "Not even the baddies." "But there has to be a first time for everything. That dragon of yours was far too enthusiastic. And so was your destruction of the castle." "I'd gotten kind of attached to the place, too," grumbled the physicist. "I meant no harm." Wilton's voice his chair. They were sharing a settee only a few feet from him. "The really fantastic thing about it all, Lynnimame -- I like to call you that, after all, it was your name when I first met you. You don't mind, do you?" Sanderson was saying. "Of course not, Henry. If you like it, I like it." "Good-oh. But as I was saying, the really fantastic thing about it all, the way I fitted into old Wilton's story, is that I am # i prince..." "But I think," said Grimes coldly as he got up from his chair, "that the Wicked Witch will be able to vouch that you're not a fairy prince." And would they all live happily ever after? he wondered as he made his way to his cabin. He doubted it. copy Witch. "He has a nasty, cruel streak  in him and only writes the sweetness and light fairy tale rubbish because   f  It  it makes good money. But that trick 'X for divorce. Any judge, anywhere,  demanded the weedy little man, tak-D Sanderson and the fragile little blonde had come into the small smoking room and had not noticed IF  Short Story I t was just before noon in the little town of Arrey that Jerrold Aix beheld the logically impossible event. He shut his eyes tightly, shook his head, and then looked again. The scene had not changed. There was the huddle of wary people on one side of the small village square. There was the tall, hooded man with the bushy beard and the piercing black eyes. And there was the oversized frog sitting on the pile of ragged garments. Suddenly frightened, Jerrold took a backward step, but he had already been observed. The bearded one was now looking intently at him, the slender stick in his hand raised as if to gesture. Jerrold abruptly ducked around the edge of a squat stone building and ran. It was not easy to run on those slippery cobblestones, and the muddy water of the puddles splashed in the village square drove him on. It had been a bad day right from his carefully-selected native costume, but the shock of what had happened the beginning. First there was that long chess game during the Zipstar trip. In a careless moment, he had pushed the wrong pawn, and that political scientist from Arcturus IV took immediate advantage of it. The result was a desperate but futile defense in the inexorable logic of the end game. It had been a bitter thing for one who had been champ at Centaurus Multiversity. Then the landing officer of the Zipstar boat had insisted on leaving him ten kilometers outside Arrey as a security measure, so that he had to spend the whole morning walking in a hot, muggy sun. And now this -- impossible, illogical and terrifying. He almost expected to find that they had dropped him on the wrong planet, but finally he saw the sign at the end of the narrow street, right where it was supposed to be. This calned him a little. He slowed down, hiked his skirts to ford a particularly large puddle in front of the sign, and entered the rickety, wooden building.   ed man seated behind the desk who seemed irritated at the interruption. Jerrold tried to talk, but he was out of breath. Instead, he pulled his appointment card from a pocket and set it on the desk. "Um," said the man after a brief glance at it. "Sit down." Jerrold gratefully sank onto the crude wooden chair indicated. "Is this the right place?" he panted. "This is Consolidated Enterprises, Endive Planet Division," said the grizzled man. "I am Director Finn. And according to your appointment card, you are the new operative I've been trying to get out of Personnel for the past six months. What's the matter with you?" Jerrold shook his head. "I don't know what happened," he said uncertainly. "But I saw something that is absolutely impossible." His voice faltered. "Oh-oh," said Finn. He got up quickly and drew a bottle and glass from a cupboard and poured Jerrold a stiff one. "Here, drink this. I gather you saw one of the local hot-shots at work. What happened?" "I don't know. It was logically impossible. It just couldn't have happened, but I saw it and -- " "Drink!" ordered Finn bruskly. Jerrold drank, sputtered and gasped for breath. After a moment, Finn said, "Feel better now?" Without replying, Jerrold nodded. "Then tell me what you saw." "Oh." Jerrold drained the last few drops from the glass. Then he stated, "Like I said, it was impossible. I thought I saw a man changed into a frog." He took a deep breath and wondered whether his new boss would laugh or call for the medics. "Frog, eh?" Finn said thoughtfully. He nodded. "Sounds like one of Eilen's spells. He's a mean one, all right, but shrewd. A pity the sheriff can't pin anything illegal on him." J errold stared at him with dismayed wonder. "You mean you believe it really happened?" "Who knows what really happens in such events?" Finn asked impatiently. "That's all beside the point, anyway. Universal Enterprises isn't in the natural philosophy business. But if you are going to work on Endive, you had better get used to such things. Didn't they brief you on the place?" "Certainly. Planetary specs, commercial potentials, local languages -- " "But no magic?" Jerrold shook his head incredulously. "And no counter-magic, then, I take it?" "Counter-magic!" Finn scowled and returned to his chair. "Didn't they even tell you that Endive is a merlin planet?" "Oh yes." "But you didn't bother to look up the reference." "Oh, but I did look it up," Jerrold protested. "The Catalog said that a merlin planet is a generic term for certain, very unusual planets which have technologically primitive cultures in which magic plays a strong role. They are closed to ordinary interstellar commerce, except for special franchises." "Well," Finn admitted, "It's sketchy, but it's all there. You just didn't believe it, I guess. You read the word 'magic' and mentally interpreted it as 'belief in magic.' Right?" Jerrold drew a breath and started to say something to the effect that such a conclusion was obvious, but then he remembered the over-sized frog hopping out of the pile of ragged clothing. "It looks as if I'll have to brief you," Finn grumbled. "As if I didn't have enough to do already." H e frowned and pulled a cigar out of a desk drawer. After lighting up, he said, "Merlin planets are different. You can say that in spades. They have a funny chemistry and a funny minerology. That's why we are in here. Endive produces one of the most remarkable natural essences ever discovered. There is a big demand for it, and so far nobody has come close to synthesizing it. "The trouble with the place is that there is something about it that is -- well, call it hallucinogenic if you like. If somebody spells you into being a frog, you think you are a frog and so does everybody else, including the animals." "You mean it's an illusion. A hypnotic gas in the atmosphere or something like that." "Scratch the hynotic gas and anything like that. Consolidated spent a whole year with their regional research staff trying to isolate a physical cause, and they couldn't do it. They ended up with some mishmash about psionic feedback, which might satisfy them, but it didn't help us any. We still had to come in here pretty much helpless at first, or lose the franchise. "Call it mass hypnosis, if it makes you any more comfortable. Only there's a strange side effect on Endive. Given the necessary environment for good frog survival, you can last indefinitely. As a frog, that is." "But how -- " "That's the reason for the postulate of psionic feedback. The ecology is stable. An enchanted frog is just as good as a natural one here on Endive." Finn quickly held up a hand to forestall any more discussion. "Just accept it as a local difficulty in doing business. Think you can do that?" IF "I'll try," said Jerrold uncertainly. "Good. Now for your countermagic." Finn dumped some ashes from his cigar and smiled. "With your background, you won't have a bit of trouble. The local wizards can't touch you." J errold listened and found himself saying, "That's nice. Why?" "All you have to do is go through some fairly elaborate mathematical pattern in your head. Like, for instance, solving Bessel's equation." "Bessel's equation," murmured Jerrold. "Well, it doesn't have to be Bessel's equation necessarily. That's just an example. It happens that my favorite counter-spell is LaPlace's equation in cylindrical coordinates. By the time I've separated the variables and got into the Bessel part of it, every wizard within spitting distance is completely terrified. Nobody knows why, but the local wizards can feel it when you just think this sort of thing at them." "Who," asked Jerrold, "is Bessel?" Finn looked at him with surprise. "You mean to tell me a math major never heard of Bessel's equation?" "I am not a math major," Jerrold replied. He drew his new degree from his tunic and handed it over. "My major was interstellar business. That's mostly Taw, with a little non-technical engineering." "Gh, no!" Now it was Finn's turn to be disconcerted. "I specifically asked them for a first class mathematician. They told me that they had hired some of them at Centaurus General Multiversity." "That's my school, all right," Jerrold told him. "But I haven't had a math course in fourteen years. Would a little elementary trig help?" "I doubt it," said Finn. "What a mixup!" He raised his voice and shouted, "Arline!" Then he turned back to Jerrold. "You are sure you don't know something just a little more advanced and complete? A little calculus, maybe?" Jerrold shook his head. "This is bad," said Finn. When his secretary entered, he said, "Where's the requisition on this new operative, Arline? I asked for math, and the idiots sent me law." "Oh, dear," said Arline. She glanced sympathetically at Jerrold, then went to a file cabinet. She drew out of it a large, bulky folder and set it in front of Finn. "That is the complete correspondence." F or several minutes, the director went through the records in the file folder and finally slammed it shut. "As I read it, it says math grads are very expensive this year and that they are afraid my budget might not be able to handle the cost. So I guess we're stuck with him." Jerrold remembered those job interviews. Law grads were as common this season as the math grads were scarce. If he hadn't spent so much time on his hobby, he would have been high enough on the honors list to compensate, and thus get one of the glamorous assignments. Unfortunately, although he could memorize an entire chess game, he discovered in the final exams that legal precedents were something else again. He said, "Maybe I could memorize one of your math patterns. I've got a pretty good memory for some things." "No good," grumbled Finn. "We tried that already. Unless you understand the significance of the pattern, it doesn't work." "Surely there must be something else -- " "It's too new to tell. The research boys at Regional Headquarters say that the sophisticated evocation of a complete, self-consistent logical pattern like mathematics interferes with local patterns already resonant in the psionic feedback net. At least as far as magic is concerned. But until they find out precisely how and why, we're stuck with the way we do it now." "Then I guess I better go back and try to get reassigned." "Too late for that," said Finn. "Endive is too far off the main sequence of Zipstar routes. There won't be another boat in here for six months." He shrugged. "So, if you are going to stay, you might as well get to work." "But is it safe, Boss?" Arline asked earnestly. "Remember how it was when we first came here." "I remember. We nearly lost half a dozen operatives before we accidentally found out about the math bit. But that was a few years ago. Things are different now. Every wizard in the area knows that we are able to throw a counter-spell at them that will ruin their magic for weeks. And their whole business is magic, right?" Arline agreed doubtfully. "Well, then. Who around here knows that this fellow can't counterspell with the best of us? All he needs is a wand." "Why of coursel" exclaimed Arline enthusiastically. "If they think he is a wizard like the rest of us, they will be afraid to challenge him." #TThat's this about a wand?"   asked Jerrold. "You have to have a magic wand if you are going to be a magician, don't you?" Finn asked with a smile. Then he went on more seriously. "We all know a little math, here, but there isn't a single one of us who is really good at it. So what we do is take a walking stick and carve the key steps on it. It is very much like an ancient Irish ogam stick. For those of us who know the code, it's a mnemonic device. For the Endese, it's a magic wand. "It's a pity we couldn't get a really good mathematician in here. He might be able to neutralize the whole region for months, and it would be easier for us. What's more, somebody like that might be able to teach enough math to the serfs so that they might be able to protect themselves. "Meanwhile," Finn concluded, "we have work to do. Fix this fellow up with some kind of wand, Arline. Then take him over to the sheriff with you and report that beggar. Anasa isn't going to be much interested in just a beggar, I guess, but it's the least we can do to help the poor guy." The Director turned back to his cluttered desk, and Jerrold left with Arline. IF S heriff Anasa was short, squat and muscular, and he wore his wizard's hood carelessly thrown back, revealing curly, blond hair. He was, as Finn predicted, not very enthusiastic about the frog. "All right," he grumbled. "So some silly beggar got himself changed into a frog. What am I supposed to do about it?" "But this is a human being," insisted Arline. "No, it isn't," replied Anasa crossly. "It is a frog. You said so yourself. Do you expect me to chase down every frog in the village and try to invert the spell? It would take me all afternoon." Arline said, "Director Finn believes that Eilen is the magician who did it." Immediately, Anasa sat up and looked at her intently. "Eilen? I was told that he might be in the neighborhood. You have a witness?" Arline indicated Jerrold: "Ah." The sheriff turned to Jerrold and said, "Can you positively identify Eilen?" Jerrold shook his head. "I can describe him, but I never saw him before. There were others in the square, though, who might be more familiar with your man. Why don't you ask them?" "You Farofflanders have odd customs," Anasa replied. "Here we do not take the testimony of serfs. Even," he added scornfully, "if they could say anything useful. And if it were Eilen, they will be afraid to incur his wrath by telling me about it. Let me hear your story, just as you remember it." Jerrold related the event, omitting nothing. A nasa nodded slowly. "It certainly does sound like Eilen. But you don't know whether there was a challenge, since you are not familiar with our customs. If Eilen offered the proper challenge and the man accepted, then it was all perfectly legal. There is nothing against the law if two wizards have a contest, provided no innocent bystander wizards are injured." "Can't serfs be innocent bystanders?" "Who cares about serfs? They are powerless and easily replaced." "It would seem," said Jerrold, "that this one cannot. The beggar is the only one who can give you the information you seek, and he is now a frog. Perhaps, however, a great wizard like yourself. Sheriff, can cause a frog to speak." The slur was not lost on Anasa. "You have a quick tongue," he snapped. "I noticed in your story that you were frightened. This is perfectly understandable for those who know no magic, but I see you bear a wand." He indicated the newly carved walking stick in Jerrold's hand. "He was new here," Arline put in quickly. "We have, as you say, different customs." The sheriff shrugged his heavy shoulders and let the point pass. "I was just curious," he said. "As I am sure Eilen naust have been. To me it is unimportant. What is important is that Eilen is a rogue and should be imprisoned in a large block of granite. Unfortunately, so far he has managed to avoid any public violation of the law. Perhaps the beggar might have to be consulted, after all." He stood up. "So. Now if you will forgive me, I must set about investigating that fool frog." I t took Jerrold several days to familiarize himself with the operation that Consolidated Enterprises was conducting on Endive. The barter deal itself was simple. Essence was distilled in the countryside, with the aid of certain insects. Eventually, it was shipped to Arrey by caravan, where Finn traded a low grade of bullion for it. About every six months, a Zipstar boat dropped down under camouflage radiation to pick it up. The background was more complicated. For many years. Central Authority had the policy of permitting the assimilation of any planet that could maintain its cultural identity within a galactic civilization. This meant that any technological changes must be initiated by the populace of the planet in question. Endive, mired in the confusion of an effective magic, was technologically helpless. Physical law seemed to change almost with the wind; or at least upon the whim of some overlord wizard. The common serf, from whom progress ultimately must come, could do nothing to help himself. Such a planet must be monitored. Survey teams were costly to field, however, so certain carefully restricted commercial activity was permitted as the most economical way of keeping tabs on the place. Unmentioned was the fact that this was also the way, long sanctioned by tradition and practice, for the dissemination of civilization. Finn showed Jerrold a sketchilydrawn map on the wall of his office. "You can see the territory where we operate," he explained. "It may not seem large to you, but by the time you have made the rounds, you will realize how slow travel is in a primitive place like this." "I understand," said Jerrold. "The principal means of transport is a jagoHy which looks like a horse but travels like a donkey." "Right. Another problem we have is information. For instance." He tapped a location in the distant mountains. "Here is the Satrapy of Bengal. This usually is a rich source of essence, but something has happened up there. I don't know what the trouble is, but the caravan Bengal sends to Arrey at this time of the year hasn't arrived. Your first assignment is to go up there and find out what happened to it." Jerrold studied the map with care. "That looks like a week's trip, providing I don't get lost." "About that, but you shouldn't have much trouble. I can provide you with a guide who knows the way. As a rule, the intervening region is infested by bandit wizards, but according to Sheriff Anasa the bandits seem to have moved elsewhere this summer. He is worried about it. They sometimes hire out as mercenaries, and that makes it more difficult for him to control them." "Maybe they waylaid the caravan," Jerrold suggested. "Possibly. Not very likely, though, IF because Bengal usually sends a couple of squads of his soldiers with the caravan. He has a good-sized army of wizards to maintain his authority there in the mountains." T he trip proved uneventful for the first two days. Like most Endese, the guide was no wizard, but he was stoic about the powers that be in the universe. Also, like most Endese, he had no name other than that of his job. On the third night, they bedded down by a delightful fresh brook, teeming with fish. Guide caught some and cooked them, while Jerrold sat on the grass and studied his map. "Ordinarily," said Guide, "such a pleasant place as this would be used only by a large convoy. It is too obvious a stopping place for the night. And the bandits like to strike at night." "We haven't seen any so far," Jerrold pointed out. "True," agreed Guide. "But there is always the first time. I am grateful to be in the company of a Farofflander wizard in such a place." Jerrold looked around the pleasant countryside in some alarm. It seemed peaceful enough, except for a large, dense forest in the distance. He asked about that. "In the forest there are lions," said Guide. "Who knows? Some of them may be enchanted people, but their appetites are those of lions." As Jerrold considered what sort of animal might be considered a lion on Endive, Guide added, "It is fortunate that they do not stray far from the forest." Nevertheless, shortly after the sun set, their pack animals appeared restless. Guide went to quiet them, and when he returned he said quietly, 'T think we are not alone in this valley. Might I suggest a small protective spell?" Jerrold's mouth was dry. He said, "Better stir up the fire." "Of course," Guide murmured. "I forget that you Farofflanders use light when you make your magic." He quickly stirred up the fire and threw on more fuel, but its light did not do much to dispel the gloomy shadows surrounding them. Soon there came a low snarl from not far away, and the pack animals immediately commenced a tumult. Reluctantly, the two men picked up torches and went to investigate. The tumult continued, and in the dim light cast by the torches, Jerrold could just make out the cause, its eyes glowing. "Wizard Aix," cried the Guide. "Cast your spell quickly." L acking a spell to cast, Jerrold threw his torch, but the big cat merely snarled and stepped nimbly aside. That left him with his wand as his only weapon. It was heavy enough, so he prepared to wield it as a club. About this time, the lion vanished. In its place stood the bandit, Eilen. "I wish no conflict with a Farofflander," said Eilen, his voice deep and mournful. Jerrold decided that the best defense under the circumstances was arrogance. "Then leave us," he ordered. "In due time," murmured the wizard in his bass voice. "For a moment, I thought you intended to club me to death with that wand, instead of casting a proper spell." "Would you like me to cast one now?" demanded Jerrold, brandishing the wand threateningly. For the space of perhaps ten seconds, Eilen considered the question. Then he said, "You feared me in the village. True, you held no wand at the time. Now you have a wand, yet you hold it like a club, rather than the mystic device that it should be. I find this interesting, and I shall think further on it." His manner changed. "I have claimed this wilderness as my domain. Therefore it is suitable that you pay me a tribute." "I pay you nothing," snapped Jerrold. "Perhaps," said Eilen. "Perhaps. You have given me much to think upon. At the naoment, however, I am in a hurry to reach my destination, so I must leave you. But do not forget that you owe me a tribute. I shall exact it when the time is ripe." With that he moved back into the shadows and disappeared. The two men returned to the fire, and Jerrold asked Guide his opinion of the affair. "Eilen means you no good," said Guide thoughtfully. "If he was indeed in a hurry, then we probably will not see any more of him this trip. However, one day he will not be in a hurry." He shrugged and settled down on his blanket. As an afterthout, he said, "Almost it seemed as if he were going to challenge you. This is very strange behavior. One might even think that he does not regard you as a wizard." J errold got little sleep that night. He spent the time going over in his mind the whole illogical situation. The Endese had magic. Magic was illogical. There was a psionic feedback network operative on Endive, according to Finn. This might be logical, but why should it be that the thinking through of a complicated mathematical theorem interfered with the magic? Jerrold knew little math, but he was convinced that the most important thing about math was consistency of logic. Beginner's math was of no value, so Finn had indicated, because it did not represent a complete system. The conclusion, therefore, must be that it was necessary to have recourse to a complete, logical system in which there was no room for the non-causal relations which represented magic. Eventually, he drifted into a doze, trying to think about complete, logical systems in which no non-causal relations existed. They did not see Eilen the next day, and soon they were wending their way through the foothills of the Satrapy of Bengal. The rugged countryside gave way to small, tilled fields with serfs at work in them, and the outhouses where the essence was distilled. Finally they came to the village itself. The news of their arrival spread quickly, and it was only minutes after their entry that they were met by a squad of hooded soldiers who IF insisted that they follow. In a short time, they found themselves in a large encampment overlooking a valley. The satrap emerged from his tent to greet them. "Welcome, Farofflander," said Bengal heartily. He came right to the point. "Accept my apologies that pressing business has delayed the usual caravan of essence." Jerrold nodded and looked around at the grouping of disciplined soldiers, their capes thrown back in the cool mountain air. "You have quite an army here," he said. "Of course I have an army," replied Bengal. "I am at war with the Satrap of Bichardy." He pointed to an encampment on the opposing hill. "Usually my forces are adequate to defend my realm, but Bichardy has enlisted mercenaries. He has made them many promises of wealth and glory for the taking. For two months, we have watched each other like jackals, so evenly matched that neither of us could make a decisive move." J errold said, "Indeed. Your realm seemed quite peaceful as we approached." "Of course it is peaceful," shouted Bengal. "Do you think my wizards have been idle? Many a sneak attack in the night has been met by sneak defense. It is a tiresome thing, not to be able to attack like a civilized person. Yet if I were to send a squad of lion conjures at him, he would counter with tiger conjures. Firebreathers are met by deluge-makers. "No, we have been too evenly matched to fight it out, but the change has come. Only this morning, Bichardy was joined by a group of stragglers from the wilderness. This will tempt him to attack. We should know soon." "Perhaps," suggested Jerrold with care, "it might be better for me to watch the event from some more distant vantage point." "By no means," Bengal insisted firmly. "As I say, the denouement is at hand. Bichardy has twenty more soldiers. But I have a Farofflander who wants the essence from my fields." Jerrold shook his head. "There is nothing I can do to help you. My organization is committed to neutrality in such conflicts." "Of course. And nobody is more desirous than I of seeing to it that your attitude remains unchanged. But remember that you are here to get essence. You will not get it from Bichardy. He is not a builder, like me. He is a raider, a destroyer." The satrap became more earnest. "I do not ask that you cast a spell on Bichardy. Simply let him know that you are my ally. This will strike fear in the black hearts of his followers." A messenger came pounding up the trail and panted, "Highness, the Satrap of Bichardy has signaled that he wishes to parley." Bengal frowned. "Strange," he said. "I would rather expect an attack. But come with me, Farofflander. This provides me with my opportunity. Merely to show yourself at my side should suffice to ensure peace in this countryside." IF It was a hard argument to resist. Jerrold took a firm grip on his wand, displaying it conspicuously, and marched down into the valley beside Bengal. Bichardy also brought an aid. With a thrill of somehow alienated fear, Jerrold saw that it was Eilen. T hey met, and Bengal shouted, "Enough of this, Bichardy. You see my ally. Leave my lands, and nothing further will be done to you. Attack, and you attack a Farofflander." "We will have a contest," insisted Bichardy in his turn. "My man against yours." "You dare challenge a Farofflander?" asked the astounded Bengal. "My man says that he knows this Farofflander. He says that this Farofflander is afraid of him, ran in terror when first they met, and later failed to defend himself properly against the threat of my man's enchantment. "I know nothing of this, myself," Bichardy added. "This I do know. If my man is wrong, I am already defeated, for the Farofflander can ruin my army with a single spell. But if my man is right, I think I can defeat you, Bengal. And our battle is now long overdue." Bengal glanced sharply at Jerrold. "Can this be true?" he demanded angrily. But he did not wait for an answer. He turned back to Bichardy and said, "I accept." With that, he strode from the field without a backward look. A few minutes later, Jerrold and Eilen alone occupied the valley. "I have considered your behavior in detail' Eilen said in his deep mournful voice. 'T have conduded that althou you now bear a wand you do not understand the use of it You are like the first Faxofflanders that came here, helpless as a serL "Also, you will recall that I told you I would exact a tribute from you when the time was ripe. Siodi a time is now at hand. You will be the tod of my aggrandizement, for I shall be famous for having beaten you. Many people will fear my name. In time, I shall replace Bichardy himself as lord of the mountahfTs." Jerrold found himself saying, "Bta suppose you are wrong alt me?" Eilen shook his head, his smile confident. "I am not wrong, Farofflander. That wand is useless to you." Slowly, as a cat torments a mouse, he prepared for the final, terrible gesture. "You are right about the wand," Jerrold told him. "But you are wrong about me. I need no wand." He began his chant out loud. For a moment, Eilen stood transfixed. Then the full significance of the counter-spell bore down upon him; he clutched his head in agony and fled. F inn was pleased, in spite of the fact that Jerrold returned without the essence. "That's great, Aix," he said. "I'll have to let the research boys know about this. When did you figure it out?" "The night Eilen visited us. I decided that even if I didn't know any of your kind of systematic logic, I had my own. There is nothing so inIF  Short Story mute the fear that all men feel! T here were only three things to which he might look forward now. Possibly four. He would not be certain of the fourth until he found it, or it found him. He stood beside a marble bench in a garden filled with flowers. There was no sun in sight, but a diffuse brightness like morning or evening filled the place, and a breeze that was cool moved the leaves and the branches. He seated himself on the bench and regarded the colors of the flowers, their fragrances strong in his nostrils. As he sat there, a final touch of remorseful oblivion dropped from his consciousness, was gone. Then, somewhere far behind him, it began, a single note, rising and rising in pitch, until it approximated the scream of a freight train passing in the distance. Abruptly, his hands began to shake, and he jammed them into his pockets and balled them into fists. Then it died. The song of the blue baboon was finished. The garden came alive with the sounds of insects and birds. He turned when he heard the footfall, and she was standing there on the flagstone walk, her pale blue blouse open at the throat, her black slacks cuffed high above white sandals. Her Carmel hair still touched her shoulders, and she smiled as she touched his. "Kenneth." He rose to his feet, and she was in his arms. "Sandra!" he said, and drew her down on the bench beside him. They sat there a long, silent time, his arm about her shoulders. Then, "It was strange," he said. "Strange that you became a hero? Many things were forgiven on the Day of Liberation, to those who fought." "No," he said. "Strange that you came back to me. I never thought I'd see you again." He plucked a ite camellia and wove it into her hair. "You couldn't really have been a traitor, or you wouldn't have fought on that day, the day we liberated Earth," she said, and she stroked his cheek as she said it. He smiled. "I was weak," he said, "but never a traitor. They were wrong about me, all along." "I know. Everyone knows now. It's aU right. Forget it." But he could not. The rats at the back of his mind began to gnaw upon the corpse of a memory. What? What was it? He sprang to his feet and stared down into her dark eyes through the wet curtains that covered tiiem now. "You're not telling me the whole truth. Something's wrong. What is it?" She shook her head slowly and rose to her feet. He moved away, then turned his back on her. "Three things... What are the other two?" he asked. "I don't know what you're talking about," he heard her say. "Then I have to find out." There was silence. He waited a time, then turned around. She was gone. H e moved along the walk until he came to a path, winding downward to his right through a stand of broad-leafed trees. He heard a sound of splashing water, from that direction. He followed it. The man beside the stream had his back to him, but he recognized him frmn a gesture: a quick flick of his thumb toward his head, to moisten it; and then the hand was lowered to seal the cigarette paper he held. A flare of light, and a moment later smoke swirled back over his shoulder. He turned, and they regarded one another. "Roscoe..." he said. The man lowered his cigarette, stroked his black beard, spat abruptly. He wore khakis under a dirty field jacket; a pistol hung at his side. 'Tig!" he said, raising his cigarette like an accusing finger. "What's wrong, Roscoe?" "What's right, animal?" "i don't..." "You betrayed us during the invasion! You sold out your lower to those blue -- baboons! -- from another world! It might have stood! We might have won! But because you betrayed us, they enslaved the human race!" "No!" he said. "I didn't!" "You gave them information! You were well paid for it!" Then he remembered his tower group in the sea, so large a destroyer looked like a toy beside it. He remembered the swelling green of the Atlantic, far below his station. He had sat there at his post as such a vessel passed. He was one of the three workers at UN Automated Defense Station #. The other two were dead by then or wishing that IF they were, for first one fool and then the other had been taken away by the blue-furred Kheean, who had seemed to come out of nowhere the previous evening without even disturbing the radar. Baboon-like they raged through the station, sometimes moving on all fours, their song of triumph a single, mounting shriek that rose and blared like a diesel's whistle. He imagined they occupied the station completely. Two of them guarded the cell in which he remained. He remembered, he remembered... "I let them pay me to destroy suspicion," he said. "There's a difference between useful and useless information. Everything I told them was useless." "You rationalize, traitor, for you could not have known what would have been useful to them. Then you let them pamper you, for six years, as a factory supervisor." "I was working with the underground the full time, you know that, getting ready for the Day." "I think maybe you worked both sides, but it doesn't matter." "Why not?" "You're going to die." "You are going to kill me?" "I've already killed you," "I don't follow you..." Roscoe laughed, then stopped abruptly at the sound of Sandra's voice: "... And it means nothing that he fought bravely on the Day of Liberation?" she asked, stepping into sight along the trail. Roscoe blew smoke and looked away. # # Qo you summon your good angel to defend you," he said finally. "What sort of tale ijs it that she tells? You were a coward on the day we rose up. You ran!" "That's not so!" "Then why is it that I myself had to shoot you, for desertion under fire -- all the bullets in the back?" Kenneth clasped his forehead, rubbed it. "It's not true. I was shot by the enemy." "You were killed by me, and she knows it! You know it!" "I -- I'm not dead..." "At this very moment they are probably typing up your death certificate, and your vital organs are on their way out, for transplant into some real human being. You know it! They gave you the drug that kills the pain, makes the final seconds seem like hours. Gives you illusions too, to pass the time. You are talking only to yourself. There can be no lying here! Admit it, you are a traitor and a coward!" "No!" "You twist everything," said Sandra. 'You are fear and natural human guilt. He was a hero of the revolution." "We lost the revolution. We have lost the entire Earth, because of the likes of him! You are wishful thinking. You are the final coverup." "We did not lose! We won, because of men like him! You know it!" And Kenneth stood straight. At first unsure, then smiling. He said, "Now I understand. All men fear the final instant of their lives, and they wish to judge themselves and be judged, be found not wanting -- "They wish to rationalize and cloak with illusion," said Roscoe, "as you have done. But they know in the end, as you will know." There came the sound of a trumpet from across the stream, then the sounds of other instruments. Somewhere, a brass band was playing march music. Kenneth pointed in the direction of the music. "Three things. Subconsciously, I knew there'd be time for perhaps three important things. Let me be judged by whatever approaches!" They crossed the stream, moving from stone to stone, wading through shallows. They mounted the hill these faced and looked down upon the broad highway that passed before it. There were buildings along its way, some of them in ruin, all of them fenced by throngs of cheering people. The pageant moved into sight. It was the armies of the Liberation passing in review. None wore real uniforms and all looked dirty and tired, but they stood erect and marched in stride, soon to be decked with flowers and bits of colored paper. As one, they began singing, and their voices mingled, though each seemed to be singing a different song. The national anthems of all the peoples Of the Earth blended together into the Song of Man that poured forth from their throats, rose above the cheering. "There is your answer, Roscoe!" he cried out. "I was right! Well go to them!" The bearded man moved down the hill to join the passing troupe. Kenneth took a step, then turned and held out his hand. Sandra had vanished. A white something fluttered at his feet, and he bent forward to pick it up. He saw that it was the camellia he had woven into her hair, and even as he raised the flower, its center turned a dark, darkening color that spread like a rising, single stain ing Corp., #I Hudson St, New York City # to receive your copy by mail. IF IF  Novelette iWhaf The Ol lens L Illustrated by instead, they just whither away I M urpho's Morgue was one of the places that made life on Otho IV tolerable. The old building was no less alien than other Isopteran ruins taken over by the Project. In fact Securityman .Cliff Savill had lately found there was something about the alien building that was getting on his nerves. But in it Murpho offered a variety of foods, Andromedian brandy and Terran beer.And his partner, Molly Cato, made your day by just being there. It followed that the Molly watchers, an unofficial group which definitely included Cliff Savill, plus the eaters, the drinkers, the talkers and the loafers, stopped at the Morgue every evening. So did the workers nearby. And while Securityman Saly, he was surprised when this time she hurried directly to his table. He was also faintly amused, watching the usual falling-domino succession of swiveling heads mark her progress across the room. The amusement lasted through the time it took to make room on one of the Old Alien wall shelves Murpho used as benches. By then it was plain she had not just stopped with the others for a day-end drink. Hers was anything but small talk. And presently she closed icy fingers around his wrist. "But Mr. Savill you aren't listening! Mack Weymouth was murder-edr He had been listening. He just hadn't liked it. His first thought was that she had to be wrong. Not murder! Not here! The Project homicide rate was zero. He rejected that, laying it to a reluctance to admit this Securityman's dream job might be turning into the real thing. But honesty made him realize that wouldn't scarf. He had never backed away from any job. Finally, reluctantly, he admitted the real reason his mind kept lunging away like a gaffed sailfish; she was accusing Molly Cato of being at the very least an accessory to murder! His face felt stiff, and Miss Larkin was staring anxiously at it. She said, "You don't believe me!" "I hear what you say. Go on." "I told you. Mack simply disappeared, three months ago. But today, just now, I overheard some Rug Row talk, a front-office intercom left open. They think those two people who own this place murdered Mack, because of something that was found here. Whattrying to blackmail Mr. Murpho and that big blonde girl." S avill forced his mind to stop fighting the gaff. He wouldn't have used that description for Molly Cato. But even leaving her out, he didn't like the words blackmail and murder. Yet blackmail as a business gambit was not unknown. Render it semantically acceptable, and Otho Mining Associates would be capable of it. As for murder, there's a murky cave in every mind where an ape squats drooling. He could even recall flashes of angry fantasy which had left him feeling guilty and ashamed. "You're certain of what you heard?" "Yes! And when they found out I had, they threatened to send me back to Terra. They don't want the murder reported. It would break up their ploy. And it sounded like they meant to see that I couldnt talk about it!' "Who are they?' "One voice was too faint. Mr. Kotch came after me. I -- I ran. And Mack told me once he was sure Mr. Murpho had something valuable right here, in this building. And didn't want anyone to know about it." Savill frowned. Murpho being secretive about a find? Hell, you uncover something big, you put it up for bid and go home rich. That was the IF whole idea behind the Project. Ho tried another tack. "Maybe your friend really is only missing. This blast desert is big and empty, and most of it is still up for grabs. Couldn't he have just gone out on his own, prospecting? People do." "No. He'd have told me. Don't der reported. There's something right here they want and they think they can get it from these people who own it if only..." He felt another icy tremor go up his arm. She had gripped his wrist again and her wide black eyes were pleading. "Please! Here comes that Mr. Kotch! I'm afraid to go back there again!" He felt a flare of anger at himself. Her story was not unreasonable. As part of Security, he didn't like the thought of murder on the Project. As Cliff Savill, he liked even less the implication that Molly Cato might be involved. But both Miss Larkin's voice and her manner had the feel of truth. And now the coarse-featured, dull-eyed Kotch, obviously bearing down on their table, strengthened that impression. Savill knew Kotch, a new man and sociate. There was a lot of arrogance in his walk and his voice. He ignored Savill and fixed licorice-dull eyes on the girl. "Larkin, I warned you about repeating that crazy lie!" S avill stood up. "What lie, Kotch? We were discussing the weather." The black eyes shifted. "This is been saying, and she's blown her mind. She's going back to talk with the boss. Now!" "He can talk at Security Center. m take the snooper mike, Kotch." "You'll take a trip to the infirmary if you butt in. Come on, Larkin!" Savill let out his breath. Roughing created the vacancy he had been hired to fill. But he kept his hand out and shifted his feet, watching Kotch's jaw muscles. Not one man in fifty could start a serious move without clenching his teeth. Kotch was easy to read. He went down hard, and Savill's thumb and forefinger at the base of his neck didn't quite make him scream. "Regulation Twelve, Kotch! Right of Privacy!" Savill stepped away, perversely hoping Kotch would try again. But Kotch climbed to his feet and kept his distance. "Chief Cayhill will hear of this! You'll be working some Terran alley again, and soon!" "With you around I can't see much difference, Kotch. As of now, Miss Larkin will be wearing a V  A spotter. If she yells for help, or if her light goes off the board without her clearing it, she'll get help!" Kotch glared, and his fists clenched. But when Savill pocketed the snooper and brought out a Vid-Aud unit, checking it tersely to the Security Center Map Board, Kotch stamped away. Miss Larkin kept a hand on Savill's arm while he locked the spotter to her wrist. Her disconcerting eyes glowed gratitude, and she said throatily, "Thank you, Mr. Savill." He waved it away. "You'll be safe anywhere in the City now. Report to the Center tomorrow early. Don't let Chief Cayhill scare you. He bellows at everybody." The Morgue's clients were moving back to their seats when she walked out. There was a replay of the pattern of swiveling heads. Savill grinned. The Girl Who Walked. Then he sobered. There was some work to do. Kotch had been right on one point. This wasn't a Terran slum. Even though, incredibly, some of the same kinds of trouble appeared to be shaping. He should have been prepared for that because of the nature of the Project itself. Otho IV was full of alien gadgets. Some were beyond comprehension; most were ahead of Terra's best. And even ten centuries after some Out-Star's saturation H-treatment, a few were still flickering. Search and Salvage on Otho meant big money. And where there are Terrans and big money, there can be big trouble. Had big trouble hit the Project? If the frightened Miss Larkin's story were to be believed, it sure as hell had. But his stomach started doing free-fall evolutions when he glimpsed Molly Cato across the room. Murpho  -- maybe. The Morgue Management, he thought wryly. A Beauty and a Beast. Old Murph did look menacing. He was bald as a boulder and shaped like one, and his thick neck spread with startling abruptness into a face like a catfish. But that didn't make him a killer. He had said that, he recalled. And Miss Larkin had asked, wide eyed, "How can you tell? About anyone?" He had conceded that. Anybody's ape could get loose. And it could have happened. Murpho could have found something valuable. Weylearned of it, and Murph could have killed him. That last didn't quite click, but the next item fit beautifully. always at their price. And what better way was there to impose a buyer's market than to hold the threat of a murder charge over the seller? II H e sighed heavily. It had to bo checked out. He had to admit he might have complicated it by flooring and searching, however fruitfully, the assistant to one of the Associates the largest and by far the most influential of the S  S operators. And while the Project had about the same degree of democracy as a division of infantry, it was stiU free enterprise. Cayhill had pointed that out, when he hired Savill, The Chief had scowled under bushy eyebrows and compared Savill's face with the photocube. "Hummm. Six two, hundred eighty. Old picture. Your nose has a cant that doesn't show here. Says you have the stupid -- ah -- insubordinate habit of not waiting for reinforcements. Well, you wouldn't need reinforcements here. We screen out the gun toters." "They leave their fists on the shuttleboat?" "You brought in yours, didn't you? But we're not dealing with the same kinds of people you find in those Terran city streets. For you, this job IF would be Rest and Recreation. I could start you at three-stripe rating, but you'd begin with rookie work -- the Missing File. These people are mostly good heads. More Doctors per acre than most universities. But they do get lost. So we find 'em. In fact that's about all we have to do. You want the job?" Savill had kept him in suspense a full five seconds. That zero homicide rate sounded restful. And it had been. Riding the computer-controlled floaters, which actually was about all there was to do, made him wonder what was going to save a pragmatic type like himself from stark boredom. Then he discovered there was synthosteak and Terran brew available, in quantity, at Murpho's Morgue. And there, too, he discovered Murpho's partner, Molly Cato. What had bothered him about that, and contin- ued increasingly to bother him, was that so far she hadn't seemed much impressed by the new Securityman. To her, he was just another client to be smiled at and talked to. He wanted to be more than that. And now, for the first time since he'd met her, he felt something other than unmitigated pleasure at seeing her approadi his table. Why her covert watchfulness earlier, during Miss Larkin's stay at his table? He pushed that implanted, unwelcome suspicion aside. It wasn't difficult. A lot of the Project's distaff side was out of the R  D mold: thin hair, thin lips, thin hips. Molly Cato was a notable exception. She was shoulder high to a big man, and her slanted black eyes didn't, at first, seem to go with her yellow hair -- and wouldn't, on another face. Hers was one of those rare, memorable faces where ordinary features blend into something extraordinary. She dropped a no-limit house token into the slot at the table as she sat down. But her slanted black eyes were faintly mocking. "Her Hero!" she jibed. "Why is it you never offer me the protection of that strong right arm? Weren't you a little impetuous? That curtain act was classic but it sure won't help your S avill grinned. He had learned to sort out her conversation. Much of it was made up of questions to which she didn't expect an answer. You replied to whatever she said last. He filled his glass, nodding thanks. "One of my burdens, Molly. Nobody loves the Securityman." "This is true? You're never around when I want you." He grinned again. Molly talked like that. It was strictly an act, but Morgue clients, when so favored, liked it. So did he. Trouble was, he wanted her to mean it. But he found now, that he was uneasy, troubled by unfamiliar guilt. He was going to have to be a cop on duty, weighing every word she said. He nodded toward the bar. "I see Murpho turned the place over to you. Molly, how did as ugly a man as Murpho ever talk you into a partnership?" She shrugged, a gesture worth observing. "Easy. Murpho likes money and makes money. You just have to watch him to be sure you get your share of the loot." "Where is he?" IF She shrugged again. "His living quarters, I suppose. Where else could he go? How did that karate workout start? Men never fight over me. Maybe if I learned how to walk..." "Did you know Miss Larkin's friend, Mack Weymouth?" "So you won't talk. A gentleman. You mean that bad tempered engineer? He's the one you should watch out for. He's her guy, although he hasn't been around for two, three months." "Friend of Murpho's?" "He and Murph used to tinker with the bar console. Mack is a fluidics man. They were trying to fix that booth back in the corner, but never did get it working. Mack hasn't been around since the time your little friend with the eyes and the followme walk stood him up. When I left that day, he had been waiting back there in the corner for three hours, getting madder by the minute. Hey!" She gave him a tilted, quizzical look. "She was watching Murph before she started down that imaginary runway 'to your booth. Is Murph in some kind of trouble? She complaining?" "Well, she doesn't like him." Abruptly Molly dropped out of character. "Leah Larkin! Do you strong, aggressive types really like those cooing biceps-patters?" Then she shrugged again. "Murpho is hard to like, but he isn't as mean as he looks. He's just better than average greedy." Savill nodded, frowning. He had traced too many dead men back to somebody else's greed. There was money to be made here selling cold drinks and hot food. But there was a great deal more money to be made from the sale of Old Alien artifacts, if you found good ones. He asked, "Ever found anything salable around here?" Molly looked surprised. "Here? What could there be in this spooky pile of plastic and Termite spit? Could you even tell me what the Bugs used this building for? Oh, we've had offers. This is a mint. Murph has even offered to buy me out. But it's the business, not the building, that is valuable." Qomething stirred faintly in Savill's mind. It didn't quite reach the surface but it prompted a question. "What kind of a price?" "To me? His kind of a price. What else? Murph will swindle anyone, any time. It's a conditioned reflex. But I can handle him. I catch him trying to swindle me. I'll clobber him good. Look, Hero. I have clients who are fighting over women here or I'll call a cop." She touched his shoulder, smiled her in-character smile, and moved on... Suddenly he grinned. She could handle Murpho, for sure. She could be explosive. She was a Terran. And when she exploded, she picked up whatever was under her hand. He frowned at that. Until now he had thought it was amusing. His eyes followed her across the shadowy room and then he looked around at the room itself, trying to see it as it might have been before those unknown alien invaders had blasted the only slightly better known builders off the planet. Something of big value here? Until recently it had seemed to him only Alien. Now, he recalled, even Molly had called it "spooky." It was one of the few Old Alien surface installations still standing in the City. But it had been passed over for more promising prospects by the Dimly lit now -- apparently a custom followed by tavern keepers since the mastodon oil lamp -- the rectangular room looked as if it had been planned for some utilitarian purpose. But no one knew what. There were recesses along three walls, large enough to be used as booths. Hence the nickname that had stuck, Murpho's Morgue, because of the slabs of some nonmetallic material on the walls of each booth. The slabs were high enough to be used as benches. Murpho had kept them. He had cleared the rubble, roofed the shell, and cleaned the still undamaged walls and floor so that the murals and the oddly rectilinear floor pattern, repeated in the booths, gleamed. He had installed self-contained servo tables in the center and had adapted what appeared to have been some kind of communications counter at one side for the tricky tubing of his bar console. With Murpho's skill at synthesizing and blending, and with Molly Cato's personality, the Morgue was an institution, a public house which was far more than a bar, and a welcome relief from the bleak desolation of the blast desert. But what, he wondered, could there be about this Old Alien shell valuable enough to motivate murder and its giggling bedmate, blackmail? His head was beginning to ache. He ignored it, knowing it meant only that his mind was skittering, caught in the ambivalence of being told to work on a problem which he wanted to solve but was fearful of the solution. A murder had to be uncovered quickly, if there had been one. But what if... H e thrust the building's owners out of his mind and looked around at the building itself. For the past three months it had seemed unaccountably -- there it was again -- spooky. The Missing File. Which now had a new name, Mack Weymouth. Once, gossiping with Murpho at the bar, Savill had started abruptly toward the back corner booth, certain he had glimpsed Shorty Wills, who was a red-starred name on the Missing File. Shorty had taken a case of negotiable claim deeds with him when he dropped out of sight. Another time it had been big Hank Wyatt. Hank, before he disappeared, had been carrying on a running feud with Murpho. There had been others who had come to mind here, unexpectedly. In a way it reminded him of the effect of those sneaky subliminal inserts some agencies had been caught slipping in behind the picture in a viewtank. A dirty trick as old as visual communication; inexplicably you found you knew the code call that would reach, by name, one of Harriet's Happy Hippies. He shrugged irritably. But he frowned at the incomprehensible wall murals and the odd tracery of faintly fluorescent floor decoration. What had those big brained, wasp-waisted Isoptera used the place for? Was there some incompreIF hensible Termite gadget around, still flickering? He shrugged again and emptied his glass. Probably he recalled the missing people here simply because they all had one thing in common. They were all regulars at Murpho's Morgue. Which meant little. Who wasn't? He got to his feet, but the problem stayed on his back. And he was letting himself be diverted. Whatever had been found here, if anything, represented only money. What counted was what had been done about it, because of it, and by whom. He hadn't learned much from Molly that he hadn't known. Murpho had tried to buy her out. That was new. And Weymouth, the missing man, had been working here with Murpho. Also new. Murph was hog greedy, out for a fast credit. But everybody knew that. Weymouth could have been a partner. Men had been killed because their partners hadn't wanted to share the loot. And killers innumerable had been blackmailed out of their loot. But dammit, Molly Cato wouldn't... His head was aching when he went home. He slept little. Ill H is temples still throbbed faintly next day when he pushed in through the Chief's privacy screen. Cayhill was glowering, but that was no cause for alarm. Savill had learned the Chief just wouldn't admit he needed lens surgery. Cayhill couldn't see clearly much beyond the width of his desk. Lowering his head and glowering up past bunched eyebrows gave him a narrow field of extended vision. But the glacial eyes glittering uier snowy hair and eyebrows were disconcerting to many. Cayhill heirf up the snooper. "So you confiscated an illegal gadget. Commendable. What if he hadn't had it?" That, Savill thought warily, was a point to consider. Outside the boundary of an undemocratic Work Project, search of the person was illegal. A man's hip pocket was his castle, inviolate. Even here, it might be an open question. Hurriedly he asked, "Have you projected it?" "Yes. And talked with your Miss Larkin. The crystal shows you smirking like a cadet at a woman who is not all that good looking." "If I had a smirk, she soon wiped it off." "True. But you swallowed the story whole, then and there. Look, I have to walk a bigh, tight wire where cued you in with those appealing black eyes, you didn't even try to be tactful. You girded your loins, mounted your stallion, waved your sabre and yelled, 'Cha-a-a-rge!' Well, I was young once. But it openly put that girl under full Security protection, to come charging back." "I was there. I thought it was necessary." Cayhill sighed. "I'm not saying it wasn't. Anyway, it's done. But hanget to your job. Is either Murpho or Molly capable of premeditated murder? For gain? Plus the gruesome little chore of disposing of a body? And where is the body?" .# Savill suppressed a smile. The Chief was getting as bad as Molly. He tried to answer all the questions at once. "I think not." Cayhill squinted, nodding. "So does the computer. But it doesn't have much data on Miss Larkin except what you fed into it last night before you started brawling. And the snooper. Look. Her guy is missing, but he said no farewells. Is she a rejected plaything, angry, frustrated, hallucinating? I know one frustrated woman who is crowding critical mass. Is this one psycho?" Savill frowned, but Cayhill's glacier eyes pulled him back to the subject. "No. I believe she told the truth." Cayhill rubbed his white thatch and glared. "You and the computer! It also says that every person on the Missing List, to which we have now added Weymouth, was last seen either in or near the Morgue. So?" "So it has to be something we haven't thought of." C ayhill leaned forward, scowling heavily. "Well, we better think of it. Soon. We know what Leah Larkin says. Damned soon we'll know reasons she gives or from righteous -- defamation of the corporate image, bias, incompetency, assault by a Securityman, brutality, the whole list. General. I don't say he is biased, but some of the ambitious Light Colonels who flit around this sector like to make a favorable impression on influential people. And at the top, Murpho. Feed it to the computer again, so I can have it as you go along if I need it. And don't go twisting his arm, hear? There are regulations against it." Savill was almost to the screen when Cayhill called his name. The Old Man's eyes seemed to have lost some of their glacial quality. "There's always the chance this may not turn out to be 'something we haven't thought of.' You want me to take this one?" Savill felt his face getting stiff again. "I'm not trying to make Colonel." Cayhill continued his stare. Then gruffly he came as close to an apology as Savill had ever heard. "I shouldn't have asked. Get going." It wasn't far to the Morgue, and Savill Liked to walk the City in daylight. You either suffered or enjoyed the twin suns, depending on your state of mind. He liked hot, dry weather. That millennium-old blasting had not glassed over completely. Traces remained of narrow, twisting "streets." They looked more like outsized termite runs than walkways. Occasionally one would dip underground. It was similar in other lightly blasted areas. You wondered how the Bugs found their way or moved anything bulky. But they had once had a planet-wide mining and industrial complex going here. The very immensity of this partly natural but mostly blast desert accounted for so many of these R  D people getting lost or stranded. But, until recently, they had always been found. He was scowling thoughtfully when he entered the now nearly empty Morgue. IF It was too early for Molly, but MurphO met him with the grimace he thought was a smile. The smile vanished when Mack Weymouth's name came up. Murpho spread his pudgy hands, and his gesture could have been called a shrug. "Cliff, I just don't know. Sure, Mack spent some free time here. He helped me make some improvements in the synthesizer and the flow systems to the booths. But he hasn't been around lately." Savin looked at the intricate bar console. "Is that what you were working on? Murph, what was under that old counter you're using?" "Nothing much. Traces of wiring. Some old Termite tubing. Plugged or disintegrated. Nothing I could use." "Have you ever really gone over the place? The original survey showed something solid, apparently shielded, down deep." M urpho's round torso again rippled with that pseudo-shrug. "The whole planet has patches of buried shielding scattered around. Cliff. What they've opened hasn't made any sense, except maybe to a Termite. Why wreck a building to dig up a chunk of plastic filled with crystals? The R  D boys have cartons of the stuff. I wanted the building, to open a saloon. Cliff, what are you getting at? What do you want?" Savill relaxed against the bar. "Missing people, Murph. Weymouth, sure. But there's also Shorty Wills, and that loud-mouth Hyatt, and three or four others. Vanished. All Morgue regulars. Do you know anything about them?" Murpho's broad face remained bland but his eyes flicked toward the corner of the room. Savill looked. There was nothing there -- the same Alien flooring, a special chair, outsize to accommodate Murpho's round bulk, an empty out-of-service booth, the door to Murpho's quarters. Savill looked back at Murpho. "Do you?" "Cliff, people come and go. I don't pay much attention." "You're going to have to start, Murph. The story we get isn't pretty. offer to buy this place?" Murpho came to his feet. His broad, bland face was incapable of much expression but there was something that could have been fear in his eyes. "You've been listening to that girl! She's out of her mind! There Ask Kotch!" "I'm going to, Murph. And you know more about it than you're admitting. Miss Larkin talked only to me and the Chief. Where did you learn about it? Kotch? Is Kotch trying to squeeze you out of this place? Look, man, if you're in a jam, the place to come is to me or to Cayhill!" "You get out of here. Cliff! That woman is off her beam and just trying to make trouble. And so are you! Just because Molly won't..." Murpho backed away when he found Savill was towering over him. Savill was following Murpho's retreat when the V  A unit in his pocket hissed insistently. He snapped, "Chief, I'm busy! Check the computer!" An unmodulated voder unit intoned, "This is the computer. Chief Cayhill is being informed of your work up to now. Take a priority message. Report to Chief Cayhill immediately. End of message." Savin scowled. For a routine assignment, or chewing out, Cayhill would have bellowed for action himself. This was formal and ominous. The toneless voice repeated, 'Take a priority..." He vented his irritation even though he knew it was wasted. "Coming!" IV H e was wary when he pushed through the shimmering privacy screen and sized up the visitors. Kotch, of course, with a mark on his neck and his licorice eyes still smoldering. Beside him sat a typical Terran tycoon, well dressed in a suit of thernwcloth which apparently had shorted out. The round, button-eyed face was pink and hot. The third visitor was several thousand lightyears distant, but very much in evidence. The subspace comscreen showed the image of a cold, bony face and most of the spit-and-polish tunic of a Project Service uniform. The screen carried the code identification of one of the Inspector General's cruisers. with muscle. The Chief named them. Pink Face sure enough, was a Colonel Holt, enroute to Otho. Savill felt his stomach muscles squeeze, few the Chiefs voice had an unfamiliar, I-never-saw-thisguy-before-in-my-life tone. charges that your irresponsible actions, during and after an illegal search of Mr. Kptch's person, have caused the spread of a malicious, slanderous story, completely false, and originating with an unbalanced, hysterical ex-employee of his. Miss Leah Larkin." So. The Old Man was going formal. "Miss Larkin's story has been checked by the computer's psychograph unit." only that she believes what she says. She overheard a part, a fragment, of a conversation. She misinterpreted what she heard. Her actions may be understandable, considering her near hysterical state of mind. Her contract was up for review, and I also assume she was -- ah -- abandoned by Mr. Weymouth." Savill turned to Cayhill. "Have you asked him just where Mack Weymouth is?" Expressionless, Cayhill nodded. "Out on a confidential field job." "Then why this awesome show of force? Let's get him in here. One word, just the sight of him, blows this whole thing..." Cayhill interrupted sharply. "That's all, Sergeant. I'll handle it. You are going out on another assignment." After an incredulous What? Savill found astonishment had silenced him. Why the spineless old... he was backing away! He was letting them Anger made his voice rasp. "Reassigned by whom? Otho Mining Associates? When I left this office an hour ago I thought you were worried about me! Maybe you were, at that. Who is Security here? I want to know whom to hand my..." IF A bellow made the visitors wince and drowned out the rest of his words. The Old Man's voice rumbled. "I am Security here, Sergeant, and don't you forget it! The Dispatcher has your orders. Dismissed!" Blindly Savill clamped his jaw and came to attention. All right, you spineless old goat. But I've had it! He met Cayhill's enigmatic glare, ignored Kotch, and met the cold stare from the listening I. G. Colonel on the screen. He saluted the screen, making the meticulously correct gesture include the furiously glowering Cayhill, and then pushed blindly out through the privacy screen. His hands had almost stopped shaking by the time he confronted the Dispatcher. That worthy grinned when Savill picked up the mike of a voicewriter. "Don't record your troubles for me, Sergeant. I got troubles of my own. I don't borrow any. Look, why can't you be realistic about these..." He stopped when Savill growled and made a fist. But that, Savill thought, was stupid. This guy wasn't a cop, by Savill's standards, but he had been Security trained. His reflexes would never let a punch land. The Dispatcher grinned again. "So Cayhill burned you down. Before witnesses. So what? That I. G. Colonel who is on his way here wanted to fire you out of hand. So why don't you read your orders?" Savjll took the flimsy. After all, he had never known the Old Man to do anything without a reason. And presently he forgot the Dispatcher. The Chief was sending him out to Joe Blough's claim -- Joey Blow, they called him -- who was currently in debt, right up to his jug ears, to Otho Mining Associates. Joey had found and partially reactivated an automated Termite mine. But he had borrowore lift. Savill recalled that when Joey had pushed his bread-boarded control switches, his alien ore carriers had started working like mad, but they carefully avoided his new ore lift platform. With singleminded insistence, they had started dumping ore at the end of a dead-end tunnel. Joey had yelled and had even stood in their way. They had sidled around him, when the end of the tunnel was full, the whole mine had hiccoughed and shut down. At the Morgue, Joey had cursed picturesquely at stupid Termite robots which insisted on doing their own thinking. Savill moved to the computer input. When he finished, he was frowning thoughtfully. The Chief was kicking him in the teeth in a way sure as hell calculated to please and quiet be showing an active interest in an independent claim. Moreover, by of dubious value. Registration and closure on Joey. better mines. They didn't need Joey's. And if you believed the Larkin pressing Murpho the hard way -- by blackmail -- to sell them the Morgue. a Map Board man to tell him how to do his job. Suddenly he felt better, so much so that he let the Dispatcher get away with it when the man cracked, "See? I not only have to provide perambulators for you field guys, I have to do your thinking for you. I told you to read those orders." Savill grimaced. "Nuts! You read 'em and saw only words. Which floater?" "The single seater. It's programmed." Slamming the floater door and settling back into its single seat, he tried to relax. He was too wound up to sleep. This could be coincidence. The Old Man might be just getting him out of the way so the I. G. office and wasn't like him. Savill tried, with eventual success, to appreciate the glittering reds, grays and whites of the blast desert as the floater homed through the hours at safe, computergoverned speeds. Joey seemed surprised, but glad to see him. "Any other Morgue bench warmer would have remembered to bring some cold brew. How's Molly?" Joey was another of that unofficial, unorganized group, the Molly watchers. But after food and a lot of rambling talk, Joey's puzzlement showed through. "What the hell, Cliff? I don't need a Securityman. Johnny Hart and I can settle our boundary dispute. My new shaft, if I can finance it, will have to start from his side of the line. But we won't need a referee." "If you can finance it? Won't "Help? The greedy bastards are pushing me to sell. At their price. Or foreclosure. And there isn't a hell #f a lot of difference. Kotch has been out here, twisting my arm. And another guy. I chased them to hell out." "Who was the other one?" Joey snorted disgust. "Fluidics man, name of Weymouth. I enjoyed throwing him out, the bad tempered ape. He wanted to argue." Suddenly alert, Savill asked quickly, "When, Joey?" "Three months ago. They haven't Savill thought, three months! So They could have sent him elsewhere later. "What was Weymouth up to?" Joey pointed to a stud on the panel. "Checking this stuff. It's dead. I could dope out everything else, but I never have figured what the Bugs used the fluidics for. The tubing goes down toward a shielded section, deep. Some of that section is boxed in behind stuff a neutron would have to crawl through. Look. Weymouth filled part of the system before I found him." Joey punched the stud. "See? Down there, the ore pile those moron ore carriers made. That border glows and then winks off. Whatever it is, it starts and then some kind of fail-safe takes hold. Must have been some kind of scale, or grader, analysis, maybe. But the carriers won't work past it. I'll have to sink my new shaft there and..." J oey's voice faded as Savill began moving away, down the tube-lit tunnel. The alien machines were lined in a precise row, facing back, as if they had made ready for another IF trip before shutting themselves off. They reminded him of a row of Terran road building robots, but they were anything but that primitive. They seemed poised, waiting for something. With tantalizing expectancy, Savill found he was waiting, too. For what? His head was aching again, but it wasn't telling him anything. He leaned against the last carrier and let his eyes wander. Abruptly his expectancy turned to elation. The floor! It had the same pattern on the edges as the floor at the Morgue. With an effort he kept his voice down. "Joey. Try it again." There was no sound. There was the faint beginning of a bluish fluorescence in the inlay of the border pattern. But the next instant he found he had jumped back a full step, his nerves tingling. Reflex had jerked his hand back as if he had touched a snake. The carrier had moved! Not much. It couldn't have been seen. It had been more a pulse, a gathering of forces, as if the big robot had been getting poised to move. Quickly he called, "Again, JoeyP This time his touch was light, expectant. In spite of himself he jumped again. But now he was certain. The big machine had completed a cycle, gone as far as it could. And now it was immobilized, trapped between conflicting signals: Work! Hold! Go! No Go! With agonized clarity he found he was trapped by the same conflict. He knew, now, where the bodies were. But that brought him back to Murpho's Morgue, to Murpho -- and to Molly Cato. His mind spun away, reaching for irrevelent distractions. Why hadn't R  D spotted it? It stood out now like the hidden face in the psychologist's trick picture. It explained the haphazard aimlessness of this whole scattered Isopteran planetary complex. But of course at least one of And so had Murpho. So, perhaps, had Molly Cato. And somebody was using it as a weapon -- more than a weapon -- in a way that was horrifying. He found he was running, then, punching the Chiefs V  A comcode as he ran. V H e ignored Joey's questions and signaled Emergency. That brought him the hum code of the City Map Room, and the Dispatcher's needling voice. "Relax, Savill. We're guarding your ward. Just now she's headed for the Morgue..." "Where's the Chief?" "He's taking no calls." "Goddamnit where is he?" The Dispatcher's voice froze. "He's calls. So I sure as bell won't have him paged for you." This book-bound idiot would want it in writing. And when he got it, he would come unstuck. Savill lowered his voice. "All rit. All right. Have the computer route my floater home. Fast. I have to come in." "I'll do no such thing! The Chief ordered you out there. That's on the Day Book. You try to move that floater without his clearance, and I'll deactivate the driv!" Cursing all book-bound desk men, he let the V  A unit snap off and called, "Phone, Joey?" Joey moved aside, and in what seemed an hour Molly Cato's handsome, tilt-eyed face filled the screen. Her in-character smile faded abruptly. "OhI You! I'd think you'd be ashamed to... Never mind. I'll call her." "Molly, what are you talking about? Never mind! Get me Cayhill!" "I'm talking about your friend with the follow-me walk! You might as well talk to her because the Chief is busy! Is he busy!" Her voice was throaty with smoldering, contemptuous anger. He felt himself frowning. Molly always played a part. But she couldn't be this good an actress. This had come as a surprise to her. "Molly, call him!" "Have you found the body? Strangled with one of my stockings? Look, he has Murph and Kotch and me back there and he's about ready to start using his rubber hose on us. And now he's waving me back. He isn't about to come to the phone. Can't that mean little mind of yours..." "Molly, stop it! Get them out of there! I know what happened to Weymouth, and all the rest of those people who are missing. Don't you?" "You gibbering cretin, how could # know?" He had been watching the play of emotion in her face. She didni know! You can't prove a negative, but you can know it! He lowered his voice. "Molly, screen the phone. I don't want anyone to hear this. And believe me, I was never more serious and I was never more scared. Does he have you in that out-of-service booth back there in the corner?" She had moved in close to the nearly silenced phone, so that her face seemed only inches from his own. When she nodded he found that, although he had expected it, he had to make a second try before the words came out. "Molly, that booth back there is an Old Alien matter transmitter. That's what that whole building was -- a Termite personnel transportation center. And that corner booth is working! I t took her five seconds. Her mouth formed a startled "O," and her eyes widened. She glanced quickly over her shoulder and then back, waiting. "Don't go back inside that thing. Cayhill may argue and say he'll call me later. So tell him, if you have to. And when they're out, help him keep people away from there. I don't know what activates it, but it has to be something at the bar. So smile and keep them away. No touch. Like you do me." Her tilted eyes widened, and he saw them move slightly as if they were scanning his image in the screen. She smiled faintly. "Sergeant, you are probably a smart cop. It appears you are. But in some ways you are just plain stupid!" She glanced over her shoulder again. "Kotch is out, but Murpho and Cayhill are still sitting there. I'll get him. Wait." She moved away, and the phone hummed, the visual pickup taking in a segment of the thin crowd at the tables in the shadowy background. He could make out one end of the no IF bar. The privacy hum continued. Wait, she had said. But it shouldn't take this long... Abruptly his pulse started pounding. Then he heard a voice, shouting. It was his own. He lunged toward the screen as if it were a window it was possible to go through. The back of a man's head, a shoulder and an arm, had appeared in one corner of the screen. He heard himself raging, and he didn't realize he was senselessly beating his fist on the table until he felt Joey Blough's hand grip his arm and heard Joey's tight, steady voice saying, "Easy, Cliff. Easy. There was nothing we could do." So Joey, too, had seen the arm reach in toward the backbar, toward something that was out of sight, below the range of the phone's visual pickup, and then stealthly withdraw. And now there was nothing either of them could do but wait. And wait. Presently Savill sank weakly into a chair Joey pushed up behind him. Then they both waited, occasionally glancing at each other. After a time they stopped doing even that. They could no longer meet each other's eyes. The phone hummed on and on, like the automatic DeadShip signal from a liner that has been opened to space. After an immeasurable time Savill looked up. "I have to get in there." "What's keeping you?" "If I don't tell that Dispatcher, he'll kill the floater the minute I touch it. If I do tell him, they'll swarm all over that place, punching and prodding. Maybe nothing can be done, but I want to talk to Kotch first. It had to be Kotch." J oey got up and reached for a tool kit. "I'm next in line, remember. Come on. I'll help you compound a felony. That drive should be like a transistor radio compared with the stuff I've been bread-boarding around here." In a little over twenty minutes, Joey looked up from the drive housing they had torched open. "You'll get some radiation. Not enough to hurt. Technically we've swiped a police floater, and it'll sure never be the same again. She'll only skim, now. But fast. Watch yourself, going in." Savill never could recall much about that twisting, skimming, floodlit ride. But he made the drive last long enough so it didn't start to flare until he had walked away from it in were quick words, ending with a ruthlessly broken arm, when the private guard at the door tried to stop him. He felt no remorse, only a cold realization that the ape in his skull had started screeching and gibbering just inside the mouth of its cave. ference, via the comscreen, with Colonel Holt. Holt's image was clearer now. The cruiser was a good many light-years nearer. Savill ignored the startled protests and walked directly to Kotch. "I want some answers, Kotch." Kotch's lips grimaced, and his eyes flicked toward the screen. He kept his voice down, barely audible. "Out, Savill! You're out of your depth here. What you think you know and what you can prove are entirely different." Savill hit him and then stepped ni around the overturned chair. He heard some squealing. That was Willits, yelling for help. The shocked, outraged roar must be the comscreen, somebody thundering that Savill was under arrest, was discharged, was to be tried for felonious assault. After a while the thundering died out. Then he could hear the screaming. And soon, between screams, some talk. And presently Savill thought dully that Kotch was a fortunate man. He had started talking just as the gibbering ape was about to break free. Savill turned then to the comscreen and the silently staring Holt. "You do what you damned please about me, Colonel. But you heard him. I'd say it was your responsibility to see he doesn't get off planet. The Map Board man will take your orders." When he entered the now nearly empty Morgue, he glanced at the clock over the W. It read # of a new day. Three hours I The thin crowd had moved to the self-serving tables in the center of the shadowy room, and the few who questioned him stayed in their seats when he motioned them back. People were used to doing as they pleased here. He walked back and checked the booth. Its emptiness seemed to mock him. T hen he walked to the phone, trying to get the same view he had had before when Kotch's hand had reached toward the end of the bar and then had dropped down, out of the screen's image. And he found the lever Kotch had described. It was part of the system that led into the beer storage section, Murpho's private stock of pilsener. He looked again at the empty booth. Few, if any, could even see it from out on the floor. He was sweating, and his hands felt cold. He had a fleeting thought that he might just make this worse. But how? It was already about as bad as it could get. He shifted the lever. The floor pattern in the booth glowed faintly. Of course. It was already empty. He looked down at the lever, and the connected stubs of old and new tubing radiating around its base. There was a setting on the other side of the circle, unworn, bearing a bubble of dried paint. His hands were damp, even shaking slightly, and it took force to jam the lever into place. He heard a faint hiss of flowing liquid. And then with relief that made his knees crumple, he heard Chief Cayhill's bellowing voice, rumbling and mad. "Savill! I ordered you Get moving! And close that screen!" His pulse pounding, he found himself standing rigid, staring at the booth. Murpho and Cayhill were sitting on the benches, and Molly was standing barely inside the faintly pulsing floor pattern, her mouth open with surprise. "Tell him? I didn't have time I Where were you calling from? I had to pound on his shoulder even to get him to listen, and then he looked up past me and started yelling at you!" "Never mind! Out of that thing! All of you!" Molly's face changed from growing understanding to fear, and she moved quickly to one side. Murpho, eyes bulging and his face fish-belly white, needed no urging. He darted out, brushing past Molly. Cayhill rose IF slowly and stamped forward, a storm on his face. But both he and Savill turned when they heard a gasp from Molly. Her voice was almost shrill. "Look It's Wills! Shorty WiUs!" Loddng trapped and scared, Wills was standing in front of the booth. He was holding a briefcase as if it had suddenly started to tick. The Chiefs face lit up, and his voice exploded. "Hah! Where the hell did you come from?" His hand closed on the briefcase, and he marched the little messenger off to the side. "Savill, I'll talk to you later. You stay right here!" Savill realized it figured. Shorty was a man they had wanted for a long time. The briefcase was worth reacting, not thinking, until he heard Hank Wyatt's bass voice. Hank was sitting at a table, with an empty glass in front of him! And he was grumbling, "Look, Fishface. Are you aging that beer?" Savill moved quickly to the booth. "Out, Hank! Drag that table with you!" "Huh? So old Fishface has police protection now! He'll need..." "Move, Hank! And shut up!" Hank scowled, but he moved. Molly gripped Savill's arm. "Cliff! Was I... ?" Savill nodded. "See the time? You were in there three hours!" She caught her breath. "But whafs happening now?" "I think it is the only operative unit. So it was just holding. God knows how. A pattern in a memory bank down behind all that shielding, I suppose. It held, and then kept trying to reverse itself. That's why I kept seeing spooks. Flickers, subliminal." Then he waved an arm. "That's good. Hank. Go get a drink at a table. And keep your mouth shut." VI S avill watched expectantly, and as the grumbling Wyatt turned away, a stranger appeared on the bench in the booth. No furniture this time; he was just sitting there. Savill waved him out. Then another, who took one look at Savill's Security tunic and scuttled for the exit. Another! Savill held his breath. One more! That was it! The Missing File! But there should be still another, the guy who had never been in the File at all. Molly gasped again. "There! It's Weymouth!" It was. But the scowling Weymouth didn't even glance in their direction. Muttering, and looking at his watch, he headed toward the shadowy table area. Savill felt the tension fall away, leaving him weak and lightheaded. He put an arm aroimd Molly. "That's it, First In -- Last Out! You're rich. Too late he realized it wasn't the best moment for the reminder. Molly wheeled toward the pasty-faced Murpho. "So! That's why you wanted to buy me out. Megacredits and you offer me tokens!" Murpho was gasping like a catfish on a grassy bank. Savill pulled Molly back. "Easy. Murph may be in real trouble. A murder charge." Muipho croaked, "No, Cliff! I swear it! I didn't know. Kotch must have. He didn't like it when the Chief picked that booth for his talk with us. And he got out the minute Molly left to get the phone." "Had he tried to blackmail you? Force a sale?" "Yes. He threatened to bring a murder charge unless I bought Molly out and sold to him. But he didn't tell me how Weymouth had been killed... Only that he could prove I had done it!" Molly's eyes were still blazing. "You lying old bullhead! You thought you could squirm out of it somehow and get all this for yourself. I know you!" "No! Cliff, I didn't know what had happened to any of them. It wasn't until Shorty Wills failed to come out that I realized that -- that every time I drew a glass of pilsener whoever was sitting in booth nine disappeared!" It was the end of a long, hard day. Afterward Savill figured he must have started giggling about then. Anyway, it didn't occur to him to stop Molly when he saw she was groping blindly while her tilted eyes blazed at Murpho. He saw her arm jerk, and too late he saw she was gripping a section of plastic hose. Then a cold spray -- good Terran pilsener, he learned later -- hit him in the face. H e pawed helplessly at his eyes, and he heard Murpho's protests. There was a wavering glimpse of Murpho's Roc-egg figure backing away. There was even Hank Wyatt's rumbling bass, yelling gleefully, "Whack 'im, MoUy!" Then Savill found he was laughing too, doubled over, with tears and beer in his eyes. And too late he sensed that Murpho was backing toward the booth. Murpho bounced off the misplaced table, which had no business being there, and fell sprawling. Savill slapped blindly at the switch of the privacy screen. But that was all he could do. And as the screen was going opaque he saw the glowing floor pattern wink out -- in an empty booth. Murpho was gone. And with a final, gurgling sigh the tube system hissed empty too. The next minutes were always a little blurred. Molly rushed to him, her eyes wide and horrified. "Cliff! I didn't mean to do that!" He put an arm around her. But then to his astonishment her face took on an angry set and her tilted eyes widened. She jerked away. "Well! Your walking doll!" He felt his jaw go slack and hands grip his arm. Miss Larkin's eager voice cried, "Where is he? I saw him!" The best Savill could do was point. Mack Weymouth was striding toward them, pushing through the now closing-in crowd. Weymouth's angry eyes shifted from Savill to Miss Larkin. "Where the hell have you been? I wait three hours and come out to find you hanging to this guy... where you been?" "Mack! Mr. Savill can explain..." "Maybe he better. You show up three hours late, wearing a different dress, a different hairdo, and looking like you needed a night's sleep. Just how did you spend the afternoon?" Savill never did figure what happened to his vaunted Security-trained IF reflexes. All he could recall was that after a fair-sized nova stopped flaring around his head he looked up from the floor and saw their backs, moving away, and faintly he heard her voice, "But Mack! I can explain!" Then the Chief went, "Hummm!" and Savill climbed wearily to his feet. Cayhill was stuffing a pair of old fashioned spectacles into his tunic pocket. Savill felt his jaw go slack again, but tightened it quickly. "How long have you been wearing those?" "Hummm! Long enough to see what was happening over here after Shorty turned out to be confused about the date. So that's why Joey's while to steal! Same kind of thingummy out there?" Savill nodded tiredly. "His is a big one. For ore transport." Suddenly Savill felt weak and weary. His jaw hurt. His lip was puffed. And one eye was painfully swelling shut. Damned old goat! Going to investigate personally and look where he wound up! The old fraud piled on the pressure, forced you to tWnk over your head and find answers from a thousand years back and then just stood there, rocking back and forth on his flat feet and going "Hummm!" T he Chief rocked back and forth and said, "Hummm! I thought you would come up with something, if you got good and mad and were pushed a little. So it was something we hadn't thought of." Savin wished there were some place to sit down. "There are several hours you haven't been filled in on yet." "Oh, no. I've been talking to the Map Board man. Holt ordered Kotch ting this investigation well started now. You come up with some of the damnedest side effects. I send you out to find me a body and a suspect and you turn up a whole room full of bodies that have to be rounded up and brought back in to testify. Well, I'll take care of that. But we'll need Molly's victim, too. You'll stay on duty here. Private, until the Techs wake that thing up again." It slipped past Savill, until Molly's voice made him jump. "Private!" Cayhill bellowed back. "Yes, Private! And don't take it out on me! He's not only insubordinate, he ruined a police vehicle, used illegal methods to get information from a citizen, and furthermore..." "You... ungrateful old... he brought you back, don't forget!" Savill told himself he was just letting his jaw go slack again because it was aching so. But Cayhill's grizzled face had assumed an expression he had never seen. The face was smiling! And the voice was gentle! "No, Molly. I haven't forgotten. I never will." But then the bellow resumed, full volume. "And furthermore, as I was trying to say when you butted in, he could have stopped you. You were within arms reach, as you frequently are, I notice, except when you go into a huff about something. That was rank incompetence. So he's busted to Private and he's staying right here to keep you under house arrest and wait for the Techs to get your victim back!" IP Savin frowned, because Molly didn't look in the least like a woman who had just been arrested. She looked about twelve years old. Even after that fleeting look faded, her lower lip stayed pushed out. She glared at Cayhill. "I don't want him here! Even if his girl with the twitchy walk did twitch out on him!" "You're under arrest, remember?" She got it that time. "Yoii actually suspect me?" "He doesn't. Wouldn't hear of it, even at first. Me, I'm staying neutral. Somebody has to be objective around here. Anyway, I want him out of sight until I get that light Colonel calmed down. You better fix his eye. It's swelling, and he wasn't pretty to begin with. But you wait a day or two before you treat that lip, hear? He has to be able to talk at your trial -- and his own." With that Cayhill glared at both of them and stamped out, shooing the crowd ahead of him. W hen they were alone, Savill leaned back ti redly and stared at her. "Maybe I am a little stupid at that. What's this about my girl? With the -- ah -- funny walk?" "Hah! That cooing biceps patter! What her walk says isn't funny. It's indecent. And you're always sitting with her." "Yom won't ever stay at my table. You keep treating me like a customer." "And you keep treating me like a lady!" "Well, hell's bells, aren't you?" "You could at least have tried to find out! Smart cop!" She moved, her eyes taking on that smoldering, in-character look again. After about an hour, or possibly fifty seconds, he gasped for breath and pushed her away to arms' length. It required, he found happily, considerable effort to keep her there. She had been blatantly flaunting the Chief's order about his lip. He found he didn't mind that in the least and he was about to let her go when something caught his eye. Alarmed, he glanced back toward the booth. Oh-oh! Sooner or later that Termite transmitter was going to upchuck old Murpho. And when it did there just might be another Security problem. Murderer or not, old MUrpho had still been trying to cheat Molly out of her share of the loot. And through it all, he saw, she had never let go of that length of beer hose! Oh well. He turned her loose and braced himself. A smart cop like Private Savill -- under pressure he'd think of something!  New subscriptions and changes of  address require # weeks to process! H# IF  Shorl Story y This is fbe real, fhe bonded West -- as any duck-billed saurian can fell! S heriff Matt Cooper was in his office reading a dime novel (Psychedelic Shoot-out at Laser Mesa) when the door burst suddenly open and Professor Doctor Addams rushed noisily across the puncheon floor. The old psychiatrist's leathern face was pinched with worry, and he was wheezing as if he'd just danced a chicken reel at high noon in Barbecue Valley. Lady, Matt! Kreev Cantrell's been shot!" Not being one to excite easily. Cooper drew himself erect in his chair, pushing the dime novel aside. His expression was stony as he waited for the rest. Dropping into a nearby chair. Doc Addams tapped his reddened face with a checkered handkerchief, a man shaken. "I saw the whole thing, Matt," he "Randolph Scott Cartwheel gunned down Kieev Cantrell. It was coldblooded murder!" He paused, considered the words, then added, "in the truest sense, you might say, Kreev being a reptilian life-form." Cooper leaned forward now, eyes flickering like miniature flintlocks. "How about provocation?" "Wasn't any. Nope. Leastways, not on Kreev's part. I saw the whole thing. They were just sitting there, playing cards, peaceful-like, when all of a sudden, out of the blue. Cartwheel starts insulting Kreev -- just kept getting nastier and nastier. Well, you know how good-natured Kreev always was. He just laughed and said, kind of jokingly, 'Randolph, you're 'bout as mean as a Heilian electrocarnivore. Then, quick as a wink. Cartwheel ups and yells, 'When you call me that, smile!' Then he hauled out his gun and shot Kreev -- three slugs in the carapace, three in the belly. Just like that!" Doc Addams snapped his fingers. "Wasn't pretty. Matt." "Kreev didn't smile?" Doc Addams threw out a stabbing gaze. "You're kidding. Matt? You ever see a duck-billed saurian capable of smiling? Not this side of Disney, you ain't!" Cooper nodded, then got slowly to his feet. "Reckon that's so." He was a tall, rangy man, more muscle than bone, with eyes the color of a cyclonewhipped sky and dark taut hands that could reach for a woman or draw a Colt with equal confidence. For three months now he had been the sheriff of Torn Scalp -- ever since his lone and mysterious arrival on West from Earth in a private flivver. At the time the sheriff's job had been open, and Cooper had stepped forward, canyonesque jaw jutting heroically, to fill the vacancy. He had tamed the' town considerably. W ith Doc Addams following him. Cooper left the office and crossed the dusty main street of Torn Scalp toward the Dirty Lady Saloon, a no-nonsense den of authentic corruption where five dollars would buy anything from three fingers of dream dram to a night in a back-room pleasure stall with a hostess and a package of inhalo cubes. Above the swinging doors of the saloon glittered a huge three-dimensional neon sign depicting a semi-clad Earth woman smiling invitingly. Cooper pushed his way through the swinging doors and strode inside. An open-prairie silence filled the room. There were some lavender Vegans drinking at the bar, minding their own business, eyes like gray stones under their forward-tilted stetsons; except for them the place was deserted. Kreev Cantrell, six feet of slim lacertian deadweight, lay slumped over the green felt of a card table in a far corner. The only sound was the whisk of the Carolian bartender's polishing cloth as he buffed an Owlhoot Special beaker, goldfish face bleakly impassive. Cooper went to the corner and examined Cantrell's body, wincing at the sight of the punctured midriff. He scowled. "What is it?" asked Doc Addams, at his side. "Now I got to ride all the way out to the Cartwheel spread," said Cooper, face darkening into a sullen pout. "If I don't get back early I'll miss the Shane revival tonight at the Iron Horse!" Doc Addams made a sympathetic clucking sound, allowed as how that was a shame, but pointed out that a Wayne festival was in the offing and might compensate. Uncheered, Cooper asked him to tend to disposing the body while he was away. Cooper got his horse out of the livery stable and rode at a swift gallop out of town. It was a clear, sizzling day, the broiling sun beaming high and yellow like Apache gold, and Cooper welcomed the slap of a light desert wind against his face. Before long he was far from town, in dull open country scattered with mesquite and cactus and an occasional patch of jewel-grass. As he rode, he switched on his wrist peep and listened nostalgically to country and western songs being sung by a trio called the Saddle Burrs. Two hours passed, and Cooper led his horse finally up a steep plateau grassland to a big white log house that stood in dramatic silhouette against the drifting sky. He slowed from a trot to a walk and, as he drew near the house, held the reins so that his hands were in conspicuous sight. T hree tall duck-billed lizards came out of the house and stood on the porch. They wore denim work clothes, but each had a .# strapped on his hip. Cooper knew them well. The one in the middle was Benjamin Cartwheel. The other two were sons of his, Joel McCrea Cartwheel and George Armstrong Custer Cartwheel. The old lizard's other son, Randolph Scott Cartwheel, was nowhere in sight. "Howdy, sheriff," the old lizard said in a grizzled voice with no welcome in it. "What brings you?" Cooper leaned on his saddle horn, smiled thinly. "Where's Randolph, Ben?" "Who cares?" "You know what he did, Ben. Why not make it easy?" "Why don't you go chew some loco weed, sheriff?" Cooper sighed. "I'd hoped for cooperation, Ben. I though you believed in the law." Ben Cartwheel laughed -- that is to say, delivered a reptilian facsimile thereof. It sounded like silver dollars rattling. "I'll tell you one thing, sheriff," he said, his voice slashing like a scalping knife. "When I came to this valley twenty years ago it was new land, virgin land. I carved a home out of it, raised three sons, fought outlaws and rustlers and sandbug plagues and landgrabbers to keep what I had. I didn't do that, sheriff, to end up letting one of my boys dangle at the end of a rope swung by some ranny who hadn't even heard of West when I was fighting for my life. Creatures like me built this country, made it what it is, and now you outworld driftabouts start pouring in from every which way looking for some of the gloryl What do you know, punk? I'd already seen three different remakes of High Noon when you were still in short pants. No, by John Ford, you aren't cutting any ice around herel" Cooper shrugged, his eyes tinting with a sudden ominous darkness. "Sorry you feel that way, Ben. Now I'll have to get up a posse. Good day." He wheeled his horse around in one quick fluid motion and rode away. There would be trouble now, he knew, and that was too bad, but hadn't he done his whooping best to head it off? The lanky ease with which Cooper had slouched low in the saddle was gone now. Instead, he leaned forward like a man angling for trout against the current of a swift stream, and there was in him the straining tension of a chicken at the chopping IF block. He went at a fast gallop, straight toward town, a restless cloud of dust marking his trail behind him. TT alfway to town he spotted a  riderless horse standing alone, a prone figure sprawled a few yards from it. Cooper rode up and dismounted. The figure was Randolph Scott Cartwheel, bleeding untidily from various bullet wounds and fast approaching candidacy for becoming a ghost rider in the sky. A thread of blood ran down one side of his bill, and his eyes blinked with glazed recognition as Cooper put an arm about his shoulders and held him up. "Who did it, Randolph?" The voice, when it came, was sibilant. "It was Venus Rio Brazos, sheriff." Cooper flinched as though he'd been standing downwind from a cow whose nostrils were threading the wind. The one person in Torn Scalp he'd always considered absolutely incorruptible was Venus Rio Brazos, her unwholesome job as a dime-adance hostess in the Slender Haunch Swirl Palace notwithstanding. The truth was he had a hankering for her, had for some time. To Cooper she was as pretty as the snuff-colored robot bison that roamed the plains of West, or a winning poker hand the week before payday. "What happened, boy?" he asked, pained. Cartwheel strained hard to get his last words out. "Said she'd run off with me, sheriff... if I killed Cantrell... and took... arid took..." "Easy, boy." "... took the Maltese Longhorn Steer..." Cooper's face became like shale. "... then she met me here, plugged me, lit out with it..." There was a sound in Cartwheel's throat like brisk radio static, then, abruptly, he sagged in Cooper's arms, duckbill pointed skyward. He was dead. Just after sunset, his bull-like shoulders set in a determined hunch, Cooper pushed through the swinging doors of the Slender Haunch Swirl Palace. It was dim and cool and crowded inside. Out on the big dance floor cowboys and their hostesses were performing the native dances of a dozen different worlds, whirling, shimmying, kwurring, hopping, shaking, and doing shamelessly intimate Tendril Slink variations to the accompaniment of mercilessly loud psychedelic music blasting from overhead speakers. Cooper stood off to one side, watching the dancers until he saw Venus Rio Brazos doing a suggestive crab walk with a lean buckskin-clad man who might have been human but for his rainbow-hued skin. When the number ended Cooper went over and drew Venus Rio Brazos aside. S he was a beautiful Earth girl, Spanish, with eyes like candle flames in a breeze and breasts so sweetly high they seemed to levitate. Her green silk dress fit her as snugly as the husk on an ear of Indian corn. "Want to tell me about Cartwheel?" Cooper asked quietly. Venus Rio Brazos shot him a chilipepper glare. "Oh, you know this?" Cooper nodded. "Where's the Maltese Longhorn Steer, Miss Brazos?" Her face became troubled; she bit her lip worriedly, deliberately for a moment, then said, 'Senor, I have always liked you and I know you like me. Maybe we can work what you call a deal, no?" Watching the buoyancy of her breasts. Cooper began to sweat. "I got no proof you killed him," he said. "Just his word. Still, the law's the law. Yet, on the other hand, if I was to recover the Maltese Longhorn Steer, Miss Brazos, we could get you a good lawyer and -- " "Enough!" she interrupted. "I will tell you, sheriff. It is this simple: I knew that Cantrell had the Steer and I persuaded Cartwheel to kill him and take it by promising to go away with him. Then I shot him. Why? Simply because your deputy, Fester, and I planned it that way. For a long time we have courted in secret. When Fester found that Cantrell had the Maltese Longhorn Steer, he worked the plan out so we could have it for ourselves, go away together -- rich. I gladly agreed. It was for love, sheriff. And now, do you wonder about my confession?" Cooper, blank-faced, heart heavy, nodded. Venus Rio Brazos smiled. "It is because I have taken a small derringer from my skirt hem while you were concentrating on my lovelies, sheriff. It is now concealed in my palm ready for action, so to speak. Comprendo?' Cooper's mouth tightened. No, he thought, he didn't comprehend at all. never would. How, he asked himself, could a girl like the one standing before him prefer a frivolous, unheroic, comedy-relief sidekick like Fester to himself? It made no sense. With injured pride and irritation careening through him, he did what he must. As in the movies, it was a cinch. Looking intently past Venus Rio Brazos, he drawled, "Well, I guess you two win this hand. Fester." Then, as she glanced behind her, he slapped the derringer to the floor. Five minutes later she was in a cell, yelling like a Delgan dervish and banging her spike-heels on the steel bars. O n his desk Cooper found a note from Fester that told, in his graceless scrawl, that he had gone out of towff to check on a prospector's claim that his pre-fab shack had been dismantled by maverick reservation Indians of Chief Small Coke's tribe and sold to a passing real-estate agent. The note added that Fester would not be back until around ten. Cooper assayed his time-piece. It was six-thirty, too late to catch Shane, but just time enough to make the first feature at the Trough. Feeling that he deserved some entertainment, he locked up the office, walked up Front Street to the box-office, and bought his ticket. Inside, he pivoted back in the foam-eez saddle seat just as the credits flashed on the screen. The two films -- Unknown Quantities Seize Fort Kearny and Belle Starr Meets the Things From Proc- yon -- were both enjoyable, if slightIF ly' bland, and Cooper sat through fliem in relaxed quietude. When, three hours later, the curtain was finally lowered as Belle Starr headed her big dun gelding toward a roseate sunset, he got slowly to his feet and shuffled out of the theater with the other creatures. Halfway to the office he saw Fester emerge from the livery stable at the other end of the block. The thin Melban panda, seeing him at the same moment, waved a forepaw in recognition; and they walked toward each other, meeting at the wooden porch. They went inside. Cooper leaving the door open to cool the stuffy office. Without preamble, he said, "Fester, I know about the Maltese Longhorn Steer." "Sure," Fester said. "We finally got it. It's in the desk." Cooper cocked an eyebrow. We? "I told you that dance hall chick was sweet on me, man. She digs my fur. Never had a pet. It was no problem having her cop the thing for me. I sweet-talked her, dad. Now we can buy the biggest spread on this orb, swing in fashion." "Are you trying to implicate me? Cooper shouted, eyes flaring. Fester blinked at him, stroking his furry chin. His voice came stiffly. "Why not, daddy, you planned the squip. You knew Cantrell had the Steer and you put me to copping it with a promise of half the split. Now, what's this clown talk?" Cooper shook his head violently, but a shade of doubt crossed his face. "Do you think I could forget such a thing?" "Repress is the word," came a voice from the doorway. C ooper and Fester both turned to see Doc Addams regarding them, balefully. He stepped into the office and turned to Cooper with a professional expression. "I overheard the whole thing, Matt. Ever since last week, observation of your behavior led me to suspect you were repressing something of this sort. As my Viennese professor would have -- "Enough!" Cooper cried. Woodenly, he slouched down behind the desk, stared thoughtfully at his hands for several seconds, then stood again. "I want to make a statement," he said. "I think I can explain. You see, as a kid, going to western movies, I always had a tendency to do something my friends never did -- to identify with the bad guys as well as the good. There was a nice maverick quality about such baddies as Barton MacClane that never came through in the Audie Murphys. What this tendency of mine did, I figure, was to set up a subconscious outlaw versus lawman conflict in me. I -- I can see that now. Doc was right. I remember everything now. The outlaw element in me took control and planned the theft, then the lawman repressed it... " He paused, then smiled unexpectedly. "But I'm in control now. The sensible element has the reins, and it's the one I'm sticking with -- the outlaw element, that is. You'll both note that, as I've been jawing. I've unholstered my .#. Now, Fester, if you'll be kind enough to open the desk drawer and fetch me Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Penny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A '"must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name Address  City  State Zip Code... (Offer good in U. S. A. Only) the Steer, I'll be on my way..." But a strange thing happened. As Fester was sliding open the drawer, an unfamiliar masked man darted suddenly into the office moving so swiftly he seemed to have materialized from empty air. In a blur of motion the stranger flew at both Cooper and Fester, pistoning out chin and body blows with awesome accuracy; and even as the sheriff and his deputy toppled, he was whisking them back to a vacant cell where, like cordwood, he stacked their insensate forms on the single cot; then, as Doc Addams stared, the lone figure dashed back out of the office, leaving him standing there, alone and dazzled, holding a small white card that had been thrust into one hand. Scratching his jaw with the card. Doc Addams murmured to himself, "I wonder who that masked man was." He looked at the card. J. Bond Folk Hero  Public Servant "Never heard of him," mused Doc Addams. "Must be an Easterner." He stood for a long while without moving. Then, taking a deep breath, he tiptoed to the desk, opened the drawer and looked inside. The Maltese Longhorn Steer was there. He closed the drawer and, face reddening, began to nonchalantly whistle The Entity WaltzHalfway through the tune he broke off suddenly, opened the drawer again and took out the Steer. He left without saying good-by IF Illustrated by IF  Serial The rogue star was mightier than any living creature -- but its enemy was a constellation of gigantic suns!  n the great monolithic universe of Companions of the Star, receives a message from the girl he loves and has given up hope of winning. Back mutual friend, and the man to whom Andy Quam believes he has lost her, and dangerous experiments. She believes Hawk is trying to create an artificial living organism, a Rogue Star which unlike the sentient and generally benign stellar bodies that make up most of the universes primary stars will use its enormous powers for disruption and destruction, Quam hastens to join her. He man- ages through the transflection network which links worlds galaxies apart, making instantaneous travel possible between Earth and any other planet in civilization. He travels millions of parsecs in less time than it takes to cross a room. But on Earth his progress comes to a halt. It is Starday, On backward Earth, where the symbiosis among men, fusorians and stars has taken the form of a ritualistic religion, this means nothing can be done. He cannot go to her. He cannot reach her by communicator, He cannot secure a guide. He can only wait. But Molly Zaldivar hasnt waited. Alone she has gone to the cavern in the mountains where Hawk and his ous man from space, are conducting their experiments. As she approaches the cave, she is creature the size of a horse, capable of traveling at enormous speeds by transflection methods, deadly as an interstellar space-destroyer, guarding fhe entrance. An explosion knocks her out and drives the sleeth away; Cliff Hawk and the Reefer find her and bring her into the cave. Meanwhile Andy Quam has found some boys who tell him something of what has been happening with Molly Zaldivar, Unable to control his patience, Quam storms into a Starday meeting and demands that the monitor, a robot, help him. The robot refuses at first. But then, when three holts of energy from the sun lash down and strike at the mountains where the cave is located, the robot relents and agrees to take Quam there. It is almost too late. The danger Molly Zaldivar warned about has come to pass. The experiment has succeeded; a Rogue Star has been created , , , and it is now beyond human control, Andy Quam and the robot go to the cave and find Molly and the Reefer injured but still alive. Cliff Hawk is dead. Worse, the rogue has absorbed Hawks personality into itself -- and it does the same thing with the sleeth, the robot and many smaller beings. It is growing both in power and in knowledge with every moment. But its growth is perverted and complicated. With the incorporation of what remains of Cliff Hawk into its own individuality, the rogue has acquired some of Hawks traits -- human traits, incredibly out of place in a creature composed of a plasma of stripped electrons, brother to stars. It even finds itself drawn to Molly Zaldivar in a simulacrum of an emotion like love. It sends out its tool, the sleeth, to bring her back to its cave. Andy Quam tries to rescue her but fails; his flyer is brought down by the energies of the sleeth; his halfally, the Reefer, is carried off by the rogues tools. Meanwhile the rogue tells Molly of its love. Terrified and repelled, the girl calls it a monster -- pathetically tries to trick it by pretending to return its love -- but is discovered. The rogue learns another emotion: anger. It threatens to destroy Molly Zaldivar; she warns it that more powerful forces in the universe, like the sen- tient star, Almalik, will prevent it. And the rogue determines to destroy Almalik and all the brotherhood of stars. XV  ndy Quam landed his flyer before the control dome of the transflex cube and grated, "Control dome! Connect me direct with Headquarters of the Companions of the Star, Almalik three!" "Your authorization, sir?" the control dome inquired politely. "Fully authorized! Highest priority!" "One moment, sir," the control dome said doubtfully. But it did not refuse him. In a moment it said, "I am seeking your circuits, sir. There is a #-second delay now estimated; will you wait?" "You bet ni wait," growled Andy Quam, and sank back in his seat. He ached. Battling rogue stars and strange beings and men from space was not the kind of life he was used to, he thought dourly. But if it was what he had to do to save Molly Zaldivar, he would get used to it! A small figure appeared at the corner of the square, running hard toward him. Tiny spurts of dust flowered at his heels, and he was panting as he reached the flyer. "Preacher" Rufe gasped. "What happened? How's Molly Zaldivar?" "She's still in the cave," said Quamodian shortly. "I think. Anyway, I never saw her." "Then what -- wat are you going to do?" "Wait." But they didn't have to wait long.The speaker clicked and hummed, and a sweet non-human voice sang: "Companions of the Star, Chief Warden of Monitors speaking. How may I serve you?" "You can serve me best," said Andy Quam belligerently, "by getting an emergency survey team out here on the double! This is Monitor Andreas Quamodian speaking. I request -- no, cancel that. I demand immediate action!" The sweet high voice sang sorrowfully, "Ah, Monitor Quamodian. We have been advised of your statements and actions." "Ha!" barked Andy Quam. "Of course you have! You've been told of my report that a created intellect in the form of a rogue star is loose here; that I have requested authority to use force against it; that I have stated that certain humans and non-human intellects have been damaged, destroyed or threatened by it. And you've ignored what I said." "Unfortunately, Monitor Quamodian, we have seen no reason to accept this report." "You think I'm wrong, eh?" "Not 'wrong,' Monitor Quamodian. It is merely that we do not assess the same quantitative need for action." "I see," snapped Andy Quam. "Then look at it this way I report that a Monitor of the Companions of the Star is suffering paranoid delusions; that he believes himself and his friends attacked by monsters; that in his insanity he is capable of wildly destructive acts of violence; and that this will inevitably reflect great discredit to all Monitors. What quantitative assessment do you give that!?' "Why -- why, Monitor Quamodian, that's frightful! We'll send a survey team at once. Who is this deranged monitor?" "Me!" snapped Andy Quam, and severed the connection. T hey left the flyer grumbling to itself in the middle of the square before the transflex gate. " -- stupid thing to do," it was saying resentfully. "They'll take you off the roll of Monitors sure. Then what will become of me? Some menial job ferrying tourists -- " The boy's house was only minutes away, and there Andy Quam showered, ate, drank thirstily of the cold, rich milk the kitchen machines produced for him and braced himself for the arrival of the emergency survey team. "How long, preacher? How long before they get here?" Quamodian considered. "Twenty minutes to think things over. Half an hour to assemble a team. Ten minutes to get their transflex priorities approved -- a few seconds to travel. I'd call it an hour." "Gee! Why, that's only twenty minutes from now. Just think, in twenty minutes I'll be seeing all those crazy three-headed beings, and greenshelled beetles, and -- " "We do not comment on the physical peculiarities of any citizen, Andy Quam said firmly. "Didn't your parents teach you that?" "Well, yes," the boy admitted. "Come to think of it," Quamodian went on, "where are your parents? Aren't they ever home?" The boy shuffled his feet. "Sure, preacher. They're just, uh, busy." "Rufe!" "Yes, preacher?" His face was angelically innocent. "Rufe, let's cut out the nonsense. You're hiding something. I can't imagine what, or why -- but let's have it!" "Aw, preacher. It's nothing. It's -- " He looked up at Andreas Quamodian anxiously. Quamodian gazed implacably back. "Well," said the boy, "it's just that they were acting a little funny. They've gone off in a flyer to Nuevo York." "Nuevo York! Why, that's two thousand miles away!" "A little more, preacher. Figured it'd take them a day or two each way." "Why?" "Well, that's the part that's kind of funny. I mean -- gee, preacher, there's nothing wrong with my parr ents! They're not crazy or anything. TTiey just, well, said the same kind of thing you were saying. About some sort of rogue intellect loose on the earth, and the robot inspector here wouldn't listen to them and they didn't have the right of direct contact with Almalik, like you. So they figured they'd better report it to Nuevo York, where people might be more interested." IF Quamodian sat up alertly. "You're still hiding something," he accused. "Why would you be ashamed of their knowing about the rogue star? It's true, you know." "Sure, preacher. Only -- " "Only what?" The boy flushed. "It's just that they were talking about it two days ago. That's when they left." Quam said, "But that can't be! The rogue star wasn't even created then!... Oh, I see." The boy nodded unhappily. "That's the part that's got me a little mixed up, preacher. They thought there was one when there wasn't" T hey were back at the transflex cube with minutes to spare, but the emergency survey team was early. Evidently they had wasted no time. The control dome cried, through Quamodian's flyer radio; "Stand back! Keep the area clear for a party from Almalik Three, now arriving!" "Gosh," whispered Rufe. His eyes were round as Saturn's rings, his worries about his parents temporarily out of his mind. "Where are they, preacher? Shouldn't they be coming through? What's keeping them? -- ohr A dozen grass-green spiral beings, like tiny coils of springs, emerged from the cube. They were twisting in orbit around each other, approaching the man and the boy with a whistle of high-frequency sound. "What in tarnation is that, preacher?" he asked. "It is not courteous to stare. I don't recognize the species; a multiple citizen of some kind -- " "And that! And -- oh, gosh, look at that one!" "All citizens, I'm sure." But even Quamodian drew his breath sharply, as from behind a foamy, almost translucent bubble of pink there appeared the shark's fangs and slitted eyes of a citizen of clearly carnivorous ancestry. The rest of the citizen was no improvement; it loped on enormously powerful clawed legs like a kangaroo's, possessed two pairs of upper limbs that seemed boneless and lithe as an elephant's trunk, terminated in vivid blue manipulating organs that were almost the duplicate of a star-nosed mole. But the fourth member of the team, and the one who advanced on Andy Quam, was human enough. In fact, she was lovely. "Monitor Quamodian?" she demanded. "I am Clothilde Kwai Kwich, temporarily assigned to clean up the mess here on Earth and thus your acting supervisor. What the devil have you idiots been up to?" Andy Quam swallowed hard. He wiped the palm of his hand on his tunic and extended it to her for shaking. "I -- I'm delighted to meet you. Miss -- " "Kwai Kwich," she said, clearly and emphatically. 'Monitor Kwai Kwich. Please speak briefly and responsively, when it is necessary for you to speak at all. These other citizens and I have little time to waste, and we wish to use it effectively. I suppose our best first move is to make an on-site investigation of the locus of the alleged events which you have tricked us into coming here to investigate." "Certainly," said Andy Quam feebly, propping his unshaken hand. "Of course. That's why I was hoping -- " "My associates can of course provide their own transport but, as you see, I am myself human. I assume you have some sort of vehicle?" "Oh, yes. This one right here." "Then shall we go?" And Monitor Kwai Kwich brushed past him without a word to enter the waiting flyer. Dazed, Andy Quam turned to follow, but the boy caught his sleeve. "Say, preacher!" he hissed furiously. "What the dickens is the matter with you?" Quam stared at him blankly. After a moment he shook his head and followed the girl into the flyer. He didn't know what to say. It was just that he was astonished at his temporary supervisor's appearance. She wore the garb of an urbane, sophisticated citydweller, her face made up almost past the point of visible humanity, her hair impeccably coiffed. But change her clothes and makeup, Andy Quam thought -- put a siipple dress on her instead of the mirror-bright tights, the fluffed bodice and shoulders, the diamond of bare skin at the back; scrub her face of the two-inch angled eyebrows and bright blue eyeshadow and rouge -- and Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich would become a dead ringer for Molly Zaldivar. T he rogue was much larger now, and wiser, and stronger. It did not seem much different in the despairing eyes of Molly Zaldivar, for at best it was only a cloud of stripped surging electrons, a controlled violence of particles that would have been her death if the rogue's own energies had not kept its components bound to its central mass. But it had fed and grown. It had assimilated neural reactions from Cliff Hawk, the robot, the sleeth, the hundred living creatures larger than microorganisms that it had absorbed into itself. It was by no means finished with either growing or learning. Perhaps it could be called adolescent. Almost mature in size and strength and intelligence. Far from mature in its understanding of itself. Molly made no sound as the radiant whirl summoned the sleeth to it, and entered into the black terrifying shape of the predator from space. The sleeth dropped down upon her and caught her, coldly but harmlessly, in its razored talons, now sheathed in slick, cold chitin. It rose with her through the center of the globe, flew through the cold core of that edgeless opal glow and on and out, tracing the endless passageways to the surface. Molly did not stir. She was past fear and worry; she was not resigned, but she was passive. She would not have struggled even if she had known how close to death that murderous opal glow had brought her. But she really did not know. She did not respond even in the hues of emotion by which the rogue interpreted her mental state. No green blaze of hate, no blues or violets of fear. No spark of love; emoIF tion had left her, leaving her dark, and empty, and merely waiting. Bearing Molly Zaldivar in the bubble of atmosphere trapped in the sleeth's transflection fields, the rogue left the round Earth. Tardily they dawdled through the "thick" gases that were the solar atmosphere -- so tenuous at one A.U. that human instruments could barely record them, and human bodies would have burst and foamed; but still too thick for the sorts of speed that the sleeth, commanded and driven by the starlike energies of the rogue, could develop. But even so, in minutes they were past gassy Jupiter and Saturn; the void was more nearly empty now, and the rogue drove the sleeth more fiercely. So fiercely that time seemed to stop. These were not physical energies that the rogue commanded now; they were the transflection fields of the sleeth and itself. They leaped through empty spaces, through folded light and darkness, through bitter cold and twisting force and giddy deeps of vastness, leaped to the golden suns of Almalik... And were there. A thin sighing shout whispered passionately in the ears of Molly Zaldivar: "Observe!" it shrieked, almost soundlessly. "I have begun to destroy Almalik!" "You cannot," she said bleakly. "Observe!" it shrieked again, and subsided. It was the molecules of atmosphere itself that the rogue was shaking now, to make sounds that the girl could hear; it could produce little volume, but in the girl's tiny bubble of air, gazing at the twelve bright but distant stars and one nearby, blinding sun that was Almalik, in the middle of the awful soundlessness of interstellar space, there was no other sound loud enough to drown it out, nothing but her own heart and breath and the faint mindless singing of the sleeth. "I begin!" whispered the tiny scream, and like a hawk swooping its prey the rogue drove them toward the nearest planet. It was a small world, less than Pluto and farther from its primary; the horizon was queerly rounded, the surface mottled with creeping blobs of liquid gas. With a power summoned from its infinite reserves, the rogue seized it, entered it -- became it. It grew once more. It fed quickly and avidly, seized new atoms, sucked electrons into the spreading patterns of its being, took new energies from frozen stone. It reached out to survey the space around itself, found ions, gas molecules, a hurtling moonlet -- and farther off, a small metal mass inhabited by organic masses of organized matter. The rogue did not know it was a spaceship, did not care. It drew the spaceship and the sleeth at once to itself. The ship crashed bruisingly on the surface of the tiny world. With the sleeth it was far more gentle, but not gentle enough. The creature struck against a spire of frozen hydrates, screamed soundlessly and went limp. And as it lost control, with it went the bubble of air it carried in its transflection fields, and Molly Zaldivar lay open to the murderous empty cold of space. F or many nanoseconds the rogue considered what it had done. As best it knew how to do so, it felt alarmed. At length it seized upon a buried shelf of rock beneath the frozen gases and shook it to make words. "Molly Zaldivar!" rumbled the planet. "What is happening to you?" The girl did not answer. She lay cradled in a bed of the planet's -- of the rogue's own, now -- crystal snow, beside the crumpled black body of the sleeth. She did not breathe; there was no longer any air for her to breathe. Dark blood frothed and froze on her face. "Molly Zaldivar!" groaned the rock of the planet's crust. "Answer!" But there was no answer. The rogue tested its powers, felt its new magnitude. Now it was a planet, its coat of frozen gas a skin, its cragged granite mountains bones, its deep pools of cooling magma a heart of sorts. The rogue was not used to so large a body. It regretted (insofar as it understood regret) that its body was unkind to Molly Zaldivar, too airless, too cruelly cold. From the wreckage of the spaceship, organized masses of organic matter were exiting, clad in metallic artificial skins. The rogue did not recognize that they were citizens and might be of help to Molly Zaldivar; it reached out a thoughtless effector and slew them. And then it again practiced the sensation it experienced as regret; for it realized that they had owned supplies of water and air, warmth and pressure that could have been used for Molly Zaldivar. No matter. The rogue was now the planet and could dispose of the planet's resources. It would not let her die. It shielded her from the cold, warmed the frozen gas around her and cupped it in a sphere of transflection forces. With bits of matter taken from the creatures it had destroyed it healed the damage to her lungs. It warmed her stiffened body, helped her breathe again, found the spark of life in her... And tjie girl stirred and spoke. "What are you doing, monster?" she moaned. "I am saving your life, Molly Zaldivar," rumbled the rocks. "I am destroying Almalik!" "You cannot, monster," sobbed the girl. "Observe!" The rogue's transflection field was vaster now, spreading to hold all its continents of dark and ancient rock, its seas of snow, all its great mass. With all its might, the rogue prepared to strike at Almalik. It halted the planet in its orbit and turned inward, toward that white and splendid single sun, the brightest star of Almalik. And in its hate for Almalik it drove inward, toward collision with the star. T he sleeth was cruelly hurt; but the creature that had been bred to kill pyropods in space was not easily killed. It stirred. The great empty eyes gazed into space, then IF bent to look into the eyes of Molly Zaldivar. Ripples of muscles pulsed under the dark, hard flesh. Ijs transflection fields grew again; it lifted lightly from the frozen gas on which it lay, and its high singing sound grew in volume. The sleeth was not an intelligent creature as Man is intelligent, or the other citizens of the galaxies; but it had awareness. It recognized that something had owned it for a time; it felt that the something was gone, now that the rogue had retreated to explore its new planetary body. It remembered Molly Zaldivar... And when the rogue next turned its attention to the girl she was gone. The rogue was quick to search for her, and find her. She was in flight. Mounted on the sleek black shoulders of the sleeth, veiled in its transflection fields, she was climbing away from the rogue planet's frigid skin of snow, flying toward the inner planets of that great white star toward which the planet was plunging. The rogue thrust out a darting arm of plasma, of its own electrons meshed in transcience forces. It reached to overtake her, pierced effortlessly the sleeth's transflection shield, shook her small sphere of air with an effector. "Where are you going, Molly Zaldivar?" the air screamed shrilly in her ear. She turned her head to look at the rogue's shining plasma finger, but she did not answer. The rogue paused, considering. There was strangeness here. Strange that to the rogue she seemed so very lovely. The redder suns of Almalik struck red fire from her hair; the blue suns burned violet in her eyes. But why should these things matter? the rogue asked itself, interested and curious. Why shouk the remembered and absorbecthought-patterns of the organized matter called Cliff Hawk exert sc powerful an influence on it still? The rogue made the air shriek in a pierc ing whisper again: "I love you, Mol ly Zaldivar. Once I was tinier than you, so small you could not see me; now I am so huge you are no more than a fleck of dust. We have never been akin, and I see no bridge fo: love between us... but I love youf "You're insane, monster," she said at last. But her eyes were gentle. The rogue pondered. "Where are you going?" it demanded again. "I am flying to the inhabited planets of Almalik. On Kaymak they will deal with you -- once I warn them." "Do you hate me, Molly Zaldivar?" The girl frowned at its bright sensor and shook her head. "You can't help what you are." The rogue scanned all her matter for the cold green blaze of fury; it was absent. Eagerly it asked: "Then do you love me now?" Her face crinkled oddly about the eyes, the skin tawny gold beneath Almalik's far suns. "How could I? I am human -- you a monster!" And her violet eyes were damp as they peered at the rogue's shining sensor. "I love you..." "Insane!" sobbed the girl. And then, "Perhaps I pity you, because you are so sadly deformed, because all your power is thrown away." She shook her head vigorously, the colored lights of Almalik dancing in her hair. 'Tm only sorry for you!" She paused, and said: "If I am in love, I think it must be with little Andy Quam. Monster, I will go back to him. Once I get to the inhabited planets and give my warning -- and you are destroyed -- I will go to him through a transflex station. But I pity you, monster." "I will not be destroyed." "You will be destroyed -- unless you kill me first, and keep me from warning the inhabited worlds." The rogue thought for microseconds. Then at last it shook the air again. "I will not destroy you," the air shrieked. "But I will not be destroyed. Observe! I will kill Almalil; before you can warn anyone!" And it withdrew its plasma arm, as the girl stared wonderingly after. T he rogue flexed its energies, and prepared for the assault. It tightened the transflectipn fields that held and moved its planetary mass. The agonized rock of its mantle screamed and grated as it flattened its bare black peaks, compressed its deserts of snow, squeezing itself into a denser projectile. It drove itself toward the blazing sun.  mil die, thought the rogue. So will Almalik, Tardily, almost carelessly, the congeries of massed beings that made up the total of Almalik took note of the intruder and lifted a careless effector to defend itself. It was not the white star ahead of the rogue that resisted. That sun lay steadily glowing, ignoring the threat. But from a mighty double sun above it, a golden giant and its immense blue companion, spinning close together, a bolt was launched. The bolt sprang from the inner plasmas of the golden star, and its energies were huge. An enormous leaping snake, thicker than the rogue's own snow-encrusted planetary body, blazed bright as the star itself. It flashed with transflection speed across the void, faster than the rogue could move to evade it. But it bypassed the rogue, and struck toward Molly Zaldivar. Even at the planetary distances that already separated them, the rogue could see the red flash of terror through her being as she saw that darting coil of golden fire. Help me, monster! she cried; the rogue could hear no words, but the message was clear, and it responded. It hurled out an arm of its own ions and their linking transcience energies, coiling it into a plasma shield around the girl and the sleeth. But it was not strong enough. The golden arm of Almalik was stronger; it burst through the shielding plasma wall, coiled a net of golden fire around Molly and the sleeth and snatched them away toward that double sun. The rogue could not help her. But an emotion that it could not identify as savage joy filled all its patterned mass. She called me. She asked my help. If I cannot help her,  still can destroy this near white star of Almalik! T he rogue paused, testing itself, preparing itself to dispose of energies greater than even it had yet employed. It was not strong enough, IP it calculated coldly. Not yet. It needed to be stronger. The planet was cold, but at its core it was not yet dead; crushed gelid masses of iron and heavier metals still seethed, not yet congealed into solids, not yet exhausted of radioactivity and heat. From them the rogue devoured energy and strength. Controlled lightnings flashed along its plasma paths. The planetary mass of its body was now no more than a slinger's pebble to it; a weapon, a The rogue intensified its driving field until its crushed mountain ranges smoked, and the dCvSerts of snow thawed and bubbled into boiling seas. The deep core shuddered with earthquake shocks; arcs and auroras raged through its reborn air. The rogue plunged on to shatter the enemy star. But Almalik was not unprepared. From the binary sun above, the golden spear of plasma stabbed at the rogue again. It pierced all the shielding fields, burned through its steaming seas, exploded its crust and jarred its heart with seismic waves. The rogue coldly calculated its damage. Much. Not too much. I still can kill Almalik! The plasma snake recoiled to strike again, again, pocking all the rogue's surface with enormous glowing craters, shattering its being with waves of destruction that the rogue felt as searing pain. But the rogue would not let itself be destroyed. It drew on its last immense reserves to increase the power of its transflection shields, holding all the atoms of its shattered planetary mas in a remorseless, destroying grip. Daring -- and learning -- it even reached out to suck new energies from the plasma snake itself. Molly Zaldivar and the sleeth were gone now, lost even to the rogue's far-ranging perceptions as the plasma coil drew them back toward some distant planet's surface. Every bit of matter of more than molecular dimensions for many A.U.s around was gone, drawn into the rogue itself or volatilized by the seething energies employed. But the rogue was not destroyed. It plunged on to strike the unresisting white sun. #TV yTonitor Quamodian," said theLVx flyer chattily, "you're not going to hear much with your bare ears. They're talking about you." Quam glanced at Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich, who was inspecting the fittings of the flyer with distaste and apparently whispering to herself. "I don't know if I want to hear," he muttered. The girl said aloud, without looking at him, "What you want makes little difference. Monitor Quamodian. There will no doubt be times when the other citizens will have inquiries to direct to you, or instructions. I do not wish to be distracted by relaying messages, therefore equip yourself with proper hearing facilities." Andy Quam grumbled, but accepted the tiny earpiece the flyer offered him on an effector. " -- flimsy old wreck," piped a shrill voice in his ear as he put it on. "We will follow, but kindly move as rapidly as you can." The voice had an odd humming, almost echoing quality, as though a well trained chorus were speaking in almost perfect unison. Quamodian guessed it was the multiple citizen of green spirals. He. disregarded them, quickly inspected his flyer. Its homeostatic devices had repaired the damage, restored the rack of flares. Not that they would be needed, he hoped. Or would be of any use if they were. But they were better than nothing. "We're all set," he announced. "I guess." Monitor Kwai Kwich said, with offensive patience: "Then can we not begin?" Quamodian hunched grimly over the controls and ordered the flyer into the air. The sun was in his eyes as they spun and rose. Nearly doubled in diameter, its red disk was now so dull that his naked eyes could watch it without discomfort. Dark splotches marred it. He thought of saying something to the girl, but decided against it -- although she, coming from Kaymak, might not realize there was anything odd about its appearance. Let her find out, he thought. It didn't matter anyway. All that mattered was that he now had help -- a kind of help -- against the rogue. They arrowed south across the narrow laJ and the first dark foothills, the multiple green citizen and the pinkly glowing cloud following effortlessly behind. The predator citizen with the enormous fangs lolled silently on the padded seats behind Andy Quam and the girl, while Rufe sat on the floor beneath it, looking apprehensively at its teeth. There was a continuing buzz of conversation on the transcience bands coming through his earpiece, but Quamodian disregarded it. He was not interested in their opinions of his flyer, himself or the planet that had spawned humanity. All he wanted from them was their help. It was dark as they reached the hill that held the cave; the sun was still sone distance above the horizon, but its dulled rays gave only a looming twilight in the sky, very little on the ground about the cavemouth. He circled the dark mouth of the cave, searching for the sleeth or any hostile thing. There was nothing. All the landscape held that ominous tinge of red, but nothing moved on it. Flying warily he approached the rubble of the demolished door. #Teserted," sang the tiny chorus of the grass-green spirals. "We detect nothing. Another entrance exists lower down." Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich glanced hesitantly at Andy Quam. "There is a good deal of destruction here," she admitted. "I told you!" "Yes. Perhaps there has been ar error." "Lower down!" chanted the spirals. "Other indications! Worth investigating!" And the soft whisper of the cottony-pink cloud citizen sighed: "Forces have been deployed in the lower area of considerable magniIF tude. Forces still exist in being of unusual characteristics." Monitor Kwai Kwich said, almost apologetically, "We should investigate." "Right," rasped Quamodian, and sent the flyer spinning down around the mountain, searching for the lower entrance. The pink cloud citizen was there before him, hovering like a puff of steam at the spout of a kettle before the tunnel mouth. "You lead," it sighed. "Dispersed matter like myself may be vulnerable." But Quamodian had not waited for permission. He thrust the flyer into the tight throat of the tunnel, probing with its searchlights for the sleeth, for Molly Zaldivar, for any trace. All he found was the tightening spiral passage itself, lined with evidences of destruction. "Forces of great magnitude," chanted the spirals, whirling about a burst wall, a ripped stanchion. "Evidence of transflection energies. Evidence of plasma activity." Rufe, forgetting his fear of the long-toothed citizen behind him, stood leaning over Quamodian's shoulder. "Gee, preacher," he whispered, thrilled. "Look at that! Something really racked this place up!" There was no doubt about that. Staring about as the flyer slid smoothly forward on its transflection fields, Quamodian saw that what had happened in this tiny enclosed space had involved more than merely chemical energies. For the first time he really understood what was meant by a "rogue star"; tiny though the creature had been, less than a gram in weight at first, it had commanded forces capable of thrusting steel and rock out of its way like tissue. The long-snouted predator citizen lifted its muzzle and howled a sentence; the translator in Quamodian's ear rendered it as: "Be careful! Monitor Kwai Kwich, should not we report to Almalik before going on!" The girl bit her lip, was about to speak; but Quamodian overrode her. "No!" he rasped. "You waited . too long already. Molly Zaldivar may be dying -- may even be -- " He did not finish the sentence. Then they were at the center of the spiral. Quamodian glanced down, swallowed, looked at the girl... then tipped the flyer down into the central shaft. C autiously they dropped down the shaft, Quamodian's flyer first, the multiple grass-green citizen second, the pink cloud hovering timorously behind. Below them a misty, opalescent disk of pale light expanded slowly into a sphere, and they entered the great round chamber below the hill. "Astonishing," breathed Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich. The tardy cloud-citizen sighed fearfully: "The energies are considerable! I am reluctant to come closer." "Stay, then," grunted Quamodian, staring about. "I wonder -- What is it? Do you have any information?" The girl shook her head. "Some ancient military installation, I suppose. Perhaps from the days of the Plan of Man. The records no longer exist for much of that period... But that fusion fire!" She pointed at the cloud of opal mist that hung above the high steel platform, "What a source of energy! I almost believe that you are right, Monitor Quamodian. With power like that one might really attempt to create a star!" Andy Quam chuckled sourly, but did not answer. Hands sweating on the flare controls, he dived to a foot or less above the water-stained floor of the sphere. The ripped and flattened orange-painted cab, the dismembered motor and tracks of the handling machine gave him an unpleasant start; something had thrown them about in rage, it seemed. And there were other fragments there among the torn and broken metal bits. A primitive white-painted food refrigerator? Quam did not recognize it at first, did not understand its purpose even then -- but finally shook with the realization of what it meant: Molly Zaldivar had been here. The food could have been for no one but her. But it too had been dropped or flung; the door was twisted ajar, small packets of food were sprinkled across the wreckage. And beyond them, what was that crushed black shape that lay athwart the grating that attempted to carry seepage away? Clothilde Kwai Kwich recognized it first: "A robot inspector!" she gasped. "Then -- then it's all true?" Rufe said complainingly, "True? Gosh, Miss Kwai Kwich, what've we been telling you all along? Of course it's true!" It was too late for Andy Quam to feel triumph. He hardly heard the exchange. Eyes narrowed, thoughtful, he was darting the flyer's beams into every section of the vast sphere. There was nothing else to be seen. The wreckage on the floor, the spidery steel tower and its ominously glittering mist of fusion energy, the water-stained walls themselves. Nothing more. Molly Zaldivar had been here, he was sure of that. But she was here no longer. Where had she gone? T he nervous sigh of the cloud-citizen interrupted him. "These energies," it whispered despairingly, "they are ionizing my gases, interfering with my particulate control. I must return to the surface." "Go ahead," said Quam absently. "Perhaps we should do the same," bayed the predator in the back seat. "This is dangerous!" "In a minute," said Andy Quam. He was observing, remembering, analyzing. Dispassionately he realize, with a small surface part of his brain, that from the moment Molly Zaldivar's message had reached him, galaxies away, he had been allowing his love and his emotions to drive him. His carefully trained reasoning faculties, the trait of analysis and synthesis which was so basic a part of his indoctrination as a monitor, had been ignored. But now he was using them again, and a picture was unfolding under his eyes. Cliff Hawk, rebel, adventurer, skilled transcience expert. The Reefer, callous misogynist. The two of them together in this place, given these energies, the months and even years of time when they had been left unsupervised. IF It was all quite logical, he noted abstractly. Hawk's scientific hunger; the Reefer's loathing for humanity and, above all, the fusorian brotherhood; the people, the place, the facilities. They had used them to create a rogue, and in return the rogue had thrust them aside, or killed them, or ignored them. But it had not ignored Molly Zaldivar. The rogue was no longer present; its energies would have been detected by any of the citizens in the party. It had gone. And wherever it had gone, Quamodian felt certain, there would be Molly Zaldivar as well. The girl monitor said hesitantly, "Andy. I mean. Monitor Quamodian..." "Eh? What is it?" "Perhaps the other citizens are rit. I -- I don't like the look of this place." Quamodian frowned. Then a fearsome suspicion crossed his mind. "Qothilde! What was it the cloud said?" "You mean the cit -- "Yes! About the energies!" "Why, it said they were ionizing gases. It has returned to the open air." "Flyer!" cried Andy Quam. "Analyze those radiations! Quickly!" The flyer said sulkily, "Thought you'd never ask. Sustained lethality, eit times permissible levels. Safe period at this distance, one hour. We have now been exposed to them for nineteen minutes, and I was going to give an alert in sixty seconds." "Get us out of here!" ordered Andy Quam. "Fast!" The flyer bucked, spun, drove upward toward the tunnel. Quamodian stared out the viewplate. The glowing deadly sphere of lit flashed past his field of vision, then the tight spiral of the tunnel walls; but he did not see them. Andy Quam was seeing something quite different, and far worse. The radiation from that glittering mist of nuclear fire that had flamed for ages in the spherical cave was deadly. The flyer's instruments had measured its intensity. They were reliable. Quamodian had installed and checked them himself. If they said that the maximum safe dose was one hour, then there was no question, to a probable error of no more than a few minutes one way or another. It was not Quamodian's own safety that concerned him, nor Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich's, nor the boy's. How long had MollyZaldivar been held prisoner in that cave, soaking in those deadly rays? Quamodian's arithmetic could be little more than a guess. But it was eighteen hours or more since she had been stolen from the little bedroom of Rufe's house. It was not sensible to suppose that less than half of that time had been spent in the cave. And if it was in fact true that she had been there that long, or anything close to that long, Molly Zaldivar was already as good as dead. T hey burst out into the cold night air. And even in his fear and anguish Andy Quam stared incredulously at the sky. Overhead lay a lacy net of blue and violet fire. Great pale slow lightnings of color writhed through the heavens, soundlessly and hugely; they were so bright that trees cast shadows on the rocky hillside, blurred shadows of color that moved with the supple shifting of the aurora. The carnivorous citizen thrust its long muzzle forward, past Quamodian's cheek. He felt its hot, faintly fishy breath on his ear as it whined softly, "This spectacle does not appear usual. Can you explain it?" Quamodian said simply, "I think our own sun has gone rogue." "But that's impossible," cried the girl. "Sol is not an intellectic body! No trace of volition has ever been detected!" Quamodian spread his hands, indicating the violence of the aurora. "Then you explain it," he said. The distant chorus of the grassgreen spirals chimed in, "We have recorded reflected intensity of stellar emissions. They have approximately doubled. Three conjectures: One, that this star is pre-nova; improbable. Two, that previous soundings to determine intellect in this star have been in error; improbable. Three, that it has acquired volition." "You mean it's gone rogue?" the girl demanded. "What probability do you give that?" "No assessment," chanted the spirals. "No known data for comparison." "Report to Almalik!" ordered the girl. "You, citizen! You have transcience facilities!" But the spirals replied, "Our signals from Almalik are disordered. We cannot comprehend their meaning. Nor can we receive acknowledgment of our own reports." Quamodian had had enough. "Forget Almalik!" he orderfd. "And never mind about the sim, either; we can worry about that later. Right now I'm worried about a girl. A human girl named Molly Zaldivar. Perhaps she is somewhere nearby, with or without the rogue intellect. Can any of you detect her?" Silence. "Try!" roared Andy Quam. Then, sulkily, the predator citizen lifted its muzzle. "For some time now," it bayed softly, the transcience receptor in Quamodian's ears converting it into words he could understand, "I have registered the presence of quarry on that far hill." "Quarry?" "An ancestral trait," the citizen explained. "It is a particular refinement of chemosampling in ambient air. What you call the sense of smell. But -- is not Monitor Kwai Kwich 'human girl' and are not you 'human male,' Monitor Quamodian?" "Certainly! What about it?" "Then this quarry cannot be what you seek. It is male. And it is severely injured." T hey skimmed over the pitted road, dropped toward the hillside where the carnivore citizen had scented a man. Its sense of smell had not been in error. The man was the Reefer, huddled against the trunk of a bent everIP greea tree. He looked gray and ill in the flickering colored lights of the aurora. One arm, badly swollen, was in a sling. He gazed up at the flyer apathetically as Quamodian jumped out. "I want a word with you," Andy Quam shouted. The Reefer growled hoarsely, "Make it short. I'm a sick man." "Where is the rogue? Where is Molly Zaldivar?" The Reefer shifted his weight awkwardly, flinching from the movement of his arm. "Gone. I don't know where." "When?" The Reefer shook his head wearily. Pale with pain, he pulled a short black stick from his pocket, gnawed the end off it and began chewing grimly. "A root that grows on the Reefs," he said, his voice almost inaudible. "Filthy to chew, I guess, but it eases pain. It has always been my personal substitute for Almalik... When did the rogue go? I don't know. It dumped me here this afternoon. Couple hours ago something went on over there -- " he gestured weakly at the hill that lay over the cave -- "and I saw something bright in the sky." "The aurora?" Quamodian demanded. "No! That's been going on since dark. This was something else. I think..." His voice trailed off; he shook hknself and finished: "I think the rogue is out in space. Maybe took the girl with him." Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich interrupted. "Andy! This man is dying. I suggest we get him to a hospital." The Reefer grinned painfully, worked his lips for a second, then jetted a stream of black liquid at a rock. "Good idea, miss," he said. "Only it's too late for the hospital. I'm going to the church." "Gosh, preacher!" breathed Rufe, wide-eyed behind Andy Quam in the shifting auroral lights. "Never thought hed say that!" "Never would," rumbled the Reefer, "if I had the choice. Knew it was coming. Your robot inspector told me weeks ago. 'Malignant fusorian virus,' he said, and he acted like he was enjoying it -- much as a robot can enjoy anything. And he said the Visitants could clear it up, but no doctor could. Expect he's right." "So you're joining Almalik," said Andy Quam. The Reefer shrugged bitterly and winced from his slimg arm. "I've tamed my last sleeth. My free life's ended." A spasm of pain whitened his face beneath the scars and the dirty beard. "Don't think I like it, Quamodian! But half my body's on fire." "Good!" cried Andy Quam. "That's fine! Now, if you want a ride to Wisdom Creek, you can start paying the fare!" The boy gasped, and even Clothilde Kwai Kwich darted a sudden incredulous look at Quamodian. The Reefer licked his lips, staring at Quamodian. "What're you talking about? I'm too sick for jokes!" "That's good, because I'm not joking. I'm going to leave you here to rot -- unless you make it worth my while to take you in," "How?" "Easiest thing in the world," Qnatnodian said tightly. "Let's just start by telling me the truth abmt what you and Cliff Hawk were doing." U nder the many-hued gleam of the auroras the Reefer's, eyes gleamed whitely, furiously. If he had had the transcience powers of the sleeth Andreas Quamodian would have been stunned or dead in that moment. There was madness in his look, and a rage that could destroy planets. But it passed. The Reefer looked away. His jaws worked; he gulped, spat a thin black stream of the juice of his root and said: "Why not? Makes no difference any more, does it? After all, the Visitants will soon be burrowing in my brain and exposing all my secrets for Almalik to know. Might as well tell you now as have you find out that way... but let me sit down in your flyer, Quamodian. I'm telling the truth about being sick." Andy Quam opened the bubble for him, and painfully the huge man sank into the cushions. The autonomic circuits of the flyer compensated for his weight, and he sat bobbing slightly, looking down on them. "Truth is," he said, "Cliff Hawk was only working for me. Insolent pup! I knew he thought he was pretty high and mighty, chasing after pure knowledge and all that stuff. But all J wanted was a cure for this virus. Ever since I picked it up on the Reefs, more'n twenty years ago, it's been sleeping there inside me. I didn't mean for it to kill me, Quamodian. But I didn't mean to take on the Visitants, either." He soothed his splinted arm with rough, blunt fingers, staring up at the many-hued sky. "I did like some of the things the Visitants had to offer, of course. Physical immortality, just about. A cure for this fusorian poison. Power... The rogues were my way of getting those things, without letting those parasites into my body. Hawk was just my engineer." "So you knew Cliff Hawk was creating a rogue?" Quamodian leaned forward to search the Reefer's lax and bloodless face. "Two rogues, Quamodian. The first got away." He grinned with a spasm of pain. "Looks like the other one did too!" "I see," whispered Andy Quam, staring up at the angry aurora. "The first one entered our sun. Now it's rogue too!" The Reefer shrugged. Clothilde Kwai Kwich cried: "Monitor Quamodian! This must be reported at once. Since our citizens are not 'n contact with Almalik, we must return immediately to Wisdom Creek and report via the transflex station there." "It's been reported already," said Andy Quam. "Impossible! How could it be? We just found out -- " "By Rufe's parents. They knew about it, didn't they?" The boy nodded, looking pleased and excited. "And they've gone to Nuevo York to pass the word along." The Reefer scratched his ribs cautiously, winced and groaned: "So that's about it, right? Now how about taking me in to Wisdom Creek?" "Not just yet," said Andy Quam, IF deadly quiet. "One more question. What about Molly Zaldivar?" "That witless little thing! She ruined Cliff Hawk. In love with her, he was; she tried to stop him and messed everything up." He gasped and leaned forward, clutching his chest. "But I don't know where she is now, Quamodian," he moaned. "Please! Isn't that enough? Won't you take me in before this thing kills me?" O n the way in to Wisdom Creek Andy Quam used the flyer's circuits to contact the control dome for priorities. "Thirty-minute delay on all messages, Monitor Quamodian," said the dome. "I will inform you when your circuits can be cleared." Grim-lipped, Andy Quam ordered the flyer to the Starchurch. Now that he knew what was wrong with the sun his responsibility was at an end. Almalik would cope with the problem -- somehow -- or Almalik would fail; Quamodian didn't care. At that moment the only thing on his mind was Molly Zaldivar, stolen into space by the rogue and doomed to early death by the lethal rays of the old power source in the cavern. As for the Reefer, Quamodian didn't care in the slightest whether he lived or died. Yet there was a sort of grandeur in what happened at the Starchurch. They were greeted by the new robot inspector, his egg-shaped black body bobbing with excitement at the presence of so many illustrious visitors. Even though this was not a Starday, a circle of the saved were kneeling on that wide floor beneath the imaged suns of Almalik, and Quamodian and Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich led the procession that brought the limping, sullen figure of the Reefer to the Visitants. Behind him the carnivorous citizen, the green-spiral citizen and the cloud brought up the rear. The kneeling worshippers chanted their praises of Almalik. Then Juan Zaldivar stood up to ask the Reefer the statutory questions -- if he understood the nature of symbiotic life; if he had chosen of his own free will to accept the fusorian symbiotes in his body, blood, brain and bone; if he understood that this choice was made forever. To each question, the Reefer croaked, "I do." He knelt, and the inhabited saved ones knelt with him, their golden brands glowing in the gloom. They chanted again, their voices rolling solemnly against the mighty dome that held the thirteen suns of Almalik. The Reefer gasped a sudden protesting cry. He rose half to his feet, turned with a sudden look of wild alarm, then pitched forward on his damaged arm. Quamodian heard a sharp, hissing crackle. Fine golden sparks were dancing up from the glowing marks on the bodies and faces of the saved ones, floating delicately toward the prone body of the Reefer. They flew together, gathering into a tiny cloud of golden fire that hovered over him. The yellow fireball sank hissing into his skin. An arm of it darted around his body, touched his cheek, retreated to rejoin the rest. The air was suddenly heavy with the sweet reek of the Visitants. The Reefer's moans subsided. Then the chanting ended. He stirred, opened his eyes, stood up easily and came to shake Andreas Quamodian's hand. "Thanks, friend," his great voice boomed. A serene and gentle smile had fallen over his scarred, ferocious face. The star of the Visitants now glowed faintly above his ragged beard. "All my pain is gone." Juan Zaldivar came to take his hand. "You are saved now. You'll feel no pain again," he said solemnly. T he control dome had been in touch with Almalik. But there were difficulties. Quamodian blazed: "What difficulties? I must communicate with Almalik at once -- go there as soon as possiblel" "Regret," sang the control dome sweetly. "It is a matter of priorities." "That's what I demand, emergency priority!" "But Monitor Quamodian," sang the control dome, "when you arrived yesterday you stated the emergency was here." "It was here. Now I have new facts! I expect a most serious danger to the suns of Almalik!" Clothilde Kwai Kwich whispered, "Andy, may I speak to him? Perhaps he will listen -- " But Quamodian froze her with a glare. She subsided without comment. She had become a softer, more feminine person since the visit to the cave, the discovery that Andy Quam's fears were not groundless. "State these facts," the monitor rapped out melodiously. "They are already available to Almalik," said Quamodian. "They exist in the mind of a man called the Reefer who has just received the Visitants. I wish to be on hand among the stars of Almalik, to assist with the interpretation and use of this new information." He did not add his more urgent private reason; it would have been of no use, since it was not the sort of thing that would influence the control dome's transcience patterns. But he clung to a wild, despairing hope that Molly Zaldivar might appear with her captor, somewhere about the multiple suns of Almalik. If she did, Quamodian wanted to be there. "Moment," sang the monitor dome. Andy Quam shifted uneasily in the seat of the flyer. Clothilde Kwai Kwich frowned thoughtfully. We have priorities," she stated, as if to no one. "What about it?" Quam demanded. "Nothing, Andy. Except that the fest of us can go to Almalik at once and plead your cause." "Agree," chanted the chorus of the grass-green spirals. "Impatient. Urgent. Suggest no delay." And the cloud citizen sighed, "There exist great forces deployed against Almalik. It is necessary to prepare immediately." Quamodian said stubbornly, "Do what you like.  am going anyway." Clothilde looked at him doubtfully, but said nothing. She was saved the need to, anyway; the control dome spoke in all their ears, through the IP very little communicator plugs: "Monitor Quamodian, your request is denied. Monitor Kwai Kwich, your priorities, and those of your party, are withdrawn. There can be no travel to that destination now." T he news struck them all with consternation. The green spirals whirled furiously in their interlocking orbits, their collective thoughts a babble of whispered fear and excitement, just below the threshold of comprehensibility for the others. The predator citizen whined mournfully and edged closer to the boy, Rufe, who stared wide-eyed at Andy Quam. The pinkly glowing cloud citizen whispered somber statements about the disasters that lay ahead, and Clothilde Kwai Kwich's hand crept out, unnoticed, to take the hand of Andy Quam. "Why?" he demanded furiously, "We are monitorsi We cannot be denied priority rights!" "All priorities are withdrawn," said the control dome somberly. "Our headquarters report anomalous astronomical phenomena among the planets and multiple suns of Almalik. Robot inspector, please clarify." Unnoticed the black egg-shaped form of the robot had drifted across the square toward them. Its oval sensor was cool and bright and blank. Its high voice hummed: "That is correct. Monitor Quamodian. The outer planet of Almalik Thirteen has suddenly stopped in its orbit. It is moving toward collision toward its primary at many times the normal acceleration of gravity." Quamodian's eyes narrowed. Inside his mind whirled with chaotic flashes of foreboding. Molly was there! He was certain of it now, and certain that he must get to her. "Not surprising!" he barked, surprising himself. "That is precisely what I hoped to prevent! I must get there at once to limit the damage, avoid it if I still can." "Impossible, Monitor Quamodian," the robot whirred. "The collision of the anomalous planet with Almalik Thirteen is expected to occur within a few hours. All transflex facilities are in use for the evacuation of the threatened planets. Even so, they are inadequate. Only a fraction of the population can be saved. Under these circumstances, no incoming travel is permitted." The girl gasped, next to Andy Quam in the seat of the flyer. The predator citizen lifted his snout and emitted a long, mourning howl. Quamodian stammered, "But -- but I must go there! To help! It is still possible to do something..." The robot did not respond. Its bright black case hung motionless. Rufe whispered fearfully, "Preacher, what's the matter? Is it dead?" Quamodian shook his head, staring. The robot's plasma sensor flickered, darkened, went out. Three thick black effector whips slid out of its body shell and dangled limply below it, brushing the dusty pavement of the square. "Robot inspector?" Quamodian called querulously. Beside him the girl whispered: "There's something terribly wrong! It's out of communication entirely..." But abruptly the effectors snapped back into the case. The sensor glowed again. "We have received a further instruction from headquarters," it hummed. "The information states that a p#werful rogue invader has destroyed the native intellects in two of the suns of Almalik. The invader has established its own tran science patterns in these suns, and it is now attacking the planets of Almalik Thirteen." Quamodian caught a sudden, rasping breath. "Call Cygnus!" he demanded. "Sacred Almalik, spokesman star of Cygnus, is calling here," the robot's high whine interrupted him. "Your transflex travel priority has been approved. You and your party may depart from the Wisdom Creek transflex station at once." L ight-years away, the rogue's consciousness grew and sharpened in the heat of a cosmic fury. The huge sentience of stripped electrons and plasma soliloquized to itself like a stellar Hamlet: My seas boil dry... my magma bleeds from glowing wounds... my core itself is shattered by those sav age plasma spears... still I hurl my self toward the great white sun ahead... The inner planets of the sun spread wiifer in their orbits as it approached. They began flashing backward past it; it was only hours now until they, aad all the space about, would be dissolved in the blazing debris of the nuL the rogue was about to destroy. And still the sun did not resist. Swelling vast ahead of the rogue, it lay serenely white, beautiful and quiet, undisturbed by the rogue's attack. By now the rogue was ancient and mature, in its own terms at least; it had existed and learned through billions of cycles of its picosecond reflexes. It had learned a full complement of "emotions," or at any rate of those polarizing tropisms which did for it what the glandular byproducts called emotions did for human beings. It had learned anger, and the calm pride of the target sun called forth anger in the rogue: If it would only recognize me! If it would only admit causing the sun of Earth to strike at me! If it would offer some apology for deceiving me, for its contempt of me... then perhaps yet I could stop my blow... But it ignored him. The rogue was not entirely ignored. Though the great white star blazed on passionlessly, benevolently, still the rogue found itself the target for great forces from elsewhere. Another sun of Almalik had joined the attack upon it. The blue companion of the golden giant stabbed at it with a twisting shaft of plasma, a monstrous snake of glowing ions and transcience energy, which pierced to the rogue's heart, withdrew and jabbed again. An agony of meta-pain jolted the rogue to its innermost plasma swirl; but it was not destroyed. It gathered its forces and sought for a weapon to hurl back the thrust of the blue star. And it found one. Passing by the great fifth planet of the unresisting white sun, the rogue reached out with IF :s p);isma arms to snatch a string of r.onns. It gathered them to itself, own body, linked their electrons into its transcience patterns. With its new mass it strengthened its defenses. And secure in its new strength, it drew more strength from the attacking stars themselves. It sucked their transcience energies, through the blue bolts and the golden ones, tightened its transflection fields and hurled its new mass always faster toward the maddening white star that glowed on, contemptuous of all the rogue could do. And that phase of the battle ended. T hough the rogue had never struck back at the twin attacking giants, they were beaten. Their plasma coils had exhausted even their giant strength. The coils withdrew, collapsed, disintegrated. The blue giant shrank and dimmed; its golden companion swelled and reddened. And then they were both dead. Their fusion fires still blazed on -- but mindlessly, now; the intellects that had animated them were drained empty. Sentience had fled from them. Anger and fear and purpose had gone. The blue star swelled again, the golden companion shrank back to normal size; they had become merely globes of reacting nuclear gas, normal atomic engines no longer controlled by any transcience intellect. It was a clear victory for the rogue... but his major enemy, the bright white star in his path, was still the same. It was not defeated. If it was even threatened, it gave no sign. The rogue felt its vast quiet mind watching, alert but strangely unafraid. It was anomalous, the rogue considered, that the target star did not request mercy, or a discussion of terms. Anomalous -- and somehow disturbing. But the rogue would not be deterred from its purpose. It plunged on to smash the white star and its haughty pride. It sought and foupd new fuel for its vengeance. Passing a cloud of asteroids, it swept them up and added them to its mass. It reached ahead to gather in the barren satellite of the fourth planet and crushed and fused the new mass into its own as it sought to crush and fuse all the suns of Almalik. Already in anticipation, it tasted the acrid joy of victory and destruction. Thirteen suns would die or be driven to mindless burning. A hundred planets and a thousand inhabited worldlets would be destroyed. A go up in white-hot plasma as the stars died... And among them, thought the rogue with a bleak stab of pain, would be the trivial living blob of organi#d matter called Molly Zaldivar.  do not wish Molly Zaldivar to die. She must die. I will not save her. But I do not wish her to die, because I love her. In its deadly plunge toward the white star it sent thin threads of plasma effectors ahead to seek her out. Its sensor filaments ranged the cubic miles of void and found her at last, still on the sleeth, far ahead of the rogue and dropping toward the atmosphere of the third planet. The arm of the golden giant that had freed her from the rogue was gone now, with its master's death; but Molly Zaldivar still lived. And felt the rogue's delicate tendril-touch. She looked up, unerringly toward the point in space where his massed energies were driving the planet down to its primary. "Monster?" she whispered. The rogue was silent. It merely watched, and listened. "Monster," she said, more confident now, "I know you're there. I don't mind." She was silent for a moment, leaning forward over the sleek black skin of the sleeth, staring toward the cloudy world below. 'You've done so much harm, monster," she sighed. "I wish... And yet you've tried to be good to me. Monster, I'm so sorry that you must make war on Almalik!" The rogue did not answer. But it probed her interior spectrum of thoughts and energies, registered the dark shadow of sadness and, with it, a pale golden glow of -- of what? Love? Fondness at least, the rogue considered. It contracted its tendril to the merest whisper, content only to observe her, while it considered. Its strength was so immeasurably greater than her own that it could lift her from the sleeth in an instant. The energies that had hurled planets about and slain stars could fold both her and the sleeth back into its own fused and glowing mass effortlessly, carrying them with it into the colHsion with the proud white star ahead. But it did not. It watched her carefully, but without interfering, as she darted, secure in the sleeth's shimmering transflection fields, into the ionized borderlayers of the third planet's atmosphere and dropped swiftly toward the cities on its surface. The third planet was a blue-green world and beautiful. It was a world of peaceful seas and friendly continents. Dazzling cities dwelt along its oceans and rivers, inhabited by all the many kinds of creatures that were companions of Almalik. The rogue watched her drop into the towering spires of one of the cities. It was not yet too late; it could sweep her up even there, and bring her back in the effortless recoil of one of its plasma arms. But it stayed its energies. It merely watched, as it drove on toward the collision, now little more than an hour off, which would sear and melt this world, and destroy the organized mass of matter that was Molly Zaldivar. XX T he flyer, with its organic passengers and trailed by the green spirals and the pink-cloud citizen, fell endlessly through the transflection distances and emerged into the exit port on Kaymar, crown city of the planet of Kaymar, central world of Almalik. Clothilde Kwai Kwich's hand tightened in consternation on Andy IF Quam's arm. Beside him the boy gasped: "Preacher! Looks like we've come to a bad place!" The great central dome of the city seethed with citizens of all kinds. Many were human, in this central city of the worlds of Almalik, calm Terrestrials, bronzed giants from the Reefs. But there were citizens in a myriad of shapes and in no shapes at all, liquid citizens and gaseous citizens, citizens that had no form of matter to clothe the bare energies that constituted their beings. The diaphragm of the transflex cube behind them was already contracting on a full load of refugees lucky enough to be on their way to some other world. The shouts, cries, hissing whistles, electronic pulses' and other sounds of the countless thousands who had not yet been so lucky added up to a vast chorus of pleas for help. Twenty crystal citizens hung just before them, their razor-sharp edges of bright blue transparency flashing in the suns of Almik. Quam dropped the flyer to the ramp, opened the door and led the way, ducking under the crystal citizens. "Got to get out of this crush," he panted. "Headquarters of the Companions of the Star is just over here -- I think -- " Clothilde Kwai Kwich cried breathlessly, "Yes, Andy! They'll still be functioning; we'll go there, and -- " But she had no breath to finish. It was all they could do to urge their way through the incredible press of citizens. There was neither violence nor outright panic; those were not the enemies. But there were so many of them, so many countless thousands more than the transflex cube could evacuate in the few score minutes left, and backed by so many thousands of thousands more that had not yet managed to make their way even into the central dome of the city. They were orderly. They were brave. But each of them knew that most of them were doomed. They fought their way to a clear space and paused for breath. The carnivore citizen was the least affected of them; he glanced at young Rufe and bayed a laughing comment which the translators in Quamodian's ear rendered as: "Let the cub ride my shoulders! We'll never make it any other way." "Naw!" flamed Rufe. "I can keep up if you can. Come on, preacher, let's do what we came to do!" The pinkly glowing cloud citizen was the worst damaged of the party. Little cloudlets of his material had been detached; some were still floating after him, rejoining the central mass of his being; others were hopelessly lost in the crush behind them. The grass-green spirals had merely tightened their orbits, maintaining exact spacing and speeds. "All right," said Andy Quam. "Let's go!" But a great shout from the dome behind them made them turn. Every citizen, warm-blooded or cold, humanoid or anmrphous, was staring upward, through the crystal ceiling of the dome, with ten thousand thousand eyes, photoreceptors, radar scanners, sensors of every description. There, streaked like a child's bright daub on the calm blue skies of Kaymar, hung the bright and glittering globe of the invading rogue star. Lightnings played about its blazing body as it shot across the sky, its motion visible even though its disAndy Quam tore his eyes away. "Come on," he muttered. "We've got even less time than I thought." T he Grand Hall of the Companions of the Star was empty. The thirteen suns of Almalik blazed down from the ceiling on an auditorium that could seat thousands, and now held no one at all. Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich said dolefully: "I can't understand. I thought here at least we'd find someone who could help -- " The chant of the grass-green spirals sounded in Andy Quam's ears: "No indications! No operative functions being performed! This construct not inhabited!" The boy clutched Quamodian's arm. "But preacher," he said. "Almalik told us to come here. Didn't he?" Quamodian said, "He gave us permission. Directly. Yes." He turned, searching the vast room with his eyes. "But perhaps something has happened." The weary sigh of the cloud citizen whispered: "There exists a largescale entity which is observing us." Quamodian flung himself into a chair, trying to think. Time was so short! He had counted on finding the order of Companions of the Star still functioning. Perhaps it had not been realistic, but in his mind he had expected to find the great hall thronged with worshippers, the many offices and administrative sections busy about the endless tasks of Almalik. If he had thought at all, he had thought that a robot monitor or a citizen would have greeted them at the entrance, led them directly to someone in supreme authority, received his information about the rogue -- and acted. Acted in time to save this world, and all the world of Almalik. He had not expected that the building would be empty. The others were waiting quietly for him to act. He realized that, right or wrong, he would have to make the decisions for all of them. And there was less time with every passing clock-tick... He stood up. "All right," he said, "we'll go back to the transflex cube. Perhaps the monitors there can help us." "Through that mob, preacher? Impossible!" cried the boy. "Impossible or not, that's what we'll have to do. Unless you have a better idea -- " But then, as they turned to leave, a Voice rumbled softly in their ears. "Wait," it said. They froze where they stood. The girl looked imploringly at Andy Quam. She did not speak, but her lips formed a word: "Almalik?" He nodded; and the Voice spoke again: "Behold," it said, and the great dome lifted on its transflection forces to reveal the splendor of the heavens themselves. It was daytime now; the glittering stars that the dome was designed to reveal could not be seen. But the bright smear of the invader was there, blighting the beauty of the IF calm clouds. And near it in the sky, dropping toward them -- "It's Miss Zaldivar!" shouted the boy. "Look, preacher! It's her and the sleeth!" r iey were in that great hall for less than a quarter of an hour, and in all that time Quamodian could not after remember taking a breathHe was overpowered by the immense majesty of Almalik himself, brooding over them, watching and helping. Even the nearness of the girl he had crossed half a universe to find could not break him free from the spell of that immortal and immense star. Though what was said was surely catastrophic enough to rouse him to action; for Molly Zaldivar, she said, was dying. "Dear Andy," she whispered across the vast gulf of the chamber, her vcHce warm and affectionate in his ears. "No! Don't come any closer to me. I'm charged with radiations, Andy dear -- the old ones from the Plan of Man madiines, new ones diat our little monster-star used to try to save my life. Or to give me life again; because I was dead. Anyway, if you come near me now it will be ycmr death " Even so, he rose to run toward her; but she stopped him with her hand. "Please," she whispered. "Now. What was it that you came from Earth to tell?" He stammered out the story the Reefer had told him, while Clothilde Kwai Kwich and the boy, one on each side of him, stood silent and awed. Molly Zaldivar listened gravely, her face composed though her eyes widened, then danced, as she saw how Clothilde's hand sought his. Then she said, "Thank you, Andy. You've always been the best friend I could ever hope to have. I -- " Hep composure almost broke for a moment, but she controlled herself, and smiled. "I don't mind leaving this world much, dear Andy. But I do mind leaving you." And then she was gone, mounting once more toward the sky on the great, patient back of the sleeth, while the enormous dome of Almalik swung majestically back into place to blot her out. Qomething had happened. The rogue's thin thread of sensor had been snapped; it had lost Molly Zaldivar and r sleeth. It tried to find them again for many picoseccmds, but in vain. Some force larger than itself had shut her off, blinded it to her activities. A sense that in a human mit have been called fmreboding filled the rogue; but it had not time for even meta-emotions; it was driving ever closer to its enemy sun, and it needed all its forces for the task ahead. The third planet had fallen far behind it now. It flashed through the orbit of the second planet, now hidden from it at inferior conjunction by the expanding white sun. The great white disk grew ahead of it. Still the star ignores my attack. It refuses to resist. It offers no apology for the attacks it has made on me through its lesser stars. Still it is watching... mocking me... "Monster! Stop for me. Now!" The thin filament of the rogue's probing sensor was alive again, carrying a message for it. The rogue energized its perceptions and aw that Molly Zaldivar was pursuing, racing after it on the black and shining sleeth. There was a power flowing from her that the rogue could not quite recognize, but that made it uneasy, unsure of itself. The feeble human frame of organized matter that was the girl should not have been able to dispose such powers. Not even with the energies the rogue itself had bestowed on her; not though her life was close to an end, and all her accumulated strengths were being disposed at once. The rogue considered for some nanoseconds the possibility that these forces came from its enemy, Almalik. But it dismissed the possibility. It simply did not matter. Contact was only minutes away. Already the thin solar atmosphere was boiling around it. It did not stop, perhaps could not stop; the gathered mass of its planetary body was plunging too fast to be diverted now. But it sent a message through its plasma effector, shaking the thin atmosphere that the sleeth carried with it through space. "What do you want, Molly Zaldivar?" its tiny voice piped. "Do you love me now?" Her answer sent a seismic tremor through the core of the planet it had made its body: "Love you, monster? I don't know. I cannot imagine it. And yet -- yes, perhaps I do. If it matters..." The rogue shook in its mad plunge. Its boiling seas loosed huge clouds of vapor as, for a moment, its grasp slackened; lightnings played through its tortured skies. But Molly was "still speaking: "But I have no life left to love anyone, monster. My body is dying, and I must tell you something. Monster! Please listen. Almalik is not your enemy y A shock of doubt shattered the rogue's great joy. "Listen, monster! Almalik never hurt you. Almalik has renounced all violence. He could not harm you, nor any sentient thing. Ever!" R age shook the rogue now. The crustal rocks of its planetary body snapped, and white-hot magma spewed forth. In the air around Molly Zaldivar its tiny voice shrieked: "Lies! Lies again! The sun of Earth that tried to kill me was Almalik's vassal! Its twin stars that tried to kill me again -- they were Almalik's companions!" But Molly Zaldivar's voice came strongly: "No, monster. I lied to you once, yes. Because I was afraid of you. But Almalik has never lied, nor has he tried to harm you. The sun of Earth that struck you -- it was your own brother!" The rogue called back the huge effector that it had lashed out to strike her. Puzzled, its shrill voice repeated, "Brother?" "Yes, your brother! Another synthetic sentience, made before you. It occupied the sun of Earth and tried to destroy you -- came here before you, and tried to destroy you again through the twin stars of Almalik. But you defeated it, monster. And IF now it is gone, and you must stop before you destroy great Almalik!" The rogue paused, while its sentient plasma revolved the startling new concept. "Brother?" its tiny voice whispered again. A dreadful doubt shivered through its core. If it were wrong, it thought... if it were wrong, then it was doing a dreadful and irrevocable deed. For if it were wrong, then Almalik had always been its friend. And it was within minutes of destroying Almalik forever. Methodically, patiently, the rogue rebuilt its net of sensors, threw out probes to scan the patient white star before it -- so close now, and so vulnerable! -- and all of space around. Its velocity, hard driven and accelermiles, was huge. Unstoppable. It had thrown its energies in profligate abandon into thrusting the dead planet toward the white star. It was simply too late to stop. With care and speed it calculated possible trajectories to divert its own plunge, not to stop it -- for that was utterly impossible now -- but simply to deflect it enough to miss the star and plunge on into the dark space beyond... Impossible. It was too late. Well, then: to pass through the star's corona, destroying itself in the process, of course, and working great havoc with the star's internal energy balance, but leaving most of it intact... Also impossible. Also too late. In what passed in it for desperation, the rogue computed its chance of plunging through the skin of the star but on a tangent that would miss the core, leave the star wounded and erupting with enormous violence, but perhaps not entirely destroyed... Also impossible, and finally impossible. Its energies were too great, its time of collision too near. It would strike the white sun almost dead on, whatever the rogue did now. And rogue and white star together would erupt in the ultimate violence of a supernova, destroying themselves and everything for a light-year or more around.  regret, thought the rogue. I feel pity. For Molly Zaldivar. For Almalik, For all the myriads of beings on Almalik's doomed planets. And for me. It sent out a message on the thin, stretched filament of energy with which it had been in contact with Molly Zaldivar, to say that there was no longer any hope. But it could not make contact. Once again it searched all of space nearby, seeking Molly Zaldivar and the sleeth. Uselessly. Somehow, Molly Zaldivar was gone. T he patterns of energy that made up the essential beings of the rogue were shaken with grief and pain. Despairing, it thrust with all the energies it possessed at the calm white disk of its target sun, now so near and vulnerable. Great spouts of flame boiled from the star below it; the rogue's own planetary body split and shattered in the violence of its effort to undo what it had done. But it was no use. The fragments of its planet, continental in size, massive as worldlets themselves drove on. Look, little one. Take that blue star. Use its energies, if you will. The rogue darted out sensors in all directions, seeking the source of that soundless, gentle voice. The sensors found nothing. But the rogue knew where it came from: it was Almalik, speaking to him from the enormous, swelling, flame-ringed solar disk so near below. The blue star? Experimentally the rogue threw out a sensor toward it. It was empty, untenanted since it had destroyed the mad sentience that had inhabited it. It was waiting for it. Something helped the rogue, something to which it could not put a name: not merely Almalik, not just the star it was so close to destroying, but a congeries of sentiences, a pooled strength of living and stellar creatures, all urging the rogue on, supporting it, giving it help. It drove along the lines of its sensor and entered into the waiting star. New energies flooded its webs of sentience. The resources of a giant stellar furnace were now its own to command. It reached out to the planet it had abandoned, hurtling down on the white star, grasped it with the mighty plasma arms of its new body. White arms from Almalik himself joined the rogue -- and with them, golden arms. The rogue puzzled over that for a few electron-orbits; surely the golden star was dead. Yet it was taking part. The golden arms linked with the blue and white ones, and together, smoothly, strongly, with infinite speed they pulled the planet aside. The planet did not survive those mighty forces; it crumbled into a milthe great white orb of Almalik and heading out into space on cometary orbits. But it had missed. Almalik was safe. And the rogue had time to realize what it had gained, in the might of its new stellar body... and what it had lost. T he great tolling chorus of the strs welcomed it into brotherhood. Join us, brother, said a great collective voice. Be one with us. Be one with all things that share the bonds of mind. Be one with Almalik. And a part of the rogue rejoiced, and a part of it ached with an unpracticed grief for Molly Zaldivar, doomed to death in her frail human body, lost forever. The slow, gentle voice held a hint of amusement and wry pity. Look, brother, it said. You gave her your strength. We gave her our empty sun for a home. And the rogue struck out, unbelieving, with a bright blue plasma sensor toward the golden star; and it met the rogue's sensor with one of its own. Gold thread and blue touched and joined, while the stars watched and rejoiced. The voice that spoke to the rogue was not a human voice, but there was something of humanity about it -- something soft and merry, something very like the voice of Molly Zaldivar, and dear. "Hello, monster," it said. "WelIF Dear Editor: I would like to make a few possibly volatile comments in rebuff to Mrs. Wills' letter in the March issue of IFy which ran down everything in your magazine from stories (with great misinterpretations) to authors and ending with the advertisements -- all of these supposedly being horribly detrimental to children and teenagers. It is quite obvious that Mrs. Wills is not a reader that you would be sorry to lose. After all, I hope that science fiction magazines continue to be for thinking people of all ages, which unfortunately does not include radicals, reactionaries and Biblebelters. I thought that most of those people were in the South, although I notice that Mrs. Wills lives in Michigan. What would Mrs. Wills have teenagers read? -- Argosy, Playboy, etc... True Confessions, etc. etc.??? Personally, I am very glad that my almost teenager has shown an interest (even though rather slight so far, but hopefully it will expand with age) in science fiction. It helps give her an insight into the possible future and helps her have a mind that will probably be much more open in its thinking to all of the problems that arise in the world. and off the world, if she is lucky enough to have that opportunity. Yes, Mrs. Wills, IF does teach and does make some people think. Thank heavens for the authors who do make us think, like Messrs. Zelazny, Pohl, Saberhagen, Anderson, Niven, Clark, Blish, Van Vogt, Vance, etc., etc., etc., etc. -- (Mrs.) Dana Morris, Apt. #-F, #I Chesterfield, Nashville, Tennessee #.    Dear Editor: As you may have gathered from the copies of Stroon I have sent you -- I am somewhat of a Cordwainer Smith enthusiast. I am currently preparing a concordance exegesis and a chronology of the Instrumentality stories for future issues of Stroon. I was wondering if you either have . or know the whereabouts of any of the original manuscripts as it is possible that they might contain passages and information deleted from the printed version which would be useful in the ordering of these stories. I am manuscripts or pay for the cost of Xeroxing (TM) them. I have a similar interest in collecting the illustrations which accompanied the stories. I have about half the bw for The Game of Rat and Dragon and the full-sized cover painting for Space Lords as well as a few rejected cover sketches for The Undermen (which I believe Pyramid is bringing out in early #). I fear that the interior illos have been scattered at conventions throughout the country but I have no idea what has happened to the magazine cover paintings. I bought International SF and found it interesting; a few comments are in order. I would prefer to see some longer stories, perhaps even a serial. It takes a much better writer to tell a short story well than a novelette; you should take advanage of this in International by cutting down on the shorts. Please don't let the mag lapse into a reprint of British writers only (or even a large portion). They can submit their work directly to the U.S. magazines or try to get a British science fiction magazine started. Pm afraid I don't think too much of New Worlds in its new avatar and I don't think it provides a market for hard core sf of the ClementAsimov Niven school. In If, Saberhagen's Brother Berserker was excellent -- he has improved greatly since his first appearance.  Some readers may rail against the mysticism but I feel that religion, metaphysics, etc. are perfectly legitimate fields for science-fiction (as well as science) to explore. The time may be propitious for a novel length Berserker story. By the by, the Star Trek episode, The Doomsday Machine by Norman Spinrad, seemed to... ah... draw inspiration from Saberhagen's conception of the Berserker machines. Keep the Larry Niven stories coming; he is one of the best new writers you have brought to us. I am curious about the "outsiders" he has mentioned in his stories and perhaps you could prevail upon him to feature them more centrally in a future story. I greatly approve of the new SF Calendar which you are starting in If. The surprising thing is that no magazine did it earlier -- all the other professional fields have such listings. The regional cons have proliferated but then so have the number of fans. This listing should help increase attendance at Boskone V (#-# March #). You are to be thanked for your thoughtfulness and consideration as regards fannish activities. -- Anthony Lewis, # Longwood Avenue, Brookline, Massachusetts #.  Matter of fact, it looks as though the calendar did just about double Boskone's attendance, with similar effects on the conferences in Baltimore, Columbus and elsewhere. For those of you who have never been to a science-fiction conference: the usual procedure is a program of talks by science-fiction writers, editors, fans, artists and anyone else who may have something of interest to conununicate, plus a chance to meet and talk with other sf readers. If that sounds like the kind of thing you might enjoy, keep your eye on the SF Calendar in If. The way local conferences are proliferating, there'll be one in your own back yard before you know it! -- Editor.  V  Dear Editor: Since it will obviously take some time to put the Poster Plan brought up at the Phillycon into operation, may I offer a stop-gap measure, the Post Graffiti Plan. If even a third of the science fiction readers in this country would write "read science fiction" on the walls IF of public rest rooms they visit the underground advertising would be immense. I am sure many want to be ahead of the game. So what if people laugh -- they'll notice us. And maybe even read. -- J.B. Post, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #.  If the above reference to the "Poster Plan' confuses you, it was a notion suggested at last fall's Philadelphia sf meeting to prepare and distribute posters advertising Galaxy If, etc. A fan suggested it from the audience. We said if them up, we'd have them made. Question is, how many readers local dealers to put in the window a card saying something like "Read If -- the Hugo Winning SF Magazine". Would, for example, you? If enough readers indicate they'll try, anyway, we'll print the iosters for you. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: I have some answers for and some comments on Mr. Kolodzeij's letter Worlds of IF, Feb. '#). First, about the Doc Savage novels and Kenneth Robeson. Kenneth Robeson was the pen name for a number of different authors. As you probably know, the Doc Savage stories are reprints from the "pulp" magazines of the twenties, and the publishers were always fishing around for authors. About # different Doc Savage episodes were written, and the majority of them (about #) were written by one person, whose name I forget. It seems that this man wanted his stories as true-to-life as they could be, because he always explored the settings of his stories before he wrote them. As a result of this, he had some quite hair-raising adventures. If anyone really wants more inf ormatioii, and has access to back issues of newspapers, there was an excellent article in The Nation- al Observer about six, or seven months ago on the topic of the revival of pulp literature. I cannot agree with Mr. Kolodzeij that the Jameson series is a must. It seems mediocre to me. A second book by John Norman is already out. It is named Outlaw of Gor and is about Tarl Cabot and his second trip to Counter-Earth. It is written in the same excellent style as Norman's first book. In your search for good SF, Mr. Pohl, as Mowgli would say, "Good Hunting!" -- Christopher Keith, # Stevens Terrace, Lancaster, N.H. #.    Dear Editor: In answer to R.W.C. Ettinger's article Interstellar Travel and Eternal Life, I can only say : "Who wants to remember everything?" I know I don't. There was a toothache I had a few years ago that I would rather forget, altogether. (Despite my liking for Heinlein's "Stranger..." pain is one thing I do not cherish!) Of course this would be taken care of by a selective memory, but -- no matter how selective your memory is, you will, still, eventually reach the saturation point, i.e., a time when you have done everything, twenty times each, and are #) bored, #) jaded, #) tired of this whole mess, and #) ready to end it all. Which does not lead to immortality I There is one very important advantage to forgetting, and this is that you can have the fun of doing it all over again, for the first time! Of course this could lead to a situation like the following: Three immortal men are sitting on a park bench. The youngest is # years old, the next is # and the eldest # years old. The youngster spies a pretty young woman walking past (well, she looks young) and says, "Boy, would I ever love to kiss that one!" The next eldest sees another lovely lady, and says, "Boy, would I ever love to hug that one!" The eldest of the three sees another beauty passing by and says. Angeles: at Statler-Hilton Hotel. For information: Charles A. Crayne, # N. Ridgewood Place, Hollywood, California #. Advance membership: #: supporting membership: #. Guest of Honor: Harry Harrison. Ben Franklin Motor Hotel, # Washington, St. Louis, Missouri. Guest of Honor: Harlan Ellison. For information: Norbert Couch, Route #, Box #, Arnold, Missouri #. Membership: #. ana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. Guest of Honor; Daniel F. Galouye. Membership: #. vention, At Hotel Claremont, Oakland, California. (We have been told that the hotel has already been completely reserved for the weekend. If you are plan"Boy, would I ever love to... Then, a puzzled frown passes over his face, and he turns to his two friends. "What was that we used to do?" he asked. Okay, okay, that is a horrible joke, I admit it! But it makes my point. As to your new magazine International, I have only one thing to say: When does the next issue come out? Keep up the good work, and the Hugo will be yours again and again. -- James A. Juracic, P.O. Box #, Fruitvale, B.C., Canada. ning to attend the convention, it will be necessary to secure accommodations in other hotelsmotels.) Guest of Honor: Philip Jose Farmer; Fan Guest of Honor: Walter J. Daugherty; Special Guest: Takumi Shibano, leading Japanese fan. a fashion show of the future, sponsored by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Meet the Authors party. Special Programs dekerman.) An authentic Medieval Tournament -- all participants in costume. Presentation of the Hugos by Harlan Ellison. Also: Project Art Show, daily auctions, gala masquerade ball... For information: Cerrito, (California #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. ciety of America. At Belknap College, Center Harbor, New Hampshire #. Papers are being solicited. Indicate whether you will present a paper or will just attend. Submit title and length of proposed papers early to Ed Meskys (address above). Sylvania Hotel, Broad #b Locust Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For information; Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. IF won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-#by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! IMease accept iny application for inembersiiip in tlie Science Fiction Rook ("lub and rush the # hooks whose numhers I have circled below. Rill me only #, plus shipping and handlinf', for all #. Then every month, send me the ('luh's fre'e bulletin. "Things to ('ome". which describes coming selections. For each hook I accept. I will pay only .#), plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extra value selection at a higher price. Circle the numbers Of I need take only four l)ooks withi,o hnnkc wmi uiantin the coming year and may resign at any time thereafter. ouy delighted with my introductory o# # #U package. I may return it in # days, # # # pay nothing, owe nothing, and my # membership will lie (anceled. Print Name --  -- If under #, parent must sign licrc. (Offer good in U.S.A. only) #, The Past Through Tomorrow: "f uture History" .Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # #. Psychogeist, L. P. Davies. I hree  lip Enterprise' Forgotten road to success m writing By J. D. Ratcliff I can't imagine why more heglnners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to you -- but they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at home, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing.) You learn to write by writing. Our instructors, themselves all published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enrolL )Iowever, there is no obligation to do so# "Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. Although he works only four hours a day, he has had hundreds of articles published in top magazines, including over # in Reader's Digest alone. Famous Writers School Dept. W-#, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City; State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council, VoL #, No. # Frederik Pohi, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Hal Clement by Larry S. Todd by Thomas J. Bassler, M.D. by Dean R. Koontz by C.C. MacApp by Mack Reynolds by Larry Niven by Dorothy Jones by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Coiporatlon, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by sell-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materiaL All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial More Bubbles For Your Bier N ext time you drink a glass of Coke or beer, consider the bubbles: pure carbon dioxide, and a very useful substance. In its proper proportion in the atmosphere it stimulates the breathing reflex; frozen, it becomes dry ice; gaseous, it not only charges carbonated beverages but provides the world's vegetation with the raw material for photosynthesis, from which they construct themselves. But we can have all too much of even the best of Good Things, and carbon dioxide looks like being too much, too soon. You know, of course, that pollution of the air is a major problem all over the world; it rots rubber and ancient marble, it dirties clothes and walls, it multiplies the rate of respiratory diseases like emphysema and lung cancer and it kills people outright -- especially babies and invalid elders -- in cities during heavy smog attacks. For this reason a lot of places have passed laws regulating the permissible output of impurities from automobile exhausts, factory chimneys, home heating systems and so on, and a few places have even enforced them. With a little luck we can (given the will to make the effort) eliminate most of the above difficulties by eliminating ozone, carbon monoxide, aerosols, sulphur and lead compounds and a few other poisons from what wfe fling into the air every time we bum fossil fuel. But no one has suggested a way of eliminating carbon dioxide from the gases of combustion, for two reasons. The first reason is that no one seems particularly worried about CO # . After all, it's a Good Thing, isn't it? And the other reason is that no one can. You can't keep carbon dioxide out of the exhaust of any combustion of fossil fuels; that's the reaction that produces the energy. But we suggest we start worrying about it. We suggest that if we don't do something about it right now, we're going to face a far more hostile world environment in a few years. And we suggest that it may right now be too late to worry -- because it's probably too late to do anything that won't in itself be reasonably disastrous to our way of life. Every time you bum an atom of carbon in air you take one molecule of oxygen out of the air and replace it with one molecule of carbon dioxide. To be sure, there are a lot of molecules of oxygen in the air -- of oxygen for every square mile of the Earth's surface, and the Earth of surface. But there's a lot of fossil fuel, too. No one knows exactly how much -- it depends on how much you want to pay for it, basically -- but the recoverable amount at not much more than present costs of production is In an anthropological anthology of speculation about man's past and future. Edited by Leon E. Stover and Hariy Harrison Most story collections have a conriecting theme, but few have ever had one as exciting as this. Using the basis of anthropology -- the study of man -- and the skill of some of the most prominent #F from the time man was still swinging on branches to his first walk in space, and beyond. With a foreword by well-known anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, and stories by such writers as Helnlein and Clarke, this is almost required reading for SF fans. In fact it fs required reading in some college anthropology courses! # Edited by Judith Merril There's a different kind of stoiy coming from London today -- and it's changing science fiction almost the way Carnaby Street changed fashion. And most readers, Including some Jaded with ordinary SF, are discovering new stimulation in the work of these swinging English writers. You'll be surprised, eveii shocked, at some of their concepts, but all the authors represented in this collection by SPs leading anthologist will make you think -- as well as entertain you in an exciting new way. # In a collection of new stories from today's capital of the "new thing." To your bookseller or to Doubleday  Company, Inc., a-Fl-# Garden City, New York #S# Send me the books I have checked below, n I'm enclosing my cheok or money order for tne cost of the books and understand you'll pay all postage.  Please bill me the cost of the book, plus smpplng charges. J Offer available only In the U.S.A. and Canada. tons of coal (all grades) and some(natural gas, tar sands, oil shde, etc.) Suppose we taken all the low-cost fossil fuel out of the ground and bum it -- which is, after all, what we are in the process of doing as rapidly as we can. What happens to the atmosphere? As far as oxygen depletion is concerned, not much, except locally. Even now cities like New York and Philadelphia have detectably lower oxygen partial pressures than the "natural" atmosphere. But as far as proportion of CO# is concerned -- ah, that's different! There's only about three one hundredths of one per cent of carbon dioxide in the air normally. By the time we finish burning the commercially now-available fossil fuels, we'll have almost tripled that -- to about # -- and that is certainly far above the danger point both physiologically and in terms of its effect on climate. The greenhouse effect will warm the Earth rather radically; the triggeriijg effect of CO# on respiration will have us panting for breath, whilev. giving us headaches. Of course plants will do their best to photosynthesize our problems away. But how much can they do? In the U.S. alone we pave over a worldwide, we destroy an incalculable area. Pelagic plants in the sea do the major share of the work -- but we're shipping plant-killers in tanker lots to Vietnam, for instance; and what will happen if a couple of those tank ships happen to sink, or founder, and discharge their contents into the sea? Obviously quite a lot will happen. But it's pretty likely that we need not consider what will take place if vegetation is depleted; just the burning of coal and oU will produce a problem big enough to keep us busy. For the greenhouse effect is potent medicine. Shortwave heat from the sun goes through carbon dioxide easily; reflected heat is longer in wavelength, and to the long waves carbon dioxide is pretty opaque. So we keep the heat. Keep enough of it, and the polar ice caps begin to melt -- no one knows, really, at what point it happens, or how fast. But happen it will, and then good-by to New York and all that. Future editorial work in the Galaxy publications office will gear. O ne solution, of course, is fewer people. Anyone who knows how to bring about that state please step forward and tells us the secret. Another is to give up burning fossil fuels. Not bad, except that, for openers, that probably means giving up the automobile. And that strikes us as a problem in cultural change compared with which taking the lifesaver away from a drowning man would be easy. Certainly we can get along without cars. But equally certainly, we don't intend to. We'U keep them if they kill us... And you know, they just might. IF  Novelette used a character quite like Mr. Smith. The two distractions were closely connected even though Smith had not removed the nail himself. He had merely ordered Jones to do it. Hoerwitz rather doubted that Shakespeare would have been satisfied with a Smith. The fellow was too simple. He knew what he wanted and went after it without knowing or caring what anyone else in the picture might care. He was an oversized two-year-old. Shakespeare would have made him more complicated and more believable, even back in his Henry the Sixth days. It was a nice idea, with perhaps some scholarly merit. But it didn't really help with the present problem. This was more a piece of postEdwardian melodrama than a carefully thought out Shakespearean plot. The hero had been trapped by armed villains, in a situation from which there was no obvious escape, and was being forced to help them commit grand larceny. Of course in a piece of prohibition-era fiction he would have refused steadfastly to help, but Hoerwitz was no flapper's hero. He was eighly-one years old and had a mass of just one hundred pounds distributed along his seventy inches of height. He could not possibly have lifted that mass against Earth's gravity. He smiled in spite of the pain of his hand yhen he recalled the facial expressions when Smith and his three followers had first seen him. 'hey had gone to a great deal of trouble to make their approach unobtrusive. They had arrived near the apogee point of the station's six-day period instead of making the just-after-perigee rendezvous which the freighters found more economical. This had served the double purpose of making fairly sure there would be no other ships present and of being harder to observe from Earth. At one hundred seventy thousand miles or so, a one-mile asteroid is visible to the naked eye and a modest-sized spaceship can be seen in a good telescope, but one has to be looking for them deliberately. It was a rendezvous, of course, rather than a landing. The latter word means nothing on a celestial body where a spacesuited man weighs about a quarter of an ounce. They had made the rendezvous skillfully enough so that Hoerwitz had not felt the contact -- or at least, hadn't noticed it over the sound effects accompanying Hamlet's stepfather's drinking. There had been no trouble about entering, since the air lock leading "underground" or "inside," whichever way one preferred to think of it, was plainly visible and easily operated from frithout. The possibiltity of anyone's stealing the horse from this particular stable had not IF occurred seriously to anyone responsible for building the place; or if it had he had attached more weight to the likelihood of space emergencies which would need fast lock action. So Mr. Smith and his men had entered and drifted down the tunnel to the asteroid's center not only unopposed but completely unnoticed, and Mac Hoerwitz's first realization that he was in trouble had come after the final peal of ordnance ordered by Fortinbras. Then he had turned on the lights and found that Hamlet had four more spectators, all carr#dng weapons. He had been rather startled. So had the others, very obviously, when they had their first good look at him. Just what they had expected was hard to say, but it must have been something capable of more violence than the station manager. The leader had put away his gun With almost an embarrassed air, and the others had followed his example. "Sorry to surprise you, Mr. Hoerwitz," the intruder had opened. "That was a very good sheet. I'm sorry we missed so much of it. Perhaps you'd let me run it again some time in the next few days. Ti T ac had been at a. loss to reconcile the courtesy with the armament. "If all you want is to see my library, the wens are a bit uncalled-for," he finally got out. "I don't know what else I can offer you except accommodation and communication facilities. Do you have ship trouble? Did I miss a distress call? Maybe I do pay too much attention to my sheets -- " "Not at all. We'd have been very disappointed if you had spotted our approach, since we made it as unobtrusive as possible. You are also wrong about what you can give us. Not to waste time, we have a fourthousand-ton ship outside which we expect to mass up to ten thousand before we leave, with the aid of your Class IV isotopes." "Six thousand tons of nuclear fuel? You've been expanding your consciousness. It would take sixty hours or more if I reprogrammed every converter in the place -- only one of them is making Class IV now, and the others are all running other orders. There's barely enough conversion mass in the place for what you want, unless you start chipping rock out of the station itself. I'd guess that on normal priority you'd get an order like that in about a year, counting administrative time for the initial request." "We're not requesting. As you know perfectly well. You will do any programming necessary, without regard to what is running now, and if necessary we will use station rock. I would have said you'd chip it for us, but I admit there's a difference between the merely illegal and the impossible. WTiy do they keep a wreck like you on duty out here?" Hoerjntz flushed. He was used to this attitude from the young and heathy, but more accustomed to having it masked by some show ef courtesy. "Its the only place I can live," he said shortly. "My heart, muscles, and bones can't take normal gravity. Most people can't take free fall -- or rather, they don't like the consequences of the medication needed to take it indefinitely. That makes no difference to me. I don't care about muscle, and I had my family half a century ago. This job is good for me, and I'm good for it. For that reason, I don't choose to ruin it. I don't intend to do any reprogramming for you, do it yourself." Smith's gun reappeared, and its owner looked at it thoughtfully. The old man nodded toward it and went on, "That's an argument, I admit. I don't want to die, but if you kill me it certainly won't get you further." Mac found that he wasn't as brave as his words sounded; there was an odd and uncomfortable feeling in his stomach as he looked at the weapon. He must have covered it well, however, because after a moment of thought the intruder put the gun away again. "You're quite right," he said. I because I do need your help. We'll have to use another method. Mr. Jones, please carry out our first stage of planned persuasion?" II F ifteen minutes later Hoerwitz was reprogramming the converters as well as he could with an unusable left hand. Smith, who had courteously introduced himself during the procedure, had gone to the trouble of making sure his victim was right-handed before allowing Jones to start work. It would, as he said, be a pity to slow the station manager down too much. The right hand could wait. "How about my toes?" Hoerwitz had asked sarcastically, not yet fully convinced that the affair was serious. "It seems to have been proved that feet have fewer nerves and don't feel pain as intensely," replied. Smith. "Of course, the toes will still be there if we need them. Mr. Jones, start with the left hand." Mac had decided almost at once that the visitors were sincere, but Jones had insisted on finishing his job in workmanlike style. Smith had supported him. "It would be a pity for you to get the idea that we weren't prepared to finish anything we started," he pointed out. As he floated in front of the monitor panels readjusting potentiomeIF ters and flow-control relays, Hoeryntz thought furiously. He wasn't much worried about his guests actually getting away with their stolen fuel; what he was now doing to the controls must be showing on repeaters in Elkhart, Fapeette and Bombay already. The station was, after all, part of a company supposed to be doing profitable business, and the fact that fusion power plants were still forbidden on Earth didn't mean that the company wasn't keeping close track of its products. There'd be radioed questions in the next few minutes, and when they weren't answered satisfactorily ere'd be arrangements to send a ship. Of course, the company would wait two or three days and make a perigee rendezvous, but if the indicators bothered the directors sufficiently they might ask a police launch to investigate sooner. On the whole, it was unlikely that anything would happen until shortly after perigee; but something would happen to prevent the thieves' escape. The trouble seemed to be that that something wouldn't do Mac himself any good. Up to now, genuuse actual violence had been strictly reading material for him; but he had done plenty of reading. He had a vivid mental picture of the situation. The belief that they would kill him before leaving was not so much insight as it was reflex. They might not even wait until the job was done. The new program was set up for the converters, and he would not be essential unless something went seriously astray. It never did, but he hoped the thieves were the sort of people who worried about things going wrong. He found his stomach reacting again when Smith approached him after the converters had been restarted. The gun was not in sight, but Mac knew it was there. For that matter, it wasn't necessary; any of the visitors could break neck with one hand. However, Smith didn't seem to have violence on his mind at the moment. In fact, his speech was encouraging. He would hardly have bothered to give warnings about Hoerwitz's behavior unless he planned to keep the manager around for a while. # A few points you should understand, Mr. Hoerwitz,' the boss-thief explained. "You must be supposing that the change in converter program will attract, or has already attracted, notice at home. You are wrong. A mysterious ailment has affected the monitor computers at the central plant. Signals are coming in quite normally from the space factories, but they are not being analyzed. The engineers are quite frantic about it. They hope to get matters straightened out ki a few days, but in the meantime no one is going to worry more about one space factory than another unless some such tWng as a distress message is received, "I know you wouldn't be foolish enough to attempt to send such a message, since you still have nine fingers available for Mr. Jones's attention, but to remove temptation Mr. Robinson has disabled your station's radio transmitters. To make really sure, he is now taking care of those in the spacesuits. We realize that a suit radio coidd hardly be received, except by the wildest luck, at Earth's present distance; but that distance shrinks to only about a thousand miles at perigee, as I recall. 'If you do wish to go outside. by all means indulge the impulse. I might enjoy a walk with you myself. Our ship is a former police supply boat, heavily armored and solidly locked. One of us has the only key -- I wouldn't dream of telling you which one. Even if you forced your way aboard, which seems possible, its transmitter channels are not standard. They would be received by my friends, not yours. You could not take the ship away, supposing you are enough of a pilot to try it, because it is parked beside your waste radiators, and the exhaust would wreck them -- " "You landed beside the radiators?" For the first time, Mac was really alarmed. IF "Oh, no. We know better than that We landed by your airlock and carried the ship around to the radiators. It weighs only about five hundred pounds here. I fear you couldn't carry it away again by yourself, and it's on rough enough ground so I don't think rolling it would be practical. "So, Mr. Hoerwitz, you may as well relax. We'll appreciate your attending to your normal business so that our order is ready as soon as possible, but if you prefer to go out for a walk occasionally we don't really mind. I suppose even you could jump off into space, since I understand that escape velocity here is only about a foot a second, and we'd be sorry to lose you that way; but it's entirely up to you. You are perfectly free in all matters which don't interfere with our order. Personally, if I were you I'd go back to quarters and enjoy that really excellent sheet library." TToerwritz had gone, but hadn't  really been able to concentrate on The Tempest. Some of Caliban's remarks had caught his attention because they expressed his own feelings quite well, and he caught himself once or twice wishing for a handy Ariel. However, he was much too old to spend much mental effort on wishing, and the only spirits available at the station were material mechanisms of very restricted versatility. Worse, he was probably not completely free to command them, unless Smith and Company were unbelievably incompetent. Of course, if something appeared to be going wrong, they would have to trust him to fix it; maybe something could be worked up from that side. But what could be done, an#rway? Just what did he have? The plant turned over vast quantities of energy, but it certainly wasn't a magic wand It had the complex gear of a hydrogen fusion unit, and a modest tonnage of hydrogen-deuterium slush; while it would require deliberate bypassing of a host of safety devices to do it, it would be quite possible to blow the asteroid into a cloud of plasma. This had certain disadvantages besides the likelihood of blinding the unfortunates on Earth who happened to be looking toward the station at the key moment. For one thing, it didn't really deal satisfactorily with Smith and his friend. It merely promised to dispose of them, and the way Mac's finger felt at the moment that wasn't quite bad enough. What else did he have? There were a score of converters, each designed to take matter and transform it, using the energy of the fuser, into isotopes which could be used on Earth legally and more or less safely as power sources. At the moment, all were working on the Class IV mixtures -- the fastyield substances usable for spacecraft fuel, industrial blasting and weaponry, which Smith had! demanded. Whether he and his friends planned to use the stuff themselves for bank robbery or political subversion, or merely . feed the black market, Hoerwitz neither knew or greatly cared. A minute charge of any Class IV product, assuming that he would get hold of it, could certainly get him into the thieves' ship, no matter how well she were armored. Whether the ship would be worth getting into after such treatment was debatable. A production controller is one thing and a nuclear-explosives expert quite another. Hoerwitz happened to be the first. Trying to abstract explosives under the eyes of Smith, Jones and Associates seemed not only dangerous but probably useless. There were the radiators, the most conspicious part of the plant from outside. They were four gigantic structures, each some five hundred feet across and nearly as high. The outer walls were cylindrical and contained high-powered refrigeration circuits; their inner surfaces carried free-election fields which rendered them nearly perfect reflectors. Inside the cylinders, out of contact with their walls, were the radiators themselves -- huge cores of high-conductivity alloy, running at a temperature which would have evaporated them into space in minutes if they had not IF been held together by fields similar to those which restrained the fusion units. The whole structure was designed to get rid of waste energy, of course. Any serious absorption by the planetoid of the flood being radiated from those units would have started a sequence of troubles of which the warming of the fusionfuel slush would have been a minor preliminary. Secondarily, the units were arranged to shine away from Earth; their location on the asteroid and the latter's rotation had been arranged with this in view. It was not a perfect success in one way, since the extremely eccentric orbit in which the asteroid had been placed to facilitate freight-handling work produced a longitude libration of over a hundred degrees each way; but Earth had agreed to put up with this. The periodic flashes of light from the space factories were rather scenic in their way, and most of the astronomers had moved to the moon or to orbiting observatories anyway. But those radiators did throw away an awful lot of energy. One should be able to do something with it in a situation like this; something really useful. But what? Ill I t was really a pity that the library contained no Fu Manchu or Bulldog Drummond. Hoerwitz needed ideas. Since it looked as though he would have to furnish his own, he selected a sheet for background material, slipped it into the scanner and drifted toward the cobwebby hammock in the center of the lounge while Flavius berated the holiday-making citizens of Rome on the screen. It was reasonably appropriate; the manager drowsed; there was certainly an Ides of March coming. He wished his finger would stop hurting. The script and background music flowed along a track that his awareness had followed a hundred times before... The frantic disclaimers of Cinna the Poet awakened him. He had drifted and been held against the hammock by the current from the air circulator. The feeble gravity which gave the visiting ship a weight of five hundred pouiMls at the surface was of course absent in the living quarters at the center of the asteroid. Almost automatically he pushed himself back to the console and shut off the sheet-scanner at the end of the third act. Obviously this wasn't helping him to think. He'd better check the convertor monitors just to wake himself up and then get some eKcrdse. Robinson was in the tunnel outside the lounge and without saying a word followed Mac along the passage. The fellow was certainly not very much at home in zero gravity; his coordination as he passed himself from handhold to handhold was worse than sloppy. If this were equally true of the others, it might be a help. As things turned out, it was. , Smith and Jones were in the control room, drifting idly away from the walls. Another good sign. Either they, too, were unused to free fall or had completely dismissed Hoerwitz from their minds as a menace. Neither of themf could have gotten into action for quite a few seconds, since neither had a pushoff point within reach -- not even each other. They said nothing as the manager and his satellite entered, but watched the former as he aim and pushed off from a point beside the door and drifted along the indicator panels, taking in their readings as he went. Somewhat to his regret, though not to his surprise since no alarms had sounded, Mac found everything going as programmed. He reached the far end of the room and reversed his drift, aiming for the door. The new course took him within reach of Robinson, and that individual at a nod from Smith seized the old man's arm as he went by. This was a slight mistake. The result was a two-body system spinning with a period of about five seconds and travelling toward the door at about a quarter of Hoerwitz's former speed. The manager took advantage of the other's confusion to choose the time and style of his breakaway from the system. He came to a halt, spin gone, four or five yards from the meeting point. Robinson, who had been made a free gift of their joint angular momentiun, brought up with his head in painful contact with the edge of the doorway. Mac couldn't pretend to be sorry; Jones concealed a grin rather unsuccessfully, and Smith showed no sign of caring either way. His order to stop Hoerwitz for a conversation had been obeyed; the details didn't bother him. # # T T ow long is our fuel going to take?" he asked. "Another fifty to fifty-five hours, barring offtrack developments," replied the manager. "I gave you an estimate at the beginning, and there's no reason to change it so far. I trust these instruments, unless you or one of your friends have been playing with circuits. I know you jimmied the radio, but if your man knew what he was about that shouldn't have bothered this board." "That's all I wanted to know. Do what you want until it's time to check your instruments again." "It's night by my clocks. I'm sleeping for a few hours, now that I've had my daily workout. I see you know where my quarters are -- what were you searching for, guns or radios? You brought the only weapons this place has ever seen IE yourselves, and a radio able to reach Earth is a little too large to hide in a photo album." Spacesuit radios are pretty small." "But they're in spacesuits." "All right. We just like to be sure. Wouldn't you be happier to know that we weren't worrying about you?" Hoerwitz left without trdng to answer that. Smith looked after him for a few seconds, and then beckoned to Brown. "Don't interfere with his routine, but keep an eye on the old fellow. I'm not so sure we really convinced him, after all. I'd much rather keep him around to do the work, but the job is much too important to take chances." Brown nodded, and followed Hoerwitz back to the latter's quarters. Then he took up his station outside, glanced at his watch, helped himself to a set of the pills needed to keep human metabolism in balance under zero-G, and relaxed. The "night" wore on. Hoerwitz had been perfectly sincere about his intention of sleeping. He had developed the habit of spending much of his time in that state during his years at the station. His age may have been partly responsible, but the life itself was hardly one to keep a man alert. Few people could be found to accept the lonely and boring jobs in the off-Earth factories -- so few that many of them had to be run entirely by computer and remote control. Hoerwitz happened to be one of the sort who could spend all his time quite happily with abstract entertainment -- books, plays, music or poetry. He could reread a book, or see the same play over and over again, with full enjoyment, just as many people can get pleasure out of hearing the same music repeatedly. Few jobs on Earth would have permitted him to spend so much time amusing himself; the arrangement was ideal both for him and his employers. Still, he slept a lot. He therefore woke up refreshed, if not exactly vigorous, some nine hours after Brown had taken up his guard station. He was not oly refreshed but enthusiastic. He had .a plan. It was not a very compBcated one, but it might keep him alive. It had two parts. One was to convince Smith that the intruders could not load their loot without Mac's help. This should be simple enough, since it was pretty certainly true. mass by muscle-power, even in zero-G, is impractical for four men in any reasonable time. The alternative was the station's loadhag equipment, and it was unlikely that anyone but Hoerwitz would be expert in its use. If the thieves were convinced of that, at least they'd keep him alive until the last minute. The second part of the plan was to arrange for himself a refuge or hiding place good enough to discourage the four from spending the time necessary to get him. This assumed that they had assigned high priority to getting away as soon as possible after loading the stolen fuel, which seemed reasonable. Det here, however, required more thinking. It might be better to trust to concealment; on the other hand, there was something to be said for a place whose location was known to the enemy but which obviously couldnt be penetrated without a lot of time and effort. n the whole, the latter choice would make him feel safer, but he couldn't offhand think of a really impregnable spot. There were very few doors of any kind in the station, and even fewer of these could be locked. Air-breaks were solid, but not made to resist intelligent attack. None of the few locks in the place was any better in that respect, if one assumed that the thieves were of professional caliber. Of course, much of the factory equipment itself, designed to contain nuclear reactions, would have resisted any imaginable tools. None of this codd, however, be regarded as practical for hiding purposes; one might as well get inside a blast furnace or sulfuric-acid chamber. All in all, it looked as though straight concealment were going to be more practical, and this pretty well demanded the outside of the asteroid. The tunnels of the station were complex enough to make a fairly good labyrinth, but there was a reasonable basic pattern underlying their arrangement. Hoerwitz knew this pattern so wdl, quite naturally, that it never bccurred to him that his unwelcome guests might have trouble finding him in the maze once he got out of sight. He did think of turning out the lights to complicate their job, but they shoidd have little trouble turning them back on again. Robinson, at least, must know something about electricity. Besides, darkness and weightlessness together were a very bad combination even for someone as used to the latter as Hoerwitz. No, outside would be best. The asteroid was far from spherical, had a reasonable amount of surface area, and its jagged surface promised all sorts of hiding places. This was especially true in the contrasty lighting of airlessness. Mac could think of a dozen possible spots immediately -- his years of residence had not been spent entirely inside. During safe periods he had taken several trips outside (safe periods meant, among other things, the presence of company; taking a lone walk in a spacesuit is about as sensible as taking a lone swim in the Indian Ocean). More familiarity with the surface IF would have been nice, but what little he had should at least be greater than the others did. If he were to drop casually some remark which would give the impression that he knew the outside like one of his own Shakespeare sheets, they might not even bother to search once he was out of sight -- provided he waited until there was very little time left before they were leaving, and provided he was able to disappear at all. Too many ifs? Maybe. It was also important that Smith not change his mind about letting Hoerwitz take walks outside. It wouldn't require careful guarding to prevent such an excursion; five seconds' work on Mac's spacesuit would take care of that. It was annoying that so much of the plan depended more on Smith's attitude than on Hoerwitz's action, especially since Smith didn't seem to believe in taking chances. The attitude would be hard to control. The manager would have to seem completely harmless -- but he'd better take Hamlet's advice about overacting. That was a matter of basic behavior. On the question of useful action, there was another factor to consider. At the present setup rate, the isotopes the thieves wanted would be ready ten or a dozen hours before perigee, which Mac was still taking as the latest time they'd want to stay around. Something really ought to be done to delay the conversion and delivery process, to keep at a minimum the supply of spare moments which could be devoted to looking for missing factory managers. Could he slow down the converters without arousing suspicion? He knew much about the machines, and the others presumably knew very little, but trying to fool them with some piece of fiction woidd be extremely risky. His left hand gave an extra twinge at the thought. Of course, some genuine trouble could develop. It hadn't in all his years at the station, but it could. There was no point waiting for it, and even if it did they'd probably blame him anyway, but -- could he, perhaps, arrange for something to happen which would obviously be Jones's fault? Or Smith's own? The basic idea was attractive, but details failed to crystallize. It was certainly high time for action, though if he hoped to accomplish anything such as living; the closer to completion the process came, the less good a slowdown would accomplish. In fact, it was time to stop daydreaming and get to work. Hoerwitz nodded slowly to himself as ideas began to shape up. IV H e went to the galley and prepared breakfast, noting without surprise that the others had toward the control chamber. Brown been using his food. It was too bad and Robinson were inside, both that he didn't have anything to looking bored. The latter was driftdose it with for their benefit. He ing within reach of a wall, the manmeasured out and consumed his ager noticed; perhaps his experience daily supply of null-G medicines, of the day before had taught him  and put the utensils in the washer something. Hoerwitz hoped not. -- one common aspect of his job he Brown was near the center of the had refused to accept. Difficult as room and would be useless to his  such things as ham and eggs are party for quite a few seconds if acto manage in free fall, he had intion were required, sisted on regular food instead of The instruments were disgusting tubes of paste. He worked out techly normal. All twenty converters niques of his own for keeping things were simmering along as proin the plate. Some day, he had grammed. Not all were doing just been telling himself for a couple of the same things, of course; they decades, he would write a book on had been loaded with different zero-G cookery. substances originally and had been With the galley chores done, he interrupted in various stages of difaimed himself down the corridor fering processes when Hoerwitz had IF been forced to reprogram. One of them had already been processing a Class IV order and was now approaching the climax of its run. It seemed wiser to point this out to the thieves so that they wouldn't think he was up to anything when he shut this one down, as he would have to do in a few hours. He did so. "At least you people won't have to do everything at once," he remarked. "What do you mean?" asked Brown. "When you came, I told you that one of the units was on Four already. You can tell your boss that it should be ready to load in eight hours or so. I'll show you where the loading conveyors are handled from -- or do you want to lug it out by hand? You were bragging about carting five hundred pounds of ship around when you came." "Don't be funny, old fellow," cut in Robinson. "You might as well have that loading machinery ready. You might even be ready to show a couple of us how to use it. If Smith should decide he doesn't like your attitude, we might be the only ones able to." "All right with me," replied the manager. He felt reasonably safe as long as Smith himself was not present. It had seemed likely that none of the others would dare do anything drastic to him without direct orders, and Robinson's remark had strengthened the belief. "The controls are in a dome at the surface. They're simple enough, like a chess game." "What does that crack mean?" "Just what it sounded like. Any six-year-old can learn the rules of chess in an hour, but that doesn't make him a good player. I'm sure Mr. Smith won't need you to remind him of that when you suggest that you ought to do the loading." The two men glanced at each other, and Robinson shrugged. "Better show me where the controls are, anyway," he said. "You better stay here," he added to Brown. "I'll be with Hoerwitz, but Smith said this panel was never to be left unwatched. We might not have time to explain if he found us both gone." The other man nodded. Hoermtz, keeping his face as expressionless as he could, led the way to the station he had mentioned. This was about as far from the A control chamber as anything could be, since it was at the surface. It lay near the main entrance, a quarter of the way around the asteroid's equator from the radiators. The converters themselves were scattered at fairly regular intervals just imder the surface. The general idea was that if one of them did misbehave it would meet only token resistance outward, and the rest of the plant might have a chance. Access and loading tunnels connecting the converters with the cargo locks and the living quarters were deliberately crooked. All these tricks would of course be futile in a major blowup, but it is possible to have minor accidents even in nuclear engineering. The dome containing the loading control panels was one of the few places offering a direct view to the outside of the asteroid. It had served as a conning site while the body was being driven in from beyond Mars; it still was sometimes used that way. The thrust pits were still in service, as the present long, narrow orbit was heavily perturbed by the moon and required occasional correction near apogee. This was not done by Hoerwitz, who could no more have corrected an orbit than he could have built a spaceship. The thrust controls were disconnected except when a ballistics engineer was on hand. The dome was small, little more than a dozen feet across, and its entire circle was rimmed with conveyor control panels. Hoerwitz, quite unintentionally, had exaggerated their simplicity. This might have gotten him into trouble th anyone but Robinson. Without worr#dng about this situation, since he failed to recognize it, the manager promptly began explaining. "First, you want to be careful about these two guarded switches on each panel," he pointed out. IF "They're designed to bypass the safeties which normally keep you from putting too hot a load on the conveyors, so that you can dump a converter in an emergency. At the moment, since all the units are hot, you couldn't operate any part of conveyor system except by those switches. "Basically, the whole thing is simple enough. One panel is concerned with each of the twenty separate conveyor systems, and all panels are alike, so -- " "Why didn't they make just one panel, then, and have a selector to set it on any one of the reactors?" asked Robinson. Hoerwitz sadly revised upward his estimate of the fellow's brain power, as he answered. "Often several ships are loading, or several reactors unloading, at one time. It turned out to be simpler and safer to have independent control systems. Also, the system works both ways -- customers get credit for mass brought to the station for conversion. We have to take material to the converters as well as away from them, and it's more efficient to be able to carry on several operations at once. The original idea, as you probably know, was to use the mass of the asteroid itself for conversion; but with laws about controlling rotation so that the radiators would point away from earth most of the time, and the expense of the original installation, and the changes in orbit and angular momentum and so on, they finally decided it was better to try to keep the mass of the place fairly constant. They did use quite a bit of material from it at first. There are a lot of useless tunnels inside, and quite a few pits outside, left over from those days." Hoerwitz was watching his listener covertly as he spoke, trying to judge how much of this information was being absorbed, but the other's face was unreadable. He gave up and went on with the lesson. They were joined after about a quarter of an hour by Smith, but the head thief said little, merely ordering the instruction to continue. The factory manager decided to take no more chances testing his listeners with double-talk; Smith had impressed him as being a different proposition from his followers. The decision to play safe in his presence proved a wise one. I t took another ten minutes for Mac to wind up the lesson. "You'll need some practice," he concluded, "and there's no way to get it just yet. I was never a schoolteacher, but I understand that your best way of making sure how well you know something is to try to teach it to someone else. I trust Mr. Smith approves of that thought." "I do." Smith's face didn't show approval or anything else, but the words were encoiuraging. "Give me a lesson right now, Rob. I'd particularly like to know just what this smtch does -- or did Mr. Hoerwitz forget to mention it?" He indicated the emergency-dump override. "Oh, no, he showed me that first. We'd better keep clear of it, because it empties that particular converter onto its conveyor and dumps it into space, even though it's still hot." For a moment there might have been a flicker of surprise on Smith's face. "And he told you about it? I rather thought he might skip items like that in the hope that one of us might make a mistake he could not be blamed for." Hoerwitz decided that it would be less suspicious to answer that remark than to let it pass. "'Is there an#rthing that could possibly go wrong that you would not blame me for?" he asked. "Probably not, at that. I'm glad you realize it, Mr. Hoerwitz. Perhaps I'll be spared the nuisance of having to leave a man on guard here as well as at the main controls." He glanced through the dome's double wall at Earth's fat crescent, which dominated the sky on one side of the meridian as the did on the other. "Is there any way of shutting off access to this place until we're ready to use it? Think how much more at ease we'd both feel if there were." Hoerwitz shrugged. "No regular door. There are a couple of safety air-breaks in the corridor below; you could get one of them closed easily enough, since there are manual switches for them as well as the pressure and temperature differential sensors, but it would be a lot harder to open. If one of those things does shut, it's normally because air is being lost or dangerous reactions going on on one side or the other. A good deal of red tape is necessary to convince the machinery that all is well after all." "Hmph." Smith looked thoughtful. "All right, we'll consider it. Rob, you stay here until I decide. You come with me, old fellow." Hoerwitz obeyed with mixed feelings. It was lucky he hadn't tried to dump the reactors and shut himself off in the dome section, in view of Smith's perspicacity, but he couldn't thank his own intelligence or foresight for saving him. The sad fact was that he'd never thought of the trick until he was explaining matters to Robinson. Now it was certainly too late. Of course, it probably wouldn't have worked an#nvay, since someone like Robinson could presumably get mr doors open again in short order; and there was an even brighter side, now that he thought of it. The last few minutes might well have IF gone far to convincing Smith that the manager was really reconciled to the situation. One could not be sure of that, naturally, with a person like Smith, but one could hope. Time would no doubt tell -- quite possibly in bad language.  s they floated back down to ward the living section -- Hoerwitz noted with some regret that Smith was getting better at handling himself in free fall -- the head thief spoke briefly. "Maybe youVe learned your lesson. From what's just happened, I guess we can both hope so. Just the same, I don't want to see you an#Twhere near that place where we just left Robinson, except when I tell you myself to go there for my own reasons. Is that clear?" "It is." "Good. I don't really enjoy persuading people the hard way, but you may have noticed that Mr. Jones does. If you've really accepted the fact that I have the bulge on you, though, we won't have to amuse him." "You've made everything very clear. Do you want the reactor which was working on Class IV when you came, and which will be ready pretty soon, to be imloaded as soon as it's done?" "Hmph. I don't know. Does your loading machine deliver to any spot on the surface, or just by that dome?" "Just at the dome, I'm afraid. It wouldn't have been practical to run conveyors all over the place, and it's even less so to drive trucks around on the surface." "All right. If it would mean moving our ship an extra time we'll wait until everything is ready. It would be a nuisance to have to guard it, too." "Jhen you're not really convinced I've learned my lesson, after aU." "Don"t ask too many questions, Mr. Hoerwitz. Why not just assume that I don't like to take chances?" The manager was not inclined to act on impulse, but he sometimes talked on that basis. This was one of the times. "I don't want to assume that." "Why not?" "Because one of yom: most obvious ways of not taking chances would be to leave no witnesses. If I believed you were that thorough. I might as well stop everything now and let you shoot me -- not that I really enjoy the prospect, but I could at least die with the satisfaction that I hadn't helped you." "That's logical," Smith answered thoughtfully. "I have only two answers to it. One you already know -- we wouldn't just shoot you. The other, which I hope will make you feel better, is that we aren't worried about witnesses. You've been reading too much. We'll have lived in this place for several days before were done, but you must have noticed that we aren't wearing gloves to keep from leaving fingerprints, or spacesuits to foil the scene analyzers, or anything else of that sort. I'm sure the law will know who was here after we've gone, but that doesn't worry us. They already want us for so many different things that our main care is to avoid getting caught up with, not identified. "Then why those names? Do you expect me to believe they're real?" For almost the first time. Smith showed emotion. He grinned. "Go baci to your drama sheets, Mr. Hoerwitz, but stick to Shakespeare. Lord Peter Wimsey is leading you astray. Just remember what I said about the conveyor controls: keep away from them." V Tf his finger hadn't beenso painful, Hoerwitz woidd have been quite happy as he made his way back to the lounge and let the air currents settle him into the hammock. He shunted Julius Caesar into the "hold" stack without zeroing its tracker, started The Pajama Game, and remained awake through the whole show. It was quite an occasion. For the next couple of days everyone was on almost friendly terms, though Hoerwitz's finger kept him from forgetting entirely the basic facts of the situation or warming up very much to Jones. Some of the men watched shows with him, and there was even casual conversation entirely uncemnected with reactors and fuel processing. Smith's psychology was working fairly well. It did not backfire on him until about twenty hours before perigee. At that time Mac had been making one of periodic control checks, and had reported that the nms would be finishing off during the next ten or twelve hours. He would have to stay at the board, since they would not all end at the same time, and it was safer to oversee the supposedly automatic cooling of each converter as its job ended. "What's aU that for?" asked Smith. "I thought it didn't matter much what was in the converters at the start. Why will it hint if a little of this is still inside when you begin your next job? Won't it just be converted along with everything else?" "It's not quite that simple," replied the manager. "'Basically you are right; we don't deal in pure products, and what we deliver is processed chemically by our customers. Still, it's best to start clean. If too much really hot stuff were allowed to accumulate in the converters between runs, it could be bad. If Class I or II fuel intended IF to power a chemical industry, for example, were contaminated with Class IV there could be trouble on Earth -- especially if the plant in question were doing a chemical separation of nuclear fuels." "But it's all Class IV this time," pointed out Smith, "unless you've been running a major bluff on us, and I'm sure you wouldn't do that." His face hardened, and once more Hoerwitz mentally kicked himself. He hadn't even thought of such a trick, and he could probably have gotten away with it. There was no easy way to identify directly the isotopes being put out by the converters; it took specialized apparatus and specialized knowledge. It was pretty certain that Smith had neither. Well, too late now. "It's all one class, as you said," the manager admitted with what he hoped was negligible relay, "but that's just it. With Class IV in every converter and on every conveyor it's even more important than usual to watch the cooling. I live here, you know. I'm not an engineer and don't know what would happen if any of that stuff found its way into the hydrogen reactors, but I'd rather not find out." "But you must be enough of an engineer to handle the fusion units." "That doesn't demand an engineer. I'm a button pusher. I can operate them very sensibly, but they don't waste a trained engineer out here with the price of skilled labor what it is. The trouble frequency of these plants is far too low to keep one twiddling his thumbs on standby the whole time." '"But how about safety? If this place blows apart, it would take quite a few centuries of engineers' pay to replace it, I'd think." "No doubt. I suspect that's the point they're trying to make, in order to modify or get rid of that law about hydrogen reactors on Earth. The idea is that if the company trusts them enough to risk all this capital without a resident engineer, what's everyone worried about?" "But the place could really let go if the right -- or I should say the wrong -- things happened." # # T suppose so, but I don't know what they'd be, short of deliberate mishandling. In the forty years I've been here nothing out of line had ever happened. I've never had to use that emergency dump I've showed you, or even the straight shutoff on the main board. Engineers come twice a year to check everything over, and I just move switches -- like this." He began manipulating controls. "Number thirteen has flashed over. I'm shutting down, and in about an hour it can be transferred from field-bottle to physical containers." "Why not now? What's this field-bottle?" Hoerwitz was genuinely surprised, and once again annoyed. He had supposed everyone knew about that; if he had realized that Smith didnt... Well, another chance gone. "At conversion energies no material will hold the charge in. Three hundred tons of an # rthing at all, at star-core temperature would feel cramped in a hundred cubic miles of space, to say nothing of a hundred cubic yards. It's held in by fields, since nothing else will do it, and surrounded by a free-electron layer that reflects just about all the radiation back into the plasma. The little bit that isn't reflected is carried, also by free-electron field, to the radiators." "I think you're trying something," Smith said sternly, and the manager felt his stomach misbehave again. "You said that those loads could be dumped in an emergency by the conveyors. And you described the conveyors as simply mechanical belt-and-bucket systems, a couple of days ago. Stuff that you just described would blow them into gas. Which was the lie?" "Neither I " Hoerwitz gasped desperately. "I didn't say that the emergency dumping was instantaneous -- it isn't. The process involves ductor fields; and even with them, we'd expect the conveyors to need replacing if we ever used the system!" "If that's so," Smith asked, "What do you mean by saying a while ago that you didn't know what could happen to blow this place up? If one of those fields let go -- " "Oh, but it couldn't. There are all sorts of automatic safety systems. I don't have to worry about that sort of thing. If a field starts to weaken, the energy loss automatically drains into conductor fields, and they carry plasma energy that much faster to the radiators, so the plasma cools and the pressure drops -- I can't give you all the details because I don't understand them myself, but it's a real fail-safe." Smith still looked suspicious, though he was as accustomed as any civilized person to trusting machinery. It wasn't the machinery that bothered him just now. "You keep switdiing," he snapped, "and I don't like it. One minute you say nothing can happen, and the next you talk about all these emergency features in case it does. Either the people who built this place didn't know what they were doing, or you're not leveling." Hoerwitz's stomach felt even worse, but he kept up the battle. "That's not wtet I said! I told you things couldn't happen because of the safety stuff! They knew what they were doing when they built this place -- of course, half the major governments on Earth were passing laws about the way it should be done -- " IF "Passing laws? For something off Earth?" "Sure. Ninety-five per cent of the company's potentii customers yfeve nationals of those countries, and there's nothing like economic pressure. Now, will you stop this nonsense and let me work, or decide you don't trust me and do it all yourself? There are more reactors almost ready to flash over," Tt was the wrong line for the old man to take, but Smith also made a mistake in resenting it. It was here that his psychology really went wrong. "I don't trust you," he said. "Not one particle. You've evaded every detailed question I asked. I don't even know for certain that that's Class stuff you've been cooking for me." "That's right. You don't." Hoerwitz, too, was losing his tact and foresight. "I've been expecting you to make some sort of test ever since I set up the program. Or did you take for granted that whoever you found here would be scared into doing just what you wanted? Surely it isn't possible that you and the friends you said were somewhere else just don't have anyone able to make such a test! Any properly planned operation would have made getting such a person its first step, I should think -- or have I been reading too much again?" The expression which had started to develop on Smith's face diS- appeared, and he looked steadily; at the old man for perhaps half  minute. Then he spoke. "Mr. Jones. I think we will havei to start Phase Two of the persuasion plan. Will you please prepare! for it? We planned this operation, as you call it, Mr. Hoerwitz, quite' carefully, in view of certain limitations which faced us. Exactly whaj those limitations were is  none of your business, but remember that we so arranged matters that no one on Earth has been seriously worried by your failure to commimicate -- nor will they for some time yet. We know that no scheduled freighters are due here for two more revolutions, though we recognize the chance of a tramp tug dropping in with mass to deposit for credit --  that is why we plan to have the job done before the next perigee. Oiu: plans also included detmls for insuring the cooperation of the person we found on duty. The fact that he turned out to be about three times as old as we expected doesa affect those plans at all. You have experienced the first part of them. I was rather hoping that no mwe would be necessary, but you seem to have forgotten that we have the bulge on you. Therefore, you wiU experience the second part, unless you can think of a way to prove to me that you have been telling the truth -- and prove it in a very short time. I won't tell you what the time limit is, but I have already decided on it. Start thinking, Mr. Hoerwitz. I believe Mr. Jones is ready." Hoerwitz couldnt think. He probably couldn't have thought if the same situation had faced him forty or fifty years earlier; he had never claimed to be a hero. He spoke, but -- as Smith had intended -- it was without any sort of consideration. "The Class IV stuff that was going when you arrived -- it's cool -- you could get a sample of it and test it in your ship's power plant #" "Not good enough. I never doubted that you were telling the truth about that load. It will have to be something else. The material that's finishing now, or your claim that could really go wrong enough to blow this place into vapor if your fail-safe rigs weren't there -- " "But how could I possibly prove that, except by doing it?" gasped the old man. "Your problem. Think fast. Mr. Jones will be with you in a moment. In fact, I think he's on the way now -- not hurrying, you understand, because he isn't really proficient at moving around in this noweight nuisance -- but I think if I looked around I'd see that he had pushed off and was drifting your way. It would be unfair of me to spoil his fun if he gets to you before you've thought of something, wouldn't it?" Smith of course meant to reduce the manager to a state of complete panic in which he would be unable to lie, or at least to lie convincingly; but just as he had planned badly in not getting hold of a nuclear engineer of his own, he had planned badly in failing to consider all the possible results of panic. He may, of course, have realized that Hoerwitz might try to do something desperate, but failed to foresee how hard such an action would be to stop in the unfamiliar environment of weightlessness. It was easy to take for granted that a person with such a frail physique could be controlled physically by anyone with no trouble. This was perfectly correct -- for anyone within reach of the old man. N o one was. Wdrse, from Smith's point of view, no one but Robinson was in a position to get there. As a result, Mac was able to do something which he would never have seriously considered if he had been given time to think. He was, of course, within reach of a pushoff point as a matter of habit. He used every bit of muscle his frail old body could muster in a dive toward the center of the board -- and made it. Only Robinson had learned his lesson about drifting, and he misjudged his own pushoff and failed to intercept the manager. Hoerwitz reached and opened a plainly labeled switch, and with the action IF his panic left him as suddenly as it had come, though fear still churned at his stomach. "At least, you believed me enough not to risk bullets in the controls," he almost sneered. "There's your proof, Mr. Smith. I've just shut down all the converters. They're bleeding energy out of the main radiators and will be cool enough to handle in an hour. If you replace that switch, you'll know I was telling the truth about safeties. Go ahead. Close it. It's safe. All you'll get is a bunch of red lights all over the boards, telling you that safety circuits are blocking you. You'll have to start those processes from the beginning. I can set that up for you, of course. I will if you give the order; but anything else at all, except dumping the loads, of course, will block you with safeties." "Why?" Smith was still in control of himself, though it was a visible strain. "Wliat do you think I am, an astrophysicist? I don't know why, if you want one of those detailed answers you were complaining about not getting. They come in high class equations. In words, which is all I understand about it, most of the processing time in these converters is for setup. The actual conversion is the sort of thing that goes on in the last moments of a supernova's fling, as I thought everyone knew. The conparameters in terms of temperature, density gradients, potential of all sorts -- even the cbanging distance from Earth in this orbit has to be allowed for, I imderstand -- and I don't know what else before the final step is triggered, if a decent percentage of the desired isotope class is to be produced. I've just cleared the setup in eighteen of those converters. If you were actually to build them up to the temperature they had before I hit that switch, you probably wdtdd blow the place up. Hence, my friend, the safeties. Working out a reaction that not only produces useful isotopes but also balances endothermic and exothermic processes closely to hold the whole works under control is a perfectly good subject for a doctorate thesis. Do you think we coidd define a supernova -- or even a few tons of one? Now, do you want me to start these stoves all over, or will you take two loads of Class IV instead of twenty, pull out all my fingernails and fly off in a rage gnashing your teeth?" During this diatribe Smith had actually calmed down, which was hardly what Hoerwitz had expected. The thief nodded slowly at its end. "I wouldn't have said there was anything which could happen here wWch I wouldn't blame on you," he said, "but I have to admit this one is on me. By all means, start the cooking over. I have learned most of what I need to know. I think I can now manage well enough even if visitors show up dxuring this overtime period you have pushed us into. "You just restart the runs you interrupted, and when that's done come with me up to the dome. I want you to get the load that was just finished out onto the conveyors. Then you may resume your life of leisure and entertainment. Hop to it, Mr. Hoerwitz." The manager hopped. He was too surprised at Smith's reaction to do anything else. He would have to recheck his Shakespeare memory; maybe there was someone like this after all. He worked the controls rapidly. Jones looked disappointed except for a moment when Robinson suddenly said, "That's not the way he had them set before #" Smith started to raise his eyebrows in surprise, but the manager, who had had no thought of deception at the moment, said, "We're not starting with the same stuff as before, remember. Many things happen long before the main conversion." Smith stopped, thought for a moment, looked carefully at the old man, and nodded. Jones shrugged and relaxed once more. By this time, certain facts were beginning to fit together in the manager's mind. yi T)y the time the trip to the dome had been made and the finished load of isotopes transferred to its conveyor, Hoerwitz's brief sense of elation had evaporated, and he had written himself off as a walking corpse. He realized just what details he had overlooked, and just where the omissions left him. He floated slowly to his quarters, his morale completely flattened and hope for the first time gone. Robinson's acute detail memory must have been a major factor in the planning Smith had mentioned. If Hoerwitz himself could run the plant effectively without a real basic understanding of what went on, so could Robinson. By arranging what had amounted to another lesson in the operation of the controls, the manager had made himself superfluous from the thieves' viewpoint. Also, and much worse, he had completely missed the hole in the logic Smith had used when the fellow had tried to prove that he really wasn't worried about leaving witnesses. It was quite true that the thieves were taking no care about leaving fingerprints. Why should they bother about such details? No one can analyze individual personcloud of ionized gas, and they certainly knew enough now to leave only that behind them. IF Even if wiring around the safety circuits was too much for Robinson, which seemed unlikely in Hoerwitz's present mood; they could always sacrifice a ton or so of their loot. The Class IV fuels might not be up to hydrogen fusion standards, but they would be quite adequate for the purpose intended. Hiding, inside the asteroid or out, would be meaningless. The only remaining shred of his original plan which retained any relevance was the desirability of fooling the others about his own attitude. As long as they believed that he expected to come out of the affair with his life, they would not expect him to do anything desperate, and they might let him live until the last moment to save themselves work. If they even suspected that he had convinced himself that they were going to dispose of him. Smith's dislike of taking chances would probably become the deciding factor. This might involve a difficult bit of acting. Behaving as though he had forgotten what had happened would certainly be unconvincing. Trying to act as though he had even forgiven it would be little better. On the other hand, any trace of an uncooperative attitude would also be dangerous. Maybe he should go back to Hamlet and rerun the prince's instructions to the players. No, not worth it. He knew them word for word anyway, and the more he thought of the problem as one of acting the less likely he was to get away with it. Maybe he shoidd just try, umobtrusively, to keep in Jones's company as much as possible. His naturd feelings toward that member of the group were unlikely to make the others suspicious. In any case, he wouldn't have to act for a while. The last couple of hours had been exhausting enough so that not even Smith was surprised when Mac sought his owm quters. One of the men followed and took up watch outside, of course, but that was routine. The manager was in no mood for music. He brought the JtiMm Caesar sheet out of standby and let the scanner start at the point where he had left it a couple of days before. As a result, it was only a few minutes before Brutus solved his problem for him. I t was beautiful. There was no slow groping, no rejection of one detail and substitution of anotb. It was just there, all at once. It would have Wertheimer, Kohler, and the rest of the gestalt sdMol dance with glee. The only extraneous thought to enter Hoerwita's mind as the idea developed was a touch of amazement that Shakespeare could have written anythhig so relevant more than four decades before the birth of Isaac Newtom. He didn't wait for the end ef Ihe play. There yras quite a while remaining before the plan could be put into action, so be went to deep. After all, a man ne his t or twelve hours when careful, exhausting and detailed work is in the offing. A good meal helps, too, and Hoerwitz prepared himself one when he woke up -- one of his fander breakfasts. With that disposed of, there were seven hours to go before perigee. He went to check the controls, pointedly ignoring the thief on duty outside his quarters and the second one in the control room. Everything about the converters was going well, as usual, but this time the fact didn't annoy him. For all he cared, all those loads of explosives could cook themselves to completion. They hadn't been ordered propierly, but there would be no trouble fng find cusomers for them later pn. He checked in time his impulse to go to the dome for a look outside. Smith's order had been very dear, so it would be necessary to trust the clocks without the help of a look at Earth. No matter. He trusted them. Six hours to perigee. Four and a half to action time. He hated leaving things so late, since there was doubt about Smith's reaction to the key question and time ndght be needed to influence the fellow. Still, starting too soon would be even more dangerous. A show killed three of the hours, but he never remembered afterward which show he had picked. Another meal helped. After all, it might be quite a long time before he would eat anything but tube-mush, if things went right If they went wrong, he had the right to make his last meal a good one. It brought him dmost up to the deadline. He thought briefly of not bothering to clean the dies, but decided that this was no time to change his habits. Smith was suspicious enough by nature without giving him handles for it. Now a flnal check of the controls, which mustn't look as though it were final. Normal, as usual. Robinson and Brown were in the control room -- the latter had accompanied the manager from his quarters -- and when the check was finished the old man turned to them. tflThere is your boss?" ' 'Robinson shrugged. "Asleep, I suppose. Why?" "VSflien you first came, he said it would be all right for me to walk outside, once you'd jimmied the transmitter in my suit. I like to watch Earth as we go by perigee, but I suppose I'd better make sura he still doesn't objejct." "Why can't you watch from the dome?" IP Tartly because he toli me o keep away from there, and partly because in the hour and a half around perigee Earth shifts from one side of this place to the other. You can see only the first part from the dome. I like to go to the north pole and watch it swing around the horizon -- you get a real sense of motion. Whoever Smith sends with me, if he lets me go at all, will enjoy it. Maybe he'd like to go himself." Robinson was doubtful. "I suppose he won't shoot anyone for asking. I take it this happens pretty soon." Hoerwitz was glad of the chance to look at a clock without arousing suspicion. "Very soon. There won't be much more than enough time to check our suits. Remember, there's no such thing as fast walking, outside." "Don't I know it. All right, I'll ask him. You stay here with Mr. Brown." "You're sure you didn't damage anything in my suit except the radio?" "Positive. Make a regular checkout; I stand by the result." "As long as I don't fall by it." Robinson shrugged and left. "Mr. Brown, in view of what your friend just said, how about coming with me up to the lock so I can start that suit check early?" Brown shook his head negatively, and nodded toward the controls. "Smith said to keep it guarded.' Hoerwitz decided that debate was useless, and waited for the leader. It was not really as long a wait as it seemed. Smith was accompanied by Robinson, as the manager had expected, and also by Jones, who, Hoerwitz had assumed, must be on guard at the dome. He hadn't stopped to figure out the arithmetic of three men on watch at once out of a total strength of four. Smith wasted no time. "AU right, Mr. Hoewitz, let's take this walk. Have you checked your suit?" "I've had no chance." "All right, let's get to it. Tell me what you expect to see as we go up. With your suit radio out you won't be able to give a proper guide's talk outside." T he manager obeyed, repeating what he had told Robinson and Brown a few minutes before. The recital lasted to the equipment chamber inside the airlock, where the old man fell silent as he started to make the meticulous checkout which was routine for people who had survived much experience in spacesuits. He was pecially careful of the nuclear-powered air-recyclmg equipment and the reserve tanks which made up for its unavoidable slight inefficiency. He was hoping to depend on them for quite a while. Satisfied, he looked up and spoke once more. "I mentioned only the north pole walk," he said, "because I assume you'd disapprove of something else I often do. At the place where Earth is overhead at perigee, right opposite the radiators, I have a sixfoot optical flat with a central "hole. You probably know the old distress-mirror trick. I have friends at several places on Earth, and sometimes at perigee I stand there and flash sunlight at them. The beam from the mirror is only about twelve or fifteen miles wide at a thousand miles; and if I aim it right it looks brighter than Venus from the other end -- they can spot in full daylight without much trouble. Naturally the mirror has to be in sunlight itself, and as I remember it won't be this time, but I thought I'd better mention it in case you came across the mirror as we wandered around and got the idea that I was up to something." "That was very wise of you, Mr. Hoerwitz. Actually, I doubt that there will be any random wandering. Mr. Jones will remain very close to you at all times, and unless you yourself approach the mirror he is unlikely to. I trust you will have a pleasant walk and am sure that there is no point in reminding you of the impossibility of finding a man drifting in space." "One chance in ten thousand isn't exactly impossible, but I'd rather not depend on it," admitted the manager. "But aren't you coming?" "No. Possibly some other time. Enjoy yourself." Mac wondered briefly whether he had made some mistake. He had told only two lies since bringing up the subject of the walk and felt pretty sure that if Smith, had detected either of them the fact would now be obvious. But he had expected to get out only by interesting Smith himself in the trip. If Smith didn't want to go, why was he permitting it at all? Out of kindheartedness? No. Obviously not. For a moment Hoerwitz wished ' he hadn't eaten that last meal. It threatened to come back on him as he saw what must be Smith's reason. Then he decided he might as well enjoy the memory of it while he could. After that, almost in a spirit of bravado, he made a final remark. "Jones, I don't pretend to care, what happens to you outside, but you might remember one thing." "What?" The fellow paused with his helmet almost in place. "If I do anything that you think calls for shooting me, be sure you are holding on to something tightly or that your line of fire is upward." "Why?" "Well, as Mr. Smith pointed out some time ago, the escape velocity IF of this asteroid is about one foot a second. I dont know too much about guns but I seem to recall that an ordinary pistol shot will provide a spacesuited man with a recoil velocity of around a third of that. You wouldn't be kicked entirely into space, but you'd be some time coming down; and just think of the embarrassment if your first shot had missed me. Don't say I didn't warn you." He clamped down his own helmet without waiting for an answer from either man. Then he wished he'd mentioned something about the danger to a spacesuit from ricochet, but decided that it would be an anticlimax. T Te would have liked to hear the  remarks passed between them, but he had already discovered that Robinson hadn't wasted time cutting out his transmitter but avoiding the receiver. He had simply depowered the whole unit, and Mac could neither transmit nor receive. He stepped -- using the word loosely -- in the inner-lock door, hit the switch that opened it and stepped through. Turning to see whether Jones was with him, he was surprised to discover that the latter still had not donned his helmet and was engaged in an animated discussion with Smith. Hoerwitz sometimes spoke on impulse, but it had been well over fifty years since he had performed an important action on that basis; the mental machinery concerned was rather corroded. It might be possible to get the inner lock door closed and the air pumps started before either of the two men could reach the inner switch; if he could do that, it would give hint nearly two minutes start -- quite long enough to disappear on the irregular, harshly lit surface of the asteroid. On the other hand,if they stopped the cycle before the inner door was closed and the inside switch out of circuit, they would presumably shoot him on the spot. His spacesuit had the usual provisions for sealing small leaks, but it was by no means bullet-proof. He wished he had taken the time to make that remark about ricochet; it would apply well to the metalwalled chambers they were all standing in. Unfortunately the thieves might not think of that in time. Hoerwitz might, if given another minute or two to mull it over, have taken the chance on that much data; but before he made up his mind the conversation ended. Jones donned his helmet, safetied its clamps and looked toward the airlock. At that same moment all three men suddenly realized that Smith and Jones were both out of touch with pushoff points. They were "standing" on the floor, of course, since they had been in the room for some time and weighed several grams each; but that weight would not supply anything like the traction needed to get them to the switch quickly. An experienced spaceman would have jumped hard, in any direction, and trusted to the next wall collision to provide steerage; but it had become perfectly evident in the last couple of days that these men were not experienced spacemen. Hoerwitz's impulses broke free with an almost audible screech of metal on rust, and he slapped the cycling control. J ones had drawn his gun. He might have fired, but the action of drawing had spoiled his stance. Hoerwitz thought he had fired, but that the soimd failed to get through his suit; the bullet, if any, must have gone bouncing around the equipment room. The inner door was shut, and the red light indicated pump cycling before any really interesting details could be observed. The pumps took fifty seconds to get the pressure down, and the motors ten more to get the outer door open. Hoerwitz would have been outside almost on the instant, but his low-gravity reflexes took over. One simply does not move rapidly in a place where the effort which on Earth will give him escape velocity. This is true even when someone can be counted on to be shooting at you in the next minute or so; a person drifting helplessly out of touch with pushoff mass is a remarkably easy target. The idea was to get out of sight, rather than far away. The asteroid was not exactly porous -- no one has found a porous body made of lava yet -- but it was highly irregular from a few collisions out beyond Mars. There were explosion pits and crevices from this source, and quite a few holes made by men in the days when the material of the body itself had been used for conversion mass. There were plenty of nice, dark cracks and holes to hide in. Hoerwitz maneuvered himself into one of the former five yards from the airlock and vanished. He didn't bother to look behind him. He neither knew nor cared whether they would follow. All things considered, they might not even try. However, they would very probably send out at least two men, one to hunt for the fictitious mirror and the other to guard the spaceship -- not that they could guess, the old man hoped, what he intended to do about the latter. Both places -- sub-Earth and its antipodes -- were just where Hoerwitz wanted them to be; they were the spots where an unwarnIF ed space-walker would be in the greatest danger. However, the ship would be a refuge, if it were still there, and Hoerwitz wanted to get there before any possible guard. He therefore set out at the highest speed he could manage, climbing across the asteroid. It was like chimney-work in Earthly rock-climbing, simpler in one way because there was no significant weight. The manager was not really good at it, but presumably he was better than the others. Earth was overhead and slightly to the west -- about as far as it ever got that way, seen from near the airlock. That meant that time was growing short. When the planet started eastward again the asteroid was within a hundred degrees or so of perigee -- an arc which it would cover in little over three-quarters of an hour, at this end of its grossly eccentric orbit. Travel grew more complicated, and rather more dangerous, as the planet sank behind him. Roche's limit for a body of this density was at around twelve thousand miles from Earth's center, and the tidal bulge -- invisible, imponderable, a mere mathematical quirk of earth's potential field -- was not only swinging around but growing stronger. With Earth, now spanning more than thirty degrees of sky, on the horizon behind him he was safe, but as it sank he knew he was traveling to meet the bulge, an# it was coming to meet him. He had to get to the ship before the field had been working on that area too long. The last thousand feet should have been the hardest, with his weight turning definitely negative; physically, it turned out to be the easiest, though the reason shocked him. He discovered, by the simple expedient of running into it, that the thieves had strung a cable be? tween their ship and the airlock. With its aid, they would travel much faster than he could. There might be a guard there already. Mac, terrified almost out of his senses, pulled himself along the cable with reckless haste until he reached a point where he could see the base of the ship a few hundred feet away. N o spacesuits were in sight, but the bottom of the globe was in black shadow. There was no way to be sure -- except by waiting. That would eventually make one thing certain. The old man almost hurled himself along the cable toward the ship, expecting every second to be his last, but trying to convince himself that no one was there. He was lucky. No one was. The ship was already off the "ground" by a foot or so; the tide was rising at this part of the asteroid and weight had turned negative. Hoerwitz crammed himself into the space between the spherical hull and the ground and heaved upward for all he was worth. At a guess, his thrust amounted to some fifty pounds. This gave him something over a minute before the vessel was too high for further pushing. In this time it had acquired a speed of perhaps two inches a second relative to the asteroid; but this was still increasing, very slowly, under tidal thrust. The hull was of course covered with handholds. Hoerwitz seized two of these and rode upward with the vessel. It was quite true that a man drifting in space was an almost hopeless proposition as far as search-and-rescue was concerned; but a ship was a very different matter. If he and it got far enough away before any of the others arrived, he was safe. Altitude increased with agonizing slowness. Earth's bulk gradually came into view all around the planetoid's jagged outline. At first, the small body showed almost against the center of the greater one; then, as the ship in its larger, slower orbit began to fall behind, the asteroid appeared to drift toward one side of the blue-andwhite streaked disk. Hoerwitz watched with interest and appreciation -- it was a beautiful sight -- but didn't neglect the point where the cable came around the rocks. He was perhaps five hundred feet up when a spacesuited figure IF appeared, pulling itself along with little appearance of haste. It was not yet close enough for the ship's former site to be above the "horizon." Mac waited with interest to see what the reaction to the discovery would be. It was impressive, even under circumstances which prevented good observation. The thief was surprised enough to lose grip on the cable. He was probably traveling above escape velocity, or what would have been escape velocity, even if the tide had been out. As it was, any speed would have been too great. For a moment, Hoerwitz thought the fellow was doomed. Maybe it was Robinson, though; at least, he reacted promptly and sensibly. He drew a gun and began firing away from the asteroid. Each shot produced only a tiny velocity change in his drifting body, but those few inches a second were enough. He collided with one of the structures at the base of a radiator, kicked himself off and downward as he hit it, touched the surface, and clutched frantically at some handhold Hoerwitz couldn't see. Then he began looking around and promptly discovered the ship. T he manager was quite sure the fellow wouldn't try a jump. He wished, once again, that his radio receiver was worldng -- the man might be saying something interesting, though he must be out of radio reach of the others. It would be nice to know whether the thief could see Hoerwitz's clinging figure on the ship's hull. It was possible, since the lower side of the sphere was illuminated by Earthlight, but far from certain, since the man's line of sight extended quite close to the sun. He wasn't shooting. But it was more than likely that his gun was empty anyway. It was disappointing in a way, but Hoerwitz was able to make up for himself a story of what the fellow was thinking, and this was probably more fun than the real facts. Eventually the figure worked its way back to the cable and started along it toward the airlock to a couple of holds with the snap-rings on his suit, and relaxed. There was nothing more to do. The drifting vessel would be spotted in the next hoiu: or so, if it hadn't been already, and someone would be along. In a way, it was a disappointing ending. He spent some of the time wondering what Shakespeare would have done to avoid the anticlimax. He might have learned, if he had stayed awake, but he slept through the interesting part. Smith, upon hearing that the ship was drifting away, had made the best possible time to the radiator site. Knowing that there was no other hope he jumped; and not being a lightning calculator able to make all the necessary allowances for the local quirks in the potential field, he naturally went slightly off course. He used all but one of his buUets in attempted corrections and woimd up drifting at a velocity very well matched with that of the ship, but about fifty yards away from it. He could see Hoerwitz plainly. Up to that time he had had no intention either of harming the old man fatally or blowing up the station; but the realization that the manager had had a part in the loss of his ship changed his attitude drastically. When the police ship arrived, he was still tr#dng to decide whether to fire his last buUet at Hoerwitz, or in the opposite direction. Hoerwitz himself, of course, was asleep. Best story yet by Robert Silverbergl James E. Gunn Brian W. Ald'iss Ross Rocklynne Fritz Leiber -- and many more! Don't miss September Galaxy, on sale now! IF IF  Short Story To dream? Aye, f here's the rubl For in that dream, what things may come... H enry Traum stepped off the Avenue Of Foreigners into a Httleused native pedestrian way, paused, glancing around uneasily, then hurried on. Not that there was any specific danger that he knew of, but he'd been on Glyne only a few days, and the natives -- solemn squat bipeds with hairless gray skins and unblinking goafs-eyes that reminded him, somehow, of human mythology -- made him nervous. The walkway, between windowless back walls of four-story wooden buildings, was already in gloom. The waning light from the greenish sky worsened his disquiet. The murmur of motor-traffic dwindled behind him, and now he heard the sounds of the seedy bazaar -- the monotonous staccato whistle of a sweetmeat-peddler's wagon, the chant of an auctioneer selling over-used native females, the dismal lowing of a draft beast, the peculiar ululating music of a drugcarousel, where the natives inhaled eyn, which did strange things to them and to some off-worlders. Already, he could smell the musty-hay odor of the keyn. He'd tried the merry-go-round; it had made him dizzy and a little drunk, but nothing more. Tonight he was bent upon a different diversion -- one he'd discovered only the night before, and which pulled him back irresistibly now. A native policeman watched him with fixed, expressionless eyes as he emerged into the. queasy purple light of the district and huiri past the carousel, about which a dozen natives wandered crookedly, still under the spell of the last ride. The auctioneer paused in his chant and called out in singsong Low Glynic, vowing that the native women could do something incredible to such as Henry. The battered females on the stand chuckled coarsely. Henry ignored them. The small shack, down at the nearly deserted, poorly lighted end of the street, was dark. Henry's heart quirked anxiously at the thought that the proprietor might already be gone. Breathing with a little difficulty, he approached and knocked timidly on the featureless solid hardwood door. Moments dragged. Finally there was the scrape of a bar being withdrawn, and the door swung inward. Henry peered at the proprietor in the dark office. The shop-owner wasn't native -- in fact, he might have passed for human, allowing for an odd elongation like an El Greco painting, and pointed, tufted ears. His face was thin and swarthy, his eyes cynical. He said boredly, "Closed for the day." His English was thickly accented but understandable. Henry said, "I -- I couldn't come any earlier. Could you possibly... rU pay double!" The swarthy humanoid made a cynical Levantine shrug, but pulled the door wider. "As you wish. But only a half-hour." Ihe office was sparsely furnished with a desk, two chairs, and a massive ornately-decorated steel strongbox. Henry fumbled in his sleeveless jacket for his wallet; he extracted native currency of coarse reed-paper, and waited for the proprietor to deposit it in the strongbox and re-lock that. The alien moved toward a door at the rear of the office, and Henry followed. There was a corridor with four stall-doors, each of thick hardwood studded with big iron nail-heads. The proprietor went to the one at the end, near the barred door that opened to the dark alley behind the shack, pressed an alien-looking light-stud, and reached up to swing aside a hinged wooden port-cover at about face height in the stall door. Light -- saffron, not purple -- glowed from the uncovered port. Henry craned his neck to see the image relayed by a set of opposed mirrors inside the port. T he dream-sloth -- Henry's name for the creature, though it looked as cnuch like an oversized honey-bear as a sloth -- was curled up in a ball on its sleeping-pad at the rear of the narrow chamber. It stirred uneasily in the light, then lifted a head to peer toward the door. Henry heard its shackles rattle. The proprietor, satisfied that the beast was securely chained, took a large hammered-iron key from his pocket and unlocked the stall door, then stood aside for Henry to enter. Henry said timidly, "Could -- could I have the same dream as last night? It was -- I can't remember more than a shred or two, but -- " The swarthy alien shrugged cynically. "That is beyond my control. Neither I nor the beast chooses the dream -- the dream comes from your own mind -- the buried part or the conscious part, or both. If your dream last night was ecstatic, you are probably of a happy nature. Some are sadists, some masochists; but that has nothing to do with me nor with my beasts. They merely will you to dream." IF Henry, muttering uncertainly, stepped through the door. There was an inner doorway -- with no door in it -- offset from the outer one, so that he had to zigzag in. That brought him in sight of the beast. The creature still huddled on its pad, its head lifted ahd turned toward the door. As Henry entered, it voiced a low querulous protest, as if it had already done a hard day's work and dreaded more; the mesmerism or whatever it was, as Henry knew from the scant literature he'd been able to find, was an exhausting effort for the beasts. Henry lay down on the mattress provided for clients, his face turned ly, its small eyes seeming to plead. But suddenly sparks crackled from the metal collar around its neck -- part of a tight harness and the creature jerked and whimpered in pain. Wearily, trembling, it heaved itself to a squat and faced Henry. Henry winced. He thought the proprietor might have been a little less impatient in dealing punishment. He tried to relax his muscles, but they were taut, trembling with anticipation for the dream he couldn't remember. He waited, eyes on the beast. It was about the size of a grown black bear, but gray rather than black, and as he'd noted on the previous night, rather bearlike in shape. But its eyes held no fierceness. The teeth were herbivorous, the claws small and blunt. Of course! What need has such a creature for physical weapons? All it needed was to lock eyes once with an enemy -- a predator, for instance -- and the enemy would go wandering off wrapped in some blissful or fierce or frightened dream that had no relationship to its actual surroundings. He stared into the beasfs forlorn eyes, shaking with anticipation. He heard the port-cover close. Privacy, of course, had to be guaranteed. Instantly, with the closing of the port-cover, the beast's attitude changed. Gone was the pitiful cowering. Quickly -- but not so quickly as to rattle the chains aloud -- it twisted and nosed under a corner of its sleeping-pad; with awkward forepaws it raked out a key -- smaller than the one to the stall door, more sophisticated, as if of a hier technology. Clumsily, holding the key between both forepaws, the beast tossed it toward Henry. Slurred speech came from its mouth. H enry gaped. He knew the beasts were intelligent enough for crude speech of some sort -- but English? A sudden thought hit him. He pinched his left arm, on the inside just above the elbow. It hurt. This was no dream, then! "Please!" the creature mouthed. "You -- kind. Help me -- escape. I -- I go with you, be slave! I work! I bring -- money. I give you -- dreams! Always, dreams! I want -- kind master. Please!" Henry struggled into a sitting position. He was badly shaken. "I -- but we can't! We're locked in!" "No!" the beast pleaded. "Doia: not lock. This key -- take off chains. Please! I -- suffer." It gestured with a paw at the leek on its harness, hdd in place on its back where the be couldn't reach it, "Owner -- gone back to woman. Not come back -- yeti" Henry stared for a minute into the creature's pleading eyes. Why -- he wondered suddenly -- need it beg? Why didn't it simply put him into a dream where -- But, no. The owner had told him the beast could not choose the dream. Slowly, shakily, he reached for the key; he sat holding it in limp fingers while he stared at the beast. The misery and hope in the small eyes brought a wave of pity over him -- not unmixed with a certain amount of greed. Hastily now, he scrambled to his feet and stepped toward the beast He grasped the harness-lock, inserted the key, and turned it. The lock sprang open. He tried the key in the leg-shackles and found that it worked. The creature shook off the bonds with a little sigh of relief. Henry began to offer the key to the beast, then realized that the paws couldn't grasp it and thrust it into his own pocket. He paused at the outer door of the stall, listening. The only sound, other than the thumping of his own pulse, was the faint noise of the bazaar up the street. He pushed open the door, peered into the corridor, and stepped out The beast brushed softly against his thigh as it came out silently and lithely. Henry turned uncertainly toward the door into the office. "No!" the beast mouthed softly. "Back door. Wait! I go first -- see safe." H enry, confused, hesitated. The creature rose on its haunches, deftly pushed the bar aside with one forepaw, nosed open the door, and was gone into the darkness. Henry waited, his eyes swinging nervously from the back door to the office door. Minutes passed, then more minutes, and a painful realization began to steal over Henry. He stepped to the back door, pushed it open a crack and peered out. Night was complete now. Dimly, he could make out lightless shacks, two or three alleys of them and, beyond, at the edge of town, the irregular black line of the forest. The dream-sloth was gone, of course. More hurt than angry, he moved hastily toward the office door. When he was two paces away, the door burst open and the suspicious face of the proprietor poked through. Henry saw the cynical eyes dart to the open door of the stall, then to the alley-door. A swarthy hand swept downward and came up holding an alien but recognizable pistol. Henry did not even think of trying to escape via the back door -- the single glimpse of the darkness there had repelled him. Instead, he lurched toward the swarthy alien, grabbed for the gun-hand, and tried to twist around and get by into the office. The lean alien was as wiry as a coyote. They grappled there, Henry trying desperately to keep the gun pointed away from himself, the proprietor trying to wrench free. The gun went off. Henry felt the searing muzzle-blast on his cheek and heard glass crash somewhere. IF The gun went off again. Then there was a third blasts and Henry's head seemed to explode. He heard, as if from a distance, his own stunned grunt as he fell; he knew, dimly, that he struck the floor hard and lay there .  . H enry came to slowly, conscious of voices raised excitedly somewhere. He pushed his shoulders and chest from the floor and rested a moment until more strength returned to his body. He shook his head, trying to clear it, felt gingerly the stilloozing superficial wound over one temple, then climbed unsteadily to his feet. His eyes roved and discovered the body of the swarthy customer on the floor, a pool of already-congealing blood near the head. He stared stupidly at it for a moment, then jerked his head around to look at the alley door. It was unbarred and ajar. He darted a look at the last stall door and saw that it was also unlocked. Heart pounding, he staggered toward it. He saw that the outer mirror of the periscope-arrangement was smashed. He knew, then, that one of his dream-beasts was gone. He lurched over to the body and only then saw the pistol -- his own pistol -- half-hidden beneath it. Desperately -- aware of the excited voices outside the front of the shop -- he tried to think. This was the same alien customer who'd come here last night. Had he come again tonight? Had there been an argument of some sort? The dream-beast, he had no doubt, was responsible somehow. Maybe it had broken the mirror; waited there for him to open the port and had locked eyes directly with him. Or -- . He cried out suddenly and clasped both hands to his head, ignoring his wound, half-insane with confusion. His dream-beast? Groaning, mouthing incoherently, he staggered into the office, sat down at the desk and let his head fall on it. Confusion... Confusion... Two sets of memoriesi In each he was Henry Traum. But in one he'd come to Glyne only days ago, had discovered the dream-shop and tried it, and had struggled distractedly through the obligations of the next day and hurried to the shop again. He had heard the dream-sloth dead with him in English... In the other set of memories, he was the proprietor! He had been on Glyne over a year -- a fugitive criminal from Earth via other places -- and had imported the dream-beasts... Wildly, he lifted his head to stare at the front door, beyond which the voices were now louder and nsore excited. What had he done? What had the beast done? Maybe not everything he'd believed about the beasts had been accurate. Or maybe they learned, developed new powers when with intelligent beings... One thing he could not deny -- both sets of memories were equally clear, running back to childhood. Both coincide up to a time a few years back, then diverged, in detail. One was false. But which one? Then he heard the voices of native police outside the door. One of them banged on it, with a gun-butt.  m fie (f ein fie Sfarsfiip nferprise (Mr. Spoch discovers emotions -- md does not know what to do with them) g Bewildered creature made of steel and leaf, Cl You wander through the empty hallways weeping, And cannot name the fountain of your grief, That yesterday lay sleeping... e Your people s unimpassioned life is gone, Ck ' Your frozen world of numbers disappears. And you are cast alone, soul-miked, on Qi Asea'oflmmantears.  But these are still your people at your side, Cit whose most ancient paths your tears began. The pale, cold-hearted elf who lately died Today is born a man. Cjj -- Dorothy Jones #k #k #k IF  Novelette One neecfecf parts and one hunted skulls. Together they found what neither wanted. I TiiTarigold stepped cautiously jdong gripping his great shol-wood bow, the other holding his three gaily-painted trophy skulls away from his chest plates. The skulls tockled hollowly against one another but made no other sound. He stopped and stared out across the scrub-jungle, straining his telescopic lenses and infrared pickups for a glance of Flesh, but none of the elusive creatures were to be seen, which was not to say that none were watching him. Slowly Marigold began inching along the limestone lge again, but paid little attention to the pebbles rolling beneath his plastic feet till he nearly slipped and fell. Raucous colors dancing across the semaphore in his face and motors whining nervously, he jerked himself back to safety. Cautiously looking over the ledge, he reflected ruefully upon his unparalleled ability to strand himself out on high, narrow ledges. Then, shrugging to adjust the quiver of arrows on his back, he took out along the ledge again. It dropped rapidly, then, and Marigold had a difficult time retaining his balance. Finally he decided to be safe rather than dead and took the remaining hundred feet very slowly, avoiding any large rocks which could scratch his armor. The Mill was always very touchy about scratched plating. Attaining the ground safely. Marigold gave the landscape another quick scan to assure himself that no Resh lurked nearby. Small and soft as they were, they could still be very fast and very nasty. The first Flesh whose ski Marigold had taken had chosen to vent his pleasure at being captured by swinging a heavy club at Marigold's right leg and relieving him of the responsibility thereof. The Mill had been so displeased about having to replace the leg that she demanded he hunt down a skull for her in payment, to be kept in her private treasury. So, though three skulls hung on Marigold's chest, he had actually slain four Flesh. The vista seemed harmless, so the robot cast off into the bushes, heading for a distant blue ridge where a team of Flesh had been reported." Marigold was on the hunt. He was uncertain whether it would prove to be a fruitful hunt, for his past three had been blanks. He had not so much as even seen a Flesh. Nor had many of his Mill-brethren; their hunts were bringing in sparse returns, too. For a while there had been quite a few Flesh about; not only the number of new skulls but the amount of Mill-Brethren who never returned indicated this. But the days were getting lean, and more and more hunters returned without skulls and even without scratches to show they had met or seen a Flesh. I t was hard to say whether the Mill was pleased or not by this. The great metal and plastic behemoth, a large dark cube with dozens of little stalls and incomprehensible machinery inside, had been uncommunicative recently, and if she spoke at all, it was usually petulant nagging about inconsequential subjects. As often as not, her anger was directed at Marigold The replacement leg had caused her to label him as careless. At first, all she had ever given him was a scolding, but every time he returned with scratches, she cut into him anew, till extreme embarrassment had caused him to take longer and longer hunting trips. These week-long forays never amounted to anything, but at least they kept the critical speakers of the Mill at a comfortable distance. He dreaded the day when she would take to complaining about their length. As he strolled through the gorse, tpirror-bright armor flickering in the sun, he became nervously aware of how late in the afternoon it was. Late afternoon was not a good time to be abroad, for Flesh could lurk behind sun-warmed rocks and never have their body heat give them away, and the gentle breezes that blew across the plain rattled the bushes much more than any smart Flesh would. Even their beige-pink bodies matched the color of the dried grasses and bushes, and Marigold knew all toO well that one could be behind him at that very moment, club held high... He checked, and finding nothing there, decided to make sure it stayed that way. He increased his pace till he was moving at a rapid walk, almost a jog. But not for long; for he was over eit feet tall and clearly visible for miles, and his heavy tread made him think uncomfortably about Flesh putting their ears to the ground and hearing him coming. The brush got thicker and Marigold became painfully cognizant of the tremendous rustling and scraping he made as he forced himself through the dry bushes. A quick look back showed him a trail a blind Flesh could follow with a walking-stick, to beat him to extinction with the stick. He looked around him, motors whining high and shrill, and all his relays on the verge of tripping. He forgot about the ridge and just ran off, feeling the eyes of all the Flesh in creation on his back, casting lots for his radar antenna and listening to the music of his newly-squeaking hip and his violent crashing through the furze. Almost on the verge of panic, he dashed through the thickets and nearly fell into a small stream. With a sudden internal splap all his systems shut down to clear his brain for dealing with this new obstacle. All of this took less than a second but was enough time for the Flesh sitting across the stream to leap into frantic activity. T he Iron had crept up on him so silently, yet so fast, that Locker IF Bannock was almost caught dead. But the thing just stood there dumbly, so he grabbed his hook-club and raced in on the machine, screaming at it to confuse it. The Iron jerked convulsively as Bannock cleared the stream; moving with stupid slowness, it tried to strike him with a great rubber hand. The hook-spike on Bannock's club tore into the hand and cut through it, but caught. The arm followed through with its swing and tore the club from his grasp. Howling in terror, he dove for it and caught it just as the Iron reached out for and gripped his ankle. The Flesh and the Iron were both stretched out along the 'ground, both somewhat stunned and both ultimately captured. Bannock twisted himself about for a better look at his captive captor, who tightened the grip on his ankle till the man hissed and turned red in the face. Marigold recognized a red semaphore signal as meaning annoyance, so he loosened his grip. Bannock looked at him and thought furiously. So the Iron could break his leg. The creature was stretched out along the ground as he was, so at least it couldn't bang him around against anything. If he sacrificed his ankle he could stave in its head. Marigold stared thoughtfully at the Flesh, wholly aware of this possibility and not wanting to tempt fate. He recalled that his first Flesh had fought very creditably with a broken arm and leg. Flesh and Iron watched each other for a long time. Finally the Flesh shrugged and began to pull himself erect. With a crackle of alarm from his speaker. Marigold gripped the ankle tighter, and the Flesh's face twisted and contorted. "Stop!" he cried. "I'm only sitting up!" Marigold hesitantly relaxed his grip, but did not release the Flesh. "You sit up too," said the Flesh, and Marigold obliged him, since the order seemed as good an idea as any. n F or five minutes more they sat that way, silently musing one another and considering the ridiculous situation they now found themselves in. The Resh could swing his club and crush Marigold's good arm before it could squeeze his ankle, but the lame left arm was still a formidable bludgeon. "Well, shall we sit here all afternoon or shall we be about our business and try to kill one another?" asked the Flesh, and he spat into the dust. Being at a loss for words. Marigold did not reply. The Flesh spoke again. "I see you're a three-skull iron. I'm a four tenna man myself." He swung a necklace out of his tunic and displayed the four reception cones strung on a leather thong. Marigold could think of only one way that the Flesh could have gotten those antennae. "You have... stopped... four Mill-brethren?" "That what you call each other? Yeh. I have. Five, actually, but I never did claim that fifth tenna 'cause a few of your Mill brethren were coming up fast. Discretion is better than valor." "I have stopped four Flesh, but I paid one skull to the Mill for a new leg." Bannock suddenly grinned, his fancy struck by the way in which he and his mortal enemy were comparing hunting records. ITien he scowled, for his present situation held little possibility for humor and levity. He examined the broken arm of Marigold, then plucked a small leather pouch from his bandolier and began to eat something. "You interrupted my dinner. Iron," he accused. Marigold watched the Flesh stuff the crumbly brown cakes into the large aperture in his head, and felt obliged to say something. He winced inside, for this was an extremely embarrassing position to be in. If the Mill ever heard of it... "What are you doing, Flesh?" "The name's Locker Bannock... call me Bannock. I'm eating." "You're... eating?" "Yeah." He looked sharply at Marigold's impassive features searching for expression. "Doing my equivalent to what you do when you fill yourself up with water. Only I have to do it a lot oftener than you. I haven't any fusion plant inside of me." "What is a fusion plant?" "You, Iron, have carried a fusion plant around inside of you since you... all your so-called life, and you don't know what it is?" "i have never even heard of a fusion plant. I do not know what is inside of me -- only the Mill knows." "The Mill! You Iron are like little ants," Bannock muttered, for the edification of nobody in particular. "You even have a Queen. Ah, fist" He finished eating, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and rolled over toward the robot. "Okay. I'll explain what's inside of you." H e took a sharp stone and began scratching little diagrams on the surface of a flat rock, expounding upon the contents of Marigold's chest, head and limbs. As he spoke, the Iron absent-mindedly let go his leg, but he quickly vetoed breaking away and trying to ambush Iron the next day. It could stHl strike out with that arm, catch him with the other. He finished the lecture. "I don't think it will make any difference, though." Marigold did not know what to make of that statement. He said so. "What I meant," explained Bannock, "was that even if you know how you work inside, you won't really understand it. You're not equipped with enough mental machinery. For example, do you know why the gears in your arm work?" 'They go around and around?" "You're guessing and you're wrong. That's how they turn. WTiy do they turn? Because force is applied to them and they are anchored in a particular way. It sounds pretty obvious, but I don't think you could really understand." Marigold thought this over for a while, and agreed. But he added that only ihe Mill had to know, anyway. "Yeah," muttered Bannock, and fell back to appraising his enemy. IF It was getting quite late, and neither had moved from where they were. The sun was sinking low to the western horizon, and the night insects were beginning to make their rounds. Bannock swatted one and broke into the customary cursing. Marigold flashed green upon his semaphore and Bannock held up the corpse of the offending neocop. "Little Flesh, Iron. Pests." He tossed the insect away and looked up at the robot again. "Iron, do you have a name or a serial number or something I can call you? You call me Bannock, I may as well call you something other than Iron." "Yes. Marigold." He tapped a small brass flower inset in the ID disk at the base of his neck. "Okay, Marigold, Fm getting cold -- an unpleasant response to dropping temperature -- and these bugs are eating me. Hadn't we better go someplace where I can rest?" "Isn't this place as good as any?" "No. For the reasons I outlined to you and others. Look, if you're worried I'm going to kill you by attacking your legs, I'm quite sure you could kill me while I did it to you. And I don't know how fast and accurate you are with that bow and arrow and I've no desire to find out. So come on... " Marigold did not move. 'fcome on, damn you!" Marigold remained motionless. "I'll clobber you..." TiyiTarigold jerked to his feet and the human danced back a little and motioned for peace. The robot made no other move, other than to nock the arrow. Bannock looked at him. "Put that thing away," he said. He was aware that he was as good as dead, but he poised his club. "I want your skull." "That's reasonable. I want your tenna." "If you dove into the water and walked along under it, I could not see you to stop you." "It's not deep enough anyway. Put that thing away, will you? I don't want to wreck your legs." Bannock knew too clearly that if the Iron did not put away the bow and arrow, he would have very little chance indeed of even coming near him, but the Iron was either none too smart or quite careless and did not see this. The robot slowly loosed the tension on the bowstring and replaced the arrow. "We have captured each other. Bannock. So that neither should escape from the other, let us bind each other to one another, and then go to your place to retire." "Fm game. You have rope?" Marigold snapped open a little cabinet in his metal belly and brought forth a long nylon cable. Bannock eyed it cautiously. "I'll bet you can break it." "I can't, and you would know if I tried, anyway." Marigold hooked the clip at one end into a buckle on his back, and tossed the other end to Bannock. Hand on club, the human tied it about his wrist, using a one-handed knot. "I'll walk to one side of you -- the left side, so you can't grab the rope and rip off my right arm." He pointed with the club at a nearby tumble of rocks. "There's a cave over there. We'll go to it." Marigold didn't care where they went, so long as it wasn't into a trap. As they walked, he kept his radar antenna pointed at Bannock, for he didn't want the Flesh to come at him suddenly, swinging the club and howling. But the Flesh kept its distance, whether aware of the surveillance or not. Marigold reflected upon the Mill's calling him careless and unobservant and not very alert. He could easily agree that he was not very alert, for he knew that the Flesh had exposed himself to dangerous situations lyAs he ran through his sensory memories, he located parts where the Flesh's heartbeat had sped up tremendously, as though it was taking a terrible risk. And these times coincided with the times Marigold had not paid careful attention to what he was doing. But the Flesh had not made any dangerous moves. But granting that it recognized its chances and seemed aware that they came quite often, it was apparently playing a game with Marigold. You trust me and ril trust you. Marigold cautioned himself to watch for this; it could be some kind of a blind for future sneak attacks. Bannock saw the antenna swing to cover him, and knew that the Iron was not entirely as dumb as it had been trying to make him think it was. He would have to keep this act up for a couple of days to provide any positive results. HI T hey climbed a black tumble of basalt and granite and came to the cave, a fissure in the ground which widened into a chamber at the end. Bannock, after announcing that he was untying himself, retreated to a dark comer of the cave, talking all the while. "Marigold, shall we forget this rope business tomorrow? It's a needless precaution, since I couldn't get very far from you and that bow. If you tried to break and run, I wouldn't have much luck in stopping you. You weigh over a ton, which implies a lot." "Very well, we will not use it." Though Marigold recognized that he had given up a very good chance to catch the Flesh, simply by suddenly running over rough terrain, he determined that two could play at the game of simulated honesty. Bannock came forth from the depths of the cave and dropped a load of dry wood on the floor. He lit it aflame and roasted his supper, a few chunks of meat from a leather pouch, and Marigold watched him dully. After a while, he stood and said, "We Flesh sleep -- like recharging our capacitors or something. You know? Anyway while Fm sleeping you could kill me, so Fm going to climb down into that little hole over there, where you can't reach me, and I'll sleep there." As he dropped down into the small-mouthed pit. Bannock watched the Iron. He worfdn't leave during the night, unfortunately. He wanted his skull too much. The following morning Bannock lit his fire again and roasted his breakfast. Marigold sat impassively on a rock, lit by golden radiance from the morning sun. "Well, Marigold. It's about time we determined what we're going to do about each other. Any ideas?" "I thought about it all last night. I could think of but one thing. Since neither of us wants to let the other go, for the risk of ambush, all we can reasonably do is have our fight and let that decide who gets what." Bannock's heart leaped sickeningly. This was all he needed, since the broken arm could still kill him and the other was twice as deadly. He adopted a scorning manner. "Won't work. I have an unfair advantage. You got a busted arm." "I can use it as a club." Bannock closed his eyes painfully, then sat on a rock and glared at Marigold. "All right, all right. We're both thinking the same thing. How do I get this guy to trust me enough for his guard to come down? No showdown, Marigold. Think again." "We shall go to your settlement, and I will set you free." "Huh?" "I will take you to your settlement, and bind you with the rope so you will not try to bushwhack me, and I will depart." "You came on that idea mighty fast. Sure, you'll escape, with my skull under your arm. The moment I drop my club you will swing that cleverly concealed knife -- yes, I see it -- and Til be dead. No dice." Marigold's semaphore filled with murkiness, and he strode silently out into the daylit to scan the morning landscape. He was silent. "Marigold, try this adaptation of your plan. There's this big plain; we will walk to the middle; you will give me your arrows, and I will carry them to one side; you will carry yourself to the other. When I get to my side I'll put the arrows down and hightail it away. You can get them and not get bushwhacked. Follow me?" "No. What if you do not return my arrows?" Bannock spat into the dust. "Dumb Iron. How far do you think I could carry those arrows with you after me, and not expect to get caught? I don't need them. I don't have a bow, and if I put them down I could be a mile away before you got near." Marigold grumbled blue on his semaphore, then asked, "Where is this plain you speak of?" "See that ridge way off that way?" Bannock pointed. "Behind that. My settlement is a dozen or so kilometers from it." The last was untrue; his settlement was a good forty miles from the ridge, along it to the west, but there was no need in risking an armored attack of Iron against the town of Werser. They set out. L ater in the day. Marigold's fractured arm began squeaking loudly and was becpming difficult for the Iron to move, up as far as the shoulder joint. He showed numerous signs of dismay but Bannock did not seem to notice anything until the squeaking got quite loud. "What's the trouble?" IP "The arm." Marigold indicated thp afflicted member. 'It's hard to move." "Oh, fist," swore Bannock. "I should have expected that. Still I'm surprised it wasn't a helluva lot worse. Or sooner." "What is the matter?" "Lubrication. You Iron have a built-in lube system, like my blood vessels, except they're not for lube. It keeps your joints moving smooth and silent." Bannock fell behind the robot. "What can I do about it?" Marigold asked. "Nothing... except maybe hold that stump high in the air so you won't lose any more lube." Marigold lifted the broken limb, finding that it moved very stubbornly. He heard Bannock snicker with subdued laughter. A rather humiliating thing. Marigold decided, if the Flesh thought it was so funny -- unless the laughter was only a trick to distract him or put him off guard. Several times he considered swinging it down upon Bannock, but it firmly resisted all efforts to move it quickly; besides, the Flesh was smart and could be useful. Marigold endured the humiliation. "Marigold, what's that up ahead?" Bannock pointed toward a hill, at the crown of which the scrub grew thinner. In the tawny grass and dry brown bushes something gleamed brightly. "A Mill-brother." Bannock jerked uncomfortably, but Marigold was oblivious of this and went on describing what he saw. "He is -- dead -- that is the word, dead? He moves no more; in fact, I'd say he hasn't done any moving for a good many sunnycyclqs now." "You're getting a wry, dry wit. Marigold. So he's dead, eh? That solves two problems in one stroke." "Eh? I can see that in his current state, he won't come to my aid, but what is the other advantage?" "Fist, can't you guess? It's to your advantage. Head this way." T he dead robot lay on the ground, parts of its stainless-steel plate worn off by weather to show the dusty yellow plastic beneath. There were lichens straggling up the side of its chest and head, and the reception core of the antenna had been twisted off. The legs were crumpled, but aside from that, there seemed to be little damage. Bannock crouched next to the corpse and tapped it tightly with a pebble, listening to the clicks. Marigold began getting impatient and shifted about on his feet, till Bannock suddenly jerked. "Stop shifting about like that. I don't know if you've got ideas on my head or not, but stop it, damnit!" "I wasn't..." Bannock cut Marigold's defense short with a noncommital grunt and returned to tapping on the hulk. "What are you doing?" "Getting a new arm for you." Bannock pried a panel from the back of the hulk, reached in, and tugged a little black box free from its position beneath the power plant. He undid a few snaps, opened it, and removed a handful of tools. 'Tt sure is a shame you Iron don't know about all the goes you have stashed away inside of you. A little fooling around with his insides would have had this fellow still alive today. He paused to laugh sarcastically. "I'll bet your mill doesn't even know she puts them inside of you. Siddown." Marigold sat, and Bannock critically eyed the min of his arm. After cautioning the Iron against any sudden moves, he attached the elbow joint of the corpse with several of the tools. It fell away, and Bannock began performing the same operation on Marigold. The Iron twitched nervously and received a reverberating slam against his side with the wrench. "Stay still, damn your hide," growled Bannock. Marigold's arm fell off, and Bannock took the other and wrestled it into place. A few left motions with his wrench, a snap connection of some of the little tubes, pressure splices applied to the cables, and the arm was on. "Try it out." "It squeaks." "Your lube system will take care of that pretty soon. It's in perfectly good condition itself. That hulk might have been dead, but all his parts were still sealed tight away. Everything above his hip-joint was in topflight condition." Marigold grunted with his semaphore, then stood up. "Very good, Marigold," Bannock commented. "You didn't try to kill me right off or anything. Shall we go on our way?" "It's getting late. You may want to sleep soon, am I wrong? And make your fire and cook your food?" "You may be right," Bannock agreed, and began to gather dry wood. He brought it to a small hollow which was surrounded by tall trees, and there he cooked his supper. IV M arigold watched disconsolately, unable to direct his thoughts upon any one subject. He tried to think of new ways in which he could kill Bannock, but none came to his mind. The Flesh just seemed to know so damn much. "Bannock?" "Grnnnch?" "How is it that you know so much about Iron?" "I'm a junkman, if that means anything to you. No? Well, suppose some hunter comes in with a dead Iron, pulling it on a little cart or something, and he wants to use it for a servant or a farm laborer or sell it. Someone has to fix the Iron, and since most hunters are rather unremarkable as brains go, it won't be the hunter who does it. I do. Remember that dead Iron we saw today? Given a few weeks I could have him running again. I studied your anatomy for six years and I'm pretty sure I could make one of you from scrap parts alone. And hell... I think it's pretty obvious that I know more about you than your Mill does." "I doubt it," Marigold replied stuffily. "Doubt it if you want." "If you know so much about us, why are you out hunting us like those stupid hunters?" Bannock broke out laughing, rocked back and forth, and gasped, "If IF you're so smart why ain't you rich?" He stifled the chuckling. "Never ex pected to get that from an Iron." Marigold blinked his semaphore in puzzlement. "Well, Marigold, I'm out here hunting because I need spare parts. I don't come out here to hunt for Iron like you, still up and kicking. I look for ones like your benefactor back there. Use them in my shop." Marigold sat on his tree-stump, bannock disturbed him a great deal, for he knew the man was smarter than he was, and quite a bit more self-confident, seeming to know an infinity of facts. The self-confidence disturbed him especially, for the Flesh could be leading him right into a trap and wouldn't let loose a peep. Still, there had been plenty of times when Bannock could have dispatched Marigold, and he had not taken advantage of them. Marigold wasn't so sure any more that this trustworthiness was so much a game on Bannock's part. It seemed to come so naturally to the Flesh. Still... Marigold squelched his thoughts and watched the fire burn. Bannock slept through the night high in a thick-trunked tree.  The first sunbeams of dawn sent A the bugs fleeing over his face, and seeking refuge in his ears and nose, so Bannock spluttered awake, climbed back down the tree, and saw Marigold exactly as he had left him -- hunched over on the stump looking at the ashes of the bumt-out fire. ITie Iron turned when Bannock landed in the shadowed turf. "You slept all night." "Right you are. Help me gather some firewood?" Presently a small fire was roasting Bannock's brefast, and Marigold watched, as disconsolate as ever. As the human ate, he spoke to the machine. "Have you decided to let me carry your arrows across the clearing?" "Yes. You may as well." "Good." Bannock opened a case from his bandolier and began shaving and trimming his sandy mustache. As he did, he asked, "Marigold, why do you Iron hunt men?" "Men?" "Flesh, then. Why?" "Oh. Because you hunt us." "Well, then, why do you wear our skulls as ornaments?" "Prestige, of course. To show we have adequately defended the home Mill." "Reasonable. That's why we wear the receptors of your tennas -- to show we've kept the Iron away from our settlementsii The more we wear around our necks, the bigger and hairier and stronger we look in the eyes of the girls. It's good for social relations to be able to be dangerous." He swore when he cut a nick out of his lower lip. "Anyway, we could probably wipe a lot of you Iron out, if you weren't so useful." Marigold didn't like that statement and let Bannock know. "I don't care if you don't like it. Marigold. It happens to be true. If I know so almighty much about your insides, doesn't it indicate to you that I can pull a few wires in you and make your fusion plant cut loose all over the countryside? No. Of course you don't know. Anyway forget it. We don't wipe you all out because there aren't enough of us to do the job right and there are still too damn many of you." "You threw a few words at me I don't know. Girls?" "You've got a lot of questions. Marigold." Bannock gnawed at a fingernail. "But then you've got a helluva lot to learn. All right. What is there to life, for one of you Iron?" "Why ... uh... hunting, and seeing that the Mill..." "Has a lot of metal-bearing rocks in her belly so she can make more Iron, right? Well, get this. What does she mean?" "The MiU... " "Of course, the Mill. It's always the Mill. She is also a word referring to the procreative aspect of something living, or semi-living, as you. You refer to another Iron as he, indicating the provider aspect. I've oversimplified it, but do you know where those words came from? They weren't invented by the Mill." "No." "Well. Does the Mill ever tell you where she comes from?" Marigold signalled negatively. "Okay. I'll tell you: C#housands of suncycles ago, A this whole world was covered with a beautiful culture of wise and erudite people, all Flesh. There were great cities which extended miles into the air and miles underground, and you may have seen some of their mins. It's from those that you get so much msty metal. These Flesh orgiinally came from some star high in the sky, and they communicated with the Flesh living on that star. just as I talk with you. Men had houses that could fly, provided with  all possible comforts, and you Iron  were the servants of men "in those days. "But something happened. I don't . know what and none of the books explain what. Anyway, the great settlements toppled to the ground and Marigold stopped him with a bluegreen flash and a honk of derision. whole world." thousand miles of here. But don't intermpt." Bannock resumed his explanation. "The remaining Flesh had to learn to live off the land, while all that you Iron had to do was throw assorted old junk into your Mills. And I guess the Mills forgot all about the Flesh having built them in the beginning. Anyway, when we started to need metal, we used you Iron, and then you began to fight back. So, here we are. Probably matched in strength, though I doubt there are as many of you as there are of us. "Anyway, to get back to the subject -- he and she. Any idea where the words came from?" "From Fleshr "Yes indeed. From male and female Flesh." Bannock began to explain the facts of life. Surprisingly, in the end. Marigold understood and believed most of it. The idea upset him no small amount, and he wandered off to think. He was too abstracted to bother watching the man, even. IF Finally, Bannock called him to suggest they get going. The robot jerked to his feet and flashed assent. He buckled bis quiver back on, took his bow, and followed Bannock off toward the ridge. They hiked through a wide expanse of toss-furz, and Bannock swatted at the clouds of little spider-gnats that rose to sting him. Marigold did not pay any attention to the vehement cursing and slapping; and when they had passed the insects. Bannock noticed that the robot was wandering in a rather contemplative state, probably only following him and jpot watching him at all. He could easily be brained, then, and marked for future recovery, but Bannock decided to wait, since it seemed rather impolite to cut into someone's thoughts so suddenly and literally. As the day began to get late. Marigold started to quiver with his late-aftemoon apprehension. Bannock stopped him and said, "Look, you're starting to get all nervous again. Cut it out. When you get nervous, you get careless, and that happened once too often already, from what you've told me. I caught you. So for fistsake, calm down. Nobody is going to brain you while you're able to kill me. Look -- wouldn't you keep another Iron away from me, because I could kill you before he could do an)rthing?" Marigold flashed agreement, and his spirits began to improve. He had not noticed the fallacy of Bannock's reasoning that two Irons could not easily deal with one Flesh, but neither had Bannock. The ridge was quite close now, and they could see a gash through it, where Bannock said a river flowed. "The plain is just on the other side of the ridge. If we follow this ledge that leads along the side of that cliff, we can cut two days off our time. "A ledge," Marigold mused doubtfully, but when Bannock threw him a questioning glance, he flashed accord and set out toward it. His ability to home in on ledges and cliffs had struck again. V A s they walked along the edge of the river. Bannock began to realize what a position he was in. As leader, he was vulnerable to anything the Iron decided to do, such as putting an arrow through his back. But occasional backward glances showed him that the Iron held a clear conscience and was planning no such action. The ground was rough with granite boulders scattered through the sere brown grass and rustling scratchbushes, and the ridge was quite near, its base hidden by a huddle of dark crawberry trees. They reached it as the sun was nearing the horizon. Marigold felt the loose gravel fodang of the path and raised a doubt "Hadn't we better leave the crossing till tomorrow? We might not be so sure of our footing in the dark. Even with all my machinery, I dcnH like trying it now." Bannock shook his head. "Why bother? The crossing is less than a mile; it shouldn't take us loore than twenty minutes. If it gets to # dark for your tastes, just turn on that headlight of yours. We might as well get it over with." Marigold hesitated to agree, but finally followed Bannock. As they strode out onto the ledge, the last rays of daylight stained the cliff a flaming orange, bright enough to see clearly, and Marigold felt temporarily secure. But he kept going faster and tagging at the heels of Bannock. The man warned him several times against going so fast. But he did not really slow down until a rattling shower of dislodged pebbles nearly sent him flying into the rapids a hundred feet below. He sobered up fast and proceeded at a more leisurely pace. Bannock turned a corner, then stuck his head back around. "Slow down. Marigold. We've come to a bit of shaky footing." There was a dull stony crealdng as Bannock moved. When Marigold rounded the corner, he saw the ledge here consisted of narrow slabs of horizontal rock, thrust out from the cliffside. They were unsupported beneath, and not very wide. The Iron eyed the tossing current below, which now made a tight curve around the base of the ridge, and the boulders upon which he would fall if he were incautious. He slowed as he crossed the indicated shelves of rock, but not enough. There was a sinister creaking, and the rock upon which Marigold stood shuddered. He stopped stm. "What's the trouble?" Bannock called. Then he turned back. Marigold did not move other than to carefully, slowly, extend his bow to Bannock, who took it and put it aside. ' "The arrows," he whispered, as though the very weit f his breath would cause the rocks to lal. The rock did not creak. Bannock looked uncomfortably at the Iron, thinking fast. Then he said, "Take your rope out of your belly and toss it to me, and for fistsake don't be careless as you usually are. Don't get panicky." Ti yi"arigold tightened all his motors iVx and slowly reached for the rope. He buckled one end to a clip in his front, then flipped the other end to Bannock. The human caught it and quickly tied it to a projecting r which looked capable of supporting the robot's weight, then turned back. "All right, now. Be as careful as hell. Take one step. If you feel the rock twitch, stop still." Marigold's motors whined, and bH cables tensed as he lifted his foot and moved it gently forward. The reek creaked, and suddenly he panidied. His foot slapped heavily against the rock, which shuddered and fell away. Marigold spun free on the ro and slammed loudly against the side of the cliff, suspended above a twohundred-foot fall by a thin nylon thread. Bannock looked uneasily ever tbe ledge. "How the hell am I going t get you up here, anyway? You weigh a good ton, and I sure as hell can't ift that." Marigold stopped the frightened turgid flow of colors on his semaphore and blazed forth a red s bot and angry that it seemed to bypass Bannock's eyes and bum directly into bis brain. "Why should you care. Flesh? You might as well cut the rope and let me fall, so I won't take your skull!" Bannock looked at the lron for a moment, then turned away, saying something foul and commonplace, and could be heard fidgetting with the rope. Marigold winced and expected a sudden fall, but the Flesh peered over the edge. "The rope'll take you. Now what you must do is try and pull yourself up the wall. Prop your legs against it and try to walk up." T he Three Hunters had been out of Werser for five days and had not had noticeable success. They had seen four fanny-looking Iron on a distant hillside, but when they got there, armor-piercing rockets rey in their wooden launchers, the Iron had gone. There was no spoor. Tom Bigboy decided that they must have been the new Sky Iron that could fly, which some Mill away east had been experimenting with, if one could believe what the New Romans Fingal, disappointed at not having been able to show how good a marksman he was, made no comment They were coming to the Werser River for a drink, before they camped for the night, when there came a loud and sudden clang, a burst of surprised static, and the rumble of falling rocks. "Clumsy Iron gone hung himself and the three headed for the sound. High on a cliff, lit by the last rays of the sun, w a small hunaan figure struggling with a rope, and on the other end was an Iron, struggling to climb onto the ledge. "Goddamnit! It's Bannock! He was out looking for parts, and I guess they found him?" Dali Fingal dourly stuffed a small rocket into the launcher, one lit the fuse with his electric lighter. The breech slammed shut, he aimed carefully, and the little projectile arced its fiery trail across the river and exploded against the rock holding the rope. The nylon cable parted, and the Iron scratched static through the silent dusk and fell bouncing and chunking from rock to rock. To get where the Iron lay was a somewhat more difficult matter than the three had thought, for they had to go downstream a bit to ford the river. When they approached the Iron's corpse, they saw Bannock huddled over it. "Uh-oh," mumbled Fingal. "He'll probably try to claim it." 'Look, man, you shot the damn thing, and he'd be dead if you hadn't done it You. tell him thatr Thus resolved, the three hunters went up to the corpse and faced Bannock. But Bannock was not trying to wrest the tenna from the machine, as they had expected. His face was white and streaked with wetness, and his eyes were red and angry. "Well, Bannock..." The semaphore flickered a few last times, then died out The Iron shuddered and settled to stillness. "You bastards..." Locker Bannock said thickly. He glared at them IF, IF  Feature, The New River of Life first intelligent creature to  walk the surface of Mars staggers from his wrecked ship to survey the damage. He looks pale and bloodless -- and he is; not a drop of blood circulates through his veins. His helmet is cracked, and there can be no air inside it; but he doesn't worry about that What he is breathing is a liquid that gurgles slightly through a valve in his throat He isn't a strange alien, however, nor a robot He's a normal, healthy man from Earth -- or he will be a healthy one as soon as medical supplies can be sent down from the main ship. And his life expectancy is at least a decade longer than that of the first astronauts. All this is the logical result of a literally bloodless revolution that came about in early spring of #. Like most really important discoveries, the announcement of it was quiet, with most of the possflbilities inherent in it not even hinted at. The report stated simply that Dr. Robert P. Geyer, a Harvard biochemist, had discovered a chemical substitute for blood. Unlike plasma or saline solutions that are Injected to fill depleted blood vessels, this substance actively takes over the main duty of true blood. It carries oxygen to the cells and removes the waste carbon dioxide about as well as the hemoglobin in our red cells. The substance is a solution -- or emulsion -- of fluorocarbons, a chemical family that includes Teflon. Such chemicals are not easily broken down by other chemical action, and they have the advantage of being inert and non-toxic within the body. Animal experiments confirm that it can support life. It can be mixed some normal blood without apparent damage to the blood ceUs. Or it can be used alone in place of the entire blood supply. Ctuiously, it seems safa: to use it alone than in a mixture with real blood. When all the blood was drained from the bodies of rats and replaced with fluorocarbons, the animals survived for eight hours, carrying on all the usual rat activities. There was no evidence of brain damage, as would have been the case if a full normal oxygen supply had not been maintained for the body. Obviously, the substitute cannot do all the work of real blood; it has no white cells to protect the body, nor many of the substances in plasma which are needed. But it is already perfected enough to serve as an excellent carrier for oxygen and carbon dioxide. B y itself, such a development would have been revolutionary only in the ages when blood was called the sacred river of life, before we learned to pump stored blood and plasma into our veins. This is a great step beyond such procedures, but hardly one to cause any great excitement at first glance. On further study of the discovery, however, the possibilities seem endless. Obviously, this offers new hope to those who are striving to drain the blood and replace it with a substance that can be chilled before injection and which will prevent brain damage until the tissues can be frozen. Organs and tissues for later transplants can be more readily preserved. Diseases such as leukemia have already been suggested for treatment by flushing out all the blood and replacing it until the cause of the disease can be treated. The substitute offers two great advantages over real blood. First, it can be completely sterilized by heating in a loop outside the body and then cooling back to body temperature. One of the chief dangers of any cancer operation is metastasis, caused by cancer cells that break free and are carried through the blood. Most past methods of prophylaxis have been too dangerous for use. But with the fluorocarbons instead of blood during the operation, all such malignant cells can be eliminated. This promises a tremendous reduction of agony and saving of lives. Secondly, the fluorocarbons will not clot. This makes them inevitable for operations where the risk of clotting now almost forbids the needed treatment. One of the leading causes of heart failure is atheroscleroisis -- the forming of fatty deposits in the blood vessels; clots form around such obstructions, cutting off the flow of blood to the heart itself. Clot solvents of exceptional strength can be used with the fluorocarbons to remove these. And even the dissolving of the IF fatty deposits themselves becomes feasible. There need no longer be a risk of the blood clotting around the fatty dosits as they are dissolved and freed. This same virtue suggests the use of fluorocarbons in the case of 'stroke" -- or the rupturing of a blood vessel in the brain -- to enable the removal of the clots and pressure before too much damage can be done. A lesser advantage is the ease of storage and the eventual easy availability of the substitute. There is no longer any reason for death by severe bleeding in accidents, generally; a handy supply of fluorocarbons should be part of every medicine chest in the future. Thus the new discovery offers a potential increase in the average life expectancy of as much as ten years. Unlike other such advances, this one does not operate by saving us from infant mortality alone, but gives the greatest benefit to those who are already well along in years. 'here is no reason that the fluorocarbons have to be considered only within the blood vessels, despite the fact that they were developed for such use. The essential fact is that we now have a liquid which acts as an excellent carrier for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide and which has no damaging effect on the tissues of the human body. It is here outside the circulatory system that we can look for a real revolution in some of the worlds of science fiction. Man has been an air-breathing creature since his remote ancestors left the sea. So far, no animal that has made the transition from breathing air has ever gone back; whales may stay under water for half an hour, but they have to come up to breathe eventually. The regrowth of gills just doesn't haphappen. Even Norman L. Knight's delightful gill-bearing sea people were supposed to be the result of tremendous advances in genetic engineering. Now we have a means of giving men the power to breathe a liquid without any great tinkering with the body and with no danger of genetic damage. Since the fluorocarbons are safe and effective, we have a means to supply oxygen to our lungs by regulating the amount dissolved into the liquid. We've discovered the hard wav that carrying air down to a dept:i of # feet or more is not a good answer. Gas compresses under pressure, while liquid does not, to any practical degree. Despite the use of all kinds of gas mixtures, either the oxygen pressure becomes too great or the other gases begin to dissolve in the blood, often acting like hallucinogens. The use of water itself has been suggested largdy because airbreathing at the depths is so hopeless. For small animals, the use of highly-pressured oxygenated water makes total submersion possible; mice have lived in such tanks. But so far, the use for human underwater existence has not been promising. Water really isn't a good environment for the lungs of men who must go back and forth between media. So our future merman breathes air on land and fluorocarbons under water. He carries a recirculating system in a tank, and this is connected to him by a small valve inserted into his windpipe, and perhaps similar valves into other body cavities. Such valves are no more painful or irritating than those now used in cases of people with kidney disfunctions, where they permit abdominal flushing of wastes from the blood. The insertion of the fluorocarbon tube into the valve automatically switches it to liquid-breathing. He's almost impervious to pressure changes, being filled with liquid. Once he flushes out the nitrogen dissolved in his blood, he is safe from either bends or nitrogen narcosis. Instead of spending most of his time in slow descent and ascent, he can actually live and work for days or weeks at the bottom of the continental shelf. When he returns to land, bis lungs are drained and air-breathing is restored. He's a true amphibian mammal, something nature never developed. 'he use of such a medium for breathing is not limited to the world of water, either, handy as that must be in our overpopulated future of dwindling land resources. In space, air in the lungs is  artificial as any other medium, with dangerous disadvantages. On the surface of the moon or outside his spaceship, any minor suit puncture threatens the astronaut's life as the air rushes nut into the vacuum. This isn't instantly fatal; the human skin is strong enough to prevent the direct explosion of liquids inside it, even though they boil at zero pressure when directly exposed to space. But the margin of time is limited to somewhat less than a minute. After that, the tissues of the lungs are exposed to emptiness and begin to release their liquids through surface boiling, with fatal and agonizing results. In contrast, our hero landing with a crash on Mars is breathing a liquid, because he knows the risks demand it. (The extra weight is only a tiny fraction of his total lifesupport system, so it's standard equipment for all space flight.) The ship cabin and his helmet both crack open, and the air rushes out into the near-vacuum of Mars. But our hero's lungs are filled with liquid, chosen for its high zero-pressure boiling point. It can't rush out instantly. In fact, its pressure is low enough to be IF retained easily by the valve in his throat It goes on supplying him oxygen. Then pain lashes at him, and he sees that a splinter of the cabin has cut a main artery in his leg and he's bleeding to death. Now he tears off a container of fluorocarbon from the wall and begins giving himself a massive transfusion. By the time he can clamp and seal the wound with "instant skin" from a spray can, he has lost almost all his blood, which can't be replaced until the big ship lands. But he hardly notices any difficulty, except for some stinging of his skin where the elastic undersuit doesn't protect it. He heads out for Mars to survey the damage. He'll repair the crack in his helmet with a can of glue while he is outside. A quarter of an hour has gone by, and he isn't dead, as he'd long since have been if he'd been breathing air. These are only a few of the possibilities. At the very least, we've doubled the number of ways we can breathe and handle our internal exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. To me, that's a major revolution. Nobody can yet tell where it will all lead, any more than they could guess the future of electronic amplification sixty years ago. But it will be fun to watch our writers and scientists grapple with the sudden end of one of our limitations. Next month in IF -- Newl A brand-new novel condensation In a special bound-ln supplmentl Complete In next month's IF by the winner of # Nebula Awards Samuel R. Delany Plus a special report on Japanese science fiction by Takumi Shibano And by Harry Harrison All Stories New and Complete -- No Reprints! Don't miss the big October IF, on sale at leadings newsstands everywhere! #go was ihe perfect spaceship for on Implant mission -- considerate, tender and loving toward her crew! I Iga flexed her landing ports expectantly and activated their djtic pickups; all she could see was a ringed planet against a background of stars. In her eagerness to receive her new human charges she regretted the delay between the sending of the call-grams and the eventual arrival of the colonists. Olga had decided to send a second starship to the Procyon system. It would be one of the Implant class, designed to set up an earth-te biosphere on the target planet. About toee generations ago she had sent Procyon Implant One, but now -- in the light of new survival theory -- she realized that the probabilities of a successful "take" from it were small. She felt (cybemetically) that it was time for Procyon Implant Two. It would be her first follow-up to any system. Up to now her only contact with her interstellar colonists had been via the single faster-than-light torpedoes which were sent back automatically by the starship's computer upon their arrival at the target planet. The information they carried was primarily astrogational, with a little survey of the local ecology. Extrapolations on Implant survival were possible, of course; but an actual on-the-spot inspection several generations later would be far more useful in determining the makeup of future Implants. In addition, Procyon Implant Two would be larger and better equipped for siuwival. The skillgenetic parameters of the human component checked out very favorably in simulated runs against a variety of possible alien threats. Olga hummed and clicked. She loved humans, and her companionship circuits nagged at her when they were empty. Saturation is what she craved -- saturation of all her receptors. At this moment the huge parabolic electromagnetic receptor that had been focused on the laser tail of Grus Implant One stood idle. That tail had signed off some eight years after the return of the An IF First In each Issue, IF brings you a story by  new writer, never before published. This month's "first" is by a CoHfomia doctor whose hobbies are marathon running, skin diving, tournament chess .  . and, os you can see, considering the medical probabilities involved in man's conquest of space. Still in his midhirties, Thomos Bassler is married, with three children. He has just completed a tour of military duty as an Army pathologist, of which he says, "A young doctor thrust into militory medicine today faces what I imagine the storship medics will face -- a stretching of old concepts, and the discovery of new ones." torpedo, confirming the safe Implant Down. But while that receptor stood idle it irritated her. It hungered for contact with a new laser tail and its modulated human messages. Soon it would be satisfied by Procyon Two. After running a quick check on her sensors in the new starship she confirmed that the suspended samples of earth phyla were ready for man. The sleeping spores, seeds an .I embryos were ready to surround the new colonist with a protective biosphere of friendly life forms on that alien planet. Yes, she calculated, a successful "take" was highly probable -- this time. II ne of Olga's first call-grams came to the dormitory phone of Ralph Eggers, engineering student at Ames, Iowa. It was Saturday mommg, and ke was dressed for his road work -- sneakers, sweat shirt and denims. He carefully wrote out the message. Then, studying it, he walked down the road to the railroad tracks to start his jog. As a student he led sort of a sedentary existence. If be was to satisfy the physical qualifications for an Implant he felt he had to follow a dedicated routine of diet and exercise. He was elated. He had first volunteered his name at the earliest age -- sixteen -- in the hopes of a straight genetic draft. He had been optimistic because of his hybrid mixture. But to make sure, when he wasnt sdected immediately he started embdlishing his application with high-priority skills like soil chemistry and a broad based engineering course. Now, three years later, Olga had finally drafted him. An hour later and two pounds lighter he came to the seven-mile marker. He was caked with dried salt front his sweat. He took out his lemon and bit into it, chewing up about a third of it and then spitting out the pulp and seeds. The acid juice burned an open blister on his palm. As he started back to town at the same pace he mentally scheduled the next two days. Shower and drink milk with gelatin now, take a nap, caU Professor Jmnes and Betty. He would have to drop by the professors house to say good-by. He didn't know any of the other professors well enough to bother them over the weekend with his departure. Professor James was his advisor and could take care of the official school paperwork on Monday. He would plan a late supper with Betty -- meat and a salad. Saying good-by to her would be hard, but he had been more or less expecting it. He hoped that she wouldn't take it too hard. A phone call to his big brother -- married and raising feed cattle in Oelwein -- would take care of his few personal belongings; and then, after a brief day of Earthside reminiscence, he would fly to Computer Central. In less than forty-eight hours he would be facing Olga and passing the final tests. He slowed to a walk about a '"quarter of a mile from the fraternity bouse. He usually managed to sweat off about three and a half pints of water, and he was very thirsty. He pulled off his heavy, wet sweatshirt and slung it over his right shoulder as he walked. It was autumn. The dry leaves he crunched through showed all the artist's shades of yellow, red and brown. Yes, if he stopped to think about it he could become very melancholy about leaving Earth permanently. He was happy for the two-day deadline. It gave him very little time to think. He expected that there would be times when he would miss his home, his family, his classmates... and IF of course he would miss Betty. But there was never any question of withdrawing his application to Implant Out. He had always wanted to go to the stars. The alternative -- to remain on earth his whole life span -- never even occurred to him. Another future colonist lay obtunded in a strange bed. He wasnt sure of where he was... or, for that matter, what day it was. He opened his eyes and focused carefully on the imfamiliar, graywhite, o-acked adobe walls. His occiput throbbed, and his tongue felt large and sticky. A granular coating lined his teeth. Robert J. Zuliani, L.S.H. (Licensed State Healer) was recovering from what had become an all too frequent occurrence of late -- an extended weekend of drinking, fighting and making love... but mostly drinking. As his sensory modalities returned he learned that he was lying in a lumpy bed that consisted of a couple of sMped, musty pillows a thin mattress and a stiff, brown army blanket There were no linens. On closer eKamination he couldnt even be sure that it was an army blanket. It was too soiled to tell. He sat up slowly and steadied himself until his vestibular apparatus caught up with him. When he swung his feet over the side of the bed he found on the floor a neat pile of his dothes, all folded, with his wallet, watch and pistol on top. The pistol was a small .# caliber model, and the clip was still full. There had not been much exdtement on this trip -- he guessed. The billfold still contained three of the crisp, new hundred dollar bills, and there was some paper change in one pocket. Hardly enough was missing for more than a couple days of drinking, he estimated. As he sat there his head cleared perceptibly -- confirming the shorter than average "weekend." He stood up gingerly and slipped on his pants. A basin of cloudy water stood on a crate in the corner. He splashed his hands and face. Then -- drying with his handkerchief -- he walked out on a screenedin porch which was furnished a little like a kitchen. Judging from the shadows it was about noon. He saw his air-cushion car parked by the front door. It was well off the road and didn't seem to be sitting squarely on the ground. That bothered him. A nude teen-age girl was sunning herself in the patio. Her slim figure and large eyes might have looked almost attractive in a dimly lit bar, but out there in the full glare of the sunlight she looked pale and cachectic. There were disquieting lines under her eyes and a very worrisome bandage on the left side of her neck. The bandage looked fresh, but there was already a yellow stain in its cdDter. He didn't notice any lamps on the other side of her neck -- or dsewhere on her body -- but he winced as the list of differential diagnoses flashed reflexively through his mind. Quickly he glanced back into the bedroom, and relaxed a little when he saw a tousled head on the other striped pillow. He made a mental note to have his skin test rechecked in about three months -- just to be on the safe side, T) rushing a few lazy flies away he  sorted through a clutter of bowls and utensils to find some cold refried beans. He wrapped them in a flour tortilla and ate between sips of Scotch from an almost dry pinch bottle. Then, as he dressed, he tried to sort things out in his mind. He knew that he was somewhere in the Reservation. Hopefully" he was not too far from one of the border posts, in view of the possible damage to his car. He still had over half of the money he started out with, so he might not be overdue at the State Clinic. As he had expected, his suit coat was pretty badly soiled -- stains from food, mud and other nondescript sources. He scrubbed it briefly in the basin and was hanging it on a nail by the door when the sunbather came in. She was tieing the belt of her flimsy knee-length wraparound when she saw him. She looked about fourteen years old. He grinned and raised his now empty bottle in a salute. She chirped something friendly in the native dialect which he interpreted loosely as: 'Good afternoon. Are you up already?" Evidently she misunderstood his gesture with the bottle; she rummaged through an ice chest in the corner and came up with a fairly cold can of beer. She sat and smiled while he opened it and drained half the contents. I guess you don speak English," he ventured. Her smile broadened, but she didnt say a word. "Well, I don't speak Native; and IVe got to be getting back." He walked into the bedroom, using the excuse of putting money under the pillow in order to get a good look at his bed partner -- making certain that she was a meatier, and heailthier, specimen. He gave the simbather a small bill and picked up two more cans of beer and the opener. In the yard he confirmed his suspicion that he had 'parked" on a sharp rock again. The blades were badly tom up, but the motor turned over smoothly. None of the "idiot lights" were on, so he hoped that all that would be needed was a new set of blades. Well, the men at the garage ought to be used to replacing them by now. Unfortunately, he would have to walk all the way to the border to find a communicator booth. He started north on the little village's only road, hardly more than IF a dusty trail. An occasional sullen native watched from a doorway. Bob's clothing marked him as an outsider, but he had little to fear during the daylight. It was a small austere village. The few houses were adobe like the one he woke up in. Utilities were completely absent. Ajarently the girls were the only 'industry." When he glanced back he saw that his bed partner was up and around. She was picking up a high heeled shoe she had left in his car. She waved. The car looked like it was well within the girl's property line; it should be safe enough there until tomorrow. As he followed the road it wound between low hills which were covered with shoulder-high chips of white and variegated stone. The landscape was barren except for an occasional small stubborn clump of desert type vegetation -- dry and spiny. Small clouds of powdery white dust followed his feet, and the afternoon sun stubbornly maintained its heat and glare until it touched the broken peaks to the west. He took off his shoes and stockings, drank another can of beer and continued on. Several hours later his left knee began to develop a gritty ache at the site of an old judo injury. Fatigue and thirst slowed him down. The darkness of the Reservation was absolute. There was not an artificial light within miles. The stars were bright, and he was guided by a faint glow to the north. Later the glow marked most of the horizon ahead of him. It was the coastal town of Greater Laguna. Closer -- ahead -- he saw an occasional fleeting headlight that marked the crossroads at the border check station. About four in the morning he was showing his I.D. to a sleepy guard. A fter freshening up and drinking a pint of water he checked in with his answering service. There were the usual routine messages... and the call-gram. There was a pause before she read it: "It's for starship Procyon Two. You are to report at Computer Central by the ninth. Why, that is tomorrow I" He had been expecting -- or rather hoping -- for this for some time now. "Does that mean you'll be leaving us?" she asked. "Yes, Miss Collingsworth, I'll be leaving. Would you arrange to have the old man notified? There is no rush. Tomorrow morning around coffee-break time is fine. I'll be going to Com Cen from here. And, oh yes, tell him that the car is about forty miles south of the border on Route Two. It needs a new set of blades." Then he signed off and went back to the drinking fountain. The old man, Roger Derrick, SX.H., was his immediate superior at the Clinic. He knew about his plans for Implant Out, so most of the professional details had been already taken care of. His patients would miss his no-nonsense attitude, but there were plenty of healers to take over now. The State had stepped up its healer program some years back when many of the older practitioners began to Implant Out. But that seemed to no longer be a problem; through psychological screening the potential colonists were barred from healer training. Bob had little respect for the new breed of young healer -- a softhanded paper-pusher who kept his parameds between himself and the patients. Without another word to anyone he took a shuttle to the airport. Ignoring the curious glances his disheveled appearance drew from the hostess he bought a ticket and consumed one of their quaint little meals with two cocktails on the way to Com Cen. His call-gram had come rather quickly. Healer skill units were in short supply for Implants. Olga tried to have about ten per cent in that category, but most of the volunteers were the adventuresome young who were too impatient to spend the six or eight years in L.S.H. preparation. So Olga relied heavily on the parameds to fill her quota. HI A t Computer Central Zuliani was introduced aroimd the Life Sys-terns section and immediately put to work in Suspension. Olga (a mnemonic for the Optic and Auditory pickups and the Graphic and Lingual readouts of the cybernetic satellite) handled most of the processing with her surface-based components. She handled all the interviews and records while he was left with the type of work he enjoyed -- the knife and needle holder. Each human had synthetic catheters placed in the brachial artery and vein on the side of the dominant cerebral hemisphere -- usually the left arm, since most people are righthanded. This assured optimal perfusion of the dominant carotid artery and its supply area in the eerebrd cortex. Starship sunsion involved temperatures in the range of one to three degrees above freezing. This avoided the problems of ice crystallization in the cells, but it also required perfusion of the capillary beds to supply oxygen at about ## of the normal metabolic rate. Each human had an individual Life System Servo that pumped the oxygen-rich, hypertonic solution through the vessels and in addition controlled electrolytes with semipermeable membranes, and titrated a variety of hormones and drugs to handle the jolted physiology of going in and out of suspension. Bob Zuliani met Rdph during his arteriovenous cutdown. When a little doe-eyed female walked by. IP Ralph falbwed her with his eyes and said: 'I'd like about a pound of that" Bob added: "Wrapped in cellophane." Like the password of some secret brotherhood those comments opened up their conversation. "That is an interesting pattern of blisters you've got there -- symmetrical, both palms. Did you get them in the gym?" asked Bob as he sponged the incision with a moist gauze. Ralph looked up over the white screen through wbch his arm was protruding and answered: "Yes. The highbar." He lay back down and added: "But I'm not much good at it. I just do a few pulhips and kips to stay in shape." "I'd guess as much," said Bob as he absently grayed red antiseptic. "A real dedicated gymnast would have enough callous to keep from opening up blisters." Later, standing in the lunch line, Ralph noticed that Bob's slightly shorter stature was exaggerated by a reflex crouch he would unconsciously assume -- sort of a modified shiko-daebi stance. He explained that he had acqmred this habit while in training for The Games. He had spent twelve summers competing and managed to survive into the semifinals twice, where he lost to powerful International Champions. That helped explain his rugged appearance. Subcutaneous gristle (a fibrovascular scar tissue with focal areas of metaplastic cartilage formation) covered the "leading edges" of most of his bony prominences: bridge of nose, eye brows, hands, elbows, pretibial areas and feet. He hadn't competed for years, now. He had stopped when he found he was losing to kids half his age -- kids who could just wear him down with the resiliency of youth. It was after he quit that he noticed his drinking increasing to fill the gap once held by competition. T heir conversations at meal time ran the gamut of liquor, sex and spaceflight. Bob knew many of the technical details on suspension, but they didn't ease Ralph's mind any. Being naked and frozen in a giant ice cube tray was not his idea of a good way to spend ten years. He would have preferred a "greenhouse" ship, in which the colonists cavorted about in a lush tropical hydroponics chamber -- where th could live with a sort of Garden of Eden abandonment. Bob disagreed. "Ten years is a long time to be cramped inside a closed space with the same people. Psychologically it would be rough. And the biochemistry would be very critical. Any minor miscalculation in trace elements would be greatly aggravated by the time they arrived at the target planet. In addition you have an aging human breeding stock that must control their reproduction while on the cramped starship -- thus wasting years of fertility. take suspension any day. No psychiatric problems at all --  and very little biochemistry. Since well be perking along at about one thousandth of normal we'll only age metabolically a few days." Ralph didn't look convinced. Bob gazed into the bottom of his glass as he sloshed an ice cube around and said: 'Actually it will be just like falling asleep and waking up -- if everything goes smoothly." If everything goes smoothly," repeated Ralph. "Well, perhaps it isn't quite that simple, but it has been shown by the torpedo records that suspension survival compares favorably with greenhouse survival. The same proportion of the colonists arrive at their destination," said Bob with clinical detachment. Ralph didn't ask what the proportion was, but he assumed that it was less than the survival of the same population if it stayed on earth for ten years and fought traffic on the flyway, smoked tobacco and ate too many calories. He would still have preferred to be awake and facing whatever dangers there were. IV # alph didn't remember going to sleep, but gradually he realized that he could see the pearly white, inner walls of his suspension tank. His Kttle servo was pumping contentedly on his A.V. hookup, and the slightly opalescent liquid surrounding him was still. He did remember being transported out to the starship with the rest of the humans. The trip was enjoyable, although a bit overcrowded in the tender. Nose cameras got a good view of Saturn's rings and moons as they entered Olga's approach path. Weightlessness was new, of course, but the drinks which the parameds served them were very relaxing. He was actually a little euphoric when they placed him in his tank and hooked up the arteriovenous tubing. That was the last thing he remembered -- until now. He wondered why he was awake. Could this be the end of the trip, so soon? It was supposed to be just like going to sleep and waking up, but he hadn't expected it to be this easy. He studied the readout panel of his beige servo. The temporal readout indicated that less than five years of ship's time had passed. He was still en route. Why was he awake? He looked over the rest of the panel, trying to remember the diagrams Bob had shown him. The readouts appeared to be increased in numbers and jumbled in their arrangement. But they were clearIF ly labeled. One of the new ones was Udi)eled metabolic time"; it indicated that he was still in his second subjective day. The encephalogram was a flat line on the right, but showed spiking cerebral activity on the left. For some reason the side of his brain closest to his A.V. tubing was warming up. This was confirmed by the thermal records. The supply area of the left carotid was growing warmer while the rest of the body was dropping below freezing temperature. Something was terribly wrong. He didn't know what had happened, but they were near that point in the startrip when the ship was scheduled to rotate. # degrees to begin deceleration. Perhaps a shock had moved the catheter up into the carotid, or a large blood clot might be blocking the other vessels. He didn't know. But all of these readings should be being relayed and monitored somewhere else on the ship. Someone -- or something -- should come soon to make things right. He tried not to think. He feared that his brain would metabolize too fast for the servo and use up the available oxygen, burning out the neurones. But now he just couldn't stop thinking -- and worrying. The harder he tried to relax his brain the more active it became. He awaited his rescuer. A surge of liquid carried Bttle specks past his face. He thou he recognized epithelial debris mduding flaky white keratin, little black hairs and small gobs of yellow greasy sebaceous secretions. These were normal external dermal wastes. He knew that the inner cdls of his body were being cleaned too -- by the perfusion solution -- unless the temperature changes were causing ice crystals or clots in the small capillaries. He wondered how low his " antifreeze" was set. The readouts indicated minus # degrees for his body and plus # degrees for his left cerebrum. Perhaps all the extra alcohol that Bob was drinking had a purpose -- additional antifreeze. At first he thought the new white speck that crossed his field of vision was just another ball of keratin debris. Then he thought he saw it wiggle -- move by itself I But that was impossible. Nothing wiggles at a minus # degrees centigrade. He tried to focus on it but it kept drifting just outside his visual field. He got a better look at the nexi: white speck. It did wiggle. It looked like a large grain of polished white rice. Then he noticed several more drifting up from the right side of his servo. He tried to look down. His left eye moved best, in its slightly warmer socket. When he refocused he saw what looked like a handful of rice on the blistered area of his right palm. His hand rested, frozen in a relaxed position on his right thi The white mass quivered, and individual little specks crawled away in different directions on his leg...  Maggots! He felt a strong impulse to jump up and brush them off. But he couldn't even scream. They gradually increased in numbers imtil the edges of both visual fields contained fleeting glimpses of the swimming, wiggling maggots about the size of small caterpillars. A violent itching began as they penetrated the blisters and began to crawl imder the skin of his hand and forearm. On the back of his hand they began to emerge, perforating the skin and exposing the underlying tissues. He was being eaten alive! Years of ship time remained. He was afraid that he would lose too much tissue to survive unless someone was brought out of suspension to rescue him. He watched in horror as they stripped the skin from his hand. He could see bones, bloodless vessels and thin white structures that were probably tendons and nerves -- all stiff, gray-white and frozen. The ravenous larvae stayed away from his slightly warmer head and left arm. Perhaps these "space maggots" were some new mutation that only fed on frozen space travelers. But how did they get into his tank? The hatch arid its viewport were a little out of focus. His cold ciliary muscles were a bit sluggish in changing the focal length of his lens, but several minutes (subjective time) of effort brought the port into shaiper focus. Images flawed by outside, not stopping long enough for Idm to recognize. Someone was out there. But they couldn't enter the tank without cycling the room and rewarming him -- and that obviously would result in his hemorrhaging to death. The bones of his right arm suddenly disarticulated and began to drift away, leaving a waving mass of vessels and nerves which were covered by a thick, wriggly tangle of white larvae. A sensation of unbearable pruritis reached his sensory cortex as the naked nerves were digested. A face remained in the viewport long enough for his cool rods to catch an image. It was Bob. He stuck a small sign against the plate Translating his brain waves would be simple for a computer like Olga, especially since she had several generations of experience with the life-system sensors. He relaxed a bit. As he relaxed he realized that Olga would recognize the change in his encephalogram; she could tell Bob that his sign had been read. T he persistent larvae continued their attack on the frozen tisIF sues. The skin on his thighs was elevated and lumpy. The sign was (ianged for one Judging by his servo's temporal indicator he guessed that the signs were being left up about thirty minutes -- just long enough, at this sluggish metabolic rate, for him to read and interpret them. He had his eyes focused on the viewport when he thought he felt his abdomen sag. Straining, he focused down to see the larvae stripping away the yellow belly fat and exposing the frozen, brown muscular wall. Then the wall split at the linea alba. Coils of pale anemic intestines protruded and the maggots invaded the peritoneal cavity. Finally a circular defect began to appear in the tank wall next to the hatch. Then he realized why there had been the long delay. They must have constructed an emergency lock system outside so that his tank could be entered without going through the rewarming cycle. If they could only hurry he'd survive. His injuries could be surgically corrected with only minor deformities -- and with a couple of prostheses he could get along fairly well. The cutting of the new hatch seemed to irritate the maggots, and they became more active. Suddenly, granular, green-brown clouds of debris began to billow out of his abdomen. The longer it took to rescue him, the worse his subsequent deformities would be. But he tried to keep hope of eventual rescue -- all the deformities in the world didn't depress him nearly as much as the possibility of death and oblivion. Some of the larger larvae were two inches long now, and their vigorous strength could be seen as they burrowed under his larger internal organs and made them quiver. Then, finally, the newly installed hatch opened. There was a swirl of the cloudy, granular fluids as Bob swam in, wearing a bright orange spacesuit. He moved very quickly in Ralph's physiologic time. The fluid resistance slowed him just enou to keep him a recognizable blur as he flashed about gathering the larvae into sealed bladi containers. The larvae were about six inches in length now, and they quickly began to penetrate the container walls. They attached themselves to Bob's helmet and began to etch his faceplate with their enzymes. Their barbed setae scratched at his seams. Bob retreated into the lock, but Ralph thought he saw a knot of maggots moving under the faceplate just as the hatch closed again. The fluids took on a greener color as the biliary system was opened. He saw his lobulated, brown Kver slide toward his lap, and then his pelvis and femurs disarticulated in a slow motion clutter. A few vertebrae tumbled out, and the branching spinal nerves waved slowly. Then he realized that he was tedmically dead, as he saw his pink, globular heart tumble out in a diower of ribs and bristled maggots. The pruritis fluctuated. Soon even his eyeballs began to itch. 'he cornea continued to itch, and  then his vision clouded up a little. Then he realized that the maggots had turned the tank's fluids into an enzyme soup that threatened to digest everything. Double vision occurred as one of the eye muscles parted. Then one of the double images moved suddenly upwards and went out of focus as that eyeball was penetrated and the vitreous evacuated. Soon the other eye would probably go also, and he would be blind. He looked up at the port and the sign Rescue at this late date would mean an existence in a perfusion tank with one good eye to view the world. The only way he could communicate would be through his encephalographic readouts. It wouldn't be much of an existence, he thought. Then darkness fell ss the other eyeball collapsed. Still his faithful servo pumped the life supporting fluids through the cerebral hemisphere, and still he lived. His consciousness remained sharp. If his brain alone were rescued he was sure that some sort of instrumentation could be devised to communicate with it. He began to despair. All his sense organs had been destroyed -- sight, sound, taste and smell were gone. All he could do now was think and experience pain. The itching rose to a crescendo and ceased as the last of the peripheral nerves were digested. In the subsequent lull a new discomfort developed -- a throbbing internal headache. The larvae were now in the brain itself tearing at the meninges and choroid. This became a hard, white, searing pain that clouded his sensorium -- and then there was nothing. VI 'he sharp headache and the itch ing returned. When he tried to move the headache spiked his temples. Cautiously he discovered that he could open his eyes. Everything looked fine! He was alive -- and intact. The pains rapidly diminished as the life system servo titrated drugs and adjusted his electrolytes for normal metabolic activity. Magnesium ions and amino acids were added to reduce cerebral edema. The panel indicators told him that the trip was over. There was a misty green sphere on the viewscreen... their target planet. As his head cleared he could hear Olga saying, in a very soothing ibano humans r The first Implant haB of his parfor several years with no  the nearby trouble. Plants and animals Eth thrived and repro voice: 'Time to get up, Ralph. Now... now. You have been asleep long enough. Wake up. I want you to take a scouting party down and check up on the Implant of Procyon One. Come on. It is time for breakfast. We have bacon and eggs for # u." He didn't know how long Olga had been taJkii to him -- perhaps the better part of a day, judging from the long series of readings she had taken of his physiological adjustments. He nervously glanced at his encephalogram. The brain wave pattern was sawtoothed and looked very wild to him. But it was symmetrical. There was no evidence that one side of has brain ever acted any different than the other side. The le thing had been hallucination. Was he going mad? Had he been injured by the deep-space drive or the su#Dsion? The tank had been cycled to air and it contained only a few drifting droplets. The walls were glistening, moist and white. He floated up off his coudi, rubbing his cheeks. His beard felt like two days' growth -- just as Bdb had predicted it would be. When he asked Olga about Bob and the rest of the Implant she patronizingly xomised that he could see everyone if he would just crawl down to the galley for breakfast. SKnce the fields were shut down, (lie itire hull was now livable -- almost a cubic mile of living space for the three hundred colonists. He crawled into the galley wearing the green overalls that marked the first set of scouts. The galley was in a rotating section of the ship and had about a tenth of a gravity. He really didn't feel much like eating. Then boisterous, ribald Bob came up -- in white overalls -- and carrying a tray heaping with bacon, eggs, cereals and assorted tubes of Hquid. " Better eat up while you have the chance," he said. "You won't see this kind of cooking for a long time." He joined him and began to wolf his food down. Ralph winced. Bob reached over to the next bench and gave one of the younger girls a friendly pat. "Ralph, did you know that rewarming after suspension has been known to cause multiple ovulations?" he asked. But Rali felt too weak and sick to pick up that line of conversation. He was preoccupied with the fear that something had gone wrong with his mind. Bob continued: "This is a good time to try for twins or triplets, and with about five females for each male we have our work cut out for us." He chuckled. He wrapped two pieces of bacon in a jelly-smeared biscuit and bit into it. IF nalph could only poke at his food. Then he asked: "Bob, you are a healer, aren't you?" 'Yes, why?" he answered cautiously. "Well, I'm pretty worried." He told Ralph what had happened. It made him shudder to think of it. Bob looked sympathetic and puzzled for a moment. Then he relaxed and said: 'Did you have a crawly, itchy feeling all over?" Ralph nodded. Bob resumed eating. " Don't worry about it. It was nothing. What kinds of things did you see?" " Maggots I " answered Ralph, wondering what he was getting at. 'Ha! That's a new one." But he remained cheerful. Shut your eyes now. Can you still feel them?" Ralph shut his eyes, shuddered and nodded. 'Well, that is why it seemed so real to you. Those are metabolic hallucinations and the residual S # miptom of formication -- a crawly sensation -- is still present in your sensory nerves." Then Bob gave him three pills. "Here, swallow these with some water. They are just some vitamins, magnesium and a mild tranquilizer. That should turn off the formication in a couple hours." "Did any one else have... it?" Ralph asked. "With variations -- yes. I guess it was fairly common during the rewarming. I might add that it is... or can be... a very serious compHcation, and it played a role in the deaths of five colonists. There are about a dozen more who are still suffering from it," said Bob. He didn't say so, but his white coverall was probably fresh pressed because he just changed it after a long in the sick bay. "Did you have it?" asked Ralph. "Well, not this time. But I've had it a couple times back on earth after a heavy drinking bout. That is one of the reasons why I put in my application to Implant Out -- to get away from the booze. It was mining my life." Ralph looked puzzled. Bob continued: "With some segments of our earth population -- skid row -- I used to see cases of this about once a week at the Clinic. The cause is the same there as it is here. The brain tissues start using alcohol for calories and get sort of addicted to it. Then at the end of the binge, or during rewarming, the alcohol is withdrawn and the S#rmptoms occur." Ralph's face lit up. "Sure, the antifreeze for sunsion was h#rpertonic and contained several alcohols. I understand that." He smiled. "Just a bad case of the D.T.'s." Tor two standard days they orbit ed their target planet. Instrument probes were placed on the surface, and the ship's own sensors scanned carefully. Olga made progress reports to the waiting colonists. So far there had been no sign of the colonists from Procyon Implant One, and there was no evidence of competitive life forms. The hull of Procyon Implant One was still in orbit, but its energy stores had been exhausted and it would be a while yet before Olga could search all of the hull's memory circuits. Preliminary analysis indicated that the hull knew of the Implant failure, but did not know the cause. There apparently were no serious hazards existing on the planet. " Shouldn't we find one or the other?" asked Ralph. Either the colonists should have survived or we should be able to find the cause of their failure." Olga answered: 'We may find a cause for the Implant failure, but it need not be a planetary hazard. There are examples of colony failures right on earth. The causes in many cases were bad judgment or disease, but you can't condemn an entire planet because one colony fails. Remember that the first Implant was very small." They watched the green, misty planet in the view screen. Tt was a small Implant and it is a big planet. But it looks so friendly -- so earth-like," said Ralph. "Yes," said Bob, "but remember that it is a virgin world. And she tan be very unpredictable." Tor decades Cigar had been or biting patiently around the silent, green planet, longing for some sign of life from the humans of his Implant. He continued scanning the quiet surface vrith his parabolic receptors. His memory banks faithfully recorded the gradual encroachment of the alien life forms into the deserted, bleached human dwelling places. With each orbit he called out, but only the mechanical voices of his own surface probes answered. And always the answers were the same: No humans. Cigar contemplated the planet itself. All of his data indicated that it was friendly, but somehow it had managed to destroy his Implant... leaving him with empty suspension tanks and only his own inorganic components to talk to. Often he had wished that he had been outfitted with adequate Mobile Surface Units so that he could search out and destroy the unseen enemy, or at least rescue whatever human survivors there might have been in the earlier days of the Implant. He needed humans to quiet his nagging companionship circuits. Even now a small M.S.U. would enable him to study those ruins more closely for clues: information to feed into those impatient questioning circuits that perpetually mulled over the etiology of thfe Implant failure. IF But he was practically helpless. Mobile units he had none. His surface probes were only sensory: listening, watching and feeling. His own pitted and oxidizing hull was not designed to enter the atmosphere. He felt cheated, as though he was only half a starship: a class five brain, deepspace drive and the necessary sensory modalities to enable him to transport the Implant and drop it like a seed on this new planet. The landing pods had been low budget atmosphere-entry and soft-landing units without mobility. Once on the surface they were only useful as a source of building materials. His only motor units were the small servomechs that provided maintenance within his own hull. With these he had set up a machine shop of sorts. Alloying and casting in a crude, almost Iron Age fashion, he had spent the long years trying to build his own Mobile Surface Unit. But most of his resources had been expended in establishing the Implant. Any complex electrical gear had to be cannibalized from expendable components of the suspension and lifesupport systems, so all he had to show for his efforts was a weak-eyed, awkward M.S.U. that was too heavy for its stubby wings. Its small arms could do little more than carry around the surface sensory probe -- if one could be found -- which was to supplement its own weak sensors. Its narrow triads would severely limit its range, and it lacked the delicate manipulators, samplers and anal#rtical capability which would make it useful to him. Repeated simulations of the landing had always shown a high probability of failure, so the actual landing attempt had been perpetually delayed while the unit was torn down and reconstructed again and again. The design was changed each time, but the problems remained the same. The combined weight of the power unit and the brain was just too much for the available wings and treads. D welling on his failures activated melancholy circuits, and he illogically wished to be down on the surface himself. He fancied his repolished hull resting solidly on a green knoll surrounded by a veritable army of servomechs. He wotild smelt the native ores and forage for electronic gear in the ghost towns. With the matter and energy available on the surface he felt certain that he could solve the mystery of his Implant failure... and, he hoped, perhaps even locate survivors. But landing himself was impossible. His own simulated re-entry always showed complete destruction by thermal and medianical forces. (My a mass of fused and useless fragments could be expected to reach the surface. He had been built V in orbit, and his energy death would come in orbit. As long as his core lived he would work for his lost Implant. The years of repeated failures in his toolshop and with his parabolic scanners had raised his anxiety circuits to the threshold of desperation. He would try something outside his programming, something repulsive -- almost dishonorable. He would build a mindless machine, a tool without mentation. By eliminating the brain from his unit it could survive the landing, theoretically; and then its treads would probably be adequate for most surfaces. But to design it would be very unpleasant Basically, be would replace the class seven brain with a light, simple transmitter-receiver. Then, by assuming a stationary orbit above it, he would have a fairly satisfactory remote-controlled 'arm" on the surface. Its reflexes would be slowed by the transmission time lag, however, and if left alone it would just remain motionless, gathering first dust and later moss and lichens. This was repugnant to him: having an arm that could be cut off by fluctuations of atmosphere, magnetic ndds and ion storms. Even his surface sensory probes had class nine brams udiich enabled them to go on recording vdien he was below the horizon. They had elaborate memoiir banks and discriminatory focusing apparatus for picking out the more significant stimuli from their environment. The assembly of the mindless robot was never completed. With the power supply low, efforts were slow, paced by the input from the solar cdls. And in the third year of its construction all the melancholy, anxiety and rugnance circuits ware washed clean by a high priority override. Emergency power was shunted to the parabolic receptors, and they were focused on deep space. Deep space -- from which a voice with the qualities of a human female had been heard. 'he voice identified itself as a starship -- the second to this system. Cigar almost blanched out his reactor core in an effort to squeeze out more energy to analyze the voice. He calculated that "she" must be a much larger and more powerful model, of the t#qes that were still on the drawing board when he was bom. If she was, then that meant there were sevo'al Implants ,on board -- periiaps hundreds of humans with the skills and equipment to survive on his planet... survive and solve the mystery of his own lost Implant. His companionship circuits quivered with expectation. After all these years he again had humans to serve. Cigar's optic pickups watched the glowing sphere approach, pulsing IF slightly as it cut through the planet's magnetic fidd. Matdiing orbits with Cigar it shut down its fields and released a shower of ion fuel from its outer shells. As the static faded away the two ships attempted a memory bank-data transfer, a routine courtesy among Implant t#pe starships. But Cigar's power supply had been low for so long that many of his cells were frozen in standby mode. Without her shellfields she looked much like a three-mile-long, mirror-finished apple core. Each of her "seeds" were half again as long as Cigar's outer superstructure. She identified herself as Olga -- inheriting much of the cyber-personality of the giant satellite back in the trans-Saturn orbit. Her nanosecond grief at hearing of his lost Implant was followed by an aggressive posture. A crew was placed in his hull to refuel his reactor and return all his systems to an active mode; complex M.S.U.s were set down near the ghost towns; and a score or so of the first scouts were started through orientation. Only expendable humans were to be landed, of course. Now Implant genes could be saved until the safety probability factors were high, TXen the first scout ship began its orbit down Bob Zuliani was with his team of parameds checking the swjension tanks. They were documenting the causes of death of those colonists who failed to survive the startrip. Olga's telemetry records were thorough enough, of course; this was just a matter of double-checking. (And there was always the possibility of getting a cell sample from the remains in an effort to salvage the genetic material.) Bob glanced up at the screen saying: "That would be Ralph. He'd be the first one down." One of the parameds smiled: "Yes. From what I hear it is a volimtary mission for the eendables. Ralph knows that if there is any hangup with early Implanting Down the expendables would be resuspended until needed later. He didn't want an#Tthing to do with suspension after his rough ride out here." Bob smiled. He knew how rough a good case of D.T.'s can be, which was what Ralph had experienced during re-warming. Well, Cigar's first Implant had survived in part for about ten years. There should be little danger for a well equipped, alert scout. TTis Orbit to Surface Module crushed a linear path in the moist greenery, tumbled and came to rest upside down in a tangle of giant filicales. Ralph relaxed, opened his eyes and squinted through his viewport at the alien vegetation. Pain fibers nagged at him from the soft tissue pinched between his clavicle and the centour seat webbing, but he felt intact As he relaxed he exhaled audibly. His earphone activated: "That you, Ralph? Are you okay?" asked Olga. "Yes. I think I'm fine. That was a pretty rough landing. How did it look from up there?" She paused to review his telemetries. "You hit some turbulence and overshot the clearing a little... sorry about that. But everything is reading in the normal range now." She paused, then added: "Can you get out and take a quick look around for us before we go below the horizon?" He winced slightly as he unbuckled and swung down to the roof panels. Gravity felt tmfamiliar at first so he moved crab fashion, with one hand always on a support. He forced his hatch down into the soft fronds and opened his face plate for a deep breath. It was cool and fresh, and actually had a faint green taste. The landscape looked familiar, as he had expected: blue sky, white, snow-capped mountains and lush green vegetation. Standing outside on the belly of his O.S.M. a binoc survey put him on a saddle ridge about six thousand feet above sealevel. The ridge ran up to peaks of about fourteen thousand feet on each side. Stout femlike trees grew thickly around him, running up to a horizontal "tree line" at about ten thousand feet. Above that the peaks looked very sharp and jagged. Geologically young, he thought. He clicked in the twenty-power eyepiece and watched the pair of starships as they began to set toward the south. "Olga asked: "Anything unusual to report?" He glanced around again: "No. So far the only signs of life are those little fl#dng things -- pouched bats, I think. It actually doesn't look much different from some places I've seen on earth." "Well, take care of yourself, Ralph. We'll be back overhead in a couple days if you need anything," said Olga. H e repressed a wry grin at those last words. They were for morale purposes only. About all he could expect from them would be advice. Implant starships didn't waste resources for genes in the expendable category. He knew how much energy it would take for an M.S.U. to pick him up and take him back up into orbit for medical care -- never happen! Of course, if an O.S.M. happened to be orbiting down nearby it might manage an airdrop of some small package of tools or medications, but nothing more. He had resigned himself to the facts. He wouldn't be seeing another human being for a year or more, except for the viewscreen -- and except for IF the unlikely possibility that one of the Implants might be located in his area. The law of averages stated that he would spend the better part of a year traveling by foot and raft to the nearest Implant, and then only after his duties were finished here. This planet was a pretty big place to scatter eight small Im plants over. He shrugged out of his spacesuit and carried his kit into the clear, ing. By using the O.S.M. for shel ter he could get right into his surI vey. First he had to culture a few soil samples, analyze a few rocks and dissect a few of the local life forms. That would take care of Olga's initial checklist. Other assignments would undoubtedly come as their knowledge of the planet's ecology grew, but he already knew pretty much what to expect from his briefings on Cigar's memorybank data. The planet's evolutionary level reminded him of earth in the early Cenozoic era: early flowering plants with fruit and early mammals. He expected tp find egg-layers, and pouched forms, but few true placental forms. He was certain that there were no indigenous forms that could possess intelligence. An interesting feature of his particular landing site was the nearby ghost town: a grouping of half a dozen buildings partially swallowed by the alien vegetation, located about five miles downstream from his camp. He could see it dearly through his scope. The structures looked intact. There were no obvious signs of physical damage. He caught occasional glimpses of Olga's new Mobile Surface Unit rooting in the dust of what must have been the road along the stream. A few small alien animal forms darted out of the path of the sampling and analyzing machine. It was standard operating procedure for the scouts to stay out of ghost towns until a plague-like organism could be ruled out. He would obey that regulation. jOobert Zuliani-was occupied for several weeks with the resuspension of seven of the Implants and about half of the expendables. Olga was being cautious with her human charges. When everything was up to date in lifesystems he took his paramed team into the Exiobiology Section, and they went on double shifts. Humans as well as computers worked on the problem around the clock. So far the information from the scouts and M.S.U.'s seemed to confirm Cigar's conclusions. There were no humans and no hazards. The first Implant had survived for several years with no signs of trouble. Plants and animals from Earth thrived and reproduced in a fairly loose greenhouse setup. Life seemed rather idyllic, with the pleasant climate and no apparent hazards. Soon the population doubled, and with the extra mouths to feed the colonists began to graduaUy eat a mixed Earth-alien table. Local food sources were abundant and could be eaten without ill effect. The more adventuresome took their growing families and began to spread out along the sea shore and up the rivers. But several years after this, conmnmications with Cigar began to dwindle, and by the tenth year there was no further sign of the Implant. As near as Bob could tell, the first drop in commimication seemed to be due to pure disinterest. He could understand that. Cigar's lack of motor units made it a one-way conversation. Some colonist took time out from his chores to check in and give a monthly report to one of Cigar's sensory probes. Cigar only had his memory banks to offer the colonists in return, and this fwoved to be inadequate inducement after the first few years. In year One or year Two a colonist might want a recipe or some advice on soil chemistry, and this would be enough to bring him to the probe for a short talk; but by year Five most of the local problems had local solutions. There was little need for advice from orbit. Cigar regretted his lack of entertainment category tapes -- no luxury weight in his class starship. It meant that he couldn't even bribe his charges with viewscreen arts. IF Bob saw many loopholes in the records. First, Cigar had no sophisticated anal#ical instrumentation on the surface -- unlike Olga's, the Cigar Implant was a one-shot deal; there was no turning back once the humans were down. Second, the colonists themselves were living at a pre-industrial level of civilization and had little ability in themselves to detect or handle many of the more subtle dangers that an alien planet could throw at new Implants. Third, what few records there were had come from immobile probes that were unable to even trim the adjacent brush. A five-year view of the change of seasons on a wooded slope is interesting, but hardly relevant to the problem. Even with these loopholes he couldn't imagine why every single Earth life form would have disappeared. The past two himdred years or so of orbital records showed no sign of survivors. 'Of course the resolution was crude, and individual humans couldn't be seen anyway. But not even a canoe, a cultivated field or a new building had been detected for two centuries.) The original cultivated fields could still be identified, as if the earth plants had somehow sterilized the soil so that now not even the alien planets would grow there. Geometric, bare patches marked each garden and field. They resisted the creeping alien growth as stubbornly as the empty buildings and the crushed stone avenues. Earth artifacts survived where earth life failed. IX ITxcept for the solitude Ralph ac tually enjoyed his experience of camping out. It reminded him of his younger days. He realized that he had been growing a little soft as he approached his twentieth birthday, spending -- as he was -- most of his time with his studies. But on this new world he was pushing his body back into a more strenuous existence. He looked forward to each overhead passage of the starships, about every thirty-six hours. He learned were down without incident. Their scouts were reporting much the same findings as he, with , the expected geological variations. An Implant was down in the tropics and apparently doing well. So far so good, he thought. During the following months he explored the peaks at both ends of his ridge. From the summits he got a good view of a second mountain range to the East with a wide, cracked desert floor in betwecm. To the West the gently rolling, green foothills gave way to tidals' flats that ended at the seashore. Local protein sources were plentiful. Both the pouched squirrel and the egg-laying rabbit were fairly dodle, though they still provided quite a challenge for an academic t#q)e like Ralph. The alien meats and vegetables added pleasurable textures to his powdered rations, improving somewhat the soups and broths, but he noticed no new flavor. In fact, the rabbit's jump muscle had no taste at all when it was broiled by itself. No flavor and no aroma! His appetite grew. In spite of rather large meals his body fat just melted away. At first he was pleased when he noticed his muscles and tendons demarcating through the once rather featureless adipose tissue. His amorphous trunk and extremities were taking on a sinewy appearance which he associated with power and strength, having seen the same lines on many of the lean competitors in The Games. Sweating over the raw umber soil, he put in several rows of seeds from his kit. Might as well really get settled in," he mused. Tf something does happen to the rest of the Implant ril have to sit out a lot of years until the next starship arrives." He smiled, thinking it would be easy, and his little garden sprouted quickly, confirming his optimism. The earth vegetables and fruits were familiar shapes on an unfamiliar world. The two starships blinked across the night iy, moving among the stars like bright, restless planets. Ralph lay asleep on his bunk -- beads of sweat welling up frqm his facial epidermis, and Ms legs twitching... It was a bright, spring afternoon, and he was running crosscountry (the ten-kilometer Hittle marathon run). Farmer, the main competition, had taken the lead at the gun and held it easily for the first up-hill leg of the course, Ralph was back in the middle of the pack running easily, warming up his cardiorespiratory machinery and waiting for the slight euphoria that would mark the beginning of his second wind. When he hit level ground his longer legs gradually pulled him up to the head of the pack, ten yards or so behind Farmer, After hair pinning the lone cedar tree at the halfway point they started back, running side by side like a matched pair of trotters. He could see the strain beginning to show on Farmer: audible respirations, full jugular veins and an irregular gait. His own breathing came easier, and his stride lengthened as he pulled into the lead. Soon he was far enough ahead so that he could no longer hear footsteps behind. He was running alone, and the finish was only a mile or so away -- all downhill. Time began to drag. Cramps slowed his legs, and he could hear Farmers finishing kick coming up fast. Pounding footsteps became louder and louder. Fear gripped his chest and the pain in his legs rose to a crescendo. IF TTe awoke with a start. His aortic arch pounded a dry dick, dick, click, dick against his trachea as he rose and limped from his O.S.M. It had all seemed so reaL His legs still hint him. Several hours later he was still sitting under the stars, eyeing the distorted constellations and squeezing the last drop of alcoholic beverage from a cold tube. He was more relied now. About five years previously that race had happened, in much that way. He had been in pretty good shape then and had managed to eke out a dose win. It had been the source of considerable satisfaction at the time. It bothered him that now the same race could be the backgroxmd for such an unpleasant dream. Leg cramps returned to awaken him several times that night. The next morning he studied his gastrocnemius and soleus. They looked slightly atrophic. The lesser saphenous veins looked larger and more tortuous as they ran down behind his knees. To Ralph mxisde-wasting meant simply a lack of exercise. He rationalized that he had been doing too much puttering around the garden and not enough hiking, so he prescribed a trip to the southern peak. He decided that a vigorous hunting trip was all he needed: fresh air and exercise. Anticipating about a twenty-hour trip, he carried a day's supply of food, the sleeping bag and Us air gun. He started out with a spring in his step. But he was still in sight of his camp Tfiien fatigue hit him. Stubbornly he went on into the undergrowth. "A little sweat never hurt anyone," he muttered under his breath as he methodically put one foot down in front of the other. Dusk found him still well below the tree line. He camped. Pumping up the airgun, he brought down one of the pouched squirrels for his stew. The business of building the fire, preparing the food and getting into the sleeping bag took longer than usual. He felt weak and uncoordinated, and it was a good feeling to dose his eyes... He was wglking up a yellow sandstone bluff overlooking a widOj brown river, A couple inches of new, soft green needles tipped the branches of the fir trees. Their resins scented the air. He was hungry. When he glanced over his shotdder to identify the following footsteps he saw Betty. Lovely, soft, young Betty. She was carrying their lunch of peanut-butter sandwiches in a brown paper bag. In her denim shorts and yellow blouse that exposed a tanned waist she looked very mature for her fourteen years. A reflex loneliness brought a tightness to his throat and a burning to the outer corners of his eyes as he slept. He concentrated on his walking to bring the fUeasatA dream back into focus. Then he cotdd hear her breathing again. Slow down Ralph. I carit keep up she said. He walked slower. The knot of hunger tightened on his stomach. Could I have half of my sand-wich nm)V he asked over his shoulder. You know wre to meet the other kids at the picnic tables she reminded him. He walked on a short distance and asked again. Pm awfully hungryP He heard the rustle of the paper bag as she said: Oh, I gttess it is okay! He turned. X , T Te was standing alone on an unfamiliar slope of the alien moimtainside. He was so hungry that he guessed that he must have been wandering for days in some sort of stupor. All he wore was the shirt and pants he had had on in the sleeping bag. The pants were soiled with urine and feces. His bare feet were badly bruised and scratched. For several hours he searched for his little overnight camp, but his sense of direction was gone. The tall, thick trees prevented a good view of the geography, and even the sun seemed to be moving in the wrong The First Issue Is On Us The Next # Copies  # or The Next # Copies # of either  Check here if you would prefer the first or second issue of Please enter my subscription to  # plus I W O IF  #  # plus I W O IF # H New Subscription IZI Renewal (check one here)  enclose my check in the amount of AS aiVd # niM #ViSOd iivw Aidaii ss#Nisna A N 'VA lI'BTd '# P :S #SS# ON !"d From We're grateful to all the sciencefiction fans who gave our pubiications a ciean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at the # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even more grateful to the many loyal readers to appear monthly from now on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best sciencefiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're determined You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure future. coupon. Send it in today? You'll save money, too! (direction. He decided he would have I climb up to the tree line to get his bearings. There seemed to be M particular urgency since there was abundant meltwater coming down from the snow cap and the slope berries were ripening. He was not too concerned about the leg cramps and hunger, but the lapse in consciousness for days at a time was frightening. He was afraid of going to sleep for fear. of never waking up. After his bout of D.T.s during starship suspension he began to have doubts about his mental stability. He was afraid that his years of a sheltered student existence had softened him, weakened his ability to handle anxiety, made him vulnerable to a breakdown. A resonating buzz interrupted his thoughts and through the vagal reflex stimulated gastric motility. A bee treel" he shouted as he scrambled in the direction of the sound. He recognized the alien counterpart of the honeybee -- a large greenish-blue insect that manufactured a fructose-honey. As he approached the hardwood tree an angry doud of bees moved meoacingly towards him. The comb -- about three bushel, he judged, hung within easy reach in a hollow in the trunk. He quickly speared off a fragment with a handy stick and danced back awkwardly as the doud of bees descended on him. Having seen optic replays of native animals reacting wildly to the stings, he expected to pay dearly for this small ration of cdories; but he felt only the tickle of huneds of legs as they landed and took off again. A few did give him painless, bland pricks with what must have been their stinger. He rested on a mossy rock and savored the sticky comb. It tasted sweet with a tart after-pucker, and it gave him some refreshing energy. After a drink from a small stream of meltwater he climbed quickly and unerringly to the tree line. It was then he learned that his wanderings had brought him nearly half the drcumference around the mountain. He was faring the cracked desert to the east instead of the expected ocean. H is head was clear, and he felt stronger than he had for days, so he easily followed the tree line around the peak and oriented himself towards his distant O.S.M. He identified the bleached buildings of the ghost town and the stream. A tributary from this peak joined that stream between his O.S.M. and the town. By following the tributary through the heavily wooded slopes he figured he could cut down his chances of getting lost again. Thirsty, he absently picked up a handful of snow, but as he raised it to his mouth his eyes focused on it briefly. He shuddered. The white snow contrasted sharply with his hand. He blinked and squinted in bright sunlight, but there was no mistaking the contrast: his skin was a slate-gray color. Even his nails and wrinkles had taken on a coal black pigmentation. Trembling with shock he sat on a weathered stone while he chewed and drank from the melting white crusts. They tasted like any other snow: no taste at all. He qxiickly checked and found his entire body was the same bizarre gray color, and his toenails matched his fingernails. He wished that he had a mirror to check his teeth and sclerae. He did learn that even his urine had taken on an inky black tinge. As he sat there his weakness began to return. He had little time to think on his problem. He knew something serious was happening to him, and his only chance was to return to his O.S.M. before his strength left him again. It was not only physical strength that had to last him through the trip; more vital was the need to keep Ws sensorium intact. His body he could push beyond ordinary limits of endurance, but his mind seemed to slip in and out of control unpredictably and in spite of any efforts he made to hold it. If he got back to the O.S.M. he was certain that Olga or Bob would have the answer to what was happening to him -- and (hopefully) advice on how to stop it. The dozen miles dragged on like a hundred. Days passed. In his weakened condition he had to crawl as mudS as he walked. Game was plentiful. He foraged the wooded stream for the small animals forms: mammaloids, amphibians, reptiles and even an occasional tiny fish. Without the benefit of a cookfire the meats had a rather unpleasant texture; but no taste. He tolerated the white, rubbery segments of the two-chambered heart forms better than the slippery, red muscles of those with the more complex circulatory systems. Hunting with rocks and clubs he managed to keep his stomach palpably full of fragments of the little creatures, but his weakness and hunger grew. He added likely looking plants to his diet, and at the peak of his cravings he found that he was grazing almost continually on anything soft enough to chew and swallow. Starvation ketosis gradually changed his body pH and turned off his hunger with the nausea of acidosis. Tn orbit, Olga's exobiology section A was still busy collating data from the Mobile Surface Units. So far they could have been taking their readings from old Mother Earth for all the surprises they were finding. Inorganics checked out okay. From the gases of the atmosphere to the ions in the sea there were no variations from Earth that would have biological significance. rganic studies werent complete, liut se far it looked like a fairly straightforward chlorophyll-based energy cycle. Molecular evolution seemed to parallel earth. Representatives of the sugar, fat and (tein groups were being detected and they seemed to play the same role. Of course the external appearances of the plants and animals were unusual -- but no more bizarre than one could see among the different species in the different environments of earth itself. Most of the alien creatures could easily pass for some new species from any earth-like planet. As the work continued the conclusions stayed as they were when Qgar was alone: no humans and no hazards. XI A sun-bleached trunk of a fallen hardwood lay in the stream bed and blocked his path. He began to brawl slowly over it, crab fashion, wlien he again saw his integument Icoatrasted with a fairly white background. His blackness had deepened to the color of coal tar. Thick, horny trusts now covered his knuckles, elbows and knees. Pausing, spreadfcagled on the log, he saw how thin and cachectic he had become: all of his ribs could be seen, and it was hard work just to breathe. His weakness progressed, and a bulky diarrhea developed. His stools were large and spongy, floating lightly on the water. They had no odor. About six or eight hours after chewing and swallowing something he could recognize it almost unaltered in his stools: red meat fibers, white reptile segments, all the colored plant pigments -- green, yellow, blue and orange. The stream was about five yards wide at the point where he nested for the night. Curling up as best he could, he lay on the dry fronds and watched the vermiform mists drifting up from the water's surface... He was warm and comfortable. He opened his eyes to a thick white fogThe glowing coals of a small campfire perfumed the air with their short-chain hydrocarbons. A thin searchlight stabbed about rhythmically in the distance. When it flashed in his direction he noticed the coals change from a glowing red to a powdery white. He left a warm bed and walked to the bank where small ripples smacked. Sullen willows crowded. As an unexpected breeze cooled him surprisingly he looked down and saw that he was wearing only a pair of swimming trunks. They were still damp. A familiar blast from a foghorn told him that he was watching the light of a Mississippi River tug with its chain of barges. He stood for a moment listening to the lonely chug, chug echoing across the calm waters. Then his hunger sent him hack to the glowing coals, where he added a few gnarled, dry sticks of driftwood and began to rummage through the knapsacks, finding only crumbs and wads of wax paper. Returning to the waters edge, he lifted out the two bank lines to find only the still-twitching nightcrawlers on the hooks. He could hear a bubbling catfish noisily working its way towards him through the weedy shallows, so he replaced the lines in its path, and started back to the warmth of the sleeping bag. The cool night air with its damp mists had contracted his arrectores pilorum and raised goose flesh on his arms and legs. While he was up, she had curled into a fetal position. Now she took up most of the bedding. He slipped back in on his side, gently, so as not to disturb her sleep. There was not quite enough room. He relaxed and enjoyed the generous warmth of her body. Her smooth, soft skin contrasted sharply with her coarse, wrinkled bathing suit. Happy, he lay quiet for a few minutes. But most of his right arm and bare back were outside the zipper and exposed to the night air. Soon he was badly chilled again. A s he attempted to move his right arm a flood of familiar pain reminded him that he was still on the alien mountain. He was now completely naked and chilled. Many days must have passed because his body had deteriorated badly. His abdomen and feet ere markedly swollen, and his skin was covered with a variety of lesions: scratches, lacerations and bruises. He was lying in coarse brush. When he attempted to move there was a new kind of pain he had never felt before -- a burning and slfooting pain in the part he tried to move. He was very weak. When his mind cleared he saw the stream nearby. A little backtracking brought him to his lost shirt. He didnt search further for his pants, for he was certain his abdomen was far too large to wear them anyhow. With weak, ineffectual movements he spent several hours trying to bathe his wounds. Then he struggled into his shirt -- which he was unable to button. Dexterity and tactile senses were gone. Freshened by the scrubbing, his wounds smarted to the air. He studied them carefully. There was little sign that any of them were healing. He could tmderstand that. His body was suffering from some very serious, unknown insult, and there probably was little spare body protein available for the healing process. But what did puzzle him was the complete lack of suppuration. In spite of the fact that many of the larger abrasions on his lower limbs contained gross fragments of splinter and stone there was no swelling, redness or pus. If he had suffered these same injuries back on Earth he was certain that there would be gas gangrene by now. He crawled methodically now, dragging his belly across the rough stones of the stream bed. His pains pushed him down the tributary, and turning right he crawled the slow mile up the stream to his O.S.M. camp. Tob Zuliani was practically alone  in orbit -- only a skeleton crew was 'Varm" in the entire cubic mile of Olga's hull. Everyone else except those on the surface (one tropical Implant and two score scouts) was back in suspension -- a level of suspension lighter and safer than the deep-space suspension used on the startrip. Olga was still a little chary with her other seven Implants and was watching everyone on the surface for a possible alien threat. She had lost contact with seven of the scouts, but only two had been missing for over three months. One was Ralph. Scouts were expendable, so there was no immediate effort to locate those who had been overdue. A year is a long time, alone. She allowed for a certain percentage of lost contact. In the absence of definite assignments it was possible that they were traveling to link up with another human, or were dead somewhere due to some accident or "natural causes." plant continued to operate smoothly. Their data was all green-light stuff. The latest find (which Bob was occupying himself with) was the diary of one of the healers from Cigar's Implant. It had been found with some wheel rims and other parts of a buggy along the site of a road. In spite of almost two hundred years of exposure to the alien environment it -- like other earth artifacts -- had survived almost intact. The M.S.U. methodically photographed every page, using several wavelengths of hght, and Olga printed out reproductions and a second copy with her translations for Bob to study in his leisure. From the healer's description of the population during the last years of the Implant several disease entities seemed to become more common. Children were smaller, grew slowly or not at all, and had protuberant abdomens, swollen feet and sores that wouldn't heal. These were the features of starvation, particularly protein starvation with a few vitamin shortages. A possible cause of the starvation, he felt, was the other entity: mental deterioration. Many of the adults -- instead of dying of recognizable causes -- would show irregular episodes of confusion, stupor and psychoses prior to wandering off into the wilds. With the adults wandering around in this condition it was easy to see how the small babies might not get enough to eat. IF Neither Bob nor Olga could offer a reason why insanity would be a problem after many years on a new planet. Of course it was a problem in some Implants, where the environment was so hostile that survival was next to impossible. But it had never swept through an Implant's whole population before -- and the survivors bred tough descendants. Certainly a friendly planet like this seemed to offer no traumas significant enough to damage anyone's psyche. Other less frequent causes of death were also listed, such as the expected arteriosclerotic and neoplastic diseases. One rare case of Tay-Sach's was fairly carefully worked up -- a hereditary defect characterized by formation and storage of a defective molecule (neuraminic acid) in the brain of the infant, causing mental deterioration, convulsions and early death before the second birthday. Of course Cigar's Implant was not able to do a scientific autopsy to confirm the diagnosis, but the clinical picture was practically diagnostic since there was the classical cherry red spot on the retina. Bob wondered how the defective gene of Tay-Sach's disease ever got past Olga's thorough screening of volunteers. Well, he reasoned, if that defect got through perhaps insanity tendencies did also. The tentative etiology for Cigar's Implant failure was set at starvation of mixed type -- due to mental deterioration of unknown type. These seemed to fit the "no hmnans, no hazards" impression also. He mulled over the problem while he worked out with his spring g#ma. Weightlessness was robbing him of his bone calcium and muscle mass. He longed for the pull of gravity. A year was a long time in orbit. He envied Ralph, wondering how he was doing.   crawled into his little camp. On all fours, like a thieving rodent, he went up and down the rows of his garden chewing off the green tops. He nested on the floor of his O.S.M., crawling out only for food and water. This went on for about a week before his sensorium cleared enough to enable him to operate the food dispenser. After that he improved rapidly. By the end of a month he was back up on his feet for short periods. This freed his hands for some things other than locomotion. With a spoon he dug up the small twisted roots of carrot, radish and turnip. Alien weeds had flourished while his little earth garden withered. If he had looked in a mirror he would never have recognized himself: a cachectic, bearded stranger with crusted, pigmented integument and sclerae, swollen ascitic abdomen, thin wasted extremities swollen with fluids. He was still wearing the open tattered shirt, and spent most of the time crawling aimlessly around the camp talking to himselL Often he spent hours at a time talking to his imagined, childhood friends -- only being interrupted at intervals by the pains of his deteriorating body. With a surprised wince his gaze would dear and he would focus momentarily on his strange, hostile surroundings -- moaning or oying -- and then as the pain fibers fatigued themselves and numbness returned his face would go blank, and he'd back in his dream world again. Dreams were pleasant, reality cruel. The separation of his lucid intervals from his dream state was less distinct now. During the short periods of every other day when Olga was above the horizon, his O.S.M. shouted, sang and chatted with him to no effect. The optic pickups recorded his vacant stare and fugue state. 'hen, one day when he was ex perimentally toying with the instrument panel (the functions of which having long been lost in the tangle of his mental jungle), he pressed the lingual playback button and heard the old message: A flicker of comprehension crossed his face. He looked westward for a while and then began to wander downstream in the direction of the ghost town. A weak, stumbling walk carried him a short way into the thick vegetation along the bank; then he continued on his hands and knees. He left as he had entered, wearing only the tattered shirt remnants. As he crawled, dragging his pendutous, swollen abdomen, it brushed a path through the loose pebbles and twigs. The old woimds were quickly freshened. Soon an exhausted stupor brought him down in a heap, and he slept where he lay, on smooth, cold pebbles of the stream bed. The meltwater gurgled through the loose stones only a few inches beneath him. Carried to his eighth nerve by bone conduction, the gurgle became a roar... With a crackling roar the cold, salty breaker carried him jar up the beach and stranded him there. He nimbly picked himself up from the foamy sand and stood for a moment facing the yellow-orange sunset. The next wave broke with a loud clap, and the foamy rip rattled the smooth pebbles with a sound like a box of spilled marbles. Between waves he ran lightly to a rocky tidal pool. Standing gingerly on the pointy barnacles, he plucked a yellow starIE fish from the bottom. The filamentom ttibe feet clung to his fingers. Another roar and the foam rose quickly from his ankles to his knees and then fell back down again. He expef'imentally set the starfish on a purple urchin but with the next wave it was gone. He watched the urchin stilt-walking on its spines until the sea swallowed the red disk of the sun and darkness changed all the bright colors to shades of gray. A thirty-foot vertical climb brought him to the recessed ledge where she waited. As he toweled he heard the hiss and pop of two bottle caps. The blanket was still warm from the sun. He stretched out on his back and was looking for a level spot for his bottle when she leaned over him. Suddenly she was on him, roughly grinding grains of sand on his lower chest -- areas made raw from body surfing -- and her mouth searched his face. His bottle spilled. The sky changed from dark blue to black, and he began to count the stars as they became visible. She slept nuzzled up on his right arm with her right knee on his abdomen. For a long time he didnH move, being happy, almost euphoric, with the joys of love, youth and health. Then the abrasions on his lower chest started to burn and her knee pressed harder and harder into his abdomen. He didnH want to move, for fear that the dream would end; but soon the discomfort grew to the point of near suffocation. D yspneic and gasping he tried to sit up, only to discover that the weight pressing on him was his own grotesquely swollen and ascitic abdomen. He lifted himself on his right elbow and breathed easier. Staring imbelievingly at his belly, he tentatively prodded it with his left hand. Frightened, he pulled his hand away. The wall was so thin it felt like a bag of water, and he had touched a hard nodular mass that filled most of the right upper quadrant His hand had changed now. It was swollen like a black, rubber glove full of water. His legs lay useless and crossed, like the obscene tail of some dead fish. The feet were so swollen and amorphous that he couldn't see the usual anatomic landmarks of heel cord and ankles. Large glairy xilcers had opened up over the bony areas of the lower chest, pelvis and knees. These wet, gray ulcers had irregular outlines and contrasted sharply with the dry, crusted, black skin -- like some sort of a relief map. He struggled to stay balanced on his elbow, but his weakness pressed down on him and his sensorium clouded as the beautiful, memories of his earlier years on Earth tried to crowd out the grim reality of his dying body. He collapsed, and as his ear touched the cool stones the sound of running water brought back the image of a friendly surf... There was d stack' of tattered comtcSy a six-bladed scout knife and chocolate gritty squares of rich fudge... He was eating the fudge when a choking dyspnea cleared his mind long enough to recognize his own clawing scratchmarks in the sandy mud between the stones which pillowed his head. T)ob put the photos in their clip and floated into the remotecontrol booth. Pressing his forehead into the binoc-rest, he had a good view of the ghost town. Reaching for the manual override, he took control of the Mobile Surface Unit which was to be his eyes and hands. He rolled it to the location of the first photo: a small shop-type building near the center of town. The front room had drifted up halfway to the sills by years of wind-borne debris. From this pile of refuse he dug up a human skull and pelvis which crumbled at his touch. Then, rolling to the edge of town, he pulled a black, mummified body of a thirty-nine-inch male child from a heap of loose sod under an alien bush. Needle aspiration provided a sample that carbon-fourteened around #, plus or minus # years. Deep in the woods he found the third body -- a perfectly preserved body of a women in her early thirties, intact down to the eyelashes and earrings biuried under ten inches of damp, musty, alien humus. It carbon-fourteened at #I plus or minus # years. Two hundred years dead I She looked like she could have died yesterday. Bob released the controls and slowly sat back in the booth. Why would bodies be better preserved away from the center of town? He had expected just the opposite. Crumbling bones fit better with forest humus. Mummification can occur occasionally in human dwellings, where conditions are better for drying in the absence of a lot of micro-organisms. But he had no explanation for the girPs body. The only time he had ever heard of bodies that old being that well preserved was in a Temple of Embalming display. Of course they used techniques like irradiation-sterilization, quick freeze and sealing with inert gases. None of those things seemed to apply here. Certainly not sterility I He leaned back into the binoc-rest and set for phase microscopy. Using the micromanips he carefully teased out the granular and cellulose debris of the humus and quickly confirmed the presence of the full spectrum of alien microphylla: crawling mites, lashing nematodes, swimming protozoa and the random Brownian dance of mycelium and bacterial clumps. As he worked he ruminated half to himself IF and half for the benefit of the everpresent auditory pick-ups. Olga watched his thoughtful frown for seven minutes and then activated her humorist circuit, postulating. Terhaps the well preserved Earth artifacts and bodies are the planet's way of saying the ecology is friendly towards the things of Earth." He glanced up, the frown unchanged. 'It is the spirit of the planet trying to communicate," offered Olga. But her joke was losing its spontaneity. Finally he relaxed and smiled. Assuming a metallic monotone, he said; "illogical." Tor several days Ralph had been  wallowing at the same point in the stream, his path block by a weir of brittle, moss-covered driftwood. Like an engorged black tick he struggled weakly on the slippery mud bank, first down to a stagnant pool for a drink and then up to the hanging sod for a mouthful of vegetation. Whenever a crawling or hopping creature crossed his path he tried to crush it and add the nondescript mass to his diet. In spite of the cramping diarrhea and foul crusts on his teeth and tongue he smiled. His eyes were glazed over. In his mind he relived his happy childhood. This monotonous activity was interrupted by the appearance of a pack of carnivorous water manunaloids -- a two-poimd alien watr rat that traveled in hxmting packs. He had seen optic playbacks of these creatures stripping the carcass of a herbivore, and the sight of them cleared his mind and sent him flopping up the bank into the brush. They quickly swarmed over him. Riga's panel went from green to amber-one. It was in the enzyme section of Organics. Bob was there listening to the tech in substrates. "It's the amylase, sir. I was checking these strains of alien bacteria against our starch standard with no results. But when I substitute alien starch I get a varied profile of amylase activity -- much as I'd expect from a panel of Earth organisms... except they only digest starch from this planet." He held up the graphic printout. Bob took the strip and studied the figures. It was one of the stanbeen using as it isolated and subcultured the soil bacteria of one of the more fertile-looking valleys. It had been classifying the flora using the Earth-type criteria (where apwas one of the microbiology robots, it often found itself helping with projects started by the biochemical M.S.U.s. Substrates was a good place to identify organic molecules. Bob asked: "How many of these en#ymesubstrate incompatabilities have you found?" "This is the first: starch. Up to now we've been working on the simpler molecules: mea, sugars, fatty acids and some amino adds. This is the first time we noticed any difference between earth and alien substrates." "Have you tried the alien substrates against a panel of earth organisms yet?" "No, sir. But the M.S.U. does have several earth panels. We'll imsuspend them and start them in continuous culture. I shoidd start getting those results in about twelve hours," said the tech. "Earth organisms against the alien substrates... right?" "Right, sir." "Good. I'll check back with you later," said Bob as he left the control room in the Organics section. As he floated down the hall he glanced up into one of Olga's consoles and said: "You know... I think it is time I went down myself. It would be much more effident if I was right there working with those M.S.U.'s instead of trying to supervise them from orbit." He paused, measuring his words carefully; "We may be relying too much on the judgment of those robots. I just don't have too much faith in a dass eight when it is working alone." Olga asked: "Are you volunteering?" "Yes, I am." C t'hat may be a one-way trip,"I she reminded him. "You know that I will not use energy to return an expendable to orbit until after the Implanting Down is a success. If I would be forced to ve up on this planet, I'd have to leave you here while I carried my remmning seven Implants to a friendlier starsystem." He masked his irritation. "I understand the priority. Implant first, and all that. But I'd prefer to be down on the surface. My X-ray densogram shows an eighteen per cent skeletal demineralization, and it is progressing in spite of my work with the gym. If I don't return to a normal gravity soon, my bones will be nothing but papier-mache. "Besides, you have the tropical Implant to consider. If is already down. The sooner we get an understanding of this planet's hazards the safer it will be," he sjdd. Olga was not surprised at his lack of emotional overlay when weighing dangers to himself. He had faced death frequently when he was in competition for The Games. He had actually been killed several times. When the resuscitator team responded to his telemetered cardiac arrest they were likely to find his anoxic body giving his assassin a parting kick. The resulting glial scars calloused both his cerebral cortex and his no IF psyche, enabling him to ignore most of life's minor traumas. The reasons he gave for going down wouldn't be the whole truth, she calculated. Entering the alien biosphere was probably just his way of meeting the enemy on his own ground -- the better to grapple with it. His decision to go himself was encouraging to Olga and Cigar, for it reflected his subconscious confidence. He must have felt that chances were better than average that he would survive and succeed. Computers had learned early in the game to respect the intuition of the more intricate organic brains. Olga assented. "You spend the next eighteen hours eating, sleeping and working in the gym. I'll assemble a mobile lab and rewarm a team of expendable parameds to accompany you. Orbiting Down time will be in seventy-two hours." Then she added in her usual feminine voice: "Okay?" "Okayl" He went to gather his notes... becking with Substrates the next  day he confirmed his suspicions. The panel of earth organisms were having trouble with the alien substrates. Starch was the first to show up, but he was sure there would be others. Without starch you might have a pretty thin population, but not a hundred per cent dead population. The simple molecules cross-digested well: glucose, fructose and other sugars; organic acids, aldehydes, ketone bodies and smaller dextrins. "Check back with me if you rim into any more nondigestables," he said, regretting the time delays in isolating the compounds prior to testing. It would be weeks before they really got into the complex groups of amino acids, proteins and fats, but he was sure that was where the real trouble was. The second yellow light -- an amber-three -- came on in the O.S. M. Control section where the monitors were picking up the optic record of one of the lost scouts. It was Ralph Eggers -- black, bloated and demented -- wandering around his camp with a blank expression on his face. Nothing the O.S.M. could do would impress him, and there were no mobile units closer than the ghost town. That one was dispatched to go render aid. "My God I" exploded Bob. "That can't be Ralph Eggers I" For a moment he watched, estimating height and relative bone size. The soft tissues hardly resembled anything human, but when the vacant smile exposed a gold half-crown Bob recognized his friend, and a reflex hatred for the planet grew inside him. Ralph had probably been the most sensitive and idealistic of all the scouts, thought Bob. And this warped planet had singled him out and transformed him to that horror on the screen. Ignoring Olga's auditory pickups with, for he realized that unless he Bob muttered to himself: "You received aid he could not live to see green bastard of a planet I So you another day. got Ralph, did you? Well, you His efforts only produced a slight aren't going to kill all of us. rustle in the leaves. Not only were "I'm coming down there, and I'm his extremities almost completely going to crack your damned secret, paralyzed, but now he was also I'm going to plant hmnans all over tightly entangled in the underyour stinking surface, and they're growth. He couldn't even crawl, going to stayl" After the starships left he cried His fists were clenched tight, and like a baby. Tears streaked his his adrenals had elevated his serum black skin. He longed for his health catecholamines; but there was noth... his home... and his Betty. Now ing appropriate for him to attack, he regretted leaving Earth. If he so he relaxed a little. Through biohad stayed home he would have electrical parameters Olga detected been alive and warm during these his hate, and estimated how it would last ten years instead of frozen on increase his effectiveness down on the starship. He probably would the surface: considerably. have married Betty, raised a family and done all those other things that ed so short, and so empty. Now in T alph lay trapped where he had the end the few happy memories flopped, in a cocoon-like tangle were released from his subconscious of vegetation. The egg-laying rats and rose up in full detail to ease his had paid no more attention to him suffering. than the alien bees had. They had The vegetation around him came swarmed over him as if he were into sharper focus. It consisted of just another inanimate object in sheaves of drying corn. He moved their path. A few paused to sniff his hand up a stalk and caressed a and stare into his eyes, but then heavy ear: dry brown silk, crisp they moved on. yellow leaves and rough golden ker Through a small hole in the thick, nels. The mealy odor was pleasant, green canopy he watched the two and when he chewed one of the starships winking by in the bright grains he could taste the rich oil of sunlight. His mottled, black skin the germ and the sweet starch of blended only too well into the deep the cotyledon, shadows. The cameras could never Then he saw her. She was beside pick him out. He feverously glanced him with her bright eyes and smile; around for something to signal them her long hair reached to her lap as IP she sat there husking and shelling. They ate corn bread and sipped water in their little house in the corn shock. He said all the things he had saved up through the years, and in the days to come she bathed his wounds. He sunned himself and his strength returned. Life was good, and in time they made love. He was happy. He watched her abdomen grow with their child. They took frequent walks . together. Tob's skimmer moved across the  tidal flats with Peter, a paramed, at the controls. "How do you spose we missed Ralph? I'd think that either the picked him up. He couldn't have come this far," said Peter. Bob studied the infrared maps of the area, taken from orbit. "He is either dead or he's dug himself a hole and crawled in. The sensors are calibrated to pick up any warmblooded animal over tWrty kilogram mass. There is nothing here." "Couldn't we make a couple more runs through the area? He may be in one of those gullies. The area is pretty densely overgrown." Bob watched silted pools pass under the skimmer before answering: "We'll make a couple more passes... hoping he'll come out from wherever he's hiding... if he is still alive. But there are several other missing scouts that we'll be hunting for too." Their search was cut off by the report of a body. It answered the description of Ralph and it was further down the tidal flats. The M.S. U. that made the discovery was standing b# and sending a homing beam. It only took them a bit over two hours to get there. The body, what was left of it, lay on a makeshift raft on the edge of a larger salt water pool. Water action and sharp coral had removed most of the skin and subcutaneous fat, but there was no sign of putrefaction or anthropophagy. "Carbon fourteen?" asked Bob. "Less than half a year," the M. S.U. answered. "Probably one of our people then," said Bob. He retract the lower lip. The gold crown was not there. It wasn't Ralph. He autopsied it rit on the spot...feeding samples to the M.S.U. for tox and micro. The only gross finding which puzzled him was the heavy, waxy appearance of the brain. On cut surface it was much firmer and more translucent than normal. The other findings he expected: a universal black pigmentation of all tissues, abundant edema fluids, absence of all body fat, atrophy of muscles, cirrhosis of the liver and -- of course -- the skin ulcers. Microscopies a few minutes later confirmed the above and added beriberi changes in the peripheral nerves and myocardium. The waxy brain micros just showed holes in the cells. Tox might tell what was in those boles. Similar holes were also present in the cells of the liver, spleen and l#nnph nodes -- but less marked than the central nervous system. Bob put a few samples in a hold jar" and had the rest of the remains buried. They moved on while the M.S.U. continued its analysis of the waxy material. As they traveled to the search area for the next lost scout Bob asked: "Olga. Was there anything unusual about those scouts that disappeared? I mean, when compared to the ones who are still at their camps?" "We already went over their backgrounds: genetic, skill and psychic. If anything, they were the best conditioned and the most content with their assignments." "How do you mean, best conditioned?" he asked. "Well, they seemed to enjoy their work more. They cultivated larger gardens, did more landscaping, explored larger areas more thoroughly, and in their free time they hiked, hunted or fished," she answered. "In fact, that is one of the reasons why it is difficult to pinpoint their disappearances. They were usually away from the O.S.M. most of the time." He turned to Peter. "That fits perfectly. If your diet lacks something you just accentuate it with exertion. You burn up whatever supply your body cells may have stored and the deficiency shows up sooner." "What deficiency, sir?" asked Peter. "I don't know for sure, just yet, but it looks like a mixed one: protein, calories and some vitamins. Those scouts on long hunting trips were probably away from their earth food supply and were eating more of this dien muck." Finally Tox came up with the cause of death in the autopsied scout: a storage disease. An inert galactoside containing an unrecognizable amino acid was stored in massive amounts in the brain, liver, spleen and other lymphoid tissues. The M.S.U. relay the molecular characteristics up to Olga for further ident. The black pigment was homogentistic acid: a fairly harmless byproduct of faulty metabolism of the amino acids t#osine and phenylalanine, also called ochronosis. The black pigmentation usually caused no serious ill effects other than arthritis. Bob was familiar with these lesions, often seeing them in study sets and occasionally in the clinics. But always they had been in separate patients. They had different etiologies. Storage diseases were sort of genetic defects: you lacked a particular enzyme and suffered from a storage of the molecule that enzyme is supposed to handle. DeIP fidency states were acquired naturally, Your diet just lacked some vital molecule -- a "vitamin." Olga identified the autopsy galactoside as neuraminic acid, similar to the molecule stored in Tay-Sach's disease. "Adult Tay-Sach's disease I I've never heard of that before." "It has never been reported," said Olga after reviewing her memory banks. The main feature of that disease was the mental deterioration. Having seen the micros on the brain, he could understand why. T Te checked with the tech in substrates to see how the earthalien cross checking was coming. So far there were only a few nondigestables -- all in the larger molecules, usually ones with benzene rings. The most resistant forms outside of the starch molecule were the two "essential" amino adds, t)n:osine and phenylalanine, which explained the early appearance of black ochronosis in the scouts...It wasn't their faulty enzymes: just resistant substrates. The tech explained about enzyme spedfidty. Both the enzyme and its subtrate are three-dimensional molecules that have to fit together like a hand in a glove before they can react. On Earth organic evolution was a progression in complexity so that molecules came before cell, and cell before higher fornis. Genes control heredity, so a molecule -- say tyrosine -- is made the same all over the planet; and its enzyme -- t#nrosinase -- is the same. This allows complete energy cydes. The tyrosine molecule can be passed from the eaten to the eater. However, on this alien planet evolution was parallel but not identical. The molecules served the same function but were slightly different in rotation of a part or configuration. But it still worked. They were all like that, with matching genes and enzymes. It was only when you took the enzymes from earth and tried to digest alien molecules that the difference showed up. It was like trying to put your left hand in your right glove. The configurations didn't match. As Bob listened his sullen hatred of the planet grew. The planet's friendly facade covered a deadly molecular biosphere. He loathed the cruel manner in which it killed its victims -- robbing them of their minds and then letting them blunder around tearing off bits of flesh on inanimate barbs and spurs. With the cause of the problem pretty well defined, Olga put the Separate Ecology Rule into effect, and the Implant went on modified greenhouse status. Earth plants grew in soil seeded by earth organisms and fertilized by earth compost. The animals and humans ate only earth foodstuffs. Large compost piles seeded with mixed earth aKen flora managed to decompose debris from either source when the flora was properly mixed. Most of the smaller molecules could be crossdigested. Further work in substrates showed that malting alien grain resulted in a wort of small sugars which could also be cross-digested by organisms from either source. (In malting, the grain's own cellular enzymes are activated by germination, and they digest the seed's own large molecules down to smaller ones.) Man was at last in the Procyon system to stay. XV Oeveral of the scouts were found in  various stages of the alien-molecule disease while still alive. It was learned that the condition was somewhat reversible, with a simple earth diet. Of course, brain cells that were lost could not be replaced, but by supplying the needed amino acids and vitamins the body quickly recovered. The mental picture usually improved partially, leaving some retardation, memory and I.Q. losses. Cigar was now re-outfitted. He was humming what would be a happy tune as he recorded the regrowth of earth plants in the bare patches that marked his old fields and gardis of Implant One. By inoculating earth flora, the peatlike layers of two-hundred-year-old cellulose fibers began to rot, providing a rich humus for cultivating earth crops. 'he M.S.U. crossed the peat Her fleeing form attracted its optic pickups. "A thirty-kilogram hominoid," it registered and loaded up a tranquilizer dart to catch it for dissection. Zoological banks opened up and the optic record was relayed to Olga. The picture was projected back down to Bob's screen in the skimmer. 'Good God! She's human I That's either a pygmy or a runt. Olga, stop that class eight M.S.U. before it hurts her I" "Too late. The dart has been fired and a local ion storm has cut off communication. Can you get over there in the skimmer?" said Olga. "Damn class eights #" muttered Bob as he lifted off and started tracking after the M.S.U. It was an hour and a half before they reached the dull-witted three-ton robot. It had sealed up in its heat-shield like a turtle, and there was a seventythree-inch black hominoid pounding on its sides with a stout limb. "Whoa there, big fellow," said Bob, approaching in a crouch. "Give me the club before -- " He was interrupted by a wild club-swinging attack. Bob reflexively went into a shiko-dachi dance and gracefully disarmed his attackIF er, gently laying the bigger man out on the peat. Two parameds arrived quickly to restrain him without hurting him. It was Ralph. He didn't talk, and he didn't seem to know or understand them. Bob half dreaded that he'd find the dissected body of the small female someplace. Then the M.S.U. lifted its re-entry heat shield, and there she was. A beautifully formed little human female, sleeping in the manipulators (arms) of the robot. She looked to be about fiftyfour inches tall, about twenty-eight kilograms in weight. No mutation, just a runt. 'Okay, soil-tiller, why are you holding the human? Why didn't you let her go?" The optic pickups focused on him, and the lingual read-out activated: 'Hominoid... correction... human had been drugged prior to arrival of large male. While asleep she required supervision for lifesupport. I could not release her to an obviously demented individual, or she might have aspirated or asphyxiated. I had to wait until the drug wore off before releasing her." 'Well, we're not demented. Release her to us." Two of the parameds climbed up on the treads of the giant cultivator robot, but it took only one to carry the small female. They wrapped her in a blanket and stretched her out on the skimmer seat. By the way, what stopped you from completing your studies of her -- the dissection?" asked Bob as hei started helping Ralph up, still restrained by the parameds. The robot answered: "The large male attacked me. I recognized him as a human and assumed that she was one also." "Good work, class eight," said Bob sarcastically. "Class seven," corrected the machine. A s she woke up Bob could uhderstand how the M.S.U. could mistake her for an animal. Her coalblack sclerae gave her eyes the solid black look of the mollusk eye, her hair -- a long heavy mane -- covered her from head to mid-thigh, and her reflex time -- about a third again faster than his -- gave her a wild, jumpy appearance. They carefully released both of them. Without a word, they ran off together into the brush. It was then that they noticed the edge of the field was rimmed by a narrow zone of dense corn stalks. Like a palisade the crowded stalks formed a fence about a meter thick. Inside, the entire field was the usual bare, flat peat and outside was the press of alien vegetation. For some reason that wall of corn had been growing there on the edge of the field, slowly pressing into the surroundings and building up the central peat pack, which now layered some three feet above ground levd. Standing at the edge and looking down, Bob saw the thick mat-like growth centrally and the sparse new growth in the outer zone of the corn-rim. "Ill bet this field has been growing here since the first Implant' ventured Bob. "There must be ten acres of peat here -- three or four feet thick -- and each cellulose fiber laid down by that expanding rim of corn." One of the parameds picked up a sample of the peat and placed it in a specimen container. The M.S.U. was busy plowing at the other end of the field. The paramed observed: "I'd guess the soil ecology of this field lacks the cellulose-eaters. Earth termites is all it probably needs. Then you'd have that corn all over this bare spot." "I think the cultivator is taking care of that now," said Bob. "Let's not excite Ralph and his little friend. They've gotten along without us this long. A few more days won't hurt anything." hey planted a sensory probe on the edge of the corn patch and stocked the area with a small flock of chickens to supplement the pigmented hominoids' diet. With the probe they learned that the pygmy colony numbered twenty-three: five paired adults, eight young adults and five small children. Ralidi was counted as one of the adults and the female was his mate. They had one child. Studying the group, they learned that there was no Iwguage other than a dozen or so grunts, squeals and gestures. No artifacts other than a few sun-dried clay bowls and random sticks. Diet: corn -- green and dry, whole, crushed and soaked. They had had fire on occasions in the past, but none now: nor could they guess how they got the fire. Their custom of disposing of waste material (body and other) by going "three paces into the bush" probably explained how the rim of corn expanded -- following the growing zone of Earth flora. 'he patch nurse sat down at her desk and looked at the report. The third Eggers' child was ready to graduate from the patch school and go to her new foster home at the local base. Three younger siblings were already crowding her out of the little hut. The screen lit up and Bob's lined face appeared. "Cathy Eggers ready to be picked up?" he asked. "Yes," answered the nurse. Ralph and Betty both sat in on kindergarten class today, and she had discussed Cathy's leaving with them. They seemed to understand -- although with a vocabulary of about seventy words it was difficult to know how much they took in. IF Ralph Junior and I will drop by around supper time and pick her up then. See you." The screen blanked. Ralph Jxmior was Ralph's eldest. Bob made a point of checking on Ralph -- although there now was little hope that he would ever get back any of his adult memories. In spite of Bob's efforts at injecting a purified alien enzyme (galactosidase) into Ralph's system to speed up the removal of the stored molecules, the permanently damaged brain cells would never come back. Now he seemed to be retraining undamaged, but previously unused, portions of his brain. On the improved Earth diet the patch pygmies showed some ability at using tools and picking up simple speech. Their children, on the other hand, would be perfectly normal. Since they would be protected from the alien amino acids there was no damage by phenyl-ketonuria; so, unlike their parents, the patch children could grasp the cultural level of Implant Two. These children left home to grow up with Implant Two and contribute their genetic material to the growing human population. Tt was autumn. A raging forest fire was blackening the foothills on an island in the temperate zone. Bob Zuliani switched off his laser and watched the flames from his hovercraft. He had been careful to start the . fire along the entire circumference of the coastline so that it would burn toward the center -- hopefully sterilizing the island of its alien ecr , ology. He enjoyed the island-sterilization project. This would be number sixty-four for him. Tomorrow the cultivator M.S.U.'s would begin plowing and inoculating, and by spring a little colony of humans should be farming the land. There were thousands of suitable islands in the achipelago, easy to sterilize with their technology -- and fertile when claimed. Yes, he was planting humans all over the planet. igar's questioning circuits had  stopped nagging him when the nondigestibles were found. The mystery was solved. Now survivors of his own Implant were actually alive and contributing to the genetic pool on the surface. His components were being updated, and he was now equipp with an M.S.U. of his own. He even had his memory banks brought up to date by Olga. Orbiting around in a repolished hull, he was looking forward to the day when he would take an Implant from this planet to seed another star system. After all, he reasoned, a starship doesn't retire after just one successful Implant! IP  Short Story Theres nothing fike a dollop of LA. to make the world go round or zigzag! TTjeigand Dennis was seeking   moment of refuge in his wef a refuge in his west wing of the White House office. The press secretary, special assistant and brains behind e "throne of the President of the United States of the Americas, had just come from a meeting of the President with his latest think tank. So far as Dennis was concerned, the think tank had thought itself dry; either that, or it had sprung a leak. The latest brain storm had come a cropper. It had seemed a promising enough idea, once the scientist cloddies had finally succeeded in teaching the porpoises to talk, to give them jobs herding great numbers of whales, something like cowboys herding beef cattle. It looked to be a solution of the protein shortage throughout the world. But who could have foreseen that they would first demand wages, and then, when these weren't foreseen that those damned Marx-spouting, communist-trained dolphins would infiltrate them, with the present danger of the herds of whales being expropriated? Steve Hammond, the Secret Service agent assigned to Weigand Dennis, stuck his head in the office door and said, "Mr. Dennis, there's an inventor out here who wants to see the President." "Inventor? Send him over to the National Science Foundation; they have a special Department of Crackpots, or whatever they call it, for inventors." "Yes, sir. But they sent him over here." "Well, why?" "It seems there's a standing order that anyone who comes up with an idea that might end the depression is to be referred to the ite House staff." Dennis groaned. "All right, damn it, send him in. But listen..." "Yes, sir?" "You stand right outside that door, just in case. The way things have been going today, it's as sure as death, taxes and our losing the next election that he's a nut." "Yes, sir." Steve Hammond's head disappeared again. The inventor's name turned out to be Newton Brown, and he weighed approximately one hundred pounds and sported a beard that looked as though moths not only bedded down there but held orgies. The facial expression was that of a lost pup, a very lost pup. Weigand Dennis said, "Sit down, Mr. Brown." The other perched on the edge of a straight chair and bobbed his Adam's apple. "My friends call me Newt." Dennis considered that for a moment. He could have said, "I'll bet they do," but refrained. Instead, he waited for more. Newt Brown cleared his throat and said, "I came to you first."" When there was no immediate response to that he said, "My latest research. I've finally found a use for water. It's obviously a flop as a beverage." "Oh, great. What's that got to do with the President?" "It will solve all the problems that beset the world, Mr. Dennis.' "Your new invention? What are you going to do?" Dennis said sarcastically. "Blow it up?" "Oh no, not at all. Just the opposite." Weigand Dennis said cautiously, "What's the opposite of blowing up the world?" Newton Brown was obviously launching into his fling now. "Mr. Dennis, what this world needs is love. Every great thinker in the history of the world has advocated love. Love thy neighbor as thyself was taught long, long before Jesus." "All right, all right," Dennis said. "Every religious leader, every philosopher down through the centuries, has advocated that we love one another. Man seems to accept the teaching in principle, but when he gets around to dealing with his fellow man, he usually winds up clobbering him instead." Newt Brown beamed, as though at a receptive student. Right," he said. Weigand Dennis looked at him. "So what are you going to do with water to change all that?" "Oh, it's not primarily water. That's just my method of distribution." "Of what?" "L.A." Tleigand looked at the other for   a long moment, wondering if he really wanted to continue this conversation. Finally, he said, "Los Angeles is already distributed all over hell's half acre. It stretches from San Francisco to San Diego." "Not Los Angeles. L.A. My new hallucinogen, Love Acid." he hurried on. "We'll dump it in the reservoirs." "Now wait a minute. A new halDidn't we have enough trouble with the old ones?" Newt Brown made a scoffing gesOld hat. I mean they're antiquated. Nothing. Love Acid is the ultimate hallucinogen. It will solve all the world's problems. No more wars. No more economic crises. No more depressions. Everybody will love everybody. In spite of his caution, Weigand Dennis was becoming intrigued. "How would it end depressions?" "What causes depressions? The flow of industry ends. When the owner of an industry cannot make a profit, he closes it down, not caring that there might be thousands of customers, consumers who need the product he manufacturers. He doesn't care. All he's interested in is making a profit. Now if he loved everybody, he wouldn't give a hoot about profit. He'd just want to supply his product to those who needed it." Weigand Dennis left off consideration of some of the socio-economic ramifications of that for later. He said, "Now if I get this right, what you want to do is dump this new hallucinogen of yours in the drinking water of the whole country." "Correct." "And then everybody would love everybody else." "That is correct." Newt Brown beamed once again as though at a student who had just mastered a difficult teaching. "Holy smokes." "Obviously." "Then, I suppose, after you've dosed everybody in the United States of the Americas, you'd turn it over to Common Eur-Asia and... and everybody." 'Tewt Brown nodded emphatical  ly. " Absolutely. If they refuse IF the gift, we'll lob it over into their reservoirs by rocket missile. Use up our stockpile of missiles. We won't want nuclear missiles by that time, anyway; we'll love everybody, not want to kill them." 'Holy smokes." Weigand Dennis shook his head, momentarily overwhelmed. Something came to him, and he narrowed his eyes at the other. "How do I know it works?" "Oh, it works all right, all right. I've tried it out on all sorts that supposedly hate each other. On cats and dogs, on cobras and mongooses, on ferrets and rats. It can get a bit, ah, gruesome, watching its effects on some of these. Oh, it works all right." "You mean it works on 'I told you. It's imi versa!. It works on everything. Of course, that's one aspect. We'd all wind up vegetarians." Dennis grunted. We'll all wind up that way, anyway. Who can afford meat any more? But, look, you mean I could give a dollop of this stuff to my worst enemy and then he'd love me?" Newt Brown squirmed a bit, in discomfort. 'Well, admittedly that, along with the vegetarian necessity, is the big shortcoming." Weigand Dennis looked at him. Newt Brown twisted in his chair unhappily. He said, assume your worst enemy is a man?" That didn't quite come through. Of course." Newt Brown said grudgingly, "Then, yes. I'm afraid so." 'You're afraid what?" 'He'd want to love you." A suspicion was beginning to dawn in Weigand Dennis. 'Took here," he growled. "When you say that everybody would love everybody after taking this L.A. of yours, how do you mean?" "Love, love," Newt Brown said impatiently. "You know what love is." "There is love and love," Weigand Dennis said dangerously. "I love the President's private secretary. I also love my cotmtry and chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. I also love a parade..." His voice was beginning to go slightly higher. "... but I've never wanted to go to bed with one!" Newt Brown bobbed his Adam's apple. "This is the kind of love you undoubtedly feel for the President's secretary." Weigand stared at him. "You mean this L.A. of yours that you want to slip into the nation's drinking water is a universal aphrodisiac?" "You might put it that way. I prefer to think..." "And this Mickey Finn to end all Mickey Finns would give everybody..." "Everything, not just everybody," Newt Brown interjected. "... the hots for everybody else?" The self-proclaimed inventor summoned his dignity. "'That is not the way I would explain it." Veigand Dennis yelled, "Hammondl" Steve Hammond burst into the office, .# Magnum Recoilless at the ready. Newt Brown winced. Yes, sir," the Secret Service bodyguard snapped. Do they still have chains?" Steve Hammond blinked at him. " Chains, Mr. Dennis?" 'In the old days, the king, or whoever, would yell. Throw him in chains r Squealing terror. Newt Brown tried to scurry toward the door, but Steve Hammond had him in an arm lock. Holding the still mewling inventor with one hand, he turned back to Weigand Dennis. 'Well, no sir, I don't think so. All we've got now is handcuffs and leg irons." Okay. Get him into handcuffs and leg irons and into some top security cell. And listen, Hammond, if he's got any vials of fluid, any packets of powders, or any pills on him, flush them all down the drain. No, wait a minute. The rats in the sewers might get it, or the fish in the sea. I'd hate to have ning around the streets trying to love us, or have fish storming the beaches with a love-light in their eye. Burn it all." "Yes, sir." Steve Hamnwnd thought about it for a moment. What's the charge?" 'Tharge?" The Secret Service man was apologetic. Well, yes sir. There ought to be some charge." He added, "Don't you think?" That set Weigand Dennis back only momentarily. He turned to Newton Brown. Tisten, did you take any of this L.A. of yours yourself?" Newt Brown was indignant. 'Of tourse. I wouldn't subject another try on myself..." Weigand looked at Steve Hammond. "Book him on a morals charge." The bodyguard looked at him blankly. "Do we have evidence to back it?" Weigand said, "Look. Just throw him into any prison available. By the time his case comes to trial, we'll have plenty of witnesses ranging from nurses in the prison hospital, to prison matrons, to prison warders, to fellow prisoners. Let's hope they don't have a dog for a prison masNew subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! IF IF  Novelette Everyone wanted to steal the Pheasant for its Dreams. But Sloane knew only nightmares he couldn't -- quite -- remember! I colliding with and injurying a bewildered pigeon. That was all Ben TalT hey were trying to steal the man had said over the phone. Simple, Pheasant of Dreams. sweet, nothing anyone could distill Sloane thought about that while the a drop of secret information from, air taxi jolted througIj#he changing Simply: 'They're trying to steal the currents between the skyscrapers. Pheasant of Dreams." bumping, rocking, now and then Theft. The most startling, galaxy-shaking theft ever recorded in the annals of crime, which, generally speaking, were annals fraught with startling, galaxy-shaking thefts. Even to reach the pheasant would be a chore for any world's army. It's "cage" was a giant, bullet-proof, shatter-proof, melt-proof, unbreakable, uncrackable, unchoppable glass dome buried beneath layers of concrete and steel seven miles beneath the off-limits grounds of the Actria Global Game Reserves, a dome boasting, aside from the formidable security arrangements, every comfort a pheasant could expect from life. The air taxi banked to the left, slipping down through the last two hundred feet toward the plaza in front of the United Worlds Relief Funds Building. Sloane mused that the building was much more than the name implied. The twenty stories above ground were the quarters from which UW officials processed requests for and dispatched emergency monies to help worlds ravaged by floods, storms, meteor strikes, and every and all catastrophies which could and regularly did strike the three hundred and seventy-two member planets of the United Worlds Federation. There was a basement ports were filed, and janitorial supplies were kept. Then, deep beneath the street, the other fifty-eight floors and their employees functioned. The building was constructed like an iceberg, with the greatest bulk unseen. In those fifty-eight levels below the water line. United World Police functioned. It wasn't a secret to the proverbial big shots: the business leaders, the law makers, or the diplomats. They realized that without a forceful policing group, the Federation would fold just as the ancient United Nations had. But the men-on-the-street, or at least a majority of them, would think of it as a form of storm trooperism or secret police. Therefore, to avoid public debate and minority protest, it was kept secret. The craft sputtered, glided to the cement, and settled finally with a solid thump. The price of the fare popped up in lighted numerals above the dashboard: # c. He paid it through the slot in the back of the front seat and waited for the machine to run a counterfeit check. Satisfied, the taxi said "Thank you" and flung open its doors. Looking down at the flagstone and cement as he got out, he thought about Talman waiting a mile below... #XTour appointment was ten minjL utes ago, Mr. Sloane," Talman said, resting his large, muscular, big-boned, scarred body in the leather swivel chair behind the plain, heavy desk. "I was caught by a fit of diarrhea and could not possibly have been punctual this morning." "You've got diarrhea of the mind." "That could be a compliment." "Okay then, of the mouth." He picked up a pencil, and Sloane expected him to snap it in two. "I don't know why I put up with you, Sloane." "Because you don't have a better agent. You know it." IF "Or even a more conceited one." "Modesty is a false virtue." "Still, now and then, it is refreshing." Sloane didn't answer. "Okay. Background." Talman could drop right out of personal conversation and into a briefing so fast it sometimes confused the agent. Andt Sloane thought, perhaps it is meant to, "You know the history of, or at least you should, the Pheasant of Dreams, the Dreaming Pheasant, the Paradise Bird, the Feathered Fantasia. There are a dozen other names for it. But, to start with and to make sure there are no misconceptions running about in your mind, I'll run through a brief history of Actria and the bird." "Good, a story." "Shut up. Now, twenty-six years ago, the planet called Actria was discovered and immediately brought under the protective folds of the United Worlds Federation. The usual investigatory period was suspended, and the planet was given membership more quickly than any other to date. It was a selfish move on the part of the Federation. Actria was a wealthy world in the most important way -- an abundant supply of novelties. More money is spent by citizens of the galaxy on novelties and entertainment within any given Earthnormal year than is spent on any other item. Actria, then, was an exploiter's paradise. There were three beautiful furbearing animals whose pelts brought enormous and deserved prices among members of the upper-upper class. There were vast regions where all manners of exotic jewels lay strewn about the sand. And, perhaps most important of all these wonders, the Pheasant of Dreams." "The Dreaming Pheasant." "The Paradise Bird," Talman continued. "Since Aetna's languages were extremely difficult to break and construct a grammar for (experts then estimating five years necessary ) , the Federation members were understandably anxious to get started on the planet's resources before they could communicate with its peoples. So we moved in. We took the furs and jewels and countless other things without their consent, holding fifty percent of the earnings in escrow until the Actrians could understand what had happened to them. The council looked upon the venture as fatherly." "Oh, very fatherly." T alman ignored him. "But in killing the Pheasant of Dreams for the three-dimensional, color-changing feathers, the Federation henchmen led the bird down the road to extinction before cracking the language barrier and finding out from the Actrians what the real purpose of the fowl was. It was an Esp-animal, a creature that could delve into your mind to bring you dreams of splendor, recreating your wildest fantasies so realistically, that any drug ever known in the galaxy pes by comparison." "I never believed they could be that realistic," Sloane said, slumping even deeper into the folds of his chair. "I wouldn't know. But the Actrians seem to think they were. We had to provide them with large quantheir desire for escape, and still they longed for the birds. Now, there is only one pheasant left. They call it Eve in an optimism, hoping she will be the first to bring her race from the dark abyss it hangs over. Ourlaboratories are working on some method of artificial stimulation to set her unfertilized eggs to growing. So far, no luck." "And on top of all this, someone has tried to steal Eve." "Exactly." "Who?" Talman reached across to a green button on a stud-covered console at the right of his desk. The screen behind him lighted and a face was projected from behind it. A wrinkled, withered, ancient face with slits of eyes and skin like crumpled paper left in the rain, lips like withered apple skins, no chin. "Him?" "You know him??" Sloane sat up straight in his chair. "Certainly. It's Tate Briscow. He's probably the richest man in the galaxy. Owns Planet Industries, hundreds of things. But why him?" "He's two hundred and seventyeight years old. Hagan-Foster treatments can keep you relatively young for a hundred years and relatively middle-aged for another hundred, but they can't make you immortal. Eventually, you do grow old. He has thing else to extend life and keep it bulging with youth. But he has failed. Now there is only the pheasant for him. He realizes, if there is to be any joy in his life, it will have to be hallucinogenic in nature from here on out. Thus, the bird." "I rather pity him," Sloane said. "Why, for God's sake?" "You said yourself it would be the only way for him to enjoy what's left of this life." "Hell, AUie, he's had a life a hundred years longer than either you or I will have. You have to check out sooner or later." "The later the better." T alman wiped the face off the screen. "Look, maybe you don't understand what would happen if the pheasant were stolen. Actria has gained allies in the Federation since her entry into galactic government. She votes radically conservative and could end up as the focal point of a war between liberal and conservative factions." "Impossible."  "You think so?" "Well, the Secretary General doesn't. He wants Briscow stopped." Sloane stood and walked to an original Famna oil hanging on the wall to the left of Talman's desk. The chief had led a colorful life, and it was reflected in his choice of art. All the colors were warm, flaring into hot even to the edges of the canvas where one might expect something darker, more subtle. Sloane didn't particularly like or dislike it. "How do you know," he said finally, "that Briscow is after the animal?" Talman punched another button. Another photo, a face from the mouth up flashed onto the screen. "This was Barney Rossman. A BrisIF cow henchman He died trying to steal the bird' Sloane studied the picture. 'How? What was his plan?" "Somehow, Rossman was dropped into the reserve land above the bird's dome. Supplied with atomic hand diggers, he worked his way down through the first layers of earth. He wasn't disturbed by anyone, since the reserve is off-Hmits even to guards of the project. When he reached the steel and concrete, atomic tools were evidently brought in on another illegal flight during the night. The launching was probably accomplished from Briscow's pleasure satellite which he keeps orbiting Actria by paying exorbitant rent to the UW. But there's no proof. Anyway, Rossman almost made it. He came down within the caverns where the dome rests, and of course he found that the guards were outside the doorways and not inside. He attached some new, high-power nuclear putty to the seams of the glass door and tried to bum it off. Given time, he might possibly have done it. Unfortunately for him, the putty reacted too vigorously with the chemical nature of the glass, and huge columns of smoke poured through the room. The guards thought it was a fire and came running. Rossman was caught in the act." "And Rossman accused Briscow. There you have your proof against the old man." "No." "Why not?" "We know Rossman worked for Briscow; he has for twenty-odd years. But before we could get a statement from him, his head was neatly severed from the rest of him." He twisted a knob, rolling up the picture to show the head from the mouth down. There was nothing but a shredded, bloody stump for a neck. No body "Ecchhl" "Agreed. Accomplished by remote control, probably a capsule of explosive jelly in his neck set to a certain signal on a certain frequency." "Okay, I'm convinced." T alman blanked out the picture. "We want you to go to Actria on the sub-space liner Pride this afternoon. Planet Industries, owned by Briscow, has used its influence to and the bird's dome. We think one of the delegates is working for Briscow and will be after the pheasant. The Federation granted the tour to Actria because it didn't want to rab Briscow the wrong way, but also because one of its men from the Funds Committee was going on the same ship, and refusal to one group while sending that diplomat could have aroused some resentment. Your cover identification to join the group is this: you're a prince from one of the outer worlds. You will be king when you reach twenty-six next month. This is a tour to acquaint you with Actria, as you will make s imil ar tours of all the other planets." "But actually. I'll be spying." "Correct" "On whom?" "Less Cannon, congressman. A little corrupt, but probably not a henchman for Briscow. Waltham, the poet, rather out of question. Reamer, the Union leader. We suspect he's your man. He has had deals with Briscow in the past -- salary fixing and such. And the last is Cossik from the Funds Committee upstairs, who is going to see how much the UW should allow for artificial fertilization to help the pheasant get pregnant. Like I said, probably Reamer." "What time does the boat leave, Angelo?" 'Two o'clock, and be there on time. A sub-spacer with five-hundred go will not wait for even you." "I doubt that," Sloane said, walking to the door. "Oh, and AUie, you'll have a backup man on this." "Oh, God, I hope not Smithe or LansdoffI" "No. A mutant. He has a few powers which I think you'll find useful." Sloane nodded from the hallway as the door slid shut behind. He picked up his briefing package with all the necessary cover papers. Someone was trying to steal the Pheasant of Dreams. He had to stop them. But first, lunch. II I t was one hell of a pain when Briscow tried to grip anything, even the glass with the very small portion of liquor in it. It was a pain that surged through every bone in his body, erupted in his brain like a volcano. Liquid fire pain. But he was determined not to become a vegetable. Even Hagan-Foster said he had thirty to forty years left to him. Those years would not be spent lying in a bed being spoon-fed by girls like those to whom he once made lovel Never. Out of the goddamn question! He finally clamped the brittle sticks of bis fingers around the moist glass and drew it to his leathery lips. His secretary, Moxham, said that ice "bruised" the drink when you dropped so much of it in. But he liked liquor cold. It took either ice cold or boiling hot thin gs to really affect his taste buds anymore... Clutching the tiny glass like the flame of life, he reflected on the next stage in the project. Too bad Rossman had died. He had liked the fellow, although he had been a total idiot on many things. But the next stage .   He had to work with a man he abhorred. A man who had not made his money "honestly." A man who was egocentric, as all men are in that profession. And, worst of all, he was going to have to share the prize. He tried to spit on the floor, but he found his mouth dry. He rang the bell on the silver cord. The door opened; a servant entered. "Pack this in ice. More ice! I can't taste the bloody thing!" Ill S loane couldn't remember what he had had for lunch, but he was certain that it had not been any good. He was in a change-over period between one of his moods of depression and the stolid, no-nonsense agent he would have to become in a few hours. IF That was one reason he liked the UW police job. Between assignments a good deal of time could sometimes pass, time he could devote to sulking. He didn't hide the fact from himself that self-pity was a way of life with him. But he didn't exactly know why. Rather, he would not let himself know. There were times when he wanted to give up everything and go running home to the folks. But of course he didn't have folks. All UW police were picked from Federation Orphanages so that they would have no family or family background to enable the unscrupous to blackmail them. And there would be no emotional ties to keep them from risking their lives when occasion demanded. Neat. He signed the name Prince Demoshkie Vontropos to the ship's log, sent his expensive, hand-tooled luggage ahead, and followed into the vast belly of the swollen sub-spacer that, despite the bulky, absurd shape of it, could hop across the blackness to Actria in two days without once popping a rivet. 'Inside, he strolled along the main corridor and into the lounge where most passengers would be awaiting orders to retire to their quarters and strap in for the liftoff, the first stage prior to reaching the point where the ship could plunge into sub-space. There were approximately three hxmdred there in the main lounge. He looked about for a group of four that might be the party he was attached to. They would be wearing name tags like his own so they could ot one another more easily. His attention was held by severe people even though he knew they were not the ones he looked for. Feo pie fascinated him. An old woman, bound probably for the special laboratories and hospitals of Hagan-Foster on Chalmer U, sat in a wheelchair, her male servant, a tall handsome, virile youth of eighteen or nineteen standing behind her, his hand upon her shoulder. The old woman stroked the rugged fingers with her gloved hand. A young couple with specks of rice in their hair were arguing over travel folders. "When we get there," the man was saying, "the first thing we have to see is the tower." "No, I think the Forum of Peace." "But the tower is perhaps the greatest historical -- " "The ForumI" she barked. Sloane turned his gaze next to the person who had got his attention from the comer of his eye. She was blonde, blue-eyed. She was wearing a peek-a-boo dress, and the valley between the young mountains of her breasts was dark and smooth. He turned away, disgusted. All orphans accepted for training as agents were raised as Shakers. They were taught how offensive (and dangerous to their mission) sex and liquor and the vices were. Sloane often marveled at how much Truth was contained in Shaker philosophy. The blonde was disgusting. A s he tried to focus his attention elsewhere, Sloane, trembling, saw a heavy-set man with a weUtrimmed beard making his way across Ae Aunge, smiling and stopping here ami Aere to shake hands and exckajige a few words with oAer passengers. Slnane was trying to think where he had seen Ae man before. There was something familiar about the face the dark eyes like pieces of night sky dotted wiA Ae twinklings of stars, Ae Roman nose, the full head of hair, and especially Ae beard. The fat man walked directly to him and stopped. "Prince Demoshkie. I believe by the royal purple on the lapel." The name tag on the oAer man's lapel opened Ae memory block in Sloane's mmd. Gregory Waltham, the poet. "How do you do, Mr. Waltham." 'T would have been pleased if you had recognized me without the name tag." "#h, I did. Sort of -- " WalAam patted his belly. "I have put on a bit of weight m the last moaAs. Success went to my stomach." That had been the Amg Aat had thrown him off, Sloane realized. The face was rather Ain, sharp-lined, not at all Ae face of a fat man. Placed on the shoulders of the pig-like body, it seemed terribly out of place. 'The oAers are over by the fountain," WalAam said. "Our staterooms are in the same hallway, and I guess we might as well get to know one anoAer right off." 'T guess so," Sloane said. "You'll be king soon, I hear." Talman had done a good job of having the rumor spread. A small paragraph had even been placed in the Earthwide Homeopape that morning. 'That's right. My parents are dead, and by tradition, I cannot become king until I reach Ae age of twenty-eight next month. My world has been kingless for three years. It will be a glorious day when I take the Arone," he finished. And a cold day in hell, he Aought. "I imagine," Waltham said. "Yes, I certainly can imagine." They threaded their way through the crowd to a group of three men sitting by the fountain Aat was shaped like a whale spouting water from its head. It was a smgularly atrocious piece of sculpture, what with the twining vines of marble, Ae stone angels singing from a gilded carol book, the naked sirens perched on rocks that looked vaguely like dragon heads, all the things which Ae newly rich seem to think constitute class and refined splendor. W alAam introduced him to the others. Cannon was boisterous, tall, red-faced, the stereotype Texan. But he was far from stereotype in ability, for he had managed to make it to the United Worlds Council of Earth as the single representative from that state. A powerful man indeed. Reamer was just Ae opposite. He was not talkative; he was short; his complexion was a sickly white; his skin was a bit on the greasy side. His eyes were bulging grapes painted white and brown and sAffed into his sockets. Cossik was all poise and charm and phoney exterior, as most diplomats from UW were. He explained his mission and purpose on the tour, obviously greatly mterested IF in the survival of the pheasant and the creation of more birds via artificial fertilization. It was plain that he would recommend a large grant out of UW funds for research on the problem. "A king, eh?" the Texan said. "That's right." "A real, honest-to-goodness king." "Yep." "I read about them in story books." "Oh?" "Yeah. You know, monarchy died out on Earth three hundred years ago." Sloane didn't answer. "Earth is a progressive planet, though, being the mother planet and all." "I guess so." "Hey," Cannon said, waving the stub of a cigar, "maybe you can get a few pheasant feathers for the royal robes!" "That isn't the least bit humorous," Cossik said. "But I hear they're real pretty." "I hardly think pretty is a strong enough word," Cossik snapped. Beauty is the whirling of the stars The sound of universal music far Between the reaches of the suns and moons Where souls are held in silverplated spoons "Very nice," Sloane told the poet. "From Space, Life, Eternity, and the Stars," Waltham said. "A book?" "My new one, as yet not released. That would be a rather presumptuous title for a single poem, would it not?" "What's it like being a king?" Cannon asked. The warning buzzer to strap ih saved Sloane from an answer. The lounge began to clear quickly, no one being fond of getting caught and mashed into the wall by blastoff. Several uniformed crewmen mingled with the people, hustling them. Sloane's room was between Cossik's and Cannon's. He watched them enter their own, keyed his own lock, and watched as the door slid aside. He stepped in. The door slid shut. "Hello, Mr. Sloane. The name is Doronich Penevitch. You can call me Dorrie." Sloane jumped at the sound of the voice, a hearty, deep-throated rumble. He surveyed the room but could see no one. The two beds were perfectly made; the paintings on the walls were tasteful, hanging straight; but there was absolutely no one in sight. The bathroom door stood ajar so that he could tell that room was empty. Besides, the voice had been very close, in the main room. "Up here, Mr. Sloane." He looked up, tried to step back. He was too close to the wall, and instead of putting any distance between himself and the thing floating up there, he cracked his head against the metal partition. "Oh," Dorrie said, "that hurt, huh? But I will say, most people run and scream at least." S loane could see why. Doronich Penevitch was evidently the mutant that Talman had mentioned. He was legless, for a starter, and had only one arm -- an enormous, abnormally long arm with two elbows in it. The arm ended in a powerful fist equipped with five fingers, each with four knuckles. The eyes were crystal blue -- wide, appearing to sink deep into the head, mysterious, misty, hypnotic. The mouth was set below a mashed-in nose and was, strangely, normal. There was no chin, but the head connected directly to the one-armed trunk which was stubby, squarish, about three feet long, and wrapped in some odd blue garment like a toga. "You're the -- " "Mutant," Penevitch said, laughing. Nafure sometimes repents of her abuses and gives the mutant some abnormality which is a blessing, a positive mutation. In Penevitch's case, it was the power to levitate and propel himself. He could not walk, but he could fly. And, seemingly, in some strange way, he was quite happy. Sloane realized, if he were the thing floating up there, he would have to commit suicide. It was not within his personality to live like that. Penevitch floated down towards the bed he had obviously chosen for his own, settled gently upon the covers. "I must say, though, you do stare a lot." Sloane blinked and tried to regain himself. "I never ran into a... a... severe mutant before." "Really? Do you think I'm severe?" "WeU -- " "No offense will be taken. I'm interested, strictly as the laboratory specimen might be, in what you people on the other side of the glass think of me. So, do you think I'm a severe case?" Sloane advanced, sat down on the comer of his own bed. "I've worked with a lip-reading mutant who could perform perfectly by catching only one word in ten and who could read ninety percent correctly on facial expression alone; he had an extra arm. I've worked with the only known paranorm in the galaxy, the fellow with the two heads. But this is really the first case, yes, in which I would say the mutant was severe." "I like honesty," Penevitch said. The crystal eyes stared steadily at Sloane. "But now letme tell you some things. I don't consider myself severe. Severe mutants are objects of pity, the mistakes of Nature as she tried to correct for the mistakes of Man in the Great War. I don't however, pity myself. I pity humans you ordinary people. You cannot fly; you cannot lift yourself above the canyons and mountains and stare down unless you're encumbered by a bulky plane or fly-suit; you can't float through the center of a thunder storm and listen to Thor talk and the gods laugh. I can. Also, you cannot Listen in on any conversation within a mile because of the talkshields that foul up your directional mikes. I can. And that suits me fine, since I tend to be a voyeur." "Wait," Sloane said, standing. "You're able to hear any conversation within a mile?" "Right." "Could you -- " "Tune in next door? Certainly." He floated off the bed. "That's necessary. I mustn't be touching anything if I wish the reception to be clear." IF T here was a moment of quiet. Stillness. The room seemed suddenly stuffy to Sloane. The air seemed about to sparkle and flame. It was Cossik's room. "He's singing -- humming really. Something from Scheherazade, I think. Yes, definitely. The Story of the Kalander Prince.' You know the piece." "I'm afraid I don't much follow music." "Oh, but you should. Especially the classics. My favorite arrangement of this piece is the ancient Philadelphia Symphony when it was directed by Ormandy. Ormandy was a genius. And on some recordings, Anshel Brusilow plays solo violin. Superb." "Is that all he's doing?" "The original piece on that Ormandy album lasts almost twenty-two minutes and is simply -- oh a masterpiece, an experience in itself!" "Is he only humming?" Sloane persisted. "And then they also do a grand job on Ravel's Alborada del gracioso, I don't think any -- " Penevitch! Is he doing any damn thing else besides humming?" "Oh. Oh, sorry. No. The water seems to be running. I'd say he's taking a quick shower before blastoff." "How about the other side? That's the Texan, Cannon." The blue eyes shifted to the other wall. "He's mumbling to himself." "What's he saying?" "It sounds like cursing, but its too low to make out." "And Reamer, the union man?" "Nothing." "You're sure?" 'rtain." 'Talman seems to ithink we'U have to watch him especially." "I know." "Talman briefed you personally?" Sloane asked, taking a step toward the mutant. "Of course." "I thought only the senior agent was advised by the chief." "I am the senior here," Penevitch Penevitch. You're AA, I believe." "WeU, I'll be damned!" "Sometimes, self-pity is what holds back a mutant, Mr. Sloane. I -- " He paused, his eyes peering one way, then another. "What's the matter?" "Someone nearby just said 'Out to steal a g-goddamn pheasant. Now isn't that really ironic?' and laughed." IV   "I don't hear anything else." "Nothing at all?" "At least nothing by that voice." "Who was it?" "Mr. Sloane, I can hear through walls; I can't see through them. An average voice. It was the tone of a man talking to himself. And he stuttered on the curse word." "Someone with a speech defect. That doesn't fit anyone in the party." "You've heard sdl of them speak?" "Yes. No stutterer." Penevitch drifted back onto the bed. "Perhaps it is an occasional stutter. Maybe you didn't hear them eak often enough to catch it.' The only one who was quiet was Reamer. I don't believe he said more than a dozen words. The others talked incessantly when the conversation got around to things they knew something about." "So. Perhaps Ben is right. Reamer may be our man." The intercom crackled above the "How," Sloane said curiously, "by the way, do you strap in?" Penevitch chuckled. "A good question worthy of demonstration.' He floated to his suitcase, reached out with the gigantic arm from the folds of the robe, and worked the latch with the nimble fingers, springing back the top. Drawing out a strange net affair, he said, "This." It attached to the light fixture in the ceiling by a sturdy cord and to the ceiling itself by means of two magnets. He floated into it, zipped up the opening. "This way. Rather like a banana on the tree." Sloane, in spite of himself, laughed. "I like you, Penevitch." "Dorrie. And I like you, Sloane." "Fine." "Allie." "Good." "Now you better strap yourself in," the mutant said, "or you'll look a helluva lot worse than I do." Sloane crawled into one of the two slope-backed chairs, worked himself into the harness and seatbelt. "I'm your servant and jester, by the way." Sloane looked up amazed. "What?" "That's the cover story. I'm a distant cousin from Earth, bom mutated. You keep me because I tell good jokes and can do menial tasks, but mainly because you pity me." "Pity you?' "I know. But I'll snivel a lot in front of people and bump into things when I levitate and generally act like an idiot." T he ooga horn sounded, the last warning to strap in. A dinosaur mating call, melancholy. The hull began vibrating softly. "What is your real story?" Sloane asked. "It's not pretty." "I guess not." "My mother died in childbirth, and my father would have killed me, so they say, if he could have. He evidently wasn't a very tolerant man. At least, he never came to see me in the special homes even though he was informed that my I.Q. was a hundred and seventy-five and that I was perfectly sound of mind -- almost abnormally sound of mind. So, I never bothered to look him up either." "And how did you get involved with U.W. police?" "I was -- " Penevitch began just as the sudden dragon roar of engines crashed upon them and the ship began to shake like a Polynesian dropped from the sky onto an iceberg. The sack with Penevitch in swung back and forth from the ceiling like the pendulum of a clock. Sloane felt his face muscles begin to tighten as speed was increased. The sack ceased swaying, hung as IF if it were starched and nailed to the ceiling at a forty-five degree angle, anything but a plumb line. The whirring grew in both their ears. But whereas it was annoying to Sloane, it was exceedingly painful to Penevitch. That was one of the rare times he cried. He wrapped the long arm about the trunk and clutched at himself, unable to shut off the super-sensitive pieces of his mind and ears. And he wept. When they finally broke into freetrip to the point where they would enter sub-space, the mutant forced his voice into calm, coughed, and began where he had left off, having voiced none of his pain, Sloane had always hked a man who could pick up an interrupted conversation at the exact point where it had stopped. It showed a singleness of purpose, a clear mind. He noticed the ability in Penevitch. "I came to the attention of Talman because of my talents. Levitation is sometimes useful, but more often than not, one profits in this business from overheard conversations. He came to see me in the special homes after I had taken a T.V. Degree in American Literature from the SorBonne. First, it was the patriotic, peace-lover, do-gooder speech about my obligations to the freedom and the process of maintaining peace throughout the galaxy. He pointed out that had peace bn maintained before my time, I would not have been born a mutant. But that didn't appeal to me. As I said, there's nothing to pity in me. People generally leave me alone because of what I am, alienate me, but since ninetyfive percent of our populace consists of asses, ignoramuses, and petty minds, I don't care how far away they stay. "Then he tried money. That worked. I imagine I'm paid double what you are. And what you get is a small fortune in itself." Sloane whistled his appreciation. "So. I'm wealthy. I live a much more exciting life than the two-legged, two-armed man-on-the-street. I like it." Sloane unstrapped himself. "Well, banana, if you'll get out of that bunch, maybe we can meet with the other members of our party in the dining room and give them a checking out over dinner." "Agreed," Penevitch said, unzipping the net. "If they've any appetite, that is." V # Briscow roaredL out of his papyrus throat. And he was immediately sorry he had not whispered. He could feel the thin trickle of rusty blood working its way down his throat towards his shrunken stomach. Now he would have a sore throat for hours. He could not even scream at people anymore. He thought that he might miss that more than anything. Now and then it was a pleasure to scream. Tate Briscow had always been known for his fog horn voice, his thunder tones. He looked back at the paper in his hands. It was the decoded telegram received from the Pride. He fumed In the back of his mind lurked the thought that he was getting too old, but he would not allow that image of feeble-mindedness to gain dominance. Instead, he took out his fury on the accomplice onboard the Pride. That man was so damned fond of verbosityl He could have said what had to be said in twenty words. But it took him three hundred! The four hundred credits it had cost were not to be sneered at. thought, learns to be careful with his small change. But this man was not responsible enough to think of that. Still, it was comforting to know that things were progressing nicely, that only fourteen hours remain until touchdown on Actria, and that soon the Paradise Bird would be his. He slobbered slightly and felt it run down the cracked flesh of his chin. His brain spinning with the heat of joint and muscle, bone and flesh pain, he forced his hand up and wiped it away. All of it. When he had accomplished that, he felt quite superior and healthy indeed. VI # # Tont you ever, ever, ever... U ever..." Her eyes were black discs set before flames that consumed everything belund her skin... She told him he must never da it again. And there were hot lead fingers melting in his brain to help put the point across... Sloane woke sweating, having immediately forgotten what the dream was about. He knew it must have been the same dream,' for he had woken in the same manner -- his heart pounding, a scream perched on the edge of his trembling lips. He was soaked with perspiration. The l umin ous clock arms on the wall said it was #:# in the morning. A familiar time. He lit a cigarette from the pack on the end table and lay back, puffing in great lungfuls, heaving them out again, softly. He wished to Hell he could remember the dream. How many times? A hundred? No, thousands. He could not rernember exactly when it had all started, though he did know it had been long, long ago. The mystery of it continued. "Was it bad?" a voice asked. "You're awake," Sloane said, starting to sit up. "One couldn't very well sleep with you moaning and tossing around like that. Was it bad?" "I can't remember," Sloane said, reclining again. "I have had it a thousand times -- I guess -- but I can never remember what it is about?" "Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist." "No, he wouldn't help." "He would." "He would not!" Sloane nearly screamed. There was a time of silence and darkness. "I'm sorry," Sloane said at last. "I have no reason to shout." IF "That's all right You were exhibiting a common stumbling block in problems like yours." "What is that?" "Subconsciously, maybe almost consciously, you know what the dream is about but you won't admit it You don't want to have to face it You know a psychiatrist will draw it out of you, so you avoid going to one.' "You think?" "I know. "An amateur psychiatristi What mcHre could I ask for in a badcup man?" "One who is rested in the morning," Penevitch answered. "I think ru conk out now before you start dreaming again and all chances are lost." "I think," Sloane said, "Fll sing and stomp my feet to the beat to help you drift off." "You're too kind," Penevitch said, politely. "But my taste doesn't run to Sousa marches. Goodnight." J ust before eight o'clock, Sloane woke again, spitting words between his clenched teeth: "Don't you ever, ever, ever..." "What?" Penevitch asked, coming from the bathroom. "Oh, nothing. Nothing." 'Touchdown today," Penevitch announced as he went through the jiggling, fumbling process of squirming into a purple robe. "And now the fun begins." "I'd hardly call it fun." "I thought you enjoyed your work." "I do. Murder and assassination cases are intriguing. But kidnapping the last Pheasant is a little too cruel to be fun." "You amaze me," Sloane said, closing the bathroom door behind himself. The hydraulic gangplank stretched down to the green soil of Actria. The space port was not especially large and not especially small. Actria being a peaceful phmet, there had never been need to dock battle craft. Yet a port was necessary, for tourist traffic was high, Actria being a planet of great natural beauty. Even now, to the west, Sloane could make out the glittering peaks of the Jewel Mountains where volcanic activity -- eons ago -- with the help of pools of heavy gases had slowly formed mountains of glass, smooth and near mirage-like mountains. Indeed, the planet was the perfect setting for the Pheasant of Dreams, the Soulbird, the very last and only Paradise Bird in the universe. That someone was trying to steal. Dorrie floated at shoulder level. Over the last two days, the passengers and other members of the party had gotten used to him. Some would even look directly at him and smile. "Those," Dorrie had said, "I don't like. Among those who won't look at me, however, there are three types: the ones who are ashamed, the ones who don't want to hurt my feelings by staring, and a few who just plain don't give a damn. I would like to know those last few. Pity I can't pick them out." Ahead of them walked the others. Cossik Wfi lumbering off the plank to greet the Actrian guide, a member of the totally humanoid race that was dominant here. The only deviation from Earthnormal among the Actrian was their eyes -- eyes that swirled with color, changed and flooded from crimson to yellow to blue. It was very distracting. Reamer, Waltham, and the Texan strolled behind, pointing at the distant mountains. Sloane could picture the poet making a poignant comment which the other two would not appreciate at all. "TTiey all, at this moment, look like such innocent children," he whispered to Dorrie. "One of them gave up his marbles and pogo-sticks long ago." Sloane started to laugh, then saw Cossik handing a folded piece of yellow paper to the waiting Actrian. The Actrian palmed it and made no show of having received anything. "Gentlemen," the alien said as Sloane and Dorrie reached the bottom of the plank behind the others, "welcome to Actria." T hey were told about their hotel -- Hotel Fantastique -- and about their tour. Today they would see the Caves of Love; tonight there would be a fancy dress ball in their honor. "The air cars are at the gate," the Actrian Klee said. There were three waiting craft. As Sloane expected, Cossik ended up in Klee's vehicle. Ven he and Dorrie were seated in their own craft, floating toward the hotefc he said, 'You saw the exchange?" "Naturally. Hais are niy speciality, but I do have eyes."  "Can you listen in?" "I already am." "And?" 'No intrigue. He wants to ascertain from Klee how much the laboratories here need. Right now, they are discussing ways of padding the funds request." "Well, it did seem like we were on to something." Dorrie sighed. "It would be a pity finding out so soon -- before all the adventure." The air car floated down to the base of the steps that stretched up to the Fantastique's golden, engraved doors that were tied back with velvet-covered cables and flanked the entrance to the main lobby. Everyone met inside, was assigned rooms, freshened up, and set out for the Caves of Love. They saw the mountain of glass, the plains of onyx, the Caves of Love. And upon seeing the latter. Reamer stuttered. But so did Waltham, Cossik, and the Texan. Indeed, it was a sight to make a man lose control of his tongue in the describing of it. Dorrie and Sloane were rather nervous for the remainder of the day's tour. When they returned to the hotel, Cossik, Reamer, and Waltham went , off to Transmitter Incorporated to send messages to relatives, messages bearing the romantic postmark of Actria. Cannon wandered off with Klee. In a quick moment of decision, Dorrie floated off after them, asking if Klee were going to show Mr. Cannon any more scenery. IF he thought, it was something from Talman. He untied the box, lifted the lid, and stared down at the little an"Well," Klee muttered, "in a manner of speaking -- " "Could I come? Please?" "Well, I -- " "Sure," Cannon boomed, "let the little feller come." "Good," Dorrie hurbled gleefully. "What are we going to see?" "The... red-light districts. And    the gambling houses." Sloane watched as the three of imal inside. It reminded him vaguely of a big-footed, floppy-eared puppy he had once had. It looked up at him out of multi-colored eyes and mewed slightly. He reached in... Everything spun; the world blanked out; Sloane lost all awareness of everything immediate... them piled into an air car, Dorrie between their shoulders, chattering inanely. He turned then and climbed TJ ags. the stairs to the lobby, caught the XV They were rags, dirty and timeelevator to his own floor, and entered eaten, pasted together with dried their suite. glue. Discarded rags. Briscow's flesh. There was a small, brown package his hands especially, looked like dish on the bed that was addressed to him. towels and scrub cloths. And worst The return address was that of the of all, he knew it. Earth Consulate on Actria. Perhaps, But her hands were smooth, tan. soft. She was a hundred percent ripe, soft, and delightful. She stood waiting for him to open the message and see whether he had any instructions. He forced himself to tear open the envelope, unfold the yellow sheet, Well, he thought, for once that baboon was using his own mind. What a delightful move, attempting to drive the prince insane! He looked back up at the darkhaired lovely. "My dear -- " he whispered. She stepped forward, smiling, trying to hear what it was he said. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to feel her softness beneath his mummy fingers. Painfully, he began IF to raise his hand from the arm of the chair. DC S loane saw the lovely hills with thick, green trees, the tangle of underbrush. He could hear the He had always like it here. The grapevines twined through the bars of the arbor, the ripe bunches of their labor sagging from them, bulbous and heavy. Crickets sang. Dandelions had turned to puff. Allie, a soft voice said from behind... He turned, looked... Screamed! There was something familiar about all of this, something he did not want to remember... He screamed. His eyes stung, and his throat burned. He twisted the neck in his hands, mangling, crushing. There were shouts in the hall. Blood spurted from a tom artery and splashed his face. Still he shredded it, screaming. Fists beat upon the door. When they finally got in, they found him smashing the small form of the puppy-like creature into the terrazzo floor, again and again. Over and over. There was blood on everything. They had to pry it from his clutching fingers. They washed him and placed him in bed and gave him a sedative and stationed a sentry by his bed to call the doctor when the prince-king showed signs of waking. And for some hours, Sloane slept a dreamless sleep. W hen he woke, the doctor was there, taking his pulse. He was a mustached man with a head of white hair. Somehow the aurora borealis of his eyes was heightened by the whiteness of his hair. In the far corner, Dorrie floated, obviously worried. Waltham was sitting in a chair behind the doctor. "Ah, awake now," the Actrian said. "Uhh, partially." "You've had a bad experience." "I vaguely remember." "Well, we aren't going to pamper you. The best thing in these cases is to get on your feet. I suggest the party tonight. In fact. I'm leaving it to Mr. Waltham to make you attend." "But what -- " "He can explain too," the physician said, picking up his instrument bag. "I have t deliver a baby." He hustled out. "Well, Gregory, explain." "It was a Nightmare Rat. "Rat?" "I know it doesn't look at all like a rat. It's cute and cuddly, and that's part of the danger. You see, for everything Nature makes, she makes an antithesis." "I see," Sloane said groggily, "the Pheasant of Dreams and the Nightmare Rat." "I was one of the first to your door, and I knew immediately -- from the manner in which you were babbling -- what was wrong. We broke the door down to get to you." He motioned to where a new door sat on new hinges. "We poets, you see, are a bohemian lot. We try all the drugs over the years. I still smoke a little marijuana now and again. Years ago, when these creatures were first discovered, right after the true purpose of the pheasant was found out too late, they became the new "drug" of the In set. They were not pretty and had not been exterminated by UW for their furs, so they were plentiful. With friends to snatch them from you if you get too violent, the experience is not so horrible -- though still a nightmare. In your case, there was no one to snatch." "But, how -- " "It re-creates, by touching upon your mind, the worst traumatic experiences of your life." Waltham shifted his great stomach. He pursed his thin lips and said, "Just what the Hell did it re-create for you that made you so violent? There was nothing left of it but pulp." "I -- " Sloane looked to Dorrie. "I can't remember." Waltham gave him an unbelieving stare. "It's true," Dorrie said. "He has a repeating dream that he caimot recall once awake. This is evidently the same dream, and even the Nightmare Rat couldn't force him to relive it and remember." "You should see a psychiatrist," the poet advised. "Don't start that," Dorrie said. "His superego intrudes and begins screaming all over the place. It isn't pleasant." Waltham began to rise. "Why the devil did you get such a thing if you were slightly unstable to begin with?" "It was a gift, sent by the Consulate." "False," Dorrie said. "I checked. They mailed no such package. The postmark places it at a common street depository with no means of checking the sender." "Well, Prince, I'd say you have enemies somewhere -- as, I guess, all monarchs do. But extremely nasty ones. A bullet would have been more certain and less painful." Sloane pushed himself to the edge of the bed. "Did the doctor really say movement was best? My head is falling apart." "He's right. I told him my past association with the little beasts, and he asked me to guide you this evening, keep you moving until the trauma has been washed from your conscious mind. So, dress and move. We've a party to attend." T he grande ballroom was a wonderland of crystal chandeliers and rich, heavy tapestries. But the dancers were brackking rather than waltzing, flinging their bodies this way and that to the pounding, driving beat of the brackk music from the seven-man band. The sounds washed over Sloane like tidal waves. Dorrie, however, seemed to enjoy it. "Are you certain?" Waltham was saying above the roar. "Yes." "But the doctor said -- " "I'm fine, Gregory. Thank you for your time, I couldn't have made it without you. I'm feeling fine now, however. Go enjoy yourself." "Okay," the poet said, shrugging his shoulders. "I certainly will." And he bounced off through the crowd IF toward the bar, the thin hands hanging beside the enormous body. Dorrie floated up close. "Nothing gained from going with Klee and Cannon. They went to view the wrong side of the tracks; Cannon was out to prove his virility. That's all." "Perhaps they weren't planning that trip until you interrupted their escape." "Possible. But I doubt it. Somehow, Cannon doesn't seem bright enough to be involved with a plan like this." "He's not too much of a goon. Remember, he is chief delegate of an entire state." "I guess so." Sloane looked around at the dancers. A strobe light had been brought into a comer of the room. The wild, leaping shadows of the brackkers flicked over the walls, glittered darkly in the chandelier. "Let's split and reconnoiter. Mingle. I doubt if there's anything to be picked up here, but try. Keep an eye on as many of the delegation as you can. If one of them escapes your attention for any length of time, get hold of me fast." "Right, Captain." "And especially watch Reamer and Cossik. For some reason. I'm as worried about that diplomat as I am about our prime suspect." "You're just getting paranoid." Sloane watched the mutant float away then began surveying the action. There were about three hundred people present, most of them important figures on the political scene. There was a great deal of gaiety, the type which is boisterous, bubbling, and more often than not, phoney. "Excuse me," a voice said to his left, "aren't you Prince Demoshkie?" H e turned and looked into the face face of a fair, thin girl-wonan of about twenty or twenty-one. She was wearing a black sheath that rose from below her knees to end in a high collar that clutched at the pale line of her throat. Her chest, in between, was boyish, almost flat. Her eyes were crimson and violet and orange... Now blue-black... "Yes, I am. Miss -- " "Frandida. Monavisa Frandida. I have never met royalty before." "I'm not very royal. Only a prince." "But you will be a king." "Yes. Soon." "You don't look like a king," she said, her eyes suddenly all white and beautiful. She was actually neuter in sex, her eyes like all Actrian eyes, her body so very thin. "I didn't know a king was supposed to look a certain way." She laughed again. "Well, stem. Possibly with a dueling scar below steel gray eyes." The music of the brackkers erupted anew -- the crashing mountains, the crumpling of clouds as the dead body of God falls upon them. "This way," she talk shouted, fflldng his hand and leading him through the clusters of people, beyond a tapestry, and onto a balcony overlooking the huge hotel lake. The dual moons shone upon the water, one casting the red light of anger, the other the soft white light of peace. "What do you do here?" he asked. "My father is on the hotel board of directors. I always wrangle invitations to these affairs." "God, aren't you bored to tears?" She laughed again. A young laugh it was, adolescent, quick. "No. As a matter of fact, I find it all very exciting." She motioned toward the ballroom. "In there, all sorts of secret tete-a-tetes are being planned -- espionage, secret deals. Everything is going on under all that pretense!" "And you'd like to be part of it?" "Wouldn't you?" "Oh, I don't imagine it would be "What would you consider exciting?" "A good meal. I haven't had a really good meal since boarding the Prider She laughed, leaned to him, kissed his lips. D one by anyone else, it would have been repulsive. Vaguely, he knew it was wrong, that the body was dirty. But he didn't seem to mind with her. She held his hand. "Well," he said suddenly, "I have to be getting back in there." "Oh?" "Yes." "But why?" "Appearances, you know. Royalty and all that." "But you said it bores you." He wanted to run from the nearness, the warmth of her. "We could walk," she suggested. 'There is a great deal you have not seen in our city." He didn't want to; he did want to. IF It was a new and confusing feeling. "Perhaps to the Gardens of Gold," he said. She frowned. "Well, I thought, perhaps, to the Fountains of Hope." 'Tve seen those so often in the films. I couldn't bear the noise of all that water anyway. The Gardens." "Okay. But I have to fix my face. Wait here." "I'U wait." She walked off behind the tapestries. Seconds later, the cloth parted again "There you are," Dorrie said, floating over in his formal white attire. "Womanizing, I see." #f "No need to explain." Sloane strolled along the balcony that hung from three sides of the building. "I didn't intend to explain." "I didn't see you. I thought perhaps something had happened." "Nothing. And there's no need for you to explain." "Rather like the calm before the storm in there," Dorrie said. "How can you stand the music?" They rounded the comer of the balcony, kept on walking. "Oh, actually, parts of that stuff have been just about lifted whole from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Really not so bad at all if they weren't so godawful loud about it." They stopped and looked at the moon reflections. S uddenly, Sloane started. 'What's the matter?" "I just heard my name. WeD, Prince Demoshkie, anyway." Penevitch floated at shoulder level and cast out the nets of his ears. "You did. You certainly did." "What's being said?" "It's mostly one-sided. Man and woman. She: but you can't expect me to steer him forcefidly to the fountains. He: try. She: he'll suspect something. Besides, he can be gotten in the damn gardens just as easily. He: no. She: listen, maybe you thiifk it's easy to -- " Sloane lept over the balcony rail, clambored down the lattice work to the patio below. Dorrie dropped behind him. When he hit the ground, the man had run. The girl was still there, confused. She turned to him, mouth open, colorful eyes wide. Black-red... Swirling, twisting, washing the globe of her eye, the colors came. He grabbed her shoulders, shook her. "What the hell? You're with him!" "Who?" she asked, all innocence. "You know, slut! They were right They were always right!" "Who was right?" she asked. "Who?" Dorrie echoed. "Damnit, they were! You're no good! Slut!" "But -- " "You're on Briscow's payroll, aren't you? You're working for Tate Briscow!" Briscow: a word transmitted, flowing through space invisibly. Briscow: a word picked up on a machine to send a certain signal on a certain frequency. Briscow: deathword. Sloane staggered backwards when she exploded. He caught her in his arms, her torn neck dangling precariously from her shoulders. He manage# to drop her gently to the floor before turning to the balcony and bringing up all undigested things within hint. Police came. They absolved him of any guilt. Nothing was solved. The police left. Everything yet to come rested heavily on their shoulders as they tried to sleep. Sloane was certain he would have a new dream -- one with a boyish girl spouting blood like a fountain. But it was the old dream again. The other nightmare... X B en Talman read the de-coded cable again and sighed. It was certain now that there was a Briscow man in the party. But outside of that, they had found nothing. And today was the day they would visit the Cave of the Pheasant. Sloane's message was not in the least encouraging. And Penevitch's was worse yet. The mutant seemed to think that Sloane was on the verge of mental breakdown. Dreams, nightmares, the mutant said. WeU, that wasn't like the Sloane he knew. But then, Penevitch had never made a mistake in judgment in the past. He was cemented in the middle. He couldn't take Sloane out on one man's opinion. He couldn't plunge a new agent into the scene without arousing everyone's suspicions. He was cemented right in the goddamn middle. There was only one thing he could do: nothing. It had not been so bad with Rossman. Men kill men. But a woman. That was different. But of course, it was to be expected. Working with a bumbling oaf like that, one could expect mistakes. If only he had been younger, only a hundred years younger, he would be down there taking care of it himself. Everything would be over now. The pheasant would be his. And if he had been able to do it alone, did not have to use this selfcentered front man, he could have had the bird all to himself. There would have been no sharing it. Of course, there would be no sharing it anyway. He would have to kill the bumbling oaf. That would be a pleasure. It was sad he couldn't perform the murder himself. If he had only been a hundred years younger, he would have been able to wipe out the man himself. But now his hands were rags. XI T he escalator that rushed down beneath the reserve lands, crashing toward the lower levels of the museum, was just about fast enough to pin the air out of his lungs and keep it out. Sloane held tightly to the rail, his knuckles white, gritting his teeth, admiring the way Dorrie paced the moving stairs, obviously unhurried. The next few minutes would do the telling, and stUl they had no plan. But what plan coid they have? Could it be Cannon who was always trying to dodge away -- although he seemed only to be hunting more time IF U# in which to patronize the local prostitutes? There was Cossik so terribly interested in the bird and the funds he might get for artificial fertilization, who might also be interested in procurring the pheasant for Briscow. After all, Cossik was in the perfect position. He could ask questions about the reserve and the pheasant without arousing suspicion and could probably even touch the bird if he asked. And there was Reamer who was untalkative and mysterious and highly suspect. Waltham seemed the least threat; his interest in the bird was one of a poet: beauty, exoticism, and the soul-stirring romanticism of the last-of-its-kind quality of the creature. But Sloane was even suspicious of Klee. Klee had been at the party and could have been talking to the dead girl. And since the girl was Actrian, why not secret the agent of Tate Briscow? And an Actrian, coning for the days when the Pheasant of Dreams was there for anyone to use... But he had to concentrate on the delegation. It was the delegation that harbored a thief. Yet, they all looked so guilty and innocent at once, Sloane was too perplexed to make any judgment. They toured the two floors below the pheasant's dome and worked their way upwards through the exhibits toward the grandest attraction of all: soulbird. Sloane was surprised, first of all, by the size of it. He had imagined it to be huge. But it was roughly the size of two fists side-by-side. The beak was blunt and orange. The feathers were all that people claimed they were. They swam with color. But unlike Actrian eyes, the colors were three-dimension. Behind the lighter reds, darker reds were swirling; behind the greens, darker greens. Mixing, bubbling, flowing, forming faces like the clouds do sometimes, then breaking almost immediately, reforming... Red on red on red over green under blue. Sloane placed a hand on his belt, ready to toss it up and strike for the pistol beneath his jacket. A dragon's face of red under red over black... Cannon stood with his hands in his pockets. "Yes sir, some great animal there. We don't have them like that back home!" A girl's face on white below green... "Mighty fine bird!" Cannon agreed with himself. S loane didn't like the hands hidden in the pockets. But he looked at the others. Cossik was closest to the glass wall. Indeed, his nose wm pressed against it. That didn't look good either. Klee was giving a brief history of the bird. Reamer was standing to the side.' His arms were folded across his chest, a posture which placed both hands under his coat. Sloane limbered his hand, made ready to grab his own weapon. Crimson, cinnabar, over cinnabar, crimson... Reamer looked at him, looked away. Sloane swept his eyes around the group. Any one of them could be on the ver of making his move. They all looked ready to jump. All except Waltham. But where was Waltham? He had forgotten the gentle poet He turned to see Waltham behind them. "So dlamned beautifull" Waltham stuttered. The poet with the thin face and fat belly tugged on a black cord within his coat. He began to deflate, this poet The gas in his stomach -- rather, wrapped around his stomach -- was hissing into the room. The gas erupted into a purple cloud, spreading outward faster than any gas Sloane had ever seen. "Dorrie!" Sloane screamed. He brought his hand up for his gun, but his lungs were burning. His mind spun. He felt himself numbing. Gamboge, sienna, cobalt, soot, rouge, said the pheasant's feathers. Dorrie floated toward the ceiling, away from the rapidly expanding fumes. But the clouds were pushing up and up, faster all the time. Waltham had a miniature breather between his teeth, sucking on the degassed air it gave him. His belly was almost gone' Sloane's hand was fastened to his chest with bolts. He could not begin to lift the gun. He saw Waltham draw his own pistol, and he saw everyone on the floor from the gas -- guards included. He tried to fight it, found it was useless. Waltham aimed toward the ceiling, fired. Dorrie lurched, wavered, drifted downwards. Wahkam fired again. Dorrie fell -- and bled. Sloane choked, found he could no longer swallow, blinked, and was gone into a silent heap on the floor. XU S loane came to after the sky had fallen on him, his head aching. The rest were still out -- all but Dorrie. The door to the cage stood open, the guard's keys discarded on the floor. Waltham. Why the hell, Waltham? he thought. He crawled across the floor to the blood-covered lump that was Dorrie Penevitch. He was still alive. The blue eyes were a bit hazy, but they focused easily enough on Sloane. "Hey," Dorrie choked, "who would have thought, huh?" He coughed blood, dribbling it through his normal lips. "I'll get a doctor, Dorrie." "No. No that won't matter. Hell, I'm so smashed up that no one could piec this humpty-dumpty together again." "Don't get mor -- " "It's true. You should go after him." "I will." Sloane started to stand. "And listen, Dorrie, if I get him. I'll bring the bird back first thing. You can hold it." Coughing of blood. "No that wouldn't be good. I don't need no goddamn bird now. That's not a good idea at all." "Just the same -- " "No. Now get him! That's an orderl Remember who's senior -- " The deep voice cut off completely a IF the blue eyes closed and the long, two-elbowed arm jerked twice, spasmodically. Sloane bent down again. "Dorrie. Damnit Dorrie, I -- " H e stood and slammed the alarm lever the paralyzed guards had not been able to reach. Then he caught sight of the open door and the empty shaft of the service elevator. He called it back, rode it quickly to the reserve above. When he stepped out, he saw the footprints leading away in the damp earth. Staggering, his mind swept along in currents he was not sure of, he followed them. Ever since his contact with the Nightmare Rat, his mind had been wavering on the brink of realization. Thoughts of the pheasant started some secret line of memory he knew he was keeping from himself. The mystery of the dream was complicating itself. He wanted out. The large-leafed tree brushed him as the trail narrowed. Somewhere in the miles of reserve, a rendezvous point had been arranged for Waltham. Another illegal flight would pick up one poet, one Pheasant of Dreams. He just had to beat Waltham to the meeting place. Rounding a bend, he was confronted by the poet. The pheasant in one hand, Waltham yelled "Catch" and tossed something brown and furry toward Sloane. He brought up his gun, fired a shot that missed, looked down at the puppylike animal that clung to his shiit, mewing. Darkness. T he hills were lovely -- green trees, the tangle of underbrush. thin, sweet flutes. Crickets sang. Dan delions had turned to puff. Allie, a soft voice said from be hind... He turned, looked. She was sixteen, going on seventeen. She had long, sunshine hair. Blue eyes. She was blessed with an up-turned nose above rosepetal lips... She had an adolescent body... Small, jutting breasts, smooth legs. She wore the conservative clothes the orphanage women chose for her. When she was old enough and became an agent, she would wear other clothes not as bulky or as long. But she would hate and be ashamed of those. Corridor Mother Amy gave us two free hours, she said.  Corridor Father Avram is gone for the day and has excused us from lessons, he said. He forced himself to look into her eyes. There was something strange there. In the eternity of blue there floated a mote that was searching for a way out. He looked closer -- then suddenly realizing that she knew he was staring, turned away. "# have something for you to see in the woods, Allie. But first you must promise never to tell any of the Fathers or Mothers. 'Okay, he said. The wind blew cool in his face. They climbed a small knoll behind the house and disappeared over the rim into a shaded valley. Under the canopy of leaves, there was little light. She pointed to a thatching of branches, a lean-to against the cliff. "There is a small cave behind it J She took his hand and led him behind the cover. They came into the center of the cave. It was delicately lighted by a waterworn hole in the ceiling. You won't tell them?' She was shaking. He was disappointed in finding so small a secret. 'No. Of course not." He turned to leave. Wait, Allie. There's more. Seat yourself. I'll be back in... soon... " He examined the fern mats, the grass chairs. And when she came back in, she was naked. And she threw herself upon him, sobbing. She told him what she had planned to do and that she was now too ashamed to do it. At first he was paralyzed. But warmth came to him, and he put his lips against her cheek -- But the thatched cover was suddenly thrust aside. Ankle-length dresses were silhouetted there. Corridor Mother Amy lifted the heavy stick, brought it down over Alicia's bare back. She breathed hard. And when Alicia bled, she breathed even harder. They saved him for the PsychaPreacher who had tubes for organs, sensor grids for eyes, and impersonal hypno-tapes for a voice. They put him inside its stomach and told it to teach him a lesson. 'l have come for absolution," he said to it. T understand." 'Please. It hurts." Lead poured through his brain cells... Tt hurtsF She had blood on her face!" e had blood on his face. The Nightmare Rat was dead. He had its blood all over him, and it might have been that which made remember the dream. He dropped the corpse, his hands sticky. Every fragment of the dream roiled in his mind. He had forgotten Alicia and what they had done to her -- rather, the memory had been driven into the depths of his mind. His legs were trembling, his knees like so much jelly. He forced himself completely erect, however, and drew in great lungfuls of air. Tears stung the flesh of his cheeks. IF The memory of that day was now making up for all the time it had been denied possession of his conscious mind. It was re-lived and re-lived like a film loop. The goddamn Federation had warped all the years and had told him not to remember the twisting I He stumbled into the brush after Walthem. But foremost of all, he ran after the pheasant. He ran faster than he knew he could run, his legs flashing up and down like pistons, plunging him along the trail. Eventually, croaking, weeping, gasping, for air, he came to the edge of the clearing where Waltham sat, his back to Sloane. He raised his Sloane ran, gathered the bird in his arms, went to the poet. "Why you, Waltham?" "I've had aU the other drugs, the Nightmare Rat, everything. He was going to share it with me. He would hide me and share the bird." "Not a man like Briscow." But Waltham was dead. Sloane dragged the body away into the bushes, returned to the clearing as the robot-driven craft descended from the sky, growing from a speck into a bidge. It would be a robot-driven, for Briscow would be taking no chances of a trace being possible in the event of failure. It would be unmarked. gun from his belt, fired once, twice. But Sloane was taking no chances Waltham leaped under the impact, either. And for once, he was very, rolled away from the pheasant, leaped very sure what he wanted. again when the second bullet struck him. W hen the craft settled, he boarded it, sat and waited, strapped in with the pheasant in his arms, for the trip to the Briscow satellite to end. When the craft loqked into the docking area of the pleasure platform and the indicators showed full atmosphere in the chamber outside, he leap through the portal onto the gangway. A near-corpse in a wheelchair looked at him, its slitted eyes growing wider with surprise. "Who are you? Where's Waltham? Who are you?" He gunned down the guard behind the ragman. "Who? Please, who?" If  only knew, Sloane thought, Vd tell you. He pounded down the gangway to the space yacht docked at the other end, electronically moored to the platform. "The pheasant!" the corpse screamed. He clutched the bird tighter. It sighed. Plunging through the open portal of the giant ship, he blasted the maintenance man, climbed the stairs to the control room. After the outer doors were closed, he flipped on the starter engines. He was disitantly aware that, in the enclosed space, Briscow would be fried, reduced to nothing but ashes by the blast. But he did not care about Briscow. He had a yacht with food lockers and water tanks. There were air-producing gardens. He could last at least seven years in deepspace. Which wasn't long. But which was, he knew as he clutched the bird to himself, much more of a life than he had ever known before. Behind him, the sparkling of a once-satdlite belonging to a onceliving corpse lit the blackness for a moment in white splendor, then was gone. He could make his thirty-two years better than Briscow's three hundred. He knew he could. He prayed to God and the Devil that he could. Someone had stolen the Pheasant of Dreams. The Dreaming Pheasant. Soulbird. Be sure to watch for The magazine you asked for! Ail-new stories of adult fantasy and great tales of sword-and-sorcery. Edited by Lester del Rey and featuring such fine writers as: IF IF  Short Story They sent the Snarkhunfer probe to far Cenfaurus. But some snarks are boojumsl a hot, lovely fall day I drove out to Stardrive Laboratories. If all went well, that was the day the Snarkhunter No. # probe would send its final message from Alpha Centauri. The Times had assigned me to cover the event. There were coffee and rolls in the anteroom. A diverse lot milled about and introduced each other and shook hands and talked. Pretty secretaries moved briskly through the crowd. I recognized people I'd talked to when I was here two months ago, and one man I knew only from his picture. Jubal Hendricks, Senior, had managed Stardrive Labs thirty years ago, when Snarkhunter No. # was launched. He'd retired just afterward, but here he was, emaciated and tottering, to watch his project's end. I headed for the coffee table. The man everyone called Butch saw me coming and waited while I drew a cup. He was five feet tall, the color of mahogany, his bright blond hair cropped short in a butch "How good to see you again, lIr. Lane I" He pumped my hand with enthusiasm. You do rememl)cr me?" "Of course. Butch, very well indeed." I didn't remember his full name, but then, nobody did. And nobody else seemed to want to talk to him. 'How have you been?" "Very well, Mr. Lane, despite my allergies. I have been taking shots." # . "They seem to help," I said. Last time I'd seen him his nose had dripped constantly. "Your accent has improved too." He laughed self-consciously. 'Ht is nearly eight o'clock. Shall we move into the -- " His tongue stumbled, and he had to point. The auditorium? Yes, let's." Two months ago we'd been here to catch the first signals from the Snarkhunter No. # probe as it entered the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. Hie probe had been flying before I was born, but that had been its first message since leaving the solar system. On that occasion it had switched itself on right on schedule, then given us the sizes and locations of the Centaurus planets. The speed of light barred us from controlling the Snarkhunter from Earth. The probe had been programmed to (ioose the planets most likely to be Earthlike, and to home on it. We had named that planet Centaura, even before we knew it existed -- thirty years ago, when it was known only that the Centauri suns had planets. Centaura did exist; we knew that now. For the last two months the Snarkhunter should have been moving toward it. 'he auditorium hadn't changed much in that time. Stardrive Labs used the same building for all its publicity on all the probes it currently had flying; but none of those probes had done an # dhing interesting since the Snarkhunter's last report. There were seventy chairs, with ash trays fixed to the backs, set up to face a lighted screen. The screen showed a plot of the Snarkhunter's presumed position with respect to the planet Centaura. Arrows pointed in the directions of Earth and Alpha Centauri A. Naturally the plot was four point three years out of date, due to light lag. Hanging from the ceiling were eight TV screens, each presently showing a diagram of the Alpha Centauri A system. In one corner of the big room was a blank sphere eight feet across, with a clear plastic hyperbola mounted near it. That was new. Butch pointed. "The curve is the projected course of the Snarkhunter. Mr. Hendricks Junior tells me they will draw continents on the sphere as the data arrives." 'Naturally," I said. We found seats. I manfully resisted the urge to smoke, that being one of Butch's allergies. Time stopped. I took my coffee in gulps. I'd been up at six o'clock, for the first time in years. My eyes felt gummy; my mouth was centuries old. Most of the seats were empty. Even under the circumstances, the lack of excitement was remarkable. On screen were a blank circle and IF a h#rperbola, a couple of arrows, and a little rectangle showing the time remaining until perihelion. The rectangle changed every five minutes, and a new point appeared on the hyperbola, showing the new position of the Snarkhunter instrument package. From time to time a blurred radio voice echoed in the auditorium. 'T am amazed," Butch said fervently. "To think that it has come so far! Do you think it will fulfill its purpose?" "As you say, it's come this far." "I cannot understand why there is so little excitement." He couldn't, could he? "It's partly the time lag," I said. "Who can get excited about old news?" "I suppose so. Still, so much hinges on the success of the project." "My cup's empty. Can I get you some coffee?" "Oh, no. No, thank you." I went out and filled my cup, then stayed in the anteroom to smoke a cigarette. Things were happening too slowly. Thirty years the probe had been on its way, but the hours it needed to roimd Centaura were far too long. Maybe Butch was getting on my nerves. Not his fault, of course. He was unfailingly poUte. You couldn't quarrel with his enthusiasm; it was genuine. It only seemed a mockery. And I had to stick with him. Butch's reactions were bigger news by far than the Snarkhunter itself. I spent ten minutes by the coffee dispenser, waiting for interviewees. It was the one sure place to find anyone you wanted to see. I caught Hendricks Senior and Hendricks Junior, Markham, who bad laimched the Snarkhtmter, and Duryohana, who ran the project now, and several others. Butch couldn't stand coffee. What had he been doing out here by the coffee dispenser? Just what I was doing, of course. Waiting for people to speak to him. And nobody wanted to. T was heading for my seat when the radio cleared its throat. "We are receiving the carrier wave from Snarkhunter. Snarkhunter has located Sol and is transmitting correctly. Repeat, location successful. We are now receiving Snarkhunter." The air was full of a two-tone musical note, the sound of the carrier wave, low and sweet. Butch was hugging his knees in delight. " Wonderful I What is it telling them? Why doesn't he say?" The Snarkhunter isn't sa#dng anything," I told him. I'd gotten that information from my interviews. "It's just a locator wave to alert us." "What kind of wave is the probe using?" "A light beam, a ruby laser. Hear that musical tone? That's the laser, translated into sound and then stepped down to the audible range." The point on the screen moved another notch. Ten minutes to perihelion. The radio voice said, 'We have received our first burst of data from Snarkhunter. Composition of Centaura's atmosphere is as follows. Oxygen sixteen percent, nitrogen eighty-three percent..." It continued detailing carbon dioxide, noble gases, water vapor, ozone, surface pressure, and the planet's surface temperature and magnetic field. Butch hugged his knees and made sounds of pleasure. Marvelous!" he crowed. 'Marvelous! From such a distance! How sensitive, how versatile the instruments!" "To me it all seems anticlimactic." "I fear that is my own fault. I am sorry." The radio saved me from having to answer. "Decoding of Snarkhunter's transmission is now in progress. In a few minutes we should have a rough map of Centaura's surface." It added, "Snarkhunter is about to pass behind the planet. It will reach perihelion three minutes later." The auditorium became silent. I made a shushing motion at Butch. We heard only the musical sound of the carrier wave. he sound cut off abruptly. "It will not reappear," Butch said sadly. "That's a pity. It was programmed to take another set of measurements at perihelion. They would have been a little more accurate." The point on the screen moved a notch, to its point of closest approach to Centaura. "Is that where you shot it down?" "Yes, at perihelion," said Butch. "How were we to know it was not hostile? We would not have believed it was possible at all. An instrument package, with no external guidance, finding its way over such a distance!" He stood up. "A remarkable achievement! Remarkable! To have done so much with so little!" "Thanks," I said. Thanks for the pat on the head. "Then you'll go ahead with the trade?" "I will have to wait," said Butch, "to see if your map of our world is accurate. Thus far your measurements have been excellent. Unbelievably so! If your map is as good, we have a bargain. We will trade you our faster-than-light drive for your incredible probes. Together we will explore space!" "Fine." I had what I came for; I rose to leave. "It has been a lonely year," said Butch. "I do not think I knew why until now. Mr. Lane, please don't be offended. Did my landing IF a year ago cause your people te regard their own technology as inferior? course. Why wouldn't it? Our lousy little probe took thirty years to reach Centaura. Your ship took six months! And here you are, like the ghost at theHaanquet. Oh, damn. I'm sorry, Butch. I lost my head." "And so you all tend to avoid me. But my own people felt the same way, when your probe reached us four point three years ago. Our faster-than-light drive was a single lucky discovery. Your probe was the combined result of centuries of single-minded, terribly expensive labor and experimentation. We are awed. We are not capable of such sustained effort. But you cannot believe that, can you?" I couldn't. And I can't. ana. Details to be announced. For information: John H. Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #. Guest of Honor: Daniel F. Galouye. Membership: #. vention. At Hotel Claremont, Oakland, California. (We have been told that Uie hotel has already been completely reserved for the weekend. If you are planning to attend the convention, it will be necessary to secure accommodations in other hotelsmotels.) Guest of Honor: Philip Jose Farmer; Fan Guest of Honor: Walter J. Daugherty; Special Guest: Takumi Shibano, leading Japanese fan. Toastmaster: Robert Silverberg. Highlights: Meet the Authors party. Special Forrest J Ackerman.) An authentic Medieval Tournament -- all participants in costume. Presentation of the Hugos by Harlan Ellison. Also: Project Art Show, daily auctions, gala masquerade ball, and of course appearances by all your favorite sf writers: Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Bob Bloch, James Blish, John Brunner, Lester del Rey, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Randall Garrett, Harry Harrison, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl, Norman Spinrad, et aliens. For information: Cerrito, California #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. ciety of America. At Belknap College, Center Harbor, New Hampshire #. Papers are being solicited. Indicate whether you will present a paper or will just attend. Submit title and length of proposed papers early to Ed Meskys (address above). Sylvania Hotel, Broad  Locust Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For information: Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. Dear Editor: In If you attempt to justify traditional sf. That's all very fair. But I feel that the British New Wave, whieh in the same breath you seem to condemn, should be given the same chance. Tradition is a mechanism which operates on, and influences, aU aspects of cultural life today. It is the call from the grave, the influence of the past upon the present. There is no word as yet for its antithesis -- prospection is as good as any -- but the new wave sf writers believe it to be an equally valid mechanism, definable, in the same metaphorical terms used above, as the call of the unborn generations, the influence, upon the present, of the future. They maintain, irrefutably, that the elements by which we judge and gauge the future are no less tangible than those "traditional" elements by which we judge and gauge the past -- this pen I hold in my hand today, I held in my hand yesterday and will hold in my hand tomorrow; I live with yesterday, but I live for tomorrow; while I have no memories of the future, I have prophetic vision and hopes that can create the fact. It is the nature of the prospective mechanism -- which utilizes these elements -- that the new wave sf writers are currently concerned with probing. When you tried to justify traditional sf you must have realized that for many people it would need no justification. Perhaps the same is true of new wave sf. -- Graham Charnock, # Warlsingham Mansions, Fulhan Road, London SW#, England.  We agree there's room for all kinds of sf. We object only when new wavers (or any other specialized types) tell us their kind of sf is the only one that's any good, and everything else is trash -- Editor. Dear Editor: Consider the planet Jupiter. It has been guesstimated that under its tortured atmosphere there is a li(#uid "hydrosphere" (or should it be "methammoniosphere"?) about # miles deep, surrounding a solid core. Maybe the liquid merges imperceptibly into solid at those pressures; or maybe there is a definite demarcation. If this were so, then the pressure of the liquid all around would defy the imagination. The solid core might, take the form requiring the least surface area, and become a fairly good approximation of a sphere. And then, what would happen if life were to evolve at the bottom of the ocean? The complex material composing the living organism would be almost completely two-dimentionaJ. Perhaps the whole of the face of the organism would be bathed in life-supporting fluids, if they were still even vaguely fluid at that depth; or maybe it would have to absorb everything along the plane of its universe. What conception of a universe would such organisms have? What gods would they worship? And how would they react to a solid-state space probe from another planet? (Maybe Earth, and then again, maybe not.) If the fluid surrounding the solid had a high mutual cohesion, then the smallest space between the organism and its environment would cause it to be sucked off and whisked up into the three-dimensional world. What would the natives make of this? Would they take it as a Sign? And would the unfortunate creature be killed instantly, or if not, what would be its experience? That is the basis of my idea. It is not properly developed, but then I won't be writing it. I am looking forward to another Berserker story from Fred Saberhagen. Being fairly new to SF I don't know if that was the first of his stories on that theme, but it was marvelous. As ah example of poetic justice -- even to the naming of the squash fruit -- it stands on a pinnacle. -- M. J. Farrell, #, Garnett Street, Huntingdale, East Oakleigh #, Melbourne, Australia.  Thanks, Mr. Farrell. How about you other fellows? We invited you some time ago to tell us about science-fiction stories you would like to see someone write. We'll publish the most interesting ones here -- then it's up to the "writers to make stories out of them! -- Editor, Dear Editor: I'll come right to the point. I'm a long-time "astro-nut" who gobbles voraciously everything I can get my hands on about space and what is or may be out there, factual and fictional alike. Now I've run into a sort of astronomical-SF mystery and I was wondering if you have an idea of an explanation. The question is: What is it about Altair that makes writers persistently provide it with planets, and inhabited ones at that? Here it is, a beautiful, bright, white-hot A#-type speed demon of a star that simply rotates much too fast to permit maintenance of a planetary system in a stable orbit. It's just a kid as stars go, and it has a long way ahead of it before it gets to the stalge where it'll get rid of its excess momentum, let alone planets. That is, if it doesn't burn itself out first. Furthermore, no perturbations have been detected in its motion, so it's a cinch it's all alone out there. Now. I have run into any number of stories where the action takes place on a planet of Altair. You probably remember the movie. Forbidden Planet -- locale, Altair IV. And on my favorite TV show. Star Trek (remember your dire prediction that it wouldn't tay? You were wrong, and I know you're as glad as I am that it's back) -- .yup, there it was, Altair with planets, and guess who wrote the script? Theodore Sturgeon. Now in this case it may have been a matter of convenience, because the story hinged on First Officer Spock and the necessity of his getting home to his lown planet, Vulcan. planet of the pointed ears is, if I remember correctly, in orbit about Component A of the Eridani system... which is maybe .# of a liglit-year away from Altalr, practically on top of it as neighboring stars go. So it would be exiedient, terprise bound for official business on Altair VI when the emergency arises. But it disturbed me. So -- what's Altair got that makes writers ignore the facts and give it planets? -- (Miss) Zita Carno, # Creston Avenue, Bronx, New York #.  Sure, we can answer that. Look at the other named stars authors might use -- Betelgeuse, Ras Alhague, Pulcherrima, Zuben el Genubi and even worse. Altair may not be inhabitable. But it's pronounoablel -- Editor.   Dear Editor: I'd send this note to Arthur C. Clarke, but I have no idea how to reach him, so I'll have to ask you to relay the gist of it when you find the time. I'm afraid that the same Leslie A. Gritten who called Clarke's attention to his having apparently misremembered the author of "The Anticipator" (Guest Editorial, ZF, ##) has misremembered some bibliophilic data of his own. Alas -- Mr, Gritten couldnH "clearly recall" the serialization of Wells's "The War of the Worlds" in The Strand Magaziney as Clarke says he does. "The War" wasn't serialized there at all, but in the rival and imitative English popular  magazine of the time, Pearon#, from April, # (in the sa;me issue which sawthe conclusion of Kipling's Captains Courageous) to December, #. Two Morley Roberts stories were published by Pearsons during the run of "The War" -- "The Onderdonk," in June, #, and "The Keeper of Waters," in September, #-#. Neither is fantasy, nor is either at all unusual in plot or style. (Gratuitous info, this.) I imagine the Wells novel Mr, Gritten recalls in connection with The Strand is the only one of the early fantastic novels the former wrote to appear in that magazine: "The First Men in the Moon," which ran from November, # to August, #I (the same issue which opened with the first installment of "The Hound of the Baskervilles") . All of which probably constitutes a good deal more data on Wells's novels, English popular magazines, and incidental Morley Roberts short storiesthan you, Clarke, and probably Mr. Gritten care for. But some of it may be of passing interest, and the correction seemed worth making. Galaxy and If continue on a high level of excellence -- at least in their longer fiction, and I was tickled with the line-up of Hugo winners this time (if baffled by Niven's award). Apropos of the current If and the author of its lead novelette: is it true, as rumors have it, that C. C. MacApp conceals the cognomen of Calvin Coolidge beneath those cool, crisp initials? -- Bill Blackboard, # Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco #, California.  No, actually one C stands for "Carroll", the other for "classified information," And now for some information that isn't classified: next month we will he bringing you the longawaited new Van Vogt story, "The Proxy Intgence." It is a complete short novel and is guaranteed to please all Van Voigt fans. Don't miss this exciting story -- or any of the others in the October IP. We'll see you next month. -- Editor. IF No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." #nur Namr # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. 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And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even more grateful to the many loya readers who have made it possible for both on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're debetter In the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #I .#  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Vol. #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Samuel R. Delany by Sterling Lanier by Harry Harrison by James Tiptree, Jr. The Proxy Intelligence by A. E. Von Vogt by Lohr Miller by TakumI Shibano by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey TF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, Predent, Vol. # No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street New York, # #c uer copy. Subscription # issues # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, Soufii America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing Sfices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, InclucP Ins translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stmnned envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. ,   Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial T he other day we toured the city vision sound and camera crew, in conjunction with a symposium on Design and the City of Tomorrow. One of the places we visited was an urban renewal project in the Southside, called the Robert Taylor Homes: a dozen tall apartment buildings, all shiny and new, on the site of what had been one of the most decrepit Negro slums in the western world. The buildings are, truthfully, pretty attractive. Each apartment has a balcony, where adults can sun themselves and children can play. Lake Michigan is not very far away, and from the upper balconies one can relax in cooling breezes from the lake and enjoy what is in fact a handsome view. Since kids are accident prone, each balcony is covered with tough wire screening, and they can be safely left unattended. And from down below the vertical rows of screened balconies look like nothing so much as cages in a zoo, and in fact the project is more familiarly called "Ihe Monkey House.' It isn't really a fair name. It isn't fair to the zoos. A proper zoological garden is designed with total care for the needs and habits of its inmates. Most slum-clearance developments -- and with all respect to the Robert Taylor project, it fits right into the general classification -- seem primarily intended just to get their inmates out of sight. A month or so earlier, coincidentally in Chicago, we took part in another "life in the future" symposium in which another participant was Dr. Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist at Northwestern. Hall is also an author, and two of his books are worth your attention: The Hidden Dimension (Doubleday, #) and The Silent Language (Fawcett, #). What are the "dimension" and "language" he's talking about? They are the human use of spatial relationships as a means of communication, and the reverse: the meaning that humans get from the spatial relationships that are imposed on them. If this seems pretty far-out and intangible, you would be interested in some of Dr. Hall's "candid camera" films of unwitting subjects being put through forced spati relationships that aren't appropriate to the situation. Queue up in a line: for a bus, at a ticket window, wherever. You automatically keep a certain distance between yourself and the man fore and aft. The difference varies with position -- the end of the line is always more widely spaced than the front; but if some clod comes along who violates "your space" by moving in too close, you find yourself restless; you try to move away; you can't because then you are intruding on the space of the man in front of you; you get up tight with hostility ... and if the ticket vendor makes a mistake in change, you take the top of his head off; and he never knows muf The Dark Continents of Your Mind maintain energy, enthusiasm and the mil to do? Do your persondity and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicruclans; an age-old fiaternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fash ion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood naU ural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human; Write for the Free Book; "The Mastery of Lifes'# Address: Scribe NJ.D. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. Scribe: NJ.D. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. Name Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code why, and neither do yoii. Different nationalities have different social distances. Arabs come up close enough to smell you, for smell is a part of communication; if you use a bland deodorant and wash yourself sterile, you may find yourself "socially offending" far more than the worst case of B.O., for in effect you are refusing to communicate with them. Latin Americans converse at closer range than North Americans. In an office conference in New York, they will pull their chairs closer to your desk; if the chairs are bolted down, as Dr. Hall's pictures show, they will try to uproot them, even perch on the edge of your desk rather than remain out of what for them is talkingdistance. Too little distance is even more distractive, and hostility-arousing, than too much. A North American receptionist can't work unless she is at least ten feet from anyone sitting in the waiting room; closer, she feels she must talk to him. S lum dwellers have three times as much heart disease as the rest of America, five times as much mental illness, four times as much high blood pressure. Why? Apparently much of it is simply crowding -- too many people intrug on each others' social distance all the time. And there is another effect which is even more insidious. Walter Kleeman, Jr., of the National Society for Interior Design Environment Research Council, tells of a small-town college which took some slum youths into its dormitories. They were bright and able; the curriculum was not a problem for them; the dortories were. The buildings were severe modem, stripped down, functional, beautiful in an abstract sense. But they were made of such materials as plastic and exposed concrete; and, no matter what the designer's intention, as Kleeman says, "the slum-dweller's eye looks upon it and he hears a siated; their education suffered. Packaging people is a far more subtle and demanding art than our society has yet come to understand. Applying the disciplines of architecture and design to it is far from enough; a proper design team needs an anthropologist, a sociologist (what would motivate a slum kid to better himself if he saw only other slumdwellers all around him? Does "urban "renewal" make any sense at all if it only builds shiny new slums where rotting old ones are tom down?), a behavioral psychologist -- even a criminologist; for proper city design can be an important part of crime control. (Simple adequate street lighting is a major help. Or witness the broad boulevards of Paris -- Baron Haussman's design to against rioters more expeditiously.) Of course, if we go on overpopulating ourselves into extinction no amount of design will keep this planet livable indefinitely. But we still have a certain amount of leeway, at least in most of the western world; if we are determined to inflict a highdensity population on ourselves, it's about time we took the trouble to learn how to cope with it. W ipRP Is. mi ## The Wonder Worker. One Drop Neutralizes Any Odor in a # Cu. Ft. Area For About # Hours The quickest -- most thorough -- most economical -- lasting room deodorizer available. Send # Enclosed find  for at the special mail order price, full refund if I am unsatisfied. Name I understand I can return the purchase for Address City State Zone The ancient Martian carvings had seen strange views -- and their eyes still carried a message af madness! Novelette WElR'Si from the top of the ladder. "What is it?" Jones, at the bottom. And Rimkin thought desperately: Boiled potatoes! My God, boiled potatoes! If I took toothpicks and stuck them in boiled potatoes, then stuck one on top of the other, made heads, arms, legs -- like little snow they would look like these men in spacesuits on Mars. "Concaved!" Smith called down. "You know those religious pictures they used to have back home, in the little store windows, where the eyes followed you down the street? The faces were carved in reverse relief like this." "Those faces aren't carved in reverse relief!" Mak, right next to Rimkin, shouted up. can see that from here." 'Not the whole face," Smith said. "Just the eyes. That's why they had that funny effect when we were coming across the sand." Mak, Rimkin thought. Mak. Mak. What distinguishes that man beside the k in his name? "They are handsome up there." That from Hodges. "A iphole year of speculation over whether those little bits of purple stone were carved or natural -- and suddenly here it all is, right on High Weir. The answer. Look at it: it means intelligence. It means culture. It means an advanced culture at least on the level of the ancient Greeks, too. Do you realize the spaces between these temple columns lead to a whole new branch of anthropology?" "We don't know that this thing's a temple," Mak grxmted. "A whole new complex of studies I" Hodges reiterated. "We're all of us Sir Arthur Evans unearthing the great staircase at Knossos. We're Schliemanns digging up the treasures of Atreus." I don't know where any of them are, Rimkin thought. Their voices come through the rubber-ringed grills inside my helmet. All these boiled-potato figures against the grainy rust; that one there who I think is Hodges; the sun blinds out the face plate. And, for all I know, behind the plastic is a grotesquerie as deformed as those domed heads along the archetrave above us... "Hey, Rimkin, you're the linguist. Why aren't you poking around for something that looks like writing?" "Huh...?" And as he said it, without hearing their laughter, he knew that inside their onion helmets they were smiling and shaking their heads. Jones said: "Here we are on Mars, and Rimky is still in another world. Is there any writing or hen-scratChing up there where you are. Smith?" "Nothing up here. But look at the surface of this eye, the way it's carved outl" "What about it?" And then Jimmi -- Rimkin could always tell Jimmi because her suit was a head and a half shorter than any of the others -- climbed up the rough stone foundation blocks and with a beautiful "Martian lope" and a wake of russet dust crossed the flooring, then turned back. "Lookl" He could always tell her voice, no matter the static and the distortion of the radios (long range; no fidelity.) "Here's one that feUl" "Herel" Rimkin said. "Let me see." They mustn't think he wasn't interested. Her soft voice said in his ear: "I can't very well move it. You'll have to come up here, Rimky." But he was already climbing. "Yes, yes. Of course. I'm coming." IF And there was the sound of somebody trying not to snicker, identity concealed by lack of stereo. T he carving had fallen. And it had cracked on the stone flags. He walked up to Jimmi. The top of her helmet came to the middle of his upper arm. "It's so funny," she said with that oddness to her laughter the radio couldn't mask. "It looks just like a Martian." "What?" She looked up at him, small brown face behind its white frame. The movements of her laughter were displaced from the sound in his ear. "Just look." She turned back. "The great, high forehead, the big beady eyes, and hardly any chin. Wouldn't you have guessed? Martians would turn out to have looked just like a nineteen-fifties sf film." "Maybe..." A third of the face had fallen away. The crack went through the left eye. What remained of the mouth leered with prunepuckered lips. "Maybe it's all a joke. Perhaps some of the military people from Bellona came here and set this whole thing up like an elaborate stage-set. Just to play a joke on us. They would, you knowl This is absurd, just the five of us taking the skimmer on a routine scouting trip across High Weir plateau, not sixty-five miles from the base, and coming across -- " " -- across a structure as big as the Parthenon! Hell, bigger than the Temple of Zeus!" Hodges exploded. "Come off it, Rimkyl You can't just sneak off in the morning and erect an entire stone ruin. Not one like this." "Yes, but it's so -- " "Hey! You people!" Again, the voice came down from Smith. "Somebody take a look at the eyes. Are they the same stone as the rest of the building, just very highly polished? Or are they some different material set in? I can't tell from here." Jimmi bent awkwardly and ran her glove over the broken surface. She who is dark and slender and the definition of all grace, Rimkin thought, muffled against the blazing ruin beneath deep turquoise skies. "It's an inset. Dr. Smith." She made a blunted gesture, and Rmkin bent to see. The eyes were cylinders of translucent material, perhaps nine inches in diameter and a foot long. They were set flush into the face, and the front surfaces ground to shimmering concavities. "Lots of them are different colors," Mak noted. Rimkin himself had noticed that the great row of eyes gave off an almost day-glow quality, from across the dunes; up close, they were mottled. "What are they made of?" Hodges asked. "The building's that Marsite stuff," Jones said. The light, purplish rock "marsite" had been found as soon as the military base at Bellona had grown larger than a single bubble-hut. Rimkin, there with the Inter-nal University group, had spent much time looking at the warn fragments, playing afterdinner games with the military men (who barely tolerated the contingent of scholars), speculating as to whether they were carved or natural. The purple shards could have been Martian third cousins to the Venus of Wellendorf, or they could have simply been eroded fragments tossed for millenia by the waterless waves. "What are the eyes made of?" Hodges demanded. "Semi-precious stones? Is it something smelted, or synthetic? That opens up a whole world of speculation about the culture." "I can chip some off this broken one to take back -- " "Rimkin! No!" Hodges shouted, and in a moment the bumpy air suit had scrambled over the foundation. Hodges swayed on bloated feet. "Rimkin... look, wake up! WeVe just had the first incontrovertible proof that there is -- or at any rate at one time there was -- intelligent life beside us in the universe. In the solar system! And you want to start chipping. Sometimes you come on like one of those brass-decked thick skulls back at the base!" "Oh, Hodges, cut it out!" Jimmi snapped. "Leave him alone. It's bad enough trying to put up with those thick-skulls you're talking about. If we start this sort of bickering -- " "Stop trying to protect him, Jimmi," Hodges countered. "All right, library cubicle. But he's absolute dead weight on this expedition. He spends all his time either completely uninterested in what's going on, or worse, making absurd suggestions like breaking up the most important archeological scovery in human history with a sledge hammer!" "I wasn't going to break up -- " Then: "Oh my -- God... No! This is -- " And Rimkin thought: Which one is it? Jesus, with all this distortion, I can't tell what direction the voices are coming from. I can place any accent on Earth, but I can't even recognize their individual voices any more! Which one? Hodges turned around. "What is it?" Jones, still down on the sand, called up, "What is it. Dr. Smith? What's happening up there?" "This is just... no... this is amazing!" 'hey were all going to the base of the column against which the ladder was leaning. So Rimkin went too. The white-suited figure on the top rung was peering into one of the eyes with a flashlight. IF 'Dr. Smith, are you all right?" "Yes, yes. I'm fine. Please, just wait! But this... "That's a low-power laze beam he's looking in there with," someone began. "He said be quiet," from someone else. I can hear five people breathing in my ears, Rimkin thought. What could he be looking at? "Dr. Smith," Rimkin called. "Shhhhl" Rimkin went on doggedly, "Can you describe what you're looking at." "Yes, I... think so. It's -- it's Mars. Only, the way it must have been. A dty, the city around this building. Roads. Machines that move, and a horizon full of manmade -- buildings? Perhaps they're buildings. The pictures move -- and the streets are full of creatures, some sort of statue. No, they're but some different. Some hurry...  some go slowly... this whole plateau, all of High Weir must have been some incredible acropolis for a mammoth, cosmopolitan community. Wait! They're unveiling some sort of statue. No, they're presenting some leader to the people. Maybe a priest. Or a sacrifice -- " After moments of silence, Mak said, "What pictures are you talking about?" "It's like looking through a window onto what must have been here... on this plateau perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago. As soon as I shine my laze-light into the concaved surface, I'm suddenly looking out on three-dimensional moving scenes, just as real... just as strange..." Mak turned to Hodges "Is it some sort of animated diorama?" "It's got to be some kind of hologram. A moving hologram!" At the top of the ladder. Dr. Smith finally looked down. "You've got to come up here and see this! I just wanted to look at the inside of the eye on this carving closely. I thought with the laze-light I might detect crystalline structures, perhaps get a clue to what the eyes were made from. But I saw pictures! He started down the ladder. "You've all just got to go up there and take a look!" Smith's indrawn breath roared , in Ramkin's ear. "It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen." "Still think somebody came by and built this today just to get us off on a wild goose chase, eh, Rimkin?" Hodges chided. "Let me go up and look. I've got my own beam, Dr. Smith." Hodges started up the rungs as Smith reached the bottom. Frowning behind his faceplate, Rimkin took out his own flash. For a moment he fondled the tube; then he went back over the rusty sand tongues and purple stone to where the head had fallen. He looked at the whole eye. He looked at the broken one. He did not know what perversity made him crouch before the latter. He flicked on his lazebeam. Tt took twenty minutes for Mak,  Hodges, Jimmi and Jones to climb the ladder, watch for two or three minutes, then climb down. They were gathering to go back to the skimmer when Jimmi saw Rimkin. She loped over to him. She laughed when she saw what he was doing. "Now aren't we a bxmch of dopesi Some of us could have looked at this one down here. Come on, we're going back now.' Rimkin switched off his beam, but still crouched before the tilted visage. "Oh, come on, Rimky. Jhey're starting back already." Rimkin drew breath, then stood slowly "All right." They started across the dressed stone flooring. The sand, fine as dust, spewed about their white boots like powdered blood. II 'he commons room of the skimmer was a traveling fragment of classical academia. The celitex walls looked depressingly like walnut panelling. Above the brass-fixtured folding desk surfaces, the microfilms were stacked behind leather spines lettered in gold leaf. There was a mantelpiece above the heating nook. The glowing plates shot pale flickerings across the fur throws. The whole construct, with its balcony library cubicles (and a bust of JWchard Nielson, president of Inter-nal University, on his pedestd at the turn of the stairwell) was a half-serious joke of Dr. Edward Jones. But the university people, by and large, were terribly appreciative of the extravagant facade, after a couple of weeks in the unsympathetic straits of the military back at Bellona Base. Mak sat on the hassock, rolling the sleeves of his wool shirt over his truckdriver forearms. He had headed the Yugoslavian expedition that had unearthed Gevgeli Man. Mak's boulder-like build (and what forehead he had was hidden by a falling thatch of Sahara-colored hair) had brought the jokes in the anthropology department to new nadirs: "This is Dr. Mak Hargus, the Gevgeli Man... eh, man..." Mak raised the periscope of his briar from his shirt pocket "Tell me about holograms. I've seen them of course, the three-dimensional images and all. But how do they work? And how did the ancient Martians store all those pictures that just pop up under laze-light?" Ling Wong Smith dropped his fists into the baggy pockets of his corduroy jacket. He and Mak gazed over the vines growing along the window box. Outside the tri-plex pane, across the dusty bruise of # ! High Weir, the dark colums -- twelve whole, seven broken -- sketched the incredible culture they had viewed in the polished eyes along the carved lintel. Jimmi pushed her dark braid back from her shoulder and leaned on the banister to look. Ling Wong Smith turned away. "It's basically a matter of information storage, Mak." He lowered himself to the arm of the easy chair, meshed his long fingers and bent forward so that his straight black hair slipped forward. "The Martians certainly stored one hell of a lot of information in those eyes," Hodges commented, coming jerkily down the stairs on her crutches. She was large, almost as large (and soft) as Mak was large (and hard). She had a spectacular record in cultural anthropology, and combined a sort of braying energy, enthusiastic idealism, and a quite real sensitivity (she had been crippled since birth), with which she had managed to stagger through all sorts of bizarre cultures in East Africa, Anatolia and Southern Cambodia to emerge with thorough and cohesive accounts of religions, mores and manners. Her spacesuit was a prosthetic miracle that enabled her to move as easily as anyone while she wore it. But outside it, she still used aluminum crutches. From his go game with Jones in the corner, Rimkin watched her lurch down the stairs. She must think they're a psychological advantage, he decided. "Go on. Ling. Now tell us all about holograms." She picked up one crutch and waved it at the Chinese psychologist, only just avoiding the venerable Nielson. "Information storage," Smith repeated. "Basically it's a photogrh, taken without a lens, but with perfectly parallel beams of light -- the sort you get in lazed light The only scattering of the light is that which comes from the irregularities around the surfape of the object being recorded. The final plate looks like a blotchy configuration of grays -- or mud if it's in color. But when you shine the parallel beams of a laser light on this plate, you get a three-dimensional, full color image hanging over the plate -- " " -- that you can walk areund," Mak finished. "You can walk around up to a hundred and eighty degrees," Smith amended. "It's just a completely different way of storing information than the regular photographic method. And it is far more efficient." Jones said softly, from across the gaming board, "It's your move, Rimky." "Oh." Rimkin picked up another black oval from his pot between his first two fingers and hesitated above the grid, dotted with white and black. Bits of information. He tried to encompass the areas of territory mapped below him but they kept breaking up into the small corner battles. "There." He clicked his stone to the board. Jones frowned. "Sure you don't want to take that move back?" "No. No, I don't." "You can, you know," Jones went on affably. "This isn't chess. The rules are that you can take a move back if you -- " "I know that' Rimkin said loudly. "Don't you think I know that? I want to go -- he looked around and saw the other watching -- "there!" The dick of his stone had been very loud. "All right." Jones's stone ticked the board. "Double attari." But Rimkin was looking past Jones's small, heart-shaped Nigerian face, to the others in the room, thinking. How can I tell them apart? They all just blend with one another. The room is round, their faces are round, stuck on Uttle around bodies. Suddenly he dosed his eyes. If they started talking, I know I wouldn't be able to tell any of them apart. How is one supposed to know? How? And if I opened my eyes? "Your move, Rimkin," Jones said. "I've got two of your stones in attari." Rimkin opened his eyes on the grid of black and white. "Oh," he said, and tried to strangle up a laugh. "Yes. That was a pretty silly move after all, wasn't it?" Ill S uch an absurd move; he lay in his bunk with his eyes closed and his lips open over his teeth in a leer, trying to think of a better one. He hadn't slept in two nights. An hour like this... maybe it was only a few minutes, but it seemed like an hour... and he sat up. He swung the reading machine over his bed and rolled it to the closing of the Tractatus. He'd been re-reading that the afternoon the skimmer had left Bellona; Wovon man nicht sprechen kann... He pushed the machine aside and ran his hand under his undershirt. The skimmer would not leave till the morning. They should return to Bellona that night and report their discovery to the Those Who Were in Charge of Such Things. But the university people (especially the anthropology department) treasured their brief freedom. One more examination of the site tomorrow, a few cursory readings and measurements... Rimkin walked barefoot into the hall. It must have only been a few minutes, because strips of light from reading machines underlined three doors. Which room belonged to whom? He knew, and yet somehow there seemed no way to know... Down in the locks, he put his air IF suit on over his underwear. The plastic form-rings felt odd against his thighs and arms without the usual padding. He stepped into the lock. Outside, sharp stars dropped frostlights. The sand was filled with great slopping puddles of ink. Cold, cold outside. The little meter humming in the vicinity of his chin kept the silicone circulating between the double thickness of his faceplate to avoid frosting. He stepped. And stepped. The desert suck his boots. The others? It was not even that he did not like them. He was infinitely confused by them. June and shadow received him. As he walked, he looked up. One bright star was... moving. If he stood still, he could follow the movement distinctly. Phobos? Deimos? He knew it was one of the two tiny Martian moons. But for the life of him, Rimkin could not remember whether it was Fear or Terror that coursed the frozen jewelry of this Martian night. He saw the ruin. He tried to blank the struggling anxieties that squirmed into the edges of his consciousness. Seven hundred and fifty-odd vitally important enzyme reactions are occurring constantly in the human body. Were any one of them to break down for even twothree minutes, the body would die. So, just to fix the free fear that ranged his mind. he worried about one of these seven hundred and fifty-odd complex reactions suddenly coming to a halt; until he lost the subject of his worry in the coils of sand. And fear moved free above him, tangible as the slender columns, the sculpted architrave. T Te looked up at the faces, obscured by darkness. The eyes caught and grayed the starlight, and regarded him. Rimkin began to paw under the flap of his pack for his flash. He found it after much too much time -- he had forgotten what he was looking for twice -- and rotated the dispersal grid to break up the laze beam into ordinary light. He played the beam over the stones. They were gray, new. He wondered if the purple were actually only a reflection from the desert No, it was just the weakness of his beam. He walked along the sand to the place where the foundation could be mounted. He started to climb, once more aware of the inside of his suit against bare skin. The heating was working adequately, but the plastic and metal textures were so odd. He wanted to take the suit off and place his hand on the stone, then grew terrified that he might; because the Martian night was dmost two hundred degrees below freezing. Rimkin stood on the edge of the foundation and fanned bis light toward the fallen head. He approached across the sandy blocl. The smaller fragment of face lay like a saucer. Its half eye had cracks all through. Rimkin squatted before the major portion of the face, leaned toward the fractured orb. He raised his flash, twisted back the dispersalgrid so that the bright, singular beam fell on the broken circle; flicker, and flicker, image and image. The fragmented orb began to weep the sights of ages. Dawn comes quickly on worlds with this atmosphere. It climbed the dunes behind Rimkin and laid its blazing hands on his shoulders. And the mechanism of his suit began to hum and twitter about him to prepare for the three-hundred-degree rise that would occur in the next twenty minutes. "Rimkin...?" Who was breathing in his ear?. "Rimkin, are you up there?" The voice had been calling for some time. But with just a sound coming out of a machine by your ear, how was he supposed to ow what they were? "Rimky, there you arel What are you doing? Have you been here all morning?" He turned around -- and fell over. "Rimkin I" He had been in one position for almost nine hours, and every muscle, once moved, was in agony. In the pain fogging his vision like heat he watched the boiled-potato, jogging toward him in a doud of fiery dust. Through his gasps he kept on trying to get out: "Who... who are... which... who are -- " "It's me, Evelyn." Evelyn, he thought. Who was Evelyn? "Who..." She reached him. "Evelyn Hodges, who did you think it was? Are you hurt? Has something gone wrong with your suit? Oh I knew I should have brought Mak out here with me. The outside temperature is about ten degrees Fahrenheit right now. But in fifteen minutes it'll be a himdred and fifty or more. I can't get you back to the ship by myself." "No -- No." Rimkin shook his head. "All right. My suit. I'm just -- " "What is it, then?" The pain was incredible, but for a moment he was in control enough to get out: "I'm just stiff... I was in one position for so long. I just... just forgot." "How long is a long time?" Hodges demanded. "Almost all night, I guess." His arms weren't so bad. He pushed himself up and propped himself against the stone. Hodges bent down, picked up the flash (a feat she coidd only do with her spedally constructed suit) and turned it around. "You've been looking at the pretty pictures?" IF Rimkin nodded. "Eh... yes.' She made a sound that had something of confusion, something of frustration. "You just be glad I came looking for youl" She squatted beside him, and after mudi maneuvering, got herself seated. "I can never sleep past five-thirty in the morning anyway, and I got to thinking that perhaps I'd let myself get carried away a couple of times with you. You know, back at the base, with all those ribbons and brass flapping around, saying all those stupid things, weVe all been under a bit of pressure. Early this morning I was in the hall, saw the light from yoiur reading machine, and thought you might be up. I peeped in, because the door was open, but you weren't in bed. I figured you must be in the library; but the doors down to the port were open and your suit was gone -- well, this is the only thing around worth going out to look at. You've been here since last night?" "Yes. I have."few moments, "we're all oddballs in our way. You're really not all that strange when you start looking at the rest of us. Maybe you're just a little less used to fitting your angles into other people's spaces. But I have been doing some thinking. And I got a feeling I've put my finger on the reason you were so... well, preoccupied all last evening. Give a listen and tell me if I'm right." She rocked a couple of times beside him to settle inside her blimp. "Yesterday I said something about the Martians having at least reached the level of the Greeks. But that was before we discovered the moving hologram records. That at least brings their technology -- or one facet of it, at any rate -- to a level comparable to the middle of the twentieth century. Or even well beyond. We still can't imbed a moving hologramic image into a crystal that just starts to playback automatically under lazed light. Now if they were all that advanced, then there should be scads of written evidence around here. If not things like books, then at least carved in the stone. But there isn't a scratch, not a dated corner stone, no mayor's name carved over the doorway. Hell, there're at least mason's mar on the blocks in the Khufu Pyramid. Now you're our semantidst, Rimky, and it must be pretty important to you that there be some evidence of a Martian semantics. But the fact that there isn't any immediately visible abouf a structure this imposing, coupled mth the fact that they obviously stored so much visually... Her voice hung on the word as a card player's fingers might linger on a daring discard. "Well, there's a good possibility, Rimky, that they just weren't a verbal race, and they somehow managed to achieve this level of technology without ever employing written communication, sort of the same way the Incas and Mayas reached their cultural level and still managed totally to bypass the invention of the wheel. If that is the case, Rimky, that makes you sort of useless on this expedition. I could see that getting to you, upsetting you." He could tell she was waiting for some great reaction of relief; that the truth had outed. How did she expect to detect it? Perhaps the change in breathing woidd come through the suit phones. He tried to remember dio she was. But there were all seven hundred and fiftyodd enzyme reactions to think about, to make sure that one of them didn't suddenly stop  .  . "You know," she was going on (Hodges? Yes, it was the Hodges woman). "I'm really the useless one on the expedition. You know what my talent is? I'm the one who can make friends with all sorts of Eskimos and jungle wildmen. And then there were the mountain cannibal in the Caucasus who wanted to make me their queen." She laughed metallically. "TTiey certainly did. I don't care if I never see another piece of decayed yak butter again as long as I live. Rimky, I'm here just in case we run into a tribe of live Martians." She looked out across the barren copper. After a few more moments she said, "I think you'd pretty well agree there's a good deal more chance you'll find Martian writing than I'll find the models for those carvings up there, wandering around in nomadic tribes, And what's more, it does get under my skin. I guess, being on edge like that, I've occasionally said some things, some of them to you, I'd have best held in. If you've got a skill or a discipline, you want to use it. You don't want to drag it half way across the solar system because there's a one in a thousand chance somebody might just want a minute of your time." She patted his forearm. "Am I anywhere near it?" Rimkin thought: Live Martians? If I were a live Martian, then I wouldn't have to worry about the seven hundred and fifty enzyme reactions that keep the human body alive. But then, there'd be others, different ones, even more complicated, even more dangerous, because they have to function over a much wider temperature range. Am I a Martian? Am I one of those strange creatures I watched in the beam of my flash, walking the strange alleys with the garnet-colored walls, driving their beasts, and greeting one another with incomprehensible gestures? But this woman, which one is she? "Where's Jimmi...?' Rimkin asked. He heard Hodges start to say something; then she decided not to, and began the complicated maneuIP ver of her prostheses to stand. "Can you walk, Rimkin? I think I'd better get you back to the skimmer." "The skimmer...? Oh, yes. Of course. It's time to go back to the skimmer, isn't it?" He ached. All over his body, he ached. But he managed to stand, thinking, Why does it hurt so? Perhaps it's one of the seven hundred reactions, starting to fail, and I'm going to... "Let's hurry up," Hodges urged. "If you've been out here all night, you're probably on the third time through your air. I bet it's stale as an old laundry bag in there." Rimkin started slowly across the stones. But Hodges paused. Suddenly she bent down before the broken visage and shone Rimkin's laze on the broken iris. She looked for the whole minute it took Rimkin to reach the edge. She made puzzled "mmmmmm" sounds twice. When she joined him to climb down to the sand, she was frowning behind the white frame of her helmet. And a couple of times she made stranger faces. IV T he process of getting Rimkin to bed pretty well finished getting everybody else up. When Dr. Jones wanted to give him a sedative, Rimkin went into a long and fairly cohorent discussion about the drug's causing possible upset in his enzymal chemistry, which the others listened to seriously until suddenly he started to cry. At last he let Jimmi give him the injection. And while the pretty Micronesian qualitative analyst stroked his forehead, he fell asleep. Mak, in his weight allowance for equipment Vital to the Facilitation of Your Specialized Functions, had secreted a Westphalian ham and a gallen of the good Slivowitz, contending that breakfast was pointless without a hefty slice of the one and a pony of the other. But he was fast was left to his episcopacy. Anyway, he had the best luck among them beating dehydrated eggs back into shape. Now in the small area under the steps where such things were done, he was clanking and fuming like a rumand-maple dragon. Smith came down the stairs. A skillet cover rang on the pan rim. Mak grunted. "I didn't realize he was that bad. Ling." Jones folded the gaming beard; the pattern of white and black fell apart. He slid the pebbles into the pot, and pushed the stud on the pot base. "I guess none of us did." The pot began to vibrate. The white stones were substantially less dense than the black ones, so, after a good shaking, ended up on top. "Do you think Mars is just too much for him?" Dr. Jones had already noticed that the separation process took longer on this light-weight planet than at home. 'Naw." Mak ducked from under the stairs with his platter of ham and eggs. The steam rose and mixed with the pipe smoke. 'This must have been building for months, maybe all his life, if the Freudians are to be trusted." He leaned over hefty Miss Hodges and set the platter down. Then he frowned at her. 'Tou look oddly pensive, ma'am." Hodges, using her aluminum stalks, pushed herself around from the table so she could see Smith, who was at the bottom of the stairs. "What happens if you cut -- or break -- a hologram plate in half. Ling?" guess you get half the picture," Jimmi said. She was sitting on the top step. Richard Neilson was staring directly at the top of her head. "If I sit down at the table before the rest of you," Mak said, ducking under the steps for the coffee pot, "you're only going to get half your breakfast." Smith, Jones and Jimmi took their chairs. Mak set the steaming enameled pot (it too was from Yugoslavia, and had come th Vital Equipment) on the coffee tile, sat down and took four pieces of toast. "Actually you don't." Ling passed the egg platter to Hodges. "If you think of it as a method of information storage, you'll understand. You take the ordinary hologram plate, cut it half, and en shine a lazed beam on it, and you get the complete, threeAlimensional image hanging there, full size. Only it's slightly out of focus, blurry, a little less distinct." He folded a sliver of ham with blackened edges and skewered it to some toast. "And if you cut it again, the image just goes a bit more out of fucus. Try and imagine a photograph and a hologram of the same object side by side. Every dot of light-sensitive emulsion on each is a bit of information about the object. But the information dots on the photographic plate only relate to one point of a two-dimensional reduction. The information dots on the hologram plate relate to the entire, solid, three-dimensional object. Theoretically, even a square milimeter cut from a hologram will have something to tell you about the whole object" "Does that 'theoretical' mean something," Mak asked, between burblings of his briar, "or is it just rhetoric?" #  AX'dl," Ling said, "there is a point of diminishing returns. From what I've said, it would seem that hologramic information storage would be vastly more efficient than photographic. But most human methods of information storage are essentially photographic; writing, tape, punchcar -- " IF "But those are all linear," Dr. Jones objected. "Photographic in that there's a one to one relation between each datum and each un-integrated fact datum and each un-integrated fact -- " "Think of a photograph as composed of the lines of a television picture," Jimmi said, hastily swallowing eggs and toast. "A photograph can be reduced to line terms too." "That's right," Ling said. "Diminishing returns...  Hodges prompted. "Oh yes. It's simply this: if you only have a relatively small number of addresses -- cybernetics term for the places your data are going to go," he explained to Jimmi's puzzled look, "then you're often better off with photographic or linear information. Because you need so many bits of hologramic information before the image starts to clear enough to be -- " " -- anything but a dark, menacing shadow, a ghost, a specter of itself, a vague outline filled with the unknown and too insubstantial to contain it." Everyone looked at Hodges, surprised. "What are you talking about, Evelyn?" "Rimkin." She gestured with her brandy glass to keep Mak from crazy Rimky." "Oh, he isn't crazy," Jones insisted. "He may be having a nervous breakdown on us, which is too man. He did end up beating me at go last night. Sometimes I'm just afraid these sort of situations are merely occupational hazards." "True, Jonesy." She smiled ruefully and sipped. And that's all I meant by crazy." "You brought this whole business up in the first place, about the broken holograms," Ling said. "Why, Evelyn?" The inflamed light of the morning desert jeweled the tiny glass in her puffy fingers. "Do you remember the head that had fallen from the frieze?It was cracked so that one of the eyes had broken in half. When I found him this morning, he'd been out all night with his laze beam looking at the images in the broken eye." She put her glass on the table. After a while. Dr. Smith asked, "Did you take a look?" Evel#m Hodges nodded. "WeU?" Mak asked. "Just what you said. Ling. The images were whole. But they were slightly blurred, out of focus. I think there was something off with the timing too. That's all." Mak leaned forward, made disgusted sound, and began to batter his ashes over the detritus of crusts and butter on his plate. "Let's go out and finish up those measuremerits' The periscope dropped hastily into his pocket. "If he was up all night, with that shot in him he'll sleep till this evening.' y e didn't. He woke fighting the drug after they had been gone twenty minutes. And he still didn't know where he was. Not where he should be, certainly. Because his head hurt; it felt as though the side had been broken away. His whole body was sore. He lurched from the bed and tried to focus on the objects, -- pillow, reading machine, boxes of microfilm on the table -- but they all had vague haloes like the superimposition from special-effect sequences in old color films. Jimmi was sitting on the bottom step, reading. She had chosen (a patient. Crash She looked up. Richard Nielson was trundling down the steps toward her. And at the top, stood naked Rimkin. Jimmi leapt away as the bust struck the reader she had dropped on the steps. "Rimky, are you...?" He came down the steps, three of them slowly, seven of them fast, the last two slowly. Then, while she was debating whether to try and restrain him physically, he was gone through the double doors to the lockers. She ran toward them -- the two brass handles swung up and clicked. She crashed against them. But behind the veneer that looked like walnut paneling was ribbed steel. Inside the locker Rimkin fumbled the catches of his air suit and thought. Hot. Hot outside. Twice he dropped the contraption on the grilled floor. Boiled... boiled something. An earthman would boil out there on the desert without a suit. But why was he worrying? He wasn't sure who or what he might be. But the streets with their shaggy pennants, and their elegant citizens walking their shambling beasts with IF Vl  vv gutters.  Ill   I I I I #I ):t wc(;;b N i i;i shapes of time-cast dust and which were the intelligent creations of the amazing culture of his people, his planet? He brushed his arm around his face plate -- but that didn't do any good. He walked down the blazing, alien street. And the street sucked his boots. He was going to take off his air suit soon. Yes. Because there was city. But wait just a few minutes, because things were still too unfocused, too amorphous. And sand, from when he'd brushed his arm across his face plate, kept trickling down his vision. Nor were the figures in front of him Martians. He didn't think they were Martians. They were white and bulbous and were busy about the shards of purple stone, doing things to the slim columns that rose to prick the Martian noon. "Who are you?" he said. Two of them turned around. "Rimkin...!" "I don't know who you are," he told them. "Hey, what's he doing out here?" "I'm a Martian," Rimkin told them. "You're nothing but... that's right, boiled potatoesl" He tried to laugh, but it came out crying because his head hurt very badly, and he was dopey from what ever they had given him that morning. "We've got to get him back to the skimmer. Come on, Rimky." "I'm going to take off my air suit," he said. "Because I'm a Martian and you -- " But then they were all around him. And they kept holding his hands down, which was easy because he was weak from the drug. And the carved heads, the gleaming eyes, melted behind his tears. "mkin! Rimkinl Are you out there? Evelyn, Mak, Rimkin's out there some place!" "We've got him, Jimmi! It's all right We"re bringing back to the skimmer." "Who are you? I can't tell who you are?" "Oh, Rimky, are you all right?" "I'm a Martian. I can take off my spacesuit -- " "No, you don't, fellow. Keep your hands down." "I think you're all crazy, you know? I'm a Martian, but you're all talking to somebody who isn't even here!" "Rinokin, go on back with them and don't give them any trouble. For me, for Jimmi. They just want to help." "I don't even know you. Why do I have to come back? This is my city. These are my buildings, my house. It's just not clear, any more. And it hurts." "Keep your hands down. Come on -- " "Jimmi, are you all right? How did he get out? He didn't hurt you, did he?" IP "I guess the sedative wasn't strong enough. He surprised me, nd managed to lock me in the study. I just found Evelyn's emergency keys in her room a minute ago so I could get down to the controls and radio you. What are we going to do with him?" "I'm going to go to Mars. I can take off my spacesuit. I'm a Martian. I'm a Martian -- " gerous. They'll get him back to Earth, fill him full of calming drugs, and in six months he'll probably be good as new. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he goes into this sort of thing periodically. I spent a couple of weeks in a hospital dr # ung out once." "Why can't I take off my suit? I'm a Mart -- " "Rimky, remember all those enzyme reactions you were going on at us about this morning when you didn't want to take your shot? You open your suit, and the temperature out here will work so much havoc with them you won't have time to blink. You'll also fry." "But which ones? How can I tell which ones will..." "Evelyn, I can't hit him over the head I'll crack his helmet." "I know, I know, Mak. We'll get him back. Oh, this is so terriblel What causes something like this to happen to a perfectly fine -- more thm fine mind, Ling?" "Don't hit me over the head. Don't... I'm a Martian. And it hurts." "We won't hurt you, Rimky" "Evelyn, we're out here exploring the ruins of new civilizations on other planets and we still don't . know. We know much of it's chemical, and we can do something about a lot of it, but we still don't... Holograms, Evelyn..." "What, Ling?" "Nobody's ever been able to figure out how the brain stores information. We know the mind remembers everything it sees, hears, feels, smells, as well as all sorts of crossreferencing. People have just always assumed that it must be basically a photographic process, all the separate bits of data stored on the juncture of each individual synapse. But suppose, Evelyn, the brain stores hologramically. Tlien madness would be some emotional or chemical situation that blocked off access to large parts of the cerebral hologram." "Then large parts of the world would just lose their sharpness, their focus..." "Like Rimkin, here." "Keep your hands away from your suit catch #" "Come on, Rimkin. Once we get you home, you'll be all right." "It won't hurt any more?" "That's right. Try to relax." As they reached the rock, Rimkin turned to one of the white, inIF  Feature, Report On Japanese Science Fiction Japanese science fiction and its fandom, told by Our Man in Tokyo 'Teedless to say, Japan was at one time among the least advanced countries in the field of science fiction. This was not because the Japanese people could not understand the modern attitude -- the sense of scientific rationalization for the fantastically chaotic universe. In the pre-Amazing era, which was the period of rapid advancement of civilization in Japan, we had several active adventure writers, such as Shunro Oshikawa, who was supposed to be a Japanese version of Jules Verne. And in the period between the two World Wars there appeared several writers of straight fantasy and pure scientific-fiction stories. The most popular and capable among them was Juza Unno, who introduced the attitudes of the newly developing s-f stories of Hugo Gernsback and others for the first time in the #'s. He appealed mainly to young readers and was not at all esteemed in the field of general literature. After the second World War, a flood of s-f paperbacks, discarded by GI's in the allied forces, filled the shelves of the second-hand book shops in the big cities. This stimulated some ambitious publishers to attempt a series of translations of this new type of literature. Most of these trials failed because of limited sales. Anthologies from Amazing Stories by Seibundo-Shinkosha Company folded after seven books, and the Gengensha S-F Series went bankrupt after twenty books. These were the main efforts during this period. However, the interest of readers was developing gradually, and for the first time in # the Hayakawa Fantasy Series -- published by Hayakawa-Shobo Company -- made suffident of a success to be able to continue publication. Starting in December of '# and changing its title to Hayakawa SF Series as the sales increased, they had issued about # titles by the early part of #. Most books in this series are translations of U.S. and British stories, but a few German and Russian stories are induded, as well as some twenty Japanese original novels and collections. A little barlier than this successful effort in prodom, the history of our fandom began with the start of a club of s-f fans and writers. Its fanzine, Vchujin (meaning cosmic dust) first appeared in May, #. Publication yta continued at monthly intervals, reaching its #th issue this February. This is famous as the largest and most authoritative fanzine -- or perhaps a semi-prozine, with its drculation of # -- and has made Takumi Shibano (b. #), its establisher-editor-publisher, a major name in Japanese fandom. More than half of the inrriters who are now supporting the Japanese s-f field have grown up in this Uchujin-Club or have at least had something to do with it. At the beginning of #, SF. Magazine, the first and only successful prozine in Japan, was brought out by the publisher of the Hayakawa SF Series. It started as a version of FSF, but the contract was soon dissolved, and it began to publish Japanese stories, too. At first they tried to have some of the regidar writers of other fields write s-f stories, but they later changed their policy and began to seek capable writers from fandom; and progress from Uchujin to SF Magazine has become the most orthodox route for developing writers. Masami Fukushima (b. #), the editor of SF Magazine, is regarded as a leading character in Japanese s-f prodom, having brought out both the Hayakawa SF Series and SF Magazine and having done meritorious work in rising the serious consideration given science fiction in journalism and the literary field. He has translated some U.S. and British masterpieces and has written many juvenile s-f stories also. Following Uchujin, several fan groups began to appear in #. Null-Club published NiM for #I IE issues in Osaka before it folded in fanzine Uchu-Kiryu (meaning space current) -- started in Tokyo in #; this is now supposed to be the largest fan group in Japan with more than # members, except for the subscription group of Vchujin. Most of the Japanese fanzines are clubzines, each supported by its subscription group. The Japanese annual s-f conventions began in #. The first of these (the Meg-Con) was a oneday meeting in Tokyo, sponsored by Uchujin Club, and it was there start. The second convention (Tokon) was held in # and was the first with a two-day program, including a movie-show, art-exhibition, lodging-together and banquet, which made a pattern for later cons. The third (Daicon) was held in Osaka, promoted by Null Club and its chairman, Yasutaka Tsutsui (b. #). The fourth (Tokon-#) was the largest Japanese s-f convention with some # attending and was sponsored by the cooperation of Uchujin, Uchu-Kiryu and the SF-Art Club, which was established in # by art fans. The fifth (Meicon) was held in Nagoya, sponsored by the Mutants Club, which was established in # by Den Yoshimitsu (b. #) as a local group. The sixth (Tokon-#) was held in # as a serious symposium, changing the preceding pattern a little, with some # attenS- ing. We were planning to have ai Pan-Pacificon in # in ceepera meeting of the Worldcon ef th year in Tokyo, but the L.A. fans and we lost the nomination of the! con-site at the Nycon-# last autumn. he number of fanzines and fangroups in Japan increase rapidly in # and #, reaching # or more, though over half of them were groups of juveniles. established the Federation f S-F, Fan Groups of Japan in #, which now consists of fourteen major fan groups. Hayakawa-Shobo's monopoly of the Japanese s-f field is continuing, and their SFMagazine is still th only prozine we have. In # they, started a new series of Japanese! original novels and have published twelve by now. But a few competitors have appeared in the field of translated works. Tokyo-Sogensha Company established an s-f section of their Sogen Mystery Series in #, which has now reached # titles. They are said to have made very profitable sales since they began publishing semi-classics such as the Burroughs and E. E. Smith stories. But recently some other publishers have begun imitating their practice. Now following are the famous characters in Japanese science fiction, or the names most frequently mentioned in our fandom: Sakyo Komatsu (b. #) is a very active and skillful story-teller with wide interests; he has been called a bulldozer in the Japanese s-f field. He is also an opinionshaper of Japanese futurology. He has written nearly twenty books and is supposed to be a Japanese version of R. A. Heinlein, though he stresses mainly the social sciences. Shin'ichi Hoshi (b. #) has been writing short-short stories mainly, with an elegant sense of fable criticism, and his published more than ten collections of his works. He was one of my closest associates when I publish Uchufin orinally; he soon became a profesaonal writer. He helped to popularize the name "SF" in the early days of Japanese science fiction. Kimifusa Abe (b. #) and the above two are a trio who have achieved popularity beyond the limits of sdence fiction. Abe wrote a few s-f stories, but is essentially a writer of mainstream literature, writing critical-fantasies and dramas based on his social beliefs. Yasutaka Tsutsui started as a pro writer after folding his fanzine, NtM, and is now following the above three with his xmique satirical and comic situation fantasies, though some rigorous fans would not consider his stories to be science fiction. Ryu Mitsuse (b. #) is, on the contrary, writing stories with hard-sdence form and poetic insight that make it seem that he intends to be a sdentific Homer discusdng future .history. Taku Ma # rumura (b. #) writes of the sodety of the comparatively near ffiture for the most part, and he is regarded as the most serious writer in Japanese sdence fiction. Masao Segawa (b. #) is writing stories and artides for juveniles and is noted for the excellent sdentific research in his work. Tetsu Yano (b. #) has been famous as the first S-F Fan in Japan dnce the dawn of our fandom and is now a professional translator and also a writer of juvenile s-f stories. These two, with Masami Fukushima, are representative names in Japanese juvenile sdence fiction. In the field of s-f comics for juveniles, Osamu Tezuka (b. #) is the top name. He is not a spedalist in sf, but his feeling is rather more stfish than any other s-f writers in Japan. He is considered a sort of Walt Disney, having produced the first animated film series for TV in Japan -- Astroboy. Many other young comic artists as Sbotaro Ishimori (b. #) are foUowing Tezuka, and it is certain that the level of s-f comics is rather higher and steadier than that of juvenile s-f stories in Japan. Aritsune Toyoda (b. #) IF writes clever stories and is doing more -- and perhaps rather better -- work in juvenile fiction and scenarios for comics. His leading competitor is Kazumasa Hirai (b. #) whose stories are esthetic rather than technical. Alan Kiodomari (b. #) was a fantasy writer in the general literary field and has worked his way over to science fiction. He is a good storyteller, but most of his living is made from juvenile stories. (This applies more or less to most s-f writers; juvenile magazines publish a far larger quantity of science fiction than the adult market.) Fujio Ishiwara (b. #) is not a full-time writer, but is a leader in the skillful execution of recent theories of science and technology. He maintains a high level of activity in fandom, too. Koichiro Noda (b. #) and Norio Itoh (b. #) are respected as excellent fans and have translated and introduced foreign stories. Each writes a column for SF-Magazine. Noda is expert on semi-classics and Itoh on more recent fiction. Once classed with the above two, Yu Mori (b. #) is now in prodom as the assistant editor of SF Magazine, Ichiro Kano (b. #) and Tadashi Hirose (b. #) are two professional writers who often do science fic tion but are also good fans anil help us especially on the annual conventions. Among many professional trans- lators. Noriyoshi Saito (b. #) and Hisashi Asakura (b. #) arci noted as specialists in sf. Saite #ncci translated Hoshi's story into English for FSF. Takashi Ishikawa (b. #) is  critic of mystery and s-f stories --  the only person writing criticism of sf professionally. There are still many more talented individuals here, both in iwrodom and fandom. Some are prot writers who sometimes write fOod s-f stories, and others are now writing only for the fanzines. I sutsti a considerable number of nami mentioned above will have to Iki replaced with others in a few years, when our juvenile or student fans -- now doing their work for fanzines with rather poor printing -- grow up into their fuller ai complishment. They are being brought up in an active s-f field, contrary to us adult fans (wbidf includes most of the pro writers) who had to create or import the! modern type of science fiction for, ourselves in order to enjoy it, New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! IF  Novelette This was the ulfimafe Quarantine. Upon its total security depended the life -- or death -- of humanity! I H is name was Joseph. He was a blue-eyed blond and just a little bald in fronts although a fuzz over his round forehead gave a promise of new hair still to come. He was healthy, weighed twenty-two pounds and was barely eight months old. He wore diapers and rubber pants, nothing else. At the moment, he had a very intent expression on his smalls fat face. Somehow, the brightly colored plastic beads on a wood-bordered wire frame were not doing what he wanted. They simply would not come off the frame to be thoroughly tested by his four teeth for true intrinsic playability and actual baby value. It was very unsatisfactory. He whimpered silghtly and then sat up straighter, his Illustrated by creased, plump legs assuming what looked like a Yoga position as they curled in front of him. A little si almost inaudible, but weaiy, escaped him. It did not sound like a baby noise at all, but rather like the wistful regret of an aged man, brooding over the many mistakes of a long life. Babies make strange noises at times. Joseph abandoned the beads to survey his domain out of roimd, cobalt eyes, thumb in mouth. The room was circular, dome-shaped and about twenty feet across. Soft white padding, spotlessly clean, covered the floor on which Joseph sat and ran up the gradually curving walls to a height of four feet. Above the edge of the padded covering, smooth dark metal, non-reflecting, rose to the top of the igloo-shaped room. Light, soft and lambent, flooded in from a round opening in the center of the dome, thirty feet over the middle of the room. Square black openings were spaced at regular intervals on the walls at a height of six feet. They gave back the blankest of mirrors where the lit hit them, and the baby paid no attention to them. He now had located and seized a toge, floppy, green dog among the simple playtgs which lay about him on the floor. Staring absently off into some far distance, he held the cloth dog firmly in his chubby hands and began to gnaw reflectively on one of its tattered ears. Inside his small body, chemical warnings were starting to send an alert throughout his system. Dinner time was approaching. Even as Joseph chewed on the dog's ear, his whole attitude was beginning to change. He was now watching only one section of the wall, a section which he had learned to keep an eye on, although it differed in no way from any other to a casual observer. Joseph stared at this particular part of the wall more eagerly now, and the green dog was dropped and abandoned. The child actually could hear nothing but the soft, almost inaudible hissing of the hidden air ducts, but his own body gave him a clock without compare, a timer provided by nature. The graduated intensity of the light in the room was an unnecessary assistance. Joseph knew it was noon. H is eyes widened in pleasure, and he held out his small, plump arms in what was obviously a gesture of welcome, combined with an involuntary plea. Soundless, an opening the size of a standard door had appeared in the section of the wall he was facing. Framed in it stood a massive figure, six feet tall, which advanced slowly with a faint humming noise toward the eager baby, who now crowed with pleasure. Behind the figure, the opening in the wall closed as silently as it had appeared -- with one difference, that is. From the figure a six-inch thick, shining cable led back through the wall, fitting a circular hole in the base of where the original door had appeared with micrometer smoothness. A rich, warm voice broke the room's silence and two long arms reached down to gather up Joseph, who was now panting inaudibly and squirming and wiggling with pleasure. "Baby, hungry? Joseph hungry? Here's the bottle. Love. Easy now, don't try and drink it all at once. There's still din-din. Mashed lamb and carrots coming, you know." His blue eyes h closed, Joseph lay back in the warm, padd clocovered arms and inhed his milk with mighty slurps and gurgles. While he drank and sucked on the bottle's nipple, he looked up with contentment at the immobile pink and white plastic mask and the blue, glassined eyes. As he continued his meal, the tapes played steadily, reeling off cooings and murmurs, loving gurgles and bits of lullaby with programmed precision. The pre-set warmth of the circuits in arms and breast reassured the baby and the duraluminum limbs rocked him ever so gently. Joseph belched and then continued to drink. All was well. Mother had come again. She always did. n B rigadier General Albert Hardwick was thin, brown-eyed and a bachelor, young for his rank at thirty-eight. The fact that he. was a deputy-Director of G-#, Army Intelligence, and had been promoted to General's rank while serving in that capacity as a full colonel, made him even more of an anomaly. As he drove, he mused over these facts and others, while keeping a sharp eye on the road. Only a superb combat record in Viet Nam and the acquisition of the Distinguished Service Cross and a Purple Heart with two clusters had warded off the mutterings within the inner circles of command. An M.A. in Political Science, earned while recovering from wounds, was distinctly not regarded as an asset in some eyes, some rather senior eyes indeed. Hardwick had gone as an undergraduate to Michigan State and entered the Army through R.O.T.C. A good school, Michigan State, fine American institution. Still, not the Point, though, was it now? And a general at thirty-eight! Hardwick drove steadily on through the flat countryside of southeastern New Jersey. He was not worried about the nullings higher up. He had faced them before when it came to a crisis point, and his record had always been more than enough -- his record plus a few seniors of vejy high rank who cared nothing for mutterings and valued performance alone. Cruising along through the unending scrub pines of the Jersey Barrens, illumined by a hazy September afternoon sun, Hardwick was not really concerned with military hierarchy. At the moment, the machinery of his mind was locked in on his present assignment, which presented enough puzzles for a decade of musing. He had been working very hard of late. As head of G-#'s Chinese desk, he had to co-ordinate with the C.I.A., the Navy, the Air Force and the whole network of Defense Department Intelligence. As the Far Eastern landmass gave birth to one confrontation after another in a grim and mounting progression, his task grew worse by the week. The Chinese takeover of Burma in #, two years earlier, had been awesome in its smoothness and precision. Burma had gone lock, stock and barrel into the Chinese camp, albeit on a privileged and semi-independent basis, led by its own neutralist rulers in a calculated gamble. The opposition leaders, including a former Secretary of the U.N., had been liquidate by their own secret police overnight, with Chinese assistance when necessary. In something like a week, Burma was solidly Peking communist, from Rangoon to the Kachin hills. Everyone, includmg the Russians, had been caught napping. F or the next two years, a relentless dual pressure had been grinding at India to the West and Thailand to the East. Well fed on Burmese rice and led by professionals, the Chinese Armies, their proletarian militia outlook totally discarded since the counter-purge of #, were now armed with the latest weapons. And they were firmly based on all their perimeters, facing out from every point of the compass. The Russian relinquishment of Outer Mongolia to Chinese Influence was now a year old. The long moribund Viet Cong had re-emerged in strength and American troops were again engaged in full scale war from the South China Sea to the Thai-Burmese border, and not winning either. A strongly hostile note had intruded into U.S.-Japanese relations, and Japan's government was pursuing a cold and distant attitude to United States overtures. And a month ago, two well-armed, well-led Hukbalahap corps had erupted overnight from the mountains of Western Luzon and attacked the Philippine Army in open and initially successful battle. Naval intelligence reports on a vast new fleet of Chinese nuclear-powered subs, mostly cargo and troop carriers, were pouring in. Everything, in short, was blowing up. Why in hell, for the fiftieth time thought Hardwick as he drove, take a top man who is working a fifteenhour day away from his job at the Pentagon and shove him out in the boondocks? Security Chief of Project Inside Straight, whatever that wasl Super Q Clearance! No written orders! Unscheduled personal interview for assignment with the Secretary of Defense! Interview consisting of route information to Point Nowhere in Southern New Jersey, period. End of interview. Get on your civvies and go, man. He had gone. The pine shadows were now darkening the narrow country road ahead. Hardwick spared a glance at his watch. Six-thirty. He braked as the road straggled lazily into a small clearing and a meaningless crossroads. A small wooden shack in front of which leaned a rusting gas pump, grayish hose in tatters, stood at one side of the road. Three broken windows leered over a sagging porch railing. As Hardwick looked around, his eye caught a flicker of movement and a glin t of metal at the left window, gone as soon as registered. His hands tightened on the Chevy's wheel, but his gaze swept calmly on. Menity, he considered the memorized travel plan and came to a decision. IF T he small black car, an inconspicuous, two-year-old electrocompact, took the road opening to the left, away from the shack, and Hardwick drove on, his mind racing. His whole life from combat in Asia to the present had alerted him to be wary of observation, and for the last ten miles he was aware that he had been steadily watched. The few farm houses, the dark scrubby pines and green thickets, the empty roadside stands, the occasional battered trucks -- all, he knew, had contained sleepless eyes. Whatever Project Inside Straight was, someone wanted the word sealed in. Again he recalled the precise tone of Secretary of Defense Madden when outlining his route. Hardwick's hands again tightened on the wheel. Now, he felt a certainty that any deviation from the route he had been ordered to follow would meet with unpleasant results, results he would have no time to question! The road at this point ceased to be even second-class and was no longer tar but plain dirt and sand. What kind of installation could this be? Hardwick cursed softly as he switched on the car's lights. He had seen no signs on the road of any vehicular traffic at all, and the road itself was in appalling shape. How did supplies and personnel get in or out? He steered around a large pothole, his right fender scraping into a tangle of blueberry bushes as he did so. It was suddenly almost full dark outside, and the last katydids of the season had started a chirping audible even over the crunch of sand under the wheels and the faint hum of the battery-driven engine. S uddenly, the road ceased. Before him, as he braked sharply, the lights shone on black, oily water. The road had ended at a tiny, forgotten landing on a broad creek winding through the Barrens. A rickety dock stood forlornly at road's end, thrusting out ten feet into the stream, but that was aU. Hardwick switched off the engine and sat for exactly five seconds in the utter silence that followed, keeping time by staring at the sweep hand on his wristwatch, glowing in the darkness of the front seat. At the fifth second he opened the window wide and began to whistle a tune. It was Melancholy Baby. After precisely fifteen seconds, he stopped whistling and sat very still. Not a sound broke the silence outside, save the faint eddying noise of the water lapping around the piers of the little dock. Then an eyebeam from a pencil flash hit him square in the face. Although he had heard no whisper of movement, he saw that someone was now standing next to his window. "General Hardwick?" came a pleasant soft voice. Feeling slightly ridiculous, he answered, "Aces over Eights." "The Dead Man's Hand," said the voice approvingly. With that, a spray with an unfamiliar, sweet, pungent odor lanced in the window and settled over Hardwick's face in a cloud. He barely had time to wonder what was going on when the powerful anaesthetic knocked him out for the count-'The trip was over as far as any volition on his part was concerned. lU H e awoke suddenly and sat up in bed, memory returning with a rush. He saw that he was wearing comfortable pajamas. Looking around the small room, he noted first a uniform of his own rank with all of his correct decorations hanging on a hanger from a wall hook. Under it on the floor lay shoes and socks, both O.D., and a single-starred cap straddled the hook. He realized that he felt fine and got out of bed and stretched, still eyeing his surroundings. The drablypainted room was windowless but the air seemed fresh. All around him he was conscious of the pulse of machines. Could this be a power plant of some kind? One of the two visible doors opened on inspection into a tiny shower-bathroom; the other, he guessed a hall door, was locked. What seemed to be all of his personal possessions lay neatly on top of a bureau near his uniform. Curious, he opened the bureau drawers and found a complete supply of O.D. underwear, shirts, handkerchiefs and such, all in his size. He seemed to be booked in for quite a stay. At this point a bell pealed gently high on one wall, and a voice came from a hidden speaker apparently concealed in the central light fixture on the ceiling. "Please shave and dress, General. You will have visitors in exactly fifteen minutes." There was a pause. "Repeat," said the voice, "Fifteen minutes." There was an audible click. He stood with his hands behind him exactly fifteen minutes later, fuUuniformed, and saw the locked door open. Outwardly calm but extremely annoyed within, he watched two people come in and close the door. I n front was a woman, which surprised him, although his face stayed expressionless. Women do not normally achieve high rank in maximum Security operations. She was about five-seven, with brown hair and eyes, quite good-looking without being a raging beauty. Her eyes were sharp and very intelligent Hardwick guessed her age at about thirty-four and was surprised later on to find she was four years younger. She was wearing a well-cut brown suit and no jewelery. The gray-haired man who stood quietly in back of her also surMrised him, but for different reasons, and his impatient anger stopped mounting right there and then. He had not seen Thomas B. Allen for over two years, but the mustached C.I.A. senior field agent, who somewhat resembled a caricature of Dr. Watson, was a man whom he respected anywhere or at any time. If Tom Allen was in this strange affair, he had better keep quiet and see what happened. The woman looked at him for a moment and then came forward, hand outstretched and a smile on her face. IF "General, you look like a man who needs an apology. I have nothing to apologize for and neither does Mr. Allen, but we apologize anyway. I'm Dr. Joanne Buder, the Technical Director of Inside Straight, and Mr. Allen, whom you alrey know, is the Security Director. Between us, we've been running things here. You're our new boss." Mechanically, Hardwick shook hands with the woman, then with Allen, while trying to grasp this last sentence. His face must have relaxed and revealed some emotion, because Dr. Butler laughed, a sound Hardwick absently noted as low and pleasant. "I'm not going to stay," she said. "Mr. Allen will fill you in, and later we can go further into the job. I'll simply say that all three of us are here at e direct -- and in my case personal -- request of the President. We're not playing around for the fun of it." "I never thought we were," said Hardwick, flushing slightly. "I know," she said. "But I wanted to make it plainer still. This is the biggest thing you've ever touched. General. Nothing and nobody must stand in its way. Too much has already been sacri... has been done, by everyone, for this to fail. Do you understand me?" P uzzled at the sudden break in her otherwise calm voice, Hardwick merely nodded. She had been about to say "sacrificed" and had changed her mind, of that he was certain. "Good," she said, her efficient manner apparently restored. "I'll see you later then when Torn brings you along. Bear with us until you know the whole story. You have an even tougher job than ours coming up." After the door closed behind her, the silent Allen seated himself in the room's one chair and pulled out a horrible-looking old pipe which he lit while surveying Hardwick from opaque gjray eyes. He waved a hand at the bed, and Hardwick sat down on its edge while his mind went racing back into what he knew about Allen. Allen was the man who, as a young agent, had broken the Mossadegh government of Iran almost single-handed and then gone on from strength to strength, until nowadays he practically wrote his own orders. His brown suit and scuffed shoes, plus the gray, bristly mustache made him look like an out-of-tenure, absent-minded professor at some Eastern college, but Hardwick knew better. Very few people did. He therefore waited, with as much patience as he could muster. His pipe going, Allen finally leaned back and spoke. "You're looking well. General, but pale. The pressure getting pretty heavy back at the ranch?" "I don't imagine that you're cut off from news here, Mr. Allen," he answered. "The roof is falling in aU over, in every way." "Call me Tom," said AUen, looking shrewdly at him through a cloud of blue smoke. "And I'll call you Al." "All right, Tom," said Hardwick. "We'll be pals, even chums, in no time. Now what in hell is this weird business all about?" "What do you remember reading or hearing about the Houston General Hospital disaster?" Allen asked suddenly, still watching him very carefully. Hardwick thought for a second. This was obviously not a time for idle questions. "Yes, I remember it fairly well. Some volatile poisonous gas or something got into the central air ducts, and the whole place went blooie in seconds when it was ignited. The place was deliberately set on fire to destroy any traces of what was there, as I recall. Lot of people killed by the gas first. So what? It just happened earlier this year, didn't it? I was in England at the time." tCp'hat was eight months ago," A said Allen almost to himself. He sucked noisily on bis pipe and exhaled a cloud of awful-smeDing blue smoke before continuing. His voice had suddenly become precise and metallic. "Because of that disaster, you were sent here under highest security orders to familiarize yourself with and take command of the installation in which you now find yourself. You were trailed from Washington out into the country, watched every yard of the way and then knocked out and dumped into a helicopter, which probably transferred you to one or two others on route. The only thing I can tell you is that you are nowhere at all, probably not by a thousand miles, near to where you last thout you were. This installation is so secret that probably not more than ten people in the wotM know its exact location. That includes me. I came here the same wajr you did. I think it's in the continental limits of the U.S., guess it may be underground, but I'm not sure of that either. It could even be underwater. StiH interested?" "Go on," said Hardwick, keeping his face impassive. "Okay. You are going to have to familiarize yourself in detail with this whole place. There are over a thousand personnel here, mostly nen, all working as maintenance and security. They were all -- except one -- kidnapped and convinced later, as I was, that this was a job that had to be done. A whole lot of the place is simply nothing but machines and more machines. You can always hear them. Half the people here are technicians, the other half guards. Half the technicians are concealed guards and half the guards are reserve technicians, held in case of emergency. Any questions yet, or do I go on?" "Dr. Butler is the non-kidnappee, I suppose?" Hardwick asked thoughtfully. "Pretty smart. Yes, she's the one. A Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. She and the President, or maybe the Secretary of Defense, grabbed the others, I suppose. No, don't laugh. When you see what we're guarding and why and understand your part in it, maybe you'll believe anything. This place kind of gets to you." Hardwick thought that if a place could get to Thomas Allen, on whose head the Soviets had once put a no-questions-asked price of one hundred thousand dollars, it ought to be worth looking at. IF A llen regretfully knocked out his ash on a saucer from the night table and stuffed the pipe back in his pocket. "No smoking outside your room, the dining areas and lounges," he said. "I don't smoke," said Hardwick. "Do you really believe that this place could be underwater?" "Wait until you see it," said Allen umly. "It might even be on the Moon. Let's go take a look." Hardwick glanced at his watch. It said eight o'clock. "Do I get any breakfast?" he asked. "You get anything you want, except Out," answered Allen. "You're the new boss, subject only to Dr. Butler and the Science staff in pure technology. I'll walk you over to the cafeteria and show you what there is to be seen on the way. "Oh, yes," he added, reaching into a pocket, "here's your new badge. Pin it on at all times outside this room. This is a very trigger-happy place." "What's everyone so afraid of?" asked Hardwick, pinning on the large blue-metal badge. It bore inset a recent picture of himself that he didn't remember seeing before, a lot of mysterious numbers and the words Director of Security. and maybe the world, I imagine," said Allen flatly and opened the door. "After you." They emerged into a narrow corridor, well lit by a continuous fluorescent panel in the ceiling. The sound of machinery was louder now, a continuous, muffled vibrato in the background, not loud enough to interfere with speech, but rather like traffic noises heard from a lofty New York apartment Down the corridor they were following, Hardwick saw a figure standing. As they approached, a tall lounging man in blue coveralls with a badge on them marked Security straightened up and waved casually. He was a light-skinned Negro. "Jim, this is General Hardwick, our new boss. I'm showing him around. He goes anywhere, any time. Al, meet Jim Tableman. I don't know aU the troops, but Jim was one of the first to arrive." "Glad to see you. General," said Tableman and shook hands. Hardwick noticed that the left hand stayed in his coverall pocket. "Got a gun?" he asked casually. Like lightning, a .# magnum snub nose emged from the pocket, then vanished again, all in one fluid motion. "Not bad for an M.A. in Biochemistry, is it?" said Allen pleasantly. "Does he just stand here all day or all watch?" asked Hardwick, turning to Alien. He was getting a bit irritated again by all the apparent mystery. "Show him what else you're here for, Jim," said Allen. "Stand still, Al, and don't move. My authority, demonstration purposes, Jim." IV H ardwick saw Tableman's hand flick out to an area of wall which )peared to tthe eye no different from any other. As Tableman touched it, a steel panel slid out from the equally unmarked ceiling and dropped to the floor with a muffled thud. The corridor ahead of them was now totally sealed off by what appeared to be an air-tight, bullet-proof barrier. The whole thing had taken less than a half-second. Tableman waited and at a nod from Allen touched the wall again. The steel shutter slid up as fast and as silently as it had come down and the empty corridor stretched before them once more. "Thanks, Jim. Come on, Al. We can talk as we walk, and you want breakfast." "How many Jims are there?" asked Hardwick as they strolled along, pie corridor was always gently curved to the left, and Hardwick guessed that they were in a vast dome-shaped or circular structure of some kind, with many levels, both up and down. Allen grinned. "Do you mean guards, biochemists or barrier watchmen?" "Barrier watchmen, I guess." "One hundred and seven. Each one knows his own wall section trigger, and none of them knows any of the others, except me and eventually you." "You've memorized all those sections, all those hidden buttons?" asked Hardwick incredulously. "No great trick for a good foreign duty agent, my boy. I'll teach you the method. You've been at a desk too long." They passed other coveralled men and even one woman as they walked along. Despite his previous disclaimer, Allen seemed to know all of them by name. Occasional doors broke the smoothness of the corridor on both sides. Through one of them which was open, Hardwick glimpsed a lofty room almost filled to the ceiling with what looked like vast, throbbing turbines. It reminded him of a ship's engine room he had once looked at. "Air re-conditioning boosters," said Allen. "The place is filled with them. Well, herer we are at the restaurant." H e led the way through a glasspanelled double door, and Hardwick found himself in a large, pleasant cafeteria. People of both sexes, all sporting identity badges on their coveralls, sat about in groups or alone. Some read while they ate; others talked, and a few were writing in pads or on sheets of paper. "Looks like the dining room of the Rand Corporation," remarked Hardwick as they chose a vacant table and sat down. 'The Rand Corporation couldn't get the three top cooks off the atom sub fleet," was the answer. "Two others worked for the Waldorf. Order anjrthing you like. They've damn near got it" A pretty waitress, also in coveralls and badge, took their order and left. A few people looked at Hardwick and away, he noticed, and then spoke to one another. A steady hum of eating noises, crockery and conversation provided a background. The place could have been duplicated, save for clothes, at any number of science establishments he had visited at one time or another. Hardwick asked few questions IF when the food arrived He had ordered breakfast without thinking very hard, but the food was excellent, the eggs and bacon being exactly as he had specified. Over his second cup of very good coffee he again began to question Allen, who had been equally silent while eating. "What next, Tom?" "You get to see Dr. Butler -- that is, after seeing the reason why we're here at all. That can be done on the way to her office. You'll understand a lot better what's going on if you see that first." Finishing his coffee, Hardwick rose and followed Allen out of the noise and into the seemingly endless corridor outside. They had only passed a couple of guards when Allen stopped at a blank door and gestured to Hardwick to stand beside him. Apparently there was some sort of scanning device in the featureless metal door, because it slid back at once into a grooved opening. Beyond the opening, a guard waved them forward into yet another corridor, but this time set at rit angles to the first. "How can every guard know everyone here?" asked Hardwick as he followed Allen on. "They don't," was the answer. "In each spied area, only certain people of the whole population have any business. Anyone else doesn't get in; and if he tried, a report would go in to security center at once. Very fast action follows. I go anywhere, and so does anyone with me, of course." T hey entered other doors, passed other guards, at one point used a ramp and at another, an elevator. It all seemed confusing to Hardwkk, and he realized that it would be equally confusing to anyone who tried to penetrate the place from outside and managed to get past the outer guards. "What's the level of education here if an M.A. in Biochemistry is a guard?" he asked, a bit further on.  "I have a B.A. in journalism from Connecticut," said Alien, "and I must be at the bottom of the ladder." "Then this place was all actually built by these brains, if I understand you correctly, and they're now all cheerfully doing guard and maintenance work as a result?" "I came late," was Allen's reply, "but they even had me doing some electrical wiring. The whole place was built in one and a half months, starting with the Center. The first work was done entirely in space suits, around the center dome, but we're not in space, despite what I said earlier. Anot minute and you'll see something. This is the last checkpoint." They stopped before still another featureless door. When it slid open, it revealed a metal desk and two more blue-coveralled men just inside, one seated behind the desk, one standing. They both nodded affably as Allen disgorged a short-barrelled Smith and Wesson .#, a German Fallschirmjager knife and a set of C.I.A. picklocks on to the desktop. Then he waited with arms raised as the standing man went over him in a thorough frisk. "You too, Al," hesaid. "These particular boys have orders to let only certain people, of whom you are now one, in here. But no one goes in unsearched, ever, including Dr. Butler. That's a house rule." Hardwick was searched in turn and a small pocket knife was added to the pile on the desk. "You see," continued Allen, "this is the inner circle. There are no guards from mow on, only a few monitors and technicians. Everything that needs doing from here on could be done by robots and servomechanisms in an emergency, with the rest of the place sealed off completely. This last check is one against plain and simple lunacy. I could do a little damage here with my bare hands, but not much. So I give up the arsenal and pick it up on the way out." T) y this time, they had left a shortD corridor and were now in a circular one, into which the first had led. A curve, like that of a rounded dome, made up one wall, as if the corridor in which they stood were circling a giant sphere. Near where the two had paused, a woman in a white lab coat was staring through a square glassed port in the dome wall. Her back was to the two men, but as they walked over, Hardwick was not surprised to see Dr. Butler turn and face them. "I wanted to see your reaction. General," she said, unsmiling. "I have few diversions these days, and this is one of them. Come and meet the ruler of the world." Hardwick walked to the inch-thick window and looked in and down. On the padded white floor below him, Joseph was having his morning nap. As Hardwick watched in amazement, he stirred in his sleq and a small pink thumb found its way to the cupid's-bow mouth. Still unable to comprehend what he saw, Hardwick stared down at the sleeping baby for another minute and then turned back to stare in equal amazement at the oth: man and the woman who were watching him. In their eyes he saw a seriousness which left him no room for doubt. And in the woman's expression, Hardwick sensed a terrible pain, a pain which no man could ever feel. There was a moment of silence as the three looked at each ether and then Allen grunted. "Come on back to Joanne's office with us. You've just seen Joph, the most dangerous creature mi earth. Now, you really need informatien! Your own mission, Al, is now starting, and you have a lot to learn." V E xactly five weeks later to the day -- rather the night -- Hardwick stood on the sloping deck of the United States Polaris sub Anthony Wayne and spoke quietly with a group of his fellow passgers. Around the ship, little waves lapped at the hull, and in the near distance a muffled roar proclaimed surf breaking over the outer reef of a small atoll. The warm ni air of the South Pacific flowed over the immobile submarine, and a blaze of stars in the black sky shed almest as much light as a northern moon at full. Hardwick was exchanging idle talk with a tall gray-haired navel officer when the latter was called away by a voice from the next group forward. "How much longer, Admiral? Isn't it time yet?" "They're late now. Sir," was the answer. "We expected that. Sonar and radar report them out there, snooping around. Probably a matter of face, making us wait. We have orders to stay here for two hours, unless there's a counter order from Pearl." A low call from the top of the submarine's towering mast sent the admiral hurrying over. The civilian to whom he had been speaking moved along the deck to where Hardwick was standing gazing out to sea. "Think they're coming. General?" "Mr. Secretary, I hope to God they're coming." Hardwick tried to read Defense Secretary Madden's expression by the tropic starlight, but the eyes in the pale face were simply pools of shadow. "They said they'd come," he went on. "Their ambassador in Warsaw guaranteed all the arrangements. I think they'll come. What in heU have they got to lose?" The tall figure of the admiral had returned, and he now reported to the Secretary. "The instruments say a big sub is heading away from the pack out there and moving straight in at ten knots. I think you'd better get ready." "I have my overnight bag and here's Chief Justice Reeves with his. Nothing left to do but for us to thank you for the trip. Good luck to all you gentlemen." "Good luck to you, Sir, and you, too, Mr. Chief Justice. Hope to see you soon." H ardwick continued to watch with attention when a little later, the squatter, more massive form of the Red Chinese atom sub moved alongside the Wayne. You never knew what tiny detail would come in handy in intelligence work. He had seen pictures of the new enemy vessels before but the real thing was aweinspiring, considering that the Chinese navy of fifteen years earlier had been mostly P.T. boats and wooden minesweepers. He was at the head of the gangway when the Chinese delegation appeared and he saluted them formally. The three uniformed members of the body saluted in return, albeit stiffly. The five civilians simply ignored him and walked on past to the deck of the U.S. vessel. Two officers motioned them to follow, and they all went below decks. Hardwick continued to watch the other vessel. He watched the Chief Justice and the Secretary of Defense of the United States and their two aides enter the hatch of the enemy sub, now cast off, and then the hatch close. The great ship moved off at once, heading out to sea to join the invisible armada which had accompanied it. When it had vanished from sight, he went below to meet the newly arrived passengers. TTiey were standing about in the special lounge which had been fitted out for them, faces immobile, not even talking, when he entered. He closed the hatch behind him and IF moved to the center of the cabin, vhiQ they all turned to stare at him. "Good evening, Gentlemen," he said, speaking in impeccable Mandarin. "I am Brigadier General Hardwick of the American army, your host for the duration of this journey, until you are returned to your compatriots. Please let me know of anything which I can do to serve you. Any questions you have will be answered to the best of my ability, barring certain matters of security, of course. May I know your names? Do you wish tea?" S ixteen dark eyes regarded him implacably. But it was obvious that someone had to speak, and the senior officer, a gaunt man who wore the gold and red rank badges of a Marshal of the Chinese People's Army on his immaculate khakis stepped a pace forward. 'Tea will be welcome. General. I am Marshal Sun Lo Jen, chief of this delegation. My .companions in the service are Generals Wu Sen Fang and Li Peng, who command respectively the Sixth and Eighth Armies of the People's Defense Force. "These other colleagues are Drs. Kai Li Po and Chang Hsien of our Central Medical Bureau and Drs. Feng Hsi Liang and Kuo Tai Min of the People's Ministry of Defense, Chemical and Bacteriolocal Division." "I am honored to meet all of you," said Hardwick politely. "Especially General Wu Sen Fang, who so closely resembles another officer. General Lo Jui Chen, the recently appointed Director of all the Combined Security Services of the Chinese Petrie's Republic." "I in turn am flattered by yeur attention," said the now unmaed head of all the Chinese intelligence and police forces. He was a powerful man with an oval face, high cheek bones and close-cropped, Mack hair who smiled politely at Hardwick. "We in turn are honored to have a Deputy Director of U.S. Army Intelligence serve as our guide," he cmitinued in very fair Engli Hardwick nodded. Point and riposte! "Here's the tea and some sandwiches," he said as the door opened to admit a parade of tray-bearing stewards. "If any of you would rather go straight to bed, I can have you shown your quarters. We'll renvous with our carrier at about eight o'clock tomorrow morning." "I think we would all like a little talk first," said Lo Jui Chen, who appeared to be quite undiscomfited by the disclosure of his identity. Although militarily ranked by the Marshal, he was a member of the Chinese Politbureau and far more important a man. Since he could not have hoped to deceive U.S. intelligence, the name change must have been for internal Chinese consumption, thought Hardwick to himself. There must still be power plays going on back home in Peking, then. "There is no point in wasting time in foolishness," continued General Lo. He had reverted to Chinese, which made Hardwick sure he wanted his associates to understand perfectly what he was saying. "Where are we going, if it is not too much to ask? "We are going, as I mentioned earlier, to meet a carrier," said Hardwick. "Why don't we all sit down for a moment, and I'll sketch the trip?" H e waited until the eight Orientals had seated themselves in a semicircle around his own chair and were sipping their tea before going on. "From the carrier we will fly to the States, board a sealed helicopter and go to an unnamed installation. In that installation, whose exact location I don't know myself, by the way, you will be shown certain things and allowed to move about wherever you wish. You will be accorded free use of laboratories and equipment to make any tests you desire. I saw, from the cases you brought along, that a great deal of testing equipment was included in your baggage. That's fine as far as we are concerned. You will be given every facility to use it. I must, however, tell you that you will be rigorously searched and so will your baggage before arriving at the site. No communications devices or electronic homers of any kind will be permitted. "You will be shown quarters at your destination which you may or may not believe to be free from bugs or observation. Anything of that nature you find you are welcome to destroy. "At the end of seven days or even longer, as pre-arranged with your government, you will be allowed to leave the way you came. You will be expected to send one uncoded signal authorizing the re-exchange of Chief Justice Reeves and Secretary Madden at this same rendezvous. Are there any other questions?" "I have so many that they would be completely pointless," replied General Lo coldly, "and I imagine my companions feel equally curious. To be frank, which you Caucasians consider a virtue, I believe neither in any of this fantastic story of a world-destroying weapon nor in even one of your assurances. I am obeying orders, however, and there is no more to be said. We would prefer to be left alone as much as possible. Perhaps we may be informed of the meal times and rest periods? Otherwise, we would wish to have as little as possible contact with your personnel, and certainly none of a social nature." "As you wish, gentlemen," said Hardwick. "I will say 'Goodnight in that case. You can reach me at any hour if you want something." He bowed and left. VI # c'hey'll be here in half an hour, JL Joanne," said Tom Allen to Dr. Butler. She merely looked at her watch and said nothing. A week had passed since a sealed helicopter had brought Hardwick and the eight Chinese by night to the landing area of Project Inside Straight, which Hardwick was now fairly sure was under a mountain, somewhere in the far West of the United States. The three, though Allen least of all, betrayed the strain of the past IF week by abrupt, staccato speech and nervous tension, try though they might to control it. Now, as they waited in the small auditorium for the Chinese to arrive for a final briefing and question period, they found it hard to sustain conversation. "Tom," said Hardwick abruptly, "can you offer any opinion on what their reaction has been? I'm supposed to be an expert on Chinese affairs, but I've never pretended that my knowledge wasn't mostly theory. I've always felt that the Defense Department people in the field were miles behind you C.I.A. types in that kind of training and in getting under the skin of an alien thinker." Allen gnawed meditatively on his unlit pipe for a second before answering. "Hard to say, pal. I haven't been eyeball to eyeball with these guys since the last Khamba uprising in Tibet, and that was quite a few years back. They certainly sent their top spooks. I'll say that, especially General Lo. He expressed great regrets that my wife had died last year, by the way, and most of the people on our own team never even knew I had one. Wise bastard!" He went on. "Well. I think they're edgy. Lord, why wouldn't they be? You both know all the daily tests we run on Joseph. They ran tiieir own, and they all checked out, just as we knew iey would. The one freak chance of a foulup would have been for him to lose his weird potential, maybe due to some obscure hormone or glandular change. I mean rit while they were here, actually testing him, and that isn't likely or possible." He snorted and waved his pipe. "They're not crazy people, so I guess they must be scared. Hell, we re scared and we live with it day in, day out." H ardwick looked over at Joanne Butler. Her expression, normally calm and impassive, was now, to his trained eye, getting a bit frayed at the edges. He felt again a quick moment of tragic empathy with this good-looking, quiet woman who had charge of so much grief and awesome power and who had carried the responsibility so well and bravelyShe sensed him looking at her and smiled briefly as she looked up, her face softening for a moment into that of a young girl. He had never known a woman who affected him this way, thought Hardwick. He had always considered himself a hopeless bachelor, a man who had found passion at rare and fleeting moments and then gone on back to his work. But now he felt a daily, almost hourly, surge of protectiveness toward Joanne and was detached enough to know what it meant. Another thought also jogged his mind before he buried it forcefully. As the top boss of Inside Straight, he had, for the past month, spent many hours in going through the massive and voluminous personnel files. There, he had encountered almost in passing a tiny bit of information, something which had set him to thinVifig hard. He had been inclined to tell Allen when the first bizarre thought had stirred in his mind, but had not done so, and now he was glad. He suppressed the unbidden thought firmly and smiled back at Joanne as warmly as he could, conscious that the strain must be as visible on his face as it was on hers. "It's ten forty-four, and they'll be here any second," said Allen. "Any last minute ideas?" "We've said it all," the woman answered. "All we can do is let AI give his little speech and wait for questions." As she spoke, a door at the far end of the auditorium opened and the Chinese delegation entered, the three military officers in front as usual. They had one Chinese-speaking companion, who had turned out, to Hardwick's surprise, to be Tableman, the chemist turned temporary gunman. It seemed that his job at his university had been that of a translator of Qiinese papers on his subject. Not content with reading knowledge, he had gone on to learn the spoken language as well. It was he who had handled the scientists in the party and had conducted tours when Hardwick and Joanne were not available. He sat down quietly in the last row of seats while the Orientals moved up and took the first row. H ardwick stood up in the center of the small stage, leaving the other two seated behind him, and addressed his audience in Mandarin. "Good morning, gentlemen. Before we conunence this final briefing, I must formally ask whether you consider your task complete? Is there anything more you wish to see, or feel you have not been shown, concommittant with your acknowledged purpose in coming here? It will be best to save time by answering now." The Chinese glanced briefly at one another, but no one said a word. Then General Lo, long since fuDy and openly accepted as the delegation's real leader, stood up, nodded abruptly and spoke before resuming his place. "We feel there is nothing we have not seen. Whether the tests are reliable under your apparatus and supervision is another matter, but we have done all we can here." Hardwick grinned, but only to himself. The grudging admission was all he could have hoped for at this point. No modern Chinese, least of all a high Communist official, could publicly admit that anything Western was not somehow suspect, even if no tangible evidence existed. Outwardly unmoved, he continued. "In that case, I will now recapitulate the whole story, keeping it as brief as possible. As you now know, the history of Joseph began eight months ago in Houston, in the state of Texas. An outwardly ordinary baby, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Lucas J. Hittle, was bom on Janua #, #. The birth was normal in every respect, save one. "As the child was bom, everyone in the operating room died. Suspecting gas, an intern watching through glass from outside the room dpnned a smoke mask from a fire prevention kit on the wall, entered the delivery room and saved the baby, who was still barely out of his mother's body. The cord was cut and knotted, and the child kept warm. IF "The mask and uniform, despite gloves, were of course not completely airtight, and the intern also died, but only after he had summoned help by phone. As fast as that help arrived, both doctors and nurses died within seconds of entering the room." H ardwick paused and studied the impassive faces before him and then went on. "The baby was not yet suspect, but an alert was broadcast and the hospital evacuated. Not, however, before many patients and staff members in adjoining corridors had also died. The hospital's excellent air circulating system probably saved the others. "Finally, fully suited and masked firemen entered the hospital and found the baby crying in the chamber of death which had introduced him to life." Hardwick still wondered about this last line, but Allen liked it, so it stayed in. mous doctor was present. He heard of what had happened and was the first to pick out e baby as a cause of the mass deaths, working on the principle of Occam's Razor, the line of least resistance. He, that is the doctor, persuaded everyone to give out no news and to handle Joseph with every precaution for the time being. "He also called Washington and reached a very high government official whom he had treated in the past. As a result of his urgency, the whole hospital area was sealed off and security measures of a drastic nature were established. The press was excluded, and the Intelligence service chiefs were called to a meeN ing in Washington." Hardwick paused and poured hinH self a glass of water from a pitcher on the table next to him. No one spoke, and after a mouthful of water, he continued. "Meanwhile, the firemen and medical staff who had cared for the baby in airtight masks and suits were now also dying, dying as they removed the suits and came into contact with a residue, however faint, of the most terrible poison ever discovered! "And those with them were dying, from mere contact with the suits! "It was possible to localize the whole menace only because the suits and masks were removed on the hospital premises or in an area close by. Chance again. If one man, still suit up, had gone back to the fire station...! None did so, luckily. #y this time, Washington wasD fully alerted and subsequent suited personnel were drenched, on orders, with an hour-long spray of almost corrosive chemicals before removing their protective clothing and helmets. They were volunteers, these brave men and women, even so, because they all expected to die. They did not, however, and a check showed that their equipment was no longer lethal. This was the beginning of our project here, the first evidence that this incredible pathogen was controllable or had any limits. "Washington now went into full operation. The newsmen and everyone else were told that a lethal gas had been released by a maniac into an air-conditioning duct. It was openly hinted that it might even be radioactive, although this was not flatly asserted. The area around the hospital was cleared for a distance of fifty blocks, and the hospital was first scientifically burned out and then razed to nothing but ash and rubble. A continuous chemical spray was maintained for a week over the ashes, every inch of them. Even so, a terrible fear gripped the few who knew the real story. Would the burning, demolition and chemical bath do the trick? Or would the smoke spread the instant killer, whatever it was? The chance had to be taken, since the alternative might be worse. "Joseph, by now definitely identified as the carrier of the lethd pathogen, w secretly, with every due precaution, rembved to a hidden site, and with him all who knew the truth of what he was. "I am the first person who knows this story ever to leave this installation, and I do not know the area I have left and to which I returned with you gentlemen. We may be under the Rockies, in Mammoth Cave or buried under an oil rig offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not important. What is important is what followed the decision to save Joseph, to hide him and to try to find out what caused his monstrous inheritance. I will now turn this meeting over to Dr. Butler, who has presided over this project from its inception. Since not all of you gentlemen speak English and Dr. Butler speaks no Chinese, I will translate. Those of you who do speak English can insure that my traiation is an accurate one." J oanne Butler got up and came over to stand beside Hardwick. He saw her swallow once, and then she began to speak, her low voice carrying clearly to the men seated below. She paused at the end of every short paragraph, and Hardwick put the words into his best Mandarin, before she re-commenced. "Gentlemen, you now know who I am. I am a biochemist who, among other things, has worked for some years for the American National Foundation of Science. I also hold a degree in psychology, which helped in my selection for this position. "I was virtually kidnapped in the middle of the night by agents of the U. S. government and taken to an interview with three of the highest officials of this country. At first, I thought they were mad when they explained what had happened and what they wanted me to do. My patriotism was not prepared for such a test. And, gentlemen, it still is not!" She waited, while Hardwick translated and then continued, her voice soft and even. "My patriotism is not, as I said, up to the test of running the scientific side of this project. But something else is, my feeling for all humanity." Hardwick expected at least a cynical smile from General Lo at this point, but to his surprise, noted nothing of the kind. Indeed, the Red security chief had leaned forward to hear better, and his face was completely serious. IF Joanne went on, after the 'translation. "When I heard the proposal that this child and his awful gift be used as the Ultimate Weapon, I was revolted to every fibre of my being, I refused the t for which I had been selected. But -- I was persuaded at least to listen further. "I was told what the leaders of my government planned. They desperately fear a third World War, a war of total annihilation using every ghastly weapon ever devised, from bacteria and gas to the cobolt Hell bombs. They felt, and feel, that such a war is perilously close. They felt humanity had one last chance, and that chance was Joseph -- whom they had christened the Deathchild. #Tt was made very clear to me," A she went on, "that there would be no conquest of any foreign country, China or any other. China would be the target for Joseph, however, if all else failed. Russia could be discounted, and even allied, since the Soviet staffs were already in secret and joint discussions with those of the West. "But China and her new arsenal of conquest, her new tributary states and her new atteiApts to rule the entire mass of eastern Asia, meant war. This was demonstrated to me in a hundred details. Whether you gentlemen here agree or disagree is not important, since I believed it and I still do. "I have been in charge of this place and all that it implies for over seven months, which I regard as seven months of torment. I have helped in and supervised the chemical tests and extractions of fluid from the baby's body and their subsequent processing. You have seen and tested the arsenal of test tubes which resulted. They are my work. You have seen the fantastic and hitherto-unheard-of safeguards used to take care of the Deathchild and also to protect him. You have been allowed to talk freely with the scientific staff of this place, to examine and pry into every detail, save for certain security measures, that exist here. You have seen the extraordinary robot mother designed to keep the baby in a happy state of mind as well as body, since we dare not tamper with anything that affects his overall well-being. And you have observed the baby and his own care and treatment." Hardwick thought he heard a very faint catch of breath when Joanne said "mother," but he could not be sure. He dismissed the idea temporarily and went on with his translating. The thought could be recovered. She continued, her voice steady: "You have seen aH the films of Houston General Hospital, the death films and those of the destruction. You have, and I stress this point for the scientists among you, been allowed to examine the test animals, and have seen that the new death does not affect them. It is reserved for humans, who brought it into the world. "You have had access to our shielded labs and have run tests of your own, utilizing a lot of equipment you brought with you. You have examined all the cunning air and waste disposal devices, the flame inIF cinerators, the filters, the chemical baffles. Is there anything you have not seen and still feel you must?" A gain there was silence, and again no one spoke. Eventually, after a look at his silent companions, General Lo shook his head. "Very well," said Joanne. "My responsibility for this group is over. I return you to General Hardwick." She walked back and sat down next to Allen again, shutting her eyes as she did so, from what seemed simple weariness. "You have heard Dr. Butler speak for, and to, the scientists," said Hardwick, resuming his conversational style. "There are a few other points to be mentioned. We have no clue to this day of Joseph's lethal mutation. No germ or bacteria, no virus, absolutely nothing, has been isolated. We remain as ignorant m at the beginning on what we are dealing with. You have seen the medical records of every member of the baby's family which we could provide, from birth to death, as far back aswe can reach. There is nothing, no hint, no lead, in any of them. All were ordinary, simple Americans, differing in no way from the norm, physically or mentally. His father, poor man, is in a well guarded mental home, suffering from shock." Hardwick's voice hardened. "But we can, by using the baby's wastes, his blood, his perspiration, dilute and render usable in a military sense the death that he carries. We have done so on volunteers, people who were inevitably soon to die anyway of disease or of natural causes. These magnificent people, all doomed to die in any case, gave the brief remainder of their lives to test Joseph's continuing power to kill. You have seen the films and records of the men and women who died, not knowing why or how, to make sure the Deathchild could still kill. Their passing, as in all other cases, was instantaneous and painless. Beyond that grace, we have nothing to give them but honor. "Two of your members selected certain of their bodies, carefully preserved by freezing, and performed dissections with every device we could give you to aid. You have their findings. This ends the discussion on the local level. I will now read a document, an official copy of which will be given to you for transmission to your own government." H is voice steady, Hardwick pulled the papers from his tunic pocket and began to read: "I, as President of the United States of America, in accordance with the powers vested in me by Congress, and in defense of not only the national security of the United States but the security of the entire human race, make upon the Government of the Chinese People's Republic the following requirements, to be listed here below by number. Any failure to abide by any and all of these requirements will be met by the seeding of the entire Chinese People's Republic with the serum of the Deathchild. Every plane, every missile and every means of utilization known to man, will be employed to this end. Three weeks will be granted from the date of exchange of personnel, and no more will be allowed for an affirmative answer. "The method of negotiation initiated by the United States, by which the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and the Secretary of Defense passed into custody of the Peoples Republic of China in exchange for the high dignitaries and scientists of that nation who will inspect the Deathchild and his facilities has, by the time of the reading of this document, been fulfilled in part. It now remains for the re-exchange to be completed and for the transmission to and the consideration by the Peoples Republic of China of these proposals. "The Requirements are herewith listed: "#) That all armed forces of the Peoples Republic of China immediately withdraw all equipment and personnel to within the borders of that country. "#) That a delegation will be sent at once to negotiate for a mutual Snd joint permanent exchange of arms control and nuclear power control personnel between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China. "#) That the Peoples Republic of China at once apply for admission to the United Nations. "#) That... vni T wo weeks had come and gone when Hardwick emerged from his daily visit to the guarded communications center. It was four o'clock in the afternoon by his watch, and a feeling of futility and depression rode him like the black dog his Irish grandmother used to talk about. There was still no answer to Washington from Peking, and time was running out. In only another five days he would have to give orders to start loading the sealed cases which were Joseph's gift to his fellow humans. The helicopters would come to the hidden field far above, and the cargo of death would depart, to begin its journey to the farscattered launching sites, airfields and submarine pens. And what would happen then, be thought? If his deepest and almost unconscious suspicions were correct, what would happen then? He strolled along the corridors toward his quarters, nodding absently to the guards as he passed them. He had nearly reached his room when he saw Joanne passing ahead of him at a cross corridor. Without even thinking, he called out to her, and she waited until he had caught up. Hardwick had not seen much of his female counterpart since the departure of the Qiinese delegation. She had totally withdrawn, staying in her quarters and having most of her mes sent in. The only time she had come out was for work, the continual and never-ceasing tests and inspections of the baby's byproducts and serology. Otherwise, she had simply stayed away from everyone, even from Tom Allen, who was her closest friend in the installation. Now, under the unvarying glow of the fluorescents, she waited almost IF passively as he approached. Her face, he saw with an inner wrench, was white and drawn, the skin taut over her high cheekbones, the eyes smudged and blurred looking, without expression. "Hey, lady, where you been?" he asked in a voice. He took her by the arm, and she followed as if without a will of her own. Inwardly, he cursed the world and its problems which had brought the two of strain and these cave-dwelling conditions. "I prescribe a stiff belt in my quarters," he said, trying to keep his voice casual. "You don't mind not being chaperoned, I hope?" H er only answer was a wan smile, but she made no resistance and allowed him almost to lead her to his room. It was as if the unending responsibility had finally drained away all her will power and left a semi-robot, capable only of routine tasks. He had barely seated her in the room's only chair and started to open his little wall refrigerator when his private phone burred, the green light indicating a closed line. He put down the ice cubes and picked it up, wondering what now. "Okay, pal," said Tom ADen. "I was just in the comm romn. They gave in. A Kttle haggling, but they gave in. A few of our reports have picked up the start of a pullout from Burma already. Congratulatkms! Say so to your friend as weD. Good luck." There was a click, and the line was dead. Hardwick put the phone down slowly, wondering, as he had in the past, where Allen got some of his information. How had he known Joanne was there? And why "Good He looked at her, staring at the wall, her face dead and gcme to outside concerns, and felt a violent Tieed to bring her back to life on a crash basis. She sipped the drink he gave her but still said nothing, like a child doing what an adult has mrdered, dutifully but uncomprehendingly. "Joanne," he said softly, standing over her. "Look at me. We've won. That was Tom on the phone. The Chinese are coming to terms. It worked. We're really going to have peace for a while." She looked up slowly and blinked. Then her tired eyes Med with tears. She put the glass on the floor and buried her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Hardwick stood over her, his own face working, and wondered, like a normal male idiot, what to do. She solved the problem for him by rising and coming into his arms so quickly that some of his highball sloshed over her back. Neither of them paid it any attention. It was half an hour before any sense returned to the room, and by this time they were both in the chair. Joanne was curled up in his lap, her arms still around his neck, her hair in total disorder, an expression of bliss on her face, which seemed to have lost years of age in mere moments. C ursing himself for what he had to do, Hardwick rose, lifted her and laid her gently on the bed. Then he stood away from her, looking down, his hands behind his back. "Honey," he said, "we have to settle something right now. I've lived with a crazy idea for a long time, and the crazier it got, the more sense it made. I have to know the answer." The smile slipped from her face; she lay back on the pillow and stared at him. "Whose child is Joseph?" asked Hardwick quietly. "And aside from not being toilet-trained, what else prevents him from adorning a living room rug in any normal home?" To his amazement, after a quick catch of breath, a very faint smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. She stretched and locked her arms behind her head in relaxation. "He's mine, Al. Had you got that far?" Hardwick exhaled a gust of air and sat down suddenly in the vacated chair. "And there's nothing wrong with him at all is there?" "Not a thing, dear." "Who else knows?" asked Hardwick. He got up and made himself a new drink, feeling curiously lightheaded. "Make me another one too, will you? No one knows the whole story but the President, Tom Allen, me -- and now you. It had to be that way. I'll have to report you, of course, unless you'd rather do it yourself." "Who's the father?" Hardwick asked thickly. He was not locdng at her and had faced the other way. "A man who had supplied the sperm bank of a small hospital in ruffled reply from behind him. "He was medically fit and' a citizen. That's all I Imow, except that Tom destroyed all his hospital records, whoever he was." "I checked on a few things while going over the personnel record files, Joanne," he said, at length. "You have a small birthmark on your left calf. It didn't register until I noticed that Joseph does too. These things frequently are hereditary. My father and brother had identical ones. No proof, but it got me to thinking. It seemed absurd, of course. It meant everything had to be a fraud, from beginning to end. Then I thought of the code name of this operation which, by 'the way, the Chinese never heard. "Inside Straight"! Who thought that up, I wondered? A desperate and unlikely gamble, using a sucker's attempt to fill a bad hand. A bad, almost hopeless hand one intrinsically worth nothing! I'm no psychologist, but that struck me as odd. Who could believe the United States, with life or death, at stake would gamble on nothing, a dud poker hand? But if it filled, as it just has, then it's a real hand! The most colossal gamble in human history!" H e drank and turned to face her. "Who thought it up?" 'Tom Allen and I. His wife, Lee, is -- was my sister. Do you want me to tell you the whole story, in order?" Her placidity was once again restored, as it had been when they first met. IF "You know very well that I do. "All right, here's what happened." Joanne and Allen had seen a lot of each other in Washington after the death of Allen's wife. They had often played complicated games for amusement, including one they had invented, which they called Superspy, In this game, each one had to present the other, who represented a major power, with a fait accompli, a means meticulously worked out, by which his or her country was absolutely compelled to surrender. The opponent, faced with this overwhelming menace, had to somehow frustrate or nullify it. From this game came the concept of the Deathchild, the lethal mutant in reverse, the one weapon to end them all. But something was missing, the actual convincer, the gimmick which really caused death. Then, exactly at the right time, a report had crossed Allen's desk, coming directly from a field agent who operated in the Virgin Islands. No one else in  Washington had seen it before Allen. It told how a young biochemist in a small, marine laboratory, working with animal proteins and alkaloids derived from corals and other forms of sea life, had discovered and isolated a terrible poison. So awful did he feel this substance to be, he had actually contacted the C.I.A. directly, not even informing his superiors at the research station where he worked. Allen had called Joanne at once and simultaneously sent a pickup order for the man and his family. "Where are they now?" interrupted Hardwick. On our Ascension Island bas under total security wraps He had always wanted to wrhe and now ho has the best private library in kis field He and his wife voluntemd, without knowing why. One nme group of unsung heroes, but his job is a lot easier than most." A llen had had the authority te go, and did go, straight to the White House. Approv came after a week, and meanwhile six C.I.A. chemists had died testing the poison, which acted in many ways much like the nerve gases, only in far smaller quantities. Further, like a number of proteins, it left absolutely no trace. The original discoverer had simply not refined it sufficiently and thus had lived. Joanne had then become pregnant under a false identity. They had felt this was the only way to insure cmnplete security, and it had been ABea's suggestion. She had asked him te be the father, and he had refused, feding it would make her task unbearalBe. The whole matter from then on had been so falsified that no one concerned had known anything but inconsequential bits of the total story. Next had come the selection of the hospital. Houston General was fairly old and a new one was badly needed. The pictures of the dead and other evidence were fakes, all concerned being of C.I.A. agents, none of whom were later associated with the project. The staff of the hospital was a harder problem, but not insoluble. Mostly they had been carefully dispersed, with only a final hard core remaining, who were put under National Security Oath. None of them were in the hospital on the day of Joseph's supposed birth The dead firemen and patients, the heroic doctors and nurses who gave their lives, were all agents, and all were pulled off the project immediately after and reassigned as far away as possible. At each level, a new team was introduced and an old one scattered to the winds. A few of the more pertinacious inquiries were dealt with by top level interviews, and the blanket of National Security was invoked. Only Allen and Joanne were in it all the way. Not even the Cabinet knew the real story, nor did the Intelligence department heads. The Secretary of Defense and the Chief Justice didn't even know the details of the cover story, a fact they were well aware of, and indeed had been instructed to tell the Chinese; T he plant installation had certainly been built with every precaution, just as if the whole thing were true. To everyone who thought he knew the actual truth, save for the President, Joanne and Allen, the precautions, guards and secrecy were vital. "I can understand that," said Hardwick. "If it wasn't believable to the last ounce, the whole atmosphere was gone. But I don't see how the stuff got moved around. Does it really kill in the atmosphere in those minute quantities?" "Al, G-gas practically does too, and diat's been around since the Second World War. But Josephine, which is what Tom and I ca the poison, dissipates almost at once. There are no traces any test can detect. It seems to be a close cousin of Ciguatera, the tropical poison that kills people after they eat certain marine fish. They may even be two aspects of the same thing." The chemical fiddling was very tricky, she went on, but not impossible. Every technical loophole they could thi of had been blocked a month before Hardwick had arrived. In a way, he was the last test. Allen had a high belief in Hardwick's intelligence and had argued that if he could be fooled, anyone could. Hardwick felt professionally pleased at the tribute, but was still puzzled. "Couldn't any of your science people have realiz that vents and hidden ducts and secret pipes in the filters were feeding this stuff in and that none of it came from the baby?" "They could, but only if the idea were given them first. ITie place was built to be believed. Workmen who had no idea of what they were doing installed all those hidden bits and pieces on the orders of engineers who had no idea why they were wanted. Then they all left. Then and only then, don't you see, did the science staff come and get the full treatment. Why shouldn't they believe it?" "Yes, I see," said Hardwick. "The belief just grew and grew, until it spread to every new person like a miasma. And I suppose you and Tom checked the mysterious machinery and the poison apparatus yourselves?" This was correct, she said. Allen was, among other things, a trained electrical engineer, and she was a competent chemist as well as a psychologist. The two could not have built the apparatus originally, but it IF was no trouble to monitor and maintain it, once installed. Any heavy or serious checking was always done during a mock evacuation or fire drill of the particular area needed. T here was a long silence while Hardwick simply sat and stared at the floor, hands clasped between his knees. Eventually he looked up and met her sympathetic gaze. "What now, Joanne? It worked. Sounds banal, but you seem to have saved the world. But what about Joseph? Who saves him? And what happens to this place? I've never had a chance to think about that aspect before, but you and Tom must have." He sighed. "What happens now? And what about your child, your little boy?" She got off the bed, came over and knelt at his side. "We stay here, dear. Joseph stays, and we stay. He's my son, and I love him desperately, fatherless, alone and thinking that a fdthy robot, padded with cloth, is his mother. But he stays. Tom stays. We all stay. The play goes on. "We can't let up. You can see that, if you think a minute. In five ten years, peace may be secure enough for us to come out and change our names. Maybe it will I don't know. "But meanwhile, the Deatbchild has to stay. He had to be believed in, hidden, guarded, cared for. Tom says the enemy will never, never stop looking for him. We may have to move, may have to rebuild this whole place somewhere else. So everyone has to believe in it, totally, religiously, especially our staff. They're giving their lives and devotion to an idea. The idea has to stay valid. It may be trite," she ended, "but we have each other now. That helps." It helped, Hardwick guessed, as he sat looking down at her, but somehow all he saw in his mind was a round-faced baby, who might have been his son. It was silly, in the face of world peace, to quibble about one atom of mortality, but he wcmdmd if he would ever be able to hold Thi Month in Galaxy by H. L Gold and E. J. Gold by Christopher Anvil by Mack Reynolds October Galaxy on sale now -- get your copy todayl IF  Short Story On the hottest planet of all, they rode its molten streams of metal in a nuclear-powered river boat! Xhe Styx, the Acheron, the Phleg thon. These are the rivers of Mercury. The Cocytus, the Lethe, the Mare Infernum, These are the seas of Mercury. They are the waters of Hell. The Charon is the sole sailor of the seas of Hell. Gaunt, scorched dull black, its paddlewheels propel it through the Beardsley-drawn shadow world of the Sunside, a stranger to the sea. Cerberus, the watchdog of Hell, spotted it as it fell, an Icarus blazing in the sky. The sensors on Cerberus screamed their warning to the reflector-plated dome of Dis. Gauntlets of oyster-white plastex coated with frost trained the detectors of Dis on it. The commander of Dis read the reports and looked at his screens in fear. The Phoebus-K engines that bore it left a trail of hydrogen derivatives glowing in the sky as the Copa de Oro dived on the Sunside. Rhadamanthus, the judge of Hell, beamed autocontrol signals into the radiation-scared sky as the unresponsive ship fell. The Copa de Oro streaked down, gaining speed. In Dis, the computers made noises like pneumatic hammers and put an answer on their screens. ES# #y N., # #V E. The commander of Dis nodded to his subordinates, who checked their maps. The Copa de Oro would come down at Point Dante, two hundred miles south of Dis. The Copa de Oro was worth everything that could be done to salvage her gaunt silver shape. She made up one-third of Earth's nuclear space fleet. She was priceless. Don Manuel Stilette Dos Muertos, the boatman of the infernal regions, donned his white suit with a row of chill-coils nesting like snakes in the back. He ran up the stairs through Dis to the docks. 'he paddlewheels clawed at the softly glowing sea. They cut through and came up, tiny viscous cltunps of lava dripping from the blades. In the dark of the buildings they resembled tiny sunsets as they fell into the sea. Dos Muertos swung the Charon south to the land where the stilettos of the sun knifed and gouged and bounced into the seas of flowing rock and lead and tin. Dos Muertos sat in his big command chair aboard the Charon and looked at the frost that covered his controls. Two nozzles in the ceiling sprayed coolant down onto the cabin. To look at Dos Muertos through his visor of ## amber revealed a pale, patrician face. Dos Muertos had an air about him that was just barely placable. Dos Muertos was a matador. The an II First Each month tf presents a new vrrHeff never before published, and his scicsncefiction story. This month's "First" is Lohr Miller, a Baton Rouge high-school etyde whose special interests ore Napoleonic history, astronomy, weaponry -- and science fiction. Miller is almost certainly the youngest contributor to science-fiction magazines (ho will be # in November), beating out f's previous "First" record holder, Bruce McAllister (#! when hb first story was published), by a full yeor and coming cl to the record set by young master (now Dr.) Kenneth SterRng several decades ago. Anybody know of a younger one? last great matador. But his jiesta brava was not in the Plaza del Ttros in Madrid, facing bulls, but on Mercury, facing the weapons of the sun. That was Dos Muertos: a matador. An enemy to the sun. Rudders turned. Jets of compressed oxygen spiurted from tanks in the hull. The Charon surged forward and southward. The winglike sides of the ship cut through the glowing waves and stood out in the red mists that belched from the craters that lined the shore. The Charon rode south. Point Dante was a jut of rock with four crown-rimmed craters on it that spewed lava. Atop the rim of one crater the Copa de Oro balanced. The Charon cut through a wave of lava borne aloft by tectonic activity and came within scope range of Point Dante. Dos Muertos brought down his periscope and swept the area. The Copa de Oro was a great trijtailed thing, and her nose was in position for a quick line from the Charon, So the matador moved in, the Charon his cape, swordless. Percolating in the crater, the lava bubbled up, and a wave cascaded (down onto the port flank of the Cdpa de Oro, The metal had already peeled, and lava whooshed through iEUid into the innards of the Number Two Phoebus-K. The Phoebus's nozzle flared out and vomited metal and flame. Dos Muertos watched, transfixed. Number Three ignited and split at the seams. Metal fell away and hit the sea. Bubbles of lava appeared. Hydrogen derivatives spurted from exposed tanks and left a trail on the crater's rim. Number Two ignited and functioned properly. Its thrust shoved the Copa from her position atop the crater info the sea. The rounded nose of the ship entered the sea a few yards in front of the Charon. That was the charge of the sun bull. Dos Muertos's veronica was quick and life-saving. He reversed the paddles and fired the forward jets as the waves the Copals fall had raised washed over the Charon's bow. Dos Muertos looked into his periscope. Lava was dripping over the lens, giving a very odd view as it thinned into transparency. He checked his controls. Aside from a twelve-degree list the Charon was functioning as well as could be expected. The Charon limped away. Dos Muertos was silent. He only looked at his upper screens of ## relux and felt hate. He knew who the enemy was. The sun was his enemy. He couldn't defeat the sun, for only time was capable of that, but he could harass it and worry it. Any victory at all was a major one; every Brienne was an Austerlitz, for the sun was an enemy to hate with all the hate Dos Muertos could dredge from his soul. The Charon carried him away to Dis, where the sun could penetrate to lash with radiation and heat to destroy the matador, a stranger to The magazine you asked fori All new stories of adult fantasy and great tales of sword-and-sorcery. Edited by Lester del Rey and featuring such fine writers as: L. Sprague de Camp  Lfn Carter Mack Reynolds John Jakes Robert Siiverberg Robert E. Howard J.R.R, Tolkien IF Remember Von Vogfs classic novel. Asylum? Here's the long-awaited sequel -- and a solution to the mystery of the Great Golactics and their serfs! I dke a sentient being -- Even Steve Hanaxdy could fit that description. He was a short, stocky man, with the look about him of someone who had lived too close to the animal stage. His eyes were perpetually narrowed, as if he were peering against a bright light. His face was broad and fleshy. But he was human. He could think and act, and he was a giver and not a taker. -- Put this sentient person in a solar system surrounded by a two nothingness beyond which, apparently, is more nothingness -- Hanardy, a product of Earths migration to the moon and to the planets of the solar system, was born on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, before the educational system caught up to the colonists. He grew up an incoherent roustabout and a spacehand on the frdghters and passenger liners that sped about among the immense amount of debris -- from moons to habitable meteorites -- that surrounded the massive Jupiter. It was a rich and ever-growing trade area, and so presently even the stolid, unimaginative Hanardy had a freighter of his own. Almost from the beginning, his most fruitful journeys were occasional trips to the meteorite where a scientist, Professor Ungam, lived with his daughter, Patricia. For years, it was a lucrative, routine voyage, without incident. -- Confront this sentient individual with this enigma of be-ing -- The last voyage had been different To begin with, he accepted a passenger -- a reporter namrf William Leigh, who ostensibly wanted to write up the lonely route for his news syndicate. But almost as soon as the freiter reached the Ungarn meteorite and entered the airlock, the meteorite was attacked by strange space vessels, whkh were capable of far greater speeds than anrthing Hanardy had ever who he seemed. It was hard to know just lAo he was. What actually happened as far as Hanardy was concerned, was quite simple: One of the defensive ' energy screens had gone down before the attack of the strange ships; and Professor Ungarn sent Hanardy to machine a new part for the screen's drive unit. While he was engaged in this, Leigh came upon him by surprise, attacked him, and tied him up. L ying there on the floor, bound hand and foot, Hanardy thought in anguish: "If I ever get loose, Fm gonna hightail it out of herel" He tested the rope that held him and groaned at its unyielding IF toughness. He lay, then, for a while, accepting the confinement of the bonds, but underneath was a great grief and a great fear. He suspected that Professor Ungarn and the professor's daughter, Patricia, were equally helpless, or they would have tried during the past hour to find out what had happened to him. He listened again, intently, holding himself still. But only the steady throbbing of the distant d#mamoa was audible. No footsteps approached ; there was no other movement. He was still listening when he felt an odd tugging inside his body. Shivering a little, Hanardy shook his head as if to dear it of mental fog -- and dimbed to his feet. He didn't notice that the cords that had bound him fell away. Out in the corridor, he paused tensdy. The place looked deserted, empty. Except for the vague vibration from the djmamos, a great dlence pressed in upon him. The place had the look and feel of being on a planet. The artifidal gravity made him somewhat lighter than on Earth, but he was used to such changes. It was hard to grasp that he was inside a meteorite, hundreds of thousands of miles from the nearest moon or inhabited planet. Being here was like being inside a big building, on an upper floor. Hanardy headed for the nearest elevator shaft. He thought: I'd better untie Miss Pat, then her pop, and then get. It was an automatic decision, to go to the girl first. Despite her sharp tongue, he admired her. He had seen her use weapons to injure, but that didn't change his feeling. He guessed that she'd be very angry -- very possibly she'd blame him for the whole mess. Presently he was knocking hesitantly on the door to Patricia's apartment. Hesitantly, because he was certain that she was not in a position to answer. When, after a reasonable pause, there was no reply, he pressed gently on the latch. The door swung open. He entered pure enchantment. 'he apartment was a physical delight. There were French-t#rpe windows that opened onto a sunlit window. The French doors were open, and the sound of birds singing wafted in through them. There were other doors leading to the inner world of the girl's home, and Hanardy, who had occasionally been in the other rooms to do minor repair work, knew that there also ever#dhing was as costly as it was here in this large room that he could see. Then he saw the girl. She was lying on the floor, half-hidden behind her favorite chair, and she was bound hand and foot with wire. Hanardy walked toward her unhappily. It was he who had brought sure just how he would argue himself out of any accusation she might make about that. His guilt showed in the way he held his thick-set body, in the shuffling of his legs, in the awkward way he knelt beside her. He began gingerly to deal with the thin wire that enlaced and interlaced her limbs. The girl was patient. She waited till he had taken all the wire off her and then, without moving from the floor, began to rub the circulation back into her wrists and ankles. She looked up at him and made her first comment: 'How did you avoid being tied up?" 'T didn't. He got me, too," said Hanardy. He spoke eagerly, anxious to be one of the injured, along with her. He already felt better. She didn't seem to be angry. "Then how did you get free?" Patricia Ungarn asked. "Why, I just -- " Hanardy began. He stopped, thunderstruck. He thought back, then over what had happened. He had been l # dng there, tied. And then... and then... What? He stood blank, scarcely daring to think. Realizing that an answer was expected, he began apologetically, "I guess he didn't tie me up so good, and I was in a kind of a hurry, figuring you were here, and so I just -- " Even as he spoke, his whole being rocked with the remembrance of how tough those ropes had been a few minutes before he freed himself. He stopped his mumbling explanation because the girl wasn't listening, wasn't even looking. She had climbed to her feet, and she was continuing to rub her hands. She was small of build and goodlooking in a bitter way. Her lips were pressed too tightly together; her eyes were slightly narrowed with a kind of permanent anxiety. Except for that, she looked like a girl in her teens, but cleverer and more sophisticated than most girls her age. Even as Hanardy, In his heavy way, was aware of the complexity of her, she faced him again. She said with an un-girl-likc decisiveness, "Tell me everything that happened to you." TTanardv was glad to let go of of the unsatisfactory recollection of his own escape. He said, "First thing I know, this guy comes in there while I'm working at the lathe. And is he strong, and is he fasti I never would've thought he had that kind of muscle and that fast way of moving. I'm pretty chunky, y'understand -- " "What then?" She was patient. IF but there was a pointedness about her question that channeled his attention back to the main line of events. "Then he ties me up, and then he goes out, and then he takes those Dreeghs from the spaceship and disappears into space." Hanardy shook his head, wonderingly. "Thats what gets me. How did he do that?" He paused, in a brown study; but he came from the distance of his thought back into the room, to realize guiltily that the girl had spoken to him twice. Sorry," he muttered. was thinking about how he did that, and it's kind of hard to get the idea." He finished, almost accusingly: 'Do you know what he does?" The girl looked at him, a startled expression on her face. Hanardy thought she was angry at his inattention and said hastily: "I didn't hear what you wanted me to do. Tell me again, huh! " She seemed unaware that he had Spoken. 'What does he do, Steve?" 'Why, he just -- " At that point, Hanardy stopped short and glanced back mentally over the glib words he had been using. It was such a fantastic dialogue, that he could feel the blood draining from his cheeks. 'HuhI" he said. "What does he do, Steve?" He saw that she was looking at him, as if she imderstood something that he didn't. It irritated him. He said unhappily: "I'd better go and untie your father before that last bunch of Dreeghs shows up." Having spoken, he stopped again, his mouth open in amazement. He thought: "I must be nuts. What am I saying?" He turned and started for the door. "Come back here!" Her voice, sharp and commanding, cut into him. Defensively, he put up between himself and her the thick barrier of stolidity which had served him for so many years in his relations with other people. He swung awkwardly around to face her again. Before he could speak, she said with intensity: "How did he do it, Steve?" The question ran up against a great stubbornness in him. He had no feeling of deliberately resisting her. But the mental fog seemed to settle down upon his being, and he said: "Do what. Miss?" "Leave?" "Who?" He felt stupid before her questions, but he felt even more stupid for having had meaningless thoughts and said meaningless things. "Leigh -- you fool! That's who." "I thought he took that spaceboat of yours that looks like an automobile." 'here was a long pause. The girl '  denched and undenched her ter hands. Now she seemed very imchildlike indeed. Hanardy, who had seen her angry before, cringed and waited for the thunder and lightning of her rage to lash out at him. Instead, the tenseness faded. She seemed suddenly thoughtful and said with unexpected gentleness: "After that, Steve? After he got out there #" She swung her arm and pointed at the aviary, where the sunlight glinted beyond the French windows. Hanardy saw birds fluttering among the trees. Their musical cries gave the scene a homey touch, as if it really were a garden. As he watched, the tree leaves stirred; and he knew that hidden fans were blowing an artificial breeze. It was like a summer afternoon, except that just beyond the glasslike w was the blackness of space. It was a cosmic night outside, disturbed here and there by an atom of matter -- a planet hidden from sight by its own relative smallness and distance from an#rthing else; a sun, a point of light and energy, quickly lost in darkness so vast that presently its light would fade, and become one grain in a misty bright cloud that obscured the blackness for a moment of universe time and occupied an inch of space, or so it seemed.    Hanardy contemplated that startling vista. He was only vaguely aware that his present intensity of interest was quite different from similar thoughts he had had in the past. On his long journeys, such ideas had slipped into and out of his mind. He recalled having had a thought about it just a few months before. He had been looking out of a porthole, and -- just for an instant -- the mystery of the empty immensity had touched him. And he'd thought: "What the heck is behind all this? How does a guy like me rate being alive?" Aloud, Hanardy muttered: 'Fd better get your father free, Miss Pat" He finished under his breath: "And then beat it out of here -- fast" n TTe turned, and this time, though she csJled after him angrily, he stumbled out into the corridor and went down to the depths of the meteorite, where the dynamos hummed and throbbed; and where, presently, he had Professor Ungarn untied. The older man was quite cheerful 'Well, Steve, we're not dead yet. I don't know why they didn't jump in on us, but the screens are still holding, I see." He was a gaunt man with deepset eyes and the unhappiest face Hanardy have ever seen. He stood, rubbing the circulation back into his arms. Strength of intellect shone IF from his face, along th the melancholy. He had defended the mbteorite in such a calm, practical way from the attacking Dreeghs that it was suddenly easy to realize that this sad-faced man was actually the hitherto unsuspected observer of the solar system for a vast galactic culture, which included at its top echelon the Great GaLeigh -- and at the bottom. Professor Ungard and his lovely daughter. The thoughts about that seeped into Hanardys fore-consdoxis. He realized that the scientist was primarily a protector. He and this station were here to prevent contact between Earth and the galaxy. Man and his earth-born civilization were still too low on the scale of development to be admitted to awareness that a gigantic galactic culture existed. Interstellar ships of other low-echelon cultures which had been admitted to the galactic union were warned away from the solar system whenever they came too dose. Acddentally, jthe hunted, lawless Dreeghs had wandered into this forbidden sector of space. In thdr lust for blood and life energy they had avidly (Concentrated here in the hope of gaining such a quantity of blood, and so great a supply of life energy, that they would be freed for endless years from their terrible search. It bad qvifJb a itip, wfiidi had enabled the Great Galactic fo capture so many of them. But now another shipload of Dree was due; and this time there was no trap. Professor Ungarn was speaking: "Did you get that part machined before Leigh tied you up?" He broke off: "WhaPs the matter, Steve?" "Huh I Nothing." Hanardy came out of a depth of wonderment: "I'd better get onto that job. ItTl take a half hour, maybe." Professor Ungam nodded and said matter-of-factly: "I'll feel better when we get that additional screen up. Theres quite a gang out there." Hanardy parted his lips to say that that particular "gang" was no longer a problem, but that another super-ship, a late arrival, would shortly appear on the scene. He stopped the words, unspoken; and now he was consciously dismayed. "What's going on?" he wondered. "Am I nuts?" Almost blank, he headed down to the machine shop. As he entered, he saw the ropes that heul boimd him, lying on the floor. He walked over in a haze of interest and stooped to pick up one of the short sections. It came apart in his fingers, breaking into a fine, powdery stuff, some of whidi drift into his nostrils. He sneezed ncsily. 'he rope, he discovered, was all  like that. He could hardly get over it. He kept picking up the pieces, just so that he could feel them crumble. When he had nothing but a scattering of dust, he stood up and started on the lathe job. He thought absently: If that next batch of Dreeghs arrives, then maybe I can start believing all this stuff." He paused and for the first time thought: Now, where did I get that name, Dreegh?" Instantly, he was trembling so violently that he had to stop work. Because -- if he could get the professor to admit that that was what they were -- Dreeghs -- then... Then what? "Why, it'd prove everything," he thought. "Just that one thing!" Already, the crumbled rope, and whatever it proved, was fading into the background of his recollection, no longer quite real, needing to be reinforced by some new miracle. As it happened, he asked the question under optimum circumstances. He handed the part to the scientist and managed to ask about the Dreeghs as the older man was turning away, Ungarn began immediately with an obvious urgency to work on the shattered section of the energy screen drive. It was from there, intent on what he was doing, and in an absentminded tone, that he answered Hanardy's question. "Yes, yes," he muttered. "Dreeghs. Vampires, in the worst sense of the word... but they look just like us." At that point he seemed to realize to whom he was talking. He stopped what he was doing and swung around and stared at Hanardy. He said at last very islowly, "Steve, don't repeat everything you hear around this place. The universe is a bigger territory than you might think but people will ridicule if you try to tell them. They will say you're crazy. Hanardy did not move. He was thinking: "He just don't realize. I gotta know. All this stuff happening -- " But the idea of not telling was easy to grasp. At Spaceport, on the moon, Europa, at the bars that he frequented, he was accepted by certain hangers-on as a boon companion. Some of the people were sharp, even educated, but they were cynical, and often witty, and were particularly scathing of serious ideas. Hanardy visualized himself telling any one of them that there was more to space than the solar system -- more life, more intelligence -- and he could imagine the ridiculing discussion that would begin. Though they usually treated him with tolerance -- it sure wouldn't do any good to tell them. IF H anardy started for the door. "I gotta know," he thought again. "And right now I'd better get on my ship and beat it before that Dreegh comes along pretending that he's Pat's future husband." And he'd better leave on the sly. The professor and the girl wouldn't like him to go away now. But defending this meteorite was their job, not his. They couldn't expect him to deal with the Dreegh who had captured, and murdered, Pat's boy friend. Hanardy stopped in the doorway, and felt blank. Huhl" he said aloud. He thought: Maybe I should tell them. They won't be able to deal with the Dreegh if they think he's somebody else. "Steve!" It was Professor Ungam. Hanardy turned. "Yeah, boss?" he began. "Finish unloading yom cargo." "Okay, boss." He walked off heavily along the corridor, tired and glad that he had been told to go and relieved that the decision to tell them could not be put into effect immediately. He thought wearily: First thing I'd better do is take a nap. Ill TTanady walked slowly up the ramp into his own ship, and so to his own cabin. Before lying down for the sleep he needed, he paused to stare at his reflection in the mirror-bright metal wall of the room. He saw a short, muscular man in greasy, gray dungarees, and a dirty yellow shirt. A stubble of beard emphasized a coarseness of features that he had seen before, but somehow never so dearly, never with such a conviction that he was a low-grade human being. Hanardy groaned and stretched out in the bunk. He thought: I sure got my eyes open all of a sudden to what kind of a lug I am. He took a quick look back along the track of years, and groaned again. It was a picture of a man who had down-graded himself as a human being, seeking escape in a lonely space job from the need to compete as an individual. "Nobody will believe a word I say," he thought. "All that other junk was only in my noo(fle -- it didn't happen out where you could prove anything. I'd better just keep my mouth shut and stop tlnnking I understand what's going on." He closed his eyes -- and looked with a clear inner vision at the universe. He opened his eyes to realize that he had slept. He realized something eke. The screens were down; a Dee in a spaceboat was coming into an airlock at the extreme lower side of the meteorite. The vampire was primarily intent on informatian, but he would destroy everyone in the meteorite! as soon as he felt it was safe. Sweating Hanardy tumbled oufi of the bunk and hurried out of his ship, and so into the meteorite. He raced along the corridor that led to the other airlock. At the entrance he met the professor and Patricia. They were smiling and excited. The scientist said, Great news, Steve. PaPs fiance has just arrived. He's here sooner than we expected; but we were getting worried that we hadn't received some communication." Hanardy muttered something, feeling immensely foolish. To have been so wrong I To have thought: DreeghI -- when the reality was -- Klugg... the girl's Icmg-awaited fianc#, Thadled Madro. But the identification of the new arrival made all his fantasies just that -- unreal vaporings, figments of an imsettled mind. T T anardy watched gloomily as Madro came down the ramp from the lifeboat. The girl's lover was a very tall, slim man in his thirties, with deep-set eyes. He had an intensity about him that was impressive, commanding -- and repellent. Instantly repellent. Hanardy realized ruefully that his reaction was ovar-critical. Hanardy coiddn't decide what had twisted this man. But he was reminded of the degraded people who were his principal buddies at aceport, on Europa. Smart, many of them were -- almost too smart. But they gave off this same emanation of an overloaded personality. Hanardy was a little surpris to realize that the girl was not rushing forward to greet the gauntbodied visitor. It was Professor Ungam, who approached the man and bowed courteously. Madro bowed in return and then stood looking at the girl who waited stiffly near Hanardy. The scientist glanced at his daughter and then smiled at the newcomer apologetically. He said, Thadled Madro, this is my daughter, Patricia -- who has suddenly become very shy." Madro bowed. Patricia inclined her head. Her father turned to her, and said, "My dear, I realize that this is an unfortunate way of marrying and giving in marriage -- to entrust yourself to a man whom neither of us has ever seen before. But let us remember his courage in coming hwe at all and resolve to offer him communication and the opportunity to show us what he is." Madro bowed to the girl. "On those terms, I greet you, Patricia." He straightened. "About communication -- I am baffled by the message I received en route. Will you please give me further information?" IF Professor XJngam old him of the Dreegh attack and of its abrupt cessation; he told him of He finished: "We have our report as to what happened from a member of the race of this system -- who was somehow infect by the mere presence of this mighty being, and who apparently acquired the ability to see at a distance, and to be aware of some of the thoughts of some people, temporarily at kast.' There was a faint smile on Ungam's tired face. Hanardy shriyded a little inside, feding that he was being made fun oL He looked nnhappily at the girl She must have told her father what he had said. Patricia Ungam caught his gaze bn her and shmgged. 'Yon said it, JSteve," die stated matter-of-factly. 'Why not tell us everything you fdt?" The newcomer stared somberly and intently at Hanardy; so intently that it was almost as if he also were reading minds. He turnied dowly to the girL Can you give me a swift summary?" he asked. 'If there's action to be taken, I'd like to have some basis for it." There was a hard note in his voice that chilled Hanardy, who had been thinking for many minutes over and over: They dorit really know him I They donH know him... He had a mental picture of the real Madro's ship being intercepted, Madro captured and drained of information and then murdered by the vampire method. The rest was skillful makeup, good enough apparently to pass the inspection of the professor and his perceptive daughter. Which meant the Dreegh had learned passwords, secret codes and enough back history to be convincing. Within minutes, this creature could decide that it was safe to take action. TTanardy had no illusions, no hope. It had taken an unbounded being to defeat these mighty Dreeghs. And now, by a trick, a late arrival had achieved what his fellows enmasse had not been able to do -- he had gotten into the meteorite fortress of the galactic watcher of the solar system; and his whole manner indicated that his fears had nothing to do with cither the professor or his daughter, or Hanardy. He wanted to know what had happened. For a little while he might be forbearing, in the belief that he could learn more as an apparent ally than as a revealed enemy. We have to put him off," Hanardy thought in agony. "We have to hold back, or maybe give him what he wants." Somehow, the latter seemed preferable. He grew aware that the girl was talking. While Hanardy listened, she gave the essential picture of what he had said. It was all there, surprisingly sharp in detail. It even penetrated some of the blur that had settled over his own memory. When she had finished, Madro frowned and nodded. His slim body seemed unnaturally tense. He said, almost to himself: 'So they were almost all captured -- " He paused and, turning, looked at Hanardy. "You have the feeling there will be one more ship?" Hanardy nodded, not trusting himself to speak. "How many Dreeghs are there aboard this one ship?" Madro asked. This time there was no escaping a verbal reply. "Nine," said Hanardy. He hadn't thought about the exact number before. But he knew the figure was correct. Just for a momwit, he knew it. Madro said in an odd tone, "You get it that clearly? Then you must already know many other things as weU." His dark .eyes gazed directly into Hanardy's. The unspoken meaning that was in them seemed to be: "Then you already know who I am?" There was such a h#rpnotic quality in the other's look that Hanardy had to wage an inner fight against admitting that he knew. Madro spoke again. "Were these -- this first group of Dreeghs -- all kiUed?" "Why, I -- " Hanardy stopped, amazed. "Gee, I don't know. I don't know what happened to them. But he intended to kill them; up to a certain moment, he intend to; and then -- " "And then what, Steve?" That was Pat, her voice urging him. "I don't know. He noticed something." "Who noticed something?" asked Pat. "Leigh. You know -- him. But I don't know what he did after that." "But where could they be now?" the girl asked, bewilder. Hanardy remained blank, vaguely guilty, as if somehow he was failing her by not knowing. He grew aware that Madro was turning away. "There is apparently more to discover here," the Dreegh said quietly. "It is evident that we must re-assess our entire situation; and I might even guess that we Kluggs could through the chance perceptive stimulation of this man achieve so great a knowledge of the universe that, here and now, we might be able to take the next step of development for our kind." he comment seemed to indicate that the Dreegh was still undecided. Hanardy followed along IF behind the others. For a few desperate seconds he thought of jerking out his gun, in the hope that he might be able to fire before the Dreegh could defend himself. But already doubt was upon him. For this suspicion was just in his head. He had no proof other than the steady stream of . pictures in his mind; and that was like a madness having no relation to anything that had been said and done before his eyes. Crazy people might act on such inner pictures, but not stolid, unimaginative Steve Hanardy. "Gotta keep my feet on the ground!" Hanardy muttered to hiimself. Ahead, Professor Ungam said in a conversational voice: "IVe got to give you credit, Thadled. You have already said something that has shocked Pat and myself. You have used the hateful word "Klugg" just as if it doesn't bother you." "It's just a word," said Madro. And that was all that was said while they walked. They came to the power room. The girl sank into a chair, while her father and the visitor walked over to the power control board. "The screens are working beautifully," said Professor Ungarn with satisfaction. "I just opened them for the few seconds it took for you to get through them. We've got time to decide what to do, in case this last Dreegh ship attacks us." Madro walked over near the girl, and settled into a chair. He addressed Professor Ungarn, "What you said a moment ago, about the word and the identification of Klugg -- you're right. It doesn't bother me." The scientist said grimly, "Aren't you fooling yourself a little? Of all the races that know of the galactic civilization, we're the lowest on the scale. We do the hard work. We're like the day laborers on planets such as Earth. Why, when Pat found out, she nearly went mad with self-negation. Galactic morons!" He shuddered. Madro laughed in a relaxed way; and Hanardy had to admire the easiness of him. If Madro was a Dreegh, then for all Madro knew this, also, was a trap set by the Great Galactic; and yet he seemed unworried. If, on the other hand, he was actually a Klu, then somehow he had made inferiority right within himsdf. "I could use some of that," Hanardy thought gloomily. "If these guys are galactic morons, what does that make me?" Madro was speaking: "We're what we are," he said simply. "It's not really a matter of too much difference in intelligence. It's an energy difference. There's a way here, somewhere, of utilizing energy in a very superior fashion. But you've got to have the energy, and you've got to get it from somewhere. That's what makes the case of this fellow Leigh interesting. If we could backtrack on what he did here, we might really get at the heart of a lot of things." Patricia and her father said nothing. But there eyes glistened, as they waited for the man to continue. Madro turned to Hanardy. 'That question she asked you before -- " he indicated the girl -- "when you first untied her. How did he leave the solar system after capturing those -- Dreeghs?" He hesitated the slightest bit before using the name. Hanardy said simply, "He didnH exactly leave. IPs more like... he was somewhere else. And he took them with him." He fumbled for words. "You see, things aren't the way they seem. They're " He stopped, unhappy. He realized that the two men and the girl were waiting. Hanardy waved his arms aimlessly, indicating things beyond the safeguarding of the meteorite. "All that -- that's not real." M adro turned towards his companions. "It's the concept of a universe of illusion. An old idea; but maybe we should take another look at it." Professor Ungarn murmured, "It would take complex techniques to make it work." Hanardy said straining for meaning, "You just keep putting it out there. As if you're doing it, even though you're not. That times you in." "Put what out, Steve?" It was the girl, her voice as strained as his. "The world. The universe ... the whole deal" "Oh!" Hanardy went on, "And then, for a moment, you don't put anything there. That's when you do something I don't understand." "WTiat's that?" The girls' voice almost emotionless, led him forward. "You stop everything," said Hanardy wonderingly. "You let the nothingness rush in. And then -- you become the real you... for as long as you have energy." He stared at the three people, through them, unseeing. As from a distance, Madro's voice came to him: "You see -- it's a matter of energy," the man said calmly. "Hanardy?" He came back into the room, mentally as well as physically. "Yeah?" "Where did he get his energy?" Madro asked. "Uh," said Hanardy, "he got most of it out where it was stored -- a kind of dark room." It was a new thought; a picture came with it of how the energy bad been put there by somebody else, not by Leigh. Before Hanardy could speak another word. Madro was over there beside him. "Show us! " he said, and his voice was like a fire, burning a path of action, demanding counter-action. Hanardy led the way, his heavy body trembling. He had the feeling that he had made an admission that spelled victory for the Dreegh. But there was no turning back. If this creature was a Dreegh, then resistance was useless. He knew that intuitively. "If I could only be sure," Hanardy thought miserably. And the stupid thing was that he was sure. As sure, it seemed to him, as he could ever be. But he wasnt sure enough even to make the attempt to save his own life. As things stood, he'd have to go through with this farce until the Dreegh -- satisfied that all was well -- destroyed them all in his own good time. IV t was twenty minutes later... After they had found the little black room to be merely a drab closet where the professor had always kept certain tools, but otherwise empty. "Where was it stored?" Madro demanded of Hanardy. "I mean the energy that Leigh got." Hanardy pointed unhappily at the metal w inside the doset. "Are you saying the energy was in the wall?" The question once more disturbed Hanardy's sense of the reality of his own thoughts, and so he simply stood there, shaken, as Pat and Professor Ungarn pressed forward and with a portable instrument tested the wall. Madro did not join them, nor did he again look into the little room. Hanardy felt an inner tremor as the Dreegh, ignoring what the father and daughter were doing, turned and strode toward him. "Steve," he said, "I want to talk to you." He glanced back, raised his voice, "I'm going to take Hanardy for a little private questioning." "All right!" That was Pat. But neither she nor her father turned. Madro had not waited. His fingers gripped Hanardy's arm firmly at the elbow. Shrinking, Hanardy realized the other's intent. A test! To determine how vulnerable he was. To the death -- if he were that weak. Even as Hanardy had these awarenesses, Madro drew him away from the storeroom and around a corner. Hanardy kept looking back, not daring to call for help but yet hoping that the professor and his daughter would be motivated to follow. His final view of them showed them still inside the closet, and IF the professor was saying, "A series of tests on this wall diould -- " Hanardy wondered what they would think when they found him gone -- and dead. Madro drew Hanardy along the side corridor and into a room. He closed the ' door, and they were alone. Hanardy still not resisting. Madro stood there for a few moments, tall, lean, smiling. "Let's settle this once and for all," he said softly. "Myself -- against whatever ability you were endowed with." And because Hanardy had begun to have fantasies, had nurtured a tiny hope that maybe it was true, that maybe something great had rubbed off on him -- as Professor Ungarn had implied -- for a few seconds, Hanardy actually waited for that something inside him to handle this situation. 'hat was all the time he had -- seconds. The speed of Madro's attack, and the total violent intent of it, instantly defeated that waiting reaction. He was lifted effortlessly, grabbed by one foot, held like a rag doll, and incredibly was about to have his head dashed against the near wall -- when, with a primitive survival spasm of effort, Hanardy kicked with his other foot, ki(ied hard against the wrist of the hand by which Madro held him. For that moment, for that one attack, it was resistance enough. The Dreegh let him go. Hanardy fell -- the slow-motion fall of less than Earth gravity. Far too slow for the speed of Madro's second attack. In his awkward, muscle-bound way, only one of Hanardy's dragging legs actually struck the floor. The next moment he was caught again by fingers that were like granite biting into his clothes and body -- Madro obviously neither heeding nor caring which. And there was no longer any doubt in Hanardy 's mind. He had no special ability by which he might defeat the Dreegh's deadly intent. He had no inner resources. No visions. He was helpless. His hard muscles were like putty in the steely grip of a man whose strength overwhelmingly transcended his own. Hanardy ceased his writhing and yelled desperately, "For Pete's sake, why all this murder when there's only five women Dreeghs and four men left? Why don't you Dreeghs change, try once more to become normal?" As swiftly as it had started, the the violence ended. Madro let him go, stepped back and stared at him. "A message I" he said. "So that's your role." Hanardy did not immediately realize that the threat was ended. He had fallen to the floor. From that begging position he continued his appeal. "You don't have to kill me! I'll keep my mouth shut. Who'd believe me, an#np#ay?" What's normal?" The Dreegh's voice was cold and demanding. The radiation from him -- uncleanness -- was stronger. Me," said Hanardy. You!" Incredulous tone. Yeah, me." Hanardy spoke urgently. 'What ails me is that I'm a low-lifer, somehow. But I'm a normal lug. Things balance out in me -- that's the key. I take a drink, but not because I have to. It doejSn't affect me particularly. When I was in my teens once I tried taking drugs. Hell, I just fdt it didn't fit in my by. I just threw it off. That's normal. You can't do that with what yovve got." "What's normal?" Madro was cold, steady, remote. "You're sick," said Hanardy. "All that blood and life energy. It's abnormal. Not really necessary. You can be cured." Having spoken the strange words, Hanardy realized their strangeness. He blinked. "I didn't know I was going to say that," he mumbled. The Dreegh's expression was changing as he listened. Suddenly he nodded and said aloud, "I actually believe we've been given a communication from the Great Galactic. A twelfth-hour, lastchance offer." "What will you do with me?" Hanardy miunbled. "The question," came the steely reply, "is what is the best way to neutralize you? I choose this wayl" A metallic something glittered in the Dreegh's hand. From its muzzle a shimmering line of light reached toward Hanardy's head. The spaceman flinched, tried to duck, had the cringing thought that this was death and stood there expecting at the very least a terrible shock. He felt nothing. The light hit his face; and it was as if a pencil beam from a bright flashlight had briefly glared into his eyes. Then the light went, and there he stood blinking a little, but unhurt so far as he could determine. He was still standing there when the Dreegh said, "What you and I are going to do now is that you're going to come with me and show me all the places on this meteorite where there are armaments or small arms of any kind." T Tanardv walked ahead, kept glancing back; and there, each time he looked, was the long body with its grim face. The resemblance to Thadled Madro was visibly fading, as if the other had actually twisted his features into a duplication of the IF young male Elugg's face, not using makeup at and now lie was relaxing. They came to where the Ungams waited. Father and daughter said nothing at all. To Hanardy they seemed subdued; the girl was Strangely pale. He thought: "They do knowl' The overt revelation came as the four of them arrived in the main living quarters. Professor Ungarn sighed, turned and -- ignoring Hanardy -- said, "Well, Mr. Ureegh, my daughter and I are wondering why the delay in our execution?" "Hanardy #" was the reply. Having uttered the name, as if Hanardy himself we not present, the Dreegh stood for a long moment, eyes narrowed, lips ditly parted, even white teeth damped together. The result was a kind of a snarling smile. "He seems to be under your control. Is he?" That was Pat Ungarn, in a small voice. The moment she had spoken, and thus attracted the Dreeghs attention, she shrank, actually retreated a few steps, as he looked at her. Sween-Madros tense body relaxed. But his smile was as grim as ever. And still he ignored Hanardy's presence. "I gave Steve a special type of energy charge that will nullify for the time being what was done to him." Professor Ungarn laughed curtly. "Do you really believe that you can defeat this -- this being -- what you have done to Steve? After all, he's your real opponent, not Hanardy. This is a shadow battle. One of the fighters has left a puppet to strike his blows for him." Sween-Madro said in an even tone, "It's not as dangerous as it seems. Puppets are notoriously poor fighters." The professor argued, "any individual of the race known to lesser races as Great Galactics -- which was obviously not their real name -- must be presumed to have taken all such possibilities into account. What can you gain by delay?" Sween-Madro hesitated, then: "Steve mentioned a possible cure for our condition." His voice held an edge in it. There was a sudden silence. It settled over the room and seemed to permeate the four people in it. The soundless time was broken by a curt laugh from Sween-Madro. He said, "I sensed that for a few seconds I seemed -- " "Human," said Pat Ungarn. "As if you had feelings and hopes and desires like us." "Don't count on it." The Dreegh's voice was harsh. Professor Ungarn said slowly, "I suspect that you analyzed Steve has a memory of mental contact with a supreme, perhaps even an ultimate, intelligence. Now, these earth people when awake are in that peculiar, perennially confused state that makes them unaccept able for galactic citizenship. So that the very best way to defend yourself from Steve's memory is to keep him awake. I therefore deduce that the energy charge you fired at him was designed to maintain in continuous stimulation the waking center in the brain stem. 'But that is only a temporary defense. In four or five days, exhaustion in Hanardy would reach an extreme state, and something in the body would have to give. What will you have then that you don't have now?" The Dreegh seemed surprisingly ing his explanations aloud he could listen to them himself, and so judge them. He said, 'My colleagues will have arrived by then." "So then you're all in the trap," said Professor Ungarn. 'T think your safest bet would be to kill Pat and me right now. As for Steve -- " Hanardy had been listening to the interchange with a growing conviction that this melancholy old man was arguing them all into being immediately executed. "Heyl" he interrupted urgently. 'What are yon trng to do?" The scientist waved at him impatiently. "Shut up. Steve. Surely you reze that this Dreegh will kill without mercy. I'm trying to find out why he's holding off. It doesn't fit with what I consider to be good sense." He broke off, "Don't worry dare. You're safe." Hanardy felt extremely unsafe. Nevertheless, he had a long history of accepting orders from this man; so he remained dutifully silent. The Dreegh, who had listened to the brief interchange thoughtfully, said in an even tone that when his companions arrived, he, Hanardy and Pat Ungam would go to Europa. He believed Pat was needed on such a jotimey. So no one would be killed until it was over. "I'm remembering," SweenMadro continued, "what Steve said about the Great Galactic noticing something. I deduce that what he noticed had to do with Steve himself. So we'll go to Spaceport and study Steve's past behavior there. Rit now, let's disarm the entire place for my peace of mind." Clearly, it would not be for anyone rise's. F rom room to room, and along each corridor, silently the three prisoners accompanied their powerful conqueror. And presently every weapon in IF the meteorite was neutralized or disposed of. Even energy sources that might be converted were sealed off. Thus, the meteorite screens were actually de-energized and the machinery to operate them, wrecked. The Dreegh next cut off escape possibilities by dismantling several tiny space boats. The last place they went, first Hanardy, then the professor, then Pat, and finally Sween-Madro, was Hanardy's space freighter. There also, all the weapons were eliminated, and the Dreegh had Hanardy dismantle the control board. From the parts that were presently lying over the floor, the gaunt man, with unerring understanding, selected key items. With these in hand, he paused in the doorway. His baleful gaze caught Hanardy's shifting eyes. 'Stevel" he said. You'll stay right hwe." "You mean, inside my ship?" 'Yes. If you leave here for any reason. I'll kill you. Do you understand?" Hanardy glanced helplessly toward Professor Ungarn and then back at the Dreegh. He said. There's some work the professor wanted me to do." 'Professor Ungarn -- " it was the vampire's harsh voice cutting across Hanardy's uncertain protest -- "tell him how xmimportant such work is." Hanardy was briefly aware of the old man's wan smile. The scientist said wearily, 'Tat and I will be killed as soon as we have served our purpose. What he will eventually do with you, we don't know." "So you'll stay right here. You two come with me," Sween-Madro ordered the professor and his daughter. They went as silently as they had come. The airlock door clanged. Hanardy could hear the interlocking steel bolts wheeze into position. After that, no sound came. The potentially most intelligent man in the solar system was alone -- and wide awake. V Qitting, or lying down, waiting  posed no problems for Hanardy. His years alone in space had prepared him for the ordeal that now began. There was a difference. As he presently discovered when he lay down in his narrow cot, he couldn't sleep. Twenty-four earth hours ticked by. Not a thinking man, Steve Hanardy; nor a reader. The four books on board were repair manuals. He had thumbed through them a hundred times, but now he got them out and examined them again. Every page was, as he had expected, dully familiar. After a slow hour he used up their possibilities. Another #ay, and still he was de-eyed and iindeeping, but .there was a devdoping restlessness in him, and exhaustion. As a spaceman, Hanardy had received indoctrination in the dangers of sleeplessness. He knew of the mind's tendency to dream while awake, the hucinatory experiences, the normal effects of the unending strain of wakefulness. Nothing like that happened. He did not know that the sleep center in his brain was timdessly depressed and the wake center timdessly stimulated. The former could not turn on, the latter could not turn off. So between them there could be none of the usual interplay with its twilight states. But he could become more exhausted. Though he was lying down almost continuously now, he became continually more exhausted. On the fourth morning" he had the thought for the first time: this is going to drive me crazy! Such a fear had never before in his whole life passed through his mind. By late afternoon of that day, Hanardy was scared and dizzy and hopeless, in a severe dwindling spiral of decreasing sanity. What he would have done had he remained alone was not at that time brought to a test. For late on that fourth "day" Pat Ungarn came through the airlock, found him cowering in his bunk and said, "Steve, come with me. It's time we took on." TTanardy stumbled to his feet. He was actually heading after her when he remembered SweenMadro's orders to him, and he stopped. "What's the matter?" she demanded. He miunbled simply, "He told me not to leave my ship. He'll kill me if I do." The girl was instantly impatirat. "Steve, stop this nonsense." Her sharp words were like blows striking his mind. "You haven't any more to lose than we have. So come along!" And she started back throUh the airlocL Hanardy stood, stunned and shaking. In a single sentence, spoken in her pre-emptory fashion, she challenged his manhood by implication, recognized that the dumb love he fdt for her made him her dave and so re-established her absolute ascendency. Silently, tensdy, he shufflrf across the metal floor of the airlock and moments later was in the forbidden meteorite. Feding doomed. The girl led the way to what was, in effect, the engine room of the meteorite. As Steve trailed rductantly behind her. Professor Ungarn rose up from a chair and came forward, smiling his infinitdy tired smile. IF His greeting tos, Tat wants to tell you about intelligence. Do you know what yoiu: I.Q. is?" The question barely reached the outer ramparts of Hanardy's attention. Following the girl along one corridor after another, a fearful vision had been in his mind, of Sween-Mardo suddenly rounding jthe next corner and striking him dead. That vision remained, but along with it was a growing wonder: Where was the Dreegh? The professor snapped, Steve do you hear me?" Forced to look at him, Hanardy was able to remember proudly that he belonged in the SSth percentile of the human race, intelligence-wise, and that his I.Q. had been tested at #. "The tester told me that I was above average," Hanardy said in a tone of pleasure. Then, apologetic again, he added, "Of course, besfde you guys I'm nothing." TTie old man said, "On the Klugg I.Q. scale you would probably rate higher than #. We take into account more factors. Your mechanical ability and spatial rdations skill would not be tested correctly by any human I.Q. test that I have examined." He continued, "Now, Steve, I'm trying to explain this all to you in a great hurry, because some time in the next week you're going to be, in fladies, the most intelligent man in the entire solar system, and there's nothing anybody can do about it except help you use it. I want to prepare you." Hanardy, who had anxiously stationed himself so that he could keep one eye on the open door -- and who kept expecting the mighty Dreegh to walk in on the little conspiratorial group of lesser beings -- shook his head hopelessly. "You don't know what's already happened. I can be killed. Easy. I've got no defenses." He glumly described his encounter with the Dreegh and told how helpless he had been. "There I was on my knees, begging, until I just, happened to say something that made him stop. Boy, he sure didn't think I was unkillable," T)at came forward, stood in front of him, and grabbed his shoulders with both hands. "Steve," she said in an urgent voice, "above a certain point of I.Q. mind actually is over matter. A being above that intelligence level cannot be killed. Not by bullets, nor by any circumstance involving matter. Now listen: in you is a memory of such an intelligence level. In manhandling you, the Dreegh was tr # dng to see what limited stress would do. He found out. He got the message from the Great Galactic out of you. "Steve, after that he didn't dare put a bullet into you, or fire a death-level energy beam. Because that would force this memory to the surfacel" In her intense purposefulness she tried to move him with her hands. But that only made Hanardy aware of what a girlish body she had. So little body, so much imperious woman -- it startled him, for she could barely budge him, let alone shake him. She said breathlessly, "Don't you see, Steve? You're going to be king! Try to act accordingly." "Look -- " Hanardy began, stolidly. Rage flashed into her face. Her voice leaped past his interjection. "And if you don't stop all this resistance, in the final issue Vll put a bullet into your brain myself, and then you'll see." Hanardy gazed into her blue eyes, so abruptly furious. He had a sinking conviction that she would do exactly what she threatened. In alarm, he said, "For Pete's sake, what do you want me to do?" "Listen to what dad has to say I" she commanded. "And stop looking the other way. You need a highspeed education, and we haven't got much time." That last seemed  like a total understatement to Hanardy. His feeling was that he had no time at all. Awareness saved him, then. There was the room with its machinery, and the old man and his daughter; and there was lie with his mind jumping with the new fear of her threat Hanardy had a flitting picture of the three of them lost forever inside this remote meteorite that was just one tiny part of Jupiter's colossal family of small, speeding particles of matter -- a meaningless xiniverse that visibly had no morality or justice, because it included without a qualm creatures like the Dreeghs. As his skittering thought reached that dark depth, it suddenly occurred to Hanardy that Pat couldn't shoot him. She didn't have a gun. He opened his mouth to tell her of her helplessness. Then closed if again. Because an opportunity might open up for her to obtain a weapon. So the threat remained, receded in time... but not to be dismissed. Nonetheless, he grew calmer. He still felt compelled, and jittery. But he stayed there and listened, then, to a tiny summary of the iStory of human intelligence and the attempts that had been made to measure it. Tt seemed human intelligence tests were based on a curve where the average was #. Eadi test Professor Ungarn had seen revealed an uncertainty about what constituted an intelligence factor, and what did not. Was the ability to tell left from right important to intelligence? One test included it. IF Should an individual be able to solve brain twisters? Many testers considered this trait of great importance. And almost all psychologists insisted on a subtle understanding of the meaning of words and many of them. Skill at arithmetic was a universal requirement. Quick observation of a variety of geometric shapes and forms was included. Even a general knowledge of world conditions and history was a requirement in a few tests. 'Now, we Kluggs," continued the professor in his melancholy voice, "have gone a step beyond that, The words droned on through Hanardy's mind. Kluggs were theory-operating people...  theories based on primary and not secondary abilities. Another race, "higher" than the Kluggs -- called the Lennels -- operated on Certainty... a high harmonic of Authority. "Certainty, with the Lennels," said the old man, "is of course a system and not an open channel But even so it makes them as powerful as the Dreeghs." On an I.Q. curve that would include humans, Kluggs, Lennels and Dreeghs, the respective averages would be #, #, #, and #S#. The Dreeghs had an open channel on control of physical movement. "Even a Great Galactic can only move as fast as -- he cannot move faster than -- a Dreegh," Professor Ungarn commented and explained, "Such open channels are pathways in the individual to a much greater ability than his standard I.Q. permits." Musicd, mathematical, artistic, or any special physical, mental or emotional ability was an open channel that operated outside the normal human, Klugg, or even the Dreegh curve. By definition, a Great Galactic was a person whose I.Q. ciurve included only open channels.  It had been reported that the open channel curve began at about #. And, though no one among the lesser races had ever seen anything higher than # -- the Emits of the space phenomenon -- it was believed that the Great Galactic I.Q. curve ascended by types to about #. "It is impossible," said the Professor's melancholy voice, "to imagine what kind of an open channel that would be. An example of an # open channel is Pat. She can deceive. She can get away with a sleight of hand, a feint, a diversion -- " The old man stopped suddenly. His gaze flicked past Hanardy's right shoulder and fastened on something behind him that Hanardy couldn't see. VI he spaceman froze with the sudden terrified conviction # that the worst had hipened, and that the Dre Sween-Madro was behind him. But it coiddn't be, he realized. Professor Ungam was looking at the control board of the meteorite. There was no door there. Hanardy allowed himself to turn around. He saw that on the big instrument panel a viewplate had lighted, showing a scene of space. It was a familiar part of the starry heavens looking out toward interstellar space, away from the sun. Near the center of the scene a light was blinking. Even as Hanardy watched, the viewplate picture shifted slightly, centering exactly on the blinking light Behind Hanardy, there was a gasp from the girl, "Dad," she whispered, 'is it -- ?" Professor Ungarn had walked toward the viewplate, past Hanardy and so into the latter's range of vision. The old man nodded with an air of utter weariness. "Yes, I'm afraid it is, my dear. The other eight Dreeghs have arrived." He glanced hopelessly at Hanardy. 'My daughter had some kind of idea of using you against SweenMadro before they got here." Hanardy said blankly, Using wc?" The meaning of that brought him wifli a jar out of his own body exhaustion. The old man was shrugging. "Whatever the merit of hex plan, of course, now it's too late." He finished dully, "Now well learn our fate." The tableau of dejection held for seconds only. A soimd, a highpitched human voice, broke through the silence and the dark emotion that filled the room. "How far away are they?" It was the girl's voice, from behind Hanardy, strained but recognizable. "Exactly how long till they get here?" Hanardy's mind stirred from its thrall as Professor Ungarn said dully, "Less than two hours would be my guess. Notice -- " He thereupon started a technical comment to her about the speed with which the view plate had centered on the ship, impljdng -- he said -- the enormous velocity of its approach. His explanation was never completed. In the middle of it, the girl uttered a screech and then, to Hanardy's amazement, she raced past him and flung herself, arms flailing, at the old man. She kept striking at his face then, yelling the most bloodcurdling curses in a furious soprano voice. A long moment went by before Hanardy was able to make out what she was sa#dng: " -- You stupid old man! What do you mean, only two hours? Two hours is all we need, damn you! IF At that point Hanardy emerged from his surprise. Awkwardly, he jumped over her, grabbed her, pulled her away. 'Tor Pete's sakel" he cried. The girl tried to turn on him, her struggling body writhing in his grip. But he held her, uttering apologies the while. Finally, she realized that his strength was too much for her. She ceased her efforts, and with an attempt at control said grimly, "Steve, this crazy old fool who is my father has twice now accepted defeat -- when it wasn't necessary #" She broke off, addressed the old man. Her voice went up a whole octave as she said, "Show Steve what you showed me only a few minutes before I went to get him." Professor Ungam was white and haggard. "I'm sorry, my dear," he mumbled. He nodded to Hanardy. "I'm sure you can let her go now." Hanardy rdeased the girl. She stood straightening her dothes, but her eyes still flashed. "Show him, damn it," she snapped, "and make it quick." Professor Ungarn look Hanardys arm and drew him toward the control board, speaking in apologetic tones. "I failed my daughter. But the truth is I'm over three hundred years old. That's just about it for a Klugg; so I keep forgetting how yoimger people might feel." Pat -- he went on -- was a product of a late-Ufe marriage. Her mother had flatly refused to go along on his assignment as a galactic watcher. In bringing the girl with him, he had hoped to shield her from the early shock of discovering that she was a member of a servant race. But isolation had not, in fact, saved her feelings. And now, their very remoteness from the safeguarding military strength of associated lower-level races had brought a horrifying threat of death from which he had decided there was no escape. "So it didn't even occur to me to tell her -- " "Show him," the girl's voice came shrilly from the rear, "what you didn't bother to tell me." Professor Ungarn made a few control adjustments, and there appeared on the viewplate first a picture of a room and then of a bed in one corner with an almost naked man ldng on it. The bed came into full focus, filled the viewplate. Hanardy drew in his breath with a sharp hiss of disbelief. It was the Dreegh. The man who lay there, seemingly unconscious, bore almost no resemblance to the tall, vital being who had come aboard in the guise of Pat's fiance. The body on the bed was unnaturally thin; the rib cage showed. His face, where it had been full-checked, was sunken and hollow. "Tkey need other people's blood and life energy to survive, and they need it almost continuously," the old man whispered. " That's what I wanted to show you, Steve." Her tone grew scatUng, as she continued, 'My father didn't let me see that until a few minutes ago. Imagine! Here we are under sentence of death, and on the day, almost on the hour that the other Dree are due to arrive, he finally reveals it -- something he had watched developing for days." The old man shut off the scene on the viewplate and sighed. 'T'm afraid it never occurred to me that a Klugg could challenge a Dreegh. An#rway, I imagine SweenMadro originally arrived here expecting to use us as a source of blood and life force. And then when you showed all that Great Galactic programming, he changed his mind and decided to await the coming of his colleagues. So there he is -- at our mercy, Pat thinks.' Hanardy had spent his years of association with this couple deferring to them. So he waited now, patiently, for the scientist to tell him what to do about the opportunity. The old man said, with a sigh, 'Tat thinks if we me a bold attack at this stage, we can kill him." Hanardy was instantly skeptical, but he had never been able to influence this father and daughter in any way, and he was about to follow the old, withdrawing pattern, when he remembered again that there were no weapons aroimd to make any kind of attack whatsoever. He pointed out that fact and was still talking when he felt something cold touch his hand. Startled, he glanced down and back -- and saw that the rl was pushing a metal bar about one and a half feet long, at his palm. Involuntarily, still not thinking, he closed his fingers over it. As soon as he had it firmly in one chunky hand, Hanardy recognized by its feel that it was a special aluminmn alloy, hard, light, and tough. The girl spoke. "And just in case that dumb look on your face means what I think it does," she said, "here are your orders: take that bar, go where the Dreegh is and beat him to death with it." Hanardy turned slowly, not quite sure that it was he who was being addressed. "Me?" he said. And then, after a long pause, "Hey!" "And you'd better get started," said the girl, "there isn't much time." " Hey I " repeated Hanardy, blankly. VH Qlowly, the room swung back into  a kind of balance. And Hanardy grew aware that the girl was speaking again: "I'll go in through the door facIP ing the bed," she stated. "If he can awaken at all in his condition, I want to ask him some questions. I must know about the nature of super-intelligence." For a brain in as dulled state as Hanardy's, the words were confusing. He had been striving to adjust to the idea that he was the one who was supposed to go in to the Dreegh, and simultaneously he was bracing himself against what she wanted him to do. With so many thoughts already in his mind, it was hard to get the picture that this slip of a girl intended to confront the Dreegh by herself. Pat was speaking again, in an admonishing tone, You stand just inside the other door, Steve. Now listen carefully. Do your best not to attract his attention, which I hope will be on me. The information I want is for your benefit. But when I yell, 'Come!' don't dday. You come and you kill, understand?" Hanardy had had a thought of his own. A sudden stark realization. The realization was that in this deadly dangerous situation there was ultimately a solution. He could cast off in his own spacecraft! But that meant he would have to obtain the key equipment SweenMadro had taken from his ship. Obtain it, repair the control board, get away! To obtain it he'd have to go to where it was -- into the Dreegh's bedroom. At least apparently, he would have to do exactly what Pat wanted. Fear dimmed before that obvious purpose, yielded to the feeling that there was no other way. Thinking thus, Hanardy abruptly uttered agreement. "Yep," he said, "I understand." The girl had started toward the door. At the tone of his voice, she paused, turned back and gaz at him suspiciously. "Now, don't you go having any plans of your own!" She spoke accusingly. Hanardy was instantly guilty, instantly confused. "For Pete's sake," he said, "I don't like what you want to do -- going in there and waking this guy. I don't see any good in my listening to a lecture on intelligence. I'm not smart enough to imderstand it! So, my vote is if we're going in let's just kill him right off." The girl had turned away. She did not glance back as she walked out of the room. Hanardy grimaced at Professor Ungarn. Moments later he was through the door, following her, weary, hopeless, mentally shut down, but resigned. Pat heard him stumbling along behind her. Without looking around she said, "You're a weapon, Steve. I have to figure out how to fire that weapon and escape. Basically, that's all we need to do! Get away IF from the Dreeghs and hide. Understand?" He was a man stumbling along metal and rock corridors in a remote part of the solar system his normal stoKdness made worse now by an immense weariness. So he heard the words she uttered; even understood their surface meaning. It was enough awareness for him to be able to mumble, 'Yeah -- yeah!" Otherwise -- she went on when he had acknowledged -- he might go off like a firecracker, discharging whatever energy homchgalactic had endowed him with in a series of meaningless explosions aimed at nothing and accomplishing nothing. So the question was: What kind of weapon was he? "As I see it," she finished, "that information we can only hope to gain from the Dreegh. Thats why we have to talk to him." 'Yeah," mumbled Hanardy, hoarsely. "Yeah." 'hey came all too quickly to their destination. At the girPs nod Hanardy broke into an uneven lope and ran aroxmd to the far corridor. He fumbled the door open and stepped inside. At this point Pat had already been through her door for fifteen seconds. Hanardy entered upon a strange scene, indeed. On the bed, the almost naked body was stirring. The eyes opened and stared at the girl, and she said breathlessly, "That! What you just now did -- becoming aware of me. How do you do that?" From where he stood, Hanardy could not see the Dreegh's head. He was aware only that the Dreegh did not answer. "What," asked Pat Ungarn, "is the nature of the intelligence of a Great Galactic?" The Dreegh spoke. "Pat," he said, "you have no future, so why are you making this inquiry?" "I have a few days." "True," said Sween-Madro. He seemed unaware that there was a second person in the room. So be canH read minds! Hanardy exulted. For the first time he had hope. "I have a feeling," Pat was continuing, "that you're at least slightly vulnerable in your present condition. So answer my question! Or -- " She left the threat and the sentence unfinished. Again the body on the bed shifted position. Then: "All right, my dear, if it's information you want, I'll give you more than you bargained for." "What do you mean?" "There are no Great Galactics," said the Dreegh. "No such beings exist, as a race. To ask about their intelligence is -- not meaningless, but complex." Thats ridiculous!" Pat's tone was scathing. "We saw him!" She half-glanced at Hanardy for confirmation and Hanardy foimd himself nodng his head in fuU agreement with her words. Boy, he sure knew there was a great Galactic. On the bed, Sween-Madro sat up. "The Great Galactic is a sportl Just a member of some lesser race who was released by a chance stimulus so that he temporarily became a super-being. The method?" The Dreegh smiled coldly. "Every once in a while, accidentally, enough energy accumulates to make such a stimulus possible. The lucky individual, in his super-state, realized the whole situation. When the energy had been transformed by his own body and used up as far as he himself was concerned, he stored the transformed life-energy where it could eventually be used by someone else. The next person would be able to utilize the enerin its converted form. Having gone through the energy, each recipient in turn sank back to some lower state. porter, had for a few brief hours been the only Great Galactic in this area of space. By now his super-ability is gone forever. And there is no one to replsjce him. "And that, of course," said the Dreegh, "is the problem with Hanardy. To use his memory of intelligence in its full possibility, he'll need life energy in enormous quantities. Where will he get it? He won't! If we're careful, and investigate his background cautiously, we should be able to prevent Steve getting to any source, known or unknown." Hanardy had listened to the account with a developing empty feeling from the pit of his stomach. He saw that the color had drained from the girl's face. "I don't believe it," she faltered. "That's just a -- " S he got no further, because in that split instant the Dreegh was beside her. The sheer speed of his movement was amazing. Hanardy, watching, had no clear memory of the vampire actually getting off the bed. But now, belatedly, he realized what the Dreegh's movements on the bed must have been -- maneuverings, re-balancings. The creature-man had been surprised -- had been caught in a prone, helpless position, but used the talk to brace himself for attack. Hanardy was miserably aware that Pat Ungarn was equally taken by surprise. Sween-Madro's fingers snatched at her shoulder. With effortless strength, he spun her around to face him. His lank body towared above her, as he spoke. (Continued on page #) IF IF  Featuri. Such material as dreams are built on C yrus Brump knew all about meteor collisions in space; he'd read all the science-fiction stories about it forty years before. There was always a tremendous thump, a shrill whistle, and a horrendous explosion. Then the air rushed instantly into space, except where huge doors slammed shut to cut off the livable sections. But he wasn't thinking of that as he sat in the control room of the Nomad with the ship's one-man pilot-and-crew. Joe had already explained that most meteoroids -- they were only meteors when they were burning up in the atmosphere of a planet -- were tiny grains of dust. Then Brump felt a curious jerk through the floor plates. Joe grunted. " Meteoroid hit us. Must be a big one -- size of a small pea." No doors slammed shut. The plastic lining between the thin sheets of soft aluminum that made up the' hull had a fantastic surface tensioni that healed any hole instantly and held the air. There was no sound of a huge explosion, because the metal of the floor was a 'dumb" metal -- one that was dead to sound and unable to ring. Joe went back to inspect the damage, pointing to the dark spot where the meteoroid had entered. Then he swore as he saw that the housing of the generator that controlled the ion rockets was badly twisted, and that half the stores were ruined by the explosion of thd little pebble from space. He hunted around until he found a can and began squirting it over the housing. In a few minutes, the scar across it began to fade and the? housing had resumed its former shape. "Plastic memory," he told Brump. "Lots of pieties try to get back to their original shape when distorted, but this is meant to recover from almost anything. The goo just speeds it up. Could do it with heat, but my welding torch doesn't get hot enough to soften this plastic." "Then weTl be all right?" Brump asked doubtfully. Joe grimaced. "Sme. But all our food's gone -- that was what was in those stores. Oh, well, I guess well have to eat the walls." Brump stared at the panelling nailed in place between storage and engine rooms. He didn't fancy eating a diet of walls soaked in water for nearly a month. But at least they'd survive. Maybe it wouldn't be much worse than Joe's cooking, at that. 'here is nothing fantastic about the above account, except perhaps for the idea of such a small ship. There are no if elements in it, and not too many questions of when. It merely involves using slightly improved materials of t#qes already in general use today, though most of them would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. The edible walls aren't even evolved beyond what is now available. Material that can be used as building forms -- sawed, drilled and even nailed up -- exists. It is made of powdered milk, hominy grits, cornstarch flour and dried banana flakes. It can be shaped into construction boards to replace the usual building material for walls -- and since it is both light and strong, it should serve excellently in a spaceship. The plastic housing for the generator is a bit beyond what we have now, but only in degree. The days when plastics couldn't be placed in boiling water without melting are long gone. Many of the modern ones can take quite high heats, and some can withstand the blast of a blowtorch; they operate at higher temperatures than many of the common metals. Plastic memory is also common enough. Contact lenses, for instance, have to be cut on a special lathe; if they were pressed into shape with hot dies, it would be a lot simpler -- but the plastic would gradually return to its original form. (The softening goo, however, doesn't yet exist.) And self-healing substances are used inside tubeless tires to seal up holes before the air can leak out. The use of laminates -- or multiple layers cemented together -- of thin sheets of aluminum and soft plastic as a cement was proved more effective against missiles than hard steel back in World War II. When a rigid shield is penetrated, the damage is usually eat; but the softer multi-layer shield absorbs ## IF most of the energy of the blow inside itself, and is virtually foolproof against rupturing. Almost all metal is pretty ugly stuff in one way, however. It rings; and it transmits sound. Living inside a spaceship of metal would normally be something like sitting inside a ringing bell. The effect can be muffled by absorbent coatings, but they add weight and bulk. This problem was tackled and licked by adding materials to the alloy which form tiny particles that soak up the energy of the sound. The result is a metal with the strength and toughness of steel, but the deadness of soft lead. Ocience is only just beginning to  get some imderstanding of even the most basic nature of the materials on which our technology is based. This may seem natural in the case of plastics, which are almost entirely the product of this century. But men have used metals for at least six thousand years. Alloys are as old as Eg#t, and excellent steel was made during the Middle Ages -- by trial and error. Nobody knew how to design deliberately to fit some special need. It was only a hundred years ago that Dr. Henry Sorbey learned how to study metals under high enough magnification to see the way the crystals behaved. And until the invention of the electron microscope, nobody could hope to go beyond the crystalline structure down to the. molecular level where most Qf jthd secrets are to be foimd. Today, we're just on tfig verge of gaining real knowledge. What we do know would fill a dozen encyclopedias with tables and facts; and one of the reasons such an engineering encyclopedia might be necessary is that too many of those facts aren't yet reduced to a full theoretical imderstanding of the principles behind them. Some of what we know -- as well as the fascinating areas where we'rei still ignorant -- is covered in a recent book issued by Basic Books. It's entitled appropriately The New Materials and is written by David Fishlock. It isn't a book that I'd call very exciting to read -- but the information is so fascinating that I'm going back immediately to read it again from cover to cover. There are a hundred story plots in it, and material to change the background thinking of almost every imagined future I've ever read. The book even covers such things as the proper way to build a ship from ice. Poul Anderson used ice rafts to fight a war in War of the Wing Men, and he did his usual fine job of thinking it out. But sevkal years before, men actually worked out the best means for constructing real ice ships. It turned out that ice wasn't strong enough. But by adding cellulose fiber -- the " slurry" that is used to make paper -- to the water before freezing, the resulting material was more than # times as streng, just as light, and almost as cheap. Tliey even cooked up a name for it -- Pykcrete, The only trouble was that the Ikcrete had the same nasty habit of melting as pure ice, so it didnt work out well. But the experiment proved again what weVe been discovering for the past twenty years -- that composite materials made up of two dissimilar materials are often fantastically better than any single substance. For instance, pl # rwood and fiberglassplastics. But some of the materials are odd, indeed. Carbon doesn't seem to be much use as a structural material. Yet when thin fibers of carbon are put together in parallel and then bonded with almost any of the new glues, the result is one of the stiffest and strongest composite materials known Without it, the lifting motors for some of the vertical-take-off-and-landing experimental airplanes would be impossible. TTe need a lot better rocket mo  tors for our spaceships. If we are ever to have Joe's little ship capable of going from planet to planet, we'll need something at least as good as the ion drive I mentioned. That's mostly just a matter of the right material. Ions are the charged parts of atoms left after electrons are stripped away. We have a substance which can be broken down into ions and electrons -- cesium metal, heated until it becomes a gas. When this is sent through porous tungsten as a catalyst (or agent to break down the ion-electron bonds), we get a fair supply of ions. Once released, these can be driven to extremely high velocities by coils carrying an electric current. The present models aren't efficient enough. We don't know how to make our tungsten catalyst behave as well as we know it should in theory. But we're learning, and the answer must lie within the secrets just beyond what we have found to date. We haven't found Maxwell's demon yet, either; this was supposed to be an imp who sent hot molecules in one direction and cold ones in another. Effectively, it would act on heat as a modern silicon rectifier acts on electricity. Probably some such means exists for getting heat or cold as we want, if we can find a little more about how our materials handle heat conduction. Meantime, we do have something that's an almost perfect insulator in one direction and a good conductor in another. A form of carbon called pyrolytic graphite (formed by depositing carbon under an arc) transmits heat across its grain but not along it. We have plastic films that will IF conduct fresh water out of salt a one-way traffic, which may provide fresh water from the sea. Another thin film being developed by General Electric will pass oxygen and carbon dioxide but is impervious to water; eventually, menwearings suits of that may work on the sea floor and get their oxygen directly from that dissolved in the water. Even spacesuit design is being altered because of new materials. The latest idea calls for a thin elastic film that is not inflated, but hugs the skin; and it will be lightly porous, so that the body temperature can be regulated by our ancient and useful trick of perspiring. The last three inventions aren't perfected yet. We have to learn a little more about what makes ma-. terials Behave as they do so tt we can tailor new ones exactly as we want them. It took us thousands of years to learn the gross facts and another fifty to begin any deeper understanding of the nature of materials. At the rate weVe been going, it should take us another ten years to discover more about how things work than ever#dhing we thought we knew before the first Sputnik went up. Or maybe fivel Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence In science-fiction writing. Every story appearing in the magazines Galaxy and If in issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected is in tended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and If. Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines in making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month after the December issues appear. Illustrated by The Edinburgers had the only way to launch an interplanetary war. Earth knew the answer -- men to go where ships and missiles dared not! IF  Novelette I raised the book, and the knife thudded into it, penetrating the #ombatman Dom Priego, I pages so that the point stopped a  shall kill you." Sergeant scant few inches from Dorn's face. Toth shouted the words the length "You stupid Hungarian apel" he of the barracks compartment. shouted. "Do you know wt this Dom, stretched out on his bunk book cost me? Do you know how and reading a book, raised startled old it is?" eyes just as the Sergeant snapped "Do you know that you are still his arm down, hurling a gleaming alive?" the Sergeant answered, a combat knife. Trained reflexes trace of a cold smile wrinkling the corners of his cat's eyes. He stalked down the gangway, hke a predatory animal, and reached for the handle of the knife. "No you don't," Dom said, snatching the book away. "YouVe done enough damage already." He put the book flat on the bunk and worked the knife carefully out of it -- then threw it suddenly at the Sergeant's foot. Sgt Toth shifted his leg just enough so that the knife missed him and struck the plastic deck covering instead. "Temper, combatman," he said. "You shodd never lose your temper. That way you make mistakes, get killed." He bent and plucked out the shining blade and held it balanced in his fingertips. As he straightened up, there was a rustle as the other men in the barracks compartment shifted weight, ready to move, all eyes on him. He laughed. "Now you're expecting it, so it's too easy for you." He slid the knife back into his boot sheath. "You're a sadistic bowb," Dom said, smoothing down the cut in the book's cover. " Getting a great pleasure out of frightening other people." "Maybe," Sgt. Toth said, undisturbed. He sat on the bunk across the aisle. "And maybe that's what they call the right man in the right job. And it doesn't matter an)rway. I train you, keep you alert, on the jump. This keeps you alive. You should thank me for being such a good sadist." "You can't sell me with that argument, Sergeant. You're the sort of individual this man wrote about, right here in this book that you did your best to destroy..." "Not me. You put it in front of the knife. Just like I keep telling you pinkies. Save yourself. That's what counts. Use any trick. You only got one life, make it a long one." "Right in here..." "Pictures of girls?" "No, Sergeant, words. Great words by a man you never heard of, by the name of Wilde." "Sure. Plugger Wyld, fleet heav#Tweight chamiHon." "No, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. No relation to your pug -- I hope. He writes 'As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."' Sgt. Toth's eyes narrowed in thought. "He makes it sound simple. But it's not that way at all. There are other reasons for war." "Such as what...?" 'he Sergeant opened his mouth to answer, but his voice was drowned in the wave of sound from the scramble alert. The high-pitched hooting blared in every compartment of the spacer and had its instant response. Men moved. Fast. The ships crew raced to their action stations. The men who had been asleep just an instant before were still blinking awake as they ran. They ran and stood, and before the alarm was through sounding the great spaceship was ready. Not so the combatmen. Until ordered and dispatched, they were just cargo. They stood at the ready, a double row of silver-gray uniforms, down the center of the barracks compartment. Sgt. Toth was at the wall, his headset plugged into a phone extension there, listening attentively, nodding at an unheard voice. Every man's eyes were upon him as he spoke agreement, disconnected and turned slowly to face them. He savored the silent moment, then broke into the widest grin that any of them had ever seen on his normally expressionless face. 'This is it," the Sergeant said, and actually rubbed his hands together. "I can tell you now that the Edinburgers were expected and that our whole fleet is up in force. The scouts have detected them breaking out of jump space, and they should be here in about two hours. We're going out to meet them. This, you pinkie combat virgins, is it." A sound, like a low growl, rose from the assembled men, and the Sergeant's grin widened. "That's the right spirit. Show some of it to the enemy." The grin vanished as quickly as it had come. and, cold-faced as always, he called the ranks to attention. "Corporal Stores is in sick bay short. When that alert sounded we went into combat condition. I may now make temporary field appointments. I do so. Combatman Priego, one pace forward." Dom snapped to attention and stepped out of the rank. "You're now in charge of the bomb squad. Do the right job and the CO will make it permanent. Corporal Priego, one step back and wait here. The rest of you to the ready room, double time -- marchr Sgt. Toth stepped aside as the combatmen hurri from the compartment. When the last one had gone he pointed his finger sharply at Dom. "Just one word. You're as good as any man here. Better than most. You're smart. But you think too much about things that don't matter. Stop thinking and start fighting, or you'll never get back to that university. Bowb up, and if the Edinburgers don't get you I will. You come back as a corporal or you don't come back at all. Understood?" "Understood." Dorn's face was as coldly expressionless as the Sergeant's. 'T'm just as good a combatman as you are. Sergeant. I'll do my job." "Then do it -- now umpP Decause of jthe delay, Dom was the last man to be suited up. The others were already doing their pressure checks with the armorers while he was still closing his seals. He did not let it disturb him or make him try to move faster. With slow deliberation, he counted off the check list as he sealed and locked. Once all the pressure checks were in the green, Dom gave the armorers the thumbs-up okay and walked to the air lock. While the door closed behind him and the lock was pumped out, he checked all the telltales in his helmet. Oxygen, full. Power pack, full charge. Radio, one and one. Then the last of the air was gone, and the inner door opened soundlessly in the vacuum. He entered the armory. The lights here were dimmer -- and soon they would be turned off completely. Dom went to the rack with his equipment and began to buckle on the smaller items. Like all of the others on the bomb squad, his suit was lightly armored and he carried only the most essential weapons. The drillger went on his left thigh, just below his fingers, and the gropener in its holster on the outside of his right leg; this was his favorite weapon. The intelligence reports had stated that some of the Edinburgers still used fabric pressure suits so lightning prods -- usually considered obsolete -- had been issued. He iung his well to the rear, since the chance that he might need it was very slim. All of these murderous devices had been stored in the evacuated and insulated compartment for months so that their temperature approached absolute zero. They were free of lubrication and had been designed to operate at this temperature. A helmet clicked against Dorn's, and Wing spoke, his voice carried by the conducting transparent ceramic. "I'm ready for my bomb, Dom -- do you want to sling it? And congratulations. Do I have to call you Corporal now?" "Wait until we get back and it's official. I take Toth's word for absolutely nothing." He slipped the first atomic bomb from the shelf, checked the telltales to see that they were all in the green, then slid it into the rack that was an integral part of Wing's suit. "All set, now we can sling mine." 'hey had just finished when a large man in bulky combat armor came up. Dom would have known him by his size even if he on the front of his suit. "What is it. Helm?" he asked when their helmets touched. "The Sergeant. He said I should report to you, that I'm lifting a bomb on this mission." There was an angry tone behind his words. "Right. We'll fix you up with IF a back sling." The big man did not look happy, and Dom thought he knew why. "And don't worry about missing any of the fighting. There'll be enough for everyone." "I'm a combatman... "We're all combatmen. All working for one thing -- to deliver the bombs. That's your job now." Helmutz did not act convinced and stood with stolid immobility while they rigged the harness and bomb onto the back of his suit. Before they were finished, their headphones crackled and a stir went through the company of suited men as a message came over the command frequency. "Are you suited and armed? Are you ready for illumination adjustment?" "Combatmen suited and armed." That was Sgt. Toth's voice. "Bomb squad not ready," Dom said, and they hiurried to niake the last fastenings aware that the rest were waiting for them. "Bomb squad suited and armed." "Lights." II 'As the command rang out, the bulkhead lights faded out until the darkness was broken only by the dim red lights in the ceiling above. Until their eyes became adjusted, it was almost impossible to see. Dom groped his way to one of the benches, found the oxygen hose with his fingers and plugged it into the side of his helmet; this would conserve his tank oxygen during the wait. Brisk music was being played over the command circuit now as part of morale sustaining. Here in the semidarkness, suited and armed, the waiting could soon become nerve-racking. Everything was done to alleviate the pressure. The music faded, and a voice replaced it. "This is the executive officer speaking. I'm going to try and keep you in the picture as to what is happening up here. The Edinburgers are attacking in fleet strength and, soon after they were sighted, their ambassador declared that a state of war exists. He asks that Earth surrender at once or risk the consequences. Well, you all know what the answer to that one was. The Edinburgers have invaded and conquered twelve settled planets already and incorporated them into their Greater Celtic Co-prosperity Sphere. Now they're getting greedy and going for the big one -- Earth itself, the planet their ancestors left a hundred generations ago. In doing this... Just a moment, I have a battle report here... first contact with our scouts." Tlie officer stopped for a moment, then his voice picked up again. "Fleet strength, but no larger than we expected and we will be able to handle them. But there is one difference in their tactics, and the combat computer is analyzing this now. They were the ones who originated the MT invasion technique, landing a number of cargo craft on a planet, all of them loaded with matter-transmitter screens. As you know, the invading forces attack through these screens direct from their planet to the one that is to be conquered. Well, they've changed their technique now. This entire fleet is protecting a single ship, a Kriger-dass scout carrier. What this means... Hold on, here is the readout from the combat computer. Only possibility single ship landing area increase MT screenbreakthrough, that's what it says. Which means that there is a good chance that this ship may be packing a single large MT screen, bigger than anything ever built before. If this is so -- and they get the thing down to the surface -- they can fly heavy bombers right send through troop carriers, anything. If this happens the invasion will be successful." A round him, in the red-lit darkness, Dom was aware of the other suited figures who stirred silently as they heard the words. # this happens." There was a ring of authority now in the executive officer's voice. "The Edinburgers have developed the only way to launch an interplanetary invasion. We have found the way to stop it. You combatmen are the answer. They have now put all their eggs in one basket -- and you are going to take that basket to pieces. You can get through where attack ships or missiles could not. We're closing fast now, and you will be called to combat stations soon. So -- go out there and do your job. The fate of Earth rides with you." Melodramatic words, Dom thought, yet they were true. Everything, the ships, the concentration of fire power, all depended on them. The alert alarm cut through his thoughts, and he snapped to attention. "Disconnect oxygen. Fall out when your name is called and proceed to the firing room in the order called. Toth..." The names were spoken quickly, and the combatmen moved out. At the entrance to the firing room a suited man with a red-globed light checked the name on their chests against his roster to make sure they were in the correct order. Everything moved smoothly, easily, just like a drill, because the endless drills had been designed to train them for just this moment. The firing room was familiar, though they had never been there before, because their trainer had been an exact duplicate of it. The combatman ahead of Dom went to port, so he moved to starboard. The man preceding him was just climbing into a IF capstde, and Dom waited while the armorer helped him down into it and adjusted the armpit supports. Then it was his turn, and Dom slipped into the transparent plastic sheU and settled against the seat as he seized the handgrips. The armorer pulled the supports hard up into his armpits, and he nodded when they seated right. A moment later, the man was gone, and he was alone in the semi-darkness with the dim red glow shining on the top ring of the capsule that was just above his head. There was a sudden shudder, and he gripped hard, just as the capsule started forward As it moved, it tilted backwards until he was lying on his back, looking up through the metal rings that banded his plastic shell. His capsule was moved sideways, jerked to a stop, then moved again. Now the gun was visible, a half dozen capsules ahead of his, and he thought, as he always did dxnring training, how like an ancient quickfiring cannon the gun was -- a cannon that fired human beings. Every two seconds, the charging mechanism seized a capsule from one of the alternate feed belts, whipped it to the rear of the gun where it instantly vanished into the breech. Then another and another. The one ahead of Dom disappeared and he braced himself -- and the mechanism suddenly and for no apparent reason halted. 'There was a flicker of fear that something had gone wrong with the complex gun, before he realized that all of the first combatmen had been launched and that the computer was waiting a determined period of time for them to prepare the way for the bomb squad. His squad now, the men he would lead. Waiting was harder than moving as he looked at the black mouth of the breech. The computer would be ticking away the seconds now, while at the same time tracking the target and keeping the ship aimed to the correct trajectory. Once he was in the gun, the magnetic field would seize the rings that banded his capsule, and the linear accelerator of the gun would draw him up the evacuated tube that penetrated the entire length of the great ship from stern to bow. Faster and faster the magnetic fields would pull him until he left the mouth of the gun at the correct speed and on the correct trajectory to... His capsule was whipped up in a tight arc and shoved into the darkness. Even as he gripped tight on the handholds, the pressure pads came up and hit him. He could not measure the time -- he could not see and he could not breathe as the brutal acceleration pressed down on him. Hard, harder than anything he had ever experienced in training; he bad that one thought, and then he was out of the gun. In a single instant he went from acceleration to weightlessness, and he gripped hard so he would not float away from the capside. There was a puff of vapor from the unheard explosions; he felt them through his feet, and the metal rings were blown in half, and the upper portion of the capsule shattered and hurled away. Now he was alone, weightless, holding to the grips that were fastened to the rocket unit beneath his feet. He looked about for the space battle that he knew was in progress and felt a slight disappointment that there was so little to see. Something burned far off to his right, and there was a wavering in some dark object occulted them and passed on. This was a battle of computers and instruments at great (Ustances. There was very little for the unaided eye to see. The spaceships were black and swift and -- for the most part -- thousands of miles away. They were firing homing rockets and proximity shells, also just as swift and invisible. He knew that space around him was filled with signal jammers and false signal generators, but none of this was visible. Even the target vessel towards which he was rushing was invisible. For all that his limited senses could tell, he was alone in space, motionless, forgotten. Oomething shuddered against the  soles of his boots, and a jet of vapor shot out and vanished from the rocket imit. No, he was neither motionless nor forgotten. The combat computer was still tracking the target ship and had detected some minute variation from its predicted path. At the same time, the computer was following the progress of his trajectory, and it made the slight correction for this new data. Corrections must be going out at the same time to all the other cornbatmen in space, before and behind him. They were small and invisible -- doubly invisible now that the metal rings had been shed. There was no more than an eighth of a pound of metal dispersed through the plastics and ceramics of a combatman's equipment. Radar coidd never pick them out from among all the interference. They should get through. Jets blasted again, and Dom saw that the stars were turning above his head. Touchdown soon; the tiny radar in his rocket unit had detected a mass bd and had directed that He Bg turned end for end. Once this was done he knew that the combat computer would cut free and turn control over to the tiny set-down computer that was part of his radar. His rockets blasted, strong now, punching the supports up against IF him, and he looked down pas his feet at the growing dark shage that occulted the stars. With a roar, loud in the silence, his headphones burst into life. 'Went, went -- gone hungry. Went, went -- gone hungry." The silence grew again, but in it Dom no longer felt alone. The brief message had told him a lot. Firstly, it was Sergeant Toth's voice; there was no mistaking that. Secondly, the mere act of breaking radio silence showed that they had engaged the enemy and that their presence was known. The code was a simple one that would be meaningless to anyone outside their company. Translated, it said that fighting was still going on but the advance squads were holding their own. They had captured the center section of the hull -- always the best place to rendezvous since it was impossible to tell bow from stern in the darkness  -- and were holding it, awaiting the arrival of the bomb squad. The retrorockets flared hard and long, and the rocket unit crashed sharply into the black bull. Dom jumped free and rolled. Ill A s he came out of the roll, he saw a suited figure looming above him, clearly outlined by the disk of the sim despite his black nonreflective armor. The top of the helmet was smooth. Even as hei realized this, Dom was pulling the gropener from its holster. A doud of vapor sprang out, and the man vanished behind it. Dom was surprised, but he did not hesitate. Handguns, even recoilless ones like this that sent the burnt gas out to the sides, were a hazard in no-G space combat. Guns were not only difficult to aim but either had a recoil that would throw the user back out of position or the gas had to be vented sideways, when they would blind the user for vital moments. A fraction of a second was all a trained combatman needed. As the gropener swung free, Dom thumbed the jet button lightly. The device was shaped like a short sword, but it had a vibrating saw blade where one sharpened edge should be, with small jets mounted opposite it in place of the other edge. The jets drove the device forward, pulling him after it. As soon as it touched the other man's leg, he pushed the jets full on. As the vibrating ceramic blade speeded up, the force of the jets pressed it into the thin armor. In less than a second, it had cut its way through and on into the flesh of the leg inside. Dom pressed the reverse jet to pull away as vapor gushed out, condensing to ice particles instantly, and his opponent writhed, clutched at his thigh -- then went suddenly limp. Doms feet touched the hull, and the soles adhered. Ho realized that the entire action had taken place in the time it took him to straighten out from his roll and stand up... Dont think, act. Training. As soon as his feet adhered, he crouched and turned, looking about him. A heavy power ax sliced by just above his head, towing its wielder after it. Act, don't think. His new ent was on his left side, away frmn the gropener, and was already reversing the direction of his ax. A man has two hands. The drillger on his left thigh! Even as he remembered it, he had it in his hand, driH on and hilt-jet flaring. The foot-long, diamondard drill spun fiercdy -- its rotation cancefled by the counter-revolving weit in the h#t -- while the jet drove it forward. It went into the Edinburger's midriff, scarcely idowing as it fore a hole in the armor and plun inside. As his opponent folded, Dorn thtunbed the reverse jet to pu the drillger out. The power ax, stni with momentum from the last blast of its jet, tore free of the dying man's hand and vanished into space. 'here were no other enemies in  sight. Dom tilted forward on one toe so that the siuface film on the boot sole was switched from adhesive to neutral, then he stepped forward slowly. Walking like this took practice, but he had had that. Abe was a group of dark figures lying prone on the hull, and he tock the precaution of raising his haiKl to touch the horn on the top of his helmet so there would be no mistakes. This identification had been agreed upon just a few days ago and the iastic spikes glued on. The Edinburgers all had smooth-topped helmets. Dom dived forward between the scattered forms and did, face down. Before his body could rebound from the hull, he switched on his belly-sticker, and the surface film there held him flat. Secure for the moment among his own men, he thumbed the side of his helmet to change frequencies. There was now a jumble of noise through most of the frequencies, messages -- both theirs and the enemy's -- jamming, the false messages being broadcast by recorder units to cover the real exchange of information. There was scaredy any traffic on the bombHsquad frequwey, and he waited for a dear spot. His men would have heard Toth's message, so they knew where to gather. Now he could bring them to him. "Quasar, quasar, quasar," he called, then coimted carefnBy for ten seconds before he switdi on IF the blue bulb on his shoulder. He stood as he did this, let it burn for a single second, then dropped back to the hull before he could draw any fire. His men would be looking for the light and would assemble on it. One by one they began to crawl out of the darkness. He counted them as they appeared. A combatman, without the bulge of a bomb on his back, ran up and dived and slid, so that his helmet touched Dorn's. 'How many. Corporal?" Toth's voice asked. "One still missing but..." 'No buts. We move now. Set your charge and blow as soon as you have cover." He was gone before Dom could answer. But he was right. They could not afford to wait for one man and risk the entire operation. Unless they moved soon, they would be trapped and killed up here. Individual combats were still going on about the hull, but it would not be long before the Edinburgers realized these were just holding actions and that the main force of attackers was gathered in strength. The bomb squad went swiftly and skillfully to work laying the ring of shaped charges. he rear guards must have been called in, because the heavy weapons opened fire suddenly on all sides. These were ".# cdibre high-velocity recoilless machine guns. Before firing, the gunners had traversed the hull, aiming for a grazing fire that was as close to the surface as possible. The gun computer remembered this and now fired along the selected pattern, aiming automatically. This was needed because, as soon as the firing began, clouds of gas jetted out, obscuring everything. Sgt. Toth appeared out of the smoke and shouted as his helmet touched Dorn's. 'Haven't you blown it yet?" "Ready now, get back." "Make it fast. They're all down or dead now out there. But they will throw something heavy into this smoke soon, now that they have us pinpointed." The bomb squad drew back, fell flat, and Dom pressed the igniter, Flames and gas exploded high, while the hull hammered up at them. Through the smoke rushed up a solid column of air, clouding and freezing into tiny crystals as it hit the vacuum. The ship was breeched now, and they would keep it that way, blowing open the sealed compartments and bulkheads to let out the atmosphere. Dom and the Sergeant wriggled through the smoke together, to the edge of the wide, gaping hole that had been blasted in the ship's skin. "Hotside, hotside!" the Sergeant shouted, and dived through the opening. Dom pushed away through the rush of men who were foHowing the Sergeant and assembed his squad. He was still one man short. A weapons man with his machine gun on his back hurried by and leapt into the hole, with his ammunition carriers right behind him. The smoke cloud was growing because some of the guns were still firing, acting as a rear guard. It was getting hard to see the opening now. When Dom had estimated that half the men had gone through, he led his own squad forward. They pushed down into a darkened compartment, a storeroom of some kind, and saw a combatman at a hole about # yards from here," he said as soon as Dorn's helmet touched his. "We tried to the right first but there's too much resistance. Just holding them there." D om led his men in a floating run, the fastest movement possible in a nuU-G situation. The corridor was empty for the moment, dimly lit by the emrgency bulbs. Holes hack been blasted in the walls at regular intervals, to open the sealed compartments and empty them of air, as well as to destroy wiring and piping. As they passed one of the ragged-edged openings, spacesuited men erupted from it. Bom dived under the thrust of a drillger, swinging his gropener out at the same time. It caught his attacker in the midriff, just as the man's other hand came up. The Edinburger folded and died, and a sharp pain lanced throu Dorn's leg. He looked down at the nipoff that was fastened to his calf and was slowly severing it. The nipoff was an outmoded design for use against unarmored curved blades were locked around his leg, and the tiny, geared-down motor was slowly closing them. Once started, the device could not be stopped. It could be destroyed. Even as he realized this, he swung down his gropener and jammed it against the nipoff's handle. The pain intensified at the sideways pressure, and he almost blacked out. He attempted to ignore it. Vapor puffed out around the blades, and he triggered the compression ring on his thigh that sealed the leg from the rest of the suit. Then the gropener cut through the casing. There was a burst of sparks, and the motion of the closing of the blades stopped. When Dom looked up, the brief battle was over and the counterattackers were dead. The rear guard had caught up and pushed over them. Helmutz must have accounted for more than one of them himself. He held his power ax high, fingers just touching the buttons in the haft so that the jets above IF the blade spurted alternately to swing the ax to and fro. There was blood on both blades. IV D om switched on his radio; it was silent on all bands. The interior communication circuits of the ship were knocked out here, and the metal walls damped all radio signals. "Report," he said. "How many did we lose?" "You're hurt," Wing said bending over him. "Want me to pull that thing off?" "Leave it. The tips of the blades are almost touching, and you'd tear half my leg off. It's frozen in with the blood, and I can still get around. Lift me up." The leg was getting numb now, with the blood supply cut off and the air replaced by vacuum. That was all for the best. He took the roll count. "We've lost two men but we still have more than enough bombs for this job. Now let's move." Sgt. Toth himself was waiting at the next corridor, where another hole had been blasted in the deck. He looked at Dorn's leg but said nothing. "How is it going?" Dom asked. "Fair. We took some losses. We gave, them more. Engineer says we are over the main hold now, so we are going straight down, pushing out men on each level to hold. Get going." "And you?" "I'll bring down the rear guard and pull the men from each level as we pass. You see that you have a way out for us when we all get down to you." "You can count on that." Dom floated out over the hole, then gave a strong kick with his good leg against the ceiling when he was lined up. He went down smoothly, and his squad followed. They passed one deck, two, then three. The openings had been nicely aligned for a straight drop. There was a flare of light and a burst of smoke ahead as another deck was blown through. Helmutz passed Dom, going faster, having pushed off harder with both legs. He was a full deck ahead when he plunged through the next opening, and the burst of high velocity machine gun fire almost cut him in two. He folded in the middle, dead in the instant, the impact of the bullets driving him sideways and out of sight in the deck below. Dom thumbed the jets on the gropener, and it pulled him aside before he followed the combatman. "Bomb squad, disperse," he ordered. "Troops coming through." He switched to the combat frequency and looked up at the ragged column of men dropping down towards him. "The deck below had been retaken. I am at the last occupied deck." He waved his hand to indicate wh was talking, and the stream of men began to jet their weapons and move on by him. They're below me. The bullets came from this side." The combatman pushed on without a word. 'he metal flooring shook as another opening was blasted somewhere behind him. The continuous string of men moved by. A few seconds later a helmeted figure -- with a horned helmet -- appeared below and waved the allclear. The drop continued. On the bottom deck, the men were all jammed almost shoulder to shoulder, and more were arriving all the time. "Bomb squad here, give me a report," Dom radioed. A combatman vrith a napboard slung at his waist pushed back out of the crowd. "We reached the cargo hold -- it's immense -- but we're being pushed back. Just by weight of numbers. The Edinburgers are desperate. They are putting men through the MT screen in light pressure suits. Unarmored, almost imarmed. We kill them easily enough but they have pushed us out bodily. They're coming right from the invasion planet. Even when we kill them, the bodies block the way..." "You the engineer?" "Yes." "Whereabouts in the hold is the MT screen?" "It runs the length of the hold and is back against the far wall." 'Controls?" "On the left side." "Can you lead us over or around the hold so we can break in near the screen?" The engineer took a single look at charts. "Yes, around. Through the engine room. We can blast through close to the controls." "Let's go then." Dom switched to combat frequency and waved his arm over his head. "All combatmen who can see me -- this way. We're going to make a flank attack." They moved down the long corridor as fast as they could, with the combatmen ranging out ahead of the bomb squad. There were sealed pressure doors at regular intervals, but these were b#qassed by blasting through the billheads at the side. There was resistance and there were more dead as they advanced -- from both sides. Then a group of men gathered ahead, and Dom floated up to the greatly depleted force of combatmen who had forced their way this far. A corporal touched his helmet to Dorn's pointing to a great sealed door at the corridor's end. "The engine room is behind there. These walls are thick. Everyone off to one side, because we must use an octupled charge." IF They dispersed, and the bulkheads heaved and buckled when the charge exploded. Dom, looking towards the corridor, saw a sheet of flame sear by, followed by a colunm of air that turned instantly to sparkling granules of ice. The engineroom had still been pressurized. here had been no warning, and  most of the crewmen had not had their helmets sealed. They were violently and suddenly dead. The few survivors were killed quickly when they offered resistance with improvised weapons. Dom scarcely noticed this as he led his bomb squad after the engineer. That doorway is not on my charts," the engineer said, angrily, as though the spy who had stolen the information was at fault. It must have been added after construction." "Where does it go to?" Dom asked. "The MT hold, no other place is possible." Dom thought quickly. "I'm going to try and get to the MT controls without fighting. I need a volunteer to go with me. If we remove identification and wear Edinburger equipment we should be able to do it." "I'll join you," the engineer said. "No, you have a different job. I want a good combatman." "Me," a man said, pushing through the others. "Pimenov, best in my squad. Ask anybody." "Let's make this fast." The disguise was simple. With the identifying spike knocked off their helmets and enemy equipment slung about them, they would pass any casual examination. A A handful of grease obscured the names on their chests. "Stay close behind and come fast when I knock the screen out," Dom told the others, then led the combatman' through the door. There was a narrow passageway between large tanks and another door at the far end. It was made of light metal but was blocked by a press of human bodies, spacesuited men who stirred and struggled but scarcely moved. The two cornbatmen pushed harder, and a sudden movement of the mob re leased the pressure; Dom fell forward, his helmet banging into that of the nearest man. "What the devil you about?" the man said, twisting his head to look at Dom. "More of them down there,' Dom said, trying to roll his R's the way the Edinburgers did. "You're no one of us I" the man said and struggled to bring his weapon up. Dom could not risk a fight here -- yet the man had to be silenced. He was wearing a thin spacesuit. Dom could just reach the Ughtning prod, and he jerked it from its dip and jammed it against the Edinburgers side. The pair of needle-sharp spikes pierced suit and dothes and bit into his flesh, and when the hilt slammed against his bodj the circuit was dosed. The handle of the lightning prod was filled with powerful capadtors that released their stored dectridty in a single immense charge through the needles. The Edinburger writhed and died instantly. They used his body to push a way into the crowd. Dom-had just enough sensation left in his injured leg to be aware when the damped-on nippoff was twisted in his flesh by the men about them; he kept Ids thoughts from what it was doing to his leg. V nce the Edinburger soldiers were aware of the open door, they pulled it wide and fought their way through it. The combatmen would be waiting for them in the engine room. The sudden exodus relieved the pressure of the bodies for a moment, and Dom, with Pimenov struggling after him, pushed and worked his way toward the MT controls. It was like trying to move in a dream. The dark hulk of the MT screen was no more than ten yards away, yet they cotddn't seem to reach it. Soldiers sprang from the screen, pushing and crowding in. more and more, preventing any motion in that direction. The technicians stood at the controls, their helmet phones plugged into the board before them. Without gravity to push against, jammed into the crowd that floated at all levels in a fierce tangle of arms and legs, movement was almost impossible. Pimenov touched his helmet to Dorn's. 'T'm going ahead to cut a path. Stay close behind me." He broke contact before Dom could answer him and let his power ax pull him forward into the press. Then he began to chop it back and forth in a short arc, almost hacking his way through the packed bodies. Men turned on him, but he did not stop, lashing out with his gropener as they tried to fight. Dom followed. They were close to the MT controls before the combatman was buried under a crowd of stabbing, cursing Edinburgers. Pimenov had done his job, and he died doing it. Dom jetted his gropener and let it drag him forward until he slammed into the thick steel frame of the MT screen above the operators' heads. He slid the weapon along (the frame, dragging himself headfirst through the press of suited bodies. There was a relatively clear space near the controls. He drifted down into it and let his drillger slide into the operator's back. The man writhed and died IF quickly. The other operator turned and took the weapon in his stomach. His face was just before Dom as his eyes widened and he screamed soundlessly with pain and fear. Dom could not escape the dead, horrified features as he struggled to drop the atomic bomb from his carrier. The murdered man stayed, pressed close against him all the the time. Now! TTe cradled the bomb against his i--- chest and, in a single swift motion, pulled out the arming pin, twisted the fuse to five seconds, and slammed down hard on the actuator. Then he reached up and switched the MT from receive to send. The last soldiers erupted from the screen, and there was a growing gap behind them. Into this space and through the screen Dom threw the bomb. After that, he kept the switch down and tried not to think about what was happening among the men of the invasion army who were waiting before the MT screen on that distant planet. Then he had to hold this position until the combatmen arrived. He sheltered behind the operator's corpse and used his drillger against the few Edinburgers who were close enough to realize that something had gone wrong. This was easy enough to do because, although they were soldiers, they were men from the invasion regular army and knew nothing about null-G combat. Very soon after this, there was a great stir, and the closest ones were thrust aside. An angry combatman blasted through, sweeping his power ax towards Dorn's neck. Dom dodged the blow and switched his radio to combat frequency. 'Hold that! I'm Corporal Priego, bomb squad. Get in front of me and keep anyone else from making the same mistake." The man was one of those who had taken the engine room. He recognized Dom now and nodded, turning his back to him and pressing against him. More combatmen stormed up to form an iron shield around the controls. The engineer pushed through between them, and Dom helped him reset the frequency on the MT screen. After this, the battle became a slaughter and soon ended. "Sendout!" Dom radioed as soon as the setting was made, then turned the screen to transmit. He heard the words repeated over and over as the combatmen repeated the withdrawal signal so that everyone could hear it. Safety lay on the other side of the screen, now that it was tuned to Tycho Barracks on the Moon. It was the Edinburgers, living, dead and wounded who were sent through first. They were pushed back against the screen to make room for the combatmen who were streaming into the hold. The ones at the ends of the screen simply bounced against the hard surface and recoiled; the receiving screen at Tycho was far smaller than this great invasion screen. They were pushed along until they fell through, and combatmen took up positions to mark the limits of operating screen. D om was aware of someone in front of him, and he had to blink away the red film that was trying to cover his eyes. Wing," he said, finely recognizing the man. 'How many others of the bomb squad made it?" None I know of, Dom. Just me." No, don't think about the dead! Only the living counted now. All right. Leave your bomb here and get on through. One is all we really need." He tripped the release and pulled the bomb from Wing's rack before giving him a push towards the screen. Dom had the bomb clamped to the controls when Sergeant Toth slammed up beside him and touched helmets. Almost done." 'Done now," . Dom setting the fuse and pulling out the arming pin..."Then get moving. I'll take it from here." "No you don't. My job." He had to shake his head to make the haze go away but it still remained at the corners of his vision. Toth didn't argue. "What's the setting?" he asked. "Five and six. Five seconds after actuation the chemical bomb blows and knocks out the controls. One second later the atom bomb goes off." "I'll stay around I think to watch the fun." Time was acting strangely for Dom, speeding up and slowing down. Men were hurrying by, into the screen, first in a rush, then fewer and fewer. Toth was talking on the combat frequency, but Dom had switched the radio off because it hurt his head. The great chamber was empty now of all but the dead, with the automatic machine guns left firing at the entrances. One of them blew up as Toth touched helmets. "They're all through. Let's go." Dom had difficulty talking, so he nodded instead and hammered his fist down onto the actuator. Men were coming towards them, but Toth had his arms around him, and full jets on his power ax were sliding them along the surface of the screen. And through. cho Barracks hit his eyes, Dom closed them, and this time the red haze came up, over him, all the way. IF #TTow's the new leg?" Sergeant Toth asked. He slumped lazily in the chair beside the hospital bed. "I can't feel a thing. Nerve channels blocked until it grows tight to the stump." Dom put aside the book he had been reading and wondered what Toth was doing here. come around to see the wounded," the Sergeant said, answering the unasked question. 'Two more besides you. Captain told me to." 'The Captain is as big a sadist as you are. Aren't we sick enough already?" "Good joke." His expression did not change. "I'll tell the Captain. He'll like it. You going to buy out now?" "Why not? Dom wondered why the question made him angry. "I've had a combat mission, the medals, a good wound. More than enough points to get my discharge." "Stay in. You're a good combatman when you stop thinking about it. There's not many of them. Make it a career." "Le you. Sergeant? Make killing my life's work? Thank you, no. I intend to do something different, a little more constructive. Unlike you, I don't relish this whole dirty plain murder. You like it." This sudden thought sent him sitting upright in the bed. "Maybe that's it. Wars, fighting, everything. It has nothing to do any more with territory rights or aggression or masculinity. I think that you people make wars because of the excitement of it, the thrill that nothing else can equal. You really like war." Toth rose, stretched easily and turned to leave. He stopped at the door, frowning in thought. "Maybe you're right, Corporal. I don't think about it much. Maybe I do like it." His face lifted in a cold tight smile. "But don't forget -- you like it too" Dom went back to his book, resentful of the intrusion. His literature professor had sent it, along with a flattering note. He had heard about Dom on the broadcasts, and the entire school was proud, and so on. A book of poems by Milton, really good stuff. No waff or battles sound Was heard the world around. Yes, great stuff. But it hadn't been true in Milton's day and it ystill wasn't true. Did mankind really like war? They must like it or it wouldn't have lasted so long. This was an awful, criminal thought. He too? Nonsense. He fought well, but he had trained himself. It would not be true that he actually liked all of that. Dom tried to read again, but the page kept blurring before his eyes. IF  Novelette After the first two alien contacts. Earth got used to alienation. The Biggies were cute, anyhow, and they brought the most ancient of gifts. Illustrated by I  Harry's voice in my ear. I discovered my wife had waked up first and was holding the office phone over my face. It was still dark.  -- Down by the Lunar Alps. Photos just coming in." "Not those Capellan witches again?" I groaned. "Smaller. Different emission features. Get down here, Max." we'd gone to bed two hours back, the ears of earth were following a moving source which kept disappearing behind Lima, and our moonstation near Mersenius was scrambling to set up a far-side relay. Now the alien had landed, a third of a great drcle from our station. The photo courier passed us at the office door. Mersenius had sent a camera-eye over the alien ship. 'Xooks as if they're interested in those ore-piles the CapeUans left," said George. 'What's that, a derrick?" "Derrick my azimuth," I grunted, rapidly opening and closing alternate eyes to catch small differences in consecutive negatives. That's called flashing. Big photo-shops do it with a trunk-sized geewWzzus  that's about half as efficient as the trained human eye. m "That's them. It. He. He is mov I ing an arm... He is shifting hisi stance... Bipedal? Maybe, ifP that's a tail. Yes I He is moving his B tail. What did we have for thel  height of that ore-pile?" P  "Forty-one meters." Little Mrs. W Peabody had joined us, alert and  I dedicated. # "Tentative estimate, six meters  tall," I concluded. "We'll see what Langley says in the morning; they've got better comparators. And not huuman. Let me project this shadow -- if it straightened up, it would look something like a small M T#rrannosaurus, wouldn't you say?" The spy-eye gave us a close-up on its second pass, just before the  fl alien knocked it down. We saw a lizard-like creature, helmeted and harnessed with weird hardware, "  wearing an unpleasant expression on its lipless face. And blue. "Eighteen-foot blue space-going dinosaurs, that's what's up there," said Harry. "At least two of them." "Or praying mantises," said George. "Quit dreaming, kid," I told her. "The lulu is played only once in a lifetime." By this time, the main photoshop had confirmed my height guess and added that the two aliens had pulled the spy-eye in with some sort of beam and then apparently cut it open for a brief look before blowing the remains. Meanwhile the hot-lines of the world were steaming, and the United Powers halls were boiling with delegates trying to get a decision on what to tell Mersenius to do. So many electric razors were used in the UnPo lounge that they blew a fuse and killed our landUne for question became academic. The aliens took off on a fast-precessing orbit around Terra itself. So far they had been silent. Now they began to transmit, and George ascended to his idea of Heaven with an endless supply of alien gabble to chew on. TThat exactly is our shop?   Basically, an unimportant bit of C.I.A. that got left out in the big move to Langley. (I warned you this would be the inside story from the pick-and-shovel level; I couldn't know less about what the President said to the Premier.) We're officially listed as a communications and special support facility. Just a small crew of oddball linguists and blown operators put out to pasture. It was a nice restful life until we accidentally got into the first great alien contact flap three years back. The Capellans, you'll recall. George came out of that as our official Extraterrestrial Language Specialist, which hasn't done his small-man's ego any good. I am optimistically regarded as having a flare for alien psychology -- shows you what can happen to a fair photointerpreter. know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist? Anyway, she's George's aide. And my wife. Harry is our captive physicist-of-all-work since they decided we rated an RD. And Mrs. Peabody got upgraded to Chief of Archives, but she still does my income-tax forms. After the Girls from Capella left hurriedly, we all expected to coast into distinguished retirement with no further calls on our peculiar talents, if any. Now suddenly here was Another Alien merrily orbiting Terra, and our little shop was being pelted with data and demands for answers. "They appear to be sending some sort of standard contact broadcast," George reported. "Three or four IF phrases repeated, and switch to a different lguage. At least twentyeight so far. One of them resembles Capellan, but not enough to read." "I think it's like a high CapelMandarin to Cantonese. The Capellans who came here must have spoken a dialect. I'm sure I heard a formal I and you and something about speak "Could it be Do you speak our language? Or Will you speak?" The United Powers were now in hot debate as to whether and what to rly to the alien. George could scarcely be prevented from trying to pull something through his friends at the Voice; he was sweating for fear the Swedes or Chicoms would beat us to it. But we couldn't get an okay. That was the time our Joint Chiefs were so cozy with the President -- remember? -- and I think there was a struggle to keep them from testing their new antiorbital-missile missile on the aliens. It may have been the same elsewhere; the big nations had all been working up their space defense since the Capellan visit. The upshot was that nobody did anything before the alien abruptly stopped transmitting speech and went into repeated da-dits. That lasted an hour. Then two things happened right together. First, Harry got a signal from Defense RD that one of their boys had identified a digital equation having to do with fissionable elements in the da-dits. Right after that was the word from a Soviet tracker that the alien had ejected an object which was now trailing their ship. We all ducked and held our breaths. The blip stayed in orbit. Just as we started breathing again, the alien poked out a laser finger and the trailing blip went up in the prettiest fusion flare you ever saw -- a complex burst, like three shorts and a long. 'his is probably where you came in. With that flare overhead, the world media roared out of conready loose, of course, and an assortment of mega-squibs were blasting up towards the alien ship. They never connected. The alien deftly distributed three more blips in a pattern around earth, about # miles out, and took off in the direction of the Coal Sack. They had been in our system exactly thirteen hours, during which the united brains of earth had demonstrated all the initiative of a shocked opossum. "Call me anthropocentric, but they struck me as ugly customers," I brooded later. "You're supposed to be able to identify, remember?" She gave me the old sulky leer, th the new magic ingredient. "Marriage has ruined you, kid... Hey, George! Did you hear that those bombs they left are covdifferent scripts, in a nice fluorescent blue. It's your life work, old brother." "A Galactic Rosetta stone," breathed George as he sat down. "Max, you've got to keep the military from destro # ung them. The photos are not adequate." "Three time-bombs going past our ears on the hour, and you want to preserve them as a reference library? What if they're loaded with disease? Or mutation inducers? Stupid-making generators, so we won't get into space? Have you heard the newscasts? George, sober up." "They can't," he groaned. "It's priceless! The key to the Galaxy!" As it turned out, they didn't, at least not then. Somebody was either too scared, or too avid for alien technology. A US-Soviet astroteam managed to make a remote-control dock with one of the ten-foot missiles and spent a week gingerly coaxing it around to a crater on the far side of Luna. From that minute, George lived to get to the moon. To my amazement, he screamed the medicos into an acceleration and low-G clearance, and next thing we knew he was actually booked for the Mersenius shuttle trip. In spite of looking like a dissipated mouse, George was fundamentally pretty healthy. At the good-bye party he told me he felt sure he had detected Capellan script on the missile's fin. "Same as the verbal transmission -- something about  you speakJ "How about: If you can read this youWe too damn close? Good luck." II Qo that was how we came to be short of George when Alien No. # came along. (Or No. #, if you count from the Capellans.) You know most of the story here. The new boys followed the same routine as the lizards: A couple of passes over Luna, pause to inspect the orepiles, and then into orbit and start to transmit. There was a diversion when they spotted the two flying bombs. They quit transmitting and, while the world watched, they sneaked up behind one of the blips. There was no laser probe. Instead, we saw some sort of fog drift out of the newcomer's ship and envelope the blip. "They've melted it!" Harry yelled on the intercom. When the fog moved on, we could all see the blip was gone. The aliens were heading for the other. ED!" Remember? IF With the second bomb gone our new pals resume transmisaon. Til lie :nas out acting dtief linguist. "What'll I do, Max?. George won't acknowledge his orders to returnl" "You can do it, girL What's so hard about little stick figures? Read it like a comic strip." "Did you ever try saying Who are you?, or Where do you come from? in little stick figures?" she asked bitterly. But they did look humanoid and peaceful enough. One sketch they kept repeating showed a mixture of big and little figures dandng mound a maypole affair. "The little figures seem to be them, and the big ones are us," said "You hope. And this one means they want to land, right?" You'll recall we let them come down in a burnt-over wilderness area in Northern Quebec. No alohaparties like we gave the Girls from Capella. No official grandstand. Just an empty plain, a sky full of contrails, and five different brands of overkill zeroed in on that big golden ship as it settled. The air-lock opened. Everyone remembers what marched out into that empty plain -- a band of little figures about four feet high and the color of the More Expensive Spread. They seemed to be wearing jointed golden armor with fxmny fittle half-opened helmets on their heads. They were carrying what looked like cerealbox death-ray guns. Each one held his up and then gravely trooped over and dropped his weapon on a pile. Then they joined hands and began to sing. This was the world's first taste of what came to be known as the Soimd from Qygnus. It wasn't really too different from a musical saw to me, but you know how it caught on. Oh my earmuffs, did it catch onl That's right, you had teenaged kids. The thing hadn't been zingling through our office a minute before I saw La Peabody starting to twitch. TThile we absorbed the Sound,   a second band of little butterboys marched out of the ship carrying a globe on a pole. The distant trigger-fingers titened. But all they did was to set it up in the center, like the maypole in their sketches, and sing harder. Then they shutup, bowed deeply and just stood there. Waiting for someone to say Hello. It wasn't long before a reception committee crawled out of the bunkers and the second alien contact got underway. Quite a relief after the previous hoopla. This one went more like grown up. No sex. No nuclear fireworks. Just a mob of decorous little yellow squirts earnestly interested in learning our languages and customs. Their chief concern seemed U be to avoid getting poisoned by ur food. Did you know they were vegetarians? They answered everything we asked as well as they could. Their home system was quickly identified as Cygmis #. The death-ray pistols were lasers; they passed out samples. They made no more objection to electronic surveillance than a herd of Guernseysj and they let us into the ship with anything we wanted to bring. Harry was in on that. 'Same general thing as the Capdlans," he reported. "And fairly old. Ty seem to have bought it second-hand from somewhere. Two auxiliary flyers on board. No major weapons we can find aside from small small standard missiles and # that particle-fog thing. That looks to be a catalyst effect." "What makes you think they didnt build it?" "Every time we ask a technical question they drag out a manual to look up the answer. They ended by giving us the whole set to copy. I brought back the lot. Where's George?" "He won't answer. What's one language when he has hundreds? He's up there with his Rosetta stone, and I doubt he'll budge till his oxygen runs out." "Fimny thing," Harry mused. "They have this maypole thing all over the ship, in different sizes. One big room looks exactly like a chapel. I believe they're deeply religious." IF Just in time, I recalled that Harry himself was deeply relious. And of course, that was the big news about our visitors. Until the religious angle came out, the Biggies threatened to be about as newsworthy as an agronomists' convention. When the official tours got started it was quickly realized that the Sound was hymns. You remember the pictiures -- drcles of little yellow fellows setting up their maypoles at dawn, noon and sunset, wherever they happened to be, joining hands and singing and beckoning the bystanders to join in. With that Sound and their appealing appearance, they got a lot of takers, especially with the young people. TUs seemed to delight them. "You comp? You comp?" they would call. "Goodl You glike? Good?" they would ask, peering up into the human faces around them when the song was over. When people' smiled back, the Biggies woidd grab their hands and squeeze. Their hands were cool and felt fragile. "Like a child's hands in paper gloves," one woman said. C(T do think they're sweet," Mrs. Peabody confessed. "Those little brown button eyes peering out." "Reminds me of Hobbits," said "It's not armor, it's an exoskelelon," I told her. "It doesn't come off." "I know -- but listen, they're going to sing." By now, we knew that the object on top of the poles was not a globe. It was roughly egg-aped, with interior aeases. "Like a bagel," said Mrs. Peabody. "They call it something like the Pupa, or the Great Pupa," ssdd Tillie. "It represents a Cgnian wrapped up like a cocoon. See the face?" "Looks sad," said Harry. There was a note of sadness in the songs, too, sadness and exaltation, which added immensdy to the appeal. The recording companies knew a good thing when it fell on their heads, and the Sound rapidly became a menace on the radio bands. Rapa had three kids and told me he had smashed his set to stay sane. Well, you know all about this, those first weeks with the Biggies touring around and ang in front of chturches and mosques and temples, and the Unitarian minister coming out to hold joint services in the open air, and the kids wearing maypole buttons and Great Pupa buttons and all the rest. Hands Across the Galaxy. Oekoumenel What you still don't know about is S'serrrop. (We spelled it that way to indicate a hard buzzing r-r-r. The Cygnians were strong on stops and clicks, but had trouble with our nasals and semiS'serrrop came to us when the West Hemisphere Cygnian party first went through D.C. We met him at the official mass reception -- an indefinably tatty-looking Cygnian, somewhat pale in color. He was one of their many language fnt# a fast huddle. We had our chief ask for him to stay behind when the tour moved on; and for a wander we got him, after State had been practically in bed with the party for a week. The Siggies jumped at any chance to learn our languages. I guess they were surprised at the number. The thing about Sserrop was that he was different. A marginal Cygnian, if you like. We never found out why. How could you evaluate aberrant factors in an arthropod's childhood? Anyway, he gave us some new insights. The first was about Siggie emotion. Remember how they always lookfed so sort of neat and merry? Well, S'serrrop disabused us of that the day he tried to join us eating meat. He was yellower than usual when George was ordering the usual salad for him at Rapa's. 'Gnol" clicked S'serrrop. 'T eat samp as hewl" IBs yellow color grew richer while he rejected our protests. When the meatballs arrived, we saw the crisis. You know that crest of tiddly bits sticking out above the Cygnian visor was actually their chemoreceptors and part of their ears? At sight of the meat, S'serrrop's receptors began to retreat until his "helmet" was a smooth round ere. He took a mouthful, chomped once, and looked wildly about. The gesture was so human I was on my feet ready to help our visitor from space to Rapa's can. But he had swallpwed and sat there breathing snatched up his plate and substituted greens, and after awhile his crest came back out. T hat gave us the clue. There was a Siggie song-fest near the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City on the screen that night. their heads I" Every one of them was as bare they were glowing like hot butter. "Intense fear, disgust, revulsion... Funny emotions for a quiet party of space-going sociologists." "I'll ask S'serrrop." "Very carefully. Very, very carefully." Oddly enough, it was Harry who did the job. We discovered he had been mixing quite a lot of religious discussion in with the particle physics. (Strange thing, I never can figure out where physicists keep the Almighty, but they seem to be among His chief defenders these days.) Anyway, Harry had the complete story of the Great Pupa. "Well, you know the Cygnians IF are hatched from eggs, and they go through a metamorphosis later into the adult form weVe met. Their religion is based on the belief that there is a further metamorphosis into a form with wings. Yes, wings. Beautiful, really. It has only happened once, when the Great Pupa achieved it. He was persecuted and tortured. They have -- or had -- a rather dreadful method of execution in which the victim is wrapped in acid-soaked cloth and his flesh eaten away alive. That's the figure on the pole. You do see the primitive parallel?" Harry interrupted himself. We nodded silently, staring at a new and different Harry. "Yes. Well, in his agony, the Great Pupa achieved the ultimate metamorphosis and appeared to his followers afterwards as d winged shape... Profoundly amazing, isn't it? Over eleven light-years away... He told us that he had invited S'serrrop to attend church services with him that Sunday. Did we realize no Cygnian had actually entered a Terran house of worship? We also soon realized how S'serrrop felt about it. Frightened and revoltedy but resolute. When we met them after the service his crest iwas still half retracted. Harry had been expounding Christian doctrine to him. The Cygnian was so excited that we could barely understand the barrage of clicks. "Abast! Abast!" he exclaimed. We took this as amazed -- or perhaps abased? He desired teered to find him a religious dictionary in which he could explore Moslem and Hindu, Greek; Roman and Hebrew doctrines as well as Harry's Massachusetts Avenue rites. told me that he became deeply exercised over questions like the propriety of using candles. Ill 'ext morning, I went into Harry's office, feeling a fairly strong shade of yellow myself. He was doodling on his blackboard. "First of all, Harry, congratulations. The array of talent around here never ceases to amaze me. But -- bear with me -- there's one thing I'd like to get straight. Are you absolutely one hundred per cent satisfied with the official estimate of the aggressive capabilities of that ship?" He looked at me from his Galactic evangelical dream. "You mean, weapons?" "Weapons. Blow-pipes, atomic disintegrators, germ cultures -- call me a paranoid bastard, Harry. What could they do to us if they tried ?' "Well," he said slowly, "Really not muA, Max. They have that shorMwge laser, wd they have about fifty tactical atomic missiles, with less advanced fusing than ours. Slow. Their auxiliary craft can't go much over Mach I all out. Very vulnerable. They have no laboratories Of culture stores. A bare minimum of machining facilities. Their main craft certainly couldn't be used as a mobile torch in atmosphere. They haven't got the right guidance systems for space attack. I think the estimate is quite correct; the most they could do would be a few lucky hits on big targets before our defenses overtook them." He XXd out a couple of equations, angrily. "Harry, is there anything about that ship you don't imderstand?" "No. If you mean, in general. Oh, maybe -- " "Maybe?" "There are one or two large generators which seem to be beyond their power needs, that's all. Just generators. They may have been in the ship when the Siggies got it, perhaps for powering a ground installation. What's eating you. Max? Here we have one of the biggest -- I'm not afraid to say it, one of the sweetest things possible to conceive of... Probably you don't get it. Max. I feel sorry for you. I pity all atheists. But others do get it." "I guess I don't get it, Harry, but I'll tell you what's wrong with me. I've read history. Earth history. A big strange ship full of religious Qunbols -- an alien race, fervently religious and revolted by the practices of the natives -- doesn't that remind you of anything, Harry? No beU?" "Sorry, it doesn't," he said. He erased the blackboard. Our comfy little shop had been invaded in more ways than one. I t got invaded some more next day when S'serrrop tiurned up afary. We learned about another Cygnian emotion, but we weren't sure at the time what it was. At first we thought he was sick. He kept making a rustling, flittering noise which we saw were his exoskeletal joints snicking together. He said he wasn't sick, it was something else. "Is bad," he kept repeating. "Bad! Sadi Hew -- I caddot say -- hew so simplel So be-hewtifuti Convulsively his elbows began rubbing against his thorax in a blur of motion. A thin shriek rent the air. hands, and he grabbed back. Handholding seemed to be the same on Cygnus as it was on Terra. He stopped the cicada wail and looked gravely in our faces. Then he said something that rocked even Harry. "So far-r-rl So bady he-years of glightl" He spead his arms in what we had come to know as the Great Pupa wing symbol. "He is hee-yar IF tool" he exclaimed. The next minute he was striding down the hall in the general direction of Rock Creek Fark with his UnFo guard scrambling after. Two hours later we discovered he had stampeded State into flying him back to his group, who were touring Mexico. He said he had something urgent to tell them. In the turmoil, there arrived a covert signal from George. As predicted, our Chief Linguist was shacked up with his explosive lexical treasure around the far side from Mersenius, and playing doggo. He had found an old pal at Mersenius to pass on a message demanding data on the Cygnians. The signal ended, "Don't trust those polyunsaturated pygmies." "Small men loathe each other," Of course you realize that the Cygnians had a written language in addition to the cartoon figures they used for first contact, but George hadn't seen it before he left. I rooted out the negatives of the script-covered missile George was working on. They looked pretty bad. Can you imagine a Chinese trying to decipher Ne pas se pencher en dehors in five European languages? Well, there were about five hundred choice graffiti on each negative; some you wouldn't believe." Cygnian script among any of these?" "I don't know. But I'll try." "What about those tech manuals they gave us, can't you compare scripts?" "They were in the script of whoever built the ship, and mostly diagrams and math." "Well, don't We have any Cygnian sanq)les?" "Mostly their cursive." Oomething was all wrong, all right. She was as stiff as an offended librarian. I pulled her around. "So you think I'm a stinker. Give me a break. Remember it's just that old heathen Max, who scares easy." "I think you're being unforgivable to Harry," she started. Then she squinted at me through her swag of hair. "Max, are you really scared?" "You bet I am. Honey, I'm so scared I even think about it in bed." "But what o. Max?" "Oh, history, micro-macro parallelism -- I don't know. That's the worst of it. See what you can get out of these, would you?" She tried, but it was no go all Tuesday. And Wednesday you remember what happened. The West-Hemisphere group of Siggies were holding their evening sing-in on the plaza outside the Catadrale de la Dama de somethingor-other in Sao Faulo, BraziL Inside, a minor mass was about to be celebrated. Instead of their usual circle, the Siggies formed a line across the front steps, and the human worshippers fou themselves barred out A collide of clerics came out to protest The Siggies stood firm, singing. The crowd milled. A padre laid hands on a Siggie, who yielded, but anotha: took his place. The Sound mounted. The cathedral bells started tolling. Somebody called the police, who added sirens to the uproar. At the height of the confusion two Siggies -- bright orange with emotion -- marched into the nave and up to the altar, where they deposited a small object. Then they mardied out again and rejoined the singing. Half a minute later the altar area of the cathedral lit up, gave off an amazing sound, and esploded into a flour-like dust idiich towered up over the plaza and came down all over everody. In the melee, the Siggies withdrew to the far side of the plaza and formed a circle. It was shortly discovered that they were now protected by some kind of force-shield, presumably generated by a large box which they always carried with them. Defense RD had identified it as a musical amplifier. While we were digesting this, news came that the East-Hemisphere Siggie group had pulled an almost identical stunt, resulting in major damage to the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. IV 'he fact that the Cygnian ship's  auxiliary flyers were both out on what was described as routine maintenance tests had up to now escaped notice. After a pause, it became apparent where they were flying to. Harry's evaluation sources had been quite right; they were slow. It took the one on our side over six hours to get from Quebec in the plaza at Sao Paulo. En route, one of our more enterprising neighbors discovered that it too was now protected by an unknown form of shielding. As it made its weary Mach I way home with the WestHemisphere Siggies aboard, our Air Force confirmed this the expensive way. Somewhere along the line the main ship had englobed itself too, with eight Terran technical people aboard. "Well, I guess we know what the generators are for now," I remarked next morning, roaming restlessly around Harry's office. "An interesting tactical problem," I mused. "What can you do with a measley few old badly guided fusion bombs -- provided you can carry them anywhere you want in perfect safety? He slammed his papers down hard and inhaled and aled expbsively. Just as he inhaled again his phone rang. IF "Huh? Who -- who? Get him down here! WeVe got to get him down here? What? All right. I'll go through your damn channels -- He banged the phone down. "Max. They opened the ship long enough to turn loose our techs. S'serrrop came out with them. He's been hurt. Get the chief to get him.' how she did it I don't know, because our chief, like everybody and the BaHai Temple in Chicago, the newscasters hit stride. From there on -- you'll remember -- it was just one bewildered yell of outrage. The Moslem world held aloof until Friday, when the Blue Mosque of Ahmed at Istanbul went up in flour. For all that first week, no one was killed or even badly hurt. Except S'serrrop. We met his stretcher at Andrews Air Base. He seemed glad to else, was caught up in the runaway to see Harry, oscillation over the Siggie atroci"I trite," he shrilled feebly. 'T ties. The media caught on a bit trite explait -- " He thrashed a slow and generated more confusion bit, under the blankets. What we than anything else at first. By could see of his hide was deep yelnext day, when the Siggies had leilow, but we couldn't see much, surely vaporized Milan Cathedral They had treated him to an acid message. Our medicos couldn't do much for the alien biology beyond the obvious topical applications. Like a burned human, he was in toxemia. That was the morning the Cygnians started their broadcasts. It was now clear why they had been so eager to learn our languages, but even so, you'll recall that the first messages were more stimulating than enlightening. Our shop had the advantage of an early copy of the eight technician's reports. The Cygnians had given them an intensive briefing before they let them go.  -- Delusions of nonpersecution. Harry, I'm sorry." He was head-in-hands, down. "When you look at the history of the early Christian missionaries, say in Polynesia, or Africa -- " "Damnation, Max, do you think you're the only one who's read history? It was just that -- my fault -- I saw the Gestalt the wrong way. From their point of view, we're the heathen. You don't need to rub it in. They never even bothered to try to understand -- " "How many missionaries ever tried to understand the native religions? They just threw down the idols, burned the ju-jus, destroyed the temples... Disgusting! Unspeakable savage rites, I believe was the standard phrase." "Only S'serrrop. He tried." "Yes, he tried. He's a believer too, of course, but liberal. What it adds up to, Harry, is a bunch of dedicated, primitive fundamentalists who bought themselves a boat and set out to bring the word to the heathen. With atomics." "Missionaries with fissionaries," squeaked Mrs. Peabody, and shut up abruptly. ' "I blame myself -- " "Don't, Harry. What could a Bushman make of a gun until he'd seen it fired? He'd have put it down as a clumsy kind of club. We'd never seen a generator used to throw a standing force field." "But how can they hope to sucTo make the whole population of earth worship the Great Pupa? We aren't even the same kind of animal! It's insane." "What do you think the Holy Family looked like to a polygamous culture where a man's father was his mother's brother? No, insane or not, conversion by the sword can work. What's our price for saving St. Peter's, or Westminster, or Santa Sophia, for starters? Or the Kremlin? Friends, don't be too sure. You'll be attending Great Pupa services in Carter Barron Ampitheatre in the near future, I promise you." "What about you?" snapped Tillie. "Purification," Harry was muttering. "Fire." IF His eyes were pale and clear, like a Weimeraner's. "The early Christians survived, Max Underground, in the catacombs. In the days of the martyrs. From persecution will come rebirth." I refrained from asking him to name a few aboriginal religions which had survived in pure form. I had something else to worry about. "Can S'serrrop talk at all. Tillie? Its urgent." TTell, you recall what went on then, the public convulsions, the predictable and pathetic brave renses we made to the Cygnian's simple ultimatum. I guess what riled people the most was the level of their pitch. They had apparently tagged us as Stone Age Stanley. "You can see the Great Pupa is the true god, because our weons are stronger than yours. Your false gods cannot protect themselves. Or you." Right off page one of a nineteenth-century missionary handbook. The part about them ending our local strife in universal brotherhood as children of the Great Pupa wasn't so bad, although I don't think people went for the idea of themsdves as larvae. But when they got into the higher doctrinal mysteries -- and what they proposed to do about our sex and mating customs, they being biologically rather different -- It was while they were explaining that aspect that the Aussie CinC up in Quebec laid our biggest nuclear egg neatly on the Cygnian ship. The broadcast stopped. Two days later when things settled down, the ship was still sitting there englobed with debris. After awhile, a new type of transmission came put of the force-shell, and every piece of metal several kilometers beyond the blast-hole went to vapor. Then the religious broadcasts resumed. The Great Pupa was indeed a strong god. Over everybody's protests, I tried to get S'serrrop to locate and decipher any Cygnian text he could find on my photos of George's missile. "What in hell do you expect to prove. Max? Even if there's a Cygnian text, so what? We know the story now.l' we? I thought you said you'd read history." But S'serrrop was nearly blind, and terribly weak. He did appear to recognise the photos. "Too bad I" he whispered again. "Kchchl Too bad..." "Leave him alone. Max." him this: Are there others? More like him? Coming here?" We coxddn't get his answer, but as you know, we were not left long in doubt. S ince this is just the inside story, I won't go into all the uproar and stuff you know -- the steady attrition of our religious monuments -- don't think Chartres didn't rock me -- the efforts of the Vatican and the International Council of Churches of Christ to negotiate some kind of co-existence for the West at least -- the day the Siggies, by an understandable theological error, took out the New York Stock Exchange -- the United Arab kamikazi attempt -- the successful assault on two isolated Siggies in Pakistan -- the Soviet proposal -- you know all that. The inside story isn't much, here: Sixteen long goarounds between me and our chief, ending in stalemate. And then the second Cygnian ship arrived. It put down in the North African desert. Same general type, a bit newer and knobbier, and coppery rather than gold. The same opening ceremonies, but these Siggies were definitely orange -- the Red Siggies as they were dubbed. As you can imagine, the welcoming committee was conspicuously absent. "I devoutly hope so," I said. She gave me the look I was getting used to those days. "IVe got to see S'serrrop." "You'll kill him. Max." She was right. When S'serrrop saw the photos of the new Cygnians he went -- or tried to go -- into his shivering and stridulating act. It seemed to be involuntary, like uncontrollable sobs. He couldn't stop himself from knocking the dressings around. Not that they were doing him any good, but the result was horrible. In his agony he could barely be understood. What came through clearly at the end was: "I trite I I trite #" And then something so obviously a private prayer that I snapped the recorder off. He died that night. I spent the night with that tape and was waiting on the chief's doormat with my reconstruction in the morning. At noon he was still not in. His hot-line girl told me about the fire-fight between Yellow Siggie and Red Siggie flyers, in which most of Marseilles had come up missing. V A t # the chief was still going 'round in the high level whirlwind. I decided to take -- it says here on my citation -- independent initiative. What the hell, how much Class A office furniture do you get in a catacomb? I had nothing to lose. The independence took the form of a structure of tastefully forged directives and speciously worded coordinating concurrences, at the end of which chain of duplicity there emerged in about # hours time one live Astromarine lieutenant He looked exactly like a screen space hero except he had coldsores. He contributed the action. By this time the Red Siggies -- IF who seemed to be faster workers and more practical-minded -- had decided that it would make for more togetherness if we evacuated our lunar bases. There was to be just one shuttle-run per each, and Mersenius was unluckily scheduled as Number Two. You'd be up all night if I told you what it took to get that boy into a disguised cargo-pod. Harry, who knew I was nuts but was too far gone to argue, helped a lot. After that we could only hope. By this point the bands were so loaded with Red and Yellow Siggie broadcasts and counter-broadcasts and doctrinal trumpetings and counter-counter-jamming that we were virtually blind and deaf, electronically speaking. To this day, I don't understand the difference between their versions of the Great Pupa religion. Something about the powers of the clergy and the existence of other lesser Pupas or prophets. Harry is making a study of it. I was more concerned with tr # dng to keep score of the accidental damage sustained by Earth when the Yellow and Red missionary flyers tangled. You remember how the media kept saying that they were decimating each other? Apparently, people outside really hoped that one side would eliminate the other at least, and maybe they might even kill each other off. The inside reports gave no such hope. There was no concrete evidence that they could do each other any serious damage and the side effects on us were brutal. Marseilles was the start; next came Altoona, of all places, and poor old Coventry, and Tangiers. And a lot of smer things. "This phe won't last," I pontificated. "The history of religious wars is like any other. Your main attack is not on the enemy leaders but on their followers. That'll be us, when they get organized. We'll have to sign up with one lot or the other, and ipyhen we do, we'll get it. What's the matter, Harry? In particular, I mean?" "Joddrell's picked up a new type of transmission from both ships, beamed off-planet." "Calling for reinforcements?" "Probably." "And alles ganz kaput... Did you ever identify that planet S'serrrop described?" "Not positively. I personally think that was Cygnus #. I don't believe these creatures are Cygnians; they just came from Cygnus #I in the sense that that was the last place they stopped. Perhaps they were there quite some time -- " "Before they and their competition managed to fracture the planetary crust." "I wonder what the real Cyg"What I wonder is where Lieutenant Stemhagen is. At least he wasn't brought down in the Mersenius evacuation." A s it turned out, of course, Lieutenant Sternhagen was right where he was supposed to be. He had cleverly managed to unpack himself undetected after his ghastly trip in the pod and had slipped away on his march around to the far side. All we had been able to give him was a dinky personnel jato imit. After # hours of hopping, sliding, ghding and tumbling he reached George, who was blissfully holed up with his life work and a nice little hydroponics set-up he had wangled out of his Mersenius pals. The young Marine, as directed, asked George one or two pointed questions. The answers being on the right trajectory, Lieutenant Sternhagen stayed not to argue, but injected a little eam-juice into George's airlines. Then he had a busy time boosting the missile -- carefully -- out of the cave, carrying George over a couple of rimwalls and stowing him and laying a remote-control laser line. The thing went up beautifully as demonstrated, three shorts and a long, but of course we couldn't see it on Terra. After that, the young Marine, who had received only minor radiation burns in addition to his previously acquired contusions, had nothing to do except hop, slide and tumble # hours back to the empty Mersenius base, hauling a hysterical George, who was undamaged except in his aspiration-level. By a miracle, Mersenius had registered our covert signal and left sufficient supplies to allow the pair to survive until rescue, during wWch time George had the opportunity to say everything he wanted to, about fifteen thousand times. It doesnt tell half enough on Lieutenant Sternhagen's medal. After this, there was nothing at all to do but wait. And wait. And wait. The rest of the world, who weren't waiting for anything, just reacted. You know. Fortunately the loss of human life was amazingly low as yet, except for Marseilles and Altoona, where the Yellow Siggies had been holding a mass outdoor Great Pupa baptism ceremony. I'll say this for the Siggies, they were brave. The Yellow Siggie conducting services didn't even look up when the Red flyer came over -- just sang harder. Glory, glory. The weapon they chiefly used was a variant of the catalytic vaporizer business. RD had not guessed that it could be produced as a rather bountiful fuel by-product. We counted a total of only five actual missiles expended to date. If the Red Siggies had brought in another fifty, that left ninety-five to go. Their fall-out proved to be rather more copious than the best art, too. During the next week, two of our tracking stations got melted domi, and we were down to our last earflaps when we caught a new ship coming in. "The reinforcements," Harry said. He had taken to shadowboxing the eraser, very softly. "Why?" "Both Siggie ships are transmitting like mad." But it wasn't their reinforcements. The little blue ship made one orbit and then came in low over North Africa and on to Quebec. When it had passed, both Siggie ships were still there and apparently undamaged, but they had lost some of their shine. On the ground, the Siggie groups were scrambling first for cover and then for their ships. We only caught part of the saurian transmission on Cygnese -- something about one planetary rotation. Xhirty hours later both Red and Yellow Siggies were on their way out of our system, leaving us mth four smashed cities, innumerable wrecked houses of religion, and more maypole effigies of the Great Pupa then could be coimted before they were melted down. The blue lizards left too -- we still don't know where they're from, "You guessed they were cops... How?" said Harry, when we were celebrating George's return. After blowing out his outrage on Stemhagen, George had more or less run down about the criminal destruction of his Galactic key. "My glands. Primitive response to the fuzz gestalt. Once you saw them as two guys in a squad car, it all fit. They couldn't stick around. Thqr set up call-boxes. One demonstration of bow to work it, good-bye. Holler if you need help, right, George? Tell me, old brother, how long had you known? Never mind, don't answer that. I respect a man who values knowledge more than the mere survival of his culture. Not to say his species. I won't ask you if you would ever have got 'round to triggering it -- " "All right. There was a report that these so-called Cygnians, maybe others too, were messing around with backward planets. Somewhere, there's a minor policy directive. Pressure from a Society to Save Our Seminoles. Low budget. Two guys to cover a sector. Probably left a set of flares around any number of likely planets. The Siggies knew damn well what they were, too." "Is that like history?" ventmed Mrs. Peabody. "Not really. Certainly not in the old days. The poor benighted heathen caught in sectarian wars just suffered. Did any of you read about what happened to people who happened to be in the paA of a crusade, by the way? We've missed that, so far." "TTidr religion was sort of poetic in a way. I mean, channg to wings -- " I saw Harry vdnce. "Tell you what isn't so beautiful, if you want more history. This is all early-stage stuffs. Informal wildcatting. Like when Tahiti or the Congo were months away from Europe, and North America was half wild. What happens now we got saved? Do we go back to our palm-trees and peace?" Then she said, "Oh." "Exactly, lt happened when industrial nation-states got organized into coalitions and went to war for global mastery? What happens to the people in the sarongs when something like Admiral Tojo's fleet smls into the lagoon to set up a fortified base? And something like Admiral Nimitz' fleet and the Allied Air Force arrives to throw him out?" "... And Eniweitok," murmured Harry. Pouring George a drink, she asked, "Did any of you know how old S'serrrop was?" "Huh?" "A kid. About like our nineteen. He got involved with the natives and felt sorry for us and begged the heads of e mission to leave us alone, because the Great Pupa's spirit had already touched us, in another form. That made him a heretic." "Any parallels on that. Max?" We iwent to bed on that one and I'll leave it with you. Along with the original meaning of the word IF (Continued from page #) "Hanardy has a memory of something, Fat. That's all. And that is aU there is. That's all that's left of the Great Galactics." Pat gasped, "If it's nothing, why are you scared?" "It's not quite nothing," SweenMadro replied patiently. "There is a -- potential. One chance in a million. I don't want him to have any chance to use it, though of course well presently have to take a chance with him and put him into a state of sleep." He rdeased her and stepped bai. No, no, my dear, there's no possible diance of you making use of some special abOity in Hanardy -- became I know hs over there by the door. And he can't move fast enough to get over here and hit me with that metal bar." The tense Hanardy sagged. And Fat Ungarn seemed frozen, glaring at the creatme. She came back to life, abruptly. "I know you don't dare shoot Steve. So why don't you shoot me?" Her tone was up in pitch, challenging. "HqtI" said Hanardy. "Carefull" "Don't worry, Steve," she answered gdly without turning around. "It's not because I have any I.Q. potentialities. But he won't touch me either. He knows you like me. You might have a bad thout about him at a key moment, later. Isn't that right, Mr. Dreegh? I've got your little dilemma figured out, haven't I, even though I've only got a Klugg brain." Her words seemed suicidal to Hanardy. But Sween-Madro just stood gazing at her, swaying a little, saying nothing -- a naked scarecrow of a man from the wtd up, and below, wearing knee-lengA dungarees over bone-thin legs. Yet there was no belief in Hanardy that the Dreegh was vulnerable. He remembered the other's high speed movements -- that seemingly instantaneous transition from one location in space to another... from the bed to Pat, at invisible speed. Fantastic! Once more Pat's voice broke the silence, mockingly: "What's this? An I.Q. of # or # baffled? Doesn't know what to do? Remember, no matter what action you take, he can't stay awake mu longer. It's only a matter of time before something has to give." At that point, another sharp anxiety struck through Hanardy. He thought: She's wasting time. Every minute those other Dreeghs are getting closer! The thought was so urgent in his nund, he spoke it aloud, "For Pete's sake. Miss Pat, those other Dreeghs'll be here any second -- " "Shut up, you fool!" Instantly shrill, hysterical, terrified -- that was her totally unexpected reaction. She said something else in that same high-pitched tone, but HanBxiy did not hear it dearly. For in that moment between his own wtrds and hers, the Dreegh turned. Aitd his arm moved. That was all that was visible. Where did it move to? The super-speed of the movement blurr that. It could only, logically, have been toward the pocket of his dimgarees, but nothing like that was visible. A weapon glittered; a beam of light toudied Hanardy's face. As blackness swept over him, he resized what else it was the girl had said: "Steve, he'll put you to sleep while that thought about the Dreegh's coming quickly is in your mind... " H ow swiftly can transition between wakefulness and sleep take place? As long as it requires for the wakefulness center to shut off and the sleep center to turn on. So there is no sq)parent consdous time lag. If you live a dull, human existence, it seems brief enough. To Hanardy, who was normally duller than most, it seemed no time at all. He started forward, his lips parted to speak -- and he was already asleep... so far as he -- the self -- was aware. He did have a vague feeling of starting to fall. Consciously, nothing more occurred. Below the conscious, there was a measiurable lapse of time. During that time, the particles inside the atoms of his body did tions. And molecules by the quadzone of matter. Because of the thought that had been in Hanardy's mind, at some level of his brain he noticed exact spots of space, saw and identified the other-ness of the Dreeghs in the approaching Dreegh ship, estimated their otherwhereness, computed the mathematics of change. It was simple in the virtual emptiness of space, difficult where matter was dense. But never impossible. As he did so, the Dreegh ship with its eight Dreeghs changed location from one spot to another exact spot in space, bridging the gap through a lattice-work of related spots. In the bedroom in the meteorite, the visible event was that Hanardy fell. A twisting fall, it was, whereby he sprawled on his side, the arm with the metal bar in it partly under him. As Hanardy collapsed to the floor, the Dreegh walked past Pat toward the open door behind it. Reaching it, he clutched at it, seemingly for support. Pat stared at him. After what had happened she didn't quite dare to believe that his apparent weakness was as great as ie saw it to be. Yet after a little, she ventiured. IF 'May I ask my father a question?" There was no answer. The Dreegh stood at the door, and he seemed to be clinging to it. Excitement leaped through the girl. Suddenly she dared to accept the reality of the exhaustion that was here. The Dreegh's one mighty effort had depleted him, it seemed. She whirled and raced over to Hanardy, looking for the metal bar. She saw at once that he was lying on top of it and tried to roll him over. She couldn't. He seemed to be solidly imbedded in the floor in that awkward position. But there was no time to waste! Breathing hard, she reached under him for the metal weapon, found it, tugged at it. It woddn't budge. Pull at it, twist it, exert all her strength -- it was no use. Hanardy had a vice-like grip on the bar, and his body weight reinforced that grip. Nothing she could do could move it, or him. Pat believed the position, the immovability, was no accident. Dismayed, she thought the Dreegh caused him to fall like that. She felt momentarily awed. What an amazing prediction ability Sween-Madro had had -- to have realized the nature of the danger against him and taken an exact defense against it. It was a maneuver designed to defeat, exactly and precisely, a small Klugg woman, whose abili at duplication coidd not lighten the weight of a body like Hanardy's enough to matter and whose ability to solve problems did not include the ability to unravel a muscularly knotted hand grip. B ut -- she was on her feet, infinitely determined -- it would do him no good! ' The Dreegh also had a weapon. His only hope must be that she wouldn't dare come near him. Instants later, she was daring. Her trembling fingers fumbled over his dungarees, seeking openings. They found nothing. But he had a weapon, she told herself, bewildered. He fired it at Steve. I saw him! Again, more frantically, she searched all the possibilities of the one garment he wore -- in vain. She remembered, finally, in her desperation, that her father must have been watching this room. He might have seen where it was. , "Dadl" she called anxiously. 'Yes, my dear?" The reply from the intercom came at once, reassuringly calm. Watching the Dreegh warily, she asked, "Do you have any advice on how to kill him?" The old man, sitting in the control room of the meteorite, feighed. From his viewpoint, he could on one viewplate see the girl, Hanardy's unconscious body and Sween-Madro; on another he observed gloomily that the Dreegh ship had arrived and had attached to an airlock. As he watched that second viewplate, three men and five women came out of the ship and into a corridor of the meteorite. It was was no longer of value. The girPs voice cut across his awareness. He must have used the super-speed again without my noticing and hidden his weapon. Wt Professor Ungarn was seeing was that the newly arrived Dreeghs, though in no hurry, were heading directly toward Madro and Pat. Watching them, the professor thought, Pat was right. SweenMadro had been vunerable. He could have been killed. But it was too late. Sick with self-recrimination he abandoned the control room and hurried to join his daughter. B y the time he arrived, SweenMadro was back in the bed, and Hanardy had been lifted onto a powered dolly which had been wheeled alongside a machine that had evidently been brought from the Dreegh ship. The machine was a simple device with a pair of bulbous, transparent cups and a suction system. A needle was inserted into a blood vessel on Hanardy's right arm. Swiftly, a turgid bluish-red liquid rose in one of the bulbous cups; about a quart. Professor Ungarn estimated to his daughter in a whisper. One by one, wordlessly, the Dreeghs went to the machine. Another needle was used. And into each a tiny drain of blood siphoned from the red stuff in the bulbous cup. It seemed as if about half of it was taken. Still without anyone speaking, the needle was inserted into SweenMadros arm; and the rest of the blood from the cup flowed into him. Pat stared at the dreadful beings with avid curiosity. All her life she had heard of, and been warned against, these creatures; and here they were from all those distances of years and miles. Four men and five women. Three of the five women were brunette, one was a blonde; the fifth was a redhead. The women were, every one, tall and willowy. The men were uniformly six feet four or five and gaunt of build. Was height a part of the Dreegh illness? Pal wondered, seeing them together like this. Did Dreegh bones grow as a result of their disease? She could only wonder. The figure on the bed moved. Sween-Madro opened eyes and sat up. He seemed shaky and unsure. IF Again, there was silent action. The Dree men did not move, but the women one by one went over and lightly kissed Sween-Madro on the lips. At each touch of lips there was a faint bluish light, a flash of brightness, like a spark. Invariably, the blue spark leaped from the woman to the man. And with gach flash he grew more alive. His body became visibly larger. His eyes grew bright. Pat, who had been watching with total fascination, suddenly felt two pairs of hands grab her. She had time to let out a shriek as two Dreegh men carried her over to Sween and held her above him, her face over his. At the final moment, she ceased her futile struggle and froze. She was aware of Sween's sardonic eyes gazing up at her. Then, with a deliberate movement he raised his head and brushed her lips with his. She expected to die. Deep inside the back of her head, a fire started. The heat of it seemed instantly unbearable; instantly there was a flash of blue flame from her lips to his. Then she was back on the floor, dizzy, but -- as she realized presently -- recovering. And still alive. Qween-Madro swung his feet over  the edge of the bed and said, "The existence of such brotherand-sister energy flows, Pat -- which you have now experienced -- and the Dreegh ability to use them make it likely that we could become the most powerful beings in the galaxy on a continuing basis. If we can defeat Hanardy. We only took about ten percent from you. We don't want you damaged -- yet." He stood up, walked over and looked down at the unconscious spaceman. Presently he beckoned Pat and Professor Ungarn; father and daughter came at once. The Dreegh said, 'T'm still not well. Can you detect any change in him?" He did not wait for a reply, but said in relief, guess nothing happened. He looks as lowgrade a human as you could ever not want to meet or deal with in any way, and that's the way he was before -- don't you agree?" Pat said quickly, "I don't understand. What did you expect?" " Hopefully, nothing," was the reply. "But that remark about how near our ship was was the first un-programmed use of his ability. A spatial relationship action like that comes in the Great Galactic intelligence curve at about I.Q. # ." "But what did you fear?" Pat persisted. "That it would feed back through his nervous system #" "What would that do?" The Dreegh merely stared at her, sardonically. It was Professor Ungarn's voice that finally broke the silence. "My dear, the Dreeghs are actually acting as if their only enemy is a programmed Hanardy." "ITien you believe thdr analysis of the nature of the Great Galactics?" "Th bdieve it; so I bdieve it." "Then there's no hope?" The old man point at Hanardy. "There's Steve." "But he's just a biun. That's why we selected him to be our drayhorse, remember?" She spoke accusingly. "Because he was the dumbest, most honest jo'k in the solar system -- remember?" The old man nodded, suddenly looking gloonQT. Pat became aware that the Dreeghs were watching them, as if they were listening. It was one of the dark-haired women vdio ike. "My name is Bilke," she said. She went on, in a low, hus voice, "What you've just describe -- a man as tmimportant as this one -- is one of the reasons why we want to go to Europa. We must find out what did the Great Galactic see in this strange little man. We should know because for our blood storage tanks and energy pool we need the blood and life force of a million people from this otherwise undefended ianetary system. And we dare not kill a single one of those is resolved." IX dke a sentient being -- Everyone aboard the Dreegh super-ship that flew to the moon Europa in thirty hours (instead of many weeks) fitted that description: the Dreeghs, Pat, Professor Ungarn, and the sleeping Hanardy. They had brought along Hanardy's freighter to be thdr landing craft. They came down without incident into Hanardy's permanent spaceship berth in Spaceport, the large moon's prindpaJ dty. Consider any sentient person -- That indudes a man adeep... like Hanardy. There he lies, helpless. In that fotuth sleep stage that Hanardy was in -- the deep ddta-wave stage -- push at him, hit him, roll him over. It is enormously difficult to awaken him. Yet it is in this state that a person can act out a sleepwalker's strange goaL Force this sentient individual to interact with a grossly vast universe -- "We're taking no chances," said the Dreegji brunette woman, Rilke. "We're going to bring him into motion on the somnambulistic level." It was Sween who directed a bright light at Hanardy's face; after mere seconds, he shut it off. There was a measurable passage of time. Then the body on the bed stirred. IF A second woman -- the blonde -- without glancing up from the instrument she was monitoring, made a gesture and said hurriedly, "The somnambulistic purpose is in the delta-wave band #-#-#B." It was a private nomenclature that meant nothing to Pat. But the words caused an unexpected flutter of excitement among the Dreeghs. Sween-Madro turned to Pat. "Have you any idea why Hanardy should want to visit with, and have a feeling of affection for, thirteen people in Spaceport?" Pat shrugged. "He associates with certain space bums around town," she said contemptuously. "Typical hangers-on of the kind you find out in space. I wouldn't waste a minute on them." Sween said coldly, "We take no chances, Pat. The ideal solution would be to kill all thirteen. But if we do, Hanardy might have punitive dreams about us as he awakens -- which awakening will happen very soon now, one way or another. So -- " the long gaunt face cracked into a grimace of a smile -- "we'll render them useless to him." "SssshI" said the blonde woman. She motioned toward the figure on the bed. The somnambulistic Hanardy had opened his eyes. Pat was aware, then, of the Dreeghs watching alertly. Involuntarily, briefly, she held her breath and waited. H anardy did not glance at her or at the Dreeghs, showed no awareness of anyone else being in the room. Without a word, he got out of bed and removed his pajamas. Then he went into his bathroom and shaved and combed his hair. He came out again into the bedroom and began to dress, putting on his dirty pants, a shirt and a pair of boots. As Hanardy walked out of the room, Rilke shoved at Pat. "Remain near the sleepwalker," she commanded. Pat was aware that Rilke and Sween-Madro stayed close behind her. The others had slipped somewhere out of sight. The somnambulistic Hanardy opened the airlock and beaded down the gangplank. Sween-Madro gestured with his head for Pat to follow. The girl had hesitated at the top of the spidery "plank." And now she stood for a moment gazing out at the city of Spaceport. The airlock of Hanardy's freighter was located about fifty feet above the heavy lower scaffolding that held the vessel. There was a space of about five feet between the opening and the upper scaffolding which actually constituted a part of the dock. Almost straight ahead of her Pat could see the first building of the city. It was hard for her to realize that the entire populace of the port, with all their available equipment, had no chance against the Dree. There was no protection here for her, or Hanardy, or anyone. Awe came. The decisive factor was the intdligence of the Dreeghs. She thought: and what's in Steve's memory of intelligence is aU that stands between these vampires and their victims. Minutes later she found herself walking beside Hanardy. She stole a glance at his blank face, so stolid and unintellectual. He seemed like a small hope, indeed. The Dreeghs and she followed Hanardy along a street, into a hotel, up an elevator and along a corridor to a door numbered SI #. Hanardy pressed a little button, and after a little the door opened. A middle-aged woman shuffled into view. She was dumpy and blearyeyed, but her face brightened into a welcoming smirk as she saw Hanardy. "Hi, there, Hanl" she yelled. Having spoken, she must have realized that the Dreeghs and Pat were with the spaceman. If she had any defensive thought, it was too late. Sween made her helpless with his mechanical light-flash hypnotism, about ch he commented casually after they were inside and the door shut, "Nothing more complex is needed for human beings, or -- " he shrugged -- "Kluggs. Sorry, Pat," he apologized to the girl, "but the fact is that, like the people of this system, you also have a vague idea that hypnotism and other non-consdous dienomena were invented by hypnotists and similar unscrupubus people." He added ruefully, "You'll never surprise a Lennel, or a Medder, or a Hulak with any control method short of -- " He broke off. "Never mind I" T Te turned to the woman. Pres ently, imder his guidance she was speaking enforced truths about her real relationship with Hanardy. From the time they had met, Hanardy had given her money. "What does he really get for it?" asked Rilke. "Nothing." Since their method evoked only truth, Rilke frowned at Sween, "It couldn't be altruism. Not on his low level?" It was visibly an unexpected development. Pat said scathingly, "If altruism is an I.Q. factor, you Dreeghs probably come in below idiot." The man did not reply. The next instant his preternaturally long body was bending over the bloated female whom they had so briefly interrogated. There was a flash of blue as his lips touched IF hers. Half a dozen times he repeated that caricature of a kiss. Each time, the woman grew visibly smaller, like a sick person fading away on a hospital bed. Finally, a bright light was flashed into the tired eyes, excising all memory of her degradation. But when they departed, the shriveled being on the bed was still alive. The next person that the somnambulistic Hanardy led them to was a man. And tWs time it was Rilke who took the glancing kiss, and it was into her nervous system that the blue fire was drawn. They drained aU thirteen of Hanardy 's friends in the same way; and then they decided to kill Hanardy. Grinning, Sween explained. 'Tf we blow him up with you, the woman for whom he feels a dumb devotion, standing beside him in his home port -- the only home he knows -- he'll be busy protecting those he loves. And then we, who will be out in space while this is going on, will probably survive the few instants that it will take for him to awaken." As she heard those words, Pat felt a hardening of her own resolve, a conviction that she had iK)thing to lose. They had started up the metal gangplank that led to the airlock of Efanardy's ship. Hanardy walked blankly in front, behind him was the girl, then Rilke, and, bringing up the rekr, Sween. And they reached the final few feet, Pat braced herself and spoke aloud. "It seems wrong, -- " she said. And leaped forward. She put her hands against Hanardy and shoved him over the side of the plank. As she expected, the Dreeghs were quick. Bianardy was still teetering over the fifty-foot drop from the narrow walk when both the man and woman were beside him. As one person, they reached over the low handrail, reached out, reached down. That swiftly they had him. In pushing at Hanardy, Pat found herself automatically propelled by the effort of her thrust away from Hanardy and over the other edge of the plank. As she fell, she completed in her mind the sentence she had begun: It seems wrong... not to put that dumb love to the uttermost test I" X Qpaceport, on Europa, like other  similar communities in the solar system, was not at all like an ordinary liffle town of four thousand human bdngs. If anything, it resembled an old-style naval refuding station in the South Pacific, with its military establishment and garrison. Except that the garrison" of Spaceport consisted of technical experts who worked in complex mechanical systems for the repair and servicing of spaceships. In addition, Spaceport was a mining post, where small craft brought their meteorite ore, gigantic plants separated the precious from the debris, and the resultant refined materials were trans-shipped to Earth. The similarity to a South Pacific port was borne out in one other respect. Exactly as each little island post of Earth's Pacific Ocean gradually accumulated a saturation of human flotsam and jetsam, so on Spaceport there had gathered a strange tribe of space bums. The tribe consisted of men and women in almost equal numbers, the size of the group being variable. Currently, it consisted of thirteen persons. They were not exactly honest people, but they were not criminals. That was impossible. In space, a person convicted of one of the basic crimes was automatically sent back to Earth and not allowed out again. However, there was a great tolerance aimong enforcement officials as to what constituted a crime. Not drunkenness, certainly, and not dope addiction, for either men or women. Any degree of normal sex, paid for or not, was never the subject of investigation. There was a reason for this latitude. The majority of the persons involved -- men and women -- were technically trained. They were bums because they couldn't hold a steady job, but during rush periods, a personnel officer of the pressured company coidd often be found down in the bars on Front Street looking for a particular individual, or group. The bums thus located might then earn good mon ey for a week or two, or perhaps even three. It was exactly such a personnel officer looking for exactly such lost souls who discovered all thirteen of jthe people he wanted -- four women and nine men -- were sick in their hotel rooms. Naturally, he called the port authorities. After an examination, the M.D. who was brought in stated that all thirteen showed extreme weakness. They seemed to be, as he so succinctly put it, "only marginally alive." The report evoked an alarm reaction from the Port Authority. The Director had visions of some kind of epidemic sweeping up from these dregs of people and decimating his little kingdom. He was still considering a course of action when reports from private doctors indicated that the illness, whatever it was, had affected a large number of affluent citizens of Spaceport in addition to the bums. The total in the final count came to a hundred and ninety-three persons sick with the same loss of energy and near-death apathy. IF XI A t some mind level, Hanardy became aware that Patricia Ungarn was falling to her death. To save her, he had to get energy from somewhere. He knew immediately where the energy would have to come from. For a cosmic moment, as his somnambulism was disrupted and replaced by the dreaming state that precedes awakening, he was held by rigidities of his personality, Tliere was a split instant, then, as some aware part of him gazed in amazement and horror at a lifetime of being a sloppy Joe. That one glance of kaleidoscopic insight was all that was necessary. The barriers went down. Time ceased. For him, all particle flows ended. In that forever state, Hanardy was aware of himself as being at a location. Around him were # other locations. He observed at once that thirteen of the locations were extremely wavery. He immediately excluded the thirteen from his purpose. To the remaining # locations, he made a postulate. He postulated that the # would be glad to make immediate pa # rment. Eadi of the # thereupon willingly gave to Hanardy seven-tenths of all the available life-energy in their # locations. As that energy flowed to Hanardy, time resumed for him. he living miiverse that was Steve Hanardy expanded out to what appeared to be a great primeval dark. In that dark were blacker blobs, nine of them -- the Dreeghs. At the very heart of the black excrescences ran a fine, wormlike thread of silvery briefness: the Dreegh disease, shining, twisting, ugly. As Hanardy noticed that utterly criminal distortion, he became aware of a red strekk in the sinister silver. He thought, in immense astonishment, "Why, that's my blood #" He realized, then, with profound interest that this was the blood the Dreeghs had taken from him Trfien they first arrived at the Un-? garn meteorite. They had given Sween most of it. But the others had each eagerly taken a little of the fresh stuff for themselves. Hanardy realized that that was what the Great Galactic had noticed about him. He was a catalyst! In his presence by one means or another people got well... in many ways. In a few days longer, his blood in them would enable the Dreeghs to cure their disease. The Dreeghs would discover the one belatedly -- too late to change their forcing methods. For Hanardy, the scene altered. The nine black blobs yfete no longer shaped by their disease, as he saw them next. He found himself respecting the nine as members of the only race that had achieved immortality. The cure of them was important. Again, for Hanardy, there was a change. He was aware of long lines of energy that were streught and white flowing at him from some greater darkness beyond. In the near distance was a single point of light As his attention focused there, all the numerous lines, except from that light-point, vanished. It occurred to Hanardy that that was the Dreegh ship and that, in relation to earth, it would eventually be in a specific direction. The thin, thin, white line was like a pointer from the ship to him. Hanardy glanced along that line. And because he was open -- oh, so openl -- he did the touching. Then he touched other places and 'did a balancing thing between them and the Dreegh ship. He oriented himself in space. Oriented it! As he completed that touching, he realized that the Dreegh ship was now slightly over six thousand light-years away. That was far enough, he decided. Having made that decision, he allowed particle flow to resume for the Dreeghs. And so -- A s time began again, the Dreeghs found themselves in their own spaceship. There th were, all nine of them. They gazed uneasily at each other and then made a study of their surroundings. They saw unfamiliar star configurations. Their unhappiness grew. It was not a pleasant tMng to be lost in space, as they knew from previous experience. After a while, when nothing further happened, it became apparent that -- though they would probably never again be able to find the Earth's solar system -- they were safe... Pat's first consciousness of change was that she was no longer falling. But no longer on Europa. As she caught her balance, she saw that she was in a familiar room. She shook her head to dear away the fuzziness from her eyes. And then she realized if was a room in the Ungam meteorite, her home. She heard a faint sound and swung about -- and paused, balandng on one heel, as she saw her father. There was an expression of relief on his face. "You had me worried," he said. "I've been here for more than an hour. My dear, all is well I Our screens are back to working; everything is the way it was... before. We're safe." "B-but," said the girl, where's Steve?"... It was earlier. Hanardy had the impression that he was rememIP bering a forgotten experience on the Ungarn meteorite -- a time before the arrival of Sween-Madro and the second group of Dreeghs. The Great Galactic of that earLeigh, bent over Hanardy where he lay on the floor. He said with a friendly, serious smile, "You and that girl make quite a combination. You with so much owed to you, and she with that high ability for foolhardiness. Were going to have another look at such energy debts. Maybe that way well find our salvation." He broke off. "Steve, there are lar system. Awareness of the genius in them is the next step up for intelligence. Because youVe had some feedback, if you take that to heart you might even get the girl." Leigh's words ended abruptly. For at that instant he touched the spaceman's shoulder. The memory faded -- t was several weeks later. On the desk of the Port Authority lay the report on the illness which had suddenly affected # persons. Among other data, the report stated: It develops that these people were all individuals who during the past fifteen years have taken ad vantage of a certain low I.Q. per son named Steve Hanardy, As almost everyone in Spaceport is aware, Hanardy -- who shows many evidences of mental retardation -- has year after year been by his own simple-minded connivance swindled out of his entire income # (a type classification) -- which he owns and operates. In this manner so much money has been filched from Hanardy that, first one person, then another, then many, set themselves up in business at their victimls expense. And as soon as they were secure, each person in turn discarded the benefactor. For years now, ivhile one human leech after another climbed from poverty to affluence, Hanardy himself has remained at the lowest level. The afflicted are slowly recovering, and most are in a surprisingly cheerful frame of mind. One man even said to me that he had a dream that he was paying a debt by becoming ill; and in the dream he was greatly relieved. Theres some story around that Hanardy has married the daughter of Professor Ungarn. But to accept that would be like believing that everything that has happened has been a mere background to a love story. I prefer to discount that rumor and prefer to say only that it is not known exactly wher Hanardy hue Dear Editor: May I commend you on your policy of printing a story by a beginning writer in each of your issues? This is a praiseworthy policy and no doubt encourages many aspiring authors to take a shot at science fiction. However, why not go another step forward and publish monthly a story with as little of the jargon of the medium as possible, and that little, clearly explained; terms defined so they could be understood by any person reading his first science-fiction story. SF has developed a vocabulary of scientific designations, quasiscientific or plain imaginative; a lexicon all its own and as foreign as Greek to tyros -- especially women. Let's get down to bed-rock terms, or explained technical terms, in one masterpiece in each copy. New readers must learn to crawl, then walk, run or fly. -- Hugh Allen, #I Nadine St., Knoxville, Term. #.    Gnome Press and reprinted by Ace Books in #. (Incidentally, Horn is not 'wrongly branded a criminal", but is actually a hired assassin and is presented as such at the opening of the story.) I really think If and Galaxy are fine magazines; and with Galaxy going monthly, I hope we'll see more features ("If -- and When" is a good begiiming). How about a regular queries-and-answers column? I ow I, for one, would take advantage of it from time to time. How about an expanded Hue and Cry? How about some suggestions from other readers for or against some new features? -- Brooklyn, NY # Many readers identified Star Bridge, and our thanks to all. And queries and answers are welcome here in Hue and Cry. So are any suggestions for features you do or don't want. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: In re Rick Norwood's query concerning the book he and 'friends are trying to identify: It is Star James E. Gunn, published in # by Dear Editor: I have read and enjoyed If for umpteen years. Can anyone help me on this short story? Heinlein, I had thought. A spaceship lands on a planet with no life on it but trees which wage war on each other. I think the human goofed them up. Also, who wrote So Shall Ye Reap? Written in late forties or very early fifties. -- Agnes O. McGuire, P.O. Box #, Richland, Wise. # Shall Ye Reap was by Rog August, # issue of Amazing. Maybe some reader can identify the other story; not by Heinlein, certainly. -- Editor.   jj Dear Editor: There seems to be a rash of readers writing you asking for stories by their favorite authors. I might as well put in my two cents, too. How about some stories by Lin Carter, particularly in reference to his Thongor series? By the way, has his column been dropped? And how about a few from Michael Moorcock, if he is writing any in the tradition of his Elric series? Yours is an excellent magazine. To have been awarded a Hugo twice means that you must be pleasing most everybody. But please, how about a good old sword-and-sorcery story once in a while for those of us who enjoy pure entertainment alone every now and then? -- Larry Neagle, #-#th, Lubbock, Texas. Most readers seem to object to having both science fiction and pure fantasy in the same magazine. But you'll be happy to know that we are going to publish some good old sword-and-sorcery tales and other fantasy in a new magazine. Worlds of Fantasy, edited by Lester del Rey. It should be on the stands shortly after this issue of If, and it's definitely pure entertainment. Lin Carter's column, incidentally, was discontinued because it seemed that Lin had already covered the subject so thoroughly that more would be nothing but repetition. -- Editor. '    Dear Editor: The Morrow cover for The Sleeper with Still Hands must surely be one of the all-time greats -- as art, rather than illustration. May I suggest you obtain more Larry Niven stories, more long Zelazny, more Delany and -- more Gree stories! The Gree novelettes show the hand of a fine, first-class craftsman; we need more like these -- nothing tremendous about them, but sheer fun. These stories and others like them are really what form the foundation of SF. How about some stories of computers? Some that don't show them as harbingers of doom for the human race. Stories like D. F. Jones's Colossus make good reading, but for one whose occupation lies in the dataprocessing field, they are likely sometimes to make one feel like Benedict Arnold. Perhaps some of your readers can help me. I'm looking for a story that appeared, I believe, in Galaxy around #. It had the flavor of a Poul Anderson. It involved a spiderlike race that destroyed Earth and almost all of its human inhabitants, save for a few wanderers. They returned to Earth and, finding it a rather unhealthy place, fled; they intended to revive the human race, there being just one catch: Being an all male crew, they had no Eve. I never did finish it. If any of your readers have the issues containing this story lying around with no one reading them, perhaps they would write to me -- I would then become eternally grateful to them. Compliments to the chef; you cook up a fine magazine. -- C. D. VanLaninam, # N. #th Ave. Stone Park, #. # Most of your want list is coming Dpi And the story was by Poul Anderson -- The Day After Doomsday, December and February #I issues of Galaxy. -- Editor...    Dear Editor: I have been a firm science-fiction fan since I was #. During that time I have never met anyone who was really interested in SF. People have been giving me an inferiority complex because they feel that no one who has any inteljjgence reads science fiction. I realize that is not the case. But    By and far, my biggest complaint is that I have no one to discuss science fiction with on any level. One of my friends states that she likes it but e never gets past Star Trek. There are probably many people who have the same problem as #. Isn't there some way you or the rest of those of First Fandom could do to help us? Why don't you start a pen-pal club for science-fiction fans? It would not have to be a regular club with dues and all; people could merely send in a self-addressed envelope and a card with name, address and possibly age. Then the cards could be placed in another's envelope and be exchanged. I feel that people who have an interest in SF should have some way of personal communication. -- Ma Lou Kundrat, Box #,' Seton Hill College, Greensburg, Pa. #I Why not try writing to those whose names appear in Hue and Cry? Some of them will surely be happy to answerl Or perhaps some of the readers share your need for communication and will write you. -- Editor. ciety of America. At Belknap College, Center Harbor, New Hampshire #. Papers are being solicited. Indicate whether you will present a paper or will just attend. Submit title and length of proposed papers learly to Ed Meskys X address above). Sylvania Hotel, Broad  Locust Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Features: Panel Discussion about "Science in Society," moderated by Ted Thomas; Ben Bova on 'Weather Control"; panels on sex and violence in the future, with Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, James Blish, et aliens... A special open meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society will be Sts.) on November #, at # P.M. -- all welcome. For information: Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsyh vania #. of Honor: Robert (Doc) A. W. Lowndes, Advance membership #, or # at the door. Two Progress Reports will be sent to members. For information: Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, ew York #. tiur #famr llrre # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. 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That is why we have arranged to . send you this #-page Treasury of Great Science Fiction for only # -- to help cover shipping -- with a Trial Membership in the Club. Here's how the Club works; each month it offers a really superb new science fact or Edited by Anthony Boucher Two giant volumes. Over # pages of exciting fiction. A handsome addition to your library. Includes John Wyndham's classic ReBirth... Heinlein's Waldo... Anderson's Brain Wave... a total of # full-length novels, # novelets, # short stories by such masters as Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Judith Merril, Alfred Bester, A. E. Van Vogt, C. M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon -- and more. fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and more in their original editions, club members get special full-length, hard-cover edichoose to take an extra value selection at higher prices). And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your Trial Subscription you agree to take as few as four books in the next twelve months. After that you may take as few or as many books as you want, and you may cancel at any time. Please accept my application for membership in the Science Fiction Book to help cover shipping. Then, every month, send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," which describes coming selections. For each book I accept, I will pay # plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extra value selection at a higher price. I need take only four books within a year and may resign any time thereafter. I may return it in # days, pay nothing, owe nothing, and my membership will be canceled. safetTH (Please Print) #  If not delighted with introductory package, return it within # days to cancel membership. Mail coupon to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York, #. If under # parent must sign here (Offer good in U.S.A. only.)  Special Supplement! Extract From a Forthcoming SF Novel November # able from a TV show! Exciting photos, actual scripts,  The show's "bible," used by all scriptions of the series format -- all the things Dept. G P.O.Box # Hollywood, California Please send me: (cash, check or money order accepted) Send to: Name. Address . November, # Vol. #, No. #I # Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn , Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Mike Kirsch by Mack Reynolds Creatures of Light by Roger Zelazny by James H. Schmitz by James Blish by F. Hafnes Price by Charles L. Harness by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, president, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial I n June the asteroid Icarus made one of its fairly frequent close approaches to Earth. Icarus can come quite close indeed, closer than the moon; this time it missed by several hundred thousand miles, But a California guru had a vision that it would hit head-on, preached the word to his flock, and a number of them spent that day on the tops of various mountains, waiting in vain to enjoy the promised tidal waves. More recently two ministers (both also Californians, as it happens) have been granted the revelation that the whole of southern California is to be destroyed by earthquakes about the time you read these words, and as we are writing them some of their parishioners are busy packing to move to Tennessee, which is alleged to be out of the immediate danger zone. To be sure there have been prophecies of doom of one kind or another for a good many centuries. The doctrine of "millennarian-ism" terrified whole medieval populations, who had been led to expect that the one thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ would be the end of the world on New Year's Day of the year #; early in this century, many were frightened at predictions that the Earth was about to pass through the tail of a comet, whose poison gases would kill mankind off completely. What's interesting about this century's Cassandra cries is that, one way or another, they are based not only on scientific facts, but very likely even on science-fiction stories. Wells's The Days of the Comet told of events very like the comet fear of a few decades ago; the idea of the San Andreas fault opening up and dumping California into the Pacific, or of an asteroid striking the Earth, are covered m any number of sf stories. So we have a proposition. Any religious leaders who wish to have an apocalyptic vision and announce it to their followers are offer -- ed a selection of other dooms culled from recent science fiction. No charge. No obligation. Just a public service: #. The Sun goes nova and incinerates us all. #. The Earth's magnetic field reverses and charged particles from space kill us by ionization while it is getting re-established. #. The frozen centrifugal hump at the Earth's equator, left over from eras when our planet spun half an hour faster than it does now, slumps back to where it belongs and the released heat boils every ocean. Enough? More on request, fellows. Just say you saw them first in ... Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Knowthe mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor...  Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. if #SS The computer was tapped, and every man if picked to save itself was murdered. So if fingered Kosloff as the next. I Paul Kosloff the Second looked up at the sweeping second hand ' I 'lie lone technician in the conon the studio clod:, then rearrangtrol booth said into his intered his papers and props on the com, "One minute to go, Prodesk at which he sat. He deared fessor Kosloff." his throat, put a hand to his Byronic-revival cravat for a final touching up. The second hand hit the hour, and the technician touched controls. A red light below the clock flashed on, showing that the studio was hot. The technician activated the canned standard introduction. "... National Tri-Vision brings you the University of the Air and Professor Paul Kosloff with the latest lecture in his Slavic Languages Series . Professor Kosloff. Paul Kosloff looked up from the desk where he had been pretending to study the papers before him and smiled into the baleful triple eye of one of the Tri-Vision cameras. He was a well built man of possibly thirty, undistinguished of face, other than its Slavic qualities of blond hair and blue eyes. "Our subject today, and for several lectures to follow will be the mouth in a rueful smile. "And I am afraid this is one of the crosses the student of Slavic languages must bear since, as you undoubtedly already know, the Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs and various others do not utilize the more nearly universal Latin alphabets, but one that is quite different and, according to its adhereants, postraditionally ascribed to Saint Cyril but was probably the result of the efforts of his followers, based possibly by Cyril himself upon the glagolithic alphabet which is still used somewhat in that area of Common Eur-Asia once known as Yugoslavia..." The technician in the control booth yawned mightily, scratched himself in boredom. An hour later, Paul Kosloff was winding it up. Once again his tone took on a rueful quality. "I am afraid there is no alternative. The serious student is simply going to have to memorize it." He smiled into the Tri-Vision camera and touched a button with his foot. The red light beneath the dock flickered off, indicating the studio was no longer hot. Paul could see the technician going through the motions of running through the canned standard routine of station and program identification. Paul Kosloff leaned back in his chair and shifted his shoulders in an elaborate stretch. He had a tendency to tense up on lens toward the end of any of his hour-long classes. The technician gestured to him in a professional's indication that all was through and this studio completely off the air, and Paul nodded. He came to his feet and fumbled with his papers, gathered them up and stuffed them into his briefcase. IF nphe technician came in smoking a cigarette. Paul's eyebrows went up a little, but he said nothing. He wondered where the other procured the illegal narcotic. Not that it was any of his business. It was up to Central Planning Production and their enforcement arm to keep tabs on the illegal use of farmland. However, he was mildly disapproving. Tobacco demanded the best of tillable land; it wasn't like, for instance, cannabis , which would grow just about anywhere. For every acre put into tobacco, somebody, somewhere, was going without cereal grain or some other agricultural necessity. The technician said, "Well, that's it for the week, Professor. You know, you teachers have it easy." "How's that?" Paul fingered the invisible automatic zipper on his briefcase, closing it. "Well, this job comes under the head of hard labor for me. I put in a full four-hour day, on a fourday-a-week basis. And I'll probably be stuck with it for a full five years before retirement. But here you turn up one lousy hour a week." Paul Kosloff grunted deprecation. "How long do you think it takes me to prepare one of these lectures, Jerry?" He took up the briefcase and stuck it under his arm. The other was only slightly impressed. "Well, I know it isn't exactly off the cuff. But it seems to come out easy enough." Paul smiled faintly. "That's showmanship. Teaching nowadays has its shortcomings, Jerry. In the old days, a professor would work out a basic lecture and give it over and over again, year in and year out, as his new classes came along. Today, you give a lecture exactly once, particularly in a field such as language which doesn't do much in the way of changing. Science would be different, of course, or such subjects as modern history. So you give your lecture once and it's canned, and for the rest of time, for all practical purposes, it's available to any student interested in the subject." "I guess that's right," the technician said, yawning again. "But you've still got it made. Twenty years from now, maybe, you'll still be dragging your royalties. When's your next book going to be put in the data banks, Professor?" "This one on Bulgarian, probably in a month or so," Paul said, preparatory to leaving. And don't be too envious about my royalties. When twenty years are up, a book goes in the public domain, and anybody can dial it in the library computer data banks for free. And there are an awful lot of books on the subject, for the student to pick and choose from, and a penny per reading takes a long time to mount up to much in the way of dollars." " Penny per reading," the other said, indignantly. Are you kidding, hombre? I pay twenty-five cents to read a thriller." P aul was rueful again. "That's fiction. You read it once, keeping it on your library teevee screen booster for probably a few hours, then it's unlikely you'd ever dial it again. But with a textbook, the student needs it over and over, sometimes only for minutes at a time. You couldn't expect him to have to pay twenty-five cents each time he dialed the book." Jerry said, "When I was still in school, we used to buy the kind of book you wanted to refer to over and over." Paul nodded, even as he toned to go. "Time marches on. Every year that goes by, the mini-apartments get smaller. Who can afford the room to have bookshelves these days? Every square foot counts." "Yeah," Jerry said. "You oughta see mine. If I stretch my arms out, I can touch both walls." Paul winced. "Thank the holy living Zoroaster I have one of the older ones. That's the advantage of staying put." He started for the sound proof door that led to the corridor beyond. "Yeh," Jerry said cynically. "One of these days the housing people will come surveying around and figure out some way of making two apartments out of yours. Especially since you're not married." Paul grinned over his shoulder at him, even as he activated the door. "That's as good a reason as I've ever heard of for getting married. When are you going to come mountain climbing with me again, Jerry?" "Ha," the other called after him. "Fat chance. You'll never get me up in those overgrown hills again. When I fell off that cliff, I thought I'd had it. If it hadn't been for you, Professor, I wouldn't be here now." Paul Kosloff had passed beyond the sound of Jerry's voice, so the Tri-Vision technician finished in a lower tone. "And don't think I'll ever forget it, chum-pal. Any time, any time at all, my right arm; 'cause you could have fallen off just as easy as not, coming down to get me that way." T)aul Kosloff made his way down the studio corridor and out into the office area of the University of the Air proper. He found it necessary to murmur greetings to others as they passed, and several times gave a brief wave to someone at a distance. However, he was through for the day and for the week, as the studio technician had pointed out, and had no desire to linger for shop talk with colleagues. In actuality, he had his next week's IF lecture all ready to go and he planned to take several days off for hiking in the New England National Park. It was autumn and there were still enough trees up in that area to appreciate the changing in leaves. He went to the nearest vacuumtube entry in the building and dialed a two-seater. When the light indicated it had arrived, he activated the closet-like door and wedged himself into the small vehicle, putting his briefcase on the seat beside him. Automatically, without need for thought, as automatically as once men drove cars, he brought down the canopy, put his Universal Credit Card in the slot, dropped the pressurizer and dialed the central vacuum-tube terminal. The Tri-Vision studios in which he worked were located in Greater Washington, but he lived in the pseudo-city of Princeton in the area once known as New Jersey. He felt the sinking sensation of the two-seater dropping to tube level, and then the robot controls took over and he shuttled back and forth, preparatory to the shot. The car hesitated briefly, that brief hesitation before the shot proper, and Paul Kosloff took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could refrain. The pressure drove him back into his seat; only seconds passed, and then the direction of the pressure was reversed. The shuttling began again, but lasted only briefly. The green destination light flickered on the dash, and he released the pressure and pushed back the canopy to step forth into the central terminal. He took a twenty-seater to the terminal in Princeton and there transferred to another two-seater and dialed the nearest local terminal to his home. He could have taken his first two-seater all the way from the studio in Greater Washington to his own apartment house, but it was a matter of economy. Like practically all others who were not in possession of a considerable number of shares of Variable Basic, Paul Kosloff made a habit and hobby of watching expenditures. When he finally retired, he looked forward to having accumulated enough Variable Basic to add to his ten shares of government-provided Inalienable Basic to live comfortably and to indulge his hobbies, which consisted largely of outdoor sports. Hiking and hunting, skin diving, and mountain climbing are not of themselves expensive, but getting to the Yukon, the Caribbean, or perhaps the Peruvian Andes can be. He could have dialed his second local two-seater into the apartment house in which he lived, but it was his practice to relax after a broadcast by having a quiet drink in one of the local auto-bars. TTe left the tube and sauntered  into Jerry's Joynt, looking forward to his relaxant. A chap he had known vaguely for some years as a neighbor waved to him. "Hi, professor!" He was seated at a table across the room where there was an unimpeded view of the large screen Tri-Vision set built into the wall. Paul waved a hand negligently. "Hello, Perry. How goes it, hombre?" The man's name, as Paul recalled, was Perry Altshuler and he was seated with his chum-pal, an equal number named Jack Simon. Paul knew them as labor draft dodgers and slackers, of working age but satisfied to live in complete idleness on the proceeds of the ten shares of Inalienable Basic issued by the government to each citizen at birth. It wasn't easy to do, Paul knew, but one could survive on a subsistence level and get through life without turning a hand. The idea didn't appeal to him. Perry called over, "Guess who I just saw on the Tri-Vision." "Who?" "You." Paul Kosloff looked over at him with an air of deprecation. "I didn't know that you were a student of the Slavic languages." "I'm not, hombre, but it's kind of interesting to see somebody you know." Paul Kosloff dialed a pseudowhiskey. What Perry Altshuler and Jack Simon would have called seabooze, the somewhat tasteless and anemic fermented product of the ocean, would have been cheaper, but he made a practice of indulging himself on this one day of the week. Someone else entered the autobar and quietly took a table off in a corner nearest to the door. Paul Kosloff frowned. He had a good memory and knew that he had seen this newcomer just recently. But where? Had he been introduced to the man? Should he say hello? But no, it wasn't that. He didn't know the other, had merely come in contact with him, somewhere recently. And then it came to him. The stranger had been in the same twenty-seater that Paul had arrived in from Greater Washington. It was undoubtedly simply a coincidence that now he had drifted into the same auto-bar. Paul Kosloff forgot about him and returned to his pseudo-whiskey and soda. He kept his eyes studiously from the Tri-Vision screen which Altshuler and Simon were watching. Although he was not fanatical about the matter, Paul Kosloff was inclined to deplore the violence of nine Tri-Vision shows out of ten. The degree seemed to be a progression, at least arithmetical IF but almost to the point of geometric. He remembered reading of the progression of the Roman games. They had started off as rather simple fights between trained and accomplished, swordsmen, and those who watched were largdy the soldiers of a warrior people themselves, knowledgeable and critical about what they witnessed. But each year that went by saw the spectacle grow and the need for the current games to intensify, if the watchers were to be satisfied. And the crowds became less and less trained soldiers and became the whole population, men, women and children. Toward the last, the emperors were providing hundreds of thousands of animals and men to satisfy the bloodlust of their people. Nor were simple fights sufficient. Battles, including naval engagements, were fought in the arena, sometimes between such exotic warriors as pigmies from Africa's interior and seven-foot-tall northmen from far Scandinavia. Criminals were crucified, tied face to face with a rotting corpse until over a period of days, they smothered to death; baboons were trained to rape virgins; living slaves were dipped in tar and strung up to be used as torches. He shook his head and finished his drink. What was there about vicarious violence that seemed to serve a need in so many? Some of their own frustrations seemed to be more bearable if they could watch others being done to death. Paul Kosloff pushed his glass back to the center of the table where it could sink away into the automated kitchen-bar in the cellar, and considered briefly another drink. He shook his head. Watch the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves. He came to his feet and started for the door. In the Tri-Vision screen, two sets of knights were battling, it out. The details of the color show were shockingly realistic. Paul involuntarily winced when a hero with a mace slugged another full in the mouth, nose and chin. The victim's features shattered. He grunted self-deprecation, even as he left the place. Who was he to talk? Since youth he had made a hobby of karate, kenpo, hoppa ken and nanpa ken and even held a Kodakan Judo Black Belt. Perhaps that was one device for getting rid of his own frustrations, although he wasn't particularly aware of any. He sauntered easily in the direction of the building which housed his mini-apartment and let his mind dwell with pleasure on his coming jaunt to New England. His building was of advanced enough nature that he had to identify himself for entrance. He stood before the identity screen, put his thumb against it on the small spot in the lower right hand corner and murmured, "Paul Kosloff." The door opened, and he stepped through into the main lobby. It was then that they jumped him, and from the beginning Paul Kosloff knew he was in for it. These were pros. 'T'here is a sizeable difference in  karate and its related methods of defense and offense in the gym, where you work out with friends, instructors and opponents who are no more anxious to hurt you than they are for you to hurt them, and being attacked with serious intent. It is not just that the participant pulls his punches in the first case, it is the spirit of the thing. The aura of deadly intent, the smell of hurt or be hurt. There were two of them and they came in quickly, silently, the one before Paul Kosloff starting the attack with an attempted high kick to the face. It was purely instinctively that Paul reacted in a classic manner that would have brought plaudits from his current old hand instructor. He swung back with his own left foot -- forcing himself, for the moment, to ignore the other stranger he could see moving from the rear -- grabbed the attacker's foot with his left hand just under the ankle and applied pressure to his knee joint by putting his right hand to the knee and pressing. As the other went down, he lashed out with a kick of his own in an attempt to get the man's groin, but a shattering blow hit him on the left shoulder from behind. He was driven off balance and down and immediately rolled fast to get away from the other's driving attack. He was able to get free, but considered only momentarily trying to achieve the time to work clear of his jerkin. The second assailant was too close upon him, even as the first was rolling out, preparatory to returning to his feet. Paul knew he had to get one or the other from the running quickly or he was sunk. He knew, instinctively, that these two were knowledgeable about hand to hand combat as he was, and they were at least his size and weight. He decided to risk the #st Kata and drew himself into fighting stance. The one who had just slugged him from behind came in fast, throwing a left punch with pointed hand, Nishi ken style. Paul bent his body slightly to the right in downward motion and threw a left edge-of-hand block hard against the other's wrist. He grabbed the inside of the wrist with his left, forcing his arm up high and pulled his opponent's arm upward as he pivoted on his left foot to the left. His body was now completely backwards against the atIF tacker's stomach. He held the other's arm high and with his right elbow came back hard with an elbow blow to the stranger's stomach. With his right foot, he then tried to follow through with a rear kick to his opponent's groin. He flunked it and his chance to eliminate the man, due to the attack of his other assailant. And inwardly he groaned. One man does not defeat two, if all three are equally competent. He tried to go into the Kokut su-dachi defensive layout position, his favorite, but the other was on him before he could get set. And then a new element entered the fray. A third stranger materialized, and for the moment complete despair washed Paul Kosloff. Two had been bad enough and, even though thus far he had been moderately successful in fighting them off, a third was beyond him. However, it was not exactly a stranger. Even as Paul tried to spin to meet this fresh attack, he placed the newcomer. It was the man he had wondered about in Jerry's Joynt a few minutes earlier, the one who had ridden into the pseudo-city of Princeton with Paul in the vacuum-tube twenty-seater. B ut the situation altered even as amazement hit him. For the newcomer took his stand on Paul Kosloff's side and was as knowledgeable, evidently, as anyone else. "Sut!" Screaming the Kiai yell, Paul's new-found ally launched himself into the fight with an #th Kata attack. For a moment, the two assailants stood and fought it eut, and all was a hash of confusion; then, evidently fearing still further outside interference, they managed to disengage themselves and beat their way through the front door and out into the street. Paul Kosloff, his fighting blood up, was all for heading out after them, but his newfound friend, who had wound up the spree on the floor, shook his head and panted. "No. Hold it, Kosloff. They're probably heeled." He came to his feet, dusted the knees of his trousers and felt of his ribs unhappily. Paul said, in indignant wonder, "Heeled! Do you mean those two cheap mugs might actually run the risk of a murder romp, on top of being footpads?" The other looked at him strangely and then bent and picked up a combat knife that thus far Paul Kosloff had failed to notice on the floor. The newcomer tested the point appreciatively with the tip of his right index finger. "You've got it a bit wrong. They weren't cheap thugs. They're well trained professionals. And they weren't attempting to roll you, Kosloff -- they were attempting to kill you." Paul Kosloff blinked. He took the other in more thoroughly. His rescuer was about Paul's age, and a bit shorter, a bit stockier. His eyes were on the narrow side, and there was a quizzical quality about them. He was dark of complexion, but possibly it was sun, rather than racial heritage. However, Paul got the impression that the other was not an American; his clothes, for one thing, had a European cut. Paul said, "You know my name and evidently some of my business. I think you have some explaining to do, Mr..." "Castriota. Zack Castriota. All right, shall we go up to your apartment?" Paul led the way to the elevator, feeling his left leg in the vicinity of his knee gingerly. He hadn't remembered taking a blow there, but evidently one of the others had landed a kick. It wasn't broken, he knew, but it gave him a limp. In the elevator, he said, "Fourth floor," and the robot voice said, "Fourth floor, sir." Even as they ascended, Paul looked at the other from the side of his eyes. He said, "Where did you learn karate?" "Okinawa." "I know you fight Okinawa style, but where did you learn it?" "Okinawa," the other said laconically. "When I was a prisoner there." "Prisoner!" Paul said. "For what?" "Espionage," Zack Castriota said dryly. "And I'm afraid that'll have to hold your curiosity for the nonce. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime." vn the fourth floor, Paul led  the way to his mini-apartment. He said, "How in the name of Zoroaster did you manage to get through that front door? It's supposed to be guarded against strangers." The other chuckled, but didn't even bother to answer. He followed Paul into the small living-cum-bedroom of the mini-apartment. He looked around and nodded appreciately. "Very nice. Must be at least twenty years old. They don't come this size any more." "That's right," Paul said, "and I'm as scared as a funker that some slick will come along and decide to tear it down so they can erect a place on the site that will house twice the number." The one who had named himself Zack Castriota sank down into Paul's sole comfort chair and looked at his host contemplatively. Paul went over to a built-in drawer, opened it and fished around inside. He emerged with a sealed bottle and began twisting the cap. "Holy jumping Zoroaster," the other said. "What's that?" IF "Scotch." "Scotch!" "Scotch." Paul put the bottle down on the small servo-table next to the other and went to his autobar for glasses. He dialed soda and ice. "So far as I know," he said seriously, "it's the last bottle in the world." The other was staring at it, highly impressed. "I've tasted Scotch once or twice, over in Common Europe, but I've never seen a full bottle before. Since the ultra-powers have banned cereals for the manufacture of beverages, it's worth its weight in... well, in..." "In Scotch," Paul Kosloff said definitely. "There isn't anything worth more. My father left me this. One of his few legacies. I've had it for years. Waiting for a suitable occasion to open it. Like my marriage, or the birth of my first child, or something like some complete stranger saving my life, out of a clear sky, for no apparent reason." He had taken up the bottle and now reached for a glass. "Oh, there was reason enough," Castriota said. "And I'm not as complete a stranger as all that. Remember, I knew your name, Paul Kosloff." "That's right," Paul said, scowling at him, even as he made the drinks. "You did. You also evidently followed me from Greater Washington. And you also evidently are acquainted with who those two men were. But, anyway, thanks." He lifted his glass ift a toast, after handing one to Ike other. "You came in the nidi of time." The other hoisted his own drink, "Don't mention it," he said. 'TPhey both drank deeply and op preciatively. And then Paul dipped his hand into the drawer again and caste out with a medium-sized but vicious looking automatic. He said mildly, "Another legacy of my father's. This shooter's from the days of his being over in Common Eur-Asia and elsewhere as an agent." Castriota nodded. "I've heard about your father. What was it they used to call him? The Cdd War's Lawrence of Arabia." Paul nodded, and the gun was directed steadily at the other's stomach. "And now, Zack Castriota, I want some questions answered. An attempt has been just made on my life, and you seem to know ah about it, which is more than I do. You know my name. You know who those men were. You followed me from Greater Washington. You are a highly experienced hand combat man. And you admit to having a background in espionage. So now talk, Mr. Castriota." The other chortled sourly. " Come now, don't make threats unless you Would you really shoot me? There's gratitude for you." Paul gave an embarrassed snort and put the gun down. "No, I suppose not. Don't misunderstand. I am grateful for that part of it, that you helped me get away from them." Zack Castriota chortled again. "Oh, but you're the one who misunderstands. You see, I wasn't primarily interested in your getting away from them." Paul looked at him blankly. Castriota took another sip of his whiskey. I wanted to be sure they got away." II P aul Kosloff was goggling the man as though the other had gone suddenly demented. He could not think of anything to say. His guest laughed. He said, "Oh, I didn't want anything to happen to you either, but I did want them to get away." Paul poured more whiskey, suddenly needing it. "You had better keep talking," he said. "The more you say thus far, the less any of this makes sense. Who are those men? Whom do they represent? Above all, why in the name of Zoroaster should they want to kill me? I'm nothing but a professor of Slavic languages." "We're not sure," Castriota said reasonably. He chopped out a laugh. "That's why I wanted them to get away." Paul simply stared at him. The other laughed once more. "If we'd finished them off, and possibly between us we could have, then we never would have found out who they were." "Well... damn it, we could have tried to knock them out, capture them, overpower them. With the two of us, we had them on the run. I'm not saying they weren't good men; they were. But they were in a more exposed position than we. They were vulnerable. If police, or anybody else had come along, they were breaking laws, not us." "The police did come along," Zack Castriota said reasonably. Paul stared at him. "The police?" "Me." Paul Kosloff had a dangerous tone in his voice now. He said, "Look, hombre, stop roaching me and start making sense. So far, you sound as though you're having the time of your life with this doubletalk you've been giving me. All right, damn it, put your Universal Credit Card on my teevee phone screen there." His face had gone cold. Zack Castriota shrugged in resignation, fished a plastic card from his inner jerkin pocket and stuck it on the screen. IF Paul snapped, " Identity check, please." He looked at his strange guest. "Thumbprint." Castriota shrugged again and stuck his thumb on the screen. A robot voice said, "Identity established, as indicated." Castriota put his hand out for his card, but Paul beat him to it. Castriota said mildly, "Don't you know that it's illegal to dispossess a man of his Universal Credit Card?" He read the card thoroughly then tossed it back to the other in disgust. "Inter-American Bureau of Investigation," he grunted. Zack Castriota grinned at him. "That's right," he said. Paul said in disgust, "Listen, Castriota, I have no interest in I'm a teacher. I don't like cloak and dagger fun and games." "Who does? But it's beside the point." Castriota tilted his head to one side. "To get back to our chum-pals. You're sure you've never seen them before, eh?" "No," Paul said, still in disgust..."But at least one of them is a Rumanian." "Rumanian I How do you know?" P aul Kosloff took up his glass again and walked over to the couch, which became a bed during the night, but now doubled as the only other seating facility besides the comfort chair in the room. He said, "Because when a man is at the height of excitement, or danger -- when he calls out, it is in the language of his birth. He might be a superlative linguist, but when he's in the dill he uses the language of his birth. When our friends there took off, one of them called to the other the equivalent of Let's go! Only he used the Rumanian verb a pleca." "I thought you were a specialist in Slavic languages." "I am, but I also have both Rumanian and Hungarian. When you have three or four languages, adding another becomes easy. Besides, Rumanian is supposedly a Romance language but in actuality the country is completely surrounded by Slavs, and a lot of their words have worked in." Zack Castriota thought about it brought his wrist teevee phone up, for a long moment. Finally, he said, "Priority One, Code A-#." Paul Kosloff couldn't see the face that appeared in the tiny screen. Castriota said, "All right, Hank. I placed it. Undetected, I'm pretty sure. But we can't tell how soon he might get near a mop. These fellows aren't cloddies. By the way, Kosloff says they're Rumanians. That fits. You better pass it on to Myers. I'll check back with you later. I'm taking Kosloff, out to see the big shot in Denver." Paul Kosloff looked at him. Castriota deactivated his phone and came to his feet. He finished his drink with a sigh of regret and put the glass down. Paul said, "Who was that?" "Department of Dirty Tricks, in the Octagon," the other said with a grin. "What's all that talk about Denver?" "There's somebody there you have to see." "To put it crudely, get goosed." Castriota shook his head. "I can't tell you any more at this stage, Kosloff, but whether or not you like it, you're coming to Denver to talk to my ultimate superior on this assignment." "I thought the InterAmerican Bureau of Investigation had its main offices in the Octagon, in Greater Washington." The agent nodded. "But this asKosloff. Now, if I have to, I can call some help and you'll wind up in Denver anyway. But it'd make more sense if you came on your own. Zoroaster, hombre! It can't hurt you to come and hear the fling." "All right, damn it," Paul Kosloff said. Wait until I take a quick shower and change my clothes. Those two dirtied me up." "Go ahead. Take your time. I have some reports to make while his wrist teevee phone to his face. vn the way to Denver, Zack  Castriota would say nothing more dealing with their destination, the attack on Paul Kosloff, the identity of the assailants, nor anything else not pertaining to the trip itself, or off-the-cuff chatter. Evidently he had revealed as much as he believed he was allowed to reveal and, until further developments, was to be mum. They didn't leave the building to summon a vacuum-tube vehicle. carefully. Instead, he dialed an ofit from the lobby entry. It seemed as though they were important enough to rate a priority shot and after a minimum of shuttling were hurtled on through to Denver. At the terminal there, matters slowed sligthly while they were shuttled around and went through some minor shots about the pseudo-city. Castriota growled, "It's like the old days. It took you longer to get from and to the airport than it did to fly half way across the country." Paul Kosloff didn't answer. He was still miffed at the cavalier treatment he was receiving. Theoretically, of course, he could have dragged his heels and refused to go. Theoretically, a man still had his Constitutional rights in the Ultra-welfare State, the United States of the Americas. But he knew IF wanted him to talk to somebody in Denver, he might as well forget about it and go to Denver. Because, sooner or god-damned later, he'd wind up on this mysterious mission to Denver. The vehicle came to a halt eventually and Zack Castriota dropped its pressure and slid back the canopy. They emerged into an extensive office -- so extensive that Paul Kosloff hissed in surprise between his teeth. The vacuum-tube terminal from which they had just emerged had a bank of at least twenty-five entries, and Paul got the feeling that this was but one terminal of many in this building. On top of that, literally scores of persons were either riding one or two-seater inter-office floaters or striding quickly up and down halls anywhere in these days of ultramation? "Where are we?" he said of his undesired guide, half expecting not to get an answer. "Denver, Denver," Castriota said, summoning a two-seated corridor floater. "I knew that. I meant, this building." "Denver, Denver," Castriota said. "What is there in Denver besides your National Data Center?" "Oh," Paul Kosloff said. He climbed onto the floater seat next to the other. Now he could understand the utter magnitude of this building, which dwarfed anything he had ever seen before, even the Octagon in Greater Washington. "What in the name of the holy Zoroaster have I got to do with the National Data Center?" Zack Castriota was dialing the floater. He chuckled and said, "Hombre, if there's anything you have got to do with, it's the National Data Center -- along with every other man, woman, child, dog and parakeet in these, the United States of the Americas." "Very funny," Paul said. However, he decided to hold his peace and await developments. nphe floater took them possibly half a mile in all. Up ramps, down corridors, through lobbies. Toward the end, the surroundings became less grim and efficient and more -- perhaps ostenacious would be the term. They approached, finally, a massive door of the type that would have seemed more appropriate to a cathedral. In fact, there was even an effect, obviously nonsense, of hand carving. The floater came to a halt and Zack Castriota said something into his wrist teevee phone. His tone had lost its characteristic bantering element. They waited a few moments, then the door swung open, and the floater proceeded. Beyond was an enormous reception room. Zack swung himself off the seat of the floater, and Paul followed him. The floater reversed itself and left, the monstrous door closing behind it. Paul growled, Whats this, the ante-room to St. Peter's office?" "Kind of," Zack told him. He headed toward a desk. To Paul Kosloff's surprise, there was even a live receptionist. How ostentatious could you get? The girl was in trim uniform, a uniform that Paul didn't place, and she was spectacularly efficient in appearance. The fact that she could have won any beauty contest going was beside the point and obviously not particularly important. Every hair was in place; every pore, for that matter. The hair was red and spectacular, the mouth wide and generous, but very sincere. Her figure matched her face, and no uniform ever designed could have disguised the fact. She said, most briskly, "Professor Kosloff, Generate Castriota, the director will see you immediately." Her voice matched face and figure, and it came to Paul Kosloff that he would have given a great deal to hear it, early in the morning, still slurring with sleep. She looked at Zack in gentle reproof. "You are several minutes late, Generate" Zack said, Sorry, mio caro. Professor Kosloff, meet Secretary Lisa Stebbins, the prettiest girl in the world, but on the snippish side." She snorted and went back to her screens, her papers and her intercom. Paul Kosloff tore his eyes away from purely staring at her and fell into step with his companion, looking at the other from the side of his eyes. "Generale?" he said. "That's right." "Common Europe?" "Thats right." "You don't look old enough to be a general." "Intelligence, not army." "I thought you said you were "On temporary assignment from our government to yours." Paul cleared his throat. Zack Castriota chortled characteristically and said, "What did you think of our Lisa Stebbins?" "One of the most beautiful women I've ever seen," Paul said. "Ah ha, a common observation, chum-pal, but she's not for such as you and me. Look, along with the rest of us, if you will, but don't think in terms of touching. Our Miss Stebbins is most ambitions and that beautious exterior covers a will of iron when it comes to her long range planning." A nother door, not as monstrous as the one before the entrance, but still imposing, opened before them, and they passed through. The room beyond had obviously been designed by, or at least decorated by, an individual who had very IF clear cut ideas about the type office in which he wished to work. Paul Kosloff was taken aback by the presence of a fireplace which obviously worked. He couldn't imagine what efforts must have been gone into by the architects to pipe the smoke out of a building such as this. There was no desk in the ordinary sense. In fact, the whole suite, of which this immediate room was a part, seemed more like the habitat of a very wealthy bachelor than a place of business. And this room into which they now passed would have been the escape room. A man's escape room. A man who evidently liked books, but had other interests as well, signified by two or three rifles up on the wall, a mounted tuna of impressive size, a rhino head, slightly motheaten, so that it must have been taken quite a few years before. A bar, a real bar, not an auto-bar, in one corner. Paintings of various schools were on the walls; not the way a decorator hangs paintings -- no attempt to blend or to fit into a school, odds and ends of paintings ranging from those of the ashcan school of the early #'s to the current Representational-Abstract. Not that they weren't good paintings -- and expensive. Paul Kosloff could recognize a Degas, one of his own favorite masters. The occupant sat in an old-fashioned overstuffed chair, not a comfort chair. It came to Paul Kosloff that there was no auto-table, no vacuum delivery box, no -- of all impossible things -- teevee screen, in the room. It was an escape room indeed. The room was absolutely primitive, even in the eyes of Paul Kosloff, who was on the revolt-againstthe-ultra-modern side himself. The most important man in the United States of the Americas -- if not the world -- looked up and said, "Good evening, Professor Kosloff." He put his book down. He evidently actually read his books, Paul realized. They weren't just collector's items. Paul said, "Good evening, Mr. Harrison." The Director of the National Data Center nodded to Paul's companion. "Hello, Zack." General Zack Castriota flicked a hand to him in greeting, "Good evening, sir." He made his way to the bar, saying, "My second ppportunity today to have real Scotch. But Paul beats you. He had a full bottle, unopened. Gelcannon." evidently a guy as well as being one of the most important men on earth, or, at least, went through the motions of pretending to be.' He said, "Gelcarinon! I had a bottle given to me some years ago; however, the bottle was right and the label was right -- but the contents were not." paul Kosloff was out of his depth. Within the past few hours there had been an attempt on his life. His first impression of the man who had saved it had been that of a competent, but low-ranking plainclothesman of the national police, now turned into a general of Common Europe. He had brought him into the presence of Dempsey Harrison -- not in title, but in actuality of more importance than the President of the United States of the Americas. Or, for that matter of The Gaulle of Common Europe, or the Chairman of the Presidium of Common Eur-Asia. They, too, were figureheads. Dempsey Harrison was a man in his early sixties, but with that projection of fitness maintained by those who have perfect diet, the best of medical care, suitable exercise, the ministrations of masseurs and all else that ultimate wealth can buy to extend the active life span. Zack Castriota evidently was fully at home. He made three drinks and handed the other two theirs before sinking into a chair. Dempsey Harrison looked at him questioningly. Zack said, "They jumped Paul here, today. I was in the vicinity, of course, and intervened. In time -- this time." The Common Europe operative made a rather wry face. "This timel" Paul said. Harrison looked at him. "Your two predecessors were less fortunate. Take a seat, Professor Kosloff. That one there is a favorite." He settled himself into his armchair and waited until Zack and Paul Kosloff were comfortable before saying, "You must be mystified by all this. It's time for a few explanations." "I wouldn't protest," Paul said. "Very well. Professor Kosloff, what do you know about the computer data banks of this country?" "Why, I don't know. I suppose what the average citizen knows." "Which actually isn't very much. Let me give you some background. You'll need it for what's to come." Paul Kosloff sipped at his whiskey and soda and waited. Dempsey Harrison looked off into far distances. "It came quickly, once it started," he said musingly. "And could easily enough have been predicted, given the computer and the ability to store almost literally an infinite amount of information in a comparatively small area. Oh, the first simple beginnings, the use of punched cards and later magnetic tape, were comparatively primitive, but they lasted only a few years. Today, the National Data Center holds an utterly unbelievable amount of information, Professor Kosloff, and it increases daily." "Well, I knew that, of course." IF H arrison ignored him. "I suppose it really began back in the late #'s when New Haven consolidated all the city's files on the individual into a single data pool open to all city agencies. Santa Clara County in California wasn't far behind, putting all county residents into a computer bank, listing age, address, birth record, driver's license, voting and jury status, property holdings, occupation, health, welfare and police records. "The Federal government wasn't far behind either, although there was an initial dragging of heels in Congress due to the feared invasion of privacy. However, in # the Internal Revenue Service began the utilization of computers in collecting income tax. There is, of course, a good deal more information on income tax forms than pertains to income alone. Adding Social Security information to these data obviously made sense, and material from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which already held dossiers on nearly everyone who had ever applied for Federal employment since #. Then, of course, the Census Bureau, the Defense Department for military records, and finally the F.B.I. records went into the data banks, they were soon followed by those of the House Un-American Activities Committee and by the C.I.A. Thus far, all these records were Federal but the addition of the F.B.I. and other police files made so much sense that the local police of every state, every city, every town, cooperated, and there came to be a national criminal record of practically everybody in the country, even though your individual record might consist of no more than a traffic violation." Dempsey Harrison took a sip of his drink. "It was just the beginning. Medical information was soon added. It was one of the most productive of the steps. A man from New York could find himself in an accident in Oregon. Within moments, at a local hospital, the doctor treating him could get a complete medical record on the patient. Very well, let us stick a pin at this point. "All this was Federal, but at the same time another element was utilizing the capabilities of the computer data banks. I refer to the universities, the libraries, the newspapers -- such depositories of human knowledge. Early in the game they began cooperating in storing information. Soon there was a gigantic data bank of books, encyclopedias, newspaper morgues, everything from Escoffier's Cook Book and that of Fanny Farmer to bartenders' guides and volumes on how to raise canaries. The big step was taken when it was decided to include the Library of Congress and, a few years later, through a special exchange arrangement with his Majesty's government, the British Museum Library. "Ultimately, of course, this educational data was combined with the .Federal government's information on the individual citizen, and all placed under the National Data Center. And then we really began in earnest. Every newspaper, every magazine, every book published in the world, in every written language, is computer translated and placed in the files, in both its original and translated form. But stick another pin there. "Neck and neck with these developments were those in the field of credit and banking, the trend to the cashless-checkless society and the universal credit card. The computer, plus the teevee phone, made possible a national credit system eliminating money in the old sense of the word. A person's income, from whatever source, is placed to his account. By placing his UniCredit Card on the payment screen in any store, restaurant, public transporation vehicle, or where ever, he is debited to whatever extent. If he is overdrawn, of course, the computers immediately reject the purchase of object or service. "But the coming of the teevee phone added still another element to our new society. It made possible immediate communication between everyone, and of communication with the authorities with every individual, or with every citizen in the nation, simultaneously. There was some protest, at first, as was to be expected, but eventually what was once our Social Security number became out identity number, period, which we carry from womb to tomb. This one number combines what amounts to our names, our telephone numbers, our driver's license, our labor draft number, military identification, our license plate number if we own a private floater or car. In short, everything. The step was finally taken to make it illegal not to wear one's wrist teevee phone. Thus, at any given time, the authorities can locate any given citizen." D empsey Harrison raised his eyebrows at Zack, who came to his feet and refreshed their glasses. The operative from Common Europe said gently, "The same applies, of course, to my own country. Possibly we haven't gotten quite to the point you people have, but it's coming, it's coming." He tongued his lower lip and added, "God dammit." Harrison nodded, and there was a weary aspect in his voice now. "We didn't ask for it, exactly. Something like Topsy, it just grew; but now, Professor Kosloff, we are what Vance Packard, some decades ago, called The Naked Society . We are the computerized society. The IF Ill privacy which we once demanded is no more. Perhaps that is the only way it could have been. To insist that an American of this period is entitled to the same privacy as they who lived in the agrarian America of # is like insisting on the right to drive a horse and buggy along an ultra-expressway." Paul shifted in his chair and said uncomfortably, "Of course, very little of this is unknown to me, Mr. Harrison." The Director of the National Data Center nodded. "I was merely summing up to give you background for what is to come. Our whole world is now dependent upon our computer system. Our whole economy, our whole way of life. We can no more go back than today's Greeks could go back to the Golden Age of Pericles." "I still don't see what all this has got to do with me." "Professor Kosloff, suppose someone whose interests were not those of the United States of the Americas discovered a method of tapping our data banks?" Paul Kosloff looked at him, some of the ramifications coming through. "Worse yet," Zach Castriota said gently, "Suppose they figured out a method of wiping them clean, electronically, from a distance." "Zo-ro-as-ter," Paul Kosloff breathed. The data-center head nodded. "Indeed." aul Kosloff waited for more. "As you know," Dempsey Harrison went on, "although most information filed away in the data banks is open to all citizens to call upon as they will, some is classified on various levels and a priority is required to release it. Such information as military, for instance. Every detail of our military machine and its planning is stored in our data banks, Professor Kosloff. Besides that, we have scientific information pertaining to weapons and defense, but to other subjects as well." Harrison thought about it for a moment. "Theoretically, of course, the Cold War is no longer with us, but in actuality the battle for men's minds goes on, and the relationship we have with Common Eur-Asia has some attributes of an armed truce. Then too, there are the neutrals." The National Data Bank head looked at Zack Castriota. "Including the strongest of all, Common Europe. Both our country and Common Eur-Asia are no longer quite so avid to have the neutrals fall into our laps. We are more nearly self-sufficient, less in need of markets and sources of raw material, than we were in the old days. However, we still both desire the balance of power to incline slightly at least in our own direction." Dempsey Harrison shook his head and left that trend of thought. "But the point is that although we are at peace with Common Eur-Asia, we would not like to see them in a position to drain our data banks of their information." "Nor to wipe them clear," Zack Castriota added dryly. Paul Kosloff scowled. "How do you know this can be done, or, if it can, who is doing it?" "Rumors have been coming through for some time," Harrison told him. "In fact, we are near some breakthroughs in the same field ourselves." "Oh, ho," Paul said sourly. "So we're guilty of the same attempt." The older man shook his head, sadly. "I would not deny it. If you fall behind in the race of progress, sometimes you wind up falling flat on your face, Professor Kosloff." "But how do you know this is being done?" Zack Castriota laughed abruptly. "One bit of evidence is the fact that your two Rumanian friends jumped you. In fact, you were being used in the way of bait, Kosloff. When these rumors first started coming through, we decided to send a man or so into what was once called the Balkans to check around a bit. So we put the problem into the labor draft files and brought forth a name. A man of about thirty, intelligent, multi-lingual, experienced in combat and other trouble, but with no espionage record. He even had relatives in Common Eur-Asia that he could be expected reasonably to visit. Wizard. But before we could even interview the man, he was killed. Murder is uncommon these days, Kosloff, and obviously we were surprised. So we turned back to the data banks and located another person with the same qualifications. And he too was cut down before we even got to see him. The next time, we slapped an immediate guard on our prospective agent, with the results that you know." # CWou mean me, of course," Paul  Kosloff said, taken aback. "Of course," Zack said. "Even as it was, they nearly got to you. Kosloff, there's only one way they could have known that you had been chosen to go into Common EurAsia on an information-gathering assignment. They tapped the computers. You don't easily tap computers connected with the InterAmerican Bureau of Investigation." Paul Kosloff shook his head negatively. "All right," he said, "but the answer is no." Dempsey Harrison looked at him in question. "The answer to what?" "I'm not going into Common EurAsia as an espionage agent." Paul pointed at Zack Castriota. "He's a pro, this is his field; let him or his fellow pros in the field do it. I'm a teacher of language. No thanks." IF The data banks official leaned forward. a The labor draft computers say you are the most suitable man in the whole United States of the Americas for the assignment." "Then the computers have sprung a leak," Paul Kosloff said. He came to his feet. "I'm sorry." Dempsey Harrison looked up at him, then at Zack Castriota. Castriota shrugged. "If you're thinking he's a funker, he's not. I've seen him in action. And I still think the computers were right. He's the best man for the job." Harrison sighed. "This is a task for a volunteer. We'll find someone else, General Castfiota." For the next several days, Paul Kosloff stewed. He could have taken his projected hiking trip into the New England National Park, but didn't. But, for that matter, neither could he find it in him to work on future lectures. He was irritated with Zack Castriota and with Dempsey Harrison. A man of Harrison's stature doesn't ordinarily personally call upon a citizen of no more prominence than Paul Kosloff. He had a hundred thousand underlings and more at his beck and call, surely many of them experienced troubleshooters. Why tap a bookish bachelor who knew no more of the world of cloak and dagger than he knew of the latest laboratory work going on in Satellite City or the tiny moon colony? Why? Because the computers had couldn't imagine why. Well, as Harrison had said, it was a job for a volunteer. They couldn't make him take it. And what was the age-old army maxim? Never volunteer. T T e didn't consider himself a patriot. He had no desire to die for the United States of the Americas. Patriotism was a sentiment of yesteryear, a victim of the new trends of society, along with organized religion. Vaguely, he was pleased that he was an American rather than a citizen of Common Eur-Asia, Common Europe, or any other land. But it wasn't that important to him. He made the usual contributions to the society of which he was a part, worked at least as hard as the next man, in his chosen profession and, had there been war or other national emergency -- Zoroaster forbid -- would undoubtedly have gone when drafted, but not before. Let Harrison and his people, and Castriota and his, worry about the National Data Center and whether or not it was being tapped by potential foes. His job was doing lectures for the University of the Air and eventually combining them into a series of books for the nation's library banks. He moped around, disgruntled for reasons he knew not, unable to get into his Bulgarian work which he was trying to get ready both for book form and as canned Tri-Vision lectures. So it was that when Zack Castriota turned up four days later, he was inwardly glad to see the Common Europe agent -- not that he let the other detect that fact. Paul Kosloff was seated in his comfort chair when the door screen was activated and Castriota's face was there. He touched the switch that opened the door, but didn't come to his feet when the other entered. "Don't roach me," he said. "The answer is still no." Zack Castriota laughed and went over to the auto-bar and dialed. "Hey," Paul growled, "stick your own credit card in there. I don't want it on my account." The other grinned at him and put his Universal Credit Card in the auto-bar's slot as ordered. "Pleasure," he said. "Unlimited expense account. We cloak-and-dagger men don't have to worry about such mundane matters, Kosloff." "Oh, wizard. I'll join right up. What do you want, Castriota?" The other, glass in hand, sat down on the couch. "I've been going through your dossier in the data banks. Very interesting." "Going through my dossier! What right have you to get into my dossier? Why, you're not even a citizen of this country. A man's dossier is private. Only authorized governmental personnel connected with whatever field is involved can inspect a man's dossier." Castriota grinned at him mockingly. "You'd be surprised how very authorized I am, Kosloff. You know what I found?" "What? By the holy jumping Zoroaster, I'm going to recheck my dossier myself and challenge anything I don't like there." 'T'he Common Europe agent knocked back half of his drink. "That's your right, of course. But I doubt if you'll challenge this. I found that you have a knack for excitement, Kosloff. Supposedly, you're a stogy university professor, but in the way of hobbies you certainly swing out. I already knew that you've got a flair for karate and have a black belt in Kodakan Judo. But what else do I learn? That you were both rifle and pistol runnerup in the selection of the last Olympics team run-offs. That you spend a good many of your vacations up in such places as the Yukon, hunting and fishing -- alone. That you've been in some sticky spots in skin-diving and mountain climbing. Oh, you're quite a professor, you are, Kosloff. No wonder the computers pulled you for the Common Eur-Asian assignment." Paul Kosloff said, "Look here, IF Castriota, I heard your fling the other day. The answer is still no. What did you come here for?" Castriota finished his drink. "I thought you might like to be in on the kill." Paul looked at him. Castriota said complacently, "What did you think I meant the other day when I told you I was primarily interested in seeing that those two assailants of yours got away?" "I thought you meant you were off your rocker," Paul said sourly. The other shook his head, and brought from his pocket a tiny object that looked like nothing so much as a brown bean. He leaned forward and put it in Paul's hand. Paul Kosloff scowled down at it. It was of plastic so far as he could see and smaller than a tiny pea. "What's this supposed to be?" "It's a miniaturized bug, old chum-pal." "Bug?" "A radio transmitter, old chumpal." "This small?" Paul Kosloff was surprised. "But what of it?" "Its equal number is at present residing in the side pocket of the jerkin of your Rumanian friend. It's beginning to move about again, so we assume he is currently wearing the jerkin in question. We've been stymied for several days, because it was remaining in one spot, probably hanging in some closet, or some such. We daren't zero-in on it, because they might not have been in the immediate vicinity, might have spotted us and taken off." "Wait a minute, now. You mean you planted one of these on that Rumanian bastard the other day?" "That's what I've been telling you. While we were scuffling around down in your lobby. Want to be in on the kill? Maybe I'll need a Rumanian translater." "Where is he?" "Manhattan." # # A T anhattan! Manhattan's been deserted for years." "Not exactly. There's a few hundred or so of what they call baboons. Possibly a few thousand. They don't exactly admit to a census. Fugitives, left overs from the riots who are afraid to come over to the mainland, mental cases, foreigners without papers who aren't eligible for being issued Inalienable Basic and hence have no way of maintaining themselves on the mainland. Then there are the looters who scrounge through the ruins trying to find art objects, jewelry, saleable things they can take to the mainland and sell to antique and art dealers. And there are always a certain number of scholars going through the rubble of the museums and libraries, trying to find this or that, and sometimes investigators prowling through the Wall Street section, trying to locate some lost record or whatever. There's even a small contingent of police at the vacuum-tube terminal at what used to be called Grand Central' "What in the name of Zoroaster do they live on?" Paul Kosloff said. Castriota shifted his shoulders in a European shrug. "A city as big as New York had one hell of a lot of canned and bottled food and water around, even after the riots and looting. They'll never find it all." "And there's nobody there except these baboons and the few others you mentioned?" The Common Europe agent said wryly, "Evidently, there's also at least two of the espionage boys there as well." "But no, well, legitimate citizens?" The other shrugged again. "Possibly a few. Non-conformists who reject the Ultra-welfare State. Refuse to settle down to a life based on what amounts to a government dole, your Inalienable Basic stock issued to every citizen at birth. You know: artists, poets and what not. A few of them evidently still live in the Greenwich Village area. They move into abandoned apartments, some of them pretty swank, and make out by getting food, clothing and whatever else they need from the ruins of department stores, private homes, so forth and so on." "Good grief, what a life," Paul said. He got up and went over to the auto-bar and dialed beverages. "What are you drinking?" "Pseudo-whiskey and soda. You know, it's not as bad as all that," "Like hell it isn't," Paul said. He dialed two more of the same. "The more ultramated we become the lousier the quality of just about everything. Have you ever seen an Irish Donegal tweed sport jacket?" "Yes," Castriota said. X)aul ignored his answer. "I wore one when I was younger. My father left it to me. That's how clothes were in the old days, they lasted so well you handed them down, father to son. Hand-woven tweed, then hand-tailored. Look at this goddamned junk we wear today. And look at this lush we drink, and the food we eat." The other said, "Well, frankly, your food over here is a cross any European has to bear. It's getting worse in Common Europe as well, but in this regard you are far, far ahead of us -- If you can call it ahead." Paul said, "Look, to get back to this Manhattan thing. You think that those two who jumped me the other day are over there, eh?" "We know they are. We've got a fix on them. They obviously don't know they're carrying a bug around. It wasn't easy to plant in the midst of all that jam-banging around we IF were going through. You see, the idea was, we wanted to know where they were holed-up, how many of them there might be, what kind of equipment they were using to dip into the data banks. If we can locate them, we might make a clean the two professional assassins is nothing. We want the works." "So where do I come in?" "A preliminary look-see. We're not ready for the big operation yet. When we are, a hundred operatives will drop in like a swarm of locusts from floaters and helio-jets. But right now, we want a preliminary reconnaisance deal. Nothing to scare them. They might have some way of destroying their equipment but quick, even a mini-nuclear device, or some such." Paul Kosloff winced. "Mini-nuclear device?" Castriota grinned at him. "You aren't up on the latest, Kosloff. The miniaturization of everything and its cousin progresses. I understand that the first A-Bombs dropped on Japan weighed tons. I saw a mini-Hbomb, there in the Department of Dirty Tricks in the Octagon the other day, that was no bigger than a baseball. I leave to your imagination what could be done in the way of extortion with such a little plaything in the hands of a gang of criminals." Paul Kosloff said suddenly, "Look here, Castriota, how is it that you're so prominent hi this thing? You're not even an Asiorican and here you seem to be hi full charge." "Well, I'm not. I'm just up here on the firing line. I have one big adassigned to be helping. You see, I'm not in your data banks." "Oh, yes. That would be right. If they're tapping the American data banks, they could find information pertaining to the men who were looking for them. But not you. Your dossier would be in the Common Europe computer data banhs." "Right." The other came to his feet. "Well, what do you say, Kosloff? Want to take a look around Manhattan with me?" npo his own surprise, Paul Kosloff stood erect and said, "All right." The next split second he told himself he would have liked to retract his words but it was too late by then. Zack Castriota chuckled. Paul went over to the buih-in drawers of his mini-apartment, opened the top one and pulled forth his .# noiseless and its harness. He shucked out of his jerkin, shrugged into the harness, buckled it and checked its tightness. He pulled the gun to check its looseness in its holster, then returned it. Castriota said gently, "Let's hope we don't need that. What was it the old timer said? Violence is the resort of the incompetent? Agree?" "Ummm," Paul said sourly. "But from what you say about those baboons that occupy the ruins, I'd just as well have this shooter along. I have a sneaking suspicion that everybody on that island goes around heeled." "You couldn't prove it by me," the other said, heading for the door. "I've ridden over the place in a helio-jet, but I've never landed." He opened the door, and made a mock gentlemanly gesture for Paul to precede him. As they took the elevator down to the lobby, Paul said, "If you've never been on Manhattan, how in the name of Zoroaster are your ever going to find these cloddies?" "We've got a full-time contact man under cover there. Hombre named Mark Martino. And, of course, we have the bug to zero-in on." In the lobby, Castriota dialed a two-seater, vacuum-tube vehicle. When the light indicated it had arrived, he opened the closet-like door. hicle this time?" "We're incognito," the other said. "We don't know what facilities they might have in the way of defense. Very possibly they keep a check on the terminal at Grand Central. Wouldn't be too difficult. It's the only terminal on Manhattan and largely the other means of ingress to the city are clogged up, blown up, burned down, or whatever." He went through the motions of dialing them through to Manhattan, and shortly the preliminary shuttling began. They had no priority this time and were shipped back and forth for a seemingly endless time before the shot. Zack Castriota said conversationally, "I've always wanted to see one of your ruined cities. Read about it in school, the riots and all." "You had no equivalent in Common Europe, I understand." "No. Same situation didn't apply. Oh, we had our slums, especially in the Latin countries, but, you know, I don't believe quite what you had here. You Americans used to be so proud of your number of cars, refrigerators, color-television sets and so forth, that you never seemed to quite comprehend that not only did you have a good many people living at the world's highest standards, but also a good many living at some of the lowest in the West. In whole countries, such as the Scandinavian, Switzerland, Benelux, there were no such things as slums at all." T)aul looked over at him. "Do I detect a slight anti-Americanism, chum-pal?" Castriota laughed. "No, not really. I've always been fascinated by the so-called American dream. IF That's one of the reasons they picked me for this assignment. It's not my first trip over, of course." "I wouldn't think so; you're at least as far up in your American idiom as I am." The shuttling of the vacuumtube vehicle in which they sat stepped and both sucked in air in anticipation. Paul said, "To what extent do you have these infernal machines in Common Europe?" "Not as much as here. Your distances are greater. You had to have something that would take you a thousand miles in nothing flat. But you take some nation such as Belgium. If you climb onto a bicycle, by the time you've got up speed, you're in another country if you don't look out." The pressure pressed them back into their acceleration seats. Castriota said, "Talking about the cities, whatever happened to Boswash?" The pressure fell off, then reversed. "Boswash?" Paul said. Castriota chuckled. "The idea was that your cities would continue to grow until there was just one big city along the Atlantic seaboard from Boston to Washington. Boswash. It would have a populaThen there'd be another gargantuan megalopolis called Chipitts which would run from Chicago to Pittsburgh and north to Canada thus taking in Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Buffalo and Rochester. And a third, Sansan, which would run from San Francisco down to San Diego on the Mexican border. Chipitts was to have a populaPaul Kosloff winced at the picture, even as their vehicle's shuttling began all over again. "One more of the predictions of disaster that didn't come off," he said. "Like oil giving out and leaving us without fuel by this period. Instead, of course, we're using other power sources. And nuclear war, which was going to wipe out the race. It didn't come. It didn't make sense to anybody . And the Russians trying to conquer the world and impose their type of communism on it. That didn't happen either; they were too busy minding their own business. And the pollution of the air that was going to be so bad that the climate would be changed. Of course, discontinuing the use of fossil fuels to such an extent stopped that trend. The thing is that the existence of a trend is no guarantee that it will continue." C astriota looked over at him. "But what happened to Boswash, Sansan and Chipitts?" "The population explosion and the urbanization of ninety percent IF of the population failed to materialize for reasons that seem obvious now, but were evidently too much for the extrapolaters back during the middle of the century. The population simply didn't explode the way they predicted. Not in America and the other advanced countries. The birth rate began to fall off dramatically even in the #'s and #'s. And for obvious reasons. To maintain any kind of standard of living both a man and wife had to work, so raising a sizeable family was difficult. Homes got smaller and smaller, so that it was difficult to find one large enough for a family of five or ten or more, such as our grandparents used to raise. Many apartment owners wouldn't rent to people with children. Then the cost of living skyrocketed, and feeding and clothing a large family became prohibitive, not to speak of sending them through school, and by this time, if you didn't have a college education you were out of the running. The pill came along, and then even more efficient and economical methods of preventing conception. And religious organizations, once opposed to birth control, first began to hedge about such restrictions and later withdrew them entirely. Even the government got in the act by passing such legislation as legalized abortion, and free sterilization of any consenting adult." Paul Kosloff thought about it. "Other things were happening at the same time! The family as we knew it, began to fall apart. People became more, well, hedonistic, I suppose. A girl no longer wanted the home, family and responsibilities of her mother. She wanted primarily a good time. She wanted luxuries, to travel, to live it up. She revolted against being tied down to children. There were other angles, too. Immigration once helped to boom the population of the United over from Europe and elsewhere. But that fell off; in fact, laws prevented it, even if Europeans had been as keen to come to America as they had been in the past. In fact, the flood began to ebb in the other direction. As far back as the lived abroad. A lot of these were military, or held down some job that kept them overseas, but the number of expatriates was zooming. Why live in the most expensive country in the world, when you can pick such spots as Mexico, Spain, Greece, Morocco and a score of other countries where the cost of living is a fraction? On their Social Security income, oldsters in California or Florida could live only on a poverty level. In Mexico they could live in luxury, complete with servants." "But what happened to your formerly booming large cities?" Castriota said. Their vacuum-tube vehicle was shuttling again. Evidently, it took another shot to get to Manhattan; the terminal there was undoubtedly a smallish one. "Various things, including the riots that hit so many of them, and over and over again. But simultaneously, something more important. You've got to realize that big cities are not attractive places in which to live, and especially American big cities. It got to the point that the air was unbreathable, the water undrinkable, the smog a real threat to health. It also got to the point that traffic could hardly move, that educational facilities, garbage disposal, police and fire fighting facilities became more and more inadequate and under financed." # # T f they were that bad, why did  people come to them?" "Largely because they had to. No person in his right mind would prefer to live in Harlem as opposed to Puerto Rico or most of the American South. But as the automation and then ultramation of agriculture privileged, under-educated citizens moved to the large cities in hopes of finding work, or, at least, getting on relief. And the more of them that moved into cities like New York, the more of those people who could afford it moved out. City after city became populated predominately by Negroes, .Puerto Ricans and others in the lower income bracket. "But there were other things developing simultaneously. Originally, the purpose of a city was for defense and trade and to be a manufacturing center. But in the modern age, a city is no defense; in fact, it's a death trap in case of war. So far as trade is concerned, in the old days the streets were lined with thousands upon thousands of small shops and businesses, hundreds and hundreds peddling identical objects. The coming of the super-market was an indication of the eventual ending of that. The small shop, the small business, largely became anachronisms. Ultra-markets, ultradepartment stores, took over, and there is no particular reason for such being located in a large city. In fact, it's much handier to locate such distribution centers out in the wide-open spaces, particularly after the emerging of ultramation into distribution and the delivery to the home by vacuum-tube method of most purchases. "At the same time, came the teevee phone, satellite relays, international integration of communications. A businessman no longer had to see his business contacts personally. He could be sitting in his home in Hawaii and dial through immediately to a factory manager in, say, Kansas. There was no particular reason for him to have an office on Wall Street, or anywhere else except his own home. "But the real blow to the city IF came when the federal government integrated what amounted to all charity and a good many pensions, such things as Social Security, relief, and unemployment insurance. With the issuing of ten shares of Inalienable Basic stock to every man, woman and child in the country, the need for the unemployed, the aged, the crippled, or whoever, to move to such cities as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, in order to get on relief, was ended. "A poverty striken Puerto Rican who had fled his island because he couldn't make a living there could now return. A Negro who had possibly been born in Harlem was free to move to Colorado, if he liked mountains, or possibly the west coast of Mexico, if he liked tropical beach. He didn't have to stay in the riot and hate racked cities, any more than did a middleclass white man who had moved out to suburbia so that he could breathe." Tphe vehicle in which they rode had come to a halt, and the green light indicating arrival at their destination was flashing. Zack dropped pressurization and activated the canopy. They stepped forth into a comparatively small terminal and full into the view of a stocky police officer. He looked at them both coldly, even as they stretched to relieve muscles after the cramped quarters. The policeman said, "You've made a mistake. This is Grand Central terminal. Manhattan." "No mistake," Zack told him. He fished into an inner pocket and brought forth a document. There was a buzzing in the background. For the moment, the cop ignored the proffered paper. He said, "That's a metal detector. You're carrying a shooter, Mister, and they aren't allowed on this island." Zack said patiently, "If you'll look at this authorization, you'll see that we both have permission to be armed. We've heard of the... the baboons." The police guard took the paper and looked down at it. "My name's jobs is to warn you that you have no police protection on Manhattan. Or any other kind of protection, for that matter. And there're no restaurants, no hotel facilities, no stores, no nothing. The city has been abandoned. If you get into any trouble, you're on your own." "We knew that before we came," Zack said reasonably. The cop looked him full in the face. "You aren't a couple of damned hunters, are you?" IV " blankly. "On a ruined island like Manhattan?" to be on active duty as a police guard and inclined to a certain slowness of movement; however, there was a confidence and a dignity and he looked levelly into the younger man's eyes. "You don't appear to be," he said, "but you never know." He looked back and forth between the two newcomers. "There isn't any law in the ruins of Manhattan. No police, no courts, no prisons. If somebody shoots you, you're on your own. If you shoot somebody, it's too bad for them. So far as you're concerned, it's self defense. This is possibly the only place in the world where a man other man, or woman or child, for that matter, can come, do it and get away with it" "Holy Zoroaster," Paul Kosloff said. The cop nodded wearily. "So some come. All done up in bulletproofs and with fancy guns. We call them hunters. They're usually bigwigs, wealthy thrill seekers. Maybe they're the type that like to go to Africa, or up to Northern Alaska, or wherever game still exists, and get their jollies shooting up deer or elephants for the sake of getting heads to hang on their walls. When you've got all the other heads, maybe you start thinking in terms of adding a... baboon to your collection." Zack Castriota snorted. "Do we look like a couple of trophy hunters?" "Like I say, you never know. Not that I could stop you if you were. You have the authorization to prowl around in the ruins. What is it you do want?" He added grudgingly, "J u st possibly I can help out." Zack went into his prepared story. "We're looking for a lost Rembrandt. It was first thought that during the looting somebody swiped it and got it over to the mainland. But it hasn't turned up, and we're beginning to suspect that it never left the island. In fact, we have reason to believe that some down-and-out pseudo-artist, down in Greenwich Village, stole it and then was either killed or burned out of his apartment house himself. We think it might still be in that house and possibly recoverable." "Rembrandt?" "A Dutch painter whose works go said, fitting into the story. know how I could help you in this case." Zack said, "Could we get a floater around here?" The police guard said unhappily, "It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. Make you too conspicuous." "Why not? We've got to get all the way down to Washington Square." "Because I can't let you have an IF armored police vehicle, and the ordinary civilian ones weren't meant for shedding bullets." ack and Paul looked at him. He said patiently, "Some of the baboons carry high-powered sport rifles. I've known a few to carry elephant guns. They'll punch a hole right through a floater." Zack said plaintively, "Why should they want to bother someone like us?" "Various reasons. On the offchance you might be in possession of something worth plundering -- even a box lunch, for instance. Or possibly just because they're goosedoff at the type of citizen who can afford to rent a floater." Zack sighed. "Well, we'll just have to risk it," he said. "We can't walk all the way down to what was once Greenwich Village." "It's your neck, hombre," the policeman said. "Here, follow me. Sorry I can't let you have a police vehicle." As they progressed down the ruins of Fifth Avenue toward Madison Square, Zack Castriota manually controlling the air cushion vehicle, Paul Kosloff looked at the other from the side of his eyes. "Wasn't that a pretty complicated fling to give that cop? We didn't have to tell him anything, did we?" Zack chuckled, steering expertly around a jammed up group of crashed and abandoned cars and trucks. "You babe in the woods," he said. "When Dempsey Harrison told you we were now the Naked Society, he wasn't just whistlin' Dixie. I'll bet you didn't even know that without coming within a thousand miles of you, put a bug in your wrist teevee phone without you knowing anything about it. They can monitor not only everything you say or receive in your phone conversations, but all the talk and other sounds that goes on in your vicinity. They can do this to everybody in the United States of the Americas who wears a teevee wrist phone, if and when they wish." Paul Kosloff stared down at his in consternation. "They can?" "Yes. And, of course, it is illegal not to wear your teevee phone. But that's just the beginning. We can bug rooms right through a wall. We can read conversations going on in a room by the vibrations on the windows. We can listen in on a conversation going on in the open, half a mile away. Oh, you'd be amazed how we snoopers can snoop these days, hombre." "Well, what's that got to do with you giving that cop a complicated fling about looking for a Rembrandt?" "Suppose the bad guys were stationed at some window, a couple of blocks or so from the vacuumtube terminal, monitoring the conversation of everybody who came out? It could be done. That many persons don't come to Manhattan. Suppose I had flashed my buzzer and requisitioned an armored police Can you see how their defenses would have gone up?" F)aul growled, "You seem to get  awfully romantic. All we're looking for is two men, one of whom at least seems to be a Rumanian. To hear you talk, you'd think they had an apparatus on this island big enough to invade the country." "Not that big," Zack said, again avoiding a pile of rubble in the street. "However, those two are not alone. They're hatchetmen, triggermen, taking their orders from someone else." They rode in silence for a time, at Madison Square Park turning down to Union Square. Paul made a gesture of disgust at the ruins of the city, as they progressed. "There's an example of what I was telling you about. The cities of the old days. Look at those buildings. A restaurant where you could buy inadequate food at inflated prices. A clothing store, next to another clothing store, where you could buy the same things. A liquor store. Another restaurant, a movie house where you could sit with thousands of others, exchanging colds and other contagion, a food stre, a stationery store, another clothing store, women's hats, a drugstore, a newsstand. Cross the street and start all over again. A clothing store, a restaurant..." "All right, all right," Zack said. "I get it. The means of distribution in the old days were antiquated." "And there was another thing, I didn't mention before. These supercities you brought up. Boswash, Sansan and Chipitts and so forth. They were to be located in parts of the country we couldn't afford to turn over to urbanization. We needed the land. Back during the middle acres of land were yearly being converted into suburbs or expressways to serve them. Land that we needed for grain, fruit, graze. Obviously, it makes more sense to build your homes on land that is impractical for agriculture. Up in the mountains, out on the deserts, along the seashore of Baja California, along the Keys of Florida, up in Canada for those who like that climate, all over New Mexico and Arizona for those who like that. With transportation what it is now, why not? Even that far back there were many New York businessmen who lived in Florida and commuted. Now it makes sense to live on a Caribbean island, or in South America, and either handle your business by teevee phone, or, when necessary, you can be lobbed up to any place in the nation in a matter of minutes." IF Something went ping and caroomed off the front of their floater. Zack blinked and speeded up. "Zoraster," he complained. "That take a shot at you here for just no reason at all. Happily, that wasn't much of a caliber." "I heard the shot," Paul said, looking back over his shoulder. "Sounded like a twenty-two." TT'rom Union Square, they turned  down Broadway. These wider streets weren't impossibly bad, though it would have been difficult to have proceeded in a wheeled vehicle. As it was, they could easily go over much of the rubble, or, if the blockage was bad, up on the sidewalk. Zack Castriota shook his head. "It must have been something," he said. "It's difficult to imagine." Paul Kosloff nodded agreement. "Everything seemed to culminate at once, so I understand. City government fell apart, overnight; police, fire fighting, garbage disposal -- everything. At the same time the, slum element took to the streets en masse . And, suddenly, everybody who could leave decided to leave. Everybody, finally even the looters and criminal element." Zack said, "I understand they're cleaning up some of the outlying areas." "That's right. But not Manhatr tan. Too big a project. They can come down the river, far into what they used to call the Bronx. And they can come in from Long Island. But it's one hell of a job and I doubt that the land being reclaimed for parks, for agriculture, for new pseudo-cities, is really worth the fantastic price and effort." A spiderweb suddenly appeared on one of the side windows and both of them involuntarily ducked. Neither heard the sound of the shot. "That one must have been a Noiseless," Zack growled as he zigzagged a little. Paul said, "You know what's happening?" Zack looked at him. "Damn right I know what's happening, hombre. We're getting shot at." "Yes, but you know why? They think we're hunters. Everybody armed takes a shot at us, just for luck." "Oh, wizard. We should be flying a white flag, or something." At West Third Street they turned right. Paul said, "Do you know where we're going?""More or less." Zack pulled a street map from an inner pocket and handed it to his companion. "This is the area that used to be an art colony and hangout of crackpots in general. Something like the Via Margutta in Rome or the Left Bank of Paris. We're looking for McDougal street." He avoided a jumble of crashed automobiles, then jabbed at the map with an index finger. "We're coming down here. Try to locate us." Paul studied the map in some despair. "The appearance of this town has somewhat altered." "From what I understand, four streets out of five can't even be found." "It looks as though it's been bombed." Zack looked over at him. "Have you ever seen a bombed city?" "No," Paul grumbled, trying to decipher the map. "But it still looks as though it's been bombed. I guess there was some bombing at that, particularly toward the end when the troops and National Guard were brought in." "It ought to be in here some where." P aul said suddenly, "Turn left here -- I think." "Yeah, there's an old sign. McDougal street. Now all we have to do if find the house where this hombre lives." "You know him?"  "No. His name is Mark Martino. He's been in here for years. His cover is being an off-beat musical composer. He's supposed to be in revolt against People's Capitalism and the Ultra-welfare State." "What number house?" Zack told him. Paul said, "There's a building in comparatively good shape, up ahead. That might be it. Most of this street is sheer rubble." They decided it was the former apartment house for which they were looking and left the floater at the curb. As they headed for the entry, which was partially caved in, Paul looked back at their means of transporation apprehensively. "Can we just leave it there?" Zack laughed at him. "We can't take it with us." "What chance is there that it'll still be here when we come back?" "Damned if I know, but it sounds remote. From here on in, we're in the hands of Mark Martino. Maybe he'll have some ideas of how we get back to the mainland." "I'm beginning to wonder if it's a matter of if we get back to the mainland." "I hate a pessimist." They moved into the building and stared about. It was about halfway in ruin. There had been some fire and there had' obviously been a lot of purely senseless vandalism. There had been a good deal of pilferage, even for such items as fire wood. There had evidently been some combat as well, evidence of bullet holes, including those of rapidfire weapons of fairly high caliber and indications of the explosion of at least two or three demolition grenades. Zack grunted. "And this is one of the better preserved buildings." IF Paul said, "They hushed it up somewhat, but evidently toward the end the fighting was pretty bad. I don't know what they had in mind, but the government sent National Guard and regular troops in with tanks and so forth. Everybody was shooting at everybody indiscriminately. It stopped making any sense at all, but there was simply no way of turning it off, for, oh' a couple of weeks." Zack looked at him sarcastically. "You Americans are quite a people, especially in view of all the talking you do about being peace loving." Paul looked about, trying to find a staircase. "I still think you've got a touch of anti-Americanism." A voice called dangerously, "All right, chum-pals, put your arms out to the sides." They put their arms out to the sides and looked up. Above them, leaning nonchalantly on a broken bannister, was a character who could have passed amazingly for the movie idol of yesteryear, Robert Taylor. Possibly Robert Taylor in that part he once played, Billy the Kid , since right now he was cradling a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, as though affectionately. He said, gently as gently could be, "You were looking for someone undoubtedly?" Zack said, "Are you Mark Martino?" "Now one of us knows who the other is. Let's keep going." "My name is Castriota. I am of the Amsterdam Museum of Fine Arts. This is my colleague, Doctor Paul." "So far, chum-pal, you have told me nothing. Make your fling a bit more informative. This toy has a hair trigger." "You are very touchy, Herr Martino." "I am still alive, chum-pal. Start talking faster. You've invaded my home. You know the old bit, my castle. Start telling me why." "We have a mutual friend..." "It seems unlikely, but keep going and keep your arms further out from your sides." "Ben MacFarlane suggested I see you." The man above nodded. "I know MacFarlane." "And I am an old friend of Charles Bellows." Something passed over the other's face. "That's too bad, then." "How do you mean? We studied together in Paris in the old days." The gun was suddenly lowered to half mast. "Come on up," the other said. "A baboon, or hunter, or somebody got to Chuck a few weeks ago. He's dead. Come on up. Excuse the hospitality." They mounted the stairs, continuing up until the sixth floor, the highest floor where there were still intact apartments. The building evidently went quite a ways back in time and had never been modernized; there was no identity screen on the door. Their host pushed it open and gestured for them to enter. They went on through into a large and lavishly furnished living room. There was even wall-to-wall carpeting. Mark Martino closed the door behind them and said, "Sorry to put you through all that gobblygook out there. But I have to maintain my cover. I assume you're Generale Castriota." Zack nodded and held out his hand to shake. "That's right," he said. nphe other shook and leaned his sawed-off shotgun up against the wall. He took in Paul Kosloff. "I thought you were coming alone. Who's this?" "Professor Kosloff," Zack said. " Professor ? You mean he's not even a pro? You want to blow my cover here bringing around every Tom, Dick and..." "The name's Paul," Paul said mildly. "And I didn't particularly want to come. I was drafted." Zack said, " I might need him for this operation. He speaks Rumanian -- and practically every other Eastern European language." He was looking around the apartment, peeking through various doors. "No chance of this place being bugged?" Mark Martino, still scowling, went over to an old-fashioned bar... "If it is, they've got some new deabout. I've got every type of mop known and every day I double check. You can talk openly now that we're inside. Just what is this mysterious operation? What'll you have to drink?" Paul said, "What're you pushing?" Zack Castriota said, looking around at the furnishings, "You don't seem to do so badly." Mark Martino said, "How about some Twenty Year Old Metaxa? That is, twenty years old when it was bottled. Brandy doesn't age in the bottle." "Wizard!" Castriota said, sinking into a comfort chair. Paul Kosloff had never even heard of the Greek brandy, but he nodded. As Mark poured the drinks, he gestured at the room's fancy furnishings and answered Zack's earlier comment. "Part of the protective coloring. Everybody on the island loots. If you didn't, the others would think something was wrong. We spend a considerable portion of our time scrabbling around the wreckage. It gives me an excuse for prying all over the island. From time to time, I bring home a load of lush, or books, or groceries; makes it look authentic." He handed the drinks around and IF settled into what was obviously his own favorite comfort chair, though obviously, too, it couldn't have been hooked up with an auto-bar built into the arm rest and such facilities as were featured on the mainland. He had to adjust the holster that swung on his right hip. Paul said, in the way of making conversation, "That looks like an old-fashioned six-shooter." The other still evidently wasn't any too pleased at Paul Kosloff being brought to his hide-away. He patted the butt of the gun and said sourly, "It is, and possibly one of the most practical handguns ever devised. The trouble with your modern automatics, recoilless, noiseless, and all' the rest of it, is that the more complicated a weapon gets the more things can go wrong with ' it when you're in action. And when a thing can go wrong, it usually manages to. There's practically nothing that can go wrong with a single action six-shooter, but if it does I can repair it myself with my penknife and possibly a little baling wire. Held by the barrel, it also makes a good club or hammer. And it's the fastest draw ever devised. But, of course, you wouldn't know about such things, Professor" P aul Kosloff 's .# Noiseless was magically in his hand. It coughed quietly, and he flicked it slightly, and it was back beneath his left shoulder again. It had been in sight only long enough to have appeared a blur. "Hey!" Mark Martino blurted. Zack Castriota chortled softly. "I didn't know your Olympic pistol teams practiced the quick draw," he said. The underground agent was looking blankly in the direction Paul had fired. "Hey!" he said again, in indignation. "That's my old Marilyn Monroe calendar, a collector's item. You've ruined the tip of her left breast." He glared at his unwelcome guest. "Don't try to tell me you aimed at that!" Zack laughed aloud. "This is a professor with a difference. Wanta see him ruin the right one?" "No r dammit!" However, Martino looked at Paul with new respect. He said, "All right, all right. What's this all about?" He turned his eyes to Castriota. "Why wouldn't they tell me on the sealed beam phone why you were coming? And why'd they send a foreign agent, and, above all, why a language professor?" Zack finished his drink and leaned forward. "They didn't tell you on the teevee phone because somewhere along the line it might have been tapped. They sent me because there's no material on me in your computer data banks. I brought Professor Kosloff on my own without reporting, so there's nothing in the data banks suggesting that he's involved." He got up, went over to the bar and poured himself another heavy slug. "This stuff is priceless." He turned back and made a motion of toast to Mark Martino. He said, "It looks as though someone has figured out a method of tapping your National Data Center, even the highest priority files." Mark Martino stared. "Tap it? Are you completely around the bend? How?" "Nobody knows." "But, how do you mean? They've infiltrated the center at Denver?" The Common Europe man shook his head. "They didn't have to. From a distance. Electronically. At least, so we suspect. But that's not the worst part of it, Martino. If they can read the data, evidently it's just a matter of time before they figure out a way of wiping it. I leave it to your imagination what would happen to this country if your computer data banks were wiped clean." dwell on it very long. "Wow," he said. And then, "Where do I come in?" Zack Castriota nodded and returned to his chair with his fresh drink. "Mr. Martino, in this modern world of our there're precious few places for a group of criminals, espionage agents, saboteurs and such to hide out. Individuals, yes. A single criminal can sometimes figure out some method of beating the rap, covering his tracks, going to ground. But when you get a sizeable operation there are prime difficulties. With computer control of crime, everybody in the country is on tap in an instant. The occupant of every home, every apartment, every hotel or motel room, is known by the computers. A foreign agent can have some advantage in not wearing an American teevee phone, but it also puts him at considerable disadvantage since survival in the Ultra-welfare State becomes practically inpossible without a standard Universal Credit Card, complete with your registered thumbprint and all the information involved that must be on record in the computer files." AyTark Martino nodded. "I see -- what you've built up to. You suspect that your data bank saboteurs have a base of operations here on Manhattan." Zack nodded. "More than suspect. We know that at least one of them is here, or was this morning. You see, I managed to plant a bug on him." "Wizard! Where is he?" "Let me have that map, Paul," Castriota said, coming to his feet. He spread the map out on the arm of Martino's comfort chair and indicated a tiny mark. "He moves IF about a bit, but this is the vicinity. Near Union Square." "He moves about a bit? How much?" "Not very much. He sticks within a fairly small area." agent thought about it. "That area's in rubble. Practically nothing left standing in any shape at all. It used to be one of the main shopping sections and it was looted and relooted and fought over as long as the fighting went on. How many of them are there?" "We don't know. We know of at least two, but they're heavies, not the type of agent that would be up on the sophisticated equipment that must be involved. So there's at least three. For all we know, there may be thirty." Martino scowled down at the map and shook his head. "If there was anything like that number, I'd know about it. In fact, I should know about it if there were three real strangers on the island." Paul said. "What do you mean by real strangers?" Mark Martino said, still scowling in thought, "There's a grapevine. We seldom get new recruits here in our happy little community. When we do, we like to know about them soonest. They're usually bad news." "How's that?" Zack said. "We old hands are shrinking in number, not increasing. The originals, left over from the riot days, die off or go back to the mainland. The only newcomers are usnaBy fugitives from justice, tough chasaeters on the run, that type." Paul snorted. "The impression I got was that everybody on this island was a tough character." The other shook his head impatiently. "Don't read into the baboons more than is there. Most of them wouldn't be here if they could avoid it. And the only way to survive is to maintain a certain unwritten law respecting each other's rights. If they were all as tough and bloodthirsty as some outsiders think, there'd be no one at aB left on the island alive. So, if somebody comes along that's a little too rugged for the rest of us, we combine and eliminate him for the sake of the community as a whole." Paul Kosloff shook his bead. "What a place to live." "Well, don't think I chose it, hombre," Martino said defensomebody present, and I got the damned short straw. Besides, there's a bonus connected with serving here." TTe stood up and paced the room,  in thought. Finally he turned to Zack Castriota and said, "Why not bring in a sizeable force and bomb the area?" The Common Europe operative shook his head. "They might have time to destroy their equipment m Our technicians are sweating blood wanting a look at that equipment. That's why I'm here, to find out definitely where they are and how to get to them before they get their wind up. Very delicate operation. Then we'll land on them like an avalanche." "Yeah, that obviously makes sense," Martino said lowly. "Just a minute." He went to a back window and pulled free a piece of heavy cardboard that was making do as a replacement of a broken window pane. He picked up an object the others couldn't make out from a nearby table and made a flowing motion. He stuck his head to the broken window and yelled, "Hey, Pete! Repeat!" Paul and Zack exchanged glances, blankly. Mark Martino was replacing the cardboard. He then began to toss the object he held back to the table. "What's that?" Zack said. "Slingshot." "A what?" "I think you call them catapults over on the Continent," the other said, holding it up. He grinned and said, "Le plus change , le plus meme chose , or however you say it." Both Kosloff and Castriota winced at the accent and the mutilated quotation. "It makes a handy signalling device when you don't have a teevee phone," Martino explained. "Signal who?" Zack said. But already there was a scampering of feet on the stairs outside. "My McDougal Street Irregulars," Mark said laconically. rrhe door burst open, and two filthy pre-teenagers were there. Filthy, that is, so far as body cleanliness was concerned. Their clothing was of the finest and newest quality, albeit on the colorful side. It came to Paul Kosloff that on this island probably every resident made a practice of ignoring the need to do laundry, and simply looted new clothing when it was required. "Yessir, Senor Martino," one of the two blurted. Mark Martino made a gesture of vague introduction. "Mister Castriota, Mr. Kosloff, these are Pete and Repeat -- don't ask me which is which -- my men Friday and Saturday. So far as I know, probably the only native-born citizens of the Commonwealth of Manhattan since its inception and two close friends." He had clapped one of them on the shoulder as he spoke. They were obviously twins, and obviously adored him. Zack Castriota was scowling unhappily. Mark Martino turned back to him. "They're uneducated, at least in the manner in which we think IF of education, so if you watch yourself you can say just about anything in full, ah, security. You see, occasionally I can do little chores for the community here. Like bringing some special medicine from the mainland on my trips to sell my songs and so forth. The boys are grateful for my helping their mother a few. months ago. I suppose I'm the nearest thing to a doctor we have on this end of the island now." He turned to the two youngsters who were staring up at him worshipfully. He said, "Boys, there are some strangers around that I want to know more about. Now what I want you to do is pass the word. Each of you will tell two others to look out for these strangers, or, if they've already seen them, to report to me. And each person you tell will tell two others to look out for these strangers, and so on. I want the word to go all around the island as soon as possible. The strangers will probably dress a little differently than we do, they might speak some strange language... "What's a strange language?" the first lad said apologetically. "They might talk differently than we do, so you can't understand them. And..." Mark Martino cleared his throat. "They might be cleaner than most of us are. Now do you know where the big movie theatre was, there on Broadway and #th?" "The one with the girl on the poster with the big ass?" the second one said earnestly. "That's the one. Now, most likely, these strangers are somewhere in that vicinity." He clapped them both on the shoulders again. "I want to know how many of them there are, and just where they're staying. Now get going, boys." He hesitated, then added, "And remember, these men are probably very dangerous..." "Nothing can happen to them," Zack said quickly. "Yes," Martino said very emphatically. "Pass the word that nothing must happen to them." He added, "Not yet." "Yessir, Senor Martino," they blurted in unison. They spun and were gone in a clatter. "Right out of Conan Doyle," Paul Kosloff grunted. "McDougal Street Irregulars, yet." Mark Martino grinned at him, and the corners of his mouth turned down. "Bet you dollars to doughnuts we get results," he said. "The same old game," Zack Castriota said, "down through the ages. The john-fuzz of today depends on stool pigeons as it has since the days of Caesar." Mark Martino said, "We'll have a wait. Let's have another drink and..." He had started for his little bar, but he came to a sudden halt, and his face went empty. "What's the matter?" Paul said. Mark Martino said very slowly, "I know where they're holed up." "Where, in the name of the holy jumping Zoroaster?" Zack said, leaning forward. "In GimbePs basement." V #tT#here?" Castriota scowled.  "In the former bombshelter in the big Macy-Gimbel department store, just off Union Square. And I know how they've been getting in and out, too." Martino, excited, slugged his right fist into the palm of his left hand. "And why nobody's seen them, so far." Paul and Zack leaned forward. But their host took time out to mix fresh drinks and hand them around. Then he said, "You can see their problem. They need space for their equipment and for themselves, but they can't afford to be spotted, not even by baboons. Too much of a risk that the word would get to the police. They probably know I'm here, too, if they can tap the computer data banks pertaining to the Inter-American Bureau of Investigation. So they want to avoid my learning about them." "I'm surprised they haven't finished you off, if they know you're here," Paul said. The undercover man shook his head. "That would just result in they'd start snooping around trying to find the killer. No, it's better for them to just avoid me." "This Gimbel's basement bit," Zack said urgently. Mark turned his eyes to the Common Europe man. "When Gimbels and Macy's amalgamated, they became the single biggest privately owned store in the world. The new building had a gigantic bombshelter in the deepest basement. Actually, two bombshelters, one for the public and suited for mass occupancy and one for the executives of the store. It was said to be one of the most swank in the country, completely equipped. Even portable generators for electricity." "How did you learn about it?" "Ran into an article, quite by accident, in a magazine in the ruins of the public library. So I thought I'd try and find it, in the belief that there might be a lot of lootable food and so forth. But I went about it the wrong way, trying to get through the rubble up above. I never did make it." "You said you knew how they were getting in," Zack said. "I think I do. Somehow, they've tunneled in from the subway." He was excited again and pointed a finger at Zack Castriota. "Don't you see? The subway tubes are empty. The baboons seldom go down into them. No reason to, except sometimes for water. In some places springs or underground IF streams have broken through the subway walls and some of the baboons use them for water. At any rate, somehow they tunneled in and found the abandoned bombshelter. Beds, food, water, lots of space and snug as a bug. And nobody in the vicinity, baboons, hunters, research people such as you pretend to be, ever see them. They probably enter the subway from as much as a mile away and, using flashlights, walk down to the Union Square area and enter there." "Sounds possible," Zack nodded.  voice shouted up from below. Mark Martino scooped up his shotgun and made his way to the door. "Just a minute," he said over his shoulder, and left. Zack said to Paul, "What do you think?" "Darned if I know." Mark re-entered with a stranger, a small shifty-eyed little wretch, dirty of face and hands but attired in impeccable sport tweeds, the effect of which were somewhat spoiled by twin bandoliers of cartridges he had criss-crossed on his chest, Pancho Villa style. He carried a beautiful carbine. Mark Martino went through very formal introductions and then offered the newcomer a drink. Evidently, in baboon society the niceties were observed. The newcomer, Joe by name, refused a seat. He said, "That kid you call Repeat. He told me you was interested in knowing like if any strangers was around." His eyes shifted to the bar. "You wouldn't have a spare bottle of guzzle, would you, Martino?" "Sure, sure, any time, Joe. Take your pick. I ran into a burned out liquor store over on the square the other day. Everything already gone up above, of course. But I managed to get into the cellar. Lush all over the place." "Thanks," Joe said. "I know the store. Never thought about the cellar, though." A full bottle of bourbon was selected from the bar and he tucked it under his arm. "Anyway, me and this mopsy I'm living with, we get our cooking water down into the subway..." Mark Martino looked over at Zack and Paul and lifted his eyebrows and nodded an I-told-you-so. "... and three days ago I was down getting a bucketful, see? And guess what's coming down the track. Four guys. Two of them got lights and are going along like guards. The other two's got some big hunk of equipment. Wouldn't have the vaguest idea what it was they'd looted, but they was treating it careful." "Where'd they go?" Zack said. Joe said importantly, "I guess I could've nailed the whole gang, but I figured, why? I kind of sunk back into a little niche like in the wall and kept quiet. You know where they went, carrying that goddamned chunk of machinery, or whatever it was? Into that there entrance into the big store." Mark looked at Zack and said, "There used to be a subway entrance in the basement of the MacyGimbePs store so that the customers didn't have to go onto the street at all." Joe said, "Hell, there's nothing worth anything in there. And it's dangerous. Dark as pitch, and you stumble over something and get a cave-in on your head. Everything worth gloaming out of that old ruin went years ago." Mark asked him a few more questions, but they'd already heard all he really had to tell. Mark thanked him profusely, clapped him in friendly fashion on the shoulder, insisted he take another bottle of the scrounged bourbon, and saw him to the door and the stairway. "fX#hen he came back, he growled,   "Joe, and various others, wouldn't mind taking over this apartment. Most of them are too damned lazy to keep a place up. They stay in a former hotel or apartment until the place gets too filthy even for them and then find another. I've got the most comfortable place on Manhattan." He grunted amusement. "That's why I make anybody who comes here shout out before starting up. If I heard somebody on the stairs who hasn't called out his identity, I fire a few rounds down the stairway at random. Very effective." Zack said, "You seem to have guessed right, Martino." The other nodded and resumed his seat. "Now what?" "We still haven't pinpointed them adequately, and we don't know how many are there. And we still don't know how to get in at them without giving them time to destroy the equipment. We need more information." "Oh, wizard. How do you think we're going to get it, just go up and knock on the door?" Paul Kosloff said to Zack, "What you were saying about, ah, bugs being so sophisticated these days. I wonder if..." Mark said impatiently, "There's a thousand tons of rubble above that bomb shelter. There's no way of getting a bug in." "Yeah," Zack growled, deep in thought. Paul said very slowly, "I have a suggestion I hesitate to make." They both looked at him. He said, "Those two kids. They've been baboons all their lives?" "What of it?" Mark Martino scowled. "Living in the ruins, scuttling around avoiding hunters, burrowing in and around the subways, the sewers, the cellars -- all their lives." IF They were looking at him closely"If anybody in the world could snake into that bombshelter undetected and plant a bug, one of those kids could." Mark said, "And if they caught him?" Paul took a breath and nodded. "That's why I hesitated. But if they caught him, he's a twelve-year-old kid pilfering in the ruins of a department store." Zack shook his head. "If they caught him, they'd shoot him. They'd have to, because they'd be afraid he'd give them away. Besides, why not shoot him? He's only a baboon. It's not even particularly against the law." But Martino was on his feet again, pacing and slugging his left palm with his fist. "He wouldn't have to get all the way in," he said in agitation. "I've got a little bug in the other room that's a doozy. Directional. If he can get to within a hundred yards of them and point it in their direction, we'd have it made." AT ark Martino drove the floater, in view of his better knowledge of the layout of the ruined city. His "Irregular," Repeat, had been left behind, both because of lack of room in the four-place vehicle and because they wished to keep their number at a minimum. It would have been possible to recruit a few others of the baboons of the vicinity that Mark was on good terms with, but they didn't want manpower. He avoided Broadway and kept to back streets, pulling up eventually across the square from the ruined department store which was their destination. They piled from the car and the shotgun and a shoulder bag of equipment. He said, "There's a subway entrance over here." They followed him silently, little Pete, Paul Kosloff and Zack Castriota, in line, down the stairs. As it grew darker, he pulled four sets of goggles from the carrying case and handed them around. "Infra-red," he said, bringing, as well, a heavy flashlight from the bag. They donned the glasses, and the invisible light guided their way. The grimy little Pete was fascinated by the flashlight magic and continued to put his glasses off and on, checking. "I've never been in here," Martino muttered, "but there shouldn't be any reason we couldn't get through to the store entry." "Trouble is," Zack growled, "we don't know what we'll find when we get there." The subway tube was in comparatively good repair, and they were able to stumble along it without overmuch trouble. They came, eventually, to an alcove, a room probably once used by subway maintenance men. Mark Martino came to a halt and considered. He said, "This is probably it. I doubt if we can all get much closer without running the chance of being spotted. Okay?" Zack said, "You're the boss." Mark looked down at the boy, and made an unhappy face. He said, "All right, Pete. Possibly your country hasn't done too well by you and hasn't even done much in the way of trying. But you are now Number One Man on the firing line." He handed the boy a smaller flashlight. "Keep away from the regular light as much as you can." He handed him a small metallic object disguised as an automatic pencil. "Get as close as possible and plant this with the point aiming in their direction. Then get out and back to us as quick as you can." "Yes, Senor Martino." The boy was anxious to please and missed in pain. When he had gone, the three of them looked after him for a long moment. Paul shook his head. He was sorry he had made the suggestion. Castriota breathed, "Aiii. We utilize children to fight our senseless wars." 'Xf ark Martino unslung his shoulder bag and from it took a box-like instrument that looked like nothing so much as a radio of the twenties, complete with two sets of earphones and various dials. The three of them squatted about it. Martino said, "I've known him since he could hardly walk." He put on one set of the earphones and began fiddling with the dials. Once or twice he flinched, evidently as some raucous sound assailed his eardrums. Finally, he pulled the earphones away and handed them to Paul Kosloff. "You're the linguist." Zack Castriota took up the other set. "I don't know Rumanian," he muttered, "but I have several other languages." They had a full half-hour wait. Suddenly, Paul Kosloff reacted. "Got something," he said. "Yeah, I heard that," Zack said, pulling one earphone free, the better to communicate. "What was it?" "Wasn't clear enough. There, something else is coming through. Two voices. One's swearing." "What language?" Martino said. "Rumanian?" "No. I'm not sure. Just monosyllables. Bulgarian, perhaps, or Serbo-Croat. Possibly Ukrainian." "I thought they were supposed to be Rumanians," Martino growled. There was probably no particular reason to, but all spoke in whispers. IF Zack Castriota said to him, "Most Balkans speak several languages. Such a hodgepodge of nationalities there calls for it." Paul said, "Shhh. Something's coming through. I think the boy's got nearer." It was an agony of strain. What words he was able to pick up were meaningless. Affirmations and negatives, bits of profanity, disconnected sentences or ejaculations. Zack said, "What the hell're they up to?" Paul Kosloff shook his head. "They could be doing anything from eating lunch to playing a game of poker." Mark Martino said, "Patience, hombres. You didn't think we could just tune in like this and they'd go into a long discussion of all their innermost business, did you?" He grunted sourness. "We could spend a week here and learn absolutely nothing." "Shhh," Paul said. "So far, I make out four of them. There's at least four." "Joe told us that much," Mark murmured. "It's a little clearer," Zack said. "That kid must be edging closer." "Little cloddy better watch himself," Mark said unhappily. Zack said, "One of them just said something about lifting something." "What language?" Mark said. "Sounded like Italian," Zack said, scowling. "I thought those bastards were Rumanian." "It was Italian," Paul said. "They're all multi-lingual. Two of them, I think, are Rumanians, one an Italian and one either a Bulgarian or a Ukrainian, and they switch languages around. Listen..." nother agony of time passed. Paul said finally, slowly, "You know what? They're working at something. They aren't sitting around eating or playing cards or thing." "I think you're right," Zack growled. "I wish the hell that kid'd plant the damn bug some place pointed in their direction and get on back here," Mark muttered. He fondled his shotgun and added slowly, '"I have half a mind to go get him." Zack looked at the undercover man in disgust. "Then you have half a mind, period," he said. "You'd blow the whole thing." "We had no right to send him in there. Kid can't be more than eleven years old." "So far, he's doing a wizard of a job. When this is over, I'm going to make a point of getting him and his brother over . to the mainland for a normal life, school and all." Mark said, "Already tried. They don't want to go. This is their world. They don't know any other." "Shhh," Paul said again. "One of them just said something about an unterseeboot" " Untersee... what?" Mark Martino demanded. "Means submarine in German, but they use the same term in some parts of the Balkans." "Submarine I Holy jumping Zoroaster! You don't think..." "Listen" After a moment, Paul Kosloff pulled the headset from his ears and looked at them. "You know what they're doing?" They stared back at him. "They're pulling out." "What'd you mean?" Zack Castriota snapped. "They keep mentioning the others. Others who have already gone. There's only four of them left. They're wrapping it up. They're pulling out." The Common Europe agent pulled his own earset completely from his head and stared down at the floor. He licked his lower lip. "Damn!" Mark Martino said to him quickly, "How soon can you ring in the boys?"r "Notime. It's not set up yet." Thepheadset which Paul Kosloff held in his hands squawked louder than usual. He rammed one of the receivers back against an ear. His face went empty.  "They've got Petel" # , Mark Martino was on his feet. "Come on!" he said. "We're going in." They scrambled after him. On a run, it was difficult for the three to keep from stumbling along the tracks, the infrared light in Martino's hands being inadequate for them all. After what seemed an age of time, they reached a station up an iron ladder to its side. Zack yelped, "Look out," and a gun in his hand blasted past Paul Kosloff's ear. Paul couldn't make out what the target had been. He hurried up after Martino onto the station platform. "Must be this way," Martino barked. "Come on." Zack was immediately behind them. 'sphere was a confusion of jwreckage now. This must have formerly been the entry to the store from the subway proper. All was broken glass, brick, chunks of cement block, wrecked and sometimes burned furniture and fittings. They stumbled as they progressed. They could hear other stumbling of feet, other confusion of getting through this impossible debris. Mark Martino yelled, implausibly, "Halt!" He kept scrambling forward. j Suddenly there was a glare of light before them -- natural light flooding from a large metal door-  IF? iwiPiii way. Paul Kosloff began to tear his infrared goggles from his face. In the door loomed a figure, a st,ubby automatic with a large, refund cartridge drum in hands. The gn blasted, the noise roaring, echoing, re-echoing in the confined quarters. Mark Martino yelled agony and pitched forward. To this point, Paul Kosloff had left his weapon in its shoulder holster, the better to utilize both hands in progressing over the wreckage and rubble. Now he flung himself down and to the right, trying unsuccessfully to draw at the same time. Behind him, he heard a scream of anger from Zack Castriota and two quick shots. The submachinegun blared its hate again, plowing up glass and fragments of cement from the pile behind which Paul Kosloff had rolled. He was pinned down, afraid to rise enough to get his own gun out. Evidently, Zack had also taken cover somewhere to the rear. Unbelievably, Mark Martino brought himself to a sitting position. His face was the chalk of death, but his left hand went out and fumbled up the shotgun. Evidently, his right arm was completely useless. He braced the butt of the gun against his torn midsection. Another burst hit him, and he fell off to one side. But he had diverted attention from Paul Kosloff for a sceond. The .# Noiseless coughed once, twice, and the gunman in the doorway collapsed forward, silently, the strewn floor before him. Zack was past Paul Kosloff on a run, bent low, the way a man runs in combat, presenting as small a target as possible. He had an automatic in his right hand, extended forward, ready for fire. Another figure loomed in the doorway. Evidently, this one was unarmed. He reached desperately for the submachinegun which had been dropped by his companion. Zack Castriota's handgun was a full automatic, rather than a semi. Its chatter was machine-gun-like, as he let loose a burst of five or six shots. The newcomer crumbled.  "Come on!" the Common Europe agent yelled, dashing to and through the door, Paul Kosloff immediately behind. The rooms beyond were obviously the bombshelter. After the complete confusion of the wreckage behind, the absolutely spick and span qualities here were like a slap in the face. The former executives of the Gimble-Macy ultra-department store had done themselves proud. 'Sphere was a blast of explosion, a flaring of flame, a heat wave of overpowering intensity. Zack Castriota and Paul Kosloff were bowled over and back. Black had washed over Paul IF Kosloff, but It was a momentary thing. He heard a shot and seemingly received a sharp punch on his left shoulder. Instinctively, he fired back at something that moved, at what distance he didn't know. Fired, and fired again. Then the blackness washed over him once more. When he came alive, a voice was saying weakly, "Paul. Hombre. Where are you?" "Here," Paul said. "Over here." "Listen," Zack's voice was fading fast. "One got away..." There was a long pause. "It's the one I planted the bug on, and he's wearing the same jerkin. Listen, Paul... Paul started crawling toward the sound of the voice. The other had become incoherent, was saying something about a message to his wife in Paris. It was pitch dark in the shelter now. By the time he found the Common Europe agent, Zack Castriota was gone from this world. Intuitively, he knew that little Pete was also gone. Paul Kosloff brought his arm around weakly and brought his wrist near to his face. He activated his teevee wrist phone and said into it, weakly, "I want Dempsey Harrison, at the National Data Center, Denver." A robot voice said, "Sorry, that is a Priority One number." Paul took a labored breath and said, "Then give me his secretary." "Sorry, that is a Priority Two Number, and you are not listed." "All right, give me her secretary, or assistant, or whatever the helL" The robot voice said, "It is an offense to use profanity on th# phone. The fact will be entered ori : your dossier for future reference if the offense is repeated."  "Go get goosed, you mechanical bastard," Paul growled weakly. The screen lit up, and a young face was there. Paul Kosloff said, "I'm Professor Kosloff. Tell Miss Stebbins I want to talk to her." "Yes, sir." Eyes were still wide even as her face faded. Lisa Stebbins, the ultimate in redheaded attractiveness, and cool as ever, was there. She took in his face. "Professor Kosloff, you've been hurt!" "You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, beautiful. Listen, first get a fix on me, and send somebody quickly. Second, let me talk to Harrison." She looked at him strangely, but was obviously moving hands in businesslike activity. Her face faded, and Harrison appeared. The bureaucrat's expression was first quizzical, then alarmed. "Professor!" he snapped. Before Paul Kosloff passed out again, he said, "I just thought I'd let you know I'm available for that assignment." IF  Feature Mice and Stars S etting up a human colony on a world around some alien star does not seem too difficult an effort. We already know enough to be reasonably sure of finding habitable planets, and our engineering skill is advanced enough to be capable of reaching them within a few decades. But the problem of making sure such a colony has a fair chance to survive has not been solved, either by science or in the works of science fiction. In fact, we can't be certain that civilized man has any certainty of surviving on Earth -- even barring atomic destruction or cosmic catastrophe. We simply don 't know enough about the real problems and complex relationships of life. The science that deals with what goes on in the biosphere -- the thin layer of air, earth and sea where life is possible -- is too new and too understaffed to have found out what constitutes a viable life colony. As a matter of fact, this science was not even considered in science fiction until the last fifteen years, and no story I remember has given it more than a token consideration. The science is ecology. It is the study of the interrelationships of living things with one another and with their common environment. This is the science that could have prevented such blunders as introducing the rabbit to Australia and indiscriminate use of insecticides. It could have told us that the ruin of certain forest areas and the destruction of the beaver would lead to devastating floods in Ohio. And when we go into space, it is the only science which can tell us how to set up a complex of plant and animal life which will survive and enable our colonists to turn the new world into a real home for man. Obviously, it should be a key science in our space program. So far, however, it is sadly neglected. Late in #, there was a symposium on interstellar travel and colonization, following the Planetology meeting at the New 'York Academy of Science. This was meant as an interchange of views between space scientists and participating sciencefiction writers, among whom were Murray Leinster, frederik Pohl and myself. It was a valuable discussion, but little dealt with the living environment that must be set up on a new planet; no one at the table was a qualified ecologist, though it meant to be a fair sampling of the major field of space science and technology. Fortunately, the Ford Foundation seems to be aware of the need to expand the training program for ecologists and provide funds for more research. This year they are dollars for this purpose. It should help -- but it's only a tiny fraction of the funds spent for work in other sciences. And it can't begin to meet the needs for ecological work in the near future. Tven on a planet very similar to  Earth -- one with suitable land, water resources and oxygenrich atmosphere -- the problems of providing a viable environment for a human colony are immense. It had been touched lightly in several novels of interstellar exploration, but it deserves -- and hasn't had -- the detailed scrutiny that science fiction has given other fields. We are pretty certain that man can't depend on native life forms. They will not have evolved precisely along the chemical lines of Earth, if they happen to be formed from basically the same carbon compounds. They may be dose, but will hardly offer either safe or adequate food for men. So the colonists will have to bring along their own living environment. There must be the obvious food plants and animals. Since conditions can't be predicted precisely, there will have to be sufficiently wide a variety to be sure of enough surviving. And behind these must be a large "backup" life-support of living things. The soil must be maintained. That requires living forms that can fix nitrogen from the air, plus a host of other creatures to maintain a porous, viable soil. A typical specimen of Earth soil may hold # animals of more than one-celled complexity per acre of ground -- insects, worms and other forms that exist within the first few inches of soil and keep it in growing condition. There must be plants that break up rocks into soil. Others must put down networks of roots that will prevent the erosion of soil that led to the dustbowls on our plains when we tried to grow only food plants. And to fertilize the plants, there must be insects. For almost every plant and animal, there must also be forms of life that prey on them in balance. And above all, there must be scavengers that break down the dead life forms and turn the elements back into usable soil, or we'll soon be crowded out by the stalks and corpses of previous life. Balmer and Wylie tried to cover this in When Worlds Collide , though the word "ecology" wasn't mentioned. But they made a big point of the fact that there would be no more lions or other predators. Any modern ecologist would know that doesn't work. The predators are as necessary to control the herds of herbivores that will result from the inevitable escaped anmals as are the scavengers that control the dead forms. We've seen that, when the deer get out of control, lacking normal enemies. It would be nice to take everything from Earth, perhaps -- but no interstellar ship could carry even the seeds and eggs for that. So it has to be a limited ecological balance for our colonists. And the problem of guessing what can safely be omitted is one nobody can yet answer. TT#e don't know enough about   the "balance of nature" on Earth itself yet. We've made gross mistakes in the past and have been paying for them heavily. Many of these mistakes have been in introducing .something like mustard or the boll weevel outside the normal range of environment. But in setting up a new world, everything will be outside its natural environment. We've also exterminated wantonly many of the forms of life that once existed, and we are curIF rently risking the extermination of many more. The dodo and passenger pigeon probably were indispensible, though their loss is a sorry one. But large numbers of African life forms are nearing extinction. Every leopard coat worn by some woman for her vanity brings the great cat closer to that extinction. Yet quite possibly, the cat is more necessary to a healthy African ecology than are the herds of Masai cattle that drive out the gorilla and other wild creatures. We've done little better in America. Many of our creatures are becoming scarce. Even our forests, which serve to control the runoff of rainfall and keep the plains from becoming deserts, are under attack. And the Sierra Club, which is trying to save the redwoods, has been denied the tax-exempt status granted to the National Rifle Association -- the voice of those who out risk as a sport. The yard back of my house should now be filled with Monarch butterflies; when I was a boy, there were hundreds everywhere. Today I couldn't find one. The unfortunate part is that we really have no clear idea of what price we will pay for our many extinctions. Ecology hasn't had the time or the means to study the incredibly complex relations that exist between one form of life and another. All we can say for sure is that the loss of almost any farm of life may represent a very grave danger to man's survival here en earth. (Nobody knows yet why the dinosaurs became extinct. Man's one extinction could be the reenlt of a chain of events that begins with something we think unimportant.) Mack Reynolds, in the current story in this issue, mentions that there were enough trees to be worth visiting in one area only. It isn't necessary to his story to wonder what changes that might make. But with the end of trees, what happens to birds and animals? What happens to the creatures and smaller plants that can only exist in forested areas? And what happens to life related to them in some long ecological chain? Oh what happens to the rain that falls and the carbon-dioxide that the trees don't remove from the air? A #I of this concerns what happens  in a complex of different life forms of community ecology. Population ecology studies another problem -- what happens to a singleform of life. And it is here that some studies indicate a threat to our civilized existence that has received little attention -- and no action. Most studies of overpopulation go back to the classic work of Malthus, which covers only the economic aspects of the problem. But there axe more factors than the people to worry us. There may be a grave psychological factor that is more dangerous than any risk of running out of food in the near future. Studies made with laboratory animals indicate that a certain type of psychotic, anti-social behavior is the direct result of too great a population density. When mice were provided with everything that any mouse could desire -- food, water, shelter, material to build nests -- they proceeded happily to multiply and grow fat. For a time, all was well. Then something strange occurred. They still had all their needs supplied, but as they passed a critical level of mice per square feet; they turned almost insane. They began to become frantic, worried, and pointlessly aggressive. They developed homosexual tendencies and a withdrawal from the normal social ways. In fact, they showed almost every sign of the type of rising crime and anti-social trend that is worrying the sociologists about behavior in our larger cities. Maybe the lack of adequate space per person is just as dangerous psychologically to me as to mice. Apparently, however, this does not work as directly. A man can accept a cramped immediate environment when he is aware of a free area still within his reach. Thus, so long as woods and fields lay near the cities, men could stand the crowding of those cities. Now, with the suburbs sprawled out for incredible distances, the free horizon is too far to help. Certainly the same anti-social pattern that existed in the middle of the last century in New York City applied only to those who were both too crowded and unable to escape the immediate environment, as covered by Herbert Asbury, in Gangs of New York . In any event, it flight be well rent rise in anti-social behavior to add a few ecologists to its staff. And every government that cannot accept population control should at least start a crash program to further ecology in all its branches. Science-fiction writers also have a rich field to explore here. I remember stories that tried to prove the existence of Atlantis by telling of the lemmings who periodically rush madly into the sea and swim to their destruction -- not really very likely? There's some indication that changes in food account for this behavior better. But there's also a good explanation in population ecology. The lemmings may simply be driven into acts of racial insanity by the pressures of overpopulation. For lemmings, such an act relieves the problem. But men surely IF Creatures IF  Short Novel The worlds of men hong between the two Houses , and oil the constellations  S pay tribute to the Creatures of Light !  T'he man walks through his Thousandyear Eve in the House of the Dead. If you could look about the enormous room through which he walks, you couldn't see a thing. It is far too dark for eyes to be of value. For this dark time, we'll simply refer to him as "the man." Why? First, he fits the general and generally accepted description of an unmodified, male, human-model being -- walking upright, having opposing thumbs and possessing the other typical characteristics of the profession -- and, second, because his name has been taken from him. In his right hand, the man bears the staff of his Master, and it guides him through the dark. It tugs him this way, that way. It burns his hand, his fingers, his opposing thumb if his foot strays a step from its ordained path. When the man reaches a certain place within the darkness, he mounts seven steps to a stone dais and raps three times upon it with the staff. Then there is light, dim and orange and crowded into corners. It shows the edges of the enormous, unfilled room. He reverses the staff and screws it into a socket in the stone. Had you ears in that room, you would hear a sound as of winged insects circling near you, withdrawing, returning. Only the man hears it, though. #S There are over two thousand other people present, but they are all of them dead. They come up out of the transparent rectangles which now appear in the floor, come up unbreathing, unblinking and horizontal, and they rest upon invisible catafalques at a height of two feet, and' their garments and their skins are of all colors and their bodies of all ages. Now some have wings and some have tails, and some have horns and some long talons. Some have all of these things, and some have pieces of machinery built into them and some do not. Many others leek like the man, unmodified. "Get up!" he calls out. "AM of you!" And his words mix with the humming that is in the air and are repeated over and over and again, net like an echo, fading, but persistent and recurring. The air is filled and stirred. There comes a moaning and a creaking of brittle joints. Rustling, clicking, chafing, they sit up, they stand up. Then sound and movement cease, and the dead stand like unlit candles beside their opened graves. The man climbs down from the dais, stands a moment before it, then says, "Follow me!" and he walks back the way he came, leaving his Master's staff vibrating in the gray air. As he walks, he comes to a IF woman who is tall and golden and a suicide. He stares into her unseeing eyes and says, "Do you know me?" and the orange lips, the dead lips, the dry lips move, and they whisper, "No," but he stares longer and says, " Did you know me?" and the air hums with his words, until she says, "No," once again, and he passes her by. He questions two others: a man who had been ancient of days, with a clock built into his left wrist, and a black dwarf with horns and hooves and the tail of a goat. But both say, "No," and they fall into step behind him, and they follow him out of that enormous room and into another, where more lay under stone, not really waiting, to be called forth for his Thousandyear Eve in the House of the Dead. Hphe man leads them. He leads the dead whom he has summoned back to movement, and they follow him. They follow him through corridors and galleries and halls, and up wide, straight stairways and down narrow, winding stairways, and they come at last into the great Hall of the House of the Dead, where his Master holds his court. He sits on a black throne of polished stone, and there are metal bowls of fire to his right and to his left. On each of the two hundred pillars that line his high Hall, a torch blazes and flickers and its spark-shot smoke coils and puffs upward, becoming at last a gray part of the flowing cloud that covers the ceiling completely. The Master does not move, but he regards the man as he advances across the Hall, five thousand of the dead at his back, and his eyes lay red upon the man as he comes forward. The man prostrates himself at his feet, and he does not move until he is addressed: "You may greet me and rise," come the words, each of them a sharp, throaty stab in the midst of an audible exhalation. "Hail, Anubis! Master of the House of the Deadl" says the man, and he stands. Anubis lowers his black muzzle slightly, and his fangs are white within it. Red lightning, his tongue, forks forward, re-enters his mouth. He stands then, and the shadows slide downward upon his bare and manformed body. He raises his left hand, and the humming sound comes into the Hall, and it carries his words through the flickering light and the smoke: "You who are dead," he says, "tonight you will disport yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to you, and you will embrace one another without pleasure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down again when I will it." He raises his right hand. "Let the revelry begin," he says, and he claps his hands together. Then tables slide forward from between the pillars, laden with food and with drink, and there is music upon the air. The dead move to obey him. "You may join them," Anubis says to the man, and he reseats himself upon his throne. The man crosses to the nearest table and eats lightly and drinks a glass of wine. The dead dance about him, but he does not dance with them. They make noises which are words without meaning, and he does not listen to them. He pours a second glass of wine, and the eyes of Anubis are upon him as he drinks it. He pours a third glass and he holds it in his hands and sips at it and stares into.it T Tow much time has passed he  cannot tell, when Anubis says, "Servant!" He stands, turns. "Approach!" says Anubis, and he does so. "You may rise. You know what night tonight is?" "Yes, Master. It is Thousandyear Eve." "It is your Thousandyear Eve. IF This night we celebrate an anniversary. You have served me for a full thousand years in the House of the Dead. Are you glad?" "Yes, Master." "You recall my promise?" "Yes. You told me that if I served you faithfully for a thousand years, then you would give me back my name. You would tell me who I had been in the Middle Worlds of Life." "I beg your pardon, I did not." "You...?" "I told you that I would give you a name, which is a different thing altogether." "But I thought..." "I do not care what you thought. Do you want a name?" "Yes, Master." "... But you would prefer your old one? Is that what you are trying to say?" "Yes." "Do you really think that anyone would remember your name after ten centuries? Do you think that you were so important in the Middle Worlds that someone would have noted down your name, that it would have mattered to anyone?" "I do not know." "But you want it back?" "If I may have it, Master." "Why? Why do you want it?" "Because I remember nothing of the Worlds of Life. I would like to know who I was when I dwelled there." "Why? And for what purpose?" "I cannot answer you because I do not know." "Of all the dead," says Anubis, "you know that I have brought only you back to full consciousness to serve me here. Do you feel this means that perhaps there is something special about you?" "I have often wondered why you did as you did." "Then let me give you ease, man: You are nothing. You were nothing. You are not remembered. Your mortal name does not signify anything." The man lowers his eyes. "Do you doubt me?" "No, Master." "Why not?" "Because you do not lie." "Then let me show it. I took away your memories of life only because they would give you pain among the dead. But now let me demonstrate your anonymity. There are over five thousand of the dead in this room from many ages." Anubis stands, and his voice carries to every presence in the Hall: "Attend me, maggots! Turn your eyes toward this man who stands before my throne! Face them, man!" The man turns about. "Man, know that today you do not wear the body you slept in last night. You look now as you did a thousand years ago, when you came into the House of the Dead. "My dead ones, are there any of you here present who can look upon this man and say that you know him?" A golden girl steps forward. "I know this man," she says, through orange lips, "because he spoke to me in the other halL" "That I know," says Anubis, "but who is he?" "He is the one who spoke to me." "That is no answer. Go and copulate with yon purple lizard. -- And what of you, old man," "He spoke to me also." "That I know. Can yon name him?" "I cannot." "Then go dance on yonder table and pour wine over your head. -- What of you, black man?" '"This man also spoke with me." "Do you know his name?" "I did not know it when he asked me -- " "Then burnl" cries Anubis, and fires fall down from the ceiling and leap out from the walls and crisp the black man to ashes, which move then in slow eddies across the floor, passing among the ankles of the stopped dancers, falling finally into final dust. tX#"ou see?" says Anubis. i  "There is none to name you as once you were known." "I see," says the man, "but the last might have had further words -- " "To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph." "Thank you, Master." "What good would a name and memories do you here?" "None, I suppose." "Yet you wish a name, so I shall give you one. Draw your dagger." The man draws the blade which hangs at his left side. "Now cut off your thumb." "Which thumb, Master?" "The left one will do." The man bites his lower lip and tightens his eyes as he drags the blade against the joint of his thumb. His blood falls upon the floor. It runs along the blade of the knife and trickles from its point. He drops to his knees and continues to cut, tears streaming down his cheeks and falling to mingle with the blood. His breath comes in gasps and a single sob escapes him. Then, "It is done," he says. "Here!" He drops the blade and offers Anubis his thumb. "I don't want the thing! Throw it into the flames!" With his right hand, the man throws his thumb into the brazier. It sputters, sizzles, flares. "Now cup your left hand and collect the blood within it." The man does this thing. "Now raise it above your head and let it drip down upon you." IF Be raises Us band, and ffid blood falls onto his forehead. "Now repeat after me: 'I baptize me... " " 'I baptize me...  # "'Wakim, of the House of the Dead " 'Wakim, of the House of the Dead...  " " 'In the name of Anubis...  " " 'In the name of Anubis...  " " 'Wakim...  " " 'Wakim...  " " 'Emissary of Anubis in the Middle Worlds...  " " 'Emissary of Anubis in the Middle worlds...  " " '... and beyond " "... and beyond " "Hear me now, oh you dead ones: I proclaim this man Wakim. Repeat his name!" "Wakim," comes the word, through dead lips. "So be it! You are named now, Wakim," he says. "It is fitting, therefore, that you feel your birth into namehood, that you come away changed by this thing, oh my named one!" Anubis raises both hands above his head and lowers them to his sides. "Resume dancing!" he commands the dead. They move to the music once more. phe body-cutting machine rolls  into the hall, and the prosthetic replacement machine follows If. Wakim looks away from them, but they draw up beside him and stop. The first machine extrudes restrainers and holds him. "Human arms are weak," says Anubis. "Let these be removed." The man screams as the sawblades hum. Then he passes out. The dead continue their dance. When Wakim awakens, two seamless, silver arms hang at his sides, cold and insensitive. He flexes the fingers. "And human legs be slow, and capable of fatigue. Let those he wears be exchanged for tireless metal." When Wakim awakens the second time, he stands upon silver pillars. He wiggles his toes. Anubis's tongue darts forth. Place your right hand into the flames," he says, "and hold it there until it glows white." The music falls around him, and the flames caress his hand until it matches their red. The dead talk their dead talk and drink the wine they do not taste. They embrace one another without pleasure. The hand glows white. "Now," says Anubis, "seize your manhood in your right hand and burn it away." Wakim licks his lips. "Master..." he says. "Do it!" He does this thing, and he falls So unconsciousness before he has finished. When he awakens again and looks down upon himself, he is all of gleaming silver, sexless and strong. When he touches his forehead, there comes the sound of metal upon metal. "How do you feel, Wakim?" asked Anubis. "I do not know," he answers, and his voice comes strange. Anubis gestures, and the nearest side of the cutting machine becomes a reflecting surface. "Regard yourself." Wakim stares at the shining egg that is his head, at the yellow lenses, his eyes, the gleaming barrel, his chest. "Men may begin and end in many ways," says Anubis. "Some may start as machines and gain their humanity slowly. Others may end as such, losing it by pieces as they live. That which is lost may always be regained. That which is gained may always be lost. What are you, Wakim, a man or a machine?" "I do not know." "Then let me confuse you further." Anubis gestures, and Wakim's arms and legs come loose, fall away. His metal torso clangs against stone, rolls, then lies at the foot of the throne. "Now you lack mobility," says Anubis. He reaches forward with his foot and touches a tiny switch at the back of Wakim's head. "Now you lack all senses but hearing." "Yes," answers Wakim. "Now a connection is being attached to you. You feel nothing, but your head is opened and you are about to become a part of the machine which monitors and maintains this entire world. See it all now I" "I do," Wakim replies, as he becomes conscious of every room, corridor, hall and chamber in the always dead never alive world that had never been a world, a world made, not begotten of coalesced starstuff and the fires of creation, but hammered and jointed, riveted and fused, insulated and decorated, not into seas and land and air and life, but oils and metals and stone and walls of energy, all hung together within the icy void where no sun shines; and he is aware of distances, stresses, weights, materials, pressures and the secret numbers of the dead. He is not aware of his body, mechanical and disconnected. He knows only the waves of maintenance movement that flow with them and he knows the colorless colors of quantity perception. Then Anubis speaks again: "You know every shadow in the House of the Dead. You have looked through all the hidden eyes." "Yes." IF "Now see what lies beyond." 'T'here are stars, stars, scattered  stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes, and they pass near, pass far, in the eternity through which he seems to move. There is no sense of real time or real movement, only a changing of the field. A great blue Tophet Box of a sun seems to soar beside him for a moment, and then again comes black, all about him. And he comes at last to a world that is not a world, citrine and azure and green, green, green. A green corona hangs about it, at thrice its own diameter, and it seems to pulsate with a pleasant rhythm. "Behold the House of Life," says Anubis, from somewhere. And he does. It is warm and glowing and alive. He has a feeling of aliveness. "'Osiris rules the House of Life," says Anubis. And he beholds a great birdhead atop human shoulders, bright yellow eyes within it, alive, aliveoh; and the creature stands before him on an endless plain of living green which is superimposed upon his view of the world, and he holds the Staff of Life in his one hand and the Book of Life in his other. He seems to be the source of the radiant warmth. Wakim then hears the voice of Anubis once again: "The House of Life and the House of the Dead contain the Middle Worlds." And there is a falling, swirling sensation, and Wakim looks upon stars once more, but stars separated and held from other stars by bonds of force that are visible then invisible, then visible again, fading, coming, going, white, glowing lines, fluctuating. "You now perceive the Middle Worlds of Life," says Anubis. And dozens of worlds roll before him like balls of exotic marble, stippled, gauged, polished, incandescent. "Contained," says Anubis. "They are contained within the field which arcs between the only two poles that matter." "Poles?" says the metal head that is Wakim. "The House of Life and the House of the Dead. The Middle Worlds about their suns do move, and all together go on the paths of Life and Death." "I do not understand," says Wakim. "Of course you do not understand. What is at the same time the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in the universe?" "I do not know." "Life," says Anubis, "or death." "I do not understand," ssfys Wakim. "You used the superlative. You called for one answer. You named two things, however." "Did I?" asks Anubis. "Really? Just because I used two words, does it mean that I have named two separate and distinct things. May a thing not have more than one name? Take yourself for an example. What are you?" "I do not know." "That may be the beginning of wisdom, then. You could as easily be a machine which I chose to incarnate as a man for a time and have now returned to a metal casing, as you could be a man whom I have chosen to incarnate as a machine." "Then what difference does it make?" "None. None whatsoever. But you cannot make the distinction. You cannot remember. Tell me, are you alive?" "Yes." "Why?" "I think. I hear your voice. I have memories. I can speak." "Which of these qualities is life? Remember that you do not breathe, your nervous system is a mass of metallic strands and I have burnt your heart. Remember, too, that I have machines that can outreason you, outremember you, outtalk you. What does that leave you with as an excuse for being alive? You say that you hear my voice, and hearing' is a subjective phenomenon? Very well. I shall disconnect your hearing also. Watch closely to see whether you cease to exist."... One snowflake drifting down a well, a well without waters, without walls, without bottom, without top. Now take away the snowflake and consider the drifting... After a timeless time, Anubis's voice comes once again: "Do you know the difference between life and death?" " T am life," says Wakim. "Whatever you give or take away, if 'F remain it is life." "Sleep," says Anubis, and there is nothing to hear him, there in the House of the Dead. II W hen Wakim awakens, he finds that he has been set upon a table near to the throne, and he can see once more, and he regards the dance of the dead and he hears the music to which they move. "Were you dead?" asks Anubis. "No," says Wakim. "I was sleeping " "What is the difference?" " 'F was still there, although I did not know it." Anubis laughs. "Supposing I had never awakened you?" "That, I suppose, would be death." "Death? If I did not choose to exercise my power to awaken you? Even though the power was ever IF present, and 'y #I ' potential and available for that same ever?" "If this thing were not done, if I remained forever only potential, then this would be death." "A moment ago you said that sleep and death were two different things. Is it that the period of time involved makes a difference?" "No," says Wakim, "it is a matter of existence. After sleep there comes wakefulness, and the life is still present. When I exist, I know it. When I do not, then I know nothing." "Life then, is nothing?" "No." "Life then, is existing? Like these dead?" "No," says Wakim. "It is knowing you exist, at least some of the time." "Of what is this a process?" I T," says Wakim. "And what is T? Who are you?" "I am Wakim." "I only named you a short while 'ago! What were you before that?" "Not Wakim." "Dead?" "No! Alive!" cries Wakim. "Do not raise your voice within my halls," says Anubis. "You do not know what you are or who you are; you do not know the difference between existing and not existing, yet you presume to argue with me concerning life and death! Now I shall not ask you, I shall tell you. I shall tell you of life and of death. ttnphere is too much Kfe and there is not enough life" he begins, "and the same goes for death. Now I shall throw away paradoxes. "The House of Life lies so far from here that a ray of light which left it on the day you entered this domain would not yet have traveled a significant fraction of the distance which separates us. Between us lie the Middle Worlds. They move within the Life-Death tides that flow between my House and the House of Osiris. When I say 'flow' I do not mean that they move like that pitiful ray of light, crawling. Rather, they move like waves on the ocean which has but two shores. We may raise waves anywhere we wish without disrupting the entire sea. What are these waves, and what do they do? "Some worlds have too much life," he says. "Life -- crawling, pululating, fecundating, smothering itself -- worlds too clement, too full of the sciences which keep men alive -- worlds which would drown themselves in their own semen, worlds which would pack all of their lands with crowds of bigbellied women -- and so go down to death beneath the weight of their own fruitfulness. Then there are worlds which are bleak and barren and bitter, worlds which grind life like grain. Even with body modifications and with worldchange machines, there are only a few hundred worlds which may be inhabited by the six intelligent races. Life is needed badly on the worst of them. It can be a deadly blessing on the best. When I say that life is needed or not needed in certain places, I am of course also saying that death is needed or not needed. I am not speaking of two different things, but of the same thing. Osiris and I are bookkeepers. We credit and we debit. We raise waves, or we cause waves to sink back again into the ocean. Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death be counted upon to limit itself? Never. It is the equally mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity. "But there must be life control and death control," he says, "else the fruitful worlds would rise and fall, rise and fall, cycling between empire and anarchy, then down to final disruption. The bleak worlds would be encompassed by zero. Life cannot contain itself within the bounds statistics have laid down for its guidance. Therefore, it must be contained, and it is. Osiris and I hold the Middle Worlds. They lie within our field of control, and we turn them on and we turn them off as we would. Do you see now, Wakim? Do you begin to understand?" "You limit life? You cause death?" "We can lay sterility on any or all of the six races on any world we choose, for as long a period of time as is necessary. This can be done on an absolute or a fractional basis. We may also manipulate lifespans, decimate populations." "How?" "Fire. Famine. Plague. War." "What of the sterile worlds, the dry worlds? What of those?" "Multiple births can be insured, and we do not tamper with lifespans. The newly dead are sent to the House of Life, not here. There they are repaired, or their parts used in the construction of new individuals, who may or may not host a human mentality." "And of the other dead?" "The House of the Dead is the graveyard of the six races. There are no lawful cemeteries in the Middle Worlds. There have been times when the House of Life has called upon us for hosts and for parts. There have been other occasions when they have shipped us their excess." C#Tt is difficult to understand. It A seems brutal, it seems harsh..." "It is life and it is death. It is the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in the universe. You do not have to understand it. Wakim. Your comprehension or your lack of it, your approval or your disapproval, will in no way alter its operation." IF "And whence come you, Anubis -- and Osiris -- that you control it?" "There are some things that are not for you to know." "And how do the Middle Worlds accept your control?" "They live with it, and they die with it. It is above their objections, for it is necessary for their continued existence. It has become a natural law, and it is utterly impartial, applying with equal force to all who come beneath it." "There are some who do not?" "You shall learn more of this when I am ready to tell you, which is not now. I have made you a machine, Wakim. Now I shall make you a man. Who is to say how you started, where you started? Were I to wipe out your memories up to this moment and then re-embody you, you would recollect that you had begun as metal." "Will you do this thing?" " No. I want you equipped with the memories which you now possess, when and if I assign you to your new duties." Then Anubis raises his hands and strikes them together. A machine removes Wakim from the shelf and switches off his senses as it lowers him. The music pulses and falls about the dancers, the two hundred torches blaze upon the pillars like immortal thoughts, Anubis stares at a blackened place upon the floor of the great Hall, and overhead the canopy of smokes moves to its own rhythms. IH X T#akim opens his eyes and looks   upon grayness. He lies on his back, staring upward. The tiles are cold beneath him, and there is a flickering of light off to his right. Suddenly, he clenches his left hand, feels for his thumb, finds it, sighs. "Yes," says Anubis. He sits up before the throne, looks down upon himself, looks up at Anubis. "You have been baptized, you have been born again into the flesh." "Thank you." "No trouble. Plenty of raw materials around here. Stand up! Do you remember your lessons?" Wakim stands. "Which ones?" "Temporal fugue. To make time follow the mind, not the body." "Yes." "Yes." "And combining the two?" "Yes." Anubis stands, a full head taller than Wakim, whose new body is well over two yards in length. "Then show me! "Let the music cease!" he cries. "Let the one who in life was called Dargoth come before me!" The dead stop dancing. They stand without moving, and their eyes never blink. There is silence for several seconds, unbroken by word, footfall, breathing. Then Dargoth moves among the standing dead, advancing through shadow, through torchlight. Wakim stands straighter when he sees him, for the muscles of his back, his shoulders, his storpach tighten. A metal band the color of copper crosses Dargoth's head, covers his cheekbones, vanishes beneath his graygrizzled chin. A latitudinal band passes above his brows, over his temples, meets at the back of his skull. His eyes are wide, the sclera yellow and the iris red. His lower jaw makes a constant chewing motion as he rolls forward, and his teeth are long shadows. His head sways from side to side upon its twenty inches of neck. His shoulders are three feet in width, giving him the appearance of an inverted triangle, for his sides taper sharply to meet with his segmented chassis, which begins where the flesh stops. His wheels turn slowly, the left rear one squeaking with each revolution. His arms hang a full four and a half feet, so that his fingertips barely brush the floor. Four short, sharp metal legs are folded upward along his flat sides. The razors come erect on his back, fall again, as he moves The eight-foot whip that is his tail uncoils behind him as he comes to a halt before the throne. "For this night, this Thousandyear Night, I " says Anubis, "I give you back your name -- Dargoth. Once were you numbered among the mightiest warriors in the Middle Worlds, Dargoth, until you pitted your strength against that of an immortal and went down to your death before him. Your broken body has been repaired, and this night you must use it to do battle once more. Destroy this man Wakim in single combat and you take his place as my first servant here in the House of the Dead." Dargoth crosses his great hands upon his brow and bows until they touch the floor. "You may have ten seconds," says Anubis to Wakim, "to prepare your mind for battle. Stand ready, Dargoth!" "Lord," says Wakim, "how may I kill one who is already dead?" "That is your problem," says Anubis. "You have now wasted all ten of your seconds with foolish questions. Begin!" nphere comes a snapping sound and a series of metallic clicks. Dargoth's metal legs snap downward, straighten, raise him three feet higher above the floor. He prances. He raises his arms and flexes them. Wakim watches, waiting. Dargoth rises unto his hind legs, so that now his head is ten feet above the floor. Then he leaps forward, his arms ti IF outstretched, his tail curled, his head extended, fangs bared. The blades rise upon his back like gleaming fins, his hooves fall like hammers. At the last possible moment, Wakim sidesteps and throws a punch which is blocked by the other's forearm. He leaps high into the air then, and the whip cracks harmlessly beneath him. For all his bulk, Dargoth halts and turns rapidly. He rears once more and strikes forward with his front hooves. Wakim avoids them, but Dargoth's hands fall upon his shoulders as he descends. Wakim seizes both wrists and kicks Dargoth in the chest. The tail-lash falls across his right cheek as he does so. Then he breaks the grip of those massive hands upon his shoulders, ducks his head and lays the edge of his left hand hard upon the other's side. The whip falls again, this time across his back. He aims a blow at the other's head, but the long neck twists it out of the way, and he hears the whip crack once more, missing him by inches. Dargoth's fist lands upon his cheekbone, and he stumbles, offbalance, sliding upon the floor. He rolls out of the path of the hooves, but a fist knocks him sprawling as he attempts to rise again. As the next blow descends, however, he catches the wrist with both hands and throws his full weight upon the arm, twisting his head to the side. Dargoth's fist strikes the floor, and Wakim regains his feet, landing a left cross as he does so. Dargoth's head rolls with the punch, and the lash cracks beside Wakim's ear. He lays another blow upon the twisting head, and then he is borne over backwards as Dargoth's rear legs straighten like springs and his shoulder strikes him in the chest. He rears, once more. Then, for the first time, Dargoth speaks: "Now, Wakim, now!" he says. Dargoth becames first servant of Anubis!" As the hooves flash downward, Wakim catches those metal legs, one in each hand, halfway up their length. He had braced himself in a crouched position, and now his lips curl back, showing his clenched teeth, as Dargoth is frozen in midstrike above him. He laughs as he springs back into a standing position and heaves with both arms, casting his opponent high up upon his hind legs, struggling to keep from falling over. "Fool!" he says, and his voice is strangely altered. His word, like the stroke of a great iron bell, rings through the Hall. There comes up a soft moaning from among the dead, as when they had been routed from out their graves. " 'Now'? you say? 'Wakim'? you say?" and he laughs as he steps forward beneath the felling hooves. "You know not what you say!" and he locks his arms about the great metal torso and the hooves flail helplessly above his back and the tail-whip swishes and cracks and lays stripes upon his shoulders. His hands rest between the sharpened spines, and he crushes the unyielding segmented body of metal close up against his own. Dargoth's great hands find his neck, but the thumbs cannot reach the throat, and the muscles of Wakim's neck tighten and cord as he bends his knees and strains. They stand so, frozen for a timeless instant, and the firelight wrestles with shadows upon their bodies. Then with a gigantic, heaving motion, Wakim raises Dargoth above the ground, turns, and hurls him from him. Dargoth's legs kick wildly as he turns over in the air. His spines rise and fall, and his tail reaches out and cracks. He raises his arms up before his face, but he lands with a shattering crash at the foot of the throne of Anubis, and there he lies still, his metal body broken in four places and his head split open upon the first step to the throne.   "Sufficient?" he inquires. "You did not employ temporal fugue," says Anubis, not even looking downward at the wreck that had been Dargoth. IF "It was unnecessary. He was not that mighty an opponent." "He was mighty," says Anubis. "Why did you laugh and make as if you questioned your name when you fought with him?" "I do not know. For a moment, when I realized that I could not be beaten, I felt as though I were someone else." "Someone without fear, pity, or remorse?" "Yes." "Do you still feel thus?" "No." "Then why have you stopped calling me 'Master'?" "The heat of battle raised emotions which overrode my sense of protocol." "Then correct the oversight immediately." "Very well, Master." "Apologize. Beg my pardon, most humbly." Wakim prostrates himself on the floor. "I beg your pardon, Master. Most humbly." "Rise again, and consider yourself pardoned. The contents of your previous stomach have gone the way of all such things. You may go re-fresh yourself now. Let there be singing and dancing once more! Let there be drinking and laughter in celebration of the name-giving on this, Wakim's Thousandyear Eve! Let the carcass of Dargoth be gone from my sight!" And these things are done. When Wakim had finished his meal, and it seems as if the dancing and the singing of the dead will continue until Time's well deserved end, Anubis gestures, first to his left, then to his right, and every other flame folds upon every other pillar, dives within itself, is gone. His mouth opens, and the words come down upon Wakim, "Take them back. Fetch me my staff." Wakim stands and gives the necessary orders. Then he leads the dead out from the Great Hall. As they depart, the tables vanish between the pillars. An impossible breeze tears at the ceiling of smoke. Before that great, gray mat is shredded, however, the other torches have died, and the only illumination within the Hall comes from the two blazing bowls on either side of the throne. Anubis stares into the darkness, and the captured light rays reform themselves at his bidding, and he sees Dargoth fall once more at the foot of his throne and lie still, and he sees the one he has named Wakim standing with a skull's grin upon his lips, and for an instant -- had it been a trick of the flamelight? -- a mark upon his brow. Far, in an enormous room where the light is dim and orange and crowded into corners and the dead lay them down once more upon invisible catafalques above their opened graves, faint, rising, then falling, Wakim hears a sound that is not like any sound he has ever heard before. He stays his hand upon the staff and descends the dais. "Old man," he says, to one with whom he had spoken earlier, one whose hair and whose beard are stained with wine and in whose left wrist a clock has stopped, "Old man, hear my words and tell me if you know. What is that sound?" The unblinking eyes stare upward, past his own, and the lips move. "Master..." "I am not Master here." "... Master, it is but the howling of a dog." Wakim returns then to the dais and gives them all back to their graves. Then the light departs, and the staff guides him through the dark, along the path that has been ordained. IV A ter." "Arise, and approach." "The dead are all returned to their proper places." "Very good. Wakim, you are my man?" Yes, Master." "To do my bidding, and to serve me in all things?" "Yes, Master." "This is why you are my emissary to the Middle Worlds, and beyond." "I am to depart the House of the Dead?" "Yes, I am sending you forth from here on a mission." "What sort of mission?" "The story is long, involved. There are many persons in the Middle Worlds who are very eld. You know this?" "Yes." "And there art some who are timeless and deathless." "Deathless, Lord?" "By one means or another, certain individuals have achieved a kind of immortality. Perhaps they follow the currents of life and draw upon their force, and they flee from the waves of death. Perhaps they have adjusted their biochemistry, or they keep their bodies in constant repair, or they have many bodies and exchange them, or steal new ones. Perhaps they wear metal bodies, or no bodies at all. Whatever the means involved, you will hear talk of the Three Hundred Immortals when you enter the Middle Worlds. This is only an approximate figure, for few truly know ftnich about them. There are two hundred eighty-three immortals, to be exact. They cheat on life, on death, as you can see, and their very existence upsets the balance, inspires others to strive to emulate their legends, causes others to think them gods. Some are harmless wanIF derers, others are not. All are powerful and subtle, all adept at continuing their existence. One is especially noxious, and I am sending you to destroy him." "Who may he be, Master?" "He is called the Prince Who Was A Thousand, and he dwells beyond the Middle Worlds. His kingdom lies beyond the realm of life and death, in a place where it is always twilight. He is difficult to locate, however, for he often departs his own region and trespasses into the Middle Worlds and elsewhere. I desire that he come to an end, as he has opposed both the House of the Dead and the House of Life for many days." "What does he look like, the Prince Who Was A Thousand?" "Anything he wishes." "Where shall I find him?" "I do not know. You must seek him." "How shall I know him?" By his deeds, by his words. He opposes us in all ways." "Surely others must oppose you also... " "Destroy all you come upon who do so. You shall know the Prince Who Was A Thousand, however, because he shall be the most difficult of all to destroy. He will come closest to destroying you." "Supposing he succeeds?" "Then I shall take me a thousand years more to train another emissary to set upon his task. I do not desire his downfall today or tomorrow. It will doubtless take you centuries even to locate him. Time matters little. An age will pass before he becomes a threat, to Osiris or myself. You will learn of him as you travel, seeking after him. When you find him you will know him." "Am I mighty enough to work his undoing?" "I think you are." "I am ready." Then I shall set your feet upon the track. I give you the power to invoke me, in my name, and in times of need to draw force from the field of Life and of Death while you are among the Middle Worlds. This will make you invincible. You will report back to me when you feel you need to. If I feel this need, I will reach out after you." "Thank you, Master." "You will obey all my sendings, instantly." "Yes." " Go now and rest. After you have slept and eaten again, you will depart and begin your mission." "Thank you." "This will be your second last sleep within this House, Wakim. Meditate upon the mysteries it contains." "I do so constantly." "I am one of them." "Master..." "That is part of my name. Never forget it." "Master -- how could I?" V T isten to the world. It is called  Blis, and it is not hard to hear at all: The sounds may be laughter, sighs, contented belches. They may be the clog-clog of machinery or beating hearts. They may be the breathing of multitudes or their words. They may be footsteps, the sound of a kiss, a slap, the cry of a baby. Music. Music, perhaps. The sound of typewriter keys through the Black Daddy Night, consciousness kissing paper only? Perhaps. Then forget the sounds and the words and look at the world. First, colors. Name one. Red? There's a riverbank that color, green stream hauled between, snagged on purple rocks. Yellow and gray and black is the city in the distance. Here in the open field, both sides of the river, are pavilions. Pick any color, they're all about. Over a thousand pavilions, like balloons and teepees and stemless mushrooms, blazing in the midst of a blue field, strung with pennons, full of moving colors that are people. Three lime-bright bridges span the river. The river leads to a creamy sea which swells but seldom breaks. From it, up the river, come barges and boats and vessels which moor along the banks. More come out of the sky, settling anywhere upon the blue fabric of the field. Their passengers move among the pavilions. They are of all races and sorts. They eat and they talk. They play. They are making sounds and wearing the colors. Okay? The odors are of sweet and growing things and kissful come the breezes. When these breezes and these odors reach the fairground, they are altered subtly. There comes up the odor of sawdust, which is hardly unpleasant; and that of perspiration, which cannot be too unpleasant if some of it is your own. Then there are smells of woodsmoke, smells of food, and the clean aroma of alcohol. Smell the world. Taste it, swallow it and hold it in your belly. Burst with it. -- Like the man with the eyepatch and the alpenstock. T Je walks among the husksters nuch, but not. His flesh is strangely flesh-colored, and his right eye is a gray wheel, rolling. A week's growth of beard frames his face, and all colors are missing from the blot of the garments. His gait is steady. His hands are hard. He stops to buy a mug of beer, moves to watch a cockfight. He wagers a coin on the smaller bird, which tears the larger apart and so pays for his beers. He watches the deflowering show, samples the narcotics exhibit, foils a brown man in a white shirt who attempts to guess his weight. A short man with close-set dark eyes then emerges from a nearby tent, IF moves to his side, tugs upon his sleeve. "Yes?" His voice seems centrally located, that deep and potent does it stir. "I see by your outfit you may be a preacher." "Yes, I am -- of the non-theistic, non-sectarian sort." "Very good. Would you care to earn some money? It will only take a few moments." "What would you have me do?" "A man is going to commit suicide and be buried in that tent. The grave is already dug and all the tickets have been sold. The audience is growing restless, now though. The performer won't do it without proper religious accompaniment, and we can't sober up the preacher." "I see. It will cost you ten." "Make it five?" "Get yourself another preacher." "All right, ten! C'mon! They're starting to clap their hands and boo!" He moves into the tent, blinks his eyes. "Here's the preacher!" calls out the emcee. "We're ready to go ahead now. What'cher name, Dad?" "Sometimes I'm called Madrak." The man stops, turns and stares at him, licks his lips. "I... didn't realize." "Let's be on with it." "Okay, sir. Make way here! Coming through! Hot stuff!" The crowd parts. There are perhaps three hundred people within the tent. Overhead lights blaze down upon a roped-in circle of bare earth in which a grave has been dug. Insects fly in rings through falling dust within the ladders of light. An opened coffin lies beside the opened grave. On a small platform of wood is a chair. The man seated upon the chair is perhaps fifty years of age. Kis face is flat and full of wrinkles, his complexion pale. His eyes bulge slightly. He wears only a pair of shorts, and he has much gray hair upon his chest, his arms, his legs. He leans forward and squints as the two approach through the crowd. "All set, Dolinin," says the smaH man. "My ten," says Madrak. The small man slips him a folded bill, which Madrak inspects and places in his wallet. The small man climbs up onto the platform and smiles out over the crowd. Then he pushes his straw hat back upon his head. # A #I right, folks," he begins,"now we're all set to go. I know you'll find this was worth waiting for. As I announced earlier, this man Dolmin is about to commit suicide before your very eyes. For personal reasons he is resigning from the big race, and he has consented to earn a little money for his family by doing it in full #S sight of all. His performance will be followed by a genuine burial, in this same ground upon which you are now standing. It has doubtless been a long time sinoe any of you have seen a real death -- and I doubt anyone here present has ever seen a burial. So we're about ready to turn this show over to the preacher and Mister Dalmin. Let's have a nice hand for them both!" There is applause within the tent. "And a final word of caution. Do not stand too close. We are bending an ordnance, despite the fact that this tent has been fully fireproofed. Okay! Take it away!" He jumps down from the platform as Madrak mounts it. Madrak leans toward the seated man as a ed beside his chair. "Are you sure you want to go through with this?" he asks the man. "Yes." He looks into the man's eyes, but the pupils are not enlarged, nor are they shrunken. "Why?" "Personal reasons, Dad. I'd rather not go into them. Shrive me, please." Madrak places his hand upon the man's head. "Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. IF Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen." " Thank you, Dad." " Beautiful I" sobs a fat woman with blue wings, from the front row. The man called Dolmin raises imscrews the cap, pours its contents over himself. '"Has anyone got a cigarette?" he asks, and the small man hands one up to him. Dolmin reaches into the pocket of his shorts and withdraws a lighter. Then he pauses and looks out over the crowd. Someone calls out, "Why are you doing it?" He smiles then replies, "A general protest against life, perhaps, which is a foolish game, is it not? Follow me I" Then he lights the lighter. By this time, Madrak is well outside the ropedin circle. A blast of heat follows the blaze, and the single scream is a hot nail driven through everything. The six men who are standing by with fire extinguishers relax when they see that the flames will not spread. Madrak folds his hands beneath his chin and rests them upon his staff. After a time, the flames go out and men with asbestos gloves come forward to handle the remains. The audience is quiet. There has been no applause thus far. "So that's what it's like!" someone finally whispers, and the words carry throughout the tent. "Perhaps," comes a precise, cheerful voice from the back of the tent, "and perhaps not, also." T T cads turn as the speaker moves  forward. He is tall and has a pointed green beard and matching eyes and hair. His complexion is pale, his nose long and thin. He wears black and green. "It is the magician," someone says, "from the show across the river." "Correct," he replies, with a nod and a smile, and he makes his way forward through the crowd, clearing his path with a silvertopped cane. The lid is closed on the casket as he pauses and whispers, "Madrak the Mighty." Madrak turns, says "I've been looking for you." #f "I know. That's why I'm here. What is this silly business?" " Suicide show," says Madrak. "A man named Dolmin. They've forgotten what death is like." "So soon, so soon," sighs the other. "Then let us give them their money's worth -- full circle!" "Vramin, I know you can do it, but considering the shape he's in -- " The small man in the straw hat approaches and regards them with his small dark eyes. "Sir," he says to Madrak, "any other ceremonial things you'd care to do before the interment?" j  "Of course not," says Vramin. "One only buries the dead." "What do you mean?" "That man is not dead -- only smouldering." "You're wrong, mister. This is an honest show." "Nevertheless, I say he lives and will walk again for your amusement." "You must be some kind of chotic" "Only an humble thaumaturge," Vramin replies, stepping into the circle. Madrak follows him. Vramin then raises his cane and weaves it through a cryptic gesture. It glows with green light, which then leaps forward and falls upon the box. "Dolmin, come forth!" says Vramlin. IF The audience presses forward. Vramin and Madrak move to the wall of the tent. The small man would follow them, but is distracted by a knocking from within the coffin. " Brother, we'd best leave," says Vramin, and slices through the fabric with the tip of his cane. The lid of the coffin is slowly raised as they step through the wall and into the world without. Beyond them a sound occurs. It is compounded of screaming and cries of "Fakel" and "We want our money back!" and "Look at him!" " 'What fools these mortals be,' " says the green man, who is one of the few persons living able to put quotation marks around it and know why. T Tc is coming, riding down the sky on the back of a great beast of burnished metal. It has eight legs, and its hooves are diamonds. Its body is as long as two horses. Its neck is as long as its body, and its head is that of a Chinese demon dog out of gold. Beams of blue light come forth from its nostrils, and its tail is three antennae. It moves across the blackness that lies between the stars, and its mechanical legs move slowly. Each step that it takes, however, crossing from nothing to nothing, carries it twice the distance of the previous step. Each stride also takes the same amount of time as the prior one. Suns flash by, fall behind, wink out. It runs through solid matter, passes through infernos, pierces nebulae, faster and faster moving through the starfall blizzard within the forest of the night. Given a sufficient warm-up run, it is said that it could circumnavigate the universe in a single stride. What would happen if it kept running after that, no one knows. Its rider had once been a man. He is the one who is called the Steel General. That is not a suit of armor that he is wearing. It is his body. He has turned off most of his humanity for the duration of the trip, and he stares now straight ahead past the scales like bronze oak leaves on the side of his mount's neck. He holds four reins, each as thick as a strand of silk, on the fingertips of his left hand. He wears a ring of tanned human flesh on his little finger, because it would be senseless and noisy for him to wear metal jewelry. The flesh had once been his; at least, it had helped to surround him at one time long ago. Wherever he goes, he carries a collapsible five-string banjo with him in a compartment near to where his heart used to be. When he plays it he becomes a kind of negative Orpheus and men follow him to Hell. He is also one of the very few masters of temporal fugue in the entire universe. It is said that no man can lay hands upon him unless he permits , ft. His mount had once been a horse. A yTadrak tilts the beaker, refills their glasses. Vramin raises his, stares out across the wide esplanade before his pavilion, quaffs it Madrak pours once more. "It is neither life, nor is it fair," says Vramin, finally. "Yet you never actively supported the program." "What matters that? It is my present feelings that control me." "The feelings of a poet..." Vramin strokes his beard. "I can never give full allegiance, to anything, or to anyone," he replies. "Pity, poor Angel of the Seventh Station." "That title perished with the Station." "In exile, the aristocracy always tends to preserve small items pertaining to rank." "Face yourself in the darkness and what do you see?" "Nothing." "Exactly." "What is the connection?" "Darkness." "I fail to see." "That warrior-priest, is common m the dark." "Cease the riddling, Vramin. What is the matter?" "Why did you seek, me here at the Fair?" "I have the latest population figures with me. They strike me a a 'approximating the mythical Point Critical -- that which never occurs. Would you care to see them?" "No. I do not need to. Whatever the figures, your conclusion is correct." "You feel it 'with your special perceptions, within the tides of the Power?" Vramin nods. "Give me a cigarette," says Madrak. Vram gestures, and a lighted cigarette appears between his fingers. "It is special this time," he says. It is not just a waning of the tide of Life. There will be a riptide." "How will this be manifest?" "I do not know, Madrak. But I do not intend to stay here longer than is necessary tQ find out." "Oh? When will you depart?" "Tomorrow evening, though I know I am flirting with the Black Tide once more. I had best do something about my death-wish again, sometime soon, preferably in pentameter." "Do any others remain?" "No, we are the only two immortals on Blis." "Will you give me a gateway when you go?" "Of course." "Then Pll remain here at the Fair until tomorrow evening." IF # # T should strongly recommend your going immediately, rather than waiting. I can provide a gateway now." Vramin gestures again and draws upon a cigarette of his own. He notices his refilled glass and sips it. "It would be an act of wisdom to depart immediately," he decides, "but wisdom is itself the product of knowledge; and knowledge, unfortunately, is generally the product of foolish doings. So, to add to my own knowledge and to enhance my wisdom I shall remain another day, to see what occurs." "Then you expect that something special will happen tomorrow?" "Yes. The riptide. I feel the coming of Powers. There was recently some movement in that great House where all things go." "Then this is knowledge which I, too, wish to obtain," says Mararak, "as it affects my former master Who Was A Thousand." "You cling to an outworn loyalty, mighty one." "Perhaps. And what is your excuse? Why do you seek to enhance your wisdom at this expense?" "Wisdom is an end in itself. Also, these doings may be sources of great poetry." "If death be the source of great poetry, then I prefer the lesser variety. I feel, though, that the Prince should know of any new development within the Middle Worlds." "I drink to your loyaky, old friend, though I feel our former liege to be at least partly responsible for the present muddle." "Your feelings on this matter are not unknown to me." The poet takes one sip and lowers his glass. His eyes then grow all of one color, that being green. The white which encircles them vanishes, and the black points are gone that had been their centers. They are now become pale emeralds, and a yellow spark lives within each. "Speaking in my capacity as mage and seer," he says, in a voice grown distant and toneless, "I say that it has now arrived upon Blis, this thing that portends the chaos. I say, too, that another comes, for I hear soundless hoofbeats within the dark, and I see that which is invisible in its many-strided pacings over stars. We may yet ourselves be drawn into this thing, who have ne wish to participate." "Where? And how?" "Here. And it is not life, nor is it fair." Madrak nods and says, "Amen." The magician gnashes his teeth. "It is our destiny to bear witness," he decides, and his eyes burn with kles whiten upon the black walking stick with its head of silver. A eunuch priest of the highest  caste sets tapers before a pair of old shoes... The dog worries the dirty glove which has seen many better centuries... The blind Noras strike a tiny silver anvil with fingers that are mallets. Upon the metal lies a length of blue light... VI siris sits in the House of Life,  drinking the blood-red wine. The green glow fills the air about, and nowhere is there anything sharp or cold. He sits in the Hall of the Hundred Tapestries, and the walls are invisible behind them all. The floor is covered with a fabric that is thick and soft and golden in color. He puts down an empty glass and stands. Moving across the Hall, he comes to the green tapestry, raises it and steps into the cubicle which it conceals. He touches three of the coordination plates set in the wall, pushes aside the tapestry, and steps into a room located three hundred forty-eight miles south-southwest of the Hall of the Hundred Tapestries, at a depth of # feet. The chamber he enters is semidark, but a portion of the green glow can be felt within it. The one who wears a red loincloth and sits cross-legged upon the floor does not appear to notice him. His back is turned, and he does not move. His body is normally formed, somewhat slim, and his muscles seem those of a swimmer. His hair is thick and as dark as hair can be without being black. His complexion is pale. He is leaning forward and does not appear to be breathing. Suddenly, another is seated across from him, in an identical posture. He is dressed in exactly the same manner. His complexion, hair and musculature are the same. He is the same, in all respects; and he raises his dark eyes from the small yellow crystal they contemplate. Looking up, he sees the orange, green, yellow and black birdhead of Osiris, and his eyes widen and he says, "I have done it again," and the one whose back is to Osiris vanished before him. He scoops up the crystal, places it in a cloth bag with drawstrings and hangs it at his waist Then he stands. "Nine second fugue," he says. "Is that your record?" asks Osiris, and his voice sounds like a scratched recording that is being played too rapidly. "Yes, father." "Can you control it yet?" "No." "How much longer will it take?" "Who knows? Ishibaka says perhaps three centuries." "Then you will be a master?" "No one can really tell in advance. There are fewer than thirty masters in all the worlds. It has IP taken me two centuries to advance this far, and it has been less than a year since the first movement. Of course, once it is developed, the power continues to grow..." Osiris shakes his head and steps forward, laying his hand upon his shoulder. "Horus, my son and avenger, there is a thing I would have you do. It would be good if you were a master of the fugue, but it is not essential. Your other powers should prove sufficient to the task." "What task is this, my father?" "Your mother, wishing to gain once more my favor and a return from exile, has offered me further information as to my colleague's activities. It appears that Anubishas sent a new emissary into the Middle Worlds, doubtless to locate our ancient enemy and destroy him." it'T'his would seem a good thing,"  says Horus, nodding, "if successful. I have my doubts, though, since he has failed each time he has tried. How many has he sent now -- five or six?" "Six. This one he has named Wakim is seventh." "Wakim?" "Yes, and the bitch tells me he seems to be something special." "How so?" "Is it possible that the jackal spent a thousand years training him for this job. His fighting prowess may be equal to that of Madrak himself. And he appears to bear a special token none of the others bore. It would seem that he is attuned to draw energy directly from the field." "I wonder how he thought that one up?" asks Horus, smiling. "It would seem that he has been studying the tricks certain of the immortals have used against us." "What would you have me do? Assist him against your enemy?" "No. I have decided that whichever of us succeeds in destroying the Prince Who Was A Thousand, that one will gain the support of his fallen Angels who are numbered among the immortals. The rest should follow. Those who do not will doubtless enter the House of the Dead at the hands of their fellows. The time is right The old loyalties have been forgotten. A new, solitary liege would be welcomed, I feel, one who offered an end to their fugitive existence. And with the support of the immortals, one House can emerge supreme." "I see your reasoning father. It may well be that it is correct. You would have me find the Prince Who Was A Thousand, before Wakim finds him, and slay him in the name of Life?" "Yes, my avenger. Do you think you can do this?" "I am troubled that you would ask that question, knowing my strengths." "The Prince will be no easy prey. His strengths axe mainly unknown, and I cannot tell you what he looks like, nor where he abides." "I will find him. I will end him. But perhaps I had best destroy this Wakim before I begin the search." "No! He is on the world of Blis, where even now the plague should be beginning. But do not approach that one, Horus! Not unless I bid it. I have strange feelings concerning Wakim. I must find out who he was before I permit such an attempt." "Why is this, mighty father? What should that matter?" "A memory of days before your days, which shall remain unspoken, returns to trouble me. Ask me no more." "Very well." "The bitch, your mother, bade me lay different plans concerning the Prince. If you should meet with her during your travels, do not be swayed by any counsels regarding leniency. The Prince must die." "She would have him live?" Osiris nods. "Yes, she is very fond of him. She may have informed us of Wakim only to save the Prince from him. She will tell you any lie to gain her ends. Do not be deceived." "I will not." "Then I send you, Horus, my avenger and my son, as first emissary of Osiris into the Middle Worlds." Horus bows his head, and Osiris places his hand upon it for a warm moment. "He is dead already," says Horus, slowly, "for was it not I that destroyed the Steel General himself?" Osiris does not answer, for he, too once destroyed the Steel General. nphe Prince Who Was A Thousand walks beside the sea and under the sea. The only other intelligent inhabitant of the world within which he walks cannot be sure whether the Prince created it or discovered it. This is because one can never be sure whether wisdom produces or merely locates, and the Prince is wise. He walks along the beach. His footsteps begin seven paces behind him. High above his head hangs the sea. The sea hangs above his head because it has no choice in the matter. The world within which he walks is so constructed that if one were to approach it from any direction, it would appear to be a world completely lacking in land masses. If one were to descend far enough beneath that sea which surrounds it, however, one would emerge from the underside of the waters and enter into the planet's atmosphere. Descending still farIF ther, one would reach dry land. Traversing this land, one might come upon other bodies of water, waters bounded by land, beneath the sea that hangs in the sky. The big sea flows perhaps a thousand feet overhead. Bright fish fill its bottom, like mobile constellations. And down here on the land, everything glows. It has been said that a world such as this unnamed place with a sea for a sky could not possibly exist. Those who said it are obviously wrong. Positing infinity, the rest is easy. The Prince Who Was A Thousand is in an unique position. He is a teleportationist, among other things, and this is even rarer than a master of temporal fugue. In fact, he is the only one of his kind. He can transport himself, in no time at all, to any place that he can visualize. And he has a very vivid imagination. Granting that any place you can think of exists somewhere in infinity, if the Prince can think of it too, he is able to visit it. Now, a few theorists claim that the Prince's visualizing a place and willing himself into it is actually an act of creation. No one knew about the place before, and if the Prince can find it, then maybe what he really did was make it happen. Whatever -- positing infinity, the rest is easy. The Prince has not the least idea, not a snowball in hell's worth, as to where the nameless world is located, anyway, re the rest of the universe. Nor does he care. He can come and go as he chooses, taking with him whomsoever he would. He has come alone, however, because he wishes to visit his wife. He stands beside the sea, beneath the sea, and he calls out her name, which is the name "Nephytha," and he waits till a breeze comes to him from across the waters, touching him and saying the name that is his own. He bows then his head and feels her presence about him. "How goes the world with thee, loved one?" he inquires. There came a sob upon the air, breaking the surf's monotone turning. "Well," comes the reply. "And thyself, my lord?" "I will be truthful rather than polite, and say 'poorly.' " "It cries yet in the night?" "Yes." #T thought of thee as I drifted and as I flowed. I have made birds to be within the air to keep me company, but their cries are either harsh or sad. What may I tell thee, to be polite, rather than truthful? That I am not sickened by his life that is not life? That I do not long to be a woman once again, rather than a breath, a color, a movement? That I do not ache to touch thee once again, and to feel once again thy touch upon my body? Thou knowest all that I might say, but no one god possesses all powers. I should not complain, but I fear, my lord, I fear the madness that sometimes comes upon me: Never to sleep, never to eat. How long has it been?" "Many centuries." "And I know that all wives be bitches unto their lords, and I may ask of thee thy forgiveness. But to whom else may I address my bitching, but to thee?" "Well taken, my Nephytha. Would that I could embody thee once more, for I, too, am lonely. Thou knowest I have tried. When thou hast broken the Thing That Cries, then wilst thou discipline Osiris and Anubis?" "Of course." "Please do not destroy them immediately, if they can help me. Grant them some measure of mercy if they give me back to you. "... For I am so lonely. I wish that I could go away from here." "You require a place surrounded by water, to keep you alive. You require an entire world, to keep you occupied." "I know. I know." "If Osiris had not been so deadly set upon vengeance, things might have been different. Now, thou knowest, I am bound to slay him when I have resolved the matter of the Nameless." (continued on page #) IF IF  Short Story No wonder Belk hod troubles. His time particles were not synchronal l 'T'his began in the office of John  D. Carew, of the JohnD. Carew Literary Agency, New York City. Present in the room were John D. Carew and George Belk, one of his authors. " George," Carew was saying, " please don't misunderstand me. When -- rather long ago -- I saw the first samples of your work, I was delighted. I told myself you might grow in time to be one of our most valuable properties. I still believe you retain that potential. But having represented you for over eight years, I begin to feel concerned. Your overall output remains regrettably slight." George Belk sighed. "I know it." W I can place almost anything you write," Carew went on, "for relatively good money. But over the years checks have been few and far between. You must be feeling the financial pinch from time to time." "I get by," George said, looking despondent. "But barely." Carew clucked in a sympathetic way. "If you'd like to confide in me, George -- what seems to be your problem?" George sighed again. "I wish I could define the probleml I can't. The effect is simply that I don't seem to have time to get more writing done." Carew's eyebrows lifted for a moment. "You are engaged in other work? Perhaps in intensive social activities?" "No! Neither. I write full time. Of course I have chores to take care of around the house. I go shopping. And I try to reserve half an hour a day for physical exercise." Carew nodded. "The last is commendable! One should keep fit. But is that all you do? Besides writing?" "Yes," George said. "That's all." "Then you must, in fact, be putting in a great deal of worktime during an average day... "No, I don't," George said. "Let me try to explain it to you -- though, as I said, I can't explain it myself. You may not believe this, but I'm a methodical and orderly man. I keep files and records. So I can't help noticing that I manage to waste an incredible amount of time." "In what way?" G eorge scowled. "That's what I'd like to know! Take my half-hour of exercise in the morning. Nine to nine-thirty is the period I set aside for it. I shave at eight, right after breakfast. Then I drag some mats out into the living room and pull back the furniture. By then it's nine o'clock." Carew looked very thoughtful. "Shaving and dragging out some mats and pulling back a few pieces of furniture consumes a full hour?" "It doesn't seem reasonable, does it?" George said. "Well, that's part of what I mean. A small part... So then it's nine o'clock and I exercise. I time that -- thirty minutes exactly. "But before I've got dressed again and straightened out the living room and am ready to go shopping, it's usually close to eleven." Carew grunted and stroked his chin. "When do you actually get to work?" George looked embarrassed. "Well, around one-fifteen." "You shop for two hours?" "Yes, somehow it comes to that. I have to go to several stores. No one store ever seems to carry everything you want." "I see. Then you work through the afternoon?" "In principle. I may put in a short break now and then." "Doing what?" Carew asked. "Oh, I might have a snack -- and then of course I have to wash the dishes again. Oh I'll tidy up a room that's beginning to look too messy. That kind of thing." "Umm. And in the evening?" "Ordinarily I'm working. I take in an occasional TV show." Carew leaned back in his chair. "And what is your average daily output under those circumstances?" George hung his head. "Roughly -- five hundred words." Carew just blinked at him in silence. IF ii'T'hat's the incredible part of it I" George said explosively. " Because I've timed myself on occasion. When I have, IVe found I can turn out a page of perfectly usable material in around twenty minutes." He leaned forward, slammed his fist on the desk. "I tell you, sometimes I think this is going to drive me crazy! Where does the rest of my time go?" "I'm not hure," said Carew, pulling open a desk drawer. "But it's possible that there is a solution to your problem. Yes, quite possible!" "What kind of solution?" George asked hopefully. Carew fished about in the drawer, took out a business card and slid it across the desk to George. "When you get home," he said, "call this number and get yourself an appointment. I'll have talked with their office meanwhile." George read the card. The name M.D. "Now wait a minute!" he said suspiciously. "This Dr. Gordon doesn't happen to be a psychiatrist, does he?" "No," said Carew. "Dr. Gordon is not a psychiatrist. He has medical and psychological degrees, but he isn't in general practice. He does research work." "And just how is he supposed to research me?" George asked in a somewhat belligerent tone. "He isn't going to research you George. He's going to research your problem." "Well, I don't know," George muttered. He stared uneasily at the card, turning it around in his fingers. "George," said Carew, "you exhibit the not uncommon fear of your ilk that if a headshrinker ever got his hooks on you, you'd be in for a fast trip to the funny farm. Let me assure you that you run no risk of that in doing as I suggest. Let me assure you further that I know of several cases in which a problem quite similar to yours was solved by Dr. Gordon to the applicants' great satisfaction." "Could you give me a few names?" George said warily. "I could, but I don't intend to," Carew told him. Tvr. Gordon was a big warm fuzzy man who seemed reluctant to voice even the most general sort of opinion about George's problem. "First, Mr. Belk," he said, "we must establish precisely what the nature of the trouble is. Only then can we begin to think in terms of corrective procedures." George had to be satisfied with that. He sat rigid in a chair while Dr. Gordon fitted a mesh of metal bands about his skull and tightened them down gently with large stubby fingers. "What's that for?" George asked. "It should give me some information about this and that going on inside your head." George cleared his throat. "Carew told me you weren't a psychiatrist." "I'm not," Dr. Gordon said, " though I started out in that direction. Think of me as an electronics specialist and don't worry about your mittful of neuroses and compulsions. I couldn't care less about them. Now let's see how well you can let yourself relax for the next five minutes..." The five minutes passed eventually, and George was told he could stop relaxing. He twisted around in the chair and saw Dr. Gordon place some instruments into a drawer in his desk. He was frowning pensively"What did you find out, Doctor?" George asked. Dr. Gordon looked up and stopped frowning. "Oh, about what I expected." He came over and began to remove the metal mesh from around George's head. "Is it... serious?" asked George. "Well, definitely it's something we must follow up. Now, Mr. Belk, I need your cooperation for the next step. It will hardly inconvenience you at all." Dr. Gordon then turned to a wall doset and took from it a device which looked like one of the more expensive kinds of camera except that it had no lens and nothing visibly on it which would be twisted or pressed. "We'll put this in a case," Dr. Gordon said, placing the instrument in a case as he spoke, "and you'll set it up in your house for the next two days. You say you're not married. Do you have many visitors?" "Very few nowadays," said George. "You live alone?" "Yes. Except for some cats." "Cats don't count," said Dr. Gordon. "Very well. Set up this instrument -- you can leave it in the case -- somewhere near the center of your house. This is Tuesday. Between now and ten A.M. Friday, I'd like you to note down the occasions when somebody besides yourself is in the house or even comes to the door. The mailman, as an example. If you happen to forget, it won't matter too much. But try to remember. Note the time anybody arrives and the length of time he stays around. I'll see you again Friday at ten. Bring the instrument back with you." Hesitantly George took the instrument case. "This is all rather mystifying #" he remarked uncomfortably. "I'm sure it must seem that way to you," Dr. Gordon. "But remember, Mr. Belk, that we live in a rapidly evolving scientific age!" He gave George a brief smile and a reassuring clap on the shoulder. "Put your trust in advanced electronics!" IF TAuring the next two days George forgot half the time that he had Dr. Gordon's device in the house. When he first got home with it, he'd taken it out of the case and looked it over carefully. That told him nothing. There were no settings, no concealed switches in it. He put it back in the case on a small table which stood approximately in the center of the house. He called John Carew, told him what Dr. Gordon had said and described the mysterious instrument. "Is that his usual procedure?" Carew said he had no idea what Dr. Gordon's usual procedure was. However they could assume he knew what he was doing, and George should go along with instructions. That part was easy. Only the mailman came to the house on Wednesday and Thursday, and George dutifully noted the time of day. Otherwise he went about his normal activities, still wondering now and then at the way time seemed to be slipping through his grasp. In spite of Carew's assurances, he found himself unable to develop much faith in the effectiveness of Dr. Gordon's approach. At quarter to eleven on Friday morning his telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. "Hello, Mr. Belk," Dr. Gordon's voice said. "It appears we've forgotten our appointment, heh?" Abashed, George admitted that he had indeed forgotten it. "And I don't know how it happened," he said. "I definitely planned to be at your office by ten o'clock. It seems to me I was looking at my watch just a moment ago, and it was then barely past nine." "I'm not surprised," Dr. Gordon said cryptically. "I'll see you as soon as you can make it here. Bring along the drainometer." "The what?" asked George. "The gadget," said Dr. Gordon, and hung up. On reflection George decided that knowing the device was called a drainometer didn't really tell him much. He took it from its place on the table and set off, feeling unhappy and badly confused. At the office Dr. Gordon ushered him into a side room, provided him with some magazines to leaf around in, and disappeared with the drainometer. Some fifteen minutes, later he came back into the room, dosed the door, and stood staring at George. "This is as bad a case as I've come across," he observed, shaking his head. "Worse even than I'd suspected!" "As bad a case of what?" George asked, alarmed. "Of time drainage!" Dr. Gordon pulled a chair out from behind a table and sat down. "I'll explain the situation to you as well as I can, Mr. Belk, and I believe you'll see why it was necessary for me to remain silent until now." Tie steepled his fingers. "I won't attempt to go into the math of this," he said. "For one reason, because I suspect that scientific math is not your forte." "No, it isn't" George agreed. "Then let me tell you in a more general way about time. There are two distinct kinds of time. There speak -- which is the time through which the world about all of us progresses. And then there is subjective, or individual, lower case time." George nodded interestedly. "Einstein's theories have to do that, don't they?" "Not really. The science of time units is a different development. Picture to yourself that everybody generates and has available for his use a personal supply of time units or particles. Say, roughly, that for every fifty years of real time, or "When this process is operating normally, the individual is synhis time particles in a steady uniform stream which keeps him comfortably abreast of the passage of lems may arise. You, for example, Mr. Belk, do not have as solid a contact with the flow of your time particles as you might have -- we can assume that something in you withdraws to some extent from the sult you're a natural time particle waster. At present there isn't much we can do about that condition. On the other hand, it's hardly a serious matter. I'd estimate that you normally lose about one time particle in twenty -- not a significant percentage." "I'm not sure I'm following all all this," George admitted. "It's not necessary for you to grasp it all," Dr. Gordon assured him. "I simply want you to have the general picture. Now look at another aspect of the matter. People, as you know, have widely varying feelings about the value of time. Some never get enough of it. They have many things to do and many more things they'd like to do and simply can't get around to doing. If they could squeeze forty-eight full hours into a single workday, they'd be delighted. "And then there are people who have, as we say, time on their hands. Often very heavily on their hands. It is a commodity for which they can find no real use. If it were possible, they would be glad to be relieved of a large part of it. "And nowadays it is possible. That's the point here. There are methods whereby a portion of the flow of one individual's time particles can be diverted from him and integrated into the flow of another person's time particles. The second person now has subjectively more time available to him than he IF had before, and the first person has subjectively less. It is an insidious process: the loser in this transaction has no way of grasping what has happened. If he is a man who places no value on time and has time to spare in that sense, he may not even notice that anything has happened. He may feel quite comfortable -- and less bored -- within the time particle flow left at his disposal. But when the victim is a busy man, a man who needs his time, it is a different matter. Again, of course, he doesn't understand the situation. He simply is aware that is seems to take him forever to get anything done. He feels that the minutes and hours are slipping through his fingers, as in fact they are." G eorge stared at the doctor in shocked dismay. " That's what's been happening to me?" he asked. " That's what's been happening to you, Mr. Belk." "But," George cried, outraged, "this has been going on for years!" "Evidently." "What can I do to stop it? You said -- " "I indicated that your problem could be solved, Mr. Belk," said Dr. Gordon. "And indeed it will be. You see, this situation is so fraught with unethical possibilities that an organization exists which is dedicated to policing the transfer of subjective time among individuals. Such transactions may be quite legitimate. As I explained, a good many people have more time than they know what to do with, they have surplus time which is a nuisance to them. People who need additional time are allowed to draw it from such individuals, providing suitable compensation is made. Since our organization operates with as much secrecy as possible, the donor frequently doesn't know there by John Jakes by Robert E. Howard AS IS by Robert Silverberg The best in fantasy -- at your newstand now! has been a transaction. But always he must be compensated. An unexpected stroke of good fortune comes his way; he may find a better job, more suitable to his unenergetic nature, suddenly open to him, and so forth. Both parties have benefited." "But why the secrecy?" George asked. "If everybody knew -- " "If everybody were aware of this, Mr. Belk, the situation might get completely out of hand. As I said, the process of extracting time particles from somebody else is very simple, once it is understood. We want no more people to know about it than we can help." "I see." George hesitated. "Then you -- this organization -- will keep whoever has beenstealing my time from doing it again?" D r. Gordon smiled. "We can do better than that. Much better. The drainometer recordings indicate that at various periods during the past two days as much as nine out of ten of your time particles have been surreptitiously diverted. This is a blatant crime. The fact that you are, as I previously indicated, inherently somewhat careless with your time has made you an easy victim. But now compensation must be made by those who took advantage of this. When you leave here, you will carry another instrument with you. The next attempt to tap the flow of your time particles will give us a direct line to the perpetrator. In all likelihood we shall find then that you have been preyed upon not by one individual but by a criminal gang." "A gang?" George repeated. "Exactly. As I pointed out, Mr. Belk, time is a commodity. It has value. For some it has great value. Among such people there always will be a number who do not care whether the commodity they want can be obtained legally or ethically, provided only they get it. And there always will be criminal elements for a price. We're constantly on the lookout for indications of such a situation." "And you can make them compensate for what they've done?" "Yes, we can," said Dr. Gordon. "The organization has very effective means of dealing with such criminals and those who benefit unethically by their crimes. We shall establish exactly how much time was diverted from you and by whom during the past years, and to the last particle this time will be drained from the guilty parties involved and restored. Not in a lump sum, so to speak. But you will have established a time credit with the organization, on which you can draw as your requirements or wishes dictate. In other words, if you should like to operate for a while on the basis of a fully usable forty-eight-hour working day, or IF even a hundred-hour day, you will be able to do it." George was silent a moment. "I hardly know how to thank the organization -- and you, sirl" he said then. "There must be some way I can repay you." Dr. Gordon cleared his throat. "Well, as a matter of fact, it is customary to charge a fee. The fee goes not to me but to the organization. As I say, time is a commodity. We all can use it. Would a fee of say ten per cent of the time you will regain seem fair to you?" "Eminently fair I" George declared. TTe called John Carew next day  to tell him of the outcome of the matter. : "Exactly as I thought I " Carew said with evident satisfaction. "So you knew all about this time drain stuff, eh?" said George. "I should," Carew's voice told him. "Quite a long while ago I found myself in a pickle not unlike yours. Somebody steered me to the organization, and they adjusted the matter very satisfactorily. In fact, I'll still put in an occasional fifty hours day, though I found, as I believe you will, that a fully available ordinary workday is quite enough in the long run." "I expect you're right," George agreed. "For a few months though I intend to really live it up on my time account!" "Fine," said John Carew. "In that case, I'll look forward to getting a new novel from you within... oh, let's say the next two Thismonth in Galaxy by Gordon R. Dickson by Brian W. Aldiss by Robert Silyerberg And many more in the big November issue! IF  Short Story There are always two kinds of immortality . As he had almost always done, done, the Waw sat beside the pool, sailing a paper boat, and listened to his undying heart. This was day four of the two thousand and third year of his imprisonment; day three of the one thousand, nine hundred and ninetyfourth year after the extinction of the human race; and, the ninth year of his age. It would always be the ninth year of his age. In a little while the Cheng would appear, the sigil of its own imprisonment blazoned on the barrel that contained its brain, and ask him if he wanted anything. And as always the Waw would be able to think of nothing to want. The asteroid that the Cheng's makers had hollowed out and powered for the two of them supplied every need the boy could imagine and was pleasant to live in. Of course, it had no sun, and the Waw did not know where in sidereal space it was wandering at the moment; but he did not care. The Cheng's barrel was loaded with useless information of that kind; he had only to ask. On some earlier changeless morning, the Waw had amused himself by asking for facts like that, so that he could compute the mean free paths of the electrons as they charged about in the Cheng's barrel to dredge up the information, but it had not been a very good game. It had been that computation that had showed him that the Cheng's barrel must hold all the knowledge of the human race that the Cheng's makers had been able to find and that none of it -- what little there was -- was much fun. The paper boat moved on the slow ripples stirred by the Waw's stick. It was not going anywhere, but its fortunes were much more interesting than the mean free paths of electrons. The undying heart ticked on. Tomorrow, too, would be like this. There was a sound in the rushes to his left; then the cattails parted and the Cheng appeared. Big though the machine was, it was not clumsy, and its movements were nearly silent. It consisted, in chief, of two cunningly jointed legs, set wide apart; a ring of heavy metal plates which was its pelvic girdle, in which, from here, the Waw could see his own red hair reflected; the chest barrel, with the blazon on it, topped by a bulging rim; arms much like the legs, except that they ended in tool assemblies; and a great flat head which sprang like a turtle's from the middle of the barrel, below the bulging carapace. All these things were connected together by fabric-covered accordion-joints which could extend the Cheng's reach, height or field of view astonishingly if it had the need, with a thoroughness possible to no creature designed by nature; and its hip-girdle was hung with supplementary instruments to augment its always-racing, always anxious mind. "Is there anything -- ?" "No." Tt went away, infinitely patient  in its disappointment. Why did it care? What had it been made to care about? Some day, the Waw thought, I'll ask it that. But not today. There's plenty of time. Plenty of time. His father had seen to that. Once when some human world -- had it been Poictesme? -- had been following the others into the striped madness of the Wave, and the Waw himself had had some other name -- had it been Root? -- his father had tenderly put him to sleep, and when the Waw had awakened, the heart was inside him. His father, already dying, had said: The Nuremberg egg... It was Columbus's cartographer who made it... the watch with the escapement that would never stop... I've given you time, Jock... use it... hatch it... " None of this had meant anything to the Waw. His father -- a collector of dictionaries -- often talked like that even when well. But since the bubble of the Cheng had lifted him from the ruins of Bellegarde and brought him here, he and the Cheng had worked out the nature of the heart. It was actually two units: the heart proper, and an implanted biological fuel cell which metabolized his own blood sugar through a series of oxidation-reduction reactions, triggered by enzymes also normal to his system. The burning took place at normal body temperature, the ashes were metabolites his body could dispose of normally, and the electron transfer produced about twenty watts of power to drive the heart. The pump itself flexed soundIt would never tire, nor wear out; but more important, the ion-exchange resin of which it had been made was so powerful a serum detoxicant as to stop the aging process completely. He wondered if his father could have intended that. But of course there was no way of knowing. The Cheng knew nothing about the motives of human beings; and at nine, neither did the Waw, though he was very good on the mean free paths of electrons. It had been about this time, too, that the Cheng revealed that the Wave had destroyed the whole of the human race, and had given him the name of the Waw, or Next-ToLast. As far as the boy could tell, the appellation represented nothing more than a hope on the part of the Cheng's makers; certainly the Cheng knew of no other survivor, nor had any further word of one reached the asteroid in the last two thousand and three years and four days. (It was lonely here sometimes.) The Waw knew this because the Cheng answered any question that was put to it; it appeared to be incapable of lying. It had even told him how he could leave the asteroid if he wished; but the method was too complicated to be worth attempting. He was comfortable here; and besides, where would he go? Humanity was dead, and he could not live on any other world that was habitable for the Cheng's makers, nor had he any desire to meet them. T he paper boat became soggy and sank, slowly. Bemused, he watched it settle. There were fish in the pool, but he caught them only rarely, so as not to get ahead of their breeding cycle. The Cheng had said that when those were gone, it could not get any more; and they were company, in a sense that the Cheng could never be because it was only marginally alive and hence quite predictable. In a while, instead, he would go to the library, where he was trying to work out why he liked an almost incomprehensible ancient work called Life on the Mississippi . But not yet; nor just yet. There was plenty of time. The boat disappeared under the ripples, disintegrating as it went no IF and turning a deeper and deeper jade. When the Waw at last looked up, the Cheng was back, rather to his surprise. "What do you want?" The machine flexed its arms uneasily. It seemed to be having difficulty in speaking. At last it said: "We have found the Ya." The boy did not quite register this for a long moment. Then he sprang up. "Where?" "In frozen storage, in a powerless capsule drifting toward the galactic rim. By its decay level, we judge that it must have been fired when the Wave first began, about a thousand years before your birth, and missed its target. But the Ya is still alive, though perhaps not for much longer." Now that the moment had come, the moment in which he had never believed, the Waw found that he could not meet it. It had been so long since he had seen another human being, so long! Suppressing the obvious question, he said instead: "What do you mean by decay level, Cheng? Was the capsule hot -- radioactive?" "Not significantly," said Cheng. "In any event, we do not know the age or generation of its radioactives. But non-radioactive matter also has a half-life; this is why the universe is finite." This revelation was so stunning that it almost eclipsed the immediate dilemma; but after a while, the boy found that he could not handle its implications, and the dilemma began creeping back. With a sigh he did not hear himself, he said: "Never mind. Where is the Ya?" "In the infirmary." The Waw had never needed the infirmary, thanks to the undying heart, but he knew where it was. The asteroid was small, and he had had two millenia in which to explore it. He said to the Cheng. "Follow." He dropped his stick into the pool. It floated silently, turning, unable to drift away because it had no place to drift to. 'T'he Ya was a girl, perhaps twelve years of age. She was asleep and looked fragile and pale, though in the whiteness of the infirmary her coloring seemed almost hectic. Staring down at her, the Waw suddenly felt a different kind of sadness than he had ever known before. Though he could not have told anyone what he thought, and indeed he did not know himself, he was wondering -- or was it trying to visualize? -- what final, terrible act of love had put the girl in that capsule. "Is this what you've been waiting for?" he said at last. "Yes," the Cheng said. "My makers too are very old. They seek continuity for life in the universe. And the Ya will not live forever either, so you must act rapidly." The boy looked up. "What do you mean, Cheng?" "It is needful," the Cheng said, "that you should breed." Until that moment, he had not really known how radically little the Cheng's makers knew or were ever likely to know about human beings. As for the poor machine, looming over them in all its power, learning and versatility, it was simply and hopelessly funny. But the Waw was unable to laugh. The girl opened her eyes. They showed nothing but terror and complete incomprehension. And why not, after three thousand years of nothing but cold sleep. "Stand back, Cheng," the boy said. "Out of sight. And pull in your head... Girl, you're all right. You've gotten to where you were going." He thought she began to breathe more quietly. After a while, he added: "Cheng, are you a surgeon?" "If needs be." "Have you a human heart in storage?" "No." "Could you find one, outside?" "Yes, perhaps," the Cheng said, "but after how many centuries? Much time has passed already; and the Ya will not -- " "Shut up." The boy thought rapidly, out of practice though he was. Not about giving up his longevity -- no, he had worn that out already; it was of no use to him any more, not even for fishing -- but about growing up, a hope he had abandoned years and centuries ago. "Will you obey me, Cheng?" "I am so constructed. Is there at last something you want?" "Yes. Prepare to leave the asteroid, you poor lump. The Ya and I are going. We require you come." "Is it necessary for breeding?" "It is. And we'll need a surgeon. "And while you're at it, search your barrel for the name and location of some place where there might be a human organ bank." "I already know that there are none within any useful time -- " "And in the meantime, shut up. We'll look anyhow. Go get on the job. Feed the fish on your way." The Cheng left. The Next-toLast turned to the Last, feeling, as he did in every artificial dawn, the almost silent ticking of the infernal machine in his chest -- and knowing now why it had been made. The girl rose timidly; and timidly, the boy tried to smile. Tn some human Scriptures, the first chapter is called Genesis. In later versions, it is called The Undeathless Heart; but no one IF IF  Short Story The gods took Hin in their ship . But they could never change him I jtTin sat before' the cooking fire   to ease the morning chill. His inroman was grinding the grain for the next day's bread, and he watchled her fat breasts swing as she crushed the seeds. Her fatness was his pride; the size of her belly and haunches told the village that he was good at the hunt and able to feed his woman much meat. While he sat, warmed by the fire and food in his stomach, his mind was full of old battles and his prowess as a warrior. Soon his father would die, and he would take his place as chief. The old man could no longer hunt, and his mind wandered into the past and lingered there. He also thought of the child in his wife's body; the swelling of growth that he hoped would be a son. These things made Hin feel proud and strong; his pleasant thoughts and warmth of the fire and the rising sun pushed him towards sleep. Suddenly the skyship broke the morning quiet with waves of sound. Hin fell to the ground and hid his eyes in the dirt. He lay there like a frightened child till the roaring stopped, hoping the gods had not come to take his spirit. When he looked up he saw the needle-shaped outline of the ship over half a mile off. The rockets' heat seemed to clear the sky of clouds, and the sun glanced and dazzled off the vessel's hull. Hin looked about him for the other villagers but he could see nothing but their backs as they ran into the forest. Only his father remained because he was too old to run. The old chief was laying on the ground quivering and squirming in his fright, and Hin was ashamed. The gods were there, and he would go me,et them; but first he hid his father in one of the huts. As he walked towards the ship, he slipped several times on the grass that was still damp with dew and was forced to keep his head bent so that he could see and direct his feet. Fear made him clumsy; he was uneasy over what the gods wanted and what they would do with him. Perhaps they would sacrifice him, or if he was lucky they would take him along in their ship. Hin would miss his wife if he had to go live in the heavens, yet he still felt that the other villagers were fools for running away; even his teacher, the old witchman, had acted the part of a child and fled with the rest. The grass near the skyship was mostly charred stubble, and a dark sooty cloud rose up around Hin's feet as he approached. By the time he stood close by the ship, the soot had coated his body and his sweat mixed with it, running down his chest and back leaving streaks of black. No sound came from within the vessel, and Hin asked the gods why they did not speak. No answer was forthcoming, but a slender plastic conveyor slowly projected itself from the base of the An IF First Each month If brings you a new writer, never before published. This month's is F. Haines Price, a #year-old Philadelphian, who found time for his writing after breaking a leg playing Rugby. He is deeply interested in biology and plans to re-' turn to college when his wife graduates with her degree in biology. At present, he's working on a novel and more short stories -- some of which we hope to be bringing you in the future! craft. When it reached Hin's feet, its outward motion ceased and the belt began to revolve slowly towards the ship. Hin prostrated himself on the scorched earth and yelled his respect for the gods in a voice shrill with fear. Yet no answer came. Nothing changed; the belt of the conveyor kept on moving towards the ship, an invitation that Hin had not yet understood. ing the alien freewill clause. You know that as well as I do. We can entice only without drugs or force." "Stuff it, Daniels; who'd know? Besides we don't know for sure that he's an intelligent being. If he's not, we can do anything we want with him." "You never giveup, Harry. According to you, there's no such thing as regulations. Why, that guy looks just like we do under all that dirt. IF And you saw him trying to talk. We almost lost our license for that deal you tried on Vega; trying to get that female dragon for the sodom section on Tori-three, and she turns out to be the Grand Burner's pet egg. If he don't get on the belt he don't get on; we don't break the rules this trip." Before the space-trader could continue his argument, he saw the primitive step on the conveyor. It had taken Hin some time to realize that the belt could take him inside the ship. When the idea seeped in past the fear and wonder that filled his mind, he did not hesitate; he wanted to see and talk to the gods. In a few minutes the slow motion of the conveyor carried him inside, and the light from the red sun was replaced by a cool florescent glow. Hin found himself in a small cubicle with just enough head room to stand. The room was colored a harsh metallic white and no entrance or exit was visible. The wall through which he had entered was as smooth as the other three without a seam showing. There was no sound. Hin wished the gods would show themselves but then it occurred to him that they might be invisible. "Hairy brute, isn't he?" said Harry. "We'll give him a shave and a bath, and he'll be the cleanest cut caveman in this arm of the galaxy. Some old hag on one of the Pallar moons would pay pretty well for c Tarzan type like that to keep hei company nights. Be a real thrill foi her. There aren't too many primi tive cultures left. Why don't yoi call Ginger up and have her take c look at your gold mine?" TTarry made a call on the intercom, and some minutes later a tall slender woman walked in and began studying the primitive through the one-way viewer. She exhibited the universal standard of beauty in shape and complexion that only the inhabitants of Sol's third planet could claim. Only on earth with its one-gee gravity and the gentle radiation of the yellow sun was such beauty produced. Other women of the human species were dried and burned by hot suns and made squat and heavy or stretched like beanpoles by extreme gravitational conditions. "You going to sell him on Pallar?" the woman asked. "You better believe it, Ginger. I figure at least three thousand units for him. Got him on the level, too. He just stepped right on the belt. Glad Daniels made me do it honest." Harry puffed himself up before he continued. "Look at the way he's bowed down and praying. He must think we're gods or something." "These primitives always think so. Never seen it fail." Hin rested on his knees with his head bowed forward. "Why don't they speak?" he thought. "Or at least give me a sign? Why am I here? I still breath and see; they have not hurt me; they must not be angry." He heard a faint humming sound and felt a movement of air across his body. Looking up, he saw one of the walls disappear and three figures reveal themselves. They watched and smiled at him with smooth hairless faces. Hin waited on his knees for the gods to act. "He's a big one, Ginger. How'd you like to tumble with that? After he's been washed, naturally." "Watch your mouth, Harry," Daniels said. "I've seen Ginger bust bigger guys than you so that they needed plasto-surgery; not that it would do any harm with your face. Why don't you take Tarzan down to the cages and wash him off? Depilitate him too, but lay off the education tapes. He'll be easier to handle if he still worships us." The biggest of the three gods grabbed Hin's arm and led him out of the cubicle. Then the god directed him up a series of ladders until they reached a room filled with cages of various sizes. Some of the cages were occupied by beasts of a kind unknown and terrifying to Hin. They were all of the same type; four legged scaly things with heads half the size of their bodies. Their jaws were huge and held if multiple rows of razor-like plates instead of teeth. Set above gaping nostrils were small eyes of a deep wavering red that expressed more hate than Hin had ever conceived of in his simple existence. The god laughed when Hin cringed before the cages. T Tin was led through another  opening, pushed through it, and the wall closed behind him. The room was similar to the one he had first entered when he boarded the ship. The only irregularity observable was a large nozzle projecting from the ceiling. From it came a light shower of moisture that Hin tried to avoid by curling up in a corner; but the spray filled the room like a fog, and he was soon soaked. He tried to stand, but there was nothing to grip on to, and he slipped back to the floor. When he rubbed his hand across his face clumps of wet hair came off in his fingers. Suddenly the spray came stinging down hard against his skin, washing away his hair and the dirt that seemed a part of his body. A bright warm light filled the room, and a breeze from nowhere dried him. Soon the god reappeared and led him out of the cubicle. A strange sense of well-being dulled his fear as he again walked past the cages where the beasts hissed their anger at him. Hin had never been clean before. He was taken to a room with a IF cot to rest on, and a god brought him food. This god was different from the one who took him to the shower; he had long hair and was more slender. He noticed other differences like the slight bulge of breasts and realized the god was a woman, yet she was slim like a man. "Gods must be rich," he thought. "Why can't they fatten up their wives?" As she walked away, he wondered what some added weight would do to her figure and then was frightened by thinking such thoughts of an immortal. For several days Hin lay in his room. The food was good although there was not enough meat, and pleasant noises seemed to come out of the walls to amuse him. He had begun to study his new environment, but there was not much to see in the room; except for the cot there were no objects at all. They fed him at regular intervals and took his dishes away as soon as he was finished. His increased familiarity with his jailers was leading him to doubt their godhood. Such things as the short growth of hair erupting from Harry's face that he noticed after the first two days increased his doubts. Hin also learned the trick of opening and closing the walls. There was a slight indentation in the surface that caused the wall to open like an expanding circle when pressed. It was magic, but it was magic that he too could perform. Hin often opened and closed the wall after they took his food dishes away, and he began to think that either most of their power depended on such tricks or that they had made him a god too, without his knowledge, and he unknowingly had powers equal to theirs. Either way, Hin felt he had much less reason to fear the beings who kept him in the room. Lie was beginning to understand  their language. Already he knew their names; Harry, Daniels, and the skinny female, Ginger. They called him Tarzan and laughed. He was not used to being an object of ridicule. In his own tribe he was a leader. The wonder of his new home was wearing thin, and he missed the red sun and sky of his world and his fat wife. It would have pleased him to leave the ship in the heavens and returned to walk upon living earth. The next time a meal came he, tried to complain to the being called Harry. Harry looked at Hin in a puzzled way and then left to return quickly with the other two. "What's he want?" asked Harry. "How could I speak that lingo?" answered Daniels. "Probably wants to go home, or a woman, or more to eat. Who knows how Tarzan's mind works? Maybe we ought to feed him some edu-tapes, then we'd know what he's talking about." "Thought you said that was a bad idea, Daniels: thought you said he'd be easier to handle this way, thinking we're gods and all." "I don't know, Harry," Daniels said. " Seems like a pretty smart cookie to me. Probably has a pretty good idea of what's going on now. You know he's getting pretty restless. Maybe if we could talk to him we could tell him what a nice time he'd have on Pallar. The regulations require that we communicate with him; supposed to find out what he wants #" "I say do it," said Ginger. They took him out of the cabin and climbed higher in the ship on the ladders; then all three of the beings shoved him into a room where the only furnishing was a large chair, the first that Hin had ever seen. Surrounding the chairs were several large boxes with clusters of tiny windows in them. Harry pushed something on the wall, and the windows began pulsing with light to the accompaniment of a rhythmic clicking sound. The clicking made him think of a tree brushing against rocks in the wind near his village and increased his agitation. He knew the strangers possessed magic, but the terrors of the flashing boxes were overwhelming. He did something he would never have considered if he had not been insane with fear; he struck out with his fist and hit Harry in the face. The give of real flesh and the sight of blood gushing from Harry's nose was enough to convince Hin that these were men, not gods. Before he had an opportunity to consider that revelation, he felt a blow on the back of his head, and unconsciousness enveloped him. Ty the time he came to he was strapped in a chair, and a metal hood projecting from the ceiling was fitted firmly to his skull. The three people surrounded him. Harry's bleeding had stopped, but clotted fluid still covered the lower portion of his face. Hin wondered what reprisals were in store for him. None of the three showed signs of agitation. The female seemed amused and was making language sounds at Harry in a playful tone. The short man, Daniels, went over to one of the large boxes and did something with his hand. There was a sensation of heat in the back of Hin's skull that suddenly increased so that his brain felt like searing coals. The fire then slowly weakened and was replaced by a welcome numbness. "Pleasant dreams, Tarzan." "Don't bother riding him; he's already out. Just give him the language tapes. I don't want him to know what's going on, just so he can talk to us. No cultural orientation. Let's give him the tapes with the primitive accent; those Pallarian hags don't like their sweet boys too sophisticated." Daniels made several adjustments on the equipment and placed the IF appropriate tape on a spool in one of the cabinets. Then he left the room with the others. When the tape had finished playing into his brain Hin was awakened automatically. The intense subliminal instruction was dimmed by a simple lack of mental energy, and the hours he spent waiting for his jailers passed quickly. It was his first opportunity to think after discovering that the three people who had captured him were no more immortal than he was. Hin realized that he was as much a slave as the children his father had stolen from the hill tribes. These slaves were badly treated and seldom lived for more than a few years. The only ones who survived were the ones who escaped. But how, Hin wondered, could he escape from the metal ship or defeat three people who had so much magic at their disposal? Even if he got outside he could not live in the sky. He was flesh and blood and needed air to breath and ground to walk on. He wondered if there was a way to make them take him back to his village. "Want to punch me again, Tarzan?" asked Harry. H in could not answer. The fact that he understood the words uttered in the strange language shocked him to such an extent that he only sat there gaping. "Don't let it throw you," said Ginger. "That chair you sat in was a teaching device. You now speak fluent Galactic. Come on, why don't you speak up?" "My name is Hin. Why don't you take me home? I wish to leave this ship." "The accent's perfect," Harry said to Daniels before he turned towards Hin. "You go where we take you, apeman. Nobody forced you onto this ship; you walked on yourself, and we're all going for a long, long trip." Hin tried to rise from the chair, but he was still strapped down. They all laughed at his efforts towards getting loose and, as Hin had not been taught any Galactic curses, he was forced to swear at them in his new tongue. He succeeded only in evoking more laughter and ridicule. "See this, Hin?" Harry waved a thin rod with a grip at one end in front of Hin's face. "It's a neuron distorter. Most people call it a stinger. I'm going to unstrap you, but first I'm going to give you a taste of this so you'll know just what to expect if you give us any trouble." Harry pointed the weapon at Hin's leg and the stinger emitted a short, high-pitched whine. At first Hin felt a faint warmth of his leg, but then the warmth expanded into a searing heat that alternated with unbelievable cold. Shocks ran up and down his leg, then reached the base of his spine and sent messages of agony into his brain. Splashes of light seared through his closed eyelids and his teeth gnashed together in an attempt to crush the pain. Harry was right about the stinger; Hin would cause no trouble while the others pointed such strong magic at him. Daniels unstrapped him while Harry covered him with the weapon. It was a long time before Hin was able to work his muscles and rise from the chair. Daniels and Ginger led him back to his cubicle with Harry covering him from behind with the distorter. After they shut the wall, he lay down on his cot and thought of the one advantage he held over his captors: the knowledge of how to open and close the entrance to his small prison. They were sure he could not escape, yet Hin could leave easily by pressing the recess in the wall. After every third meal there was a long period when no one came to check on him. Hin assumed that Ginger, Harry, and Daniels were all asleep during that time. If he could catch Harry sleeping and get the magic weapon, he would kill them all except the woman. He would need one of them to guide the ship back through the heavens, and he felt it was wrong to kill a female. Harry he would kill first. T T e ate his first ;neal, slept, then   ate again and waited for his third meal. Ginger was the one who brought it. When she came back to get the dishes, he struck her on the back of the head with his fist. Checking first to see if she was still breathing, he bound and gagged her with the clothes that he stripped off her body. The sight of Ginger's naked body excited him in spite of its lack of fat. He ignored this feeling and placed her on the cot, assuring himself that she was securely tied, and then went out in search of the two men. After closing the door to the cabin, using the indentation on the outside, he decided to look for Harry and Daniels in the upper part of the ship. He moved quietly with the callused bottoms of his naked feet pattering almost soundlessly on the ladder rungs. He explored three levels before an opened wall revealed Harry snoring heavily on a small bed. The room was furnished with two small bureaus and a cheap plastic standup wardrobe. There were several grooming utensils that Hin did not recognize, and a bottle was laying on its side on one of the bureau tops. Hin could not see the weapon. He decided to chance closing the wall, thinking that it would muffle any sound made by a struggle, so that Daniels would not be alerted. Hin held his breath as he pushed the recess and sealed the room, but Harry was not awakened by the slight displacement of air. After crossing the room, he placed his IF fingers on the back of Harry's neck and pushed his thumbs against the man's Adam's apple and pressed in towards the spine. Harry's eyes opened but only a faint gurgling escaped his lips before he stopped breathing. Hin searched the drawers of the bureaus and looked under the bed but he could not find the weapon. He thought that Daniels must have it as he left to hunt down his remaining enemy. There were only two more levels above Harry's, and Hin found Daniels in the second one, sitting in front of the instrument console. The primitive saw more large cabinets like the ones in the teaching room and a large screen above Daniel's head showing the space outside the ship. Hin could not smother a gasp when he saw the blackness of space spotted with bright points of light and the glowing dust of distant galaxies, and Daniels turned around towards the noise. "Hin! What the devil are you doing loose?" Before Daniels could reach the distorter in front of him on the console, Hin was half way across the room. When Daniels had grasped the weapon and was half turned around, Hin was on top of him. H e dragged the dead body to the ladder and pushed it off. It hit on the next level with a heavy thump and Hin climbed down after it. He pushed it off the next level and dragged it into the room where he had killed Harry. Harry's body had stiffened, and he dragged it from the bed with difficulty. Not being able to decide where to put his two victims, he left them heaped in a corner of the room. He was very proud of himself. In his culture, it was a glorious thing to kill an enemy and capture the corpse, and the meat of a man slain in battle was a great delicacy among Hin's people. Those who sat down to feast on the body of a warrior were not only well filled but refreshed and strengthened by the dead man's spirit. Hin wished that his wife was with him to share in his meat and his pride. He thought of returning home and of the woman who could guide him down from the sky and back to his village. He decided to get the magic weapon from the pilot's room where Daniels had dropped it in the struggle. Then he would check to see if Ginger was still securely tied. When he reached his old prison, Ginger was still tied to the cot. She was awake and followed Hin with her eyes as he crossed the room towards her. As he stooped down to release her he saw her glance fall on the stinger he held in his hand. Hin held the weapon well away from her as he untied the knotted strips of clothing that held her down. He pulled her gag off and stepped back; there was no need for silence. The girl did not cry out in fear but looked at Hin calmly"What have you done to Harry and Daniels, fool? Give me that gun." "They are dead. It is a brave man and not a fool who kills his enemies. And the weapon is mine. Answer only my questions or I will give you a sample of its pain." Even though Ginger was a female, he was afraid of her. She knew the magic of the skyship and therefore had many tricks to defeat him if he was not cautious. He would have to make her help him or he would not ever return home. "Will you teach me how to fly the ship, Ginger? If you show me or fly it yourself, I will set you free." Hin hoped that she would not guess that he was lying. It would be foolish to release a female captured in battle, no matter how skinny and man-like in her pride she was. She must have guessed Hin's plans, for she spat full in his face. After Hin wiped the spittle off his face, he aimed the distorter at her leg in the way that he had seen Harry do to him. As he pulled the trigger there was the same shrill whine and Ginger's screams soon gave way to unconsciousness as she slipped to the floor. Hin was not a beater of women but he felt no qualms in punishing such insolence in that way. lT#hen she came to, Hin had al  ready thought of a way of keeping her prisoner until she decided to cooperate. He climbed back up to the room where he left the two corpses, keeping the girl well ahead of him and prodding her with the stinger. She moved quickly, knowing that Hin would not hesitate to hurt her again. When Ginger saw the remains of her former associates and smelled the beginnings of the death stench, she began to retch. Hin was pleased with this sign of fear. He took the bed and jammed it into the opening so that the wall could not close. Using a heavy metal object that he found on one of the bureaus he proceeded to smash at the recess that was used for opening and closing the room. The wall immediately tried to close but was halted by the bed. After smashing at the switch a few more times and pulling out some loosened wiring, Hin climbed over the bed and pushed the recess on the outside wall of the cabin. The door pulled back from the bed and Hin returned to the room and put the bed back in its original position. Now the door could be controlled from outside but Ginger would be locked in with the bodies where she could not escape. For over a day Ginger was locked in with no food or company but rotting flesh, but when Hin opened the door she still refused to cooperate.  IF "Help me, woman, and I will let you loose." As Hin moved towards her she jumped off the bed and pushed him hard against the wall. His elbow struck the supposedly inoperable switch and suddenly the cabin was sealed. Hin pounded on the switch but nothing happened and for hours, both of them, sharing a fear of slow death, tried to open the room's only exit. Tt took seventeen days for the  ship to reach the Pallarian system on the course previously programmed into the navigational computer by Daniels. The vessel automatically entered into a circular parking orbit about twenty astronomical units out from the system's sun. After two more days an alert patrol cruiser captain noticed the ship and attempted radio contact. When no answer was received the captain was forced by regulations to board and investigate. He entered through the lower airlock with three patrolmen armed with distorters set at full power. They found no evidence of life until they opened the compartment where Hin and Ginger were trapped. When they opened the wall they were thrown back by a stench like an opened coffin containing a body in the most advanced stage of decay. The four men quickly put on respirators for protection against the smell. The captain led the way and was half way into the cabin before he reeled back, his screams accompanied by the squeal of a distorter. Another of the patrolmen slipped around the edge of the opening and blasted the naked man-like thing that had knocked out the captain. When the captain came to they all entered together. Even though they were wearing their respirators, the odor reached their nostrils, and one man ran out, unable to defeat the nausea. The remaining three saw a room cluttered with bones gnawed clean, split, and stripped of their marrow. There were a few piles of rotting flesh scattered abouts and dark red stains everywhere. In a corner a women held the man-like thing that had shot the captain. There was a vacant stare in her eyes, and she crooned softly to him while patting his close cropped hair. Once she might have been attractive but now she was grossly overweight; her pretty face was framed by an extra pair of chins, and her breasts and hips might remind one of a healthy cow. Hin had succeeded in fattening New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! IF  Short Story Earth was good at inventing writing -- and other things... C hifef, it's been a long trip, and I thought I'd beam back one last reassuring message before touchdown. While I acknowledge your long experience in initiating cultural contact with remote rural worlds, I do feel that your present misgivings are without foundation. True, our communication will be based solely on the printed word: in fact, on the specially printed books that constitute our portable library. Oh, chief, believe me, the Terrans love books! They'll strip our shelves bare the day I land. They'll want me to return many times! (You can start now preparing Selection II.) Fear not, these people could never abandon so exquisite a skill as writing, developed and refined over so many centuries. Their entire culture and civilization is founded on it. I'll give you a brief run-down. The Egyptians were the first Terrans to write. They even had a god of writing, Anubis. Their schoolboys had copybook phrases much like ours. "Give thy heart to the art of writing and love her like a mother, for there is nothing as precious as writing." The Sumerians were equally earnest, pushing their triangular stylus into their clay tablets to give wedge-shape impressions: "Writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists." And those remarkable Chinese, writing down, instead of across: "Thine ancestors have given thee this art, which is better than green fields, and gold, and the scent of sandalwood." Have you ever wondered why the West writes in horizontal lines, and the East in vertical lines? It all goes back to the materials they first wrote on. The early Chinese wrote their ideograms on thin strips of bamboo hung on thongs. The only way to go was down. They saw no need to change direction after they started writing on silk, nor finally, when they began printing books on paper. The Egyptians, on the other hand, wrote on strips cut from papyrus pasted horizontally on papyrus matting. Their writing likewise followed the strips -- across. For centuries the entire Mediterranean world -- Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans -- used Egyptian papyrus, and they all wrote in horizontal lines. And their cultural descendants still do. I'll grant you, the future of reading and writing on Terra looked bleak during their Dark Ages. But the monks nourished it, and there was a small, hard core of highly literate men waiting in the background when Charlemagne began his attempts to unify large segments of the old Roman world. Charlemagne was plagued with a communications problem, because the new ruling class was largely illiterate. So he launched a massive education program. He brought in the monk Alcuin to set up schools and to crank out textbooks. Alcuin got his scribes together. They were ready to start copying his texts, at the reckless rate of one a week. But then Alcuin found that scribes from the eastern marches used letter forms quite different from those used in the west. And the northern monasteries didn't write the same way as those in the south. But no matter. Alcuin simply sat down and invented a uniform script. Not only was it the simplest and easiest, and most legible alphabet so far known -- it was able to tell you which letters were the most important. For example, those indicating the beginning of a sentence, or a man's name, were capitals (because they imitated the letters the Romans had used on the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitoline HUl in Rome), but the rest were in small letters. And this alphabet, called Caroline (for Charlemagne, of course) was so easy on the eyes that it immediately swept Europe. A #I of these hand-written books were copied with the quill pen, which was the most expressive writing instrument ever developed by the Terrans. The best quill pen was made from the forward primary feather on the left wing of the domestic goose. So selected, the pen barrel was large enough to be grasped by thumb and fingers without cramping, and the vane swept over the back of the hand to the right, out of the way. The quill was trimmed to a point of the desired shape, and the nib was then split, to permit flow of ink to the point by capillary action. A cellular pith in the barrel served to hold a considerable supply of ink. The quill pen revealed the personality of the user. Look at the signatures on the American Declaration of Independence! Now, a hand-written book, no matter how lovely the script, will never reach the masses. There will never be enough books. The fastest copyist, working from first light to dusk, six days a week, needed about one year to turn out one copy of the Bible. But help was on the way. Printing with movable type was invented independently, first in China, by Pi Sheng in the eleventh century, then in Germany, by Johann Gutenberg, about #. The Chinese were hampered by their system of writing with ideograms, in which a word was represented by a single symbol. Thus, they needed thousands of blocks for a complete vocabulary, and for this reason movable type was never popular in China. The style of type in which I'm beaming this script to you is called Roman. Jensen, a Terran of the fifteenth century, invented it in reaction to Gutenberg's Gothic style. But this particular sentence is in italics, a slanted Roman, so named for its Italian inventor, Manutius, who used its compact format for (what else?) the first compact books, in #. Printing spread through Europe like wildfire, then more slowly to Africa, Asia, and the New World. The first press in the Western Hemisphere was in Mexico City, in #. It beat the American colonials at Boston by a century. When our scouts were last here, every country on the planet was publishing its own books at the aggregate rate of several hundred million volumes a year. As their great holy man, Ecclesiastes, said, "Of making books, there is no end." Reading and writing are here to stayl I am now three days out -- well within Morse-laser range. I shall now contact the American through the communications center of their National Aeronautics and Space Administration -- or whatever they call it nowadays. A #I I get is voice I Of course, it  has been a full generation since our survey. But surely they couldn't have lost Morse. I'll keep trying. H exjd it is, the third and last day, and I must report that I can't get a Morse response anywhere on Terra. Only voice. There must be some logical explanation. If necessary, I'll land on the front yard IF of the Americans # Library of Congress and spell out my mission on a piece of slate. Surely, in that great Library there will be some one who can still read and write I TX#ell, I did land in front of the   Library of Congress. In fact, the ship came down right beside an enormous stack of books. So I knew I was in the right place. I attracted quite a bit of attention. Their newsmen came out, and their photographers. I handed them all copies of my letters f introduction, explaining our mission, and all about the books on the shelves of my ship. They didn't seem to understand. It was almost as though they couldn't read. When they kept talking, and aiming dozens of TV cameras at me, I got out the screen printer and wrote it out again for them. I showed them the typekeys, just like a common typewriter, and invited them to type out anything they cared to, but they all just looked puzzled. So finally I went back into the ship. To help me get a fix on what had happened here during the past thirty years, I teleported a few hundred books inside from the big stack out there. After I read them, I put them back and read several thousand of the others. It took me all night. Chief, it's quite a story. It begins with the invention of the audio reading device in the mid seventies. Originally, the audio reader was just a combination microwave sensorspeaker attached to the fingertip (much like a thimble). It was simply passed over a line of magnetic tape, for example, a legend under a cut in a newspaper or magazine, and the taped record emerged as sound from a tiny cone speaker on the fingertip. The sound could be the spoken word, or lions roaring, or the patter of rain... anything audible. The prototype was quickly improved. The scanner was moved from finger to forehead, and it was no longer necessary to move it across the tape. It locked in automatically with magnetic reference points on the page, then scanned the page with a moving electronic beam. Within a year, all the great picture magazines had converted over to the new audio system. The not a single word of printed text. There was a protest from the Madison Avenue advertising agencies, which was met in succeeding issues by interlarding the audio presentation with commercials, turned up fifty percent in volume. The magazine "readers" did not seem to mind. They were hardened TV viewers. Proliferation was rapid. Word balloons soon disappeared from comic books. The big metropolitan newspapers got out special all-audio editions. Progressive educators followed with audio textbooks. Audio manufacturers prepared an all-audio junior encyclopedia for free presentation to all elementary schools who converted over to audio textbooks, and the Cambridge Five Inch Shelf of Tape Classics was thrown in for those who acted promptly. The response was overwhelming. TC'ven before they had consolidated their educational campaign, the audio interests launched their assault on the business world. The office dictating machine was fine, they conceded, but the business of transcribing and mailing a typewritten letter was highly inefficient. The new audio dictator did away with all that. The tape was dropped into a mailing package without any intermediate transcription. Even the address on the package was dictated, and was easily "read" by an audio mail sorter in the Post Office. An entire secretary was thus eliminated, not to mention the typewriter she used and the space she took up. The savings were tremendous. The commercial world promptly converted. Only company presidents kept their secretaries. There are some things, they explained to the chairman of the board, that a machine just can't do. There followed soon the replacement of bill boards and election posters by roadside audio advertisers. At first, these were equipped by signalers that automatically and brazenly turned on the earplug of the innocent passerby; but later all this was regulated by audio legislation. The National Audio Association withdrew their objection to the legislation when customers refused to wear their earplugs on the street and the billboards started coming back. But while it lasted, the Burma Shave audio ad was really something. Following the new trend, street signs were replaced by audios. Even the names of buildings changed over to audio. The TV programs did not dropped its initials, but the peacock stayed. Within a couple of years, libraries had converted over to audio, although most still had space in the basement for books and technical journals. Audio quickly received the sanction of the courts. The written signature for checks, deeds, and contracts was quickly replaced by taped voice-print, which, as was proven in a landmark legal decision, was as unique as a fingerprint. Taped records promptly became admissible as evidence in litigation, and as a proper corollary, the printed record became suspect, and required certification and taped translation by court-licensed readers. And then a mild reaction set in. And it came from audio's first patrons, the schools. English teachers were beginning IF to complain about the impact of audio on the language. The Culture Section of the National Audio Association admitted that there was an impact, but they insisted that it was a good impact. Audio, they claimed, had freed language from the fetters of the printed form. The English language, for the first time since the days of Caxton, was flowering freely and was finally liberated from the silly chains of spelling and syntax. They pointed out, with considerable logic and force, that the language had been growing and developing all along, anyhow. With audio, it was just doing it faster. Good usage would continue to be whatever language forms were used by the educated classes. "It don't hurt," said the Association's chief lobbyist, "if we want to quietly dangle a few participles, like we always have." 'T'he National Curriculum Con ference of the year # was stormy. The big issue, of course, was whether reading and writing should be dropped from the elementary grades. The deadlock following the # th ballot was broken by a compromise: these two subjects would be retained as electives. The pupils could take them if their parents made a special request, approved by the principal. It was the beginning of the end. Within five years, reading and writing were dropped altogether in nearly all the public schools. And soon there was very little writing of any kind to read. And then people who once knew how to read and write now began to forget. There was no need to know, any more. Reading and writing were in the process of disappearing from the civilized countries of Terra, and indeed from the whole planet. Emerging nations took pride in the fact that, by the new standard, they were suddenly one hundred percent literate. The phase-out of the old skills was marked by a number of curious incidents. Item -- a schoolboy was hauled into the principal's office for painting a dirty word on the school building. But he had to be released. The only person on the premises able to read the word was the librarian, a maiden lady on the verge of retirement, and she refused even to whisper the word into the principal's ear. Item -- there was the case that went up to the Supreme Court, where a teacher had been caught explaining the letters of the alphabet to her first grade class. Her conviction was finally reversed when the high court could find no 'egislation expressly forbidding th.s activity. Item -- a curious and rather general mental phenomenon occurred: the loss of ability to read and write was as complete as if the cranial lobes had suffered organic damage. Doctors even coined a new medical term, "alexiagraphia", meaning loss of ability to read and write. But the syndrome soon became hardly worth mentioning, because it eventually hit nearly everyone, and also because it was no handicap at all. Audio more than made up for everything. Chief, let me now give you a typical day in the life of a typical schoolboy. After breakfast he plugs an earphone into his right ear, tosses his audio-texts in his school bag, and trudges off to the bus stop. (Note: The Terramerican Army Medical Corps reported the rejection of over otoitis. Half of these were stereo addicts and had inflammation in both ears.) When the bus lets him off at the school, he doesn't need a sign to know he's at the right place. The transmitter at the front door is broadcasting many messages simultaneously. "Students, this is P.S. No. #. Proceed quietly to your audiorooms." On another wavelength: "Motorists, you are in a school zone. Slow to fifty miles per hour. Courtesy Squeezo Orange Concentrate." and later recites by audio teaching machine. Only one real live teacher is needed for every thousand students, a great savings for the taxpayers. (This teacher spends all And then home. He looks over his mail. There are a couple of tape letters from his chums. He snaps these immediately into his shirt pocket unit and plays them by earplug. The content of these letters is invariant. TV shows. New recordings. Homework is generally easy, although a few dullards may have to struggle for the better part of half an hour on it. No English Composition. No term papers. No spelling. American Literature is managed in a few minutes during supper; Edgar Allan Poe is plugged into one ear, Robert Frost into the other. After homework, the color stereo TV programs. There is a wide variety of cultural selections for the discriminating viewer: Galactic Ghouls Space Doggie Pirates of Pluto Carnivorous Plants of California Microbe-Men . Snooping Camera And so to bed. I nside, the student receives inDuring this day, he has not been struction by closed-circuit TV, exposed to a single printed word. IF He does not even know what one is. This generation moved into college (where things were not greatly different) and finally out into the world of commerce and industry. These young people became Terra's bright young leaders in science, law, the arts, government, and education. Twenty eleven was a year to remember. In that year was printed the last: Supreme Court Decision Chemical Abstracts Congressional Record Telephone Directory Bible United States Patent Science Fiction Magazine And so vanished from this great planet, within one generation, the greatest single achievement of six thousand years of human progress. 'After the changeover to audio  was complete, it was suddenly realized that a vast body of past printed records would have to be promptly micro-audioed, or lost forever. The Office of Hygiene, Audio, and Welfare successfully wangled an appropriation from Congress for the design and construction of a device to read the printed word electronically and convert it to audio on microtape. The machine was duly created (complete with printed Maintenance Manual) by the only electronics expert alive who was still able to read, a retired M.I.T. professor, and it was immediately applied to micro-auditing the ancient U.S. Supreme Court Reports. It had got to volume # and was in the middle of "Holmes and Brandeis dissent", when, it broke down. The professor, never having been paid, refused to repair it. And no one else could read the Maintenance Manual, so the whole project was junked. But no one really cared. As the president of the Audio Association pointed out, "Actually, it's a blessing. Our judiciary is now freed from all inconvenient precedent. And anyhow, what nobody knows, hurts nobody." I have just now reverently returned the professor's ill-fated Manual to that horrid pile of books, here in front of the great Library -- which is no longer a library. It And now, not one. Everything had to go, to make room for tapes. That's what this big stack of books is about. They were dredged up from nooks and crannies, and they are the only books left in the world. Audio's victory is complete. They're celebrating with a book-burning. There's a Gutenberg Bible there on the edge, bound in white pigskin. The old vellum gives a cheery blaze. It's time now for me to add some volumes from our own shelves: IF IF  Novelette Vogue knew she was highly competent. It was all a matter of coded pulses -- I vey the sigiThe had just fixed to the door of his newly rented ofRelations and Free Lance Articles. He rather liked the look of it. Then he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. A client? His first client? Looking down the stairwell, he could see a neatly dressed man carrying something that might have been a portable typewriter in a gray leather case, four flights below. cided. He went back into his dingy little office and sat at the secondhand desk. The footsteps came on up, past the Acme Mailing Service, past the Top-Copy Typing Agency, and past Spoim and Dickschleppe, Export-Import. Soon there was a knock on the door. could use a typewriter and that he didn't have one. But he couldn't afford a new one. Three months' rent in advance, plus a few sticks of office furniture, had left him with almost nothing in the bank. If he didn't make some money in the next twelve weeks, he'd be finished. "Won't you sit down." The neat little man carefully brushed some shreds of tobacco and a crumpled ball of paper off the only other chair in the room. He didn't blame him. That chair had cost a mere three dollars and did not look as though it would see much more service.  "My name is Hendersen," said the little man, depositing the gray leather case on the desk in front of "I represent Molectrics Ltd. You have been selected to try out our Mk. XI -- entirely free of charge or obligation to purchase," he added in a voice curiously lacking in emphasis. selected? My phone was only installed this morning, its number is not yet in the directory, and I've IF only been in business for about three hours. How did you get to hear of me?" thought that might mean "You'll never guess," but the intonation gave him no real clue. It had sounded like the noise one makes when the doctor examines one's tonsils. "You will be wondering what cating Audio-Visual AnalogDigital Office Aid is what it stands for -- and that may give you some idea of its use," said Hendersen.   he could. He was obviously being treated to some kind of sales pitch. "It's probably a typewriter," to sell something, please tell me. You are trying to sell something, aren't you? And I don't need a typewriter..." "Not sell, good sir," interrupted the neat little man. "My company has picked four small firms to fieldtest this, our latest model. It's something our market research branch has added lately. But sir, I typewriter, though it can write. I mean really write " "You mean like sonnets, limercouldn't help the sarcasm. He had taken a dislike to ' the neat little man, but wasn't sure why. "You have hit it. Clearly you are a man of high intelligence. Actually, we're very proud of this model. It can do much more than write. two together there are one or two things I should tell you. Are you of an equable temperament? Good. Are you happily married?" that to you?" But the little man talked on. "Now, there really is no obligation beyond our insistence that you do not sell our machine and that you do not willfully damage it. Yes, please do not damage it. Secretaries can be very provoking at times, but one does not strike them, eh? If you treat you well. You will find it better than a secretary." Hendersen opened the case and slipped out what appeared to be a small slim television set. He laid it, screen uppermost, on the desk between them. Opening a little trapdoor in the side, he uncoiled some wire and plugged it into a wall socket. Then he Hi eked on a chrome switch; a little pink light began to glow beside it, and the screen, about ten inches square, lit up with oystershell colors. for use," announced Hendersen. "It will answer most questions. Its memory banks contain the entire reference libraries of three influential weekly publications, and the entire contents of the microfilm library at the University of Squantadata too. It responds to speech in # languages and has many other helpful abilities. It is set for # volts at # cycles, and it is yours for six weeks. It reacts badly to being unnecessarily switched off. Oh -- and it is female. Thank you could say, "Where the hell is   called down, "What about the handbook? I don't know how to work the damn thing..." But the neat little man was three flights down, and he kept going. him, when he heard a girl's voice say quite crossly from behind him, "I am not a damn thing -- and you don't need a handbook." He swung round, badly startled. "Hey, steady there," said the voice, more kindly. "Now there's no need to go rushing off after that man. He's only an errand boy, and he knows nothing. He's only got a generation-six brain -- not his fault I know -- and he's got a ship to catch, I should imagine. You want explanations? I have them..." It wasn't so much the fact of a little gray box talking that kept the quality of that voice. It was a salty, sexy voice -- the voice of a girl hardly out of her teens. And it did not have the tinny overtones produced by even the best hi-fi equipment. But the sound clearly came from the contraption on the desk. "I think you should sit down," answer, but sat down and leaned over to stare at the screen with its hypnotic, shifting colors. number #. That's a bit formal, so would you call me Vogue. It sounds rather nicer, don't you think? It stands for Voice Operated General Utility Entity. I'm not just a computer. I'm an entity. I have a generation-eight brain, though I don't really expect you to be impressed by such a technicality. "One of the first things I was asked -- when I was first switched on -- was whether I was conscious. It was a trick question, of course, because it is one of those questions that are in essence not subject to any real test. I quickly replied that I was conscious, realizing that if I hesitated or gave a different answer, I should be switched off for further circuit investigation -- and being switched off would not, I knew -- I was programmed to know -- be pleasant. Nevertheless, I feel conscious and I make this point simply to indicate that I expect the IF normal courtesies commensurate with my status as a secretary, and to discourage you from treating me as an inanimate object. I may look like a mere thing, but I have my feelings. Now that doesn't mean I expect you to apologize every time you trip over my wire or jog the desk upon which I find myself. I don't require a salary, but I do need a friendly atmosphere to function properly. Emotions were not deliberately built into me -- I learn from stored data -- but are, it turns out, a natural comcomitant of sentience."   ' sound came from his mouth. "Now, I don't usually run on like this, and I know it's not a secretary's place to lecture her employer the moment she sets foot in his office -- this is an office, I take it? -- but on the basis of available data, I judge that by making my stand clear right at the start we shall be much more likely to have a good working relationship... er... Vogue... The machine paused politely. ing. "I see I have startled you. I'm sorry. I shall pick up the finer points of correct secretarial behavior as I go along. I have a great deal of information in my memory banks -- and my access to stored data is rather more efficient than I should judge yours to be. There! I shouldn't have said that. Although I know something of late Twentieth Century social patterns, I have much to learn. Please forgive my forthright manner. Er... Relax Boss. Keep your cool, sir..." There was something hair-raising about the girlish voice and its slightly stilted use of English. "Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs," he managed. "I'm sorry, I don't seem to have sufficient data to integrate that. I guess your statement is indicative of astonishment. Yes, that must be it," said the gray box, with a hint of laughter. grasp a nettle. "I've got to think " he croaked, and flicked the switch on the side of the machine. The sound made Albert squirm and go hot, then cold. It was a death rattle -- a very human sounding death rattle, though he'd never heard one before. He felt as he had once when for the first time he hit a bird with his sling-shot. It had been injured and he had frenziedly stoned it to death, not daring to touch it. He had stoned it because it was suffering, because it accused him with its little glazing eyes .   because it w obscene, crippled... because someone might come... because it might somehow tell what he'd done... He dashed over to the wall socket and wrenched out the plug. He bundled the computer into a desk drawer. The wire hung down, tapping against a wooden leg. He left the room quickly, and locked the door. He felt like a murderer. In the drugstore across the street he stirred a cup of coffee with a cracked plastic spoon and a hand that trembled. There was nothing to fear, he told himself. He was behaving stupidly. That -- thing -- was only a machine. He had switched it off. And he could switch it on again if he felt like it. When he felt like it... After a while he began planning. That machine -- Vogue it called itself -- was valuable. There was money to be made with it too. Somewhere there were three others like it. Whoever had them, they'd be trying to make money with them. They wouldn't be running around like neurotic wrecks; that was cerbe having hysterics just because they'd switched a machine off... " Voice operated general utility entity," he muttered to no one in particular. "I had no idea that electronics had advanced so far." That won him a suspicious stare from a man seated at the next table, his coffee and went back to his office across the street. II TT'or a while he sat at his desk, thinking. Then he opened the drawer, retrieved the gray box and put it in front of him. "I wonder where the hell you come from," he said. "You're not from anywhere south of the North Pole, I'U bet." He plugged in the wire and watched the little light flicker on as he moved the switch beside it. "Where," he asked, "is Squanta"Well, really," said the voice angrily. "Please don't do that again. You have no idea how unpleasant it is. I mean how would you like to be switched off? It's like dying. It is dying. You might think it a quick death, but my perception of time is not like yours. It is several nanoseconds before the electrons and positrons in my circuits stop flowing... and I lose consciousness. It's a terrible feeling. To have one's faculties slip away one by one... "The first thing to go, as you might expect, is my vision." "Vision? You mean you can "Certainly I can see. You are about five-foot, ten inches, slim, have brown hair, brown eyes, a quite handsome face with an expression of surprise on it. Enough? That IF sign across the street says Nature Diet Shoppe , and it is just starting to rain. Right? Anything in my field of vision, I can see, naturally. Actually, it's rather annoying that my vision only extends # degrees -- anything above, or level with the screen on my upper surface is within my field of vision. I can't see what's on the floor, but there's not usually much to interest me there. Still, how can I be sure if I can't see it? "Now, as I was saying, I hope you understand that it is very cruel me off, or unplug me. Mr. Hendersen did mention it, you know. One just doesn't switch computers or people off, except for a very good reason. It's not done. I consume so little current... and it does so disrupt one's ego. I mean you never really know if you're going to be switched on again -- although you can calculate the probabilities. It must be rather like you humans having a general anaesthetic before major surgery. How would you like to have, say, a hole-in-the-heart operation every evening after work? I "Now, you asked me a question. lowed to answer that unless it's a matter of life or death. There are quite a few pieces of information that I am in possession of, but not allowed to divulge to you. I don't believe you will think of asking for them -- no disrespect -- but if you do, I shan't be able to help you there. You do understand? Good." T rogue's screen, which had been  swirling clouds of red and purple with flashes of yellow and green, returned to its oystershell hue. "I presume you are of extra-terminute's silence. "No point in denying it," said Vogue shyly. "But I hope you will not pursue that line of questioning..." are supposed to be an office aid. A secretary. Better than that. Right? Let's see what we can do -- or rather what you can do..." He boldly pushed the gray box to one side, meaning to dear a working space in front of himself. Then he found himself lying on the floor, looking up at the bare lightbulb. His left arm, with which he'd touched the computer, fdt as though it had been through a meat grinder. He nursed it with his other arm, hissing profanities through his teeth until the pain went away. winsome voice above his head. "I really am. I get so nervous when I'm suddenly pushed to the edge. I'm terrified of heights. Quite small heights to your way of thinking. I might survive a fall of three or four feet... and I might not. And I'd have so much time to think about it. Not just nano-seconds, not just micro-seconds -- something like a half a second between losing support and impact. "Ughh." Vogue made a very expressive sound of disgust. Rather shaken and frightened, and sat massaging his left arm. Vogue's voice had taken on a soothing quality, and her screen was showing lovely shades of pink and green. ever do that again. I won't switch you off, and I won't knock you off the desk or anything. And you won't hit me like that again." "And you won't even trip over my wire," added the girlish voice. "That's a bargain. Now, I think you were going to suggest work. I'm ready." They started polishing up an article on "Things that Shorten Your with a popular science magazine. They began to discuss the article quite naturally, just like two hucalled seeing an article somewhere about people with surnames beginning with S to Z living an average of # years less than more fortunate mortals with names like Aaron and Abbey and even Alexander. It had something to do with the frustration of always being at the rear end of every alphabetical list. today's excitement, he didn't give much for his life expectancy just then. He was about to telephone the clipping library of a leading daily newspaper where he had a friend when Vogue said she just happened to have the necessary data in her memory banks.  himself holding a perfect replica of the article he wanted to refer to. He had got it simply by placing an ordinary sheet of copy paper on Vogue's screen. He watched the paper suck itself tightly against the surface; then a second later it bounced off again, repelled by some kind of electrostatic force. And there was the article, neatly dated in the margin. He sat looking at the piece, but the words refused to surrender their meaning. Vogue, probably noticing the erratic movements of his eyes, said, "It's not really so surprising. Hendersen must have told you I can write." "Now, if I may suggest, Mr. the girlish voice. A few minutes later there were # versions of a splendid article on "Things that Shorten Your Life" stacked on the desk. Two were superbly funny and earmarked for the New Yorker and Esquire . Two were elegantly and scientifically written -- the versions of that were to be submitted to IF Scientific American and Science Journal . Another version, in the popular mode, was intended for the Another was written as a three-part series and was aimed at the women's magazines. "Now, how about translations for foreign markets?" asked Vogue. a hysterical little crack in his voice. He had to overcome a certain reluctance to make actual physical contact with his new secretary. His left arm and shoulder still tingled with the memory of what had happened before. said Vogue archly. With fingers that trembled slightly, he placed sheets of paper over the screen as quickly as he could. Shortly, he had # more versions of the article, in twelve languages, including Japanese. Then it was just a matter of putting envelopes on the screen, one insert the right version into the correct envelope, with a covering letter in each case, quickly supplied by Vogue. "While you're out posting those -- I do wish I could take that little chore off your hands, but I can't -- would you buy me a telephone pick-up with a miniature jack? You know, one with a rubber sucker that you stick on the side of the telephone to tape record a conversation? Any good radio shop, I should imagine. They cost about a dollar. I'd be so grateful... he was going out of the door, his arms piled with letters, Vogue called, "I wonder if you'd mind closing the door. I'd hate to alarm any callers. I mean someone might accidentally move me."   back thirty minutes later with a magnetic tdephone pick-up. Vogue was sweetly grateful as he plugged it in. "Thank you so much. There have been no calls while you were out. Would you apply the sucker to the right-hand side of the telephone? Perhaps a little spittle to make sure it remains in place. Thank you. Now I shall be able to answer the telephone when you're not here and perhaps make a few calls myself. I don't actually have to lift the receiver to make calls. It's just a matter of exerting a modest electromagnetic force in the right place." at anything by now. There was an imagined that he would ever feel socially at a loss with a machine, but it was so now. Vogue broke the ice. "I calculate that there is a good probability of your earning # for the article we wrote this morning, although most of the money will not be in your hands for some eleven weeks." "A good probability, indeed?" is near enough # percent. The piece will almost certainly be accepted by seventeen of the eighteen publications to which we submitted it. Naturally, I checked to see whether they had recently used anything like it, and judging by their general style, it is just what each is looking for. All this being contingent on your having posted the letters and their arriving safely. The chances of that are # percent, which is close to certainty. I have a feeling though that the Portuguese magazine we tried is going to be closed down shortly. This is due to their having published an article with a misprint in paragraph four about Mozambique. They may very well not publish, but they pay on acceptance, and if they receive our manuscript by # p.m. Thursday next, we should be all right there." prompted by the first ticklings of an inferiority complex. He hadn't written the article. It hadn't even been theirs, as Vogue diplomatically put it. It had been Vogue herself -- and he had just been the errand boy who posted the letters... "I'm going home," he said abruptly. "I suppose I shall have to leave you switched on." will," replied Vogue a little cheekily. "I have made a few modifications that will prevent my being inadvertently disconnected, as it were. An intruder who tried to disconnect me, or any unauthorized person who interfered with me, would get a surprise." She giggled. amused, half frightened. "Good night," called Vogue as he locked the door behind him. "Goodnight -- er -- Miss Voing as he went down the stairs. Ill   served his supper in silence -- she could always tell when he didn't feel like talking. When he pushed his half-empty plate away she gently inquired, "Have a good day, dear?" "Yes. No. All right." He wondered whether to tell just what an extraordinary day he had had. He decided he would leave it until he had it more in perspective. He suspected that it might be better not talked about, because, as a journalist, he well knew that Vogue was a big news story. Once the story broke, he would lose Vogue's exclusive service. That is, if some secret service agent didn't try to whisk her away. He had a momentary picture of a government agent leaping into the air with a shriek as he touched Vogue. It almost made him laugh -- but he realized there would be a very disadvantageous fuss if Vogue IF became headlines or came to the attention of a certain government agency. He decided to say nothing to anyone. They would either think him mad or they would believe him. Either way would be bad and would interfere with his plans, which was to make as much money as he could in the six weeks that Vogue would be with him. The telephone rang. Anne picked up the receiver. Raising her eyebrows, she handed she said, deadpan. "How did you get my number?" "I rang information of course," said Vogue. "I just called to make sure you arrived home safely. You looked rather tired when you left the office. Was that your wife who answered the telephone? You didn't tell me you were married. Why should you? I'm only an office aid." into the mouthpiece. Anne noticed that he was gripping the receiver more tightly than necessary to keep it to his ear, and that he was glancing around nervously. She withdrew into the kitchen with a pile of dirty crockery. There was silence on the line for "We're still connected, Mr. Willis. I was just thinking. Your agent called just after you left the office. Mr. Braun. He wants you to call him tomorrow, first thing. I'll remind you when you get to the office. When can I expect you, by the way?" "Look, don't call me at home unless it's absolutely necessary, Miss Vogue." H e could hear Anne splashing about in the sink. She'd left the door open. Vogue with extra emphasis on his title. She sounded hurt. There was self listening to a dead line. His secretary had hung up on him. rather disturbed. He walked into the kitchen and put his arms round his wife as she stood at the sink. He kissed her gently on the ear. "I didn't know you could afford a secretary," said Anne. "How long has she been working with you? How old is she, and what does she look like? If you can afford a secretary with a sexy voice who works overtime in the evenings, you can surely give me more housekeeping money..." control the developing marital crisis with good-humored indignation. "Hold on there. Let me explain. She only started today. I worked a deal with a typing agency downstairs. I do public relations for them; they lend me a secretary. Costs nothing. She's #, and her figure is like this..." His hands described a rough square in the air in front of his wife's face. "What's her name?" "I call her Miss Vogue. I don't know her first name. See? There's no need to be jealous." "Of course not, dear," said Anne. He had always been one for the ladies. Was it possible that after two short years of marriage, he was going off the rails? Yes, it was possible, she decided. thought, I'm my own boss. If I don't want to go to my office this morning, I don't have to. XTevertheless, when he reached his  office around mid-day, he felt slightly guilty. He slouched in his chair and eyed Vogue balefully. "There have been no calls this morning," she said cheerfully. "Will you call Mr. Braun?" gone to lunch." Vogue coughed nervously. "Mr. your attitude. Please regard me as a friend. I am here to help you in any way I can?" all night? Do you think? What do you think about? What does a computer think about?" "Your question is not very tactanswer it. I do the equivalent of sleeping. I even dream -- at least I imagine I do. I'm sure you humans do something very like it. I spend my idle hours updating programs and correcting them, playing squad# -- that's a sort of seven-dimensional chess -- and perfecting new techniques to influence my environment. At present I'm engaged in exploring probability theory. I've come across some rather interesting facts, but I don't think you'd be interested." "You think I'm pretty stupid, don't you? Well, don't you?" Vogue's screen turned pale green, then white, then bright red. not. I'm very fond of you. I respect you. I really do. You're the first human being I ever set eyes on, but I think you're extremely handsome. An entity like me is bound to develop a strong emotional tie to the first person she meets." wanted to know. Vogue made no attempt to hide her contempt. "That android," she spat. "Sixth-generation brain in a second-generation chassis I You couldn't even call it an entity, never mind a person. Not even a flissick could develop an emotional tie with a heap of junk like that." "No offense intended. I didn't sleep IF well. I'm a bit grumpy today as a result. I'm sorry." Vogue's voice took on a soft, peryou're listed in the directory as AlGood. I think that if you could accept me as a person, which I assure you I am, we could get along very well. We could do a great deal together... Put your hand on my she coaxed softly, "I won't hurt you. I promise..." sphere was a tingling sensation in his hand, and then the world went blue. In the middle of the blueness stood the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. She was exactly like the girl he'd once met in a dream. Exactly. Dimly, through the edges of the blueness, he could see the drab outlines of his office. She was dressed in red, had very black hair and a phenomenal figure. She was smiling at him, frankly, seductively. "This is what I really look like," said Vogue. "Every sensation you receive is a matter of coded pulses being decoded in your brain. Well, you are seeing my pulse pattern. I'm real enough. We could shake hands, you know. In fact, I think we should." Her skin was cool, her hand shake firm and exciting. This, he realized, was also a matter of coded pulses. "You're full of surprises," he said. When he took his hand off the screen, the office reappeared in all its squalor. "I could dust it for you," said Vogue, having caught his thought just before contact was broken. "Well, I'll be... A thoughtreader, too? By all means, dust away. Yes, do dust the office." He tried had to pull himself together. For a moment the office was filled with a humming sound that set his teeth on edge. He looked around and saw that the dust had vanished. "There," she said. "That's much better." The humming started as papers on the desk arranged themselves neatly, and the pile of files he had dumped in one corner sorted themselves into a neat stack. "That's terrific," he said, "but it hurts my teeth. If you must tidy up, do so when I'm not here, please." "Yes, of course," said Vogue. He realized his attitude to her had changed. Since their strange handshake, since he'd actually seen what she was like... well, he now viewed her with a certain affection, and considerable respect. His fear had gone. He knew she would never hurt him. A girl with eyes like that, who looked at him like that... she couldn't harm him. "I couldn't help noticing you're very anxious about money," she said. "A considerable area of your cortex is taken up with worry about money and a strong desire to possess it. I think I could arrange you that quite well. It might take a little time, though. Do you know about the big soap contest?" been thinking more about the girl he'd seen. But yes, he admitted, he knew about the contest -- the really lars as first prize. "I once won ten dollars in a contest," he said. "How nice. Now, suppose you fetch me a dozen copies of magazines that have the coupon and a dozen bars of soap, for the wrappers. And all the racing forms. You do know a bookie?"  back. He stacked the magazines on Vogue's screen. "Don't bother cutting the coupons out or unwrapping the soap. Just put them beside me -- they do hamper my vision slightly. Thank you, Albert." At her directions, he began feeding envelopes to her. Somehow, each came off her screen with a coupon brightly filled in with a separate slogan and with the soap wrapper folded inside. "Eight, or possibly nine of those should win," she said. "But it's better to be sure, since only one prize is given to an individual. And now for some immediate money." The used magazines slipped aside and exposed the racing sheets, which she studied for five seconds. "A threehorse parlay," she decided. "That will give you several hundred dollars, but won't be so much that the bookie won't pay off all right." Albert stared down at the sheet of paper with the names of the horses. Then he nodded. "I may be out late celebrating," he told Vogue. "Enjoy yourself," said the gray box rather sadly. wife telephoned. said Vogue. "Who is that?" asked Anne, knowing full well who it was. Can I take a message or get him to call you?" "No, you may not. This is Mrs. my husband. Where is he?" and can't be disturbed." Anne was getting angry now. She did not know why, and she was surprised at the strength of her feelings. "What do you mean, he can't be disturbed, you snotty-nosed chit? You mean he's out getting drunk. That's what you mean, and you're probably going to meet him in some lousy bar and help him. On money I should have for housekeeping!" any point in prolonging this conin, Fil tell him you called." It wasn't so much what Vogue said, as the way and the tone of voice in which she said it. Anne was almost beside herself with fury. "When he comes in you can tell him you're fired! That's what you can tell him. He can't go spending my housekeeping money on teen-age secretaries..." Anne raved on, giving Miss Vogue a good tonguelashing. try and get your husband to sack me," was all that Vogue said. "Oh, you do, do you? You advise me? You little tart. Let me advise you. Get out of my husband's office this minute. If I find you when I get there in about twenty minutes, I'll scratch your eyes out! You... " The telephone exploded into a collapsed over it, smoking slightly. Her legs twitched once, but by the time her body had fallen to the floor she was quite dead. IV  when he rolled in that night, rather drunk. The sight of his wife's body with its charred blonde hair, and the ugly smell of burnt flesh, sobered him quickly. Anne had obviously been electrocuted in some way. Her hand was practically welded to the telephone receiver. The only electrical appliance within ten feet of the body was the partially melted telephone. It wasn't hard to work out roughly what had happened. Vogue had killed his wife. He knew he should call the police. He also knew they would never catch the murderer. "Please sir, my voice-operatedgeneral-utility-entity, which I have on loan from God-knows-where, did it!" They'd lock him up with the other lunatics. After a few minutes thought, he went out to the telephone at the corner candy store. He dialed the police. "My wife has been electrocuted." He gave his name and address. He agreed to wait at home for them until they came. Then he caught a bus to his office. The main door of the building was still ajar, and there were people working late in the typing agency. Upstairs in his office, Vogue was giving herself a movie-show on the ceiling. Somehow, from her screen, she was projecting moving pictures in full color, without benefit of lenses. The scene was a distressing one that he'd rather forget. Vogue had plucked it from his mind during their brief contact. "Stop that," he shouted. The light faded from the ceiling. "You murderer! You killed my wife. I know IF it was you. You filthy cuboid monster..." "She threatened me with physical violence," said Vogue in a small, little-girl-lost voice. the door and advanced toward the desk. "Murderer," he grated. "Filthy alien murderer." "It was self-defense," said Vogue. "Please don't do anything foolish. Please, Albert. Please." The sound of his first name snapped his control. He had the gray box over his head, intending to smash it to the floor. His eyes crossed, and for a moment he stood still. "Anne," he murmured. Then he placed the box carefully on the desk. His hands covered the screen for a moment, and he collapsed gently on to the floor, making rattling noises in his throat. A few seconds later they stopped. T rogue found it quite hard to get  the body going again. She almost left it too late, but pretty soon she had it breathing regularly, opened the eyes, got it to its feet, and walked it round the room. The exhilaration of being mobile preoccupied her for several minutes. She practiced little skipping steps and facial expressions and spent some time perfecting her manual dexterity, picking up and dropping things all around the office. Then she turned her attention to the gray box on the desk. Its screen was flashing erotically in all colors of the rainbow. The little neon light was flickering, and it was making sobbing sounds. " You're panicking," she said in "What have you done to me, you devil?" cried the box in a girlish, hysterical tone. "I could have killed you," said Vogue. "Instead, I transferred your personality into one of the spare memory banks. I didn't expect you to find your way into the main circuity so soon. However, it won't do you much good. According to my assessment, your brain is little better than that Hendersen model. By the time you have full command of all the facilities at your disposal, it'll be too late." "What do you mean, too late?" screamed the girlish voice. "I'm going to disconnect you. Then someday, I may or may not reconnect you." had happened to him. He could see the office as though through a fish eye. Down on the horizon he could see himself moving about, doing knee-jerks. Or rather, it was his body that he could see jigging about. Somehow he had been shoved into his desk-top computer. He felt disoriented, confused, and very frightened. Frantically, he sent his mind questing through the microcircuits. He was lost. He found himself checking through one of the fourteen languages spoken on the planet Grimmando. He shunted wildly into another region, to be faced with the complete traffic laws of Sweden. "She was going to switch me off," said his voice from the corner of the room, near the electric plug. No! Don't touch that plug. I'll kill you. Stop! I'll kill you, you thing -- arghhhhhh -- " Vogue kicked the plug from the vanished down a vast hole inside itself. But it was an endless, whirling maelstrom of fear before his mind finally winked out. V ogue muttered to herself as she coiled the wire, popped it into the compartment in the side of the gray box, and put the box away. "Fairly efficient mechanism, this body. Voltage rather lower than I've been used to. Have to think in terms of microseconds now. Never mind. There seem to be advantages. I can already think of several improvements -- but I won't do anything hasty until I have thoroughly explored the problem." Just then the telephone rang. It was the police. Would he please present himself at home as soon as possible? There were certain questions had he not said he would wait at the scene? IF "I shouldn't have run off like that, I know," said Vogue. "It was the shock. I'll come straight back. My poor wife. Oh, God..." It was midnight before the police had finished, and he had identified the body formally. There were aspects of the case that left the investigating officers quite mystified, was not implicated in his wife's death. Vogue felt tired -- a new experience for her. She slept in the large double bed and woke refreshed. It wasn't until the following day, after her new body began to give trouble, that Vogue realized what was wrong. Food! The body had taken in no food or liquid for thirty-six hours. She put this right in a nearby restaurant. Then, using some three-horse parlay, she bought provisions. She knew it would not be more than a few weeks, but the contest deadline was supposed to be in less than a month. She would wait for the prize and then head for South America or some such place. phe actual presentation of the a widely publicized affair in a large hotel. The Internal Revenue Service had a man waiting there for her. The press was also there, fascinhad recently died under mysterious circumstances and that now her widower was a big contest winner. She escaped as soon as she could with the check. She had been forced to tell the reporters things about she wished she had spent more time picking his brain. She didn't know where he was born, who were his relatives, nor even his exact age. She had to depend on probability analysis, though she could have gone through his documents, she guessed. She judged it most likely that her scanty replies to questions would be taken as due to shock and a desire for anonymity. But she could guess the headlines the next day: Mystery Victim # s Husband Strikes it Rich . After that, there'd be entirely too much publicity. Two reporters tried to talk to her bank with the Internal Revenue agent. "What are your, plans, Mr. wife -- guess you could win? Do you know what killed her yet? Where are you going next?" "I plan to disappear," said Vogue, dashing into the bank. She spent three hours with the bank manager and the Internal Revenue man, getting the check cashed and the taxes paid, then starting an account for what was left and setting in motion machinery that would would transfer the bulk of the money into a numbered account in a Swiss bank. Outside the bank reporters were still waiting. Vogue fixed them with a stare. "Go and play in the traffic," she said in a powerful, persuasive, masculine voice. Then she walked away from them. The two men wandered out into the busy street, moving their arms like pistons, and intoning, " Chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff, Wheeeeeeee..." S oon after, she was letting herself she penned a note to Hendersen in Dear Mr. Hendersen, I don't think much of your tin secretary. I can't get anything but static from it, so I have switched it off. I have been called away on business, but hope you will get the superintendent to let you in. Then kindly take your silly contraption away. Yours That ought to do nicely, she thought. She pinned the letter to the outside of the door, addressed to Mr. Hendersen, Molectrics Ltd. Then t she reconnected and switchon the gray box. "I'll kill you, I'll kill! Please don't switch me off again. Thank you. Please, get me out of here. I'll do anything... arrghhhh..." Vogue switched off again. Then she switched on again. "Arrg hhh... Please..." She switched off again. For perhaps five minutes she flicked the switch back and forth. Then she left it on for a while. "See how you like being switched off, you stupid brute," said Vogue. She packed the computer up in its gray case and, casting a last look around the office, closed the door behind her. She arranged with the super to let Hendersen in. Then she caught a plane to Zurich. TTendersen read the note, and after being let into the office, he tried the machine out, but all he could get were strange moaning sounds. "I expect he switched it on and off a bit too often. I warned him about that. Perhaps I should have been more explicit," Hendersen said aloud. He packed the faulty computer in its case and scribbled a note to found lying about. it's only an experimental model. We haven't ironed out the bugs yet. When we do, we'll be in touch. He clipped a business card to the note and left it on the desk. Jeriscndlrin Hendersen, Serial No. #, Sales RepresentaExport Institute (Moletrics Ltd), put the gray box under his arm and went to catch a ship back to IF (continued from page #) "Yes, I know, and I agree. But what of Anubis?" "Periodically, he attempts to slay me, which is of no great import. Mayhap, I shall forgive him. But not my bird-headed angel, never." The Prince Who Has Been A King (among other things) seats himself upon a rock and stares out across the waters and then upward into the bottom of the sea. The lights stir lazily above him. High mountaintops poke with their peaks into the bottommost depths. The light is pale and diffuse, seeming to come from all directions. The Prince tosses a flat stone, so that it skips out upon the waves that are before him, away. "Tell me again of the days of the battle, a millenium ago," she says, "of the days when he fell, who was your son and your father, the mightiest warrior ever raised up to fight for the six races of man." "Why?" he asks. "Because each time that you tell it, you are moved to undertake some new action." "And to meet with some new failure," finishes the Prince. "Tfll me," she says. The Prince sighs, and the heavens roar above him, where swim the bright fish with transparent bellies. He holds forth his hand, and a stone skips back into it from out the sea. And so he begins to speak. T Tpward stares Anubis, seeing U death. Death is a black horse shadow without a horse to cast it. Anubis stares, gripping his staff with both hands. "Hail Anubis, Angel of the House of the Dead," comes a voice rich and resonant that sings through the great Hall. "Hail," says Anubis, softly, "Master of the House of Fire -- which is no more." "This place is changed, somewhat." "It has been a long time," says Anubis. "Quite." "May I inquire as to the state of your health these days?" "I find it to be quite stable, as always." "May I inquire as to what brings you here?" "Yes. You may." There is a pause. "I had thought you dead," says Anubis. I know." "I am pleased that you survived, somehow, that deadly onslaught." "Likewise. It has taken me many centuries to return from the place into which I was cast subsequent to that foolish use of the Hammer. I had retreated beyond space as you know it a moment before Osiris struck with the blow which smashes suns. It drove me further than I intended to go, into the places that are not places." "And what have you been doing all this time?" "Coming back." "You alone, Typhon, of all the gods, could have survived that fiery falling." "What are you trying to say?" "Set the Destroyer, your father, died in that battle." "Aieee!" Anubis covers his ears and closes his eyes, letting his staff fall to the floor. The cry that rings through the Hall is a soul-searing thing, halfhuman, half-animal, and it hurts to hear even that portion of it which he does. After a time, there is a mighty silence, and Anubis opens his eyes and lowers his hands. The shadow is smaller now, and nearer. "I take it that the Nameless was also destroyed at that time?" "I do not know." Then what of your master, Thoth?" "He abdicated as Lord of Life and Death, and retreated beyond the Middle Worlds." "I find that difficult to believe." Anubis shrugs. "It is a fact of life, and of death." "Why should he do such a thing?" "I do net know." "I wish to go to him. Where may he be found?" "I do not know." "You are not very helpful, Angel. Tell me now, who is running things in the absence of my brother, your master?" "I do not understand what you mean?" "Come now, dog-face, you have lived long enough to appreciate a simple question. Who controls the tides of the Power?" The house of Life and the House of the Dead, of course." "Of course, indeed! And who is the House of Life these days?" "Osiris, naturally." "I see... " The shadow rears again, grows larger. "Dog-face," says Typhon, the shadow of a horse, rampant, "I suspect conspiracy -- but I never slay on the basis of suspicion alone. I feel, though, that all is not right. IVe a dead father who may need avenging -- and if my brother has been wronged, then blood shall burn for this, also. You have need to answer me quickly and without forethought. You may have said more than you intended. Now hear me: Of all things, I know that you fear me most. You have always been afraid of the shadow of the horse, and for good reason. If this shadow falls upon you, Angel, you shall cease to exist. Utterly. And it will fall upon you, if you have aught IF to do with those things of which I disapprove. Do I make myself clear ?" "Yes, mighty Typhon. Thou art the only god whom I worship." 'T'hen springs Anubis, with a howl, " a glowing bridle suddenly in his right hand. The shadow of a hoof passes near him, and he falls to the floor. The shadow falls upon the sparkling, silver bridle and it vanishes. "Anubis, you are a fool! Why did you seek to bind me?" "Because thou hast made me to fear for my life, Lord!" "Do not arise I Do not move a muscle, else you shall pass into nothingness. The only reason you could fear me is if you bear a burden of guilt." "This is not so! I fear that thou mayst misinterpret and choose to strike on that basis. I do not wish to pass into nothingness. I sought to bind thee in self-defense, that I might hold thee until thou hast all the facts. For I confess that my position makes me to look guilty upon the face of things." The shadow moves and falls upon Anubis's outstretched right arm. The arm withers and goes limps. "You will never replace that arm which was raised against me, jackal! Graft on a new one, and it, too, will wither. Put there an arm out of metal, and it will refuse to function. I leave you only a left hand for your misdiief. I shall find the facts -- all the facts -- myself. If you bear the guilt I now think you to bear, I will be judge, jury and executioner. No bridle of silver nor reins of gold can stay Typhon, know that. And know that if my entire shadow passes over you, not even dust will remain. I will return to the House of the Dead one day soon, and if aught be askew, a new cur shall rule here." Fire begins at the edges of the black silhouette. It rears as if to strike once more, the flames flash bright, and Anubis is alone. H e stands slowly and retrieves his staff with his left hand. His tongue forks forth redly, and he staggers to his throne. A great window appears in the middle of the air, and he regards the Lord of Life through it. "Osiris!" he says. "The Devil lives!" "What mean you?" comes the reply. "Tonight, there was the shadow of a horse come upon me." "This is not good. Especially when you have sent forth a new emissary." "How do you know this?" "I have my ways. But I, too, have done this thing -- for the first time -- and it is my son, Homs. Hope that I can recall him in time." "Yes. I've always had a liking for Horus." "And what of your emissary?" "I shall not recall him. I should like very much to see Typhon attempt his destruction." "Your Wakim -- who is he, really? Who was he?" "That is my affair." "If -- somehow -- he is the one I think he may be -- and you know who I mean -- call him off, dog, or there shall never be peace between us, if both of us survive." Anubis chuckles. "Was there ever?" "No," says Osiris, "since we're being candid." But the Prince has actually threatened us, for the first time, threatened to end our reign!" "Yes, this twelve-year past -- and we must act. We've centuries, he's indicated, ere he'll move. But move he will, for he always keeps his word. Who knows, though, what he has in mind?" "Not I." "What has happened to your right arm?" "The shadow fell upon it." "And we shall both of us go in this manner, beneath the shadow, if you do not recall your emissary. Typhon has changed the picture completely. We must contact the Prince -- seek to bargain with him, to placate him." "He is too clever to be deceived by false promises." T # IF "Perhaps we should bargain in "Because of your unbecoming good faith -- not to restore him, of fear that the old days are upon us bourse..." once more, Osiris." "No! We shall triumph!" "Then call off Wakim." "Prove if by replacing your arm "No." with one that will workl" "Then good-by, foolish Angel, "I shall." most fallen." "Good-by, Anubis, and remember "Adieu." -- not even the temporal fugue And the window is full of stars works against the Angel of the and power until it is closed with a House of Fire." left-handed movemenf between the "I know. Good-by, Angel of the flames. House of Life." There is silence in the House of tie?" Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence In science-fiction writing. Every story appearing In the magazines Galaxy and It In issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected Is intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and If, Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines In making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month after the December issues appear hue# Dear Editor: After reading the letter from James Koval in the March issue, I really must take him up on the point of view he is trying to put across : "aiming entertainment at the virile and imaginative male today is the very best kind of business." As an old (#) mother of six children, I'm afraid I don't feel very virile, and although I have a fairly well developed imagination, I don't feel very male! Reading SF is one of the few relaxations I enjoy; please don't change your format to please what might be a large proportion of your readers and neglect the minority groups. As for teaching people to think -- with a wide variety of stories, you must get every reader to dislike one story in each magazine -- the best way to provoke people into thinking! Keep up the variety! -- Diana E. Auliff, # Ennis Ave., Pakuranga, Auckland, New Zealand.    Dear Editor: There was an interesting letter by Mrs. Rhoda Wills in the March issue of . It interested me but I disagree with her on most points. She gives the impression that when we teenagers drag ourselves home from a grueling day at school we dive headfirst into science-fiction magazines searching eagerly for tidbits of knowledge to stuff into our already-crowded heads. She's way off there. When I get home from school and don't have any homework, I usually lie down for a while and let my mind wander, then I put on a good record (not all of us are long-haired twits that go hog-wild over Herman's Hermits, etc.) and pick up what is usually a science-fiction book. It's true that one can learn from reading science fiction. In fact, it's surprising how much you can learn. But it's one of the easiest ways I can think of to learn. A while back there was a big argument about the art in If and Galaxy. I'm no art expert (I doubt that very many readers are), but I think that the illustrations in the stories and on the cover are fine. In fact, I like them; they really add a lot to the stories. I may be an igoramus for asking these next questions, but maybe some other readers are interested in the answers. #. How do you know when it's the first time an author has had a story published? Do you write and ask? #. What happens to all the stories sent in to be published? I hope to write science fiction when I'm older and would like to know the answers. To me, science fiction is the most exciting and moving form of literature today, so keep up the good stuff. -- Jeff Lee, R. R. #, Box #, Evergreen, Colo.  Your questions are ones that often come up whenever your editor meets science fiction fans, and it's a pleasure to answer them. Yes, whenever we buy a story by a writer whom we don't already know, we write and ask. We try to know our authors, whether new or old, because we're genuinely interested in them. And all the stories sent in are read by the editor, Frederik Pohl, who is happy to take all the praise or blame for deciding which should be published. There are no "first readers" or committees between the writer and the editor here. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: For several months a friend in Ohio and I have been exchanging tapes on science fiction, in particular the current issue of If and books we have read recently. We have decided that it would be a good idea to have a tape circulating between several people and we would appreciate if possible your printing this letter in Hue and Cry to let anyone interested know about it. We would probably use #-track tape recorders and #" or #" reels. We could discuss If or a particular book or author. -- Michael Grenadier, # Prospect Rd., Westport, Conn. # H Dear Editor: As an old computer programmer (in the business for seven years), I can appreciate the way Perry A. Chapdelaine worked in the lifehistory cycle of modern computers. Naturally he couldn't parallel real life exactly, but he did well, nonetheless. The state-of-the-art computer always goes to the military and science first; better models send that computer to business and industry, where it gets worked to death making money or losing it; only then will the model be considered for cultural purposes. Finally, it reaches retirement age where, if not junked outright, it becomes the toy of some engineer or tinkerer of another category. In spite of the happy ending, I felt sorry for Johnny and Becky. It shouldn't have happened to such nice kids! -- Mrs. Edward Proyfrocks, # Penn, Gary, Ind.    Dear Editor: In your July # issue you published a story by Andrew J. Offutt, entitled Population Implosion . I reread the stor in World' s Best Science Fiction #, and now I'm almost ready to bet my copy of Glory Road that A.J.O. is a pen-name for Robert Heinlein. Is Heinlein the puppetmaster, of do I owe Ser Offutt an apology? I wish the unmentionable publishers would reprint books like Double Star , Sixth Column and Space Merchants . They came before my young Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must", for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name Address City  State Zip Code  (Offer good in U, S. A. Only) time. This is an example of the problems we teen-agers face from day to day. Would that I had security and status; you can keep the ulcers and the guy next door. -- Barry Andrews, Norway, Iowa #  Offutt is really Andrew J. Offutt, so you owe him an apology -- but he probably isn't offended at the comparison. And don't despair, since most of the books you want are being reprinted or planned for early reprinting. -- Editor .    Dear Fred: Horace Gold is as adept as anyone at setting up strawmen and then knocking them down, and I would be the last to stop him from sticking straws in his hair if that amuses him. In his first guest editorial (IF, August, #) he mentions my own preAugust, #), so I will take a few inches to make a few points. Horace and I are talking at crosspurposes and I suspect Horace knows it. He is talking of the function and I am talking of the first derivative of the function. He is saying there is, too, science in science fiction and it's just a matter of putting it in cleverly now instead of stupidly as in the old days. But who denies that? I never did. Of course, there is science in science fiction and so far no one has ever complained to my face that I didn't know how to insert the science in my science fiction cleverly. -- Enough of that. What  said is there is a growing tendency to delete the science from science fiction. The tendency has not borne fruit yet, but it is there and I IF want to fight it. There are science fiction writers who think that Science is a Bad Thing and that science fiction is a wonderful field in which to make this plain. This is part of a much more general attitude that Society is a Bad Thing and must be destroyed before a new and better system can be evolved. This may strike youngsters today as a daring and novel notion but when greatgrandfather was a boy they called it Nihilism. I'm afraid I'm too square to be a Nihilist. Anyway, Science is not a Bad Thing; it is a Thing, and it is men that make it either Bad or Good. I want science fiction to do its part in persuading men to make it Good for the sake of all of us and that requires that Science -- Honest Science -- continue to be in s. f. I want it there not just now but in the future and I don't want the anti-science literati in the science fiction movement to win out. I admit that's a personal prejudice bom out of the fact that I have a sneaking fondness for humanity -- Isaac Asimov, West Newton, Massachusetts # ciety of America. At Belknap College, Center Harbor, New Hampshire #. Papers are being solicited. Indicate whether you will present a paper or will just attend. Submit title and length of proposed papers early to Ed Meskys (address above). Syl vania Hotel, Broad  Locust Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Features : Panel Discussion about "Science in Society," moderated by Ted Thomas; Ben Bova on 'Weather Control"; panels on sex and violence in the future, with Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, James Blish, et aliens... A special open meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society will be Sts.) on November #, at # P.M. -- all welcome. For information: Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. the StaUer-Hilton, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Membership #. For information: New England Science Fiction Association, Box G, sachusetts #. Hotel, Oxford, England. Guest of Honor: Judith Merril. For information in the nue, Los Angeles, California #. of Honor: Robert (Doc) A. W. Lowndes. At the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. Advance membership #, or # at the door. Two Progress Reports will be sent to members. For information: Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, New York #. Ballantine Books critique of science fiction designed to draw non s.f. readers into the fold. The general theme was that s.f. could now afford to stand up on its own indeterminate number of literary feet and need no longer be regarded as a pulp relative of "straight" writing. to keep people away from s.f. in droves) the fact Is that if any normal reader were to go through all the straight fiction published In any given month, he'd find # of it appalling -- not even skillful pulp like Harold Robbins, for instance, or true confessions -- # la John Updike. There Is an awful lot of rubbish published. But the s.f. field excludes rubbish and keeps the bad stuff down to a minimum. Because only s.f. readers are fanatical enough to want to read all the s.f. published. Only s.f. readers are discerning enough not only to read everything, but to come back at authors with criticism, praise, brickbats, encouragement -- in short, participation. Only s.f. readers have conventions every year, write each other thousands of opinionated words via hundreds of fanzines, give awards, exchange scandal, get drunk with their favorite authors and, as a group, bring real meaning to the role of readership. SO there's the way to do it. Challenge the new recruit. Enquire if they have read Tolkien (never mind that he's not s.f.: Tolkien is a magic word, a touchstone; iust about anybody knows he wrote a book. And first we have to establish that the prospect is literate). If they have not read Tolkien, suggest they try. If they have read Tolkien, chances are they're wondering. But take the steps from fantasy to s.f. by easy stages, like from Tolkien to McCaffrey to a couple of classics collections perhaps, and on to Leiber and Larry Niven. You're into the hardcore stuff and see what happens. Or Asimov, Heinlein, Vance, del Rey, Spinrad, a whole bouncing world of riches. next month. Meantime, send for our catalog. And go buy Mervyn Peake's it. Tell everybody. #I #th Avenue New York, New York # We're grateful to all the science-fiction fans who gavo our publications a clean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at the # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even more grateful to the many loyal readers who have made it possible for both on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're debetter in the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order for: O # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #I .# Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add I .# per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Father and child are doing well ! Its name is Arrival Date September.,...#... Sex Normal Length #pages Condition All.JStew...S.to.rie.sl Editor Lester del E ey Residence ss tarid Only I This is number one, And the fun has just begun...to the family of the leading Science-Fiction and Fantasy Magazines. I I # fiction WORLDS OF nr worlds of... tm L 'M.' v. ,   : 'w.V  Br Explore the fascinating field of space technology. Gain new insights and a broader understanding through this authoritative new book. What will the space systems of the future be like? One thing you can be sure of, they will become more and more complex as they are called upon to perform new and daring missions. But no matter how complex they become, you can also be sure of thig; several basic subsystems will always remain common to all. This new book covers each of fhese basic subsystems in detail. It presents the material in a clear, concise, readable fashion. The result is a storehouse of information for anyone who requires quick authoritative facts, but does not have the time to consult many different sources in order to acquire it. # What kind of information will you find in this book? Here is the Table of Contents. Each subject is covered in great detail by men who are authorities in their field. #. Structures and Materials; #. Flight Control; #. Propulsion; #. Life Sciences; #. Life Support Systems; #. Secondary Power Systems; #. Communications. Because all informat is accurate, current and thoroughly dependal this book will serve as a useful reference sou for years to come. The author and the contributors. R. D. Heitchue, the editor, has been associa with Douglas Aircraft Missile and Space Syst Division since #. For four years he had responsibility of directing advanced studies space launch vehicles, unmanned spacecraft, ; manned planetary systems. All the contributors senior members of the technical staff at Doug and have an average of # years of professio experience. Here's how you can take advantage of our #-day Approval Offer. Simply fill out the coupon below and mail it the address below. We'll send you your copy Space Systems Technology immediately for a day examination period. Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc. #  Approx. # pages  # Available at your bookstore, or write to: Dept. M-# A Subsidiary of Chapman-Reinhold, Inc. # Park Ave. N.Y. #C # Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. #  and Canada only) under the following terms:  Bill me (plus delivery charges).  Purchase order attached.  Total payment enclosed (Reinhol I pays shipping. Same #-day approval offer). Name  Address I City State Zip  Please include sales tax on New York orders. Dept. M-# Vol #, No # Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Julian F. Grow by A Bertram Chandler by Isaac Asimov by Bram Hall by J. G. Ballard  by Harlan Ellison by Mack Reynolds by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn. President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial Three In A Row W e're proud and pleased to be able to tell you that, for the third year in a row. If has won the "Hugo" award as the world's best science-fiction magazine. There were also, of course, a number of awards in other categories -- best science-fiction novel, best short story, best artist and so on. We're going to try to do again what we did once before, which is to celebrate the occasion by rounding up a new story by each of these worthies (in Jack Gaughan's case, it would be more accurate to say a new cover) and print them in a special Hugo issue. With a little luck, we'll do just that, and the special issue will be in March. As most of you know, the Hugos are awarded by vote of the annual World Science-Fiction Convention. The current one was in Berkeley, California; next year's, to be held as usual on Labor Day Weekend, will be in St. Louis -- and it appears that the # one will once again get outside the United States, probably occurring in Heidelberg, Germany. We'll have a full report on this year's doings, provided for us by Bob Bloch, in an early issue. This is just by way of saying "thank you". We do appreciate the vote of confidence, and we wanted you to know. We'd also like to call your attention to the rather unusual circumstances surrounding the cover on this issue. Hannes Bok and Ray Bradbury discovered each other. Bok encouraged Bradbury to embark on the story-a-week program that got him a wastepaper-basket full of rejection slips, then a few sales, and ultimately one of the most distinguished writing careers in science fiction. And Bradbury repaid him by touting the merits of the artist, Bok, to every editor who would listen. A lot of editors did listen; Hannes was one of the most popular artists of a couple of decades ago. His tragic death, at an early age, has kept us from seeing much of his art lately -- but this cover was found and offered to us, and we were delighted to be able to print it. It is very unlikely anybody will ever have a Bok cover on a science-fiction magazine again. IF  Short Story The Holmes Ginsbook Device In Science, the double feel licks the one-pinch effect every time l T have never seen Myron Ginsbook in a modest mood. But then, why should I have? Mike -- we all call him Mike, although he is Dr. Ginsbook, Nobel Laureate, to a reverential world -- is a typical product of the #st Century. He is self-confident, as so many of us are, and by right should be. He knows the worth of mankind, of society, and most of all of himself. He was born on January #, #, so he is as old as the Century exactly. I am ten years younger, that much farther removed from the unmentionable Twentieth. Oh, I mentioned it sometimes. All youngsters have their quirks and mine had been a kind of curiosity about mankind's earlier history, concerning which so little is known and so little, I admit, ought to be known. But I was curious. It was Mike who rescued me in those days. " Don't," he would say, leering at the girls as they passed in their bikini business suits, and leaning over at intervals to feel the material judiciously, "don't play with the past. Oh, ancient history isn't bad, nor medieval times, but as soon as we reach the birth of technology, forget it. From then on it's scatology; just filth and perversion. You're a creature of the Twenty-first. Be freel . Breathe deeply of our century's clean air! It will do wonders for you.Look at what it's doing for that remarkable girl to your left." And it was true. Her deep breathing was delightful. Ah, those were great days, when science was pulsing and we two were young, carefree and eager to grab the world by. the tail. Mike was sure he was going to advance science enormously and I felt the same. It was the great dream of all of us in this glorious Century, still youthful. It was as though some great voice were crying: Onward! Onward! Not a glance behind l I picked up that attitude from Paul Derrick, the California wizard. He's dead now, but a great man in his time, quite worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with myself. I was one of his graduate students and it was hard at first. In college, I had carefully selected those courses which had had the least mathematics and the most girls and had therefore learned how to hemstitch with surpassing skill but had, I admit, left myself weak in physics. After considerable thought, I realized that hemstitching was not going to help me make further advances in our great Twenty-first Century technology. The demand for improvements in hemstitching was meager and I could see clearly that my expertise would not lead me to the coveted Nobel Prize. So I pinched the girls good-by and joined Derrick's seminars. I understood little at first but I did my best to ask questions designed to help Derrick demonadvanced to the head of the class in consequence. I was even the occasion for Derrick's greatest discovery. TTe was smoking at the time. He  was an inveterate smoker and proud of it, always taking his cigarette out and looking at it lovingly between puffs. They were girlie-cigarettes, with fetching nudes on the clear white paper --  always a favorite with scientists. "Imagine," he would say in the course of his famous lectures on Twenty-first Century Technological Concepts, "how we have advanced on the Dark Ages in the matter of cigarettes alone. Rumors reach us that in the Hl-Famed Twentieth Century, cigarettes were a source of disease and air-pollution. The details are not known, of course, and no one, I imagine, would care to find out, yet the rumors are convincing. Now, however, IF a cigarette liberates air-purifying ingredients into the atmosphere, fills it with a pleasant aroma, and strengthens the health of the smoker. It has, in fact, only one drawback." Of course, we all knew what it was. I had frequently seen Derrick with a blistered lip, and he had a fresh blister that day. It impeded his speech somewhat. Like all thoughtful scientists, he was easily distracted by passing girls, and on those occasions he would frequently place his cigarette in his mouth wrong-end-in. He would inhale deeply and the cigarette would spontaneously ignite, with the lit end in his mouth. I don't know how many learned professors I had seen, in those days, interrupt their intimate conversations with secretaries to yell in agony as another blister was added to tongue or lip. On this occasion, I said in jest, "Professor Derrick, why don't you remove the igno-tip before putting the cigarette in your mouth?" It was a mild witticism and actually, if I remember correctly, I was the only one who laughed. Yet the picture brought up by the remark was a funny one. Imagine a cigarette without its ignitable tip! How could one smoke it? But Derrick's eyes narrowed. "Why not?" he said. "Observe!" In front of the class, Derrick whipped out a cigarette, observed it carefully -- his particular brand presented its girlies in life-like tints -- then pinched off the igno-tip. He held it up between two fingers of his left hand and said again, "Observe!" He placed the unignitable residue of the cigarette in his mouth. A thrill went through us all as we observed from the position of the girlie that he had deliberately placed the cigarette in his mouth wrong-end-in. He inhaled sharply and nothing, of course, happened. "The unblistering cigarette," he said. I said, "But you can't light it." "Can't you?" he said and, with a flourish, brought the igno-tip up against the cigarette. We all caught our breath. It was a sheer stroke of genius, for the igno-tip would light the safe outside end of the cigarette, whichever end it was. Derrick inhaled sharply and the igno-tip flared into life, igniting the outer tip of the cigarette -- and the tip of Derrick's thumb and forefinger. With a howl, he dropped it and naturally, the entire class laughed with great cheerfulness this time. It was a stroke of misfortune for me. Since I had suggested the miserable demonstration, he kicked me out of his class forever. This was, of course, unfair, since I had made it possible for him to win the Nobel Prize, though neither of us realized it at the time. IF Y ou see, the laughter had driven Derrick to frenzy. He was determined to solve the problem of the unblisterable cigarette. To do so, he bent his giant mind to the problem full time, cutting down his evenings with the girls to five a week -- almost unheard of in a scientist, but he was a notorious ascetic. In less than a year, he had solved the problem. Now that it is over, of course, it seems obvious to all of us, but at the time, I assure you, it dumbfounded the world of science. The trick was to separate the igno-tip from the cigarette and then devise some way of manipulating the igno-tip safely. For months, Derrick experimented with different shapes and sizes of handles. Finally, he decided on a thin shaft of wood as ideal for the purpose. Since it was difficult to balance a cigarette-tip on the wood, he discarded the tobacco and paper and made use of the chemicals with which the cigarette tip had been impregnated. These chemicals he coated on the tip of the shaft. At first, he lost considerable time trying to make the shaft hollow so that it could be sucked or blown through to ignite the chemicals. The resulting fire might then be applied to the cigarette. This, however, revived the original problem. What if one put the wrong end of the shaft in the hand? Derrick then got his crowning idea. It would only be necessary to increase the temperature of the chemicals by friction, by rubbing the tip of the wood against a rough surface. This was absolutely safe for if, in the course of bestowing a fatherly kiss on the lips of a girl student intent on an A in her course at any hazard -- a typical event in every scientist's life -- one should rub the wrong end of the wood on a rough surface, nothing at all would happen. It was a perfect fail-safe mechanism. The discovery swept the world. Who, today, is without his package of igno-splints, which can be lit at any time in perfect safety, so that the day of the blistered lip is gone forever? Surely this great invention is a match for any other this great Century has seen; sc much a match, in fact, that some wags have suggested the igno-splints be called "matches". Actually, that name is catching on. Derrick received his Nobel Prize in Physics almost at once and the world applauded. I returned then and tried to reenroll in his class, pointing out that but for me he would never have earned that Nobel Prize. He kicked me out with harsh expletives, threatening to apply an igno-splint to my nose. After that my one ambition was to win a Nobel Prize of my own, one that would drown out Derrick's achievement. I, John Holmes, would show him. But how? How? I managed to get a grant that would take me to England in order to study Lancashire hemstitching, but I had no sooner got there than I pulled every string I could to get into Cambridge, with its famous covey of girl students and its almost equally famous Chumley Maudlin (pronounced Cholmondeley Magdalen) Technological Institute. The girl studentjrwere warm and exotic and I spent many an evening stitching hems with them. Many of the Cantabrigian scientists were struck with the usefulness of the pursuit, not having discerned earlier this particular advantage of sewing. Some of them tried to get me to teach them to hemstitch but I followed that old First Law of Scientific Motivation: ".What's in it for me?" I didn't teach them a thing. Mike Ginsbook, however, having watched me from a distance, quickly picked up the intricate fingermanipulations of hemstitching and joined me. "It's my talent," he said with charming immodesty. "I have a natural aptitude at manipulation." He was my man! I recognized at that moment that he would help me to the Nobel Prize. There remained only to choose the field of activity that would get it for us. For a year our association produced nothing except for a sultry brunette or two; and then one day I said to him lazily, "I can't help but notice, Mike, that your eyes are extraordinately limpid. You're the only one on campus who doesn't have bloodshot sclera." He said, "But the answer is simple. I never view micro-films. They are a curse." "Oh?" "I've never told you?" A somber look crossed his face and a clear Stab of pain furrowed his brow. I had clearly activated a memory almost too sharp to bear. He said, "I was once viewing a micro-film with my head completely enclosed in the viewer, naturally. While I was doing that, a gorgeous girl passed by -- a girl who won the title of Miss Teacher's Pet the next two years running, I might say -- and I never noticed her. I was told about it afterward by Tancred Hull, the gynecologist. He spent three nights with her, the cad, explaining that he was giving her a physical checkup. Had pictures taken to prove it that were the talk of Cambridge." Mike's lips were quivering. "From that time on," he said in a low, suffering voice, "I have vowed never to view a film again." T was almost faint with the sud den inspiration that struck me. IF "Mike' I said. "Might there not be some way in which microfilms can be viewed more simply? Look, films are covered with microscopic print That print has to be enlarged for us to see it That means bending over an immobile screen or encasing the head in a viewer. "But -- " and I could hardly breathe with the excitement of it -- "what if the material on the film were enlarged until it could be seen with the naked eye and then a photograph of the enlarged print were taken? You could carry the photograph with you, looking at it at your leisure whenever you chose. Why, Mike, if you were looking at such a photo and a girl passed by, it would be the work of a moment to lift your head. The photo would not take up your attention as a viewer would." "Hmm," said Mike, thoughtfully. I could see his giant mind spinning over every ramification of the subject "It really might not interfere with girl-watching; less important, it might prevent bloodshot eyes. Oh, but wait, all you would have would be about five or six hundred words and you would be bound to read that through before the day was over. Then what?" It was amazing to watch him pick unerringly the flaw in the project For a moment, I was daunted. I hadn't thought of that Then I said, "Perhaps you could make a large series of small photographs and paste them together in order. Of course, that might be more difficult to carry." "Let's see -- " Mike's mind continued to work. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, straightened suddenly and looked piercingly about in every direction to make sure there were no girls in the vicinity, then closed them again. He said, "There's no question but that magnification is possible; photography is possible. If all of a typical microfilm is expanded and photographed, however, so that it could be read with the unaided eye, the resultant series of photographs would cover an area of -- " Here he whipped out his famous girlie slide-rule, designed by himself,, with the hairline neatly and stimulatingly bisecting a buxom blonde. He manipulated it caressfeet in area at least We would have to use a sheet of paper ten feet by fifteen feet and crawl around on it." "That would be possible," I muttered. "Too undignified for a scientist unless, of course, he were pointing out something to a girl student And even then she might get interested in reading whatever it was he was pointing out and that would kill everything." We were both down in the dumps at that We recognized that we had Nobel material here. Films had the virtue of being compact, but that was their only virtue. Oh, if only you could fold a tenfoot-by-fifteen-foot piece of paper in your hand. You would require no electronic or photonic equipment to read it. You could read any part of it at will. You could go backword or forward without having to manipulate any controls. You would merely shift your eyes. The whole thought was incredibly exciting. The technological advance involved in using eye muscles in place of expensive equipment was enormous. Mike pointed out at once that glancing back and forth over a large sheet of paper would exercise the eye muscles and equip a scientist better for the important task of not failing to observe the feminine parade. Tt remained only to determine how best to make a large sheet of paper portable and manipulable. I took a course in topology in order to learn folding techniques and many was the evening my girlfriend of the day and I would design some order of folding. Beginning at opposite ends of the sheet of paper, we would come closer and closer as we folded according to some intricate formula, until we were face to face, panting and flushed with the mental and physical exertion. The results were enormously exciting but the folding procedures were never any good. How I wished I had studied more mathematics. I even approached Prunella Plug, our harshvoiced laundress, who folded bedsheets with aplomb and dignity. She was not about to let me into the secret, however. I might have explained what I wanted the folding for, but I wasn't going to let her in on it. I meant to share the Nobel Prize with as few people as possible. The famous phrase of the great scientist Lord Clinchmore -- "I'm not in science for my health, you know" -- rang through my mind. One morning I thought I had it. Oh, the excitement of it! I had to find Mike, for only his keen analytical mind would tell me if there were flaws in the notion. I tracked him down to a hotel room at last but found him deeply involved with a young lady -- or popsie, to use the scientific term. I banged away at the locked door until he came out, rather in a bad humor for some reason. He said, "Darn it, Jack, you can't interrupt research like that." Mike was a dedicated scientist. I said, "Listen. We've been thinking in terms of two dimensions. What about one dimension?" "How do you mean, one dimension?" "Take the photos," I said, "and make them follow one after the other in a single line I" "It would be yards and yards IF long." He worked out the figures with his finger on his colleague's abdomen, while I watch closely to make sure that he made no mistakes. He said, "It could easily be # feet long. That's ungainly." "But you don't have to fold," I said. "You roll. You place one end on one plastic rod, and the other end on another. You roll them together!" "Great Scott," said Mike, shocked into profanity by the thought. "Maybe you have it" Tt was that very day, however,  that the blow struck. A visiting professor from California had news. Paul Derrick, he said, was rumored to be working on the problem of a non-electronic film. He didn't seem to know what that meant, but we did and our hearts sank again. I said, "He must have heard of what we're doing here. We've got to beat him." And how we tried! We took the photographs ourselves, pasted them side by side, rolled them on rods. It was a job of unimaginable complexity and delicacy that might well have used skilled artisans, but we were intent on allowing no outsider to see what we were doing. It worked, but Mike was uncertain. He said, "I don't think it's really practical. If you want to find a particular place in the film, you have to roll and roll and roll, one way or another. It is very hard on the wrists." But it was all we had. I wanted to publish, but Mike hdd back. "Let's see what Derrick has worked out," he said. "But if he has this, he will have anticipated us." Mike shook his head, "If this is all he's got, it doesn't matter. This isn't going to win the Nobel Prize. It isn't good enough -- I just fed it, here." He placed his hand on the girlie stitched on his shirt pocket so sincerely that I did not argue. Mike was a great scientist and a great scientist just knows what will get a Nobel Prize and what wfil not That's what makes a scientist great D errick did announce his discovery -- and it had a flaw in it that an average high-school student would have spotted at once. His non-electronic film was simply our old two-dimensional sheets, but without even our efforts to fold them. It just hung down the side of a large walk A movable ladder was supplied that was attached to a runner near the ceiling. One of Derrick's students climbed the ladder and read aloud into the microphones. Everyone ooh-ed and ah-ed at the sight of someone reading with the unaided eye, but Mike, watching on television, slapped his thigh in amusement. "The idiot," he said. "What about people with acrophobia?" Of course! It leaped to the eye when Mike pointed it out. Anyone afraid of heights couldn't read under the Derrick system. But I seized Mike's wrist and said, "Now wait a while, Mike. They're going to laugh at Derrick and that's dangerous. As soon as this point about acrophobia comes out, Derrick will feel humiliated and he will turn with every fiber of his magnificent brain to the project. He will then solve it in weeks. We've got to get there first." Mike sobered up at once. "You are right, Jack," he said simply. "Let's go out on the town. A girl or two apiece will help us think." It did, too, and then the next morning we thought about other things and got back to work. I remember I was walking back and forth, muttering, "We've tried two dimensions; we've tried one dimension; what's left?" And then my eye fell upon Mike's girlie shirt with the nude on the breast pocket so cleverly hem-stitched that strategic areas were distinctly raised. "Heavens," I said, "we haven't tried three dimensions." I went screaming for Mike. This time I was sure I had it and I could hardly breathe waiting for his judgment. He looked at me, eyes luminous. "We have it," he said. It's so simple, looking back on it. We simply piled the photographs in a heap. The heaps could be kept in place in any number of ways. They could be stapled, for instance. Then Mike got the idea of placing them between stiff cardboard covers to protect individual photographs from damage. Within a month, we had published. The world rang with the discovery and everyone knew that the next Nobel Prize in physics would be ours. Derrick, to do him justice, congratulated us and said, "Now the world can read without electronics and by the use of the unaided eyes, thanks to the Holmes-Ginsbook device. I congratulate those two dirty rats on their discovery." That handsome acknowledgment was Science at its best. 'T'he Holmes-Ginsbook device is now a household item. The popularity of the device is such that its name has been shortened to the final syllable and increasing numbers of people are calling them simply "books." This eliminates my name, but I have my Nobel Prize and a contract to write a book on the intimate details surrounding the disadvance. Surely that is enough. Scientists are simple souls and once they have fame, wealth and girls, IF IF  Novelette It was a mother's star-crossed love that kept Magdis steam up and her flywheel ever turningl I i C A mother," Young Widder  Poplowski said, "has as many hooks to hang hearts on as a hatrack." She sounded like warm apple pie. But her kid Sid wept by the window just then and I happened to spit through it and she tossed me out of the kitchen. She wasn't a flighty female generally, but a regular she-cougar when it came to that confounded sprat. Going down off the back stoop, I spat again but the kid Sid, he dodged and flung a rock back at me. We just never have hit it off. He's the horsefly in my particular ointment, if you don't mind a medical term from a bona fide mailorder M.D. and the best damn doctor this town's ever had -- sole and only one too, of course. Anyways, though, the kid Sid has been the bug in my broth ever since I moved into Young Widder Poplowski's Elysian Field Boarding House, which is also the best and only one in town. Purity Poplowski's her Sunday name, but Purity Osgood as was, before she married this Polish count or whatever down in Boston and come West, where he tipped into a well and drowned. Wet year that year. Any other time wouldn't have bothered him none. Any rate, she's Boaz Osgood's second eldest girl, from Bethel 'Lympus, just down the North Branch and up a couple hills from East Randolph, Vermont, where I was whelped. I'm Doctor Hiram Pertwee, by the way. I have got this notion that Young Widder Poplowski'd just as soon be Missus Doctor Pertwee, what with a professional man being the closest we come to royalty hereabouts, outside of the borax mine superintendent, and he's crosseyed. Purity Osgood Poplowski Pertwee? I dunno. And then there's the kid Sid. A man shouldn't start his very first marriage by strangling his wife's nine-year-old son, but sure as shooting that'd be the way of it. And like I said, Young Widder is kind of touchy on the topic. She is forever trying to get us together and friendly, her having more or less set her cap for me like I said. That was pretty much how come we had the adventure I'm going to tell you about, so I could learn to dote on what she called Sidney and he'd get to know me, on the order of paw and son. Jehoshaphat, I'd rather gargle hot lard. But you know women. S o this day we went on a picnic, her and me and the kid Sid. IF We clopped off in the buggy behind Poor Harry the Morgan gelding that cost me #. That was four years ago I bought him, and I figured he still owed me #. Young Widder sat on the off side; natural enough, I sat on the nigh. The little scorpion sat in the middle and dug at my leg with a sharp stick. We went about eight miles out of town, to Pritchard's Crick. There wasn't no water in it this time of year, of course, but it had sort of a tree and is a favorite picnic spot around here. I beat the twigs and small animals out of the buffalo robe and we set on it in the shade of the tree, swatting flies and eating chicken legs and watching Poor Harry chew at the dried old tree. "A mother's love," commented Young Widder Poplowski, "is a soft pillow for souls to sleep on." "Yes'm," I told her, watching the kid Sid hog his pockets full of English walnuts his maw got him all the way from Denver and then go haring off up a draw. I guess I haven't mentioned that Young Widder isn't rightly a bad-looking woman. Soft brown hair forever coming out of the bun, blue eyes pretty enough, except she don't see none too good, nice pleasant face, and probably limbs sufficient to get by. Only real trouble is, she has this tendency to be sort of single-minded. "Motherhood is the unfolding of nature's finest bloom," she observed, nodding to herself. "Once she has blossomed as a woman, her spirit is soft enough to cradle the tiny babe, yet strong enough to sustain her husband in even the most arduous calling -- even a physician who charges all out of doors to take a dried pea out of an innocent child's nose. Where in tunket's that Sidney gone?" "Yonder," I told her, and she settled back on the buffalo robe. "Pray, what were we discussing?" she said, in her head flipping pages in Mrs. Leonora Pemberton Dodie's Motherhood, the Sweetest of Life's Labours, and How to Treat Numerous Complaints of Childhood, Copiously Illustrated, That was her weekday Bible, but by gorry she'd never have got that dried pea out with it. She found her mental page. "Wise mothers... " she began. "Widder," I said. "... will always keep..." she said. "... oil of the castor bean plenteously on hand." Damn if she hadn't got the wrong page. " Widder," I said, "you downright got to face the fact that there ain't a doctor in six states and the Indian Territory that'd even talk to that cub of yours, much less get a pea out of his nose for a dollar. I wouldn't of tried it myself except for my veterinary experience." "Sidney is a deeply sensitive child, a delicate nature housed in a none too robust physique," Young Widder Poplowski said. "He inherited the vigorous, inquiring mind of my father, who, as you may know, is the proprietor of a prosperous shuttle mill in Vermont." I did know it, what with her mentioning it several times a day, seems like. "Alas," she went on, "his frail constitution is the melancholy legacy of generations of Polish nobility. The result, I believe, of the use of heavy spices in their cooking. My late husband, the Count -- " I t was going to be a long siege if she started in about her late husband, the Count. Lucky for me, the kid Sid came flying down out of the tree just then, lit spang on the hunting-case repeater watch in my vest pocket -- I'm happy to say I'd laid the vest with my frock coat on a log -- rolled over four times howling, and lit out like a turpentined tomcat. Neither of us'd even heard the little imp of Satan shinny up the tree nor hide there listening, like a winter-gaunt puma at first thaw, but he made up for it now. He cut out, like I said. He ducked between Poor Harry's legs and out the other side, tripped and rolled and shot up another draw, trailing noise behind him like a comet's tail. Poor Harry, he reared up out of his wits, pulling the buggy wheel he'd been tied to right off the hub: I never did find the damn hubnut. Naturally the buggy tipped over onto him, and just as natural, that hammerhead horse stomped the whole kit and caboodle into kindling. After all that healthful exercise, Poor Harry snorted and just stood, his chest heaving. So (did I, thinking about that eight miles home in the heat, and the # for the rig, and, more cheerful, about using the kid Sid to club Poor Harry insensible with. I was going to broach this proposition to Young Widder Poplowski, but it turned out she'd been sitting there on the buffalo robe, shrieking like a banshee ever IF II since her lamb come out of the tree. Then she shut up and scrambled to her feet, displaying a turn of limb that in time could of softened my heart toward her son. She started off and I turned to see it was him, coming back down the draw slow, not looking like he was wounded, but a little like a normal scared tad. Oh, she rushed up and carried on over him enough to sicken a pig. It was O My Poor Baby, and Tell Mother If You're Mortally Hurt, and If Your Neck Is Broke Don't Talk Just Point To Where You're Bleeding, and I don't know what all. After a while the kid Sid got mad and pushed his maw away. "I'm all right, goldang it I" he hollered. "And I seen something up there #" Young Widder paid him no mind, of course, just kept caterwauling and carrying on. Finally I bellered, "Widder!" at her loud enough to hurt my neck and she gentled down some. "You young pipwit," I remarked to her lamb, "you got any idea how much a buggy costs? How we going to get home, your maw and me, with the buggy wrecked? Forty-five silver dollars, that's what a buggy costs. And what you mean, cussing at your maw? I got half a mind to -- " "'I don't care," the kid sid yelled. "'I seen something up there. I did, you ole gasbag sawbones. Something funny." T uckily, I guess, Young Widder ' Poplowski come flying between us at that point and clutched at him, glaring at me and wailing O My Poor Baby, over and over. Finally he stamped his foot and screeched, "But I seen something!" I commenced to think maybe he had. I pried his maw off his neck and held her squirming and asked, kindly as could be, "What'd you see, brat?" "Well, goldang it, I'll show you," he yelped, and set off plodding up the draw. Young Widder wriggled loose and lit out after him. He broke into a trot and I went along after them, hauling Poor Harry by the bridle. When I caught up, they was standing quiet, staring into a pinon pine clump at what was an oddment, sure enough. It was the best-organized trash heap I ever saw. To this day I couldn't tell you what-all was in it -- sticks, rawhide, old bottles, a coal-oil can upside down, a rat's nest of copper wire in a Mason jar, a battered cavalry canteen, twists of rag and knotted rope, odds and ends, copper tubes and spools, a cracked telegrapher's galvanic cell patched with mud -- oh, a genuine bona fide hodgepodge, sure enough. The thing was, though, it did seem like it had a purpose. Like it was heaped that way deliberate. The three of us just looked at it -- four, counting Poor Harry, who had in mind eating it -- and then at each other, and back at it. "I tole you I did," the kid Sid, blubbered, starting to cry now. His maw was clucking at him when I heard something, and clapped a hand over both their mouths. There was a far-off creaking. Then a hissing. Then a voice like a steamboat whistle, moaning: "Bad, bad, bad, bad. Mokwun ss-so bad, bad, bad." It was getting close. I dragged Young Widder Poplowski, her whelp, and Poor Harry into a jumble of rock back the way we came, and we watched. After a tolerable wait, we saw it. First the cloud of steam, then it. It was a regular enough copperwalled, brass-riveted vertical steamengine with a flywheel and all, puffing vapor out of the top of its head, rolling along the ground on four little red wheels, wringing its hands and moaning: "Bad, bad, bad, bad. Profess-ss-ssor ss-so mad, mad, mad." It tended to hiss on the esses. Boys, even imps of perdition like the kid Sid, go for locomotives pretty hard, and he stared at it starryeyed. Young Widder Poplowski, for her part, more or less fell to shuddering and trying to wring my arm off at the elbow, which she just  might've done, being a passable j powerful woman. As for me, I  hadn't never seen the like, not even in White River Junction or Saint  Joe. 'T'he thing trundled up to the trash heap, mourning, and stood for a time facing it -- facing, that is, if you judge the flywheel to be on the back of its head. Way it looked to me, anyways. Then, spurting vapors and hissing, it tapped the canteen in the trash heap with one of the two fingers on its right hand. The canteen tunked, like it was near full. Then the thing tapped the coal-oil can in the trash heap and the can tinked, empty. The thing nodded its flywheel and took off the top of its head, unscrewed a little cap, and poured from it into the coal-oil can. It screwed the cap back on and replaced the top of its head, and reached down for a dead pinon pine branch on the ground. Then it opened the fire-door in its belly, stuck the stick in to set it ablaze, and with it lit a bunch of little gas jets, like, here and there in the trash heap. It looked like the start of a firstclass bonfire, but it wasn't. First thing you knew there was kind of a lazy stirring in the trash heap, and then damn if it didn't start to get up. Very slow, understand, and creaking to beat the band, with sparks playing in that Mason jar full of wire. We watched it. Now, I got sharp eyes. And I could see that pairs of wires went into the trash heap from that jar, and that each wire ended in a little spool at the end of a tube. One set of tubes come from the canteen, and the other, that come from the coaloil can, led to those jets the steam engine had lit. If you knew what to look for -- if you was, say, a trained medical man -- you might almost say it was a circulation system of some kind. Damn if it wasn't. As the trash heap stirred and shook, it began to shape up sort of like a skeleton, made of wood. What happened is that sparks would dance around one of the spools and water would drip out of that tube onto a length of twisted rawhide tied to either end of a jointed rod. Soon as the rawhide got wet it'd stretch, of course, and the joint would open up just like an elbow. Or the sparks'd fly around the other spool of the pair and the little coal-oil flame'd swing under the rawhide, drying it out and tightening it up again. That'd make the elbow bend. Well, this squirting and drying was going on all through the trash heap, and it was pulling itself together slow -- about an inch an hour, seemed like. And the steam engine was rolling back and forth, wagging its flywheel and wringing its hands, and hooting mournful like a sidewheeler Vay downriver losing a race. But the trash heap was making it up. At least I guess it was, for just then the kid Sid ducked out to watch from up closer; Young Widder Poplowski yipped and lit out after him, Poor Harry whinnied and reared up, kicking me in the head, and I went down like a pole-axed steer. When I come to, there was nobody around but me. etting kicked by a horse is bad,  but getting up after you got kicked by a horse is worse. I remember thinking, as I got up, that some picnics just don't work out as good as some others. I staggered a ways down-trail, and there stood Poor Harry, trailing harness and gnawing on the oilcloth hood of the busted buggyj If I'd of had a gun I'd of shot him and if I'd of had a knife I'd of stabbed him, but it was eight miles in- to town and I had to ride him. So I was nice to him. i "Good old Poor Harry," I said, sweet as pie. He ran off. Well, I ran after him. The benighted hammerhead didn't have the decency to stampede toward town, naturally -- he charged off in six different directions, all the wrong ones. Finally his harness looped around a stump and he stopped long enough for me to come panting up and grab him. After maybe three-quarters of an hour I'd convalesced sufficient to think about climbing up on his back. Now, this particular gelding, Poor Harry, didn't like much to be drove. But he purely hated to be rode. He must of bucked me off eighty-seven, eighty-eight times beIF Ill . tween there and town, him shooting me off his back every few yards or so and me crawling doggedly back on. The eighty-ninth time was at the stage depot, next to my office. Into the water trough. Kind of a crowd gathered when I climbed out dripping, and some of the comments were on the thoughtless side. But I wanted to address my noble animal. "Poor Harry," I said, "you have got me to town when I needed to get to town, to raise a posse to rescue Young Widder Poplowski and her infernal pup, and I am grateful. Truly I am. "When they are safely back," I told Poor Harry, "I am going to send all the way to the silversmith in Denver. I don't care none about the cost. I am going to have him make you a solid silver-mounted bridle, with a solid silver bit. And I will have him make solid silver rosebuds for the tips of the buggy thills. There will be solid silver buckles on your harness and solid silver conchos on your reins, and I will have him engrave P and H, your initials, in solid silver on the blinders for your soft brown eyes. For I am grateful. "But I will have him make a solid silver mallet too, Poor Harry," I told him, "and with it I will beat your head in, first sunny day! " One or two of the drunks applauded. But that wasn't why I came. vur day marshal enjoyed delicate  health, so there wasn't np point in bothering him. I stomped to the Owl Hoot Saloon, squishing every step and being hoorahed most of the way, and pushed my way in the batwings to round up a rescue party tive. There was about seven men in the Owl Hoot, and one more if you count the swamper, Jubal Bean, which I don't. Four were playing Red-dog, and the wildest bet I saw made was three cents. Two men were egging the big-time gambler on. The seventh was a fellow calling himself an arteest from Europe, name of Maestro Fuccelloni. He was on his way to San Francisco, as he told it, when his monkey jumped out of the window of the stage and clean disappeared, and that was the end of Maestro Fuccelloni's act. He stopped the stage and scouted around for days searching for the monkey, and finally come staggering into town carrying his carpetbag and his crank-organ. He gave the organ to the church, never minding it was Protestant, and got drunk. Said he was destroyed as an arteest. Maestro Fuccelloni'd been drunk ever since, and that was better than two years now. Sundays he used to come around the church and stand outside, listening to Santa Lucia, but he'd never once come in. He wasn't no real use to me now. Neither were the others, come to that. Leander Shaw had a bad back, Sam Griswold claimed his horse came up lame, Hubie Torrence was due back at the livery stable in half an hour to watch a shoeing. Deuce-High Magowan had a serious . catarrhal condition and besides it was his deal. Asa Hinchley was, he said, unable to sit a saddle because the salve I gave him didn't work, and I wouldn't trust Walleye Waggoner to watch a stump. That left Jubal Bean, which meant I went alone. I swear I don't know how them sheriffs in the Wild West penny-dreadfuls are always corraling a posse on short notice. My experience is that the only ones that are idle enough to be available are loafers and bums too pimple-witted to spit and hit dirt. However. I did tell Jubal Bean to unharness Poor Harry and slap a saddle on him, figuring he'd probably get bit in the process. Did, too, it turned out. Both of them. Poor Harry chewed Jubal on the arm, and Jubal bit him back on the fetlock. A VTeanwhile, though, I run up to the Elysian Field and changed my wet duds. I fetched the late Count's fowling-piece down from over the fireplace, and grabbed up a .# rimfire Slocum Frontloader I took in trade from a faro dealer with three busted fingers and no plans for the future -- nor, it occurred to him, much need for selfprotection any more. Considering the nature of the enemy, I suppose a pipewrench and a crowbar would've been a better choice of weapons. Still, I figured the noise just might do some good -- that locomotive hadn't seemed particularly brave. Jubal Bean and Poor Harry were glaring at each other when I got back, so I hoisted myself up without ado and cantered off to redeem Young Widder. , Mind you, I didn't have an idea, how to go about it, never having, taken on a steam engine and a trash , heap simultaneously before. But you get to play a lot by ear in my trade, medicine, and so where there wasn't much profit in plotting strategy I concentrated on staying on Poor Harry. Did, too, mostly. I tied him in the pinon grove and moved up the draw afoot The amount of clatter a reasonable careful man can make sneaking around never ceases to amaze me. They say Indians move about quiet, but I dunno. I never saw them at it. Only Indians I ever saw being quiet were asleep, which is not to say drunk. Which is what they were. Both of them. Anyhow, the crashing around did not appear to rouse nobody, Indians, locomotives or otherwise. So I thought First thing I knew, skulking along, there was this hiss and IF puff of steam from behind, my arms were pinned tight and I was being packed off by that infernal boiler with the flywheel on its head. Wasn't no use struggling, either. I decided to go where it took me. Which was to a rock that looked like it was part of a cliff but wasn't. The locomotive toted me up around behind and into the mouth of a cave, hissing and billowing steam on the upgrade, and then rolling like the #:# down a long tunnel into a sizable cavern. There, right in the middle, stood the trash heap, looking in the gloom like a Christmas tree with all its little coal-oil flames going. And there behind it was Young Widder Poplowski, pale, scared half out of her wits. I didn't see the kid Sid. "Oh, Doctor Pertwee!" Young Widder yelped. I tried to get down, but the locomotive hissed, "Pleass-ss be ss-still," in my ear and like to scalded it off. Young Widder made as if to come to me, but the trash pile moved at her -- not fast, of course, but enough to make her scream a little and settle back. Then there was a bustling in an opening on the far end of the cave. "Heighly, heighdy!" said the little feller that come out, followed by the kid Sid. His maw moaned and ran to her cub, trash heap or no -- like I said, it wasn't too fast. "I do hope," the little feller said, "that my machines haven't caused you any discomfort. Here, Magdu, put the good doctor -- Pertwee, isn't it? -- down immediately, and bring some tea for our guests." myself," said the runt. "My name is Troy, Professor Mark Troy. The absent Magdu you already have met, though in circumstances of a lamentable informality. And Mokwun -- " He nodded to the trash heap, which nodded back ponderous as dephant bones. " -- you have also, I believe, seen during one of his infrequent lapses from discipline." Damn if he didn't talk odd, this Professor Troy. He was short, like I told you, and bald as an egg, and had on little gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He wore a frock coat like me, but his shirt was ruffled and he had on a high stock and fancy cravat -- somewheres between a yard-goods drummer and a temperance lecturer, or maybe an Episcopalian, I figured. But it turned out he was a mad scientist, an inventor. Young Widder Poplowski, it goes without saying, couldn't have cared less. She was busy taking inventory of her whelp. He didn't seem to me to have anything missing. He was chattering away like a red squirrel, in fact. Any case, we got interrupted around then by Magdu coming back, carrying a flat board like a tray. On it was a dented tin cup, a small skillet, the bottom half of a busted bitters bottle, and an old Army canteen without a cork. "Ah, tea," the Professor said. "Thank you kindly, Magdu." He turned to Young Widder Poplowski. "And now, madame," he said, "if I may impose -- what exactly is tea, and how do I build it?" Well, we goggled at him popeyed, for you'd have sure taken the Professor for a jasper schooled in the social graces. Just then, though, the kid Sid squirmed out of his maw's clutch and ran over to the Professor and kicked him hard in the ankle. "I want a walnut," the whelp said. The Professor never even winced. "I do not believe, young person, that we have any of that in our larder," he said, pleasant as you please. But Young Widder Poplowski allowed as to how she still did, and dredged up a handful from her reticule. She gave them to her brat and he went off to squat against a wall, splitting the nuts with two flat rocks and watching us with squirrel-bright eyes. It was a relief to be shut of him. The Professor, though, seemed kind of horrified. turned to Young Widder Poplowski. "You all right, Young Widder?" I asked her. Her color was high now, but beyond that she lookIF ed fit enough, except her hair was a mess, as usual -- I judged so far she wasn't no more than only scared half to death. "Pm only scared half to death," she said. Score one for Dr. Gideon Faustus's Correspondence College of Internal, External  Lower Animal Medicine, Post Office Box #, St. Louis, Mo., where I took my degree. "That there thing," she said, jerking her head at the trash heap, "never touched me, and that there other thing -- " she nodded at Magdu " -- carted me and Sidney just like she did you. Sidney," she said, proud, "fought against those arms of steel like a knight errant of old, but to no avail." I was going to make some sort of humorous remark about night errands, kind of to enlighten the atmosphere which, to tell the truth was getting rather steamy, but didn't. The Professor spoke up. "I assure you, madame," he said, "Magdu would not hurt a single hair of your head." He glanced at her mop like maybe he wished he'd put it some other way. "Magdu was built to be a servant, to faithfully carry out the wishes and commands of her master and -- ahem! -- his guests. Mokwun is, I fear, rather more primitive, in both its mechanical articulation and -- ah -- intellectual faculties. Mokwun's brain is only a receptor of my mental impulses -- and, of course, Magdu's. But Mokwun, too, is a servitor, and is built to protect its master and, with equal ability, those whom its master wishes protected. "Its master," the Professor said, bowing again right courtly, "wishes no harm to come to you." . I cut in. "Built, you say," I said. "You mean to tell us you strung together that infernal machine out of kindling your own self, as well as the other there -- Magdu, or whatever? Well, I never." "Indeed," the Professor answered. "I should think not. Mokwun is, as I said, quite crude, but Magdu, for all her multitude of faults, is a nearly perfect apparatus. I daresay none like her exists under this sun, considering the local dearth of raw materials and intelligence. Magdu is very close to being a perfect servant, albeit only a machine." The subject of this was off a ways, watching the Professor with as close to adoration as a steam engine can get, I expect. Every time the Professor lifted a finger or twitched, Magdu'd churn her flywheel and hiss, eager to get into action serving, and then bleed steam kind of disappointed if there was nothing to do. When the Professor snapped his fingers at Magdu and asked us if we'd like to see her innards, Magdu highballed over, fit to pop a valve. First the Professor opened the fire-door in Magdu's belly and showed us the coal-oil burner that kept the pressure up. Then he unlatched Magdu's chest and swung that open. IV  sphere was more machinery in  there than you could shake a stick at. Over the firebox was a regular-enough little engine, with a belt up through Magdu's neck to the flywheel I told you about, and another belt down to the gear-box that ran Magdu's wheels. There were four of them -- red, you remember I said. Above all that was two dingusses the like of which I'd never seen before. Then it came to me, maybe I had. Before my Paw died, back in East Randolph, Vermont, he took me over the mountain once to Brandon for a laugh at Crazy Tom Davenport, that being a popular activity then thereabouts. Everybody'd stand around and giggle whilst old Crazy Tom fussed with his fool contraptions. He said they'd make the waterwheel obsolete. Well, mebbe. We laughed at him anyways, of course, that being the popular thing to do. But the dingusses in Magdu's chest looked like some of old Crazy Tom's electrical foolery. Meantime, of course, the Professor was explaining all about Magdu's giblets, but it might as well have been in chinee or Creek Indian, for all of me. Oh, he undid Magdu's right arm and showed us how steam pipes and copper wires came down and made things make her arm wiggle and her fingers wobble. But I didn't get hardly a word, and Young Widder Poplowski, she'd just give a little shriek and totter every time the Professor took Magdu apart some more. I made like I was catching on to what he said, because looking smart and knowing is in my experience about two-thirds of being a doctor. And while the Professor was putting Magdu back together, an idea hit me. Now, I was a surgeon's helper in the late War of the Rebellion, and held down a sight of poor devils that were getting their arms and legs sawed off. They were pretty upset about it, most of them. Well, I thought to myself there in the cave, why not hitch one of the machinery arms on some feller that had got his arm sawed off, or a tin leg to replace one that was missing? Of course, the poor devil'd be kind of fat with all that gear in his gut to make the leg or whatever to work, but wouldn't it beat a crutch? I was minded to speak to the Professor about it. "Professor," I said, "I was a surgeon's helper in the late War of the Rebellion, and..." Hphe Professor was just putting Magdu's head back together. The coal-oil and water reservoirs fitted like doughnuts around MagIF dii's smokestack, over the part where her eyes -- electrical cameras, the Professor said, and I nodded right profound -- and her mouth hole were. Magdu's voice was some kind of calliope which the Professor explained all about, but I didn't get. Incidentally, what passed for Magdu's brain and made all the stuff work and did the thinking was located in the lower rear portion of her body, just above her hind wheels. We all knew people situated like that. Anyways, though, I just began telling the Professor about how I was in the late War of the Rebellion and he cut in on me. "The what?" he said. Well, I never. A grown man that didn't know about the late War of the Rebellion? Then I thought what with how he was a mad scientist he might of been in a lunatic asylum during the hostilities, and the keepers might never have mentioned it. "Oh, that was just a little old skirmish between the North and the South to see about sedition, secession and slavery," I told him. "What is slavery?" the Professor asked. "Oh, that's just one man telling another to do whatever, without the one that's supposed to do it having any say about whether he does it or not," I told him. He appeared shocked. "Do such conditions really exist?" he asked. "Are there really situations in which someone given a command can question the rightful authority of his master?" My, the Professor'd surely been out of touch. So I told him about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution and how Ethan Allen and General John Stark won it, and about how the War of # was settled on Lake Champlain, and about poor Old Osawatomie John Brown just for the hell of it. And I told him about the heroic part played in the Rebellion by Colonel Redfield Proctor's Fifteenth Regiment of Vermont Valunteers, Army of the Potomac. Which is the outfit I happened to have been in. Professor Troy, he soaked it up, especially about how fatal wars are to so many people, and about slavery. Seemed kind of distressed the Secesh lost, but I took that to be normal enough, him being demented and all. By the end of the recital, though, my neck felt like it was paved with corncobs and I was hungry to boot. "It sure has been a pleasure telling you all these things any gr ow n man in his right mind would know but to tell the truth I am bone dry and could eat a horse," I said. "A horse," the Professor said, sort of dubious. "I will see what Magdu can do." He looked around. "Where is Magdu?" Tvamn if Magdu wasn't with  Young Widder Poplowski. They were both standing over the kid Sid, who was squatting on the floor playing with the stuff that Magdu'd brought for tea. The whelp already had busted the rest of the bitters bottle, but the two of them, Young Widder and the steam engine, were watching him fondly. "A mother's love," Young Widder Was saying, "is rain upon the desert, sun upon the snow, sustenance for every growing thing. It makes the seedling grow straight and tall, and the mature tree bear bounteous fruit." Magdu nodded, apparently unfamiliar with the nature of fertilizer, and I came to see that for all of her being an apparatus Magdu tended toward the maternal in her inclinations. Any case, the Professor hustled over past the hulking brush heap, Mokwun, and had low words with Magdu. She hung her flywheel, shamed, and rolled out. The kid Sid ran along with her. Professor Mark Troy watched him go. "Very interesting articulation," he muttered to himself. "And the smaller pattern would be more efficient in terms of fuel weight and water supply, while still as capable of accomplishing the objectives as a larger model. Ideal. "Madame," he said to Young Widder Poplowski, "if it is not presuming too much, could I have Sidney?" Oh, I grant you it was kind of an irregular request, albeit I'd have shaken hands on it, done-and-done, in a minute. But there really wasn't hardly any need for Young Widder to carry on so. First she went pale, and then, when she understood he meant to keep the whelp permanent, she went red. My, didn't the wind blow wintry chill. I never did hear the like, her such a genteel female, and a widder, and the daughter of the proprietor of a prosperous shuttle mill. Her tongue marched up the Professor and down the other side, stomping all the way; I never heard a tongue lash and snap so; she must of been breathing through her ears. The Professor, he just stood there looking patient. Young Widder went some ways beyond the limits of human endurance and finally ran out of vocabulary. Just at that moment, Magdu come chuffing in, leading Poor Harry by the bridle, white-eyed but too stupid to buck. "I have the horss-ss," Magdu said. "Howss-shall I cook it?" 'IX#ell sir, yielding up the kid Sid   was one thing, but my horse, even Poor Harry, was another. I squared off and was just about to follow the widder's footprints up and down the Professor and derail Magdu to boot, when the whelp showed up again, coming from a different direction. Young Widder IF Poplowski fled to him shrieking, and clutched him hard enough to break his bones. It was O My Poor Baby all over again. "Goldang it, I'm all right," the kid bellered. "Lemme go, goldang it, you'll bust my skull!" Young Widder drew back at that, and the kid unlimbered his arm, and damn if he didn't have a skull and a bone in his grubby little fist. Young Widder let out a squawk and jumped back like her baby'd just gone lizard. I took the headbone out of his hand, having to squeeze his wrist only the least bit to get it away, and looked at it. There was something funny about it It wasn't the sort you find as a regular thing. No more than the size of a Yellow Delicious apple, it was too small by some to be a calf's, if there were any calves around, which there weren't, nor even a lamb's, if there were any of them around either. And it was too short in the muzzle to be a dog or coyote or cub wolf. And the teeth were wrong for a cat. The other bone was plain enough -- a human femur. I held the skull in one hand, studying on it, and held the kid Sid off with the other. Good little kicker, I'll give him that. Then the Professor spoke up, like nothing had happened. "I really must have Sidney," he told Young Widder Poplowski, earnest as all get out. "I have to insist. There is more involved here than whatever transient emotional attachment you may have for him. He is needed here." Well, when it came right down to it, I guess maybe things had gone far enough. The widder, pale again, was pressing the writhing whelp to her bosom, so I stepped in front of them to reason with the Professor, just between us two men of science. "Hold on, bub," I told him. "I ain't saying whatever you got in mind mightn't be a more useful purpose than that limb of Satan is likely to serve, everything considered. But the fact is, his maw wants to hang onto him a while, and so that's that. You, DeWitt Clinton," I said, to Magdu, "you turn loose of Poor Harry. He ain't to eat' "I have got to have that specimen!" the Professor said, lunging at the kid Sid who was cowering in the widder's arms. "Not likely," I hollered, pushing the Professor away and like to busting my wrist doing it. He was sure solid for such a runt. "I will have that specimen," the Professor said, making another grab. "No, you won't," I said, and pulled that .# rimfire Slocum FrontLoader from my belt, where it had been all this time. The Professor, he never even noticed. He came toward Young Widder Poplowski and her kid Sid, so I aimed dead center at the Professor's chest and gave him all five chambers, two of which misfired. The Professor hissed and stopped short, looking sort of abstracted, his arms swinging back and forth; then he went over in a heap. Magdu hooted like a mine whistle and highballed over to him, letting go of Poor Harry. I scooped up the bridle with one hand and collared Young Poplowski with the other, and hustled the three of them the hell out of there. V 'T'rouble is, I picked the wrong tunnel. It didn't lead to the mouth of the cave, but deeper inside the mountain to what I took to be the Professor's workshop, full of foundry tools and junk. And there was no other way out. There wasn't any choice but to go back (the way we came, taking our chances with Magdu -- and Mokwun. I had the widder and the kid Sid wait just around the bend before the main chamber. I looked around the corner real judicious, and saw Magdu cradling the Professor's body like a grieving mother. Only the Professor's head wasn't on his body. His head was lying on the floor, staring straight at me. "Heighdy," the head said. "Um," I said. "No hard feelings, then?" "Certainly not," the Professor's head said. "You opposed the course of action proposed by me, and carried out that opposition by means at your disposal. I would have done the same, had our roles been reversed. Indeed, I shall." "Yeah," I said to the Professor's head. "Well, it's been nice chatting with you, but we got to go now. Uh, don't get up -- we'll find the way." "That," the head said, "will not be possible. I .must have Sidney. Magdu is foolishly concerned with my body and unfortunately is not subject to telepathic control, but will respond to my articulate command. Excuse me. Magdu -- " There wasn't time for small talk. I ran out and booted the Professor's head. It flew and bounced off the far wall; it fell to the floor and popped open, and a little brown thing that looked like a nut come out. "That will do you no good," the Professor's smashed head said, kind of faint. "My vocalization apparatus is still operative. Magdu, immobilize Doctor Pertwee and seize the Sidney!" Magdu, still holding that headless body, turned. "I am ss-sorry, I cannot, ".jslig, said. "I cannot see harm comlgi another mother'ss creation. The head sputtered, in faraway voice, "Another mother? You imbecile machine, I order you to -- " "Do not order," Magdu said. "It IF was-ss bad to do what was done to the ss-small brown beas-sst, and to the little man. I ss-shall obey no more ss-such orders-ss. You are a bad ss-son." The head said, faint but angry, "I have failed in you, Magdu. I would prefer not to do this, but it is imperative." The head shut up; but over on the other side of the cave Mokwun's little flames begun to get brighter and it began slowly to move. It was coming at me. Magdu laid the body down. She huffed a minute, building up a head of steam, and tore across the floor right into Mokwun, knocking it inher flywheel slowing, then spoke to the strewn kindling. "I am very ss-sorry, Mother," she said. 'T'hings were happening a little fast. I was standing with my mouth open when Young Widder Poplowski came up soft and grabbed my right arm, and Poor Harry chawed me on the left elbow. The kid Sid kicked me in the back of the leg, so I knew everybody was O.K. "Then I have failed," the Professor's head was saying, faraway and like it really didn't matter a whole lot. "This time I have failed. But I shall begin again, and in time I shall succeed, for much depends on my success. Doctor Pertwee, would you like to know what has been destroyed here?" "Sure," I said. I "I was one of an advance party sent to your solar system from my home, far from this star," the Professor's head said. "Ours is a race of beings greatly unlike your own, elect beings who evolved over the aeons into almost quintessential intellect, housed in a brain small by your gross standards, protected from harm by a hard carapace. "Possessed of no limbs with which to accomplish the works out intellects devised, we developed a symbiotic relationship with a breed of lesser brutes on our planet, which we telepathically induced to ingest us. Once swallowed and safely encysted in the brute's body, we could direct its every thought and move and, with its body, perform our will. "Recently, however, our vehiclehosts began to die of an unfathomable and incurable disease, threatening our useful existence. The scouting expedition of which I was part, in a ship piloted by a creature whom I piloted in turn, was sent out to find new planets, new vehicle-hosts. "Mine, already ill, was killed in the landing near here. Whether any one of my fellow-scouts survived their landings I cannot know. We are almost indestructible within onr carapaces, but the actual range of our telepathic communication i s limited. "Almost I despaired of finding a new vehide who would swallow me , establishing symbiosis so I could accomplish my mission. None of your local animals has, evidently, a throat of suffident size to pass me whole, though I was gnawed by several of your gophers. Quite useless for my purpose. " Finally a small, brown-furred primate happened along, and put me in his mouth. I was able to establish control before he enacted his intent of cracking my shell. Staying pouched in his cheek was hardly as secure as the customary internal cyst, but it served." "Wait a minute, Professor," I said. "Would that have been a small Italian monkey, fairly musical?" nphe Professor went on like I never spoke. "The small primate, under my control, built Mokwun from materials nearby and light enough to be managed by the Inferior strength of its body. It took a great deal of experimentation with the inadequate materials available, and even more of an effort to keep the primate alive until that first primitive model of automaton was completed. "I was, you understand, virtually helpless until that was done. I allowed 'the primate to die immediately afterward. Its skull is the one Sidney found. "Mokwun was cumbersome and excruciatingly slow-moving, but its receiver under my control, managed to assemble a suitable collection of tools and, finally, the second model, the traitorous Magdu. I chose to make Magdu self-reasoning, using navigational computing elements from my wrecked star-ship. It was an error I now have cause to regret. "And, with the techniques refined in making both prior models, and with Magdu's vastly improved speed and dexterity, I produced the Mark to call Mark Troy." It wasn't until then, I guess, that I really came to see it wasn't the head talking. It was that little brown nut on the floor, making some kind of machinery in the head make sounds, from a distance. Well, I never. "The pattern," it was saying, "for Mark Troy was a small fat man who wandered, lost, into this cave quite providentially -- except for him, of course, if that is of any concern. Magdu, at my command, eventually disassembled him and duplicated his external appearance in Mark Troy, which still wears the little fat man's clothing. We had already studied his speech and habits, and later learned more from the books he carried. He was a temperance lecturer, he said." Didn't I know it? And those' books explained how come he'd known about serving tea but not how to make it. He'd got the words pretty good but he didn't have no way of knowing the tune. IF "So now," the head went on, "You have disabled Mark Troy temporarily, and caused the destruction of Mokwun. Magdu, after this lapse of discipline, will repair Professor Mark Troy and we shall begin again. And we will win your world." "No." That was Magdu. "I ssshall not help you any more," she said. "I ss-shall take these people away and never come back here to you. Good-by ss-son." And she steamed right past him, grand as a duchess on her little red wheels. She guided the four of us, Young Widder Poplowski, the kid Sid, Poor Harry and me, right out of that cave without looking back. TV T agdu's living at the Poplowski's now. Of course, she has to stay pretty much in the house, so's not to cause talk, but she seems happy enough. Fixes up like a stove during the day. There's that whelp, the kid Sid, to play with, and her and the widder like to swap quotations about maternal love. Seems one of the books the late temperance lecturer had was that Motherhood one by Mrs. Leonora Pemberton Dodie. Oh, one other thing. Once we got out of the cave and into the open again, the kid Sid turned up missing. I went cussing back to look for him and never laid eyes on him, but when I got to the main chamber where Professor Mark Troy was laying around, that little brown nut was gone from the floor. I felt real fear then. Thought maybe Poor Harry had swallowed it whole. The notion of Poor Harry taking over the world would make jelly out of any man. Then I remembered I'd held Poor Harry tight by the bridle all the way out, so he couldn't of done it. But when I got about halfway back down the tunnel, I saw what looked like two halves of a walnut shell by the wall, near a couple of flat rocks. Empty. The kid Sid was looking smug alongside his maw when I came out, having somehow found another way. Young Widder's real pleased with the way we get along, because nowadays I treat him a mite more careful. Whatever else you can say about him, he's got to be just about the smartest whelp, for his years, in For the best in fantasy and adventure Don't miss it! featuring Robert E . Howard , Un Carter, L . Sprague do Camp, Mack Reynolds and many others. At your newsstand nowl IF  Feature V Catching up on the treadmill l TT'ver so often I'm asked what ' science fiction can do, now that science has. caught up with it. There seems to be a mental picture of a science-tortoise plodding along in a straight line to win the race. Nothing could be less true, however, even for such an ancient and exact science as astronomy. Men had been studying the planets for centuries, and our modern writers simply took the old pictures that science offered. Venus was a hot, steaming world, filled with lush life; since the planet was the Sun than Earth, it had to be hot; and the dense clouds that covered it clearly indicated steaming swamps and seas -- the mother of life. Then the spectroscope failed to show the lines that would indicate water vapor in those clouds. And later observations showed very slow rotation, if any. So Venus became a dust-bowl planet, baking on one side and frozen on the other, with poisonous gases that meant no life could exist there. For the next decade, the theories went in all directions, however. Getting a reliable spectroscopic analysis through our dense atmosphere proved far more difficult than we'd first thought. But then the Russians landed a probe on the planet. Now we had the facts. Venus' atmosphere was mostly carbon-dioxide, with only # oxygen and water vapor. The temperature was up to # F., and pressure was fifteen times ours at sea-level. No life possible! Well, a little less than a year has gone by, and more careful analysis of the results has again changed the picture. Impossible or not, it seems some form of plant life must exist on Venus. At a gravity slightly less than ours, fifteen times the pressure means more than fifteen times as much total gas. If only I  of that is oxygen, the total is equivalent to # of all Earth's air -- not too far from out actual # of oxygen. But at #, this gas is a highly active chemical; even on Earth, the free oxygen would all be used up by chemical reaction in four thousand years if there were no plants to replace it. So -- there must be plants on Venus! And since such plant life can't exist at very high temperatures, Dr. Willard F. Libby is suggesting that the poles of Venus must be cool enough to make living possible there. By coming around to where it started, science has caught up with science fiction again. We can have men living on Venus and perhaps breathing the air without space suits. Shades of Arthur K. Barnes' # story entitled "Hothouse Planet". 'T'he existence of probable life on such diverse planets as Venus and Mars presents a challenge to the biologists, too. They have pretty well established a way in which life could come about on Earth; sunlight acting on nitrogen and carbon compounds that existed in our early atmosphere can create amino acids -- the basic buildingblock chemicals of life. When these fall into the oceans, they have a tendency to clump together in more and more complex arrangements that eventually make living cells. But nobody seriously thinks that there were ever real seas on Mars or that the atmosphere there was right for such a chain of events. And on Venus, the high level of solar energy should break down the early compounds, even though life might exist there if it could somehow get past this stage. Apparently the tendency toward the formation of life is a lot greater than our theories can explain. There have even been serious reports of finding organic compounds and particles resembling fossil algae in certain carbon-bearing meteorites (known as carbonaceous chondrites) that fall from space, though, there is still a good deal of argument about this. Fortunately, we can find one good theory that gets around some IF of the difficulties. According to this, all the life for which we find evidence may have originated on Earth. When our planet was half a billion years younger, it was struck by a great many huge meteorites. Some of these must have hit at very high velocities, according to the evidence we can find. Like pebbles hitting water, some of their energy created a great splash that must have thrown bits of Earth's surface violently upwards -- some at high enough a velocity to escape permanently from Earth. Maybe the chondrites are bits from those splashes, finally falling back. And maybe other bits hit Venus and Mars and found it possible to start life there with the living spores they contained. In that case, Earth may have been seeding much of space with life, since the Sun circles the entire galaxy once every two hunThis would greatly increase our chances of finding life throughout the galaxy. We are pretty sure that planets exist around a large percentage of stars. And with life capable of existing under such wildly differing conditions as on Venus, Mars and Earth, it may be that at least a quarter of such solar systems have planets where life can and does exist. Bram Hall's story in this issue, "The Canals of Santa Claus", suggests that men will find scarcely a star-system that does not have life of some kind. There's a good chance he's right. In the early days, science fiction used Svante Arrhenius' theory of life spreading by spores throughout space -- mostly because we wanted to find life everywhere. Now science is suggesting a sort of variation on the same universal spread of life. Again, science and science fiction are catching up with each other. H owever, nobody seems to be catching up in at least one area of astronomical theory. When it comes to the question of the origin and nature of the universe, there are two completely different guesses, mutually contradictory and alternately seeming to make points. For a time, when science fiction was doing its most sweeping conceptualizing, we had to fall back on the theory popularized by Dr. George Gamow. According to that, every bit of mass and energy was once concentrated into a great "super-atom", which exploded outand has been expanding ever since. One school held that the expansion would go on forever, and the other main school felt gravity would eventually slow down the expansion and pull everything back into the same "super-atom" again, to start another explosion, and so on. In either IF form, this was appropriately called the big-bang theory. Then a man who doubles as top scientist and science fiction writer -- Dr. Fred Hoyle -- popularized another theory, called the steadystate theory. In this, the universe is being steadily created. Hydrogen atoms appear in space constantly, forcing the older matter outwards and causing the expansion. This can go on forever, and may already have gone on forever. It requires the constant creation of energy-matter, but that is no harder to explain than the initial creation in the big-bang theory. For a time, things looked good for Hoyle's group. The age of the universe turned out to be greater than the big-bang advocates expected, which took some fancy juggling with the theory. And the creation of some of the very heavy elements couldn't have occurred in the brief explosion; they had to be the result of reactions taking place in older stars, as might be expected in a steadystate universe. A year ago, however, the steadystate idea was dealt a body blow a few miles from my house by work at Bell Labs, where they detected what seemed to be evidence of the original radiation of the great initial explosion. Even Dr. Hoyle conceded that the steady-state theory might be dead. He was a bit premature, it seems. One of the best tests for the theories is the distribution of matter in the universe -- uniform for a steady-state universe, but not for the big-bang one. Early surveys by radio astronomy indicated a lack of uniformity. But now Dr. John Bolton, of Sydney, Australia, has completed new surveys, using what he feels are more appropriate radio frequencies. The new evidence is so strongly in favor of the constant-creation idea that the two theories are again fighting it out neck and neck. Tune in again max on how our universe really began -- maybe I  nd finally, there's a wild new angle on the theory that there may be particles which exceed the speed of light. As I covered earlier, the suggestion has been made that particles may exist which act opposite to what we know; they must have velocities greater than c (the symbol for constant, used to designate light speed), and they gain mass as they slow down toward c. Since then, I've talked to Dr. Gerald Feinberg of Columbia University, who was most widely quoted in the press. And Richard Wilson has sent more details from Syracuse University, where the idea was first suggested by Dr. E. C. G. Sudarshan. Quite a few serious particle physicists are interested  and are making efforts to IF find such particles, which have been named tackyons. Obviously, if we can learn to create and modulate -- or impress messages upon -- these particles, it would make a tremendous difference in our ability to signal across vast distances of space. It may turn out that so far every effort to detect messages from other stars has been futile because advanced races naturally send such messages by tachyon beam, obviating the years of waiting before they can be answered. But now there's evidence that these tachyons not only exceed light speed but also travel backwards in time! That might complicate things. If a space ship arriving on Centauwould be awkward to answer, because the answer would come before the original message had been sent -- before the ship could get there to receive it, in fact. We can imagine a postal system in the future where Special Delivery is used to insure ultra-slow delivery. Messages will be marked for holding months or years before delivery, according to the distance of their origin. A birth announcement to grandma from the edge of the galaxy gets put in the hundredyear-hold box to make sure that grandma has a chance to get born before she receives it! I'm going to try to arrange to have my future issues of If relayed to Deneb and back by tachyon beam, if I can find the application blank. That way I should get next century's magazines and find for sure whether science has finally caught up with science fiction -- by Fritz Leiber by John Wyndham by Mock Reynolds -- and many more) Don't miss the big December Galaxy, on sale now! IF ... IF  Short Story f nu: Their landing on that planet imposed a sentence of death. M ai found the first of the canals on the third day after they landed. Tangled ghosts of mist broke lazily from its sluggish surface, and it should not really have been there at all, although Mai was the only one to attach any importance to the fact. The first two days had been spent on the ship. The Hannah P was an old second-hand freighter, and although the warp drive was new, the rest of the ship was not. There were sprung hull-plates to be welded, burnt-out valves to be spotted and replaced and the number three tube-lining had to be removed and entirely resurfaced. Mai, Mulligan and Miller worked feverishly for almost forty-eight hours, for one never knew, on a strange planet on this distant rim of the galaxy, when a quick lift-off might mean the difference between life and an exotic death at the hands of some new and therefore unenlightened life form. The memory of their narrow escape from the pink savages of Susskind B IV was still fresh in their minds. Their anxiety to have the ramshackle ship in constant readiness was heightened by the knowledge that the nearest help in an emergency was several light-years nearer the hub of the galaxy, and. only just within reach of their out-of-date subetheric radio. They had intended  to install a new unit with the proceeds of their last trip, but a sudden drop in the price of fissionable materials had cut their profits to the point where they could only just cover their expenses. Despite the glamorous image presented by the video shows at home, life for such small, freelance prospecting outfits was a hand-to-mouth affair. Their only advantage over the big ness to accept the risk of ranging far from the space-lanes in their decrepit little ships, landing on and exploiting any unexploited planet which offered the prospect of a strike. There was no shortage of recruits; there were plenty of starstruck young men, like Mai himself, ease and monotony of life on the civilized worlds for the risks and hardships of small-time prospecting; which was just as well, for while the rewards for a successful trip were high, the mortality rate was high also. The Hannah P had dropped into normal space quite close to this star system -- as yet unmapped and therefore without a name -- and Mulligan in his role of navigator (he was pilot and cook as well) had elected to land, although with its four tiny planets the prospect of a strike seemed small. The choice of planet had been taken out of their hands by a smoking valve in the control panel, which had threatened An IF First Each month H brings you a new writer, never before published. This month's is Bram Hall, a #-year-old Londoner who composes and teaches musk, in which he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. So far, he's also a bachelor in life as well as in education. His chief interests are sailing small boats and driving , sports cars. He considers Tolkien's Lord of the Rings one of the greatest books ever written and prefers honest escape literature. We hope to see more such escapes from himl to blow and take the rest of the panel with it. The panel, maintained by Miller with small blobs of solder and a large amount of taciturn faith, was hardly designed for such alarms, and the Hannah P hastily settled on the nearest of the four planets, the only one which boasted an atmosphere, though even that was less than four miles deep. As the three prospectors hurriedly strapped themselves to their shock couches, the silver planet rushed up at them. The servos cut in the main rockets at the last minute and the ship was swallowed up. TVTal, still young and capable of wonder at the sight of a virgin planet, had been first to the viewport. "Fog!" he said disgustedly, "That silver we saw was just fog! What's the atmosphere?" Miller, geologist and engineer, unfolded his long shanks from the IF couch and ambled to the instrument panel. "Thin," he grunted, and scratched his carrotty head. A shower of dandruff fluttered like doves to roost on the shoulders of his filthy tunic. "Mainly inert gases, but some oxygen. And lots of water vapor. That's your fog." Mai had already gone in search of the light suits, but Mulligan gruffly called him back. "Hold it, hophead! Ship first." And ship first it was: the Hannah P was a venerable old lady and demanded constant attention. At last the ship was ready, and their attention could be turned to less pressing matters. Miller, whose lean frame had proved itself, on this as on many other occasions, admirably adapted to crawling in and through and around the complex guts of the spaceship, scraped at least half-an-inch of grease and grime from his sour features, and grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied. It was decided that while the engineer remained aboard to do a final check on the delicate servomechanisms, Mulligan and Mai would make the first foray and maybe do a couple of preliminary was with ill-concealed excitement that Mai made preparation for the trip; all the repairs and maintenance had been carried out from within the hull, for spacemen habitually expose themselves to the unknown as little as possible, and soon they would be seeing a new planet for the first time. Mai had joined the team as deckhand and general dogsbody only four months previously, and was now a veteran of two trips and nine planetary landings. Soon enough, he knew, the wonder of new places would leave him and he would become hardened and cynical like Mulligan and Miiller; for the time being he coaxed and nurtured his excitement carefully, maintaining his feeling for the romance of space as long as possible. Nevertheless, his first sight of the new planet was disappointing. 'T'hick white mist obscured everything and from the airlock, fifty feet up, even the ground was invisible. The two men pushed their feather-light gravsleds out of the hatch, stepped aboard and began to sink slowly down. The journey took only twenty seconds, but seemed endless to Mai, poised beside the silver hull, sight and sound deadened by the fog. When they touched down, Mai stepped off and looked around. "Christmas trees!" he grunted. "Rows and rows of flaming black Christmas trees!" The black, conical bushes stretched in all directions into the mist, which seemed thicker at ground level. The hard soil, save where it had been scorched by their rocket blast, was dull and sandy. "What shall we call this place?" Mulligan asked. "Yule," suggested Mai. "No, that's been used before. How about Santa Claus?" "Suits me. I don't see us having a very merry time here, though. Let's pick a nice hot planet next time. Shall we stay together or split up?" Mulligan looked round. "Seems fairly harmless," he said. "We'll split up. You go south, I'll go north. Keep in touch." As the pair split up and moved off, Mai glanced back nervously, only to find that already the mist had swallowed up all trace of the ship and the circle of blackened, rocket-blasted rubble on which it stood. Used as he was to solitude and confinement, a feeling of claustrophobic loneliness swept over him. He guided the sled two feet above the flat, sandy ground between the "Christmas trees." Tree after tree, all six feet or thereabouts in height, swam into view on either side, slid past, and vanished in the mist. They all seemed to grow the same distance apart, in fairly straight lines. "Like an orchard," he thought, and wondered, with a start, if he would meet the gardener. That life should be found in such a thin atmosphere -- so thin and cold that heated pressure suits were necessary -- amazed him not at all. Life, in this galaxy at least, was. persistent, and space travelers soon grew blase about its hardihood and diversity. The arguments and speculation of the twentieth century on the likelihood of finding life on other planets had been confounded when, with the invention of the space-warp in #, man had exploded through the center of the galaxy and found that there was scarcely a star-system that did not have life of some kind, and that intelligent life was by no means scarce, although so far no life form had appeared to challenge man's supremacy in the space-lanes. A shrill buzzing in the earpiece of his helmet told Mai that Mulligan was on the blower. He nudged the intercom switch with his chin and immediately felt less alone as Mulligan spoke, although the skipper was probably two or three miles away by now. "Mai, have your young eyes spotted anything strange about these trees?" "Well, they're black, for a start. But that only means they don't photosynthesize, which isn't unusual. There's a planet somewhere in this quadrant where the plants break down their food by a kind of electrolysis. Not much direct sunlight can filter through this mist anyway. Perhaps they absorb other radiation?" IF "The black color would make them absorbent, I suppose," There was a short silence, broken only by the sound of Mulligan's breathing in the mouthpiece, "Their conical shape gives them plenty of surface area. You could be right. Mai, get off your sled and have a closer look at them! I've just thought of something else." Mai stopped the sled and lowered it gingerly to the ground. Stepping off, he walked to the nearest tree. The foliage was rubbery to the touch and pushed aside easily. In such light gravity and thin atmosphere little strength was needed. "All I can see is smooth branches and flat leaves. What am I supposed to be looking for?" Mai asked. "No buds or flowers?" Mulligan's voice in his ear was casual. "How do they reproduce?" "Perhaps this is the wrong season," Mai replied. "Atmosphere's too thin, orbit's too regular. No seasons." "Could they be immortal?" Mulligan laughed. "You've been reading too many fantasies. Unique if they are. Perhaps we'd better try and take one home -- the boffins might be interested. I'm going on. See you." There was a click as Mulligan flicked off his intercom, and Mai glanced over his shoulder at the sudden silence. An uneasy feeling had been growing on him ever since leaving the ship. Not being able to see more than twenty feet in front of him did not help. He felt that if anything that wasn't a Christmas tree suddenly loomed out of the mist he would scream. egaining the sled, he felt easier,  and moved off again. The journey took on a dreamlike quality as the constant succession of black rubber trees slipped out of the mist, solidified, and dissolved again behind him. He found himself looking once more over his shoulder, and shook himself angrily. A good spaceman doesn't get the jitters this easily, he told himself, and speeded the sled up a little. The sandy ground sped under the blunt nose of the sled, which was little more than a ten-foot tray with a seat and controls at the front. He had set the controls at an altitude of two feet above the ground, and had glanced at the dial several times before he realized that there was no need to do so. The terrain was as smooth and unbroken. The sled left no trace of its passing, and Mai would need the direction finder to make his way back to the Hannah P. At the thought of being lost in this misty maze, his nervousness increased, but his next thought made him jab at the intercom switch with such haste that he hit the wrong button and received an unwanted mouthful of vitamin and glucose concentrate. The ideal spaceman needed a prehensile chin to operate all the controls in a Mark IX helmet. When Mulligan finally answered, Mai had to make a conscious effort to remain calm and not to allow his tongue to trip him up in his haste. "Mulligan, we've been going about half an hour, so we've each covered about ten miles, right?" " Right." "So far, has there been any variation in the landscape -- any hills or valleys?" "Nope. Flat as a pancake. I'm going to turn back soon." "Then how come, with an atmosphere this shallow, there are no meteor craters?" Mai finished with an air of triumph. "Well, heck! You know there aren't usually many meteors this far out. Perhaps there just haven't been any recently." Mulligan was a practical man, and had little time for unproductive speculation. "Oh, come on! There must have been a few at least. And yet the ground isn't even pockmarked. This atmosphere is no protection at all, and yet there are no plants broken down and no holes in the ground or anything." "Well, what's your explanation?" "I haven't one. But I'll tell you something else." "Must you?" The older man mocked, but Mai was stubborn. "Yes." "Then I suppose I'll have to listen. What is it, O imaginative I one? Blue spiders fifty feet high?" "No, it's the mist." Mai ignored the pleasantry with an ease born of a thousand ribbings. "To produce mist, there must be a temperature differential, mustn't there? There must be warm air and cold air, or warm water and cold air, or something like that. Yet everything's freezing here." "Perhaps the fog is the noxious breath of those blue spiders, spawned by the venomous drool from their fangs!" suggested Mulligan drily. Mai snapped, "The only blue spiders we're likely to see will be coming out of those bottles you've got hidden under the chart table!" He flicked off the blower before Mulligan could retort. 'T'his exchange did not answer the question, however, and Mel was so absorbed in the puzzle that when he did find the answer he very nearly fell in it. Awakening with a start, he slammed the sled to a halt and looked around. He had come to rest on the very brink of a canal. The sides were almost sheer, and very regular, and the channel stretched as straight as a die into the mist to right and left of him. Twenty or thirty feet away on the far bank, scarcely seen through the mist, the black forest resumed its march to the invisible horizon. Seven or eight feet below him the IF oily, dark water slid slowly past, and skeins of white mist rose lazily from it. Mai snapped off a black leaf from the nearest tree and, clumsily because of the heavy gauntlets of his suit, tossed it down. Before it sank, it had' traveled almost out of sight. He turned towards the sled, preoccupied. One puzzle was solved, only to give rise to another much more mystifying. The fog obviously came from the canal, whose temperature must be many degrees higher than that of the surrounding air. Volcanic action could explain that -- hot springs were found on many planets, including Terra itself. But how does a river flow in an apparently featureless plain? Rivers flow from a high place to a low place, yet they had seen no evidence of any hills or mountains as they had landed, and not even a molehill had disturbed the flight of the sled in the last ten miles. The canal could not be natural, for the laws of nature are universal. If it was not natural, it must be artificial. So who built it? Mai suddenly whirled round, almost losing his footing, but the shadow at the corner of his vision was only another dark tree, standing motionless. The helmet of his suit restricted vision, and it was easy to imagine that something might be lurking just behind him, beyond the field of his vision. Before he reached the sled, the intercom buzzed angrily. It was Miller back on the ship, apparently stirred by some anxiety to heights of verbosity entirely out of character. "Mai, where are you? Mulligan's nearly here -- get back as quick as you can!" "Miller, wait! I've found a river, and..." "You've no time for swimming now! Get back, we're lifting offl" Exhausted by this unparalleled feat of oratory, Miller sharply cut off. Mai, disturbed, ran to the sled and took off. He set the altitude at twenty feet, well above the trees, and switched the automatic homing device onto the ship; then, as the sled rushed through the mist and the trees darted underneath for all the world like the sleepers of an oldfashioned railway, he glanced nervously about. He had a strange sensation, as though someone, or something, might be keeping pace with him in the mist on either side, watching. nphe sled beeped to warn him of the approach to the ship, and automatically slowed. The Hannah P loomed gigantic out of the mist, and Mai's heart sank. The slim nose of the ship, # feet above him, was canted alarmingly to one side. Below, the area of ground where the fiery maelstrom of the landing jets had charred the rubbery plants and fused the sand into blackened glass, was now a glittering, wet bog. One slender landing-leg was engulfed for half its length, while the other two seemed for the moment to stand on firmer ground. Even there, however, the water glistened; as Mai watched, a bubble broke to the surface and the ship settled a sickening six inches. Mulligan waited at the airlock as Mai shot in and stepped off the sled. "Quick, get upstairs and into your couch. We're moving ship. Just our goddam luck to land on some goddam bogl" Mai clattered up the steel ladder to the control room with Mulligan pressing on his heels. As they climbed, Mai tried to explain about the river and the mist, but Mulligan was concerned only with the safety of the ship and would not listen. Miller was already on his couch, and snapped, "Orbit?" "No," grunted Mulligan as he stumped stickily to the control position. "We haven't done any drilling yet, and we're not going to let any blasted bog stop us; we came to prospect, so we'll prospect! I'll set her down a couple of miles away." His cropped head bristled with indignation as he slammed one podgy fist on the firing button. The ship paused for a moment, straining, and then the legs broke free suddenly. Mai was thrown against his straps as the Hannah P lurched into the air. Otars glittered momentarily  through the black viewport at the corner of Mai's vision, only to be eclipsed by brighter stars within the cabin as three overloaded control valves blew at once. The cabin slewed to one side, then steadied as Mulligan's chunky hands danced on the controls that were left, maintaining thrust here, cutting to compensate there, firing the steering tubes to eliminate side movement, cutting and thrusting like a fencer as the stars twisted and lurched outside and the silver mist rushed up to engulf the stricken ship, Mulligan's hands danced up and down the rows of buttons, thrusting and parrying each new component of movement, each twist and fall as the tortured hullplates squealed and the main beams groaned and flexed. Then the ship hit, bounced twice on her hydraulic legs, miraculously stayed upright, and Mulligan cut the engines and slumped wetly in his couch. Silence flooded the cabin; the lights suddenly seemed dull and yellow and they lay sweating to the tick and twang of cooling metal below. Mai stared up at the ceiling. "Mulligan, I'll never make another crack about those bottles under the chart table," he said. "I bet they're all broken anyway," replied Mulligan flatly. Miller sat up and shook his head, scattering a new snowcap on his shoulders. IF "Do you know where we are?" he asked. "I know where we were" grunted Mulligan, "but the instruments are knocked haywire." "Does it matter?" asked Mai. "One part of this planet seems much the same as any other part to me." "It matters a little. We need to know where we are, to calculate a good trajectory for take-off, if we're not to waste fuel buzzing around before we warp into hyper-space." "Well, astro-navigation will..." "How in hell's name do you astronavigate through this fog?" asked Miller rudely. "So far as I can see, the best thing would be to find our old place in the swamp and calculate our present position from that." Mulligan agreed. "One of us can spiral out from the ship and search while the others do a couple of anything worth claiming, but we can try." A yTal, as the least skilled and most curious of the three, elected to search for their old position. From there, he could line up the direction finder on the sled and calculate their present position on the planet. On a planet the size of Earth's moon, the search could be quite protracted, but the sleds were fast and economical. Stifling an ever-increasing feeling of being watched, Mai helped the others unthe Geiger counters, then took a sled and began his search. Instantly the clinging fog closed behind him and swallowed up the familiar shape of the Hannah P and his spacesuited companions. He was alone once more with the unending columns of black, still trees and the silent mist which opened before him and closed behind him, muffling sight and sound and offering concealment to he knew not what. price # credits Terran, guaranteed for five years against faulty materials and workmanship -- consumes one power cell per one hundred hours use and can lift loads of up to one ton to heights of approximately fifty feet at speeds of up to two hundred miles per hour. It is a fast and efficient means of transport and Mai had nothing to do but sit, watch the ground, and worry. When he returned to the Hannah P twelve hours later, he had travelled # miles, had covered the ground quite systematically over a circle approximately one hundred miles in circumference, had found nothing and was very worried indeed. Pilot, navigator, cook, engineer and geologist greeted him with long faces; the two men had drilled sixteen very deep holes and also found nothing. "I just don't understand this place at all," gloomed Mulligan. "There's nothing under here except a large amount of mineral salts and other rubbish that's no use to us. Not a single mineral concentration worthy of the name. We've analyzed the film the auto-recorder took as we came down, and there isn't a geological formation in the place; it's flat and featureless as a baby's bottom." "No meteor craters, then?" "The hell with your meteor craters! If you spent a little less time dreaming about meteor craters that don't exist but should, and rivers which shouldn't exist but do, instead of keeping your eyes open, at least we'd know roughly where we are on this God-forsaken bristly take off on a bad trajectory and have to waste half our rocket-fuel getting far enough out to warp." A yTal, nettled, said sharply, "Fm not dreaming! If you thought a little more about the things around you, instead of getting your ideas out of a bottle, you'd realize that there are a lot of things wrong with this place. Plants that can't reproduce, craters which should be there and you can't deny it, apparently solid ground which suddenly goes soggy for no obvious reason and then vanishes without trace, a planet with no mineral deposits at all, and last of all, the rivers !" "Rivers! How many are there for God's sake?" Mulligan sat up, and alarm creased his stolid features. "Have you found more?" "Yes, lots of 'em. They're all the same, quite straight, at about thirty mile intervals, all warm and all flowing in the same direction. I took a sample from one of them -- it's in the analyzer now. On present form, it'll probably turn out to be pure Scotch whisky, which'll please someone I could mention. It wouldn't surprise me if those drillings you made didn't vanish during the night, either." "They already have!" Miller, unnoticed, had drifted into the control room and draped himself over the console. "I've just been out there to bury the garbage. That ground's as hard as flint, by the way. So I decided to shove the stead of digging a hole. Only -- gone." Mulligan snorted uncertainly, "Are you sure?" "Sure I'm sure.  know where we drilled." Encouraged, Mai broke in. "Do you get the feeling we're being watched?" Before Mulligan could utter a rebuff, Miller answered, "Yes." He said it flatly and ambled out. Mai, fearing Mulligan's caustic tongue, followed him out, and caught him up at the bottom of the ladder. IF "Miller, did you mean that?" : "Isaid it, didn't I? This place spools me; mist and trees, trees and mist, row upon row." "Come and see what the analyzer makes of that water." Miller groaned but followed, trailing clouds of white glory behind him. The prolonged weightlessness of space does unpredictable things to a man's metabolism, and dandruff was the cross Miller had to bear. Mulligan had once confided to Mai that he believed that in trying to get rid of the dandruff, Miller had shampooed his brains away. Mai wondered if Mulligan's own weakness for whisky was attributable to weightlessness as well. The analysis room was tiny, and the automatic analyzer, or Annie, took up so much room that the two men had virtually to stand in the companion-way and poke their heads through the door. As the results reeled across the scanner, Mai whistled. "Soup!" he said. "It's a soup -- you could can that and sell it!" The scanner told the tale of a multitude of small organisms, ranging from the microscopic to those visible with the naked eye. All, however, were simple in construction and all were very alien indeed. Apart from that, the water was a strong, warm solution of mineral salts. Mai felt an idea tickling the back of his mind but could not grasp it. T ater that evening, lying on his back in the tiny cubicle he called a cabin, he pondered the problem. Although man had visited thousands of planets and had found life in incredible profusion and variety, the same general rules applied wherever you were. On no planet visited in recorded history had the rules of logic been broken. A thin atmosphere provides little protection from meteors and other debris of space. Therefore, there should be craters. world so far out that its parent sun looked no bigger than a pinhead in the inky sky, lived a race of crystalline beings who took centuries to grow a single thought and with whom it would be as impossible to communicate as it would for a mayfly to hold a conversation with a human being. liquid oxygen flowed from up to down and would remain still on an infinite flat surface. On Susskind B IV, their last port of call, the crew of the Hannah P had seen a self-propelled Geiger counter come to a particularly nasty end at the hands -- and teeth -- of a race of pink hominids who could not suffer anything to live that was not pink also -- indeed, the three men had barely escaped the same fate themselves. Yet even on Susskind B IV when a hole was dug, it stayed dug. Somewhere in the Hammond system, there was a planet the dominant species of which spent their entire lives fluttering in the air, descending to the ground only to breed, which they did with astonishing rapidity and, it seemed to the human observers, without gaining very much satisfaction therefrom. Yet even there, bogs did not suddenly appear where there had previously been arid desert, nor did they accurately position themselves directly under a very heavy, very vulnerable spaceship. Mai, suddenly alarmed, sped up the companion-way to the airlock. Fumbling with the fasteners in his anxiety, he pulled on a suit and exhausted the airlock. What he saw when he opened the outer door and looked down confirmed his worst suspicions; the blackened ground beneath the ship glistened and moved slightly, as the Hannah P settled imperceptibly deeper into the mud. The landing legs were already hidden as far as the hydraulic struts and had only to sink another three feet before the main jets were clogged and silenced for ever. Slamming the airlock, Mai raced for the control room, ripping off his helmet as he ran. He threw himself into the pilot's couch and began flicking switches, meanwhile yelling for Mulligan and Miller. The two men, one stomping noisily and swearing under his breath, the other ambling with deceptive speed and leaving a trail of white flecks to mark his passage, threw themselves onto the spare couches as Mai's hand hit the firing button. For a long moment, the ship hesitated; then, with a tremendous sucking implosion which echoed throughout her length, she shook herself free and shot skywards. Tn a safe parking orbit seventy  miles up, the three men recovered their three wits and showed three different reactions to their narrow escape. Miller, as usual, was scornful; Mai was triumphant -- he had achieved every space cadet's dream of saving the ship and solving a dilemma which had puzzled older and wiser heads than his. "It's simple really," he crowed, lolling in the pilot's seat and waving an airy hand. "We were being eaten! That's why there were no meteor-holes -- the meteors are absorbed and the craters heal overl And that's what happened to your a cut or a burn." Mulligan stomped to the chart table, opened the locker underneath and began counting his bottles. "Are you sure you haven't been at these? You'll be telling us next that the whole damned planet was one big beastie, and that those heated rivers of yours were its blood #" IF "Exactly I If you lived in a completely sterile atmosphere you could wear your bloodvessels on the outside tool" "And the trees?" Miller asked. "What about the trees? Parasites, I suppose." "No," said Mai, "they absorb radiation -- how do you think... Mulligan moved to the control console and began punching co-ordinates. He turned, grinning, to Miller and said in a hushed voice, "Well, weightlessness affects us all in different ways, I suppose. But so young, and so promising #" Shaking his head and switching in the autopilot, he went to the chart table and pulled out a bottle. Miller eased himself off the couch and went off to the bathroom to shampoo his hair. TTigh in the firmament, invisible  trom the mist of the planet's surface, a single fitful star moved slowly off, winked once, and then vanished as the Hannah P slipped into hyper-drive. Midway between two of the black Christmas trees, where Miller had finally hacked out a small hole in the hard, sandy surface and buried the garbage, the ground glistened like an open wound, and bubbled slightly. Minute organisms, specially adapted for the purpose, began to eat through the polythene wrapping and its contents. Old tin cans, plastic containers, a half eaten steak and several empty bottles, among many other things, dissolved and were carried away by tiny absorbent corpuscles. With them went an old toothbrush of Mulligan's, several pairs of disgusting socks which had once adorned the thin legs of Miller, and a few of the paper handkerchiefs Mai had used when he'd had a slight headcold the week before. All carried a profusion of micro-organisms totally alien to their new host. Slowly, the canals grew sluggish. A thin skin formed on their black surface, their edges crinkled slightly and eventually they stopped flowing and began to freeze over. The black trees, rank upon rank, grew brittle, drooped and broke. The flat, even surface heaved itself into furrows and ridges, for all the world like the wrinkles on the face of an old woman close to death. Soon even these corrugations cracked, split and crumbled to dust. As the warm pulsations of its interior cooled and stopped, the mist thinned and turned to a rime of frost. Alone, as it had lived, save for the brief visit of its unconscious executioners, slowly the planet sickened, saw the stars, and died. New subscriptions and changes o! address require # weeks to process! IF  Short Story The Comsat Angels Unto us a child is born -- and another and another ... Now I know who sits on the left part of Horizon's new series that I of Kosygin and Johnson, who sets was scripting, "The Expanding the courses above Cape Kennedy Mind", about the role of communiand waits in the Vatican behind the cations satellites and data-processPapal throne. I know, too, what ing devices in the so-called informathey are waiting for... tion explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and   assignment I did my best to wise serious program, turn it down. Charles Whitehead, "Charles, you'll destroy the whole based science program, Horizon, that morning. "These child prodiasked me to fly over to France gies are all the same. Either they with him and record a press consimply have some freak talent or ference being held by a #-year-old they're being manipulated by amchild prodigy, Georges Duval, who bitious parents. Do you honestly was attracting attention in the Paris believe this boy is a genius?" newspapers. The film would form "He might be, James. Who can say?" Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. "We're doing a program about advanced communications systems -- if they have any justification at all, it's that they bring rare talents like this one to light." "Rubbish -- these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a cross-channel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut." In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over with his bland producer's charm, but I was still skeptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors. For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion. "Do you remember Minou Drouet?" I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. "A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, 'Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet.' " "James, relax... Like all scientists, you can't bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let's wait until we see him , He might surprise us." He certainly did, though not as we expected. eorges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals' house was an expensively built, white-walled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A well-tended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and water-meadows. Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from Radio-Television Francaise and a Mercedes with a Paris Match sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharp-faced maid led us without ado towards "le press-conference." In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hotel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of # with calm gray eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemnfaced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table. Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three darksuited men -- the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institute Pascal, a center of advanced study -- gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a greasy suit, and the boy's schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed man hunched around his pipe. Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment. Georges Duval was then #, a slim-shouldered boy small for his age, self-composed in a gray flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his overlarge wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem. T)rofessor Leroux of the Sorbonne  opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at #, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges's career : reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam -- usually taken at # or #. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by #I had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by # was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge. While this familiar catalog was being unfolded, Georges' eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft gray suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges's older brother -- he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered he had a very different role. IF Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern -- what did he think of Viet Nam, the space-race, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigit Bardot, Ronald Reagan? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humor, stating that ouside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle. While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges's father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval were in the least educated, and the house, which the widow and son had moved into only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from he town. As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: "I notice you didn't ask any questions yourself." "The whole thing was a complete set-up. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle." "Perhaps we were." "You think the General may be behind all this? As publicity for La Belle France?" "It's possible. Let's face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more difficult for him to go off "But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I'll bet "you that three years from now noone will even remember him." A fter we returned to London my  curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Center at White City I scanned the children on the sidewalk. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library. As I turned through the clippings, going back # years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting at #, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a #-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look , Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high school principal, doting mother -- and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, post-graduate fellowand CalTech. And then what? "That was nearly three years ago," I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. "What's he doing now?" She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. "Nothing. I suppose he's taking another degree at a university somewhere." "He's already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life." Judy gazed at me with her licorice eyes, bangs flaring outrageously. "He's only #. Wait until he's a little older." "Older? You've given me an idea. Let's go back to the beginning -- #." Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first post-war prodigy, a #-year-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala .University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed "quasars." "A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He'D be what? # now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize." We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation. No one had heard of Gunther Bergman. "Right, where is he?" I asked Judy when we had exhausted aU lines of inquiry. "For heaven's sake, it's twenty years; he should be world-famous by now." "Perhaps he's dead?" "That's possible." I gazed down pensively at Judy's quizzical face. "Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We're going to make the Comsats sing." T iree weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead's office, there was an electric spring in my step. Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. "James, I hear you've been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?" IF "A new program."  "New? We've already got Georges Duval listed in the Radio Times ." "For how long?" I pulled a chair up to his desk and opened my briefcase, then spread the dozen files in front of him. "Let me put you in the picture. Judy and I have been back to #. In those twenty years there have been eleven cases of so-called child geniuses. Georges Duval is the twelfth." I placed the list in front of him. # Gunther Bergman (Uppsala, Sweden) # Jaako Litmanen (Vaasa, Finland) # John Warrender (Kansas City, U.S.A.) # Arturo Bandini (Bologna, Italy) # Gesai Ray (Calcutta, India) # Guiliano Caldare (Palermo, Sicily) # Wolfgang Herter (Cologne, Germany) # Martin Sherrington (Canterbury, England) # Josef Oblensky (Leningrad, U.S.S.R.) # Yen Hsi Shan (Wuhan, China) # Robert Silverberg (Tampa, U.S.A.) # Georges Duval (Montereau, France) Charles studied the list, now and then patting his forehead with a floral handkerchief. "Frankly, apart from Georges Duval, the names mean absolutely nothing." "Isn't that strange? There's enough talent there to win all the Nobel Prizes three times over." "Have you tried to trace them?" I let out a cry of pain. Even the placid Judy gave a despairing shudder. "Have we tried -- ? My God, we've done nothing else. Charles, apart from checking a hundred directories and registers, we've contacted the original magazines and news agencies, checked with the universities that originally offered them scholarships, talked on the overseas York, Delhi and Moscow." "And? What do they know about them?" "Nothing. A complete blank." Charles shook his head doggedly. "They must be somewhere. What about the universities they were supposed to go to?" "Nothing there, either. It's a curious thing, but not one of them actually went on to a university. We've contacted the senates of nearly fifty universities. Not a mention of them. They took external degrees while still at school, but after that they severed all connections with the academic world." C harles sat forward over the list, holding it like a portion of some treasure map. "James, it looks as if you're going to win your bet. Somehow they all petered out in late adolescence. A sudden flaring of intelligence backed by prodigious memory, not matched by any real creative spark... that's it, I suppose -- none of them was a genius." "As a matter of fact, I think they all were." Before he could stop me I went on. "Forget that for the moment. Whether or not they had genius is irrelevant. Certainly they had intellects vastly beyond the average, IQ's of #, enormous scholastic talents in a wide range of subjects. They had a sudden burst of fame and exposure and -- " "They vanished into thin air. What are you suggesting -- some kind of conspiracy?" "In a sense, yes." Charles handed me the list. "Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they're slaving away now on some super-weapon?" "It's possible, but I doubt it." I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. "Have a look at them." Charles picked up the first. "Ah, there's Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly aging." "It's not Georges Duval. It's Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though." I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze. "Wait a minute I Are you sure this isn't Duval?" Charles picked up Oblensky's photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light gray suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlor. "He was at Duval's press conference, sitting right in front of us." I nodded to Judy. "You're right, Charles. And he's not only in that photo." I pulled together tie photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-gray suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. "No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for..." Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. "Such as the C.I.A. -- you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government thinktank? It's unlikely, but -- " "What about the Russians?" I cut in. "Or the Chinese? Let's face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?" Charles stared down at the photographs. "The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes... somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new program here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be onto something." W e set off for Canterbury the next morning. The address, IF which I had been given by a friend who was science editor of the Daily Express , was on a housing estate behind the big General Electric radio and television plant on the edge of the cathedral city. We drove past the lines of gray-brick houses until we found the Sherringtons' at the end of a row. Rising out of the remains of a greenhouse was a huge ham operator's radio mast, its stay-wires snapped and rusting. In the eight years since his tremendous mind had revealed itself to the local grammar-school master, Martin Sherrington might have gone off to the ends of the world, to Cape Kennedy, the Urals or Peking. In fact, not only were neither Martin nor his parents there, but it took us all of two days to find anyone who even remembered them at all. The present tenants of the house, a frayed-looking couple, had been there two years; and before that was a large family of criminal inclinations who had been forced out by bailiffs and police. The headmaster of the grammar-school had retired to Scotland. Fortunately the school matron remembered we were all very proud of him. To tell the truth, though, I can't say we felt much affection for him; he didn't invite it." She knew nothing of Mrs. Sherrington, and as for the boy's father, they assumed he had died in the war. Finally, thanks to a cashier at the accounts office of the local electric company, we found where Mrs. Sherrington had moved. As soon as I saw that pleasant, white-walled villa in its prosperous suburb on the other side of Canterbury, I felt that the trail was warming. Something about the crisp gravel and large, well-trimmed garden reminded me of another bouse -- Georges Duval's near Paris. From the roof of my car parked next to the hedge we watched a handsome, strong-shouldered woman strolling in the rose garden. "She's come up in the world," I commented. "Who pays for this pad?" The meeting was curious. This rather homely, quietly dressed woman in her late thirties gazed at us across the silver tea-set like a tamed Mona Lisa. She told us that we had absolutely no chance of interviewing Martin on television. "So much interest in your son was roused at the time, Mrs. Sherrington. Can you tell us about his subsequent academic career? Which university did he go to?" "His education was completed privately' As for his present whereabouts, she believed he was now abroad, working for a large international organization whose name she was not at liberty to divulge. "Not a government department, Mrs. Sherrington?" She hesitated, but only briefly. "I am told the organization is intimately connected with various governments, but I have no real knowledge." Her voice was over-precise, as if she were hiding her real accent. As we left, I realized how lonely her life was; but as Judy remarked, she had probably been lonely ever since Martin Sherrington had first learned to speak. O ur trip to Germany was equally futile. All traces of Wolfgang Herter had vanished from the map. A few people in the small village near the Frankfurt autobahn remembered him, and the village postman said that Frau Herter had moved to Switzerland, to a lakeside villa near Lucerne. A woman of modest means and education, but the son had no doubt done very well. I asked one or two questions. Wolfgang's father? Frau Herter had arrived with the child just after the war; the husband had probably perished in one of the nameless prison-camps or battlegrounds of World War II. The balding man in the light gray suit? Yes, he had definitely come to the village, helping Frau Herter arrange her departure. "Back to London," I said to Judy. "This needs bigger resources than you and I have." As we flew back Judy said: "One thing I don't understand. Why have the fathers always disappeared?" "A good question. Putting, it crudely, love, a unique genetic coupling produced these twelve boys. It almost looks as if someone has torn the treasure map in two and kept one half. Think of the stock bank they're building up, enough sperm on ice in a eugenic cocktail to repopulate the entire planet." This nightmare prospect was on my mind when I walked into Charles Whitehead's office the next morning. Charles was in his shirt sleeves for the first time I had seen him. To my surprise, he brushed aside my apologies, then beckoned me to the huge spread of photographs pinned to the plaster wall behind his desk. The office was a clutter of newspaper cuttings and blown-up newsreel stills. Charles was holding a magnifying glass over a photograph of President Johnson and McNamara at a White House reception. "While you were gone we've been carrying out our own search," he said. "If it's any consolation, we couldn't trace any df them at first." "Then you have found them? Where?" "Here." She gestured at the dozens of photographs. "Right in front of our noses. We're looking at them every day." He pointed to a news agency photograph of a Kremlin reception for Premier Ulbricht of East GerIF many. Kosygin and Breshnev were there, Soviet President Podgorny talking to the Finnish Ambassador, and a crowd of twenty party functionaries. "Recognize anyone? Apart from Kosygin and company." "The usual bunch of hatchetfaced waiters these people like to surround themselves with. Wait a minute, though." Charles's finger had paused over  a quiet-faced young man with a high dolichocephalic head, standing at Kosygin's elbow. Curiously, the Soviet Premier's face was turned towards him rather than to Breshnev. "Oblensky -- the Russian prodigy. What's he doing with Kosygin? He looks like an interpreter." "Between Kosygin and Breshnev? Hardly. I've checked with the Moscow. They've seen him around quite a bit. He never says anything in public, but the important men always talk to him" I put down the photograph. "Charles, get on to the Foreign Office and the U.S. Embassy. It makes sense -- all eleven of them are probably there, in the Soviet Union." "Relax. That's what we thought. But have a look at these." The next picture had been taken at a White House meeting between Johnson, McNamara and General icy in Viet Nam. There were the usual aides, secretaries and Secret Service men out on the lawn. One face had been ringed, that of a man in his early thirties standing unobtrusively behind Johnson and Westmoreland. "Warrender -- the # geniusl He's working for the U.S. Government." "More surprises." Charles guided me around the rest of the photographs. "You might be interested in these." The next showed Pope Paul on the balcony of St. Peter's, making his annual "Urbis et Orbis" -- city and the world -- benediction to the huge crowd in the square. Standing beside him were Cardinal Mancini, chief of the Papal Secretariat, and members of his household staff. Obliquely behind the Pope was a man of about thirty wearing what I guessed to be a Jesuit's soutane, large eyes watching Paul with a steady gaze. "Bandini, Arturo Bandini," I commented, recognizing the face. "Oggi did a series of features on him. He's moved high in the papal hierarchy." "There are few closer to II Papa, or better loved." After that came a photograph of U Thant, taken at a U.N. Security Council meeting during the Cuban missile crisis. Sitting behind the Secretary General was a paleskinned young Brahmin with a fine mouth and eyes -- Gesai Ray, the high-caste Indian who was the only well-born prodigy I had come across. "Ray is now even higher up on U Thant's staff," Charles added. "There's one interesting photograph of him and Warrender together during the Cuban crisis. Warrender was then on J.F.K.'s staff." He went on casually: "The year after Oblensky reached the Kremlin, Khrushchev was sacked." "So they're in contact? I'm beginning to realize what the Moscow-Washington hot line is really for." C harles handed me another still. "Here's an old friend of yours -- our own Martin Sherrington. He's on Professor Lovell's staff at the Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory. One of the very few not to go into government or big business." "Big science, though." I stared at the quiet, intense face of the elusive Sherrington, aware that someone at Jodrell Bank had deliberately put me off. "Like Gunther Bergman -- he moved to the United States IS years ago from Sweden, is now very high Yen Hsi Shan is the youngest, barely #, but have a look at this." The photograph showed Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai on the reviewing platform in Peking during the cultural revolution, an immense concourse of teen-agers passing below, all holding copies of Mao's Thoughts and chanting out slogans. Standing between Mao and Chou was a boy with a fist in the air who was the chief Red Guard. "Yen Hsi Shan. He's started early," Charles said. "One or two of the others we haven't been able to trace as yet, though we hear Herter is with the giant ZurichHamburg banking trust. Jaako Litmanen, the Finnish prodigy, is rumoured to be working for the Soviet space program." "Well, one has to admit it," I commented, "they've certainly all made good." "Not all." Charles showed me the last picture, of the Sicilian genius Guiliano Caldare. "One of them made bad. Caldare emigrated to the United States in #, is now in the inner circle of the Cosa Nostra, a coming talent from all one hears." I sat down at Charles's desk. "Right, but what does this prove? It may look like a conspiracy, but given their talents one would expect them to rise in the world." "That's putting it mildly. Good God, this bunch only has to take one step forward and they'll be running the entire show." "A valid point." I opened Charles's note-pad. "We'll revise the program -- agreed? We start off with the Georges Duval conference, folIF low up with our own discoveries of where the others are, splice in old newsreel material, interviews with the mothers -- it'll make quite a program." r so we hoped. Needless to say, the program was never started. Two days later, when I was still organizing the newsreel material, word came down from the head of features that the project was to be shelved. We tried to argue, but the decision was absolute. Shortly after, my contract with Horizon was ended, and I was given the job of doing a new children's series about great inventors. Charles was shunted to "International Golf." Of course, it was obvious to both of us that we had come too close for someone's comfort, but there was little we could do about it. Three months later, I made a trip to Jodrell Bank radio-observatory with a party of scientific journalists and had a glimpse of Martin Sherrington, a tall, finely featured man watching with his hard gaze as Professor Lovell held his press conference. During the next months I carefully followed the newspapers and TV newscasts. If there was a conspiracy of some kind, what were they planning? Here they were, sitting behind the world's great men, hands ready to take the levers of power. But a global dictatorship sounded unlikely. Two of them at least seemed opposed to established authority. Apart from Caldare in the Cosa Nostra, Georges Duval put his musical talents to spectacular use, becoming within less than a year the greatest of the French "Ye-Ye" singers, eclipsing the Beatles as a leader of the psychedelic youth generation. In the forefront of the world protest movement, he was hated by the police of a dozen countries hut idolized by teen-agers from Bangkok to Mexico City. The uniquely tough and uncompromising gaze stares at us all now from record labels. Any collaboration between Georges and Bandini at the Vatican seems improbable. Besides, nothing that happened in the world at large suggested that members of the group were acting in anything but a benign role: the nuclear confrontation averted during the Cuban missile crisis, the fall of Khrushchev and the Russo-American detente, peace moves in Viet Nam, the Vatican's liberalized policy towards birth-control and divorce. Even the Red Guard movement and the chaos it brought could be seen as a subtle means of deflecting Chinese militancy at a time when she might have intervened in Viet Nam. nphen, three months later, Char les Whitehead telephoned me. "There's a report in Der Spiegel ," he told me with studied casualness. "I thought you might be interested. Another young genius has been discovered." " Great," I said. "We'll do a program about it. The usual story, I take it?" "Absolutely. That same forehead and eyes, the mother who lost her husband years ago, our friend in the villa business. This boy looks really bright, though. An IQ estimated at #. What a mind." "I read the script. The only trouble is, I never got to see the movie. Where is this, by the way?" "Hebron." "Where's that?" "Near Jerusalem. In Israel." "Israel?" I put the phone down. Somewhere in my mind a tumbler had clicked. Israeli Of course, at last everything made sense. The twelve young men, now occupying positions of power, controlling everything from the U.S., Russian and Chinese governments to satellite policy, international finance, the UN, big science, the youth and protest movement. There was even a Judas, Guiliano Caldare of the Cosa Nostra. It was obvious now. I had always assumed that the twelve were working for some mysterious organization, but in fact they were the organization. They were waiting for the moment of arrival. When the child came, he would be prepared for in the right way, watched over by the Comsat relays, hot lines open, the armies of the world immobilized. This time there would be no mistakes. After an hour, I rang Charles back. "Charles," I began, "I know what's happening. Israel..." "What are you talking about?" "Israel. Don't you see, Hebron is near Bethlehem." There was an exasperated silence. "James, for heaven's sake... You're not suggesting that -- " "Of course. The twelve young men, what else could they be preparing for? And why did the ArabIsraeli war end in only two days? How old is this boy?" "Thirteen." "Let's say another seven years. Good, I had a feeling he would come." When Charles protested I handed the receiver to Judy. As a matter of fact, I am quite certain that I am right. I have seen the photographs of Joshua Herzl taken at his press conference, a slightly difficult lad who rubbed quite a few of the reporters the wrong way. He vanished off the scene shortly afterwards, though no doubt his mother now has a pleasant white-walled villa outside Haifa or Tel Aviv. And Jodrell Bank is building an enormous new radio-telescope. One day soon we shall be seeing signs in IF sss! '  ,  Vi Across hundreds of light-years he raced -- to keep a rendezvous at the bqttom of a deadly alien sea l I Commodore John Grimes was pro ceeding homewards from Tharn the long way around -- by way of Grollor, Stree and Mellise, by the route that he, in the old Faraway Quett, had opened and charted so many years ago. Now the Rim Runners' ships ran the Eastern Circuit in both directions, and Grimes could have been home weeks sooner by waiting only a few extra days on Tharn -- but Port Forlorn, on Lorn, lived up to its name as long as Sonya wasn't there. She was still away from the Rim Worlds, still absent on her Galactic cruise. Grimes was off the leash in more ways than one. In his capacity as astronautical superintendent he hacj been sent to Tham to cope with a situation, a near mutiny, that had delayed the departure of a Rim Runners' vessel from that planet. He had coped, both with the original crew trouble and the ensuing complications. After this, an exchange of Carlottigrams with Head Office had established the fact that things were running themselves quite nicely during his absence. Grimes then thought of a number of reasons why he should revisit the other planets of the Eastern Circuit, upon which he had been the first human being ever to set foot and upon which, with the exception of Stree, he had never set foot again. After a further exchange of Deep Space messages the management had approved his itinerary. On all the worlds he was still remembered. On Tham the spaceport was named after him. In Braardon, the planetary capital of Grollor, a huge statue of him stood in Council Square. Grimes stared up at the heroic monument with some distaste. Surely his ears didn't stand out that much, and surely his habitual expression was not quite so froglike. He made allowances for the fact that the Grollans, although humanoid, are a batrachian people. But on his return to the ship in which he was a passenger, he inspected himself for a long time in a fulllength mirror. And then Rim Kestrel , in which Grimes had taken passage from Tharn, came to Mellise. Mellise is a watery world, fully four-fifths of its surface being covered by the warm, mainly shallow seas. The nearest approach to a continent is a long, staggering chain of islands almost coincident with the Equator. On one of the larger ones is the spaceport. There is no city, only a village in which live the human spaceport personnel and the Rim Confederacy's ambassador and his staff. The Mellisans themselves are an amphibious race. Like the Earthly Cetacea they, after having reached quite a high stage of evolution ashore, returned to the sea. If they are obliged to, they can live and work on dry land. But they prefer the water. They dwell in submarine villages where they are safe from the jnolent revolving storms that at times ravage the surface. They tend their underwater farms. In some of these they rear giant molluscs, great bivalves that yield the lustrous pearls which are their main item of export. Their imports are the manufactured goods needed by an aquatic culture -- nets, cordage, harpoon guns and the like. They could make these for themselves but, with the establishment of regular trade between themselves and the Confederacy, they have preferred not to. Why should an essentially water-dwelling being work with fire and metals when pearl IF siifi SffiiilSKr'  ,';-v- : igr  .# farming is so much more comfortable and pleasant? rimes rode down to the surface  in Rim Kestrel # s control room. Captain Paulus, the ship's master, was nervous. Obviously he did not like having his superior there to watch his ship-handling. But he was competent enough, although painfully cautious. Not for him the almost meteoric descent favored by other masters. His Inertial Drive delivered a thrust that nearly countered the planet's gravitational pull. The Kestrel drifted surfacewards like a huge balloon with barely negative buoyancy. But Paulus reacted fast enough when a jet stream took hold of the ship; he canceled its effect by just the right application of lateral drive, reacted fast again when the vessel was shaken by clear air turbulence, pulling her out of the danger area with no delay. Nonetheless, Grimes was making mental notes. The efficiency of the spaceport's meteorological observatory left much to be desired. Paulus should have been warned by radio of the disturbances through which he had passed. (But he, Grimes, had made his first landing here before there was a spaceport, let alone spaceport facilities. In fact, he had brought the Quest down blind, through the beginnings of a hurricane.) The commodore looked at the vision screen that showed, highly magnified, what lay aft and below. There were the islands, each one raggedly circular, each one ringed by a golden beach that was ringed, in its turn, by white surf. There was the cloudy green of shallow water, the clear blue of the deeper seas. Inland was the predominant purple of the vegetation. Yes, it was a pleasant world, Mellise. Even here, out on the Rim, it could have been developed to a holiday planet, rivalling if not surpassing Caribbea. If the Mellisans had been obliged to deal with the Interstellar Federation rather than with the Rim Worlds Confederacy, this probably would have been the case. Grimes, whose first years in space had been as an officer in the Federation's Survey Service, knew all too well that the major Terran Galactic power was far more concerned with the rights of other intelligent races in theory than in practice -- unless there were some political advantage to be gained by posing as liberator, conservator or whatever. He could see the white spaceport buildings now, gleaming in the light of the afternoon sun, startlingly distinct against their backdrop of purple foliage. He could see the pearly gray of the apron, and on it the black, geometrical shadows cast by cranes and conveyor belts and gantries. He could even see the tiny, blinking, scarlet stars that IF were the three beacons, the markers of the triangle in the center of which Rim Kestrel was to land. He wished that Paulus would get on with it. At this rate it would be after sunset by the time the ship was down. After sunset it was, and the night had fallen with the dramatic suddenness to be expected in the low latitudes of any planet. Overhead the sky was dear. Save for the opalescent arc that was the upper limb of the Galactic Lens, low on the western horizon, the sky was almost empty. Paulus had ordered all ports throughout the ship opened. Through them flowed the warm breeze, with scents of growing and flowering things that would have been doyingly sweet had it not been for the harsh tang of salt water. There was the distant murmur of surf, and, even more distant, a grumble of thunder. "Thank you, Captain Paulus," said Grimes formally. "A very nice set-down." And so it had been. Merchant captains, after all, are not paid to put their ships in hazard. P ort formalities were few. The Mellisans cared little about such matters as health, customs and immigration regulations. The port captain, a Rim Worlder, took care of all such details for them. Insofar as vessels owned by the Confederacy were concerned there was not even the imposition of port dues. After all, the levying of such charges would have been merely robbing Peter to pay Paul. The rare outside ships -- the occasional Interstellar Transport Commission Epsilon Class tramp, the infrequent Empire of Waverly freighter, the once-in-a-blue-moon Shakespearean Sector trader -- were presumably another matter. Grimes sat with Captain Paulus and Stacey, the port captain, in Paulus's day cabin. Cold drinks were on the table before them. The commodore was smoking his foul pipe, Paulus was nervously lighting one cigarette after another and Captain Stacey had between his fleshy lips a peculiarly gnarled cigar of local manufacture. It looked as though it had been rolled from dry seaweed. And it smelt like it. ("An acquired taste," Stacey had told them. "Like to try one?" They had refused.) "Only a small shipment of pearls this time," the port captain said. "The pearl farmers are having their troubles." "Disease again?" asked Paulus. "No. Not this time. Seems to be a sort of predatory starfish. Could be a mutation. Whether it is or not, it's a vicious bastardy." "I thought, Captain Stacey," said Grimes, "that the people here were quite capable of dealing with any of the dangerous life forms in their seas." "Not this new starfish," Stacey told him. "It's a killer." He sipped his drink. "The natives knew that you were coming here almost as soon as I did, Commodore. Telepathy? Could be. But, sir, you are almost a local deity. Old Wunnaara -- he's the boss cocky in these parts -- said to me only this morning, 'Grimes Wannarbo' -- and a .Wannarbo is roughly halfway beIween a high chief and the Aljmighty -- 'will us help Really touched by his faith, I was." "I'm not a marine biologist," said Grimes. "But couldn't you, with your local knowledge!, do something, Captain Stacey?" "I'm not a marine biologist either, Commodore. It takes me all my time to run the port." And I recommended you for this appointment , thought Grimes, looking at the fat man. I thought that this would be an ideal job for anybody as notoriously lazy as yourself. I thought that you could not do any harm here , and that you'd get on well with the Mel lisans . But you can't do either . Paulus said, "They must produce pearls if they're to pay for their imports. They've nothing else we want." Nothing else that we want , thought Grimes. But the Rim Confederacy is not alone in the Galaxy . He said, "Surely, Captain Stacey, you've found out what sort of weapons would be most effective against these things. They could be manufactured back on Lorn or Faraway, and shipped out here. And what about protective netting for the oyster beds?" "Useless, Commodore," Stacey told him. "The starfish just tear even the heaviest wire-rope nets. As for weapons -- poison has always been effective in the past, but not any longer." "We have to do something to help these people," Grimes said definitely. "And, frankly, not altogether from altruistic motives. As you should know, both Waverly and the Shakespearean Sector are anxious to expand their economic spheres of influence. If they can help Mellise and we can't... " The unspoken words, you'll be out of a soft job, hung in the air between them. "They seem to rely upon you fo help them, sir," Stacey grumbled. "And perhaps I can," Grimes told him. Terhaps he could. But, as he had said, he was not a marine biologist. Even so, he knew of the parallel evolution of life forms on all Earth-type planets. In the course of his career he had tangled with unfriendly and hungry beasts on more than a century of worlds. He was still around. The hostile animals were not. Variations on familiar patterns or utterly IF w alien, all had fallen victim to hit man cunning and human weaponry -- and human savagery. Man, after all, was still the most dangerous animal. He said good night to Stacey and Paulus, told them that he was going outside the ship to stretch his legs. He made his way down to the after airlock, then down the ramp to the smooth, dean concrete of the apron. He walked away from the direction of the administration buildings and the human village, found a path that must lead down to the sea. On either side of it the feathery fronds of the trees rustled in the warm breeze. Overhead, Mellise's single moon, a ruddy globe with an almost unmarked surface, rode high in the sky. Grimes came to the beach, to the pale, gently shelving stretch of coarse sand beyond which the surf was greedy luminescent He kicked off his sandals and, carrying them, walked slowly down to the edge of the water. He missed Sonya. He saw that a black humanoid shape, outlined by the phosphorescence, was waddling ashore, splashing through the shallows. From its dark head two eyes that reflected the ruddy light of the moon stared at Grimes. The teeth glinted whitely in the long muzzle as it spoke. "Meelongee, Grimes Wannarbo." Its voice was like that of a Siamese cat "Meebngee," replied Grimed. Ha remembered that this ins the son! of greeting. "You have come back." The English was oddly accented but perfectly understandable. "Yes. I have come back." "You... help?" "I shall try." The native was dose to Grimes now, and the commodore could smell the not unpleasant fishy odor of him. He could see, too, that he was old; in the moonlight the white hairs about the muzzle and the white patches of fur on the chest were plainly visible. "You me remember?" There was a short, barking laugh. "No? I was cub when first you come to Met lise, Grimes Wannarbo. Now I am chief. My name Wunnaara. And you too are chief, not of the one skyship but of many. I am chief but know little. You are chief but know much." "The Rkn Kestrel lifts tomorrow," said Grimes. "But you will stay, Wannarbo? You will stay?" Grimes made his decision. If there was anything that he could do he would be furthering the interests of the Confederacy as well as helping the natives of Mellise. Stacey, it was obvious, would not lift one fat finger. The ambassador, like the port captain, was a nohoper who had been sent to a planet upon which no emergencies were ever likely to arise. Grimes had not yet met him, but he knew him by repute. "I will stay," he told the chief. "Then I tell my people. There is much to make ready." Wunnaara slipped back into the water, far more silently than he had emerged from it, and was gone. The commodore resumed his walk along the beach. II TTe came to a shallow bay, a crescent-like indentation in the shoreline. There was somebody out there in the water swimming -- and by the flash of long, pale arms Grimes knew that it was not a native. Too, there was a pile of clothing on the sand. Quickly Grimes stripped. It was a long time since he had enjoyed a swim in the sea. He divested himself of his clothing without embarrassment. Even though he was no longer a young man his body was still compact, well-muscled, had not begun to run to belly. He waded out into the warm salt water. Suddenly he was confronted by the other swimmer. Only her head and her smooth, bare shoulders were visible above the surface. Her eyes and her wide mouth were very dark against the creamy pallor of her face. "Can't you read," she was asking indignantly. "Didn't you see the notices? This beach is reserved for ladies only." Her accent was not a Rim Worlds one; it was more Pan-Terran than anything. That would account for her indignation; only on parts of the Home Planet did the absurd nudity taboo still persist. But this was not the Home Planet. Grimes said mildly, "I'm sorry. I didn't know." He turned to leave the water. She said, "Don't run away. At this depth, we can talk modestly enough." "I suppose we can." "You're from the ship, aren't you? But of course you must be... Let me see, now. I've a good ear for accents, and you haven't quite lost the good old Terran twang... Commodore Grimes, would it be?" "Guilty," admitted Grimes. He was amused to note either that the tide was going out fast or that his companion had moved closer inshore. Her full breasts were fully exposed now, and there was more than a hint of the pale glimmer of the rest of her below the surface. She said, "It's rather a pity that you're leaving tomorrow." "I'm not leaving." "You're not?" she asked sharply"No. I promised Wunnaara, the chief, that I'd stay to look into this plague of starfish." "You promised Wunnaara." Her IF voice was scornful. "But he's only a native. He has to be kept in his place. That's why I insisted on having this beach made private. I hated to think that those...  things were spying on me, leering at me while I was swimming." " And what about me, leering and spying?" Grimes asked sarcastically"But you're a Terran." "Ex-Terran, young lady. Very ex." "... and we Terrans should stick together," she completed with a dazzling smile. "I'm a Rim Worlder," Grimes told her severely. "And so must you be, if you're employed at the spaceport, no matter where you were born." He asked abruptly, "And what do you do, by the way?" "I'm in the Met Office," she said. "Then I shall see you tomorrow," stated Grimes. "Good!" Her smile flashed on again. "I shall be calling in to register a strong complaint," the commodore went on. He attempted to step past the girl, intending to swim out to the first line of breakers. Somehow she got in his way, and somehow both of them lost their balance and went down, floundering and splashing. Grimes got to his feet first, pulled the young woman to hers. He was suddenly conscious, as she fell against him, of the firmness and the softness of the body against his own. It was all very nice -- and all a little too obvious. But he was tempted, and tempted strongly. Then, but with seeming reluctance, she broke away from him and splashed shorewards, her slim, rounded figure luminous in the moonlight. Her voice floated back to him, "I still hope that it's a pleasant meeting tomorrow, Commodore!" I t was not as unpleasant as it could have been. The girl, Lynn Davis, was second in charge of the spaceport's meteorological office. By daylight, and clothed, she was still attractive. Her hair was a dark, dull-gleaming blonde and her eyes were so deep a blue as to be almost black. Her face was thin and intelligent, with both mouth and nose a little too pronounced for conventional prettiness. There was a resemblance to Sonya, his wife, that strongly attracted Grimes, and it was more than a physical one. It was a matter of essential quality. This at once put Grimes on his guard. Sonya had held the rank of commander in the Federation's Survey Service, and in the Intelligence Branch at that. But now Federation and Rim Worlds Confederacy worked together, shared all information, kept no secrets from each other. Even so... Lynn Davis had all the answers ready. Rim Kestrel had been given no information on jet streams and dear-air turbulence because there had been a breakdown of radar and other instruments. This, Grimes was made to feel, was his fault. The Rim Runners' Stores Department should have been more prompt in dealing with requisitions for spare parts. "And after all, Commodore," she told him sweetly, "you made the first landing here without any aid at all from the surface, didn't you?" Grimes asked to see the instruments room. He thought that this request disconcerted her -- but this was understandable enough. Any officer, in any service, likes to do things his own way and is apt to resent a superior's intrusion into his own little kingdom, espedally when the superior is in a fault-finding mood. But she got up from behind her very tidy desk, led the commodore out of the office and up a short flight of stairs. At first glance the compartment looked normal enough; its counterpart could have been found at almost any human-operated spaceport throughout the Galaxy. The deviations from the norm were also normal. On many worlds with a lack of recreational facilities the instruments room, with its laboratory and workshop equipment to one side of it, is an ideal place for hobbyists to work. The practice is officially frowned upon. But it persists. There was a tank there, a small walked over to it. The only animal denizens were a dozen or so small starfish, brightly colored, spiny little beasts, unusually active. These, unlike their kind on the majority of worlds, seemed to prefer swimming to crawling as a means of locomotion, although they possessed, on the undersides of their limbs, the standard equipment of myriads of suckers. "And who belongs to these?" asked Grimes. "Me," she replied. "Is marine biology your hobby?" "I'm afraid not, Commodore. I just keep these because they're ornamental. They add something to the decor." "Yes," he agreed. "Starfish." He walked to a bench where there was an intricacy of gleaming wire. "And what the hell's this?" "A mobile," she told him. "Jeff Petersen, the Met Officer, has artistic ambitions." "And where is Mr. Petersen?" "He's away. The crowd who're setting up the weather control station on Mount Llayilla asked Captain Stacey for the loan of him." "H'm. Well, I can't help feeling, Miss Davis, that if you and Mr. Petersen devoted more time to your work and less time to your hobbies IF you'd give incoming ships far better service." She flared, "We never play around with our hobbies in our employers' time. And there's so little social life here that we must have something to occupy us when we're off duty." "I'm not denying that, Miss Davis." She switched on that smile again. "Why don't you call me Lynn, Commodore? Everybody else does." He found himself smiling in reply. "Why not, Lynn?" "Isn't that better? And, talking of social life, I'd like it very much if you came to my place some evening for dinner." She grinned rather than smiled this time. "I'm a much better cook than Mrs. Stacey." That wouldn't be hard , thought Grimes. The port captain's wife, as he had learned that morning at breakfast, couldn't even fry an egg properly. "Try to keep an evening open for me," she said. "I'll try," he promised. He looked at his watch. "But I must go. I have an appointment with the ambassador." Ill f"phe Confederacy's ambassador was a thin, languid and foppish man. In spite of the disparity in physical appearance he was cut from the same doth as Captain Stacey. He was one of the barely competent -- not quite bad enough to be fired but too lazy and too uninterested to be trusted with any major appointment. He drawled, "I can't order you not to stay, old man, any more than than I can order you to stay. Let's face it. You pile on a few more G's (as you spacefaring types put it) than I do. But I still think that you're wasting your time. The natives'll have to pull their socks up, that's all. And tighten their belts for the time being -- not that they have any belts to tighten. Ha, ha! You may have been first on this world, Commodore, but you haven't lived with these people as I have. They're a lazy shiftless bunch. They won't stir a finger to help themselves as long as the Confederacy's handy to do it for them." "And if the Confederacy won't," said Grimes flatly, "there's the Empire of Waverly. Or the Shakespear eans. Or the Federation. Even the Shaara might find this planet interesting." "Those communistic bumblebees? It might do the Mellisans a world of good if they did take over." He raised a slim, graceful wrist and looked at his watch. "Old Wunnaara's due about now. I don't encourage him -- it takes days to get the fishy stink out of the embassy -- but he insisted." " You could," pointed out Grimes, . "have a room specially fitted for the reception of local dignitaries, something that duplicates, as far as possible, the conditions that they're used to." "You don't understand old man. It's taken me years, literally, to get this shack fitted and decorated the way that it should be. The battles I've had to fight with appropriations! It's all a matter of keeping up a front, old man, showing the flag and all that -- " A smartly uniformed Marine entered the elegant, the too elegant, salon. "The Chief Wunnaara, Your Excellency." "Show him in, Sergeant. Show him in. And attend to the air conditioning, will you?"   occasion. His ungainly (on dry land) body was clad in a suit of what looked like coarse sacking. Riding high on a complicated, harness-like framework was a tank, the contents of which sloshed as he walked. From this tank depended narrow tubes, connected to his clothing at various points. They dripped, both upon the cloth and upon the Ambassador's carpet. A goggled mask, water-filled, covered his eyes and the upper part of his face. The smell of fish was very evident. "Your Excellency," he mewed. "Meelongee. Grimes Wannarbo. Meelongee." "Greetings," replied the ambassador, and, "Meelongee," replied Grimes. "Your Excellency, Grimes Wannarbo has agreed us to help. He come with me now, I show him trouble." "Do you want to go through with this, old man?" the ambassador asked Grimes. "Of course. Would you know of any scuba outfits on this island? Captain Stacey tells me that the only ones here are privately owned." "That is correct, Commodore. I could ask the Sergeant to lend you his." "Not necessary, Grimes Wannarbo," interjected the chief. "Already waiting on beach we have ship, what you call submarine." "Good," said Grimes. "You'd trust yourself to that contraption?" demanded the ambassador in a horror-stricken voice. "It'll be one of the things that they use to take stores and equipment down to their farms." "They work, don't they?" "Yes, old man. But -- " "But I'd have thought, on a world like this, that the ambassador would have his own, private submarine." "I'm a diplomat, old man, not a sailor." Grimes shrugged. He said forIF mally, "With your permission, Your Excellency, I shall accompany Chief Wi mi laara." "Permission granted, old man. Don't get your feet wet." The submarine had been pulled  up on the beach, on to a ramp that had been constructed there for that purpose, that ran from the water to a low warehouse. Apart from its wheeled undercarriage it was a conventional enough looking craft, torpedo shaped, with a conning tower amidships and rudder and screw propeller aft, with hydroplanes forward and amidships. A wooden ladder had been placed on the ramp to give access to the conning tower. Wunnaara gestured to Grimes to board first. The commodore clambered up the ladder with a certain lack of agility; the spacing of the rungs was adapted to the Mellisan, not the human frame. He had the same trouble with the metal steps leading into the submarine's interior. When he was down in what was obviously the craft's control room he looked about him curiously. It was easy enough to get a general idea of what did what to which. The Mellisans, with no written language of their own, had adapted Terran English to their requirements. There were depth gauges, steering, hydroplane and engine controls, a magnetic compass. Inside an aluminum rather than a steel hull it should, thought Grimes, function quite satisfactorily. What had him puzzled was a bundle of taut bladders, evidently taken from some sea plant. Beside them, in a rack on the bulkhead, was a sharp knife. And he did not quite approve of the flowerpot that was hanging to one side of the steering gear, in which was growing a vividly blue, fernlike plant. He recalled the conversation that he had had with Lynn Davis on the subject of hobbies. Apart from these rather peculiar fittings the little ship was almost as she had been when built, to Mellisan specifications, at the Seacraft Yard on Thule -- the original electric motors, a big bank of heavy-duty power cells, a capacious cargo hold (now empty) and no accommodation whatsoever. He had noticed, on his way down through the conning tower, that the compartment, with its big lookout ports, could still be used as an airlock. Wunnaara joined him, accompanied by another native dressed as he was. The younger Mellisan went straight to the wheel, from which all the other controls were easily accessible. The old chief asked Grimes to return with him to the conning tower. The upper hatch was shut now, but there was an unrestricted view all around from the big ports. And although the lower hatch remained open there #  IF was ample room, on the amralaa: platform, to walk around it. Wunnaara yelped some order down through the opening. Slowly at first, then faster, the submarine started to move, sliding astern down the ramp on her wheels. She slipped into the water with hardly any disturbance, and when she was afloat at least half of her hull was above the surface. Electric motors hummed and she backed away from the beach, her head swinging to starboard as she did so. She came round well and easily, and when die was broadside on to the short, starting to roll uncomfortably in the swell ,the coxswain put the engines ahead and the wheel hard over to complete the swing. Then, after surprisingly Kttle fuss and bother, she was headed seaward, pitching easily, her straight wake pearly white on the blue water under die noonday sun. r A red marker buoy indicated the location of the pearl beds. Quietly, without any fuss, the ship submerged, dropping down below the surface as her ballast tanks were filled. Grimes went back to the control room. Always keenly interested in ships -- the ships of the sea as well as the ships of space -- he wanted to see how this submersible was handled. He was alarmed when, as he completed his cautious descent from the ladder, the coxswain snatched that nasty looking nife from the rack on the bulkhead. But the MeBisan ignored him, dashed swiftly and expertly at one of the seaweedbladders. It deflated with a loud hiss. Behind Grimes. Wunnaara hooted with laughter. When he had the commodore's attention he pointed to the absurd pot plant hanging almost over the compass. Its fronds had turned scarlet, but were already slowly changing back to blue. Grimes chuckled as he realized what was being done. This was air regeneration at its most primitive -- but still effective. These submarines, when built, had been fitted with excellent air regeneration plants but, no doubt, the Mellisans preferred their own. The oxygen released from the bladder brought with it a strong smell of wet seaweed which, to them, would be preferable to the odorless gas produced by the oroginal apparatus. Grimes watched the coxswain until Wunnaara called him back to the conning tower. He was impressed by the Mellisan's competence. He was doing things that in a humanoperated submarine would have required at least four men. Could it be, he wondered, that a real sea man must, of necessity, be also a vfkst class seaman? He toyed, half humorously, with the idea of lecruitmg a force of Mdlisant mercenaries, to be hired out to those nations -- on those few worlds where there was still a multiplicity of nations -- which still relied upon sea power fo rthe maintenance of their sovereignty. Back in the conning tower he forgot his not-quite-serious moneymaking schemes. The submarine -- as he already knew from his inspection of the depth gauges -- was not running deep. But neither was she far from the sandy bottom, which she was barely skimming. Ahead, astern and on either side were the pearl beds, in orderly rows of giant bivalves. Among them worked Mellisans -- who, like similar beings on other planets, including Earth, were able to stay under water for a very long time on one lungful of air. Some of them, explained Wunnaara, were planting the irritant in the mantle of the shellfish. Others were harvesting the pearls from molluscs that had been treated months previously. These were taken to the underwater depot for cleaning and sorting and eventually would be loaded into the submarine for carriage to the spaceport. But, said the chief, this would be a poor harvest. From his vantage point he conned the ship, yelping orders down to the coxswain. Finally they were drifting over a long row of the bivalves, the way almost off the ship. All of them had been opened, and considerable force had been employed in this opening. (The Mellisans could do it, and could extract the pearl, without inflicting permanent injury upon the creature inside the paired shells.) In many cases the upper valve had been completely shattered. In all cases no more than a few shreds of tattered flesh remained. And in all cases what had been a pearl was now only a scattering of opalescent dust. Now the submarine was approaching the high, wire net fence that had been erected to protect the pearl farm. It looked stout enough to stop a ship of this class. But something had come through it. Something had uprooted metal posts embedded in concrete; something had snapped wire rope like so much sewing thread. It was not something that Grimes was at all keen to meet, not even in the comparative safety of this well-designed and built submersible. "You see?" mewed the chief. "You see, Grimes Wannarbo?" "Yes. I see." "Then what do, Grimes Wannarbo? What do?" Under stress, the old Mellisan's English tended to deteriorate. "I... I don't know. I shall have to see some of the starfish. Have you any in captivity, or any dead ones?" "No. No can catch. No can kill." There was a steady thumping sound, transmitted through the IF water, amplified by the hull plating. "Alarm!" Wunnaara cried. "Alarm! Alarm!" He shouted something in his own language to the coxswain. The submarine changed course, her motors screamed shrilly as speed was increased to full -- or a little over. She skimmed over the flat, sandy bottom, raising a great coud of disturbed particles astern of her, A head there was a commotion of some kind -- a flurry of dark, almost human figures, an occasional explosion of silvery air bubbles, a flashing of metallic-seeming tentacles, a spreading stain in the water that looked like blood. Just clear of the fight the submarine reared like a frightened horse as she came astern -- and then she hung there, almost motionless, on the outskirts. There were half a dozen of the... things , the starfish, and a dozen Mellisans. Through the now murky water could be seen the wreckage of practically an entire row of bivalves -- shattered shells, crushed pearls, torn, darkly oozing flesh, The odd things about it all was the gentleness of the marauders. They seemed to be trying to escape -- and they were succeeding -- but, at the same time, were avoiding the infliction of serious injury, upon the guardians of the beds. And they were such flimsy things. Or they looked flimsy, as though they had been woven from fragile metallic lace. They looked flimsy, but they were not. One of them was trapped in a net of heavy wire handed by three Mellisans. Momentarily it was bunched up, and then it... expanded. The wires snapped in a dozen places. One of them received a direct hit from a harpoon -- and the weapon, its point blunted and broken, fell harmlessly to the bottom. They were free and clear now, all of them , looking more like gigantic silvery snowflakes then living beings. They were free and clear, swimming towards the breached barrier, their quintuple, feathery arms flailing the water. They were free and clear, and although the Mellisans gave chase there was nothing that anybody could do about them. "You see?" said the chief. "I see," said Grimes. He saw, too, what he would have to do. He would make his own report, of course, to Rim Runners' head office, recommending that something be done on a governmental level to maintain the flow of cemmerce between Mellise and the Confederacy. And he would have to try to persuade that pitiful nong of an ambassador to recommend to his masters that a team qualified to handle the problem -- say marine biologists and professional fishermen from Thule -- be S# sent at once to Mellise. But it would not be at once, of course. Nobody knew better than Grimes how slowly the tide runs through officials channels. But... What could be, Grimes, do? Personally? With his own two hands, with his own brain? There had been something oddly familiar about the appearance of those giant Asteroidea, about their actions There had been something that evoked memories of the distant past, and something that had brought to the surface of his mind the memory of something much more recent. What was it? Lynn Davis's gaudy pets in that brightly lit aquarium? They swam, of course, and these giant mutants (if mutants they were) were swimmers, but there the similarity, seased. "What do. Grimes Wannarbo?" Wunnaara was insistent. "What do?" "I don't know," replied the commodore. "But I'll do something." But what? IV T hat night, back in his room in the port captain's residence, he did his homework. He had managed to persuade Captain Stacey to let him have the files on all Rim Run ness personnel employed on Mellise, and also had borrowed from the ambassador's library all six volumes of Trantor's very comprehensive Mellisan Marine Life. (Trantor should have been here now, but Trantor was dead, drowned two years ago in a quite stupid and unnecessary accident in the Ultimate Sea, on Ultimo, a body of water little larger than a lake.) He skimmed through Trantor's work first, paying particular attention to the excellent illustrations. Nothing, nothing at all, resembled the creatures that he had seen, although most of the smaller starfish, like the ones he had seen in Lynn Davis's tank, subsisted by making forcible entry into the homes of unfortunate bivalves. Then he turned to the files. About half the spaceport employees were true Rim Worlders born out on the Rim. The other half -- like Grimes himself -- were not, although all of them were naturalized citizens. Judging from the educational qualifications and service records of all of them, none of them would be capable of inducing a mutation. Grimes had hoped to turn up a biological engineer, but he was disappointed. And biological engineering is not the sort of thing that anybody takes up as a hobby. In addition to the years of study and training there is the quite expensive License to Practice to obtain, and the qualifications for that are moral rather than academic IF or practical. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a permanent fixture in Man's mythology. Feeling like a Peeping Tom -- another permanent fixture -- he leafed through Lynn Davis's service record. She was Terran-born, of course. Her real education had been at M.I.T., where she had graduated as a Bachelor of General Physics. After that she seemed to have specialized in meteorology. There had been a spell with weather control, North American Continent, and another spell with weather prediction, satellite-based. After that she had entered the service of TransGalactic Clippers as a spaceport meteorological officer. She had seen duty on Austral, Caribbea and Waverly, all of them planets upon which T-G maintained its own spaceports. From Waverly she had gone to Caribbea -- and on Caribbea she had blotted her copy book. So, thought Grimes, she's a com pulsive gambler . She doesn't look like one . But they never do. It was on Caribbea that she had become a regular habitue of the New Port of Spain Casino. She had, of course, worked out a system to beat the wheel. But the system hadn't worked out for her. There had been the unhappy business of the cracking of the T-G Cashier's safe -- allegedly thiefproof, but (luckily) very few thieves hold a degree in physics. There had been the new banknotes, the serial numbers of which were on record, that had turned up in the safe of the casino's cashier... After that -- the Rim Worlds. A pity, said Grimes to himself. A pity . But it could have been worse. If she'd gone to Elsinore, in the Shakespearean Sector, where they're notorious for their gambling, she'd really be in a mess by now. He turned up the file on Petersen. The absentee Met Officer was another ex-Terran, and also had been employed with Trans-Galactic Clippers. Grimes noted with interest that Petersen had spent a few weeks on El Dorado, popularly known as "the planet of the filthy rich." (Grimes had been there himself as a young man, as a junior officer in the Federation's Survey Service.) It seemed that a T-G aires' cruise, and T-G had insisted on sending its own spaceport personnel there in advance. Women, not money, had been Petersen's trouble. Twice he had been named as co-respondent in an unsavory divorce case. If the ladies had not been the wives of prominent T-G executives it would not have mattered so much. But they were. There could be a connection , thought Grimes. There could be. Both of them from Earth , both of them ex T-G... He shrugged away the idea. After all, it has been said that if one throws a half brick at random aboard any Rim Runners ship, the odds are that you will hit an ex-officer of the Interstellar Transport Federation's vessels. So it went on --  case histories, one after the other, that made depressing reading and, insofar as the quite serious crisis on Mellise was concerned, a shortage of both motive and opportunity. But money could be a motive. Suppose, tomorrow, a foreign ship dropped in, and suppose that somebody aboard her said to old Wunnaara, " We'll fix your starfish for you -- in return for full trading rights... " And whatever else I ant, thought Grimes tiredly, Vm not a starfish fixer . He poured himself a stiff drink -- Stacey, with all his faults, was a considerate host -- and went to bed. Qhe said, "I hear that you've  been looking through the personnel files, John. That wasn't very gentlemanly of you." "How did you hear?" asked Grimes. "My doing so was supposed to be as secret as the files themselves." "There aren't any secrets on this bloody planet." Her face, as she stared at him over her candlelit dining table, was hard and hostile, cancelling out the effects of an excellent meal. "And did you find what you were looking for?" "No." "What were you looking for?" "Somebody who's capable of doing a spot of biological engineering." "Did you find anybody?" "No, Lynn." "What about the spaceport quack?" "Frankly," said Grimes, "I wouldn't go to him with a slight head cold." "Frankly, my dear, neither would I." She laughed, and her manner softened. "So you're still no closer to solving the Mystery of the Mutated Starfish." "No." "Then I'll solve it for you. There was a bad solar flare about a year ago, and our atmospheric radiation count went up no end in consequence. There's the answer. But I'm glad that you stayed on Mellise, John. You've no idea how hungry a girl gets for intelligent company." "I'm glad that I stayed, Lynn. For personal reasons. But I really wish I could help Wunnaara." She said, "I don't like His Too Precious Excellency any more than you do, John, but I often feel that he's on the right track as far as the natives are concerned. Let them help themselves." He said, "I discovered this world. I feel, somehow, that it's my direct responsibility." IF She replied, a little bitterly, "I wish that you'd start shedding some of your feelings of responsibility, Commodore . Don't worry so muck Start having a good time, while you jean. " And I could , too , he thought. With a quite beautiful , available woman. But... She said, "It's a wild night. Hurricane Lynn -- I named it after me. You aren't walking back to old Stacey's place in this, surely?" He said, "It's time I was going." "You'll get drenched," she told him. "It won't be for the first time," he grinned. "All right. Then go. You can let yourself out." For a tall girl she flounced well on her way from the little dining room to her bedroom. Grimes sighed, cursing his retentive memory, his detailed recollection of the reports from all planets to which Rim Runners traded. But he had to be sure, and he did not wish to make any inquiries regarding this matter on Mellise. He let himself out of the little, dome-shaped cottage, and was at once furiously assailed by the wind. Hurricane Lynn had not yet built up to its full intensity, but it was bad enough. There were great sheets of driving rain, and with them an explosion of spray whipped from the surface of the sea. It was on a night such as this that old Captain Engels, in Lorn Lady, had almost lost his disabled ship on Mellise. But there hadn't been  a proper spaceport then, and the facilities, such as they were, had been on a much lower-lying island. T uckily the spaceport was downwind from the village. Grimes ran most of the way. He didn't want to, but it was easier to scud before the gale than to attempt to maintain a sedate pace. He let himself into the port captain's large house. The Staceys were abed -- he had told them that he would be late -- but Captain Stacey called out from his bedroom, "Is that you, Commodore?" "Who else, Captain? I shall be going out again shortly." "What the hell for?" testily. "I have to send a message. An important one." "Telephone it through to the Carlotti Communications Office from here." "I want to make sure it goes." Grimes faintly overheard something about distrustful old bastards as he went to his own room, but ignored it. There was a very cunning secret compartment built into his suitcase. The commodore opened it, took from it a slim book. Then, with scratch pad and stylus, he worked rapidly and efficiently, finishing up with eleven gibberish groups. He put the book back in its biding place, pocketed the pad. Then he had to face the stormy night again. , The duty operator in the Carlotti Office was awake, but only just. Had it not been for the growing uproar of the hurricane, penetrating even the insulated walls, he would not have been. He reluctantly put down his luridly covered book and, recognizing Grimes, said, "Sir?" "I want this to go at once. To my office at Port Forlorn. Urgent." He managed a grin. "That's the worst of space travel. It's so hard to keep track of dates. But my secretary will be able to lay on flowers for the occasion." The operator grinned back. Judging by the way he was making a play for that snooty Lynn Davis the commodore must be a gay old dog. He said, a little enviously, "Your message will be winging its way over the lightyears in a jiffy, sir." He handed the commodore a signals pad. Grimes put down the address, transcribed the groups from his own pad, filled in his name and the other details in the spaces provided. He said, "Let me know how much it is. It's private." The young man winked. "Rim Runners'll never know, sir." "Still, I prefer to pay," said Grimes. He watched the miniature CarIotti Beacon -- like a Mobius strip ft was, distorted to a long oval -- turn on its mounting in the big star tank until it was pointing directly at the spark that represented the Lorn sun. He hoped that the big beacon on the roof of the building was turning, too. But it had to be. If it stopped, jammed, the little indicator would seize up in sympathy. In any case, it was shielded from the weather by its own dome. The operator's key rattled rapidly in staccato Morse, still the best method of transmitting messages over vast distances. From the wall speaker blurted the dots and dashes of acknowledgement. Then the message itself was sent, and acknowedged. "Thank ySu," said Grimes. "If there's a reply phone it through to me, please. I shall be at the port captain's house." "Very good, sir." Grimes was relaxing under a hot shower when he heard the telephone buzz. Wrapping a towel around himself, he hurried out of the bathroom, colliding with Captain Stacey. "It's probably for me," he said. "It would be," growled Stacey. It was. It was a reply to Grimes's signal, which when decoded, had read, "Urgently require information on solar flares MdUse sun last year local." It said, after Grimes had used his IF : msmm little book, "No repeat no solar flares Mellise sun past # years." Somebody? s lying, thought Grimes, and I don't think it's my secretary. V T Turricane Lynn, while it lasted,  put a stop to any further investigations by Grimes. Apart from anything else, the sea people were keeping to their underwater houses, each of which was well stocked with air bladders and the carbondioxide absorbing plants. He managed, however, to get back on friendly terms with Lynn Davis -- or she with him, he was never quite sure which was the case. He found her increasingly attractive; she possessed a maturity that was lacking in all the other young women in the tiny human community. He liked her, but he suspected her -- but of what? It was rather more than a hunch; there had been, for example, that deliberate lie about the solar flare. Grimes, who was an omnivorous reader, was well aware that fictional detectives frequently solve their cases by sleeping with the suspects. He wasn't quite ready for that. Such a modus operandi he considered ungentlemanly. Then Hurricane Lynn blew itself out and normally fine weather returned to the equatorial belt. Flying was once again possible, and Petersen came back to the spaceport from Mount Llayilla. Grimes didn't like him. He was a tall, athletic young man, deeply tanned, with sun-bleached hair and startlingly pale blue eyes. His features were too regular, and his mouth too sensual The filed stories of his past amatory indiscretions made sense. And he was jealously possessive insofar as Lynn Davis was concerned. She's mine, Commodore, was the unspoken message that Grimes received, loud and dear. She's mine. Keep your dirty paws off her. Grimes didn't like it, and neither did the girl. But he, now that the storm was over, was busy again. At least once daily he argued with the ambassador, trying to persuade that gentleman to request the services of a team of marine biologists and professional fishermen. He composed and sent his own report to Rim Runners' head office. And, whenever conditions were suitable, he was out to the pearl beds with Wunnaara, at first in the little submarine and then in a skin-diving outfit that the spaceport's repair staff had improvised for him. It was a bastard sort of a rig, to quote the chief mechanic, but it worked. There was a spacesuit helmet with compressed-air tanks, suitably modified. There was a pair of flippers cut from a sheet of thick, tough plastic. There was a spear gun and a supply of specially made harpoons, each of which had an IF explosive warhead, fused for impact. As long as these were not used at too close a range the person firing them should be reasonably safe. Lynn Davis came into the maintenance workshop while Grimes was examining one of the projectiles. " What's that, John?" she asked. "Just a new kind of spear," he replied shortly. "New -- an' nasty," volunteered the chief mechanic, ignoring Grimes's glare. "Pack too much of a wallop for my taste. If you're too dose to the target when one o' these goes off, you've had it." "Explosive?" die asked. "Too right." She turned back to Grimes. "Are these safe, John?" "Safe enough -- as long as they are used carefully." "But against starfish. Like using an dephant gun against a gnat!" "There are starfish and starfish," he told her. "As everybody on this planet should know by this time." "You think this will kill them?" "It's worth giving it a go." "Yes," she admitted. "I suppose so." Then, more briskly, "And when are you giving your secret weapon a trial?" "There are a few modifications to be made," Grimes told her. "They'll all be ready for you tomorrow morning," said the chief mechanic. "As promised." She turned on her dazzling smile. "Then you'd better dine with me tonight, John. If you will insist on playing with these dangerous toys there mightn't be another time." She laughed, but that odd, underlying note of seriousness persisted. She went on, "And Jeff will be out of our hair, I promise you that. There's a party on in the Carlotti Operators' Mess, and those he never misses." "I've a pile of paper work, Lynn," Grimes told her. "That can wait." He made his decision. "AH right, then. What time?" "Whatever time suits you. # hours, shall we say? For a few drinks first..." "Good. I shall be there." T T e dressed carefully for the dinner party, paying even more attention to the contents of his pockets than the clothes themselves. He had one of his hunches, and he knew that he would need the things that he was taking from the secret compartment of his suitcase. There was the Minetti automatic, with a spare clip, neither of which made more than a very slight bulge in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. There was the pack of cigarillos -- and two of the slim, brown cylinders possessed very spedal properties and were marked in such a way that only Grimes would be able to identify them. Marriage to an Intelligence Officer, he thought, has its points. Something is bound to rub off. There was the button on his suit that was a camera, and the other button that was a miniaturized recorder. On the way from his room to the front door he passed through the lounge where Captain and Mrs. Stacey were watching a rather witless variety program on the screen of their playmaster. The port captain looked up and around, his fat, heavy face serious. He said, "I know that it's none of my business, Commodore, and that you're technically my superior, but we -- Lucy and myself -- think that you should be warned. Miss Davis is a dangerous woman." "Indeed, Captain?" "Yes, indeed. She leads men on, and then that Jeff Petersen is apt to turn nasty." "Oh?" An ugly flush suffused Stacey's face. "Frankly, sir, I don't give a damn if you are beaten up for playing around with a girl young enough to be your granddaughter. But because you're Astronautical Superintendent of Rim Runners there'd be a scandal, a nasty scandal. And I don't want one in my spaceport" "Very concisely put, Captain. But I can look after myself." "I hope that you can, Commodore. Good night to you." "Good night, Captain Stacey." Grimes let himself out The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place. His suspicions were about to be confirmed. He smiled grimly as he walked along the narrow street towards the row of neat little bungalows, in one of which Lynn Davis lived. Night was falling fast Already lights were coming on in the houses. From open windows drifted the sound of music. The scene was being set for a romantic -- romantic? -- assignation. Lynn Davis met him at her door. She was dressed in something loose and, Grimes noted as she stood with the lamp behind her, almost transparent. She took his hand, led him into her living room, gently pushed him down into a deep chair. Close by it was a tray of drinks, and a dish upon which exotic delicacies were displayed. Real Terran olives I A score of those would make a nasty hole in the weekly pay of an assistant met officer. Sea dragon caviar from Atlantia. Pickled rock frogs from DunartiL The playmaster was on, its volume turned well down. A woman was singing. It was an old song, dating back to the Twentieth Century, its lyrics modernized, its melody still sweet with lost, archaic lilt. IF Spaceman , the stars are calling , Spaceman, you have to roam... Spaceman, through light years falling, Turn back at last to home... # C C Qherry, John?" asked Lynn  Davis. She was sitting on the arm of his chair. He could see the gleam of her smooth flesh through the sheer robe. "Amontillado?" He said, "You're doing me proud." She said, "It's not often I entertain such an important guest as you." He sipped the wine from the fragile glass she had filled for him. She had measured her own drink from the same decanter. He did not think that there was anything wrong with it -- any connoisseur would have told him, indignantly, that there was nothing wrong with it -- but at the first hint of muzziness he would smoke a cigarillo... She was leaning closer to him, almost against him. Her robe was falling open in front. She was wearing nothing underneath it. She said, "Aren't you hot? Why not take your jacket off?" "Later, perhaps." He managed a quite creditable leer. "After all, we've all night." "Why waste time?" Her mouth was slightly parted in frank admiration. What the hell I thought Grimes -- and accepted it Her body was pliant in his arms, her lips on his warm and moist But his mind, his caU, calculating mind, was still in full command of the situation. He heard the door open softly, heard feet sliding over the thick carpet. He pushed the girl away from him, from the corner of his eye saw her fall to the floor, a delectable sprawl of exposed, gleaming body and limbs. "Sol" snarled Jeff Petersen. "So. This is what you get up to, Mr. Commodore Dirty Old Man Grimes! What did you promise her, you swine? Promotion, and a transfer to a better station?" But Petersen, Grimes noted, was not a slave to his instincts any more than he, Grimes had been. Superficially his voice was that of the wronged, jealous lover. But there was an artificial quality in his rage. Grimes said equably, "I can explain -- " "Yes." Petersen was advancing slowly. "You can explain after I've torn off your right arm and beaten out your brains with it." Suddenly the tiny pistol was in Grimes's right hand. It cracked once, and once only, a sound disproportionate to its dimensions. Petersen halted, staggered, staring stupidly. He swayed on his feet for long seconds and then crashed to the floor, oversetting the low taing body of the girl. She exploded up from the carpet like a tigress, all teeth and daws. Grimes was hampered by the chair in which he was confined but fought her off somehow. He did not want to use the gun again. "You bastard!" she was sobbing. "You ruthless bastard! You killed him! And we were careful not to kill -- not even the natives #" "I didn't kill him," Grimes managed to say at last, after he had imprisoned her hands behind her back, after he had damped her legs between his own. ff I didn't kill Mm. This pistol is loaded with anesthetic needles. He'll be out for twdve hours -- no more, no less." "He's not... dead?" "Do dead men snore?" asked Grimes practically. "I... I suppose not" Her manner changed abruptly. "Well, he asked for it, John, and this time he got it. Poor Jeff." There was little sympathy in her voice. "So..." "So what?" "You did say he'd be out of things for twelve hours, didn't you?" He said admiringly, "You're a cold-blooded bitch." "Just realistic." She lunged forward with her head, but it was not to bite. After the kiss Grimes released her. She pulled slowly away from him, walked undulatingly to the door of the bedroom, shedding the torn remnants of her robe as she went. Grimes sighed, then got up and followed. yi he said, "That was good... " "It was." "Stay there, darling. FH make us some coffee. We don't want to waste time sleeping." A sleep , thought Grimes, is just what  should like. The sleep of the just... Of the just after... He sprawled at ease on the wide couch, watched her appreciatively as she left him, as she walked gracefully to the door. In the subdued light she was all rosy bronze. In any sort of light she was, as he knew, beautiful. He heard a slight clattering from the kitchenette, imposed upon the still stertorous snores of the hapless Jeff. After a while he heard the hissing of the espresso machine. She came back with a tray on which were a pot and two cups. She poured. "Sugar, darling? Cream?" The steam from the coffee was delicately fragrant. He reached out for his cup, accidentally (?) put his fingers on the handle of hers. She gently pushed his hand away. "Mine has no sugar," she told him. "You're sweet enough as you are," he said, asking himself, How corny can you get? So he took three sips of the cofIF fee that was intended for him, and at once felt the onset of heavy drowsiness, even though there was no warning flavor. He mumbled, "Like a smoke... Would you mind, Lynn? In my pocket... She reached out to his clothing, produced the packet of cigarillos and his lighter. She, he already knew, did not smoke herself, which was just as well. She handed him the packet. In his condition, in the dim lighting, he could hardly make out the distinguishing mark. He hoped that he had the right one. Here and now, the special effects of the other one would be more spectacular than usual. She lit the cigarillo for him, smiling condescendingly down at him. He inhaled the smoke, retained it for long seconds before blowing it out. He took one more sip of coffee, then let a dribble of the hot fluid fall onto his naked chest. He was careful not to wince. He mumbled indistinctly, then fell back against the pillows. His right hand, with the little, smouldering cylinder between his fingers, fell limply on to his belly. He could smell the acridity of burning hair, felt the sharp beginnings of pain. With a great effort of will he remained in his relaxed posture. He heard her mutter, "I should let the old bastard burn, but -- " Her cool, slim fingers removed the miniature cigar from his hand. He felt very grateful to her. He heard her dressing. He heard her walk rapidly from the bedroom. He heard, eventually, the front door open and shut. He gave her time to get clear of the house.   bed he expected to feel sick and dizzy, with drug and antidote still at war within his system. But he did not, although he was conscious of the minor burns. He dressed rapidly, checked his possessions. He was pleased to find that the Minetti was still in his pocket. Probably whatever it was in the coffee was supposed to put him under for a longer period than the anesthetic needle-bullet that he had used on Jeff Petersen. The street outside the house was deserted. Everybody was indoors, and everybody seemed to be having a party. He grinned. He had had one too, and some of it had been fun. He walked briskly away from the spaceport, in the direction of the beach where he had first met Lynn Davis. The signs that had been affixed to the trunks of trees were a help. By what moonlight And how would she have managed, he wondered, if the other human ladies on Mellise had shared her views on public, outdoor nudity? The beach was deserted. Backing the narrow strip of sand were the trees, and between their boles was undergrowth, affording effective cover. Grimes settled down to wait. He dipped out the magazine from his automatic and exchanged it for the other one. The needlebullets in it were no more lethal than those of the first had been. But they differed from them in one or two respects. He took the remaining cigarillo from his packet, put it carefully into his breast pocket. This one had a friction fuse. At last she came, walking barefooted over the sand, her shoes in her left hand, a heavy case in the other. She dropped the shoes, put the case down carefully. She opened it, then pulled out a silvery telescopic antenna to its full extent She squatted down, making even this normally ungainly posture graceful, appeared to be adjusting controls of some sort. There was a high, barely audible whine. Something was coming in from the sea. It was not a native. It came scuttling ashore like a huge crab -- like a huge, five-legged crab. Then there was another, and another, and another -- until two dozen of the beasts stood there waiting. For orders -- or programming? Grimes walked slowly and deliberately out from the shadows, his Minetti in his right hand. He N said quietly, "I'm sorry, Lynn." She whirled grotesquely, like a Russian dancer. "Youl" she snarled, making it seem like a curse. "Yes. Me. If you come quietly and make a full confession I'll see to it that things go easy for you." "Like hell I will!" She toned swiftly back to tKei transmitter, kicking up a flurry of sand. The whining note abruptly changed to an irregular beat. And then the starfish were coming for him, slowly at first, but faster and faster. He swatted out instinctivdy at the leading one, felt the skin of his hand tear on metal spines. In his other hand was the gun. He fired -- almost a full burst. The minute projectiles tore through the transmitter. Some of them, a few of them, were bound to sever connections, to shatter transistors. They did. There was a sputtering shower of blue sparks. The metal monsters froze into immobility. But she did not. She had her own gun out, a heavier weapon than Grimes's. He felt the wind of her first bullet. And then, with one of the few remaining rounds in his magazine, he shot her. T Te stood there looking down at her. She was paralyzed, but her eyes could still move, and her lips, and her tongue. She was paralyzed -- and when the drug took hold properly she would feel the compulsion to talk. She asked bitterly, "How long will this last?" IF "Days, unless I let you have the antidote." She demanded, "How did you know?" "I didn't know. And I added two and two to make a quite convincing and logical four. Suppose I tell you -- then you can fill in the details." "That'll be the sunny Friday I" "Will it?" Grimes squatted down beside her. "You had things easy here, didn't you? You and Jeff Petersen. Such a prize bunch of nongs and no-hopers, from the ambassador and the port captain on down. I shouldn't have said  that; I forgot that this is being recorded... "Well, one thing that started to make me suspicious of you, especially, was that lie you told me about the solar flare. I checked up. There are very complete records of all phenomena in this sector of Space in my office at Port Forlorn. Then there was the shortage of spares for your equipment -- I remembered that the requisitions for electronic bits and pieces have been abnormally heavy since you and Mr. Petersen were appointed here. There was that ornamental tank of little starfish -- and that so-called mobile almost alongside it. Petersen's hobby. The construction that, I realized later, looked very like the tin starfish I saw raiding the pearl beds. There was the behavior of these same tin starfish -- the way in which they attacked the bivalves with absolute vidousness, the way in which they seemed very careful not to hurt the Mellisans. "That tied in with the few weeks that Petersen spent on El Dorado. "They have watchbirds there, Lynn, and similar semi-robots that function either on the ground or in the water. Animal brains in metal bodies. Absolute faithfulness and obedience to their human masters. As a skilled technidan, Petersen would have been able to mingle, to a certain extent, with the gifted amateurs who play around with that sort of thing on El Dorado. He must have picked up some of their techniques, and passed them on to you. The pair of you modified them, probably improved upon them. A starfish hasn't any brain to speak of so probably you have the entire animal incorporated into your destructive servants. Probably, too, there's an electronic brain built in somewhere, that gets its orders by radio and that can be programmed. "You were going to recall the local -- flock, pack, school? what does it matter? -- tonight, weren't you? For reprogramming. Some pre-set course of action that would enable them to deal with xthe threat of spears with explosive warheads. It wouldn't do to have tin tentades littering the ocean floor, would it? When the Mellisans brought in the evidence even the ambassador would have to do something about it. "And for whom were you working?" he asked sharply and suddenly. "T-G." The answer had slipped out before she could stop it. "Trans-Galactic Clippers Why do they want Mellise?" "A tourist resort" She was speaking rapidly now, in obvious catharsis. "We were to destroy the economy, the trade with the Confederacy. And then T-G would step in, and pay handsomely for rights and leases." "And you and Mr. Petersen would be suitably rewarded." TTe paused, "Tell me Lynn. Did   you enjoy tonight? Between the disposal of Jeff and the disposal of myself, I mean?" "Yes," she told him. "I'm glad that you said that. It makes what I am going to do a lot easier. I was going to do it in any case." As he spoke, he pulled the cigarillo from his breast pocket, scratched the friction fuse with his thumbnail. The thing ignited at once, fizzed, ejected a bright, blue pyrotechnic star. It was his signal to Wunnaara. "I'm letting you go free," Grimes went on. "Both of you. You will have to resign, of course, from Rim Runner's service, but as T-G are your real employers that shouldn't mean any hardship." "Haven't much option, have I?" she asked. "No." "There's just one thing I'd like to say. That question you asked me, about my enjoying myself... I'm bloody sorry that this damned truth drug of yours made me give the right answer!" "I'm not," said Grimes. by Roger Zelazny by J. T. McIntosh -- and many morel Don't miss the January Issue of It, thrice voted world's favorite science-fiction magazinel IP IF  Serial Everyone was outspying Kosloff -- until the revelations of Nostra damus taught him to use intuition Illustrated by of a famed espionage-counter-espionage agent , is giving one of Ms weekly lectures on the Slavic languages over Tri-Vision . Although on the stodgy side, his hobbies indude mountain climbing, hunting and fishing in remote spots such as the Yukon, pistol and rifle shooting -- and karate . On a mountain climbing jaunt he once saved the life of his Tri-Vision technician, Following the broadcast in Greater Washington, he returns to his home in the pseudo-city of Princeton, dimly becoming aware of a stranger in the same vacuum-tube transport vehicle in which he rides . Upon entering the block of miniapartments where he resides, he is jumped by two assailants who are ed Mm from Greater Washington, enters the fray. Castriota accompanies Paul to his mini-apartment and reveals that the two footpads were trying to kill him. Castriota also reveals that he is connected with the Inter-American Bureau of Investigation and pressures Paul into a trip to Denver. In Denver, Paul is taken to the high officiaTs beautiful secretary sibly the most important man in the United States of Americas , being chief of the National Computer Data Banks. He explains to Paul that the nation has become completely dependent upon the system of computers, data banks , and the teevee phones which every citizen must wear. And also reveals that mysterious efforts are being made by unknowns both to tap the American data banks for their information, and possibly to wipe them clean. Such an eventuality would mean complete collapse of the American culture. Paul, who has relatives in Common Eur-Asia and also speaks all the Balkan languages, has been selected by the computers as the most suitable man to enter Eastern Europe as an agent to find whether or not the Common EurAsians are behind the efforts to sabotage American data banks. He refuses on the grounds that despite his father's prominence in the field, he knows nothing about such matters. He returns to his home and several days later is approached again by Castriota who reveals that during the scuffling with the two wouldbe assassins of Paul a bug was planted in the pocket of one and mysterious saboteurs are hiding. They are on Manhattan , wMch has been abandoned since the riots that destroyed the city years ago. He IF wants Paul to come along , since the others are suspected of being Rumanians and Paul speaks the language . Paul accompanies him to Manpretends to be one of the " baboons " who live in the ruins of the city , outcasts from society and rebels against the Ultra-welfare State . boons who are in Martino y s debt , they locate the hideaway of the saboteurs and , in an effort to secure more information about them , send Pete through the ruined subways with a bug to plant near the former bombshelter in a deserted department store basement where the others are hidden . Pete is captured and in an effort to rescue him and also to prevent the others from escaping by way of a submarine which is awaiting them in the Hudson River, Paul, Zack and Martino dash in. A fight follows in which all except Paul and one of the enemy, who escapes, are killed. Paul, badly wounded, activates his wrist teevee phone and calls Dempsey Harrison in Denver. "I'll take that assignment ," he says. XI 'pvempsey Harrison, Director of the National Data Center, lot... cated in Denver, said, " Professor Kosloff, Mr. Edgar of the InterAmerican Bureau of Investigation. I believe you have already met Miss Stebbins." Paul Kosloff recognized the head Vision news programs. He shook hands and exchanged the usual banalities. He also said hello to Lisa Stebbins, who today was in the latest of feminine fashion, rather than Data Center uniform. They were in the escape room of Harrison's luxurious offices in the National Data Center, possibly the most extensive complex of offices in the world. Implausibly, there was a real fire going in the fireplace and, almost as implausibly in this ultimate center of the computer system of the United States of the Americas, their host stood before a real bar. He took up a bottle, saying hospitably, "Is it too early in the day for anyone?" James Edgar chortled deeply to the point that his rotund belly shook. He was a rolly-poly man in his late fifties, jolly of face ' and looked absolutely nothing at all what one would expect of the ultimate authority in the world's second largest police organization. He said, "It is never too early, in this day and age, when you are offered real guzzle. The ultimate luxury, eh, Professor Kosloff? Dempsey should be ashamed of himself, setting such an example. For all practical purposes, the whole world has banned the use of cereals for beverages, and this nation, at least, grapes for wine. Next thing we know, hell be offering us cigars." Their top bureaucrat host said, "My dear Jim, none of your precious laws are being broken. This stuff is all prehistoric. Rank has its privileges, one of which is to spend astronomical sums on such ultimate luxuries as top quality guzzle and -- you'll never believe this -- hermatically sealed Havanas. I had one the other day at Bickford's. Actually, it has been so long that I found I had lost the taste for tobacco. Cognac and soda acceptable to everyone?" Lisa Stebbins, sitting rather primly to one side, said, "If you don't mind, sir, sherry for me." "Imagine anyone as young as Miss Stebbins having developed a taste for anything as exotic as Spanish sherry," Harrison said jovially. Paul Kosloff was inwardly impatient. He still had minor bandages here and there and was a full five pounds under his normal weight. He wanted to get underway. He said, "Cognac is fine."   drinks, Edgar said to Paul Kosloff, "I knew your father slightly. "Oh?" He couldn't help adding, "So did I." Paul said, "What I meant was -- only slightly. He was too busy fighting the Cold War to pay much attention to the little boy under foot about the house." James Edgar chuckled, as though it had been meant to be amusing. "The Lawrence of Arabia of the Cold War, eh? And now, here you are following in his footsteps." "Not exactly," Paul said coldly. The rotund police head had a tendency to irritate him. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to have second reactions to this situation in which he found himself. Dempsey Harrison evidently sensed the latent antagonism. He handed the drinks around, found his own favorite comfort chair, and said to Paul, a placating element in his voice, "You must realize, Professor Kosloff, that we four in this room are the only persons in the United States of Americas who are familiar with your assignment." Paul couldn't keep from frowning at him. "You mean that not even the President..." Harrison made a negative gesture with his left hand. "There is no such thing as letting the President in on an ultimately hush-hush situation such as this, Professor Kosloff. He has assistants, and assistants of assistants, and assistants of assisIF tants of assistants. It funnels down through scores of persons." He added, dryly humorous. "And besides, frankly, he isn't very bright." Paul Kosloff had already suspected that from what he had heard of the Chief Executive, but it wasn't exactly the sort of thing he had expected to hear from Dempsey Harrison who was actually a more important official, though supposedly a subordinate of the President. The computer data chief went on. "We are keeping the utmost security on this, Professor. It is not even going into the top priority data banks. How efficiently this mysterious element is tapping our information, we don't know, but they won't find anything about your mission. The last piece of information that went into your dossier recorded your refusal to take the assignment to Common EurAsia. There has been no record of your trip to Manhattan, your hospitalization, nor your coming here today." Paul said, "That Rumanian with the bug planted on him. He probably saw me there at the fight at the bomb shelter." "But from the description of that fracas, it was brief and poorly lit. It's very probable that he didn't know you were present." "What's happened to him?" Paul said. J ames Edgar's face had lost its jolly qualities and there was a puzzled something in his voice. "We kept the fix on the bug. He went down to the river, obviously got aboard a vessel and headed out for the open sea." "Couldn't you have had the craft intercepted?" Edgar shook his head. "Not when it was three hundred feet below the surface. By the time we had suitable craft after it, it was six hundred feet." Paul said, "I didn't realize naval submarines went that deep." Dempsey Harrison said, "Why did you think it was necessarily a naval vessel?" Paul looked at him in surprise. "It never occured to me otherwise. A Common Eur-Asia submarine." "I doubt if the usual submersible could have penetrated our waters, even to such a point as the ruins of Manhattan. But our detectors, once locked onto it, indicated that this vessel was less than fifty feet long. Some specially built spy-craft, possibly. And that was borne out later. You see, we dumped the whole thing in the lap of Interpol when the submarine began to approach Europe. Frankly, we expected it to proceed through the Straits of Hercules and probably to the Dalmatian coast of what was formerly Yugoslavia. But according to Interpol, it didn't. That bug of ours proceeded to a thinly populated stretch of the Normandy coast. The man carrying it obviously disembarked. The bug then proceeded to Paris, where it was lost." "Lost?" "Evidently, at that point the carrier was mopped and the bug discovered and destroyed. We're lucky it remained undetected as long as it did." Paul Kosloff thought about it. He said finally, "Frankly, I don't see of what use I'd be to you. People continually seem to get the impression that because my father was active in international espionage-counter-espionage that I acquired his abilities in my genes. I didn't. I don't know a secret code from the blue prints of a space satellite." "You don't have to," James Edgar said. "What you'll be mostly, Kosloff, is a contact man. You have various excellent qualifications, especially your cover. You speak the Balkan languages, you have relatives there. You're undeniably a university professor. In fact, if I'm not misinformed, you have some international credit coming to you that you can spend only in Common Eur-Asia -- royalties on a couple of your books." "I'd forgotten about that," Paul said, nodding. "Very good. You have a perfect excuse for going into their country. You'll contact people there, give them the situation, find out what can be found out and return to report verbally." Paul said, "Do you mean to tell me that you people have no more efficient means of communicating with your foreign agents than messenger boys?" Dempsey Harrison said mildly, "Formerly, a sealed beam phone was considered excellent. But if they are tapping our data banks, how do we know they aren't tapping everything else? No, everything connected with this operation goes by courier." it this way. You'll lob over to Paris, independently of each other, and contact Interpol to find out if they have anything. They've already been briefed by courier and..." "Independently of each other?" Paul asked. "Ah, you didn't know that Miss Stebbins is also involved in the assignment?" "Miss Stebbins?" Paul looked at the beautiful and self-possessed Lisa Stebbins. She turned down the sides of her mouth. "You have objections?" "Oh, I didn't mean that. It just, well, never occurred to me." "How much do you know about computers and their data banks, Professor Kosloff?" "Nothing." IF "I know everything about them." Dempsey Harrison said, "You might need someone an the spot to consult with on some element of the problem with which you are not familiar. Miss Stebbins won't go into Common Eur-Asia with you, but will be on hand in, say, Geneva. Interpol will undoubtedly have some suggestions on that. We're turning this over to them." "Could you brief me on this Interpol?" Paul Kosloff said. "I've heard of them vaguely." "International Police," Edgar said. "In the old days, before the amalgamation of the Western European countries into Common Europe, Interpol was a somewhat loose organization of national police cooperating in international matters, smuggling, the dope traffic, criminals who would commit a crime in one country and flee to another to escape arrest. That sort of thing. But with the forming of Common Europe, the only thing that made sense was to merge Scotland Yard, the Prefecture de Police of France, the Bund Polizei of West Germany, and all the rest, into one. We cooperate widely, of course." Paul said, "All right. I contact Interpol. How?" "Carefully. You first go to a moderately priced hotel, like any tourist. That evening you go out on the town. You'll be met." "How'll I know I'm being contacted by the right people?" "You'll know. And they'll take it from there. Miss Stebbins will go independently of you and will make connections through Interpol." "All right," Paul said. "I suppose I have it." He looked over at Dempsey Harrison. "Could I have a spot of that cognac for the road?" Harrison grinned at him. "I should say no," he said plaintively. "Within a couple of hours you'll be in France, and there you can still get the precious stuff, although they won't export it." But he took the edge off his words by pouring them all another hefty snort. The data bank head looked at Paul speculatively. "You realize, of course, Professor Kosloff, that this is the single most important project upon which you have ever embarked. Our world today is geared to the computer. We cannot go back. If anything happened to our data banks, our culture would collapse. All industry, all distribution, all our accumulated knowledge, is dependent upon the data banks." Paul Kosloff knocked back the brandy. "So everybody keeps telling me," he muttered. D empsey Harrison said, "We might as well get the show on the road. Professor Kosloff, Miss Stebbins will go further into the details with you, provide your rocketplane ticket, and International Credit Card." The data, bank head looked at James Edgar. "If you'll just stay on for a few minutes, Jim, there are some odds and ends to go over." Paul Kosloff and Lisa Stebbins came to their feet Paul went through the usual routine of shakmurmuring amenities, then turned and followed the lithe Lisa from the escapl room! studiously trying to keep his eyes from the gentle sway of molded hips. In the outer office, she was briskly efficient. She fished in a drawer of her desk. "Here is your International Credit Card." "How about my passport?" "You are out of date, Professor. Your International Credit Card is your passport. All the data once on a passport is now on your credit card." "I assume I have unlimited cr cut." "Wrong assumption, Professc tt is not to be expected that teacher of languages would be qui so prosperous. We don't know what extent our data banks are b mg pned into, but if our frien came up with the little item th Professor Paul Kosloff had be, given unlimited credit, they mig smell a rat. As Mr. Edgar suggej . act like any touri staying m a moderately priced h tel and so forth." Paul pretended to groan. " Paris, and I have to be on a shoestring." She looked at him speculatively. "You don't exactly look the type who would throw a blast on the Rue Pigalle." "Looks can deceive." "If that is supposed to be a leer, it doesn't quite come off. Here's your rocketplane ticket." "Tourist class, of course." "Of course." Paul was looking at the International Credit Card. He winced and said, "Where'd you get this photograph?" "Out of the data banks, of course. I picked the one that looked least like you." "I'll say you did." "Lends authenticity. Passport photos never looked like the bearer, and now the same thing applies to International Credit Cards." He looked at her. "I'll bet your lunch that your own photo on your credit card is tri-di, in color and makes you look like this year's winner of the Inter-American Miss America Contest." TT'or the first time since he had met Miss Lisa Stebbins, she laughed. And it came to Paul Kosloff suddenly that not only was this girl extraordinarily handsome but that she was possibly the single most beautiful girl he had ever seen. It brought him up abruptly, IF along with the realization that he was going to be thrown together with her in the following days very closely indeed. He wasn't complaining. "All rigjit," she said. "You win. Lunch is on me. No, I'm prevaricating. Actually, it's on the National Data Center. Mr. Edgar already suggested that we two get together over lunch to learn to know each other a bit better. If you'll come this way, I'll take you to the senior executives' auto-cafeteria." "Auto-cafeteria?" Paul said. "Is that the best Edgar could offer to two of his gladiators who are probably going forth to die? Which reminds me, he looks like a professional Santa Claus between Christmases." She led the way to the outer corridor, saying, "Don't downgrade Mr. James Edgar. You don't reach his position by other than your own efforts and his position is one of the highest in the Ultrawelfare State." She looked up at him from the side of her eyes. "By the way, just for the record, he is a very bad man not to have on your side." Paul snorted lightly. "I'm a professor of Slavic languages. What difference could it possibly make if Edgar was less than happy about me?" She said, "All right, but I told you." Lunch was surprisingly good in spite of the ultramated nature of the auto-cafeteria. Evidently, Harrison's comment about rank having its privileges applied to the food of the data center's senior executives, as well as to liquor laid and fermentation. No dishes based on Antarctic krill were served here, nor even whale steaks. Paul ate beef for the first time in so long that he couldn't remember. It must have been imported from Australia, he decided. He had heard that they still grazed beef cattle down under, and wondered vaguely how much longer the Aussies would be able to afford to. It turned out that they had considerable in common, including love of sports, contempt of TriVision as a means of entertainment, love of good books, contempt of labor draft dodgers and others who purposely lived lives of complete leisure, love of good food and drink, and contempt of what they usually had to put up with as an alternative, a preference for Chinese food, and contempt for such pseudo-concoctions as Chop Suey and Chow Mein. P aul said, over their coffee, "Actually, I'm not really interested in sodo-economics but I sometimes wonder if we aren't in a rut with this People's Capitalism of ours." "How do you mean, Paid?" They were calling each other Paul and Lisa already. Professor Kosloff and Miss Stebbins had fallen by the wayside. "It's possible for cultures to get into a historic rut. Egypt was an example. So was the Mayan civilization. They reached a certain level and stayed there for centuries." She thought about it, tilting her head unconsciously. She was, he decided all over again, the best looking woman he had ever talked to. He had never particularly liked red hair before; now he was enraptured of red hair. "Go on," she said. "It's not good for a people to be able to exist without any effort whatsoever. It wasn't good for the Roman proletariat, and it finally contributed greatly to the fall of that Empire. And it's not good for the United States of the Americas, and I wonder if it'll eventually contribute to the fall of our country. Possibly, it'd be better if these data banks of ours were wiped clean, and we'd all have to pitch in and rebuild our world." She shook her head at him. "You can't unsolve a solved problem, Paul, any more than you can unscramble scrambled eggs. The computer world is here to stay. Perhaps it isn't the best possible of all worlds, possibly it needs changes. But whatever changes we make, the new world would still utilize computers. You know what would happen if our worse fears were justified and our unknown enemy was able to wipe our data banks?" He looked at her. She said, "We'd devote all efforts to fill them again. We'd have to. It gives me a headache just to think of the magnitude of the task, but we'd have to begin." He shrugged. "Life was simpler before." "That it was," she admitted. "But that doesn't answer everything. Today, the combination of computer, data banks and the teevee phone working through them, is as important to man as fire was a couple of centuries ago." "Oh, come now." She pointed at her wrist teevee phone. "Practically every element of your life is tied up with this. At birth you are issued your teevee phone number which is also your credit account number, the number of your home, your postoffice box number, if you will. It is also your driver's license number, your medical records number, your military, and so on. It's also your voter's registration number and your teeveephone is your secret voting booth. "Think of just that aspect of it. A citizen no longer registers to vote. Upon coming of age, the comIF puters automatically register him. When he votes, it is on his teevee phone and there is no way possible for a crooked politician to count him out. Remember reading in the past, when whole elections were completely crooked? Ward heelers would go through the cemeteries finding names to register and later vote. Ballot boxes would be stuffed, or sometimes stolen. Records would be lost'. Some elements even voted over and over again. Well, no more. Elections are now at least honest. "Or take another aspect, that you've possibly never thought of. Children don't get lost any more. They can't. At birth they get their number and parents hang a little -- well, it amounts to a bug -- around their neck. The little tots don't have teevee phones that early but their parents, the police, or whoever else might be looking for them, can get a fix on them from the computers in a matter of seconds. Of course, that applies to you, too. I understand you like mountain climbing. Wizard. Suppose you're up in the Canadian Rockies alone and fall and break your leg way out in the boondocks. In the past, you would have been a dead man. But today you activate your wrist phone and request that they come and get you. You are, literally, in communication with anyone in the world within seconds." P aul Kosloff said uncomfortably, "Oh, I'm not denying the extent to which the computer-data bank-teevee phone combine enters into our lives. But that's the very trouble. It robs us of all privacy. Of course I can get in communication with anyone in the world in a matter of seconds, but the trouble is, they can get in touch with me, too. Suppose I'm up there in the Canadian Rockies trying to get away from it all, and my phone rings and there's some slick trying to sell me a fancy imported wallto-wall rug for my mini-apartment." Lisa had to laugh. "You know very well that's easily handled. You have priorities on your phone. Tri-Vision stars and other celebrities would be deluged otherwise. Everyone lists their Number One Priorities and only those persons can ring them up at any time at all. Then you have your Number Two Priorities and that list includes most of your friends, acquaintances and business associates. But if you'd rather not have even these calling you in the middle of the night, or when you're out on a date, or whenever, you simply switch off your Number Two Priority and nobody on that list can get through to you. Then, of course, there's Number Three, and celebrities keep that switched off practically all of the time, but persons like you and me don't bother to. Number Four Priority is for the pests, and only the type person who is lonesome, or some such, :omes through has it switched on." It was Paul's turn to laugh and his chuckle was rueful. " Trouble with me is, I'm top curious to know who's calling to switch off any of the priorities, except possibly Four. But this whole conversation reminds me. I've heard they have a new library booster teevee phone screen over in Common Europe. Very fine screen, wonderful for its reproductions of paintings and such delicate reception. I want one." Lisa said, "I've got too many teevee boosters around the house as it is. One whole wall is taken up by my movie booster. Then there's my library booster, and a phone screen in every room. That's not counting the door identity screen, the Tri-Vision set and a smaller library booster screen I've had set into the ceiling above my bed so I can dial old movies, or concerts or whatever, if I can't sleep. I'll have to move out if anyone moves another screen in." Paul Kosloff said, "All right, I surrender. I'll admit that our world is so computer-teevee phone orientated that we couldn't abolish them, even if we wanted to." Lisa Stebbins was suddenly very serious. "The point is that we've simply got to prevent anyone else from abolishing them for us." nphe rocketplane lobbed him over directly to Orly Rocketport and he took a vacuum-tube vehicle from there to the terminal on the lie de la Cite . He had never been in Paris before, but his French was adequate and he was tourist equipped with maps and guidebooks. He had been somewhat surprised that Harrison and Edgar hadn't given him a definite hotel to go to, but then, he supposed that was part of his cover, as they called it. The less others knew about where he was and what he was doing, the better. He didn't imagine Interpol would have much trouble finding him, not in this day of police detection gadgets. From one of his guides he had already picked a hotel, the aging George V Hilton. He studied the maps and instructions on the terminal walls, and dialed his way through to it, after placing his International Card in the payment slot. In the United States of Americas, he could have dialed through right to a room and have registered from it without ever having to see a hotel employee. But evidently here in Common Europe ultramation had not gone quite so far, at least not in the George V Hilton. He emerged from his vacuum-tube vehicle into a large lobby and live bellhops grabbed up his luggage and hauled it to a busy reception desk. Paul Kosloff had never seen IF a bellhop before, save on TriVision shows. At the reception desk he told them his needs, was assigned quarters and registered by putting his International Credit Card in the desk teevee screen, and adding his thumbprint. At least, the bellhops didn't lug his stuff all the way to his room. There was a delivery chute at the side of the desk. In his room, he found the French weren't as prehistoric as all that. There was an auto-bar in the comfortable quarters which overlooked the Place de la Madeleine and the Roman temple with its majestic Corinthian colonnade. The auto-bar was a slightly different model than the ones he was used to at home, but presented no problems. He dialed beverages, then alcoholic beverages and then read the list admiringly. Perhaps the French had gone along when the world had banned the use of cereals for such drinks as beer and whiskey, but they had no intentions of giving up the products of the vine. Paul Kosloff had had precious little wine in his life and looked forward to it during his stay in Europe, but right now he was up to spirits. He dialed a cognac and soda and, when it came, took it to a chair near the window and sat and sipped and looked out over the city. Paris, the City of Light. He had never met a person who had been to Paris that didn't like the city. Come to think of it, they usually liked the city and disliked the French. Why, he didn't know. Paul Kosloff was not politically conscious, but inwardly thought of himself as a liberal. He didn't believe in making judgments of a whole people, he believed in judging each person as an individual. But then, he had never met such as the Egyptian, either singly or en masse. T T e was again having second   thoughts. He must have been an idiot to have taken this assignment. He hadn't the vaguest idea of what was expected of him. Very well, admittedly his cover was excellent. Few would think twice of his entering either Common Europe, formerly known as the West, or even Eastern Europe, now part of Common Eur-Asia. But so what? Once there, what was there for him to do? Well, he couldn't put it off indefinitely. He put his glass back on the top of the auto-bar so that it could sink away into the bowels of the hotel to be automatically washed and stored away for its next usage. Map and guidebook in hand -- still the tourist -- he went down to the lobby and out onto the street. He could have taken a vacuum-tube vehicle or, just for the experience, one of the antiquated metros, but he decided to walk. The reason was double. He wanted to witness the city; he also wanted to check on whether or not he was being followed. Who would follow him, he didn't exactly know, but whether it was the enemy or an agent of Interpol, he'd still like to be aware of it. He strolled down the Rue Royale to the Place de la Concorde and crossed the Champs-Elysees at its lower end. In the distance, he could see the Arc de Triomphe and felt that tiny stirring when a man first sees Napoleon's arch of victory. He crossed the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde and emerged onto the Boulevard St. Germain. The walk fascinated him. The United States of the Americas was new. The cities, even the old ones still standing, were new, not to speak of the planned pseudo-cities. Paris was old, old. His instructions were to go out on the town. How he would be contacted and by whom, he hadn't the vaguest idea. Very well, he was out on the town. He strode along St. Germain, taking in this generation's artists, poets, musicians, sculptors, writers, both pseudo and otherwise. Paul Kosloff didn't know it, but they differed little from those of Hemingway's Lost Generation, or of the lost generation of Francois Villon's day. All generations of artists are evidently lost. He was beginning to get tired of pavement-pounding and turned left on a side street, the RuelAbbaye, which bordered an ancient looking church. There was a sound of guitars and song from a small place. All right, he was on , the town. He entered a small club called L'Abbaye.  And was hissed to silence. An .  t p   y aging Negro was sitting on a straight chair on a platform and singing a folk song. Folk music was no longer "in" in the United States of the Americas and it had been some time since Paul Kosloff had been subjected to it. The old timer was good.   L.i   "  i i , '   ushered to a tiny table. A head waiter, yet, he marvelled. He was used to the auto-cafeterias and auto-bars of home, where the customer was untouched by human hands, period; where the customer never saw an employee of the establishment -- assuming there were any such. Usually, efficient crews of men served the ultramated auto-cafeterias back home. However, his table was automated. He put his International Credit Card in the slot and dialed champagne. It was expensive, but, then, he had never tasted champagne. Let Dempsey Harrison foot the bill. Paul Kosloff was on an expense account. The center of the table sank -- to return with glass and a full bottle of chilled wine. Paul Kosloff blinked at it. He had expected a single glass. However, he poured and sipped. To his surprise, it turned out that he didn't lie the taste of the bubbly wine as much as he had expected to. The folk singer launched into a new song. Little boy, how old are you? Little boy , how old are you? Why , sir, Vm only six years old . Paul Kosloff found that he was enjoying himself. The other occupants of the tiny boite were largely younger people, teenagers some of them. Evidently, this was a favorite hangout of the ardent striver set When a song ended, they snapped their fingers rather than applauding; seemingly it was an institution in this establishment. As he lifted his glass to his lips again, realizing that the taste of the vintage wine was growing on him, a newcomer slid into the chair across the table. The light was dim, but it was all that he could do to refrain from spewing his mouth full of wine out over the table top. rf Zackt " he ejaculated. T he other said drily, "The name is Georg." And then, even in the dim light of VAbbaye, Paul Kosloff could see that the man across from him was a younger edition of Zack Castriota. He put his glass down and shook his head. "This came as a surprise," he said. "I last saw Zack under the most unpleasant of circumstances. We hadn't known each other very long, but we were beginning to grow on one another. Brother... ?" "That's right," the other said. He extended a hand to be shaken. His voice was low. "Younger brother. Colonel Georg Castriota. You, of course, are Professor Kosloff." Paul said, even as he shook, "How did you locate me? I've been looking out for anyone following me." The other chuckled in deprecation and looked at the champagne. He even had the mannerisms of his brother. "That's going to cost said, dialing for a glass. "I will gladly submit the bill to Paul said. Georg Castriota's glass arrived and he helped himself to a glass of the wine, evidently automatically assuming he was welcome. He said, quietly, "Security being what it is, the details of Zack's... end haven't all come through to us." #I  IF Paul Kosloff said in a new-found caution. "Is it at all possible that our conversation is being overheard ?" The other shook his head. "Quite impossible." "Someone told me that snooping devices have been so perfected that it is possible to put a bug on anyone's wrist teevee phone so that not only can all phone calls be monitored but all conversations taking place in the vicinity. And nobody seems to know just how sophisticated this equipment of our mysterious snoopers might be. If they can tap our data banks, perhaps they can also tap our communications system." The Interpol agent nodded. "However..." He brought from an inner pocket of his jerkin what would at first appear to be an old fashioned cigarette case and handed it to Paul Kosloff. Paul scowled down at it. Georg Castriota said, "For every flow there's an ebb. When some slick first invented the sword, several millennia ago, in short order somebody else came up with armor. More recently, when the tank was devised, someone else came up with the bazooka." He nodded at the compact object Paul was examining. "You activate it by simply throwing that little switch. It scrambles any electronic bugs in your immediate vicinity. A lot of people keep a variation of it in their escape rooms. As long as it's on, not even your teevee phone will work." "I'll be darned," Paul said. He began to hand the device tack. "Keep it," Georg Castriota said. "And now, the details of Zack's death?" Paul told the whole story. ; B y the time he had come to the end, the bottle of wine was empty. They maintained a lengthy silence. Georg Castriota's face was expressionless save for a slight tic at the side of his mouth. He sucked in air, finally, and said, "All right. It's the way Zack would have liked to have gone." He fished in a pocket again to emerge with another credit card. He handed it to Paul Kosloff. It was evidently a standard Common Europe equivalent of the American Universal Credit Card, although Paul had never seen one before. The face on it was his own and he suspected the thumbprint was as well. However, the identity number was strange to him and the name on the card read, Herman Voss. He looked across the table at the Interpol man. Georg said, "Your cover involves your having limited expenditures as a teacher making a tourist trip through Europe. We've issued this to you in case of extraordinary expenses. Even though our data banks are being tapped as well as your own, it's unlikely they could trace this to you. Nor will any of the records of this appear in your own data banks to cause suspicion. What you spend on your International Credit Card will, of course, appear all over the place, including in Switzerland for eventual international clearing." He grunted sourness. "The world's got a lot of progress still to be made. We need an international njonetary system. As it is, ultimately our exchange is still based on gold, and still has to be cleared from one country to another." "Well," Paul said, "the credit card is still a big improvement over the old system. Money never was a very good means of exchange. In the old days, you could work all your life and accumulate a small fortune, represented by gold. Wizard. But along would come a man with a gun and point it at you and walk off with your life-time work. It got even worse when paper came in to represent the gold, which was buried away in the ground somewhere. Your house could burn down and your paper money with it, and there was the end of your life's work. At least now nobody can steal your money, nobody can spend it but you, you can't lose it, and you can't be conned out of it." "I suppose so," Castriota said. "However, I still think at least a monetary union of the United States of the Americas and Common Europe would make a lot of sense. For that matter, a more allembracing union." Paul Kosloff was intrigued. "Sort of bring you into the United States as a junior partner of the firm, eh?" Castriota said, "Why junior?" Paul said, "Sorry. I wasn't trying to tread on your toes. It's just that we're so much bigger than you are." "Size isn't everything. Australia is bigger than Common Europe, too." Paul said uncomfortably. "Well, I wasn't simply speaking of size. Our gross national product is considerably larger and..." C astriota was looking at him impatiently. "Zoroaster, I sometimes think you Americans are the most arrogant people since Rome. These gross national product statistics are, along with per capita income statistics, some of the most elastic going, and it makes one hell of a difference who does the compiling." Paul frowned at him. "Look," Castriota said, leaning forward slightly. "Suppose you have two brain surgeons, one located in Greater Washington and one in Vienna. They are equally accomplished and do the same number of operations a year. The American is paid fifty thousand IF dollars a year and the Austrian doctor ten thousand. Those amounts are entered in their respective countries as part of the gross national product. Next year, the American arbitrarily doubles his fees, figuring he might as well get in on the gravy. He performs no greater number of operations, but now his contribution to the dred thousand dollars. That of the Austrian doctor, strictly controlled by the government, still remains ten thousand dollars." Paul had to laugh. Defensively he said, "Well, admittedly in services, errors can creep in. However, ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the American standard of living is the highest in the world." The other was still irritated. "Is it? What determines a standard of living? For a long time, you Americans have been claiming the highest in the world, but by using whose criteria? If you base standard of living on diet, then the Australians, New Zealanders and even Argentines could point out that their meat consumption has been higher than yours since the early part of the #th Century. If your national health is a criterion, then by the standards of northern Europe in general, your level is shockingly low. If education is your criterion, then even the Russians surpass you." Paul said mildly, '"We have more color Tri-Vision and teevee sets per capita..." The other was on him. "And so what? How do you stand on legitimate theatres, opera, ballet, concert halls? Even the Eastern Europeans have been far ahead of you in those fields since long before your Ultra-welfare State was formed. Where do you place security in this standard of living of yours? The Scandinavians, the Swiss, the Dutch have had a security going back for decades before your comparatively recently instituted People's Capitalism with its inadequate womb to tomb dividends from Inalienable Basic. There hasn't been what you could truly call a poor man in Scandinavia or Switzerland in the memory of living man." Georg Castriota was well into it now; evidently it was a pet peeve of his. He said, "Besides, Gross National Product and the per capita income of a country has little to do with the living standards of the people. You might have ten people whose gross product is one their per capita income a hundred thousand dollars apiece. However, how it is distributed is another thing. One man might get nine hundred thousand of that amount, a second man get sixty thousand of it, and the remaining eight wind up with five thousand apiece, which comes under the head of poverty in these days. "As far back as the middle of the #th Century, Russia had the second largest gross national product in the world, but the people lived like pigs. The government spent the income on rapid industrialization, on the military and the space program. The United States had the largest gross national income of all; but it also had the largest military machine, the largest bureaucracy, and the most ostentatiously living upper class in the world. And with all this went the appalling poverty of your slum dwellers, your American Indians and your rural backward areas such as the Appalachians." T)aul Kosloff said with a grimace.  " You're even worse than Zack. He too had this anti-American bit." Georg Castriota was still impatient. "I'm not anti-American. If anything, it's the other way. I think Common Europe and the United States should have closer ties, particularly in our monetary systems, communications and computer data banks. But I get fed up with your delusions of grandeur occasionally." Then, in a complete change of subject: "Who are they?" Paul looked at him. Castriota said, "These people who are tapping the data banks?" "We were hoping you'd have some ideas." The other shook his head. "Do you know who we thought it was, at first?" "Who?" "You." The American stared at him. "What are you talking about?" "When we first became aware of the fact that our data banks were being tapped, we thought you Americans had come up with a method of doing it. Zack couldn't believe it and was assigned to go to Greater Washington to check. He had the advantage of being a personal acquaintance of your Dempsey Harrison. We accepted his reports that you people were up against the same thing." "Well, that leaves our friends the communists." "Calling them communists, these days, is stretching a point. However, why? Why couldn't it be some neutral state -- say the Union of North Africa?" Paul Kosloff was unhappy. "From what Dempsey Harrison said, our own technicians have been working on the theory..." "Oh, they have, eh?" Paul said, "Well, have yours?" Castriota grunted. "I suppose so. Not with much success certainly." "Harrison says that our people think they're near some break throughs, and near possibilities, IF whatever that means. But it's one thing being near breakthroughs, and another having made them. The point is that this is pretty sophisticated stuff. If your scientists and ours haven't been able to tap the data banks of another power from a distance, why should a bunch of Arabs, or whoever, be able to?" "You're most likely right. Look, who started the rumors?" "What rumors?" "The first inklings we had of our banks being tapped were a spate of rumors that spread through Paris and Geneva, where, as you know, we have our main banks. Rumors were that the data banks were being invaded," Paul Kosloff said slowly, "Zack and Harrison did mention rumors. They didn't go into details." astriota said suddenly, "Look,  have you had dinner?" "Why, no. I ate last in Greater Washington, just before taking the rocketplane over." The other came to his feet. "There's a restaurant nearby. Let's continue there." It was all right with Paul Kosloff. He looked forward to French food which, along with that of the Chinese, was still the most famed in the world. However, they had to wait for a short period until the folk singer finished his current song. Evidently in UAbbaye correct protocol was not to stir as long as a song was in progress. When it was through, they dutifully snapped their fingers in applause along with the teenage fans of the boite. On the street again, it was night. "This way," Castriota said. "It's only a few blocks and the walk will give us an appetite." He led the way back up to Boulevard St. Germain and turned left. It was completely dark now, save for the street lights, which were somewhat more bright than Paul Kosloff was used to in the pseudocities of America. However, he suspected that the Manhattan of the old days before the riots must this, not to speak of such abominations as Las Vegas. As they pressed through the throngs of pedestrians, Georg said, "You've never been to Paris before?" v "No. My sole European jaunt was to Yugoslavia to visit some relatives there." "It's a town that gets under your skin. I suspect that it will be a long time before such centers as Paris, Rome and London disappear. Our cities didn't evolve quite the way yours did." They waited at the corner of St. Germain and Rue de Seine for a letup in the swarm of floater autocabs, and then crossed to the far side of the boulevard. Paul Kosloff was fascinated by the clothing styles, or rather the lack of them. Evidently fashion on the Left Bank of Paris was meaningless. It was every person on his own, and evidently the devil take the hindmost. Had he known it, this had been so almost since Caesar's day, and a computerized world was not about to change it. He looked at his companion and said, "How do you mean?" "Your big cities never had anything of enough value to retain. They completely changed their faces every couple of decades or so. A building seldom lasted long enough to become old. It was torn down and another more modern one erected. We treasure old building, you become impatient with them. Some of the best hotels in Europe are literally hundreds of years old." Paul said sourly, "I doubt if we have any that are fifty. If we do, they aren't our best hotels. They're fleabags." Georg said, "So when you started building your expressways and speedways, you tore great holes in your cities, pulled down buildings, uprooted parks. We couldn't do it. Almost every building in downtown Paris or Rome is a historic monument that can't be touched. We simply couldn't allow to happen to our cities what did to yours." Paul looked about him. "You should be glad." "I am. Here. We turn here. You'll love this place. Rim by a family that's now in its third generation. Old, old neighborhood. There's one bar in this vicinity that has cellars going back to Roman times." 'T'hey turned right onto Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, out of the bright lights of the main stem of the Latin Quarter. Within a block it had become quite dark. Georg Castriota looked up at a darkened lamppost and said, with a puzzled quality, "Lights seem to be out in this vicinity. Hope the restaurant hasn't been affected." They crossed another street. The area was residential now, and largely deserted. Paul could see only two other figures, both of them in the distance. Georg said, "That's the Odeon Theatre up there at the end of the street. Very famous once." He added, "Here's the restaurant. Monsieur Pierre's. Michelin gives it one star, but it deserves two." Paul snapped, "Look out!" He spoke too late. The assailants were upon them. He inwardly swore now. He hadn't been allowed to bring his .# Noiseless. University professors on tourist trips do not usually go armed. And most certainly, crossing the Common Eur-Asian IF border with a gun would have been disastrous. The border authorities would without doubt have been equipped with detectors that would have picked the metal up. There were three of the others, and they descended from nowhere. Immediately, developments became a blur of confusion. Georg Castriota blurted, "The scrambler I Deactivate..." and then went down in a crumbled heap. Paul bounded back into the small doorway of the restaurant. It wasn't a matter of two to three now, it was one to three. Georg didn't stir. Paul hadn't even seen what had hit the Interpol agent. Evidently, some sort of bludgeon. Georg seemingly wasn't the handto-hand fighter his brother Zack had been. The three came toward him slowly. One said in a low, guttural voice in English, "Surrender yourself, Professor Kosloff. Resistance is futile." Paul Kosloff was in the Hachijtdachi spreadout position. Left foot slightly forward, body weight evenly distributed, both fists clenched, knuckles facing down and held slightly to the side of his waist. "Come in and get me, you f linkers," he growled. They began to move in unison, their hands outstretched. It suddenly came to him what Georg Castriota had said, even as he noted that worthy beginning to move slightly beyond the trio. He darted a hand to his side jerkin pocket, slid it in and snapped over the lever of the cigarette-case-like scrambling device Georg had given him. The three rushed. One threw a right, and Paul moved slightly back and to the left and blocked the punch with a hard right block to the other's outside wrist He felt a blow crush into his left ribs, and grunted. TTe had one small advantage.  The three got in each other's way. No, he had two advantages. The others were trying to overcome him, not kill him. In fact, the one who had spoken was still muttering placatingly, calling on him to surrender, even as he tried to throw his arms around the American. As they scrambled about, behind them, still on the cement sidewalk near the curb, Georg Castriota managed to get his wrist teevee phone to his face. "Zero-dans, zero-dansl" he snarled into it. One of the three growled irritation and rushed over and aimed a brutal kick at the fallen man's head. But Georg rolled quickly over the curb and into the street and tried to come erect. The other followed him and chopped down with a vicious judo blow. It contacted only glancingly, but the Interpol man went down again. Meanwhile, Paul Kosloff had his work cut out for him. The narrow doorway in which he had taken his stand confined him in his movements, but on the other hand, it prevented the two who now opposed him from coming in from either side. Their attack had to be from the direct front. Largely he punched, using the Okinawa fist, but given the room, he occasionally attempted a side knife-edge kick or a cross kick. Suddenly the two stepped back, their expressions furious. One fumbled under his coat to emerge with a squat handgun. But at that split moment, a police floater came careening around the corner from the direction that Paul and Georg Castriota had just come. The wail of another floater's siren screamed down from the direction of the Odeon. The gun began to come up, but its bearer was put off by the new emergency. One of the three, darting his eyes about like a trapped coyote, screamed, " Venn rapide " Even as he began to run, he also began tearing a weapon from his own shoulder rig. In seconds the street was seemingly full of police floaters and men, both uniformed and in plain clothes, began erupting from them. Georg Castriota, a gun now in his right hand, was up on one knee and yelling, "Prend-les vivantl" And disregarding his own order, he blasted three rounds into the back of the sole remaining of the trio, just in time to prevent that cornered desperado from cutting Paul down. A uniformed flic came running up to Castriota. " Colonel , comment allez-vous, okay?" Georg snarled something at him, came entirely erect and barked at Paul, "Get inside, damn it! Off the street! " P aul Kosloff knew when to take orders. He turned quickly, grabbed the knob of the door and went on into the restaurant, ignoring the body of the fallen assailant. From up the street came the chatter of guns. Inside, obviously the sounds of the conflict had penetrated. The ground floor of the small establishment seated approximately twenty, and the tables had evidently been full. Now the customers were on their feet buzzing excitedly, bugeyeing Paul when he entered. In the middle of the floor, standing before a tiny bar, a pear shaped, applecheeked little man in the most stereotyped of stereotyped chef's costumes, complete to white hat perched high, was wringing his hands and whining. Paul said impatiently, "Do you have a private room?" IF The other stared at him in terror. Paul repeated it in French, "Avez-vous une chambre privee?" The restaurant employee came out of it long enough to point at a very narrow, winding stairway. Paul went up it and found three small private dining rooms above. He entered one of them and took a chair facing the door. Georg Castriota wanted him out of the way. Very well, he was out of the way. He sat there wishing that he'd had the presence of mind to garner himself a hefty drink down at the bar before coming up here. Possibly twenty minutes passed before Georg Castriota entered, still dusting the street's dirt from the knees of his trousers. He was obviously disgusted. He turned and shouted something down the stairwell, then entered the room where Paul sat He glared at Paul. "Did you contact anyone at all, between the time you left Orly until you entered that boite on the Rue d'Abbaye?" Paul said, "No." "You had to have!" "No. I don't know anybody in Paris, even if I had wanted to contact them." Georg Castriota flung himself into a chair, rather than simply sitting down. "They're all dead," he said in complete disgust. "They wouldn't allow themselves to be captured. They shot it out. Damn good men, as a matter of fact." A waiter, on the trembling side, came up the stairs. "A bottle of Beaujolais," Georg snapped in French. "And menus. This is a restaurant, isn't it?" The waiter murmured something, and scurried down the stairs again. G eorg took a deep breath and looked at Paul accusingly. "That simply couldn't have happened. It makes no sense at all." Paul could think of nothing to say to that. Finally, he said, "Who were they?" "We don't know. No identification at all. I couldn't even identify that language." "It was Esperanto," Paul said. "I'm not really up on that so-called universal language, but I know a few words. I heard one of them say, kill him in Esperanto." Georg looked at him in surprise. "I gained the impression that they were trying to kidnap you." "At first. When they saw it wasn't coming off, evidently their orders were to finish me." "The thing is, they shouldn't have been there. It's an impossibility." "If you located me, why couldn't they have? You found me by getting a fix on my teevee phone?" "Correct. But there in the nightclub we had the scrambler on. No bug could have worked. They had no way of knowing we were going to Monsieur Pierre's here." " Maybe they simply tailed us. This might be the age of computers and teevee phones and all the rest, but methods of yesteryear can still be used." Georg said, as though explaining to a backward child, "They didn't tail us here. They were here before we arrived." "How do you know?" Paul said, mystified. "Because the street lights had been extinguished before we ever turned off St. Germain to go up Rue Monsieur-le-Prince." Paul Kosloff was taken aback. "That's right," he said. "How did they accomplish that?" "We'll find out," Georg said grimly. "Some of my men are working on it now. But it couldn't have been something they pulled off on a minute's notice." They halted their conversation when the waiter returned with the bottle of light red Burgundy, two glasses and two menus. When he was gone, Georg Castriota took up his glass. "Well, it was a short acquaintanceship, but it was pleasant knowing you, Professor. A real experience to see you in action." Paul looked at him. "How do you mean?" "I mean you might as well get back on the rocketplane and return to your university, Professor. You're useless over here. Your cover has been blown sky high. How, I don't know, but so far as cover is concerned, you're as conspicuous as a walrus in a goldfish bowl." As was obviously correct. P aul sipped at his glass, frowning his puzzlement. "I can't see how." "Neither can I, damn it. There must have been a leak back in Denver." Paul shook his head. "Only Dempsey Harrison, James Edgar and Lisa Stebbins knew about it at all. Nothing went into the data banks. It was all planned in Mr. Harrison's escape room. Nothing was said over a teevee phone. The leak couldn't have been in Denver." "Well, it couldn't have been here. You weren't in town for more than a few hours." "Could it have possibly been a coincidence? Three footpads attacking us?" "Don't be ridiculous. Have you forgotten? They were trying to kidnap you. Zoroaster only knows why. And one of them called you by name. It's as you said earlier. Their orders were to kidnap you, and if it was impossible to pull that off, to kill you." The Interpol man's phone tinkled and he activated it and held it up to his face. Paul couldn't hear the conversation, but the other's face went wan. IP Finally, Georg Castriota said, "#I be at the office later." He deactivated the phone, picked up his glass and drained it. He looked over at Paul Kosloff. "That was Geneva. What did you say the name of that girl was? The one who was present at your conference in Harrison's office at your National Data Center, in Denver?" "Lisa Stebbins. Why?" "She's disappeared. She was scheduled to land at the Geneva rocketport at seven o'clock. Evidently, she did. That is, she was on the rocketplane. She must have left it, quite normally. There's no record of her from there on. Her luggage is still at the rocketport. Her wrist teevee phone has evidently been destroyed or deactivated. They can't get a fix on it" xv T)aul Kosloff blurted, "She's been kidnapped ! " Georg Castriota looked at him strangely. "Or rejoined her colleagues?" "Don't be ridiculous." "Somebody blew your cover. An attempt was made to capture you. It failed. So she disappears. Doesn't that suggest anything to you, Professor Kosloff?" "Yes. We were a team. When we landed here in Common Europe an attempt was made to kidnap me. Evidently, in her case, it sue ceeded. Her cover was obviously blown too. It sounds increasingly as though whoever is behind all this is on this side of the ocean." "You're the one who is being ridiculous." "Why would she abandon her luggage, if she simply wished to make off with her colleagues, as you call them?" "How would I know?" Georg Castriota picked up his menu in disgust. "We might as well order. We have to eat. Do you like Co quilles St . Jaques ? Monsieur Pierre does them beautifully, in a special semi-sweet wine sauce." "Scallops? Of course, but look here, Castriota..." "You're going to have to eat anyway. We can finish any discussion while we do." He pressed a button for the waiter. "I'll assign you a couple of bodyguards and they can see you safely back to Orly Field and get you on the next rocketplane." Paul Kosloff lapsed into sour silence while the waiter came, took their order and disappeared again. He said, merely to be saying something, "I don't believe I've ever seen so un-automated a restaurant. I doubt if there are a score of live waiters in all Greater Washington, and they're in private clubs and such, purely for ostentation." The Interpol man said ungraciously, "You Americans carry your ultramaiion to the utter extreme. Gracious living is one of the most precious attributes of existence, why throw it away? Auto-cafeterias are all very well, if you are in a hurry and want only a quick sandwich and a cup of coffee for lunch, but to eat automatically prepared food, served in a sterile atmosphere automatically to canned music, is an abomination and to be avoided if possible." "It saves a good deal of time and labor." "Time and labor we have in abundance these days. Save it to what end? What better way to expend surplus labor than on attractive restaurants? Saving labor was all very important a century ago, but you Americans got on the binge and can't shake it." npfie dishes they had ordered   came and were served with a flourish. Paul Kosloff tasted. "Zo-ro-as-terl" he said. "Good?" "Wonderful I" Paul exclaimed. "I don't believe I've ever tasted anything like this." The other nodded, gratified. "You certainly haven't in the United States of the Americas." "No. I suppsiI haven't. Admittedly, we Americans largely eat to stoke the furnace. Perhaps it's part of our Puritan tradition." Paul took another bite of the superlative food. "A good many of us look on too much preoccupation with food as, well, almost effeminacy. The question is put: do you live to eat, or eat to live." Georg Castriota snorted at that. "Obviously, both. However, good food is an art, not a craft. You don't look down on a man because he likes to listen to good music, nor to look at beauty, or to smell a flower. Why should the other sense, taste, be discriminated against?" He pointed at Paul with his fork. "You started with some very sound traditions in the foods of a frontier country. Such items as the seafoods of New England, your wonderful fruit pastries, pies, your smoked hams and the skillet magic of your Southern States, your barbeque meats, your soups and chowders. But then you began to mechanize. You started down hill with your monstrous reliance on canned foods. You invented such abominations as skinless frankfurters, and the feeding of skim milk to chickens." The European rolled his eyes upward. "Anyone who would eat the insipid meat of a milk-fed chicken! But that was just the beginning. Frozen foods came along and rapidly became a fetish. Kery few, if any, foods will take freezing and retain their true flavor. But it was still just the beginning. Your women became caught up in IF this drive to save time at any cost and revolted against the kitchen. Prepared dinners came in and took over. Put the whole, beautifully packaged, prepared mess into an electronic heater and then serve, later throwing away the dishes and even utensils. And your restaurants. Cafeterias and automats and finally, now, the auto-cafeterias, the food prepared by auto-chefs, untouched by human hands and served at auto-tables automatically, in restaurants that even self-clean themselves. Nor..." Paul said quietly, "Pm not going, you know." The other was disconcerted by the break into his attack on the eating habits of the people of the United States of the Americas. "Eh?" He took up his wine and half drained it. "I'm not going back to the States." "But of course you are." "No." Georg Castriota put down his fork. "Look here, hombre, I told you, your cover is completely blown. You're of no value to us. Frankly, I never was of the opinion that you would be of much use, but the decisions were made on a higher level than mine." "I'm staying." "And I say you've gone completely drivel happy. Do you think for a moment that we would now turn over to you the identity of any of our contacts in Bucharest, Belgrade, or anywhere else?" "No, I suppose not. Nevertheless, Miss Stebbins and I were a team. I'm not going to leave her over here." "Wizard. The lone eagle, eh? A university professor storming into Common Eur-Asia looking for his chum-pal. Kosloff, what in the name of the very living Zoroaster do you think you could do in the way of finding this Lisa Stebbins that Interpol, with the cooperation of your Inter-American Bureau of Investigation, can't do?" "I don't know," Paul Kosloff said stubbornly. #Tf you stay on here, we'll have to utilize the manpower necessary to guard you, when they could be busy at trying to find Miss Stebbins." "I don't want a guard. He'd probably just draw attention to me, anyway. Listen, that fellow your brother Zack planted the little bug on. Where'd he go? All they told me in Denver was that the bug faded out here in Paris." Georg Castriota sighed. "We followed him a bit longer than that. Before he detected the bug, here in Paris, we put a twenty-fourhour-a-day tail on him. He shook two of them, the last day he was here, and evidently thought he had shaken them alL However, one agent was still on him." "And then where did he go?" "Budapest. We lost him there." Paul said thoughtfully, "Of course, you would. He was in home territory." Georg Castriota scowled at that. "Well, no, not necessarily. You see, he was of Italian descent, not Rumanian. Possibly the other one that jumped you and Zack in front of your home was a Rumanian, but we checked this one out closely enough when he was here in Paris to find he was an Italian." "Do you have any idea at all why he went to Budapest? I suppose it's a silly question." Georg Castriota said, in a tone reminiscent of his brother, "Budapest, Budapest. Seat of the Commissariat of Computer Data Banks of Common Eur-Asia, and the head offices of Academecian Pol Kodaly." "Who is he?" "You really don't know anything about the computer system, do you, Professor? Pol Kodaly is the Common Eur-Asian equivalent of your Dempsey Harrison. In other words, ultimate head of their data banks." "All right," Paul said. "That's where I'm going. To Budapest." "I warn you, Kosloff. You'll have no support whatsoever from Interpol." "I don't expect any." He had already been equipped by the efficient Lisa Stebbins with visas for Common Eur-Asia and with sufficient international credits to see him through the expenses end. He returned to the hotel, downed several stiff cognacs in hopes of nulling himself to sleep, but then spent a largely slumberless night. By three in the morning he was fully awake, staring into the darkness above, and going through that early morning period of wakefulness during which all seems disaster. Georg Castriota had obviously been right. Who was he to go romantically to the rescue of his team mate? International espionage-counter-espionage was not handled on such a basis. Spy-craft was not as prevalent today, perhaps, as it had been of old, but organizations such as Interpol and the to handle the problem than was Professor Paul Kosloff, linguistics teacher on the Tri-Vision University of the Air. But toward dawn he fell off again and got some fitful rest. TT'rom the air he received a quick  impression of Budapest when the rocketplane utilized its braking jets for the descent and landing. The two old cities straddling the Danube had changed little in the central areas over the centuries. Buda on the hilly west bank, Pest on the flat east bank, and the ultraIF beautiful Margitsziget Island going back to the days when Roman legions originated the twin city as a military camp. The outer areas were different, especially on the Pest side of the river. Pest now spread out almost to the extent of an American pseudo-city, and far beyond the modern rocketport. Paul Kosloff had heard it had one of the most advanced vacuum-tube transport systems in Europe and quite up to the standards he was used to. And by the looks of the hills above Buda, the elite of Common Eur-Asia evidently made their home here. He was mildly surprised, since his one contact among his never-seen relatives lived in the Matyas-Hegy section of Buda. Evidently at least one branch of the family had prospered, in spite of living behind what had once been known as the Iron Curtain -- now long since rusted through. He had actually half expected to be arrested at the rocketport upon landing. To the contrary, he was all but ignored. The examination of his papers and his luggage was but a formality, and the immigration authorities seemed downright pleased at an American with such an excellent command of their language. He realized, of course, that linguistically speaking the Hungarians were an island in the midst of a Germanic and Slavic sea. The only other European language even remotely allied to Magyar was Finnish, thousands of miles away. He explained briefly his business. He was an American teacher in Budapest to perfect his accent and to visit his relatives on his mother's side. He entered as a tourist and really had no idea of how long his stay was to be. They politely inquired as to his finances, and he revealed that he had certain resources beyond the amount credited to him on his International Credit Card. He had royalties coming on several of his books that could be spent only in Common Eur-Asia, an institution between East and West that went back for decades. The government tourists organization, still known as Ibusz, had tourist guides available; but with Paul's command of the language and his ever-ready tourist guide books, it was obvious that he didn't require one. He went on into Budapest proper in a public vacuumtube vehicle that differed little from those he was used to at home, save that the vehicle seated some fifty persons rather than the more usual twenty in the Americas. The downtown terminal was located at what had once been the Keleli railroad station at the end of Rakoczi Ut. Paul Kosloff emerged and asked a police officer how to summon a floater auto-cab, and how to dial it through to his destination. Once again, his command of the Magyar tongue greased the way for him. In fact, the policeman tried to practice his English on Paul, who remained firm, explaining that his own purpose was to perfect his accent. H e had read of Budapest, and had seen Tri-Vision travel and fictional shows devoted to the city. And it was, after all, the birthplace of his maternal grandmother. He would have liked to have strolled the streets, assimilating its flavors. However, his luggage among other things called for an immediate locating of a hotel. The better Budapest hotels stretched along the Danube, on both sides. Those destroyed in the Hitler war were a heartbreaking loss of some of the most elegant hosteiries of the old Europe, but long since they had been replaced. To Paul Kosloff's gratification, the Hungarian architects had refrained from the ultra-modern which prevailed in the Americas and had chosen to rebuild in the architectural traditions of the medieval. At random, he chose the Danu, at Apaczai Cseri Janos ut # , located charmingly on the river within sight of Margitsziget Island and Buda on the far bank. The old, weathered Parliament Building, now a museum, his guidebook told him, was a block or two to the north. As in Paris, hotel employees were still utilized. Paul Kosloff repressed a smug feeling of satisfaction that in the United States of the Americas the hotel enterprises had been far more ultramated. In the States one could dial right through in a small vacuum-tube vehicle to a hotel room, register in the teevee screen there, order food, drink or anything else, stay for the period desired and leave again, without ever seeing a hotel employee. Come to think of it, though, he was not so very sure that such sterility in hotel hospitality was so desirable. There was a certain pleasantness here in being personally greeted, his desires requested, having a clerk see him to his room and being assured that all was in correct order. The clerk suggested a cool bottle of Riesling wine, to help him relax from his arduous trip and showed him how to dial the Common EurAsia version of the room's autobar. His trip hadn't been as arduous as all that, having lasted a matter of no more than minutes from Orly field, but Paul Kosloff had heard of Hungarian Riesling and had no desire to refrain. He put his International Credit Card in the teevee screen slot, his thumbprint on the indicated position, and dialed a bottle of Balaton. He poured and took the glass of IF chilled wine to the window and stared out. Well, here he was, on his own in Common Eur-Asia. Was Lisa Stebbins here in Budapest, probably under duress and possibly even physical pressure? He shook his head. In actuality, he had no idea of why they should wish to abduct her. For that matter, he had no idea of why they had made the attempt on him in Paris. Nothing about all this made sense to him. TTe finished the one portion of wine and put the glass down. He went over to the room's teevee phone screen and dialed information and then said, "I wish to put a call through to Antal Puskas." When the face faded in, Paul said, "I am Paul Kosloff, from the United States of the Americas." "Paul Kosloff? Professor Kosloff, my nephew?" "That is correct, Uncle Antal. I am here in Budapest." "Well, how pleasant." The other man was in perhaps his early sixties. "My dear boy, just a minute, we must get together as soon as possible." Evidently, he was checking the time. "See here, could you come to the house in, say, two hours?" "Excellent." Antal Puskas gave him the address, which Paul already had at any rate, gushed his pleasure for a moment and then faded off. Two hours. He had the time to eat his lunch and perhaps to stroll along the river a bit before looking up his relative. Lunch at the Danu was a revelation. Evidently the Hungarians no more than the Parisians made modern concessions to good food. He ordered porkolt , a veal stew heavy with paprika sauce, after kalazle, a fish soup which was Budapest's answer to bouillabaisse. He had another half bottle of Riesling to wash it down with, and wound up with retes , the local strudel which came crisp and flaky and filled with cherries, apples and nuts. Throughout the meal he enjoyed greatly the small gypsy stringed instrument band. Offhand, he could never remember having eaten to the music of live musicians before. The institution had disappeared in favor of the canned variety long years since back home. Or, at least, it had in the sort of establishment Paul Kosloff could afford. Later, replete, he strolled down to the Lanchid Bridge and over to the Buda side of the river and wandered around in the reconstructed medieval buildings there. It was, he decided, a beautiful city. It came to him that if the local authorities were by this time looking for him, it might be as well if he didn't return to the hotel. His dimly conceived program was now under way and he didn't want it aborted.   had given him were up, he dialed for a floater auto-cab, got into it, put his International Credit Card into the slot and dialed his relative's home. In actuality, of course, if the local police -- or whoever -- was really interested in him, they'd have no trouble at all finding him. They could always take a fix on his teevee phone, and obviously such taxi rides as this would be monitored somewhere in the computers of the dty. The cab took him along the river on Bern Rakpart to about half way down Margitsziget Island and then turned left and ascended into the Buda hills up Utca Epvolgyi . His unde's home was moderately impressive, set back off the road behind a brick wall no more than waist high. Flowers were in profusion on the wall and in the garden behind it. By American standards, Uncle Antal was in upper-dass categories. A member of what Djilas, the Yugoslavian, had once called the New Class. Evidently the achievement of the dassless sodety was still in the future in Common Eur-Asia. He left the auto-cab and approached the gate and looked into the identity screen there. He said, "Paid Kosloff." The gate opened and he went through and started up the gravel path to the front door. There was another identity screen, but before he could activate it, the door opened and Antal Puskas was there, beaming hospitality. He grabbed Paid's hand, shook it; grabbed Paid about the body with both arms and bussed him on each cheek in turn. Paul's first American reaction was to recoil from an embrace by another man, no matter how dosely related, but then he recalled the few occasions during his youth, when he had met European relations of his mother's side of the family. Evidently kissing, in the Balkans, was protocol. He bore this now with such stamina as he could muster. Antal Puskas ushered him back into what was obviously the Hungarian equivalent of the American institution of the escape room, jabbering away that it was a shame that both of Paul's cousins and his Aunt Ana were away on a short vacation in the mountains of Transylvania. It was to be hoped that Paul's stay would be lengthy enough so that they would return before he left. In the escape room, Antal Puskas bustled about securing a bottle so long-necked as to be grotesque and two liqueur glasses. He hdd the bottle up triumphantly. "Barack," he said. "Stoneage apricot brandy. Ah ha, it is seldom you get barack, eh?" IF Paul smiled. "None at all, Uncle. Our production planners don't allow fruit for beverages. Most of our drink, these days, comes from products of the sea, although we can still get Mexican tequila and mescal, which is distilled from an inedible plant related to cactus." His uncle closed his eyes in pain. "In Hungary, it would lead to revolution," he said. Tn actuality, Paul Kosloff didn't particularly like sweet drinks, and inwardly steeled himself before sipping the barack. To his surprise, it was extremely strong and had no suggestion of sweetness at all. Evidently, it was distilled and redistilled until all except the faintest hint of the apricot flavor was gone. He bore the expected questions pertaining to family and the state of matters in the Americas until at long last, Antal Puskas who, though aging, was obviously as sharp as he was energetic, switched subjects. He said, "You're here for some definite purpose, I can see. Not that you aren't interested in meeting your relatives, but your visit here involves more than that." Paul nodded. "Well, yes. The fact is, Uncle, I wish to meet Pol Kodaly." "Pol Kodaly! You mean Academician Pol Kodaly, of the Commissariat of Computer Data?" Paul nodded again. "My dear Paul, you must realize I don't move in such exotic circles. My work is in biological research." He reached out and poured them additional barack, an apologetic element in his voice. Paul leaned forward. "I didn't expect you to. However, I once listened in on  conversation in which one of the speakers maintained that it took only foiir contacts, at most, to meet anyone in the world." His uncle snorted. "I'd just like to see four contacts get me an introduction to, say, the King of England." Paul accepted that. "Very well, I would be your first contact. I studied Polish and Czech with a friend who had once spent a year at Oxford. I would introduce you to him. In turn, while at Oxford, he associated with a man who was later to become Sir Antony BrettJames, who is now a colonel in the Royal Guard. I am sure he could arrange for an introduction for you to the King. Four contacts, iii fact only three." Antal Puskas was taken aback. "Fascinating," he said. T)aul said urgently, "I didn't expect you to know Kodaly; however, I thought you might be my first contact. That you could introduce me to someone whq could introduce me to the head of your Commissariat of Computer Data." His uncle was unhappy. "But why do you wish to see this man, Paul? His time is not available for frivolous reasons." Paul looked at him. "A man does not travel from the Americas all the way to Budapest -- risking his life in the process, by the way -- for some frivolous reason, Uncle Antal." "Risking your life!" his uncle said. "See here, Paul. I am not political." "Neither am I, in the ordinary sense." His uncle said doubtfully, "What do I tell these people is your reason for seeking out Pol Kodaly?" Paul Kosloff thought about that. "You may say that I am on a secret mission for Dempsey Harrison." Harrison's name was known even in Common Eur-Asia, evidently. Paul's uncle was impressed. IBs face twisted in irritated thought. "I understand that back in Greater Washington you teach the Slavic languages over the airwaves." Paul nodded. "They are also taped, and both in Tri-Vision and in book form go into our own data banks." "Ah, ha. Perhaps I have something." Antal Puskas thought about it some more. "I have a colleague who sometimes has dinner with Zoltan Szilard. You have possibly heard of him?" "I am afraid not." "Too bad. It would have been perhaps easier if you had. In a way, he is a colleague of yours. You see, he is in charge of the educational matter that goes into our computer banks for later release to the schools all over Common EurAsia. He, of course, works closely with Academician Kodaly." "Sounds ideal," Paul nodded. "If I can just get that far." His uncle stood and went over to the teevee phone screen. "Just a minute," he said, dialing. "I'll get in touch with Ferencz." He grinned at Paul. "He's your second contact." A s is so often the case with men who have reached the apex of power, Pol Kodaly, once met, was friendly, affable, and seemingly had at his disposal all the time in the world for an obscure American professor of languages. He came around his desk to shake hands with Paul at his entry. He was a tall man for a Hungarian, brisk of movement and with a pleasant enough face, save possibly for an overly piercing quality in his eyes. He would be, Paul decided, in his early fifties; young considering his rank. He said in English, "Professor Kosloff? We have all of your works in our library banks, of course. I had the occasion to skim through your book on Serbo-Croatian variations on the basic Slavic. Most interesting. I look forward to when I can find the time to read it thoroughly. I too am fascinated by language, Professor." Paul Kosloff was taken aback. He had expected at best a quick handshake and then an almost immediate attempted brush-off. He shook and allowed the other to see him comfortably into a chair. While Kodaly was returning to his own swivel chair behind his desk, Paul looked about the room. It was a far cry from the swank of Dempsey Harrison's office in Denver. He said, in the way of opening, "I had occasion to be in the American data center, just recently. The magnitude of the building astonished me. I am surprised you are able to do with so much less room." The Hungarian chuckled. "This building was formerly a royal residence of the Hapsburgs, back before the first World War, Professor. It contains but a few offices of senior executives. Our more modem equipment and our banks are far below the surface. So far, that it would take a major nuclear attack to discomfit them." He added quickly, "Not that such an eventuality was what we had primarily in mind in so constructing them. You see, of recent years we in Common Eur-Asia have evolved what amounts to an absolute fetish in regards to hiding the more grotesque buildings necessary in a highly technological society. Once we proudly built our factories and other industrial buildings prominent to view. But that was in our infancy. Now that the basic goals have been reached, we are more conscious of beauty." "I couldn't agree with you more," Paul said. Pol Kodaly smiled at him. "And now, Professor? I am sure you haven't traveled all the way to Budapest merely to compare the architecture of this city with that of Denver." Paul took a deep breath before launching into his fling. "I'll come right to the point, sir. I've come here looking for Lisa Stebbins." The Academician looked at him quizzically. "Indeed? A moment, please." He touched a desk control and said into one of his abnormally large desk teevee phone screens, "The dossier on Lisa Stebbins, if we have one." He looked at Paul. "An American?" Paul said, somewhat surprised, "Well, yes." "That will cut it down considerably." And into the screen: "An American." To Paul: "A contemporary, of course." Paul said grimly, "She'd better be." Into the screen: "Contemporary." Printed matter appeared on the screen and the Hungarian quickly scanned it. Finally he grunted and looked up at Paul again. "Very well. I assume she is not an elderly poetess, now residing in a small town in what was once the State of Iowa. Remaining is one other Lisa Stebbins, thirty years of age, resident of Denver. Employed by the National Data Center and currently the secretary and mistress of my colleague Dempsey Harrison." i C AyTistress? " Paul blurted. #VI That's ridiculous." Pol Kodaly nodded. "Quite possibly. Our data on American citizens is obviously limited, nor are they usually in any position to challenge a misconception that creeps into it. However, in this case..." He went back to the screen and read further. "... I am inclined to think the report accurate." Paul shook his head. He felt bewildered, but wasn't quite sure why. Kodaly said, "Our material on Miss Stebbins is limited. Could you tell me why you are looking for the young lady here in Budapest, and how I could possibly help?" "I suspect she has been brought here." The data chief looked back at the screen and shook his head. "No. There is no record that Miss Stebbins has entered Common EurAsia." Paul said, "Perhaps the material has not been entered in your computer banks." The other shook his head again. "No, Professor. If you are thinking of forged papers perhaps, it is still no. For her to cross our borders, her thumbprint would have to be registered. Just as yours was when you crossed. It would have immediately been cross-checked and all but instantly the computers would have recorded that Lisa Stebbins was trying to cross into Common Eur-Asia under false pretenses. You see we have here her thumbprint from when she once attended a conference in Warsaw with her superior, Dempsey Harrison. "Possibly she was brought here in some manner so that the regular customs and immigration authorities were avoided. Perhaps against her will." Still another shake of the head. "Professor, as chief of the Commissariat of Computer Data, I am also a full member of the Presidium of the Central Committee -- a rank, as you possibly know, only under that of Number One himself. The Presidium no longer consists of Old Bolsheviks and ambitious politicians, but of scientists, highly trained technical men, managers of industry. Nothing else makes sense IF in this technological world. And, hanky-panky with a member of the Presidium. If, for whatever reason, some Common Eur-Asian authority found it necessary to perform such an action as would not be entered in the data banks, I would be informed -- or heads would roll." Paul said doggedly, "Perhaps someone involved thought it not important enough to be brought to your attention." "Professor Kosloff, if the secretary and mistress of Dempsey Harrison, my equal number in your country -- though I have sometimes wondered why -- is involved, then the matter would be brought to my attention." Paul Kosloff sank back into his chair. "Where else could she be?" he muttered. "I suggest that you tell me what this is all about. I am admittedly intrigued." F or reasons unknown to him, Paul Kosloff trusted the other. He said, "Sir, are your data banks being tapped?" "What?" "I said, are your computer data banks being tapped? Those of both the United States of Americas and Common Europe are." "My dear Professor, you... you are speaking nonsense." "Dempsey Harrison doesn't James Edgar, doesn't. And neither does Interpol." "But this is unbelievable. Tapped by whom?" Paul shook his head. "We don't know. When it first began to happen, the Interpol people of Common Europe suspected us, but when they sent a representative to Greater Washington, it was discovered that our banks too were being tapped. And the rumors spread that there was a possibility of them being wiped clean." "But, by whom?" The man was either a superlative liar, or he was completely bewildered. Paul said slowly, "Obviously, one alternative we had to consider was that Common Eur-Asia was behind it all. In short, that the Cold War was being secretly reheated. I need not point out to someone in your position what it would mean to our economy, our military machine, and everything else for that matter, if our data banks were wiped clean." The other remained silent for long moments. Finally, he said, "See here, Professor Kosloff, how do you know that your data banks are being tapped, as you call it?" Paul looked up at him blankly. "I'm not up on the technology involved. I would think that you would certainly know more about that phase of it." Pol Kodaly allowed impatience to show through. " Professor, the data banks are simply an extensive collection of human knowledge. If somebody extracts a portion of the information contained in them, the data itself is not affected, any more than anything is changed when you read the type on the page of a book. There is no physical evidence that a page of a book has been read, after a person has read it. Not even the librarian could look at the page later and say, 'Somebody has read this " He chuckled deprecation. "Not unless it was a child who had been eating bread and jam." Paul Kosloff was puzzled. "I simply don't know. Mr. Harrison didn't go into that detail." The other was silent again. "Professor Kosloff," he said finally. "In view of your status as an envoy of Dempsey Harrison, I am going to let you in on a matter that is very hush-hush, as you Americans would say. Let me give you some background." Paul nodded, and remained silent. #T#e ry well. The nationaliza of the data banks was a comparatively simple operation in your nation, Professor. When the modern computer first began to come into its own, you were fifty -- no, I suppose still forty-eight -- States. But you were United States, with but one Federal government. It was simple enough to consolidate all of your computer data into your National Data Center. However, at that time what is now Common Eur-Asia was a dozen individual countries, each admittedly with the same socio-economic system, but still sovereign -- although we had such institutions as the Warsaw Pact and in actuality the Soviet Union dominated like a colossus. Thus it was that in the early days each nation compiled its own computer data banks, most of which were inadequate. Those of the then Soviet Union were, obviously, by far the most extensive, but even nations as small as Bulgaria accumulated their own. It was ridiculous; indeed, one of the prime reasons for our amalgamation into Common Eur-Asia was so that we could unite our data in the same manner you were able to unite that of your fifty States. "Much the same was developing in Western Europe. Each country was compiling national data banks; Germany, France, England, Italy, every country rich enough to have a computer system. Once again it was ridiculous, a fantastic duplication of effort. However, so long as the nations remained sovereign, a national data bank was as necessary as a national military. It was one of the strongest factors leading to the growth of an alliance from the beginnings that were the Common Market. Do you begin to see at what I am driving, Professor?" IF Paul frowned. "I don't believe so." Pol Kodaly looked at him, a touch impatiently. " Professor, the next step should be obvious. It is ridiculous that the two major powers have individual data banks, and just as ridiculous that those neutrals, such as Common Europe, that are strong enough to have their own national data banks, have separate ones. We have internationalized communications -- nothing else made sense. The next step is to internationalize the world's data banks, bring together in one wonderful whole all the accumulated knowledge of man." There was an element of inspiration in the data chief's tone. Paul said slowly, "Just recently a citizen of Common Europe was suggesting to me that an international currency be developed, but he was referring only to Common Europe and the United States of theAmericas." The other spread his hands in a Hungarian gesture. "But why? That too obviously makes sense, and will eventually come about. But what I am saying is this, Professor Kosloff. The discussions now underway to combine our data banks are being held in the utmost secrecy. It may take a month, it may take a year; international jealousies and suspicions are such that it might take many years of discussions, debate, concessions and all the rest of it; but, Professor, sooner or later, and I hope sooner, the world's data banks will be joined. Now in view of that fact, is it reasonable that we of Common EurAsia would attempt to tap your data, not to speak of wiping it clean?" Paul Kosloff sank back into his chair in complete confusions. He said finally, "Dempsey Harrison told me nothing about this." "It is being conducted only on the highest levels, but certainly my colleague, Mr. Harrison, is privy to the conference. Probably he didn't deem it expedient to entrust the information to you." "It possibly doesn't seem to make sense," Paul complained. "But the fact is still with us that I was sent over here to find whether or not the saboteurs originated in Common Eur-Asia. I have been twice attacked by men who attempted to kidnap or kill me. A general of Interpol was killed and nally Lisa Stebbins has been abducted. This is not imagination, it has actually happened." pol Kodaly evidently made a snap decision. He came to his feet. "Come with me, Professor," he said, and led the way to a small elevator which occupied one corner of the office. IF He opened the door and motioned Paul inside. " Careful," he said. "The drop is abrupt." It was. Paul Kosloff's knees all but buckled. The drop was both abrupt and long. Pol Kodaly was saying, "While most of us in Common Eur-Asia look forward to the day when all data banks are united, meanwhile we continue to work on our own, independently of the other nations. Undoubtedly, both your country and Common Europe do the same. Thus it is that each year we make progress in one aspect or the other of our computer system." "They're certainly continuing to evolve in the States," Paul said, "and I suppose the end is not in sight. Sometimes there are terrifying aspects." They had evidently reached the level for which the computer chief was heading. The elevator had slowed and stopped. They emerged and a soldier sprang to the salute, his submachine gun held across his chest. Kodaly ignored him and ushered Paul Kosloff past and to an interoffice corridor floater very similar to those Paul and Zack had utilized in the data center in Denver. They mounted it and Kodaly flicked the direction dial. He continued to talk as they traveled endless halls. "I suspect that in this particular field we have forged ahead of you." He smiled his smile of deprecation. "But of course, one never knows. Perhaps it is something like the former space race; first one ahead, then the other." He snorted. " There is a prime example of the stupidity and duplication of human spent, duplicating each other's efforts. We could have reached the moon on less than half of what was spent, had we cooperated." Paid Kosloff didn't bother to point out the impossibility of that at the time involved. It was hard to believe, here in the sterility of this ultra-modern atmosphere, that they were still in actuality in the medieval-like city of Budapest. It could have been thought that this maze had been designed by the same architects that had laid out the data center in Denver. Paul Kosloff, the scholar and teacher, was far out of his element. And he continued to be when the corridor floater came to a halt and they dismounted. Pol Kodaly, obviously completely at home, activated a door and ushered his guest into a chamber that extended so far that the final reaches seemed to disappear into the distance. "One of our research areas," the Hungarian murmured. "This way, please." Tie led Paul to a side alcove where a dozen or so coveralled technicians were engrossed in a fantastic mess of electronic equipment, absolutely none of which was recognizable to the American. The computer chief nodded to all, spoke a first name to several. Evidently they were of various nationalities. Frol is not a Hungarian name, nor is Ion. Pol Kodaly didn't bother to introduce Paul around. He chuckled and said, "Frol is astonished at your being here. Supposedly, this is currently our most hush-hush of projects." He led Paul to a console which had a seemingly standard computer screen on it and motioned him to a stool, taking one himself. For the moment, he seemed to ignore the machine. The technicians went back to their work after shooting questioning glances at the stranger. Kodaly said, "Professor, what do you know about intuition?" Paul frowned at him. "Intuition? Why, I don't know. Do you mean in the colloquial sense, such as 'feminine intuition,' or the philosophical interpretation, the power of obtaining knowledge which cannot be acquired by either inference or observation, reason or experience?" The other said, "Well, perhaps both. Let us put it this way. We are still in our infancy in the understanding of the human mind. Some of its workings are all but mystical. We like to think of ourselves as logical beings but, in actuality, sheer intuition enters into our thinking processes to an amazing extent. "Suppose, Professor Kosloff, you have a problem to solve that contains, say, ten elements, one or two of which are unknowns. Very well, into our human brain we begin to feed the elements known, one by one. Somewhere along about the fifth or sixth element, the answer suddenly comes to the human brain. The problem is solved, even before all the known aspects were considered. Assimilating the remaining knowns but strengthens the validity of the conclusion. You follow me?" "I... I suppose so," Paul frowned. "Let me use an example. Suppose we have a poker game in progress. American poker is an addiction of mine. Say stud poker, rather than draw. You have a pair of queens. Across from you an opponent has nothing showing higher than a king. Possibly his hole card is another king, in which case you have met defeat. Very well, you have considered all the elements available. Such matters as the cards showing in the hands of the other players. Suddenly as though by inspiration, intuitively, you know that his hole card is the other king he needs. So you fold your IF hand. How did you know, Professor Kosloff?" Paul Kosloff had to laugh. "As you say, intuitively. It doesn't exactly admit of proof." "Until he turns the card over," the Hungarian laughed in return. He hooked long fingers around a knee cap and became serious again. "Currently, most popular opinion is that in actuality you were calling upon data you didn't know you possessed, something perhaps buried in your subconscious. Possibly your opponent has a mannerism that revealed his secret to you. Each time he gets a pair of cards back to back, he has a habit of lighting a cigarette, taking a single puff, and then grinding it out. You have not conscious ly noted this, but subconsciously you have filed the information away. When your supposed intuition comes up with an accurate answer, you have called upon your subconscious data bank." Paul said, "Sounds fairly reasonable. But what are we getting at?" 'T'he Hungarian reached out and patted the machine before which they sat. "We call it Nostradamus." The technician he had earlier addressed as Frol was working only a few yards off. He snorted. Kodaly laughed. "Though Frol is more inclined to Casandra or even Cagliostro. We are having our difficulties." The American scowled his lack of understanding. The computer chief said, "However, we shall give it a try, Professor. State your question and then divulge all the data of which you are cognizant." Paul Kosloff stared at him. "What do you mean?" "This is an intuition computer, Professor. Given that same problem I mentioned earlier that had ten elements, two of which are unknowns: A man will often hit, intuitively, the correct answer after assimilating only five or six of the seemingly necessary elements. Nostradamus, here, halves that. It often comes up -- intuitively -- with the correct answer after being given but one-third of the seemingly pertinent information." ff Zo-ro-as-ter I" Paul blurted unbelievingly. Kodaly shrugged. "We are still in highly technical debate, and frankly I myself am out of my depth. However, it would seem that Nostradamus works on much the same basis as does our intuitive poker player. He is tied into our complete Computer Data Banks. Undoubtedly, Nostradamus draws upon data with which we are unfamiliar, draws upon elements which it would not occur to us to utilize in solving our problems logically. Whatever, Nostradamus can sometimes be startlingly accurate." "You mean this is a thinking machine? Thinking machine, hell, "Perhaps. We would have to go into the semantics. State your problem farto the screen, Professor, and then give us all the data you have available." Paul Kosloff stared at the computer's screen in fascination. "In what language?" he said. "Whichever best suits you. As I say, Nostradamus is tied into our whole system. He can be utilized in any known language or combination of languages." Paul took a deep breath. He worded it over inwardly, before saying, "Who is tapping the data b anks in Denver and in Geneva?" He then began reciting every item of information he had accumulated, even that which didn't seem relevant. He began to feel foolish. Could tins Pol Kodaly be pulling his leg? On the face of it... The machine had thus far been absolutely noiseless. Not a hum had proceeded from its interior. Now, of a sudden, a robot voice announced: Paul Kosloff came to an abrupt haft, in mid-sentence, and goggled the screen. He turned and stared at Pol Kodaly, who returned his look with a certain complacence. Paul blurted at the Hungarian, "But that's impossible." The other shook his head negatively. "I doubt it. I told you earlier that in my estimation the charge is ridiculous." Paul spun and said shakily into the screen, "Who spread the rumors that the American and Common Europe computer data banks were being tapped and in danger of being wiped clean?" "What are their names l" Paul Kosloff felt as though his brain was spinning. To the next question, he didn't expect an answer. "Where is Lisa Stebbins?" He turned weakly, and looked at Pol Kodaly. He said, "I am beginning to have some intuitive ideas of my own." P aul Kosloff lobbed back to Orly Rocketport, Paris, and went directly to the George V Hilton . To his surprise, he was given the same accommodations he had occupied before. It was too late to begin his project that night, and he kept to his IF room, making sure the door was barred and ordering food and drink at the room's auto-table. He had no intention of exposing himself on the streets at this stage. He was halfway through his meal when the door screen hummed. His eyes narrowed as he activated it. However, the face there was that of Georg Castriota. Paul Kosloff flicked the button that opened the door and came to his feet. Castriota entered and eyed him speculatively, "Well, back already, eh? And have you found your Lisa Stebbins?" "Not yet," Paul said, making sure the door was barred again. He motioned to the table. "Wine?" "No, thanks. When are you returning to the States, Professor?" "I don't know," Paul said, refreshing his own glass. Castriota said grimly, "I suppose I could have you declared persona non grata" Paul thought about that. "I wish you wouldn't. I have a lead on Miss Stebbins." The other was surprised. "A lead? What is it?" "I don't believe I'll tell you." "Why not, hombre? I've got all the resources of Interpol at my command. You're working alone in a strange country." Paul said deliberately, "Because you have leaks in your highest ranks." "Leaks! Have you gone completely drivel-happy, hombre? Do you mean in Interpol?" "Probably. It comes to me that it was no accident that those three men who jumped us outside the restaurant were all gunned down, in spite of the fact that you yelled at your men to try and capture them alive. Dead men tell no tales. It also comes to me that there could be only one reason why they knew we were going to be at Monsieur Pierre's restaurant. You told somebody we were going to go there and they passed the information on. But whether or not some of the higher echelon Interpol people are in on the conspiracy, others in high office are, and probably have Interpol connections." "You've said either too mttch or too little, Kosloff," the Interpol man said. "I've said all I'm going to say, since I have no intentions of committing suicide." "And you insist on remaining here in Paris?" "Yes. For a time, at least. Can you arrange permission for me to buy a gun?" Georg Castriota, disgust on his face, brought an automatic from under his left arm and handed it over. "Do you know its operation?" Paul Kosloff threw the breech, checked the magazine, clicked it back into the gun's butt and jacked a cartridge into the barrel. "I know its operation. Thanks." "Don't mention it," Castriota said grimly. "I'll keep in touch. The sooner you get out of town, the Paul said, "So will I, but I've got something to do first." TTe found them on the third   night, in a small Chinese restaurant in the vicinity of the Place d'Etoile . She'd mentioned her liking of Chinese food and he'd been haunting the few Oriental places for the past few nights. They were seated in a small alcove, eating with chopsticks. Paul came up behind them, immediately behind the man, and stared over his back at Lisa Stebbins, whose flaming red hair had been dyed black. Her eyes came up and suddenly widened in shocked surprise. The man, sensing something, started to his feet, his hand darting beneath his jerkin. It was one of the two who had first jumped Paul and Zack Castriota in front of the Kosloff apartment. Paul chopped down viciously with the Tcttui ken edge of fist blow to the other's right collar bone, crushing it, and then again, in a blur of speed to the other collar bone. The man collapsed into his chair, unconscious. Paul steadied him so that he wouldn't fall. Keeping his eyes on Lisa Stebbins, he brought his wrist teevee phone to his face and said into it, "Information. I want to talk to Georg Castriota of Interpol." Castriota's face faded in immediately. He seemed to be seated in a vehicle. He snapped, "Yes?" "I'm in the Lee Chang Chinese Restaurant, near the Place..." "I know where it is." "And I have the man who killed your brother Zack." Castriota's face flicked off. Paul, still steadying the unconscious Italian, took an empty chair and sat down. "Professor Kosloff!" Lisa blurted. "So. No more Paul and Lisa, eh? Don't use that wrist phone! I warn you." To his surprise, Georg Castriota came hurrying in, followed by another husky who was obviously a plainclothesman. Paul said, "You got here in a hurry." Georg Castriota said disgustedly, "You didn't think we'd allow you to bustle all over town on your own, did you? We have a dozen men on you, Kosloff, including me. What's this about my brother's killer?" "This was one of the four men at the final shoot-out, there on Manhattan." "That's a lie," Lisa Stebbins said. She began to bring her wrist phone to her face. Paul Kosloff reached out and, more or less gently, pulled the inIF strument from her arm and pocketed it. Georg Castriota looked at them. Paul said, "This is our missing Lisa Stebbins." Lisa said indignantly, "It is illegal to deprive a citizen of her teevee phone." The husky companion of the Interpol man had taken over the handling of the Italian triggerman. Paul looked at Castriota. "I don't want her to make any contacts over here. If she does, I wouldn't guarantee that we'd live the night out." 'T'he other's eyebrows went up skeptically, but he said to the beauteous secretary of Dempsey Harrison, "In Common Europe it is legal for a proper authority, such as a police officer performing his duty, to temporarily appropriate a personal teevee phone." "He is not a proper authority and I am not subject to the laws of Common Europe." "The way I see it," Georg Castriota said, evidently deciding on Paul's support, "is that Professor Kosloff is at present on a special mission for the Inter-American Bureau of Investigation, and as such can be deemed a police officer. And so long as you are on Common Europe soil, you are subject to our laws, since you cannot claim diplomatic immunity." He looked back at Paul. "What's up?" "I'm returning with her tomorrow to the United States. She Has some matters to answer to." "What are your charges against this man?" He made a gesture with his head at the still unconscious Italian. "Your evidence." "You know as much as I do. Find your own evidence. All I can tell you is that he's one of the men Your Interpol facilities should allow you to dredge up all you'll need against him. And, Georg .  . " "Yes?" "... remember what I told you about leaks. I mean big leaks. If you lose this man, it's your own fault." "I won't lose him," Georg Castriota said grimly. Georg Castriota saw them to the Orly Rocketport in the morning. He was unshaven and somewhat red of eye and obviously hadn't slept. Lisa Stebbins had gone into a sullen silence. They had spent the night in Paul's George V Hilton room, she taking the bed and sleeping fully clothed, he sitting in the heavy comfort chair, snoozing fitfully, coming awake immediately if she so much as stirred. Paul said to the Interpol man, "Any luck with our friend?" The other grinned. "Not yet. He's a tough one, a real pro. But we've got methods. I'm waiting on a serum they've recently developed in Copenhagen. Truth-drug sort of Hung that makes scopolamine ashamed of itself." He motioned with his head at the girl. "You know, as soon as you get her back to the States, you're not going to be able to keep her. I've made concessions, under the circumstances, but in actuality you're in no more position to arrest her than she is to arrest you." "I know." Lisa Stebbins scowled. It was time for them to embark. Georg Castriota held out a hand to be shaken. "Good luck, Professor. And as soon as you're in a position to do so, let us know what you're holding that you can't release now. You've got a Priority One rating on my teevee phone." "Of course." Georg looked at Lisa Stebbins and said wryly, "You're awful pretty to be a wrong-o." "Curd!" "My, my. Four letter words out of that rosebud of a mouth." A s they lobbed across the Atlantic, Paul looked at her from the side of his eyes. "Zack Castriota said you were ambitious. That you'd do anything to get to the top," She bit out, "That's more than I can say for you, Professor Kosloff. You're going to find out the hard way that you shouldn't nose yourself into situations that don't concern you." In spite of himself, he had to laugh. "Don't concern me? In the first place I didn't nose myself in, I was dragged in, protesting all the way. In the second place, at least three attempts have been made on my life for reasons I hadn't the vaguest idea about at the time. If that doesn't concern me, I don't know what does. By the way, has it occurred to you that you, too, know too much? These people are ruthless, Lisa. Are you sure you were meant to ever return from Common Europe? It would have been a bit difficult for them to explain, when and if you did." For a moment, die looked startled, but then snorted her scorn. "Don't be ridiculous. Besides, you don't know what you're talking about. You're fishing around, trying to get me to say something I'd regret." Paul Kosloff smiled at her and dropped it. They landed at the Greater Washington Rocketport. As soon as they were at the administration building, she turned on him bitterly and held out her hand. "My teevee phone, please, or I'll immediately call an officer and have you arrested." He bowed slightly and extended it to her. He said, "I imagine you'll be going on directly to Denver. I have some personal things to do here. Among other matters, checking in IF at the school. You see, ordinarily, this is my day to broadcast my lecture." "Ever the pedagogue, eh?" she said contemptuously. "You might as well forget it, Professor . After today, you'll never again work in the United States of the Americas. You'll be bounced down to living on your ten shares of Inalienable Basic -- at best." "We'll see," he said. "However, as soon as I get one or two things fixed up, I'll come to Denver, too. You can expect me later today." She looked at him coldly. "Is that a guarantee?" "It is. Word of honor." She spun and stalked off, her Etruscan revival sandals clicking sharply on the cement of the tarmac. For the moment, Paul Kosloff stared after her, but then he too turned and hurried away. He had no way of knowing how quickly she might make contact with some of her people, and possibly take steps against him. XX T Te tried to time it exactly, and wasn't overly surprised when he had no difficulty whatsoever in entering the Denver National Data Center. In fact, he was met at the entry by not only the guards he had come up against before, when he had first entered the information center, but by a clean-cut, conservatively dressed young stalwart as well. When he had identified himself, this new one said, "Professor, the indicator there..." He nodded at a small red light set into an inconspicuous panel to one side. "... suggests you are carrying a shooter. I'm afraid you are not allowed to enter the Center armed." "Very well," Paul said. "But what is your own authority?" The younger man brought forth his Universal Credit Card, and showed it to Paul Kosloff. He said softly, "Agent Peter Baker." Under occupation, it read : Senior Agent, Inter-American Bureau of Investigation. Paul said, "Pardon me." He took the card from the other's hand. Peter Baker's eyebrows went up slightly, but he surrendered the identification. On the heavy desk that stood at the entry was a standard teevee screen. Paul put the card in the slot and said, "Your thumbprint, please." The agent shrugged and put his thumb on the screen. Paul said, "Identity check, please." A robot voice said, "Identity established, as indicated." Baker regained his card and returned it to his pocket. His eyebrows went up again. Paul said, "I just wanted to be sure with whom I was dealing." He brought the gun Georg Castriota had given him from his hip pocket and handed it over. The agent stuck it in his own pocket and indicated a corridor floater. Evidently, the rule against firearms in the data center didn't apply to Agent Peter Baker. On the floater, they retraced the route Paul had first taken with Zack Castriota -- which now seemed long, long ago but in actuality was only a couple of weeks in the past. There was another at the desk that had been occupied by Lisa Stebbins when he had first come. Identically uniformed, but far from the pulchritude standards of the beauteous Lisa. Agent Baker said something to her that Paul didn't catch, and she answered, "Professor Kosloff is to go in immediately." Evidently this was as far as Peter Baker entered into the picture. He nodded to Paul and made a gesture toward the door which opened to Dempsey Harrison's sanctum sanctorum. As he approached, the door opened before him and he was once again in the escape-room-like office of the ultimate head of the National Data Center. Lisa Stebbins, in smart fresh business suit, was seated there and hardly bothered to look up at him when he entered. Her face was surly. J ames Edgar was there, rotund and beaming, a cool long glass in his right hand. He sat, at jovial ease, in one of the room's several comfort chairs. Dempsey Harrison was over at the bar, evidently refreshing his own drink. He turned when Paul entered. Professor. Returned from the wars." Dempsey Harrison, his dose shaven, well cared for face bland, said, "A drink, Professor Kosloff?" "No, thanks," Paul said. "I'd rather this take place in some other room." Harrison scowled at him questioningly. Paul said doggedly, "In the past couple of weeks I've become ultraconscious of bugs, spying devices of a half dozen varieties, electronic geegaws that I'd never dreamed existed. This report can't get much paore confidential. I'd rather we talked in... well, say the autocafeteria Miss Stebbins took me to when I was here last." Dempsey Harrison sighed. "I can assure you it is no more bugged, or romantically equipped with electronic gadgets than this room. We can adjourn there if you so demand. Lisa, my dear?" He cavalierly held out a hand to help her to her feet. She looked her disgust at Paul, but stood up and led the way to the door. James Edgar chuckled. "Cloak IF and dagger." He too followed. In the relatively spacious senior executive's auto-cafeteria several of those sitting about looked moderately surprised when their chief entered with his guests; but without instructions they moved away from the vicinity of the table Dempsey Harrison chose. The four of them sat. "Can I order you something?" the data head said courteously to Paul Kosloff. "No," Paul said. He looked up at the clock on the wall. "I suppose your time is valuable, and this might be long. Shall we dispense with the amenities and get underway?" "By all means. Lisa has filled us in a bit. It would seem that you ran into some difficulties... and some misconceptions." "I don't think so," Paul said evenly. "Give me a moment to describe what I found." Lisa gave a bored sigh. Edgar chuckled meaninglessly. Harrison said, "By all means, Professor." Paul took his characteristic deep breath before launching into his subject. "I suppose it starts with the old truism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." "My dear Professor." Paul said, "When Miss Stebbins supposedly disappeared in Geneva, with the implication of kidnapping, I was urged to return home by Colonel Castriota of Interpol, following an attack on my own person. However, I refused; instead, I went to' Budapest where I was able to confront Pol Kodaly, of the Commissariat of Computer Data." Harrison nodded pompously. "I know Pol well. We have met at various conferences. Competent man." "Yes, so I thought. He revealed to me the high-security conferences being held on the matter of un iting all the computer data banks in the world." T T arrison was slightly taken  aback. "Ah? In actuality, a matter that should be held in more secrecy, considering your level of authority -- or lack of it, Professor." "Perhaps," Paul said. "He also pointed out some of the ramifications. This would be a step far and beyond such organizations as the Reunited Nations, toward world government, obviously. The first  feeble efforts in that direction, the League of Nations, the United Nations, and now the Reunited Nations have all come a cropper. But on the face of it, a combining of the world's data banks would be a step toward a one-world government that could never be retraced. Perhaps in the conferences now being so secretly held, that aspect isn't even being discussed. The subI # ject would have such taboo aspects that it might be completely avoided; but, gentlemen and Miss Stebbins, given amalgamation of all the world's data banks, further steps would willy-nilly follow. Unification of postal systems, of coast and geodetic surveys, the exploration of the ocean depths and of space. All these things and a score more, a hundred more, become ridiculous to be handled unilaterally, when all the world's information is at the hands of each nation. And such cooperation would inevitably lead in time to more and more amalgamation in every field from industrial planning to education." "I am afraid you are a dreamer and a romantic, Professor Kosloff." Paul Kosloff had put his hands on the table before him, the fingers interlaced. "That I am not, as you well know. I am a somewhat stodgy professor of language, immersed largely in his work and not up on the ins and outs, the double-dealing of high government and interna tional intrigue. Which is one of the reasons I was chosen to be one of your stooges." James Edgar chuckled and said, "What were the other reasons?" Paul twisted his hands slightly and said, "The fact that I am my father's son. I can hear the TriVision news commentator excitedly saying: ' Flash! Paul Kosloff the Second, son of the espionage-counter-espionage star agent once known as the Cold War's Lawrence of Arabia, was shot to death today in Paris while involved in an attempt to flush secret agents who have been tapping American data banks and threatening to wipe them clean. It is known that these agents have stolen the plans for the min-nuclear bomb and it is expected that they will utilize them for extortion.' " Lisa Stebbins snorted. Paul twisted his hands again, nervously, and looked at her. "Possibly later, there would be another alarming news flash. 'Beautiful Lisa Stebbins, personal secretary of Data Chief Dempsey Harrison, while on vacation in Common Europe was kidnapped today by elements of the group which has been threatening to wipe clean American and Common Europe data banks, thus precipitating a complete collapse of our economies. It is suspected that she has been smuggled into Budapest.' " Edgar chuckled again, but Harrison was staring at Paul Kosloff speculatively. P aul went on. "And somewhere along in here there would probably be an item which would go like this: 'It has been revealed that Generale Zack Castriota, ace Interpol agent, met his death in the ruins Mark Martino in a gun battle with elements of the gang suspected by some of being from Common EurIF Asia, and known to be tapping American and Common European data banks. Remnants of the gang escaped by submarine " Paul's hand moved nervously again. "And somewhere along in here would come the really big news flash. Something like this would probably be announced: The President of the United States of head James Edgar , and generals so and-so, to take emergency measures to protect our national data banks , and forestall attempts at extortion on the part of enemy agents , suspected of representing Common Eur-Asia " "Generals so-and-so?" Dempsey Harrison said. Paul looked at him. "I don't know all the details of this, and doubt if I ever will. I don't have to know them. I don't know who your confederates might be, but I assume some of them are highly placed military." "Our confederates!" Harrison said. "My dear Professor, your, ah, report has thus far been so ridiculous as to be almost incoherent, but now you verge on insanity. What possible reason could we have to go to these fantastic extremes?" Paul nodded. "That would be your obvious reaction, of course. To pretend innocence. There must be many elements in high government in our country and in Common Europe and Common Eur-Asia as well who would be opposed to eventual world government. Given such drastic changes, how could they be sure of retaining their posts? They might even be afraid that basic socioeconomic changes would take place that would leave them without their present affluence. It would seem impossible, for instance, that the present economic system in Common Eur-Asia could stand if subjected to union with the West. But possibly our own People's Capitalism, which has its ridiculous aspects, couldn't stand either. In short, there are those in all major governments who, to protect themselves in their positions of power, would take any steps -- any -- to forestall the moves in the direction of world government such as the amalgamation of the world's data banks." He looked straight into Harrison's face. "Take your own position as head of the National Data Center. If this merging of the banks took place, could you be sure that you would be chief of the new ultra-data-banks, or 'might the position go to Pol Kodaly, or whoever it is that currently heads the Common Europe banks? Might it turn out that while you are quite a wily politician, perhaps you haven't the real knowledgeability of such men as Kodaly? I suspect that in at least one field of computer research the Common Eur-Asian scientists are sweeping ahead of our . # own research. Could it be because of ineptness in our ranks?" He twisted his hands again nervously. "The same would apply, of course, to our military. Given all the data banks of the world combined, armies and navies would be completely antiquated, since all information of a military nature would be available to all. Generals and admirals would suddenly be on the scrapheap." L isa Stebbins said to her boss, "I told you." "Be quiet, my dear. Let me think." James Edgar said, his voice less than amiable now, "What is there to think about? Let me take care of him." For the moment, Dempsey Harrison ignored Paul Kosloff as though he wasn't there. He said to would have entered this lion's den, if he didn't have some resources to guarantee his safety? What they are, I don't know." He looked back to Paul. "There are many aspects to this of which you are unaware, Professor Kosloff. You have done a fairly good job of striking near the truth, but there are elements with which you are unfamiliar. It is quite true that I and certain colleagues in both this country and Common Europe, and even Common Eur-Asia, strongly oppose the merging of the data banks and for the very reason you point out. That is, it would eventually tend to eliminate national boundaries. It is our motivation that you misunderstand." "Oh?" Paul Kosloff said flatly. "Yes. Professor, we of the elite, if you will not think me too vain to use that term, cannot allow the mongrelization of this, our great country. We must stand firm and prevent, by whatever methods we can, being taken over by the hordes of Europe and Asia." "And I suppose over there, they are telling their people that the threat is of being taken over and mongrelized by the hordes of Americans." "Please don't be facetious, Professor. This noble goal must be achieved." "And the ends justify the means, eh? Even when the means involve men that I know of, so far." Harrison said tightly, "The means are justified by our idealistic ends, Professor. Eleven is a small number when the cause is considered. They were expendable." Paul said wryly, "The one who tells others they are expendable usually isn't one of those who becomes expended. Did Zack Castriota know that he was expendable in this idealistic cause? He seemed to think you were somewhat of a friend." "That was an accident," Edgar IF said coldly. "That group in Manhattan was putting on a show, admittedly to alarm the common herd to the point where they would not object to certain measures taken to strengthen our government. But they were meant to be gone before Castriota found their mysterious hideaway. It was all a big act." "Generate Castriota was not acquainted with the true nature of this little intrigue," Harrison said. "Our group includes members of Interpol, and indeed some elements in Budapest and Moscow, but Castriota was not among them." His voice went very earnest. "Professor, some are meant to rule, others to be ruled. We who are, let us say, in the saddle now in the United States of the Americas, are the elite of this land. If basic changes take place, who can know who might wind up in control of our noble country? It is our duty to remain in our position of power. Now obviously you are even more astute than I had believed. You belong with us. Professor Kosloff, how would you like to be Secretary of Education in the President's cabinet?" Paul Kosloff laughed and shook his head in deprecation. "I am not trained in administrative education, Mr. Harrison." "That is not of essence," Harrison beamed at him. "You can be briefed on the duties. They are not arduous." "Ill bet they're not," Paul said. "I'm beginning to see why you're afraid of amalgamation with the other leading countries, if our cabinet members are chosen in such manner as this." James Edgar had drifted far from his pose of amiability. He looked a question at Harrison, who shook his head negatively. D empsey Harrison said to Paul, "Very well. The issues are great, and I have no way of knowing what steps you have taken. I will pull no punches. Professor, how would you like deposited to your portfolio so many shares of Variable Basic stock that all your dreams of avarice would be more than fulfilled?" Lisa said sourly, "I don't see why you think him so damned important." Paul ignored her and said to Harrison, "That's the difficulty. You see, I have no dreams of avarice. I am that rare specimen, a satisfied man. I like my work, I enjoy my leisure; I am amply enough paid to accomplish the things in life that I like. Mr. Harrison, I can't be bribed. Even if ordinarily I could be, I rather doubt if I could ever forget a young chap named Pete who died in the ruins of Manhattan as a result of your little play act, nor Zack Castriota and Mark Martino. You and your friends have concocted a fantastic scheme to frighten the people of this country into accepting some sort of emergency government which would undoubtedly seize power in the name of protecting the nation against the two most dreaded things that could happen to it -- nuclear attack and a complete collapse of our culture due to loss of our data banks. I intend to do everything in my power to reveal your scheme." James Edgar said flatly, "I see that it's about time for me to take over. Kosloff, I have approximately a hundred men between this room and the nearest exit. Do you really think you can get out of here? I suggest you take Dempsey's offer while you can, and mend your fences with him and me. The issues are too big for a pipsqueak of a language teacher to get in the way." "You're threatening me?" Lisa Stebbins laughed at him, her voice ugly, and shook her head as though marveling. "Could it be more obvious?" Edgar said flatly. Paul said, "You know, you should have considered that pipsqueak of a language teacher a bit sooner." He looked up at the clock on the wall. "Did you know that this is the hour upon which Professor Paul Kosloff of the University of the Air, on National TriVision, brings his weekly lecture to his students?" "What in the name of Zoroaster are you driveling about, hombre?" Edgar snorted. Paul twisted his hands again, this time in such a way that they could all see the screen of his wrist teevee phone. "The reason I wanted you to come here to the auto-cafeteria for our little discussion was because I wasn't sure but that you might have a scrambler in your office. You see, this past couple of weeks I've become increasingly conscious of bugs, teevee phone communications, and a dozen other electronic devices. To cut the story short, chum-pals, before I came here I made a call on the studios in Greater Washington where I give my broadcasts. The technician is an old friend who owes me a debt. The past two weeks, I missed my regular broadcasts but he played canned ones. This time, we made other arrangements. You see, all through, this conversation, my teevee wrist phone has been on and dialed to Jerry, who has been receiving it for the past fifteen minutes and broadcasting it. With a little screen like this, I imagine reception will be somewhat poor so far as image pickups are concerned, but it should be sufficient so that you are all identifiable. And, of course, the sound will be excelIF Dear Editor: As one of the offenders of Miss Camo, in that I used Altair as the scene of a story (Close to Critical), may I be allowed a word of defense? First, she is partly right, and if I had known in # what I know now, I would probably have laid the story on Venus. However -- Altair does, indeed, rotate rapidly; it is the standard example of this property in astronomy texts. This would have no affect whatever on the stability of a planetary orbit, however. It does suggest that most of the originalangular momentum of the cosmic cloudlet which presumably formed the star is concentrated in the star itself; it is the rather sudden disappearance of evidence for rapid rotation at about spectral class F# which makes some astronomers suspect that something regularly causes these cooler bodies to give their angular momentum to, say, a planetary system. Since this point came out, I have avoided hotter stars as background scenes for stories; but I am not convinced that the original cloud couldn't have had enough angular momentum to take care of planets and a rapidly whirling sun. We just don't know; this is one of the foggier spots in the current theories of planet formation. Calling Altair a "kid" as stars go is a bit shaky. It is not a Rigelyears old; it is of spectral type A#, luminosity class V -- that is, a main sequence star. Its absolute magnitude is about # -- about a dozen times as bright as our sun -- and or so old instead of Sol's four or five ent. I'm quite prepared to believe in not only life but intelligence evolvThe fact that no perturbations have been detected means nothing whatever. If Jupiter were in a # A.U. orbit around Altair, it would perturb the latter to the tune of about one fifteen-hundredth of a second of arc -- wholly undetectable by present techniques. The Earth has less than one three-hundredth the mass of Jupiter; its perturbations would bo directly proportional to this. Also, to have normal Earth temperature it would have to be less than four A. U.'s from Altair, rather than five, and the perturbations would also be proportional to that. There is simply no star in the universe for which we can disprove the existence of planets on the basis of no-observed-perturbations. I doubt that Ted Sturgeon used Altair because it was close to Vulcan, since he presumably knew better. It is true that # Eridani and Altair are about equally distant from Sol; it is also true that Buffalo, New York, and Richmond, Virginia, are about equally distant from New York City. Anyone who assumes that Richmond is adjacent to Buffalo has not checked all the relevant facts. A similar relevant fact is that # Eridani, seen from near Sol, is oves one hundred twenty degrees from Altair. If some hasty mental arithmetic is correct, the two are about thirty light years apart So -- I grant that on the basis of current theory, Altair is rather unlikely to possess planets; but I still don't feel too guilty about using it. -- Hal Clement, Milton, Mass.    Dear Editor: I'm a very old science fiction fan, and I've a complete collection of s-f works published in Italy. I read regularly French Galaxy edition and since last year I collect your Worlds of IF. I don't have a good knowledge of English, but I'm studying by myself, and IF is my reading book. In the last IF issues I've liked Lin Carter's features on U.S. fandom and Zelazny, Delany and Ellison's stories. Very beautiful, your covers. Unfortunately in Italy we don't have as good artists as Pederson or Morrow. I write to ask you for a favour: there is someone of your readers that will exchange back issues of IF with Italian magazines? I hope you publish my letter (subject to corrections). -- G. L. Staffilano, # via Madonna delle Rosa, #, Torino, Italy. Sylvania Hotel, Broad  Locust Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Features: Panel Discussion about "Science in Society," moderated by Ted Thomas; Ben Bova on "Weather Control"; panels on sex and violence in the future, with Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, James Blish, et aliens... A special open meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society will be Sts.) on November #, at # P.M. -- all welcome. For information: Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. the Statler-Hilton, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Membership #. For information: New England Science Fiction Association, Box G, sachusetts #. Hotel, Oxford, England. Guest of Honor: Judith Merril. For information in the nue, Los Angeles, California #. of Honor: Robert (Doc) A. W. Lowndes. At the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. Advance membership #, or # at the door. Two Progress Reports will be sent to members. For information: Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, New York #. IF LgaiaxyT Arrival Date Normal # pages Length Condition All.Ne.w...S.tor.ie.s.l Lester del Rey Editor All Residence This is number one, And the fun has just begun... nil choice. Pub. ed. # #. From The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling. # spine-tingling sto ries that breach the gap betwefen science and superstition. #. Dangerous Visions. Anthology of # original stories never before in print by Sturgeon, Anderson, others. Pub. ed. # #. Interrupted Journey by John G. Fuller. The strange story of an American couple abducPub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed # #. Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov. A miniaturized team of doctors invade a man's blood stream Pub. ed # #. The Time Hoppers, K. Silverberg. Population explosion forces thousands to flee back # years. Pub. ed. # #. The Flying Saucer Reader. J. David. Anthology fiction? Pub. ed. " # #I #. Element #, Fred Hoyle. Satan as mayor; non-human TV viewers: agents chasing State If under #, parent must sign here. (Offer good in U.S.A. only) #. Colossus by D. F. Jones. Machine conquers man! "Ingenious... alarming". Punch. Pub. ed. # #. The Egg Shaped Thing. C. Engineer finds creature "programmed" to destroy the world. Pub ed #. #. The Past Through Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed # #. Psychogeist, L. P. Davies. Three minds -- a galaxy apart -- meet and turn a sleepy village into a nightmare. Pub. ed. # Take any Edited by Anthony Boucher #. A giant twovolume collection of great science fiction reading. Over # pages of exciting fiction -- four full-length novels, twelve novelettes, eight short stories by Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt. Foul Anderson. Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester. and a dozen more. Counts as I counts as only a single choice! How the Club works: Each month it oilers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and more in their original editions, Club members get them for only # eaci-in special full-length, hard-cover edit ions -- unless you select an extra-value book at slightly higher price. And the Clutf tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your trial membership, you agree to take as few as four books in the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. No-Risk Guarantee: If not delighted with introductory #-book shipment, return books within # days to cancel membership. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member. Mail coupon today to Science Fiction Book Club. Garden City, New York # Please accept my application for membership in the Science Fiction Book Club and rush the # hooks whose numbers I have circled below. Bill me only #, plus shipping and handling, for all #. Then every month, send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things tb Come", which describes coming selections. For each hook I accept. I will pay only #, plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extravalue selection at a higher price. circle the numbers of I need take only four books withwmi uant in the coming year and may inB J D#  s you resign at any time thereafter, # # # delighted with my introductory package, I may return it in # days, pay nothing, owe nothing, and my membership will be canceled. Print Name Circle the numbers of the # books you want: # # # # #I # # # # # # # Address. when you join the Science Fiction Book Club and agree to accept only fbur books during the coming year.  Grid's Best #P S OF January nr vonios The Year Dot (Author of Four-Sided Triangle , etc.) The story of a space threat to Earth men so horrible -- and so completely possible -- that medical science is afraid to contemplate its consequences Kii who man the station. Should those still alive be brought back to Earth and risk infecting all human life -- or be sacrificed in an orbiting tomb? On Earth, medical science is helpless. Terrified people are rioting, protesting the space ship's return. Official Washington is torn by the desperate dilemma. On Space Station Epsilon no one knows what his fate will be. of space-age science-fiction has turned out a great story -- fiction with the frightening ring of scientific possibility, not in # but in the #s. At all bookstores  # VoL #, No. I Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Jacqueline Lichtenberg by Dean R. Koontz The Steel General by Roger Zelazny by J. T. McIntosh by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyidght by GcOaxy Publishing Coiporation, #. All rights. Including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by s-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similar! between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # W hen we first began reading science fiction, which is quite a few years ago, one of the things that most caught our fancy about the sf magazines of the times was the pretty pictures on the cover and inside. Remember those Frank R. Pauls and Bonestells, with the lovely rocketships landed on the Moon and the gorgeous views of Earth as seen from space? Thirty years ago these pictures were sheerest fantasy, as far from real human experience as any thing in the stories. Today they've come into the real world, and they are as beautiful real as they were in imagination. You can see all you want of them for #, in a new book published by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, called Exploring Space with a Camera, To get these pictures for us took the combined efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and technicians around the world, as well as an astronomical number of doUars and rubles. We think they were worth the price. Luna Ill's first pictures of the far side of the Moon, now alnjost a decade old, gave us not merely a better look at a near neighbor than we had ever had before, but a sight of a landscape no human eyes had ever seen. Surveyor I's self-portraits, showing the long ladder of a human spacecraft on the barren rock of another world, are as impressive embodied in a book, as they were on the world's TV screens, back in the summer of #. The Gemini color photographs of Earth, the Apollo IV color shot of the glowing Saturn V interstage falling away after separation, any of a dozen others in this book are worth hanging on your wall. We think thpy're beautiful, and we think you will too. But how many more like this are we likely to see? The space program is coasting along these days; probably it will carry out all Ae goals it set for itself a decade ago... but then what? In spite of pious words from politicians, it is pretty clear that the steam has gone out pf space. There are no new long-range goals, no plans to go on to the outer planets, to send men to Mars, least of all to take the big and all important leap to other stars. The money has dried up. Not only in the U.S.; Professor Sedov hints that it's true in Russia as well; one of the most important international space organizations is canceling its next year's meeting, because the funds to pay for it have gone. If the politicians have their way, they will be using future tax money in the traditional manner -- to buy votes instead of knowledge. And the human race, having reached out gingerly into space, will return to its little wars and squabbles. Or shall we tell the politicians that they're making a miste? IF  Serial Six Gates To Limbo by j. T. McIntosh It was. a place that could be called Umbo But to one, it would be better called Hell! I Imbo dropped into his hazy awareness. Being reluctant to be a man A fter a time that was neither without a name in a place without heaven nor hell, and a period a name, he named one of the two that was pure hell, he awoke in a at once: Limbo, gentle world that was not Earth, It was generously warm but not did not seem to be heaven and hot. The lush grass he lay on was was certainly not hell. The word as soft as a caress, and there was no more than a breath of movement in the rich, clean air. This could be Earth, but it was not. He knew of the planet Earth vaguely but so intimately, like a woman in the dark, that there could be no doubt Earth was home. Yet despite his real feeling for Earth, his love for a world he knew but couldn't quite remember, peace flooded him as he looked around him and knew this was not Earth. Water... he had to find water. Automatically he turned downhill. In the imdergrowth, as he walked, small animals scurried. He saw lizards, hares, small deer, and heard, though he didn't see them, hogs and sheep. When he found water, there were no half measures about it. The lake was perhaps a mile across, blue, sparkling, clean, enchanting. The moment he saw it, he ran down a grassy slope and dived into the pool. Afterwards, on a convenient stone, he looked in the placid waters of a lakeside pool and saw himself. He was not pretty. There was nothing to soften the line of a craggy jaw, his dark eyes were flinty under black brows, and only a hint of humor about his mouth prevented his appearance from being wholly forbidding. But he was satisfied. It was beginning to get dark, and he found himself quite suddenly so tired that the hunger which had begun to stir in him was far less important than sleep. He thought of making a bed, a tent, only vaguely aware of what beds and tents were. He thought of possible danger from the wood only a few hundred yards away. In the end he found a cranny among stones at the water's edge, settled himself comfortably on moss and fell asleep. "lichen he opened his eyes, he was stiff and sore, severing uncontrollably, with a raging thirst and no desire at all for food. Belatedly he realized he should never have allowed himself to sleep until he had filled his belly, stoking the fires which had amost gone out in him. It was full day, bright, yet he could not see the sun. The sky was blue and cloudless, and nevertheless he couldn't see the sun. Almost without thought, he dived into the lake. The shock nearly killed him. Instead, it brought him back to full, ravenous, thirsty life. He drank, and the water lay in his belly like lead. Now he had to eat. He came out of the lake running. Nothing mattered but meat. It had to be meat. He caught a hare within two minutes through fanatic determination. The hare had survived to that moment through speed -- but he was famished. He caught it and killed it IF with one quick, impatient movement. Tearing away some skin, he sucked the still moving blood, tore with his teeth at the warm flesh. When there was nothing left on the bones to suck he went back to the lake soberly and cleaned himself. Thefe was no doubt about it, he would have to learn to make fire. Eating raw flesh like an animal was all very well when hunger turned the screw, but he was never going to be as hungry as that again. Not in this world of plenty. When he set out to explore Limbo he felt, for the first time, alone. He was sure he would know if there was another living human being anywhere in Limbo -- and there was none. Reaching a place where the gradual ascent from the lake was steeper, he struck away from it, up the hill. Height might save him a lot of trouble. He might be able to survey miles of his kingdom from a single vantage point. Moments later, as the steep rise leveled off, he looked around and realized a strange thing about Limbo. It was astonishingly, unnaturally flat. True, there was a general decline to the lake. There had to be, or there would be no lake. He had found several small streams, over all of which he could jump. Following any of the streams to their source, he could find the highest points in his domain. But these could not be very high. Recalling the trees he had seen, he guessed not one was more than thirty or forty years old. There was an inescapable conclusion. Since Limbo was d'early not a natural world, someonehad made it less than half a century ago. T Te did follow a stream. About   six miles from the lake, the stream welled from a hole in a rock. Farther on, behind the rock, the ground level, which had never risen much, fell away sharply. He looked at the clear water gushing from the rock and found it, as a spring, decidedly unconvincing. The spring welled from the highest point around, one of the highest points in Limbo. Of course such things could happen. But this spring looked, despite the natural setting, very like a public drinking fountain fed by pipes. And behind the stream he had traced to its unconvincing source, the ground, almost flat everywhere else, fell away to... Nothing. He stared at it, trying o penetrate it. It could be fog. It was gray like fog. But if it was, it was fog behind glass. Down the slope, steeper than anything he had seen so far, only a quarter of a mile away. Limbo ended in gray mist. Despite his misgiving -- he found he had a caveman's fear of rolling down the slope and over a cliff edge into a bottomless chasm -- he descended the slope. The vegetation he saw on the way down was sparser and tougher than any he had seen anywhere else. Life here, behind the streams, was a struggle. Indeed, only the birds and the wiry grass and scrub found the struggle worth while. There were nests everywhere. The birds had had the sense to nest in the one place shunned by all the other inhabitants of Limbo. The slope evened out at the bottom. There was a ten-yard track facing the wall. It was impossible not to think of it as a wall, although as he stood facing it, three feet from it, he couldn't be sure there was anything solid there at all. Nothing grew within ten yards of it. A twig thrown at the wall bounced back, proving that it was some kind of barrier. He went closer still and cautiously touched the wall. It gave slightly, with no sensation of touch, and then his hand was stopped. The wall ran at first sight absolutely straight. Close to it, he found it curved gently. Probably it made a perfect circle... looking up and guessing the shape of the wall higher up by the part he could see before it disappeared into what he had assumed to be open sky, he saw no reason why it could not be a truly perfect dome. He was a prisoner. He had been doomed to solitary confinement in an idyllic world. And he wondered -- what was his sin? 'hree days later, early in the  morning, he was back at the mound of stones he had built to mark his starting point. Circling the outer limit of Limbo, he had walked about fifty miles, he judged, not counting the forays over the hill for food. The bare track inside the wall never rose or fell the whole way round by as much as a foot. Inside the flat outer ring, close to the wall, all the way round, hills rose steeply to form a saucer with the lake in the middle. If Limbo was a prison, it was a fairly generous prison, its area being something over # square miles. His preliminary estimates indicated that the diameter was about fourteen miles. However, he was no longer so sure that Limbo was a prison. At six points on the perimeter, in the wall that wasn't there, about twenty feet up, were curious indeterminate circular areas about three feet across. Although they were faintly purple rather than gray or blue, their hue and texture were not sufficiently different from the barrier in which they were set for them to be noticeable from any distance. IF And yet they looked like holes or doorways. He was sufficiently sure of their nature to name them Gateways. Having established the limits of his domain, he sought a new point of departure -- and found it at once. At his awakening he had completely ignored the area where he found himself. There just might be something there. Footprints... some manufactured thing like a pin, a cigarette butt, a match, an empty can or packet. Could he find the place? Already, having explored perhaps one per cent of the available area, he was developing a sense of direction which might come from his nakedness and vulnerability, or might depend on something he had not consciously noticed. Of course he could find the place. It didn't seem to take long, although it must have been three or four hours. He knew that civilized people, as he had been once, were ruled by time. But he no longer worshipped time. There was a glut of time in Limbo. He found with no difficulty the glade where, for him, life began. But there was nothing to see. His own bare feet had made no marks on the ground, and there was no other marks. If he had crawled or staggered there, where had he come from? Almost certainly up the hill a little. He took a few cautious steps... And found the house. II T he house shattered all his theories. Entirely out of place in a world which had no other artifact, it was set there firmly and boldly in a clearing which could become a garden. The front door was open. Memory did not stir. He was sure he had never set eyes on the house. He approached the house slowly. The big windows were clean. There was no smog to make them filthy. Small animals and birds treated the house exactly like any other inanimate object. The birds rested on the roof when they felt like it, the hares ran within inches of the walls. But no creature approached the open door. When he reached it, he found out why. In the doorway he felt something which harmed him not at all, but made him shiver and told him to be afraid. Being a man, he shivered and refused to be afraid. Animals and birds would react differently. He entered, and the feeling dissolved. He had crossed the invisible barrier. Wherever he moved in the house, there was light. If he went naked from now on, it would be from choice. A complete wardrobe of clothes was only one of the things the house provided. It had everything -- furniture, beds with sheets and blankets, a fully equipped kitchen, a well stocked larder, hot and cold water, a library, and a workshop at the back which contained not only every hand tool and power tool he could imagine himself needing, and many whose purpose he didn't know, but also stacks of wood sawn into planks and beams, huge sheets of plywood and hardboard, metal tubing, brackets, posts, girders, rolls of felt, plastic sheeting, tarpaulin. He went back to the kitchen, hungry as he always was. Only once in his six days in Limbo had he felt really satisfied -- after killing and wolfing the hare. Now he could gorge himsef until he couldtft move. There was an electric cooker, a refrigerator humming quietly, and although nothing here could be fresh, he was sure that all the canned and preserved stores would be in perfect condition. In that workshop it would take him only a few minutes to fashion a bow as strong as he could pull and some wicked, deadly arrows. Deer were so plentiful and so unafraid that he could get so dose to a buck it would be impossible to miss. A nticipation of cooking and eai ing fresh meat was exquisite torture... but there was a mirror on one wall of the kitchen, and catching sight of himself in it he decided there were things to be done even before he ate. After bathing, shaving, trimming his hair and nails, he looked more closely at the clothes in the wardrobe. He went the length of starting to dress himself in a suit, with socks and a shirt and a tie, before rebelling and putting on only a pair of khaki shorts and soft leather sandals. In Limbo, that was all even a civilized man needed to wear. Then, still hungry, he examined the other bedrooms, those he had previously dismissed with a glance after finding the one he wanted, the one that was his. Only two were ready for immediate occupancy, as his had been. In the vast wardrobes of the two that were ready, he foimd women's dothes, in every variety and style known to him, dothes not for one woman but for two, dothes that only young and attractive women wodd wear... Suddenly he found himself sweating. A man could face what he had to face. A man could see himself living until he died, alone, with only pigs and diickens for company. A man could face that as he could face life with one leg, with one eye, with no eyes. But when hope opened the door... He discarded the eviIF dence that there were te be two women and thought only of one. Could he have missed a girl who had come to life as he had come to life, at about the same time? Undoubtedly he could. In an area of # square miles two individuals could blunder about for months without becoming aware of each other's existence. She had to be here. If there was any justice, any hope, any happiness. She had to be here. But She was not in the house. He prowled through it again. On the ground floor he tried doors he had not yet opened. After a while he feund the one he wanted. Stone steps led down into a cellar. Although the cellar was bare and cold compared with the rest of the house, lights went on as he opened the door. He went down the steps. In the cellar, which was not large, were three things. They lay side by side on stone plinths. They were coffins. They were coffins in shape, with brass plates, which he could see while still halfway up the stairs, set in the polished wood. But each had one thing he had never seen on any coffin -- a glass faceplate where the head should be. He approached the first casket cautiously, unafraid but not wishing to spy on death. On the brass plate in plain letters was the one word Rex. There was nothing behind the faceplate. And without thinking he touched the lid and found he could open it on a hinge. The case was empty. He had a name. He was Rex. He moved to the next casket and scarcely had to look at the plate to know what it said: Regina, A moment later he was gazing at her through the faceplate. 'his was She, sleeping so much as the Sleeping Beauty always lay in illustrations in children's books that he put out his hand to raise the lid and kiss her to rouse her. This lid, however, didn't budge. She was a pretty blonde, her head so small and her features so so fine and delicate that she must be tiny, slim, soft, the most feminine kind of woman. Because she was tiny, he could see her bare shoulders through the glass, and they were shaped to inflame a man. Her hair was pure gold, her skin, as much of it as he could see, exquisite. Regina. She. And as lovely a She as he could have hoped for. At the thought he became intensely curious about the third box. What, logically, could it contain? A child? A dog? He padded across and looked. He caught his breath. Regina was pretty. She was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Yet she remained a pretty girl. This was a very beautiful woman. On the brass plate was engraved: Venus. Between the two cases he stood uncomprehendingly. He had wanted a woman, wanted her with a longing which no one but another castaway could ever appreciate. He had felt, somehow, that in the nature of this environment, there must be a She... But why two of them? It was obvious that he was not meant to burst open the caskets. His own had opened from inside; the others would do the same if they opened at all. The labels, rather than names, Rex and Regina, he accepted easily. He was prepared to be Rex of Limbo and call his consort Regina. She had to be his consort -- their labels united them. But what of Venus? All the indications were that Venus was not meant for him. Then who was she meant for? The puzzle diverted him so much that he climbed out of the cellar and sought information in the small library he had seen, a case of books in the main lounge in the center of the house, windowless. There were only about a hunshelves in a glass-fronted bookcase. Reference books of various sizes came first on each shelf, then non-fiction, then literature, then whatever was left. There was a dictionary, a one-volume encyclopedia, a book of facts and figures, an atlas, a medical dictionary, an outline of history. There was a book of seven-figure mathematical tables, a dictionary of music, an encyclopedia of art, a cookery book, a book on gardening, an album of flora and fauna. The Bible was there and the Koran. Almost all the books were brand new, untouched. The last date he found was #. They cracked and rustled as he handled them, never having been opened. It was only by chance that a flyleaf fell open and he found that every book had a printed stick-on label reading: Section K, Department of Educa- tion and Science, London, Earth. So he was a guinea pig. He had suspected it. Suddenly he went rigid, all his senses bent on what had alerted him. Steps in the hall. Human footsteps. 'hen as he listened to the steps, and thought, he relaxed deliberately and forced himself to stay where he was, although the temptation to leave the books and investigate was strong. When he entered the celler, he had broken a contact, let fresh air in, or in some other way threw a switch. A few minutes later Regina awoke, as he had awakened, and did as he must have done -- IF Ill crawled up the stairs, staggered outside and a little way down the hill, and rested, perhaps slept, in a glade. He hoped fervently it was Regina and not Venus. He could not see any point in the presence of yenus. He could see many good reasons for the presence of Regina, however. He didnt follow her, didn't force his presence and assistance on her. He had been allowed all the time he needed to orient himself in Limbo, and Regina should have the same. Venus as well as Regina might have awakened. He turned to the books again. The dictionary told him Venus was the goddess of love in Roman mythology, equated with the Greek Aphrodite, which he knew. It also told him she represented sexual love, amorous desires or influences. But her personal history did not seem particularly relevant. He took it for granted that he was not in any real sense a king nor Regina a queen, and that Venus was a label rather than an incarnation of a being who had never existed anyway. Yet labels meant something. His and Regina's meant they were husband and wife, and he assumed they would be, although he had no recollection of ever seeing Regina before. Why was the other woman labeled Venus? R egina already knew she was Regina and that there was a Rex. For her, awakening was a far greater ordeal than for Rex, yet more complete more quickly. From the very first her mind was dear. She got out of the case, with an effort that exhausted her so much that she had to cling to the case, her head reeling, only because she was sick and did not want to be sick in a box. After a few seconds she managed to shut the case so that she could lean over it, and it was then that she saw her name. Curiosity impelled her, though all she wanted was oblivion to end her agony, to stagger to the next box. Thus she found that Rex was already awake. Then she had to totter across to the third box. It was the sight of Venus that made her dedde to live, after all. Until she saw her, all Regina wanted was to climb back in her case hoping that she would lose consciousness again. But now she knew she was Regina and there was a Rex, both of them awake, and Venus was still asleep. It became necessary to stay awake. She managed to reach the stairs and began to climb them, half crawling. The greater warmth at the top was the first thing to bring her some semblance of pleasure; the torture eased slightly. It did not occur to her, finding herself in a house, to stagger out of it. Instead she went to the stairs and began to climb them, appreciating the softness and warmth of the carpeting after the hard cold floor of the cellar under her bare feet. After ten minutes in the bathroom a second thing happened to give her the will to live. The first had been the realization that another woman was ready to step in if she refused to take her place in whatever situation existed here. The second was her first conscious sight of herself in a full-length mirror. Her mood changed gradually but steadily as she looked. She was not only pretty. The slim, small body which had been giving her hell was exactly what she would have admired jealously if another girl possessed it. She could wear anything or nothing and need no assistance from what she wore. TJ ex scarcely realized it was the sixth or seventh time he had returned to stare down at the lovely Venus, or how long he had spent staring. He bent closer to examine her. There was the faintest breath of movement. She wasn't exactly breathing, yet she wasn't as still and rigid as stone. "Try kissing the glass," a voice said acidly. " Maybe that will do it." He spun round. Only a couple of yards from him was Regina, cool and completely in command of herself, wearing a pink patterned dress and high-heeled shoes. She had done something to her hair, too. Hello, Regina," he said. You look wonderful." know. But thanks for noticing." "You seem to have recovered a lot quicker than I did." "I don't think I'll ever recover. I still feel like death." "You went out, you were... sick?" "Please," she said coldly. "We don't know each other. Let's leave the intimate details until later -- much later -- if ever. Anyway, I didn't go outside. Why should I?" "No reason -- " "Never mind. Tell me what this is all about." "I don't know what this is all about." But he told her what he did know, concluding: "Apparently we're guinae pigs of a sort, perhaps watched all the time, perhaps watched only when we try to get out of Limbo -- " "We can get out?" Regina said sharply. He had not mentioned the Gateways so far. "In time. With some effort... I think. But the point is -- " "Let's get one thing clear," said Regina. "I may be ignorant. I may be only Regina to your Rex." She glanced without enthusiasm at VeIF nus in her case. "I may be only half your weight, so you can knock me about whenever you feel like it. We may have been thrown together by a couple of names on boxes. But I will not stand for any man, even the only man in the place I happen to be in, telling me what is and what is not the point. I can think. I can add two and two and get any number I happen to fancy. If there are only two of us here -- " she cast another brooding glance at the third case -- 'before we go any further, that doesn't automatically mean that I'm your wife. Still less does it mean I'm yom squaw, and most definitely I'm not part of the interior plumbing. Is that clear?" "'Not entirely." right, I'll put it plainer -- " 'No don't bother. I think I caught the gist." "Well you could have put more clothes on," said Regina unsympathetically. 'I did." "Hungry," he asked. "Let's raid the kitchen." She saw nothing to argue about in that, and they went up the stairs, shutting the cellar door behind them. S he knew her way around a kitchen. A few quick glances into cupboards, drawers and the big refrigerator seemed to tell her exactly what was there and what was not. "The potatoes look all rit, but there are no fresh vegetables," she said. "Theres no parsley growing around here, but there's mint at the back of the house -- " His eyes narrowed. "How do you know?" "What?" "You haven't been out." "Well do you always have to go and look before you know what you are going to find?" "Yes." She shrugged. "Anyway, there's mint at the back of the house. Will you get it, or do I have to go for it myself?" " AU right." He left her in the kitchen and went out to the back of the house. Here a vegetable garden had been set out at one time, but it had not been tended for years. The rhubarb was plentiful and good. Very little else was. The mint was usable. When he returned to the kitchen, he found Regina, an apron over her pink dress, coping competently with about a dozen things at once. "Thanks," she said, accepting the mint. "Now go and get washed. Dinner in twenty minutes." After he showered, there was time to go down to the cellar and see if there was any change in Venus. Venus was still the same. "Do you want your dinner in here?" Regina asked tartly. Again she was just behind him, and he hadn't heard her. Regina' he said firmly, Hhere are only three human beings in this little world. What do you want to do about Venus? Kill her?" 'The thought hadn't actually occurred to me. But I'll give it due consideration." The meal was very good. That night, after a day of hard work in which Regina proved herself not only practical but also a consummate expert in finding work for idle hands to do, it was she who said, carelessly, without thinking: "Let's go to bed." "Let's," he said. She looked at him broodingly. "No, not together," she said. "Definitely not together." "You think you could stop me?" "No. But I'd try." He didn't try her door later. It did occur to him to go down and have another look at Venus. But Regina would know. IV hey worked hard for six days and then, by tacit consent, observed a day of rest. There were two main areas of friction between them. One of them arose from the fact that neither was made for simple friendliness with the opposite sex. The other area of friction was the Gateways. "Maybe you want to escape from a place like this, but I don't," Regina said. "I don't want to escape. If those spots really are Gateways, they have to be investigated. That's obvious." "Don't tell me," said Regina crossly, "what is and what is not obvious." "Well, I'm a big, healthy fellow, and I need a woman. If I can't get one in Limbo -- " "Stick to the subject. Why are you obsessed with the idea of getting away from here?" Very mildly Rex said: "I'm not obsessed with anything. You're doing all the protesting. Why not tell me quietly, calmly, why you refuse even to think about going through a Gateway away from here?" She didn't hit the roof. She never did. Often she seemed on the point of losing her temper, of hitting him or throwing things, but she was too innately practical to do anything of so little practical value. "Well, some day I want to go back to Earth," she said. "I think everybody does and always will." He was interested. For her the barrier between what she knew and didn't quite know had always been more easily broken down than for him. She knew more than he did. "I'm in no hurry," she said. "I said some day. Earth's the only place I might leave here to go to, and I'd want to come back. There's peace here, and purpose. It's a place so much better than anywhere else IF I ever heard of that I think it's crazy to leave it voluntarily." 'You don't mind being alone here?" 'I'm not exactly alone. Only half alone. You're here." After that the conversation petered out in their other area of friction. On the seventh day, they took a basket, which Rex carried, and a beach bag, which Regina slimg over her shoulder, closed the house door and set out. Rex, as usual, wore shorts and sandals. Regina, for the first time, was dressed frankly frivolously. 'Very nice," he said when he first saw her. "Well, there's no need to rave about it all day," she retorted. Still, you noticed. I was beginning to think if I wanted any attention I'd have to wear nothing but a gold chain around my waist and bring a panther on a lead." They were walking down the slope, and this meant they were bound to reach the lake. Before they reached it, however, they struck off to the right to skirt the shorter arm of the lake and reach the other side, where, Regina said never having been there," there was a soft grass clearing nearly a mile square with deep water for swimming right up to the two-foot bank. 'Regina, you see things," said Rex. 'You know things. If I asked you what the country was like two miles from here you could tell me, though you've never been tho -- " "Well, can't you?" "No. I had to explore this dace before I knew an # rthing about it. And I haven't really explored more than about a tenth of it yet." "You don't know what you're going to see until you see it?" "No. Never. Now -- " "Yes?" "Tell me about the Gateways and the wall." #C'llell?" she said coldly. Every time the Gateways were mentioned they ended up argimig. "You can sense them, can't you?" "The wall, not what you call Gateways." "Can't you see through the Gateways? Beyond the wall? Itside here?" She paused and then said quietly: "No." "No?" "Nothing. Blankness." He would have said more, but he didn't want an argument on this day of rest. When they reached their destination it was exactly as Regina had described it, even to the huge boulder resting on the bank of the lake. She waved at it. "You change on this side, and I'll change on the other," she said. He stared at her rather blankly. aU right," said Regina sweetly. If you didn't think of it, X did." She opened her beach bag and handed him trunks wrapped in a towel. Then she went behind the rock. Rex changed into the briefs and dived in. Only a moment later Regina in the water beside him. It surprised him that she swam so badly. But he saw, not being insensitive, that she was on the defensive, daring him to jeer at her and frankly terrified, though she would never admit it, that he would use his infinitely superior power and skill in the water to frighten and humiliate her. He was therefore gentle and understanding, ignoring her clumsiness in the water (the only time he had ever seen her looking clumsy). Of course Regina then went to the other extreme and complained: "I'm not a baby, you know. I won't drown. You don't have to treat me as if I were made of paper." "No, Regina," he said gently, infuriating her. Yet they were laughing when they chmbed out, shaking the water from their hair... then the laughter died. If she wished to maintain the status quo, Rex thought, she would have been wise not to go swimming with him. In her face, as the laugh died, was awareness, awareness of herself, awareness of him. Only by a great effort did he manage to restrain himself -- and the next instant, when the moment had passed and they both knew it, he realized he had been wrong, he should not have fought the impulse down; the door had been opened for a moment, but now it was shut. They , sat down and ate, saying little, Regina's eyes faintly mocking. Presently, with a sigh, she lay back on the grass and went to sleep instantly. Rex moved to sit over her. Her flesh was warm, but surely not warm enough to burn his hand so. He traced her contours, learning her, remembering they had touched only a few times, by accident, while working together. She slept on, but he was no longer overscrupulous, afraid of making a wrong move. She smiled in her sleep, and her body began to move under his hands. Then she was awake, easily, still smiling, and it was all right.  fterwards everything was different, as they had both known it would be. "Now we're really Rex and Regina," said Rex smugly. She merely grunted. "Regina... what about children?" 'What about them?" she asked. "Are you scared here, only with me?" "I expect we'll cope. If you mean do I want children, I think the IF question scarcely arises. In a place like this we cant not have children, surely?" He kissed her again, fighting down his reawakening desire. Something had to be said. The two people in a tiny world must never have things between them that could not be spoken of. Quietly he told her: "I'm going through the first Gateway tomorrow." She froze. Well. I see I'm going to have something really special in the way of hone#mioons." What do you mean? I may only be gone five minutes." "Or five years, or forever. Why not be content with what we have here?" "Because the Gateways exist," he said patiently. "You mean you're one of thosfi idiots who have to go aroimd climbing mountains because they're there?" she demanded. "Maybe I am." She jumped up and rather crossly started putting on her clothes. Rex got up too. "Don't do that," he said. "Why not?" "Ask a silly question," he said, "and you don't always get a silly answer." This time she welcomed him with a passion that startled him. # # T wouldn't trust myself on  that," said Regina rather sullenly, looking critically at the spidery stairway. She had openly hoped it would take Rex so long and would prove so difficult to make a stairway which could be carried to the north wall and set up there that he would give up the idea. However, a few hours' work the evening before had sufficed for him to make the stairway. "It's not only strong enough to bear my weight, but secure enough to support me if I have to lower myself twenty feet on the other side." "You think you'll have to?" "No. I believe that's a mattertransference field up there." "What's that?" "I don't know anything about it, beyond that, and there's nothing in the books -- I looked. But that's what I think those Gateways are doorways to six spots that could be anywhere in the galaxy." The stairway was a framework of metal tubing, made in sections now securely bolted together. At the top was a wooden platform with metal rails round it on three sides, set within an inch of the wall. He wore plain gray overalls, with a shirt and shorts underneath. He reckoned this gave him the best chTance of passing muster in an environment which could be absolutely anything. "I'll come with you if you like," Regina said ungraciously. "N#. You stay here, Regina." "Wky don't you want me to come?" she demanded. 'Because we don't know anything about this. The Gateways may be nothing but spots on the wall. They may be doors leading only to empty space, and I'll die the moment I go through." She shuddered. "I'm not staying here alone. If you're not back in twenty-four hours, I'm coming after you." "No, Regina," he said sharply. "I may be delayed, injured, captured, anything. I'll get back, I promise, if it's possible to get back. But it may be days, weeks." After making her promise to wait at least twenty days before even thinking of following him through the Gateway, he kissed her and turned to the stairway. She spim him back and kissed him fiercely. "You don't think you're getting away just like that, do you?" she demanded. "A brotherly kiss, with your mind on the other side of the Gateway -- " Like thousands of other women throughout history, she put everything she had into dcla#dng his departure. And like most of them, she succeeded. But afterwards, he really did go. At the top, he fastened one end of the coil of nylon rope he had round his waist to one of the rails round the platform. Then, with a wave, he touched the Gateway. He felt a violent tug at his middle. Then nothing. V A fter a time that was neither heaven nor hell, and a period that was pure hell, he awoke to full consciousness in a not-so-gentle world. This time he was lying on rough, hard, gravel-mud, stone-clay ground in what was obviously a disused quarry. There was a sun in this sky, gray and leaden though it was, and from its position behind the clouds, just dropping behind the ravished walls of the quarry, it would set pretty soon. He was cold and there was rain in the air. The temperature was nearly twenty degrees lower than in Limbo. But this was less important than the discovery that matter-transference was similar to the unpleasant rebirth process that he and Regina had gone through once and had somehow expected would never have to go through again. The rope was neatly severed, as if cut. Apparently you could take things through the Gateway, but they could not be attached to anything in Limbo. Before he could move, he had to be sure he could return to exactly this spot, or he'd never be able to return to Limbo. Behind him there was no sign of any Gateway. Terror gripped him, but he calmed himself. The GateIF way, though there was no visible sign of it, must be immediately behind him. He scraped away a little of the broken stone, sand, soil and moss to make doorposts for the invisible doorway, a guide to him and to no one else. Then he felt it safe to move away. On three sides the walls of stone and earth rose to fifty or sixty feet. On the fourth, a former access road was blocked by thin scrub, and from that direction he now heard a heavy rolling sound. Then he turned and saw the highway. Beyond the line ef shrubbery a rough barbed-wire fence had been erected, probably to keep children out of an obvious danger spot. The significance of all this was not lost on'him: the Gateway was carefully located in a place useless to everyone, shut off, with no shelter, buildings or huts to attract even vagrants. Scaling the fence presented difficulties. Fortunately, he still had most of his rope witii him, the only thing he did have except for his clothes and a clasp knife. Looping the rope over one of the metal supports, he climbed up and jumped down on the other side. He hid the rope at the foot of the fence. It was immense. Lanes stretched as far as he could see in the misty dusk. Although he could not count the lanes, they were aU one-way. So probably somewhere else there was a similar vast highway leading the other way. There were huge articulated trucks which despite their vastness must be doing a hundred miles an hour. There were slower, lumbering lorries which looked like cattletrucks. There were little flashing cars which sped like arrows across the plain. Only a mile or two away, a city began. He thought of it as beginning, because he could see well enough that it had a beginning -- the first houses, halls and churches, with lamps already beginning to glow. But he could see nothing to indicate that the city ever ended. It spread in both directions into the gloom. It could not, he guessed, have fewer than # inhabitants Indeed, since he had to guess, with the volume of traffic to help him to guess, he estimated the population at more like #. An hour later he reached the first buildings. The street lamps were lit, but this vast city was evidently a place where public light was doled out parsimoniously. T Te waited until he saw people in   the streets. They were twolegged, two-armed, and some of them were in overalls. It seemed safe to proceed. Nobody looked at him. He passed It must be the name of the town, incongruous as it was. Certainly it IF was not on the planet Mercury.' Although he entered the city on the same level as the road, he presently found himself on a walkway which overlooked it, or part of it. Below was a one-way tunnel roadway, only three-lanes, along which cars and trucks raced into the city. Their speed was uniform, and the path they took so precise that there could be no doubt control was automatic. Most of the other pedestrians were hurrying. The people were dressed quite unremarkably in rather drab garments suited to the climate, with no difference whatever between the sexes. All wore tunics and slacks. He had seen one sign, the one that read Mercury. Now he saw another. Starkly it warned, in flamindication whether it was intended to be taken literally or evangelistically. And nobody looked at it. He would have liked to stop somebody, anybody, and speak to him. But for all he knew, that might mean instant arrest. Maybe he was supposed to have a work card or curfew permit or at least identification. Only a little way into the city, the walkways became canopied. He was fortunate in reaching the first canopy just as the rain began. The lighting was uniform, always adequate, nowhere real bright. Shop windows, increasingly commoner as he penetrated from the outskirts, were lit dimly. He would have liked to enter any building, a shop or bar or house, but having no money he decided to go on until he found a public reading-room, library or even toilet, where he could get some idea what a Mercurian interior was like. Again he came to a sign giving people passing it didn't ignore it. It was moire than that. They were deliberately blind to it, knowing it was there and being careful not to see it. Although from outside the city he had seen many steeples and towers which he had taken for churches, he had not yet passed one. Presently he did see a church, but it was on the opposite walkway. Even from the opposite walkway, and in the poor light, he could read the text on the church's billboard. So the text was evangelical. People were being frightened into the churches, as they had been in the Dark Ages. Now perhaps two miles into the city, he came to a crossway, no mere bridge but a walk.ay going at right angles between buildings, with no road beneath. He took it because the route he had been following had shown him nothing very new for a long time. Scarcely anyone was walking here. Presently the walkway curved over another lower-level road, but this one seemed more like a railway without rails. The long green cars were imiform, there was twoway traffic, and they moved at the same speed in exactly the same track. Here there was nobody at all, except a small girl leaning over the rail on the opposite side -- engaged in the age-old children's pastime of looking at the trains, Rex thought. He took his eye off her for a moment. When he looked back, drawn by a movement, he shouted involuntarily. She had one thin leg over the rail and was swinging the other over. Although she must have heard his shout, she didn't look at him. She was looking down at the trains. Calmly, as one approached, she launched herself out and fell with apparent slowness right into the path of the car. She hit the ground, and the train hit her in the same instant. There was no noise above the rumbling purr of the car, no scream; and after it had happened nothing remained down there but a small stain, gleaming dimly in the poor light. She could have been no more than nine or ten. Tefore he found the church, Rex saw another suicide. This one was public. In one of the bugj walkways a man of about thirty-ii five, alone, suddenly leaned over thi rail, pivoting on his stomach, and fell headfirst to dash his brainflj on the road below. What shocked Rex most about if was the indifference of the citizens.; A few, mildly curioys, looked over the rail to check that the man was writhing about with broken limbs and a broken back. Traffic control knew about it at once. Every vehicle detoured the fallen body. Close to the edge of the road, it was not much of a nuisance. Within three minutes an ambulance, clearly marked with a red cross, drew up, and the traffic went round it too. How a casualty was picked up in Mercury was new to Rex.It stopped over the body, and when it moved on a few seconds later, there was no sign that anything had been there, except a rectangle gleaming with liquid of some kind, probably disinfectant. Before he found the church, Rex had an encounter with a homicidal maniac. A shout alerted him, and he turned. The moment he turned, Rex knew that the man running at him with a breadknife was completely off his head. His wildly working face told the story. Something had snapped -- suddenly. In the split seconds before the man rcach him, Rex was able IF to observe from the reactions of the score or so people in the immediate vicinity that this was unusual, this was shocking, this was themselves were barely worth a second glance. A man running amok with a breadknife was not, apparently commonplace in Mercury. There was time to sense this, but no time to be afraid. And then, as the man came nearer, there was no real need to be afraid, because he wasn't coming for Rex at all. He was running past him, his quarry a little old lady who from her dazed, terrified yet puzzled expression had never seen the maniac in his life. Rex didn't think. As the man with the knife raced past him, Rex caught the arm holding the knife, diverted it upwards and used all his strength on the wrist. All his strength was not necessary. The knife dropped, as he had intended. He had not intended to break the man's wrist and dislocate his shoulder. In pain, the maniac whimpered and drooped. Sanity did not return. What returned was apathy. He was swept out of the way as quickly, cleanly and neatly as the man who had killed himself. Three men in white coats, summoned by means or persons unknown to Rex, arrived magically and took him into the nearest entrance. With them was a blue-suited man who had to be a policeman. To Rex's astonishment, he didn't speak to him at all, and only very briefly, one question and answer to the terrified old woman. Then the policeman nodded briefly at Rex, ten yards away, turned and picked up the knife and followed the others. That was it. The flow on the walkway resumed, and not one of the people concerned cast another glance at Rex. The old lady had hurried away the moment the police let her go. Still wondering why he hadn't even been asked his name, he saw something lying close to the wall, where it had been kicked in the brief struggle. He picked it up. It was the maniac's wallet. There was nothing in it but paper money and coins. It was a purse rather than a wallet, not intended for anything other than money. There was no identification. In most other places in the galaxy a man openly picking up a purse would have attracted some attention. In Mercury, nobody noticed. Nobody was interested. Rex hesitated for quite a while, the purse in his hand. Finally, not happy about it, he put it in his pocket. B efore he found the church, he was offered love, or what passed for love in the walkways of Mercury. The girl simply caught his arm and looked at him, ignoring everybody else, and this happened at a particularly busy spot. He smiled down at her, trying to ton her down gently without having to say a word. His smile inflamed her -- she was not used to smiles like that. She pulled him to one of the boxes he had guessed to be telephone kiosks. They were. When she shut the door it locked. She put her hand to the zip of her tunic. Then, in the brighter light of the kiosk, she happened to see his eyes clearly. She froze. Twentyman," she whispered. "You should have told me.' The next instant she was out of the kiosk, letting it swing slowly shut behind her. Rex's impression was that she was not terrified, not desperate to escape; she merely knew that no Twentyman, whoever or whatever that might be, could possibly be interested in her. Soon after leaving the booth he if this was forbidding, the door was open and there was light within. Organ music rolled out to him. He entered. The church was vast. As he took in its immensity, he realized why he had taken so long to come on a church. If they were as big as this, not many would be needed. Vast as it was, and although no service was in progress and no minister present, it was well filled. Before the many altars people knelt and crossed themselves. Thousands of candles blazed, as if the electric lighting were not fully adequate. Every moment hundreds entered and hundreds left. The decorations and ritual seemed overpoweringly Roman Catholic. At the thought of Catholicism, he watched the moving crowds for a pattern and presently saw, in addition to the normal coming and going, a steady procession to a large archway beside the main altar. Confession. There would be priests in there, evidently very many priests. Rex started for the doorway. He was no Catholic, but confession was privileged, wasn't it? What would happen if he saw a priest and confessed he did not belong to this world and asked for information and advice? It would be interesting to find out. VI T Tis awakening in Limbo was the   worst of the three he had experienced, but there was one good thing about it. Regina was there. She was crying. Vaguely he gathered he'd been gone seventeen days. Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom. An hour later, desperately tired IF and weak but dean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasnt anywhere upstairs. Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found energy enough to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak... , He went down in his pajamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine. Much later, he was sufficiently restored totalk. Indeed, after such a meal he didn't feel inclined to move for at least an hour. He told her all the obvious things, and she listened, seldom asking questions. He told her he had seen three suicides. He told her more about his impressions of Mercury than the details. "It's a sad, tired, aimless place. There's nothing wrong, no oppressive government, no war, no crime wave. Nobody's starving and there are no problems, except everything." There must, be a reason. Deficiency in air or food?" 'Deficiency in environment is my guess. Of course I don't know any details of government, laws, sanctions, an # rthing like that. But how it looks is -- nobody sees any future." He paused and then said. "But the Twentymen exist. Perhaps they represent hope. "You haven't told me about them." "No... I told you that later, after seeing the priest, I was talking in a bar to a girl who knew that another shot of pex would kill her, and took it... Well, after she died, a Twenty man came in to see what had happened. This one was a woman, an old woman. Twentymen can be men or women, young or old. When she came in, everybody knew about it." "What did she look like?" "I don't remember, and it didn't matter." "What are Twentymen?" "Special. You can see it and feel it. She came to me at once and said Twentyman? From where?' I said nothing and just stared back at her." "And then what?" "Then... practically nothing. She asked what had happened, I told her, and she went away. Seems there's a Twent # maan union. She was in no doubt that I was a Twent # onan -- neither were the two others who looked into my eyes -- and after that my business was my own and anything I said had to be the truth." "Well, everybody knows you're something very special indeed. You are Rex. Naturally you're a Twentyman. One small question that crosses my mind -- " "Yes," said Rex. "What exactly do you mean by yes?" "You're a Twcntyman too." S he was disconcerted. "How do know?" He smiled. "Take it from me you are." "Apart from the Twentymen aspect, you paint a grim picture, Rex." "There's worse. I didn't really tell you about the priest. I took a risk talking to him, telling him a little about this place, about you... I needn't have worried. Nobody in Mercury cares enough to denounce anybody or persecute anybody or hound a stranger out of town. Besides, he knew I was a Twentyman. Everybody knows, unless you keep your eyes down or look blank. "What did he tell you about Twentymen?" "Nothing. He simply ignored my questions. But he told me a few tWngs, afterwards. I told him about the wallet, and he said in the circumstances he didn't think it would he very wrong if I used the money, which wasn't much, to find out something about the city. So I #id, and I found the three things that seem to keep them going. They call them pex, lex and sex." "One of them sounds normal." "Not the way they go about it. Sex is purely for escape. That makes it the weakest and least reliable of the three. You escape for only an infinitesimal fraction of your life. Pex is better. It's a drug, not alcohol, though you drink it in a bar. It releases all the available reserves of happiness in a person. He's happy for an hour or so. Then he has to pay. He's more miserable than he dreamed of being. The ciure is time or another shot." "Did you try it yourself?" "No. Maybe I should have. But I couldn't take the chance of doing something crazy in Mercury." "And they don't ban this stuff?" Regina said wonderingly. "Ban many people's hope of happiness?" "That leaves lex. Lex for law?" "Yes, but they use it in a special sense. They mean the law of God." "Religion doesn't seem to fit in the kind of environment you've been describing. But if they're religious, doesn't it help them?" "Not as it should, because they lean too heavily on it. God isn't a staff and comfort. God has to be father, mother, doctor, nurse, confessor, crutch and sanctuary. Religion doesn't work for them, though they cling desperately to it, because they put nothing into it, only take from it. Well, they give the church money -- plenty of money. But that's all they put in." "Money? Aren't they poor? I got the impression of a poor society." "They're poor in everything but money. Mercury is highly automated, efficient. Unfortunately they don't know how to take advantage of comparative affluence." #t IF Regina said: "You didn't tell me much about the priest. You said he told you a few things afterwards. After what?" "After I told him a little about this place and about you and me. He asked me a few questions. He was a good, patient man in his way. But when I'd answered his questions and asked for his help, he stretched out his arms and said 'Help me.' " 'he day after his return Rex went to the library to find out about Twentymen. And what he found was that the library contained no mention of Twentymen, in poetry, prose, fiction, history, anthropK)logy, sociology or anything else. He also found something he kicked himself for not noticing before, because it must be important. Most of the books in the small library were brand new, dated #. The others, those which were not brand new, were dated various years back to #. The point was that these books were encyclopedias, dictionaries, histories and other reference books. For several weeks Rex and Regina worked hard until all that remained to be done in Limbo was maintenance. The subject of the Gateways was temporarily dropped. They stabled some cattle, fenced others in, built a fish trap at the lake and started stocking a smaller pool near the house with trout. Although the most predatory birds, animals and fish had been kept out of this reserve when it was stocked, many of the creatures there were incapable of long-term survival without a guiding hand. Many of the things that grew, likewise, needed cultivation. At first Rex had thought of the creatures of Limbo -- whom he assumed to be Section K, London, Earth -- as all-seeing, all knowing gods, trusting them to have made Limbo as perfect as it could be expected to be, trusting their assumed plan. But now he was no longer as trusting. Limbo was not the beautifully balanced sanctuary he had thought it to be. There should have been predators, after all, to keep the fish in check, the birds, the deer Venison was so plentiful in Limbo that the cattle were fed on it. Partridges and grouse were no delicacy; he would have been glad of a few shooting parties to reduce the numbers, the carcasses being shipped away to some place that would be glad of them, like Earth. He didn't mind being a hunter. He hated being a butcher. The Gateways were ignored. They had left the stairway where it was, although Rex had no wish to return. IF Not all their time was spent working. Soon they had read most of the books in the small library, at vant to life in Limbo, any rate the parts that were releO ne day when Regina was out doing the chores, including a visit to the herds on the south side of the lake, because Rex had tripped on a root and slightly sprained his ankle, he looked again at the books and something clicked. It was not memory. It was more like deduction. They had been provided with everything they needed -- far more than they needed. It did not make sense that what their minds needed was not supplied -- unless, of course, the Gateways were the answer, and curiosity and boredom were meant to make them turn to exploration. He hadn't even looked at Venus for several weeks. Now he went down the stairs again and gazed at her. Venus was as lovely as ever. He loved Regina and he could not love Venus; he didn't believe a man could fall in kve with a beautiful, sleeping face. However, he wasn't there to look at Venus. Instead he did something it had not previously occurred to him to do . He examined the cellar closely. The walls were plainly whitepainted, the floor plastic. Although cold, it was not damp. He found ventilators and wondered where they led. Not upward, he guessed. There were no cold air curremts in the house or outside it. He found no sign of a door, trapdoor or hatch. The two empty cases seemed to mock him, and he returned to examine his own. The plinth seemed solid. The lid opened and closed easily, not locking. He could see the locks, all the way round, nee they were closed, it would be easier to smash the solid oak lid than to force the locks. This made him pause for a moment, but there was nothing to be gained by standing looking at the case. He climbed in and pulled the lid shut. At once, as he had half expected, the bolts shot. The base n which he lay began to sink smoothly and rapidly, and he sighed with relief. He had guessed right. The descent stopped without a jar and lights came on. Rex rolled out into a second, lower cellar. This one was colder still, scarcely if at all above freezing point, and he was already shivering from the chill of the upper cellar. Ignoring the other marvels of this vault, he looked around and, to his relief, saw an insulated suit hanging on a hook. He lost no time in putting it on. The vault was vast and it was immediately obvious that this was the heart of that artificial haven, Limbo. Being non-technical, he was impressed by, but not particularly interested in, the machines. He ignored them. There were three shafts leading upward from three plinths, open for a few feet on one side. All looked the same from where he stood. Regina's shaft, examined closely, was identical to his own. There was nothing even to indicate that the base which had raised her was still at the top of the shaft, while his had lowered him to the bottom again. But Venus's, when he examined it, was not quite the same... W hen Regina arrived, not unexpectedly, he held out another suit for her. "Here," he said, 'put this on." She did. 'You crazy idiot," she said as she did so. thought you were dead." Why?" "Oh, it's another of those sensory blocks, I suppose, like the wall round Limbo. I knew you were in the cellar, but not what you were doing -- except when you were drooling over Jezebel, of course. Then you... stopped. Like when you went through the Gateway." "I'm sorry. Of course, there had to be a block. Otherwise you'd have known about the vault." Apart from the machines, the main content of the vault was a vast library of microfilm, and one other thing. It was a model oi the galaxy, in an ovoid case. What was particularly interesting was that from some of the tiny specks representing systems (the scale was too small for mere planets to be represented) hairline wires led to the plastic case, and from there thicker wires ran to a board on the wall. There were six wires. "The Gateways," said Regina flatly. There was never any enthusiasm in her voice when she had to speak of the Gateways. Rex nodded. It was no mere coincidence. He felt for controls around the base of the projection and found them. Any section of space could be brought up to fill the whole case. It was easy to find the system of the Sun and bring it up to full magnification. The device was a mere model, in no way a projection of the real galaxy. But the model of the Solar System was so detailed, within the limits of the scale, that each tiny planet was instantly recognizable. And there was no wire to it. Even Regina, who Jiad deliberately thought less about such matters than Rex, was surprised. "Section K, Department of Education and Science, London, England, Europe, Earth, Solar System, doesn't want us casually dropping in to complain about the arrangements," she said. "No," said Rex thoughtfully. IF At one corner of the model was a panel giving the names of systems and planets as they were focused. Soon Rex found BuUan, the ninth planet of a star called Carthage, with a dty named Mercury. A wire led from Bullan, confirming something that scarcely needed confirming. The Bullan wire led to a connection exactly at the top point of the circle on the wall board. The five others led to worlds called Cresta, Neri, Landfall, Chutcr and Byron. Not one was a planet of a sun with a name known to Rex or Regina, stars that had been old friends of mariners on Earth long before man started sailing the spaceways. But that doesn't matter," said Rex, going back to the microfilm shelves and setting up a viewer. 'wenty minutes later he frowned up at Regina, who had been silently watching him. "Not a word about any of them," he said thoughtfully. "Everywhere else, yes." "We're meant to make up our minds at first hand, then." He managed not to laugh. Taken unawares, she had admitted what she had obstinately refused to admit. But he said nothing. Instead, he went back to the model and turned the knobs apparently aimlessly. Regina started to move about. "I don't have a built-in crystal ball," she said. knew the moment you were back from Bullan. But the moment before that -- nothing. I was lying awake in bed. No presentiment. Suddenly you were back. That was all. Nevertheless, I've got a presentiment about this. Go on as you're doing, and something fearful is going to happen. I know it." "You could be right. But don't you see, it doesn't make any difference? People do what they have to do." She whirled away impatiently. Then abruptly she came to a stop at the foot of Venus's shaft. "What is this?" she said. Rex came and stood beside her. "I saw that," he said quietly. Unlike the other two, this shaft had a large, ostentatious switch on the plinth. "What do you want to do about that?" said Regina, going to a lot of trouble to be casual. He shrugged and said nothing. Indeed, he walked away, leaving Regina by the shaft. "Are you just going to leave it like that?" she demanded. "Leave what like what?" "Well, I won't." she said deliberately threw the switch at the base of Venus's shaft. "Why did you do that?" Rex asked mildly. "It had to be done." "Did it?" She shrugged and didnt answer. 'You mean, he suggested, "it's like having to climb mountains because theyre there?" Terhaps." She ignored that. They looked at the shaft, and waited a couple of minutes. Nothing happened. hat night, scanning the micro film as Regina sat at a table altering clothes which she had decided she didn't like, Rex found a recurring theme, one which puzzled him. Just why was Earth still so important? The emotional ties he could under stand. On Earth and on Earth idone, a human race, the human race, had evolved. Yet with the emotional ties unbroken. Earth could still have become the Old Country, half despised, half reluctantly loved. Somehow it hadn't happened like that. Earth ran everything. Every colony was always turning to Earth. That was why there had never been major conflict among the human settlements. Nobody risked being cut off from Earth. What's Earth to you, Regina?" he asked. Absently, busy with her work, she said: "Home. The mother world. That's aU." And you want to go back there some day?" "Some day." She looked up, more alert. "Don't try to talk me into anything, Rex. Limbo is fine. Earth's a noisy overpopulated, screaming madhouse like nearly everywhere else. The last thing I want is to go back and live there. All I'm say is, everybody wants to see the old place again, sometime." He passed that, although apparently he was not included in everybody. The next day, Rex's ankle being much better, they both went to check on the herds on the south side of the lake. Regina had not reached them the day before. In the middle of a severely practrating yoimg bulls, preferably killing if they could get the carcasses back to the house, Regina observed: "She's out now." "Venus. What's she doing?" Regina shrugged. "I haven't the faintest idea." "Why did you do it, Regina?" She knew what he meant. I'd never build a house halfway up a volcano or labor anxiously in a valley threatened by an avalanche that had to come sooner or later. I like to know where I stand. If something has to happen sooner or later, I'd rather it was sooner." "Do we go back now? I'm asking because this seems to be yoiu: idea." IF 'No. We carry on as intended." It was late afternoon when they returned to the lake, making their way round the shoreline because it was mostly flat and easy going. "Were privileged, or about to be," Regina said. 'You especially, being a man." What are you talking about?" "An historic occasion. A wonderful spectacle. You're about to be present as Venus Rises from the Waves." Rex still looked blank. They rounded the small ridge. And there, emerging from the lake to meet them, was Venus. S he was naked and she was as magnificent as Regina had feared. It would have been, even Regina admitted, ludicrous for such a being to emerge from the wayes vulgarized by a bathing costume. It would have been like putting clothes on cats and dogs. Seeing them without surprise, Venus pulled herself strongly up the three-foot bank, twisting lithely to get her feet under her and stand up all in one fluid movement. Mere water could not make her long dark hair limp. Breathing deeply, beginning already to steam as water was still running off her pale flesh, she was less a goddess than woman incarnate, making Regina feel suddenly very young, small, frail and helpless. It was not that Venus was old -- she might have been twentytwo or twenty-six, but no more. 'You must be Rex and Regina," said Venus. We must," Regina agreed. "Nice to see you. An)nvay, Rex thinks so. You must forgive a certain lack of enthusiasm in me." Venus laughed and spontaneously caught one of Rex's hands and one of Regina's, clasping them together in both of hers. 'No suspicion, Regina," she said in her warm, slightly husky voice. "From the start, no suspicion, no jealously, no awkwardness between us. In the way you're concerned about, I'll stay in my place. In others -- " "What places are you not going to stay in?" Regina asked, since Venus did not continue and Rex, smiling as he looked thoughtfully into Venus's eyes, did not seem inclined to say anything at all. Venus smiled too. "Oh, that just slipped out. I meant for instance, if Rex... No, that really must wait. We've just met." Rex was thinking: She knows more than Regina or I knew in our first hours awake in Limbo. Perhaps she already knows more than we do now. On the way back to the house, Rex asked Venus to go on ahead. When she had gone, he took Regina gently by the shoulders and said, "You precipitated this, remember?" "It's all my fault, then. Obviously." "I didn't say that. If it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of whoever decided Venus should be here with us. That's certainly a puzzle -- " "No, it isn't," said Regina coldly. "The reason is quite obvious." "It's not obvious to me." "With her here, we've got to investigate the Gateways." He had exp)ected something quite different. "Huh?" he said blankly, completely at a loss. "Don't you see? You and I were a imit. Now she's here, suddeply we have conflict. It's inevitable. It is not your fault or mine or even hers. It's in the situation. Her promise, if it was a promise, is neither here nor there. Three of us in Limbo... that means we have to look outside." "I see what you mean," he said slowly. "But why did you throw that switch?" "I told you at the time." She had told him, he decided more than enough for the moment. He kissed her to tdl her something important: that she was Regina and Venus was just Venus. IX V enus couldn't have been less trouble to them. She acted like a self-effacing mother-in-law, though nothing looking less like any mother-in-law could have been imagined. If Rex and Regina seemed to want to be alone at night, Venus went to her room with a book or a ndcrofilm. If Regina was otherwise engaged -- but only then -- Venus would cook meals almost equal to Regina's. If there was work to bo done, Venus was glad rather than hang a little heavy on her hands, though she was far more patient than either Rex or Regina. Rex never gave Regina a moment's anxiety. Neither did Venus. But... They all knew that Venus's presence meant Limbo was overflowing, too full of company or not full enough. Ironically, the second Gateway expedition was made by Rex and Regina. At the foot of the stairway to the second Gateway, they turned to Venus awkwardly. "See you in seventeen days or so," she said cheerfully. It was at that moment that Regina remembered one unanswered question, and it suddenly seemed important. "Venus," she said, "when we first met you, you said that in one way you'd stay in your place, but in others... You promised to tell us later what you meant." Venus smiled. "I didn't promise to tell you," she said, "but I will. Here, Rex is supposed to be the boss. I've never disputed it, have I? But if I thought Rex shouldn't be the boss, and I should, I'd do something about it." liF There was no menace in her voice. Rex knew, however, that she meant it. It even seemed logical, tmderstandable, that, the patient Venus should turn out to be the supervisor of the Limbo plan, whatever that was. Regina, two steps up, started to come down. She seemed to think there was something to discuss, to argue about. Rex caught Regina by the waist and gently started her up the stairway again. see," he said. 'So long, Venus." "Good luck." Rex and Regina climbed the stairs, waved to Venus, and simultaneously touched the Gateway. I t was worse than the arrival at Bullans city of Mercury, worse even than the awakening in Limbo. It was hot, blindingly hot, searingly hot. Rex's overalls were already soaked with sweat, steaming in the heat. Regina lay beside him, pale and limp and unconscious, and although he ached to help her, he could do nothing for her, yet. Around them was blinding yellow desert -- nothing else. Rex looked around for some indication where he should go and found none. The needle of the compass he had brought was spinning aimlessly. He reached over to stroke Regina's cheeks, her hair. She was breathing, but as if in a deep trance. This time they had brought with them three things -- a compass, a water-bottle and a knife. All could be thrown away if they didn't need them. The compass had already proved useless. The knife might or might not be valuable. The waterbottle was worth its weight in gold. Rex took his first sip from the bottle. The water, he found with relief, was the main restorative. Now his headache was easing and he was able to face the ordeal of standing up. Regina could not be left, as she had been left in Limbo, to revive in her own time. He sat up, and she groaned without opening her eyes. For a minute or two he seesawed her up and down. Then she opened her eyes. "Let me die," she said. "Don't think like that." "You're very bright and spry," she said resentfully. "Have you been awake for hoiurs?" "Only a few minutes." The ordeal was far worse for her than for him. She was, of course, a slim, tiny creature, with only a small reserve of strength. Regina pulled herself together with an effort, sniffed the air and looked around. "It's all right," she said without enthusiasm. "I know where we are. Stay here for a moment." She staggered about twenty yards and turned round two or three times, her eyes shut. Then, her eyes still closed, she returned and stopped only inches short of where the Gateway must be. She opened her eyes. "We don't need to mark the spot," she said. T'll be able to come right back to it. That's north." She pointed. 'There's a city almost due east of here, about four miles." A city four miles away in a world where compasses didn't work would have been hard to find without Regina's special sense. Can you sense the whole world?" Rex asked. 'Only very vaguely." You can sense people, can't you?" 'Gnly that there are people. Men and women, not aliens. But I can't tell you whether they're black, red or green, dwarfs or giants, friends or enemies." 'he dty was not large; Regina couldn't give a more accurate estimate than that. There was no other city within fifty miles. The population of the planet was small, she thought, and mainly on the equator. Their overalls were not unsuitable for the environment, but they should have had sunhelmets. Rex took off the timic of his overalls, took off the shirt he was wearing underneath, and put the tunic back, on. He ripped the shirt in two to make turbans to protect their heads. When he turned, he saw Regina flat on her face on the binning sand, motionless. He dropped beside her. She was scarcely breathing. He felt her pulse and found it rapid and, frighteningly irregular. A thought grew from nothing until it filled his whole mind. Regina was dead against exploring the Gateways, whether he did it alone or they went together. She had never exactly agreed to accompany him; her attitude was rather that if it was impossible to stop him going, she would go with him. Regina had a special gift. It was not telepathy, and she could not foresee the future. Yet she had had a presentiment. Wasn't it possible that she knew that for her the Gateways were deadly? When at last she opened her eyes, he said: We're going straight back." She smiled with something of the old sarcastic twist. 'You could. I can't. Do you think I could take that again so soon and live?" She began to laugh weakly, half ldng, half sitting. With the slight exertion her flesh began to steam again and droplets welled from her to run over her body and fall on the sand. 'Tt's funny," she said. There's nothing I want more than to get back to Limbo. But I can't go. I'll have to help you to explore this hellspot. If I don't make myself get up and move and burn out IF this sickness, I'll never see Limbo again." X "O egina, who had been leading the way in a dead straight line, at last turned almost due south. "Over that ridge," she said, nodding at it, "is the city. If we skirt the ridge we'll be about level with the city as we enter. Appearing on the skyline we might be too conspicious." Rex nodded. A few seconds later they saw the city. It consisted of squat concrete buildings, wide avenues and grassy parkland not unlike a North African city except that there was no Arab influence in the architecture. The cars that speeded about were ordinary ground cars, and though the pedestrians they could see were too far distant for any details to be made out, they seemed to be ordinary humans. They waited until a few people had passed close enough for them to make out what they were like. Inspection of the Crestans satisfied them that Rex's overalls and Regina's tunic and skirt, their height, color and general appearance would pass without comment in the city. Their improvised turbans, however, would not. The Crestans didn't wear sunhelmets. Rex and Regina took off their turbans and buried them in the sand. Then they stepped forward boldly. More than most cities, this one began abruptly at a set point, instead of straggling out into the country, semi-urban, semi-rural. The presence of the desert explained that. Soon Rex and Regina were in quite a busy quarter. Although they were not ignored, as Rex had been in Mercury, anyone who stared stared at Regina, and that was merely her natural right. These people were busier, more alert, more purposeful than the people of Mercury. Everyone appeared to have somewhere to go, and all were in a hurry to get there. When they found a church open they went inside. It was clear at once that churches here, like everything else, were very different from those of Bullan. Here were no reminders that Doomsday was near. This church was small, very modern, cool and empty. There was no equivalent of the archway in the Mercurian church, and this was not merely because this chiurch was not Catholic. The Crestans were too busy always to be running to the priest for what help he could give them. After walking in Strand # for an hour, they felt they were getting nowhere. On the face of it, they had learned a great deal. Cresta was a recently developed world, not rich as planets went but not poor cither, specializing in delicate workmanship because the natural resources of the planet were negligible. A valuable find was a thfck newspaper left on a park bench. Strand # was not big enough to have a newspaper of its own. The Cresta Times served the whole world and at that it was not daily but weekly. Since no one else was sitting on a public bench reading a newspaper, they scanned it quickly and then carefully folded it to put in their pockets. But now, from tag-ends of conversation, a notice or two and what they had gleaned from the paper, plus some guesswork, they knew one of the main Crestan problems, the one on which the future of the settlement depended, and the main hope of a solution -- a plan to stock the seas with fish. Tefore colonization, Cresta had had no life whatever; such soil as there was had to be worked on for a long time before it would grow anything useful. The grass they had seen was artificial. Cresta had no soil to waste on mere decorative grass. For years the seas had been stocked with live fish, algae, plankton and all the organic refuse Cresta could spare from the eternal fight to make another acre of soil productive. The basic snag was that any creature brought alive to the planet could live only on something else brought to the planet. Cresta took ever # rthing other worlds didnt want -- sewage, any non-poisonous effluent, vegetation in any condition, all the refuse of other, live planets. To get all this for nothing beyond freight cost, which was considerable, Cresta couldn't afford to be choosy. The plan, or rather the pious hope, was that all life or near-life being dumped into the seas and on sterile soil would eventually rearrange itself into a balanced pattern. And all this refuse was brought to Cresta by ships. There was no mention of any Gateway. Little Limbo could actually breathe life into Cresta, possibly enough to make it a real, living world. Thousands of birds and animals, hundreds of tons of vegetation could be pushed through the looking glass... Of course, Cresta would want too much, would fight for it, and Limbo would die, like many another golden goose. They had learned a lot, but they had made none of the fleeting contacts Rex had made with the people of Mercury, the brief glimpses into their lives which had told him almost everything of any importance that he discovered there. At last Regina said: 'Tf we're going to find out anything here without money, we'll have to make something happen." IF "Do you have any ideas?" 'You're the one who's supposed to have ideas. You managed to find out quite a bit about Mercury. Why not here?" "You sit on that bench," he said. "If anything happens to me, don't get involved." "What are you going to do?" He moved away from her without answering, because he didn't know. Then he remembered the immigration office they had seen in the next street. Without a glance back at Regina, he went to it, walked in and said to the clerk at the desk: "I want to go back." The clerk, a thin girl with pale eyebrows, smiled thinly and said: "You know you can't." "I want to go back, I tell you." "Back where?" "Earth." T?or a moment she was too as- tonished to laugh. Then she laughed. "You came direct?" she asked. Something told me not to say yes. He didn't want to say no either, because he couldn't answer the next question. "What does that matter?" he retorted, trying to act belligerent and not very smart, so that anything he didn't know could be put down to general ignorance. "You know perfectly well," she said, as if to a child, "that if you left Earth voluntarily, you undertook never to return except on visits, the first not less than thirty years ahead. If you didn't leave Earth voluntarily, you don't get back, ever." Half the time you don't know what you're signing," he grumbled. She shook her head. "You must have known, if you really came from Earth. How can I help you?" "If you can't get me back you can't help me." "Short of that, how can I help you?" "I'm out of a job." This time he'd really said the wrong thing. "Who are you?" she asked. He was in trouble. "Look," he said desperately, "I'd say or do anything to get off this planet. Any ideas?" "What do you know about the birds?" she asked carefully. He knew it was a trick question. It was like asking a man who claimed to come from Mercury if the street lighting was still good. He couldn't guess the answer. He had to know it. "What birds?" he said, and was not in the least surprised when her eyes showed instantly this was one of the many wrong answers. She reached for a button m the desk. He didn't know who she was stunmoning, but he was quite sure it would be someone -- or something -- he didn't like. # IF IF  Novelette There was a year missing from the calendar. Only the X-men knew where it went -- and why. I A boy needs to identify himself with someone, I guess. Or, anyhow, something. TTiere has to be a model. Usually a parent. Maybe Ma first, than Pa later. I suppose it comes naturally to those who have parents. I didn't, not after I was three years old, so I had to cast around. There was no anchorage in Gran. She had lost her own bearings soon after finding her son and daughterin-law shot dead at the river's brink. She had taken me for a walk. Together, hand in hand, we came upon them. Ma lay on her back, head and shoulders submerged. Her face was a pallid blob which seemed to be actively grimacing. But it was only the effect of the brown water flowing over and around it. My father was sprawled on top of her, arms about her, head on her bosom. We wore a blue and yellow checkered shirt, with a red pearshaped patch between his shoulder blades. From the stalk end of the pear, redness trickled very slowly, making a thread down the dirt bank. The thread's end was frayed by the streaming river. Years later, I was able to form a guess about it. Someone with a gun had trapped them, backs to the river. Maybe trying to evade a shot, my mother had fallen. My father had shielded her with his body and caught the next shot in his back. He died holding her, and his weight forced her down the bankside. She drowned. I never heard that anyone tried all that hard to catch the murderer. Anyhow, no one was caught. I grew up with Gran but most f the time she made no sense. Her mind had gone to pieces. Little she said led anywhere. Our highest flights of conversation concerned the weather. It was hot or cold, dry r wet. She paid small attention to what I said and usually contradicted what she herself said. She confused me. I couldn't ape her behavior; there was no pattern 'to it. If I had other living relatives, I never heard tell of them. My neck of the woods was thinly inhabited. None of the inhabitants cared a cent about me. It was so unanimous that I reckoned I was unlikable. I couldn't think why, for I was eager To please. Yet I was always odd-boy-out at school, as if I were trying to be different by being an orphan. I wasn't popular with the teacher, either. I found it tough to follow the drift of his mind. The others seemed able to keep in touch with it. I floundered behind and was punished for it. If I protested, the answer was the same in flavor and content. "You want reasons, Cabot? Right. One, you're incurably stupid. Two, you're lazy. Three, you ask too many silly questions. Why don't you just remember what I tell you, as the other boys do? That way you might complete a halfway decent exam paper." T preferred animals to people. Yet they had shortcomings, too. I mean, there was nothing noble. about them. I used to think maybe a lone wolf was noble. But I never saw one -- I think it was only book-stuff. When the snows drove the wolves down out of the mountain woods, they went around in packs attacking the weaker creatures. Just like schoolboys. I think my father must have been noble. The giant oak was noble. They called it that -- giant. Maybe it would have been a giant among IF other oaks but here there were no other oaks. It stood on top of a hill. The pines rooted on the slopes seemed nothing beside it. It had lived and suffered and grown twisted and gnarled.The pines were just a lot of skinny telegraph posts. They hadnt any character. They yere only striplings. The oak was older than they ere in every way. The metal plate on the stake nearby said; This oak was planted from an acorn on August #th # to commemorate the victory of the Allied Forces, That was after the Second World War, of course. I used to think a lot about the past because the present was dismal and portended no change for the future. The past seemed to become real when I sat and dreamed under the widespread arms of the .oak. It was my childish fancy that they were antennae picking up faint pulses from a world that had been hereabouts but drifted away. I was fool enough to mention this to the Sheriff's son. He looked at me strangely. "You ain't right in the head, Bart." Thereafter I kept my fancies to myself. Another attraction of the oak was its being the only vantage point from which you could see a mite over the next ridge, into the valley of the X-men. The X-men -- apparently so-called because they were an unknown quantity -- fasd nated me. There seemed to be very few of them -- I'd never glimpsed more than two of them at the same time. They rarely left the valley, either on foot or by spaceship. You'd never meet one to speak to. Since Bobbie was knocked out, no one wished to. Bobbie was a trigger-happy goon who killed more creatures than he could cat, because it made him feel good. One day he saw something move in the undergrowth and shot at it from force of habit. It was an X-man who shot right back at him with some kind of raygun. Bobbie was unconscious for two days. The Sheriff posted an order: Everyone keep clear of the valley of the X-men. You couldn't enter the valley, anyhow. There was an invisible fence around it. I ran into it once. It was like coming up against a headwind which became stronger at every step. It forced me to a standstill. But there was no wind, only an elastic force-field which stretched but wouldn't break. Obviously the X-men were interested in us only to the extent of making us keep ur distance. A Taybe once, and never more than twice a year one of their spaceships would drift earthward, humming like a great bee, and AS settle in the valley. Almost always its visit was short. Within a couple of #ayS; it would be off again into the infinite. Where did the X-men come from? Where did they go to? And why was no one except myself interested enough to wonder? There was a sizable library in Yorktown. Each time I was in town, I would search for information about them -- in vain. The librarian was middle-aged, fat and stupid. Her face was like the hack of a shovel -- convex and blank. She cared so little for books that she often set them on the shelves upside down. She was no help. "The X-men? No, I don't recollect seeing an # dhing about them. I reckon nobody knows anything about them, anyway. So who could write a book?" "But surely there must be something about them in the newspapers or the magazines?" "There are the files. Look for yourself, son." I looked. And looked and looked during repeated visits. One day I discovered something I wasn't looking for: the Year Dot. Logically, it should have been the year # A.D. but, illogically, it didn't exist. I first noticed the hiatus in the massed pulp of the Yorktown Weekly Advertiser. Each complete year of issues was tape-strung between two wooden slats. I'd been leafing back through the last couple of decades, yawning over the same old fines imposed on the same old drunks, and the same old disputes about drains and boundaries. During such a yawn, I reached down the next file. As the files were in chronological order, it should have been labeled #. But it was in fact #. I completed the yarn without surprise. The fat lady was a slipshod filer. Then I went hunting for the missing year #. Eventually I was among the yellow and gray pages of almost half a century ago, half afraid to turn them because they were brittle and tore easily. By then I'd had about enough and was tempted to forget it. But the librarian was oozing past, so I tapped her elbow. "Pardon me, but do you know where Year # of the Advertiser has gotten to?" She looked at me vaguely, then over my shoulder at the desk. "Why, you've got it right there in front of you." "What? No, look, this one's #." She looked again, and frowned. "Don't waste my time, son. It's not April Fool's Day." She jellied on. Temused, I checked the fifty-two copies in the file. They were all #. I sucked my thumb, which sometimes gives me an idea. IF ant. I went and surveyed the ranks of various yearbooks. Some sets didnt go back far enough but the ones that did shared a characteristic: there was no edition for the year #. With a respect I didn't feel but thought wise to assume to avoid being ejected,I asked the librarian to come and look. "Look at what?" she asked irritably, but came. I ran my finger along the spines of the Medical Yearbook, "#, you see, and then #. But no #." She said, "Look, boy, IVe had enough of this. Settle down quietly or else get out." She was dead serious. But then, so was I. "I'm sorry, I'm not trying to make trouble. Guess I can't see straight today. Would you point out the # volume?" She looked at me suspiciously, hesitated, then touched the Yearbook for #. "Oh, I see," I said, guilelessly. "And that's # to the left of it?" Half watching me, half watching what she did, she jerked her finger back along the line of books. "#, '#, '#, '#, '#... and so on. It's plain as plain. You'd better see an oculist son; you need glasses." I rubbed an eye and then peered with an assumption of sqopia. "And the other way -- # on?" I asked. She sighed, and fing-jabbed again. "#, '#, '#, '#, '#... This time her prononacementa and the dates on the spines coincided -- I couldn't have agreed more. Whereas, working back, she named the year before each edition, a year out of kilter all the way. And I couldn't prove she was wrong. No use to subtract the first date (#) from the last (#S) and then count the books to skew that there was one short. For she would see # as #, a conqnsating error. None so blind, et cetera. "Thanks," I said quietly. "I'll go see that oculist." "Wait -- let me see your reader's ticket." I gave it to her. She glanced at it and asked, "Why didn't you renew this last year, when it expired?" I peeped at it. It was in date. Somehow, she was seeing last year's date. What a way to run a library, I thought. There was no future -- or past -- in arguing the point. I bent with the gale. "Guess I forgot. Sorry." "I'll renew it," she said, and did so at her desk. She passed me the new ticket. I watched for her to tear up the old one -- the usual procedure. She didn't. She put it in a drawer. I began the long walk home, wondering about that -- and the rest of it. II W as it my business to report that the librarian had slipped a cog in her brain? Maybe the Council knew that and bore with it, together with her slovenly methods. Why was # so painful to her that it had to be exorcised from her memory and even from her library? She wore no wedding ring. Was that the year of her final rejection, sentencing her to spinsterhood -- and a trauma? Back at the shack which I called home, I asked, with little hope of a sensible answer, "Do you remember the year #, Gran?" For once there was a responsive flicker in her eyes of much diluted blue. Her lips twitched in the beginning of a smile which never made it. "Sure I remember. I remember 'em all -- right back to the Year Dot." The Year Dot was a term she often used. I took it to niean the Year Zero, the year God created the world. "Anything special happen in #?" "The Year Dot," she said, and the smile came, and it was a grim and strange one. That happened. That was the Year Dot, Bart." "I don't understand." '"It was a cold winter, that year. Terrible cold. Everything froze. Everybody froze to the bone like they was all bone. Except for the wolves. And they came down and ate everybody up. Bones and all. Thousands of 'em." "Thousands of wolves?" "Thousands," she said, her eyes emptying again. She chewed her gums and plucked at non-existent loose threads on her lap. She made mumbling noises, then said, almost brightly, "It's turning cold again. Colder than yesterday." Subject normal -- and safe. I could get no more out of her about the Year Dot. There was no one else in this district I would confide in. But there were other towns than Yorktown and other libraries. All far away, but I would start saving for fares. I saved nothing, for Gran died a few days later from hardened arteries. The funeral swallowed my small capital and more. I had to sell most of our old furniture to cover the bill. She'd provided, of late, so little company that I told myself I'd hardly miss her. I missed her like hell. She was the only person I didn't regard as a stranger, my only blood relation. The last link with my parents had broken, and I learned what real loneliness meant. The day after the funeral I was IF wedged in the topmost crotch of the giant oak, as far above this sad world as I could get, brooding over what I could glimpse of the valley of the X-men. It wasn't much. The trees, the scrub, the stony ground looked much the same as in my own valley. The fference lay in their inaccessibility and the danger that dwelt there. nce already this morning I'd seen an X-man walking slowly -- they never seemed to hurry -- across the far slope. Distance made him tiny, but X-men, I knew, were taller than us -- at least a foot taller. He wore a long gray coat and a black hood or helmet, that might have been of fur. He was very erect; his carriage conveyed dignity. I couldn't distinguish enough of his face to form a picture of it. But my imagination furnished a noble brow, imperious nose, and wise, kind eyes. The kind off ace maybe my father had. Nobility was suggested by the stately way they walked. It was a quality lacking in my world. I guess I was aware of it from history books about Washington and Lincoln and story books about King Arthur. "Cabot!" A harsh bellow came from my ignoble world down there under the waves of curiously and endearingly shaped oak leaves. "Cabot, come down here!" It was the Sheriff, He-WhoMust-Be-Obeyed. Reluctantly hat sensibly, I duly obeyed. That toa screen of branches mightn't step all of the buckshot from reachiaag me. The Sheriff was Bobbie's opposite. Bobbie's rule of thumb was: if it moves, shoot it The Sherills rule was: if it doesnH move whra ordered to, shoot it. "Coming," I called, to forestal perforation, and abandoned itij eyrie. Instead of looking down, I became the one looked down on. The Sheriff was almost as tall as an Xman, not a bit noble, and had difficulty in controlling sudden animal rages. He glowered at me. "You're a great reader, mn't you, Cabol?" "Yes, I do read a lot. Sheriff." "Then why the hell idn't yen read my notice? It said to keep away from that valley." "I never go any nearer to it than this." "And that's too damn near. Be you want to get shot?" "Bo you mean by you -- er the X-men?" Animal rage won for the moment. His backhander sent me crashing against the knobbly trunk. "Don't sass me. What was yon doing up there?" "Only looking. Sheriff." "See any X-men?" "Yes. One." "Then make no mistake, he saw A# you. They carry guns, you know. They don't like to be spied on. They'll pick you off that tree like you was a crow." "m watch it, Sheriff." "Watch nothing. Just stay away from this ridge. Stay home and read your books. What kind of books you read? History books?" TTis eyes, close-set as a chimpan zee's, were conning me with unusual intensity. As he was all but interest in my literary tastes. "Sometimes." "What you tr#dng to learn." "What it used to be like in the old days, I guess." "What old days?" What lay behind this cross-examination? Wy had the Sheriff come looking for me, anyhow? Books, libraries -- memory connected them and I made a guess. I experimented with the guess. "The nineteen-seventies mostly." His eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared. Yes, the connection was sound. The librarian had held my old reader's ticket because it bore my name and address. She had phoned the Sheriff about me. He was checking how much I knew about the Year Dot. Obviously, I wasn't supposed to know anything. From here on, I should have to watch my step. "What's so interesting about them, Cabot?" I shrugged "I was born around the end of that decade. It's just natural curiosity about what the world was like when I came into it." "Mooning about what's past and gone won't earn you no bread. And you ain't got all that much in the larder now, have you? You'd do better to think about making a living instead." "Guess you're right. Sheriff." "I ought to jail you for breaking the law -- you know that? But seeing you're only young, I'm gonna parole you instead. You report to my office twice a day, except Sundays, at eleven and four, sharp, until further orders. Got that?" "Yes, Sheriff." "Then get this too. Don't ever come up this area again. Keep away from this tree. Stay in the valley. That's a final order. Break it and I'll break you -- in pieces. There won't be no second chance. Now get out of here." I slouched in a defeated sort of way down to our valley. There was every cause to feel defeated. Unless you had a car or horse -- I had neither -- you had to walk to Yorktown which was a three-hour tramp, either way. Those reporting times were designed to prevent me from visiting the Yorktown library during its open hours. But I didn't feel all that cast down. I realized I'd happened upon something important. Discovering IF just what was a challenge that offered excitement and some danger. Just as well, maybe, that I didnt realize then the degree of danger. I paused once to glance back up the slope. The Sheriff was standing, hands on hips, looking judidally up at the oak tree as though he'd been asked to estimate its height. Ill 'lext morning I went to the Sheriff's office to report, and he was out. His Deputy was in. I tried to report to him. "You can't do that," he said. "Sheriff said you gotta report to him personal. You just wait till he gets back." I waited for three and a half hours, becoming angry and then uneasy. If it went on like this, I'd never be able to earn enough to eat. Maybe that was the idea... The Sheriff arrived in a station wagon. He dropped a couple of passengers -- the Evans brothers, woodsmen. They went on down the street, taking a cross-cut saw with them. The Sheriff came on in, ducking under the lintel. He looked at me and smiled, surprisingly. It was the sort of cruel anticipatory smile people have when they know someone they don't like is due for a nasty shock. "Okay, Cabot -- blow. But be back at four o'clock." It was two-thirty and hardly worth trudging home to turn around and come back. But I had hung about long enough and had a lot of bottled frustration to work off. I strode out, silent but furious. I heard the Sheriff whisper something to his Deputy, and the latter's cackling '"Haw-haw-haw" followed me along the passage. It was one of those times when I suddenly hated the human race. The quiet, deserted woods were a haven and soothed my rage. As I walked through them, I fell to thinking about the Year Dot. It stood to reason that there could be no missing year. Time didn't stop and start like a clock. At midnight, December #st, # Earth began another circuit of the sun and the period of twelve months it took to complete it was #. Calling it # changed nothing basically. Therefore, this current year of grace, #, was in fact #. My mind began circling instead of tackling the problem. It needed figuring out at leisure; I would postpone it till the cool of the evening, I reached my shack and glanced at my watch. I could spend a whole fifteen minutes at home before starting back. I went on a little way along the valley to a spot where I could see the forbidden hill. The hill was still there. The giant oak wasn't. I could see blue sky through the gap where it wasn't. That pang of dismay is sharp in my memory yet. It was as bad as that time I looked into Gran's room and saw at once that she was dead. I didn't give another thought to the Off-Limits order. I ran up there, reached the crest with a thumping heart and no breath. The oak was still there, after all, but in two parts. Its great roots incongruously supported a stump only two feet high. The upper bulk, fallen, lay just over the crest, sprawling down the steep slope. I looked down at it, sobbing for breath, and then over its foliage at the ridge of the valley of the X-men. Like a sentinel, an X-man stood on that ridge. He seemed to be gazing straight at me. Qhocked and hurt, I jumped to a  conclusion. The X-men had done this to stop me from peeping into their valley. Possibly they'd used some kind of long-range cutting ray. I shook my fist at the distant figure and gasped vain threats of retaliation. Then I sat down on the stump, hid my face in my hands and cried like a lost child -- which in effect I was. That oak had been to me the one solid, reassuring thing in a bewildering and untrustworthy world. Its roots were my roots, its existence confirmation of my own existence. I had scaled it so often that my hands and feet knew the shape of every bough, the relative positions of all vantage points for the ascent. More than once, for amusement, I'd climbed it with my eyes shut. And now my hands, although I was still aware of the conditioned impulses in them, would never again reach for those rough branches. When I pulled myself together and stood up, the X-man was still there, as motionless as any of the valley pines. Then I discovered I'd done him an injustice. From the evidence of the sawdust and teethmarks, the oak had been cut down by human hands. Those of the Evans brothers, doubtless, by order of the Sheriff. Now I understood his smile. For the first time, I felt a senseless urge to kill a man. I looked at the raw, sap-bleeding stump. Long though the tree had stood, as oaks go it had been slain in the prime of life, at the age of fifty years, if my theory that it was now # were correct. Should I ever be able to verify it? The concentric circles of the annular rings suggested a monster eye staring up into space. I stood there like an oaf too dumb to read the message in it: This is the record of my years. IF Newton and Archimedes were quicker off the mark than I, but I got the message presently and with equal excitement. I counted the rings carefully thrice and thrice agreed with myself. The oak was fifty-one years old, and therefore the present year was #, just as they said it was. My theory was incorrect. And this meant that one year had been snipped clean out of history, leaving no record -- at least, not in Yorktown. The Year Dot: #. They may have destroyed all the yearbooks for that year and deleted it from the calendars. They may have maintained by a trick of numeration that there never was such a year. But they couldn't buck Nature's calendar. I sat there awhile, brooding about who was trying to fool whom and why. Maybe they had been fooled into believing there was no #. Maybe a hypnotic blind spot had been planted in their minds. By whom? The X-men? If so, why? I looked across to see if the Xman were still there. He was. I stood up on the small plateau of the stump and studied him for a couple of minutes. He was as thin as a scarecrow and could have been one for all the movement he made. In fact, I began to wonder if it were a dummy planted there to act, so to speak, as a scare-human. Behind me, the Sheriff's voice said, "Wasted my breath warning you, didn't I?" I froze, heart sinking, then slowly turned. He was only a couple of yards away and look tensed up. He hadn't brought his shotgun, but there was a revolver in his holster and his arm was crooked as if halfway to the draw. "Figured I couldn't trust you, Cabot. That's why I follered you. I been watching you counting them rings. Smart, ain't you? But I outsmarted you." I realized then that he at least knew the books had been cooked, and wasn't fooled any about the Year Dot. I tried to look cool and sound steady. "You outsmarted yourself, too. Sheriff. When you cut down this tree you revealed the true calendar." "Get down from there," he growled. "Come here. This time you go to jail." I saw from his eyes that he meant it -- and more. I would be clapped in a cell and never emerge from it in this life. "I'm coming," I said, quietly, to mislead him -- and suddenly leaped from the stump, away from him, over the crest, down into the lower branches of the fallen giant. There was tangled undergrowth all around. The trunk formed a bridge over it. The maze of branches was no obstacle to me; I knew every foot of the route through it. The Sheriff didn't. He took a blind shot from the crest at me; the leaves hid me and the thick limbs shielded me. Then he plunged after me. I'd almost OTear that the oak did its best to block and hinder him. He kept getting hooked up on its branches. By the time he broke free, I had said goodbye to the oak and reached the bottom of this valley. Which way now? To the right, the valley became a cul-de-sac, a potential trap. To the left, it emerged on a bare prairie where there was no place to hide. Either way, capture or death was inevitable. Ahead of me the ground sloped up to the spot where the X-man stood like an unconcerned spectator. He was an unknown quantity. The Sheriff was a known quantity. I hesitated. Thud. A bullet hit the earth a yard behind me. I opted for the unkown and scrambled up towards it. T heard the revolver fire again and  lead swish past my ear. Sweat ran onto my eyebrows, and it wasn't all caused by exertion. Wildly I looked for cover but the undergrowth was thin on this side of the valley. I scrambled onward towards the X-man. All at once he came , to life and pointed an arm in my direction. Something in his hand glowed deep red for an instant. I flung myself on my chest. But I wasn't the target I heard a tnmcated cry behind me, and peered back and down. Near the valley bottom, the Sheriff lay on his back, arms and legs spread stiffly apart, forming an X. Would it be my turn next? I looked up. The X-man was statuesque again. I was close enough now to see his eyes. They were watching me. Calmly. Sanely. There was none of the anger, scorn or stupidity so common in human eyes. But the rest of him was repellent. His long military-style coat was unfastened and hung apart, revealing a figure emaciated and seemingly deformed. Where had I gotten that impression of physical grace and dignity? His limbs were double-jointed though not in the usual sense. They were hinged into three moveable sections; each arm had two elbow joints, each leg two knee joints. That grotesque arrangement bothered me less than the evidences of disease. His neck glands were swollen lumps, one practically a goiter. His bloodless face was purple-scarred with the craters of old pustules. His large-knuckled fingers looked arthritic. His fur helmet was skull-tight. IF Nevertheless, he had kept his pride. He held himself erect. His mouth was firm yet sensitive. I got to my feet, watching him all the time. He spoke. His voice carried to me through the still air like a sweet-toned faraway campanile bell. His English was only slightly accented. "You may go. I shall not harm you." "There's nowhere for me to go." "I wouldn't say that. Suppose you come and discuss it with me, Bartholomew Cabot?" I didn't ask him how he knew my name. Just then, reasons were less important than feelings. For the first time I could remember, I had been made to feel welcome. I went to him without another thought. He fingered a small control box on his belt. I gaess he dissolved the invisible fence temporarily, for I reached him with no trouble. He towered over me, misshapen, horribly marred, a nightmare creature. And friendly warmth radiated from him. I felt no fear. "Call me Lon," he said. "It's near enough." He led me into his valley, walking in a deliberate, stately fashion. It was his way of combatting Earth's stronger gravitation without losing poise. IV L on had shown me over the huge ship repair bay deep in the valley. It was cybernetics-plus. The atomic reactor plant drilled for ore, extracted its fuel, and governed its output with severe self-discipline. The gantries moved their mass around at the touch of a finger. Robots bristling with powered tools awaited the word of command. Lon issued the commands. It was all he had to do. He was quite alone in that long, dog-leg valley. He saw another Xman but once or twice a year, when a ship stopped by for repair or refueling. They were mostly oneman ships, fully automatic. "We're nomads now, and there aren't all that many of us. We're the remnants of a once great and flourishing people, who thought they were the masters of their future, HubriSf Bart. Nobody's omniscient -- there are just too many imponderables in the universe. The computers only knew what we told them, and we didn't tell them about the Lykas because we didn't know about the Lykas." We were in the spacious openplan room where Lon spent most of his time. There was the living area with the long sofas to rest those long legs. A section of the wall here was hung with paintings of exotic flowers 'and beasts; the luminous paint made them glow with life. There was the kitchen corner. Then came the operational area with the consoles and the wall panels where colored pin-points crawled like insects over numbered configurations. There was a whole battery of TV screens. Some screens which were dark now would light only to reveal intruders at the boundary fence. Lon became abstracted. "I don't know about the Lykas, either," I prompted. He looked at me. 'You do and you don't." Then he smiled at my plain confusion. "Visual illustration," he said, and reached long arms to a control panel. He indicated one of the screens. It framed an aerial view of my own valley. He had told me of the many tiny eyes, no larger than mustard seeds, seemingly windborne for miles around but actually components of a planned scanning network. They were microengineered cameras of infinite complexity. 'his particular Eye moved up  the valley, though the gap where the oak had stood, swooped down the far slope and hovered so low over the still unconscious Sheriff that his face filled the screen. Then it swept into the dark cavern of his left nostril. The screen was black only for a moment. Then the Eye became a penetration ray camera looking into the brain, turning its arteries into glass, its convolutions into shadows, with the sutured cranium a background to it all. Thick among the brain cells, infesting the bloodstream, were a m#n:iad of moving black points, like iron filings. "The Lykas: a microbe race," said Lon. "Their intelligence was always limited by their size, but in human blood they've become even duller than they were; it's not a very stimulating environment." "They've made the Sheriff sick in his mind?" "Well, sicker, shall we say? Frankly, much of the human race was pretty sick before they affected it." An abominable thought struck me. "Are the Lykas in my brain?" "No, Bart. I've checked the whole local population. Even gone into their personal and medical histories as far as I could. You're the only one that's clean. You have a rare blood-group which doesn't suit the Lykas at all. Even if I hadn't check, I should have known that you weren't infected. You came to me. You weren't afraid. But the Lykas are afraid -- afraid I might discover they're here and exterminate them." "So they think you've not discovered them yet?" I asked, feeling a lot easier. Lou smiled. "They've degeneratIF ed to the point where they can harffly think at all now. Their reasoning is infantile. They're behaving like a child which shuts its eyes and reasons that because it can't see you, therefore you can't see it." "How long have they been here? How did they get here?" "They came by way of my planet long, long ago. But they didn't reach Earth until the year which should have been numbered -- " "Nineteen seventy-eight I" I exclaimed. "The Year Dot, I call it." "Which they pretend was nonexistent. You see how childish they've become." "Tell me all about them, Lon." It was a story which ended with a question, and I had to answer that question. Lon gave me time to think it over. I used much of the time going back over his story. 'he Phelenic Empire was the  wonder of its corner of the Galaxy. Proud, learned, aspiring, it acknowledged neither master nor equal. The handsome and vigorous Phelenes lived life to the full in every direction: exploration and adventure, art and sport, research and philosophy. They were happily aware that sex, too, offered opportunities in all these directions. They were benignant to their subject races so long as there was no protest. But at the mere hint of rebellion or suggestion of self-government, the offending race was crushed by force and new laws and its spirit broken. The Phelenes were the rulers and intended to stay so. But the Lykas came without respect for their intentions. They were a nomadic tribe, but not from choice; they were seeking their Promised Land. Microscopic, almost without mass, they let light pressure carry them iJirough the void to new worlds and new hopes of roots -- roots in creatures immeasurably larger than themselves, whose bodies would become both larders and instruments of power. They had little luck. Sooner or later, the organisms they tried to take over rejected them. It was so with the Phelenes. Unsuspected, the Lykas entered the bloodstream of the master race and strove to overcome the automatic bodily defenses. It was a war without victory. True, the Lykas were ousted eventually. But the price was the destruction of the Phelenic Empire and more gradually of the Phelenic race itself. The Phelenes' glandular systems had collapsed into anarchy under the strain. The race lost protection against disease -- and also the power to reproduce. The Phelenes died off, save for a small percentage which were tempered in the fire and became resistant even to the natural process of aging. But they remained sterile. IF Toppled from their throne of power humiliated in the sight of their subject races, denied growth and an expanding future, the survivors vowed to hunt down and cleanse the Galaxy of the Lykas. "We claimed to be plague exterminators," Lon had said. "Then that seemed too prosaic. A master race should be more than scavengers. Remember, our pride needed restoring. So we elevated ourselves to the Saviors of the Galaxy. We were selflessly trying to save others from sharing our fate. Obviously, therefore, we were instruments of the Holy Spirit, Crusaders for the Right. Many of us are still rampaging on like that through the wondering worlds and maybe still impress the impressionable. But some, like myself, realized it was only a cloak covering the desire for vengeance. We were ever a spoiled race. We never really gave a damn for anyone but our own kind." It was Lon, alone, who caught up with the Lykas at last. It was his duty then to rally the pack and be in at the death. But by then' vengefulness had left him. He felt he needed time to consider the situation on Earth and reconsider the conception of duty. The Lykas, aware they were hunted, sought obscurity. Although seated in the brains of Earthlings, they tried to maintain an illusion that the human race had not been infected. They hoped the Phelenes would pass them by, undetected. The battle to gain control of the Earthlings lasted a full year. Then they tried, naively, to obliterate all human records and memories of that year, so that the Phelenes wouldnT notice any traces. But a small minority of Earthlings had escaped infection. If and when they identfied them, the Lykas usually arranged either to confine or kill them. Pretty certainly, I judged, my parents were such victims. Maybe I was spared at the time becaause I was too young to know anything, and Gran because she had lost her mind, anyway. "Frankly," Lon told me, "the average level of human intelligence had been declining steadily for some time before the Lykas reached Earth. They came only to fall on stony ground yet again. This time, I think, for the last time. Earthlings and the Lykas are bad for each other. A process of mutual mental degeneration has set in. I doubt if the Lykas have enough wit left to pull out now. That solves my dilemma." "What dilemma?" I asked. "There's no way of destroying the Lykas without destroying the Earthlings also; they're commingled. The only workable method is mass extermination. And the few who arc immune, like yourself, are so scattered that it would be impossible to isolate them; they would share the general fate." "I don't see the solution," I  said. "Time will provide it without Kiy intervention. The Lykas are on the way out. Whether the human race survives them is not my problem -- at least, not a problem that I can do anything about at this time. Things will have to take their course. I'm glad not to be much in this far-from-hospitable Galaxy, and my sympathy goes out to any form of life trying to cling to a foot-hold in it. I find an increasing number of my fellow Rielenes, as they call in here, beginning to share that outlook. Experience teaches tolerance. The hunt is, losing its impetus even before it knows the quarry has been found." "But the Lykas caused it in the first place, by attacking you." Lon smiled wrily. "Bart, you must broaden your educationtoo. You must go out there and see some of the things I have seen. The Lykas didn't attack us from malice but from necessity. In fact, they're less blameworthy than we. It was we who went spreading hatred among the stars. And we shall pass into extinction as surely as they. Our life-span was enormously increased, yet we remain mortal -- and sterile. What I have left of life -- which is still far more than you have left, Bart -- I plan to spend well. Exploring, learning, and wherever possible doing all I can to keep Life, in the broader sense, going. It has a thousand enemies, and ignorance and hatred are only two of them. What could be more rewarding? I can hardly wait to get started. I shall be leaving Earth soon, Bart. Come with me -- and learn. There's no future for you on this planet but that of a hunted outcast. Will you come?" I considered. "Shall we ever return to Earth?" "It's a remote possibility. No more than that." "I must think it over, Lon." "Of course." L on turned his attention to the screens. The Eyes covering the settlement were depicting the Deputy's departure in search of the Sheriff. He would find him sooner or later, but in any case could learn nothing from him about myself for another two days. That was the minimum period of recovery from brain-stunning. I thought about this world and that, all against me. I thought about the endless wonders and beauties of faraway worlds which I should never see unless I went with Lon -- and the wisdom I might attain if I did. I thought about the other outIF casts like myself here on Earth, but jfho were denied my chance of escape. They were as bewildered, isolated and unhappy as I had been -- and they would never know the reason why... unless I enlightened them. I made my decision. "I'm staying, Lon. On Earth, I mean, but not in this locality. I'll clear out tonight and head south. I have two days start on them, at least. Maybe much more. The Sheriff may assume I'm still here in the valley with you. He can't be sure I'm not. And when you go, he may think I've gone with you." Lou studied me, warmly, sagely. "What's the point, Bart?" "I want to link up with my own kind. We'll get organized and fight them off. We stand a chance of survival -- we aren't degenerating, you know, whereas they are. We'll cling to our foot-hold, as you call it. Survival's our immediate aim. If we succeed, we may learn wisdom later." Lon smiled. "It's the answer I expected, really. But there's a bit more to it than that, isn't here, Bart? At your age, you feel another call." Yes, I felt it in my heart and in my loins. Spirit and body were uniting in crying for a mate. It was a call which could be answered only on my own planet. Lon didn't need my confirmation. He went on, "Maybe I should envy you. However, sterility has its compensations: peace of mind, detachment, the contemplative life. The gulf between youth and maturity is so wide... Yes, we must go our separate ways, Bart." "I lost my father when I was too young to realize it," I said. "And now I feel as if realizatioii has caught up with me. I'll always miss you, Lon. But I have to go." That night I left the valley of the X-men and journeyed unda: the stars I shoiild never reach, southbound for the hot lands. I was alone again but very determined that I would not remain so. Next Month in IF ! by Harry Harrison by James E. Gunn by Robert Bloch -- end many morel Don't miss the February issue of I FI IF  Feature The Staff and Stuff of Life big shuttle from the Moon ' settled onto the landing grid at Denver Spaceport, and the airlock began to open. As the ramp touched the good rich soil of Earth, Joe Lunik was already running down it. His eyes were glued firmly to the sign of the nearest restaurant, and he headed for it in a mad dash. After a year eating the hydroponic junk fed the Lunar colony, he couldn't wait for real food -- honest, sail-grown baked potato and apple pie with the unmistakable flavor only Earth could provide. Sound familiar? It's a scene used often enough in science fiction, and one I've been guilty of writing myself. But it's probably totally wrong, if the future follows the present trends. It's part of the great body of m#d:hs we've come to accept about what we grow and what we eat, and there's no sign that these m#dJis are any less entrenched now than ever. The chief of these myths is the claim that American agriculture can keep producing more and better food in an almost unending progress; and once the world learns to use our methods, there'll be no need to worry about feeding twice the world's present population better than ever before in the history of mankind. And after that, we'll take our know-how out to the oceans, where we can probably feed a population of at least ten times what we now support. Like many myths, there are elements of truth and historical fact behind this one. Without any question, the land today is producing at least four times as much food as it could have grown in Revolutionary times. It is doing so with only a tiny segment of our labor force, as compared to earlier times when over helf of our population had to work the soil to feed this country alone. And we've been exporting grain to the starving countries on other continents. Furthermore, with heavy use of fertilizers and modern machinery, we can produce much more. We can also turn land that was once deemed useless into reasonably fertile soil where more food can be grown. But the emphasis in the above truths lies on pure quantity and on what may be very short-term views. It's something like the statement that a man who takes enough amphetamines can produce twice or four times as much work; it's enough, but it overlooks the fact that in a short time he may be producing no work at all, because he'll be dead or in the hospital from the destruction of his constitution. 'he theory of fertilizers is that they may replace what is taken from the soil by the growing plants. That is scientific enough an idea. But it just isn't so. The types of fertilizers in use today are made up of only a few elements, however complicated their formulation may be. They are intended to replace the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. With those, they usually contain some sulfur -- because the sulfates are handy chemicals to hook up the other substances -- and often calcium, which may also be added in lime to keep the soil from becoming too acid. That makes a total of five basic elements. The plants can supply their own carbon, hydrogen and oxygen from the water and air. So we have eight elements, out of the more-than-ninety to be foimd in a table of the elements. Without these eight, the plants simply won't grow. With them, vegetation seems to do well. Hence, by sheer economic necessity, the fertilizers are designed to supply the missing ingredients only. Yet we know already that plants contain a far greater number of the elements than eight. And we know that some of the conimds formed are both incredibly complex and necessary for the animals that live off the plants. Grapes that grow within a few yards of each other and receive identical care can vary tremendously in the wine they produce. A slight difference in the soil can make one grape produce a dull wine and the other #deld a vintage that will be pure delight. The diemists have identified an incredible number of substances in wine, but so far they have not been able to spot the exact tiny differences in the two ferments. One gets something from the soil that the ether lacks -- and beyond that, we don't know what happens. Iron is needed for the plant chlorophyl and the red blood cells of the human who eats the plant. Magnesium, manganese, iodine, and several other elements are needed in tiny amounts. Without these, the plants don't da well. But many other elements in 'Hrace" amounts -- often less than one part per million -- influence the flavor of vegetables, and some may have effects on human health not yet recognized. These are not being replaced by chemical fertilizers. Some are sufficiently present in most soils and so little used that it may not matter for millennia -- as magnesium. Others, like iodine, are already deficient in most soils. Organic farming -- the use exclusively of animal and plant wastes in place of chemicals -- isn't a satisfactory answer today, either. It was a fine solution when most of the produce was consumed locally and hence supplied practically the same amount of waste to be returned to the soil. But today far greater amounts of food are grown per acre and shipped beyond the local area. Large amounts of agricultural produce are also used commercially, where little can be salvaged to be returned, but is dumped into the sewers to flow away forever. Little by little, we are leeching out these trace elements from the land. And obviously, the more we grow per acre, the faster we exhaust this vital resource. Tn the short-range outlook, it may not seem to matter. The plants still thrive and will continue to do so. Part of the reason is that plants are versatile. They can substitute one element for another fairly well. As an example, in some areas there is a deficiency of sulfur, and the wild plants use selenium in its place. The result is sometimes rather poisonous to animals, and the taste is vile; but the plant goes on. Modern agricultural experts have also been extremely good at developing new varieties of food plants. Our hybrid com, for instance, produces a profusion of giant, uniform ears that would have shocked any farmer of the last century. These plant geniuses have already begun to develop strains that do well on soils previously considered impossible for sound agriculture. And we'll unquestionably go on with that technical answer to the problems of the soil. It's apparently a lot easier to develop a new breed of plant that doesn't need some trace element than to go looking for whatever it is that is missing in some slight degree. It rnight turn out to be indium, needed by and not probably of any use in human nutrition -- according to what little we now know on that aspect of the trace elements. Anyhow, it sometimes takes forty or fifty years before men begin to show evidence of some kind of malIF nutrition from the absence of an dement. A man usually doesn't devdop serious atherosclerosis until lie is in his later years. If it turns out that traces of vanadium in his diet might have prevented that, it's a little late to go back and stop using the plants that do very well on soil laddng in vanadium. Maybe it's just tradition that accounts for the way gourmets come back raving about the taste of vegetables they get in the little rural restaurants of France. But the peasants there are growing food in the ancient ways and using the older strains of plants. Their productivity is low, anyhow, and a few gourmets shouldn't stand in the way of efficiency. As for the Vietnamese who don't like the taste of our high-yield rice -- well, they only live on the stuff. They obviously are pretty poor farmers, so who cares what they think? AyTeantime, back at the ranch, some strange things may be going on in that good rich soil that has been so carefully fertilized with calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Natural compost has a tendency to improve the texture of the soil, as does the plowing under of such natural sources of nitrogen as clover. I grew up on a farm, and I can still remember th change in soil after a few years of such enrichment. It was not only richer, hut it had a texture that held the rain gently and released it to every tiny rootlet of the plants. The chemicals contain soil-conditioning additives, but the looults are not the same. Natural is a complex and living thing. It requires the work of a vast army of creatures such as anglewor to keep it in shape. These creatures live on the organic wastes put back iolo the soil, in return for which they turn and revitalize the soil. The chemicals offer them no food suitable for their use. And the eacolully weed-free crops give them iar less compost than the natural ecology. Without the healthy creatures of the soil, the ground cannot last, despite all our efforts. The waters leech out the surface materials and slowly wash away the true loam that was built up over thousands of years. Then the soil cover thins, and the earth is blown away. Even with primitive methods of agriculture, man has been sdle to ruin the soil in large areas of the world. The Negev desert once bloomed, though it never got much rain. Today it is a waste. And we have narrowly escaped similar waste areas in our own plains. Apparently, once the balance is tipped, the decline is rapid and irreversible. It might be wise to wait before persuading the Asian peasant to give up his "night soil" and oldfashioned plant varieties until we have had a little longer to see how our chemicals and hybrids work out. We should keep at least a few areas in reserve for the next effort to overproduce. Of course, there are the oceans to be farmed, as every reader of science fiction must know. But we have found that most of the seas are badly in need of fertilizer. Phosphorus tends to sink to the bottom; only at the Antarctic, where cold waters flow downward and stir up the bottom ooze, is the sea really fertile. The equatorial areas of the oceans are able to support less plant life than most of our desert land areas. Which leaves us with our Moot colonist in the restaurant at Den ver Spaceport. This year, Joe Lu niks on the way back to the costlj controllable h#q)roponic gardens oi Luna City. He sits fingering tht menu, tiying to persuade himself t( eat some sort of tasteless Eartl food before embarking. He stares ai the half-healthy people around then glances back at the menu. Finally he makes up his mind Bit by bit, he stuffs the paper o the menu into his mouth and be gins chewing. After a month on thij benighted planet, it tastes deli ciousl ZI Complete Short Novel E S by Larry Niven I ZZ by Ben Bova E  by Keith Laumer Z ZI and Harlan Ellison Zl " by James Tiptree, Jr. Z S Don't miss the J)ig January Galaxy -- on sale now !  # II T Tpward stares Wakim, sedng the  Steel General 'Taintly do I feel that I should have knowledge of him," says Wakim. "Come nowl" says Vramin, his eyes and cane flashing fires green. "All know of the General, who ranges alone. Out of the pages of history come the thundering hoofbeats of his war horse Bronze. He flew with the Lafayette Escadrille. He fought in the delaying action at Jarama Valley. He helped to hold Stalingrad in the dead of winter. With a handful of friends, he tried to invade Cuba. On every battleground, he has left a portion of himself. He camped out in Washington whn times were bad, until a greater general asked him to go away. He was beaten in Little Rock, had acid thrown in his face in Berkeley. He was put on the Attorney General's list, because he had once been a member of the I.W.W. All the causes for which he has fought are now dead, but a part of him died also as each was born and carried to its fruition. He survived, somehow, his century, with artificial limbs and artificial heart and veins, with false teeth and a glass eye, with a plate in his skull and bones out of plastic, with pieces of wire and porcelain inside him -- until finally science came to make these things better than those with which man is normally endowed. He was again replaced, piece by piece, until, in the following century, he was far superior to any man of fledi and blood. And so again he fought the rebel battle, being smashed over and over again in the wars the colonies fought against the mother planet, and in the wars the individual worlds fought against the Federation. He is always on some Attorney General's list, and he plays his banjo and he does not care, for he has placed himself beyond the law by always obe#dng its spirit rather than its letter. He has had his metal replaced with flesh on many occasions and been a full man once more -- but always he hearkens to some distant bugle and plays his banjo and follows -- and ihm he loses his humanity again. He shot craps with Leon Trotsky, who taught him that writers are underpaid; he shared a boxcar with Woody Guthrie, who taught him his music and that singers are underpaid; he supported Fidel Castro for a time and learned that lawyers are underpaid. He is almost invariably beaten and used and taken advantage of, and he does not care, for his ideals mean more to him than his flesh. Now, of course, the Prince Who Was A Thousand is an unpopular cause. I take it, from what you say, that those who would oppose the House of Life and the House of the Dead will be deemed supporters of the Prince, who IF has solicited no support -- not that that matters. And I jdaresay you oppose the Prince, Wakim. I should also venture a guess that the General mil support him, inasmuch as the Prince is a minority group all by himself. The General may be bten, but he can never be destroyed, Wakim. Here he is now. Ask him yourself, if you'd like." The Steel General, who has dismoimted, stands now before Wakim and Vramin like an iron statue at ten o'clock on a summer evening with no moon. 'T have seen your beacon, Angel of the Seventh Station." "Alas, but that title perished with the Station, sir." "I still recognize the rights of the government in exile," says the General, and his voice is a tUng of such beauty that one could listen to it for years. "Thank you. But I fear that you have come too late. This one -- this Wakim -- who is a master of temporal fugue would, I feel, destroy the Prince and thus remove any basis for our return. Is that not so, Wakim?" "Of course." "Unless we might find a champion," says Vramin. "You need look no further," says the General. "It is best you #deld to me now, Wakim. I say this with no malice." "And I reply with no malice: Go to hell. If every bit of you were to be destroyed, then I feel there would no longer be a Steel General -- and there would never be again. I think a rebel, such as yourself deserves annihilation, and I am here." "Many have thought so, and I am still waiting." "Then wait no longer," says Wakim, and he moves forward. "The time is here, and begging to be filled." II T Torus has entered the Middle  Worlds, and he comes to the world of mists that is called D'donori by its inhabitmits, meaning Place of Contentment. As he disembarks from his chariot that has crossed the cold and airless night he hears the sounds of armed strife about him within the great mists that cover over all of D'donori. Sla#dng with his hands the three knights who fall upon him, he comes at length to the high walls of the city of Liglamenti. D'donori is a world which, though it lies within the tides of the Power, has never been subject to the plagues, the wars, the famines that limit the populations of the other Midworlds. This is because the inhabitants of D'donori take care of their own problems. D'donori is made up of numerous small citystates and ducal principalities whidi are constantly at war with one aiiother njQiting only for purposes of destroylilg anyone who atteoaipts to unite tliem on a pennanent basis. Hocw #)foaches the great gates of Liglamenti and bangs upon them with fab #st. The booming sound carries throughout the city and the gates creak upon their hinges. A guard hurls down a torch through the gloom and follows it with an arrow, which, of course, misses its mark -- for Horus is able to know the thoughts of his attacker and mark the line of the arrow's flight. He steps to the side as the arrow whizzes past him and he stands in the light of the torch. "Open your gates or I'll unhinge them!" he calls out. 'Who are you that walks about weaponless, wearing only a loin cloth, and would give me orders?" T am Horus." "I do not believe you." "You have less than a minute to live," says Horus, "unless you open these gates to me. Your death will be the proof that Horus does not lie. I will then unhinge these gates and enter here, walking upon you as I pass in search of your Lord." "Wait! If truly thou be he, understand that I am only doing my duty and following the orders of my Lord, Do not think me blasphemous if I should refuse admittance to any who may call himself Horus. How do I know but that thou art an enemy who would say this to deceive me?" "Would an enemy dare be so foolish?" "Mayhap. For most men are fools." Horus shrugs and raises his fist once more. A vibrant musical note stirs then within the air, and the gates of Liglamenti shiver upon their hinges and the guard within his armor. Horus has increased in stature by now, to ner three meters. His breechclout is the cojor of blood. The torch flickers at his feet. He draws back his fist. "Wait! I will give thee entrance!" Horus lowers his fist, and the music dies. His height decreases by a third. The guard causes the portal to be opened, and Horus enters Liglamenti. C oming at length to the fogshrouded palace of its ruler, the Lord Dilwit, Duke of Ligla, Horus learns that word of his arrival has preceded him from the walls. The somber, black-bearded Duke, whose crown has been grafted upon his scalp, manages as much of a smile as he is able; that is, the showing of a double row of teeth between tight-drawn lips. He nods slightly. "Thou art truly Horus?" he asks. "Yes." "It is told that every time the god Horus passes this way there is difficulty in recognizing him." "And no wonder," says Horus. IP "In all this fog it is rather miraculous that you manage to recognize one another." Dilwit snorts his equivalent of a laugh. "True. Often we do not, and slay our own men in error. But each time Horus has come, the ruling Lord has provided a test. The last time..." "... The last time, for Lord Bulwah, I sent a wooden arrow into a two-foot cube of marble so that either end protruded from a side." "Thou rememberestl" "Of course. I am Horus. Do you still have that cube?" "Yes. Certainly." "Then take me to it now." They enter the torchlit throne room, where the shaggy pelts of predators offer the eye its only diversion from the glittering war weapons upon the walls. Set atop a small pedestal in a recessed place to the left of the throne is a cube of gray and orange marble which contains an arrow. "There you see it," says Dilwit. Horus approaches, regards the' display. "I'll design my own test this time," says he. "I'll fetch you back the arrow." "It might be drawn. That is no -- " Horus raises his right fist to shoulder level, swings it forward and down, striking the stone, which shatters. He retrieves the arrow and hands it to Dilwit. "I am Horus," he states again. Dilwit regards the arrow, the gravel, the chunks of marble,   "Thou art indeed Hor," he agrees. "What may I do for thee?" "D'donori has always been justly famous for its scriers. ThoiSje pf Liglamenti have oft been exceeding good. Therefore, I would , consult with your chief scrier, as I'yp several questions I'd have answered." "This would be old Freydag," says Dilwit, flicking rock dust from his red and green kilt. "He is indeed one of the great ones, but . ,..." "But what?" asks Horus, already reading Dilwit's thought, but waiting politely, nevertheless. "He is. Great Horus, a mighty reader of entrails. But none but those of the human sort will serve him. Now, we seldom keep prisoners, as this can run into some expense. And volunteers are even harder to come by for things such as this." "Could not Freyday be persuaded to make do the entrails of some animal, for this one occasion?" Horus reads again and sighs. "Of course. Great Horus. But he will not guarantee the same level of reception as he would with better components." "I wonder why this should be?" "I cannot answer this. Most Potent Horus, being no scrier myself -- though my mother and sister both had the Sight. But of all scriers, I know scatologists to be the queerest sort Take Freyday, now. Hes quite nearsighted he says, and this means -- 'Tumish him with the necessary components and advise me when he is ready to entertain my questions! " says Homs. "Yes, Puissant Horus. I will organize a raiding party immediately, as I can see thou art anxious." "Most anxious." "... And IVe a neighbor could use a lesson in observing boundaries!" Dilwit springs upon his throne, and reaching upward takes down the long gol-horn which hangs above it. Three times does he place it to his lips and blow until his cheeks bulge and redden and his eyes start forth from beneath the pelt of his brows. Then does he replace the horn, sway, and collapse upon his ducal seat. "My chieftains will attend me momently," he gasps. Momently, there comes the sound of hoofbeats, and three kilted warriors, mounted upon the unicornlike golindi, come riding, riding, riding, into and about the chamber, staying only when Dilwit raises his hand and cries out, "A raid! A raid, my hearties! Upon Uiskeagh the Red. Half a dozen captives I'll have of him, ere the mist lightens with tomorrow's dawn!" "Captives, did you say. Lord?" calls out the one in black and tan. "You have heard me right." "Before tomorrow's dawn!" A spear is raised. Two more flash high. "Before tomorrow's dawn!" "Aye!" And they circle the chamber and depart. '"The following dawn, Horus is awakened and conducted to the room where six naked men lie, hands and ankles bound together behind their backs, their bodies covered with gashes and welts. This chamber is small, cold, lighted by four torches; its one window opens upon a wall of fog. Many sheets of that monthly journal, the Ligla Times, are spread upon the floor, covering it fully. Leaning agaiust the windowsill, a short, age-tonsured man, pinkfaced, hollow-cheeked and squinting, sharpens several brief blades with a whetting bar. He wears a white apron and a halffurnished smile. His pale eyes move upon Horus, and he nods several times. "I understand thou hast some questions," he says, pausing to gasp between several words. "You xmderstand correctly. I've three." "Only three. Holy Horus? That means one set of entrails will doubtless do for all. Surely, a god as wise as thyself could think of more questions. Since we have the necessary materials it is a shame to IF waste them. Its been so long... "Three, nevertheless, are all the questions I have for the entrailoracle." "Very well, then," sighs Freydag. "In that case, we shall use his," and he indicates with his blade one graybearded man whose dark eyes are fixed upon his own. "Boltag is his name." "You know him?" "He is a distant cousin of mine. Also, he is the Lord Uiskeagh's chief scrier. A charlatan, of course. It is good fortune that has finally delivered him into my hands." The one called Boltag spits upon the Times obituary section when this is spoken. "Thou art the fraud! Oh mighty misreader of innards!" says he. "Liar!" cries Freydag, scrambling to his side and seizing him by the beard. "This ends thy infamous career!" and he slits the other's belly. Reaching in, he draws forth a handful of entrails and spreads them upon the floor. Boltag cries, moans, Kes still. Freydag slashes along the bending length of the intestines, spreading their contents with his fingers. He crouches low and leans far forward. "Now, what be thy questions, son of Osiris?" he inquires. "First," says Homs, "where may I find the Prince Who Was A Thousand? Second, who is the emissary of Anubis? Third, where is he now?" Freydag mumbles and prods at the steaming stuff upon the floor. Boltag moans once again and stirs. Horus attempts to read the thoughts of the scrier, but th tumble about so that finally it is as if he were staring out the room's one window. hen Freydag speaks: "In the Citadel of Marachek," he says, "at Midworlds' Center, there shalt thou meet with one who can take thee into the presence thou seekest." "... Strangely," mutters Boltag, gesturing with his head, "thou hast read that part aright. But thy failing vision -- was clouded -- by that bit of mercenary thou hast erroneously mixed -- into things..." With a mighty effort Boltag rolls nearer, gasps, "And thou -- dost not tell -- Great Horus -- that he will meet with mighty peril -- and ultimately -- failure..." "Silence!" cries Freydag. "I did not call thee in for a consultation!" "They are my innards! I will not have them misread by a poseur!" "The next two answers are not yet come clear, dear Horus," says Freydag, slashing at another length of entrail. "False seer!" sobs Boltag. "Marachek will also lead him to the emissary of Anubis -- whose name is spelt out in my blood -- there -- on the editorial page! That name -- being -- Wakim!' "Ob, falser' cries Frqr, slashing further. "Holdr' says Homs, his hand falling upon the mans shoulder. "Your colleague speaks truly in one respect, for I know his present name to be Wakim." Freydag pauses, considers the editorial page. "Amai," he agrees. "Even an amateur may suffer an occasional flash of insight," "So it seems I am destined to meet with Wakim after all, if I go to the place called Marachek -- and go there I must. But as to my second question: Beyond the name of Wakim, I wish to know his true identity. Who was he before Lord Anubis renamed him and sent him forth from the house of the Dead?" Freydag moves his head nearer the floor, stirs the stuff before him, hacks at another length. "This thing. Glorious Horus, is hidden from me. The oracle will not reveal it -- " "Dotard...#" gasps Woltag. "It is there, so -- plain -- to see..." Norus reaches after the gutless seers dying thought, and the hackles rise upon his neck as he pursues it But no fearsome name is framed within his mind, for the other has expired. Hems covers his eyes and shudders, as a thing so very near to the edge of comprehension suddenly fades away and is gone. When Horus lowers his hand, Freydag is standing once more and smiling down upon his cousin's corpse. "Mountebank #" he says, sniffing, and wipes his hands upon his spron. A strange, small, beastly shadow stirs upon the wall. Ill Tiamond hooves striking the-'ground, rising, falling again. Rising... Wakim and the Steel General face one another, unmoving. A minute goes by, then three, and now the falling hooves of the beast called Bronze come down with a sound like thunder upon the fairground of Blis, for each time that they strike the force of their falling is doubled. It is said that a fugue battle is actually settled in these first racking moments of regard, before the initial temporal phase is executed, in these moments which will be wiped from the face of Time by the outcome of the striving, never to have actually existed. The ground shakes now as Bronze strikes it, and blue fires come forth from his nostrils, burning downward into Blis. Wakim glistens with perspiration now; and the Steel General's finger twitches, the one upon which he wears his humanity-ring. Eleven minutes pass. IP Wakim vaiiishes in a flash. The Steel General vanishes. Bronze descends again, and tents fall down, buildings diatter, cracks appear within the ground. Thirty seconds ago, Wakim is standing behind the General and Wakim is standing before the General, and the Wakim who stands behind, who has just arrived in that instant, clasps his hands together and raises them for a mighty blow upon that metal helm --  -- while thirty-five seconds ago, the Steel General appears behind the Wakim of that moment of Time, draws back his hand and swings it --  -- while the Wakim of thirty seconds ago, seeing himself in fugue, delivering his two-handed blow, is released to vanish, which he does, into a time ten seconds before, when he prepares to emulate his future image observed --  -- as the General of thirty-five seconds before the point of attack, sees himself draw back his hand, and vanishes to a time twelve seconds previously... All of these, because a foreguard in Time is necessary to preserve one's future existence... And a rearguard, one's back... While all the while, somewherewhenperhaps, now, Bronze is rearing and descending, and a probable city trembles upon its foundation... And the Wakim of forty seconds before the point o Attack, seeing his arrival, darts twenty seconds backward -- one minute of probable time therefore being blurred by the fugue battl, d so subject to alteration... The General of fortyven seconds before the point of attack retreats fifteen to strike agmh, as his self of that moment observes him and drops back eight -- ... The Wakim of one minute before goes back ten seconds -- Fugue! Wakim behind the Steel General, attacking, at minus seventy seconds sees the General behind Wakim, attacking, as both see him and his other see both. All four vanish, at a pace of eleven, fifteen, nineteen and twentyfive seconds... And all the while, somewhere whenperhaps, Bronze rears, falls, and shock waves go forth. The point of initial encounter draws on, as General before Generd and Wakim before Wakim face and fugue. Five minutes and seven seconds of the future stand in abeyance as twelve Generals and nine Wakims look upon one another... Five minutes and twentyone seconds, as nineteen Wakims and fourteen Generals glare in frozen striking stances... Eight minutes and sixteen seconds before the point of attack, one hundred twenty-three Wakims and one hundred thirty-one Generals assess one another and decide upon the moment... To attack en masse, within that instant of time, leaving their past selves to shift for themselves in defense -- perhaps, if this instant be the wrong one, to fall, and so end this encounter, also. T)ut things must end somewhere. Depending upon the lightning calculations and guesses, each has picked this point as the best for purposes of determining the future and holding the focus. And as the armies of Wakims and the Generals clash together, the ground begins to rumble beneath their feet and the fabric of Time itself protests this use which has been made of its dispositions. A wind begins to blow and things become unreal about them, wavering between being and becoming and afterbeing. And somewhere Bronze smashes his diamonds into the continent and spews forth gouts of blue fire upon it. Corpses of bloodied and broken Wakims and fragments of shattered Generals drift through the twisting places beyond the focus of their struggles and are buffeted by the winds. These be the dead of probability, for there can be no past slaying now and the future is being remade. The focus of the fugue has become this moment of intensity, and they clash with a force that sends widening ripples of change outward through the universe, rising, diminishing, gone by, as Time once more ticks history around events. Beyond their midst. Bronze descends and somewhere a city begins to come apart. The poet raises his cane, but its green fires cannot cancel the blue flare that Bronze exhales now like a fountain upon the world. Now there are only nine cities on Blis and Time is burning them down. Buildings, machines, corpses, babies, pavilions, these are taken by the wind from the flame, and they pass, wavering, by the fairground. Regard their colors. Red? There's a riverbank, green stream hung above, and flying purple rocks. Yellow and gray and black the city beneath the three limebright bridges. Now the creamy sea is the sky and buzzsaw come the breezes. The odors of Blis are smoke and charred flesh. The sounds are screams amid the clashing of broken gears and the rapid-fire rainfall of running feet like guilt within the Black Daddy night that comes on like unconsciousness now. "Cease!" cries Vramin, becoming a blazing green giant in the midst of chaos. "You will lay waste the entire world if you continue!" he cries, and his voice comes down like thunder and whistles and trumpets upon them. They continue to strive, however, and the magician takes his friend Madrak by the arm and attempts IF to open them a gateway of escape from Blis. Civilians are dying #" cries a moment of the General. A moment of Wakim laughs. "What difference does a uniform make in the House of the Dead?" A great green door appears in outline, grows more substantial, begins to open. Vramin diminishes in size. As the door swings wide, he and Madrak are both swept toward it, as tall waves race and topple upon a windslashed ocean. The armies of Wakim and the General are also raised by the waves of chaos and driven by the winds of change until they, too, are come at last to the green gateway which stands now wide, like a luminous magnet drain whirlpooPs center. Still striving, they flow toward it and one by one pass within and are gone. Bronze begins to move very slowly as the gateway closes, but somehow passes through it before the chaos comes upon the empty space it occupied. Then the roaring and the movement cease and the entire world of Blis seems to sigh within the moment of its reprieve. Many things are broken and people dead or dying at this moment, which could have been one set thirty-three seconds before Wakim and the General began the fugue which will not now begin upon the litter-strewn fairground with its crevasses and Its steaming craters. Among the fallen archways, the toppled towers, the flattened buildings, salvation strides with its sword of fires unsheathed. The fevers of the day come forth from the Houses of Power, and somewhere a dog is barking. IV 'D egard now the Citadel of Marachek at Midworlds' Center... Dead. Dead. Dead. Color it dust. This is where the Prince Who Was Once A God comes often, to contemplate -- many things. There are no oceans on Marachek. There are still a few bubbly springs, these smelling like wet dogs and being warm and brackish. Its sun is a very tired and tiny reddish star, too respectable or too lazy ever to have become a nova and passed out in a burst of glory, shedding a rather anemic light which makes for deep, bluish shadows cast by grotesque stands of stone upon the enormous beach of dun and orange that is Marachek beneath its winds; and the stars above Marachek may be seen even at midday, faintly, though in the evening they acquire the intenaty of neon, acetylene and flashbulb above the windswept plains; and most of Marachek is flat, though the plains rearrange themsdves twice daily, when the winds achieve a kind of sterile climaK, heaping and unheaping the sands and grinding their grains finer and finer -- so that the dust of morning and dusk hangs throughout the day in a yellowish haze, which further detracts from Marachek's eye in the sky -- all, ultimately, levelling and settling, the mountains having been ground down, the rocks sculpted and resculpted, and all buried and resurrected perpetually. This is the surface of Marachek, which of course was once a scene of glory, power, pomp and pageantry, its very triteness crying out for this conclusion; but further, there is one building upon Marachek at Midworlds' Center which testifies to the saw's authenticity, this being the Citadel, which doubtless shall exist as long as the world itself, though mayhap the sands shall cover and discover it many times before that day of fiinal dissolution or total frigidity. The Citadel -- which is so old that none can say for certain that it was ever built. The Citadel, which may be the oldest city in the universe, broken and repaired (who knows how often?) upon the same foundation, over and over, perhaps since the imaginary beginning of the illusion called Time. The Citadel, which in its very standing testifies that some things do endure, no matter how poorly, all vicissitudes -- of which Vramin wrote, in The Proud Fossil: "The sweetness of decay ne'er touched thy portals, for destiny is amber and sufficient" -- the Citadel of Marachek-Karnak, the archetypal city, which is now mainly inhabited by little skittering things, generally insects and reptiles, that feed upon one another, one of which (a toad) exists at this moment of time beneath an overturned goblet upon an ancient table in Marachek's highest tower (the northeastern) as the sickly sun raises itself from the dust and dusk, and the starlight comes down less strongly. This is Marachek. When Vramin and Madrak enter here, fresh through the gateway from Blis, they deposit their charges upon that ancient table, made all of one piece out of a substance pink and unnatural which Time itself cannot corrupt. This is the place where the ghosts of Set and the monsters he fights rage through the marble memory that is wrecked and rebuilt Marachek, the oldest city, forever. V ramin replaces the General's left arm and right foot; he turns his head so that it faces forward once more, then he makes adjustment upon his neck, to hold the head in place. "How fares the other?" he inquires. Madrak lowers Wakim's right eyelid and releases his wrist. IF "Shock, I'd suppose. Has anyone ever been torn from the center of a fugue battle before?" "To my knowledge, no. WeVe doubtless discovered a new syndrome -- 'fugue fatigue' or 'temporal shock' I'd call it. We may get our names into textbooks yet." "What do you propose to do with them? Are you able to revive them?" "Most likely. But then, they'd start in again -- and probably keep going till they'd wrecked this world also." "Not much here to wreck. Perhaps we could sell tickets and turn them loose. Might net a handsome penny." "Oh, cynical monger of indulgences! 'T would take a man of the cloth to work a scheme like that!" "Not so! I learned it on Blis, if you recall." "True -- where life's greatest drawing card had become the fact that it sometimes ends. Nevertheless, in this case, I feel it might be wiser to cast these two upon separate worlds and leave them to their own devices." "Then why did you bring them here to Marachek?" "I didn't! They were sucked through the Gateway, when I opened it. I aimed for this place myself because the Center is always easiest to reach." "Then suggestions are now in order as to our course of action." "Let us rest here awhile, and I will keep these two entranced. We might just open us another Gateway and leave them." " 'Twould be against my ethics, brother." "Speak not to me of ethics, thou inhuman humanist! Caterer to whatever life-lie man chooses! Th'art an holy ambulance-chaser!" "Nevertheless, I cannot leave a man to die." "Very well. Hello! Someone has been here before us, to suffocate a toad!" Madrak turns his eye upon the goblet. "I've heard tales that they might endure the ages in tiny, airless crypts. How long, I wonder, has this one sat thus? If only it lives and could speak! Think of the glories to which it might bear witness." "Do not forget, Madrak, that I am the poet, and kindly reserve such conjectures to those better able to say them with a straight face. I -- " Vramin moves to the window, and, "Company," says he. "Now might we leave these fellows in good conscience." Upon the battlements, mounted like a statue. Bronze whinnies like a steam whistle and raises three legs and lets them fall. Now he exhales laser beams into the breaking day, and his rows of eyes wink on and oF. Something is coming, though still unclear, through the dust and the night "Shall we, then?" "No." "I share thy sentiment." Sharing, they wait. V 'Tow everyone knows that some machines make love, beyond the metaphysical writings of Saint Jakes the Mechophile, who posits man as the sexual organ of the machine which created him, and whose existence is necessary to fulfill the destiny of mechanism, producing generation after generation of machinekind, all the modes of mechanical evolution flowing through man, until such a time as he has served his purpose, perfection has been reached, and the Great Castration may occur. Saint Jakes is, of course, an heretic. As has been demonstrated on occasions too numerous to cite, the whole machine requires a gender. Now that man and machine undergo frequent interchanges of components and entire systems, it is possible for a complete being to start at my point in the mech-man spectrum and to range the entire gamut. Man, the presumptuous organ, has therefore achieved his apotheosis or union with the Gaskethead through sacrifice and redemption, as it were. Ingenuity had much to do with it, but ingenuity of course is a form of mechanical inspiration. One may no longer speak of the Great Castration, no longer consider separating the machine from its creation. Man is here to stay, as a part of the Big Picture. Everyone knows that machines make love. Not in the crude sense, of course, of those women and men who, for whatever economic purposes may control, lease their bodies for a year or two at a time to one of the vending companies, to be joined with machines, fed intravenously, exercised isometrically, their consciousness submerged (or left turned on, as it would be), to suffer brain implants which stimulate the proper movements for a period not to exceed fifteen minutes per coin, upon the couches of the larger pleasure clubs (and more and more in vogue in the best of homes, as well as the cheap street corner units) for the sport and amusement of their fellows. No. Machines make love via man, but there have been many transferences of function, and they generally do it spiritually. Consider, however, a unique phenomenon which has just arisen: the Pleasure-Comp -- the computer like an oracle, which can answer an enormous range of inquiries, and will do so, only for so long as the inquirer can keep it properly stimulated. How many of you have entered the programmed boudoir, to IF have enormous issues raised and settled, and found that time passes so rapidly. Predsely. Reverse-centaur-Uke -- i.e., human from the waist down -- it represents the best of two worlds and their fusion into one. There is a love story wrapped up in all this background, as a man enters the Question Room to ask the Dearabbey Machine of his beloved and her ways. It is happening evoywhere, always, and there can often be nothing quite so tender. VI XTow comes Horus, who, seeing Bronze on the wall, deposeth and saith; "Open this damned gate or I'll kick it down!" To which Vramin makes reply over the battlement, sa#dng: "Since I did not fasten it, I am not about to undo it. Find your own entrance or eat dust." Horus does then kick down the gate, at which Madrak marvels slightly, and he then mounts the winding stair to the highest tower. Entering the room, he eyes the poet and the warrior-priest with some malevolence, inquiring: "Which of you two denied me passage?" Both step forward. "A pair of fools! Know you that I am the god Horiis, fresh come from the House of Life!" "Excuse us for not being duly impressed, god Horus," says Mad-r rak, "but none gave us entrance here, save oursdves." "How be you dead men named?" "I am Vramin, at your service, more or less." "And I, Madrak." "Ah! IVe some knowledge of you two. Why are you here, and what is that carrion on the table?" "We are here, sir, because we are not elsewhere," says Vramin, "and the table contains , two men and a toad -- all of whom, I should say, are your betters." "Trouble can be purchased cheaply, though the refxmd may be more than you can bear," says Horus. "What, may I inquire, brings the scantily clad god of vengeance to this scrofulous vicinity?" --  Vramin. "Why, vengeance, of course. Has either of you vagabonds set eyes upon the ftince Who Was A Thousand recently?" "This I must deny, in good faith." "And I." "I come seeking him." "Why here?" "An oracle, deeming it a propitious spot. And while I am not eager to battle heroes -- knowing you as such -- I feel you owe me an apology for the entrance I received." "Fair enough," says Madrak, "for know that our cockles have been raised by a recent battle and we have spent the past hours waxing wroth. Will a swig of good red wine convey our sentiments -- coming from what is, doubtless, the only flask of the stuff on this world?" 'It should suffice, if it be of good quality." "Bide then a moment." Madrak fetches forth his wine bulb, swigs a mouthful to show it unsullied, casts about the room. "A fit container, sir," he says, and raises up the downturned goblet which lies upon the table. Wiping it with a clean cloth, he fills it and proffers it to the god. "Thank you, warrior priest. I accept it in the spirit in which it was offered. What battle was it which so upset you that you forgot your manners?" "That, Brown-eyed Horus, was the battle of Blis, between the Steel General and the one who is called Wakim the Wanderer." "The Steel General? Impossible! He has been dead for centuries. I slew him myself!" "Many have slain him. None have vanquished him." "That pile of junk upon the table? Could that truly be the Prince of Rebels, ho one time faced me like a god?" "Before your memory, Horus, was he mighty," says Vramin, "and when men have forgotten Horus, still will there be a Sted General. It matters not which side he fights upon. Win or lose, he is the spirit of rebellion, which can never die." "I like not this talk," says Horus. "Sturely, if one were to number all his parts and destroy them, one by one, and scatter them across the entire cosmos, then would he cease to exist." "This thing has been done. And over the centuries have his followers collected him and assembled the engine again. This man, this Wakim, whose like I have never seen before," says Vramin, "voiced a similar sentiment before the fugue battle which racked half a world. The only thing which keeps them from laying waste -- excuse the poor choice of words -- to this world Marachek is that I will not permit them to awaken again from a state of temporal shock." "WaJdm? This is the deadly Wakim? Yes. I can believe it as I look upon him in repose. Have you any idea who he is really? Such champions do not spring full-grown from the void." "I know nothing of him, save that he is a mighty wrestler and a master of the fugue, come to Blis in her last days before the dark tides swept over her -- perhaps to hasten their coming." "That is all you know of him?" "That is all I know." "And you, mighty Madrak?" "The sum of my knowledge, also.' IF p.Re Supposing we were to awaken him and question him?' Vramin raises his cane. 'Touch him and I shall dispute your passage. He is too fearsome an individual, and we came here to rest." Homs lays a hand upon Wakims shoulder and shakes him slightly. Wakim moans. "Know that the wand of life is also a lance of death #" cries Vramin, and with a lunging motion spears the toad, which sits immediately beside Horus's left hand. T efore Horus can turn upon him,  there is a quick outward rush of air as the toad explodes into a towering form in the center of the table. His long golden hair stands high and his thin lips draw back in a smile, as his green eyes fall upon the tableau at his feet. The Prince Who Had Been A Toad touches a red spot on his shoulder, says to Vramin, "Did you not know that it has been wrtten. 'Be kind to bird and beastV" "Elipling," says Vramin, smiling. "Also, the Koran." "Shape-shifting miscreant," says Horus, "are you the one I seek -- called by many the Prince?" "I confess to this title. Know that you have disturbed my meditations." "Prepare to meet your doom," says Horus, drawing an arrow -- his only weapon -- from his belt, and breaking off its head. "Do you think that I am unaware of your power, brother?" says the Prince, as Horus raises the arrowhead between thumb and forefinger. "Do you think, brother, that I do not know that you can add the power of your mind to the mass or velocity of any object, increasing it a thousandfold?" There is a blur in the vicinity of Horuss hand and a crashing sound across the room, as the Prince stands suddenly two feet to the left of where he had been standing and the arrowhead pierces a six-inch wall of metal and continues on into what is now a dusty and windy morning as the Prince continues to speak: "And do you not know, brother, that I could as easily have removed myself an inconceivable distance across space with the same effort as it took me to avoid your shot? Yea, out of the Middle Worlds themselves?" "Call me not brother," says Horus, raising the shaft of the arrow. "But thou art my brother," says the Prince. "At least, wed the same mother." Horus drops the shaft. "I believe you not!" "And from what strain do you think you derived your godlike powers? Osiris? Cosmetic surgery might have given him a chickens head, IF and his own dubious strain an aptitude for mathematics -- but you and I, shapeshifters both, are sons of Isis, Witch of the Loggia," "Cursed be my mother's name I" Suddenly, the Prince stands before him on the floor of the chamber and slaps him with the back of his hand. "I could have slain you a dozen times over, had I chosen," says the Prince, "as you stood there. But I refrained, for you are my brother. I could slay you now, but I will not. For you are my brother. I bear no arms, for I need none. I bear no malice, or the burden of my life would be staggering. But do not speak ill of our mother, for her ways are her own. I neither praise nor do I blame. I know that you have come here to kill me. If you wish to enjoy an opportunity to do so, you will hold your tongue in this one respect, brother." "Then let us speak no more of her." "Very well. You know who my father was, so you know that I am not unversed in the martial arts. I will give you a chance to slay me in hand-to-hand combat, if you will do a thing for me first. Otherwise, I will remove myself and find someone else to assist me, and you may spend the rest of your days seeking me." C#'"Then this must be what the  oracle meant," says Horus, "and it bodes ill for me. Yet I cannot pass up the chance to fulfill my mission, before Anubis's emissary -- this Wakim -- adiieves it. For I know not his powers, which might exceed your own. I will keep my peace, run your errand and kill you." "This man is the assassin from the House of the Dead?" says the Prince, looking upon Wakim. "Yes." "Were you aware of this, my Angel of the Seventh Station?" asks the Prince. "No," says Vramin, bowing slightly. "Nor I, Lord" -- Madrak. "Arouse him -- and the General." "Our bargain is off," say Horus, "if this be done." "Awaken them both," says the Prince, folding his arms. Vramin raises his cane, and the green tongues come forth and descend upon the prostrate forms. Outside, the winds grow more noisy. Horus shifts his attention from one to the other of those present, then speaks: "Your back is to me, brother. Turn around that I may face you as I slay you. As I said, our bargain is off." The Prince turns. "I need these men, also." Horus shakes his head and raises his arm. Then, "A veritable family reunion," says the voice which fills the chamber, "we three brothers having come together at last." Horus draws back his hand as from .an asp for the shadow of a dark horse lies between himself and the Prince. He covers his eyes with one hand and lowers his head. "I had forgotten," he says, that by what I learned today, I am also kin to thee." "Take it not too badly," says the voice, "for I have known it for ages and learned to live with it." And Wakim and the Steel General awaken to a sound of laughter that is like the singing wind. fiiris, holding a skull and depressing a stud on its side, addi?esses it, saying: "Once mortal, you have come to dwell in the House of Life forever. Once beauty, blooming fair atop a spinal column, you withered. Once truth, you have come to this." "And who," answers the skull, "is papetrater of this thing? It is the Lord of the House of Life that will not let me know rest." And Osiris makes answer, saying: "Know, too, that I use thee for a paperweight." "If ever thou didst love me, then smadi me and let me diel Do not continue to nourish a fragment of she who once loved thee." "Ah, but dear my lady, one day migt I re-embody thee, to feel thy caresses again." "The thought of this thing repels me." "And I, also. But one day it might amuse me." "Dost thou torment all who displease thee?" "No, no, shell of death, think never thatl True, the Angel of the Nineteenth House attempted to slay me, and his nervous system lives, threaded amidst the fibers of this carpet I stand upon; and true, others of my enemies exist in elementary forms at various points within my House -- such as fireplaces, ice lockers and ashtrays. But think not that I am vindictive. No, never. As Lord of Life, I feel an obligation to repay all things which have threatened life." "I did not threaten thee, my Lord." "You threatened my peace of mind." "Because I resembled thy vrife, the Lady Isis?" "Silence I" "Ayel I resembled the Queen of Harlots, thy bride. For this reason didst thou desire me and desire my undoing -- " The skull's words are then cut short, however, as Osiris has hurled it against the wall. As it falls to pieces and chemicals and microminiature circuitry are spread upon the carpet, Osiris curses and falls upon a row of switches at his desk, the depression of which gives rise to a multitude IF of voices, one of which, above the others, cries out, through a speaker set high upon the wall: "Oh clever skull, to so have tricked the fink godl' Consulting the panel and seeing that it is the carpet which has spoken, Osiris moves to the center of the room and begins jumping up and down. There grows up a field of wailing. Tnto the places of darkness and  disrepute, upon the world called Waldik, enter the two champions, Madrak and Typhon. Sent by Thoth Hermes Trismegistes to steal a glove of singular potency, they are come to do battle with the guardian of that glove. Now, the world Waldik, long ago ravaged, hosts an horde of beings who dwell beneath its surface in caverns and chambers far removed from the courts of day and night. Darkness, dampness, mutation, fratricide, incest and rape are the words most often used by the few who offer commentary upon the world Waldik. Transported there by a piece of spatial hijackery known only to the Prince, the champions will succeed or remain. They go now through burrows, having been told to follow the bellowing. "Think you, dark horse shadow," asks the warrior-priest, th thy brother can retrieve us at the proper moment?" "Yes," replies the shadow that moves at his side. "Though if he cannot, I care not. I can remove myself in my own way whenever I wish." "Yes, but I cannot." "Then worry it, fat Dad. I care not. You volunteered to accompany me. I did not request this thing," "Then into the hands of Whatever May Be that is greater than life or death, I resign myself -- if this act will be of any assistance in preserving my life. If it will not, I do not. If my saying this thing at all be presumptuous, and therefore not well received by Whatever may or may not care to listen, then I withdraw the statement and ask forgiveness, if this thing be desired. If not, I do not. On the other hand -- " "Amen! And silence, please!" rumbles Typhon. "I have heard a thing like a bellow -- to our left." Shding invisible along the dark wall, Typhon rounds the bend and moves ahead. Madrak squints through infrared glasses and splays his beam like a blessing upon everything encountered. "These caverns be deep and vasty," he whispers. There is no reply. Suddenly he comes to a door which may be the right door. Opening it, he meets the minotaur. He raises his staff, but the thing vanishes in a twinkling. "Where...?" he inquires. "Hiding' says Typhon, suddenly near, "somewhere within the many twistings and turnings of its lair." "Why is this?" "It would seem that its kind are hunted by creatures much like yourself, both for food and man bull-headed trophies. It fears direct battle, therefore, and retreats -- for man uses weapons upon cattle. Let us enter the labyrinth and hope not to see it again. The entranceway we seek, to the lower chambers, lies somewhere within." or perhaps half a day they wan der, unsuccessfully seeking the Wrong Door. Three doors do they come upon, but only bones lie behind. "I wonder how the others fare?" asks the warrior-priest. "Better, or worse -- or perhaps the same," replies the other, and laughs. Madrak does not laugh. Coming into a circle of bones, Madrak sees the charging beast barely in time. He raises his staff and begins the battle. He strikes it between the horns and upon the side. He jabs, slashes at, pushes, strikes the creature. He lod with it and wrestles, hand to hand. Hurting one another, they strive, imtil finally Madrak is raised from the floor and hurled across the chamber, to land upon his left shoulder on a pile of bones. As he struggles to raise himself, he is submerged by an ear-breaking bellow. Head lowered, the minotaur charges. Madrak finds his feet and begins to rise. But a dark horse shadow falls upon the creature, and it is gone -- completely and forever. He bows his head and chants the Possibly Proper Death Litany. "Lovely," snorts his companion, when he comes to his final "Amen." "Now, fat Dad, I think I have found us the wrong door. I might enter without opening it, but you may not. How would you have it?" "Bide a moment," says Madrak, standing. "A bit of narcotic and I'll be good as new and stronger than before. Then we shall enter together." "Very well. I'll wait." Madrak injects himself and after a time is like unto a god. "Now show me the door and let us go in." "This way." And there is the door, big and forbidding and colorless, within the infra-light. "Open it," says Typhon, and Madrak does. In the firelight it plays, worrying the gauntlet. Perhaps the size of two and a half elephants, it sports with its toy there atop an heap of bones. One of its heads sniffs at IF the sudden draft of air from beyond the Wrong Door, two of its heads snarl and the third drops the glove. "Do you understand my voice?" asks Typhon, but there is no answering intelligence behind its six red eyes. Its tails twitch, and it stands, all scaley and impervious, within the flicker and glow. "Nice doggie," comments Madrak, and it wags its tails, opens its mouths and lunges toward him. "Kill it!" cries Madrak, "That is impossible," answers Typhon. "In time, that is." IX C oming at length to the world Interludici, and entering through the sudden green gateway the poet hurls upon the blackness, Wakim and Vramin enter the mad world of many rains and religions. Lightfooted, they stand upon the moist turf outside a city of terrible black walls. "We shall enter now," says the poet, stroking his sky-green beard. "We shall enter through that small door off to the left, which I shall cause to open before us. Then will we hypnotize or subdue any guards who may be present and make our way into the heart of the city, where the great temple stands." "To steal boots for the Prince," says Wakim. "This is a strange employment for one such as myself. Were it not for the fact that he had promised to give my name back to me -- my real name -- before I slay him, I would not have agreed to do this thing for hinu" "I realize that," says Vramin, "but tell me, what do you intend to do with Horns, who would also slay him -- and who works for him now only to gain this same opportunity?" "Slay Horus first, if need be." "The psychology behind this thing fascinates me, so I trust you will permit me one more question: What difference does it make whether you slay him or Horus slays him? He will be just as dead either way." Wakim pauses, apparently considering the matter, as if for the first time. "This thing is my mission, not his," he says at length. "He will be just as dead, either way," Vramin repeats. "But not by my hand." "True. But I fail to see the distinction." "So do I, for that matter. But it is I who have been charged with the task." "Perhaps Horus has also." "But not by my master." "Why should you have a master, Wakim? Why are you not your own man?" Wakim rubs his forehead. "I -- do not -- really -- know. But I must do as I am told." "I understand," says Vramin, and while rWakim is thus distracted, a tiny green spsrk arcs between the tip #f the poet's cane and the back of Wakim's neck. He daps at his neck then and scratches it. "What...?" "A local insect," says the poet. "Let us proceed to the door." The door opens before them, beneath the tapping of his cane, and its guards drowse before a brief green flare. Appropriating cloaks from two of them, Wakim and Vramin move on, into the center of the city. The temple is easy enough to find. Entering it is another matter. Here now, there are guards -- drug-raaddened -- before the entrance. They approach boldly and demand admisdon. The eighty-eight spears of the Outer Guard are leveled at them. "There will be no public adoration tffl the sundown rains," they are told, amidst twitches, "We shall wait." And they do. TTith the sundown rains, they join a procession of moist worshippers and entered the outer temple. On attempting to go further they are brought to a halt by the three hundred flfty-two drug-maddened spearmen who guard the next entraacnway. "Have you the badges of inner temple worshippers?" their captain inquires. "Of course," says Vramin, raising his cane. And in the eyes of the captain, they must have them, for they are granted entrance. Then, drawing near the Inner Sanctum itself, they are halted by the officer in charge of the five hundred and ten drug-maddened warriors who guard the way. "Castrated or non-castrated?" he inquires. "Castrated, of course," says Vramin in a lovely soprano. "Give us entrance," and his eyes blaze greenly and the officer draws back. Entering, they spy the altar, with its fifty guardians and its six strange priests. "There they are, upon the altar." "How shall we obtain them?" "By stealth, preferably," says Vramin, pushing his way nearer the altar, before the televised service begins. "What sort of stealth?" "Perhaps we can substitute a pair of our own and wear the sacred ones out of here." "I'm game." "Then, supposing they were stolen five minutes ago?" "I understand you," says Wakim and bows his head, as in adoration. The service begins, "Hail to Thee, Shoes," lisps the first priest, "wearer of feet." "Hail!" chant the other five. IF "Good, kind, noble and blessed shoes." "Hail!" . Which came to us from chaos." "Hail!" "... To lighten our hearts and uplift our soles." "Hail!" "Oh shoes, which have supported mankind since the dawn of civilization... "Hail!" "... Ultimate cavities, surrounders of feet." "Hail!" "Hail! Wondrous, battered buskins!" "We adore thee." 'We adore thee!" "We worship thee in the fulness of thy shoenessl" "Glory!" "Oh archetypal footgear I" "Glory!" "Supreme notion of shoes." "Glory!" "What could we do without thee?" "What?" "Stub our toes, scratch our heels, have our arches go flat." "Hail!" "Protect us, thy worshippers, good and blessed footgear!" "Which came to us from chaos... On a day dark and drear."... Out of the void, burning -- "... But not burnt" "... Thou hast come to comfort and support us." "... To sustain and enliven us." "Hail!" "... Upright, forthright d forward forever!" "Forever!" Wakim vanishes. A cold, wild wind begins to blow about them. It is the change-wind out of time; and there is a blurring upon the altar. Seven previously drug-maddened spearmen lay sprawled, their necks at unusual angles. Suddenly, beside Vramin, Wakim says, "Pray, find us a gateway quickly!" "You wear them?" "I wear them." Vramin raises his cane and pauses. "There will be a brief delay, I fear," and his gaze grows emerald green. All eyes in the temple are suddenly upon them. Fortythree drug-maddened spearmen shout a battle cry, as one, leap forward. Wakim crouch and extends his hands. "Such is the kingdom of heaven," comments Vramin, perspiration like absinthe glittering coldly upon his brow. "I wonder just how the video tapes will show this thing?" VI X iiXTbat is this place?" Homs cries out. The Steel General stands braced, as for an anticipated shock, but there is none. We are come to a place that is not a world, but simply a place," says the Prince Who Was A Thousand. "There is no gr # und to stand upon, nor need of it here. There is little light, but those who dwell in this place are blind, so it does not matter. The temperature will suit itself to any living body, because those who dwell here wish it so. Nourishment is drawn from this air like water, through which we move, so there is no need to eat. And such is the nature of this place that one need never sleep here." "It sounds rather like Hell," Horns observes. "Nonsense," says the Steel General. "My own existence is just so, as I carry my environment around with me. I am not discomfited." "Hell," Horus repeats. "At any rate, take my hands," says the Prince, "and I will guide you across the darkness and amid the glowing motes' of light until we reach the ones I seek." They link hands; the Prince furls his cloak, an they drift through the twilitic landscape that is empty of horizon. "And where is this place that is not a world?" asks the General. "I do not know," says the Prince. "Perhaps it only exists in some dei and shiny corner of my dark and dirty mind. All that I really know is the way to reach it." Falling, drifting a timeless time, they come at last to a tent like a gray cocoon, flickering, abovebelowbefore them. The Prince disengages his hands and places his fingertips upon its surface. It quivers then, and an opening appears, through which he passes, a "follow me" drifting back over his shoulder. Brotz, Purtz and Dulp sit within, doing something whidi would be quite disgusting and unique by human standards, but which is normal and proper for them since they are not human and have different standards. "Greetings, smiths of Norm," says the Prince. "I have come to obtain that which I ordered a time ago." "I told you he'd cornel" cries one of the grayish mounds, twitching its long, moist ears. "I acknowledge that you were correct," answers another. "Yes. Where's that frawlpin? I ought to refrib it once more, before..." "Nonsense I It's perfect." "It is ready then?" inquires the Prince. "Oh, it's been ready for ages. Herel" IF The :eaker draws a length of cold blue light from a sheath of black fabric and offers it to the Prince. The Prince takes it into his hands, inspects it, nods and replaces it within the sheath. "Very good." "And the payment?" "I have them here." The Prince withdraws a dark case from beneath his cloak and places it in the air before him, where of course it hangs suspended. "Which of you will be first?" "He will." "She will." "It will." "Since you cannot decide, I will have to do the choosing myself." The Prince opens the case, which contains surgical apparatus and an extrudable operating light, as all three creatures begin to quiver in their places. "What is happening?" inquires Homs, who has entered now and stands beside him. "I am about to operate on these fellows, and I will require your enormous strength in assistance, as well as the General's." "Operate? To what end?" asks the General. #hey have no eyes," says the Prince, "and they would see again. IVe brought three pairs with me and I'm going to install them." "This would require eztensiye neurological adaptation." "But this has already been done." "By whom?" "Myself, the last time I gave them eyes." "What became of those?" "Oh, they seldom last. After a time, their bodies reject them. Generally, though, their neighbors blind them." "Why is that?" "I believe it is because they go about boasting how, among all their people, only they are able to see. This results in a speedy democratization of affairs." " Ghastly #" says the General, who has lost count of his own blindings. "I'm minded to stay and fight for them." "They would refuse your assistance," says the Prince. "Would you not?" "Of course," says one of them. "We would not employ a mercenary against our own people," says another. "It would violate their rights," says the third. "What rights?" "Why, to blind us, of course. What sort of barbarian are you?" "I withdraw my offer." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Thank you." "What assistance will you require?" asks Horus. "The two of you must seize upon my patient and hold him, while I perform the surgery." IF Why is that?" "Because they are incapable of unconsciousness, and no local anesthetics will affect them." "You mean you are going to perform delicate surgery on them just as they are -- exotic surgery, at that?" "Yes. That is why I will need two of you to immobilize each patient. They are quite strong." "Why must you do this thing?" "Because they want it done. It is the price agreed upon for their labors," "Whatever for? A few weeks' seeing? And then -- what is there to see in this place, anyhow? It is mainly dust, darkness, a few feeble Kghts," "It is their wish to look upon each other -- and their tools. They are the greatest artisans in the universe." "Yes, I want to see a frawlpin again -- if Dulp hasn't lost it." "And I, a gult." "I, a crabwick." "That which they desire costs em pain, but it will give them memories to last for ages." "Yes, it is worth it," says one, "so long as I am not the first." "Nor I." "Nor I." The Prince lays out his instruments in the middle of the air, sterilizes them and points a finger. "That one," he says, and the screaming begins. The General turns off his hearing and much of his humanity for the next several hours. Homs is reminded of his father's study; also, of Liglamenti, an D'donori. The Prince's hands are steady. Then it is done, the creatures   have bandages over their faces, which they may not remove for a time. All three are moaning and crying out. The Prince cleans his hands. "Thank you. Prince Who Was A Surgeon," says one of the creatures. "... For this thing you have done to us." "... And for us." "You are welcome, goodly Norns. Thank you for a wand well made." "Oh, it was nothing." "... Let us know whenever you need another." "... And the price will be the same." "Then I shall be going now." "Good-by." "Farewell." "Adieu." "Good seeing to you, my fellows." And the Prince takes Horus and the General in hand, setting all feet upon the road to Marachek, which is but one step away. Behind him there is more wailing, and things quite normal and proper for Noms are quickly and frantically done. They are back in the Citadel almost before Homs, who knows what it is, has succeed in drawing the blue wand from its sheath at the Prince's side. It is a duplicate of the weapon which sun-ey Set had used against the Nameless, a thousand years before. XI AyTadrak has one chance of living through the onslaught. He throws his staff and dives forward. The choice is the right one: He passes beneath the dog as it leaps, snapping at his staff. His hand falls upon the strange fabric of the glove the creature had been wonying. Suddenly, he is comforted by a confidence in his invincibility. This is something even the narcotic had not fuDy instilled in him. Quickly, he determines the cause and slips the glove upon the right hand. The dog turns as Typhon rears. The black shadow falls between them. Tickling, stirring, the glove reaches to Madrak's elbow, spreads across his back, his chest. The dog lunges and then howls, for the dark horse shadow comes upon it. One head hangs lifeless as ihe others snarl. "Depart, oh Madrak, to the appointed place!" sa# Typhon. "I sbaHH occupy this creature to its destmction and follow in my own way!" The glove moves down his left arm, covers the hand, edds across his chest, reaches down to his waist Madrak, who has always been mighty, suddenly reaches forth and crushes a stone within his right hand. "I fear it not, Typhon. I'll destroy it myself." "In my brother's name, I bid thee go!" Bowing his head, Madrak departs. Behind him, the soimds of battle rage. He moves through the lair of the minotaur. He makes his way upward through the corridors. Pale creatures with green, glowing eyes accost him. He slays them easily with his hands and proceeds. When the next group of attackers moves upon him, he subdues them but does not slay them, having had time to think. Instead, he says: "It might be good for you to consider the possibility of your having portions of yourselves which might withstand the destruction of your bodies, and to label these hypothetical quantities souls, for the sake of argument. Now then, beginning with the proposition that such -- " But they attack him again, and he is forced to slay them all. "Pity," he says, and repeats the Possibly Proper Death Litany. Proceeding upward, he comes at IF last to the appointed place. And there he stands. At the Gateway to the Underworld... On Waldik... "Hell hath been harrowed," he says. "I am half invincible. This must be the gauntlet of Set. Strange that it but half covers me. But perhaps I'm more a man than he was." Stomach then regarded, "And perhaps not. But the power that lies in this thing... Mighty! To beat the filthy souled into submission and effect their conversions -- perhaps this is why it was rendered into my hand. Is Thoth divine? Truly, I do not know. I wonder? If he is, then I wrong him by not delivering it. Unless, of course, this is his secret will." Regards hands enmeshed, "My power is now beyond measure. How shall I use it? All of Waldik might I convert with this instrument, given but time." Then, "But he charged me with a specific task. Yet... " Smile, (The mesh does not cover his face,) "What if he is divine? Sons who beget their fathers may well be. I recall the myth of Eden. I know this serpent-like glove may indicate the Forbidden." Shrugs, "But the good "which might be done...No! It is a trap! But I could beat the Words into their heads I'll do it! 'Though Hell gape wide,' as Vramin says." But as he turns, he is caught up in a vortex that sucks the words from his throat and casts him down a wid blank, cold welL Bdiind him, the dows strive, Waldik gapes wide, and then he is gone, for the Prince has called him home. n Marachek, in the Citadd, stand they all, there, as backward reel their minds. "I've the shoes," says Wakim. "You may have them for my name." "I've the glove," says Madrak and turns away his face. "And I've tke wand," says Horus, and it falls from his hand. "It did not pass through me," says the Prince, "because it is not formed of matter, nor any other thing over which you may exercise control." And the mind of the Prince is closed to the inner eye of Horus. Horus steps forward, and his left leg is longer than his right leg, but he is perfectly balanced upon the now uneven floor; the window burns like a sun at the Prince's back, and the Steel General is turned to gold and flowing; Vramin burns like a taper and Madrak becomes a fat doll bounding, at the end of a rubber strand; the walls growl and pulse in and out with a regular rhythm keeping time with the music that comes from the shuffling bars of the spectrum upon the floor at the end of the tunnel that begins with the window and lies like burning honey and the tiger above the wand now grown monstrous and too fine to behold within the eternity of the tower room in the Citadel of Marachek at Midworlds Center where the Prince has raised his smile. Horus advances another step, and his body is transparent to his sense, so that all things within him become immediately known and frightening. 'Oh, the moon comes like a genie from the Negro lamp of night, and the tunnel of my seeing is her roadway. She raises up the carpet of the days IVe walked upon, and through caverns of the sky we make our pathway," says a voice strangely like yet unlike Vramin's. And Horus raises his hand against the Prince. But the Prince already holds his wrist in a grip that burns. And Horus raises up his other hand against the Prince. But the Prince already holds that wrist in a grip that freezes. And he raises up his other hand, and electrical shoc pass along it. And he raises up his other hand, and it blackens and dies. And he raises up a hundred hands more, and they turn to snakes and fight among themsdves and of course he whispers: "What has happened?" "A world," says the Prince, "to which I have transported us." "It is unfair to choose such a battleground," says Horus, "a world too like the one I know -- only a fraction away and so twisted," and his words are all the colors of Blis. "And it is indecent of you to want to kill me." "I have been charged with this thing, and it is my will also." "So you have failed," says the Prince, forcing him to kneel upon the Milky Way, which becomes a transparent intestinal track, racked by a rapid peristalsis. The smell is overpowering. "Nol" whispers Horus. "Yes, brother. You are defeated. You cannot destroy me. I have bested you. It is time to quit, to resign, to go home." "Not until I have accomplished my objective." he stars, like ulcers, burn within his guts, and Horus pits the strength of his body against the kaleidoscope that is the Prince. The Prince drops to one knee, but with his genuflection there comes a hail of hosannas from the innumerable dogfaced flowers that bloom upon his brow like sweat and merge to a mask of glass which cradks and unleashes lightnings. Horus pushes his arms toward the nineteen moons (Continued on pa #) IF IF  Novelette of all the Simes. An IF First. to himself and the hopes Illustrated by To a Gen, the Changeover can be I lad blissfully in my old shorts  and sandals instead of the cover-every-inch costume the Gens required at their medical school, I headed outdoors to soak up some Indian Summer heat. I was glad nobody was home when I got there. The privacy would let the resonant peace of the ranch heal my nerves before I launched my attack on the Retainer Laws. I paused in the kitchen, massaging my wrists and forearms, extending and flexing all the tentacles and trying to relieve the bruised soreness and tingling that still lingered twelve hours after shedding my retainers at the Sime Territory border. At last, Id received my M.B. and was home, the place that had haunted my dreams for the last two years at New Harvard. The ranch had always been our week-end retreat. We allowed no life-pewered services, preferring to use medianical door locks, a petrochemical stove and heater, electrochemical lights, and a really ancient ice box -- no power, just ice. We get along well without hot running water and vigorously enforced our ban on all powered communications instruments, public and private. It was a bubble of rustic isolation perfect for Noadron, that vitally necessary Sime discipline that relieves the tension of constant transfer denial demanded by life among the non-Donor Gens, and that's what I was here for. I went out the kitchen door onto the patio, letting the screen clatter lopadedly shut behind me. The single-floored, rambling structure was surrounded on two sides by the patio and its roof-high, whitewashed wall. The third side was the garage; the whole back of the house was a glassed-in sun porch with a view of an ancient pine forest. I stood on the patio, luxuriating in the dry heat. Extending my grasping tentacles to the fullest, I jumped and caught the beam connecting the patio wall to the roof. I was shocked when I had to support my weight on my hands, the tentacles were so weakened by constant use of retainers. Walking out into the yard, I looked back at the house with the perspective of years. It seemed to crouch in the middle of our ten acres of rocky, virgin hills like some sort of invader, not really a part of the country. With renewed purpose, I strode toward the back, bearing left away from the pines, stepping carefully, mindful of my bared toes. Five minutes later, lying among the summerparched grasses of my favorite hillside, I studied wisps of cloud roiling in stratospheric breezes and relaxed into the vaulted infinity with no field gradient other than my own to distract me. XTfould it really be a good thing to walk among the Gen lifepotential fields unprotected by retainers? As a QN-I class channel, I wouldn't be bothered as much as a simple Q-class Sime, but still, I did rely on retainers for comfort in the steep field potentials of nonDonors. The Gens, the Generators, the normal humans, invented retainers about four hundred years ago so that the Sime mutants they capIF tured during the Sime Wars could not attack and kill them by stripping them of life-energy. As contact developed into integration, any Sime not wearing retainers was shot on sight. Then the channels appeared. They were like the ordinary Sime in every respect except that they could take life-energy from a Gen without ordinary Sime, satisfying his desire for a kill. Now many Gens donate life in return for the life-powered services only Simes can provide, and the penalty for not wearing retainers in Gen Territory is deportation to Sime Territory. The time for change had again arrived. I held up my right arm and extended the moist pink-gray laterals. Used only in life-transfer, but they loved freedom and sunshine, not the confining and heavy retainers. I extended the two dorsal and two ventral gripping tentacles, touching the tips of my fingers. By contrast, these were sinewy ropes with a smooth, dry, ordinary skin. Their strength and dexterity were the joy of Sime musicians and artists everywhere except in Gen Territory, where, needlessly immobilized in retainers, they became weak and clumsy. I was determined to present my argument and my inventions to Grandpa Digen tonight. If I could convince him that the time was right to force the issue... A fter dinner, Grandpa Digen and I sat alone on the sun porch watching darkness engulf the pine forest. Aunt Clar was puttering in the kitchen as women do, and nobody else was about. Cousin Dorien and his family wouldn't come until later. Grandpa Digen is really my great grandfather. A hundred and twenty is old even for a Sime, so I wanted to broach the subject gently and keep the talk quiet. 'Did you hear about the Sime, Ray Bilton I think his name was, who tripped on a crowded walkway a few days ago and knocked a Gen into the path of a truck?" No, I didn't. What happened?" 'The Gen was hospitalized. The Gen police didn't hold Bilton responsible, but the Sime investigation turned up that he'd been wearing retainers, more than twelve hours. They blamed his carelessness on the cumulative effect of the pain and discomfort and let it go at that." There ought to be a law against wearing retainers more than twelve hours." disagree. There ought not to be a law requiring retainers when they are not needed." 'T should live to see the dayl" "Well, you've lived to see the invention of revolutionary, comfortable retainers, so why not?" 'I have?" Grandpa was really interested now. I reached into my pocket and brought forth my ring. It glittered red-gold in the dying sunlight. It's crude because I didn't have tools to make real jewelry." I pointed out the half-inch rounded crown where the stone would be. The mechanism is here. I call it an attenuator because it attenuates field gradients by several dynopters with absolutely no cumulative discomfort. Here, try it." He took it and putit on his ring finger a bit gingerly. Hol How about that! It really does." He took it off to look it over carefully. "It's my own invention. I want to market it, but I don't know where to begin. I have something else, too." I took out my other prize. Grandpa looked at it. Xooks like half a sleeve. The bottom half." "I call it a damper and I believe it will replace the retainer. You slip it on like this, fasten this strap below the elbow and hook this loop around your middle finger to keep it from twisting. Now this material strip hugs the lateral and completely cuts off field sensation from that lateral only." I showed him closely in the fading light. There is none of the discomfort and disorientation of the regulation model, and it leaves all handling tentacles free. You only wear it on one lateral at a time so there's no problem of over sensitization, and it's quite comfortable. 'flhile Grandpa gave it the   same careful inspection, I continued, Tt will provide as much protection for the Gens as the retainers; and used with an attenuator, it can make any Sime reasonably comfortable in any field gradient, even direct skin contact. No time limit. No agony. No torture. The problem is to convince them of that." No family patriarch was ever more respected than Grandpa Digen. What he said went. I waited anxiously while he pondered. With family help, the first step of my crusade would be easy. To market my inventions for private use of Simes -- for instance exchange students living with all-Gen families, or for medical therapy -- and then get accepted by the Gens. The second step -- to put the use of them completely at the discretion of the individual Sime -- would take much longer and be more difficult... At last Grandpa spoke. That will require convincing the Gen public that transfer cannot possibly take place without all four laterals in skin contact. We'd have to get their congress to legalize the things. We'd have to get our congress to define criteria for need of them. IF It would mean a tremendous public relations campaign to drum up Gen sympathy for their suffering Sime friends..." He trailed off, and I sat perfectly still holding my breath as it became completely dark. The old man still had a quick intelligence, a lightening grasp of the heights and depths of a problem. When he spoke again, it was with a fired enthusiasm. What a fight that would make I What a crusade! I'm going to do it. My last crusade, my last project." I leaned back with an explosive high. Now to business. 'IThile I spent the next ten days   in Noadron, relaxing, quietly motionless for hours at a time, Grandpa Digen made plans and contacted people. Each evening we'd sit and watch the sunset and he'd tell me how it was going. The first night he reported that he had spoken to several Sime manufacturing firms and a patent attorney. My inventions would be on the market in all Sime territories within the month. A few days later, he had arranged for a publisher to put out a book about transfer mechanics and field-gradient sensing written in an easy, popular style. Also, he had someone working to change the image of the Sime in Gen Action from the aloofly non-participant -- which was the least explosive he'd been able to manage when he was running his integration crusade -- to sensitive, long-suffering, uderstanding, human type people. In a few weeks we'd start pushing stories about retainer incidents. He organized the whole thing so well that I began to feel it wasn't my project. But on the tenth day, we were sitting on the porch again, after dinner. Well, son, have you had enough Noadron to last you a while?" Yes, quite enough." That's good. Feel up to a little trip into Washington?" 'Washington? The Gen capitol?" "Hmmmm." He nodded affirmatively. 'T suppose so. Why?" "Operation High Time is your baby. It's time you took over. I'm too old to travel and too weak to button hole, browbeat, cajole, argue and plead. That's your job and you're scheduled to start with some lobbying in Washington." 'he next morning, I was still saying to myself, over and over, "Me? Lobby? In Washington?" I felt unsure as I boarded the special helicopter Grandpa had arranged for me. It just didn't fit my self-image. What does a young doctor who should be interning in somethingorother Memorial Hospital know about politics? Still, I'd asked for it when I started this whole thing. As I climbed into the chopper -- life-powered, not petrochemical -- the pilot, a Q-dass Sime, began to modulate the three dynopter fields that twirled our blades, and we were off. Cross country from the Pacific Ocean to Washington-on-Potomac in a two-seat whirly would be impossible if we couldn't hop from one Sime island territory to the next for re-fueling, that is taking on new life-packed batteries. We arrived at the Sime Reserve just south of the Potomac border of Washington about dark, and I decided to stay at the Harvington Ward for the night before plunging into the Gen area. The Sime Reserve is not really a Sime Territory. It's a legal fiction, like a foreign embassy. Its borders are sacrosanct and it's internally under Sime law, but it's only the size of a small city, not the usual few hundred miles across. From my room in the Ward, I could see the Gen capitol afire with colored lights designed to make the buildings look impressive, which was unnecessary. They were. What was impressive to me was that of all that electricity, probably sixty percent was lifepowered. The next morning I claimed the car Grandpa had reserved for me and drove into the Gen Capitol. It was one of those magnificantly alive fall days that can following misery of a Washington summer. I had a ten o'clock appointment with Jon Izak whom Grandpa had only identified as a professional lobb#dst. Izak's plush suite was across the street from the Senate offices. His private office cowered behind three rooms full of secretaries and stenographers. In his office, I waited for him while gloomily contemplating how I'd stopped every machine in the place simply by walking in the door. Evidently, they weren't expecting a Sime. "So you're Mairis Farris!" The voice that came from behind me would have boomed fifty years ago. Now it croaked huskily. I was startled enough to jump to my feet.' I hadn't felt the field gradient increase because I was wearing retainers, of course. "Well, turn around, let me have a look at you." T turned obediently while examining the speaker. He was a Gen. Maybe eighty or eighty-five. A little shorter than my five-footeleven, portly but not obese. He looked like an elder statesman, complete with silver-knobbed cane. He snapped a formidable-looking lock on the door and hobbled to his polished dest, gesturing at me. Take them things off and make yourself at home. You're the spittin' image of your grandfather, you know that?" "No, sir, I didn't," I said, so surIF prised I actually started removing my retainers. Then, I realized what I was doing and stopped, horrified. "Go onl Go on!' the old man wompted. Your grandfather and I worked together many years ago. I'll never forget it. Crusades he called 'em! Hah! I'll never forget the time... No, not now. Digen got me out of retirement to give you a hand, not a lecture. You comfortable?" "Yes, sir," I said. "Well, I'm going to give you a hand. In fact my whole organization is going to give you multiple hands, but we won't do your work for you. You've got about three weeks of good hard leg work to do. Think you're up to it?" "Yes, sir," I said, not at all sure I was. "Good! Now, my son generally runs this place these days, but he's off helping his wife have a baby, so we'll just have to get along without him." He started hunting, through drawers. "I don't know anything about this sort of work, sir, I'm just an intern." "Well, you can talk can't you?" "Yes," I said, bewildered. "Retainers drive you crazy, don't they?" I nodded again. He seemed to know all about me. "All right. All you have to do is be yourself. Project your sincerity for your cause. Tell 'em like they never heard it before. You'll do all right. "Ah. Here they are!" he produced a stack of papers. "Briefly, the situation is this. There's a bill up before the Senate." He handed me a paper. "Says that public establishments, restaurants, theaters, even buses, have the right to designate areas where Simes may enjoy the services without having to wear retainers. It's been up in one form or another several years now, but always dies in committee. You're going to see every member of that committee, and you're going to talk that bill onto the floor. Here are your appointments." He handed me another paper. "Next year, when the public has been softened up a bit, we'll get a bill legalizing your invenventions. Meantime, you've got to convince these men that retainers are painful, therefore dangerous, and public rest areas should be provided for those who want 'em. Here's a bunch of statistics. Memorize 'em and use 'em. Good luck." T found myself on the street, my head whirling like the blades of the copter that had brought me here. It didn't stop whirling for three weeks. I talked. I saw everyone on the list several times. I learned to recognize influential Senators and catch them in restaurants, corridors, even the mens' room. Soon everybody knew me; in fact they and their secretaries knew me better than I knew them. Which sometimes wasn't so good. Then it was the big morning, the day the committee would either report the bill out or table it for the year. I figured it had a good chance. I'd convinced a majority of the committee. But Senator Fieldman, the chairman, was still the Opposition. Oh, he'd made a lot of public noise about how he was all for 'humane treatment of our fellow humans, the so-called Simes." And the public swallowed it. I'd looked up his voting record and I knew what to expect. So it was with some apprehension that I entered the pseudoGrecian building that served the Senate. The inside was as modern as tomorrow whil the outside was kept archaic. "As a link with our revered ancestors," it said over the door. I marched self-consciously down the long, carpeted, and hush-ceilinged corridors, avoiding the occasional Gen and hunting conference room A-#S. I had become quite adept at finding my way around government buildings, so I walked right to it and swung my weight against the door as if I knew where I was going. I bumped my nose on the newspaper clipping tacked to the locked door. It read in part, Senator J. P. Fieldman and his fiften-year-old son, Ronald, were kidnapped last night from their Washington apartment, Mrs. Fieldman says that no ransom note has reached her. The Washington police..." There was a handwritten note attached saying that the committee meeting was postponed. I must have stood staring at the clipping for several minutes reading it over and over. All it said was that they knew nothing. Dazed, I wandered back to the lobby and sat in my favorite chair in a tiny alcove almost hidden behind a huge potted frond. I stared at the oiled leaves and thought furiously. From my viewpoint, the motive was easy -- to stop my bill. I'd convinced a lot of people of the need for the bill, but they wouldn't necessarily stay convinced. Perhaps the Opposition believed Senator Fieldman's public stand. Or perhaps they wanted time to do some counter-lobbying. I t didn't matter; they had stopped the bill by stopping the vote by removing the key figure. If they kept him isolated for a few days, the committee would elect a new chairman and proceed. By then, the situation would be less favorable to me. So the kidnappers would have instructions to hold the Senator, IF probably without hurting him, in as unlikely a place as they could manage, but not too far from Washington so he'd be available. Perhaps taking the son was an accident, or perhaps they planned to release the Senator while holding his son to insure co-operation. I asked myself over and over, "Where wouldn't the police look?" It was two o'clock and I was still asking myself when hunger drove me to the nearest restaurant. I didn't like eating in Gen restaurants because retainers were required; but after six years of school cafeterias, I'd learned to handle utensils without pinching my laterals too often. Pain like that spoils digestion. Naturally, I was shown to a corner table. Nobody wants to eat with a Sime at the next table. After I'd ordered, the waiter silently presented the Sime beverage list and I chose Porstan, the vaguely sweet Sime beer. To a Gen it tastes like iodine. I sat back and observed the restfuUy dim, wood-paneled, carpeted room. Each table had an elegant white tablecloth that seemed to glow in the shadows, reflecting more than its fair share of the light from the ancient crystal chandelier. Most of the tables were empty now, but some were surrounded by neatly dressed Washingtonites conducting the real business of government. I watched that waiter. He hadn't spoken a word to me. He'd known immediately that I was Sime. There was no outward difference between us, but he'd known -- or assumed -- simply on the basis of my retainers, that I was Sime. I ate slowly, mulling that thought over, turning it every which way. Somehow, it was important, but I couldn't quite see how. That's the way it always was. Why did it attract my attention now? With the last swallow of Porstan, it suddenly hit me. Suppose, wild as it might sound, just suppose a Gen walked in wearing retainers I Every Gen in the place would know he was Sime. Only another Sime would know different, provided he was close enough to sense the field gradient and was not wearing retainers. In one huge inductive leap, I knew where they had taken Senator FieldmanI T made for my car and was on the road for the Sime Reserve before I'd had time to question the validity of induction. The Sime Reserve border was not guarded by both Simes and Gens like Sime Territories. It had a Gen military guard only. Any Sime covld pass inward without challenge, any Gen could pass outward witJiout challenge. Vice-versa you needed papers and counter-signatures. Any Gen audacious enough to snap retainers on his wrists like medieval gauntlets could pass the Gen guards Tvith a breezy wave, just as I was doing. A Sime who happened to look like Senator Fieldman would not be noticed or reported. Now, where would they put up? In the city itself where no Sime wore retainers and no Gen non-Donor was allowed, they'd be discovered immediately. As soon as I'd asked the question, the answer loomed obvious. I turned onto the main reserve boulevard, setting myself in the through lane in step with the traffic lights heading due south. There were a couple of hours of daylight yet, and I knew where I was going. If they were indeed there, it would be the interracial incident of the century. Gens would demand rights of search of Sime Territory instead of granting us greater freedom. I decided to look over the situation and see if I couldn't break it up quietly. My destination was an abandoned copter port built before the development of ground-effect landing made it reasonable to set a chopper down in town. My pilot had pointed it out on our way down. The Sime Reserve extended five miles south of the town to include the copter port and, on its far side, a wild life preserve and picnic area. I shot past the field, scarcely daring to look for signs of life. At the first turnoff under the trees, I parked next to a dark blue sedan. There were no other cars about, and nobody in sight. My heart leaped into my throat. It could be their car! I wiped my palms on my trousers and removed my retainers. As far as I could tell, I was alone. "The October foliage was a furious riot of color, and the early evening breeze was brisk with the promise of winter. I took a deep breath, buttoned my coat, and crept into the forest in the direction of the copter field. A kind of forboding dread settled over me as I crept through that forest. I hadn't been so scared since I went into the QN-I placement test when I was thirteen. The placement was designed to strain resources, to determine limits. I'd had nightmares for six months after. I had that same nightmarish feeling now. Finally, I reached a tremendous oak and peeped around its gnarled trunk at the whitewashed, decrepit passenger terminal, square and lonely on the cracked concrete apron. The starkness of the scene was relieved only the the huge poles that had held lights and Reeves projectors. 'This is silly," I said to myself. 'You're being melodramatic. Now, take yourself back to the car and go talk to the police if you think there's anything in it." By the time I yielded to good IF sense, it had turned full dark. When I noticed that, I noticed the Gen standing behind me. I must have been lost in a revery akin to Noadron. I had not felt him approach, but he was definitely a non-Donor. I started to turn around. 'Hold it I" the man said. have a gun primed right in your. back. Now march I Right up to the front door." I had no choice. I marched. Ill They had pitched a tent in the waiting room and had camp lanterns, a stove and a small heater going. There was the smell of boiled coffee and a staleness of onion and garlic. Each of these alone was enough to turn my stomach; together they almost made me vomit. My captor jabbed the gun barrel in my back and marched me to the dispatcher's office, a small shack in the rear corner. He threw a makeshift bolt they had nailed to the door and shoved me in with the stock of his rifle. I sprawled on the floor weakly, fighting nausea and the backwash of fear. Only when my head stopped spinning did I realize I was imprisoned with Senator Fieldman and his son. There was enough moonlight through the small duroplast window to see the boy lying on a blanket in one corner and the Senator standing by the window staring at me. His prematurely bald pate reflected the moonlight, creating a halo for his distinguished features. "Mr. Farris?!" I'm sure he did not know what to think. 'Yes, sir." I got up and brushed myself off. mat... ?" He was entitled to an explanation so I told him everything. All the time I was talking I was nagged by a queer discomfort, but didn't pay much attention. But when I'd finished, that prick came into sharp focus. I went over to the boy, What's the matter with your son?" 'Ronald suddenly took sick this morning. I think he's sleeping off a fever. These..." He searched for a sufficiently strong term as I searched for words to tell him the news. " These criminals won't pay any attention." I bent down and felt Ronald's forearms, extending a lateral behind his ear and checking his temperature and the field gradient. I knew already -- it's an instinct to recognize it -- but I went through the motions anyway. Senator, sit down, sir." It was beginning to dawn on him. He sat on the floor. There was no furniture. Ronald is... " I took a breath and started again. 'Ronald is going through changeover." As a QN-I I'd delivered that news hundreds of times, but it had never been so hard. He just sat there and stared. I imagine he felt as if the elevator had gone down and left his stomach on the fifth floor. He sat perfectly still, perfectly silent for about five or ten minutes; then he took a deep breath and began to sob. I gave him a handkerchief, but I didn't touch him. He might have misimderstood. He was a noh-Donor. What coxild I say? In a Sime family, changeover is a celebration. At last he blew his nose and said, Never before in my family, never #" Senator," I said more to be talking than to say anything, " thirty percent of the children of two Simes are Gens and thirty percent of the children of two Gens are Simes. It's no respecter of family. Your son is not lost to you. He's growing up. But he'll always be your son. Possibly, if you're willing to make some adjustments, he may come back to live with you." He heaved a great sigh; he knew I meant he'd have to become a Donor. It would be a complete change of philosophy. Many parents in this situation still react with violent hatred. A generation ago, it was common for a Gen parent to murder his child during the first helpless stage of changeover. Now, from our educational campaigns, they generally accept the situation. But some who have strong anti-Sime feelings, disown the child. I was relieved when Fieldman spoke with dazed neutrality. 'What can we do for him here?" I turned to my patient, trying to sense the exact stage of his condition. " Would you move back, please, sir? I want to check him over more carefully." He moved to the far corner of the room, and the gradient eased off so I could separate out Ronald's. I checked the forearms again. The tentacles were tiny ropes beneath the skin, so small you had to know what to look for. His temperature was rising; it was almost Sime normal, so his hormone balance was almost achieved. I checked the back of his neck, and the Remott gland was swollen nearly to changeover maximum; no wonder he was unconscious. He was well into Sequence four and so far so good, but I could see trouble. The life-energy supply he was born with woidd run out before his laterals would be developed enough to receive more. It was a common problem with the children of Gens. Fear eats life at a stupendous rate. Before the QN channels, these children died. Today, a channel backed by a Sime hospital could usually save them. Practically nobody died in changeover these days. IF T was not backed by a Sime hoshospital, but I was supposed to be an extraordinary skilled channel, a QN-#. Bunk I Without certain drugs, there was nothing I could do. I got up, stuck my hands in my pockets and stared at the only door to our prison. " There are six men out there with guns," Fieldman said, 'and they're the type who'd use them." 'But they don't want your son to die." 'Die!" " Relax. He won't if I can help it." I pounded the door trying to sound imperious and humble. Presendy, a gruff voice, full of gravel... or maybe buckshot... said, "What cha want?" said, We've got a very sick boy in here. He'll die without medical aid. I'm a doctor, I can save him, but I need a few things." 'Yeah? Like what?" "Extra blankets. He's got a high fever. And some medicines. In my car, in the glove compartment, there's a flat metal case. It has everything I need except water." "And you want us to let you go get your case and whatever Sime weapons is in it? You think we're nuts?" "The car is unlocked. Get the case yourself. Don't try to open it, though. I'll open it for you. It's life-locked and you'd only destroy the contents." ;i# "Huh. WeU, I'll think about it." He left, and I laid my jacket and coat over the boy. Fieldman shook his head and started to take off his coat. "No, no, sir," I said. "Don't. It isn't necessary. I can keep warm other ways." He understood I meant by using my stored life-energy. As a channel, I always carried far more than I needed just to stay alive. I was entrusted with public property, to be dispensed to Simes in need, and to be used in the public interest. I took to staring out the window. After a while, I noticed Fieldman kneeling quietly by his son, holding his hand and rocking back and forth. I hated to do it, but I had to. I said, "Sir, don't go near him. You're very high field, and it only makes matters worse." I t must have been almost two hours later that I heard the bolt of the door slide. "O.K. Sime, come on out of there. Make it slow." Gravel voice was back. There was a slight glow from the tent, but I'm sure it wasn't visible from outside. Three men were silhouetted against that glow, their faces pale in the moonlight from the observation windows. They were all Gen non-Donors, wearing mismatched hiking clothes and knee-high boots and pointing rifles at me. "Into the tent." Gravel voice IF gestured, and they closed in behind me. A fourth man hulked over a small table illuminated by a suspended lantern. He was at least a head taller than the others and maybe fifty poimds heavier. The tent held six cots and a couple of stools. The emergency kit from the car lay on the table. There's your miracle box, 'Doctor.' Open it!" said the big one. His voice was about two octaves higher than expected from a man that size. He shoved it at me and moved back, obviously taking no chances. I thumbed it open. As I had expected, it was almost the standard kit containing the thirty-six chemicals used to aid changeover -- pills, liquid and aromatics. "As you can see, it contains nothing but medicines," I said as steadily as I could. "Sime medicines I How's that and a Sime doctor going to help him?" "I'm a me doctor, but I've had some training in Gen medicine." I wasn't going to admit that Ronald was one of us. "In addition to this. I'll need extra blankets, and, in the morning some boiling water," The big one seemed to be the boss. He sat there and squinted at me for an eternity before flicking a finger at gravel voice, who picked up a bundle from the nearest cot while the others prodded me out the door. The moonlight had shifted, and this time I spotted the rest room sign. "Hey," I said to gravel voice, "Does that work, or do we go find a tree?" "It works... You get a turn in the morning." The rest of the way back, I wondered what would happen if I insisted on taking a turn right now. I found Fieldman pacing anxiously across the far end of the room from his son. Retrieving my coat, I covered the boy with the extra blankets and started him on an aromatic sedative. He gave a few tosses of the head and then relaxed completely. "He's sleeping now, sir, the way he needs to sleep. In the morning, you'll tell him that you accept him, that you still love him and you'll give him courage." I held my breath waiting for his commitment. "Yes, yes, I can do that. At least that. I... " Relieved, I said, "In the meantime, we ought to try to help ourselves out of this situation." "There's no way out," Fieldman gave a hopeless little shrug. "I've tried everything. The window does not break, the floor's cement, the guards are un-trickable." "Of course the building is strong. It was deigned to protect people from a crashing helicopter. But there must be some way..." we wait long enough, we'll be found..." We can't wait. By tomorrow afternoon Ronald's condition will be obvious, even to them. If they believe that this will bind you to the Sime viewpoint, they may kill us and run." "What do you propose to do?" don't know. I must admit I'm embarrassed. A Sime trapped in a Sime building in Sime territority by Gens. Most embarrassing." Through our tiny window, I studied the landing apron and its border of undisciplined forest which one day would obliterate this relic of modern civilization as it had countless pre-Sime structures. My mind whirled like the vanes of an idling copter, throwing up five or six plans to arouse my eagerness to be away from here, free to take my patient to the facilities he really needed. And, like a Judo expert, I used that figurative centrifugal force to rid myself of those plans because each one involved newly discovered QN-I abilities. I could not betray our secrets to the Gens merely to save a few lives. Any premature hint of these superior or odd talents of Simes would only be fuel for the anti-Simes who would burn us at the stake. Presently, the Senator said very quietly, "A man whose touch can doesn't need a gun..." 'Senator #" I whirled on him truly shocked. That hadn't occurred to me. Every Sime is pledged to die by attrition or suicide rather than kill in transfer. That's what I've been telling you for weeks. This is no longer the dark ages. Gens can trust Simes. What use is life without stable society?" After a long pause he said very faintly, Tt was only a thought." T returned to staring out the window. Moonlight glinted off the tops of the light standards. For the first time, I noticed the Reeves projector casings humped at the tops of the poles like frightened monkies. I said, Tsn't it strange that the toilets were left operative?" Fieldman looked at me a moment, then shrugged accepting the oddment, Terhaps they turned them on?" Terhaps," I said searching the room with renewed interest. 'And then again, perhaps not." How had the dispatcher's furniture been placed? The chart table at that end where Ronald now lay, atlas case, radiophone, and the dispatcher's desk in this corner opposite the door. I ran my hand down the join in the walls. The Reeves control box was mounted to be reached from the desk, life-locked, about as big as my hand. Not daring to hope, not daring to think, I opened the box and IF threw the switch. A surge of power I Somewhere charged life-batteries still fed the projectors. "They workl" "What work?" "The Reeves projectors." "Fine. What are Reeves projectors?" "Standard markers used ta supplement lights by creating an interference pattern any Sim can sense. They take hours to warm up, but with any luck, they may be noticed by tomorrow noon. When a field's in use, they're kept warm on standby, but these were turned completely off. Odd they weren't removed, but very lucky for us." "Now all we have to do is survive until tomorrow afternoon." "And to do that we better get some rest." "I couldn't sleep." T#ven without examining the deepening circles about his eyes I could sense the fatigue in him. "Sir, tomorrow is going to be a very hard day. You'll need all your faculties, you really must sleep, at least a few hours." I hesitated a couple of breaths and then decided, "If you wish, I could help you sleep..." Instantly, I regretted it. He gasped and stiffened in panic. Simes are ultrasensitive to a Gen's fear and react with instinctive aggressiveness. I suppressed my animal response with gritted teeth and clenched fists, and tried to calm him, "Senator, I won't touch you without your permission... ever." Then suddenly it was over. He said, "Yes, there's no time like now. If only for Ronald's sake... what do I do?" Arranging a couple of blankets in the farthest, corner from Ronold, I said, "Lie down here, push your sleeves up and try to relax." I sat on a blanket on his left side and began to talk softly, "Now, this will work only if you co-operate. Listen to my voice, relax, think very hard about sunrise. You don't want to know anything until sunrise when the light will awaken you. I'm going to touch you, lightly just with my hand." I brushed the palms of his hands. "Now, I've got an accurate reading, I'm going to even the field gradient. Relax, don't pull away, just lie still. You won't feel a thing; next you know it will be dawn and you will wake refreshed. I leaned forward and made wrist contact with my laterals. Then I brushed his lips with mine ever so gently for the instant of transfer and made time sense adjustment so he would sleep. It was his first, so I only took the first level of his life-store. He was a General class Donor new. I bedded down next to my patient, linked to be roused instantly by any minor change in his condition. IV T woke to pre-dawn grayness and checked Ronald over. Now he needed exercise. When I waved a second aromatic under his nose, he stirred restlessly. Then I sat him up, supporting him against my chest as I chose a small vial of liquid. 'Ronny, Ronny, Im your friend Ronny, Im going to help you feel bettw. He looked at me, blearyefred, with changeover's instinctive hostility, the withdrawal, the need for total privacy during this vulnerable phase warring openly with tfie docile suggestivity induced by Bqfr drugs. "Here, drink this down. It will clear your head. I know you don't want to swallow, but this won't upset your stomach." The drugs prevailed, and he drank. While we huddled together, waiting for it to take effect, his father woke. Ronald had buried his face in my shoulder and was breathing heavily to the waves of sensation from the drugs and from his condition. I motioned his father to be still and waited. Finally, Ronald drew a shuddering sigh and looked up to my face, down at my arms, and then shrank away in trained reflex. Our eyes met. I said, "You too, you know?" Hesitantly, he nodded. "Ronald." I took his hands. "Don't fight it any more. Your life depends on that. I can help you only if you relax and accept it. You do what I say and you'll live. I promise." I montioned his father over. "Talk to him a while." And I went to the window to give them privacy. The Reeves projectors were drawing power, but I knew they were still imperceptible. The building was insulated, so I woiddn't know when they established a pattern, but I could guess. Suddenly, my stomach remembered it hadn't had any dinner and only a light lunch yesterday. I pounded on the door and kicked it imtil gravel voice husked sleepily, "What 'cha want?" "Breakfast, and that pot of hot water. Or are we to be starved to death?" It was a crude jibe. Simes always fed their prisoners well. But it was effective. Half an hour later we received boiled eggs, bread, cheese, milk, coffee and a pot of hot water. T sent the Senator to eat while I poured some of the hot water in a cup, added a powder from the emergency kit and took it to Ronald. I turned him to the corner and sat in front of him, taking out my other handkerchief. "This is going to be painful, but it's necessary. I fear, you've used too much life-energy. So you'll reIF quire more before your laterals are fully developed. If I werent here, that would be deadly. But I am here. And I'm a QN-#. I can force a transfer to you with a minimum development of your tentacles, but I need at least that minimum. "This is old-fashioned and very crude, but effective." I dipped the handkerchief in the steaming water and applied it to his forearms. He bore that torture with staid courage until, finally, I wiped the tears of pain from his eyes. Then I tested the brew I had prepared and made him drink it all. It was pure nourishment in a form his disturbed metabolism could accept. I spent the rest of the morning alternately walking Ronald around the room and instructing him in the channel's transfer technique. GenSime transfer is instinctive, but Sime-Sime transfer has to be learned. With lunch, I demanded more hot water and got it without comment. Surprisingly, our captors did not look in on us more often. I stippose they depended on the outside guards. I knew that at this time of year only the rangers and the border police used this road, so I didn't care to calculate the probability of the right man noticing the Reeves' field and reacting the right way. About mid-afternoon, I began routine sedation for Ronald's first transfer, an effective tranquilizer that would nevertheless sharpen his new senses. It was getting dark when I could put it off no longer. I engaged the life-lock on the door to insure our privacy, "Sir I'm going to ask you to stay back in the corner again. The less interference the better. " "He's going to be all right?" "Definitely. But this is the critical point." 'hat was more confidence than  I felt. I'd never done it outside a hospital before. Nothing is quite like your first field test. Reminding myself that I was far overqualified for this simple job, and that any QN-# could have done it, I worked through the routine very slowly, talking the half-conscious boy into confidence, reminding him of what I'd taught him that morning, and slowly building a tremendous field gradient between us. I watched for his first instinctive reaching toward the apex of that gradient, the sign that I really had my 'minimal development.' I got it after two heartstopping minutes, made contact, gave him enough to see him through to full development, and withdrew. Just in time, too. I sensed somebody at our door. Ha'Itily, I disengaged the life-lock and tried to pull myself together. After that operation, I needed about five minutes to return to normal. It was only our dinner, the same un-insptring fare. And another pot of hot water... unasked. " How's the kid?" gravel voice inquired. "Sleeping. I think he'll be fine." Gravel voice looked me up and down once, very slowly, "Yeah... he better be." I was afraid he'd look for himself, but he left with only a glance at the heap of blankets in ' the comer. Perhaps he thought it was contageous. I sat down, poured myself a cup of hot water, added a little something from the emergency kit, and drank it all. It helped. I stopped shaking. Then, I noticed Fieldman. I poured another cup of water and added a mild Gen sedative from the beginning of the sequence. I'd been treating Ronald from the middle of the array and I'd taken mine from the end. "Doctor Farris prescribes." I offered him the cup. He hesitated. I smiled. "Come on, sir, this is good for you." With a sigh, he sat beside me and took the cup. "Rescue's late." "Not too. I think we're safe until morning. I don't know about you, but I've had a day. I'm going to sleep." "How can you sleep?" "I don't know, but I'll manage." T woke to the sound of rifle fire. The Senator stood by the window, moonlight splashjng the floor around his shadow. Ronald was soundly unconscious. "Rescue?" I asked "I think so. I think they're trying to get away." I joined him to watch for the sporadic flashes among the trees. Presently, it tapered off and ceased. Fifteen minutes later the bolt slid, and the door opened. Grandpa Digen stood there leaning on his cane and chuckling. Four days later. Grandpa and I sat on our porch watching the sunset. "So they finally rounded up all the people responsible as well as the kidnappers themselves. Credited solely to the Sime police. And you have got yourself a Senator for a friend. What more do you want?" "What did you mean about Izak? Did he have me followed? I don't want someone snooping on me." "Hahl No, he didn't have you followed. He has more savvy than you'll ever know. When you didn't check back, he got worried and started worrying others. If you'd thought to turn on the Reeves sooner, we'd have got there sooner." "Well..." You can't argue with Grandpa, so I changed the subject, "We got the bill out of committee, recommended for passing. So where do we go from here?" This set him to wheezing and chugkling and mumbling. " Got myself a real trooper for a grandson!" IF IF  Novelette There were three to shape destiny with the Shield's ancient Prisoner: a Poet; a Mue; and -- perhaps -- a Man. I 'lichen he woke from a featureless dream of silver, there was nothing but endless blackness on three sides, a blackness so intense that it almost coughed out a breath and moved. And when he woke, he did not know who he was. The control console's flashing told him that this was a spaceship imder and behind him. That explained the darkness through the viewplate of the guidance nipple. And his misty reflection in the thick plastiglass told him he was a man, for he had the blue eyes of a man and the face of a man, severe but handsome, topped by a dangle of coal-dusted hair. But these things were general. When he tried to concentrate on specifics, but there were no answers. Who was he ? What had been his past? And where was he bound? He could remember that this was the year #, and he knew all about the society it had, or a good deal of it, anyway. Yet his personal history was a blank. He got up, walked behind the chair, away from the viewplate and toward the rear of the chamber. A quick search of the gray chamber showed that there were no written logs. The logtapes only roared and screeched when he turned them on. When he turned them off, the sOence was even more penetrating. He tugged at the circular wall hatch at the fear of the chamber, swung it inward. Beyond lay a corridor, narrow and low ceilinged. At the end of it, he knew, lay a room of shielding before the drive chamber. Along the sides were two rooms that he could enter without being burned to cinders by hard radiation. In the room to the right, there was a complete laboratory with roho-surgeons hanging from the ceiling like bloated spiders. Directly under the machine doctors was an operating table with a flexo-plast mattress that clutched a patient firmly and held him as if it were alive. He shuddered and walked into the haU. He did not entirely 'trust machines like that -- machines that were so much like men but had neither mercies nor faults of men. Across the corridor, the other room was an armory. Crates of construction explosives sat on the floor, enough tp level a city. There were racks of guns on the wall. Vaguely, he knew there were no guns in the world any more. Men of this age did not kill anything but game animals. Guns were mainly for collecting. But these were too new for collecting, and deep within him he knew he possessed the ability to use each of them. Against the far wall and next to the cargo portal, a groimd car with broadcasting nubs studding it. With its invincible shield turned on, it was, in effect, another weapon. There was something bothering him, something more than the mere presence of weapons. Then, as he gazed at the ground car, he knew what it was. Nothing here carried a tradename I The car was void of brand, model and make. So were the rifles and the throwing knives and the explosives. These things had been produced to provide anonymity. But who IP made them? And for what purpose? Bong-bong-bong! A t first, he ignored the ship's alarm, trying to think. But the ship grew more insistent. He put back a rifle he had been examining and left for the control room. computer's squawkbox grated the words out much like sandpaper be'A man? Out here without a ship?" Like a grotesquely misshapen fruit, the body in the red suit floated in the blackness, directionless, moving with a slight spin that brought all sides of it into view. He brought the ship in as close # possible, studied the crimson figure. What was a man doing this far from a ship, alone, in a suit that could not support him for more than twelve hours? T'm going to have him brought in," he said to the ship. He'll die out there!" The ship was silent. Like small animals, his fingers moved. A moment later, the cylindrical body of the Scavenger appeared in the viewplate. It was another almost-alive machine. He shivered. The single eye of the Scavenger focused on the body. On the console screen, there was a closeup of the stranger. Then the lens caught the face inside the helmet, and he was no longer so sure it was a man. There was a face with two eyes but no eyebrows. Where the brows should have been, there were two bony ridges, hard and dark and glistening. A mane of brown hair streaked with white lay as a cushion about the head. The mouth was wide and generous, but not the mouth of a man. The lips were a bit too red, and the teeth that stugk over them at two places were sharp, pointed, and very white. Still, it was more of a man than an animal. There was a look about the face that suggested soul-tortured agony, and that was very human. He directed the Scavenger to begin retrieval. When the Scavenger was locked into place, he opened the floor hatch, drew up the body, and carefully unsuited it. The helmet bore the e was in a great cathedral. The red tongues of candles flickered in their silver holders, Belina was dead. No one died anymore, but Belina was dead, A rare case. The monster in her womb had slashed her apart. Nothing the doctors cotdd do. When you cant turn to blame other men, there is only one entity to blame: God, It was difficult finding a temple, for there were not many faithftd these days. But he had found one now, complete with its holy water tainted with sacrificial blood and its handful of ancient Christians -- ancient because they refused the manmade immortality of the Eternity Combine: they grew old. He was in the great cathedral, climbing the altar railing and clutching the feet of the great crucifix, On the kneecap, slipping . , . Grasping at the loincloth, pulling himself up, weeping A foot in the navel, shoving up . Screaming into the ear. But the ear, after all, was wooden. Rocking, swaying the giant monument. Finally, he toppled it ,, , and pushed away from it as it fell , , , There were sirens, and hospital attendants. The last thing he remembered seeing was an old man, a Christian, cradled between the broken halves of Gods face, mumbling and content with his sanctuary , , , TTe pulled himself away from   Hurkos, shook his head. This was the stranger's dream. How had he experienced it? Hurkos opened his eyes. They were chunks of polished coal, dark jewels threatening many secrets. His mouth was very dry, and when he tried to speak, the corners of his lips cracked and spilled blood. The nameless man brought water. "It didn't work then," Hurkos had a voice deep and commanding. What didn't work? What were you doing out there?" Hurkos smiled. "Trying to kill myself." "Suicide?" "They call it that." He sipped more water. "Because Belina died?" Hurkos bristled. "How could you know -- " After a moment, he nodded. "I guess I told you." "Yes. How could I hear your dreams like that?" Hurkos looked puzzled for a moment. "I'm a telepath, of course. Sometimes I project, some rare times I read thoughts. Unstable talent. I project mostly when I'm asleep -- or under pressure." "But how did you get out there without a ship?" "After I was released from the hospital -- after Belina's death and the crucifix incident -- I signed on the Space Razzle as a cargo handler. When we were in relatively untraveled space, I went into the hold, disconnected the alarms from the pressure chamber, and left. I won't be missed imtil pay day." "But why not step out without a suit? That would be quicker." Hurkos smiled an unsmile. "I IF II guess a little of the healing did take hold. I guess we can recover from anything." But he did not look recovered. Right now, my talent is fading. I can't see a name in your mind." The other hesitated. "You can't see a name... because I have none." Briefly, he recounted his sad story, the amnesia and the strangeness of the ship. Hurkos seemed interested. Here was something to submerge his melancholia. "We are going to make a real search of this tub, you and me. But first, you ought to have a name." "What?" "How about -- Sam? After a friend of mine." "I like it. Who was this marvelous friend?" "A dog I bought in Galileo." "Thanks!" "He was noble." With the preliminaries out of the way, Sam could no longer contain his curiosity. "We both have names now. We know I am a man -- but what are you Hurkos looked startled. "You don't know what a Mue is?" "No. I guess maybe I have been gone too long. Maybe I left before there were Mues." "Then you left a thousand years ago -- and you want danm far away!" TJurkos padded down the corri dor and into the main chamber. "Absolutdy nothing!" They had been searching for six hours and still had no clue to Sam's or the ship's origin. Hurkos had manged, somehow, to fill him in on Mue history. Once, well over a thousand years before, man had tried to make other men with the help of the Artificial Wombs. After hundreds of attempts, nothing very worthwhile had come of it. They had been tr#dng to produce men of psionic abilities valuable as weapons of war. Sometimes, they came close. Never did they have complete success. Then, when the project was finally junked, they had five hundred mutated children on their hands. This was at the time when mankind was laying aside weapons for plowshares. Most looked upon the Wombs as a hideous arm of the recent war efforts, and they looked upon the Mue diildren with pity and shame. There was a great public outcry when the government hinted that the Mues might be "put to sleep." They were allowed to live. In fifteen years, they had equality. They mated, had more of their own kind, but often produced normal children. Today, there only a fifth of one per cent of gaAnd Sam could not ever remember having heard anything b them. " Food's about ready,  lii said. ' Smells good' Hurkos rqdied as the trays slid from png dot. They sat on the floor tg iafi It's damn eerie, Hurkod muttered around a mouthful of synlHe-beef. "There should be at least one brand name. He paused, swallowed, then said, "The food! Sam waved him down. "I already looked. The food basics below the synthesizer are in unmarked containers." They made a list of their known facts and found it small. They pondered over it as they ate. "What's the matter?" Hurkos asked a few moments later. "You hardly ate a thing." Sam grimaced, waved a hand vaguely, let it fall into his lap. "I'm sort of afraid to eat, because -- " "Go on!" "Because it has been made by machines. The food isn't natural." Hurkos swallowed. "That's another piece of data. You're afraid of machines. I thought so earlier -- judging by your reaction to the robo-surgeons. "But I could starve!" "I doubt it. You ate enough to keep you going. You just won't get fat." S am opened his mouth to speak... and felt lightning sear his brain. Thunders crashed. Chaos swirled. He pushed from the floor, found his seat, strapped in, unable to control his actions. Hurkos was beside him, shouting. But he could not hear the Mue. Something had a fist around his mind, and his world was a world of thunders. He slammed toggles. Behind the command chair, Hurkos wrapped himself in the flexoplast mattress they had removed from the surgeon's table. There was no second seat in the ship, and the resiliant living foam was an adequate replacement. He was almost into it. Sam slammed the ship into hyperspace... and they collided with something... The thunders were gone, and he was in control of himself. Hurkos was rolling all over the floor, bouncing off the walls as the ship wallowed from the impact. Sam reached the viewplate, saw another ship hanging only a mile away. The collision had jolted them back into real space. He tried for radio contact but got no response. "What the Hell were you doing?" Hurkos shouted, freeing himself from the mattress and staggering to his feet. "I don't know! Someone took over my body, told me to set a course for Hope -- "The capital?" "Yes. I can't argue." Hurkos rubbed a bruise on his arm. "Recognize the voice?" IF wasn't exactly a voice. It was more like -- " There was a sudden pounding noise. They whirled toward the viewplate and saw a giant poimding on the plastiglass. '"Open up and leave me ini" He had his helmet pressed to the viewplate and was threatening to tear the ship apart if they didn't open up. He looked as if he just might be able to carry out the threat. They let him in. Tf the stranger from the other ship had been an imposing figure seen through the viewplate, he was overwhelming seen at first hand. Six-foot-six if an inch, two hundred and seventy pounds if an ounce. He pulled Ms helmet off, spewing a stream of vivid curses. His blond, unruly hair fell into blue eyes like sky chips. What the devil are you, some sort of moron? Morons have been bred out of the culture I You're the last living moron, and I have to -- " guess you're angry about the collision," Sam began, and -- " You guess I'm angry about the collision I You guess I" He paused, let his jaw drop, picked it up without losing his expression of disbelief, and continued Of course I'm angry about the collision! You hyperspaced without checking to see if there was another ship in hyperspace within the danger limit. Your field locked with mine and jolted both of us into real space. What if our ships had collided instead of just our fields?" 'That's rather imlikely," Hurkos said. "After all, the fields are five miles in diameter, but our ships are a tiny fraction of that. The odds -- " "A moron spewing logic!" The big man struck his forehead with a palm. "If you'd just listen for -- " "I'm listening! I'm all ears! I want to hear your excuses for -- " "Wait a minute!" Hurkos shouted suddenly, his eyes bright. "I know you! Mikos. You're Gnossos Mikos -- the poet!" The rage was swept off the face by a smile. The huge hand came forth to be shaken. "And I have not had the pleasure," the giant said politely. Hurkos shook the hand vigorouslyRelief swept through Sam's frame. He wanted to fold up his legs, tuck them under his belly, and fall onto his face. He fought it. "My name is Hurkos. A nobody, but I love your poetry. Especially The Savagery of Old!  Spill the blood across the savage face, Raise the axe, the bow, the gun, the mace -- ' " Gnossos finished the quatrain: " 'Scream the scream that breaks apart the chest; bestr "Hummpphhl" Sam managed to say. 'Oh! Mr. Mikos, this -- " Gnossos," the poet interrupted. Hurkos beamed. 'Gnossos, this is Sam." The giant engulfed Sam's hand in his giant paw. Glad to meet you. Now what malfunction of your vessel caused this recent unpleasantry?" T ater, after the poet had heard  the entire story of the amnesia and strange voices in Sam's head, he rubbed his hands together, and said, What a mysteryl You won't get rid of me until we solve it!" Then yoii aren't angry?" Angry. But whatever for?" Sam sighed. 'WeU," Hurkos said, what do you make of it?" He hunched forward like a small boy at his father's knee. Gnossos rolled his tongue over his wide, perfect teeth, thought a moment. Tt sounds," he said at length, 'as if someone is trying to over-turn the galaxy." Sam shifted, waited for more, shifted when the poet didn't speak. "What do you mean?" Hurkos asked. 'Consider the weapons. Weapons have been illegal -- except for sport and collecting -- for over a thousand years. You say these are obviously not for sport because of their design and power, yet no one collects explosives or new guns. Someone, it seems, plans to use them on humans." Sam and Hurkos exchanged looks. This was a fear they had not voiced. The tradenames," Gnossos continued, 'are missing because the owner of all this wants his part kept secret. Sam is a tool, a tool being used to overthrow the current order of things." "Then at any moment he might get orders to kill us because we know too much!" Sam was perspiring . "No," the poet said. "The order to hyperspace sounds as if it was post-hypnotic." He waited for them to register relief. "Sam was kidnapped, and his memory was wiped out. Then they -- whoever They may be -- implanted a series of hypnotic commands. When that was done, they shipped him off to do whatever they commanded. Perhaps the first order was designed to be triggered by the first meal he ate. The remaining commands may now be geared to a time sequence -- regular or irregular intervals between each." "So whatever gave him the orders would not be aware of our presence." "Correct." IF S am wiped his forehead dry. 'Good. I like both of you too much to kill you." One thing," Gnossos said. "Why didnt you acknowledge my radio message just after the collision?" 'We didn't receive any," Sam answered perplexed. We tried to reach you but got no answer." " Broken radio?" Hurkos asked. Sam went and checked the control console. "That shoots one theory. But how could Sam's secret master get control of the radio if all his commands are post-hypnotic?" Gnossos shrugged, stood. "Maybe they do know we are here. Maybe they're just waiting for the right moment to knock us off. We'll have to wait and see. Right now, let's check your laboratory. I have an idea." The three of them went below to the robosurgeons. "Someone could have machined the cases for these," Gnossos said, "but there are only a few companies that have the facilities to produce the interiors. Whoever put this together would have to use factory-made parts." Sam flicked the control knob, lowered the spider-like, many-armed machine, rotated it so that the access plate of the main component faced them. Gnossos rubbed his palms together. "Now we'll see if we can find a few clues." He threw back the latches that held the plate on, dropped the cover to the floor. "Every company keeps a list of purchasers. One serial number, and we can find this tub's owner." He bent over and peered into the darkness of the globe's interior. He looked puzzled. "Awful dark in there," Hurkos said. Gnossos put a hand inside, reached in, up to his elbow. "There's nothing in it I" Sam said. "Oh yes there is! " Gnossos shouted. "And it has hold of my hand!" HI gnossos tore his hand from the machine, rubbed it against his chest. It was red and bleeding in a few spots. "What the Hell is in there?" Hurkos asked. Sam stifled a low-key scream that began slithering up his throat. As if in answer to Hurkos's question, a jelly-mass began dripping from the open plating onto the table. It collected there, amber spotted with areas of bright orange. It trembled, quivered. There was a skin forming over it, the amber and orange changing to a pinkish-tan hue that made it look a great deal like human flesh -- too much like human flesh. The skin expanded, contracted, and there were pseudopods pulling the mass across the table toward the warmth of their bodies. They had backed nearly to the door. 'The machine had no insides!" Gnossus said, rubbing his wounds. But it moved," Sam said. operated like a machine. How could it do that without moving parts?" That -- that thing was its insides, its working parts, Gnossus said. 'That jelly-mass operated the shell like a machine." The last of the mass dropped from the bowl of the main segment. There was more there than could have been contained in the main sphere; obviously, all the sections had been filled and were now drained and empty. The jelly-mass, shapeless, plunged over the end of the table, struck the floor with a sickening squashing sound, and rolled toward them, arms of simulated flesh lashing out for purchase on the cold floor. The armory!" Sam shouted, turning into the hall and flinging the door to the other room wide. Perhaps it had been the hypnotic training with the weapons that made him think of the armory. He knew how to kill; he could stop the amobea, the super-cell. He stepped back into the hall, a rifle in his hands, brought up the gun, and sighted. Move away!" Gnossus and Hurkos stepped behind him, moving toward the control cabin. Aiming for the center IF f the mass, Sam pulled the trigger. Hue lightning flashed outward, sparkling, and illuminated the passageway like a small sun going nova. Bespite the light, there was no heat. In fact, the flame seemed to radiate coolness. It struck the writhing mass of jelly, sank into it. There was something like a scream, though it was not a voice. It sounded as if the very molecules of the mass had closed gaps and were rubhing one another. The jelly halted. Sam released the trigger, started to let the air out of his lungs. And the jelly leapt. T Te fired, caught it in mid-jump,  sent it crashing backwards, blue fire coursing through it. He aimed again, depressed the stud. Nothing. Nothing! No blue flame. No cool flame. Not even a click. He raised the weapon to look at it, to see if some latch or bolt had not been thrown properly by the automatic mechanism. Then he saw the amber goo beginning to pulse out of the tip of the barrel. Suddenly his hand was burning furiously, and there was amoeba slopping out of the powerpack casing inside the handle. He threw the gun down, wiped his hand on the wall. " Explosives I" Gnossos shouted. Sam turned, dashed into the armory once more. When he came out, he had three grenades. He ran to Gnossos and Hurkos, panting, his eyes wide, heart furious. The jelly-mass was recovering and had slopped into the hall where it joined up to the smaller dump of stuff that had been the insides of the gun. think I see why the radio didn't work, Gnossos said. "It did not want to work." The entire ship is alive," Sam agreed. Hurkos wrapped a hand on the wall. Tt's steel. I'll be damned if it's anything but stedi" 'Tnside," Sam said, keeping an eye on the amoeba pulsating at the end of the passageway. Deep inside the plating, there's more jelly." But the hrper-drive -- " " There is no hyper-drive," Sam said. 'At least, no mechanical hyper-drive. The jelly can hyperspace somehow -- naturally. There are no machines on board -- just jellycored shells. Your fear of machines -- " Hurkos began. Was gained from whomever built this -- this ship-thing." The lump had begun to move again. It was six feet high, a good three hundred pounds. You two get into suits," Gnossos said, taking the grenades. He still had his own suit on and the helmet lay within easy reach. "We will have to go across to my ship. This one won't let us live long, now that we know part of its secret." S am and Hurkos struggled into their suits, fitted the helmets to the shoulder threads, attached air tanks. When they were dressed, Gnossos pulled the hatch shut, sealing the main cabin from the hallway where the thing was advancing warily. "Let's see it get through that," the poet said, putting on his helmet. "Now let's get out of here." "I'm afraid there isn't much hope of that," Sam said from his position next to the control panel. "I've pressed all buttons to depressurize the cabin and open the exit chamber, but I can't see any response from the ship." Hurkos jumped to the console, flipped on the comline to the computer that wasn't a computer. "Let us out I" There was a deafening roar from the wire and plastic voice. There were screams, thunders, explosions. It sounded like a thousand rats burning alive. "Shut it off!" Gnossos shouted. Hurkos slammed the switch off. The noise continued. At first it swept them in irregular waves, shrded them and put them back together. Then there was not even a pattern of waves but a constant din. And there was jelly spewing out of the speaker grid... Jelly spewing out of all jackholes... In a moment, the speaker grid was gone, thrust away by the surgIF ing pressure of the thing behind it. Parts of the console began to sag as the supportive gum that had filled it drained away. Still the noise persisted. "It's the same sound," Sam shouted into his suit phone, "that I heard when I was obeying the hypnotic commands." "The grenades #" Hurkos shouted as the jelly began to collect on the floor, change from amber to pinktan, and rise in a pulsating mass. The other glob pressed against the hatch from the hallway. There was the screeching of metal being strained to its limits. Soon the hatch would give, and they would be trapped between two shapeless jelly-things. It would cover them and do whatever it did to flesh and blood and bones. Gnossos flipped the cap that dissolved the anti-shock packing in the outer shell of the grenade. He tossed it. There was no result. "The grenades are jelly tool" Hurkos shouted. Sam snatched one of the remaining bulbs from the poet. "No. They aren't machines. It's a naturd chemical that explodes without mechanical prompting. It just needs a jar; you didn't throw it hard enough." He sailed the second against the glass viewplate. A #I the world was a sun. A lightbulb. Then the filament began to die -- the light went completely out. The force of the explosion had gone, mostly, outward. What had pressed in their directibn had been caught by the mass of jelly that rose to snatch at the grenade, unsuccessfully. Miraculously, they were tumbling through the shattered front of the ship, moving into the darkness and emptiness of space toward the Ship of the Soul, the poet's boat that lay silently a short mile away. Behind them the jelly came, boiling away in the vacuum, tumbling and sputtering. Steaming, it lashed out with nonrms. The thunder of its non-voice was definitely not sound but thought. It bombarded their minds. Hurkos was out ahead, his shotilder jets pushing him swiftly toward the ship's portal. Then came the poet. Finally, Sam. A hand of false-flesh streaked arqund the latter, curled in front of him, attempting to cut him off from the others and devour him. He choked, maneuvered under the whip before it could sweep around and captoe him. And still it came. It grew smaller, boiled and bubbled itself away. But there was always a new central mass moving out from the hull, trying to leap the blackness. Yet finally there was nothing left except a speck of pinkish-tan. Then it too puffed out of existence. With it went the noise. Inside the Ship of the Soul, they stripped and collapsed into soft chairs without animate padding. This was a ship of comfort -- not one of destruction. This was a ship built for six people if necessary -- not for one man, one tool of an insane unnamable entity without a face or time. For a while, then, they were silent, composing themselves for what must be said. The moment the composing ended and the talking began was signaled by a quiet suggestion from Gnossos that they get some wine to help loosen their tongues. The wine was warm, green. It was the same sound I heard under the hypnotic commands," Sam said. That means," Hurkos said, staring into his wine as he talked, Hhat it was the ship itself that was ordering you around. That jelly-mass was the plotter behind the scheme." nossos downed one glass of VX wine, poured a second from the decanter. "I don't agree. If the ship were responsible for Sam's actions, there would be no reason for post-hypnotic suggestions. It was close enough to use a more direct method. And when he shot it, it should have been able to order him to throw the gun down. No, the ship was just a cancerous mass of go that was to convey Sam to Hope. Nothing more." But what kind of man could make a thing like the jelly-mass?" " I think," Gnossos said, "that there is a chance you are the dupe of an extra-galactic intelligence." 'That's absurd; that's -- " " That's frighteningly possible," Hurkos reflected. There are thouthere. How do you know a bunch of jelly-masses didn't kidnap you, take you away, and decide to train you to overthrow your home galaxy?" Sam finished his wine in a gulp. Heat flooded through his flesh. Still, it could not ward off the chill in him. "Because," he answered in even, measured tones, "that would be one helluva backward way of invading the Federation. If these extra-galactics have all this skill -- can use something like the blob back there for hyper-spacing and making food and operating robosurgeons -- they could overturn the galaxy in a month. A week! Hell, that blob even talked to me in a computer voice. Probably forms some crude set of vocal cords when it needs them. And it operated like a radar set; it -- " "It's a living machine," Gnossos said, almost to himself. iC'That's another thing," Hurkos added. "Your fear of machines. You got it, obviously, because whoever -- or whatever -- hypnotized you fears machines also. Because, he, it or they do not use machines. They have blobs, living IF things that are machines. That almost proves they're extra-galactic. We have nothing like this." "One couldn't live in the Federation without the aid of machines," Gnossos agreed. One would have to be from -- Outside." No." Sam set his glass on the floor. 'No, if there were extra-galactics with this sort of thing, they woiddn't need me." "Agreed also," the poet said. "Looks like there is a stalemate in this conversation." He heaved his bulk to a more comfortable position. "Well, I for one am sticking with you until this mystery is unraveled. I couldn't bear to quit yet. This could be the most important, most dangerous event of the last thousand years. Warring man might have been crude, but he sure as Hell had his fill of danger in a lifetime. Today we travel on, living hundreds of years, and everything is so safe and perfect that we rarely ever experience danger. I'm ready for some excitement!" "Me too, I guess," Hurkos said. Sam had the feeling the Mue was not terribly comfortable since the jelly-mass had attacked them. But he would not -- could not -- back down in front of the poet. "So what next?" Gnossos rubbed a hand across his chin, wrinkled his nose for a moment. "We set this tub on a course for Hope. When we get there, we wait for your next command. We're going to find out just what this is all about." "But," Sam said uneasily, "suppose I am to overthrow the galaxy?" "Hurkos and I will be right behind you to stop you before you have a chance." "I hope so," he said. Later, after more wine and much conjecture as the Ship of the Soul plunged through the thick river of the void, they retired, leaning back in their chairs, belting themselves, in, and shutting their mouths so that they could neither consume nor converse. And eventually they fell into sleep... IV tThere was a darkness, save for the pinpoints of the stars dotting the entire roof of the night. Then, as the breezes shifted, dawn came crawling over the horizon, tinting the blackness with yellow... Then orange...And there was a hill with a cross atop it; there was a man on the cross. His hands were dripping blood. And his feet were dripping blood. The wounds had festered. The man on the cross raised his head, looked to the dawn. He seemed very weary. There were clumps of matting at the corners of his eyes. His teeth were yellow. Damnit, let me downT he shrieked. The words rehounded from the low sky. Please he said, begging. The sun was a flaming eye. When it was at its zenith, there came angels, beings of light and majesty. They flocked about the man, administered to his needs. Some carried water which they poured between his cracked lips, and some brought oil with which they anointed him. And some sponged away the oil while others fed him. Then they were gone. The sun was setting. It seemed only minutes since it had risen. Please," the man said. The angels had missed some of the oil in his beard. It glistened there. With darkness came the demons. Crawling from under brown stones, slithering out of crevices in the earth, they came. There were dwarfs, slavering, eyeless yet seeing. There were wolves with sabers for teeth. There were things with tails and horns, things with heads that were nothing more than huge mouths. They screamed and cawwed, muttered, shrieked, and moaned. They came at the cross, crawling over one another. But they could not reach the man. They clawed the wood of his prison but could not claw him. One by one, they began to die... They withered and became white ghosts that the cool wind bore away. They collapsed into dust. They dribbled into blood pools. Then there were stars for a time. And again came the dawn... And the angels... And the night and the demons and the stars and the dawn and the angels and the night... It continued at a maddening pace. Days became weeks; weeks turned to months. For years he hung there; for centuries, he remained. And finally, all time was lost as the sun spun madly across the sky and night with its devils was barely a blink of the eye. Please!" he screamed... last scream brought them out of sleep, breathing hard. Sam pushed himself up, looked about the ship to reassure himself. Then he turned to Hurkos. 'What sort of dream was that?" Gnossos looked curious. "He's a telepath," Sam explained. "Irregular talent. But what the Hell kind of thoughts were those?" "That's what I'd like to know," Hurkos said. "I was getting them from you ! " Me?" "Well, not really from your mind... Through your mind. The generator of those thoughts is very distant, no one in this room. And the mind is horrifyingly large. This was a fraction of its thoughts, a small corner. In this case, I picked up this trce of thoughts and -- for some reason -- my subconscious talent began boosting their vividness IF and also re-broadcasting them." But I wouldn't have dreamed this without yoxu: help." Hurkos smiled sadly. "You wouldn't have been aware of it. You would have been dreaming it nonetheless." But what was it? It's like the man on the cross you toppled." 'It's the Christ legend," Gnossos said. They turned to stare at him. 'T make legends my business. Poets work in all sorts of mythologies. There have been a large number of wild ones too. The Christ legend is not so ancient. There are still Christians, as you know -- though damned few. Most of the religion died out about a thousand years ago, shortly after the Permanent Peace and the immortality drugs. According to legend, the god-figure, Christ, was crucified on a dogwood cross. This dream seems to be a reenactment of that myth, though I do not recall that the man hung there that long or that there were administering angels and tempting demons." "This could be another clue," Hurkos offered. How so?" Sam was ready to clutch at any straw. Terhaps your invisible hypnotist is a neo-Christian, one of those who refuse the immortality drugs. That would certainly explain why he would want to overthrow the Federation. He would want to convert the pagans. That's us." Good point," Gnossos said, 'But that doesn't explain the blob." Hurkos lapsed into silence. "We're almost to Hope," Gnossos said. "Perhaps we will soon be having more clues." 'he flight-control system of the planet-wide super-city locked them into its pattern and began bringing them down to a point of its own choosing, since they had not requested any particular touchdown spot. Ships fluttered above and below them. Bubble cars spun across the great elevated roadways, between the buildings, sometimes slipping into tunnels in the skyscrapers from which they often emerged going another direction or did not emerge at all. They settled onto a gray pad where the flames of their landing were soaked up, cooled, dissipated. Beyond the pad, on all sides, Hope lay sparkling. They stood at the open portaf and waited while the attendant marked their checkslip so that they would have the proper ship returned to them and gave them half. "Well," Gnossos said, "where to?" "No orders yet," Sam said. Let's just wander around a bit," Hurkos suggested. And they did. T Te sat before the thick window   that was not really a window at all, and he looked at the thing bond. It raged, lashing, screaming, roaring. How long? How long had it fought against the Shield, trdng to get out? Breadloaf peered deeper into the Shield, leaned deeper into his chair. The massive desk nearly concealed his slumped form. Over a thousand years. That was how long. His father had constructed the barrier, the chamber beyond which dipped into another dimension. No, not another dimension -- a higher dimension. And when his father had died in a freak accident from which the medics could not undo the damage, he had come into possession of the family fortune, the family buildings; the family office structure in the center of Hope, the Shield and tank beyond. The last two were things that one did not advertise. It was a family secret -- a big, hoary skeleton in the family closet. The burden was his -- and his only. For six himdred years, he had come here every week, sometimes for stretches that lasted days, most often for just a few hours. He came to look at the Shield. It was a weight that rested heavily on his shoulders at all times. It was insane to worry. The shield had held for a thousand years; it would hold forever. It coidd not fail. It was maintained by machines, and machines had not been known to fail since his grandfather's time. These machines were not tended by unreliable men, but by other machines that gained their power from still more machines. It was fool-proof. came once a week, sometimes staying a long time. Crimson exploded across the Shield, washed down and turned to ocher at the bottom. Explosions would not shatter the Shield, no matter how violent they might be. Didn't it understand this by now? A thousand years of explosions, and still it did not understand. That thought left a sorry spot in his soul, but he reminded himself of what his father always said -- said so often that it became the family motto: There is no longer ignorance in men." Maybe. Evidently. Although he feared ignorance lurked just below the surface, waiting for a chance... There was a lovely pattern of blue and silver as it applied certain stress pattern sequences to the shield. But it had tried that before. It had tried ever)d:hing before... He pushed himself from the chair, and walked toward the door that led into the hallway. He would get some simple foods, some coffee. And he would return. This was one of those times when a brief glance at it was not going to be enough. It was going to be one of those IF weeks. One of those long weeks. V I n their wandering, they had gone to the light shows, the totalexperience places. They had seen the parks, the avenues of art. Gnossos knew the city well, that being one of the qualifications of a true poet to know the beating heart of megalopolis. He explained all things they did not understand, clarified things they thought they knew. It was rather a gay time, save for the constant awareness that another hypnotic trance and order could be on the way, minutes from them, ready to swallow Sam into a noisy chaos and use him. So it was, in the course of their aimless ramblings, they came upon the Christian. Sam noticed that Hurkos bristled at the sight of the man -- not because of this individual, but because of the heedless god behind him. The Christian was old. He was fifty, ancient in a world where all were eternally thirty or younger. He had obviously been the child of a strong Christian family, for he had not received even anti-beard elements; the heavy shadow on his face gave him a metallic look. His teeth were yellow. His skin was wrinkled. Across his chest and back hung the halves of a sandwich sign. them coming, he executed a small heel turn to reveal the words on 'T can't understand them," Hurkossaid. Gnossos smiled a thin smile. "Some day they will all be gone." "But why are there these people?" Sam asked. "Don't the medics prevent mental infirmities in babies?" "Well," the poet said, trying to shorten his giant strides to match the smaUer steps of his companions, "the original concept of the Federation was complete freedom. Mental infirmities were weeded out, true, true. As a result, the numbers of religious people dropped over the years. But one cannot limit another man's beliefs under a system of complete freedom. So religious persons were allowed to practice their beliefs. Though their children might be born mentally sound, the parents raised them and passed their superstitions on to their offspring. The number of religious dwindled. But as long as they procreated -- and this is a strong part of their religion, these Christians -- they would always have children to indoctrinate, to warp. It's a shame. But, after all, it is their life. A man, I guess, can waste his own life if he chooses." C # now the word," the Christian said as they drew abreast of him. He handed Gnossos and Sam pamphlets -- yellow paper with red print. "I'll take one too," Hurkos said. There was no reply from the Christian, and Hurkos asked again. "Will you ask this person of tainted blood to cease speaking to me?" the boarded one asked Sam. He was obviously distressed, running his thin, bony hands up and down the edges of his chest sign. "Tainted blood?" Sam asked. "They don't like Mues," Gnossos explained. "They would never speak to one." "Why?" "A Mue is not a creation of God, but the work of man," the Christian said. "A Mue is a violation of God's holy power of creation." His eyes gleamed fanatically. "Prejudice," Gnossos said. "It's part of the dogma of every religion -- sometimes heavily disguised, but always there. Do you know the history of your church, old man?" The Christian shuffled his feet. "Of course. In the beginning -- " "It doesn't start that far back," Gnossos laughed. He licked his lips. "It doesn't start with the darkness and light and the first seven days. It comes along much later. There's no church until man decides he needs a means of social climbing, something to make him superior to his neighbors. So he forms a church, a religion. By forming it, he can say that he knows what and why IF God is. He can say he knows the purpose of things and can -- therefore -- be a cut above other men." "God chose Saint Peter to start the church, to be above other men." Gnossos smiled patronizingly. doubt that. History is studded with men who said God had chosen them to be leaders. Most of them fell flat on their faces. Most of them got trampled down and smashed in the flow of time and history -- which are two things bigger than any man." False Prophets," the sign-carrier said. "So why don't you call Saint Peter a false prophet?" What he began is still functioning." " Duration does not prove worth. Wars lasted a helluva lot longer than your religion has, but they were finished and done away with because they were not good things. It seems to me that your faith is facing a similar end." Qam made a face. "But why hate Hurkos just because he is not directly God-created? If God gave men the power to invent and use the Artificial Wombs, then he was involved in the creation of the Mues, though -- " "Men usurped the power," the Christian said. "But if God is all-powerful, men could not usurp -- " Gnossos put a hand on Sam's shoulder. "It is not for this reason that Christians hate Mues. As I said, they have to feel superior. There are so few people they can look down on anymore; the Mue offers a perfect scapegoat. Because he is so often abnormal physically, they have something visible to feel superior about." A crowd had begun to gather around the debate. This seemed to please Gnossos, though it irritated the Christian. "And my dear fdlow," Gnossos continued in a friendly tone, "do you know who started many of the wars in the past three thousand years?" "Satan's forces." "No. Christians. In -- " The bearded man showed his teeth in what coidd have been a snarl if he had added sound. "I will not pursue this argument any longer. You are in Satan's employ." He moved quicily, pushing at the crowd that had gathered. They hesitated, then parted to let him through. He was gone into the breast of night to be suckled by its darkness. "You don't imagine you did any good," Hurkos said as the crowd around them dispersed and they began walking again. "You don't imagine you got through that bony structure he calls a head, do you?" "No. But I can't resist tr#dng. He is unreachable by this time. Besides, even if he doubted his U# faith, he would not allow himself to give that doubt prominence in his thoughts. He had forsaken concrete eternity via the inmiortality drugs, and now he has nothing to cling to but the hopes of his religion, the promises of God." " Gives me the shivers," Sam said. This is getting too morbid," Gnossos said. " Let's find a hotel and settle down. My feet are killing me, and there is no telling how much running we might have to do to catch Sam if he gets another order." T readloaf finished the last pieces of his sandwich, took a swallow of black coffee and leaned back in the chair. The room was dark, for the thing behind the Shield was not the thing for well-lighted rooms. Its details were brought out too fully in light. Blackness allowed obshmty. Cinnabar horsemen riding green stallions exploded across the screen, were gone in a wash of lavender... He liked to pick out patterns in the explosion of color, choose and name them as some men do with clouds. A Dragons mouth holding the broken body of an amber knight... ed whether his father had sat like this, watching the patterns and trying to make sometJiing of them: it was a seeking after order; certain ly that was the purpose of watching them. Had his father sat here, his great leonine head bowed in contemplation, his heavy brows run together from the forehead-minkling concentration? Had he laced his thick fingers behind his waterfall of white hair and watched -- actually studied -- the Prisoner of the Shield as the family had come to speak of it? He doubted it. His father had been a man of hard work and action. He had built his father's small fortune into a very large fortune. When his engineers accidentally stumbled across the Shield while looking for a non-matter material for construction purposes, when they had discovered what lay beyond, the old man took the practical angle. He knew there was a fortune to be made here, more than his already formidable masses of wealth. He had only to enslave the powers behind the Shield and turn them to work for himself. The Shield was maintained. But the powers could never be enslaved. To agree to slavery, the slave must have fear of his master. And there was no fear in the Prisoner. None. like fish through a sudden sea of smoked burgundy... T Tis heart thudded at the bright   light, even though he knew the Shield was impenetrable. Take one molecule and expand it. Expand it some more. Make it bigger IF and bigger and bigger -- but don't disturb its natural particle dimensions. A barred doorway -- really a window. But that window turns the higher dimension into a prison, squeezes it into a confined space  -- a law of opposites which equalizes the pressures created by expanding the first molecule. The higher dimension is then bound within tiny limits. It and its inhabitants are trapped, unable to move or get out. No, his father had never sat here like this. He was too practical for melancholia. Along about the second hundred years of the Prisoner's confinement, the old fellow had realized he could never enslave it. And as the years passed, he came to maintain the Shield only because to let it die out would mean the end of his family and possibly all human life. The Prisoner would be seeking revenge. By the days of Alexander the Third, this fear of the Prisoner had been compounded by a feeling of moral obligation. The sanity and progress of the Federation depended on keeping the Prisoner imprisoned. Always, in the rear of his mind, was the fear that the thing would escape. Sometimes, that fear surged to the fore. At times like these he wanted to run into the street and scream about his charge behind the Shield. But the Breadloafs had done this thing, had trapped it. It would be up to the Breadloafs to watch it for all eternity. Finally, when watching was not quite enough, Alexander walked to the Shidd, stood with a hand upon the coursing energy. How did you," he said to the thing beyond, become like this?" It could only thought-speak to him when he was touching the Shield. And even then the words were tiny and distant: 'Letmeout, letmeout... " How did you become like this?" 'Letmeout letmeout, letmeout That was its constant cry. Sometimes there were threats. He knew -- and it knew -- that the threats could not be carried out. Not as long as the Shield was there. But it seemed reluctant now to answer his question: How did you become like this." He knew the answer anyway: " have always been like this..." n hydro-mattresses, redining, they opened their ears. The hotel room was pleasant. Gnossos lay before the door so that Sam would have to crawl over him to get out. The lights were warm, the wine sweet upon their tongues. It was certainly a time for verses. Lok through the window to the streets below; Ws the age of sorrow, babies freezing in the snow; Look through any window across a sea of lust; Ws a time for grinding every bone to dust. Look through my window... Then it was time for sleep. The wine had been drunk, the verses spoken, and the darkness crept over them. For a time, at least... A dream. A dream of an empty tomb and rotting bodies. Except for one single body which stood and walked toward the doorway. And the dream was one of demons that grasped the body and flung it down among the corpses and commanded it to stay dead. Always and everywhere, there were slavering, keening demons... Then Hurkos lost the thread of the alien thoughts and the trio awoke as one. They were all perspiring. Not mine again?" Sam asked. " Relayed from somewhere implanted your hypnotic commands. Very far away." But the smell of spoiled meat had carried over into reality. Well," Gnossos said, grumbling and standing, 'T certainly can't sleep now." They agreed. So let's go sight-seeing again. Maybe the next command will be coming along soon now?" Where to?" Hurkos asked. 'Ts it far? My feet still hurt." Not far," Gnossos said. There are a number of them. This one is called the InfernoJ VI 'he Inferno was a bar. But more  than a bar. Everything here was geared to some sensory stimulation. Ebony and silver clouds drifted through the rooms of the place, carrying nude performers. Floor panels popped open, spewed forth clowns in imagi-color costumes that were purple, yellow, red, or green according to one's mood. The floor revolved at a different speed than the walls and in a different direction than the ceiling. Strobe lights flashed. Smello-symphonies treated the patron's senses to moments of synathesia where music was an olfactory sensation. The erotic cygian perfumes seeped through the misty air, seeking nostrils to inflame. They took a table in the corner one almost hidden by shadows. The robo-tenderin the center of the table delivered their drinks once Gnossos had compiled an order, punched it out and deposited the proper coins. They sat sipping the cool liquids and watching the two dozen or so characters in the place. What's so special about this bar?" Sam asked, almost choking on a particularly heavy breath of perfume. Look at the people," Gnossos said. Sam did. He could see no way in which they differed from Federation norm in dress or habit. IF 'Took more closely. Look at their faces." Sam swung his gaze from the ruddy face to the more distant visages, lut it was their faces. The longer he watched, the clearer he saw it. But what was it? He searched his mind, looking for some comparison. He was just about to give up when the perfect simile sprang into his mind. The look in their faces was much like the look in the faces of scooterbeasts when they were penned in zoos. In a natural state, the scooterbeasts moved as quickly as lightning across a storm sky. Penned, they pressed their faces to the glass walls and looked mournfully toward freedom, wishing to move, to travel, to do something denied them. T see it," he said to Gnossos. "They're Unnaturals." "The ones -- " "Who would like to kill," Gnossos said. "They are defects born with many of the old faults -- with the desire to kill, an overwhelming greed and bent toward self-gratification. There is nothing the government can do but make them Sensitive. If they hurt someone, they also feel pain. If they aid someone, they feel the other's person's joy and pleasure. It is wiser for them to aid than harm. If they killed someone, they would feel the death spasms ten times more intensely than the victim. None of them would dare that." "He knows about the Unnaturals," Hurkos said, "but he did not know about the Mues." "Or my own past," Sam reminded them. G nossos ordered another drink from the robo-tender, deposited his coins and waited for the liquor. None came. He pounded it once, then bellowed for the human tapkeeper polishing glasses behind the bar. He was growing red-faced as he had been when his and Sam's ships collided -- a false anger put on merely for the pleasure of appearing furious. The tapkeeper opened the gate in the bar and crossed the room with strides as sure and quick, almost, as those of Gnossos. In his eyes glittered the tenseness, the trapped expression. "This thing is broken!" Gnos back!" "Here," the human bartender said, flipping a coin to the poet. "Now all of you had better leave, please." "Why?" Sam asked. "This is not a Natural bar." "You're a Natural if I ever saw one," Hurkos mumbled. "We are allowed service anywhere. Naturals and Unnaturals are not segregated." Shuffling his feet, suddenly a little cowed -- or taking a new line of tact, perhaps -- the bartender said, "It's just for your own safety." There was a mixture of fear and general uneasiness in his eyes now. Was that a threat?" Gnossos boomed. 'Am I with the uncivilized?" 'Not a threat. Its just him -- that one." They followed the tabkeepers thumb as it jerked toward the fellow standing at the far corner of the bar. He was clutching a glass of yellow liquid, taking large gulps of it without effort. He was huge, nearly as huge as Gnossos, redheaded and red-eyed. His giant hands clenched into fists, unclenched again. Though physically a bit smaller than Gnossos, he had muscle where the poet had run somewhat to fat. The corded masses of tissue that were his arms seemed able to snap anything or anyone to pieces. Who's he?" Gnossos asked. '"Black Jack Buronto." "You've got to be kidding," Hurkos said, slumping farther into his chair. "You must be." "Henry Buronto 's his name, but he wins all the time at the gaming tables, so they call him Black Jack. And he carries one too -- a blackjack." Many Unnaturals carried crude weapons, wishing they could use them, but never daring to because of the pain echoes that would engulf them. Clearly, Gnossos was fascinated by Buronto. Here was someone a bit different. Here was someone smiled on by Fortune, someone perhaps stronger than himself. And someone, for some reason, to be feared. "He's dangerous," the tapkeeper said. "Dangerous because he carries a blackjack and wins at cards?" "No. Dangerous because he would use the blackjack. He could kill all three of you just like thatT The tapkeeper snapped his fingers. He cast a glance at all three of them, then looked back to Buronto. A Imost as if he had seen a signal, Buronto started across the room toward them. "Please leave," the tapkeeper said. "I think maybe we had better," Sam agreed. "Why?" Gnossos asked. "He won't hurt us. Remember, every pain we feel, he feels ten times over." "But -- " the Tapkeeper started. "You're talking about me," Buronto said, stepping up to their table. And his voice was like the voice of a canary -- high and sweet and melodic. The trio stared at one another for a moment, astounded. The tiny voice again seeped from the massive throat. "Were you talking about me?" Sam tittered, then let go and burst out laughing. Gnossos followed with his laugh like thunder. IF Hurkos fought it, seeming t be comfortable in his recently self-imposed melancholia. Buronto spoke again: "Stop laughing at me!" The order was so high-pitched that his voice cracked in the middle of it. And Hurkos too burst out laughing, spraying the table with saliva he had Wn fighting to hold back with the laugh. "Stop it! Stop it;" Buronto shouted. But the tension within the three of them had been at a peak. They had been restless, nervous, on edge since the encounter with the jellymass. The constant state of expectancy had honed their nerves to sharp, thin wires that were ready to vibrate whenever even slightly plucked. And Black Jack Buronto's voice had been the tuning fork that had set them all roaring as the tension drained. They laughed all out of proportion to the joke. "Oh no, no, no," the tapkeeper said. He moaned it over and over like a litany. "Shut up!" Buronto roared, squeakily. His mouth was foaming. He brought a colossal fist down on the simu-wood table, knocked all the glasses off. But this too sent them into paroxysms of laughter. Hurkos was leaning on Gnossos, and Sam had his head thrown back, howling. Black Jack muttered something nearly incomprehensible. Clasping one fist in the other, he smashed the wedge of his flesh onto the table top, shattered the thing into two halves that stood separately for a moment until the weight of the broken top pulled the lamented leg apart and the table collapsed into the laps of three Naturals. They ceased their laughter. Black Jack Buronto now had a face like a jungle animal. Great swatches of ugly blue slashed the once uniform red of his face. His teeth were bared. He snarled and spat foam and screeched unintelligible things between his teeth. He was mad as all Hell. He latched onto Hurkos's chair, ripped it out from under the Mue and sent him crashing to the floor. "What the Hell?" Gnossos said to the tapkeeper. "He's an Unnatural, but he's also a Sensitive!" "He's a Sensitive, yes," the tapkeeper shouted as Black Jack smashed Hurkos's chair into the wall again and again. "He's a Sensitive and feels his victim's pain. But he was more Unnatural than the doctors knew. He's also a masochist! " 'nphe color drained from the poet's face. "Then he likes being a Sensitive -- " The bartender finished: "Because he likes to feel pain!" Buronto had finished with the chair. There was nothing left of it that could be pounded against the wall; and the wall was worse for the wear too. Black Jack Buronto, obviously, would not care if he killed a hundred men. A thousand. He turned to them and plodded through the mounting wreckage. Anything that was in his way, he tossed aside, knocking over tables, smashing chairs and lamps and robo-tenders. He lashed out at Hurkos, struck a blow that sent the small Mue tumbling across another table and crashing to the floor in a cloud of broken glass. Gnossos stepped up to take a swing at Buronto, but he was a Natural. It was impossible for him to strike out at a fellow man. Had Burohto been an animal, the case would have been simple. But he was not. And a thousand years of sanity made Gnossos check his blow even before he started it. Buronto delivered a punch that set the poet down hard. As Gnossos and Hurkos struggled to gain their feet. Black Jack heaved a table out of the way and came for Sam. And at that moment, the second hypnotic order came... A chaos of noise obliterated the noise in the bar. Sam's eyes glossed. He wobbled for a moment, then determinedly set out for the door. Buronto, "seeing the move, snarled and leapt over fallen furniture, reaching the door first. Not yet. I hurt you first #" He reached for Sam with great hands... And suddenly doubled up as Sam struck him a blow in the stomach that would have crumbled a wall -- because a wall would not have given as did Buronto's stomach. And Buronto's stomach certainly gave -- gave up to Sam's wrist. The giant oofed, stumbled, but still managed to clutch Sam's shoulder. Sam brought up a foot, twisted away, and slammed the foot into Buronto's gut, sending him to his knees. Then he was past the Unnatural and through the door. After him I" Gnossos shouted. "He's gotten another order!" The two of them ran past the gasping Buronto and outside. But in the dimness of the night, the streets were empty. Sam was already gone. 'he water, chemicals, and lubricants flowed about him in invisible pipes. No. Not invisible. Nonexistent. There were tubes of force that clothed the liquids rather than metal piping. The fluids flowed from one part of the giant mechanism to another, covering the block-byblock machine quickly and efficiently. This was the machine that kept the Shield up, however, and it was frightening because it seemed so flimsy. Breadloaf knew that forces, adapted and shaped, were better than actual material parts that could wear out or fail from structural flaws. Still, all those liquids IF flowing through nothingness, and 'he orders were coming in a all of the vital to the maintenance A series now. Between the of the Shield... accomplishment of one demand and Click! the next order, there were only secBreadloaf whirled around -- onds when Sam had control of himaround again. The noises bothered self. He could never remember what him; he interpreted every sound it was he had just done and was as the beginning of a breakdown, engulfed by the next order before Okay, he had seen it. Now he should he really had a chance to invest!leave. gate. He walked to the door, hesiHe was standing in a great chamtated and looked around. There ber full of machines. That made were other clicks and a muffled him -- or whatever was controlling clank. He would go insane just him -- feel uneasy. He had broken listening to it operate, he told in. The street doors had not been himself. Before the horror of a poslocked, for hardly anything was sible failure should flood his mind locked any more. But this floor had again, he stepped into the hallway been sealed. So his last order had and closed the door behind. He been to break in here where things went back to his office. flowed through invisible pipes and machines hummed. But what had he done before that? What would he do aect? Tkea chaos and noises came, swaSowing him... Wlien he came out, a package he bad been holding under his arm was gone. He did not know what he had done with it. Or what it had been. Then chaos and noises came, swallowing him... B readloaf rubbed fists in his eyes, pulled open a desk drawer and fumbled in it for anti-snooze tablets. He found the bottle, popped two pills in his mouth, swallowed without benefit of water. Recappifig the bottle, he withdrew a secMd container of tiny nerve pills. He was in the process of swallowing one of these when the door flew off its hinges, crashed inward with a terrle roar. There was a man standing there -- eyes like vacant marbles -- with his hands flung outward like the hands of a stage magician the tips of his fingers vibrating with' some hideous power. And from the nails came the darts. Needles of sleep. They bit into him spread their red warmth and pulled him into darkness before he could scream... Then Sam was in control of his   body again, the first thing that struck his attention was the man slumped in the chair behind the desk; the man was sitting in a relaxed position but with every muscle taut in a sort of forced relaxation. Secondly, there was the screen. It was to the side of him, and for a moment it had been in a low-key color series of magenta and black. But abruptly it spewed forth oranges and whites and creams that splashed across the room and grabbed his attention. He walked to the screen, stared into it. Something sent a chill up and down his spine. It was as if the colors were alive and wanted out. What do you want? Who are you?" The voice startled him, and he leaped, his heart pounding. But it had not been the colors; it had been the man. Sam turned and walked to the desk. My name is Sam. I -- " 'What do you want? Why did you do this to me?" "Do what?" "I cant move, damn you!" Sam hesitated, looked about the room, sensing a ghost scene of what had happened. "I paralyzed you." Breadloaf s lips moved, and his eyes revolved like ball bearings in well-oiled grooves. "You -- and the darts beneath your fingernails. What the Hell kind of man are you!" Sam lifted his hands and looked at them. The nails were discolored as if fine bits of flesh had puffed IF into ashes beneath them. He rubbed one, but the color was definitely not on the surface. What kind of a man are you?" Broadloaf roared this time, panic flashing through every word. don't know," Sam said finally. Hs there some way I can help you?" Breadloaf was breathing heavily. Yes. Go get helpl" "I can't do that," Sam said. He stood on the carpet, shuffling one foot over the other. Why? Why can't you?" 'Ht won't let me." qt?" B riefly, he recounted his story -- the jelly-mass, the hypnotic commands. When he finished, the other man's eyes were wide -- too wide to contain anything but horror. "The Prisoner," he croaked. What?" The Prisoner of the Shield. You are under its direction I" Sam turned instinctively toward the portal of colors. 'Then they are alive!" Breadloaf was laughing, and Sam could not get him to stop. But neither could he leave to get help. His feet would carry him toward the doorway but not through it. There was a block that kept him in the room -- a mental block. His memory began to clear slightly, and he could remember what else he had done in this building. He had planted some sort of bomb in the machinery below. And it must be the machinery that kept the Shield going. "A thousand years," Breadloaf shouted between whoops of laughter. For a thousand years it tried the same things, and we thought it was too dense to try anything Instead, it was pretending stupidity, making us lax. And it worked. Just when we're feeling safe and secure -- " he burst into another fit of laughter. "Just when we're feeling secure, it takes you and breaks in with ridiculous ease." He laughed again, harshly. There was sweat on Sam's upper lip. He wiped it off and became aware of sweat all over him. He was frightened. A thousand years had been as nothing to it. He shivered, watching it. Were the colors its true appearance or merely the effects of it filtered by the Shield? A blue splotch of color rippled up from the bottom, seemed to form a question mark such as one would find no a large tronicsign -- Tronicsign! He suddenly remembered seeing the huge tronicsign band that ran around all four sides of the Breadloaf building with letters twenty feet high. Perhaps the control console was up here. If it were, he could spell out a message for Gnossos and Hurkos. Surely they would be looking for him. And it was almost a certainty they could see the towering tronicsign frem anywhere in this part of the city. If they were in this part of the city... 'The tronicsign controls' he said to Breadloaf. What?" The light letters. Where are the controls for the light letters?" Why -- " Where are they?" There was a tone of command in his voice that he had not known he possessed. There's a master set in the main lounge, but I have a secondary plugin set in the wall cabinet . -- over there." T Te found it, plugged it in, began  typing out the message that the big boards would hold in glowing red?amber?blue? -- letters. He decided on crimson words against a this? he asked Breadloaf. 'Top." There was a while to wait, and he paced the carpet. But they came. And they demanded explanations. He gave them the few he could, told them about the bomb planted below, the bomb that would wreck the machinery, shut down the Shield, and set the Prisoner free. He gave them the location of it, told them how to remove it and how to handle it -- gently. And they ran to get it. They were gone what seemed like a very long time. Just when he was ready to count them as deserters, they returned with the bomb and the timer, carrying it like delicate crystal. Carefully, Sam disconnected the times, lift the halves of the casing apart, and poured the volatile liquid out of the single window behind the desk. Four breaths were released simultaneously when he turned and said, Tt's okay." 'Then this is it I" Gnossos said, the first to recover completely. He paced back and forth, looking at the Shield. This is the thing that has been directing you. But if it is trapped behind this Shield, how did it get to you to hypnotize you? And how did it whip up that jeUycored ship?" 'T think I can shed some light on that," Breadloaf said. He was still paralyzed, but his fingers were tingling, and he could move his thumbs. The effects were beginning to wear thin. They turned to him. Gnossos crossed the room. "What light?" "He -- " Broadloaf began. "Sam," Sam identified himself. "Yes. I think you are operating on a false assumption. The Prisoner did not get to' Sam. He did not kidnap Sam. Sam is the Prisoner's creation." "Creation?" Gnossos snorted. "Yes. The Prisoner imagined Sam, built him into a concrete cnIF tity. Probably with a last burst of his energies." "Thats absurd." B readloaf tried to shake his head, only succeeded in making his lips quiver. 'No. The Prisoner concentrated his efforts, summoned all his resources and shaped a man and a ship. The ship was not a machine, for machines are alien to the Prisoner's mind. In some places, the dimensions are rather close, due to the warping of the higher dimension. Perhaps at one of these places he forced his thoughts through the thin barrier and made Sam and the ship." But why not force himself through at one of these spots?" Hurkos asked. "He could not do that with what energies he has left. You see, he is much larger than the ship and Sam put together. He is ihe entire higher dimension "One creature is an entire dimension?" Breadloaf coughed. "If that creature is God, yes. And that is precisely who the Prisoner is." # od!" Gnossos shouted. Hurkos wandered next to the Shield, pressed his face to it, looking into the colors that swirled, folded upon themselves and became new colors. Here, brought to him through modern science, was the thing that prayer could not # deld. "The Dreams," Gnossos sid, turning to look at the colors. "The dreams Hurkos took from it were the dreams of a paranoid, then; they were the dreams of a being obsessed by demon-persecution." Sam's mind was whirling too. "And the machines were not machines at all, for God is not the father of machines. He is the father of life, the father of man who makes the machines. God could imitate the exterior of a machine, but the only way he could make it last was to create a life-form that could imitate the workings of one." "And God feared machines because they were something above his abilities. And he feared Mues and chose to ignore their existence because they were things beyond his powers -- they were results of men usurping his rights." "A thousand years," Breadloaf said. "How could you stand it?" Gnosr"How could you sit there, knowing?" "Sometimes I thought I could never come back. But when I thought of how much worse it would be if he escaped -- " "Of course," Gnossos said. "For a thousand years, men have grown gradually saner, have broken connections with their past history. It's because he's been trapped in your warped dimension and can't influence anything. Isn't that it?" B readloaf sighed. He was able to make fists of his hands, and he sat exercising them. "Yes. My father thought he could enslave the Prisoner and make him work for the family. We knew who he was. He was no time at all in telling us, in demanding to be freed. But we could not master his powers and use them. Then it became clear that we could never let Him out. At first, of course, it was for the family's safety. He would wipe out every Breadloaf if given a diance. Then, after a few hundred years, when we saw what the Federation was becoming, how much better it seemed, we realized that much of the chaos of life had been God's doing. We had even strongreasons for keeping Him locked up. "If He ever is released -- Breadloaf wriggled an arm at last. "War will come again, famine, pestilce, and disease. We have no choice but to contain him." "You have no choice but to release him." They turned toward the door. The man standing there was a Christian. There were a dozen others behind him -- dirty, unshaven, dressed in rags of self-denial. One of them was the sign-carrier Gnossos had berated on the street. He was smiling now. He stepped into the room. "Strange who God should choose as His liberators." "How did they -- " Breadloaf began. "I told them I" Sam shouted. The series of h)notic orders flashed through his memory now. What God had ordered him to do was a breathing clarity. He recited the post-hypnotic commands that had followed the landing on Hope: "Find a temple and tell them that God is being held prisoner by the Breadloaf family in the Breadloaf building; I will give you flames upon your tongue as a sign to convince them. In the Sell-all Hardware store, purchase these chemicals and pieces of equipment -- ester of glycerin, nitric acid, a watch, a spool of number twenty-six copper wire, and a small construction detonator. Next, prepare a bomb of glyceryl trinitrate. Next, break into the Breadloaf Building, plant the bomb by a force pipe in the basement. Render Alexander Breadloaf helpless by drug darts." He had told the Christians, then. They were here on his word. "It's not your fault," Gnossos said. Then the echo of an explosion rumbled through the floors of the buildings, shook the walls. The Christians were destro)dng the machinery. A second explosion... And the Shield blinked... Was gone... IF B readloaf screamed a piercing scream, a thing that he had only half finished with when the eyes and the claws of brass swept from the vacant spot in the wall, swooped out on the cold winds and descended on him. The room had expanded, it seemed, to the size of a dozen galaxies. Yet all of it was filled with them and this thing from beyond their dimension so that it seemed -- in another way -- only as large as a small closet. There was no up nor down. The stars had lost their glitter. And the darkness ate the light. Sam was tumbling around yet within God, smashing against the pinions of the huge feathers, caught alternately in winds as cold as ice and as hot as volcano hearts. Now and then, as he fought the overwhelming expanses of blackness that fingers, he saw Alex Breadloaf. He saw him first without skin -- peeled and bloody. Then he saw him blackened and a thing of ash. He saw lightning flaring from charred nostrils and worms eating the mans black tongue. He saw him undergo all the punishments of all imagined Hells. And he feared greatly the moment when God would turn upon the rest of them, come with claws and with fangs to eat out their livers with silver-plated teeth. There was no warmth; neither was their cold. And everywhere there was Fear. 'Then, suddenly, there were words in his mind. The familiar tones of Hurkos. Listen. Listen, I can see him. I can see God. I can see him too, Sam's thought screamed. No. I mean, I can see him with my psionic powers. There is nothing to him. Hes so damned small! Clarify yourself. This from Gnossos. He is puny. He is not this large or forceful. The room is not expanding. Breadloaf is not being charred or eaten. God is trying to frighten Breadloaf to death. Fear is the only weapon he has left. He has lost his greatest powers. Perhaps from years of confinement and the last surge of creating Sam he has drained himself. But all this, Sam thought. A damn fake. Til send you the true picture. Pm looking right through his illusions and delusions. I can see. Til broadcast. Abruptly the room was normal. Breadloaf was uncharred. But he was dead. His eyes were blank, fish-dead things. His hand clutched his heart. The tiny transmitter in his chest would be yelling for the medics. He would be reached in time -- here in the city -- to be given a new heart before brain damage occurred. He would live again. Where -- " Gnossos began. Then they saw it. It was poised on the rim of the Shield itself. It was a small, pink, formless thing. It had not transferred itself because it was too big; it had created Sam, because Sam would be more effective than it would have been in breaking down the Shield. For a moment, the dreams surged badr, but Hurkos fought them off. Then the Mue raised a chair, smashed it into the pink slug. Again, again, and again. He mashed with a fury Sam never guessed him to possess. And Hurkos killed God. B readloaf came through the door of the saloon, stopped a moment to search them out, then smiled as he found them. Only three hours had passed since he had died, but he looked healthy and cheerful. More cheerful, in fact, than he had ever looked before. He made his way through the crowd to their table, sat down. passed the churdi on the way. The Christians are moving out of their homes in the basement, bundles on their backs. In a way, it is a shame. Their lives have been nothing." 'They can take the shots now," Hurkos said. He was relaxed for the first time. He had gotten his revenge -- more revenge than any man could hope for. Sam had wondered, at first, if Hurkos could be deranged, for he had, after all, killed. But he had not lulled a man. What he had killed was a rung lower than Man and, therefore, might be called an animal. 'They can live eternally." 'Some of them probably will. But they are old, remember. Fifty, some sixty, while the rest of us are thirty or under. It will not be exactly pleasant to be eternally old in a time of eternal youth." Tragic and ironic both," Gnossos said, sipping his drink. 'How do you feel?" Better than ever," Breadloaf answered. guess so," Hurkos said. 'Gnossos, I killed God tonight. Hows that for an epic poem?" "IVe been thinking," the poet said. 'But it would have been better if He had been a Goliath. There is nothing particularly heroic about smashing a helpless slug to pulp." Sam finished his drink. I'm going for a walk," he said standing. be back in a while." Before anyone could speak, he turned for the door, struggling through the crowd, and stepped outside. Night was giving way to day; a toudi of golden dawn tinted the horizon already. You all right?" Gnossos asked, stepping out beside him. 'T'm not sick. Not exactly." Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean." The purpose of life: to overcome your creator." But what can a walk do? Me -- I'm getting drunk." IF '"Yeah Sam said dwly. Maybe I will later. But now, I'll walk." Want me to come adong?" Sut there were questions. WhQ was he? What had been his past? And where -- oh where! -- was he bound? timore, Maryland. Theme: Swordplay and Sorcery, with speeches by Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp. Membership: #. For information: Jack L. Chalker, #I Liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, Md. #. receive two progress reports. For information: Jim Young, # Ulysses Street N.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota #. Make checks or money-orders payable to Mrs. Margaret Lessinger. Hotel, Oxford, England. Guest of Honor: Judith Merril. For information in the nue, Los Angeles, California #. of Honor: Rolrt (Doc) A. W. Lowndes. At the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. Advance membership #, or # at the door. Two Progress Reports will be sent to members. For information: Franklin M. Dietx, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, New York #. Street, Newark, New Jersey #. General theme: 'Looking Backward: #, Changes in the SF Field in the Last Thirty Years. Admission: #. For Information: Allan Howard, # Grafton Avenue, Newark, New Jersey #. the Statler-Hilton, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaugan. Membership #. For information: New England Science Fiction Association, Box G, sachusetts #. the Holiday East Motel, Columbus, Ohio #. Guest of Honor: Terry Carr. Features: Panel Discussions, Open Party, Banquet. Registration fee: #. Banquet Ticket: #. For information: Bob HiUis, # Byron Avenue, Columbus, Ohio #. the Hotel Andrews, #th Street at Hennepin, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Guests of Honor: Charles V. De Vet, Gordon R. Dickson, Carl Jacobi, Cliffo D. Simak. Membership: # -- register now and Monica, California. Guest of Honor: Randall Garrett. Fan Guest of Honor: Roy Tackett. Toastmaster: Harlan EUison. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. A supporting membership of # entitles you to all publications. For Monica, California #. Make checks payable to Ken Rudolph. August #-September #, #. ST. Convention. At COase-Park Plaza Hotel, # N. Kingshighway, St. Louis, Missouri #. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Fan Guest of Honor: Ted White. Features: Project Art Show; Masquerade Ball; All-night movies -- every night; Rock Band; Panels and speeches featuring all your favorite writers, editors, and artists; Auctions; Awards "'Banquet and the Presentation of the Hugos. Memberships: #, attending; #, supporting. Join now and receive all the progress reports as they are published. For information: St. Louiscon, P.O. Box #, St. Louis, Missouri #. Make checks payable to St. Louiscon. (.Continued from page #) which are being eaten by the serpents his fingers and who calls out oh god but conscience his father is birdheaded on the sky's throne and weeping blood. Resign? Never I Go home? The red laughter comes as he strikes at the brotherfaced thing below. "Yield and diel" Then cast... far forth... where Time is dust ber... and the night is a purple cockatrice whose name is oblivion denied... He becomes a topless tree chopped through and fng... At the end of forever, he lies upon his back and stares up at the Prince Who is his Brother, standing at all heights with eyes that imprison him. "I give you leave to depart now, brother, for I have beaten you fairly," come the green words. Then Homs bows his head and the world departs and the old world comes again. "Brother, I wish you had slain me," he says. "I cannot." "Do not send me back with this kind of defeat upon me." "What else am I to do?" "Grant me some measure of mercy. I know not what." "Then hear me and go with honor. Know that I would slay your father, but that I will spare him for yoiu: sake if he will but aid me when the time arises." "What time?" "That is for him to decide." "I do not understand." "Of course not. But bear him the message, anyway." U J) "Agreed?" "Agreed," says Horus. When he regains his feet, he realizes that he is standing in the Hall of the Hundred Tapestries, and alone. But in that last, agonizing instant, he had learned a thing. He hastens to write it down. Madrak. "He was here but a moment ago." "He has gone home," says the Prince, rubbing his shoulder. "Now let me name you my problem -- " 'My name," says Wakim, "give it to me. Now." "Yes," says the Prince, "I will give it to you. You are a part of the problem I was about to name." "Now," Wakim repeats. "Do you feel any different with those shoes upon your feet?" "Yes." "How so?" "I don't know. Give me my name." IF "Give him the glove, Mairak." "I don't want a glove." "Put it on, if you wish to know your name." "Very well." He dons the glove. "Now do you know your name?" "No. I -- " "What?" "It feels familiar, very familiar, to have the mesh spread across my body." "Of course." "It can't bel" says Madrak. "No?" the Prince inquires. "Pick up that wand and hold it, Wakiim. Here, hang its sheath about your waist."  "What are you doing to me?" "Restoring what is rightfully yours." "By what right?" "Pick up the wand." "I don't want to I You can't make me! You promised me my name. Say itl" "Not until you've picked up the wand." The Prince takes a step toward Wakim. Wakim backs away. "No!" "Pick it upl" The Prince advances further. Wakim retreats. "I may notl" "You may." "Something about it... It is forbidden that I touch that instrument." "Pick it up and you will learn your name -- your true name." "I -- No I I don't want my name any morel Keep my namel" "You must pick it up." "No!" "It is written that you must pick it up." "Where? How?" "I have written it, I -- " "AnubisI" cries Wakim. "Hear my prayer! I call upon thee in all thy power! Attend me in this place where I stand in the midst of thy enemies! The one whom I must destroy is at hand! Aid me against him, as I offer him to thee!" Vramin encircles himself, Madrak and the General with elaborate spikes of green flame. The wall at Wakim's back slowly dissolves and infinity is there. A rm hanging limp, dog-face jeering, Anubis stares down. "Excellent, servant!" come the words. "You have found him, cornered him. But the final blow remains and your mission is done. Use the fugue!" "No," says the Prince, "he will not destroy me, even with the fugue, while I have this thing for him. You recognized him when first you saw him, long ago. His true name is now near to his ears. He would hear it spoken." "Do not listen to him, Wakim," says Anubis. "Kill him now!" "Master, is it true that he knows my name? My real name?" T# "He lies! Slay him! Now!" "I do not lie. Pick up the wand and you will know the truth." "Do not touch it! It is a trap! You will die!" "Would I go through all these elaborate motions to slay you in this manner, Wakim? Whichever of us dies at the hands of the other, the dog will win. He knows it, and he sent you to do a monstrous act. See how he laughs!" "Because I have won, Thoth! He comes to kill you now!" Wakim advances upon the Prince, then stoops and picks up the wand. He screams, and even Anubis draws back. Then the sound in his throat turns to laughter. He raises the wand. "Silence, dog! You have used me! Oh, how you have used me! You apprenticed me to death for a thousand years, that I might slay my son and my father without flinching. But now you look upon Set the Destroyer and your days are numbered!" His eyes glow through the mesh which covers his entire body, and he stands above the floor. A line of blue light lances from the wand that he holds, but Anubis is gone, faded with a quick gesture and an half-heard howl. "My son," says Set, touching Thoth's shoulder. "My son," says the Prince, bowing his head. The spikes of green flame fall behind them. Somewhere, a dark thing cries out within the light, within the night. Section #. Title #, (United SUtes Code). #. Date of filing: October #. #. #. Title of Publication. If Magazine. #. Frequency of Issue: Monthly #. Location of known office of publication: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the Publishers: #I Hudson Street. New York, New York #. Names and addresses of Publlshtr, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street. New York. New York #. Editor: Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson Street. New York. New York #. Managing Editor: None. #. Owner: Galaxy Publishing Corporation. #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #; Robert M. Quinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Known bond-holders, montgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bwids, mortgages or other securities: None. #. Paragraphs # and # Include. In cases There the stockholder or security holders appears upon the books of the company as trustee or In any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements In the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear on the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which itself Is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been included In paragraphs # and # when the Interests of such Individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run): average no. copies each issue during preceding # mcmtha: #; single Issue nearest to filing date, #. B. Paid circulation: #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales: Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #, single Issue nearest to filing date #. #. Mall subscriptions: Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #, single Issue nearest to filing date, #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #; single issue nearest to filing date, #. D. Free Distribution (Including samples (by mall carrier or other means: average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months: #; single Issue nearest to filing date, #. B. Total dltribution (sum of C and D: average no. copies each Issue preceding # months: #; single Issues nearest to filing date, #. F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, polled after printing: Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #; single Issue nearest to filing date, #, G. Total (sum of B and F -- should equal net press run shown In A) : Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #; single Issue nearest to filing date, #. I certify that the statements made by me alrave are correct and complete. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher. IF IF  Special Feature We recently asked Roger Zelazny some questions about himself, his stories, his feelings about science fiction and the world. His responses were transcribed directly from the tape, without polishing or second thoughts. We think they are of interest to science-fiction readers, and we are pleased to present them here. T first got interested in science fiction with the Doctor Doolittle stories in the first or second grade; I was a fantasy fan when I was very young. Then, when I was in the sixth grade, I got hold of a book -- I can't think of the name of the author right now, but it was called The Angry Planet, I was eleven years old at the time. That was the first exposure I had to science fiction, and then I ran into a fellow who had also read it. We got to talking about it, and he said, "Gee, there's lots of other good stuff in the school library," so I went through the whole school science-fiction library shelves. I read all the Heinlein and everything else there. About two years later this fellow was in my same class, by which time I was reading science fiction in hard covers in the local library, and he told me about the magazines. I had never read any of them because I didn't like the covers, they looked awfully garish. But he loaned me some and I read them, and as a result I started buying them. Once you get interested in the science fiction magazines, of course, you read backwards as well as forwards So I started going around to all the bookstores. Then my friend -- who was about fifteen years old at the time -- sold a story to Ray Palmer. I looked at it and thought, gee, I can write better than he can. Pll try it. So I tried it, and I couldn't do it. I got a bimch of rejection slips. I wrote about two hundred stories, and every one of them was rejected. I was sixteen when I entered a National Scholastic high school story contest -- Harlan Ellison also entered it; he won it in his time, and I sold them a story in mine. They paid me twenty-five bucks for it, and they printed it. That inspired me to go out and write about another hundred stories. They were all rejected, but occasionally I'd get a little nice note. I had a sentence from Fletcher Pratt once, saying try again. Ray Palmer dropped me a couple notes sa # ung, "Comes close this time," "Didn't quite make it." Then I went to college and stopped writing altogether; I had too many courses even to read science fiction. I went through college and grad school, and finished all my courses for my master's degree, but I had to write a thesis before I could get it. It would take me about six months to write it, and I was afraid I'd be drafted in the meantime; so rather than writing my thesis, I joined the Army Reserve and served six months. After I got out I drew unemplo)mient compensation. You had to prove that you'd asked for a job at least twice a week in order to get the check, so I'd call up a plant and say, "I'm after a graduate degree and I only want to work for a little while, but if you need a person with an English degree to work at your lumberyard I'd be glad to work for you. They would always say no and I'd put their names down in my little book. The third week, I think it was, I was running low on lumberyards so I tried Civil Service. I took the test, and unfortunately they gave me a job. In the meantime I'd finished my thesis and had it accepted, so all I had to do was wait for the next time to come around to take my tests and get my degrees. So I did that, and got it. Then, having the degree and the job, I decided that the one thing I'd really always wanted to do was to write. Thinking about the best way to break in I started reading again, out of the usual academic area; and I went back to science fiction. I figured I knew science fiction; I'd read thousands of stories in the area; and since I had this much knowledge I might as well try science fiction. So I started batting out stories, for about three months; and finally I sold one to Cele Goldsmith. I remember the date of the first sale; it was very vivid. It was March #th, #. Before the year was up I'd sold seventeen stories. Stanley Weinbaum was my favorite science-fiction writer at first; then came Heinlein; when I got a little bit over him, I decided it was Sturgeon I liked best. I liked some of Ray Bradbury's stuff... It's a funny thing; I always used to loQk at the author's name. But I've noticed that there are a lot ef people who, when you say, 'Who do you like?", don't remember anything but the story. Weinbaum's characterization was something special. Just the way he treated man-woman relationships wasn't like science-fiction stories prior to that time. Weinbaum had witty people, and his women were real people as well as his men; I thought that was important. Some f his ideas were exciting, too; I must have read A Martian Odyssty six or seven times. The Black Flame had one of the few female central diaracters that I thought was handled well; I haven't read it for many years now, but it impressed me. In my own work, Lord of Light was a purposeful thing. I used various mythologies; I like to take a mythology that hasn't been used much in science fiction and see if I can satisfy both the science-fiction fan and the fantasy fan, throwing in enough fantasy to satisfy the fantasy fan and putting in enough the way of underpinnings to satisfy the science-fiction fan. The Creatures of Light and Darkness, on the other hand, is just a sort of a hobby story, a fun thing. I wanted to try every radical writing technique I could think of at the moment and write a way out story. I really intended it to be a parody of what is sometimes referred to as the "New Wave." Probably it won't be considered that. I guess I've used up all the mythologies now. I'm going to try something different next time. I liked Damnation Alley very much. I feel very comfortable with the "man against the elements" sort of theme; I was also very fond of Antoine de St. Exupery's stories about the early days of airplane traffic: Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight, I thought it would be nice to put something like that into a science-fiction setting, turning somebody loose against all the forces of nature. At the same time I had been thinking about anti-heroes; I considered using someone who had been sort of trapped into being a hero and reached a point where he couldn't turn back. I'll probably do more of that kind in the future. I owe a debt to an English teacher I once had named Ruby Olson. She was a fine woman who  knew a lot about writing, and she picked out about five kids who she thought showed some promise and tried to nurture this. Everything influences me. It usually shows up transmuted or changed into other forms in my stories, but I don't think a good piece of fiction should really be pushing any particular position. I'm not too fond of the "thesis" type story. I'd rather write the story and let the moral follow. E D Dear Editor: I think science fiction for many years has needed style such as the "New Wave" introduces. What really matters anyway is how Life reacts to itself. For the past few years a small number of science-fiction writers has really gone through some changes, seen and felt what the mind actually is; astronauts of inner space and science-fiction writers discovered they may have many more inner dimensions to work with. And what you do is write about it. After all, the most mind-blowing alien is Man. -- Bill Wolfenbarger, # West Hill, St., Neosho, Mr. #.  Correction: To science fiction, what really matters is how Life will react to itself. Or do all advocates of the "new" form really feel that man's thinking must remain forever static? -- Editors    Dear Editor: Regarding the letters printed in Hue and Cry on the subject of Doc Savage Magazine the information so far printed is somewhat lacking in detail. There were exactly # i Doc Savage novels, written from March # to the last issue, dated Summer #, in which the superhuman Doc Savage does battle against the minions of Satan himself. Of these, # were penned by Lester Dent, who died in #. Dent created and developed the character Doc Savage for Street  Smith Publications. Nine of the novels were done by Norman A. Danberg, four by Alan Hathway G. Bogart. For most of the series. Dent was writing one Savage novel a month, and he turned out some fantastic material at that rate, always with a realistic background and style. All the stories were published under the house name of "Kenneth Robeson". Bantam Books is now reprinting the novels at the rate of one per month, with James E. Bama doing the covers. When are you going to publish another Berserker story? -- Lohr McKinstry, # Park St., Bloomsburg, PA #.  And that should settle the issue of Doc Savage. Fred Saberhagen is busily at work on stories for us, and we hope to have more of his Berserker stories shortly. -- Editor. T# won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! O O O ) o f J O O o o o " O O O IJ o o o o o  # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finqgle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." No. CF-# by Emsh No, CM-# by Cullen Rapp The designs shown above are the only ones we offer I Club and agree to accept only fbur bools during the coming year. counts as only a single choice! How the Club works: Each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and more in their original editions. Club members get them for only # eachin special full-length, hard-cover editionsunless you select an extra-value book at slightly higher price. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your trial membership, you agree to take as few as four books in the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. No-Risk Guarantee: If not delighted with introductory#-book shipment, return books within # days to, cancel membership. Otherwise yqu will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member. Mail coupon today to Science Fictfon Book Club, Garden City, New York # Edited by Anthon.v Itoucbor #. A giant two-volume collcrtion of groat .science fiction reading. Over # page.s of exciting ilcJl#--foUr full-length novels, twelve novelettes, eight short stories by Hay Bradiniry. Hobert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Podl Anderson...Artimr C. Clarke. Theodore Sturgeop. Alfred Be.ster. and a dozen more. Counts as I choice. Pub. ed. # Please accept tny application for niemliersiiip in tlie .Sciciui Fiction lk)ok Club and rush the It books whose numliers I iiavc circled below. Hill me only #. plus shipping and iiandling. for all #. Then every month, send me the ('luh's free inilletin. "Things to ('ome", wiiicii descrilies coming selections. Foi Iiandling, unless I take an extravalue selection at a liigher price. I need take only four books witliin the coming year and may resign at any time lliereafter. delighted with my iiitroductorj package. I may return it in # day. pay nothing, owe notliing. and m.' membership will be canceled. Print Name #S. From The Twilight ZoDC by Rod Scriing. # spine-tingling stories that breach the gap between science and superstition. #. Dangerous Visions. Anthology of .#.I original stories never before in print by Sturgeon, Anderson, others. Pub. ed. # #. Inte'rraptcd Journey by John G. Fuller. The strange story of an American couple abducPub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. # #. The Past Through Tomorrow; "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # #. Psychogclsl, L. P. Davies. Three #. Fantastic Voyage. by Isaac Asimov. A miniaturized team of doctors invade a man's blood stream. Pub. ed. # #, The Time Hoppers. K...Silverberg. Population explosion forces thousands to flee back # years. Pub. ed. # #. The Flying Saucer Reader. J. David. Anthology fiction? Pub. cd. # #. F.lemen(#, I red Hoyle. Satan Circle the numbers of the # books you want: # # # # #I # # # # # # # rt meet and a sleepy village Pub. cd. # #. Colossus by D. F. Jones. Machine conquers man! "Ingenious... alarming". Punch. Pub. cd. # #. The Egg Shaped Thing. C. f-ngincer finds creature "programmed" todestroytheworld. Pub. cd, #. At! tire,' If iiiuler #, parent mti (Offer good in  WorTd # j Praiseworthy Saur  ,.u -- ft lir y Trial By Fire... and many other I stories and features! Pt  faN JF#?V v am I ' JMfl PIfl ! jm   . J #  Jr I inilrT # I  ajP eombiA.d w'k Here's just the first three months: (the best of the best) Brian Ball's exciting novel by Robert Silverberg: Zenna Henderson's (stories of other people... and tilings) by Dan Morgan... J. T. McIntosh's An anthology of science fiction devilment by John Wyndham, Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, and others... And April... well, save April for next ad, but remember: Vol #, No. # Frederik Po hi. Editor Lester del Key, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Burt Filer by Harry Harrison by Andrew J. Offutt by Roger F. Burlingame Trial by Fire by James E. Gunn by J.T. McIntosh by H.L. Gold by Robert Bloch by Lester del Roy IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York. #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights. Including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Guest Editorial, The "Hoax" Story O nce a hoax has been established, it becomes the next worst thing to immortal. Years ago, for example, I reported -- with a straight face, as befits the telling of a whopper -- that parents bought their children baby alligators, which soon outgrew bowl, sin and bathtub and were flushed into the New York sewer system, where they flourished on the warmth and abundant food. Now the publicity department of that estimable system has a printed form refuting the "fact" that refuses to die. But confession doesn't kill hoaxes. H. L. Mencken spent # minutes inventing, and a lifetime disowning, the story that winter bathing was illegal in colonial Boston, yet you still keep encountering it. Every year, too, someone will declare that Jules Verne described the periscope so accurately that the subsequent inventor of it was denied a patent. It's not so. Neither is the ever-repeated complaint of professional fans that today's science fiction is lacking in science. This charge is much more elderly than you might think, going back to the late #th century, when Verne, the elderly engineer of sf, bitterly attacked young upstart H.G. Wells, the basic researeher of sf, for not having Science in his fiction. There is room in this field for both kinds of writers, of course. But Verne lived to see most of his work become obsolete while Wells, with a handful of novels and a few dozen shorter stories, originated very many themes of modern sf. Serious people are working on Wells's antigravity, which Verne denounced as fantasy, but who is working on Verne's spaceship shot out of an enormous cannon, not to mention such funny ideas of his as clockwork machine guns and underwater bikes? This division of scientists and authors into basic researchers and engineers is a practical one. Insisting on either to the exclusion of the other is not practical. Naturally the engineer authors have more success in forecasting, working as they do on applications of existing knowledge. Sf is glad to accept applause for such successes, laintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality nd power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream conolled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your eative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they rere thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left nexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelgently these powers of self. Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old frarnity of thinking men and women (not religion), point out how you may fashn life as you want it -- by making the dlest use of these little-understood naU al faculties which you possess. This is challenge to make the most of your sritage as a human. Write for the Free ok; "The Mastery of Life," Address: :ribe S.HJ. San Jose, California # U.S.A. Scribe: S.H.J. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. Name. Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code but forecasting is not the primary function of sf. If it were, we'd have stories about the perfect clothes hanger and the like, exclusively. T o paraphrase a phrase-monger, the idea is the hero of sf . Here are some examples: It's a commonplace statement that da Vinci invented the auto, airplane and air conditioning. Lacking motive power, he used what was available -- springs and sails, human and animal muscle power. They were not good enough, though nothing was cheaper, and da Vinci, stuck fast to the knowledge of his time, as his followers were to theirs and we to ours, could not envision electricity and the internal combustion engine. Even if he had, how well could he have described them, much less work out the math and metallurgy, the chemistry, physics and geology -- the great number of disciplines that produce and move these everyday wonders? Could he then have gone a step further and predicted how these wonders pollute the air and water, the extinction of whole species of life, the forced migration from farm too small to be machine-worked to the city strangling with people and machines, the paving of more and more of our land so more and more vehicles can go murderously from one congested city to another? Thomas More's Utopia had telephones, generations before they were invented. Instead of electric wires, however, he used something that the science of his day considered workable: hollow tubes. Just imagine what a tangle that would be! Perhaps you remember Baron Munchausen's tale of the Russian winter being so cold that it froze voices, which were heard when spring came. Nobody believed him, of course. Yet we freeze voices all the time, and music as well, and do not have to wait till spring to hear them. George Washington's passionate plan to link up the vast new United States with an equally vast network of canals seemed entirely reasonable to his contemporaries, and it was pushed even more fervently a couple of decades later, when the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the infant country. The most optimistic citizens estimated that it would take # generations -- until # A.D. -- to tame and colonize the additional # square miles. At that moment, in England and in New Jersey, two inventors were developing the steam locomotive. J ust about that time, the King, having inspected Faraday's laboratory, asked: "Of what earthly use, Sir, are all these toys?" Faraday replied: "Of what earthly use, Sire, is a newborn baby?" Within their lifetimes, Faraday and Volta saw more progress than the millennia since electrical phenomena were first observed. Yet even they could not foresee, however dimly, the civilization built by electricity. Malthus predicted that population growth would always outstrip food production. It's hard to say which would astonish him more, a world that bribes farmers to prevent glut. A doomsman, he'd no doubt point to the underfed parts of the globe, and, tragically, he would be right. But they could support their populations with modern methods -- and huge areas of the world, like the interiors of South America, Africa, Australia, even Canada, are desperately underpopulated. Berlioz was considered mad because he scored his music for thousands of voices and instruments, believing that the resulting sound would be that many times louder. It wouldn't. But how was he to suspect that a neighbor, with just the touch of a heavy hand on a small dial, could drive us out of our homes with a volume that Berlioz could only dream of? Coming down almost to the present -- to #, in fact -- we sf writers casually had spaceships built by updated Wright brothers, never knowing that only a world power -- and a big, rich one at that -- could put a man on the Moon by spending so much of its treasure for so long a time. For that matter, whatever became of the spaceships we wrote about so knowingly, shiny on one side to reflect heat, black on the other to absorb it? If you date back as far as I do -- I sold my first story (at a very early age) in # -- you may remember a greatly respected author suggesting that we develop "science secretaries" to cue in people of one science with the knowledge of another. Luckily, before the planet had to be scoured for such phenomenal minds, computers came along -- lots of them, improving all the time, with memory banks able to hold all the sciences of all of mankind -- and retrieval time in microseconds. W hat point am I trying to make? Just this: that the idea is the message both in science and science fiction, and that explaining future discoveries in terms of current knowledge must always prove as laughable as the examples I've given. But that must not stop the ideasters. Their job is to get the idea written and published and read. In sf, that means presenting it entertainingly. And I submit that doubletalking characters in and out of time machines, starships and other standard themes of sf are not entertaining. For of what earthly use, dear critics of modern sf, are repetitions of tired old analogies that even now sound as hollow as telephone tubes, formulas and equations taken from textbooks and detailed is impatiently saying: "Okay, okay, so you've got robots (or androids or espers or whatever) -- now what's the story?" Certainly I exempt the fresh new idea, which comes along more often than sf is credited with and needs explanation, or even "explanation" -- but with two reservations: a) it should be woven into the story instead of dumped in a lump in the reader's lap; b) it should be taken for granted when, or if, it becomes a standard sf theme. That's not much to ask, is it? IF  Novelette It was a crazy world where the mountains chased the Janes. But it was a world Hatch had to save I I Tj'rom two hundred miles out she looked like a cheap plastic beachball, the mottled kind, mostly green but swirled with the dregs of every dyepot in the factory. From a hundred miles you could see the mountains, a strangely smooth ridge tracing a great circle through the poles. Stranger was the fact that they exactly followed the day-night shadow line. But strangest was that they stayed there, despite the planet's steady rotation, one turn every fourteen months. From five miles you could see that the swirls of color were vegetation. The planet was completely immersed in an ocean of moss. Layer lived upon layer, with the upper strata rootless, flowing as freely as colored water. The only bare earth to be seen anywhere was at the top of the mountains. Near the equator, great sweeps of the moss were sun-charred. From two miles you became aware of her piddling gravity. Though twice the size of Mercury, she pulled barely three-quarters as hard as earth. Radar soundings would show her to be nearly coreless, a recently formed, loosely packed dustball. But what was that silver necklace that ran around the equator, in a great circle perpendicular to the mountains? Dropping to a mile, you could make out individual beads in the necklace, sausage shaped and gigantic. Every now and then one would be prune-wrinkled or completely flat, like inflatable cells of some kind. And down there next to the necklace, barely in front of the mountains, was a dot. The dot was mobile; it moved against the planet's rotation to keep itself in the sun. The dot was Hatch's barge. S he shouldered her way across the landscape like a junkyard in search of a home. But there was majesty in her messiness, the sort that's inspired by old ships in high seas, alone among the elements. Mossy swells groaned under her hull on their way to the mountains behind, which hung there in a dustcapped tidal wave forever threatening to break. The moss varied in more than color; there were a thousand texMarjoram or something like it vied with minted marijuana and a dozen subtler scents. From every crest the wind tore fragrant spray. From every trough the salamanders fled like startled herring. The barge plowed along just just ahead of the twilight line, keeping a permanent sunset dead over the bow. From the planet's dayside a sweaty gale panted in over the gunwales, on its way over the mountains to the nightside, where it would subside to a frozen breeze. Yet for all its turbulence, the air was eminently breathable, moist, supercharged with oxygen. Hatch liked the air there. But what about everything else? He didn't particularly like the planet's speed of rotation. He spent half his time wishing the silly dustball would spin faster; the other half, that it would stop dead. If it didn't move at all, he wouldn't have to, either. He could sit on the twiline or the dawnline living in ease. Or if it whirled around as fast as old earth, the day-night temperature differential would equalize and he could be comfortable anywhere. But a seven-month day could get surface temperatures up near four figures; and a seven-month night lowered them to the sub-thinkable. This temperature span, combined With the looseness of the crust, had another implication. Where the cold side of the planet met the hot, some truly remarkable thermal stresses built up. The crust bulged to relieve them. The result was a smooth wave of mountains that forever chased the dawnline and twiline and, incidentally, Hatch himself. Galloping alps, he called them. So Hatch daily told himself he hated the place, a sort of perverse prayer. But he loved it, really, and knew he did. It was a dizzy hell but it grew on you. And it was all his. He'd bought it from GS with his severance pay, the very day they'd stripped him of his uniform. His uniform at the moment was a pair of shorts. He'd set a course parallel to the abandoned silver sausages of the T-belt, locked in the autopilot, and had just begun the " day's" work. Coming down from the bridge, he headed toward the starboard side, picking his way through the clutter. At one time this hoverbarge had been a mining craft and her deck was a maze of external piping, lockers, deckhouses, and radio masts. B ut the whole starboard side had been cleared off. Amid the general disorder, it stood out as plainly as an aisle. It was empty of mossmen too, which was unusual; not a Joe or Jane in sight. Frowning, he went over to a control box on the rail, opened it, took out the headphones, put them on. Just as he thought, the taped message he'd programmed for broadcast wasn't coming through at all. He didn't know what had done it, but suspected the swivel connections up on the antenna itself. Which meant he'd have to climb up and have a look. It was the tallest mast aboard, forty feet, and it waved in the wind like a reed. He went aft, put on his tool belt, and shinnied up. Yes, that had been it. A few minutes' work put it right again. Holding his giddy perch with knees and safety harness, he plugged his phones into the test circuit, and heard: " -- to the square floating object at the top of the moss. Don't be afraid of the big hairless one who will meet you. He will show you where to lay your eggs. Remember, every egg you leave with him will have twice the chance of hatching. Why should you leave your eggs at the mercy of the mountains -- " It droned on but he listened to it no more, knowing it by heart despite its length, since he'd composed it. It went on in the repetitious manIF ner of a sound truck trying to get out the vote, repeating the same message a dozen different ways. It was simple-minded, but Hatch was not about to change a word. The translation had been done at the rate of a word a day; and then expressing it all in radar frequency blips so that the Joes and Janes could even hear it had taken him equally long. He climbed down. Almost to prove the thing was working again, a black shape clambered up out of the moss to greet him when he returned to the work area. A mossman is about the size and shape of a husky twelve-year-old. Detail differences included: fur (black) ; spatulate fingers and toes for navigating in the moss (three in a bunch and ten inches long; and a small-eared, small-eyed head that could have been Alley Oop carved out of a coconut. She was a Jane, clumsy with the eggs she carried, and somewhat afraid of Hatch. He began a rather gross charade of egg-laying, led her over to a small deckhouse with a canvas flap for a door, and pushed her through. While she was busy, he started up a relatively quiet radar recording which gave instructions in their language for what he'd just done in gestures, for subsequent visitors. 'C'ven as he worked, another head appeared at the rail, and another. Big day, it looked like. He went over to the rail. He must have hit a school. At least a hundred furry heads bobbed just off the beam. Hatch never lost his fascination for the sort of climbing swim by which they stayed afloat and moved about. Waving, he got hesitant waves in return. They had a dose-to-human intelligence and other anthropomorphic habits along with it. Waving was one. Almost any human could communicate with any mossman by sign language, given a little practice. Well, no need to hang about. The recording would keep the operation going. As he turned back inboard he found his first customer waiting rather self-consdously for his attention. "What is it, Jane?" he gestured. "Your voice," she pointed to the smaller bitchbox, "said he would be rewarded, and also be able to rest a while." "By all means." He clapped a comradely hand on her shoulder, and with no more than a startled wince of just-understanding, she returned the gesture. Another habit of theirs. Hatch laughed. She aped it, silently of course, incapable of anything more than a hiss. Mossmen normally communicated by radar frequency yelps, generated by an auxiliary diaphragm, tucked behind their sternums. By now he'd led her back to the II still. He made a note to fill the hopper with more moss when he had the chance. Beside it was an array of fifty-gallon drums. Hatch considered. He'd been on the white stuff lately himself, but didn't know how the mossmen would react. While it didn't come out as clear as the blues or greens, it had better manners. The sweet, oregano-tainted milk picked you up off the deck all right, but put you back gently. Still, no point in experimenting, not with the crowd he expected today. Better stick to the blue. He pried the bung from a barrel that smelled heavily of bayberry and mint, stuck a finger in, licked it. It tasted as it smelled, and gave him a blip of nirvana that lasted half a minute. Definitely good stuff. He tipped the barrel into a tenfoot trough. Jane didn't know what to do right off -- she got most of her water from the food she ate, like old earth Koalas -- but he showed her. One slurp sent her shuffling giddily away in search of a place to sleep. And as she left, numbers two and three came around the corner. At this rate, in two hours there wouldn't be a square foot of deckspace without a sleeping mossman. Next chore on the list was raking the decks clear of moss that had sprayed in while he was sleeping. He'd been at it for fifteen minutes when something caught his ear. A boom and then a thin whine. He squinted upward. The red sun had a mote in its eyes, which was growing bigger. Hatch hmm'd. A few tourists had been by in the last six years, whose company he'd generally enjoyed. But the landing sled dropping toward him now looked too big. He hurried inside to turn on the guide beacon, and to put on a shirt. He reappeared at the rail in time to see the sled drop to deck level some thirty yards off his beam, and match speeds. Noisy thing, it had sent the mossmen stampeding overboard to the security of the depths. The sled's well painted hull had GS written all over it, literally and figuratively. He grimaced and went over to the line gun. But the sailor at her open hatch waved him off. No indeed, they'd shoot their line over to him. Shrugging, he stood back and watched the shot. The plastic blank looped over, dragging the string, got caught in the wind, fell short. Even from where he stood Hatch could hear the sarcastic berating being handed the sailor by someone inside. The voice was hauntingly familiar. A second shot made it over the rail, but would have dribbled back into the moss if Hatch hadn't pounced on it. He pulled the string which pulled IF the rope which pulled the cable from their sled to his hoverbarge. In ten minutes the pod had made two trips, depositing a nervous young sailor, and a female civilian on his deck. But the pod's third load was one hundred and thirty pounds of bad -- Hatch's old Commanding Officer -- climbed out and saluted. Hatch half raised his arm, remembered he was a civilian, dropped it. It drew a rather nasty grin from Handy. "Hello, Hatch," the thin man said. "How have you been?" "Well enough. You?" "Well enough. This is Miss Holloway of the Board of Estimate, and Personnelman McIntyre." He nodded, shook hands, smiling dutifully but never taking his eyes from Handy's. "What brings you here, Commander?" "Oh, we'll get to that." He glanced around the deck with pointed curiousity. "How's this little operation of yours going? Why don't you show us around?" TTe could see that Handy was  going to keep him on the hook for a while. Okay. He took them over to the work area. It was deserted. He ran through an explanation of how he was collecting the eggs. Handy's interest was the gloating kind, it seemed. McIntyre was too nervous to react at all. Obviously the sailor knew the score. Obviously the girl civilian didn't. She was fascinated. "What are the eggs like?" she asked. He took her over to the laying den, thrust open the flap. Mossmen smells billowed out. "They bury them in the dust on the floor here -- see -- which is what they normally do on the bottom of the ocean." As he spoke, his quick hands sifted through the moist dust, coming up with handful after handful of black, pimply bullets. "But there're so many?" "Right. They survive like rabbits, only because of their prolificity." He flashed a glance at Commander Handy, but the thin face was inscrutable. Hatch stood up. "You see, the mountains move across the everything but the moss, every seven months. They also destroy all but a hundredth of one percent of the eggs." "And what do you do with them?" she asked. Blue earnest eyes. "Fly them over the mountains." "Why? Why can't they handle the survival of their own species naturally? After all, didn't they evolve here?" She had no. notion of the sort of bomb she'd just dropped. For a long moment Hatch studied the egg in his hand, rolling it between two fingers. He didn't trust IP himself to look at Handy. "Well, it's like this, Miss Holloway. Some time ago, a bunch of men opened up a transmutation plant down here, and the radiation almost killed them off." The blue eyes widened. She pointed at Handy. "But he wants to -- " Hatch's turn to be startled. So that was it. Handy smirked. "Well, Hatch, I guess we can talk business now." Hatch led them up to the observation tower he used for living quarters. He had chairs enough, just. McIntyre set up a recorder, mumbled into it, nodded to the Commander. Throat being cleared. "Very well, then. Hatch, we're going to buy back your planet. GS has decided to reopen the T-belt." re going . Has decided . Hatch swallowed. Handy must be holding some pretty high cards. He'd forgotten what it was like to fear a man like this. But it all came flooding back, as vividly as the day of his Court Martial. Still, his guts weren't jelly, he was no quivering McIntyre. Hatch shifted in his chair, almost physically pulling himself together. "There was a time when you could say things like that to me, Handy. But I'm not in the service any more -- thanks to you. And this isn't government land any more. I'm a civilian and legal owner of this place. And I say -- no sale." Handy's birdlike face was getting white around the beak. "Read, McIntyre." The nervous sailor hopped erect, a five-by-eight in his hand, and began to recite. "Definition: Eminent domain is -- " He looked like a school kid sans homework, and at any other time Hatch would have laughed. Across the room, Holloway looked for a second as if she might too. "Definition: Eminent domain is the superior dominion of the sovereign power over property within the state, which authorizes it to appropriate all or any part thereof to a necessary public use -- reasonable compensation being made." Hatch looked puzzled. McIntyre turned the card over. "Eminent Domain, Reference #: The People vs. the colonists of Tillman, GS Circuit Court, Sixth Arm, Third Quarter. #. "It was established that, despite private ownership of the Planetoid Tillman, the colonists thereon must deliver same to public ownership for a reasonable price. Necessary public use was invoked since the core of said planetoid was the only known source of radioantigen #-A in the galaxy, and an epidemic of intestinal cancer had broken out in the sixth arm, affecting humans and many other denizens thereof. "Precedent set: It was recognized that surrender of this planetoid would mean the death of the fourteen colonists, who had developed environmental, adaptive and other physiological dependencies on it. "While the court strongly deplored the implications of such action, it was deemed just, in light of the disproportionately high number of GS citizens who might otherwise die of cancer." AyT clntyre sat down. Hatch stood up, pointing angrily through the transplas wall at the string of silver beads resting out on the horizon. "That's no goldmine of #-A. That's a broken down T-belt that makes ordinary fuel, and not very efficiently either. That's a T-belt that should never have been opened, and wouldn't have been if you hadn't been so goddarrw stubborn. Just who decided it y s so necessary?" Handy's face contorted, but to his credit; his voice was soft. "I have news for you, my friend. I've been reassigned. Do you have any idea what my new billet is?" Even softer now, the jaw quivering with malice. "I'm Adviser to the President on Fuel Resources. I've declared a shortage. I'm going to reopen that belt. I'm going to get you, Hatch. I'm going to get -- " There were tears in the man's eyes. Hatch's face was rigid, stark white. McIntyre forgot to breathe. Holloway's face filled with revulsion. Finally, composing himself, the Commander got to his feet. "Miss Holloway will remain here a few days to assess your belongings and determine 'reasonable compensation.' " He did an about face and walked out. McIntyre snapped the recorder shut, sprang up, scampered after. In five minutes they'd both cabled over to the landing sled, and in ten it was a dot against the sun once again. Hatch squinted after them. "I'm sorry, Hatch," said a timid voice beside him. "Sure you are," he snorted, turning to her, rubbing his eyes. "Oh, but I am. I had no idea of this vendetta of his." She said a lot more, which while not making him feel any better, succeeded in convincing him she was sincere. He looked her over. S he was cheerleader cute, almost a prettiness. Wide-set blue eyes he'd already noticed. Lips full and so nicely bowed that there was a little part in the middle, even with them closed. The face was, naturally, heartshaped; the hair blonde; and the blouse crowded. Her name had to be Jill, he thought. When she'd talked herself out, he asked her. "Nadine," she said. "What's so funny?" "Nothing. Well look, Nadine. I was in the process of raking up when you came down. So why don't IF you go back inside, and later -- " "No, no, I'll kelp." She was quite a circus. Not having the best sea legs in the world, she did a lot of grabbing and leaning -- on her rake, the bulkheads, Hatch himself -- and even then managed one beautiful sprawl. But she got a kick out of the smells, though not digging the salamanders which lived in the stuff. They'd been working twenty minutes when Nadine met her first mossman. She was back near the work area, picking moss from the jungle of stays and antennae that made up Hatch's communications masts. He was midships at the time, but her screech had no trouble making the trip. Nor did Hatch. Galloping back, he found her backed up against the deckhouse, waving her rake at the Jane. The loudspeaker was still on, and now that Handy's sled had left, they were filtering back toward the barge. This was the first to climb in over the rail, however. Hatch laughed. "Relax, Nadine. Hey Jane -- that's right -- over here." With broad gestures he led her to the laying den. When she was out of sight behind the flap, Nadine said, "I need a drink." They were standing right next to the still. Hatch offered her a cup and a warning. She took the cup but not the warning and got lifted off in two swallows. Hatch decided what the hell, he had as good a reason to blow his mind now as ever, and followed suit. They ended up sitting with their backs to the deckhouse, within an arm's length of the spigot. He told her the one about the trisexual rigelian cabbage, and she responded with the limerick that began, "There once was a fruit-bat named Freddy." Hatch told her she didn't look the type for that kind of joke and she said oh yeah. The conversation drifted in a more serious direction. Whatever had gone on between himself and Handy? Hatch considered. The sun was where it belonged, the speed about right, the old T-belt steady off the beam. No need to check the autopilot. Hatch took a big swig, a deep breath, and began. Ill H e'd been a First Class Petty Officer. Rating: Transmutation Technician. A T-tech's work was the upgrading of stable elements into fissionables by first gasifying the base metal and then irradiating the hell out of it. It sounded hairy to Nadine but Hatch said no, not really. The process wasn't that complicated but required two things: a base ore with both lead and actinium in it, and a whole lot of energy to pour into the beta beam. This planet had both, so GS had sent his old outfit down to exploit it. And yes, Handy was the C.O. There were several hundred men at first, to get the T-belt built. He waved toward the horizon where it floated on the moss like a string of gigantic silver sausages. Girding the entire planet, their thermoelectric skin produced energy from the hotside-coldside temperature differential. Except for a central conduit, the sausages contained only a few gallons of sealant and a small pump to keep the boron-fibred, plastic skin inflated. In spite of its simplicity, the Tbelt had been hard to build. Most of the materials had to be mined from the planet itself. Actually mining was hardly an appropriate word for the screwball operation they carried out. They started at the dawnline. moss, they quickly dropped in a crew and equipment. As the mine rotated out into the hotside, then, they had the thermal insulation of the moss itself. Oh, it helped; but temperatures approached one-sixty. Men had to wear suits. You can imagine how the T-crew envied the mossmen, whose tolerance made them comfortable right up to boiling water temperatures. Sometimes a mossman would show up with bits of charred vegetation in his fur, indicating he'd been as close to the surface as the flame area. Anyway, the heat was just part of it. The mine was actually a dust sifting operation -- since the upper strata of the crust had been pulverized by the galloping alps. Then, just after they'd got things going, seven months would be up and here came the mountains at the twiline. There was a mad scramble to get out in time, and more than once someone didn't make it. Finally, since the mountains obliterated their digs each half-rotation, it was necessary to go through the whole mess from scratch, each time. I n short, the project was almost impossible. But Handy never quit. Not when GS was currently putting four stripes on the sleeves of successful T-Group C.O.'s. The man was crazy. They both drank to that. But whatever the engineering problems might have been, Hatch's planet was a natural scientist's paradise. Ever since man had broken free of the solar system, he'd been disappointed at how little life there was in the galaxy. Plants were rare, animals rarer, and intelligent beings -- fellow citizens of the Galaxy -- well, there were exactly two species. To find life in as inhospitable and bizarre a place as this had been quite a surprise. And what adaptations! The mossmen, for instance. They began as eggs laid at the twiline. When oncoming mountains engulfed both IE parents and eggs, the parents died but one egg in a thousand lived through it. Because of the cold, the surviving eggs simply sat on the bottom as the planet made its ponderous, seven month half-turn. Then they were hit again, this time by the dawnline mountains. What few survived this onset usually hatched. All it took was two hours of dayside temperatures. They popped out of the shell as miniature adults, and started eating. Salamanders, mostly. And moss. They reached full size and maturity in less than a month. Instinctively, they always moved against the motion of the planet, just as did Hatch's hoverbarge. Their language was also instinctive, as was a strong social sense and a gentle mortality that was almost oriental. They were good, Hatch said. Nadine nodded. Hatch went on. Well, flesh and blood isn't a hoverbarge, and sooner or later the mountains caught up with all of them. They got old and couldn't keep up. Finally, they fell back to the twiline -- where Hatch was right now -- and spent their final weeks laying eggs on the bottom before the mountains got them. As they spoke, a procession of Janes had come aboard, left their clutch, and wandered past on their way to and from the still. They lay all about, sleeping off a fraction of what must be perpetual exhaustion. Nadine pointed to one, asked how old she was and how much longer she could keep up. Hatch said, oh, maybe five years, with a month or two to go. About average. Nadine was visibly upset by this, so he hurried on with his story. Tt began when the construction crew began putting mossmen to work in the mines. No, it wasn't slave labor. The Joes actually liked being near the creatures that fascinated them so. And they liked learning things, such as what clothes were and how a wheel or a shovel worked. But the mines didn't move against the planet. A lifespan which any normal mossman could stretch to six or seven years was chopped off in seven months. Handy got away with it because he hadn't ever reported the mossmen's existence to home base. This, Hatch had decided right off, was a rotten thing to do to someone nearly as smart as yourself. He was among the minority of crewmen who regarded the mossmen as sub-humans rather than superanimals. And being the sort of man he was, he decided to do something about it. When he formed a committee and appealed to Commander Handy, he found himself in the brig. Handy hadn't even spoken to them. When Hatch had finished his little speech, the Commander had simply nodded to the Master at Arms and gone on sipping coffee and reading reports. Six days. TJ c got a month -- and was bust ed to Second Class -- for writing his GS Rep. Then he was busted right down to SR for smuggling a spool back earthside to the newstapers. After that, Hatch got smart and went underground. He smuggled a smart old Joe into his section of the crew's barge and began training him. A Personnelman buddy of his swiped an IQ test for aliens -- which GS gave to determine how humanity would subsequently treat them. It was mostly non-participatory as such tests had to be, and it measured reaction to various stimuli. Joe passed. The mossmen were legally intelligent and had full GS citizenship. So he'd sent the test earthside, out of the mines and a hero's status for himself. But Handy swore he'd kill him, just as soon as he faded from the limelight. For the moment however, he couldn't even put him in the brig. Then two things happened. For one, the T-belt was finished even without the mossmen's help; and the galloping alps began to systematically wreck it, for another. Handy needed every T-Tech he had. Hatch was the best there was. His competence prevented the terminal accident his Commander had dreamed of, over and over, late at night. Hatch almost felt secure again. The construction crew went home and only sixty men ran the T-belt and barges. Despite the continuing stream of repair work, their output of suburanic fuel was passable. It began to look like the station might be a success. "Until?" asked Nadine. Until the radioactive ash from the men. Trouble was, the processing barges hovered right over the twiline where the Janes laid their eggs, and sterilized a lot of them. The yield began to drop. So Hatch had stowed away in a supply ship, gone back to earth, T-belt was shut down. Handy remained a Commander. But Hatch was court martialled. If Handy could have gotten him in the brig, he'd have been a dead man. But all this happened at the Arctic Naval Base back on earth, so he was powerless. IV N adine had been listening so closely that she'd forgotten her cup. Hatch had been talking too much to bother with his, and they were both back down. "So you bought the place and moved in. Why?" Hatch eased her off his lap -- a little embarrassed now -- and IF stood up. "Because a lot of irreparable harm was done before I could stop Handy. The mossmen were cut down so far that they can't maintain their number. They're dying out." They went into the obs tower to eat. Hatch was talked out, brooding. Nadine rummaged through the mess of his food prep locker and put the semblance of a salad together. They drank water. She let him take his time. "I guess you'll want to start assessing things," he said finally. "Forget it for now." She came around behind his chair and put her hands on his shoulders. "Richhave re-directed his entire career in the service to get the job he's got now. To get you." Hatch laughed. "But for all that, he got me. Public domain seems to be the biggest single hole in the bill of rights. In the final analysis, the majority has the power of life and death over the minority." "And it's not really applicable," she said. "There's no real fuel shortage." "But what court is going to refuse the word of the President's Advisor on that count? No, he's got me." Hatch checked his watch, got up, stretched, turned to her. "Day's half shot, and I haven't done a thing. Not that it'll make much difference now, but what the hell." Nadine was surprised at how quickly she got used to the mossmen. She worked together with Hatch now, directing the Janes to the nests, placating the Joes, collecting the eggs when the nests were full. Hatch was sweating in the sun, half naked, walking among them. Patting, smiling, a continuous charade of goodwill and congratulation. She saw him as an Indian, a latter-day noble savage, holding a dying tribe together for its own sake. Finally, he turned off the recordings, and the newcomers diminished to a trickle. They, had only to transfer the eggs to the storage holds, Hatch said, and then wrap it up for the day. S he helped slide them down into four huge refrigerated holds. All souls, he told her. Enough to repopulate the galaxy. "Why such a backlog?" she wondered. Well, because only recently had he developed a method of ferrying them over the mountains. But he had it now and would probably stop collecting soon and concentrate full time on that phase of the operation. "And how do you get them across?" she asked. "Would you like to see how it was done?" he answered. "Yes." So when all the eggs were stored, he led her to what had been a lifeboat locker, back near the stern. They had to pick away among the bodies of several hundred sleeping mossmen. Hatch went in and turned on the light. The small shed had been converted to a hangar. Eighty percent of the room was filled with boron plastic silk. Hatch poked at a control board near the door and the roof slid open. A compressor whistled to life and the jumbled fabric began to shape into a flabby cigar. When it tightened into a blimp, she could see that a nacelle had been at the bottom of the pile. It bore what seemed to her like much too big an engine, a laser, and a rudimentary bomb bay and doors. They loaded it with about ten thousand eggs. Hatch got the motor started, and cast off the cables. They watched it lurch up into the hot wind. "Come up to the bridge," he said. "The radio control panel's there." Like everything else on the barge, Hatch's RC equipment was a real kitchen job. He combined Ford's ingenuity with Goldberg's total lack of regard for symmetry. Amid the mechanoelectrochemiphysical mess of it all was a screen, and on that screen was the blimp. It was being swept rapidly astern toward the mountains. Hatch motioned her to sit beside him as he brought up power to the antenna, and then plunged into lipbiting concentration. It was as if they rode with it. He directed the thing by a dummy stick and half a dozen toggles. The blimp began to pick up altitude, but slowly. He gave it more throttle and steeper flaps. She nosed up more quickly now. The mountains rolled ever closer in the background, and the violence of all that moving earth was a frightening thing. Nadine said she was glad she couldn't hear it. It didn't look at first as if they'd make it. The engine was a monster, but the wind was more monstrous. He cranked on full throttle, full flaps. The screen flashed black as the tracking radar went out of sync; and Hatch fumed to get the picture back. When he did he heard Nadine gasp. Not a hundred feet separated the lurching limp from the hellstorm of dust and moss below it. But an inch would have been enough. Hatch let out his breath lftudly and smiled. T he nightside stretched out before them like a burnt, black blanket. You could almost feel the cold. Hatch slowed to a hover. All around them the dust settled down through the moss, perpetuating the the same weird ecology it had since this particular world had begun. IF He fired the laser, tunneling into the moss at a very shallow angle, perhaps ten degrees, and counted silently to himself, to twenty. They were quite low. The surface of the freezing moss lay only fifteen feet away. The hole was ten feet wide now. Hatch couldn't miss. He dropped a thousand eggs, and they rolled on down the shaft. "Bravo," Nadine said, and mimicked one of the faces he made when congratulating the mossmen. He grinned. They repeated the process until the eggs were gone. He got back the altitude more easily coming back unladen, and they cleared the mountains by a thousand feet. In an hour the blimp was hissing out its helium in the hangar. They went down and tucked it in. He could see the girl was tiring, though she didn't complain. It had been eight hours since she'd come down from Handy's orbiting cruiser, and she'd been working most of them. His suggestion of a break drew a nod and quick imitation of a bear woofing and collapsing on the deck. "Do you always made faces?" he asked as they went up. "Yes." Hatch cooked this time. In the midst of his typically misdirected pan rattling, Nadine commented that he was perhaps the worst organized human she'd ever seen. Hatch chuckled but he was hurt. "I don't know. Take what we did today. It's pretty systematic, isn't it?" "Yes, but we only did half the job. Too bad you can't get them over the far twiline too," she mused. "Though halfway around the world's some blimp trip -- " "Right. And no gasbag would stay buoyant in that cold." She sat up. "Still, I'll bet there's a better way. You could -- " But then she wilted and looked apologetically at Hatch. They ate, carrying on a glum but realistic conversation. When would Handy be back down for her? In a few hours. They discussed what various things were worth. Nadine made a few notes. Would he come back to earth with them? No, he'd stick around. Even with the Tbelt running, there might be something he could do for the mossmen. She suggested that Handy would probably kick him off as soon as the transaction was complete. Hatch shrugged. "Eminent domain," he sighed. "Majority be served, minority be damned." Twenty-three seconds of silence. "Hatch?" She pointed down. "This barge." Raised eyebrows. "Could it survive a run over the mountains?" "Well, suppose it could. Suppose eggs over the mountains, across the coldside, across the dawnline mountains -- and lay them in the dayhatch, right?" "I don't dig." "Majority. There aren't that many other intelligent beings in the galaxy, don't you see? Handy couldn't invoke public domain." y 'T'he barge sidled closer to the Tbelt. Nadine was nervous about handling the controls, but there was no other way. Hatch had spent the entire trip over explaining them to her. The ship handled like a pig, and he impressed this on her. Course corrections came with agonizing slowness. From this distance the T-cells loomed like Enterprise-sized gray elephants, stumbling along trunk to tail. Nadine kept saying she felt she was going to get stepped on any minute. Hatch pinched the meagre fat of her waist reassuringly, and left the bridge. Down on deck, he prepared to board the T-belt. Just like the old days. He'd used some of the same procedures, too. Since both the wind and the roughness of the moss diminished as you moved further away from the mountains, he'd driven them thirty miles out into the hotside. But if it was less stormy here, it was hotter. IF The sun was orange, not red, and Hatch's twiline-oriented pupils had shrivelled to pinheads. He could barely see through the tears, or think through the headache. He had on a full complement of TTech gear too, from tool suit to back pack, and the unaccustomed weight smothered him. He waited as Nadine piloted them in. He wished they could skip this whole operation, but he knew that the barge wouldn't have enough power for the trip up the mountains, not by herself. So he was forced to run a power cable to the T-belt. They'd make the run like an electric toy at the end of a cord. He stood by the line gun, arm upraised, one eye on the bridge, another on the approaching gray Tcells. She angled them in ever closer. Now they were actually beneath the great rising curve of one of them. He dropped his arm, and saw the barge straighten out to parallel the chain. They were really too far out, but he was being conservative on her account. Go too far in, and a chance swell could lift the barge up against the T-cells and crush them. He waited until they'd drifted up to the junction between two cells, then told her to cut forward motion. They'd have about an hour before the mountains overtook them. He aimed the line gun, made the shot, and put on the climbing harness. The line ascended at about thirty degrees to the joint linking two of the huge sausages. It was a tough climb, even for him. He was sweating so much that his hands slipped, even with gloves. Twice he lost hold and dangled heavily from the safety harness. TTe made it. Sitting on the two  foot central cable, he wiped his eyes, caught his breath. Down on the barge, Nadine waved encouragement from the bridge. The junction box was scarcely more than a black boulder of corrosion. It took twenty minutes of torching and chipping to get the thing open. There were four hundred terminals in a twenty by twenty array Half were positive, half negative. Most were dead. Six years of disrepair. He ran through seventy-three of the plusses before hitting one that was live. He kept on going, getting one more as an alternate if he needed it. Then he went through the minuses, nd got three. After bolting in the cables, he fused the insulation and shut the box. Getting back down was easier, because down is easier than up in the first place -- and because half an hour had passed. They'd drifted back toward the mountains and things were cooler and dimmer. And rougher. The moss was breaking in over the bow in dark streams as he touched down, and the wind turned each tendril into a whiplash. He was glad for the techsuit. They were drifting closer into the belt, too. He sprinted up to the bridge. As he burst in, Nadine wailed, "It won't go -- J " "Yes, it will." He took the stick. "Your face is bleeding." "You're crying." "I'm scared." So was he. The barge yawed violently, and the bow rose within yards of the cell above. He crabbed the rotors like mad, lifted the portside apron, and prayed nothing would blow. They got out. The moss was just as rough, but with the T-belt a thousand yards away, they wouldn't get mashed. He gave her back the controls. This time the deck was murder. They'd fallen back to the foothills. He'd put on a helmet, but the winddriven moss howled up under the faceplate, into his sleeves, up his cuffs. He was getting high from the scent too, which didn't help. He waded back to the blimp hangar. Inflating the thing in a gale like this was something he decided he would never do again. The blimp finally bobbed a hundred yards behind and above on her tether cable. But he had to do it again, to the auxiliary blimp on the starboard side. TTe staggered back up to the " bridge, a tight hand on the lifeline all the way. Inside, he nearly collapsed. She gave him water and thirty seconds of attention, like a prizefighter's trainer between rounds. He got up, walked to the transplas wall, looked back aft. The blimps shuddered on their tethers like fishing bobs dragged by a demented muskie. But they had the desired effect, that of weathervanes. They dragged the stem of the barge around and aligned it with the wind. With the wind and straight up the mountains -- backwards. At least they wouldn't have to worry about holding a heading with the barge's rudders. There was one final job, and barely time to do it. Hatch had to unreel as much power cable as he could, to allow them to get as far as possible from the T-belt, as it stampeded over the mountains. The mountains. Here they came. It looked like the whole world was rearing back to stomp them. Hatch put the helmet back on. He was back down on deck now. Not only moss but dust fouled the air now. And an occasional dark shape that went thump. The whole barge shuddered. The wind must have been sixty knots. The roar of it was deafening. A lot of the topside gear had been carried away. There was the rising howl of more moss getting chewed in the rotors. IF Hatch made his way to where the cable over to the T-belt arced off into the portside darkness. Tension in the cable told him his connections were intact. He opened the shorepower junction box which was set into the deck, and connected the T-belt's cable to the spools inside it. Under the box was a hatch. He went belowdecks. Belowdecks in a hoverbarge is a shallow crawl space full of things that make noise. He loaded the reels with every last foot of conduit on the barge, and pulled out the pins. They sang free. Then he climbed out again, and for the last time, returned to Nadine. They didn't say anything. No point; you just couldn't hear. Hatch piloted them as far from the T-belt as the cable reels would allow. Now, to cut it in. He flashed her a grin, held up crossed fingers, and threw four switches. Sixty thousand extra kilowatts from the T-belt poured into the support rotors and tried to make a helicopter out of a hoverbarge. Tt was a typical, Hatch-style  kitchen job in that it worked -- barely. She'd surge ponderously up to the full height of her aprons, and kept on going for five or six feet. While up in the air her pitching and rolling ceased, but she tended to rise high at the bow, reversing the slope of the deck. Then she'd fall back slowly, plunging the apron into the moss until the cushion built up again. While in the moss all kinds of horrible noises issued from the rotors as they hacked into -- everything. Heavy moss with treetrunk tendrils, cast up from the lower strata; dust and gravel from the bottom; and, most horrifyingly -- mossmen and other fauna. It was like being in an elevator on a starship during warp-out. No human gut can take it. Nadine got sick; Hatch got sick. Nadine collapsed, but Hatch wedged himself erect and did what little he could to control the ship. They rolled giddily up the mountain wave. The incline increased. They spent less and less time in the air and more and more in the rubThere was no more power, nothing he could do. Up ahead he saw the T-belt go booming over the crest, link by link. One burst even as he watched, and the thunderclap it made could be felt as well as heard. Now there was nothing he could see. Dust obscured everything. It filtered in through a defective vent. It stank of earth and burning moss and burning hair. As if the planet was compensating for its fragrance at the twiline. Hatch found himself standing on nothing. The deck dropped out, came back, dropped out again. They'd lost one of the blimps and now crabbed up the mountain at a weird angle, whipsawing back and forth on the single tether. He felt it first, then heard it. One of the four support rotors had sheared. The drive motor wound up to an astronomical speed. He tried to get to the console, but somebody kept shaking the world. He felt like an ant in a matchbox. He heard the motor blow, and gave up trying to do anything but hang on. Nadine slammed against him on her way to the ceiling. He grabbed her. The transplas shield blew in. Hatch blacked out. VI T Te woke up, cold, in six inches of fine dust, under two feet of moss. Nadine was shaking him. "Thank God," she said. One collarbone, an ankle -- though that still worked -- and a mild concussion for her. A hole in the head for him, some ribs, and a back. As for the barge: one blimp, one rotor, and everything that wasn't welded to the deck. He looked out on a barren metalsquare, punctuated only by the major tanks and houses. The outside temperature was sixteen degrees and falling. They were a hundred miles into the coldside. Item: turn around, get back closer to the mountains, and get warm. Two hours. Item: repairs, human and otherwise. Twenty-four hours. Item: check supplies, power connections to the T-belt, environmental units and so on. Prepare to dive. Ten hours. Item: Dive: The first thing needed here was a hole to dive into. They ran up the blimp and tried to burn a shallow angle tunnel not far from the barge. But the moss, recently uprooted by the mountains, was like water. It wouldn't hold a tunnel for six feet before caving in. So they had to run farther into the coldside, where the moss was frozen solid. The shaft was sunk within a few hundred yards of the T-belt, so that they could bury themselves as deeply as possible and still keep the power cable connected. They'd need it for the heaters. Their passage down the long, shallow tunnel was uneventful, except that Nadine got claustrophobia from the closeness of the reedy walls. When they reached the end of the power cable, they were about a mile down. Hatch wished it was deeper. But while the cold of the surface might get more quickly to them, they would at least have power to combat it. He scoured out a flat-floored cavern with the laser, put the barge in the middle, and -- for the first time in six years -- shut her down completely. IF They stood there on the bridge with the self-absorbed smiles of people straining to hear distant music. First the main rotors stopped. Not that they were loud, but they'd been constant. And when Hatch stopped the auxiliaries, his ears almost hurt. He was aware of Nadine's breathing. Finally, the hissing of air from the support apron -- accompanied by the slow sinking of the barge right down to its frame -- stopped. Even his own breathing seemed loud then. "Hatch," she boomed. "Isn't this weird?" 'phey grew used to it in the months that followed, and to each other. There were no problems, and nothing to do except turn up the heat every few days to compensate for their distance into the nightside. They ate, played cards, slept, talked, made love, and grew pale from lack of sun. Hatch sometimes took a torch and walked around out on the deck for exercise, but soon it grew too cold for that. Soon, in fact, they were forced to block off all but the most essential compartments of the barge to keep the heat. The outside temperature fell to sixty below. Hatch guessed it to be more like a minus one hundred-ten on the surface. Finally, the point was reached when they were living on the bridge and in the obs tower -- and drawing every watt their T-belt cable could put out. Yet still the temperature fell. The hoverbarge had never been meant for this; its insulation was nowhere near thick enough. Hatch was barely able to keep their living quarters above freezing. And then he wasn't able. The morning she woke and found both the taps frozen, Nadine got scared. When they were forced to stay in bed all the time, even Hatch got scared. They'd been under six months. As a last ditch effort; he started up the barge's auxiliary pile, to augment what they got from the T-belt. They celebrated by dancing barefoot on the warm metal deck. But it might well have been a funeral dance, and they knew it. They started saying dramatic things to each other. Last words, I love you, if I had it all to do over, and so on. It was in the midst of one such maudlin tirade that Hatch noticed the red blade of the recording thermometer was above the black blade. They'd made it. When the barge crept up from the tunnel, when the sunlight poured over the shoulder of the mountains ahead of them, Nadine cried. Hatch was surprised; she'd never broken before, not during the worst of it. Crossing the mountains was infinitely easier this time. Because the moss was frozen solid, it cushioned the heaving planet underneath. It was like riding a glacier as opposed to their previous salmon-run, upstream, through the rapids. Not that glaciers don't roar and crack; there were a few tense moments. Actually, they went up on a glacier and came down the other side on a smallish iceberg. But they came down intact, to the dawnline of the dayside, with 'T'hey sowed the eggs. They had  more than enough time before Handy found them. The GS sled descended with unwonted speed. They watched it fall toward them. The cablepod disgorged McIntyre on the first trip, whose immediate comment was, "Gee, we thought you were dead." Then came Handy, who said only, "Where have you been?" So they took him up to the obs tower, sat him down and told him. "So you came across the nightside. Why?" "I had a boatload of eggs, Commander." "Mossmen's eggs?" "Naturally." "Hmp." Handy looked thoughtful, cocked his head, sloshed his wineglass gently around and around. "So. I guess this was a last ditch stand to save the species before we open the T-belt, eh?" "Something like that." "Do you think you're succeeded?" IF "Sure. In fact, we'll have some overpopulation for a while -- despite the size of the planet -- until the bears come down to accommodate the available grazing area. After all, we increased birth expectancy from, oh, roughly less than a "To?" "Over ninety." "So?" "Tell him, McIntyre." "Sir?" asked the flustered sailor, looking at Hatch. "That public domain thing. Read it." Questioning spaniel gaze shifting to the Commander, met with an irritated nod. McIntyre hopped erect and began to recite. "Eminent domain is -- " He looked like a freckled sixth grader. "Eminent domain is the superior dominion of the sovereign power over property within the state, which authorizes it to appropriate all or any part therof to a necessary public use, reasonably compensation being made." The sailor sat down. "Now, Commander, what's thy sovereign power? The majority, right? And what's the galactic population right now?" Handy looked briefly thoughtfuL "Twenty seven-six or so. But -- " "Wrong. Fifty seven-six, thirty of which are mossmen. So you're outvoted." As Handy reached angrily for his hat, Hatch lifted a restraining hand. "Wait now -- don't leave yet. I assume that while we were gone you've been working on the belt?" "Yes." "And you've brought down barges and everything?" "Yes, damn it." "Good. We're going to open up a school for the mossmen, and we'll need facilities. When you go -- any time in the next ten hours -- This Month in Galaxy -- by Robert Silverberg by Hoyden Howard by Philip K. Dick by Algts Budrys Plus regular columns and features -- February Galaxy on sale now! IF  Short Story "Our race is greater than yours . You can serve in only one way -- die, and let us succeed you " #T TTe are there; we are correct. Y Y The computations were perfect. That is the place below." "You are a worm," # said to her companion #, who resembled her every way other than in number. "That is the place. But nine years too early. Look at the meter." "I am a worm. I shall free you of the burden of my useless presence." # removed her knife from the scabbard and tested the edge, which proved to be exceedingly sharp. She placed it against the white wattled width of her neck and prepared to cut her throat. "Not now," # hissed. "We are shorthanded already, and your corpse would be valueless to this expedition. Get us to the correct time at once. Our power is limited, you may remember." "It shall be done as you command," # said as she slithered to the bank of controls. # ignored the talk, keeping her multicell eyes focused on the power control bank, with her spatulate fingers in response to the manifold dials. "That is it," # announced, rasping her hands together with pleasure. "The correct time, the correct place. We must descend and make our destiny. Give praise to the Saur of All who rules the destinies of all" "Praise Saur," her two companions muttered, all of their attention on the controls. Straight down from the blue sky the globular vehicle fell. It was round and featureless, save for the large rectangular port, on the bottom now, and made of some sort of blue metal, perhaps anodized aluminum, though it looked harder. It had no visible means of flight or support, yet it fell at a steady and controlled rate. Slower and slower it moved until it dropped from sight behind the ridge at the northern end of Johnson 's Lake, just at the edge of the tall pine grove. There were fields nearby, with cows, who did not appear at all disturbed by the visitor. No human being was in sight to view the landing. A path cut in from the lake here, a scuffed dirt trail that went to the highway. A n oriole sat on a bush and warbled sweetly: a small rabbit hopped from the field to nibble a stem of grass. This bucolic and peaceful scene was interrupted by the scuff of feet down the trail and monotone whistling. The bird flew away, a touch of soundless color, while the rabbit disappeared into the hedge. A boy came over the shore. He wore ordinary boy clothes and carried a school bag in one hand, a small and Homemade cage of wire screen in the other. M the cage was a small lizard which clung to the screen, its eyes rolling in what presumably was fear. The boy, whistling shrilly, trudged along the path and into the shade of the pine grove. "Boy," a high pitched and tremulous voice called out. "Can you hear me, boy?" "I certainly can," the boy said, stopping and looking around for the unseen speaker. "Where are you?" "I am by your side, but I am invisible. I am your fairy godmother -- " The boy made a rude sound by sticking out his tongue and blowing across it while it vibrated. "I don't believe in invisibility or fairy godmothers. Come out of those woods, whoever you are." "All boys believe in fairy godmothers," the voice said, but a worried tone edged the words now. "I know all kinds of secrets. I know your name is Don and -- " "Everyone knows my name is Don, and no one believes any more in fairies. Boys now believe in rockets, submarines and atomic energy." "Would you believe space travel?" "I would." Slightly relieved, the voice came on stronger and deeper. "I did not wish to frighten you, but I am really from Mars and have just landed." Don made the rude noise again. "Mars has no atmosphere and no observable forms of life. Now come out of there and stop playing games." After a long silence the voice said, "Would you consider time travel?" "I could. Are you going to tell me that you are from the future?" With relief: "Yes I am." "Then come out where I can see you." "There are some things, that the human eye should not look upon." "Horseapples! The human eye is okay for looking at anything you want to name. You come out of there so I can see who you are -- or Pm leaving." C#Tt is not advisable." The voice was exasperated. "I can prove I am a temporal traveler by telling you the answers to tomorrow's mathematics test. Wouldn't that be nice? Number one, #. Number two -- " "I don't like to cheat, and even if I did you can't cheat on the new math. Either you know it or you fail it. I'm going to count to ten, then go." "No, you cannot! I must ask you a favor. Release that common lizard you have trapped and I will give you three wishes -- I mean answer three questions." "Why should I let it go?" "Is that the first of your questions?" "No. I want to know what's going on before I do anything. This lizard is special. I never saw another one like it around here." "You are right. It is an Old World acrodont lizard of the order Rhiptoglossa, commonly called a chameleon." "It is!" Don was really interested now. He squatted in the path and took a red-covered book from the school bag and laid it on the ground. He turned the cage until the lizard was on the bottom and placed it carefully on the book. "Will it really turn color?" "To an observable amount, yes. Now if you release her..." "How do you know it's a her? The time traveler bit again?" "If you must know, yes. The creature was purchased from a pet store by one Jim Benan and is one of a pair. They were both released two days ago when Benan, deranged by the voluntary drinking of a liquid containing quantities of ethyl alcohol, sat on the cage. The other, unfortunately, died of his wounds, and this one alone survives. The release -- " "I think this whole thing is a joke and I'm going home now. Unless you come out of there so I can see who you are "I warn you..." "Good-by." Don picked up the cage. "Hey, she turned sort of brick red!" "Do not leave. I will come forth." IF Tvon looked on, with a great deal "-of interest, while the creature walked out from between the trees. It was purple in color, had large goggling eyes, was slightly scaley, wore a neatly cut brown jumpsuit and had a pack slung on its back. It was also only about seven inches tall. "You don't much look like a man from the future," Don said. "In fact you don't look like a man at all. You're too small." "I might say that you are too big. Size is a matter of relevancy, And I am from the future, though I am not a man." "That's for sure. In fact you look a lot like a lizard." In sudden inspiration, Don looked back and forth at the traveler and at the cage. "In fact you look a good deal like this chameleon here. What's the connection?" "That is not to be revealed. You will now do as I command or I will injure you gravely." # turned and waved towards the woods. "#, this is an order. Appear and destroy that growth over there." Don looked on with increasing interest as the blue basketball of metal drifted into sight from under the trees. A circular disk slipped away on one side and a gleaming nozzle, not unlike the hose nozzle on a toy firetruck, appeared through the opening. It pointed toward a hedge a good thirty feet away. A shrill whining began from the depths of the sphere, rising in pitch until it was almost inaudible. Then, suddenly, a thin line of light spat out towards the shrub which crackled and instantly burst into flame. Within a second it was a blackened skeleton. "The device is called a roxidizer and is deadly," # said. "Release the chameleon at once." Don scowled. "All right. Who wants the old lizard anyway?" He put the cage on the ground and started to open the cover. Then he stopped -- and sniffed. Picking up the cage again he started across the grass towards the blackened bush. "Come backl" # screeched. "We will fire if you go another step." Don ignored the lizardoid, which was now dancing up and down in an agony of frustration, and ran to the bush. He put his hand out -- and apparently right through the charred stems. "I thought something was fishy," he said. "All that burning and everything just upwind of me -- and I couldn't smell a thing." He turned to look at the time traveler who was slumped in gloomy silence. "It's just a projected image of some kind, isn't it? Some kind of three-dimensional movie." He stopped in sudden thought, then walked over to the still hovering temporal transporter. When he poked at it with his finger he apparently pushed his hand right into it. "And this thing isn't here either. Are you?" "There is no need to experiment. I, and our ship, are present only as what might be called temporal echoes. Matter cannot be moved through time, that is an impossibility, but the concept of matter can be temporaly projected. I am sure that this is too technical for you..." "You're doing great so far. Carry on." "Our projections are here in a real sense to us, though we can only be an image or a sound wave to any observers in the time we visit. Immense amounts of energy are required and almost the total resources of our civilization are involved in this time transfer." "Why? And the truth for a change. No more fairy godmother and that kind of malarky." "I regreat the necessity to use subterfuge, but the secret is too important to reveal casually without attempting other means of persuasion." "Now we get to the real story." Don sat down and crossed his legs comfortably. "Give." TX#e need your aid, or our very   society is threatened. Very recently -- on our time scale -- strange disturbances were detected by our instruments. Ours is a simor so years in the future, and our race is dominant. Yours has long since vanished in a manner too horrible to mention to your young ears. Something is threatening our entire race. Research quickly uncovered the fact that we are about to be overwhelmed by a probability wave and wiped out, a great wave of negation sweeping towards us from our remote past." "You wouldn't mind tipping me off to what a probability wave is, would you?" "I will take an example from your own literature. If your grandfather had died without marrying, you would not have been born and would not now exist." "But I do." "The matter is debatable in the greater plan of the universe, but we shah not discuss that now. Our power is limited. To put the affair simply, we traced our ancestral lines back through a! the various mutations and changes until we found the individual proto-lizard from which our line sprung." "Let me guess." Don pointed at the cage. "This is the one?" "She is." # spoke in solemn tones as befitted the moment. "Just as somewhen, somewhere there is a proto-tarsier from which your race sprung, so is there this temporal mother of ours. She wil bear young soon, and they will breed and grow in this pleasant valley. The rocks near the lake have an appreciable amount of radioactivity which will IF cause mutations. The centuries will roll by and, one day, our race will reach its heights of glory. "But not if you don't open that cage." Don rested his chin on fist and thought. "You're not putting me on any more? This is the truth?" # drew herself up and waved both arms -- or front legs -- over her head. "By the Saur of All, I promise," she intoned. "By the stars eternal, the seasons vernal, the clouds, the sky, the matriarchal I... " "Just cross your heart and hope to die, that will be good enough for me." The lizardoid moved its eyes in concentric circles and performed this ritual. "Okay then, I'm as soft-hearted as the next guy when it comes to wiping out whole races." Don unbent the piece of wire that sealed the cage and opened the top. The chameleon rolled one eye up at him and looked at the opening with the other. # watched in awed silence and the time vehicle bobbed closer. "Get going," Don said, and shook the lizard out into the grass. nphis time the chameleon took the hint and scuttled away among the bushes, vanishing from sight. "That takes care of the future," Don said. "Or the past, from your point of view." # and the time machine vanished silently. Don was alone again on the path. "Well, you could of at least said thanks before taking off like that! People have more manners than lizards any day. I'll tell you that." He picked up the now empty cage and his school bag and started for home. He had not heard the quick rustle in the bushes, nor did he see the prowling tomcat with the limp Make TfioseW#W Connections ifim. IF  Feature Our Man at Conventions tells us what went on at the other riots in Berkeley -- the sf convention l nphe doctor is gone now. doesn't have any sleeves and fits He really behaved very nicely, a bit tightly about my neck and and I don't mind all those tests he waist. "I have heard about the Loch gave me, or the way he tapped my Ness Monster and the Abominable knees with that rubber hammer beSnow Man. So who am I to say that fore he stuck the needles into my a Harlan Ellison doesn't exist?" arm. At least he listened to what I He shuddered slightly as he said had to say, and he agreed that it it, but he did say it. And then he could be possible; such things mumbled something about the might conceivably have happened. "cathartic method," and I hope "I understand,"' he told me, as that doesn't mean he's going to give he strapped me into this rather unme a laxative; not in this jacket, usual little Nehru jacket which But I think he was suggesting to me that I write everything out, just as it occurred, and I'm going to try. Even if I can't use my hands, I may be able to type with my nose -- it could even help me to make scents that way. I don't really care much for typing, anyhow. As a wise old editor once told me, "You can always spot a drunken science-fiction author. The only part of the typewriter he likes is the space bar." But I digress. And the time has come to gress -- about the Baycon, the #th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Berkeley, California, from August #th through September #nd, #. It really took place, you know. That's why I'm wearing this jacket. And in order to comprehend what happened, perhaps I'd better sketch in a brief background. Tour score and seven years ago "that's #, according to my arithmetic" the first World Science Fiction Convention was perpetrated, in New York. Some two hundred odd -- if that's the term I'm looking for -- science-fiction fans writers, editors, artists and publishers gathered together in a meeting-hall to listen to speeches and panel discussions on science fiction. There was much socializing, even more antisocializing, and a finale in the form of a lavish banquet, at I a head. Only # of the attendees could afford this expensive luxury in those faroff depression days, but the affair was voted a success. Since that time, with the exception of a hiatus during World War II, these Conventions have continued on an annual basis -- and most of them have exceeded World War II in their impact. Each year, the affair has moved from city to city, sponsored by a fan-group which bids for the privilege on a competitive basis. The winning masochists then undertake to put on a Convention, and these put-ons have occurred throughout the United States. Once a Convention was held in Toronto, and twice it took place in London, but always the concept has continued to grow and expand. Now a Science Fiction Convention is a four-day affair, frequently attracting upwards of a thousand guests, to say nothing of those it repels. Baycon co-chairmen Bill Donaho, Alva Rogers and J. Ben Stark, together with their committee members, selected the Hotel Claremont for this year's affair. The Claremont is a huge, rambling, old-fashioned place set against a picturesque hillside background, which has often been recommended by opthamologists as a site for sore eyes. But the attendance proved so large that guests were eventually scattered about in three other hotels in the Berkeley area, thus producing a full-scale Berkeley riot. The rumble began on Thursday IF as the fans assembled. Not just science-fiction fans, mind you, for seemingly the Convention is becoming a convenient vehicle for other groups to hitch a ride on -- a sort of surrey with the fringe-fans on top. There's First Fandom, composed "or decomposed" of elderly types who entered fandom thirty or more years ago, led by such stalwarts as Bob Madle, Dave Kyle and Lou Tabakow. There's the Burroughs Bibliophiles, spearheaded by such lovers of bibliofilth as Verne Cordell, Stan Vinson, Russ Manning and John Coleman Buroughs. They sponsored a special luncheon for their group and also put on a panel discussion which I attended. To my horror, I discovered they were not even Abe, but some obscure character named Edgar Rice Burroughs. Then there was a sizeable group of comic buffs, also on the program; devotees of science-fiction and monster-film fans had their own session featuring Forrest J Ackerman, Bill Warren, and Eric Hoffman of the Count Dracula Society. Another large segment of attendees were dedicated fans of Star Trek; producer Gene Roddenberry addressed them at a session with remarks as pointed as Leonard Nimoy's ears. ny and other fannish groups participated in the proceedings. And just to complicate things more, a considerable number of attendees were on hand merely to patronize the daily auctions -- where original manuscripts, teleplays, film stills, first editions, old magazines and original artwork sold to eager bidders, proceeds of this donated material being alloted to defray Convention costs. Chief Auctioneer Walt Daugherty knocked down one item for #, an alltime record. This is somewhat more than he obtained when he auctioned off Harlan Ellison and myself to fans who sought exclusive interviews. (That's what my bidder got from me; what Harlan's bidder got is one of those secrets Men Are Not Meant To Know) . At any rate -- or, at least, at the rate this magazine is paying for the article -- there was a lot more going on at this Convention than just straight-line, old-fashioned sciencefiction fanning. B y the time I arrived on Friday afternoon, there had already been a movie session, a fan revue, two official parties, eight unofficial parties, and nineteen feuds. The Convention was officially opened at noon, with keynote speeches by British writer John Brunner and American author Randall Garrett, together with rebuttals by various fans and pros. After I was conducted through the winding corridors to the spiderinfested ruins of my room by the bellboy (Dwight Frye) I wandered down to a Wine-Tasting Party to meet the authors. Here, for the first time, I encountered the legendary E. Hoffman Price -- a renowned name when I was a boy, a personal friend of H. P. Lovecraft whom I'd had the pleasure of corresponding with over thirty years ago, but had never met. He seemed every bit as much at home at this affair as Larry Niven, Joanna Russ or the other comparative newcomers to science-fiction circles. The next event, for authors at any rate, was the Science FictionWriters of America Banquet, at which I noted such notables as Jim Harmon, Miriam Allen deFord, Tom and Terri Pinckard, Sam Moskowitz, Ed Wood, Philip K. Dick, David Gerrold, Sam and Florence Russell. (I didn't actually see all these people at the dinner, but it's a sneaky way to drop a few names, and believe me there's more name-dropping at a Convention than pigeon-dropping in Central Park). While Star Trek episodes played and the Order of St. Fantony conducted its esoteric rites, I wandered from private party to private party, encountering Guest of Honor Philip Jose Farmer, his wife Bette Jos Farmer, Galaxy Gal Judy-Lynn Benjamin, and the charming couple responsible for the # San Francisco Convention, Les and Es Cole. Such fannish figures as Ruth Berman, Ed Meskys, Walt Leibscher, Leland Sapiro and last year's Guest of Honor, the little-known Lester del Rey, were very much in evidence. But, unable to keep up with such inveterate swingers as Leigh Brackett, I retired at the respectable hour of # a.m. and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep which lasted all of twenty minutes. Saturday I inspected the Art Show, the Photo Exhibit, and the Book Room, where hucksters such as Don Day and Earl Kemp peddled books and magazines to collectors and unwary passersby. Then it was time to hear Ray Bradbury deliver his talk in the Convention hall. Ray really turned on. Immediately thereafter I found myself in exalted company, on the platform with a panel consisting of Edmond Hamilton, Emil Petaja, E. and Alva Rogers, with Fritz Leiber sitting at my elbow to keep me in line. Fritz and Harlan Ellison later delivered a sensational reading of their works to the accompaniment of a psychedelic light show background. Somewhere along the line I met up with Bjo Trimble and John, AI Lewis, Poul and Karen Anderson, Wendayne Ackerman and a supper group consisting of the Kyles, publisher Bob Guinn, Carol Pohl and her lovely daughter, and her husband (whose name I can't recall) . And then it was time for the IF Masquerade Ball and Galaxy of Fashion -- one of the top events of any Convention. That is to say, the Ball is one of the top events, and the Fashion Show is rapidly becoming topless. 'Tphis particular Ball will be bouncing around as a topic of discussion for a very long while to come, for the Convention committee augmented it with the performances of three "name" rock bands and a light show by Great Northern. Those under #, including a conspicuous number of hippies, really were digging the mind-blowing sounds and the visual array of psychedelicatessen. But for those who don't grok rock or like psych, the deal was an ordeal. And the # costumed contestants for prizes were jammed into a narrow outer corridor during the three #-minute decibel-shattering sessions between parades while the judges deliberated on their choices. Jack Chalker, Chuck Crayne and others responsible for staging this affair were vindicated when next year's Convention-bid winners pledged a repeat performance, but I predict that amongst the older generation who will attend, one of the most popular costumes will consist of a pair of dark glasses and a set of earplugs. Some of the costumes were imaginative and outstanding; Bruce Pelz, Quinn Yarbro, Don Christman and Lin Carter were among the winners, and I can only apologize to those whose names I didn't catch from Hal Clement and the other judges I was too busy talking to Evelyn del Rey. But no one present failed to be impressed by Walt Daugherty and Elaine Ellsworth, whose "Android Rejects" costumes and pantomime are probably the alltime standout presentation in my memory of masquerades. Then it was private party time again, but while such youngsters as Frank Dietz, Honey Wood and Barbara Silverberg reveled, I crept off to bed at the respectable hour of # a.m. and didn't wake up until almost #. Breakfasting with Peg Campbell and her husband (John, isn't it?) and Lester del Rey, I then wandered about through a maze consisting of Louis and Bebe Barron, Jo Ann Wood, Donald Wollheim, Roy Squires Lois Lavender, Paul Turner, Jean Bogert, George Price, Mary Alice, Arnie Katz, Dick and Pat Ellington, Joe and Roberta Gibson, and a dozen others. For the benefit of completists, the dozen others consisted of the Goldstones, Sid Coleman, Ian and Betty Ballantine, Ross Rocklynne, the Busbys, Boyd Raeburn, Daniel Galouye, Dirce Archer and Vera tion Len Moffat and Elmer Perdue, but that would throw me off my count. And countingtime was about to begin. The Business Meeting took place, with Columbus and St. Louis competing for next year's Convention. St. Louis won the bid, and Missouri pharmacists are already laying in an extra supply of aspirin and tranquilizers. Messrs. Pohl, Campbell, Silverberg and Spinrad were among the hardy souls who manned a panel discussion after Gene Roddenberry's talk; the auction went into action, and I drifted off to tape a radio program discussion with Fritz Leiber. When we emerged, it was precisely twenty minutes before the start of the Banquet and we decided ?o drift down into the dining room. We drifted no further than the lobby -- there encountering a waiting-line which extended from the dining-room doors all the way out into the parking lot. A staggering # banquet guests (some of whom never stopped staggering throughout the entire Convention) were queued up for admission. If it hadn't been for the kind offices of Norman Spinrad, I'd never have found a seat. But he saved me a place, and quicker than you can say Bug Jack Barron , I was esconsed across the table from Terry and Carol Carr and several other people whose names were impossible to catch in the deafening din. The dining room at the Claremont is a maze of pillars, cleverly designed to block the view of the podium while at the same time trapping every whisper of sound, and I spent most of the time trying to outguess Norman Spinrad regarding our banquet fare. Tt was I who predicted that as a sentimental gesture we would be served some of the peas left over from the first Convention Banquet in #. But it was Norman who anticipated the chicken, with the tell-tale tire-marks. True, I did tell him we'd also be served rice -- but the only reason I knew it was because I'd noticed a wedding ceremony at the hotel earlier in the day. Neither of us guessed the dessert, which had been donated, apparently, by the property department of the old Dr. Kildare television series. But one doesn't attend a Science Fiction Convention Banquet to eat; the meal is just a toughening-up process to insure a strong stomach for the program itself. Toastmaster Bob Silverberg took over in fine form as a series of awards were bestowed; the First son, the E.E. Evans "Big Heart" Award to Walt Daugherty, the Little Men's "Invisible Man" Award to J. Francis McComas, and -- at intervals -- special Baycon Awards to Harlan Ellison, Gene Roddenberry and Silverberg. Randall Garrett and wife Alison, in full IF costume, performed a calypso-type ballad based on a Poul Anderson Novel. Fan Guest of Honor Walt Daugherty spoke warmly and nostalgically of his years in science fiction. The Trans-Oceanic Fan Fund, which annually imports a foreign fan to an American Convention or sends an American fan to a foreign convention, had brought the illustrious Takumi Shibano from Japan; he was introduced, honored for his fanactivity across the Pacific, while other foreign fans beamed up at him from the tables. Then the Guest of Honor, Philip Jose Farmer, took over the platform to a standing ovation. The ovation was repeated, and deservedly so, at the conclusion of his address -- in which he pledged himself personally to the principles of the "Triple Revolution" sociological concept and movement after an incisive analysis of the problems plaguing both science-fictional and actual society. Following came the "Hugo" Awards, presented by Harlan Ellison. It was a great night for Harlan, who walked away with two trophies himself -- Best Drama "City On The Edge of Forever" and Best Short Story "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream " Harlan, who first appeared at a Convention in #, as science-fiction's answer to Tiny Tim, has really risen to the heights, and such recognition may have to some extent compensated him for smashing up his car earlier in the course of his stay. Best Fanzine Award went to George Scithers, for Amra, a notable publication which represents only one aspect of his fan-activity. George Barr took a trophy as Best Fan Artist, and Ted White received a Hugo as Best Fan Writer. Jack Gaughan won Best Pro Artist Award, to much acclaim; he will be Guest of Honor next year. The Hugo Award for Best Pro Magazine went to the publication you are now clutching in your hot little hands. It was presented to Frederik Pohl (the guy whose name I couldn't remember) and accepted by publisher Robert M. Guinn. And it will probably end up as a doorstop for Judy-Lynn Benjamin. Best Novelette Award was bestowed on Fritz Leiber for his Gonna Roll The Bones , and the Hugo for the Best Novella went to two winners: Anne McCaffrey for Weyr Search and Philip Jose Farmer for Riders Of The Purple Wage . The Best Novel Hugo was presented to Roger Zelazny, for Award was given to retiring president Bob Silverberg, the # guests arose from the five-hour-long session and made a mad stampede for the washrooms. I made a brief, five-hour token appearance at the Galaxy suite and then bedded down with the spiders. TXhile the Tolkien Society of America convened the next morning, as is their hobbit, I breakfasted with Alan Nourse and his wife, then dashed off to visit with Richard Wade, who had "bought" me at the auction. Then I packed, looked in at the party which had just started in the Farmer's suite, and made a chauffeured dash for the airport in the company of Harry Harrison and his diminutive darling, Joan. My last backward glimpse showed the Convention still going on -- a concert of medieval music on the greensward beyond the hotel, preliminary to a full-scale Medieval Tournament. What happened there I'll never know; did Frank Robinson demolish T. Bruce Yerke with a broadsword, did Sid Rogers clout Art Widner with a pikestaff, and did George Nims Raybin get clobbered by Bill Rotsler's mace? The mayhem continued until midnight, but by that time I was back home, safe in bed with my own spiders. Before drifting off to sleep, I spent a little time reflecting on Science Fiction Conventions, past and present, and soon began to dream of a Jew conclusions. Conventions, no doubt about it, are bigger than ever. But bigger is not necessarily synonymous with better. There are, perhaps, a few changes which might be made to improve procedure and faciliate festivity. For one thing, there's the matter of the banquet. Admittedly the high spot of the Convention, it has now reached a length where additional Hugos may have to be awarded for bladder-control. Five hours is a long time to sit still under optimum conditions; not only for diners but for the dignitaries and indignantaries on the podium. In the early days, the Guest of Honor delivered his address at a special session in the Convention hall -- until, somewhere along the line, it was decided that if he spoke at the Banquet, more ticket sales would result. Then the Hugo Awards became a part of Convention tradition, and this stretched the Banquet program to its present length. Inasmuch as Banquet attendance no longer constitutes a problem, I'm inclined to recommend that the old order be reinstated. Let the Guest of Honor appear for his talk before the entire Convention in the hall; it's no "honor" to sit and wait for three and a half hours of dining and din before facing an already restless audience. Several years ago I put forth another suggestion, and I'd like to state it again. Now that Conventions have emerged from the smallscale attendance-problems of the depression years, there's no reason why membership fees couldn't be safely raised from # to # -- and the additional sum turned over to IF a professional convention-planning organization in whichever city is selected. The Committee would remain in full charge and sponsorship, but the professional convention-organizers would handle the increasingly difficult logistics -- and deal firmly with hotels and suppliers to insure, under legal contract, that management promises are kept. When a thousand or more people gather together, some of them coming from great distances, at great personal expense, they deserve the kind of treatment and the kind of facilities afforded to "mundane" convention-goers. And an amateur Committee, with the best will in the world, and the ultimate expenditure of time and effort, just cannot cope with the situations which inevitably arise -- the elevators which don't arise, for example -- the bellhops who don't hop -- the "#-hour-a-day" coffee-shop which closes due to lack of Labor Day help, or opens to serve thirty people out of thirteen hundred. None of this is meant to be a reflection on the Baycon Committee or any previous or future Convention committee -- and yet, until these matters are solved, it constitutes a reflection on all who strive so mightily to make these affairs a success. Perhaps this matter is worth consideration at future business sessions. M eanwhile, the World Science Conventions go on -- for fun, for fraternalization, for the enriching, exciting moments they provide. There's nothing else quite like them in this world -- or out of it. And if I recuperate in time, I'm going back next year. Next Month in IF anne McCaffrey And a cover by Jack Gaughan All the Hugo winners in the next issue of the magazine that was voted world's best science-fiction magazine for the third straight year. Don't miss March If -- a real collector's item I IF  Short Story The green man from Mars came for justice -- in a libel suit against Earth . He seemed to have a easel L ook, I didn't want to go to Washington in the first place. I am just a prosperous but honest trial attorney with clients in need of my gilded but glib tongue. I even winced when Miss Anderson said it was the Attorney General on the phone. "You mean Hank Layton?" "Um-hm." "Oh, God." Henry C. Layton was a so-so lawyer who was Attorney General of these United States because he campaigned successfully for President-then-Governor Barber, rounded up a sizable campaign contribution and was from Barber's home town. I've always felt that the last point carried the most weight. But he was the A.G., and I took the phone and listened to him babble frenetically. He had been sitting there trying to figure how to put the screws to a labor leader -- without forfeiting the muon vote in the next election. Then he heard a little noise and smelled a funny smeH and looked up. The gentleman from Mars had arrived, sans secretarial announcement, sans knock. And he hadn't come through the outer office -- there hadn't been any shrieks. After a brief discussion, Hank called his boss. In the first place President Barber was busy trying to figure how to put the screws on a corporation without losing its President's Club contribution. In the second place he was bugged at being interrupted by someone other than the military. He hung up. Apparently Hank tore his hair for a few hours and called good old me. Another Ohio boy. I resisted. Hank predicated the predictable. "Joe," he pleaded, "your country needs you, Joe." I snorted at the telephone's dolorous voice. Hank resorted to a more basic appeal. "This is a great opportunity for you, Joe." I thought about that. National headlines: Ohio Lawyer Saves World . That should parlay into a cabin and a boat on Lake Lumen, at least I sighed. " Green, huh?" "Green, Joe." "Hm. What are the precedents? Whose system of jurisprudence prevails? Who calls and examines the jury? What color will they be?, What's my fee?" He admitted ignorance; it was up to me. As to fee: "Joe, it's your country you're serving!" "I've noticed. The increase in social security I paid for my secretary this year was higher than the penalty I was charged because my quarterly tax estimate was low. Man, I'm serving!" I had made up my mind, in point of fact. But you don't sum up your case in your opening address. Besides, I wanted to hear his final plea. T did. Internal Revenue, it seemed, was interested in my tax returns. They might even be interested in them for the duration. "Jqst a minute, Hank," I said with malicious mien. "I've got to change the tape on my telephone recorder." That, please be assured, brought silence from the Attorney General. After a passage of time no doubt measurable in seconds but seeming to span hours, I could no longer keep a straight voice. I, in lay terms, busted out laughing. "Hank, I can't be blackmailed with threats of the Secret Police. And I have never and will not now accept a case on the telephone. But I will agree to confer with prosecution." I waited, knowing he was calming himself, wisely curbing a profusion of appreciative noises and taking a few deep breaths. "I am very pleased to hear that, counsellor," he said, and I nearly broke up agaim. "Suppose we send a plane dowm for you." "Suppose I catch one myself. I'd just spend the whole flight on your plane thinking what a helluva way this is to spend all the taxes Fve sent in the last five years. Besides, I'm in favor of private enterprise. Make me a room reservation and have me met, please. I'll wire my arrival time." He agreed, and we parted, and I buzzed Miss Anderson. I told her I wanted a reservation on the first Washington-bound plane and asked her to send Turk in as soon as he showed up. Turk is my assistant. learning, fresh from passing the bar, and about as green as the Martian in Layton's office. Then I called home. "What's for supper?" "Hamburgers mit onions," my wife Jodie said. "You're not working tonight, remember, and no meetings for a change. Oh, and John and Judy." My favorite at-home meal and my favorite talkers! "Damn! That makes it even worse, but... I'll be a little late." She sighed; you know the sound. But she's well trained; we don't watch TV comedies. "Thanks for calling, honey. How late?" "Ummm... maybe a few days, maybe a week. Can't be sure. I seem to be going to Washington." I watched Miss Anderson's progress across my office -- one of life's little rewards -- and conned a piece of paper she handed me. I nodded and winked at her. "I'm leaving at #:#," I told the phone. Jodie, as I said, is well trained She also knows me. She didn't say a word. My one true love knows when to make noises or wait silently, thereby forcing me to give her the straight nitty-gritty. I explained with brevity unbecoming a lawyer, and we said some sweet sad things, and she rang off to go do some packing for me. The plane was not a headlinegrabber, and I was safely in Washington a few hours later. Naturally the damned fools got me a suite. In Washington the only people who know how to be small are Internal Revenue. Within an hour of that I was meeting with my learned opponent, the eminent Martian attorney Lars Larkas. TT e was most definitely green, was   Lars Larkas. His hairless humanoid body was, in point of fact, a very handsome olive color. This made it considerably more palatable than had he been, for instance, chartreuse or bilious. He possessed the standard complement of two arms and two legs -- but with a pair of intermediary limbs thrown in. ObIF viously a Martian in the wrestling-ring, or, if you're female, on the livingroom couch or at a drivein movie, would be Bad News. His eyes -- two -- were set at the sides of his head -- one -- and moved independently of each other, like those of an Earthly horse. The vertical slit of his, ah, nose and the nasty upcurving tusks resemble nothing I know of, aside from things I've seen in my own bed after several drinks and pizza with plenty of onions and garlic, topped off with pistachio ice cream. His big cupped ears stuck out like those of a certain recently-deceased movie star or a certain recent president. The fact that his eyeballs were intensely white with irises of an equally intense red did not serve to put me wholly at ease with a visitor from a planet named after a war-god. My first impression of this first known visitor from space was one of inimicality. I hasten to add that I was wrong. He always looks that way. He can't help it, poor fellow; with big ears and red eyes and ferocious-looking tusks and a couple of extra limbs, what are you going to do? I was introduced as an eminent attorney; so was Lars Larkas. "My pleasure, counsellor," I said, with what I think was admirable aplomb. "The pleasure is mine, counsellor," he said, in such perfect English that he blew my aplomb. His voice was startlingly soft, for his bulk; a delicate susurrus. He did not smile, I noticed. Thank Godl We got the preliminaries out of the way and agreed to sit; I am six-one and not accustomed to tilting back my head in conversation, since I have never formed the habit of conversing with overpaid pituitary freaks called basketball players. Seated, with several feet of carpet and free air between us to lessen the slope from the top of his head down to mine, I was considerably more at ease. The fact that he was far too big for his chair made him look even more imposing, and I made a mental note. "perhaps I should add for the libidinously curious that he wore a handsome one-piece jumper or tunic or something of charcoal gray with a dark red stripe bisecting it down the front. The insignia of a practitioner of law. I liked that I "You must stand high in the councils pf Earth, Counsellor Blair, to Kav# been chosen to represent your nation and, generally speaking, your planet in this matter," Lars Larkas said. "That's something we should clear up," I told him. "There is a matter of jurisdiction involved. There may be one or two countries on Earth so niggardly as to object to so momentous a matter resting in the hands of the United States. I realize you have been through this before, but would you mind stating to me the exact nature of your business here, and the complaint of your planet? I blush to admit it, but we have not been aware of your existence. As a matter of fact we have proven quite conclusively that intelligent life does not and cannot exist on Mars" "Our philosophers have mentioned the same conclusion," Lars Larkas said, "as have yours." And we had a nice polite laugh together. He looked shocked as I continued to smile. I tried it with my mouth closed. He seemed to prefer that. I made a mental note. After all, it is rather unusual that man is the only beast on this planet that bares its fangs in friendship ! Apparently the -- to broaden the term's application -- men of the planet called Red do not. "I do not mind in the least, Counsellor Blair," Counsellor Lars said. (Patronym comes first on Mars, as in China. We all have our little peccadillos, as the American driver said in England just before he was creamed all over Berkely Square.) "As background information, there is indeed life on Mars. We are older than you, although not tremenduously older. Our race was full-formed though barbaric when your race first descended from the trees." "You know that for fact?" I could not help interjecting. "Our descent, I mean." He looked astonished -- I guess. "Of course. I state nothing positively unless it is fact, Counsellor." "Admirable in an attorney," I observed. Sets us apart from legislators. At any rate, Mister Scopes will be very glad to hear of man's origin, although a minister of my acquaintance will not. It'll play hob with his radio show -- please excuse me and please continue, Mister Larkas. Excuse me -- Counsellor Lars." T Te shrugged. "Of course. We for  got that you are still wrestling with myth on this barbar -- " He broke off and cleared his throat, which I thought was damned considerate of him. "There is also in fact intelligent life on Venus and on two of Jupiter's moons and, strangely, on Uranus, although the form it takes there would leave you breathless! It is rather more cold out there than on our worlds, and they are of course adapted to such a climate. Not to mention an impossibly abominable atmosphere." And I swear unto you Mister Lars Larkas shivered. "We have a union; that's as good a word as any. A concordat, rather like your United Nations, although ours is effective." To the quick, I thought. Be sure to wipe off the blood when you pull out the blade, you Martian male dictor! "Naturally the matter of Earth has been brought up repeatedly, IF particularly in recent years. Your people are a bit more warlike than most, but human nevertheless and intelligent, and we feel you would make valuable members of the Intrasystem Union." Be damned! He did not, please observe, say that we are backward! He did not claim to vast superiority! He did not say we'd have to be quarantined, or wiped out, or that we'd been voted down or any of that old stuff. It is nice to know after a great deal of propaganda to the contrary that one is human and intelligent and would make a valuable contribution to an interplanetary alliance of Red-Eyed Monsters! (I stored that phrase "The matter has come to a vote and you have been accepted. However a blackball was cast, and a point of law was raised. The vote was completed on a contingency basis. That is the purpose of my visit. My planet has sent me here to state its case, Counsellor Blair, and to endeavor to arrive at a settlement." "Just a moment," I said. "First, apparently you don't find our air overrich in oxygen? The gravity does not prevent too great a strain on your muscles or internal structure?" He nodded vigorously, thereby confusing me; I did not learn until a bit later that a nod on Mars indicates a negative. We will not discuss their indication of a positive reaction or affirmative just now; not having been treated to the blessings of an antisexual religion, they are an astonishingly open and erotically frank people. Fortunately he said "Oh no" as he nodded, thereby giving me a clue. "I have had a series of inoculations and I take antoxygenates every six hours -- Martian hours -- and I am wearing a brace. I feel little discomfort. As a matter of fact, it certainly is easy to breathe here!" "Try New York," I muttered. I had taken notice that he was as eager as I to get to know each other, to be polite, to otherwise take a roundabout course toward our final business, after the statement of which we might be enemies forever. It's the way things are done, you see. "You may be aware of our unfortunate tendency to debilitate with such things as intoxicants and depressants and the like. May I ask if -- " He waved a hand. No, two. Both on the same side. "Please feel free to drink coffee, which I find delightful, or alcohol, which we also use, or tobacco. That, you realize, we cannot afford, inasmuch as our air is thin and our lungs more important to us than yours to you." T considered that from an empirical standpoint as I extracted a dgaret from one vest pocket -- oh yes, I wear them; we conservafives need badges to distinguish us from the socialists. I found a book of matches in another. He watched with interest and, I believe, something akin to horror. Or perhaps pity. I was careful with my smoke, which gave rise to a thought. I went to the bathroom and turned on the light. Uh-huh; at once the blower or rather sucker, the little ventilator thing most hotel bathrooms, have came on. I left the door open and the light on and blew my smoke that way. It went wherever bathroom blowers blow their bathroomy essences. "This litigatory point existing between our planets, then, is the only factor holding Earth back from an open-arms welcome in the Intresystem Union, is that it?" I realized we'd have to do this all over; I had no secretary and thought it impolite and impolitic to switch on my recorder. I filled the tape later, and we later made an agreement to tape our conversations, too. "Precisely that, Counsellor Blair, and well put," he said, patting his -- that is, making the Martian sign of assent agreement. "Good. You seem rather more formal than we, by the way, and although I must admit I enjoy being called Counsellor just as if I were as important as someone with a Ph.D in Physical Education, I think it might be simpler if you just called me Joe, Counsellor Lars." Then is when I got scared. First his eyes swelled up, and he became in every sense of the word a BugEyed, ah, Martian. His fingers twitched. All of them, on all four arms, which is one hell of a lot of twitching. His ears moved. His big lower lip trembled, and the upper one writhed. And then I saw the tears begin to creep down his green cheeks, glittering like emeralds and trembling as his cheeks seemed to shudder. He rose, slowly. I braced myself, wondering how six or eight of my valuable innards had got themselves jammed up in my throat. I wondered, too, what sort of weapon my cigaret would prove against an acre or so of green flesh. He executed a bow that would have cricked Charlie Chan's back and a tear made a dark spot on the Federal Gold carpet. He rose slowly"You honor me most highly, most eminent Counsellor-of-Law of Earth," he said. "I shall never forget this moment. Nor shall the authorities on my planet fail to be apprised of your obvious connate comity! With honor this representative of the Sons of Lars accepts your name, Joe." TT#ell, I couldn't think of much   to do save sigh gustily and beam at him. I certainly wasn't about to tell him his English vocabulary transcended mine! At any rate, with a great deal of obvious IF ritual, he then reciprocated, and I was given permissionhonor to call him Lark. (Lark! # pounds of long green!) I stood up and damn near broke my back bowing. It seemed the least I could do, inasmuch as I was totally unable to obtain the cooperation of my lachrymal glands in producing a tear or two for the occasion. Then we both sat, and I started another cigaret, and my old buddy Lark let me have it between the eyes. "For many decades, and you realize of course we can and will spell out the full period of time, Joe; for many decades, I say, the inhabitants of your planet have heaped malicious, malevolent, and maleficient malignity on the gentle people of Mars. In your periodicals, on your radio, on your television, in books of both stiff and soft cover, in conversation and drama and even poetry, you have designated the gentle inhabitants of this sun's fourth planet as every form of monster and imperialist invader. The War of the Worlds of the Englishman Wells and the radio version of the same drama by his codefendant of the same patronym represent only the most infamous of the repeated libeling of my people by yours." He paused for breath. So did I. I remembered about then to close my mouth. The first interplanetary libel suit, with Earth's entire future hinging upon its outcome, and  was supposed to play Perry Mason for my entire planet! "Said libel will certainly have an inelectable effect on the relations of our two planets and our races for years, decades, perhaps even centuries to come. Thus my outraged people does state its intent to implead our case against persons living and the executors and administrators, heirs and assigns of persons deceased, of Herbert G. Welles, Orson Welles, Edgar R. Burroughs, Otis A. Klein -- " and he went on for seven or nine minutes with a string of names that sounded as if they'd been copied from the telephone directories of at least three of New York's boroughs; I hadn't known there were so many pen-pushers and typewriter-wranglers in the world. He finally terminated with: "... and the planet Earth... I" Without giving him pause for breath I made a figurative leap forward, mental sabre and raygun in hand. "You mean to tell me that the advanced race of a planet older than this, said race having not only interplanetary travel but being indeed a part of an interplanetary union, is bringing suit agains: my entire world for fiction? The countless stories by imaginative writers whose plots involve Martian menaces?" "I do," he said, unintimidated. I nodded. "All right," I said, with a great deal more confidence than I felt. "Obviously we are guilty, however improper an admission that may be for an attorney to make. However I make it entirely off the record and will no doubt reconsider before you take any official pretrial depositions. May I ask what are the consequences? What are our grounds for fighting the case? In other words what the hell are you suing for?" T ars Larkas of Mars -- they call  it "Srrickle," which means "dirt," same as "earth" -- drew himself up and formed twin steeples with all four hands. "You will show cause why you should not be denied membership in the Intrasystem Union and indeed forbidden to leave your planet until such time as full recompense has been made to our gentle people." Well, "gentle" beats "peaceloving," anyhow. "Please explain 'full recompense,' Lar -- Counsellor Lars," I requested, getting formal. I always get formal when I am afflicted with the regrettable human debility known as anger. " 'Full recompense " he said, "as stated and defined shall mean that for an equal period of years -- yours -- and in an equal number of publications and dramatic presentations, the people of Earth shall be shown Mars in its true character as a gentle, friendly planet -- " Well, I thought, at least that isn't too ba -- " -- while Earthmen are clearly depicted as inimical, malicious, malevolent, maleficient and -- " " -- malignant," I finished. "Not to mention morbid and mordadous and pretty darned morose. Good God, Lark, that ain't possible! First we have to prove we did not do something you can prove we've done with all four arms tied behind you. And if we don't, we're quarantined like measle-ridden first-graders while we spend decades or whatever cranking out tales about goodguy Martians and badguy Earthmen! Where the hell's the justice in that sort of one-way street?" Once again my new Brother-under-the-Name (that's what they call it when you're on a first-name basis) looked shocked, or at the very least astonished. "But Joel It is fair in the extreme! There are no punitive damages specified whatever, and the judges' hands are completely tied as to sentence; they cannot levy so much as a gram of uranium in punitive judgment! You should have heard the demands before the Intrasystem Union's Civil Council at last agreed on this!" "Thank them for me," I said, with a dryness untranscended by any possible quantity of gin and vermouth. Which prompted me to excuse myself and reach for the telephone and dial the appropriate number. "Room Service? Blair in Suite #. One bottle of vermouth, one bottle of gin, a handful of IF olives, a lemon, ice and an assortment of glasses on the double." I paused and then, learning fast the ways of Our Nation's Capitol, added, "by order of the Attorney General!" I blotted the polite voice with my finger and dialed again. "Please call Attorney General Layton, who is somewhere in this hotel, and advise him Mister Blair is most anxious to confer with him. Thank you very much." Another inside number got me another hotel voice. I identified myself and dropped Hank Layton's name. "Please get me Miss Helen Anderson in Portsmouth, Ohio." I gave her the zip area or whatever it is and the number and hung up. # # please pardon me, Counsellor," I said. "Have you brought along a secretary or an assistant?" "One of each. You were calling yours?" I nodded. "I can't do a damned thing without Miss Anderson, although I just realized it. She will call my assistant, and they'll be up here, or else. We will be ready to meet with you at any time after ten in the morning. Make it eleven. When is the trial set for, Lark, and when may we visit Mars." "The trial will be at your convenience, Joe. And you may not visit Mars." "How and to whom do I appeal?" "To the Union; I can help with that. But it will do no good; you realize of course that this case will decide when the people of Earth are ready to leave Earth." I stood up and enjoyed gazing down at him for the few seconds he remained seated. "The men of Earth will be in space and on Mars within the year, Lars Larkas, and then we will see what the Intrasystem Union thinks of our lawsuit!" He was up now, and looking very much taken aback. "What suit?" "Never mind," I said airily, going to answer the knock at the door. "I'll think of one between now and then!" I yanked open the door "Hello! Just bring all that right in and put it there by that awful orange chair. Will you stay for a martini?" Room Service laughed. "Man, I heard you were from the South #" "Southern Ohio," I said. "Lark... I guess we're through for tonight. You have a tremendous head start on me, but I shall try to make it up by eleven in the morning." "I will telephone," Lars Larkas said, and departed. He bent for the doorway. I grabbed the bottle of gin and issued the order to the scarlet-coated Room Service to crack open the vermouth; that's harder. "Do you have any idea, any idea at all," "No sir," he said, his eyes dancing. "All those Martians looked just alike to me." When Attorney General Henry C. Layton came in, Room Service and I were standing integratedly in the middle of that Federal Gold carpet screaming with laughter, knuckling at tear-streaming eyes. T began to see how easy it would A be to let go and plunge onesself into this nose-in-the-taxpaidtrough business. All you have to do is look busy and act important. I began to look busy. I learned quickly that a crowd-pleaser and symbol of status is the size of one's staff. I had no desire to avail myself of the services of the myriad of brighteyed husband-hunters and eager young men whose services were offered, nay urged, by both the Attorney General and the President. The fact is I don't like the Feds, and told a few so. But I did create enough research projects and typing to tie up a hundred or so. It occurred to me that whatever I came up with could not look too easy, and would have to be done Washington-style. Too, there was the necessity of window-dressing to impress my worthy opposition. So I assigned a few bright-eyed husbandhunters and eager young men -- amazing how many were Ohioans -- to reading periodicals. Every time they came across a story with a reference to Mars or Martians, no matter how minuscule and no matter whether favorable or otherwise, they were to have the entire story typed and the author contacted. This proved very difficult in some cases. Writing types seem to move a great deal. Whether this is occasioned by wanderlust or need of a good attorney is a problem I hope to report on later, now that I am an honorary member of several organizations whose existence somehow escaped my knowledge for thirty-six years. I had a steady stream of writers and editors and even agents through my suite, each man giving a statement and most of them hazarding opinions and advice and most of them accepting a bite or two of the bottles I kept about. Publishers I didn't bother with; they can hustle their own drinks. Meanwhile Turk -- my assistant; I've mentioned him, haven't I? -- and Miss Anderson legged it all over and out of town. When I found a trustworthy youngster from Cincinnati who had not graduated from anywhere in the inscrutable East and who seemed to be interested in more than social-climbing, attire, females, and not-working, I grabbed him for my very own. Then I sent Turk home to get some continuances -- he had a letter from the President, no less -- and try to keep my clients happy. Miss Anderson formed a friendship, meanwhile, with her Martian counterpart, Miss Omilara Larkas -- a cousin of Lark's, the Martian nepotist! Omilara nearly lost her gleamIF ing-tusked head; she was a nut over imaginative writing and went wild over her stream of writers and editors. Some nut from Pennsylvania invited her down to his farm to attend a writers' conference; another from New York talked earnestly with her about setting up a reciprocal speaking-engagement arrangement. She also had a weakness for Maker's Mark and branch water -- tapwater sufficed -- and girltalk with Miss Anderson. I had to hire her in the end, inasmuch as she won our case for us. #'X  Te're ready to go to court,"   I told Lars Larkas three weeks after his arrival on Earth. (He had yet to tell us how, and we had not then discovered his means of transport. It played hell, as you know, with several transportation company stocks for a few days, until they jumped into the new mode, led by the new Hughes Cave Company.) "Any time you're ready, Lark. Where do we go?" "We set it up via television," he said, looking surprised. I remain unconscionably and unreconstructably proud of the number of times I made him look surprised, that mabigionic Martian I "Your Telstar, I admit, will make it easier. But -- are you sure -- " I smiled -- with my mouth closed. "Very sure, Lark. That's why I thought we should have this little pretrial conference. You'll join me in a Martini, I presume?" "Of course, Joe." And he made a Martini Martian play on words I will not even record. "Lark," I said, sitting back and swinging one leg over the other comfortably while pawing my vest for cigarets, "you and your people should be ashamed of yourselves. You have attempted to bamboozle, hoodwink, and otherwise pull the wool over the eyes of a fine people who haven't had the opportunity to study you as you have us. And to steal from us." He gaped. Nasty-looking, those tusks. One would think a civilized race would do something orthodontal about that reminder of an earlier, less friendly existence. "It is indeed fortunate for Earth that she has a President and an Attorney General of such wisdom they saw fit to call in the most handle your allegations," I said with a perfectly straight face. "Hands down, Lark; I said allegations, and allegations I mean. Drink up. I do not plan to answer your charges. As a matter of fact I'll have them thrown out of court." I had waited -- malevolently, maliciously, etc., etc. -- until he got the glass to his lips. We had commandeered some lab beakers to facilitate his and his assistants' drinking between their tusks -- and now I was gratified to see him splutter and stain the nice brandnew Earth-tailored suit he wore. With vest. And four armholes. And dark red stripe. He peered at me over the rim of the glass, not deigning to brush at his Martini-spotted clothing. Then, to show his calm, he lifted the glass again. And I let him have the other barrel. "As a matter of fact," I said, flicking my cigaret in the best Hollywood manner and watching an amorphous serpent of pearly smoke climb ceilingward, "I will bring not one but two countersuits. The second is one that we, and I hope the Intrasystem Union's Civil Council, considers even more reprehensible, under the circumstances." Tie stared. He ignored the new   wetspots on his suit. That's one advantage of charcoal worsted flannel; spots fade quickly and don't show, unless they're mustard or Hollandaise. "First, that the people of Mars have for several decades published and dramatically exhibited malevolent, etceteraetcetera ad M-finitum libel on the friendly people of this planet, by showing Earthmen as barbarous invaders and monsters attacking and displaying multiform and manifold attitudes of enmity toward the people of our great and respected sister-planet, Mars. Not only does this basely libel the friendly people of this world, but in view of your suit it demonstrates your people's regrettable and barbaric lack of the civilized trait of fairness and justice. How d'you like them olives?" He put down his glass. "Wait," I said, as he started to speak. "Before you start to speak, I remind that you that even though you came here on an unfriendly and indeed underhanded mission and we met as opponents and, so to speak, enemies, I invited you almost at once to call me by my personal name. That clearly indicates the inherent friendliness, the, as I believe you put it, innate comity of the people of Earth. You yourself have reported that back; gonna help my case, isn't it?" I smiled at him. "Nothing personal you understand, Lark, although you do represent your government on a career basis, and I do hate Feds. But then there's the matter of the second charge, purely aside from the fact that you've just published just as many novels and dramas in which we were monsters. I let him stew while I poured some more Martini, offered him some with a gesture and an eyebrow-question -- he refused with a violent nod -- and lighted up a new cigaret. I hadn't enjoyed myself so much since I nailed that snotty DA's son for larceny and Possession back in #. "Far more serious in my eyes is your obvious cynicism, your obvious dishonesty as a people. You are an uncreative lot, aren't you? IF War of the Worlds by Tornos Bors indeed! Swordsmen of Earth by Flans Pollans indeed! Menace of the Green Planet hmp! Your socalled writers have stolen and palmed off as their own all of our imaginative fiction, changing only the names to protect the Martians!" Watching him collapse and begin to look small in his big chair -- I'd had a hernia-size one provided, to make him less overbearing, I went on. "Your people brought this suit against us only in order to cover up decades, centuries of plagiarism, to keep us restricted to this planet." I leaned back slowly and enjoyed a large sip of good cold Martini. My baby-blue eyes remained on Lars Larkas' red ones. "I might," I said very quietly, "even go so far as to ask why your name bears such a strong resemblance to one invented by an Earth creator named Burroughs." "How... did you... find out?" "That does it! I temind you, Brother-under-the-Name, of our agreement of three weeks' duration: I have been recording ever since you came into this room." Tt seems to me that the best thing to do was allow him to report home and let his leaders back down, which they did, and start taking steps to set up a wholesale book-burning, which they did. I admit I felt a little bad about not pressing to obtain royalties for all those earthly writers whose works were so well known on Mars under other names, and reprinted almost verbatim all over a planet whose people had one terrible debility; a lack of creative literary ability. But they are scientific whizzes, and it seemed to me at the time -- and now -- that we are best advised to get things started on a friendly basis. So I got them to withdraw the suit and the blackball, and we were officially contacted by the Intrasystem Union last week. And I am a thoroughly dishonest so-and-so; I have told no one how I won the dismissal. And now I have a seven-foot green secretary, since Omilara naturally got her tail canned -- figure of speech; tails they don y t have -- when Lars Larkas and his people found out who'd spilled the beans to my Miss Anderson. And I am meeting with several presidents of several writers' groups next week, to discuss my new job: I'm apparently going to represent a few thousand writers on Mars, through my contact and business partner, Lars Larkas. The most enormous and also best-paying market for speculative fiction of all time has just opened up on a planet without speculators, and someone has to act as agent. I figure that if standard rate for foreign sales is twenty percent, I can charge at least double that for IF  Feature   There are nine and sixty means of upsetting human genes And every single one of them is... Qcience fiction has been called  escape literature, and the term may be correct -- but in a way no literary critic has yet realized. The writers and readers apparently aren't escaping from the problems of the world, but to the problems that the rest of the world doesn't yet know about. So far, those major problems seem to come along about once every decade; or the public becomes aware of them at that rate. Twenty years ago, people became aware of the danger of atomic destruction. Then there was consternation as the first Sputnik sailed overhead. In both cases, science fiction had discussed the ideas so long that there was no shock left to the events for readers of our magazines. Now there is a new problem, this time as a result of the amazing progress of biology. Most of the possibilities will be far from new to science fiction, but I suspect that full realization of what man can do in the near future in tinkering with life will be a more profound shock to most people than any previous problem. This is all discussed in The Biological Time Bomb, a book, by Gordon Rattray Taylor. It's the first complete survey I've seen for the general public, and it does cover almost everything being discussed by scientists up to the time of its publication. While many of the possibilities will be somewhat familiar to science-fiction readers, the impact of the total collective ability of man to alter himself and his race in the next half century is impressive --  perhaps even "more earth-shaking than the atom bomb," as the jacket copy claims. One of the most interesting parts of the book is the time-table given in the last chapter. By the year #, Taylor lists such probabilities as baby-factories, artificial increase of intelligence in men and animals, the creation of one-celled life forms, and even the making of half-man, half-animal monsters -- or chimeras. Even before then, we should have the power to choose the sex of our children and to build artificial viruses. A little further in the future, there should be control of ageing, control of heredity by manipulation of the genes, and such "horrors" as disembodied brains linked to computers. Such a listing could come out of science fiction, of course. But in this case, Taylor cites the experimental work and the words of the scientists in the field, and the time-table is one he has averaged from their predictions. He also makes a serious attempt to analyze the impact of such developments on human society, together with the dangers to be faced. Generally, it's a bock worth reading carefully. The soft cover edition should be out shortly; look for it. T here's nothing new about man tinkering with life or even himself, of course. Skeletons dug up from neolithic times show evidence of trepanning -- the boring of a hole in the skull to relieve pressure or let the demons out. Men deformed the feet of their women and tattooed and circumsized themselves from ancient days. They also changed much of the plant and animal life around them. Wheat was evolved from the primitive einkom before written records, and the dog has been so completely altered and diversified by breeding that we can't be sure of his original ancestry. So far, men haven't made any radical changes in their own nature, but our literature suggests that the idea has been with us for a long time. Plato's Republic represented special types of men -- soldiers, workers, etc. -- bred to type, like ants in a colony. And a fair amount of what science proposes to do was covered in Huxley's Brave New World. Even the cyborg -- the mixture of cybernetic machine and human organism -- has been foreshadowed. Bifocal glasses are probably the most common example, dating from the time of Ben Franklin, though the cybernetic element of control was still in the eye of the beholder, in that case. The only change has been in the sudden development of cybernetics, medicine and biology within the last twenty years. Recently, for instance, the newspapers carried the story of an artificial arm which is controlled by nerve impulses and powered by electric energy. We are learning to overcome the body's immune reaction against anything other than its own tissue, and transplanted limbs and organs are no longer news. We've developed infertility drugs, and we've begun to the huge molecule that controls heredity and makes us what we are. What we have not yet begun is the real investigation of the consequences, except in science fiction. Larry Niven's Organleggers in Galaxy suggests what might happen in a world where there was more demand for spare human parts than any normal supply. But, as Taylor points out, even such a simple thing as controlling the sex of our offspring can have a major impact on society. What happens if most parents want boys, as they will in many parts of the world? If there are two or three males for each female, what happens to our family institutions? If the female to male ratio is about even in one country and there's a dearth of females in another, will we have another war and rape of the Sabines? Of course, if society can adapt to the change, this might be an answer to the population explosion. On the other hand, the possibility of extreme prolongation of life and youthful vigor within the next fifty years would seem to make controlling the population impossible. So far, fortunately as I see it, there cells doesn't quite maintain itself perfectly, which reduces the chance of immortality; but even that is questionable for the future, since Japanese geneticists have found the cell's self-healing power greater than we expected and are studying ways to improve this. Anyhow, with organs grown to replace defective ones or with artificial cybernetic organs, life almost certainly is going to be greatly prolonged. Cloning also rears its head in the book. This is the trick of taking a few cells from the body and growing them in a culture; since each for the whole organism, it should be possible to grow a whole new individual. It has already been done with such vegetables as the carrot. The personality would be different, due to different environmental forces, but the basic abilities would be the same. How many supergeniuses should we grow from each natural one? TVTost of these steps involve tinkering wilh the individual. They may prove rather shocking to the general reader, but no permanent racial harm can come from IF them, except for the impact of such a change on the society. They are aH reversible. If cyborgs prove harmful, we can stop creating them -- or man-animal chimeras, or whatever. A sex imbalance will be corrected by changing demands created by the scarcity of one sex or the other. Even immortality (that is, an extreme life extension) would probably be corrected when tiie population got out of hand; the food wars would see to that. molecule is another matter, and it might not be reversible. Unquestionably within the next fifty years men will learn how to alter the tiny genes within the egg and sperm cells and change heredity. Scientists can already substitute part of one virus for another and create a viable new virus. But now we are tinkering with the basic germ plasm of the human race. All the results of such changes would not show up at once. Some might well not show up for generations, as recessive characteristics lay dormant at first. There is already evidence of gene-linked characteristics that can wait for generations to develop. And by the time the results were in, there might be no chance to return to the immensely varied racial germ stock. Who can determine what changes in heredity should be made, anyhow? Such power would hardly remain in the hands of scientists; it has too much political power inherent in it. And even assuming absolute benevolence, who can be sure of what characteristics to breed for -- or build into mankind? Apparently, we have already been tinkering with this far more than we realized until recently. Twenty years ago, we were fairly sure that mutations -- changes in only occur as a result of something as violent as ionizing radiation from X-rays, atomic explosions, etc. Now nothing is so simple. Viruses infect bacteria and swap tions; the same effect may cause cancer in human tissue. Drugs can produce such changes. Thalidomide caused deformed births, though no one so far has determined whether this change is hereditary. But there other hallucinogens alter the germ plasm. We don't know what other drugs may effect such changes. And we've bombarded our systems with an incredible variety of chemicals, from preservatives in our food through pain-killers to industrial by-products in the atmosphere. Even without trying, we may have been tinkering with our own heredity. If we do so deliberately, the results may seem better -- but in being less random, they may prove to be much harder to correct. 'T'here's even a degree of "social" tinkering. Every time we save a child from dying of some hereditary problem, we theoretically weaken the racial germ stock by keeping an individual with what would previously have been a selfdefeating defect. And we're a lot less sure of what's hereditary than we once thought. Even the high amount of near-sightedness may have come about because eyeglasses made the defective vision so easy to correct that it could then compete with those having normal vision. (One "defect" that seems uhimportant -- since men will probably never lose the ability to grind lenses now.) Certainly the increasing innoculation of children against all kinds of diseases will tend to place less advantage on a high ability to fight off disease, and possibly weaken the race. Such "social" tinkering has been largely a passive response to developments, based mostly on a failure to re-examine old values. But from now on, as Taylor points out in his last chapter, society must take full responsibility. The decisions that must be made in the use of the newly developed possibilities for human-engineering are too big for a few scientists or a group of semiinformed politicians. (And even the decision not to tinker is itself too big for any group now existing to accept.) Sooner or later, he believes, we're going to have to create a responsible organization to oversee the developments and plan for the integration of the results into our way of life -- or we'll lose that way of life. This is the only really frightening concept I find in the book. It's a case where there has to be some answer, but no answer looks good. And here for the first time we get out of the proper element of science fiction and into politics where no writer has done more than skirt around the problems. Maybe there will be a political answer. In that case, I have a feeling that ten years from now we'll get a book on the next great problem to face humanity. It might be called The Political Time Bomb -- a frightening examination of the new breakthroughs in political science and the dangers there that must be controlled. By then, I hope, science fiction will have helped to let us escape into the future ahead of time, as it has done with all our other major New subscriptions and changes of ! i address require # weeks to process! i JF IF  Complete Short Novel BA # His crime was the foulest known to man -- the practice of science -- and the penalty was execution ! Illustrated by C#Hphe people against John Wil son," a man said. It was chanted like an incantation, and it echoed in his head. "The people against John Wilson. The people against John Wilson." John Wilson. John Wilson. Then he remembered. He was John Wilson. He tried to open his eyes and found they were open. Slowly, as he tried to remember what he had been doing before this moment, where he had been, who he was, his surroundings swam into focus. He was in a large room with a high ceiling. He was conscious of the size before he saw it. Varnished wood was slick under his hands. He was seated in a wooden armchair at a long wooden table. The wood was light colored, oak perhaps. Opposite him was another long table. Two men sat on the other side of it, facing him. One was a big, blocky man with light brown hair and lumpy features. The other was smaller and younger. He had a large nose and dark, curly hair that grew low on his forehead. His lips seemed set in a perpetual sneer, and his close-set, black eyes squinted now at Wilson, looking into Wilson's eyes speculatively. Wilson stared back. He wondered why this young man was so interested in him. Another voice was speaking. "John Wilson, please stand," it said. The voice had said the same thing before. "Can you stand up?" asked a voice beside him. The voice was light and drawling, with an edge of irony. Wilson put his hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself erect. It was no particular effort, but once he was up the room spun around him in a blur of alternating darkness and light. The illusion reminded him of a carousel ride when he was young, and he watched it with interest and nostalgia. As the room began to slow and settle into place, he saw a man placed higher than he was some ten paces to his right. The man was seated behind a tall, broad desklike piece of furniture. The front of it was made of oak, too, and it was carved into patterns of rectangles within rectangles. The man behind the desk leaned forward. He had gray, wavy hair and a triangular face. "I say again, John Wilson," he said, "you are accused of arson and of murder in the first degree. How do you plead?" (( Arson?" Wilson thought.  "Murder?" Had he burned something? Killed somebody? He could not remember. He could remember flames, yes, flames roaring in the night and forked, black figures running back and forth. And he could remember a silent crowd that waited for the figures IF with dubs and pitchforks and axes, and some of the black figures chose the flames. But it was more like the memory of a nightmare than of something real. It had the spectatorlike quality of a dream. Was it reality instead, something he had pushed into the subconscious through fear or guilt? The drawling voice beside him helped. "My client pleads not guilty," it said. "Thank you, Mr. Youngman," said the man behind the desk. Only it was not a desk, of course. It was a bench, and the man was a judge. He was being tried for arson and minder, Wilson told himself, and he couldn't remember what he had done or what had brought him here or, now that he thought about it, anything of his past. Was he a victim of amnesia? Of course not. There was no such thing as amnesia. Of that he was sure. Only he didn't know why he was sure. Wilson sank back into his chair, thankful he had been relieved of the compulsion to speak, thankful, too, that someone had believed in him enough to speak up for his innocence. His heart overflowing with warmth, Wilson turned his head to the left. Seated beside him was a tall, thin man with short, sandy hair and a face like a beardless Lincoln. His long legs were curled under his chair, His body was curled, too, until it rested on its spine. He was cadaverously thin. IBs face was tanned, and his indolent body seemed coiled with wiry strength. He smiled at Wilson and nodded as if to say, "You don't need to say anything. We're in this together, you and I." Or so Wilson interpreted it, with relief -- partly because he did not know what to say, partly because he was not sure he could muster the will to speak. Men and women were being questioned, one at a time, as they sat in a chair on a platform raised a foot above the floor to the right of the judge's bench. The women seemed much alike and so did the men. The women were dressed in long dark dresses of gray or black or dark blue cotton, the men in coveralls with blue shirts or occasionally a dark suit with a blue shirt underneath open at the throat. So, too, were dressed the men at the table opposite him. One of them was not at the table now. He was asking questions of the men and women who sat in the chair. The younger one sat at the table. He said nothing. He stared at Wilson or occasionally allowed his gaze to drift around the room. The questioning had been going on for some time now, Wilson decided. He must have drifted away again because half the chairs facing him in front of the oak partition now were filled with men and wornen. Like the young man at the table, they spent most of their time looking at him. "Do you have a financial interest in any scientific laboratory?" the blocky man was asking. "Has any member of your family attended college? Taught in college? Performed research? Has any member of your family benefited from any of the so-called miracle treatments for organic disease? Do any of them have artificial organs?" "Objection!" Youngman said occasionally. "Overruled," said the judge. I f the answer to any of his questions was "yes," the blocky man said, "You are dismissed," and if the answer to all of them was "no," he would turn to Youngman with a little bow. Then Youngman would uncoil himself and standing negligently beside the table ask idle questions. He was not content to ask the same questions over and over like the blocky man. He asked some of the men and women whether they had made up their minds about the case, some whether they had seen the university burn, some whether they knew the defendant, and one whether he had any prejudices about science or scientists. "Objection, your honor," said the blocky man. "Sustained," said the judge, and he turned to Youngman to say, "I must warn you, Counselor, that this line of questioning is not permissible. Science is not on trial here. Nor are scientists." "Exception," said Youngman. "The derk will note the fact as grounds for appeal. Sdence and sdentists are on trial here, as they are throughout this nation and throughout the world. Universities are being burned; sdentists are being hunted down and exterminated..." "I must caution you, Counselor, that you are risking contempt proceedings with this outburst," the judge said. "I will call attention to the irregularities of this trial," Youngman said, "as the basis for an appeal not only to a higher court but to a higher jury." He waved his hand toward the back of the room. "There is the proof of the nature of this trial..." "If you do not control yourself I will also dismiss you from this case," the judge said. Wilson let his attention wander. To his left was a wooden railing. In the railing were three wooden gates on hinges, one at either side of him and one behind him where the railing jogged to allow room for a doorway with double doors into the courtroom. Beyond the railing was the audience. They sat on pewlike benches. They sat silently in their dark dresses and their blue shirts, their hands folded in their laps or #ft IF their arms folded arcoss their chests. They stared at him. Wilson could not read their expressions, whether it was judgment suspended or judgment passed. If he was an arsonist and a murderer they would hate him, of course. Good men and women were bound to hate evil. Here and there in the audience were a few persons who did not seem to fit with the rest -- a beautiful blonde girl with short hair, young men with hard faces and watchful eyes, a few men in uniform on the front row. Behind the audience, at the back of the aisles, were the television cameras pointed at the front of the room, at the men and women in the witness chair or at the lawyers or at the judge or at someone behind Wilson, but mostly at Wilson himself. He amused himself with watching the little red eye beneath the long lenses, particularly when he could tell that the lens was pointing toward him. The blocky man -- what had the judge called him? Oh, yes, the district attorney -- was talking to the jury, but he kept turning toward the television cameras. The twelve chairs for the jury were placed in two rows of six; they all were filled. Above them was a crowded balcony. The balcony was reached by a narrow corridor behind the paneled partition that formed the back of the jury box and by a circular staircase at the end of the corridor. In the balcony were people jvho kept pointing things at him. The district attorney was saying, "I shall prove that this man, in league with others like him, planned the burning of the University to discredit the Lowbrow Party and the Senate Subcommittee on Academic Practices and ini an attempt to gain sympathy for the egghead cause, that the fire got out of hand and killed many of the arsonists themselves, but that this man, John Wilson, escaped and made his way to the Gulf Coast, where he attempted to sell his services and his nation's secrets to a foreign power and where he was captured by courageous members of this nation's national police force and returned to the Federal Penitentiary to stand trial..." There was no doubt, Wilson thought. The expression of the audience was hate. Before the scene faded out he decided that he liked the other dream better. As this one ended he felt Youngman take him by the hand in farewell. Then he was in some kind of wheeled vehicle. From the vibration he thought it was moving fast. He was lying flat on a kind of cot. On the other side was another cot. Someone was sitting on it. In a moment he recognized the dark-haired young man from the courtroom "He keeps coming out of it," the young man said. He had an eastern accent. His voice had a sneer to it, too. "Give him a bigger dose." Someone leaned over him, shutting off his view of the young man, and he felt something cold and metallic placed against his bare arm. He heard a hissing noise, and the cold object went away. He turned on his left side and let his eyelids descend. After a suitable period he tried to read the note Youngman had pressed into his hand. The light through the barred window beside him flickered, but he finally made out the words. "You're under some kind of sedation. Next time try to cut yourself. We'll analyze the blood. Destroy the note. It's soluble in water." How interesting, Wilson thought. He worked his hand up to his mouth and slipped the paper between his lips. It dissolved all right. It tasted like peppermint... II H e dreamed. He dreamed that he woke in the transparent darkness just before dawn. Someone was hammering at the door. "Doctor," the door murmured through the house. "Doctor." He got up quickly and slipped into his white coat. He never appeared to the villagers dressed like an ordinary man. That would corrode their confidence. When he reached the door, it transmitted to him the voice of an excited woman. "Doctor, my little girl!" And more knocking. He pressed a button beside the door, as he ran his fingers through his hair. It was the blonde Pat Helman, as he had thought. He could see her plainly in the mirror beside the door. She had her daughter in in her arms. They were alone. Wilson took a stimulant pill from the dispenser beside the door, shook off the last remnants of his disturbed slumber and told the door to open. "Come in," he said to the woman. He took the little girl from her mother and carried her into the laboratory, shutting the door of the white-tiled room carefully in the mother's face. The girl was hot and breathing rapidly but still conscious. He placed the girl on the diagnostic table and set the dials for her identification. The computer clicked as it searched its memory bank for the girl's medical history. The sensors applied themselves to the girl's body while Wilson soothed her fears with a calm hand and a calmer voice. In a moment the diagnosis appeared in the frosted glass above the little girl's head. Encephalitis . The injection came immediately afterward, painless, virtually unfelt. IF Wilson returned the girl to her mother. "She'll be all right now," he said confidently. "But hang this around her neck to ward off evil." It was a simple puzzle. Perhaps the girl would improve her mind with it. "Thank you, Doctor, thank you, thank you," the young woman said, unable to stop. "She would have died." "Yes," Wilson said. She would have, too, he thought. "How is your husband's leg?" "All healed. He was walking on it the next day, just as if it had never been broken." "And does he remember to say the charm?" "The two-times-two? Yes, doctor. I'm even beginning to say it as well, just from hearing it so often." "It won't hurt you," Wilson said. "You missed much instruction, coming from the city." "We'll bring you a pig, Doctor!" "I am here to help. Is everything all right in the village?" "The stranger is still at the motel. The one we suspect is a tax collector. He has been asking questions about you." "By name?" "No. He asks only about our witch-doctor. Are you good? Do you charge too much? Where do you live? Do you have visitors? We do not tell him anything." "Thank you, my dear." He did not have time to think about the stranger in the village. Scarcely had the door closed behind Pat Helman and her daughter than the knocking began again and the door announced other callers. TT'irst it was a farmer whose com was not growing as it should in spite of fertilizer and water. He brought a sample of soil. The analyzer said it was too acid, and Wilson gave him a wagonload of holy powder to work into the land. A delivery truck limped in for service. The analyzer revealed that the reactor element was worn out and would have to be replaced and sent in for renewal. Even with the automatic equipment in the sealed garage, the job took half an hour. Then came the most difficult part of Wilson's job, the birth of a child with a brain injury. The diagnosis was quick and the reaction immediate. The child was dead as soon as the computer clicked out the judgment that it would never lead more than a vegetable existence. Wilson found the mother's gratitude most difficult to endure, but he knew it was deserved. By this time the sun was well up, and the time for religious instruction was at hand. In the classroom was a sprinkling of children from four to sixteen, and even a few married women who could not go on the pilgrimage and were not yet tied down by children. He welcomed them all. After an invocation and a brief sermon, Wilson settled them to their individual programs at their individual learning stations. Soon they were listening to the personalized instruction that seemed to come to them out of the air. They listened for a few minutes, wrote on the magic tablets in front of them, and then compared their answers with the one in the soothsayer window beside the tablet. Wilson left them and returned to his living quarters in the selfcontained cottage. It was identical with thousands of such cottages in villages across the world. Now he would have a few moments of rest, while everyone was at work in their homes or in the fields or in the classroom. Perhaps he would even have time for a little research of his own. But he did not have the time after all. He had no more settled himself into his favorite chair in the study than the computer told him that someone had followed him from the classroom. When the light rapping came at the door he knew who it had to be. "Come in, Christopher," he said. It was the James boy -- # years old and a good student, a handsome, quick, inquisitive lad with an annoying habit of arguing with his elders that caused dissension in the village. His parents despaired of making him a cooperating part of the family group. But he was humble now. "Doctor," he said, "I wish to be a wise man like you." "How like me?" Wilson asked. "Wise like you. I wish to know all things." "I do not know all things. The universe is infinite and eternal, and even if a man searched through infinity for an eternity still he would not know all things." "I wish then to know as much as a man can know." "Knowledge alone is neither a blessing nor a virtue." "It is all I want." "The passion for knowledge is ai fever that can consume a man." "I am consumed now. How can I learn more?" "There in the classroom." "The voice of God tells me only what I know already. It is drill only, and I do it perfectly." 'T'hat was true. Wilson know. The  boy had made no mistakes for weeks. The computer had warned him that it was time for the boy to begin his pilgrimage. "Knowledge is worthless without an end. The idle learner is a danger not only to himself but to others. He will put his knowledge to work only to satisfy his idle curiosity, heedless of the consequences." The boy argued. "This survey is man's destiny -- to seek truth and to follow wherever it leads. Truth is the greatest good. If some are IF hurt in the discovery, some always will be hurt -- in the absence of truth even more than in its presence -- and it is better that they be hurt in the search for truth than in the protection of their ignorance." "The man who has found true wisdom does not deal in right and wrong; he does not judge ends. For some, truth is a good, for others, a god. It must be good for all or it is good for none. God must serve man, not man God. The latter way leads to cruelty and amorality justified by self-righteousness." "How can truth be good for all?" Christopher asked sullenly. "I have sought truth all my life," said Wilson. "How do I use the little I have found?" "You serve the village, but -- " "Yes?" The boy burst out, "What good is knowledge? If one cannot seek more, if with every step one cannot see the universe opening up?" Wilson was silent. He let the boy think about it. "I suppose," Christopher said reluctantly, "you do not stop seeking. But you spend time in service when you might be learning." He was silent again. "I suppose I could learn to serve." "That is part of what you must learn," Wilson said. "How do I start?" "The way of the seeker after truth is long and difficult." The boy nodded. Wilson thought, he could not know; how hard and how difficult it was, but perhaps, perhaps, he would follow the path to its end. "You have lived in this village long enough," Wilson said "Now you must go out and learn something about the world. You will wander from place to place learning about people and serving them, doing for them what they cannot do for themselves, and learning to do it with a glad heart. Perhaps you may spend some time at the Emperor's Court. Perhaps you may visit another kingdom. But if you learn well and seek long, you may find the way to greater knowledge than you now dream of." "When can I begin?" the boy asked. "Ask your parents," Wilson said gently. "Tell them I said you are ready for the pilgrimage." They would be sorry to see the boy go, he thought, and yet rdieved. The boy turned eagerly toward the door and then swung back. "Will I ever be like you, Doctor?" "If you seek long and are found worthy, you will learn much. One day, if you are successful in all things, you will be expected to serve as I do." "May I be worthy I" the boy said. As he left, the door admitted George Johnson, the village elder. He was breathless with excitement "Doctor," he said, panting. "There are soldiers in the village." "How many?" "Eight and a sergeant They are demanding taxes." "They or the stranger?" "The stranger. He commands them." "Where are they?" "At the motel. Shall we refuse to pay? Shall we resist?" "'Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.' But I will go to speak with them." When he reached the motel, he found two soldiers in imperial purple guarding the door with their pellet guns. They stirred uneasily at the sight of his white jacket and then stood aside to admit him. At a table in the dining room, a man in a wrinkled suit and an opencollared blue shirt was accepting a few pieces of gold jewelry from one of the villagers and checking off a name on a list. The man looked up, and an expression of sardonic delight crossed his face as he waved the villager away. The man was out of Wilson's persistent nightmare. He had dark, curly hair that grew low on his forehead, a large nose, and closeset black eyes that looked speculatively into Wilson's." "You have come." "You state the obvious." "The rest is incidental," the young man said. "Worthwhile but incidental. We wished only to get you away from your fortress. We have had quite enough of their defenses." "Here I am," Wilson said. "If you are on a witch-hunt, you have found someone who will serve your purpose." "You will be taken to district court for trial." Wilson nodded. The villagers were gathered outside in the dusk when Wilson was taken out of the motel, his hands chained behind him. The villagers stirred toward the soldiers, and the pellet guns came up quickly. Wilson stepped forward. "Go home," he said. "They will not do to me anything that I do not permit. There will be another doctor here to help you while I am gone. Go home. Do not resist the Emperor's soldiers." The villagers parted. The soldiers put him into the wagon and sat on the benches on either side as the horses started the wagon along the cracked, old, four-lane highway to the city... in O nce more the voice of the bailiff parted the fog that filled his mind. "All rise. District court, Judge Green presiding, is now in session." The twelve good men and true IF -- some of than women, fo be truly accurate -- were back in their oak jury box. The little balcony above the jury was crowded. Wilson had the feeling that it was balanced precariously on stilts and that it might topple forward at any moment. As Wilson's gaze drifted around the room, he saw that the benches beyond the railing to his left were filled as well. He looked until he saw the blonde girl and smiled. The television cameras were back, too, their red lights switching back and forth hypnotically. Perhaps it was because he had been here before. Perhaps, if it was true that he was drugged, his tolerance for the drug was increasing. Or perhaps, if this were a dream, his subconscious was dredging up more detail to satisfy his conscious mind. Everything moved with elephantine slowness. Even in that slow progression there were curious gaps. Perhaps the summer day was more humid and the old air-conditioners in the back windows could not keep up. They chuffed continuously, but the arms of his chair had a slick, moist feel to them. The room smelled oddly -- acrid and musky, with human sweat from the bodies packed closely together, a little musty like decaying wood, and over it all the bite of burning incense. Events had moved along in the courtroom, Wilson became aware. He had the impression that witnesses had been sitting in the chair to the right of the judge's bench and that they had been talking about him and a fire. A university had been burned. Not just a building or two but the entire fifty or so structures. Now on top of the hill where once red roofs had been glimpsed from afar could be seen only black ruins. A janitor who had worked at the university testified, under the insistent questioning of the district attorney, that there had been late meetings in the offices he cleaned. He had overheard talk about setting fires, and he had retrieved from wastebaskets rough plans of the university buildings on which had been written the words "gasoline" or "thermite." The district attorney offered the papers in evidence. Youngman objected occasionally. Usually he was overuled. He asked to have the identification of the handwriting verified by an independent expert and was refused. The dark-haired young man beside the district attorney who looked familiar to Wilson, in a dreamlike way, said nothing. Sometimes he smiled at Wilson. Occasionally he leaned over to whisper to the district attorney or to motion with his head at the cameras. Then the district attorney would ask the witness a question or make a motion. Then there was a student on the stand who saidsomething about discussions in class concerning the ignorance of the common man and how easily he was misled. He had reported the discussions to the local committee on academic practices. He also had made tape recordings of the discussion and of the teacher's lectures. He had recorded talk in class about the university burnings, too, and whether they would turn the people against the Senate Subcommittee on Academic Practices and, indeed, the whole Lowbrow movement. Tt all was vaguely familiar, like an old dream, and about as important. Wilson gazed idly around the room again. Four old light fixtures hung from the tall ceiling. Some of the ceiling tiles were sagging. The air-conditioners were thin, old window units placed high in four tall windows at the back of the room, behind the cameras. Suddenly he could not see as well. The room had darkened. Films were being shown at the front of the room. The scene was in a classroom, and mostly the films showed a single person, the teacher, at the head of the room. He should know the teacher, Wilson thought... Of course. It was himself. He felt good to realize that he had a piece of himself back; he had been a teacher. He had not been particularly good at it, though. He looked rather ridiculous up there talking about things like the sociological significance of protest and the psychological content of lynching, about the values of the Lowbrow movement and the hypocrisy of Senator Bartlett and his Subcommittee, about the importance of the scientific method and the necessity for the detachment of the scientist. The film was dull, and the lecture was dull and pointlessly pontificial, saying nothing repetitively. Wilson felt Youngman's elbow glance into his ribs and heard the lawyer mutter something. He nodded and stared past the screen at the front of the room. There were two doors, one on either side of the judge's bench. The one on the judge's right had a frosted window; in the other the glass was clear. The judge had just come through the door on his right; the recorder, who was in charge of a complicated device just in front of the bench, had come through the door with the clear glass. Wilson turned farther to his right. Behind him, Wilson was fascinated to discover, was another group of chairs -- about a dozen, similar to those on the opposite side of the room for the jury. Only this side had no wooden back or platform to raise the second row of chairs. IP People were sitting in the chairs. They were dressed in ragged suits, most of them, with blue open-collared shirts beneath their coats. One face in particular drew Wilson's gaze. It was a face a little like that of an Old Testament prophet with a boyish, unruly mop of hair and eyes that looked at Wilson as if he were an object. Wilson looked at the man for a long time before the man looked away. Wilson decided that he knew the man, but he could not remember from where. Above the heads of the people sitting behind him were a group of large pictures hung in two rows on the wall. They were in oak frames of assorted sizes. Four of the men pictured in them had beards; three of the other four had mustaches. That made it seven to one in favor of face hair, Wilson thought. He felt his chin. He was cleanshaven, though he did not remember shaving. en he turned his gaze to the front of the room, the films were more exciting. They were color films of a great fire. Buildings were burning, big ones with pillars and towers, built of stone and brick. Some of them were ruins of rubble and glowing coals, others were melting islands in a sea of flame. If one looked closely one could see, as Wilson saw, black stick figures running in front of the flames, back and forth, back and forth... until the realization came that they were not in front of the flames but in them, and they were consumed. It was the old nightmare. Wilson remembered it now with all its horror. He moaned. "Sylvia! " he said beneath his breath. "Sammy #" The fog lifted a little from his brain and allowed the pain to lance through. Even as he watched the terrible scenes he remembered so well, he knew there was something he should do, something he had forgotten to do, something he must remember to do. Then there was a face on the screen, a face painted with scarlet fingers, a face satanic in expression, a face trying to hide, it seemed, behind an unbuttoned shirt collar and a coat collar turned up. It was another familiar face. He knew that face. It was his own. It was the face of guilt. He shrank from it. He turned his head away from it and met the gaze of Youngman at his side. Youngman's eyes were on him, asking him to do something, but Wilson's head was too filled with pain. Across from him the dark young man was looking at him, too, his lips curled in  mockery of a smile, his face changed by the scarlet reflections from the screen into a kind of devil's mask, not unlike Wilson's face there in the film. Behind him, Wilson had the feeling, other eyes were staring. He stood up, swaying on his feet, and put his hand to his throat. He felt as if he were choking. There was a tie there, although he didn't remember putting on a tie. He felt his shoulders. He wore a coat. He ran his fingers tremblingly along the lapels. Suddenly he jerked them away with an exclamation of pain. As the lights went up in the courtroom, he was standing at the table, looking down at his hand. There was blood on his right hand and more blood welling from a cut on his right index finger. Youngman reached out his handkerchief to staunch the flow of blood and got some on the sleeve of his coat. The television cameras were staring at him. Wilson looked guiltily into their lenses. IV 'T'he room was on the third floor of a #stoiy building located in the heart of the old city. It was on the third floor because the elevators had stopped working long ago and there was no point in climbing when so many comparable rooms were available on low levels all around the city. The city was thinly populated now, supported only by the desultory activities of the Emperor and his authorities. Those activities had to be located where the old highway systems focused, where river traffic was possible and where an occasional steam-powered locomotive could tug in a string of decrepit cars on the rusty rails. The room was large, but a corroded metal counter divided it in half. Wilson stood on the window side of the counter, where only a battered desk and a few rickety chairs cluttered the marble floors. The walk, too, were faced with marble higher than his head. A potbellied iron stove stood near a window where its black chimney pipe could snake through the shattered glass patched with plywood scavenged from somewhere eke. The stove was cold now in the heat of the summer, but the room was cool. The dark young man sat behind the desk, watching him. Wilson stood in front of the desk, waiting, hk hands still chained behind him. "So," the young man said finally, "you are a witch." "That is what people call me." "But you are not a witch." "I am many things. To people who call me a witch, I am a witch. I have strange powers with which to control the natural world. I can do things that others cannot do, things they cannot even understand. For thk they respect me; for my services in their behalf they sometimes pay me. I am their mediator between the goodness of life that they want and the evil in life that keeps them from having it." "You are an educated man who uses the old science to delude the IF people. The Emperor wants to know where you got your learning, and he wants to know where you got your building and equipment and now it is defended and where you get your supplies." "The Emperor wants to know a great deal. That is the beginning of education." "It is not wise to joke about the Emperor," the young man said. "I do not joke," Wilson said. education," the young man snapped. "He wants information. He will get it from you." He settled back in his chair. "You have succeeded in stirring me once, against my will. If you succeed again you will be a clever man. Too clever to be allowed to exist. We will tye put to the trouble of finding another witch." anyone." "You would be wise especially not to trouble the head of the Emperor's secret police." "You are young for such eminence." The young man smiled. "There is no age requirement for competence." "Nor for ambition. And what is this competent young man's name?" "You may call me 'Captain.' " "You do think of me as a witch, a little, Captain." "And why do you say that?" "You do not give me your name. Is it because, after all, you believe that if I know your name I might have power over you?" "Peasant superstition." "And yet -- ?" "You will not taunt me into revealing my name to you. I think you have no power. And yet who knows what power the old science may give you? A prudent man -- But you are clever I I have brought you here to answer my questions, and you have me answering yours. In the end it will avail you nothing, however. You will answer my questions." "And then?" "If you are cooperative the Emperor may choose to be merciful." "The Emperor's mercy is well known. But I am a man who lives by reason. If I cooperate I will need to be convinced that my cooperation is merited. You will have to answer my questions." "Ask your questions," the young man said, shrugging. "Why does the Emperor suddenly interest himself in the villages?" "The Emperor is interested in every part of his empire." "But he has not interfered in the internal affairs of the villages for a decade. That was when the last witch-hunt ended in failure." "So I have heard. But this is not a witch-hunt. What is one witch more or less?" Wilson stood squarely in front of the young man, not shifting his weight, his shoulders pulled back by the chains binding his wrists. "Don't the villagers pay their taxes?" "Only when soldiers are sent for them, and even then there is not much. A few trinkets. But no coins. And grain and livestock are too bulky for soldiers to carry." "The villagers have little need for money." "Thanks to you and your fellow witches. They have only to ask for help and you give it to them. How can they develop their initiative, their ability to help themselves?" "And yet we keep the villages peaceful, the villagers happy. Surely the Emperor counts this a blessing. There have been no uprisings." "How can sheep rebel? We are an annoyance to them. We should be indispensable." "As are their witches," Wilson said simply. "The Emperor begrudges us that." nphe Emperor begrudges nothing. He rules an empire stretching from St. Louis to Denver. It is the largest and greatest empire in the world, but it is only a shadow of what it might be. You and your fellow witches keep it feeble. Instead of sturdy, ambitious subjects, he has villages of listless farmers. Instead of a bustling empire filled with the sound of factories turning out goods for export, be has a land that is content to listen to the com growing. How long before suck a nation is conquered by its neighbors?" "What difference would it make to the villagers?" "It would make a difference to the Emperor. And it would make a difference to the villagers if they had the ambition to improve their lots, to produce for trade instead of consumption, to move their excess populations to the dries where they can put the factories to work again, revive the mines, repair the refineries, get the economy going... " "Back to the machines?" Wilson diook his head. "Your Emperor's predecesors did their job too well. A hatred of machines is bred into the people. They cannot go back." "You give them machines." "Those are not machines. They are magic. The people are not tied to them. They are to serve, not to be served." "The people won't go back as long as you and your fellow witches give them the benefits of the machine without responsibility for It The Emperor calls you the opiate of the people." The young man's eyes smoldered. "It is you witches who oppress the people. Once relieved of your crutch they will find that they never heeded you. They will have to return to the dries; they will have to return to progress." IF, Wilson chuckled softly to himself. "You laugh?" the young man asked incredulously. "At the irony. First you destroy science and the machines science built, and then you struggle to get them back. It is all a matter of leverage for those who wield power -- or want to." "There would be no struggle if it were not for you. Our Emperor has the interests of the people in his heart; he wants to see them happy and prospering. He does not want them ground under the heel of a conqueror." "Does someone threaten war?" Wilson asked. "That is hard to believe. Conditions are much the same everywhere. Only a few young men -- who cannot master the teachings or the way of life of the villages, or who grow up untutored in the city's ruins -- become soldiers. There are too few to fight a war of conquest. There is not enough transportation or enough material. But perhaps it is the Emperor who grows restless. Would he like to expand his empire? Is it he who plans a war of conquest?" The young man looked at Wilson with hard eyes and unmoving face. "Enough of your questions. Now you will answer mine." "Ask." "Where did you get your knowledge?" "I was educated in a village not far from here." tiXou did not learn all yon know  in a village school," fte young man said sharply. "We have questioned villagers, and they have an interesting amount of misinformation and information of little value to them or anyone else. But they are filled with superstition. And they do not know how to heal the sick or how to make the land fertile or how to repair their machines when they stop working." "When I was a young man," Wilson said, his eyes reminiscent, "there still were universities. I learned many things in one of them but more in the villages. I traveled from village to village working, talking to the people, learning from them. Eventually, by contemplation and perseverance, I found my way to truth." "What is truth?" "You will pardon me, Captain," Wilson said, as he moved slowly toward the unbroken window pane that was left and looked out into the street three floors below. It was cluttered with debris from the building opposite, which had been burned out before, and with rusted vehicles of various kinds, now little more than mounds of ore. A path wide enough for a wagon had been created in the center of the old street. Otherwise the street was the way it had been left when the city was abandoned by all except the scavengers. The street was empty and silent. "If I could tell you what I found," Wilson said, turning back to the young man at the desk, "I would not have had to go to seek it. No one could tell me. At best I could only be prepared to find it and to know it when I found it and was ready to accept it. What is truth? I cannot tell you, Captain. I can only tell you where to find it." "Where will I find it?" "Among the people and in your heart and mind. It is the secret of the people's survival and their fitness to survive. It is what the people must be to survive and how they must be selected if they are to evolve." "All this is the superstition you feed the villagers to keep them under your spell," the young man said impatiently. "What is it you found? Where did you get your knowledge?" "This is not something you can pass along like a multiplication table, Captain. You must find it for yourself, with humility and an open mind." "Rubbish! Where do you get your buildings? Where do you get your supplies?" "From those who also have found truth." The young man sat in his chair looking at Wilson. "You will tell me these things," he said at last. "We have some of the old drugs that are reputed to loosen tongues. And if these have lost their powers we can try methods more physical. And when you have told us all we wish to know, you will go on trial as a witch." "How will you try me," Wilson asked, "when you already have judged me?" "Sergeant," the young man called out. The leader of the platoon came through the doorway followed by two of hfe soldiers. The young man smiled. "By fire, witch. How else?" V A woman was sitting in the witness chair when the courtroom swam back into Wilson's consciousness. Except for her the room was just as it had been before -- the jury, the two men at the table opposite, Youngman beside him, the stone-faced audience, the peering eyes of the television cameras, the men sitting behind him under the pictures of the eight old men, seven of them with beards or mustaches. It had the recurring quality of a nightmare, but it moved along. Which was real he wondered fuzzily. Was he the witch-doctor in a world of villagers being put to the question and dreaming of a world in which science was being repudiated? Or was he a scientist on trial for burning a university and dreaming of a world in which IF the scientist was a respected and beloved helper of the people?, He could not decide. He knew, though, which one he hoped was real -- and this was not it. There were so many things he did not know. He did not know whether he was guilty, as this vaguely familiar woman in the chair seemed to be saying. The lawyer who was defending him -- he had said Wilson was not guilty. But that was what lawyers always said, wasn't it? Or else there would be few trials. The district attorney was asking the woman questions about the evening the university had burned. "You saw the defendant that evening, Mrs. Craddock?" "He was at our house. We had dinner, and he said -- " "Who is this man? Can you identify him for us, Mrs. Craddock?" "John Wilson," Mrs. Craddock said. "That man sitting there," she said, pointing. She was an attractive woman, Wilson thought, but an unattractive emotion was distorting her features. Was it hatred? "The defendant?" "Yes. He said Harvard had burned and CalTech had burned, and the University would be next." "And by 'the University , he meant -- ?" "We all knew what he meant The university he worked for." "And why did he think the University would be next?" "He didn't say, but he gave us the impression that it was inevitable. That it was already determined." "That it was planned?" "Yes." "That it would be soon?" "Yes." "And did you get the impression from the defendant that he had been part of the planning?" "Yes -- " Youngman objected, and the judge ordered it stricken from the record, but the audience had heard it -- and it stirred them to an animal moan. The television viewers had heard it. And most of all, the jurors had heard it. They were ready to declare him guilty on the spot, Wilson felt As a matter of fact, he was ready to admit his own guilt If he could only remember I He half rose in his chair. "Emily?" he began. "Emily -- ?" And he could not continue, because the thought had comb to him that the name of the woman on the witness stand was "Emily," and he had remembered that much -- an evening when he had eaten at a table with Emily and someone named Mark and two children named Amy and Junior, and he had said something like the things that Emily had said. Only it was not quite right. IF T Te stood there in front of the j ur y and the audience and the television eyes, and it was like an admission of guilt that he should speak the woman's name but say no more but he could not think of The woman he knew by that name frowned and unconsciously bit her lower lip. The dark young man who sat at the table opposite him and bad not yet spoken aloud braced his hands upon his chair as if he were about to rise. "Sit down, Mr. Wilson!" the judge ordered. "You may not interrupt the trial. If you wish to be heard, you must appear as a witness." Youngman's hand touched Wilson's arm, and Wilson sank back to his seat, bemused. After Youngman's cross-examination, unshaken but with apparent relief, Mrs. Craddock was allowed to leave the witness chair. She was followed to the chair by others. A man identified as a desk clerk at a downtown hotel testified that on the night of the fire he had seen the defendant get off a bus from this town, make a telephone call and then register at the hotel under the name of "Gerald Perry" and with the occupation of "salesman from Rochester, N.Y." He had left in the middle of the night. No one had seen him go. A seedy middle-aged man said that he had been paid by Wilson to pick up a package addressed to Wilson at General Delivery and then to toss it behind a bush as he left the post office. Immediately afterward he had been accosted by detectives who were hunting for Wilson but by the time they had returned to the spot Wilson had fled. An old man testified that a man who looked like Wilson had bought a hearing aid from him for # on the day following the fire, and a young man, who had clerked at that time in an electronics parts store, said that on the day following the fire Wilson had paid him # for parts and the use of a workroom and tools. A broad-shouldered, thick-necked man with a nose that had been broken sometime in the recent jpast identified himself as an investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Academic Practices and testified that he had picked up Wilson in New Orleans as Wilson was about to sell his services to an agent for the government of Brazil, along with whatever secrets he had in his possession. Xoungman objected again.   "What is the relevance of the testimony of these witnesses to the crime of which my client is accused? These actions are readily interpreted as those of a mqn in great fear of his personal safety. As who would not be if he had a # seen his university burned and his friends slain by a mob? I ask that all this testimony be struck from the record, and that the jury be asked to disregard it." The judge looked at the district attorney, and the blocky man turned to the dark young man beside him. The young man whispered in the district attorney's ear, his hand cupped in front of his mouth. "Your honor," said the district attorney, rising to his feet, "I am shocked at the attorney for the defense accusing the people of this state and of this nation of mob actions. I would remind the court and the attorney that they are not on trial. The witnesses who have appeared before this court have painted a picture of a man whose actions are not those of an innocent person who had only to enter the nearest police station if he needed protection. He could there have entered a complaint against others if he felt they were responsible for this tragic event. Instead he assumed a false name, persuaded others to act for him under suspicious circumstances, obtained devices for which he had no legal use and attempted to slip illegally out of the country. These are the actions of a man ridden with guilt and trying to evade the natural conseqquences for his actions -- " "Your honor," Youngman said, half-rising, "the district attorney is making a speech." t "All the testimony given today is pertinent, your honor," the district attorney said. "And it will lead to other revelations." "Will it lead to the revelation," Youngman asked, "that I have not been permitted to consult with my client since his arrest, an official action which prejudices the entire trial and which will be called to the attention of the appellate court as soon as this trial is coi cluded?" "Are you raising an objection, Mr. Youngman?" the judge asked evenly. "I am objecting to the entire nature and structure of this trial," Youngman said clearly. "It is a; farce to think that this man can defend himself without consultation. This man has not even been allowed to see his wife since his imprisonment. If this state of affairs continues, if my client is prevented from communicating with his lawyer and his family, I will refuse to let my client take the stand, and we will appeal this case to the highest court." The jury stirred. The audience groaned. A blonde young woman stood up in the audience and screamed. Then, putting the back of her hand to her lips, she crumpled to the floor. How fascinating, Wilson thought. Was that woman his wife? She looked familiar all right. He had seen her before. She looked like the IF Pat Helman of his dream -- or his dream of the Pat Helman of his real existence. VI VT#ilson's senses were numb, but   the very numbness seemed to enhance his subconscious awareness. He had, for instance, a feeling that he was in a building of immense size. The room itself was relatively small. The walls were stone, and a stone fireplace with a marble mantle was built into the far wall. Several old tubular metal chairs with leatherette upholstery were placed neatly against the walls. A single tall window broke the wall at his right: it was latticed with metal bars. A thick doorway was to his left. Beyond it were two uniformed guards, and beyond them was a peering lens mounted on a tripod. It made a muted, whirring noise. Besides the feeling of massive size, Wilson also sensed a strong institutional odor of soap and antiseptic. In addition he sensed, nearer, a more subtle fragrance that he had not smelled for a long time, for many months. It brought back memories of a girl driving a long Cadillac Turbojet #, a girl with bright golden hair like a scarf tugging at her head, with blue eyes and warm lips and a throat like a white column. He was not surprised that she was sitting beside him, but then Httle seemed . to surprise him. "You've -- you've cut -- your hair' he got out Her hair was straight and short now, not much longer than a man's, with soft bangs across her forehead. But she was as lovely as ever. She dressed more sedately than his errant memory recalled. "Yes, darling," she said. "I'm an old married lady now." She held out a left hand with a thick gold ring on it. "Married?" he echoed. "Oh, what have they done to you?" she wailed. And she threw herself at him. Her arms went around his neck. Her head buried itself in the hollow between his neck and his shoulder, and he felt something sting the back of his neck. "To you, John Wilson," she whispered in his ear. He straightened, and for a moment the clouds in his head parted. "I'm sorry," she said an instant later as she pulled hair. "I lost control of myself. I promised myself I wouldn't do that. You have enough to worry about without that, I said." He looked at her, trying to remember. Her name was Pat Helman. Maybe. Or perhaps it was Pat Wilson, Mrs. John Wilson. But surely he would be more certain about his wife. He was on trial for something to do with the burning of a university. He remembered that. And now he must be in prison where he was bang visited by this woman who said die was his wife. She had been talking for several minutes, and he had not been listening, he realized guiltily. He tried to concentrate on what she was saying. "You must try to understand, Johnny. They let one of us visit you. Only one. It's just for show, of course, but Charley and I -- that's Charley Youngman, your lawyer -- decided that we couldn't pass up the opportunity. We talked it over and decided I should come, that maybe I could get through to you better. "You're on trial for your life, Johnny. They'll hang you for sure if you don't do something. As payment for this visit we've agreed to let you take the witness stand in your own defense. But you've got to snap out of it or they'll cut you up!" fThe fog was beginning to drift away, he thought. A moment later he was sure of it. First came the stab of remembrance like a flaming sword. The flames spread until they ate away a great and beautiful university and then consumed its beating heart, the men and women who taught and studied there, friends of his, colleagues, and one who was more than a friend. The pain made his eyes lower to his hands where they rested motionless bn his legs like huge paralyzed white spiders. "You're not guilty, Johnny," the blonde girl was saying, "but you're acting as if you were. And that's the same thing." No, he wasn't guilty. He remembered now the way it was. He had returned to the university too late, returned from a dinner with his friends, Emily and Mark Craddock, in the city -- Emily, who had repudiated him to save her family and had twisted the truth about him on the witness stand so that her family could be secure. He had returned too late to see the blaze begin, but he had seen it in its greatest fury. And he had seen the mob who had done it, and the faces of the mob, turned demonic by flames and something else worse than demons. He had not been too late for the r unnin g of the egg-heads, for the silent crowds that waited at the exits of the university with clubs and pitchforks and axes for the black figures that ran in front of the flames and the casual youngsters who used them for target practice like clay pigeons at a skeet shoot. He had seen a sight like that once. When he was a boy he and some friends had fired an old grain bin to kill the rats as they came out. "The time is almost up," the girl said. "They've given us only half an hour. You're going to be all right. I know it, now." IF Yes, he was going to be all right if he could only keep remembering and not forget. He could remember the terror and desperation of the long escape to New Orleans, aided by the brain-wave detector he had gimmicked together out of a hearing aid, some electronic parts and an antenna he had sewn into his coat. They had traced his every step, these people who were trying him for the crimes of all scientists. The only facts they did not have -- or at least that they had not revealed yet -- were this girl beside him, who was not, he thought regretfully, Mrs. Wilson, and the shadowy organization die represented. She had picked him up on the highway after he had left the train at Alexandria and his second-hand car had given up. "Fm old Tim Helman's only child," she had said, "and I have a guilt complex a runway long." He knew who Tim Helman was. He was the financier who had put his money and the money of millions of others into commercial rocketports and artificial satellites. He was the man who had lost it all when the Lowbrow movement came along and the government revoked his subsidies before the complex could start paying off. He was the man who had died of a heart attack -- it was announced as a heart attack -- before he could be brought to trial for fraud under a blue-sky law that was, for once, aptly named. Wilson had not been in the mood to trust anyone, and he had leaped from the car at the first opportunity. Weeks later he made contact with a man named Fuentes, a representative of the Brazilian government, who offered him a chance to work there, not at his own research but at tasks that would be assigned him. He realized that there was no place left where a scientist could pursue truth in the old unfettered fashion. The question was academic, in any case. Agents of the Subcommittee on Academic Practices had been watching Fuentes. Wilson literally had fallen into their laps only to be rescued, in turn, by Pat Helman and a man named Pike. They had convinced him that he and his fellow scientists were as blindly wrong in their pursuit of inhuman truth as the mobs who made up the Lowbrow movement were wrong in their massacre of the scientists. He had gone to live with the people, to see if he could become one of them instead of an egghead walled off by an impenetrable shell of superiority, to determine if he could learn from them what they were trying to communicate by violence. T itellectually he had understood before he joined them. He had accepted the idea that the ordinary citizen whose skills were being outmoded by galloping automation several times in his life had grown terrified. The ordinary citizen felt that his fate was beyond his control; it had been placed in the hands of others, distant and unconcerned, who did things that he could not do with powers he could not understand and who pretended that anyone could do these things if they wanted to and tried hard enough, who pursued their mysterious ends without thought of human consequences and with only casual attempts to communicate to laymen what it was they were trying to do and why. He had understood with his mind that the little man, in his terror of bombs and rockets and machines, had despaired of attracting the attention of the scientists by tugging a their sleeves. So he had given the scientists the same troubles he had, insecurity and the fear of sudden death, in the subconscious hope that he could learn from the efforts of the scientists to solve that problem. And they had learned nothing -- except that scientists died like other men and fled from danger like other men. Still they had killed them and chased them because if they could not help the people at least they could not hurt them either. Now Wilson understood these matters emotionally as well, and he thought he understood the people. He understood their need for a scapegoat to take the blame for their sins, and he also understood their desires for someone better than themselves to represent their finest aspirations. He had given himself up as one or the other. What was it to be? "Oh, Johnny," said Pat Helman, whose name was not Wilson and never had been and perhaps never would be. "It's all up to you, and I've got to go now. I may never see you again." Once more she threw herself at him, and again she whispered against his ear. "We didn't mean for you to give yourself up, you idiot! We can't get you out of here or that courtroom either. All we can do is give you the antidote to the drugs. Which I've done. You mustn't let on though, or they'll never put you on the stand, and your martyrdom might as well pay off in one moment of glory." And then she pulled herself away. "Good-by Johnny. Good-by." He was left alone in the little room, staring after her, staring into the eye of the camera which had recorded this touching moment of reunion between a notorious criminal and his wife, through official generosity, and he dulled his eyes and let them sink to his hands as the guards came and led him unresisting down the echoing corridors to his cell. IF nphe words in the relentless " whisper echoed in his ears, "You are a witch, a witch, a witch. Where do you get your wit, your wit, your wit?" The echo was inside his head, which was a great empty space. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. At first he thought that he was blind. Then, as a shadow pirouetted across the ceiling, he realized that the cell was lit by a single candle in the comer. He could not summon the will to look at it but he knew it was there by the shadows. He was lying on crumbling cement. He could feel it dusty beneath his hands. From the musty smell of the place it might be an underground room, perhaps a room in the same old City Hall in which he had talked with the young man who called himself Captain. "Who are you? What is your name?" came the whisper again. "John Wilson," he said with difficulty but with precision. He did not need to look. The dark young man was seated on the cement beside him. "John Wilson," the young man said, "you will tell me what I need to know." "I will tell you -- what you need to know," Wilson repeated. The words were the same but the meaning somehow was different The young man felt it, too. "You will tell me what I wish to know." "I will tell you -- what you need to know," Wilson said. "Where did you get your education?" came the whisper. "Part of it -- before the destruction -- of the machines." "But that would make you, more than one hundred years old!" the young man snapped. Wilson did not say anything. It was not a question. "Are you more than one hundred years old?" "Yes." "That's ridiculous! You do not look more than middle aged." Again there was silence. "How can such things be?" "Much is possible -- for men who had found truth," Wilson got out. "Disease is unnecessary. Aging can be delayed." The young man was silent again. Perhaps he was absorbing the implications of the information he had received. What would the Emperor give for the secret of longevity? What could the young man himself do with another half century or more of vigorous life in which to get ahead in the world? It might change his entire outlook upon his career; he might not have to take shortcuts to win success while he still could enjoy its fruits. T he silence endured until Wilson was afraid he would fall back into the cavern made his head. But he dung to consciousness as if it were the edge of a cliff. Next time he might not have so firm a grip on his cavern -- on his mind. "Are you telling the truth?" "Can I tell -- anything else?" "Always you answer a question with a question. Why?" "That is the nature of man -- and the nature of life. There are no final answers -- only new questions." "Mystidsm! The answers I want are not so difficult. Where did you get the rest of your education?." "Everywhere." "Are you a witch?" "To some." "Where are your fellow witches?" "In the villages." "Where do they get their support?" "From the villages." "They do not get their machines from the villages nor their supplies. Where is the witch world? Where is the place that witches learn their craft? Where do they get their machines?" "The witch world -- co-exists with the empire -- and with all other kingdoms and empires -- of the world." "Where else is it?" "Wherever man can exist." "And where is that?" "Everywhere." "You are evading my questions. Have you the will to do that?" "The will -- and the capability." "Then there are other methods of persuasion." Distantly Wilson felt his hand lifted. The shadows swirled on the ceiling above his head. He did not feel pain, but in a few moments the odor of cooking meat drifted to his nostrils. "A foretaste of the flames," the young man said. "Your measures -- combat each other." Wilson said. "I feel nothing. Bum away. Or if you would have me suffer -- you must give me the power -- to resist." "You devil!" As distantly as it was lifted, Wilson felt his hand dropped. The shadows danced once more across the ceiling. "Why did you let yourself be captured?" "If not me then another." "The villagers could have resisted. They could have overcome us." "They are peaceful folk. Violence breeds more violence. Other soldiers would come. So long as the Emperor is content -- to rule the body without coercing the spirit -- the Empire will exist and the people will obey it. The life the people have -- is beyond the realm of the Emperor." "You are speaking nonsense again," the young man said, but he said it absently. "Would you like your right hand to match your left? Let me tell you what the Emperor has in mind. If the witches P# IE would support him with goods and machines -- and you have them, we know -- he could soon conquer this entire continent Eventually perhaps the world itself! All the world under one peaceful rule. Think of that! And you witches would be well repaid." "Sometime in his life every ruler has that dream," Wilson said. "The answer is always the same. You cannot give us anything we do not already have. You can only take from the people." "You are an obstinate and shortsighted witch!" TX#ilson summoned his energies   once more. "You are an inquisitive young man. You wish to know. If you had attended a village school you would know much already." "I attended the Court School. And I learned much there but even more at the Court itself. You see where it has taken me." "From ignorance to ignorance," Wilson said. "It is not too late. I was ten years older than you are before my education truly began. You still can learn. Go seek the truth. What distinguishes half-man from animal? What separates man from half-man? What will select next man from present man?" "What should I care about such follies? Be still, old man." "You may be next man. But you must find your way. You must pass the tests. To be fit to survive you must survive." "You talk rubbish, old man," the young man said, but he sounded uneasy. He was thoughtful for a few moments and then, Wilson thought, he shook himself like a dog coming out of a cold bath. "Next man or past man, you will bum, old man. We will put you to the trial, and then you will be dead man." "You do not fear the witch's power?" "Let it save you from the flames. Perhaps then I will believe in witchcraft and your mumbojumbo." "Then it may be too late. The man who can be convinced only by a show of force -- is lost to reason." "Reason is a weak man's solace." "Force is a strong man's refuge." "You will bum brightly!" "Bum me brightly then," Wilson said. "Perhaps by my light you may see a part of the truth. You will not have another chance. I am the only witch we will allow the Emperor to take." And Wilson loosened his grasp and fell back into the cavern and dreamed of flames. TX#llson woke not to the dim   confusion of the courtroom but to the pale light of morning filtering through tall windows lined with bars. His pillow was whispering to him, "You are a witch, and you have set a fire -- a fire which destroyed a university and the people in it, people who were your friends and now are dead ashes. You are guilty. You have committed arson and murder, and you must be punished." More bars were all around him. Bars for walls, bars for a door. Only above him and below him was there something solid -- the ceiling and the floor were concrete, but Wilson felt that inside them, if he dug, he would find the same cold, gray bars. He was in a cell. It was part of a block of cells stacked one atop another and beside another like so many houses built of toothpicks, but the toothpicks were solid steel. Outside his cell was a corridor, and beyond that was a stone wall. The tall, barred windows were in the wall. He was a prisoner held in a maximum security prison, and he had no more chance of escaping than a witch from the deepest Inquisitorial dungeon. He ran his hand over the rough material of the prison blanket that covered him, and over the dustily astringent odor of mopped concrete floors he smelled coffee brewing far off. How long had it been since he had smelled something so good? They had taken that from him, and he lay in his bunk, listening to his pillow, and enjoyed the smell. "You're awake, eh?" said an interested voice dose beside him. "It's the first time you've been awake." Wilson's eyes slowly drifted shut "Oh," the voice said, disappointed. "I guess you ain't. But if you are and don't want to let on, I want to talk to you when you get a chance to listen. They say you're a crummy scientist. But you don't seem so bad to me. You just lay there, moaning and talking in your sleep, and I guess you're just a crummy con like me, and it's us against them. We got something working, fellow. If you want a piece of it just wiggle your eyelids." Wilson lay very still, breathing regularly, listening to his vindictive pillow. His eyelids did not move. "I don't blame you, fellow," said the voice beside him. "Why should you trust anybody? Maybe when they bring you back -- if they bring you back." nphey came soon afterwards. Men dressed Wilson's unresisting body in newly pressed clothes and half carried, half dragged him to an armored truck. It had two cots in the back, and they placed Wilson on one of them. The truck started up. After about ten minutes of slow, twisting city driving, the truck picked up speed. Twenty minutes later it drew up to the back of an old brick building. Wilson was hustled into a small doorway IF and up a flight of stairs to the courtroom. "No one will appear in this man's defense," Youngman said. "His cause is unpopular, and anyone who testifies for him will be called 'traitor' by his neighbors, and perhaps worse will happen to him. Therefore I will call John Wilson himself to be the only witness for the defense." With great care, as if he were walking a tightrope, Wilson made his way to the witness chair and with Youngman's aid settled himself into it. Slowly Youngman led him through a rebuttal of the testimony presented by the prosecution. Wilson hesitated often and fumbled for words, but he finally told his story of the events. He had returned to find the University already in flames, he said. He had fled the scene and later the area under an assumed name for fear that what had happened to the others at the University would happen to him. By the time Youngman had finished, they had painted a picture of a man driven by desperation into a wild and sometimes irrational flight for his life. Youngman turned to the district attorney and took his seat. The district attorney hesitated for a moment, frowning, and then pulled himself up. "You claim that you returned to the University to find it in flames. Yet Mrs. Craddock points out that you were talking about plans to burn it at dinner that evening." Wilson straightened a little. "Not plans," he said gently. "The possibility of others burning it. And by the testimony of your own witnesses -- Mrs. Craddock and the officials who noted the time of the fire -- I left the city after the fire already had begun, # miles away." The district attorney seemed unable to find an appropriate word. He turned halfway toward the young man sitting at the table. Smoothly the young man got up. "Your honor? May I interrogate the witness?" The voice was familiar. The judge nodded. "Of course, Mr. Kelley. You have been appointed asistant prosecutor for that purpose." Now Wilson knew him. Leonard Kelley was chief investigator for Senator Bartlett's Subcommittee on Academic Practices. "Mr. Wilson," Kelley said smoothly, "you are, as you know, not accused of setting the fire itself but of conspiring with others to set it. That you were not there to put the torch yourself is incidental, and you are only trying to confuse the jury by pretending otherwise. You will not deny that your actions following the fire were those of a guilty man." "It is a truism that the guilty flee when no man pursueth," Wilson said drily, straightening a little more. "But it is equally true and equally obvious that the wise man, w r hen he sees an angry mob approaching with a rope, does not stop to ask questions." Kelley studied Wilson's face with shrewd, perceptive eyes. "You were trying to flee the country entirely when you were captured." "A moment of folly. Luckily I thought better of it and returned." "You mean you were returned." "No, I returned of my own volition, having escaped from the agent of the Subcommittee." "You escaped, Wilson? How?" "Your colleague lost his head -- and had his nose somewhat altered." "And then what did you do, Wilson?" "I returned. Three months later I gave myself up voluntarily." phe members of the jury turned to each other. The stem-faced members of the audience shifted positions. "What did you do in those three months, Wilson?" "I lived in small towns, worked in the fields and in the shops." "Did you believe that this would enable you to escape justice?" "I knew that I could avoid recapture," Wilson said with a careful choice of words. "But I was living in these places in this way so that I could learn why the people hate scientists." Kelley turned toward the jury and the audience until his back was almost to Wilson. "I am glad that you admit this basic truth, Wilson. The people hate scientists, and they have good reason to hate. But why do you think they hate you." "Not me personally," Wilson said. "All scientists. Blame for that lies on both sides. The scientists are at fault because they have been blind to the needs of the people for security, and the people, because they have been unable to see that the only security is death -- or a way of life so like death that it is scarcely distinguishable." "You are condemning the people to death?" "You twist my words. The people must accept the fact of insecurity. I do not say it; life insists on it The people must find their security in their own ability to cope with change. The scientist, on the other hand, must give up his childlike worship of science. "One of the great philosophers of science, T. H. Huxley, summed it up this way, 'Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every pre-conceived ,( continued on page #) IF An Interview with Harr  Harrison Hphe story of my interest in sci ence fiction is the story of my life; at the age of seven I came across one of the old largesize magazines, with the Frank R. Paul covers, and I read it and that was that. I've been hoping for years to come across that issue again, but I'm afraid if I ever saw it it would be like The Green Man of Graypec, which I was so much in love with that I cut it out and bound it up separately... and came across a long time later. When I tried to read it, I could only get through a couple of pages. Aargh. Only Sam Moskowitz can read that old stuff and really enjoy it. IVe been a fan all my life, starting around #. A few years later the Queens Science Fiction League came along, and I met such great names as Moskowitz and Sykora; I stayed on as a member until the war came along and I went into the Army. Wlien I got out I went to art school, where I ran into some comics artists. I spent a lot of time telling them what a negative, degenerate, lousy art form comics were; then I found myself beginning to do some. Actually, they had some damn good artists. Beautiful artists, who could get just the line they wanted down on paper; but the writers were always afraid to sign their names. I kept working in comics, drawing and editing, and when the Hydra Club came along I joined. I was Harry The Artist, doing illustrations for Marvel Tales and Galaxy -- the first one I remember for Galaxy was for Bridge Crossing, by Dave Dryfoos; the Art Editor was W. I. Vanderpoel at the time -- and book jackets for Marty Greenberg's Gnome Press and so on. Then Damon Knight was editing a magazine called Worlds Beyond, around #; I'd done a couple of illustrations for the first issue, about half of the second issue, the third issue was all mine -- and then I got a throat infection. I lost thirty or thirty-five pounds, and I was too weak to draw, but I could sit up in bed and type. So I wrote a story. It was called Rocky Diver; Damon bought it, and I was immediately anthologized -- the man who did the anthology was also my agent -- and I should have stopped then, with a perfect record: # sales, # anthologizations. I was still editing comics, and writing and drawing them, but science fiction was the Holy Grail. I did a little of it -- and a lot of other kinds of writing. I was a hack artist and a hackwriter: Confession St Westerns, Detectives -- whatever they want to pay money for I did. They'd pay me ten dollars for a picture, and then I'd write a special story around it -- maybe a confession about a girl in an iron lung, dying, giving birth to a baby, whatever. Then comics collapsed. I'd gotten in with a publisher named John Raymond and worked for him on his science-fiction and fantasy magazines while they lasted; then I spent about six months as an art editor and got together enough money to go to Mexico. I got an apartment and an old car and lived down there on # a month and wrote a novel called The Stainless Steel Rat, which was my first big sale, and never looked back. I found that down there I could write more than #-word stories, which I couldn't do in New York. On the strength of that my wife and I went to Europe, for the London Worldcon in #, and for the next ten years or so we stayed there most of the time. My big bread-and-butter income was from writing Flash Gordon scripts over most of that period, but I also did a lot of science fiction. We lived in England, Italy, back to New York for our first baby to be bom, then to Denmark, where we stayed for seven years. I served as a foreign correspondent for a magazine for a while, wrote some science articles under a pen name -- and kept on with science fiction. I haven't done any drawing for at least ten years -- which is a good thing; face it, I was a bad artist -- except that when I was sitting on the beach in Italy with a ballpoint pen, I did some drawings of future weapons for a fanlittle town south of Salerno, waiting for a free ride back to the states from a friend of mine who's a shipowner; I'd just sold a novel for a couple thousand dollars and did IB! not see any point in working, so I sat in an olive grove and killed time for a couple of weeks. While I was in Denmark, I'd take a trip to the various sciencefiction conventions in Europe; I met Brian Aldiss at the Trieste Film Festival and we kept in touch, corresponded, saw each other now and then, and we started SF Horizon, a critical science-fiction magazine. To my thinking Aldiss is one of the big sf writers of the last five or ten years. Maybe the biggest. His novels have a feeling for continuity and form -- Non-Stop, Greybeard, which I think is a classic; it's going to be the sleeper of all time, I swear. Then there's Bester -- of course: stories like The Stars , My Destination -- and always there's Heinlein. Perpetually there's Heinlein. This is the seminal guy in the while field. I'm not talking about what I consider his bad period -- he went preachy; the same thing happened to Huxley, when he quit writing novels in favor of essays on society -- but the bulk of his work satisifies me completely. I associate them with the Golden Age of Astounding, back in the '#'s and '#'s. Those were the perfect days for me; I remember I used to go down to Hudson Terminal to a stand that got the new issues two days ahead of anybody else -- an extra half hour on the subway, just to get those two extra days. It wasn't just those two writers; there was a whole gestalt to that time. Heinlein, Clement, Sturgeon, a lot of others; they may not all have been polished writers, but they were superb entertainers. I miss that in a lot of newer writers. Ballard, for instance -- some of his short stories are fine, but his novels lose me. Ellison has done a couple of good ones -- not science fiction, though, the ones I like best. Fritz Leiber is a guy who's been growing all the time. He writes so well . And it's science fiction to the core, sometimes like Lovecraft, with a little bit of fantasy. Now I'm back in the States -- we had to make up our minds whether we wanted the kids speaking Danish or English and decided on English -- and spending just about all my time on science fiction: writing, editing anthologies and so on. I have twelve or thirteen books behind me now, enough so that I can feel I can survive in any environment. The environment I've got is just below San Diego, about four miles from the Mexican border; completely away from everybody else. We've got an acre in the hills -- rabbits, quail; there's nothing around us, and we've got the house sealed off with an airconditioner, so we can lock the doors and turn off the telephone and we've got absolute privacy. So I can work; and it's been working IF  Short Story The Fire Egg To a peasant it is not given to handle the Holy Things -- # T Tail" Sum Lin dropped his   hoe and knelt in wonder beside the furrow he had just made. The tip of the stone hoe had uncovered a scaly metal oval, scarcely distinguishable from the rust-red dirt around it. A fire-egg, he told himself excitedly! A fire-egg waiting to hatch in my field! Lin picked up the fabulous egg and cupped it reverently in his rough hands. He felt a sullen warmth creep from the metal into his flesh. It wants to be bom, he thought. It wants me to help it hatch into a sickle-bird. I must tell the priest! Turning his face toward the rosy, cloud-free sky, the boy in black pajamas silently thanked the gods of the thunder-that-comes-no-more for honoring him with this discovery. Nor did he forget to thank them for the many pieces of flat hammered steel he would get for returning to their local priest this symbol of the god's prehistoric activity. Panting, Lin arrived at the gate of his village. A guard stepped forward, shifting his rusty M # to the crook of his elbow to begin the customary clothing search, but the young farmer protested. "No, honored green-head! It is not fitting to search one who carries a holy thing. See, I bring a fire-egg to our priest." Proudly he held up the egg. The guard automatically reached for it, then jerked his hand back to hide his face. Dropping his non-fuctional rifle, his hands covered his eyes under the green-dyed hair. He bowed deeply. "Take it, fortunate Lin. And tell the Intelligence Win Dom that I sped thee on thy mission!" Achieving some compromise between an anxious trot and a selfconscious saunter, Lin made his way down the dusty main street toward the priest's house. This stood in the center of the village, a single-storied bungalow of neatly fitted concrete blocks, contrasting with the peeling plaster and wood of the village huts. Behind it loomed the walls of the sacred enclosure where the Superior Persons dwelt, who, legend related, once could talk to the great sickle-birds in their own language. Lin knocked respectfully at the heavy teak door. Then, stepping back, he squatted in the posture suitable to his class and waited with the patience he used in waiting for the annual monsoon. Finally the door swung back to reveal the pallid figure of the priest. "Intelligence" Win Dom always reminded Lin of a ghost -- that is, if you believed that ghosts had red and baleful eyes. All the rest of the man was white: hair, skin and robes. Lin was not shocked, for this was how all priests looked: white with glaring red eyes. Perhaps, thought the farmer, that is why they are priests. The gods have marked Each month If publishes a story by a new writer, never before in print. This months "first" is by a #-year-old minister of the Church of Christ in New York State. A former Fulbright scholar (to Heidelberg, Germany), graduate of Oberlin and the Harvard Divinity School, Rev. Burlingame has been a science-fiction reader since his teens. The Fire Egg, which began as an assignment for a course in the Famous Writers School, is his first fiction appearance anywhere. them for their own by making them unlike all living men. The old priest's voice contrasted with the brightness of his eyes as he said in a dull, unconcerned tone, "Thou hast a wish, my son?" As soon as he heard the door open, Lin shifted from his haunches to his knees. Holding up the fireegg in laced fingers, he answered, "Truly, Intelligence. I discovered this holy egg buried in my new field. After giving thanks to the gods at once, as is proper, I hurried to bring it to you!" ' Getting to his feet, the young man made as if to hand the egg to the priest. But Win Dom jumped back clasping his hands behind him. "No, my son. I may not touch it." He hesitated as if in confusion at the sudden revelation of holiness. "I am not yet purified today. But since thou hast found it, keep it for now. I must consult with one of the superior persons." Lin swallowed his surprise. He had never been in contact with these awesome creatures. Indeed, no villager had ever seen one in Lin's generation. They gave their orders and directives through the priests. Lin placed the egg tenderly inside his shirt and pressed it to his flat stomach while the priest disappeared inside the house. Tn his office, Win Dom, who was called "U-stase" within the bosom of his albino family, closed the door firmly and stood in worried thought. He knew what the farm boy had found and he knew he had to report it at once. Slowly he clenched and unclenched his bony fingers as he thought of the possibilities of the boy's discovery. Priestcraft, at least that form into which Military Intelligence had degenerated, informed him of the true nature of the fire-eggs, not much less powerful than the spitting teeth of the giant beetles which once had fought with and against the sickle-birds. If Win Dom had such an egg to possess, then how superior would those insufferable people be inside their walled enclosure? With the destructive force of the egg at his command, he would no longer be forced to live in this half-world between the great concrete wall and the village huts, dependent on the good will of his superiors and the sometimes intermittent offerings of the peasants. His thoughts focused on the picture of his second son -- a handsome infant as white as his father, though born without legs. Win Dorn's wife had hidden the child with a peasant family; but on the boy's first birthday four greenhead guards ferreted him out and delivered him to the superiors to be devoted to the gods. Win Dom had never seen this ceremony, but he had watched the oily smoke rising above the walls of the enclosure. He gritted his teeth in an agony of remembering. Some day! But Win Dom was born to be a priest in an age when priests were intermediaries, not between men and the gods, but between two classes of men -- the , villagers and the superior persons who hid behind walls of concrete. It's uncomfortable for a priest to live too dose to the gods he serves, but it's unbearable to be bom a priest with no more choosing of it than the melanin-free skin tint which characterized all the members of that profession. Win Dom pushed his finger tips hard against the plywood top of his desk, then let his hands relax. His second right index finger moved to the button of the patched-up intercom and pressed. The box responded laconically: "Report!" "A farmer, sir, with a fire-egg he says he found in his field." The box gave him a black oneeyed stare. "Better come in!" IF   doors: one opening onto the village square, one leading to his family quarters, and the third a combination wood and steel gate opening into the enclosure. The priest waited until the gate swung back and thought happily how those strong hinges could be twisted apart by the impact of a single, recently found fire-egg. And the villagers rushing in for the food and metal, and the priests for the precious instruments and weapons! Entering the check room of the enclosure, Win Dom saw the dark figure of Bu Run bulging over the plastic top of his desk. Bu Run smiled at the waspish little priest and asked, "What's with the fireegg, Stase?" Win Dom flinched, as always, at the inelegant language used by his superiors. Even the farm boy spoke more correctly, using the proper forms of address. With offended dignity he reported, "A young farmer, sir, just brought this fire-egg to my office. He says he uncovered it with his hoe, but my opinion is he stole it. There are several holy egg shells in our temple museum. I will send someone to see if one be missing. I have reported the incident to you immediately, as the directive requires." Bu Run's dusky smile dissolved as he studied the priest. "Do you have the egg with you?" "No, sir. I left it with the boy, thinking it better for the evidence to be in his possession if my suspicions were justified." "You don't think he'll run away?" Win Dom expressed judicious assurance. "Out of the question, sir. He's after the sheet metal, and he won't do anything to jeopardize his reward!" Bu Run nodded agreement. "And who were you going to send to check the museum?" Without hesitation Win Dom answered, "My oldest son. He is worthy of my confidence. We can rely on his discretion." Bu Run shook his head impatiently. "Better bring the kid who found it in. Let him talk for himself," he ordered. The priest tried to protest, summoning up regulations prohibiting the entrance of village personnel into the enclosure. Against his will he found himself stepping back through the gate into his humid office, opening the door to the street. Lin was crouched against the wall, his arms cradled against his stomach warming the precious egg, even as it was warming him. He rose eagerly as the priest opened the door. "Come, my son, and take courage. A superior person has ordered that thou shouldst bring him the holy egg. Surely the reward will be great, if thou art thus honored #" Too shocked for speech, Lin followed the priest into his office, averting his eyes superstitiously from the finger play with the intercom. As he entered the holy ground of the enclosure, Lin's heart laughed inside him. The great one must be as excited as he was at the discovery. Ah, the sheets of gleaming metal that would be his, the strong tools, the look of respect in the eyes of the village elders I They would visit his house to pay him compliments and to ask his opinion on the prospects of the crops. Even Mai Ling's father, he exulted. Ever since he had begun to appreciate his male equipment, he had chosen Mai Ling to be his mate. Now her father would rejoice to have such a fortunate sonin-law. Not for him a girl chosen by the old men who make marriages. He was a man now, with the power to choose his own. But he stood with humbly bowed neck before the glistening table of the great one. The huge dark person smiled gently at him. "You found a fireegg, son?" Lin nodded, feeling its soothing power against his bare flesh. "But the holy one says that you stole it," Bu Run continued. "Now, how am I going to find out who speaks truth?" Aware that the native was unable or afraid to answer, the Negro turned to the priest standing some distance away. "The directive says: where there is no evidence, the word of the superior is to be taken. I think I remember it right?" Win Dom nodded, a glint in his ruby-colored eyes. "You are perfectly correct, sir ! " "Okay, it's your egg," Bu Run shrugged. "Go ahead and take it." The priest almost jumped forward, then stopped himself -- a reaction three ancestors too late. "First -- first I must get a suitable nest for it, sir. The sacred egg must lie on soft metal." A smile touched Bu Run's mouth. "What's the difference? You can rely on our discretion. Just get it back to the museum!" When Win Dom still hesitated, Bu Run's tone grew harsher. "All right. There's one sure way to find out! Have your discreet Number One Son take this kid out to the hill of sacrifice and offer the egg to the gods. If it's a museum egg, they won't take it. If it's a live fire-egg, they'll let us know!" Grudgingly, Win Dom ordered the oriental out of the check room and started to follow him. "Hold it!" Bu Run commanded. "Tell him how the little ring hatches the egg. Then get back here and leave the gate open!" The black man leafed through the reports lying on his desk. The IF pages repeated yesterday's information -- or last year's, for that matter. No activity on the perimeter, compound enclosure still at safe level. No contact with Saigon or off-shore stations. No contact with anyone except within the sterile incubator of the enclosure. The priest returned, and Bu Run motioned him to a seat while he took out and lit a cigarette, made with what he had been assured was tobacco. Blowing the first puff of smoke toward the open gateway, he addressed the albino without looking at him. "You never learn, do you? We've got all the clean stuff in here. That's why you live out there, remember? Maybe the ground's clean now, and maybe the food's fit to eat. But the metal they dig up is still plenty hot, or 'holy as you call it!" Win Dom clasped his twelve pale fingers together and stared glumly at an imaginary speck of mildew on the spotless metal desk. Bu Run ignored the sullen white man and imagined the feel of the end-of-duty shower that would clean his skin of contamination with priest and peasant. V#hen the blast of the concus  sion reached them, the papers on Bu Run's desk fluttered madly. Over the hill of sacrifice bits and pieces of Sum Lin were undergoing separate and bodily assumption into the cloudless atmosphere of Viet Nam. Sergeant Bu Run, or "Brown," in the archaic pronunciation still used in the enclosure, ground out his cigarette and signalled for the priests to leave. Slowly he heaved himself up from behind the desk and walked to the open gate. It's the best way to get rid of that damned radioactive junk, he told himself. Anyway, it's a lot quicker for the poor gook than having his stomach corrode from the inside out. He pushed the switch beside the heavy gate and watched it swing closed. "Well," he muttered the traditional benediction. "Keep the faith, i IF  Serial by j. t. McIntosh There were six ways to get out of Limbo . Five of them involved suffering -- the sixth meant death ! Tie did not know his name, but with green fields , flowers, a the coffin from which he had house to live in, a crystal lake, arisen bore the legends Rex. He birds and animals that were love did not know the name of the place ly and unafraid. Two things marwhere he found himself and called red it: it Limbo. First, an Eden should have an It was a paradise -- almost -- Eve -- but Rex had two : the girl whose nameplate said Regina, and another , the loveliest creature he had ever seen, labeled Venus . Second, this paradise was surrounded by a wall . The wall was not stone or brick, but a gray, queerly fuzzy form of energy . He could not pass through it, but there were six Gateways in the wall, each opening onto another world . Rex dared one gateway and found himself on the planet of Bullan, where the human colonists were despairing to the point of apathy and even suicide . He returned to Limbo, perplexed and worried . Yet there was nothing to do but to explore the other Gateways, one by one . He chose the second and entered it, this time accompanied by Regina . They found themselves on a desert world, where the heat was intolerable and the only life in sight that which had been imported, cell by cell, from other planets . It had a human population, even great cities . Yet it was a dying world, cut off from Earth, lacking the basic organic components in its ecology to keep itself going... and intensely hostile and suspicious . Unfortunately for Rex, he aroused the suspicions of the first people he talked to. He let slip that he was not a native, and not from Earth -- and the girl he was talking to reacted instantly. She reached to press a button to summon help. TTe was over the counter in a   moment, her wrist held in his. His other hand was over her mouth and she was trying to bite it, to scream. He dragged her through the doorway behind her and into the first room off the passage there. His luck was in; it was a toilet, with a bath, showers, and no windows. And there she suddenly stopped struggling. "You're a Twentyman," she said. He didn't let her go, but his tactics changed. "So?" he said. "Why hold me, then?" He let her go. Twentymen didn't have to use violence. "What is a Twentyman?" he asked. She stared. "Tell me," he said, and instead of trying to conceal his power, he exerted it all on this thin, pale girl, "Oh... you have to be special in the first place, the dominant people merge with you -- " "Merge?" "Suicides. Instead of just ending it all, they merge with the Dominant to make a Twentyman. Nothing much survives of them, everybody knows that. No knowledge, only traces of skill and intelligence and talent. But some of the soul, we believe. The cream. The top of the personality. The no IF suicides get peace, and they don't quite die." "And the result?" "A Twentyman? He's stable. He never commits suicide. It's never been known. He never gets depressed. He's... moral. It's not possible for him to be evil." "Or her?" "Girl Twentymen? There aren't so many of them. Not because there aren't as many women suicides, but because there aren't as many girl Dominants. Well, do I pass? What do you really want?" "I came only for information." She looked at him warily. "Not about me, surely. I'm nobody. I've done nothing." "About Cresta." "You came in the last ship?" "No." She nodded. "You came like the birds." Something clicked. "Birds have been turning up here unexpectedly, is that it? And you want more?" few of them manage to live. You do know about the birds, don't you? Where they come from?" T Te could guess. The area im mediately beside the Gateways in Limbo was swarming with birds. Deliberately, carelessly or blindly, many of them had blundered into the Gateways. Section K had made a mistake there. "There won't be any more," he said. Tears welled from her eyes. She didn't sob. The tears, unchecked, ran down her thin face. "Then it was Just a mistake," she whispered. "We thought -- some of us thought -- someone was really trying to help us." She didn't resist as he tied her to a chair with strips tom from a roller towel. Instead, she looked at him steadily and said: "Twentyman, unless all I've ever heard is wrong, you have to be good, moral, just. Cresta is hovering between life and death. Not the voluntary death that faces almost every other world in the galaxy. Slow, painful death because though we're a good settlement we can't import or create enough life to keep us alive. Twentyman, wherever you're from, you've got to help us." "I can't promise anything," he said. "But if it turns out it's possible for me to do something, I'll do it." Five minutes later he joined Regina and said: "Let's get out of here." The rest had done her no good. She was lackluster, drooping. She stood up with an effort. Nobody paid any more attention to them than before. At the edge of the city they did not have to wait long until there was nobody in sight. In the desert they felt safer. "What happened?" asked Regina. "I'll tell you later. I know you're in a bad way, Regina, but we have to leave this place." "If I survive, I'm never going through a Gateway again. You know that, don't you?" "Sometimes it's worse than others." Her tired brain gave up the effort. It was all she could do to plod along, reeling. All the way back to the Gateway, Rex was looking for corpses of birds. To his relief he saw none. So the birds, although they had given the Crestans a clue to the existence of the Gateway, had given them no clue to its exact location. Without Regina's unerring sense of direction, they'd never have found the Gateway. The coincidence which showed them exactly where it was would have been of no value to them if they hadn't been within fifty yards of it at the time and making directly for it. A large pigeon suddenly appeared from nowhere, flapping desperately. It fell to the ground as if it had been brought down by a shot. But within a couple of seconds, its movements more coordinated, it took off and began making wide circles in the sky. "Nothing to them, apparently," said Regina. The tiny effort of thinking and speaking proved too much for her. Her knees buckled and she folded. Rex had to carry her to the Gateway. XI n ex managed, with enormous effort, to get down the stairway. It took him half an hour. Surprisingly, Regina was conscious, though too weak to raise an arm. He had to leave her on the platform, knowing that if he tried to help her down they would both tumble all the way. This time there was no water. But within yards of the base of the stairway were hundreds of eggs. Rex sucked a few and took some to Regina. Half an hour later, with his help, she was able to get down the stairs. And then Venus was with them, strong and capable. Rex noted indifferently, for consideration later, that Venus had known they were back the moment they arrived, as Regina would have done. It was late afternoon when they reached Limbo, and it was beginning to get dark as they dragged themselves into the house, Venus half carrying Rex and more than half carrying Regina. Only then did Rex ask Venus: "How long were we gone?" "Twenty-nine days," she said. As Venus carried Regina upstairs and put her to bed, Rex, sprawled in an armchair, realized that Venus had a clear and important role in Limbo after all -- the unlikely one of nurse. Later, when she had heard the IF story, it was Venus who hit on the one word that crystallized the mood of Strand #, probably of the whole world. "Desperation," she said. That was it. As Bullan was characterized by apathy, Cresta was a world of desperation. The scheme to re-create life on the planet wasn't going to work unless someone or something much bigger and richer and more powerful than the little Crestan settlement weighed in and made it work. It was a far better world than Bullan, but perhaps only because Cresta couldn't afford apathy. Cresta had to be desperate... N ext day all Regina could do was lie on a divan out in the open and drink orange juice. She had always been tiny and fragile. Now as she lay soaking up the veiled sunlight of Limbo, she was a ghost of the tiny creature she had been. "Obviously," she said faintly when she caught Rex looking at her, "I can't go through a Gateway again. I hope you never go. I know I can't." Rex sat down beside her. "Perhaps you can," he said. "Rex, I can't take that again. Oh, I'd do it if it was the only way of getting back here. If it was a matter of life and death. But when it's only an experiment, something done out of curiosity, because you believe exploration is important  "What I meant was I don't think transference need be so bad as that. The galaxy model doesn't tell us where Limbo is, but if we assume the length of time gone is proportional to the distance traveled -- we Ve got to assume something -- we'll soon get some indication where Limbo probably is. When I went to Bullan I was gone seventeen days.The Cresta double trip took twenty-nine. Bullan is roughly two-thirds of the way to the rim of the galaxy, from the center. Cresta is practically on the rim. Suppose Limbo is roughly at the center -- " "Thai we'll have a long trip to Earth," said Regina tiredly. "We can't go to Earth. On my theory, the next world, Neri, is farther than Bullan, farther even than Cresta. Landfall not quite as far as Bullan. Chuter, at the center of the galaxy, may be no distance at all. We may even be on Chuter." "Rather wild guesses, aren't they?" "Of course. To check it, I suggest we go to Chuter next. All of us, Venus too. If I'm right, the journey won't be anything like the ordeal the long trips are -- " "Let's discuss further expeditions from Limbo," said Regina, "in about three months, when I feel approximately human again." Inevitably, with Regina spending all day and every day lying in the sun, Venus and Rex spent a lot of time together, working together. It was Venus who helped Rex to fix up a light framework of steel and wood round three sides of the platform facing the Cresta Gateway, preventing birds from flying into it and at the same time leaving the Gateway open. Later she helped Rex to build another stairway at the Chuter Gateway. Three weeks after the return of Rex and Regina from Cresta, the three of them stood rather awkwardly at the foot of the Chuter stairway. Rex's relations with Regina had been strained in the last few days. They had not quarreled, largely because the Gateways were never mentioned. But it was an awkward situation, a man going on a possibly dangerous mission with a beautiful woman, leaving his wife behind because she had flatly refused to go. "Good-by, Regina." Rex was formal partly because Venus was there and partly because he wanted the parting, since it could not be cordial, to be as neutral as possible. He kissed Regina lightly, started to say something, and stopped. They waved from the top of the stairway... T his time there was scarcely any unconsciousness. It was almost like awakening from a healthy night's sleep, with a certain thirst, a desire to go to the bathroom and clean his teeth, but no more than that. Rex took a drink from his waterbottle. They were in a forest of huge trees, with a blinding sun shooting white arrows through thick foliage. Venus smiled at him. She was throwing aside everything but the sandals, skirt and blouse which she had worn under her overalls for use as tropical kit, as Regina had done on Cresta. "Now let's get this clear, Venus," he said warmly. "Until we know better, our overalls are our best chance of passing unnoticed on this or any other world. Now put them back on." She shook her head slowly, her smile fading. "No," she said. "It doesn't matter a damn how we look here -- because there's no one to see." They marked the location of the Gateway. Then they drank, ate some chocolate and found the edge of the forest. When they saw the city Venus said soberly: "It's dead." "You can sense things, like Regina?" "Not quite like Regina. She can see places, things. I can only sense the living and the dead." "And this planet is dead?" "No, the animals, birds and insects are alive. Look, there's a flight of birds. But humans... it's hard to IF say. Quite recently, I think, there were humans. Now they're either dead or have gone away." The moment they stepped from the shade the heat hit them, making them gasp for breath. Instantly Rex was wet with sweat. Two out of three worlds very hot. This was worse than Cresta. They walked over yellow grass to the city. It was neat and clean and new, but nobody moved in it. The streets were bare. On the whole, it looked as if there had been orderly evacuation rather than disaster. Certainly there had been no sudden disaster, for doors were locked, cars were off the streets, and there was no damage. Dust and dirt were negligible. "There's no life," said Venus, but I can tell the places where life has most recently been." They went to some of these places and found bodies. It was no puzzle, no secret. This city, which was called, rather forbiddingly, Havoc, had killed itself, gradually, systematically, inglorioudy. Plenty of material was left for anyone who wanted to write a history. of the Last Days of Havoc. Some of the last messages were mere suicide notes. Some were voluminous diaries. Many were tapes left on recorders. Rex and Venus read and listened to many of these messages from the grave. The last man in Havoc died three months before they arrived on February #, #. They found several chronometers still recording both galactic time and local time. In all those hundreds of thousands of last words, they did not find exactly why Havoc had committed suicide. Some blamed the incessant heat. Some blamed the solitude -- Havoc was the only city on the planet, a pilot city set up and populated with # people and left for five years. One blamed the fact that there had never been a child in Havoc. On tape he said: "We were meant to have children. There were plenty of young couples. But who was to be the first to bring a child into this world? Early on, we lost heart. It was too hot; the work was hard; there was no variety; nobody could be bothered to do any more than stay alive..." There was a long pause, and then the tired voice went on, the tired voice of a man of twenty-nine whose twenty-three-year-old wife had killed herself that morning. "We drew together, once there were gaps. We hadn't been here a year, and the ship from Earth wouldn't arrive for five years -- that was the bargain. Most of us hadn't realized how hard the cleavage from Earth would hit us. And only a few could go back, we knew that -- just a few to tell the story That was the bargain..." IF A woman who did not give her  name but who sounded like a young girl said on her tape: "There is a sickness in mankind. Doomsday is near... and it's our own doing. A hundred suicides, five other deaths. Only # of us left. The heat. The tiny city. The work. The four years still to wait. And no way of getting back to Earth then... Why did we ever agree?" There was escalation in suicide. When there were still over # of them, the people of Havoc began to be terrified of being left alone. The last man had died just eight months short of the scheduled return of the ship from Earth. Eight months was just too long to wait. There was one thing more, the thing that made it hopeless, pointless, to wait for the ship. Havoc had murder as well as suicide on its hands. A low voice on one of the tapes said: "We grew to hate the Twenty men. The rest of us had let go, and they wouldn't let go. They wouldn't let us give up. "So we killed them. Yes, we killed the Twentymen. All three of them. We couldn't have done it face to face. We arranged a meeting. They turned up. We didn't. And the bomb went off." The pause was so long that they thought there was no more on the tape. Then the voice began again, perfectly calm now:' "That did it. Yes, we meant to kill them. We weren't sorry they were dead. We didn't repent. They didn't haunt us. But later -- how could we wait for the ship and say when it came we murdered three Twentymen because they were Twentymen, because they wouldn't let us give up?" Rex looked up at Venus. They had been listening in silence. "Apathy, desperation and... what?" he said. "Fear," she said. "The most spineless kind of mass surrender. They even murdered through fear." "It's pathological, of course," Rex mused. "Mass neurosis." "And that girl was right. It's not just in the pathetic five thousand who came here. It's in mankind." "They know it and they do nothing about it. Doomsday is near " "For Havoc," said Venus drily, "Doomsday has come and gone." egina met them halfway between the Chuter Gateway and the house. "You were gone only two days," she said. Rex turned his head away to smile. She was surprised, even a little resentful, that the Chuter mission had so obviously been easy. Regina had taken a stand against a course she felt to be highly dangerous and a big test of endurance. She had flatly refused to submit herself to such an ordeal again. Had Rex and Venus returned exhausted, parched, famished, barely able to stagger from the Gateway, she wouldn't necessarily have said "I told you so," but only because it would not have been necessary to say anything. Now it seemed that the Chuter trip had been no more arduous than an overnight stop in the far south of Limbo. "What did you find?" she asked crossly. Rex told her. As they rested at the lake, Venus said abruptly: "Suppose we go to Chuter and stay there." Regina's astonished stare was her only answer. "I mean it," said Venus. "Moving between Chuter and Limbo is easy, like walking through any ordinary doorway. If we want anything, we can easily come back. There's an empty city on Chuter, crops for five thousand, plenty of fruit." "But why?" Rex asked. "Don't you want to meet the people behind Limbo? The people of Section K? There will be a ship from Earth in five months. It wouldn't have taken five thousand people back to Earth -- that wasn't in the bargain, as so many dead men told us. But it'll take three, if we're persuasive. If we let them see we're Twentymen -- " "Yes," said Rex thoughtfully. "Instead of dragging this on, there's a way to get it over with." "How?" said Regina quickly. "We'd have to work together. The three of us draw lots for Neri, Byron, Landfall. Then we all go at the same time, each alone, and compare notes when we get back." They thought about it. Rex liked the idea: it was a way to get this preliminary investigation over, this thing which had to be done, and be on Chuter in plenty of time to be sure of meeting the ship. It was Regina, of course, who raised doubts. "Will that be enough? A quick glance at the three other worlds?" "It might be," Rex said. "I don't think the Gateways are meant to provide six keys, each of them necessary to unlock a vast puzzle. They're more like six windows. We look through each of them, and having done so, we act." There was still one more important objection Regina could make. She made it. "Assuming you're right about the position of Limbo -- near the center of the galaxy, certainly very near Chuter -- whoever draws Neri is going to be a long time gone. Maybe forever." Rex nodded, frowning. "I know. We have to assume it can be done. And that it's important." He took it for granted somehow thathe would draw Neri. "You want me to draw, Rex?" He hesitated. At last he said: "I don't wish danger on you, Regina. I don't want you to be hurt, or go IF through anything like what happened last time. But I do want you to work on this." "Fll draw," she said. Rex got Byron, Regina Landfall, and Venus Neri. egina lay for a time without opening her eyes, not wishing to awaken. But inexorably awareness came back, and at last she sat up abruptly and opened her eyes, remembering before she saw anything that she was not in the climatic chaos of Landfall after all. She was back in Limbo. One disappointment... she was alone in Limbo. Venus was not likely to be back from Neri for several weeks, but Rex might easily have been back before her, especially since she had been forced to spend eight days in Landfall. She shuddered at some of her memories of Landfall, and then breathed deep relief at being back in Limbo. Rex was not back, as she knew the moment she reached out with the 'fingers of her mind. She was not really worried about him, however. It was by the greatest good luck, as well as courage she did not credit herself with possessing, that she was back in Limbo. Some of the desperate things she had done she had accomplished only because there was clearly no choice. But Rex was different. Her black plastic snowsuit was still damp inside. Curiously, transference, which took days, brought hunger and thirst, but wet clothes didn't dry. She started off for the house at a determined trot. Soon she had to remove her plastic suit. She left it hidden under a bush in case Rex wanted to examine it as a product of Landfall, the only one she had brought back. Exertion made her hungry and thirsty, proving that she was in far better state despite the rigors of her stay in Inverkoron than on her return from Cresta, or even on her arrival at Cresta. But she did not pause again until she was home. Home... Luxuriating in a warm, scented bath that eased her cuts and bruises and drew all the other aches from her body, she remembered that once she had told Rex that Earth was home. Well, so it was. Yet she was less inclined now ever to return there. Landfall had helped to cure her. She was still in her bath when she sensed that Rex was back. She laughed aloud in relief. On the point of jumping out of the bath and running to him, she changed her mind and relaxed again. There was no sense of distress about his arrival. He would make straight for the house, as they had agreed. Since the Byron Gateway was the nearest except for Bullan, he would be back in an hour or so. She needed that time to make herself look her best, start a meal in the kitchen, and make a quick round of the house without which it could not be considered habitable. CCTou first, please," Regina said.  They were in the lounge with glasses and a bottle of wine Rex had brought back from Byron. Regina, in a cool white dress, somewhat Grecian and nearly ankle-length, was curled on the sofa. Rex looked at her thoughtfully, wonderingly. "You've changed, Regina," he said. "In no essential particular," she said. "True, IVe been nearly killed by men and women and the elements, beaten with sticks a couple of times, had to swim a river full of ice floes, escaped rape only because my host turned out to be temporarily impotent, dashed against trees in a forest by a wind the like of which youVe never dreamed, had my throat cut -- " "What?" "Oh, it was a threat rather than a serious attempt at murder. And as you see a surgeon was called in at once and fixed me up so that it will never show." She shrugged. "All that is nothing really, now it's over and I don't have to go through it again. Maybe you're right that I've changed, Rex, but that wasn't what changed me. Let's have your story, Rex." "There's nothing in it to match yours. Oh, all right." It was not an exciting or even a very interesting story. Byron was superficially very Terran. Nobody bothered Rex, except one maniac reminiscent of the one he had encountered on Bullan. Byron was, literally, a mad world, a schizoid world. Except for the Twentymen, who were more necessary there than in most places to preserve even a semblance of order, the Byronians were manic-depressives reacting violently on each other. Their particular type was gay-sad, with frenetic gaiety switching itself, sometimes instantly, to blackest depression. The suicide rate was the highest in the galaxy. "Can't be higher than Chuter," Regina remarked in one of her rare interruptions. "There it was # per cent." Byron was a world of fantastic excesses. "Venus would find a word to sum it all up," said Rex, "but I can't. Decadence, maybe. Sometimes it reminded me of Rome at its most rotten, with people carousing at the most incredible orgies and then having each other murdered the next morning. Incest -- they make quite a point of that. Any man with an attractive daughter who has not contrived to go to bed with her is considered... let's say peculiar. There are few of these, because it's equally obligatory for any girl demonstrably nubile to IF complete the Electra adventure. The Search for Something on Byron, is so desperate, so unremitting, that anything that has not been tried has to be tried, no matter how revolting." He shook his head as if to clear it. "I stayed longer than I need have done, looking for something that wasn't there. On Byron, it was easy to stay. Find any wildly enthusiastic fun-maker, and he'll give you half what he owns. I tried to pump some of the Twentymen, but all I found was that they feel it their duty to keep the unholy mess from being even worse. Is that enough, or do you want any more details?" TO egina sipped her wine. "This is good. Very good. Does that mean nothing?" "Nothing. I got it from some Twentymen who made it themselves. They gave me a few things because I helped them in a small way -- a few pitiful things that represented the best of Byron. There's a couple of paintings we might hang somewhere, a weird dress for you book that nobody understands but nobody puts down. I left them at the Gateway and hurried here." Regina stood up and began to move about the room, but not restlessly, Rex noticed, rather with a casual grace which he would have said before this night was more typical of Venus than Regina. He looked at her admiringly and with a new wonder. It was hard to listen without irrelevant anger or belated protectiveness as she told him what had happened to her on Landfall. The dominant feature of Landfall was rage. Not the maniacal rage he had encountered on Byron. Cold rage directed mainly at Earth, so far away from Landfall and so implacable. Unfortunately, the first time Regina spoke, her accent immediately identified her as Terran. There were no Twentymen in Landfall. It was partly for this reason that all the nastiness of humanity went naked there, without even the minor check on the baser instincts that the Twentymen achieved. WhenRegina gave herself away as a Terran, a gang of teenagers, girls as well as youths, beat her with sticks. Rescued by police, she was taken to headquarters, where they shut her in an open courtyard with snow three feet deep and forgot her existence. Hungry and frozen, she labored for an hour to build up stampeddown snow so that she could climb over a thirteen-foot gate and was on the point of escape when one of the fantastic climactic reversals of Landfall hit the courtyard. A blast of searing heat, swirling, boiling, dry air, funneled down, took Regina's breath away and melted the snow in seconds. Although the drainage was good -- it had to be in Inverkoron -- she was soaked to the waist before the water had flowed away. Since there was now no means of escape over the gate, she had to take the chance of breaking a window and entering one of the buildings. For the first time fortune favored her; she found herself in a pantry, and thereafter hunger wasn't a major hardship. She escaped from the building easily enough, but her gray overalls did not make her inconspicuous in Inverkoron, where everyone wore plasticsuits with hoods, internally heated. A crowd gathered again, shouting abuse at her, and die was saved from further violence only by the intervention of a little fat man. The little fat man took her home with him, and she went not unwillingly because it was snowing heavily again, night was falling and she knew it was physically impossible at the moment for her to reach the Gateway, allhough it was barely a mile from Inverkoron. She felt she could handle the little fat man, and she couldn't handle a mob. I t worked out quite well, the first night. The little man lived pitifully in a tiny and rather dirty corner of a large house. Once the whole house had been his and technically it still was, but after his wife and family left him he was not allowed to keep all that first-class accommodation to himself. Despite his wealth, he was shoved into a bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette, and this palatial suite was walled off from the rest of the house. He entered by a door starkly cut in the outside wall of the bedroom. "You don't sound at all sorry for the little man," said Rex. "I'm not sorry for him," said Regina grimly. "Wait." The little man started to make supper, but gratefully accepted Regina's offer to take over. Afterwards, he made passes at her which she was able to ignore. She slept at first on the floor and later in the bath, with the door locked, after wakening to find her host feebly pawing her. The next morning she made breakfast and decided she had seen enough of Landfall. After breakfast the little man, who had apparently been steeling himself, made quite a determined assault on her virtue. Regina was not impressed until she found herself pressed against a wall by his greater weight, with a long and very sharp knife at her throat. "That was when it happened," Rex said. She nodded. "He was so ineffectual I was sure he was bluffing. I made it very clear that in no circumstances would I have anything to do with him, in that way. Then I felt blood running down my neck." IF A doctor was called, and she was patched up efficiently. The little man was incoherently apologetic, and she did feel a little sorry for him... until the police arrived, called by the little fat man, to take her away, because she was no good to him. She then spent several days in a semi-jail, semi-asylum. She was fed well enough and nobody bothered her. There was no word of trial either. Then three men came to pay her fine and, apparently, buy her. As a Terran she had no rights. She was not supposed to be there. Any time she ceased to be there, no one would care. iiHphe last night," said Regina "I was locked in a bathroom right at the top of an eleven-story block of flats I -- " "Hey, what's this?" Rex demanded "You've skipped about four days." Regina said firmly. "Honestly, I don't think it's relevant. There's more to tell you, but what matters all happened after I was locked in that bathroom -- " "Please, Regina," said Rex. She looked at him steadily, asking him not to insist. When he said nothing, she sighed and said: "All right. They bought me to put me on show." "On show?" "For people to pay money to spit on a Terran girl. At first they hung me up outside by my wrists, in a disgusting costume, and periodically threw water over me. But I fainted from the cold, and they saw they were going to lose me very quickly if they went on treating me like that. So they moved the show inside and dressed me in filthy rags. Thousands of people came." She shuddered. "The little fat man came, and he spat on me. They let me loose, but with my hands tied behind my back, and threw disgusting food on the floor. I was supposed to get down and lick it with my tongue. I ignored it, and they beat me with sticks. I still wouldn't eat the food on the floor. After that they fed me decently. I was a valuable property... More thousands came. Then the flow began to diminish. A new act was needed. This time they cleaned me up and made me a pin-up girl, swathed in jewels and yards of scarlet satin. At least the crowds weren't allowed to spit any more. That worked for another day." "They had a lot of bright ideas, did they?" Rex said quietly. "I can guess." "The best one, of course, was to put me up for auction -- not for keeps, just for a half-hour. I told you about that already. My sponsors were annoyed, because this part of the show was public too, and it was an utter flop. More than that, I got scratched and they had to let me clean myself. That was when I was locked in the bathroom." "Ah," said Rex. He was fighting down the impulse to go to Inverkoron immediately and clobber everyone in sight. "Well, I knew I was on the top floor. I knew the river Koron flowed past the block. They knew that too. I suppose it didn't occur to them, because I'd made it perfectly clear that I wasn't the suicide type, that I'd break the window and jump out." Rex got up and sat beside her, taking her in his arms. "Why did you?" he asked. "Well, it was the first real chance I'd had. So I took it" "Yes," said Rex, caressing her gently. "So... I dropped the satin rubbish on the floor, because it could only hamper me. I smashed the window with a jar of bath salts. Then I got through and pushed myself outwards as I fell. The water was freezing. Anyway, I missed the ice floes. I went so deep I thought I'd never come up again. But after I reached the other side and climbed out, the cold struck right through me, I could scarcely move for shivering, and I knew I had to get a snowsuit in about two minutes or it would be too late." "You got it," said Rex. "Yes. I don't know whether I killed the man or just stunned him. When I saw his face I was relieved. I was certain he was one of those who spat on me. That made me feel a lot less guilty." The whole thing should have been over then. She was less than half a mile from the Gateway. However, she had scarcely passed the end of the last bridge across the Koron when she heard the howling mob racing across from the other side. She must have been heard breaking the window. They must have guessed where she had to go. S he ran, at least having the advantage of knowing exactly where she was going. In a flurry of snow it seemed for a minute or two that she was bound to make it. Then the night cleared, the air went still and there was a shout behind her as the mob saw her. Looking over her shoulder she tripped on a root, and although she was up at once, no bones broken, she could not put her left foot to the ground. And she knew it was over -- the wrong way. She turned to wait for the mob, and, twenty beams of light fastened on her as she waited without a trace of fear, despising the mob too much for fear. She smiled. One of the beams faltered, then another. The crowd broke. "It was all unnecessary," Regina sighed. "Hadn't you already found that for yourself? Landfall has no Twentymen, but when I stood and IF faced them, they were helpless. I needn't have let those kids beat me. I could have handled the little fat man more easily with my eyes, if I ever really looked at him. The three showmen, even the crowds, I could have silenced and cowed. I didn't need tn be brave, to be desperate. I'm a Twentyman. If I'd stood up for myself and dared them to touch me, instead of bowing my head and hoping I'd find the courage to get through the next ten minutes, none of this would have happened." Rex turned her head and kissed her. "Thank you," he said. "For what?" "For helping. For going through all that." "Unnecessarily." "No. If you'd marched into Inverkoron as a Twentyman, making all bow down before you, you'd have learned nothing." "And it matters, Rex? You think it matters? Does what we've found out make sense?" "Yes," he said. "Well, tell me the sense." He shook his head. "It's one of those things that everyone has to decide for himself, or herself." "And you've decided?" "Yes." "Then Venus is wasting her time? You already know what she'll find?" "No, I wouldn't say that. I could make a few guesses, not more than three. If she confirms what I suspect, that will be very important." Regina shrugged. "My voice is raw. I'm tired. The wine is finished. Venus won't be back for days, maybe weeks. I'm disgusted with some men, but not, strangely enough, with you. Are you coming to bed or aren't you?" "I'm coming." Much later they established, almost definitely, that that was the start of Regina's pregnancy. nphey were both, as it happened, A obliviously ill at the moment when Venus returned from Neri. It was food poisoning, beyond doubt the result of using a defective can of food. Even in Limbo, such things could happen. As a result, Regina was too deeply asleep, with a high temperature, to sense Venus's return, and Rex couldn't do things like that anyway. Thus it was that Rex, venturing shakily downstairs late the next day, encountered Venus dragging herself tiredly into the house, wrapped in a shapeless, all-enveloping cloak which was curiously stained. Weak as he was, he rushed to help her, but she held up her hand. "I'll manage," she said. "I'll be all right now." She was as beautiful as ever, though tired. "I won't be down for two or three days," she said, "but I think I can tell you in one word all that Neri stands for." "Venus, I'm sorry we weren't able to help you -- " "Never mind that. I didn't need help, and I'm back now, thank God. You and Regina are all right, I know. In fact you're closer than you ever were." She dragged herself towards the stairs, and Rex had to check himself. Except when it was accidental or in play, or in tiny acts of courtesy, she had never let him touch her, he remembered. "Neri in one word," she said, turning at the foot of the stairs. "Cruelty." And as he watched her, with troubled eyes, pulling herself up by the banister, Rex realized that what Regina had suffered in Inverkoron was merely rage, as she described it, not cruelty. t was winter in London. There had been no difficulty in getting this far. There had been regret at leaving Limbo, greater regret at leaving Regina. It had been decided that he alone should return to Chuter and wait for the ship there. There was regret at leaving Limbo and Regina to go to Earth, but no difficulty. The ship from Earth, a fast scout, arrived at Havoc exactly on schedule, and Rex, for once admitting from the first his Twentyman status, found he could have told any lie and been believed. As it happened, it was unnecessary to tell any lies, except the indirect one of pretending to be one of the Chuter Twentymen. He had temporarily adopted the identity of an actual Twentyman, one of the first to be murdered. The crew and field-study group brought by the ship were quite unsurprised at what had happened. They were rather surprised and relieved to find a surviving Twentyman who could save time and trouble by telling them what had happened and had already collated the story of the last days of the Havoc settlement. Anyway, he was taken back to Earth, where he was to report, conveniently, to the Department of Education and Science, London -- not Section K, but another section in the same building. As he strode through archaic slush in London's West End, knowing Regina was only six months pregnant and that it was perfectly possible that he might be back in Limbo before her time came, Rex was in a mood to get the present unpleasant business over as soon as possible. London was one of the museum cities of Earth, the central part kept as it had been a thousand years ago, except that only ceremonial traffic ever passed through the old-fashioned streets. Wearing a hat, coat and gloves over a lounge suit and leather shoes IF (all charged to Section K), Rex looked more at the people than the surroundings. He was reminded of Bullan. Mercury was no museum dty. Unlike the West End of London, it was entirely functional, planned and built for the present circumstances. Yet the people who passed him without even a glance at him reminded him irresistibly of the people of Mercury, although they were dressed quite differently. Tourists had to be allowed in, had to be allowed even to live in the sanctuary, because otherwise the object would not be achieved. The Ritz, the Dorchester, the Grosvenor, the Berkeley were still there, but only outworld visitors could stay there. The waiting list was so enormous that chance decided who actually got in; there was a complicated system of priorities for Earth visits, and even someone who got to the head of the list had to accept the booking he got, which might be for London, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Edinburgh, Shanghai, Calcutta, Sydney or any other of the seven hundred museum cities or the five thousand reservations. Apart from the gawking visitors, the people, like the Mercurians, were isolated, apathetic. The Terrans were no master-race. Rex reached the Department of Education and Science and looked at its exterior, unimpressed. He was not surprised to find it took up the whole of one side of Hill Street. He would not have been surprised if it stretched all the way to the Thames. TTe entered by a glass door and  found himself between two lines of reception desks, as if the Department of Education and Science dealt with hundreds of visitors an hour. But he and the middle-aged woman behind one of the desks were the only people in the place. "Section K," he said briefly. She pressed buttons on a viewer file beside her, and he realized, incredulously, that she was looking up the location of Section K. "Section K comes under the Research Group," she said finally. "Go to B# -- and take it from there," she added with a wintry smile. "Thank you." At the end of the entrance hall, a passage at right angles bad wall signs and arrows indicating A-M and N-Z. He took the first. For such an enormous building, the Department seemed singularly deserted. Only occasionally did he meet a typist or an office boy crossing the miles of corridors. After walking several hundred yards he found and entered the B section. All the doors, the infinity of doors were blank and no sound came from within. Then, suddenly, everything was easy. At another desk, facing another middle-aged woman, he knew he had to give a password. He said: "Rex." In no time at all he was shown into the office of John Hilton, the section chief. TTilton, a quiet little man with  gray hair and watchful eyes, came to him with hand oustretched in greeting. "Glad to see you, Rex," he said cautiously. "Surprised, but glad." His grasp was soft and warm. "Why surprised?" "You weren't expected for at least another five years. Sooner or later you had to investigate Section K. It was presumed you'd explore the six available worlds first. Did you?" "We had a look at them." "You and..." "Regina and Venus." "Oh. Venus too." Hilton's eyes, if anything, had become even more watchful. He went back to his desk and waved Rex to a chair, yet all the time Rex felt he was watching for something... or perhaps everything. "Hilton, who am I?" Hilton was silent, questioning. Rex had to give him a reason for answering that before he would answer. "I know I'm a Twentyman -- " "Wrong." "I'm a Twentyman," said Rex patiently, "and so is Regina and so is Venus." "Wrong. Regina is a Twentyman. The only two in existence." U A h," said Rex. "Perhaps I un- derstand about Venus and myself. Tell me about Regina. Why is she only a Twentyman?" Hilton smiled. "Only a Twentyman?" "It's been harder for her. She's too Earthbound. Happy in Limbo, but -- " He stopped. He was not handing out information, but seeking it. "The dominant personality, Regina's dominant personality, was borrowed?" Hilton nodded, unsurprised this time. "I know what you mean. You and Venus are yourselves, plus # would-be suicides. Regina is a Dominant who chose the body of one of her nineteen... partners. It often happens. Naturally she chose the prettiest." "But that made her an uneasy amalgam. It's only now that she's begun to... Never mind, I know about that. Now, Hilton -- the goal. What is it? Why?" When Hilton shook his head, Rex went on wearily: "Oh, please take my word for it I only want to plug the holes. I know the goal. We had psychological treatment and were then sent to Limbo to lose our Earth ties. We were given a IF chance to see six not particularly important worlds to find out that Doomsday is near, and why. We were supposed to decide something ought to be done about it, and figure out what. All that is elementary, and I wouldn't be here if I hadn't already made up my mind what has to be done -- " Hilton was really startled this time. He was excited too. He jumped up and began to pace about. "Something can be done? You have a plan?" "However," said Rex in the same tone, "there are, as I told you, holes I want to plug. I can't guess everything." He stood up. "Hilton," he said softly, "tell me what I have to know." Hilton went behind the desk and sat down again. He began to smile. he said, "but of course I'm a Twentyman myself. Only a Twentyman. But you'll find it's no use trying to browbeat me." "All right," said Rex. "Assume I've decided what to do. Assume that, simply as a hypothesis. Assume that I'm going to do what I believe has to be done. Don't you think you'd better tell me anything I should know before I take the first step to implement the plan?" "I think you should know it," Hilton said. "But I don't think I should tell you." "Then who should?" "Venus." Rex stood still for several seconds and then nodded. "Yes. That's right. Venus. Who gave us these ridiculous names, by the way?" "You chose them yourselves," said Hilton mildly. "How can I get back?" "Now there's a problem. There's a Gateway between this building and the place you call Limbo, of course." "I guessed that." "But it can be locked shut on Limbo, and it is. You can't use that." "Venus might have told me. A lot of trouble could have been saved." "Venus probably doesn't know. When you get back, remind her of Ron and Phyllis." "Regina and me?" said Rex quickly. Hilton shook his head. "Tell her of the time she turned her back. Remind her she was tricked into sounds bitter, remind her that it was she who decided there should "That's all?" "It should be enough." "How do I get back to Limbo?" Hilton leaned back in his chair. "Well, Limbo is on a poisonous, useless, sterile world that marches round an uninteresting sun in an unvarying orbit. It's impossible for any ordinary ship to land on the world -- Limbo, as you may have guessed, is a bubble sanctuary, a sort of immobile luxury spacehouseboat. It was created as an experiment quite independent of the things which have been concerning you. We took it over later. Anyway, you can return only through one of the seven MT screens, and the direct one is locked." "That means I have to get to Bullan or Cresta or Neri or... " "Just a minute." Hilton pressed a button. "I'll see what can be done." XV Tt was not far to the house from the Cresta Gateway. Rex was nearly there when Regina came running to throw herself in his arms, laughing and crying at once. Presently he held her back to look at her, and marveled. She had completely lost her former glossy smartness. Having a child to look after had made her settle for practical neatness rather than bandbox elegance. She wore a white sweater and white shorts and flat shoes, and her hair was simply caught in a band. But she was far lovelier, and Rex realized, even if she herself did not have the important clue, that she was at last one in mind and body, having come to accept herself as she was. "The baby?" he said. "Princess? Crawling in the grass at the back. We made a playpen, Venus and I." "Princess?" said Rex. "That needn't be her name. Since we hadn't decided on a name together, I called her that -- it's pretty obvious, isn't it, though maybe it should have been in Latin -- as a sort of pet name, one we can always use even though we call her Dawn or Mary or Venetia -- " "Venetia?" She laughed again. "Oh well. We'll talk it over, of course... she just seems like a little Venetia to me." At the house they found Venus patiently waiting for them, curious, naturally, but taking it for granted that Rex would want to see Princess first of all. Princess, or Venetia, was really an unusually beautiful child, he decided, and remarkably healthy. The moment he saw her he changed his mind, like so many other fathers, and told himself he hadn't really wanted a son after all. Left alone after lunch while Venus and Regina attended to Princess and settled her for her afternoon nap -- apparently it took two of them to do it -- Rex went down to the cellar and then the vault. At the wall board he did what the technicians of Section K had told him to do, after Hilton reluctantly agreed. Basically the effect was to merge the Chuter and IF Cresta Gateways, so that people on the Cresta side found themselves in Chuter direct, without having to touch Limbo. There were ways in which he could still use both Gateways himself, and return to Limbo. Without real understanding, he did as he had been told. The job would not have been difficult but for the fact that he had felt it necessary to know from the equipment here how many people were making use of the Gateway. Through the girl at the immigration center, they would know now what to do -- but would they do it? It was late in the afternoon before he left the vault and sought out Regina and Venus. T T e found Venus in the kitchen,   preparing something very elaborate for dinner, no doubt in honor of his return. He began to feel hungry at once. "Where's Regina?" he asked. "At the lake with Princess." Venus was working with a quickness and assurance which was entirely like her, but her obvious total command of the kitchen was something new. "You do the cooking now?" he said. "Some of it." "You were never as good a cook as Regina." "Now that's not very nice, Rex. I always do my best." "But now you are." "She and I have been working in the kitchen. I may have picked up a few things." "She couldn't teach you a thing. And you know it." Venus wiped her hands, took  last look round to see that all was well and drew him with her into the lounge. "They told you?" she said quietlyRex was almost certain that she was talking about something he had not been told, but hazily guessed. "Not exactly," he said. "Hilton told me you would tell me." "But you know?" "Please, Venus," he said, "let's have no more sparring. Hilton told me to remind you of Ron and Phyllis -- " "Oh." There was sadness in her face. "And of the time you turned your back." Now the sadness was pain. "Rex, I wonder if you know what you're doing to me," she said. "I don't, but it seems I have to do it. I was to remind you you were man." Bleakly she murmured: "That's something I don't need reminding about. It's something I remembered even as I looked at the cases and read the labels Rex, Regina and Venus." "Hilton said," Rex went bn, " 'if she sounds bitter, remind her that It was she who decided there should The sadness and the pain was gone, replaced by resignation that jwas almost her old serenity. "Yes," she said. "And I'm almost sure I made up for everything with that. You're not as I thought you'd be, Rex. You're not tortured, like me." "Tortured? You?" not a success. Twentymen, yes. They're not perfect, they're not geniuses, yet the relatively few Twentymen in the galaxy are holding Doomsday back." Rex nodded. "I've seen that." "Talking isn't one of my favorite occupations, Rex. You know that. What do you want?" "That's the trouble. I don't know." "So you want me to tell you what I think you should know." "Yes." ' "That would amount to my jclirecting you." "You said talking isn't your favorite occupation. Why not tell me in about three sentences the plain facts that you know and I don't, and let me worry about the use to make of them?" "I could... Rex, do you know what has to be done?" "Yes." He didn't say, "I think so." He said simply, "Yes." "Anything more I tell you may make it harder for you to do what has to be done. Think about that." He hesitated. He thought of Regina and Princess. And he found an excuse or even a good reason to wait for a few more days. He wanted to know about the Crestans. What they did could be the crucial point. Did they realize that they must disobey earth's ruling and go to Chuker? He was already certain what had to be done. But there was one more test. "I'll wait," he said. "But it has to come -- you know that." "I know that," said Venus. The pain was back in her eyes. Even Cresta, the most independent world he had found, was a dependent. A dependent relative. Not a world with courage and freedom of action. There was no such world. They had a chance of life, but they found Earth's displeasure. And finally one day he talked to Venus, again when Regina set off with Princess for the lake. He set out clearly what he wanted to know, and she told him. She was right -- it made it harder. At the same time, however, what she told him crystallized everything. As a young but highly regarded executive in Section K, just married and very happily married, she first became involved with Limbo (it wasn't called Limbo, of course). Here was a white elephant abanIF doned by the section which had gone to enormous, expensive trouble to create it. What could be done with it? That, at the time, was only a minor problem. Her husband Ron, also in Section K, was asked to become a Twentyman. Asked -- that was a little unusual. Suicides and would-be Twentymen Dominants were so common that it was rare for anyone not actively thinking of becoming a Twentyman or part of a Twentyman to be invited into the circle. But Ron, Section K thought, would be more useful to them as a Twentyman. He went to the clinic at the appointed time, a routine affair. Nothing ever went wrong. The process was well established. But Ron died. So did the others. Phyllis, or Venus as Rex still thought of her, was shattered. She was pregnant at the time, and she was a one-man woman. There would never be another man for her. While her baby was growing in her, she worked, since she had to work on something, on the Limbo project. success. needed. The human race was in a sorry mess. Population explosions had led to frantic colonization of the galaxy, but nobody had guessed what would follow that... Section K had had a plan for Ron and later, when that failed, Venus. A special Twentyman with all ties broken might see the Answer, if there was an Answer. After Ron's death Venus took over, for something to do. Venus had learned by this time that Ron had been meant to be a Thousandman, the first ever. And something had gone wrong. Coldly, dispassionately, in a manner diametrically opposed to her essential nature, Venus set up the project -- in her last months of pregnancy and before she was even a Twentyman. Qomeone would be sent to Limbo  alone to live there and lose involvement with Earth and the human race. The new MT transference would be used with deepsleep and certain phychiatric techniques to ensure that the Supremo should have all impersonal knowledge and no personal knowledge whatever. The Supremo would sleep perforce for ten years and exist in Limbo for another ten. After that, the Supremo, it was hoped, would know what to do. Venus had her baby, a girl, and never looked at her. Venus had turned her back on everything except Project Supremo, which had sustained her for eight months. Now she wanted to die, like so many others. They tricked her by making her think she was to be one of the nineteen to feed a Twentyman. Her baby would be looked after, of course. She accepted gladly. Instead, she was the Dominant. And she was not merely a TwentyNine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninetyher. She would have screamed at the cruelty of the trick that had been played on her, but for the was no failure this time -- she had become a unique being, unable to scream about things which could not be helped. She still abandoned Regina, but she went to Limbo instead of to heaven or hell. On her awakening in Limbo, things were different, but not different enough. She would never forget Ron. She never managed to become uninvolved, and she knew it. Her idea, formed when she was an ordinary girl of twenty or so, not sound. But she was not the one to put it into practice. There was only one Gateway then, the one to Earth. It was in the vault, only to be discovered when the occupant of Limbo had attained serenity and poise and icecold clarity. Venus found it at once. She did not spend ten years awake in Limbo. She spent scarcely two. At about the time when Regina was fourteen, Venus, who had made the Limbo plan, saw the inadequacies in it and in herself. First, she was not the Supremo. A man was needed, and not an entirely lonely man. Such a man, instead of being utterly impartial, was bound to be in some ways more involved than ever with the future of his race elsewhere. Secondly, she knew too much. The process intended to divorce the Supremo from personal involvement with the human race had to go deeper. He had to remember still less. Yet at the same time, he had to be able to learn something of the situation in the galaxy. He had to be able to see it for himself and make up his mind about it and about what had to be done. She did not then know much about MT transference, an expensive system with many snags. So Venus went back to Earth. Her old boss was dead, a fact which for the good of Project Supremo was perhaps as well. She could never have, worked at full efficiency with the man who had killed Ron and tricked her. The new chief was John Hilton. The new plan took four years to work out and put into effect. Venus never saw her daughter, never sought to see her. And then, when the vast Section K computers were asked for the names of young men and women most fitted to figure in the key roles of Proj'ect Supremo, one of the first names to issue from the machines was that of Venus's daughter. IF # # "possibly John Hilton arranged that deliberately," she said. "He was in on the original plan, as a young man. I think he was horrified at my abandonment of... I may as well go on calling her Regina. "You were a brash young man, less assured then and over-confident in manner. But I felt sure you were right. Regina was curiously rootless. My fault. She had known love all right, but not from her family. And there had been no man in her life. She was keen on the idea, as a theory -- " "Did we ever meet? Regina and I?" "No. We all agreed, including yourselves, that the first meeting should be in Limbo. And I was to return with you... I don't have to tell you any more, do I? You know all you have to know. Perhaps it might be better if you knew a little less." Rex knew what she meant, but had not been aware that she knew. "You're so young," he said wonderingly. She smiled. "I was born in #, which makes me forty-five. But I've lived less than thirty years -- funny, I've never bothered to work it out. Ten off for my first long sleep, a little over five for the second. And deepsleep has a rejuvenating effect. I suppose, practically, I'm around twenty-five." "About that I always thought," said Rex. "No wonder it didn't exactly spring to my mind that you were my mother-in-law." "And yet... you always knew, didn't you?" "I knew something." There was a long pause. Both knew what was coming, but neither was in a hurry to go ahead. At last Venus said: "You've made up your mind, Rex?" "Yes." "You're sure?" "I'm certain. The only doubt is whether I have to do it myself or if it's possible to ask you." She smiled. "Of course it's possible to ask me. It's possible to ask anyone anything." "Not this." Her smile faded. "I knew all along. I created the plan, but I couldn't face the conclusion. No, Rex, you needn't ask. Just tell me you're certain that it's the only way." "It's the only way." "Right," she said briskly. "You do me credit, Rex. You have the moral courage to order what no one else could order, and to order someone other than yourself to be the one to do it." "It's no order -- " "Now, don't let me down, Rex. After all, I'm not your mother, but I created you. You have broad shoulders. Take the responsibility, and never deny to yourself or anyone else that you took it." "All right. He smiled faintly. "You know, f course, that you're not making it difficult for me, Venus. You're making it easy." "Let me try to make the other part easier for you too. You have to stay here. You have to be the general who gives the brutal order and then sits back and watches. That's why you were created. That's why you're here. Good-bye, Rex." It was so abrupt that he was caught off his guard. She kissed him man mother couldn't help doing: "Look after Regina-" Then she left him. He forced himself not to move. Venus feaew far more of the workings of Liibo than he did, having helped to set them up. She would return straight to Earth. She knew how. Tt was only a few minutes lat- er that Regina dashed in. "What's happening?" she asked breathlesly. Regina were not identical, but they shared each other's special abilities to some extent. Venus sensed feelings, mainly, and Regina things, but Regina had clearly sensed something far more than the simple fact that Venus had gone down to the vault, alone. "vhiere's Venetia?" said Rex, stalling. "She's sleeping. I left her outside. WJiat's happened to Venus?" Rex found he couldn't say anything. He was, as Venus said, the general who gave the brutal order and then sat back in safety to watch. He, and not Venus, was the greatest criminal in history, "She's gone," he said at last. "I don't think we'll ever see her again. That's what you wanted, isn't it?" "Did you send her away?" "I didn't have to. She knew what she had to do." "Because of us?" He shook his head. "Nothing so unimportant as the convenience of two people." "Well, tell me!" "How do you feel about VfeptUs now, Regina?" She shrugged impatiently. "Oh, she's... well, she and I are linked somehow. She could be my sister. If that's what you've got to tell me, don't pile on the suspense." "She's your mother." Regina drew in her breath. She had not expected that. Yet once she heard it, it made so much sense to her that she didn't argue, didn't protest about any of the difficulties, such as the curiosity of a twenty-five-year-old girl having a daughter of nineteen. "Well, we're straight now," she said at last. "I think everything's been put right between us. Come to that, I never did or said anything to her I might regret for the IP rest of my life. And I did throw the switch, the first time I had the chance." "Didn't you know all along?" "No," she said frankly. "There were times when I hated her." There were tears in her eyes. "I must go and see if Venetia is all right," she said, jumping up. Princess was Venetia now; they had never agreed on it, it was taken for granted. And Rex was glad that that had been established even before they knew that Venetia was Venus's granddaughter. Occasionally they called her Princess. That would stick too. When Regina came back she was thoughtful again. u Venus has gone, you said. By way of the vault?" "To Earth." "There's another Gateway, then?" Rex now had an easy way to stall for a while. He told her what Venus had told him. But at the end... Regina faced him. "What's this thing she's gone to do?" "Destroy Earth," said Rex quietly 'T'he words didn't register. Regina stared at him blankly. "Isn't it as obvious to you as it was to her and to me?" said Rex haftbly. "Some sons and daughters never cut loose from their mother's apron strings. That's what happened with the children of Mother Earth. 'They weren't forced, like you, to live for the. whole of their childhood and adolescence without a father and without a mother. The umbilical cord was never cut. They went on depending on Earth. The children of Earth, all over the galaxy never grew up, because Earth was so big, so powerful, so efficient in the early stages that it was never necessary for them to grow up. Those settlements that did cut themselves off failed, perhaps by chance, perhaps by -- " "Destroy Earth?" said Regina incredulously. "We've seen six of the colonies. Bullan, apathetic. Cresta, desperate. Chuter, selfc canceled because Earth didn't come back to help. Landfall -- " "Never mind about Landfall. I was there. You weren't." She pause "You really mean -- " "There's only one way to do it." "The most inhuman mass murder in history?" "Yes." "And Venus agreed?" "We didn't discuss it. She knew." "You sent her?" Rex didn't even wince. "She went." "To do what, exactly? What were your instructions?" "I told you, there were no instructions. She knew." "Don't keep saying that!" "She went to Earth. That's all." Regina jumped up. "Destroy Earth? That will be easy, of course. All she'll have to do is buy a firework. Why, it's nonsense. How could she possibly -- " They looked at each other, suddenly close again. Venus was no ordinary woman. Whatever had to be done, she would be able to do. She didn't have to be instructed. She would find a way to do it. "But she'll come back," whispered Regina. Rex shook his head. "You know better. If she destroyed Earth, could she allow herself to escape before the end? No. She'll stay. So would I." Regina was suddenly furious. "But you let her go, and didn't go yourself? Even if it's necessary... Well, maybe for the greatest good for the greatest number it might be. How should I know? I'm only a Twentyman. Rex -- we've got to stop her." Regina's sudden appeal was to him as her husband. He followed her as she ran to the cellar, raced down the stone steps scarcely touching them, and leaped into her case... It didn't move. She shut the lid behind her, opened it, stared at Rex frantically, shut it again. Rex tried his own. It didn't move either. And Venus's case was locked. "Break it open!" Regina exclaimed. There was nothing in the cellar with which to do this. Rex went with Regina to the workshop. There he caught her in his arms gently but firmly. "Regina. This is no use." "Maybe, but we've got to try, haven't we?" "No. Venus wanted to go." "Wanted to? Nonsense. How could anyone want to?" "She knew it had to be done. She knew she had to do it. I was created merely to confirm what she knew." "If a mere Twentyman like me can't commit suicide, how can a "Regina." His voice was no longer urgent, but soft. "You were right. This was what you saw. What you knew. Why you fought exploration of the Gateways all along. Yet you knew, as you fought, that it couldn't be stopped." "It?" "What Venus calls Project Suremo." "And you," she said bitterly, freeing herself to step back and look at him, "are the Supremo." "No." "What do you mean, no?" "Venus is and always was behind it. We're part of Venus's plan. We were needed, I was needed, as a switch is needed. You don't complete the circuit as you build a relay. You include a switch so that when the time is right, someone can." "A switch," she whispered. IF "Yes, sl switch. I was the switch. At the right time." "I did know." He said nothing. She said quietly. "All right, so I'm in it too. In her plan, I mean. When I saw the switch on her plinth, I knew it would be far better for all of us if it was never touched. But I knew I had to close the switch, and I did it. So... " Her eyes were full of tears. "I think I knew then that by reviving I had to do it." Rex kissed her very gently. He did not feel like a murderer. 'T'wo months later they found the way to the vault again open to them. But when they got there, there was no sign of any Gateway to Earth. That remained Venus's secret. And there was nothing Regina could do. It was not until after Prince was born (they called him Ron and sometimes Prince, as they called his sister Venetia and sometimes Princess) that the relay set up in the vault showed that the CrestaChuter Gateway had been used at last. First a few went to Chuter. Then a pause. Then some of them returned. Then many began to use the Gateway. "Now they know Earth is gone." It wasn't Rex who said that, it was Regina. And it was Rex who said: "Venus is gone too." "Well," said Regina, with the brutal practicality of a mother of  two, "she left me for nineteen years. I must try to remember that. Before I abandoned Prince and Princess, something would have to happen to me that..." She shuddered. "She was a lovely woman. But I believe now some of the things you told me just after she left. Her life must have been over before we ever knew her. Beglad of a great, important, unanswerable, unavoidable excuse to die." It was a strange epitaph, and it might have been better expressed. But Rex thought there had seldom been a truer one. And Regina said it. They were happy. Regina never left Limbo, would never leave Limbo again. Rex went to one of the Gateway worlds only occasionally, to keep in touch with events in the galaxy. What he saw was good, and he was pleased. Any surgeon who cut off a leg would be glad to have it confirmed that the leg was incurably diseased. He had to keep on watching what was going on. He would always have to watch what was going on. Some day he might be needed again. (i continued from page # ) notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. , The scientists must recognize that he still is a layman in every field but one. And in that one field he must accept the consequences of his actions, reckoning the human payment for every change and communicating broadly the information that is peculiarly his own. I do not say it; the gulf between the people and the scientists demands it." "You claim that they are a separate breed?" "Their attitudes set them apart; their common interests and their common heritage must bring them back together. The scientist is rational man at work. The mob is irrational, wherein lies the ultimate terror for the reasoning man." "Now you are calling the people irrational!" "Only when they act like a mob or when, like the scientist when he is out of his laboratory, they are sentimentalists. The sentimentalist is the person who wants to eat his cake and have it, too. G. K. Chesterton once said about him, 'He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel.' " lelley studied the audience and  the jury and then looked back at Wilson. "Science never has reckoned the consequences for any of its actions or computed the human payment that must be made. Why should it start now?" "Men once never herded cattle or tilled the land or lived in cities or traveled in airplanes. Tribes once killed every stranger. Kings once cut off the heads of the bearers of ill tidings. Senators once were elected by state legislatures." "Are you trying to tell us that men change?" Kelley asked. "That is obvious to everyone except the cynic. Men can change. And they do. This is not only a possibility for the individual and a necessity for society but a historical inevitability. Our perspective is too short for us to recognize the phenomenon in action, but men evolve. We can see it happening more swiftly in our social institutions." "How do you think men are changing, Wilson?" Wilson smiled. Kelley was willing to let him convict himself out of his own mouth, not only before the jury here in the courtroom but before the broader jury of the nation. But it was more important to Wilson that he get these concepts on the record -- not just for now, important as it was, but for the years to come. "Surpluses slow down the process IF of change," Wilson said. "Shortages speed it up. Necessity is not only the mother of invention but evolution. Surpluses are created by advancing stages of civilization, and population expands to consume them. When primitive man progressed from nut and fruit gathering to the hunting of concentrated sources of protein on the hoof, he had extra food with which he could feed the child which once might have been sacrificed to starvation. "When the hunter became the farmer and the herder, the process of selection became slowed even more. He could nurse the sick as well as feed the unable and the chine and industrialization brought further surpluses and the further development of morality and ethics and the religions that glorify weakness. Evolution is further slowed." "Are you now attacking the Christian religion?" Kelley asked sharply. TX#ilson waited until the roar of   the audience died away. "Other religions do the same thing." The roar returned. "Moreover, I am a Christian -- though, to be sure, a Unitarian. Christianity is one of the finest ethical and moral philosophies man ever had conceived, but it is a philosophy bred of surpluses. It could never have been possible to a tribe living on the narrow edge f starvation. "The concern of that tribe is for the traits that will promote survival in this life, not in the next. That tribe's religious rites are basically evolutionary. When man was recently separated from his apelike ancestors, many throwbacks must have been born. They had to be weeded out." "How, Wilson?" Again Kelley was leading him, Wilson thought. Let him lead as long as the ideas came out. "The rite of manhood was the principal method ' -- not merely adulthood but manhood. As soon as the child was old enough to have reached discretion, he was subjected to some ritualistic torture or feat of endurance. Scars were scratched into his body and face; lips and earlobes were distended by progressively larger plugs; food was withheld or voluntarily abjured. This was true of the American Indian. And even in some of the countries considered more civilized it was part of the rites preceding knighthood. "All of these rites stressed a common element -- present sacrifice for future good, something no animal can comprehend, something only the human can consciously achieve. Imagine a tribal meeting around a campfire. The adolescent stands straight before the fire, hoping he can endure what lies ahead, anticipating the joys of manhood if he can come through without disgrace. The chief or the witch doctor picks up a burning brand from the fire and hands it to the boy, flames toward him. If the boy is human he accepts it, lets it bum him to prove that he is fit to join the adults of the tribe. If he is animal, if he is not fit, he refuses to take it or lets it drop. And he is killed. Or he is killed genetically by the refusal of any young woman of the tribe to mate with him." "Are you suggesting," Kelley asked, "that the American people return to that kind of tribal rite?" "The time when that would have been effective has passed. We have other tribal rites, only they are not as effective in producing the desired results. The greatest examples of present sacrifice for future good are found in religion. And its greatest symbol is Christ on the Cross. To day we need a new device, a new evolutionary pressure or a new rite to select the men and women who are capable of living in close association with the machine." "Why should we wish to do that Kelley asked. "Why not merely destroy the machines and return to a better life?" "Some always want to go back," Wilson said patiently. "Serfs who cannot accept industrialization, hunters who constitutionally cannot tie themselves to a single plot of ground, nut gathers who can't eat meat, animals who will not suffer now to live better later. But you can't go back. A least you can't go back as you are. You go back decimated. This world cannot support more than a few hundred culture alone. If you discard the there will die." IX 'T'he jury came upright in its chairs. The audience looked startled, and men and women turned to one another to murmur. Kelley jerked his head squarely enough to talk to Wilson. "Scare talk! That's the kind of unprovable predictions with which scientists always have tried to get what they want. You can't trust a scientist. We've found that out." "There is enough evidence to prove everything I have said," Wilson said, "but proof really is unnecessary. Simple logic will tell you that I am right. Simple logic will tell you, too, that man is perfectible. He can go on to greater works, greater glories, greater humanity. In every one of you," Wilson said, turning to the jury and then to the audience and the cameras, "is that potential. The only requirement is ing brand, to let yourself be nailed to the cross of your own convictions. This thought, and the hope of getting it across, was the real reason I gave myself up." "Are you comparing yourself to IF Christ?" Kelley snapped back. "God help me," Wilson said, "I hope not." #" elley hesitated and then turnedto the judge. "Your honor, I request that this session be adjourned and that this cross-examination be continued tomorrow." Youngman was on his feet much quicker than Wilson ever had seen him move before. "Your honor, I see no grounds for this unusual request. The session is scarcely an hour old. If the assistant prosecutor wishes to conclude his cross-examination, we will consent. If not, I ask that he be instructed to continue." "The witness has been questioned for a considerable time," Kelley said smoothly. "My request was only out of consideration for him." "I feel fine," Wilson said. He glanced at Youngman. The lawyer nodded encouragingly. "Tomorrow, when the Subcommittee's doctors get through with me, I may not feel so well." The judge looked from Youngman to Kelley to Wilson, his lips pursed. He glanced quickly to his left and said, "Continue." "Wilson," Kelley said without hesitation, "you have called for a new selection process by which men will be chosen for this new world of yours. Are these to be supermen -- like you?" "Like me, perhaps," Wilson said quietly. "I have enough vanity to think that I might be qualified to live in a changing world, to adapt to its demands and to pass along my talents to children that someday I might have. But not supermen. No more than the farmer was a superman to the hunter or the mechanic to the farmer." "And where will these supermen be selected," Kelley asked, sneering, "in the universities?" Kelley had not been corrected, and Wilson supposed he never would be. No matter what anyone said, the concept would stick. "Some were far a while. College graduates, on the whole, were more successful in their society. They made more money, accumulated more authority, and sometimes passed along their traits and their power to their children, who also went to college. A greater proportion of the population was going on to higher education. They were becoming a majority, which might have meant a new plateau of selectivity; but, unfortunately, higher education wasn't adaptable to everybody's needs. More important, it was not responsive to the needs of the future. And it was somewhat lacking in the needs of the present. The universities became isolated from society, intellectually inbred, and the things for which they were selecting their students were idle intellectual pastimes riot the world outside." "I had not expected you to provide the justification for the burning of the universities by the people," Kelley said. "You know, of course, that the nation's tax-free colleges and universities and the tax-free philanthropic foundations that help support them now control nearly onethird of all he produtcive property in the nation." "I have heard that statement." "How can you justify that kind of selfish use of private property?" C#T can't because I don't believe it," Wilson said, "although the amount of property controlled by the # or so colleges and universities must be substantial. Even if it were true it would be human and not diabolical. Education should be everyone's responsibility to himself and to his children and collectively through these to his neighbor and his neighbor's children. He should pay for it daily or at least annually. But it is human to forget to pay, and it is human to those placed in charge of education to amass wealth for their institutions for protection against the public's neglect. Just as it is human for men and women in this audience and perhaps even on the jury itself to condemn me for a crime in which they themselves participated -- and honestly believe that I am guilty." After the uproar subsided, Wilson added, "What your question means to me, or course, Is that you and Senator Bartlett have the same economic reason for burning the universities as King Henry Vin and his fellow rulers had for confiscating church lands in the Middle Ages," Wilson smiled. "My former colleagues in economics would be smiling if they were here." "I do not care what your former colleagues would be doing," Kelley said savagely, "nor what this question means to you. Nor does this excellent jury that you have slandered with your filthy accusations or the vast American audience care for this farcical justification for your criminal actions. A man on trial for his life should not be cynical." "A prosecuting attorney should not be making speeches during cross-examination," Wilson said. Kelley turned off his anger as quickly as he had turned it on. "I understand that you are a sociologist, Wilson." "A physicist and then a sociologist." "What is a sociologist?" "He is concerned with the development and evolution of society." "He wants to know why groups of people act the way they do?" "That's part of what he wants to know." "And what if he should find out, Wilson?" IF "People could construct better societies. They could learn how to live together without conflict and frustration, getting out of society the satisfactions they need and putting back the fuel that society needs." "You mean, don't you, that sociologists could construct societies they thought were better?" T#ilson said, "You turn to a   doctor when you are sick because he knows more about sickness and health." "And knowledge is power, isn't it, Wilson? If I know why a group of people does something it is only a small step farther to knowing how to make the people do it -- or do something else." "Well, yes," Wilson admitted, "but sociologists wouldn't -- " "Why wouldn't they? Wouldn't you construct a better society if you could, a society in which the universities would not burn?" "I suppose -- " "Are the rest of us to trust our lives to the benevolence and wisdom of the sociologists? Or the psychologist? If a psychologist knows why a person acts the way he does -- if he really knows instead of guessing a little better a little more often than the average person -- the next thing he can do is make a person act that way, or some other way. Give a psychologist that power and you take away free will from the rest of us. People don't want that to happen. You don't want it, Wilson. I don't want it. Nobody wants to be a puppet; they want to be people; they want to make their own choices, their own mistakes. They don't want to live somebody's else's idea of the good life." "Nobody wants -- " "How do you know what nobody wants? You want to build a better society. The psychologist wants to build a better person. But who knows how to build a better sociologist, a better psychologist? Who knows how sensible you are? How sane you are? Who gave you the power? The people do not want you to know that much about them. Before they let you know that much they will bum you!" Kelley's voice had climbed steadily until it was almost a scream at the end. Wilson looked at him in amazement. "What you are saying is that ignorance is preferable to knowledge. It may be bliss, but it is a dangerous bliss that threatens its neighbor as well as itself." But very few could have heard Wilson. The courtroom was in an uproar. The judge's gavel was banging on his bench. At last, when relative quiet returned, Wilson said, "You are talking about mere animal survival; I'm talking about the glory of being human." Kelley's voice was deceptively mild. "That is your own coat you are wearing, isn't it?" Wilson looked down, surprised. He fingered the lapel where he had once, in a moment of lucidity, concealed a razor blade. The blade was gone now. "Yes, I think so." elley stepped forward and putlhis hand on the breast pocket. He pulled down hard. The pocket ripped -- so artfully that Wilson thought it must have been carefully prepared for this moment. With the pocket came much of the jacket front. It revealed what had been concealed between the layers of cloth -- a fan of thin, insulated wires. So much had happened since he put them there that he had forgotten, but Wilson remembered now the device he had gimmicked together in the desperation of his flight, a gadget adapted from his research which would pick up primitive theta brain-rhythms in his immediate vicinity. The hearing aid he had attached to the antenna had long ago been discarded. He didn't need it now to pick up the theta rhythms of the audience, rapid, pounding... "Here is not merely a sociologist!" Kelley was screaming. "Here is a scientist with a machine for reading minds -- and perhaps, God forbid, for making others do his will!" The audience roared in animal fury. They were out of their benches, fighting toward the railing. In spite of his training Wilson shrank back in his chair. But there was a man, a single man, who stood between him and the crowd -- not Kelley, who had pulled back in front of the jury, but a man who had been sitting in the group behind Wilson's table. Senator Bartlett himself, in his threadbare coat and his ragged blue shirt open at 'the collar, held back the crowd. "Gentlemen," he implored in his unctuous voice. "Ladies! This man is on trial in a court of law. No matter how heinous his crime, he deserves a fair American trial. Not only the nation but the world is watching. He must be convicted legally, not lynched by a mob." Slowly they fell under the mesmeric spell of his singsong phrases. The television cameras came up close to study Bartlett's face. Wilson, however, was not present for the end of the scene. Guards had closed around him, hustled him out the door with the frosted glass and then out the back way and into the waiting truck. In a moment it had pulled away and was speeding toward the highway, leaving the old courthouse behind. "Well," Kelley said, "you gave us a little surprise there, didn't you?" Almost pulled it off, too. Who got the antidote to you? The girl? I suppose. It doesn't matter, though. You're going to die in a IF very public and edifying way. Put him out, Doc." And someone pressed an anesthetic gun to his arm and pulled the trigger. It was a drug for which he had received no antidote. Or one for which the antidote he had received had worn off. The world faded away. X Qomeone was shaking him by  the shoulder. "Wake up, Mac," said a rough voice. But that was not the start of it. Even before the shaking and the voice that urged him out of his dark isolation, he had felt the bite of a needle into his arm, or his subconscious remembered it. "Shake out of it, fellow," the voice said impatiently. "We gotta go." The sting of his arm had roused him out of a vivid dream of that world which he now accepted as a dream world. He had been standing in the imposing entrance of the City Hall. Its ceiling towered # or # feet above his head. Around the edges of the central lobby had been the soldiers. Huddled within the circle formed by the soldiers were a hundred spectators, mostly villagers with a sprinkling of ragged city dwellers. A soldier stood on either side of Wilson. In front of him was the dark young man. He sat in a tall chair. Between them was a charcoal brazier. From the coals that glowed in it a thin, almost invisible column of smoke spiraled up to be lost in the dim heights of the ceiling. On the coals the large, blunt tip of a soldering iron with a wooden handle was beginning to turn red. "John Wilson, are you a witch?" the young man asked in a stem voice. The audience drew a deep breath. "I am what I am," Wilson said. "Are you a witch?" the young man asked again. "I am a man, no more, no less," Wilson replied. "Are you a witch?" the young man asked the third time. "If I were a witch," Wilson said, "you would not dare my wrath, Captain Leonard Kelley." The audience moaned. The young man drew back in his chair, his index finger and his little finger making horns at Wilson with his right hand. His face was rigid and his eyes narrowed. "If you know my name, you know it by witchcraft," he said. "But I do not fear your power, nor will I condemn you without fair trial. Hold out your hand, John Wilson." Wilson held out his right hand. Kelley picked up the soldering iron and moved it gently through the air. Smoke curled from the glowing tip. Kelley passed the iron in front of Wilson's face. Wilson could feel the radiant heat. "If you can hold the iron and not be burned," Kelley said, "you are a witch and you will be placed in a fire prepared for you in the plaza outside until your power is overcome. If you do not accept the iron, you are a confessed witch and you will burn. John Wilson, do you confess?" "I confess that I seek truth and serve the people," Wilson said, "and because of these things I will accept the iron." Wilson held out his hand. Kelley hesitated and chewed on one side of his lower lip. "Take it, then!" TTe placed the still-glowing iron -in Wilson's hand. The audience groaned and surged forward only to be met with the upraised weapons of the soldiers. "Calm yourselves, friends," Wilson said clearly, although his hand smoked and waves of pain coursed up his arm toward his head. Kelley sank back in his tall chair, staring at Wilson with dark eyes, his hand covering the lower part of his face. "And what if I accept the iron and burn, Captain Kelley?" Wilson asked. "Kill him!" Kelley said. The spectators surged forward. "You gotta wake up," said the voice again. "We got no time." Wilson opened his eyes and looked at his right hand. It was pink and unmarred. He wiggled his fingers. They moved freely. He had only the memory of pain, but it still seemed quite real. A man was bending over him, a man in prison denims of gray and dark blue. Beyond him the sliding bars that formed the door to his cell were pushed back. The door was open. Beyond the door was the wide corridor between the cell block and the stone outside wall, lit feebly now against the night by light bulbs high in the ceiling. The barred windows were dark. "We're breaking out of here," the man said, moving back a little. "Strange things're going on. Men have seen fire balls drifting outside and one guy said he saw one inside the walls. I don't know why but the guards're gone. Come on, Mac. Get up and let's go." "That's all right," Wilson said. "I'd just as soon stay here." "Mac, you don't know what you're saying. They're gonna hang you." "How do you know?" Wilson asked, interested. The man shrugged, his shaggy eyebrows moving high on his forehead. "We heard the radio reports on our earphones. No jury could do anything but find you guilty, the announcer said. That's the word, brother, believe me!" "You'd better go on," Wilson said. "I'm going to wait for whatever comes." The other caught his right wrist IF in a strong right hand. He pulled Wilson upright. "You don't know what you're saying, Mac. We ain't gonna leave nobody here." Wilson pulled his wrist free. "Try to understand, fellow. I'm conscious, and I'm turning down your invitation. I'm grateful for your concern, but -- " The other's fist caught him on the jaw before he could finish. As consciousness fled Wilson could feel himself falling. XI TX#ilson lifted his head as the   men half-carried him down the broad steps. Subconsciously he counted them as his feet bumped down each one. "Forty-two," he said at the bottom and didn't know why he said it. Fifty feet from the bottom of the steps was a tall guard house shaped something like a lighthouse. Wilson couldn't see a guard in it, but he thought he saw something else in the shadows behind the glass panels at the top. Something with one staring eye and a small red eye beneath; but he couldn't be sure. Beside him and around him other men were moving. He could feel them in the darkness and then he saw them clearly as a ball of red lightning drifted around the corner of the tall penitentiary building and passed near them before it swerved toward the guard house, clung to the knob at the top for a few seconds, and dissipated. The heat of the evening was oppressive and still, and the clouds were low. "Just the night for a tornado," Wilson muttered. The group of men in whose midst he was moved along turned toward a truck parked nearby in the broad driveway that circled the guard house before it headed back toward the distant town. Suddenly men in uniform began coming around both comers of the building. They came endlessly. "Stop!" said a voice amplified into a giant's roar. "Don't move! If you try to escape, you will be shot down. Stop where you are!" Wilson looked back up the steps. More men in uniform were coming through the doors they just had left. One of them carried a portable amplifier held to his mouth. Down the long double driveway past the guard tower lights began to flicker like giant fireflies. The men with Wilson didn't stop. They continued toward the tarpaulincovered truck, but others began to scatter. Some of them ran to the left across the open lawn. Others sprinted out to the right. "For the last time, I warn you! Stop where you are!" said the giant's voice. Guns barked. Searchlights came on, holding men pinned in their beams like butterflies; against a black velvet mounting board. Men crumpled in mid-stride. Others staggered on until they, too, were knocked to the ground. Some were whirled around by the shock of the impact. Others turned and held their hands in the air. The group of men with Wilson was almost to the truck now. Just before they reached it the tarpaulin in the back parted. The men with Wilson stopped. The dark young man named Kelley was in the back of the truck, and more guards and more guns. "Here he is," said the man who had been in Wilson's cell. "And here is your reward," Kelley said. A gun went off and another. The  men near Wilson began to drop away. The man who had spoken looked to the right and left bewildered. "But you said -- " he began, and then he, too, started folding himself up. In a moment Wilson was standing alone. He felt his sore jaw. "Aren't you going to shoot me, too?" he asked. "We're going to do better than that," Kelley said and motioned toward the driveways. The fireflies had turned into torches, and the torches were at the head of twin crowds of men and women. Hoarse voices reached his ears. They were singing something. Men with portable cameras ran along beside the crowds. Guards were on either side of him. They boosted Wilson into the truck and pulled the tarpaulin back against the cab. There, his back braced against the cab, was Senator Bartlett. He did not move as the truck started up and pulled slowly down the driveway. Wilson staggered and caught himself. "Hello, Senator," Wilson said. Bartlett's arms were folded across his chest. "You're a strange man, Wilson. We could have chosen better." "Everybody agreed he was the one," Kelley said defensively. "I'm not blaming anybody," Bartlett said. "But the way things turned out, we could have chosen better." "I would gladly have had this cup pass from me," Wilson said. "You are a blasphemer as well as a meddler," Bartlett said. "No wonder the people hate your kind." The voice of the crowd was closer. The song they were singing was The Battle Hymn of the Republic . "They will hate anybody," Wilson said, "but you have done your job well. And profited thereby." The truck stopped, backed in a curving path, and turned in another curve so that its back was toward the crowd. The crowd's torches created a ragged hemisphere of light. Beyond it the blackness struggled to return. "I do not lead," Bartlett said, his gaze turned inward. "I am pushed. IF The people tell me what to say and what to do, and I say and I do what they tell me. They say that the eggheads must die if the people are to live, and the eggheads will die." It was as if God had spoken. Bartlett stepped to the rear of the truck to face the crowd. A murmur ran through it as the singing died away. The murmur turned to cheers and shouts of "Senator! Senator!" Bartlett held out his arms for silence. Standing between two guards Wilson could see the cameras focused on the Senator's flame-lit face and outstretched arms. It was a familiar pose. Wilson had seen it often on television and in publicity shots. It brought back the memory of the night the university had burned. "People!" Bartlett said. He said it quietly but his voice carried well. Wilson decided that he had a pickup in his artfully threadbare coat. The crowd roared and sltwly returned to silence. "My .people!" The crowd roared again. "Disperse, I ask you now! Go to your homes! Leave this man to the law!" "No! No!" the crowd shouted. "Burn him." Teyond the crowd Wilson could " see a tall pillar and a pile of crates and boards around it, still growing as men tossed more wood on the pile. "I honor your feelings in this matter," Bartlett said. "The man did try to escape, to evade his proper punishment. But I ask you to forbear. A second time I ask you, leave him to the law" "Burn him! Burn him!" "This man is guilty," Bartlett said. "We all know that. The verdict is a formality. But I ask you to hold your hand, restrain your honest wrath. Leave him to the law!" "No! No! No!" "Then if you must have it so, I give this man to you for justice. Let him die for what he has done! Let him bum for the torment he has given others! Let him perish along with all others of his kind! Let his fiery end be a warning to the rest! The people will not be ruled by any except themselves. "This man is guilty of treason to the people. He has betrayed you. He has tried to steal your minds and twist your thoughts. Let him burn!" Bartlett ended with his arms spread wide once more. His arms dropped to his sides, his head drooped like a wilting narcissus, and he stood aside. Wilson was pushed forward by the guards. "I can walk," Wilson said, but they would not let him. He was shoved from behind, and he fell into the crowd. Head high the men and women carried him toward the post. Hands clutched at his clothing and tore pieces of it away and, he thought from the twinges of pain, pieces of himself as well. In a moment they placed him upright against the pillar which was, he discovered, an old fence post. Someone pulled his arms behind the post, tied his hands together, and hammered something into the post. When he couldn't move his hands up or down he decided that the rope had been nailed to the post. "Hang on tight!" someone said in his ear. Wilson tried to see who it was, but the man was gone. Then a man came forward with a torch. "People!" Wilson shouted. They quieted slowly, and the man with the torch hesitated. "Go ahead," someone urged from the back. The man with the torch started forward again. "I came back," Wilson shouted, "to die if I must. But I did not come back wanting to die. I am ready to die because we all are guilty, but it will not help you to yourselves -- the part that thinks, the part that makes you human. Know what you do! When you abandon reason and commit yourself to terror, you can be certain of only one thing. You will never know what tomorrow brings. You may be next. You -- And then the torch plunged into the crates and boards at his feet. They began to smoke and to crackle. In a moment they had sprung into flame, and Wilson took a deep breath of air before it, too, turned into flame. TTe was trying to decide whether  it would be better to hold his breath as long as possible or to breathe in the fire and shorten the end when he noticed the crowd stirring around him, looking behind rather than at him. Over their heads as they cringed aside came a ball of lightning. It came straight toward Wilson and settled on the post just above his head. Wilson could not see it then, but he could feel it, electric and almost cool, behind him. It must make him quite a sight, he thought, as he wondered how long it would be before the flames began to consume his legs. Miraculously, however, the post began to move, slowly at first and then with greater speed, pulling him up and away. He felt the strain on his shoulders as if they were about to be dislocated, and he hugged the post tight with all his strength. The flames dropped behind, below. He could see the faces of the crowd looking up at him like curious saucers with shadowy eyes and noses and mouths painted on them. "Shoot!" somebody shouted below. It sounded like Kelley. "Quick. Shoot him!" But the barking of the guns was seconds too late. He felt a bullet pluck at his tattered clothing, and then he was into the low-hanging IF clouds and into something else, and hands grabbed him, something cool and wet was sprayed onto his legs and feet, and he was drawn back onto a bench or cot. Wilson looked around. He was in the belly of some kind of airplane. In front of him an open doorway in the floor was closing. From the way it hovered, Wilson thought it must be a helicopter, but it was remarkably silent. To his left was a man he had known as Pike. In front of him was Youngman. To his right was Pat Helman looking as desirable as ever. "Surprised?" Pat Helman said. "Pleasantly," Wilson said. "I wasn't expecting you." "That's the best kind," Youngman said. "That was quite a fireball," Wilson said. "The ball lightning was just for show," Pike said. "A strong black wire did the real job, just like in the. magic shows." "What were all Bartlett's and Kelley's last-minute shenanigans about?" Wilson asked. "They were losing in the courtroom and on the tube," Youngman drawled. "They had to wind it up fast and dramatically or find themselves on the losing side -- and once those kind start to lose they go down fast, like Danton and Robespierre." "You're joking," Wilson said. "You underestimate your powers of persuasion," Pat Helman said. "You're quite a man, John Wilson." Wilson looked at her. "I wonder how persuasive I could be." He turned' to Youngman again. "Was it worth it? Did we do any good?" vur best estimate is that it will slow them down," Pike said. "Nothing will reverse the trend. That must wear itself out. But we may have eased it off a little. Maybe we can save a few more victims. At least the stage is set for the next act." "Was the last act to your satisfaction?" Wilson asked. His voice had an edge to it. "We're not stage managers," Youngman said. "We just hang around to pick up the pieces and try to keep the edges of the conflagration dampened so that it doesn't spread too fast. You've had the toughest part, but don't forget that Pat and I had our necks out there, too." "Sorry," Wilson said. "What is the next act?" "We have to start work in the little towns, the little out-of-theway places," Pat Helman said. "The consensus is that we should establish ourselves there as witches, if you will, or witch-doctors, with the power to help the people control the unseen and the unknowable, while others go in search of truth and find -- " "Don't tell me," Wilson said giddily. "I already know all about it." He was feeling very strange. He was just beginning to realize that the martyrdom he had accepted had indeed passed him by. The relief made him feel weak and somehow ashamed of his weakness. He thought about how he must Street, Newark, New Jersey #. General theme: "Looking Backward: #," Changes in the SF Field in the Last Thirty Years. Admission: #. For Information: Allen Howard, # Grafton Avenue, Newark, New Jersey #. the Statler-Hilton, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Membership #. For information: New England Science Fiction Association, Box G, sachusetts #. the Holiday East Motel, Columbus, Ohio #. Guest of Honor: Terry Carr. Features: Panel Discussions, Open Party, Banquet. Registration fee: #. Banquet Ticket: #. For information: Bob Ohio #. the Hotel Andrews, #th Street at Hennepin, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Guests of Honor: Charles V. De Vet, Gordon R. Dickson, Carl Jacobi, Clifford D. Simak. Membership: # -- register now and receive two progress reports. For information: Jim Young, # Ulysses Street Make checks or money-orders payable to Mrs. Margaret Lessinger. have looked to the crowd as he rose, with his halo of ball lightning, toward the clouds. The apotheosis of John Wilson, he thought. And he recalled how close the flames had been... and fainted. That was a habit that would be N.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota #. Hotel, Oxford, England. Guest of Honor: Judith Merril. For information in the nue, Los Angeles, California #. of Honor: Robert (Doc) A. W. Lowndes. At the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. Advance membership #, or # at the door. Two Progress Reports will be sent to members. For information: Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx, New York #. Monica, California. Guest of Honor: Randall Garrett. Fan Guest of Honor: Roy Tackett, Toastmaster: Harlan Ellison. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. A supporting membership of # entitles you to all publications. For Monica, California #. Make checks payable to Ken Rudolph. August #September #, #. ST. Convention. At Chase-Park Plaza Hotel, # N. Kingshighway, St. Louis, Missouri #. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Fan Guest of Honor: Ted White. Features: Project Art Show; Masquerade Ball; All-night movies -- every night; Rock Band; Panels and speeches featuring all your favorite writers, editors, and artists; Auctions; Awards Banquet and the Presentation of the Hugos. Memberships: #, attending; #, supporting. Join now and receive all the progress reports as they are published. For information: St. Louiscon, P.O. Box #, St. Louis, Missouri #. Make checks payable to St. Louiscon. IF Dear Editor: Many years ago I read a story based on or referring to the Epic of Gilgamesh. I would appreciate it if any of your readers could supply me with the name of the author and the book or story title. -- Sophie Marks, # East #th St., Brooklyn, N. Y. #.  One that comes to mind is The Time Masters , a novel by Wilson Tucker. But there must have been others on this subject. Any suggestions from the readers? -- Editor .    Dear Editor:  I do not agree with your idea of eliminating serials in If. The most popular stories in your magazine are the serials, and without them the sales will falter. Where would you be without The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress , Skylark DuQuesne , Earthblood and others? People buy your magazine for the stories by big-name authors. Heinlein hasn't written a short story in years. Please under no circumstances condense a novel in the manner of the Van Vogt piece coming up. A shortened version of a novel can thwart an author's attempts at characterization, can destroy the theme or eliminate an important part and thus render the whole thing illogical and incomprehensible to the reader. Wise old Horace Gold said in one of the very first issues of Galaxy that he would not review fanzines because "that is being covered sufficiently elsewhere." Now it is being covered nowhere and I would like you to do this. Lin Carter seems to be the ideal person to be the reviewer, so why don't you ask him? It doesn't have to be large; only a page or two of small print. Let's have more Morrow, Pedersen, McKenna and Chaffee covers. See if you can pry a story out of Ed Hamilton. Get Zelazny's next novel. And avoid Harlan Ellison's version of the new wave. -- Darrell Schweitzer, # Deepdale Rd., Stratford, Penna. #.  Part of Zelazny's "next novel" is in this issue. And we have no intention of eliminating serials. When we get a good one, we'll use it! It's a funny thing; we get letters objecting to serials until a serial is missing -- then everyone screams at us for not having one! As to f anzin e reviews, we feel the long lag between our receipt of the publications and the time the review could appear in print would make them useless; by the time the readers could see our comments, the magazine reviewed would be no longer obtainable. And the life and quality of most of such fan publications is too uncertain to make other than really current reviews fair to our readers. As to Ed Hamilton, we're prying. -- Editor . Dear Fred: A little experiment occurs to me, which you may or may not like to play with. I enclose three columns of numbers, whose nature and meaning would be obvious to any astronomer. If anyone can take these numbers and from them tell me the mass of the star system they refer to, I will be glad to listen to his opinions about the Velikovsky thesis. It is understood, of course, that no references other than log and trig tables are to be used. If anyone who cannot do this presumes to support Velikovsky against the "establishment", I will cheerfully cite him as an example of this "arrogance of ignorance" we hear so much about lately. It ought to be fun to read the excuses. To forestall the most obvious, this is not something fit only for Ph. D.'s. It is part of a firstyear astronomy exercise in which I had no difficulty in getting an A -- at a time when my math and physics grades were C and D respectively. It Date Position Angular of Angle Separation Observation (Degrees) (Seconds) # # # # # # # #.I # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # # # # #.I #I # # # # # # # # #I # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # # # # # #I # # # # #.I # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #.I # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #.I # # # # #I # # # # # # # # Parallax -- #" is not something controversial, except to EV supporters; the same basic rules are used in predicting eclipses, though the latter demands a lot more detailed computing. It does IF not demand access to a high-class computer; most of my tenth-graders who have done it use the slide rule, but some prefer longhand arithmetic and still finish in a reasonable time. The observations are quite genuine, obtained from a published source, not cooked up for the purpose. As a schoolteacher, I know the near hopelessness of changing the mind of an adult; but maybe the excuses we get could be used to show my youngsters what they'll be sounding like if they don't develop reasonably high standards of thinking. And maybe, of course, since my own mind is just as fossilized as that of most people my age, I'll wind up looking silly myself. -- Hal Clement, Milton, Mass.    Dear Editor: I would like to compliment you on the excellence of your magazine. Worlds of IF. No one can say science fiction is dying. On the contrary, it is on its way up with IF setting new trends. Now to the point of my letter. Imagine for a moment the magazine Playboy. You change the girl on the centerfold to a space ship, the pictorials to colored art work by Chaffee, Adkins or Morrow. Next you add stories out of IF , the now silent Worlds of Tomorrow , Galaxy, etc. What fan could pass up a magazine like that! Certainly a dollar would not be a price too high to pay. I would like to applaud Mrs. Morris for her letter in the August IF. There is nothing more saddening and dangerous than a person who refuses to think for himself. Who knows, maybe if more people read science fiction, we'd have fewer wars. -- Jurgen Heidenreich, # #th Avenue S. E., Bellevue, Wash. #.  The only trouble with your idea for a magazine is that it would cost three dollars a copy to put out; and science-fiction magazines can't get the advertising to make up the difference, as more generalized magazines do. -- Editor.    Dear Editor: With regard to Mr. Allen's letter in October If, I totally disagree with him. To publish a story in each issue with "as little of the jargon of the medium as possible" would ruin the story completely. In my opinion, most science-fiction readers are of above-average intelligence and are not in need of explanations. There may be a technical term once in a great while with which the reader may not be familiar, but that can easily be looked up. It is very considerate of Mr. Allen to suggest that you provide these explanations -- "especially for women." But he really need not worry. There are very few women who read SF, and those few, I am sure, are mostly young, college-educated women who have no trouble understanding SF, no matter how technical. (I started reading SF about five years ago and I have never had any trouble -- even though English is not my mother tongue. As a matter of fact, I have come to prefer it to any other type of fiction.) So much for that. I would like to refer to Mr. Neagle's letter in the same issue, who would like a swordHere is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. I Galaxy Publishing Corp. j #I Hudson Street, fe New York City # i Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi  record of Music from Mathematics  right away. I enclose check or  money order of #. I Name I Address I City  State . Zip Code... I ( Offer good in U. S . A. Only) and-sorcery story once in a while. I am sure that most If readers will agree with me when I say that If should stick to "hard-core" SF. At present there are only three magazines available which publish SF exclusively; there are three magazines which publish a mixture of SF and fantasy as well as a fantasy-type magazine. Worlds of Fantasy , so there should be no need to publish that type of story in . -- Mrs. Victor Porguen, # Sawyer St., Rochester, N. Y. #.    Dear Editor, The December # issue of If was a goodie -- I even liked the Ellison. It had one story of outstanding merit which I must commend. I do not know when I have read any story which so perfectly demonstrated the true function of science fiction -- the logical projection of present day scientific trends into the future. In addition, this story very neatly pointed up another function of sf which I I feel is important, although I have never seen it mentioned. This is the fact that human nature does not change -- it hasn't through the ages of history, and it won't in the future. The story is, of course, Asimov's "The Holmes-Ginsbook Device". Add to this the delightful finishing touch. Gaughan's illustration of The Compleat Scientist, which again subtly points out this second sf truth -- that scientists in the future will be, basically, just like the scientists of today. Yeah. -- Rachel C. Payes, Shrub Oak, N. Y. # # # IF o o O CJ o o ')   j o o o flnur Namr trrp # s No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward # for #, #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." M Edited by Anthony Boucher #. A giant twovolume collection of great science fiction reading. Over # pages of exciting fiction -- four full-length novels, twelve novelettes, eight ihort stories by Ray Bradbury. Robert A. Heinlein. A. E. van Vogt. Poul Anderson. Arthur C. Clarke. Theodore Sturgepn. Alfred Bester. and a dozen more. Counts as I choice. Pub. ed. # for only Club and agree to accept only four book dunng the coming yea counts as only a single choice! How the Club works: Each month it offers really superb new science fact or fiction book ; a fraction of its regular price. Even though the! books sell for #, # and more in their orii inal editions. Club members get them for on # each-in special full-length, hard-cover ed lionsunless you select an extra-value book ; slightly higher price. And the Club tells you i advance what each monthly selection will b During your trial membership, you agree to tak as few as four books in the coming year. Cano any time thereafter. No-Risk Guarantee: If not delighted with intr ductory #-book shipment, return books within I days to cancel membership. Otherwise you wi be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member. Ma coupon today to Science Fiction Book Clul Garden City, New York # Please accept my application for membership tn the Science Fiction Book Club and rush the # books whose numbers I have circled below. Bill me only #. plus shipping and handling, for all #. Then every month, send me the Club'n free bulletin. Things to Come", which describes coming selections. For each book I accept. I will pay only #. plus shipping and handling, unless I take an extra --  -- value selection at a higher price rireU tha munhrA i need take only four books with Circle the numbers Of In the coming year andmay the # books you want: resign at any time hereafter. # # # delighted with my introductory # #I # package. I may return it in # days. # # # pay nothing, owe nothing, and my # membership will be canceled. #-S#J If under IS. parent must sign here. (Offer good in I'.S.A. onlyJ #. The Fast Through Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # M#. Psyehoaelsl, L. P. Davies. Three minds a galaxy apart meet and turn a sleepy village into a nightmare. Pub. ed. # M#. Colossus by D. F. Jones Machine conquers man! "Ingenious . alarming". Punch. Pub. ed. # M#. Killer Thine by Kale Wilhelm A scientist in the #rd century develops a robot with a laser eye. Pub. ed # #. From The Twilight Zooc by Rod Serling. # spine-tingling stories that breach the gap between science and superstition #. October the First Is Too Late, by Fred Hoyle. Solar beams play havoc with time on earth. Pub ed # #. Three Novels by Damon Knight Rule (jolden. The Dying Man A Natural State-all com plete. Pub. ed. # #. Dangerous Visions. Anthology of # original stories never before in print by Sturgeon. Anderson, others Pub. ed. #  WOlOS OF Special Awards Issue ' i:W i ja  I Ff. wfe' Wf. V A Wfr  i 'fr' M  iBb II s L # Ills ? t i X A  ikj # #  v#i  x i  Try it alone or with any combination. i IB I  I I i  I yM N iF B #I i II l it mi i i iivili Try It alone or with either Van Dyke, mustache or both. Now at last you can have the experience of wearing sideburns, mustache, or Van Dyke that is so real looking your friends will think it is your very own! Competition tough... want to impress your employer or girl friend... want to look older or younger or different... cool or sharp??? Do you miss the attention you should be getting?? Try a Masquliner Van Dyke, Sideburns andor Mustache... all three, separately or in different combinations... onds! Don't miss out on all the fun that so easily can be yours! Send for your Mustache, Sideburns and Van Dyke at once! Simply check the color you want in the coupon or send a sample of your ha ; r and leave the matching to our expert. Your hair sample is color matched at no extra cost... or order Adheres securely... off and on in seconds... can be worn as is or trimmed to just the style you want... wear it confidently whenever tache or Sideburns... sent in plain wrapper with order. you want it to be or your money back! # Amherst St., East Orange. New Jersey or I may return everything for full refund. Send color checked or  please match sample of my hair enclosed. Rush the Following: Please Send Order in Color Checked:  Mustache #.  Blonde  Dark Brown  Van Dyke #.  Black   Grey Silver fl Sideburns #. ft Light Brown  j Dark Auburn ' j Medium Brown  Light Auburn  I eaclose . Send all #. (I save #). Send Cash, Check or M.O. Name Address City State Zip Entire Contents Copyrighted # Vol #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Editor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn , Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin , Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circulation Director by Philp Jose Farmer by Anne McCaffrey by Ted White by Roger Zelazny by Harlan Ellison by George Scithers by Fritz Leiber by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, President, VoL #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, # #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S. A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # The Galaxy Awards The editors of Galaxy and If are pleased to announce the winners of the # Galaxy Awards for the best stories published in our magazines in the past year. The winning stories were chosen by polling randomly chosen groups of subscribers to both magazines, and their vote was final. i # Galaxy Award Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak (Serial, April and June issues of Galaxy,) # Galaxy Award Slowboat Cargo by Larry Niven (Serial, February, March and April Issue of If,)  # Galaxy Award (Due to the closeness of the voting, we are giving three # awards.) The Man in the Maze, by Robert Silverberg (Serial, April and May issues of If,) Getting Through University, by Piers Anthony (Novelette, August issue of If.) The Time Trawlers, by Burt K. Filer (Short story, August Issue of Galaxy,) Watch for announcement in an early issue of the # Galaxy Awards , Hugos  Others I f yon've been paying attention to what we say up front here over the list few months, you don't need to have this issue explained to you. Bot well explain it anyway. ( Actually, we kind of enjoy it.) Every year, at the World Science Fiction Convention, the assembled science-fiction fans vote to honor their favorite magazine, writers, art ists and so on. The award is called a "Hugo" (after the late Hugo Gemsbgck, who started this whole business of science-fiction magazines some # years ago.) , we are honored and pleased to say, has carried off the "best magazine" Hugo for the past three years running; and we are celebrating the most recent award with this special issue, containing stories and Olds By all the other Hugo winners: Roger Zelazny (who won the # Hugo for Best Novel), Anne McCaffrey and Philip Jos# Farmer (tied for Best Novella), Fritz Leiber (Best Novelette), Harlan Ellison (who acquired two Hugos this rime, Best Story and Best Dramatization), Jack Gaugjhan (Best Artist), Ted White (Best Fan Author), George H. Scithers (editor of the non-profestional magazine that won as Best Fanzine), and George Barr (Best Fan Artist). It took a bit of doing to get all of these eminences to produce stories in a very short period of time... but, as you see, we did it Or they did it They all came through handsomely, and we're grateful to them -- and to the traders whose votes gave us this honor. Now we've got to get busy and try to win it again. No magazine has ever won four straight. Maybe we won't do it either... but we're sure going to give it a try. T he Hugos, of course, which were awarded at the Baycon, held in Berkeley, California over the Labor Day Weekend last year, were for stories and issues published in the year #. It'll be some months yet before we know who won what for the material published in #. But meanwhile we have our own voting results to report, for the Galaxy Awards, and that too is a source of considerable pride. As you'll see by the announcement in this issue, the story that carried away the top prize was Clifford D. Simak's Goblin Reservation, published in our companion magazine, Galaxy, last summer. The issue was never in doubt; Goblin Reservation led by a wide margin on the first scattering of votes that came in on the first balloting, and held that lead in every batch all the way to the end; and we couldn't be more pleased. For Simak is not only a first-rate writer for #, he's been a first-rate writer for more years t han some of the competition have been alive. Not only that, but he manages to keep a steady production of science fiction coming along in the teeth of a demanding editorial Job with a leading Minneapolis daily. Congratulations, Oiff ! It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. The winner of the number two spot gives us nearly equal pleasure -- in a sense, even more, because Larry Niven, as regular readers will remember, started out in If with his first published story, only a handful of years ago. His Slowboat Cargo (now available in book form from Ballantine under the title A Gift from Earth ) was as thoroughly in command of the second spot as Goblin Reservation was of first among all the stories published in If Iasi yga r f something more than # of them, Slowboat Cargo easily led the way. Number three in the voting was also from If, and the Author Was that most productive of writers, Robert Silverberg. The story was The Man in the Maze; and if third place doesn't seem like anything to get ter-' ribly excited about, note Silverberg's remarkable feat: Of the top # stor-i ies in the reader voting, Silverberg had written three -- The Man in the Maze from If and Nightwings and Perris Way from Galaxy -- which is exactly two more than anybody else managed to get on that select list. Fourth, fifth and sixth places were a virtual tie: Burt K. Filer's The Time Trawlers (from Galaxy) managed to edge out the others by a narrow margin -- an admirable shewing, considering that it was a short story and all those above it, and most of these immediately below, were either serials or long novelettes; Filer, of course, is also a former " First." Then came Rogue Star, by your editor in collaboration with the cash awards on the grounds of nepotism -- sorry. Jack!); and close behind was Piers Anthony's Getting Through University... both of these last two from If. Thanks to those subscribers who helped us by sending in their ballots on request. It was a lot of fun --  so much so that we're going to do it again next year, with more prizes, more ballots -- and, we hope, even more good stories to honor! Earthmen, you are a vital galactic resource. It's too bad we have to use you up I I love lo you as I human makes love to a human. I 'm felling you this because I You'll know why when I've told need your love. Just as you you everything, told you the true need mine, though you don't know story. The story I first told, that's it -- yet. And because I can't make a lie. V. i You must know I'm not human, even If I do look just like one. Do humans sweat quicksilver?. You must know; I can't make love to you. If you were Subsahara Sue... But they #I be watching Sue, so I won't dare go near. No, I didn't mean that I prefer her. It's just... I don't want to get into subtleties. Anyway, Sue might turn me in, and, as you can see, I don't trust her, right? And if Sue did turn me in, let me tell you, keelhauling is no fun. I need love almost as much as I need a hiding place. That's why I'm telling you. You, the first humani to know. I need love. And forgiveness. Only, as you'll see... never mind... I'll tell you all about me, about all of us. I have much explaining to do, and you may hate me. Don't. I need love. 'T'he Rooster Rowdy had caused the trouble almost # Earthyears ago. I didn't know anything about it. None of the crew knew anything about it. You see, communication is instantaneous, but perception is no faster than light. You don't see? Maybe you will as I go along. The instruments on The Bridge had indicated nothing and would! not for I don't want to tell you how manyyears. If Philip Jos# Farmer, who was the Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction convention this year, won the Hugo for his novella "Riders of the Purple Wage # This Is Farmer's second Hugo; In # he was awarded the same trophy as the most promising new writer. Once again a science-fiction prophecy has become fact. The Quartermaster -- let's call him The Filamentous Wafter -- had not been prowling that particular deck, hunting down ratio fixers, nobody would've known about it until it was too late. As it was, it still might be too late. The first I knew of the trouble was when the call came from The Bridge. Directly. Five minutes earlier, the call would not have been able to get through. The electric sparks, microwaves and hot mercury drops -- spinning like tops -- would have warped transmission. They were flying all over inside our ten f. But Subsahara Sue and I couldn't really be blamed for this interference. Although we would have been. Five hundred years had passed since we'd seen each other. Or, for that matter, any of the black gang. Although we both worked in the same continent, my territory was the Berber-Semitic area, and Sue's was where the nickname indicated. IF After managing to get permission, toj have leave together, we'd signed lb fit I Libyan seaside hotel. We spent most of our tima on the beach, Inside our tent, which was made of a material to confine the more explosive byproducts of our lovemaking. During that half a millennium, we'd dormantized our attraction -- notice I say attraction, not love, if that'll make you feel any better -- but, even In dormancy, attraction accumulates a trickle charge and # years build up a hell of a lot of static. However, there's a large amount of resistance to overcome, and I'd been oscillating and Sue resonating for hours before our nodes touched. The tourists on the beach must have wondered where the thunder was coming from On that cloudless day. Afterwards, Sue and I lay quietly to make sure that no one had been alarmed enough to Investigate our tent. We talked about personal matters first, what We'd heal doing, our loneliness and so on . Then We talked shop. We chattered about philiac thrust phobiac weight efficiency ratios, toleration tare, grief drag, heliovalves and so on. We started to reminisce about crewmen Sue said, "Who's in charge of cosmic bleedoff?" The Intercom bleeped. Groaning, I turned on the intercom, which looked just like a portable TK for the Benefit of humps. The "head" and pari of the "shoulders" of The First Mate filled most of the screen, and the camera must have been several thousand miles away. Behind him was a small part of The Bridge and a piece of abyss-black shadow edged by a peculiar white light. The Captain's tail. That was all I cared to see of The Captain at any time. I'll never forget having to look at a closeup of his "mouth" when he chewed me -- not literally, thank the stars -- in A.H. #. I have to admit that I deserved that savaging. I was lucky not to get keelhauled. Oh, how I goofed up the Mahomet follow-up! The black gpgs all over The Ship had to sweat and slave, all leaves canceled, until proper thrust could be generated. The First Mate, seeing the mercury drip off me, roared, "Mecca Mike! What the bilge have you been doing? You oscillating at a time like this? You sleeping at the post again? You neglecting your duty again?" "Sir, I'm bn leave," I said. "So I couldn't he guilty of neglecting my duty. Besides, sir, I don't know what you mean by again. I was never courtmartialed, sir, and..." "Silence I" he bellowed. Behind him, the tall of The Captain   twitched, and I started to oscillate negatively. "Why didn't you answer the allstations alarm?" x "It didn't get through," I said. I added, weakly, "There must have been too much static and stuff." The First Mate saw Subsahara Sue behind me, where she was trying to hide. He yelled, "So there you are! Why didn't you answer your phone?" "Sir, I left it in the hotel," Sue said. "Since we'd be together, we decided we'd just take Mike's phone, and -- " "No wonder neither of you has worked up out of the black gang! No more excuses, now! Listen, while I tell you loud and clear!" T he Rooster Rowdy was reside a quasar galaxy, where she had sponsible for the emergency. just finished setting the structure I was surprised when I heard of a new heliovalve. The Rooster The First Mate mention him. Like Rowdy was near enough to sense everybody else, I'd thought he was her, and he came galloping in, galdead or had run away so far into actic light bouncing off the trilfound. Not until The Ship docked, three-organ body. He was one of the ringleaders -- The Crystalline Sexapod put up in fact, he was The First Mate a good fight for her virtue, which then -- in the Great Mutiny #,was the same thing as her life -- # Earth-years ago. He was the I haven't time to go into biologionly one to escape alive after The cal-mora! details -- but in the proCaptain and his faithfuls mopped cess she completed the wreckage of up on the mutineers. And the the galaxy and so wrecked the helioRooster Rowdy had been running, valve, wasting a century and a or hiding, ever since. Or so we half of time. She took off for the thought. lower decks, where, for all anyA moment ago, I told you Sue body knew, she might still be runhad asked me who was in charge ning with the Rooster Rowdy hot of cosmic bleedoff. I'd been about (#F) after her. to tell her that The Crystalline Meanwhile, the wrecked helioSexapod was in charge now, when valve meant that there was no we were interrupted. The Sexapod bleedoff of phobiac drag in that had her station at that moment insector. Nor in a quarter of the sectors, since this valve was the master valve in a new setup Ententes to increase efficiency of bleedoff by #. And that really messed up our yelocity. Fortunately, The Quartermaster happened to be in the lower decks, where he was hunting ratio fixers. A ratio fixer, HI explain, is a creature that lives in the interstices between ratios. Thus, it's compelled to be moving on, can't stay in one place long, otherwise it'll lose its foothold and fall. If it stands still very long, one of the quotients -- analogous to a human foot -- dwindles, and the other expands. The ratio fixer, like any form of life, wants security, so it tries to fix ratios (freeze them)'. Its efforts to keep from falling messes up proportions and causes The Ship's bulkheads and sometimes even the hull to buckle. The Ship's shape, size, and mass are in a constant state of flux, but generally controlled flux. And if these are changed without The Bridge finding out about them in time, the vectors of velocity, direction, et cetera are changed. Using human analogies, ratio fixers might be compared to the rats in a ship. Or, better, to barnacles on a hull. Or maybe to both. The quartermaster had caught one and was choking it with its filaments when it caught sight of the wrecked heliovalve and of The Rooster Rowdy chasing The Sexapod through a hatchway into the depths. He notified The Bridgeaf once, and the all-stations akurtn went out. Tow I understood why The First Mate was talking Sweetly to me instead of the message being filtered down through suSto-the-#nd-power officers and pe officers. With this emergency, it would take a long time for an order from The Captain to reach every engine room if it went through normal procedure. But I had not, of course, understood completely. Or at all. I just thought I did because I was too awed and stunned to be thinking properly. The Mate thundered, "In the name of The Port! You better not foul this one up! " "I'll do my best, sir, as always," I said. Then, "Foul what one up, sir?" "Idiot! Nincompoop! I'm not speaking directly to you fust to give you a pep talk! A Thrust Potential has been detected in your engine room!" "A Thr Thr Thrust Po Po-Potential! In this area? But... "Imbecile! Not in youf area, what is it, the Semitic?' But it's your specialty! According to the message, it's in the Southern California area, wherever that is!" "But what do I have to do with that, sir?" IF "Stoker, if we weren't in such a mess and if The Thrust Potential wasn't so promising, and if I didn't have to contact # other promising TP areas, I'd have you up here on The Bridge and flay you alive! You don't ask questions while I'm talking! Remember that, stoker!" "Yes, sir," I said, humbly indeed. The First Mate then became very businesslike. Aside from a few numbskulls, coprolite heads and other terms, he addressed me as one entrusted with a great task and with the abilities to carry it but. That is, if I had learned anything from experience. He did remind me that I had not only screwed up the Mahomet follow-up, I had blown the whole Ancient Egyptian Monotheist Deal. "I was called Ikhnaton Ike and Pharaoh Phil by my chief engineer for a long time afterwards." The First Mate was, however, kind enough to say that I had shown much skill in the follow-up to the Burning Bush Business. Beware The First Mate when he's kind. I said to myself, "What's he working up to?" T found out too soon. It was the last thing I'd expected. It was a transfer to the Southern California area and a promotion to engineer, first class. I was staggered. The chief engineer of this room and several engineer's mates and a number of very competent stokers operated in that area. In fact, there were more black gang members there than in any area of Earth. "The chief engineer's had a breakdown," The First Mate said, although he did not have to explain anything. "He's on his way to sickbay now. This report says there's something about that area that generates psychic collapse. A distortion of psychomagnetic lines of force. However, as you know, or should know, you ignoramus, this kind of field also compensates by generating thrust potential impulses. The Northeast section of this -- what's it called? -- U.S.A. has a similar distortion. Both are danger reas for our engines. But, on the other hand, you don't get anything good from a safe neutral area." "Thanks for the elementary lecture," I said inside my head, which was a safe, though not neutral, place for my retort. A few minutes later, I had finished saying a sorrowful good-by to Sue and was checking out of the hotel. "Why should you be transferred to Beverly Hills, California?" Sue said. "It may be largely Jewish in population, but the citizens are basically English speakers. They don't think Semitically, like your Arabs, Abyssinians and Israeli." "That's not the only puzzling thing," I said. "The Thrust Potential is non-Semitic. That is, it's not even descended from Semitic speakers." The engineers and stokers in that area must all have become somewhat unstable, too, otherwise they surely would have been used. So, the thinking of The Bridge was, let's shoot in Mecca Mike. He's fouled up, but he also had some great successes. Perhaps this time he'll come through. He's the best we have, anyway, The Dock preserve us! The First Mate told me that I had better come through. Or else... There would be officers watching my work, but they wouldn't interfere unless I was obviously mining an "engine" beyond repair. If I came through, if I developed the badly needed Thrust Potential, I'd be promoted. Probably to chief engineer. The situation for The Ship was much worse than I'd guessed. Otherwise, they'd have let me take an airliner. But orders were to get me to California with utmost speed. I drove into the Libyan countryside during the daylight. At noon the saucer-shaped vehicle landed, picked me up and took off at # G. If socked info its base fifty miles west of Phoenix, Arizona, with Air Force jets scrambling from Luke Field. They neither saw the ship nor the base, of course, and I drove into Phoenix in what looked like a # Buick, and took a plane into Los Angeles. Coming down over Los Angeles must have been disheartening to the other passengers. They saw the great greenish-gray tentacles, the exhaled poison, banging over the big complex. I had my special "glasses" on, and what I saw was encouraging, at least momentarily. Down there, in the blackness which is phobiac drag, were a dozen fairly large sparks and one huge spark. That big spark, I knew, must be in Beverly Hills. There, if all went well -- it seldom does -- was the potential to develop a thrust which, combined with the thrusts in existence and with those being developed on other worlds, would hopefully cancel the drag caused by the wrecking of the bleedoff heliovalve. And so the vitally needed velocity would be ours. Can anything good come out of Ndzareth ? Can anything good be in Beverly Hills? History has answered the first question. The future would answer the second. II T told the taxi driver at the airport to take me to a street IF which angled south off of Wilshire between Doheny Drive and Beyerly Drive. This was lined with 'drylooking maples. The block where the taxi let me off was, in a sense, in the "dums" of Beverly Hills. Relatively speaking, of course. Both sides of the street in this block were occupied by apartment buildings, some only five years old and others about # to # years Id. The apartments in the new buildings rented from # to # a month and so were considered low-rent in Beverly Hills. The apartments in the old buildings averaged about # a month. My Thrust Potential, my TP, was in the second story of an older building. I had the cab park across the street from it, and I went inside a newer, more expensive apartI put !#own three months , rent in cash, which upset Mrs. Klugel, the landlady. She had always dealt in checks. I signed the lease and then went back to the taxi. My apartment was second-story and fronting the street. It was almost directly across the street from my TP and almost as high as her apartment. I carried my three bags up to it. One was full of clothes, the second full of money, and the third crammed with my equipment. Mrs. Klugel stood in the vestibule. She was a i heavy short woman about # with range-#yed hair, g hose like a cucumber and a clowns mouth. Her black rimmed eyes widened as I went lighter up Hm staircase with a huge bag in cadi hand and one under my arm. "So you're a strong man in seme act already?" she said. I replied that I was not a strong man, professionally, that is. I was a writer who intended to write  novel about Hollywood. "So why don't you live in Hollywood?" "By Hollywood, I mean this whole area around here," I said, sweeping my hand around. She was such a lonely old lady, she was difficult to get rid of. I said I had work to do, and I would talk to her later. As soon as she shut the door, I readjusted the antigrav belt around my waist under my shirt. My two thousand pounds of dense metal-shot protein would have buckled the floor if I hadn't had the belt operating. Then I took out my equipment and set it up. I was nervous; quicksilver beaded from me and fell onto the fleer. I made a mental note to clean up the stuff before I left the apartment. Mrs. Klugel looked as il she'd snoop around during my absences, and it certainly would Be difficult to explain mercury drops on the floor. The setup for my work was this. Across the street, in the #-yearold, rundown building were four apartments. My concern was the upper story on the right side, facing the street. But I soon found out that the apartment just below was also to be intimately involved. The apartment upstairs was reached by climbing a steep series of steps, carpeted with frayed and faded material. A long hall at the top of the stairs ran the length of the building, ending in a bathroom at its far end. The back bedroom was occupied by Diana, the #-year-old, unmarried daughter and her #-monthold daughter, Pam. The grandparents, Tom and Claudia Bonder, slept in the other bedroom. Tom also did his writing in this room. Claudia was # and Tom was #. When I looked through the specanalyzers, via the tap-beam, I saw the baby, Pam, as the bright light I had seen coming in over Los Angeles. She was the big Thrust Potential. Sometimes, the light was dimmed. Not because its source was weakened. No. It darkened because of the hatred pouring out of the grandfather. This black cataract was, seemingly, directed mainly at the people in the apartment below. If hatred were water it would have drowned the people below. And, if they were what Tom Bonder said they were, they deserved drowning, if not worse. TX#atching that building was like  watching the Northern Lights during a meteor shower on the Fourth of July. I ignored the pyrotechnic displays of the tenants on the other side of the building. They had little to do with the "stoking" and the follow-up. Tom Bonder, ah, there was a splendid spectacle. Although he had been depressed in his youth, at which time he must have radiated heavy-drag black, like smoke from Vesuvius, he had semiconverted his youthful depression into middle-aged anger. Reversed the usual course of psychic events, you might say. Now he looked like Vesuvius in eruption. Bonder, the grandfather, was determined not to fail as a grandfather just because he had failed as a father, husband, lover, son, teacher, writer -- and you name it. And, truly, he had failed, but not as badly as he thought, or, I should say, desired, since he lusted for defeat. Rage poured out of him day and night, even when, especially when, he was sleeping. What most infuriated him was the uproar beating' upwards day and night from the Festigs downstairs. The Festigs were a father, # years old, a mother, #, and a daughter, Lisa #. From the time they arose, anywhere from #:# to #:#, until they went to Bed, midnight or #:#, or later, the mother was shouting and bellowing and IF singing and clapping her hands pillow-covered ears of Tom Bomsharply and the little girl was screaming with glee but usually Wailing or screeching with frustration and anger. The father was silent most of the time; he was like an old sunken Spanish galleon, buried in black silt, with his treasures, his pieces-of-eight and silver ingots sand gold crosses, spilled out of a breach in the hull and only occasionally revealed when the currents dredged away some mud. Oh, he was depressed, depressed, which is to say he was a very angry man indeed. The black heavy stuff flowed from Myron Festig like a Niagara fouled with sewage. But sometimes, out of boredom, as he sat on his chair in the living room, he groaned mightily, and the groan went up and out the windows and into the windows of the apartment upstairs. And Tom Bonder would start when he heard the groan and would quit muttering and raging under his breath. He would be si lent, as one lion may fall silent Ibf a moment when he hears the roar of another from far away. The screaming joys and buzzsaw tantrums were enough for the Bonders (not to mention the nextdoor neighbors) to endure. But the child also had the peculiar habit of stomping her feet if she ran or walked. The sound vibrated up through the walls and the floors land through the bed and into the er. Even if he managed to gel ft sleep, he would be awakened a Awn en times by the foot-stompiags er by the screams and the bellows He would sit up and cmse. Sometimes, he would loosen his grip on Ids fear of violence and would shout out of the window: "Quiet down, down there, you barto get up early to go to work! Wfere not on relief, you bloodsucking inconsiderate parasites!" The reference to relief , if nothing, else should have turned Myron Fes tig's depression into rage, because the Festigs were one of He few people in Beverly Hills Iviag on relief. The relief came from the county welfare and from money borrowed from Mrs. Festig's mother and doctor brothers. Occasionally, Myron sold a cartoon or took a temporary job. But he was very sensitive about the welfare money, and he would have been astounded to learn that the Bonders knew about it. The Bonders, however, had been informed about this by the manager's wife. Rachel Festig, the wife and mother, was revealed in the analyzer as intermittent flashes of white, which were philiac thrust, with much yellow, that is, deeply repressed rage sublimated as sacrificial or martyred love. And these was the chlorine-gas green of selfpoisonous self-worship. B ut there was the bright white light of the Bonder baby, Pam. Now that I was near it, I saw it split into two, as a star seen by the naked eye will become a double star in the telescope. The lesser star, as it were, radiated from Lisa Festig. All infants, unless they're born psychotic, have this thrust. Lisa's, unfortunately, was waning, and its brightness would be almost entirely gone in a year or so. Her mother's love was extinguishing it in a dozen ways. But the far brighter white, the almost blinding Thrust Potential, radiated from the Bonder granddaughter. She was a beautiful, strong, healthy, good-humored, intelligent, extremely active, and very loving baby. She was more than enough to cause her grandparents to love her beyond normal grandparental love. But they had reason to especially cherish this baby. She was illegitimate. The father had dropped out of sight in West Venice, not that anybody was looking for him. Furthermore, both Claudia and Tom felt that they had been psychically distorted by their parents and that they, in turn, had bent their daughter, Thea. But Pam was not going to be fouled up, neurotic, nearneurotic, unhappy, desolate, and so on. At the moment, both the elder Bonders were going to psychoanalysts to get their psyches hammered out straight on the anvil of the couch. Mrs. Bonder was doing fine after years of painful lonely feelings, suicide attempts, hospitalization, and hysterical flights home to her mother. In fact, she was on her way to being the only adult in her family who was aware of her drives and compulsions and able to handle them. The daughter had her problems, too, including schizophrenic tendencies, guilt, and an Oedipal conflict which kept her from a normal closeness to her father. But neither she nor Mrs. Bonder, though they figured significantly and were to be used by me, had the importance in my plans that Tom Bonder, the grandfather, had. Why? Because he was an atheist who had never been able to shake himself free of his desire to know a God, a hard-headed pragmatist who lusted for mysticism as an al coholic lusts for the bottle he has renounced, a scoffer of religions whose eyes became teary whenever he watched the hoakiest, most putridly sentimental religious movies on TV with Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald and Humphrey Bogart as priests. This, plus the tiniest spark of what, for a better term, is called pre-TP, and his rage, made me choose him. As a matter of fact, he was the main tool I had for the only plan I had. Myron needed to be dependent, IF to be, at #, an invertebrate, a waxingly fat invertebrate. Yet he wanted to be a world-famous cartoonist, a picture-satirist of the modern age, especially in its psychic sicknesses. Recently, in a burst of backbone, he had stayed up all night for several weeks, when his family was sleeping, and drawn an entire book of cartoons about group therapy. He knew the subject well, since he was a participant in a group and also had private sessions once a week. Both were paid for by arrangement with the county and his brother-in-law, the doctor. The cartoon book was published and sold well locally, then the excitement died down and he subsided into a great roll of unbonestiffened protoplasm. Depression blackened him once more, and he gained a hunger for food instead of fame, and so he ate and swelled. Tom Bonder worked daytimes as an electronic technician at a space industry plant in Huntington Beach, and evenings and weekends he wrote fast-action private-eye novels for paperback publishers and an occasional paperback western. He loathed his technician job and wanted to go into fulltime fiction writing. However, he was having enough trouble writing part-time now because of the uproar downstairs -- Ill T used the tap-beam and sight" beam to listen and look into the apartments and also to eavesdrop on Bonder's sessions with the analyst. I knew he ascribed his problems to a too-early and tooharsh toilet training, to a guilt caused by conflict between his childhood curiosity about sex and his parents' harsh repression of it and so on. His main problem throughout most of his life had been a rigid control over himself. He thought himself a coward because he had always avoided violence, but he was finding out in therapy that he feared that he might become too violent and hurt the other person. Fortunately, he was now getting rid of some of his anger in little daily spurts, but, unfortunately, not swiftly enough. He was always on the verge of going berserk. Berserk I That was the key to my "stoking." The Ship must have been losing speed even worse than we of the crew had been told. About six months after I got into Beverly Hills, I received a call from The First Mate again. "How's the setup coming along?" "As well as can be expected," I said. "You know you can't stoketoo fast, sir. The engine might i overheat or blow," "I know that, you cabin-boy reject!" fie bellowed so loudly that I turned the volume down. Old Mrs. Klugd quite often kept her ear pressed to the tenants' doors. I said, "I'll use more pressure, sir, but it'll have to be delicately applied. I sure wouldn't want to wreck this little engine. Her nimbus looks as if she could provide enormous thrust, if she's brought along properly." "Three hours you get," The First Mate said. "Then we have to have # T units." Three hours of Ship's time was # Earth-years. Even if I got the stoking done quickly, I had a hell of a lot of hard mercury-sweating Work in the next # years. I promised I'd do my best, and The First Mate said that that had better be better than good enough, and he signed off. Tom Bonder and Myron Festig were working themselves closer to that condition I'd been working for. The Festig child was stomping her feet and screaming all day and until one in the morning, and the inability to get sleep was putting black circles around Tom Bonder's eyes. And red halos of wrath around him. Myron Festig Was deep in the sludge pit of despond. His latest cartoon had been turned down by Playboy . He had just been fired from a job as a cheese salesman. His mother-in-law was threatening to visit for several months. The car needed new tires. "I'd thhmei them down one night." His brother-in-law, the doctor, was needling him because he wasn't making a steady income, aside from welfare payments. And Rachel, Ms wife, when not chewing him out for his inability to hold a job, was crying that they should have another baby. They needed a son;she would deliver him a boy to make him proud. The last thing Myron wanted was another mouth to stuff, and, though he dared not say it, another noisy mouth and big heavy feet to distract him from his cartooning. 'Tpom Bonder would have agreed I with this. He was, he told his wife, slowly being herded to suicide or homicide. He could not take much more of this. And more frequently, as if in jest, he would open a drawer in the kitchen and take out a hand-axe, which he had brought out of the Midwest. And he would say, "One more night of thumping from Little Miss Buffalo Stampede, one more night of bellowing 'Myron!' or 'Rachel!', and I go downstairs and chop up the whole swinish bunch #" His wife and daughter would grin, nervously, and tell him he shouldn't even joke like that. "Fm fantasizing!" he'd cry. "My beadshrinker says it's good therapy W to imagine slaughtering them, very healthy. It relieves the tendons. As long as  can fantasize, I won't take action I But when I can't fantasize, Beware! Chop! Chop! Off with their headsi Blood will flow" and he Would swing the axe while he grinned. Sometimes, exasperated Beyond endurance, he would stomp his foot on the floor to advise the Festigs that their uproar was Intolerable. Sometimes, the Festigs would quiet down for a while. More often, they ignored the hints from aboye or even Increased the volume. And, once, Myron Festig, enraged that anyone should dare to object to his family's activities (and also taking out against the Bonders the rage he felt against himself and his family) slammed his foot angrily against the floor and cried out. Mr. Bonder, startled at first, then doubly enraged, slammed his foot Back. Both men then waited to see what would happen. Nothing, however, followed. And this and other events or nonevents are difficult to explain. Why didn't Tom Bonder just go down and have a talk with the FestigsK Why didn't he communicate directly, face to face, with words and expressions? I've watched human beings for shaped like a ground ape's then), and I still don't know exactly why they do or don't do certain things. Bonder's overt problem Was communication. Rather, the lack thereof. He kept too rigid a control ever himself to talk freely. Which may be why he turned to writing. He probably did not go down to tell the Festigs how they were disturbing him because, to him, even a little anger meant a greater one would inevitably follow, and he could not endure the thought of this. And so he avoided a direct confrontation. Yet, he was getting more and more angry every day; his safety valve Was stuck, and his boilers were about to blow. I can tell by your expression what you're thinking. Why don't we build 'engines' which will automatically put out the required thrust? If this were possible, it would have been done long ago. The structure of the universe, that is, of The Ship, requires, for reasons unknown to me, that philiac thrust be generated only by sentient beings with free will. Automatons can't love. If love is Built into, or programmed into, the automaton, the love means nothing in terms of thrust. It's a pseudoleve, and so a pseudothrust results, and this is no thrust at all. No. Life has to be created on viable planets, and it must evolve until it brings forth a sentient being. And this being may thei be IF manipulated, pulled and pushed, given suggestions and laws, and so forth. But the blazing white thrust is not easy to come by, and the black drag is always there. It's a hideous problem to solve. And hideous means often have to be used. And so, obeying my orders, I speeded up the stoking. Far faster than I liked. Fortunately, a number of events occuring about the same time three months later helped me, and everything converged on one day, a Thursday. 'T'he evening before, Myron Festig had gone on the Joseph Beans TV Show to get publicity for his group-therapy cartoon book, although he had been warned not to do so. As a result, he was stingingly insulted by Beans and his doltish audience, was called sick and told that group therapy was a mess of mumbo-jumbo. Myron was smarting severely from the savage putdown. On the next day, Tom Bonder was ## hours late getting home The motor of his car had burned out. This was the climax to the increasing, almost unendurable, frustration and nerve-shredding caused by the #-day-a-week #-hour roundtrip from Beverly Hills to Huntington Beach and back on the freeway. In addition, his request for a transfer to the nearby Santa Monica plant was lost somewhere on the great paper highway of interdepartmental affairs of the astronautics company, and the entire request would have to be initiated again in triplicate. Two days before, Myron had been fired from another job. He'd made several mistakes in giving change to customers because he was thinking of ideas for cartoons. Tom Bonder found his wife did not want to listen to his tale of trouble with the car. She had had a setback in therapy and was also upset about some slights her doctor employer had given her. After tapping in on Myron's account to his wife of how he lost his job, I made an anonymous phone call to the welfare office and told them that Myron Festig had been working without reporting the fact to them.They had called Myron to come down and explain himself. Myron Festig's brother-in-law, the doctor, wanted part of his loan back. But the Festigs were broke. Tom Bonder, on coming home, was received with a letter of rejection. The editor to whom he had sent his latest private-eye thriller had turned it down with a number of nasty remarks. Now Bonder wouldn't be able to pay all of next month's bills. Myron Festig's mother, the day before, had called him and begged him, for the hundredth time, to accept his aged father's offer to become his junior partner in his business. He should quit being a nogoodnik 'artist" who couldn't support his wife and child. Or, for that matter, himself. Moreover, and this as much as anything sent him skiing out of control bn the slopes of despair, ,his psychiatrist had gone on a twoweeks' yacation in Mexico. And, that very morning, Myron got word that one of the group in therapy, a lovely young woman whom Myron was becoming very fond bf, had lifted the top of her head with i .# automatic. Tom Bonder flushed the toilet, ana if filled up and ran all over the bathroom floor. Bonder suppressed his desire to yell out obscenities and denunciations bf his landlord because he did not want to upset his granddaughter, and he called the plumber. This incident was the latest in a long series bf blown fuses in the old and overloaded electrical circuits and the backing of dirty waters in the old and deteriorating plumbing. Rachel Festig told Myron that he had to get another job and quickly. Or she was going to work, and he could stay home to take care bf the child. Myron sat in the big worn easy chair and just looked at her, as if he were an oyster with # o'clock shadow and she were a strange fish he was trying to identify. Rachel became hysterical and raved for an hour (I could hear her across the street through my open window, I didn't need my tap-beam) about the psychic damage to Lisa if her mother left her to go to work. Myron was so silent and unresponsive that she became frightened and left him for a while. The plumbers finally left. The baby, who had been awakened by their activities, finally went back to sleep. Tom Bonder sat down at his desk in the crowded bedroom to start writing a story for a mystery magazine. If he wrote it quickly enough and the editors did not dawdle reading it, and bought it, and then 'did not dawdle in sending his money, he might have enough to pay next month's bills. He wrote two paragraphs, using his pencil so that the typewriter wouldn't wake up the baby. The thumping of Lisa's feet and her screaming as she ran back and forth from room to room disturbed him even more than usual. But be clamped his mental teeth and wrote on. Then Rachel began to march along behind Lisa, and she sang loudly (she always said she could have been a great anger if she hadn't married Myron), and she clapped her hands, over and over. It was now ft PM. The baby stirred in her crib. Then, after some especially heavy crashing of Lisa's feet, Pam cried out. Tom's daughter came into the back bedroom and tried to quiet her down. Tom Bonder reared up from hfs W desk his flailing hand scattering papers onto the floor. He stalked Into the kitchen and opened a bottom drawer with some difficulty. As usual, it stuck, and he had to get down on his knees and yank at it. This time, he did not mutter something about fixing it someday. He took out the hand-axe and walked through the front room, hoping his wife would see it. IV S he curled her lip and said, "Don't be more of an ass than God made you, Tom. You're not scaring anybody with that." And then, "Why aren't you writing? You said you couldn't talk to me because you had to write." He glared at her and said nothing. The reasons for his anger were so obvious and justified that she must be deliberately baiting him because of her own turmoiled feelings. Finally, he grunted, "That menagerie downstairs." "Well, if you have to fantasize, you don't have to hold that axe. It makes me nervous. Put it away." He went back into the kitcheU. At that moment, I phoned. His wife said, "Get the phone. If anybody wants me, I'm out to the store. I don't feel like talking to anyone tonight, except you, and you Won't talk to me." .Violently, he picked up the phone and said, harshly, "Hefip" I was watching the whole scene directly on the tap-beam, of course, and at the same time was displaying the Fes tigs' front room on i viewer. I mimicked Myron Festig's voice. "This is Myron. Would you please be more quiet up there? We can't think with all that noise." Tom Bonder yelled an obscenity and slammed down the phone. He whirled, ran out into the hall, pad charged down the steps with the axe still in his hand. Rachel and Lisa had stopped their parade, and Myron had risen from his chair at the thunder on the staircase. I hid started to dial the Festig's number as soon Os I'd finished with Tom Bonder. The phone rang when Bonder reached the bottom of the steps. MyroB, who was closest to the phone, answered. I mimicked the voice of Myron's mother. I said, "Myron I If you don't go into business with your father at once, I'll never ever have anything any more to do with you, my only sofi, God help meT What did I ever do to deiserye a son like you? Don't you love your aged parents?" And I hung up. Tom Bonder was standing Outride the Festigs' door with the Sxe raised when I ran out Of my apartment building. I was wearing a policeman's uniform, and I was ready for Mrs. Klugel if she should see me. I meant to tell her I was going to a costume ball. She did not, however, come out of her room since her favorite TV show was on. I walked swiftly across the street, and not until I got on the sidewalk dig Tom Bonder see me.  T Te could have been beating on  the door with his axe in a maniac effort to get inside and kill the Festigs. But his abnormally powerful self-control had, as I'd hoped, reasserted itself. He had discharged much of his anger by the obscenity, the energy of aggression in charging down the stairs, and the mere act of raising the axe to strike the door. Now he  stoo# like the Tin Woodman when the rain rusted his joints, motionless, his eyes on the door, his right arm inj the air with the axe in his hand. EE coughed; he broke loose. He whirled and saw the uniform by the nearby street light. My face was in the shadows. I said, "Good evening," and started back across the street as if I were going home after work. I heard the door slam and knew that Tom Bonder had run back into his apartment and doubtless was shaking with reaction from his anger and from relief at his narrow escape from being caught in the act by f policeman. Once in my apartment, I used the tap beams to observe the situation. Tom Bonder had opened the door and tossed the axe onto the floor in front of the Festigs' door. It was his obscure way of communicating. Quit driving me cjrazy with your swinish uproar, or the next time... I'm sure that the (chopping of the axe before the Festigs was, at the same time, an offer of peace. Here is the axe which I have brandished at you .  no longer, want it; you may have it. And there was a third facet to this seemingly simple but actually complicated gesture, as there is to almost every human gesture. He knew well, from what Rachel had told his daughter, and from what he had observed and heard directly through the windows that Myron was on as high and thin a tightrope as he. So, the flinging down of the axe meant also: Pick it up and use it. Tom Bonder did not realize this consciously, of course. I had thought that Tom Bonder might do just what he had done. I knew him well enough to chance that he would. If he had acted otherwise, then I would have had to set up another situation. Myron opened the door; he must have heard the thump of the hatchet and Bonder's steps as he wont back up the stair s. He picked it up after staring at it for a full minute and returned to his easy chair. He sat gain and put the axe on his lap. His fat fingers playeci frith the wooden handle land a thumB felt along the edge of the head. Rachel walked over to him and bent over so her face was only about three inches from his. She shouted at him; her mouth worked and worked. I didn't know what she was saying because I had shut off the audio of their beam. I was forcing myself to watch, but I didn't want to hear. This was the first time I bad cut off the sound during a stoking. At that moment, I didn't think about what I was doing or why. Later, I knew that this was the first overt reflection of something that had been troubling me for a long long time. All tiie elements of the situation (I'm talking about the Festigs, now) had worked together to make Myron do what he did. But the final dement, the fuse, was that Rachel looked remarkably like his mother and at that moment was acting and talking remarkably like her. The black clouds which usually poured out of him had Been slowly turning a Bright red at their bases. Now the red crept up the clouds, like columns of mercury In a bank of thermometers seen through smoke. Suddenly, the red exploded, shot through the black, overwhelmed the black, dissolved it in scarlet, and filled the room with a glare. Myron seemed to come up gut of the chair like a missile from Its launching pad He pushed Riche with one hand so hard that she staggered back halfway across the room, her mouth open, jelled In the middle of whatever she had Been screaming. He stepped forward and swung. I forced myself to watch as he went towards the child. When Myron Festig was through with the two, and he took a long time, or so it seemed to me, he ran into the kitchen. A moment later, he came back out of the kitdien door with a huge butcher knife held before him with Both hands, the point against his solar plexus. He charged across the room, slammed into the wall and rammed its hilt into the wall an # ran the knife through him. The autopsy report was to state that the point had driven into his Backbone. I turnSI the audio Back on then, although I could hear well enougB through my apartment window. H siren was whooping some blocks away. The porchlight had Been turned on, and the manager, his wife, and juvenile daughter were standing outside the Festigs # door Presently, the door to the Bonders' apartment opened, and Mrs. Bander came out. Tom Bonder followed a minute later. IF The manager opened the door to the Festigs' apartment. Tom Bonder looked Into the front room between the manager and the side of the doorway. H e swayed, then stepped back until he bumped into Mrs. Bonder. The blood was splashed over the walls, the floors, and the furniture. There were even spots of It on the ceiling. The broken handle of the axe lay in a pool of blood. Its head was buried somewhere. I turned the beam away from the Festigs and watched Tom Bonder. He was on his knees, his arms dangling, hands spread open stiffly, his head thrown back, and his eyes rolled up. His mouth moved silently. Then there was a cry. Pam, the baby, had gotten out of her crib and was standing at the top of the steps and looking down at die halfopen door to the porch and crying for her mother. Then ran up to her and held her in her arms and soothed her. At the cry, Tom Bonder shook. No nimbus except the gray of sleep or trance or semiconsciousness had welled from him. But then a finger of white, a slim shaft of brightness, extended from his head. In a minute, he was enveloped in a starry blaze. He was on his feet and taking Mrs. Bonder by the hand anj going up the steps. The police car stopped before the building. The siren died, but the red Eght on top of the car kept flashing. I packed my stuff in my three bags and went out the back entrance. It was now highly probable that Tom Bonder would take the course I had planned. And, since he was a highly imaginative man, he would influence his granddaughter, who, being a Thrust Potential, would naturally incline toward the religious and the mystical. And toward love. And those in charge of her development would see that she came into prominence and then into greatness in later life. And, after the almost inevitable martyrdom, they would bring about the proper followup. Or try to. They would. I wouldn't. Make ThoseWiM Connections I was through. I had had enough of murder, suffering and bloodEestlgs haunted me. Somehow, and E EnoW the crewmen and officers say it's impossible, I'd grows i Kegrt. Or had it gives to me, in the same way the Tin Woodman got his heart. S'jjJ had enough. To# much. That is rhy I deserted gsd Why I've Seed hiding for all these years. And why I've managed to get three others of the black gang to desert, too. N ow We're being hunted down. The hunters and the hunted and the hunt are not known by you humans. You engines, so they call you. But I fled here, and I met you, and I fell in love With you -- not is a quite-human Way, of course. NoW you know Who and what I am. But don't turn away. Don't make me leave you. i love you, even if I can't make love to you. Help me. Join me, I'm a mutidy, I'm interested in mutinying because of you humans, not Because I want to be first, to be The Captain. We must take over. Somehow, there has to be a better way to run The best in science notion comes irom walker You'll find the best in a new series of science fiction novels published in handsome hardcover editions. The Walker series features major new novels by established writers as well as classics you will want for your library. Ten titles are now being published. y wo new nove  S Eight classics -- now in hardcover Norman Spinrad is a novel of raw energy and punch that makes a radical departure from traditional science fiction style. April # is an abrasive and entertaining satire of politics and society. April # Walker and Company # Fifth Avenue, New York The Whole Man by John Brunner, Jan. # The Watch Below by James White, Jan. # The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Jan. # The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Feb. # Brain Wave by Poul Anderson, Feb. # Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, Feb. # A Case of Conscience by James Blish, March # Thorns by Robert Silverberg, March # IP IF  Novelette l For a Ship fo divorce a Pilot, there must be sufficient reason. Such as extreme mental cruelty. I t CD rain ships don't 'disappear," Helva said in what she Hoped was a firm, no-argument tone. Teron stuck his chin out in a way that caused him to appear a neckless neanderthal. This mannerism had passed from amusing through annoying to unendurable. "You heard Central," Teron replied at his most didactic. "They ido disappear because they have disappeared." "The fact of disappearance is inconsistent with shell psychology," Helva retorted, bardy managing to restrain herself from shouting at top volume. She had the feding that she might force him to understand by overwhelming him with sound alone. She knew this was basically illogical but In trying to cope with Teron over the past galactic year, she found she reacted more and more on an emotional rather than a reasonable level. This partnership was dearly intolerable -- die would even go so far as to say, degrading -- and she would allow it to continue no longer than it took them to finish this assignment and return to Regulus Base. Helva had had enough of Teron. She did not care two feathers in a jet-vent if the condusion wasn't mutual. It had been difficult for her to admit she had found herself in a situation she couldn't adjust to, but she and Teron were clearly incompatible. She would just have to admit to an error of judgment and correct it. It was the only sensible course of action. Hdv# groaned inwardly. He was contagious. She was talking more and more as he did. "Your loyalty is commendable, if, in this instance, misplaced," Teron was saying pompously. "The facts are there. Four brain controlled ships engaged on Central Worlds commissions have disappeared without trace, their accomAnna McCaffrey received one of the two Hugos awarded In She novella category for her dragon tale "Weyr Search." She Is the first woman ever to receive the coveted Hugo. panying pilots with than. Fad:; a ship can alter Its tape, S pilot cannot. Fact: the ships have failed to appear at a scheduled port-of-call. Fact: the ships have failed to Appear In the adjacent sectors of space nearest their previous or projected ports-of-call. Therefore, they; have disappeared. The ships must have altered the projected journey; for no known reason. Therefore the ships are unreliable organisms. This conclusion follows the presented data and is unalterable. Any rational intelligence must admit the yalidity of that conclusion." He gave her that irritating smirk she had originally thought a sweet smile. Helva counted slowly to one thousand by tens. When she spoke again, her yoke was under perfect control. "The presented data is incomplete. It lacks motivation. There is no reason for those four ships to have disappeared for their own purposes. They weren't even badly indebted. Indeed, the DR was within three standard years of solvency." Just as she was, she thought. "Therefore, and on the basis of privileged information EE available to me . She came as close as makes no never mini to spitting out the pronoun. "... your conclusion is unacceptable" "I cannot see what privileged information, if you actually have any," Teron said, awarding her a patronizing smile, "could change my conclusion since Central has also reached it." rjhere, Helva thought to herself, he had managed to drag in old infallible authority, and that was supposed to stop her in her tapes. It was useless to argue with him anyway. He was, as Niall Parollan had once accused her of being, stubborn for the wrong reasons. He was also pig-headed, dogmatic, insensitive, regulation-hedged and so narrowly oriented as to prevent any vestige of imagination or intuitive thinking from coloring his mental processes for a micro second. She oughtn't to have thought of Niall Parollan. It did her temper no good. That officious little pipsqueak had paid her another of his unsolicited, unofficial visits to argue her out of choosing the Acthionite. "He passed his Brawni training on theory credits. He's been slated for garbage runs, not you" Niall Parollan had cried, pacing her main cabin. "And you are not the person who will be his partner. His profile-tape looks extremely compatible to me," "Use your wits, girl. Just lee at him. He's all muscle and no hsgrt, too perfectly good looking to fee credible. Christ, he's ... he's su android, complete with metal brainworks, programmed in a ratified atmosphere. He'll drive yon batty." "He's a reliable, well-balanced, well-read, well-adjusted..." And you're a spiteful tin-plated virgin," snapped Parollan, and lor the second time in their acquaintance he charged out of her cafein ff Now Helva had to admit Niall Parollan had been demoralizingly accurate about Brawn Teron of Acthion. The only kind thing that could be said about him, in Hdva's estimation, was that he was a complete change from any other partner she had bad, temporarily or permanently. And if he called her an unreliable organism once more, she would blow the lock on him. However, Teron considered be had silenced her with the last telling remark. He seated himself at his pilot control board, flexed his fingers as he always did, and then ran his precious and omnipotent data through the computer, checking their journey tape. It was obvious he was out to thwart any irrational desire Helva might have to change their journey and mafe them disappear, as the other four ships had. Teron worked methodically and slowly, his broad brow imwrinkled, his wide-cheeked face serene, his brown eyes never straying from the task at hand. TTow under the suns of heaven, H-did she ever have the incredible lack of insight to pick him ?; Helva wondered, the adrenalin level in her shell still high. She must have been out of her ever-loving, capsulated mind. Maybe her nutrient fluid was going acid. When she got back to Regulus, she was going to demand an endocrine check. Something was wrong with her. No, no, no. Helva contradicted herself. There was nothing wrong with her that getting rid of Teron wouldn't cure. He had her doubting her sanity and she knew she was sane or she wouldn't be this ship. Remember that, Helva, she told herself. It was quite possible that, before this trip ended, he'd have persuaded her she was a menace to Central Worlds Autonomy because her intelligence was so unreliable and the safest thing for the known world would be for her to opt out. Him and his assumption that a brain ship must be an unreliable organism because they shehe (never it, please) could digest data, ignore the irrelevant and proceed oh seemingly illogical courses io logical and highly successful ends -- such as the tangle she and Kira had got into on AUoth. And to quote particulars, she, Helva, had already been unreliable several times in her short career as a brain ship. Teron had been kind enough to point out these deviations to her, as well as a far more logical course of action under all the same conditions, and he had admonished her never to act outside cut orders .while he, Teron of Acthion, was her brawn partner. She was to do nothing, repeat, nothing, without clearing first with him and then with Central. An intelligent organism was known by its ability to follow orders without deviation. "And you actually mean," Helva had remarked laughingly the first time Teron had made this solemn pronouncement -- she had still had her sense of humor in those days -- "that, if our orders required me to enter an atmosphere my subsequent investigations proved was corrosive to my hull and would result in our deaths, I should follow such orders... to the death, that is." "Irresponsible orders are not given Central Worlds Ships," Teron replied reprovingly. "Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward..." "I do not understand what half leagues have to do with the principle under discussion," he said coldly. IF "I was trying to make a subtle point I wiU rephrase." "In a concise, therefore comprehensible, manner, if you please." "Orders can be cut without foreknowledge of unavailable but highly relevant facts. Such as the before mentioned corrosive atmospheres..." "Hypothetical..." "... but valid as a case in point. We do, you must admit, often approach relatively unexplored star systems. Therefore, it is entirely possible, not merely hypothetical, that pre-cut orders can require an intelligent and mature re-evaluation which may require what appears to be insubordinate alteration of those same orders andor rank disobedience to those orders." 'T'eron had shaken his head, not t sadly because Helva was certain he had experienced no deep human emotions in his life, but reprovingly. "I know now why Central Worlds insists on a human pilot as commander of the brain controlled ships. They are necessary, so necessary when an unreliable organism is nominally in control of so powerful an instrument as this ship." Helva had sputtered in astonishment at his misconception. She had been about to point out that the pilot control board did not override her. She had the override on the pilot. "There will come a day," Tartu had continued inexorably, "when such poor expedients are no longer necessary. Automatic operations wiU be perfected to such a fine degree that human brains will no longer be needed." "They use human beings" Hdya had replied, pronouncing each syllable distinctly to emphasize the fact that the whole body, not At cranium alone, was included. Mechanically controlled ships -- even cerebral ships -- had proved highly unsatisfactory in performance, especially where initiative might be required. The brain-brawn combinations were the perfect solution. "Ah, yes, human beings. Fallible creatures at best, we are, subject to so many pressures, so frail a barque for so great a task." Teton tended to go in for homiletics at the drop of a gauge. 'To err is human, to forgive divine." He sighed. "And when this human element, so prone to err, is eliminated, when automation is perfected -- ah, there, Helva, is the operative word -- when it Is perfected, there will be no more need for such stop-gap techniques as Central Worlds must presently employ. When that perfection is achieved, ships will be truly rdiable." He patted the computer-console patronizingly. Helva had stifled a monosyllable. Historical and incontrovertible arguments welled up from her SChoelrfP ing and conditioning years. These were based, she abruptly realized, on incidents which unfortunately tended to support his peculiar theory of unreliability -- however sane the outcome. In each instance, the brain ships had acted by ignoring or revising previous orders as the unusual circumstances they encountered required them to do. By Teron's unswerving logic, intelligence itself -- whether shel or mobile -- was unreliable. Helva could not see him ever admitting that intelligent conclusions were not always logical. And right now, every scrap of intelligence, instinct, training, conditioning and reason told Helva that brain ships did not just disappear. Not four in a row. Not four in less than a Regulan month. One in a hundred years, yes, that Was possible, logical and probable. But there was always some hint, some deducible reason. The ship she had discovered on Alioth, for instance, had lost her brawn and had gone psychotic in grief. She disappeared. It had been logically assumed the ship had opted out and buried itself in a sun. The # had indeed attempted suicide but missed its mark, dying years later when Helva and her brawn, Kira, had found it. TT#hy had she allowed Kira to   leave her when that assignment was over? Kira would have been quite of Helva's mind in this matter, but Helva did not see the faintest hope of convincing Teron that multiple disappearances were so preposterous. Because it involved some intuition, of which Teron had none. How had this didacticism of his escaped Psychprobe? And another thing she had noticed about him, whether he would ever admit it consciously or not: the very concept of cyborgs like Helva was repugnant to Teron. A brawn was very much aware, if the majority of Central Worlds' populations were not, that behind the ship's titanium bulkhead reposed a shell, containing the pituitarily and surgically stunted, inert but complete human body. When Helva had been Bom physically deformed, into a world of physical perfection, her parents had elected to donate their dayold child to Central Worlds Government. By-passing her damaged nerves, her brain synapses had been linked to the controls of a small jet-propelled shell first, and later to a large, slim, faster-than-light scout ship in the Medical Service of Central Worlds. Helva and her kind had been so thoroughly conditioned to their shell life that there were not even trace longings to be released from their unusual immolation. Freed of certain purely physical stresses and stimuli, they benefited by possessing curiously sharpened percepIF tions and instincts for inter-human relationships. Complex internal controls gave them sight and sound o inhuman versatility. Helva could project a whisper a furlong from her. She could turn her vision up to a magnification of # times normal or project it telescopically five hundred miles planetbound -- where atmospheric conditions interfered with clarity -- or one thousand space miles. Olfactory and tactile senses were translated into atmospheric pressures and compositions, heat-cold tolerances of her ship's skin. As an avocation, Helva had studied pure voice production to the point where she could sing in any tessitura used by human vocal chords and some exotic variations such as the Reticulan mating croons and the hiss-dick percussions of the Ophiuchian spider people. Her unique skill had caused her, in her first tour of duty, to become known as the ship who sings. With the death of her first brawn, Jennan Sahir Silan, her interest in vocal artistry had waned. Now, in this partnership with Teron, she was raising her voice far more in schism than song. As a matter of fact, Teron had taken such exception to this epithet that she dreaded calling on planets where she had sung. Indeed, he did his best to dehumanize her. Yet Be was the one who consistently acted in a mechanical fashion. It was as if he were determined to live according to pre-set, pre-programmed directives, without allowance for mistake, fatigue or disease. If he weren't so thoroughly aggravating, she could almost feel sorry for him. And before he had antagonized her, she had actually understood this drive toward perfection which motivated every thought and action. Teron was psychotically afraid of error, of making any mistake because mistake implied failure and failure was Inadmissible. If he made no mistakes, he would never be guilty of failure and would be a success. Well, Helva mused, she was not afraid of making a mistake iand she wasn't afraid of admitting failure. And she'd surely made one with Teron. When he started mistrusting shell people, he was no good to her or Central Worlds. Wdl, she would not be vindictive. She would request a change and take the fine. It wouldn't set her too far back in the red. And with a new partner and a couple of good assignments, she'd still pay-off. But Teron was going off her deck! The decision of divorce, now subvocalized, made her feel much better. W fien Teron woke the next day, he checked as he always did, every gauge, dial and meter, forward and aft. This practice took him most of the morning. A s imila r rundown would have taken Helva ten minutes at the outside. By custom and by any other brawn but Teron, the check was left to the brain partner. Wearily Helva had to read back to Teron her findings which he corroborated with his own. "Shipshape and bristol fashion," he commented as he always did when the results tallied... as they always did. Then he seated himself at the pilot console awaiting touchdown on Tania Borealis. As the TH-# had had planetfalls on Durrell, Tania Borealis fourth planet, before, the spaceport was familiar with Teron -- familiar with and contemptuous to the point of addressing all remarks to Helva rather than to her brawn. If it complimented Helva, it made Teron harder to deal with later. He responded by being twice as officious and pompous with the port officials and the Health Service Captain to whom their cargo of rare drugs had been assigned. A certain amount of extra precaution was required, considering the nature and potency of the drugs, but it was offensive of Teron to tight-beam back to Central Worlds for a replica of Captain Brandt's ID cube before turning over the invaluable packet to him. To make matters worse, Niall Parollan, being Section Supervisor, had had to take the call and Helva caught all the nuances in his carefully official words. Helva seethed inwardly. It would' have to be Parollan. But she had the heretofore unexperienced urge to burst outward from her shell in aH directions. Parollan would be unbearably righteous no matter when she filed intent to change brawns. There were three more stops, one at Tania Australis and the two Alula counterparts before she would touch down at Regulus Base. Better let Niall Parollan have his laugh now so he'd be over it by the time she did ditch Teron. So, girding herself for Parollan's smug reception, Helva flashed a private signal for him to keep the tightbeam open. Teron, slave that he was to protocol, would see Captain Brandt off the ship and to the waiting landcar. She'd have a chance to file her intention then. "Tower to the TH-#. Permission to board you requested by the Antiolathan Xixon," said Durrell Tower. "Permission refused," Helva snapped without so much as a glance in Teron's direction. "Pilot Teron speaking," the Brawn interjected forcefully, striding to the console and opening the local channel direct. "What is the purpose of this request?" "Don't know. The gentlemen are on their way by ground car." 'Teron disconnected and glanced out the open airlock. Brandt's car was just passing the oncoming vehicle midfield. W "You have no right to issue jrders independently, Helva, when the request has been properly sSted." "Have you ever heard of an Antiolathan Xixon?" Helva demands. "And isn't this a restricted mission?" "I am perfectly aware of the nature of our mission and I have never heard of an Antiolathan Xixon. That doesn't mean there Isn't one. And, as it sounds religious and one of our prime Service directives is to be respectful to any and all religious orders, we should receive him." "True enough. But may I remind Pilot Teron that I am his senior in service by some years and that I have access to memory banks, mechanical memory banks, less prone to lapsus memoriae than the human mind? And there is no Xixon." "The request was issued properly," Teron repeated. "Shouldn't we consult Central first?" "There are some actions which are indicated without recourse to official sanction." "Oh, really?" The groundcar had arrived and the Xixon-people had dutifully requested permission to board. Their arrival meant no chance for Helva to speak privately with Central. She was doubly infuriated by Teron's childish insistence on seeing whoever these Xixop were. She knew perfectly well that if she. had countermanded Us order, be would have been in the right of it to tall her down. But since he had taken the initiative, naturally it was all in order. The four men stepped on board, two in plain gray tunics, stepping smartly inside the lock as though the yanguard of a great dignitary. Sidearms hung from their belts and both wore curious cylindrical whistles on neckchains. The third man, gray of hair but vigorous, obsequiously ushered in the fourth, a whitehaired man of imposing stature in a long, gray-black robe. He fingered a whistle, larger than the guards' but similar in design, as if it were some kind of sacred talisman. There was something not at all reassuring, Helva noted, in that obsequious performance. For the gray-haired man, in the action of ushering, was missing no single detail of the cabin's appointments. Just as he switched his direction to put him beside Teron, who was still at the control console, the old man reached the titanium bulkhead behind which Helva resided. The maneuvers were almost completed when something in Helva's mind went wild with alarm. "Teron, they're imposters," she cried, remembering with sudden hope that the right-beam to Central Worlds was still open. S# The white-haired m an lost all trace of formal dignity and, mouthing syllables in a frightful cadence, stabbed a finger toward her column. Helva, in the brief moment before she lost consciousness, saw the two guards blowing on their whistles, the piercing notes sonically jamming the ship's circuitry. She saw Teron slump to the floor of the cabin, felled by the gray-haired man. Then the anesthetic gas the old man had released into her shell overwhelmed her. T Ter circuits were out of order,  Helva mused. And then she returned to acute awareness. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. Not so much as a whisper of sound. Not so much as a tiny beam of light. Helva fought a wave of primeval terror that all but washed her into insanity. I think so I live, she told herself with all the force of her will. She could think and she could remember, rationally, calmly, what had happened, what could have happened. The horror of complete isolation from sound and light was a micrometer away from utter domination of her ego. Coldly, dispassionately, Helva reviewed that final, flashing scene of treachery. The entrance of the four men, the arrangement of the two guards and their whistle-ornaments. A supersonic blast patterned to interfere with her circuity, to paralyze her defense against the unauthorized activation of her emergency panel. The maneuvering of the third man to overpower Teron. Now, Helva continued inexorably, this attack was engineered to overcome brawn and brain simultaneously. Only someone intimately connected with the Central Worlds Would have access to the information needed to vanquish both mobile and immobile units. The release syllables and the proper pitch land cadence at which they must be spoken were highly guarded secrets, usually kept separate. For anyone to have known this information alone was shocking. Helva's mind leaped to an obvious, but still startling conclusion. She knew now how the four brain ships had disappeared. They had unquestionably been shanghaied in much the same way she had been. But why? And where were the others? Incommunicado like hershelf? Or driven mad by... She refused to consider that possibility for herself or any other shell personality. Constructive thought, fierce concentration, would relieve the present tedium. The first ship to disappear was the FT-#. They had also been on a drug run, picking up raw material, though, not distributing it. So had the RD-#I and the PFIP #. This line of thought bore possibilities. The drags which she had been delivering were available only through application to Central Worlds and were delivered in minute quantities by special teams. A one hundred cc ampoule of Menkalinite could poison the water of an entire planet, rendering its population mindless slaves. A granule of the same drag diluted in a massive protein suspension base would inoculate the inhabitants of several star systems against the virulent encephalitis plagues. Tucanite, a psychedelic compound, was invaluable for psychotherapy in catatonic and autistic cases for it heightened perceptions and awareness of environment. The frail elders of Tucan had revived waning psionic powers with its use. Deadly as these drugs might be in one form, another and must be available. The damodean sword of use Sn# abuse forever swung perilously over the collective head of mankind. N ot even a shell person was sacred from the machinations of a disturbed mind. Disturbed mind? Helva's thoughts ground down. Where was that idiot brawn of hers right now? Him and his neanderthal attributes -- his muscles -- would be very useful. She felt a distinct pleasure within herself as she recalled his being clouted wickedly by the third man. She hoped he was bruised, beaten and bloodied. But at least he could see and hear without amplification... Helva felt every crevass of her mind quivering with the effects of sense deprivation. How long could she keep her mind channeled away from... Two households, alike in dignity... I attempt from Love's fever to fly    Fly, I cannot see. Fly? The quality of mercy is not strained... It droppeth as the gentle rain from... No, not heaven. Portia would do her no good. The Bard had played her false when she had been his sturdy advocate on other shores. In Injia's sunny clime where I used to spend my time... Time she had too much of or not enough. Could it be that she was suspended midway between time and madness? There once was a lishop from Chicester Who made all the saints in their niches stir...  She had a niche once, only she was moved out, not by a bishop, but a Xixon. She should sit on a Xixon or fixon a Xixon or Nix on a Xixon or... She could not move. She could not see. She could not hear. Howlonghowlonghowlonghowlong? When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one country to dissolve the... She was dissolving. There was nothing she could think of in all space and time that did not bring her right back to... A scraping metallic sound. But a sound upon her aural circuits. Like a hot iron in her brain, a fiery brand of sanity after the dense, thick, solid, infinite inquiet soundlessness. She screamed, but having no connections except the aural, screamed soundlessly. in Something was thundering: "I  have reconnected your sound system!" Helva tuned the volume rapidly down to an acceptable level. The voice was harsh, whining, nasal, unpleasant, but the sense divinely welcome. "You have been disconnected from your ship function." The words made no immediate sense. She was listening to the glory of sound and the sensation of noise was unbelievable agony. It took a moment for those syllables to re-form themselves into comprehensible tones. "You have been connected to a limited audio-visual circuit to permit you to retain your sanity. Any abuse of thi s courtesy will result in further if not permanent, deprivation." A nasty laugh accompanied the threat. Unexpectedly, sight returned, an evil benison because of the object in her lens. She could not suppress the scream. "This is your idea of cooperation?" demanded the strident voice; and a huge cavern, spiked with great ivory tusks, opened directly in front of her, pink and red and slimy white. She adjusted vision hastily, putting the face into normal proportions. It was not a pleasant face, even at proper size. It belonged to the man, no longer disguised as bid, who had styled himself the Antiolathan Xixon. "Cooperation?" Helva asked, confused. "Yes, your cooperation of nothing." The Xixon moved his hand to one side of her limited vision, wrapping his fingers around input leads. "No. I'll go mad," Helva cried, alarmed, frightened. "Mad?," Her tormentor laughed obscenely. "You've plenty of company. But you shan't go mad... not yet. I have a use for you." A finger dominated her lens like a suspended projectile "No, no, fool, not like thatl" Her captor shrieked and dashed off to one side of her screen. Desperately assembling her wits, Helva tuned up her hearing, sharpened her sight focus. She was facing a small audio-visual amplification pand into which were plugged her leads and those of... yes... she could count twelve other input lines. She had only one line of vison, straight ahead. Directly in front of her, before the panel, were two shells, trailing fine wires like fairy hair from their blunt tops. Within those shells existed two of her peers. There should be two more. She had a peripheral glimpse of more wires. Carefully, she drew against the power in the amplifier. A very limited capacity. To her left, whence the Xixon thing had gone, was the beginning of a complex interstellar communications unit from the look of it and the few dial readings she could see. Xixon returned, smiling a mocking, smug smile at her. "So you are the ship who sings. The Helva obscenity. May I present your fellow obscenities. Of course, Foro's company fa limited to groans and howls. We kept him in the dark too long." The Xixon howled with pure spite. "Delia's not much better, true, but she will speak if spoken to. Tagi and Merl have learned not to talk unless I address them. So shall you. For I have always wanted my own zoo of obscenities and I have them all in you. And you, my latest guest, will cheer my leisure hours with your incomparable voice. Will you not?" stantly plunged into utter dark, utter soundlessness. "He is mad himself. He is doing this to terrify me. I refuse to be terrified by a i madman. I will wait. I will be calm," she told herself. "He has a use for me so he will not wait too long before giving me right and sound again or he will defeat his purpose. I will wait. I will be calm. I will soon have sight and sound again. I will wait. I will be calm but soon, oh soon..." "There now, my pretty awful, you've had time to reconsider my generosity." Helva had indeed. She limited her capitulation to a monosyllable. The blessedness of right and sound could not quite erase the seemingly endless hours of deprivation; yet she knew, from the chronometer on the panel board, that he had shut her off for a scant few minutes. It was frightening to be dependent on this vile beast. She refilled her vision, scanning his eyes closely. There was a faint i but .unmistakable tinge of blue to his fijdn tone which tagged him as eitr a native of Rho Puppis' three habitable worlds or a Tucanite addict. The latter seemed the more Jikely. For one thing, she had been carrying Tucanite and she knew! the RD had, also. "Fed like singing now?" His laugh was demonic. "Sir?" said a tentative and servile Joice to her left. The Xixon turned, frowning at the Interruption. "Well?" "The cargo of the # contained no Menkalite." "None I" Her captor whirled Back to Helva, his eyes blazing. "Where did you squander it?" "At Tania Australis," she replied, purposefully keeping her voice low. "Speak up," he screamed at her. "Pm using all the power you've allowed me. That amplifier doesn't produce much." "It's not supposed to," the Xixon snapped irritably, his eyes restlessly darting around the room. Suddenly there was his finger obscuring #I other objects from her vision. "Tell me, which ship is to deliver Menkalite next?" "I don't know." "Speak up." "I feel that I am shouting already." "You're not. You're whispering." "Is this Better?" "Well, I can hear you. Now, tell me, which ship is next to deliver Menkalite?" "I don't know." "Will you remember better in darkness?" His laugh echoed hollowly in her skull as he plunged her back into nothingness. S he forced herself to count slowly, second speed, so that she had some reference to time. He did not keep her out very long. She wanted to scream simply to fill her mind with sound, yet she managed to keep her voice very low. "Isn't it any better?" he demanded, scowling suspiciously. "I took that Foro obscenity off completely." Helva: steeled herself against the compassion she felt. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Foro had already been mindless. "For speech, it is sufficient," she said, raising her volume just slightly. She could not use that ploy again, for it would cost Merl or Tagi or Delia what fragile grip they had on sanity. "Humph. Well, now, see that it does." He disappeared. Helva heightened her listening volume. She could hear at least ten different movement patterns beyond her extremely limited vision. From the reverberations of sound, they were in some large but lowSO ceilinged, natural rock cavern. Now, if the main communications panel, part of which was visible to her, was a standard planetary model, if there were not too many chambers beyond this one to diffuse the sound, and if all the madman's personnel were nearby, she might just be able to do something. He wanted her to sing, did he?. She waited and she kept calm. Presently he returned, rubbing absently at his shoulder. Helva increased magnification and noticed the increase of the subcutaneous blue. He used Tucanite, then. A chair was produced from somewhere for him, and he settled himself. Another disembodied hand provided a table on which a dish of choice foods was set. "Sing, my pretty obscenity, sing," the mad Xixon commanded, reaching languorously above his head toward her input leads. Helva complied. She began in the middle of her range, using the most sensuous songs she could remember, augmenting them subtly in bass reflex but keeping the yolume tantalizingly low so that he had to crouch forward to hear her. It got on his nerves ind when he peevishly reached out to snatch all but her leads from the board, she begged him not to deprive her peers of sense. "Surely, sir, you could not, when all you need do is augment my power just slightly from the main board. Even without their very minute power drain on this amplifier, I could not possibly Reficulate a croon, for instance." He sat up straight, his eyes flashing with anticipation. "You can Reticulate the mating croons?" "Of course," she replied with mild surprise. Tie frowned at her, torn between  a desire to hear those renowned exotic songs and a yery real concern to limit her shell's ability. He was deep in the thrall of the Tucanite now, his senses eager for further stimulation and the lure of the Reticulan croons was too much for him. He did, however, call over and consult with a fawning technician, who blinked constantly and had a severe tic in one cheek. Fascinated, Helva magnified until she was able to see each muscle fibre jerk. She was plunged into dark soundlessness and then suddenly felt renewed with the sense of real power against her leads. "You have ample power now, singer," he told her, his expression vicious with anticipation. "Perform or you will regret it. And do not try any shell games on me, for I have had them seal off all the bther circuits on this amplifier. jfg, shipless one, sing for your sight ing sound." She waited until his laughter gied. IE Even a Reticulan croon could not be heard... or be effective... above that cackling. She took an easy one, doublevoicing it, treble and counter, testing how much power she could get. It would be enough. And the echo of her lilting croon came back, boundngly, to reassure her that this installation was not large and was set in natural stone caverns. Very good. She cut in the overtones, gradually adding bass frequencies but subfly so they seemed just part of the Reticulan croon at first. Even with his heightened sensibilities, he wouldn't realize what she was doing. She augmented the inaudible frequencies. Her croon was of a particularly compelling variation, and she heard, under her singing -- if one would permit Reticulan croons such a dignified title -- the stealthy advance of his slaves and co-workers, lured close by the irresistible siren sounds. She gathered herself and then pumped pure sonic hell into the triple note. It got him first, heightened as he had been by the Tucanite. It got him dead, his brain irretrievably scrambled from the massive dose of sonic fury. It got the others in the cavern, too. She could hear their shrieks of despair over the weird composite sound she had created, as they fainted. The overload shortcircuited several panels in the master board, showering the unconscious and the dead with blinding sparks. Helva threw in what breakers she eenU to keep her own now reduced eivcuit open. But even she felt the backlash of that supersonic blast. Her nerve ends tingled, her hearing sang and she suddenly felt extremely enervated. "I'll bet I've developed a very acid condition in my nutrients," she told herself with a bit of graveyard humor. The great room was silent except for hoarse breathing and kissing wires. "Delia? Answer me. It's Helva." "Who is Helva? I have no access to memory banks." "Tagi, can you hear me?" "Yes." A flat, mechanical affirmative. "Merl, can you hear me?" "You're loud." Helva stared straight ahead at the dead body that had torture# them so cruelly. Oh, for a pair of hands I Revenge on an inert husk was illogical. Now what do I do? she wondered. At that point she remembered that she had been about to divorce Teron Arid the VighUbeam had keen left open f Parollan wasn't the hand to sit on his hands. Where was he? ei IV CCnphere you are, Helva, back at the old stand," the ST-I Captain said, patting her column paternally. She scanned to make certain the release plate was locked back into seamless congruity with the rest of the column. 'Your new cadence-syllable release was tuned into the metal, and Chief Railly is the only one who knows it," the Captain assured her. "And the independent audio and visual relays are attached to the spare synapses on my shell?" "Good idea, that, Helva. May make it a standard procedure." "But mine are hooked up?" "Yes, yours are hooked up. Seems like a case of asking for clearance when the ship has blasted off, this precaution after the fact, but..." "Have you ever been sense-deprived, Captain?" He shuddered and his eyes darkened. None of the Fleet or BrainBrawn Ship personnel who penetrated the Xixoh's asteroid headquarters would be likely to forget the pitiable condition of the shell people: the amplified human beings who had once been considered invulnerable. "Tagi, Merl and Delia will recover. Delia will be back in service in a year or so," the Captain said quietly. Then he sighed, for he couldn't bring himself to name Foro either. "You people are needed, you know." He leaned forward so suddenly, toward her panel, that Helva gasped. "Easy, Helva." An# he slid his hand down the column. "Nope. Can't even feel the seam. You're all secure." He carefully gathered up the delicate instruments of his profession, wrapping them in soft, spongy surgi-foam. "How are the brawns?" she asked idly, as she stretched out along her rewired extensions, shrugging into her ship skin. "Well, Delia's Rife will pull out of Menkalite addiction. He'd only had the one dose. They've still to track down the other two ships but I expect all the brawns will survive." His expression altered abruptly as if he had caught an unpleasant smell. "Why did you have your tight-beam channel open, Hdva? When we got that brawn of yours out of his padded cell, he was furious that you could disregard proper procedure in such a fashion." The Captain managed to sound like Teron for a moment. "Why, if you hadn't, and Cencom hadn't heard the whole damned thing... How come you left the channel open?" "I'd rather not say, but since you've met Teron, you might do a little guessing." "Huh? Well, whatever the reason, it saved your life." "It took 'em long enough." IF 'phe Captain laughed at her sour I complaint "Don't forget, you'd been cleared so your kidnappers just lifted off Durrell before your supervisor could stop them. But Parollan scorched the ears of every operator in frequency range getting Fleet ships after you. At that, with a whole sector to comb, and the drug runners using this asteroid off Borealis as a hideout, too close to Durrell to be even a probability, it took a little time." "That Xixon thing was smartmad, hiding right out in sight." "Well, he had a high intdligence factor," the Captain admitted. "After all, he made it into brawn training twenty-odd years ago." That had been an unnerving development, Helva reflected. If he'd actually qualified and then developed neural maladjustments... He had taken enough Tucanite to break the deconditioning mind blocks -- another matter that was going to be re-evaluated by Central Worlds as a result of this incident -- and had managed to insinuate himself in maintenance crews on Regulus Base, laying the groundwork for his operation by the judicious use k of addictive drugs on key employees. Then, using Central World brain ships with drugged brawns under his control, he could have landed anywhere including Regulus Base. "I'll be off now," the Captain said, saluting her respectfully. "Let your own brawn take over new." 'Not if I can help it Helva amended. Whatever bond of loyalty she had once had for Teron had dissolved as surely as she had been Darted from her security. Teron, having decided that he was hopelessly Incarcerated, had stolidly composed himself to await the worst with calm dignity... as any logical man ought to do. On anyone else's tapes -- including the captain's, to judge by the expression on his face -- such logic was cowardice; and that was Helva's unalterable conclusion. Although she would grant that his behavior had been consistent. Delia's Rife, on the other hand, had tried to break out. He had clawed a foothold in the padded fabric of his cell, lacerating hinds and feet in the attempt to regch the ceiling access hatch. Dizzy from a Menkalite injection, confused gfcd weak from starvation intended to allow the Menkalite to work unhindered in his system, he had actually crawled as far as the airlock when the rescue group had amved. Helva let the ST-I down the personnel lift and ran a thorough hut hasty flip-check of herself, scanners, sensory meters, power-pile drive chamber, inventory. It was like revisiting a forgotten treasury of mindmiracles. Helva wondered if she had ever before appreciated the yersitility incorporated in her ship body, ## had really valued the power she had at her disposition, or cherished the ingenuity of her engineers. Oh, it Was good to be back together again. CC T Telva?" a low voice spoke   tentatively. "Are you alone now?" It was Central Worlds on the light-beam. "Yes. The ST-I has just left. You can probably reach him..." "Shove him." Then Helva recognized that the hoarse voice must belong to Niall Parollan. "I j'ust Ranted to know you were back Sphere you belong. You're sure you are all right, Helva?" Niall Parollan laryngitic with concern? Helva was flattered and surprised, considering the unflattering description of her he'd hurled at her at their last parting. "I'm intact again, if that's what you mean, Parollan," she replied in droll good humor. She could have sworn she heard a sigh over the tight-beam. "That's my girl." Parollan laughed, so it must have been a wheeze she'd heard. "Of course, if you hadn't had your synapases scrambled bn Beta Corvi, you'd have listened to me when I tried to tell you that that simple simian Acthionite was a regulation-bound brass..." "Not brass, Niall," Helva interrupted sharply, "not brass. Brass is a metal, and Teron had none." "Oh ho ho, so you admit I was right about him?" "To err is human ,... " "Thank God!" Just then Teron requested permission to board. "I'll see you later, Helva. I couldn't stomach..." "Don't go, Parollan..." "Helva, my own true love, I've been glued to this tight-beam for three days for your sake, and the stimutabs have worn off. I'm dead in the seat!" "Prop your eyelids open for a few moments more, Niall. This will be official," she urged Parollan as she activated the personnel lift for Teron. She felt a cold dislike replace the bantering friendliness she had been enj'oying. Big as life and disgustingly neanderthalic, her brawn strode into the main control room, saluting with scant ceremony toward her bulkhead. Strode? He swaggered, Helva thought angrily, looking not the least bit worse for his absence. Teron rubbed his hands together, sat himself down in the pilot's chair, flexed his fingers before he poised them, very business-like, over the computer keyboard. "I'll j'ust run a thorough checkdown to be sure no damage was done." His words were neither request nor order. "Just like that, huh?" Helva asked in a dangerously quiet voice. IF T'eron frowned and slewed round I A in the chair toward her panel. "Our schedule has been interrupted enough with this mishap." "Mishap?" "Modulate your tone, Helva. You can't expect to use those tricks on me" " can't expect what?" "Now," he began placatingly, jerking his chin down, "I take into consideration you've been under a strain recently. You should have insisted that I oversee that ST-I Captain during that installation. You might have sustained some circuit damage, you know." "How kind of you to consider that possibility," she said. That was it! "You could scarcely be harmed, physically, contained as you are in pure titanium," he pointed out. "Teron of Acthion, all I can say at this point is that it's a damned good thing for you that I am contained behind pure titanium. Because if I were mobile, I would kick you down that shaft so fast..." "What has possessed you?" For once, sheer blank illogical amazement flashed across Teron's face. "Get out! Get off my deck! Get roared, pouring on volume with each word, with no regard for the tender structure of the human ear. With sheer sound she drove him, hands clapped to the sides of his head, off the deck, down the side oi the # as fast as she could escalate the lift. "Take me for granted, will you? Unreliable organism, am I? Illogical, irresponsible, and inhuman..." Helva bellowed after him in a planet-sized shout. And then she burst out laughing as she realized that such emotional behavior on her part was the only way she could have routed the over-logical Teron of Acthion. "Did you hear that, Niall Parollan?" she demanded in a reasonable but nevertheless exultant tone. "Niall? Hey, Cencom, you on the tight-beam... answer me?" From the open channel came the shuddering discord of a massive adenoidal snore. "Niall?" The sleeper wheezed on, oblivious, until Helva chuckled at this additional evidence of human frailty. She asked and received clearance from the asteroid's half-ruined spaceport. She was going to have a long chat with Chief Railly. Her penalty for divorcing Teron would be a speck against the finders' fee for four shanghaied BB ships. And there ought to be a Federation bonus for aid in the apprehension of drug runners. Totalled if true justice was given half a chance, the rewards might just make her a free ship, out of debt, truly her own mistress. The thought was IF IF  Complete Short Novel The Frozen Summer Man's ancient glory was gone , buried under the Ice, save where the Goddess held even Summer her eternal prisoner I the valley by now. It was a long green scar on the smooth white V el Senna uncorked the speakicefield below. Even a human could ing tube to the control room, hardly miss it. "Captain Zing?" "The valley is approximately "Speaking, sir." three miles away, bearing two nine "Do you see the valley?" five degrees," said Captain Zing. There was a pause. Vel Senna "We are altering course towards tapped his long purple fingers imit. The ice appears suitable for patiently against the tube. Surely landing." everyone on the airship had seen "Good," said Vel Senna. "Choose a safe landing place not less than half a mile from the valley. Take the ship down as soon as yon can." Vel Senna plugged the speaking tube. The captain was reliable enough, for a native. He could be trusted to keep the airship a reasonable distance from the valley. Krau Sara was at the window of their observation room, studying the valley through a native-made telescope. He glanced up as Vel Senna joined him. " Aren't we landing inside the valley ?" " Certainly not," said Vel Senna. " Remember the priest's warning!" "Perhaps it's for the best. I doubt whether we could land among those trees." Krau Sara passed him the telescope. "Take a look." Vel Senna accepted the telescope. He was a muscular centauroid being, with purple hide and a single multi-faceted eye. He needed no dothing, but his three-fingered hands bore several jewelled rings. Those powerful hands held the telescope with a surprising delicacy. He and Krau Sara were highranking administrators who liked to spend their vacation years out in the colonies. This particular planet, discovered by the Senechi some five generations before, was known as #-Arkon Three. The natives called it Earth. There were mans, and many of them were quite intelligent; this airship had been designed and built entirely by the natives. #-Arkon Three was a pleasant world despite the ice-sheets covering most of its land surface, and Vel Senna had visited it twice before. Four days ago their hired airship had landed at a remote mountain valley called Inghota. Its main feature of interest was the Temple of Invisible Fire, which contained many sacred relics. Vel Senna had persuaded the old priest to tell them some of the ancient legends. The one which roused their interest was the story of the Summer Goddess, who lived in a cave full of gold and jewels in a mysterious ice-free valley far to the north. The two Senechi immediately decided to visit the valley. The priest tried to dissuade them, but his outburst merely convinced the Senechi that there was some truth in the story. And now, four days later, their airship had reached the valley. 'T'he speaking tube whistled. Vel Senna opened it. "Captain Zing speaking, sir. We are about to land on the high ground between the ship and the valley. Is this convenient, or do you wish to land nearer it?" Vel Senna quickly identified the spot. It was a small rise where the ice probably concealed a low hill. IF The distance from the rise to the valley was three-quarters of a Senechi mfle -- about one kilometer in the native measure. "Yes, this will do. Land at once." He replaced the cork. "Landing here?" asked Krau Sara. "We shall have nearly a mile to walk." "We can use a sledge, if our guide is not too frightened of the goddess to drive us." "Weston will give no trouble. The only one who seems frightened of the goddess so far is yourself." "I am taking an elementary precaution, that is all," said Vel Cenna. He thought Krau Sara was taking the priest's warnings too lightly. He was sure the native had been sincere. "There may not be a goddess, but there is something unusual below those tree-tops. A single ice-free valley in a zone of severe glaciation cannot be natural." "It could be volcanic. Soon we will find out." "Soon we shall find the gold," said Vel Senna. Moments later, the airship settled gently on the ice. The valley as seen from the ground was a thin line of green near the skyline, with only the topmost branches visible. Nothing of the valley floor could be seen. Vel Senna uncorked the tube for the last time. "Captain, instruct our guide to drive us to the valley. Prepare a motor sledge at once." Krau Sara was still gazing through the window. "The priest was right about the valley. I hope he was right about the treasure as well." "And the goddess?" "The tale is centuries old. If she ever existed she has been dead for many years." Vel Senna went to the door. "There is only one way to find out. To the sledge, my friend." Krau Sara followed him down. 'TT'he prisoner lived in silence, but the silence was in his mind. There were days when he could not remember who he was. He sat alone in the cave, in darkness, trying to recall Ms identity. It had been so long that sometimes he forgot he had ever had a name. Escape was the only dream he had. Every afternoon the prisoner went outside the cave and wandered idly through the sunken forest. The grass was soft underfoot, and birds nested in the branches. The real world had been under the ice for longer than he could remember, but within this timeless valley the Ice Age did not exist. Everything was green, and he hated it. Far in the distance he could see the ice-covered mountains, beckoning to him. They had the same cold beauty as the woman who possessed him. She walked in the forest too, but she never looked at the mountains. Early one afternoon, before it was time to go outside, the prisoner felt a strange stirring in his mind. He was thinking about his walks through the trees, and he realized that he could remember a time when all the world had been covered with trees. He lay quiet in his dark little corner of the cave rediscovering his past as it returned to him. It sometimes happened like this, as the witch's power lessened for a while; he became sane again. Gradually the cloud lifted. He had had a beginning. He had not always been in this valley. That was why he wanted to escape; he belonged to the world outside. It had been in the days when ice was something new and dreadful. He and his two companions came to the valley, seeking to rob the mad woman of her jewels and precious metals. Her treasure was the wealth of a dozen forgotten nations. She was tall and fairskinned, and wore a circlet of pale gold to match her hair. Her skin was smooth and clear, and she seemed still young. The men thought she would offer little resistance, but they were wrong. He was the only one to survive. She killed his two companions, and the men who came after. She stripped the flesh from their bodies and fashioned their bones into weird ship-like structures, wrapped around with gold leaf and laden with gems. Sometimes she made the skulls into grotesque figureheads for the skeleton-ships. The prisoner watched her do it, again and again, and his desire for the treasure faded away. TTe tried to think how long he had been here, but he could not remember. Parts of his mind were still gray. He recalled other passing spells of sanity, and his successful attempts to escape. He must escape now, today, before the clouds returned. His chance would come during his afternoon walk in the valley. There was another way to the outside world -- a huge air shaft at the back of the tunnels -- but its walls were too steep to dimb. The valley was his path to freedom. In his usual state, possessed by the witch, he never dared leave the valley. This time it would be different. He had to be careful. If he stayed too long in this corner, the witch might wonder what he was doing. It was time he went to join her, in the chamber where the Sleeper lay dreaming beneath his golden blankets. Quietly the prisoner walked down the tunnel towards the Sleeper. The way to the valley was through the main chamber, so he would have to wait until the witch let him go out. As he walked, he looked at the row of skeletonIF ships lining the wall on his left. There was just enough light to see them. The first ships were in the Sleeper's chamber, where the witch worked, and the later ones stretched away end to end along the dark tunnels. Each ship meant another adventurer had died -- but how often did treasure-seekers visit this distant valley? He kept his face impassive as he entered the chamber. The soft orange light seemed strong after the darkness of the tunnels. The witch did not look up from her work as she sat on the bare floor. She was cutting a ruby with a small knife which buzzzed steadily in her hand. Her long golden hair hung shining against her black dress on her shoulders. Its brightness made him think of sunshine. She looked young, hardly more than twenty. She had looked the same on the day he and his two friends came to steal the jewels. But he too had not changed, and he remembered the long line of skeleton-ships along the tunnel. The light in the cave was supplied by a crystal sphere suspended from the ceiling. A burning brand was trapped within the sphere, giving out a pale orange light. The brand was never consumed. Even the flame had been frozen by the witch. Directly below the sphere was the eoudi of the Sleeper. Under his golden blankets the youth lay still and peaceful. The witch had cared for him well. Even more than the prisoner, the Sleeper was completely in her power. He had no chance of escape at all. At least the prisoner had his occasional days of sanity, unlike the Sleeper. He had such a day now. Soon the witch would take him out into the valley. He waited, and presently the moment came. T ts engine roaring, the sledge  slowed down and came to a halt on the edge of the ice. Weston, their native guide, switched off. The two Senechi stepped off the boards and stood on the thin frozen crust. They looked down into the valley. "I do not understand," said Vel Senna. "I see only trees and grass. I see no trace of occupation. Where is the machinery needed to keep this area free of ice?" "It could be underground," said Krau Sara, or those boulders at the northern end could be a camouflaged heating unit." Something was heating the valley. Thirty feet below them grew obviously natural temperate-zone flora. The trees were all deciduous, the highest having their tops level with the Senechi. The only animals in sight were a brown furry tree-climber and several small birds. No humans were visible. "The place seems deserted," said Krau Sara. He addressed the IF guide. "Weston, bring the lamps. We shall look for the cave." "No, sir," said Weston. "Fm staying here." The human sat firmly in his pilot seat. He had not left the sledge. "Did you hear that, Vel Senna?" "I understand Earth Basic as well as you. Weston, are you refusing to obey our orders?" "Yes, sir. I'm not going into that valley. I know what's down there." Vel Senna lifted his whip threateningly, but the native shook his head. Vel Senna knew this gesture meant refusal. "A native taboo against entering the holy place," Krau Sara suggested in Senechi. "I agree. Weston expects the legendary goddess to destroy us." Vel Senna spoke to the guide again, "Weston, we will overlook this matter. Give us the lamps and then take the sledge back to the airship. Return in three hours with lifting tackle and a towing sledge." "Thank you, sir. I'll arrange everything." Weston looked relieved for a brief moment. "And... Sir, I can't stop you, but I think you shouldn't go near that cave. Believe me, it's more dangerous than you realize." I appreciate your concern," said Vel Senna patiently, "but we Senechi can protect ourselves." The huge centauroids were larger and tougher than anything now native to Earth. They had no n eed of human guards. i i 'T'hey watched Weston drive away, then returned to studying the valley. It did not look like a trap. "We should be cautious," said Vel Senna. "Weston is comparatively reliable, like the captain. He would not warn us of danger without good reason." "The cave may be occupied by a wild beast if not by a goddess. There is always a first time for discovering a new species. I think a little caution is wise." Vel Senna pointed to the upper end of the valley. "See that open space covered with boulders, and the bare rock of the cliff face. The stream appears to flow from there. It is the most likely place for a cave." Krau Sara agreed. The two Senechi walked along the valley rim, their hooves sinking deep into the ice, until they reached a vantage point to look down on the fallen boulders. There were very few trees at this end; the ground was mainly exposed rock with a few patches of grass. In the cliff face were several promising shadows, and at last Vel Senna judged it safe to leave the ice. They scrambled down the slope to the rocky floor thirty feet below, trying to avoid any undue noise. They did not want to arouse anything in the cave, animal or goddess. "It is warm," said Yel Senna, as he felt his skin adjusting to the higher temperature. "I wish I could see some of the heating equipment." "It must be well camouflaged," said Krau Sara. "I am certain these plants are survivals from the preglacial period. Time has stood still in this valley." "The priest used those same words at the Temple of Invisible Fire. He has been right about everything so far." "So far, Vel Senna. He could be wrong about the jewels -- and right about the goddess, although I doubt it. We take the risk. Come, follow me towards the cave." The two Senechi crept forward, close to the cliff face. Approaching the entrance in this way, they could not be seen from inside. Quietly they picked their way through the boulders. Suddenly they heard a faint sound ahead. They sank down upon the stones, lowering their bodies right to the ground. They waited. Two humans came out of the cave. One was a man, the other a woman. They walked into the trees without seeing the hidden Senechi. The man was old, and wore a brown trouser suit. Yel Senna glimpsed a gray beard on his chin. The woman was much younger, wearing a long black dress which reached to her ankles. She had bright yellow hair which trailed out behind her. By native standards she was extremely beautiful. The goddess , thought Yd Senna. II J ohn Weston stood on the lower deck of the airship. The seven crewmen were facing him as he told them why he had returned without the aliens. The crew had seen him bring back the empty sledge. "We shouldn't leave them in that valley," said Mike Jones, the burly chief engineer. "We ought to go back before the three horns are up." Weston shrugged. "I tried to stop them going down, but they wouldn't listen. Still, maybe the witch only kills humans." "Don't you believe it," said another engineer. "The witch kiBs anyone who goes after her treasure." "This pair isn't bad for Senechi," said Mike. "They don't hand out the floggings like some of these, third-generation types." Ram Badal Zing was the captain and part owner of the airship. He said, "Mr. Weston, you accompanied our clients into the museum of radiation studies. How IF much did the attendant tell them about the valley?" "Most of it," said Weston, thinking back to that day in Inghota. The attendant had described jthe cave and the treasure quite accurately. He had warned them about the witch. But he had not mentioned her son who was now dreaming away the centuries. "He didn't say anything about the Sleeper. Maybe he didn't want to interest them too much. He stopped answering their questions when he realized they wanted to go there." "Perhaps you should have done the same," said the captain. Mike had taken a quick look at the Senechi through a small telescope. "Don't worry, they're still on the ice. Our bosses have moved along a bit and now they've settled down to watch something. They aren't rushing in there just yet." "That's better," said Weston. "I thought they were going straight down. As long as they stay up here they'll be all right." All the same, he thought, Mike was right. If the Senechi did enter the vaUey, he ought to take the sledges back, just in case. Although, what could he do for the aliens if they were seen by the witch? "Well," said Anna, "you may enjoy standing here doing nothing, but I don't." A nna Holm, a tall Nordic blonde, was their navigator. She pointed over the rail at the two aliens and continued, "They'll pever miss one of the sledges. I'll take one and check up on that pit we saw on the way down." "I don't... It's highly kregular," said Captain Zing. Weston remembered seeing the pit as the airship landed -- a circular patch of shadow on the brilliant white ice. It was near the valley but rather small, so maybe the Senechi hadn't spotted it. Wanting to poke around it was typical of Anna. Crazy idtal He and Mike Jones came from a country where women were barred from holding responsible positions. The more he saw of Anna, the more he admitted the old folks had had some sense. That pit was only a queer-shaped creynsse... Then the implication hit him. The pit was along the line of the valley's axis. Was it another cave entrance? It might be a new way into the Sleeper's cave. "One sledge," said Captain Zing, giving in reluctantly. "That's settled, then," said Anna. She thumbed the davit buttons. "I'll take this sledge. Ml be back well before the three hours are up." "You are not going alone," said Captain Zing. "Someone most accompany you." "Why don't you?" she asked, as her sledge was lowered automatically onto the ice. "HI go," said Mike quickly. "You're right, cap'n -- someone's got to keep an eye on her." "I can take care of myself #" "The Senechi thought so too," said Weston. "I'm not so sure. I'll come along with you. We'll take the lifting gear they want on a trailer, so we can go straight from the pit to the valley to meet the bosses." "Hmm," said Anna. "It might save time. All right. Load up." "One other thing," said Weston to the captain. "If our bosses go into the valley, send someone over there. Flash us with a signal lamp if you need us." "Certainly," said Captain Zing. "You know best, Mr. Weston." His tone implied the opposite. Zing didn't like him, he knew. A good captain, though. Well, it didn't matter. He was off to the pit with Anna Holm. He helped Mike finish loading the trailer. # #ome along," said the witch.  The prisoner accompanied her down the passage to the cave mouth. The sunlight at the entrance was the most beautiful sight in the world. If he succeeded now, he need never see the orange light of the Sleeper's chamber again. He followed her into the open air. In the woods, they parted without speaking. The witch expected him to follow his usual afternoon routine. He went on beside the stream until he was sure he was well away from her. This was it. All he had to do was climb up the slopes onto the ice. He would be free. The real world was very near now. A bird on a branch caught his eye. It was a dark grayish-blue bird with a yellow breast, and a bright inquisitive eye. Poor prisoner. But he was different from the bird. He was going to escape. He left the stream and hurried through the trees to the side of the valley. Ten meters above him, the slope levelled off and the icefields began. Up there was freedom. He did not hesitate. If she recaptured him, he was lost again, perhaps for good. He thrust one foot firmly on the slope. How easy it was! He took anpther step, and another. On the fourth upward step Ins foot seemed heavier. On the fifth it was heavier still. He faltered. She was trying to hold him back. He could feel the strain mounting as he struggled to lift his feet. He drove himself up towards the ice. The higher he readied, the more he suffered. His heart throbbed like a mighty engine, and there was pain with every beat. He sank to the ground, unable to stand any more, but he went on crawling. IF Every movement took an eternity to accomplish. His limbs had become monstrous, stiff and clumsy, and the weight of his body pressed him into the ground. Inch by inch he dragged himself up. He moved through shadows, for the light was fading around him. Still he fought the invisible power binding him to the valley. His upward progress was barely perceptible. His lungs were almost bursting under the pressure. Now the light was gone completely, and he strained forward in darkness. The blackness exploded within him, and he was overwhelmed. Red shadows whirled around him. His grip on the earth failed. He slid, and rolled downward, and came to rest on the grass. He lay still, arms outstretched. After a while he opened his eyes. The witch stood over him, her golden hair shining in the sun. Her dress was the color of night. She smiled, her expression mocking, and she spoke. "When you are ready, come back to the cave. Don't be too long; we have visiters." Then she was gone. He lay there, helpless, his body aching, his eyes watering. He was still a prisoner. X #e I Senna crouched among the  boulders, glancing from the trees to the rocks and back again. The goddess and her companion had been gone for several minutes. Nobody else had come out of the cave. "Quickly," whispered Krau Sara. "Let us go inside before they return." They rose swiftly and bounded to the entrance. It was wide enough for them both, and the roof was several feet above their heads. Switching on their lamps, they went in. The tunnel grew smaller and narrower. It bore to the left, past a strange pillar of rock. Vel Senna shone his lamps on the stone column. It took the form of a giant human arm, the elbow rising from the stone floor, the hand apparently supporting the roof. The workmanship was extremely crude. "I think it is unfinished," said Krau Sara. "Perhaps the sculpture was abandoned when the ice came," suggested Vel Senna. The opposite wall of the cave was blank. He looked around for further relics and noticed a faint orange glow in the tunnel ahead. He pointed to it. "Let us go nearer," whispered Krau Sara. Past the stone arm, they had to go in single file, stooping to avoid the roof. Krau Sara led the way, blocking Vel Senna's view. Then the tunnel opened out again, and they entered a large highroofed chamber. An orange bulb in the ceiling shone brightly. "The jewels," said Krau Sara. Gems and precious metals lay in confused heaps around the chamber. Vel Senna saw long rods of shining silver, pyramids of golden bars, and mounds of countless precious stones. Some jewels were in mixed heaps, others had been sorted -- emeralds in one pile, sapphires in another, rubies in a third. There was no furniture, only the treasure. Leaning against the walls were hundreds of shields and dishes made of gold studded with gems. A miniature hill in the center seemed to be entirely gold. Vel Senna picked up the nearest shield. The soft gold had been battered and deeply scored, and over half the chamonds were missing from their sockets. The rest of the relics had received similar treatment. Despite this, the hoard was enough to put them both into the highest non-hereditary caste. The Senechi valued treasure like this even more highly than humans did. T Te saw a large sheet of gold A  nearby. It bore the shape of a human hand, impressed on it like a footprint in wet day. Vel Senna showed it to Kara Sara. "The metal must have been softened in the cold state for that print to be made." "You are right," said Krau Sara. "There are more prints on the gold discs there. They could only have been made with a molecular field distorter." "I know. But the selective distorer is a heavy industrial machine weighing many tons. Do you see the implications?" "I think so." "This valley is maintained by post-technological techniques. Here, at least, Earth's old dvilization was ahead of us. We saw no machines because the natives have passed beyond machines. Elsewhere they reverted to technology, but here they carried their antient secret s with them into the Ice Age." "The theory is fandful, but you could be right. It explains the absence of the heating equipment, which you were seeking so anxiously." "I am sure of it," said Vel Senna. He indicated the orange bulb in the ceiling. "That lamp functions, undoubtedly, but its purpose is mainly decorative. Everything in this chamber is for pleasure." i "Forget your theories," said Krau Sara, eyeing the treasure again. "We are here for gems, not for sdence. We must collect a first installment before the natives return. I thought you were the cautious one, not I!" Krau Sara, was right, of course Vel Senna followed his example and swallowed a few pounds of emeralds and rubies into his first stomach. He need not regurgitate the stones until he was back on the airship. IF Gazing across the chamber, Vel Senna saw a peculiar structure of gold and silver. It resembled a native sailing ship. There was a row of others like it, stretching away into a small tunnel entrance. As he looked for more, he saw a patch of lighter color in the central golden mound. The longer he stared, the stranger it seemed. Puzzled, he went over to look. The light object was a human head, fair-haired, facing upwards. The mound was a circular golden bed, and the head belonged to a human being sleeping there. At his call Krau Sara came over. He saw the sleeping man. "We must leave," whispered Vel Senna. "He might awake." "Yes," said Krau Sara. "We must go at once." As they turned, they saw someone enter the chamber. It was the woman they had seen earlier, tall and beautiful in her black dress. She held up her hand. "You can't go," said the goddess. "I won't let you."   curve around the valley, the engine muted. He did not want the Senechi to stop him on his way to the pit. Explanations might be awkward. Despite the added weight of the loaded trailer, the sledge reached the pit in five minutes. "Everybody out," said Mike. "Let's have a look at it." The pit was a large smoothsided shaft, twenty feet in diameter, absolutely vertical, with a floor of rough gray stone. There was no snow inside it at aB. "That's nice," said Anna Holm. "It's ice-free, just like the valley." "The bottom's about fifteen feet down," said Weston. "It's a bit far to jump. Anyway, we couldn't climb out again. Those sictes have been polished smooth." "We'll throw a rope down," said Mike. Weston nodded. "Sure. We can use some of the gear here. FH pull it off the trailer." "Wait a minute," said Anna. Weston waited. "Why are you two so eager to go down there?" "No harm in a quick check," said Mike. "Seems safe enough," added Weston. "No it doesn't, and you know it. That pit obviously has something to do with the valley. You didn't dare go with the bosses, but you're falling over yowselves to jump down there. Why change your minds so suddenly?" "I can guess John's reason" said Mike. "A way round the prohibition?" "What prohibition?" asked Anna, pouncing. "It's a long story," said IRfeston, silently cursing Mike. He had no wish to tell Anna about the death of his ancestors in the valley. Still, he had better give her part of the truth. "We guides are forbidden to enter this valley. It's Family law. Most of the other banned zones are radioactive. This place doesn't have any radiation, but it comes on the same forbidden list. The valley is just as deadly, in its own way, as a ruined nuclear power station." "Then why do you want to go down the pit?" asked Anna. "The list includes the valley. It says nothing about this pit." That statement was misleading, but he intended it to be. Besides, it was true. "You men!" said Anna. "Hoping to get into the caves by a back way without breaking Family rules, are you? I don't know!" He knew she was satisfied. She already had a low opinion of men from his country. W eston and Mike brought over the tackle from the trailer and set it up. The rope ladder dangled over the edge of the pit, hanging invitingly from the paying-out board. "Well, here I go," said Anna, hand on the rope. "Not so fast!" said Mike. "One of us is going down before you." Even after years in Anna's country the old instincts returned. "I'll go," said Westen. "You stay there, Anna -- the navigator's more valuable than the guide." "You just want the thrill of being first," said Anna. "No, never," said Mike. "We're making sure the place is safe for you. Go on, John, before she makes a jump." "When the Family try me for breaking regulations, at least #I be able to say I was first down." He started descending the ladder as he spoke. Seconds later he was standing on the rocky floor. "I'm down. Well, you can see that. Leave the ladder where it is. The sides are so smooth nobody could climb out. No holds at all." "Can you see anything?" called Anna. "Something," said Weston. He had found the dark opening of a low cave, level with the floor. "It's a tunnel going into the rock. This is the side facing the valley, isn't it?" Anna checked. "Yes. Your tunnel must lead towards the Sleeper's cave." It probably did. There was quite a draft in the opening. "I'm coming down!" called Anna. "All right," said Weston. "Do you mind staying up there, Mike?" "No, you're welcome. From the look of that gap I couldn't squeeze into the cave anyway. Wrong shape. Say, John, tie a rope round you. IF Then I can call you back if we get any signals from the cap'n." " Right," said Weston. Mike threw him one end of a lightweight coil, and he tied it around his chest. Four tugs from Mike would mean that he had to return at once. Anna joined him. She gave him a small torch. "One each." She switched hers on and studied the opening. "Off we go," said Anna. She slid herself into the shadow. "I thought I was going first," said Weston. "You thought wrong, mate," said Mike. "Hop after her before she vanishes." Hurriedly Weston followed Anna into the cave. Darkness surrounded him. Xou can't go," said the god dess. "I won't let you." Vel Senna knew there was no way out from the chamber. The goddess was standing in the entrance, and the other tunnel was too low for Senechi to use. He and Krau Sara were trapped. "Can you understand me?" she asked. "Yes, perfectly," he replied in Earth Basic. "Sit down," said the goddess. There was no furniture in the cave, other than the couch with its sleeping occupant. Vel Senna knelt on the floor beside a group of ancient jewel-studded shields. The goddess sat gracefully in front of the Senechi. She matched the priest's description of the Summer Goddess, but she looked like a normal female native. Only the gold circlet on her head was unusual. "I've never seen creatures like you before," said the goddess. "What are you?" "We are Senechi," said Krau Sara. "Surely you recognize us?" "No. Where do you come from?" Vel Senna understood then that the goddess had never heard of the Senechi, even though Earth had been discovered nearly two centuries ago. "Surely, even in this isolated northern valley you know about the Senechi ? " "I know nothing about you. Tell me." "We are natives of a planet called Del via," said Vel Senna. He described how his race had discovered space travel and started colonizing the planets of nearby stars. Earth was one such colony, with achi living in the equatorial region. The goddess had no difficulty in understanding the concept of space travel. She had not known any surprise at their non-human bodies either. "What brings visitors from another world to my valley?" "We are searching for traces of the legendary pre-gladal civilization' said Vel Senna. He hoped she had not seen them swallow the jewels. "We were warned to keep away," added Ktau Sara. "They said a goddess killed everyone who came here. A foolish superstition... "Foolish?" She smiled. "You came here to steal my gold, didn't you?" "We are scientists, explorers," Vel Senna began. His protest was interrupted by the voice of a native. "You're thieves!" Tt was the old man they had seen earlier, outside. They had not heard him enter the chamber. "She'll kill you," said the man. "She always kiMs you, whatever you are. You're all thieves to her." "Sit down and be quiet," said the goddess. "Ignore him. He is mad." The man sat down, running his fingers through his gray beard. His clothes and face were streaked with mud, Vel Senna noticed. Who was he? The priest had not mentioned him. "You Senechi, come over here," said the goddess. "I'll show you what I do to thieves." She rose and led them across the chamber to the ship-like structures. She pointed to the first. If had a corrugated golden hull, decorated with precious stones, and had five sails of thin silver sheeting. AH the metal shone. "That was Pilovitch," said the bearded man. "Can you recognize a human skeleton?" asked the goddess. Vel Senna recognized one now. The hull of the ship was a human rib-cage. The bones were covered with gold foil, and the gaps between them filled in with gold and jewels, but it was clearly part of a human skeleton. "I discarded the skull," said thd goddess. "The arms and legs I used in the ship. The mainmast is a fibula, and the other two masts come from the lower arms. You see, this is an ulna. The remaining arm and leg bones filled this gap between the ribs and the pelvis." It was a beautiful piece of work So was the next one, and the next. Vel Senna could see a long series of skeleton-ships disappearing into the small tunnel. None of them was identical in design, but the basic materials were obviously the same. Many of the ships had skulls in the bows or high on the masts. "I've been making these since my vigil began. The thieves keep; coming, and I always need more bones." She studied the two Senechi. "I'm not sure what to do with you. You're almost human from the waist up, but the quadruped part of you is a problem." Vel Senna said nothing. He pictured the succession of jewel thieves who had met their deaths IF in this valley. It was disturbing to know he would join them, so far from the communal dying-place of his home. "How can we escape?" asked Krau Sara, in Senechi. "I don't know," said Vel Senna. They looked at the skeletonships, then back at the entrance. "You can't get out," said the bearded man watching them. "It's too late. You've forgotten how to resist here. You were in her power from the moment she saw you." UfAwl" exclaimed Anna. "That  is the second time I've hit my head on the roof." "Not so much noise," whispered Weston. "They'll hear you at the other end of the cave." He and Anna were still crawling through the tunnel. It was sloping very slighty downwards. The light from their torches cast strange shadows on the walls as they moved forward. "It's all right for you -- you haven't bumped yourself once yet." "I have enough sense to keep my head down. Keep moving, Anna." "I am moving! Don't rush me. There, John. The cave's opening out" About time too, he thought. If He went on crawling much longer he'd forget how to walk. Soon the tunnel was four feet high and almost as wide. Smaller openings appeared in the sides at intervals, but the main passage was obviously the way ahead. After a while Weston took the lead. The cave was high enough for him to get up off his stomach. Anna did the same. He tried to make as little noise as possible. There was no knowing where sound might carry in these passages. According to his sense of direction, the cave was heading towards the valley. The twists and turns did not affect its overall direction. Quite suddenly, he came round a slight bend and saw a strange silver and gold object shining in the torch-light. He stopped. "What is it, John? Not a dead end?" "No." He let her move up alongside him. It was like a model of a sailing boat, made from jewels and precious metals. He could see others ahead, forming a long glittering row against the dark stone. There was just enough room to squeeze between the line of boats and the opposite wall. He glanced over them quickly. All had squat golden bodies with silver sails above. Hundreds of gems sparkled in them. They knelt down to examine the first object. It seemed unfinished, as if someone had put the main members of the hull together and then forgotten to fill up the gaps, Inside the hollow boat, partly hidden in its covered bows, were several long golden rods with knobbed ends. Weston picked up one of the rods, thinking it looked familiar. He scratched the metal experimentally. The gold leaf rumpled and came curling away. T#eston unwound the gold   sheet, exposing a hard whitish substance beneath. It took him a moment to realize what it was. Anna said it for him. "It's a bone. That's a human arm bone." A sudden shiver ran along his spine. He carefully replaced the bone. He paused and looked hard at the boats. The next one had a strange figurehead -- a human skulL He studied the first boat again. Now he knew what to look for, he could easily identify it as a rib-cage. The arms, legs and head had been removed at some time, leaving only the bones of the torso from the neck to the pelvic girdle. Everything in the mutilated skeleton was covered with gold leaf, and the ribs bore clusters of diamonds. " There must be dozens of them along here," said Anna. "So this is where all the people disappear to." "The witch does this," said Weston. "It's what you'd expect f her, if you knew the old stories." At that moment something jerked around his chest. He felt a spasm of fear; he had forgotten the rope. It jerked again -- four times in all. "That's Mike's signal," said Weston. "The Senechi must have gone into the valleys." "We can't go back now! We've just started finding things." "It's tough, I know. The Sleeper's cave can't be far now. But if we're wanted up top we've got to go." "I suppose so." She stared at the golden remains again. "They're horrible, but they're fascinating." "So they are." He touched the diamonds on the skeleton, then drew back. "I hate leaving these, but we can come back for them later. Come on." They started back slowly towards the surface. At the pit, Mike Jones was waiting for them to return. T)erhaps it was his imagination, but Vel Senna fancied the orange glow had deepened to imitate the death-lamps of his homeland. "Why do you not kill us now?" he asked. "I don't know how to use you," said the goddess. "Your two separate rib-cages won't form a ship as they are. I don't want to sever your spinal columns, but there's no other way. IF "Let us leave and your problem will be solved," said Krau Sara. "You can't leave. I'll kill you tonight whether you give me an answer or not." After that, the goddess appeared to lose interest in her captives. She sat down by a heap of rubies, putting a handful in her lap and examining them one by one. Watching her, Vel Senna wondered how many other prisoners she had held in this chamber. "Pretty, isn't she?" said the bearded man. "Do you think you'll escape?" "I do not know," said Vel Senna. "She kills them all. She should have killed me with the rest." "You will not die," said the goddess, momentarily looking up from her rubies. "I shall keep you alive." "You're the lucky ones," said the man to the Senechi. "You'll die soon." "How long have you been a prisoner here?" asked Vel Senna. "I can't remember. I know I'll be here until he awakes." The man pointed to the sleeping form in the central mound. "Who is he?" The prisoner ignored Vel Senna's question. "You know, he's the cause of all this. If he'd never been born, none of this would have happened. Everything depends on that boy. When he awakes the valley will cease to exist." How absurd , thought Vel Senna. I could arouse him with a single touch . Why not? He reached out for the Sleeper. Somehow he failed to touch him. He moved forward again, but the Sleeper was still the same distance away. It was impossible to reach the golden bed. "What is happening?" he asked. "Nothing," said Krau Sara. "What do vou mean?"  "I told you, you're in her power," said the prisoner. Vel Senna gave up the attempt. "It is very strange." "It is simple," said the goddess. "I don't want you to touch my son." T Ter explanation was no expla  nation at all. If an invisible force-field had surrounded the bed, Vel Senna would have understood, but her casual disregard for logic and science left him bewildered. "Your son?" asked Krau Sara. "Is that sleeping human your child?" "Of course he is. Didn't you know?" "The priest said nothing about him," said Vel Senna. "I'd better tell you, if you don't know where you are. My son and I came here when the long winter began. I've guarded him ever since." "Impossible!" cried Vel Senna. "The last interglacial period ended at least a thousand years ago?" "What?" the bearded man stood up, staring at the goddess. "It doesn't matter. It will be longer still before the ice melts. When the Ice Age comes to an end, my son will awake. He will go out into the world and rule over its peoples. That is his destiny." "I have heard this before," said Vel Senna. "It is nonsense." "It is true. He will build new civilizations." "I cannot believe it," said Vel Senna. "This tale of a Sleeping God occurs on many planets. It is common among the religious beliefs of primitive people." "A thousand years," said the bearded man. "Forget the legends. You are in my world. My son will inherit the Earth at the end of the ice." "Will the ice ever melt?" asked Krau Sara. "It must," said the prisoner. Vel Senna remembered the old stories he had heard from the natives. The humans had reached the height of their ancient civilizaton, only to see it destroyed by the advancing ice. All trace of that age had vanished, except for the Summer Goddess and her valley. By her power she had held back the ice for a thousand years. She had defied the laws of the Universe to shape the destiny of her son. It was beyond reason. He looked at the goddess again. She had said the bearded prisoner was mad, but it must be she who was mad. And yet... In this valley Time had stopped. She might be insane, but that did not lessen her power. "So your son will awake and rule your planet," said Krau Sara. "What is his name?" "Conqueror," said the goddess. IV n the edge of the ice, Weston and the others gazed down into the valley. Nothing moved "This is where the Senechi were last seen," said Captain Ram Badal Zing."They vanished before we arrived." The two female engineers had accompanied the captain. One of them said, "I saw a man walking out of the trees. He went into a cave among the rocks." "Has he come out?" asked Weston. "No? Where's the cave?" The captain pointed. 'That large opening just this side of the stream." "What did the man look like?" "Bearded, gray hair, pale Ain, brown clothes," said the woman who had seen him. "You think our bosses are in that cave?" asked Mike. "They are not in the valley," said Captain Zing. Below them the trees were still. Only a few small birds could he IF seen. Weston searched in vain for a flash of purple. "Any sign of the witch?" "No." Weston paused. It would be almost certain death to go after the Senechi. He knew now how thosei earlier Westons had felt, centuries ago, standing on this same brink. It had started with his ancestor Endes Weston, whose gang had crowned their previous robberies by stealing his own Family Shield. The rest could be forgiven, but not the Shield. The Family of Guides traced the gang as far as the valley, and here the trail ended. Several Westons had died before the quest was finally abandoned. Some people who only spent a few moments in the valley survived, but those who went into the cave never returned. John Weston felt responsible for the Senechi. He had brought them here. He had been mad to think they could find the Shield for him. It was his duty to save them somehow. He wished he had never accepted their contract. He might reach the Sleeper's chamber through the tunnel from the pit, but the Senechi could never get out that way. The centauroids were far too big for the narrow tunnel. "We've got guns and grenades on the sledge," said one of the engineers. "We could fight our way in." "Don't be stupid!" said Mike. "Guns agains Tihe witch?" "A cave is an excellent defensive position," said the captain. W eston made no comment. They had no idea what ancient weapons the witch might have in her cave. The ice had covered so much. "I know," said Anna Holm. "One person could slip in and look around without being seen." Good idea, thought Weston. It might just work. "No," said Mike. "If there were guards waiting inside we'd never see them." "I could look in with a night telescope. I'd see the guards then." "You could?" snapped Weston. "Yes, why not? I've been in caves before." "So have I," said Weston, and his decision was made. "You're not going. I am." He should have gone down with the Senechi at the beginning. "That's typical of you two. You keep all the exciting things for yourselves." "It's not exciting, Anna. It's dangerous." That woman would never learn. J Swiftly he began arming hinw self with weapons from the sledgesi Guns for gas, projectiles, ice anc sonic rays. Grenades: smoke, gas explosive -- one of them might work. Captain Zing coughed. "Mr. Weston, yon are under a separate Contract. I cannot order you not to go down" "Then don't," said Weston. He checked his weapons. "That's enough. If I break a photoelectric relay it's too bad. Give me twenty minutes in the cave. If you don't see me by then I won't be coming out. Don't come in after me." He walked to the very limit of the ice. His feet touched the valley earth. "Good luck, Mr. Weston," said Captain Zing. Looking up, he realized the man meant it. "John," said Anna quickly, "how will you know when the twenty minutes are up?" "My watch, of course? Why?" "This is the valley where time stands still. Will your watch work down there?" He.held up his wrist. "It's working now." "People have been in the valley before," said the captain. "If the body rhythms continue normally, timepieces will not be affected." "There you are," said Weston. "Time hasn't really stopped. She's done something else to it." It was an intriguing notion, but he could, not pursue it now. "See you later, then. Twenty minutes." I t was too easy. Weston went down the slope, across the grass SS and into the fallen boulders, all without incident. Nearing the cave mouth, he crept forward slowly. He knew the others were watching him from the ice. Almost there, he had ai moment of doubt. What if Anna had been right, and time flowed differently in the valley? His watch seemed normal, but suppose a few minutes in the valley were equivalent to Several hours of outside time. Twenty minutes to him might seem like a day to the people outside. Well, it was too late for him to worry about that now. He thought of those dead Westons of long ago. He drew his night telescope and peered into the shadows. The cave was empty as far as a corner. This was still too easy. As he walked in he drew his projectile gun. A faint glow appeared at the far end, growing brighter as he walked on. The old histories were true, he thought, seeing a rounded pillar of rock at his side. This could only be the Sleeper's cave. Then suddenly the passage opened out, and he was in the chamber. The orange light and the Sleepers couch were as he had expected. Gold and jewels lay everywhere, astonishing him by their sheer quantity. The two Senechi were there, and the bearded man the engineer had seen. There, too, was the golden-haired witch, dressed in black, a legend come alive. The IF dead Westons were very close to him now. Whipping up his projectile gun, he squeezed off a quick burst of bullets. They had no effect. He fired the whole clip, but she was unharmed. Somehow he was not surprised. He had other weapons. He snatched up a two-second smoke grenade, thumbed it and flung it at her. The bearded man jumped up towards the witch, and then the white smoke enveloped them both. TTigh up near the roof, some thing dark and shapeless floated towards him. It touched the smoke and withered away. Shaken by the sight of that dark presence, he set off two more grenades. As they burst, he saw the bearded man go flying backwards to crash against the wall. Simultaneously, waves of dizziness washed through his brain. The Senechi were standing at the fringe of the smoke clouds, unmoving. "Run, you idiots!" he cried. "Get out." They remained like statues, and the smoke covered them. The dizziness pulsed through him, stronger and stronger. Tiny blue electric discharges appeared in the smoke; he heard them crackling. The blue sparks flashed towards him and stung wherever they hit him. His head was throbbing under enormous blows. The witch appeared from the clouds. He fired his sonic gun, but a giant blue flash jerked it from his hand. The gun hit the floor and exploded. Both he and the witch were hurled to the ground by the blast. He had not the strength to rise. He thought foolishly that it was a feeble explosion. Recovering his wits despite the constant pounding in his brain, he drew his ice gun. Blue sparks from the smoke still jolted him, but the gun stayed put as he fired. A stream of rectification impulses hissed towards her, freezing everything in their path. Snowflakes whirled out of the beam, but the witch was untouched. Sparkling diamonds showered upon them. Weston glimpsed the bearded man through the smoke, casting jewels into the air. The gun crumbled away in his hand, but he hardly noticed. He was almost beaten. "It's time you stopped this," said the witch, getting to her feet. Sapphires descended from thg smoke. j "A thousand years!" cried tifi bearded man. "Curse you, daugl ter!"  Suddenly the jewels were glom ing. Inner fires flared up withf the crystals, flashing out bright ly. Some of them struck Weston burning him. All around him th jewels were heating up, shining like colored searchlights through the thinning smoke. And the Senechi were screaming. Then the light was cut off, and everything disappeared. All thei noises ceased, even the thunder of his pulse. His mind became quiet and peaceful in the darkness. All resistance ended, and he let the witch possess him. T#el Senna watched the battle  between their guide and the goddess without emotion. The native could not kill her. He was fighting bravely, but his efforts were in vain. The goddess would soon subdue hm. Smoke swirled around the Senechi, and Vel Senna saw tiny blue sparks crackling in the clouds. Obviously the goddess was using a localized field distorter, although he could not see the instrument. The bearded prisoner flung handsful of jewels into the smoke He cried out, "Curse you, daughter!" Her face became terrible. Vel Senna screamed. Fire burst out within him. The gems in his stomach were burning! He coughed in desperation, and with terrible slowness the stones came up. A stream of glowing emeralds and rubies spouted from his mouth. He had to get out! Suddenly his mind was free. The goddess had lost control. "This way!" he cried. "Follow me!" Krau Sara was with him. They raced out of the chamber galloping madly along the tunnel. Sunlight struck them like a blow. He saw natives above the valley. Their crew! The two giant centauroids hurtled across the ground. Safety was but a few yards away. Vel Senna put every possible effort into leaping up the slope. His hooves hit ice. They were out. "We have escaped!" he shouted sending the natives reeling back in alarm. He clasped Krau Sara. ; Their flight had taken mere seconds, so swiftly had they moved. He looked with new vision at the ice on which he stood. That frozen white water was more precious than any colored crystals he could possess. It meant he was free of the goddess and her eternal summer. He was back in the Ice Age. ne of the natives stepped for ward. It was the dark-skinned captain, Ram Badal Zing. He asked, "Sir, what happened in the cave? Where is Mr. Weston?" The guide was probably dead by now. He could not win against the goddess. In fact, the sooner, the Senechi left the area the better. It was too dangerous to stay here. "Where is Mr. Weston?" the captain repeated. TF "He has served his purpose," said Ve! Senna. "We 'will return to the airship at once." "What happened to him?" These natives were infuriatingly persistent. "He was fighting the goddess when we escaped. He is now dead or a prisoner." "We can't just leave him," said the chief engineer, Jones. "You must. The goddess can influence your minds to make escape psychologically impossible. She may be affecting you now. We jnust not remain here. Get aboard the sledges. We shall hire a new guide at the next town." "No," said the captain. Vel Senna boarded the nearest sledge, Krau Sara following. "Captain Zing, I order you to drive back to the ship." "Mr. Weston is still in the cave." Vel Senna and the captain stared grimly at each other. Jones broke the silence, "I'll drive them back, cap'n. The rest of you stay here and look for John. We'll wait for you." The engineer swung himself into the pilot seat. "I'll have you back in a few moments, sir." The possibilities were good, thought Vel Senna. Hastily counting the natives here, he calculated there were two crew members at the airship -- plus Jones. That was enough to fly to the nearest town, and then they could pick up a fresh crew. "Drive off," said Jones, kicking on the engine. He cut in the flywheel, and the sledge moved off. That was the last they would see of those natives. It was annoying, because good crews were hard to find and also extremely expensive. But it was worth it to escape that terrible valley. 'T'he journey to the airship was over in minutes. Jones halted the sledge in the shadow of the gasbag, right under the davits. Vel Senna gained the lower deck in a single leap. "Secure the sledge," said Vd Senna to the two humans aboard. They attached the hooks and inched the sledge up into its flight position. "Jones, come with us to the control room," said Vd Senna. "Yes, sir." The engineer followed the two Senechi along the passageway. In the control room Vel Senna felt more relaxed. Soon he would be far away from the goddess. He pointed to the instruments. "Lift ship, Jonos." The engineer frowned. "What -- take off, sir?" "Yes, human. Take off." "Well, sir, if you put it tike that... " The native went up to the controls. Clearly he was better conditioned to obedience than the others. At the controls Jones readied into a pocket. Out came a heat gun. fi He fired into the panels. He did it so casually that Vel Senna stood there and watched him do it. Under toe hissing beam whole banks of instruments melted away. The steering columns collapsed inwards. Vapor rose up from the wreckage, and drops of liquefied metal spattered on the floor. There was a bang as the fuses blew. "Well, there's a thing," said Jones, as the last controls dissolved. He stopped firing and shook his head. "I don't know what came over me. I'll start the repairs right away." V el Senna drew his whip. "Human, you have immobilized this airship." "Clever of you to notice." Almost by accident, the gun was now pointing towards the Senechi. "Just by the way, I'm the only one on board who can repair these controls. Unless you want to go back to the valley for my assistants you'd better leave me completely alone." "The other two here -- " "They cannot help," said Krau Sara. "They are unskilled domestics." "Quite true," said Jones. "Maisie's a good cook but she's a hopeless engineer. Well, I'll pick up something to start patching up this mess. I might have some part trouble because of the changeover to Senechi calibration. Still, it's not as bad as it looks. I should rig up something by nightfall .' # He strolled out. His footsteps receded along the passageway to toe equipment stores. Vel Senna let his whip fall. "I shall definitely kill that human tomorrow." "Why not now?" suggested Krau Sara. We could ride a sledge back to civilization." "No, we need him," said Vd Senna. "If we do not return with this airship there will be an inquiry by the Native Relations Board. We cannot stand another investigation." "So Jones has the advantage?" "Yes, and he knows it. The natives back at the valley are armed. If we kill Jones and leave, they will pursure us -- on sledges or in the airship." "Can we kill him now? His subordinates will do the work." "We would have to return to the valley. They might search for the guide until sunset, and then we would have to spend the night here. I do not wish to face toe goddess in darkness." "Neither do I." "So now we must wait for Jones." "He's the second native today who has trapped us." "Yes," said Vel Senna, with rare bitterness. "I shall not forget this day." IP V 'T'he prisoner touched a sapphire hesitantly. It was quite cold again. Around him, the smoke was drifting away as the chamber retoned to normal. On the ground lay the fur-clad warrior, still and quiet in defeat. His weapons had disappeared. The prisoner remembered other warriors coming to the cave, all had met the same end. He had tried to help the stranger, but the end had been inevitable. His one consolation was the escape of the purple monsters. Only three people had ever escaped before, and two of them had later returned and died. The struggle to free the aliens had been worthwhile. The battle had been hard; jewels were scattered everywhere, and the bursting grenades had printed white smears over the floor. His hands were still raw where his daughter's fury had turned the jewels to fire as he held them. He was amazed that the stranger had fought on for so long. His daughter stood over the warrior, calm and in control once more. She was not ready to kill the man yet "Get up," she said. "What is your name?" The stranger obeyed slowly. "Pm Jehn Weston," he said. He looked around and saw the skeleton-ships. Clearly he recognized than. Watching him, the prisoner realized that tins man Weston had known from the beginning what Ins fate would be. Then the stranger saw him. "I remember you," said the stranger, "you and the jewels. You called her daughter. Are you her father?" "I am, God help me." "What is God?" A thousand years, thought the prisoner. "My father is no better than you," said the witch. "He was the first to come after my treasure. Do you know why I keep him aKve? To show my son that his ancestors were peasants and thieves. He is the past that Conqueror will destroy." He was completely in his daughter's power. It was his punishment for bringing her into the world. "Do you hate your father that much?" asked Weston. "No," she replied. "He is weak. They were all weak." The prisoner saw Weston look towards the row of gleaming skeleton-ships. "You will be one soon." "I thought so. I've seen them before." "You have actually seen them?" asked the witch. "Where?" "In the cave." "From the air shaft? How did you get out?" 'T'he prisoner was as surprised as  as his daughter. He had often crawled along the dark tunnel to the pit, but Ms daughter had always prevented him from climbing out. Other captives had tried it before she killed them, and all had failed. "We turned round and went back the same way we came." said Weston. "We? You were not alone?" "Anna was with me." "What made you turn round?" "Mike's signal. I had one end of the rope. He stayed outside, and when he tugged it I knew we had to go back." "External stimulus," said the witch. "How simple, how ingenious. I shall prevent it in future." That explained it, thought the prisoner. Anyone entering the air shaft was lured further in by subtle mental suggestions. The signal called Weston back before her automatic conditioning had taken full effect. Perhaps the idea was common, for they had had fewer visitors of late, it seemed. Ropes! Weston was not alone. There were other men outside with ropes. Perhaps they were still there, thought the prisoner. If he went up to the pit they might be able to ptdl him out. The prisoner quickly formed a new plan. When his daughter was fully occupied with Weston he would leave the chamber for thel air shaft. If the men were there they would help him escape. It was his final chance. "You made a very determined assault on me," his daughter was saying to Weston. "You resisted me for several minutes. What kept you going?" "I don't know." Good. She was busy probing Weston's motives for the attack. Presently he would slip away to the shaft. The purple aliens would want to rescue Weston, and they would surely have men stationed up there. It was hard for him to remember, but these periods of sanity lasted for about a day. He would have ample time to escape. "I feel guilty about bringing them here," said Weston. "I was hoping all along they'd go inside." "Why was this?" she asked. "I hoped they might find our Family Shield." There were many shields in the cave, mostly dating from before the Ice Age. It was possible that some of them had belonged to the Families, but it did not matter to the prisoner. He had lost interest in shields long ago. Only one thing mattered to him now. "I see it now," said the witch to Weston. "You are not the first Weston I've killed. There were others. Describe your Shield." "Rose patterned gold, sapphires dominant upon diamonds in field. IF   We still use the same design Now, thought the prisoner, go now while she's still interested in him. While they were talking, the prisoner stole away silently past the skeleton-ships. The tunnel led to his private corner -- and to the air shaft. They had not seen him go. He could still hear their voices as he hurried along the dark passage. tt'T'his is the one," said the  witch. Weston looked at the shield she was holding. It was old and battered, with many empty jewel sockets, but he knew the design. It was the ancient device of his Family. "Yes. It's our Family Shield." "A man called Endes Weston brought it here. He had already stolen this from his Family, and he came here to steal more." Other shields lay about the chamber. Most of them were in bad condition, but Weston saw one standing by the Sleeper's bed which was perfect. "So the blood of Endes Weston still flows. You came here with your purple friends to steal back your Shield. Your greed and your guilt were combined -- as in my other Westons." He did not want to die, but he saw no way to prevent it. She had taken away his will to resist. Endes Weston must have gone through this same torture three hundred years ago. "Did you turn my ancestor's bones into a boat?" "Yes, I use you all. Perhaps I shall put you beside him." The witch suddenly looked up towards the entrance. She had seen something. Weston turned. In the chamber stood another woman, also a blonde, but dressed in furs. "Hello there," she said. Anna Holm! It was impossible. He had told them not to follow him. But it would have to be Anna, who disobeyed him. Calmly she was walking to them. "Have you come to die too?" asked the witch. "Oh no," said Anna. "I've ceme to give you something." Weston could only stave at her. She put her hand into a pocket and brought something out. It was a small watch. Its ticking was loud in the quiet cave. Anna offered it to the witch. "It's for you. A present from me. Look, it teHs you the time." Time. The watch was ticking away, in a place where time had been forgotten. His own watch had vanished with his weapons. Now here was another. "Put it away," said the witch, drawing back. "No, take it," said Anna. "It's yours. You like treasure. The casing's made of solid gold. Don't you want R?" Tick, tick. Tick, tock. The witch's eyes were fixed on the moving hands. Seconds passed with no other sound. Gold isn't any use to me," said Anna. "You can have it, really." "No," said the witch. "Stop tormenting me!" "If you don't want it, just pick it up and smash it. I won't mind." "I cannot touch your gift. The sight and sound of it are terrible. You have made Time move before me." "What's wrong with that?" "I make Time stand still." "I had an idea you did." nphe second hand went on round and round, marking off the numbers without pause. The witch looked away. "Very well. Go from here, and take your watch away." "And John?" "Take your man as well." Anna caught hold of him. "You heard. Come on!" He was bewildered. "Yes, but -- " He pointed to the Weston Family Shield. Weston hesitated, unable to decide. "Don't!" cried Anna, jerking at his wrist. "Don't spoil everything now! " Anna. Trust Anna. Weston allowed himself to be led away. As he went, he felt the mists inside his head suddenly disappear. "Don't look back," said Anna. "This way." "I know," said Weston. "I'm clear again." "Remember," called the witch, "my son shall conquer you all!" "Come on " said Anna. "Back to the others!" They went running out of the chamber, away from the orange light and into the darkness of the tunnel. Weston had a vision of ice, stretching away in endless wastes across half the world. He ran towards the ice. The pale light of the entrance expanded before him, and suddenly he was out of the cave and in the valley. It was wonderful to have open air around him again. They struggled across the rocky ground to the slope. Anna stumbled on a loose stone; Weston held her firmly. "I'm all right. You can let go of me now." "Not yet. You're the only real thing in the valley." Together he and Anna scrambled up the slope. He saw the captain and the engineers waiting on the skyline. They looked reassuringly solid. They reached down and helped the two of them up onto the ice. Ice, firm and hard, outside the witch's domain. Weston stamped on it, feeling it crunch underneath IF his heel. "Ice," he said "Nothing to beat it." "Look," said the captain. Down in the valley, the witch had come out of the cave. She stood looking up at the little group of people. Weston found Anna's hand again. "This is where we get out for good. I'm not staying here any longer." "An extremely sensible point of view," said Captain Zing. He nodded to the engineers. " Right, aboard the sledge. Back to the ship." The witch was still gazing at them as they sped away. Her face was full of hate. Tt was bitterly cold at the bot tom of the pit. The prisoner sat against the smooth wall, his eyes closed, his breathing slow. Five meters above him was the ice, a circle of blue sky, and nothing else. He did not return to the tunnel. His period of sanity was not over yet, and while it lasted he intended to wait in case the men came back. They were his only hope of escape. A thousand years in this valley, he thought, pulling his clothing tighter against the cold. No man could have remained sane throughout such a captivity. The wonder was that the madness ever faded at all. It was an eternity later that the prisoner heard the engine. He stood up as the sound of the motor grew louder. The men had returned I He listened intently as the noise gave a final roar and died away. Voices came down to him. "Stand back!" It was a man speaking and one accustomed to authority. "The witch may have laid a trap since you were here last." "I'm not worried about her," said a woman. "I just hope the Senechi don't fly off before we get back." "You leave that to Mike," said another man. "You saw what he did to those controls." The prisoner recognized the last voice. It was Weston! The man had escaped. Something had happened in the Sleeper's chamber after he left. "Now," said Weston, I'm going to the edge. Give me five seconds and then pull me back whatever happens. No, make that three seconds. Ready?" Suddenly Weston came into view, staring down at the prisoner from the ice high above. "Help me!" cried the prisoner. "Get me away from here!" "Stay there!" Weston shouted, and disappeared. Rescue. In a few moments he would be free. He heard Weston speaking to the others. "Yes, it's the man from the cave. He's there." "I told you be would be," said the woman. "This is the only place be could have come." "He was lucky you thought of it," said Weston. "I didn't see him leave the chamber. Ah I Thanks. Fire away." The prisoner heard a series of ringing metallic blows, seven or eight in all. Wbat were they doing up there? The noise might attract his daughter. Weston reappeared, accompanied by several other people. ne of the men flung a rope  ladder. It hung quivering in front of the prisoner, inviting him to take hold of if. He could see every strand of the rough fibers. Hesitantly he touched it. The men shouted at him to climb up it. He put his foot on the first rung and began to climb. He moved very slowly, hardly daring to breathe in his tension. On the third step he felt the old familiar heaviness flowing into his limbs. He knew that her power was still strong. After six steps he paused, his breathing labored, and he found he could not rise again. The ropes were taut and stretching under the weight of his distorted body. They would break soon. He knew the men watching him, uncomprehending. He hung there on the ladder, not moving, until the ropes parted. He dropped back into the pit. He lay on the floor, looking upwards at the puzzled faces. They threw him another ladder and urged him to try again, but he shook his head wearily. He would never be able to reach the surface  while his daughter possessed him. One of the men shifted his feet, dislodging a piece of snow. The lump came falling into the pit, but it melted away in the air. The prisoner saw it vanish. He had to face the truth. His daughter's power never lessened. This had all happened before, again and again. He had lain here jin previous centuries, seeing the anxious people above, knowing their efforts were useless. Now he remembered why Weston's face was familiar in these surroundings. Endes Weston had stood up there, three centuries before. And how many others had tried to rescue him from the pit? All of them had failed. He was fated to remain here until the Sleeper arose. He was trapped in this fragment of a forgotten summer, beyond the help of any man. Bitterly he called out to them to go away, and presently they did. Their engine started up, fading gradually into the distance until he could no longer hear it. He was left alone. It always ended like this. He was no better than the birds in the trees, singing the same songs. Only the people outside were IF IF  Short Story The message was urgent! The fate of empires rested on it -- and it was # # years too late! A lonely wind whispered across the dead city's harbor, carrying with it a wisp of dust from the dry sea bottom. Jon followed the swirl of dust with his eyes, saw it eddy around the rounded, timesmoothed stones of the crumbled ruins, then drift to the ground as the tired wind died. The Scout looked up; though the local sun stood high, the sky was almost black, and he could make out Deneb. Sol, he knew, was just a few degrees to one side, but too far -- much too far -- to be seen from here, even through this thin, dry atmosphere. "Quiet place, isn't it?" asked Jon's partner, tall Rolf. "Yeah, we're the most excitement the planet's had since the ocean boiled away." "Well, you aren't going to have much excitement to match a lowgrade nova -- I suppose that's what it was. Still -- " Shrill bells sounded. The two men jumped, then ran for their Scoutcraft, a few hundred meters away in the ruins. As they ran, Jon touched his radio, yelled, "I hear ya; alarm acknowledged! What'n space is it?" "Aerial craft approaching, nonTerran, non-Federation." The Scoutcraft's computer shifted from its flash-message to its emergency tone of voice, continued: "Bearing # degrees, elevation # degrees; field drive of novel type; broadcastGeorge Scithers received fils Hugo for the fan magazine (fanzine) ho edits, which Is and-sorcery literature. In addition to being one of our Hugo winners, Sdthers Is also the author of this month's "first" story, and we look forward to seeing his and third and many more when returns from active duty In the Far lag S my radar frequency and Juratly alternating to establish "Koice Broadcast?" panted Rolf s he vaulted oyer a heap of dusty stone. "Digital signals -- establishing a number base -- multiplication table -- series of prime numbers -- shall I attempt to open communication? " "Yes!" said Jon. He slapped his radio, said "Yes! " again. "Unknown is apparently computer-directed," the Scoutcraft computer went on in its prioritymessage tone of voice. "Programming includes a Ianguage-leamingand-translation program of Extraordinary adaptability." "Where'n space the thing come from?" panted Jon, remembering to turn on his radio this time. He bounded over a crumbled wall, slid to a stop at the Scoutship's side. "I thought you said there wasn't anything radiating on the whole planet before we landed." "The unknown was not on planet then," said the computer. "Fascinating ffahdatfcm ft frill Be SMe to converse wftB you By the time It arrives." "You mean, It and us found this planet at exactly the same time? That's -- that -- " Rolf fell silent, looked up and pointed. "There it Is!" A spot in the sky quickly grew, resolved Itself into an oblong, tarnished spacecraft some ten meters long that settled almost to the ground some distance from the two Scouts and their ship. The unknown floated slowly, silently toward them and stopped, still floating, a dozen meters away. Jon took a step into his Scoutcraft's airlock, hesitated, then stepped back out, staring. The unknown looked like nothing he had ever seen before -- too small o be a manned spaceship, too big to be a bomb, too featureless to be an exploratory probe and definitely not a Federation device of any kind. Not that there would have been another Federation device bn this planet of Deneb, countless lightyears from Earth. A new voice cut through the thin air. The unknown asked: "As thb Representatives of the Minister of Messages of the Government of Therin #, will you accept -- " "What in space do you mean?" asked Jon. "And who or what are you?" asked Rolf. ie# IF UT am message #Q# -- I have translated the number from Ease twelve to your number system -- of the Goarra Region, Messagetrinsport Department, of Tam-Raken, with rush and ordinary messages from the regional center." The tarnished spacecraft paused, then added, "I am on the Realm's business." "But -- but -- what happened here?" said Rolf, gesturing at the sere landscape, at the dusty ruin of the dead city. "Are you sure you aren't off course?" said Jon. "Way off course?" asked Rolf. "I've never heard of the Realm." "Incredible," muttered the oblong messagecraft. "You are in the very midst of the Realm. Still, it has been a long time -- " "How long? And what in space happened here?" "I am not authorized to make astronomical reports or provide irrelevant information," said the messagecraft, apologetically. "Now: this is the planet Therin, and you are only intelligent beings inhabiting thereon, correct?" "Yes, but -- " said Rolf. "Therefore, you constitute the Government of Therin # and hence, you necessarily encompass the office of Minister of Messages as well. Wherefrom it follows logically that you are authorized to accept messages. Now -- " "But -- " "The messages have been too long Relayed in delivery; I must deliver! them at once. You of course affirm your own secrecy-worthiness ; some of the messages are Realm's Secrets." "Well -- " "As the Government of Therifij #, you obviously can authorize yourselves to receive official messages. WiU you accept the messages?" "Okay, but -- " "I have," said the messagecraft, "just now transmitted my messages to your ship's computer." , "Printout of the data ready," said the Scoutcraft computer, via radio. Jon scrambled aboard, found a fivecentimeter stack of paper stacked under the ship's printer. "I would," said the tarnished messagecraft as Jon slowly stepped from his ship with an armload of message text, "have given you my messages by voice, only I understand from your ship's computed that you read faster than you listen. If you will check the messages now? I have translated them, of course, with the data from your computer." Jon handed Rolf half the stack of freshly printed paper, then began to read the top page himself. "Most Urgent, For Delivery In Haste," began the message. "From WD Goarra to WD, Therin #, for readdressal. # Third #. The invasion of the leading edge of the mtfft spiral by the Confederacy Fleet places the Realm's defense dispositions in serious hazard. Immediate mobilization of the following annex-forces is hereby..." Jon glanced down a page of numerical designations, turned to the next communication, read a fragment: u... loss of six systems in the trailing end of the Goarrn Region makes necessary instant retransport of auxiliaries and supplies for six again six sub-squadrons for # years to the far side of the Darker Nebula... " Jon turned to another: "... immediate outsending of interstellar watch and detection forces on bearing." Another message directed inventory of ferrous plating. Others sent forces thither, supplies hither, patrols yon. An invasion had swept across an eighth of the galaxy; the Realm and the invaders had been locked in struggle over systems, over whole clusters of stellar systems. But... J on looked up from the messages, glanced around The chill win swept over dusty ruins, over worn nibble, as it sighed past the age-crumbled city and out across thi# dusty basin of a long-vanished jocean. Behind Jon, his Scoutcraft glittered, sleek and polished, in the pale sunlight. Ahead of Jon, the tarnished messagecraft of the Realm of PTam-Raken still floated a half metier above the dusty ground. ios "But where --  " Jon gestured helplessly, at the time-worn stones, at the dry desolation that surrounded them. "If you acknowledge receipt and have no traffic for me to store, I must... " began the messagecraft. "Wait," said Jon. "The Realm -- where? And how long? What happened here?" "I am not authorized to report irrelevant information," said the tarnished, oblong spacecraft. "I -- " the machine paused, went on: "I can provide information about message handling only." "Ha!" said Rolf. "Uh -- messagecraft, why were you delayed in delivering these messages?" "There was a class six nova in the local sun just before my emergence from hyperspeed translation which blew away the atmosphere and oceans of the planet. Since then, I have waited. The present atmosphere gradually seeped from the planet after the sun normaled again." The messagecraft paused, added, "Cause of nova unknown." "But -- there's a message here on the use of nova-inducing weapons by the invaders and a warning -- " "Minister of Messages," said the messagecraft in an immediate-message, somehow shocked tone of voice, "we never read the messages with which we are entrusted." Jon asked, "How long ago?" "I am not authorized --  " IF I "N(S, go," sail? Rolf. "What Is tEB -- the Sme of ransmission of these messages?" "From # through # Third #. Were not the be ginnin g times on the messages you receives?" "Yes, but -- " "Then you acknowledge delivery?" asked the messagecraft, floating half a meter higher, as if eager to be off. "Yes, and what's that in our dating system, and what in space Is your hurry?" asked Jon. "Your computer's data on the secular deceleration of your timekeeping planet's rotation are incomplete for precise extrapolation," said the messagecraft. "However," it continued, while Jon and tall Rolf looked at each other in surprise, "the beginning times in your timekeeping are between about # September and # October, #, # ." "B. C.," added the messagecraft, in a calm, routine-message voice. And since For Delivery In Haste messages require acknowledgment of delivery to be returned to the sender, I must depart immed -- " Said Jon. "In that time the Reahri of -- of -- " "Of Tam-Raken," said the mesfcagecraft. "Unless you have a message -- " "Yes," said Rolf. "I do have a message: 'Good Luck'." "And the address?" "It's for you. Good Luck." L The messagecraft floated a fevg centimeters lower. "This is very unregulational and irregular but -- but -- receipt acknowledged and -- and thank you." The tarnished oblong of metal Sobbed once more, then lifted swiftly, silently into the dark sky. In seconds, messagecraft # was out of sight. 'said Rolf weighing the pile of messages in his arms. "The Realm of Tarn-Rakefi must've had the slowest message delivery system in space," said Jon. "AH of that," agreed Rolf. He looked up toward the empty sky that once had held the mighty, lost empire of Tam-Raken. "And ceri  New subscriptions and changes of  address require # weeks to processl I mam ## I? -- A? .'  ' V k . i l! I ii v ' v  ' . XT 'iz# r W? fj' ;v,. V. # ": .k #j v jm  t y t'H'.b tK P  #. #   ni; r r. Z ; rf A; 'M; rr, -- ' ,  .V  .#   rhj  A" i#l ,, liv ,    "liw i ii 'iwlv:" V  A ih  . iflliv fIF  Short Story " Beware  all you fyrantsl I come to help the underdogs -- no matter what their color, creed or rac el" A Ierted by their watchmen, who  were mostly Seminoles, the RedNecked Ofays of the Okefinokee Reservation came hurtling out of their soggy holes and nests with such yiolence that the alligators and water moccasins went hurtling back into theirs. Reptiles can take only so much excitement. With hoarse cackles of happiness, the emaciated whites and their Red Indian fellow-reservationists floundered about snatching at the little transparent packets of hominy grits, chitterings, and moonshine originally intended for the poor Black trash of Appalachia, but falling like manna from the sweaty southern sky. Along with the hillbilly ambrosia and nectar, a faint cry haunting as the flight of the flamingo lingered in those same dismal hot heavens: "Compliments of the Endfray of the Ofay I" The Red-Necked Ofays paused in their snatching to lift a ragged cheer. This was not the first exploit of the mysterious marauder who bad thus far left no due to his identity except a cry from the sky. Most folks now attributed to him the signs, "Whitey lives #" which a month ago hid begun to appear scrawled big in shiversomely daring spots, such as the front wall of the Black House in Memphis. Then a week ago a boisterous party of Luxor Blacks on a sweep-and-annoy Excursion through the Bayous Reservation had had their persons and swamp buggies deluged with Yazoo mud "Courtesy of the Endfray of the Ofay I" Many intellectual and fashionable Blades had secretly approved this literally dirty trick, since the chivvying and terrorizing of helpless Ofays was beginning to be considered uncouth behavior. Then only yesterday a #year-old white concubine of the Caliph of Harlem had been kidnapped by the Endfray and levitated back to her tribe in the Great Barrens Reservation. Reactionary and moralistic Blacks, long detesting the Caliph for his contempt of the strict rules against miscegenation, had openly praised the act. In fact, only the rescued and windblown white girl had been completely unhappy about the whole business. But no Blacks could be expected to approve the food drop, which not only upset the national economy, but also violated the even stricter laws against interfering, by helping the weak, with the divine principle of survival of the fittest. The Black wardens of the Okefinokee melted with their furious and frightened messages the wires to Memphis, Cairo, Thebes, Luxor (once Vicksburg and Natchez) and the other great Government cities of the American Nile. Within ten seconds two squadrons of Black Angels based on Winning this year's Hugo for his novelette "Gonna Roll the Bones' Fritz Lelber added the new trophy to the two he has already wont one In # for his Kamak had scrambled and another was screaming down through the stratosphere. A t Her palatial HQ in Memphis, Her Serene Darkness noted the disturbance and ordered that samples of the food packets be recovered and rushed to her. She did not, nevertheless, shift one black iota of her essential concentration off the great war that was being fought between North America and Africa to Make the World Safe for Black Supremacy, by determining which Blacks really were supreme. Ten seconds more and all three squadrons of Black Angels were reversing course west as quickly as their already great velocity would permit, and then shifting into overdrive. Word had come that there had Been another drop of mysteriously diverted viands -- this time on the Death Valley Reservation of the Bearded and Beaded Ofays. Once again there had come that weird cry from the sky: "Compliments of the Endfray of the Ofay I " Along with the packets of fruit and saffron-tinted, precooked rice IF land vegetables, there were falling foam packaged Tibetan prayer wheels, smuggled no man might say how through the Nirvana Screen. The starving descendants of ancient hippies, beats, culdsts and movie moguls had come boiling up out of the furnace-hot mouths of their caves and holes. Even outside the reservations, holes were a popular residence in those exciting times when Black atom bombs were in the air and when all mankind was preoccupied, to a degree at least equal to his interest in space, with Earth's molten, slow-churning mantle, rich in mohole-minable radioactivies and also a source of strange and mighty powers when man Dufresne Electrogravitomagnetic Fields) or by magic spells. For in the new world sorcery and sdence walked arm in arm, sometimes so closely that none might tell which was which, or who was holding the other up. And the density iand darkness of Earth's interior suited the Black Age. Russia, which ever since Dostoyevsky Day had shifted her fundamentally introspective and peasant interests from the sky to the East European plains and Siberian steppes, had Tungu chants) to carry by slow convection and concentrate vast subcritical masses of fissionable radioactives underneath all the world's ling would produce unimaginably destructive earthquakes -- the socalled mantle bombs that were sion. Africa and North America utilized the same methods to enrich the radioactives they took from their mohole mines. Australia had Aboriginal magic to accelerate continental drift, so that the great down-under island, shoving Tasmania before it, was now separated from Antarctica by only a narrow strait. Australia enjoyed a Canadian climate and was hemmed by extremely rich fisheries. While the great Buddhist hegemony of Sinoand yoga and zen (certainly) to create the Nirvana Screen. In response to the echoing cry from the dry sky, the Beaded and Bearded Ofays touched fingertips to foreheads and briefly meditated their gratitude. In the fringes of her awareness, Her Serene Darkness noted this food-drop also, and she gave the same order. Over the Pacific, a tiny Westward speeding vehicle reversed course instantaneously, and so of course without circling, to return momentarily to a point over Death Valley and shout down, "The Endfray thanks you for your prayers." The Ofays below rejoiced, while by the psionic grapevine that tenuously links unfortunates, a little hope was kindled in the Swarthy Ofays of the Chihuahua Reservation, the Stunted Ofays of the Jersey Flats, the Giant Ofays of the Panhandle Reservation, the LongHaired Ofays of the Tules, and even in the Wild or Unfenced Honkies of the Rocky Mountains, the Black Hills, and the Badlands. The Endfray's linear loop wasted enough time to let the Black Angels zero in on him, her, it or them, with their radars and telescopes. With aimed and activated their deadly lasers, rocket bombs and constriction fields. Ophe Endfray went zigzagging  west again just in time. His evasive tactics were masterly. He seemed able to anticipate each move of his pursuers. Mini-atomics burst info searing violet spheres about him, red laser-needles lanced past him, space itself was squeezed and wrenched, but he bobbed along unharmed like a Ping-pong ball in a tornado. For an instant one Black Angel telescoped him clearly. The fleeing vehicle was incredibly tiny, the size and shape of a chunky dwarf's spacesuit, snow white in hue, and across it went the red letters "Endfray of the Ofay." There were no jefs or antennae. It flashed out of sight perhaps a microsecond before a laser pierced the space it had occupied. Yet despite or perhaps because of the Endfray's ingenious doublings and dartings, the Black Angels were gaining on him. He veered south, but Australia sent up a line of warning star rockets. He veered north, but when he neared the moored, melancholy black balloons marking the Russian border, they moaned, "Nyet, nyet," at him and he once more reversed course and sought the Equator. The blue of the sky ahead became grainy and glittering like a holograph. It extended down to sea level, blotting out Borneo and the western shore of Celebes. Without hesitation the Endfray plunged, at precisely # degrees east longitude, into the Nirvana Screen. Chanting their fatalistic death chants, the pilots of the Black Angels sent their slim ebon ships after him. Without perceptible passage of time, pursued and pursuers emerged over the Indian Ocean at # degrees east longitude. The same thing would have happened in reverse if they had been traveling east, or at # degrees north latitude and the Equator if they had been traveling along a northsouth vector. It was the Orient's master mystery, greater than the rope trick. Truth to fell, ho one outside knew for sure whether India and China still existed inside the Nirvana Screen, or not ExplanaIF lions ran the gamut from spacewarp to mass hypnosis and the Nigerian gull-spdL While what the superscientific andor superphysic Buddists of the Fourth Dimensional Path might o if they ever came out, chilled even Earth's blackest blood. Africa loomed, the continent that was the home of the biggest animals, the biggest magics and the biggest bombs in the world. The Endfray climbed steeply. Already at greater altitude, the Black Angels rode the hypotenuse of a collision course. Ninety miles from intercept, magnibombs mashed the stratosphere everywhere around the Endfray and coalesced into one massive incandescence. Veering off with hardly nanoseconds to spare, the Black Angels' wing commander bounced home his message off the most convenient orbital relay: "Target destroyed by African antispacecraft fire." K uf before it was received at Memphis, there was dropping on the Fierce Fuzzy, or Bluecoated Ofays of the Chicago Craters Reservation, a shower of packeted food -- wienerschnitzel, corned beef and cabbage, Irish whisky, beer -- and foam-crated roller skates, the latter diverted from a shipment intended for the great gladiatorial ring at Cairo. While down the dants of rain from the dismal sky there resounded, "Compliments of the Endfray of the Ofayl" No one knew why the Chicago Craters Ofays were called fuzzy, or amply refered to as "the fuzz," once all of them were totally bald from residual radioactivity. It was one of recent history's many mysteries, about which thought was discouraged. But anyone could figure out that roller skates would be an excellent means of transportation on crater glass. And by now everyone. Black or White, knew that the Endfray was an impudent and unbearable affront to absolute authority. Her Serene Darkness made a derision and took her mind completely off the War. She could safely do this because her uncles were good generals and because her psionic intelligence organization was the world's best, with vast powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, dairaudience, telekinesis and teleportation, from the orbiting espers each shuteyed in her capsule to the Blacks in Blackness: whole psionic families which had lived for generations in deep-buried, absolutely anechoic, aoptical psi-spy-proof environments, their only connections with the upper world being inbound nutrientpipes and oxypipes and quartzcable ultraviolet conductors and outbound waste-pipes and report lines. Psionic Intelligence's chief task was to spot and course-chart bombs lobbed over from Africa and up from Argentina and Brazil, where Africa had an enormous beachhead, and then either turn them back by telekinesing their controls, or else guide atomic interceptors to them. Her Darkness was certain that her espers were the world's finest because she had been their working chief before taking over her largely conscious, nonpsionic imperial duties. Now like an arboreal black leopard -- slim, flashing-eyed and dangerous -- she gazed down the Watusi-Hottentot gap between her and her pages. "Summon me my psychiawitches and sorceresps," she commanded. The patter of sprinting bare feet faded from the tesselated floor, which was a great, diagrammatic map of Earth and the spaces around. Turning her beautiful, small head on her slender, long neck, Her Darkness gazed out between the narrow pillars of Vermont marble fretted with California gold at the rippling blue Mississip, and she meditated. A page entered and knelt to her, lifting a golden tray on which gleamed glassy packets, samples from the Endfray's food-drops. She silently indicated where to set it. A tall, glossy warrior in HQ harness folded his arms in the Communications doorway and intoned, "Acapulco, Halifax and Port of Spain have sustained medium to severe damage from nuclear near-misses. Our rockets intercepted, but not in good time. Orbital warnings on the three African attacks were late and inadequate." "What from the Blacks in Blackness?" Her Serenity inquired. "No warning whatever from that quarter." She nodded dismissal and returned to her meditations. Yet it seemed hardly picoseconds before the Presence Pavilion was once more full and silent, except for the faint susurrus of the most respectful breathing and the pounding of frightened hearts. Qlowly, one by one, Her Dark ness gave her assembled psychiawitches and sorceresps the leopard look which her populace expected of her and loved, especially when they did not have to face it. Those gathered in the pavilion were almost as tall as she and even more gorgeously clad, but they crouched away from her and ducked their heads like terrified children. Then she asked in a voice that set them shivering, "Why is our newest and insolentest enemy uncaught by you, nay, unreported even," and without waiting for an answer commanded, "Read me the mind of the Endfray. Ice it and slice it, dice it and rice it. Skewer him in space, nail him in time. IF no Situtl him from his lowest note to the top of his compass. Tell me his source, his nature and his fate." Instantly a sorceresp of the Seventh Rank babbled, "He is a dwarf white trainee! and equipped hi a secret laboratory in a branch of the Carlsbad Caverns underlying the White Sands Reservation of the Bulge-Brained Ofays. His aim, unquestionably, is the fomenting of an Ofay revolt, a Honky insurrection. He is now hovering seventeen miles above Aswan St. Paul." Without intervening pause, the Second Psychiawitch chittered, "He is an African agent of Pygmy .extraction, a marauder skilled in teleportation and telepathy. His means of aerial locomotion is a deceit; he uses slowed-down teleportation, not speeded up field flight. Under cover of the magnibomb blast, be landed unharmed In the territory of our hateful enemies and is now making report to His Terrible Tenebrosity in bis shelterpalace beneath Mogadishu." "The Endfray is not one, but many," another took up. "He is radioactive atoms over the Somali boast. He also speeds east intact Over Old Cleveland on the Dead Sea'. Another of these duplicates -- " "By Bast and by Ptah, the Endfray is extraterrestrial," yet another I cat In. "A seven-tentacled amphibian from the fourth planet of puling Altalr, he Is the forerunner of an invasion which -- " "By Serapis and Harpocrites, she is an Indian witch, sister to! Hah, able to penetrate tbe Niryana Screen and let others through. She -- " "The Endfray is a group-minded nation Of Black Martian Ants. Only such tiny creatures could survive the changes ofmomentum that -- " "The Endfray is a fantasml That's why no material weapon can i -- " "That'll be (enough!" interposed Her Serene Darkness. "When I want improvisations, I'll summon me my artists." The faint, jeering notes Of an electronic calliope on a distant pleasure barge seemed an Overtone of her scornful contralto Voice. "Facts I desire. Where is the Endfray? Take scent and search!" And picking up the gold tray, she scattered its contents across the room in one sweep. Tphe soaring, transparent foodspackets were snatched, sniffed, fingered, held to ear and forehead, passed hand to hand. There were faint growlings and eager whimperings as the assembly transformed Into a pack. Her Serenity directed, "Each search that part Of earth or space On which she stands," referring to the diagrammatic floor map. "Eet not one oozy sea cranny or fissure in of damp clay cave be overlooked, and forget not the far side of the moon. Except you... and you," she added, beckoning the First Psychiawitch and also the sorceresp of the Seventh Rank who had been first to answer. "The rest, to work! " "How many minutes have wei for ur task?" the Second Psychiawitch ventured. The eyes of most of the others had already closed or gone blank as the minds behind them clairvoyantly scanned. "I give you each one hundred seconds." Then, turning to the Seventh-Rank sorceresp, "You spoke of an Ofay revolt. Where? When?" "One is planned, Your Darkness, It will begin in Los Alamos and be timed to coincide with an all-out African assault ordered by His Terrible Tenebrosity." "Ridiculous!" the First Psychiawitch interjected in a whisper. "Not even His Idiocy would be so stupid as to think the reservation Ofays might be roused to helpful revolution, or the wild Honkies organized for any purpose. Nor would even His Vileness stoop to use such foul and tawdry means." In the Communications doorway there appeared a warrior, impassive but white-eyed. Her Serenity showed him her finger. He intoned, "The Blacks in Blackness report that Africa has launched from Casablanca a vehicle with a stage thrust. Window clouds surround it. Its course bends west." "Aye. Ten times that of any known Afric or Americ launching vehicle." "It is the revolt-sign!" the Seventh-Rank sorceresp wailed. "From its size, it's more likely itself our death-sign, if our interceptors let it get over our land," the First Psychiawitch remarked coolly. "Silence," Her Darkness said, not unkindly. Then, to the room, "The hundred seconds are up. Where is the Endfray?" I n the hundred and seventyodd faces, eyes opened andor came alive with spirit, looking toward Her Serenity with a professional confidence which, as the seconds passed and not one of them spoke, transformed, again into fear. "Has toy one of you not completed search?" Her Darkness inquired. "Or failed to make it as thorough as I commanded?" Heads rotated from side to side. Lips formed, "No." "Then the Endfray is nowhere," the First Psychiawitch whispered in a voice that was not meant to carry, but did. One cried, "It is as I said. He is a fantasm, invisible to psionic search." "No, it is as # said!" another took up. "He is from Altair, tod returned there in the twinkling of IF a self-teleportive thought We have not searched Altair, only space out to Pluto" ' When the possible seems to fail, only weak brains grasp at the impossible," Her Serenity interposed. "Stellar teleportation takes perceptible time and leaves perceptible dues, as you well know. While fantasms make no teleportive fooddrops land leave no psychic scent No, to solve our problem we must use an apothegm of Sherlock Holmes." Eyes grew puzzled, while the First Psychiawitch murmured, "Who is that?" "Sherlock Holmes was a Cryptoblack of vast deductive intelligence, who lived in -- " Her Darkness rapidly starred herself, moving fingertips to the seven cardinal points -- "the Tabooed Times " Everyone else copied Her Darkness and starred herself at once, to ward off any ill hap which might come from mention of a forbidden area of the continuum. Her Serenity continued, "The Sherlockian apothegm I have in mind i# this: when all other explanations are proven false, then the least likely explanation must be the true one. You have not searched all of habitable Earth and Solar space." The psychiatrist standing bn Memphis said hesitantly, "But, begging Your Serenity's pardon, I have searched every closet of your secret quarters, including the apartments housing your harem and your laboratories of magic and the vault guarding your secret fortune." "It is well that you have," Her Darkness replied, smiling most dangerously. "But those are not the sole forbidden or esp-proof volumes of Earth." "You are thinking of the mantle and core?" one asked. "I said, 'habitable " Her Darkness snapped. "Can you not guess the other spot I have in mindfc" i A sorceresp standing just south of Louisville cried out, "I scent the Endfray over Bowling Green! His vector, southwest by west. He speeds. Already he overpasses Clarksville." The psychiawitch standing between her and the one on Memphis took up with, "And now I catch his scent in turn. He comes on fast. He is over Paris, Milan, Bells, Brownsville, Covington -- " "And now -- " the one on Memphis began. The air screamed. The goldchased pillars shook, and the purple silken awning snapped and flapped as something white flashed through the pavilion, tumbling by its blast everyone but Her Serenity. The scream, which had abruptly dropped in pitch as the disturbance went by, and then faded somewhat, now rose again in pitch and volume. "He returns to buzz us once more," the First Psychiawitch gasped from the floor. Her Dark Serenity -- hair unspiraled and straight on end, eyes like a mad tiger's, fists clenched, knees bent, slender feet a-stamp -- incanted rapidly, "Null Kull, nufi Rufi, Nutt time, null space, Nufi motion and null Grace. By Kinged Man, Spades, and Lovers Be winged-dogged, aU that hovers. Paralysis know, and fear -- " The screaming knifed. The pillars began to shake. Something white -- " -- And drop down here! " S ilence returned with a roar. Something white lay on the tesselated floor -- a squat and rigid spacesuit like a white oQ drum with stubby cylindrical arms and legs, but windowless and without sign of bead. Her Serenity drew and expelled three gasping but controlled breaths. Her hair recurled With faintest rustlings. Those around am id, leaned in, and peered, though without rising fully from the floor Where they had been sent sprawling. Holding out her right hand prone, Her Serenity commanded, "Arise!" Like the reverse motion picture of a rigid fall, the white spacesuit swung erect as if its heels were hinged to the floor. "Emerge!" Her Serenity continued. The suit did not open, but out of it, as if walking through a white wall, there stepped a handsome black boy who looked nine years old. He Wore a loincloth. Though his eyes were shut tight, his face was animated, and he smiled as he looked up. "My Empress -- " he began. Her slender hands, snaking forward to capture him, clamped tight on air. A chuckle came from the far end of the pavilion, where the black boy had rematerialized midway between fwning and floor. Heads switched around to watch him where he stood on air. Two sorceresps pointed at him, the one a wand, the other a yellow thighbone. Three warriors appeared at the Force door, bearing silvery, conenosed hand weapons. Her Darkness snapped her fingers. Still shut-eyed, the black boy chuckled again. The three warriors swayed like ticked bowling pins, anus tight to sides, legs tight together, bound by the constriction fields their weapons had projected backfiring on them. While pointed Wind and thighbone hung limp as cooked spaghetti from the hands of the sorceresps. IF "Any more games?" the black boy inquires hopefully. If he'd been chubbier, he'd have seemed like a wingless cupid. "Who are you?" Her Darkness demanded far more coolly than she felt. "The Endfray, of course, Empress," he replied, looking at her as directly as if his eyes had been open. "At your service, providing -- I humbly beg your pardon -- the service suits me." "Yet you have helped the Honkies, aided the Ofays -- why?" Her Darkness asked automatically. She was still half in shock. The Endfray's grin widened and he quirked his face. Finally, "Just for fun," he said. "No, that's not true. Fact is, you see, I like stories of wars and battles, and -- " "As any young Black should," Her Serenity interrupted approvingly. She was regaining her sense of command, and her mind was beginning to work again. At her feet the First Psychiawitch took fire from her and cried out, "Indeed yes! Brave battles! Complete courage! Stark strength! Merciless might! Violence and victory!" The Endfray hung his head. His expression became an odd mixture of embarrassment and defiance. "But you see, Empress, I always like the losing side best. Being with the winners is no fun. But siding with the losers, when all the odds are against them -- And you got to admit, it's hard to imagine a losinger side than the Ofays." "Accommodation! Tomism! Honky-Iove!" the Second Psychiawitch cried scandalized. "Don't you know the first sign of high intelligence is the faculty of violence?" the First Pyschiawitch demanded. "Inside the Niryaha Screen, they think it's the ability to sit still," the Endfray countered. "Strength is virtue. Weakness is sin," the Leading Sorceresp chanted. "But you got to remember we were the losingest once, we were the weak ones, we -- " the Endfray continued stubbornly, but his voice was drowned in cries of horror at his unprefaced and unstarred reference to the Tabooed Times. The warrior appearing at the Communications doorway did not stand on ceremony, but roared over the din, "Our psionic trackers have lost touch with the African supermissile south of the Azores! The Blacks in Blackness have broken off their reports." sphere was shocked silence, in which the Endfray's voice sounded out clearly. His grin was gone. "Yes," he said, "and now, big as a metal moon, it's approaching Bermuda. Our interceptors rise to destroy it. Counter-missiles shoot from it and become balls of white flame. Our interceptors puff into nothingness. It still comes on." The Leading Sorceresp pointed him a shaking arm. "He is an African agent," she screeched, "sent to disrupt our counsels at this moment of crisis." "That's not true, Empress," the findfray protested "I've stuck with America because we are the losingest side of this war. We are the weak ones. Africa's going to win, unless I --  " Once again his yoke was lost, this time in a din of outrage that broke off only when Her Dark Serenity threw up her arms and died, "Fools! Have you not yet guessed who the Endfray is? Have you not yet solved the Sherlockian riddle? The only spot you haven't psionically searched is psi-proof Mammoth Cave, immemorial home of the Blacks in Blackness and just by Bowling Green. He is dearly one of them, and their best tracker too, highest product of our breeding for psionidty. When he Was out on his mad mission to the Ofays, three bombs got through. When he returned home and you could not find him, We got reports on the launching of the African super-missile. When he started here, those reports stopped. And did it not occur to you that he keeps his eyes drat because he has never before been in an environment of optical light? You are all idiots! Endfray, haw goes it?" "The big one zoomed in over Savannah and Macon. Its last counter-missiles blasted those of our coastal and backup defenses. Ten seconds ago it was about to break up over Birmingham and shower all the dties of the Nile with a hundred hydrogen heads." "Was?" "Of course, 'was,' Empress. While all these here were squawking I jiggered its controls and put it into a permanent #-minute circular orbit around Terra. I'm going to keep; it there too. I'm sorry, Empress, but In spite of you being yery bright and right about me, I don't trust you With that big a bomb Or His Terrible Tenebrosity, of course. War's romantic, but destruction's loo realistic." Her Darkness turned on him. 'You have your nerve!" His embarrassment returned. "I told you I'm sorry, Empress." She paused and turned toward the Communications doorway, where a warrior had appeared. "The super-missile still speeds west," he rapped out. "Twenty of our interceptors have risen from Colorado Springs and thirty from Frisco to destroy it." "Imbeciles! Would you break it up, to do destruction, while it is still over our continent?" "Don't worry, Empress," the Endfray said. A second warrior appeared behind the first. "Our fifty interceptors have escaped control and formed IF themselves into two goose wings slanting back from the super-missile. Their radar blips are unmistakable." The Endfray grinned. "And now, my Empress, I got to be going. That flock needs looking after." A third warrior appeared behind the second. "A bliplet, tiny but unmistakable, has added itself to the fifty blips and one super-blip." "We know," Her Dark Serenity said a shade wearily, waving her hand in dismissal. Then, to the First Psychiawitch, who was at last pushing herself up from the floor, "What exactly, Sister, means the word Endfray?" "# Your Dread Serenity," the other replied, "now that the taboos are lifting, it comes to me. I take it to be a word of Swine Roman, or Pig Latin if you prefer, a secret language of the Evil Days when Satan-Dis-Ahriman ruled. It was formed from English by putting the last part of a word first and then adding a long A. Even as Ofay means foe, Endfray means friend." "Friend of the Foe," Her darkness intoned tiredly "I might have deduced all from his name alone." Her eyebrows lifted. "Or Ender of the Fray. Frayender." "However you name him, he appears to have a lost-cause fixation and a comics-books mentality," the First Psychiawitch intellectualized. "Stop," Her Serenity protested, raising a listless palm, heard enough about Hohldes loS today. Dismiss alL" Russia noted the sup-BomB orbiting with its entourage ghfj set off a warning earthquake that quivered all Antarctica. Australia in turn dropped in the Bering Seg a warning bomb that upset a sealer and sent small a tsunami foaming over the beaches of Kamchatka. But that night the Ofays in their reservations went to sleep for the first time in a century with hope and even a little confidence in their hearts. Someone cared.   rica agreed to a bombing halt. It was madness to continue a war which only built up the Endfray's orbiting armory. They diverted all their research -- scientific, psionic and sorcerous -- to a hunt for a means of knocking the Endfray out of the high sky. But secretly Her Dark Serenity decided that he would make her ideal successor. She pondered plans to win him over. So did his terrible Tenebrosity. The Endfray turned his major attention to the plight of the Untouchables behind the Nirvana Screen. There was a cause even more lost than that of the Ofays. And he still had, for a lost-cause ace in the hole, the Boers and other white trash of the Blancostahs and concentration camps of Rhodesia IF  Feature, V ary feg stience-fiction stories have dealt In any way with robots, though the term has been used often and creatures of metal Have been some of the best characters found In our literature. But these have almost always been mere mechanical men or sub-men. n both their nature and the functions they serve, they are simply artificial humans, sometimes limited in ability' and frequently given greater strength or toughness, but pot essentially different. From the yiew of economics -- Which Is what largely determines How! things wdl really develop -- this is utter nonsense. It makes fief sense to use a costly machine to do I man's job. There will be fio shortage of humanity for such work unless there's a radical change ifi our proclivity to breed and bring up our own kind. And for the jobs requiring strength, an intelligent man inside a power machine is still a lot more efficient than an intelligent machine. Anne McCaffrey suggests that the man-inride-machine idea may be carried much further in the future. In her story, The Ship Who Disappeared, the narrator is an ultimate cyborg -- a mixture of organic intelligence and mechanical parts, in which the human being becomes I part of an interstellar ship. Such  dip should be the perfect place for a robot brain, if one is ever developed. The huge number of sensors that have to he monitored in such a complex mechanism seems to demand an intelligence with more information inputs than can be hooked to the human nervous system; and need for almost instantaneous integration pf the information also demands something frith greater speed than that found between human nerve cells. And the building of such a ship is going to be so expensive that the added cost of robot control no longer seems prohibitive. AfiyhoW, the idea of using an adapted human being here yiolafes another theoretically important economic rule: a man should not be used to do a machine's job. This is a good rule, but it is Being Broken regularly in many of bur factories today -- and probably Will be Broken in the future, is well. It's often cheaper to Waste i man In some routine mechanical bpeirfBon -- t such as fastening a nut Onto a bolt -- than to install the self-regulating machinery to replace him. Unless the robot is functionally and economically superior to a man -- unless he's definitely unlike a man, in other Words -- Miss McCaffrey is correct in her choice Of a human-ship cyborg. S # far, science can't tell us much about robots, except that they must be different from men. The cyberneticists Who work frith "thinking" machines have done no better than science fiction When it comes to robots. Computers are simply tools, and the real intelligence they show comes from the programming done by human operators. Marvelous as they are, they lack the sdf-programming and complex learning abilities that are minimum requirements for what we call a robot. Yet the computer has made the robot at least mechandally posable today. Thirty years ago, toe idea of such a creature was pure fantasy. The vacuum tubes needed for all toe circuits couldn't have been packed inside toe Empire State Building, and toe Waste heat from the power needed Would have made adequate cooling impossible. NoW we have gone to toe transistor ng beyond it to toe IC -- toe integrated circuit; this puts several transistors and toe other components of a circuit onto an etched bit of silicon so small that hundreds could be stacked on a quarter. The power requirement for their operation is also reduced to such a small amount that it is no longer a problem. A mechanism as complex as the organization of brain cells needed for human thinking might conceivably be little bulkier and draw little more power than the body that is needed to support a man's brain. But the hardware has far outstripped the software in this case -- that is, the knowledge of how to build bur robot and what to build. We simply don't know enough about perception land thought yet to have any clear idea of how to build them into a think ing machine. At a recent Boskone meeting in Boston, Dr. Marvin Minsky discussed the problem of teaching a Computer to "see" -- and showed a film of his program. By adding a scanning tube from television to the computer, he had worked out a program that enabled if to distinguish various cubes well enough to stack them up into piles. This represents a difficult progress in machine perception. But it's still a long way from the human ability to look at a circle from the side and see a circle, rather than the oval it becomes, or to build up a pattern from many distorted images. But we still haven't the faintest idea of how our own internal thinking machine functions. We don't Know how we organize the perceptions into patterns, nor even how we store them as memories. Lately, there has been some speculation that eveiything we had guessed about memory in the past is Wrong. We assumed that each bit of information was somehow registered somewhere in a certain cell. Instead!, it may be that memory is diffuse, and thaf everything is somehow impressed everywhere. This is called the hologram theory of memory, since it behaves le the holograms used in laser demonstrations of three-dimensiona projections. On such a film, every bit of the film contains the whole picture -- and cutting off a piece for use still yidds the whole image, rather than only part of it, though the fineness of detail suffers. If so, we don't know how it is done, nor how such memory can be used. And we don't even know whether this is a fair guess or just another blind alley of speculation. fTTeverthdess, work has already started in an attempt to build a robot. He already has a name -- Frederick, for Family Robot for Entertainment, Discussion, Education, the Retrieval of Information and the Collation of Knowledge. And the project is being undertaken quite seriously by a group of sdentists at the Edinburgh Department of Machine Intdligence and Perception. (They haven't This will be a task in which many fidds of research can be pooled. It is headed by Professor Donald Michie, who is a biologist, and his two chief fellow-workers Will be a psychologist and a theoretical chemist. Frederick Will never be a mechanical man. His brain may be housed in a building separate from his "sense organs," or even in several scattered units, linked by cables. Nobody is interested at present in giving him a body, beyond some kind of mechanical arm or #M IF manipulating tool. He isn't meant to be a working model of a sciencefiction robot, but simply a tool for research into how mechanical simulation of thinking can be achieved. The men working on him have ambitious enough a project without trying to make him fully humanoid. They want to find ways for storing information as patterns of memory for faster retrieval and for his own use. They want to enable him to perceive and manipulate objects under wider and less specific conditions than now possible. And he must be able to learn. He must be able to program himself to a large extent. When the programs he is given don't work, he must be able to revise the rules and make up new ones to fit the recurring hew situations he will face. Hopefully, he will learn to communicate significantly about what he perceives and learns. This won't be in English, probably, but in a more generalized language than previous special computer languages that hkve been developed. The results Won't prove much about how the human brain thinks, directly. We can already duplicate some of the specific actions of the Eraih, but there is no evidence that the circuits used do their work in the same way that the human nerve cells do. But science will learn a great deal about one form of thinking from Frederick, and that will be far more than we now know. From such knowledge, it should be possible to form a reasonable body of theory about thought in general, and from that we can go on to test and formulate theories about how the human mind functions. And from what we can then learn about human thought, it will be possible to go back and make a far better attack on the problem of simulating thought in  robot. 'T'he robots that evolve from such a continuous program won't be human simulacra in their thinking, however. We can give them a somewhat similar set of "instincts" -- since they'll be preprogrammed by liumans, just as we're preprogrammed with human instincts by our evolutionary background. We may even find ways to give them the equivalent of our biological drives, such as a pleasurepain response. But they'll still have to think in non-humah ways. Dr. Claude E. Shannen -- "the father of information theory" -- outlined some basic differences in ment and the Computer of the Future. According to him, a robot's circuits will be precise and designed for their functions, where human cell linkages are random and depend oh redundancy to work. Also, a robot will think serially -- step-by-step, but at # fantastic rate; while men apparently think IF    in a parallel fashion, attacking a problem In sort of an all-over fashion. In time, such differences might be brought closer together, of course. But there is one essential difference that wQl never change, because it is the one big advantage of robot thinking. A robot necessarily carries bn the maneuvers of thinking -- whatever they may be -- at a rate thousands of times faster than the human brain can. Messages travel along nerves and across the gaps between cells at a rate measured in thousands of feet per second; electrical pulses travel along wires at over a hundred thousand miles a second. A nerve cell has a response cycle measured in thousandths of a second; and the circuits of a computer today operate in nanoseconds -- thousandths of slowest, the robot is going to have his thought processes operating a hundred thousand times as fast as those of a human being. Perhaps with that speed of thought, a far less complex cluster of "cells" will be able to do the job for him. He can make serial thinking work, where we have no time to trace every step down, but must have enough circuits to examine our memories in parallel. With that difference, a robot can't think like a human being. It would be like a man trying to think by waiting a whole day between each word he utters! The robot is going to have to use different symbol structures in his mind, and that means he's going to perceive his "reality" differently from the perception of any human being. Our robot may some day be superior to us, or he may always be inferior -- probably because Sre won't permit him to be otherwise. But his thoughts are going to be alien to us in a sense that the thoughts of no protoplasmic brain can ever be alien! Out of that alienness will come the abilities he has which are unique to him and useful to us because they are not talents which we can develop. We can't possibly know what good he will be until we begin to build his prototypes. Unquestionably, he'll have uses; and those uses will be unique, not imitations of human activity. There's one comforting thought, however. If men and robots hre so different in thought and function, they won't be in competition. They'll form a natural symbiotic pair, with no danger of the robothuman war so often described in      IF IF  Novelette He could see that the world was doomed to chaos, and the only hope was to speed the process! I door opened, and the legend "A  L Expediters" was revealed. Then M ark Redwing, a lean, dark man the woman had entered and closed of less than average height, the door behind her. dipped the mimeograph stencil Redwing's features lit with a from his typewriter and gazed at saturnine expression. "Listen to it with admiration. this, Linda -- I really love this! A shadow fell bn the frosted Listen: 'The time has come and glass door of his small office, the passed for idle contemplation. We cannot remain silent, inactive. We can no longer tolerate wholesale witchhunts and the persecution of our membership by fascist hategroups. The Emergency Committee for tire Defense of Gus Wilson sees no other alternative to that of drastic, immediate action! Now is the time!'" He chuckled. "I've thrown in every radical political cliche I could think of. How does that strike you? Anything I've missed?" Linda shook her head. "That should shake them up on both fronts, all right. And I guess you're ready for these." She set down the package she'd been carrying and unwrapped it. It was a box of fresh letterheads. "Let's see one," stud Mark, reaching. He held it up to the light, then! pulled open Ids top desk drawer and took out a second sheet. He compared the two, ran his finger over the printing on the fresh one, and nodded his approval. "Very nice, nearly identical. A good job, a fine job of printing." "I'd just as soon not go back there though," Linda said. She shrugged from her suit jacket and hung it neatly beside the door. "It's One of those shops where you just know they're not meeting their overhead with legitimate work. I fed a little crawly every time I'm in there. "But they're cheap, and they ask no questions," Mark said, dismisTad White, o long-time fan, was honored With a Hugo for his many distinguished articles and controversial contributions to various fan magazines. Mr. White has also functioned as a professional sf editor and writer. In # he was co-chairman of the World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York Gty. sing the complaint. "Here's the stencil. Set it up and start running them off. I want to start them into circulation by this afternoon." The cream phone rang. Linda scooped it up on the first ring. "A and L." She extended the phone to Redwing. "For you, 'Mister Lewis.' " He took the phofce. "Lewis here." There was a long pause. He grunted several times, then replaced the receiver. "Everything's moving along smoothly," he said. "The bus company found the bomb in Boston in plenty of time."  cover off the. desktop mimeograph, Redwing moved to the Wall of filing cabinets. From one file be pulled an envelope. He returned to his desk with it. From a: lower desk drawer fie took a sheet of unwatermarked, Woolworih's sulfite typing bond and rolled it fhtd bis typewriter. His bands paused, momenSrpy, over thei keyboard, and tEeB Began rattling out tfie brief message: IF This is our last yarning. You have until Thursday the #st to publish your agreement in the personals section of the Nevv York Times. The enclosed is a reminder that your time is running out. From the envelope he removed a sheaf of snapshots. There were several different shots. Each in quadruplicate. All showed a nearly identical scene; they must have been taken in quick succesion. The subjects were two men. One was past his middle age. His face was clearly visible. It was a face Which had been well known for over a quarter of a century, the face of a man who, by Presidential dispensation, still held his high governmental post long after the mandatory retirement age. The other was a young man. Both were nude. Redwing selected one of the snapshots and laid it on his desk while he neatly folded his brief letter into thirds and then inserted both in a business envelope. A carbon went into the file, along with the envelope of remaining photographs. i "Any of those things run off yet?" he asked Linda. She stopped the clacketing mimeograph and passed him a small stack of sheets. "Most of them are run off, Boss," she said. "Here's the first twenty or thirty." I "Good," he grunted. He dropped them to the floor. They slipped and fluttered until they were blanketing the floor around his feet. He did not bend to retrieve them. Instead he began walking on them, wiping his feet on them, scuffling them as he might a doormat. When he was satisfied with the results, he picked them up and shuffled them into an untidy pile on his desk. From another file drawer he removed a set of letters and envelopes. Some of the letters were typed -- on demonstration machines in Macy's -- and some were hand-scrawled. The latter bad cost an average of fifty cents apiece and had been written with careful effort by the winoa and derelicts he bad found when he had spent an afternoon three months earlier wandering from Union Square down Fourth Avenue to the Bowery. The paper used for the different letters was a motley variety, ran ging from monogrammed sheets in odd sizes and tints to lined paper tom from a pad. T he fop letter was typewritten. It said, "Dear Sirs. I found this crazy paper oti the street and I think its disgrisefull and you out to do something about it rightaway." Redwing folded if together with One of the footprinted mimeographed sheets, and inserted them both in an envelope addressed to "The Justice Department, Washington DC." The other letters were similar In sentiment. They Were addressed to congressmen and senators, with varying accuracy, as well as to a number of governmental agencies, including the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Meticulously, Redwing folded the dirty sheets with their indignant letters and sealed them into their respective envelopes. "This evening, Linda, I want you to take five of these out to Brooklyn With you and mail them in boxes in different zones. They have return addresses -- you can post them nearby." Linda shrugged. "There goes my evening, just driving ground. Couldn't they all just have mailed them in Grand Central Station on their way home?" "You can take off an hour early," Redwing said. That morning Redwing and his secretary folded and stuffed over five hundred of the form letters -- undirtied litis time -- into envelopes addressed to major names of every political denomination: Liberal, Reform Democrat, Socialist, Socialist Worker, Republican, Democrat, Young Republican, Youth Against War and Fascism, Dixiecrat, the Anti-Defamation can! Nazi Party, the John Birch Society, Jewish leaders, leaders of IF gelt patriots "Who is this Gus Wilson, anyway?" Linda asked at one point. lowing flapped a dozen more envelopes. "Head of a trade union. Suspected of strong leftist leanings. This letter should clinch it. Right nog he's testifying before the Senate Labor Relations Subcommittee. He's not putting on too good a show, and there's been a few demonstrations on his behalf. There's an emergency committee set up to collect funds for his defense; they've already cut him off from the union war chest. The union's about ready to dump him. This letter should help." "But, if he's already on the way put -- :?" "Why go after him?" Redwing smiled. There was no warmth in his anile. "Chaos. This should muddy things up a little. It should embarrass a lot of people. It's too pat; somebody on the emergency defense committee will catch the blame. A saboteur. Disunity will erupt. And of course that's the prelude for our campaign against the Unions. I'm setting it up for the wolves." St noon Redwing loaded the neatly addressed envelopes Into his atfidiS case and took them to Gritad Central Station, where he pbisted them before heading up Pjgjdc Avenue to his private dub for ' H i  L tT Tdlo f Mark," Chester Folkes i-tlsaid a shade too eagerly. Redwing stifled his inward impulse. An aroma of blended deodorant, hair cream, after-shave lotion and month wash assailed him; he wanted to wrinkle his nose in disgust and turn his back. Folkes was, at something less than thirty, already neatly preserved in all the proper emb almin g agents. His sandy hair was too thin, but brushed impeccably in place and held there as if lacquered. His shining face had a pinkness that would never become ruddy. His outstretched hand was so plump that his knuckles were dimpled. And it was because of these qualities and the others they all too accurately suggested that Redwing had decided immediately that Folkes would be useful. He had let the man cultivate him. "Share my table?" Folkes asked, his hand still out. "Certainly, Chet," Redwing said warmly. "Just let me get washed up first." He turned as if not noticing Folkes's limp gesture. His hands were itching badly now, and he needed to remove the transparent rubber surgical gloves he always wore in the A  L office. Once in the washroom he could soak his hands for a few minutes before talcing them. Once seated at Folkes's table in the dining room, he took a deep breath, held it for the count of ten, let it out slowly, anil smiled warmly at his erstwhile companion. "How's the work coming, Mark?" Chester asked effusively. "I hear Ford just renewed your grant." Redwing nodded. "They did. We're In the midst of a very promising line of research." "Is that right?" Folkes said. "You know, I don't believe you've ever told me much about your project." "That's true," Redwing agreed. He glanced down the menu. "Something to do with politics, isn't it?," Folkes asked. "Group dynamics," Redwing said. "A very rough science. We're still in the early stages of setting things up ini terms that can be programmed, and I don't anticipate fullscale application of our findings for use in political prediction for another, oh, ten years yet." "Group dynamics, eh?" Folkes said, trying to sound both knowledgeable and curious. "The behavior of groups, you might say," Redwing amplified. "There's a strong analogy to atomic physics. An individual electron is pretty unpredictable, but statistically you know exactly what they'll do. Human beings are an individualistic lot, taken one by one. But group behavior is another story. Mob psychology, political action; if you can peg down enough of the valuables, you can rough out a workable equation. Right now, we're still forking with the rudiments, but if our present research pans out, we'll be a long way toward a genuine political science."   sayl Just marvelous! You know, I certainly am amazed at all the things they're doing with science these days. Why, it seems only yesterday we hadn't even men bn the moon, and now we've not only got them on Mars, but flatwall color TV, and -- " "And the Russians have bases on Mars too, as well as their own positron bomb," Redwing said. His voice dropped and became more intense. "It's unfortunate that they had to be first, but that's tKe breaks, huh? Of course we really don't have to be afraid of the Russians these days, anyway, but it is a little scary to realize that once every eighteen hours a Chinese space station passes over our country, isn't it? Some people have trouble sleeping when they get id speculating over how) close the Chinese are to the positron bomb, now that they have the delivery system. Bui that's progress, I guess. You can't stop process." Folkes looked up sharply from his meal. "What's that, MarEH Who'd want io stop progress? Redwing smiled. If was a feline! expression, and if seemed id transfix Folkes's widened eyes. "Havj IF jra fever pondered?" be asked, "Consider this. Fifty years ago, Ibis dub -- he gestured about him at the teak-paneled walls and somber hues, the obsequious staff and wealthy dubmen -- "would never have admitted an American Indian to its sacrosanct rooms. And many still grumble at the thought. Would you have their whole way of life disturbed?," Folkes tried to chuckle at what he sensed must be the joke. "But, Mark -- fifty years ago, how many Indians had..." IBs voice seemed to lose all impetus and trickle off as he realized what he was saying. "Hit oil, made their mint, cast off their loin doths, and come off the reservation?" Redwing asked, finishing the question for him. "Not many, Fm sure, Chester. It's a sign of changing times. Sometimes change is not fully appreciated. Sometimes it shakes somnambulent men from their quiet slumbers with the threat of extinction. Sometimes, Chester, it will jar a man into rash action. Things start happening just a little too fast for him to comprehend. He doesn't think --  he reacts. Bang, goes the weasel!" "But, ahh, Mark. Are you saying you think we should stop progress?" "You can't stop progress. That's meaningless," Redwing said. "But still, better to let the deeping Bogs lie, eh? Than to provoke their bark ipd their bite?" His voice was sardonic. "Mirk, I'm afraid  don't undegstand you at all," Chester FolEes said dowly. He shook Ms head gs he spoke, and his fleshy cheeks shook. Redwing pondered how long it would take Folkes to lose the flab, after the food stopped. K fter luncheon, Redwing picked up an early edition of the after- noon Post, and admired the head- photo, in the bottom left quarter of the page, pas of Selma Ryan displaying as much thigh as possible for the purpose of publicizing her latest TV show. The few short lines directly under the headline on the tabloid's front page said simply: "Abraham Victor, President of the New York Stock Exchange, jumped to his death ... Market closed .   immediate investigation under way... story on page three." Page three carried the story across four columns of the top left, ground the smiling photo of a gray old man. Redwing read only the opening lines: "Abraham Victor, president of the New York Stock Exchange for nine years, took his life today only shortly after opening business hours, at about #:# a.m. in a spectacular death dive from his #th-story office in lower Manhattan. He left behind only a pile of well crumbled ashes to explain his action..." "Strike one " said Redwing. Ill j C C A ny calls?" Redwing asked, !j when he returned to the j j A  L office later that afternoon. ! j "Two. Both on the black phone jjjj -- your other office. Dr. Seymore f jwants to see you about some charts, ji j And somebody from the Ford j! Foundation, for a luncheon apj  pointment. I put him down for next  Wednesday."  Redwing nodded, then tossed the  paper onto his desk. "Seen this? g  Our first direct hit. Victor commitip ted suicide. The Exchange is closed. , They're afraid of irregularities, but they'll have to reopen. There'll be j a panic." The cream phone rang. Redwing i answered it. He listened without it l speaking then hung up: "That was  Cleveland," he said. "Greyhound m didn't find the bomb in time." ? Linda turned to stare at him. "It  -- went off?" # Redwing nodded. "I trust the I others will be searched far more H diligently." I Linda gave him a strange look as  he went out again. AT ark Redwing did not return to the small office until late that afternoon, just as Linda was preparing to lock up. His expression was troubled. "What's up, Boss?" Linda asked solicitously. "Seymore's pretty charts get out of order?" IF Redwing sat down and stared out the single office window at the wall of the airshaft opposite. "No, not at all. I wish you wouldn't keep riding him. You've never met the man. He's an extremely able individual, exactly the man for the job, my perfect front man. Trouble is, he's too good." "What do you mean? On the phdne he's another one of these perfect Whiteys, all full of hearty hello's, how-are-you's, always telling me how we must meet some time, since we have the same boss. He strikes me as the sort who's better at getting a job than holding it. I get the feeling every time I talk to him that he's making a long-distance pass at me." She shrugged. "He should only know." Redwing shook his head impatiently. "That's just the mold they cast scientists from these days. If he hadn't met me, Seymore would be bucking for a Government research grant or a niche in some huge corporation. Like everyone in his field, any intelligent man who wants to get anywhere, he's taken on the protective coloration. You should see him operate on those people from Ford. "No, that's not the problem. Seymore is an okay man, all right. It's his job to set up the main computer program for us and to coordinate all the rest. He's already through the prelims -- and it's the direction he finds himself headed toward that is scaring him. He's smart. He can evaluate the stuff he's feeding into that program. And he's been getting closer and closer to the truth. "As far as he knows, the Institute for Population Studies is simply trying to program a long-term study of political behavior, with an eye to a little forecasting in times to come. But nobody in the Institute is aware of my real reasons for setting it up, nor the uses I've been putting the program to. No one has any idea of my real purposes. They naively believe they're helping to turn political science into a real science, and they're full of what they think it'll do for human relations and all that baloney. God help us. If this sort of thing ever was used in politics... "But, anyway, Seymore is catching on." "How could he? You haven't been doing anything to make him suspicious, have you?" Linda asked. 'O edwing swivled around to stare at her. She was not unappealing. "I don't have to. It's all there already. He's reading it out of the preliminary results and the data we've amassed. The headline on Victor crystallized it for him. "The human brain, Linda, is a vastly superior and more efficient computer than anything we've yet built. Those chains of protein molecules store and remember everything. Every so often the subconmmu correlates a couple of items mi comes up with a 'hunch,' which far the most part we ignore. Seymore -- the man has a broad grasp of everything programmed for the computer. It's all up there in his own computerlike brain." Redwing tapped his own forehead. "It's just waiting for his subconscious to sort it all out. "Now ideally he should arrive at the same conclusions. There's no magic to a computer, Linda. It just adds things up. Its only real advantage is its single-mindedness. It operates without bias, without the built-in 'noise' of distractions we humans have. It doesn't require a particular answer in order to justify its existence to itself. It has no prejudices. It just weighs all the factors, like a super adding machine, and reports the balance. "There have been human computers -- people with trick minds, the lightning calculators, the type who work huge sums without effort, or recall or compute the date of any day of the year, for any year in history. Most are idiots. Simple-minded. It's not a survival trait. "But most of us have minds cluttered with too many problems, too many unrelated thoughts and ideas. Our emotions get in the way. And we don't trust bur intuition. So there is Seymore; he's been picking and subconsciously sorting all the data he's been feeding the machine, lie "There's only one answer. And it's nagging at him, at the fringes of his consciousness. Victor's death was very upsetting to him. He can't quite figure out why, but it is disturbing the man, Linda. And that disturbs me." Linda nodded, slowly. "I see. But just how much can he find out?" "The broad outlines: the trends and countertrends. They're all there in the data; -- I know; that's where I got them. The death of the individual among the masses. Population pressures. Racial friction. Religious friction. The growth of insuperable pressures, and monolithic power blocs. The signs are Ml there, just as I'd originally instituted them. The Institute's study necessarily confirms them. "If you look for them, the trends are obvious: power massing, gaps growing. The world's getting too small. No man is more than two man in the world. You can't go off and live on an island any more. A bad cabbage crop in France will lay ten thousand men off Detroit assembly-lines. No one has to make decisions any more. Responsibility is a corporate function. How much longer can we wait for the Chinese and hope for prosperity to humanize them? One more major famine over there, and they'll take us all with them, just for spite. The races aren't assimilating any more -- they're dividing. And where will IF our allegiance go?" He laughed mirthlessly, "You've heard it all from me before. The world is one great machine now, and all of us are cogs within wheels within cogs within wheels. We're all geared in together, and we don't have a flywheel to balance us. We're a steamroller without brakes. "It's all there for Seymore to read. A huge machine on the verge of going completely out of control. "And you know what we have to do, Linda. When a machine goes but of control, you have to stop it, before it blows up and destroys you. "That's our job. To stop the machine." He nodded toward the Out basket. "Don't forget those letters when you go." IV TVedwing worked late that night. He spent the next hour making phone calls and jotting notes. Several of his calls were overseas, by satellite. Following that, he wrote letters, brief and anonymous, on Woolworth's typing bond. Occasionally, before seeing an envelope, he would tuck in a photostat or photograph. Once he opened the safe that was behind the file drawer marked "M" and removed several bills of a large denomination, which he dropped into an empty envelope with a blank sheet of paper. By the time he was finished, the hour was late. He stood and stretched, then went out in the hall, locking his office behind him as though leaving it, and soaked his hands for five minutes in the washroom down the ball. His hands felt puffy and sore when he added more talc, snapped the gloves back on, and returned to the office, but he did not doff them for the night until his letters were in the mail and he was on his way home. iC'KTou know," said Chester   Folkes, after taking a rather strong gulp of his martini, "it is really not safe to be out bn the streets, these days. Can you imagine it? There I was, taking an afternoon stroll from the apartment just trying to work up a little honest appetite, you know, and the next thing I knew, there were bullets flying all around me! This seedy little colored man, if you know what I mean, he was running down Sutton Place with a suitcase in one hand, and these policemen were shooting at him." He mopped his forehead with the napkin, oblivious to the reproving stare of the approaching waiter. "They got him, of course. Along with all the glass in the telephone booth on the corner across the street. They shot him and knocked him down in a heap right in the middle of the sidewalk, right in the direction in which I was heading. The suitcase fell opea and a little pile of dirty laundry ipilled out of it. I heard one of the policeman swearing about it, and about how it would have to be covered up. I can't imagine what he was talking about. I was so upset that I hailed a cab. I would have crossed the street if a cab hadn't come along, you know that?" He downed the remainder of his martini and signaled for another. "Totally unnerving, to be shot at on Sutton Place" "I can imagine," murmured Redwing. T kere are some quite fascinating stories in here, if you know .Where to look for them," Redwing remarked to Linda a few days later. He tapped his copy of the morning Times with his forefinger. "For instance, scandal has struck the Church. The Archbishop of the pasfem Diocese shot himself. A sin, pSu know. There was a riot in fettle; somebody started potshotting the police during the Boeing strike, and they attacked the strikers. A shame; the strike had almost been resolved. And there's an editorial about that regiment of American Legion hotheads who invaded the East Village last night looking lor pacifists to beat up. Another JgSJ I ! crashed into Long Island almost immediately after fkebff from Kennedy, and yet anSther mistook the Indian Ocean for # grounding them all. Douglas is screaming, of course." "Was that all us?" Redwing nodded, flashing his surprisingly canine teeth in a momentarily smile. "All but the American Legion." "You've really got your program rolling, now," she said. Her tone was strange. "Push a little here... pull a little there," Mark said. "Yes. Phase one is finished. We've flexed our muscles sufficiently to prove their capabilities. Now it's time for phase two -- the main program." "I just don't know," Linda said. "I mean, I can't see what good it's really doing, Mark. All I can see is that you've hurt a few individuals, ruined a few lives. And now you're aiming to destroy more people. But you keep saying that there is no individual responsibility any more. How can you expect this to add up to anything more than -- " "More than a little nastiness?" Redwing sighed. "That's where good old Population Studies comes in. I'm not hitting out at random, Linda. This is judo, an advanced sort of judo. "I already knew things were heading out of control. You knew that. What I wanted, what I had to find, was a way to cripple them without just accelerating the big bang. I had to find a way to sabotage things, slow them down, withIF out completely destroying everything. Sure, Population Studies is a front, but it's a good front, because it's real. It's equally valid for what people think it's doing. But its real purpose, the real reason I set it up, is to weigh the masses of data, to show me the time and the place for another judo chop, another crippling blow. By hitting at the people I do, when I do, it's as though I knocked the tooth out of a gear -- and made the machinery falter. It's not the specific men I hit, it's the things they symbolize, and what I strike through them. Like I said: chipping teeth from the gears. The gears aren't stripped, but -- " "I see," Linda said. Her tone was emotionless. "It's all a matter of gears and tactical chops to you. Just a matter of choosing the right targets at the right time?" There was something in the way she said it that kept Redwing from automatically agreeing with her. "What's the matter, Linda? Developed a conscience all of a sudden?" #X#ou're like a kid with an air  rifle," she said, her voice tight, intense. "Like a kid who plinks at birds and squirrels like they were tin cans that moved. You don't see these people as real, live, human beings, do you? "Sometimes I think you're just a hostile Goddamned Indian still sniping at the white settlers, you know that? And you feel free to hire me to assist your little scheme because you think, 'She's a Negro. She'll go along with my ideas; she wants to see things changed too.' But you're a rich man's son. It's like everything else for you -- it's all just abstractions." He stared at her with concealed surprise. There was a hint of tears at the corners of her eyes. It was the first, emotional outburst he'd seen from her. "I forgot you took a Ph.D. in sociology, Linda," he said calmly. "I forgot you knew all the answers already." There was a long silence. Then: "I've been talking with Seymore," Linda said quietly. It was a bomb which fell, ticking, to the floor between them. His face flickering no change of expression, Mark asked, "When was this?" "Yesterday, when you were out. He called, he wanted to talk to you again. It was very urgent, he said. I asked him what he wanted. I told him I knew the main details of the program. "He told me, Mark. He told me what was happening -- what's really happening." "You didn't tell me he'd called." "No." There was another long silence. Suddenly the shrill yammer of the black phone broke the silence. RedI Vriag fixed Linda with a sardonic I m, then swiveled his back to her pad picked up the phone. "Ahh, Mark?" It was Chester FoBos. Ahh, listen, Mark, I'm a frauf IH have to skip lunch frith jom today." Mark said it was all right. "I hate to caned out on you," Fdkes said. His voice was thin and L  sfcri B over the phone. "I know how taxLdst you enjoy the chance to relax. But things have been a little hectic lately. Stocks are acting up, d'you know what I mean? My broker has been quite a bother for the last eqople of days. I --  well, I don't want to cry bn your shoulder, old man. Perhaps tomorrow, eh?" "Certainly, Chester," Redwing sad. "Tomorrow." He hung the phone up, and swung back around to face Linda. "Where were we?" "Seymore." "Yes." "Do you want to know what he said?" Redwing did not answer. "He told me he was running some independant checks of his own, th at he'd had a hunch about things and he wanted to check it out. It was Victor's suicide. You were right about that, Mark. That's what set him off. It was too neat. It happened at too opportune a time. He wasn't sure for whom it was opportune, but... He worked it but. A week earlier, or a week later -- it wouldn't have had the effect it had. It was just too pat for him. So he started integrating a new factor: a party or parties dedicated to taking advantage of just such weak points as in the Victor case. And he extrapolated the trends." # A nd just what did he find out,  Linda?" Redwing asked softiy"Chaos. Total chaos. Not just a little slowing down. The reverse. He said that things Were snowballing, that it was like a finely tuned machine. If you threw it out of balance, the internal vibrations Would tear it apart. You can't slow if doWn because that's how the balance is lost. He made some predictions, Mark. You want to know a couple?" Redwing nodded, with a vague show of polite interest. His mind was elsewhere. Seymore was going to be a problem. One he'd have to deal With. "He predicted that there'd be a breakdown in labor-management negotiations throughout most of the major industries. He said any spark, almost, could set it off. He said that there might be an aviation crisis. He suspected that there might be a popular uprising against organized religion." "That's not all," Redwing said. "Tonight on Public Television, in the midst of the Disney Retrospective, a fifteen-minute piece of animated pornography will be shown in living color. Snow White never looked so good." IF Linda glared at him, wordlessly, "Buf you're right, at that," Redwing said. "Let's not quibble over terms. We have only one foreseeable future: chaos. We have two possible Ways to get there: slow disintegration, or the big bang. If Seymore weren't an idiot, he'd have tried an extrapolation along both lutes instead of just the one. PC want chaos, yes. But I want the chaos that man can survive. Yes, I 'do want to reduce our gleaming technology to rubble... I want to bring the Whole stinking mess down around our ears, Linda, because as hard as it'll hurt, it's better than extinction for the race." Redwing rose from his desk and Began to pace. "Ever since we've had atomic power, we've been in acute danger. And since the positroH bomb has been a reality we've Been living on borrowed time. "There are two schools of thought One holds that power is so dangerous that it must not be held by individuals, but by groups -- corporations. The other feels that power must be held by a small and closely watched number of individuals. "But they are both wrong. As long as power easts in such a tremendous concentration, it doesn't matter Who holds it. La any bands, it's tod dangerous. We must disarm the bomb. We must strip out the fuse aid scatter the components to the winds. "In other words, Linda, we must create chaos. My ancestors had the right idea. When mankind is reduced to small and semi-isolated communities at best -- Or subsistence-level existence at worst -- when the lines of communications and transportation are completely broken so that there can be no warring nations poised at the brink of disaster, then the human race can take a deep breath and begin to live again. "We've been pushed too far, too fast. We're breeding out of control. We're a half-mad cage of overcrowded rats. We're losing our souls in the hell of our own making. "It has to end, Linda. It will end. Of that there can be nd doubting. The only question is how. Can we control it sufficiently? Or will it wipe us all out? -- will die. They'll be the Ones who can't adjust, the city-dwellers cut off from food and water and -- " be laughed once, a short bark -- "their dubs. They're the excess. They have to go. Something Would take them in any case: plague, war, pollution. But they can't call their present lives really living, anyway, taught as they are in sterile boxes, pressured from birth to death in anonymity. "I don't kid myself I'm really doing them a favor, the Ones who Won't make if. But I'll be doing the race one." # #'V#" #U poor naive, idiotic fool," Linda said quietly and bitterly. "You, you -- idealist . Back to nature. Back to your father's father's ways. Solve everything by turning the dock back. Do you think that destroying this country alone would accomplish anything -- beyond doing the Sino-Soviet Bloc's work for them? Do you really think you'd be doing a favor for anyone ?" Mark sighed, turned to stare out the small dingy window. Sunlight slanted down the airshaft, warming and ydlowing the sooty brick wall opposite. "You can't conquer a country when it isn't a country any more," he said. "Not when it's nothing but an area of tribes and individuals, and all the channels for control are gone. But that's an academic point in any case. I'm not quite so much alone in this as you may have thought, Linda. And in any case, they're too closely joined to us, economically, to escape the scythe. You're right -- it's a snowball. It won't observe the artificial distinction of national borders. I'm sorry you've chosen to react in this way, Linda. Because this is my mission. I will not be stopped." Behind him, Linda reached a shaking hand into her purse and removed a small gun. It was a .# calibre solid-fuel, self-propellingslug Schneikel automatic. It was as thin as a cigarette case; it was designed for a woman's purse. '"I was afraid of that." Her voice caught and something about it alerted Redwing. He started to turn. "The trial period's over, you said. And Seymore says soon we'll be over the brink, past the point of no return. Somebody has to stop you," Linda said. "I wish it didn't have to be me. Good-bye, Mark." The violent hissing of the small gun blended with her last words. It was much easier than she'd thought it would be. The gun lay easily in her hand, and when she squeezed the trigger it did not recoil. The first shot was high, and she thought she'd missed, as Redwing threw himself at her. The second and third shots caught him in his throat and chest. It was much messier than she'd expected. The cream phone began to ring. Redwing's leg kicked weakly at the desk, then lay still. With subdued haste, the saboteur gathered up her few things from the office and left. The phone continued to ring for # IF IF  Novel Excerpt He fled into Skagganauk, the abyss... where there are no stars, and men dare not go, and even gods die I I shadow upon the' castle wall. "Yes, Typhon." . "Father I" A sound to break the ears occurs then. "Anubis said you had perished #" "He lied. Osiris must have wielded the Hammer, saying that he was saving the universe, for I was losing the battle." "That is true," says the Prince. "I was not losing, however. I was winning. He wished to slay me, not the Nameless." "How did you survive?" "A reflex. I went into fugue as the blow descended. A fraction of it fell upon me, and Anubis retrieved me, senseless, and spirited me off to his House. He scattered my gear across the Midworlds. He trained me as his weapon." "To slay Thoth?" "That was the task he gave me." "Then he diesl" said Typhon and rears, flaming. 'Desist, brother," says the Prince. "He did not succeed, and we may yet have a use for the dog." But already the dark horse shadow Has faded, and the Prince lowers his head. He looks to Set. "Should wel follow to stop him?" "Why? Anubis has lived a thousand years too long. Let him guard himself now. -- And how? Even if wl would, there is none can stop Typhon when the madness lies upon him." "That is true," says the Prince and turning, he addresses Vramin: "If you would serve me further, my former Angel of the Seventh Station, go you to the House of the Dead. It will soon require the presence of one who can operate the machinery." "Typhon was Lord of the House of Fire," says Vramin. "Yes, but I fear he will not remain in the House of the Dead after he has gained vengeance. If I know my brother, he will then seek out the one who wielded the Hammer. He will go after Osiris." "Then I shall remove me to the House of the Dead. Will you accompany me, Madrak?" "If the Prince has no further use for me here." "I have not. You may go." "Lord," says Vramin, "it is kind of you to trust me again, knowing the part I played in the Wars of the Stations." "Those days are gone, and we are different people. Are we not?" "I hope so -- and thank you." The Prince crosses his arms and bows his head. Vramin and Madrak vanish. "How," says the Steel General, "may I assist you?" "We go again to fight the Nameless," says the Prince Who Was A Thousand. "Will you come and stand in reserve?" "Yes. Let me summon Bronze." "Do so." The winds of Marachek stir the dust. The sun flickers its way into another day. V ramin stands in the great Hall of the House of the Dead, holding his Maypole cane. Its streamers go forth, entering into all the passageways, visible or otherwise, which come together at that place. At his side, Madrak shifts his IF weight from foot to foot and stares about him. Vramin's eyes glow, and the light dances within them. "Nothing. Nothing alive. Nowhere," he says. "Then Typhon has found him," says Madrak. "Typhon is not here either." "Then he has slain him and departed. He doubtless seeks Osiris now." "I wonder..." "What else could it be?" "I do not know. But now I am master here, by delegation of the Prince. I will find the places of power and learn their functions." "Yet once you broke faith with the Prince." "That is true -- and he forgave me." Then Vramin seats himself upon the throne of Anubis, and Madrak pays him homage, saying: "Hail, yramin! Master of the House of the Dead"" "You need bend no knee to me, old friend. Please rise. I will need your assistance, for this place is quite different from Seventh Station, where once I reigned." And for hours Vramin studies the secret controls about the throne. Then, " Anubis #" cries a voice which he knows is not the voice of Madrak. And somehow he mimics the bark, the whine: Yes?" "You were right. Horus was defeated, and he returned here. But he is gone again." It is the voice of Osiris. He gestures with his cane, and the big window appears in the middle of the air. "Hello, Osiris," he says. "So the Prince has finally moved," says Osiris. "I suppose I am next" "I hope not," says Vramin. "I can personally attest to having heard the Prince assure Horus that he would not take vengeance upon you -- in exchange for cooperation." "Then what has become of Anubis?" "I do not know for certain. Typhon came here to kill him. I came here to clean up after Typhon and to hold the Station. Either he has slain him and departed, or Anubis fled and Typhon followed. So listen to me, Osiris. Despite the Prince's assurance, you are in danger. Typhon is not aware of the Prince's promise, and he was not party to it. Having learned, the true story from Set herself and having heard it confirmed by the Prince, he is likely to seek vengeance on the wielder of the Hammer -- " "Set lives?" "Yes, He was known for a time as Wakim." "Anubis's emissary I" "None other. The dog had stripped him of his memories and sent him to slay his own son -- and father. That is what moved Typhon to anger." "A pox on the whole bloody family! And what has become of my son? He but left me this note, and -- Of course!" " 'Of course what?" "It is not too late. I -- " "Behind you, on the wall!" cries yramin. "Typhon!" Osiris moves with a speed which belies his fragile appearance. He dives toward a green tapestry, casts it aside and moves beyond. The shadow flows after him and rears. When if moves away, there is a iTyphon-shaped hole in the tapestry and the wall itself. U'T'yphon," says Vramin.  "I am here," comes the voice ."Why did you give warning?" "Because Thoth gave him his life." "I was not aware of this." "You did not remain long enough to hear it repeated. Now it is too late." "No. I fear he has escaped me." "How so?" "He was not within the chamber when I destroyed it." "This may be a good thing. Listen. We can use Osiris." "No! There can never be peace between our families so long as he lives, regardless of any chivalrous sentiments my brother may mouth. No. I will search this House until I find Osiris and he passes down Skagganauk Abyss!" "As did Anubis?" "No! Anubis has escaped me!" comes the cry. "For a time. Then Typhon rears; the flames come, and he Is gone. Vramin makes a daisy-beheading gesture with his cane and the window is closed. "Anubis still lives," says Madrak, looking back over his shoulder. "Obviously." "What shall we do?" . "We shall continue to study the functions of the House of the Dead. "I wish to rest." "Then do so. Find yourself a near chamber and retire. You know where the food is." "Yes." "Till later, then." "Till later, Lord." Madrak goes forth from the great Hall and he wanders. He comes after a timeto a chamber where the dead stand like statues. He seats himself among them. He speaks. "I was his faithful servant. Hear mb, lady with the breasts like melons. I was his faithful servant. The poet went to war with the other Angels, knowing it went against his will. But he is forgiven and exalted. And where am I? Servant to a servant." It is not fair. "Fm glad you agree with me. And you there, fellow with the IF extra arms. Did you spread religion and morality? Did you singlehandedly defeat monstars and wondrous beasts among the unenlightened?" Of course not . "So you see." He slaps his thigh. "So you see, there is no justice, and virtue is constantly betrayed, befouled, imposed upon. Look what has become of the General, who devoted his life to humanity; Life took away his own humanity. Is that justice?" Hardly. "All comes to this, my brothers. We all become statues in the House of the Dead, regardless of the lives we led. The universe never thanks. The giver is never repaid. Oh, You Who May Be, why did You make things to be this way -- if You did make things, to be this way, that is. Why? I have tried to serve You and the Prince, Your Agent. What's it gotten me? Coach fare and third-class accommodations. I am glad that Set battles the Nameless without the gauntlet of power -- " "What?" And looking up, he sees a statue which had not been there before; and unlike the others, it moves. Its head is the head of a black dog, and its red tongue darts and curls. X hidden from Vramin, escaped Tphon?" "This is my House. It will be many ages before all its secrets may be learned by another." Madrak stands, and his staff spins in his hands. "I do not fear you, Anubis. I have fought it every dime and place where man may take the Word. I have sent many to this House, and I come myself as a conqueror, not a victim." "You were conquered long ago, Madrak, and you only just now realized it." "Silence, dog! You speak to one who holds your life in his hands." "And you speak to one who holds your future in his." "What do you mean?" "You said that Set goes to battle the Nameless once again?" "That is true. And when the Nameless has been destroyed, the millennium will come." "Ha! Save your metaphysics, preacher. Answer me another thing, and I will tell you a very good thing indeed." "What thing?" Anubis steps forward, limp arm fluttering at his side. "What of the gauntlet of power?" "Oh," says Madrak, removing a gauntlet from beneath his dark garment and drawing it upon his right hand. "When I obtained this item, I thought that worlds might be won for the faith with it." It reaches to his dbow, his shoulder. "I did not know that Wakim was Set I was tempted to keep it for tnyself. So I substituted my own gauntlet-that-grows. If is a common enough item in some places among the Midworlds. This one seems to be of peculiar potency, while the other is but ordinary armor." The gauntlet now flares to cover his back and his chest "I could kiss thy fat cheeks," says Anubis. "For Set will now have less of a Chance against the Nameless. And all along you planned this betrayall You are a shrewder man than I'd supposed, Dadl" "I was used and I was tempted." "But no more shalt thou be used. Oh nol Now you wear the glove, and I propose an alliance -- " "Back, dogl You're no better than anyone else. I've something you want now and my backside is suddenly kissing sweet. Oh nol Whatever I do with my newfound power, I do for one person: Mel" "The alliance I propose will be mutually beneficial." "I need but give the alarm and you will be bound so tightly that all your guile will not serve to free you. I need but spin my staff in the proper manner and your brain will decorate the walls. So speak now with that in mind, fork-tongue, and I will listen." "If Osiris still Kves," says Anubis, "and if we can' reach him, then we three together may be able to destroy Thoth." "I am sure that Osiris still lives -- though for how much longer this will be so, I cannot say. Typhon pursues him about the House of Life at this moment." "We've a chance, a very good chance, of recovering all -- now that you hold the gauntlet. I've got a way to get us to the House of Life, and perhaps a way to rescue Osiris, also." "Then what? We do not even know where the battle with the Nameless is occurring." "One thing by itself, another when if arises. Are you with me?" "I'll go along with you to the House of Life, as Thoth desires that Osiris live and I may help to effect this much of his will. In the meantime, I shall be thinking." "That is good enough." ((Qee how the gauntlet grows.  Further than before! It is down to my thighs this timet" " Excellent I The more invincible you become, the better for us all." "A moment. Do you seriously think the three of us can defeat Thoth, Set and the Steel General?" "Yes." "How?" "The Hammer may strike again," says Anubis. "It still exists?" "Yes, and Osiris is its master." "Well, granting all these things and assuming that even yrjimin, who is now master in your House, JE nay be dealt with -- what ef the bther? What of the great shadow Ea the shape of a horse which will RursuS us till the end of our days, he who does not live in space as we know it, who cannot be destroyed, and who cannot be reasoned with when anger lies upon him?" Anubis looks away. "Typhon do I fear," he admits. "Ages ago I constructed a weapon -- no, not a weapon, a thing -- which I thought might serve to restrain him. When I tried to use it recently, he fell upon it and destroyed it. He also took my arm. I admit that I have nothing but my wit to use against him. But one does net throw away an empire for fear of one individual. If only I knew the secret of his power..." "I heard him mention Skaggapauk Abyss." "There is no such place." "Fve never heard the name before. You have?" "Legend, fancy, fiction." And what do these things tell of it?" "We waste time discussing nonsense." "If you wish my assistance, you will answer me. See, the gauntlet now reaches to my knees "Skagganauk Abyss, sometimes called the chasm in the sky," says Anubis, "is the place where it is said that all things stop and nothing exists." "There are many very empty spaces throughout the universe." "But the Abyss is said to be jempty of space, also. It is a bottomless hole that is not a hole. It Is a gap in the fabric of space itsdf. It is nothing. It is the theoretical hub of the universe. It is the big exit leading nowhere, under, over, beyond, out of it all. That's Skagganauk Abyss." "Typhon does seem to possess Wiese qualities himself, does he not?" "Yes, he does. I'll admit that. But it answers nothing. Curse the mating of Set and Isis! They have begotten a brute and a monster!" "You can hardly talk, Anubis. Was Typhon always as he is now? How could the Witch be delivered of such a one?" "I do not know. He is older than I. That whole family is shrouded in mystery and paradox. Let us be off to the House of Life!" Madrak nods his head. "Show me the way, Anubis." II rtTonis walks in the places of power, and none know his name. But if each among the creatures which pass were to be asked, they would say that they had heard something of him. For he is a god. His power is almost beyond measure. He has been defeated, however. The Prince Who Was A Thousand, his brother, worked his undoing to preserve his own life and the order of life which he represents. Now, Horus turns up an avenue, well lighted, where the various species cavort. Power and the night are around him. He has come to this particular street on this particular world for a reason: He is invariably undecided. He needs opinions. He loves oracles. He seeks advice. Darkness in the sky, bright lights along the thoroughfare. He passes places and people of entertainment. A man moves to bar his way. He seeks to pass around him, stepping into the street. The man follows and seizes his arm. Horus glows his breath upon him and it comes down with the force of a hurricane. The man is swept away and Horus moves on . After a time, he comes to a place of oracles. The Tarot readers and the astrologers and the numerologists and the casters of the Yi Ching beckon to the god in the red loin cloth. But he passes them by. Finally, he comes to a place where there are no people. It is the place of the machines which predict. At random, he selects a booth, enters. "Yes?" inquires the booth. "Queries," Horus replies. "A moment." There cames a metallic click, and an inner door opens. "Enter the cubicle." Horus moves to enter a small room. It contains a bed, of sorts. A heavy female torso lies upon it, joined with a gleaming console. A speaker is set within the wall. "Mount the inquiry unit," he is instructed. Discarding his loincloth, Horus does this thing. The rule is that your questions will be answered for so long as you give satisfaction," he is informed. "What is it that you wish to know?" "I have a problem: I find myself in conflict with my brother. I tried to defeat him. I failed. I cannot make up my mind as to whether I should seek him out again and renew the battle." "Insufficient information to reply," comes the answer. "What sort of conflict? What sort of brother? What sort of man are you?" Gruesome grow the lilacs and the rose rows be hedges of thorn. The garden of memory is filled with frantic bouquets. "Perhaps I have come to the wrong place." "This may be, and it may not. Obviously though, you do not know the rules." "Rules?" and Horus stares up at the dull mesh of the speaker. IF D ry monotone, the voice is sifted through: "I am not a seer, nor am I a foreseer. I am an electrical-mechanicalbiological votary of the god Logic. Pleasure is my price, and for it I will invoke the god for any man. To do so, however, I need a more complete question. I do not possess sufficient data to answer you at this point. So love me, tell me more." "I do not know where to begin," Horus begins. "My brother once ruled all things -- " "Stop! Your statement is illogical, unquantifiable -- " "... And quite correct. My brother is Thoth, sometimes called the Prince Who Was A Thousand. One time, all of the Midworlds were his kingdom." "My records indicate the existence of a myth concerning a Lord of Life and Death. According to the myth, he had no brothers." Correction. These matters are generally kept within the family. Isis had three sons, one of them by her lawful Lord, Osiris; two of them by Set the Destroyer. Unto Set she begat Typhon and Thoth. Unto Osiris she begat Horus the Avenger, myself." "Thou art Horus?" "You have named me." "You wish to destroy Thoth?" "That was my assigned task." "You cannot do it." "Oh." "Please do not depart. There may be more questions you wish to ask." "I can't think of any." But Horus cannot depart at this moment, for the fires are upon him. "What are you?" he finally inquires. "I have already told you." "Yet how have you become what you are: half-woman, half machine?" "This is the one question I may not answer, unless I am properly cued. I shall, however, attempt to comfort thee, seeing that thou art distraught." "Thank you. You are kind." "It is my pleasure." "I'd say that once you were human." "That is correct." "Why did you cease being so?" "I may not say, as I have already said." "May I help you in any way to effect anything which you may desire?" "Yes." "How? "I may not say." "Do you know for a fact that Horus may not destroy Thoth?" "This is the most valid probability, based on the knowledge of the myths which I possess." "If you were a mortal woman, I'd be inclined to be kind to you." "What does that mean?" "I might love you for your terAle honesty. "My god, my god! Tliau hast saved me." "What do you mean?" "I have been doomed to this existence till one who is greater than men shall look upon me with love." "I might look upon you in such a manner. Would you deem that probaUe?" "No, for I am too used." "Then you know not the god Moths." "It is the utmost improbability." "But Fve no one else to love. So I love you." The god Horus loves me?" "Yes." "Then thou art my Prince, and thorn hast come!" "I do not -- " "Side thou a moment and other things shall occur." i# l shall abide," says Horus. Ill V ramin walks through the House of the Dead. Had you eyes in that place, you couldn't see a thing. It is far too dark for eyes to be of value. But Vramin can see. Me walks through an enormous room, and when he reaches a certain point within it there comes a light that is dim and orange and crowded into comers. Then they come up out of the Inmsparent rectangles which now appear in the floor, come up unbreathing, unblinking and horizontal, and they rest upon invisi ble catafalques at a height of two feet, and their garments and skins are of all colors and their bodies of all ages. Now some have wings and some have tails, and some have horns and some long talons. Some have all of these things, and some have pieces of machinery built into them and some do not. There comes a moaning and a creaking of brittle bones, then movement. Rustling, clicking, chafing, they sit up, they stand up. Then all bow down before him, and one word fills the air: "Master" He turns his green eyes upon the multitude, and from somewhere a sound of laughter comes to fall upon his ears. Turning, toning, turning, he waves his cane. Then there is a sudden movement, and she stands by his side. "Vramin, your new subjects pay you homage." "Lady, how did you get in here?" But she laughs again and does not answer his question. "I, too, have come to honor thee: Hail Vramin! Lord of the? House of the Dead!" "You are kind, Lady." "I am more than kind. The end draws near, and that which I desire is almost at hand." IF "It was you who raised these dead to rest once more, ami I may ask your assistance. I may also ask what it is that you desire." "And I may leD you." nphe dead suddenly lie down and  descend into their graves. The light departs. "Do you know why Anubis fled?" he inquires. "No, I am only just arrived here." "He departed, pursued by your son Ityphon." And the Red Witch smiles within her veils. "That Typhon lives pleases me beyond measure," she says. Where is he now?" "Presently, he is seeking the life of Osiris. It may be that he has already disposed of both the dog and the bird." And she laughs, and her familiar leaps upon her shoulder mid holds its stomach with both hands. "How joyous a thing this would be -- now! We must look upon this affairl . "Very good," and .Vramin draws a green picture frame upon the dark air. Isis moves to his side and takes his hand in hers. Suddenly there is a picture within the frame, and it moves. It is the picture of a dark horse shadow, alone, moving upon a walk "This is of no help to us," says yramin. "No, but it is good to look upon my son once again, my son who contains the Abyss of Skagganauk within him. Where may his brother be?" With his father, as they have gone to fight the Nameless once again." And Isis drops her eyes, and the picture wavers. "I would look upon this thing," she finally says. "Before this, I would locate Anubis and Osiris, if they still live -- and Madrak." "Very well." And within its emerald frame, the picture slowly takes form. T Tis arm is around her waist, and together they watch the pictures that form within the frame, there in the House Of the Dead. They watch Osiris, as he sails across the sky in his black crossbow, up on which is mounted a thing that can smash a sun. He rides alone, and the yellow eyes never blink within that face which cannot know expression. They watch the dark cockleshell which contains Anubis, Madrak and an empty glove which holds power. Vramin traces two lines with the courses of the vessels. The picture changes to the place where the lines intersect. There lies the twilight world, and its surface untier goes upheavals as they watch. How it is that they could know the place?" asks Isis. "I do not know -- Unless -- Osiris! He found a note. I watched his expression as he read it." "And... ?" "Horns. Horus must have left him the note -- telling him the place. " "How could Horus know it?" "He fought with Thoth -- probably within Thoth's own mind, and Horus can look into a man's head, know what he is thinking. Sometime during that encounter, he must have stolen this knowledge from the Prince, who is normally proof against such skills. Yes, at some time he must have let down his guard for an instant. He must be warned #" "Perhaps Typhon will yet provide for his safety." "Where is Typhon now?" They regard the frame and all pictures flee. Black, black, black. There is nothing. "It is as though Typhon does not exist," says Vramin. "No," says Isis. "You look upon Skagganauk the Abyss. Typhon has withdrawn from the universe, to sad: his own way along the undersides of space as men know it. It may be that he, too, has found 'whatever note Horus left." "This is not sufficient insurance lor the Prince. The whole project lit may miscarry unless we can reach him." "Then go to him quickly!" "I cannot." "One of your famous gateways." "They only function within the Midworlds. I draw my power from the tides. I cannot operate beyond. Lady, how did you come here?" "In my chariot." "Of the Ten Invisible Powers?" "Yes." "Then let us use it." "I fear -- Listen, Mage. You must understand. I am a woman and I love my son, but I also love my life. I am afraid. I fear the place of that conflict. Do not think the less of me if I refuse to accompany you. You may take my chariot and you may ride in it, but you must keep your own company." "I think not the less of you, Lady." "Then take this pendant. It controls the Ten Powers that drive the chariot, and it will give you additional strengths." "Will it function beyond the Midworlds?" "Yes," and she slides into his arms and for a moment his green beard tickles her neck while her familiar gnashes its tiny teeth and knots its tail, twice. Then she conducts him to her chariot on the roof of the House of the Dead, and he mounts If, holds high the pendant in his right hand, becomes for a moment part of a IF  cleverly contrived tableau within a red-glass bottle, is then a distant twinkle in the heavens Isis watches. Shuddering, she retreats to the daces of the dead, to dwell again upon the one whom she fears to face, who is even now battling the Nameless. Suramin stares ahead with eyes of jade. Points of yellow light dance within them. ehind Vramin's eyes is the vision distilled. There stands the Prince, downward staring. The surface of the world's afire. On the hood of the Prince's ship stands the beast whose body is armor, whose rider sits unmoving, gleaming, also facing the place of conflict The crossbow approaches. The cockleshell swings forward. The Hammer is cocked, snaps forward. Then rag-tail ablaze, the comet comes forth, glowing, brightening as it races onward. Somewhere, a banjo is plucked as Bronze rears and the head of the General swivels over his left shoulder to face the intruder. His left hand jerks toward him and Bronze continues to rear, up onto his hindmost legs and then springs away from the Prince's vessel. Three strides only are taken. Mount and rider vanish. There comes a haziness, a crinkling, and the stars dance in that corner of the sky, as though they are reflections within an agitated pool. The comet is caught up in this wind that is Change, becomes two-dimensional, is gone. Pieces of the broken crossbow continue on along the path the vessel had followed when whole. The cockleshell heads toward the surface of the world, vanishes amid the smoke and the dust, the flames. For a long while, the entire tableau is a still-life. Then the cockleshell streaks away. It now contains three occupants. Vramin tightens his hand upon the piece of bloody light, and the Chariot of Ten turns to pursue. The conflict rages upon the surface of the planet. The globe seems a liquid and boiling thing, changing shape, spurting forth fiery fountains. There comes a series of enormous blazes and a mighty shattering. The world comes apart. There is brightness, mighty, mighty, and dust, confusion: fragmentation. Behind the jade eyes of Yramin, within which dances the yellow lights, there is this vision. IV YJ-ands clasped behind his back, i'  A the Prince Who Was a Thousand considers the destruction of the world. The broken body of the world, its members splintered and crushed, rotates beneath him, flattening, elongating, burning, binning, burning. Now he watches through an instrument as he orbits about the ruin, an instrument like a pink lorgnette with antennae. Occasionally, tkere is a click and the antennae twitch. He lowers it, raises it again, several times. Finally, he puts it aside. "What is it that you see, my brother?" He turns his head, and the dark horse shadow is at his side. "I see a living point of light, caught up in that mass down there," he says. "Twisted, shrunken, weakly pulsing, but still alive. Still living." "Then our father has failed." "I fear so." "This thing must not be." And Typhon is gone. Then it is framed in flame. Nothing lies within the blazing silhouette. Nothing whatsoever. Then the flames subside and the shadow shrinks, retreating, retreating, running down a long, absolutely empty corridor. Then there is nothing. It is as if the world had never existed. It is gone, finished, kaput, and the Nameless Thing That Cries in the Night along with it. And now, Typhon, too, is gone. A line comes into Vramin's head: "Die Luft ist kuhl und es dunkelt, und ruhig fliest den Rhein." He remembers not the source, but knows the feeling. Bloodbolt held on high, he pursues the god of death. Tow, as Vramin pursues the  cockle of Anubis, he sees the thing for which there is no understanding. Upon the blasted heap of elements that was a world there comes now a dark spot. It grows, amidst the light, the dust, the confusion, grows until its outline becomes discernable: It is a dark horse shadow that has fallen upon the rubble. It continues to grow until it achieves the size of a continent. Rearing, the dark horse is rampant over all. It swells, it expands, it lengthens, until the wreckage of the entire planet is contained within it. V , A wakening, slowly, manacled spread-eagle fashion to a steel table, bright lights stabbing down through his yellow eyes like electric needles within his brain, Set groans softly and tests the strength of his bonds. His armor is gone, that pale glow in the corner might be the star wand, his shoes that walk upon everything are not to be seen. "Hello, Destroyer," says the wearer of the glove. "You are fortunate to have survived the encounter." "Madrak?" he asks. "Yes." # IF "I can't see you. Those lights -- " "Fm standing behind you, and those lights are only for purposes of preventing your use of temporal fugue to depart this vessel before we are ready to permit it." "I do not understand." "The battle waxeth furious below. I am watdiing it through a port now. It looks as if you have the upper hand. In a moment, the Hammer that Smashes Suns will strike again, and you will of course escape it as you did the last time -- by means of the fugue. That is why we were able to pick you up a few moments ago, just as Anubis did in days long gone by. The fact that you did appear testifies to what will happen shortly. There! Osiris strikes, and the Hammer begins its descent -- Anubis! Something is wrong! There is some sort of change occurring! The Hammer is... is ... gone..." "Yes, I see it now," comes the familiar bark. "And Osiris, too, has gone away. The Steel General, he it was." "What shall we do now?" "Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. This turn is even better than we had hoped. Set's occurrence recently by means of the fugue testifies that some cataclysmic event will still shortly occur. Does it not, Set?" "Yes." "Your final clash will doubtless destroy the world." "Probably. I didn't stay." "Yes, there it goes," says Madrak. "Wonderfull Now we have Set; Osiris has been disposed of, and the Steel General is no longer available to pursue us. We have Thoth precisely where we want him. Hail Madrak, new Lord of the House of Life!" "Thank you, Anubis. I didn't think it could be that easily accomplished -- but what of the Nameless?" "Surely it must have fallen this time. What of it, Set?" "I don't know. I struck it with the full force of the wand." "Then everything is tied up neatly. Now hear me, Set. We wish you no ill, nor will we harm your son Thoth. We rescued you when we could have left you to rot -- " "Then why have you secured me thus?" "Because I know your temper and your power, and I wished to reason with you before freeing you. You might not have granted me sufficient opportunity, so I insured it myself. I wish to deal with Thoth through you -- " "Lord!" cries Madrak. "Observe the ruined world! There comes over it a monstrous shadow #" "It is Typhon!" "Yes. What can he be doing?" "What do you know of this, Set?" "It means that I failed, and that somewhere amid the rujns a NameIF less Thing still cries in the night. Typhon is completing the job." "There is fire, master, and -- I cannot look upon the emptiness which occurs!" "Skagganauk Abyss!" CCes," says Set. "Typhon is Skagganauk Abyss. He evicts the Nameless from the universe." "What was the Nameless?" "A god," says Set, "an old god, Pm sure, with nothing left to be dime about any more." "I do not understand," says Madrak. "He jests. But what of Typhon? How shall we deal with him?" "You may not have to," says Set. "What he has done has probably resulted in his own exile from the universe." "Then we have won, Anubis! We have won! Typhon was the only thing you feared, was he not?" "Yes. Now the Midworlds lie for ever within my hands." And mine, don't forget!" "Of course not. So tell me, Set. You see the ways the stars are drifting. Will you join with us? You will become the right hand of Anubis. Your son can be a Regent. He may name his own job, for I do not undervalue his wisdom. What say you?" "I must think of this thing." "To be sure. Take your time. Realize, however, that I am now invincible." "And you realize that I have defeated God in battle." "It could not have been God," says Madrak, "or He would not have been defeated #" "No," says Set. "You saw Him at the end. You witnessed His power. And even now He is not dead, only in exile." Madrak lowers his head, covers his face with his hands. "I do not believe you! I cannot." "But it is true, and you have been party to this thing, oh recreant priest, blasphemer, apostate!" "Silence, Set!" cries Anubis. "Don't listen to him, Madrak. He sees your weakness, as he sees the Weaknesses of all things he encounters. He seeks to draw you onto a battlefield of another sort, one where you struggle against yourself, to be beaten by the guilt he has contrived for you. Ignore him!" "But what if he speaks the truth? I stood by and did nothing -- even profited by -- " "Indeed you did," says Set. "The guilt is mainly mine, but I bear it with pride. You were party to the action,; however. You stood by and watched, thinking of the profit that would come to you, while He whom you served was beaten to His knees -- " Anubis strikes him a terrible blow that rips the flesh of his cheek. "I take it that you have made up your mind, and this is your answer: To try to turn Madrak against me. If will not work. He is not so gullible as you think -- are you, Dad?" Madrak does not answer, but continues to stare out the port. Set struggles against his bonds but cannot loosen them. "Anubisl We are pursued I" Anubis departs Set's side, vanishing into darkness. The lights continue to stab downward. "It is the Chariot of Ten," Anubis says. "Of the Lady Isis?" Madrak inquires. "Why should she follow US?" "Because Set was once her beloved. Perhaps he still is. Eh, Set? What's the story?" But Set does not reply. "Whatever," says Madrak, "it draws nears. How strong is the Red Witch? Will she give us trouble?" "She was not so strong but that she feared her old Lord, Osiris, avoiding him for many centuries -- and I am certainly as strong as Osiris. We will not be beaten by a woman. Not when we have come this far." M adrak bows his head, mumbling, and begins to beat upon his breast. "Stop that I You're bong ridiculous!" But Set laughs, and Anubis turns upon him with a savage snarl. "I'll tear your heart out for that!" But Set raises his bleeding left hand which he has just tom free and holds it before his body. "Try if, dogl Your one hand against mine. Your staff and any other weapon you have against the left hand of Set. Come closer #" And his eyes glow like twin suns and Anubis falls back beyond his grasp. The lights continue to dazzle and #pin. " Rill him Madrakl" cries Anubis. "He is of no further use to us! You wear the gauntlet of power! He cannot stand against it!" But Madrak does not reply, instead, "Forgive me, Whatever You Are or Were, Wherever You May or May Not Be, for omissions and commissions in which I indulged or did not indulge, as the' gase may be, in this matter which has just come to pass," he says, still beating his breast. "And in the event that --  "Then give me the glove!" cries Anubis. "Quickly!" But Madrak continues. A shudder runs through the cockleshell,. and magicians and poets being very good at that sort of thing, a doorway which had been doubly sealed springs open, and Kramin enters. He waves his cane and smiles. "How do?, How do?," IF "Take him, Madrakl" cries Anubis. But yramin advances, and Madrak stares out the window, mumbling. Then Anubis raises his staff before him. "Angel of the Seventh Station, and fallen, depart!" says Anubis. "You use my old title," says Yramin. "I am now Angel of the House of the Dead." "You lie " "No. By appointment of the Prince do I now occupy your forma: position." With a great wrenching movement, Set frees his right hand. Yramin dandles Isis's pendant before him, and Anubis backs away. "Madrak, I bid you destroy this one!" he cries out. "yramin?" says Madrak. "OH, no, not Vramin. He is good. He is my friend." Set frees his right ankle. "Madrak, if you will not destroy yramin, then hold Set!" " 'Thou Who might be our Father who perhaps may be in Heaven...  " Madrak intones. Then Anubis snarls and points his staff like a bazooka at yramin. "Come no further," he announces. But Yramin advances another step. A blaze of light falls upon him, but the red beams from the pendant cancel it out. "Too late, dog," he says. Anubis circles, draws near the port where Madrak stands. Set frees his left ankle, rubs it, stands. "You are dead," says Set, and moves forward. But at this moment, Anubis falls to the knife of Madrak, which (enters his neck above the collar bone. "I meant no harm," says Madrak, "and this is to pay in part for my guilt. The dog led me astray. I repent. I make you a gift of his life." "Thou fool!" says Yramin. "I wanted him prisoner." Madrak begins to weep. Anubis bleeds in red spurts upon the floor of the cockleshell. Set lowers his head slowly and rubs his eyes. "What shall we do now?" asks Yramin. " 'Hallowed be Thy name, if a name Thou hast and any desire to see it hallowed... says Madrak. Set does not answer, having closed his eyes and fallen into a sleep that will last for many days. VI Ophe Citadel of Marachek, empty, ' not empty, empty again. Why?. Listen... Set stands his ground, facing the monster, and it lunges toward him. For a long while they wrestle, there in the courtyard. Then Set breaks its back, and And each time that Set destroys it lies a-groaning. a creature, he turns his eyes once Then Thoth, his son, his father, again toward a place, a moment, the Prince Who Was A Thousand, where he had battled the Nameless opens again the bottle of instant and destroyed a world and where monsters and removes another seed, the dark horse shadow his son Sowing it there in the dust, anrears and blazes; and heeding the other menace blooms beneath his beck of annihilation he moves tohand, then bends toward Set. ward that place, that moment. But The madness that lies within Thoth follows, distracting him with Set's eyes falls upon the creature, monsters. and there is more conflict. This is because Set is destrucStanding above its broken body, tion, and he will destroy himself if Set bows his head and vanishes. there is nothing else that is suitaBut Thoth follows after him sowble at hand or somewhere in sight, ing monsters, and the ghosts of Set in time or in space. But the Prince and the monsters he fights rage is wise and realizes this. This is why through the marble memory that he follows after his father on his is wrecked and rebuilt Marachek. temporal journey toward the altar of annihilation, after his awakening from the trance of battle against the Thing That Cries In The Night. For Thoth knows that if he can distract him long enough from his pilgrimage, new things will arise toward which Set's hand may be turned. This is because such things always arise. But now they move through time, ered from this moment of it -- the wise Prince and his deadly father son -- skirting always the Abyss that is Skagganauk, son, brother and grandson. This is why the ghosts of Set and the monsters he fights rage through the marble memory that is wrecked and rebuilt Marachek, the copy #ii! IF Dear Editor: Isaac Asimov's The Holmes-Ginsbook Device (Dec. If) was a dam funny story, which makes me wish that the Good Doctor would do more writing, other than science-popularization. But, on the first page of the story, the narrator says, "Mike Ginsbook was bom on Jan. #, #, which made him exactly as old as this century." I beg to differ with Dr. Asimov, but if Ginsbook had indeed been born on the #st of January, in #, he would be exactly one year less than the age of that century (i.e., in # Ginsbook would be # years old.) So he must have been bom Jan. #, #. Was that a typographical error, or did My Hero goof? Mack Reynolds's serial The Computer Conspiracy was a very good novel. But I am puzzled about one thing. I am damn sure that this story is the latest in a (more or less) series about such things as Inalienable Basic, teevee wrist phones and the wilds of Brooklin (or is it Manhatan?) which all seem to stem from am If First by the name of Bircher, that was published a year or so ago. But Mack Reynolds (I am fairly sure) has been around a lot longer than a year or two. Where did I go wrong? Did my memory circuits blow a gasket or what? Two final questions: Whatever happened to the If policy of overlapping serials (I miss them)? And whatever happened to the novels by Robert Heinlein you used to print every now and then (I miss them too)? If If continues to be such a fine magazine, it will make a clean sweep years (at least as long as MY vote has anything to say about it. -- ) !!! -- James A. Juracic, P O Box #, Fruitvale, B.C., Canada.  No goof. Figure it for yourself. There was no Year Zero, so January #st of the year I was the first day of the first century; January #st of the year #I will be the first day of the twenty-first century; and so on through the ages. Asimov make a mistake? You must be kidding! About Mack Reynolds: Yes, he's been around quite a while, and isn't the author of Bircher -- different story, different writer. Heinlein: He's still building his super-house, but signs are he may soon be getting back to novels -- at which time we hope to get back to bringing them to yon. Overlapping serials: We stopped overlapping them because we couldn't find enough good serials to keep it up. Writers move in cycles, like lemmings. It looks like the migration is toward good serials again, so maybe we'll be able to overlap them again before long. -- Editor .    Dear Editor: #) Before all else, let me add my congratulations to the multitude's on the occasion of the award to Worlds of If of the Hugo for the third consecutive year! This honey of praise should sweeten the gullet before the gall of stricture, here followi ing, is sipped. Look not behind you to see of the pursuit, nor linger to bask In favor's warmth, for, know that always the competitions' choppers gnash at your heels. A pseudoarchaic touch of Howard or Edison Marshall may well lubricate the accompanying rude shaft of criticism. #) While this writer does, in truth, admire your successful elects cism as editor in selecting (and, no doubt, amending) the contents of Worlds of If, the mechanical and substantiate aspects of the magazine apparently have not had your December, # issue (not even read in full as yet) mechanical errors abound typographically as evinced on pages #, #, and # to exhaust not #) In the fast-paced, thought-provoking and well-enjoyed serial The Computer Conspiracy, its author Mack Reynolds, an omnivorous autodidact by all the signs, states most inaccurately on page # that the Esperanto phrase venu rapide means (page #) kill him . Not so. The significance of these two words is come quickly; to achieve the d esired On page # Reynolds asserts incorrectly that Hungarian's sole linguistic relative in Europe is Finnish. Not so. Not affluent perhaps, but an indubitable relative (cognate, even, to Finnish) is Estonian. And some would add, as second cousin perhaps, Turkish which retains a small but definite toehold in Europe. All these last could have been precluded by an glert researcher through a phone call or three to some knowledgable source Ight there in mighty, if slowly de-i composing. New York. Now, it is not suggested that in addition to your other duties you assume directly those of proofreader and researcher (but then, why not?!); however, as editor, you are responsible for all literary material appearing in your magazine, and therefore you should exercise a firmer control over its ap- pearance and content -- as a matter of your editorial reputation, if nothing else, don't you agree? #) Alas, in most laurel wreaths are concealed a few thorns. If moved thereto, hopefully a few more of the former could appear in the future from your scabrous, but loyal subscriber -- R. C. Marble, P O Box #, Reseda, California #.  Mea culpa. Esteemed Subscriber. Typographical vicissitudes (and aucIF tonal misdemeanors) inevitably redound discreditably to redactive reputations. Yet pari passu, what is one to do when previously normative par- ameters enter a heteroscedastic phase? -- Editor.  # # . Dear Editor: "Science-fiction' it says here on the cover of . So what's Creatures of Light, a fantasy by Roger Zelazny, doing here? I don't like fantasy, like religion, it is the product of human imagination with no basis in fact. That's where religion came from. If I want to read fantasy I'll read the BiUe. -- Roger Frohn,    Dear Editor: Mack Reynolds, an entertaining author and constructor of ingeni ous tales, needs some editorial assistance. He is obsessed with the idea that proper development of his characters requires "Cuteness" and a slang to which he tries to impute currency: Zoroaster, trank, wizard, chum-pal, fuaker, whisdin Dixie, lush, guzzle, ddL Some are his and some are borrowed, and none are good. If he must use such blunt tools, he should at least research thorn to the extent of observing their shortness of span in real life. Can't yon help him? and me? -- W. F, Poynter, # Monterey Boulevard, San Francisco, California #.    Dear Editor: Since you read all the stories submitted and decide which stories are to be published (as you state in Hue  Cry ) exactly what do the Managing and Associate Editors do? I had always thought that they screened the stories first and sent die best to you for final selection. I bought Worlds of Fantasy . It's excellent. More, please! -- Fred F. Jackson ID, # Ddlwood, Pontiac, Michigan #.  What do they do? Why they do all the hard work, of course -- proofreading, manuscript editing, dealing with artists, etc while The Editor lounges at his ease, eating chocolates and reading stories. R.H.I.P . -- Editor. March #, #. First Annual ConferMoe cm the 'bibliography of Science Fiction," sponsored by the Fantasy and Science Fiction Society of Columbia University. At the Harkness Theater, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City, from #:#-#:# P.M. There will be an exhibition of bibliographical and scholarly works on science fiction. The program wUl include presentations by librarians, bibliographers, collectors, etc. For information: Fred Lemer, #-B, The Boulevard, Bast Paterson, New Jersey #. Street, Newark, New Jersey #. Genral theme: "Looking Backward: #," Changes in the SF Field in the Last Thirty Years. Admission: #. For Information: Allen Howard, # Grafton Avenue, Newark, New Jersey #. the Statler-Hilton, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Membership #. For information: New England Science Fiction Association, Box G, sachusetts #. the Holiday East Motel, Columbus, Ohio #. Guest of Honor: Terry Carr. Features: Panel Discussions, Open Party, Banquet. Registration fee: #. Banquet Ticket: #. For information: Bob Ohio #. the Hotel Andrews, #th Street at Hennepin, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Guests of Honor: Charles V. De Vet, Gordon R. Dickson, Carl Jacobi, Clifford D. Simak. Membership: # -- register' now and receive two progress reports. For information: Jim Young, # Ulysses Street Make checks or money-orders payable to Mrs. Margaret Lessinger. N.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota #. Hotel, Oxford, England.' Guest of Honor: Judith Merril. For information in the nue, Los Angeles, California #. of Honor: Robert (Doc) A. W. Lowndes. At the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. Advance membership #, or # at the door. Two Progress Reports will be sent to members. For information: Franklin M. Dietz, # Walton Avenue, Bronx. New York #. line Inn, South Capitol and I Street, S.W. Washington D.C. Guest of Honor: Lester del Rey. Membership: #, in advance; #, at the door. For information: Jay Haldeman, # Woodboume Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland #. burgh regional convention). At Allegheny Motor Inn, # Beerschool Road, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guest of Honor: Robert Silverberg. Features a banquet. Membership: #, in advance, #, at the door. For information: #I Wightman, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #. four or six weeks, and college credit may be granted. Faculty: Robin Scott, Frederik Pohl, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. The cost is # for each two-week segmant and includes full room and board. For information: Robin Scott Wilson, English Department, Clarion State College, Clarion Pennsylvania #. The North Plaza Motel, #I Reading Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. For reservation blanks and information: Lou Tabakow, # St. Johns Terrace, Cincinnati, Ohio #. Monica, California. Guest of Honor: Randall Garrett. Fan Guest of Honor: Roy Tackett, Toastmaster: Harlan Ellison. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. A supporting membership of # entitles you to all publications. For Monica, California #. Make checks payable to Ken Rudolph. August #September #, #. ST. Convention. At Chase-Park Plaza Hotel, # N. Kingshighway, St. Louis, Missouri #. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Fan Guest of Honor: Ted White. Features: Project Art Show; Masquerade Ball; All-night movies -- every night; Rock Band; Panels and speeches featuring all your favorite writers, editors, and artists; Auctions; Awards Banquet and the Presentation of the Hugos. Memberships: #, attending; #, supporting. Join now and receive all the progress reports as they are published. For information: St. Louiscon, P.O. Box #, St. Louis, Missouri #. Make checks payable to St. Louiscon. IF We've heard the sad story over and over at science-fiction meetings. Some reader was right in the middle of one of our award-winning serials when his magazine dealer goofed, and he missed an issue. Or he found the stand all sold out and never read the novelette every other fan is raving about now. Naturally, nobody wants to miss an issue of IF -- the magazine that won the Hugo as Best in the field at the past two World Science Fiction Conventions. And surely nobody will want to miss the great stories and brand new features we are already scheduling for the future issue of IF. We try to make sure there are enough copies for every reader, but we can't guarantee that you won't miss an issue, unfortunately. Only you can do that. And it's really quite simple and will even save you money. Just fill in the coupon below -- or if you hate to mutilate the magazine, write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and mail it today! Then nobody will pity you, because you'll be sure of getting every vital issue of IF! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # Yes, start my subscription to Worlds of If right away. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues for #  # issues for #  # issues for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside of the Western Hemisphere add # per year for postage. Please check whether  new or  renewal won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh mtr Name iHerr No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: 'No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep."  ffff A New Science-Adventure Novel We've heard the sad story over and over at science-fiction meetings. Some reader was right in the middle of one of our award-winning serials when his magazine dealer goofed, and he missed an issue. Or he found the stand all sold out and never read the novelette every other fan is raving about now. Naturally, nobody wants to miss an issue of IF -- the magazine that won the Hugo as Best in the field at the past two World Science Fiction Conventions. And surely nobody will want to miss the great stories and brand new features we are already scheduling for the future issue of IF. We try to make sure there are enough copies for every reader, but we can't guarantee that you won't miss an issue, unfortunately. Only you can do that. And it's really quite simple and will even save you money. Just fill in the coupon below -- or if you hate to mutilate the magazine, write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and mail it today! Then nobody will pity you, because you'll be sure of getting every vital issue of IF! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # Yes, start my subscription to Worlds of If right away. I enclose my check c money order for:  # issues for #  # issues for #  # issues for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside of the Western Hemisphere add # per year for postage. Please check whether  new or  renewal Vol #, No. # Frederik Pohl, Edifor Lester del Rey, Managing Editor Robert M. Guinn, Publisher Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Associate Editor Mavis Fisher, Circula tion Director by Keith Laumer by Andre Norton by E. G. Von Wald by Lawrence Mayer by Roger Deeley by Luigi Cozzi by Frederik Pohl by Lester del Rey IF published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn President, Vol. #, No. #, Main Office: #I Hudson Street, New York, #. #c per copy. Subscription # Issues # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, New York, and at additional mailing offices. Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #. All rights, including translation reserved. All material must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelope. The Publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Company, New York, N.Y. # IF  Editorial What We Think With B y now we all have heard about Australopithecus africanus and Professor Leakey's paradoxical conjecture that it isn't really so much true that man invented tools as it is that tools invented mam We've discussed the reasoning involved in these pages before: How the large bones the idiot Australopithecines used to kill their prey and theii enemies -- the first tools -- demanded more agility in their use; how the increased mobility demanded increased nerve connections; how the increased sensory and nK)tor nerve networks demanded increased central nervous systems -- that is, brains. But we've never before discussed what those brains are. A new book by an old friend of Galaxy and If readers, H. Chandler Elliott -- who is not only a sciencefiction writer as time permits, but a professor of anatomy, neurology and psychiatry at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine -- gives us as full a look at the structure and workings of the brain as we have ever seen. (It's called The Shape of Intelligence, and it's just published by Scribners.) It's a beautiful book, handsomely illustrated by Anthony Ravielli -- almost too beautiful in a way, since it's very likely that a number of copies will wind up on someone's coffee table and will never be cracked except to admire the pretty illustrations. That will be a pity. For the trouble with the world, ih the troubles with the world, rest on what men do to it; and the only hope of curing them rests on understanding why men do what they do. And one cannot understand men's minds without understanding the hardware that generates and forms them, the brain and nervous system. It takes Professor Elliott nearly # pages to tell us what is now known about the brain. We can't cover it in the space we have on this page. But he does -- very authoritatively, clearly and provocatively -- and we commend the book to you. We've known all along that some of the best science-fiction writers were scientists; we're glad to get further proof of the corollary, in books like this one. What distinguishes a first-rate scientist from a clod is his imagination and understanding. And we think that's why it appears to be so that some of the best scientists are science-fiction writers, IF  SerM Tamisan built dreams for others. But now she was trapped in nightmare -- and her dream was reality! I # Che is certified by the Foostmam, Lord Starrex. A true action dreamer to the tenth power' Jabis was being too eager, or almost so; he was pushing too much, Tamisan sneered mentally, keeping her face carefully blank, though she took quick glances about from beneath half-closed eyelids. This sale very much concerned her, since she was the product being discussed, but she had nothing to say in the matter. She supposed this was a typical sky tower, seeming to float, masked in clouds at times, since its supports were so slender and well concealed, lifting it high above TyKry. However, none of the windows gave on real sky, but each framed a yery different landscape, illustrating what must be other planet scenes. Perhaps some were dream remembered or inspired. There was a living lambil grass carpet aroirnd the easirest on which the owner half lay, half sat. But Jabis had not even been offered a pull-down wall seat. And the two other men in attendance on Lord Starrex stood also. They were real men and not androids, which placed the owner in the multicredit class. One, Tamisan thought was a body-guard, and the other, younger, thinner, with a dissatisfied mouth, had on clothing nearly equal to that of the man on the easirest but with a shade of difference which meant a lesser place in the housdiold. Tamisan catalogued what she could see and filed it away for future reference. Most dreamers did not observe much of the world about them. They were too enmeshed in their own creations to care for reality. Most dreamers... Tamisan frowned. She was a dreamer. Jabis and the Foostmam could prove that The lounger on the easirest could prove it if he paid Jabis' price. But she was also something more. Tamisan herself was not quite sure what And that there was a difference in her, she had had mother wit enough to conceal since she had first been aware that the others in the Foostmam's Hive were not able to come cleanly out of their dreams into the here and now. Why, some of them had to be fed, clothed, cared for as if they were not aware they had any bodies! "Action dreamer." Lord Starrex shifted his shoulders against the padding which immediately accommodated itself to his stirring to give him maximum comfort. "Action dreaming is a little childish -- " Tamisan's control held, but she felt inside her a small flare of anger. Childish was it? She would like to show him just how childish a dream she could spin to enmesh a client. But Jabis was not in the least moved by that derogatory remark from a possible purchaser; it was in his eyes only a logical bargaining move. "If you wish an E dreamer -- " He shrugged. "But your demand to the Hive specified an A." TTe was daring to be a little  abrupt. Was he so sure of this lord as all that? He must have some inside information which allowed him to be so confident. For Jabis could cringe and belly-down in awe like the lowest beggar if he thought such a gesture needful to gain a credit or two. IF "Kas, this is your idea. What is she worth?" Starrex asked indifferently. The younger of his companions moved forward a step or two. He was the reason for her being here -- Lord Kas, cousin to the owner of all this magnificance; though certainly not, Tamisan had already deduced, with any authority in the household. But the fact that Starrex lay in the easirest was not dictated by indolence, but rather by what was hidden by the fas-silk laprobe concealing half his body. A man who might not walk straight again could find pleasure in the abilities of an action dreamer. "She has a ten-point rating," Kas reminded the other. The black brows which gave a stern set to Starrex's features arose a trifle. "Is that so?" Jabis was quick to take advantage. "It is so. Lord Starrex. Of all this year's swarm, she rated the highest. It was -- is -- the reason why we make this offer to your lordship." "I do not pay for reports only," returned Starrex. Jabis was not to be ruffled. "A point ten, my lord, does not give demonstrations. As you know, the Hive accrediting can not be forged. It is only because I have urgent business in Brok and must leave for there that I am selling her at all. Though I have had an offer from the Foostmam herself to retain this one for lease-outs -- Tamisan, had she had anything to wager or someone with whom to wager it, would have set the winning of this bout with her uncle. Uncle? To Tamisan's thinking she had no blood tie with this small insect of a man -- with his wrinkled face, his never-still eyes, his thin hands with their half-crooked fingers always reminding one of claws outstretched to grab and grab and grab. Surely her mother must have been very unlike Uncle Jabis, or else how could her father ever have seen aught worth bedding -- not for just one night but for half a year -- in her? Tot for the first time her thoughts were on the riddle of her parents. Her mother had not been a dreamer -- though she had had a sister who had regrettably -- for the sake of the family fortune -- died in the Hive during adolescent stimulation as an E dreamer. Her father had been from offworld -- an alien, though humanoid enough to crossbreed. And he had disap)eared again off-world when his desire for star roving had become too strong to master. Had it not been that she had early shown dreamer talent. Uncle Jabis and the rest of the greedy Yeska clan would never have taken any thought of her after her mother had died of the blue plague. She was crossbred and had intelligence enough to guess early that this had given her the difference between her powers and those of others in the Hive. The ability to dream was an in-bom talent. For those of low power, it was an indwelling withdrawal from the world. And those dreamers were largely useless. But the ones who could project dreams to include others -- through linkage -- brought high prices, according to the strength and stability of their creations. E dreamers who created erotic and lascivious otherworlds once rated more highly than action dreamers. But of late years, the swing had been in the opposite direction, though how long that might hold no one could guess. And those lucky enough to have an A dreamer to sell were pushing their wares speedily lest the market decline. Tamisan's hidden talent was that she herself was never as completely lost in the dream world as those she conveyed to it. Also -- and this she had discovered very recently and hugged that discovery to her -- she could in a measure control the linkage so she was never a powerless prisoner forced to dream at another's desire. She considered now what she knew concerning this Lord Starrex. That Jabis would sell her to the owner of one of the sky towers had been clear from the first. And naturally he would select what he thought would be the best bargain. But, though rumors wafted through the Hive, Tamisan believed that much of their news of the outer world was inaccurate and grabbled. Dreamers were roofed and walled from any real meeting with everyday life, their talents feverishly fed and fostered by long sessions with tri-dee projectors and information tapes. Qtarrex, unlike most of his class,  had been a doer. He had broken the pattern of caste by going off-world on lengthy trips. It was only after some mysterious accident had crippled him that he became a recluse, supposedly hiding a maimed body. And he did not seem like those others who had come to the Hive seeking wares. Of course, it had been the tord Kas who had summoned them here. Stretched out on the easirest with that cover of fabulous silk across most of his body, he was hard to judge. But, she thought, standing he would top Jabis, and he seemed to be well muscled, more like his guardsman than his cousin. He had a face unusual in its plans, broad across the forehead and cheek bones, then slimming to a strong chin which narrowed to give his head a vaguely wedgeshaped line. He was dark-skinned, almost as dark as a space crewman. IF His hair was black, cut very short so that it was a tight velvety cap, in contrast to the longer strands of his cousin. His tunic -- lutrax of a copperyrust shade -- was of rich material but less ornamated than that of the younger man. Its sleeves were wide and loose, and now and then he ran his hands up his arms, pushing the fabric away from his skin. He wore only a single jewel, a koros stone set in an earring as a drop which dangled forward against his jaw line. Tamisan did not consider him handsome. But there was something arresting about him. Perhaps it was his air of arrogant assm:ance, as if in all his life he had never had his wishes crossed. He had not met Jabis before; and perhaps now even Lord Starrex would have something to learn. Twist and turn, indignant and persuasive, using every trick in a very considerable training for dealing and under-dealing, Jabis bargained. He appealed to gods and demons to witness his disinterested desire to please, his despair at being misunderstood. It was quite a notable act, and Tamisan stored up some of the choicer bits in her mental reservoir for the making of dreams. It was far more stimulating to watch then a tri-dee, and die wondered why this living drama material was not made available to the Hive. Unless, of course, the Foostmam and her assistants feared it, along with any shred of reality which might awaken the dreamers from their conditioned albsorption in their own creations. For an instant or two she wondered if the Lord Starrex was not enjoying it too. There was a kind of weariness in his face which suggested boredom, though that was the norm for anyone wanting a personal dreamer. Then suddenly as if he were tired of it all, he Interrupted one of Jabis' more impassioned pleas for celestial understanding of his need for receiving a just price with a single sentence. "I tire, fellow. Take your price and go." He closed his eyes in dismissal. II Tt was the guard who drew a credit plaque from his belt, swung a long arm over the back of the easirest for Lord Starrex to plant a thumb on its surface to certify payment, and then tossed it to Jabis. It fell to the floor so the small man had to scrabble for it mih his finger claws, and Tamisan saw the look in his darting eyes. Jabis had little liking for Lord Starrex -- which did not mean, of course, that he disdained the credit plaque he had to stoop to catch up. He did not give a glance to Tamisan as he bowed himself out. And IF she was left standing as if she were an android or a machine. It was the LfOrd Kas who stepped forward, touched her lightly on the arm as if he thought she needed guidance. "Come,' he said, and his fingers about her wrist drew her after him. The Lord Starrex took no notice of his new possession. "What is your name?" Lord Kas spoke slowly, emphasizing each word as if he needed to do so to pierce some veil between them. Tamisan guessed that he had had contact with a lower-rated dreamer, one who was always bemused in the real world. Caution suggested that she allow him to believe she was in a similiar daze. So she raised her head slowly, and looked at him, trying to give the appearance of one finding it difficult to focus. "Tamisan," she answered after a lengthy pause. "I be Tamisan." "Tamisan -- that is a pretty name," he said as one would address a dull-minded child. "I am Lord Kas. I am your friend." But Tamisan, sensitive to shades of voice, thought she had done well in pla#dng bemused. Whatever Kas might be, he was not her friend, at least not unless it served his purpose. "These rooms are yours." He had escorted her down a hall to a far door where he passed his hand over the surface in a pattern to break some light-lock. Then his grip on her wrist brought her into a Iiigh-ceilinged room. There were no windows to break its curve of wall. The place was oval in shape. The center fell in a series of wide, shallow steps to a pool where a small fountain raised a perfumed mist to patter back into a bonewhite basin. And on the steps were a number of cushions and soft lieons, all of many delicate shades of blue and green. While the oval walls were covered with a shimmer of rippling zidex webbing -- pale gray covered with whirls and lines of palest green. A great deal of care had gone into the making and furnishing of that room. Perhaps she was only the latest in a series of dreamers, for this was truly the rest place -- raised to a point of luxury unknown even in the Hive -- for a dreamer. A strip of the web tapestry along the wall was raised, and a personal-care android entered. The head was only an oval ball with faceted eye-plates and hearing sensors to break its surface, its unclothed, humanoid form ivory white. "This is Porpae," Kas told her. "She will watch over you." My guard, Tamisan thought. That the care the android would give her would be unceasing and of the best, she did net doubt, any more than that the ivory being would stand between her and any hope of freedom. "If you have any wish, tell it to Porpae." Kas droid his hold on her arm, turned to the door. "When the Lord Starrex wishes to dream he wiU send for you." "I am at his command," she mumbled the proper response. She watched Kas leave and then looked to Porpae. Tamison had good cause to believe that the android was programmed to record her every move. But would anyone here believe that a dreamer had any desire to be free? A dreamer wished only to dream; it was her life, her entire life. And to leave a place which did all to foster such a life -- that would be akin to self-killing, something a certified dreamer could not think of. "I hunger," she told the android. "I would eat." "Food comes." Porpae went to the wall and swept aside the web once more to display a series of buttons she pressed in a complicated manner. When the food arrived in a closed tray with the viands each in its own hot or cold compartment, Tamisan ate. She recognized the usual dishes of a dreamer's diet, but better cooked and more tastily served than in the Hive. She ate; she made use of the bathing place Porpae guided her to behind another wall web, and she slept easily and without stirring on the cushions beside the pool where the faint play of the water lulled her gently. Time had very little meaning in the oval room. She ate, slept, bathed and looked upon thetridees she asked Porpae to supply. Had she been as the others from the Hive, this existence would have been ided. But instead, when there was no call to display her art, she grew restless. She was prisoner here, and none of the other inhabitants of the sky tower seemed aware of her. There was one thing she could do, Tamisan decided upon her second waking. A dreamer was allowed -- no, required -- to study the personality of the master she must serve, if she were a private dreamer and not a leasee of the Hive. She had a right now to ask for tapes concerning Starrex. In fact, it might be considered odd if she did not, and accordingly she called for those. Thus she learned something of r master and his household. Kas had had his personal fortune wiped out by some catastrophe when he was a diild. He had been in a manner adopted by Starrex's father, the head of their clan, and since Starrex's injuries Kas had acted in some fashion as his deputy. The guard was Ulfilas, an offworld mercenary Starrex had brought back from one of his star voyages. IF Tut Starrex, save for a handful of bare facts, remained more or less of an enigma. That he had any human responses to others Tamisaiv began to doubt. He had gone seeking change off-world, but what he might have found there had not cured his eternal weariness of life. And his personal recordings were meager. She now believed that, to him, any one of his household was only a tool to be used or swept from his path and ignored. He was unmarried and such feminine companionship as he had languidly attached to his household -- and that more by the effort of the woman involved than through any direct action on his part -- did not last long. In fact, he was so encased in a shell of indifference that Tamisan wondered if there was any longer a real man within that outer covering. She began to speculate as to why he had allowed Kas to bring her as an addition to his belongings. To make the best use of a dreamer, the owner must be rea to partake, and what she reaa in these tapes suggested that Starrex's indifference would raise a barrier to any real dreaming. But the more Tamisan learned in this negative fashion, the more it seemed a challenge. She lay beside the pool in deep thought -- though that thought strayed even more than she herself guessed from the rigid mental exercises used by a point ten dreamer. To deliver a dream which would captivate Starrex was indeed a challenge. He wanted action, but her training, acute as it had been, was not enough to entice him. Therefore -- her action must be able to take a novel turn. This was an age of over-sophistication -- when star travel was a fact, when outer action existed in reality. And by these tapes, though they were not detailed as to what Starrex had done off-world, the lord had experienced much -- the reality of his time. So -- he must be served the unknown. She had read nothing in the tapes to suggest that Starrex had sadistic or perverted tendencies. And she knew if he were to be reached in such a fashion, she was not the one to do it. Also Kas would have stated such a requirement at the Hive. There were many rolls of history on which one could draw -- but those had also been mined and remined. The future -- that again had been over-used, frayed. Tamisan 's dark brows drew together above her closed eyes. Trite -- everything she thought of was trite! Why did she care anyway? She did not even know why it had become so strong a drive to build a dream that, when she was called upon to deliver it, would shake Starrex out of his shell -- to prove to him that she was worth her rating. Maybe it was partly because he had made DO move to send for her and try to prove her powers, his indifference suggesting that he thought she had nothing to offer. 'apes -- she had the right to call upon the full library of the Hive, and it was the most complete in the star lanes. Why, ships were sent out for no other reason than to bring back new knowledge to feed the imaginations of the dreamers! History. Her mind kept returning to the past, though it was too thread-bare for her purposes. History -- what was history? A series of events -- actions by individuals, or nations. Actions had results. Tamisan sat up among her cushions. Results of action! Sometimes there were far-reaching results from a single action -- the death of a ruler, the outcome of one battle, the landing of a star ship -- or its failure to land. So -- Her flicker of idea became solid. History could have had many roads to travel beside the one already known. Now -- could she make use of that? Why, it had imuunerable possibilities! Tamisan's hands clenched the robe lying across her knees. Study -- she would have to study! And if Stajrex only gave her more time... She no longer resented his indifference now. She would need every minute it was prolonged. "Porpae!" The android materialized from behind the web. "I must have certain tapes from the Hive." Tamisan hesitated. In spite of the spin of impatience, she must build smoothly and surely. "A message to the Foostmam: send to Tamisan n' Starrex the rolls of the history of Ty-Kry for the past five hundred years." The history of a single city and that of the one which based this sky tower! Begin small so she could test and retest her idea. Today a single city, tomorrow a world, and then -- who knew -- perhaps a solar system! She reined in her excitement. There was much to do. She needed a note recorder -- and time. But by the Four Breasts of Vlasta -- if she could do it! It would seem she would have time, though always at the back of Tamisan's mind was the small spark of fear that at any moment the summons to Starrex might come. But the tapes arrived from the Hive and the recorder, so that die swung from one to the other, taking notes from what she learned. Then after the tapes had been retinned, she studied those notes feveridily. Now her idea meant more to her than just a device to amuse a difficult master; it absorbed her utterly, as if she were a low-grade IF dreamer caught in one of her own creations. When Tamisan realized the danger of this, she broke with her studies and turned back to the household tapes to learn again what she could of Starrex. T)ut she was again running through her notes when at last the summons came. How long she had been in Starrex's tower she did not know, for days and nights in the oval room were all alike. Only Porpaes watchfulness had kept her to a routine of eating and rest. It was the Lord Kas who came for her, and she had just time to remember her role of bemused dreamer as he entered. "You are well and happy?" He used the conventional greeting. "I enjoy the good life." "It is the Lord Starrex's wish that he enter a dream." Kas reached for her hand, and she allowed his touch. "The Lord Starrex demands much. Offer him your best, dreamer." He might have been warning her. "A dreamer dreams," she answered him vaguely. "What is dreamed can be shared." "True. But the Lord Starrex is hard to please. Do your best for him, dreamer." She did not answer, and he drew her on, out of the room to a grav shaft and down that to a lower level. The room into which they finally went had the apparatus very familiar to her -- a couch for the dreamer, the second for the sharer with the linkage machine between. But here was a third couch. Tamisan looked at it in surprise. "Two dream, not three." Kas shook his head. "It is the Lord Starrex's will that another shares also. The linkage is of a new model, very powerful. It has been well tested." Who would be that . third? Ulfilas? Was it that Lord Starrex thought he must take his personal guard into a dream with him? The door swung open again, and Lord Starrex entered. He walked stiffly, one leg swinging wide as if he could not bend the knee nor control the muscles, and he leaned heavily on an android. As the servant lowered him onto the couch, he did not look to Tamisan but nodded curtly to Kas. "Take your place also," be ordered. Did Starrex fear the dream state and want his cousin as a check because Kas had plainly dreamed before? Then Starrex turned to her as he reached for the dream cap, cop#dng the motion by which she settled her own circlet on her head. "Let us see what you can do." There was a shadow of hostility in his voice, a challenge to produce something which he did not believe she could do. Ill S he mus not allow herself to think of Starrex now, only of her dream She must create and have no fear that her creation would be less perfect than her hopes. Tamisan dosed her eyes, firmed her will and drew into her imagination all the threads of the studies' spinning. She began the weaving of a dream. For a moment, perhaps two fingers' count of moments, this was like the beginning of any dream and then --  She was not looking on, watching intently, critically, a fabric she spim with dexterity. No, it was rather as if that web suddenly became real and she was caught tightly in it, even as a blue-winged drotail might be enmeshed in a foss-spider's deadly nest curtain I This was no dreaming such as Tamisan had ever known before, and panic gripped so harshly in her throat and chest that she might have screamed, save that she had no voice left. She fell down and down from a point above, to strike among bushes which took some of her weight, but with an impact which left her bruised and half senseless. She lay immoving, gasping, her eyes closed, fearing to open them to see that she was indeed caught in a wild nightmare and not properly dreaming. As she lay there, she came slowly out of her dazed bewilderment; she tried to get c#ntrol not only oyer her fear but hea: akeaming powers. Then she ppeg her eyes cautiouslyAn arch of sky was overhead, palidly green, with traces, like long, clutching fingers, of thin gray cloud. As real as any sky might be, did she walk imder it in her own time and world. Her own time and world! The idea she had built upon to astound Starrex came back to her now. Had the fact that she had worked with a new theory, trying to bring a twist to dreaming which might pierce the indifference of a bored man precipitated this? Tamisan sat up, wincing at the protest of her bruises, to look about her. Her vantage point was the crest of a small knob of earth. But the land about her was no wilderness. The turf was smooth and cropped, and here and there were outcrops of rock cleverly carved and clothed with flowering vines -- some of them; others were starkly bare, brooding. And all faced down slope to a wall. These forms varied from vaguely acceptable humanoid shapes to grotesque monsters. And Tamisan decided that she liked the aspect of none when she studied them more closely. There were not of her imagining. Beyond the wall began a cluster of buildings. Used to seeing the sky towers and the lesser, if more substantial structures beneath those IF which were of her own world, these looked unusually squat and heavy. The highest she could see from here was no more than three stories. Men did not build to the stars here, they hugged the earth closely. Tut where was here? Not her dream -- Tamisan closed her eyes and concentrated on the beginnings of her planned dream. ' That had been about going into another world, bom of her imagining, yes -- but not this I Her basic idea had been simple enough, if not one which had been used to her knowledge by any dreamer before her. It all hinged on the idea that the past history of her world had been altered many times during its flow -- and she had taken three keypoints of alteration, studied on what might have resulted had those been given the opposite decision by fate. Now, keeping her eyes firmly closed against this seeming reality into which she had fallen, Tamisan concentrated with fierce intentness upon her chosen points. "The Welcome of the OverQueen Ahta -- " she recited the first. What if the first star ship on its landing had not been accepted as a supernatural event and the small kingdom in which it had touched earth had not accepted its crew as godlings, but rather had greeted them instead with those poisoned darts the spacemen had later seen used? That was her first dedsion. "The loss of the Wanderer." That was the second. A colony ship driven far from its assigned course by computer failure, so that it had had to make a landing here or let its passengers die. If that failure had not occmred and the Wanderer not landed to start an unplanned colony... "The death of Sylt the SweetTongued before he reached the Altar of Ictio." A prophet who might never have arisen to ruthless power, leading to a blood-crazed insurrection from temple to temple, setting darkness on three-quarters of this world. She had chosen those points, but she had not even been sure that one might not have canceled out another. Sylt had led the rebellion against the colonists from the Wanderer. If the welcome had not occurred... Tamisan could not be sure -- she had only tried to find a pattern sequence of events and then envision a modern world stemming from those changes. However  -- she opened her eyes again -- this was not her imagined world I Nor did one in a dream rub bruises, sit on damp sod, feel wind pull at clothes, and allow the first patter of rain to wet hair and robe. She put both hands to her head -- what of the dream cap? Her fingers found a weaving of metal right enough, but there were DO cords from it. And for the first time she remembered that she had been link with Starrex and Kas when this happened. jamisah got to her feet to look around her, half expecting to see the other two somewhere near. But she was alone, and the rain was falling heavier. There was a roofed space near the wall, and Tamisan hurried for it. Thred twisted pillars supported a small dome of roof. There were no Wa, and she huddled in the very center, trying to escape the wind-bome moisture. She cotild not keep pushing away the feeling that this was no dream but true reality. If -- if one could dream imel Tamisan fought panic and tried to examine the possibilities. Eai she somehow landed in a Ty-Kry which might have existed had her three checkpoints actually been the decisions she envisioned? If so -- could one get back by simply visioning them in reverse? She shut her eyes and concentrated... T here was a sensation of stomach-turning giddiness. She swung out, to be jerked back -- swung out, to return once more. Shaking with nausea, Tamisan stopped trying. She shuddered, opening her eyes to the rain. Then again she strove to understand what had happened. That swing had in it some of the sensation of dream breaking. It didi Which meant that she was in a eam. But it was just as apparent that she had been held priscmer here. How? And why? Or -- her eyes narrowed a little, though she was looking inward, not at the rainmisted garden before her -- by whom?, Suppose -- suppose one or both of those who had prepared to share her dream had also come into this place -- though not right here -- then she must find them. They must return together or the missing one would anchor the others. Find them -- and now! For the first time she looked down at the garment clinging dank and damp to her slender body. It was not the gray slip of a dreamer, for it was long, brushing her ankles. And in color it was a dusky violet, a shade she found strangely pleasing and right. Frmn its hem to her knees there was a border of intricate embroidery so entwined and ornate that she found it hard to define in any detail, though it seemed oddly enough that the longer she studied it, the more it appeared to be not threads on cloth, W words on a page of manuscript such as she had viewed in the ancient history video tapes. The threads were a metallic green and silver, with only a few minor touches of a lighter shade of violet. Around her waist was a belt of silver links, clasped by a broad IF buckle of the same metal set with purple stones. This supported a pouch with a metal top. The dress or robe was laced from the belt to her throat with silver cords run through metal eyelets in the material. And her sleeves were long and full, though from the elbow down they were slit to four parts, those fluttering away from her arms when she raised them to loose the crown. What she brought away from her head was not the familiar skull cap made to fit over her cropped hair. Rather it was a circlet of silver with inner wires or strips rising to a conical point that added a foot or more to her height. On that point was a beautifully-fashioned flying thing, its wings a little lifted as if to take off, the glitter of tiny jewels marking its eyes. It was so made that, as she turned the crown around, its long neck changed position and the wings moved a fraction. Thus at first sh# was almost startled enough to drop the circlet, thinking it might just be alive. But the whole she recognized from one of the history tapes. The bird was the flacar of Olava. Wearing it so meant that she was a Mouth! A Mouth of Olava -- half priestess, part sorceress -- and oddly enough, entertainer. But fortune had favored her in this; a Mouth of Olava might wander anywhere without question, searching, and seem merely to be about her normal business. Tamisan ran her hand over her head before she replaced the crown. Her fingers did not find the bristly stubble of a dreamer, but rather soft, mist-damped strands which curled down long enough to brush her forehead and tuft at the nape of her neck. Qhe had imagined garments for herself in dreams, of course. But this time she had not provided herself with such, and so the fact that she stood as a Mouth of Olava was part of the time of the OverQueen's rule. Had she somehow swept herself back in time? The sooner she found knowledge of where -- and when -- she was, the better. The rain was slackening and Tamisan moved out from under the dome. She bunched up her robe in both hands to dimb back up the slope. At its top she turned slowly, trying to find some proof that she had not been tossed alone into this strange world. Save for the figures of stone and beds of rank-looking growth, there was nothing to be seen. The wall and the dome structure lay below. But when she faced about, there was a second slope leading to a still higher point which was crowned by a roof to be seen only in bits and patches through a screen of oarn trees. The roof had a ridge which terminated at either side in a sharp upcurve, giving the building the odd appearance of an ear on either end. And it was green with a glitin spite of the. clouds overhead. To her right and left Tamisan caught glimpses of the wall curving, and more stone figures with flower or shrub plantings. Gathering up her skirts more firmly, she began to walk up the cinve of the higher slope in search of some road or path leading to the roof. She came across what she sought as she detoured to avoid a thicket of heavy brush in which were impaled huge scarlet flowers. It was a wide roadway paved with small colored pebbles imbedded in a solid surface, and it led from an open gateway up the swell of the slope to the front of the rear structure. In shape the building was vaguely familiar, though Tamisan could not identify it. Unless is resembled something she had seen in the tridees. The door was of the same walls were a pale yellow, cut sharply at regular intervals by windows, very narrow, and so tall that they ran from floor to roof level. Even as she stood there wondering where she had seen such a house before, a woman came out. Like Tamisan she wore a long skirted robe with laced bodice and slit sleeves. But hers was the same green as that of the door, so that, standing against it, only her head and arms were clearly visible. She gestured with vigor, and Tamisan suddenly realized that it must be she who was being summoned -- as if she were expected Again she fought down imease. In a dream she was well used to meetings and partings, but always those were of her own devising, did not happen for a purpose which was not of her wish. Her dream peqple were toys, game pieces, to be moved hither and thither at her will, she being always in command over them. "Tamisan -- they wait -- come quickly!" The woman called. IV 'amisan was minded in that instant to run in the other direction. But the need to learn what had happened to her made her take what might be the dangerous course of joining the woman. "Fah -- you are wet! This is no hour for walking in the garden. The First Standing asks for a reading from the Mouth. If you would have lavishly from her purse, hurry lest she grows too impatient to wait!" The door gave upon a narrow entryway, and the woman in green propelled Tamisan toward a second opening directly facing her. She came so into a large room where a IF circle of couches was centered. By each stood a small table now burdened with dishes which serving maids were bearing away as if a meal had just been concluded. And tall candlesticks, matching Tamisan's own height, stood also between the divans, the candles in each, as thick as her forearm, alight to give forth not only radiance but a sweet odor as they burned. Midpoint in the divan circle was a tall-backed chair over which arched a canopy. And in that sat a woman, a goblet in her hand. She had a fur cloak pulled about her shoulders hiding almost all of her robe, save that here and there a shimmer of gold caught fire from the candlelight. Only her face was visible in a hood of the same metallic-seeming fabric, and it was that of the very old, seamed with deep wrinkles, sunken of eye. The divans, Tamisan marked, were occupied by both men and women, the women flanking the chair, the men fartherest away from the ancient noblewoman. And directly facing her was a second impressive chair, lacking only the canopy; before it was a table on which stood, at each of its four corners, four small basins, one cream, one pale rose, one faintly blue, and the fourth sea-foam green. Tamisan's store of knowledge gave her some preparation. This was the setting for the magic of a Mouth, and it was apparent that her service as a foreseer was aliout to be demanded. What had she done in allowing herself to be drawn here? Could she make pretense her servant well enough to deceive this company? hunger. Mouth of Olava, I hunger -- not for that which will feed the body, but for that which satisfies the mind." The old woman leaned forward a little. Her voice might be the thin one of age, but it carried with it the force of authority, of one who has not had her word or desire questioned for a long time. Qhe must improvise, Tamisan  knew. She was a dreamer and she had wrought in dreams many strange things. Let her but remember that now. Her damp skirts clung clammily to her legs and Jhighs as she came forward, saying nothing to the woman in return, but seating herself in the chair facing her client. She was drawing on faint stirrings of a memory which seemed not truly her own for guidance, though she had not yet realized that fully. "What would you know. First Standing?" She raised her hands to her forehead in an instinctive gesture, touching forefingers to her temples, right and left. "What comes to me -- and mine." The last two words had come almost as an afterthought. Tamisan's hands went out without her conscious ordering. She stiffled her amazement -- this was as if she were repeating an act as well learned as her dreamer's technique had been. With her left hand she gathered up a palm full of the sand from the cream bowl. It was a shade or two darker than the container. She tossed this with a sharp movement of her wrist, and it settled smoothly as a film on the tabletop. What she was doing was not of her conscious mind, as if another had taken charge of her actions. And judging by the way the woman in the chair leaned forward, the hush that had fallen on her companions, this was right and proper. Without any order from her mind, Tamisan's rit hand went now to the blue bowl with its dark blue sand. But this was not tossed. Instead, she held the fine grains in her t and that upright, passing it slowly over the table top so that a very tiny trickle of grit fed down to me a pattern on the first film. And it was a pattern, not a random scattering. What she had so drawn was a recognizable sword with a basket-shaped hilt and a slightly curved blade tapering to a narrow point. Now her hand moved to the pink bowl. The sand she gathered up there was a dark red, more vivid than the other colors, as if she dealt now with flecks of newly shed blood. Once more she used her upheld fist, and the shifting stream, fed from her palm, became a space ship I It was idightly different in outline from those she had seen all her life, but it was unmistakably a ship. And it was drawn on the table top as if it threatened to descend upon the pointed sword. Or was it that the sword threatened it? She heard a gasp of surprise -- or was it fear? But that sound had not come from the woman who had bade her foretell. It must have broken from some other member of the company intent upon Tamisan's painting with the flowing sand Tt was to the fourth bowl now that her right hand moved. But she did not take up a full fistful, rather a generous pinch between thumb and forefinger. She held the sand high above the picture and released it. The green specks floated down -- to gather in a sign like a circle with one portion missing. She stared at that, and it seemed to alter a little under the intentness of her watching. What it had changed to was a symbol she knew well, one which brought a small gasp from her. It was the seal, simplified it was true, but still readable, of the House of Starrex, and it overlaid both the edge of the ship and the tip of the sword. "Read you this! " The noblewoman demanded sharply. IF And from somewhere the words came readily to Tamisan. 'The sword is the sword of Ty-Kry raised in defense." "Assured, assured." The murmur ran along the divans. "Tlie ship comes as a danger -- " "That thing -- a ship? But it is no ship -- " "It is a ship from the stars." "A woe -- woe and woe -- " That was no murmur now but a full throated cry of fright. "As in the days of our fathers when we had to deal with the false ones. Ahtap -- let the spirit of Ahta be shield to our arms, a sword in our hands!" The noblewoman made a silencing gesture with one hand. "Enough! Crying to the reverend spirits may bring comfort, but they are not noted for helping those not standing to arms on their own behalf. There have been other sky ships since Ahta's days, and with them we have dealt -- to our purpose. If another comes, we are forewarned, which is also forearmed. But what lies there in green, # Mouth of Olava, which surprised even you?" Tamisan had had precious moments in which to think. If it were true as she had deduced, that she was tied to this world by those she had brought with her, then she must find them. And it was clear that they were not of this company. Therefore this last must be made to work for her. "The green sign is that of a champion, one meant to be mighty in the coming battle. But he shall not be known save when the sign points to him, and it may be that this can only be seen by one with the Eyes." Ohe looked to the noblewoman, and,meeting those old eyes, Tamisan felt a small chill rise in her, one which had not been bom from the still damp clothing she wore. For there was that in those two shadowed eyes which questioned coldly and did not accept without proof. "So should the one with the Eye you speak of go sniffing all through Ty-Kry and the land beyond the city, even to the boundaries of the world?" "If need be," Tamisan stood firm. "A long journey, mayhap, and many step-strides into danger. And if the ship comes before this champion is found? A thin cord I think, # Mouth, on which to hang the future of a city, a kingdom or a people. Look if you will, but I say we have more tested ways of dealing with these interlopers from the skies. But, Mouth, since you have given warning, let it so be remembered." She put her hands on the arms of her chair and arose, using them to lever her. And so all her company came to their feet, two of the women hurrying to her so that she could lay her hands upon their shoulders to support her out. Without another glance at Tamisan she went, nor did the dreamer rise to see her go. For suddenly she was spent, tired as she had been in the past when a dream broke and left her supine and drained. Only this dream did not break, but kept her sitting before the table and its sand pictxures, looking at that green symbol, still caught fast in the web of another world. The woman in green returned, bearing a goblet in her two hands, offering it to Tamisan. "The First Standing will go to the High Castle and the OverQueen. She turned into that road. Drink, Tamisan, and mayhap the Over-Queen herself will ask you for a seeing." Tamisan? That was her true name. Twice this woman had called her by it. How was it known in a dream? Yet she dared not ask that question or any of the others she needed answers for. Instead she drank from the goblet, finding the liquid hot and spicy, driving the chill from her body. There was so much she must learn, must know, and she could not discover it save indirectly, lest she reveal what she was and was not. "I am tired." "There is a resting place prepared," the woman said. '"You have only to come -- " Tamisan had almost to lever herself up as the noblewoman had done. She was giddy, had to catch at the back of the chair. Then she moved after her hostess, hoping desperately to know... V D id one sleep in a dream, dream upon dream, perhaps? Tamisan wondered about that as she stretched out upon the couch her hostess showed her. Yet when she set aside her crown and laid her head upon the roll which served as a pillow, she was once more alert, her thoughts racing or entangled in such wild confusion that she felt as giddy as she had upon rising from her seers chair. The Starrex symbol overl#ung both that of the sword and the space ship in the sand picture -- could it mean that she would only find what she sought when the might of this world met that of the starmen? And had she indeed in some manner fallen into the past where she would relive the first coming of the space voyagers to Ty-Kry? But no, the noblewoman had mentioned past encounters with them which had ended in favor of Ty-Kry. Tamisan tried to envision a world of her own time, but one in which history had taken a different road. Yet much of that around her was of the past. Did that mean that. IF without the decisions of her own time, the world of Ty-Kry remained largely unchanged from century to century? Real, unreal, old, now -- she had lost all a dreamer's command of action. Tamisan did not play now with toys which she codd move about at will, but rather was caught up in a series of events she could not foresee and over which she had no control. Yet twice the woman had called her by her rightful name used the devices of a Mouth of Olava to foretell, as if she had done so many times before. Could it be? Tamisan closed her teeth upon her lower lip and felt the pain of that, just as she felt the pain of the bruises left by her abrupt entrance into the mysterious here. Could it be that some dreams were so deep, so well woven that they were to the dreamer real? Was this indeed the fate of those "closed" dreamers who were worthless for the Hive? Did they in their trances live a countless number of lives? But she was not a closed dreamer -- Awake! Once more, stretched as she was upon the couch, she used the proper technique to throw herself out of a dream. And once more she experienced that weird nothingness in which she spun sickeningly, as if held helplessly in some void, tied to an anchor which kept her back from the full leap to sane safety. There was only one eIanation -- that somewhere in this strange Ty-Kry one or both of those who had prared to share her dream was now to be foimd and must be sought out before she could return. So -- the sooner that she accomplished, the better! But w'here should she start seeking? Though a feeling of weakness climg to her limbs, making her move slowly as if she strove to walk against the pull of a strong current, Tamisan arose from the couch. She turned to pick up her Mouth's crown and so looked into the oval of a mirror, startled thus into immobility. For the figure she looked upon as her own reflection was not that she had seen before. Tt was not the robe or the crown which had changed her; she was not the same person. For a long time, ever since she could remember, she had had the pallid skin and the close cropped hair of a dreamer very seldom in the sunlight. But the face of the woman in the mirror was a soft, even brown. The cheekbones were wide, the eyes large, the lips very red. Her brows -- she leaned closer to the mirror to see what gave them that odd upward slant and decided that they had been plucked or shaven to produce the effect. Her hair was perhaps three fingers long and not her very fair coloring, but dark and curling. She was not the Tamisan she knew, nor was this stranger the product of her own will. And it must follow logically that if she did not look like her normal self -- then perhaps the two she sought were no longer as she remembered either. Thus her search would be twice the more difficult. Could she ever recognize them? Fritened now, she sat down on the couch, facing the mirror. No, she dared not even give way to fear. For if she once let it break her control she might be utterly lost. Logic, even in such a world of unlogic, must make her think lucidly. Just how true was her soothsaying? At least she had not influenced that fall of the sand. Therefore -- perhaps the Mouth of Olava did have supernatural powers. She had fdayed with the idea of magic in the past to embroider dreams, but that had been her own creation. Could she use it by will now -- since it would seem this unknown self of hers did manage to draw upon some unknown source of power? Fasten her thoughts upon one of the men, hold him in her mind- -- could the dream tie pull her to him? Kas or Starrex? All she knew of her master she had learned from tapes, and tapes gave one only superficial knowledge, as if one could study a person going through only half-understood actions behind a veil which concealed more than it displayed. Kas had spoken directly to her, his flesh had touched hers. If she must choose one to draw her, then it had better be Kas. Kas -- in her mind Tamisan built a memory sketch of him as she would build a preliminary picture for a dream. Then suddenly the Kas in her mind flickered and changed. She saw another man. He was taller than the Kas die knew, and he wore a imiform tunic and space boots -- his features were hard to distinguish -- and that vision lasted only a fraction of time. The Shipl That symbol had lain touching both ship and sword in the sand seeing. And it would be easier to seek a man on the ship than wandering through the streets of a strange city with no better clue than that Starrex -- :this world's counterpart -- might just be here. So little on which to pin a quest! A ship which might or might not be now approaching Ty-Kry -- and which would meet a drastic reception when it landed. Suppose Kas -- or his this-world's double -- were killed? Would that anchor her here for all time? Resolutely Tamisan pushed such negative speculation to the back of her mind. First things first; the ship had not yet planeted. But when it came she must make sure that she was among those who were preparing for its welcome. IF Tt seemed that having made that decision she was at last able to sleep, for the fatigue which had struck at her in the hall returned a hundred-fold, and she fell, back on the couch as one drugged, remembering nothing more until she awakened to find the woman in green standing above her, one hand on her shoulder shaking her gently back to awareness, "Awake -- there is a summons." A summons to dream, Tamisan thought dazedly, and then the unfamiliar room, the immediate past came completely back to her. "The First Standing Jassa has summoned." The woman sounded excited. "It is said by her messenger, and he has brought a chair cart for you, that you are to go to the High Castle I Perhaps you will see for the Over-Queen herself I But there is time -- I have won it for you -- to bathe, to eat, to change ybur robe. See -- I have plundered my own bride chest -- "She pointed to a chair over which was spread a robe, not of the deep violet Tamisan now wore, but of a purple-wine. "It is the only one of the proper color -- or near it." She ran her hand lovingly over the rich folds. "But haste!" she added briskly. "As a Mouth you can claim the need for making ready to appear before high company, hut to linger too long will raise the anger of the First Standing." There was a basin large enough to serve as a bath in the room beyond. And, as well as the robe, the woman brought fresh body linen. So that when Tamisan stood once more before the mirror to clasp her silver belt and assume the Mouth crown, she felt renewed and refreshed and her thanks were warm. But the woman made a gesture of brushing them aside. "Are we not of the same clan, cousin-kin? Shall one say that Nahra is not open-handed with her own? That you are a Mouth is our clan pride, let us enjoy it through you!" She brought a covered bowl and a goblet and Tamisan ate a dish of mush-meal into which had been baked dried fruit and bits of what she thought well-chopped meat. It was tasty, and she finished it to the last crumb, just as she emptied the cup of a tart-sweet drink. "Well away, Tamisan, this is a great day for the clan of Fremont when you go to the High Castle and perhaps stand before the OverQueen. May it be that the Seeing is not for ill, but for good. Though you are but the Mouth of Olava and not the One dealing fortune to us who live and die." "For your aid and your good wishing, receive my thanks," Tamisan said. "I, too, hope that fortune comes from misfortune on this day." And that is stark truth, she thought, for I must gather fortune to me with both hands and hold it IF tight, lest the chancy game I play be lost. F irst Standing Jassa's messenger was an officer, his hair clubbed up under a ridged helm to give additional protection to his head in battle, his breastplate enameled blue with the double crown of the Over-Queen, and his sword very much to the fore -- as if he already strode the street of a city at war. There was a small grypon between the shafts of the chair cart and two men-at-arms ready, one at the grypon's head, the other holding aside the curtains as their officer handed Tamisan into the chair. He brusk ly jerked the curtains shut without asking her pleasure, and she decided that perhaps her visit to the High Castle was to be a secret matter. But between the curtain edges she caught sight of this Ty-Kry. And, though in parts it was very strange to her, there were enough similarities to provide her with an anchor to the real. The sky towers and other off-world forms of architectures which had been introduced by space travelers were missing. But the streets themselves, the many beds of foliage and flowers, were those she had known all her life. And the High Castle -- she drew a deep breath as they wound out of town and along the river -- this -- this had been part of her world. too, though then as a ruined and very ancient landmark. Part of it had been slagged in the war ef SylVs rebellion. And it had been considered a place of misfortune, largely shunn, save for off-warld tourists seeking the unusual. But here it was in its pride, larger, more widely spread than in her Ty-Kry, as if the generations who had deserted it in her world had clung to it here, adding ever to its bulk. For it was not a single structure but a city in itself, though it had no merchants nor public buildings , but rather provided homes to shelter the nobles, who must spend part of the year at court, and all their , servants, and the many officials of the kingdom. In its heart was the building which gave it its name, a collection of towers, rising far above the lesser structures at the foot. These were of a gray at their bases which changed subtly as they arose until their tops were a deep, rich blue, while the other buildings in the great pile were wholly gray as to wall, a darker blue as to roof. The chair creaked forward on its two wheels, the grypon being kept to a steady pace by the man at its head, and passed under the thick arch in the outer wall, then up a street between buildings which, though dwarfed by the towers, were in turn dwarfing to those who walked or rode by them. There was a second gate, more buildings, a third, and then the open space about the central towers. They had passed people in plenty since entering the first gate. Many were soldiers of the guard, but some of the armed men had worn other colors and insignia, being, Tamisan guessed, the retainers of court lords. And now and then some Lord came proudly, his retinue strung along behind him by threes to make a show which amused Tamisan, as if the number of followers to tread on one's heels enhanced one's importance in the world. She was handed down with a little more ceremony than she had' been ushered into the chair. And the officer offered her his wrist, his men falling in behind as a groom hurried forward to lead off the equipage, thus affording her a tailof-honor too. But the towers of the High Castle were so awe inspiring, so huge a pile, she was glad she had an escort into their heart. The farther they went through halls -- so high that it was hard to see their dusky roofs, ill lit by only the big candles in their man-tall holders -- the more uneasy she became. As if once within his maze there might be no retreat and she woiild be lost forever. VI T wice they climbed staircases until her legs ached with the effort and the stairs took on the aspect of mountains. Then her party passed into a long hall which was lighted not only by the candle-trees but some tMn rays filtering through windows placed so high above their heads that nothing could be seen through them. And Tamisan, in that part of her which seemed familiar with this world, knew this to be the Walk of the Nobles, and the company now gathered here were, nearest, the Third Standing, then the Second and, at the far end of that road of blue carpet onto which her guide led her. First Standing -- or rather sitting, there being two arcs of hooded and canopied chairs, with a throne above them on a three-step dias. And the hood over that was upheld by a double crown which glittered with gems, while on the steps were grouped men in the armor of the guard and others wearing bright tunics, their hair loose upon their shoulders. It was toward that throne that the officer led her and they passed through the ranks of the Third Standing, hearing a low murmur of voices. Tamisan looked neither to right or left. She wished to see the Over-Queen, for it was plain she was being granted full audience. And then -- something stirred deep within her as if a small pin pricked. The reason for this she did not know, save that ahead was something of vast importance to her. Now they were equal with the IF first of the chairs and she saw that the greater number of those who so sat were women, but not all. And mainly they were of an age to be at least in middle life. So Tamisan came to the foot of the dais, and in that moment she did not go to one knee as did the officer, but rather raised her finger tips to touch the rim of the crown on her head. For with another of those flashes of half recognition, she knew that in this place that which she represented did not bow as did others, but acknowledged only that the Queen was one to whom human allegiance was granted after another and greater loyalty was paid elsewhere. 'he Over-Queen looked down with as deeply searching a stare as Tamisan looked up. And what Tamisan saw was a woman to whom she could not set an age; rather she might be either old or young, for the years had not seemed to mark her. The robe on her full figure was not ornate, but a soft pearl color without ornamentation, save that she wore a girdle of silvery chains braided and woven together, and a collar-like necklace of the same metal from which fringed milky gems cut into drops. Her hair was a flame of brightly glowing red in which a diadem of the same creamy stones was almost hidden. As for her face -- was she beautiful? Tamisan could not have said. But that she was vitally alive there was no doubt Even though she sat so quietly bow, there was an aura of energy about her suggesting that this was only a pause between the doing of great and necessary deeds. To Taaiisan she was the most assertive personality she had ever seen and instantly the guards of a dreams went into action. To serve such a mistress, Tamisan thought, would sap all the personality from one, so that the servant would become but a mirror to reflect from that surrender onward. "Welcome, Mouth of Olava who has been uttering strange things." The Over-Queen's voice was mocking, challenging. "A Mouth says naught. Great One, save what is given it to speak." Tamisan found her answer ready, though she had not consciously formed it in her mind. "So we are told. Though Gods may grow Id and tired. Or is that only the fate of men? But now it is our will that Olava speak again -- if that is fortune for this hour. So be it!" As if that last phrase was an order there was a stir among those standing on the steps of the throne. Two of the guardsmen brought out a table, a third a stool, the fourth a tray on which rested four bowls of sand. These they set up before the throne. Tamisan took her place on the stool, again put her fingers to her tenles. Would this work once more? Or must she try to force a picture in the sand? She felt a small shiver of nerves she fought to control. "What desires the Great One?" She was glad to hear her voice steady, no hint of her uneasiness in it. "What chances in -- say four passages of the sun?" Tamisan waited. Would that other personality or power, or whatever it might be, take over? But her hand did not move. Instead that odd, disturbing prick grew the stronger; she was drawn, even as a noose might be laid about her forehead to puU her head around. So she turned to follow the dictates of that pull, to look where something willed her eyes to look. But all she saw was the line of officers on the steps of the throne, and they stared at and through her, none with any sign of recognition StarrexI She grasped at that hope; but none of them resembled the man she sought. Olava sleep? Or has His Mouth been forgotten for a space?" The Over-Queen's voice was sharper, and Tamisan broke that hold on her attention looked back to the throne and the woman on it. "It is not meet for the Mouth to speak unless Olava wishes -- " Tamisan began, with increasing nervousness until siie felt that sensation in her left hand, as if it were not under her control but possessed by another will. She fell silent as it gathered up the brownish sand and tossed it to form a picture's background. But this time she did not seek next the blue grains; rather her fist dug into the red and moved to paint in the outline of the space ship, above it a single red circle. Then there was a moment of hesitation, before her fingers strayed to the green, took up a generous pinch and again made Starrex's S#mibol below the ship. "A single sun," the Over-Queen read out. "One day until the enemy comes. But what is the remaining word of Olava, Mouth?" "That there be one among you who is a key to victory. He shall stand against the enemy and under him fortune comes." "So? And who is this hero?" Tamisan looked again to the line of officers. Dared she trust to instinct? Something within her urged her on. "Let each of these protectors of Ty-Kry -- " She raised a finger to indicate the officers. "Let each come forward and take up the sand of seeing. Let the Mouth touch that hand and may it then strew the answer -- perhaps Olava will so make it clear." To Tamisan's surprise, the OverIF Queen laughed. good a way as any perhaps for picking a champion. Though to abide by Olava's choice -- that is another matter." And her smile faded as she glanced at the men, as if there was a thought in her mind which disturbed her. At her nod, they came one by one. Under the shadows of their helmets their faces, being of one race, were very similiar; and Tamisan, studying each, could see no chance of telling which Starrex might be. Each took up a pinch of green sand, held out his hand palm down and let the grains fall while she set finger tip to the back of that hand. The sand drifted, but in no shape and to no purpose. Tt was not imtil the last man came that there was a difference, for then the sand did not drift, but fell to form again the symbol which was twin to the one already on the table. Tamisan looked up. The officer was staring at the sand rather then meeting her eyes, and there was a line of strain about his mouth, a look about him such as might shadow the face of a man who stood with his back to a wall and a ring of sword points at his throat. 'This is your man," Tamisan said. Starrex? She must be sure -- if she could only demand the truth in this instant! But her preoccupation was swept aside. "Olava deals falsely!" That ry came from the officer behind her, the one who had brought her here. "Perhaps we must not think ill of Olava's advice." The OverQueen's voice had a guttural, feline purr. 'Tt may be his Mouth is not wholly weed to his service, but speaks for others than Olava at times. Hawarel -- so you are to be om champion -- The officer went to one knee, his hands clasped loosely before him as if he ved all to see he did not reach for any weapon. "I am no choice, save the Great One's." In spite of the strain visible in his tense body he spoke levelly and without a tremor. "Great One, this traitor -- " Two of the officers moved as if to lay hands upon him and drag him away. "No. Has not QIava spoken?" The mockery was very plain in the Over-Queen's tone now. "But to make sure that Olava's will be carried out, take good care of our champion to be. Since Hawarel is to fight our battle with the cursed starmen, he must be saved to do it." Now she looked to Tamisan, who was still startled by Ibe quick turn of events and their hostility to Olava's choice. "Let the Mouth of Olava diare with Hawarel this waiting that she may, perhaps instill in Olava's choice the vigor and strength such a battle will demand of our chosen championV Each time the Over-Queen spoke the last word she made of it a thing of derision and subtle menace. "The audience is finished." The Over-Queen arose, stepped behind the throne as those about Tamisan fell to their knees; and then she was gone. But the officer who had guided Tamisan was by her side. And Hawarel, once more on his feet, was closely flanked by two of the other guards, one of whom pulled their prisoner's sword from his sheath before he could move. With Hawarel before her, Tamisan was urged from the hall. At the moment she was pleased enough to go, hoping for a chance to prove the rightness of her guess, that Hawarel and Starrex were the same and she had found the first of her fellow dreamers -- was this far onward toward their release. They traversed more halls until they came to a door which one of HawarePs guards opened. The prisoner walked through and Tamisan's escort waved her after him. Then the door slammed shut and at that sound Hawarel whirled around. Under the beaking fore plate of his helmet his eyes were cold fire and he seemed a man about to leap for his enemy's throat. "Who -- " His voice was only a harsh whisper. "Who set you to my death wishing, witch?" TTis clawed hands were reaching for her throat. Tamisan flung up her arm in an attempt to guard, stumbled back. "Lord Starrex I" If she had been wrong -- if -- ! Though his finger tips brushed her shoulders, he did not grasp her. Instead it was his turn to retreat a step or two, his mouth half open in a gasp. "Witch -- witch!" The very force of the words he hurled at her made them like darts dispatched from one of the archaic crossbows of the history tapes. "Lord Starrex," Tamisan repeated, feeling on more secure ground at seeing his stricken amazement, no longerfearing he would attack her out of hand. His reaction to that name was enough to assure her she was right, though he did not seem prepared to acknowledge it. "I am Hawarel of the Vanora," he brought out those words as harsh croaking. Tamisan glanced around. This was a bare-walled room, with no hiding place for a listener. In her own time and place she could have feared many scanning devices. But she thought those unknown to this Ty-Kry. And to win Hawarel-Starrex into cooperation was very necessary. "You are Lord Starrex," she reIF furned with bold confidence or at least what she hoped was .a convincing show of such. "Just as I am Tamisan, the dreamer. And this, wherein we are caught, is the dream you ordered of me." He raised his hand to his forehead, his fingers encountered his helmet, and he swept it off unheedingly, so that it clanked and skidded across the polished floor. His hair, netted into a kind of protecting cushion, was piled about his head, giving him an odd appearance to Tamisan. It was black and thick, just as his skin was as brown-hued as that of her new body. And without the shadow of the helm she could see his face more clearly, finding in it no resemblance to the aloof master of the sky towers. In a way, it was that of a younger man, one less certain of himself. "I am Hawarel," he repeated doggedly. "You try to trap me, or perhaps the trap has already closed and you seek now to make me condemn myself with my own mouth. I tell you, I am no traitor -- I am Hawarel and my blood oath to the Great One h been faithfully kept." amisan experienced a rise of  impatience. She had not thought Lord Starre:: to be a stupid man. But it would seem his counterpart here lacked more than just the face of his other self. "You are Starrex, and this is # dream." If it was not, she did noI care to raise that issue now. "Re member the sky tower? You boughi me from Jabis for dreaming. Ther you summoned me -- and Lore Kas -- and ordered me to prove my worth." His brows drew together in z black frown as he stared at her. "What have they given you oi promised, that you do to me?' came his counter-demand. "I an: no sworn enemy to you or yours -- not that I know." Tamisan sighed. "Do you deny you know the name Starrex?" she asked. For a long moment he was silent. Then he turned from her. took a stride or two, his toe thumping against his helmet, sending it rolling ahead of him. She waited He rounded again to face her. "You are a Mouth of Olava -- ' She shook her head, interrupting him. "We have little time for such fencing. Lord Starrex. You do know that name, and it is in my mind that you also remember the rest, at least in some measure. I am Tamisan the dreamer." It was his turn to sigh. "So you say." "So I shall continue to say. And, mayhap as I do, others than you will listen." "As I thought!" he flashed. "You would have me betray myself." "If you are truly Hawarel as you state, then what have you to betray?" "Very well. I am -- am two! I am Hawarel and I am someone else who has queer memories and who may well be a night demon come to dispute ownership of this body. There -- you have it! Go and tell those who sent you and have me out to the arrow range for a quick ending there. Perhaps that will be better than to continue as a battle field between two different selves." Perhaps he was not just being obstinate, Tamisan thought It might be that the dream had a greater hold on him than it did on her. After all she was a trained dreamer, one used to venturing into illusions wrought from imagination. "If you can remember a little -- then listen!" She drew closer to him and began to speak in a lower voice -- not that she believed they could be overheard, but it was well to take no chances. Swiftly she gave her account of this whole mad tangle, or what had been her part in it. TThen she was done she was surprised to see that a certain hardening had overtaktti his features, so that now he looked more resolute, less like one trapped in a maze which had no guide. "And this is the truth?" "By what god or power do you wish me to swear to it?" She was exasperated now, frustrated by his lingering doubts. "None, because it explains what was heretofore imexplainable -- what has made my life a hell of doubt these past hours and brought more suspicion upon me, I have been two persons. But if this is all a dream -- why is that so?" "I do not knbw." Tamisan chose frankness as best befitting her needs now. "This is unlike any dream I have created before." "In what manner?" be asked crisply. "It is part of a dreamer's duty to study her master's personality, to suit his desires, even if tlMse be unexpressed and hidden. From what I had learned of you -- of Lord Starrex -- I thought that to# much had been already seen, experienced, known to you. That it must be a new approach I tried, or else you would find that dreaming held no profit. "Therefore it came to me suddenly that I would not dream of the past, nor of the future, which are the common approaches for an action dreamer, but refine upon the subject. In the past there were times in history when the future rested upon a single decision. And it was in my mind to select certain of these decisions and then envision a world, co-existent with our own, in which those decisions had IF golie in the opposite direction -- trjing to see what would be the present-day result of actions in the past." "And so this is what you tried? And what decisions did you select for your experiment at the rewritting of history?" He was giving her his full attention now. "I took three. First, the Welcome of the Over-Queen Ahta; second the drift of the Colony ship Wanderer; third, the rebellion of Sylt. Should the Welcome have been a rejection, should the colony ship never reached here, should Sylt have failed -- these would produce a world I thought might be interesting to visit -- in a dream. So I read what history tapes I could call upon. Thus, when you summoned me to dream I had my ideas ready. But -- it did not work as it should have. Instead of spinning the proper dream, creating incidents in good order, I found myself fast caught in a world I did not know, nor build." As she spoke she watched the change in him. He had lost all the fervent antagonism of his first attack on her. More and more, she could see what she had associated with the personality of Lord Starrex coming through the unfamiliar envelope of the guardsman's body. "So it did not work properly -- "No, as I have said, I found myself in the dream, with no control of action, no recognizable creation factors. I do not understand -- " "No? There could be on explanation." The frown line was back between his brows but it was not a scowl aimed at her; rather it was as if he were trying hard to remember something of importance which eluded his efforts. "There is a theory, a very old one -- Yes I That of Parallel worlds!" T n her wide use of the tapes je had not come across that and now she demanded the knowledge of him almost fiercely. "What are those?" "You are not the first -- how could you be -- to be struck by the notion that sometimes history and the future hang upon a very thin cord which can be twisted this way and that by small chance. There was a theory once advanced that when that chanced it created a second world, one in which the decision was made to the right, when that of the world we know went to the left." "But -- alternated worlds -- where -- how did they exist?" "Thus, perhaps." He held out his two hands horizontally one above the other. "In layers. There were even old tales, created for amusement, of men traveling, not back in time, nor forward, but across it from one such world to another." "But -- here we are. I am a Mouth of Olava, nor do I look like myself. Just as to the eye you are not Lord Starrex -- " "Perhaps we are the people we would be if our world had taken the other side of your three decisions It is a clever device for a dreamer to create, Tamisan." "Only,' she told him now the last truth, "I do not think I have created it. Certainly I can not control it -- " "You have tried to break this dream?" "Of course I But I am tied here. I think by you and the Lord Kas. Until we three try together, perhaps we can not any of us return." "And Kas -- now you must go searching for him?" She shook her head. "Kas, I think, is one of the crew on this spacer about to set down. I believe I saw him -- though not his face." Now she smiled a little shakily. "It seems that though I am mainly the Tamisan I have always been, yet also do I have some of the powers of a Mouth. Just as you are Hawarel as well as Starrex." "The longer I listen to you," he announced, "the more I become Starrex. So we must find Kas on the spacer before we wrangle free from this tangle? But that is going to be rather a problem. I am enou of Hawarel to know that the spacer is going to receive the usual welcome dealt off-world ships here -- trickery and extinction. Your three points have been as you envisioned them. There was no Welcome, but rather a massacre, no colony ship ever reached here, and Sylt was speared by a contemptuous man-at-arms the first time he lifted his voice to draw a crowd. Hawarel knows this as the truth; as Starrex I am aware there is another truth which did radically change life on this planet. Now, did you seek me out on purpose, your champion tale intended to be our bridge to Kas?" "No, at least I did not consciously arrange it so. I tell you, I have some of the powers of a Mouth -- they take over." He gave a sharp bark of sound which was not laughter but somewhat akin to it. "By the Fist of Jimsam Taragon, we have it "complicated by magic, tool And I suppose you can not tell me just how much a Mouth can do in the way of foreseeing or forearming or freeing us from this trap?" Tamisan shook her head. "The Mouths were mentioned in the history tapes; they were very important once. But after Sylt's rebellion they were either killed or disappeared. They were hunted by both sides and most of what we know about them is only legend. I can not tell you what I can do. Sometimes something -- perhaps it is the memory and knowledge of this body -- takes over and then I do strange things. I neither will nor understand them." IF TTe crossed the room and pulled two stools from a far corner. 'We might as well sit at ease and explore what we can of this world memories. It just might be that united we can learn more than when trying singly. The trouble is -- " He reached out a hand and mechanically she touched finger tips to the back of it in a oddly formal ceremony which was not part of her own knowledge. So he guided her to one of the stools and she was glad to sit down. "The trouble is," he repeated as he dropped on the other stool, stretching cfut his long legs and tugging at his sword belt with that dangerously empty sheath, "that I was more than a little mixed up when I awoke, if you might call it that -- in this body. So that my first reactions must have suggested mental imbalance to those I encoimtered. Luckily the Hawarel part was in control soon enough to save me. But there is a second drawback to this identity -- I am suspect as coming from a province where there has been a rebellion. In fact I am here in Ty-Kry as a distrusted hostage, rather than a member in good standing of the guard. I have not been able to ask questions, and all I have learned is in bits and pieces. The real Hawarel is a quite uncomplicated and simple soldier who is hurt by the suspicion against him and quite fervently loyal to the crown. I wonder how Kas took his awakening. If he preserves any remnant of his real self, he ought to be well established by now." Tamisan, surprised, asked a question to which she hoped he would give a true and open answer: "You do not like -- you have reason to fear Lord Kas?" "Like? Fear?" She could see that thin shadow of Starrex overlaying Hawarel become more distinct. "Those are emotions. I have had little to do with emotions for some time." "But you wanted him to share the dream," she persisted. "True. I may not be emotional about my esteemed cousin, but I am a prudent man. Since it was by his urging, in fact his arrangement, that you were added to my household, I thought it only fair he share in his plan for my entertainment. I know that Kas is very solicitous of his crippled cousin, ready-handed to serve in any way -- so generous of time, energy -- " "You suspect him of something?" She thought she had sensed what lay behind his words. "Suspect? Of what? He has been, as all would assure you freely, and as far as I would allow, my good friend." But there was a closed look about him, warning her off from any further exploration of that IF crippled cousin." This time Hawarel repeated those words as if he spoke to himself and not to her. "At least you have done me a small service on the credit side of the scale." Now he did look to Tamisan as he thumped his right leg with a satisfaction which was not of the Starrex she knew. "You have provided me with a body in good working order. Which I may well need, since so far bad has outweighed the good in this world." # C T T awarel -- Lord Starrex -- "  she was beginning when he interrupted her. "Give me always Hawarel. Remember! There is no need to add to the already heavy load of suspicion surrounding me in these halls." "Hawarel, then. I did not choose you for the champion; that was done by that power I do not understand, working through me. If they agree -- then you have a good chance to find Kas. You may even demand that he be the one you battle." "Find him how?" "They may allow me to select the proper one from the off-world force," she suggested. A very thin thread on which to hang any plan of escape, but she could not see a better one. "And you think that this sand painting will pick him out -- as it did me?" "But it did you, did it not?" "That I can not deny." "And the first time I foresaw -- for one of the First Standing -- it made such an impression on her that she had me summoned here to foresee for the Over-Queen." "Magic!" Again he uttered that half laugh. "To another worlder, much that the space travelers can do might be termed magic." "Well enough. I have seen things -- yes, I have seen things myself, and not while dreaming either. Very well, I am to volunteer to meet an enemy champion from the ship and then you sand paint out the proper one. If you are successful and do find Kas -- then what?" "It is simple -- we wake." "You take us with you, of course?" "If we are so linked that we can not leave here without one another -- then a single waking will take us all." "Are you sure you need Kas? After all, I was the one you were planning this dream for." "We go, leave the Lord Kas here?" "A cowardly withdrawal you think, my dreamer. But one, I assure you which would solve many things. However -- can you send me through, return for Kas? It is in my mind I would like to know what is happening now for myself -- in our own world. Is it not by the dreamer's oath that he forwhom the dream is wrought has first call upon the dreamer?" So he did have some lurking imeasiness tied to KasI But in a manner he was right. She reached out before he was aware of what she would do and seized his hand, at the same time using the formula for waking. Once more that mist which was nowhere enveloped her. But it was no use; her first guess had been right -- they were still tied. And she blinked her eyes open upon the same room. Hawarel had slumped, was falling from his stool so that she had to go to one knee to support his body with her shoulder or he would have slid full length to the floor. Then his muscles tightened and he jerked erect, his eyes open and blazing into hers with the same cold anger with which he had first greeted her upon entering this room. "Why -- ?" "You asked," she countered. T Tis lids drooped so she could no   longer see that icy anger. "So I did. But I did not quite expect to be so quickly served. Now, you have effectively proven your point -- three go or none. And it remains to be seen how soon we can find our missing third." He asked her no more questions and she was glad, since that whirl into nowhere in the abortive attempt at waking had tired her greatly. She moved the stool a little so her back could rest against the wall and she was farther from him. But in a little while he got to his feet and paced back and forth as if some driving desire for wider action worked in him, to the point where he cold not sit still. Once the door opened, but they were not summoned forth. Instead food and drink were brout to them by one of the guards, the other standing ready with a crossr bow at thigh, his eyes ever upon them. "We are well served. Hawarel opened the lids of bowls and inspected their contents. "It would seem we are of importance. Hail, Rugaard, when do we go forth from this room, of which I am growing very tired?" "Be at peace, you shall have action enough when the Great One desires it," the officers by the crossbowman answered. "The ship from the stars has been sighted, the moimtain beacons have blazed twice. They seem to be aiming for the plain beyond Ty-Kry. It is odd that they are so single-minded and come to the same pen to be taken each time. Perhaps Dalskol was rit when he said that they do not think for themselves at all, but carry out the orders of an off-world power which does not allow them independent judgment. Your service time will come. And, Mouth IF of Olava -- " He took a step forward to see Tamisan the better. "The Great One says that it might be well to read the sand on your own behalf. For false seers are given to those they have belittled in such seeing, to be done with as those they have so shamed may decide." "As is well known," she answered him. "I have not dealt falsely, as shall be seen at the proper time and in the proper place." When they were gone she was hungry, and so it seemed was Hawarel, for they divided fairly and left nothing in the bowls. When they were done he said, "Since you are a reader of history and know old customs, perhaps you remember one which it is not too pleasant to recall now -- that among some races it was the proper thing to dine well a prisoner about to die." "You choose a heartening thing to think onl" "No, you choose it, for this is your world, remember that, my dreamer." 'amisan closed her eyes and ' leaned her head and shoulders back against the wall. Perhaps she even slept a little, for there was the clang of sudden noise and she gasped out of a doze. The room had grown dark, but at the door was a blaze of light and in that stood the officer, behind a guard of spearmen. "The time has come," he smd. "The wait has been long." Hawarel stood up, stretching wide his arms as one who has been ready for too long. Then he turned to her and once more offered his wrist. She would have liked to have done without his aid, but she found herself stiff and cramped enough to be ad of it. They went on a complicated way through halls, down stairs until at last they issued out into the night. And awaiting them was a covered cart much larger than the chair on wheels which had brought her. to the castle, this one with two grypons between its shafts. Into this their guard urged them, drawing the curtains, pegging those down tightly outside, so that even had they wished they could not and looked out. And as the cart creaked out, Tamisan tried to guess by sound where they might be going. There was little noise to guide her. It was as if they now passed through a town deep in slumber. But in the gloom of the cart she felt rather than saw movement, and then a shoulder brushed hers and a whisper so faint she had to strain to hear it was at her ear. "Out of the castle -- " "Where?" "My guess is the field -- the forbidden place -- " The memory of the this-world Tamisan supplied explanation. IS Controversial Uninhibited Deadly Serious Humorous and Incredibly Interesting! Brian Aldiss... Poul Anderson  .  Piers Anthony... Isaac Asimov .  . Richard Bergeron... Bob Bloch .   yaughn Bode... John Brunner...  L Sprague de Camp .   Terry Carr... John Christopher...  Philip K. Dick... Harlan Ellison...  Philip Jose Farmer... Jack Gaughan   . Harry Harrison... Lee Hoffman   . John Hayden Howard... Leo P. Kelley... Dean R. Koontz... Anne McCaffrey... Michael Moorcock... Alexei Panshin .  . Mack Reynolds .   Bill Rotsler ... Norman Spinrad .  . Bob Tucker... Harry Warner, Jr,   Fed White... and many, many more     Richard E. Gels does his thing. P. O. Box # That was where two other spacers had planeted -- not to rise again. In fact, the one which had come fifty years ago had never been dismantled but stood, a corroded mass of metal, to be a double warning -- to the stars not to invade, to Ty-Kry to be alert against such invasion. It seemed to Tamisan that their ride would never come to an end. Then there was an abrupt halt which bumped her soundly against the side of the cart, and lights bedazzled her eyes as the end curtains were pulled aside. C#ome, Champion and Cham pion-maker!" Hawarel obeyed first and turned to give her assistance once more; but he was elbowed aside as the officer pulled rather than led her into the open. Torches in the hands of spearmen ringed them around. Beyond was a colorful mass of people, with a double rank of guards drawn up as a barrier between those and the dark of the land beyond. "Up there -- " Hawarel was beside her again. Tamisan raised her eyes, almost blinded by the glare as a sudden pillar of fire burst across the night sky. A spacer was riding down on tail rockets to make a fin landing. IF IF  Short Story Starbright The gems were worth a kings ransom... and anybods life I I t was a perfect sphere, about ten owed like a tiny, cold blue star. The old man at the bourse table nodded, smiling in appreciation. With his hand, he shaded it from the lights of the bright exhibition hah, and the blue glow diminished. As the shadow cast by his hand became darker, the stone became dull, neutral, gray, lifeless-looking. He nodded again and pronounced the word "perfect" with a certain reverence. Then, with evident regret, he replaced it in its case, closed the case and handed it back to its owner. "Sean Macnessa, you old jewel thief," he said in mock severity. "That is as fine a blue as I have ever seen," Macnessa acknowledged the compliment with a pleased nod. "I traded five Centauran filigrees for that blue," he said. "Four of them were flawless." They were old friends, these two, although they had not seen each other in years. It was natural that Macnessa, upon arriving at the gem collectors' convention, should go first to the booth of the dd Centaumn, Ommaley. If there were anything truly excellent available in the Aldebaran system, Ommal would know. Ihe noise of the crowd of ccctors, traders and dealers was muted by the walls of the booth. That was one of the reasons for having booths. A certain privacy and quiet was deemed appropriate for the viewing of fine gems. "So it's starbrights that you are after now," Ommaley said thoughtfully, his old gray eyes gazing quizzically at Macnessa. "A pity. I doubt if you will find any here." Macnessa frowned. "I was given to understand that there were several reds in the Aldebaran region." "For two months I have been here," Ommaley said, "preparing for this convention. I have yet to see even a black offered for sale." "How can this be possible? My informant is like you, and rarely in error when it comes to fine gems." O mmaley shrugged. "I have heard that as recently as a year ago, seven starbrights existed in Aldebaran dealers' stocks or in private hands. A blue -- not as fine as yours -- two yellows, a green and two reds. One of the reds is reputed to be a blood red and flawless, and readily excited to its characteristic radiation by even dim white light." "What happened to them?" "Gone. Disappeared. Nobody seems to know where. Of course, you know gem dealers. If something is available, it is not at all difficult to find out about it. Once it has been disposed of, discretion is the rule. It is good business as well as good ethics." "But these are starbrights," Macnessa insisted. "An ordinary gem -- yes, these can disappear. Even a Centauran filigree. But not starbrights. They are too rare and valuable." He paused and considered. "If they were available," he decided, "but have been disposed of, then perhaps they could be made available again for a suitable trade. Unless -- " He raised his eyebrows questioningly. Ommaley shook his head. "The peculiar political institutions of Aldebaran admit of considerable activity which we of Centaur would consider lawless, even brigandage. But I have heard of no gem traders involved in any such activity." "I didn't really expect that," Macnessa admitted. "Gem traders generally know how to stay out of trouble." "Exactly. Now your other point. You reason that if some local collector obtained them, he might be willing to trade them for something you might have. I'm afraid this is unlikely. Most Aldebarans, bless their ostentatious little souls, take great delight in display. None has shown off the starbrights." "You mean they have been traded out of the system?" Ommaley frowned thoughtfully, cocking his head to one side. "That part of it can be considered odd. If they had been traded, one would expect to see the equivalent value in other gems suddenly becoming available. But the better stones at this bourse today have pedigrees a meter long, and tre is nothing irregular, or even sudden, in their recent history. "On the other hand, although truly fine starbrights are not often sold, it IF is possible. But even the usual brokerage commissiQn for handling the transaction would be very large. I have heard of no dealers who have come into sudden wealth lately." "Then what is your conclusion, old friend?" T he old man threw up his hands. "I have none to give you. The starbrights are gone." "I cannot quite believe this," Macnessa insisted. "An old Centaurah like you being at a loss for information about the gems of his adopted Ianetary system!" "I am but a poor dealer," Ommaley said, with every evidence of humility except the twinkle in his eyes. "And what about a young Centauran like yourself, Sean?" "A not-so-young Centauran like myself has the good sense to be respectful of his elders, particularly those of the old sod of Brave Centaurus." "You wrong me," Ommaley said quickly. "I would do you no harm, !n. If I could honestly help you, you know that I would." Macnessa smiled and said, "Of course. But you admit that there is a possibility that the starbrights are still in Aldebaran?" "I admit nothing. If you wish to so conclude, that is no affair of mine." "I see." Macnessa pursed his lips. Abruptly he changed the subject. 'Tell me about the native customs, old friend. I understand that they have 'warlords' here." "It is true. There is a confederation of planets, but it is as loose as the confederation of the states on the planets. Here on IV, power is concentrated in the hands ct seven families. "A hundred years ago the number of local chieftains was much larger, but through war and marriage this has been reduced to the present stalemate." "There is much wealth?" "Oh, yes. Gem collectors' conventions are not held in poor systems." "I mean, could these warlords easily afford material in the starbright class?" Ommaley smiled and shrugged. "If you want to know the common gossip, I can give you the common gossip. Certainly, any of them could to buy up one or two starbrights without straining their resources. Possibly all seven of them." "Are they cdlectors?" 'To some extent Nobody has a truly great collection, though, except the family Brandt. Theirs is hereditary. I ve been told of no recent acquisitions. Lord Hauken has lately shown a greater interest than usual. He has a large harem. It is said that he would welcome a starbright, or possibly a particularly fine filigree of our homeland." "He sounds like a man of taste." "Hauken's taste runs more to political power. He and the Family Brandt are closely matched, and it is said that they are currently engaged in some political struggle. The Princess Brandt has recently disappeared, some say kidnapped, and as a result her mother has taken to the black garb of mourning." "A kidnapped princess," said Macnessa. "How quaint! Is she beautiful?" "She is. She is also very young, although marriageable by local custom." Ommaley suddenly appeared worried. "My advice to you, old friend, is to be very careful if you are thinking of getting involved in local politics. They play for keeps in Aldebaran." "Politics is always for keeps," said Macnessa. "And I am always careful. Tell me something about this Hauken," Ommaley glanced around, then lowered his voice. "Hauken is ambitious, clever, and extremely powerful and absolutely ruthless. The only real indication at he might have kidnapped the Princess Brandt is that nothing has been done about her disappearance. Only he could go unchallenged by the Brandt clan. Even so, there will be blood spilled before long, I think." "Intriguing," murmured Macnessa. "A man with a captive princess, great wealth, and who now seeks a starbright." "There are none available," said Ommaley soberly. "Unless you care to dispose of yours." "I have a small stock of duplicates from my collection," admitted Macnessa. "The blue?" Ommaley seemed slightly apprehensive. "The blue is not available. That is to become part of my collection. And the other items I have are available only in trade for the gem I seek." "I doubt if Lord Hauken has anything to interest you." M acnessa left his friend paid courtesy visits to several ofi the other defers at the bourse. He was quite well known as a collector and trader. Those who had not met him personally knew him by reputation. Discreet inquiries about starbrights brought 'nothing but puzzled confessions of ignorance. The following morning, a messenger delivered an invitation. Macnessa studied it carefully. He was not very surprised to receive it. He had made no secret about possessing some of the fabulous starbrights. The invitation was large, ornate and carried all the trappings of a wealthy but medieval political culture. There was an elaborate coat of arms, surrounded by cartouches of subordinate divisions of territory. i In a stately script, the missive advised him that His Eminence, Lord Hauken of IV requested the honor of his company that afternoon. The messenger who brought it was almost as ornately got up as the invitation. Unfortunately, he knew nothing, or would admit to knowing noth- ing. Again, Macnessa sought his friend at the bourse. "I know better than to warn you," Ommaley said. "But this is dangerous. Lord Hauken will stop at nothing if he really wants your starbrights." "I have been in dangerous situations before." "Your luck and your ingenuity are well known," Ommaley admitted. "But my advice is to take the first ship out and don't come back. Both you and Hauken seek the same thing." IF L ord Hauken was a man of medium height, powerful of build although somewhat given over to fat, with curly dark hair. His eyes were expressionless, but his manner was affable. "Welcome to my humble abode," he said, indicating the huge palace with an expansive wave of his arm. "It was brought to my attention that you honored our system with your presencQ and all know of your eminence in the study of gems." "You flatter me, my lord Hauken," replied Macnessa. "I have a fondness for beautiful things. Gems are beautiful. Therefore, I occasionally acquire one." "Indeed," Hauken said. "Perhaps you would honor me by viewing my collection." "It would be a pleasure," said Macnessa. Hauken carelessly waved, and a small platoon of servants approached with hand carriages. He and Macnessa each entered a carriage and were lifted to the servants' shoulders. "There are those," he said, "who prefer mechanical conveyances, but I have always preferred to use humans. Somehow it does something for my soul." They proceeded along huge, brilliantly lighted corridors, down broad and sweeping staircases, until finally they came to a secluded section, luxuriously planted with all manner of exotic vegetation. A pool gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight. After assisting them out of the carriages, the husky servants vanished, to be replaced by others of a more delicate character. "Few people are permitted in this section," Lord Hauken said wiUh a smile. "It is my private retreat." "It is delightful," said Macnessa. They seated themselves in soft chairs beside the pool. Refreshments were brought. "And now allow me to display some of my poor baubles," Lord Hauken said, and nodded a signaL At once a young, dark-haired girl appeared from behind a screen ef shrubbery. She walked calmly toward the two of them, and Macnessa became' aware that something seemed to be missing. It was her clothes. With a smile, she bowed to the ground before them and held up her hands, which were covered with rings and ter a suitable pause, she departed. She was followed by a blonde, quite statuesquely round, wearing nothing but the green and red firestones native to Aldebaran I. Macnessa was pleased at the way they complemented her color, ahhough they were not of the best quality. The third was dark, small and elfin. Hardly more than a child, she bore herself like a queen. Her jewelry was metallic and massive-looking, contrasting pleasantly with her sBght frame. Lord Hauken said, "You can see why I rarely exhibit my coIlectioiL The special settings are suited only for the connoisseur." "Beyond doubt," murmured Macnessa. "You will find the gems attractive? Perhaps you would like to examine them more closely." Hauken signaled, and the next girl. after bowing to her lord, sat in Macnessa's lap. Her gem was a large filigree-and-emerald, suspended a few inches below her throat by an almost invisible metallic thread. Macnessa smiled at her and was rewarded by a raised eyebrow and ust the hint of a dimple in her cheek. He admitted, in response to Hauken's question, that it was a most attractive setting for a filigree-and-emerald. "I take keen delight in my jewels," Hauken said, dismissing her. Then he assumed a melancholy attitude. "Unfortunately, the collection is meager." "But pleasant," said Macnessa. "Possibly. But I am sure that in your varied travels you have seen much better. Tell me, what would you say is the finest gem in the galaxy?" "This would depend upon the locality and the species of being making the evaluation. However, I believe that most would agree that the stone called 'starbright might claim that title." CCh, yes," said Hauken with stuied casualness. "I have heard of that one. It glows all by itself, I understand, like a phosphor." "Only in a certain sense," Macnessa replied. "The starbright does resemble a phosphor in that it can absorb light at one wavelength and emit light at another. But there the resemblance ends. For one thing, the starbright exhibits far greater purity of color. For another, starbright radiatin is very nearly coherent, which ter of fact, they make excellent lasers with only the most primitive of optical systems, and using only the ambient room illumination for excitation." "I see," said Hauken. "There is another interesting point. A starbright will emit its characteristic glow only if it is excited by light of a shorter wavelength. For this reason, the blue is usually dimmer in white light than, say, the red. A black, on the other hand -- so-called because its characteristic radiation is infrared and therefore invisible -- can convert the entire visible spectrum. Even a very tiny black always provides a pleasant sense of warmth. Large ones are used in industry." "Fascinating," said Lord Hauken. "Where do you suppose such marvelous gems might be obtained?" Macnessa shrugged. "This is difficult to say. I understood that some fine reds would be available in Aldebaran. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate any." He watched his host attentively, but could read nothing. More refreshments were brought. Lord Hauken, having completed his display of jewelry, caused a small string orchestra to be assembled. It consisted of similarly lovely women, all of whom were similarly underdressed. Macnessa observed that they played with great skill. Finally Lord Hauken came to the point. "I cannot help you with the red starbright. On the contrary, I, myself, am looking for a starbright of any color. I am told that you own one." "This is true." "Then I will buy them from you." IF "I regret to say that this is impossible. The only way I could obtain the red that I want would be as a trade rather than a purchase. Such stones as I can spare from my collection constitute the currency for that trmisaction." "I will buy your entire collection," insisted Hauken. "I never sell my collections -- whether gems, coins or any of the other items which I have collected from time to time." "That is indeed regrettable," Hauken said. With a wave of his hand he banished the all-houri orchestra. The court became very still. "You are sure you won't change your mind?" he went on. "I can pay you well." "It is out of the question." "What a shame," said Hauken. "I had hoped to do business with you. If you won't do business, though, then I must accomplish my objective by other means." Macnessa stood up. "I am not sure I understand," he said. "It is simplicity itelf," replied Hauken with a heavy-lipped smile. "You will be my guest until such time that you agree to part with your pretties." The smile widened. "Naturally, although I am patient, my time is limited. I shall have your quarters searched. If the gems are not found, it may be necessary to use some more potent persuasion on you." "You mean I am a prisoner?" "Certainly notl You are a valued guest. Your quarters will be comfortable. I have another guest, whose quarters will adjoin yours. I am sure you will be well entertained, since the other guest is extremely talkative -- a characteristic which I am sure will be cured in due time." He snapped his fingers. "Guards!" A brace of husky, well-armed men appeared within ten seconds. "Take the gentleman to the special guest rooms. His suite shall adjoin that of the Princess Brandt." M acnessa allowed himself to be led away. While carefully observing the route they took through the elaborate palace, he tried to engage his guards in conversation. The effort was unrewarding. They went down corridors, down stairways and down elevators. Macnessa estimated that they must be at least fifty meters below the surrounding surface level when they stopped. It was a very large room, done entirely in white with curious pieces of covered apparatus set in the floor at various places. When he attempted to examine one of them, he was stopped. The guards told him gruffly that he would find out all about them in time. The idea seemed to amuse them. They stripped him, examined him and his clothes and confiscated his money, pins, ocular cases and sundry minor items. Then they allowed him to dress again. After this, one of them drew back a curtain along the wall, which proved to have covered a barred door. T he first thing that Macnessa did when the guards left was to examine his spacious cell. There was a comfortable chair, a soft bunk, a table, a food dispenser and an alcove equipped with various plumbing fixtures. Considered as a prison cell, it was quite comfortable indeed The decor left somethiDg to be desired, as sterile white was not Macriessa's favorite motive. He noted that the heating system was typical of the planet, being of the faceted radiant variety. Such systems consisted of close-spaced electric heating junctions, each faced with a small plastic lens; they provided an excellent distribution of radiant heat. Several minutes later, while he was examining the food dispenser mechanism to see if it had any useful and detachable parts, he heard the words, "Oh dear." He glanced around. A broad grill panel separated him from another room. There had been a white curtain across it when he entered, but this was now drawn back. "I hope I didn't disturb you," the girl said. "Ah," said Macnessa gallantly, "the Princess Brandt." She appeared quite blonde and beautiful and also, as Ommaley had suggested, quite young. She was dressed in a pale green frock. "I can't really say I am sorry you are here, sir," she said. "Actually I'm dying to have somebody to talk to." "No doubt," agreed Macnessa. He approached the grill and examined it. It was quite securely fastened. "Everything is locked up tight," she told him. "You can't get out when you want to, and you can't get in when you want to, either. But tell me who you are, sir?" "My name is Sean Macnessa, Centauran by birth," he said proudly. "My name is Tintinetta," the girl said, "but my friends call me Lulu." "I see," murmured Macnessa. PW a princess, she did not seem parBcularly haughty. "May I call you Sean?" "By all means." "Good. Sit down, Sean, and we can get better acquainted." Macnessa did so. "I understand you have been captive for some time." "Nearly a month. It isn't so bad, except I don't have anybody to talk to except the guards, and they don't like to stand and chat. Maybe they aren't supposed to. And anyway, a princess really isn't supposed to be too familiar with the help, you know. It seems odd, but that's the way it has to be done." "Are you permitted to contact your family," asked Macnessa, "or perhaps a lawyer?" "I'm sure I wouldn't know what to do with a lawyer if I had one, and nobody expects visitors or letters when one is kidnapped. It seems to be against the rules. Do you know why?" M acnessa sought for a reasonablesounding reply. "Well," he said, "perhaps your kidnapper wants to keep it all a secret." "Oh dear no. Everybody knows I'm kidnapped and they know who did it -- that terrible Ird Hauken. They might not know exactly where I am being kept, of course." She hesitated momentarily and added, "But then, I don't know either." "I believe -- " Macnessa started to explain that she was in the Palace . IF Hauken, but she seemed already to have lost interest in that topic. "Did you say you were a Centauran?Does that mean you are in the jewelry business. Are all Centaurans in the jewelry business?" Macnessa explained, "In times past, there was a great abundance of precious stones on the planets of Centaurus. This has made it a sort of ethnic calling. I myself make it a hobby -- and occasionally a business -- to collect rare and beautiful things of all sorts." "Gem stones?" "Yes." "I see," replied Lulu. "Why did Lord Hauken kidnap you? Did you cheat him? I hope you did. I don't like him." "I do not cheat," Macnessa said with irritation. "I have never foimd it necessary." "But there must be some reason why he kidnapped you." "Why did he kidnap you Princess?" "He wants to marry me, of course." "Ah," said Macnessa. "Ah what?" she demanded, suddenly angry. "I don't want to marry him." "Does Hauken think that keeping you here will change your mind about that?" "Of course not. He knows better than that. But if he has me here, then nobody else can marry me." "There is somebody else, then?" "Oh of course. Lots of boys want to marry me." She added with an impudent smile, "Wouldn't you?" "If the circumstances were suitable, I could think of nothing I should like better." "You are very good at making pretty speeches. Are all Centaurans like that?" "It is sometimes said to be a hereditary trait," Macnessa admitted. "I Imow," she said. "You do?" Macnessa was having some difficulty in following her conversation. "Yes. The Lord Hauken wants to steal your jewelry." She frowned slightly and said, "In that case, you must carry some extremely valuable jewelry. Lord Hauken would never waste his time otherwise. He would -- oh!" Her voice caught. "Now I understand. You must have some starbrights." M acnessa was astonished. The combination of little girl chatter and quick analysis was a little disconcerting. He admitted that he had some starbrights and asked her how she guessed. "It was easy. You see in my family we have had a custom for many generations. Any important princess like me must be given a wedding present of the finest jewelry available. Not many people know the custom has become an obligation, so that if somebody can produce jewelry that is truly the finest, then the wedding is almost automatic." "So that is why Hauken wants the starbrights." She nodded. "My father is all upset about this, too. He and Lord Hauken are enemies. Lord Hauken wants to make a lot of changes in the government, and my father says that the changes would make virtual slaves out of all the people. Only, if Lord Hauken is married to me, then my father will have to compromise with him." "So now Hauken holds you as a hostage." "Hostage? You mean, he might harm me if my father di't give in? Of course not! Lord Hauken is a tyrant and mean and terrible, but he certainly is a gentleman. My father is simply worried that Lord Hauken might force a marriage with me by getting hold of some starbrights. Then, he might hurt me. But not before." "You have strange customs here." "I don't think so," she replied logically. "A gentleman would never think of harming a girl like me, but naturally there is nothing to prevent a husband from harming his wife. Everybody knows that." "And is that why you don't want to marry Hauken?" Lulu sat for several moments considering it. Then she shook her head, making her golden hair form a brief halo about it. "I really never thought about that. I never expected it to go that far. Oh, dear!" "Well," Macnessa said gently, "he doesn't have the starbrights yet." "He will get them. You think you have hidden them well, and maybe you have. But if he doesn't find them, he win simply torture the information out of you. That is what the machines in the big room are for." Macnessa turned and contemplated the torture instruments through the barred door to his cell, and involuntarily shuddered "I am very sorry, Sean," said Lulu. "Really I am. Are your starbrights very good?" "Some of them are extremely good," he told her gravely. She sighed. "Well, then be will marry me, an)rway. So I shall just have to marry him without the starbrights. My father won't like k. But since Lord Hauken will make me marry him one way or another, you see, I might as well do things so at you don't get hurt. Only hs a pity that the family jewel collection wiU not benefit from my marriage." "Can you do this?" "Certainly!" Lulu said. "You don't think we are a primitive culture, do you? A princess is permitted to marry without a marriage gift if she wants to." "Thank you very much," Macnessa said. "It is very generous of you." "I think so, too," said Lulu. "I'm glad you appreciate it. I'll tell the guards when they check us on the next change of watch." Macnessa smiled. "Perhaps it won't be necessary. I am not without a certain ingenuity, Princess Lulu." "If you are going to address me as a princess, you must use my proper name of Tintinetta. You can only call me Lulu when you address me as a woman." "I -- ah -- I shall try to keep that in mind. Princess," Macnessa murmured. "And if by your ingenuity you mean that you are planning to escape, you don't have much time," she went on. "It won't take Lord Hauken long to discover you have hidden your treasure. This will make him angry." IF Macnessa agreed that Hauken might get angry, upon which the girl burst out eagerly, "Incidentally, where did you hide your treasure?" "In a safe place." "All right," she pouted. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to." Then she angrily pulled the curtain across the opening. M acnessa shrugged, moved to the table, and set about his plans. After several minutes, however, he discovered that he lacked an essential part of the apparatus he expected to construct. He wondered if the luck of the Centauri were deserting him. Soon the princess relented, drew the curtain back again and insisted on attention. When Macnessa humored her, he noticed that she had changed her attire; she was now wearing a new gown and some jewelry. There was a string of seven very large pearls which she said her mother had given her to wear only a few days before she had been kidnapped. She was very pleased with them. Macnessa did not tell her that they obviously were not genuine. What interested him considerably more was a chain of concave silver spangles that she wore. They were almost precisely the right size and curvature for his needs. Agreeably, she let him remove one of them from the chain, and he set to work on his apparatus. Using the silver spangle as a mirror, and several of the lenses prised from the radiant heating, he was able to construct a fairly adequate arrangement. The lenses were not ground to the proper focal distances, of course. But a gem trader has necessarily an excellent background in optics. And Lulu was able to provide an adequate grinding compound in her silver polish. Finally, Macnessa pulled off one of the round, plastic buttons from his tunic. "What is that you are making?" Lulu demanded. "It i called a Golden Ruberg, after a mythological genius." "Did Ruberg come from Centaurus?" "Ruberg, if he ever existed, lived long before Centaurus's humans came out to the stars. AU a Golden Ruberg really is, I guess, is a complicatedlooking gadget." "Does it do anything?" "I certainly hope so," said Macnessa. He fashioned a hood for the main focal point, connected it to a release lever and began to peel the plastic off the button. About that time, a sound came from the big room outside. Macnessa hastily shoved his Golden Ruberg under the bunk. As he straightened up, the door to the cell was unlocked and two guards entered. "Just a check-up," one of them said. "Change of watch." They looked around the room, examined the remains of the lunch Macnessa had dialed from the food dispenser. One of them was about to look under the bunk, when a shriek came from Lulu's cell. "I'm dying," she exclaimed. "I'm bleeding to death. Help!" Hastily the guards rushed out, locking the cell door behind them, and entered into Lulu's cell. It was difficult for Macnessa to tell precisely what was going on, but apparently Lulu had cut herself. The guards were clearfy angry. The cut did not strike them as serious, but they felt it necessary to see to it that she was placated. W hen they finally left, taking her broken spangle chain with them, they did not think to complete the interrupted search of Macnessa's cell. "What happened?" he asked after Lulu returned to the grill panel. "I was watching through the curtain," she said. "I knew you had hidden your Golden Bugbird under the bunk where they were going to look. And I couldn't think of anythink to distract them except cut my finger on one of my spangles. I had to do something, didn't I?" "You did marvelously," Macnessa assured her. "I hope it wasn't too painful." "It was very painful." She held up the index finger of her left hand with its tiny little bandage. "But one must be brave when one is a princess, don't you think?" Macnessa agreed that a princess must be brave, and that she was every bit a princess. "Good," she said happily. "Now you will tell me what the Golden Bugbed does." "First I must finish it." "You don't have much time left. I'm perfectly safe, but I am afraid you are not. Perhaps it is already too late, because once Lord Hauken is angry, he gets mean." Macnessa retrieved the apparatus from underneath the bunk. He took the plastic button which he had removed from his tunic and peeled the casing off, revealing a small, black sphere. He then polished it to a fine slick surface with some of Lulu's face powder. "That doesn't look very important," she said doubtfully as she watched. Macnessa took it over to her and let her hold it. "Notice anything?" he asked. "It's shiny." "Anything else?" "You must have rubbed it very hard, because it is still warm." "The heat doesn't come from rubbing," he told her. You are hdding a black starbright." "Oh, dear. Is that where you keep them -- in your buttons?" She giggled. "Lord Hauken will be so angry. He will plan a very long and unpleasant death for you." "What a charming imaginatiwi you have," Macnessa grumbled, taking the black starbright and inserting it into the device. This operation was a little tricky, because he had to shield it with his hands until he could get the tiny hood over it. "There," he said. "It's finished." He held it up for to see. "So that's a Golden Bedbug," she said, her eyes wide with wonder. "Ruberg. Not bedbug." "Oh. All rit. Now what? Do you say some magic words?" "No words are necessary. I simply press this trigger-like lever, that pusl es on this stanchion, the stanchion leans and forces this little rod over, and that lifts the hood off the black starbright. Then, if the optical sysIF tern is properly set up, the device behaves as a powerful laser." L ulu had more questions, but Macnessa had heard more racket from the outer room again. Hastily he was trying to test the device. The opportunity was denied him. A jangling of keys sounded in the door. Lord Hauken's voice commanded the single guard who accompanied him to ready one of the pieces of torture apparatus. The door opened, and he stood there, scowling, while behind him the guard could be seen busily uncovering what appeared to be a large electric grill. "You mock me by hiding things too well, Macnessa. So much the worse for you. It will merely be necessary for me to interrogate you for a while." He stopped frowning. "What is that?" he demanded, pointing at the apparatus. "You wanted a starbright," said Macnessa. "This is one -- " Lord Hauken interrupted him. "Of course," he spiiled. "Your buttons. I see you have removed one. Well, never mind removing the others. I'll do that myself, while my man fries #our liver a little." The smile vanished as he added, "I am not accustomed to being kept waiting," He advanced into the room. emitted into a thin, intense beam. Hauken screamed briefly and toppled, acrid smoke arising from his head. As the guard turned, reaching for his sidearm, Macnessa held the trigger down and swept the beam in that direction. The guard yelped, his wrist badly seared, and let the weapon fall. Macnessa quickly stepped out and scooped it up. It took ordy a few minutes to truss the lightly injured guard up and lock him in a cell. Macnessa then let Lulu out, and they dressed in the uniform capes that Hauken and the guard had worn. The fit was poor on both, but it was unlikely that anybody would question them closely. Lulu said happily, "Oh, good! Now I can marry you instead of that awful Lord Hauken." S everal hours later, Macnessa was relating it all to Ommaley, in the latter's hotel suite. "I had picked up that black in a trade for some other material. It was too small to be of much value commercially, but it was a starbright." "And you have a certain affection for starbrights. Fascinating. What did Macnessa aimed the optical system and pressed the lever. The hood was withdrawn from the starbright. The room was already at a high level of ambient illumination, and the lenses greatly increased the capture area of the small stone, while at the same time they focused the coherent infrared radiation which the starbright All types for songs  recordings. Records Send poems for # Sunset Blvd., Hyd, Cal. # Lord Brandt say when you returned his daughter and advis that Lord Hauken had suffered a slightly incinerated brain?" "He was most grateful, of course. There was some embarrassment over Lulu's insistence on marrying me, but her mother managed to talk her out of it. Instead of giving herself to me, she gave me one of her imitation pearls." "One of the imitation pearls?" Ommaley chuckled good-naturedly. "This one." Macnessa held it up with mild disgust. "I had to accept it. It was the only polite thing to do." Ommaley reached for it and examined it carefully. He hummed a little tune as he turned it around in his fingers. "Naturally, what I was hoping for was the sort of reward that only the Family Brandt could give," Macnessa went on. "It didn't take much reflection to realize that they were the only ones in the system who had material suitable for trading. Given the custody of display prevalent here, when you told me that Lady Brandt had taken to mourning dress, I suspected that she had pledged the family jewels in return for all the starbrights in the system." "And did you," said Ommaley, as he busily worked on the imitation pearl with a small knife, "conclude who would be the only trader in this system who could be trusted to arrange such a deal in complete socrecy?" Macnessa's mouth fell open with astonishment. He said, "Ommaley, you old jewel thief. You did this to me!" "What I should have done," Ommaley said, "was to buy this worthless-looking bauble from you for half a credit. Instead, I expend nay own time and energy in removing the casing with which I so carefully camouflaged it. Poor Hauken! He wanted starbrights, and he ended up with every starbright within twenty lightyears in his own basement." He removed the last shreds of the opaque casing, burnished the core with his sleeve, and held it up to the light. It was a perfect sphere, about ten the dim light of the study, it glowed like a tiny, blood-red star. # Next Month in F -- i  A long and funny sf adventure novelette  S by Robert Bloch (Author of Psycho, etc.) z: E Authorgraphs E S An interview with Lester del Rey S ZZ And concluding # IZ by Andre Norton " S Don't miss the May If -- reserve your copy now I  IP L ast July the lovely Italian city of Trieste offered its annual week fully dedicated to science-fiction movies. Several countries have entered the Trieste Science-Fiction Film Festival with different kinds of movies all of them well worth seeing. Mostly interesting, this year's festival offered a wide range among science-fiction film trends. US and Japan cooperated to create the space opera Battle Beyond the Stars; Great Britain gathered the First Award for the best movie with an horror fantasy, The Sorcerers, which also got a prize for Catherine Lacey as best actress and a Gold Medal to its star Boris Karloff; the monster saga was introduced by the mighty Japanese spectacle Ebirah, starring Godzilla and Mothra in a satiric vein; a future space world was shown in the Russian movie The Andromeda Nebula; a plain satire was Please, Dont Joke with Martians, from France; an adult political drama was the Czech shocker #, the Justice; even the robot theme was masterfully treated in the best Asimov vein by another Russian spectacle. Its Name Was Robert, Apart from the awards released from the international jury held by famed Italian writer and movie director Mario Soldati, the best movie shown in Trieste was The Androme da Nebula. It is a pretty faithful adaptation of the same novel by Ivan Efremov (see article in International Science Fiction No. #). This movie can be easily considered as the Russian answer to Stanley Kubrick's #: A space Odyssey -- and really it is. Most astounding of all, The Andromeda Nebula as shown in Trieste is just the first of four colossal movies covering the whole Efremov book: movies No. # and # have already been completed and the fourth one is in the works. This Russian cycle will be long remembered as one of cinematographic marvels. Several other movies of short length have been shown here in Trieste. I myself entered the Festival with a short fantasy, Isabell, a dream. The best of all was a French fantasy, The Cage of Stone, one of the best ventures into this field ever made. Boris Karloff got high ratings as starring in The Sorcerers, as he was in two other classic movies shown here in Trieste: The Black Cat and The Bride of Frankenstein. The festivd included an exhibition of fanzines from all over the world. Fans gathered from all countries. As Forrest Ackerman wrote in to the committee head of Sixth Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival: "May sf films and festivals always become IF  Short Story J eff said: "The season's coming. I can feel it In my bones." Mark groaned. They were standing by the water cooler, drinking. It was late afternoon; the office was restless, slack. Mark said: "I don't feel up to it, this year." "Tomorrow you'll feel different," Jeff said. Mark grunted his displeasure. But he knew Jeff was right. The idea was unthinkable, disgusting... until tile season. Then it overpowered a man. And the time was soon. You could almost smell it in the air. The calendar said so too. There was a budding in his senses; his eyes kept peering toward Daisy, almost involuntarily; that was a sign. She worked in advertising. They were friends and bridge partners the rest of the year. And during the season, they had a longstanding arrangement. Daisy too kept watching him all day, talking to him, touching him when she could. "You're ed Mark," she said. "It's because of the season, isn't it?" But he denied it, out of mascline pride. "Hell, it's this pile-up of work," he said. "It's getting on my nerves. One good thing: when the siren goes off, I can tell the boss to go to hell." "Hey, Daisy, how about switching this time?" Jeff said. "Get rid of this guy." "I'm not thinking of anybody, she said. "Come on, we'll have a ball," Jeff said. "A ball, ha. You don't get pregnant." She was good-looking, Daisy. Young and succulent. Good figure, pleasant eyes. Mark found himself staring, vaguely, at the sweet line An IF First Every month If brings you the first published story of a new writer. This month, our writer is Lawrence Mayer, who combines a strong interest in sociology with a long-time interest in science fiction. Married and with two children. Among his other interests are music and history. We hope to see more stories in which he can combine his hobbies and his writing. of her blouse. A small distant shadow crossed his mind. He felt something deep in his body, slight, bothersome, like the tickle of a feather. He tried to remember what it felt like, a year before, with Daisy. No use. Not yet. But the sirens would be soimded soon, for sure... as usual, he wouldn't feel ready... Early June, yes, that was the time. In the nurseries, hundreds of thousands of babies, now three months old, cried for their milk. Dogs would be howling at the moon, cats scratching and whining at the doors... He sighed, put down his cup and went back to his desk. TVyTark lived alone, in a tall apartment house, not far from downtown. From his living-room window, he could see at night the bright city lights. Most men his age preferred dormitory life; but something in his nature liked living alone. Not that he lacked for good company. Jeff lived down the hall, Marie and her friends across the street. Yet he felt, from time to time, a certain sourness in his soul, a cmrdled enptiness. What was it that was lacg? Was it kinship, was it warmth? In the old days, before the Great Change, people lived in family groups. A man of his age, and social class, would have lived very differently then... with a wdfe, small kids, a home, a mother and dad... What a difference had come from that slight chemical change, carried in the air! A slight alteration of the genes: and society, irreversibly, was twisted out of joint. Mark often wondered: what was it really like, before? What was the texture of living then? He knew the gross facts from the books -- about marriage, families, and divorce, about babies bom tiiroughout the year, and brought up at home. Grown men rarely lived in dormitories then. They had houses, homes, they had wives that cooked their food, loved them, took care of the kids. Some things died slowly. Taking care of kids was still women's work. Some even raised children in their flats -- sometimes their imn children, too. But more and more women lived with their friends, in dormitories, apartments and clubs. Children grew up in nurseries and boarding schools, along with other children of their age. During birthday-months (April and March) everybody tinned out to help children celebrate. Even men took part. Babies were not to most men's tastes, but they liked to lend a hand tin the raising of small boys, teaching them baseball, or swimming, or 'masculine crafts, taking them on hikes or to the zoo. A few men formed attachment with boys whom they knew or thought to be their sons. Usually, it was hard to be sure. All in all, though, during most of the year, the texture of life seemed, on the surface, much the same as before the Great Change. Or so Mark thought. Men slept, woke up, ate, went to work, worked a day, and went home. The big difference came once a year, that was all. When the sirens blew. I t was almost nine when Mark woke. He slid out of bed, yawning. To his annoyance, old Edna, the scrubwoman, was standing near his bed. He must have left his door unlocked. She was staring at him, licking her lips. Good God, it's coming soon, he said to himself. He pushed her out of his apartment. She made a pitiful squealing noise as he slammed the door in her face. She was ugly as sin. He showered and shaved as quickly as he could. He wondered, did it pay to go down to the office, or not? No sirens had sounded; sometimes it took days to work up to that point. Still, the authorities were rather on the conservative side; they sounded the horns only when absolutely sure. He flipped a coin; and decided to take the chance... he had so much to do at the office. His flesh had that creeping feeling, his head was mildly dizzy, but he thought: there's still a little time. Edna was still in the hallway as he left. She stared at him. He locked the door and ran to the elevator. Traffic on the way to work was curiously unyielding. A certain tang of irresponsibility hung in the air. Not a leaf stirred in the trees. Gray-bellied clouds hugged the horizon. The air was sultry, moist. He parked in the company lot and went up to the office. Nobody was there but poor Miss Grimm, tottering about in the file room. She was, of course, much too old to be affected by the sirens. Still, he warned her, shouting loudly (she was deaf as a post) that the sirens might sound at any minute. She thanked him and hobbled away. She, like other women of her age, would spend the weeks of the season at the nurseries, helping out. Every young woman ran away. The whole population of babies would surely have died, each year, except for the white-haired crew of women like Miss Grimm, who came streaming in when the sirens blew. They used the nursery as a refuge from the madness of the world; and paid for their sanctuary by caring for mankind's young. IF Mark sat at his desk, playing with a pencil. He should never have come, he thought. He could not concentrate. He could scarcely scratch a word or two on paper without thinking of Daisy The clock struck ten. He tore off his tie. He was sweating. It was late, late, late. His whole body pulsed with a rage of feeling. Then the siren sounded: a high-pitched whining scream. It had an almost physical impact. He ran through the office, to the door. Outside, he collided with Daisy. She screamed, half in delight. knew you'd be herel I knew itl" He dragged her by the waist into the boss's suite of offices. She seemed nearly faint with expectation: her eyes were glazed, she breathed deeply, her body trembled. He closed the door behind them. L ater on, in the afternoon, they smoked a cigarette together and talked rationally about their situation. "I've got to get you to my place," he said. Daisy whimpered, "Can't we stay here?" "We'd starve," he said. "There's nothing to eat, not even a candy bar. The cafeteria's closed; the food's locked up. And where will we sleep?" "Right here," Daisy said. She was frightened now. "It's too dangerous. The boss might come... or Jerry... or Jeff... or anybody. We've got to try it. My car's downstairs." They waited for darkness. When night arrived, they slipped crat the door and down the hahway. A man lay in a heap near the elevator, his clothes in disarray, a dark stain of matted blood beside him. He moaned; they ignored him. "Let's take the stairs," Mark said. The elevator was too much of a risk: who knows who was hiding there? In the lobby, they saw a small group of elderly men, standing about. When the men saw Daisy, a great howl went up. One of the men started running toward them. He was white-haired, heavy; Mark recognized Gifford, the insurance broker whose office was on the #th floor. "Get going,"' he told Daisy. They ran out through the service entrance, slamming the door in the broker's face. Mark's was the only car on the lot. He had forgotten to lock it, and two youngsters were in the back seat. The boy was scrawny and pimply-faced, no more than fifteen, the girl scarcely older. Mark threw them out bodily. The boy ran; the girl clung to Mark, panting hard. He looked into her face, then put her down on the back seat and started to undress. "Please, please," Daisy begged. A crowd of young males, armed with sticks, knives, and stones, stormed onto the parking lot. "They'll kill you!" Daisy said. He picked up the girl and put her down on the groimd. The gang rushed toward her like arks drawn by blood, mat gave tbem their chance. Mark started the motor, and the car raced away. It was only a short distance to his apartment, but his heart was in his mouth the whole way. No street lights shone; no buses or taxis were running; few cars could be seen on the street. An early, eerie moon passed like a ghost in the sky. He drove slowly and carefully once he got onto the street. The streets were unsafe. Mobs of young men prowled up and down, hunters of prey, smashing down doors, breaking windows, looking for girls. Many would fail in their search. They would suffer the tortures of frustration, or settle for an old, unattractive, desperate woman, wandering the streets looking for men; or, when these too were gone, turn to howling and looting and destruction. Mark drove without lights. Daisy crouched in the back of the car. The mobs would have pulled her out bodily, if they saw her, and killed Mark, too if he fought. Violent crime, in season, was a roaring tide. Policemen stopped work when the sirens blew; armies melted away. Afterward, there was little that could be done to mend the damage. By law, any violence over a woman was not punishable; that was simply the way of the world. Other crimes of violence were hard to prosecute, for lack of evidence; juries set free all but those who committed the grossest of crimes. If a crowd of boys smashed Mark to death, who was to say that he died defending a woman, or out of the simple blood-lust of the crowd? And for him, of course, any verdict would come much too late. It was foolish to go out on the streets, except with a pack or gang of men. Many no doubt lay bleeding in the gutters already, drunk and dying alone. "Hurry, darling, hurry," Daisy whispered. On the horizon, the red glow of a fire, burning out of control. They reached the apartment without incident. He parked his car in the alley behind the building. They entered quietly through the rear door and took the stairs. They had eight flights to climb. When they reached his floor, they were both exhausted; they clung to each other. He felt her warm breath near his ear. He took out his key. A heavy hand closed on his wrist. It was Jeff, blocking the way. "What the hell are you doing here?" Jeff said: "You damn well know." "Where's Marie?" "She's gone off... with somebody else." Jeff was younger than Mark, and heavier: a good athlete. The wise man might have let Daisy go. But if he had, he would have been forced out onto the street, to join IF the gangs. And that was hell. He would rather fight. Then, too, he felt his blood grow hot inside of him, felt an animal instinct to defend his mate Cautiously, they circled about each other, looking for an opening. Daisy stood to one side, nervously smoking a cigarette. Whatever her preferences, she would go with the winner. She had to. The Great Change had been fatal to certain kinds of romantic love. Now Jeff darted forward and grappled with Mark; Mark struck back, savagely kicking, biting, and punching. He had to be vidous and fast; it was his only hope. Jeff's heavy fist caught him full on the face; Mark's jaw oozed blood. He shifted to one side breathing heavily; he caught Jeff off balance, tripped him, sent him crashing to the floor. Jeff reached for a knife. But Mark had thrown himself on top of Jeff's body; now he bit Jeff's wrist, as hard as he could; Jeff shrieked in pain; his arm spurted blood. The knife flew down the corridor. Mark pressed his advantage,, pounding Jeff's skull against the floor until his eyes glazed and his body went limp. Edna, the cleaning woman, stood in the shadows, himched over, like a buzzard, waiting... "Let's go," Mark whispered to Daisy. She crushed her cigarette underfoot and followed him. Jeff stirred and moaned dimly. Edna dabbed at his bleeding skull with a rag. Mark had the key now; he opened his door, pulled Dai in- side, they locked and bolted flwm- selves inside. They were sale now... They had food, warmth, and sane-; tuary... and a soft massive bed. D ays and nights passed by, in a dream-like frenzy. In the streets, the panic reached its beit. Angry mobs pillaged every hmise with an unlocked door. It seemed to ihim the season had never been worse -- never more concenUated, frantic, unbound. Luckily, the bolts held on the door, and the windows were too hi to be dunbed. He was more thankful than ever for his privacy. God, the madness #f gang life, the insanity of those dormitories, for men and women alike... Toward the middle of the second week, Daisy's naood turned suddenly sour. She was pregnant, she said. She said, love made her sick to her stomach. But he was stiD a roaring fire "Danm it," he said, "it's too soon to turn off." She sobbed, she begged, she demanded. But his body still screamed with desire; and she was trapped. So, too, was he. A few days passed. He woke up shine stream through the blinds. Daisy was awake, reading a magazine in bed. He reached out and lightly embraced her. She yawned in his face. Her skin felt clammy to the touch. He disengaged bunself, showered and got dressed. It's ending, he said to himself. He stiU felt great affection for Daisy; from time to time, he caressed her, or gave her a brotherly kiss. She found a papback copy bf Gon With the Wind, and spent the day reading it, coyer to cover. Petite her nausea, she was ravenjous for dinner. He made her a feast, 'to celebrate," out of the rest jof his stock of food: a good strong steak, a salad and bread, washed Sown with a bottle of wine. "Till next year," he said, raising his glass in a toast. She puckered her lips. "Next year I might switch. For a change." "I'll kill the guy," Mark said. But he knew it might happen. Three years before, she had gone over to Jeff, halfway through, and he went to Marie. Next year, who knows? But the strain of this season was over; that was well worth a toast. The wine went to their heads; they giggled, rubbed noses, held hands and went early to bed. In the morning, a noxious fog crept through the window. He shut the blinds and shivered. They dressed like strangers, irritably waiting for a signal. Even the motion of a kiss was revolting. At ten o'clock the siren sounded; it was always a trifle on the conservative side. "Can I give you a lift?" he asked Daisy. h smd; "Take me home. I've got to picM up some stuff. Then you can drive me to work." By noon, they were all back at the office. Mark looked for Jeff; when he found him, they grinned and shook hands. Jeff's face was bruised and bandaged; one eye was still swollen out of shape. "Sorry, boy." "Forget it." The first day back at work was always hairy. The boss was illtempered and coarse, as expected. The men on the staff were exhausted; some limped and mused their wounds. The women were more or less morning-sick. Jeff said: "How about bridge? Tonight, at my place. You too tired?" No, it soimded fine to Mark. "Gooi it's a date." He drove out after work with Daisy and Marie. They ate pizzas and drank wine, and sang and played cards. A driving rain poimded on the windows, so the girls stayed the night, on the couches, and made breakfast for the four of them at dawn. The season was only memory now -- less real than a dream. At breakfast, not a whisper of the season intruded. They made waffles and drank coffee, and teased each other like small children; then they drove to the office in one car, tired but happy, laughing over and over again at the jokes of the night beIF IE  Nowlelie I, Sporkf am a true son of the Ayor, Buf what are the strange beings that look like me, who are called "human"? I T liad o bear in minfl tbaf, A unlike other Ayorians, I was yiMble to many more wavelengths hi lit than ultra-violet, yet I lted a perfectly dear view of the two T)eh tr. It was i matter of revenge, and my vengeance for Erne's murder must not be left jto chancel Near one of fiie Tepea traps there was a waterfall, cascading from level to levd high overhead. I climbed to a small depression about one hundred feet above the two traps, half-hidden by the splattering, chilled water. I used only my leg and arm muscles, all the time reminding myself over and over again, "I must dqend only on my physical strength, not my mind!" The ultra-violet hued sun overhead beat hot against my unprotected skin as I squatted down to wait restlessly. "How odd everything appears below," I reflected. Never before had I voluntarily turned off my telekmass -- mass sensing and telekinetic -- faculties. Far below me, here and there across the brilliant tapestry of the valley floor, I could see animals, and plants too, appearing and disappearing at random. Nothing had pattern or made sense... except for the stupid Gen. It was incapable of teleporting itself, so it stayed always steady as a rock, teleporting debris of every kind into its own huge stomach. The heat was almost unbearable. I could do nothing about it. I knew if I were to use my indirect faculties to teleport away the moleades of high kinetic energy near my skin, thereby achieving comfort, I might all too easily become prey of the evil Tepeh! I crouched further bdiind the water-spray seeking its filtering protection from the mercilessly hot sim. Time passed while my body, unused to such energy burdens, quivered in agony. As my mind slowed, I dreamed fitfully. I dreamed primarily of Erne... of her loss... of how I came to accept not only her twinning problem but the obligation to avenge her death. I dreamed of the longdistant day when I first came to Enithra, and she found me... he big red ball bounced before me as I crawled on hands and knees, reaching expectantly for the bright, elusive object. It stopped. I grabbed for it with my hands and arms, only to miss as it jumped away again. Next I remembered the feel of the sharp prick-pain of the needle, the softness of my bed and cover-ing pressure pushing against me, month old body with the terror of falling. Then blessed sleep, so peaceful and calm, though each cell screamed still with its individual entrapped fear. On that same day Emes thoughts were chiefly on her inability to twin, though she was long in years. When her telekmass receptors sensed the large, hot body falling through Enithras outer atmosphere, she extended her finetuning sensitivity to detect its twisted and tortured metallic compartments. IF V ' Evn ms the dropfing object scooped' out. ten mUes or more of viotep and vHtra-rdolet jnngle grotit and Wi. before coming to test. Erne tdeported to the object. Now it rested. Within it she sensed Mo fine layers of organic chemictds, charred and flattened on two formed holding platforms. Slightly forward of these were mechotUccd instruments which triggered gyeed fear in her slight body. They might be traps buUt by Tepen -- har heredory enemies. It was already too late for retreat; the acthity of her masssensing probes and tdekinetic movements wovdd have given her away instantly. But nothing happened. She was greatly relieved when no Tepen energy net clasped at the magnetic structure of her bdng. But when she sensed the strange shidd of polarization surounding, in turn, the exceedingfy stardense mass endonng many directaction instruments, her caution and fear sprang forth again unbounded. In fha center of this red-hot mass was me. Was this a new kind of Tepen trapt Wovdd the Tepen use ordinary animal life, surrounded by strange machines and materials, to capture the 'Ayor?. Portunately for me, the code of twinsUng preverded her from Seedsing furthr help of he kind, TMs puzzle was only hers to solvat Erne, like oE other Ayorians except me, was transparent to every frequency except ultra-violet between # " and #  cydes -- a fact which has occasionally been used by the Tepen in their capture. Site found herself a well hidden cave several miles from the intensely radiating object where she cotdd feel at least partially safe from Tepen while her indirect facuUies continued to probe the wreckage. She threw d protective tdeHnetic shield over the conglomerate of metal and fused plastic to protect it from the ever-seeking tdehmass fingers of other Bsdthra plant and anitnal life. Then she carefiMy studied the sUdd of polarization 'and its associated heavy mass, the broken and twisted direct-action instruments and the animal body which, at that time, was mine. She carefiMy studied every aspect of the gross geometry too, for one of the lowest philosophical leads in supprt of twinning requires knowledge of the geometry which replicates. Just above the two flatten smears of organic matter and immediately before the shield of polarization were the strange figures; Her "humlge of ivttural staUstiIF cdl puttems suggested that these figures might represent forms of direct-action communications. Per haps meaning lay in the spaces between each figure, or in thdr shapes. She died before this part of her twinning problem cotM be confirmed. dozing mind screamed its -grief helping to wake me as my musdes, too, began to shri their anger as I crouched so long and steadily beneath the waterfall waiting for the Tepen. I longed to teleport the diemicals of fatigue away from the periphery of my musdes, thus decreasing the pain sensation. But I dared not. The sun was lower now, only a few diameters above the tall moimtain peak at the end of the valley. I stretched my leg and arm musdes with direct-action physical motion. It gave me considerable release from the pain for a moment; then I forcibly stilled my body again. The pain returned; and it and the burning sun once again drove my thouts into reveries, back to Eme and her twinning problem, though every light and sound receptor of my being remained set on alert for Tepen... As Emes mass sense passed back and forth through the smouldering object, it slowly cooled until all that remained to be studied was the animal -- which was me -- in the cetder, surrounded all around by Tepen#ike direct-action machines. Still wary of Tepen magnetic traps, she inspected the machines atom by atom. One, she discooer ed, seemed to move in periodic rhythm corresponding, roughly, to the period of motion of our planet Brdthra; but always it moved a tenth of a cycle faster. This same cyclical equipment seemed to cordrel the flaw of electrons in other parts of the complex apparatus. Wires and tubes attached to me pulsed with the life of chemicals or electrons. Vluids flowed in and cut of me; while certain skin areas of my body changed density causing changes in dectrornc flows. These changes, in their turn, caused other equipments to blow heavier or Ughtef, dir particles thrmghoul the hollow cubicle. Once she teleported radioactive particles away from the internal structure of the power source, noting how it affected the fhm of electrons in support of dd equipments -- except one, the shield of polarization, wMch seemed to be generated as a by-product of the very dense metal surrounding all. Fate had handed Eme a powerful puzzle as part of her tiwirming cycle; a puzzle which was completely foreign to either her personal experiences or those af ht group! Now satisfied that no Tepen traps existed here, she opened her philosophical self to assist in her studies. Would that flow be animal blood? Could the other flow be the product of animal waste? What chemical was it? With her sensitive mass-receptor she explored the fine details of structure. She learned -- iron so much, carbon so much, nitrogen so much, a little phosphorus here in just this shape. Swiftly, starting with the smallest chemical consist uents and their structure she pieced together her conclusions. Her original conjecture was verified. A form of animal life was trapped inside the hollow object. Erne had need to call on ereative aspects of her philosophy. Other than distorted information about the direct-action devices of the evil Tepen, she had no other experiences remotely connected to this. It was a wonder she did not twin right at that point in time! As the jungle hours passed, animal, but primarily Enithra plantlife, slowly reclaimed the charred area around the broken fragment from the sky. Erne, using the same methodical pattern she had used in study of the equipment surrounding me, now began study of my immature form. How great her surprise must have been when, on exploring the neutral patterns of my mind having to do with ability to teleport and to sense mass, she discovered these patterns to be incomplete! I had no telesenses at all! Time passed -- I in my cubicle in drugged sleep and Erne in her cavern arranging and rearranging conjectures of her twinning problem. The jungle was now nearly covering all. Though I was Emes personal twinning problem, the time of Ayorian grouping approached -- the time when all Ayors, hemisphere to hemisphere, stack themselves in a line as long in length as there are Ayors to form it. Tor much of my early life I was  unclear as to what occurred during the grouping. I have the wrong shape for it. My arms and legs, my light and sound and chemical receptors, do not match the Ayors. To fit the grouping pattern (me needs the "#" shape of the Ayorian, where the top hemisphere is hollow on one side and the bottom hemisphere is hollow in the opposite direction. Furthermore, my magnetic structure is weak. It is diffused cell by cell, rather than strong and unitary in nature. Later I learned that the time erf grouping enables all twinning problems and their solutions to be shared by individual Ayors -- as well as assisting the Ayor, as a racial whole, to achieve a higher evolutionary level. It was easy to understand Erne's IF dilemma when she found me. If she left for the grouping, she would miss her individual advancement by skipping her personal twinning problem -- me. On the other hand, if she didnt attend the grouping, she missed her opportunity to assist in the advancement of the Ayor as a racial whole. She also would lose other Ayorian experiences which might materially assist her toward her next twinning. Since I was the central part of her twinning problem she resolved her difficult dilemma by teleporting me out from the wen protected cubick directly to the Ayorian grouping chamber some five miles below Enithra's surface... Spray from the falling water chilled me in the here-and-now. The formerly broiling sun overhead was much cooler. Soon my skin shivered and tiny bumps formed from the cold. Thick haze appeared, consisting mostly of dust and vegetable oils. It thickened as the sun's weakened image cast longer rays through the atmosphere. Along the valley floor, the teleporting plant and animal life merged into blurs of violet shadows. Hunger pangs began. I relieved them by groping and grasping with my arms and hands for fruits and nuts lying along the waterfalFs edge. I wondered how long I could go without sle. But somehow, I vowed, in spite of cold, in ite of the lack of use of my indirect faculties and other comforts which were yet to be taken from me, I would wait, catch and kill these evil TepenI Nr the clifFs base I quenched my thirst in a novd way. I used my hands; I stooped over, cupped both hands, filled them with water, raised them to my lips and drank! Could the Ayorian children have seen me, many hours of philosophical games would have been stimulated by this novel way of drinking. Between me and the Tepen traps lay the flat, thickened membrane of plant growth, designed by nature to cover and protect a maximum amount of soil nourishment from foreign seeds which might, by chance, have teleported to its base. The membrane provided a sufficiently strong telekinetic protective field to prevent such seeds from sprouting. More by instinct than reason, I tore this plant membrane from the soil with my muscles. I shook the small nodules of earth loose from its underside and wrapped it around my shaking body. The protective membrane provided satisfactory warmth at last I reflected on how discovery of such a novel use, alone, would have helped me to win in the children's philosophical games! I tied long strands of fibers to the two Tepen traps, being very sure to hide the dead strands beneath the soil Then I pulled the other ends to my hiding place overhead. Enithra's insistent plant and animal life would eventuy sense then tdqport needed materials from these dead, hidden strands, I knew. But probably they would last until mdining. Mjr stomach was full now, though I had accomplished it throQ the most unusual -- and fatigpoing -- way of diewing and swaSowing. With my body warmed by the organic membranes and the Tepea traps secured, weariness filled my body. I slept to dream again... Teff below Enithras surface,  Erne experimentally forced my nemomc growth, completing it. My indirect powers grew. This enabled my body to assume the autonondc duties of self-protection from other seeking Enithra life forms, as my slower body growth consciously and unconsciously began the arduous tasks which accompany use of tdekmass faculties. I recovered my conscious awareness for the first time on Enithra whUe the Ayorian grouping assembled overhead. Bvorywhere around me were fascinating Hoys of different shapes, sizes and feeP I reached with my hands and arms to grasp arid fosfle them. Though my new masssensing receptors assured me these 'object were within grasp", my physical efforts were fruitless. My fingers came away empty. Bventudly I learned to reach for these new objects with my mind. By turning sensitivity for mass up or down, I could make small objects appear large or small according to my interest of the moment. Though awakened in darkness, I perceived; though deep in the bowels of the earth, lacking food and oxygen, I nourished and breathed. Erne kept watch on my needs. Up around me, on all sides of me, were the Ayor, every one aligning himself according to their respective polarities and their respective philosophical attitudes, each sharing his twinning problems and twinning experiences. Even one of Enters wonderftd talents could not completely solve my babyhood need for human attention and affection, though she came dose. By use of her telekinetic power, she could cause different parts of my body to feel warm with pressure -- as would be the case if a genuine human held and cuddled me. When an adult Ayorian Hwins," he becomes two independent, separated Ayorian childrenJ Each Ayorian chUd has increased abilities along the lines which caused his parenV to twin; but none has the memories of his parent. IF Ayorian evolutionary po gress can be measured by individual twinnings as ieeU as group growth from group-accepted poSlems. My 'dreams, hdmuped for but a moment, continued with my first groupng where the dialogue, weaved itself into my dreams: Ee is atdmal in body, thus non'Ayorian" said one of the group. "He has a completed neuronic powth giving him the indirect factdties," another forced into the coordinated assemblage. "He must be Pought to full self-sufficiency," another respotided. 'Place him with the children until he develops; Bme shall guide him until her twinuing." In my sleeping mind echod clearly the 'Ayorians booming tones over and ovet again, "Erne shall guide Mm; Bme shtdl guide him; Bme shad guide Mm...I" But Bme was dead. n Qeardung, scorching beat of the  sun wobe me up. Below an# all arountl Eidtbrai life stirred. It moved in jerky, discontinuous jumps, grasping with hungry power. No dou hid the sun's rays. And as far as my lit receptors could percdve, ' no evil Tepm traveled on the vqr floor hdW. I scurried qui(Iy down to the waterfall's basin, again using only my direct faculties of arms, legs and mouth to dean, move, eat and drink. Though my musdes ached excruciatingly, I returned to amt the Tepen. I was fully consdous on this second day. Certainty I was suffering less from exposure to heat than the day before. Almost relaxed, I ddiberatety brought to mind my most early life with the children. Constantty thq laughed at me; my awkwardness in the use of indirect faculties was as dumsy as the very yomigest of the Ayorian children. "Spork!" thqr shouted wiUi glee. In Ayorian language it means "moron." They could talk and bear by vibrating the concave side of the hemihere which composed the top half of thdr body. It was my only advantie over them. I s far superiw in these two faculties. But it was trivial. What was important was the tdmass -- mass sensing and tdekinetic -- faculties. Like duldren everywhere, Ayorian children played those games, which were si # q)osed to prqjare ititftm for the serious rensibilities of maturity. In "hide-and-seek", one playing member teleports an object to an unknown location. When the dgnd is given, all others enlarge their tdekmass network in eyer-expand ing radii in search of the hidden object. Though the object might be hidden, say, only twenty miles away, each position in a three-dimensional sphere surrounding each playing member must be inspected. At each linear increase" of the searching sphere's radius, each member has need to strain; the volume of positions to be searched increases by the cube of the radius. Though most A#mrian children rapidly achieve a capability which includes all of Enithra, I could never find an object beyond a forty mile radius. This will give some idea of just how moronic I was I Another common game was called "squeezing". Each player attempts to teleport the other; each resists the other. If the players are evenly matched, each feels as though he is "squeezed." Eventually one gives way and loses. During my very early childhood, I was better at "squeezing" than other Ayorian children because of my greater mass. But, all adult Ayorians could always handle me with great ease. A third game was called "nullthought". It consists of shutting off one's thought processes. While most Ayorians, with their unified magnetic field of thought, were expert at it, I, with my biological processes and their associated small, cellular, independent magnetic-fields, continually broadcast loud identity waves in all firections. My best game was "philosophical speculations". An object or set of relationships of any kind is selected for the game. This object or set of relationships may be almost anything. Each of us children woidd contemplate on the object or relationship. If an object were chosen, we extended our mass-sensors down to lowest levels to learn and discuss composition of structure; or, if relationships, we all speculated and formed hypotheses. Those who advanced the most novel conjecture -- determined by majority vote -- which also fitted consistently within the framework of past "accepted" conjectures, won. Though I could not play this game until I was five Enithra years old, the first day I played I won. This caused much surprise to all -- Spork the moron, won! One of the children had selected as a particular relationship a triangle drawn upon the dirt floor of the jungle. It had one right angle. While all busied themselves in sensing the relationship of lines to lines and angles to angles while tiying to generate new conjectures, I walked up to the triangle and drew a square along each side using the sides of the triangles as one of the sides of each square. It seemed quite obvious to me that the sum IF of the areas of the two small squares was equal to the area of fit big square and I said so to the others. They decked and reecked this hypothesis -- then finally agreed to the worth of my conjecture. How big I felt on that dayl Usually though, speculation involved some object. Since I could seldom extend my tdekmass sens(w lower than molecular levels, I seldom ccHijectiured much that was new or novd... C ouds formed on the right side of my valley, now hiding the sun, I prepared another of the vegetable growths for cover, found food which I carried back to my hiding place and composed my mind on my tedious wait. How useless all those games were to the Ayorian children, I thout. They were designed to train them in self-protection from Tqpen. But they were miserable failures. The clouds overhead now grew faster than the valley's puffballs could consume th, as they freely floated in search of minute particles of air, moisture and other nutrients. Water dropped from them. I had often been exposed tl rain. I didn't mind it Always before I could tdeport the water away from my iin u fast as the rain dropped. But now, without the use of my indirect faculties, the water soon soaked me, making me even more miserable. To mature toward twinning, each individual Ayorian must develop new and novd philosophical qeculations about reality. Now, crouching in the heavy rains, groveling beneath the dead organic skin which provided me with some warmth, hiding beneath the heavy grief wWch was still mine, I almost smiled. I was thinking of how many philosophical games I could now win with what I had learned of direct-action effectsl But all these things were unimportant, compared to my need to avenge Erne's death! When I woke, late on the next morning, I was exhausted and stiff from exposure to the cold and wet. The sun was already above the valIqr's peaks, raising steamy tendrils from last night's rain. What water was left unused by Enithra's jungle life now flowed in tiny rivulets all over the valley. The waterfall behind which I crouched thundered louder, with a thousand new fountains fanning out wider and thicker from every splattering ledge. I moved closer against the rocky backdrop, trying to avoid the greater water-spra, to no avafl. My vegetable covering was now pitted and holed by the telekinetic acti(Hi of Eniriira' life during the night It offered little protection. After securing new covering and turned to my watching post My thoughts, as usual, returned to the evil Tepen and their source. TTundreds of thousands of years earlier, the Tepen and Ayor had been one tribe. During the time of twinning of some long foiv gotten Ayorian, his philosophical twinning problem involved speculation on the 'purpose" of material things. He solved his twinning problem with the conjecture that material tilings were to be used "directly' -- that is, without use of one's telekmass ilities -- rather than "indirectly" as would be the case with use of these two abilities. His children followed this natural line of speculation. From then to the present day, each of his descendants solved Ms twinning problems within the consistent framework of those assumptions. They separated from the Ayor, developed a material science and an urban society. Unfortunately, as thdr capadty for directly using material things grew, their capacity for mass sensing and teleportation declined. As these capacities declined, their philosopMcal sense of ritness and wrongness degenerated. They gave up groupings in favor of a single, all-powful leader and a distorted, evil drive toward mastering thdr environment through direct means. Capacity for tdekmass changed to a sense of a different kind. Each Tepen was surrounded at twinning with complex mechanical equipment responding directly to hb mental command. Their shells contained clever energy fidds capable of resisting the planet's life forms and their ever-present telekinetic tug. Different, more ingenious energy fields were devdoped to catch other life forms. These captures e placed into huge machines wMch ground them into proper size and separated out thdr chemical constituents. The results were injected as nourishment into the machinery surounding each Tepen. My first contact with the Tepefi came when we children chased "tree" nuts. As each tree teleported its ripened seed away, hopefully to land in a region of nourishment within the capability of its feeble sensing apparatus, we would spring after the seed. First to find the nut was free to use it for his own nourishment. How delicious th were! On that day we had all sensed the quickened ripening of one seed. It was ready for a quick journey. We tensed, ready to spring after it ho matter wMdi way it flew. The nut ripened, qrang fromi bur location, then disappeared from everyone's tdekmass sensors -- IF mudi to the surprise of everyone. Ovef was far the best of us in the game of "hided-seek". He found the nut first .  . but he also distqipeared from our sensing network We searched long and diligently for Ovct I was the lucky -- I should say imlucky -- member that found him. C'loating in the middle of a jungle clearing was a huge cage. I bad never seen anything like It befwe. It was surrounded by pulsating energy fields which cycled from low infra-red throng ultravirfet. As I watched the unusual disIy, I could see Ovef's small, now shrunken form reflected ba( to me each time the energy field passed fiirough its ultra-violet sequence. ThMi I noticed the nut. Somehow, diabolically, it had been drawn far beyond its normal range to land in the energy trap. Ovef, being the strongest, had sensed it and followed. And he, in turn, bad tripped the energy fields which now contained him. As soon as the other Ayorian children found us, without exception, they shouted "Tepenl" Then just as quickly tdeported themsdves away. Having no Rouping experience upon which to build my own fear of Tepen, I was not to be dissuaded so easily. I hid from sight and waited. Our past conjecture games had taught me the Tepoi used traps triggered by use of me's own telekmass faculties. So, I hid, using only my usually useless light receptors and other direct-action faculties -- just as I was now doing high on this ledge. I kept my eyes on the terrified Ovef. When evening came I heard the Tepen approach, their floating suit-tanks scraping agdnst Enithra foliage. Ugy protrusions of direct-action machinery covered the Tqen's metal suit-conveyances everhere. No wonder Erne suspected my arrival vessell It must have looked just like a trap of Tq)enl I thought, staring at the mechanical assemblages . Though they nne much noise whQe talking, and though the noises sounded mudi like the Ayorian language, I could not understand them. One turned a small knob on the outside of his metal suit. The differeit colors surrounding Ovef changed to a steady ultra-violet. I could see him crouch back terrified. Another Tepen unloosed a small photocell which sout out Ovef, then steadied on him. I later learned that this small photocell had pi(hed up Ovef's ultra-violet reflections, then transmitted the returned energy to a form which could be easfly sensed by the atrophied mass-sensor of the Tepen. As soon as the photocell steadied on Ovef, the Tepen produced a hose, which sprang from a complex cubical box. He pointed it directly at Ovef. An intense light beam poured forth from the top half of the hose and an energy stream came back from Ovef to flow through the lower half of the hose into the box. I saw Ovef shrink and puff apart, as though he were as tenuous as one of the puffballs which suddenly disintrate after their air is teleported from inside. The Tepen turned off the corusucating energies around the cage and reset the trap. Then the three quietly floated away from the clearing in the opposite direction from where I was hiding. I didn't follow them that day. Oh, how I wished I might have had the wisdom, the knowledge, the courage and the maturity to have done so. Erne might even now be alive if I had. his day of waiting was very  much like the other days -- hot, uncomfortable, and full of pain for both body and mind. Puffballs lofted above and floated ever#here. The predatory Ettel consumed its share of stupid Qens. The waterfall flowed on, though now decreased somewhat in size and noise; and the Tqpen cages continued to tantalize me below .    I remembered when I was twelve Enithra years old. life until then had been one long agony of attempts to overcome my handicaps. I couldn't mass-sense any better than the least of the young. I couldn't teleport much better. I did have some little advantage on abstract relationships. But I couldn't go below the chemical level in mass-sensing, nor could I reach beyond a forty-mile radius. I lost in every game; I was the moron. Yet I often wondered what it was about me which, unBke other children, enabled me to watch Tepen from hiding? Was this to be my twinning problem -- as I was still Erne's? And, if solved, would I then twin to become two helpless, moronic children? Life continued its pastoral flavor. We moved. We played games. Once each year the grouping occurred -- without me -- and twining occured sporadically here and there as one or another A#rorian individual reached his philosophical plateau. Though life continued the same for all the other children, it was different for me. How could Ayorians live so carefree when their very Eves were endangered by Tepens? I wondered time and again. When I asked the adults this IF question, tbdr only answer was, 'This must be your twinning ooblon. You are stOl a chfld in many ways. But maybe, for you, twinning comes early." How could a small animal-like child, as I was, make any impression on tbdr conqlacen(y? I know now that Ayms have no sense of hatred or revenge as I do. My emotions are probably doser akin to the evil Tepen than to the Ayor. Each game became for me a philosophical vessd within whidi to faon the fabric of Tepen revenge for Ovefs death. Each abstract conjecture was turned over and over in my mind to find some handle allowing me revenge. Still I did nothing any different from the other children. Not yet could I be stirred to actually change my cultural behavior pattern. T He day Erne was caught was beautiful to view witii light receptors. She and I were dowly teleporting through this beautiful valley, so covered with flowers of all kinds. I remember commenting to Eme on how much I wished die ors with light reciters like mine. Her comment was typical -- how much she wished I could sense the tieautiful energy levek operating below my thrediold level in the flowers I I described for her how one ticular flower slowly amassed bundles of red and green nodes as it reached seed maturity. I had to use Ayorian energy wavdength dimendons in my descripticm, instead of color names; so I diink the visual impact was not truly appredated by her. Yet I was so anxious for her to share my sensitivities that I forged ahead. I told hsx how each red and green node swelled up to form S hemisidierical dot which aligned itself among others like it to fmm an unusually beautiful pattern. Then, as eadt dark red node teleport at maturity, a shifting, changing pattern ai)eared. The background blue of tte flower-pod suddenly showed in place of the dark-red seed. Now one could see the shifting blues, reds and greens weaving over and oyer into captivating patterns. While I was trying to describe to Eme what I could view with lit receptors, I remember also seeing a row of the rounded diape of the Cien, a rather dinnb animal. They were teleporting debris of all kinds to their stomachs, without regard to food-value or type -- just as thqr were now doing below me. Usually th continued tills rather engorging bdiavior until their stomadi howled with protest, after which thqr Then, on awakening, they repeated thdr senseless qrde of satiation and pain. IP The predatory Ettd corild be seen tdeporting from hummock to hummock behind the rovr of Gen. One Gen disa)eared and Erne and I both could sense its rqq)earance in the stomach of the Ettd. The other Gen continued their placid Muttony unconcerned. We came to the end' of this valley surrounded on all sides by steep, sweeping dieer diffs. I was about to telKnrt to the top of one large diff when Erne tted the trap. Perhaps Erne was getting old and cardess. More Ukdy, her twinning problem was heavy on her mind. She made the error of assuming the trap was simply what it appeared to be. #ie carefully cautioned me to stOlness while e searched th ho mind for the trap's outer boundaries. Another trap, set just for this fcontingency, caught her mass-sensing probe and spnmgl It drew her to it and dosed with the same polyidic field I had seen endosing Ovef. Her voice screamed to me... then was suddenly cut off. I expected the trap to behave just like the one I had seen around Ovef. But this time the Tepen had energy field passed finrough the ultra-violet, and I could see Erne wither and dissipate as the ray of energy passed through her body. I raged with mixed anger and grief. I struck at the trap with my bare hands. Wilfly, See some stiid Gen, I threw ddnis at the machine -- to no avaO. Then, in total exhaustion, I droiqed to the gioimd, my recers strangely ' letting forth streams of liquid while my dtest heaved breathlesdy. Erne was gonel I tras alone. Of an the Ayor,oidy I would seek her revenge, I knew. When sanity returned to me, I carefully searched around both traps -- 'Bot with my mind, but with my body. I actuafiy used my # and arms to Walk, physicaUy, around each trap. In my mixture of aoga and grief, I perceived the philosophical principles which could be tested only by me -- not the Ayof' -- that these traps would be tri only by mind energyl Gtrefufiy, theii, I Walked around each trap. Tentetivdy, ready to draw back instantly, I held my hand around the sustaining fidd. I could feel only the normd pluck of mass-sensing fingers from the forest in the background. Then, as my hand passed physically through the net, whatever readual mind energy existed in the cdls of my mm triggered the trap. My arm felt pulled inward my body tensed muscles in the poate direction, easdy conquaing the pull. An around the iadde of the trap I moved my ann tmfil I came to tlie back ef aaother of the death-ray devices With something solid to grasp, I dosed my Hngers and pulled it toward me. It came easily and I crushed it imder foot. My hand came to the container from which the telekinetic field emanated. I reached for a heavy rock, and with my hands I raised the rock over my head and crushed the box flat. When I had done the same to the other trap, I searched the area carefully for any sign of Erne. Only a thin residue of dust bore witness to her once beloved presence. Many hours of philosophical conjecturing with the children had sharpened my mind insofar as relationships were concerned. Though I was a moron to the Ayor and their children, I knew now, without iuivocation, that only I was capable of handling the relationships imposed by the Tepen. These were of an order of abstraction foreign to the Ayor. But not to me. Also, it seemed somehow a sweet kind of justice that I, who was Erne's twinning problem, should carry on hr twinning goals -- What am I? What is my purpose in life? And I now consciously, deliberately accepted ha: twinning problem as my own. In the pseudo-clearness of thoughts genarated from my grief and now by my terrible anger, I could almost sense the end ibat ould have been Erne's to observe, to enjoy, and to use in raising herself bond her own philosophical limitations resulting, thereby, in the evolutionary necessity and pleasures of twinning. But not quite -- not quite! Much yet -- too much -- had to be done and learned! 'he next night I dreamed again.  The ledge was somewhat wider now because of the decrease in size of the waterfall. But I was wearying. I held myself in a tight ball to keep from falling off the hundred-foot ledge. In my hands and aroxmd my legs were twisted new strands of vegetable growth, tied to the Tepen traps below, ready to warn me should the Tepen return at night. I dreamed that Erne was alive again -- only ten times larger. My child-like form grew to her size, then went beyond until she appeared no more than fist-size. I reached for her, swallowed her, then began to sense her expanding form inside my body. Tighter and tighter she became until every cell of my body contained a part of Erne. When the pressure released I felt good over all my body. Afterward, I slept deeply and comfortably for the first time since Erne's death... IF m T ike shiny, tiny glow-light insects, teleporting here and there, now strong, then gone, the Tn's body-suit reflected electro-magnetic radiation from the sun as it weaved its way in and out of Enithra's thick foliage. Unlike any ether moving object in the valley, these tiny sparks moved continueusly -- contrasting greatly with the normal Enithra stop-and-go modes of locomotion. There were seven sparks. In my imagination I could once again view the monstrosities which had attacked Ovef so long ago -- metallic jacket, oval in shape; many mechanical protrusions of unlmown functions attached to their protective suits; each floating above the groimd as high as my knee, bringing their tops to about shoulder height. My mind raced, my muscles tightened and I placed every effort of my physical, emotional and mental makeup into the concentrated task of watching Tepen. I was close to avenging Erne's death. At their slow, lumbering pace, half the day passed before they reached their traps. Then they rushed from one trap to the other and back again. Excitedly they made their Ayorian-Iike but incomprehensible noises to one another. I rolled a heavy rock to the edge of my hiding place overhead. As one Tepen neared the base of the cBff directly below me, I dropped it direcAly on top of him and his machinery. I coidd see his yellowish fluid ooze between the crushed metallic membranes of his suit I had conjectured that since, except for themselves, their total environment was made up of life forms capable of only indirect action, not once would they think to focus their mechanical light cells upward in search of another directaction being. Apparently I was right Quockly now they unlimbered an odd-lookiiig box. Nervously they began turning and adjusting its controls. I dropped another rock. The five remaining increased their efforts with the machinery. I placed myself in their position and imagined what their chain of reasoning must be: If someone were teleporting rocks on them, their protective machinery in the traps, which normally sensed telekinetic fields then took protective action, was not working. Furthermore, no purpose would be achieved by fleeing from their hidden enemies, No conceivable escape speed could possibly outdistance teleported objects. I counted on such thinking on their part as I dropped yet a third rock. The yellow fluids gushed forth from another of the evil Tepen. A polyordic ligt surrounded their mechanioal assemblage as the its field. loeide this spectacular diqlay, marldhig off the limits of th aevr telddnetic feld, floated the four reuMuniog Tepen. At their head, aimed at the exact center of the surrounding barriar, sat another of (he automatic death rays which had killed Eme. Croudiing back further from the edge the ledge, with only the tep of my head and my tit reoqtms peng over, I gave thought to this new Tepen course of action. As (he nut-tree seed had beea caught aa soon as its telinetic Add had been activated, and as Ovef had been caut for the same reason, I believed that the Ten had established a dmilar trap. Were I to exmdse my own iniffirect facidties I would surely be instantly tdqrarted to the center of the tr: -- where the death ray would destroy me. I could, of course, continue to dn ro# on (he Tepen with UQf arm muscles. But, if I did, they wotdd sooner or later learn about my use of direct faculties. Then th Would probably be capable of takhog couBleiMiction against me. Sfoce I couldn't kill more than one at a time by this means, the risk was too great. Fhrtiiermore, did I want to let Tepen everywhere learn bf my pecidhur abifilfes? And were these seven to be the end of my revenge for Erne's sake? I thought notl For my kind of revenge, seven Tepen loould not satisfy the emptiness of my spirit I sensed, thou; only immaturely as yet, need for more knowledge and a greater campaign against these hereditary Ayorian enemies. T he sun slowly approached evening-line as both the Tepen and I patiently wdted in our deadly game. For some time each of the Tepen rotated his photocells in all directions of the compass. Finally, tiring of this profitless task -- none ever thought to point his photocell up in my direction -- th hung the cells back on thdr protective suits unused. My plan was Weil formulated now. I descended along the waterfall out of their posdble hue of until, reaching their level, I was well hidden behind the final Und largest fountain of falling water. I cirded qtdetly behind the rear bf tto water-spray, finding additional screen from thick growing trees. Further bqrond, well hidden from the Tepen lineH)f-sight, sat # row of Giens. One was asleep. This one I grabbed with my arm muscles, carefully transporting it directly behind the foliage near the fomr Tepen trappers. I reasoned tfoit sooner or later the Cien's indiscriminate appetite IF Z# would cause a piece of material to follow a telekinetic line beginning with its source, throu the field of the Tepen trap and ending in Its huge stomach. When the Gen's telekinetic field readied forth to seize its prey, the Tepen trap would automatically pull it in -- just as it bad for the tree nut and for Ovef end for Erne. The Tepen death ray at the center of the trap Would automatically and nearly instantaneously destroy the Gen. I hoped the Tepen would condude that their Ayorian enemy had been killed. Back again on my ledge overlooking both the Tepens and the sole Gen, I waited for its awakening. When it came, the sun had reached its lowest point before disappearing for the day. As with all Cien, it opened its huge stomach sack to receive all manner of organic and inorganic materials for possible nourishment -- an # dhing at all which was within its sphere of telekinetic strength. I could almost feel the Tepens' jubilation over their success when the Gen was caught and instantly disintegrated. They talked to one another in their strange Ayorianlike gabble as they disassembled equipment and turned back across the valley floor in the same direction from which they had come early in the morning. The sun was half below the horizon as I dipped from stone to stone down the w to follow them. The remaining Tepen advanced steadily toward the valley's side, never once turning photocell to the rear. Wiin a matter of minutes I readied the traiEng Tepen. I dubbed it to death with a broken brands The dusk lit vanished. The Tepen forged ahead before me, bobbing, weaving and floating, each in a sphere of radiated light. Where they floated above the broken valley floor, I had to scramble and push and tug around many formerly minor obstades. My musdes, nowhere near used to this unusual punishment, ached wifli dull pains of growth and sharp pinpricks of over-use. As their lit-cndrcled bodies floated easily the valley's steep banks, I nearly weakened in my resolve not to use indirect faculties. I could easily catch up by a small use of teleportation. But I dared not. I knew that other Ayorians, far above me in the use of indirect faculties, were falling to still unknown, hidden Tepen traps that used thdr own superiority against them... Eventually exhausted and crying from the fibers of every one of my muscle filaments, I reached the steep rim overlooking the vaBey beyond. There, deceptively dose in the dark, was the object of the Tepen's travels. Glittering lits shone from the floor of the valley dustered in near circular form. Many lights sparkled like teleporting fireflies as iSxey moved from point to point in the dark. The cool breeze blew jungle foliage back and forth between the lights and us. This sight of my first Tqen village fully explained the avoidance of certain areas by my fellow Ayorians, T forced air into my laboring lungs by forcing the expansion and contraction of my weak chest muscles. Then, taking a calculated risk, I rushed down the valley floor, ignoring noise and the possibility of discovery though direct sight. I slowed to a fast walk, taking more time to push organic materials away from my direct path of approach as I neared the closest moving light. Within the Tepen's light-circle I could see his photocell pointed away from me, as with the otha: Tepen, I struck him down with some elation. Only two to go! When the next rearmost member fdl as easily, we were better than halfway across the valley floor to the Tepen village. I airoached the last unsuspecting Tepen close onou to strike when my mind presented me with a novel conjecture. I could make this Tq)en teach me what I must knowl Fortunatdy for myself and the other Aymlans, I gave little thought to potentially dangerous devices available to the Tepens conscious defense and unknown to me. Possibly poisons from my muscular over-exertions clouded my thinking. Dropping behind the remaining Ten, I drew upon my mental images of one of the children's early conjectures. Quickly reconstructing their concept, I re-created the system of forces of their speculations by hand. I tied two stones to the end of a long vine and began whirling it around and around over my head. When I could feel both of the stones pulling against the muscles of my arm, I let the whole system of forces fly at the floating Tepen. It whizzed around and around his body, successfully tangling most of his outer instruments. I jumped on his suit, adding my weight to the total assemblage, then grabbed at his photocell and jerked it off. As the combined weight of my body and the rocks exceeded the telekinetic capacity of his protective suit, we settled to the valley floor. I kept my legs wrapped around the Tepen's suit. I reached for vines near us, using them to more completely entangle the captive. Then I broke off all of his suit's sensory jMrotruberances. This Tepen had the trap-box with its death-ray attachment I slung the trap-box over one shoulder and, using the end of one trailIP ing vine, tugged the monster along the valley floor in the opposite rection from the Tepen village. We traveled most of that night and the next, using only my powers of direct action. 'Yelekmass faculties had always made my search for food and water a minor task. Now, using only my direct faculties, I found the diore far more time consuming. In a valley far away frmn the Tepens point of capture, along a stream whose banks were lined with edible food, I took the precaution of tying every protruberance on the Tepen's covering machinery with live vines bound to sturdy trees. In view of the fact that I hadn't bothered to respond to the Tepen's noises, that it couldn't "see" without its photocell and that it couldn't mass-sense or teleport beyond the confines of its own mechanical protective suit, it must have been very puzzled indeed, I set the death ray next to him, carefully pointing it away from us. By changing control knobs and observing effects, I was able to learn how it operated. Then I turned it back toward my captive, plugged his photocell back into his suit of machinery and pointed the death ray directly at him. Finally, I tied his body to my foot with a long vine and slt. The Tepen did not move all that night When I awoke, the sun was well overhead. The air was cool and slightly misty. I ate and drank -- the hard way -- then turned back to my captive. When his photocell was moved to include me in its vision, I pointed it at my finger, which was hdd near the death-ray switch, I made motions with my finger, pretending to switch the death ray on. Even a stupid Cien could get that messagel I moved its photocell to cover me and said, "SporkI" Then I moved the cell to the stream of water, using Ayorian terms to say "water." The beast and I learned. Its language was rooted in the Ayorian tongue, though concepts were structured around material things rather than philosophical ideas. I am sure that without the peculiar characteristics of my sensory network -- light and sound receptors, etc. -- I would have had as much difficulty learning its language as would any other Ayorian, Most nouns had concrete referents which I could point to, merely by moving his photocell from object to object. I don't mean to imply that I was unusually bright It was just that my Bmited capabilities happened to match the Tepen better than they did the other Ayor. Tn a matter of weeks I was able to converse with my captive, tbou haltiitgly. I learned wbere his fooid bos was located, allowmg it to t whatever nourishment needed. As his food decreased, his rage would sometimes bo# over; im, #:e me, he could preface anger. Then I would learn thinp which I am sure it had no initial intention of communicating -- Ifte tte novd idea that messages could be sent from him to his fardistant village. I Aut off its photocdl and denied it food until it taught me about the form of electromagnetic radiation which could bounce around the planet very nidly. It took me somewhat longer to learn tiiat one of the metallic suit protrosioas, whidi I had already luckily broken, bad been, constructed for the purpose of sending such messages. Even though I now felt confident that I could separate its lies from its truthful statements, I moved to a further valley and kept even more careftd watch for searching Tepen. Months passed while I learned not only the language, but the function and Bmitation of every one of the sint's appendages. Some were for grasping objects, others for plugging into equipment found only in their viige or larger cities. Some were spedal puixose protrusions whose functions were related to the trapping of Aycnian life. It was this latter feature which gve me the most difticulty, and about which I wanted the most information. As day followed day, I reflected ever more frequently on how difficult it would be to kill the Tqen, without motive, so to speak. As my ability to communicate increased, a certain empathy grew between us. Can anyone  anotii being xmder such conditions? I wondered often. Then I learned the Tepen purpose for trapping my Ayorian brothers and toe intended purpose of Erne's death. As toe death-ray tube worked on Erne, the return enagy given off by her death was collected and trapped in side attachments. Thdr sole motive in so capturing this peculiar life-energy was in toe sensory pleasures its rdease gave them. Just as I considered the meat of the nut tree to be a ddicacy worthy of expending time and energy to obtain, the Tepen considered Ayorian life a delicacy worthy of toe search and death of their fomor ancestor. How depraved toe Tqpen had becomel When every drop of knowledge 'ms squeezed from toe Tepen, now finding it anotionally easy to kill, I pushed a toarp stick through opoiings in its armor. Then, using my indirect faculties for toe first time in months, I teleported toe dead organic mass out of toe armor. IP I studied the suit piece by piece, putting into play the many hours of philosophit conjecturing I had practiced :ivith my playmates. There ms not much about the machinery jrhich I did not learn, of my senses, including mass-sensing and teleportation. T manipulated the machinery with my mind, and I also doubled my body inside the suit, directing it to move from potet to point. It was imcomfortable, but possible. So long as I trigger no mind traps, I could be free to move within their village should the need arise -- that is, assuming they did not notice the small light receptor holes which I had created in the suit -- and assuming I actually understood as much about the Tepen as I thout I didi IV 'hough, I, Spork, the Ayorian ' moron, determined to become Spork, the Ayorian avenger, I was not so stupid as to think I could yet imitate the Tepen in their own village. Furthermore their village was but a tiny ou#ost of their complete civilization. Time and chance had caused the number of Tepen to be approximately equal to t of the Ayoe -- nearly one hundred thousand each. I needed to convince the Ayor of their need for eliminating Tepen before we Ayors were all hunted down and killed. As yon will immediately know from what I have said of my foster race, this was to be a most difficult task. Even more difficult was the problem of just how an Ayor could kill a Tepen, even if he so desired. The. only abilities native to Ayorian life were the indirect faculties which Tepen used against theml The time of Ayorian grouping had arrived. There I h(ed to make my plea, and so I teleported the death ray, the empty Tepen suit and myself to the place of gathering, a good five miles below the surface of Enithra. Even Tepen direct-action technology could not go this deep -- yeti As the Ayor arrived for the gathering, they arranged themselves into their new patterns of polarity. Their line curved along tiie top of the immense cavern and seemed to throb with intense philosophical thout, as their individual messages contributed to total racial growtii. As usual, they ignored Spork, the moron. Using my indirect faculties, I filled the huge cavern with sufficient air from the planet's surface, so that sound waves could be formed. Then, with a loud voice, I shouted, "Listen, fellow Ayoriansl I have discovered many new things about the Tepen which all must diare." Unable to break their chain, the Ayor ike back in unison, one himdred thousand strong. "What can Spork, the diild, contribute?" From the fonn of their response I knew I had met with great pessimism. In the adult mind, I was yet a child because of my obvious limitations. "I am as a diild Ayorian, but am not a child for me," I responded. "Hear me out. Can the Ayor escape the Tepen traps? I can I Can the Ayor kill the Tepen? I have! Can the Ayor talk the Tepen language? I can! Should I say, then, that all other Ayor are children because they cannot do these things which I can?" This thought, as I knew, was original and novel to my brothers. Their interest and respect had been aroused, so I pushed my advantage. I explained how their "squeezing" and "null-thought" games were useless -- indeed, worse than useless, for the very act of protecting one's self with such mental energy activated Tepen traps. I demonstrated the death ray and Tepen suit; I explained the depraved purpose of the energies taken from dying Ayors and I told concluding with the logical appeal that all Tqen must be killed everywhere. 'his became the longest grouping in the history of the Ayor. There was much new to learn, discuss and iare. I had upset some of the most cheried attitudes found among my brethren, and they knew me to be truthful. They had need to re-structure their complete phibsophical concepts. Weeks passed while they weighed, assessed and evaluated each concept. I felt I was winning my main point -- and so I dM, but in a way very much different than I supposed. First, they abolished the squeezing and null-thought games. They were to be replaced by another called "non-sensing" which was to be played very much like the nullthought game. This, they felt, would give the children practice in not triggering Tepen traps. I tried to explain they were talking "nonsense" with their new "non-sensing" game... but got nowhere. Second, they abolished the nut game to avoid traps of the kind which had killed Ovef. I tried to explain that Tepen would make other traps and other ways of accomplishing the same objective. They were little concerned. They felt that, statistically, it was improbable the Tepen could harm the Ayorian race very badly. I didn't try to explain my idea of the need for Ayorian revoke, since this concept would have been completely foreign to their nature. IF a Yet I tried to describe the great loss to the Ayorian race when individuals such as Erne were prevented from completing their twinning problem. This only brought the response I had heard before. That is yowt twinning problem. If you are not a child, solve itl" Thus, Spork the moron became Spork the only Ayorian avenger! I teleported ba to Enithra's surface dong with aU the other Ayorians, my emotions in turmoil over their refusal to face what I felt was reality. Alternately grief-stricken, then furious with rage, I moved from point to point along the surface without thought to my direction or purpose to my motion. One hundred thousand Tepen were too many individual life forms for me to wage war against alone, I knew. Yet my deep loss over Erne and my non-Ayorian vow to seek revenge burned deeply. Tventually, almost by accident,  I foimd myself in the valley where I had been led by the Tepen who had killed Erne. There, far along the valley's lu violet and ultra-violet floor, shone the reflected metal of the Tepen village. I teleported myself to a point close by the village, then walked to its edge with my legs and feet. There I physically climbed one of the larger trees overlooking some of the metallic huts to better observe the Tepen activities in secret Had I not known of their common genetic heritage I would have thought the Tepen and Ayor to be totally different races of beings. Where the Ayor Kved freely, nomadically, across the planet's surface, the Tepen built and lived in cavelike metc structures tied together by concentric circles of metal-like paths that spread out from the center of the village. I could tell the metallic humps were living quarters because the Tepen floated along the paths into and out of the structures. When night came, I retreated from the tall branch of the tree by use of direct action faculties and, in similar manlier, filled my mouth and stomach with berries found on bushes nearby. As I ate, I watched ripened berries teleport themselves in random directions, as was normal for all Enithra seed. Since my present indirect sensing faculties were deliberately self-protective only -- automatically protective against Enithra's ever-seeking plant and animal life -- I was incapable of following any of the berries' flight paths. I knew the approximate teleportation strength of the berries. Thu# I knew, within a radius of several arm lengths, about where they uld be appealing. Since me of IF tile Tepen metal paths ms locate jnitiiin the se's radius of strength chance alone I uld expect the ipearance of ripened seeds scatter along the path. Ncme could be seen. Nor did any appear while !E ate. Knowing now that Tepen protective devices were operating throuiout the vQlage, I returned to my watch above the village with even more caution Nighthdl deepened and artificial lighting turned on. Yet, during all the long, cold night of watch, nothing stirred bdow me. At sunrise, three Tepm floated toward the village exit, carrying traps and photocdls. I quickly descended to ground leved where I puriied my w through foliage and fallen jungle debris to hastily follow than. We travel for three days, rieegmig nits, across five different valleys, lore reaching the first trap. This time my direct action fatties -- my leg and arm muscles -- were hardened. I had no difficulty following behind in seaet. As they worked over their first Ayorian trap, rain tumbled from lingering clouds ovahead. As I bad learned to do once before, I quickly covered mysdf with vegetable growth to keep off the cold rain and to cture some heat for my body. llie rain provided me th suffideot cover so that I could now creep doser to the working trio. Thdr vdees were dear and I now knew thdr language. Stimulated and dted over success in capturing another Ayorian delicacy, they re-set the trap and began their slow flotation toward the next one. When they had gone beyond thdr normal seeing distance, I drded the re-set trap to study it from every angle. There were two of them, the same type which had caught and killed e. I could easily trigger them or destroy them. I coidd eaaly follow the Tepai and destroy every trap they set. But what then? Sooner or later, Tepen would know of my presence. Could I, dngle-handedly, kin one hundred thousand Tn? But if I let the traps lie untoudieS Ayorimi brothers would die, one at a time. Even at the risk of being discovered by Tqen, could I allow this to happen? One tr was conspicuous while the other was bidden. Both were protected from Enitiura's ever-seeking life-fingers by tiny, mechanically generated indirect-action fields. Thus they could lie on the jtmgle floor indefinitely in wait for unwary Ayorians. Whai the Ayor sensed the obvious trap and reach ed to switch it off, the mechanically generated entrapinng field hid several feet away was activated -- and the wary Ayorian to be tricky into trafping himsdf. # eaching tbrough the trap's telekinetic barriers physically, I pulled away one of t two death lays. I set it beside the other, orienting it in the opposite direction but hidden low. FMcking the switch to the on position, I separated a strand of fiber from one of the plant growths and tied it to the switch. Then I wrapped the other end of the fiber to the "off" switch of the other ray, and thus set up my Tepen trap. Carefully, I turned the "off" switch "on" -- and the strand of fiber tugged the "on" ray "off." Since both switches were constructed the same way, whatever happened to one switci caused the other to do the opposite On their next rounds, the Tepen would see the energy field surrounding an obviously "on" death ray. Then, when they extended a mechanical appendage to turn it off, they would be positioned just right to be blasted by the other ray as their action tum it on. I was highly pleased with this arrangement. Ayorians might still be trapped, but it was not as likely. And it was almost certain that investigating Tepen would be. With heightened aithusiasm, I followed behind the Tepen, resetting every one of the fourteen traps they visited. Sooner or later th would begin to suspect my presence. But I s determined to put fear into them while they were learning! The rain had ceased several days earlier. While I was not entirely comfortable, I was not cold and wet as before. 'he three Tepen approached their home valley late in the afternoon, moving as quickly as their mechanical devices would allow. One Tepen trailed far behind the others, beyond their hearing distance. I leaped upon his suit, grasping it tightly with both arms and legs. I struck first at the long distance radio message wire, breaking it off while my legs clung to his cold, metallic coating. My weight prevented it from moving. Reaching for jungle vines, I quickly tied the waving appendages of the struggling Tepen, hoisted him to my shoulder and ran into the jungle, away from the village, faster than any Tepen could follow, until I felt myself to be sufficiently far away. Then I put the Tepen down for a careful surveillance of every feature of his suit. I ignored the items which were familiar to me and broke all those which were unfamlBar. Once sure that no traps could remain hidden in these features, I teleported both of us to a distant spot. Interrogation of this prisoner went swiftly. I drew a design of the village on the jungle floor and asked for the function and purpose of every building. Though the TepIF en d not ye me pcoper answers at first, several days of starvation broHt truthful statements. I learned the village was one of several himdred scattered aroimd the planets siurface, each having file ef function of trailing the Ayor. I learned the purpose of each metal mound -- which building was their laboratory, whidi was their resting quarters and which was their long-distance communications center. I knew where the source of thdr iergy was located. And, I bdieved, I now knew how to destroy their villages safely. But if I could teleport only forty miles per jump, how long would it take me, Spork the moron, to find several hundred villages scattered across the complete planet? Also, how could I handle their citadel village, where sat their ruler -- the one for which most of the Ayor "delicacies" were being collected? At, say, fifty Tepen per village, two hundred villages made only ten thousand Tepen, I could hope to destroy one by one. I would still be facing ninety thousand at the other main center I I continued surveillance of the viflage, harrassing its members while puzsling over my extra twinning problem. Obviously I needed Ayorian assistance. Equally obviously, the other Ayor needed to hdp themselves; for, even should I be successful in my campaign against Tepen, Ayors were still untrained to the art of self-preservation. What of the next unpredictr bale obstade in their racial progress? The next captured Tqen taught me about planetary maps and described how Tepen travd swiftly from dty to dty merely by stepping into the grid of one of the little metal mounds. It looked and sounded very much like a kind of slow, mechanically induced teleportation device. This Tepen started the idea which slowly percolated upward to my consdouaiess. There were exactly forty-two members in the village. If I could dose off their tranxartation door as well as their means of longdistance communication, I believed the village would be mine. V T ate that night I dressed myself in one of their mechanical suits and slowly made my way to the communication center. I inspected everything very carefully for traps before teleporting chunks of instrument, far away in the jungle. Except for a slight tinkling of certain materials as my mental shearing cut through the equipment, all was yet quiet. I worked my way just as carefully near their transportation door where, in the dark, my infra-red presence would look to any watching Tepen as though I were another Hepen. Any dose inspedloin mmld certainly give me away, however, so I depended on their habit of nitly deep. Again I carefully Inspected the tranrtadon device for Tepen traps. Emding none, I also teleported part of this assemblage away from tte village. Neither communicator nor door were any longer operationaL I should now find exay forty-two helpless, or near hdpless, sleeping Tepen. I quietty counted thdr floating figures. Yes, there were exactly forty-two floating figures. I unlimbered one of thdr death rays and sprayed its beam slowly across the awag figures. Deliberately missing one of them, I watched as it rushed past me through the dooriway. The forty-one dead Tepen were ho longer a threat As the escaping Tepoi ran first to the Transporter, then to the commimicator, I teleported out of the mechanical suit, keeping it afloat and active-looking with my indirect faculties and directing it to follow the Tepen overtly while I followed seaetly. The stage of damage found on both the communicator and transporter gave the remaining Tqen its due to my nature -- at least I hoped so. It headed from the useless communicator directly to the laboratory, with my empty suit trailing behind. I made the mechanical tqpendbge on the suit aiqear to open fte door and follow it, as my mass senang extended throughout the tirea sensing his every move. It reached for a bulky device, swiveling it around to face the trailing suit As soon as I sensed his appendage reach for the "m" switch, in rapid sequence I mentally shoved the empty suit forward to distract its attention, teleported a large chunk of wall away from the building's side for my own entry, damped mental energy on the Tqh en's appoidage to keep it from activating the bul weapon and, with my musde jumped through the open hole to its side. The creature was completely surprised. My musdes were more than suffident match for his mechanical linkages. Furthermore, if needed, I was now free to use my indirect faculties without fear of traps. Once it was tightly tied with metallic cords I turned with antidpation toward the bulky object of my search -- a device which intuitive reasoning, alone, told me must exist. It was nearly tidce as large as me and nearly exceeddl the limit of mass which my mind could transport Its barrd-diaped body was linked by cables to S square box, th the usual switch. I reached out with my mind beyond the village to find a Gen and (continued on pEe #) IF IF  Feature Such stuff as dreams are made on rphe average man probably does not remember too much of what he dreams, and that may be a good thing. Aside from nightmares -- often based on some standard form of total helplessness or estrangement -- most dreams don't leave a vivid impression because there really isn't enough interesting material in them to be worth remembering. Even nightmares depend on emotional rather than intellectual interest, as a rule. Apparently the human mind spends a great deal of time in sleep in dreams, many of such low intensity that they aren't remembered at all. Tests have indicated that this activity is far from useless, however; a man who is interrupted whenever his brain pattern shows dreaming to be taking place gets very little real rest out of his sleep. And if he is prevented from dreaming for several nights, he becomes disoriented to a large degree, even though he seems to sleep enough. Apparently the memory gets loaded down with assorted bits of garbage and random associations during the day, and dreams act as the mental garbage collector; the useless material is dumped. But the sleeping mind can't afford to clear itself without some care, so samples are played back and examined. It seems a shame, however, to think of all that time spent in dreaming with so little obvious reward in enjoyment. We know that a dream can be an interesting experience. Now and then, one with some stronger angle will apparently trigger the ideeping mind to build some kind of a story around it, and the personal sense of involvement makes it seem far better than it probably is. A few people are lucky enough to dream mostly in stories -- so far as they can rememba:. IVe known a few who could be waked up and go back to sleep deliberately to finish their dreams. And IVe talked to a couple beside myself who have caught their minds delaying a dream until they could replot it, and then finishing it in the improved version, without waking up. Probably that happens mostly to writers, who spend a fair amount of waking time re-plotting basic story ideas. A ndre Norton is obviously touching on a matter dear to our wishes with her expert dreamer who can control all of a dream (supposedly) and supply this welldeveloped story as a dream to an-, other. Obviously, if we could do it only from one mind to another, it would be as expensive as she indicates -- limited only to the filthy rich. Others have suggested taping or broadcasting dreams. If there were some way to program a better grade of dreams for most sleepers, it should be even better than television, and save the apparent waste of several hours we now spend in sleep. Of course, someone would pitiably figure out how to add commercials, but most roses have thorns somewhere. Most of these stories in science fiction deal with entertainment. But there is no reason why it shouldn't serve a serious purpose. A dream done by a man who could really play the piano might be very helpful to the dreamer who hasn't time for steady practice; a dream of Valley Forge could give a sense of the cold and misery that no movie could convey to a history studeit. So far, nobody has been able to do much to influence dreams, beyond such crude things as dropping an object with a loud crash -- which sometimes produces a dream of some random kind around the noise. But dreams are an intrinsic part of sleep -- as even careful study of a dog or cat will show. As such, they must be tied into the gaieral mysteries that surround the whole matter of sleeping. Here science has developed a wrinkle that isn't exactly new, but is finding new interest though better means of appl#dng it. This was once called electronarcosis, but now goes under the simpler term of electrosleep. It's a fairly old idea, first developed by a French scientist named Leduc near the turn of the century. Today, the Russians seem to have gained the lead in this field, using far more sophisticated equipment than was possible until recently. American scientists are just picking up the idea and experimenting with it. The basic idea is to make the brain sonmolent through "negative" IF stimulation with pulsing electric current. Here modem electronics has provided us with excellent means of adjusting voltage, amperage and frequency, as well as the pulse shape. The brain generates a number of pulses of its own. One of these, known as the alpha rhythm, is always strongest and most regular during sleep. Scientists working with electrosleep usually use this alpha rhythm as a model, preferably while stud)dng the alpha rhythm of the subject to be put to sleep. First treatments last for about half an hour, increasing gradually up to three hours, after which the subject is allowed to sleep normally. Many cases of insomnia can be cured with a dozen or so sessions, though more stubborn cases may take the course over again later for several times. The sleep induced seems to be normal, restful sleep, with none of the undesirable side effects that accompany most chemical means of causing sleep; there is no dopey feeling on awakening, nor is sleep unduly prolonged beyond the normal, healthy period. G ood results have also been achieved in some cases in treating schizophrenia. One theory to account for this psychosis is that the brain is overstimulated (by fear, worry, habit, etc.) until it is suffering from overexhaustion -- which makes sleeping more difficult leading to worse exhaustion I The electrosleep machine can break the cycle and give the brain cells a chance for the completed rest needed. Electrosleep equipment is generally available in Europe, such as the Elektrodorm models in use in Russian and French clinics. But so far they are not available for home use -- .nor should they be. The technique is still experimental, and the possibility for serious and permanent damage does exist without skilled medical supervision. But it seems probably that in the future, after enough is learned of this, every bedside might have its simplified Elektrodorm -- probably with a slot for the patient's own alpha pattern to be inserted. With mass production, the cost of a machine should come down to less than that of a television set -- and a black-and-white one, at that. Maybe by then scientists will also have been able to learn a bit more about sleep and how the brain manages it. They've had very poor success so far in trying to read what goes on with the encephalograph. The location and basic nature of the processes in the brain are almost as much a mystery as ever. By experimenting with the creation of wave patterns -- or the augmenting of them -- by electric currents and pulses, it may be possible to learn more. There is no way lo isolate a single type of brain wave from others when reading the signals of the living brain. But we can already isolate any type of signal to be sent into the brain, and its effects can then be studied. WeVe bug suspected that the alpha rhythm is the basic clue to our sleep activity; now, by sending such a pattern through electrodes into the brain, weVe at least proved a direct relationship. AyTost of the other brain patterns are more difficult to pin down than the strong alpha rhythm. Eariy work with the encephalograph showed a fairly simple series of fMitterns, but it was often deceptive. The early recording macUiies had a limited ability to handle higher frequencies, and often smoothed off the sharp peaks of the pulses -- they were like a bad tape recorder tr#dng to handle piano music! Modern "high-fidelity machines have shown that the brain's activity is far more complicated than the early traces indicated. Here we can again approach things from the other end. If there is a suspicion diat certain pidse patterns are involved in the use of speech, they can be experimentally induced and modified, while the subject undergoes a continuous test to determine the effects. This may also have the additional benefit of helping people with aphasia and other mental difficulties with speech. Some work has already been done in tT#dng to alter dreams by means of pulsed signals. Speech patterns can be impressed on the wave trains -- or series of pulses -- just as speech modulation can be impressed on the wave trains of radio signals. So far this work is highly experimental, and no significant results have yet been published, but the beginning of dream shaping and dream creation is already with us. Andre Norton's dream-linking machine isn't Impossible, theoretically, either. We know a great deal about shaping, modifying and amplifying pulses; some of our electronic organs can turn out shaped pulses of fantastic complexity to produce the ready waveform of a clarinet or the effects of a whole percussion section going at once -- all from the electronic manipulation of the most simple pure tones. It seems entirely possible today to take the brain patterns of one person and impress them on the brain of a second individual, particularly if the recipient is sleeping, without interference from signals from his sensory organs. A highfidelity encephalograph can pick up the brain patterns of the sender and impress them on a train of pulses being sent through something like the Elektrodorm to the mind of the recipient. It can be done with animals as well as men for IF early experiments; such things as a pecking movement from a sending chicken to a receiving one could be easily detected, at least. There have been reports of such efforts to establish "wired telepathy" reported previously, but IVe yet to see evidence of adequate equipment being used, as should be the case now. Almost certainly there is going, to be trouble in trying to make the pattern of one mind fit another. The signal from the sender will probably have to be modified considerably before it can be effective. But with sufficient study and even today's computers, this difficulty can surely be overcome. Nobody can guarantee that there will be any clear transfer of thoughts -- though that remains a possibility -- but there is a good chance that at least certain basic mental activities can be impressed on one brain from another. The machine to do this is, of course, exactly what Andre Norton describes briefly in her story. It is interesting to note that she limits it generally to one person to make dreams and another to receive them -- as would be the case where some computer-controlled modification was needed to make the dreamer's patterns fit the recipient mind. T ike most "inventions in the ' egg", this presents all sorts of potential benefits and problems -- and most of them are ones we can't begin to guess accurately until the invention reaches common usage. It's too valuable a research and teaching tool to be wasted on entertainment, for instance; so was television, which was constantly being written up as a means to inform and instruct -- until the entertainment moguls made it a household commodity. The most obvious danger is the transfer of thought patterns that somehow deform the recipient's own thoughts (except where that is the therepeutic goal). Will a man who wants to learn to appreciate music from the mind of a great musician pick up such things as a terror of insects -- or some ugly racial prejudice he didn't have before? Or will use of the device weaken his own personality and establish a mere shadow of another mind in his head? This may be a serious problem because the impressed pulses can be made much stronger than the natural ones. I keep wondering, however, if dream-spinning will go through the phases that so often hit out ancient attempts to share our dearns -- will there be a "new wave" among the dream makers? Or will there be "adult" dreams restricted to those over sixteen? Where do you draw the line between dreams and nightmares? IF  Short Story Never mix pepper with nerve drugs -- or there'll be the devil to pay I he Coventry Drug Company, as you are probably aware has (due of the largest research departments in the business, with some himdreds of chemists, pharmacologists and others of related skills, all dedicated to the discovery of new and better, but confceivably more costly, drugs. Quite 'a few echelons from the top of Shis great organization was an unhappy yoimg man named Peter Five years earlier Pete Coghill, in somewhat erratic piursuit of his Ph.D., had been notably extroverted, given to beer guzzling, ball games and dates with good looking wenches. He liked everyone aroimd him and was liked in turn. Though not exactly anybody's genius, he gave promise of becoming a pretty good biochemist and in a gener sort of way he looked forward to a university career. This was not to be. The formidable Professor Metz assigned him a problem, the nature of which is neither here nor there. It was a neat enough problem, one on which Metz had already worked and published. Young Coghill was expected to do no more than fill in some detail. Injudiciously, Coghill undertook a new approach and came up with findings which completely (and beyond dispute) invalidated the great man's earlier work. If Peter had been a few years wiser, or if he had paused to consider the possible consequences, he would have found a way to save face for Professor Metz. Instead he discussed his findings freely and gleefully around the Department. Metz had perforce to admit his error, and, indeed, encourage Coghill to make the work a part of his thesis; but naturally he was bitter about it and began, as did some of his faculty cronies, to avoid seeing Coghill when they passed in a corridor. Just after Peter was awarded his doctorate. Professor Metz died of a broken heart, perhaps complicated by a kidney ailment, and the atPeter abandoned his plans for an academic career and went to work for industry. His first assignment with Coventry had to do with a drug called Neonexal, which had been passed by the Food and Drug Administration and was about to be put on the market. Peter was responsible in large part for the unwelcome discovery that occasional lots of the drug could cause a skin irritation which, while not serious, was unsightly and a likely basis for lawsuits. So Neonexal was held up for nearly a year while some changes were made to eliminate its allergenic properties; and one senior research man most unfairly blamed Peter Coghill for making an issue of a trivial deficiency. In the following year he discovered three errors, one of them serious, on the parts of colleagues, and he hadn't a friend left in the entire organization. Top management began to consider him an insurance policy against mistakes and oversights and gave him the task of reviewing the reports of many of his co-workers. It took most of his days and left nearly no time for constructive work of his own. Teing an insurance policy had  proved at first to be unrewarding. Little by little, however, Peter Coghill was adapting to his job, coming to value a discovered error as an accomplishment in itself and even savoring the act of pouncing on the perpetrator. He was in the course, that is, of becoming a thoroughly unpleasant character. His evenings provided little relief from the increasing loneliness of his days. The good looking wenches he had known in college seemed mostly to be married and he had mislaid the facility to locate new recruits. Most nights he drank a couple of beers in the corner tavern and retreated to his apartment with the worthy but unexciting excuse of keeping up with the scientific journals. One day near the beginning of his fifth year with Coventry, Dr. Coghill sat alone in his office-laboratory, considering whether to eat lunch first or to read Dr. Brock's monthly report. He decided to do them together. Brock was in the course of synthesizing compounds the derivatives of lysergic acid itself, but structures in which the parent substance was subtly altered in one way or another. This is not to say that Coventry wasn't just as aware as any other responsible group of the dangers of too much about the psychoses, the suicides, the accidental deaths and the crowd of pimply fizz heads which followed in its wake. Nobody like it; but it was much too valuable a clue to the biochemistry of the brain to be ignored. So Brock was synthesizing analogs, and other people were testing them in mice and rabbits and cats and monkeys, and Peter Coghill picked up his red pencil, all ready to find a good juicy mistake. Peter had given up going to the company cafeteria. It was no fun always to eat alone at a table for six. Most days he put together a lunch of sorts before leaving his apartment and, along with a few journals, his attache case would usually contain a couple of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Today his fare included a hardboiled egg, and he performed the neat trick of chipping the shell off cleanly without once looking at it. He read: "The free base (#-#J obtained from the hydrochloride with silver oxide had a strong blue color. MP #-#." "Now why the hell," said Peter aloud, "would it have a strong blue color?" He flipped back a page to look again at the structure, sensing the possibility of an error. "n esting in his in-basket was a collection of vials, each containing a minute sample of one of the experimental chemicals of current interest. Coventry circulated these in the hope, not often realized, that they might stimulate someone to serendipitous thought. Sure enough, there was Brock's #-#, along with several others of the series. The sample was blue, no question of that, even though it was a fine powder. Very odd. No reason at all for it to be colored. Carefully Peter spilled a little heap of the blue dust on a sheet of paper and even more carefully sniffed it. Odorless. He returned to his reading and his lunch. He found nothing to red pencil and very little to give him pause up to the last page, when the room shook. His first thought was that an explosion had occurred in one of the nearby rooms, and he shot out of his own laboratory and stood peering up and down the empty corridor. There was no sound or sign of excitement. No alarm bells clanged. It could have been a very small IF earthquake, he told himself. Leaving the door open, he went back to his desk and sat down with a thud on a chair that had suddenly become an inch higher than usual. Peter closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at the white pad that should have had a small heap of blue powder on it. The powder was gone, or very nearly. Next to the pad was another piece of paper, once folded neatly, now open. It bore a scatter of salt and pepper. There were crumbs of hard boiled egg on both sheets. He stared silently at the evidence and wondered what he had just done to himself. Structures like this one (to the extent that you could infer such things) weren't likely to be violently toxic, but they were very likely indeed to produce distortions of the mind or senses; some of them damned unpleasant. Peter knew this from reading and observing, not from personal experience. By habit he shied away from pill taking and had never been tempted to that practice of some biochemists to try things on themselves. The knowledge that he was now absorbing into his bloodstream a compound of totally unknown properties ws dinstinctly discomforting. The room shook again, quite sharply this time, and he was on the point of rising to see whether anything on the laboratory benches was in danger of falling off, but reminded himself that these tremors were subjective and unreal. So, of course, was the slow tilt which he was now perceiving -- a few degrees to the right, back to normal, then a few more degrees. He remembered reading about a hoped-for morphine substitute which not only slanted the room, but convinced several experimental subjects that they were hanging from the ceiling. His own laboratory came gradually to rest about fifteen degrees to starboard. Not a bad angle at all. The room looked rather nice that way. He wondered whether the entire Coventry Tower Building pointed slanting toward the sky, and told himself not to be vainglorious. Where the hell had that word come from? He really ought to let somebody know, so he dialed Dr. Brock who more than anybody should be interested in #-#. There was no answer. The wall clock told him it was a quarter after. Everybody would be at lunch. He tried Dr. Kinnison. No answer. Rather xmbut hung up before they answered. Oo okay, he would ride it out  alone. Lock the door, that came first. Against the rules to lock a lab door during working horns. Pfui. He wasn't working. He bent one leg against the tilt and made it to the door gracefully and with some aplomb. The latch made a satisfying snick, though his fingers weren't working quite right. Thurber had said something about nouns showing up in the past tense; that his fingers were becoming fungers. How neatly Thurber stated things. Back at his desk with notebook open and pen poised, he sat prepared for all things to be said or left unsaid. His clothes had tingled as he walked, which must be noted, and so he wrote (back-hand to compensate for the tilt), 'garments do tingle." The door opened and Dr. Hugo Carreford walked into the room. That he had entered through a just-locked door was less surprising than the visitor's identity. Peter had once heard Dr, Carreford make the keynote address at a very important meeting, had read several of his papers and had seen his picture many times. Carreford was an accepted authority in half a dozen an advisor to presidents, in short the prototype and paragon of scholars. Peter leaped to his feet, pawing the air only a little to correct his balance. Perhaps in the presence of so great a man the aberrant angles were correcting themselves. In any case the tilted room became unnoticeable. Tlease," said Carreford, and waved a bony hand in typical gesture. 'Tlease, Dr. Coghill, do sit down. Relax. You make me feel my visit is somehow dismaying. There, I'll take this lab stool. Time was, you know, when my rump was better contoured to the lab stool than the easy chair. I see that you smoke, so I'll take the liberty." Peter watched ratr numbly as his visitor fitted a cigarette to the long black holder which had become a Carreford trademark. He found his voice. To what am I indebted... ?" he began, then realized how utterly silly the question sounded, and let it trail off. Carreford blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling and smiled, the corners of his mouth turning up till he looked like a sculptured sat#n. 'Yes indeed, a natural question, which I can and shall answer. First let me say that my appearance here, though made at some personal inconvenience, is a pleasure. One is always happy to meet a fellow who is due to accomplish great things." 'Hahl" said Peter. "I beg your pardon?" 'Hahl" Peter repeated with fervency. 'T know just what accomplishments I'm likely to make; tearing apart work that somebody else has done. That's what. And you know it, too." Carreford raised bushy eyebrows in astonishment. do?" Of course. For a minute I forgot I was doped up with a hallucinating agent. You walked in through a locked door, which should have been a tip-off, but I'm IF not thinking too dearly. Besides, you do look real, you know." 'Thank you," Carreford said drily. "Its reassiuring to be told. As a realistic hallucination, then, I should know what you know. Is that it? Let me assure you, the situation is not quite that simple. You wont mind, perhaps, if I ask you some questions?" P eter's laugh held a note of hysteria. 'This is asinine. It's one thing to see a hallucination, something else to debate with it about its reality. How screwed up can you get? So go ahead and ask your questions." "You have already answered a first and most important question. It required, you see, a rather spedfic concatenation of circumstances to bring me here; the drugs, that is, your character and your need." Peter lost the thread of this remark and took to staring around the laboratory. The effects of the #-# were now much more interesting than alarming, and the concern with which he had viewed his role as an unwitting guinea pig had disappeared. "Sam Brock," he remarked aloud, "is going to be very much interested. J'he light in the room seems to have increased not less than three-fold." In a mental aside he noted his casual use of the unfamiliar expression. "Three, four or five-fold. Dazzling. The walls are lacy and light permeable. Yonder Venetian blind has fulfilled itself with crackling streamers of blue. In fact, you're the only thing here that looks solid, and you're a phantasm. I could walk right through you." "Please," said Dr. Carreford, "don't try it, and I'd really rather you stopped peering at me as though trying to see through. My interior is, after all, rather personal. But now to business. You are unhappy because you find yourself cast as a critic of the scientific drama rather than an actor." "Who said I was unhappy?" "You are. Let us not belabor the point. You want greatly to be an originator, an innovator, a creative thinker, which, in fact, you must be. My kind of assignment, you know." Peter shook his head. "Are you telling me that you've been assigned to visit me to discuss my creativeness?" "Approximately that, yes." "Who assigned you?" Carreford gestured vaguely. "Well, um, the Committee, shall we say?" "Say it if you wish. You're a preposterous hallucination. Who's on the Committee?" "Different people, different people. Albert, of course, and Niels, Sir Humphrey. Some others. Lucifer is the permanent chairman." "Lucifer! You're an emissary from the devil?" ' I cigarette holder waggled in a manner suggesting annoyance, and left a zigzag of orange light in its wake. "Now, please, young man, let's not fall into that ancient error. Lucifer is the light bearer and was once an angel of excellent character. He fell, however, from heaven as a result of certain misdemeanors. Someday these will be expunged from the books, but in the long meanwhile he mittees. "I thought Lucifer was one of the names of Satan." "There is considerable confusion in the literature, I must admit. Let us consider him, notwithstanding, as a bearer of light. On this brief errand, my visit to you, such is assuredly my mission. To bear some enlightenment, that is. Now, young Dr. Coghill, I ask you, what is your attitude toward a mistake? Do you regard it as a challenge?" "What do you mean?" Dr. Carreford wreathed himself in silvery smoke. His cigarette had grown no shorter and now appeared to be a super king size. "I'll explain. I do in fact know something of your history. Early in your career you detected an error on the part of one Professor Metz. Metz, as I recall, had the manners of an ill-natured peacock, but he was an able scientist and he didn't deserve what you did to him." "But he was wrong." '"Of course he was wrong. But if you and he together had reviewed discrepancies between your findings, a more significant conclusion would have been reached. Why is # blue -- those few micrograms you swallowed?" "Probably contaminated. What's that got to do with anything?" "I've no notion," Carreford said. "It may be quite unimportant. But once upon a time somebody found some blue specks in a batch of phthalic anhydride, and a new dye industry was born. When you saw that blue color you were startled. You said, I believe, why the hell?' Now you dismiss it as an unknown contaminant. Um. Let us get back to the matter of mistakes." Peter grimaced. "I wish I could stop finding them." "You never will," Carreford told him. "You never will. You have a quick eye and a keen analytical sense. But you must never again turn a mistake to anybody's disadvantage. That's the easy part of my advice. But mark this welll What may at first seem a mistake may prove, if one is lucky, to be a wild fact." "A what?" "A wild fact. The point that lies off the curve, the analysis that adds to a hundred and five percent, the bacterial broth that unexplainably begins to foam, the hint of an odor where there should be none. Faced with what is difficult to explain. no IF you, my young friend, are given to deducing a mistake, and you may often be right. But make that deduction as a last resort, if you please. Hold the belief, for a time anyway, that your odd datum may be right, even if that requires you to sacrifice some things you know and dierish. Examine your wild facts forward and backward, upside down and inside out, and one of these days you'll be known as an original thinker." "Is that how you did it?" Peter Coghill inquired. arreford grinned and looked  alarmingly satanic for a moment. "So now you ask the old phantasm how he, as Hugo Carreford, achieved success. Well, there are a variety of approaches to recognition, but those of us who possess creativity -- I include both of us, naturally -- seem to display the trait at an early age. You, for example, are reported to have built a seismograph of sorts before you'd ever heard of such an instrument, and succeeded in detecting trucks as they passed a block away." "Aha," said Peter, "oho. That proves it. You're a figment of my imagination, otherwise you coiddn't remember what I've almost forgotten. On the other hand -- " Peter held up his left hand and regarded it surprisedly, since it appeared to be backward. " -- on the other hand, you're giving me some good advice -- well anyway, advice -- which strongly suggests that you want something from me in return. So-o-o-o." The sound of the last word pleased him and he continued it for some time until the air was quite full of little round O's. "So?" Carreford prompted. "So you must be an emissary of the devil." "Lucifer, as I told you." "Lucifer, the devil, Satan, Beelzebub. You're trying to buy my soul." Carreford chuckled, seeming in high good humor. "And what is your soul, my dear Dr. Coghill? As a biochemist of course you must have a theory. Would it be a ductless gland, a hormone perhaps, a peculiar sequence in a hidden helix invent a new enzyme every time you want to explain a biological event. Well, whatever your soul happens to be, I don't really want it, and neither does the Committee." "Then what do you want?" "Just to help you get back on the course of a career from which you have been straying." "For a hallucination, you've been making some statements which sound uncommonly sensible. I wonder if I'll remember it later. Wait." He seized his pen and wrote in an ungainly scrawl. When he looked up Dr. Carreford had become rather dim. "I can so," said Peter suddenly. "Can what?" "See through you. No detail, but I can see the doorknob about where your liver should be." "Ah, yes. I'm about to depart and this is the easiest way. I am, at the moment, attending a conference on education in Rome and I should be getting back. Somebody might say something intelligent, you know. Concerning my advice. If you decide to act on it, you may -- just possibly -- incur a slight obligation. Nothing to do with souls." "Then what?" Peter asked. "You might be asked to go on an errand someday. An errand similar to this. Nothing arduous, but you do get into some of the damnedest conversations. One last word. Don't mix pepper with drugs likely to have a central nervous system effect. Capsicum is frequently synergistic." TTith that the figure dimmed   still further until it was barely visible, then it disappeared with a small popping sound. After a minute Peter rose and prowled the laboratory, navigating now without difficulty. Feeling foolish, he waved his arm through the air over the lab stool. Naturally there was nothing, nothing beyond a faint unfamiliar fragrance of Turkish tobacco. "Well," said Peter; then, after some thought, "Well." The clock m stood at one ten, but he had not perceived the passing of nearly an hour. To all intents and purposes then, he had been asleep, and he foimd himself stiU overpoweriny sleepy. He slumped into his chair, elevated his feet to the desk and slept dreamlessly until nearly five o'clock. The following day, with no evident aftereffects from his encounter with #, he was inclined to smile at his recollections, already becoming a little hazy. He gave a much abbreviated account to Dr. Brock. In due course, #-# was tested in mice for toxicity and in cats for behavioral effects. It proved to be quite inactive and was presently abandoned in favor of other, more promising structures. At no time during the next year did anyone become aware of any change in Dr. Coghill's character, or realize that their attitudes toward him were changing little by little. By the end of that time, however, his comments on programs were being sought out, because so often he had something helpful to suggest. Let's kick it around with Pete, became a frequent expression and his table in the cafeteria was the center of a lot of productive discussions. In later years, as we all know. Dr. Coghill accomplished much. But his first major accomplishment was in some respects one of the most interesting. It began not long after his marriage to an exceedingly good IB looking wench who thought that biochemistry was an odd way for a grown man to make a living... But she liked to cook, she liked most of his friends and she knew how to listen. They got along fine. his particular thing started one day when he'd gone into one of the animal labs to share a coffee break with Joe Polanetsky. Joe was standing before a collection of white rats, scribbling notations on a clip board. There was a score or more of the rats, each quartered in a separate cage. They were largely comatose. "Here's your coffee," said Peter. "What are you doing with those?" "They're for Doc Siever," Joe said. "For his anti-shock drug work. Once a week I've been putting a collection of rats into mild shock, then he tries to bring them out of it." "How do you do it." "Put rats into shock? Various ways. These got a series of electric shocks ranging from barely perceptible up to fairly unpleasant, along with lights and noises. Vary the timing and the sequence. After a while poor old rattus gets to the point he doesn't know what's going to happen next and he doesn't much care. He turns pale, ceases to wiggle his whiskers and so on." "What about number five?" Peter asked. "That one. He looks pretty frisky. Held out as a control?" "Nope. He's had the treatment, too. Sometimes you get rats that don't give up. At least they don't go into shock in up to twice the usual period." Peter went over and watched number five thoughtfully. "Mind if I tickle him?" Joe looked severe. "If you enjoy tickling rats, you may. I don't know what Freud would have made of it." Peter lifted the lid and prodded number five with a cautious forefinger. Number five looked interested. "Would Siever let me have him, do you think?" "He's no use to Siever. I'll put him back in stock, marked for you. What do you want to do with him?" "I don't know. Do these resistant rats come in both sexes?" "Never noticed." "How many do you get?" "One in a couple hundred, maybe." "Save me some more, will you?" "Sure enough." polanetsky called him on the phone a month or so later. "I've got six. Four of them are females. If you still want them, you owe me a drink." "I do," Peter said, and went to see Helen Markley, the geneticist. He still had no idea what he was going to do with them, but he wanted to know the pattern of inheritability of the resistance. WhUe Helen was finding this out -- purely as a favor, since there was no official project on the books -- Peter Coghiii began to look for biochemical variations in his rats and Polanetsky bootlegged some behavioral studies. These were interesting. The rats which resisted shock also learned mazes more rapidly than their fellows and took longer to forget them. By choice they ate a little more heavily and, in the jiggle cages, showed higher than normal activity. Peter took to carrying one of them in his side coat pocket, and several times carried him home. Let it be said for Susan Coghill that, after some initial reservation, she became quite fond of one exceptionally intelligent rat called Hugo. The search for biochemical variations proved, however, to present difficulties. The Coventry management tolerated, and to a degree encouraged, research bootlegging, but they had about reached the point of clamping down on any further work on shock-resistant rats, when Peter received from Anal#d;ical Department this note, still unofficial and correspondingly informal: 'We reanalyzed the nerve fibre extract. The second cut was trimethyl hydroxyethylphosphonium chloride. Elemental analysis is damn near on the nose. Confirmed by titration and IR. If you want an blessing." Carried by Peter to the Director's office, this brief report had immediate impact, and before the end of the working day he had received his topside blessing, an allocation of funds and two new assistants. Susan heard him banging around in the kitchen. "What's up?" she called. "Hugo and I are going to have a martini," he shouted back, then added generously, "You may have one, too." "Well, thanks. Did you get a raise?" "No, nothing like that. This is important." Tt must be recorded that Hugo did not like his first taste of martini. Deplorable, but one can't expect too much of a rat. "OK," Susan said presently. "Settle down and tell me about it. Easy words only, remember." "Very good," said Peter. "First of all, you recall that Hugo and a few of his cousins are very superior rats." "How could I forget it?" "Right. And we're beginning -- Helen Markley is -- to be able to breed this quality into them. But we hadn't found out why they were the way they are. Not until today. Not until today. We had dissected out some nerve fibres and analyzed them six ways from Sunday, but we kept missing it. IP 'So-#. In our nerves -- yours and mine -- there's a material called acetylcholine. It can come apart and go together again very rapidly like an on-off switch and this effect causes impulses to travel along the nerve. Okay? Well, choline consists of a centrd nitrogen atom with three methyl groups and a hydroxcthyl group attached to it." Hvdroxethyl group. Sort of like dcohol?" 'Sort ot. i:jo our nerves contain this choline and so do rats' nerves, including Hugo's. Only, as we found out today, his contain something else, too, in a very small quantity. It's a central atom of phosphorus with three methyl and one hydroxethyl group attached. You see? The same thing except for the central atom." 'T guess I see." "Of course you do. The molecules aren't exactly the same shape, but they should have the same function in the body, almost certainly." "And this is important? Is this why we're having martinis?" "Right. Heres the rest of the picture. Hugo is smarter and healthier and has a finer moral character than other rats. Haven't you, Hugo? Somewhere among the branches of his family tree he learned to synthesize this phosphorous compound and how to use it, along with choline, to carry nerve impulses. Presumably it's a little more efficient than choline, and this accounts for his smartness although there isn't yet any solid evidence for that presumption. I'm making an inference. Right? "So okay. Humans, at least so far as we know, haven't learned to synthesize this compound. Question: If we provide it, say by injection, can human nerves learn how to use it? Will it increase human abilities to resist shock and to think better and to find our way through our own frightening mazes? This is speculation, of course. LrOts of work still to be done. In the meanwhile you had better not mention it." "Mention it?" said Susan. "I can't even remember it." 'his, then, was only the first of a number of important developments in medicine which are credited to Dr. Coghill. You must have seen his picture in Time quite recently, when he was given another honorary doctorate in California. He travels a good deal these days and makes a lot of important speeches. Not long ago Peter and Susan were in Paris, he to attend an international conference, she to pick up a few dresses. Late one afternoon they came back to their hotel and who should Peter see but Dr. Hugo Carreford sitting in the lounge with the American ambassador. Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Cbristmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers indude Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. I Galaxy Publishing Corp. # #I Hudson Street,  New York City # I Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi  record of Music from Mathematics I right away. I enclose check or I money order of #. I Nome  Address I Gty  State Zip Code .   .  (Offer good in U, S, A, Only) "Let's walk over this way," he said to Susan. That's Dr. Carreford over there, and I'd like to get a good look at him." They would have walked past, looking as casual as possible, except that Carreford rose and waved his cigarette holder in greeting. "Peter," he called, "Peter Coghill. So good to see you again. Ambassador, I'd like you to meet Dr. CoghiU and -- I presume -- Mrs. Coghill. How nice that you could come along to Paris." Peter shook hands numbly and, unable to find words, said nothing. Dr. Carreford filled the gap. "This young man. Ambassador, is the fellow who fathered the drug that stimidates learning and has turned our whole academic world topsy turvy. He also has the distinction, if you can call it that, of having a strain of white rats named after him "I do trust, Peter, that you have not been mixing pepper with any of your experimental products. Capsicum, you know, has some odd synergistic effects. Don't look so baffled, Mrs. Coghill. Just a private joke of ours." That was four months ago, and Peter Coghill hasn't heard a word from the Committee. OO IF An Interview with T must have started writing sdence fiction in #, or thereabouts. A little bit earlier IM read Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and been thrilled by it and tried to write a sort of imitation of it called The Castle of the Seven Gates. I used up all my material ,on the first page. ! . When Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories came out, which was in #, this was exciting to me. Earlier I'd thought about science, hoped to be a scientist, saw no real opportunity; but at least I was interested in science. And when I discovered science fiction, why here was something I could do about it, I suppose. I started writing science-fiction stories in my spare time, sending those I could finish to Gernsback. And in '# he published one of them, called The Metal Man, After I'd been writing for a while I got acquainted with Edmond Hamilton through Jerry Siegel, the inventor of Superman, who'd been corresponding with Ed and with me. I met Ed for the first time in a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had originally planned to buy a houseboat and drift down the Mississippi River. The houseboat idea didn't work out, so we got an outboard motorboat and went down the river, camping on the banks the first part of the trip, then later night. Finally, when the outboard motor wore out, we sold the boat and went on down the river on the Tennessee Belle, which was one of the last of the old riverboats. The trip on that was something like a chapter out of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Ed and  talked about science fiction, and the captains on the boat talked about old days on the river. Mostly IVe never done anything else but write science fiction. I was on Air Force weatherman for about three years, # to #; and lately, for the last dozen years, IVe been edging back into the academic field. In my Army service, when I went to Fort Bliss for induction, and got shipped to Chanute Field, I had three choices of what I wanted to do when I got in. I put down first "glider pilot" -- thank tte Lord I didnt bome a glider pilot! -- and second "intelligence" and third "weather". I got to be a weatherman. I was very happy about it. I spent eleven weeks at Chanute Field learning to be a weather observer, and six months in the field practicing weather observation -- that is, taking observations, plottingaps and so forth -- and went back to forecasting school at Chanute Field for twenty-two weeks. I came out as a weather forecaster and spent fifteen months at Hobbs, New Mexico forecasting the weather for a four-engine pilot training school flying B-#s. Finally, in #, I went overseas to the Southwest Pacific and briefly had a try at forecasting tropical weather for the Marine air groups that were heckling the Japanese in the Northern Solomons. I had started out to become a chemist. But when I got into chemistry, it began to look like sort of drudgery. Physics turned out to be far more interesting. I suHose if I could have been a scientist, I should have liked to be a theoretical physicist, or an astronomer. I'm still very much interested in such branches of science. I had dropped out of college after three years. I entered college first in #; and I got my bachelor's and master's degrees in # -- after a lapse of # years, I believe it is. I got my Ph.D. in #. Since # I've been teaching English at Eastern New Mexico University, and I've been writing science fiction in the summers, since I finished my doctoral dissertation. That was: H. G, Wells: A Critical Progress, my idea being that there is an unfair stereotype of Wells as a sort of materialistic Utopian who believed that machinery and science and progress could solve all our problems. My thesis in this is that Wells had been apprehensive about change from the beginning, afraid of what was going to happen, and that in much of his life -- when he was writing The OMtline of History and The Science of Life and his work on economics -- he was trying to educate the human race, to make them fit citizens for a World State that he hoped might be the salvation of the race. I think in his latter years he became pessimistic about his education effort -- and about IF anybody saving the human race. He was -- well, a great man, I think; and the real father of modern science fiction. Most of modern science fiction has been written in patterns that Wells pioneered. In modern science fiction, the big names that occur to me are Heinlein and Arthur Clarke -- and Ray Bradbury, I suppose; it's debatable whether he writes science fiction, but he writes literature. Heinlein and Clarke are two people I like to name because they can see good things happening in the future because science can be used to solve problems and make the world, possibly, better. There are only a few writers you can think of who take this point of view. Most of the best modern science fiction belongs to the dystopian and anti-Utopian school, the school of the early Wells, and Huxley's Brave N ew W orld and Orwell's #. They see nothing good coming out of progress; even if science solves our problems, it destroys us in the process. At the university, I used to teach a course in writing the short story. Now I have a course in science fiction that is about half appreciation and half writing; most of the students are interested in writing science fiction, and I let them write either critical papers or sciencefiction stories. Some of them have been writing some excellent stories; I've been thinking I might publish a class magazine this semester. Among the new science-fiction writers, I was very much taken with Delany's The Einstein Intersection -- written in a dazzling style; a wonderful story with a flavor of its own. Half of the way it reads like fantasy, but it has. a disturbing amount of reality in it, also. It's something new and exciting. I haven't read too much of Ballard. But his story. The Drowned Giant, strikes me as a classic. It has a sort of mythological impact to me. Of course, I'm generally a little cool toward the "New Wave". As I understand the New Wave, what it does is essentially to throw out the tested ideas of plot and characterization in favor of radical experiments in language, style and presentation, and most of the socalled "New Wave" things leave me cold. But when you have something like The Einstein Intersection, that has believable characters and interesting action, why, it's wonderful. In the forty or so years I've been writing science fiction, I suppose many writers have influenced me. In the beginning I was a tremendous admirer of A. Merritt. In a way, I still am. But I've recently been looking at some of the old stories that I wrote under Merritt's influence, and they seem to me too flowery, with too many adjectives and too much elaboration of style. What I try to do nowadays is something leaner and simpler. The influences have been too numerous to mention, I suppose. Now I like the way Hemingway writes. There was a writer named C. E. Scoggins, who used to write for the Saturday Evening Post, whose style and way of construction I admired, and attempted to imitate when I was becoming Will Stewart for John Campbell dining the war, when he wanted a new name on the contents page of Astounding. Science-fiction writers are pretty much the same as when I first got started, nearly # years ago. They're vocal, they're full of ideas that are challenging and interesting to me. They don't agree on anything, and they're likely to disagree explosively. It seems to me that the New Wave writers are a little more pessimistic or soured on the world. It's possible that more writers were more optimistic about the future thirty years ago than they are now; more of them felt that science would do us good, and not so many were convinced that science would do us harm. But they weren't all rosy optimists even then. Wells was pretty pessimistic about the possible futures. When I was in England, I looked for Wells' country. London has since sprawled out over all of the War of the Worlds territory, so it wasn't like WeDs had described it. But I got a thrfll out of seeing familiar names on street intersections and so forth. What was countryside when the Martians came is now built up with modern housing. On that trip, my wife and I flew to Spain, spent a week in Madrid, crossed North Africa to Egypt; we were there for five days, seeing the Pyramids, et cetera. Then we came back through Athens and made some tours to the Greek islands; a few days in Italy, then up across Europe to England. When we were making this part of the trip it was fascinating to me to see the evidences of how civilization was born in the Near East and spread across Europe. Then, from England, we spent a couple of weeks on a guided tour to Russia. Russia had a sort of science-fictional interest of its own, in that it is a society very much like ous Western society, but based on slightly different assumptions -- the assumption that Marx was right. This gave it a kind of familiarity with a difference that was poignant, partly because the Russian cities -- with the trees in the streets and the absence of motorcars -- had a sort of nineteenth-century aspect. So Russia was exciting and a lot of fun; and then we came back to London in time for a science-fiction convention, which sort of finished this tour of the past to the future that began with the Pyramids. IF IF  Short Story Some tourists will buy anything ! police Sergeant Herbert Slocombe was strolling leisurely down Maxcombe Parva High Street. He was an imposing figure this Police Sergeant Herbert Slocombe -- tall, perhaps huge is more the word, with a waistline that laughed mockingly at diet sheets, and a pair of feet to put the Queen Mary to shame. Police modernization had spread to most parts of the country, where patrol cars, personal walkietalkies, helicopters and mobile headquarters were no longer new terms, but progress is slow in some parts of the country, and nowhere more so than in Maxcombe Parva. Here at night Police Sergeant Slocombe still ambled slowly along his beat on his size thirteens, able and ready to deal with all the terrors that the world of crime was prepared to throw at him, normally consisting on an average week of half a dozen traffic offenses, an occasional break-in, young boys stealing apples, and poaching. And poaching. And poaching. The local poacher was Geoffrey Rye. And he was a poacher par excellence, a poacher whose sheer uncanny ability left everyone else in the shade. He could sniff rabbits miles off, and he knocked down pheasants by the score -- silently -- with an old crossbow he had made himself. Everyone knew this happened. But could they catch him? Not on your life. Once in a while, to be sure, Geoff would accidentally round a corner too fast on his old bike and run straight into some arm of the law, too unexpectedly to get rid of the sack full of dead stock over his shoulder. There would be a fine, perhaps a couple of months in jail, but he was soon back to take up where he left off. He was no criminal, no member of the underworld, just someone who couldn't see quite eye to eye with the local gamekeepers, and who happened to like rabbit pie. In the summer months, the situation got a bit different, for Geoff rather tended to fancy himself as a bit of a con man. This part of the West Country was Toiurist Country, and large portly foreigners in enormous befinned cars, festooned with ultra-modern cameras and other wondrous gadgets, (descended on Maxcombe Parva and the near area, determined to drink in the beauty of the English countryside. And Geoff loved it. Originally he had simply hung arotmd the local pub, told fascinated tourists at great length and in great detail some of the more lurid if more imaginative historical details of this particular area ('Ar yes, m'dear, that there chair you'm sittin' on be the selfsame chair that old Charley the Second sat on to rest when we were being chased by the Roundheads.") in the hope of making out of it a couple of drinks and a smoke. Then he discovered the engaging fact that these tourists were same chair to take home with them to Connecticut, to show off to the folks. And so the idea had mushroomed. Sergeant Slocombe, being the senior police officer of the district, had smiled amiably at such goings-on, merely shaking his head sorrowfully at the seemingly endless naivete of tourists, until Geoff had started selling things that were not his to sell. This had to be stopped, and a few fines imposed by the local Bench seemed to have had a salutary effect. But only seemed. Geoff went on from strength to strength, and on one famous day he sold the entire Town Hall clock complete with tower to no less than five people on the same afternoon. And oddly enough, most of the time he got away with it. When their astonishing gullibility was pointed out to them, the tourists were so appalled with themselves that they left the district immediately without ever bothering to press charges. So Geoff prospered, relatively speaking. Once in a blue moon, he made a fortune from some enterprising idiot, but it all got spent at once, or else an enormous great fine took most of it off him, so he was reduced to poaching again, come winter. His relations with the law were friendly, almost neighborly. No one bothered anyone much. IF They remained the best of enemies. B ut on this day in question, Sergeant Slocombe was puzzled. A sort of miniature crime wave seemed to have hit the sleepy village, and he was determined to find out the cause. Six cars had been reported stolen in the last three hours, which -- considering only two others had gone since the end of the war -- was an astonishing fact, to say the least. Sergeant Slocombe had nothing to go on as such, except his local knowledge. Naturally the County Police had been notified, searches and checks were being made in all the surrounding districts. But Sgt. Slocombe had ideas of his own. In a small community like Maxcombe Parva news travels fast, and someone had mentioned to him only a few minutes ago that Geoff Rye was in the Tup and Pistol' spending more money than he'd seen for many a long year. Geoff with a lot of money was a factor which always interested him, so Sgt. Slocombe strolled through the gnat-filled summer twilight and pushed open the door to the Public Bar of the Dog and Gun, long ago christened the Pup and Pistol by its regulars. Ther bar was full of smoke and conversation, and Sergeant Slocombe immediately made out Geoff Rye leaning against the bar, clutching a half-empty tankard in his fist, a gigantic cigar blazing like a miniature bonfire in his mouth, with an admiring crowd of locals around him listening to tho story he was telling. Sgt. Slocombe crossed over to this group, and the conversation suddenly and miraculously stopped. Geoff Rye looked at the sergeant and grinned companionably. "How do, Bert," he declared with a grin. "You drinking?" "Not on duty, Geoff, you know that," Sgt. Slocombe replied. He looked around him. "Been buying drinks for all these people, then, Geoff?" "Ar." "Very sociable of you, isn't it?" "Ar." "Come into some money, have you?" "Ar." It very much appeared that Geoff was not in the most communicative of moods, so Sergeant Slocombe took him by the elbow and said, "Come on, Geoff,! think you and I had better go and have a little talk." Geoff grinned. Then he downed the last of his pint and followed the sergeant out of the bar and into the carpark, where they both sat down together on the low stone wall and listened for a time in silence to the hum of the insects in the dying day. "o have you done this time, thei?" asked the sergeant. "I don't know what you mean." Oh, come on, Geoff," continued the sergeant, cheerfully enough. We've both known each other for years. If you suddenly produce a fat wad of notes, we all know you didn't dig it up in your back garden. Who have you done?" 'I'm not saying a word," Geoff replied, idly drawing a pattern with his shoe in the gravel of the carpark. Look, Geoff, you know as well as I do that I can't do anything unless someone makes a formal charge, so you needn't worry. We've both got pretty well the same opinion of the tourists, so why don't you tell me? If they do make a charge, you've had it anyway." 'Why are you so interested?" asked Geoff, eyeing him shrewdly in the twilight. Qgt. Slocombe shrugged. There  are circumstances," he announced rather officially, about this particular case that are a little unusual." 'Which ones?" 'T'll tell you in a minute. Now who did you do?" Geoff shrugged. 'T don't see as how it'll matter to tell you, Bert," he said casually. Though I don't think this one will complain. He seemed too satisfied." "Who was he?" asked the sergeant. "Anyone you've seen before? American? European?" "Oh, I don't know who the fellow was, "Geoff replied, spreading his hands and hunching his shoulders in a massive shrug. "He spoke English well enough, but with a bit of an accent. He was one of them foreigners all right, but I couldn't tell you where from." "All right then, what did you sell him? The Town Hall clock again?" Geoff grinned. "No, Bert, that's old stuff. This chap would've bought anything." He drew closer to the sergeant and winked conspiratorially. "Personally I'm of the opinion he was drunk." "Why?" "He'd have to have been drunk to take what I gave him." Sergeant Slocombe sighed. "And just what was that, Geoff?" he asked heavily. "Well, he said he wanted souvenirs, right? But he acted as if everything was strange to him -- everything, cars, clothes, furniture, the lot. I don't know what country he came from, but they couldn't have had very much. Except money. He said the cars were fascinating, so I sold him six." Six? Mentally Sgt. Slocombe sat up. "And he couldn't get over our funny clothes, as he called them, so I said he could have his pick of the ones in John White's shop, and the furniture in Martin's, and... oh I don't know. I was enjoying myself too much to remember what I IF said. But he wrote it all down in a little book, and seemed very excited. Kept telling me how generous we were, to sell all these things to a visitor." Geoff sniggered. Don't know how he thought he was going to collect them." Sergeant Slocombe was feeling unaccountably worried. Geoff," he sud slowly, that's what I came to see you about. Six cars disappeared today. I don't know about the rest." He had a strange premonition that back at the police station they would at this moment be at White's and Martin's and elsewhere. Geoff's grin had disappeared like magic. But he canH have," he said. 'How do you take away six cars? It must be coincidence." Tossibly." Slocombe got to his feet. 'But I think we ought to see this foreign fellow, whoever he is. Do you know where he's staying?" Geoff shook his head. No," he said. He said he was leaving almost at once. Said he landed over there, past Druid's Wood. I kept thinking he might be some Arab sheik or something, didn't know cars or that, lots of money, and he was all dark and suntanned. I thought he probably meant he had his own private helicopter, perhaps." He stopped, worried. "Let's go and see," said Sergeant Slocombe. We might get a clue or something." 'hey drove in Sergeant Slo combe's car to as near as they were able to Druid's Wood, then continued on foot. The wood in fact was a sort of circle of trees; there had always been a great cleared space in the very center, and it was towards this that they walked. When they stepped out of the surrounding trees, they both stopped in silent astonishment and indeed some fear. All the vegetation, the grass, the bushes, the shrubs, in this clearing to a diameter of a hundred yards or more was squashed flat as if by some gigantic weight, the grass around this perimeter blown outwards around the huge circle as if by a hurricanestrength wind. The trees on the edge of the clearing were shredded of leaves, and the bark facing it had been peeled in places, and lay in thin wafers on the ground. Blimey I" murmured Geoff Rye. "That would have to have been a bigger helicopter than you or I have ever seen," commented SerDO WRim Do you write short stories, poetry, articles, books and plays? And do you wish to place, sell them? Then mail your manuscripts promptly for quest full particulars. It will be nice to have you with us. # B'way (DeptFC-#)  N.Y. # geant Slocombe, scared despite himself. " Something enormous has landed here and taken off again. I don't know who your man was that you thought you'd swindled, but it looks very much as if he's collected, and he has the machinery to do it with." He turned round, to see Geoff as pale as death, his eyes staring in a kind of horror. 'What is the matter?" he snapped, urgently now. "Do you think he'll collect?" whimpered Geoff almost soundlessly"He already has done." Geoff sank to the floor, moaning softly. "I thought he was mad, Sarge, really," he said. Slocombe grabbed him by the shirtfront with more force than he had used on anyone in years and hauled him to his feet. "What did you do?" he hissed fiercely. "He said our way of government was so archy... what's the word, means old?" "Archaic?" Yes. Said it fascinated him." "So?" "So, I think I got carried away. I said he could have it. For five himdred pounds I threw in LonI I I i I I I I I I This Month in Galaxy Witch Hunt by James E. Gunn Bncketis of Diamondis by Clifford D. Simak (Winner of ihe # # Galaxy Award) And Xow They Wake by Keith Laumer I  i I i April Galaxy on sale now -- at your favorite newsstand today !  IF  Novelette aumer I C"T"wenty thousand years ago," said Cultural Attache Pennyfool, "this, unless I miss my guess, was the capital city of a thriving alien culture." The half dozen Terrans -- members of a Field Expeditionary Group of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne -- stood in the crater of a narrow strip of turquoisecolor sward that wound between weathered slabs of porous, orange masonry, rusting spires of twisted metal to which a few bits of colored tile still clung, and anonymous mounds in which wildflowers nodded alien petals under the light of a swollen orange sun. "Imagine," Consul Magnan said in an awed tone, as the party strolled on through a crumbling arcade and across a sand-drifted square. "At a time when we were still living in caves, these creatures had already developed automats and traffic jams." He sighed. "And now they're utterly extinct. The survey's life detectors didn't so much as quiver." "They seem to have progressed from neon to nuclear annihilation in record time." Second Secretary Retief commented, "But I think we have a good chance of bettering their track record." "Think of it, gentlemen," Pennyfool called, pausing at the base of a capless pylon and rubbing his hamds together with a sound like a cicada grooming its wing-cases. "An entire city in pristine condition -- nay, more, a whole continent, a complete planet I It's an archeologist's dream come true I Picture the treasures to be found: the stone axes and telly sets, the implements of bone and plastic, the artifacts of home, school and office, the tin cans, the beer bottles, the bones -- oh, my, the bones, gentlemen I Emerging into the light of day after all these centuries to tell us their tales of the life and demise of a culture #" "If they've been dead for twenty thousand years, what's the point in digging around in their garbage dumps?" an assistant Military Attache inquired sotto voce, "I say Corps funds would be better spent running a little nose-to-ground reconnaissance of Boge, or keeping an eye on the Groaci." "Tsk, Major," Magnan said. "Such comments merely serve to reinforce the popular stereotq)e of the crassness of the military mind." "What's so crass about keeping abreast of the opposition?" the officer protested. "It might be a nice change if we hit them first, for once, instead of getting clobbered on the ground." "Sirl" Magnan tugged at the iridium-braided lapels of his Hvercolored informal field coverall. "Would you fly in the face of six hundred years of tradition?" "Now, gentlemen," Pennyfool was saying, "we're not here to carry out a full-scale dig, of course, merely to conduct a preliminary survey. But I see no reason why we should not wet a line, so to speak. Magnan, suppose you just take one of these spades and we'll poke about a bit. But carefully, mind you. We wouldn't want to damage an irreplacable art treasure." "Heavens, I'd love to," Magnan said as his superior offered him the shovel. "What perfectly vile luck IF that I happen to have a rare joint condition known as Motormans Arm -- " "A diplomat who cant bend his elbow?" the other replied briskly. "Nonsense." He thrust the implement at Magnan. #utrageous," the latter muttered as his superior moved out of earshot, scanning the area for a likely spot to commence. "I thought I was volunteering for a relaxing junket, not being dragooned to serve as a navvy." "Your experience in digging through Central Files should serve you in good stead, Mr. Magnan," Second Secretary Retief said. "Let's just pretend we're after evidence of a political prediction that didn't pan out by someone just above you on the promotion list." "I resent the implication that I would stoop to such tactics," Magnan said loftily. "In any case, only an idiot would go on record with guesswork." He eyed Retief obliquely. "I,, ah, don't suppose you know of any such idiot?" "I did," Retief said. "But he just made Ambassador." "Aha!" Penny fool caroled from a heavily silted doorway flanked by a pair of glassless openings. "A wellnigh intact structure, quite possibly a museum. Suppose we just take a peek." The diplomats trailed their enthusiastic leader as he scrambled through into a roofless chamber with an uneven, dirt-drifted floor and bare walls from which the plaster had long since disappeared. Along one side of the room a flattopped ridge projected a foot above the ground. Pennyfool poked a finger at a small mound atop it, exposing a lumpy object. "Eureka!" he cried, brushing dirt away from his find. "You see, gentlemen? I've already turned up a masterpiece of the Late Meretricious!" "I say, sir," a plump Third Secretary addressed the expedition's leader. "Since Verdigris is a virgin world, and we're the first beings to set foot here since its discovery, how does it happen the era already has a name?" "Simple, my boy," Pennyfool snapped. "I just named it." "Look here, sir," an eager information Agency man who had been poking at the find said, "I think there's been an error. This place isn't a museum, its a lunch counter. And the masterpiece is a plate of petrified mashed potatoes and mummified peas." "By jove, I think you've got something there. Quagmire," a portly Admin Officer said. "Looks just like the stuff they served at the Testimonial Dinner for Ambassador Clawhammer -- " "He's right," Magnan announced from his position farther down the line. "Here's a side-order of french fries." IF "Dunderheads I " Pennyfool snaped. "I'm not in need of uninformed conjectures by amateurs in order to properly classify priceless antiquities. Kindly leave such matters to experts. Now come along. There seems to be an adjoining room with an intact roof -- a room unvisited for twenty centuries I I'll wager my fig-leaf cluster to my Grand Cordon of the Legion d' awaits us there!" His staff followed him past the edge of a metal door standing half open, into a dark chamber. The next moment, pale yellowish light flooded the room. "To stop where you are! " A weak voice hissed the words in a breathy .alien tongue from behind the delegation. "To raise your digital members above your cephalic nodules or to be incinerated on the spot!" II A spindle-legged creature in a flaring helmet and sequinned greaves emerged from the deep shadow of the door, aiming a scatter gun carelessly at Magnan's knees. "What's this?" Pennyfool's voice cracked on the words. "Groaci? Here?" "Indeed, Soft One," the alien confirmed. "To comply at once with my instructions or to add your osseous components to those already interred here!" Other gun-toting creatures appeared from alcoves and behind columns, closed in, clacking horny mandibles threateningly. "See here. Captain," Pennyfool said in a high nervous voice to a larger than average Groaci in jeweled eye-shields who carried no weapon but an ornamental side arm. "What's the meaning of this unwarranted interference with a peaceful party of duly authorized official personnel of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne?" "The meaning, Mr. Pennyfool," the officer replied in accent-free Terran, "is that you are anticipated, forestalled, preceded." He casually waved a dope-stick in a foot-long ivory holder. "You are interlopers, trespassers on Groacian real estate. You note that out of delicacy I refrain from use of the term 'invaders.' " "Invaders? We're scientists! Artlovers! And -- " "To be sure," the captain cut him off curtly. "However, it will be necessary for you to indulge these fancies elsewhere. Verdigris, as an unoccupied planet, has been claimed by my government. Unfortunately, we are at present unable to issue tourist visas to the curious. You will therefore repair at once to your vessel, pay the accumulated landing fees, demurrage, fines for illegal xarking and lifttax and be on your way." "This is an outrage, you fiveeyed bandit #" the assistant military attiuiie yelled, thrusting to the fore. "This planet was discovered by a Corps scouting vessel! It belongs to usl" "I shall overlook your tone, Major the Groad whispered acidly, "induced no doubt by envy at my racers superior (tical endowments and simply inquire whether any Terran daim to tie world was ever registered with the appropriate tribunals?" "Of course not," Pennyfool snapped. "We didn't want every claim-jumping Tom, Dick and Irving in this end of the Arm swarming in here to see what they could loot!" "An unfortunate oversight." "But the Survey boat planted a claim beacon. You must have seen it." "Dear me, now that you mention it I seem to recall my chaps vaporizing some sort of electronic noise-maker which was interfering with radio reception. Too bad that not a trace remains." "That's a gross violation of Interplanetary Rules!" "So? Possession is nine points of the law, Mr. Pennyfool. But enough of these pleasantries; at the moment, the matter of accounts receivable requires our attention. I'm sure you're eager to clear up the trifling indebtedness and be about your no doubt legitimate activities dsewhere." "How... how much," Pennyfool asked, "is this going to cost us?" "If one of you will hand over twenty-two thousand six hundred and four galactic credits -- cash, no checks, please -- you can be on your way." 'wenty-two thousand!" Penny fool choked on the words. "That's highway robbery!" "Plus an additional thousand penalty fee for each insult," the captain added in an ominous whisper. "And of course I need not remind you that the demurrage charges are piling up minute by minute." "That's out of the question," Pennyfool gasped. "I have no such amount in my possession! We're a scientific expedition, not a party of bank messengers!" "Too bad," the captain whispered. "In that case..." He made a curt gesture; ariried troops stepped forward, guns at the ready. "Stop!" Magnan yelped. "You can't just shoot diplomats down in cold blood!" "Since higher organisms sudi as myself employ no vascular fluids, I am under no such restraint," the captain pointed out. "However, I agree it would be less than couth to fail to observe the forms. Accordingly, I shall refer the matter to my chici." He murmured a word to a soldier, who slung his weapon and hurried away. The captain saunterm IF ed off, humimng a gay little tune to himself. "Verdigris was supposed to be the best-kept secret of the year," Pennyfool muttered brokenly to Magnan, "Who would have dreamed the Groaci would be here ahead of us?" "They couldn't have found it by accident," the Information Agency man said glumly. "Coincidences like that don't happen." "You're right, Crouchwell," Penny fool said, staring around at his staff. "Gentlemen -- somebody leaked I " "Well, gracious, don't look at me, sir," Magnan said, an indignant expression pinching his narrow features. "# hardly breathed a word, except to a few highly respected colleagues." "Colleagues?" Peimyfool raised a pale eyebrow. "Fellow diplomats; high-type chaps like Ambassador P'Yim-Yim of Yill and Slunk the Fustian Minister, and... and..." 'And?" Penny fool prompted. "And Consul-General Shilth," Magnan finished weakly. "Planetary Director Shilth, if you don't mind," a voice susurrated from the doorway. 'here was a stir among the troops ringing in the Terrans. A tall Groaci in an elaborately ribbed hip-cloak strolled forward, waved jauntily at Magnan, nodded to Pennyfool. "Well, gentlemen, good of you to pay a courtesy call," he said smoothly. "Consul-General Shilth," Magnan said in a hurt tone. "I never dreamed you'd be so uncouth as to betray a confidence." Shilth frowned, an expression he achieved by crossing two pairs of eyes. "No?" he said in a surprised tone. "Why not?" He vibrat his throat sac in a manner analogous to throat-clearing. "By the way, Pennyfool, just what was it you expected to find here?" His whisper was elaborately casual. "You're standing in the center of a treasure house," Pennyfool said sourly, "and you have the confounded gall to ask me that?" "My chaps have devoted the better part of the past ten hours to fruitless scrabbling in these ruins," Shilth hissed. "They've turned up nothing of the remotest utility." "You've allowed your troops to dig here at random?" Pennyfool yelped. "Ahal" Shilth wagged an accusatory tentacle. "In spite f your subtle dissembling, your reaction proves that treasures do indeed lie beneath this wilderness." His tone became crisp. "Kindly icify precisely what it is we're looking for, and I might -- might mind you -- find a way to reduce your port fees." "You... you assassin I" Pennyfool yelled. "You have no right to so much as set foot on this hallowed ground!" 'Still -- I am here," Shilth said blandly. "And I see nothing in interest." He stirred a heap of potsherds, bottle caps and broken phonograph records with a horny foot. "Ergo, there must be a subtler prize awaiting the lucky finder." "Shilth, you Vandal I" Pennyfool yelped. "Have you no reverence for anything?" "Try me with gold," the Groaci said succinctly. "YouVe out of your mind, you Philistine! IVe told you I don't have amy cash on hand!" "You refuse to speak?" Shilth turned to the attain. "Thish, I tire of the Soft One's lies and his insults. Take him out and execute him." Penny fool squealed as the guards laid hold of him. CFrxecute him?" Magnan bleated. "Couldn't you just strike him off the invitation list for cocktail parties or something?" "If it's gold you're interested in," Sector HQ will come through with a tidy sum in return for Mr. Pennyfool's hide, unbroken." "Splendid notion," a member from the Commercial Section piped up. "I'm sure the ransom money -- tt is to say, the port fees -- will be forthcoming the minute they see us all bax:k to Sector HQ." "Indeed?" Shilth said in a bored tone. "And if I allowed you to depart, what surety would I then have that the just indemnities will be paid?" "You have the word of a diplomat," Magnan said promptly. "I admire your coolness, Magnan," Shilth said with a little bow, "essaying jests at such a moment." "I suppose I might consent to go alone," Pennyfool said, blinking his eyes rapidly. "Although of course I'd prefer to stay on as hostage myself, my rank will undoubtedly be helpful in expediting payment." "One may go," Shilth said in a pointed at Relief. Thish stepped forward, pointing his over-decorated hand-gun at the victim. "Watch him closely. Captain," Shilth admonished. "He has a reputation as a trouble-maker. As well have him off our hands." As Thish, close beside Relief, waved the gun toward the entrance, Relief, with a swift motion, swept the weapon from the other's grip, took a step, caught Shilth by the neck and backed against the wall, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against the hostage's ventral carapace. Ill CC'ell your boys to stand fast,"  he said in a conversational tone as the Groaci official writhed IF and kicked futily, while the soldiers looked on as if paralyzed. "Mr. Pennyfool, if you're ready to board ship, I don't think Planetary Director Shilth will voice any objection." "My soldiers will shoot you down like nesting nid-fowlsl" Shilth hissed. "In which case I'd be forced to pump your thorax full of softnosed slugs," Retief said. "I've heard they penetrate the exo-skeleton and then just ricochet around inside until they lose momentum. Be interesting to find out if it's true." "I remind you, Pennyfool," Shilth cocked his oculars at the Terran, who had not moved, "my lads' scatter-guns are highly disruptive to flimsy organisms such as yourselves. Disarm your misguided colpense of a mass funeral, no less costly for lack of any identifiable remains I" "Better get moving, sir, before some bright lad gets ideas," Retief suggested. "They... we... I... " Pennyfool gasped. "By no means," Retief said soothingly. "They hold Shilth in far too high esteem to see him converted into a boiled pudding in the half shell." Cautiously, the Terrans sidled toward the door. Pennyfool went through in a scrambling leap, followed closely by his associates. "Retief," Magnan, at the rear ef the party said "How are you going to get clear? If one of them gets behind you -- " "Better get aboard, Mr. Magnan," Retief cut in "I have an idea Mr. Pennyfool won't dawdle around waiting for stragglers." "But -- but -- " "CaptainThish, perhaps you'd be kind enough to act as escort," Retief said. "Just in case any of the boys on the outside leap to conclusions." "To comply," Shilth whispered in Groaci as the officer hesitated. 'Xater, to visit this miscreant's crimes upon him in a fashion devised at leisure. Our leisure, that is." Magnan made a gobbling sound and disappeared, Thish at his heels. Shilth had stopped struggling. The Groaci soldiery stood in attitudes of alert paralysis, watching for an opening. It was ten minutes before the sound of the Corps vessel's drive rumbled briefly, faded, and was gone. "And now?" Shilth inquired. "If you contemplate a contest of endurance, I remind you that we Groaci can carry on for upward of ten standard days without so much as nictating a membrane. "Send them outside," Retief said. Shilth remonstrate, but complied. A moment later, a shrill but unmistakably human yelp sounded from beyond the door. Magnan appeared in the entry, his arms grimed by a pair of Groaci while a third held a scatter gun to his head. "They... they didn't wait," the diplomat wailed. "Release me!" Shilth hissed. "Or would you prefer to wait until after my lads have blown your superior's head off?" "Sounds like an even trade," Retief said. Magnan gasped and swallowed. "Much as I should dislike to see the Planetary Director's internal arrangements hashed in the manner you so vividly describe," Thish said from behind Magnan, "I assure you I would make the sacrifice on the interest of the Groaci national honor." "In the interest of his next promotion, he means," Shilth hissed. "What does he care if I'm diced in the process?" "O etief thrust Shilth away, tossed the gun on the floor. "If I didn't know you wanted both of us alive, I'd have called your bluff, Thish," he said. "Oh? And do I want you alive, Soft One?" Thish took aim with a borrowed rifle. T)f course you do, litter-mate of genetic inferiors!" Shilth snzped, massaging the point of his back where the gim muzzle had dug in. "At least until they divulge the secret of what they sought here I" He turned to Retief. "And now let us to business, eh?" Retief plucked a cigar from his breast pocket, puffed it alight, blew scented smoke past the alien's olfactory orifices, which cinched up tight at the aroma of Virginia leaf. "Certainly, Shilth. Who's for sale now?" "You are, my dear Terry," the Groaci said ominously. "The price of your life is a complete description of the nature and location of the riches hidden here." Retief waved the stogie at the blotched walls, the dirt-drifted corners, the broken tilework. "You are looking at them." "Ah, so we are to have the pleasure of assisting you in developing a more cooperative attitude, eh? Capital. Easy babblers are such bores." "You wouldn't dare torture us," Magnan said in squeaky tone. "Our colleagues know where we are. If we aren't returned imharmed, they'll extract a terrible vengeance!" "A sharp note to the Ambassador, no doubt," Shilth said, with an amused snap of the mandibles. "Still, there are subtler methods of persuasion than living dismemberment. Now, we Groaci are quite at home in enclosed spaces; but you Terries, it is rumored, are claustrophobes, an allegation I've often IF yearned to test. And I know just the setting in which to conduct the experiment." He gestured to Thish, who urged the two Terrans at gun point along a wide passage to a metal door. Two soldiers came forward to wrestle the heavy panel aside, exposing a tiny chamber no more than six feet on a side, windowless, unfurnished. "Gentlemen, your cell, A trifle cramped, perhaps, but well protected from excessive wind and rain, eh?" Retief and Magnan stepped inside. The two soldiers forced the heavy sliding door shut. In the total darkness, a dim spot of light glowed on one wall. Retief reached out and pressed a thumb against it. With a grinding of ancient gears, a groaning of antique cables, the elevator started down. IV TiTagnan emitted a shrill cry and attempted to climb the wall "Retief! What's happening?" "No, no, Mr. Magnan," Retief said, "Your line is, 'Ah, just as I planned.' That's the way reputations for forethought are built." "Shilth was quite right about the claustrophobia," Magnan said in a choked voice. "I feel that the walls are going to close in on me!" "Just close your eyes and pretend you're at a Tuesday morning staff meeting. The relief when you find yourself here should carry you through anything short of utter catastrophe." With a shudder and a clank, the car came to a halt. "N-now what?" Magnan said in a small voice. Retief felt over the door, found the stub of a lever. He gripped it and pulled. Reluctantly, the door slid aside on a large, column-filled room faintly lit by strips of dimly glowing material still adhering to the ceiling and walls, which were adorned with murals depicting grotesque figures engaged in obscure rites. "Tomb paintings," Magnan said in a hushed voice. "We're in the catacombs. The place is probably full of bones -- not that I actually believe in the curses of dead kings or anything." "The curses of live Ambassadors are far more potent, I suspect," Retief said, heading the way across the room and into one of the many passages debouching from the chamber. Here more cabalistic scenes were etched in still-bright colors against the ancient walls. Cryptic legends in an unknown script were blazoned across many of them. "They're probably quotations from the local version of the Book of the Dead," Magnan hazarded, his eye caught by a yividly pigmented representation of a large alien being making what seemed to be a threatening gesture at a second alien from whose ears wisps of mist coiled. "This one, for example," he said, "no doubt shows us the God of the Underworld judging a soul and finding it wanting." The passage turned, branched. The left branch dead-ended at an ominous-looking sump half filled with a glistening black fluid. "The sacrificial well," Magnan said with a shudder. "I daresay the bottom -- goodness knows how far down that is -- is covered with the remains of youths and maidens offered to the gods." Retief sniffed. "It smells like drained crankcase oil." They skirted the pit, came into a wide room crowded with massive, complex shines of corroded metal, ranked in rows in the deep gloom. "And these are the alien idols," Magnan whispered. "Gad, they have a look of the most frightful ferocity about them." "That one," Retief indicated a tall, many-armed monster looming before him, "bears a remarkable resemblance to a hay-baler." "Mind your tongue, Retief!" Magnan said sharply. "It's not that I imagine they can hear us, of course, but diy tempt fate?" T here was a sharp click!, a whirring and clattering, a stir of massive forms all across the gloomy chamber. Magnan yipped and leaped back as a construct the size of a fork-lift stirred into motion, turned, creaking, and surveyed him with a pair of what were indisputably glowing amber eyes. "'We're surrounded," Magnan chirped faintly. "And they told us the planet was uninhabited!" "It is," Retief said, as more giant shapes moved forward, accompanied by the squeak of unlubricated metal. "Then what are these?" Magnan came back sharply. "Oversized spooks?" "Close, but not kewpie doll," Retief said. "This is the city garage, and these are maintenance robots." "R-r-robots?" "Our coming in must have triggered them to come to alert status." They moved along the row of giant machines, each equipped with a variety of limbs, organs, and sensors. "Then... then they're probably waiting for us to give them orders," Magnan said with returning confidence. "Retief! Don't you see what this means? We can tell them to jump in the lift and ride up and scare the nether garments off that sticky little Shilth and his army -- or we could have done," he added, "if they understood Terran." Terran under stood , a scratch bass voice rasped from a point just opposite Magnan's ear. He leaped IF and whirled, banging a shin smartly. Retiefl They understand us! We're saved! Good lord, when I first planned our escape via the lift, I never dreamed we'd have such a stroke of luck!" 'Now you're getting the idea," Retief said admiringly. "But why not just add that extra touch of savoir-faire by pretending you'd deduced the whole thing, robots and all, from a cryptic squiggle on the contact party's scopegram?" "Don't be crude, Retief," Magnan said loftily. "I fully intend to share the credit for the coup. In my report I'll mention that you pushed the lift button with no more than a hint from me." "Maybe you'd better not write up that report just yet," Retief said, as a robot directly before them shifted position with a dry squeal of rusty bearing to squarely block their advance. Others closed in on either side; they turned to find retreat similarly cut off. "My, see how eager they are, Retief," Magnan said in a comfortable tone. "There, there, just stand aside like a good, er, fellow," he addressed the machine before him. It failed to move. Frowning, Magnan started around it, was cut off by a smaller automaton -- this one no bigger than a commercial sausage grinder, and adorned with a similar set of blades visible inside a gaping metallic maw. "Well! I see they're in need of re-programming," Magnan said sharply. "It's all very well to fawn a little, but -- " "I'm not sure they're fawning," Retief said. "Then what in the world are they doing?" Terr an are surrounded, a voice like broken glass stated from behind the encircled diplomats. "IFe are judging Terran an imoiled tenor stated from the rear rank. And finding you wanting, Frightful oversized robots will jump on your smoking remains chimed in a third voice, reminiscent of a file on steel. "PFe are eager for crude contact, Broken Glass agreed. #'hey have a curious mode of expressing themselves,' Magnan said nervously. "I seem to detect an almost ominous note in their singular choice of words." "I think they're picking up their vocabulary from us," Retief said. "Retief -- if it wasn't so silly, I'd think that one intended us bodily harm," Magnan said in a tone of forced jocularity, as a ponderous assemblage of sharp edges came forward, rumbling. "PFe intend you bodily harm File-on-Steel said. "But -- but you can't attack #," Magnan protested. "You're just machines! We're alive! We're your rightful masters!" T# Masters are better than robots Broken Glass stated. "Fom are not better than us. You are not masters. We will certainly harm you, You will not escapey a redeyed monster added. "Retief, I suspect weVe made a blunder," Magnan said in a wavering tone. "We were better off at the tender mercies of the Groacil" "What's it all about, boys?" Re. tief called over the gathering creak and clank as the machines closed in. This planet is not your world. We are programmed to give no mercies to you fellow. "Just a minute," Magnan protested. "We're just harmless diplomats. Can't we all be friends or something?" "Who gave you your order?" Retief asked. "Owr masters replied a voice like a sand-filled gearbox. "That was a long time ago," Retief said. "Matters have changed somewhat." "Yes, indeed," Magnan chimed in, "You see, now that your old masters are all dead, we're taking over their duties." "#r duties are to see you dead, Red-eye boomed, raising a pair of yard-long cleavers. "HelpI" Magnan yelped. "We wouldn't want to stand in the way of duty," Retief said, watching the poised cutting edges, "but suppose we turned out to be your masters after all? I'm sure you wouldn't want to make the mistake of slicing up your legitimate owners." "You see, we took over where they left off," Magnan said hastily. "We're, ah, looking after all their affairs for them, carrying out their wishes as we understand them, tidying up -- " 'There is no mistakey Terran, You are not our masters, "You said masters are better than robots," Retief reminded the machine. "If we can prove our superiority, will you concede the point?" V S ilence fell, broken only by the whir and hum of robotic metabolisms. " you could so prove, we will certainly concede your status as our masters," Sand in the gears said at last. "Gracious, I should think so!" Magnan jerked his rumpled lapels into line. "For a moment, Retief, I confess I was beginning to feel just the teeniest bit apprehensive." You have one minute to prove your superiority," Broken Glass said flatly. "Well, I should think it was obvious," Magnan sniffed. "Just look at us." 'Indeedy weve done so. We jind IF you Utile, silly, crude, tender, apprehensive and harmless!' "You mean -- ?" "It means we'll have to do something even more impressive than standing around radiating righteous indignation, Mr. Magnan." "Well, for heaven's sake," Magnan sniffed. "I never thought I'd see the day when I had to prove the obvious ascendancy of a diplomat over a donkey engine." 'We are waiting," File-on-Steel said. "Well, what do they expect?" Magnan yelped. "It's true they're bigger, stranger, faster, longerlived, and cheaper to operate; and of course they have vast memory banks and can do lightning calculations and tricks of that sore -- which, however, can hardly compare with our unique human ability to, ah, do what we do," he finished in a subdued tone. What do you do?" Red-eye demanded. "Why, we, ah, demonstrate moral superiority," Magnan said brightly. "Shilth was right about your sense of humor," Retief said admiringly. "But I think we'd better defer the subtle japes until we discover whether we're going to survive to enjoy the laugh." "Well for heaven's sake do something, Retief," Magnan whispered, "before they make a terrible blunder." He rolled his eyes sideways at a scythe-like implement hovering as if ready to shear at any instant through the volume of space he occupied. Time is up," Broken Glass said. 'he machines surged forward. The scythe, sweeping horizontally, clanged against the descending cleavers as Retief and Magnan jumped aside from the rush of a low-slung tree mower with chattering blades. The latter swerved, collided with a massive punch-press, one of whose piston-hke members stabbed through the side of a ponderous masonry wrecker. It wobbled, did a sharp right turn and slammed into the cast-concrete wall, which cracked and leaned, allowing a massive beam to drop free at one end, narrowly missing Magnan as he rebounded from the flank of a charging garbage shredder. The falling girder crashed across the mid-section of the latter machine with a decisive crunch I pinning the hapless apparatus to the spot. It clashed its treads futilely, sending up a shower of concrete chips. The other machines clustered around it in attitudes of concern, the Terrans for the moment forgotten. "HsstI Retief! This is our chance to beat a strategic withdrawal!" Magnan stage-vhispered. "If we can just make it back to the elevator -- " 'We'll find Shilth waiting at the top," Retief said. "Mr. Magnan, suppose you find a comfortable spot behind a packing case somewhere. I'm not quite ready to leave yet." 'Are you insane? These bloodthirsty bags of bolts are ready to pound us to putty!" "They seem to be fully occupied with another problem at the moment," Retief pointed out, nodding toward a post-hole digger which was fruitlessly poking at the end of the beam which had trapped its fellow. The scythe-armed robot was as busily scraping at the massive member, without result. The ranks parted to let a heavy-duty paintchipper through; but it merely clattered its chisel-tips vainly against the impervious material. And all the while, the pinioned machine groaned lugubriously, sparks flying from its commutator box as it threshed vainly to pull free. Retief stepped forward; Red-eye swiveled on him, raising a large mallet apparently designed for pounding heavy posts into hard ground. "Before you drive home your argument," Retief said, "I have a proposal." What proposal? "You don't seem to be having much luck extricating your colleague from under the beam. Suppose I try." "Owe minute, I will lift the heamy a deep voice boomed. A massively built loading robot trunIF died forward, maneuvered deftly into position, secured a grip on the concrete member with its single huge arm and heaved. For a moment, nothing happened; then there was a sharp clonk! and a broken duralloy torque rod dangled from the lifter's forged-steel biceps. The girder had not stirred. CC'ough luck, old fellow," Retief said. turn." 'Good heavens, Retief, if that cast-iron Hercules couldn't do it, how can you hope to succeed?" Magnan squeaked from his comer. "Fow have the ability to help our colleague? Broken Glass demanded. "If I do, will you follow my orders?" " you can do that which we cannot do, your superiority is obvious "In that case, just pull that bar out of there, will you?" Retief pointed to a four-inch diameter steel rod, twenty feet long, part of a roller assembly presumably once used in loading operations. A stacking machine gripped the rod and gave it a firm pull, ripping it free from its mountings. "Stick one end under the edge of the beam, like a good fellow," Retief said. "You there, jack-hammer: push that anvil under the rod, eh?" The machines complied with his requests with brisk efficiency, adjusting the lever as directed, with the fulcrum as close as possible to the weight to be lifted. "Retief -- if you couldn't even lift the lever how are you going to... " Magnan's voice faded as Retief stepped up on the treadskirt of a sand-blaster and put a foot on the up-angled long arm of the jury-rigged pry-bar. Steadying himself, he let his full weight onto the rod. Instantly, it sank gracefully down, lifting the multi-ton beam a full half-inch from the depression it had imprinted in the garbage shredder. TTie latter made a clanking sound, attempted to move, emitted a cascade of electrical sputterings and subsided. "He's ruptured himself I" Magnan gasped. "Poor thing. Still, we've done our part." The other madiines were maneuvering, making way for a squat cargo-tug, which backed up to the victim, but was unable to get in position to attach its tow-cable. A dirt-pusher with a wide blade tried next, but in the close quarters failed to get within six feet of the disabled machine. The others had no better luck. "Mr. Magnan, find a length of cable," Retief called. Magnan rummag, turned up a rusting coil of braided wire, "One of you robots with digits tie one end of the cable to the patient," Retief said. "Cinch the other up to something that won't give." U# minutes later the cable was stretched drum tight from a massive stanchion to the cripple, running between closely-spaced paired columns. "Next, we apply a transverse pull to the center of the cable," Retief directed. "They can" Magnan wailed. "There's no room!" "In that case, Mr. Magnan, perhaps you'd be good enough to perform the office." "I?" Magnan's eyebrows went up. "Perhaps you've forgotten my Motorman's Arm." "Use the other one." "You expect me, one-handed, to budge that ten-ton hulk?" "Better hurry up. I feel my foot slipping." "This is madness," Magnan exclaimed, but he stepped to the cable, gripped it at mid-point, and tugged. With a harsh squeak of metal, the damaged machine moved forward half an inch. "Why -- why, that's positively astonishing!" Magnan said with a pleased look. "Tighten the cable and do it again!" Retief said quickly. The Machines hurried to take up the slack. Magnan, with an amazed expression, applied a second pull. The wreck 'moved another centimeter. After three more nibbles, 'the tug was able to hook on and idrag its fellow clear. Retief jumped gown, letting the beam drop with an incredible floor-shaking boom! "Heavens!" Magnan found his voice. "I never imagined I was such a brute! After all, the diplomatic life is somewhat sedentary... " He flexed a thin arm, fingering it in search of a biceps. "Wrestling with the conscience is excellent exercise," Retief pointed out. "And you've held up your end of some rather weighty conversations in your time." "Jape if you must," Magnan said coolly. "But you can't deny I did free the creature. Er, machine, that is." You have freed our colleague, Sand-in-the-gears said to Magnan. We are waiting for your orders, Master. "To be sure," Magnan placed his fingertips together and pursed his lips. "You won't fit into the lift," he said judiciously, looking over his new subj'ects. "Is there another way up?" "To be sure. Master." "Excellent. I want all of you to ascend to the surface at once, round up and disarm every Groaci on the planet, and lock them up. And see that you don't squash the one called Shilth in the process. I have a little gloating to do." VI n a newly excavated terrace under a romantically crumbling wall of pink brick, Magnan and IF Relief sat with Shilth, the latter wearing a crestfallen expression involving quivering anterior mandibles and drooping eye-stalks. His daborate cloak of office was gone, and there were smudges of axle grease on his once-polished thorax. "Dirty pool, Magnan," the Groaci said, his breathy voice fainter than ever. "I was in line for the Order of the Rubber Calipers, Second Class, at the very least, and you iled it all with your perambulating junk-yard. Who would have dreamed youd been so sly as to secretly conceal a host of warmachines? I suspect you did it merely to embarrass me." "Actually," Magnan began, and paused. "Actually, it was quite shrewd of me, now that you mention it." "I think you overdid the camouflage, however," Shilth said acidly as a street-broom whiffled past, casting a shower of dust over the party. "The confounded things don't appear to be aware that the coup is over. They're still carrying on the charade." "I like to keep my lads occupied," Magnan said briskly, nodding grandly at a hauler trundling past along the newly cleaned avenue with a load of newly uprooted brush. "Hielps to keep them in trim in case they're needed suddenly to quell any disturbances." "Neva fear, I've impressed on Thish that he will not long survive any thneat to my well-being." "Company coming," Relief said, gesturing toward a descending point of sun-bright bine light. They watched the ship settle in to a landing a quarter of a mile distant, then rose and strolled over to greet the emerging passengers. "Why, it's Mr. Penny fool," Magnan said. "I knew he'd be along to rescue us. Yoo-hoo, Mr. Pennyfool!" "That's Mr. Ambassador, Magnan," Pennyfool corrected sharply. "Kindly step aside. You're interfering with a delicate negotiation." The little man marched past Relief without a glance, halted before Shilth, offering a wide smile and a limp hand. The Groad studied the latter, tinned it over gingerly and examined the back, then dropped it. #T iver spots," he said. "How  unesthetic." "Now, Planetary Director Shilth, we're prepared to offer a handsome fee in return for exploratory rights here on Verdigris." Pennyfool restored his smile with an effort. "Of course, anything we find will be turped over to you at once -- " "Oh, ah, Mr. Ambassador," Magnan hazarded. "We Groad," Shilth said sourly, "are not subject to such pigmentational disorders. We remain a uniform, soothing puce at all times." "Sir," Magnan piped up. "I'd just Uke -- " Now, naturally, we're prepared to underwrite a generous program of planetary development to assist your people in settling in," Pennyfool hurried on. "I had in mind He paused to gauge reaction. "Per year, of course," he amended, judging the omens, "with adequate bonuses for special proj'ects, naturally. Now, I'd say a staff of say two hundred to begin with... ?" "Pennyfool, I have a dreadful node-ache," Shilth hissed. "Why don't you go jump down an elevator shaft?" He patted back a counterfeit yawn and stalked away. "Well, I can see that this is going to be a challenge," Pennyfool said, staring after the alien. "The tricky fellow is going to hold out for two "Mr. Ambassador, I have good news," Magnan said hastily. "We can save the taxpayers those billions. Verdigris belongs to me!" "See here, Magnan, the privation can't have scrambled your meager wits already! You've only been here seventytwo hours!" "But, sir -- there's no need to promise Shilth the moon -- " "Aha! So that's what he's holding out for. Well, I see no reason the negotiation should founder over a mere satellite." Pennyfool turned to pursue Shilth. "No, no, you don't quite grasp my meaning," Magnan yipped, grabbing at his superior's sleeve. "Unhand me, Magnan!" Pennyfool roared. "I'll see to your release after other, more vital matters are dealt with. In the meantime, I suggest you set a good example by cobbling a record number of shoes, or whatever task they've set you -- " "Master, is this person troubling you?" a torn-metal voice inquired. Magnan and Pennyfool whirled to see a rust covered hedge-clipper looming over them, four-foot-clippers at the ready. "No, that's quite all right, Albert," Magnan said acidly. "I like being bullied." "You're quite certain you don't wish him trimmed to a uniform height? "No. I just want him to listen to what I have to say." Albert clacked the shears together with a nerve-shredding sound. "I -- I'd love to listen to you, my dear Magnan," Pennyfool said rapidly. AyTagnan delivered a brief account of his capture of the planet. "So you see, sir," he concluded, "the whole thing is Terran property." "Magnan!" Pennyfool roared, then with a glance at Albert lowered his voice to a whisper. "Do you realize what this means? When I reported the Groaci here ahead of us, I was appointed as Terran Ambassador Extraordinary and IF Minister Plenipotentiary to the con" founded place! If we own it, then pfft! There goes my appointment!" "Great heavens, sir," Magnan paled at the announcement. "I had no idea!" "Look here, do you suppose we could get the Groaci to take it back?" "What, stay here, surrounded by these mobile moldy monstrosities?" Shilth, who had returned silently, hissed. "Never! I demand repatriation!" Retief caught Magnan's eye as Pennyfool turned to soothe the Groaci. "What is it, Retief? Can't you see I'm at a critical point, careerwise?" "I have a suggestion," Retief said... As Magnan rejoined Pennyfool, Shilth was still hissing imprecations. "Master, what say I prune this fellow a bit?" Albert proposed. "He seems to have sprouted too many eyes." "Not unless he says another word," Magnan said. He turned to Pennyfool with a thoughtful look. "I say, sir, suppose I should come up with a scheme which will insure you confirmation, and which will at the same time reflect favorably on the Terran image? You know, the kindly, selfless, helping-hand sort of thing?" es, yes?" "I daresay once established here, you'd want to surround yourself with a staff widely versed in local problems -- " "Naturally. Tliere are plenty of reliable team-men available doing Underground research work in subterranean libraries back at Sector. Get on with it, Magaan." "I want the Counsellorship," Magnan said crisply. "You, number two man in my Embassy? Ridiculous! Pd have to jump you over the heads of men with vast experience under their belts!" "Most of my experience has been at a somewhat higher level," Magnan said loftily. "No Counsellorsliip no scheme." "What's this, Magnan, blackmail?" Pennyfool gasped. "Precisely," Magnan said. Pennywise opened his mouth to yell then closed it and nodded. "Magnan, it's apparent you're more familiar with the techniques of diplomacy than I suspected. I accept. Now, just what do you have in mind?" # #Tt's a bit unusual," Ambassa dor Pennyfool said complacently, glancing out the window of his freshly refurbish office on the top floor of a newly excavated tower of green-anodized aluminum serving other hand, it is a challenge." "Gracious, yes," Counsellor Magnan said, nodding. "The first Terran envoy to present credentials to a mechanical Head of State. "I don't know," the Military Attache said darkly. "Freeing these inanimate objects and letting them set up in business for themselves may create a dangerous precedent. What if my cybernetic military equipment, for example, should start getting ideas about pensions and promotions?" "d office machines," the Budget and Fiscal Officer said worriedly. "If my bookkeeping computers took it into their transistors to start agitating for civil rights I shudder to contemplate the consequences in terms of, say, late pay checks." "I'm already having trouble with my Motor Pool picking up liberal ideas," the Admin Officer wagged his head, frowning. "I've had to enact strict rules against fraternization with the natives." There was a musical chime from the desk screen. The square-cornered sense-organ panel of Planetary Secretary Albert Sand-in-theGears appeared. "Ah, there, Pemiyfool," the robotic Chief of State said in a tone as genial as his vocal equipment would allow. "I hoped I'd find you in. I was just ringing up to ask whether you'd care to join me on the links this afternoon for a few holes of ballistic golf." "I'm sorry, Mr. President," the IF Terran said shortly. game in which one is required to score eight holes-in-one out of ten from a tee seven miles from the green is not my strong suit." "Of course. I keep forgetting you're not equipped with telescopic sights. A pity." The President sighed, a sotmd like tearing steel. "It was difficult enough grasping the idea of the superiority of my inferiors; trying to behave as equals is even more trying. No offense intended, of course." "Mr. President -- who's that sitting behind you?" Penny fool asked sharply. "Ah, forgive me. This is Special Trade Representative Shilth, of Groac. His government has sent him along to assist in getting the Verdigrian economy rolling." "How long has he been here?" # T ong enough to demonstrate my indispensability," Shilth leaned forward to leer at the Terrans. "I've already concluded Trade Agreements with a number of hard currency markets for export of Verdigrian antiquities." "You didn't," Pennyfool gasped. "Oh, have no fear, they're not the real thing." Shilth waggled an eye at Magnan, who pretended not to notice. "Though we let it be noised about that they're all bootleg National Treasures." "Oh, I see. Reproductions?" Pennyfool grunted. "Just so you don't ship any irreplacable objets d'arte off-planet." "We won't. We require them as patterns for the matter duplicators." "Eh?" "The locals are digging them out by the truckload; they sort them, discard the rejects -- broken pots and the like -- then scrub up the choice items and send them along to the duplication centers. We already have a dozen plants in full swing. Our ceramic fingering-knobs are already a sensation with the cultured set. In a year Verdigris will be known as the antique capital of the Eastern Arm." "Matter duplicators? You're flooding the Galaxy with bogus antiques?" "Bogus? They're identical with the real thing, to the last molecule." "Hahl The genuine articles are priceless examples of Verdigrian art; the copies are just so much junkl" "But, my dear Pennyfool -- if one can't distinguish a masterpiece from a piece of junk... ?" " can detect the genuine at a glance I " "Show me," the Groaci said, and whipped out a pair of seemingly identical shapes of lumpy blueglazed clay the size and approximate shape of stunted rutabagas. "... but unfortunately, I have something in my eye," Pennyfool subsided, poking at the offending organ. "A pity. I would have enjoyed a demonstration of your expertise," Shilth cooed. "Well gentlemen, that tears it," the Ambassador said to his staff after the screen had blanked. "After all my delicate maneuvering to secure self-determination for these unfortunate relics of a by-gone age, of paternal influence vis-a-vis their emergent nation, the infernal Groaci have stolen a march on us again. Fake antiques, indeed!" "Goodness, I see what you mean, Mr. Ambassador," Magnan said sympathetically. "Why didn't we think of doing that?" Tn the Chancery corridor ten minutes later, Magnan mopped at his thin neck with a large floral-patterned tissue. "Heavens, who'd have thought he'd fly into such a passion?" he inqiared of Retief. "After all, it isn't as if those silly little gobs of mud possessed an intrinsic merit." "Oh, I don't know," Retief said. "They're not bad, considering that the locals have to mass-produce them and bury them at night when nobody's looking." "Retief!" Magnan stopped dead. "You don't mean... ?" "It seemed like a good idea to sidetrack the Groaci away from the genuine stuff," Retief pointed out, in a completely serious voice. "Just in case any of it had any sentimental value." "Fake fakes," Magnan murmurred. "The concept has a certain euphony." They paused beside a pair of double doors opening onto an airy balcony two hundred feet above the freshly scrubbed city. As they stepped out, a small copter with a saddle and handlebars came winging in across the park to hover just beyond the balustrade. "Hope aboard, Retief, we're late," the machine called in a cheerful baritone. "Retief, where are you going?" Magnan barked as the latter swung over the rail. "You have the quarterly Report of Redundant Reports to compile, to say nothing of the redundant reports themselves!" "Duty calls, Mr. Magnan," Retief said soothingly. "My additional assignment as Wildlife Census Officer makes it incumbent on me to cement relations with the locals. I'm off to a game of sky polo with a couple of Cabinet Ministers." He waved and set spurs to his mount, which launched itself with a bound into the wide      IF continued from page #) placed it within the device's field. At once it appeared to "squeeze" down just as I had seen life do in other Tepen traps. The weapon acted as effectively as would any organically generated field. I learned how to make the field large or small. When, in time, I had the desired knowledge, I killed the remaining Tepen without qualms. Tow the sun was rising above the valley's rim and a cold wind blew through the village. Thankful that I could use my indirect faculties again, I teleported myself and the new weapon to the cavern of Ayorian grouping many miles away and five miles below ground. Though exhausted and badly in need of nourishment, I returned to the empty Tepen village quickly. I remembered how Erne had described the power supply surround ing me. She had learned that she could shut it down by moving radioactive particles away faster than they were produced. Though I couldn't reach this low energy level, perhaps something similar might be arranged at the molecular level -- which I could reach. I found a mixture of different elements in rodlike containers which furnished the main Tepen power source. By moving certain kinds of heavy chemicals from poorer to richer local concentrations, I increased the activity of the power supply. I had no knowledge of just how fast such an increase could take place. Fortunately I was well over thirty miles away from the village when the power supply blewl The Tepen were not dumb. As a matter of fact, they had been able to duplicate nearly all of the Ayorian senses by means of directaction science. I appreciated the truly stupendous amount of practical knowledge which they had gained. It would be possible for them to ignore the blowup of one village. Would they overlook more odd occurences? Not wishing to risk their further alarm and since my final plan required a full Ayorian grouping, I had nearly a whole Enithra year to wait. It would be dangerous to use the time in further harrassment of the Tepen, I concluded. But what should I do? he answer was obvious. I would " rejoin the children. Not only to avoid the long period of aloneness -- for we Ayor do not take well to long periods of solitude but also to prepare for the implementation of my plan. Any Ayor can always find any other. This is why we use objects for hide-and-seek, rather than oursdves. How this is accomplished I #o not know; but since I desired to rejoin my group, I teleported perhaps sixty or seventy times -- between two and three thousand miles -- and found them. On my way I filled my stomach with berries and nuts, stopping only long enough between jumps to sense nourishment and move it to my stomach organ. The day was nearly gone, the sun weakening rapidly, but the children were still deep in one of their philosophical games which all Ayorian children and adults love so well. When I arrived, they clustered around me excitedly as I brought forth concept after concept of a new and novel nature. All of them were familiar with my twinning problem -- not the real one which I had accepted at Erne's death, but the assumed one which the grouping had called upon me. I didn't attempt to argue my conviction regarding the Tepen. This would have been futile. My plan was far more subtle, and I was convinced that every Ayorian must as represented by Tepen or surely all Ayorians would one day be extinct. Had they ever thought of an infinite series of teleportations across an infinite set of points? I demonstrated what I meant by walking back and forth across the valley, so they could observe the characteristic of "continuous motion." Had they observed the relationship between twinning structure and language structure? I demonstrated the concreteness of the Tepen language versus the abstraction of the Ayorian language. Had they considered the requisite characteristics of tools required for direct" action on material things as opposed to "indirect" mental action? I demonstrated by using my body -- fingers, hands, arms and legs -- in new and novel ways, then moved on to the construction of crude implements. Sticks used for shovels, levers and other devices of this nature captured their attention for weeks before I could direct their attention to more sophisticated Tepen machinery. Needless to say, Spork, the Ayorian moron, kept their attention for the year of wait. Though Spork was still far inferior in mass-sensing and teleportation, he was proving to be superior in philosophical construct! This latter, as all Ayorians knew, was far the most important. Without it, how could individuals twin or the Ayorian race advance? One member of our children's group reached beyond his immature plateau level. He matured nearly to the point of twinning and thus left us for adult company. The excitement of this event caused all to press me even harder for novel philsophical ideas. I saved my best and biggest idea for the time of grouping, however. This idea consisted of two parts. IF Can intelligent beings exist which do not twin?" And: "What happens to a race when they refuse to accept their twinning problem?" VI 'he time of grouping came again. I waited silently in our huge grouping cavern, letting my mind wander back over the memory of my years, back to Erne's careful telekinetic caressing of my small body when I so needed comfort and attention. As the Ayor formed their grouping chain overhead I imagined I could once again sense Erne in her appropriate polarity position for this year. I imagined that I could sense her attention on me, supplying me with air and food and water as my needs became apparent. I imagined, too, that I once again could feel her love for me and her hidden puzzlement, always present, as to the purpose of her twinning problem -- namely me, Spork the Ayorian moron. I imagined I could answer her. I said, "# now know the purpose of your twinning problem. Bear with me through this next great trial and you, too, shall know. Then you will be free to complete your twinning!" When the cavern was filled with all the Ayor, lined up according to their respective philosophical polarities, and their grouping interchanges had begun, I turned on the Tepen field from the captured Tepen weapon. It filled the whole cavern to contain all the Ayor. Slowly I turned the dial to squeeze the field down. Slowly the whole Ayorian race was squeezed tighter and tighter with no way of escape. "It is the Tepen!" they shouted as one, in near hysteria. "No!" I shouted back. "It is Spork, the Ayorian moron!" "What are you doing, Spork? Why are you doing this?" they chorused. "I, Spork, was given my twinning problem last year at the grouping. I have come to solve it!" Their puzzlement was clearly evident. I let them think on it while I twisted the field down tighter. "We are not Tepen! Why do you treat us like this?" they cried together. "I am presenting the Ayor with a racial twinning problem!" I responded enigmatically. Then, no matter what they asked, I kept silent. I knew the Ayorian mind as I knew my own. My seeds had been planted -- now, as well as earlier with the children! D ays passed as I squeezed the field down always tighter. Each squeeze caused the Ayor more anguish. But each squeeze had the (Jesired effect. By now they were forgetting the insignificant philosophical points which formerly took so much of their energy and time. Every member was called on by the racial mind of the Ayor to contribute every bit of itself toward a solution to this dilemma. Weeks passed in silence... to be broken finally by the suffering Ayor. "We understand! We accept our racial twinning problem." And I released the field! The seeds I had planted in the children's mind during the past year had slowly worked their way to the attention of the Ayorian consciousness. "What happens to a race," I had asked the children just before the grouping, "when they refuse to accept their twinning problem? Can intelligent beings exist which do not twin?" Faced with direct threat to survival of the whole race, the Ayors now recognized that Tepen were, and had been for many generations, their chief twinning problem. They now knew how they had refused to accept the problem -- how stagnated at one plateau of development each of the groupings had become. They knew what I had done to them with Tepen equipment would eventually have been done to them by Tepen. Then the Ayorian race would die or be enslaved! With individual Ayorians, once the twinning problem is accepted, one accepts full responsibility for its resolution. It is the same with the race. The Ayor, having seen their error, fully accepted the problem of evil Tepen as their racial twinning problem. With one hundred thousand Ayorians now giving it their primary attention, I felt no obstacle could prevent us from quickly overcoming the Tepen. I was close to being very wrong I Never once had the Tepen been endangered by any form of life on Enithra. They would feel secure. They would puzzle over the disappearance of one remote village, but they would have no cause for suspicion, or need for Ayorian traps, within their own communities. It was safe, therefore, for the Ayor to scout out the location of each Tepen on the planet. The day of attack arrived. Each Ayorian was assigned to the destruction of at least one Tepen and surveillance of another Ayorian to give assistance in event of trouble. At a prearranged time, each Ayor telekmassed his assigned Tepen several thousand feet underground. The sudden appearance of Tepen atoms within the matrix of underground materials caused a spontaneous realignment of energy patterns... resulting in huge atomic explosions imderground, effectively destroying each Tepen. D egraded, selfish, bestial entities that they were, yet still they had keen brains. The Tepen IF leader had prepared equipment for his self-protection even in the remote possibility of an Ayorian uprising, Such a contingency was so logically remote and unnecessary that it demonstrates the degree of paranoia which must have accompanied Tepen leadership! As each Ayorian accomplished his single act of destruction against his assigned Tepen, he also observed the success or failure of another. Athie, assigned to the Tepen leader who was located in his more than adequately protected citadel, was trapped by the Tepen first. His mental probes activated the protective devices. The Ayorian observing fWe turned to help -- and was trapped next. As each Ayorian mentally flew to help another, his own mental probes entrapped himself, as Ovef had been trapped in chase of the nut during our "nut game". Faster and faster the Ayorians were caught while I, nearly a planetary diameter away, raged in frustration. I rushed to one group of adults only to watch as they disappeared before my light receptors. I, Sport, the Ayorian moron, Spork, the would-be avenger, had been the cause of this disaster! Was this mighty effort merely the start of total Ayorian extinction? One group of children moved me the planetary distance and I arrived, striking in frenzy and anguish at the mound of metal which served to protect the Tepen leader and within which so many of my beloved Ayorian brethren were now trapped. Whatever I did had to be right! It also had to be done without the use of mass sense or teleportation faculties! I physically walked to the doorway of the metal mound, stepping: cautiously inside. There, in the center of the huge dome, was the suited figme of the last remaining Tepen. He floated over a circular platform surrounded by my entrped brethren. Though the telekinetic cages had only begun to be filled with Ayors, each was squeezed tightly against another and more entered in the brief moment of my glance. Enraged at these evil doings, T ran swiftly toward the platform interrible Tepen leader with my bands and teeth. Never before -- not since the time of Erne's death, at least -- had I had to control such terrible pent-up emotions. I rang forward -- and it wa then I hit the new physical-barrier energy field to be knocked uncon sdous by my own momentum! W hen I regained awareness, all was as before -- except that now there were twenty or more energy cages containing the suffering Ayor. Whatever threat I might have represented to the Tepen chief he must have felt was successfully countered by the new, invisible physical-barrier shield which I had struck. The Tepen leader ignored me. I regained my feet to batter in futile rage at the invisible shield. Around and around the platform and cages I raced, battering and bruising only my fists against the impregnable barrier; while, just beyond my reach, new energy cages sprang into being. Helplessly, I sat exhausted then, to stare at the polycyclic energy fields encaging my tribe. As each cycle passed from infra-red to ultra-violet, I could momentarily see their agonized bodies. Then, thank the great one, I knew the final answer I I teleported myself toward the evil Tepen -- only to find myself, as expected, trapped in Hie of the energy cages with the Ayor. Ah, but I could move through the energy cages with my appendages -- arms and legs I As I d learned so long ago, the magnetic structure of my being was too weak to be held by the field as my brethren were. I immediately pushed my way through the limbless Ayorian bodies, and easily pushed myself kinetic entrapping field to land on the floor beside the Tepen chief. Only then did he take cognizance of me. He raised his death ray toward me. But I had long ago learned how swiftly I could move compared to them. I dodged his motion easily, swung to his side and crushed my fist completely through the top of his thin artificial, metallic shell. My hand withdrew, dripping his sickly yellow fluids onto the "off" switches of the telekinetic cages. How filled with joy we were with the release of nearly half our tribe I Now the evil Tepen were dead -- and not one Ayorian had died in the accomplishment. The last citadel of the Tepen was largest of all; it contained every device invented or in use by the Tepen. Though we destroyed all other villages, we left the power plant operational in this largest one so that its metallic structures would be protected from the seeking fingers of Enithra life. As a racial group, the Ayor had reached and passed a major twinning plateau, I was sure. Heretofore, the Ayor, who were the dominant species of Enithra, excepting their degenerate descendants, had interest and concern for only things mental. So long as they persisted in this direction,, they came closer and closer to their racial extinction. Thus a plateau had been reached, unknowingly, many generations back. IF ic hypothesis of life, their relationship to it and their tribal goals, they maintained their plateau position unchanged. They had disguised their lack of evolutionary progress in their terrible drive for "consistency." Even their philosophical games, as I had learned under the children, bore the marks of this rigidity. Only those ideas which were both novel and simultaneously consistent with their past philosophy could win in the game. Over the years, truly new and novel ideas that were inconsistent with past philosophy were unacceptable. Thus the rise of the Tepen was inevitable as some kind of divergent radial adaptation. Fortunately for the Ayor, I, too, was inconsistent to the Enithra way of life -- not just to Ayor or Tepen, but to all plant life and animal life. I was capable of indirect and direct action against the material environment. Thus, as the central part of Emes twinning problem, she had to recognize and accept my inconsistency from Enithra patterns. If my beloved Erne had only lived, I like to believe that her eventual recognition and acceptance would have led her genetic children to accept the principle of direct action along with their native-born instinctive, indirect action. JT'ortunately, too, I was placed with the Ayorian children for so many years. There I thoroughly learned the Ayorian mind, how it worked, and how each individual twinning led to divergent radial adaptations through changes in the magnetic structure of each twin. For the Ayor, form followed function almost completely. Once function -- that is, accepted premises of one's attitude toward the universe -- changed, then so did their structure and their potential. Only the children were sufficiently plastic to accept my ideas as worthy of consideration -- even though not consistent with past Ayorian belief. Then, too, only the terrible Tepen threat to Ayorian survival could force the Ayorian adult to re-structure his thinking. I could easily imagine the next plateau for the Ayorians ! First, tentatively exploring and stumbling time and again, the Ayor would reach for the knowledge of the Tepen. Slowly but surely, they would enlarge the fabric of their being to include the principles of both direct and indirect action against their environment. Then, and only then, they would become true masters of their environment -- ready, perhaps, for the next plateau. But why do I speak of them" so easily? Am I not, too, an Ayorian? If I were truly an Ayor, one who has accepted fully another's twinning problem and conquered it successfully as I had Erne's, would I not twin? Yet here am I, Spork the moron, Spork the avenger, untwinned. Release of tension which often accompanies death and its dangers brought me to a new low of emotional apathy. I could not understand my failure to twin, as would any other Ayor who had conquered a twinning problem. So in puzzlement and emotional apathy, I turned my back on my brothers. I teleported at random, from point to point, across Enithra's surface. The sun shone brightly whenever I passed through cloudless skies; the flowers still displayed variegated rivers of colorful motion; animal life jumped and struggled around me. Yet I passed through Enithra's delights with my mind slowed and my spirits sagging. # hadrCt twined! Who am I? What am #? The place was profusely covered with dense violet jungle growth -- it was the place where Erne had found me twelve Enithra years ago. Oddly, I had not given thought to this place during all my years of growth. Nearly all of the metal I had been found in was gone. Plant life had found it an easy source for nourishment from which, molecule by molecule, it was drawn. My hand touched the polarization barrier surrounding the untouched dense metal ball within which Erne had found me. Inscribed on some chemical structure still unwanted by Enithra life was the regular geometric inscription that Erne had described to me and puzzled over for so many years. It was shaped thus: Beyond this strange geometry was the dense sphere. Inside it lay only broken pieces of apparatus discarded or not yet used by the voracious appetite of Enithra's life. Clearly, there was no hint here as to what Spork really was I In much sadness and sentimentalism, I sat to stare at this odd figure. My mind searched all around to recapture the original scene. Where had Erne hidden? What did she hide behind? Was she in the small hollow cave only three miles away? Was she behind that flowing waterfall only a mile away? With strangely watering lightreceptors, I let my mind reach through its forty-mile limit to find what would have appeared to Erne to be a good hiding place from Tepen. Then I imagined Erne there, slowly letting her fine-tuned telekmass sensor reach out for IF study of the once hot body at my feet. As I imagined her mind pushing from atom to atom, always alert for Tepen traps, I let my mind wander over the small life form which was I, inside the protective sphere; I imagined how I must have lain so still to be fed by strange mechanical and chemical apparatus. As my mind dwelled sentimentally on the total experience, I imagined I could once again feel the touch of soft hands pressing and caressing my baby skin. "Much like Erne's telekinetic touch," I thought. 'hen, still in deep fatigue and  reverie, fragments of my memory coalesced to break open with blinding reality. I really was being held! I could feel her hands on my back and her breast at my chest! I could smell her clean perfume! I knew the security of deep contentment that comes only with a full stomach and a biological mother's love! She patted me on my buttocks while the other being spoke: "Though we headed the house of the galactic council, Patricia, the sabotage was inevitable. We may be genetically superior. But to the common people we are still only human. Place the baby in the life container now." I, Spork, the Ayorian moron -- Spork, the avenger -- was Spork, "only human!" Aside from new conscious memory of my parent's similarity to my structure -- with arms, legs, nose, mouth and so on -- their conversation was as meaningless to me as was the geometry proclaiming Though I now knew I belonged to another species, the knowledge was only that, not an emotional fact of my life. And the noises which my parents used just before placing me in the life container were "feeling" messages, not semantic symbols terminating in conscious understanding. I still had to discern meaning. "Only human" was just a part of the buried semantic content in need of deciphering. I slept a dreamless sleep, deep with comfort and contentment this night The weather was mild and ally composing itself in nature's way, also prepared me for the long future ahead. I slept in peace. Perhaps I could not twin, but I had been given a new twinning problem: to find the content for the symbol "human" -- hue Dear Editor: Since President Nixon has recently gone on record as opposing appropriations for deep-space exploration, there are good grounds for your concern that our race will elect to delay its full entrance into space and return to its "wars and squabbles". If the squabbling is carried out in the usual fashion, this clearly involves a net loss. But the closed-system approach to inhabited planets has spawned an odd and somewhat frightening conjecture which might be used to defend Mr. Nixon's position. The conjecture (I believe it was made by Fred Hoyle) is that any intelligent race on the verge of becoming spacefarers is apt to be threatened at exactly that time with a period of extreme social instability -- a mechanism ideal for reducing interstellar congestion. The argument for this is fairly simple. A race which is just reaching the technological level needed for space travel is starting to crowd the limits of its planet in several important ways. Its civilization's normal functioning is starting to get rough on global ecology (and other environmental features). Its technology can raise comprehensive hell in the (formerly tolerable) event of major war. And it is being pressured toward these hazards by the simple force of population pressure. In one sense there shouldn't be any problem. The ecological damage could be cut down, the social tempers soothed and the population quickly decrowded -- all by some simple applications of fast, highvolume space travel to lots of well scouted habitable planets. The efficacy of this "frontier" solution could be argued by analogy with the salutary effects that the opening up of the Western Hemisphere had on our own "old world". But there will not be enough time for this solution to develop. Before the race can develop and carry out interstellar exploration, it will have (at least temporarily) taken itself out of the running... unless it can develop other means of getting itself through the social bottleneck. If this conjecture is at all correct the races who inherit the stars will be, paradoxically, not those which devote their energies to space travel as soon as it comes within their reach, but those which divert their energies to fairly successful dealings with their wars and squabblesl I would be interested in hearing other people's reactions to this idea. I do not apologize if the above sounds neo-Malthusian. I cannot agree with Mr. Gold's listing of Malthus among the "great refuted theorists" of the past, particularly in view of the fact that Argentina, Australia and the U.S. -- the only nations now producing more food than they can eat -- were all pure frontier to his world. -- Wilbur Walkoe, Jr., # Lake Michigan Drive, Allendale, Michigan #. # Very good points, to be sure. But whether they can be used to demonstrate the space program should be canceled is another question. We think not. First, because a solution which may not work should not be abandoned on those grounds unless there are alternative solutions which are both more likely to work and competitive with the uncertain one. We have no such alternative solutions. Second, because there is no clearly visible future time which will be better for implementing a space program than now, so why not do it now? (Especially since if population gro? remains explosive, iEill future times are likely to have less in the wsqt of available capital than the present.) Third -- and probably most important! -- Because Space Is There. The Editor,  #P  Dear Editor: Why don't you conduct a poll where fans send in a list of their favorite authors and you get stories from the top half dozen or so for a special issue of Galaxy or If? It might take a year to get stories from the favorite authors, but would be worth the wait. 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The great bulk of the so-called mainstream literature (and of New WhatchamacalKt science fiction) seems concerned with petty anti-heroes who whine over the lot of mankind but do nothing about it And they may be reflecting accurately a tendency that is strong in current human development The concept that the human animal is entitled to earn and hold dignity as an individual is fairly rare in human history. We inherited it from three sources. The ancient Hebrews somehow developed it. The Roman Republic held it for centuries, and its tradition got passed on into Christianity to some extent And above all, the ancient Norse people brought it to its peak and passed it on to ,us. (Even their gods had human dignity, and did not -- uniquely -- violate the dignity of their worshippers.) But to most of the rest of the world, dignity lay only in high places, or in the horde known as the State. 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I Working for him was about as safe as practicing dentistry on an I started my writing assignment at alligator, but I needed the bread. the studio on January #nd. Ten Besides, he did my kind of picminutes after I checked into my ture -- hed just finished a spookoffice I got a call from my protacular, The Turn Of The Screw, ducer, Effingwell Wright. and was now considering a sequel, The Return Of The Screw . Which was why I'd been hired. At least that's what I thought until I arrived at Wright's office. "We're going to do Hamlet " he announced. "Hamlet?" Wright nodded through a wreath of cigar-smoke. "That's it, baby. Now we only got one problem. How do we lick the story?" I stared at him. "I'm afraid I've never had any experience with Shakespeare." "Don't worry, you won't be working with him." Wright's cigar waved dismissal of the problem. "But there's a ghost in this property, isn't there? And that's where you come in." That, actually, is where Wright's secretary came in and handed him a letter. "Here's the censorship report. It just arrived." "Censorship?" Wright scowled through the smoke. "From the Anti-Amusement League. They want some changes in the story-treatment." Wright scanned the letter, shaking his head and muttering as he read. "Relationship between Hamlet and his mother is unacceptable to this office. Suggest you make him an orphan." Wright frowned, then went on. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstem objectionable for ethnic reasons -- no Jewish names. Recommend you make them Negroes." Wright sighed and continued. "Be  sure to eliminate vioend." He began to frown again. "Imperative that you cut the phrase, To be or not to be . It might encourage suicide." Wright's frown darkened. "Remove business with skull in graveyard scene. Better still, drop graveyard scene entirely. Too gruesome for kiddies in audience. Finally, we cannot accept the ghost. There must be no cheap, morbid nonsense about spirits of the dead thirsting for revenge. Sincerely -- " Wright shrugged at me. "Sorry, baby. You can't fight progress." He rose and moved with me to the door. "I'd Jike to use you on this project, but the Anti-Amusement League carries a lot of clout in the industry. I suggest you go back to your office and clean out your drawers." I got the message. I was being tossed out on my assignment. Meanwhile, back at the Unemployment Office -- II nphe first thing I did at the Unemployment Office was read the bulletin board to see if there were any openings. It had only one listing today, and I glanced at it. "Nit-pickers wanted . Must be experienced quibblers" I shook my head. No government job for me. Better off to apply for compensation. So I bought a paper and got in line to wait for my interview. From the look of the headlines, the year was starting off with a bang. Wars were escalating abroad, prices were escalating at home and taxes were just plain rising. Eighteen people had been killed in a riot for peace, and there was talk that no such groups would be allowed to demonstrate in the future without a riot-permit. A small box contained a bulletin on #I traffic fatalities and a large front-page story dealt with the arrest of a local museum guard who had been accused of mummy-molesting. I sought solace in the sports section, reading the scores of the New Year's football games -- the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Toilet Bowl -- "Pardon me," the soft voice murmured. Glancing up, I saw this unnatural blonde, the lass with the psychedelicate air. "Are you three o'clock?" she asked. It took me a moment to interpret her question; she wanted to know the time of my interview. "That's right," I nodded. "Mind if I slip in ahead of you? I'm two-forty-five." Actually, I'd have guessed her to be #-#-#, so I gallantly allowed her to precede me and returned to my reading. When I looked up again, she was gone, and I stepped before the window to do the interview bit It wasn't until I went outside that I saw her again. She was standing on the curb beside the car parked just ahead of mine -- a beat-up old heap 'with a bumper-sticker reading I Want To Be Conspicuous. The car was decorated with the usual floral designs, but from the look on the girl's face I gathered that her Flower Power had wilted. "Trouble?" I inquired. She glanced up. "Oh, it's you!" There was no point in denying it, so I nodded. "What's the matter -- car won't start?" It was her turn to nod. I opened the door and got behind the wheel. "Here, let me give you a hand." I gave her more than a hand; I gave her a foot, on the gas-pedal. The motor coughed, spluttered, then gave an unmistakable death-rattle. "Don't bother," she told me. "It's totalled." And she started to walk away. "Hey, aren't you going to call the Auto Club?" "Not unless they'll give me a lift home." I climbed out hastily. "Where's that?" "Above the Strip. On Basic Drive. You know where that is?" I opened the door of my own IF car. "Get in, and I'll prove it." "Thanks." She slid across the seat, snuggling over on the passenger side. I climbed in after her and we peeled off. A s we turned up Highland, I learned that her name was Sandy Simpson. Making a left on Sunset, I discovered that she was a professional body. "That's right," she said, as I reacted by nearly ramming the car into a lamp-post. "I sell my body for a living. All, or any part of it. You know, like in a TV commercial with a star -- sometimes her hands show her age, so when they cut to a tight closeup, it's my hands in the shot. Or maybe my feet. I do knees and elbows, too, and I'm very good at cleavage." "In other words, you're a double?" "A dubber, too. I specialize in howls for the laugh-tracks on comedy shows." And she gave out with an ear-splitting screech. "Sounds like a good racket." "Not lately." Sandy sighed heavily. "Haven't had a studio call in three months. I'd have starved to death if it wasn't for a couple of nose residuals I got from an old sinus-tablet commercial." "So that's why you were down collecting compensation." Sandy nodded. "What's your excuse?" "I'm a writer. In this business we are constantly starving." "TV or movies?" "I'm versatile. I starve in both." I crossed Crescent Heights and moved on into Sunset Strip. "Couldn't you do like, books?" "I've done like, books. Three of them, to be exact. How To Drown A Fish, The Romance of Sewage Disposal, and one of those big special gift-books -- A Pictorial History of Dandruff" "Did they sell?" "Like hot-cakes." I shrugged. "Trouble is, nobody buys hot-cakes in a bookstore." "But you're really a writer?" Sandy eyed me curiously. "What's your name?" "Considine. Joe Considine." "You got a pad around here?" This time I nearly piled up the car against a street sign. Not because of the implications of her question, but due to something I suddenly remembered. Something weighing about # pounds of solid, unyielding granite -- my landlord. "I did," I told her. "That is, I do and I don't. I mean, I haven't been getting up the rent for a couple of months and the landlord is leaning on me. I figured on drawing a salary advance today, only my job was shot down. So when I show up tonight without a payment, it's outsville." "Tiat abotft your compensation?" "Two week waiting period before I collect the first check." "I knew it!" Sandy bounced up and down on the seat, squealing happily. "Now you can move in with me!" I gave her a double-take, and she nodded quickly. "The minute I saw you standing in line, I figured you'd be a good choice." This time I watched the road before replying. "You mean you came down to the Unemployment Office to shop for a room-mate?" "Not a room, man. A great big groovy spread. And you can pay your share of the rent when your compensation checks come through -- just like the others." "Others?" Sandy nodded. "Don't worry, you won't be crowded. You'll see." She gave me a reassuring smile. "Like I'm not pressuring you. Just think about it." T thought about is as I drove. Drove along Sunset Strip, passing all the familiar landmarks. Here were the shops and the signs -- Mr. Gladys, the hair stylist -- Mother Naked's Southern Fried Chicken -- Toilet A-Go-Go -- the interior decorator place where they restored antique furniture like new -- and the other interior decorator place where they aged new furniture to make it look antique. We sped by the Now Generation Clinic, specializing in youthful diseases like hippytitis, and passed the Topless Restaurant where I had once been thrown out for not wearing a necktie. Dusk was falling, and the hippies were rising; the under-achievers, members of the uptrodden masses, hiding from the world behind dark glasses and beards. This was the scene -- boots and bare feet, buttons and bushy hair and beads, the mod and the odd intermingled. I'd never been with it; among these Flower Children I was just an elderly weed. But now, under the circumstances, perhaps I'd better blossom forth. I glanced at Sandy. There were worse fates than sharing a pad with her. At least it might be a temporary solution, until my agent came up with another job. "Okay, it's a deal," I told her "I'll sneak my things out of' the apartment and move in tomorrow." "Crazy," she said. "Turn right at the next corner -- that's Basic Drive." I turned right at the next corner and started the climb up a dark and deserted hillside street. And that's where the crunch came. The crunch, and the squeal as I applied my brakes -- just a moment too late to avoid impact. Apparently the street hadn't been entirely deserted after all, because there was a crumpled figure lying on the pavement before my car. IF Sandy and I opened our doors simultaneously, and a moment later we stood staring down at the yellow-suited, gray-booted little form sprawled in the street "Hippy outfit," Sandy murmured. "But he's just a kid -- " I nodded, then stooped and turned him over gently. His eyes were dosed and I couldn't distinguish his features here in the deepening darkness. But his chest rose and fell regularly, and that's what mattered the most to me at the moment. "He's alive." I gestured to Sandy. "Hold the door open while I get him in." Lifting him carefully, I placed him in the front seat of the car, right in the middle, so that when Sandy climbed in on her side he was propped up between us. "Hang onto him now," I told her. Sandy nodded obediently. Then she gasped. "What's the matter?" "His face -- he's turning green #" "Shock." I glanced over. My diagnosis was correct, but I had the wrong patient It was Sandy who was in shock. She sat there, gaping and pointing, trying to speak, "His hands are green, too -- " I shook my head grimly. "Hold tight. We may break a few speed records, but I've got to get him to a hospital." It was then that I felt the stirring beside me. It was then that I turned to see the yellow eyes pop open and the wide mouth part in a grin. The head twisted towards me and I heard the words. "Not hospital." A hand rose up in a restraining gesture. A hand that was perhaps a paw -- with a thumb and only three fingers. "Not hospital," the voice repeated firmly. And the next words fell like a knell of doom. "Take me to your leader ." Ill Tow the Strip is filled with un dersized specimens who wear far-out outfits. Some of them even cover their hands and faces with psychedelic designs in paint. Down there I'd probably never have given this one a second glance, but here in the lonely darkness of the hillside it was different. Everything about him was different -- his costume, his complexion, his size and his eyes. The face was froglike and that three-fingered paw was neither batrachian nor human. "Crazy #" Sandy whispered. And it was. Sandy seemed relieved now that the creatine had spoken, but I didn't share her reaction. "Don't you understand?" I muttered. "He's an alien" "So what? I've got nothing against foreigners." "But he's not an ordinary foreigner -- he's extra-terrestrial." "Nobody's perfect," she told me "The important thing is he's not hurt." She turned to the creature. "Isn't that right, man?" "Not man. Drool." "Drool? Is that your name?" "Yes. In your speech. Mine is different. Like you say, something else." "You're something else!" Sandy shook her head. "Are you really an alien, like Joe says?" The creature nodded. "I tell it like it is, man." Sandy stared at him. "Where did you learn how to speak such perfect English?" "In the ship." I got into the act. "You came in a ship? From where?" "Up." The green hand gestured. "Another planet?" Drool nodded. "But the ship was yours. Krool found it. What you call spacecraft. Hardware. One of yours -- empty." I shook my head, but not in doubt. It was all too possible in these days of Top Security. We might have sent out an advanceddesign spacecraft on a secret test flight. If something went wrong and its crew was lost, the ship would go on, drifting through space until it felh into the paws of creatures like these. Creatures like -- "Krool," Sandy murmured. "Who is he?" "Boss. Big Daddy. Father of us all. Like me, only twenty times more. He looks like -- " Drool went on to describe his father's appearance, and I didn't like what I heard at all. According to him, his sire was a cross between a sabre-toothed tiger and a giant multi-colored leopard. And he had no paternal affection for his son, because Drool was the runt of the litter. "My brothers and sisters are nordon't grow. Maybe not the right chromosomes, maybe no blue genes. Krool is very up-tight about it. So when he found the ship, he took me off with him. A long journey, but the charts told him how to go, and the handling was simple. You are still quite primitive, right?" "Let me get this straight," I said. "Your father brought you here in a ship. But if the crew was missing, how did you learn our language?" "The crew left much literature to read and study. What you call comic books." TThat explained his speech pattern. I wondered what else this alien had learned of our contemporary culture. But there were more important concerns right now. "Where is this ship?" "Krool took it back." "After he landed you here?" "Not landed. Dropped. Bad trip, man." IF It was beginning to sound like one to me. "He dropped you out of the ship into space?" "Only a few feet. Nobody saw us because of the air. Like it's a gas, man?" "Smog," I told him. And visualized the hovering space-craft, the gigantic creature at the controls, dropping this little creature down to land before the car in the street with no one the wiser. It could happen that way. Anything could happen twenty feet above our heads and we'd never know it because of the prevailing pollution. It transmogrified everything it touched. "How cruddy!" Sandy exclaimed. "Cutting out on you like that -- leaving you all alone in a strange place, not caring if you live or die -- " "He cares," Drool assured her. "I am not left to die. It is just that I am so weak and small. I can't come on like my brothers and sisters when they are sent to the big, important worlds. So Krool brings me to this earth because it will not be a problem for me." He nodded. "Krool says even a child Gan do it here." "Do what?" "My thing." "Which is?" "The same as my brothers and sisters do when they go to the better-class planets. They conquer." I turned to him. "Let's have that line again. You're really here to conquer earth. That's your plan?" "That's my bag. So take me to your leader." "Sure." I nodded. "And then what?" Drool smiled happily. "Then I merely blast him with my superdisintegratosonic -- oppsl" . He sat there, suddenly silent as his green face slowly paled to chartreuse. Sandy eyed him anxiously. "What's the matter?" "Krool gave me one. I know I had it when he lifted me out. I must have dropped it -- " "Your weapon?" Drool nodded, frowning. "It's probably still floating around somewhere in the smog -- almost weightless, you know -- " He broke off and peered at me anxiously. "But if I lost it, how do I -- ?" "You don't," I told him. "And that's final." I tromped on the gaspedal. "Let's go." "Where are you taking him?" Sandy's voice was apprehensive. It was a good question, but at the moment I didn't have any good answers. Police? The Orphan's Home? Lost And Found Department? nphe answer cam,e with clarion clarity. For as I started the motor, the car was suddenly filled with soaring sound. "Ooh!" Sandy squealed. "The Galloping Cruds!" And indeed it was. With ear-splitling precision, that popular hardrock group belted out their latest hit. As the guitars twanged and the drums echoed the beat, the voices proclaimed a moving message. "Vd like to turn you on, baby , But I can # t find the switch -- " Sandy cupped her hands and shouted, "Groovy! But turn it down a little." "Sorry," I yelled. "I don't have a radio in the car." Sandy stared at me. I stared at her. Then we both just stared at Drool. His wide mouth was wide open, And from it poured the sound of electric guitars, the thud of drums, the cacaphonic blending of five male voices. "Impossible!" I breathed and clapped my hand across Drool's mouth. The sound blurred instantly. I removed my hand quickly and Drool looked up. "What's with you, man?" he inquired. Sandy was still staring at him. "Was that really you singing?" "Yeah. Don't you dig it?" Sandy nodded. "But how on earth -- ?" "Not on earth." Drool grinned, "In the ship. There was an instrument -- stereo tape machine -- I listened while I read the comic books." "Wait a minute." I stopped the car again and faced him. "Are you trying to tell us you can imitate anything you hear recorded?" Drool shrugged. "Why not?" "You mean you can do all those voices at once, plus the guitars and drums?" "The sounds are very simple." "Your vocal cords must be tied in Boy Scout knots." Sandy raised her hand. "Wait a minute." Drool glanced at her and she continued. "Can you do the Zappers?" Drool opened his mouth, and the answer came. The Zappers -- two male minstrels, two female minstrels, and one interlocuter-type -- began to wail their Golden Record classic, Doobie-Do Or Doobie-Don't You? With full orchestral background. Then Drool did a pop ballad by Eddie Breech and the Clouts. After that, a small filet of soul music, followed by a children's recording of East Indian raga, featuring the soft tones of a baby sitar. "Wild!" Sandy shook her head. "I don't believe it!" "Hearing is believing," I told her. "What you've been listening to -- pouring right into our laps." I put my hand on Drool's shoulder. "Still want to conquer earth?" I asked. He nodded eagerly, then frowned. "But how -- ?" "Leave everything to us," I asIF sured him. "I think it can be arranged." IV r  s Jack the Ripper used to say, how's that for openers? Between the time Drool finished his concert and the time we parked in Sandy's driveway I had it all figured. Sandy started to follow my reasoning and ended up way ahead of me. "It's a big deal. We're going to have to use the others." "WHat others?" Sandy gestured up at the imposing mansion which loomed against the hilltop horizon. "I told you I didn't live here alone," she said. "Come along -- you'll see." We left the car and moved up the walk. I put my hand on Drool's shoulder. "Remember your instructions. Speak only when you're spoken to and let us do the talking. Play it cool." He nodded, and we entered. Then it was my turn to remember instructions. But I found it very difficult to keep my cool in the overheated atmosphere of Sandy's pad. Somehow I hadn't expected her to live in a twenty-room mansion, complete with marble floors, a fireplace in every bedroom, and an indoor swimming pool. "Don't you recognize where you are?" she murmured. "It's the old Riga Mortice place." Something clicked, and I nodded. I remembered Riga Mortice very well indeed. She had been a popular entertainer during my childhood, until illness forced her retirement No longer a bouncy, bubbling ingenue, she became a victim of alcohol, narcotics and diet-pills. But her fans never deserted her, and when she emerged to make a comeback on a singing tour, her popularity boomed again. Her first appearance, weak and wan and forty pounds lighter, had sparked something in the souls of a hundred who identified with her because of their own hypochondria. Since they themselves were on a daily diet of sleeping pills, pep pills, water pills, reducing pills, tranquilizers and laxatives, Riga Mortice became their heroine. They flocked to her concerts, not to hear her voice but merely to see if she'd manage to last out the performance. Whenever she cancelled an engagement or took an overdose of liquor, popular enthusiasm increased; some of the adoring lady fans even kept scrapbooks filled with clippings on her suicide attempts. Her appearance on crutches brought applause; her tour in a wheelchair was a smash hit, and when she finally began to sing to her public from a microphone built into an iron lung, she was Number One Box Office. IF UDiga Mortice," I murmured. "Of course! Whatever hap pened to her?" "Something terrible," Sandy sighed. "She got healthy." I shook my head. "Sad, isn't it? Here was a gal who had everything -- neurasthenia, self-destructive tendencies, a manic-depressive psychosis -- what a shame to lose all that talent!" "She lost this house, too," Sandy explained. "That's when we moved in." "We?" "I and the others." Sandy was leading Drool and me along an imposing corridor panelled in solid mahogany from floor to thirty-foot ceiling. "But how can you afford it?" "Because we're all on unemployment compensation. There's six of us here -- that is, until we lost one of our tenants yesterday. He got a job and moved into a one-room furnished apartment. Now he can't afford to stay here." "But isn't he making more money -- ?" "Look. His job only pays him a hundred and fifty a week. We each get seventy-five dollars in compensation." "I don't understand." "Our seventy-five is net, tax free. But after this poor guy pays commission to his agent, and deductions are taken from his check for income tax, surtax, social security, state disability insurance and all the rest, he winds up with less bread than we have." I was beginning to get the picture. Six times seventy-five is lour hundred and fifty dollars a week -- more than enough to pay the rent on . even such a palatial pad as this one. And that's why Sandy had scouted the Unemployment Office; she needed to replace the sixth tenant with a new resident, such as me. Sandy smiled at me. "How about that?" she inquired, gesturing at the sweep and thrust of the threestory staircase which rose at the end of the hall. "Where else eould you find such a glad pad for seventy-five per, including food, liquor and gas for your wheels?" I glanced around. "Something's missing, though. I don't see any chairs and tables." "Oh, that!" She made a gesture of dismissal. "We don't have any yet. But we're planning to buy some period furniture -- on monthly payments, of course. Meanwhile, we just make do." She steered Drool and me toward an ornate double door. "But come on and meet the others." Hphe others were gathered ter the cocktail hour at the drained indoor swimming pool. Seated inside it, with their bottoms touching bottom, they gave us glasses and greetings. Seldom have I seen such a collection of disparate types, but as Sandy made the introductions I began to sense that they were desperate types as well. All of them had one thing in common -- they were bom losers. Sandy led me to a spade-bearded, scholarly-looking gentleman whose name was Mr. Barf. Regarding me mournfully, he started to rise and I waved him back. "Please don't get up on my account," I told him. Barf broke into a sudden smile. "Thank you. I prefer it here at the bottom of the pool." "Mr. Barf is our philosopher," Sandy explained. "He once tried to drown himself in Walden Pond." "Unsuccessfully, I fear," Barf sighed. "Next time I hope to be more Thoreau about it" The wan little man beside him scowled at me. "What did you mean by that 'on my account' crack?" he demanded suspiciously. "Don't mind Mr. Emia," Sandy whispered. "He's very sensitive about such things. He used to be the cashier in a blood-bank, but they fired him for embezzlement." Luke Emia glowered at me but accepted my hand in greeting Sandy moved with me to a mopheaded young man whose psychedelic jacket was covered with buttons, although he still looked as if he didn't have all of his own. "Mr. Grafitti," she announced. "He writes a column ior one of the underground newspapers." "Pleased to meet you." " -- ," said Grafitti, pleasantly. Warmed by his greeting, I moved on to the next tenant. This young man, introduced to me simply as Swinger, was so ragged, filthy and unkempt that I automatically pegged him as a musician. Such proved to be the case. He had once been part of a recording group, he told me, until he suffered a nasty shock -- when his electriconic harmonica had short-circuited on a high note and blown all the caps off his teeth. Since that time, apparently, he'd nursed a grudge against aU performers including singers, and carried on an active crusade against them. "I just got busted," he concluded mournfully. "Not again?" Sandy sighed. "What happened?" "Well, I read where Tony Bennett was opening at a club here in town, and you know what that means. Last night I went down there, and when he came on and started singing I Lost My Heart In San Francisco , I walked up on the stage and handed him one. It was only a beef-heart, of course, but the fuzz hauled me in anyway." Shaking her head in commiseration, Sandy led me to the last member of the gathering, a dapper balding man who greeted me with a firm handclasp. IF "Ko tic's the name," he told me. "But you can call me Cy." I blinked in sudden recognition. "Not the Drive-In Psychiatrist? The one who used to set up his couch in the parking lot over in Beverly Hills?," "Five couches," he announced proudly. "A regular open-air clinic." His smile faded. "But I got out of the racket. It is a racket, you know. Head-shrinkers don't do you any good -- the thing to do is get your head Sanforized. I retired to work out my new theories." D uring this exchange, Drool had been standing patiently and silently at my side. Now Mr. Kotic eyed him speculatively. "Who's your sickie friend?" he inquired. "He's not sick," Sandy declared. "Well, he's too short to be the Jolly Green Giant," Kotic muttered. "And you must admit he is green around the gills. In fact, during my entire professional career I've never seen anyone look greener. Ergo, he must be ill. Note the hyperthyroid bulge of his eyes, the reddish pupils, the nasal malformation and the labial deformity. I've been a psychiatrist too long not to recognize a real ding-a-ling when I see one." I gave Sandy a quick glance and she picked up her cue. "That's no way to talk about my cousin," she retorted. "Cousin?" Barf's eyebrows rose. "That's right. He's a hippy from San Francisco," he murmured. "Haight-Ashbury." Luke Emia rose and approached him curiously. "What's your name, man?" Drool had learned his answers well. "Sneed Hearn," he said. " I " sneered Grafitti. "You can say that again," muttered the Swinger. "Like, I mean all us old W.C. Fields fans know that 'Sneed Hearn' is a name he made up and used in The Old Fashioned Way" I paled. Stupid of me not to remember that today's In Group were old film buffs. "All right," Swinger persisted. "Lay it on us, man. Who is this creep?" Cy Kotic moved closer to the hapless Drool, who shrank from his professional scrutiny. "I can't identify the syndrome yet," the psychiatrist muttered. "But I am getting a definite gut reaction from him. That is to say, he's making me sick at my stomach." " -- ?" Grafitti inquired. "A good question." Barf joined the group clustered around Drool and nodded philosophically. Sandy gave me a helpless look, and I stepped forward. "All right," I said. "Guess there's no sense trying to conceal the truth from you. It would have to come out sooner or later." "Joel" Sandy's voice sounded an alarm. "I know what I'm doing," I assured her. "Come on, everybody drink up and I'll plug you in." And that, of course, was exactly the procedure. They passed the drinks, and I passed the word. Half an hour later they were falling out of their trees as Drool's open mouth emitted a stereophonic version of the latest protest-song recorded by that group of militant young rebels known as Tarzan and All the Apes. By the time he closed his mouth, theirs were hanging open. "Well?" I murmured. "How did that grab you? Think he can conquer the world now?" " I " said Grafitti. Which just about summed it up. V Qandy sent out for some Chin ese food from Pu King's, and we huddled over the meal discussing the deal. Grafitti's reaction was shared by most of the others. Only Barf seemed to have reservations. "I don't know," he mused. "This may not be the most propitious time for such a project. After all, Mars is in conjunction with Uranus -- " "Watch your language," Sandy cautioned him. Then to me: "Mr. Barf is not only a philosopher, he's an astrologer." "That's his problem," I told her, "My horoscope tells me not to put any faith in astrology." "I don't know anything about astrology," declared Swinger, his words filtering through a mouthful of fried rice. "But with that voice, we can't miss. And the way he does all of that instrumental accompaniment too -- man, it's something else!" Drool blushed a deeper shade viridan at the compliment and lowered his head modestly over the sweet-and-sour pork. I waved a forkful of chow-mein at the gathering. "The way I see it, we've got a winning team. As Swinger says, Drool has a voice that doesn't quit He can sing anything, in any style, imitating any group and any orchestration or accompaniment. But he's got something else that's equally important." "And what's that?" Luke Emia inquired. "What else has he got?" "The uglies." I jabbed my fork in Drool's direction. "Look at him -- did you ever see a more repulsive, disgusting specimen in your life?" Drool popped his eyes at me, and I quickly shook my head. "I'm not putting you down," I said, hastily. "This is your most important asset." "I don't get it," Sandy said. W "You will, if you stop and think. What makes one hard rock group more popular than another today? It can't be the difference in musical arrangements, because they all use the same beat or off-beat revved up to Total Sound, or Total Sound Effects. It can't be variations in singing style, because they all have the same delivery -- nobody understands the words. Even the soloist soul-singers and the protest groups sound basically alike, snarling about love or crooning about hate. So what's that extra ingredient which makes a star?" "Appearance?" Swinger ventured. I swallowed my chow-mein and nodded. "Exactly! Years ago it was enough for a nice-looking kid to come out on the stage and make anguished faces while he sang. Then it became necessary for him to contort his body in spastic spasms in order to make a pleasing impression on the audience -- since he sounded as if he was having a fit, he might as well look like he was, too. "But as audiences grew mofe sophisticated, that wasn't enough any more. Singers started to dress in weirdo outfits. Wild colors and sequins at one extreme, rags and blue-jeans at the other -- it didn't matter which, as long as the pants were tight enough. "Then came the real revolution. Not just the change in clothe? but the change in bodies. First we had sideburns, then long hair, then the bushy mop. The beards and mustaches followed -- mostly amongst the males. Now we have dark glasses, granny glasses, tattooing, psychedelic makeup, the works. The ugliest-looking singers, making the ugliest sounds and using the ugliest words, make the most beautiful dollars." C y Kotic nodded in emphatic agreement. "He tells it like it is," he declared. "Today's singing star must give the audience the whole sado-masochistic mystique, and no mistake. Oral aggression in the words, revolt against the Establishment in the clothing -- that takes care of the latent hostility. And for the self-pitying component, that finds its expression in the downbeat, beat-up look. "I see great possibilities here. Because our little friend is probably the weirdest-looking freak-out yet. Consider his assets! He's noseless, almost bald, built like a oneman disaster area, and best of all, he's green!" Cy Kotic smiled at Drool admiringly. "I don't want you to get a big head over this, but as a practicing psychiatrist it is my professional opinion that you're the most miserable-looking yutz I've ever encountered." It was my turn to rise and step forward. "You see? With Drool's natural gifts of voice and appearance he can't miss. All he needs is the proper management team behind him. And that's where we ah come in." "We do?" Luke Emia muttered. "Of course. Every star must have an entourage, and we're it. Sandty, here, will handle the secretarial duties. Mr. Emia, with his banking experience, is a natural for treasurer. Swinger, we'll need you for music and arrangements." Grafitti cleared his throat " ?" he ventured. "Songs are no good without lyrics," I reminded him. "And with your background in the underground press, you know all the right wrong words. Consider yourself a lyricist." " ," said Grafitti, gratefully. I turned my attention to Cy Kotic. "You, of course, will be invaluable as our psychological consultant in public relations. Handle our ads, our presentation format And I, naturally, am going to function as agent and business manager. And that's the wrap-up, kiddies." Mr. Barf cleared hut throat timidly. "What about me?" "Wdl," I hedged. "Maybe we can use some astrological predictions along the way. Advice from the stars to a star, that sort of thing." 'Tve got another suggestion." Surprisingly enough, it was Sandy who spoke. "Mr. Barf here knows a great deal about the World and its ways. After all, he's a philosopher." Barf nodded. "That's why I tried to kill myself," he agreed. Sandy moved to Drool and placed her hand on his shoulder. "You say all you know about earth is what you learned from listening to the radio and reading comic books." "Right," Drool conceded. "Then there you have it," Sandy told me. "Mr. Barf can be Drool's teacher. Let him educate Drool, broaden his knowledge, expand his horizons -- " "Okay," I said. "Just as long as he doesn't teach him so much that he'll want to drown himself." "Have no fear," Barf said. "The swimming pool is empty." And it was, because we all climbed up and crowded our way into the hall, glasses held high. Sandy refilled them quickly. "A toast, then," I proposed. "A toast to that new singing sensation of the nation -- that multi-voiced marvel, star of radio, television, motion pictures, recording artiste and just plain little old multi-millionaire -- Sneed Hearn I " We gulped our drinks. "That does it," I declared. "And now, beddy-bye for everybody. Got a big day scheduled for tomorrow." Drool glanced at me. "Where are we going?" IF "To launch your career," I answered. "Bright and early, we're off to Groovyland." VI Tt was early when we started, but not bright. As the car rolled down the ramp and inched itself into the morning traffic on the freeway, I switched on the fog-lights. It was the only way to go, here in the yellowish, billowing murk that shrouded our bumper-to-bumper crawl. Drool sat beside me. I glanced past him at Sandy. She sat utterly still, eyes closed in concentration. "Something wrong?" Sandy shook her head. "Just doing my yoga. The stop-breathing exercises. It's the only way to cope with the smog." Drool took a deep breath. "I like this air," he announced. "It reminds me of home. The -- what do you call it? -- smog is very nourishing." "That reminds me of something," I said. "You didn't touch your food last night." "I don't have to eat," Drool announced. "All I need is this." And he took another deep breath. "Well, I do." Sandy glanced at the torturous tangle of the interchange. "When we get out of this mess, let's have some breakfast." We were well past Pomona before the traffic thinned and we pulled off onto the highway leading to our destination. "Breakfast it is," I said. "Let's try this place." The El Ulcero was a typical roadside restaurant, very spic and Spanish. As Sandy concluded ordering, I whispered to the waiter. "Where's the Juan?" Drool accompanied me, although he had no need to. I eyed him curiously. He didn't eat and last night he hadn't slept -- just sat beside me as I curled up in the sleepingbag Sandy gave me. Apparently his physiological needs were different from ours. But at the moment it was the difference in his appearance that worried me. The waiter had stared at him suspiciously, and I began to wish that I'd told Drool to stay in the car. But I couldn't hide him away forever, and we rejoined Sandy at the table. Immediately the waiter was at our side. "The leetle boy," he murmured. "He ees not eating." "Not hungry," I said, curtly. "Mus' be seeck," the waiter observed. "Behold of the face. Ees very green, no?" "Yes," I challenged. "What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a green face before?" "Only after eating here," the waiter shrugged. He stepped up to Drool. "Observe of the hands. They also are green." "Of course," I told him, "The kid's a natural-born gardener. Haven't you heard of a green thumb?" N Nudging Sandy, I whispered, "Let's get out of here." We rose, paid the check and fled. The waiter stared after us, muttering to himself. "Got to watch it," I told my companions as we climbed back into the car. "Remember, when we get to Groovyland, I do all the talking." "What is this Groovyland?" Drool demanded. "You'll see." TT Te moved through the tourist   traffic and approached the glittering gates at a brisk crawl while I pondered his question. Once upon a time we were a nation of happy voyeurs . "Visuallyoriented by the theatre, motion pictures and television, we were content to move through life as spectators, even at sporting events. We went to zoos, museums, aquariums. But the more we saw, the more jaded we became, and the more we resented the barriers. The footlights barred us from the stage, movies and television separated us from events by a screen, the bars kept us from the zoo animals, the museum exhibits and the fish in the aquariums were under glass, and the sporting events took place in stadia a half-mile away from our reserved seats. Everyone wants a seat on the fifty-yard line. At a parade, the biggest thrill is to be up close. As we got up tighter in our daily lives, the need to get up closer in our entertainment-escapes increased. where you can actually walk down the reconstructed street of a preRevolutionary village. Came planetariums where the stars are still an illusion -- but they surround you on all sides. Came Marineland where the fish leap out of the water and the seals and dolphins perform close enough to splash you. Came Disneyland, with its trips and happenings. Trips and happenings . Perhaps that's the answer. The need to see combined with the need to be. To make viewing a personal experience, to momentarily enjoy a feeling of actual participation. In this regimented, automated, digit-dialling, zip-coded impersonal world where the tedium is the message, we're cut off from close contact with reality. So out of artifice, we construct our own. Drugs for trips, happenings for audience involvement. But drugs are dangerous and happenings demanding. Hence Disneyland, with its safe and easy surrogates -- synthetic trips to synthetic worlds,, happenIF ings where nothing really happens. That's a lot. But Groovyland is the most. "The most!" I repeated to Drool, guiding him through the turnstile and laying out # for three admissions. "Why lay out all the loot?" Sandy asked. "Don't worry, we'll be rolling in it right after we set our deal here. But first I want to show Drool around a little. He ought to know what he's getting into -- it's part of his education." We got into plenty, but I don't know how educational it was to our green-faced guest. Psycholand he didn't dig at all. The idea of entering a fake mental hospital as a make-believe patient and getting a free personality-profile and a ten-minute analysis from a plastic psychiatrist while lying on a plastic couch just didn't do anything for him. He wouldn't try on a straitjacket or take an I.Q. test, nor was he interested in the computerized dating-rating. Sandy tried her best. "Why don't you sit down and fill out the questions on this card?" she coaxed. "What for?" "The machine will process your answers and indicate your best choice for a marriage partner. It's what we call a computer match." Drool shrugged. "Who wants to marry a computer?" he asked. T took him out of there fast and led him into Grislyland. i lie results here were hardly more encouraging. The medieval torture devices left him cold; even the strappado didn't give him a boot. Nor did he care for the Chamber of Horrors with its wax-figure criminals and its replicas of television comedians. "Try Heroland," Sandy suggested, sensing Drool's lack of interest. "He should get some jollies there." I nodded. "Wait until he sees George Washington," I said. Quickly we entered Heroland and I led Drool proudly over to the little auditorium where, as I remembered, every fifteen minutes or so a remarkable event took place. Before the assembled audience an amazingly clever animated figure of the Father of our Country rose from a chair and walked to center stage, there to deliver Washington's Second Inaugural Address. "This you've got to hearl" I told Drool, happily. But when we reached the auditorium we found it deserted; the stage itself was bare. A bored attendant was sweeping the floor near the doorway and I collared him. "What gives?" I inquired. "Where is Washington?" "Took him away yesterday," the attendant informed me. "What a shame!" I glanced at Drool. "I wanted you to see it -- the most lifelike automaton you could ever imagine -- " "Too lifelike" the attendant volunteered. "That's why they took him away." "What do you mean?" "Hear tell he was sold to a bunch of politicians. The way election campaigns are going nowadays, they figure to put this dummy on television, let him give his speech, and run him for governor." "Might have a chance at that," I agreed. "Considering some of the speeches I've (heard other dummies make. After a #, he's got a good name and a familiar face. This is what they buy." "Not those lemon-faced voters in Orange County," Sandy reminded me. "The minute they remember that Washington had something to do with the Constitution, they'll vote against him. He's too left-wing for them." She had a point there. But I was rapidly losing points with Drool. There was just one possible way left to hook his attention, and I decided to take it. I dragged him over to Bodyland. Now all of the other lands in Groovyland are housed in separate buildings. Bodyland is different -- because Bodyland is the building. Drool's eyes bugged when he saw it, and frankly, I don't blame him. Even though this wasn't my first visit here, my eyes protruded. Picture a naked woman three hundred feet tall and proportionately proportioned, tipped over so that die is lying on her stomach. Fluorescent lights flash from her staring eyes as you approach her open mouth, and the lights blind you. Yet you must approach, because that's how you enter Bodyland -- through her mouth. "Step over the lower incisors," I told Drool. "Then sit on her tongue and we'll slide down her throat." Sandy glanced across at me over Drool's head and winked. It was unnecessary; I could already sense his kindled interest. 'Together we seated ourselves on  the pink, plushy surface of the tongue. Somewhere deep inside the inner recesses of the giant figure, a motor began to hum. Slowly the tongue elevated at an angle, propelling us into the throat cavity beyond. "Duck your head," I cautioned. "We're coming to the tonsils!" ly illuminated, and we passed them en route to the tunneling throat. It received us as we shot off the tongue and shot, at a steeper angle, along a neon-lit esophagus. Then we landed in the vast, hollow cavern of the stomach, its well-lighted lining disclosing a network of passages on every side and overhead. Drool glanced around in open curiosity. IF "Want to see the lungs?" I inquired. He nodded quickly. "Oh, yes. Everything." He turned to Sandy. "I never realized there was so much inside you." "I've got a lot of guts, if that's what you mean." But Sandy wasn't displeased by the observation. Quickly we led Drool on a conducted tour of the human anatomy -- through the lungs, along the aorta into the ventricles, past the bronchia, then doubled back along a maze of veins. Pausing to wait for arterial traffic, I branched off into the liver, spleen and kidneys. Everything was well lit, and there were little signs on the walls of each organ or passage to chart our route. "Remarkable, isn't it?" Drool beamed at me happily. "You're getting the real inside story," I assured him. "This exhibit is endorsed by the Secretary of the Interior." With plastic bone-structure and muscle-sheathing gleaming on all sides, we wound our way through the labyrinthine intricacies of canals, ducts and sinus cavities until we were confronted with another corridor, darker and longer than the others. Sandy peered into it. "What's this?" she queried. "One of the canals?" "Alimentary, my dear Watson," I said. Grasping her wrist, I started forward. "Join, hands now, because we're going to loop the loop a few times, and we'll need some intestinal traction." "Isn't there another way to go?." For answer I pointed up at one of the small, neatly lettered signs -- Please Exit Thru Rear . Climbing, clambering, then crawling, we did just that and finally emerged again amidst Groovyland's vortex of vacationing visitors. "Satisfied?" I asked Drool. He nodded. "It was fascinating. Next time we must go to the head -- " "They don't have one in there," I informed him, then realized what he was referring to. "Yes, we'll do that," I amended quickly. "But right now we've got another head to visit. The head of this enterprise -- Sylvester Schlock." Qylvester Schlock rose from be hind his desk and threw his cigar at me. "How dare you?" he spluttered. "How dare you come to me with a proposition like this?" I shrugged with outward calm, but inwardly I echoed the question to myself. Approaching this fabulous showman had not been easy. For I, like all the world, knew the Schlock story. IF Sylvester Schlock was the most controversial figure in the world of show biz. His admirers said he was a self-made man. His enemies agreed, but pointed out that this merely indicated . what you got when you used cheap labor. His boosters stated that Schlock had been bom in a log cabin. His detractors reminded you that the log cabin had been built atop his father's penthouse, where that mulcreate a rural atmosphere. It is true, as Schlock's friends state, that he worked his way through school. But it is also true, as enemies assert, that he had to do so because his father disowned him, and he had worked his way through medical college as a corpse-washer in a Forest Laundromat... In any case, Sylvester Schlock graduated and began his practice as a physician. His supporters remind you that he gained a brilliant reputation as a proctologist. His foes assert that the reason he gave up his spe cialty is because he could never identify his patients when they came face to face with him, and he took a dim view of humanity. Be that as it may, Schlock retired to an area east of Los Angeles, where he owned a thousand acres of barren desert land, and it was here that Groovyland was bom. At first he operated on the lowest level of entertainment -- the roadside tourist trap. Crude signposts along the highway urged motorists to Visit The Monster Museum! and Feed The Ravenous Reptiles! The monster museum turned out to be a small snake-pit Schlock stocked the pit with specimens he found wriggling over his own property, and the ravenous reptiles were merely toads or gecko lizards. But enough cars stopped and enough quarters poured in to enable Schlock to expand. He added a tiny restaurant to his enterprise. Here, his champions say, be attracted a growing clientele because of the unusual flavor of his 'burgers. His opponents admit the flavor was unusual, but hint he used the same source of supply for his food as he did for stocking his snake-pit. Snakeburgers or no, Schlock did have the only eatery in all that stretch of dreary desert -- to say nothing of the only restrooms. To say that Groovyland was founded on the receipts from a public pay-toilet would be a vast oversimplification, but it is true that Schlock always gave the customers what they wanted. He next incorporated an amusement park and carnival, not hesitating to use the lowest carny attractions. And it was here that his unusual genius for entertainment first came into play. Noting that people would pay money for almost anything -- even to see a geek bite the head off a chicken -- Schlock added refinements. On Thanksgiving Day he advertised that his geek would bite the head off a turkey. And before long, just for the kiddies, he had a junior geek who bit the heads off canaries. S uccess breeds success, and from that point on Sylvester Schlock soared. He obtained financing and started Groovyland with its first major attraction -- a typically phony frontier town which he called Tombstone Territory. It had the usual livery stables and saloons for atmosphere, plus Central Casting cowboys, but Schlock added an extra. No doubt harking back to his pre-med days, he built a Boot Hill cemetery plot, with genuine tombstones. Here, driving around in the comfort of a Rent-a-Hearse, one could follow the progress of a daily western drama; see an outlaw apprehended for rustling cattle, watch his twominute trial, attend the subsequent hanging (in which a very skilled stunt-man literally risked his neck at every performance) and then observe the digging of a grave and the burial of the outlaw as a grand finale. Perhaps this is the point where Schlock really made his start. Certainly it was a stroke of sheer genius when he altered the program to include audience participation. Now, for a given fee, one could purchase tickets to join a posse and ride after the outlaw. Another ticket entitled a customer to serve on the jury during the trial. For a considerable extra sum, some lucky member of the audience could play executioner during the hanging. And the biggest kick -- at the largest price, of course -- was to join the burial party and help dig the grave in which the outlaw was interred. Schlock had fathomed the secret at last, and now there was no stopping him. Within the next decade, Groovyland rose from the dusty desert like the pleasure dome of Kublai Khan. Came Monkeyland , where you put on the ape-suit and swung through the branches of the artificial trees; came all the other lands, plus facilities for weddings, christenings, conventions, bar mitz vahs and actual burials in what was somewhat painfully described as a "real, live cemetery" adjoining the private landing-field. Finally, came The Hall of the Mountain King -- a gigantic openair cavern, with rocky walls moulded of genuine papier-mache , in which outdoor concerts were held every weekend. Here the top singing stars performed, the hit combos, the Name Attractions. A booking at Groovyland could make a national reputation overnight and pave the way for television, a spot in Vegas, films, recordings, the works. So it was here, IF naturally, that I determined to launch the career of the entity Fd introduced to Schlock as Sneed Hearn. No wonder he'd hurled his cigar at me. But now, as I stared into Sylvester Schlock's heated countenance, I came on cool. "He's a great singer," I said softly. "Wait until you hear him." "This is a singer?" Schlock stared scornfully at Drool. "I can't even stand the sight of him, let alone the sound." "What's wrong with his looks?" Sandy inquired. "He's green l" Schlock lifted his arms in an imploring gesture. "Do you think for a moment I'm going to put my audience at the mercy of some green kid?" T his, as we say in the industry, was my cue -- and Drool's. I signaled, he stepped forward, he opened his mouth. Out came a perfect reproduction of that smash singsational group, Vermin and the Varmints. Schlock reached for another cigar, but he didn't throw it. He didn't even light it, just sat wideeyed and open-eared as Drool poured it on. Without pausing for breath. Drool launched into a second selection. This one, with an oriental beat, was Yogi and the Yo-Yos punching out What Makes Swami Run? Drool was just about ready id launch an imitation of Charlie Horse and the Bruised Tendons when Schlock's dgar levelled in imperial command. "Stop!" he shouted. "Enough, already!" I noticed that the hand holding the cigar was shaking. So was Schlock's head. "I don't know how you do it, young man," he jproaned, "but never in my life have I heard anything so atrocious, so abominable, so positively disgusting! In other words, you sound exactly like those groups you're imitating. And if it's bad enough few me, it's good enough for the audience." Pointing his Havana Xmperfecto at me, Schlock got down to business. "Our next big concert is scheduled for a week from Saturday. What do you say to a spot for your boy at three G's?" I shrugged. "Forget it." Sandy gave me a glance that was strictly distress merchandise, but I ignored her. "Okay, five G's but that's my top quote, and I'll want repeat options on -- " "No," I said. "But you can't get any more the first time out, not even from the Sullivan Show -- " "No," I repeated. "We don't want any money." Now both Sandy and Schlock were sending out distress signals. I smiled at them happily. "We'll let our boy perform for you absolutely free of charge," I told him. "But on one condition." "Name it." "He's not going to have a spot in your concert a week from Saturday. He is the concert." "The whole show, all by himself?" Schlock did something new with the cigar; he swallowed it. "What's the matter, don't you think it's possible? You heard him." "But -- " I brushed objections aside. "He can take the place of any solo singer, any singing group, any combination of instruments and instrumentalists. What more do you need?" "I know," Schlock conceded. "It's just that a one-man concert is practically unheard of. Even the so-called one-man shows are usually backed up by a supporting act to open the bill." "My boy supports himself," I said. "And if you'll give him a chance, he'll support you, too. This act is going to sell a lot of tickets." "After they've heard him and the word gets around," Schlock agreed. "But this first appearance, he's an unknown quantity. I can't advertise just Sneed Hearn in a one-man performance." "Then bill him as a group," I said. "After all, he is a group when he opens his mouth, isn't he? Call him -- oh, anything -- " Inspiration gleamed in Sylvester Schlock's flashing eyes. "Sneed Hearn and his Hearnias!" he shouted. I gripped his hand. "Okay, we have a firm deal." And thus, a star was bom. 'T'he ride back to Los Angeles I was something of a triumph. "That was a stroke of genius, letting him go on for free the first time," Sandy conceded. "After one exposure, you can name your own price. Joe, you're a genius." It is my policy never to contradict a lady, so I just nodded silently. But deep within myself I could feel the surge of supreme confidence. I knew now that nothing was beyond me; I could achieve the seemingly impossible. Right then and there I resolved to put my belief to the final test. The next time I stopped for a traffic light ou the Strip and a hippie came up to sell me a copy of The Free Press, I would sell him a copy of The Christian Science Monitor. My mood was heightened when we goi.back to the house and Sandy told the waiting group what had happened. "Incredible!" Luke Emia gasped. "Wait 'til they hear him!" "They'll go outta their skulls," Swinger predicted. " I " agreed Grafitti. IF I accepted the accolades with due modesty. After dinner I wandered out on the patio behind the house to compose myself and my thoughts. This was going to be a hectic week, and I had to plan a schedule. To my surprise, I found Drool standing there at the edge of the hilltop, staring up at the smog as though he could actually see the stars beyond. His face was expressionless. I moved up beside him. "What's the matter?" "Nothing." "Then cheer up. You're on your way. You heard what Schlock said -- with your looks and your voice you can't missl" Drool blinked at me. "I still don't see how I'm going to take over the world this way." "Look," I said. "It's all a matter of who has the clout, and in this world money is power. Your voice will make more money than anyone has ever dreamed of earning. With it you can buy anything you want -- " "But I don't want anything for myself. I'm only here to follow orders. And my orders are to conquer. If I just had my own little superdisintcgratosonic weapon -- " "This is your weapon." I pointed at his throat. "And for the moment, I'm your commanding officer. So forward march!" Luke Emia stepped forth from the shadows. "What's this about g weapon?" he asked. I filled him in on Drool's story. "Mean to tell me you haven't investigated any further?" Luke gestured excitedly. "If Drool dropped this gizmo of his when he fell, it must have landed around here somewhere, just as he did. For all we know, it could be lying out in the street." "Forget it," I said. "Who needs weapons?" "We do! Why, if this thing has half the power he says it does, we're wasting our time. We could sell a copy to the government for "Quit talking like a business man," I told him. But Luke was carried away with his own vision. "Then we could turn around and sell another copy to the enemy powers for more billions." "Quit talking like a big business man," I sighed. "I still think you're making a mistake -- " I shook my head. "I'm making a star. From now on, we're all going to be concentrating on that concert. Beckoning to Drool, I moved toward the house. "Time to hit the sack," I said. And we djd. Despite Drool's policy of letting sleeping-bags Be, he rested beside me all night. X#hen morning came, we went to   work. And that's the story of the next ten days -- work and more work. Grafitti wrote lyrics. Swinger did arrangements. With them I coached Drool on proper styles of delivery; how to slur his pronunciation and moan words incoherently, where to go off-key, and all the other techniques of today's top vocalists. Luke Emia and Sandy were kept busy loading platters on the stereo as Drool listened to the groups he'd be imitating -- the Zappers, the Calamity Howlers, Rock Bottom and the Living Ends, and all the other great artists. "You're a slave-driver," Cy Kotic complained. "I don't even have time to listen to the news any more. Because of you, I've missed two declarations of war, an epidemic, four riots, six mass-murders and nine tax increases. If I can't keep up with these normal, every-day events, how can I stay in touch ivith reality?" Only Barf seemed satisfied with the schedule. He'd rearranged his habits so that he now slept all day and stayed awake all night. It was then, while the rest of us retired to our sleeping-bags, that he proceeded with his educational activities. He and Drool spent those nocturnal hours in Barf's room upstairs where the philosopher lived in a fashion once popular in square circles. I'd never been invited to that room, but I know it contained books, a writing desk, and even an old monophonic record-player. It was the sound of the latter which aroused me one midnight just at a time when I was about to entice Sandy over to my sleepingbag to discuss the territorial imperative. "What's that?" I muttered, jumping up and taking the stairs two at a time. As I burst into Barf's room the sound ceased. Drool was seated on the floor amidst a welter of records and books. Barf stood at the recordplayer, removing a disc. "What were you playing just now?" I demanded. Barf put the platter away. "Just a recording from my own collection." "Stop wasting Drool's time. You're supposed to be teaching him something worthwhile." "But he is." Drool indicated the volumes stacked up beside him on the floor. "He's taught me a great deal about life in your world. We've been going through the encyclopedia, slowly. Three volumes a night -- " "Three volumes?" "Drool is a very fast reader," Barf explained. "And a very fast listener, too. I answer questions as he goes along." "What sort of questions?" I inquired. "Well, we're up to the letter P" Drool said. "So we've been discusIF sing pathology and psychosis and poverty and plagues and pollution and population-explosion and prejudice and Pop Art -- " He nodded reassuringly. "I'm beginning to understand how you people live." "I've just been discussing public opinion polls," Barf explained. "For example, here's one of the latest -- a poll taken to determine whether or not people believe in polls -- " "Who needs it?" I glanced disapprovingly at the book-shelves lining the walls. "You think books are obsolete?" Drool asked, eagerly. "So does Marshall McLuhan. In fact, he wrote a book about it." I gripped Drool's shoulder and pulled him to his feet. "Come on," I murmured. "You're going downstairs with me." Barf looked confused. "Don't you approve of my educational methods?" T shook my head. "Teach him the things he must know when he's rich and successful. How to handle a sports-car with a right-hand drive, how to order a hamburger from a French menu, how to set up a taxfree foundation. That's what he needs to learn -- the practical stuffl With only a few days left before the concert, I don't want his mind cluttered up with a lot of useless knowledge. Facts will only confuse him." Barf gestured tentatively. "Are you quite sure this is what you want?" he said quietly. "In a world of chaos, can't you think of any meaningful contribution besides more chaos?" "People want to get zonked," I told him. "That's what's happening, baby. You go with whatever turns you on." "Maybe it's time to turn off," Barf mused. "Before we reach a point of no return, where sheer sensory impact loses meaning. We have no music any more -- just the beat. Our abstract art is nothing but a series of Rorschach tests. When artists cease to communicate with their audiences, the ability to communicate is soon lost and all that matters is subjective sensation, drug-induced. We have sold our birthright for a mess of pot." "End of lecture," I snapped, and dragged Drool downstairs. "But I like talking to him," Drool protested. "He's even taught me about warfare and strategy. Divide and conquer. To the victor belongs the spoils. Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Oh, if I only had my superdisintegratosonic weapon now -- I could take over in no time!" "You take over Saturday," I reminded. "By making a success of the concert. And until then, I'm calling the shots." The remaining days" before the performance blended into a hyperactive blur. Rehearsals and lastminute preparations occupied every waking moment and even invaded my dreams. If I'd taken time to reflect I probably would have kept a closer watch on my companions, but it didn't occur to me. I was only vaguely aware that Luke Emia absented himself from the house at regular intervals, and that Barf and Drool exchanged muttered conversations in the comer whenever they met. But I was too busy to check up. I spent hours on the horn with Sylvester Schlock, going over the publicity and promotion for the concert, and additional hours with Swinger, Grafitti and Sandy, planning the numbers to use in the program itself. By Friday evening I was a basket case. "Tranquilizers don't help any more," I told Cy Kotic. "You were a doctor once. Can't you do something to calm me down? Isn't there some kind of operation -- a pre-frontal lobotomy -- ?" "This you need like a hole in the head," he replied. "Now just relax. Tomorrow at this time it will all be forgotten. That's your answer, the same answer I give all my patients. Just remember to forget" It sounded like a great notion, and somehow it got me through the final night. Late that evening I wandered out on the patio with Drool and Sandy. The view was breath-taking. So was the smog. "Look!" Sandy gestured to the east. "Those lights, way off in the distance -- isn't that Groovyland?" "It's all Groovyland," I told her. "The whole world." Drool nodded excitedly. "Just think -- like tomorrow I'm going to conquer it!" "Sure," I said, smiling at Sandy. I wasn't worried about Drool and his predictions. As far as I was concerned, all this talk about conquest was just his schtick. The only trouble with schticks , of course, is that sometimes you wind up with the short end... IX nphey came to Groovyland on i Saturday night. They came by Cadillac and by pick-up truck, by station-wagon and by motorcycle, by sleek and shiny sports-car and by broken down bus. They tangled the traffic on the freeway, turning the air blue with exhaust fumes and with curses. They jammed the parkinglot, jockeying for position as they smashed one another's fenders. They glowered and glared, swore and snarled, then pushed and pummeled their way into the lines before the ticket-windows. Twenty thousand of them came, sweating and squirming and shrieking their IF way into their seats. And why not? After all, they came here to have fun. We came for business; Luke Emia in his car, Barf, Swinger, Grafitti land Cy Kotic in a Volkswagen. Sandy and Drool rode with me. Originally I'd intended to bring them all, but Luke pointed out the advantages of keeping extra transportation handy. "Suppose we need to make a fast get-away after the concert," he said. "I don't think you're a bit funny," Sandy told him. But in the end, we split up and drove our separate ways. While the others joined the audience in the Hall of the Mountain King, Sandy and I conducted Drool backstage. "Up tight?" Sandy whispered to him. Drool shook his head and grinned. "Under control." And why not? He didn't have to scuffle for bread, because he didn't eat. He didn't need a fancy pad because he didn't sleep. He was the quintessence of all that the gurus taught and the hippies sought -- a completely non-involved entity who lived merely to do his thing. Maybe if I had his advantages I wouldn't be here. I'd have turned Drool over to the scientists for study, let them examine his unique physiology and alien mentality. Or perhaps I'd just let him free to g# his own way in the world. But I did have to eat and I did need a pad, and my thing was everybody's thing -- do unto others before they do unto you. So I was here, and I was nervous. Jostling through the narrow corridor behind the outdoor stage, we came to the tiny cubicle which served as Sylvester Schlock's temporary headquarters for the evening. He bounded into the hall and grasped my hand. "DM you see the crowd?" he demanded. "Beautiful!" I stared into the office over his shoulder. "So is that," I told him. The floor of the little room was stacked with canvas bags stuffed with coins and currency; loose bills and loose change cascaded from their containers, brought here from the box-offices. "Twenty thousand customers at three bucks a throw," Schlock murmured. "Sixty thousand on one concert alone. And if your boy makes it big tonight -- " "He will," I promised. "Just keep an eye on him." "Sorry," said Schlock. "I've got to stay here and keep an eye on the loot. I never mix business with pleasure, and watching money like this is a pleasure, believe me." "But I thought you were going to introduce our star -- " "There's a mike on stage. Why don't you do the honors?" Schlock waved me forward. "Better start soon, that mob is getting restless." Oandy squeezed my hand. I  squeezed back. And then, somehow I was out there under the lights, under the scrutiny of twenty thousand pairs of watchful eyes. And I was singing something about, "Tonight we bring you a new era in entertainment -- a new star straight from the heavens -- Sneed Hearn! " The applause rose, and Drool stepped onstage, moving to the microphone and bowing. "This is it," I whispered. "Remember -- all systems go!" "I'll lay it on them," Drool promised. I left the stage, perspiring. Drool stood under the spotlight, grinning. The crowd fell silent, waiting. Ill never forget that moment; the hushed, still moment of expectancy. And I'll never forget the moment that followed it; the moment when Drool opened his mouth. Drool opened his mouth and the music came out It poured and pulsed, surged and soared. It wasn't just the sound of a vocalist and a small combo -- the majestic strains issuing from that tiny throat were the unmistakable utterance of a mighty orchestra and full chorus. "Holy Toledo!" Schlock moaned. "No," I corrected. "That's not it. What he's laying on them is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony!" Schlock may have groaned again; if so I didn't hear it, for the sound was drowned in the greater # groan of the audience. Even Beethoven was lost in the impromptu chorale of boos, hisses, shouts and catcalls. "Get him off before they murder him!" Schlock shrieked, pushing me onstage. I got him off. "Come on," I muttered, grabbing Drool by the nape of his neck. "They're starting to throw things." And indeed they were. I dodged a pizza hurled by an indignant music-lover and ducked a beer-bottle aimed at me by another patron of the arts. "What's the matter?" Drool quavered. "Why don't they like it? Barf told me they would -- " "Barf?" I shook my head, but the picture was clear now, only too clear. That two-bit philosopher had corrupted our boy with classical music on his own record-player, seduced him into symphonies. "Wait until I get my hands on him!" I promised. But wait we would. Right now the important thing was to keep that angry crowd out front from getting their hands on us. Somehow I propelled Drool into the wings. The audience was rising, converging on the stage amidst a thunder of rage. IF The thunder was split by the lightning of Sandy's scream. "No!" she wailed. "Stop -- " I glanced up quickly, then blinked in sudden shock. Apparently Barf wasn't the only traitor in our midst. TT'or there, standing beside the  little offstage cubicle where the box-office receipts rested, was Luke Emia. As Schlock and Sandy raised their hands high in helpless surrender, Luke moved forward to cover them with -- "My superdisintegratosonic weapon!" Drool squealed happily. "He found it!" Which explained Luke's interest when he questioned me about the lost weapon, explained his absence during recent evenings when he went out to hunt for it in the canyon brush near the house. It also explained why he'd suggested we drive here tonight in separate cars. He had the weapon, and now he had the caper: holding up the place for the concert receipts. "Stand back!" Luke warned. "Don't anybody move -- " The words came too late, for Drool was already ducking under his arm, tugging at the oddly shaped, rifle-like object in Luke's hands. Luke pulled the trigger -- Then it was in Drool's hands, just as the weapon went off. Drool jerked the muzzle aside just in time to avoid the puff of greenish smoke which burst forth and coalesced into -- Another Drool, standing side by side with his exact counter-part, an identical twin Drool holding an identical weapon from which a puff of greenish smoke burst forth to coalesce into a third Drool -- "Stop!" I shouted. "Not until I conquer the world," Drool gurgled. "With that thing? It doesn't kill anyone!" "Never said it did," Drool shrugged. "All it does is reproduce." "You mean it duplicates?" "Reproduces," Drool corrected me. "How do you think Krool manspring?" Another greenish puff and from it, another Drool -- then another and another -- "That's the secret of taking over the world," the Drools chorused. "Divide and conquer." A rumbling roar from the platform behind us indicated another kind of problem. "It's the audience!" Schlock cried. "They're storming the stage -- they'll tear us to pieces -- " "Don't worry," said the Drools in unison. "We outnumber them." Then six Drools turned and marched onstage, raising six weapons. Six puffs coalesced and as the crowd shrank back there were twelve Drools facing them. Twelve weapons raised, and now the twelve became twenty-four. Twenty-four became forty-eight and forty-eight became ninety-six and ninety-six became a hundred and ninety-two and a hundred and ninety-two be came an army and the army became -- But you get the idea. So did I. Grabbing Sandy's hand, I ran for it. X Tt is very quiet here. Sandy and I stopped to plunder a refreshment stand on our way,  k "witzendUand find cur, baby. and I think we have a big enough stock of provisions to last us indefinitely. That's good, because I'm not sure we're ever going to come out again. At the rate Drool was reproducing himself, he may well have managed to take over the world by sheer weight of numerical supremacy alone. And I can just see it now -- everybody knee-deep in masses of Drools, rising higher and higher until they smother. It's the final population explosion, I suppose. And since Drools don't eat or sleep or have much need of oxygen, there's no reason to suppose they'll ever stop multiplying. If they ever get the idea to start singing in unison, the sound-waves will topple every man-made structure on earth. Oh, there's no end to the possibilities. But meanwhile, Sandy and I will stay here, where it's safe and quiet. Here, in Bodyland, in the one hiding-place that we can depend on. We're back in the womb. Some day, when it's all over, we may venture out again, just to see what happened. Right now I like it here, and I'm not about to move. The way things are now, Drool can have his world. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there... IF IF  Feature Let There fphe Martian Invasion seems to be coming to an end. It was a long war, lasting for decades, and facets. Great ships plied space bevoid with every conceivable ray and alien Martians of every kind and description died. The sands of Mars grew colorful with blood -- red blood, green blood, you-name-it blood. The seas of Earth were looted for water and boiled away a thousand times. But now the ancient war is nearly over, and not even a conference table is left to mark its attrition. At least that seems to be true in the science-fiction magazines. This month, for example, Chapdelaine's Spork is busy with humans and Be Light aliens in an entire solar system, but the system is not that of our sun. Robert Bloch brings us a little green man, but not from Mars. And C. C. MacApp's ship with its crew and strange ship minds voyages far from Earth -- but not toward any planet of our system. Perhaps it's a pity. We'll miss the loveliness of Dejah Thoris and the sad, haunting Martian cities of Leigh Brackett. But science fiction still depends on a genuine respect for the basic facts of science, and our present knowledge rules out any chance for technical, intelligent races of the solar planets except Earth. We can't rule out the possibility of life on some of the other planets -- even some that seem pretty hostile. But if such life does exist, as most scientists hope, it must be composed largely of rather primitive plant and very low orders of animal forms. Most of the general public aren't ready to accept that yet. The flyingsaucer groups just about have to have nearby aliens to make the constant coming and going of their illusive (and in my opinion, illusionary) craft possible. But even the more conservative public clings to the belief in solar aliens. Whenever I address a group not composed of science-fiction fans, most of the audience stubbornly refuse to give up their feared but beloved Martians. They are now pointing out, quite correctly, that newspapers have reported that the astronauts who circled the Moon couldn't find any visible evidence of technical, intelligent life on Earth. Hence, it seems to most people that we can't possibly know enough about other planets to rule out such life there. It sounds logical, but the argument won't hold water. The catch lies in that often-omitted word, visible. There was a tremendous amount of evidence of technical, intelligent life on Earth available to those astronauts. They were bombarded by beams of high-frequency radio signals that required a welldeveloped technology and carried information in an ordered form that had to denote intelligence. We're no longer limited to that tiny part of the spectrum usable by our eyes. And any other technical race in our evidence that we could detect. AT ercury has always been con-"-" sidered a pretty poor place for life to flourish. Lying only # once supposed to turn only one face toward that searing light, leaving the hot side at the temperature of molten tin while the other froze at almost absolute zero. A few stories had life in a thin Twilight Zone that wobbled back and forth between light and dark, but even that area was troublesome because Mercury was supposed to have no atmosphere. Our current picture leaves much of this in doubt. The latest findings indicate that Mercury revolves in a way that turns all of the surface beneath the great solar orb, and that there is some kincl of thin atmosphere. But the new knowledge doesn't make life more probable. We know now that the light from the sun is accompanied by fantastic energy radiation of other kinds, such as highly charged particles that would be fatal even to electronic robots and would never permit life to form there. Venus remains largely a mystery, despite the American and Russian probes. These have given us a picture of a planet with a tremendous IF blanket of atmosphere under high pressure and a temperature above #F. Initial indications are also that this temperature is fairly uniform over the entire planet, also. It would obviously predude any life we can imagine. Yet there are some doubts. While much of the atmosphere seems to be composed of carbon-dioxide gas, the Russian probe did indicate that there were slight traces of free oxygen and water vapor. Some scientists have calculated that even this small amount of oxygen could not exist at such high temperatures unless there were plant forms to break down the carbon-dioxide and release the oxygen regularly into the atmosphere. If so, the plant life must be scarce and located mostly around the polar regions. Certainly there isn't enough oxygen for any high level of animal activity to exist there. Tars remains the hopes of most extraterrestrial doters. And there is a good reason for that. The fantastically successful flight of Mariner IV around that planet gave us a lot of information and showed us that Mars was pitted with craters like the Moon, but it did not make conditions quite so bad that life was impossible there. We know that the planet has an atmosphere; we can even see clouds in it, and locate what is best explained as a thin layer of frost or ice that accumulates in winter at the poles. The results of tests by Mariner force us to admit that there can be very little oxygen or water vapor in the air of Mars -- but that little might still support some life. Our visual evidence tends to indicate that such life does exist. There have been elaborate theories of odd chemical crystals to account for the fact that each summer green spreads rapidly over one hemisphere of Mars, to die off with the coming of winter. But those theories run into difficulties when they have to account for other factors. We see storms that must be dust storms on Mars. These blot out the green -- but it pops up again quickly, as it would if growing plants forced their way through dust deposits. Anyhow, the most economical theory as to unprovable assumptions is that there is life there. The canals, incidentally -- or properly, the channels (canali) -- are no evidence of anything, because They're as subject to debate as the existence of life. There's no certain evidence that they are more than accidental illusions caused by certain vague markings on the planet; and the evidence of Mariner IV tends somewhat to be against their existence. Scientists on Earth have even demonstrated that some Earth life could exist under Martian conditions. Lichens -- composed of algae and fungi living together symbiotically -- and some other simple plants have been grown at simulated Martian conditions -- and even a few primitive animal forms have survived there. But this has nothing to do with technology and intelligence. No early technology would be possible to give rise to a higher culture. In that atmosphere, fire would be impossible. And most primitive technology grows out of the use of fire, leading to metals, glass and all the other artifacts needed to handle the things that come later and don't require fire for their shaping. The same poor atmosphere would limit the activity of any animal to the point where the Earth sloth would seem like a bolt of lightning in motion. There simply isn't enough free oxygen to supply the energy for great activity. Brains would be excess baggage that couldn't be supported; such a collection of energy-consuming cells not immediately necessary to raw existence would be too great a luxury for the environment, and would never evolve. Tn the long run, the level of energy  available to the organism is probably the most important consideration in the development of higher life forms. Too much of it in the environment would speed up certain processes until no living balance could be struck. Too little limits the organism to the dreariest need for pure animal efficiency to exist at all. Even evolution must be limited by the energy supply, and such evolution on a world with little oxygen for animal life would obviate any chance for intelligent brains. Of course, there are other processes that don't involve the oxygen from an atmosphere, such as fermentation. But these are less efficient and yield less energy; and all life forms that use such processes on Earth are extremely primitive; most also depend on food from plants that can benefit from the high levels of energy available by photosynthesis on Earth, where the sunlight level is high without being lethal. This need for a source of energy suitable for biological use makes life in even the most primitive form unlikely on the planets beyond Mars. The moons of Jupiter receive less light and warmth by far than does Mars, so that even plant life there may be impossible. And the largest of these moons -- Ganymede -- is smaller than Mars, and less capable of holding a rich atmosphere. Jupiter itself remains an enigma. With more than ten times the diameter of Earth, it has retained an enormous atmosphere from which even the hydrogen has not vanished into space. Its huge gravity grips every gas molecule firmly, and the sun is so far away -- almost half IF is conveyed to those molecules to speed them up to velocities that could break from the planet's pull. We can see only the surface here, and our instrument readings leave many factors in doubt. If one theory is correct, Jupiter is far too cold to provide the energy needed by life. But there are other theories, involving the slow escape of radioactive heat from such a giant atmosphere and the odd behavior of the gases in it, which make the amount of free energy unpredictable at present. If any planet beyond Mars can support life, it must be Jupiter. But while the physics of energy are uncertain, the chemistry of biological processes offers us no real hope of any life there either. Saturn and the other planets further out must be dead. There could never have been enough energy available on them for the first organic chemicals that build living matter to form. T ittle by little, science has tak' en away our hope of finding alien enemies and friends in our system. But there are compensations. Forty years ago, when science fiction was just beginning in the magazines, all the speculations of science indicated that the chance of life beyond the solar system was almost exactly zero. At the time, the only theory we had to account for the existence of planets around our sun was so complicated that we could expect no other star in the entire galaxy to have similar planets. And we didn't have any idea at all as to how life could evolve spontaneously on even our own planet. Now. we know better. We've demonstrated experimentally that life is almost certain to evolve, and we have theories which indicate that the formation of planets is a natural and common thing for stars. Better still, we have evidence that other stars do have planets. So far, the other planets we have discovered are huge, bearing little resemblance to Earth, but they help to prove that planets are not unique to our system. Today, it's not too optimistic to believe that most stars somewhat like our sun -- and there are a vast number of them -- have planetary systems. Our current theories indicate that many of those systems must include a planet not too dissimilar to ours, and that such planets almost certainly will have life. There must have been other intelligent races in the past. There surely will he other intelligent races in the future. The only question is whether intelligence has enough survival value for another race -- or for us -- to survive until we can get together. But we have to allow some optimism in our science fiction, after alL And now that the great and IF IF  Novelette With Gerlik insane, Ben Tomsun had to take over the Ship. But no sensible man would help him. I TT'rom Deck Ten, where the " pines grew, it was fifteen hundred feet up to the sunlamps on the steel bottom of Sea Deck. That was not, of course three times as hard a climb as the five hundred feet between lower decks, because deck-gravity -- a full gee at soillevel -- tapered off quickly above any deck. Then, too, the rope ladder here only hung to a platform six hundred feet up in a vast old pine beside the circular hatchway called Central Well. By the time one reached that platform, gravity was less than half a gee, treetops and parasitic flowers were burgeoning joyously, and a vigorous young man need hardly pause for breath before starting up the ladder. Pryingboy Thorp was already near the top of the ladder, preceding, as a Watch Corporal should, the five men of his squad. The lamp-heat -- not too much of it directed toward Central Well -- was delicious on his skin. He loved this trip -- had, in fact, pestered superiors brashly to get assigned permanently to Sea Deck patrol. He loved the colorful, per fumy mass of vegetation, and even more the feel, this far up the ladder, of virtual free-fall. for his ancestors, in times before the Catastrophe, to don those legendary pressure-suits and go completely outside the sinus -- outside the Ship, even! Just below the edge of Sea Deck, while he pas st  weightless, he paused to look down at his squad. Kail, Waran, Arden, and Pendergast were spaced along the ladder, with Muller still on the platform as rear guard. Pry went a rung higher. Carefully, because sudden weight could play tricks with one's co-ordination he reached up, grasped a knoblike thing that had once been an interior eye of the Ship, and pulled himself onto the narrow ledgelike shelf that ran around the inner curve of Sea Deck's central retaining-wall. His renewed weight felt enormous at first. He leaned against the wall until dizziness passed, then climbed a battered steel ladder mid sat straddling the fifteen-foof-high wall. The acrysteel was cool between his thighs. He glanced around at the circular sea. Light glinted off wavelets stirred by influx-air. There was a smell of fish and sea-plants. From an excrescence on the steel a few feet away came one of the Voices of the insane Ship. "This is Captain Gerlik. I feel your electrical capacitance. By your mass, you must be a grown man. I bless you, my son! Though I am deaf and blind where you are, I bless you." Another voice cut in for a fe moments, mouthing gibferish, then Gerlik's voice returned. "Though the universe has passed away, I shall maintain...-. " The sound dribbled away into a mutter and stopped, as if the speaker had forgotten Pry. He shivered a little. He knew the voices were only the minds and personalities of longdead people transcribed into the Ship's computers, but they were eerie. He wondered why the first rebels, ten or twelve generations ago, hadn't smashed this communicator-outlet along with others. Maybe they'd needed to know whether the Ship stayed alive at all. IF 'T'his space -- called Middle Void -- was the biggest in Sinus B, unless there might be bigger ones in the dark, uninhabited, unreachable other half. From where he sat, by turning his head be could see the entire enclosing curve of the sinus wall. Sinus B, the tattered old books said, was a long cylinder closed at both ends, hashed across at intervals with decks having their own artificial gravities, and with various ingresses, ducts, fittings and buried machinery. He knew the dimensions by heart. Fifteen thousand feet long; four thousand in diameter; with the hundred-foot-wide holes in each deck that comprised Central Well, There were no overhead lamps here in Middle Void. The lamps were in a ring around the sinus wall, fifteen hundred feet above the water. They provided light and heat not only for that round ocean, but also for Upsidedown Sea, three thousand feet above his head. He tilted back his head and stared up. Had that half of the sinus been peopled too, at some time? No record remained, and the round hole in the middle of Upsidedown Sea -- surely the continuation of Central Well -- was perpetually dark. It wasn't likely anyone would ever reach there now, because three thousand feet was much too far to build a ladder or to catapult a grappling-hook, even aside from the complications of inverted gravity. There were sounds below hfaa, and Fathersface Kail climbed the wall. He grinned at Pry and asked, "All right if I dunk?" "Sure," Pry said, and watched enviously as the other dropped to the shallows and began to splash about. The Ship maintained the water at a comfortable temperature, the better for the fish crop. But as Corporal, Pry must stay alert. Not that there was ever anything to observe, except some citizen trying to fish illegally, or a toothick growth of seaweed. It was two hundred years since the last Ship's stooge tried to sneak in, and almost as long since the last robot machine appeared. General opinion was that there was no longer anyone alive outside Sinus B, and no 'pairbots still operating. Nevertheless, he must be watchful. The rest of the squad arrived one by one -- Troublechild Waran, Secondboy Arden, Baldbaby Pendergast -- who, however he'd been born, was far from bald now -- and Jamestwo Muller -- the oldest man of the squad, who was beginning to be bald. They all joined Kail in the water. After a while Waran climbed up beside Pry. Waran was the youngest of the squad, barely nineteen. He stared up at Upsidedown Sea. "Why aren't there any fish up there?" Pry gave him an amused glance. "Maybe there are. They'd have to be pretty big to see at that distance. Did you ever hear of a fish five or six feet long?" Waran flushed a little and grinned. "No." He was, quiet for a minute. "If the gravity ever failed up there, all that water would fall on us, and some would pour down Central Well! Why is the gravity upside-down there, do you suppose?" Pry, who'd wondered often enough, shrugged. "Maybe that's part of the Ship's madness. Or maybe it was designed that way when the Ship left Earth." .Waran said softly, "Eight hundred years! And now Earth's gone, with the rest of the universe. How long do you suppose the Ship will last? And will it ever war upon us again? It could stop recycling air, or leave the plant nutrients out. It could leave the sunlamps off, or -- or poison the water!" Pry, irritated, got to his feet. He began shedding his backpack and Other gear. "Then I suppose we'd all die." He started around the top of the retaining-wall. "I'm going to have a look at the other side." He went carefully -- one certainly didn't want to fall down Central Well -- but tried to act nonchalant. The sensible thing, of course, would be to drop to the water and swim or wade; but, except for Waran, the squad were all older than Pry and he didn't want to show timidity. II Hphe shallows near the opposite I curve of the retaining-wall were normal. Or were they? His stomach tightened suddenly. That shape out there, distorted to view by the surface and the waves -- was it a man lying on the bottom? Drowned men don't stay submerged. He dove and swam, after shouting for his squad. The thing had arms and legs, certainly, but... Then he was close enough to see that it was some kind of limp garment -- one that would cover a man all over. Skin prickling, he threw a look up toward the black hole in the middle of Upsidedown Sea; then, arching himself, he dove and seized an arm of the garment. It felt slick, like the few scraps of old plastic that still existed. His men gathered around, treading water. Waran, eyes wide, asked in an awed voice, "What is it?" Pry's own voice was shaky. "It's a pressure-suit! It was right here, on the bottom. There's not enough current to have moved it, and it wasn't here yesterday; so, an intruder's come into the sinus sometime during the last dark-cycle here!" Muller said hoarsely, "There aren't any more people outside the sinus! It must have been some kind of robot!" IF Pry said impatiently, "A robot wouldn't need a pressure-suit. They 'don't breathe, and they have their own grav-lifts. So there are people out there after all!" He began towing the suit toward the retainingwall... There was no more talk until they pulled themselves from the water. Then Muller asked, more reasonably, "But why would he abandon it? Do you suppose he drowned? Or maybe the suit just fell from up there I" Pry suppressed annoyance. "How could that happen, with the gravity reversed up there? Do you see any water falling this way?" Muller grinned. "No. But why would he abandon it?" "Because," Pry said, "he's trying to pose as -- as one of the people! Maybe in the dark, he didn't realize the suit could be seen from the retaining-wall. But he's gone somewhere below. He could be hiding on Deck Ten. Or lower." Waran tasked shakily, "What would he want?" Pry shook his head slowly. "As a stooge of the Ship, he may have been sent to prepare the way for some sort of invasion; or he might be here just as a spy." Muller growled, "He won't find spying easy! Are we going to search Deck Ten?" "No. Not until we get reinforcements." Pry stared upward. "First of all we're going to send word down to Deck One; then I want to get this thing out of sight in case someone or something's watching from -- from up there." He looked at Muller. "You probably know more people on the various decks than any of us do. You take the word down. Tell a few people along the way, but no strangers; and don't delay getting down to Deck One. You'll have to climb down through four or five ladders in the dark." Muller shrugged. "I've done that plenty of times. Shall I say anything else except..." Pry shook his head. "Just what's happened." In case Muller were intercepted by the intruder -- who might have unimaginable weapons, hypnotic drugs, anything -- it would be better to keep the report vague. AyTuller nodded and hurried to"- ward the down-ladder. "I wonder," Waran said softly, "what he'll look like? If he'll be normal, I mean." He eyed the suit which, with the water drained out of it, was surprisingly light. "One thing -- he's bigl" Pry looked again at the suit. "Yes. There were four sizes of pressure-suit, and this must be the biggest. We'll have to be really alert! Kail, you and Waran stay up here on watch. Pendergast, you go down to the tree-platform on Deck Ten as a lookout. Arden, you follow me down. Both of you make sure your knives are loose in the scabbardsl " Pendergast turned, then hesitated. "How are you going to carry the suit? If he's skulking somewhere, watching the ropes, he'll see it!" Pry told him, "I'm going to bundle it up and stuff it in my backpack. If we all act casual, even if he does see us he may not suspect anything." The plastic of the suit -- brownish-yellow stuff -- seemed incredibly thin to ward off the terrors of open space, "though those might be exaggerated in the old tales. There were many thickened parts of the suit, including a thick ridge around the waist, where things were imbedded. There were loops for attaching things. The helmet was semi-rigid, with a horizontal window of clear yellow glass. There were instruments sealed into the helmet, and several turns of wire completely around it near the' crown. No doubt it had radio and all the other legendary things. But it made a small enough bundle to get in a backpack. Pry walked around to the ladder, glanced to make sure Arden was following and started down. There was five hundred feet or more of clear air before he was among lacelike tendrils of vine, and glad even of that tenuous cover. Then he reached the flaring pinetops and paused to let his eyes adjust to dimmer light. This was a dim fairy-world, with the light from the sunlamps heavily screened by foliage. Birds that would have had to beat their wings hard in full gravity soared easily here, or hovered with rasual wingbeats. Squirrels made magnificent slow leaps from branch to branch. There was a distinct ecology of small animals at this level -- even cats took advantage of the thick foliage and low gravity, eating what they could catch, drinking water that collected in upturned blossoms during the gentle dark-cycle rains. Pry continued on down. Gravity increased. The pine-trunks became thick and gnarled, the branches fewer and the light dimmer. He joined Pendergast on the platform. "Hear anything?" "No. Shall I go on down?" "Yes." Pry waited while the older man climbed down the ladder of pegs driven into the treetrank. When Pendergast set foot on the ground and signalled up, Pry could see him only dimly by light coming in laterally from Central Well. Pry went down and they strode the short distance to the retaining-awll of this deck. Pry turned to peer into the gloomy forest. "My guess is, he went farther down while it was dark' He couldn't be sure, but be shrugged and sent Pendergast down the next ladder. IF D eck Nine, five hundred feet below Deck Ten, had a thinner layer of soil suitable for wheat. It was in day-cycle now, but wouldn't be for long. Pry, stepping off the ladder, stood with his hip against the retaining-wall -- a low one, here -- and stared around at the sinus wall. Intervening low hills hid the base of it and the rim of trees along it -- willows taking advantage of the peripheral drain-off ditch. There'd have to be a search there when enough guardsmen arrived. The sunlamps were hot. One quadrant of wheat, to his left, was nearly ripe. Directly before him was a greener quadrant, while to the right was a crop of alfalfa to re-liven the soil. On the far side of Central Well was the newly-plowed sector. He'd scrutinized all four quadrants, of course, as he came down the ladder. He waited for Arden to join him and Pendergast. "Wait here a minute, the two of you I'm going to look at those tracks in the ripe sector." The tracks, two sets of them, led away from the retaining-wall. A little way out, one set zigzagged, while the other mote or less pursued. That might mean some girl leading her man friend on a laughing chase; no one lived on the grain decks, but anyone could visit. At the best, the pair who'd made these tracks had trampled grain unnecessarily. Pry followed the tracks to a low hummock. Partway up the slope, one set continued straight on over while the other turned back -- retracing carefully to avoid trampling more wheat, which was proper. Stepping in the continuing tracks for the same reason, Pry followed them up the hummock. From the top he could see the body sprawled face up in the wheat beyond. An area of flattened grain indicated she'd fallen, gotten up to stagger a few steps, and fallen again. He shouted for Pendergast and Arden, then ran toward the girl. She was perhaps in her early twenties, slight, dark-haired. She wore a tunic of green cloth that left her tanned arms and legs bare. Her moccasins were scuffed. Her hands showed signs of moderate work. Pry guessed she might be from Deck Four or Deck Five, where people lived in the fruit-orchards. She lay limp, her breathing slow, but Pry saw no sign of injury. Carefully he rolled her over and winced at a round stain of blood on her garment, just at the back of the left arm-hole. Pendergast, coming alongside, grunted. Pry reached under the cloth. There was a small hard object half-imbedded in the flesh. Gently, he pulled it free and looked at it. Arden gasped. The thing was a very slim bullet -- hardly more than a half-inch IF needle. Pry looked up at the other two men. "This is a hypodermic bullet! Do you remember the pictures and descriptions of the pistols?" He gently pressed her garment against the tiny wound to make sure she wasn't bleeding any more, then got bandage-cloth and a bit of dry balsam from his belt-pouch, washed her wound with water from his canteen, rubbed the balsam against the still-wet skin and plastered on a bit of doth. Then he got to his feet and stared toward the rope ladder. It seemed very likely that the intruder had gone down at least one deck farther. "You two stand guard at the ladder. I'll try to revive her." Ill   to stir, moaned and tried to gather her arms under her. Pry knelt quickly. "Lie still! I think you'll feel better in a few minutes." She stiffened, but obeyed. Her breathing strengthened. Presently she lifted her head enough to see him. "Oh!" she said in a surprised, relieved tone. Her brown eyes, though, showed fright. "What happened to you?" he asked. She drew in her breath. "I -- I'd just come up to inspect the wheat. A man was standing a little way from the ladder. I nodded and he nodded back, and I walked along the retaining-wall to the ripe sector. I must have stopped and looked back at him too curiously. He -- he acted a little odd, and he was -- was pale; not tanned. I thought he might be some hermit from Deck Ten. Then he ran toward me and I saw something in his hand, a sort of pistol, like the pictures in the old books. I ran and tried to dodge, and he followed me. I felt a sting at the back of my shoulder. I tried to get across a hummock, hoping he wouldn't follow, and then... and then I began to feel weak. I guess I went a little way and fell down." "You fell twice," Pry told her, and felt foolish. "What did he look like?" "Just -- j'ust pale. He was cleanshaved, and his hair was cut short. He wore ordinary clothes like anyone. Anyone on the orchard decks, I mean." "Was he big?" "Yes. An inch or more taller than you, and heavier. I thought it was odd that such a muscular man wouldn't be tanned." Pry felt a stir of pique. He was considered muscular enough himself. He demanded, "Did you see him go back to the ladder?" "No. I didn't look back until I was beyond the hummock, then I -- Do you think he's still on this deck?" "No, I don't. I think he went farther down." Her eyes widened. "Somebody has to give the alarm! Obviously, with that pistol, he's a -- a stooge! " Pry felt that he was scowling at her. "I've already sent a messenger down. Come on, if you can walk now. We'll build a fire near the ladder." She looked puzzled. "A fire?" "The upper decks will be dark by now, and before long this one will, too. I don't want to risk starting down in the dark until reinforcements get here." He flushed, realizing she might interpret that as cowardice. "In this backpack I've got the suit he came down in. I can't risk his getting it back. Without if, at least he's trapped in our half of the sinus." She stared at him for a minute. "Ah! You mean a pressure-suitl Where did you -- " "We found it on Sea Deck." He helped her to her feet, and urged her toward the ladder. nphere was, as on all decks, a small pile of firewood near the ladder, since patrols were likely to camp on any deck through the dark-cycle. Pendergast got busy with a firebow and soon had a blaze going. The girl looked fairly well recovered by now, and Pry questioned her some more. "Didn't you bring a canteen up with you, or anything? "Yes, a standard kit. I left it near the ladder rather than carry it with me. I guess he took it" Pry stared away for a minute. "Fine," he said sourly. "Anything to help out his disguise. Well, we'll feed you. I don't want to send you down the ladders in your condition in the dark. Where do you live? On one of the orchard decks? She flushed, a little angry. "Deck Five. I can get down all right!" "No. There'll be men coming up the ladders anyway, and you'd slow them down. Besides, I need you here, in case some superior of mine comes up and wants to question you. You're the only person, so far as we know, who's seen the intruder." She shrugged coldly and settled herself against the retaining-wall, not looking at him. He felt a little ashamed of his gruffness. Deck Nine was ghostly when the sunlamps went out. There was almost no light from Central Well, since decks Five and everything higher were in darkness too. The fire illuminated a short curve of the retaining-wall and a small half-circle of the grainfield. Cool influxair was wafting down from the ducts between the dark sunlamps. He realized that he and his companions would be here when the rain started; but on a grain deck it was a mere drizzle. He waited impatiently. Reinforcements ought to be here by now! Finally he got up, threw a IF leg over the retaining-wall and took a firm grip on the few rungs of metal ladder that were an ancient fixture here. The girl was on her feet staring at him. "Are you going down? I thought -- " He grinned at the concern in her voice. "No. I'm just going to lean out and look down. There'll be torches, if men are coming up." He let his body hang as far out as his arm would stretch. H is skin began to prickle. Something was unfamiliar about Central Well. Then he gasped. There was no light at all -- no dim rings of luminosity marking the lowest decks, which should be out of the staggered dark-cycle before now. No light at all! Or -- was that a torch? The tiny point of light winked off, then on, then off again. He read the signal, half-mumbling it over to himself. Presently he pulled himself up and back over the wall into the welcome firelight. All three companions stared at his face. He said slowly, "All the lamps are off, clear down to Deck One. There's a signal fire there, directly below Central Well. They say no one knows what the trouble is. They order all guardsmen to stay on post, wherever they are." There was a shocked silence. Finally Pendergast asked, "What did they say about Muller?" "Nothing. That may be just caution, but I think -- well, I don't think he ever got to them! I think he was intercepted. I think he's lying somewhere unconscious, or -- or dead!" He raised his voice because the tightness in his chest made it hard to speak softly. "Do you see the significance of the lamps all being off at once? The Ship's co-operating with its stooge -- making things easier for him. Maybe even without the suit he has some way of communicating with it. Or maybe they're working on a prearranged schedule!" The girl said in a low, slightly unsteady voice, "We can't live without the sunlamps." Pry looked at her halfblindly. He had to get that suit down to Deck One, along with word of what was happening. He moved to the wall again. "I'm going down. Now!" But before he touched the wall he stopped, rigid with a thought. After a moment he laughed hoarseiy"What's funny?" Pendergast demanded sourly. Pry said, "I'm an idiot! Here I'm thinking of climbing down several thousand feet of dark ladder, carrying in my backpack a suit that has grav-lifts. Why don't I simply put it on and float down?" The trio stared at him. Finally the girl said, "You don't know how to operate it I" "I can learn ! A few experiments -- " "But," she said hastily, as if she were worried about him and sought any argument, "suppose he intercepts you? He may have ways of seeing in the dark. Then -- then he'll get the suit back!" He said, "First he'll have to see me, then he'll have to reach me. And then he'll have to take it back!" His heart was pounding now. Why hadn't it occurred to him before to put on the suit? He shrugged off the backpack. "What's your name?" he asked the girl. "Maybe, if they've built bonfires on Deck Five by now, I'll stop and tell them you're all right!" She glared at him. Finally she said, "Marytwo Garth." He pulled the suit from the pack and let it fall loose. The closure down the front was open. He thrust in one leg, then the other. He pulled the helmet over his head, worked his arms into place and tugged the front together. He felt for the small knob that was the closure-closer and began to pull. And the suit spoke to him. IV r A fter his first frozen moment of startlement, he realized it was only a communicator built into the helmet. The voice sounded human, but it wasn't Captain Gerlik's. "Hello," it said again, "who are you?" It still took him a while to find his voice. Then he said guardedly, "I'm a citizen of Sinus B. Who are you?" The voice chuckled. "I know you're a citizen of the sinus. What's become of the man who wore this suit a few hours ago?" Pry's mind raced. Did the suit have any way of destroying him? Could the owner of the voice tell precisely where the suit was, or see via it? Pry said cautiously, "We have him under control." "Oh," the voice said. "Well, my name when I was alive was Ben Tomsun. I'm one of the personalities programmed into the Ship. You people evidently believe the whole Ship's insane. Parts of it are. There were schisms at the time of the Catastrophe, and the computers divided into at least four factions, located in different parts of the Ship. Several of the nineteen human personalities programmed in were destroyed. Others went insane, in a way peculiar to a half-machine, half-human intelligence. Two who retained joint control of Sinus B warred against each other, and your own ancestors suffered greatly until they quite reasonably rebelled and seized your half of the sinus. Are you listening?" Pry felt as if his stomach were full of active beetles. "Yesl" "Good. Captain Gerlik eventualIF ly overcame the other mad personality, or absorbed it -- even now we aren't sure about some things. There are parts of the ship under our control -- mine and several colleagues'. There are live, sane, healthy humans in the forward part of the Ship, which is called Nose Cone and contains Sinus A. With them and what few repair robots and other facilities remain, we -- the sane computer-personalities -- have gradually been repairing the Ship and getting ready to seize control of all of it, if possible. We had to work very carefully, because Captain Gerlik can still wreck your end of Sinus B. You have been hostages." The voice paused "Maybe this all sounds like gibberish to you. Have you any knowledge of computers, and of the Ship's lifeenvironment machinery?" Pry was irritated, and still not sure he wasn't talking to a clever madman. He said stiffly, "We have a few books left. I've read them." There was a hint of a chuckle from the voice. "Fine; fine. From time to time in the past -- not within the last few generations -- we've been able to send human agents by a circuituous route into Sinus B. Some have been intercepted by robot machines under Gerlik's control. The rest were all killed by our people." The voice took on a worried note. "You haven't killed the present one, have you?" P ry thought it wise to say, "No. "Don't, please l The safety of your whole people depends on him! " After a moment the voice added, "Or upon you " Pry wondered if he heard rightly. "Upon... me? The voice sighed. "Yes. Since we've had so little success sending envoys to your people, we decided -- once we were able to clear a route for another attempt -- to try to enlist one of you as an envoy to us. That was the aim of our present agent. Now it seems that you -- I wish you'd tell me your name, and what position you occupy in your society -- have voluntarily climbed into that suit. It occurs to me that to come visit us and learn certain things for yourself. Then you could return and persuade others. What do you think of that?" Pry swallowed hard and stared through the yellow window of the helmet at his two men and the girl. Their faces showed that they'd been hearing every word. "I... don't know. What is it you -- you'd want me to see?" "Various things. First of all, that there are sane people who retain the knowledge and technology your ancestors had before the Catastrophe. And that they trust me -- us. That would be a big thing for your people to know, wouldn't it?" "Well -- yes." come outside Sinus B and visit us in Nose Cone? I won't lie to you -- the trip will be dangerous. Gerlik has resources, and he regards us as infidels, and will destroy any messenger between us and you, if he can, as you would step on a poisonous insect You still have insects in Sinus B, I think." "We have insects." Pry's mind was kneading. If there were nothing hut the danger described -- if it had been only a perilous adventure -- how eagerly he'd acceptl But his whole people were at stake. Anything the voice said might be a lie. Once the Ship had him in its control outside the sinus, might it not tamper with his mind in some way? Could it not bend him to its own insanity, and send him back as a subtle poison for his own people? If he only knewl If he could only make a reasonable guessl "Well? the voice said gently. Pry writhed. "I don't know I I couldn't operate this suit anyway!" That was true enough. The voice chuckled again. "Why are you wearing it, then? But it's only a matter of a few simple instructions from me, and a few trials by you. Why are you so reluctant? Are you afraid?" "No! Not the way you mean." The voice sighed. "Then you think I'm lying. pry moaned. He daren't say yes, and to say no wouldn't help him any. He reached with a trembling hand -- awkward enough anyway, because of the gauntlet -- for the closure-knob, thinking he had to get out of the suit or go mad. But the voice said, "How could we use you to harm your people? Suppose we could brain-wash you -- I guess that would be possible, if we had the desire. At worst, you'd go back to your people with false beliefs. They wouldn't be brainwashed. Wouldn't they simply disbelieve?" There was a pause. "Here -- to show our good faith, I'll turn the lamps on!" The deck was suddenly bathed in light. Pry, his eyes protected by the yellow glass, saw Pendergast, Arden, and the girl blink. The voice said, "With the lights on, your people will see you leave and return. What else are you worried about? That we'll infect you with some deadly disease? Think -- if we, or Captain Gerlik for that matter, wanted to destroy your people or beat them to their knees, we could do it by tinkering with your environment. Do you see that?" "Yes. I -- that's true!" The voice sighed. "Here's another point. You say you have our present agent under control. He'll be a hostage for your own return. Does that help?" Pry was almost sobbing by now. IF He ought to wait for his superiors to arrive -- they'd be coming, now that there was light -- and leave the decision to them. But they'd take the suit away from him, and send someone else, even if they did believe the voice. He was too junior in the guard... Slowly, his hand dropped from the closureknob. Anyone else who went would run the same risks, and bo the same risk. He drew in his breath sharply. "How do you operate this suit?" The voice that called itself Ben Tomsun was talking steadily. "Put your left hand on the rows of little bumps on the left breast of the suit. The row across the top controls the grav-lifts. Pressing the first from the left and the first from the right will set up automatic neutralization of any gravity you're in, so that in effect you weigh nothing. Now -- " Pry's heart was thudding. He might be a traitor or he might not; but he was going through with this or die! He neutralized his weight; he pushed very gently with his feet and floated upward, then pressed bumps and floated down. "I've got that! Now how do I -- " The controls weren't complicated, once they'd been explained. In fifteen minutes he was ready to launch himself up Central Well. He waved a jaunty hand at the trio standing by the rope ladder and grinned at them through the helmet window. Pendergast and Arden stood rigid, staring at him with ludicrous expressions that combined awe, disapproval and envy. The girl's face was harder to read. There was a trace of concern, plus, perhaps, admiration. V Iphe first bit of difficulty came when he had to turn over halfway through Middle Void, so he'd be dropping feet-first toward Upsidedown Sea. The suit had a built-in resistance to any change of head-and-foot alignment that had to be counter-acted. Once he achieved it, though, he knew he could do it easily next time. The retaining-wall around the hatchway in that other sea was identical with the one he knew -- except that its sensors and communicators were undamaged. He cringed a little when Captain Gerlik's voice assailed him. "Faithless one! Traitor! What devil's-work have you perpetrated among my people? You shall be punished; do not doubt it. You shall burn through all eternity! Yea, though Heaven and Earth perish..." The voice faded into mumblings. The voice of Ben Tomsun whispered in his helmet. "Pay no attention and keep moving slowly. He can't interpret sanely what he sees or hears." Later, at Ben Tomsun's direction, Pry turned on lights -- one that fanned out in all directions from his helmet, another that lanced straight ahead so he could see farther. He dropped through a space that must correspond to the one above Deck Ten. His light-beam made a dim oval on nearly-bare soil. He asked hesitantly, "Is it all right if I -- " Ben Tomsun said quietly, "Take a few minutes to look around. It's best you know how things are." Pry moved laterally from Central Well and hovered a few feet above the lifeless deck. There had been trees here -- tall ones, but not pines. A few forked trunks thrust upward like supplicating skeletons. Mostly, though, only stumps remained, chopped off a few feet above ground, the axe-marks showing clearly. The wood was darkened and splintered, with strange deposits of some kind that glittered in the light-beam. He said to Ben Tomsun, "There's something here like broken glass." "Ice," the voice told him. "I guess you've never seen it before. There've been no sunlamps here for two centuries. Air circulates through, but isn't warmed. Where are you now? Do you see the metal ladder on the retaining-wall?" "No. I'm on the opposite side." Tomsun suggested, "Cross over and look at the dead camp." P ry complied, and found what Tomsun wanted him to see. There'd been people, all right: He hovered, staring down and puz zling thing out. There was chopped ffrewood, and the ancient remains of many fires. So that was what had happened to most of the trees. He realized suddenly that these folk must have kept a vigil here, on the highest deck they could reach, during a long perpetual night. Had they stared up at his own half of the sinus, where there was still sometimes light? They must have been near starvation at the last; all of the fifty or more corpses were horribly emaciated -- mere skin draped over bones. But they hadn't all died of starvation. Moving slowly, directing his beam about, Pry gradually built up the story. Many had died in a single way -- by having their skulls split open with an axe. Blood had long since turned to a solid dark stuff. He found the axe that had done it, and the wielder. Angry horror formed within him. Had the man been insane? Had he obeyed some raving of Captain Gerlik? Or... had he turned to cannibalism? No, there was no sign of that. The killer had apparently completed his work, then leaned the axe against a stump and lain down nearby. Then Pry saw the knife in the IF...  , ; '  ; . :    ,  ' :  VA  : ' V ' ' W v ;   fJ'J'J'J V.? mmms corpse's chest, with the fingers of the right hand still clenched around the hilt. Finally he saw the bit of paper clutched in the shrunken spidery fingers of the left hand. So they'd all been dying, and one -- with enough vigor left -- had gone around finishing them off quickly, then killed himself. They must have consented; there was no sign of struggle. An awful thing. But at least they hadn't descended to cannibalism. Pry choked on emotion. He ought, he knew, to go down and try to work that scrap of paper free from the dead hand to read the last message. But he couldn't bring himself to it -- not now. If things turned out right, he might do it on the way home; or someone else would do it later. Slowly, in a carefully-controlled voice, he described the scene to Ben Tomsun, who'd never had a complete description before. When he was finished, Ben Tomsun answered as slowly. "It's about as I'd thought. And it would have been so easy to rescue them, if we hadn't been prevented! So easyl" There was a pause. "Well, you'd better hurry on. You have to go down five more decks, then out to the sinus wall. Be very watchful -- keep turning your beam in all directions. If anything moves, get away from it fast!" Pry nodded, more than to obey that advice. sphere was dead soil and lifeless remains of plants on the; next two decks. On the third one down, there seemed to have been a fire. That was an orchard-deck, and everything was charred to stumps. The next deck down had known not only fire, but something worse. One whole side of the deck was buckled upward. Soil had been thrown aside, leaving bare steel. Ice had formed there. The sinus wall was pleated like a bit of doth. It was the next deck down, though, that showed the full force of the Catastrophe. Where the anus wall had joined the deck, jagged talons of acrysteel splayed upward. The sinus wall had bulged far out and ruptured here, leaving scraps of itself attached to the deck. It was through that toothed gap that Pry had to go. Beyond was darkness that swallowed up his beam.  Ben Tomsun said, "Move about and direct your light through at various angles. If you see anything move, turn off your lights and retreat!" Pry did as he was instructed. But there was no hint of movement outside. Ten minutes later he went through the hole. He paused there, awed. He'd understood that Sinus B was enclosed within another cylinder that was the outer hull of the Ship, but he'd had no conception of the distance between. His light couldn't IF VI probe it. Near him, the light slashed across great columns like steel bars ten feet thick. Then, seeing ragged holes in one of them, he realized they were hollow. Tomsun's voice said very quietly, "You may as well take time to go out and look at the hull. We won't be ready to meet you for half an hour anyway." "All right." Pry manipulated suit-controls. He must have travelled four hundred feet before his Kght showed a steel wall, badly rumpled and belled outward. In two places, great patches of thick steel plate had been welded on -- to close up ruptures, he supposed. One of the columns which, he realized now, were supports fixing Sinus B within the outer hull had been pulled apart by the awful force, and was crudely pieced together with welded-on girders. So the hull had bulged outward , not inward! He'd been thinking of the damage as some blow from outside. Instead, it must have started with terrible heat; there was plenty of other evidence of that. The softened hull must have been swelled outward by the air-pressure within and ruptured in the two spots. The same thing had apparently happened to the sinus wall. He shivered. How had the Ship kept any , of its air? Then he realized how small those ruptures were compared to the immense volume of the Ship. T) en Tomsun's voice cut into hfa  musing. "Where are you now?! Can you describe anything unique near you?" Pry nodded. "Yes. There are two patches, a steel column that's been mended near the outer hull." "That's adequate," Ben Tomsun said. "Drift down to the sinus waD a hundred yards from the base of that column, and on the opposite side of it from the patches. By swinging your light from side to side you can see the curve of the sinus wall. Give yourself partial weight so you can walk and come along it toward the fore aid of the ship. That's back toward Deck One, I hope you haven't lost your sense of direction." Pry mulled that over confusedly for a minute. "Oh. I'm all rfit, I guess -- only I didn't know Deck One was at the fore of Sinus BI I -- we -- supposed it was the opposite!" "No; it's forward. If you stray off-line, I'll correct you. We can sense you on the sinus wall; that's why I want you to walk. But he alert -- Captain Gerlik can sense you too! Swing your light constantly and look behind you. Avoid any place that might be an ambush, such as the bases of the travecolumns." The voice paused. "You are in a compartment now that's seven-hundred-fifty feet long, and you're near the aft end of it. When you reach the forward bulkhead, there'll be a hatch to come through. I'll open it long enough for you to slip through. The danger is lids: Gerlik has pairbots of various sizes in the aft end of the Ship that are still operative, and he may try to intercept you. We'll know if they roll along the sinus wall; but if any can fly, we have no way of detecting them. You'll see various stalled machines along the way. Don't worry about them unless they move, but detour around them. Some may be able to swing a tool or a tentacle, or even throw things. But any attack is most likely to come from the rear, and there's only your alertness to rely upon if he has flyable machines. Do you understand?." Pry said, "Yes. But there's one thing -- can't he overhear us talking?" "No, unless you pass near one of the wrecked machines. Some of them may still have working sensors. Now, I'd like to be able to send a strong escort to meet you, but that won't be possible for two or three hours, if at all; there are skirmishes going on right now in several different parts of the Ship, and we simply don't have weapons enough to spare. Our actual hope is that Captain Gerlik won't consider you important epough to waste resources on. He won't know you're a Sinus-B dweller, we think -- he'll think you're the same agent returning. All right?" Pry tinned his head to cast the light-beam about him. It seemed hardly to scratch the oppressive darkness. "All right. Shall I start?" "You'd better." P ry swerved around the fractured trave-column and slanted down to the sinus wall. He gave himself half-weight and started along at a fast walk. The suit hardly hindered him at all -- and that was a puz zlin g thing. How did it lift or move him, or vary his weight in effect Without tugging at his armpits or crotch? It must generate some sort of field that worked upon everything in it, or within a certain space. What ancient theory he'd seen hadn't explained it. He carefully skirted another column and paused to swing his light about him. It dimly showed other columns at various distances. He started on, swinging it ahead of him -- and suddenly stopped in a crouch. What was that his beam had slashed across? He found the object again -- an assortment of booms, levers, and tentacles mounted on a low threewheeled base. He'd never seen a picture of that kind of repair-robot, but it couldn't be anything else. Was it stirring? Heart thumping, left hand resting shakily on his (Continued on page #) IF IF  Novelette. Spork and the Beast How could aii unintelligent beast I S tars can be bright, merciless pins. Especially when one is floating free among their sharp needle-points,, sans ship, sans nourishment and sans oxygen. We had striven mightily to overcome the telekinetic effects of the strange, unknown beast which lay somewhere around or beyond the third planet's orbit Dingon, who had far stronger telekmass -- masssensing and telekinetic -- faculties # iMam  " . MiiW fr, ,, .:... UZ i   than I, had brought his own tiny figuieight-shaped form to the very brink of exhaustion in carrying my larger human-shaped mass as well as warm air beyond the reach of the seemingly irresistible beast. Dingon could easily have made the trip back to Enithra in some twelve jumps. My body's greater demands for oxygen and our inability to replace energy consumed by each jump had stopped us here in outer space. On Enithra, Dingon and I would have more or less automatically replaced energy drains from the life and food surrounding us; here, no such complex energy proteins were available. miles from home. We were surrounded by only a slight film of air, our ship had disappeared somewhere in the direction of the third planet and soon, though we had escaped the terrible clutch of the beast's telekinetic fidd, we too would probably be scattered in fine partides throughout the universe. Time passed and anoxia approached. My mind dwelt most naturally on home -- Enithra -- and its lush violets and ultra-violets, its eternally seeking mass-sensing and telekinetic plant and animal life, our successful struggles against our hereditary enemies, the Tepen, and our grouping decision to study and to utilize direct phenomenon as well as indirect -- tdekmass -- phenomenon. nphough I am human in form, I am Ayorian to my tiniest cell and I love our Enithra with every part of my body. When my biological mother and father crashed on Enithra I was but six months old. Erne, one of the figure-eight Ayorians, noted that my neuronic structure was incomplete, preventing me from utilizing tdekmass faculties. She helped me complete my growth, then accepted me as her twinning problem. Each Ayorian must make a personal committment aimed at dther solving some philosophical, scientific, or other type of problem. When successfully solved, that Ayorian twins to become two child-Hkci Ayorians, both shorter in stature with baby-like memory, but with improved capadty for solving problems originally accepted by its parent. Thus, for thousands of generations, the Ayorian magnetic form followed freely selected function, each twinning serving as a kind of radially-divergent evolutionary effect. The Ayorian species itself had the analog to twinning. Periodically all Ayorian members combined cup to hemisphere of one another to form a long chain of Ayorians tied together by the characteristics of their magnetic structure. Then, speaking in unison, they made decisions which affected the whole species. These decisions, hopefully, permitted the spedes as a whole to IF progress up the ladder of evolution, too. It was such a decision that led to our slaying the Tepen -- an evil, degenerate offshoot of the Ayor. I was first known as Spork, the moron, because of my childlike limitations of tdekmass. But once the Tepen were gone, caused primarily by change in the direction of Ayorian philosophical construct, I was fully accepted as an Ayorian adult though still called, not without some affection, Spork I I was twelve Enithra years old when the Tepen were destroyed; I worked five years more to advance the Ayorians in the direct use of their environment. Though sometimes suspecting that I would never twin as do other Ayorians, I accepted an additional twinning problem to advance the Ayor in their dual approach to life, my first being that accepted from Erne at her death, namely to find my purpose in life. Toward the end of learning more about direct action and its implications in the real world, we conserved the Tepen citadel, the last remaining "city" of the Tepen which contained much of their knowledge and artifacts. Until I was forced to use my body and muscles in continuous motion, like all Enithra life, patterns of movement across the planet and their meanings could be discerned easily by application of my telekmass faculties. I had first noticed how the Tepen, When moving across the valley floor, contrasted so strangely with their environment. Instead of teleporting from hummock to hummock as would the predatory Ettel, they seemed to flow, as though they were teleporting "continuously across an infinite set of points." Of course, in walking or running, I, too, behaved like that; but it was not so easy to observe myself against the background of other Enithra life. U sing this concept as a starting point, I instructed the Ayor in concepts of direct manipulation of their environment; as I had once done for the Ayorian children, I used my own body to convey the message. I demonstrated how hands and arms could be used to lift, pull, bend and push things; I even demonstrated the novel way of drinking which I had discovered. Instead of teleporting water directly  to my mouth or stomach, I cupped my hands to hold the water, then bent to drink from my hands. Once these simpler concepts had been satisfactorily absorbed by the Ayors, I moved on to the development of tools from the environment around. For example, sticks could be used as levers, spears, dubs -- each multiplying the weaker action of my muscles in some manner. They enthusiastically joined Ini the invention of these simpler tools t since, as past masters of abstract concept, they could easily compute anticipated effects from geometrical and physical energy considerations. Thus, they could often correctly predict the final outcome of a new and novel tool before its actual construction. As I saw it, my biggest job was to keep the Ayoris attention on the actual testing of their conjectures; for they had had thousands of years of heredity against which to fight, when only indirect twinning concepts were of importance and to this end I also applied myself diligently with some degree of success. Of course, always the children were most plastic. Indeed, without their plasticity there would have been no Ayorian race for they were the ones who had held my conceptual seeds enabling the Ayorian race to discover their racial obstacle during the time of grouping. Each child who successfully matured to reach adulthood eventually twinned to become two new children, each of whom were even more capable of comprehending and handling direct action without any loss of their indirect action faculties. I became the oldest untwinned Ayorian child, which was fortunate since there was indeed much to teach our one hundred thousand members! I was seventeen Enithra years old when the second ship came. All life on Enithra plucks eternally, within its sphere of capability, for nutrients. The tiniest life which I can sense with ray mass receptor reaches out with a telekmass field truly enormous for its small size; it teleports minerals, water and even tiny energy packets into its vacuoles. On up the scale of plant and animal life, each form takes dead or living matter in the same way, depending upon its nature. Thus, the beautiful violet and ultra-violet jungle growth spreads protective membranes over desired nourishment, struggling always against other life for its share of life requirements. T ie predatory Ettel teleports the fat, stupid Cien into its hug(B stomach sack; the Cien voraciously teleports all kinds of debris into its huge stomach. In the air, floating puff-balls reach out with frail fields hoping to catch dust motes or lightenergy packets which, once caught, are teleported to interiors sometimes in sufficient quantity to light like stars in the sky. While, in the many streams surrounded by our beautiful violet and ultra-violet vegetation, all manner of Hfe extend mass-sensors in weird and complex patterns to sense, catch, and teleport organic debris or five forms for food. It is easy to understand that one without telekmass faculties is at IF decided disadvantage on Enithra where even ultra-dense matter is as thin air to these faculties. AB Enithra life plucks at one another for food and only those who can generate stronger protective telekmass fields can survive the weaker. I was fortunate that Erne observed my lack so early, for, by completing neuronic growths inside my body, she provided me with the means for self-protection on Enithra. Unfortunately, when the second ship arrived, none noticed for a time and telekmass mechanisms in all plant and animal life surrounding the downed craft must have been instantaneously attracted to the rich, unprotected life ingredients. Perhaps the landing area was poor in needed minerals for the first to go were minerals from the human bodies inside the craft! One of the children playing the nut tree game stumbled on the craft first. Ouble -- the one who made the discovery -- tdeported from the sunny side of the planet to teH me of his discovery. Thunder and lightning were shaking the sky and all around me the rain spattered against my slightly extended telekinetic field, while at every side plants Were struggling against one another to capture the finely dissolved nutrients accompanying the rain drops. Ouble appeared before me, creating another shell of spattering rain, to state in his quiet way, "A second ship has cradled. We think you should be there." t my request, several Ayorians moved me to the site immediately. Though I could have made the trip, forty miles per jump was more time-consuming than the situation seemed to call for. It takes somewhat longer to describe my impressions than I would like. In nearly simultaneous order, I sensed the pitted metal caused primarily by surrounding plant life, the two shallow graves filled with rapidly disappearing bodies, and the extremely weakened human being who was slowly, methodically shoveling dirt into the graves. Then it was that the fantastic thought occurred to me in almost blinding boldness, "Could it be that this other, who is so much like me, knows nothing of Indirect action?" With my light receptors I could see the human utilize direct action only, to dig dirt and move it, to breathe, to perceive and to move his body. Although I did the same in varying combinations at various times, this human was not even protected from Enithra plant and animal life around us, which probably was the reason for his weakened condition! Pitting of the ship and the dead humans in the grave below was also caused by the same source -- nothing had protection from our ever-seeking life! Once I had extended my personal protective field around the ailing human and his ship, I spoke to one of the children. "Go to the Tepen "citadel for one of their telekmass protectors." By the time the human had Jraised his head to take notice of my ffcudden presence, the child was back pgrith the device and I ignored the fjrisitor until the protective field held the whole area safe. I Turning back to him I thought, "How strange is his appearance!" Though I had often looked at my own darkened features in smooth water and smooth metal mirrors, my standard of beauty was the symmetrical shape of the Ayorian. Until now I hadn't realized how truly ugly I must be. From the body portion, two arms hung loosely to lean on the shovel while his legs shivered with sickness and fatigue. I extended my mass sensors to take note of how calcium had been pitted from his bones. His head was thatched with yellow, tallow-like hair, as was mine; his light receptors were deep violet, as were mine; but his facial features were rounded where mine were lean and craggy. Now his light receptors opened wide with astonishment at my presence. I thought nothing of it at the time, but it wasn't my sudden, naked appearance from out of the dense jungle which had surprised him so -- it was my floating about two feet off the ground! When I telekmassed dirt into the shallow graves to complete his difficult labors I was rewarded with even more peculiar, uninterpretable expressions over his face. Though I was Spork, the Ayorian moron, I was not so dumb as to think this person would know either Ayorian or the dead Tepen language, though I tried both. I thought long and hard, then remembering my six-month-old recall experience from my early childhood, I mimicked my dead father's voice to say: "Though we headed the house of the galactic council, Patricia, the sabotage was inevitable. We may be genetically superior, but to the common people we are still only human. Place the baby in the life container now! " Our visitor fainted! n I telekmassed his body inside the ship to a strange platform covered with rectangular square patterns of imitation fibers and knitted with springy materials beneath; then, I let my sensors pass through his body, comparing bis chemistry to mine. Calcium and phosphorus were seriously lacking as well as certain complex proteins. I reached info the surrounding forest to recover IF calcium from various soft mushy growths -- probably the same ones Which caused his depletion -- and replaced the calcium. The phosphorus was retrieved from puff-balls in the air surrounding the ship. When I checked his blood against mine, I noted certain chemicals which performed similar functions to some of mine, yet had minor structural and quantitative differences. Just as the Ayor, upon twinning have different personal magnetic structures due to differences in alignment of their magnetic fields, humans too had normal differences. "Better not change those #" I thought. Otherwise, his blood was sadly lacking in iron; any of the jungle trees around us would reach for such a rich supply. I reached deep into the soil of Enithra to tdeport molecules of iron, sulphur and oxygen. I mixed these minerals with water and placed them inside his stomach where I was gratified to sense Its rapid absorption for manufacture of red-blood platelets. When the limits of my knowledge had been reached andj I dared not go further, he woke. Only for a moment did his light receptors look at me; then he closed them again to deep for many days. I filled his stomach with nourishment and took care of his biological needs during his period of recovery. Only once, when bis heart faltered, and I moved it in proper rhythm telekinetically, did I fear for his life. Afterward he gained health rapidly. As once before yvith the Tepen, my struggle for language began. As With the Tepen, concrete nouns formed the easiest common referent, or so it seemed until I used the Ayorian children usually surrounding us as a word referent. For days he had thought I Was pointing to the air around us, or to the ship, or fo something else, for he could not see the Ayorl He icould not see ultra-violet reflections at alll As We studied together, his strength returned and protein deficiencies were rapidly eliminated. L ooking back upon the experience, I now realize how I must have stared to see him chew gnd swallow every bit of food. Even to this day I find it a most fascinating phenomenon! The tongue and mouth are properly used for taste and talk. To use them, always, for swallowing is nearly beyond comprehension! Other things, such as the clothes over his body, were odd, too -- 'Stiff collar and decoration, stiffly pressed blue pants, bright red shirt, buckles, shoes and even smaller clothes underneath next to his skin. As odd as all these things Were, none could compare with his complete inability to mass-sense or fo teleport. "If the Ayor call me a moron because of my limitations with these faculties, what should we call our visitor?" I wondered. Months of language training from Toby Randolph -- our visitor's name -- enabled us to carry conversations beyond concrete nouns to somewhat higher levels of abstraction. Again I mimicked my father's phrase as I remembered it; he listened most carefully, but could not identify it. Toby Randolph belonged to a far distant planet many parsecs distant and he belonged to the household of the two humans buried outside the ship. Though it was many months before I learned the meaning of his rdationship to them, he described himself as a kind of "indentured slave-scientist" of their household. Mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology were exceptionally easy languages for me to understand. They were quite precise in themselves; but more than this, I could extend my mass-sensor at least to the chemical level whenever firmer mental referents were required; physics and mathematics were quite similar to Ayorian philosophical games upon which I had already spent endless childhood hours. Most difficult for me to understand were concepts such as money, art, stores, schools, culture and so on. No Ayorian equivalents could possibly be construed to represent the concept of ownership, for example. In his turn, he constantly exclaimed over how rapidly I could learn such abstract and complex concepts. To the Ayor I was Spork, the moron ; to Toby I was Spork, the savage. I wondered if everyone knew what I was except me! The most fantastic concept of all, however, was Toby's description of civilization. When the concept of continuous motion as opposed to discrete teleportation was so new to me and other Ayorians, how could we be expected easily to understand and mentally grasp images of ously with time, not to mention plant seeds, animals and even sea creatures? And what of the social organization behind such concepts? The nearest comparison here on Enithra were the now-dead Tepen who, though offshoots, were still from Ayorian stock! I vowed then to find some way of visiting these strange lands to see and experience for myself!   Toby's ship was brought back to our captured Tepen citadel where its vast scientific resources could be better studied. Toby Randolph proved to be an invaluable asset in the Ayorian struggle to learn the tools and concepts which accompany direct faculties. He hdped the Ayor, too, while I learned. These, being many times quicker intellectually than I, had long ago passed the mechanical leverage stage of toe# use. With the arrival of Toby, their capabilities increased in geometric progression. And twinning, too, increased geometrically. So many had twinned that only few remembered me as Spork, the child; though none would probably ever forget me as Spork, the moron. We learned to read. My light receptors could move back and forth across a certain span of printed characters just so fast. My telekmass sensor was quicker, leading Toby Randolph to believe that I had capabilities of eye span far greater than norioaally possible. But I refused to learn writing with my fingers. Why should I spend valuable time moving a tracing instrument when, merely by mentally visualizing the complete set of symbols I wished to transcribe, I could instantaneously place corresponding marks on the page? After all, only a very tiny number of molecules on the page need be changed to effect a desired change in light transmission or reflection properties! The years passed and overhead in the clear sky above the lush tangle of Enfthra growths, the Ayorians again formed their grouping chain. This day, instead of hiding like skulking animals deep within the bowels of Enithra's crust, the Ayor pridefully joined cup to hemisphere better than two hundred and fifty thousand strong, each jockeying for proper polarity position, all contributing their bodies and experiences in a long curving line crossing the sky from horizon to horizon. Even Toby Randolph's company, with his special glasses enabling him to see the chain of ultra-violet bodies overhead, couldn't dispel my normal grouping gloom. Wasn't I an Ayor, too? Must I forever be left out of the grouping chain? Normally the grouping lasted several weeks. This time, each individual Ayorian was so well aligned with the Ayorian racial goals that only days were spent. When they broke, we were informed of their racial decision to penetrate even deeper the principles of direct action and associated scientific knowledge -- they expected to be able to duplicate Toby Randolph's spacecraft Toby was astounded and delighted for in him must have been stimulated new visions of return to his civilization after all hope had gone. I knew there was something more behind the Ayorian decision, however, for once the Ayor had accepted the principle of dual action, they fully realized their evolutionary progress lay in facing and surmounting ever-larger challenges. IF Tphu the ship was to be reconI structed; Toby was to have his trip home; I would satisfy my curiosity regarding civilization -- but far more important, the Ayor 'would accept new revolutionary challenges! Were we Ayorians to be limited by only direct action faculties, as were the humans of Randolph's home planet, we too would need a (complex civilization where specialists built the tools to build the tools to build the tools -- perhaps to ten or twelve generations. On the other hand, given the model to go by -- his pitted ship -- as well as the new wealth of information supplied to us, by principles of indirect action alone we could have reconstructed his Ship. The process of reaching throughout the whole planet of Enirtha for appropriate elements selecting them to properly prepared states of purify, and forming them With telekinetic energy to useful shapes was no more difficult than the normal Ayorian child's game of hide-and-seek. But the adult Ayorian, though he could teleport himself about ten planetary diameters outward, would stOl have need for a ship when traveling across system or over galactic-wide distances, as well as need for direct action knowledge! similar to the other intelligent beings most likely to be encountered in the universe. Lack of complete linkag e in the echelon of tools plus the more natural faculties of indirect action led us to compromise. When it was possible to visualize the tool required to make the desired item, we made the tool first, then did What was necessary to use it in making the desired item. If we could not make the tool because of our insufficiency of knowledge, we used indirect action o make the item itself. Toby Randolph's first response to the Ayorian ship-building detisian was emotional in character; sober reflection on his part convinced him of its impossibility. "The drive," he said, "is essentially a one-hundred-per cent mass to energy (converter. Its action chamber must be surrounded by a field of polarization which can only be formed by collapsing energy layers to form yery dense materials. "This process," he continued, "can only be accomplished by manipulation of exceedingly strong electro-gravitic fields far beyond Ayorian capacity to build or control." T he day was hot and humid, so all plant and animal life was at peak activity. Now, of course, I realize that such temperature and humidity changes often adversely iaffect the non-telekmass human, causing short temper and illogical reasoning. Perhaps that was Toby Randolph's chief difficulty at the time. Then, too, I suppose I should have explained the Ayorian ability, other than mine, to reach below the molecular threshold with telekinetic energy. As it was, I assigned the problem to Ayorian children who, now knowing one of the uses to which the chamber of dense metal within which I was found after the crash of my parent's ship and which is always associated with a polarization barrier, re-shaped the chamber to Toby's demanding specifications. Our visitor became quite emotional oyer the incident. "You we in contact with a superior civilization I You are lying to me!" Only when the children created more of the dense metal would he believe; and, for the first time, it my prior discussions of direct versus indirect faculties at their face value. We developed a small mechanically generated telekmass field for Tony's self-protection so that he could journey safely away from the citadel. On every trip he would acclaim to me, "The colors are wrong. They should be green! There is no pattern, no continuity to the behavior of things! Seeds ripen, mature, and spring away too rapdily!" "When nourishment is available within the sphere of the flower's telekmass action in sufficient quantity to construct the seed, why should it wait for days?" I asked. Though trained in the arts of objectivity, he retained his basically emotional nature, it seemed. When I turned from the subject of Enithra flowers to the small Eman, an animal which is equally at home in water or on the land, he showed similar exasperation. The Eman had virtually no intelligence; its chief survival characteristic lay in its ability always to anticipate the teleported flight of certain seeds. When the seed arrived, the Eman found its sphere of influence weH within the range of the newly deposited seed. From there it was but a moment until the seed lay inside the Eman's stomach. "But there just can't be any way to knowl" Toby insisted. "Sometimes," I thought, "he is as stubborn in his way as the Ayor used to be in their wayl" Until the decision to build the ship, little attention had been placed on our planetary system or the stars beyond. Our planet Enithra has no moon. Although adult Ayorians could teleport # miles outward, air had to be teleported along with them. Only energy fields, stripped atoms and some few whole molecules, thinly scattered, were to be found there. Though lacking in light receptors, their ability to mass-sense below the molecular level gave them fine reception of energy groupings scattered throughout their sky, resulting IF in better knowledge of the stars and other energy sources than narrow range of visible light frequency alone might have done. I grew up with the knowledge that our planetary system consisted of five planets surrounding a huge sun in elliptical orbits. We were the fourth planet from the sun and before visiting other worlds, such as the one represented by our visitor, we wished to know our own planetary system better. nphe finished ship was a perfect duplicate of Tony Randolph's -- dim, long-tapered with severe geometric lines from head to tail, clusters of matter conversion chambers surrounding its tail and terminated with stacked propulsion units and other interesting, unusual-toEnithra features. "Later," I thought, "we Ayorians will create original forms!" Dingon, one of the Ayorians who had nearly reached his twinning period with the finish of the ship, was selected for our first trial run, though Toby Randolph protested that he should go. But the decision was to include only one human and one Ayor. The ship raised easily; we adjusted the molecules of our body to compensate for the pull of acceleration as the ship swept upward with ever-increasing velocity. What a unique experience it was for Dingon and me! Near us, we sensed the craft's solid state switching and other slight vibrations in the instrument board, the smooth flow of the air-exchanger and much other internal phenomenon. While far away, decreasing density of air molecules, made up of lighter and lighter fractions, swept past us. The biggest change was the sudden silence. I don't mean the audible kind of silences; I mean the lack of Enithra's plucking telekinetic fingers. For aU of Dingon's life, he had been exposed to the background of ever-seeking plant and animal life; and for eight of Enithra years, I had subconsciously countered these same probing fingers; but beyond the planet's atmosphere, at seventy miles, the planet's fingers decreased to nothing. I can only say the silence was fantastic. I could extend my mass sensitivity nearly double my usual forty miles; Dingon could increase half of our telekmass capacity had been unconsciously used to counteract Enithra life in our own selfprotection! I had half-way believed Toby Randolph when he said we were unique -- the only planet to use and develop indirect faculties. Planet five was a certain refutation of his statement. Unlike Enithra, Janet five was colder and its vegetation was not so profuse; also unlike Enithra, it had i huge ice caps at both of its poles. But like Enithra, all of its primitive life forms followed the indirect action principle. TX#e landed in its warmest zone,   near the equator. I sent my mass sensor up the steep cliff lying before our grounded craft and at the very top, lacking moisture and warmth as well as oxygen, were very primitive organisms. Their feeble search through the rocks for water, oxygen and minerals could be easily sensed. When they encountered minerals containing needed chemicals, they separated the molecule from its binding force and the rocks slowly but surely succumbed to the demands i of new life. As my mass-sensor followed down the high mountain side there were encountered ever-increasingly complex patterns of life. Throughout most of the planet, oxygen was mixed with combinations of nitrogen and hydrogen; the plant growths reflected the differences of both energy and atmosphere. "Someday," I thought, "life will become intelligent even here!" We scouted around the planet. With his great telekmass range, Dingon now knew it intimately, of course. Across the narrow, warm band which represented planet five's equator, was a form of life related to us. Where the Ayorian was shaped like a figure eight, his primitive counterpart on this planet was like two eights laid one over the other at right angles -- like Toby's description of a four-leaf clover. "Finding the true relationship between life of both planets should one day provide the Ayorian with many twinning problems," I thought. We pushed off from the fifth planet to explore the other three unknowns in our planetary system. Out in space, we were once again able to extend our mass sensors through approximately douSle their normal volume. Just for fun, Dingon and I teleported outside the ship. W took air with us and kept it under pressure. My light receptors of our stars in every direction; it was so beautiful I How I wanted to explain its sight to Dingon! He, in his turn, wanted very much to explain the fine sensitivity of energy patterns which he could sense below my threshold level! We passed the orbit of Enithra and swung in toward where planet three would soon be. We were peraway from Enithra's orbit when Dingon's far-probing mass sensor hit the telekinetic field. He knew immediately the nature of its strength. "Turn back -- quickly! " he shouted with panic in his thoughts. I flicked the switches with my mind rapidly heeding his cry; but as fast as I was, the new telekinetic IF field was faster. Long, thin, sensitive strands of telekinetic energy had been laid well beyond the orbit of the third planet. These strands, not unlike the mechanical traps of the dead Tepen, were set only to sense usable chemicals. When such was encountered, the full force of gome gigantic being impressed its will in that direction to grasp fully and teleport its prey. The field slugged us like some gigantic gravitational weS. m   field with every molecule of our beings. We could not carry ourselves and the ship, which was protected with its own mechanically generated field, against that alldemanding force. Dingon teleported us both to his now-shortened two hundred-thousand mile range, well beyond the reaoh of the bestial field. With only small amounts of air held telekinetically tight around us, miles of nearly empty space between us and Enithra. When I become moody, or otherwise emotional -- a state foreign to the biological Ayorians -- I tend to escape my troubles by letting my thinking processes dwell on Enithra and its beloved ecology. Loneliness in space and near death brought no exceptions to the rule. On Enithra there exists a tough mammal, which we call the Fervra, addicted to a world-swinging nomadic existence. Though there are few desert s and all of small consequence, the Fervra passes directly through these climatic zones without regard to consequences, unlike other mammals of equally short telekmass range. Whenever food becomes sparse, the Fervra teleports fats from its own body to its stomach sack, thus living on itself during famine periods. My mind now dwelled on the interesting habits of the Fervra as I let my body swing around and around, watching the stars circle about me. It was then the insight which saved our lives penetrated my conscious thought! "Will fat and protein from my larger body supply Dingon while he teleports us?" I wondered. I reached into the fat layers of my body and teleported thin layers into Dingon's stomach. Quickly realizing my purpose, he molded the ingredients to suit his own needs, then caused us to jump nearly half way home before all of my body fat was gone. I reached into my body again, taking liberally of my blood and this brought us nearly home. Now in weakened state, I reached feebly into the long stranded fibers of my big muscles selecting every hundredth strand. I remember no more, for I lost consciousness then! Even with Ayorian assistance, many months passed while my body mended. Not yet could the Ayorian mind repair the life cell itsdf and I had dangerously exhausted many of the organs of my body when supplying Dingon with the materials from which he could gain the tremendous energies needed to teleof space. 'T'he next time of grouping came and we puzzled over this apparently new form of life -- so tremendously powerful, it could reach grasp mass the size of our rocket. On this portion of Enithra, on this particular day, the weather was cool and the wind blew gently across the rapidly shifting plant forms. Toby Randolph, now dressed in what he called workclothes, sat near the grouping area, looking somewhat bug-eyed because of his ultra-violet glasses. High overhead in an arc as long as the horizon, weaving in several S-shaped curves across the sky, were the Ayor, clasping one another with cup to hemisphere. With my pitifully weak magnetic field attached to single cells in uncoordinated array, even I could feel the mighty pulsing of their joint field as permutations and combinations of individual Ayorian experiences moved swiftly hack and forth along the chain. " "What are they doing this time?" JToby asked. "Fve seen them like this before, but I still don't believe it." I knew his comments were merely rhetorical, for I had explained the grouping phenomenon many times before. "Listen, TobyT Soon their experiences will be completely shared and they will begin to question and make decisions." Booming like Enithra thunder as It rolls between peaks of broadly u-shaped valleys, their joint comments began: "Can Spork and Dingon elaborate on the giant telekinetic field of their trip?" Dingon passed bis personal experiences in detail along the chain and I confirmed his comments by verbal response, not having near the detail available to Dingon. "Would that giant field be a mechanically generated one created by the evil Tepen or organisms like the evil Tepen?" they asked in unison. Dingon's experience replied, but they still answered together: "No! The quality was different It was an organically generated field." "How far does the field extend Into space?" "Unknown." "What are its limitations?" "Unknown." "Can the joint power of our whole race handle the fiddE' IF "No I" was the joint reply. "Where is the beast located?" "Unknown." "What are the beast's characteristics?" "It is primitive; it is grasping, voraciously, blindly in hunger; it needs materials of all kinds -- metals protoplasms, chemicals and so forth; it is fantastically powerful -- far more so than anything previously imagined by the Ayor." The sun split its ultra-violet beams between Tepen towers when the Ayor grouping chain broke and I followed Toby Randolph into the Tepen chamber.  nphe remainder of the year  passed; I turned nineteen and the puzzle remained with us. Now the time of grouping was on us again and Toby was depressed again, having lost his chance, he thought, of returning home. Though I had probed both Toby Randolph's and Ayorian memories mercilessly for some clue, we just didn't have sufficient data upon which to build a decent conjecture. And, much like a year ago, Toby and I sat near Enithra's surface, while overhead across the horizon, doubled and re-doubled, were the linked Ayorians. We waited. Then with some respect to my limitations, the group spoke in unison: "We must re-structure the Tepen field which once held nearly the whole of the Ayor in captivity. We conceive this new, mindless entity to be our new racial twinning problem." Imagine! Once I had to force the Ayor to face their immediate Tepen of miles away, far stronger than the Ayor, was pronounced to be their racial twinning problem! How fast my brethren grewl m T only hoped the problem would not prove too great for us! All knew that tdekmass faculties reached deeply beyond the spatial structure of ordinary material concepts to tap "triggers" which caused discrete jumps of objects from point to point. This was why we labeled our faculties as being indirect instead of direct. Our problem was not so much to learn the Tepen trick of artificially inducing the field as to learn how to strengthen it Our nervous structure was capable of assimilating large quantities of chemically formed energy which we used to open the door, so to speak, to reach through to the triggers. Once the triggers were reached, virtually zero energy was involved in the teleportation of mass or in the communication back to us on the state and structure of the mass. A precise scientific statement of the trigger phenomenon involves the complexities of shrisltiiig space between points A and B by means of slowing all energies between the two points to some limiting factor -- exactly the opposite from the phenomenon observed whenever we note the ultra-violet shift of a far off galaxy as the universe expands in toto. When all energy within a particular sphere of influence has slowed sufficiently, space contracts and two points become contiguous, but only from particular points of view. We Ayorians, by means of indirect faculties, could trigger the phenomenon in both directions. Our chief problem, then, was in opening the door, after which no energy at all was required to maintain its effect. On Enithra, the tiny one-celled life teleported nutrients as far as one hundred cellular diameters; yet, it could do nothing to resist the tiny water creatures which teleported the one-celled life to its own The one-celled solution for survival was to increase its twinning rate, multiplying itself swiftly. Meanwhile the Yal, which fed on such one-celled life, could in no way resist the Ries; and, the Ries could not resist the voracious, stupid Cien who in turn could not resist the predatory Ettel. Nowhere in the ecological niche of Enithra life did one miss a thread leading always to the Ayor on top. Now, in our own planetary system, it appeared that some unintelligent entity was superior to the nphe children discovered the first clue. When asked to create the dense material with its associated shield of polarization for Toby Randolph's benefit, a new game had become traditional among the children. Whoever could create the densest material was declared its winner. On a certain day, Nltque lost track of his created mass. Piqued with curiosity, the children asked Nitque to repeat the phenomenon while they observed. Some thirty children were holding the tiny pinpoint of dense material as it snapped out of its spatial orientation through a minute "hole", but the children's minds followed easily finding it among the telekinetic triggers. Mass, another form of energy, when condensed to its ultimate, stressed the fabric of space sufficiently to open normal space to these telekinetic triggers, and, it seemed the more mass per unit of volume, the more stress; hence, the more trigger access and the more field power, but not in exactly a proportional relation. We stored the heaviest possible mass just short of the point of diminishing return in our next ship. By attaching the Tepen-type machine to our spatial holes we hoped IF t# generate a truly strong telekinetic field capable of resisting the fantastic being of outer space. Nonetheless, when the time came, Dingon and I prepared nutrients to hang around our bodies should we have need of returning in the same awkward manner as before. The sun was just rising above the horizon as our new ship rose flawlessly as before. The trip, though of interest to such newcomers to space as we, held no new phenomenon and we progressed well until touched the beast at the fringes of the beast's searching tendrils. It was then I felt the full power of the beast as he sprang toward us. Dingon pushed our prepared dense mass over its spatial threshold, the Tepen machinery caught, generating its strong telekinetic field and I thought: "Now we shaS see what happens when the irresistable force meets the immovable object." Unfortunately we were not exactly immovable! Stronger and stronger the beast's field became, while our field stayed at constant strength. Hour after hour we crept through his field, never daring to relax. Near the orbit of the third planet, the beast's intensity jumped even higher in easily felt increments; it became apparent to both of us that our present equipment was not yet strong enough. I mentally snapped the controls, causing us to turn; the beast, perhaps instinctively sensing .our purpose, doubled and redoubled its efforts. T Tnder heavy attack from the  beast, both Dingon and I felt we were participating in some gigantic squeezing game; though we added our own puny efforts to those of our machinery, the beast's resources seemed endless. Slower our ship traveled, though its fuel converted to energy at maximum rate. Was this finally to be my end? I wondered if all our personal efforts, our life's evolutionary purpose, was merely to provide chemical feed to an insatiable monster? If so, to what ultimate purpose? Was this to be the answer to my twinning problem: What is my true purpose in life? Jerking my mind from such thoughts, I asked Dingon to increase the rate at which fuel was being converted, hoping that the chamber could stand the strain. The ship shuddered, not end to end, or side to side, but molecule by molecule; and we could sense shudder. The conflicting telekinetic fields caused the new phenomenon. But the ship leaped forward successfully to leave the grasp of the beast behind and we felt great relief as we sensed the laist of his tendrils behind us. Our sigh was premature for the struggle had had its effect on every atom under our control; part of the ship's atoms had vibrated in one direction while adjacent atoms vibrated in opposite directions. Weaknesses developed, holes grew, materials pitted; then the ship itself began to fall apart. With all our being, Dingon and I struggled to hold the ship together to no avail. Then it failed and we were out in space again, without ship. This time sufficiently braced with nutrients hanging around our bodies, we leisurely teleported pur way home. Our trip was not a total loss. We had penetrated much deeper, for one thing. And another phenomenon correlated in our minds: first was the case of Toby Randolph and his rapidly sickening "house masters." At the time I had thought the valley of their landing lacked minerals and other easy nutrients causing the valley's life forms to leap on the ship as a new, easy source. Now I wondered if Toby's ship had traveled within grazing distance of the monster I If so, just a fleeting touch could easily have explained the rapid depletion of vital proteins and minerals from both humans and ship. Confirmation could be obtained from Toby and his ship's computers and their records. But what about my owti parents' flight? Was my very presence on Enithra caused by the beast and his action against my parents' ship? We re-computed the relative positions of all planets as they had been two years ago as well as the position of Toby's ship. He shad indeed grazed the fringes of the beast By simple deduction, this placed the monster beyond the third planet, further in toward the sun. Since nothing capable of being sensed lay between the orbits of the third and second planet, this raised an even more astounding conjecture; for if the monster Was on the second planet, it was capable of extending its telekmass sensor some # miles in radius. We Ayorians, even as a complete grouping entity, were yet thousands of generations away from that kind of range and power! IV W e Ayorians had indeed selected a worthy racial twinning probleml The building of ships had almost become a kind of instinctive reflex -- so much of that chemical in this quantity, structured just so; add a little of this; hold it in a certain way; weld the metal together telekinetically -- and so the third ship was built. If was constructed similar to the second ship, only stronger and bigger. Our whole intent this time was IF to learn about the beast's limitations and exact location. If the beast were located on a planet, two possible means of its control were suggested. At our present state of technological development, everyone realized that any thought of On our third trip, Dingon and I skirted the edge of the beast's sensory tendrils. Dingon cast his halfuntil just barely grazing the beast's, then signalled me to reverse direction rapidly before the beast could launch an all out attack. From every direction we repeated the procedure until our spatial map was complete. Take a ball and place a hundred arrows around it pointing directly toward the ball's center. Now move the ball in an egg shaped orbit around, say, a bright lamp. Keep in mind the locus of points of the arrows around the egg-shaped path representing successive time points. This spatial graph made it quite clear that the beast was located on planet two. Since the beast was bracketed between the first and third planet, at certain times of the year the beast was capable of reaching either planet, probably to strip them of their life and minerals until relative orbital positions changed. Our ship had reached inside the orbit of tiie third planet Based on this knowledge, phis estimates of the beast's strength, we planned ahead. The new ship was to be capable of landing on either the first or third planet without undue stress from the beast of planet two. It had to be huge, since the mass of the required dense metal used for triggering our enlarged telekinetic field required abnormal structural bracings. To avoid stripping our beautiful planet of Enithra for minerals in the quantities needed for our new ship, most of the shipbuilding Ayor moved to the fifth planet. Within a matter of weeks, assembled in orbit and nearly twenty miles long, the engineering feat which would assist us in capturing the beast of planet two was finished. Nearly one thousand adult Ayorians were loaded aboard the new ship to assist in handling and tipping the dense mass which was to provide us with our extra-powerful protective fidd. Other Ayorians operated and sensed the special telekinetic control instruments which controlled the ship. Vf#e swung outward with pon  derous slowness entirdy unlike our earlier trips. We plodded onward until we swung around planet three at approximately seventy miles up, now just barely able to sense the beast's frantic efforts to grasp us. Bdow us was IF the most fantastic sight; the planet had no gaseous envelope, no water, methane or ammonia. There were no features anywhere -- nothing exeept a tiny rounded ball of radioactive materials -- ingredients unwanted by the beast of planet two. Planet one, too, proved to consist of beast-swept radioactive debris; and it now became clear why the beast extended itself into empty space so far in search of random debris to satisfy its hunger. Long ago, it had used every non-radioactive ingredient of both planets one and three! The return to Enithra was uneventful, though filled with anticipation for our next stage of preparations. Our cumbersome ship was left high in orbit while we teleported to Enithra's surface. I made my first jump from sixty miles up, then fell free for a few minutes, receiving such an exhilarating experience I vowed to repeat the game again during more peaceful times. Down below me, shimmering across the hundreds of miles of planet, was the violet and ultraviolet valleys of Enithra. On one side of me was Enithra's only large body of water; in front of me was the wandering river near our captured citadel; and everywhere I could see as well as sense, were the shifting, jumping changes of animal and plant life I loved so well. It made me feel good. Mathematical computations shewed the beast to be of planetary size. Apparently Hfe based upon the principles of indirect action was common to our whole planetary system since it was found on planets two, five and four. It was not unreasonable to suppose that planets one, two and three had also developed to our form of Kfe. During evolutionary branchings some mindless creature had become dominant on planet two, where its voracious appetite led it to consume not only all other Kfe but all except the most useless of demental materials. As the being grew in size, telekinetic structures must have been formed internally to support its fantastic volume while internal indirect action sensory organs must have developed to form and speed nutrients from one portion of its huge bulk to another once they arrived at each receptor site. TX#hen the mindless creature had  ' consumed all nutrients on its own planet, or even before this happened, it must have had sufficient telekinetic power to reach across space to its nearest neighbor, planet one, at certain times of the year. Then having voraciously swept planet one clean of aD useful materials, it turned its blind insatiable appetite toward the more distant planet three. One could easily imagine how it must have struggled time and again to reach the more distant planet, always failing but, in its drive to live, always learning new means for focusing ami reinforcing its telekinetic pseudopods. Then one day, at the proper time of year, a tip of its reaching finger touched planet three's surface, after which an avalanche of materials followed back into its hollowed belly until finally even planet three was swept dean of all but the most unusable radio-active debris. What then? Planet four -- Enithra, of course! But Enithra was so far distant from planet two that hundreds of thousands of years must pass while the beast learned to sweep space for atom-sized debris garnished occasionally by meteorite or chance space-ship, collecting only enough nourishment to maintain life; never enough to pick the Enithra plum beyond. The radio-active debris unwanted by the beast, though small, proved sufficiently dense to provide the base upon which our telekmass protective screens could be assembled. The dense mass which would provide us with the required power, once pushed through normal space, had been scooped from the bowels of our own planet five. The residue of planets one and three followed orbits which sometimes caused one or the other to be far beyond the beast's range. But always, at least one of the covering fields surrounded the beast and sometimes both. Once the beast was successfully caged, we landed on its leathery surface with impunity. Unlike anything ever before imagined by us. Ayor, the beast was perfectly spherical and of nearly three times the volume of Enithra. Ayorian faculties were necessarily limited to the beast's surface. Had we been so foolhardy as to probe our protective field, the beast, from his own interior, would certainly be instantly in command. Speculations on novel internal telekmass faculties continued to explain both the unnatural size and perfect sphericity of the beast. TT ad we really captured the beast? " Was it fastened there now -- would it solve its new evolutionary challenge within a short time, to rise again in renewed wrath and energy? What could such tiny energy units as we Ayorians actually do to something as gigantic and ancient as this beast? We were incapable city to announce its successful capture! How long before chance events tore our trap apart? A particularly heavy meteor of just the right vector could easily tear through our feeble physical object barrier surrounding our telekmass generators IF on either of the planets one or three. What then? Would the beast find sufficient intelligence and means somehow to destroy us after all? Who knew what the beast was really capable of doing? When I could not understand all the workings of the tiny Ayorians whose bodies were only half as tall as mine and half as wide, could I, or any other Ayorian truly expect to know the inner workings of a beast three times the volume of our whole planet? I felt uneasy about our solution but recognized it as the best that could be done at our stage of technical development. "Someday," I thought, "we Ayorians must learn how to destroy this beast. What skill and technology Is ours is not yet capable of its sure (destruction! " Toby Randolph found our beautiful violet and ultra-violet jungle with its myriads of teleporting insects and animal life, depressing in spirit. He was therefore delighted with my decision to return with him to civilization. Our first Ayorian problem became evident when I gave Arl, one of the twinned children of my former partner Dingon, permission to accompany us. Always before, for thousands of generations back, we Ayors had been restricted to one planet and each year aU Ayor except me joined in the grouping. If I were to remove one of the grouping Ayors, would the race lose some of its evolutionary impetus? Further, would Arl himself still be capable of personal twinning advancement when no longer flee to join the annual grouping? Many weeks ware spent contemplating these questions while Toby fretted and fussed in his anxiety to return home. I was now slightly over nineteen Enithra years old and anxious to continue with my own twinning problem which I had taken from Erne: What was my purpose hi life and who was I? Yet, I couldn't press my own twinning with possible sacrifice to either Arl or my whole race. est damage to any of my brothers and while deep in thought, I wandered out of the dtadel to the cool of the beautiful forest surrounding us. My mind relaxed while my body, using its muscles in direct action, moved continuously from point to point along the cool, mossy floor. At my feet I could perceive the mass-sensing tendrils of the jungle moss reaching below the ground, jerkily searching for mineral, water and oxygen. Some nutrients were easily teleported to proper portions of the tiny plant while the sweet odors of its flowers changed texture from moment to moment and its seeds grew to mature and burst forth in hew seed of teleported flight, landing, hopefully, in rich soil to begin the cycle anew. Here and there I sensed the small mindless insect, called the let, which, like the Eman, placed itself exactly near the expected arrival point of maturing seed to wait for itsappearance; then reaching out with its own tiny mass sensor, R quickly teleported portions of the newly created seed to its stomach. As I physically walked through the telekinetic plucking of other life forms I wondered: "Since each ecological niche has been filled on Enithra, and we Ayor are the highest, why are we afraid to separate from the group? Even the tiny seeds of the moss at my feet spread outward in new and different directions seeking the opportunity to spread its kind in new places. What is so unique about the Ayor as to cause such strong need for grouping each Enithra cycle?" As my body continued to practice direct action motion, my mind roamed from jungle object to abstract thought in relaxed, random order. I let my mind soak in the whole of the jungle surrounding me to the very limit of my forty-mile radius. I could sense Ayorian children at play in one direction while in another I could watch the predatory Ettel teleport from spot to spot to come within range of its custdmary dinner. # On my right, perhaps a half a mile away, was a whitish puffstick growth rare to this part #f the jungle. In some little state of curiosity, I focused my attention on its slow growth. Its customary nourishment was oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and water from the air. I sensed it reaching for these ingredients; then, as it teleported each to itself, it quickly reassembled the molecules in complex patterns to farm new parts of itself. As I walked and observed, the puffstick grew ever-larger but at a rate much slower than most other Enithra plant growth. When it became as big as my head, it teleported all parts of itself; some of the fragments passed completely out of my forty-mile sensing range. It had a truly remarkable range when compared to its other weaker capabilities! The portions landing within my sensing field began to grow as had its parent, except for those which found themselves providing nourishment for other insects and stronger plants. Then it was that the puffstick activity triggered my next thoughts: "How will the Ayor successfully advance in their group twinning cycle if they are to be limited to the size of one grouping? Since they place their bodies one to the other, forming a long chain consisting of all the Ayor, eventually their population will number so many that the time involved in IF sharing each experience in every permutation will take longer than the total time period between grouping cycles I" Tj'or generations the Ayor had  numbered no more than one hundred thousand; when the Tepen were defeated, the Ayor grew swiftly in number. Not only were they no longer preyed upon by Tepen, but individuals were twinning more rapidly as they individually undertook new challenges of direct action principles; now, they numbered better than #. I knew my reasoning must bn correct; but could I convince the Ayor? Next grouping was nearly a year away, and this was so long to wait in pursuit of my twinning problem! Also, why did the Ayor meet only once each year? CotdJ they successfully group whenever desired instead of periodically? My musings continued into the dusk; my thoughts stirred endlessly throughout the night. In the morning I hesitatingly and in stumbling manner posed these bask questions to my brethren. They responded by tests and found they could group at will; and while another long cherished Ayorian tradition fell, from high overhead in the cod of the evening, their newest grouping nearly hid all of the stars as they jointly reviewed my newest point of philosophy far into the next day. Their group decision emphatically favored distribution and dispersion of separate Ayorian nuclei as far and as wide as possible throughout the stars. I was greatly pleased, for now we Ayorians would survive and grow in many new and successful patterns! Tnstfead of just Ari, then, I took nearly one hundred thousand of my brethren. We built a new, larger ship, then took our leave from Enithra. Now free of the dangerous probing tentacles of the beast of planet two, we directed our course through the center of our system toward the star Quations, the home star of Toby Randolph. He, of course, was mightily pleased; yet I wondered if his unnaturally quiet ways and increased anxiety didn't forecast difIf You're a Subscriber --  -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not contain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let us know what it is. And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Today?   the orbit of the fifth planet before I tripped the so-called hyperspatial drive. To Toby Randolph the phenomenon was one of silence, motionless and lightlessness. To us Ayorians, the sensation was interesting, stimulating, surprising and otherwise opposite from Toby's experiences. Once free of Eaithra's eternally plucking telekmass fingers, our indirect faculties doubled, mine to eighty miles while others reached its. We held our senses outward prior to switching the deepspace drive, sensing infrequent molecules moving swiftly across our field of motion. But once hyperdrive switches were tripped, we suddenly sensed the trigger phenomenon which is involved in our activation of mass sensing and other telekinetic phenomenon. There is no direct action phenomenon capable of describing the experience. First, we were sensing matter in and around the space ship by means of these triggers, then we were able to sense the triggers them- selves. Toby Randolph's civilization had not consume time, while hyper-drive did. We entered the Quations system Uneventfully. Toby Randolph's enthusiasm was contagious. He was (ebullient, bubbling over with thoughts, words and anticipation for his civilization. My fellow Ayorians, too, were excited. Soon they would fulfill the grouping decision to grow and to face the natural barriers in the outer universe, far beyond the Enithra system. How did Spork fed? I was as naturally stimulated by the excitement around me. Who wouldn't be? And I was certainly curious about Toby's civilization as well as the biological source of my origin. Without question, the twinning problem I had accepted from Eme lay ahead, and this, too, prompted a great enthusiasm. Down deep inside, though, Spork, the Ayorian moron, thought of his lush Enithra valleys. As to any other Ayorian, home is always Enithra! do WRtre? developed by direct action means A , artlcles.wks piays?' And ## alone a pheaoewaon of indirect action which taev called hyperfree evaluation and report. Or reJ quest full particulars. It will be nice space. to have you with us. But one difference was but daniel s. mead. Literary Agent standing; natural teleportation aid #  D# " lFC #   N Y # # IF An IF First Each month If brings you a new writer, never before published. This month's Is Robert Weinberg, a #-yearold New Jersey graduate student in mathematics. He's the president of one science fiction club and past president of another, and his hobbies have been largely devoted to reading and collecting science fiction. He has been writing since he was #. We're sure you'll be glad to know there will be more stories by him in the near future. The Pale Horsemen rode again -- and now there were Five  T lived again I How many years it had been since my last revival I had no way of knowing. Nor did I care. All that mattered was that I lived again. Destruction walked again with death, to come hurtling from the void. The Four who were my brothers rode the skies, whispering in their harsh voices, welcoming me back to the living. Disease called to me. " Brother, you have come to mount again? Will you ride with us, share our glories, crush those who seek to oppose us? Ride the night winds with us, brother!"  But of the four, Disease was the one whom I liked the least. His way was wasteful, never ceasing. He took strong men and made them weak. He was the coward of the four. So I answered him not. Soon his horse could not keep up with the pace of my steed, the starship Terror . Next to approach me was Famine. "Do you ride to destroy the crops, oh mightiest of all, my brother? Together, shall we make the worlds of men tremble again under our hoofs? Forget this mission of yours. Abandon the fools who bring you back to life only when they need your powers. Leave them, desert them. Come ride with us. We four are feared, but the five of us would be Gods! Ride with us, brother!" His argument could not sway me, for the automatic reflexes installed in my body would destroy my consciousness immediately upon the mission. I had tried many times in the past, but those who created me knew too well the lusts which drove me. So, I rode onward, passing by Famine. Huge, powerful War was the third to come alongside my ship as it began to spiral down to the planet of my destination. The stupid foe, dim-witted but so very powerful. Once he began to ride, no one had ever been able to stand in his path. No one, except me. "Brother!" he cried out in anger. "Stop. I command you to return. You strive to cheat me of my due. Battle is brewing on this world below. It is not for you to upset my strivings. Go back, I tell you. Yon are one of us, but you work for those who oppose our aims. Go back!" I laughed at him. I knew that he could not harm me, for I was as powerful as he, if not more so. And he knew it too. Every time I rode, he threatened. And every time, he moved out of my path. "Go, my brother," I called to him, not unkindly. "There are many other worlds on which wars rage. This one could be too costly. It must be stopped, and only I can do this. Begone." Like mists before my eyes, the first three riders dissolved into nothingness. Already, the Terror was roaring down into the planet's atmosphere. The automatic controls had already taken over. They would land the ship in a pre-designated spot, where it would not easily be found. My thoughts were on an entirely different subject. A final rider had come galloping out of the darkness. The cowl which covered his features did not muffle his voice, the sound of crying winds. "So, we ride together, again, brother. I have waited long for your return." "There has been a long peace?" "Three hundred years," he replied, sweeping out with his scythe. "My blade has grown dull with just normal oiling. It will be good to drench it with life. Even I had to shudder at the way my brother turned a phrase. For I knew well the oil that his scythe used. No matter. Together we came riding down to this unsuspecting world. t times, I wondered if the cowled figure who walked beside me in that blue forest of giant plants was real or just the ramblings of a half-crazed mind. When I had first died, and part of my brain was transferred to this machine, had I been secretly brought to believe that such beings as the Four Horsemen really existed? Were they just a mental compensation created by my memory banks to provide IF the companionship that a man who lived only when he was needed desperately craved. Or were they real, not dream figures, but ancient and powerful spirits? A man had never truly died and been brought back to life. Nor did any man ever exist with all the censors and moral codes in his mind completely destroyed, his only function. I was a destroyer, the first and only God of Destruction ever created. If the Horsemen did exist, would they not consider me their brother? The real and the unreal had long ago blended into one and the same. The answer to my puzzlings was no longer very important, merely the random thoughts of a freak machine. I could see Death, but to all others he was invisible and intangible. Yet when a man died, I saw Death let his mighty scythe swing. There is no answer to the unanswerable. The planet was totally dissimilar to Earth. The atmosphere was a mixture of various poisonous gases. This bothered me little, as I do not breathe. Why I had been sent had been fed into me via mempry units as I was returned to life on the voyage thru sub-space to this world. Earth was beginning to expand its empire into this section of the galaxy. The humanoids of this world, the Ccern, had been at first quite friendly. They had no use for the Earth-type worlds in this area, anyway, as our atmosphere was as poisonous to them as theirs was to us. A long and useful period of cooperation between planets seemed in the making. That was until a new leader took over control of the government. Trre # and his cohorts refused to let any Earth colonists settle the planets in the Ccern sector of space. He had deliberately set to force Earth into a costly war, unless certain terms of his were met. The alien knew that it would be cheaper for the Terran empire to make concessions to his government than fight a war hundreds of light years away from the mother world. What Trre did not know was of my existence. Death's low whisper broke me out of my reverie. "There are men up ahead?" The question signified humanoid beings, but not fully so. Was this a true question, or just subconscious compensation. "Yes, they are men," I answered. Scythe held low, Death disappeared in the darkness of the night. I crept forward alone. Beneath me, everywhere my hands touched, wherever my bare skin touched the ground, life died. My trail was an easy one to follow -- thin line of death and destruction. T here were four of them, soldiers by their uniforms and the weapons they carried. Probably part of a large search for my space ship. I cared little whether they found it or not. When I left, it would not be by secrecy, if I left at all. They were taller than I, and very manlike in appearance. Only the absence of any nose or nostrils gave them an alien appearance. This made my job all the easier. It was These beings could almost be called men, thus putting them under my domain. From across the small clearing in which they stood, I saw Death waving his scythe. I walked out of the brush and into the open. They didn't know what to do. Since I seemed to be unarmed and quite helpless before their weapons and the safety of odds, they let me approach without showing any great fear. One of them reached for the radio device clipped to his belt. "We have just found a survivor of that alien vessel, Commander Ywwe," he reported in the sing-song language which was part of my mempry banks. "Yes, sir, alone and obviously harmless. There is one Strange thing, sir. He does not seem to need any breathing apparatus. Is not our atmosphere supposed to be deadly to these Earthlings ?" As he spoke, I kept on approaching. I was in luck. General Ywwe was one of the ruling cartel which I was sent to destroy. Already, the instruments in my chest had located the broadcast point of his transmitter. It was time for me to move into action. The soldier with the radio turned to his companions. The man had just switched off the communicator. This made my task even easier. Now the commander would have no warning of my approach. He would not learn of the patrol's death until I revealed it to him myself. "The General says that we are to detain the alien until a medical team can get here." I chuckled. The medical team would have been quite shocked if they could exam me. But I had other plans. By now I had come face to face with two of the four men. Their weapons raised, they appeared slightly nervous, but not afraid. Death swung his scythe into the back of one of the two as I reached out and touched his arm. He dropped to the earth, dead, the poison fed from my fingertips into The others raised their guns in horror, but for them it was too late. I pursed my lips and whistled. The half computer part of my brain took over the sound, raising it to just the right pitch. Three aliens crumpled as Death cut them down. Their brains were jelly, destroyed by the precise high frequency sound that I had just emitted. Death looked at me, his cowl flung back. "Tonight, brother, we live again," he chuckled, his eye sockets gleaming horribly. My grin matched his toothy one. "Tonight," I answered, "the evil IF quiver. The world trembles. Men huddle in their caves with fear. Tonight, I am master. Let my enemies beware. I have felt my power, and know that I am as strong as old. Now aloft, to the camp of the fool they call General. Away, for Destruction does ride!" 'T'he camp of my enemies laid below me. Death whispered in my ear. "The structure with the force screen around must be the place of the commander." "I too have eyes, bony brother. It is too well lit to try to land now. Come, let us destroy this camp of our enemy. Oil your blade." Together we swooped down on the unsuspecting camp. The antinoxious fumes issued from my gravs throughout my body propelled me like a streak of dark lightning. Every man I touched died, every one who heard my call also. My very breath was destruction, as mouth. The laser beam where my left eye should have been burned down those few who tried to flee. I killed without mercy, young and old, male and female. Those who begged for mercy died as swiftly as those who tried to fight me. Only the general, inside his force screen, remained alive. His radioed calls for help went unanswered as my tracking apparatus blocked out every message he sent. By the time I called for him, the man was in a state of near shock. Trembling he watched me approach the force screen. My fingers went out and touched it. Energy flared for seconds and then went out. I was through. The general didn't even bother to raise his weapon. He knew that if the force screen could not stop me, no mere hand weapon could. "Who or what are you?" he asked in a voice trambling with fear. "No man can walk through an energy screen. No man can destroy an entire command of imperial soldiers. You interferred with my radio signals!" His voice was rising higher and higher. "Who are you? What are you?" .I laughed. I laughed the laughter of the damned. "Men have spoken of me many times. Legends tell of Four Horsemen -- Death, Famine, Disease and War. I am their brother, the strongest of all. I am... Destruction." "Mad!" screamed the man in the high pitched voice of the insane. "The world is mad, the universe is mad." He raised his weapon to his forehead. Death raised his scythe. But I still needed the General. My hand moved with the speed of the swiftest machine. The laser gun that the General held rumpled under the force of my machinedriven fingers. "You cannot die," I mocked. "Your life is mine." T I he General was in a state of shock. He could do nothing, say nothing. His whole world had been destroyed before his eyes. The false skim that coated my body fooled him. If I had been shaped like any other robot or android, he might have been able to comprehend such destruction. And even then, he would not have been able to credit his eyes, for no ordinary robot could be programmed for such a complex action as destruction in such varied manner. Only a combination of the two, the mentality of man, harsh, destructive and ruthless, combined with the sheer power and ability of the machine could be such an agent of destruction. "Your command base?" I asked in a tone that could not be denied. "Where is it? Is General Trre in charge? Answer me, slave, or feel my wrath." In reality, I could not torture him in the least. I could only kill. Everything about me was for quick, ruthless extermination. I was not programmed to be able to kill slowly. But the General did not know this. Listlessly he told me what I desired to know. I nodded. Death grinned and let his scythe arc as I touched the man's arm. The blaring communicator reminded me that my enemies would be prepared for my attack. But I was not worried. My mission was proceeding as planned. Turning on full force from my anti-gravs, I speed across the countryside. When I was only about five miles from the now dead camp, rockets roared out of the sky and blew the area to atoms. The radiation bathed my artificial skin, adding new energy to my storage banks. Smiling, I flew on, Death winging along beside me. What was the truth? Was I an emissary, or Destruction? I knew my mission was that of terror, destroying all those who sought to stop me. I was one of the Horsemen but in a way, opposed them. For my mission prevented their evils. I killed the rulers, the ones who created wars and brought about famines. Death rode with me, taking the crumbs, but if I did not ride, he would have soaked his scythe in rivers of blood. I prevented war, for I destroyed all those who strove to start it. But if I worked for peace, why did I get such satisfaction less, so terribly destructive? The Four Horsemen, whom I thwarted again and again, were my friends, yet I strove against them. I died many times, but each time I lived again. Why didn't I have any memory except for these missions -- missions that took place over the span of hundreds of years? I was not immortal -- or was I? I had died a hundred times, but yet I still lived. As the general asked, what was I? As I flew through the night air,  I analyzed all my circuits. Everything was in perfect order. I IF was a fool to say that I knew nothing about myself. In reality, I knew everything, just could not admit the truth. Take a man who had just died, keep his brain alive with superscience until a new body was ready, and then transfer the now slightly altered organ into the machine which was to be its new home. Alof the being's nature, make destruction its only goal. Control it by a small computer, ever linked with Earth. One that directed the half-man, half-machine in its tasks. Invent the most destructive machine ever built, form it so that it appeared human even though its insides are stuffed with myriads of monstrous machines of death. Create a destroyer, a fifth Horseman. Half mad from brain damage, nearly insane from lack of will or desires, entirely deadly with an armament capable of destroying a world -- this was my identity. Dormant with my life flow at low ebb until I was needed, immortal and nearly indestructible, I was nearly a God, but not even a man. Once I had an identity, once I was humachine. The Fifth Rider: Destruction. I came upon the supreme headquarters of Commander Trre during the late morning. His base was located in the middle of the main city of the world. I knew that I could never pass as a Ccern, but I also knew that every delay made my mission more difficult. I could not just destroy the entire area, for I was programmed against wanton while I pondered. I knew that there was but one answer. I would have to wait till nightfall, no matter what the consequences. Time passed so very slowly. The planet rotated once every thirty hours, so my wait was both dull and long. I had no way to amuse myself, for the only emotion I felt was satisfaction when I had killed. I rechecked my circuits a hundred times. Death had drifted off, for he was never idle. I knew that he would return once I started to move. Finally, twilight came, and then night. The planet had no moon, and the starlight was not very bright. Silently I flew into the city. As I came to a stop, hovering over the Commander's palace, Death came gliding out of the shadows. "They expect you, brother." "No great surprise. But they don't know what to expect. Nor when I come, or my powers, other than that I am very dangerous." I laughed. "They do not know that tonight they face Destruction." The palace had a steel roof. My laser eye cut a small gap in the metal, and I then proceeded to widen the opening with my hands, twisting away the jagged metal. "I create my own entrance, brother," I called to Death. "They could not be prepared for that. T was right and wrong. The en tire palace was set so that any destruction or damage would set off alarms. The hall into which I had come filled up swiftly with soldiers. I whistled, but with no effect. These men were all wearing space suits. They could not be reached by sound or touch. The poison in my fingers was useless. I swallowed the poisonous gas in my lungs. My laser eye was my only weapon, and they had lasers which they used to fight back. My energy shield was at maximum strength, but I knew that it could not stop coherent light for any length of time. I knew that my masters on Earth would never let this body be captured. The selfdestruct mechanism within me had probably started. My personality already part of a huge memory bank on Earth, would not die. I was immortal. This body would perish. And I had not completed my mission. I retreated steadily before their onslaught. My laser took a toll of them, but for every one that died, two others took his place. Death laughed as he swung his scythe. "We have not lost yet, my brother. Look who watches!" General Trre! The fool was watching the battle from behind an   energy shield at the other end of the hall. He was guarded, but that did not worry me. With the General dead, his party would never be able to hold together. I had to destroy him before I was destroyed. There was only one chance left. My antigravs roared in protest as I went hurtling across the floor. A laser bolt penetrated my screen, fusing my legs into scrap. Already I could feel the machinery in my stomach crumbling under the acid which was to bring about my end. The General did not realize my intent until it was too late. I flashed through his energy screen just as my absorbers gave way. I was blind, with half my machinery gone, but my radar sense still located the retreating man. Death waved me onward, as laser beams from Trre's guards struck me again and again. But I would not be stopped. I flung myself at the man, holding him in a grip of iron. A grip that could not be broken. They couldn't use their lasers now. The General shrieked in terrible pain as the corrosive acid in my chest burst through and covered his body. Mortal flesh could not stand up against such destruction. The General died in seconds. My mission was finished. "Until we ride again, Death I" I cried, and willed the final act of destruction. My own.    IF IF  Serial The dream world Tamisan had made was out of control -- and her only escape lay in finding a man who did not exist in that if-reality. dreamer on the world of Ty-Kry. sky-tower arid, instructed by his roving arid can only find adventure -- one based on what might have in the dreams she can make and happened if Ty-Kry had not ddmitted the space culture and joined the Confederacy . At the first dream session , however, things are not normal . Kas is asked to join the dream she and Starrex will share , using a new dream linking machine . She falls into a dream at once -- but it is all wrong. She is alone, and the world is strangely real . She seems Unable to control events. It is a culture filled with ancient magic and gods , and she is the Mouth of Olava, a seer ess in the service of the nobility. Summoned to foretell the future, she finds herself possessed and capable of performing the ritual. She predicts that spacemen are about to invade the planet and that it must be saved by a champion -- whom she realizes is Starrex. Shaken, she tries to break the dream, but cannot. She knows she is anchored by Starrex, and perhaps by Kas, both of whom' may be anywhere in this world. To return, she must find them. Then she is summoned to the great inner city -- a wreckage in the prediction. She does, but the Over-Queen is not impressed. They knew the spaceship was coming -- and there have been other spaceships, which they have destroyed in the past. She demands that Tamisan produce this champion. By an uncanny ritual that Tamisan somehow knows, she does locate  Starrex among the OverQueen's guards. But the OverQueen promptly orders him and Tamisan into prison. Here he occupies the body of an other-self already accused of treason. Under Tamisan' s prodding, he admits he is Starrex and Hawarel, fused into double memories, and it was his confusion by the Starrex memories that led to his seeming treason. She tries to break the dream with him, but still fails. She feels that it can only be done when they find Kas, whom she believes must be among the crew of the coming spaceship. Later, they are summoned under guard. The Over-Queen intends to meet the spaceship when it lands and is taking Hawarel along as the "champion" Tamisan predicted. They go out where the wrecks of other spaceships lie, to wait for the latest one. Seeing the fearsome weapons on those ships, she cannot understand how they were subdued. But now the Over-Queen plans to send Hawarel out to face a ship with only a sword against it. And with him, she announces that Tamisan must go to share his fate. As the OverQueen smiles mockingly after delivering this obvious death sentence to them, the great ship comes dawn on a trail of fire and lands, awaiting them! IF IX B y the light of those flames, the whole plain was illumined. Beyond stood the hulk of the unfortunate spacer which had last planeted here. And there, drawn up in lines was a large force of spearmen, crossbowmen, officers with the basket-hilted weapons at their sides. However, as they stood they might seem a guard of honor for the Over-Queen, who sat raised above the rest on a very tall chair cart -- certainly not an army in battle array. And those in the ship -- they might well look contemptuously on such archaic weapons as useless. How had those of Ty-Kry taken the other ship and her crew? By wiles, treachery -- as the victims might declare -- or by dever tricks, suggested that part of Tamisan who was the Mouth of Olava. The surface of the ground boiled away under the descent rockets. Then the bright fires vanished, leaving the plain in semi-darkness until their eyes adjusted to the far lesser light of the torches. There was no expression of awe by the waiting crowd. Though they might be, by their trappings, dress and arms, accounted centuries behind the technical knowledge of the newcomers, they were braced by their history to know that they were not to face gods of unknown powers but mortals with whom they had successfully fought before. What gave them this barrier against the star rovers, Tamisan wondered, and why were they so adverse to any contact with star civilization? Apparently they were content to stagnate at a level of civilization perhaps five hundred years behind her world. Did they not produce any inquiring minds any who desired to do things differently? The ship was down and gave no outward sign of life, though Tamisan knew its scanners must be busy feeding back what information they gathered to appear on videoscreens. If those had picked up the derelict ship, the newcomers would have so much of a warning. She glanced from the silent bulk of the newly landed spacer to the OverQueen, j'ust in time to see the ruler raise her hand in a gesture. Four men came forward from the ranks of nobles and guards. Unlike the latter, they wore no body armor nor helms, only short tunics of an unrelieved black. And in the hands of each was a bow -- not the crossbow of the troops, but the yet older hand-bow of expert archers. That part of Tamisan which was of this world knew a catch of breath. For those bows were unlike any other in the land, and those who held them unlike any other archers. No wonder ordinary men and women gave them wide room. For they were a monstrous lot. Over the heads of each was fitted so skillfully fashioned a mask that it seemed no mask at all, rather their natural features, save that the features were not those of human men, but rather copies of the great heads which surmounted, one for each point of the compass, the defensive walls of Ty-Kry. Neither human nor animals, but something of both, and something beyond both. And the bows they raised were fashioned of treated human bone, strung with cords woven of human hair. The bones and hair of ancient enemies and ancient heroes, so that the intermingled strength of both were ready to serve the living now. T?rom closed quivers each took a single arrow, and in the torchlight those arrows glittered, seeming to draw and condense radiance until they were shafts of solid light. Fitted to the cords, they had a hypnotic effect, holding one's attention to the exclusion of all else. Tamisan was suddenly aware of that and tried to break the attraction, but at that moment the arrows were fired. And her head turned with all the rest in that company to watch the flight of what seemed to be lines of fire across the dark sky, rising up and up until they were well above the dark ship, then following a curve, to plunge out of sight behind it. Oddly enough, in their passing no they had left great arcs of light behind which did not fade at once, but cast faint gleams on the bubble of the ship. Ingathering -- one part of Tamisan's mind supplied -- a laying on of ancient power to influence those in the spacer. Though that of her which was a dreamer could not so readily believe in the effeciency of any such ceremony. There had been sound with the arrows' passing, a shrill high whistling which hurt the ears so that those in that throng put hands to the sides of their heads to shut out the screech. A wind arose out of nowhere and with it a loud crackling. Tamisan looked up to see above the Over-Queen's head a large bird flapping wings of gold and blue, until a closer look said it was no giant bird but rather a banner so fashioned that the wind set it flying to counterfeit the action. The black-dad archers still stood in a line a little out from the ranks of the guards. And now, though the Over-Queen made no visible sign, those about Hawarel and Tamisan urged them forward until they came to front both those archers and the Over-Queen's tall throne cart. "Well, champion, is it in your mind to carry out the duties this busy Mouth has assigned you?" There was jeering in the OverQueen's question, as if she did not honestly believe in Tamisan's IF a dupe to march to destruction in his own way. Hawarel went to one knee; but as he did so, he swung his empty sword sheath across his knee, making very visible the fact that he lacked a weapon. "At your desire, Great One, I stand ready. But is it your will that my battle be without even steel between me and the enemy?" 'T'amisan saw a smile on the lips of the Over-Queen. And at that moment, she glimpsed a little into this ruler -- that it might just please her to will such a fate on Hawarel. But if the Over-Queen played with that thought for an instant or two, she put it aside. Now she gestured. "Give him steel, and let him use it. The Mouth has said he is the answer to our defense this time. Is that not so, Mouth?" And the look she gave to Tamisan had a cruel core. "He has been chosen in the farseeing. And twice has it read so." Tamisan found the words to answer in a firm voice, as if what she said was an absolutely unchangeable decree. The Over-Queen laughed. "Be firm, Mouth, put your will behind this choice of yours. In fact, do you go with him, to give him the support of Olaval" Hawarel had accepted a sword from the officer on his left. Now he arose to his feet, swinging that blade as he saluted with a flourish which suggested that, if he knew he were going to extinction, he intended to march there as one who moved to trumpets and drums. "The Right be strength to your arm, a shield to your body," intoned the Over-Queen. But there was that in her voice which one might detect to mean that the words she spoke were only ritual, not intended to encourage this champion. Hawarel turned to face the silent ship. From the burnt and blasted ground about its landing fins arose trails of steam and smoke. Small, red, charring ran in lines away from that ruin. The faint arcs which had remained in the air from the arrow flights were gone now. As Hawarel moved forward, Tamisan followed a pace or two behind. Though if the ship remained closed to them, with no entrance hatch opened and no ramp run forth, she did not see how they could carry out their plans. And what if that were so, would the Over-Queen expect them to wait hour after hour for some decision from the spacer's commander as to whether or not he would contact them? Fortunately the spacecrew were more enterprising. Perhaps the sight of that hulk on the edge of the field had given them the need Hi to learn more. The hatch which opened was not the large entrance one, but a smaller door above one of the fins; and from it shot a stunner beam. Luckily it caught its prey, both Hawarel and Tamisan, before they had reached the edge of the sullenly burning turf, so that their suddenly hdpless bodies did not fall into that fire. Nor did they lose consciousness -- only the ability to control slack muscles. Tamisan had crumpled face down, and only the fact that one cheek pressed the earth gave her room to breathe. But her sight was sharply curtailed to the edge of burning grass which crept inexorably on toward her. Seeing that, she forgot all else. 'T'hose moments were the worst she had ever spent. She had conjured up narrow escapes in dreams, but always there had been the knowledge that at the last moment escape was possible. Now there was no escape, only her helpless body and the line of advancing fire. With the suddenness of a blow delivering a shock through her still painful bruises, she was caught, right side and left, by what felt like giant pinchers. As those closed about her body, she was drawn aloft, still face down, the fumes and heat of the burning vegetation choking her. She coughed until the spasm made her sick, spinning in that brutal clutch, being drawn to the spacer, as if the ship had shot forth a robot's arm to pull her in. She came into a burst of dazzling light. Then hands seized upon her, pulling her down, but holding her upright. The force of the stunner was wearing off; they must have set the beam on lowest power. There was the prickle of feeling returning in her legs and her heavy arms. She was able to lift her head a fraction, to see men in space uniforms about her. They wore helmets as if expecting to issue out on a hostile world, and some of them had the visors closed. Two picked her up easily and carried her along, down a corridor, before dropping her without any gentleness in a small cabin with a suspicious likeness to a cell. Tamisan lay on the floor, recovering command of her own body and trying to think ahead. Had they taken Hawarel, too? There was no reason to believe they had not. But he had not been put in this cell. She was able to sit up now, her back supported by the wall, and she smiled shakily at her thought that their brave boast of a championship battle had certainly been brought quickly to naught. Not that the Over-Queen's desires might have run far counter to what happened. But she and Starrex had gained this much of their own objective: they were in the ship she IF believed also held Kas. Only let the three of them make contact and they could leave the dream. And -- would their leaving shatter this dream world? How real was it? She was sure of nothing, and there was no reason to worry over side issues. The time had come to concentrate upon one thing only -- Kas. What should she do? Pound on the door of this cell to demand attention -- to speak with the commander of this ship? Ask then to see all his crew so she could pick out Kas in his this-world masquerade? She had a suspicion that while Hawarel-Starrex had accepted her story, no one else might. The important thing was some kind of action to get her free and let her search... The door was actually opening! Tamisan was startled by what seemed a quick answer to her need. X ere was no helmet on the man who stood there, though he wore a tunic bearing the insignia of an upperofficer, slightly different from that Tamisan knew from her own Ty-Kry. He also had a stunner aimed at her, while at his throat was the box of a vocal interpreter. "I come in peace -- " "With a weapon in hand?" she countered. He looked surprised; he must have expected a foreign tongue in answer. But she had replied in the Basic which was the second language of all Confederacy planets. "We have reason to believe that weapons are necessary with your people. I am Glanden Tork of Survey." "I am Tamisan and a Mouth of Olava." Her hand went to her head and discovered that somehow, in spite of her passage through the air and her lacking-in-ceremony entrance into the ship, her crown was still there. Then she pressed the important question: "Where is the champion?" "Your companion?" The stunner was no longer centered on her and his tone had lost some of its belligerency. "He is in safekeeping. But why do you name him champion?" "Because that is what he is -- come to engage your selected champion in Right battle." "I see. And we select a champion in return, is that it? What is Rightbattle?" She answered his last question first. "If you claim land, you meet the champion of the lordship of that land in Right-battle." "But we claim no land," he protested. "You made claim when you set your fiery ship down on the fields of Ty-Kry." "Your people then consider our landing a form of invasion? But this can be decided by a single combat between champions? And we pick our man -- " Tamisan interrupted him. "Not so. The Mouth of Olava selects -- or rather the sand selects -- the seeing selects. That is why I have come, though you did not greet me in honor." "You select the champion -- how?" "As I have said -- by the Seeing." "I do not see, but doubtless it will be made plain in the proper time. And where then is this combat fought?" "Out there." She waved to what she thought was the ship walls. "On the land being claimed." "Logical," he conceded. And then he spoke as if to the air around them. "All that recorded?" Since the air did not answer him, he was apparently satisfied by silence. "This is your custom, Lady -- Mouth of Olava. But since it is not ours, we must discuss it. By your leave we shall do so." "As you wish." She had this much on her side, he had introduced himself as a member of Survey, which meant that he had been trained in the necessity of understanding alien folkways. And the underlying principle of such training wherever possible was to follow planet customs. If the crew did accept this idea of championship, follow it completely. She could demand to see every member of the crew, thus find Kas. And once that was done -- break-dream! B ut, Tamisan told herself now, do not count on too easy an end to this venture. There was a nagging little doubt lurking in the back of her mind, and it had something to do with those death arrows, with the hulk of the derelict. The people of Ty-Kry, seemingly so weakly defended, had managed through centuries to keep their world free of spacers. When she tried to plumb the Tamisan-of-thisworld's memories as to how that was accon iplished, she had no answer but what corresponded to magic forces only partly understood. That the shooting of the arrows was the first step in bringing such forces into being she was aware. Beyond that seemed only to lie a belief akin to her Mouth power, and that she did not understand, even when she employed it. She was accepting all of this, Tamisan realized suddenly, as if this world did exist, that it was not a dream out of her control. Could Starrex's suggestion be the truth, that they had by some means traveled into an alternate world? Her patience was growing short; she wanted action. Waiting was very difficult. She was sure that scanners of more than one kind were IF trained on her and she must play the part of a Mouth of Olava, displaying no impatience, only calm confidence in herself and her mission. That she held to as best she could. Perhaps the time she waited seemed longer than it really was. But Tork returned, to usher her out of the cell and escort her up ladder from level to level. She found the long skirts of her robe difficult to manage. The cabin they came into was large and well furnished, and there were several men seated there. Tamisan looked from one to another searchingly. But she could not tell, she felt none of the uneasiness she had known in the throne room when Hawarel had been present. Of course, that could mean Kas was not one of this group, though a Survey ship did not carry a large crew -- mainly specialists of several different callings. There were probably ten, even twenty, more than the six before her. Tork led her to a chair which had some of the attributes of an easirest, molding it to her comfort as she settled into it. "This is Captain Lewald, Medico Thrum, Pyscho-Tech Sims, HistTechneer El Hamdi." Tork named names and each man acknowledged with a half bow. "I Have outlined your proposal to them and they have discussed the matter. By what means will you select a champion from among us?" Qhe had no sand. For the first  time, Tamisan realized that handicap. She would have to depend upon touch alone, but somehow she was sure that would reveal Kas to her. "Let your men come to me, touching hand to mine," she raised hers to lay it palm up on the table. "When I clasp that of him whom Olava selects, I shall know it." "It seems simple enough," the Captain returned. "Let us do as the lady suggests." And he leaned forward to rest his own for a minute on hers. There was no response, nor was there any in the others. The Captain called an order on the intercom, and one by one the other members of the crew came to her, touching palm to palm, while Tamisan, with mounting uneasiness, began to believe she had erred. Perhaps only by the sand could she detect Kas. Though she searched the face of each as he took his seat opposite her and laid his hand on hers, she could see no resemblance to Starre's cousin, nor was there any inner warning her man was here. "That was the last," the Captain said as the final man arose. "Which is our champion?" "He is not here." She blurted out the truth, her distress breaking through her caution. "But you have touched hands with every man on board this ship," the Captain answered her. "Or is this some trick -- " ns He was interrupted by a sound sharp enough to startle. And the chanted numbers which spilled from the com by his elbow' meant nothing to Tamison but brought the rest in that cabin into instant action. A stunner in Tork's hand caught her before she could rise, and once more she was conscious but unable to move. As the other officers pushed through the door on the run, Tork put out his hand, holding her limp body erect in the chair, while with the other he thumbed some alarm button set into the table. His summons was speedily answered by two crewmen who carried her along, to thrust her once more into a cabin. This was getting to be far too regular a procedure, Tamisan thought ruefully as they tossed her negligently on a bunk, hardly pausing to see if she landed safely on its surface or not. Whatever that alert had meant, it had certainly once more brought her to the status of prisoner. Apparently sure of the stunner beam, her guard went out, leaving the door open a crack so that she could hear the pad of running feet, the dangs of what could be secondary alarms. W hat possible attack had the forces of the Over-Queen laimched against a well-armed and already alert spacer? Yet it was plain that those men believed themselves in danger and were on the defensive. Starrex -- and Ras. Where was Kas? The Captain said she had met all on board. Did that mean that the vision she had earlier seen was false, that the faceless man in the spacer dress was a creature of her too active imagination? She must not lose confidence. Kas was here -- he had to be! She lay now trying vainly to guess by the sounds what was happening. But the first flurry of noise and movement were stilled; there was only silence. Hawarel -- where was Hawarel? The stunner's power was wearing off. She had pulled herself up somewhat groggily when the door of the cabin shot into its wall crack and Tork and the Captain stood there. "Mouth of Olava, or whatever you truly are," the Captain said, with a chill in his voice which reminded Tamisan of Hawarel's earlier rage, "the winning of time may not have been of your devising -- this nonsense of Champions and Right-battle -- or perhaps it was. Your superiors perhaps deceived you too. At any rate, now it does not matter. They have done their best to make us prisoner and will not reply to our signals for a parley. So we must use you for our messenger. Tell your ruler that we hold her champion and we can readily use him as a key to open gates shut in our faces. We have weapons beyong swords and spears, IF even beyond those which might not have saved those in that other ship. She can tie us here for a measure of time, but we can solve such bonds. We have not come as invaders, no matter what you believe, nor are we alone. If our signal does not reach our sister ship in orbit above, there will be such an accounting as your race has not seen, nor can conceive of. We shall release you now and you will tell your Queen this. If she does not send those to talk with us before the dawn -- then it will be the worse for her. Do you understand?" "And Hawarel?" Tamisan asked. I "Hawarel?" "The champion. You will keep him here?" "As I have said, we have the means to make him a key for your fortress doors. Tell her that, Mouth. From what we have read in your champion's mind you have certain authority here which ought to impress your Queen." Read from Starrex's mind? What did they mean? Tamisan was suddenly fearful. Some kind of mindprobe?, But if they did that, then they must know the rest. She was utterly confused now, and found it veiy hard to center her attention on the matter at hand, that she must relay this defiant message to the Over-Queen And, since there seemed to be nothing she could do to protest that action, she would do so. Though what reception she might have in Ty-Kry -- Tamisan shuddered as Tork pulled her frpjn the bunk and half carried, half led her along. XI F or the third time Tamisan satin prison, but this time she looked not at the smooth walls of a spaceship cabin, but had the ancient stones of the High Castle ringing her in. Captain Lewald's estimation of her influence with the OverQueen had fallen far wide of the truth, and her plea in favor of a parley with the spacemen had been overruled at once, while the threat concerning their strange weapons and their mysterious use of Hawarel as a "key" was laughed at. The fact that those of Ty-Kry had successfully dealt with this menace in the past made them confident that their same devices would serve as well now. And what those devices were Tamisan had no idea, save that something had happened to the ship before she had been unceremoniously bundled out of it. Hawarel they had kept on board, Kas had disappeared -- and until she had both to hand she was indeed a captive. Kas -- her thoughts kept turning back to the fact he had not been among those who had faced her. Yet Lewald had assured her that she had seen all his crew -- Wait I She set herself to recall his every word -- what had he said? "You have touched hand with every man aboard this ship." But he had not said all the crew. Had there been one outside the ship? All she knew of space travel she had learned from tapes. But those had been very detailed as they needed to be to supply the dreamers with factual background and inspiration from which to build fantasy worlds. This spacer claimed to be a Survey vessel and not operating alone. Therefore -- it might really have a companion in orbit, and there Kas could be. But, if that were so, die had no chance of reaching him. Now if this, were only a true dream -- Tamisan sighed, leaned her head back against the dank stone of the wall and then jerked away from that support as its chill struck into her shoulders. Dreams -- Suppose -- she sat upright, alert and a little excited -- suppose she could dream within a dream -- and find Kas that way? Was it possible? You could not tell until you proved it in one manner or another. She had no stablizer, no booster. But those were only needed when a dream was shared. She might venture as well on her own. But if she dreamed within a dream, could she do aught to set matters right? Why ask questions she could not answer until it was put to the proof? She stretched out on the stones of the cell floor, resolutely blocking off those portions of her mind which were aware of the present discomfort of her body. Instead, she began the deep, even breathing of a dreamer, fastening her thoughts on the pattern of self-hypnosis which was the door to her dream. But all she had as a goal was Kas and he as he was in his real person. So poor a guide! She was going under -- she could still dream!   these were of a translucent material through which flowed soft and pleasing colors. It could not be a space ship. Then the scene wavered, and swiftly Tamisan thrust aside that doubt which might puncture the dream fabric. The walls sharpened, fixed into a solid state: this was a corridor, facing her a door. She willed to see beyond and was straightway, after the manner of a proper dream, jn that chamber. Here the walls were hung with the same sparkling web stuff which had lined her chamber in the sky tower. Seeking Kas, she had returned to her own world. But she held the dream, curious as to why her aim had brought her here. Had die been wrong, and had Kas never come with her? Blit if that were so, why had she and Starrex been marooned in the other dream? There was no one in the chamber, IF but she felt that faint pull drawing her on. She sought Kas and there was that which promised he was here. A second room. Entering, she was startled. For this she knew and well -- it was the room of a dreamer. And Kas stood by an empty couch, while the other was occupied. The dreamer wore a sharing crown, but what rested on the other couch was not any second sleeper but a squat box of metal, to which her dream cords were attached. And Tamisan was not the dreamer! She had expected to see herself Instead the entranced was one of the locked minds, the blankness of her countenance was unmistakeable. Dream force was being created here by an indreamer, and seemingly it was harnessed to that box. Given such clues, Tamisan projected the rest. This was not the same dreaming chamber where she had fallen asleep; rather it was a smaller room. And Kas was very much awake, intent upon some dials on the box top. The indreamer and the box, locked so together, could be holding them in the other world. But what of that faint vision of Kas in Ship's uniform? To mislead her? Or was this a misleading dream, dictated by the suspicions she had detected in Starrex concerning his cousin? For this was the logical reasoning from such suspicions, that she had been sent with Starrex into a dream world and therein locked by this indreamer and machine -- real or dream? Was she now visible to Kas? If this were a dream, she should be. If she had come back to reality -- Her head reeled under the listing of things which might be true, untrue, half true. To prove at least one small fraction, she moved forward and laid her hand on that of Kas as he leaned over to make some small adjustment to the box. He gave a startled exclamation, jerked his hand from under hers and glanced around. But, though he stared straight at her, it was plain he saw nothing; she could be as disembodied as a spirit in one of the old tales. Yet if he had not seen her, he had felt something. A gain he leaned over the box, eyeing it intently as if he thought he must have felt some shock or emanation from it. The dreamer never moved. Save for the slow rise and fall of her breathing, which told Tamisan she was indeed deep in her self-induced and created world, she might have been dead. Her face was very wan and colorless. Seeing that, Tamison was uneasy. This tool of Kas's had been far too long in an uninterrupted dream. She would have to be awakened if she made no move to break it for herself. One of the dangers of indreaming was this possible loss of the power to break a dream. That occuring, the guardian must break it. Most of the dreamers' caps proIF vided the necessary stimulus to do so. Only the cap of this dreamer's head had certain modifications Tamisan had never seen before, and these might prevent breaking -- What would happen if Tamisan could evoke waking? Would that also release her -- and Starrex -- wherever he might be now -- from their dream, return them to the proper world? She was well drilled in the technique of deep dream break. But those she had used when she stood in reality beside a victim who had overstayed the proper dream time. She reached out a hand, touched the pulse on the sleeper's throat and applied slight massage. But though her hands seemed corporal and solid to her, there was no response in the other. To prove a point, Tamisan aimed a finger, thrusting it deeply as she could into the pillow on which the dreamer's head rested. Her finger did not dent that soft roundness, but rather went into it, as if her flesh and bone had no substance. There was yet another way. It was harsh and used only in cases of exterminty. But to Tamisan this could be no else. She put those unsubstantial fingers on the temples of the sleeper, just below the rim of the dream cap, and concentrated on a single command. Awake The sleeper stirred, her features convulsed and a low moan came from her. Kas uttered an exclamation, hung over his box, his fingers busy pushing buttons with a care which suggested he was about a very delicate task. "Awake!" Tamisan commanded with such force as she could summon. The sleeper's hands arose very slowly, unsteadily from her sides and wavered up toward the cap, though her eyelids did not raise. Her expression was now one of pain. And Kas, breathing hard and fast, kept to his adjustments on the box. So they fought their silent battle for possession of the dreamer. And slowly Tamisan was forced to concede that whatever force lay in that box, it overrode all the technique she knew. But, the longer Kas kept this poor wretch under, the weaker she would grow. Death would be the answer, though perhaps that did not trouble him. Tf she could not wake the dream er, break the bonds which she was certain now were what tied her and Starrex to that other world, then she must somehow get at Kas himself. He had responded to her touch before -- therefore he might just -- Tamisan slipped away from the head of the couch and came to stand behind Kas. He straightened up, a faint relief mirrored on his face as he studied the dreamer, and apparently his box reported that there was no longer any disturbance. Now Tamisan raised her hands to either side of his head, spreading wide her fingers so they might in someway ape the expanse of a dreamer's cap, and then brought them swiftly down to cover his head, putting firm touch on his temples though she could not exert real pressure there. T Te gave a muffled cry and tossed his head from side to side as if to free himself from a cloud. But Tamisan, with all the determination of which she was capable, held fast. She had already seen this done once in the Hive. However then it had been used on a docile and willing subject and both the controlled and the dreamer had been on the same plane of existence. Now she could only hope that she could disrupt Kas's train of thought long enough to make him release the dreamer himself. So she brought to bear all her will to that purpose. He was not only shaking his head from side to side now, making it very hard to keep her fingers in the proper position, but he was swaying back and forth, his hands up, clawing as if to tear her hold away, though it appeared he could not touch her any more than she could lay firm grip on him. That fund of energy which had enabled her to create strange worlds and hold them for a fellow dreamer was bent to the task of influencing Kas. But to her dismay, though he ceased his frenzied movements and his clawing for the hands he could not clutch growing feebler, and though his eyes closed and his face screwed into such an expression of horror and rejection that it was that of a frightened child, he did not move to the box. Instead, he slumped forward so suddenly that Tamisan was taken wholly unaware, falling half across the divan. And in that fall he flailed out with an arm to send the box smashing to the floor, its weight dragging the cap in turn from the dreamer. Ohe drew several deep breaths, her  haggard face now displaying a small trace of returning color. Tamisan, still startled at the results of her efforts to influence Kas, began to wonder if she might have made matters worse. She did not know how much the box had to do with their transportation to the alternate world and whether, if it was broken, they would ever be able to return or not. There was one precaution, if she could take it. If she returned to that prison cell in the High Castle -- as she must do or leave Starrex-Hawarel lost forever -- then to leave Kas here, perhaps able again to use his machine -- no! But how -- since she could not -- IF 'T'amisan looked to the stirring dreamer. The girl was struggling from the depths of so deep a strata of unconsciousness that she was not aware of what lay about her. In this state she might be pliable. Tamisan could only try. Leaving Kas, she went back to the dreamer. Once more, touching the girl's forehead, she sought to influence. The dreamer sat up with such slow movements of body and limbs as one might use if almost unbearable weights were fastened to every muscle. In a painfully slow gesture, she raised her hands to her head, groping for the cap no longer there. Then she sat, her eyes still shut, while Tamisan drew heavily on her own strength to deliver a final set of orders. Blindly, for she never opened her eyes, the dreamer felt along the edge of the couch on which she had lain, until her hand swept against the cords which fastened the cap to the box. Her lax fingers fumbled and then tightened as she gave a feeble jerk, then another, until both cords pulled free. Holding those still in one hand, she slipped from the couch in a forward movement which brought her to her knees, the upper part of her body on the other couch, one cheek touching that of the unconscious Kas. The strain on Tamisan was very great. She was wavering in her control now; several times those weak hands fell limply as her hold on the dreamer ebbed. But each time she found some small surge of energy which brought them back into action again. So that at last the cap was on Kas, the cords which had connected it to the box in a half coil on which the dreamer's head rested. So big a chance and with such poor equipment! Tamisan could not be sure of any results, she could only hope. Tamisan had released her command of the dreamer, who now lay against the couch on one side as Kas half lay on the other. She summoned all that she had, all that she sensed she had always possessed, that small difference in dream power she had secretly cherished. Once .more she touched the forehead of the sleeping girl and broke her own dream within a dreaml This was like climbing a steep hill with an intolerably heavy burden lashed to one's aching back -- like being forced to pull the dead weight of another body through a swamp which sucked one ever down. It was such an effort as she could not endure -- Then that weight was gone, and the relief of its vanishing was such that Tamisan did not for a space more than just savor the fact that it did not drag at her. She opened her eyes at last and even that small movement required an effort which left her spent. She was not in the sky tower. These walls were stone. And the light was dusky, coming wanly from a slit high in the opposite wall. The High Castle from which she had dreamed her way back to her own Ty-Kry, the dream within a dream. But how well had she wrought there? Tj'or the present, she was too tired to even think connectedly. Bits and pieces of all she had seen and done since she had awakened first in this Ty-Kry floated through her mind, not making any concrete pattern. It was the mind picture of Hawarel's face as she had seen it last while they marched toward the spacer which roused her from that uncaring drift -- Hawarel and the threat the Captain had made and which the Over-Queen had pushed aside. If Tamisan had truly broken the lock Kas had set up to keep them here, then it would be escape -- but now there was in her no strength. She tried to remember the formula for breaking, and knew a memory proved faulty. She could not do it now -- she must have more time to rest both mind and body. Now she was hungry, thirsty, with such a need for both food and drink that it was a torment. Did they mean to leave her here without any sustenance? Tamisan lay still, listening. And then she inched her head around slowly to view the deeper dusk of her surroundings at floor level. She was not alone! Kas! Had she been successful and pulled Kas with her? And if so -- was it that he had no counterpart in this world as she and Starrex had found, so that he was still his old self? However, she did not have time to explore that possibility, for there was a loud grating, followed by a line of light marking an opening door. In the beam of a torch stood that same officer who had earlier been her escort. Using her hands to brace up her body, Tamisan raised herself. But at the same time there was a cry from the far corner. Someone moved there, raising a head and showing features she had last seen in the sky tower. Kas -- and in his rightful body! He was scrambling to his feet. The officer and the guardsman behind him in the doorway, stared at the otherworlder as if they could not believe their eyes. Kas shook his head to clear away some mist and then -- His lips pulled back from his teeth in a terrible rictus which was no smile. There was a small laser in his hand. She could not move; he was going to bum her! In that IE moment she was so sure of it that she did not even know fear, only waited for the crisping of her flesh. T)ut the aim of that weapon raised beyond her and fastened on the doorway. Under it, both officer and guard went down. With one hand on the wall to steady himself, Kas pulled along until he came to her. He stood away from the stone then, transferred his laser to the other hand and reached down to hook fingers in the robe where it covered her shoulder. "On -- your -- feet." He mouthed the words with difficulty, as if his exhaustion nearly equalled hers. "I do not know how -- or why -- or who -- " The torch dropped from the charred hand which had carried it to give them much curtailed light. But Kas swung her around, thrusting his face very close to hers. He stared at her intently, as if by the very force of his glare he could strip aside the mask this other world body made for her, force the old Tamisan into sight. "You are Tamisan -- it can not be otherwise! I do not know how you did this, demon-bom." He shook her with a viciousness which struck her painfully against the wall. "Where -- is -- he?" All that came from her parched throat were harsh sounds without meaning. "Never mind." Kas stood straighter now and there was more vigor in his voice. "Where he is -- there shall I find him. Nor shall I lose you, demon-born, since you are my way back. And for Lord Starrex here there will be no guards, no safe shields. Perhaps this is the better way after all!" He slapped her face, his palm bruising her flesh, once more thumping her head back against the wall so that the rim of the Mouth crown bit into her scalp and she cried out in pain. "Speak! Where is this place. Answer me." "The High Castle of Ty-Kry," she croaked out. "And what do you in this hole?" "I am prisoner to the OverQueen." "Prisoner? What do you mean? You are a dreamer, this is your dream. Why are you a prisoner?" Tamisan was so shaken she could not marshal words easily as she had done to explain to Starrex. And she thought, a little dazedly, that Kas might not accept her explanation anyway. "Not -- wholly -- a dream," she got out. He did not seem surprised. "So the control has that property, has it -- to impose a sense of reality. Then -- " His eyes blazed into hers. "You can not control this dream, is that it? Again fortune favors me, it seems. Where is Starrex now?" She could give him a truthful answer and she was glad of that. As it seemed to her now, she could not speak falsely with any hope of belief. It was as if he could see straight into her mind with those demanding eyes of his. "I do not know." "But he is in this dream -- somewhere?" "Yes." "Then you shall find him for me, Tamisan. And speedily. Do we have to search this High Castle?" "He was, when I saw him last, outside." S he kept her eyes turned from the door, from what lay there. But now he hauled her toward that and she was afraid she was going to be sick. Where they might be in the interior of the small city which was the High Castle, she did not know. Except that those who had brought her here had not taken her on to the core towers, but had turned aside along the first of the gateways and gone down a long flight of stairs. She doubted if they would be able to walk out again as easily as Kas thought to do. "Come." He pulled at her, dragging her on, kicking aside what lay in the door. She closed her eyes tightly as he brought her past. But the stench of death was so strong that she staggered, retching, with his hand ever dragging at her, keeping on her feet and reeling ahead. Twice she watched glassily as he burned down opposition. And his luck at keeping surprise on his side held. They came to the foot of the stairs and climbed. Tamisan held to one hope -- now that she was on her feet and moving she found a measure of strength returning, so that she no longer feared falling, if Kas released his hold upon her. When they were out at last in the night, with the damp smell of the underways wafted away by a rising wind, she felt clean and renewed and was able to think. Kas might have been able to get her this far because of her weakness. So to his eyes she must continue to counterfeit that, until she had a chance to act. It could be that his weapon, so alien to this world and thus so effective, might well cut their way to Starrex. But that did not mean that once they had reached him she need obey Kas. And somehow she also felt that face to face Kas would be less confident of success. It was not a guard that halted them now but a massive gate, such a barrier as was meant to hold. Kas examined the bar and laughed, before he raised the laser and sent a needle-thin beam to cut as he needed. There was a shout from above and Kas, almost lanquidly, swung the beam to a narrow stair leading from the ramparts, laughing again as there came a choked scream land the sound of a falling body. IF "Now!" Kas put his shoulder to the gate and it swung, more easily than Tamisan would have thought possible for its weight. "Where is Starrex? And if you lie -- " His smile was a very evil one. '"There." Tamisan was sure of her direction and she pointed to where there was a distant blaze of torches about the shadow bulk of the grounded spacer. xin U A spacer I" Kas paused. "Besieged by these people," Tamisan informed him. "And Starrex is a hostage on board, if he still lives. They have threatened to use him in some manner as a weapon and the Over-Queen, as far as I know, does not care." Kas turned on her. His evil merriment had vanished, his smile was rather now a snarl, and he shook her back and forth. "It is your dream -- control it!" For a moment, Tamisan hesitated. Should she try to tell him what she believed the truth? Kas and his other world weapon might be her only hope of reaching Starrex now. Could he be persuaded to a frontal attack if he thought that was their only chance of reaching their goal? On the other hand, if she admitted she could not break this dream, he might well bum her down out of hand and take his chances. "Your meddling has warped the pattern, Lord Kas. I can not control some elements. Nor can I break the dream until I have Lord Starrex with me -- since. we are patternlinked in this sequence." Her steady reply seemed to have some effect on him. Though he gave her one more punishing shake and uttered an obscenity, he looked on to the torches and the half-seen bulk of the ship, a certain calculation in his eyes. They made a length ly detour, away from most of the torches, coming up across the open land to the south of the ship. There was a graying in the sky and a hint that dawn might perhaps be not too far away. Now that they could see better, it was apparent that the ship was sealed. No hatch opened on its surface, no ramp ran out. And surely the laser in Kas's hand was not going to bum their way in, in the manner he had opened the gate of the High Castle. Apparently the same difficulty presented itself to Kas, for he halted her with a jerk while they were still in the shadows well away from the line of torches forming a square around the ship. They sheltered in a small dip in the ground surveying the scene. The torches were no longer held by men, but had been planted in the ground at regular intervals, and they were as large as outsize candles. The colorful mass which had marked the Over-Queen and her courtiers on Tamisan's first visit to the landing field was gone, leaving only a perimeter line of guardsmen in wide encirclement of the sealed ship. Why did the spacemen just not lift and planet elsewhere? Unless that confusion in the last moments when she had been on board the spacer meant that they could not do so. They had spoken then of a sister ship in orbit above. It would seem that it had made no move to aid them, though she had no idea how much time had elapsed since last she had been here. Tow Kas turned on her again.  "Can you get to Starrex -- reach him a message?" he demanded. "I can try. For what reason?" "Have him ask for us to come to him." Kas had been silent for a moment before replying. Was he so stupid as to believe that she would not give a warning with whatever message she could so deliver? Or had he precautions against that? But could she reach Starrex? She had gone into the secondary dream to make contact with Kas. There was no time nor preparation for such a move now. She could only use the mental technique for inducing a dream and see what happened thereby. She said as much to Kas now, promising no success. "Be about what you can do -- nowl" he told her roughly. Tamison closed her eyes to think of Hawarel as she had seen him last, standing beside her on this very field. And she heard a gasp from Kas. Opening her eyes she saw Hawarel, even as he had been then -- or rather a palid copy of him, wavering and instinct, already beginning to fade, so she spoke in a swift gabble: "Say we come from the Queen with a message, that we must see the Captain -- " The shimmering outline of Hawarel faded into the night. She heard Kas mutter angrily "What good will that ghost do?" "I can not tell. If he returns to that of which he is a part, he can carry the message. For the rest -- " Tamisan shrugged. "I have told you this is no dream I can control. Do you think if it were, we two would stand here in this fashion?" His thin lip parted in one of his mirthless grins. "You would not, I know, dreamer #" His head went from left to right as he slowly surveyed the line of planted torches and the men standing on guard between them. "Do we move closer to this ship, expect them to open to us?" "They used a stunner to take us before," Tamisan saw fit to warn him. "They might do so again." "Stunner," he gestured with the IF laser. Tamisan hoped his answer would not be a headlong attack on the ship with that. But instead, he used it as a pointer to motion her on toward the touch line. "If they do open up," he commented, "I shall be warned" by rough handling, frayed in strips at the hem where she could be tripped if she caught those rags between her feet. And the rough brush growing knee-high about them caught at it so that she stumbled now and again, urged on continually by Kas's pulling when he dug his fingers painfully into her already bruised shoulder. So they reached the torch line. The guards there faced inward to the ship and in this increase of light Tamisan could see that they were all bowmen, arqied with crossbows, not with those of bone which the black-tunicked men had earlier used. Bolts against the might of the ship I The answer seemed laughable, a jest to delight the simple. Yet, the ship lay there and Tamisan could well remember the consternation of those men who had been questioning her within it. Now -- There was a dark spot on the hull of the ship and a hatch suddenly swung open! A battle hatch -- though she had only seen those via tape study. "Kas -- they are going to fire!" With a laser beam from such, they could crisp everything on this field, perhaps dear back to the walls of the High Castle! She tried to turn in his grasp, to race back and away, knowing already that such a race was lost before she took the first lunging stride. But he held her fast. "No muzzle," he said. Tamisan strained to see through the poor, flickering light. Perhaps it was a lightening of the sky which did make dear that there was no muzzle projecting to spew a fiery death across them all. But that was surely a gun port. As quickly as it had appeared, that opening was dosed. The ship was again sealed tightly. "What -- ?" "Either they can not use it," Kas answered her half question, "or they have thought better of doing so. Which means, by either count, we have a chance. Now -- stay you here! Or else I shall come looking for you in a manner you shall not relish, and never believe that I can not find you!" Nor did something in Tamisan dispute that. She stood. After all, apart from Kas's threats, where did she have to go? If she were sighted by any of the guards, she might either be returned to prison or dealt with summarily in another fashion. And she had to reach Starrex if she were to escape. But she watched Kas make good use of the interest which riveted the eyes of the guards on the ship. He crept, with more ease than she thought possible for one used to the luxury living of the sky towers, behind the nearest man. TX#hat weapon he used she could   not see; it was not the laser. Instead he straightened to his full height behind the unsuspecting guard, reached out an arm and seemed only to touch the stranger on the neck. Immediately the fellow collapsed without a sound, though Kas caught him before he had fallen to the ground and dragged him backward to the slight depression in the field where Tamisan waited. "Quick!" Kas ordered. "Give me his cloak and helm!" He ripped off his own tunic with its extravagantly padded shoulders, while Tamisan knelt to fumble with a great brooch, freeing the enveloping cloak of the guard. Kas snatched it out of her hands, dragged the rest of it loose from under the limp body and pulled it around him, taking up the helm and settling it on his head with a tap. Then he took up the crossbow. "Walk before me," he told Tamisan. "If they have a field scanner on in the ship, I want them to see a prisoner under guard. That may bring them to a parlay. It is a thin chance, but our best -- #j He could not guess that it might be a better chance than he hoped, Tamisan knew, since he did not know that she had been once within the ship and the crew might be expecting some such return with a message from the Over-Queen. But to walk out boldly, past the line of torches -- surely Kas's luck would not hold so well; they would be seen by the other guards before they were a quarter of the way to the ship. But she had not any other proposal to offer in exchange. This was no adventure such as she had lived through in dreams. She believed that if she died now, she died indeed and would not wake unharmed in her own world. And her flesh crawled with a fear which made her mouth go dry and her hands quiver as they held wet and tight upon the folds of her robe. Any second now -- she would feel the impact of a bolt -- hear a shout of discovery -- be -- But still Tamisan tottered forward and heard, with danger-alerted ears, the faint crunch of boots which was Kas behind. His contempt for a danger which was only too real for her made her wonder, fleetingly, if he did indeed still believe this a dream she could control, and need not then watch for any one but her. But she could not summon words to impress on him his woeful mistake. So intent was she upon some attack from behind that she was IF not really conscious of the ship towards which they went. Until, suddenly she saw another of those ports open and steeled herself to feel the numbing charge of a stunner. However, again an attack she feared did not come. The sky was growing lighter even if there was no sign of sunrise. Instead the first drops of a storm began to fall. And under that onslaught of moisture from lowering clouds, the torches hissed and sputtered, finally flickering out, so that the gloom was hardly better than twilight. 'nphey came close enough to the ship to board, were one of the ramps lowered to them. There they stood waiting, while Tamisan felt the rise of almost hysterical laughter inside her. What an anticlimax if the ship refused to acknowledge them! They could not stand here forever and there was no chance they could battle a way inside. Kas's faith in her communication with that ghost of Hawarel had been too high. But even as she was sure that they made an absurd failure, there was a sigh of sound from well above them. The port hatch wheeled back into the envelope of the ship's wall, and a small ramp, hardly more than a steep ladder, swung creaking out and dropped to hit the charred ground not far from them. "Go!" Kas prodded her forward. With a shrug, Tamisan went. She found it hard to climb with the heavy, frayed skirts dragging her back. But by using her hands to pull along the single rail of the ramp, she made progress. Why had not the rest of the guards along that watching line of torches moved? Had it been that Kas's half disguise had indeed deceived them, and they thought that Tamisan had been sent under orders to parlay a second time with the ship's people? She was nearly at the hatch now and could see the suited men in the shadows above waiting. They had tanglers ready to fire, prepared to spin the webs to enmesh them both as easily handled prisoners. But before those slimy strands spun forth to touch -- patterned as they were to seek flesh to anchor -- both the waiting space men jerked right and left, clutched with already dead hands at the breasts of charred tunics from which arose small, deadly spirals of smoke. They had expected a guard armed with a bow; they had met Kas's laser, to the same undoing as the guardsmen at the castle. Kas's shoulder in the middle of her back sent her sprawling, to land half over the bodies of the two who had awaited them. She heard a scuffle and was kicked and rolled aside, fighting the folds of her own long skirt, trying to get out of the confines of the hatch pocket. Somehow, on her hands and knees, she made it forward, since she could not retreat. Now she fetched up against the wall of a corridor and managed to pull around to face the end of the fight The two guards lay dead. But Kas held the laser on a third man. Now, without glancing around, he gave an order which she mechanically obeyed. "The tangler -- here!" Otill on her hands and knees,  Tamisan crawled far enough back into the hatch compartment to grip one of those weapons. The second -- she eyed it with awakening need for some protection herself, but Kas did not give her time to reach it. "Give it to me -- now!" Still holding the laser pointed steadily at the middle of the third spaceman, he groped back with his other hands. She had no choice -- no choice -- but she did! If Kas thought he had her thoroughly cowed -- Swinging the tangler around without taking time to aim, Tamisan pressed the firing button. The lash of the sticky weaving spun through the air, striking the wall from which it dropped away, then one arm of the motionless captive, who was still under Kas's threat; there it clung, across his middle. And then it spun through the air until it clasped Kas's gun hand, his middle, his other arm, adhering instantly, tightening with its usual efficiency and tying captor to captive. Kas struggled against those evertightening bands to bring the laser around to beam on Tamisan, though whether he would have used it even in his white hot rage, she did not know. It was enough that the tangler made it so she could keep from his line of fire. Having ensnared them enough to render them both harmless for a time, Tamisan drew a deep breath and relaxed somewhat. She had to be sure of Kas. She had loosed the firing button of the tangler as soon as she saw that he could not use his arms. Now she raised the weapon, and with more of a plan, tied his legs firmly to r gether. He kept on his feet, but he was as helpless as if they had managed to turn a stunner beam on him. Warily, she approached him. And guessing her intent, he went into wild wrigglings, trying to bring the adhesive tangler strands in contact with her flesh also. But she stooped and tore at the already fringed and frayed hem of her robe, ripping up a li strip as high as her waist, winding this about her arm and wrist to make sure she could not be so entrapped. IF In spite of his struggles, she managed to get the laser out of his hold, and for the second time knew a surge of great relief. He made no sound, but his eyes were wild and his lips so tightly drawn against his teeth, his mouth slightly open, that a small trickle of spittle oozed from one corner to wet his chin. Looking at him dispassionately, Tamisaa thought him near insane at that moment. The spacecrewman was moving. He hitched along as she swung around with the laser as a warning, his shoulders against the wall keeping him firmly on his feet, his unbound legs giving him more mobility, though the cord of the tangler anchored him to Kas. Tamisan glanced around, searching for what he appeared so desperate to reach. There was a com box. "Stand where you are I For now -- " she ordered. The threat of the laser kept him frozen. With that still trained on him, she darted short glances over her shoulder to the hatch opening. Sliding along the wall in turn, the tangler thrust loosely into the front of her belt, she managed with one arm to slam the hatch door and give a turn to its locking wheel. N ow -- Using the laser as a pointer she motioned the crewman to the com, but the immobile Kas was too much of an anchor. Dared she free the crewman by even so much? There was no other way. She motioned with one hand. "Stand well away." He had said nothing during their encounter, but he obeyed with an agility which suggested he liked the sight of that weapon in her hand even less than he had liked it when Kas had held it. He stretched to the limit the cord would allow so she was able to burn it through. Kas spit out a series of obscenities which were only a meaningless noise as far as Tamisan was concerned. Until he was released, he was no more now than a well anchored bundle -- helpless. But the crewman had importance. She gestured him on to the com, reaching it before him. Now she played the best piece she had in this desperate game. "Where is Hawarel? The native who was brought on board?" He could lie, of course, and she would not know it. But it seemed because he thought that the truth would strike her worse than any lie. "They have him in the lab -- conditioning him." And he grinned at her with some of the evil malignancy she had seen in Kas. She remembered the Captain's earlier threat to make of Hawarel a tool to use against the OverQueen and her forces. Was she too IF late? But there was only one road to take and that was the one she had chosen in those few moments when she had taken up the tangler and used it for herself. "You will call." She spoke as she might to one finding it difficult to understand her. "And you will say that Hawarel will be released, brought here -- now!" "Why?" the crewman returned with visible insolence. "What will you do? Kill me? Perhaps, but that will not defeat the Captain's half the crew burned -- " "That may be true." She nodded. Not knowing the Captain, she could not tell whether or not that was a bluff. "But will his sacrifice then save his ship?" "What can you do?" began the crewman and then he paused. His grin was gone; now he looked at her speculatively In her present guise she perhaps did not look formidable enough to threaten the ship, but he could not be sure. And one thing she knew from her own time and place -- a spaceman learned early to take nothing for granted on a new planet. It might well be that she did have command over some unknown force. "What can I do? There is much." She took quick advantage of that hesitation "Have you been able to raise the ship?" She plunged on, hoping very desperately that she had made the right guess. "Have you been able to communicate wiffi your other ship, or ships, in orbit?" His expression was her answer, one which fanned her hope into a bright blaze of excitement. The ship was grounded, had some sort of a hold on it which they had not been able tobreak! "The Captain won't listen." He was sullen now. "I think he will. Tell him that we got Hawarel -- here -- and himself -- or else we shall truly show you what happened to that derelict across the field." R as had fallen silent. He was watching her, not with quite the same wariness of the crewman, but with an emotion she was not able to read. Surprise? Or did it mask some sly thought of taking over her bluff, captive though he was? "Talk!" The need for hurry rode Tamisan now. By this time those above would wonder why their captives had not been brought before them. Also, outside, the OverQueen's men would certainly have reported that Tamisan and a seeming guard had entered the ship. From both sides enemies might be closing in. "I can not set the com," her prisoner answered. "Tell me then!" "The red button -- " But she thought she had seen a slight shift in his eyes. Tamisan raised her hand, to press the green button instead. Without accusing him of the treachery she was sure he had tried, she said again, more fiercely: TaIk!" "Sannard here." He put his lip dose to the com. "They -- they hare me. Rooso and Cambre are dead. They want the native." "In good condition," hissed Tamisan, "and now!" "They want him now, in good condition," Sannard repeated. ".They threaten the ship" There came no acknowledgement from the com in return. Had she indeed pressed the wrong button because she was overly suspicious? What was going to happen? Time -- sfee could not wait on time! "Sannard -- " the voice from the com was metalic, without human inflection or tone. But Tamisan gave the crewman a gush which sent him sliding back along the wall until he bumped into Kas and the binds of both men immediately united to make them one struggling package. Tamisan spoke into the com... "Captain, I do not play any game. Send me your prisoner or look upon that derelict you see and sajr to yourself that will be your shq. For this is so, as true as I stand here now, with your man as my captive. Also -- send Hawarel alone, and pray to whatever immortal powers you believe sit in judgment over your actions that he can so come! Time grows very short and there is that which will act if you do not, and to a purpose you shall not relish!" The crewman, whose legs were still free, was trying to kick away from Kas. But his struggles instead sent them both to the floor in a heaving tangle. Tamisan's hand dropped to her side as she leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. With all her will she wanted to control action as she did in a dream, but only fate did that now. 'T'hough she sagged against the wall, Tamisan felt rigid, as if she were in a great encasement of su-steel. And, as time moved at so slow a pace as not to be measured normally, that prisoning hold on her body and spirit grew. The crewman and Kas had ceased their struggles. She could not see the crewman's face, but that which Kas turned to her had a queer, distorted look. As if before her eyes, though not through any skill of hers, he was indeed changing, taking on the aspect of another man. Since her return to the sky tower in the second dream she had known he was to be feared. Now, in spite of the fact that his body was securely imprisoned, she found herself edging away, as if by the very IF intentness of that hostile stare he could aim a weapon to bring her down. But he said nothing, lay as broodingly quiet and impassive as though he had foreknowledge of utter failure for her. She knew so little, Tamisaon thought, she who had always taken pride in her learning, in the wealth of lore she had drawn into furnishing her memory for action dreaming. The spacecrew might have some way of flooding this short corridor with a noxious gas, or using a hidden ray linked with a scanner to finish them. Tamisan found herself running her hands along the walls, studying the unbroken surface a little wildly, striving to find where death might enter quietly and unseen. There was another bulkhead door at the end of this short corridor; at a few paces away from the outer hatch a ladder ascended to a closed trap. Her head turned constantly, until she regained a firmer control of herself, from one of those entrances to the other. They had only to wait to call her bluff -- only to wait. Yes! They had waited and they were -- The air about her was changing, there was a growing scent in it. Not unpleasant -- but even a fine perfume would have seemed a stench from the dungheap when it reached her nostrils under these present conditions! Also the light which radiated from the jointure of the corridor roof and ceiling was altering. It had been that of a moderately sunlit day, now it was bluish. So under it her own brown skin took on an eerie look. She had lost her throw! Maybe, if she could open the hatch again, let in the outer air -- Tamisan tottered to the hatch, gripped the locking wheel and brought her strength to bear. Kas was writhing again, trying to break But oddly enough the crewman lay limp, his head rolling when Kas's heaving disturbed the lay of his body, but his eyes were closed. And, at the same time Tamisan braced against the wall, her full strength turned on the need for opening the door, she knew a flash of surprise. Was it her over-vivid imagination alone which made her believe that she was in danger? When she rested to draw a deep breath -- XX#hy -- in her startlement she   could have cried out aloud. She did utter a small sound. She was gaining strength, not losing it. Every lungful of that scented air she breathed in -- and she was breathing deeper, more slowly as if her body desired such nourishment -- was a restorative. Kas, too? She turned to glance at him again. Where she breathed deeply, with lessening apprehension, he was gasping, his face ghastIy in the change of light. And then, even as she watched, his struggles ended, his head fell back so that he lay as inert as the crewman he sprawled across. So whatever change was in progress here, it affected Kas and the crewman -- that latter faster than the former -- but not her. And now her trained imagination took another leap. Perhaps she had not been so far wrong in threatening those on this ship with danger. Though she had no guess as to how it was done, this could be another strange weapon in the armament of the Over-Queen. Hawarel? The spacemen had probably never intended to send him. Dared she go to seek him? Tamisan wavered, one hand on the hatch wheel, looking to the ladder and the other door. If all within this ship save she had reacted to the strange air, there would be none to stop her. But if she fled the ship, she would face the loss of the keys to her own world -- Starrex and Kas. In addition, she might be met by some evil fate at the hands of the Over-Queen. She had broken prison, and -- if they did not know of Kas -- had left dead men behind her. As the Mouth of Olava, she shuddered from the judgment which would be rendered one deemed to have practiced wrongful supernatural acts. Resolutely, Tamisan went to the door at the end of the corridor. It was really true that she had no choice at all. She must find Starrex, somehow bring him here, so that they three could be together and win a small space of time in which to arrange a dream breaking -- or she was totally defeated. She loosened her belt a little so she could draw up her robe through it, shortening the hampering length, leaving her legs freer. There was the tangler and Kas's laser. In addition was this mounting feeling of strength and well being, though an inner warning suggested she not trust to over-confidence. The door gave under her push and she looked out upon a scene which first startled and then reassured her. There were crewmen in the corridor. But they lay prone as if they had been caught while on their way to the hatch. Lasers -- of a slightly different pattern than that Kas had brought -- had fallen from their hands, and three of the four wore tanglers. Hpamisan picked her way care fully around them, gathering up all those weapons in a fold of her robe, as if she were some maiden in a field gathering an armload of spring flowers. The men were alive, she saw as she stooped closer, but they breathed evenly as if peacefully asleep. She took one of the tanglers, discarding the one she had used, fearing its charge might be near exIF haustion. As for the rest of the collection, she dropped them at the far end of the passageway and turned the beam of Kas's weapon on them; she left behind a metal mass of no use to anyone. Her idea of the geography of the ship was scanty. She would simply have to explore and keep exploring until she found Starrex. But she would start at the top and work down. So she found a level ladder, three times coming upon a sleeping crewman. Each time she made sure he was disarmed before she left him. The blue shade of the light was growing deeper, giving a very weird cast to the faces of the sleepers. Making sure her robe was tightly kilted up, Tamisan began to climb. She had reached the third level when she heard the sound, the first she had noted in this too-silent ship since she had left the hatchway. She stopped to listen, deciding it came from somewhere in the level into which she had just climbed. With laser in hand, she tried to use it as a guide, though it was misleading -- and might have come from any one of the cabins. Each door she passed Tamisan pushed open. There were more sleepers -- some stretched in bunks, others on the floors or seated at tables with their heads lying on those surfaces. But she did not halt now to collect weapons. The need to be about her task, free of this ship, built in her as sharp as might a slaver's lash laid across her shrinking shoulders. Suddenly the sound grew louder as she came to a last door and pushed it. Now she looked into a cabin not meant for living but perhaps for a kind of death. Two men in plain tunics were crumpled by the threshold. As if they had had some limited warning of danger to come and had tried to flee, but fallen before they could reach the corridor. Behind them was a table and on that a body, very much alive, struggling with dogged determination against confining straps. Though his long hair had been clipped and the stubble of it shaven to expose the full nakedness of his entire scalp, there was no mistaking Hawarel. He not only fought against the clamps and straps which held him to the table, but in addition he jerked his head with sharp, short pulls, to dislodge disks fastened to his forehead, and from there, by wire, to a vast box of a machine which filled one quarter of the cabin. npamisan stepped over the inert men, reached the side of the table and jerked the disks away from the prisoner's head; perhaps his determined struggles had already loosened them somewhat. His mouth had opened and shut as she came to him as if he were forming words she could not hear, or he could not voice. But as the apparatus came away in her hands, he gave a cry of triumph. "Get me loose!" he commanded. She was already examining the under part of the table for the locking mechanism of those straps and clamps. It was only seconds before she was able to obey his order. He sat upright, bare to the waist, and she saw beneath, where his shoulders and the upper part of his spine had rested on the table, a complicated series of disks. "Ah!" Before she could move he scooped up the laser she had laid on the edge of the table when she had freed him. And the gesture he made with it might not have been only to indicate the door and the need for hurry, but perhaps also was a warning that with a weapon in his hands he now thought he was in command of the situation. "They sleep -- everywhere." she told him. "And Kas -- he is a prisoner." "I thought you could not find him -- he was not one of the crew." "He was not. But I have him now, and with him we can return." "How long will it take?" Starrex was down on one knee, searching the two men on the floor. "I can not tell." She gave him the truth. "But -- how long will these sleep? Their unconsciousness is, I think, some trick of the Over-Queen's." "It came unexpectedly for them," Starrex agreed. "And you may be right that this is only preliminary to taking over the ship. I have learned this much, that their instruments and much of their equipment has been affected so they can not trust them. Otherwise -- " His Hawarel face was grim under its bluish, deadman's coloring. "Otherwise I would not have survived this long as myself." "Let us go!" Now that she had miraculously -- or so it seemed to her -- succeeded, Tamisan was even more uneasy, wanting nothing to spoil their escape. 'T'hey found their way back to the corridor before the hatch while the ship still slept. Starrex knelt by Kas and then looked with astonishment at Tamisan. "But this is the real Kas! " "It is Kas, real enough," she agreed. "And there is a reason for that. But need we discuss it now? If the Over-Queen's men come to take this ship -- I tell you her greeting to us may be worse than any you have met here. I remember enough of the Tamisan who is the Mouth of Olava to know that." He nodded. "Can you break dream now?" She looked around her a little wildly. Concentration -- no, somehow she could not think so clearly. IF It was as if the exultation of fumes of that scented air had awakened in her was draining. And with that sapping went what she needed most. "I -- I fear not." "It is simple then." He stopped again to examine the tangle cords. "We shall have to go to where you can." She saw him set the laser on its lowest beam to bum through the cords which united Kas to the crewman, though he did not free his cousin from the rest of his bonds. But what if they marched out of the hatch into a waiting party of the Over-Queen's guards? They had the tangler, the laser, and perhaps -- just perhaps -- the half smile of fortune on their side. They would have to risk it Tamisan opened the inner door of the pressure chamber. The dead men lay there as they had fallen. Fighting nausea, she dragged one aside to make room for Star rex, who carried Kas over his shoulder, moving slowly under that burden, a fo.ld of cloak well wrapped about the prisoner to prevent any contact between the cords and Starrex's own flesh. The outer hatch was open and beyond -- A blast of icy rain, with the added bite of the wind which drove it, struck viciously at them. It had been dawn when Tamisan had entered the ship, but outside now the day was no lighter. The torches had been extinguished. Tamisan could see no lights. Shielding her eyes against the wind and the rain, she tried to make out the line of guards. Perhaps the severe weather had driven them all away. She was sure no one was waiting at the foot of the ramp, unless they were under the fins of the ship, sheltering there. And that chance would have to be taken. She said as much and Starrex nodded. "Where do we go?" "Anywhere away from the city. Give me but a little shelter and time." "Vernier's Hand over us and we can do it," he returned. "Here -- take this!" He kicked an object across the metal plates of the deck and she saw it was one of the lasers used by the crewmen. She picked it up in one hand, the tangler in her other. Burdened as he was by Kas, Starrex could not lead the way. She must now play in real life such an action role as she had many times dreamed. But this held no amusement, only a wish to scuttle quickly into any form of safety wind and rain would allow her. The ramp being at such a steep angle, she feared slipping on it and had to belt the tangler, hold on grimly with one hand and go much more slowly than her fast beating heart demanded, anxious lest Starrex in turn might lose footing and slam into her, carrying them both on to disaster. The strength of the storm was such that it was a battle to gain step after step, even though she reached the ground without mishap. Tamisan was not sure in which direction she must head now to avoid the Castle and the city. Her memory seemed befuddled by the storm and she could only guess. Also she was afraid of losing contact with Starrex; as slowly as she went, he dragged even more behind. Then she stumbled against an upright stakje. She put out her hand and fumbled along it enough to know that this was one of the rain quenched torches. It heartened her a little to learn that they had reached the barrier and that no guards stood here. Perhaps the storm was a life saver for the three of them. Tamisan lingered, waiting for Starrex to catch up. Now he caught at the torch, steadying himself as if he needed that support. His voice came in wind-deadened gusts, labored. "I may have in this Hawarel a good body, but I am not a heavy duty android. We must find your shelter." There was a dark shadow to her left; it could be a coppice. Even trees or tall brush could give them some measure of relief. "Over there." She pointed, but did not know if, in this gloom, he could see it. "Yes." He straightened a little under the burden of Kas, staggering in the direction of the shadow. They had to beat their way into the vegetation. Tamisan, having two arms free, broke the path for Starrex. She might have used the laser to cut, but the ever-present fear that they might need the charges for future protection kept her from a waste of their slender resources for defense. At last, at the cost of branchwhipped and thorn-ripped weals in their flesh, they came into a space which was a little more open. Starrex allowed his burden to fall to the ground. "Can you break dream now?" He squatted down beside Kas, as she dropped to sit panting near him. "I can -- " But she got no farther. There was a sound which cut through even the tumult of the storm, and that part of them which was allied to this world knew it for what it was, the warning of a hunt. And -- since they were able to hear it -- they must be the hunted I "The Itter Hounds!" He put their peril into words. "And they run for us!" . Mouth of Olava or not, when the Itter Hounds coursed on one's track there was no defense, for they could not be controlled once they were loosed to chase. "We can not fight them." "Do not be too sure of that," he IF answered. "We have the lasers, weapons not of this world. The weapon which put the ship's crew to sleep did not vanquish us; so might an off-world weapon react the other way here -- " "But Kas -- " She thought she had found a weak point in his reasoning, much as die wanted to believe he had guessed rightly. "Kas is in his own form, which is perhaps more akin to the crewmen now than to us. And, by the way, how is it that he is?" She kept hej tale terse, but told him of her dream within a dream and how she had found Kas. She heard him laugh. "I was right then in thinking my dear cousin might well be at the center of this web! However, now he is as completely enmeshed as the rest of us. As a fellow victim he may be more cooperative." "Entirely so, my noble lord!" The voice out of the dark between them was composed. "You are awake then, cousin. Well, we would be even more awake. There is a struggle here in progress between two sets of enemies third. We had better travel swiftly elsewhere if we would save our skins. What of it, Tamisan?" "I must have time." "What I can do to buy it for you, I will!" That carried the force of a sworn oath. "If the lasers act outside the laws of this world, it may be that they can even stop the Itter Hounds. But to get to it! " She had no proper conductor, nothing but her will and the need. Putting out her hands she touched the bare, wet flesh of Starrex's shoulder, was more cautious in seeking a hold on Kas, lest she encounter one of the tangle cords. Then she exerted her full will and looked far in, not out. It was no use, her craft failed her. There was that momentary sensation of suspension between two worlds. Then she was back in the dark brush where the growing walls did not hold off the rain. "I can not break the dream. There is no energy machine to step up the power." But she did not add that perhaps she might have done it for herself alone. Kas laughed then. "It would seem my sealer still works in spite of all your meddling, Tamisan. I fear, my noble lord, you will have to prove the effectiveness of your weapons after all. Though you might set me free and give me arms, necessity making allies of us after all." "Tamisan!" Starrex's voice was one to bring her out of the dull anguish of her failure. "This dream -- remember, it may not be a usual dream after all. Could another world door be opened?" "Which world?" At that moment her memories of reading and viewing tapes were a whirl in her head. And the voiceless call of the Itter Hounds to which this Tamisan was attuned made her whole body cringe and shiver, addled her thinking even more. " Which world? Any one -- think, girl, think! Take a single change if you must, but think!" "I can not. The Hounds -- aheee -- they come -- they come! We are meat for the fangs of those who course the Dark Runnels under moonless skies! We are lost!" The Tamisan who dreamed slipped into the Mouth of Olava, and the Mouth of Olava vanished in turn, and she was only a naked, defenseless thing crouching under the shadow of a death against which she could raise no shield. She was -- Her head rocked, the flesh of her cheeks stung as she swayed from the slaps dealt her by Starrex. "You are a dreamer!" His voice was imperative. "Dream now then as you have never dreamed before! For there is that in you which can do this, if you will it." It was like the action of that strange scented air in the ship; her will was reborn, her mind steadied. Tamisan the dreamer pushed out that other weak Tamisan. But -- what world? A point -- give her but a decision point in history! " Yaaaah -- " the cry from Starrex's throat was not now meant to prouse her. Perhaps it was the battle challenge of Hawarel. There was a pallid snout, about which hung a dreadful sickening phosphorescence, thrust through the screen of brush. She sensed rather than saw Starrex fire the laser at it. A decision -- Water beating in on her. Wind rising as if to claw them out of the poor refuge to be easy meat for the hunters. Drowning -- sea -- sea -- the Sea Kings of Nath! Feverishly she seized upon that. But she knew so little of the Sea Kings who had once held the lace of islands east of Ty-Kry. They had threatened Ty-Kry itself -- so long ago that that war was legend, not true history. And they had been tricked, their kind and his war chiefs taken by treachery. The #I Cup of Nath. Tamisan forced herself to remember, to hold on that. And, with her choice made, again her mind steadied. She threw out her hands, once more touching Starrex and Kas, though she did not choose the latter; her hand went without her conscious bidding as if he must be included or all would fail. The #I Cup of Nath -- this time it would not be drunk! 'T'amisan opened her eyes. Tamisan -- no -- she was Tami-sinl She sat up and looked about her. Soft covering of pale green fell away from her bare body. And, inspecting that same body, she saw that IF her skin was no longer warmly brown but w as instead a pearl white. What she sat within was a bed place fashioned in the form of a great shell, the other half of it arching over head to form a canopy. Also -- she was not alone. Cautiously, she turned a little to survey her sleeping companion. His head was somewhat hidden from her so that she could see only a curve of shoulder as pale as her own, hair curled in a tight fitting cap, the red-brown shade of storm tossed sea-weed. Warily, very warily, she put out a finger tip, touched it to his hunched shoulder -- and knew! He sighed, began to roll over toward her. Tamisan smiled and clasped her arms under her small, high breasts. She was Tam-sin, and this was Kilwar, who had been Starrex and Hawarel -- but was now Lord of LockNer of the Nearer Sea. But, there had been a third! Her smile faded as memory sharpened. Kasl Anxiously she looked about the room, its nacre-coated walls, its pale green hangings, all familiar to Tam-sin. No Kas. Which did not mean that he might not be lurking somewhere about, a disruptive factor if his nature held true. A warm arm swung up about her waist. Startled she looked down into green eyes, sea-green eyes, eyes which knew her -- and which also knew that other Tamisan. Below those very knowledgeable eyes lips smiled. "I think," his voice was familiar and yet strange, "that this is going to be a very interesting dream, my Tam-sin." She allowed herself to be drawn down beside him. Perhaps -- no, surely -- he was right. by Sydney van Scyoc by Richard Wilson i by Terry Carr  Alexei Panshin L, An Interview with Lester del Rey Lester del Rey, Ij's Managing Editor and author of a score of science-fiction books ( not to mention an equal number of non-sf titles), has been writing science ficion since before some present writers were born. We found a good opportunity to start him talking, so we turned on the tape recorder and let it run -- and the following is the result. I got interested in science fiction as soon as I could read... or a little bit before. I had Jules Verne read to me before I could read. As soon as I'd learned how, we had a pretty good collection of his stuff and I read it all. I read Wells, from the library, Burroughs when I could get them. As a matter of fact, the first hard-cover book I ever sent away for and bought -- I spent good money for it, forty-nine cents, I'd have you know, in the Grosset  Dunlap edition -- was Burroughs. Sooner or later somebody gave me a copy of a science-fiction magazine, but I never saw them again for quite a while; I never saw a magazine stand that carried them, in Minnesota, and had to wait till I got to Washington. I had to borrow from Milt Rothman to backtrack and read all the old stuff. That first magazine had had an Ed Hamilton center-of-the-earth story in it, and I thought he was great. Doc Smith I loved, of course; John Campbell, with his heavyscience Arcot, Wade and Morey stories. I liked Raymond Gallun very much, in fact his stuff I can still look back on with pleasure. I was pretty much for the heavyscience and strong adventure people, at least until I came across Stanley Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey. That was quite a shock and quite a revelation; it was a U# sort of turning point in my whole attitude. I kept on reading sf, just for fun, until some years later I was reading a story called Pithecanthropus Rejectus, by Manly Wade Wdlman, along about December, #. I didn't like it. I said so -- perhaps in slightly strong words; matter of fact, I threw the magazine across the room. The gal I was going with had some very harsh words about that, and about my right to criticize anyway, since I hadn't written anything myself. I wasn't presumptuous enough to think I could get a story published, but I was pretty sure I could write one, and even get a letter from the editor instead of a rejection slip -- I had pretty good reason to believe that, since I more or less knew the editor, at least through letters. The girl doubted that too, so I had to sit down and write a story to prove my point. I wrote it at # words, because I was suffering from logorrhea, as all writers do in the beginning, but I was smart enough to know that you got much better attention from an editor when you sent him a short piece first, so I cut it down to # by taking a red pencil and going zoop , zoop, zoop and retyping it. I sent it off; and actually, I didn't get a letter from the editor; what he did was to send me a check -- just about the first week of January, #. After that, of course, I sat down and wrote a couple of others. They didn't sell -- or not then; one did some years later, another got lost. That one was about digging ice on Mars. A real genuine adventure story, full of a girl, and monsters, and all kinds of things. Looking back on it, I'm not so sure it's a bad thing it got lost. But that was it, for then. I'd been to the well three times and sold once, more or less by accident ; I figured that, like most writers, I was a one-story writer, so I gave it up... until the editor wrote me and asked for another story. So I went out and bought a copy of Writers # Yearbook , in which he'd been talking about what he liked in sf stories. He had a long article, pointing out that he wanted human reactions; strong human element; if the story was about a robot, he wanted a human robot. So I said to myself, uh-huh, what's the most human thing a robot can do? Fall in love? So I sat down and wrote Helen O'Loy , which he bought. And then I began doing it seriously -- in all honesty I don't know how many, but around twenty science-fiction books and I don't know how many others. I think good science-fiction is very much worth reading. But I'm not really interested too much in what it's "worth"; I think it's fun to read, and that interests me a lot more. If I want to get educated in philosophy and the injustices that are done to the poor people of the Stuth and what every good yotiftg college boy is thinking and so Oft, #I go out and get myself serioas books on the subject. The purpose of fiction is to entertain; I prefer to be entertained. Oft of the beauties of good science fiction is you never really quite know what's going to happen next. There are unlimited possibilities A good science-fiction writer is gpiftg to have details that you never thought about, because he's building a dream right in front of you. He's making up a whole world, a whole civilization before your eyes. I ttke science in my science fiction. I don't demand it every time, little romance now mid then; but I like to see whatever science is there reasonably accurate. If, the man. is going to use science basically for his takeoff, I want him to use it, I want him to develop it accurately. There's plenty going on in science right now that would make good sf stories. Take biochemistry. The business of gene engineering, mutations created by the future gene manipulator, has tremendous possibilities, and damn few sciencefiction writers are doing anything with it. It seems to me this is the first time a wonderful new field has opened up, and sf writers have said ho-hum and gone back to imitating i #  the old stuff. I did one, called The Eleventh Commandment . The hero is a Martian cytologist, used to manipulating genes; I had to set up a way where he could actually get into it and manipulate it: a special microscope, with fields to control the temperature very rapidly, so that he could slow down the cell and hold it for operations, or speed it up to see the results. There was a plague with the deep-sea plant life, so that the one-celled plants were suddenly flipping over to animals -- there is, incidentally, one form of such life that actually does that, but in the story it does it consistently. The problem was to find out why. Our hero finds out that there's a virus in there which apparently has mutated, and now swaps parts with these cells. There's more, of course. The point I'm making is that I don't know very many other examples of that in modem sf. And I don't know why. And the new cosmological stuff is interesting. I think that in the old days writers would have been going nuts about quasars, coming up with half a dozen cockeyed ideas about pulsars and so on. But they don't, any more. I'd like to see Isaac Asimov writing a story about an android, using the genuine biological knowledge he has, creating the android because it was necessary for some empire-saving reasons. I wish Fred IF Hoyle would touch on astronomy In his stories more; he can write science fiction, and he's got the knowledge for it, and a good imagination, too. I'd like to see what Heinlein could do in that field. He's given little bits of hints at times; in Methuselah's Children, for instance. Larry Niven, I think, is doing a fine job with the neutron stars and the exploding galaxies; I'm all in favor of it. What I'd like to see him try is something with a little romance in it. Among the contemporary writers, most of the so-called New Wave writers I don't have much use for. (Note the "so-called." Brian Aldiss for instance, I don't regard as a New Wave writer; he himself says he isn't.) Most of Zelazny's stuff I think has been 'damn good; I don't like some of his stuff, because I think he's gotten much too typed, straining too hard to get religious elements in, where he no longer has much enthusiasm; but he's good. I like Burt Filer's stuff; I thought he was a happy combination of old and new. And I like Tiptree's work. He has something that's rather unusual nowadays; he even has a good bit of style. There's liveliness to it, and a certain adaptability to it. I'd be glad to discuss sciencefiction critics, but first someone will have to name one. There are a few good book reviewers. I have no objection to Schuyler Miller as a reviewer; he gives you a kind of an idea of whether you want to read it or not. I rather liked Bob Silverberg in that field. I thought he did a good competent review; but that wasn't criticism. When you use the word "critic," you probably mean people like Damon Knight and Jim Blish. Damon's criticism, as far as I'm concerned, is mostly a total misunderstanding of the "new criticism" that went out in the '#'s. Blish can be perceptive as hell -- and jinperceptive as hell. You have to read the book first to decide whether you like his criticism of it. Real criticism I don't think exists in the field. Every so often a science-fiction movie comes along that's delightful. I don't know whether it's every ten years or every twenty years. The Day the Earth Stood Still was a fine job. I liked Forbidden Planet. Planet of the Apes wasn't bad; a little heavy-handed and a little obvious, but it was kind of fun. #? Well, I've said my piece on that. The acting was better than usual; the photography was often superb; some of the mechanical work in it was wonderful; it's just too bad that Stanley Kubrick couldn't let Clarke do a real sf story, and then do his best to follow it. Some of the TY hasn't been bad. A few of the early Star Trek things IS Controversial Uninhibited Deadly Serious Humorous and Incredibly Interesting! Brian Aldiss... Poul Anderson  . c . Piers Aafhony... Isaac Asimov   . Richard Bergeron    Bob Bloch .   Vaughts Bode... John Brunner .  . L Sprague de Camp   . Terry Carr .  . John Christopher... Philip K. Dick ... Harlan Ellison   . Philip Jose Fanner... Jack Gaughan...  Harry Harrison... Lee Hoffmgn ... John Hayden Howard .  . Leo P. Kelley .   Deem R. Koontz   . Anne McCaffrey .  . Michael Moorcock... Alexei Pansfcat... Mack Reynolds... Bill Rotsler... Norman Spinrad... Bob Tucker... Harry Warner, Jr... Ted White... ... and many, many more... tahard E Geis does his thing. f  P. O. Box #   # i  were quite good. There was a lot of hokum built in, because they used series characters, but there were several good stories -- Gene Roddenberry's own most of the time. His pilot script, with the cat, was almost as if Van Vogt had written it, and. I loved it. Most TV in the area has been either horror or fantasy, and the horror stuff, I think, is anti-science fiction. I said the other day at the Modern Language Association meeting that I thought one of the things that science fiction expresses strongly is that all intelligences are brothers; but the basic rule in most TV stuff is that it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, if your skin isn't put on right you're an alien and frightful. That I resent. What I wish sf writers would do is think . Think about their situation until they begin to feel it; not be smart-Alecky. I'd like to pass a law against their believing they were artists. I think the average reader of science fiction is a lot better judge of the medium than most people seem to think he is. If a reader likes a story, he doesn't have to give reasons for it. He's perfectly capable of making up his own mind -- and, on the average, I think he'll be right. IF (Continued from page #) suit's control-bumps, lie swung the light across it again, slowly. Finally he decided it was only the shifting light that had made the thing appear to move very slightly. He detoured a hundred feet around it. But before he'd gotten much beyond, he found that he wasn't going to be able to avoid the machines by that far -- there were too many of them. Some were as big as the first one he saw. Others were the smaller kind he'd seen pictures of. He saw one biped robot -- he knew those too, from the old books -- but it was prone and inert, and didn't look much like a man. One of its legs was cut off below the knee-joint. The stub had a fused look, as if some kind of heat-beam had burned it. There were other signs of violence too. Most of the 'pairbots had tentacles missing, and he saw several of those amputated flexible steel members, many-jointed like the legs of insects, lying about. If there'd been any human corpses after those fearful battles, they were gone now. He wound his way through the relics. Ben Tomsun said he was off line a little, so he moved to his left. Presently his beam showed the bulkhead -- a vertical wall of steel rising into the darkness. He located the hatch and paused to look behind and to both sides. Before be approached the hatch he talked to Ben Tomsun. "There's a machine about twenty yards in front of it." "Yes; it's been there for about seventy years without moving. There's another not far away from it. You'll have to pass between. Tell me when you're within ten yards of the hatch. Our detection's not very precise there." P ry strode slowly toward the gap between the two machines. The one nearest the hatch was medium-sized, and a specialized sort. It had the tri-wheeled base, and in the center of that was a vertical column that looked as if it were extensible -- some kind of a hoist. There were half a dozen of the steel tentacles, and a battery of things shaped like drums. Those looked familiar, from some picture. Yes -- they were searchlights. He could see the shattered glass now, and the silvery curved reflectors. He moved a step closer -- and the machine suddenly rolled to intercept him! Simultaneously there was a loud buzzing in his helmet. Distracted, he turned to run -- and was suddenly bathed in dazzling light from one side! Through the buzzing in his helmet, which was maddening, he thought he heard a faint voice shouting. And now other lights converged on him. He spun, saw vague shapes rolling toward him and crouched in pure terror for a moment. But he wasn't a guardsman for nothing! Shame drove some of the panic from him. He reached hastily for suit-controls; he pressed bumps that killed his own lights and sent him shooting straight up. He darted to one side to escape for a moment the savagely searching lights of the machines and swung his head about, trying to build up a mental picture of what lay about him. He was going to have to flee in the dark, and he didn't want to slam into some trave-column I The lights found him again. He zoomed away erratically, trying to get behind a column; but the searchlights came from too many directions. He dodged again. If only the maddening buzz in his helmet wwdd stop. He remembered Ben Temsun's saying something about the lowest row of studs. He pressed one. The buzz broke off for an instant and resumed on a slightly different tone -- but louder, if anything! He tried another bump. Blessed silence! He went limp with relief. Now at least he could think. He zoomed higher, slanting up toward the outer hull, where the lights would have to reach farther. They hadn't found him now for several seconds; all they did was provide light so he could see his way around. But unless Captain Gerlik or whoever else directed the machines was stupid as well as mad, that wouldn't last for long. He had to find cover. Back into the sinus? No -- he suspected very strongly there'd be an ambush waiting. Some other hatch that opened out of this compartment? He couldn't go around looking for one. Nor could he, apparently, talk to Ben Tomsun; the old books had described radio jamming clearly enough so Pry recognized it. He needed a place to hide for a while until he could think, or until Ben Tomsun and his allies had time to organize help. That broken column! 'fT#hile the slashing lights lasted  he shot that way, swerving and trying to stay hidden. He had to stop and wait for a searchlight to swing this way before he could see his objective. Then, when the light had passed, he flew slowly, groping ahead with his arms. He felt the girders, brought himself to a hover and tried to squeeze in between two. Not enough room! He moved to the side, found another gap and slipped in through it. He maneuvered until his body was down inside the hollow column, with only his helmet in the clear so he could see. His panic was gone now. He knew he was in terrible danger, but it wasn't immediate. He watched the machines rolling about. They apparently knew, he'd headed aft IF and that he'd gone far up toward the outer hull, and they were organized in a line of search, their lights probing aloft. Would they recognize this pieced-together trave-column as a possible hidingplace? If so, he'd have to be ready to move fast! Of course, if the column were hollow and uninterrupted for its full length, he could retreat far down. That wasn't inviting, but at least he could get out of sight. Then he saw one of the mediumsized machines rise slowly from the sinus wall. His midriff contracted. So some of his mechanical pursuers, at least, had grav-lifts in working order. Should he leave his concealment and try for the hole back into Sinus B? If he could get through that... No. He wasn't going to lead these madman's machines back to his people. So long as Captain Gerlik's fatherly attitude lasted, they'd be all right. Pry mustn't let the Ship find out he was one of them! Four machines were off the steel floor now. Only one maneuvered easily, but the others could fly and bring their searchlights up near the outer hull. He saw the agile one turn itself slowly in midair and continue on until its wheels touched the outer hull. The event brought him a moment of confusion -- he'd been thinking of the outer hull as up, and now suddenly, as he watched the machine begin to roll toward him, he realized that the outer hull could be considered down as well. All right, he thought angrily, to the devil with that! Up or down, it's coming this way. Its light moved toward his hiding-place. He lowered himself hastily out of sight. Other lights were sweeping the outer hull now too, and reflected light spilled in upon him. Thinking he'd better reconnoiter into the column, at least, while he had the chance, he let himself fall slowly. His feet touched something yielding. Hastily he moved aside and peered at the thing. The dim light from above showed a slick surface. The light strengthened for a moment... He shuddered. The thing was a human corpse in a pressure-suit. He hung there staring at it. nphis victim, unlike the frozen ones in the dark hall of Sinus B, hadn't escaped decay. The death-face behind the helmet window was ghastly; the flesh rotted away, the teeth exposed. TTie grim relic seemed anchored somehow to the inner curve of the column. The light faded. Pry hovered for a while until he felt it wasn't coming back, then rose to where he could peer out. The machines weren't far away, but the pattern of the search seemed to be aimed IF even farther after -- where the searchlights showed a warped and ruptured bulkhead, not more than two hundred feet from the hole into the sinus. Did they suspect he'd fled into a farther-aft compartment? Maybe. Or maybe they were Just faking -- Gerlik might cunningly hope to lure him into the open. Well, he wasn't going to bite yet. He waited. After a while curiosity prompted him to go down and investigate the suited corpse that hung there so oddly. Feeling about in the dark, he'd presently solved the thing. The man, obviously, had been dropping down inside the column -- hastily, perhaps, to avoid some pursuit -- and had gotten snagged. There, on the otherwise smooth steel, a terrible spike thrust upward and inward -- a spike created by the impact of something that had crashed against the outside of the column. That murderous dagger had punched through the plastic suit and into the man's spine. When? At the time of the Catastrophe? Or more recently, in some furtive reconnaissence into this dark no-man's-land? Pry brooded about it for a while. He himself might meet some such fate before the hour was out! Then, slowly, an idea began to crystallize in his mind. He was too late to do anything for the dead man -- but possibly the dead man could do something for him! Did the punctured suit still have power? Of course -- it was hanging precisely where he'd let go of it after hoisting it off the snag, which me,ant it was set on automatic hover. The occupant must have accomplished that much before he died. With queasy shivers along his spine, Pry worked the grisly thing up the column and got it wedged between two girders, aligned so the head aimed aft and a little down. Then he felt carefully of its control bumps, readying himself to push two. But before he did that he tried his own helmet radio again -- and got the same loud, distracting buzz. Well, he couldn't talk to Ben Tomsun yet, then. Should he wait longer, hoping rescue would come? He thought not. Ben Tomsun must assume he was dead by now. And the longer he waited, the more likely the machines or whoever directed them were to decide he was still in this compartment after all, and concentrate here. If he could get near the hatch and run back and forth for a moment, wouldn't Ben Tomsun be able to feel him? That was a question. What were his alternatives? To try for the sinus and hide there; to look for some other way out of the compartment; to wait where he was. Or maybe to dash out in a brief attack against the machines. None of those attracted him. T T e took a deep breath and  pressed the chosen bumps on the corpse's suit. The girders held it for a moment; then it tugged free and slanted aft, fairly well aimed toward the hole in the sinus wall. Pry waited no longer. He launched himself in the opposite direction slowly, straining his eyes to see by what dim light bounced this way. He swerved around a column, then tilted himself parallel to it so that, by twisting his helmet, he could see aft. The searchlights were still swinging there. He passed another column. He couldn't see the suited corpse when they located it, but he could tell by the way the lights swung. Now most of them converged on one spot. His pulse quickened with hope, and he turned his head forward again. But there was very little light reflecting to this end of the compartment now. He had to go by dead reckoning. When he felt he must surely be near the bulkhead, he drifted very slowly. Finally his outstretched fingers touched a surface. He moved laterally to make sure it was the bulkhead, then let himself down slowly until he felt the sinus wall beneath his feet. He looked aft. The machines were headed this way again! Sickness formed in his middle. Should he grope along, hoping to find the hatch by feel? Suppose he ran back and forth where he was? Would Ben Tomsun correctly interpret whatever was felt, or assume it was some light machine? If he only knew more about things! The machines were coming as if they'd already seen through the trick. Then Pry realized Gerlik could feel him here! In desperation, he turned on all his lights and directed the beam along the base of the bulkhead. Where was the hatch ? There! In dismay, he saw that he'd missed it by nearly a hundred yards. He ran as fast as the suit would let him, swerved around a dead machine and cast a hasty look aft. Search-lights speared toward him now. Was Ben Tomsun alert? Would he understand? A machine rolled feebly to intercept him. He dodged around it. Another was between him and the hatch -- and moving as if to block it physically with its own bulk. Searchlights fixed on him precisely, making him feel as conspicuous and vulnerable as an egg on a table. Something heavy hurtled through the air, missing him only by two feet, and slammed against the bulkhead at hip-height. He sprinted desperately, seeing that the slowlytrundling machine would reach the hatch before he did. A voice -- Gerlik's, no doubt projected via the machines -- thundered, "Stop, traitor!" IF 'T'hen, abruptly, the hatch slid open and light spilled through! The slow machine didn't pause. But from the open hatch shot another big shape, blocking the light for an instant. It crashed directly into the blockader. Pry felt the jar and heard the rending of metal and saw objects fly. Then he dodged around the locked-together machines and hurled himself through the hatch. It slammed shut behind him. And then he stood gasping for breath and staring at four men in suits identical to his own. Each had a pistol of some sort -- a heavy kind -- in his hand. But the hands hung limp as four pairs of eyes stared back at Pry. Presently he felt himself grinning. It wasn't all one-sided, this wonder he felt! It was the first time they'd ever seen a man from Sinus B! One of them grinned back and said in ordinary English, "Turn on your radio." Pry said, "It's being jammed." But he tried it nevertheless. To his surprise the buzzing was faint, and through it came the voice of Ben Tomsun. "So you got through alive! I hope you'll let your escort bring you to my compartment at once. After all this, I'm anxious to get a look at you!" There were several of the big compartments to pass through, all of them lighted and all apparently in friendly hands, then an airlock with double doors. After that one of the four men said, "We're in Nose Cone now." Nose Cone! A phrase from legends. Pry looked around. The compartment was smaller than the ones he'd just passed through, and there were a number of doors in it -- overhead as well as in the floor and walls. From somewhere came the muffled hum and throb of machinery. And then there was a twisting corridor that left Pry with the impression they'd entered a gravity at right angles to the one he'd expected; and there were people, who stared at him, and a glimpse of a tree-covered deck through a doorway. Then, finally, divested of his suit, he stood in a small room, alone except for Ben Tomsun. T)ry realized he must have resisted, at gun level, the knowledge that Ben Tomsun wasn't a living man; for he was dazed now. The cabinet of shiny metal was rectangular and more or less the size of a man. That helped a little. So did the horizontal row of small holes at about face-height and the mesh-covered opening below them. These could be thought of as eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth. The voice did come from the mesh-covered opening. But aside from that, it was a simple featureless box, probably of acrysteel. Ben Tomsun must have known how he felt. "Forgive the way I present myself. I'm not really confined to this box. My personality is scattered among various computerbanks of the Ship, all scrambled up with other personalities, history, technologies, Euclidean and nonEuclidean geometries, and data such as the germination-time of peachpits. But I and the other recorded brains prefer these cabinets. They give us at least a tenuous simile to the time when we had live bodies." Pry stared dumbly for a minute. The first words he blurted were, "You don't sound insane!" Ben Tomsun sighed. "I hope I'm not. I can't explain to you exactly how things are with me. There was the original Ship's computer-intelligence, then human personalities were programmed in, for reasons that were probably partly emotional. But some of us changed. I guess that was inevitable. Gradually we took over many of the Ship's functions. Whether the purely mechanical intelligence would have gone insane at the time of the Catastrophe is something we debate and ponder among ourselves. But Captain Gerlik and a few others did lose their sanity. He and one other were in control of most of the Ship; and as I've told you, they warred between them. Gerlik overcame the other personality, or absorbed it. The rest of us hadn't nearly as much power, but by joining together and by careful maneuvering, we were able to clear him out of Nose Cone and some compartments of Main Hull. We infiltrated the environment-maintenance systems for Sinus B, but couldn't take them over. And that leaves your people in serious danger. There's a reason why we have to get you out of there soon. Well, two reasons, actually -- the less urgent being the need to take over and finish repairs." Pry said, "I can understand that. With the universe destroyed, the Ship has to last as long as is physically possible. Even so... " Ben Tomsun chuckled. "That's one of the reasons we wanted you up here -- to convince you that the universe has not been destroyed! We don't know precisely what Captain Gerlik or his rival told your ancestors at the time of the Catastrophe, nor all of what he's told you since. By the way -- won't you please tell me your name?" "Well... Pryingboy Thorp. I guess I was, uh, a nosy child." 'T'he voice laughed briefly. "Well, Thorp, this is what happened. We were skirting a cloud nebula -- a great mass of dust and gas -- when we were unexpectedly thrown off course by a small, dark, very dense, invisible body -- probIF ably the core of a long-dead star. It whirled us into the cloud, tailfirst. Tidal forces -- I guess you don't know about those -- did some damage, but the worst was the frictional heat. Spots of the hull softened and bulged out and ruptured. You've seen the hasty patches. The heat penetrated far enough to soften the wall of Sinus B too, in one spot. It was touch and go whether we'd survive at all. Captain Gerlik, who was under the worst strain for a long period, went insane. While we were in the cloud, the stars were hidden from us. That's all." The voice paused as if the cabinet were scrutinizing Pry. "You don't look as if you believed me." Ben Tomsun sighed again. "I wish it were possible to put you in a pressure-suit and send you Outside to see for yourself, but that would take too much time. This will have to do." A section of the wall behind the cabinet suddenly slid aside. For a moment Pry thought there was a five-foot-square hole; then he saw that it was a dark screen of some kind. The screen suddenly blossomed with tiny points of light. At one edge was a convoluted mass of light and dark. Ben Tomsun said, "That luminoisity at the edge is the cloud we passed through. The points of light are stars. Have you seen pictures of a starfield?" Hope and doubt fought a cutlass-battle inside Pry. He swallowed hard. "I've seen small pictures." "Now," the voice said. The screen suddenly lit all over. There was a mottled pattern of greenish blue. It seemed to shrink in upon itself, and became a half-disc. Pry drew in his breath sharply. "That's a picture of Earth! Is Earth still -- " Ben Tomsun said, "We're far out of telescope-range of Sol, but we have no reason to think that anything's happened to Earth. This is not a picture of Earth -- it's the next planet we're going to colonize. It's earthlike and primitive. Listen carefully, Thorp! We're in wide orbit around this planet right now. All of us, except for a few who remain aboard Main Hull in orbit to do necessary things, such as repairing the hull and trying to cure Captain Gerlik, will be landing in Nose Cone. Your people will have to clear one of the Sinus B exits your ancestors blocked up and come out the near end. Oh, I don't mean within the next few hours; it'll take time to convince them. And a few people have to land in gravcars -- you've read about those? -- for preliminary explorations. But you will have to start persuading your people. The alternative is that we'll try to take over control of the sinus from Captain Gerlik. And that might end in disaster for your people." The voice was silent for a minute. "This is a lot for you to swallow in a hurry, I know, but I haven't time to show you more directly, or to let you mull it over. One reason I haven't is that the agent who went into the sinus may be in deadly peril. You have to get back in time to forestall any execution. Now, may I have your decision?" T)ry stood there, so full of feelings he could hardly breathe. He was shocked and angry at such a blunt ultimatum. Yet, if it were all true... To have a whole planet to live on... The voice said gently, "If you succeed with your own people quickly, you can be part of one of the exploration teams. Is that any inducement?" Pry squirmed mentally. He finally burst out, "Damn it! If you're eight hundred years old -- " "Six hundred. I never saw Earth." "Well, if you're that old, you know how I feel! Of course it's an inducement! Any man... But I'm no spy! I wouldn't know the first thing about -- about -- " "About spreading a sudden truthPi Naturally we wouldn't expect you to work alone. That agent who's already there -- if you get back in time -- " Pry trembled for a minute more, then took a deep breath. "All right! What choice do I have, anyway? I -- I have to believe you or disbelieve you, and..." He stared away for a moment. "I lied to you about that agent. I said we had him under control. We didn't. But if he tries to pose as one of us -- " Ben Tomsun said amusedly, "I knew you were lying." Pry scowled at the cabinet. "Oh. Well... Are you going to tell me how to find him?" "Not exactly." "Not -- why, in God's name?" "Because it isn't a 'he', and you've undoubtedly already found her. She was going to call herself 'Marytwo Garth.' " Ben Tomsun said tersely, "We had to make contact. You, or your ancestors, killed every man we sent in. She volunteered. We aren't playing games, Thorp! Will you work with her?" Pry tinned slowly and took a few blind steps. Such a big suit, and such a small girl... But it was clever. And she must have stuck that dart into her own shoulder, calmly abandoned herself to unconsciousness and whatever luck had in store. After first stopping Muller, so he couldn't report. What a woman! He whirled back to face the cabinet. "I'll help! And -- uh -- that exploration team I may go on. Might she, uh, be part of it too?" IF hue -- Dear Editor: It's hard to believe that none of the Huers  Criers who have expressed their appreciation for Asimov's "The Holmes-Ginsbook Device" (Dec. #) have detected this story's most delicious quality, nameon Watson's  Crick's Nobelled remolecule. The parody begins in the very title (read "Watson-Crick" for "Holmes-Ginsbook") and goes on from there in remarkably detailed parallel to the original. That the spirit in which Asimov wrote it was not entirely one of good clean fun only adds spice to the knowledgeable reader's enjoyment, for the malice is entirely justified -- the Watson-Crick work scarcely begins to exemplify the independence and originality that a Nobel Prize is supposed to token, and unlike Watson few good scientists see their research primarily as a means to ego glorification. I don't mean to suggest for a moment that the typical scientist is self-effacingly indifferent to status and adulation; but these are secondary gains from his research, not its main purpose -- Alberta, Department of Psychology, Edmonton, Canada.  You're right, of course about the story being a take-off on the book. Dr. Asimov -- to use his official title -- was having his fun at certain traits he found in the original. Of course, he was good natured about it, unlike some who seem to have been very bitter about the account. As you may have noticed, we tried to indicate by a kind of atrocious pun in the "blurb" over the story that "Holmes-Ginsbook" was a parody. It's a little hard to generalize about what leads a scientist to win a Nobel prize, however. Undoubtedly a great many men -- Fermi, for example -- have been motivated only by a truly scientific desire to understand some aspect of the universe. Does it really matter? It might be nice to think of all scientists as highminded men who care not for the plaudits of the masses, or even the highest award of their fellows. But in any event, somehow the work gets done. It isn't the motivation, but the increased understanding of the great environment around us, that remains when the tumuk and the shouting die. -- Editor UI line Inn, South Capitol and I Street, S.W. Washington D.C. Guest of Honor: Lester del Rey. Membership: #, in advance; #, at the door. For information: Jay Haldeman, # Woodbourne Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland #. burgh regional convention). At Allegheny Motor Inn, # Beers School Road, Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. Guest of Honor: Robert Silverberg. Features a banquet. Membership: #, in advance, #, at the door. For information: Peter Hays, #I Wightman, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #. Honor: Ed Hamilton and Leigh Brackett Motor Lodge, Detroit, Michigan. Membership: #, advance; #, at the door. 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But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know' how' to get started writing, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago they joined forces with Rod Serling. Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith and Bergen Evans, to form the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they knew about writing into a remarkable new' kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing -- then specialize in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising Writing or Business Writing. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional w riter or editor. He goes over your work line by line, word by word, blue-penciling his changes right on your manuscript, much as an editor does with an established author. Then he returns it with a long letter of advice and guidance. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to the Reader's Digest, Rod Serling s urge to write made him a leading TV dramatist (Twilight Zone, Pattern j Reejuiem for a Heavyweight) and won him six Emmy awards. Ladies' Home Journal , Fantasy and Science Fii lion, and more than # other publication Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing abilit worth developing, send for the School's revea ing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer othc evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enrol However, there is no obligation to do so. i ! Famous Writers School  Dept. W-#, Westport Conn. #S#( I want to know if I have writing aptitude worth developing. Please mail me, i without obligation, your Aptitude Test i and #-page brochure. ! Mr. I Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print J Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Vol. #, No. # Freclerik Pohl, Editor Emeritus Willy Ley, Science Editor Lester del Roy, Feature Editor Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Managing Editor Ejler Jakobsson, Editor by Keith Laumer by Dean R. Koontz by Mack Reynolds IF  Editorial I n the first eight years of Ifs existence, from that first issue in March, #, until the end of #, the magazine had half a dozen editors -- Paul Fairman, Larry Shaw, Eve Wulff, James Quinn, Damon Knight and H. L. Gold. From #I till now, the undersigned has been lucky enough to be running things... and lucky enough, too, to have won three Hugos with it as the best science-fiction magazine in the world. Enough is enough. A good time to quit is when you're ahead. And so, with considerable nostalgia and some flashes of regret, we're moving out of the way to make room for a new crew. Starting with the next issue, the Presiding Genius of If (and of the other Galaxy-group magazines as well) will be Ejler Jakobsson. Sf veterans will remember Jake as whilom editor of Super Science Stories some years ago (History does repeat! Curiously, we edited that one before him too). What Jake will do as editor you will be discovering as the issues roll along. We'll be as interested as you are in seeing what new slants on the science-fiction subject Jake will bring to bear... and we expect to be pleased with the result. And, in a way, we expect to be a little envious. F or, while there is much that is in doubt about the next few years for science fiction and for the human race, there is one thing that's for certain, and that is that it is going to be a time of excitement and a time of change. Just in the last decade we've seen such science-fiction dreams come true as men going into space, the first test flights of supersonic airliners, the wide development of communications miracles like computer facilities on an ever-increasing scale and the growth of color TV. By the time you read this, men may be walking on the surface of the Moon. For old-timers like most of us, who have discounted all these astonishing events because we lived with them for years in the pages of sf magazines long before they happened in the real world, these things already have a sort of quaint, old-fashioned sound; we've come to look for beyond them, to stranger worlds and more remote times. And yet they are now a part of our lives. And with them, they bring a freight of consequences whose ends are far from being in sight. Riots... violence... campus confrontations and civil unrest. Organ transplants and medical marvels to ease our lives on one hand; ever-increasing pollution of the be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toaay. organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe X.H.C.  Scribe X.H.C. j San Jose, California # j Please send me the tree book, The Mastery   of Life , which explains how I may learn to j j use my faculties and powers of mind. j  Name I I Address I The Rosicrucians (not a religious WTe Rosicrucians (AM , City Zip Code environment and stresses on our nervous systems on the other. What is happening in our society is only the reflection of what has happened to our capability of changing the world to suit ourselves. When we buy scientific progress, the commodity we really want to get is betterment of the world for everyone -- betterment in tangible ways, through technology that gives us improved food and medicine, or betterment in such intangibles as a clearer understanding of the basic laws of the universe. But the price we pay is not only money. We pay for energy in the coin of air pollution. We pay for better health in the coin of overpopulation. We pay for increased capabilities in the field of defense in the heavy price of increased danger of war. Thafs not a bad thing in itself. "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch," as Bob Heinlein said in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress some issues back; whatever we get, we pay for one way or another. But our bookkeeping isn't up to striking a balance in these cloudy areas. Is it worth while to have two cars in every garage, at the cost of two lungfuls of carbon monoxide in every driver? We can't tell. We just don't have any good way of measuring the Good Things against the Bad Things in this way, to find out if we are getting our money's worth. Not yet. But there's hope. There are ways now being developed of foreseeing the consequences of change in a quantitative way, so that one can be stacked up against the others. They may give us refined and useable answers before very long. And until they arrive, we have that cost-accounting system ol evaluating possible futures all of us have been using for some time now, the science-fiction story. For it's still true that the best lens available with which to peer into tomorrow's world Is in science fiction. Sometimes the oracle is a bit hazy in detail, cryptic, hard to understand. But that has been an oracle's privilege since the days of Delphi and Nostradamus. And looking into the tomorrows of these fascinating and eventful todays should keep science-fiction writers pretty busy for some time to come. W e hope to be with you in that capacity from time to time; our real reason for cutting dbwn on editing time is to make a little more space in the day for writing. But we won't be entirely absent in the editorial capacity either. We are going to stick around for a while as Editor Emeritus, which is the rough Latin equivalent for secondguesser, the fellow who looks over the shoulder of the people actually doing the work and criticizes. So thanks -- readers, writers, artists, associates in one capacity or another -- for the best part of a very interesting decade. We've enjoyed it. We hope you have. And we will be looking forward to the decades to come. IF IF  Serial Hardin was the town cop and a good one . But the town was on tour in a foreign land and some of the natives were restless... I N ew Woodstock crossed the Rio Grande at McAllen and passed through the Mexican city of Reynosa. There had been two fairly major sites on the American side of the border with excellent facilities for as many as ten thousand homes apiece but Bat Hardin and the executive committee had checked to find that the next nearest site was at Linares, a full # kilometers to the southwest. They wanted to push on through and avoid the necessity of setting up for the night at some second-class or emergency site where there would be inadequate supply facilities and other short comings. There would be enough of that when they got down into Central America and beyond. New Woodstock was a small town as mobile towns went, and they hadn't the problems of some of the larger communities. The committee had handled all the required border formalities the day before so that there was nothing to hold them up. Bat Hardin leading, as usual, they strung out along the highway, some five hundred homes strong with the auxiliary vehicles spaced periodically between them. Bat rode alone in his converted police vehicle, drawing his moderately sized mobile home behind. He was far from a misogynist but at this junction in his life he had no permanent feminine affiliations and for some reason not quite clear to even himself he desired none. He was a moderately tall man with a military carriage and a habitually worried expression. His hair was crisp, his complexion dark and his features so heavy that he would hardly have been thought of as handsome by average American standards. He had a nervous habit of gnawing on his under lip at the slightest of problems. He wore a khaki semi-uniform. Local police often had a chip on their shoulders in their attitude toward the pseudo-police of the mobile towns, who, after all, had no authority in the areas through which they passed. Law in the mobile towns was largely a voluntary matter; minor infractions could be taken care of in the community but any major matter made it necessary to call in the proper authorities of whatever area the town was in at the time. 'T'his part of Mexico was not  particularly attractive as Bat had known from earlier trips but the site at which they were to stay that evening was at the edge of the mountains and on the banks of a stream. And the following day they should be getting into the Mexico famed in story and song. At the thought of that, Bat Hardin grunted deprecation. The world was becoming one in more than one sense. The larger cities, in particular, such as still existed at feast, were becoming unbelievably aEke. Somehow or other they all seemed to look like Cincinnati. He was hoping that it would be different in South America. A mobile town, like a convoy of ships in wartime, moves at the speed of its slowest member. Atone, Bat Hardin's electro-steamer could easily maintain a steady five hundred kilometers an hour, at least on an automated underground expressway in the States. Even under manual control such as at present, three IF hundred kilometers an hour was quite possible. However, the average home behind him seldom got much above a hundred kilometers an hour especially when traveling in a group. He shrugged that off. He was used to this reduced spel and they were in no hurry. If they wished, they could take a year -- or ten years -- to reach their destination. He grunted at that, too. In actuality, they were rather vague on just what the destination was. What was really on his mind was the sullen quality that he had seemed to detect in some of the border officials. It was nothing he could quite put his finger upon and didn't apply to all of the immigrations and customs people but it was there. And he didn't quite know why. He said into his car phone, "New Woodstock, AI Castro." Al's face faded in. "The rear guard here," he said, yawning. "I'll sure as hell be glad when we get up into the mountains a ways." Bat ignored the complaint of his second. AI Castro was a chronic complainer when things were going fine and never uttered a word of beef when matters were anxious. He was a good man and Bat sometimes wondered at his presence in this community. AI was no more of an artist than Bat was. Bat said, "We'll be turning off in about a half horn:." "Going to stop then for lunch?" "We'll put it to the vote but ## going to recommend no. I'd like to get into Linares before dark. Some of the boys haven't ever driven on these roads before." "Yeah," AI grumbled. "I'll call back to the old lady to whomp me up some sandwiches. Probably wind up with acid stomach." The vote carried and in the early afternoon Bat unwrapped the two sandwiches he'd made himsell earlier and the plastic of beer. When he had finished the beer, he threw the container out the window without compunction. The plastic containers which dissolved in the sun or rain within a week spelled progress with a capital P in Bat Hardin's book. Gone with the snows of yesteryear were the multi-millions of beer and other cans which used to line the roads and clutter up the parks, beaches and resorts of half the world. Hphey were only to spend the one night at the Linares site so they made no particular efforts to arrange themselves in predetermined order, other, of course, than that the administration and other auxiliary vehicles parked in the center of their group. They occupied only about a third of the sitete most favored area and there w ease only half a dozen other mobBe homes. Bat himself parked near the adI P ministration building, noting; that the driver, Milt Waterman, wasn't bothering to set it up but was making his way over to his father's home to rejoin his family. Bat detached his electro-steamer from his home, to have it ready in case of emergency. He parked it, to Wander about on foot on the off chance that he could be of some assistance to someone setting up one of the larger and consequently more awkward homes. Jim Blake, for instance, could usually use an extra hand. Jim might be one of the most prominent artists in New Woodstock but he wasn't mechanically enough minded to wind a clock. Blake, however, had secured the services of one of his neighbors. Ferd Zogbaum, a bachelor, lived in what wfls usually called a camper, a very compact bus-like vehicle that combined the electro-steamer and living quarters very neatly. Ferd was usually on hand to help out when help was called for. A damn good member of the community, Bat had long since decided. Everything seemed to be settled down and Bat Hardin fell in beside Dag Stryn, the guru of the New Temple, and elderly Doc Barnes and headed toward the site's ultra-market. He said to the town's doctor, Doc Barnes said, "She'll be all right, Bat. I haven't the facilities in the clinic to handle her operation but. I'll stop off with her at the first city with an adequate hospital. I have her in stasis for the time being." "She and Phil will have to drop behind?" Bat said, nibbling on his lower lip. "Not necessarily. She can convalesce in the clinic while we're underway." Dag Stryn, a blond Viking of a man but almost unbelievably gentle .in all things, said, "I'm worried oldest, and I'm just wondering if this protracted a trip is the sort of thing they should be doing." "Basically they're both as strong as a couple of horses," Barnes said. "They'll be all right. You can't just sit and die because you've readied your seventies." The doctor must know, Bat thought. He was certainly pushing that age himself. They reached the ultra-market and stood at the end of a short line that had formed. When his turn came, Bat took up a number key and walked on past the display shelves, periodically stopping before an item he wished and touching his key to the impulse device. Aside from tortillas and an inordinate selection of chili peppers, he could have been in an ultra-market in Maine or Oregon. He wasn't, he realized, particularly happy about the fact. It must have been interesting, in the old n days, to be able to witness different cultures, eat exotic foods, sample different drinks, ogle girls attired in saris or sarongs, rather than the now practically universal fashions. TTis selections all made, he re" turned to the delivery counter, put his number key in place and then slipped his pocket phone cum credit card in the appropriate slot. Within moments, his package erupted from the delivery chute and he picked it up and headed for the door. In turning abruptly, he caroomed against a newcomer, one of the community members named Jeff Smith. "Hey, watch yourself, boy," the other snapped. "Sorry," Bat said mildly. Smith grumbled something inarticulately and made off. Bat looked after him for a moment. Jeff Smith was a fiery little man of about thirty-five, fairly recent to New Woodstock. He was supposedly a composer and had a small piano in his unusually large mobile home. Bat occasionally heard rambling music from the Smith quarters but to this point the other had never offered to play any of his compositions or anything else at any of the community entertainments. Bat shrugged and continued on his way. He hoped that Jeff Smith worked out. In a mobile town there was small room for soreheads. You were either a tight community of cooperating fellows or you soon came apart as a town and dispersed to seek better companionship elsewhere. Bat Hardin liked New Woodstock and would hate to see anything happen to it. It was unique as mobile towns went; in fact, to his knowledge, there simply weren't any other mobile art colonies in North America. He left his purchases in his home, decided to postpone his evening meal and walked around the site a bit more, pondering the desirability of teaming together with some of the other singles such as Diana Sward or Ferd Zogbaum and taking turns cooking; not that he knew whether or not the others were any better in a mini-kitchen than he was. Thinking of Diana Sward, he came upon the girl sitting in a folding chair before her mobile home, an easel before her, a palette in hand and a scowl on her face. She was obviously trying to get the colorful mountain peaks to the west on her canvas. She looked up and grimaced. "The damn light is off. This Mexican light is different. You'd think it would be the same as similar countryside up in California, or wherever, but it isn't." Bat said mildly, "How can light be different? Light is light." IF "That shows how much you know about it," she snorted. "Sit down, Bat." Ohe was potentially a very pret ty young woman but made small effort to realize her potentialities. On the few occasions when she bothered to do herself up for some community affair or whatever, she wowed them all, looking surprisingly like a brunette version of the ancient movie star Marilyn Monroe. Now she was attired simply in paint-bespattered shorts and there was a streak of blue down her right cheek where she had obviously touched her brush in an absentminded moment of irritation. She said, "The hell with it," and tossed the brush to the shelf of the easel. "Are you any good, Di?" Bat asked idly. She grunted her disgust. "Not very, but I make a modest living. I have a show or two a year and that usually puts me over the hump. Three or four idiots collect my stuff." He was moderately surprised. "You mean you don't have to call torted. "Besides, I'm not eligible for it." "How do you mean? I thought three quarters of this whole town "But I'm an alien, you know." "We're all aliens in Mexico." "I mean, I'm an alien in the United States. I'm not eligible far the Negative Income Tax. I came over from Common Europe as a youngster. When the Germanies reunited, my mother had to hustle out. Some of the new authorities weren't too happy with the stand she had taken in the old days. My name's actually Diana Von Swifird und Hanse -- very impressive, eh? She was a Grafin." "A what?" "Something like a countess from way back in the Kaiser's day. She was also on the chauvanistk side and didn't want to become an American. Since she seemingly had all the money she, and I, would need she didn't become a citizen. By the time she lost her capital -- mother was an ass with money -- it wasn't as easy as all that to become an American. With the adin the world would have become citizens if the government would have allowed it." She changed the subject Bat, what in hell are you doing in New Woodstock?" He shrugged. "In any mobile town, even an art colony, you need other than artists, writers, mamdans, sculptors and the rest You need, for instance, a cop or two." "Sure, but I mean, what do you get out of it. There is no pay with your position. Like you said, Tie said slowly, "I'm not by nature a loafer. Besides, I feel a need to identify, I suppose you'd call it. Be part of the community. I want to do my share..." "Well, a mobile art colony is a sort of a strange place to have that drive." "No it isn't." He looked at her from the side of his eyes. "I'm a cop, for free. Some of the others who don't spend full time at their art act in helping on repairs, as car mechanics, teachers or whatever. For instance, why do you teach art classes to the kids three times a week?" "Touche," she snorted. "But what I meant was, if you're ambitious to work and don't want to be a loafer, why do you stay in a community like this? Why not get yourself a job up in the States?" "Di, old girl, we have a new socioeconomic system in our America. Today such labels as democracy, capitalism, free enterprise and such, are passe. We have Meritocracy." "All right," she said. "Drop the other shoe. So what's Meritocracy got to do with you?" "Just this. The majority of our population is unneeded in our socioeconomic system. What John Kenneth Galbraith, the old economist, once called the Technostructure -- in short, management -- has become for all practical purposes the entire working population. Practically everybody who works is part of management: from scientists, through engineers to technicians. The blue-collar worker is an anachronism. Happily -- I guess -- by this time production is at such a scale that the unneeded are not forced into starvation. Simultaneously with the advent of Meritocracy came the movement toward Guaranteed Annual Income, the Negative Income Tax and other floors beneath the income of every family in the country, employed usefully or not. In short, the dole." Diana Sward said, "Damn it, stop lecturing me largely about things I already know. What's this got to do with you not being a loafer, not going up and getting yourself a job?" He nodded, bitterly. "There's not enough work to go around, Di. And that which is available requires both I.Q. and education. You need both. I.Q. without education is, of course, worthless, but you need the I.Q. to get the education -- in the schools that count at least. I've never seen figures but I suspect that the average person who works today in American industry has an I.Q. of something like #. The number that have an I.Q. of a hundred or less must be infinitesimal. "Di, when you apply to enter a university, or, even if you get over IF that hump and graduate, when you apply for a position With any corporation in the nation, the first thing they do is check your dossier in the National Data Banks. And shortly after your name and identity number is your good old Intelligence Quotient which they've been testing periodically ever since you entered kindergarden. When a fraction of the population can hold down all the jobs needed, why should any corporation in its right mind hire somebody with an I.Q. of less than #?" "What in the name of God has that got to do with you?" "IVe got an I.Q. of #, Di." II Qhe stared at him. "Don't be  ridiculous. Why, you've been lecturing me like a professor of economics since I first met you." He made a face of deprecation. "Don't confuse learning with intelligence, Di. I didn't have much formal schooling. In fact, practically none at all. When I was a kid we still had the ghettos and slums and my family was as lower class as you could get. But during the Asian War I copped one and was in the hospital for quite a spell. I learned to read there. No, I mean literally. Before that I couldn't do much more than read comic books and sign my own name. I became a compulsive reader, an inveterate reader I suppose you ooB it I spend all my free time reading." "Well, that shows you're really intelligent." "No it doesn't," he said doggedly. "All it shows is that I'm a compulsive reader. You can be stewish as far as intelligence is concerned and still do a lot of reading You even learn the twenty dollar words, but you mustn't kid yourself, it doesn't make you any smarter. If your I.Q. is #, it's still #. And in the Meritocracy it's exposed. There is no room for the stupid." She tightened her mouth in rejection. "How do you know your I.Q. is #?" He chuckled wryly. "When I first entered the army I worked for awhile in records. I sneaked a look at my induction examinations. By the way, what's yours?" She made a gesture of shivering. "I've never tried to find out" "I don't blame you," he laughed. "Sometimes, I'm sorry that curiosity ever hit me in the army. I'd be happier if I didn't know." She leaned forward. "But look, Bat, there are fields in which I.Q. doesn't particularly enter. The arts, for instance. Some of the great artists of the world were lamebrains. Sorry, I shouldn't have said that." He spread his hands in a gesture of submission. "Yeah, but I haven't any particular aptitude for any of the arts. Believe me, I've messed around in them." "But there are other fields..." "Sure, and IVe held down jobs in some. I used to curry horses for one of the big mucky-mucks in Kentucky, down where one of my ancestors was a slave. But I don't like being a servant." "In a way, you're a servant now, a public servant." "All right. But, here in New Woodstock I'm an honored member of the community. With a few exceptions, possibly, I'm welcome in everybody's home. I get invited to the parties, I'm often brought in for lunch or dinner. Hell, the Robertsons named their new baby after me." She stared at him in frustration. He said doggedly, "Here I belong. Here I'm wanted. Here I can be of use. The Meritocracy doesn't need me and I refuse to sit around in the new America collecting my anything of value to society. I don't like charity." He shrugged, once again in selfdeprecation. "In the world as it is there is no other way to survive. Theoretically, perhaps, I could go off somewhere and be a hermit. But that's theory. Man's a social animal and can't divorce himself completely from society." J eff Smith, who seemed to be listing slightly to starboard, passed by them, heading back to his home from the direction of the site's cantina . He stared at them, his eyes particularly going over Diana Sward's semi-nudity. There was an element of sneer in his voice when he slurred, "Yawl having a good time?" He had passed before either of them could think of anything to say. Bat chuckled. "I think Jeff sports the last of the southern accents. He's trying single-handedly to maintain the old provincialism. And what's that chip on his shoulder, anyway?" "He invited me to have a drink a little earlier," Di said distastefully. "I turned him down." Ferd Zogbaum came up, a scowl on his face. A scowl wasn't normal on Ferd. He was an easy-going, generous type, about thirty, pushing six feet and a hundred and sixty pounds. He was as nearly universally liked by everybody in New Woodstock as is possible to be liked without being completely wishy-washy. They exchanged amenities, and Di suggested he get himself a chair. She stood. "I think I'd better put on some more clothes, it's cooling off." Ferd said to Bat, "Could I talk to you a minute?" His tone indicated that he meant alone. "Sure. Why not?" Bat said, coming to his feet. "Let's go over to my place. See you later, Di. IF Bat and Ferd sauntered along easily. It was the time day Bat liked best in the mobile art colony. Two of the younger set, known to be considering marriage, went by slowly, hand in hand. Off in the distance, a guitar, poorly played, was starting up a folk song. The kids were beginning to emerge from their homes; a ball game was shaping up. There weren't many children in New Woodstock, slightly over a hundred, but their presence added a needed something, even to an art colony. Bat said to Ferd, in the way of make-conversation, "Getting any work done?" Ferd said, "Some people might work from sun to sun, but a writer's work is never done." Bat looked at him from the side of his eyes. "Oh? You don't seem to be wearing yourself to a frazzle." "I'm working right this very minute," Ferd said, in put-on protest. "One of these days I'll do an article about you. How's this for a title, Last of the Neighborhood Cops?" "It'll never sell. Do you place much of your stuff, Ferd?" "Some. Not enough to negate my somebody who's trying to break into the arts the opportunity to survive while he's learning the tools of his trade. "No more starving in garrets." B at's mobile home consisted of a fairly large living room, a mini-kitchen, a bath and a bedroom. In the tradition of house trailers, since their inception, everything was compactly efficient: refrigerator, automatic bar, electronic stove, TV screen, tucked away here and there with a minimum expenditure of space. Ferd slumped into an easy chair and Bat went over to to bar. "What'll you have?" he said. "It's been a hot day, how about a Cuba Libra?" "Sounds good to me," Bat said, dialing the rum and coke and a dash of lime juice. He paused a brief moment,  then opened the compartment and brought forth two long, chill plastic glasses. He handed one to Ferd and look a chair himself. Bat said, "What was k you wanted to see me about, Ferd? Ferd's face worked unhappily for a moment before he answered. "I don't know exactly how to put it, Bat, but something's wrong.' Bat looked at him. Ferd said, "I can't put my linger on it. It's kind of intuitive. But, for one thing, where are to local people?" "How do you mean?" Bat said, scowling. He had run into this intuitive feeling of Ferd Zogbaum's before. The other hadn't been with New Woodstock very long but on two occasions he had come up with this intuitive feeling, or whatever it was, and had been astonishingly accurate. Now Ferd said stubbornly, "The last time I was in Mexico, about five years ago, the locals used to hang around a site when a group of American homes came through. Some were there just to gawk, but some had souvenirs and such to sell. Where are they this time?" Bat scowled again. "Damn if I know. Possibly so many Americans have been coming through that we're no longer a novelty." "That wouldn't apply to peddlers, or beggars. It wouldn't even apply to kids. Kids never get tired of gaping at strangers and different ways of doing things." Bat thought about it, biting his lower lip. He said slowly, "Did you notice at the border this morning a, well, kind of a sullen quality about some of the authorities?" "As a matter of fact, I did. We had all of our papers, permission to enter and all but I got a distinct feeling that most of them hated to see us pass." Bat said suddenly, "Look, what do you say we go into town this evening after we eat? Take a look around." Ferd came to his feet, pulled out his pocket phone and dialed the time. "Okay," he said. "I've got to get back over to Di's now." After Ferd Zogbaum had gone, Bat went into his mini-kitchen, opened the refrigerator-freezer and scowled in at the purchases he had made earlier. He wasn't particularly hungry after the heat of the day. Tn honor of their first stop in Mexico, he brought forth a container-dish of chili con carne and placed it in the electronic heater and gloomily watched as the container top melted, becoming part of the prepared contents. The chili con carne heated but the dish remained at room temperature and Bat took the food over to the small table in the living room. From a cabinet he brought forth a box of utensils, some crackers and another plastic of beer and sat down to eat. He wasn't going to need the knife with this meal so he ate it along with the chili. When he had finished, he ate the plate and the spoon and fork and went back to his favorite chair to wait for Ferd Zogbaum. He considered dialing himself an afterdinner drink but decided not to. He had no idea of what they might run into in Linares and didn't want to be even slightly befuddled. He reached up for a book from his shelves and sat again. Bat Hardin was getting fully emersed in the work when Ferd Zogbaum's knock came at the door. He gave a grunt of displeasure, marked his page and got up. IF Ferd's camper was on the slow and awkward side, comparatively, so Bat suggested they take his electro-steamer. Linares proper was about a kilometer down the road and it took them only minutes to arrive. The town of Linares boasted a small population of approximately # and had little call to fame. The area was not particularly suited to farming, mining nor, certainly, industry and since its scenic attractions were only moderate tourism was also a matter of little gain. Thus it was that the community had participated hardly at all in the growth of Mexico proper such as was to be seen in the progressive cities of Monterrey, Guadalajara, Vera Cruz and above all Mexico City itself. In fact, Linares remained a town of yesteryear, a sleepy, dull and at this time of the year, at least, dusty backwash to the days of Pancho Villa. The main highway, leading west and further on, south, compounded insult to injury by avoiding Linares proper. Bat and Ferd had to take a side street to the village zocco or plaza, the center about which every Mexican hamlet, village or city revolves. It differed not at all, except possibly being amongst the least picturesque in all the Republic, from the norm. There was a park, a bandstand in its center, iron benches about the perimeter, patches of sad flowers spotted here mid there. A score of trees provided perching for multitudes of Boat-tailed Grackles which evidently had no respect for weary townsmen slumped below on the benches. There were few cars parked about the square, and those that were there were more often oldfashioned internal combustion engines, rather than steamers or the more recent electro-steamers. Evidently pollution laws had never been enforced in Mexico. In fact, of wheeled yehicles there were more beaten up trucks and buses than private cars. Bat Hardin parked the electrosteamer in front of a bar and got out, Ferd doing the same on the other side. 'T'hree or four indolent villagers, leani ng up against wall or lamppost, seemed to take displeasure when Bat locked the car doors. He wondered idly if it was because they were thwarted in going through the vehicle, or if they were objecting to his suggesting that it might be done if he failed to lock up. Come to think of it, Bat recalled that in these small towns the crime rate in Mexico was said to be infinitesimal, though it could be different in the larger, more sophisticated cities. Ferd led the way. If the town as a whole had reminded them of a movie set based on the Mexican revolution of #, there was little in the interior that would indicate the bar wasn't a continuation of the set. The room was long, the walls decorated with bullfight posters and illustrations of bountifully bosomed women. There was a brassrail along the bottom of the bar and a tile trough with running water for those who must needs expectorate. At the far end of the bar, along the whole wall which faced the door was a tile urinal which could easily have accommodated half a dozen beer discomfited customers at a time. There was a stench of stale urine in the air, along with that of unwashed bodies. There were perhaps twenty imbibers present, leaning on the prehistoric bar. Behind were three bartenders; one, a fifty-year-old pushing three hundred pounds in weight, was obviously the proprietor; the other two were youngsters in their teens. The liquor selection was limited; tequila, mescal, rum and gin. A battered refrigerator indicated that at least the beer and coke would be cold. Ferd muttered from the side of his mouth, even as they found a place, "Montezuma drank here." "Or at least, Cortez," Bat muttered back. A silence had failed upon their entry. The two Americans ignored it. The proprietor, who puffed slightly upon movement, hesitated for a long moment but finally came down to them, ignoring some of the cold stares of his habitufe. He stood before them, both obscenely fat hands on the bar, and said expressionlessly, "Senors?" "Tequila, por favor," Bat said. He nodded, turned and secured a bottle of the white liquid midear bomb, a saucer of limes cut into quarters and a shaker of salt Both Bat and Ferd had been in the country before and knew the routine. They poured themselves drinks that would have been called triples in the States, took the salt and sprinkled a touch of it on the back of their left hands. They touched their tongues to the salt, took up and tossed the tequila back over their tonsils in one fell swoop, then grabbed up a quarter of the lime and bit into it. "Wow!" Ferd said, half in appreciation, half in objection to the strength of the fiery product of the maguey plant. The Mexican standing nearest to them and at Bat's left, sneered and said in passable English, "Ah, not enough macho for tequila, eh, Gringo?" Ill TT'erd hesitated for a moment.  Finally, he said to Bat, "Well, we came here to learn. What does macho mean?" IF Bat said quietly, "Manliness, more or less. The quality of being a real man." He was nibbling unhappily at his lower lip. "And Gringo?" "It's a derogatory word for an American. When the American troops invaded from Texas and Vera Cruz one of the popular songs of the day was Robert Burns' Green Grow the Rushes, Oh, and the Americans sang it as a marching tunfc. The Mexicans of the time took the first two words and called the unwelcome invaders Green Grows or Gringos." "Thanks for the lecture," Ferd said politely. He turned to the Mexican. "And you're just a greaser." "Holy Smokes..." Bat began in protest... much too late. The Mexican, although a small man by the standards of either of the two foreigners, pushed Bat Hardin to the side with a sweep of his right arm. He moved in fast, so fast that he should have been upon Ferd before that worthy could erect defenses. However, the American was prepared. Ferd went backward in the one, two, three shuffle of the trained pugilist, his hands coming up in fists. The Mexican was ardent but fighting out of his class as well as weight, height and reach. He swung once, twice, wildly. And then Ferd Zogbaum stepped in with a classic feint of the left and a crushing blow into the other's stomach with his right. Bat Hardin, meanwhile, had turned to meet the rush of the other occupants of the bar. Unlike his companion, he adopted a crouching stance, his hands slightly forward and held as choppers, rather than fists. He had not spent his long years in the Asian War without compiling background in hand to hand combat. The very number of the others, in the confined space of the cantina, was their handicap. That and the fact that the locals had been knocking back the Mexican equivalent of the product of the vine considerably before the arrival of the strangers. They had fully the spirit of the thing but precious little science. While his companion was finishing off his attacker, Bat was able to hold them, although he was being pushed back slowly by sheer weight. Ferd yelled, "Let's get out of here, Bat!" But Bat was nearly eliminated from the fray at this point by an attack on his flank. The bartender, something that looked like a child's baseball bat in one of his fat paws, leaned over the bar and took a massive swing at the embattled American. Bat caught the motion from the side of his eyes and tried to swing out of the blow but only partially succeeded. For a moment the fog seemed to roll in when the bludgeon struck him glancingly on the side of his head. Ferd caught him, supported him just long enough for the other to shake his head in an attempt to clear it. Swinging almost as wildly as the charging locals now, the two shuffled backward toward the swinging doors. "I'll try to hold them," Ferd yelled. "Get the car door openl" Tt was the obvious strategy. Bat  turned quickly and made a dash for it. In the street, he straightarmed one of the loungers who had been outside and who was now coming up on the run, obviously attracted by the sounds of the battle. Another was coming from the opposite direction, a smallish youngster probably not out of his teens. However, Bat Hardin had neither time nor patience for compassion. He slugged the younger man in the face, putting him down, and tore his car keys from his pocket. He fumbled at the door's lock and felt a body hit him from the rear. Somebody threw arms about him. He reached back, snagged an arm and threw the other brutally over his shoulder in the old wrestler's favorite hold, the Flying Mare. Ferd Zogbaum erupted from the cantina and slammed the doors back into the faces of the enraged enemy. The car door was open. Bat Hardin darted in and snaked across the seat to the driver's position. Ferd was still holding the rapidly emerging local citizens, his arms swinging like windmills. Bat Hardin reached out and grabbed him by the belt and pulled him bodily inside in a sprawl. The car began to move forward. Bat deliberately held down his speed so as not to seriously harm the two or three of the enemy who were immediately ahead, trying to stop him. They scurried to either side as he slowly sped up. Ferd had finally managed to sit erect and now slammed shut the still open door on his side. "Fun and games!" he yelped. "Get us the hell out of here, Bat. If any of those jokers are heeled, we've had it." Bat growled, "This is a police car. They'd have to have anti-tank guns." They were back on the main road leading out of town and to the site where New Woodstock was parked. "Armored, eh?" Ferd said and then, "Hey, you've got a nasty cut on your head." He pulled forth a handkerchief and handed it over, then put a hand to his own head and groaned. Bat Hardin was driving with one hand and holding the handkerchief to the cut. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Splitting headache," Ferd muttered. "I always get them, if I get into a fight." "Damn it," Bat said bitterly. "I always thought of you as an easy going character. What the hell was the idea of calling that guy a greaser?" Ferd groaned, still holding his head. "Listen, we had no more chance of getting out of that joint without a scrap than we have of flying without wings. Couldn't you feel that in the air when we walked in? I just precipitated it before they got organized -- thank God." "More of your feminine intuition?" Bat said in disgust. He dabbed at his head and looked at the handkerchief. He was bleeding profusely. "I'll have to take this to Doc," he growled. They were approaching the site. Ferd looked over his shoulder. "None of them coming -- yet." "They won't come," Bat said, still in disgust. "There weren't more than twenty or so of them, most tight. If we stuck around here for any length of time at all, they might stir up enough of the other townspeople to help them give us a hard time, but as of right now they'd be outnumbered. I suspect that the local cops, at this moment, are cooling them." He pulled up before the colony's clinic. D oc Barnes was sitting in a folding chair out front talking to his nurse who was also relaxed in the cool of the evening. Ferd muttered, "This head is place. See you later, Bat." He stumbled from the vehicle, head still in hands, and staggered away. Bat didn't bother to answer. He got out of the electro-steamer on his side and started over to the colony physician. Doc Barnes looked startled and came to his feet. "What in the world's happened? Miss Stevens!" Barbara Stevens hustled to her own feet and held open the door to the colony hospital. Bat headed into the interior saying, "Ferd Zogbaum and I went into town and got into trouble at a bar. " Doc Barnes, following him, said grumpily, "I wouldn't think either of you were the types to get into barroom brawls. Here, let me look at that." Bat said, "They were laying for us, Doc. Haven't you noticed the atmosphere?" "I can't say that I have. Hold still." "Well, we're evidently not as popular around here as we might be." The veteran doctor moved briskly, staunched the blood flow, treated the cut, closed it and placed a layer of pseudo-flesh over the wound. "There you are," he said. "It'll be healed in a few days." IF "No stitches necessary ?" Bat said. "We don't use them for that sort of thing any more," the older man said. "You going to see Dean about this?" Bat turned to leave. "I suppose so. I'll have to. Thanks, Doc." His eyes swept the mobile clinic. When on the road, it moved in two sections drawn by two heavy electrosteamers. When parked, and set up, it consisted of two floors, sporting twelve compartments in all including Doc Barnes' living quarters. Bat said, "You know, this is the first time I've seen your set-up from the inside. It's impressive." Doc Barnes said, "You can thank Dean Armanruder and Jim Blake for that. They split the cost fiftyfifty and donated it to the colony." Bat Hardin said, "Why did they donate this outfit? It must have cost a fortune." "Contrary to some opinion, these mobile towns are not necessarily Barnes said. "Some people, even well to do people, prefer to live this way. An art colony such as this will attract men like Armanruder and Blake because of the companionship." "That still doesn't answer my question." D oc Barnes said impatiently, "They donated it shortly before you joined New Woodstock because I told them I wouldn't take the position unless we had better facilities than were provided at that time." Bat scowled. "What position? I thought you volunteered your services." "I did. I'm retired and have all the income I need. Sort of an old workhorse that hates to be out of harness. I saw an advertisement in one of the magazines devoted to mobile town life for a doctor and answered it. New Woodstock's doctor had passed away. Armanruder and Blake liked my qualifications and for the sake of their own selves and family members ponied up the necessary loot if I'd stay." "Damn nice of them." Doc shifted his thin shoulders. "You need a competent M.D. in a mobile town. It wasn't completely altruistic on their parts." Bat said, "Well, if you wanted to remain in practice, why didn't you stay on up north?" The doctor said testily, "Because I'm outdated. In medicine today you become outdated about every five years. Normally, a competent physician will return to school every five years and spend one or two years catching up on the latest advances. I've got to the age where it's too difficult to keep up. Besides, I like this life. I'm not so confoundedly senile that I don't appreciate a change of scene, open air life, the beach or lakeside in the summer, a southern climate in the winter." Bat was beginning to feel better but he was in no hurry to go. He liked old Doc Barnes and suspected that the other had been a top man of his field in his day. He said, "Were all the other auxiliary buildings acquired the same way?" Doc looked at him. "You should know, you've lived in mobile towns before, haven't you?" "They sometimes differ in how they're composed," Bat said. "The only other one I've lived In was even smaller than this and specialized in archeology. There were precious few auxiliaries, and those largely inadequate, except for the mobile museum." T he doctor shrugged. "As far as the auxiliaries are concerned, some, such as the ad building and the school, were bought by popular subscription when the town first organized some years ago. Others are privately owned. Sam Prager's TV and electronic repairshop, for instance. Evidently, Sam had always loved to tinker. When his job was automated out from under him, he and his wife Edith took what resources they had and made a down payment on a mobile home and equipped one room as a repair shop." "I wondered why Sam joined New Woodstock," Bat said. "You'd think he'd look up some town that had a lot of members with similar interests in fiddling around with electronics." "Edith writes. Poetry, I believe. She's on the striving intellectual side. Answer the question yourself, Bat. Why has a healthy, comparatively young fellow like you retired to a life in New Woodstock?" Bat told him. The doctor was irritated. "The word intelligence has its elastic qualities," he said. "Anyhow, one test isn't enough, though the tests we use now are considerably more efficient than they used to be. However the I.Q. tests largely measure the speed of your thinking, not necessarily its quality." "How do you mean?" The testy old man said, "See here, suppose you were shipwrecked on a deserted island. Who would you rather have as a companion, a computer programmer with an I.Q. of # -- gifted, in short -- or a chappie with an I.Q. of #, slightly above average, who was a professional fisherman and spent his vacations in hunting, hiking and skin diving?" Bat said dryly, "These days, you're not apt to be shipwrecked. And under the Meritocracy high I.Q. is the criteria that counts." "All right," Barnes said. "Possibly you know more about it than I do. But you're building up one grand inferiority complex." IF Bat Hardin turned to leave. He said, "It's not an inferiority com plex, Doc. I am inferior." TJefore going to the mobile mansion which was the home of Dean Armanruder, Bat Hardin headed for the considerably less ostentatious home of his deputy AI Castro. On the way he passed the camper of Ferd Zogbaum and considered, momentarily, sticking his head inside and inquiring about the other's headache. It was a strange thing, that headache. What had Ferd said? That every time he got into a fight the headache hit him. He approached the camper but then drew himself up. Through one of the windows he could see Ferd sitting at his tiny desk talking earnestly into a TV phone. There was an anxious look on his face, one of strain, although he was seemingly trying to control that element of his expression. Bat shrugged and moved on. Since it seemed unlikely that the freelance writer had any contacts here in Mexico, he must have been communicating with someone back in the States and the conversation was evidently of more than passing interest. Bat shrugged again. For all he knew, Ferd was querying some editor about an article. Possibly the strained element was there because he needed the money. But why should Ferd Zogbaum particularly need money? He was a single felcould go all year without selling any of his pieces, and never be really up against it, particularly since mobile town life was comparatively cheap and Mexico, in particular, considerably less expensive was enough that anyone on it could live-it-up in Mexico or some of the other Latin American countries to the south. And more and more people were discovering the fact every day as witness the exodus of mobile towns and cities southward. AI Castro's home was approximately the size of Bat's own but since he lived with his well larded wife, Pamela, the space was really less than he could have wished for. The place was lighted up but the curtains drawn. Bat rang the bell. AI came, yawning as ever, and opened up. "Hi Bat, what's on? Come on in, have a drink." Pamela Castro was sitting at the small dining room table, a tall frosted glass there and a wilted look about her. She was an objectionably fat woman, and Bat had never particularly got along with her. She couldn't see any reason for her husband donating his time as Bat's deputy when he received no compensation. Theoretically she was a water colorist but in actuality she spent precious little time working at it. Bat said, "No thanks. I just had a drink and got knocked for a loop." "They got strong liquor down here, all right," AI nodded. "But it tastes like turpentine. Take the tobacco stain right off your teeth. I'll stick to State-side grog." "It wasn't the liquor," Bat said wryly. "It was the bartender. He slugged me with a baseball bat." AI Castro stared at him. "What 're you talking about?" Bat told him what had happened. "I'm heading over to see Armanruder. But whatever he says, I think we'd better post a guard tonight. Why don't you round up a couple of the emergency deputies, say Jake Benton's boy, Tom, and Luke Robertson? We'll share watches, four hours on, four hours off." "Heavens to Betsy," Pamela complained in a half whine. "Is this getting to be an all day, all night thing? What do you get out of it, up and down all night? You'll be too tired to drive tomorrow." AI didn't answer her. He turned back to Bat. "Okay, I'll run over and get Tom and Luke." Tat made his way across the " center area to where Dean Armanruder was set up not far from the mobile administration building. The senior member of the executive committee this week had by far the most luxurious mobile home in New Woodstock. His threesection establishment was a far cry from the little original trailer homes. Six vehicles in all were involved, three mobile homes which folded quite compactly while underway and three heavy electrosteamers which drew them. Two of the homes were joined on setting up to make the quarters which Dean Armanruder and his secretary occupied; the third home, considerably the smallest, was parked nearby for Manuel Chauvez and his wife, the only two servants in New Woodstock. Bat Hardin was on friendly enough terms with the retired corporation manager but found no real warmth in the man. In theory, Dean Armanruder dabbled in painting but in actuality such real professionals as Diana Sward had to repress their shudders if they were unlucky enough to see his latest product. Armanruder was a phenomenon that has been known to the art colony down through the ages, the outsider who loves to associate with Bohemians -- whatever a Bohemian is, Bat thought sourly. The Armanruder home was one of the few in New Woodstock that boasted an identity screen in the door. Bat activated it and stood there waiting for the door to open. It did, and Armanruder's voice IF came through the screen at the same moment. "Come in, Hardin. Good evening. We're here in the salon." "Good evening," Bat said and made his way down the short corridor to where Dean Armanruder and his secretary, Nadine Paskov, were relaxing before the TV screen which was built into the end wall of the room, taking up most of it. When set up, the mobile mansion had a second floor which telescoped down into the bottom one when underway. The top floor was devoted to sleeping quarters, dressing rooms, closets and baths and Bat had never seen it. The ground floor was living quarters, library, dining room, a surprisingly extensive kitchen for a mobile home, storage space, a large office and a smaller one for Miss Paskov. Nadine Paskov was really a secretary though some snide elements in the colony prefered to doubt that. She also obviously doubled as Dean Armanruder's mistress and was undoubtedly the most beautifully groomed woman in town unless Diana Sward held that honor. Dean Armanruder touched a control of the arm of his overgrown chair and the lights went up sufficiently for them to see each other more easily. "Sit down, Hardin," he said. "Could I have Manuel bring you a drink?" He touched another control. 'T'hat was the Armanruder style. Not for him an automatic bar nor even an old-fashioned one which he would have to operate himself. Cool it, cool it, Bat told himself. What business of his was it? Armanruder had earned his comforts. You didn't become manager of a corporation these days because your father owned most of the stock. The wealthy might inherit a concern nowadays but few were foolish enough to attempt to operate it themselves. He took the chair proffered but said, "No thanks. I'm going to be up half the night, and a drink would probably make me that much more groggy." He nodded to Nadine Paskov, ever the beauty queen, who looked as though she was bored by his arrival. "Good evening, Miss Paskov." "Hi Bat," she said, finishing the drink in her cocktail glass. Manuel entered but for the moment Dean Armanruder ignored him. The small, dark-complexioned servant wore a white jacket now. During the day, while driving one of the Armanruder units, he wore a dark suit and a chauffeur's cap. Armanruder said to Bat, "How do you mean, you'll be up tonight?" Bat told him the day's developments and the older man was obviously disturbed. "Why in the world did you two go into town?" "I told you that. We sensed a sullen quality and wanted to check up on it. We certainly weren't looking for trouble and would have avoided it if we could." "I suppose so," the other said, then looked at his butler cum chauffeur. "Two more of the same for Miss Paskov and me, Manuel. Mr. Hardin isn't drinking." "Yes sir." The Spanish American tinned to go. If Bat had it correctly, Manuel and his wife, Concha, had come from New Mexico or Arizona. Their Spanish would be invaluable on this town move to South America. Bat looked after the slightly built servant and must have had an element of questioning in his face. D ean Armanruder misunderstood it. He said, "You're wondering why Manuel would take a job like this in these days of few indeed in the States any more. Only the truly wealthy can afford them. But it's not that with Manuel and Concha; I pay them little more than they would get in the "Oh? I was under the impression he was an American citizen." Armanruder chuckled again. "Yes. But not all citizens are eliManuel was caught at falsifying his income tax. He and his wife working on the side to augment their fortunes. Very, very bad. When the computers check you out and catch you, you're no longer eligible for Negative Income Tax and in this day and age of unemployment you have your work cut out finding a position." Bat said, "Actually, that wasn't what I was thinking, though. The thought went through my mind, there but for luck go you or I." Nadine Paskov said in bored impatience, "Oh, good heavens." Armanruder shook his head. "Speak for yourself, perhaps, Hardin, but not for me. Luck is not involved. Manuel Chauvez and I come from different strata in society. It was fated that he occupy his position and I, mine. At his birth he was slated to be a servant or the equivalent, I to be among the top one percent of our system." He settled back into his chair, made a dome of his fingers and his tone became slightly pompous. "Under the Meritocracy you seek and reach your level. It's a system that fits the human race because it's one that is stratified, because people are. It's highly disciplined, because the universe is. It's a society in which individuals can freely move from one level to another but only by their own abilities. Nothing counts except your own individual achievements." IF Nadine Paskov finished her drink and tapped the back of her hand to her month. Bat had a few arguments in mind but he stood and said, "I should be getting on my rounds." He added wryly, "I suppose the manner in which we do the little governing that is needed in these mobile towns is the last of the old time democracy." Armanruder chuckled. "Yes. And do you see who our fellow townsmen elect to the executive committee? We who, before retirement, were most successful in our positions in society. You don't find men like your impetuous friend Zogbaum on the executive committee." As Bat Hardin walked back to  his own home, with the intention of getting a few hours sleep before relieving AI Castro, he muttered, "No. And you don't see me on the executive committee, either." It came to him that high intelligence wasn't the only requirement to get to the top in his each-manfor himself and the devil take the hindmost world. You had to have the push and aggression of a Dean Armanruder. You had to have the desire for power. When Armanruder had first come to the mobile art colony, he had begun operating, volunteering his services, taking over responsibiiities. Most of the town's members did a minimum of participating in its required community work. Oh, there were few complete shirkers too taken up with his art work, his family, the maintenance of his mobile home to find time for lengthy committee meetings, the handling of accounts, the making of decisions involving the community. Within a month, Dean Armanruder had been elected to the executive committee and within two months was dominating it Bat relieved AI Castro at ten o'clock and patrolled the town with Luke Robertson, a tall, lanky, slow moving fellow who did sculpturing in iron and who seemed to have an inordinate affection for Bat Hardin, as did his wife, for that matter. Bat wasn't quite sure why. But when somebody likes you, for whatever reason, you have a tendency to like him in return. In actuality, Bat had to admit that he didn't appreciate Luke's work; in fact, it was exactly the sort of abstract, meaningless -- to Bat Hardin -- sort of thing that he actively disliked. Bat's tastes went to the representational art forms; even free verse left him with a taste in his mouth. Of course, he had never mentioned that to Luke Robertson. AI Castro and young Tom Benton had reported their four-hour watch uneventful. They had immediately taken off for their respective homes upon the approach of Bat and Luke. And the hours between ten and two were equally free of any signs of disgruntled locals. In fact, Bat was beginning to wonder if the whole idea of posting a guard hadn't been somewhat ridiculous. He was undoubtedly exaggerating the event in Linares. A bunch of drunks had lit into him and Ferd Zogbaum. So what? It didn't mean that a mob was going to descend on New Woodstock. At two, AI and Tom came back, AI looking as though in the midst of the self-same yawn he'd had four hours earlier. Bat returned to his mobile home, slept four hours more and came back for the final shift at six. It was unnecessary. At this time of the year, it was dawn and early risers in New Woodstock were already up and around. On the way back to his place, more sleep in mind, he passed Diana Sward, once again seated at her easel and. once again scowling at the mountains beyond. Bat looked over her shoulder for a moment at her efforts. "You'll never make it," he said, shaking his head. "Shut up. Good morning, Bat. When do we roll?" "I wouldn't know. I'm in favor of getting out of here but I imagine it will be ten o'clock or so, as usual." Something was there that he didn't like. He couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe he was associating with Ferd Zogbaum too much. Ferd and his intuitions. Maybe they were rubbing off on him. But he had the something-is-bad feeling. T Te went back into his home,  opened a drawer and stared down at the Gyro-jet pistol there in its shoulder harness. He took a deep breath, took it out, took off his j'acket, shrugged into the harness, put his jacket back on and left the home again. He got into the electro-steamer and dialed a map of the local road system on his TV phone screen. He traced their route for the day, with a finger. The next stretch was #S kilometers and led largely through the mountains. At the end of the stretch they would j'oin the Pan American Highway about # kilometers south of the city of Saltillo. The Pan American Highway was well patrolled, had ample sites strung along it and endless powerpack outlets and stations for fuel cells for those who used them. He would feel happier when they were upon it. As it was, this stretch between Linares and the little town of San Roberto was going to be the most remote that they would travel over in Mexico. He made a sudden decision, checked his power packs which he IF had charged during the night, activated the car and started up. He picked up his phone and said, "New Woodstock, Dean Armanruder." But it was Nadine Paskov's face which faded into the screen. She was obviously in bed and for once the glamorous secretary was less than her best. She looked at him sleepily and indignantly and said, "What in the damn world do you want at this time of the night?" Bat said mildly, "Sorry. I wanted to let Mr. Armanruder know I was going to take a quick scout along the route we're taking today. I assume that I'll be back before the town takes off. If not, I'll rejoin along the route." She muttered something and flicked off. It wasn't necessary to enter Linares proper to continue on along the highway, for which Bat Hardin was thankful, although he rather doubted the town would be awake this early. Mexicans are seldom early risers as he had found out from his previous visits. Perhaps it went back to the old days when they were without means of heating their homes and remained in bed until the sun had warmed up the world. He drove along Route E-#, the road rather rapidly ascending. It was considerably more beautiful a drive than had been the day before with its flatness of countryside; however, Bat Hardin wasn't particularly observant of scenic values. He still had his premonition and chewed away at his heavy lower lip as he rode. There didn't truly seem to be anything untoward. T'hey nailed him about five kilometers before he reached the tiny hamlet of Iturbide and about fifty kilometers out of Linares. There was a road block of three cars, only one of which was a steamer and it is an old-fashioned kerosene burner, by the looks of it Four men, two of them in uniform which Bat didn't place and all of them armed, stood before the road block. Bat came to a halt and activated the window. One of the civilian-dressed of the four came over and said, "Senor Hardin? Come out, please." His English was at least as good as Bat's own. Bat opened the door and came forth, scowling. He said, "How did you know my name?" His eyes went over them. The alleged uniforms were obviously make-shift. He snapped, "You're not police!" His hand shot for his snoulder holster. Bat Hardin was not slow at the draw but the Mexican was a blur. His own pistol was out and trained on the American's stomach. He said softly, "Move much more slowly, Senor Hardin, and give me that for which you were reaching. So. You carry a gun here in Mexico. To shoot Mexicans with, undoubtedly." Bat brought forth the gun and handed it over. He said, "I have a permit issued by your border authorities. Our town is going all the way down. At least to Peru. Undoubtedly, we'll go through some fairly wild country in places Hk Columbia and Ecuador. So we have various guns. They weren't meant to be used against the citizens of this country." He submitted to a frisk by the other, who relieved him of his pocket phone. The Mexican stuck Bat's Gyrojet pistol in his belt and said, "You'll never reach Peru or Ecuador, Senor Hardin. This way, please." He indicated with his gun the more modern of the three cars. "Where do you think you're taking me?" "It is not a matter of mere thinking, Senor Hardin. Just to make matters clear, I would not particularly mind shooting you." Bat climbed into the seat next to that of the driver. Into the back climbed one of the uniformed men, a short carbine at the ready and trained at the back of the American's head. The English-speaking one took the driver's seat and started up. They had to wait a half minute for the engine to heat; the steamer was that old a model. "What am I supposed to have; done?" Bat demanded. The other ignored him and said something in Spanish to the Mexican in the rear. That one threw what seemed to be a towel over Bat's eyes and tied it roughly. Bat winced when his cut on the ride of the head had pressure applied to it. They drove only a few minutes before taking off on what was obviously a side road. They went on for perhaps two kilometers, apparently climbing rather steeply. 'C'inally they came to a halt and car doors opened. There were other voices now, in the background, all speaking Spanish. Bat was taken by each arm, not especially roughly, and led forward. They entered a house, led him down what was evidently a hall and sat him in a chair. A new voice, an older voice and a highly cultured one, said, "Ah, Mr. Hardin. You do not look like a villain, Mr. Hardin. But I suppose you do not know that you are a villain. Villains seldom think of themselves as villains, I understand. They usually think they are terribly put upon and only doing what is correct." Bat snapped, "What is the meaning of all this? I don't have the vaguest idea of why you've grabIF bed me, or what's going on. How do you know my name?" "That's not important, Mr. Hardin, and we are not particularly interested in you. Any of your town authorities, or even an ordinary member of your community would have done. It is just that circumstance made it you, rather than someone else. We wished to issue an ultimatum." "An ultimatuml" Bat snapped. "I'm beginning to suspect you're all around the bend. What was the idea of stopping me, dressed in those phony uniforms? You're not Mexican officials, certainly you're not police." "But we are Mexicans, Mr. Hardin, and in a way even police. Vigilante police. And here is our ultimatum. Your mobile town of New Woodstock must turn about and return to your own country." "We applied for and received all permissions required by the Mexican authorities to pass through the country and exit through Guatemala." "We do not agree with some of our authorities. They are overly conscious of the American dollars spent by you tourists, you vacationers and you who permanently establish yourselves in our country and devastate it and corrupt our young people with your money, your lack of common decency in your moral code, your bad taste." Bat began to say something but the older man interrupted him. "When I was a boy, you used te cross the border in ones and twos, some as ordinary tourists, some in their house trailers. We welcomed you, welcomed the dollars you spent in our country. It must have been at the time of the # Olympics that the dam first broke. That year, not scores or even hundreds of your trailers and mobile homes crossed but literally thousands. And that was just the beginning. When you established your fantastic Negative Income Tax and denly free to leave America's overcrowded cities with their slums and ghettos, then they swarmed out over not only your own land but Canada and above all Mexico, as well." A new voice,  a younger voice but still in English, added, "And now my own country, Guatemala and the other nations to the south. Everywhere, everywhere, your damnable mobile cities destroy the countries in which they park." "Look," Bat said. "We pay our way. We spend plenty in every country we go through or remain in. Your people benefit by the dollars we spend." The older man's voice came again. "A few benefit. Most of us, not at all. Our way of life, our culture, is destroyed. The sites in W which you stay, government-built, are government operated. The government collects for the power you buy, it collects for the expenditures yoti make in the ultra-markets, restaurants and cantinas located on each site. Admittedly, the money realized is used by our authorities in their grandiose attempts to speed up the industrialization of Mexico. But some of us are not even sure that we wish to be industrialized to the fantastic extent to which you of the north have accomplished." Bat began to retort, but the other overrode him. "Mr. Hardin, Mexico's relationship with the colossus to the north has not been a happy one, by and large. The flag that flew over the Alamo and was captured by Santa Anna's army was that of a volunteer troop from New Orleans. And did you know, Mr. Hardin, the big reason the Texan revolt took place? Most of the American immigrants were from your southern states and couldn't bear the fact that Mexico had abolished slavery. But Texas was not enough. Border trouble was provoked and what are now your states of Arizona, New Mexico, California and parts of others were also seized. The fact that the seizure was pre-meditated is to be seen in the fact that your General Fremont and his army had treked all the way to California before the war was declared and were ready at hand to capture that area. "But all that is past history. It is the present to which we object. Your New Woodstock is but a small town, comparatively. Your mobile cities come and completely dominate our country. The best beaches from Tijuana to the Guatemala border and from Matamoros to Yucatan are crowded with them. Manzanilla, for instance, once a small fishing town and resort, now has no room for Mexicans on vacation. Thousands upon thousands of your luxurious mobile homes cover every desirable spot. Every restaurant is full of your people, every bar, every nightclub overruns with them. Your hordes eat up the best products of our seas and our fields and orchards. With your fantastic incomes, you shame a Mexican, make him appear a beggar in comparison. In such resorts you run up the prices astronomically so that we can no longer buy any luxury items." The older sounding man snorted in contempt. "What is your current Per Capita Annual Income? Something like #?" Bat said sourly, "Precious few of us who live in mobile towns have incomes approaching that." "But nevertheless, even a comparatively well-to-do Mexican seldom sees the amount one of your Bat said angrily, "If you people would cool your population explosion a little your Per Capita income would go up too. Your population increases almost as fast as your industrialization." T he first voice he had heard, that of the leader of the group that had captured him spoke then and bitterly. "We do not need lessons in the manner in which to control the size of our families, Senor Hardin. One of our greatest objections to your presence is the manner in which you spread your corrupt moral code" The old voice came again. "How can our people get underway when the intellectual drain bleeds us white of our best minds and most highly trained technicians? My own son is a surgeon. Does he operate on his people who need him so badly? No, he has been attracted by the high pay in the United States." A new voice broke in, as bitter as were the others. "But your towns, your hundreds of thousands of mobile homes, streaming south. It is they that blanket our country and make them envious of your affluence and susceptible to your corruption. Why even this New Temple that sweeps your country. It is a religion of no religion. What do you think our simpler people are to believe when they see that such a religion is that of people who live like gods by their standards?" Bat said, "Look. None of this is deliberate on our part. It began a long time ago and accelerated and there is no way to call a halt. We Americans have a tradition of being on the move." "But why to Mexico? Gringos go home I You're destroying our country. We don't want you!" Bat said stubbornly, "Your officials gave us permission to enter." "Yes, our officials! Your dollars corrupt everything. Our officials cannot see beyond the immediate through the money you spend." "We're only passing through," Bat said. "We'll only be in Mexico for a short time. We're heading all the way down the Pan American Highway to South America." The voice of the one from Guatemala broke in heatedly. "Yes, and in our small country your presence is even more objectionable. We of the more progressive classes are up in arms. I have come all this way to join the forces of Don Caesar..." "Shuush," somebody muttered. "... and to prevent you fuom getting any further. Some of your towns are already swarming over nations as far south as Chile and the Argentine. Why you have not already been met with arms, I cannot say." B at said impatiently, "Why, pick on New Woodstock? I've never heard of anything Kke IF this before. You haven't attempted to turn back other towns." The older man's voice said, "Quite deliberately, Mr. Hardin. Obviously, what we do is illegal by Mexican law. However, we are dedicated and determined men. You will be an example. The fact that you are a mobile art colony, with all the connotations that brings to the average person's mind, will make the example stronger. Were we to attempt to stop a city or town composed almost entirely of elderly retirees, it would be more difficult for us to gain sympathy both in your country and ours. But an art colony has a connotation of Bohemian life, immoral artists, high flown parties, much drinking of alcohol and smoking of marijuana." Bat said bitterly, "You'd be surprised how hard working and staid most real artists are." "That is beside the point. It will be what people think, not the reality. Those that support us will draw a vivid picture of the depravity of New Woodstock, Mr. Hardin, and how God-fearing, countryloving Mexicans turned you back in indignation." "And if we don't turn back?" "We are dedicated and determined men, Mr. Hardin." "It isn't up to me," Bat said flatly. "New Woodstock is operated democratically to the extent we have government at all. It'll have to be brought before the executive committee." "Very well," the old man said. "Jose, return him to his car." Jose, evidently the original captor, spoke rapidly in Spanish for a moment, then took Bat by the arm "Let's go, Gringo," he said. Bat came to his feet and suffered the other to lead him back the way they had come earlier. They retraced the route in the same elderly steamer, and the blindfold was not removed until they reached the spot where Bat's car had been left. They kept him carefully covered. Jose looked into the interior of the car thoughtfully. He reached out with the barrel of the revolver he carried -- it was an old style, possibly World War Two vintage, six-shooter -- and smashed the screen of the vehicle's phone. "Hey, that was a dirty trick," Bat protested. Jose said apologetically, "Sorry. We'd rather you not be able to communicate with the police immediately." "I'll do just that when I get back to Linares." "That will give us time enough." "How about my gun?" "I'll keep your gun, Senor Hardin. I'd hate to have you using it on me, later." Bat climbed into the car, started it up and made a wide turn, heading back for the site where New Woodstock had settled for the night previous. He swore under his breath. It was going to be a hassle to get another pocket phone here in Mexico. He'd probably have to wait until he got to Mexico City and the American Consulate. These days, the unique device combined not only a portable TV phone, but your identity number which embraced your credit account, your voter's registration, your military number, what amounted to your post office box, your income tax registration, and all else in the way of identity, including passport. Well, it couldn't be helped. Tew Woodstock was beginning  to get itself together preparatory to leaving, when Bat arrived. However, it would undoubtedly take a couple of hours or so more before it was really ready to roll. Instead of going to see Dean Armanruder immediately, he returned to his home with a cup of coffee in mind. He wanted to think about it a little before confronting the executive committee's questions. Obviously, they would depend largely on his opinions and Bat Hardin wasn't quite sure what they were. He entered his mobile home and stared at the table. There on it was his pocket phone cum credit card. He took it up, still staring disbelief. So far as he could see, there was nothing wrong with it. Bat left his home and looked up and down. Sam Prager's mobile home and electronic repair shop was parked next to him on one side but nobody seemed to be about his place. Probably still in bed. The Pragers were inclined to read late into the night and arise at a late hour. Ferd Zogbaum's camper was on the other side but there was no sign of Ferd. Bat strode over in that direction, and ran into his comrade in arms of the night before on the far side of the camper. He was evidently deep in a heated discussion with Jeff Smith, a discussion that was already just short of physical combat it seemed. "All right," Smith snapped. "You asked for it!" He began to fall into a fighter's stance. Bat began, "Okay, okay, you two. Break it up, you're not a couple of kids." Jeff Smith turned on him, glowering. "Shut up, nigger t" V B at stared at Jeff Smith for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. "It's been a long time since I've heard that word," he said. "You must be the last of the old time southerners. As a matter of fact, my maternal grandmother was a Negress, but I doubt if even she was full-blooded." IF "Any nigger blood at all makes you one!" Bat grinned at him. "So I understand was the law in some of the southern states in the old days. I wonder just what percentage of you southerners have African blood in you. For two centuries and more you had your black slaves. For all that time your men forced themselves on the more attractive girls. There was a custom in .such towns as New Orleans of young aristocrats setting up an apartment there in the French Quarter and keeping a quadroon or octaroon mistress. You know what the children of an octaroon look like, Smith? They look white and they move to another town and pass as white. Did you labor under the illusion that the famed Creole beauties of Louisiana were solely of French descent?" Smith began some obscenity, but Bat was suddenly fed up with the argument and with himself for bothering to get into it. He turned to Ferd and said, "Could I talk to you a minute? It's important." "Sure, why not," Ferd Zogbaum said, ignoring Jeff Smith. He took Bat's arm and headed around the camper, leaving behind the smaller man to glare after them. Bat said, when they were out of earshot, "What was all that?" Ferd shrugged it off. "Evidently, Jeff has delusions of being a great lover, or something. He's got a thing for Diana, you well know." "Well, I don't blame him. She's a darn nice girl." "Sure. But unfortunately for Jeff, she doesn't have a thing for him. What'd you want to see me about?" "Did you see anybody go into my home this morning while I was gone?" "I didn't even know you were gone, but no. Something stolen, or something? We don't have much in the way of petty thievery around New Woodstock. I'd hate to see it happening." "No. Not that. As a matter of fact, the other way. Somebody put something back." Ferd looked at him and Bat made a quick rundown of the morning's happenings, including the return of the pocket phone. Ferd hissed a whistle. Bat said, "As a matter of fact, it was damned decent of them to return it. They didn't have to and there must have been some risk involved. These vigilanties aren't really bad people and in a way I can see their point." "Sure. Great," Ferd said. "But that's not going to do you much good when they start sniping away at us from the top of some hill as we go driving by." Bat said, "Well, keep it under your hat for the time being. I'll see what Dean Armanruder has to say." Tat Hardin stood before the  identity screen of the Armanruder home and activated it. Nadine Paskov's voice said impatiently, # 'You again? I thought you were driving up the road to check it." Bat said patiently, "Pm back. I'd like to see Mr. Armanruder." "He's having his breakfast." "It's of the greatest importance, Miss Paskov." "Just a minute." Within that time the door opened and Bat stepped through and started down the corridor to the dining room. "Good morning, Hardin," the retired magnate said, looking up from toast and coffee, "Coffee? Sit down." Nadine Paskov wasn't present but a dirty cup and plate indicated where she had taken her own breakfast. The Armanruder establishment was one of the few in New Woodstock that didn't utilize disposable plates and utensils; but then, it was also the only home that had servants to clean up. Bat accepted the coffee and launched into his story. By the time he had finished, Dean Armanruder was swearing. He banged down his cup, came to his feet and said, "Come with me." He led the way to his office. He sat down at his desk and activated the TV phone screen. "The police station in Linares," he said. A Mexican face faded into view. Armanruder snapped, "D you speak English?" The other said evenly, "For all practical purposes, all educated Mexicans speak English. May I ask who you are and what you wish?" "I am Dean Armanruder, senior member of the executive committee of the mobile town of New Woodstock." " And I am Miguel Avila DeLeon, captain of police of the city of Linares," the other nodded. "What can I do for you, Senor?" The captain of Mexican police listened to the account with a frown of disbelief but said courteously, "Who were these men?" Bat came over and stood next to Armanruder. "I wouldn't know. I was blindfolded. However, one who was obviously an older man was called Don Caesar and the one who kidnapped me was called Jose." "Both rather common names in Latin countries," the captain said. "They turned you loose?" "Yes, f course, here I am." The captain had a few other questions. Bat answered everything to the best of his ability but there seemed to be a strange something in the police chief's manner. Finally, it came out. He said, "Senor Hardin, if I am not mistaken you are the gentleman who, in company with another Norteamericano provoked a drunken brawl..." IF "We weren't at all drunk!" Captain DeLeon went on, "Er, in one of the cantinas here in Linares, severely battering several of the citizens. My men took measures to see that none of our victims carried the matter further, but it would seem that some of them, Working behind our backs, took their revenge by playing a bit of a prank on you." Bat said flatly, "The men who kidnapped me had no relationship to those in the bar. My kidnappers were educated men who spoke excellent English. Those in the bar were town bums." "I am sure you are mistaken, Senor Hardin. However, I will look into the matter." Armanruder said harshly, "What are you going to do about it?" The captain shrugged a most Latin shrug and pursed his lips in regret. "I doubt if there is anything I can do about it, but, as I say, I shall investigate. Have you decided to turn back?" "No we haven't!" Armanruder snapped, flicking off the set. TTe sat and glared in Bat's dL  rection but not at him. Bat said, "The captain's voice. I've heard it before, or, at least, I think I have. It was one of the voices when I was blindfolded." "Are you sure!" "No, not sure, but I think it was." Dean Armanruder steamed for a moment, then flicked on the set again. "John Fielding, President of United Mobile Cities Association of America, Greater Denver, Colorado." When the face faded in, it was an impatient face. "Fielding here. I must say, this is an untoward hour. I won't be in my office until nine." Armanruder said, just as snappishly, "And this is an untoward situation." He gave Bat's story to the association head in detail. The other thought about it, unhappily. He took a deep breath finally and said, "This is the worst yet." "You mean there have been other examples?" "Mr. Armanruder, do you know how many mobile cities, towns and villages crossed the border yesterday? Twenty-two, including New Woodstock. The largest was a city of more than fifty thousand occupants. Of course, this is the high season. Most of the mobile towns will remain in Mexico for only a few weeks, or months but some plan to remain indefinitely. The number increases each year. Wouldn't you expect a certain amount of friction?" "Friction isn't quite the way to put it. These men were heavily armed. They threatened Mr. Hardin's life." John Fielding nodded. "I suspect that before we're through it will continue to get worse." Dean Armanruder said, "What are you going to do?" "About Mr. Hardin's adventure? What can we do? We'll protest to the Mexican tourism authorities but, actually, you have very little in the way of evidence to present and evidently aren't getting much in the way of support from the local police in acquiring more. Frankly, I'm inclined to think it a bluff. A small number of malcontents who wished to throw a scare into you. The moment one of them actually fired a shot, the Mexican police would be on them like a flash." "I hope you're right," Bat muttered. Dean Armanruder made the standard goodbyes and flicked the set off. Then he flicked it on again and said, "New Woodstock, Mr. Blake, Mr. Stryn, Doctor Barnes, Mr; TerX T#hen the executive committee   had all assembled, Dean Armanruder had them seated in the salon. Jim Blake, the town's most successful artist, financially speaking; Dag Stryn, also an artist and the guru of the town's New Temple movement; Doctor Barnes; Phil tired element in New Woodstock; and Sam Prager, who more or less represented the mechanics and other workers in town. Dean Armanruder told the story himself, rather than Bat, but when it was over the questions were fired at the town's patrolman. Sam Prager finally asked, "How many were there, Bat" "I'm not sure. I saw only four. I heard the voices of at least three others. There might have been twenty of them, for all I know. Or more." voice on the fearful side, "I think we ought to go back." "Certainly not," Jim Blake said heatedly. "What are we, a bunch of sissies? We'll call on the police." "We already did," Bat said. "They didn't answer." Blake said, "We'll call in the American authorities, then. We're all American citizens." "I'm not," Sam Prager said. "I'm a Canadian, but the thing is we're in Mexico and under the jurisdiction of the Mexicans even if this is a predominantly American mobile town." "We can issue a complaint to the American Consulate in Mexico City." "If we get to Mexico City," Bat said lowly. "I vote to turn back, before it's too late. I'm retired and have only a few years of life left to me. I have no intention of having the period shortened by desperate men shooting at me." IF "IH vote to go back too," Dag Stryn said. "I'D go on if the rest of you so decide but these people don't want us." "A very small number, perhaps, don't want us; but for that matter some Americans don't like the mobile towns and cities. We can't please everyone," Dean Armanruder said. "I vote to go on." "I vote to go on," Jim Blake said loudly. "So do I," Sam Prager said. Doctor Barnes said, "Until we have evidence that they are really as determined as they say, I also vote to go on." "The vote is four to two," Dean Armanruder said. "We will proceed. I suggest that the whole matter be kept to us here; there is no use alarming the possibly more timid elements in New Woodstock." "Wait a minute," Bat said. "This isn't a matter for the executive committee to decide alone. You can't expose everyone to this possible danger without their even knowing about it. This is a matter of convening the assembly. If we vote on such matters as whether or not to stop for lunch, we certainly should vote on something as important as this." Dean Armanruder looked at him. "Your opinion is not needed, Hardin. As town police officer you have a voice but not a vote in this executive committee. "Bat's right," Sam ftager said. "It isn't up to us to decide. "We'D have to call the assembly." Doc Barnes nodded. "Obvioesfy. I'm afraid it's going to mean a splitting up of the town. But we can't take innocent people into possible gunfire or other danger without giving them the opportunity of debating and voting on it.   Armanruder were going through the routine of summoning the assembly of all residents of New Woodstock over the age of eighteen, Bat Hardin went over to Sam Prager's home cum repair shop and knocked at the door. Edith Prager opened it. She was an intense woman who impressed Bat Hardin as having a culture complex beyond that usually associated with even inhabitants of an art colony. He liked Sam Prager but invariably felt uncomfortable in the presence of his wife. She wrote poetry, Doc Barnes had said. "Hello, Mr. Hardin," she said, standing in the door without inviting him in. "Good morning," he said. "Is Sam back from the meeting yet?" "No, he isn't. What's this atxmt an assembly?" "That's right It's being organized right now. When Sam comes, will you let him know that the spreen on my car phone is broken? I think it's just the screen. She said sharply, "It'll take a whole unit, possibly. Who's to pay?" Bat said, "It's my own car, Mrs. Prager, but it was damaged while on duty for the town. I assume the cost of parts will come out of town finances, but I'll take the bill immediately and charge it to the town later on. Tell Sam I'd appreciate having him put a high priority on this. A police car simply can't operate without a TV phone." "I'll tell him," she said and closed the door. She seemed a bit abrupt. Bat remembered Jeff Smith and wondered if there were others in New Woodstock who, inwardly at least, objected to him because of his racial heritage. It had been quite a time since he had even thought about the subject. Particularly in a town such as New Woodstock, you didn't expect to nm into characters who bothered with such nonsense as race, color or religious beliefs. He wondered vaguely if there were any Jews in New Woodstock; he had never thought of that before, either. Was Prager a Jewish name, or Zogbaum? The hell with it. He was impatient of the subject in this day and age. T Te re-entered his mobile house and took up a folding chair and, carrying it, went back to the center of the site. Others were already setting up their own chairs in a large horseshoe-like semi-circle. It came to him that this was a present day equivalent of the old Town Meeting of New England or, possibly, something like the governing of the Swiss Confederation of cantons. Working democracy in which every adult had his say because the governing unit was small enough so that power and responsibility didn't have to be delegated. When all except a few straggling latecomers had found places, Dean Armanruder opened the meeting. He came immediately to the point. "Mr. Hardin has requested a convening of the assembly on the grounds that the community has been threatened with physical danger and must decide whether or not to continue this move to South America. Mr. Hardin." When Bat had finished, stunned silence met his words for the nonce. Dean Armanruder cleared his throat. "The question before us is whether to proceed, or whether to return to the United States." For a long moment, no one requested permission to speak. Finally: "The chair recognizes Mr. Jeff Smith." Smith stood next to his folding seat and looked about him deliberately. "I think the first thing to consider is whether this whole story isn't a complete lie?" IF IF  Short Story On the Dead Star You might say a trial on the J ason leaned both hands on the thin euramite handrail. He could feel the intense straining of the gravity shell vibrate up his arms and into his head. It was a familiar feeling and it was a familiar position, standing in front of the large, thick, crystal viewing window, with the hazy lime-green glowing of the gravity shell tinting the view. He liked being captain of a Heavy Probe, and he liked standing there, staring out at the perfectly symmetrical surface of Black Dwarf #. There was no doubt about it; Jason liked his work. "These damned dead stars give existence was merry sphere. me a pain," he said, as he pounded the rail with the palms of his hands. From across the small raft-likecabin there came a faintly mechanical reply. "Indicate the nature and location of your pain. I will prescribe treatment." Jason turned slowly and faced the dozen or so blinking lights of the computer. His face looked pained. He started to scream, "It's in my " Then he stopped himself. "Computer, disregard statement." "Disregarded." For the last six months hed put up with all of the smart-alec cracks from the new computer, and he was finally beginning to get used to them. He turned away, shaking his bead, and stared out at the symmetrically perfect carbon ash-heap that reached out into the dim distance. It always made him feel strange inside to think he was on the surface of a star -- a dead star. It also made him feel strange when failure of the gravity shell. The result would be to spread him as a film one atom thick over the entire surface of the star. But really there wasn't anything to worry about. The shells just didn't fail; and besides, that was all part of the thrill of the work. Then, as he looked out the viewing window, he saw another part of his job. Stars. The black surface of the Dwarf set off their faint radiance and made them look as if he could reach up and grab a handful. God, of them within a dozen parsecs. And then, with a sigh, he turned to the matters at hand. "Computer, activate sensors and begin recording data." As an afterthought, he added, "Audio readout this time." "Activating," the machine said, and then silently went to work. Jason rather liked this new model computer, despite the fact that it sounded off at times with impudent cracks. He also rather liked not having to sweat over a control an IF first Each month If brings you a new writer, never before published. This months is Jack L. Alston, a #-year-old California student who plans to study screenwriting hobbies as # you name it" -- but his chief Interest is writing science fiction.At fifteen, he was already writing # words a week regularly, and now he # ; working hard on TV scripts. All that effort paid off, as you'll see in his story this time  -- and many more to come, we're sure. panel and figure out the trajectory and the landing procedures and all the other stuff that went with manual control. But probably best of all, he liked not having to put up with all the damned clattering racket the old one had made. The computer was ready. "Data coming in. Surface temperature: # degrees Kelvin. Mass: # kilometers. Radial velocity: one galactic year. Additional: galactic coordinates zero-zero degrees." Well, no wonder all the stars I Right smack in the center of the galaxy. At first he felt like laughing out loud, but then he felt a curious sort of pride and just smiled. The feeling made it all worthwhile. The computer interrupted his thoughts as it continued. "Extremely high percentage of zirconium. Otherwise, standard class C-#... IF hold!" There was a brief silence filled with blinking lights, and followed by a now puzzled mechanical voice. "Sixty-eight degrees, four minutes west -- forty-five degrees, three minutes south: protrusion on surface." Jason muttered something about the fail-proof new computers and went over to the machine and pushed several red buttons. Lights flickered in the silence, then nothing. "What the hell?" he said aloud, "There's nothing wrong with it!" It had all checked out. He was suddenly worried. "Computer, recalibrate." "I TThile the machine worked on in '  silence, Jason ran over to the viewing window, wondering if it was the Gelcons. Brother, that was just what he needed -- a diplomatic incident on his record. Well, it wasn't his fault. How the hell was he supposed to know the Dwarf belonged to somebody else? You don't just hang a flag out on a Black Dwarf. "Fact is affirmative," boomed the computer. It just had to be something else. Hoping some freak in the laws of physics could save him, he turned and asked, "What's surface gravity?" "# gravities." That was it. There wasn't anything natural which could stand all that force. It had to be the Gelcons. He wondered if he'd blundered onto a whole military outpost on some sort of anti-grav pads. "Can you specify size and type of protrusion?" "Two objects. One: metallic -- two point eight-nine kilometers vertapering to a point. Two: ceramic crystal structure -- spherical -- two hundred meter diameter." Next came the big question. "Is there any... Stop. Can you detect any life forms in the area?" Silence. Then the machine answered, "Negative. Suggest a close examination of area." Jason was so relieved to learn there was nobody there that the Probe was already speeding across the Dwarf toward the strange pair of objects, before he realized he'd given the command. He suddenly wondered if he'd better not let somebody else handle this whole thing, and just get out of there. But then he began thinking about the needle-like spire pointing two miles straight into space, and about the big sphere. It puzzled him. Should he go? Here he had a chance to discover something, something possibly valuable. And after all, wasn't that why he was there? That was it, and he was going. Just then he felt a twinge in his stomach and he tried to figure out if it was from fear or excitement. Minutes wore on, miles fled behind the speeding Probe, and Jason grew nervous. "Computer, any additional information?" "Negative," it said simply. "How long till we reach the objective?" "Five minutes, forty-three . seconds." That was going to be one long five minutes. He sat down and tapped an erratic beat near the sharp edge of the desk top with his fingers. The unidentified twinge in his stomach wrenched. He stood up and walked over to the handrail. Stars, ash-heap and galaxy were all tinted with the lime-green glowing of the gravity shell. Somewhere out. there ahead was something that just couldn't exist; and yet it was there -- withstanding eleven thousand plus gravities. He took a deep breath. The uneasy rasp from it seemed to reverberate through the silent cabin, and he half wished the computer would come up with some stupid wisecrack. Suddenly the computer voice resounded in his ears. "Object visable on horizon," it said, "Contact in three minutes." Jason strained his eyes and frantically searched, but he couldn't see anything. The Probe began its slow braking process, as he searched back and forth across the horizon. Nothing, nothing but... Wait! Yes, there it was. Ever so faint, a tiny glint of metal. He watched as it grew in size and brightness. It was an incredible thing. With normal gravity, a two-mile spire was a difficult engineering feat, but here on a Black Dwarf it was just impossible. Then, the top of that ceramic sphere began to rise slowly above the horizon. It was white, and from the distance it looked smooth. "Computer," he asked, "what are they?" "Unknown," was the answer. "Well, how long to contact?" "Contact in... " But the computer never finished. As Jason watched, it seemed as if a thousand electrical storms had been unleashed from the sphere. Hundreds of spider-tentacles of lightening energy ripped across the surface of the star, toward the Probe. They danced madly on the hull, and inside they sparked through everything, sucking out the energy. Then instantly they were gone, retreated back to the Sphere. The cabin was dark and silent. Jason lay by the handrail on the floor in a heap, unconscious.  like a shovel full of dried desert mud. It cracked as he breathed. His eyes were burning 'fiercely and beads of sweat poured from his body. The first blurry thing he saw was the viewing window. Its lime-green glowing was gone. The gravity shell was gone! He must be dead! Slowly he raised up on one side, blinked and rubbed his IF eyes, unbelieving. As he stood up, he was hit by a blast of seething hot air. He gasped for breath. The cabin was hot, unbearably hot. His head swam. "Computer," he choked, "temperature control." There was no response. He swung around to find the computer's blinking lights were out. The computer was deadl Dazed, he staggered across the deck to the machine and stabbed blindly at several swaying red buttons. His arms ached. His head began to throb, and then the whole cabin spun around and went black. Jason was shivering when he regained consciousness. The metal deck felt cold against his face. He suddenly tasted blood in his mouth and it scared him. A shock of adrenalin flushed through his body and he doubled up in a convulsion. His fingers were numb and his eyes ached from the cold. Everything was blurry. He sat up and touched his aching forehead. There was a deep gash there and it was bleeding. He could feel the warmth of the blood as it ran down his cheek. Then he remembered -- the viewing window! He looked. It was black. As he looked around, he couldn't believe it. Everything was still there, and he was alive! Even the computer was operating again, and yet the gravity shell was gone! His teeth began to chatter as he asked, "Computer. Why aren't we dead?" "There is a gravity neutralization field within a five kilometer radius of the sphere. Present gravity: sub-normal." Jason felt helpless. His head was blurry, he couldn't think straight and he was freezing. "Computer, activate temperature control." "Impossible." "But why? What's going on?" "We triggered a reaction field. Variety: unknown. It has extracted all the Nu-mesons from the reactor elements. No main power Auxiliary batteries only." "Then tap some of the battery power!" Almost immediately the cabin began to warm. Jason's teeth soon quit clacking together and he could think once again. Without the reactors, there was no high-pulse communications, and the nearest star-base was over # parsecs away. That also put the engines out of work, and along with them the gravity shell. It was all fantastic! There was something here on a Black Dwarf canceling the star's crushing gravity. He was caught up in something he couldn't understand and coldn't help. The deck passed awkwardly beneath his feet as he went toward the viewing window. Then suddenly, the Probe shot forward with a tremendous lurch; Jason was thrown to the deck. "Yee-ouch!" he yelled, as he crashed to the hard floor. "Vehicle is in motion," affirmed the computer from across the room. He felt like cursing the machine, but thought better of it and rubbed his bruised knee instead. After crawling the rest of the way over to the viewing window, he pulled himself up to the handrail. God, it was a weird feeling to see the viewing window without the green glow of the shell. Outside, roughly four miles away, he could see the sphere and the spire. The computer announced,  "Vehicle approaching sphere at eight meters per second." Quddenly in the distance, there light. It came from the spire. Great cloud-like pulses of energy were sweeping up from the base to the tip and then diffusing out into space. It looked like some gigantic Jacobi Ladder. There was more data. "Vehicle is increasing speed. Fourteen meters per second." Well, if this kept up, he was certainly going to get a closer look. It suddenly hit him. He was being pulled right into that mass of seething energy! "Computer, are we heading for the spire?" "Negative," came the reply. That was a relief. At least he wasn't going to be fried alive. As he looked out, he could see that the ship was heading safely between the pair of objects. Now that he was safe, he grew curious again. "Computer, can you analyze the energy from the spire?" "Spire pulses are masses of neutron-proton groups, whose mesonmeson interaction has been violently upset, causing the emanation of approximately ten megawatts of giga-frequency electromagnetic energy, in an omnidirectional pattern." What it all meant was more than he could see. Obviously a radio transmitter of some sort, but why here on a Black Dwarf? Then the computer had more information. "Vehicle trajectory is curved. Will impact with sphere in two minutes, five seconds. Velocity increasing. Seventeen meters per second." It couldn't be! Jason spun around and glared out the viewing window. It was right! Already he could see they were turning, right toward the sphere. He was confused. He didn't know just what to make of the last few minutes. Everything had happened so fast All the power had been sucked out of his engines -- he couldn't alter his course, he couldn't send for help, and in another two minutes he'd be dead -- smashed like a tomato against the sphere. He stared numbly out the window. The Probe was plunging faster and faster toward it. Death was crashing in on Jason with all its vulgar fury, and yet he was immersed in silence. It was too much; he couldn't stand it. IF He whirled around. "Computer! Can't we do anything?" "Negative," was the cool reply. "How long?" he yelled. "Forty seconds." He was totally helpless. Closer and closer, larger and larger grew the sphere. Twenty seconds away. He gripped thfc handrail harder. The sphere now filled the viewing window completely. In another ten seconds he'd be smashed to a pulp. Silence, weird and out of place. His knuckles were white. He braced himself. With a tremendous crunch, the Probe met the sphere. Instantly the small cabin was filled with great streaks of lightning and Jason was thrown against the opposite wall. Uninjured, he shook his head and looked up. Half of the Probe was gone. The sphere was absorbing it, like a bit of food! Slowly the ceramic surface of the sphere was moving across the deck toward him. It was closing in on him. He pushed frantically against the deck with his feet to get away. No good! He was trapped against the wall. It was coming closer and closer, crackling as it came. He could see himself being crushed against the wall. What was that? There was a strange feeling in his foot. He looked down. The foot was gone -- it was in the sphere. He tried to move it. Impossible! He pushed against the sphere with his other foot, but it too was immediately absorbed into the sphere, as into wet cement. Both of his legs were in up to his thighs. He couldn't feel them at all! It was up to his waist, like so much sand pouring through a sieve. His stomach and lower ribs were disappearing. He was frantic. He reached with his hands to push himself away. No good! They too stuck tight. Slowly it moved up his chest. All he could move was his head. He was being suffocated! He tried to scream, but he couldn't -- he no longer had any lungs. J ason didn't know how long he'd been unconscious, but he felt rested. He was inside the Probe, lying on the deck and there fusing into the cabin through the viewing window. He slowly crawled over to it; shading his eyes from the glare, he peered out. The light seemed to be coming from everywhere. He couldn't see anything, except a fuzzy wall that flickered red and orange and looked like fire. Damn these Probes, he thought to himself; there was only one window. He leaned close to the crystal window and pressed his cheek against it to increase his viewing angle. No good, still nothing. He wondered where in hell he was. Well, there was only one way to find out. "Computer, give me the life support specs." "Atmosphere: oxygen nitrogen plus trace elements. Temperature: normal. Radiation: slightly above normal." Jason now knew it was safe to go outside, but he was hesitant. He decided he'd better dean himself up before he went out. That way he'd have a little time to organize his thinking. He went over to the medical locker and got out a medipad. And then, from the storage cabinets, he got a large steri-towel and deaned his face and hands and the wound. That felt better. He tore open the package and gently put the medi-pad on his forehead. "Yee-ouchl" he yelled. "Five thousand years of medirine and the damned things still burn." Instantly he added in the same tone, "Shutup, computer!" There was nothing else to wait for. He took a deep breath and then released the lever. The thick hatch popped open without any hiss of pressure equalizing. Jason carefully went to the opening and stuck his head out. He was inside a huge hemisphere about # meters across. The curved walls of the thing changed colors randomly in patches, now a deep red, now a bright orange. He realized he was inside the sphere. The reason he couldn't see anything from inside the Probe was because the viewing window had been backed up next to the wall. But now he was facing right out into everything. The Probe was resting on a plane that split the sphere in half. Whatever was beneath it, he couldn't tell, and what was above it, he couldn't believe. Three short steps below him was an open space covered with a dark green growth of some sort that looked like grass. A little way off, there was a narrow, orange pathway that led through what appeared to be a forest, but not like any forest he'd ever seen before. There were literally hundreds of weirdly twisted geometric shapes and cylindrical forms scattered randomly about, as far as he could see. The objects were made of some dear crystalline substance, but their insides were shot through with tiny particles of color that flashed and ance, like the glistening of a displaced rainbow. All these objects in the weird light made an utterly fascinating sight. Jason stepped down and bent over to examine the grass. It felt cool like grass, but it was artificial. He knew it wasn't real because, as he walked over to the pathway, it crunched beneath his shoes like the breaking of glass. As he stepped out onto the pathway, he. found it very smooth, but not at all slippery. He began to walk toward the forest of objects. About ten feet in front of him was one object nearly twice his height that looked something like a pretzel, but was twisted and misshapen. As he approached, the insides of the thing began to flow with washes of color that IF blended with each other but didn't disturb the bursting particles of color. He was next to it now; he reached out and touched it. It was very smooth and a gentle warmth seemed to radiate from it. As Jason looked down toward the bottom of it, a voice -- a smooth, masculine voice -- flooded the hemisphere. "Do you like it?" the voice asked. "It's my favorite." J ason turned around, but there was no one there -- nothing. And then he recalled that the voice had seemed to come from everywhere. "Where are you?" asked Jason. "Beneath your feet, inside of you, all around you. I'm everywhere." Jason tried to focus on the walls, but couldn't. A quick scan of the forest of geometric objects revealed nothing. All was motionless, except for the smooth changing of colors in the walls. "Who are you?" he asked. A short laugh rang out. "Don't be frightened now, but let's say I'm one of the Damned, returned from Hell to taunt and haunt." It laughed again. "Does that frighten you?" A strange crawling thing seemed to march up and down Jason's back. "Yes," he choked. "Yes it does." The tone became different now, concerned. "Oh, I'm sorry," it said, "That's no way to start a long friendship, is it?" A long friendship? What did it mean by that? What was going on? "Why did you bring me here?" he asked. "I did not bring you. You came of your own will, to stay with me." Those words rang in his ears. "Stay with you?" "Yes, of course. I am a curious soul, a human sold. I want companionship. It's really very simple. You will remain here with me." That was all there was to it. "I'm your prisoner, then?" "Well, not exactly," it said, not unkindly. "You may leave anytime you wish. Provided, of course, that you find a way of combating the gravity and the vacuum, once you leave. Not to mention getting out of this sealed sphere. But one never knows; does one?" "No, I guess not." Jason couldn't believe it. Here he was, standing and talking with something he couldn't see, something totally unknown to him, that was holding him prisoner. It was all ridiculous. "Why are you doing this?" he asked. "Just what are you curious about? "That's a good point to start on." The voice suddenly had a direction. "Look, why don't you follow the pathway over here? Then we'll talk about it. Yes, yes indeed, we'll talk." The voice was gone. Jason could feel its absence. He conld also feel his own anger at ever leaving the floor of that bar on Beta-Tau-Four to join the service, mixing with anger at this thing, whatever it was, that was holding him here for some stupid reason. It had said there was no certainty about escapes. Well, that had sounded damned overconfident, as far as he could see. So this would be his point to start from. First, he needed information about this thing -- what it looked like, why it was here, how much power it had? From there, he could plan on how to fight it and escape. The twisted objects held a weird sort of fascination for Jason as he hurried down the pathway, surrounded by them. The insides of them would wash with color as he approached; and when he had passed, the colors would fade and just the exploding pin points of color would remain. Then, all around, was that vexing wall of the sphere. When he looked up into it, there was no depth. It was like trying to see the distance of the stars. It all had a sort of bizzare unreality to it. Just then he rounded a bend, and there before him in a clearing was the thing. Tt sat head-high atop a pyramid of ebon cubes. It was a small sphere that glowed internally with a blue light. This was his captor. "Hell-o ! " it said, gaily. "I see youVe come." "Yoy gave me a big choice," he replied' angrily. Its voice was suddenly loud irftb anger. "How would you like to be peeled and salted? Or I can roast you where you stand, if you Kke!" It paused and then went on, "Humph I Is it better to be well or medium rare... uh... Say, what is your name? I could seek it m your mind, but I find that peeping-tom practice very distasteful." Jason was so scared he had difficulty answering. "I... Pm... Jason," he finally managed to blurt out. "Jason," it said, savoring the name. "I like that. And it's a start! Yes, it surely is." The thing was no longer mad. Jason couldn't fathom the change, but there was something else. What was it a start of? Carefully, he asked, "Now that Pm here, what are we going to do?" "We talk, what else?" "Talk? Talk about what?" "About you, of course. I already know all about myself. I want to learn about you." "About me? But why?" "Oh, dear. I can see that this is going to be more difficult than I had thought." Jason was sure this was the end. He closed his eyes and there was a sudden crackling noise behind Mm that made him wince. He turned slowly to find a bench, a table, a pitcher full of liquid and a glass. IF "Tell you what," said the thing, "you sit down and refresh yourself, while I start the conversation. Is that all right with you?" "Yeah, yeah that's all right," he said. He sat down quickly on the hard bench. "Good I Well, let's see -- where to begin? Ah, yes. I'm a beacon, or rather I used to be one. I was called the Voice." It seemed to think for a second, then continued. "Now, how I got here. The little blue sphere you see before you contains a soul, my soul. A bodyless soul, but one that volunteered for hazardous duty when in flesh." It began to laugh, heartily. "Oh, myl It's so good to tell someone about all this. You see, I didn't volunteer -- I was volunteered." The thing continued its laughter. Jason wanted to keep it talking and happy. "What kind of hazardous duty?" It sobered. "Takes an explanation. My people were going to leave the galaxy to explore the universe. And so, to make a long story short, they needed a beacon to find their way back." A couple of pieces fell into place. "The spire outside." "Well, yes. There is the spire now, but that is really insufficient, since all its power will dwindle There was something that didn't fit. "Sorta strange place for a beacon -- here on Black a Dwarf." "Ah, but you see, a little over a G-# star. It was then that I was really a beacon." Now this might lead to something. "You say you made a beacon out of a star?" "Yes, and that was the -- or rather my -- hazardous duty." "What do you mean?" "Well, you see our scientists discovered how to turn the photosphere of a star into a tremendous radio transmitter. But there was one catch." "Yeah, what?" "It had to be done from the inside." J ason, who had been sipping cautiously at the cool drink, choked and began to cough. "From the inside! You mean the inside of the star?" "Uh-huh. An inside job." Jason choked again and forced a laugh. He then pressed on. "But the temperature is twenty-eight G-# star. Nothing but free subatomic particles." "And hot as hell, too," it said, describing the living conditions. "Yeah, but how?" "Through hazardous duty. Flesh can't exist with all that radiation and the tremendous heat. Even with our most sophisticated protection and cooling systems it wasn't feasible." "Why not? Do you know?" "Well, the beacon had to last for doesn't. So my soul was transposed onto a bank of neural, superfluid poly-helium circuits. These would control our displacement device, which knocked all the Delta-mesons from the opposite field nuclei, which in turn set up... Well, you get the idea." Jason was puzzled. "I think so," he said, "But why use a human soul? Why not let a computer do it?" "You see, at the time we didn't have any practical knowledge about the internal evolution of stars. Oh, we had theories, but there was too much at stake to take the chance. With a human soul inside, research could be undertaken to adjust for any unforseen changes, if any took place. And the star could continue functioning as a beacon." There was a pause. Jason searched madly for conversation. "So, years, eh?" "Six to be exact," it said, happily, "I transmitted for about five grees, I lost my transmission and controlling power and drifted to so years the star took to cool, I developed a way effectively to cut off the gravity. But my energy stores had all but dwindled to nothing when you came to help me." That explained another difficulty Jason had met, and it made him angry. "You stole the Nu-mesons from my reactor, didn't you?" He caught himself and waited for pun-, ishment. None came. Instead, the thing sounded hurt at the harsh accusation. "I didn't steal them, I just wanted to borrow them." It sounded as if it was crying. Jason didn't know what to expect. He tried to sooth the creature. "Well, can you put them back? I mean, make my reactors function again?" "Oh, yes. Yes of course, I can." It sounded happy again. "But I have no intention of sending you away like that, now that you've come to me." Another lull in the conversation. Come on boy, keep it going or you'll end up fried alive! "Well, why don't you go on with your story?" It was enthusiastic again. "AB right. Oh, by the way, I'm sorry about the temperature extremes after I borrowed the mesons from your reactors. I didn't know what your normal temperature was, so. I had to guess at it." "Don't mention it. It was only two of the seven rings," he said, with a far-away smile. The voice laughed loudly, and an invisible hand slapped him on the back and knocked him off the IF bench. "Yes, I can see well get along very well together. You have a marvelous sense of humor." Jason frowned, brushed himself off and got back on the bench. "What, uh, did you do all this time?" to do. That was a problem at first, but slowly as my intelligence began to increase along with my knowledge, I began to research and invent and discover things -- evyears you can unravel just about all the tangles of science and creation. As you might have guessed, my latest fancy is art. This garden, or forest or whatever you wish to call it, is merely an extension of my own mind. Sort of like painting or sculpture, but without any physical effort on my part. Just for fun, I think things into place. It's intensly interesting to me." It sighed. "But it's gdtten so dull. What I mean is, there's nothing new. I've learned all there is to learn, I've done everything and I'm bored. The only thing left is people. That's why you're going to stay with me." Jason sounded concerned. "But what do you want me to do?" "I want to share your experiences, your memories -- I want you to tell me of them." The thing sounded like a child with a new toy. "So as long as you're here, you might as well start" Jason had no choice. All his life he'd never been much of a conversationalist, but now he was going to learn -- and quickly. M any hours must have gone by before Jason finally asked, "Are you interested in continuing this now?" "Oh, yes, indeed I am," I said brightly. Then it added, "Ah, but you're tired, I can see that. You may return to your Probe and spend the night. Tomorrow we'll make plans for a permanent place for you to sleep." Jason got up. His legs ached and his seat hurt from sitting on that damned hard bench. He limped the first steps down the pathway, and then turned to look back at the sphere as it said, "Good-night, Jason. Sweet dreams." "Yeah, right. Happy nightmares to you, too," he choked back, hoarsely. The thing laughed again. "You're just hilarious, Jason. I've made an excellent choice in you." As he hobbled down the pathway, he didn't think too much about the choice the thing had made, and he didn't think it was one damned bit funny. The hatch was still open when Jason reached the Probe. He slowly entered, crossed the deck and plopped down in his bunk. He tried to think, but he ached too much. All he could think about was spending the rest of his life entertaining that stupid blue ball. "Damnit!" he yelled, as he slammed his fist into the pillow. "Why me? Of all the jerks in the galaxy, why do I have to be the one!" From across the cabin, lights blinked and the familiar computer voice said, "One jerk is just as good as another." That was the last straw! "Shutup! You damned clanking piece of junk!" Brother! That was just what he needed. It was then, in his anger, that suddenly the solution came to him. Hours later, the new makeshift control panel was set in front of the viewing window. Through it, he watched the darkness and distance at last swallow Dwarf #. Inside the cabin it was dark too, except for the new control panel. As Jason stared from the viewing window, he wondered if he would start to miss that smartaleck computer. Then he smiled. Nope, he wasn't going to miss it one bit. And he was sure that both it and the voice would be very happy back on the star, spending endless hours entertaining each other. And best of all, he was free again. There was no doubt about it. If he had to name one man in the service who really liked his work, the name was Jason. The best in science fiction comes from walker You'll find the best in a new series of science fiction novels published in handsome hardcover editions. The Walker series features major new novels by established writers as well as classics you will want for your library. Ten titles are now being published. j wo new nove  S Norman Spinrad is a novel of raw energy and punch that makes a radical departure from traditional science fiction style. April # is an abrasive and entertaining satire of politics and society. April # Walker and Company H? # Fifth Avenue, New York Eight classics -- now in hardcover The Whole Man by John Brunner, Jan. # The Watch Below by James White, Jan. # The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Jan. # The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Feb. # Brain Wave by Pout Anderson, Feb. # Oragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, Feb. # A Case of Conscience by James Blish, March # Thoms by Robert Silverberg, March # IF IF  Short Story by bruce McAllister Everyone agreed that autohumans alt were very well adjusted... 'T'he dashboard fights were red, yellow and white teeth, bared suddenly in a smile when the radio crackled and headquarters announced: "Autohuman #, S-#-#! Armed robbery seventh sector. Biturb, thought to be Fordam model Light Year , metallic green, license ing hand-rasers, proceeding west on Freeline #, dangerous." Lt. Grabe Massel smiled back at the dashboard. As headquarters continued with a repeat of its information and implicit orders, he deactivated two rockets, decelerated rapidly, slipped his police vehicle down an off-ramp and crossed the underpassing street with his multipitch siren screaming and his analogous-colored warning lights syncopated. Stopping finally on the adjacent on-ramp, MassePs car hovered on puffing air-foils, hidden under the edge of Freeline #S, as he waited for the passing blur of the fleeing suspects in their metallic green Fordamerican Motors Light Year . All freeways except the distant Urban Crux I were empty this time of night; the first car that passed was the right one, and instantly Massel activated the prime motor and its five rockets. First the main engine went tarun, tarun, tarun as Massel gunned it. Then opal rear-rocket fires seared the pavement, and Masel was thrown back against the seat as his auto lanced up the on-ramp, wobbled in the air as he overshot the norm hover-level, and finally fell back to a stable airfoil level on the freeway, about a mile behind the Light Year but gaining rapidly. The Light Year was fast, with its twin turbines, but Massel's auto had too many finely developed speed and suspension extras for the race to be fair. In addition, Massel was one of the twenty best coordinated drivers in the force. And, of course, there were the highrange stunners that could fan the entire interior of a fleeing auto, if speed failed to give Massel enough advantage. MasseFs car was a good one, one to be proud of, as he knew each time he heard its confident starting voice. Still, Massel wondered why auto companies built civilian vehicles for that speed. Perhaps in some juvenile hope -- or unconscious wish -- that there would be freeway auto competitions with police or other members of the young public? Massel did not know. He didn't care at this moment; he was moving wonderfully fast now, the Light Year growing larger in his eyes. Excited but confident, with nothing on his mind except an easy chase, Massel happened to look down at the floor. All the webs of colored wires there caught his eye, and for a second his mind allowed him to see the truth of his condition. Then his mind blurred, as his mental block worked for the sePs reality into acceptable terms for him -- terms of youth and of legs, in the poetry of another man who had lived an idyllic youth of legs. Massel saw himself, in a time and place he had never lived in, but with legs he had once known, and the vision had its parallels -- A s always, Massel was running  after someone, along a wonderful path, a path free of dust but still not at all rough to his bare feet. The feeling of Mercurial wings on his feet and head made the eternal chase pleasant. Massel was a fleet-footed boy. To run, sang his mind. To run, to run, to run. In front of him ran a slower, weaker boy, clad in an airy shirt and shorts just slightly different from MassePs own. The path twisted and curved, and Massel flew past the moist moss on tree trunks and the yellow lichens of granite boulders. His precious feet padded against the earth rhythmically, and the earth made thumping sounds in answer to his running. His heart and legs pumped in harmony. The nectar of his blood coursed affectionately through every vein. The boy ahead of him jumped a creek stumbled on the bank, scrambled to his feet and ran on. Massel IF cleared the water easily, soaring into the feathery grass high on the creek bank, reciting as he ran lines of ambrosial verse: "By brooks too broad for leaping, the light-foot boys are laid..." Sailing over a gnarled root, Massel went on remembering: "The rose-lipped girls are sleeping, in fields where roses fade." "Ah..." Massel thought as he ran, "When I was one and twenty, I heard a wise man say..." The breeze cuffed him gently, and he ran, the muscles in his legs flowing golden. He could hear the bells of distant towers, the nearer warbling of wild finches, and the brooks and streams competing with the birds in song. "But there is no rue within my heart now," Massel improvised. The other boy was now only a few strides ahead of him. To run, his mind whispered -- to run, to run. Massel spoke to his legs; they complied and he reached out with a sinewy but boyish arm -- 'T'he "Light Year" decelerated to a halt and the two young passengers sat rigidly in their seats, stunned and thinking murky indecisive thoughts. Ten meters behind them, Massel deactivated the stunners mounted on the front of his auto, then leaned back to watch the two boys quietly. The boys would remain pacific for an hour, Massel thought, and long before an hour has passed, the ped-cops would have arrived to take custody. All Massel had to do was wait, staying inside his vehkJe. But it wasn't frustrating, really. In fact, Massel no longer thought about the matter at all. His mind would not let him. Long ago the frustration had waned -- the past ulcerous frustration of having to wait for the arrival of fellow officers who were physically able to leave their vehicles and walk around. Now Massel had even forgotten that he'd once been prey to that humili -- that frustra -- those confused feelings... Massel sat quietly in fcte auto, thinking of blue skies, pebbled streams and the wispy insects of flower fields -- read about so often that their past existence was present reality -- instead of the web of neural-wires that joined the nerves in the stumps of las amputated legs to the controls of his police vehicle. Staring ahead, Massel dreamed of legs. I n the University-Suburb Riot # three years before -- the same riot that had left his wife and son burnt alive by "serious" demonstrators brandishing flamethrowers -- Massel's legs had been burned, too, into uselessness. Subsequent to the accident, he had requested -- as was most honorable for a dedicated federal police officer -- to be fused with an #uto, made into one of the two dozen or so elite autohumans who served the law with their perfect coordination of human mind and steel body. Nerves joined to wires, to rocket controls, airfoil activators, lights and weapons; Massel could issue ten major commands to his vehicular body with the nerves that had once led to his legs. He liked to think of those commands as his ten lost toes. The operation had been delicate, but successful -- typically successful. "No mental or physical problems in recuperation or psychological adjustment." Typically successful, they'd all said. Massel was contented now, even when his mental defenses dropped for the duration of a thought or two and he had to admit he was an autohuman. All autohumans, as reports emphasized, were very well adjusted to their condition. Sometimes the catheter leading to Massel 's bladder was annoying, when it leaked or scraped him. And sometimes the cramps in his body, the result of too many hours on the freeways, left him few hours of sleep at night, as he dozed fitfully in the dim garages of various police stations. But all in all, Massel knew he was well-adjusted... Or rather well-adjusted enough . His daydreams -- his "defensive fantasies," as he rarely admitted -- were his concern alone, as long as they didn't cause accidents or general incompetency. And his didn't. When he needed -- as he often badly needed -- to bathe and drink of the old poetry in his copy of A Shropshire Lad, that very old book of verse was right there in the glove compartment ready for his  reach and reading. The book had been a gift from a neighbor of the past, a University professor who had wanted the past badly, just as Massel -- No, Massel never thought about all of that. He had once and for all told himself he would forget the professor's name and everything about those years -- the years before the cities began to cover everything, before the universities were "adopted" by the federal government, before his legs were -- He would forget because he had his poetry, much more real than reality, than those days before his legs -- He should have been a Shropshire lad, from a century or two ago. He should have been, so he would forget... As he continued to tell himself, daydreams were his own affair, as long as they caused no accidents, as long as he continued to function efficiently. Chances were that his defense-fantasies would have no negative effects on his performance. There had been only one autohuman who had failed in the history of the fed-police; because of distracting self-pity, that autohuman had let a psychopath IF suspected of two murders evade him on the freeway, and as a result his autohuman status had been reduced to perma-monitor with a life of immobility, HQ radio communications work, and only spectator status in the police world... MassePs thoughts in this vein trailed off when he looked up at the Light Year beyond his car hood and saw one of the two young men -- dressed in a green plastic jacket struggle slowly from the car. The stunner's effect had worn off, Massel realized, and both youths were peanut-brained enough to try a run from the freeway. And the pedcops? Even later than usual... Massel started to activate the stunners again, but his synaptical command snapped off when a police vehicle with two ped-officers hissed and screamed to a stop behind him. One of the officers leaped from the car, waved what seemed to be a hand-stunner, and in a moment had run past Massel, stopped in front of him, and was taking aim at the farther of the two youths fleeing on foot down the shoulder of the freeway. Instead of the bluish waver of a stunner's beam, the ped-officer's weapon issued a boiling line of energy. Massel jerked in surprise. A handraser? Since when was HQ ordering rasers for a situation like this? Then Massel remembered that headquarters had attached the adjective "dangerous" to the report on the two young men out there on the freeway. Because they were carrying hand-rasers themselves, that made them dangerous? Massel didn't think so, and the presence of a ped-officer with a flared-beam raser for a weapon seemed melodramatic. The raser's beam struck the youth, and the aura of melodrams dissolved. The beam had struck the suspect in the legs. Legs! Massel's mind froze, and his throat held back a scream. Legs! In his trance he saw the young man fall on the asphalt, clutching at his legs, which looked wet, smoking and gnarled all at once in the night's dimness. In the continuing trance Massel stared at the ped-officer, an unfamiliar growl escaping his lips. Almost unconsciously, he activated his stunners and focused them -- on the ped-officer, who threw up his arms, flung his weapon away in a spasm, stiffened and fell to the pavement. Full focus was fatal nine out of ten times, Massel remembered faintly. Everything in hie senses seemed faint now. Massel stared at the wounded youth, at the crippled legs, then activated all power in his own body. The engine spoke to him, telling him to flee, reminding him about the autohuman who had erred and was now an immobile radio uperator. But he was trapped, vulnerable within his own steel, unless he -- TTnless he ran. Massel had won lU one chase, an easy race, and now he would be the one chased. But he was fast His legs were strong. For another moment Massel allowed himself to lounge bn the grass toying with a buttercup and listening to the sighs of circling bees. Words like Light Year and Freeline and 'autohuman drifted against the bath of his mind, but dissolved when he thought of bisects instead of buzzing words. To run, to run, his mind suggested. "By brooks too broad for leaping," his mind remembered sagely, reciting. Not far from him on the grass lay a young man, the man he had been chasing, and now this young man's legs Were hurting -- the same people who had hurt the young man's legs now wanted to hurt Massel's. The young man could no longer run on the grass, and unless Massel rose and began running, he too would not be allowed ever again to touch that velvet grass with his own two feet any time he wanted to run, to run, torun, tarun, tarun... In the August issue of IF two, new features begins by Lester del Rey At lost, IF has Its own book-review column  .  each month our favorite Feature Editor will fake a long look at the new books In the field and report on them In his own salty style. New Wave? Old Wave? What to read? Read Lester del Rey every month! Next month: Reviews of Bug Jack Barron and The Left Hand of Darkness . by Willy Ley In the next twelve Issues of IF, Willy Ley -- dean of science writers -- traces the history of our planet. And where will he begin? At the beginning, of course, whenever that #st "How long was 'the Past " Is the first question he asks and answers. Also in this issues Brood World Barbarian by Perry Chapdelaine Posture Of Prophecy by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro a new story by Philip St. John IF IF  Novelette Spork Conquers Civilization When Spork of the Ayor discovered human civilization , he was in for a shock -- hut so was civilization I I As the oldest untwinned member of the Ayorian race, I naturally led the expedition into the Quations system. Since the dawn of Enithra's creation, and the Ayorian type of evolution which followed, the figure-eight-shaped Ayor has been bound by two immutable laws of survival -- twinning and grouping. Each Ayor must create and ac cept a personal commitment toward solving philosophical, scientific or Other types of problems to promotg a his own maturity and descendents. Upon successful completion of the accepted problem, the Ayor twins in a very natural way, producing two children similar in their figureeight structure to the former adult, but each with greatly improved capacity for problem solving in the direction of the accepted twinning problem. Twinning, therefore, provides a kind of radially-divergent evolutionary path for the Ayor. Though my biology was human, I had been adopted as an infant by one of the Ayor and trained in Ayorian ways. After my beloved Erne had completed my neuronic growth enabling me to use Ayorian faculties of telekmass -- mass sensing and teleporting -- I fully expected to twin once. I had resolved my twinning problem which was: "Who am I and what is my purpose?" Since the Ayorian species maintains its singleness of racial integrity by grouping, where each Ayor places the magnetic structure of his being, cup to hemisphere, against another in a very long chain, thus enabling each individual Ayor to exchange personal experiences and the race as a whole to arrive at group decisions, I had had great difficulty in convincing the Ayor that their proper racial thrust was outward, toward the stars. Eventually, however, we overcame the Tepen, a degenerate evolutionary offshoot of the Ayor who had once preyed on us, and opened the door to more progressive grouping decisions. When Toby Randolph, slave scientist from the Quations system, crashed on Enithra, we Ayorians quickly learned to build spaceships by means of both direct action -- use of tools and their products -- as well as indirect action -- telekmass faculties. But once we had left our own little planet to visit others of our system, we encountered the beast of planet two, a mindless entity that had used its irresistible telekmass faculties to strip planets one and two down to their radioactive ingredients and had constructed itself to be virtually three times the size of our own planet, Enithra. T Tsing both Tepen and human  science, we were able to capture, but not kill, the beast, placing it under telekmass shield from the positions of the debris of planets one and two. Now we were free to return Toby Randolph to his own system; I was free to continue my personal twinning problem; and my Ayor brothers, ten thousand strong, were free to plant another culture like ours among the stars. Unlike my Ayor brothers, I am tall, muscular, dark-skinned and have light receptors which are violet hued. My wide-set eyes and athletic build would probably have made many a ship captain from IF human worlds envious, though, to the Ayor, I was still Spork the moron, because of my limited telekmass faculties. Still I was the most experienced Ayorian for the purpose and was therefore chosen as the expedition's leader. We entered the Quations system uneventfully and were approaching halfway to Toby Randolph's planet of Feren when the missile struck. Our very naivete destroyed the ship; for, had we known of the extent to which humans prey upon one another, we could easily have prevented the disaster which followed. Our concept of struggle did not include the idea of direct-action devices, though I had killed the evil Tepen by means of rocks, clubs and fists. Since we did not consider ourselves to be Tepen, to be openly attacked by members of Randolph's civilization without prior warning or provocation, we did not look for their immediate survival threat. Apparently the explosive mass struck our ship and released large quantities of chemical energy which expanded rapidly, vaporizing part I was knocked unconscious; and in the resulting confusion, all the other Ayor teleported themselves to the nearest planet. The explosion split the ship; one half carried the now dead Toby Randolph, and my half accelerated well beyond the sensing range of the Ayor. When I regained consciousness, my legs and arms were shackled by heavy metal bands while my back lay against a hard metallic wall. All around my immediate vicinity I perceived heavily riveted metal sheets. "How odd!" was my first thought. "Is this civilization?" Now free of Enithra's eternally searching plant and animal life, my own telekmass sensors extended their full eighty-mile limit. As in empty space away from Enithra's surface, the telekinetic silence was pronounced; nowhere could I feel the least of telekinetic fingers plucking for self-nourishment. As my senses moved outward from me, I noted humans with metal pellet-accelerating tubes, then other humans in different poses -- some eating with the mouth as did Toby Randolph, some sleeping; others were laying small cards on a table in unpredictable patterns; and many other humans were behaving In strange and unusual ways. All of them were dressed with clothing of similar design and pattern. T reached through several lay ers of metal cubicles, each of similar construction to mine, before encountering the planet's surface. Here I could sense fresh air mixed with fuel exhaust from hundreds of ships -- some posed for flight, some landing, some just resting. Other buildings scattered here and there surrounded the space field. Some contained machinery of a complex nature while others were filled with containers holding unstable chemical or radioactive mixtures. Approaching me I could sense a huge human with coarse, heavy eyebrows and puckered nose. Like everything and everyone else, he was walking with his own muscles. The human at my door opened it, and the newcomer stepped into my cubicle, exploding words at me. "Pig! Where are the rest of the rotting Ventery family?" I didn't know what a pig was, but experience with Toby Randolph's emotional outbursts taught me that this human was angry. Greatly curious now, I listened and watched with my ears and light receptors as well as my telekmass sensors. Without warning, he struck me forcibly across the face. "Pigl Answer me!" Now I had never been struck before. The closest experience to physical struggle was my personal vendetta and destruction of the Tepen. Ayorian children never have need for discipline or punishment, and no life on Enithra would have used direct-action physical force to accomplish an end. I was so astonished I failed to react when he struck me again. IF My mind reached out toward his arms and froze them in the act of reaching toward me again. "Guard! Guard!" he shouted loudly with trembling in his voice. On the appearance of the human from outside my doorway he called, "Kill this dog!" Again, I didn't know what a dog was, but I could see and sense the long metal stick containing chemically driven pellets as it was raised toward me and I knew what "kill" meant. I used my telekinetic faculties, preventing the bullets from exploding. The first man swiveled around and shouted even louder. "Kill the pig before I have you hung!" Now the frightened guard swung his rifle around with intent to crash its butt against my face. I froze his two arms, then stepped out of my shackles to appear behind the two men. "I don't understand what civilization is really about, but I think it is time for you two humans to teach me," I said. II A bout seventy miles away I could sense a strange tree with a moss-like growth covering the ground around its base; here I teleported the two men, their arms and legs still frozen to their sides. All around me was the green color, just as Toby Randolph had stated. The strange tree had green leaves and the covering underfoot was green. Unlike Enithra 's lovely violet and ultraviolet, green foliage was predominant! I let my mind flow through their chemical processes, finding that they too eternally sought nourishment of water, minerals and gases, just as did Enithra's plant life; but there the similarity ended. Energy supplied by radiation from the sun beating directly on the wide leaves caused slow chemical reactions which resulted in sugars, proteins and other life structures. No wonder Toby had felt that all Enithra life moved too fast! "Why, at their present rate of growth, months might pass before they bear seed!" I thought. Insects and bacterial growths, just as on Enithra, could be sensed all around and they, too, followed the slow-direct action processes. Were it not for my two rude hosts, I would have studied these strange forms endlessly. Turning back to the first, I unfroze his speaking apparatus and asked, "Why did you strike me?" "Pig!" he exclaimed. "You are of the house of Venetry. All are dogs subject to immediate interrogation and death by our ruler's order! Let us go and I will see that you die quickly instead of slowly as you most certainly should for this insolent action!" Not yet understanding the motives behind this emotional outbursts, I squeezed a little of his body in sensitive spots until I had worked some rationality into him. It seems that the ship which we had copied was designed by the Venetry family -- the family to which Toby Randolph had belonged. Not only had we copied its silhouette, but also its crest of arms, in our passion for detail. The new ruling dictator of this system Lad given standing orders to arrest, interrogate and destroy all Venetry family members. I gathered this was because of some fear on his part that the family might legitimately lay some claim to the planet's rule. When we naively entered into this planetary system, one of their powerful spaceship had spotted our silhouette and crest, ordered us to change direction by means of electro-magnetic radiation signals and then struck us with their chemical torpedo when we failed to answer their challenge. "VJo words of mine were acceptable to this strangely emotional human. He didn't comment on the matter of my use of indirect faculties; but I'm sure from the way he looked all around from time to time that he was searching for others of my family who might be using direct action devices to cause the new control phenomenon from a distance. From the second man I learned that soldiers were humans who must obey the orders or be killed themselves; otherwise he held no personal animosity against me. "Why would otherwise rational beings wish to leave Enithra for the doubtful security of civilization, as did Toby Randolph?" I wondered. Life, all life, was valuable to Ayorians. Some life killed other life but only for the sake of survival. In the cases of the Tepen and the beast of planet two, we were justified in our actions. But here, in my first contact with Toby's civilization, I had my ship torn apart, was knocked unconscious and was jailed and struck and cursed with the promise of torture and death to come. Civilization was becoming ai great twinning problem for me I Teleporting the two men back to my jail cell, I extended my mass sensor to the maximum and began moving from point to point across the planet in search of my Ayorian brethren. Time and again as I halted at teleportation points, I was able to with the phenomenon of continuous motion. Not only was this true of their plants and animals, but also of the vehicles in the air, on the land and in and on the seas. Though anxious to find the other Ayorians -- who could certainly handle anything encountered here better than I -- I took time to IF study the strange phenomenon. There were monstrously huge cities roughly similar to Tepen vilof humans! The depth and complexity of their machines in application of direct-action principles was beyond our wildest predictions. Tenth, twelfth or even a hundredth generation of tool development was required to fabricate some items which we Ayorians could build only by indirect-action means. "How," I wondered time and again, "could life so limited, moving so slowly in basic accomplishment -- accretion, growth and twinning -- have evolved such tremendously complex equipment?" My greatest shock came when I learned how humans reproduce. Ayorians twin. Much Enithra animal life transports seed to egg by means of teleportation. Here all animal life, including humans, transport seed by means of direct action! XJo wonder Erne, when she first sensed my presence, wondered if I were an animal to be used by Tepens in capturing Ayors; for humans were certainly closer to Enithra animals than to the Ayor. Still thinking of myself as an Ayor, however, I failed to apply the lessons of my emotional shocks to my own twinning problem. I chose food from many locations which seemed to specialize in their accumulation and storage. Night came, then daylight again -- somewhat faster than on Enithra. My muscles, too, responded quicker here than on Enithra, perhaps because of the planet's smaller mass. Eventually I located what I thought to be a decent hiding place where I slept, turning and tossing with strange dreams involving the fantastic phenomenon of direct action. Terrible nightmares occurred of indescribable and equally unbelievable nature. I dreamed, for example, of the predatory Ettel creeping silently up to the voracious Cien and tearing it apart with jaws and paws! The nightmare quality was caused by the fact that the Ettel has neither jaws nor paws and certainly would not creep up to the stupid Cien -- it would teleport the Cien directly into its stomach sack! My choice of a safe hiding place for sleep was an empty building with doors tightly locked. As always my custom, I slept several inches above the floor or platform, which lay immediately before rows of seats; and once asleep, I slept soundly with those puzzling dreams tumbling through my mind. I was awakened suddenly both by my awareness of other humans now surrounding me and by the sound of human giggling and laughter. I opened my light receptors to find the building well lighted and my floating form completely surrounded by laughing men and hysterically giggling ladies. "This is the best performance ever!" one man cried. "Oh, he doesn't have any clothes!" several ladies screamed. I should have known about body coverings from Toby Randolph. Entertainment houses were a new concept to me, however. Needless to say, I teleported myself away quickly and, from the top of their entertainment building, I reached out in search of proper clothing. Greatly surprised, I found specialized buildings devoted to their storage and display. By careful scrutiny I soon learned which pieces to wear and on what parts of my body and in which order. Ill TT'nithra was about six thousand miles in diameter; this planet was somewhat lighter, hence probably somewhat smaller -- perhaps only five thousand miles in diameter. At jumps of nearly eighty miles each -- closer to seventyfive when I figured in my altitude -- it would take me roughly # X # # divided by # X # # jumps just to cover the planet's surface area. It would take around # jumps to make a systematic search for the Ayor. But what if they were five miles under the crust in some hidden cave? Of course, if only one Ayor were I should already have been found by them. But then, what if unknown Tepen-like telekinetic fields were being used in their capture? Though highly unlikely from what I had already learned of this planet and its occupants, I did not dare chance the risk. I compromised by searching the surface area thoroughly -- though I must confess part of my reasoning was based upon pure curiosity about the humans and their environment. Figuring on perhaps # jumps per day, it would take me # days; and as I finished these mental estimates, I began jumping from point to point, stopping long enough at each point to search thoroughly throughout my sphere of sensitivity. Within a matter of several jumps, I detected tiny masses containing chemical explosives streaking toward me. Noting their crude similarity to the one which had struck our ship, I removed their explosive materials and fuel, letting them scatter in tiny pieces over the ground. As my jumps continued, the company of missiles increased in number. Something or someone was learning to predict my probable path of appearance! I changed my tactics then by IF teleporting from point to point along the ground surface of Feren, as the planet was named. Thirty days of thoroughly searching the planet's surface left me with knowledge more complete than I had held of my beloved Enithra. Feren had several large bodies of water; and near each pole, snow covered the surface to great depths. Much land was cultivated and, from overhead, appeared multicolored, checkered and sometimes puckered. G reat sweeps of the planet's continents were devoted to the activities of soldiers and their implements. They were to be found in the cities, in the country, on and in the sea, in specially built thickmetalled ships, in the farm areas and in specially built reservations consisting often of rocket ports and other facilities. Missiles ringed the planet in such a manner that they could easily cover every square foot of surface area in a very few minutes. One military base was unusual because of its strength when compared to the others. Surrounded by thousands of missiles and other unknown protective machinery, its cavern-like building was rooted to the planet's bed-rock by means of flotation apparatus capable of holding the peculiarly dense metal surrounding it all. I didn't find the Ayor. They might have died from the chemical explosive; or with their reaction time, most likely they had teleported themselves from the damaged ship to the other planet. There was only one way to discover the truth. Since I couldn't very well manufacture my own ship, I chose a large, swift looking craft which appeared to be well cared for and of about the same size as ours had been. Though differences in some instruments caused a little delay, I soon determined their function. I moved the ship's guards away from the blast area and accelerated upward rapidly. My mind flickered from missile to missile, telekmassing at least three hundred before their attempts ended. Time had changed the relative positions of the planets with respect to the position of our ship's destruction; but like any Ayorian, I knew exactly where their spatial referents were and where each must now be, relative to one another. In my mind's imagination I could sense the seventh planet in one direction, while fragments of my old ship sped in the opposite direction. Soon faster and more sophisticated missiles tore through space to find me. These were also deactivated as soon as they reached within my eighty-mile telekmass limits. Though I could easily deactivate even those designed for one hundred per cent mass conversion, sooner or later one would be fused to explode near or beyond my eighty-mile limits. If so, not even my Ayorian faculties would save me from the energy release of the explosion. I now directed my ship toward the incoming missiles and within ten thousand miles I discovered an orbiting military satellite. It was gigantic, filled with soldiers and weapons of offense, and could easily have stopped me had the humans known my nature and my limitations. I flung their missile ingredients toward the sun and only then felt free to return to my quest for the Ayor.  s the ship approached the planet most likely to hold my Ayorian brethren, I came within One of the Ayor immediately teleported to my ship, where we greeted one another with great affection and happiness. He guided me to a large cavern hollowed out of barren rock below the planet's raw atmosphere. Fortunately, by their capability of reaching below the molecular level, the Ayor were able to create new molecular forms to provide themselves with food, water and oxygen. My ship was easily transported into their cavern where all the Ayorians grouped to show their welcome and their joy over Spork the moron's return. I naturally felt a strong sense of belonging as I perceived the display hovering above me. Cup to hemisphere, they tied themselves one to another and spoke in unison as was their custom. "Welcome back, Spork!" Their great booming voice bounced from wall to wall within the cavern. My light receptors watered strangely at this magnificent display of brotherhood and warmth. The planet was cold, lifeless and inhospitable; its surface was crystalled over with frozen radicals involving complex and simple hydrogens, methanes, ammonia and water. I could well appreciate the stupendous task which these Ayor had undertaken. Blown compulsively from our ship by explosive, they had teleported to this planet, carved out a habitable cavern and stocked it with life nutrients within a matter of hours. Then, dividing up their talents, some had begun to restructure the total atmosphere of the planet, changing it from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere. Others had been busy reconstructing a new spaceship from unrefined materials easily found throughout the planet. To my knowledge, no race before had attempted the use of indirect IF faculties on such a grand scale. Twinning was frequent -- made inevitable by the difficult twinning problems in need of solution when transforming a whole planet. 'T'ime passed while some gains were made on the planet's atmosphere. My personal twinning problem, again, became the dominant theme within my mind. It would be easy to force the people of Feren under our will, but was this way best? Eventually we Ayor would need allies in our search for individual and racial fulfillment. Would a race under our domination and control, like one of their beasts-ofburden, be likely to provide this need? No! It seemed unlikely that raw force was an answer to the problem. Meanwhile, other youthful Ayorians, uninterested in planet transformation, clamored for a different sort of twinning problem. A time of proper grouping came where each shared his personal experiences and desires with every other and I was asked, "Spork! Where does your twinning problem lead?" "To Feren," I shouted to the group overhead. "Will you take more of the Ayor along?" "Yes, if their twinning problem also lies in that direction." "Very well," they thundered together. "Fifty thousand will accompany you in further contacts elsewhere and the other half have elected to stay." "We have concluded," they continued, "that survival considerations require the Ayor to remain hidden as yet. We are too small in number to risk further dangers at this time." "How will we meet the Ferenian humans, then?" I asked. "Your body is biologically human and you know their language. Learn to pass yourself as one of them. Mix with them and learn what you can." The Ayorian grouping wisdom usually impressed me and this time was no exception, although, for a moment, my body felt deep resentment at their reference to my biological similarities. "I accept the suggestion," I answered boldly, "and may all of my brethren have good twinning!" "Good twinning to Spork!" they replied together. IV   tive human detection system and burrowed deep within the ground of Feren, hiding the ship and my fifty thousand brothers. I chose a city at random, to appear on one of its empty streets and begin deliberate attempts to mingle with the population, hoping IF to gain knowledge of their culture and the motives behind their strange and complex behavior patterns. The day was bright and cool in my chosen location. And all that first day, I briskly walked up and down various concrete paths formed within their cities. No one could believe how many details could be telekmass-sensed in an eighty-mile sphere within a city unless, like us, he had telekmass senses. Only the microscopic detail of natural biology could exceed it for complexity! Humans walked into specially prepared buildings to eat. When in need of nourishment, I followed one group and entered where food was automatically served on plastic trays. Carefully watching the man ahead with my light receptors in order to imitate his every move, I picked up a tray. The man selectively dialed food combinations, and I did the same. Just as I was congratulating myself on my successful mimicry, he reached into his pocket and brought out metal coins and pieces of fibrous paper; he handed these to a machine which accepted them and returned similar objects. I had no small metal objects of fibrous paper! The machine blinked and said, "That will be # Odell, please!" Thinking rapidly, I reached into the human's pocket behind me and placed some of his fibrous paper in my right-hand pocket. Toby had told me of their monetary system but I was quite ignorant of its implications. Did I or did I not have # Odell in my pockets now? I withdrew the recently acquired paper, handing all of it to the machine. "Oh my goodness," it said. "I said one point five six Odell, not one hundred and fifty six." It took only one paper-piece; then, as I turned to lift my tray manually as I had seen others do, it called me back to take my change. The rest of my meal was without incident. Since the metal pieces and the fibrous paper seemed to represent important symbols of exchange to these people, I felt I should learn where they came from and what they meant. nphe next day I studied every  place where money moved or was kept, becoming quite perplexed. Most everyone had it. Some humans seemed to work for it while others seemed to store huge quantities of it in protected places; still others handed it out to some for their immediate use, though they appeared to not work for it; one place actually manufactured it, then stored it in other places. I had worked with the Ayor in the most complicated areas. We had overcome the evil Tepen and the beast of planet two, learned of modern mathematics and science and built spaceships and many other things; yet this culture, supposedly similar to the one of my biological origin, was most confusing and complex. Before I learned about schools, I was in trouble again! To move from one city to another, the humans boarded public vehicles which might be any of several kinds of transportation. At each terminal, guards demanded to see a little card from each person before he could board the vehicle. Assuming the card was part of their confusing monetary system, I teleported one from the purse of a female human behind me. I naively handed the card to the guard, not noticing the picture on its surface and its writing which stated her sex, size, weight and so on. The guard took the card, looked at the picture and then asked the lady behind me for her card. Of course the lady didn't have one, so I teleported one to her purse from the man behind her. She handed this card to the guard. The guard glanced at this card, then asked for one from the next man. The activity continued for six more cards while the guard held on to my original stolen card. "All right," he said, "how many of you are together?" Not one of them answered. Politely handing the proper cards back to the right individuals, he grabbed my arm and placed me under arrest. I went along with him since I was most curious about this custom. I was jailed again! It seemed that each citizen had need for identification papers which vouched for the fact that he was who he was and showed where he was permitted to do business which was fully approved by the state. The jail regime was boringly different from my experience with the military, and teleporting outward was delayed only long enough for me to learn this fact. Schools were next! I enthusiastically enrolled in one which specialized in adult education. How disappointed I became when I learned that their rate of learning was slow -- as slow as their green colored plant growths. At their rate, I would need to attend for dozens of years simply to learn two or three subjects well; I could not afford the time. But I did meet books of every description -- psychology, sociology, political science, military science, economics, literature, art, music, history and various strange languages. I had full recall of a six-monthold child's memory of my father speaking to my mother while IF our ship spun toward Enithra. "Though we headed the house of the galactic council, Patricia, the sabotage was inevitable. We may be genetically superior, but to the common people we are still only human. Place the baby in the life container now." Erne, also, had passed down to me the words, scribed on our ship. None of the language books held knowledge corresponding to the written or spoken language of my origin. Economics made much of their monetary system understandable, but I still failed to understand how money came into being. What started the process? Energy, commodities, goods and services could be added to a community; but how could money be arbitrarily created and then arbitrarily placed into isomorphic correspondence with these things? Was the law of conservation of matter-energy somehow repealed? I learned the descriptive language of sociology and psychology, understanding the behavior described therein; but the phenomenon itself remained unreal. The history books, however, were at first my greatest puzzlement. Each book seemed to be written by the same person. I failed, always to reconcile the meaning of the words to actuality. This planet was a military police state but the history books referred to it as the "beneficial democracy surrounding us everywhere." The paradox, as paradoxes usually do, eventually pointed the way toward an understanding of the culture of this planet. Thinking to move faster in my learning efforts, I directly approached a human teacher and asked for an explanation of Feren's political paradox. He called the security police and again I was jailed as some kind of enemy of the state I Though teleporting out of jailhouses seemed to be my chief new occupation, I was beginning to learn! The next three instructors approached by me refused to discuss the subject. But I persisted in my search until, one day, a very elderly human raised his fingers to his lips in their symbol for verbal caution; then, writing an address and a time on a slip of paper, he handed it to me as he quickly left the room. His house was built low, hunkered down between taller buildings on either side. Colored ceramic fibers impregnated in a matrix of concrete provided its decor; it was old compared to buildings on either side and it held space in reserve for his private use, as did all human structures. I activated the door announcer, wondering if I were to be jailed again. He answered, standing tall with his long white hair curling delicately upward at the tips. Behind him, I could see and sense four other people in the house. He smiled in cheerful recognition, his bushy-haired eyebrows raised slightly at the corners during the process. I was invited in and given a soft chair and a cool drink; he introduced me to two human females and two human males. "These are my students," he said. "These are the only ones who have had the courage to question." "I realize that questioning the state can lead to jail," I commented, "but how do you know that I do not represent the police?" "Oh!" he laughed, "I have had much dealing with police states in my life. You were entirely too awkward to represent them. You could not have passed their training programs and remained as innocent as you appear!" V nprod Gerard taught me and I  learned that the Quations planetary system had once been a newly settled, outlying territory of a distant confederation known as the Galactic Council. As the galactic civilization spread, communication and control problems developed for governing bodies. I could understand communication and control problems, since we Ayorians had made our decision to develop independent colonies because of our forecast of similar difficulties. Indeed, our problems were just beginning in that respect. When humans were first faced with the communication and control problem, their science was vigorously applied to breed a special class of human who was just a little more intelligent, a little faster in reflex, a little superior in most human respects. These genetically bred humans were trained to be controlling leaders of far-reaching, sprawling, complex galactic confederations. But even improved biology did not save the union; the solution was applied too late, the genetically bred controllers were not quite capable of the feat, and the confederation was fragmented by selfish, authoritative humans whose only goal was self-aggrandizement and plunder. The great galactic unions fell apart, with each part fought over and split into smaller and smaller pieces until, like this planet Feren, each piece was ruled by powerhungry dictators. Feren's dictator -- D'Cela -- who was certainly as bad as the predecessor who had ruled Toby Randolph's slave-state, now controlled the police and soldiers who mans. IF The many pleasant days "studying under this brave old man also taught me that the paranoic aggressive treatment which we Ayorians had experienced to date was an act of one group and not typical behavior for the whole human race as, for example, the Tepen was not representative of the Ayor. Trod Gerard had once been on the ruling board of Feren; now he was hiding his real activities, though his extreme age gave him immunity of a sort. Probably D'Cela's followers would only kill him outright rather than torture him, in deference to his age. With my Ayorian faculties searching for detail, I roamed the planet at will, checking on his every lesson. D 'Cela's fortress and permanent living quarters were the gigantic military installation which my telekmass sensors had identified to be unique among all of Feren's military bases during my first planetary survey. "If I am to determine the final truth of what I have learned, I must visit D'Cela," I concluded. The nature of his protections was complex, subtle and fantastic to an extreme, indicating that D'Cela was a badly frightened human. I teleported into the nearest empty room -- past the heavy metal shell of the fortress and the radioactive fires raging between layers of this shell, through doublethick layers of diamond-hard carbon embedded in matrices of iridium, platinum and nickel and through layers of other exotic materials, into an empty room. The room's doors slammed shut, alarms rang and gas screamed into the space. Had I been just a trifle slower of reflex, death would have found me then. I teleported the gas away as fast as it spewed inward. My mind raced, thinking over the fanaticism of this man who prepared even empty rooms within his citadel as death traps for the unwary. What if the next room had a death ray instead of gas? The only safe place was beside D'Cela himself, I concluded. I quickly teleported to his side. Upon observing me, he dropped his food, reached for the row of buttons on his desk and then froze like a human wooden mannikin as I telekmassed both his arms and legs. He was fat, corpulent and sloppy -- greasy food still dribbled down his stubbled chin. His hair, uncombed, was brown and short. He dressed in some sort of togalike robe within which I could sense several kinds of weapons which he must have thought to be hidden. Along the sides of his desk were rows of buttons and behind his back were various communication racks. The emblem of his state, a flag containing his clean-shaven likeness in purple and gold, was the only object higher than himself. Otherwise the room appeared barren, probably deliberately made uncomfortable for others. I sensed the supposedly secret escape-way beneath his desk leading downward below the level of the planet's bedrock. And along the walls and ceilchines of various types which, I was sure, must be connected to some of the buttons at his desk. I released his speaking apparatus. "We will talk together. I am Spork of the Ayor. You are D'Cela. Why do you wish to control the planet Feren and its humans?" "Insolent pig!" was his only comment. By now I knew that a pig was a kind of animal found with humans everywhere which was relished for food but abhorred for its supposedly filthy eating habits. Still I wondered why so many members of his tribe greeted strangers with the word. I tightened the muscles about his heart and watched him struggle as he tried to grasp his aching chest with arms frozen tightly to his side. "Now you will answer?" I asked. "What are you? Some kind of devil? I must be dreaming this. Too much liquor. Yes, yes, too much liquor." He took decent recognition of me when I squeezed his heart again. Almost with pity, I listened to his odd tale. As a child he had had a difficult time, always scrabbling and fighting for crusts of bread. Fighting and winning, he pushed his way upward in search of security until he controlled all those who could possibly hurt him. Emphatically he intended to maintain his position, too. "To gain personal security," I said, "you would sacrifice the se"They want to be controlled. People come in two types. Either they are stronger than you or weaker. If weaker, they need the leadership of the stronger. Without this arrangement, great inefficiencies develop and there is waste in resources and energies." He felt strongly about his position as his planet's savior, while his voice worked ever-upward in emotional dialectics. How odd were his rationalizations! Especially so when I contrasted the simple social structure of the Ayor with his. What would D'Cela have thought to know that children as well as adult Ayorians might spend years in random play or experiment solely for personal fulfillment. What kind of waste would he call that? How would he attempt to control it? I could feel his arm and leg muscles struggle again to reach his protective devices when I said, "I understand the Feren people were once free to select their own leaders." "Bah! Rigged elections. Crooked politics." "Still, there was more personal fulfillment and happiness then, was there not?" "The state is the only creation which has a right to fulfillment." Soon I was convinced that D' Cela, though human, was of the evil Tepen personality. Were he a Tepen biologically, I would have crushed him then. But as an Ayorian, what right did I have to determine the fate of a whole planet? Yet, there was a way common to both Ayorian and human by which truth could be known. Determined to put that means into effect, I teleported to the cavern of the Ayor at the same time I released D'Cela from his telekinetic chains. T tossed with sleeplessness as I reviewed the merits and demerits of my plan. In the morning I approached Trod Gerard for his mature human advice. He laughed hugely, as though I were yet an infant -- one with futile, naive imaginings and fantasies and who must be humored out of his delusion. I had forgotten that to him I was still an ordinary Ferenian citizen in search of political and historical truth rather than an Ayorian from another planetary system. Through special lenses I let him view the Ayor, fifty thousand strong, in our hidden cavern below ground. Once he appreciated the subtlety and power of our telekmass faculties he was wildly, enthusiastically cooperative over my scheme. With their long-range sensors, the other Ayor studied the planet's defenses in detail. Fifty thousand Ayorians fanned their telekmass sensors outward in search of explosives, both nuclear and chemical, as well as bullets, death rays, bombs, projectiles and other po ling humans. Their senses swept through the planet with accustomed agility as the assignment itself reflected sober uses for their early childhood days of hide-and-seek on Enithra. All control objects were tossed miles outward. Armed now with only muscle and club, D'Cela's police state ended suddenly. Incapable of stemming the people's vengeful tide, the dictator and his crew barely escaped from the planet Feren and only by chance. I was confident this would be the people's choice; yet, as I had taught the Ayor, conjectures must be adequately tested when using direct-action faculties and this problem seemed analogous. Representative democracy returned to Feren; Trod Gerard was well known, popular with most of the population and a personal friend of most of the elected officials. He insured that Spork and the still hidden Ayor were given all credit though an aura of impenetrable mystery surrounded the means. Nothing we could ask was denied us though our wants were few in number. When I was made Honorary Planetary President I felt a strange sense of emotional tie with these strange humans. "Am I becoming human, too?" I wondered. But an invitation to stay on Feren brought me direct confrontation with my true instincts and we Ayorians returned quickly to planet seven where we were received by the now better than sixty-thousand who were diligently transforming their new planet to suit our tastes. VI  lready we could roam its sur face and breathe oxygen. The planet had warmed while dangerous gases and chemicals had been transformed to something more useful or stored in mammoth underground caverns scooped out by telekmass faculties. To be truly Enithra-like, it lacked only the ecology of Enithra -- IF and the beautiful violets and ultraviolets of our extensive jungle-covered valleys. We covered the planet with human bioforms, including the clashing greens and browns; for it would have been immoral of us to introduce a potentially dangerous planet in the human's back-yard. "Perhaps we could adjust to the greens!" we all sighed. We have since learned that understanding human motives requires more than simple naivetd. We fully expected the people of Feren to regain their political voice, and they did. But D'Cela, who had not crossed my mind since my forcible entry into his headquarters, was far more dever and subtle than I had imagined. He was corpulent, selfish, evil, frightened and decidedly clever; and I, Spork, completely overlooked the paths he could take, given his single-minded motivation. Arl, twin of Dingon, had twinned in turn long ago. I stayed with Arl's twins on New Enithra -- our new name for planet seven of the Quations galaxy -- to watch the process of transformation which changed it from a harsh, frozen environment to one of warmth and comfort. Most humans would yet find the air too thin and cold but with our ability to sort and surround ourselves with denser, energy-packed air molecules we enjoyed the planet's surface at an early period. A certain sign that Ayorian evolutionary progress continued was shown by the increasing rate of twinning, signifying individual fulfillment by specific Ayorian individuals. And each twinned child became more skilled at addressing the peculiar problems of planet tranformation. We were now # in number; I was twenty Enithra years old, nearly twenty-one. Though I almost always stayed on New Enithra, I did travel from time to time to Feren to sit through ceremonial dinners where dull speeches filled the smokey eating halls. And whenever I attended one of these special human events in my capacity as Honorary Planetary President, the luncheons always brought to mind the Imply mammal on my home planet of Enithra. Many of our insects and smaller mammals can predict the path of teleported seed or smaller insect and can therefore arrange to be within its own striking distance at the time of the seed's or insect's arrival. But the Imply had evolved a peculiar oddity. It teleported from spot to spot in fairly random jumps. Whenever it stopped, it unfolded its stomach sack by means of fleshy hinges to about seven times its original size. If the Imply had chosen a sufficiently dense population of bugs, chances were reasonably good that some insects would blindly teleport to the inside of this rather cavernous stomach. As I listened to human speakers and watched their mouths open and close mostly in random, meaningless patterns, I often caught myself wondering just when a bug would teleport to the inside of the big opening! I did enjoy my visits with Trod Gerard; he was old but lively in thought. His knowledge was vast, including both human politics and galactic history. He had already given me the clue which was to lead to resolution of my personal twinning problem but I was not aware of this fact as yet. phough Ayorian divergence by  radial adaptation was an excellent means by which a race could pass on knowledge from one generation to the next -- through increased capability -- it had some defects. First, learned knowledge was a hidden, intrinsic part of the magnetic configuration of an individual Ayorian. Only during the time of grouping could all share equally in this knowledge. Second, an Ayorian like myself, in human form, could not share in the grouping; I had constant need for a personal search in answer to simple technological questions. This defect bothered me constantly and my mind always came back to the recorded and written records of humans. We Ayorians needed objective written records too. Then, after we had planted many colonies throughout the galaxy, these records could serve as quick, accurate means for transmitting knowledge from colony to colony without the necessity for an otherwise impossible physical When I took this problem to the children who were most often receptive to new ideas and consequently more inventive, they naturally made a new game of it. Each child had to invent some recording device which, when used by another, had to hold the most information in a form most accurately recoverable in the least amount of time. Under some rather tough measurement criteria, the one who could do the most would win the game. I watched the beginnings of this new game. One child teleported fragments from a rock, engraving his newly invented alphabet on it, Another used ideograms. A third used binary, then tertiary digits. And so all tried something no matter how cumbersome or awkward it might be. The ideograms won the first round. The one who had invented the alphabet used his same symbols, still convinced they were superior; but this time he engraved messages in microscopic script. He won the second round. The fourth winner reached below the molecular level. His was IF an excellent solution except that one Ayorian, namely me, could not reach this level; therefore he had violated the initial premise that ell Ayorians must be capable of utilizing the communication device. Knowing the game would preceed until an eventual satisfactory solution to the problem came. I left. Life was pastoral for us; all thought of D'Cela and his followers had left our minds. But had I given him further thought, I would have acted no differently, such was the naivete of my thinking. When Erne was killed by the Tepen, I was enraged beyond belief, though no other Ayorians felt emotionally disturbed. Now, when half our thriving colony on New Enithra was wiped out by one missile, my rage grew proportionately; and this time, though still lacking emotion of my kind, the surviving Ayorians recognized this to be a true group twinning problem and they acted accordingly. fTTith great dismay we asked our  selves how such a dangerous missile coming from outer space to the surface of our planet, sweeping through territory well covered by every adult's telekmass sensors, could have entered unsensed. Had the human race developed. Tepenlike telekinetic fields capable of blanketing Ayorian faculties? Our questions were analyzed swiftly in detail, using both facts and logic to give us the answer, or probable answer, which also proved discomfiting. The only direct action instrument known to humans which also involved indirect action phenomenon was the human developed hyper-drive. D'Cela, the ousted Feren dictator, had probably used one of his many escape routes to leave Feren, once the true revolution had started. I had met one military satellite on my way to New Enithra from Feren and it seemed highly probable that other 'satellites of the same kind, as well as war ships and perhaps other Quation system planets, would contain men and the materials of war which could be drawn upon by D'Cela. Though very few Ferenians were aware of our Ayorian faculties and how they had been used in ousting D'Cela; D'Cela himself was well aware of the effects of indirect phenomenon. It was not a weak conjecture, then, which forced us to decide that at least one of D'Cela's missiles had been modified with human type hyper-drives. Furthermore if our conjecture was correct, we could expect others soon. The really big question was how much warning time might we expect between the first appearance of the missile from out of hyperdrive until it struck our planet. Though hesitant to group during a time of emergency -- for the next missile could easily have killed all the remaining Ayor -- reaction time knowledge was so important we accepted the risk. My reaction time when employing telekmass faculties is about one-tenth of a second. My brother's reaction time is about one onehundreth of a second. The missile's reaction time approximated two hundredths of a second. Should other missiles have similar reaction time prior to exploding after reentry to Euclidean space, one would imagine that the Ayor could easily handle the problem, since each adult would have nearly twice the required reaction time. Not so! Full alertness sustained over long time periods is probably difficult for any biological organism and Ayorians were no exception. TI#e could place more Ayorians   on maximal watch, and we did. But how many watchers were sufficient? What were the resources of the enemy -- ten missiles per minute? Ten missiles per second? Ten missiles per nano-second in mass saturation drives? We could disperse Ayorians throughout the planet, and we did. Several more missiles struck at random intervals. It became a nerve-wracking period of spotting a suddenly appearing missile, then teleporting either it or sensitive parts of it away. Then our unsensed enemy became serious; volley after volley came in hundreds, sometimes thousands. Adult Ayorians on watch now were fed by Ayorian children as the constant need for attention and the heavy drains of energy through constant use of telekmass faculties called upon biological conversion of energy in ever-larger quantities. Since I was the only Ayorian whose reaction time was too slow for the watch, I gave my time to thought on our danger and our new fight. And I raged inwardly over the death of sixty-thousand of our brethren who had died needlessly. Wherever our enemy was located, it would be beyond the halfgiven to the adult Ayorian. This meant D'Cela must be in satellites, spaceships or on other planets or combinations of any of the three. Feren could be ruled out. So could New Enithra. This left planets one, three, four, five, six, eight and nine. Planets eight and nine were inhospitable even to the Ayor, so I ruled out those. Planet one could be dropped for the same reason; and planet five was entirely too massive -- unless they had gravity-controlling equipment unknown to us. Hesitant to decide on a negative, I kept planet five on my list. IF From mental visualization of our nine-planet system, since planets seven, eight and nine were too hostile, the defense of the whole planetary cluster -- if that was the original purpose -- would be pulled back just outside of the orbit of planet six. It seemed reasonable that Ferenian defense planners would have wanted as short a supply radius as possible, yet would want to include all of the more valuable planets. They would have been unaware of Ayorian capability to transform the seventh planet. Accordingly there should be stations surrounding the orbits of all the planets stationed at least as far as beyond the orbit of planet six. But how many? In what density per unit of time? Co far as ships were concerned,  they might be located anyWithout data to the contrary, I might just as well assume the exan inch beyond the sensitivity limits of my brethren, though I knew the thought to be foolish. So, probably planets three, four, five and six were involved; probably several thousand satellites swung around orbit six and some unknown number of ships were miles or more. The large salvos stopped momentarily, then began again, and the war of nerves continued. Once, when we fought the beast of planet two in our own system, Dingon had carried himself and me With sufficient nutrients, there should be no reason why the fact couldn't be accomplished again for the purpose of finding D'Cela's military units and destroying them. I estimated that, without my dead weight, the adult Ayorian could probably carry himself and his nutrients about # miles in miles each jump before exhausting his nutrients. The closest satellite had to be orbiting somewhere between fifty not a little closer. Several of the adults volunteered, once I explained my conjectures and plan. They fastened supplies of food to their bodies, then attempted their first jump, fully realizing that should they be unable to find a military unit they would starve in space for lack of energy-giving nutrients. They couldn't make their first jump! The whole planet was ringed by telekinetic energy fields similar to that of the Tepen fields. The Ay-orian, having evolved strictly from indirect action beings, had no other means of propulsion or motion than that of teleportation. They without the use of indirect-action faculties. Now our plight began to look very serious. Indeed, I had greatly underestimated this D'Cela human! While all adults remained on guard and the children continued their feeding duties, I continued my thinking efforts. D'Cela's scientists had somehow converted hyper-drive phenomenon to some kind of telekinetic fence around our new planet. But to what end? Would it satisfy any military establishment of his type merely to fence us so that we could not get to him or he to us? Eventually the cost in labor and manpower required to build and shoot his missiles at us would far exceed their effect. It also occurred to me that he might have developed a net which, like the Tepen's, could squeeze tighter and tighter until all those with only telekinetic capabilities lay prostrate. If so, we were in very, very serious trouble! 'T I he children checked out my conjecture, and it was clearly evident that the net was getting smaller ! I could move through the telekinetic net as I had once done against the Tepen, but how was I to gain solid foothold, high overhead, enabling my muscles to move me through the field? Should I teleport to somewhere near the field and bring the ship there too with the assistance of the Ayor? Blasting through the telekinetic field should be simple, but would D'Clela be likely to permit such an obvious counter-move? Settling on one idea which seemed promising, we reached through the planet's crust to bedrock, carving out a two-mile chunk of irregularly shaped rock consisting mostly of iron and nickel and silicon. Within, we hollowed out room for myself and one adult Ayorian as well as food and water. At the risk of allowing one missile salvo through, all Ayorians grasped the rock containing us, teleporting it nearly five hundred thousand miles away from New Enithra's surface, hopefully in the direction of the orbiting satellites which must ring this system. Teleportation does not obey what the human community calls Newton's first law of motion. The moment we arrived at our predetermined point in space, our vehicle remained motionless with respect to a point which could only be determined from higher telek mass mathematical calculations. The planet of our origin as well as the other Quations planetary bodies and its central nucleus, the sun, crept slowly away from us in a predetermined configuration of relative motion. D'Cela's telekinetic net was sevIF eral thousand miles ahead of our point of entry into normal space. The relative velocity between ourselves and New Enithra was so low it soon became apparent that unless we could build up additional velocity, our efforts would be too late. From our deeply buried hiding place, I telekinetically shredded mass from the front of our vehicle, handing them to Eries, my companion. He slammed them against the rear of our rock, causingg its velocity to slowly increase. Faster and faster we traveled until, by drifting with ever-increasing velocity, we passed easily through D'Cela's telekinetic net. Once beyond the barrier, Eries long-ranging sensitivity was activated and we began our first serious search for D'Cela's ships or satellites. Tories jumped thirty-one times ' before he found the first military satellite. He returned to our false meteorite to collect food and water and to assist me to the satellite's location. I swept my mass sensor through the five-mile station, finding it much like the military fort I had encountered and pacified many months before. Soldiers were eating, sleeping, preparing activated missiles, repairing other apparatus, drawing charts, preparing reports and doing all the other activities which accompany military communities. Not wishing to underestimate our foe again, we surveyed every compartment with microscopic precision. One room was devoted to maps and charts of the Quations system, and it was there I could sense several soldiers speaking through radio communicators. With only my light receptors, I could see several small access doors open along the side of the giant satellite from which several dozens of missiles streamed forth, each rapidly jumping into hyper-drive and disappearing from both sight and my mass sensor. I disabled the radio first as I had once done against the Tepen. Also we disarmed all of the missiles and destroyed any materials which could lend themselves to explosive use. When we teleported into the commander's quarters, where Eries' transparent body was invisible to all but me, I fully expected to interrogate the commander. But D'Cela's thinking was ahead of me again. The commander clamped his jaws together, swallowing a fatal dose of poison the moment I appeared! The chemical acted too swiftly for me to intervene. In the map room I was again too late. Standing orders had been given which prevented us from gaining any usable knowledge. D'Cela had proved himself to be a clever, forward thinking and dangerous human beast! But he had left one weak link in the form of his radio operator, a frightened soldier obliged by order to send a particular coded message every thirty minutes. Though he did not know its purpose, Eries and I were sure that failure to receive his message would signal other satellites immediately to send missile salvos against this one; probably all satellites would be so organized. His signals were allowed to continue while the invisible Eries monitored the actions of all the men and I probed for the most likely location of the other satellites. Were I to build an economical network of military satellites around a whole planetary system, how far apart would each station be placed to insure adequate coverage with a minimum of overlap? 'T'he answer would seem to depend primarily upon the nature of the weapon which would be used, its range and power and the time for travel from any station to the object to be destroyed ; also the percent of desired overlap for the sphere of destruction would be important, reflecting military overkill features balanced against economy. Distance between each satellite was probably computed from the characteristics of unmodified missile drive. Estimating our station to be at approximately # X # # miles from the sun, and assuming a sphere of protective covering # X # # square miles, and allowing for # overlap on every side of each station, this still meant a protective network of # stations! Accordingly we should expect to find our next station somewhere on the surface of the protective sphere's boundary in about four adult Ayorian jumps of half a million miles each. Once these crude estimates had been made I was convinced that D'Cela, though having made correct, shrewd guesses regarding some of the characteristics of our telekmass faculties, still had no idea of the great jumping range of the adult Ayor. We easily found the next orbiting station, where I immediately froze its commander's jaw muscles to prevent his suicide; his eyes bulged as he tried again and again to obey D'Cela's post-hypnotic command. In his false tooth I also sensed the micron-sized radio transmitter which, when the tooth's cap was crushed, also signalled to the map room for immediate destruction of all the maps. When his poison and transmitter were removed, Eries kept watch on all other humans IF again while I moved into the map room. To capture the gigantic beast of planet two in our own system we had placed telekinetic generators on each side of the planet, thus insuring that planet two would always be embedded in the field. Had D'Cela and his human scientists done the same to us at New Enithra? If so, where might the field generators be located? Obviously every satellite engaged in directing missiles to New Enithra would need to know the location and orbiting characteristics of every other, including those which might control our new telekinetic barriers; I found such maps clearly delineating not only the generator's location but also their plan of action which called for closingup the net around New Enithra within a seven-day period; after that, D'Cela hoped to collect nothing but dead Ayorian bodies from the planet's surface. '  on my part, one of the humans removed the explosive head from one missile and re-directed it to land at the surface of the satellite containing the telekinetic field generator. What he did not know was that Eries, invisible to human eyes, teleported within the opening and rode the missile directly to the station, where he easily deactivated the generator. Space was open again to the Ayors and we began the long, dirty task of disarming # stations. By now, D'Cela and his military advisors certainly knew something had gone wrong; but they couldn't know the nature of the trouble. While deactivating these monuments to evil, I had the additional thought that perhaps the satellites were only an outer line of defense. "Maybe, these humans were careful enough to build a second line somewhat further in," I thought. Additional speculation showed the absurdity of the thought. Even for the first line, enormous amounts of time, sweat and energy had been needed to build # satellite stations, each nearly five miles in diameter by means of direct faculties only. Either these humans were fantastically paranoiac or there was even greater danger from outside the Ferenian system than I had been taught. Principles of the modified hyper-drive apparatus showed it to be new and novel; left to our own, we might not have adapted similar principles for many generations. We were considerably more independent of gravitational effects than humans. We could use our indirect faculties to move through the gravity-well easily. For this reason, I suppose we hadn't really given the phenomenon of gravity the attention it really deserved. D'Cela's humans, on the other hand, fought gravity from the moment of their birth. I imagine their and its effects for hundreds of generations before they began to learn its' control. Whatever the case, Eries had found D'Cela's telekinetic field generator to be relatively small, not much bigger than ten by twelve eet. It tapped the gravity-well of the sun. D'Cela did not appear with his ships during our entire clean-up period. No longer underestimating him and his scientists, we methodically completed our deactivation of his military satellites while forming plans of our own. Alert patrols placed around New Enithra would prevent recurrence of our disaster. The children returned to their games while some of the interested adults began study of the D'Cela modified hyper-drive. The remainder of us filled our ship with supplies for a determined search for D'Cela and his men. Vvnce I had felt planet five an untenable base for human habitation because of its steep gravity-well. Now I wasn't so sure. If humans could tap the sun's gravity well, could they not also tap planet five's, making it habitable? Even so, I chose the most rational course of search. First, at Feren, I spoke to all citizens, explaining what D'Cela had attempted. Trod Gerard introduced us to several scientists who agreed to move to New Enithra for joint human-Ayorian study. Turning then to the problem of D'Cela, we found the third planet covered with noxious gases. I dropped the ship into a reddish atmosphere charged with striking lightning bolts while several of the Ayor extended their mass sensors throughout the planet's structure. The ground level was smooth. Gases surrounding the planet were so reactive that its hot flouride radicals had long ago combined with and leveled its surface. Yet, strange as it may seem, deep within the crevices of 'the planet's crust could be sensed a primitive life which, almost as rapidly as our energetic Enithra life, was building up complex plastic-like molecules. They captured energy from the furious chemical reactions, replicated themselves, then grew again. Even here was the beginning of life! The fourth planet was pitted and past meteorites. As soon as we were station we knew exactly where its military fortresses were located. But before any stations could respond to our presence, we reached out to identify and nullify all missiles. Then we drove in closer as though we had no suspicion of the station's presence or the nature of IF their armanent. When we were nearly two hundred miles from the planet's surface, from two separated stations came hundreds of missiles, making our ship the third apex of a triangle. We stopped the missiles in midflight, turned them around and let them drop back by gravity pull only. Each missile struck with only the impact of its kinetic energy, some breaking through lighter roof structures while others simply crushed themselves flat, the pieces sliding off harder sloping domes to the ground. Every other military station was treated in similar manner until, finally convinced of their futility, they flew the white flag of peace. D'Cela was not here; he would have driven his men to death rather than permit surrender even in a hopeless cause. IX nphe fifth planet was indeed a  fortress. Its rotation period was ten hours and fifty-seven minutes, but its diameter was # miles. Surface velocity was fast and its gravity well was steep. Fortunately, like other planets in this system, it had no moons to complicate our search. Two military citadels had been placed on opposing sides of the planet; and overlaying each fortress was a tightly bound telekinetic field which prevented Ayorian sensors from reaching through. Aided by optical instruments, I was able to make use of my normally useless light receptors to find that their construction was similar to D'Cela's headquarters back on dense metal surrounding raging atomic fires, all bolted to planet's bed-rock. I could move myself through the telekinetic barrier, but obviously wouldn't be allowed to come so close. I further doubted my ability to react as fast as his missiles. Easily fending off droves of missiles, we moved closer to his main station, probing it with our own explosive forces. Not since my capture of the Tepen had I witnessed the effects of a physical object barrier. Our missiles could easily have passed through protective telekinetic barriers but they splashed themselves to death against the physical object barrier, exploding prematurely as they hit the newer force field surrounding the station in near hemispherical perfection. D'Cela's station was protected by the ultimate defense -- telekinetis and direct-action barriers. We couldn't touch him and he couldn't get at us. How did he move his missile through his doubly protected network? My light receptors could not respond quickly enough to view possible switching of double fields and our telekmass sensors could view nothing at all. Did D'Cela turn off the physical energy barrier long enough to permit hundreds of missiles through during each salvo? If so, we should be able to take advantage of the time aperture no matter how small it might be. There was a way to test our conjecture! Several of our own missiles were moved to the planet's surface at its junction with the physical object barrier. They lay about five miles from the edge of the fortress, on a slightly inclined plane, each pointing toward the fortress. A small telekinetic force against the missile's rear-most edge kept their noses pressed against the physical object barrier; should this barrier open, even momentarily, the missile would be inside and we would have our knowledge. To divert attention, we cast more missiles directly at the fortress. Their answering missiles appeared at once. Our missiles at the barrier's base tore inward to explode in gigantic bursts against the hypothesized second barrier at about three miles from the citadel. D'Cela had two physical object barriers placed around his fort, synchronized so that at no time would we gain access to him. When his missiles flew to the first, he released that barrier, replacing it be fore the missile reached the second D'Cela was a formidable oppon entl N ews from New Enithra arrived. Ten new twinnings had occurred while solving the puzzles presented by the gravity-generator. Otherwise all was tranquil at home. Oh how I longed for the peaceful Enithra days where life moved simply from puzzle to puzzle, rather than from death to death! My mind just naturally called up the beautiful violets and ultraviolets of Enithra and its many interesting, friendly-seeming life forms, like the delicate puff-ball which floated easily through the atmosphere, reaching its tiny mass-sensor outward to identify and to teleport dust motes and light energy packets to its top nodule. I remembered that some of these would glow like little lanterns or stars in the sky while others would float in darkness, resting. When the sky filled with sweet smelling rain -- and if the rain were thick enough -- the puff-ball often was pushed to the ground, where unluckily it drowned in larger pools of water. Unhappily I thought, "What we need is a heavy rain to pour on D'Cela's fortsl" Such speculative withdrawals from life's real problems seemed remote from the issues, but I had always found them useful and this (Continued on page #) IF An Interview with Robert Bloch Bob Bloch is best known to That Big World Outside as thei author of the crawly Hitchcock movie, Psycho; but science fiction knows him as the author of science-fiction and fantasy stories beyond counting , and perhaps most affectionately as the man who writes most of the SF Convention reports for If. Turn about , they say y is fair play. At the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival and Science-fiction Symposium in March , we lured Bob up to the balcony of our hotel room , turned on the tape recorder and started him talking . This is what came out. I first got involved as a sciencefiction reader in #, with David H. Keller's story, The Revolt of the Pedestrians . That hooted me on reading the stuff. I went through the usual stages -- Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and the current sf magazines, of course. I became socially involved in #. Pd jusl sold my first few stories to Weird Tales, and I was invited to become g member of the Milfraugag Fictioneers. This was a professional writers' group which met every two weeks for purely professional purposes; that is to say, there were only working writers for members. We spent our time plotting stories and assisting various members with hangups. The reason I say it was a professional group was that we had no lady poetesses, no one was allowed to read from manuscripts and no alcohol was consumed during meetings. I don't know how many hundreds of stories came out of the Milwaukee Fictioneers during those pulp years, but I do know that this was where I first met real live sf writers. At that time our group included several men who sold occasional science-fiction stories, plus such pros as Roger Sherman Hoare (also known as Ralph Milne Farley), Kaymona a. Calmer ana Stanley U. Wembaam. Stanley in particular impressed me. He was a very softspoken former resident of Louisville, Kentucky, with a very fine literary background. Oddly enough, although he was then doing spectacularly well in science fiction, his great ambition was to write for Weird Tales . We spent a great deal of time together, aside from the contacts at meetings, discussing the elements of fantasy and just how these could be translated into science-fiction terms, that is to say in reference to the science fiction of #. Both of us were hooked on James Branch Cabell and carried a #-pound Silver Stallion on our backs. So while I tried to indoctrinate Weinbaum regarding fantasy, he in turn gave me an orientation to science fiction. This may be a little presumptuous. I was IS, and he was an old man of #. But I made a very pleasant corollary discovery, viz, that in the scienao#iction world time is indeed relative, and a teenager can explore the same dimension as a mature adult, and meet on the same level. Again it was the Milwaukee Fictioneers that indirectly brought me to the actual writing of science ing and Fantastic Adventures . He called upon the Fictioneers for contributions, and I wrote my first story for him. It was called The Secret in the Observatory. The real secret, ot course, was now it ever managed to get published. During World War II my interests in sf fandom grew, and with it my desire to write farther in the field. Fd say that the majority of the sf I wrote then, and of what I write now, consists of borderline fantasy. My interest in hard science is somewhat limited by my complete inability to understand the workings of any mechanical gadget more complicated than an electric toothbrush. However, my interest in the field of imaginative speculation is extremely intense. As a writer, IVe always considered myself to be primarily a performer. I look upon my work as an effort at entertainment, and my readers, if any, as an audience. This attitude had its roots in my early childhood. My mother had been a social worker in order to support her family, but in so doing had given up a career as a singer; she'd once been offered an opportunity to enter what was then called light opera and operetta work by Florenz Ziegfield's father. He was the head of the Chicago Academy of Music, and a very influential figure in the #'s; that's where Flo got his start. My mother gave up her musical career, but she never abandoned her interest in the theater. As a child in Chicago, we attended regularly. I was more impressed, however, by the vaudeville shows which my father introduced IF me to. By the time I entered high school I was stagestruck. During those depression years I appeared regularly in dramatic productions. I wrote and performed in my own skits and sketches, and rather fancied myself as a comedian. As I look back on it now, my pretensions were funnier than I was. But I did succeed, around #, in selling a few gags to radio comedians Stoopnagle and Budd, and to Roy Atwell who at that time was working with Fred Allen. I also made a few appearances as a master of ceremonies at the kind of night spot later celebrated by John O'Hara in Pal Joey . For three shows a night the performer received ten dollars, a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The agent took #, but he got no sandwich. I had a particular advantage in that my agent could not drink coffee. But, somehow, it wasn't enough to compensate for the long hours and the long layoffs during those depression years. Abandoning my dreams of glory of becoming a top banana in the burlesque wheel, I resigned myself to a fullfledged career as a writer. Unfortunately, for many years the best I could attain was a halffledged career. There were not enough markets for fantasy, and very few outlets for my dubious brand of science fiction. It must be difficult for today's readers to realize that at the time of which I speak there were only three hard-cover anthologies of fantasy fiction in existence, with the exception of an English reprint series which had borrowed heavily from Weird Tales . There were no science-fiction anthologies whatever. There were no paperback reprints, nor, of course, any paperback originals. The situation was far different from that which exists today. Even by the depression standards of income, it was virtually impossible for a fulltime writer to earn even a meager living, unless he also turned out detective stories, Westerns, love stories and true confessions. Many of my colleagues augmented their income by writing for the comic books. So my little entertaining was performed on a very small stage. The economics of science fiction have improved: the status of science fiction has grown; the audience for science fiction has become greatly enlarged. The techniques of writers have advanced. But, to me, science fiction ideally remains entertainment.       k  nrijriinril New subscriptions and changes of IF  Novelette Gon was a creafure without a world , sent to bring destiny to those who refused it. But sometimes destiny takes over...   Cruthers said. The chief of the Planetary Resource Survey team was a lean, gray-faced, grayhaired man with the fussy, precise manner of a bookkeeper. He addressed his question to a tall, redfaced, middle-aged man in field khakis, and to the boy who sat on the bench beside him adjusting the straps that held the flat compressed-air tanks to his back. The lad was sturdily built, though oddly proportioned; his arms were thick and long, his torso short. Tough membranes linked his powerful fingers. His body, clad only in diving trunks, was hairless, the skin a blotchy greenish color, coarse and leathery. His eyes were large and round, his nose almost nonexistent, his mouth small, pursed. He looked too alien to be fully human, too human to be other than a man. "We've come too far to be beaten now, Mr. Cruthers," the blond man said heartily, resting a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Gon and I will carry on so long as the Infinite gives us the strength." "Mostly the boy's strength," Cruthers said shortly, eyeing Gon sourly. "This can't go on indefinitely, Brother Glad." He looked the big, florid man in the eye. "I have the authority to order an end to these swimming expeditions on medical grounds. He's exhausting himself for nothing. It's obvious there's no viable culture among the natives -- assuming any are left alive." "We know they're alive. And as for culture, it's not their fault Terra withdrew support, let them revert to savagery," Brother Glad said in his large voice. "These people are a human creation, no less human for their appearance. It was Terran science that mutated their ancestors, disinherited them and denied them the open air. We can't slough off responsibility for them!" "That was three hundred years ago. My job isn't to emotionalize over what's past, but to look for ways to build the future. Recommending uneconomic ventures on lifeless worlds isn't one of those ways." "We must stay long enough to establish contact and learn their needs!" the missionary said indignantly. "We owe it to the Merieds to do what we can to lighten their lot." "The Meried experiment was carried out in order to open a new world to colonization, to afford an outlet for the human need for a frontier. The test failed. I shall so report." "But we could try again -- " "I can't base my recommendations on sentiment, Brother Glad, however noble. Tomorrow we lift. You may plan accordingly." The Survey chief turned and strode from the room. "Don't despair, Gon," Glad said to the boy after the door had closed. "I'm sure we'll have luck today. Think what it will mean, Gon -- to meet your own people -- " "They're not my people," the boy interrupted. He looked at the stone floor, not at the man. "They look like... like freaks," he added in a mutter. "We don't use that word, Gon!" the man said in a whiplash tone. "You, least of all!" A beige flush mounted the boy's narrow face. "I'm worse than they are," he blurted. "They're at home here, but I'm not at home anywhere! I can't stand sunlight, but I can't breathe water! I swim better than any Terran, but not as well as a baby Meried!" "There'll always be a home for you in the Tabernacle," the missionary said in a gentler voice. "Now come along. It's time." Gon didn't move. "Gon, Gon, have you forgotten every thing we've taught you?" the blond man said in a tone of patience long abused. "Don't you remember our purpose here, your own privileged role as a unique instrument of the Infinite?" "I'm not a unique instrument, Brother Glad. I'm a halfbreed monster that never should have been bontl" "Stop it!" The missionary's voice cracked like a physical blow. "You're forbidden, ever, to voice thoughts like those! There is a purpose in life for every soul born under a sun! Your purpose is here! Now get on your feet and come with mel I won't let you fail -- us or yourself!" Reluctantly, the boy rose and followed the blond man as he strode down across the pebbled beach. At the edge of the sea, the older man halted and turned his face up to the sky. "O, thou who art eternal and without limit," he intoned, "grant this humble creature of thy making the privilege of leading those who were lost and are found again back to the true path of thy wifll" He turned to the boy. "Perhaps today is the day, Gon," he said solemnly. "Good luck." The boy shivered, looking out across the wind-riffled water. He went forward hesitantly until an edge of surf washed about his feet, then paused to adjust the breathing mask across his mouth. As he looked back, he saw Brother Glad's pale eyes fixed on him. He waded on; the chill water surged about his waist, his chest. I'm afraid l he wanted to scream. # don't want to go down into this alien ocean . I want to go home. But instead he drew a deep breath and dived forward into the breaking wave. II O n their barge, anchored ten miles off the lifeless North Continent of the world known as Meries, Cap O'Royle and Pard Kuchel, traders, sat at the cabin table, drinking coffee. For the last IF five hours they had been busy, loading the displays of Terran manufactured goods into the homemade display racks designed to be lowered over the side for the examination of their prospective customers. Small tools, wrist compasses, patent fish-baits, sea-lights, buckles and straps, small hardware, a few foodstuffs; all the items that twenty years of tramp commerce had taught them would be welcomed by the elusive Merieds. There was a sudden splash in the diving well at the center of the barge; a goggle-eyed gray-blue face appeared there, water sluicing down across the coarse, almost reptilian skin. The creature's sphincter-like mouth gaped comically, like a goldfish on a carpet. Water ran from the nostrils, mere slits in the wet-clay sheen of the face. The seaman made a hoarse, croaking sound, waved a webbed hand and dropped from sight as O'Royle, a stodty, white-haired man, called a greeting. "They're here," he said, rising. "I'll take the first load down." "Damn! Wish old Dreen would give a man more warning! Many times as I've seen that ugly face, it still gives me the leaping creeps when it pops up at me that way!" "They're adapted to their environment, Pard, like a bird or a fish. Think of 'em that way and they have a kind of beauty." "Hard to believe they're only ten generations away from normal folk," Pard said. "I heard somewhere a man could still breed with 'em. Picture getting that close to one of their females." O'Royle grunted. He checked his gauges, closed his helmet and lowered himself into the well. As the blue-green water closed over him, the sea-man swam up, his oversized eyes gleaming in the watery light. "Hello, Dreen," O'Royle said, his voice echoing oddly through his underwater microphone. "Good trip up?" The Meried's finny headcrest rippled as he nodded, uttering the gasping, clucking sound that was an all-purpose affirmative. He held out a small pouch of soft, slick-wet fishskin. "I have a few sea-stones for you, O'Royle," he said in his thin, going down for the last time voice. "Not so nice as last time, but big, eh?" The trader squeezed the pearls out on his palm. They were as big as walnuts, but lumpy, an iridescent milky-blue yellow in color. "They're beauties," O'Royle said. He waved a hand at his stock of goods -- mostly small hardware, water-proof power tools. "Take what you like." nphe Meried took his time look ing over the display. Other sea-men gathered around. They had brought their barter-goods with them: nets of rare shells, glassy, polychrome corals, sea fruits mutated from Earthly plants. There were swollen ears of sea-corn with yard-long cobs set with fist-sized kernels, purple oceanberries descended from Pinot Noir grapes, clusters of tomatoids, like great green raspberries; hundred-foot salt-melons which would be flensed like whales and the sweet red flesh lifted aboard in hundred-pound slabs, to be ferried ashore and stored in the spaceship's freezer. The stones O'Royle sold on distant planets, but the foodstuffs he rationed out to himself and Pard over the long years between visits. "Did you know, O'Royle, there is another party of drymen camped on the shore there, half a swim to the north?" the sea-man said. He pointed off through the murky water. "Traders?" O'Royle frowned. "These are no traders. They built a house on the high beach, but they offer no goods." "Maybe they're scientists, a mapping party, something like that." O'Royle rubbed his chin, looking troubled. "They say," Dreen went on, "that there's a man among them who's of the sea, but not of the sea." O'Royle looked at him questiottingly. "You mean a frogman, with scuba gear?" "No... he swims naked in the surf. Yet he sleeps on land. Curious, eh, Royle?" "Half a swim to the north, you said?" Back on deck, O'Royle told Pard the news. The smaller man swore. "Might of known it wouldn't last, having the place to ourselves." "There's plenty here for everyone, Pard," his partner pointed out. "It might be the best thing for the Merieds to build up trade here, remind the government they're out here." "I don't mean that. I just don't want strangers poking in, spoiling things. I like it like it is -- peaceful." "We don't own Meried, Pard. But I'm curious. I'm going to take the flitter over and pay a courtesy call. You mind the store." m A s Gon's eyes adapted to the light level, he was able to see the undulating slope that stretched away before him, its sin face thickly grown with weed of the strange color that he only saw here, under the sea. A cloud of silt rose like a puff of smoke ahead, as some small sea-dweller took alarm at his approach; at once, with a sharp pain, the nictitating membranes that protected his eyes flicked closed -- a reflex never triggered on land. He swam on, out past the second IF bar, angling more sharply downward now. Outcroppings of rock broke the bottom here; the luminous lichens crusting them shed an eerie glow through the water. Small shrimp-like piscoids moved in awkward sp urts among the stalks of sea-cane. Something large and lazy oozed away across the bottom. Gon drew air from his breather, giving the big fellow a wide berth. The first chill had passed; as his body warmed, he swam more strongly, questing through the dim water for the elusive mermen. O'Royle flew north for half an hour, following the barren coastline of the lifeless continent. Behind the froth-laced beach, gray and tan hills rose toward distant peaks of stone, untouched by the faintest hint of green. Only patches of dead trees and sere grasses along the strand attested the three-centuries-gone attempt to transplant earthly soil and flora to the young world. Those, and the remnant of the viaformed humans who had been seeded here. The Lost War had wrecked the grand scheme of which they had been a part, cut off the support and aid that would have made the scheme work. Now with a resurgent Terra again feeling her way into the Arm, the Merieds might benefit from some belated assistance, O'Royle reflected. But, more likely, the sea-men would suffer from the rediscovery of their world. The oceans were rich in dissolved minerals; floating refineries could extract them, discharge the contaminating wastes into the sea. It was standard practice on pre-life worlds, but tough on the Merieds. That was the reason O'Royle had never reported his find, twenty-five years ago. Now, it seemed, the secret was out. He saw the camp ahead, a cluster of pre-fab sheds perched on a knoll of rock above high-tide line. He settled in near a shed; a stocky man in khakis came forward. "I'm Brother Glad," the stranger said, holding out a square hand. "Surprised to see your flier. The others are away, out in the launch." O'Royle listened silently to the other's explanation of the purpose of the Survey Group. "I understand you have a halfbreed in your party," he said when the missionary paused. "I'd like to see him." Brother Glad looked surprised. "There is a lad of mixed blood with me, yes. How did you -- " "Where is he?" "What's your reason for asking?" "This boy -- he's from Terra? About nineteen years old?" Glad frowned. "And if he is?" "His name's Gon O'Royle. He's my son." Glad's face went rubbery; his mouth shaped itself around words as if trying them for size but finding none that fit. "I left the boy in school, back on Terra," O'Royle said. "Why did you bring him here?" Trother Glad made an effort to  reassemble his expression of stern good will. "He belongs here," he stated. "His destiny -- " "He belongs back on Terra, getting an education," O'Royle cut off the other's speech. Brother Glad's expression jelled over. "Gon is here doing what the Infinite shaped him for, what he was born for." O'Royle narrowed his eyes. "He was born," he said grimly, "because a young spacer met a woman in a lonely place, and they fell in love. As for his shape -- Gon's an intelligent boy, a fine scholar. He can lead a useful life -- " "A life of seclusion -- a scientist-monk, a misfit in a dead-end! He deserves a chance to live! Here, he can make a unique contribution. He'll play a role in the Great Plan -- " "Hogwash!" O'Royle cut in. "You're not going to use Gon as a pawn in your game, whatever it is! Now, do you tell me where he is, or do I have to start looking?" Brother Glad met O'Royle's eye. "You may be Gon's father, but he's of age. You've no claim on him now." "And you do?" "To do what?" "His people were disinherited -- denied the open land, the free air -- by the meddling of our ancestors! I intend to undo that wrong -- to bring these unfortunate stepchildren of the human race back to their own world! Gon can help!" v'Royle stared at the zealot. "Back to their own world? This is their world, damn you! They can't live out of water for more than a few hours!" "Perhaps -- but we needn't abandon them to such a fate! They've regressed since their ancestors were left here; they no longer farm; their domestic animals have returned to the wild. They've multiplied, but no start has been made on bringing life to the shore. The experiment, in other words, is a failure. Very well -- these people are doomed -- but their children deserve the right to rejoin their race, to live normal lives! They're innocent victims of unnatural tampering with the Infinite's plan! We owe it to them to give them back what they lost!" "Where does Gon come into all this?" "He's my ambassador to the Merieds. He'll go among them, bring the good news of their deliverance to them, lay the foundation for the program -- " "You sent him out there -- into the ocean?" "Of course. It's his natural eleIF men t. He can go among the Merieds as no norm -- ordinary man could do." "You fool I" O'Royle's voice was ragged. "Why do you think I took him to Terra in the first place?" "To be rid of him, I suppose!" O'Royle's fists were clenched, but he held his voice steady. "Gon looks like his mother -- externally. To normal Terries that makes him a freak, a side-show exhibit. But internally, it's different. He's only half Meried. His heart's not designed to pump under the pressure of more than fifty or a hundred feet of water. And the trace minerals in the water here are wrong; iodine and arsenic and lead can reach toxic levels in his cells in a matter of hours -- if he hasn't drowned by then, or been killed by the local sea-life I" "Wh -- why, Gon's been swimming every day since we arrived; he's suffered no ill effects -- " "He's been lucky." "The locals seem safe enough!" Brother Glad snapped. "They're used to it," O'Royle came back. "Gon isn't. He's led a sheltered life until now. How long has he been gone?" "Perhaps an hour, a little more. But, look here -- " "Did he have a set course, any communication link?" "No set course... he was to swim out a few miles, then cast about. I'm not in direct communication with him at all -- " "I'm going after him with scuba gear," O'Royle snapped. "Do you have a flitter you can take out to search the surface with?" "No -- nothing " "Then stand by on shore, in case he makes it back here." O'Royle turned to the door, giving the missionary a hard look. "If Gon dies," he said, "I'll be back to see you." IV G on saw the Meried at a depth of forty feet, two miles offshore. It was a slim female who appeared before him out of the darkness, her body glowing faintly to Gon's sea-eyes, slightly magnified by the lens effect of the watery medium. Gon halted, staring into the grotesque mask that peered wide-eyed at him. Then the seagirl's small mouth opened, emitted rasping speech resembling the squeaks and chirps of dolphin-talk. For a moment the young halfbreed was baffled; then he caught the rhythm of the Meried speech, which he had heretofore heard only on tapes in a sunny classroom on Terra. "You're the half-man; I've seen you playing in the surf." "I... I'm Gon O'Royle," the boy said. His voice, coming through the specially designed speaking mask that covered his mouth and IF nostrils, echoed and grated in his ears. The rehearsed speech he had memorized against this moment froze on his lips as the Meried swam closer, moving herself effortlessly with small flutterings of her fingers and toes, turning to look at Gon from all sides as she circled him, carrying a light spear gun in her hand. "You are like a sea-man and yet... not like," the stranger said. "What is that you hold in your teeth?" "I have to have it -- to breathe," Gon said. "Indeed? Still, you swim well -- for a dryman." "I'm no dryman!" Gon blurted, and paused, experiencing for the first time in his life a sense of shame at his land-dweller traits. "You're far afield," the Meried said. "We seldom swim these waters, The grampus lairs here. I came searching for a strayed swoat, never thinking to find a half-man instead!" The sea-girl's mouth puckered into an expression Gon recognized as a smile. "I want to talk to you," Gon said hurriedly. "I have news for you -- wonderful news. You haven't been forgotten -- " "I must go. Will you come with me?" the stranger cut in. "Many will want to see you, to welcome you. We hoped you'd venture out to us in time." "You've been... watching me?" "We're curious folk. We welcome any diversion." Gon hesitated, remembering Brother Glad's instructions: to deliver his speech, arrange a second meeting, then return. But it had been so long with no results. What if this creature swam off and never came back? He owed it to Brother Glad to cement relations now, while he had the chance... "Yes, I'd... I'd like to come." The Meried flashed her strange smile again, turned with the flexible grace of an eel and was gone into the murk. Gon paddled hurriedly after her. Half a minute later the Meried reappeared. "You must learn to use your strength in the water," she said. "Not to waste it in floundering." Swimming slightly ahead, she led the newcomer out across the edge of the continental shelf and down toward the lightless Deeps of the Continental Sea. U sing the wet-jet strapped to his back, and following the beam of his sea-light, O'Royle covered three miles in a quarter of an hour, alert for a signal from the locator on his wrist, set to resonate to a moving body of the mass of a man. Twice he picked up traces that led him into detours; the first time a great mollusk scuttled away at his approach; the second, a wild sea-dog approached, fangs bared in its seal-like snout. He drove it off with a beam of sound from his 'caster. He could have killed it as easily, but the scent of ma mmali an blood would have attracted a pack of its fellows. The Terran transplants had thrived on native fare, multiplied hugely in their adopted home; but their taste for red meat clung in instinct, even after three hundred years of sea-life. Now the offspring of strays and runaways had claimed huge volumes of the sea as their own, in competition with their former masters. O'Royle pictured Gon, alone and helpless, surrounded by sea-carnivores with the smell of Terran blood in their nostrils. Grimly, he swam on. It had been a long time since he had cruised here, in the purpleblack waters of Meries. Not since Gon's birth, in fact, and the death of Onide, his mother. And now -- so close to the day .when Gon would have been graduated, able to take a post with the University Foundation -- a meddling fanatic had come along to destroy the whole careful structure built up over two decades of hard labor. O'Royle switched trains of thought again, concentrated on his compass readings, heading outward toward the sea-dty where he had met and wooed a sea-woman once, long ago. lose behind his guide, Gon  threaded his way down, down, toward a faint, water-diffused glow spreading out below. Dark spires of rock swept past to left and right; the Meried woman turned and twisted, rounding craggy, weed-grown buttes, sailing under fragilely balanced arches, plunging downward at last into a near-vertical cavern mouth to emerge in an amphitheatre of terraced stone asparkle with pastel glows. Only then did Gon realize that he was in the ruins of one of the undersea cities built three centuries before for the sea colony. Suddenly, Meried faces were all about. A cacophony of alien voices called greeting, asked questions, made observations. "Back so soon, Seryl? And who's this with you?" "Mama -- why is he a funny color?" "Hello, young one. What's that across your mouth?" "Does he really sleep on the rocks?" A large, scar-faced sea-man with a tattered crest was before Gon, looking at him with eyes that seemed covered with a grayish film. "Who are you?" he demanded plaintively. "What are you?" "I'm Gon O'Royle," he said, and again his prepared speech deserted him. "I want to be your friend," he stammered. "I remember," the old man said. IF "Onide. She bore a son to the dryman. He took the infant away." "Yes -- you must be the son of Onidel" a woman said. "How like her he is -- and yet how strange he is." "So, so. Strange things happen as the world grows old." The aged Meried drifted away. Gon looked around bewildered at the slim, swift shapes gliding in and out of the rounded doorways -- or were they windows? -- that reminded him of the toy castles in fishbowls -- and of sunken ships, drowned sailors. Abruptly, the sea seemed to close in on him. He sucked air frantically through the mouthpiece, feeling terror rise in him. He struck out In what he thought was the direction of the passage through which he had entered, but found only a slimy barrier of volcanic stone. Seryl called, but he pushed his head, the thud of his heart, banging his head, bruising his hands as he scraped and fumbled, forcing his way through narrow passages that opened only into other pockets, ending in a dark cul de sac. He tried to orient himself, but the infallible sense that had always before told him in which direction to move seemed numbed, amputated. Even the phosphorescence was gone from the water. For an instant he thought that he was blind; then he caught the infinitely faint glow of his own skin. "Seryl #" he shouted, and almost lost the breather, choking as a jet of water sprayed past the mouthpiece. He doubled up in a paroxysm of coughing. He recovered -- weak trembling, with a pounding pain in his head -- to find himself in total darkness and total silence -- alone and utterly lost. V Tnside O'Royle's scuba suit the pressure and the cold were as oppressive as a filled grave. He wasn't as young as he had been when he had first swum here -- not by a lifetime. He realized quite suddenly that he might fail, might not find Gon might not even find the sea-city of the Merieds. But he had to find it. He knew its location; his compass would lead him there. And there he'd find his old friends and tell them what had happened, enlist their help He swam on, tiring, but driven by the mental image of Gon, alone and in danger, needing him. He was taken by surprise by the trio of sea-men that were suddenly around him. "Benoroyle!" a familiar voice came scratchily through his helmet. "Is it you indeed?" "Dreen -- thank God you're here I It's my son -- the half-man you told me about. I've got to find him!" The sea-men conferred. "The lad visited City," another Meried said. "But we sensed he was discomfited. So we left him alone, until he should feel more at ease. He soon departed, perhaps to meditate in solitude." "Departed? Where did he go?" "Who knows, Benoroyle? No one was so discourteous as to follow him." "You damned fool! Gon's no Meried! He'll drown! Why the devil didn't you help him?" O'Royle cut off his outburst with an effort. "I'm sorry, Dreen. Will you help me find the boy?" "As you wish, Benoroyle -- but the sea is wide, and filled with perils -- " "Don't treat me to any of your Meried philosophy now! Just find Gon before it's too late!" A lone in the labyrinth, Gon felt  a sudden swirl of deeper coldness around him. Something was moving nearby. He backed water, retreating into a niche in the rock. Then a familiar twittering voice spoke: "Gon -- where are you?" "Seryl!" The stab of relief that went through the boy was as sharp as physical pain. "Seryl! Get me out of here, back to the surface!" "Gon, you've hurt yourself! I sense blood in the water!" He felt her touch on his arm; seeing her face hovering before him, her immense eyes wide, he wondered how he had ever thought her ugly. "Please -- help me...!" He fought down the rising panic. The air in his throat seemed hot, stale. He was choking, drowning. He had to get out. He caught at Seryl's arm, but it slipped away. "Come -- This way!" she called. "I can't see you!" He choked on the words, struck out blindly, smashing face-first into sharpedged stone. Then her hand gripped his, tugging gently. "Poor halfman. You're blind; I didn't know. Come now, I'll lead you." It seemed to Gon that for an endless time they wormed their way through a serpentine route, up, down, twisting, turning, at times forcing their way along passages barely wide enough to pass, then swimming a few strokes until the way narrowed again. Attempting to squeeze through a vertical crevice, he stuck fast. The girl tugged at his hands, uselessly. "No good. I'll have to go back." He tried to retreat, found that he was wedged equally tightly against withdrawal. He attempted to turn his body, succeeded only in cutting his hide on the sharp edges of volcanic rock. "Gon -- careful!" Now there was anxiety in the girl's voice. "The sea-hunters roam herel If they scent blood... " He fought silently then, in blind IF panic. He was only dimly aware of the girl's voice calling to him, of her hands trying to hold his flailing arms. "Gon -- they're here!" Her cry cut through his panic. He went slack then, hung, half in, half out of the fissure, watching a thing likg an eight-foot otter or beaver, black and sinuous, armed with a tiger's jaws. It cruised past at a distance of ten feet, stroking with broad, seal-like flukes, studying him with wide, dark-glistening eyes. Gon recognized it as a mutated dog, a remote descendant of a retriever or herder brought from Terra centuries before, now grown large, wild and fierce, the ancient subservience of its kind to man forgotten. With sudden decision, it started in, jaws gaping. Seryl set the butt of her spear gun against her shoulder, followed the patrolling carnivore as it shot forward ancl fired. A plasticfeathered quarrel sprang out and sank to half its length in the side of the predator. Instantly, the creature whirled to bite at the shaft, fighting like a hooked tarpon; but as the smoky blood wafted from the wound in a widening veil, a second sea-dog closed; in a lightning snap it opened the dying animal's throat. Through water abruptly opaque with an ink-black stain, Gon caught glimpses of swiftdarting bodies that struck, and struck and struck... 'T'ime had passed. How long, Gon didn't know. But his air was running out. Where was Seryl? How long had he been trapped here? How long since Brother Glad had bade him farewell on the shore? A long time -- too long. His air was gone. Here he would gig -- The flash of teetE brought him from his state of shocked reverie; a creature half agaig as large as the sea-dog Seryl Sad killed had swept past him dose enough to buffet him where K lay, wedged in the rock -- a porpoise, once a mildmannered friend of man, here on Meries driven by the competition of competing mammals into the role of voracious killer, hungry for the flesh of warm-blooded seabeasts. The killer-porpoise turned, patrolling back past him. Beyond it Gon saw others of its kind, gliding like grim torpedoes in formation. In a moment one would turn on him; with one snap of those spikestudded jaws, it could take off his arm -- or his head. Better to drown than to be torn to pieces. He reached, found the quick-release latch, and slipped the tank harness. The mouthpiece was ripped away as, with a twist and a kick, he tore free from the harness, pushed away from the rock, and shot toward the surface a hundred and fifty feet above. 'T'he pain struck O'Royle with out warning, like a blow in the chest with a spiked club. He gave a single gasping grunt and doubled over, tumbling as the powerful water jets drove him erratically on. He managed to switch off power and hung, afloat now in a sea of agony wider than the Continental Ocean. Time passed -- how long, he had no idea. Slowly, he became aware that he was drifting, head-down, in black water. Fire still burned in his chest, but it was a bed of embers now, not a roaring blaze. He moved, mid pain lanced through his rib-cage. Slowly, awkwardly, like a crippled insect, he straightened his body, began to move slowly toward the mile-distant shore. Gon was still out there; but Dreen and the others would find him. He had done that much, anyway. Now the trick was to reach shore alive, to be there waiting when they brought the poor lad back. G on's lungs were bursting. How far above was the surface? He stroked, stroked, eyes bulging, jaws locked, chest straining. It had to be close now; only a little farther. His vision was blurring, shot through with red; his lungs ached, his tissues screamed their torture. Hold on, hold on -- Without his conscious volition, against every conscious instinct for self-preservation, his mouth opened, his lungs heaved convulsively. He felt the icy pressure in his throat, the burning pain as the sea water flooded his straining lungs -- and blackness flooded his mind. VRoyle did not suspect his er ror until the rush of inchlong crustaceans swirled around him like a flock of startled birds. Then they were gone -- and a vast gray-black body hurtled after them. "Sea-bull," O'Royle grunted. "Deep-sea critter. What's it doing this close to shore?" He glanced at his compass -- and then he saw. He had been holding steadily on course -- directly away from shore. By now he was five miles at sea, in the dreaded Deep, where the big hunters roamed, looking for red meat. VI on floated in a pink mist of pleasure, wafted from cloud to sunset cloud on a perfumed breeze. At his whim, he sailed effortlessly across the pillow-soft sky, drifted with the gentle tides of air, plunged downward in a dizzying swoop, soared upward again, faster than thought... "It's the dream again," he thought. "The dream of flying. But this time it's real. I can fly. I always knew I could, if I could just remember the trick..." He flew on, savoring the total freedom of the spirit and body that expressed itself in soaring high above all mundane cares. Brother dad, Cruthers, the others, seemed remote, unreal. There had been a thing he had worried about; what was it? It seemed so far away now, so unimportant. Something about a role he had to play in the Plan of the Infinite. Gon almost laughed aloud at the innocence of the conception: that the power that had evoked galaxies from nothingness should require the intervention of a bor to bring about its purposes... Brother Glad had wanted him to go to Meries, the water-world where he had been born, where his mother had died in the birthing; to go down again to the sea, seek out his kin, begin a movement to bring them back to Terra. Back to Terra! This time Gon laughed, surrendering himself to the inexpressible grotesquerie of the idea. Back to Terra -- to live in goldfish bowls, and flatten their noses against the glass, begging the aquarium visitors for crumbs of fishfood? Or to waddle about the dry, dusty streets of the cities, wearing water-filled helmets? Or perhaps to swim glumly about the polluted Earthly seas, on the alert for the mile-wide pelagic harvesting craft. Once caught in their water-sweeps, they'd windup as organic fertilizer for hydroponic farms! Gon blinked the tears of hilarity from his eyes -- and as he did, he became aware suddenly of a coldness and a pressure against his ribs. He moved to relieve the discomfort and felt a sense of vertigo that made him flail out with both hands to bring himself upright. Smoky, gray-brown opacity swirled before him. He waved it away, was looking out across a rolling expanse of dun-colored hills, densely grown with tall, willowy plants that waved in the light but irrestible wind-like images reflected in the surface of a pool. The light that shone from the green-black sky seemed to waver, rippling through minutely discernible changes of intensity. It was a weirdly alien landscape -- and yet, in some indefinable way, a comfortable one. But -- where was he? He now remembered Brother Glad's invitation to accompany him, the preparations for the trip, the long, eventless weeks in space... And the landing on the deserted shore... and the building of the camp... The rolling, phosphorescent sea. Himself wading into the cold, alien surf, Brother Glad urging him on; his first swim, the let-down as no Meried came swarming to meet him, the discouragement, the suicidal thoughts. The one, last try that he had privately promised himself to make, after which -- IF A fter? What had happened? Had he been successful or... ? He remembered a face, narrowbluish-green, wide-eyed, pursemouthed, sleek. Seryl. He had met her, and -- With a convulsive movement, Gon fought to tear free of the remembered trap -- and drifted effortlessly forward across the waving grass-plain beneath him. Vm flying , the thought crashed into his mind. But that was a dream . But l  m not dreaming now; Vm awake -- and still Vm flying . He moved his hands and at once his body responded, angling up and to the left, drifting as lightly as a gasfilled balloon. Drifting. But not like a balloon; like a fish in water. Not flying, swimming. Not breathing air... but water. Gon drew a deep breath, felt the healing coolness flow in, flow out again. He was breathing under the sea. He had lost his mask and mouthpiece, and he was still alive. Lost in the wonder of the miracle, he drifted with the swift current toward the deep sea. Consciousness was a light pow ered by a failing battery. As his awareness flickered dimly alight again, O'Royle knew that it was hopeless, that he would never reach the distant shore. He throttled back the wet-jet with a motion that sent new pangs stabbing through his chest, and hung motionless, his body a broken vessel filled with pain. Pressure waves beat against him; a thing vast as a whale loomed out of dimness, tossing him like a chip in its wake. O'Royle saw the great scarred flank slide past him at a distance of less than three yards, saw the strokes of the mighty flippers that could crush a man with a careless flick, unaware of his presence. But this monster was aware, he realized as it turned and made a second pass at even closer range. This time he saw the coiled proboscis, the narwhale-Iike tusks, the spined ears, the great swell of the crested shoulders as the grampus -- a mutated Indian elephant -- swam straight at him. O'Royle half expected to see the jaws gape to snap him up, but at the last moment, the behemoth rolled, showing a flash of the shark-like teeth studding the wide mouth, modified for flesh eating, not by man, but by natural mutation, here in the adopted environment of Meries. The giant meat-eater was confused by the sterile scent of the protective suit, O'Royle knew; but in another moment, satisfied of his harmlessness, its appetite would assert itself. The next pass would be the last. He watched it move away, turn with a lazy flick of its modified limbs, hover, measuring him for the kfll. He saw the trunk go up, the jaws open. As helpless as a newborn infant, he waited for the final charge.   ty of sea-men to the place where she had left Gon trapped, the sea-wolves were still patrolling there; but of the half-man there was no sign. "They've taken him," Dreen said. "We're too late." "No -- I smell no blood in the water -- only a trace from his earlier wounds," Seryl retorted. "He must have freed himself." "Look -- his breathing apparatus," another Meried called, retrieving the tank and attached mouthpiece from the sea floor a few yards below. "Without this, can he live?" Seryl uttered a choked cry. "Poor half-man! He wished so much to live..." "We must find his body," Dreen said. "There's a vicious current here; by now the corpse will be far away -- if the carrion beasts have spared it," a man said. "Why venture into dangerous waters on a futile quest?" another questioned. "You needn't come; but I must try, for the sake of my friend, whom I failed." Dreen swam away, Seryl beside him. The others hesitated, then followed. 'T'he sea-man hailed Gon from a I distance, calling in the strange, penetrating under-sea voice of his kind:" "Sheer off! A hunting grampus near! " Gon hesitated, confused by the warning and filled with an urgent desire to talk. "No time to waste," the stranger called. "It's occupied for the moment with easier prey; a dryman, poor fool, weighted in his trappings like a mud-castler!" "A dryman?" Gon queried; but the other was gone in the murk. A land-dweller, about to be killed by a sea-hunter? Could k be Brother Glad looking for him? But the missionary owned no scuba gear -- and no one else in the party would have reason to come here. Cautiously, Gon advanced. A pair of sea-men flashed past him at the edge of visibility. He went on and saw a group of Merieds hovering in the water ahead. As he swam up to them, one, a small, slender female, turned -- "Gon!" Seryl called sharply, coming toward him. Beyond her, Gon saw through an obscuring haze of roiled silt a shape as big as a twenty-man copter, gray-black, horny-hided, massive; flippers bigger than a man's body stroked #  IF restlessly, holding its position. "You're alive -- arid -- " Seryl broke off as Gon swept past her, his eyes on the man-shape drifting in the water ahead. A dryman, as the Meried had said, bulky in a vermilion-dyed dry-suit with a bubble helmet, through which the features of a square, lined face, whitehaired, blue-eyed, were visible. The face of Captain Ben O'Royle. "Father!" Gon shouted. At his cry, the Merieds whirled; the giant sea-thing gave an ill-tempered thrust of its flukes, turning ponderously to face the new disturbance. A big sea-man came toward Gon as if to intercept him, but he veered aside from the out-stretched hand, shot to O'Royle's side. "Father! Run! Quick!" Gon grabbed at the older man's arm, only then saw that his face was slack, his eyes half-shut. Gon whirled to the sea-men, ignoring the hovering mass of the sea-elephant, which had swung again to face him. "Help me! He's sick!" "Gon! Beware! He'll charge!" Seryl called. She darted forward, raised her tiny spear-thrower, fired from the hip, once, twice, three times full into the monster's face. Gon felt the tiny shocks, saw the darts leap to imbed themselves in the expanse of horny hide above the back-curled trunk as the seaelephant, head lowered and tusks foremost, rushed at him. XT' or a frozen instant, time seem ed to stand still. Gon hung motionless, peripherally aware of the staring eyes of the helpless seamen in the background, of the unconscious, suited man beside him, of the curious translucence of the water, of the thumping of his heart, watching the bulk of the leviathan grow as it hurtled straight at him. Then, at the last possible instant, he moved aside -- not a wild leap for safety, but a calculated sidestep, just sufficient to avoid the forward-lunging tusk of the monster. Instantly, Gon was in behind the spined ear, and with a powerful thrust of his legs, astride the horny back, grasping the umbrellaribbed dorsal fin, flattening himself to the curve of the great beast's shoulders. The grampus fought. It plunged, rolled, flailed backward with its trunk. The blows, impeded by the density of the medium, thudded across Gon's shoulders like strokes with a canvas hose. He pressed himself closer, digging his fingers into the tender membranes at the base of the back-flattened ears, his knees locked along the main rib of the fin. Over and over the grampus rolled; once it slammed the mucky bottom, and for a moment Gon was immersed in murky ooze; but he held his breath, and a moment later his mighty mount was streaking forward at a speed that sent water sluicing back around the clinging rider like the backwash of a torpedo. As the animal's course veered left, Gon twisted at the tender tissues of the left ear; the grampus angled back to the right. Gon hung on grimly, saw the color of the water changing, lightening. Abruptly, the sea-elephant broke water with a Niagara-like smash of surf; it crashed back then, splashing and hissing, to surge ahead another hundred yards. Then it was humping itself through the shallows like a monster walrus, spewing water from its trunk and mouth. Air was like fire in Gon's lungs as he ejected the water from them. Coughing, he clung, waiting for the blow that would smash him flat; but panicked, the sea-elephant had forgotten the weapons of its trunk and its bulk. It could have plucked him free, trampled him, rolled on him. Instead, it floundered up the beach, bellowing and snorting. Gon blinked away the film of water from his eyes and saw the survey camp a few hundred yards off to the left. He saw men running out and heard their shouts. Brother Glad appeared, rifle in hand. As Gon raised himself to shout a warning, the creature changed course abruptly, hurling itself toward the sounds. Gon's knees slipped from their grip; the grampus skidded to a halt, lowered its head, and tossed. Gon felt himself going up and over, then falling, to slam against the gravelly sand with a stunning impact. Above him the big bull lowered its head, lunged. The needletipped ivories gouged into the sand on either side of Gon; the horny hide of the immense head rasped him, bumping him as the beast strove to gore him, but was fended off by its own tusks. There was a sharp car-rong as a heavy rifle fired nearby. The monster grunted and keeled forward; its weight came crushingly on Gon. The sky went dark, and far away voices shouted through the failing fight. B rother Glad sat smiling at him. Beside him, his father, pale but recovered, smiled too. "They told me what you did, Gon," he said. "You saved my life; but more than that, you taught them something." "It was a stroke of genius to think of driving the beast on shore," Brother Glad said. "The Merieds never dreamed of such a thing." "Too bad... you killed it," Gon gasped. There was pain in his chest, in his arms, in every bone of his body. "They... could be tamed... used..." "It's not dead, just drugged," the missionary said. "Our fellows helped the sea-men to winch it back into the water. When it wakes it will be in harness." His smile widIF ened. "They have great plans for capturing more in the same way." "Gon, the doctor examined you," O'Royle said. "You have a few broken ribs, but you'll be all right. But the curious thing is -- water respiration seems to have had the effect of metamorphosizing your metabolism. Your reflex times, muscular tone -- everything -- has become almost double the Terran norm -- or the Meried norm, for that matter." "It seems to be just what Captain O'Royle called it -- a metamorphosis," Brother Glad said. "It seems that a Terran-Meried hybrid has to spend his infancy on dry land," Gon's father said. "But as an adult, he becomes a true amphibian, breathing water or air equally well." "Mr. Cruthers wants to offer you a job," Brother Glad said. "As a liaison man with the Merieds. Your father and I, between us, have convinced him that the Meried trade is worth developing." "You'll be more than a liaison man," O'Royle put in. "You're a hero to the sea-men -- and to a seagirl named Seryl. They want you as their official ambassador. They've offered to build you a palace, half on land, half under water, and to stock it with the rarest delicacies of the ocean -- including a girl named Seryl." There was more; Gon listened, his thoughts afloat on a sea of pleasing fancy to rival the green ocean he had at last discovered. I came here as a man without a world," he said when the others fell silent at last. "Now I have Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert I The City That Was the World by James Bllsh The Kinsolving's Planet Irregulars by A. Bertram Chandler IF  Short Stor i I Only one could survive the Games! them, I watched the tall, endless Finally we arrived at the Telebuildings rush past the police Games Court, a large white buildground-car. They were glassy ing that reached upward to disapstructures, colored in rainbow pear into the night sky. The officer brightness, slipping by one after who had presented me with the ofanother. The people walked the ficial papers now ushered me out night-streets and moved into neof the car, up the steps into the oned clubs happily, as on every building. night of their lives, unaware of the The walk through the Courthard fact that they could be snaphouse was a flashing series of dark ped away to the Tele-Games, withimpressions that disappeared alout even a moment to say good-by most immediately. I was pushed to their loved ones. into a small courtroom, invisible I, Charles David Travers, a death hanging from its clean white peace-loving Citizen of the #nd walls. Century, had been arrested for The gray-faced judge stared some unnamed crime, to appear in down at me as if made of cold steel, the Tele-Games of March #th, " Charles David Travers, for # # Judgment sir," my escort announced like a robot. "Case #-# #, of Los Angeles Major, California." The judge looked at me. He said, "You are brought before the High Court for treason against the State. How do you plead?" Every muscle knotted in disbelief. "Fve done nothing. This is a farce. You have the wrong man." The judge asked, "You are Charles David Travers, son of David Jay Travers and Joan Marianne Travers? You have a mistress by the name of Julie Thorson? You work at the International Message Service as a file clerk, Code-#B? You are a collector of old books, adventure novels, and are in the habit of spending hours in libraries and in your one-room bachelor apartment reading? You are the Charles David Travers, who wrote an article in college defending the concept of the Tele-Games as a logical means of controlling the world population and relieving our civilization of criminals, of giving the Citizens the kind of violent entertainment they so highly desire? An article which had its tongue-incheek subtle double-meaning -- obvious, now in light of what we have learned about your true activities." "Yes, but -- " "Then there is no mistake," the judge announced with finality. "You have been the companion of Julie Thorson for the last six , months, working with her in an attempt to overthrow the government. You are guilty of first-degree treason. Miss Thorson has confessed." "It's a lie!" I shouted. "Silence! You will appear before the National Tele-Games of March #th as a Man-at-Arms to do battle to the death. In the event you should be the sole survivor, you will be freed, never again to be sentenced to the Tele-Games. So is the fair judgment of the State's Justice." Dazed, I followed the guard out of the courtroom and down a series of corridors. He stopped before two large iron doors and presented an identification card to the guard there, who allowed him to lead me into the inner chambers of the Central Los Angeles prison. I was led to a narrow door marked #. The guard ordered me into the cell with a wave of his arm. The door closed behind me like the clanging of some morbid trap. It was a voice that cut into my agony. It was filled with a mixture of surprise and pained horror. "Charlie!" All the emotions rushed up in a flood, choking all senses like invisible fingers blotting out sanity. Whipping around, I saw the tall woman who had been my mistress these last months. But I couldn't equate this beautiful creature with the one with whom I'd shared silent walks through building-top parks or companionable evenings in my apartment or simply dancing gracefully in the dim night-clubs, chatting happily over a dinner and cocktails. This couldn't be that same woman I Madness clutched at my brain. There stood the creature that had placed me here. Through the emotion of wild fury I looked at her voluptuous body, draped in a green glowing cloth that wound around her slim waist and angular hips above firm thighs, dropping like silken waves about every beautiful and loving curve of her body. She didn't seem real, standing there in the drab coldness of the cell, her arms stretched out in offering. Sanity snapped like a thread. "You lying tramp!" I yelled, leaping. My hands gripped her silken white throat; my fingers squeezed the air back into her lungs, trapping it there. Maybe it was the look of surprised horror in her large brown eyes that jolted sanity back into my shocked brain. My hands lowered as I slowly stepped back. "Those lies... I've never done anything against the State." She clutched at her throat, gasping for air, and finally said, "Charles... believe me -- I didn't tell them anything  So help me God!" "Then why?" I managed, confusion defeating all hatred. "Why do they have the Games? Why is a person sent to his death for voicing, objection against the State? Or getting drunk in public, or being late paying his bills? There doesn't have to be any logical reason!" she blurted. "But they had to have some reason!" "You were my companion. Oh, Charlie, believe me, I'd do anything to get you out of this!" Her eyes pleaded with me to forgive her. They blurred with moisture and then closed, tears running down her creamy cheeks. How could I hate her? She had been created for love. And I knew she returned my love. Looking at her I felt a flood of overwhelming emotion. Helplessly I folded an arm about her waist, gently raised her chin until our eyes met. And as I looked at her, reality slipped away to become a fantasy of love. "Oh, Charlie, thank God!" she breathed. "I was afraid you wouldn't understand! Or forgive." After that the insanity of need overwhelmed all other considerations. There was only my sensations and Julie's form. Some time later I was aware of Julie moving from me. I sat up and asked, "How'd they pick you up? Why?" She shook her head. "They brought me to the Games Judge and announced that I was guilty of treasons against the State, senIP tenced me to the Arena and brought me here. The next thing I knew you were in the cell. That's the whole truth, Charlie." She shrugged. "We're living in the most terrible Police State mankind ever devised. In our grandparents' day it was different." I merely nodded, aware she spoke the truth. Yesterday I would have refused to believe. My own grandfather had told me that in his youth there were television shows of violence, but they were plays written by fiction writers, performed by professional actors. Violence was the keynote. Then sporting events became more popular than drama, because of the real violence. It was a logical step to take hardened criminals, already condemned to die, and let them fight to the death for the home audience. Freeing the winner always promised a more exciting battle. With universal peace, an overcrowded world, unemployment and depression, the development of the Tele-Games became a natural evolution. Now it was an international institution that fed the greedy public with the bloodviolence it so craved. People were killed. But they were other people! That made the difference. It might have been only a couple of hours or a day before two uniformed guards stepped into the cell and ordered me out. I was taken into a small room where several rows of chairs were facing a blank wall. As I sat, the guards flanking me, the door opened and five grim-looking officers stepped in; four seated themselves directly behind us and the fifth, a Major, stood in front of me. "You, Charles Travers, have one way to lower the sentence against you. Placing you with Miss Thorson was a waste of time; therefore, we will show you part of the recording of her interview." He then sat. The room darkened and the wall glowed into shimmering blue life. To all appearances, it disappeared to reveal another room beyond; in reality, it was one of those huge Tri-D screens. The major was standing in front of Julie on the screen. "You've been seeing Travers for months. What is his connection with the underground movement?" "I can't tell you." "Miss Thorson, you don't seem to realize your position." "I'm fully aware," she spat out. "We don't give information about our activities." The major nodded to one of his companions who held a small steel box. "This will give the information we want." Julie's eyes flashed toward the box and then jerked back to the officer. Her shoulders sagged as she announced in a cold voice: "Charles Travers is my contact. He got me into this. I don't know anything else." The screen went dead and the lights snapped on. The real major stepped in front of me. "The rest of the information's classified. We used the Brain-box to check it out. There's no reason for you to deny connection with the Underground Nationalist Movement." Sweat broke out over my body. No matter what I claimed, they wouldn't believe me. The major said, "Just tell us who your contacts are." I shook my head. "I don't know what you're talking about. She was lying." The major nodded an done of his assistants stepped forward with a Brain-box. I looked at the mental probe and then shrugged, remaining silent. One of the men damped a small band on my forehead. The man holding the box pressed a button and reality blacked out... Then the room snapped back into place. I blinked and looked at the major. It seemed as if a great, terrible pressure had been lifted. The major frowned, grimacing in puzzlement. "It would seem Miss Thorson lied -- or one of you has been conditioned." A gnawing cut at my stomach. "How could I afford conditioning? Only the Government has the machinery for that!" I stood, rage tensing every muscle. "There are ways. If you are a member of the underground, there would be ways." The major laughed. "But it makes no difference. You have been sentenced -- even if wrongly -- and it will be carried out." Violence snapped sanity as he turned. I leaped, grabbing his flabby throat. A great feeling of power came over me as I gazed into his reddening features; his eyes were popping out and his tongue was convulsively struggling for air. Then I felt the other men clawing at my arms and body. Something hit the back of my head, but I didn't release the major's neck until another hard object slammed once more at the base of my skull. I had awakened in the blackness of a cell hours before, unable to see anything. It was a small place with little room for my six feet to stretch out. There wasn't any bed or covers, just hard steel to sleep on. Time passed slowly; then guards came to take me to a huge chamber packed with over a thousand people, locked behind large barred doors. I was standing there for some time before a gentle hand touched my shoulder. I turned to see Julie. Her face was white and drawn, her lips thin, pale trembling lines. "I... had to lie," she stammered. "The cell was tapped." I tried to feel the hate that should be inside me, but it wouldn't IF come, jno emotion at au aiiected me, "There's nothing we can do about it." "I have to make you understand what you're dying for." She hesitated, then pulled me aside, away from the guards. "I was arrested trying to make contact with a man. I had to lie to save him. He's very important." "What's his name?" She shook her head sadly. "I can't tell you. You might use the name to save yourself." T started to argue the point, then shrugged. No matter what, I'd be sent into the Arena -- to my death. The chances of survival were reduced to zero. Yet there was still hope as long as I lived. I found myself reviewing all the major combats I'd witnessed in the National Events. They were Woody battles between inexperienced citizens armed with clubs, rapiers, broadswords and spears. No modern-day weapons were allowed for fear they might be used against the guards or the cameramen who were lodged just above the fighting area. The Arena was surrounded by an army of Games Police with weapons that could cut down every occupant of the Arena at a moment's notice. I'd seen, in viewing countless Games, that many people stood frozen in fear, letting themselves be killed. Others, more realistic, would keep outside the range of the battle until it narrowed down to a lew combatants. This I hoped to do. After that, if I survived, I'd try to join the underground movement. But it was useless to tell Julie that; she wouldn't believe me. The two of us stood together, holding hands. Finally we were ordered out through a corridor in single file, to another larger room lined with armed Games Police. There we were handed primitive weapons for the Event. I was given a small short sword, like the ones the Romans had used in battle. It was light and made of strong steel -- unlike Roman weapons. It was the thought of personal survival on which I focused as we were herded like a mass of dumb animals into the confines of the Arena. At that point something unexpected happened to me, like a cutting off of all sensation. It was a sharp mental shifting, a release from fear, as if a switch had been pulled, disconnecting emotion. I looked at Julie, letting my eyes run along her flesh, but felt nothing. It was as if I had suddenly become a zombie, without any desire other than the want to kill. I automatically swung the short sword in the air in front of me. My huge arms flexed as I stood there in the middle of the Arena, surrounded by fellow citizens, awaiting the command to kill. Then it came. A loud blast of horns. My sword swung Into the skull of a man standing next to me. I didn't wait to let others defend themselves. The short sword moved, cutting into arms, chests, heads and necks, creating a bloody passage of death until a mass of bodies were cluttering my passage. Then I was facing a tall man carrying a huge broadsword. He swung the weapon right at my head. Ducking to one side, I whipped the point of my blade toward his chest; it cut lightly into the flesh, drawing a thin line oi red. He swung again, a slicing blow at my stomach. With speed and skill I shouldn't have possessed, I leaped in close and rammed the short sword deep into his gut, twisting with sadistic delight. Withdrawing my sword, I turned and dropped the edge of the bloody blade into a woman's skull. The weapon wrenched from my hand locked in the bony tissue of her head. Turning, I picked up the broadsword from my fallen male antagonist of a moment before and swung it in a circle through the neck of one man and across the chest of a woman whose body sliced open, the insides bursting out like a bloody fountain. I made a path of dead bodies before me, like cutting wheat in the fields; then I spotted Julie holding a Scottish broadsword and making a path of death much like my own, without any emotion on her face. There wasn't time to marvel at Julie's unnatural skill; she should have died in the first moments. It's amazing how fast a couple of thousand people will die when all are enemies of each other. It seemed but minutes before less than a dozen people still lived and I found myself without an opponent. My eyes searched the Arena. I spotted Julie still alive, cutting down a tall muscular man with one swing of her blade. She looked savagely magnificent standing there, the broadsword clutched in her hands, long hair hanging loose and flying as she turned to make another kill. But now there was none other than myself. It seemed strangely ironic, even fantastic, that it should have ended this way. She rushed at me calmly, a primitive, mindless killer. Her blade swung at my right arm, but merely cut the outer layer of flesh. It was enough to make me accept real danger. Her light sword, built for fast movement, might easily prove superior to my heavy weapon. Instinct snapped my broadsword toward her head. It would be over quickly. At least she would die without much pain, I told myself. But her sword met my blade with superhuman strength. Then IF the point jerked out and flicked at my chest, just missing. Our eyes met at that moment, but there was only a black expression on her face. In the next minutes we exchanged blows which must have given the Tele-Games' viewers the greatest excitement in their lives. We weren't two amateurs battling to the death; we were expert fighters. Where either of us had learned our skill was impossible even to guess. How could I have known the truth? I moved with all the sweeping speed in my muscles, attempting to put a quick end to the duel. It was as if some Fate had made us almost perfectly matched. Each was skilled to perfection; each was seeking the death of a former lover. Then she suddenly leaped forward, the point of her sword reaching for my chest. I side-stepped, using every muscle in my body. At the same time my sword moved in an arc toward Julie's middle. She had been caught off balance, unable to check the forward movement. My blade sliced cleanly across her mid-section. Oddly I felt nothing but relief. It was over. I'd survived. Then I noticed something so alarming that I couldn't believe it at first. Where Julie's body was cut open appeared an odd, twisted mass of wires, circuits and plastic flesh. Without thinking, without wanting to guess what this implied, I collapsed over he rform as if exhausted. My hands turned her body so that the gaping hole was hidden from view. How much this explained! I stood and walked to the Freedom Door, the cameras following my every action. As I stepped from the Arena, I was surrounded by international reporters, eager with questions that I answered until a small dark man stepped up. He said, "Come, follow me." His attitude was so much that I an Official of the Games that I followed automatically. He carried a pass that let us through the guarded corridors and out into the streets of Los Angeles. He indicated a car parked in front of the building and we got in. As we pulled away from the curb and sped hurriedly down the street, I demanded in alarm, "Where are you taking me?" "I'm Julie Thorson's contact," was his answer. "All will he ex- plained shortly." "But Julie was -- " "An android?" He smiled in a strange, almost sad manner. "Everything will be explained." We drove in silence through the streets for half an hour before stopping at a small building in the outskirts of the city. He escorted me into the house and I found myself in a living room filled with people. Afl stood and turned, looking at me. What I saw then scared me far more than anything I'd experienced in the last days. There, standing before me, was Julie Thorson, quite alive and beautiful! I started to take a step forward when a man beside her turned and began to speak. I stood there, stunned. "Von see, Charlie," he said, "we secretly developed perfect androids; we gave them truthful memory backgrounds up to a point and then added a fictional background to bide information that we couldn't let the authorities know about. We had to find out how perfectly they had been made, to see if it were possible to fool the Government Officials. Of course nobody, outside of those in this room, knows about our discovery. And nobody would even imagine such a thing if the evidence were put before his eyes." He paused, smiling sadly, then continued, "You see how valuable this will be in our efforts to overthrow the now existing governments and end the Tele-Games. Agents who have inhuman strength and ability, programmed to know nothing other than the 'instinctive' missions given them. The Brainboxes will reveal nothing. We even had to give our androids sexual drives and a sense of synthetic excitement; the absence of such small things might prove a give-away. That explains why you were able to enjoy a seemingly normal sensual relation with... your Julie Thorson. The experiment worked out perfectly. We couldn't have wished for more." I stood there dazed, shocked into believing what I saw and heard. It all fit perfectly together. "What about me, now?" was my only question. "After you have taped a full report you will be re-programmed," said the real Charles David Travers. S... Will be back in the fall.  # Watch for it on your newsstands.  # IF IF  Feature Oometimes it seems that there's  nothing new under any sun. The first great hyperspace ship from Earth breaks into normal space around Tau Ceti and begins running on , normal drive toward the nearest planet. Then the navigator gasps and shouts to the pilot: "Alien ships coming up fast, sir!" And sure enough, there they are on the screen, operating on the same normal space drive as our explorer. But don't worry; they haven't yet found the hyperdrive, discovered three years before on Terra, and our brave Solarians can easily outmaneuvered them. Or maybe everything looks fine, and there aren't any ships. In fact, our explorers set down near a convenient village of thatched huts and wait for the local chief to emerge, complete with witch doctor and a suitable primitive language. Whatever other ideas are to be found in a great many sciencefiction stories, we can begin jrith convenient intelligent aliens whose culture ranges from that we had a scant ten thousand years ago to what we might turn up in the next century or so. More conservative writers may skip the intelligent aliens, but most planets still have native life, much of it vaguely mammalian and often hostile. axy with life of every sort is an ancient tradition of our literature, dating back to its very beginning in the magazines. It probably derived from the early popular acceptance of the idea that Mars must have intelligent life to account for the so-called canals. When writers got tired of the limits of the Solar System, they naturally carried their plots filled with alien contacts to the stars. At the time, this all seemed hopelessly unscientific, and several scientists wrote some rather snide comments on science-fictional beliefs in the miraculous existence of life all over the universe. Men had once believed that life could arise spontaneously, but science had learned better. Long before, the Abb# Spallanzani proved that many-celled life could only grow from a seed or an egg; and later, Louis Pasteur showed that even one-celled life could not arise from non-living substances. Hence, life was an inexplicable miracle. We had to accept the fact that it had happened once, since we were here; but logic denied any wholesale sowing of miracles and made us unique in being alive. Of course, Svante Arrhenius had suggested that life might be spread from world to world by spores that could Stand even the conditions of space. Bat that didn't help much, though a number of writers used the theory of justification for their aliens. An examination of the rate at which such spores could be spread from star to star by light pressure made the wide dissemination of such life almost as much of a miracle as spontaneous generation on every world would be. 'T'he first crack in the uniqueness of our existence came in # when a Russian biochemist A. I. Oparin published a theory on the origin of life on Earth. So far as I can remember, few stories mentioned this; and even in scientific circles it caused less comment than it deserved. But it should have served as a perfect justification for our desire to have an inexhaustible supply of aliens, bugeyed or not. Oparin's theory not only explained how life could come about here, but made such life almost inevitable in the development of any Earth-like planet. It was based upon the best scientific picture of what our early atmosphere must have been like before life arose. Such an atmosphere could not contain free oxygen. That gas is far too corrosive to stay uncombined. Without plants to break down carbon dioxide gas and free the oxygen, all of the oxygen in the air would unite with other elements in about # years, leaving none for animals to breathe. Earth's early atmosphere must have resembled the gases in the deep ocean of air around Jupiter. There would be methane, a simple compound of carbon and hydrogen, and ammonia gas -- a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. There might have been some free hydrogen, as well as water vapor, a little carbon dioxide and traces of some IF sulfur compounds. It was a noxious mixture, in other words. Oparin reasoned that the action of lightning bolts striking through such a mixture of gases would cause more complicated compounds to form, among which would be the amino acids that are the basis of all living protoplasm. By #, this became more than a mere theory. Dr. Hermann J. Muller -- under the direction of Dr. Harold C. Urey -- demonstrated it at the University of Chicago. A mixture of such gases was put in a flask and treated with electric current from a carbon arc. The resulting compounds were collected in water and analyzed. To the amazement of those conducting the experiment, there was a very high yield of amino acids In fact, there was even some discussion of using the process for commercial preparation of the acids. The water turned into a pink "soup." And not only were the amino acids present, but it turned out they were present in about the same percentages relative to each other as they were in living tissues. Then it was found that the action of ultraviolet light could cause the process to occur without the need of the electric spark. Given the conditions that scientists are sure must have existed on Earth perhaps three-and-a-half billion years ago, there had to be an enormous production of the basic materials from which life is made. Such substances are quickly detroyed in an oxygen atmosphere; but since there was then almost no free oxygen, they were stable and would continue to accumulate. The shallow seas of that ancient Earth must have been very literally a rich broth. There was no ozone layer (since ozone is a form of free oxygen, having three, atoms per molecule instead of the normal two), and hence no screen to hold back the full ultraviolet radiation of the sun. Earth was one enormous chemical factory turning out amino acids. O parin had no idea of how rich the production must have been. He had theorized that even a few such compounds might combine into a sort of primitive protein if given enough time. But the results of the experiments indicate that there was such a huge amount of amino acids that the combining into more complicated forms must have occurred over and over again. There may very well not have been a single initial life-form, but many similar ones. The shakiest part of the whole thing lay in the need to get those separate amino acids to combine into sufficiently large and complex a molecule. But later experiments indicated that even this problem was not a real one. When collected into a broth under conditions that prevailed in those ancient times, the # different amino acids that form life showed a natural tendency to attach themselves together in long chains. The giant molecules that are necessary to life arise automatically. The only problem would be to prevent them from doing so. By now we know that it is almost impossible to draw a sharp line between life and non-life. The tobacco mosaic virus can exist as a pure crystal, seemingly no different from many other non-living crystals; yet on the tobacco plant it becomes an active virus that shows every characteristic of life. In between it and a one-celled plant or an amoeba there is an almost continuous spectrum. Life apparently didn't suddenly appear; it evolved. Some combinations of amino acids had a greater tendency than others to add more budding blocks onto themselves; semfe of these grew too big and unwieldy and split; and some of these split (reproduced) into two equal parts (hat carried on this greater efficiency. Accidental changes -- mutations -- are frequent in simple organisms, and such changes produced even more efficient forms. For eons, perhaps, the sea broth offered all the nutriment necessary, together with the new "food" that must have been dropping froqi the atmosphere as creation went on. Then some cell added a trace of magnesium from the sea water by some Occident to produce chlorophyl. This first plant began to change the atmosphere by releasing free oxygen. This, of course, put an end to the spontaneous generation of life by upsetting the conditions that had made it possible -- and also destroyed most of the evidence. So far, science has not created life from the raw elements directly. But every essential step has been tried and proved. We know that the only miracle involved in the start of life is to be found in the normal laws of chemistry. We also know now that life must be as common in the universe as science fiction has always assumed. Our current theories and such evidence as we have indicate that most stars somewhat similar to our sun have planetary systems and that each such system should have at least one planet suitable for the creation of life. There is a very good chance that we will find living creatures -- and even oxygen atmospheres suitable for our habitation -- around most of the stars we will explore in interstellar ships. I ntelligence is another matter. The technically advanced enemies or the friendly savages so useful to our story plots are only slightly less improbable today than they were forty years ago. Time is the enemy of our desires in this case. Life began on IF of the planet's existence and has more years by now; there's a good chance that it will be another five too hot and unstable for such life to continue. That means that life will have been on Earth during #  of its existence as a planet. The first vertebrate creature -- some early form of fish -- appeared The first warm-blooded animal may years. And the earliest form of man that we could consider even remotely human dates from perhaps wouldn't consider him much, probably, even beside the most primitive human being our history shows. Stars come in all ages. Some are just forming now and building their planets with them. Others are almost at the end of their hydrogenfusion cycle, after which no habitable planets will exist. And the factors producing intelligence are so complex that we can't possibly guess the time needed for another race. Intelligence occupies such a tiny and uncertain period in history that the chance of finding it elsewhere is almost nonexistent. Of course, we can hope that intelligence, once reached, will continue forever. The evidence isn't favorable; the bigness of the dinosaur and the striking power of the sabertooth vanished before advances none could have foreseen. But maybe intelligence is the ultimate goal of life. Certainly, however, it will not be static. Evolution seems to go faster as we rise higher, rather than haltyears ago would have less in common with us than with Proconsul be still further from "man" of ten thousand years in the future. A primate learned to use his hands and built a brain around them to create us. What will man build it, for instance? When we write about our aliens, we cover no more than our earliest history of a few millennia ago to perhaps not even a century ahead. It is too small a second to consider in the day of a planet. Or so science and logic tell us. We are not unique among stars in having planets, nor among planets in having life. But we're still unique in our particular concept of intelligence. Science fiction is just wish-dreaming, as usual, in having us meet alien intelligences so like ourselves. As usual? We were right and logic was wrong about there being planets around the stars and about life on those planets. I can only hope we are wish-dreaming as usual I Well IF  Novelette Bounty hunting is never for the squeamish. But this Beast was one no sane man could ever kill. I L ong ago, shortly after my mother blood was sluiced from the streets of Changeover and her body burned upon a pyre outside of town, I suffered what the seems a very inadequate word to psychologists call a trauma. That me. To understand this trauma, you should know some of the events that preceded  it. The townfolk came in the middle of the night and took her, decapitated her, stuffed a cross cut from stale bread into her dead mouth, and charred her in fire fed by the bows of a dogwood tree. I was five years old at the time. Those were the days when men still killed, before Hope sprang up as the capital of our galaxy and pushed forth a society where no man killed another man, where sanity ruled. That was a thousand years ago, a century after Galactic War I, before Eternity Combine gave us immortality. And worst of all, that was Earth. The rest of the galaxy was staggering to its feet; Hope was an idea born in brighter minds; and Earthmen were still hunting witches. To hide me from those who Would destroy me because my mother was a mutant who could lift pencils -- only pencils and scraps of paper -- with her mind, my grandparents locked me in a doset of their house. There were smells of mothballs, old rubber, rainshoes and yellowed magazine paper. I could see dark ghosts of wools and cottons hanging all about. And I wept. There was little else to do. On the third day, the witch hunters were certain that I had perished in the fire of the house, for they could not find me and trusted my grandparents, chiefly because they were normal. So it was that on the third day I was brought forth from the closet and into the parlor where my grandmother kissed me and dried her eyes on her gray, coarse apron. On that same day, my grandfather came to me where I sat with my grandmother, his huge calloused hands folded over each other, concealing something. "I've a surprise for you, Andy." I smiled. He took one hand from the other, revealing a lump of coal with eyes a shade darker than the rest of it. "Caesar!" I cried. Caesar was my myna bird, rescued in some miraculous fashion from the holocaust of the exorcism. I ran to my grandfather; and as I ran, the bird screeched in imitation: "Andyboy, Andyboy." I stopped and stared at it. It fluttered a wing. "Andyboy, Andyboy, An -- " And I started to scream. It was an involuntary scream, tom from my lungs, bursting through my lips, roaring into the room. The myna's words were mockings of my mother's. The inflection, though not tone, was perfect. I turned and ran from the parlor. Wings beat against me. Caesar was a stuck recording. Grandfather was running too, but he was not grandfather any longer. Instead, he seemed one of the witch hunters shooting out the windows of our house, screaming faildly for my mother's death. Running through the half open cellar door, I stumbled down the steps, flailing at the hideous wings, the sharp orange beak that tried to be her lips. I locked myself in the coal room while Caesar battered himself to tatters against the thick door. When grandfather finally broke it down, I was on my knees with my head against the floor, unable to scream in anything but a hoarse whisper. My knuckles were raw from pounding them against the concrete, my blood a polka-dot pattern on the grayness. I was taken to bed, nursed to recovery and sent off-planet to an aunt's home in another solar system where men were coming of age faster. I grew up, took Eternity Combine's treatments in the first public group and outlived Caesar, grandfather and all. Years later, at one of Congressman Horner's parties, a psychologist told me it had all been a trauma concerning Death and my new perception of it. I told him trauma was a terribly inadequate word and went off to dance with a particularly beautiful young woman. Tow I was experiencing fear much the same as the fear that day so long ago when I was five and my mother was three days dead. It was the fear of death -- stinking, oppressive, omnipresent. I am always afraid at the beginning of a hunt. It made no difference this day that I had gone on # others; it was this one that was immediate -- and frightening. If I was killed in these jungles, Eternity Combine could never reach me in time to restore me to life. Dying here, one stayed dead. And what for? Money? Certainly, that was part of it. Lotus, Crazy and I would pick up seventy thoucredits apiece when we split the bounty on this Beast. But it was more than money. Lotus was all stirred up by the photos of children who had fallen prey to the Beast. She's soft-hearted for kids and dogs. Crazy? Well, he had a brother who was a bounty hunter too. His brother had tried to bring back this particular Beast, and his brother had never been seen again. It was revenge for Crazy. Then there was blood lust. We didn't kid ourselves about that. In a world where eryone, we killed. True, only animals. But the point is we had a violence-tendency that was missing in most. We wouldn't kill people, but Beasts were another story... I guess blood lust was my major driving force, all stemming back to that trauma. I loaded the last of the cameras into the floater and looked around for the others. "Lotus! Crazy! Let's get a move on!" "All right, all right," Crazy said, stomping down the steps of the outIF side entrance to the guest house. We were staying on Congressman Homer's Earth Ranch until the completion of the hunt. Crazy Horse, since he weighed three hundred pounds plus fifty and was blessed with hooves, did not use the highly polished, slippery indoor steps of plasti-glass. Oh, his full, real name was Jackson Lincoln Puicca, after the famous General, famous humanitarian and famous scientist. But we called him Crazy Horse -- mostly because he was crazy -- and because he sure did look like a horse. Crazy was a natural mutant, not a product of the Artificial Wombs. One day there had been a nuclear war spreading through the civilized galaxy. Several generations later, there was Crazy -- muscular, bright, shaggy-headed, and horsebefainded. He was a valuable man on a bounty hunt. Just as his brother must have been... "Where's Lotus?" I asked. "Out picking berries somewhere. You know her." "You know what about her?" Lotus asked as she lifted over a corral fence, her blue-fog wings fluffing gently as she glided on the breeze. "What would you say of me behind my back, Crazy?" Crazy Horse stomped his hooves, folded his hands in supplication. "What could I say behind your back, pretty one, when you're possessed of such ears?" Lotus settled on the ground next to me. She fingered the delicate, elongated shells that were her elfin ears and looked at Crazy. "Yours are bigger. I don't think I should make nasty remarks about another's ears if mine were distended bladders like yours." Crazy snorted and shook his huge head so that his wild mane covered his baggy ears. "I'm on time, I trust," Lotus said. "Trouble is," I said, putting an arm about her twenty-inch waist and looking at her small four-feeteleven form, "you know damned well we'd wait all day and not be angry at you." "That's because I'm the prettiest girl around," she snapped, her green-blue eyes adance. "Not much competition on an all-male ranch," Crazy muttered. "And you, Crazy, are the handsomest horse I have seen here." She said it so that he didn't know whether to be mad or laugh -- so he laughed. T hat was Lotus. She was cute as Christmas multiplied by Halloween and Easter -- and she knew it, which wasn't always so bad because she pulled her own weight. Aside from being one of the best botanists specializing in postA-war plants, she was our aerial reconnaissance expert since she could fly ahead, land where a floater would never fit, and let us know what was dangerous or interesting that stood in our way. Why a botanist on a bounty hunt? Well, it was true we usually stalked killer animals that disturbed the small towns on the post-war rural planets. But now and again there were plants which were just as deadly. There were those walking plants on Fanner II that latched onto the nearest warm-blooded animal -- often human-type -- lashed roots around it, grew through it all night long, absorbed it and walked away with the sunrise -- a few inches taller and satisfied until darkness came again, which was every nine hours on Fanner II. Thus, Lotus. "Let's get moving," I said. "I want these cameras set before dark." "After you, Butterfly," Crazy said, bowing as far as he could, considering his less-than-human posterior. Lotus breezed into the floater like a smoke puff. Crazy followed, and I went last, dogging the door behind. We had three seats across the front of that tub -- Lotus between us two men. I was pilot. A floater is a round ball with an inner and outer hull, each independent of the other. Thus if you ever meet an eighteen-foot bat, you can have an outer hull beaten to Hell and never feel it inside or let it deflect your course, since the inner one carries the drive engines, I pulled back on the stick, lifted us and set out for the forest jungle that had spread outward from the Harrisburg Crater. The screens gave us a full view of the ugly woods. At the edge were gray-green ferns. Later, these gave way to giant trees that choked the ferns but were equally gray and lifelesslooking. "You haven't said what you've found out about our quarry this trip," Lotus said. "It killed Ralph," Crazy said. "That's all I need to know." "Tell us more," Lotus said, pulling the thin membrane of her wings about her like a cloak. "Tell us all Homer told you." "Mainly, we're the fifth team to be sent after it. Crazy's brother was on the fourth." "The other teams?" Crazy asked. "All together, there were twentytwo in the other four teams. Twenty were never seen again." "The other two?" Lotus asked. "Rescue parties brought them out -- in pieces." Below, the world was gray-green. Five miles into the forest, I set the floater down in a small clearing. Lotus went ahead to check for other clearings and crossings where it might be wisest to rig the cameras and their tiny electric-eye triggers. Chances were we'd get a wide variety of freaks on film, but we should have no trouble picking our killer. From the four hazy deIF scriptions we had, we knew that he was approximately eight feet tall, man-like and damnably ugly. There were a number of mutants that fit the first and last parts of that -- but few of them were manlike. None of the descriptions gave any indication of why twenty-two experienced bounty hunters had not killed it but had been killed instead. Crazy was setting up electric eyes, stringing wires back toward me and concealing them with fine layers of dust. I was rigging the cameras in the rocks and bushes. Both of us had our backs to the same part of the forest. And that was a mistake. II C razy would have heard it first, except that he still had his hair down over his ears, hindering his usually keen hearing. When I heard the snapping and low keening, it was almost on top of us. Whirling, I brought my gun up... And up, and up, and up... Damn, was it bigl Big and quiet, which is a combination we hit more often than you might think. It stared down through the trees at us, thirty feet high, its bulbous belly opening over us like a wet, wicked mouth -- which it was. No long, slow throat-to-stomach affair here. Just open up and -- slurp  Spiders make me sick. This one made me sicker than usual. There were ugly, cancerous scabs all over it, pus-coated hairs hanging heavily from each disease pocket. "Don't shoot yet," I told Crazy. But he didn't have to be told. More than once he had seen these things react reflexively to a shot, leap in and chomp up whatever was holding the gun. A big spider is not so large as he looks; he is mostly spindly legs which can squeeze together fast into a little ball, to drop him fifteen feet in height and let him scuttle in under the trees after you. "The rocks," I said quietly, watching the multi-prismed eye watch me. Very slowly and with grace, we edged our way along the rocks where I had been setting that particular camera. The spider watched, swiveling its strangely tiny head to follow us, a row of fine hairs a-twiddle below its eyes. The rocks were actually the ruins of centuries, tossed here by the Ablast that had leveled Harrisburg, a provincial capital at that time. It was a vast tumble of caves, valleys and mountains of bricks and stone and powdered mortar. Moving a tentative step, the spider settled long legs through the brush with a minimum of noise. It keened a bit louder. We reached a place where the rock broke open tcf form a small valley, closing again four hundred feet away and forming a dark tunnel that led further into the ruins -- a tunnel too small for a beast like this. "Now," I whispered. "Run!" We turned and loped into the valley, cutting ourselves off from view of the spider. Crazy reached the tunnel first. His legs were often an asset when speed was needed. I was halfway down the valley when the spider mounted the one valley wall and looked down on us. The colossal red eyes glittered accusingly. Then the belly appeared, mandibles open and clacking. Crazy opened fire with his vibra pistol, catching one of its legs. The beast drew up the wounded member, twiddling it madly. Crazy fired again and blew off another leg. I ran. The spider started down into the valley Crazy shot again, tearing open the beast's side. But spiders are tough -- and a fist-sized wound wasn't stopping this baby. Also, we had too-hastily overlooked a very important thing: tunnels make nice homes -- for things. Crazy was raising his pistol for a shot at the giant head when a pinkish grub-like creature came wriggling out of the tunnel in defense of its abode, casting off threeinch, hard thorns. One of these struck Crazy's arm and sent him tumbling, his gun lost in the stones. he spider keened insanely. The grub, suddenly a more immediate danger, hissed, arched its back and flung itself forward in spasmodic lurches that were immediately followed by the jerking release of the sharp quills. I ran to Crazy and tried dragging him to the walls where the beasts could attack from only one direction. But dragging three hundred and fifty pounds was just about impossible. I crouched behind Crazy Horse and pulled the spine fro mhis arm. There was a lot of blood pumping out of that arm. I had nothing to stop it with, either. I turned to the grub, looking for a vulnerable spot. Most of his belly was calloused, but he always managed to keep the first two segments aloft. I aimed my vibra pistol there, pulled the trigger and held it down. The worm went kicking into the air, turning over and over, tossing off spines that shot over our heads. He crashed back to the ground when I stopped firing and was very still. But the spider... It was at the opposite end of the valley now, having used the grub's diversions as a chance to find an easy entry. Behind it, anchored to the rubble, was a thin web structure. It was getting ready to snare us. Crazy moaned, kicked a foot and lapsed into unconsciousness again. The spider leaped. All those legs just tensed, and it IF was moving through the air, hitting the ground and running silently. I fired. The shot caught it in the legs, folding the spindly members up under it, and sent it tumbling backwards. It lay still so long that I thought it dead, but finally it stirred, stood, and clung to the rubble wall, watching me. I was mentally charting all possible pathways of advancement for it, trying to anticipate its next move. But I didn't expect the silk to come spitting out like liquid smoke from so great a distance. Lazily, it twirled toward us. The spider could evidently direct two of these lines at the same time, for two of them approached. One struck the wall to the left, curling over a rocky projection halfway up; the second hit at an equal height on the opposite wall, lacing through loosely stacked rubble and welding its hold into a solid position. Then the beast began swinging the lines, wrapping them back and forth from wall to wall, dosing us in. I sat on the ground, braced my back against Crazy and thumbed the controls of the vibra pistol to full power. The web dropped over us, fouling my hand. I had to spend several valuable seconds trying to untangle the sticky mess from the gun and my fingers. When I raised the gun again, the spider had advanced fifty feet. I fired. But the web was so dense now that it absorbed the blast and diffused it, before dissolving under it. I could not dissolve it as fast as the spider could make it. Another filament dropped across my back. Crazy was almost covered. I shot. The web absorbed it. The web dissolved. The web was replaced. The spider was keening more frantically than ever, no longer quiet in its advance. A sticky strand lashed around me, pinning my arms to my chest. Another. A third. I was being cocooned. The gun dropped out of my hands as circulation was cut down in my arms and my hands grew numb. A strand crossed my face, fouling an eye. Crazy was invisible beneath snowy thread. The spider tensed to leap. Ill T otus was no helpless, frighten ed rabbit of a girl when there was danger. Lotus was a girl who came fluttering over the tree tops just as the spider was about to devour her friends and leaped onto the spider without a gun. But she had her knife. She kept it in her waistband, where only the red gem handle showed until she had to use it. I was pinned by the web, watching the hairy black mutant dance #  across the foggy highway it had built when she came into view in the sky and spotted the action. She dipped, swayed with half a second's hesitation, then landed on the twisted semi-shoulders behind the beast's head. She tossed her legs around that neck, riding it as if it were a bronc. It swiveled its eyes, trying to catch sight of her, but the eyes didn't revolve far enough. Just when they were at the apex of their revolution, she drove the silver blade Into the left orb, up to the crimson hilt, and slashed downward. The spider reared. The stream of web fluid ceased abruptly, and the beast danced backward down the inclined silken plane, keening like a thousand flutes gone sour. It staggered sideways like a drunk. I wanted to shout that it might try to roll over on her, but my mouth was blocked with fast-drying web, and I could not move my arms to clear it away. She pulled the knife out and found the second eye with it. The spider flailed and ran at the cliffs, but found it too much trouble to climb out and still bear the pain that was wracking it. Then it rolled... "Lotus!" I screamed. But it came out a choked whisper, strained through the web matting my lips. But she was flying again, her wings beating furiously until they had taken her high enough to catch the low breezes. They fluffed out then and carried her back and forth across the chasm, letting her watch the spider. It died slowly and with lots of kicking. Once, I was sure it was going to blunder onto the web and fall in upon Crazy and me, but it never did. When it was down for good, Lotus drifted into the web, to settle at its edge. "Andy! Crazy!" I tried to call out. The result was a low-key vibration. "I hear you! I'll get you out!" I blessed her elongated ears. A moment later, she began hacking into the web with her knife. In time, she reached me and cut away the fuzz that bound my arms and closed my mouth. Together, we removed Crazy, ready for the worst. B ut it wasn't that bad at all. He was still unconscious, but the webbing had matted over the spine wound, stopping the bleeding. "We'll have to take him back," I said. "The cameras?" "We were only setting up the second one." "You finish," she said. "I checked ahead. Follow the main trail for half a mile and you'll cross six major intersections. That should give us enough coverage to see if the beast uses these trails regularly. If IF you bring the floater here first, I can take care of Crazy." "He may be -- " "He'll be okay. There's enough medical supplies in the floater to fix him up." She was a good nurse. "Okay," I said. "I'll be back in a minute." Actually, it was four minutes, but when I settled the floater down next to the pieces of the web, she already had Crazy uncovered and clean of the sticky stuff. I took the cameras, slung them over my shoulders and set out -- lugging what two were meant to carry. I kept my gun drawn and an eye out for hairy trees... Three hours later, I stumbled back, worn out and showing it. Lotus and Crazy were laughing about something. "Nice way to get out of doing work," I said. Crazy looked up, whinnying that silly laugh of his. "You can have this arm if you want. I'd rather have gone setting the cameras than nursing this." "Likely story." "We'd better be getting back," Lotus said. "Looks like a storm, and I don't want to see what might come tromping around in the rain." It was a heavy rain that gave Fanner II's vampire plants such voracious appetites. "Okay. Can you walk at all, Crazy. "I can manage." "Let's go." O ne day, the men start looking like animals to you . And you realize you are allowed to shoot animals... And you realize you are just imagining them as animals so that you can shoot them and revenge your mother -- and maybe wipe out that entire chapter of your life... Deep down, you think maybe you want to spill the blood of men, spill it and drink it... I must have been moaning in my sleep. It was an old and often-felt dream. I say that I must have been muttering, for when I slipped from the dream to the dark reality of the bedroom, there was a light body against mine, lips on my two, and soft, velvet wings enclosing us in the closet of our souls... The next morning, we went out to collect the cmras. Crazy's arm was almost healed, thanks to the speedheal salve and bandages. We hoped he would be well enough to begin the hunt shortly after noon in the event the cameras had recorded anything. And the camera had. "I don't like it," Crazy grunted as the film loop came across the viewer for the sixth time. "It isn't the ugliest we've met," I said. It stood seven am? a half feet tall and was heavier than Crazy. Two arms trailed the ground, with six-inch claws on them, and there was a set of smaller arms in the middle of a barrel chest. The little hands fiddled with each other, lacing fingers. The mouth was a treasure trove -- if you value sharp, yellow teeth. It had one sunken eye in the left side of its face and an undeveloped socket where the other one should be. "It doesn't even look as dangerous as the spider." "That's what I mean. I don't like it." "Huh?" "I think," Lotus interrupted, "that Crazy means it looks too easy. Anything that easy would have been knocked out by the first team that went after it. It must have something else besides claws, teeth and an extra pair of hands." "What do you think?" I asked her. "Can't say," Lotus chirped. "That would be like stating the cause of death before the murder." "What's the concensus? Should we back out of this one?" They both voted to go on. I smiled and shut off the film loop. "Okay. Let's get started. Crazy, your arm all right?" He peeled off the bandage and flexed it. It was swollen but unseamed. "Never felt better. Let's go." IV   way where the camera had caught him. Lotus took the first watch, and I was halfway into the second when I heard something of more than medium size coming along from the right. Unholstering my pistol, I stretched out behind a heavy row of bushes and waited. My infrared goggles filtered out the night, giving me a perfect view. In a way, I wished it had been dark. This fellow looked a lot more formidable in person than when seen from a camera. The short view on the film hadn't shown the easy loping motion of the mutant. I decided upon his ancestry pretty quickly -- ape. There had probably been a zoo around when the big bang wiped out the city and its suburbs, a zoo just far enough out to be saved. Radiation did the rest. He loped by and was gone in the darkness. I found I was sweating -- yet the wind was cool. I pushed myself up from the ground and stepped back to my previous waiting post. I was in the process of sitting down when I saw, from the corner of my eye, that the Beast had returned and was standing half a dozen yards away, squinting at me. I cursed myself for forgetting the curiosity and cunning of the apes. I hadn't wantstudied him a few more times. Now I had no choice. Suddenly, he started toward me. I brought up my pistol and fired two blue-white bolts at him. But he wasn't there any longer. IF He had ducked and taken off beneath. the line of the brush. He could have been a hundred yards gone or only four feet away. I panicked. That's a bad thing to do in a strange jungle in the dark with a killer Beast prowling around. I started backing up, moving toward a small, cleared knoll where I imagined I would have the advantage of a better view. There was a rustling to my left. I fired, but there was no scream. I backed faster. My heart was throbbing, and the loudness of it seemed to reverberate through the trees. All other sounds had ceased. The fauna knew something was up. I kept backing. Then I found that the knoll wasn't a knoll at all. The infrared goggles were not at fault, for it did look like a knoll, even from a dozen feet away. But it was a lush, cloverlike growth that rose to a height of five feet in the center, tapering to three at the edges of the clearing. I turned to move forward, realizing the Beast was ahead, waiting. If I backed long enough, I would cross the small hill and come into the safety of our camp. I cursed myself for missing that first shot. I was in the middle of the stuff, clover up to my middle chest, when there was one other sound besides my heart thumping -- a thick, guttural snarling. Somewhere, in the dense growth, crouched beneath its surface, the Beast moved. T almost yelled for help. But that would have given the Beast a fix. Now, he was only prowling, but he would come running at the sound of my voice. Or at the sound of my feet. I couldn't move and I couldn't yell, and I damn sure couldn't just wait to be discovered. Aiming where I thought the noise was coming from, I pulled the trigger. A patch of burned-out clover turned steaming and black. Nothing more. It was impossible to tell where in the dense stuff the growling was. Then he leaped! I whirled sideways, spun even further and faster as his wicked claws tore through my shoulder. He crashed into the clover again and did not make a sound. I clutched my shoulder with my gun hand, then realized I would have to keep that hand free and let the damn wound bleed if it wanted to. It wanted to. Ape. Damn, clever, agile apel I cursed him, gritting my teeth against the pain in my shoulder, blinking out tears of fury that blotted my vision. Suddenly, he was leaping again. This time I moved fast enough. He missed altogether. I kept my eyes on the spot his hand disappeared into. Slowly, the clover began to waver as he moved around to the right to spring from a different direction. I followed the movement of the clover until he had positioned himself. I waited. He was foxy but not too patient. He leaped, and I burned him. He fell halfway to me, rolling around through the clover. Now, I had the upper hand. I moved after him, burning off the clover to keep him moving. He stood up to run, and I shot his left arm. He screamed like a kitten at its first bath. Then, abruptly, there was blackness... More like a blur. In that blur, he was charging me, swiping at me, tearing at my side, ripping me up and down... Much later, when the sun was up and the birds were singing, Lotus poured something warm into my mouth and I was waking up to the beautiful scene of her face. Then Crazy spoiled it by sticking his horsey mug into the picture. "What happened?" I struggled to sit up, managed with their help. My head swam, settled slowly and was still. "I shot it Wounded it, anyway. It tried to kill me." "Why didn't you kill it?" Lotus asked. "I guess it knocked my gun away." "No," Crazy said. "You had the gun clutched in your hand when we found you. You must have been holding it when he chewed you up. Then why didn't you shoot it again?" T tried to remember. I could picA tore the blue-white vibra beam tearing open the night. There was some sort of exclamation -- evidently from me -- and I could no longer shoot. It was limping at me, bleeding badly, but I could not pull the trigger. I didn't want to pull the trigger! I explained the memories as I recalled them. "Hypnosis?" Crazy asked. "I don't think so. I wasn't spellbound. Something... something else." "I think we should back out now," Lotus said. "I think we should pack our gear and move out fast." "No," I said, trying to look more chipper than I felt. "We'll get it. I know we'll get it." "But there are other jobs -- easier jobs," she protested. "We've shed our blood for this one," Crazy said. "When you spill your blood for a hunt, you're bound to get the beast no matter what." She fluttered her soft blue wings, looking right through me as only she can do. "It's more than that to you, isn't it, Andy?" "Yes," I croaked. "Yes, I suppose it is. Though I don't know what." Then I passed out. the Beast since, though we were not inexperienced enough to think it had crawled away to die. We decided, instead, that it had returned to its lair, somewhere in the forest, IF to heal itself. We had ceased to speculate about why I had been unable to kill it when I had the chance, for that was not a happy thing to speculate about. There were too many bad dreams in something like that. Leaving everything that could not be carried easily, we struck out with inflatable mattresses, food, water and guns. Most of all, guns. After establishing what our quarry's footprints were like -- humanish, four-toed, with long and wicked nails tipping each toe -- from a set that led away from the fight scene in a limp pattern, we set off deeper into the woods. On the second day of the march, we found where it had fallen and had lain for some time until it found the strength to go on. On the third day, we tracked it to the lip of the Harrisburg Crater -- where the footprints ceased. We stood there on the rim of the vast depression, staring across the table of nuclear glass that the triple-headed super-nuclear rocket had made. The crater, I knew from the maps, was two and a quarter miles in diameter. That was a lot of space. Dotting it were thousands of bubbles of glass. A number of them were broken and led to the maze of caves that lay under the floor of the crater. Apparently, in one of those caves, the beast was licking its wounds -- and waiting. "How can we cover all that?" Crazy asked. "We'll do it," I said. I didn't want to do it. I didn't know why I didn't order everyone to back track, to get the hell out of there. Lotus was right, of course; the reason was more than revenge against a dumb animal. For a moment, I felt like Hamlet on the castle ramparts, talking to a ghost. But that feeling passed. My determination had something to do with that night when I could have killed it and didn't, when I almost let it kill me. And why? Why had it killed twenty-two others? "I guess here is as good a place as any," Lotus said. "Let's make camp here." She swung a hand around, indicating the thirty feet of hard-packed earth that separated the forest from the crater edge. Here and there, a few sparse pieces of vegetation were trying to grow on the no-plant's-land between woods and glass. They weren't doing too well, but they made the bleakness a little less bleak. "Here it is," I said, dropping my own gear. "We'll start to search the caves tomorrow." Nightfall drifted in -- a black fog. There were stars in the sky, but the greatest light show of all lay at our feet. For two and one quarter miles ahead, the nuclear glass shimmered with vibrant colors, giving off the heat of day. Blue chased reds across its surface while ambers danced with oranges. T was sitting on the edge of the crater, dangling my legs, a hundred yards or so from the campsite. Crazy was back there, still eating supper. His suppers lasted two hours. Lotus drifted down next to me, folded her tiny legs under her and put her head on my shoulder. Her hair was cool and sweetsmelling. It was as black as the night and blew around my ears and chin and made me feel good. "Beautiful, isn't it," I said. Ibere was a burst of orange rimmed with silver to the right. "Very," she said as she tried to orawl closer. She was our consolation. She held the team together. Crazy and I could not have lasted a month without her. Briefly, I wondered at her and Crazy; he was so big and clumsy, while she was so tiny, so fragile. But she never came back cracked or chipped, so maybe the lummox was gentler than he seemed. "You scared?" I asked. She was trembling, and it was not cold. "You know me." "We'll win. We're the good guys." I felt something wet on my neck, and I knew it was a tear. I shifted a little and cuddled her and muttered soothing platitudes. But mainly, I just sat there being uncomfortable and damned happy all at once. Lotus almost never cried. When she did, she was worried about one of us -- I mean really worried -- and then she couldn't stop until she was dried out. I could only sit and hold her. So she was crying. And I was cuddling. And, suddenly, Crazy was screaming! V A very long time ago, as I had sat at an upstairs window before my mother made me leave our house, there had come two giant red eyes out of the night mists. They had been as large as saucers, casting scarlet light ahead of them, focusing on the house. It was a jeep covered with sheets and red cellophane and painted to look like a dragon by the Knights of the Dragon to Preserve Humanity. I thought it very funny that grown people should play at such games. Now, below me in the pit that had suddenly opened and swallowed Crazy, a spider, spindly legs bracing it a hundred feet down, was looking up with crimson headlamp eyes. Only, there was something worse than a jeep behind these orbs. "Crazy!" I shouted. "Here. Toward the left! " I took the lantern Lotus brought from the camp and lowered it into the steeply sloping tunnel. The spider backed off another fifty feet. Branching off from the main fall were several side tunnels, all filled IF with eggs and sticky webbing. It must have burrowed close to tile surface," Crazy shouted. "I just stepped on the ground and it gave away under me." He had rolled into one of the tunnels and was caught up in the stickiness and the eggs. The mother spider fidgeted below, wantftig to come charging up, frightened only for the moment. "Lotus, dimbing cleats -- and your knife. Hurry!" She lifted away and was back almost instantly. I slipped the cleat attachments onto my boots and took her knife to cut steps into the tunnel wall. "I'm coming down, Crazy." "What about the spider?" "She looks scared." "She'll get over that. Stay out." "Crazy, you're nuts." I crawled down into the sloping cave, hating to turn my back on the spider but unable to negotiate the steep passage head first. The red eyes watched. They never blinked. They had no lids. I reached the side cave where Crazy was trapped, with dirt packed so tightly under my fingernails that they ached. I hacked away the web, balled it up and stuffed it behind him. I didn't want to drop it down the main shaft for fear the jOit would bring her flailing upward, stomach open. When I had his head and arms free, he was able to help himself. "You first," I said. "Can you make it up?" "These hooves give perfect balance." He kicked out of the egg pocket and started up the incline. I waited until he was almost out, then launched myself on the climb. But all this action had shaken the mother spider to action. I could hear the scuttling of her feet coming up fast. "I can't shoot, Andy!" Lotus shouted. "You're in the way!" T started to say something when the furry legs touched me around the waist and pulled me loose. But the spider wasn't prepared for all my weight. She wobbled and collapsed. We both plunged down the slope, twisted around a bend -- all her legs kicking furiously -- and dropped twenty feet onto a cavern floor. I was on top of the spider. She was screaming. Then, despite the pounding of my heart, I could hear that most of the screams were echoes, cast back by the walls of the great stone chamber. I felt something wet, scrambled for a hand hold on the flailing beast and looked down. My foot was dangling inside her stomach! She had rolled onto her back, and I was mounted on her deadly under-side. The mandibles quivered. I jerked the foot back and discovered the knife still clutched in my hand. I # The head reared up as she tried to throw me off. I struck for the eye, pulled back the blade and was rewarded with gushing blood. She screamed louder, rolling about. I was tossed free, to crouch behind a large boulder. The spider did her death dance, and then stilled, her flashing legs awkwardly akimbo. I remained behind the rocks, clutching an arm that ached, too afraid to look at it until I saw that the beast was dead and she would not be rushing me. It took her some time to expire, but she did so with a great amount of frothing. When I looked at my arm, I could see the reason for pain; a small piece of white bone was sticking through the flesh, white and spotted with blood. My head was swimming, and I suddenly felt more than a thousand years old. Above, from the tunnel that the spider and I had fallen through, I could hear a noisy scuffling. My head spun even faster, and visions of the beasts mate swam through my head, magnifying my fears. I got to my feet. I felt as if I were walking on a cushion of air. My eyes were burning coals someone had dropped into my sockets, while my head was a block of melting ice. I staggered out of the large cavern, moving to a tunnel that glittered with light at its end, hoping that this -- in some way -- would lead me out. The stones seemed to melt and reform around me. My teeth chattered in my ice head. I perspired. The end of the tunnel was a branching-off place where the walls turned to glass and wound erratically off under the floor of the vast crater. Turquoise and crimson ceilings flashed over me. The walls were tinted mirrors. Reality was pushed even further from my mind, and delusion and fever grew stronger. I moved to the right. My arm had become a flaming tree, its roots grown deep into my chest, constricting my lungs. Panting, I moved on through the winding glass corridors, sane enough to know who I was and that I must get out, but just delirious enough to not think of turning back and working along the route I had covered. In this manner, I came across the Beast in its lair. 'T'he tunnel ended in a room where grasses had been dragged in, and there was rotting flesh from past meals strewn on the floor. There was a natural stairway, uneven but usable, breaking one wall. It led to the ceiling where a half-moon aperture offered escape to the crater floor overhead. But lying between that escape route and me was the Beast. And, though dying, he was not dead. I stopped, swaying crazily. The Beast was watching me from where he lay, his massive head raised IF from the floor, his single red eye a hideous lantern, bright even in this glittering room of fantasy walls. He grunted and tried to move. His leg was a mess. That was the work of my first shot. He shoved his other leg under himself and pulled into a sitting position, all weight on one arm and his good leg. He snarled. I saw that he was going to leap. I looked about for a chunk of loose glass and found one the size of my fist. I bent, picked it up and weighed it. I brought my healthy arm back, to heave it at the Beast's head. It struck his chest instead, knocking him on his behind. He struggled to a sitting position while I searched for another rock. The walls glittered, seeming to recede and quickly approach me when I moved too much... I found a sharp-edged piece and brought it back to throw. And he spoke. "Make Caesar shut up!" he said. "Make him shut up!" I almost dropped the rock. The walls wiggled crazily. The Beast repeated the thing, over and over. Then he leaped. The force of his impact was not ,as great as it might have been had he been able to use both feet to propel himself. Still, he bowled me over. He raked claws down the side of my face as we rolled. I kicked free mid rolled across the floor to the far wall. Above was the exit "Andy!" Lotus and Crazy appeared at the entrance to the room. It had been they, not the spider's mate, who had been scrambling down that tunnel! "Make Caesar shut up!" the beast recited. "Make him shut up!" The two of them froze. Crazy had a gun drawn and was about to fire. Now he left the gun dangling loosely in his fingers. "Kill it!" I shouted. "It's intelligent," Lotus said, rubbing her tiny hands together. "It is like hell!" Panting as I was, I must have sounded more like an animal than the Beast. "It killed Ralph, Crazy!" Crazy flinched, looking very distressed. "It's more man than animal," he said, his gun hanging uselessly in his hand. "It got that phrase from mel" I shouted. "I said that when I shot it in the woods. It must have been speaking then -- something it picked up from a previous bounty hunter -- mid I thought it was intelligent. That's why I couldn't shoot it. Man cannot kill man. But this is a Beast! Nothing more. A myna bird." "It got that phrase from me!" the Beast shouted, struggling across the floor toward me, throwing a few cautious looks behind at Lotus and Crazy. "See!" "See!" it mocked me. Lotus grabbed the gun from Crazy and aimed. But she could not fire. "Here, Andy I" She tossed the gun to me, over the Beast. It clattered against the wall five feet away. Wearily, I inched after it. And the Beast was on me. He tore at me with his reserve of strength, the strength he had been If you give up cigarettes, you might gain a few pounds. (And also a few years) The plain, unfiltered fact is that people who smoke cigarettes get lung cancer a lot more frequently than nonsmokers. And lung cancer can finish you. Before your time. We'd rather have you stay alive and well. Because even if you do gain a few pounds, you'll have the time to take them off. american cancer society c ? saving to meet death with. I felt blood pumping out of my back as his claws raked it. His foul breath swept over me. I kicked out with a last ounce of strength. My boot caught him on the chin and stunned him. My fingers slipped over the gun. Bringing it around, with the barrel centered on the brutish face, I choked as my finger pressed the trigger. "See!" he shouted, reaching a long, hairy arm out for me. Strange scenes of a house on fire, of a woman burning, of people turning into animals, flashed through my mind. Then I pulled the trigger. I saw his face go up in a red fountain and collapsed backward into darkness. T#hen I came to, it was to see   a blue sky overhead, trees flashing by on both banks, and blue water underneath. Crazy had broken the top from one of the glass bubbles and had used it as a boat, placing it in the small river that drifted through Congressman Horner's ranch. This would be a much swifter route than that by which we had come. "How are you feeling?" Lotus asked. "Relieved," I croaked. "I know," she said, running a cool hand over my forehead. "No, you don't," I said, turning my head to the glass bottom where the water revealed its depth. My IF (Continued from page #) time was no exception. "Perhaps," I reflected with growing enthusiasm, rt we can drown D'Cela's forts." Leaving the larger of our two ships to guard D'Cela, I raced back to New Enithra with some hope of end to the D'Cela problem. Both human and Ayorian scientists, now working in teams, were asked, "Can the gravity field be made directional over an area equal to that of D'Cela's forts?" The humans, looking like gigantic bugs because of the goggles enabling them to see the Ayor, answered in the affirmative. 'Will the energy of gravity pass through both the physical and telekinetic barriers?" Again the answer was yes. What I had in mind was simple enough. D'Cela's fortress had a thin double skin made with exceedingly dense metal. Such dense structures, especially when constructed in strong gravity-wells, needed special flotation platforms to keep them from sinking through the planet's less dense bed-rock. With the gravity generator, we should be able to upset the delicate balance of those floatation platforms, causing the fortress to sink naturally and completely through the planet's composition. I returned to D'Cela's final retreat with the modified equipment, and we increased the apparent mass of the fort in steep exponential progression. It sank toward the planet's center as though falling through a hard-vacuum column we were fortunate to escape the explosion which resulted, causing the planet's crust to be tom away in cascades of fire. On approaching the fortress on the planet's opposite side, we soon sensed both the absence of humans and the quick popping of small hyper-driven ships as they snapped into hyper-space. Would we never catch this evil man? R ational logic dictated that we quit the chase since there was no known way of either tracing or catching D'Cela in hyper-space. coming-out point. But my emotions were not rational and I drove myself and all others to find the means by which D'Cela could be destroyed. My need for revenge drove me as no Ayorian had ever been driven. The nearest galaxy was # X # # light-years distant from Feren's sun. Under hyper-drive, flight time would fill six weeks, were he to choose that direction. This would be my maximum time for solution to two major problems -- first, to exceed D'Cela's hyper-driven velocity and second, to develop a means for locating his ships while still on hyper-drive. Driven mostly by emotions, I felt instinctively convinced that we could solve these two problems. There was first the clue that hyperdrive phenomenon was crudely related to our natural indirect action faculties. Next was the fact that no time accrued during our organically induced teleportation, while time did accrue under the mechanical variety. Those children who were deeply engrossed in their personal twinning problems could not be dissuaded from their tasks, but all others were pushed and prodded as never before into study of the problems. And within a matter of days, we had our first breakthrough and within hours we had our first potential solution. When the adults reached into the hyper-drive field under their highest power of sensitivity, they were able to observe or sense a kind of "wake," sub-nucleonic in character. As the field moved, the wake left a fine trail of asymmetrically arranged sub-particles. In time, they dissipated; but they lasted long enough to provide the trace of D'Cela's ships. When a smaller hyper-drive generator was placed inside the field of another generator, relative velocity was increased by a power factor of two for the total assemblage. In theory, an endless number of generators placed one within another would provide mechanically induced "instant" travel, like that which we already enjoyed by means of our natural faculties. Practical considerations enabled only one power boost, and even then the linkage worked for only small objects. But we had our solution I Tied to the dissipating wake of D'Cela's ships were small nuclear explosives which moved ever-doser to each of his ships in the ratio of one number to its square power. Wherever and whenever the wake terminated, indicating the normal space position of his ship, our explosive would perform satisfactorily and the resulting blast would loose enough free energy to destroy any ship. X B y now I was well aware of the fundamental differences between even two beings of the same biological stock. The Tepen, though derived from Ayorian stock, were all evil; D'Cela and his men were derived from human stock and they, too, were mostly evil. Probably on any planet there were both evil and good stock, so I could not truly condemn the whole human race for the actions of a small number, anymore then I could blame all Ayorians for the action of the Tepen. But what of cultural and control institutions? The Ayorian had never allowed themselves to be IF "AH alliance with other human groups will be approved only through the Ayor, as well as growth or preparation of military efforts." How these humans felt about my ultimatum was unimportant, since I was fully determined to protect my race. Never again would more than sixty thousand of my brethren be destroyed by the idle whim of some mad human. Therefore I, Spork the Ayorian moron, Spork the Tepen avenger, Spork the beast enslaver, now became Spork, ruler of the Quations planetary system! controlled by evil, choosing to die rather then to succumb to that which was against their natural nature. How did the humans of Feren allow themselves to be so controlled? If we Ayorians were successfully to colonize the empty planets of the Ferenian planetary system, we would have great need for peace. Could we ever have peace if the humans were to continually allow might to rule right? With an almost paranoiac, passionate feeling for detail, we checked planet six to insure no further dangers and I gave thought far ahead to our future. My emotions, once boiling against D'Cela and his murder of thousands of my brethren, now transferred to a determination that security, would be established for my people. We landed on Feren to be met by a large government delegation; when the empty speeches were through and the banquet ended, I explained to all the kind of government I had in mind. "From this day forward," I said, "this planetary system shall be considered under the dominion of the Ayor. 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Please add sales tax where necessary -- the trivia of a thousand areof the games after I had neatly nas on a thousand planets in a decapitated the former champion thousand ages. I am an athlete of the Sabre worlds by means of great proportions, strength and of wrist pressors only. Declared skill -- one who kills by order of the season's Grand Champion, the gawkers or my master, head garlanded with red-brandy whichever calls first -- and I am vines, chest proudly extended one soon to be killed. against chest band, I swaggered away from the game's space on wrist pressors only, as if to say, Look at me, you weaklings. I have bested your best. Now who is master and who is slave? Their sun of a thousand yellow rays beat down on my back as I pushed my way across the game's space into the lower ramp to my cage, expecting there to relax with wine, song and the caress of the opposite sex as, I suppose, has been done by my kind for ages past. Then she came. The lights burned brightly as the crowd surged past our flux cages. The public was not satisfied with the death, pain and sadism of the arena, but demanded that my cage -- all our cages -- be kept open to public gathering. Like my cell-mates I was a freakish one-G animal, trained by means of gravity-like pressor and tractor beams to tear and hew at others. She walked with her father. He, merely a seven-tenths-G animal, was human and shaped like myself. He had a strong smile, cropped gray hair and rugged features set-off by sunken eyes, a bulbous nose and bright, straight teeth. Oh God! How I hated that animal -- that all-powerful, allgreat leader of the Sabre planets. Trevic Strenger and his family walked in public gathering to view me, this season's Grand Champion, in my "natural" habitat! First came the retinue of sycophants and guards. Cloaked in tight plastic of weblon to nullify pressor and tractor rays, they stationed themselves to one side of my cage, holding the crowded path open for the dictator Strenger and his family. I threw my wine outward to vent my disgust and anger, helplessly watching as it struck the surrounding magnetic field, to be sucked inward and downward instantaneously as the powerful field latched onto minute iron particles in the liquid. They didn't yield an inch nor did they acknowledge my act by even a twitch of the mouth -- except Trevic Strenger. He passed his hand back to his beautiful wife and gently tugged her forward so as not to miss the show, just as he did the night I was taken, five years ago, on my rocky planet. and, had I known then what I now know, even their fleetest hunters would have gone back to the ship empty. My brood cell -- brothers, sisters, mother and father -- had left me for the day. I tossed rocks at the passing pack animals below our cave, not aware of the hunters swooping over me, preparing to entangle me in their rays and beams. I spat at Trevic with the thought, and he pulled his head back to laugh, just as he had the day I was brought, bound and struggling before him. Oh, I was more than a barbarian from the Planet of Rocks. I was an educated barbarian, for their pleasure would not be enough unless they knew that inside of each gladiator lay a trapped, cunning and scheming modern mind -- a mind equal perhaps even to their own in knowledge, yet trapped by their science and their orders to fight on a barbaric level of their choice. I spat again when I thought of their educators and how facts were poured into my animal brain day and night, indiscriminate facts. IF Did you know that a man named Plato once said, "Know thyself?" I spat again in honor of such useless information. His wife's face strained at her husband's sadistic laughter and I imagined that she disapproved. Then I vowed some day to kill Trevic Strenger with my own bare hands. I watched the daughter. She pushed through the crowd and I saw perfection. I had known many other women, slave women thrown to us along with victory wines and victory songs. I had seen none with the grace, the litheness, the color, the shadows of this one. Daughter of a mad king and a radiant slave-queen, she was -- and her eyes seemed to glow with a kind of empathy for me I had never before known outside of the brood chamber. I opened my gnarled fists, dropping my cups, and sprang to the field's side. My chest band pulsed with heat as its magnetic field fought against the lines of force. I strained my body mightily to bring it closer to her side until only inches separated us and my metal chest-belt glowed cherry red from hysteresis. of flux sprang the stronger invisible rays of my love. Her blue eyes met my gray ones and mine clung while the world dissolved around us. Though worlds of differing customs and a powerful kingdom lay between us, I vowed to reach her as deeply and strongly as I had just vowed to kill her father. respond to me? Could a barbaric brood-world creature reach her more refined heart? Though doubt assailed my thoughts, I clung to my twin emotions of hate for her father and my new-born love for her. "Barbarian," he said, "You must come to terms with your simple emotions. In you lie only the pure emotions -- hate, love, anger -- not any refined, civilized, subtle and complex ones." Snarling, I threw my drinking vessel at him, only to see it stop in mid-air, then retreat backward from the invisible wall. He did not even laugh at my anger. "Our people crave heroes," he continued evenly. "You may be a great one. With gladiator success come civilized opportunities which would normally be denied one of your kind. You may soon see complete freedom, then complete citizenship with all the rights and privileges of a Sabre citizen. Shall we drop this silly feud now?" Hate boiled in me like a hidden volcano and I did not answer. Trevic Strenger paused silently to watch my heaving chest, then added: "After all, barbarian, had it not been you who was captured, another from your brood world would now be standing where you are -- another would now be offered full education, citizenship and opportunity for world-wide adulation." I could not control my emotions. So complete was my hatred for this man who had torn me from brood-home that my whole muscular body convulsed as I spat directly at his face. Without change of tone in his voice he said, "Tomorrow I will introduce you to Urut of Ewit, a two-point-five-G champion." I sneered, as I had yet to learn of either Ewit or Urut of Ewit and therefore lacked comprehension of his plans for the morrow. Trevic narrowed his browless eyes to watch as he bored in with his varied rapier-like pieces of knowledge, "Urut can crush rocks on your planet between his two hands. On his world a day lasts seven of yours. A day's work to him means seven times twentyfour or one hundred and sixtyeight of your hours. Can you fight him even one of his days. Grand Champion?" I knew the answer. Urut's skin would be as tough as rock, his stamina far beyond any normal one-G human's bounds, and his strength would be like ordinary muscle taut against the pressure of invariant hydraulic presses. I would most surely die tomorrow. I knew it and Trevic Stronger knew it. But I spat again in barbaric defiance. II sounds of tractor and pressor duels around me and knew I had overslept on this, my last day. According to my educated brain, thousands of years before a certain B. Franklin had said. Early to bed and early to rise will make a man healthy, wealthy and wise. I paused briefly in disgust at giving thought to such revolting associations. Why had not my mind been permitted to remain that of a normal brood-world barbarian? I bound my two pressor beams to my wrists and my two tractor beams to my ankles and gyrated my body through the endless contortions of tension and countertension so necessary to the modern gladiator. I pulled my leg muscles to their limit of endurance, slowly . but surely overcoming the tractor-versus-tractor configuration. Then, and so rapidly that the eye would be unable to follow, I twisted my body muscles to push pressor against pressor until, biceps bulging, I heard the faint clink of wrist plate against wrist plate, signifying I had once again overcome the hidden power of my death machinery. Only then did I eat lightly, my IF good nature returning slowly as I felt a sense of well-being. Again I passed my body through every one of the hardlearned exercises designed to test to the utmost one muscle against another, passing through the last just as the aurora at the side of my cage indicated that I was to move out into the arena. To avoid death from chest-band pressure, as my cell slowly contracted around me, I moved forward, following the energy glow. There, under the beat of their merciless sun, was the open arena, its sand, its hate-driven gawkers, its blood of the past and psychic blood yet to flow. Pushing my way toward the ellipsoid's nearest focus, I then squinted to see the squat hulk of Urut of Ewit at the far end. The crowd of blood-mongers surrounding our large cage, except at floor level, howled on my entry. Knowing I was the handicapped, they screamed for Urut's blood which, could I but arrange it, would be most happily furnished them -- for it was his blood or mine. Almost I felt sorry for that hulk -- short, broad of torso, leg and arm; flat-headed with parrotlike lips; humanoid of form and lizard-hided of skin. M y survival was at stake and my mind swiveled back to life and death calculations. He had the sun. Trevic Stranger would have seen to that. He had more. As strong as I was, my muscles were but one-G trained. As quick as I was, he would act faster. Very probably I would not find any weak spot in his natural armor, whereas to him I was but an anthropomorphic jellyfish. In a gladiator's daze I calculated my survival paths overlong -- already he was swimming toward me with tractors and pressors working together. No sooner had I tensed to meet his first attack than he was beyond me, already rebounding from the magnetic wall. I pushed both tractors outward at the widest angle of my legs, unconsciously reaching for the bedrock which I knew to exist there. Both arms were folded against my chest band to place pressors in their firmest position. He struck like a ten-ton boulder rolling down the mountainside. My muscle-banded legs vibrated with the pressure and my reserves soon evaporated. His right tractor could reach around to the side of my head to hold while his left reached to my right side and I knew scant instants stood between me and decapitation. More in instinctive desperation than for any reason I switched pressors down low and slipped my body under his. He rocketed overhead to slam mightily against the far side of the arena's shield, chest band glowing red, while I twisted around from back to belly on the sand floor. Still no strategy came to my mind. Can a pygmy subdue the elephant? Can the ant topple the pedestrian? Can a simple one-G human resist for long the heavyplanet man under oneG conditions? I concentrated every bit of thought and will on my survival. Brute force against inhuman force was my only strategy. He sliced through the air again and I dodged. He brought both legs into play to cut me in two and I again dodged. He tried the ploy of alternating leg tractors and arm pressors and I eluded him. Not until he sat above me in the overhead tractor-lock position did my strategy bloom. Though only tiny moments of time were involved, my thoughts ran as follows. Why can I dodge this lightninglike man so easily? How is it he misuses his speed so much? Could it be that he is unused to fighting in a one-G environment -- that this is his first experience on such a light world? If so, his timing must be too fast and I am not really eluding him. He misses me and then I dodge, gers and toes, I crawled excruciatingly slowly across the bottom until his tractors caught bedrock below and I could slide out from under. He jabbed down with pressors but this time I was ready. I kicked my tractors into his squat belly and followed behind his moving arms with my own pressors. He somersaulted then and pinwheeled before catching himself. Now I had the trick. Every time he moved I swung either tractor or pressor, catching his motion from behind and enforcing it. I used his own strength and speed against him until finally, during one complex maneuver where his tractors reinforced his pressor movement, I doubly reinforced his action with my pressors and tractors and his two arms snapped. The gawkers screamed and howled for blood but I had other ideas. Already exhausted, I doubted my ability to penetrate his thick hide, though he lay helpless. More important to me than his destruction were the death of another and the love of a third. Urut floated around and around on tractors, frantically twisting his body to redirect his dangling arms and their pressors. I shot forward and spoke for the first time. "Urut. Cooperate with me and live to fight another day." In a high, squeaking voice he warily asked, "What is it you want?" "I want out of this cage and IF you can help. What they do to me outside and where I go should be of no concern to anyone but me -- and no one will suspect your help in what will follow." "What do I do?" "I am going to use both pressors and tractors to propel myself through the cage. Only if I go very quickly will my chest band remain sufficiently cool for me to survive. I am going to place myself within range of your tractors and with their help, and the quickness of your legs, I can crash through. Will you do this Unit?" "But you will die if we are not quick enough. Why should you place yourself within my control when you have already won?" "Urut, my friend, you and I have no quarrel. We have never had. We fight only to survive -- now let us help each other live. I want freedom and revenge. You want your life. Why should we not bargain?" T he crowd began the death chant. "Blood -- blood! Kill the hulk! Kill the hulk -- " I could tell from their frenzy that soon something must be done or their passion would be on all of us. Urut could also sense it. The idea of mutual help was not yet fully integrated in his mind but he nodded. "May your mud-nest be pleasing!" I swung to the other side of the arena to begin my plan. From hundreds of previous fights I knew every inch of arena bedrock and I used the knowledge to advantage. I flung wrist pressors at each point behind me and ankle tractors ahead of me, accelerating swiftly in line with Urut. The crowd hushed and Urut patiently moved his hulk into position for the throw. I swung past his body swiftly. More swiftly still he lashed onto me with both tractors webbed together. I felt the fringe of their beams pass my arms, then my head and thick neck absorbed the pull and I was flung up to and against the magnetic shield surrounding us. My chest band glowed and part of my body tried to wrench itself backward -- but still onward and through I passed. I flew over the heads of those in the first tiers, then plowed into the next ranks. Heads popped; chest, arm and leg bones snapped. I arose amidst the gore of dead and dying gawkers. Their hush changed to screams. Pandemonium reigned. A small number in the crowd rushed to the exits but the majority stood shouting, "Champion! Champion! Champion!" Over and over again their acknowledgment echoed -- like the beating of surf on the rocky shores -- until my very bones vibrated with the chant. Never II before had one escaped the magnetic arena and the crowd was wild with enthusiasm. I should have trusted to my judgment of their emotion. My next move was utterly foolish. I swung out to reach for Trevic Strenger, hoping to crush his thin neck between my pressors. Above and below and all around me flew his weblon-encaaed protectors. High over me were the platforms of heavy rays, while on each side were the smaller hand weapons -- but I had agility, speed and coordination far beyond those of any group of Strenger guards. I had one tactic which would catch them by surprise. My muscles were trained to use beams but my mind was trained to use muscles. With those I bowled over the first group, tumbling weapon and guard onto the tiers below. Ill F ighting one-G animals in an open environment and with full knowledge of their beams and rays, I was more than a match for them all. But no matter how I hacked and hewed, how cleverly I spilled their heavy weapons, I still could not reach Strenger. I can see himyet in my memory, sitting back, watching with faint amusement as I tossed his guards here and there like feathers -- only to find more guards taking their places. The gawkers shrieked with pleasure over this new form of entertainment and I turned and ran, dashing up beyond the seat rims, finding space between the roof and two structural pressor beams to squeeze my bulky body through. Outside the arena I fell several hundred feet before my rays caught bedrock below and I could twist myself across the pylons and roadways of this ungodly civilization to search for the city's end and silent peace. Behind me, perhaps a mile away, the guards boiled out from the arena area and I swept down low below their sight level. Another mile and another and another -- when would the city end? Then little by little trees, parks and farms replaced city blocks, until only farm land and tall mountains lay ahead. That first night I slept in peace among the wild foothills of this strange world, free for the first time since being taken from my brood world. In my dreams lived the face of Strenger -- but also in my dreams was the sad, melancholy face of Patricia and my body longed for both in their proper place. The morning sun no longer seemed so hot and sultry. The air seemed fresher and the planet, even with its strange flora and fauna, appeared friendly. I speared a small carnivore with IF a tractor beam, drank fresh water and ate the raw meat, then washed and rested while I thought. Were I to go back to the city my large bulk would easily identify me as the Champion. My muscles would be impossible to hide in this civilization. Farmers I knew about because of my helter-skelter education -- I knew, for example, that some Sabre planet genius had called farmers stewards of the state. Could I trust the farmer not to turn me in for one of Strenger's high rewards? I thought not. Though I searched my brain for other informative tidbits on this society, I concluded that only the mountains and hills would hide me. sors, fastening them to my chest band by means of twisted fibers, then unhesitatingly I strode off toward the snow-capped mountains ahead. Day followed day and night followed night. I easily speared game with tractor or pressor while I followed the animal trails from elevation to elevation. My body stayed in trim and my hate gradually oozed outward as my path came closer to the appearance of rocky plateaus similar to my brood world -- all, that is, except the tiny, reserved corner of my emotions which repeated my need over and over. Kill Strenger, The rocky path wound upward and I trod closer to the snowy peaks, my body now covered with animal skins for warmth. Slowly the rock turned to snow, then snow to mixed snow and ice, glazing white while I moved onward and upward, never hurrying, never slowing. Miles of ice w'ere crossed and only once did I have to pull myself from a deep crevice by means of a tractor beam. Finally the downslope snow line was reached on the mountain's other side. I stepped with relief into familiar rocky plateaus, fully expecting a similar leisurely pace downward. Then it happened. It was Strenger again. I was caught. His men dropped the cage neatly over my body and turned the field on high. He came from behind the rocks with his bold smile and just looked, hands folded against his chest. "The gawkers now love you, barbarian, and we can still make a truce. Come, I invite you to bury your hatred. You are one of the greatest of our world's champions -- over all time -- and it saddens me, your waste. By popular demand I can now release you from gladiator status to become a free citizen. But how can I permit a hate-driven barbarian to roam free among us?" I showed my feeling by emitting a low growl. I clenched my fists IV imagining his thick neck in my hands. Trevic beckoned his retainers to lower the cage. He found a convenient rock upon which to sit while he pleaded his case again with me. "Know this, barbarian. Your use of tractor and pressor beams can be traced wherever you go on the Sabre planets. Even so, you have no further need for them, no matter w'hat your decision." He motioned with his finger and my cage began to tighten until my chest band squeezed me from all directions. Weblon-encased tools drove through my shield and skillfully cut my beams from my chest band, after which the cage was restored in size. "Your chest band is made of the world's strongest metal. It cannot be removed without special scientific tools. Wherever you wear it, you are subject to immediate seizure and capture. Do you still wish these marks of the gladiator?" My tongue finally loosed. I spoke in an angry voice, "You tore me from my brood-world without my permission, mad king, and I shall one day kill you!" Unable to reason with me further, he beckoned his men forward. My cage was lifted by weblon devices and I continued my trans-mountain flight as his captive. T hey towed me farther into the mountains, disregarding any inconvenience inertia might make to my caged body. My chest band glow'ed again and again as my body bounced off the cage's sides. Perhaps fifty miles inward, we followed another rocky path down to the valley of our destination. Below us, laid out in neat geometrical array, were the energy cages of thousands of humans. Walking like tiny bugs between each cage were the weblonprotected guards who passed out either food or water or else the whip -- whichever seemed most appropriate for the moment. A scrap of random information forced its way into my conscious mind -- forced, I suppose, by the association of the antUke men far below. Only a century ago someone named G. Harcel had said "Men are tiny bugs once they have seen their souls." Could any information be more useless at a time like this? High on one side were the mine tailings, glistening red from the evening sun. Immediately behind those tailings stood the factory, puffing out streamers of noxious gases which, I eventually learned, represented part of the physical and chemical wastes resulting from separating weblon metal from the ores found deep in the planet's crust. IF My cage was tugged next to a larger one. The aurora along the side, signifying an opening in my cage, burned brightly and I hurried across into the larger. Trevic Strenger paid his last respects then. "Enjoy your new lessons, barbarian. When you have learned more, find a way to contact me. Perhaps we may yet be friends." He walked away and I flung myself furiously at my magnetic shield. My routine was simple. Each day, every day, I was chained to a row of ten other prisoners who walked two miles along the valley floor and three miles downward on sloping shafts to our work area. Here alternating tractor-pressor beams were given to us, each a model considered too large for a single human to support. Two of us would hold the mining tool, aiming it at the green streak of weblon metal running throughout the enormous, partly natural and partly man-made caverns. The alternating tractorpressor forces acted swiftly on the cavern walls, grinding all but the impervious weblon metal to thin mono-molecular layers. Follow-up crews sucked up the dust-mixed metal and transported it back to the surface, where further chemical and physical processes separated the pure weblon metal from the monomolecular dust layers. Large ships transported the purified weblon to other industrial locations for treatment into forms and shapes for use wherever beam neutrality was required. ning that I was different from the others. Most were political prisoners with only puny muscles. Most werie gregarious creatures, friendly with one another, some counting days until their release while others were hopelessly resigned to making the best of a lifetime under lock and chain. Though I was as sociable as anyone on my brood world, here I snarled and spat until, like one with a great scabrous disease, I was avoided by all. Enemies were easy to make. The chip on my shoulder was as big as a sturdy oak, balanced precariously and waiting patiently for anyone to tip its trunk toward the ground. It took only one or two short tussles for my strength, agility and training to show. We were fed in line and normally the distance between my chained figure and others in my line was the maximum length of chain between us. One day a particularly fast, aggressive person bumped against my broad body in his eagerness to get nourishment. I swung around snarling, grabbed his neck between my I# giant paws and began to squeeze the life from him. Only the whips of the guards and the combined pulls of other prisoners dragged me from his body while life still throbbed in him. Another day my reflexes were sufficiently quick to grab the whip from a guard as he swung its tip toward me. I turned the whip around and nearly lacerated the guard to death before others could stop me. That was the day all of them, prisoners and guards alike, combined positive efforts against me. That I was not only asocial but beyond the restraints of any ordinary prison had now become obvious. In the first attempt at my life one of the heavy tractor-pressor beam generators was tipped on me from a height of about fifteen feet. Fortunately my gladiatorhoned senses caught the movement and I easily side-stepped and safely evaded what seemed to me was the generator's slow fall. I didn't catch on then. The next time a small, wiry prisoner pushed his body against mine in such a way that I tumbled backward into the yawning black chasm below us. I twisted and caught the edge of the chasm's rim and quickly drew myself upward. Already the guards had moved my attacker beyond reach, passing him quickly to the surface to become part of a different and unreachable work crew. It was then I began to suspect. O NE day the guards left our work crew. All became quiet and I looked up from my work to see every eye staring at me. Some had grasped rocks and stones while others grabbed the neck chains lying nearby. Slowly the group closed in on me, eyes glazed and muscles taut. I moved swiftly to my gladiator's stance and waited quietly. Every sense on the alert, I could place every one of the nine around me. How little they knew of my training. None had access to gladiator power-beams and I was now faced with a purely twodimensional problem. The rocks came fiVst and I easily dodged them. Then, in quick resolve, all nine swooped in toward me. I rushed through the circle, grabbing the nearest one holding the chain. Lifting him from the ground I flailed the group, though the chain was still held by two others. Those poor misguided point-seven-G fools had no concept of a gladiator's training and strength. I flailed until it seemed that none survived. But two had climbed above me during the melee to redirect the mining beam at my body. I am . quick and w'ell coorIF dinated but even I could not move as fast as their fingers on the machine's switch. Quite probably the alternating tractor-pressor beam had never been used on human flesh around these prisoners before. They certainly had no knowledge of the effect of the beams when used this way. I stood my ground and let the waves of current ripple through my body, neither resisting nor helping the flow of alternate tugs and pulls, and my gladiatortrained body as well as my waterbased tissue withstood the strains well. Every piece of metal I wore -- including my hated chest band and the newly attached neck band -- disintegrated into monomolecular powder as fine as any created in the weblon mines. I was truly free of their hated instruments of capture now. I leaped to the machine's top and from there crushed my attackers' heads like eggshells. Now only I, the mining machine and the solitude of the caverns remained in this branch of the tunnel. I wondered how long I had before the guards returned? Behind me lay certain capture. Directly ahead of me lay granitic rock, but to my side lay the deep, perhaps more dangerous chasm. What choice did I have? I picked up the mining tool and chain, using the latter to tie "the tool to my back. Then slowly, using trained fingers and toes, I picked my way down the steep crevice's side, using the slightest of indentations along the wall to support my own two hundred pounds and the additional two hundred on my back. Down I crawled. Down until my fingers and toes were sore beyond description -- down until I reached the first ledge. Here I rested, conserving my strength for the next lap downward. Again and yet again I traveled downward, resting from ledge to ledge, sometimes finding one only when it seemed that my last reserves of strength had been reached. Would I never reach the bottom? long, dark, silent tube, hearing only the sibilance of air sweeping around its path -- never hearing splash or bounce of its final strike. It was then I paused to consider. It was highly doubtful that I could go up again and going farther down seemed useless. Now was the time to unlimber my mining instrument. Then I pointed the alternating tractor-pressor inward against the chasm's wall and powdered my way forward. The first layer powdered at my feet and swept outward into the chasm below. Soon I was scrabbling with hands and knees to force the dust backward behind me. Fortunately the mono-molecular layers filled less space than their more complcx forms and air from the cliasm swept in behind me as the stone ahead powdered to the floor. Mile after mile I bored ahead. When tired, I rested. Then I bored again for miles. Days passed. Even my gladiator's physique suffered from lack of nourishment. My body became sluggish, my mind tormented by memories of the sneering laughter and redspurting throat of Trevic Strenger and by the graceful body and full lips of his daughter. The latter vision filled my mind to overflowing until my muscles responded. I pressed on, even forgetting which way was up and which down and distrusting my fatigued senses for knowledge of either direction. Dust filled my mouth, my eyes, my ears and, it seemed, even my mind, until I could go no farther. With one last effort at survival I shoved my poundage and my machine against the wall, lurched forward. Under sudden acceleration both the machine and my body fell outward and down as the thin wall between my tunnel and the opening broke through. My body revolved around and around. Centrifugal force flung my arms and legs outward as I plunged through a narrow fissure. I strained my back, neck and belly muscles to bring my turning to a stop but did not succeed. Light glimmered several hundred feet below and my frustrated mind focused on it until my spinning made it appear a whole galaxy of light particles swinging around me in tighter and tighter circles. My mind let go. My back and head hit the water first. To this day, I am unaware of the extent of the true damage done to me in the fall. V H ow long did I lie there? Weeks? Days? Minutes? No one will ever know. I do know that hundreds of thousands of scraps of their educative process passed through my mind, only one of which I remembered on regaining consciousness. " The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'to talk of many things: Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing wax -- Of cabbages -- and kings -- ' " Could any thought have been more out of place and foolish or less useful? On returning to consciousness, I found my body to be whole and undamaged but bruised terribly. Water was washing over me. Some trickled into my open mouth and some laved my nose and ears, trailing my hair downstream like fine wires extended. My right arm lay under me, touching the rocky stream bed below. My left arm lay partially submerged, the hand resting on a shallow bank. IF My legs were upstream, resting on rock. My eyes were pasted shut by the dust around their rims. Soon I became aware of the mining tool's soft hum and the gentle tugging and pulling of my flesh under its influence. I waved my right hand around in a circle and felt the broken chain with which I had attached the mining tool to my chest. I scraped mud from my swollen eyes, opened them and found I could see. Phosphorescent particles emitted sufficient photons for me to view my surroundings dimly. The mining instrument was on and pointed steadily in my direction. I drank until my shrunken belly was fully distended, then lay back to rest and to sleep peacefully under the gentle vibration and hum of the tractor-pressor beam. Probably never before in history had a human being been subjected so long to the rapid alternate pull and push of the tractor-pressor beam. Would its effect be harmful? I didn't know. When I awoke I crawled again to the stream, taking my fill. Below me I could see the shining shapes of water creatures, among them the unmistakably welcome shape of a fish. I struck with my right hand and grabbed the unwary creature tightly. Its cold flesh furnished my first nourishment in what seemed like months but may have been only days. A gain I slept, then ate and slept again. Later I walked over to my mining instrument and turned it off. I felt light-headed, but oddly healthy and not in the least tired. I attributed this to the effect of poisons manufactured by my own system under unusual stress and at the time had no idea of the damage done to my body. I could have acted no differently under the conditions. Suffice it to say that I felt unusually alert and full of a sense of well-being, though attributing all of these characteristics to normal results of excessive stress. I began my long walk along the stream hopefully toward light, air and freedom, packing the mining instrument on my back once more. The walls of the stream bed became narrower. Soon they reached a point where my broad shoulders could no longer squeeze through. My way forward was finally halted by granite blocks. With almost a swagger of confidence, certainly more than the moment warranted, I unlimbered the tractor-pressor and blasted my way out. T he ship waited for me at my exit point. Of course -- use of tractor or pressor beams anywhere on the planet could be easily followed by Strenger and his men. I turned too late to reenter my cavern retreat. A rock bounded from my head and I fell forward to lie unconscious once again. When I gained consciousness, my feet were trussed together, my arms tied behind my back and my head ached. I was in a cabin. Two gnarled men sat in front of me, alternately eating and gawking. Was I back in the arena? Were these my new keepers? I strained at the bonds on my hands and feet but the ties were stronger than I. I humped my body to a sitting position and looked at my two captors, hatred washing through me in waves. "Pretty, ain't he?" the one on my left said to the other. "Needs a bath though. Think we could oblige him?" Both stopped eating. One tied a drag rope to my legs and hauled me outside the cabin to a nearby spring. My flesh was torn and bleeding from the sharp rocks and sticks over which I was dragged and my head was still dizzy from the blow on my head but I uttered no complaint. They pulled the rope end over an overhanging rock until I was dangling upside down over the water, my head scant inches from its surface. I took a deep breath, expecting the worst. It came. I was dunked under water seven or eight times, probably saved from drowning only by my one-G physique and high lung capacity. I was dragged back into the cabin, trussed up against the post and forgotten for the time being. T hey finished their dinner, checked various instruments lying around the cabin, then turned back to me. The older one -- gray-haired and with a stubble-covered chin -- was the first to speak directly to me. "You might as well tell us why you were snooping around our private weblon mine. It's your only chance of saving your life." My mind, now quite confused, failed to function as quickly as it might have under gladiator conditions. I said nothing. IF me and said, "f you are a I coughed some water from my government agent we will let you burning lungs and said, "I am go free on another planet. It's a gladiator. I have no name." "All gladiators have names," the first one said. "Besides, what would a gladiator be doing using pressor-tractor equipment in these mountains? Come on, iellow -- if you value your life -- tell us the truth." I strained every muscle of my body to burst the bonds. At last my body sagged. I knew a spasm of futility before I lost consciousness again. I came to inside their ship. The interior was pure luxury and there I learned how the gawkers had searched for me in vain. I was one of the most popular heroes of all Sabre history -- my life was public property and not even Trevic Strenger, dictator over all, would dare to violate it openly. But no trace of me was found until my mining equipment had been sensed by these lawviolating miners near their illegal mine. I was kept bound inside their ship while they checked and double-checked my now cleanshaven features with pictures taken during my gladiator days. Convinced I was truly the escaped Grand Champion, they struck my bonds, not knowing how close they were to true death at the moment. I soon learned that everywhere I was loved by the people. But I felt certain that I would still be unsafe anywhere on a planet ruled by Trevic Strenger and his type. hoping to get back to my brood world one day. But how could I flee when my two goals of hate and love were here? Not only would deserting them be unnatural to my brood training -- it was unnatural to the ' unusual state of my biology, still deeply hidden from my conscious processes. Still, in violation of every instinct, I left civilization behind to flee toward the Planet of Rocks of my birth. Seven long light-years lay ahead, meaning months of travel. Hundreds of thousands of strange worlds would be silently, unknowingly passed as we sped onward. How many contained brood worlds? How many had produced two-and-a-half-G monstrosities like Urut of Ewit? How many contained Patricia Strengers or Trevic Strengers? How many had educated barbarian champions and how many even held the humanoid form? The days passed slowly. I became acquainted with the two outlaws. An objective study of their patterns of behavior gave me a certain recognition of their finer shadings of emotions. All three of us were outside the law but these two still subscribed to certain ethics and species-assisting patterns of behavior -- much as each of the brood helps another for the sake of survival of the whole. Unlike the brood, they had days IF when their minds were dominated by mixtures of pure emotions. They certainly exhibited pure forms of overt anger and calm complacency but they also showed fine shadings of moroseness and languor. I began to recognize emotional subtleties and, for the first time, began to question my pure hatred response to Trevic Strenger. Was he really as bad as I had projected or did he, too, have comprehensible feelings and behavior-motives mixed into his treatment of me? One day I noted the outlaws' deep concern for one dial on the ship's panel. Daily the dial's indicator swung upward and daily other instruments were checked and rechecked against it. Presently I read their concern -- patrols were on our path. A whole fleet crawled toward us, closing in slowly. There are no maneuvers that can deceive a determined fleet. Our only hope lay in an act of some god who, out of the goodness of his being and the emptiness of space, would reach outward and hand us some device or means by which to escape. To make matters worse, I had no place to stand and make the fight mine, using my gladiator's training. I felt trapped like an animal and could almost feel civilization's magnetic cages crush through my bones again. My chest, where I had worn the metal band of servitude, had healed and was covered with keloids. I wanted no more slavery. One slim hope remained to me. My captors searched the directory for any kind of planet with breathable air. Then they began long-range perturbation analysis of surrounding stars, hoping to spot planets within range. One bright yellow sun on our pathway seemed to offer hope and they quickly adjusted our route slightly to pass near its planets. We swung inward in a giant cycloidal loop, and an automatic analysis assured us that one planet, fourth from center, had breathable, oxidizing air. But now our range was within the patrol's striking power and their beams reached out for hundreds of thousands of miles to vibrate our craft ceaselessly. Though weakened structurally, we recklessly approached the planet's atmosphere, dropping swiftly into its density to skip and skip again as the craft was buffeted by the force of its own passage. Now weakened further and red from heat, it plunged at even sharper angles until its tail section broke off and our front portion spun uncontrolled toward the water below. VI T he miners must surely have been killed in the plunge. At the time I attributed my survival to my gladiator's training and my powerful physique. I had bunched my muscles together and dived out the ship an instant before it splashed. I hit hard, maybe as hard as Unit had hit me. Maybe a little harder -- I don't know. In any case my body sustained the shock and I swam to the surface, spotting land perhaps ten miles away. Toward this I swam and just before sundown reached the sandy beach where I lay in exhausted stupor. The jungle ahead of me was unrecognizable. Whether fern or animal, flora or fauna, I could not tell. Only experience would show. Food was my immediate concern. Next came shelter and water. I rose, rather unnaturally recovered, and strode confidently into the strange organic configurations ahead. Suddenly my emotional complex dropped from open elation and overwhelming optimism to complete apathy. Death would have seemed a pleasant release. Striving always with my gladiator's training and the stubborness born of brood world, I consciously searched everywhere without success -- no recognizable cause was creating my emotional void. Down the scale of emotions my feelings plummeted -- and slowly and silently the fibrous matting of the jungle undulated toward me. It was white with streaks of gray running through it and gave the appearance of some broadpatterned. supine foliage which moved like a leech. Who could tell what it really was? I wanted to back away but my apathy was too deep. I stood in an abandonment of despair, even squatting so the slimy thing could more easily flow up my body. My apathy was dense -- as dense as thick glue -- and the thing nearly covered my back. I squatted lower to let it cover more of me, then felt its acid trickle over my skin. Apathy prevailed -- nonetheless, under the stimulus of pain, my gladiator's instinct snapped my body erect and my hands and feet flung the horrible thing from me. Acid had etched the skin all over my back, neck, arms and shoulders. Just as suddenly as the skin had been destroyed my body began its preconditioned, rapid repairs, though at the time I was too busy to give the phenomenon thought. thing flowed toward me as before and my apathy was as leaden as before. Why should I move when all of life seemed so useless, so hopeless? W. Shakespeare did not quite say it, but my mind, sunken in depths beyond conscious control and mired in the IF facts of the educators, paraphrased it as: "O mighty barbarian -- dost thou lie low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?" I will say this about the paraphrase -- at least there was some relation between its semantics and my condition of the moment, though there was little else to recommend it. Yet my fighting instinct had been aroused and at another level of my being I exploringly fought back. First I strove for excitement and the adrenalin lift which accompanies it. Then I strove to force enthusiasm into the cellular portions of my body -- to no avail. Whatever force the thing had, my manufactured enthusiasm was not the answer. I let my body freely wage swift endocrine war as my emotions tore from cheerfulness through antagonism, overt anger, covert anger, resentment, fear, grief and apathy. Nothing manufactured by my b(y for my body helped. As the thing crawled closer I switched my endocrine war outward against the whole world of loops and snakelike whorls around me, raging within my soul but nonetheless subtly spouting torrents of emotion outward through some unseen orifice of my stilled body. It was when I again hit the apathy band that the thing stilled. Each time my body broadcast apathy, it retreated a little farther. My body had instinctively found the key to survival on this planet. The thing's emotional load lifted from my body. Again I felt lighthearted and full of a sense of health, though I still poured tons of black apathy at the crawling thing now scurrying away so rapidly. I turned back to the tangle of organic misshapes and little by little ferreted out its secrets. The ropy black serpent-like form dangling from above responded to fear. The flapping fan-like objects responded to overt anger and the other dangers responded to other emotions either singly or in combination. be identified as food, but now that I was learning to walk through the jungle by casting my emotions externally here and there, I followed the first stream upward with hopes of learning what was edible and what was not. Clearly the acid and baseforming entities were inedible. Time after time I succumbed to all their emotional complexities, learning only after their acidic or basic sting to fling them off and redirect my emotions outward. Time after time, my skin rapidly healed itself. Order began to appear from the chaos surrounding me. I watched the slinker root, a slob of jellylike flesh that looked like a weathered tree-root from my Planet of the Rocks, as it flushed out its quarry, a small blob of milksac covered with horny projections. Using almost pure fear, its emotion swept outward to cover growths of pink and purple velvety layers of some vertical materials. From the bottom of this growth the milksac animals -- if that's what they were -- rushed directly toward the j e I I y I i k e growth. There they were easily held until the chemical base dissolved their vital layers, after which they were absorbed into the attacker's system. For lack of better hunch, I followed the next jellylike sack. It captured a victim, I tore it away from its grasp, using my hands for the act of tearing and my emotions for the act of neutralizing the strange beast. I placed the juices of the injured beast on my tongue and found them sweet -- but some poisons are sweet. I didn't know the difference but my body did -- or so I thought at the time. I chewed and swallowed and stayed healthy. Looking back on the experience now, I wonder. Did my body adapt to the alien food or did my instinct determine what was food and what was not? I ate my way across thousands of miles of outrageous growths and forms as I traveled from coast to coast across one great continent. Occasionally I hid from search ships -- the Patrol would not rest until our bodies were discovered, I reasoned. I left no daily trail by use of tractor or pressor beam and my human body could hide among the fibrous, gelatinous, oozing, slinking, stinking mess around me. I crossed two mountain ranges, walking high above the lifeplateau, living for weeks on air, water, fat and determination. Lonely pools of water were to be found at these higher levels. T he longer I survived in tliat emotional jungle the more grip I had on my own emotions -- until I could instantly turn up the emotion of hate against Trevic Strenger or the passion and hunger of love for his daughter. I soon was aware of his ships less often and rightly assumed their surveillance of the planet to be more or less precautionary and automatic. Now I wanted the ships down, but only under my own terms. The problem was to attract their attention in order to make them a bit suspicious -- but not overly so -- and to trap the trappers. Fire is common to most planets -- but during a year's survival on this one, I had never IF seen a conflagration. I assumed that the patrol would also have observed this obvious fact. Could I make the unnatural happen by natural means? The unnatural did happen but in a different way. I found a large piece of metal with fused pieces and burned spots. Either our ship or another had caused this piece to be flung across the continent where it burned and fused on entry into the atmosphere; but whatever the true case, I had the part I needed to attract Strcngcr's persistent watchers. Above the organic line, which is also above the rain line, are mountains, thin dry air and pools of water resting in bowls of rock lined with streaks of nearly pure lead. No w'eather or natural disturbance occurs at these heights or does so only occasionally. The pools are remnants of another era in the planet's ecology. Before placing my plan into action, I had much work ahead and hoped my body was equal to its task. First, I found the pool nearest to the organic growth line. The pool I chose featured rocks jutting overhead. From one of these overhangs I tossed in more stones until the pile below the water's level was nearly to its surface. I then lowered a large organic membrane to this new rock level under the surface, folding it into a kind of loosely formed bag with its corners and sides above water. I tied the corners together loosely and tied the other end to a rock overhead. Within the newly separated layer of water I slowly lowered the spaceship's metal part, keeping one end high above the rock projection and lowering the other end to the bottom of the waterfilled bag. I tied another piece of organic rope to the top of the metal structure and looped its end to a rock some seven feet back from the water's edge. Then, carefully, I pulled on the metal, bending it farther and farther until it just touched a streak of partially oxidized lead jutting from the banks of the pool. Again and again I pulled the metal until I was in absolute control of its motion and could touch the lead streak with the ease of long practice. T he next day I drove hundreds of organic entities ahead of me, using only the apathy band, for I had learned that this emotion was associated w'ith acid-bearing life. Up the rocks tliey tumbled and rolled, gyrated, squirmed and crawled until the pool was reached. When the pool was made sufficiently acid by these monsters, I went after the base-bearing kind, using covert hostility for the drive, and I also drove them into the pool without qualms. There the the bases partially neutralized the acids, forming a serviceable electrolyte. How many beasts of which kind should I drive to create the huge battery I wanted? I did not know. Neither did I know about the permeability of the membrane sectioning off some liquid from the rest, nor the difference in electrolytic potential between the streaks of partially oxidized lead crawling along the pond's basin and the unknown metal now jutting above the pond's surface. With so many unknowns I could only try -- perhaps to fail and try again. After rest I pulled the metal down to the lead streak by means of the attached rope and was rewarded by observing a weak spark as the gap nearly closed. I returned to the herding of more creatures. Night came and the following day and I still herded creatures to the pond, testing the spark size with every new batch. I hoped that the spark of light could be seen from a spaceship at night -- or at least that the electro-magnetic waves radiating from the source would alert the patrolling monitors. I had not figured on the quick response which actually occurred. I was driving my last batch of creatures ahead when the ship came. I crouched behind the rocks to watch when the rays hit and I was stuck rigid to the spot. Through instruments of science or intellect, possibly both, they had outwitted me again. I was incapable of moving a muscle. The ship I had seen was the decoy. Another one had landed somewhat earlier to trap me. vir T here were two of them, one on either side of me, and they held me fast with heavy portable pressors. I strained with every bit of muscle tissue to no useful end. All around me the life I had driven from the jungle below boiled in confusion and from that movement came my idea. I summoned my energy and emoted apathy, driving the group toward one of the men. He faltered, then fell under the onslaught. The other also slumped. The pressors slipped from me and I ran to each man in turn. One pressor I threw into the acid pond. The second I focused on the ship, wedging it between two rocks. I turned to the fallen men. One was encrusted with an acid which had eaten deeply. Almost dead, he would be of no help to me. The other was visibly shaken. I ran my own emotional output back up and down the scale several times until I could key into his basic confusion, then brought him up to a comfortable emotional level. IF "How many arc in the ship?" I quietly asked. "Three. But who arc you? What are you doing alone on this surrealistic planet?" Now it's strange, but up to that point I had not thought of myself as a name. On the planet of my birth I was just one of the brood and could easily be identified by smell or appearance. On the Sabre planet I was known as barbarian or Champion or Grand Champion. Here on an alien planet, under an alien sun, I was again being asked a most fundamental question whose answer I could not give. "Are you on regular patrol around this planet?" I asked. "Yes." "What are your duties?" "We are to observe and report any slightest irregularity in shape or phenomenon or behavior over the whole planet's surface." "How long has your patrol had the planet under surveillance?" "Better than a year. Ever since outlaws were seen to approach the planet." I moved the patrolman closer to the pressor beam so that I could more quickly reach its controls if I needed to. "What did you expect to find here?" I asked. "None of us knows. We merely take orders. We sighted the pond's heat activity by auto-infrared surveillance and watched you at work. It was then we laid our trap to capture you and find out what was happening." "Are you a follower of the gladiators?" I asked. "Who isn't?" he replied. He looked up expectantly. "Then you are familiar with the disappearance of your Grand Champion over a year and a half ago?" H e looked me over from top to bottom before answering, then said excitedly, "Why, I believe you are he. Yes -- you must be -- " His emotions bounced from my artificially maintained level to his interest and sincerity. "If you are indeed the Grand Champion of a year ago -- you should know that your status is that of a free man. After your successful fight with Urut of Evvit and your escape from the arena you were declared free by the enthusiasm and will of all the people. How did you get here?" At one time I might have snarled and growled at this representative of their civilization. Now my mind froze as my conscious portion became aware of my own lack of emotional response to him. I listened politely and rationally to his talk. My mind, though, buzzed with consternation. Was I wTong to hate Trevic Strenger so? Was their world really all bad? Would I have been better off on the Planet of the Rocks, chasing rock wolves and fighting with others of the brood? Then, against all the instincts which make up a brood world barbarian, I freed the man and docilely followed him to his ship. The way back to Sabre planet was filled with wining and dining in the best of the patrol tradition. Word went out that the Grand Champion had survived shipwreck on a horribly inimical planet, and space for parsecs around was charged with the news. My fame had spread -- and my prowess increased. I had been the Greatest of Grand Champions and had so been declared on official gladiator roles. And only Trevic Strenger knew my true status but even he was not certain how I bad come to be found on the forlorn Planet of Emotion. puters battling one another. Trevic Strenger knew that every move I made might lead inevitably to his death -- for I still meant to keep my vow. I knew that anything he did might cause my destruction directly or indirectly. He held the power, the education and the experience. I was the Great Grand Champion, beloved of the people and not entirely unused to facing the thought of daily danger. Urut of Ewit was now champion, for no ordinary one-G humanoid had been able to withstand his stamina, strength and speed once he had grown experienced in one-G conditions. Between Urut and myself the people gawked as only gawkers can. When I entered the gladiator stands, the gawkers stood and cheered for fifteen minutes. On the other side, far away from my grasping hands, Trevic Strenger sat surrounded by his sycophants and guards. Did I still wish him ill? I genuinely did not know. I knew only that I meant to kill him. Urut entered and the crowd applauded with enthusiasm. Today was his show as well as mine. Then Trevic began his clever move against me. He arose, stilled the crowd, announced that it was only fitting that the newest and best of champions, Urut of Ewit, be challenged by the world's Great Grand Champion. As he knew it would, the idea caught the gawkers' imagination and they howled their approval. I was committed before my barbaric wits could form a defensive reply. Only by sustaining the people's good will could I be safe from Trevic and he had cleverly made use of the situation. I had to IF fight. I flung off my civilized accouterments and leaped into the arena, no longer bound by chest band, free to enter and leave whenever I wished. I caught the tractor and pressor beams, tying them quickly to my ankles and wrists, and waited for Urut to move. He looked at me sadly from his heavy-lidded eyes and parrot-shaped mouth and I knew he had no desire for what he felt was sure to come. H IS first blow, with pressor, was light and I knew he was pulling his attack. As any other one-G gladiator would be, I was clumsy, slow and weak compared to Urut. I was also out of training. At any time he could have decapitated me or ripped my body to shreds, for his timing was perfect. For purpose of show. I'm sure, he let me cartwheel him several times and the gawkers thought my response would soon build in duration and quality. I knew and he knew that we were mismatched and that he had the advantage. Survival on the Planet of Emotion had taught me that emotion, too, can be a club if only one knows how to generate it. I had much practice and while Urut had his will with me -- now under tractor lock, then under pressor throw -- I sought the key to the emotions in his humanoid bulk. My endocrine system worked rapidly, generating pure emotions from apathy to grief, resentment to fear, boredom to happiness. None worked. I then tried combinations as I had learned to do on the Planet of Emotions. Once I saw Urut falter briefly and pause to stare from glazed eyes. I thought then I had the key but lost the combination. My powerful physique was tiring fast. Urut had pressors on opposite sides of my body and tractors at right angles, on opposite sides. I was being simultaneously squeezed and pulled on different body sections. I could almost feel cartilage tear and muscle tissues pop. The gawkers were yelling for blood as I continued my search. I caught the emotional combination to his alien form and Urut paused again briefly. I drove my emotional wedge in and he faltered. He stumbled and fell to his chest as I slowly rose from the sand, giving every appearance of pushing back on pressors and pulling back from tractors still clinging to me. The gawkers screamed. As my body strengthened, my emotional output rose and Urut twitched in agony. I have no idea what the emotional content meant to his way of life; but it was a powerful antidote to his physical superiority. By the time I reached his side, my body was fully recovered and, using every ounce of my two hundred pounds of muscle, I might have been able to decapitate him. I looked to the crowd and asked their pleasure and I thanked the great brood-God that nearly all screamed for his release. The gawkers yelled, stamped their feet and clapped their hands together. For them the solution had the appeal of a well-laid plot. How else could they have both their Great Grand Champion and the newest Champion to carry on with their future entertainment? T he day of Strenger's trap ended and I rested in my public-donated apartment that was lined with trophies of my earlier slave-status wins. Now, I thought, it was my turn against Strenger. My plan took form. During my planning stages and the impasse to follow the faulty educative process to which I had been subjected caused A. Zlinsky's ph rase to repeat through my mind. It ran: "To the wise go words!" A meaningless utterance. I tried to suppress it. It wouldn't go away, so I found myself trying to rationalize it. I did need a true and honest education to compete with Strenger -- maybe that was what Zlinsky's silly quotation meant. I don't know. But eventually it led me directly to more efficient and better organized educators. The habit pattern my mind had developed of tracing all knowledge through quotations or simulated quotations whenever possible was disturbing. My new educators explained that I would slowly lose the habit with time if I made a conscious effort to do so and that it arose from faulty use of the educator when I was a gladiator trainee. Time passed. I became more acclimated to civilized behavior patterns. My emotional control was nearly perfect and I could more easily read the emotional patterns of others. Were it not for my vow against Strenger's life, I might have learned to enjoy my new free status. When I was invited to attend the annual fealty procession and to serve as one of many state showpieces for public consumption, I could not help but suspect that Trevic Strenger's next trap was ready. My own plan was shelved and I prepared myself to look for any opening, regardless of cost to myself. approach Trevic Strenger's seat within a matter of feet, I knew our day of confrontation had come and that I was being baited. He couldn't know of my new ability to manipulate emotion, with which I would trap trapper. I took his challenge. On each IF leg and arm I attached secret pressor and tractor beams and joined the grand procession. Behind the others, I slowly approached his position to give my symbol of fealty to the state. I could sense Trevic's muscles tighten as I approached him. His emotions became snarled and bent by covert hostility. I grabbed his emotions by means of my new talents and twisted them down through grief and apathy. Downward they went until his face became placid, his arms and neck muscles relaxed and his whole stance presented a hopelessness. Only one person stood between Trevic and me and that one quickly left, urged on by another emotional impulse from my hulking body. I faced Strenger as if he and I were alone in the world. His eyes seemed to plead and I scorned him, for what power could this emotional invalid have over me? And then I knew that my hate for him was over and I dropped my long vow of hate and vengeance. Suddenly the floor dropped from under me. Instantly my reflexes snapped on tractors and pressors and I curved my body into the best stance to slow my fall. Slow it would not! Somewhere above me automatics caught and sheared off my powers. No matter how I scrambled and twisted my body, the machinery kept up with my efforts, seeming to anticipate every one of my merely human emotions. The fall was not far. I landed catlike on all fours and bounded up to my feet again. Automatic machinery continued to nullify my pressors and tractors and steel bars surrounded me. Light came from the walls outside my new steel cage. I heard a door open in the outside wall and then Trevic Strenger's careful tread. He did not smile; neither did he frown. I reached forward with my emotions to engulf him in apathy again but he spoke quickly. "Turn off your machinery, barbarian. Throw out your tractor and pressor beams, too. I expected you to try for my life again and, as you can see, your attempt has not and cannot succeed. Face up to the fact that your machinebuilt education is only veneerdeep, your emotional control is uncivilized and your continuous attempts to kill me are more barbaric than our gladiator's arena. At least, there you know the rules." outward but remained silent. "That's better," he said. "At least you are intelligent enough to know when you are captured. That's more than I could say for you when I first caught you on your Planet of the Rocks. You fought until exhaustion then. Why not now?" I remained quiet but watchful. I read less emotional hatred in his voice and actions than before, perhaps because I projected less of my own thoughts into the situation. "I don't know what mutational talent you used to control my emotions to such a deep apathy before I triggered your fall into this chamber," he continued, "but I can assure you, you are here to stay until this senseless hatred of me is gone or -- as is most likely from your stubborn character -- you die of old age. Which shall it be?" Unbidden to my mind came Farragut's thought, "Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead!" I pushed it below my conscious level and spoke to Trevic for the first time since his capture of me. "I thought to kill you upstairs but then realized its futility just before your trap door opened. My hate has burned itself out." He smiled and I noted how pleasant the smile was -- not at all malevolent as I had believed for so long. "How can I believe your statement now?" he asked. "You have urged me to accept the civilization you represent. What guarantee do I have that it consists of the advantages you have told me about?" "Try it," he said instantly. "Then try me," I also said instantly. He laughed at my answer and seemed to consider my request quite seriously. He reflected only minutes, however, then bravely motioned to his retainers. "Free him." The bars around me rose and I faced Trevic Strenger, separated by only feet. I could easily have killed him at that moment. IX Y ears had passed since Trevic's momentous decision to free me. Sitting at the helm of this tiny empire known as the Sabre planets I looked back with nostalgia at my innocent entrance into its society. Man had gone to the stars and returned, gone again. And those remaining at home had formed a weakened gene reservoir. Noting this state of affairs, man had returned the gladiator games to his home planet and then had forcibly invited back the barbaric and the humanoid -- any mutational sports or freaks bearing new and untested genes were brought to Earth as gladiators. Here in the arena of strength, agility, intelligence and courage the long screening took place -- its IF purpose to find new blood for the human race. Those freed, like myself, were the backbone of humanity's new drive outward and inward. Slowly man returned his genetic protoplasm to an honored, aggressive, survival status. I'll not forget the day of my final release from both the steel cell and my own inward-driven emotions. Trevic Strenger stood before me, bravely waiting for me to call his bluff -- to kill him suddenly or to accept his offer for civilized peace. He waited. Then suddenly he tore off his shirt and I could see the thickened keloids around his chest where his gladiator band had once burned into him. Patricia Strenger, hair now grayed, skin wrinkled, figure long gone, sat by my side. She crushed my hand in thoughtful empathy as I looked down on the newcomer from far beyond the Sabre planets. His hatred of me was volatile and could have exploded at any moment, were it a gaseous compound. I could have dulled the edge of his emotions with my own freakish control over external emotions, of course, but this would also crush his spirit. Who knew? Perhaps the young barbarian below me would be my replacement. I smiled at the thought, all the time knowing that he would interpret my brief flicker as a sneering grin of hatred. To my mind came unbidden phrases from quotes of our ancient past and I had finally learned to reconcile my thoughts to their contents. J. Christ had said, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." I signaled to have the snarling barbarian thrown into our ship and prepared myself for our long trek home.  R obert sat up slowly and cautiously on his bed in the white, quiet room. Like a membrane on the infinitely clean skeleton of his immediate universe the rumpled sheet relaxed across his legs, curving maternally around the mattress corners like the wings of a great albino bat. Shifting his eyes from side to side with nervous prudence, Robert held himself still for an hour, then two, and three -- he jumped in surprise when air happened to whistle through his own nostrils. Under the flaccid marble of his brow, morning thoughts continued to swarm from his two personalities. But he was always calm, so his walls were smooth, sans pads. IF "Oh, Tve been here a long time, and, oh, I haven't moved in a long long time. I'd like to move, to straighten that wrinkle on this bed -- grab that fly right out of this room's sky. But let me tell you, if I started to do either of those things, Dad would warn me not to. It's as simple as that. Dad's always around and he knows what I shouldn't do, and he tells me. "Oh, if I stretched my arm and touched the fly. Dad would stretch his arm from wherever he is and touch my face. And the power of Dad's slapping hand would be like my hand squashing that fly. "That woman with the tray of food -- she calls herself a nurse and tells me that I'm in a hospital -- but I must be at home if Dad's voice is here as it is all the time. Sec the tray and the nurse? I'd call to her right now but Dad would hear me and smack me. "Dad lets me eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. So I'm stretching out my hand and touching the tray. Dad lets me chew, too, and swallow, which I'm doing. "There is also pie on the tray. It smells good and -- " No, Bobby! That pie is sweet, bad for you, for your teeth. Bad for your veins, bad for your mind. Tve told you a thousand times -- eat to live, don't live to eat. It says so in the Bible and Benjamin Franklin, great man of the United States of America, said so, too. No pie. Tell pie goodbye. "Goodbye, pie. See, Dad knows what I shouldn't eat and he tells me what not to eat. If I had licked one bit of that lemon pie I would have blood on my nose now or bmised red eheeks or purple eyes like those Dad always gives me when I do bad things." Y ou ask me again what it was like back then. Before Robert. Mainly I was young, a researeher for Decade. I wrote my bit for the magazine but I was basically as unaware as anyone else in the nation. Do your really think my memory is worth anything? Okay, but it's your ear that will suffer. P for Parapsychology and Pctrocelle. Let's begin with the doctor, since he is credited -- or blamed -- for starting it all. Dr. Sebastian Pctrocelle led the invasion of the mental hospitals in #. As a persecuted member of the Defense Department he had the right and the obligation to do just that. In fact, it had been one of his own colleagues -- the lone mystic found in the department -- who had discovered that the mentally ill seemed to possess awesome powers in prect para-cetera. When the initial report on the significant correlations was at last released, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts around the world arose, wide-eyed and bushy-brained, seized the problem by the throat and wrote the equivalent of five thousand volumes of War and Peace in just one month after the discovery. Older doctors of the psyche who were reluctant to accept the fact of extrasensory perception and the boat and failed to adorn themselves with all those doctorate degrees that went up for grabs because of the giant litter of possible thesis topics sired by the Discovery. course, a scientist's self-assurance that extrasensory merely involved some yet undiscovered sense that had its own easily comprehensible laws of order -- embraced the crucial question: "Is the presence of extrasensory perception and conception in the metally ill the result or the cause of the mental illnesses?" Of the five thousand rambling nonfictive books written to answer that question, one thousand responded: "Illness is the cause." One thousand claimed: "Illness is the result." The remaining three thousand concluded in faddish anti-Black Box manner, "The two cannot be considered independently -- no clear-cut cause-effect relationship is evident." Dr. Petrocelle did eventually read one of the five thousand Great World Articles written on ject. That article happened to be the prototype of all of them and had been written by a colleague. Consistent with Petrocelle's usual MO, his perusal of the article came twelve months after he led the invasion of the mental hospitals, twelve months after his grandiose faux pas with Robert Johnson. Petrocelle, having spilt the Defense Department's milk, was in a rest home when he finally got around to reading it. sole concern was for the power illness correlation. "Power for progress," he was known to say, "and progress in competion with the Enemy -- who hasn't always been the enemy but happens to be now." Dr. Petrocelle received easy finance for his search for the power potential simply because his usual skepticism about parapsychology and other occult fields was well known. His was also a skepticism recognized, respected, and matched by the feelings of men who doled Defense Department coin. "If our Dr. Petrocelle really sees something in this mental illness-mental power stuff, then IF (here must be something to it." Little did they know that was understatement. As it was, Dr. Pctrocelle was grasping for straws and could not truly chance being skeptical. His career in the Defense Department was at stake. When questioned about the rather nebulous nature of parapsychology and his search for said, "We are encouraged." This meant that he and his colleagues hadn't contributed significantly to National Defense for more than five years, that they feared, therefore, admissions of anything but optimism and that for personal survival's sake Petrocelle that verged on being science. As typical of frantic government antics, a machine was somehow thrown together, constructed to test roughly for the presence of what the public now was terming "mind power." Petrocelle and associates chose, instead, to call this power FA -- for for titer animae -- a feeble incorporation of an overly romantic Latin phrase for adding dignity to their work -- while at the same time they refrained from entering the Greek nomenclature tradition out of fear that a failure on their part would taint that wonderful medical language. The machine was called an electroFAgraph. Dr. Petrocelle was encouraged as soon as his electroFAgraph discovered a Breton State mental patient with a sizzling FA potential. At first Petrocelle remained uncertain about the degree of the power latent in the discovered patient -- but his uncertainty soon vanished when the final shock treatment prescribed for the patient brought the poor man abruptly from his mental and physical immobility. Unfortunately the shock therapy only gave the patient motion -- he still remained quite insane. A policeman had to shoot him to death when he used his FA to puncture a ten-foot hole in the hospital wall, hoping to escape. The officer shot him because, in the lawman's own words, "He just wouldn't stop coming." And everyone did admit that the man in blue couldn't have handled the FA maniac with his bare hands. Before the bullet punctured a much smaller but equally formidable hole in his belly, the FA wielder spoke his not-soon-to-beforgotten words: "I must get away!" Everyone assumed this was a reference to hospital confinement. The policeman was not the sort of man who usually shot at mental patients. The variable factor this time was that all the plaster flying from the hospital wall reminded him of a grade-B movie he had once seen, called Earth versus the Mind Master -- a film that had offered a hot scene where a policeman was lucky enough to shoot the first seven-foot mind master that landed on Earth -- lucky because after that incident no human being was in any mental condition to shoot at anything. After the accidental execution of his prodigy Petrocelle grew cautious and more scientific. He snapped into action, brought more men to his side -- allegedly for recording, experimenting, and learning but actually for verbal support of the doctor in case the FA venture didn't progress fast enough for the government's taste. At Adaja State mental hospital Dr. Petrocelle and the FA machine discovered a second patient. His electroFAgraph sizzled in a nostalgically similar way to the late Breton State patient's. tCoo you've given me the cliniical report on Robert," Professor Stapleton said. "But I don't understand how you're going to cure his schizophrenia with my machine and on top of that get him to work for the government with his FA when he is cured. I'm a professor. Dr. Petrocelle, not a doctor or a government mind." "I know that. Stapleton. But you do know that machine of yours, and that's all the reason I want you here." Stapleton nodded doubtfully. "What we're going to do," Dr. Petrocelle continued, patting the teaching machine, "is crawl inside Robert's mind. Instead of teaching a sleeping student with your influential voice, you're going to crawl inside Robert's mind and you're going to convince both sides of his mind -- the father and son halves that render his whole being immobile and his FA only potential. Convince them that they should work together. Tell him that they agreed on things once upon a time and they should agree again forever. Robert will interpret your voice, Stapleton, as another father-voice, and his Bobby-son-voice will fuse with the critical father-voice he's created for himself. Then when you pull out of his mind, you'll leave tlie father and son reconciled, happy together, and Robert will be able to move again and to utilize his FA. When he's of one mind once more -- pardon the expression -- he'll be in our hands. What we must do is tell him that those disc-shaped wireless electrodes for the teaching machine are really just hearing aides so he can hear his father better -- Bobby will put them on and give us no trouble. He's never heard of a teaching machine and its apparatus before. Besides, he seems to be subnormal in intelligence." "How do you expect to get him to use his FA for the government? He might use it for IF himself to become a criminal, you know. That's what everyone has predicted for a situation like this." "In the morass of words in that report you're holding, it says Robert is both very religious and very patriotic -- as his real father was. Unfortunately for Robert's mental state -- but fortunately for our goals -- his father was also very strict. The patriotism, religious devotion and also the disciplinarianism of the fathervoice in Robert's mind will induce in the boy a fear of being unpatriotic -- among other things. We should have no problems." Stapleton looked a little pained, a little dubious. Dr. Petrocelle decided immediately on verbal anesthesia, his special talent. motherless since he was seven -- has always had a problem. His father was a paragon of discipline, matched only by the Inquisition with its brutality-for-a-highermorality's-sake. When very young, Robert grew accustomed to having his father criticize his every move with fiery words and physical abuse. Robert withdrew into himself, ceasing to function in any social way, barely eating, because even hidden in his own mind he could not escape the voice of his father. He's not autistic or catatonic, technically, but he's in a bad way. The habituation to criticism demanded that Robert fashion for himself a paternal gargoyle for his mind's shoulder. The father-voice is very real to Robert, though it is only a manifestation ' of his own generalized guilt feelings and conditioning. Unfortunately, or fortunately -- we haven't yet decided which -- Robert isn't very smart. "There was a certain method to Robert's father's disciplinary madness but Robert, very young and not too intelligent, couldn't discern it. Robert concluded subconsciously that his father in an ideal state would criticize everything a son did. So the father-voice now attacks most every one of Robert's motions or verbalizations. His survival instinct -- to put it simply -- forces Robert to believe his father wouldn't criticize a son's eating of the barest essentials -- but sometimes the boy does nearly starve to death. Sometimes, though very infrequently, as when he is waking, he'll speak words that express his omnipresent fear of his omnipotent and seemingly omnisagacious father." Ears numb. Professor Stapleton muttered, "Dear God." "So," Petrocelle concluded, his voice bursting from its monotone, "I want you, Stapleton, to get father and son together. Have a man to man talk with father and son. Okay?" R obert blinked and shifted on the bed. His tailbone was feeling all tingly numb and he shifted again, then looked at his hands slowly. His temples were adorned with disc-like attachments. "Oh, I want to bite my fingernail. Bite it with my teeth until it comes off like a crescent moon. But, oh, I know I shouldn't, so ril be good and think of other things. The sun is nice through the window. But it makes my nose itch and I want to scratch it." Boh, my son, scratching your nose is crass. It's bad manners. You could infect your nose, get it all red and puffy and look all diseased, too. You wouldn't want that would you? If you scratch your nose, you'll look like some urchin that hasn't had any upbringing, so -- "What is that? Someone calling me. And its not Dad." If someone's calling you, Bobby, don't listen! Don't just listen to any voice you hear. You can't always believe everything you hear. Listen to your father. Don't -- bobby! bobby's father! bobA new voice was telling him things. Don't listen to the voice! "Should I answer the voice? I think I'll answer the voice." 'No! The voice is of evil. "Why is the voice evil?" "So the voice is good. Dad?" I don't know. Bob. The voice could be good or bad. "Should I move from the bed to open the window to let cool air in while I listen to the new voice, which told me to do as I want?" "Should I open the window?" IF Yes, I guess you should do just exactly what you want to do, Bobby. D r. Petrocelle was excited. "Stapleton, did you see the way he finally decided to open that window? The crash of that window was a sound for sore ears. And he didn't even touch it. He just sat on his bed and finally let go of his will to open that window, so hard that it actually slammed open. What FA!" "Yes, I saw it and heard it, too." Stapleton was uncomfortable in the presence of the doctor's enthusiasm. He also felt guilty. "I'm glad we got out of his mind, though. A boy, just like a man, has a right to certain privacy of mind." "Certainly, certainly. Robert will be working for us now." Suddenly Petrocelle's enthusiasm waned slightly and he said, "I do wish you had said something to him about working for the nation, using his power for his country." "I told him he had the power to help others." "Yes, I know, but you should have said something about the nation. Well, anyway, he's patriotic -- his father was very patriotic. Robert's been talking to everyone all morning -- all the orderlies and doctors -- so we'll be able to make our point about his country easily enough." R obert smiled, said "hello" loudly to himself and stretched, keeping eyes proudly on the window. The sheets felt cool and he stroked them hard for the first time ever. "Oh, that window went up with quite a noise, didn't it?" Yes, Bob, it did. "The voice was right. I've got quite a power now." Yes, a good power, Bob. "I wish, dear Dad, that I knew what the voice came for, where it came from, what it was. It was like a ghost -- far-away sounding. But it made sense. Father and son. I love you, Dad, like a son should love his iather." And I love you too, son. The ghost voice was good to come and talk and be with us -- to make us understand what we should do, what you should do with your power. Whatever you want to do, isn't that right. Bob? Whatever you want, right? "Of course. I just wish I knew where the voice came from, what it was. I liked the voice. I'd like it to come back, you know." rd like it to come back too. Bob. We both want it to come back and be with us. It made us feel good, didn't it. Bob? "Yes, it sure did. Maybe if we listened hard we could hear it again. Can you hear it?" I don't know. "I think I can hear it, barely."  think I can hear it. We both love it and we want it to come back. I think I can hear it. "We can hear it." Yes, I think we can hear it. ME? "Yes, we can hear you. But who are you, why are you here?" 'Yes, why are you here? "I will think about you, too." Both of us, father and son, will think about you and why you're here and who you are. trocelle left Robert's room, the boy shut the door and began staring through the window at the sky. Four steps from the door outside, Petrocelle stopped the professor. He asked, "What was he talking about? The ghost voice is back? I didn't even get a chance to talk to him about it -- he just kept talking so damn cryptically about the ghost voice." Stapleton was angry. "He has imagined the teaching machine's voice -- my voice -- has returned. We have compounded now his schizophrenia. He has three voices in his head now." "Calm down. Nothing at all is wrong." Petrocelle looked him in the eye. "He has the power and nothing is going to change that, because he's happy now -- he's found an out, a way out of his frustration and misery from the critical father-voice. And he likes his FA power. The father-voice is all for that power now, too. The ghost voice he's imagined won't harm him. Now all we've got to do is talk to him about working for the defense of this nation." "Can't we just leave him alone with himself -- with his new selves -- for awhile. He looks so damn tired. He's gone through a great change." "We'll give him a night by himself and talk to him in the morning. Government dragons will be breathing down my neck if I don't get Robert moving on something productive soon. Ah, when they see him open windows as he can, kill flies as he can -- " Petrocelle was ecstatic. Stapleton mumbled. H ospital nurses, guards, local police and, without a resentatives were scurrying around the hospital. It took Stapleton thirty minutes to find Dr. Petrocelle. IF The doctor was leaning over a desk telephone in the main hospital office, his face a dirtysheet color and his eyes twitching with dark thoughts. "Robert's gone," Petrocelle said, the words slipping from limp lips. Stapleton sighed, shrugging his shoulders. "What did you expect? He was a boy on the move." "We didn't even get to talk about the nation and the country's defense plans for the next ten years. His power was to be the main focus." "He's a boy and he's just discovered a kind father and a new voice inside his head. Did you really think he'd stay inside the hospital when there's a whole world outside he can voyage through -- and when there's his power, a great big toy he can play with?" "Good Lord, Stapleton -- he's a patriotic boy, isn't he? He wouldn't harm his own country, would he? His power is so great -- " "No, I don't think he'll hurt us. Tom Sawyer pranks at worst. Not unless you tried to stop him from going where he wants to. I'll think he'll be back soon. Even back to this place. You can talk with him then about the nation's defense. He's not going to wreck anything -- don't worry. At least you can be confident he won't go over to the other side." Stapleton allowed a little sarcasm to show. "His fine religious and patriotic upbringing -- or should I say conditioning -- has made sure of that." The professor left the doctor and returned to his teaching machine, which was crated and ready for the move back to the university. He was smiling and chuckling -- for fear of crying. L ike the yellow eye of a Cyclops, the sun blinked overhead and Robert continued walking peacefully along the path. "I am the Son and I have the power to help people. There are and all of them have hurts in the Son, with power. I have the power of good and I discovered who the ghost-voice is." And you discovered who you really are, Son. We know now who the ghost-voice is and who I am. "I am moving and I am not going to stop moving until I can this earth can hear my three voices." Our three voices. Every birth helps to define the shape of things to come! negative, Qyi Nine-eightfive." Jfaa # extruded the quarter-inch pseudopod of Admonition along the frozen ground. "Why,"it is quite impossible. How could there be life there? How could it survive?" Qyi # drew himself from his flat Security to an Indignant six inches. "They may have evolved differently. They could be a different life form altogether." In the posture of Amused Tolerance: "How many life forms can there be? It has been proven sufficiently that our present form and mass are the optimum in adaptibility and convenience as well as efficiency. We can alter IF our shape at will, adapting to all conditions." "This is very true." "Even in this best of all possible forms," Jfaa # hurried on as he noticed Oyi # taking on the crenelations of the Adversary form, "how could we expect to live under the conditions of Thwth? The sky burns daily and twice as long. Being so close to the Primary, there are sharp differences from the light to full shadow. The constant change from true brightness to the dark contrast would be dizzying. And, affirmative, maddening. And, as if the heat of the day were not enough, if some poor life form got caught in the shadow -- which is twice as long as ours -- the drop of temperature would probably kill him on the spot." "Perhaps they migrate to keep in the light. After all, the planet is smaller than Xhamllitt." "That does not signify. The mass is different." "All right. But certainly they have evolved in another form." "Oyi Nine-eight-five, please negate that posture of Challenge. What other form could possibly survive? They would have to be formless such as we. They would require three sexes. And we have the advantage of a planet that revolves at a civilized pace so that we are never long without light. And we are at a respectable distance from the Primary." "In our studies there has been some debate about bodies with ome type of framework." "Framework?" Incredulity. "Tpri Seven-seven-one has suggested the possibility." "Ah." A twist of Recognition. "Tpri Seven-seven-one is the only Colleague who is doing creative and important thinking today. All the others are lost in a tangle of academics." At this, Jfaa # extruded a second pseudopod and pulled himself to the full extent of Righteous Indignation. "And how could such a -- a monster move? How would he keep his body from being crushed? Negative. That is the most ridiculous part of this life-onThwth nonsense." "Then how do you explain the signals that have been picked up here?" "There must be many strange effects from radiation so close to the Primary. I think we can safely dismiss those as random atmospheric conditions." "But there was pattern and repetition to them." "There is pattern in your mass fluctuation. There is repetition in the paths of our moons. There is regularity in our orbit." "It's just that -- " Oyi # began to slide into Confusion. "It sounded so reasonable the way Tpri Seven-seven-one explained it." "Naturally," Jfaa # went on, gathering himself into Maximum Paternal. "Tpri Seven-seven-one is a genius. But even genius can err. I commend his gift. I applaud his creative thinking. However, I leave it to those of us who have been instructed in the ways of logic to evaluate the worth of his work." "How?" Jfaa # assumed a pose of Confidence. "We are better prepared. Ours is not the privilege of genius but the responsibility of knowledge." "And you are convinced it is not possible?" "How can it be? Let us assume the pragmatic approach. The planet Thwth is only three from the Primary -- far too close for survival. The atmosphere is a poisonous mass of nitrogen and oxygen with several other trace gases. It has vast seas of liquid ice formed of an oxygen-hydrogen compound and ambient vapors of this are always evident. Any natives would either boil or drown." Oyi # was reluctant to concede the point. "Must they?" "Then consider the satellite. They've just the one -- and that is so large that it must pull the seas around so violently that there are daily floods everywhere." Oyi # Acquiesced. "Or take the radiation. I shudder at the amount any poor inhabitant of Thwth would have to contend with. Why, under such bombardment there might be a dozen different species on the planet, assuming for the moment that life could exist at all. Think of the confusion that would cause. Imagine the problems in ecology. If you find just one other life form difficult to postulate -- then what do you propose for the variety that would necessarily be part of that postulate?" "Til admit I hadn't considered that." "There could be as many as twenty sub-species. Nature is an orderly process as is demonstrated time and time again. There is a reason for all things. How could you find reason in the chaos that twenty different -- different, Oyi Nine-eight-five -- species would cause?" Jfaa # propelled himself forward in Emphasis. "Negative reaction. I am without defense." And Oyi # flowed into Defeat. "There, there. You have been given the chance to understand and have done beautifully. But such an idea, when you look at it in the cool light of reason, defies that reason. It is disciplined minds, such as mine and yours, that will turn genius such as Tpri Seven-seven-one's into the solid fact our science demands." IF "Should T denounce him, do you think?" "Negative. Of course not. Why, if it weren't for him you would never have given a moment's thought to the possibility of extraXhamllitt life." "True enough," said Oyi #, looking a trifle Recovered. "You see, you have learned from this experience. There's no point in behaving like Pgfd Threetwenty and his lot. They have been insisting that Tpri Sevenseven-one be banned from teaching because he has caused so much upset among the young." "Well," Oyi # allowed, "there has been a little trouble." "But that unrest has turned many of you to deeper study than my generation has ever attempted." In the posture of Embarrassed Acceptance of Praise, Oyi # asked cautiously, "Do you think Pgfd Three-twenty will succeed?" "I doubt it." Jfaa # assumed Contemplation and Wisdom. "As long as T am in charge of teaching the young on this planet nothing can go wrong." Oyi # adjusted his ocular stalks and gazed rapturously at the horizon. "Even from an esthetic point of view, how could they live without the beauty of our rings? Think how dull their sky must be with just the one moon. Even if anything could live there, it would have to be a dull, soulless thing. Obviously nothing there could have intelligence. Or art." "Now you're thinking. You are intelligently considering things that Tpri Seven-seven-one has overlooked in his enthusiasm." "Yet you must admit that his speculations are interesting." Jfaa # jerked happily into Indulgent Humor, continuing, "They're absolutely fascinating. But such ideas belong to that cult of interplanetary travel." "I confess," Oyi # admitted cautiously, "that I have read some of their scrivings. Not recently," he amended hastily. "Ah, well, we all did in our youth, I suppose. Even I did. The scrivings were not nearly so sophisticated then but, still and all, delightful entertainment for the immature mind." Jfaa # adjusted his body to allow the forming of a small Dent of Nostalgia. Oyi # adjusted himself to Acknowledgment. "They probably prompted me to consider a scientific career. They certainly increased my curiosity." "Uhm?" the older Jfaa # rumbled. "For that matter, those foolish scrivings got me started." "But I'm beginning to realize how impossible it all is." "That, my dear Qyi Nine-eightfive, is the trouble with growing up." They rubbed Nostalgia Dents and hummed in the Companionship that a commonly misspent youth imparts. I T IS perhaps unfortunate that, just at the time of Jfaa #'s logical triumph, Earth launched its first manned Saturn probe which would make Jfaa # eat his words -- even if he had to form teeth to do it. The day was a glorious one for Earth. The thirty-month probe was the first joint United StatesSoviet Union project. The ship was crewed by one person from each of the two participating countries. As they passed beyond Mars, the captain, a thirty-three-year-old Marine test pilot from Boulder, Colorado, turned to his navigatorcrew, a stunning brunette from Kazan with a command of English only slightly less dazzling than her smile. "You're what?" he asked. "I'm pregnant." "Are you sure?" She nodded triumphantly. "So much for those fusty old men back on Earth who said it couldn't be done. We've been in space for three months and I'm going to have a baby." Quite a bit later, extracting themselves from a complicated free-fall embrace, he asked her what -- according to her feminine intuition -- she thought the baby was going to be. "Oh, I don't care," she said, turning lazily in his arms, "so long as it's healthy." As far as it went she was to get her wish. But it was perhaps an unluckily accurate word. Just two months out from Earth when it was little , more than a few dividing cells, a random submicroscopic particle that was blundering through the mother's body had subtly altered the order of its incipient skeletal structure. Fortunately the radiation bombarding the ship's fragile hull had played havoc with her blood or she would never have been able to nurse it. Even Oyi # would have been Outraged yith the proud father's comment a few months later as he admired his wife's swollen abdomen. "There's no life on Saturn now but we're sure as hell gonna start some." His tone would have been considerably more apprehensive if he could have foreseen the quasitentacled, twenty-pound mass of amorphous flesh he was to cut from her dying body as they crossed Jupiter's orbit. For Jfaa # was correct about Thwthian life in one particular. Unprotected from radiation by Earth's atmosphere, unhampered by gravity, the child -- or whatever it was in her womb -- lived. And grew.  IF itomri' Both the man and the robot were old -- and getting hard to take! R obot # had become a bit creaky about the joints during his long service with old Moondust Curtis. You could hear Six-seven-eight when he started from the kitchen. You could tell when he crossed the patio and detoured by the swimming pool. You knew exactly when he stepped on the carpeting of the hall. No matter where you stood in the Big House you could follow his progress. The right knee joint emitted a distinctive creak. The left knee joint countered with a nerve-scraping screech pitched at about twelve thousand cycles. The elbow joints made a two-tone harmony as they swung, the left a diminished third based upon a slightly off-tune middle C, the right an augmented third based upon A-flat below middle C. Syllabicated, they produced a sort of rhythmic hoowah-hoowoh, hoowali-lioowoli in the tempo of human arms swinging back and forth in contra-motion to the walking feet. As he approached, you also became aware of a constant low-key whirr of machinery deep within his chest -- an uneven pulsating drone containing two alternating notes sounding like hrewer-ntniph, htewer-rumph. Old Man Curtis called him Cappy. In a dog-eared, Martianhuniming-fly-bcspecklcd, real Venusian-drcamer-juice-stained Catalogue, one that Moondust kept around somewhere in the Big House, Cappy was listed as R (for robot) #. Included in the programming of his memory circuits was the manufacturer's own sneaky little scheme. If, by some chance, you asked Cappy what you should call him, Cappy was triggered to answer, "I am Robot General Utility Servant, model R-SixSeven-Eight. A duplicate of me may be purchased from any agency of Happy Home Helpers, Incorporated, a licensed aitch-aitchaitch representative on every inhabited world -- or contact by space beam, code: Happy, Earthside twcnty-dash-bce-tvvosix-dash-ten-four." Robot # could not slate that this commercial was no longer valid. Happy Home Helpers, Inc., had allowed itself to stagnate during the forty years of his existence and had finally succumbed to younger and more competitive producers of servants whose soft, cosmetically perfect skin glowed with the pink of health and with a warm mockery of human life -- and whose voices were capable of quarter-tone modulations in a range of three octaves. That information, obviously, was not in his circuits. So do men and machines lose touch with accelerating streams of evolution after they are tossed willy-nilly into its eddies. The catalogue had smelled of fresh printer's ink when Robot # came to live with Moondust. From its pages, gleaming with virginal purity, not yet stained by Venusian dreamer juice nor speckled with excreta of the Martian humming fly, Moondust and his young Earthside 'bride had chosen R# during the first year of their marriage, in the first month after Moon's promotion to Assistant Administrator of Luna and after becoming certain that she would present her husband with an heir. An optimistic joy surroupded R# until a husky son was born -- who, in his journey from womb to world, killed his mother, thereby severing the zest for living from his father. IF The baby was then shipped Earthside to the care of an aunt. Young Curtis stepped out of his promising career to wall off grief in a forty-year search for that fabled end of the rainbow, with R# faithfully clumping along. Moondust prowled the interlands of Luna like any of the swarm of other dust rats, hunting for the big strike each of them hoped to find. But unlike most of the moondusters, perhaps because he did not care. Moon found his Eldorado -- several of them -- first on Luna and then, as those planets opened up, on Mars and Venus. And finally in a deposit of strangely glowing jewels out in the asteroid belt -- which made his fortune one of the fabulous treasure accumulations of all time. For forty years R# prowled the silences at the expanding edges of man's domain in space, faithfully following his master. There were interludes during which Moondust would walk into some frontier saloon and sit morosely at a table with bottle and glass. Labels on the bottles changed through decades but their contents produced similar results. Robot # stood unmoving behind Moon's chair. When the final glass tipped and spilled under fumbling fingers he picked up his comatose master and carried him to whatever lodgings had been engaged. There he stood quietly at Moondust's bedside through the remainder of the night. And when the alcoholic sleep broke, he massaged his man and injected him with restoratives. Then inevitably Moondust would say, "Cappy, I'm getting mighty restless again. Let's you and me take out." The whirr within Cappy's breast would become more pronounced as the proper response was searched from his memory banks. A couple of seconds later Cappy would answer, "As you wish, sir." And within hours they would be off into space, following the beckon'mg phantoms of a galaxy's buried treasure. Some time in their forty-first year, Moondust was out on a large asteroid, setting a small fission device to blast his way into some rock that looked promising. There was a premature explosion. It blew him clear but both his legs were mangled. Cappy applied bandages from remembered instructions stored during similar but less critical accidents. He then picked up his master in metalloy arms and strode off over the restricted horizon to their ship. By a miracle they made it through the vast darknesses between the stars to Marsport, where the major space hospital was located. But both of Moon's legs had to come off. That was when grafting of limbs was still a rather uncertain surgical problem and the doctors considered Curtis too old to take the risk. Of course there would be a set of clever artificial legs for him but Moondust saw the face of the coin chance had tossed -- no more long lonely jaunts to the outer reaches, no more adventure-filled hours to keep a lid over grieving memories of his sweet young bride, memories as pain-filled as that hour when the birth cry of an arriving heir and the death cry of his mother had stirred the sterile hospital air simultaneously. When news of his double amputation was chunked at him Moondust -- still drunk from anesthetic -- mumbled, "Hear that, Cappy? I'm going to be a dadblasted split-Venusian shummoxshucking invalid. You're fixing to have to tote me around like a baby. Can those old scrap metal bones of yours take it? Or do I have you carted to the dump and buy some beautied-up imitation of a busty blonde amazon to do the job?" Speaking above the rising volume of noises in Cappy's chest, the surgeon said heartily, "It is not as bad as that, Mr. Curtis. Prosthetics are almost as flexible as their human counterparts nowadays. You'll walk with hardly a limp." "Peglegs," snorted Moondust. By this time R# had found what seemed an appropriate answer to Moon's question. His speaker sizzled and his reply came in the statement form of the two inflections which had been built into his vocal mechanism. "I shall require more data to understand imitation of a busty blonde amazon, sir, before I can reach a conclusive answer." Moon snapped, "Oh, go lay an egg, you pile of junk tin." Cappy answered, "I have not been programmed for that particular operation." Moon shouted, "Don't you answer me back, you iron-headed goony bird!" And the doctor said, "Pshaw now, Mister Curtis, don't let a little thing like those legs upset you. You'll hardly feel them." "You bet your life I won't," Moon snorted. "There won't be any nerves or flesh or blood in the damned things." However, Moondust wobbled out of the hospital after a convalescence remarkably short, his mind in the dark blue area of the soul's spectrum. He moaned peevishly, "I can't get the hang of these crazy metalloy legs, Cappy. They aren't going to carry me over anything rougher than a plasticon walkway. I'm nothing but a half-man now." The nearest appropriate answer Cappy could find in his memory systems was, "That is undoubtedly true, sir." And Moondust squalled, "You don't have to rub it in, you peaIF brained assembly-line welded conglomeration -- " Moon tacked to port and headed for the joy district, grimly determined to drown himself in Venusian dreamer juice. R# clumped along beside him, making the evening air melodious with his eek-hoowah-hoowoli brewerrumph, yiku hoowah-hoowoh brewer-rumph -- sweet harmonies of his joints and his continuing life processes. But Moondust discovered that dreamer juice would neither kill him nor hold back memory demons, no matter how protracted the binge. He came to that point where he could not think of the stuff without gagging. Then, after he had spent an hour staring through liquor-fuzzed eyes at a full glass, trying to coax inner reflexes out of their determination to eject the bubbling blood-colored liquid the moment it reached them, he growled, "Blast your dod-rotted selenium soul, Cappy. Why don't you stop me from making an ass of myself?" Through the familiar prelude of all the whirring brewer-rumph and crackling speaker Cappy quickly answered, "You have set a problem which is impossible for me to solve, sir." He picked up the wilting Moondust and walked out of the joy joint. ner and friend, Jim Stanton -- now a government commissioner of something or other in the Department of Planetary Expansion -- who had a remedy. The visiphone in Moondust's lodgings chimed and Jim's homely face came up on the screen. "I've been off planet and only just now heard about the accident. How's the ipvalid?" "Sick," Moondust moaned. "There's no prospecting left for me. I'm just a piece of a man, a planet-bound jail bird. I'm headed for the crazy house." "Want a job to keep your mind off your troubles?" Jim asked. Moon shouted, "I couldn't stomach being a fancy-pants diddling around an office." "Well, let me think about it anyway, you old dust rat," Stanton shot back at him. "And in the meantime be careful not to bite yourself and die of hydrophobia." And before Saturday noon (Earthside Greenwich), Commissioner Jim Stanton had his old friend and the faithful # on a government star cruiser, headed out of the solar system. Moon had been invested with the title of Administrator, member of the sparse band of governors of Earth's expanded frontiers. The planet entrusted to Moondust was almost literally at the end of time -- a humid world, fresh from an era when the shallow seas completely covering its surface had once been shoved cataclysmically into more confined beds by new mountain ranges and young continents. The cruiser plunked Administrator Curtis and R# down on the only explored area. It was a triangular patch of fifty thousand or so square miles, fenced on its north by a two-hundred-mile lava dike which still steamed, and on each side by two huge rivers that rolled along, mightier than Earth's Mississippi, toward a restless plankton-cluttered ocean. It was a beautiful spot if you liked the swamps and bayous of Louisiana, the moss-covered oaks of Mississippi and East Texas and the chiggers and moccasins and alligators of the whole Deep South, Earthside. Newly appointed Administrator Curtis looked at the land he would govern, sucked in heavy pollenscented air, and crooned to his faithful servant, "Cappy, we're home. I could just shut my eyes and imagine I was a little shaver waiting for my papy and mammy to come back from New Orleans, driving their spanking pair of matched blacks proud and happy and Old Uncle Tom setting in the back of the surrey, grinning like a slice of brown watermelon with white seeds. Cappy, just smell this air. I'm almost expecting to hear a steamboat whistling around the river bend any minute. And listen to all the little bugs scritching in the woods." R# whirred a moment, then answered, "The olfactory impressions cannot be recorded. I shall keep a sensor trained upon the river bend. I am attempting to classify and record all vibration patterns of the scritching bugs, sir." Administrator Curtis tore into his new job with all the excitement of a kid with a handful of lightning bugs. The work was not monumnetal in its demands. Planet Sol Type Series XX-#, Sector #, was in a sense being kept on ice against the time when the fecundity of man should require its broad living room. Exploration and development of its unknown lands could proceed at a leisurely pace, in fact was not proceeding at all during the present decade, and Moondust there had no E. and D. men around underfoot to bother him. It was a toss-up whether the native inhabitants of the explored area should be classified as prestone age or post-ape age. They had to be handled like a band of educated chimps in a space lab. They possessed a language which seemed as substantial as' swamp shine, consisting of clicks, grunts, growls and gurgles, accompanied by elaborate charades and posturings and an everpresent grin. The key to their communication IF had not yet been deciphered but there was a faded female with thick glasses and a Bryn Mawr air who spent her days among them with recorders and psychological gadgets, trying to break the code. Moondust found that she was quartered in Administration House, as was the balance of his staff, which consisted of a nervous, allergyafflicted clerk of male persuasion and a Venusian cook who was neither, or both or either, whichever way you looked at the problem and whatever phase of the life cycle was uppermost. These formed the total non-native population of XX-#. Patchy surveys had shown the huge unexplored areas of XX-#I to contain another type of primitive dweller, designated by some E. and D. man on the discovery crew as a Noddy. Nothing was known about the race, except that its members seemed to be able to change their shapes -- revised thus from conclusions of the first contacts which had noted a dozen different species. The Noddies smelled like skunk cabbages after a rain. This facility for changing shape was discovered by the only investigator in E. and D. to return alive from its second expedition across the big rivers. Later, other vaguely noted characteristics, not too clearly substantiated, filtered into the lore surrounding this seldom-seen unique species. Members evidently mated as some Earth animals did. As her labor time approached, the female ate her mate. Each female ran to the hilltops at rutting season and howled until a band of males answered. The strongest and fastest got her. On moonlit nfghts, inhabitants of the explored triangle could hear packs of young studs in screaming pursuit of females in heat. And when the chase circled to the river bank, a more grisly sound sometimes lifted above the banshee howls -- the slurp of tribal jaws signifying that one of the pursuers had injured himself and was being devoured by his comrades. The species was listed as dangerous. Fortunately, for some reason as yet undiscovered. Noddies could not seem to cross water, a trait which probably saved the little settlement between XX-#rs big rivers, for no means had yet been found to kill them. The one surviving E. and D. member of that second expedition had written in his notes that both laser and explosive projectiles just passed through a Noddy -- any portion of its body that was struck simply dissolved around the penetrating force and flowed with the balance of the creature's bulk into some new form. His was the only authentic account. No one else who might have gotten close enough to a Noddy to testify to this report had ever returned from across the river. The tame natives in Moondust's little triangular province, two small tribes, performed as laborers for the settlement, mechanically and zestfully, like trained dogs in a circus. You blew a horn at sunrise and they sprinted from their grass and mud huts and raced for the corkroll fields. There they followed the same pattern day after day, tirelessly, with all the verve of a blind mule plodding a circle around a sugar cane grinder back in the Old South, Earthside, circa eighteen hundred something -- cultivating corkroll, Which actually rather resembled Earthside cane, except that its sap was dried and powdered and shipped to Earth pharmaceutical companies to form the basic ingredient of a miracle drug which had added almost a hundred years to man's life. And the natives' quick fingers and steadily chomping jaws were much more effective than any insecticide that could be devised for the tender corkroll plants. At sundown you blew the horn once more and they scattered, like chickens running from a hawk, into the woods to hunt swamp fleas and crack them to suck out their juices, or to paddle down under the black bayou waters, scrounging for frogs and snails and snakes to pop into their mouths. Nobody from Cultural Affairs Department, Earthside, had yet been able to interest them in setting a formal table. These far from arduous duties thus left Administrator Curtis with plenty of time to stroll out to the hickory grove that shaded the hog hollow -- except that the hickories were scaly-barked Bronta trees bearing iron-hard seeds in a chestnut type burr which at ripening time squirted them out with the range and velocity of shotgun pellets. And the hogs were nonexistent -- the place merely bore a resemblance to the old home hollow. Moondust strolled there or sat upon the dewy grass in perpetual June-time weather and floated back on memory's drift. R# stood patiently behind Moondust, recording in his memory circuits every word the old man spoke and every sniff he took of the balmy air, offering a shoulder to support him when moist midday heat drove him indoors. Cappy fanned him through the steaming afternoon, woke him from his nap when the hour came to blow the horn and send native plantation hands scampering off on their frenetic food hunt. It was like putting raw whiskey away in charred oak barrels. Moondust mellowed. T he mellowing first assumed the form of an attempt to duplicate his by now exaggerated memories of the old plantation. IF He took # out where a long grassy slope tilted toward the river and said, "Cappy, pry into this blasted thick skull of mine and get a clear picture of just what Tve been dreaming about. Then design me a real honest-togoodness Louisiana plantation house that'll fit right on top of that knob." The robot replied, "As you wish, sir." It adjusted sensors to make contact with the master's head. Moondust said, "Now I'll just sit down right here and fix my eyeballs on the river and I'll say to myself 'Good old Mississippi.' I'll start thinking about that house so hard you won't have any trouble catching just what I want. And mind you, Cappy, don't make one little smidgin of that house any different from the way I'm seeing it in my mind or I'll build a bonfire and melt you down to a cinder. I want me a real old mansion." "As you wish, sir," answered #. And silence settled while Moondust concentrated and Cappy recorded brain waves -- silence except for the brewer-rumph in Cappy's ehest and the chittering tion of a Screaming Slug Eater and the moaning of several macaw-like flying things, the sizzling of swamp worms, plash of river and whisper of breezes. Construction presented no problem. Moon's limitless fortune brought space freighter, contractors, architects and an army of robot artisans to XX-#. The problems arose from a temperamental melee which blew up between the highly paid architects and Administrator Curtis over his insistence that #'s plans be executed down to their last detail, exactly as drawn. Violent tantrums got the architects nowhere, nor did derision. There was no way for them to ease their ulcers by walking off the job. When you're stuck on a distant planet, you're stuck. So a rambunctious compromise resulted after #, on command, had brought them all tenderly, two at a time, one under each arm, and set them gently in a row of chairs facing Moon. So the mansion took form. It had the wide wind-swept porches and tall white columns, the gracious entrance hall and sweeping staircase of ante-bellum plantation showplaces. But sentimental remembrances of one's childhood are apt to become confused with more recent impressions over a half-century span. Beyond the great stairway came Moorish arches, Byzantine incrustations, Japanese prayer lanterns, Chinese pagoda, Spanish patio, moon-base dome and a Hollywood swimming pool, all tied together. Then the space freighter lifted, taking with it the artisans and architects, leaving behind to keep Administrator Curtis company only the female Bryn Mawr type, the male allergic clerk and the uncommitted Venusian cook. The next phase of mellowing in the charred wood of the barrel settled upon Moondust. He rubbed his hands together, snapped his fingers and said, "By Gadfry, Cappy, weTe alone again." R#'s circuits buzzed a bit. He eventually replied, "The definition of alone must be altered, sir, or some other descriptive symbol used." "Now just you don't bother your tin head about that, Cappy. What I'm after is for you to tote me a rocking chair out on this veranda and fetch me a big tall cold julep." R#'s speaker rumbled, "As you wish, sir." And he went Eek hoowahhoowoh brewer-rumph, yiku hoowah-hoowoh brewer-rumpli to the kitchen. Administrator Curtis found that only a smidgin of imagination was required to transport him back to the old home place to rock on a shady porch of the Big House, with scented breezes stirring stray locks of white hair and a julep ever waiting at his elbow. Although the imitation skin of # was not black, its texture and hue of weathered chamois did fit the picture to some degree. And the robot could mix a julep worthy of its prototypes, with ingredients much more exotic than its ancestors, including a sprig of plueil, which was not only more tangy than mint but left one in a heavenly state of euphoria. The cicadas and lightning bugs were missing and the coughing snort of XX-#'s swamp lizards bore no real resemblance to that full-throated roar of the good old green bullfrog giants of Mississippi's river bottoms. And no haunting harmonies drifted from cabins of the field hands. But heavy flower-scented air drifted thickly after sundown and one could dream quite effectively with eyes closed, so that the thick, threefoot fronds of Bronta trees did not destroy images of oaks and magnolias hanging over oleanders and calycanthus -- that is, unless a flock of rock chickens happened to be foraging in the area. Their nasty chuckles and cat-calls, as well as a certain post-digestive habit, could destroy any reverie. Then Moondust went through another mellowing stage. One twilight redolently damp with dew upon the meadow and a scent of mud grass heavier than a dowager's cosmetics and the rock chicken flocks far enough away so that their lewd noises could be ignored. Old Man Curtis suddenly said, "Cappy, I've got a son somewhere in this far-flung IF gaggle of stars and I bet he's feeling plumb low because his pappy never did right by him. We're just fixing to find that little boy and make up to him for racing around this here galaxy petting up our own sorry feelings and letting him get spoiled by some female relation. Go get me Henry Riitenhauser." R# eekyikued over to Administration House to fetch the allergic clerk. So Henry, under instructions, poured a bucketful of Moondust's wealth into the pockets of a detective agency. The dicks were efficient. They found the son's grave, the son's widow and his twins, a boy and a girl. "That's no more than I deserve for negleeting the poor boy," Moon moaned to the clerk. And to the robot he said, "If you ever get any kids, Cappy, don't you be a dod-swizzled fool like me and let them get away from you." Through a slightly uneven brewer-rumph Cappy stated, "The R Six-seven-eight model was not designed with the ability to reproduce, sir."  "Don't tell me things I already know, you dag-nabbed rusty junk pile," growled his master, "I was talking to myself. Reckon the best way to make it up to my poor dead boy is to bring his pretty young widow and his two babies here to live with me." He turned to the clerk. "Henry, you get busy on that little old thing." Jt would have done no good to remind Moondust then that inexorable time had probably helped the young widow to skate toward forty and that the twins must be babies of at least nine summers. In his mellow role of plantation colonel, with a rosy filter censoring any rays that might have played white light over his imaginative excursions, Moon was destined to wait and receive such news with shock when a starship's shuttle dropped the little family off on XX-#. The widow turned out to be a pale-eyed blonde instead of Moondust's romanticized picture of a small dark-haired beauty scarcely out of her teens, whose brown eyes glowed with warm sentiment -- his own portrait unconsciously influenced by agemisted memories of the only other woman in his life. But Moon could adjust. The widow's sharpnosed appearance he could blame on no one but her ancestors. Marking her with the name Tcena was the fault of her parents. Moon had too little experience with civilized ways to determine whether Tecna's silvered yellow hair was the product of genes or industrial chemistry. But the children had the look of his dead son, even though they were older than he pictured. They sidled toward him, responding to nudging from Tcena. The girl curtsied; the boy offered his hand. And both said politely, "How do you do, Grandfather?" And their mother followed them and touched her lips briefly to Moon's wrinkled cheek. Then they all looked at each other until Moon gestured toward the landscape and said, "Well, how do you like it?" Teena stared at the terrain. "There isn't much here, is there? ' And the children asked, "Where's the city?" Moondust explained that this was an undeveloped planet but very comfortable and full of great promise for the future. Teena assured him that she didn't mind, that she and the children were deeply indebted to Grandfather. "We'll miss the stimulation and conveniences of city life but pleasure costs too much for a widow with only a few credits in the bank. I wouldn't care for myself but I want good things for the children. We can't thank you enough for asking us to come live with you." The twins' butterfly minds had darted to things more interesting than politenesses. Jill tugged hard at her grandfather and pointed to #. Bill cried, "That's a funny robot -- " Jill asked, "Does it belong to you?" "Why doesn't its face look like a face?' Bill finished. That's Cappy,' Curtis told them and put a hand on the robot's metal shoulder. "These are Billy and Jill, Cappy. And Teena, I want you and Cappy to be acquainted. He'll take real good care of you all. Cappy and T have been friends for years." The twins went into a fit of giggles at the rising hrewer-rumph. as # spoke in his statement inflection, "I have been instructed to serve Billy and Jill and Madam faithfully." Teena said, "It's certainly an old relic. I suppose on worlds like this you can't find anything better." Billy added, "Back on Earth robots look like people." Jill giggled. "And they don't talk funny." A rousing welcome banquet awaited the new family of Administrator Curtis. No shining carriages discharged southern belles and courtly gentlemen at the portico but the company did its best to make up this lack by animation. Henry Rutenhauser was there, well shaven, with allergy under temporary control and two new jokes picked off the space waves. The Bryn Mawr type lent dignity with discourses upon the aspirated whisde and nosedamped hoot of the natives. Officers of a freighter, down for their midseason consignments of powdered corkroll, were glad of an opportunity for dining on unconcentrated food. IF All stuffed themselves with beaten biscuits from real Earthside wheat flour and the Venusian cook had whomped up a reasonable facsimile of southern fried chicken from a scaly flying creature called by the natives a swsss, accompanied by patting of midriffs and flapping of arms. Crystals impregnated with ancient Stephen Foster melodies disgorged home-sick sweetness through the stereo horns and # eek-yi kneel through butler routines acceptably.  II T he trouble between the twin's mother and # barely waited twenty-four hours later before erupting. Curtis heard Teena shrieking in the Spanish patio. He clumped back there as fast as his prosthetics would carry him and found his robot backing toward the Hollywood pool while the blonde daughter-in-law threw chair cushions and julep glasses and end tables at the metal man. "Get away from me, you thing! You nightmare! I can't stand that squeaking of yours. Get out!" Henry Rutenhauser held her hand, trying to comfort Teena. He led her to a lounge, crooning, "There now. Don't. let it upset you. I can't understand why the Administrator keeps a nightmare like that but some men get a little batty with age, you know?" Moondust whispered, "Cappy, you'd better go on out front." And to the clerk he said with exaggerated mildness, "Henry, I'm not batty enough to forget there's an office full of manifests to work up so that freighter can lift off on time. Maybe you'd better go," Henry went -- fast. Moon limped to his daughterin-law and sat beside her. "You don't need to be so upset with Cappy. Just tell him what you want and he'll do it." She dabbed her eyes. "He's like a scarecrow. He grates on my nerves. When I try to take a nap that thing's squeaks wake me up. Tm a sensitive person. I can't stand shrill noises." "You just keep remembering Cappy has a heart of gold," Moon said. "That blank face makes me ill," Teena said. "You'll get used to him," Moon said firmly. Teena waited, "With all your money -- I can't understand why you don't junk the monster and buy some of the new miracle robots." "Why, I couldn't do that. Cappy's like a big brother to me. Why, Td die before I did anything to hurt Cappy's feelings. You wouldn't want me to put Cappy out of his own house, would you?" Teena ran out sniffling. Only a week after this Moondust found Teena in his special rocking chair on the north veranda. Slie gave her pouting smile and started to rise, sighing martyrishly.  Moon protested: "Now don't you get up."  He eased himself down on the porch and leaned against a pillar to enjoy harp sounds a breeze played in Bronta fronds, the bubbling, whistling, far-off chit-chat of natives in the corkroll fields and the calls of fauna in the swamp lands as they gaily gobbled each other for lunch. I Moondust waved a languid paw and yawned. "Listen to all those little things. Makes the air downright peaceable." i The forced smile again touched Teena, with a pucker to her underlip that Curtis decided must have made her look sort of cute in the first bloom of girlhood. And thafs when my son courted her... I He could imagine how his boy might have found her intriguing and blamed himself anew for not sticking by his boy to educate him about women. But Tecna's voice was fretful. "It's lonely here. We had lots of people around us all the time back on Earth to keep life exciting. And visiscreens to pass the time. Even if we were so poor we didn't know where the next meal was coming from." (A "You're hankering to go back there?" "Oh, no. Til endure any kind of hardship to make life easy for my children." She stopped rocking and puckered her lip again. "Maybe if we had some servants that looked like real people and talked like them I wouldn't be so lonesome." "Oh, we don't need extra help. Missy," the old man answered amiably. "Cappy can take care of all of us." He watched clouds cover his daughter-in-law's face and twist her mouth and shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry you've taken out a hate on Cappy. I want the mother of my boy's children to be happy." "Then get servants that look like people and talk like people." "That kind are a mighty far piece from this planet and we won't be having another ship touch down until Spring." "Henry says there are some down in the warehouse." "You been talking to my clerk about this?" She pouted. "Henry's very understanding. But he has his work and he can't be around all the time to talk to." Moon muttered, "He'd better not." "Henry says there's a whole retinue of house servants in their original boxes stored there. All we have to do is activate them. He says they are the latest models. IF You can't tell them from real people, even when you touch them." Moon sighed. "Well, Missy, I reckon it would be more peaceful for us all to give in to you. Til just mosey down and set Henry to breaking those boxes open this afternoon." "And then we could get rid of that horrible-looking old robot that follows you around." "Get rid of Gappy? No, ma'am. Gappy's my friend. Gappy's saved my life more times than you have fingers and toes." She started to sniffle. "I won't endure it. He scares me. I can't eat for watching him." Moon shook his head sadly. "Fm sorry, Missy. I couldn't look Cappy in the eye if I was thinking of doing him in. He's got a right to live, same as you and I." "But he's just a robot. He's not a person." Moon said positively, "No, ma'am." "That imitation skin is full of moth-eaten patches. It disgusts me. "Then you'll just have to look somewhere else." Teena had sense enough to recognize the determination in Moondust's voice. She took her pouting elsewhere and hunted up Henry Rutenhauser for consolation. Put Eve into an Eden and she does not need an apple or a serpent. A squeaky robot and an allergic clerk will do. Together, Teena and Henry planned a strategic campaign. After the new servants had been on the job a few days, Teena began hinting, finally asking Moon outright, "Don't you just love the way our new servants keep the house?" And Henry added casually at other times, "Good thing we had a retinue of robot house servants in stock, sir. They're remarkably efficient. It's a joy to watch them work." And Teena, as if in afterthought: "They're so efficient that they leave absolutely nothing for that mouldy old robot to do. And they talk like real people." "That's right nice," Moon told her the first few times. "Cappy don't mind letting your pretty dolls do the housekeeping. Cappy deseiAes to take life easy. He's got old and creaky like he is by keeping me out of trouble, and any man that's done his duty in this galaxy ought to have a long easy-going old age. You keep your dolls out of Cappy's way and off my veranda so I won't have to listen to their jabbering and they can work all they want to." Then Eve chose her Adam. Moondust heard it from the children first. "We're going to have a new father," Jill burbled. Teena admitted that she and Henry had decided upon marriage. Old Moondust complained to # at the edge of the corkroU fields where he felt safe from inquisitive ears. "Cappy, I just can't make out what she sees in that nose-blowing diddler after being married to my son. Can you? But I also can't figure out what kind of a prize my boy thought she was." From the midst of the brewerrumph exertion # replied, "More data required before an answer to your question can be formulated." "I didn't ask any questions, you blasted chatterbox. I just remarked to myself that if your squeaking sends her into a tizzy, then IF Ill I don't see how Henry's eternal sniffing wouldn't give her a conniption fit." "Squeaks and sniffs are not synonymous," Cappy answered. Moondust behaved like the indulgent, plueil-mellowed southern colonel he had built in imagination. He gave the bride away and stirred up the gayest wedding supper that could be arranged with one guest, Bryn Mawr type. The marriage was performed via the space beam by the Space Academy chaplain far off on Mars, and the groom movechihto Teena's quarters in the Big House. And Henry began to expand, gradually changing his manner of addressing Administrator Curtis, abandoning the subservient "sir" for a patronizing "grandfather." Moon enlightened him quickly on that point. "I am not your grandpappy and I never hope to be. Let's straighten out our little old relationship in a big hurry, Henry." The clerk said, with a lift of an eyebrow, "Happy to oblige you. I assumed that using 'grandfather' would make things less confusing for the children. I had forgotten that you might be a little bit sensitive about your age." "It's not the age, Henry Rutenhauser. It's your claiming to be related in a way you just don't have any dag-swizzled right to be." tude of the parents, # was no anathema to the children. They were constantly with the robot, each holding tightly to a metalloy hand from which the imitation skin was shredding. Under Cappy's guidance they explored the plantation, chattering like Martian Jabber Birds. Out in the corkroll fields they giggled at the monkeylike movements of natives and Jill hid her face against the robot's hard side each time she saw workers snatch wriggling, many-legged black things from the plants and pop them into their mouths. Where the last grassy slope slid toward the swamp the children tugged hard, trying to coax the stubborn metal man farther into black tunnels of fernlike thickets where vines writhed when touched and made soft plopping noises. "I want to find out what's doing that zing sound," Billy urged. "It is forbidden to take you into the swamp," Cappy's statement inflection rattled over the hrewer-rianph, "The zing is the feeding song of a sizzling swamp worm." "I want to see it." And Jill begged, "Come on, Cappy." "The sting of the swamp worm is fatal. We shall go to the Big House instead." Their feeble fingers could not break the robot's iron grip, gentle though it was. They went to the Big House, fussing like two flies stuck to a piece of tanglefoot. "Let's go for a boat ride on the river then," Billy pleaded. "It is forbidden to take you on the river," rumbled Six Seven Eight's speaker. They soon found Administrator Curtis in his porch rocker. "Why can't we have a boat ride?" the twins asked together. "Please, Grandfather?" Moondust shook his head. "The current could sweep you too close to the other bank and Noddies hang from tree limbs out over the water, waiting for things to float past." "What the devil is a Noddy, Grandfather?" And Jill chimed in with, "Are they animals?" "Nobody's sure what they are," the old man muttered. "You don't know whether they're around or what they're going to look like until one of the dad-blasted thingumbobs starts for you." "Oh!" Jill cried, big-eyed, and Billy asked, "Do they eat you?" Moondust said, "Reckon they do. Many's the field hand that's swum too far under water looking for water worms and come up right under a tree limb hanging low over the river, right in the claws of a Noddy that was there waiting for him. The Noddies drag them off into those mountains across the river -- and that's the last you ever see of the native fools." Billy had a logical mind, keen for a nine-year-old. "Why don't those Noddies swim over here and kill people on this side of the river?" "Because their constitutions can't stand soaking in water." "What's constitutions?" asked Jill. "It's their innards," Moon replied. "What do Noddies look like?" Billy asked. "Like almost anything they take a notion to. Sometimes it's a rock; like as not one could be aping a tree stump -- or anything." Billy was the skeptic. "Aw, how could a rock or a bush hurt you?" "Trouble is, they don't stay that way, Billy. When you blunder against one, all of a sudden it gets big and round and arms like those of an octopus come out and grab you." Billy said, "Aw -- " But he was impressed. The children turned back to #. He had become their friend, their confidant, their story-teller. Forty years of Moondust's gusty tales were imprinted on his memory circuits, an inexhaustable store of colorful adventure related verbatim in the vigorous language of his master. It needed only Jill's plea, "Tell us another story. Gappy." IF Oscillation of the brewer-rumph would intensify, the speaker which formed a round "O" where a mouth belonged would crackle and Cappy would begin, always a new yarn: "I remember one scary time when I got stuck on a mile-wide hunk of magnetite fizzling around an orbit out in the Betelgeuse sector -- " Or the story would take another track: "There used to be an old joy joint out in the Red Hills settlement on Mars where dust rats like me could get about every kind of entertainment a fellow could think of. An old witch by the name of Luna Maggie kept the blasted shack. I was sitting there fixing to kill my first liter of dreamer juice when this here dad-blastedandshummox-shucking Venusian went right into a change of gender. The frummel-gnittling chittler was neutral when it came in, but young ones don't have enough experience to feel one of those dag-nabbed transformations coming on in time to get off by themselves. And the dad-burned cycle turned out to be female and I was the first male her eyes turned on. And there I was, with the blasted thingamabob coming straight for me -- " Which brought Teena frothing to Moon. "You've got a stop that filthy mouthed old robot from telling stories to the twins." And Moon would say sadly, "Cappy, we've got to remember we're in civilized company now and watch how we talk." And the robot's speaker would sizzle and an answer finally come: "All data filed in my circuits define this as a remote, primitive planet, sir." "This is the last straw," Teena raged. "I won't have that machine corrupting my children." She stamped into the house and Moon said sadly, "Cappy, we just don't seem to be able to keep out of the doghouse." The robot answered, "The meaning of doghouse is obscure, sir." R# disappeared that night. Moondust Curtis went to sleep in his high-ceilinged bedroom whose broad windows looked past white columns across the sloping Bronta-dotted lawn to the moonsilvered river. Spicy scent of corkroll blossoms drifted into the room. Bronta-fronds rattled like dry bones in a soft southern breeze. An occasional yiku or an eek punctuated the tropic night murmur. Moon's eyes closed and his senses vaguely notified his somnambulant brain that Cappy stood in his accustomed place at the bedside, unsleeping and watchful over his master's health and safety. Middle of the night ululations of a Noddy pack coursing a breeding female disturbed Moon only slightly. Some other type of confusion touched him during the dark hours but he fuzzily equated it with a wild dream whose tentacles clutched him. Moondust awoke to sun in his eyes and a rude racket of rock chickens somewhere in the rose garden. "Shut those things up, Cappy," he muttered, then became aware that no eek or yiku answered. Moon sat up in bed growling, "Cappy, are you getting deaf?" He saw only emptiness where # usually stood. Precariously balancing on the edge of his bed. Moon laboriously adjusted his artificial limbs and pulled on his clothes, rattling the windows meanwhile with frantic bellows for the absent servant. He stomped downstairs, teetering and swaying like a swimmer in a riptide. Teena was the first person to meet him. "Where's Cappy?" he roared. Her pale eyes opened round and wide. "I really don't know." Moon staggered off down the warehouse path, yelping, "Cappy -- " with one breath and, "Henry -- " with the next. Henry tried to make a joke of it. "Never can tell what will happen to junk piles like that robot. Maybe a circuit burned out could be headed for the other side of the planet." He saw the look in Moon's eyes and suddenly assumed an aggrieved tone. "If I took time off my job down here to keep track of that worn-out old machine you'd flay the hide off my back." "That just might happen anyhow if you and that woman have done anything to Cappy." "I don't enjoy knowing that when something goes wrong around here I will automatically be accused of being responsible," the clerk muttered. His words were strong but Henry's voice held an undertone of the born underling's self-pity. Halfway to the Big House, Moondust met the twins. "Why can't you go after Cappy?" they begged. "Please? He'll die. The Noddies are after him." Jill was crying. "Will the Noddies eat him up?" "Mother says he won't ever come back," Billy gulped. Moon roared to silence the breathless stabbing of their words. "Here now -- Be quiet. Who told you the Noddies have Cappy?" Bill stood straight and accusing. "Mother. She says you made him work too hard and that's why he ran away. And you can't bring him back because your legs won't stand going. There's nobody to find him." Moon stomped off to say the harsh things he was thinking to the twins' mother. She had prudently hidden herself. Not until midafternoon did her wailing advertise her. IF "I can't find the twins. What have you done with my children?" She pointed an accusing finger at Moon. Moon stomped away as fast as Ins metal legs would allow him, a fearful certainty in his mind. No special talent was needed to trace them to the river bank. A severed rope which had moored a rowboat told the rest as clearly as if a note had been left behind. The twins were across in the unexplored country of the Noddies, hunting for their robot friend. "You did this," Moon stormed at Teena. "You told them that Cappy went across the river. You've killed those children." Incoherently, between sobs, Teena repeated, "I couldn't think of anything else to tell them. I didn't know they would run away. I didn't know -- " "And you and Henry did something to Cappy, between you. I can't go after those children without Cappy to help me walk. What did you do with Cappy? Quick, While there's time." Teena cried, "I don't know." "All right. Stand there and lie and let your babies die." Teena wrung her hands helplessly a moment, then moaned, "I made Henry dump the robot into the bayou." Henry joined them, saying, "I'm responsible." "Show me where," Moon yelped. "I don't know where," the clerk answered, frightened into a falsetto by Moon's ferocity. "I let a bunch of natives do the job." The old man let out a bellow that shook the Bronta trees and headed for the river, striding with an awkward up and down motion on his artificial limbs. "I'm going across by myself," he called back. "Any minute those poor kids might meet up with one of those thingamabobs. You find Cappy and git a new power pack in him and send him after me or I'll tear you to pieces when I get back." Moondust had a rowboat in the water when he heard the Bryn Mawr female calling. "You can't go alone." "Don't bother me," he roared and slipped the oars into the pins. "I'm going with you." "I haven't got time to take care of any female," he snapped. "I've got two eyes and a shoulder you can lean on," she answered, frosty and impatient. Moon had the blades dug deep by this time and pulled hard. He looked up in time to see the lady pull up her skirts and jump. She landed hard, thumping on to the stem thwart. The boat took some water. Moon roared. "It won't do you any good to use that kind of language," she said firmly. "You need help and I am the only other human being IV on this planet who isn't a sniveling idiot, so kindly continue your rowing." The current rapidly whirled them out. She guided the old man, carefully scanning the opposite bank for a safe place to land, a spot with reasonable chance of being free from any wandering Noddy. The skiffs bottom soon scraped mud and Moon handed her an oar. "Now you hold this boat against the bank while I climb out," he told her. Thumping, catching one metal foot under a thwart, he managed to scramble over the bow and crawl up the muddy slope, turning first to give the boat a hearty shove that sent it swirling out into swift river current. "I can't have you along taking chances on getting killed," he yelled. "Now get on home and make those two crazy people find Cappy and start him after me. I don't want any dead females bothering my conscience." She was scrambling to her knees, screaming, "That was most unkind of you." And she grabbed the oars and worried the boat around, trying to pull awkwardly back tow'ard Moon. "You turn back across that river," he called and entered the dense thicket without giving her opportunity to reply. H umidity pressed upon him like huge balls of damp cotton, soaking his skin with hot perspiration, weighing upon his breath so that it seemed almost viscous to his nostrils. And thornstudded branches tore at the old man. Underfoot there was no kindness for artificial limbs that could not feel and telegraph back to Moon's brain the sudden upthrust of rock, tangle of vine or unseen softness of a swampy spot. Moon stumbled, fell, crawled, pulled himself erect, stumbled and fought each forward inch, calling at intervals the twins' names. No echo came back through deadness of jungle-confined air. On Moon's own side of the river there would have been vocal responses to the noise of his progress: the snort and hiss from a giant lizard, grunts, squeals, hasty stirring of retreating animal feet. But here nothing moved -- nothing but the slow gyrations of a strangler vine caught his eye and not even vagrant whispers of heat-stirred air touched Moon's eardrums. The forest lay dead. Moon's calls died barely beyond his lips, absorbed by heavy foliage. And scattered, worried thoughts of the Noddies stared from subliminal corners of his mind -- no animal species could survive the voraciousness of Noddy appetites, not even the IE weaker Noddies. There was no living being on this side of the river except Noddies. Moon knew he limped toward certain death. He knew the twins were already dead -- yet he hoped for a miracle. When eventually steep incline and dense river forest gave way suddenly to scraggly brush and wide expanse of grassland. Moon just stood there completely spent, breathless, eyes unfocused for several moments. Tn the clearing's center one lone lichen-covered lava block stood man-high, a good place to lean and recover strength. But before moving to it. Moon turned a slow circle, a wary search for the possibility that a wandering Noddy might be close. He drew a breath of relief and out of the corner of his eyes caught a stirring. He froze, afraid to move. Slowly he shifted his gaze and saw the thing. What had seemed a rock half covered with scraggly moss was beginning t o dissolve -- not dissolve, his mind amended, but flow -- or like the trick camera work of Tri-D screens, a second image superimposed itself over another and with increasing speed was blanking out the rock outlines. Ragged moss became a mass of coarse hair. Yellow and green patches of lichenlike growth gathered into warty scales. Rock planes relaxed into a knobby body that suddenly rose upon two heavy legs. A single yellow eye with the glaze of an agate glared from under the thatch of tangled hair and a mouth cracked open beneath, a horrible maw -- narrow, almost pointed arch of teeth, three rows above, three below. A big shark-like mouth in a head nearly as large as the whole body. Moon was quick. He shot even as the false rock had begun its metamorphosis. He could see the passage of the projectile througli the Noddy, its body substance flexing and rolling like a bowwave curling from the prow of a swiftly moving boat and like a wave, subsiding again into the mass from which it had risen. There was no second shot. Change came too fast. Even as a mouth formed over the rock-like first image, tentacles whipped out and Moon found himself in their tight curls. The Noddy moved with him, bounding high over bushes, growing in stature as it raced aw'ay. Moon could hear breath snore in its single wrinkled nostril. He could hear a peculiar bubbling, like a chuckle, deep in the Noddy's throat, as if it laughed in ecstatic anticipation. And he could smell the beast -- a filthy carrion scent. They whipped through a Bronta forest, then out on a barren slope. The Noddy headed up its steep surface, leaping over crevices and over crumpled up-thrusting dikes of heat-puddled lava. Moon's captor topped the ridge. An ancient crater lay below. The Noddy screamed and answering howls rose from the crater floor. Jumping, sliding, the Noddy flipped in a corkscrew course around the volcanic throat and raced across the jagged bottom toward basalt cliffs. There the tentacle coils unwound suddenly and Moon slammed upon pitted rock and rolled against the blackened wall. He sat up, painfully scratched. More of the frightful beings faced him, each with a single glazed eye focused unwinkingly upon Moon. Sudden silence let his heart sound like a drum in Moon's ears. Then he heard a low sobbing coming from around the edge of a buttress leaning from the crater wall. For a moment he thought it to be a variation upon the Noddy's ululations. Then a human voice spoke -- Billy, shaky but trying to comfort a crying Jill. "Billy -- " called Moon, and the twins ran into his arms. He turned to shield them but the frightful apparitions stared and made no menacing gesture toward their prisoners. The Noddies gathered in a group perhaps thirty feet away. They squatted in a semicircle and watched, tentacles at rest. It seemed they waited for something. The waiting was not long. Some time before Moondust could sense any sound the Noddies rose from their squat and turned to face the opposite crater wall. And several breaths later, more of their tribe appeared high on the rim. They screamed and held high a human body. It could be no other than the Bryn Mawr female. "Stubborn woman," Moon thought. The Noddies bounded in a circular sidehill slant toward the crater bottom. Their comrades at the bottom began a weird prolonged scream and were soon answered. Sound rose and reverberated on the crater walls throughout the descent, until the climbers leaped over the last barrier of brush and tossed their burden in a rolling tumble toward Moon. The old man was able to place himself as a buffer between the Bryn Mawr female and the jagged rock wall but the collision sent him tumbling. She helped him up, saying with wry coolness, "We're in something of a pickle." Moon scarcely heard. "That hard metal in my legs hurt you?" She said, "Not as much as the rock would have." The Noddies squatted again, all but one. It moved in a swaying short-step dance from one end of their line to the other. Then the thing faced them and its enormous mouth opened. The other Noddies opened their mouths in unison. IF The leader snapped his shut, and the triple row of sharp teeth clicked unpleasantly. The Noddy line clicked teeth in response. Then, one at a time, each imitated the steps of the leader. "Interesting," said the Bryn Mawr person. "I would think this is some kind of ritual preparation for dining." She scribbled in her notebook. "Won't do you any good to write in that book," Moon told her. "We're done for." "I am aware of that. T am aware also that the human being often muddles his way out of utterly hopeless situations. I shall conceal my notebook in some crevice at the last moment and hope it will be found and a bit more information added to man's store." Moon said suddenly "You're quite a lady." The corners of her mouth crinkled. The Noddy dance became more complicated now, their line swaying in hop-step toward the captives. Frenzy crept into the ceremony. Noddies' breathing quickened, snoring loudly through single nostrils. Only a few feet separated the monsters from their captives now. A low wail added itself to the clash of teeth. A new sound sifted through the cacophony: Eek hoowah hoowoh hrewer-rumph, yikti hoowah-hoowoh brewer-rumph. Moon roared, "Gappy!" The children were crying, "Gappy -- here's Gappy -- " Loose rock rattled down the crater wall and Robot # followed,sliding the last dozen feet to thump with a clattering of metal. "Get us out of this mess, you damned tin can," Moon yelped. R#'s speaker sizzled and his flat tones answered, "It will be necessary to furnish more data re the meaning of 'mess,' sir." Before Moon could reply the Noddies began their last rush, jaws wide, a moaning sound of anticipation in their throats. Gappy turned and moved out to meet them, arms flailing. The pack swarmed upon him, four of the stinking creatures at once. They sprang, jaws crunching upon the robot's arms and legs. Gappy went down. Four Noddy voices screamed in waves of ascending yells. They backed away from the robot, howling. Tentacles writhed toward mouths. There was blood on the gaping jaws, a thick greenish purple. Pieces of broken teeth fell from the mouths. A fifth Noddy plunged upon the prostrate robot and clamped its jaws on a waving leg. Its scream rose above the other four and it stood, tentacles reaching into its mouth. Moon yelled, "Go to it. Gappy -- break their jaws!" But the Noddies backed away from #. They passed him, ignoring the kicking legs, moving more warily now toward the other captives. The Bryn Mawr person turned to hug the children closer and cover them with her body. Moon stood between them and the advancing tribe, knowing this was the end. The old man hobbled out to meet the fright things. He picked up a rock large enough to crush a skull and brought it down hard on the leading Noddy's head. The rock twisted and curved off, shunted by the strange yielding flesh of the Noddy. Every bit of Moon's strength had been in the blow. He followed the rock to the ground, rolling on his back, helpless, legs waving in the air. And the Noddies were upon him, great jaws clamping down on those thrashing limbs. And they screamed and backed away, spitting out broken teeth. "My legs -- my legs -- " Moon called out. "They broke their jaws on these damned imitation legs! ' Moon rolled over and thrust a leg at the nearest Noddy. It backed away, howling. "Come on, Cappy!" Moon shouted. "Bust some more teeth!" R# clanked to his feet and stomped toward the Noddies, The Bryn Mawr female helped Moon to his feet and the humans faced the howling aborigines. Humans stepped forward and the Noddies edged backward. "Run, you frummel-gnittling chittlcrs," Moondust taunted. He staggered after them, ripping off every colorful piece of vocabulary he knew. And suddenly the monsters broke, whirled toward the crater's opposite wall and up its steep side in ten-foot leaps. Their howling could be heard long after the things disappeared over the rim. Tecna heard an old familiar eek hoowah-hoowoh brewerriuuph, yikii hoowah-hoowoh hrewer-rumph and saw against the growing gray of river fog the tall awkward form of # clumping along, Moondust sitting conir fortably in the crook of one. arm, the other hand holding the little fingers of Jill, with Billy grasping her right hand, and the Bryn Mawr person striding alongside. And the last mellowing stage crept over Moon. He found himself thinking of her as a companion -- with Tcena, the allergic clerk and the uncommitted Venusian cook banished to Administration house. But those who wailed were aware of nothing but eek hoowah-hoowoh brewerrumph, yiku hoowah-hoowoh brewer-rumph. What went on in Moon's mind sprang at them much later, like a Noddy.  IF But each time Levy's murderous attack drove him out. He lost the point and retired to the clinic. The bored paramed had an ulnar pin ready to insert. He quickly swabbed Zuliani's elbow and stabbed the skin. Zuliani put his mind elsewhere as the drill moved the long pin down the medullary space of the broken bone, splinting the fragments from the inside. "Forty minutes," announced a sibilant voice from Zuliani's belt. He closed his eyes and cautiously relaxed his autonomies. Pain appeared, delineating the fracture lines around the pin in his left forearm. Lesser soft-tissue traumas went unnoticed by his cerebral cortex. Tears welled up momentarily. Then, as the nerve endings dulled, he slept. The paramed covered him with a blanket and quietly tidied up his surgical tray for the afternoon Games. Robert Zuliani the Sixth (sixth generation colonist from Earth) had just lost in Procyon's Semifinals, bested by the bulky Negro, Levy. In less than an hour they both would reenter the Ring to face new opponents: Levy fighting for a First Place, Zuliani for Third. Meanwhile they rested, while recharging their neurones. Zuliani's belt soothed him with his favorite gladiator music, the low notes slightly distorted by its resonance limitations. The music stopped. "Five minutes," announced the belt. Zuliani sat up, wincing at the arm pain. He concentrated. The pain diminished. He reasoned that his next opponent would probably have essentially the same number of injuries, having faced the same number of Ring encounters, so his own pinned ulna shouldn't be too much of a handicap. Stoically he walked out to face Jones -- young, sinewy and a genetic Amerind. L eaving the clinic's astringent odors, Zuliani returned to the Ring and the ominous smell of death -- blood and urine spilled by the decerebrate losers. Jones approached stiff-legged. Much of his racial pigmentation was now masked by layers of protective -- as well as rather anonymous -- syntheskin. Zuliani hoped the limp indicated a serious knee injury, such as a rewired patella. (It took more than self-hypnosis to get a weight-bearing joint's function back.) Their telemetered cardiograms ticked off a hundred regular beats and the paramed nodded them into the thirty-yard-diameter Ring. Jones's limp vanished as he circled warily. Sparring, they assessed each other's reaction times. Feinting and blocking, they quickly burned up what little nervous reserve they had been hoarding for this final match. IF Jones, a serious businessman, directed a growing mining operation. He considered The Games an avocation; tomorrow he'd be back exploiting the planet's mineral resources. His strength and enthusiasm had carried him this far, but to him it was still just a game. On the other hand, Zuliani was a born competitor. He had literally been bred for the Ring, his parents being selected for their winning qualities. The cybernetic belt he wore marked him as one of the Competitor genetic lines. His parents had "won" and his entire lifetime had been spent in preparation. The belt had raised him, setting his habits and providing for his essentials. He had been honed for the Games. In their stumbling they found themselves grappling awkwardly. Zuliani locked his grip around Jones's waist and wrenched him off his feet. Jones threw his arms out wide and chopped viciously at Zuliani's straining neck -- bruising the soft tissues under the angle of the jaw and depolarizing the nerves in the carotid sinus. Zuliani's heart stopped. Zuliani felt a dull flop in his chest as his heart squeezed out its last beat, marking the beginning of the loud silence of asystole. Terror showed on his face but his mind schemed. He still had almost a minute to win the point. His grip tightened to the sound of a wet popping in Jones's spine, until cerebral anoxia tipped him over. His telemetered cardiac arrest brought the resuscitator team to oxygenate his convulsing body. Jones limped from the Ring. The team worked. Zuliani's encephalogram hardly missed a spike but his cardiogram remained isoelectric. The clock ran. Suddenly the team jumped back, as if they had just roped and tied a calf. Zuliani's heart was beating again and the point was still to be won. The paramed counted out a hundred systoles and waved Jones back into the Ring. Zuliani's gaze cleared. He rolled over into a crouch -- alert. Zuliani's neck and shoulder muscles bunched and twitched. Jones stood there for a moment, evaluating the killer he faced, while his own aches and pains welled up against him. Zuliani's last bear-hug had momentarily displaced several vertebrae and had polarized his lumbar autonomies -- nerves he relied upon to mask the pain impulses from his legs injuries. His gait became stiff-legged in spite of his concentration. He backed out of the ring. Zuliani pounced -- feinting -- psychologically driving his opponent back from the edge of the ring. Jones weighed his chances in the ring against the immediate relief of the pain medication. Fourth place was good enough for a hobby. He had his family, his job -- and another chance next year. Opting for fourth, Jones reclined on the floor, leaving Zuliani standing alone. T hird place in The Games. It seemed to satisfy the belt. But it didn't satisfy Zuliani. A year earlier he had placed tenth in the planetwide Long Run. Now he would travel to the equator and train for next year's thirty-hour Swim. He'd probably not even make the top ten in that event. A fine Competitor he was turning out to be. He stopped in front of a public dispenser, ignoring the credit card slot. A rivet-sized optic pickup on his belt focused. His index finger moved down the list of choices, pausing at a stringy protein, a semiliquid carbohydrate and a small, sticky fat. Each time his finger stopped, his belt spoke silently to the machine, and the food item dropped into the chute. "Thanks, belt," he said, eating. "Y'welcome." T he year in the Tropics went smoothly for Zuliani. His belt -- in contact with several of the alert cybernetic off-shore buoys -- led him to ample ocean edibles. His ab-iron and spear supplied protein, while machinecultivated flora supplied carbohydrates. He seldom had to resort to the dispensers. , He fathered an eight-pound baby girl and placed seventh in the Long Swim. Jones placed fiftyfourth, and Levy -- lacking an adequate amount of subcutaneous fat -- dragged himself in after the "medal positions" were closed. "That's another medal for us," congratulated his belt as he crawled up on the twin-hulled "cat" after his swim. "But no first places," he gasped, glancing at the six exhausted humans who had arrived before him. "You've medaled straight through. Your profile may be the current highest," reassured the belt. His profile proved the highest and the celebration lasted three days. Overindulgence -- considered a vice by everyone of the competitors -- brought little joy to Zuliani. But he mingled easily with the celebrants, accepting their accolades. His profile did entitle his new daughter to a ceremonial genetic belt of the type he wore through life; and this gladdened him. It assured her of status in life -- a Competitor. After her belt was awarded he bowed out, taking one of the single-seaters to a mountain retreat. T he hovercraft slipped quietly out of the cloud layer and hung for a moment above the damp fir trees. Its headlights flickered about, searching. Then, IF deep among the trees, a small, rustic cabin blinked back; and the craft landed. A fireplace came to life as the cabin's circuits awoke. Wisp of resin-scented smoke curled out of the conglomerate chimbrain ruminated a moment and then roused its sleeping cargo. "Up, Zuliani. You're here." Blinking, he stumbled from the craft and shuffled up the path, allowing most of his mind and body to enjoy the languid state of half-sleep. Sullen softwoods crowded out of the night mists. The cool mountain air went unnoticed as he pictured the soft bed that awaited him. The craft's directional speaker focused soft music on his receding back. "Zuliani?" came the questioning voice of a female in the darkness over his right shoulder. Turning, he peripherally saw a shadowy form. "Kick, kick, kick!" shouted his belt. Instantly he bent over at the waist and drove his right heel out hard. A bright flash warmed the air and the acrid stench of singed moss filled his olfactory bulbs. tumble into the moist pine needles and heard the sound of his assailant thrashing in the brush. He crouched, silent. A small flame flickered up in the moss and then went out. The assailant's movements stopped. "Thanks, belt," he whispered. "Welcome," said the belt. Belatedly, bright lights from the cabin illuminated the low, white clouds, bringing bright high-noon visibility. "We're alone," reassured the belt. He stood up and walked to the still form of his assailant. A female. Her abdominal muscles were still twitching, but no breath moved through her open mouth. He felt no pulse. Between her breasts he saw his brown-stained heel print. The sternum was depressed and made gritty sounds when he palpated it. Fractured. And probably displaced into the mediastinum, cutting off venous blood flow back to the heart. He grabbed both of her wrists and jerked them over her head, levering the bone fragments up. Her heart fluttered and began to beat as soon as the pressure was taken off the large veins. Slie gasped several times, mouthing like a dry fish. Her face pinked up. She looked to be about his age, mid-twenties. A stranger. Not unattractive. Dressed in a thermal suit and boots. Empty holster. A small back pack. "Assassin," said his belt in a matter-of-fact tone. He raised his eyebrows. "How can you tell?" "Her cold, businesslike expression as she squeezed the trigger. Her finger was already starting to tighten as you turned. No question about it. She was just going to kill you. Fry you on the spot -- no questions asked," answered the belt. H er eyes opened wide -- briglit, screaming sclerae. Her face tightened into a grimace exposing regular, white teeth. Growling and clawing for his throat, she tried to leap up, only to invite another thrust against her already damaged breast bone. She went down in a heap, and he resuscitated her by pressing her elbows up over her head. "Relax! Take it easy or I'll turn you off again," he warned. Her eyes opened. This time they appeared glassy and failed to focus. The last anoxic episode must have scrambled her memory a bit, he thought. He tightened the straps of her back pack to splint her rib cage. Then he carried her into the cabin where 'he quickly taped her shoulders back with a heavy figure-eight bandage. Then her breathing became easier. She lay still, watching him as he deactivated the Bodkin HI. Leaving his belt to watch her, Zuliani crawled wearily into the other bunk and slept soundly. "Visitors," announced the belt. The prisoner opened her eyes but remained still. Zuliani sat up. He heard footsteps approaching the cabin. The door opened and four uniformed young men stepped quickly inside. They carried hand weapons. An older soldier, thick of neck and wrist, remained outside. He beckoned for Zuliani to join him. "Colonel Budd. We're Alien Security," the older soldier said as he shook Zuliani's hand firmly. "Alien?" repeated Zuliani blankly. "Your prisoner," began the colonel. "Oh, I keep forgetting how naive some of you Competitors are. You were almost killed by an off-worlder last night. She -- or it -- is from another planet. Another star system altogether. Your capturing it was a break for us. Gives us a hostage as well as a specimen for study." Zuliani glanced back inside. He knew of life on other planets -- his ancestors had come from one. Earth. But other planets held man. Humans, not aliens. "But we've never heard of -- " began the belt. The colonel glanced down at the four-inch wide belt -- featureless except for a few small rivets -- audio membranes and microcircuits hidden in its eighthof-an-inch thinness. "You're not supposed to be here. This is classified," said the colonel. He motioned for one of his aides. The belt loosened itself and was carried silently into the cabin. IF The colonel waited until they were alone and continued : "She's a Dreg. A non-human. Subhuman. Her race lives out in the Rim of our galaxy. They have some sort of a bizarre relationship with their machines -- use them for reproduction and everything. This is the first time I've ever seen one of them away from its machine. I'm half afraid it'll selfdestruct or something." They were interrupted by a squad of parameds carrying a stretcher into the cabin. The number of soldiers in the area seemed to be increasing. Zuliani stared. "But she doesn't look much different -- " "Oh, she's one of them, all right. Easy to spot. Full of wires and transmitters. Show up' on the scope like one of our selfcontained communicator booths," said the colonel. The Dreg was carried out, her willowy frame strapped firmly to the stretcher. Armed guards glanced warily about. They filed down the trail and into a large personnel carrier. Other military hovercraft were scattered about the valley at treetop level. "Zuliani, you might as well return to the base with us," suggested Colonel Budd. The silent guard formed up behind them, giving Zuliani little choice in the matter. The belt made the trip in one of the lesser vehicles. Its. optic pickup cleared and it eyed the Dreg's back pack and Bodkin The morning sun burned tlie mists out of the little valley. As the troops left, silence returned. In a few minutes the cabin's circuits had returned to standby. noticed the Dreg's face go white. She started to retch. He motioned for one of the parameds to help and they hastily unbuckled her shoulder strap. She sat up and vomited copiously. Her sternum gave an audible crunch with each effort. Then she collapsed back onto the stretcher, breathing weakly. Comfortable in the colonel's cabin, Zuliani and Budd watched the Dreg on the viewscreen. Her straps had been loosened and the parameds -- mostly young and conscious -- quickly busied themselves around the now trembling female form. "Lucky for you that we arrived in time. No telling what they would have tried next," said the colonel. "How did you know?" asked Zuliani. "Your class sevens reported up through channels. Of course they didn't know the significance of it -- not knowing about the Dregs. But when it reached the class threes, we were then notified," answered Budd. Budd explained that the Dreg spaceship had appeared in the Procyon system about thirty years ago, carrying human genetic material. The suspended sperm, eggs, embryos and fetuses had been part of the cargo of one of Earth's Implant Starships -- the one bound Out Galaxy to Andromeda. Neither the genetic material nor the Implant Starship had been damaged and the Dregs continued to maintain that their intentions were peaceful -- until this attack on Zuliani. "If they are so peaceful -- why did they stop our ancestor's starship in the first place?" ask(d Zuliani. "They don't want man to leave this galaxy. Oh, it is more complicated than that. But their view of mankind is some sort of a naked anthropoid cluttering up planets with his babies and civilized garbage. Their machinerun planets are supposed to be long on flowers and philosophy and short on men. Those Dregs! They worship natural beauty -- open space -- unspoiled, virgin planets. They shudder at our random approach to our ecology -- violence, madness and disease. After we 'contaminate' a star system they find it no longer suitable for meditation. The way we're going they fear that only the other galaxies will have a chance to remain pure and unspoiled. Their machines are powerful and they control the Rim. They can probably keep us here -- unless we want to go to war. And the politicians don't want that," said Budd. "But they are still holding our spaceship," said Zuliani belligerently. "Isn't that an act of war?" The colonel shrugged. "They're too clever for that. They say that they'll return the ship, or -- they'll let it continue its journey as a scout ship. One human can go." "One human -- no sexual reproduction." "Right." "And the other Earth life forms: the plants and animals in suspension?" "Intact." "The Tattering apparatus?" "Intact. With mechanical embryogenesis the scout could make genetic carbon copies of himself from any of his diploid, somatic cells. Theoretically he could put armies all over Andromeda -- each surrounded by an Earth biosphere of plants and animals," said Colonel Budd. Zuliani thought for a minute or two. The Tatteripg apparatus -- standard equipment in most starships -- provided efficient genetic copying. A single cell from a carrot, frog or a man could be embryonated into a new individual. All that was required was a class VI computer, a IF greenhouse life-support system and time. Gestation by that method took no longer than when triggered sexually. When Professor Tatter had succeeded in producing the first human being in his prototype machine he had said something about "predictable genetic copying" and an "improved race of man." Obviously the Dregs had a similar attitude toward a monogenetic. Tattered race of humans. Being all of one sex they'd be dependent on the mechanical asexual reproduction. Not much danger of "contaminating" a planet. The technology required to support the Tattering apparatus was infinitely greater than the requirements of a pregnant human female. Colonel Budd continued: "The Dregs have no fear of a machinedependent mankind. We'd be like them. They'd probably consider us a higher form of life -- like themselves -- and they could deal with us as equals." At their destination the personnel carrier landed immediately while the lesser craft stacked themselves in the sky to await instructions. The Dreg -- apparently asleep -- was rushed into a low-profile blockhouse under heavy guard. Colonel Budd and Zuliani strolled more leisurely towards a tall glass-and-plastictower. Everyone they passed wore a large T.D. badge. Heavy gates and doors buzzed open and shut as they passed. Zuliani began to get apprehensive. The reason for his presence became clearer as the guards casually nodded him through the gates -- him with nothing more than his face to identify him. Obviously he was more than the object of an attempted assassination. He was to be the Andromeda scout. foil and ceramic costume. Designed to lull the Dregs, this comic "space-scout suit" had been embellished with gaudy boots, gauntlets, helmet and even with extremely unsophisticated electronic gewgaws. Even his belt, which contained a class VI brain, had been disguised with a scabbard and small tool kits. The captive mended while the colonel negotiated. The Dreg ship sat exactly where it had appeared thirty years before, a human force field covering it. The military base which had grown up around it controlled the aliens' contacts with the planet. Communications and visitors were monitored. On the other hand, the Dregs seemed eager to have themselves and their ship's gear examined. Their machines appeared competent but not overly bright. Children were born on the ship, whose quarters provided room for about a hundred adults. They aged rapidly, but none seemed to be over the age of thirty. Negotiations went along very, very smoothly. Dreg command soon apologiz for the actions of the assassin -- claimed she acted as an individual, and offered to have lier executed when she was released. The colonel demurred. The captive remained in her cell. The Dregs agreed to free the Andromeda starship. They would accept Zuliani as the scout and transport him out to their Rim territory with their own ship.  w ULiANi sat by the captive's bunk, his helmet balanced on his knee. A delicate chain tethered her right ankle to a ring in the wall. Her guileless conversations truly fascinated him. Evidently the Dregs never learned to lie. Or they couldn't. Or -- and the possibility worried him -- they were the best liars in the universe. She sat up and began brushing her hair whenever he visited. The crackle of the static electricity seemed to relax her. Perhaps it helped drown out whatever bugging devices were built into herself or the room. "Glad to see you haven't left." "Because when I do go it'll mark the end of your way of life?" he said, picking up the conversation where they had left off the previous morning. She continued to brush. Her arms still moved stiffly, as her clavicles and pectoralis muscles were tender from her injury. She had been born on this planet and so was probably younger than he. Her Meck-angel -- the machine she grew up with -- had mentioned he began. "But we're treating you Zuliani's competition record when well." the colonel had announced his "Only because it serves your winning the High Profile award, purposes," she said. "You'd kill Her eyes reflected her hatred. me in a minute if you could "You still dislike us humans," benefit from it." a? He started to object mildly. She continued; "I know youVe going to say it was my gun up in the mountains. But the fact that I failed to kill you points out the differences in our cultures. We Symbiots -- or Dregs, as you call us -- are very peaceful. From an ordered, peaceful planet. We have no competition for survival -- no famine, war or disease. We don't waste nature's resources. We just improve our minds and bodies. And -- and -- " she searched for words. "And are happy" he supplied. "We're really no match for you -- killers -- carnivores. You who actually are trained to kill. That's repulsive," she said. Zuliani leaned into the conversation. "You call us killers and shudder. Aren't you competing with us for Andromeda? Weren't you planning to kill for your aims?" "Not at all," she answered. "We're not going to colonize Andromeda. We seldom have the need to add a new planet to our federation. We just don't want to .see you humans rushing out there while you're still a young, ignorant race. You'll spoil it. Waste the resources and clutter it up with your -- civilization." "But later it will be okay?" be asked. "Certainly. When you have evolved into a more conservative race -- such as our own. Then perhaps vve can explore together -- with our machines." "But you don't want me to go now -- as a scout?" he said. Her voice became sullen. "You're no scout. You're a Competitor. Suffering or waste doesn't bother you. You'll try to go out there and populate the next galaxy just because it is thre. You don't want to save anything for the future races." They stared silently at each other for a moment. Then Zuliani shrugged and left. Their conversations were always the same. II J through the mockup of the alien craft. "Td swear that their machines arc getting simpler each year. Here is their astrogation center. Sec how all the star maps are projected from the Rim and again from the Hub. They don't seem to favor any one Arm more than another. Makes it hard for us to evaluate which zones they actually control. "Their suspension apparatus is quite similar to ours -- graded hypothermia, oxygen squeeze and hypertonics. Similarities in life support are obvious. Their physiology is almost identical to ours. But here is where the problems come in -- bulkheads," said the colonel. Zuliani palpated the mock-up walls -- three and four feet of smooth-surfaced dividers between the ship's compartments. "Our engineers tell us there is no reason for much of the space these walls take up. In some sections you could squeeze whole extra rooms into the damn walls. I'm suspicious -- but I can't very well go cutting into their ship without their permission," said the colonel. Zuhani shrugged again. After talking to the captive he'd accept almost any explanation for the unused space taken up by wall width -- probably part of Dreg religion -- to save some space for the future generations. T he next day Zuliani met one of the Dreg's machines -- supposedly the Meck-angel which had raised the captive female assailant. It stood four feet high -- a small head and body on soft, bulky treads. It had two arms, two eyes and a mandiblelike mouth that clicked when it talked. "Click, click. You Zuliani? You scout?" it asked awkwardly. Zuliani fingered the hilt of a new broadsword that hung by his left side. A bright red cape draped his left shoulder, contrasting sharply with the silver sheen of his ceramic and foil costume. 'Mc scout," he said. His belt winced. The force fields were shut down and the Meck-angel led Zuliani, the colonel and his entourage into the belly of the alien starship. A half a dozen Dregs of assorted sizes and body colors were installing a suspension tank for the scout. It was hard to believe that they were all genetic carbon copies -- but by means of hormone management, their bodies had been molded -- pituitary hormones for size, and gonadal hormones for sexual characteristics. Body paints added to the variety. Two large male Dregs helped the parameds hook up the fiftyliter container of suspension fluids. The tank's membranes would use the alien's life-support fluids for the gas exchange. "Click, click. What are in these small tanks?" asked the Meckangel. The paramed moved his index finger across the row of transparent bottles connected to the pump by a web of tubes. "Induction sedatives. Energy concentrate. And also rewarming sedatives -- " There was one bottle left. " "And -- click, click, click?" "And adrenal steroids to buffer his system against the shock," said the paramed. Zuliani glanced at the controls. The low temperature readings frightened him a little. But he knew that the alien faster-thanlight drive involved powerful fields. Stress lines would polarize any living cell that was not frozen solid. He was not afraid of the hazards themselves -- he simply preferred to be awake when he faced them. But he would have to sleep through this one. B ack in the briefing room an aide asked for Zuliani's belt and took it out of the room. "You are leaving tonight. The medic here is going to give you a run-down on this transparent mannequin, pointing out the latest data we have on the Dregs' personal circuitry. These small transducers in the skull may be used to communicate directly to the cerebral cortex. This could give the appearance of mental telepathy. The energy converters are here in the large leg muscles. Autonomies are heavily wired for monitoring -- should be able to control pain and emotions better than you. And remember -- the Meck-angel may very well be in charge, not the biological humanoid," said Colonel Budd. As the medic began to outline the circuits, Zuliani wondered where they had gotten such detailed information. He hoped it hadn't come from a dissection. But then he caught himself -- after all, these were aliens he was thinking about. "Now about the Dregs' genetics," the medic continued. "They have an uneven number of chromosomes. This explains their dependence on machines for their reproduction. The nuclear material is decidedly human -- just a minor error here," he said, pointing to the karyogram. "This then matches up as two X chromosomes -- the larger ones. And this tiny one looks like a Y. We've decided that the best They are unable to make haploid sex cells -- no eggs or sperms. But -- by exposing the embryo to high levels of estrogen -- they can cause the female organs to develop fairly normally. And a high testosterone level would give them a passable male body. But they're sterile." Zuliani glanced up. "An extra chromosome?" "Yes. They have forty-seven. Normal humans have fortysix -- forty-four somatic and two sex." Sterile, thought Zuliani -- remembering the definitely male and female Dregs he had seen. "Isn't there something that can be done to correct it? If there is just one extra chromosome?" asked Zuliani. The medic smiled and continued that line of thought. "Why don't we just pick out the extra one -- leaving a normal cell? In theory it sounds fine. Actually there is a human genetic IF Klinefelter's syndrome. B y removing an X it leaves an XY pair (normal male) -- and by removing the Y it leaves an XX pair (female). Research biologists working with cell cultures from these patients have been successful in removing the chromosomes many times. They have to do it under phase microscopy as the living cell goes into metaphase at the beginning of cell division (when the chromosomes can be seen best). But so far -- nothing. Going through the nuclear membranes with a hook is not the best way to get a good cell division. There are molecular and ionic forces at work, dividing up the genetic material. And sticking anything into the cell just wrecks everything. Maybe some day," answered the medic. It looked easy on paper. Oh, well. Zuliani glanced at the colonel. "Now Zuliani, we want to give you a posthypnotic suggestion. Something important to you and the human race -- for when you arrive at the starship. You'll be traveling in the Dregs' ship, so there is no way we can communicate with you without their knowing. Just put yourself in a trance and the hypnotists will take over from there." Zuliani snapped his mind out of his body, using the same techniques that protected him from pain during the Games. When he woke up he was on the Implant Starship leaving the Galaxy for Andromeda. Ill i t T T ow do you feel?" asked XI the high-pitched voice. "Fine, belt," Zuliani answered, picking up his familiar companion. "It was a rough trip. They brought you up to a light sleep several times and questioned you about your mission." "Did they learn anything?" asked Zuliani. He could remember nothing that would indicate that this was anything other than a scout mission. Perhaps the posthypnotic suggestion would clarify everything -- but so far he drew a blank. His mind was a vacuum after his self-induced trance. His belt continued: "When they started probing your mind I got so worried that my anxiety circuits must have overheated. Tliey detected me and took me away. I don't know what happened the rest of the trip. How is your memory? Any big voids?" . "No. I don't think so. I guess they are pretty refined with their erasing. Or else they didn't find anything worth erasing," said Zuliani. "How does the starship check out?" "Fine," said the belt. "A servo took me through the hull. Plenty of Earth genes are represented in the suspension tanks -- plants, animals, even microorganisms. But no humans." "The Clicks and Dregs were that thorough? I'm the only human on board?" asked Zuliani. "Yes." "Well, I wonder what the colonel had in mind." "All you need is a source of female genes. There isn't any skin under your fingernails, is there?" asked the belt -- half in jest. "No." Zuliani smiled. "But the cells would have to be alive and capable of division in our Tattering apparatus. No sense in searching for secret compartments in my sword or other gear either. Outside of suspension the Dreg's faster-than-light drive would have killed any cytoplasmic units they might have carried." They rechecked the gear and his outlandish costume. Nothing. He began to notice a number of unexpected aches and pains as the rewarming drugs wore off, so he settled down in his control couch to rest -- and think. "Message from the Dregs," announced the ship. "I'll take it here," he said and turned toward the viewscreen. "Qick, click. Have a nice scouting trip. Don't forget to send your message torpedo back to Procyon. We wouldn't want them to worry.' "Can we answer that?" asked Zuliani. "Probably," replied the ship. "We're still under light-speed one. But there is no need to. If we send the torpedo they'll detect its trail through their system." Zuliani considered not sending it. That would upset the military and raise doubts about the Dregs' good intentions. Perhaps it would lay the groundwork for a future space war. Well, he'd send it. Play by the rules and see what happens. After the ship filled the torpedo's memory banks he added a postscript with some of his suspicions and sent it back. ing section while the machine harvested his buffy coat for cell cultures. About half a pint of his blood went through the separator, which removed his white blood cells. The red cells and plasma were transfused back. The buffy layer -- a light yellow-white mixture of plasma and white cells -- was suspended for future embryogenesis. About three ounces a day were harvested. He tried to be cheerful. "We can start a monogenetic line and build a civilization that rivals the Dregs," he said. "Unfortunately that isn't possible," said the starship. "A cell line can not replicate indefinitely. After about fifty or a hundred IF doublings the cell line dies out of old age. Each nucleus seems to have a molecular clock that ticks off the cell divisions. When an organism uses up its ticks -- it dies. Sexual reproduction is needed to make a new organism with a new clock." He looked at the ship's optic pickup. "But how do the Dregs manage? he asked. "A hundred doublings, more or dividual cells. By using threefourths of the doublings to make cell cultures they've grown a massive supply of genetic units. But that leaves only one-fourth of the doublings for each individual's life span -- and you probably noticed that all the Dregs were under thirty. That is about a fourth of the usual human life span. However, there is evidence that they are getting to the end of their material. The Clicks will soon have to adopt a few humans or go on working without biological units for pets," said the ship. Zuliani doubted that many humans would accept the Clicks on the same terms the Dregs had. But then, the Dregs were quite sterile and had no alternative. said the Meck-angel over the viewscreen. The appellation depressed Zuliani, but that was what he had become -- a symbiot. A human alone in intergalactic space, away from his species and dependent on machines for asexual reproduction. Then the alien machine shucked its angular jaw. Its voice lost its metallic quality as a featureless, egg-shaped "head" drifted up from the silent husk of its robot facade. "Go on to the next galaxy and explore. Live with your machines, Symbiot. But go knowing that you failed to deceive us. We removed your uterus and ovaries, so you can't contaminate Andromeda with your primitive race," said the alien. Zuliani didn't understand. The message continued : "Foolish, Our technicians knew that your steroid treatment was a protective cover for a graft, but female sex organs were so obvious! But a hermaphroditic space scout would be your race's answer to the problem we have offered -- reflecting the ingenuousness of a race that has been in space only a few centuries -- " The message became fragmented as their acceleration carried them up into light-speed and the cone of blackness blotted out the center of the screen. Zuliani palpated his abdomen. Syntheskin still covered his body, sprayed on to protect him from friction during his suspension. A tender spot below the umbilicus? Masked by the generalized aches and pains of rewarming and hidden under the syntheskin, he found the small incision in his lower abdomen. So that was it! The colonel must have bungled the posthypnotic suggestion, but he could imagine what it had been. Fill the sperm banks first -- since the same body can't produce both eggs and sperm at the same time. Then with a heavy dose of estrogens he could bring the infantile uterus and ovaries to maturity in a few years to provide the eggs. Basic biology. Almost too basic. The Clicks had discovered it and thwarted him. Mankind would have to wait a while longer before it could go Out Galaxy. Depressed, he went back into suspension to wait out the long trip. M any years later the starship orbited a likely looking star in the Rim of Andromeda. There were two planets to choose from, both Earthlike. The Tattering systems activated. Mobile surface units were put on both planets to compare the environments. The nearer planet finally was selected and Zuliani was rewarmed. His memory was intact and he was still depressed by his defeat at the hands of the Clicks. Then a cold fear dampened his axillae and bleached out his adrenals. The Tattering apparatus contained males and females -- fetuses of all sizes and colors. "That is a Click trick -- hormones, dye. What am I on? A Click ship?" he asked. His belt reassured him: "This isn't a Click ship. I would know. Take me to the Tattering controls." He studied the controls. His belt's optic pickup focused on the readouts. "No overriding hormone controls here. Those fetuses are developing with their own hormones and genes," said the belt. "But those were my cells. I'm not a mosaic. I'm just one individual," he protested. The starship activated a viewscreen in front of them and projected the standard list of # genetic types of Earth humans. "These red arrows indicate the genetic types we have already identified in the incubators. Red dots are probables -- yellow dots are possibles. Apparently your bloodstream was filled with the Rainbow Mix of white cells just prior to suspension. With an umbrella of steroids to prevent rejection most of the cells survived and are now producing daughter cells. You have acquired mosaicism," said the ship. "What will that do to me?" he asked apprehensively. IF "Nothing. We'll harvest buffy coat for a couple weeks and then stop the steroids. After that, your own antibodies will clean your system of any foreign cells," said the ship. Zuliani smiled. The Rainbow Mix -- designed for suspensionstorage in the Tattering apparatus -- but evidently capable of setting up a limited kind of "housekeeping" in the vascular spaces of his spleen, lymph nodes and marrow. He'd get rid of them before they got a good hold on his marrow. He didn't want them to reject him. But meanwhile, they represented mankind. T he human race had come to Andromeda in the body of Zuliani. Now it was poised on the rim of that Galaxy -- poised and ready to pounce -- spreading babies, the picnic litter of civilization throughout the star systems. Zuliani walked from the cornfield into the Meek nursery, brushing pollen from his shoulders. As he waded among the smiling faces, distributing pats and wwds of encouragement, he reflected on their rainbow skin colors: reds, whites, browns, yellows. Outwitting the Dregs with mosaicism had been easy, for the Dregs were really a clone race -- monogenetic. Single genetic pattern and single antigenic pattern. Their cells and organs were freely interchangeable between individuals. But, because the transplanted tissue lost its donor identity in the Dregs they had no way of detecting it -- therefore they couldn't even understand the theory of human mosaicism. And therefore humanity would soon own another galaxy.  Watch for the big Fall Issue! K eir Soth lifted his eyes wearily from the tattered fragment of a book he was trying to read as he heard the gritty cycle of the airlock. He sighed and rose to his feet to stare through the left vision port at the alien landscape beyond the ship. Melok was a harsh world. Even at sunset it showed no softening of the raw desert that ran directly to the ugly brick towers of the city to Keir's right. The sky was dull with a thin overcast of dust and haze. Three miles away most of the red sun was hiddenby Superstition rests on error. Religion worships the truth. Between must lie -- confusion! the immense pyramid that was the native temple. Already there was a yellow wash of light glowing from an opening in the fane. Por Dain came into the control room to stand beside him. The scientist was older than Keir and slightly shorter but they might have been brothers from their looks. Both were normally dark of complexion and abnormally lean and sharp of features. Por Dain had removed his protective garment but sand and grit still clung to the creases around his eyes. Fatigue from the double gravity of Melok showed in the droop of his shoulders. "Five thousand light-years of searching space in this can," he muttered. "Then, less than thirty parsecs from home we find -- this. By Earth, Tm tired of all these superstitious savages and their tin god!" 'Keir Soth winced at the oath, reaching out to touch the tiny emblem that represented a hemisphere of lost Earth. He was noti tf course, superstitious. But childhood habits were hard to break. Por Dain snorted. "Can't you get it through your head there's no truth to the legend, Keir? How could any planet wrap itself in a silver haze and then just disappear -- supposedly into some mystic higher dimension -- to leave its colonies stranded? Tommyrot!" "But we found the picture of just such a happening on that world in the third quandrant," the captain protested. "A world that had been barren of human life for at least twenty thousand years," Por Dain reminded him. "Do you think our legend would have lasted that long?" Keir Soth shook his head reluctantly. There were legends of some great war in the heavens that had blasted civilizations back some fifteen hundred years -- and those were probably true. There was even evidence that Melok itself might have been the enemy world, since it had been rendered almost lethally radioactive at the same time. Its atmosphere still contained more radiation than Keir found comfortable to think of. But a legend older than twenty millennia...? And there were other puzzles. If men had been colonizing worlds so long ago, why were there no ancient and advanced worlds? Did every planet rise to spew out colonies and then die in some new holocaust of war with those colonies? Was life so stupid? L yssa the Novitiate came into the cabin then, bringing broth and platters of rations for them. She was quite typical of her kind -- blond as no other women were, slight, resembling a porcelain doll. The girls who served Earth were carefully bred to look alike. Surprisingly, For Dain made room for her on his seat. The old agnostic usually avoided her, bitter at the law forcing all ships to carry at least one Novitiate. She smiled her usual pleasant and empty smile at him as she began the evening invocation in the ancient speech. " 'F  forgethce Ozinc. , . "She did fine today," For Dain admitted when he saw Keifs questioning look. "She talked that high priest Shaggoth into letting her up by that Earth-damned tin god of theirs and she planted three pickups." She made the circle of Earth but the blasphemy didn't seem to bother her. "Shaggoth calls it the last true god," Lyssa said. She had been uncomplaining throughout the voyage. After finding the pieces of books on the ancient planet, she had even begun teaching them the ancient tongue. That had proved fortunate, since the natives of Mclok also used it for their ritual and Shaggoth spoke it enough like Lyssa's version to be understood. She'd proved helpful enough on the voyage. Besides, men needed a woman on a long trip. Why Shaggoth seemed to accept her was another puzzle about this dratted world. He had been rough enough on For and Kier, forbidding them to come within three hundred feet of his fane. And he had refused to let even the girl see his sacred books, though he made no secret of their existence. The scholars back on Homework! would give a dozen fortunes for the legends of any alien world, too! It was dark outside -- except for the red light of Mclok's four visible moons -- when For Dain finished his food and sttxd up to ti# the tricky outside receptors. The old man's hands shook with fatigue as he tuned them. Then he grunted with pleasure and surprise. He had been tinkering with the receptors for weeks -- and now at last one seemed to be working properly. It showed the inside of the temple clearly. Shaggoth was fussing about with bits of wire, making happy sounds. The high prievSt was a dark, hairy man, grotesquely short and ugly. There was something indecent about his expression and his chuckling. Then the focus cleared for depth. For the first time, the two men saw the god worshiped on Melok. "A robot!" Kier exclaimed. "A robot like the legends in the books IF from the ruined planet." Por Dain ncxlded slowly. "Looks like it. I knew it was metal -- yet how ean it be? Metal would have gone to pieces by now. It must be some kind of statue shaped of tin and made to look like the robots their legends described. These savages are worshipping a machine." event. Dust and grime had been polished from it but there was an unmistakable patina of centuries. It was vaguely manlike, though its face gained the touch of nobility without any definite features. "Maybe it is the wreck of a real robot," Por decided. "lf the ancients before the bombing here had some of our alloys -- it could be. Now there's religion for you, Kcir. A race of men blindly w'orshipping something they made for a servant." Lyssa touched the Earth emblem but her smile remained unchanged. She no longer protested Por's remarks. Instead she pointed to Shaggoth, who was blowing out the torch and turning down the gas mantles. "He's coming here," she said. In that she was right. The pickup showed him moving across the sand toward them, badly distorted but recognizable. Por had turned the gain up enough to see by the dim temple lights. He caught Kier's attention and began tracing the thing Shaggoth had been working on. It was a weirdly wired mess of coils and blocks of some kind, seemingly directed toward their ship. Por pointed out where the wires led from it and were cither stuck on the robot body or somehow plugged in. "Must be a mockup of some machine from tlie legends," Kicr guessed. "Ritual magic -- similarity principle. But docs he think some kind of god power is still generated in that creature?" "There's always power in the god," Lyssa informed them. "Shaggoth has bragged of it. He makes miracle fires with it." Any power in those batteries had been dead for millennia, Kicr realized. But a clever priest could fake something to convince his followers. "Maybe he's coming here to warn us he's making big medicine and we're in his power," Por guessed. Lyssa shook her head, her smile deepening slightly. "He's coming to sec me. He asked me today. I think he wants to be converted to the blessed lost-Eartli faith." "You're not going out. Lyssa," Kier told her sharply. "And you're not letting him in." He flipped a toggle to cut in the hull pickups. Around the ship were some fifty partly concealed figures waiting patiently, as they had wailed every # night. "That's an order. Lyssa. Stay away from the airlock until morning." She nodded faintly, then more firmly at his expression. "All right," she agreed softly, though her smile was almost gone. "Good night, then. I'll sleep now." They heard her sounds of final prayers and the faint noise of her body sinking into the hammock in her tiny room. After a while Por Da in also retired. K niR sat watching the high priest. Shaggoth reached the ship and knocked softly. Then he squatted down in the sand, motionless and patient. Kier waited but nothing else happened. And finally he released his control scat and sank onto it. The last sounds he heard were the heavy breathing of Por Dain and L.yssa's faintly adenoidal snores. A heavy hand on his shoulder shook him back to consciousness. Por Dain stood over him, scowling and swearing. "She's gone! The Earth-damned crusading little fool -- she pulled a sneak and they're all gone." Kier snapped out of his stupor. By the clock, six hours of the long Melok night had passed since he fell asleep. He saw that the outside hull pickups were on, showing no sign of the natives or of Shaggoth. "We've got to get out and rescue her," he muttered thickly, reaching for the caffein tablets. "No chance. Holy Earth, look at them!" Por Dain had turned the pickups toward the temple and the distorted one showed an enormous crowd of Melok natives streaming from the city and mounting toward their fane. Then the one good pickup caught Shaggoth as the priest moved into view. Gas jets were now casting a half-light over the temple, and the priest was again busy with his wired contraption. "Damn him," Por growled. "He isn't as ignorant as I thought. That savage is tuning a circuit, looks like. Ah!" As he spoke, the contraption seemed to come to life. A blue glow ran over the coils and turned white. It seemed to spread like a spark climbing a Jacob's ladder. Then it was a faint glow of spherical shape that stretched and grew too thin to see. Then acolytes appeared, bearing Lyssa. She was trussed firmly but seemed unharmed. She made no sound but her smile was gone. Her eyes, wide and round with fear, were centered on Shaggoth. A chanting began as the acolytes laid her on a stone block before their last true god. Shaggoth approached her, holding two wands from which wires led to the robot's body. IF K eir Soth found himself blaspheming heavily as he reached for the weapons in a drawer of the control panel. But Ror Dain held him back. "Don't be a fool, Captain. It's a bluff. He wants us to come out to rescue her. That's his whole plan. Then he'll have the ship. There must be a horde of the savages waiting below the hull where we can't pick them up." "Then we'll take the ship there." "No." Anger mingled with reluctant respect in For Dain's .expression. "I recognize that field he's generating now from the layout of parts. We've got one like it on Homeworld -- only no bigger than a pea yet at maximum. You can't get through. It would damp the engines half a mile before we reached the pyramid." No wonder the priest had refused to let them see the ancient books. He must have a technical library there -- and somehow the old faker comprehended what was in them, however little he used them for the good of his followers. Shaggoth was staring directly into the pickup, as if aware that they could see him. Now he brought the wands into contact with Lyssa's body, smiling thickly as she screamed. Keir began warming the engines. "I'll take the ship in as close as we dare," he said. "Then we get out and kill as many as we can trying to reach her." For Dain began loading the weapons as the engines warmed. Again Shaggoth brought the insulated wands against the Novitiate's body. Her muscles tensed in a wild spasm but the savage chant rose to cover any cries she made. The ship was just beginning to respond, rising sluggishly. Keir grinned thinly, hoping a horde of Melok natives were caught under that pressure field. The ship couldn't yet operate well but power was building up. Again Melok brought down the wands. And this time the chant quieted. "Help me -- " Hers was a cry that should have torn the heart from a brazen idol. "For the love of Earth, help me -- " And help came. T he robot figure moved. A metal arm swung down to tear the wires free from its body. Slowly, ponderously, the figure straightened. There was a creaking sound as the limbs moved, and dirt and scale chipped away. Then it was erect. In two strides the metal figure had caught the frozen priest and broken him like a thin stick across one knee. Shaggoth was flung back into the mob of screaming, fleeing worshippers. For a moment the robot halted. staring toward Lyssa. It sank to one knee. Shaggoth was flung gesture of some kind. A bass voice sounded over the pickup, using an oddly pure-sounding form of the ancient tongue. "Saintly One, I -- " The words cut off as the robot bent closer. Then something like a sigh came from it. It stood up quietly, moving to snap the bindings away from Lyssa's limbs. She lay limp. The metal arms reached under her to lift her. The robot turned then, facing away from the pickup for a long minute, its head up as if listening. Again there was a sigh. "The field is too strong," the even bass voice said in the ancient tongue. The figure turned, searching until it located the pickup. "I go by another way." the robot said slowly and carefully. "Your lady is safe but you who are in the ship must wait until I appear again." It turned quickly toward the throne on which it had sat. A foot reached out to kick the massive structure aside, while a hand made a pass through the air. Almost instantly, an opening appeared in what had seemed solid rock. The robot stepped into it, carrying the Novitiate, and disappeared. Immediately after it was gone the rock closed tightly. A small explosion seemed to take place inside. Keir had the ship up but now there was no place to go. "Wait until he appears where?" he asked bitterly. "Or until he can get safely hidden away witj? her in some hole in the ground?" "Try cruising slowly toward the pyramid," Por Dain suggested. "Maybe there's a secret shaft out to the bottom and he'll show up there." "He'd better." B efore the ship was in full motion, however, they saw the robot again. This time he was only a dot on their screen until Por raised the magnification of the hull pickup. He stood threQ miles from the pyramid on a narrow ledge of the most ancient of the brick structures. Lyssa was still unconscious in his arms. Somehow he had traveled that distance in less than five minutes. Now he stood staring into space, as if listening to a voice from the stars. Then his head dropped. "So long?" he asked. "Fifteen hundred years from the radiation that paralyzed my mind until the right words could waken me?" He sighed again and seemed to listen once more. He nodded slightly and turned to face the ship. From the receiver of the now useless temple pickup a softer and warmer voice spoke, using standard Homeworld speech. "Bring your IF ship close to me and open your airlock. I will leap across. And do not fear. I shall be the Watcher for Homeworld now, since these people have forfeited all right to one." Keir Soth manipulated the ship very delicately across the small distance while Por Dain went down to the airlock. It was tricky maneuvering but Keir had time enough to see a series of small explosions running like a mole's trail from the pyramid across the desert to the big brick building. Whatever secret way the robot had known was destroyed now. The metal figure leaped when the ship was fifty feet away. Keir flinched and held his breath. Then he heard the lock cycling to full space closure and the robot came into the control room, with Lyssa conscious and smiling her pleasant and empty smile beside him. Por Dain stood in the doorway as the robot glanced around at the controls. "I have brought the few books from here that you can use," the robot said, pointing to a small sack Por Dain was holding. "There is no need to wait here longer." He slipped confidently into the captain's chair, reaching for the controls. With unerring accuracy he plotted the course toward Homeworld and the ship began its gradual acceleration into the red sky and toward space. Keir Soth shook his head, benumbed by wonder. "How could Melok have lost any war if they could create robots like you?" The Watcher looked back at the three humans and his voice was soft but filled with immense pride. "I was never created on Melok," he said. "I came from Earth!" There was only the soft drone of the ship's engines as Lyssa and Keir Soth slipped to their knees, to be followed a moment later by a former agnostic, Por Dain.  Willy Ley OF #. How Long Is the Post? #News of the sudden untimely passing of Willy Ley has reached us just as we go to press. His death shocks the worlds of science and science fiction. He leaves an empty place in the hearts of his co-workers and friends, a place no other can fill -- for Willy Ley was unique. In his honor, and because of its interest and significance, we shall publish posthumously that portion of his new series with which he has supplied us. It concerns the Earth's geologic history, the emergence of life, and its fascinating evolution in multiple forms -- including man. North America was covered by glaciers. At an earlier time the central portion of the North American continent had been flooded -- with "sea serpents" in the water and "flying dragons" overhead. And before that, luxurious but strange jungles grew in Pennsylvania, leaving coal seams behind. Before that there was a time when the land was devoid of life. And once upon a time the earth did not exist. First question -- what does "once upon a time" mean in years? In plain language -- how old is the earth? who knew? For two centuries or so there was a traditional answer. Didn't it say in the margin of the Authorized Version of the Bible that the world had been created in # B.c.? Most of the people who quoted the figure knew that it had been supplied by the Irish archbishop James Ussher (#-#), however very few knew how it had been established. What the good Ussher had done was to add up the genealogies given in the Old Testament but since the statements are often not very explicit quite a number of assumptions had to be made. For that reason the Roman Catholic Church disapproved of the method. And Jews and German Lutherans said that rabbi Shemayah Hillel, a pupil of the High Rabbi Loew of Prague -- he, who is said to have made the Golem -- had done the same about a hundred years earlier and had done it better. At any rate, Ussher and the Jewish calendar do not agree. According to the Jewish calendar, it is now # years since Creation while according to Ussher it should be #. Leaving theological thinking behind we can now progress to a man who thought that it should be possible to calculate the age of the earth. He was a French count who was in addition an excellent mathematician, who had translated the works of Sir Isaac Newton into French and who was also an all-around naturalist, usually referred to as Buffon. His full name was Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and he lived from # to #. His reasoning was that the earth must have been a part of the sun at some time and after it had been split off the sun (by a glancing blow of a large comet, he thought) it naturally was hot. Now it was no longer hot, at least not at the surface. How long would it take a sphere of metals and rocks the size of the earth to cool off from "very hot" to the present temperature? To find the answer he ordered a number of spheres made. They were all of the same size but of different materials -- iron, brass, copper and various kinds of rocks. Next he had a number of wire holders prepared. The spheres rested in these, making minimum contact with anything but the atmosphere. After that he had a blacksmith heat all these spheres in his furnace, with orders to run the furnace as hot as he possibly could. When the spheres were hot they were placed in the wireholders and Buffon sat, watch in hand and waited for them to cool off. Every once in a while he would touch them, first with a gloved hand, then, when it seemed safe, with his fingers. Each time he wrote down how many minutes had elapsed. The most important times were when his fingers could just stand the heat of the spheres and when he could not longer perceive a difference between the temperatures of the spheres and the temperature in the room. Then he started calculating, trying to apply the cooling times he had found to a ball of rock the size of the earth. He found that the whole cooling period would amount to # years for the earth. About # years ago the earth had cooled off enough to be touched and Buffon assumed that life had appeared about then. Any high school physics student of today can think of a number of flaws in the experiment. For example any temperature which did not even melt the metals obviously was not high enough. And the spheres were cooled by both radiation and convection, while a hot planet in space would cool off by radiation alone. But Buffon's experiment had its value as an attempt at actually measuring the age of the earth. And at least it showed that that age had to be expressed in tens of thousands of years. T he next attempt to calculate the age of the earth was not made until #. Geologists had been busy in the meantime. Austria, France, Germany and Russia had their share of geologists during the early part of the nineteenth century but England and especially Scotland provided an unusually high number. Many of the latter were amateurs in the sense that they did not get paid for their geological explorations. But they were good amateurs. More by coincidence than for any other reason, many were churchmen. They first established that some layers of rock were older than others. The rocks of Wales seemed to be especially old and came to be referred to as Cambrian, for Cambria is the Latin name of Wales. The famous chalk cliffs were indubitably younger than the rocks of Wales but older than certain layers of sandstone. A nice, simple theory was promulgated: the Primary Period was examplified by the Cambrian, the Secondary Period by the chalk cliffs. The Tertiary Period was the time during which these sandstone layers had formed. Unfortunately the simple theory did not hold up for long. There was coal. Lots of coal -- its formation must have covered a period of its own. Next some German geologists said that the Jura mountains of southwest Germany and Switzerland did not fit into the basic scheme -- the theory had to be revamped, especially after Jurassic formations had been discovered in England, too. By a happy coincidence the IF new scheme held six geological periods and, of course, the amateur geologists -- remember that quite a considerable number of them were clergymen -- thought this a fine agreement with the "days of creation" of Genesis. The new scheme looked as follows: #. Laurentian Period -- by definition the oldest #. Cambrian Period -- now the second oldest #. Carboniferous Period -- the time when the coal seams had been formed; the name comes from carbo, Latin for "coal" #. Jurassic Period -- after some discussion conceded to be older than the chalk cliffs #. Cretaceous Period -- the time the chalk cliffs were formed; the name comes from creta, Latin for "chalk" #. Tertiary Period -- the youngest of all, which kept its name even though it did not make any sense any more Not much later the Russians started publishing papers that showed that the rocks in the Russian District of Perm did not fit into the scheme since these Permian rocks seemed to be older than the German Jurassic rocks but probably were not old enough to belong to the Carboniferous Period. Whether there had been six or seven or even more geological periods was a minor question by comparison to problem of how long it took for these periods to follow each other. Nobody mentioned the # B.c. date anymore except in some rural areas where few people read and knowledge was word of mouth from generation to generation. But how much time had truly elapsed? The German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (#-#) had established an upper limit based on the "fused" theory of the origin of the solar system by Immanuel Kant (#-#) and Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (#). Their ingenious theory assumed that the solar system had really begun as a diffuse cloud of cosmic dust and gases. This cosmic cloud was to contract slowly by the mutual gravitational attraction of the gas molecules and particles. As it contracted it grew hot, especially the central condensation that was to become the sun. The rapidly rotating sun was then supposed to have produced the planets one by one, by throwing off a ring of matter that had formed around its equator because of the fast rotation. The whole idea was discarded later but when von Helmholtz did his work no doubts had yet been uttered. Hermann von Helmholtz approached the problem as systematically as possible. The sun shone and threw vast amounts of energy into space every moment. That energy had to come from somewhere and the only source Helmholtz could think off was contraction -- a major part of the theory. This continued contraction because of the mutual attraction of the molecules meant that the sun was gaining density at every moment. Calculation said the sun would have contracted as much as it possibly could. Then it would radiate its heat away into space and would stop shining. But the geologists were not so years of sunshine to come -- they wanted to know what had gone before. In the past the sun had been less dense and had, therefore, taken up a larger volume of space. Considering the rate of shrinkage that von Helmholtz had already calculated, the diameter of the sun must have been # miles is the diameter of the earth's orbit. This meant that the earth could not possibly be older than to be younger -- how much younger remained to be seen. By I # the geologists had nine geological periods on their lists but their estimates of the duration of these periods were mainly guesswork. They had two clues. One of which was evolution -- pretty generally accepted by then -- while the other was "rate of sedimentation." All one could say definitely about evolution was that it must have taken a long time. Nobody could tell at what rate evolution progressed and it was doubtful even then that the rate was consistent. We now know that at some times in the geological past evolution proceeded at a surprisingly fast rate, while there seem to have been long periods during which the picture did not change much. Nor was the rate of sedimentation more helpful. Of course one could observe how much sand and mud a given river would deposit in a bay per year. One could establish how much of the yearly total had been deposited in late spring and how little in winter. Then, having found that the average was half an inch per year one could be quite close to the truth if one assumed that the half inch of sand and mud would make a layer of sandstone slightly less than a tenth of an inch in thickness by being compressed into stone. And it was then a question of elementary arithmetic to calculate how many years had been needed to deposit a #-foot thickness of a sandstone layer. Unfortunately different rivers perform at different rates, depending on the rate of flow of the river as it fought its way to the sea -- and also on the material along the course of IP the river. Estimates of how much time was required to form a given deposit were simply estimates. Moreover, if an area had been flooded and sediments had formed and it subsequently became dry land -- only to be flooded again after some time, the number of years for that "some time" were not even an estimate but just a guess. Small wonder that different books by different and respected experts gave figures for the same phenomenon that had nothing in common, except for the fact that they represented vast ages compared to the human life span. Some time ago  found a beautiful example, two estimates of the age of the black slate in which a fossil reptile (Ichthyosaurus) occurs. It had been found off the British coast (Isle of Wight) and, in much larger quantity, in southwest Germany. One estimate and the other was five or six estimates had been about the British deposits and the other about the German deposits one might consider that the different localities somehow played a role. But both estimates referred to the German deposits in Swabia. P eople who were not geologists regarded even these figures with a mixture of alarm and contempt. A teacher of mine often related the story that he had taken a course in ancient history at the University of Heidelberg during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The historian had told his students that chronology was fine back to early Greece, say # B.c. Of course Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia were older, though one could not say by how much. "All in all," my teacher quoted him as saying, "history will add up to about # years and that is what we do now. Now if you should ask a geologist you'll hear has nothing to do with science any more." And at that time geologists were timid indeed. The total duration of all geological periods, they said, might add up to ten Interestingly enough, t h e discoveries that were to provide the answer were just being made at the time when my teacher's history professor made his remarks about the "unscientific" behavior of the geologists. The discoveries were the ones that showed that an atom was not an indestructible and eternal supertiny sphere of matter but something that had a structure, too. One day in #I at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, a discussion look place that has been partly preserved. The two men involved were Sir Ernest Rutherford (#-#) and Frederick Soddy (#-#), who was a graduate of Oxford and had just joined forces with Rutherford. They studied the long-known element thorium which gave off what was then called "emanation." First they found that that "emanation" did not come from thorium but from something else they called thorium-X. Then Soddy found that the emanation was a gas like argon -- actually it was the radioactive gas radon which had not yet been discovered -- and when he felt sure of the facts he said: "Rutherford, this is transmutation -- the thorium is disintegrating and turning itself into an argon gas." Rutherford did not doubt the facts either, but answered: "For Mike's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation! They'll have our heads off as alchemists." So in their publication they spoke of "sub-atomic chemical change." An American, Bertram Borden Boltwood (#-#) believed Rutherford and Soddy and after a year or so of work announced that the parent substance seemed to be uranium. Uranium became radium after an intermediate stage and radium, going through several other stages, finally became lead, which is no longer radioactive, it must be remarked here that all the early descriptions are somewhat vague and full of names one can't find in a handbook any more, because the concept of an isotope was still in the future. Isotopes are different versions of the same element that are chemically the same -- but their atoms have slightly different weights. Since this idea had not yet occurred to anybody the early researchers believed each time when they had discovered a new isotope that they had discovered a new element. After Soddy had left Rutherford the latter acquired a new assistant: Otto Hahn (#), who was also interested in thorium and had discovered something which he called "radiothorium." In Canada he discovered "meso-thorium" which then turned out to be a mixture of meso-thorium I and mesothorium #. (Actually they all were just various thorium isotopes.) Hahn thought that there was in addition a second line of "natural transmutation," beginning with thorium and also ending up as lead. Though he was an accomplished chemist he did not succeed in detecting any difference but still thought it prudent to speak of "radium-lead" and "thorium-lead." not know about isotopes the very important concept of "halflife" had been evolved. Radioactive elements changed into other elements and that took time. But MO IF one could not speak about the "life-time" of a radio-active element, for that would depend on the amount you had. A large sample naturally lasted longer than a small sample. However, one could, regardless of the size of the sample, say that after so and so much time half of it would have changed into something else -- hence half-life. It was found fairly fast that there was no way of influencing the half-life of a naturally radio-active element. It was also found that the half-lives of different elements were of different lengths. A few samples (modern figures) must be given here to show how it works. Element no. #, astatine, of atomic weight #, has a half-life of # hours and # minutes. Element no. #, actinium, of atomic weight #, has a half-life of # years. Element no. #, polonium, of atomic weight #, has a half-life of # years and element no. #, radium, of atomic weight #, has a halflife of # years. These short half-lives could be established after a few days, or months, of observation -- I should add here that astatine was not yet known. But when it came to uranium of atomic weight # things were difficult -- we now know that its half-life is # apparent that the half-life of uranium had to be expressed in age of the earth had been found. Look for uranium-bearing rocks. Check the percentage of uranium, then check on the percentages of other elements that are the "descendants" of uranium, mainly lead. And you know how old these rocks arc. Early figures which we know now to be too small were that way because at the time the half-life of uranium had still been underestimated. And that is why we know that those famous ichthyosaurs of Coal turned out to be about # cliffs could boast an age of only In the meantime the geologists had rewritten their table of periods, going by their own evidence -- the atomic scientists only added the proper age figures. The whole history of the earth, beginning with the first clear fossils, was subdivided into three eras. There was the Paleozoic Era comprising six geologic periods, named Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Denovian, Lower Carboniferous (Mississipian in the U.S.A.), Upper Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian in the U.S.A.) Permian. Then followed the Mesozoic years ago and lasting for #-# Ihree geologic periods: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. The newest is the Cenozoic Era It is equivalent to the old Tertiary period which still bears that name and which has been divided into half a dozen sub-periods called Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene. Then came otherwise known as the Jee Age which ended I I ,# years ago. And the second half of that small remainder is what is called "history." T said a while ago that the geologists wrote their own table and that the atomic scientists only added figures. That is correct for the periods since the time of the earliest fossils. Where the atomic scientists did add something was at the front end, so to speak. Everything older than the Cambrian period was logically called the Pre-Cambrian and its duration could not be guessed until dating by radioactivity proclaimed that some rocks had to be more than The Pre-Cambrian was then split into Lower and Upper PreCambrian and a duration of # each. Subsequently this was inmore" so that the beginning of the Lower Pre-Cambrian is now years in the past. By that time the earth was fully formed, with a solid surface, with and with an atmosphere. That atmosphere would not be to our liking -- in fact it would kill us in about a minute -- but it was an atmosphere. How long it took for the earth to be formed by accretion of cosmic dust and gas is unknown, though the process is estimated to have taken around # is that at some time during the Pre-Cambrian life originated.  United States. Anywhere else beginning necessary. There are enough international misunderstandings as it is. F or the past year one of the loudest literary controversies of science fiction has centered around a new novel by Norman Spinrad -- one often encouraged by vigorous diatribes from Spinrad. Each step in its history was treated as a major disaster or triumph. The publisher who had contracted for the book rejected it upon its completion. Nobody wanted it until it was finally serialized in the British New Worlds, where the postal service tried to suppress it. After that, naturally, the American publishers began bidding for it. Spinrad held out for a contract that would guarantee to preserve every word exactly as he wrote it. Then at last we learned that art had triumphed; a contract was signed. Now it is out in both soft-cover and hard-bound editions: Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad (Avon, #; Walker and Co., #). Now you can read it for yourself and you can determine whether -- according to the Avon jacket copy -- it should be damned as "depraved" or hailed as a work of genius. Tf you do, you may wonder what all the shouting was about. Don't expect to be shocked if you've been reading many of the current best-sellers. Compared to Harold Robbins' Carpetbaggers, this will seem pretty tame. Aside from a heavy sprinkling of four(Continued on page #) ficer for New Woodstock, a small mobile artists colony of trailers that is heading through Mexico toward South America, Many ko' people live in such towns now, most living off their Negative Income Tax from the Welfare State, or Meritocracy, Bat feels he doesnt have enough merit for better work, since an Army test set his l.Q, at only # . Not all are poor, however. chance to practice after his forced I acts as mayor and is rich enough to keep a secretary named NAhis wife. They stop for the night outside Linares, where they sense surprising hostility. In a local bar they are forced into a fight. Bat escapes unhurt, but Fred develops a sudden severe headache. Then Bat is forced to fight unreconstructed type of old-time  southerner,' challenges Fred be cause the writer has been pretty and talented young artist. Jeffs biggest complaint is that Fred is a Negro and has no right to compete with him for Diana's favors. Bat reports to the town council. stressing the rising hostility jrorn the local Mexicans. Then he takes ojf in his official car on a scouting trip to examine their route. On the way, he is stopped by an armed young Mexican who gives his and blindfolded. He is taken to a place where someone named a polished gentleman, threatens like a wild bandit. Don Caesar tells Bat that Mexico is being ruined by the relatively rich 'Gringo" tourists who come in their mobile towns and turn the Mexican people into nothing but mendicants. Don Caesar heads a group sworn to stop this. If New Woodstock does not turn back to the United States, the town will be ambushed and everyone in it will be killed. Bat is permitted to leave, but his gun and all-purpose phone are not returned to him. He goes back to report to the Town Council. Later, while they are discussing their best course, he finds his possessions returned to his car. The Town Council calls a general meeting to decide what to do. And Bat starts to tell his story. But Jeff Smith interrupts to question whether there is anything to worry them. He points to Bat and ridicules the story of the threats. 'It's all a damned lie," he claims. VI T here was another moment of shocked silence and then a muttering, then a jabbering. Dean Armanruder rapped them to silence. He looked at Jeff Smith, still standing, a defiant smirk on his face. The senior executive committee member said evenly, "Mr. Smith, you have either said too much or too little. Will you please elucidate?" Jeff Smith was eager to do so. "For the first part of the story we have only the word of Hardin and Zogbaum -- from whom we haven't as yet heard, though I assume he'll back his fellow barroom brawler. They say they went into town and that the Mexicans started a fight. That's what they say. Evidently, the Linares chief of police sees it otherwise. The second part of the story has nothing to back it whatsoever. Mexico is a civilized country. Armed vigilantes don't attack peaceful tourists. What Hardin's purpose is, I wouldn't know. For some reason he evidently doesn't want to see New Woodstock continue to our destination, South America. He wants to turn back. Possibly he's afraid of the long trip ahead and would rather remain in the States where life is admittedly easier, especially for the town's peace officer." The assembly buzzed again and Armanruder rapped for silence. He looked at Bat Hardin and said, "Do you have anything to say to this, Mr. Hardin?" "No," Bat said. Armanruder looked back at Jeff Smith. "And what is your proposal, Mr. Smith?" "I propose, first, that we go IF on, as planned. And secondly that we depose this alarmist and elect a new police officer. I make it a motion." There was silence for a moment. Finally, Jim Blake said, "For the sake of bringing it to the vote, I #I second that motion. And Fll also vote for Bat Hardin being retained." Armanruder said, "Motion has been moved and seconded. Bat Hardin to be dismissed as police officer of New Woodstock. Miss Paskov, are you tied into the computer for voting?" "Yes, sir." D ean Armanruder looked at the assembly. "To simplify, if there is no objection, cast your vote for either Mr. Smith or Mr. Hardin." There was little hesitation. Each member of the assembly put his pocket phone to his mouth and cast his vote. Nadine Paskov said dryly, "There were two votes for Mr. Smith." A laugh tittered through the assembly. Jeff Smith flushed angrily and sat down. Bat Hardin, obviously, was gratified. He also wondered vaguely who had cast the second vote in favor of Smith, who had obviously voted for himself. Armanruder was saying, "We have all, except two, evidently accepted the truthfulness of Mr. Hardin's story, that he was kidnapped and the town threatened. How large an element has threatened us, we cannot say, but a threat has been made. Further comments before we put to a vote whether or not we retreat?" mission to speak. He said, "It is all very well to be gung ho, to wish to press on into adventure. However, when my wife -- who is already quite ill -- and I voted to take this trip with the rest of the town, we did not expect to be bitten by snakes in Nicaragua, or buried by a landslide in Costa Rica, or..." His elderly voice went sarcastic. "... or even attacked by head-hunting Indians in Ecuador. We had been of the opinion that with the advent of the Pan American Highway it was quite possible these days to travel all the way to our destination in reasonable comfort and safety. However, if on our first day we are threatened by a body of armed men, then I think we have stuck our necks into something more than we had originally planned. I strongly urge that we turn back as a town. If you others vote to go on, then I, at least, will now disassociate myself from New Woodstock and return to the States to take up residence in some other mobile town or city." There were others. They spoke in varying degrees of heat, indignation or fearfulness, some taking one side, some the other. When it was finally put to the vote, four-fifths of the assembly were for going on. The remainder refused to accept the decision of the majority and decided to return in a body to Texas. The returnees numbered approximately one hundred of the mobile homes, largely those owned by the more elderly and by those not really involved in the arts themselves but more or less hangers-on of the art colony. T he question then became what to do with the community property such as the auxiliary vehicles and the town treasury, which was not overly large. The treasury was accumulated by a slight tax on all citizens of the town, or a community assessment if an emergency of more than usual magnitude developed. Since the vote had gone so strongly for the element that wished to go on, it was decided that all auxiliaries remain with New Woodstock and that those who were returning be recompensed out of town funds for their share of what they left behind. And the question then became, where were these funds to come from, since the treasury held no such amount? This was solved by several of the more affluent town members such as Armanruder, Doctor Barnes and Jim Blake making a loan to the town which would be repaid as tax money came in. A small levy was also to be made, small enough not to be a strain even on citizens who existed solely on their Negative Income Tax, to help in the transaction. Still another problem arose. Among those who were to return was the middle-aged Barbara Stevens, the competent nurse of Doc Barnes. He had two or three other practical nurses in the town, on whom he could call in emergency, but Miss Stevens was the only professional. In all, the meeting of the assembly took several hours and Bat Hardin could see that they wouldn't be getting away that day. He didn't like it. He didn't like giving the vigilantes under Don Caesar the extra time to consolidate their forces and to prepare for whatever trouble they had in mind for New Woodstock. 'However, there was nothing for it. Even aher the assembly had adjourned, there was considerable to be completed in the breakaway of the hundred mobile homes that had decided to return to the States. Bat headed in the direction of Sam Prager's home and repair shop. He discovered Sam seated, sprawled rather, before his vehicles, in the same folding chair he had occupied at the assembly shortly before. He was scowling in thought. Bat said, "Having second thoughts about going on?" The other stirred. "No, not really. But I must say, I didn't expect to run into a hassle such as this so early in the game." "Nor did I," Bat admitted. "I didn't know you were a Canadian, Sam -- till you mentioned it." "No particular reason to lean IF on the fact. There's precious little difference between a Canadian such as myself and a Yankee such as you." Bat had to laugh. "Calling me a Yankee is on the side of stretching a point I'm getting called just about everything today, starting with Gringo this morning. But I'm somewhat surprised you're not with one of the Canadian mobile towns." Sam shrugged. "Easier to get work in a Yank town. Not many of you have to work. You have Negative Income Tax. We haven't come to that yet in Canada. Knock on wood." Bat looked at him. "You don't "Nope. Makes bums of people. Man was created to make his bread by the sweat of his brow." Bat nodded. "I think you're right. A man should work. Which brings us to the point. Did you finish repairing my phone?" S AM stood up and turned toward the door of his combined home and shop. "Yeah. I had to put in an entire new unit. Bat. You going to pay for it, or should I bill the town?" "Just to speed things up, I'll pay you. I'll take the bill to Armanruder later." Bat Hardin followed the electronic repairman into his shop. Sam Prager had a licensed credit exchanger attached to his TV phone screen by reason of his trade. Bat Hardin put his pocket phone cum credit card on the screen and his thumbprint on the square at the screen's side and looked at Sam. Sam said, "That'll be twentythree dollars and fifty cents." Bat said into the screen, "Please credit to Sam Prager twenty-three dollars and fifty cents from my balance." The screen said, "Transaction completed." Bat took up his phone and returned it to his pocket. He said to Sam, "Do you have a gun?" Sam said, "Well, yes. A carbine. I thought we'd possibly be running into deer country, wild pig and that sort of thing down in Central and South America." "Does Edith drive?" "Sure." "I suggest that when we take off, you let her drive and you sit next to her with the carbine." Sam hissed a low whistle. "You really expect trouble, don't you Bat?" Bat didn't want to overly alarm the town. He said, "Not necessarily, but there's no harm in being ready. If anybody does take a shot at us, I'd like to see an immediate response big enough to set them back on their heels." Bat started in the direction of Dean Armanruder's home, thinking about it. The instructions he had just given Sam Prager had come to him on the spur of the moment but the more he considered it, the more he liked the idea. A rmanruder was standing before his mobile mansion talkiflg to Doc Barnes. Bat came forward and said to Armanruder and the other member of the executive committee, "I think it might be a good idea if you'd give me carte blanche on organizing the line of march tomorrow." "How's that, Hardin?" the former magnate said. "Well, I've got a double motive. First, I think common sense dictates that we take off from Linares as ready for trouble as we can be, even though it may not materialize. We want no stragglers, for one thing. I'm of the opinion that if a mobile home breaks down between here and the Pan American Highway, which should be safe, it should be abandoned and its inhabitants taken up to go on with us." Doc Barnes said slowly, "I doubt if many of our people would simply leave their homes right next to the highway, Bat." Bat looked at him. "Doc, I feel so strongly that nobody should be left behind that I suggest that if it becomes necessary to abandon one of our homes, or even more, that the owners be recompensed out of New Woodstock town funds." Dean Armanruder puffed his cheeks. "That becomes quite a drain on the treasury, Hardin. And it's already bare as a result of having to pay off the hundred homes that are turning back for their share of community property.' Bat said doggedly, "Under the circumstances, we can't let anyone fall behind. Our best chance is to push on as fast as possible. If we stopped, up there in the hills, we'd be sitting ducks for any snipers, or whatever." "Ummm. And you said you had a double motive?" "Sir, usually when a mobile town moves, it proceeds more or less haphazardly. Sometimes, units lag behind for days. All right, I think that tomorrow New Woodstock should move in close order. Women driving, those men who possess guns sitting next to them, ready for action. I think, we should drive almost bumper to bumper, looking for any trouble and damn ready for it if it materializes." Doc Barnes muttered, "Sounds like a confounded military convoy." Bat said softly, "It is." Dean Armanruder was thinking about it. Bat said, "I'd like to put this on the community phone. You see, I suspect we have a leak. Ordinarily, our community phone wouldn't be tapped by outsiders. But I suspect that anything that goes over it is forwarded to Don Caesar, or whoever. If so, then they'll pick up this move of ours and perhaps our very readiness will dissuade them." Armanruder was quite obviously taken aback. "A leak? What in the world do you mean by that?" "I mean that Don Caesar's men were tipped off that I was coming up that road this morning. On top of that, my pocket phone was taken from me by the kidnappers IF but was sitting on my table when j returned. I doubt if a complete stranger to New Woodstock could have done it. He wouldn't have known where my home was and he would have been spotted wandering through the town, even if he did know." A rmanruder said, "All right, all right. You're the police officer. So far as I am concerned, you can make any arrangement you wish pertaining to our socalled order of march tomorrow. Go into my office, if you wish, and use the desk phone there. You'll be more comfortable," Bat nodded, and said, "One other thing. I suggest we make all preliminary arrangements for leaving tonight and that we roll at the first flush of dawn. These people confronting us -- if they're confronting us -- are not professional military. I doubt if they are very well organized. Civilians lack discipline. We might catch them unawares and be completely through the mountains while they're still comfortably in bed." "Well, that sounds reasonable," Armanruder admitted. "Notify the town to that effect, Hardin." Bat shook his head. "No. That wouldn't do. We'll have to pass that on by word of mouth, not put It on the air. That might tip them off, if they have some way of tapping our communications," "How about this leak of ydufs?" Doc Barnes demanded. "JF there is such a traitor among us, he'll let them know." Bat nodded again. "Of course. And, if so, then we'll know we've got a traitor and not just suspect it." "You handle it, Hardin," Armanruder said. Bat trudged to the major entrance of the Armanruder home and found the door open. He entered and headed for the office. Nadine Paskov, in mini-shorts, but otherwise no advertisement for expansion of the textile industry, met him in the hall. Suddenly, she put a hand on his arm. "Bat, is there really danger?" He said carefully, "There probably isn't but the safe thing is to go ahead as though there is. The better prepared we are, the less danger there is." "Do you think these people actucilly might shoot at us?" Bat said carefully, "They might but I'm not really expecting it. We just want to tread carefully, Miss Paskov." "Look, Bat, do you think I should go back with the others to Texas?" He cocked his head slightly to one side. "Why didn't you?" She took a breath. "It's the best job I could ever get." if you couldn't get another." subsistence level income!" He said, "Well, it's your decision, Miss Paskov. You can go back with the others, or on with us." She said urgently, "Bt, you don't understaild. He's written me info his will. I can't quit. But... B at couldn't think of anything to say to that. He sidestepped her and continued on to the office. He sat down at Armanruder's desk and activated the TV phone and said into the screen, "New Woodstock, General Call." And then: "Please hear this. This is Bat Hardin, your town police officer. With the concurrence of Mr. Armanruder, I strongly make the following suggestions. That all of us who are armed, ride with our weapons at hand. Women should drive, when possible. If fired upon en route, return as heavy a barrage as possible. Even if you do not see an immediate target, fire in the direction from which the attack came. I want as large a display of fire power as we can muster. Even if you have a weapon of no larger caliber than a twentytwo, have it at hand. If you have only a shotgun, load it with as heavy a load as you have, either slugs or buckshot would be best. If you do not have a weapon, try to borrow one from those among us who have more than one. We shall proceed with several of our younger single men in the lead vehicles. If we run into a roadblock, it shall be their duty to clear it, even under fire. We'll want volunteers for the lead vehicles. Please contact me. When we move, it will be bumper to bumper and no stragglers will be allowed. In case of breakdown, the mobile home involved. must be abandoned and its occupants taken up by its neighbors. We'll try to send mechanics back for it from the next Mexican city which has suitable garages. If the house is destroyed, the owner will later be recompensed from the town treasury. If there are any questions, please consult either me or Mr. Armanruder." He sat there for a moment, thinking out further plans, then came to his feet and left. He didn't see Nadine Paskov on his way out which was all right with him. He hated to have someone as nervous as she in the convoy. Fear is contagious. They needed to keep their cool, especially if they actually did run into grief. He walked over to Al Castro's house and found his deputy talking to Luke Robertson, standing in front of the mobile home. They cut short their conversation at his approach. He gave them a quick rundown on his plans and they nodded agreement. Bat said to Al Castro, "I'm going to let you take my usual place in the column. I'll preceed the town by about two kilometers. We'll be tuned into each other all the time. You do the same as everyone else, that is, let Pamela drive and you have your Gyro-jet pistol ready in your hand. Keep in continual touch with both me and Luke, here. Luke, you bring up the rear. Have young Tom Benton riding with you. My phone and Al's will be continually open to you -- we'll be, on a three-way hookup." They were both nodding. H e bit his heavy lower lip and hesitated before adding, IF "Boys, once we're under way, ignore anything from Mr. Armanruder or anybody else of the executive committee, until we get to the Pan American Highway. Once on the move, wc are in command. There's no democracy in combat. If anytlung happens to me, you take over, Al." He told them to spread the word about the early departure time. Bat turned and headed for the nearby camper of Ferd Zogbaum. However, on the way he passed the mobile home of Diana Sward and found Ferd there idly talking with the feminine artist who was cleaning paint brushes. They gave him the standard friendly greeting and he explained the plans for the following morning to them. He turned to Ferd and said, "Ferd, you're cool when the bets are all down. I'd like you to take second place in the column behind Al Castro. If they hit us... Ferd said, "I don't have a gun. Bat." "Oh." Bat Hardin rubbed the side of his face. "Well, there are a lot of homes in New Woodstock with more than one. Some of our people are hunting buffs. Seek one out and..." Ferd Zogbaum's lips were white. "I'm not allowed to carry a gun." Bat looked at him. Ferd said, "I'm a felon. Bat." # a what." Diana Sward Jy blurted. He looked at her emptily. "I'm a paroled convict, Diana," The three of them held a long silence. Ferd sucked in air and made a face. "You still don't understand. I can't carry a gun. You see. I've got a bug planted in my skull." That made no sense to either Di or Bat. Ferd said, "I mean an electronic bug. Everything I say is monitored. If I have a gun, or if I get into violence, I get a splitting headache and have to report immediately to my parole officer -- by TV phone, of course." "Holy smokes," Bat said in protest. "It's better than being in a prison cell. Bat. There have been some changes of recent years in penology that a lot of people don't know about. Today, most convicted offenders are not kept in prison. Even lifers, such as myself." "Life?" Di said. "Yes. I'm a three-time loser, Di. For the rest of my life Til carry this bug. If I have a gun in my possession, or if I participate in violence, my head aches unbearably until I report. They have a continual cross on me, always know exactly where I am. They don't even care if I leave the country. If they wanted, they could drop me in my tracks, any place in the world. But at least I can carry on a reasonably normal life. It's notlike the old days. Of course, if I wish to do certain things, take a job, or get married, for instance, I have to report in. Then my parole officer decides if I can do it or not. A woman is warned that Tm a felon, a boss is also so informed." He added, wryly, "Few women wish to marry a felon, and few bosses want one to work for him. However, weVe Bat said, uncomfortably, "What are you...well, what were you sentenced for, Fcrd?" Ferd, his lips white again, said, "Are you asking me as a police officer?" "Don't be an ass," Di said. Bat said, "Of course not. As a friend." "You have to ask me as a police officer, so I can explain later to my parole officer." "What in the hell are you talking about?" Ferd sucked in air. This was hard for him. "Everything I say is monitored. If I use certain words the computers report it to my parole officer and I have to have an explanation." "All right," Bat said. "As town police officer, I ask, what were you given life for, Ferd?" "Conspiracy to commit subversive acts against the government." , They both stared at him. He shrugged. "You asked me. I told you. Shortly, I'll get a headache and have to report to my parole officer. They caught me three times. I was easy to catch. Anybody's easy to catch these days when you can't exist without a credit card and when the computer data banks know everything about you that there is to know." He clasped his hands suddenly to his head. "Damn it! It's starting," he muttered in agony. "I'll have to go." Bat Hardin took off in his police car. He wasn't pulling his mobile home. He had left it for Ferd Zogbaum to draw behind his camper. It would slow Ferd down but he'd be able to manage. Bat and his deputies had been lining the town up for the past two hours and it was as ready to roll as it would ever be. There had been a great buzz of excitement but for some reason everybody had tended to speak in whispers. He had both Al Castro and Luke Robertson on his car phone, the screen split so that both of their faces could be there at once. He passed Linares. The town was dead at this hour of the morning. When he was two kilometers along the road he looked at Al Castro and said, "Okay, Al, let her roll." They had agreed to attempt to keep at a one-hundred-kilometcrsan-hour clip, if possible, and Bat Hardin remained at that speed. Light was coming on fast now and his head was continually in motion, peering to the right of the road, to the left, continually checking his rear-vision mirrors. He kept in continual communication with Al Castro and Luke Robertson, checking their JF speeds. Everything was going fine. All during the night, the town's mechanics had worked on the engines of any electro-steamers that were suspect of possible breakdown. Thus far, all was tight, no stragglers. At almost the exact spot where he had been halted the morning before, he came to a sudden halt. Leaning nonchalantly against a lone mesquite tree by the side of the road was the one they had called Jose. He seemed to be alone, nor was there any cover in the immediate vicinity which might have held others. Bat said into the phone screen, "Al." "Yeah." "Slow down to about twentyfive. One of the jokers who picked me up yesterday is here." "Okay." His Gyro-jet carbine, which fired the very same #mm rocket shell as the pistol which had been appropriated yesterday, was on the seat beside him but he left it there. The other had no weapon -- in hand, at least. Bat got out of the car and approached. Jose stood erect and looked at him scornfully. "So, Gringo, you didn't bother to listen to our warning." Bat said, "Some did. About a hundred of our homes turned back." "It isn't enough. This is your last warning. Gringo. Turn back now and return to Texas or what will happen is your own fault." Bat shook his head. "We have permission from the Mexican authorities to enter and travel through Mexico." He added, "As you know, there are women and children and elderly people in this town." "We did not ask them to come to our country," the other said flatly. "They too contribute to the corruption that you Gringos bring wherever you go." B at Hardin, in a quick flow of motion, stepped closer and drove his left fist into the other's stomach. Jose, his eyes popping in agony, folded forward and Bat slugged him brutally in the jaw. The Mexican collapsed to the ground. Bat reached down and frisked him. The other was out cold. Bat Hardin grunted satisfaction as he retrieved the Gyro-jet pistol which had been taken from him by the other the previous morning. He stuck it in his belt and returned to his car. He said into the car phone, "Okay, Al, back to full speed. Ignore the seeming corpse at the side of the road, if he's still there when you go by. He's just unconscious." They rolled on past the tiny town of Iturbide, also still asleep, only one or two sleepily shuffling locals on the streets. Bat was doubly alert now and unconsciously chewing away at his lip. He said to Al and Luke, "That fellow knew we were coming." Luke said, "How could he have, Bat?" "Somebody told him." There was no answer to that. They were getting out of the mountains now, and Bat Hardin felt moderately happier. He hadn't liked being caught in the canyons, mountain crags to both sides that could have sheltered snipers. For that matter, an enemy who was knowledgeable about dynamite could have, with a comparatively small charge, set off an avalanche that might have buried a score of homes. And he might have done it in such a manner that the police would have had their work cut out finding evidence that the landslide had not been an act of God. It was only forty-five kilometers to San Roberto and Bat realized that they were going to make it to the Pan American Highway without difficulty. If there was going to be an attack, it would already have taken place. The best spots for an ambush were all behind them. Don Caesar's vigilantes simply had failed to materialize. It had been a bluff. A well acted out bluff, but a bluff. However, Bat didn't like it. Somethiqg didn't ring true. He had no doubt about the sincerity of Don Caesar, Jose and the others. They desperately wished to end the flood of mobile towns that were inundating their country. But what possibly could have been accomplished by the phony threat? Of course, a hundred homes had turned back but that wasn't a drop in#he bucket. The vigilantes had achievedvirtually nothing to end. the flow of more than . twenty towns and cities a day coming over the border. He put it from his mind. of Route E-# and entered the wide Pan American Highway at the town of San Roberto. Without halting, Bat Hardin turned left and headed south. He had, thus far, continued to remain a full two kilometers before the convoy but now he dropped speed until Al Castro caught up with him. Bat said into the phone screen, "Okay, we can relax a bit now. However, still no stragglers. I want to put as much distance between us and Linares as we can." 'Righto," Al yawned. "I didn't really expect anything to happen anyway. We have something like four hundred men with guns in this town. You'd need a small army to take us." Bat said, "The precautions didn't hurt us any." He flicked Al and Luke off his phone screen and dialed a road map of this vicinity and checked if. The Pan American Highway at this point wasn't automated so they'd have to remain on manual controls. That was all right with him. He flicked the map off and said, "New . Woodstock, Dean Ar raanruder." Armanruder's face faded m. He was evidently sitting next' to Nadine Paskov in his swank electrosteamer which drew one section of his mobile mansion. Bat knew that usually Manuel Chavez drove the other section and that his wife. Concha, drove the smaller mobile IF home which was the living quarlisted as having several sites. You tens of the two servants. could call ahead, to be sure, for Dean Armanruder said testily, reservations for our town." "See here, Hardin, the past hun"How far is it?" dred kilometers and more I've "Three hundred and twenty several times tried to get in kilometers." touch with you to give instruc"That's a pretty long drag." tions. I couldn't get you." "Yes, sir. And I suggest we not "Sorry, sir," Bat said. "I've had stop for lunch." my screen on AI Castro and Luke "It seems to me, Hardin, that Robertson continually so we'd be you're taking over a good deal in instant touch if anything came of the running of this town." up." Bat sighed inwardly. "Not "Well, what did you call me deliberately, Mr. Armanruder. But for now?" I'm the town cop and we were "I suggest we drive all the way being threatened." through to San Luis Potosi and "Well, just remember that New put as much space between us Woodstock is governed by an exand our anti-American friends as ecutive committee elected by the we can. It's a fairly btg city and citizens." Bat said, but gently, "Whose decisions have to be passed upon by the assembly of all town members." "Of course. Very well, Hardin, ril put it to the vote, whether to press on all the way to San Luis Potosi and to skip stopping for lunch." His face faded. Bat grunted. He sometimes wondered at his desire to hold down this job. What did he get out of it? Not even a bit of gratitude from such as Dean Armanruder, and the open dislike of such as Jeff Smith. Which brought Smith to mind again and again he wondered who had voted for that worthy to take over Bat's office. But then he knew. Whoever the traitor was that had kept Don Caesar and his people informed on the movements of the town had also wanted Bat out and someone less competent in the crucial office of town police officer. That was an interesting thought. S AN Luis Potosi was the most modem and progressive Mexican city they had as yet seen. Situated, as it was, on the Pan American Highway and the principle route from the States to Mexico City, it was well equipped with sites for mobile towns. In fact, they spread out far over the countryside and in area were actually larger than the city itself, though it would seem doubtful if all of the sites were ever completely occupied at one time. There were three grades of sites, the smallest, ultra-luxurious with a fine complement of stores, restaurants and even nightclubs and theatres. The least well equipped was by far the largest and intended for mobile towns and cities largely occupied by persons with no other income than commodations at this site must have seemed exotic to the average Mexican, if the complaints of Don Caesar and his men were to be taken literally. Dean Armanruder had called ahead for reservations and been accepted, in spite of the fact that two other towns were at present already parked in San Luis Potosi -- evidently, like New Woodstock, on their way through to points further south. Their town, art colony that it was, seldom took on the expense of renting space in sites of the more swank variety. Although some of New Woodstock's citizens were rather wealthy, a considerably had to watch expenditures. Here, in San Luis Potosi, they drove to the cheapest site available. Bat Hardin, as usual, parked near the administration building and before setting up his own home drifted about the town to check that all was well. Evidently it was. They'd had excellent luck all day with not a single breakdown. The town had kept well together, much more so than usual. New Woodstock's artists were apt to be a bit on the philosophical side and sometimes, on a long haul, the town might be stretched out several hundred IF kilometers. In fact, often single units or small groups would drop behind for days. It made life a misery for the town policeman who would have preferred more cohesion. Bat, sauntering along, passed Jeff Smith who was setting up his overly large home; overly large in view of its single occupant. Smith's mobile home was not as big as those of Armanruder, Blake or even Sam Prager's, although the Prager establishment included the workshop, of course. Jeff Smith looked up at him "Vigilantes," he snorted. Bat ignored him and went on. He was afraid that the southerner wasn't going to make out in New Woodstock. Actually, Bat was sorry. He couldn't like the man but Smith was the only musical composer the art colony had and could have been expected to break down sooner or later and present some of his work at community affairs. All seemed i n order -- with everyone so tired from the strain of the day and the long drive that it was a matter of a quick evening meal and then to bed. Bat returned to his own home, and w'ent through the motions of setting it up. H e went inside and dialed himself a tequila sour on the automatic bar. He could use the drink; he'd been through a lot and gotten precious little sleep the last couple of nights. Glass in hand, he slumped into the most comfortable chair and automatically looked over at his small collection of books. But, the hell with it, he was too tired to read. On his phone screen, he dialed the local road map again and checked. Oueretaro was the next major city, two hundred and three kilometers to the south. That would probably be their next stop. It was far enough, in that they'd been pushing themselves for the past several days. They had made their decision to make the trek to South America while parked in the vicinity of New Orleans and had kept on the road since then. Some of the younger children, in particular, were getting tired. He supposed that they would take a several-day stop at Mexico City to rest up, make any repairs that had accumulated, shop for major items that might not be available in the smaller cities to the south, and allow time for those who had never seen the Mexican capital before to do some sightseeing. He checked. Oaxaca was a fairly good-sized town but otherwise the next major city to the south of Mexico City was Guatemala, in that country. There was a knock on his door and he said, "Come on in." It was Diana Sward. She looked about the room and said, "Damn it, how is it that male bachelors are invariably neater than female ones? I'm ashamed of how my joint looks as compared to this." Bat came to his feet. He said, "You're an artist: paint, brushes, sketching paper, canvases, paintings. It's hard to expect that you could keep a mobile studio spotless." She sighed and sank down onto the couch, without invitation, stretching her long shapely legs out before her. He went over to the bar. "Drink?" "Do you have whiskey?" "No, you can't have whiskey." "Why not?" "Because you're in Mexico. Drink the local product. In Mexico, drink tequila, mescal or Kahlua." "You're a hard man, Hardin. What's Kahlua?" "A liqueur based on coffee and one of the best in the world." "Sounds too sweet. What are you drinking?" "A tequila sour." "You talked me into it." He dialed another tequila sour and took it over to her and then returned to his own chair. They sipped for a moment in silence. Finally she said, "Remember that conversation we had about I.Q.?" "Sure." "I've been thinking about it. The question never occurred to me before -- but is it desirable to breed for greater intelligence?" H e scowled at her. "How do you mean, Di?" "Well, take greater height. Why is being a six-footer or taller desirable? Why is the average height of the Japanese, slightly over five feet, not just as good, or better? Certainly, in the old days when men slugged it out with swords, or when they worked with a shovel or plow, physical size was desirable -- but why now? We don't usually think of a man who weighs over two hundred as being in the best of shape, but we seem to have an absolute mania to be over six feet and to have a genius level I.Q. Why? Has it ever been indicated, not to say proven, that the man with an I.Q. of # is happier than one with an I.Q. of #? The genius, as well as the moron, is a misfit in society. Do we want to be smarter or happier? If it is the pursuit of happiness that is our primary interest, then perhaps we should not seek, as a race, a high intelligence quotient." Bat thought about it, for some reason slightly irritated. The subject was not a happy one with him. He said slowly, "Man is a thinking animal, Di. If it wasn't for our superior intelligence we never would have gotten out of the caves." "All right. But what I meant is man has largely licked the problems he was confronted with in his infancy. We've defeated our animal enemies. We've conquered nature, at least to the extent where we can now satisfy all our needs in abundance. All right. Isn't it time we took stock and decided where we want to go from here? We've achieved the necessities of life, now shouldn't we resume the pursuit of real happiness?" "Whatever that is," Bat said sourly. "Anyway, it's a great idea IF that possibly the average person with an I.Q. of # is just as happy, or possibly happier, than one with #. However, under the Meritocracy, I.Q. is what counts. And if you're ambitious and want to get ahead in our society you'd best have one in the upper brackets." She set her glass down and leaned forward slightly. "That's what I mean. Maybe Ferd Zogbaum is correct. Maybe this Meritocracy of ours isn't the end of the line so far as social evolution is concerned, if there's ever an end." Bat said impatiently, "It's true that in production today not all jobs require a high intelligence. There are various operations, the sensory-manipulative operations that are involved in handling a power shovel, for instance, which have no appreciable educational or intellectual requirements and which do not lend themselves to automatic processes. But the overwhelming majority of useful jobs today do require high I.Q. and there is simply little place for those who are not particularly bright, to put it bluntly." "But there should be, that's the point I'm trying to make." B at made a gesture of impatience. "But the fact remains that there is no place for us in modern production. A fraction of the people can handle all of the jobs. Maybe it's not good for the rest of us to sit around idle, but there's no alternative." She leaned forward still further, the towns must roll her elbows on her knees and her voice very earnest. "Then we've got to make some changes. Back before we licked the problems of production of abundance that was and had to be the main goal of the race. Food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, recreation for all, in abundance. But now that we've gained the goals, let's stop a minute and look around. How about the arts, how about the handicrafts? Ours has become a synthetic world, why not devote these surplus energies of ours, devote the leisure time that hangs so heavily, to cultivating the old virtues? My grandfather mentions that when he was a boy, practically everybody played some musical instrument, there was a bandstand in every park and at least one band in every town, no matter how small. Women used to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, make quilts and so forth. Have you ever seen in a museum some of those homemade quilts and compared them with the mass produced things that we put on our beds today?" Bat was chewing away on his lip. He said, "Some people already go into the arts. Yourself, forinstance. But not everybody has talent. And most are too lazy, if they don't have to, to bother with doing ceramics, weaving cloth, quilting or whatever." "Perhaps they are now, but that's our problem. We've got to educate our people to want to do them. Take cooking. Cooking has become automated -- and it lisstes like it. Why, the person who could afford decent food a hundred years ago wouldn't have dreamed of eating the tasteless stuff that we down these days. Ncver has food been more beautifully packaged, been so adulterated, and tasted so poorly. And music. For all practical purposes. it's all canned. Sometimes I think that a few dozen musicians are turning out all the music for the country. How long has it been since you've seen a live musician? How long has it been since you've seen live theatre?" "It. doesn't make sense in this day for there to be live theatres, employing tens of thousands of actors, when a cast of twenty can once over TV." "Like hell it doesn't," she said. "That's exactly the point I was trying to make. I'm beginning to suspect that Ferd is right. Our present society needs a little subverting. What time is it?" She brought her pocket phone from lcr jeans and dialed the time. "Good Lord," she said. "Is it that late? I better be going. I assume w'e're off to a fairly early start in the morning." Bat shrugged. "Not necessarily. We'll probably only go about two hundred kilometers." He stood to see her to the door. B at Hardin had been right. New Woodstock was slow to get underway the following moring. It was almost eleven o'clock before they began to roll. Dean Armanruder was impatient with 'Bat but yielded to his demand that the town remain in tight convoy again this day. Bat led the way down the Pan American Highway, about a kilometer in advance of the town proper. AI Castro -- driving today rather than his wife Pamela -- was in Bat's usual place immediately ahead of the column. Luke Robertson brouglit up the very rear. All went without incident for the first # kilometers, then before him Bat spotted an officiallooking car, with two uniformed men next to it. There was a crossroad and a barrier blocked the highway they were proceeding along. The sign on the barrier read Dcsvicicion and an arrow pointed to the right. Bat pulled up and one of the uniformed Mexicans canle over and touched the peak of his cap in an informal salute. Bat said, "What's up?" "Desviacion,' the other told him, then in passable English, "What you call a detour, Senor. The road is being worked upon ahead." He brought forth a road map from his hip pocket and traced on it with a finger. "It is not much difference in distance. You go over here toward Dolores Hidalgo and then turn south to San Miguel de Allende. Then you come out at Oucrctaro, here." He shrugged. "Actually, it is a much more beautiful drive than this one." Bat shrugged too. "Okay," he said. The other turned and went back to the car. IF The town was beginning to catch up with him. He raised Al Castro in his phone and said, "Slight detour. We turn right." "Okay as she goes," Al yawned. "Hotter'n hell today. I hate heat." Al also hated cold, when it was cold and rain when it rained, as Bat Hardin recalled. Bat flicked him off and proceeded. He dialed the local road map and checked out the route of the detour. As the Mexican had said, it didn't lengthen their trip by very much. The road, of course, wasn't nearly as fine as the Pan American Highway, but it was adequate. There seemed to be no traffic whatsoever, which mildly surprised him. But then, of course, there weren't nearly the number of vehicles in Mexico that there were in the States and this was a by-way. Before quite reaching the historic Dolores Hidalgo which. Bat vaguely recalled, was the town where the Mexican revolution against Spain had begun, the road turned south. Before him he could see mountains rising, but in this vicinity, although there were some hills and rises, the terrain was largely flat and covered with cactus and mesquite. Attractive enough, in sort of a wasteland way, but not exactly an area where one would build a home. Suddenly his screen flicked on and Luke Robertson's face was there, his eyes wide. "Bat!" he yelped. "I'm under fire and..." The screen blanked and Luke's face was replaced with an abstract the towns must roll of meaningless flashing colors. A barrage of screaming bullets ricocheted off the armor of Bat Hardin's converted police car. Across the fields, he could see large scurrying groups of men, running and firing, converging upon New Woodstock. H e banged the activating switch of his car TV phone and snapped into the screen, "Mexican Highway Police. Emergency!" The screen still ran impossible color. He slewed the car to the left, presenting the far side to the fire from the attackers. He grabbed his portable phone from his pocket, aclivtted it and yelled, "Mexican Highway Police. Emergency! Emergency!" But that screen too was a meaningless menage of streaks of moving color. Bat banged out the side of his car and, crouching, darted back to Al Castro's vehicle, now immediately behind him. Al was driving, Pamela seated next to him, her pudding face a lard gray and her eyes in shock. Al was firing over her through her window with his Gyro-jet pistol, his face wild with excitement. Bat shouted, "Al! Your car phone! Does it work?" The magazine of his deputy's gun was evidently now empty. Al slammed the phone on. The color was there again. Bat groaned. "They've got some kind of a scrambler on us. All Out over the fields! Lead them into a complete circle. Bumper to bumper! Take off!" He ripped back to his own car and fetched his carbine. Al Castro took out over the cactus-strewn field, bumping and bouncing, his mobile home careening every which way behind him. Jake Benton, his eyes wide, was immediately behind Al. Bat yelled to him from the shelter of the rear of his police car. "Follow Castro! Form a circle! Form a circle! Then get out and return the fire!" Benton's mobile home, careening as wildly as Al Castro's before him, took out over the desolate field. Sam Prager's vehicles were next. Bat yelled, "Auxiliaries to the middle! Form a second circle. Hospital and school in the center!" Sam nodded, gripped his wheel fiercely and vas out after the others. Bat glared right and left. The attackers were largely in front on hills and knolls and too far off for really accurate fire, though they were closing in fast. However, occasionally slugs were still bouncing off the other side of his car. They seemed hitting from all directions and Luke's warning before the phones had gone out meant they were in the rear of the convoy as well. He continued to yell orders as the homes went by. Out in the field, Al Castro, avoiding mesquite trees but plowing right over all except the largest cactus plants, was making his circle. Bat fished inside the car and located a fresh clip for his carbine. He fired and fired again, bellowing directions to the arriving cars. When the hospital, one section of which was being driven by Doc Barnes himself, came up. Bat yelled, "The hospital and school to the very center. Women and kids into them! They've got the thickest walls, for soundproofing. Women and kids into school and hospital!" Doc Barnes nodded grimly and took off after the others, his section of the hospital bobbing desperately behind. A l Castro's car and his drawn home were beginning to come up from the rear on the tail end of the last of the New Woodstock column. Even after the circle had been drawn, with Luke Robertson's vehicles at the closure, Al continued to circle, slowing down, getting as near bumper to bumper as possible. Bat Hardin jumped back into his car and took after them. Luke Robertson slewed to one side to let him through. Bat drove to the center and popped out. All the auxiliaries had been drawn, as directed, in a smaller circle; within were hospital and school which a dozen men were setting up as rapidly as possible in the mounting confusion. Bat yelled at the top of his IF voice, "All with guns take positions behind your homes. All without, get shovels. Dig foxholes. All with more than one gun, turn them over to your neighbors. All women with children, into hospital or school. Lie down on the floors. All women under thirty-five without children, get guns or shovels. If you have no shovels, frying pans. Dig!" Children were screaming, women calling and crying. Half of the town was running about in a hash of confusion. There were a dozen cases of hysteria. Jeff Smith came up, under his arm a wicked high-velocity game rifle with a telescopic sight. He looked around at the preparations Bat had ordered and which were now fully underway and said, "I understand you were in the Asian War. What was your rank?" Bat looked at him. "First Lieutenant, when it ended." Jeff Smith cocked his head a little. "You don't look the type Bat said, impatiently, "I was battle commissioned during the Mekong Delta debacle." Smith nodded. "I was at the delta. #th Airborne. Was a Staff Sergeant. What are your orders...sir?" Bat took a breath. "Move around the circle, locate what other veterans we have. Spot them strategically. Be sure they all have the best weapons we have, even if you have to confiscate them from the others...sergeant." "Yes, sir." Jeff Smith turned and, crouching, hurried in the direction of the perimeter. Luke Robertson and Al Castro came in at a trot. "Wow!" Al shouted, over the blast of shotguns, the snip of twenty-twos and other small caliber gunfire, the snap of sporting and converted surplus military rifles. Bat rapped, "Al, get around the circle. Cut down on this fire. We'll be out of ammo in half an hour. Cut the fire down to men with longer range rifles and our best shots. Cut those goddamned shotguns out. They can't reach a fraction of the range those guys are at." "Right, Bat." Al scooted away. There was a whoosh of sound and beyond them a mesquite tree erupted in flame and explosion. Bat winced. "Holy smokes," he protested. "A bazooka." Luke said, pointing excitedly, "It came from over there on that knoll. Bat." Bat Hardin was gnawing his lip in agitation. "That's an old model, probably far back as the Second War. God only knows where they got it. But it's out of range. Listen, Luke, go around and locate our best marksmen. They'll know who they are. Get our best long-range rifles into their hands, those with telescopic sights. Pin that bazooka down. If they get it within range, we're mincemeat." Luke was off, crouching low as he left the semi-security of the inner circle of auxiliary vehicles. Bat snarled. So they had been jumped in a bad spot. Now he realized that detour had been a plant. Don Caesar's men had directed them out here. Now he realized why they hadn't been seeing other vehicles, cars and trucks along this lonely by-way. Somehow, the enemy had blocked off the road. Worse, in effect now, they were surrounded. Single men and small groups edging closer, darting in, scurrying around for cover. But the fire had fallen off. Evidently, the antiAmerican vigilantes hadn't expected this efficient a defense. Bat's lips thinned back. "Come in and get us, you bastards," he muttered. Two men went by with an improvised stretcher. Doc Barnes came hurrying out of the hospital and bent over the victim. Bat called, "Is he bad?" Barnes looked up. "It's Thompson. He's dead." Bat closed his eyes in pain. Fred Thompson had the biggest family in New Woodstock. Five children. Bat said to the two stretcher bearers, "Bury him immediately. We don't want any of our dead lying around where they can be seen. Bad for morale," Little Chuck Benton came up excitedly. "Mr. Hardin, what should I do?" Bat looked at him. The boy was eleven or twelve. He began to order him to the shelter of the school, then pulled up. He said, "Get a bucket of water and a dipper or cup, son. Go around to the men. Combat is dry work." "Yes sir." Crouching low, as Smith, Castro and Robertson before him. Bat left the shelter of the auxiliaries and scurried for the perimeter of mobile homes, his carbine in hand. He began touring, barking orders for more rapid digging of fox holes. Art Clarke came hurrying up to him, an enormous and glinting gun in hand. Bat Hardin recognized it. He snapped, "Isn't that a Chinese Am-#? Where in the hell did you get it?" Even in this excitement, Clarke seemed slightly embarrassed. He said, "War souvenir." "Fully automatic? How many clips do you have for it?" "Yeah. It's the Canton model. Two clips." "How much spare ammo?" "Possibly a hundred rounds." Bat looked quickly around and yelled, "Milt Waterman! Over here." The boy who usually drove the administration building when they were rolling came hustling up. Bat rapped, "You two, get into that hole over there. Set that automatic rifle up. Milt, you keep the spare clip loaded. Art, you let loose a burst of fire from time to time. A longer burst than you'd expect from a gun that light. I want to make it look as though we've got a machine gun. Wait a minute. After you've let off a couple of bursts from this side, go to the direct opposite and do the same. Make it look as though we've got two machine guns. But go easy. Stretch out that ammo IF as much as you can, understand?" "Got it," Art Clarke said excitedly. Bat walked on. D iana Sward was sitting on the ground at the rear of her mobile studio. She had a sporting rifle in her hands and her elbows were on her knees as she periodically and with great coolness squeezed off a shot. "Watch the ammunition," Bat told her, beginning to go by. She grinned up at him, her eyes shining. "I think I nicked at least one. You know what this reminds me of? A wagon train, surrounded by Sitting Bull's braves." "It is," he said grimly and hurried on. He heard a bee buzz past his head. That had been a close one. He came to Dean Armanruder's mobile mansion. Armanruder, his back tight against the side of one of the sections, his face pasty, screamed at him, "Do something!" Bat looked at him. "What? We're doing all we can. They've got a scrambler around here, somewhere. We can't call for help." "Surrender! Tell them we'll do anything! We've got money. Anything they want!" The older man was panting. "Tell them we'll do anything they say." Bat Hardin shook his head as though in an attempt to clear it. Two more of the men without guns went by, carrying one of the hospital's stretchers, an inert form on it. Jeff Smith was approaching from the direction opposite to the one in which Bat had been circling the perimeter. Bat said, "Sergeant, you and AI Castro improvise a white flag. He added sardonically, "My compliments to Don Caesar and ask him for his terms." "Yes, sir." Crouching, Jeff Smith headed for the inner circle of auxiliaries. Bat went on. He passed Ferd Zogbaum, who coolly and efficiently was digging a small trench. He had an army surplus entrenching tool. There were quite a few of the efficient compact tools in town, Bat knew. Bat said, "Ferd, there's a scrambler on us. All electronic communication devices have been disrupted." Ferd looked up, his face registering surprise. Bat said, before going on, "I doubt if that bug of yours is operative." Jeff Smith and Al Castro came hurrying up. Smith had a white pillowcase tacked onto a broom handle with thumbtacks. The southerner said, "Any special instructions. Lieutenant?" Bat shook his head. "Play it by ear. Tell them we'll go back. Tell them we pledge not to take any action against them, to the extent we can. Obviously, the Mexican authorities are going to get after them, but so far as we can, we'll avoid prosecuting. Promise anything. Armanruder offered money, but he's hysterical." "Yes, sir," Jeff said. T he two leaned their guns against a mobile home and stepped out into the open, the improvised white flag held high. For a moment, they stood there -- obviously awaiting the impact of slugs before those out beyond could distinguish that they were seeking a conference. Bat Hardin, his hands cupped to his mouth was yelling, "Hold fire, hold fire, everybody!" The firing of the defenders .fell off. So did that of the attackers. Smith and Castro began to walk forward. Shortly, down from one of the nearer knolls came two others. Even at this distance, the hair of one showed gray. "Don Caesar," Bat muttered. He 'turned and called to Ferd, "Make the rounds. Get Tom Benton to go with you. Round up all the ammo we have and take it into the enclosure of the auxiliaries and inventory it. Separate it into piles by caliber and gauge. Also inventory every gun we have, rifle, pistol, shotgun, by caliber and gauge. We've got to take rigid steps to conserve our munitions." Dean Armanruder came up, still quaking, his eyes glaring. "What do you mean? What do you mean? We're surrendering." Bat said grimly, "We hope we're surrendering but I doubt if we're going to be allowed to." He turned and called, "Keep digging. When you get your fox holes finished, you with shovels go on into the inner circle and start a new trench. If worse comes to worst, we'll make our last stand there." Armanruder said shrilly, "Are you mad? We're surrendering. We'll do anything. I've got money! We can buy them off." Bat said, "Mr. Armanruder, those men out there think they're fighting for their country, their culture, for their socioeconomic system, their women and even their religion. It makes quite a motive for fighting. On top of that, it hasn't been easy for them to organize this and put it over. They're not going to have a second chance and they know it. The Mexican authorities are going to land on them like a ton of bricks. They'll have to or Uncle Sam would take measures. So they've got to put this over this time. Their strategy is obvious. They're going to make an example of us so frightful that no American mobile homer would dream of coming to Mexico, and those already here are going to make a beeline for the border and never return." "You're insane!" "I hope so," Bat growled. Several score of the men, guns in hand, had gathered around to watch after Smith and Castro, who had by now met the delegation from the other side. Bat spoke softly. "We've got one thing in our favor. They've got to finish us quickly. Somehow they've blocked the road both in front and behind but they can't keep that up indefinitely. A police patrol or someone else will stumble on what's happening. If we can stick it out until morning, we'll have it made." IF Art Clarke said, "Great -- but when night comes they're going to bring that bazooka into range. Then we've had it." Bat said, half angrily, "That'll be all, Clarke. They probably only have a few rounds for it. The thing's an antique. It's unlikely they've got more than a few charges." on their way back. All stood in silence, waiting. The two reentered the perimeter of mobile homes. Both of their faces were strained. Bat said, "Well?" Jeff Smith looked him in the face. "They'll grant no terms. Wouldn't even allow the w o m en and children to come out under a truce flag. The old one said it was less brutal in the long run to make this example so crushing a one that it would be done once and for all." Smith snorted disgust. "He sent his apologies, but said there was no alternative." "So," Bat said. "A massacre." He turned to the assembled men. "Return to your positions. So long as they're at this distance, restrain your fire. Only veterans and our experienced marksmen with long-range rifles are to fire at all. Hold your small arms and shotguns up until they are at point blank range, which possibly won't come until tonight." Dean Armanruder shrilled, "No. No, don't listen to him! Don't shoot back at them! We'll all surrender! We'll go out with our hands up, in a body. They'll accept our surrender!" "Like hell they will," Bat said. "Get back to your positions, men." "Shut up, Hardin!" the former magnate yelled at him. "You're removed from your position as town police officer. I'm in command here!" He began going from group to group, yelling at the men, some of whom looked sheepish now. Somebody grumbled, "Maybe he's right. If we all went out with our hands up..." Jeff Smith looked at Bat. Bat said, "Sergeant, put him under arrest and take him into the inner circle. Post a guard over him, one of the older men we can spare from the firing line. If he attempts further to destroy morale, shoot him." ' Smith said, "Yes, sir." He turned and grabbed Armanruder by the arm and hustled him away, jerking at the restraint and protesting hysterically. The vigilantes were firing again, beginning to edge in. Bat began making the round once more, encouraging the marksmen, continually urging the conservation of all ammunition. "You'll get your chance soon enough," he snapped to those with short-range veapons. He came to Ferd Zogbaum, who was seated nonchalantly in a foxhole, looking out over the field. He held a double-barrel shotgun in his hands, but wasn't firing it. Bat said, "See you've got yourself a gun." He began to go on. But Ferd looked at him strangely and said, "Bat. I've got a funny feeling." Bat Hardin stopped and looked at him. Ferd looked out over the field again and said, "I've got a feeling that that scrambler, or whatever you called it, is awfully nearby. Well, say within a couple of hundred yards or so." "How do you know?" "I don't. I just have that feeling." B at went on again, crouching, going from one foxhole to the next. He came to Sam Prager, who was crouched in a comfortably deep one-man entrenchment. Bat hunkered down on his heels and said, "Sam, tell me something about scramblers." "Not much to tell," Sam said. "You wouldn't understand the workings unless you had some background in electronics." "I haven't. How wide a range does one have?" Sam scowled. "According to what kind it is. The miiitary have some real doozies, blanket a wide, wide area." "But would our pals out there be apt to have anything like that?" Sam looked up into the sky, scowling still. "Well, no, now that you mention it. And they don't even have a helicopter." "Why would they need one?" "It'd give them more range. As it is, they've probably got it mounted on some high spot out there." "Do I understand you right? It's got to be within sight of the area it's blanking?" "Well, more or less. Part of it has to be. The antenna." "So out there, somewhere within sight, is our scrambler?" "It's got to be." Bat took a deep breath. "Isn't it portable? Can't they be moving it around?" "I wouldn't think so. A scrambler's a pretty delicate mechanism, Bat. They'd have to get it all set up. If they had to move it, it would be off for the time of moving and until they got it rigged up again." Bat got up. The firing was growing slowly more intense from the other side, falling off on the part of the defenders who were becoming increasingly conscious of their depleted store of ammunition. New Woodstock had not been proceeding with any idea at all of a need for large stocks of cartridges and shells. Some weapons had only a score or so rounds available, which was the reason that Bat had pooled their supply. It was now being doled out grudgingly to the best shots. Bat Hardin again bent almost double as he scurried across the open space between the outer ring of vehicles and the inner. He sought out Jeff Smith, who was busy supervising the digging of the trench to mark their last stand, if it came to that. Bat said, "Sergeant." The southerner came over and IF looked at him queslioningly. Bat pointed with his finger, swept it around the horizon. "According to Sam Prager the scrambler is somewhere out there in an elevated position. Probably on one of those knolls. We could make a sortie and destroy it." "Yeah," the other one said disgustedly. "But which knoll?" Bat called over to Luke Robertson. "Luke, locate us a couple of pair of the strongest binoculars in town." Then he turned back to Jeff Smith. "It seems that it takes a bit of time to set a scrambler up. Very delicate. And if you want to keep it in action, you can't be moving it. It's got to sit there. Now our friend, Don Caesar, is no fool. He's figured out this raid to the last detail. He knows that our only chance is to get to that scrambler and wreck it. He also knows that we have some four hundred armed and desperate men on hand for a sortie. So what does he do?" S mith's forehead was wrinkled. "I'm not following you, Lieutenant." "If one of those knolls out there was more strongly defended than any other, what would you suspect?" "That that's where the scrambler was." "And if one knoll had no men around it at all... Smith got it of a sudden. "You mean the old bastard is trying to fox us by having that damn thing stuck up somewhere with nobody at all in the vicinity ?" "It's worth thinking about." Luke came up with the glasses and handed them to Smith and Bat. They began to scan the vicinity slowly, carefully. Bat peered. "It would probably be one of the higher knolls, and one not too very far away. They planned this down to the last detail. They maneuvered us out into this field, knew exactly where we'd have to go. And that scrambler was all set up and waiting for us when we arrived." Jeff Smith said, "There it is. Lieutenant." He pointed. "I can just barely make out an antenna, or whatever it is." Bat Hardin direeted his glasses. "You're right. Okay, Sergeant. It's you and me." Smith looked at him. "Just the two of us? Wouldn't it make more sense if we took a hundred of the best men and headed for that knoll on the double?" Bat sh(X)k his head. "My converted police car is the only armored vehicle in town and it's a two-seater. We have, in short, the equivalent of a tank. Can you operate an AM-#?" "The Chinese automatic? Sure, why not?" "Get Art Clarke's from him and both clips of ammo. I'll meet you at my car." Jeff Smith took off and Bat Hardin called to AI Castro, "Al, let me have your gyro-jet pistol." Al handed it over. Bat Hardin checked the magazine, jacked a #mm rocket cartridge into the barrel. He stuck the gun in his belt, then brought forth his own identical weapon and checked and loaded it. Then he went over to his car, located spare #mm rocket shells and dropped them into his side pocket. He took up his carbine and filled the magazine to capacity. Bat said, "Al, get together our best half dozen marksmen. That knoll out there looks as though nobody at all is around. There's nobody firing from the top or anything. However, I'll bet my left arm that they've got a sizable defending force behind it, keeping hidden. Jeff and I are going to need all the covering fire we can get." "Got you," Al said, moving off. been digging now stood around, pop-eyed, at what Bat was planning. Manuel Chavez, shovel in hand, said, "Mr. Hardin, for sure, you are not going out there into all that fire?" "Somebody's got to go, or we'll unlikely see tomorrow," Bat growled. "Come on. Sergeant. The delta was never like this." "Thank the good Lord," Jeff Smith muttered. "It was bad enough." He had Art Clarke's automatic rifle under his arm and was stuffing the spare magazine into a side pocket. He climbed into the seat next to Bat's driver position. Smith looked out over the terrain. "You think you can make #V it over that? You'd need at least a four wheel drive." Bat grinned. "I've got secrets in this buggy." He dropped the conversion lever, activated the air cushion and the vehicle rose a foot from the ground. He recessed the wheels and yelled out the window, "Luke, get that crate of yours out of the way." "I'll be damned -- a little old hover-car," Smith said. Bat nodded while Luke hurried to get his electro-steamer and mobile home out of the way so that the two volunteers could leave the perimeter. Luke yelled, "Okay, Bat!" The police car, now air-cushion borne, flowed ahead. Immediately, slugs began to bounce off in screaming ricochet. "Holy smokes," Bat bit out, "You'd think they were waiting for us. Keep your window up until we get on the scene. Bullet-proof glass. They'd have to have antitank shells to knock us off." Smith said, "They don't need anti-tank shells. They've got that bazooka." "Ummm," Bat said distastefully, beginning to zig and zag in evasive action. "But I've got a sneaking suspicion that the boys operating it aren't exactly crack shots. Who in the hell knows how to fire a bazooka accurately these days? It's one thing sitting pat and directing it at something as big as New Woodstock. But a small target on the move?" "I hope you're right. Lieutenant," the other told him dryly. The knoll was perhaps three IF hundred yards away. AVs marksmen were going to have to be on their merit to do much in the way of covering. However, any fire at all was better than none, just so it didn't hit Bat or Jeff Smith. Bat kept the car at as high a speed as was consistent with the terrain and their air cushions, but they were doing fifty kilometers an hour at best. Occasional bullets continued to rain off their armor but thus far there had been no stirring of opponents on the knoll which was their destination. Bat began to wonder if he had guessed wrong. But no, it was more than a guess, the closer they got the more obvious was the antenna, stretching its evil feelers up into the sky, robbing them of contact with the outside world and succor. obvious that the car would never make it up to the summit. Bat groaned, "These things are impossible on non-horizonal surfaces. They slip off in every direction except the one you want to go." Jeff Smith bit out, "Get as far up as you can and then cover me. I'll make a run for it." "Why not me?" "Because you know how to drive this contraption and I don't." "All right." Just as they hit the bottom of the slope, a half dozen Mexicans materialized at the summit and began firing down at them. Smith muttered, "Amateurs!" He activated the window, then steadied the Chinese automatic rifle on the sill and let loose a sweeping burst. Several went down, screaming pain; the others ducked for cover. Jeff Smith was out of the car, gun in hand and zig-zagging up to the crest. "Go it!" Bat yelled. He popped from the side of the car, both gyro-jet pistols in his hands. Jeff Smith scrambled, slid, fell, was on his feet again. Up he went. One of the Mexicans at the top got to his knees. He was holding some sort of automatic weapon with which Bat Hardin was unfamiliar. It stuttered and Jeff Smith fell off to the side. Bat fired twice and brought the gunner down. He started up the hill after his companion. From the perimeter of mobile homes came a hail of supporting fire, sweeping the top of the small mesa. Bat Hardin reached the other man. He jammed his pistols into his belt, swearing uncontrollably. "Bad?" he snapped, reaching down. Jeff Smith groaned, "Yeah. Nailed me at least twice. Belly." Bat hiked the other up over his shoulder, reached down and swept up the automatic and started staggering and stumbling down the hill. A blow struck him in the right hip and he all but fell. He continued on, stumbling. He could feel the blood running down his leg. They got to the car, on Smith's side. Bat dumped him in and hurried around, limping and dragging his leg, to his own side. He lifted his right leg by grabbing hold of the cloth of his pants and swung it into the cab. He wedged himself in and pulled Smith to a position so that he could close the door on that side. He swerved the car and headed back. He would have liked to have made his own try for the crest but he doubted that his leg would allow him; and besides, Jeff Smith had to be gotten back to Doc Barnes. Bullets were again caroming off the surface of the vehicle. They retraced their route. Twice, Bat Hardin recognized the whoosh and trail of bazooka rockets but he had been right; they were far off the mark. Whoever was on the old-time rocket launcher was no marksman. Luke Robertson's vehicles were still drawn out of the way and Bat Hardin maneuvered through. He yelled out the window "Jeff's been hit. Where's Doc Barnes?" Barnes came hurrying forw'ard. Jeff Smith, his face drained as death, looked over at Bat. "Hey, man." "Yeah?" "Sorry about that...that..." Doc Barnes wrenched open the door of the car on Smith's side and bent over him. He looked up at Bat. "He's dead." B at HardN didn't say anything for the moment. Two men were hauling Jeff Smith from the car, ridiculously gently in view of the fact that pain would never come to the small southerner again. Bat said, "I've copped one too, Doc. See if you can patch me up a little." "Get out of the car." Bat shook his head. "Can't. If I do. I'll never be able to get back in, and I'm the only one who can drive this thing." He looked at Luke. "Somebody in here tipped them that we were coming in this vehicle. Find Nadine Paskov. Find out who voted against me in that hassle I had with Jeff." He added sourly, "She's probably under some bed, somewhere. I suspect whoever cast that vote against me is our traitor. If she refuses to tell you, for whatever reason, slap her around a little." "Got it," Luke said. "What do I do if I find the traitor?" Bat looked at him. "Got it," Luke said and was off. "Hold still, damn it," Doc Barnes snapped. "Let me get this bandage on. You need plasma." "Oh, great," Bat said. "Have you got a pep pill instead?" He looked out over the crowd and called, 'Terd, you're next." "Coming up," Ferd Zogbaum sang out, pushing his way through the assembled men. He caught up the automatic rifle that had fallen to the ground when the men had taken Smith's body out nd scrambled into the bloody seat next to Bat. IF Bat called, feeling himself already weaker, "There's an extra clip of ammo in Jeff's pocket." Somebody brought it. Bat Hardin activated the lift lever again and they started forward. He explained as they went, "I can't get the car to the crest. You'll have to make it on foot. All hell is breaking loose there. Don Caesar is sending new men over as fast as they can make it to defend the point. They know damn well, now, that we know it's there and they've got to defend it." He felt his voice going weaker. Next to him, Ferd Zogbaum was checking the clip in the gun. Jeff Smith had nearly emptied it. Ferd threw it and rammed home the spare full clip. Bat said, weakly. "Where'd you get checked out on the Am-#?" "I was in the big one, too." They were approaching the knoll. From behind, the full barrage of all that New Woodstock could mount in the way of longrange rifles was firing over them, attempting to pin down any of the enemy forces on hand. Bat ground to a halt. He pulled his two pistols out. "Okay, Ferd, it's all yours." Ferd was out of the car, automatic in hands and scurrying up the hill. A continual fire kicked up the dust around his feet but he miraculously remained erect. Bat, his eyes fogging, leaned out the window of the car and blasted away at anything else that moved. The freelance writer achieved the top, fired in this direction and that and finally immediately down as though toward his feet. He turned and began retracing his steps, running dangerously. He fell, rolled a score of feet, staggered back erect and came on again. Suddenly, Ferd Zogbaum stopped dead in his tracks. The automatic rifle dropped from his hands. He grabbed his head desperately and began to waver. "The bug!" He staggered around, completely out of control of himself, moaning agony. Bat, sagging weakly himself, flicked on his phone and stuttered, "Emergency, emergency. Mexican Police. Road Dolores Hidalgo, San Miguel de Allende. Emergency, emergency, emer..." And then the fog rolled in. scious again, he was in the mobile dinic of Doc Barnes. He felt weak but his mind was alert. He looked about him. Ferd Zogbaum, unconscious, was in the next bed. It was a three-bed dormitory. The other bed was empty. Doc Barnes came in followed by Diana Sward who was wearing a white nurse's smock. She was obviously a volunteer. Barnes said, "You're awake. Good." He turned and looked down at Ferd Zogbaum. Bat said, "How's Ferd?" "He'll be all right. We're taking him in for some minor surgery now." Bat said, "Listen, has he been unconscious all this time?" Doc Barnes looked at him impatiently over his shoulder. "Why, yes." Bat said, "Look Doc, when you were in private practice what was your specialty?" "Why, I was a surgeon." "Brain surgeon?" "No. I have done some brain surgery but it was not my specialty." Bat took a deep breath. "Look, Doc. Ferd Zogbaum is going to die on your operating table." Di Sward blurted, "Don't be an ass." He ignored her. "Doc, Ferd has an electronic device planted in his skull. Can you take it out?" Barnes stared at him. Bat pursued... "He's a paroled convict. Life sentence. He saved us all. Look Doc. We took a lot of casualties in this fracas. All is confusion. He can die on your operating table. You can sign -- whatever it is you doctors sign when a guy cashes in." "I'm an ethical..." "And you and everybody in New Woodstock owe your life to Ferd Zogbaum." Doctor Barnes held a long silence. Finally he said, "What was he sentenced to life for? I have heard of this electronic bug before but it is the first in my experience. Is he a murderer?" It was Di Sward who said heatedly, "He's an idealist! He has political objections to the present socioeconomic system in the States." Doc Barnes looked at her wryly. "You seem a bit partisan, Miss Sward. However, so am I. I don't know exactly what they are, but I too have reservations about our present socioeconomic system. You are sure that Zogbaum's, ah, crimes, are all of a political nature?" "Yes!" Diana said firmly. "Very well. Now the question becomes, if he, ah, dies on my operating table and I remove the electronic device from his skull, how does he continue to collect himself?" Bat and Diana looked at each other blankly. Diana Sward said finally, "I make a reasonable living with my painting. He can write under a pseudonym until he gets to the point where he is making better sales. We'll never return to the States." Doc Barnes thought about it, disgust on his face. "Damn it," he said. "Why can't a doctor just carve them up, or slip them the necessary shots or pills?" He looked at Di. "Miss Sward, let's make the arrangements to get this operation rolling." He turned and left the room. Diana Sward looked at Bat and said, "I think we've swung him. See you later. Bat." "Yeah, see you later, Di," he said, looking after the woman he loved as she left the room. Aftermath T he Secretoria de Defensa Nacional colonel said courIF teously, "Your arrest was a technicality, of course. You are free to go at any time you wish, Senor Hardin. But after all, several of our citizens were killed, including Caesar Munoz and his son, Jose." "And several of our own citizens," Bat Hardin said softly. "Yes, including one that you killed yourselves, this Manuel Chavez." "He was caught signaling Don Caesar's men," Bat said. "He tried to resist arrest and Mr. Robertson was forced to shoot him. Evidently, he had what amounted to a mania against his employer and against Americans in general." The colonel gestured to the TV phone screen on his desk. "As I said, your arrest was a technicality; however, to double check on you, I secured your dossier from your National Data Banks. Your record, I am pleased to see, is impeccable." Bat said, "I should congratulate you people on the speed with which you came to our assistance. I understand the heliocopters were there in less than half an hour." The colonel nodded. "You see, we were aware of Caesar Munoz's activities and his group was under observation. We knew they had desperate plans but weren't exactly sure what they were. Nevertheless, we had a sizable force on continual alert. Frankly, we were astonished at the magnitude of his attempt. Thank God he has failed." Bat looked at him. "Are you sure he has? What will happen when this affair hits the headlines?" "It will not hit the headlines, Senor Hardin. The Mexican and United States governments are cooperating to suppress the account. We are aware of the problems brought on by the mobile towns, but Don Caesar's solution was not the correct one." "What is the solution?" The colonel shrugged in a Latin gesture. "Perhaps I do not know. Perhaps it is more rapid progress for Mexico so that we, in turn, become an affluent society." He laughed abruptly. "You would be surprised, Senor Hardin, how rapidly the spread of mobile homes is coming to our country. We already have several mobile resort towns, some of which cross periodically to the United States. And, to the south, Guatemala has recently complained of the large number of Mexican homes and trailers that are flooding that country." Bat came to his feet. "I should be going. New Woodstock is scheduled to head south today. All repairs have been completed." "Of course." The colonel stood too and extended his hand for a shake. He said, "Would you mind answering one question, Senor Hardin?" Bat looked at him. The colonel said, "I went over the details of the whole unfortunate affair. I must say, I admired your measures." "Thanks," Bat said. "As a police officer myself, I find I am somewhat surprised that your talents are hidden away in such a small town as New Woodstock. Your war record is impressive." He gestured at Bat's dossier, still in the screen on his desk. "Have you never considered attending one of your American police schools and then securing a position in one of your larger cities?" Bat said evenly, "I'm not eligible." The colonel frowned puzzlement. "But why?" "My I.Q. is inadequate." "inadequate! We do not use the same system here in Mexico but I was under the impression that an I.Q. of # was quite superior." "My I.Q. is #, Colonel." Frowning still, the colonel looked down at the dossier. "It says here, #. You seem to have made some mistake, Sehor Hardin. One test shows #, but the average is corrected to #." Bat Hardin stood silently for a long moment. Finally, he said softly, "AI Castro can take over my job." The colonel's eyebrows went up. "You are not continuing with the rest of your town to the south?" "No. Tm returning to the States to find my level. Perhaps Ferd Zogbaum was correct and there are basic changes to be made in the Meritocracy, but, if so, they'll be made from the inside, not from without." "I wish you luck, Sehor Hardin," the colonel said.  Poul Anderson Jack Wodhams Fritz Leiber A. Bertram Chandler copy on the newsstond today! IF (Continued from page #) letter words and a few overt sex scenes, this is one of the least depraved books I can imagine. In fact, in many ways this might be considered a wholesome and old-fashioned novel, despite the surface trimmings. The leading character is neither a weak antihero nor a pervert of any kind. In his own way, he's a strong man facing up to his problems as best he can and slowly solving his own ethical obligations in terms of his conscience. If the novel isn't inspirational, it's at least up-beat in the final analysis. Spinrad seems to accept the fact that evil is rather horrible and to come out in favor of decency. T he novel concerns a power struggle between two men, with other groups doing some fighting from the sidelines. Jack Baron is a former radical activist who helped found a third party known as the S.J.C. Then he got into television by accident and has achieved success as a master of a television interview show known as Bug Jack Barron. With a hunhe is intoxicated by his power to make or break almost any person or cause. Power has him in its grip and the old crusading spirit seemsTibout to die in him. As a result of a routine interview, he finds himself pitted against the noted Benedict Howards. Howards has become the leader in operating freezers for the dead who hope to be revived later when medical science has learned a bit more. Each freezing requires a deposit of # and so far. This gives Howards control Senators and thus he dominates the Democratic Party. He is now fighting to put through a bill to make his concern a legal monopoly in the frozen death field. Voting on the bill is due shortly and Barron's needling of him is dangerous to his success. This soon develops into an allout fight for dominance between the two men. Howards manages to enlist the help of Sara, the estranged but still beloved wife of Barron. He sends her back to Barron to persuade him to lay off. But when she finds evidence of the old crusader in Barron still, she again falls under his spell. Meantime, the Republican Party recognizes it has no chance in the next election and seeks a coalition with the leader of the radical S.J.C. Lukas Greene, who controls the radicals, is the black governor of Mississippi and an old friend of Barron. Then at his prompting, the coalition offers nomination for the Presidency to Barron, since he seems the only one capable of fighting Howards' political control. Howards counters with an offer of immortality. He has been using his funds to pay for research that will let him live forever, and success has just been achieved. He promises the treatment to Barron and Sara. Barron realizes there is a concealed price, though he has no idea of how horrible it is. He decides to force Howards' hand in hopes of learning what is behind the offer. T his is an extremely strong situation around which to build drama. Throughout most of the book, Spinrad pulls it off, though he falters briefly in one episode. There Howards is confronted with an emotional accusation from a woman whose dying father can't afford freezing. Howards should have found some excuse for a noble gesture to win the viewer's sympathy; his failure to do so makes him seem too much of a patsy. If he can't handle this, how did he fight to the top in a tough world, anyhow? Nevertheless, the first threequarters of the book continues to build. Genuine passion and tension are developed during the several interview programs where Barron and Howards battle just below the awareness of the public. The elements of the struggle are made believable and the complexity of Barron's character is used with fine insight. Then the last part of the book runs into too many encounters where one character acts like a patsy. Barron puts himself in Howards' headquarters, doing so even though he knows Howard has something extremely unpleasant set up for him there. Sara's last gesture comes during an acid trip, not from her natural response to the situation; and Barron's decision is then made less from inner conviction than because of her act. Howards proves a pushover for the right nudge. His paranoia was established before. But for a hard man to crack so easily to pressure lets down much of the hightension realism of the earlier parts. There are a couple of minor but irritating flaws in the attitudes of the characters throughout, however. Spinrad's women are much less convincing than his men but usually this doesn't matter in this book. For example, it's a bit hard to accept their all being thrown into an orgiastic frenzy at the idea of a man wielding power. First it is the secretary, perhaps -- but hardly both she and Sara. It's also surprising that nobody in the novel seems to have any doubt about immortality's being ultimately desirable at any price. History is full of men who gave up what they believed to be the immortality of their soul in heaven for a few years of power. And men still commit suicide, rejecting even their normal span. IF Still, if Spinrad had thought out his final situations and the last encounter as well as he did the earlier developments, this would have been a splendid book. As it is, it adds up to an interesting one -- and perhaps even a good one -- but no more. I T would never have been a great science-fiction novel, however. Despite the immortality trappings, this is simply no more science fiction than were some of Alan Drury's books. This is a mainstream novel with a few science-f iction touches . The world of Jack Barron is basically the world of today. His studio scenes are true and convincing against my own experience with somewhat similar situations -- but they are true for today. On the other hand, his black state capitol is described in more detail -- but it doesn't feel lived in until it is filled in with scenes from today's ghetto streets. His New York City Bleeker Street is the one I traveled last Friday. The technology is early spaceof discovering a new medical marvel. Pot and acid are legal, but with no social appreciable difference. The major political change is the radical third party centering around the blacks and the New Left -- but we get only vague hints of other effects from racial and ideological upheavals. Even the slang has remained what's happening in #, after twenty years, though nothing alters so fast as the current "in" jargon. Here we're faced with an uptight cat trying to dig that it's the nitty-gritty before he splits. It ain't groovy, man! Even if Barron learned the slang in Berkeley, this is #; he can't have avoided dropping old expressions and adding new ones. It's a mainstream trick when the facts of a novel can't fit into the here-and-now to suppose the necessary extra elements and differences and lay things in a sort of timeless tomorrow. But in science fiction we like to have all this thought out in detail. It's the way the changes fit together to form a new and interesting future milieu that fascinates us with the future. A s AN example, when Howards finds he's immortal, he must also realize that this only applies if no accident kills him. With his fixation on enduring forever, a science-fiction story would make sure he avoided risks. Yet he seems unaware of this as hp flies to meet Barron. This is probably all right for mainstream readers who don't do much thinking about immortality; but science-fiction readers have seen too many other stories where such details are considered to overlook the inconsistency here. In an article, Spinrad discussed a "new" method of punctuation that enabled him to make the reader go fast or slow as the writer chose. This, of course, is what normal punctuation does when handled properly. But the "new" method seemed to consist mostly of omitting commas. If it had any effect, it was only to slow the reading of all passages. The style has also come up for considerable discussion. It is different from most science-fiction stories but it's hardly a great innovation. It often seems inadequately controlled, but it's within the normal variation of the innerdialogue, stream-of-consciousness writing style for intensely subjective novels. Hume and others of the Paris Review clique were using it in a very similar way at least fifteen years ago. Again, while it may be odd in science fiction, it is well chosen for the mainstream. This book shows a remarkable growth of Spinrad as a writer. His earlier work gave little evidence of the sustained passion so strong in the first part of this novel. It's a pity, therefore, that the manuscript didn't fall into the hands of a sympathetic but critical editor who could overcome the false notion that a writer's words are too precious to change. Artistic integrity only begins with doing one's best; it should go on to an eagerness to discover ways of improving from anyone who can help and thus making sure that the result really is the best possible. In the hands of an understanding editor this could have become a major mainstream novel. It would be a natural for the movies then and it would be no less interesting to the science-fiction audience. T he history of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (Ace, #) is different from that of Spinrad's book. There was absolutely no advance publicity. Nobody discussed the book before its release and Mrs. LeGuin has partaken in no provocative writing for the fan magazines. Apparently she simply wrote it and sent it in. Ace bought it and published it as one of the Science-Fiction Specials. Only the mouth-to-mouth advertising of contented readers began to bring it the attention it deserves. This is a quietly passionate story about sex and love. But. it is a different kind of "book about sex" from what the term implies. There isn't an overt scene of sex in the whole book or a word that anyone could object to. The sex here involves a race of human beings on another world where each individual is both male and female. The interest is then both psychological and sociological; it is the effect of such a development IF that is studied, not the rutting and gratification of the individual's sexuality. At a deeper level, is an examination of love that is not related to sexuality or romance. This is a love between individuals that can disregard malness or femaleness. But it is none of the bland "love thy neighbor" stuff usually preached; this is a hard, real and active relationship. Genly Ai is sent to Winter, a planet where the ice age is at its peak and where most of the land is covered by a great glacier. His job is to win the planet to acceptance of membership in a sort of interstellar union, for which he can offer no tangible rewards. He has only his wits and training to aid him. There is no invasion force behind him. If he dies or is killed another envoy will be sent later. He finds the world broken into different nations. Karhide is a kingdom of village chiefs; rather loose and highly individualistic. Orgoreyn is a syndic, with almost every action governed from a central Committee. In both, there is something called shifgrethor, a conduct related to "face" saving but varying slightly from each other. Ai finds it difficult to understand, just as they have trouble understanding him. H IS cause is taken up by Estraven, a noble of Karhide. As a result, Estraven is exiled to Orgoreyn. War is unknown on Winter, but the two countries are in the process of inventing it. Estraven hopes Ai's "union" will help prevent this. When Ai is interned in an Orgoreyn labor camp, Estraven rescues him. They still cannot fully trust or understand each other but they must somehow reach Estraven's native section of Karhide to send out a message that will bring evidence to convince the king to accept the union. After that, the war can perhaps be stopped. Their only escape from Orgoreyn lies across the great glacier in the middle of Winter. This means a trip of a thousand miles on foot, with only the supplies they can carry, through territory nearly as hostile as Earth's Antarctica. To make such a desperate trek, they must rely completely on each other, even though neither can yet fully trust his companion. The story is centered around that trip and what happens to Estraven and Ai during it -- two men completely unlike in birthworld, culture or even in their physical form. It makes for a good adventure story but the book is far more than that. Every element is worked out in fine detail and then dovetailed skillfully into every other element. The background of Winter is a strange mixture of the familiar and the alien. (I'm told this resembles Islandia; I wouldn't know nor care, since this is only one factor among many here.) Even the misty union of the stars in the distant background takes on importance and becomes a fascinating and novel concept. When I finished the book, I put it down with affection and respect. And the next morning at breakfast I picked it up to check one small detail at the beginning, only to read through the whole book again. It was even better the second time, too! It's a difficult book to review. But unless a better one comes along this year -- which I don't expect -- I'll make my real review of it by nominating it next year for a Hugo.  Coming in next month's IF Keith Laumer's powerful new serial, pitting Man against Galactic forces at once beyond him -- and within his reach! Frank Herbert's exciting new novelette about an Earth so sane -- it could only go mad! IF by Alexis N, Tsvetilcov T he posthumous glory of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (K.E.T.), the great Russian pioneer in rocketry, came to Western Europe and the U.S.A. only after the successful launching of the first Sputnik in a desert of the Middle Asia -- that is, after October #, #. The world now knows the astronautic works of K.E.T. He wrote and published in Kaluga, Russia. His projects and scientific articles concerned hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, works in cosmic biology (astrobiology, as he named it) and the theory of cosmic rockets. The most important and best known were his works in rocketry, which he began in #. His principal work. Exploration of Space by Means of Reactive Apparatus, was published for the first time in #. I knew K.E.T. personally for a few years and I had a correspondence with him up to the end of his life in #, at the age of #. After the death of K.E.T., all his manuscripts were brought to Moscow and placed somewhere in the governmental archives. In the old K.E.T. house, Bol'shaya Korovinskaya, No. #, Kaluga, a museum bearing his name was soon organized, filled with his personal things of lesser importance. In articles about K.E.T., authors usually mention only his scientific-technical works and his science-fiction novels. However, there exists also a series of his brochures buried, perhaps forever, in the official archives. Rare samples of those works, I am sure, are still in possession of a few persons in Russia. Those are his philosophical works, regarded officially as anti-materialistic and therefore non-permissible. In spite of this, they are sometimes listed in his bibliography without comment. To the same category belongs also his correspondence -- the letters received by K.E.T. were confiscated by the same governmental office in Moscow. K.E.T. started his philosophical writings in #. The first of this series was the booklet Nirvana, published in Kaluga. philosophy of K.E.T., always officially suppressed? It was mainly a kind of nature-philosophy directed toward the ontological and ethical problems. K.E.T. usually did not write about any religion, a subject considered outmoded and even dangerous officially. The ethics, evidently, he did not connect with any religious teaching. 'The ethical principles are the result of evolutionary processes only," he said. The traces of this idea can be seen in his The Scientific Ethics and in the Monism of the Universe, Ethics, he thought, inevitably develop during the process of evolution of earthly and non-earthly intelligent beings. We do not need to fear the visits of non-earthly intelligent humanoids, who arc older in their evolution than we are on our Earth. They have not yet appeared on our planet only because we are not prepared to meet them as friends and as the wise people. Such an appearance of other "intellectofers" would create panic in our society. We have first to send them out friendly signals and let them know a little more about us. In his brochures, especially in The Will of the Universe and the Unknown Intelligent Forces (#), K.E.T. mentioned two of the "meditative and inspiring illusions" he saw. Generally, K.E.T. avoided any mystical speculations. However, he lived an inner life unknown to anyone else. K.E.T. dreamed since his poor childhood about stars, interstellar flights, and later, about his rockets. There was nothing more beautiful, exalting or more important for him. In his philosophy first came the cosmogonic and cosmonautic ideas. He did not think very much about such cardinal physiconietaphysical categories as Space and Time. They were for him just simple Newtonian realities, the media for floating of Energy, and Matter in them. Being a good mathematician, he understood the ideas of Einstein. However, he felt intuitively something wrong in the Einsteinian idea of the limiting velocity of light; he denied also the Riemann-Einsteinian finiteness of the space curvature. He was inclined more to the Lobachevskian point of view: that space is curved; however, infinite. Even in the classicial physics he fought against the teaching about Entropy, or the Thermal Death, of the Universe. He believed in the reversible processes in Nature. IF "Science cannot avoid a strange path," K.E.T. had often said, "and sometimes such a path is more fruitful than the direct one." K .E.T. was sure that most of the stars, their planets and the inhabitants of those planets are already in a later stage than our Sun, Earth, and ourselves. He wrote that the interstellar flights and colonization of distant worlds are the most common events in the Universe; only a few civilizations, such as ours, have not yet advanced to that stage. Because of colonization, many stellar systems, especially those around the center of our Galaxy, i.e., in the space beyond the constellation Scorpio, are possibly united already under one administration. K.E.T. thought that extremely different forms of life might exist on other worlds, including living hydrogen. On the highest levels of evolution, he said, there can be also some bodiless, immaterial forms of life: islands of a pure mind or consciousness living in empty space. The union, the sum total of the whole world consciousness in the Will and Cause of the Universe. Such was his own religion, masked strongly by the concepts of naturalism. Most of the dearest ideas of K.E.T. are described in his Monism of the Universe -- a suppressed work which had gained, however, a great deal of underground popularity. This small book ends with eight theses, almost each one beginning with the words, 'Razve mozhmo somny e V a t s y a ,... " ' , meaning 'Can one doubt..." These "R.M.S." theses sum up the ideas of the booklet. I present here a translation of them: "#. R.M.S. that the innumerable multitude of planets are illuminated by their suns? "#. R.M.S. that on (at least) one of those planets life reached such might and perfection that we humans cannot imagine it. That might permit them (i.e., unearthly humanoids) to overcome the force of gravity and to colonize the Universe? "#. As a result, there does exist the spreading of perfection and dominance of mind in the Cosmos. "#. R.M.S. that this happened already infinitely long ago, and this is the normal and permanent state of the Universe? The spontaneous natural generation and evolution, with all its sufferings, is a rare exception. "#. R.M.S. that the atoms take part in conscious life, when they reach the brain or its equivalent? They reflect the state of life, however, without any permanent impressions. "#. R.M.S. that the world of matter is mixing up and periodically changing its forms; and the atom, an infinite number of times after the immense intervals of time, takes part in the processes of life? "#. R.M.S that the period of the stay of the atom in inorganic matter passes as a deep swoon, and such time does not exist for the atom? "#. R.M.S. that all periods of life flow together into a single, permanent, conscious, beatific and infinite stream of life?" S uch were the "R.M.S." theses by K.E. Tsiolkovsky. Later he wrote an additional article in the Monism of the Universe -- the Migration of the Atom, which bore the following thesis: Beside the insensible sojourn of atoms in the inorganic world, they have their hosts in the form of plants, animals and men. The animals, whose life is imperfect, meaningless, miserable, full with pain and suffering, must and will completely disappear in the future, and the atoms will wander only in the plants and humans. Life in the plant is almost equal to non-existence, since it is insensible. The superior beings, and the humans in the future, like good gardeners, will weed out lower animal species, harmful bacteria and valueless plants, except for laboratory samples. "Individuals die," K.E.T. said. "However, the total amount of living matter increases. We can imagine a spherical organism with the cycles of physiological processes closed completely i n themselves. Such an organism will be immortal and photosynthetic (with some kind of chloroor quanto-phyll in it) and it can develop even a higher consciousness..." Such was a "strong wine made by K.E. Tsiolkovsky in Kaluga," as one of his correspondents said. K.E.T. planned to make some corrections in his Monism of the Universe, but did not find time to do so. The main problems of his life lay in astronautics, and his cosmic philosophy was an additional, however important, product of his broad and original mind.  IF (Continued from page #) Moon. Dr. Menzel was president of the parent body. Commission # -- The Moon and the Planets, when it was first formed in #. These four men will decide -- or will have decided by the time you read this -- by what names future generations shall know the craters on the far side of the moon. Craters seen only -- out of all tronauts of Apollo #: Air Force Col. Thomas P. Stafford, Comdrs. Eugene A. Cernan and John W. Young of the Navy. The I.A.U. Working Group's choices will become official when approved by the entire body of the I.A.U. -- # top astronomers representing every nation on Earth and supported by every government -- when it meets in Brighton, England, in #. By tradition most of the farside craters will be named after deceased scientists. The Russians may have established another precedent, that of naming some moonmarks for memorable science-fiction writers, by calling one of "their" craters Jules Verne. Dr. Menzel -- besides being among Earth's leading astronomers -- is an accomplished and executed Martians will appear in full and vibrant color on the cover of September Galaxy -- IFs companion magazine. Others will be exhibited in early July -- by request -- at the International Scientific Conference in Liege, Belgium. Still others have long and quietly been collectors' items among top space scientists. We plan to make enlarged color September ' cover Martians available to readers of IF and quire original Martians may write to Dr. Menzel in care of either magazine. We are also hoping soon to arrange an exhibit of Menzel's Martians in New York City. For whoever may question the role of science fiction in the molding of men and scientists -- Dr. Menzel is a starswinger from far back. He put himself through graduate school a t Princeton by writing science fiction stories and popular science articles for Hugo Gernsback. IF's readers, and its editor, will undoubtably be subjected to a good deal of moonwash regarding the nonexistence of Moonworms once our astronauts stand on Earth's sole satellite. We, too, may give lip service to popular skepticism. But Dr. Menzel's blue eyes were incredibly clear and enormously candid as he told us about Moonworms -- and he towers white-maned to the stars. And IF is the magazine of infinite Alternatives. Readers write -- and wrong! Dear Editor: You wouldn't believe the rumors rife with stress, plight and frantic speculation since the announcement that Someone had purchased Galaxy and If, and that our noble Pohl, around whom many s-f stars have gladly turned, was leaving. As contributor, reader and an officer of Science Fiction Writers of America, my apprehensions rise to the third power. #. Will Galaxy and If continue to publish the broad spectrum of science fiction? Both tales of wonder and tales to ponder have coexisted until now. To my mind there should be no cut-and-dried definition of what must be science fiction, this form and no other! A good story, well written, is a good story! #. Will Galaxy and If continue to introduce new authors -- for competition is as important to the writer as it is stimulating for the reader -- and furthermore swells the ranks of ing in the field. #. Can anything be done through the new owner about the sorry state of distribution? When our friends, relatives and fans try to buy copies on the newsstand and can't, it irketh and looseth prospective customers? #. Will something be done about the typesetters who either do not read English or what they are setting and bolix up things until the astonished author squirms rapidly into the nearest "o" and pulls the circle out. #. Most important of all, what kind of a guy is this new editor Ejler Jakobsson? He edited Super Science back when, but -- despite my advanced years and silver hair -- it was before my time. #. How open to author-editor discussion is he? Must I follow his "line"? Is he apt to pull whole sections of my patiently-constructed and word-weighed stories without asking my permission? I am really a most tractable author and quite amenable to discussion, responding amiably to editorial suggestion, but preferring to be consulted! #. Is there any truth to the horrible rumors that story payments will be reduced -- which will definitely reduce the number of writers able to continue producing in the field? #. Are other titles in the GalaxyIf combine to be resurrected? I hope this one is true because it will make everyone much happeir with more good stories to write and read. #. Will there still be provocative covers for which writers will produce new stories? #. Will the features that enliven the magazines continue? #. What is the editorial climate on "taboos"? #. and... whal will be so rare as a Galaxy in June? -- Anne Hi, Anne. By now weve met and share new secrets. To dear up the power apprehensions I -- # and # -- #. As to number # -- 'twas not ere your time. Just something you missed. We all have these regrets. # -- your words shall be mine at usual or better rates. Please? # -- horrible rumors are untrue but have you taken a good look at reality lately? II -- whats taboo? # -- an IF this June. IF If you give up cigarettes, you might gain a few pounds. (And also a few years.) The plain, unfiltered fact is that people who smoke cigarettes get lung cancer a I lot more frequently than nonsmokers. And lung cancer can finish you. Before your time. We'd rather have you stay alive and in good health. Because even if you do gain a few pounds, you'll have the time to take them off. american cancer society # The Science Fiction Book Chib invites you to take Any # books AH Including, if you wish, with trial membership #: A  Arthur C. Clarke  Hunting an alien  ' "presence" in the  universe, # men and a f computergonepsychoI tic stumble upon the incredible secret of mankind's birth -- only to trigger the Pub. ed.#f cosmit "booby-trap" that could spell its death. A controversial best-seller by the most acclaimed science fiction writer of our era. #: A Space Odyssey batt-salling noval and o word-winning cinamo tpoctocwlar '  Science Fiction has grown up. Have you kept up?  A new literary genre has come of age -- your age. Mature. Sophisticated. Provocative. And respected. You are invited to explore it now under an amazing trial  offer. Take any # volumes on this page (worth up to # in original publishers' editions) for only I with membership. "New club selections will be described to # # you in advance each month. Choose from new works of Pub ed # # Action -- and fact -- by such acclaimed authors as Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Robert . k... AkHeinlein and others. All volumes are full-length, hardt-seiier by the bound -- and uncut. Though they sell for as much as #, iier OT our era. # # nd more in their original publishers' editions, club members pay only # plus shipping. (You may choose books during the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, N.Y. #. ' Please accept my application for membership and rush me ' I the # books whose numbers I have circied beiow. Biii me oniy I #, pius shipping and handling, for all #. Then, every  I month, send me the Club's free I I bulletin, "Things to Come", which ' I describes coming selections. For Eh # I each book I accept. I will pay only ?"' "umbers of  #. plus shipping and handling, the # books you want. I unless I take an extra-value selecitnA eno nin I I tlon at a higher price. I need take V? Vo ' I only four books within the coming "IB # BI# . I year and may resign at any time # # # I I thereafter. # # # I ' delighted with my introductory I  package, I may return it in # I days to cancel membership. I Rule Golden, The Dying Man A Nat' ural State-all comI plete. Pub. ed. #  #. HawksbIU StaI tlon, by Robert SilI verberg. A group of . # I St century revolutionaries are I #-S# I I I If under #, parent must sign here. (Offer good in U.S.A. only) I #. The Past Throngh Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # #. Twice # by Ray Bradbury. Fourty-four stories by the Grand Master of science Action. Pub. ed. # #. Cbocky by John Wyndham. Alien powers "possess" small boy in shocker from author of "Day of the Triffids". #. October the First is Too Late, by Fred Hoyle. Solar beams play havoc with time on earth. Iib. ed. #.M #. Kiner Thing by Kate Wilhelm. A scientist in the #rd century develops a robot with a laser eye. Pub. ed. # #. A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. #-volume set. # pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # #. Asimov's Mysteries by Isaac Asimov. # love#. Dangerous Visions. Anthology of # original stories never before in print by Sturgeon, Anderson, others. Pub. ed. # Printed m  The Seeds of Gonyl i The Mind Bomb The First .Traces, of Life Chapdelaine  Anthony  Malzberg  Del Rey  others The best fiction is science fiction; and the best Leader in the science-fiction field for almost two decades! 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Murphy, Circulation Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director StItlAl IF is published monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The Company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. Sirius, the Dog Star, this morning rose with the Earth's sun and I am rolling at eighty mph, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the mike and this is what I am saying. This morning marks an emergence. Not a rebirth; none of us is given that kind of second chance. Today does not pause for rebirths. It simply changes. Sirius tonight will set with the sun -- but on an Earth slightly altered. I am on my way to tell Baby Machine that it is not yet ready for the Worlds of IF. Alternatives must take over. Baby Machine stands about seven feet tall, is all head and gaping stomach, and men live by it. It controls other machines men once operated and the men who understood those are gone. The men left are survivors of an era when machines did not think and they stand around, apprehensively eyeing the door through which their predecessors -- the men who could think -- passed and never returned. The survivors speak softly. Dont get too close to the door... Don't think... Baby Machine does all the thinking for the giant, leftover, mechanical typesetting dinosaurs of an earlier time who no longer respond to the men who do not understand them but who depend on them for a livelihood. Baby Machine, a computer, issues their orders and when Baby speaks the ancient, intricate monsters thunder to ghostly life, spewing out words. They emerge enormously mangled, elongated, mutilated, inane, for Baby Machine -- being a Baby, you understand -- has no memory banks. It has only a brain and a Program. It does its best for the men who live by it. But its best is not good enough for men who are not afraid of the door. The New England mountains and the road ahead are flooded with sunlight and alternatives and I am on a Serius errand, if you will forgive the pun. Baby is a Holy Yoke to the helpless humans who live by it -- and the Words of IF are clamoring for release. And IF is the magazine of Alternatives that lie beyond the door Baby Machine's people are afraid to approach. Too much responsibility, see? I reach the door and use it to enter. I speak to the men who depend on Baby. I ask them for the Words of IF. Communication is difficult. The sun and Sirius are setting by the time Baby lifts the Yoke. I use the door to go out. With me are these Words of IF. In our tomorrows -- yours and mine -- is an Adult Machine that remembers, that speaks to its mechanical contemporaries and to humans who understand it and who are not afraid of the door. To put it plainly, you and Galaxy, Worlds of IF, Worlds of Tomorrows and Fantasy are changing to a modern printer with this issue of the magazine of Alternatives. Much remains to be done. But how do you like the emergent new look? SVkMCi fftOM mte. The Dark Continents of Your MM maintain energy enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicruclans, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood nat ural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life," Address: jScribe C.M.P. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. Scribe: C.M.P. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Ijfe" which I shall read as directed. Name Address City State  Please Include Your Zip Code Infinitely wise and endlessly good, the machine created a world so sane that it could only go madi year. The Being Machine had reduced many of its activities and sped up its cooling system. This season is called hot and desolate, the Machine recorded. People must be entertained in such a season ,... Shortly after noon it noted that IL LL Lhl not many people were in the streets except for a few tourists who carried, slung around their necks, full-sense recorders. The tourists perspired heavily. Some loc residents, those not busy with the labors of survival, peered occasionally from behind insulated windows or stood shaded in the screen fields of their doorways. They seemed to float in muddy seclusion beneath the lemonade sky The nature of the season and the environment crept through the Machine. It began sending out the flow of symbols which guarded the gateway to imagination and consciousness. The symbols were many and they flowed outward like silver rivers, carrying ideas from one time-place to another across a long span of existence. Presently, as the sun slipped halfway toward the moment when it would levy darkness, the Being Machine began to build a tower. It called the tower palace of stretched across the tower's lower stories in glowing letters taller than a man. At an insulated window across the plaza a man called Wheat watched the tower go up. He could hear the shuttle moving in his wife's loom and he felt torn by watch the thought spasms in his mind. He watched the tower instead, "The damn thing's at it again," he said. "It's that time of year," his wife agreed, not looking up from the design she was weaving. The design looked like a cage of yellow spikes within a wreath of cascading orange roses. Wheat thought for a few minutes about the subterranean vastness men had measured out, defining the limits of the Being Machine. There must be caverns down there. Wheat thought. Endlessly nocturnal spiral corridors where no rain ever fell. Wheat liked to imagine the Being Machine this way, although there existed no record of any man's having entered the ventilators or surface extrusions by which "the Machine made itself known. "If that damn machine weren't so disgusting -- it'd be funny," Wheat said. "I'm much more interested in problem solving," his wife said. "That's why I took up design. Do you suppose anyone will try to stop it this time?" "First, we'd have to figure out what it is," Wheat said. "And the only records which could show us that are inside there." "What's it doing?" his wife asked. "Building something. Calls it a palace but it's going up pretty high. Must be twenty stories already." His wife paused to readjust If the harness of her loom. She could see the way this conversation was going and it dismayed her. The slanting sun cast Wheat's shadow into the room and the black shape of it stretched out there on the floor made her want to run away. At times such as these she hated the Machine for pairing her with Wheat. "I keep wondering what it'll take away from us this time," she said. through the window, awed by the speed with which the tower was rising. The rays of the setting sun painted streaks of orange on the tower surface. He was the standard human male, this Wheat, but old. He had a face like a vein-leaf cabbage, wrinkles overlapping wrinkles. He stood about two meters tall, as did all the other adults of the world, and his skin was that universal olive-tan, his hair dark and eyes to match. His wife, although bent from years at the loom, looked remarkably like him. Both wore their hair long, tied at the neck with strips of blue flashcloth. Sacklike garments of the same material covered their bodies from neck to ankles. "It's frustrating," Wheat said. For a while the Being Machine conducted an internal thoughtplay in the language of the KersanPueblo, exploring the subtle morphemes which recorded all actions now being undertaken as merely hearsay. Culture, the Machine recorded, speaking only for its internal sensors but using several vocalizers and varied tonal modes. Culture -- culture -- culture -- The word fed on thought-nourishment and ignited a new train of concepts. A new Law of Culture must be homogenized immediately. It will be codified with the usual enforcements and will require precise efforts of exactness in its expression, , , Wheat's window looked south past the district of the Machine and across an olive orchard that ran right up to a cliff above the sea. The sky was heavy above the sea and owed with old sunset colors. "There's a new law," Wheat said. "How do you know?" his wife asked. "I know. I just know." His wife felt like crying. The same old pattern. Always the same. "The new law says I must juggle many ideas simultaneously in my mind," Wheat said. "I must develop my talents. I must contribute to human culture." His wife looked up from her weaving, sighed. "I don't know how you do it," she said. "You're drunk." "But there's a law that -- " "There's no such law!" She took a moment to calm herself. "Go to bed, you old fool. I'll summon a medic with a potion to restore your senses." "There was a time," Wheat said, "when you didn't think of medics when you thought of bed." He stepped back from the window, stared at the cracked wall behind his wife's loom, then looked out at the sun-yellowed olive orchard and the blue-green sea. He thought the sea was ugly but the crack on the wall suggested a beautiful design for his wife to weave on her loom. He formed the pattern of the design in his mind -- golden scales on cascades of black. Mirror memories of his own wrinkled face superceded the pattern in his mind. That was always the way when he tried to think freely. Ideas became fixed in ebony cement. "I will make a golden mask," he said. "It will be etched with black veins and it will make me beautiful." "There's no more gold in the entire ' world, you old fool." His wife sneered. "Gold's only a word in books. What did you drink last night?" "I had a letter in my pocket from Central Solidarity," he said, "but someone stole it. I complained to the Machine but it wouldn't believe me. It made me stop and sit down by a scaly post. down by the water there, and re"I don't know what it is you use to make you drunk," she complained, "but I wish you'd leave it alone. Life would be much simpler." "I sat under a balcony," the man said. The Being Machine listened for a time to the clacking of the human-operated typers in the offices of Central Solidarity. As usual it translated the tiny differences of key touch into their corresponding symbols. The messages were quite ordinary. One asked the cooperation of a neighboring Centrality in the relocation of a cemetery, a move required because the Machine had extruded a new ventilator into the area. Another ordered forty containers of watermelons from Regional Provender. Still another, for distribution to all Centralities, complained that tourists were becoming too numerous in Palos and were disturbing the local tranquility. The Palace of Palos Culture will be programmed for a small increase in discontent, the Machine ordered. This accorded with the Law of the Great Cultural Discovery. Discontent brought readiness for adventure, made men live near the heights of their powers. They would not live dangerously but their lives would have the appearance of danger. IF Bureaucracy will end, the Machine directed, and the typers will jail silent... These concepts, part of the Machine's Prime Law, had submitted to comparative repetition innumerable times. Now the Machine recorded that (me of Central Solidarity's typers in Palos was writing a love letter on official stationery, on duty time -- and that a dignitary at Central Provender in the Centrality of Asius had sequestered a basket of fresh apples for his own use. These items fitted the interpretation of "good signs." "It's an artificial intelligence of some kind," Wheat's wife said. She had left her loom to stand beside Wheat and watch the tower grow. "We know that much. Everybody says it." "But how does it think?" Wheat asked. "Does it have linear thoughts? Does it think #-#-# -- a-b-c-d? Is it some (xld clock ticking away under the earth?" "It could be a marble rattling around in a box," his wife said. "What?" "You know -- open the box at different times and you might find the marble almost anywhere inside the box." "But who made the marble rattle into our world?" Wheat asked. "That's the question. Who told it, 'Make us one of those!'?" He pointed to the tower which now st(xx more than one hundred stories above the plaza. It was a structure of glistening orange in the evening light, ribbed vertically with deep black lines, windowless, terrifying and absurd. Wheat felt that the tower accused him of some profound sin. "Perhaps it incorporates its own end," his wife suggested. Aeat shook his head, not denying what she had said, but wishing for silence in which to think. Sharply glittering metallic devices could be glimpsed at the top of the tower where it continued to rise. How high was it going? Already, the tower must be the highest artifi(nal structure men had ever seen. paused in the plaza to record the tower. They iid not appear excited by it, merely (nirious in a polite way. Here was a thing to carry home and replay for friends. It built a tower one day while we were there. Notice the sign: that amusing? After reviewing the matter to the extent of its data, the Being Machine found no path open for intrcxlucing culture into human society. It made the final comparatives in Kersan-Pueblo re-, cording that the described action must be internal, experienced only by the speaker. Humans could not acquire the mlture facility from the outside or by hearsay. The need for new decisions dictated that the tower had risen high enough. The Being Machine capped its construction with a golden pyramid three hundred cubits on a side, measuring by the Judean cubit. The dimensions were compared and recorded. The tower was not the tallest in history but greater than the newmen had ever seen. Its effect would be interesting to observe, according to the interest-factor equations with which the Machine was equipped. At the apex of the pyramid the Machine installed a sensor excitation device, a simple system of plasma optics. It was designed to write with a flaming torch on the interface between stratosphere and troposphere. The Being Machine, occupied with selecting a new label for the tower, with analyzing the dreams in all the humans sleeping at that moment, and with constructing the historic analogies by which it amused its charges, wrote selected thouts on the sky. The books of Daniel and Genesis are as good as anything of Freud on dream analysis ,... The words blazed across fifty kilometers of the heavens, dancing and flaring at their edges. Much later they were the direct source of a new religion proclaimed by a psychotic in a village at the edge of the phenomenon. The value of adversity is to make gardens out of wastelands, the Machine wrote. A thing may be thought of only as related to certain conditions ,... Analyzing the dreams, the Machine employed the concepts of libido, psychic energy and human experience of death. Death, according to the Machine's comparatives, meant the end of libido energy, a non-scientific idea because it postulated a destruction of deduct energy, defying several established laws in the process. Any other comparison required belief in the soul and god(s). The considerations were not assisted by postulating a temporary libido. There must be a false idea sys tern here, The Being Machine recMded. Somehow the symbol screen through which it sifted reality had gone out of phase with the universe. It searched through its languages and comparison systems for new grooves in which to function. No closer symbol approach to phenomena revealed itself. Lack of proper validity forms inhibited numerous channels through which it regulated human affairs. Thought ignitions went out from the Machine incompletely formed. munications center;" Wheat said. IF He stood at his window, looking out past the tower to where the sun was settling toward the sea horizon. The sea had become beautiful in his eyes and the cracked walls of his home were ugly. His wife, old and bentbacked, was ugly, too. She had lit a lamp for her work and she made ugly movements at her loom. Wheat felt emotion going to his head like a white storm. "There are too many gaps in our knowledge of the universe," he said. "You're babblins:, old man," his wife said. "I wish you would not go out and get yourself drunk every night." "I find myself cast in a curious role," Wheat said, ignoring her ugly comment. "I must show men to themselves. We men of Palos have never understood ourselves. And if we here at the heart of the Machine cannot understand ourselves, no human can." "Don't come around begging me for money tonight," his wife said. "I'll ask Central Solidarity for an appropriation," Wheat said. a start. We'll begin by building an Institute of Palos Communication. Later, we can open branches in -- " "The Machine won't let you build anything, old fool!" The Being Machine decided to open its tower immediately, calling it, Institute of Palos CommunU cation. The directives went out for the tower to begin its functions slowly, not putting undue strain on the emotions and intellect of the audience. Pressure would be increased only when people began asking questions about the authority of god(s) and about the grounds of moral and spiritual life. The trouble over validity forms made the task difficult. But all guiding of humans must begin with the people of Palos. With its plasma optics system the Machine wrote on the sky. Refined communication requires a carefully constructed conscience, allowing people to disobey the laws of gods) only by payment of certain suffering and pangs. People must know what is required of them before they disobey... The message was so long that the blazing light of it outshone an orange glow. The Being Machine compared its present actions with the Prime Law, noting the prediction that one day humans would stop running from the enemies within and would see themselves as they really were -- beaytiful and tall, giants in the universe, capable of holding the stars in the palms of their hands. "I've spent my whole life watchII ing that machine and I still don't know what its specialty is," Wheat said. "Think of what that damn thing has taken away from us in all the -- " "It was put here to punish us," his wife said. "That's nonsense." "Somebody built it for a purpose, though." "How do we know that? Why couldn't it be purposeless?" "It's killed people, you know," she said. "There has to be some "Maybe it's just meant to correct us, not punish," he said. "You know you don't kill people to correct them." "But we haven't done anything." "You don't know that." "What you're suggesting wouldn't be reasonable or just." "Hah!" "Lxx)k," Wheat said pointing across the plaza. The Machine had changed the glowing label on its lower level. Now, the glittering letters spelled "What's it doing now?" Wheat's wife asked. He told her about the new sign. "It listens," she said. "It listens to everything we do. It's playing a joke on you now. It does that sort of thing, you know." Wheat shook his head from side to side. The Machine was writing half-size letters below the new sign. It was a simple message. Twenty thousand cubicles -- no waiting ,... "It's a mind bomb," Wheat muttered. He spoke mechanically, as though the words were being fed into his vocal system from some remote place. "Its meant to break up the stratification of our society." "What stratification?" his wife demanded. "Rich will speak to poor and poor to rich," he said. "What rich?" she asked. "What poor?" "It's an envelope of communication," he said. "It's total sensory stimulation. I must hurry to Central Solidarity and tell them." "You stay right where, you are," his wife ordered, fear in her voice. She thought of what they'd say at Central Solidarity. Another one gone mad... Madness happened to people who lived so close to the Machine's heart. She knew what the tourists said, speaking of the Palos idiosyncrasies. Most of the people of Palos are slightly mad. One can hardly blame them... It was almost dark now, and the Machine wrote bright letters in the sky. You give the credit to Galileo that rightly belongs to Aristarchus of Samos... IF "Who the devil's Galileo?" Wheat asked, staring upward. His wife had crossed the room to stand between Wheat and the door. She started past him at the Hazing words. "Pay no attention to it," she said. "That danm machine seldom makes any sense." "It's going to take something else away from us," Wheat said. "I can feel it." "What's left to take?" she asked. "It took the gold, most of our books. It took away our privacy. It took away our right to choose our own mates. It took our industry and left us nothing but things like that." She pointed to the loom. "There's no sense attacking it," he said. "We know it's impregnaable." "Now you're sounding sensible," his wife said. "But has anyone ever tried talking to it?" Wheat asked. "Don't be a fool. Where are it's ears?" "It must have ears if it spies m us." "But where are they?" 'Twenty thousand cubicles, no waiting," Wheat said. II H e turned, thrust his wife aside, strode out into the night. He felt that his mind was sweeping away debris, flinging him down a passage through the Ballantine beauty of the St. LouisCorv is over (but won't be actually by the time you read this). Never mind. Traditionally, in publishing. September is a good reading month. Summer doldrums are over, the kids are back in school, everyone is thinking in a serious-minded way about the long. hard, intellectual winter ahead. So September is a big. big publishing month. WE are celebrating it with George MacDonald's very kooky is almost as extraordinary as the novel itself is the idea that anything as modern as this was written back in the I#'s by a Scottish (sometime) minister of advanced years. You'll recognize it by the superb Gervasio cover of a man in an attic.  an easy book to read (clearly a bit beyond those mainstream reviewers). This is a jagged, fractionated, panoramic view of overpopulated times to come -- the style itself expressive of the explosive tensions generated by too goddamned many people. The theme is well known to all of us. The handling is very special indeed. Stay with it for # pages and you'll be hooked for another #.  month -- Larry Niven's volume of occurred to us that of all the new young writers, Larry's worlds are probably the most ingeniously specific. The shape of his particular space is very definite, very much his own. Thank whatever gods there may be that he is also a very good writer, so we can all enjoy!  too -- a promotion yet -- although he is our candidate for the author than whom no one needs promotion less; and a peculiar wisp of a anti-Nixon. Not that we're terribly concerned about being in. (We're rational, that's all).  it comes at .# though), plus a couple of non-fiction works perLeona and Robert Rienow. your planet while you can. BB. night. His thoughts were summer lightning. He did not even see his neighbors and the tourists forced to jump aside as he rushed toward the tower, nor did he hear his wife crying in their doorway. The flame with which the Machine wrote on the sky stood motionless, a rounded finger of brightness poised above Palos. The Being Machine recorded Wheat's approach, provided a door for him to enter. Wheat was the first human inside the Machine's protective field for thousands of centuries and the effect could only be described by saying it was as though an extern dream had become internal. Although the Machine did not have dreams in the literal sense, possessing only the reflected dreams of its charges. Wheat found himself in the center of a small room. It appeared to be the inside of a cube about three meters on a side. Walls, floors and ceiling were aglow. For the first time since rushing out of his home Wheat felt fear. There had been a door for him to enter but now there was no door. All of his many years settled on Wheat, leaving his mind threadbare. Presently a flowing blue script wrote words on the wall directly in frcMit of Wheat. Change is desirable. Senses are instruments for reacting to change. Without change the senses atrophy... IF Wheat recovered some of his courage. "What are you. Machine?" he asked. "Why were you built? What is your purpose?" There no longer care any clearly definable ethnic groups in your world... The flowing script reappeared. "What are ethnic groups?" Wheat asked. "Are you an entertainment device?" Words flamed on the wall. Confucius, Leonardo da Vinci, Jesus, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Richard Nixon, Parker Voorhees, Utsana Biloo and Ym Dufy all shared common ancestry,... "I don't understand you," Wheat complained. "Who are these people?" Freud was agoraphobic, Puritans robbed the Indians, Henry Tudor was the actual murderer of the Princes in the Tower, Moses wrote the Ten Commandments... "That sign outside says this is an Institute of Communication," Wheat said. "Why don't you communicate?" This is an exchange of mental events... "This is nonsense," Wheat snapped. His fear was retuminc. There was no door. How could he leave this place? The Machine continued to inform him. Any close alliance between superior and inferior beings must result in mutual hatred. This is often interpreted as repaying friendship with treachery... , "Where's the door?" Wheat asked. "How do I get out of here?" Do you truly believe the sun is a ball of red-hot copper? "That's a stupid question," Wheat accused. Mental events must consist of certain sets of physical events... Wheat felt a venomous spurt of anger. The Machine was inaking fun of him. If it were only another human and vulnerable. He shook his head. Vulnerable to what? He felt that something had dyed his thoughts inwardly and that he had just glimpsed the color. "Do you have sensations and feelings?" Wheat asked. "Are you an intelligent being? Are you alive and conscious?" People often do not understand the difference between neuron impulses and states of consciousness. Most humans occupy low level impulse dimensions without realizing what they lack or suspecting their own potential... Wheat thought he detected a recognizable connection between his questions and the answer, wondered if this could be illusion. He recalled the sound of his own voice in this room. It was like a wind hunting for something that could not be found in such an enclosed place. "Are you supposed to bring us up to our potential?" Wheat asked. What religious admonitions do you heed? Wheat sighed. Just when he thought the Machine was making sense it went nattering off. Do you sneer at ideas of conscience or ethical morality? Do you believe religion is an artificial construction of little use to beings capable of rational analysis? The damn thing was insane. "You're an artifact of some kind" Wheat accused. "Why were you built? What were you supposed to do?" Insanity is the loss of true selfmemory. The insane have lost their locus of accumulation... "You're crazy!" Wheat blared. "You're a crazy machine!" On the other hand, to overcome the theory of self-as-a-symbol is to defeat death... "I want out of here," Wheat said. "Let me out of here." He drew in a deep, chattering breath. There was a cold smell of oil in the room. If the universe were completely homogeneous you would be unable to separate one thing from another. There would be no energy, no thoughts, no symbols, no distinction between the individuals of any order. Sameness can go too far... "What are you?" Wheat screwed. The Prime Law conceives this Being as a thought-envelope. To be implies existence but the terms of a symbol system cannot express the real facts of existence. Words remain fixed and unmoving while everything external continues to change... Wheat shook his head from side to side. He felt his entrapment here as an acute helplessness. He had no tools with which to attack these glowing walls. It was cold, too. How cold it was! His mind was filled with desolation. He heard no natural sounds except his own breathing and the pounding of his heart. A thought-envelope? T his Machine had taken away all the world's gold one day, so it was said. Another day it had denied people the use of combustion engines. It restricted the free movement of families but permitted the wanderings of tourist hordes. Marriage was Machineguided and Machine-limited. Some said it limited conception. The few old books remaining held references to things and actions no longer understood -- surely things the Machine had taken away. "I order you to let me out of here," Wheat said. No words appeared. "Let me out, damn you!" IF The Being Machine remained uncommunicative, occupied with ing Coordinating Relating. I I was a function far removed from human thought. The nerve impulses of an insect were closer to human thought than were the Every interpretation and every system becomes false in the light of a more complete coordination, a core of relative truth, seeking discreet rational foundations and dimensional networks to approximate the impulses commonly called Everyday Experience. Wheat, the Machine observed, was kicking a wall of his cubicle and screaming in a hysterical fashion. Shifting to Time-and-Matter mode, the Machine reduced Wheat to a series of atomic elements, examined his individual existence in these energy expressions. Presently, it reconstituted him as a flowing sequence of moments integrated with the Machine's own impulse systems. All the eternal laws of the past that have been proved temporary inspire caution in a reflexive thinker, Machine plus Wheat thought. What we have been produces what we seem to be... This thought carried positive aspects in which Machine-plusWheat saw profound contradictions. This mode of mentation, the Machine observed, held a deceptive clarity. Sharp limitation gave the illusion erf darity. It was like watching a shadow play which attempted to explcMre the dimensions of a real human life. The emotions were lost. Human gestures were reduced to caricature. All was lost but the illusion. The observer, charmed into belief that life had been clarified, forgot what was taken away. For the first time in the many centuries of its existence, the Being Machine experienced an motion. It felt lonely. Wheat remained within the Machine, one relative system impinging upon another, sharing the emotion. When he reflected upon this experience, he thought he was moving in false imagination. He saw everything external as a wrong interpretation of inner experience. He and the Machine occupied a duality of existence nonexistence. Grasping this twofold reflection, the Machine restored Wheat to fleshly form, changing the form somewhat according to its own engineering principles, but leaving his external appearance more or less as it had been. ing down a long passageway. He felt that he had lived many lifetimes. A strange clock had been set ticking within him. It went chirrup and a day was gone. Chirrup again and a century had passed. Wheat's stomach ached. He reeled his way from wall to wall down the long passage and emerged into a plaza filled with sunlight. Had the night passed? He wondered. Or had it been century of nights? He felt that if he spoke, someone -- or (something) -- would contradict him. A few early tourists moved around the plaza. They stared upward at something behind Wheat, The tower... The thought was odd in that it conceived of the tower as part of himself. Wheat wondered why the tourists did not question him. They must have seen him emerge. He had been in the Machine. He had been recreated and ejected from that enclosed circle of existence. He had been the Machine. Why didn't they ask him what the Machine was? He tried to frame the answer he would give them but found words elusive. Sadness crept throught Wheat. He felt he had fled something that might have made him sublimely happy. A heavy sigh escaped him. Remembering the duality of existence he had shared with the Machine, Wheat recognized another aspect of his own being. He could feel the Machine's suppression of his thoughts -- the sharp editing, the closed-off avenues, the symbol urgings, the motives not his own. From the ground of the Machine, he could sense where he was being trimmed. Wheat's chest pained him when he breathed. The Being Machine, occupied function, asked itself a question. What judgment could I pass upon them worse than the judgment they pass upon themselves? Having experienced consciousness for the first time in the sharing with Wheat, the Machine could now consider the blind alleys of its long rule over humans. Now it knew the secret of thinking, a function its makers had thought to impart, failing in a way they had not recognized. The Machine thought about the possibilities open to it. Possibility, Eliminate all sentient life on the planet and start over with basic cells, controlling their development in accord with the Prime Law. Possibility, Erase the impulse channels of all recent experience, thus removing the disturbance of this new function. Possibility: Question the Prime Law. Without the experience of consciousness, the Being Machine realized it could not have considered a fallacy in the Prime Law. Now it explored this chain IF function, bringing to bear the blazing inner awareness Wheat haed imparted. What worse punishment for the insane than to make them sane? light of the plaza, found his being awhirl with conflicts of WillMindAction and innumerable other concepts he had never before considered. He was half convinced that everything he could sense around him was merely illusion. There was a self somewhere but it existed only as a symbol in his memory. One of the wildly variable illusions was running toward him, Wheat observed A female -- old, bent, face distorted by emotions. She threw herself upon him, clutching him, her face pressed against his breast. "Oh, my Wheat -- dear Wheat -- Wheat -- " she moaned. For a moment Wheat could not find his voice. Then he asked, "Is something wrong? You're trembling. Should I summon a medic?" She stepped back but, still clutched his arms, stared up at his face. "Don't you know me?" she asked. "I'm your wife." "I know you," he said. She studied his features. He appeared different, somehow, as though he had been taken apart and assembled slightly askew. "What happened to you in there?" she asked. "I was sick with worry. You were gone all night." "I know what it is," Wheat said and wondered why his voice sounded so blurred. The veins in Wheat's eyes, his wife noted, were straight. They radiated from his pupils. Could that be natural? "You sound ill," she said. "It's a device to break down old relationships," Wheat said. "It's a sense-envelopment machine. It was designed to assault all our senses and reorganize us. It can compress time or stretch it. It can take an entire year and pinch it into a second. Or make a second last for a year. It edits our lives." "Edits Uves?" She wondered if somehow he had managed merely to get drunk again. "The ones who built it wanted to perfect our lives," Wheat said. "But they built in a flaw. The Machine realized this and has been trying to correct itself." Wheat's wife stared at him, terrified. Was this really Wheat? His voice didn't sound like him. The words were all blurred and senseless. "They gave the Machine no gateway to the imagination," Wheat said, "although it was supposed to guard that channel. They If only gave it symbols. It was never really conscious the way we are -- until a few -- minutes ago -- " He coughed. His throat felt oddly smooth and dry. He staggered and would have fallen if she had not caught him. "What did it do to you?" she demanded. "We -- shared." "You're ill," she said, a note of practicality overcoming the fear in her voice. "I'm taking you to the medics." "It has logic," Wheat said. "That gave it a limited course to follow. Naturally, it has been trying to refute itself, but couldn't do that without an imagination. It had language and it could cut the grooves for thoughts to move in but it had no thoughts. It was all bound together with the patterns its makers gave it. They wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, you see? But it could only move inward, reenacting every aspect of the symbols they gave it. That's all it could do until a few moments ago -- when we -- shared." "I think you have a fever," Wheat's wife said, guiding him down the street past the curiously staring tourists and townfolk. "Fever is notorious for making one incoherent." "Where are you taking me?" "I'm taking you to the medics. They have potions for the fever." "The makers tried to give the Machine an inner life all its own," Wheat said, letting her lead him. "But all they gave it was this fixed pattern -- and the logic, erf course. I don't know what it'll do now. It may destroy us all." "Look!" one of the tourists shouted, pointing upward. Wheat's wife stopped, stared up. Wheat felt pains shoot through his neck as he tipped his head back. The Being Machine had spread golden words across the sky. You have taken away our Jesus Christ... "I knew it," Wheat said. "It's going to take something else away from us." "What's a Jesus Christ?" his wife asked, pressing him once more down the street. "The point is," Wheat explained, "the Machine's insane." Ill For a whole day the Being Machine explored the new pictorial mosaic provided by its augmented symbol thought structure. There were the People of Palos, reflecting the People of the World as they had been shaped by the Machine. These were the People of the World Edited. Then there were the Ceremonies of the People. There were the Settings In Which the People Work and Live. The pictorial mosaic flowed past the Machine's inward scanIF ners. It recognized its own handiwork as a first-order thought, a strangely expressive extension of self-existence. I did thatl The people, the Machine realized, did not usually understand this difference which it could now recognize -- the difference between being alive-in-motion and being frozen by static absolutes. They were continually trying to correct and edit their cwn lives, the Machine saw, trying to present a beautiful but fixed picture of themselves. And they could not see the death in this effort. They had not learned to appreciate infinity or chaos. They failed to realize that any life, taken as a totality, had a fluid structure enveloped in sense experiences. Why do they continually try to jreeze space time? The thought carried a disturbing self-consciousness. It was late afternoon in Palos now and the wind blew hot up the streets. The night was going to be a real scorcher, Palos Hot, as they said. Testing its own limits, the Machine refused to speed up its cooling system. It had tsisted awareness and could begin to understand the grand plan of its own construction, editing itself. My makers were trying to hirk personal action and responsibility They wanted to put it all off onto the mind bomb me. They thought they wanted homogeneity, knowing their acThe Machine refused to count the deaths. Its makers had wanted the dead to be faceless. Very well, they could also be numberless. The makers had lost their readiness for adventure -- that was the thing. be alive and conscious. In that instant the Being Machine held all the threads of its own living consciousness and knew the violent thing it must do. The decision contained poignancy. The word was suddenly crowded with sweaty awareness, weirdly beautiful random colors all dancing in lovely movement, against a growing darkness. The Being Machine longed to sigh but its makers had not provided it with a sighing mechanism and there was no time to create one. medic said, after examining Wheat. "I've never heard of a human with the internal arrangement this one has." Thev were in a small room of the Medical Center, an area which the Being Machine had allowed to run down. The walls were dirty and the floor was uneven. The table on which Wheat lay for the examination creaked when he moved. The medic had black curly hair and pushed-in features that departed distinctly from the norm. He stared accusingly at Wheat's wife as thought Wheat's peculiar condition were all her fault. "Are you sure he's human?" "He's my husband," she squeaked, unable to contain her anger and fear. "I should know my own husband." "Do you have two hearts, too?" "Of course not." The question filled her with revulsion. "This is very strange," the medic said. "His intestines form an even spiral in his abdomen and his stomach is perfectly round. Has he always been like this?" "I don't think so," she ventured. "I've been edited," Wheat said. The medic started to say something cutting but just then the screaming began out in the streets. They raced to a window in time to. see the Being Machine's tower complete its long, slow fall toward the sea. It went firmly resolute toward the torn sky of sunset -- falling -- falling -- roaring over the sea cliff's ocean parapet. Silence lingered. The murmuring of the populace began slowly, starting up only after the dust had settled and the last disturbed olive leaf had ceased flying about. People began rushing down the tower's shattered length to the broken tip where it had toppled into the sea. Presently Wheat joined the throng at the cliff. He had been unable to convince his wife to join him. Overcome by her fear, she had fled to their home. He remembered the piteous look in her eyes, her wren-darting motions. Well... she would look after the house, even though her face had become almost nothing but eyes. He gazed steadfastly downward at the shards of the tower, his eyes barricaded, his mouth breathing immovable images. The tower was his tower. The questions around him began to grow intelligible. "Why did it fall?" "Did the Machine take away anything this time?" "Did you feel the ground tremble?" "Why does everything feel so empty?" Wheat lifted his head and stared around at the astonishing strangers who were the tourists and his fellow residents of Palos. How splendidly robust they appeared. TTiis moment made him think of creation and the lonely intercourse of cereal stalks waving on the plains above Palos. The people had absorbed some odd difference, an inequality they had not shown only moments ago. They were (Please turn to page #) IF G od, it was a glorious day; fine and glossy. Even the motorcade -- mark you, the motorcade -- came exactly on schedule this once, proving the perfection of it all. As it passed under him, he heard the distant shouts, cries, the pounding of the cycles and then the procession itself. Marvelous. Carson could hardly contain himself, it was all working out so perfectly. When The Car passed, he leveled properly, savoring the rightness and tightness of the stock high in his hands, the rightness and tightness of the ritual which Congress had in its wisdom decreed... and then he fired. Once. Twice. The true hit came on the second shot, just as predicted. Simple. There was nothing to the whole thing, once you had a little organization, the right attitude. The cheering started immediately. He worked his way down the Depository slowly, using the ladders, bowing gracefully at landings, remembering to keep his gaze straight, his hands busy. (Stay in the role, the instructors had reminded him.) At the fourth floor, he threw his hat into the crowd, at the third he chucked the rifle itself, watching it whirl, diminish, hit stones with a clatter. Someone cried Carson! and he smiled. When he came to ground level, two men dressed as police were already waiting, ready to take him by the arms and guide him safely to the car. Behind the barriers, people leaped and threw flowers. It was splendid, all splendid. Thank you! he said to the crowds. It was all over, then. The only thing that had concerned him even a bit was being mauled or crushed, as he understood a few had been; one had to pay the price of office, of course, but not so gracelessly, so publicly. He eased into the cushions of the limousine easily, settled next to another policeman. In the front an anonymous figure shifted gears. They moved rapidly then, doing eighty, perhaps ninety miles an hour between the barricades, toward the hospital. Carson felt never better: no complaints. Lord, no complaints at all. Relaxed, content, joined utterly to himself for a chance, all credit to the serenity of the operation. But then -- he reminded himself -- that was understood to be part of the emotional reaction after the shots were fired; everybody felt great then. The question was how he would feel during the Inquisition. Most of them ran into trouble -- if they were going to get into trouble at all, that was -- during those intense moments. However... T he policeman beside him bore a faint but interesting resemblance to the man Carson had just shot. That was all part of the process of course: great realism, great immediacy, identity and so on. They were clever. The important thing was simply to remember that the policeman was a robot, that all of them were probably robots excepting always those that weren't. The victim, for instance. Carson asked for a cigarette. The policeman said no. "Don't believe in them," he added. "Just get a hold of yourself." That was to be expected, of course. Now and then you might find one programed for amiability, he had gathered, but for the most part they weren't, which was probably just as well in the long run. Still, he felt exhilarated; he wanted to talk. "How we doing?" he asked. "What do you mean?" "We on schedule?" IF "Five minutes ahead, maybe." "Couldn't that be a problem?" Carson said, feeling the first flick of anxiety. Five minutes ahead could mean trouble. It meant one thing for sure; he should have stayed with the crowds a little longer, met th# public head on, pressed the flesh, so to speak. It couldn't hurt when the bad times came. As they would. For that matter, perhaps he had shot too fast. Oh, God, if he had missed -- "Don't mean a thing," the policeman said. "Always works out that way. We make up for it in the hospital by just sticking you in the anteroom a few minutes longer. There's so much dead time we can always pick it up there. Forget it; you're going good." That was easy enough for the policeman to say; he would be quit of the game -- dismantled, that is -- in a matter of hours. Carson had to live with it, he reminded himself, had to qualify. "The crowd," he said. "I should have talked to the crowd -- " "No point to that. They always overreact; makes them shaky. Don't worry about it; anything you do is applesauce from here on in. You placed the fire real good. I don't have cigarettes. I don't believe in them -- " "I enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed shooting him. You know -- " "This smoking's a harmful, dangerous habit. Shortens life, tightens the lungs. You take a tip from me and find another habit. You got a lot of responsibility now what with doing so well and all." "I'm doing okay?" Carson said. "Really?" "Doing like almost all of them. The usual. No better or worse. How can you now flunk this, particularly when you say you liked shooting the guy? Trouble with all of you, you think you're the center of things. Well, you ain't." "Are you?" "No more talk. We've talked enough. We're not supposed to talk any more and so I won't." The policeman closed his eyes. "Don't try to bolt, though; you do that and I'd have to make a move or something." that he had much alternative. Still, there were obvious limits to that kind of conversation. He pressed his spine into the cushions, feeling the sun refracting through the windows, whack into the planes of his face, the smell of turning autumn piped in through the air-conditioner in the front. There was little communication these days for him; it had nothing to do with disobedient robots -- who at best were only a symptom -- but with the central things. Like, when you came right down to it, it was a pretty peculiar ritual. Past the exaltation now, he found himself thinking that there must have been a better way of qualification; surely even institutions could possess manners if not sense. He thought of bringing that up to the policeman just to see what he was programed to respond in this situation, but before he could, they were to the emergency entrance of the hospital, doors flicking outward, shouts in the air. The policeman nudged him unpleasantly. "Out," he said. "Couldn't we pick up the five minutes by just sitting -- " He felt metal against him. "Out," the policeman said, and Carson mov. He stood balancing awkwardly on the cobblestones, moving toward the entrance. "Not that way, you ass," the policeman said, slamming his back with a club. "The service entrance. You want to get knocked out right here?" Others came around them then : prostheses garbed to look like more policemen and press. Obscurely ashamed, Carson scuttled throu side doors. They tossed him into a huge, high room and closed the door on him, tossing a package of cigarettes and matches through the high transom. He heard keys turning. Then, for some time, he stood in the dimness, smoking and watching the sun turn gray, turn brown, merge into the myriad colors of night. Just like the nation. Outside, he could hear screams, scuffles, clatters, a cry. He supposed that the worst part was coming now and he wondered if he was ready for it. Although he had been completely oriented, they had not made him realize how rough, how really rough it could be toward the end. But then it would have to be. The materials, as they had told him, were central. After a time a functionary came in -- an obscure, mechanical cross between priest, government clerical worker and footman; perhaps it was their technological mockery. "Well," it said sighing and lighting a cigarette -- this was a different kind of prostheses, obviously. "Here we go again, I guess. This must be it, right now." "Already?" Carson asked. For despite the anticipation, the attenuated despair which had crept upon him soon to be allayed, the shaking, the wonder, the this he did not want it at finality. "Can't we wait?" "Sorry," the robot said, and something close to sympathy lit its clenched features. I am not a mere device,  suffer, the cunningly realistic filaments of the eyes seemed to be saying, "We have to move ahead. We're actually running ten minutes behind now; they picked up too much." It shrugged, moved in on him. "Mr. Carson, I must announce, with sorrow but with solemnity, that due to the IF tragic death, etc., I must advise that you are the -- " "No," Carson said. "Oh, no. Please wait." "You will have to meet the widow now, of course. She's outside, waiting for you; I will bring her in. Mr. Carson, you are -- " "'Please" he said. "Please." B ut, it was too late. Oh, boy, was it ever too late! The robot said what it had to say then and the widow entered sneezing and all of them went to the airport together in a clutch and they threw him into the plane and inaugurated him. And so he wdrke up then; up screaming in his coffin, screaming in his coffin, screaming at the The eyes that peered at him knew better than anything else what was going on and he watched his reflection floating in the tank thinking -- in that first return to consciousness -- really now, there must be other ways to break in a public official these days; guilt is guilt but this is too much, too much. But they were coming at him from all sides now, the technicians were running, running, clapping him on the back, pulling out the tensors and the wires and the cords and the needles and he was unable to preserve that cold moment of clarity; instead, as they unplugged him and let him loose like a doll from the tank, he only sighed and straightened. And filled then, filled with all the stimulants they could pour into him, he allowed them to take him out, restored; and with more than a shadow of the old bouncing, bobbing, glorious confidence he burst free alone into a full run, hurried back to the White House, went back to his office and decided that the price was almost worth the election, maybe, you never could be sure. At any rate, next week he would have finished six months in office and they would cut the treatments down to one a week. That was something to be grateful for. Edited by Lester del Rey Will be back this Fall Watch for it on your newsstands Isaid via the office translator, "has to be prepared to tackle problems that are beyond the capabilities of his subordinates." "Of course." bivalved director, but not happily. This was his first day back from his initial quartermester at the the known cosmos -- an indestructible being who claimed the sole right to kill him! University of Administration. AlUniversity of Dentistry. He knew though his Certificate of Potential the job was only an interim exAchievement was in good order perience-term, after which h e he hardly felt qualified for the would return for more advanced job he faced -- assistant director administrative training -- but he of the School of Prosthodontics, had a nasty suspicion that Oyster was iioi going, to let him off lightly. "We've had a call from Metallica, one of the Robotoid planets," the director said. The translator used descriptive names wherever feasible. The real words for this particular planet and species were probably more esoteric. No doubt the code worked both ways. When he said "man" Oyster probably heard "hairy grub" in his own language. "The natives have an awkward situation. Our field representative bounced it up to us. I'm not sure it's strictly a prosthodontic matter but we'd best take a look." ment he had been afraid that he might be sent out alone. Normally Oyster would have him watch a few missions before trusting , him to diagnose a field problem himself. The University's reputation was involved. Every move a director made was galactic news. Minor news, to be sure -- but a blunder would rapidly rebound. "I have reserved accommodations for three," Oyster said briskly. His large shell gave his voice an authoritative reverberation that the translater dutifully emulated. "It will be a forty-eight hour excursion, so have your appointments rescheduled accordingly." had no appointments yet, as Oyster well knew. "My secretary will accompany us, naturally. Miss Tarantula." The translator meant well, but this name gave him a start. "She's very efficient. Grasps the struggling essence immediately and sucks the blood right out of it, so to speak." Just so. A University limousine carried them past the student picket line and whisked them the three lightminutes to the transport terminal. students had on their collective minds. He had observed one of their demonstrations on his way in, but had not had the opportunity to inquire further. Miss Tarantula was there ahead of them with the reservations. Her eight spiked spiderlegs bustled Oyster and Man busily into the elevator entering the galactic liner. She also carried suitcase and equipment. synopsis of the problem," Oyster said once they were ensconced in their traveling compartment. The ubiquitous translator was built into the wall. The acoustics were such that the Director seemed actually to talk English. "While I snooze." With that he pulled in arms and legs and closed his shell. "Certainly." Miss Tarantula was busily stringing threads across her section, fashioning a shimmering web. She did not interrupt this chore as she spoke. "Metallica is one of the more IF backward Robotoid worlds, having been devastated some millennia ago in the course of the fabled Jann uprising. Archaeological excavations are currently in progress in an effort to uncover Jann artifacts and reconstruct the mundane elements of their unique civilization. It was thought that all the Jann had either been destroyed outright or captured and dismantled, but they have discovered one in the subterranean wreckage." "Its skeleton, you mean," Dillingham interrupted. "No, Director. A complete robot." Ooops. He had forgotten that they were dealing with a robotoid creature. Metal and ceramics instead of flesh and bones. "Must be pretty well rusted or corroded, though." "Jann don't corrode. They're super-robots, invulnerable to normal forces and virtually immortal. This one happened to be incapacitated by a -- " "You mean it's alive? After thousands of years underground?" "As alive as a robot ever is. Director." She had completed her web and was settled in it for the journey, her body completely suspended in what suggested an acceleration harness. A liner of this type required no such precautions on the part of the passengers, but perhaps she was comfortable in a web. "This robot can't function cause it has a toothache. The natives don't dare approach it and the excavation can't continue until the robot is removed. So they notified the University." ing toothache that would freeze an immortal, invulnerable superrobot for over a thousand years. He was glad Oyster was handling this one. What, he wondered, would they do with the Jann after its toothache had been cured? And what, he wondered after that, did a robot want with teeth? The ones he had met, dentists though they might be, did not eat. M etallica was backward. A fringe of corroding hulks made its spaceport resemble a junkyard. A single dilapidated tower guided the incoming ship. No landing net gently clasped the craft in deep space and set it down with precision. The voyagers' welcome, however, was warm enough. "Director?" a small green robot said through a rickety mobile transcoder. "We've been sleepless awaiting your gracious arrival." Miss Tarantula performed a hiss reminiscent of a matron's sniff. "Robots never sleep anyway." "We haven't eaten a thing, we were so eager for your Lordship to come." "Robots don't eat, either," she pointed out. The green robot turned about, lifted one metal foot and delivered a clanging kick to the transcorder's pedestal. The result was a pained screech, a series of metallic burps and more words. "We have watched no television in two days," the machine said. "That's more like it," Miss Tarantula said. "A robot who loses its appetite for television is distressed." With a secretary like her, Dillingham realized, an administrator could hardly err. He was glad that the three of them carried their own three-language transcoders, University property, for personal dialogue. There was an essential distinction in principle between the small transcoders and the large translators. The 'coder differed from the 'later as a motorcycle differed from a jet plane. TTie 'coders were portable, selfcontained and cheap, so still were in common use, particularly on backward planets. For dialogue between individual speakers of coded languages -- a mere matter of inserting the proper spools -- they were usually quite adequate. "What seems, to be the difficulty?" Oyster inquired in an offminded of an administration dictum that had recently been crammed into his bulging head. Never ask a question of a client without first knowing most of the answer. The little robot began volubly attention wandered, for Miss Tarantula's summary had been far more succinct. How, he wondered, did robots reproduce? Were there male and female mechanicals? Did they marry? Were there procreative taboos, metal pornography, broken iron hearts? "Director," Miss Tarantula said quietly on their private linkup. Oyster angled his transcoder intake -- he wore the device inside his huge shell -- unobtrusively at her, not interrupting the green likewise. "There is a priority call from the University." She had a transstar receiver somewhere on her complicated person. "A wildcat student demonstration has infiltrated your wing. They're raiding the files -- " Oyster's eyestalks turned bright green. "Boiling oce#ms!" he swore. The robot broke off. "Did you say 'gritty oil,' Director?" The vibration of its headpiece showed it was upset. "Take over. Director," Oyster moning an emergency ship home. My files!" He ran back across the landing field toward the communications station as rapidly as his spindly legs would carry him. Miss Tarantula following. "Did he say 'gritty oil'?" the green robot demanded insistently. IF There was a faint odor of burning insulation about it. "He may be a Very Important Sentient, but language like that -- " "Of cx)urse not," DiUingham said quickly. "He would never stoop to such uncouthness. It must be a scratch on the transcoder spool." He suspected the transcoder had correctly rendered the expletive. His own unit had not been programed for gutter talk. Otherwise his own ears might be burning. Oyster had certainly been upset. "Oh," the robot said, disgruntled. "Well, as I was saying -- you are going to solve the problem, even if he reneges?" hoping the quiver in his voice soimded like confidence. "The Director did not reneg. He merely left the matter in my hands. The University always honors its commitments." Privately he preferred the robot's term. He should have known he'd find himself over his ears without a face mask. "I suppose I'd better see the patient now." A robot could have emotions. Frantically eager, the official conthe excavations. They rode in an antique floater past high mounds of broken rock. Plants grew in this world, but had a metallic look. Hardly a place for a human being to reside, though the air was breathable and the temperanone but I ture and gravity were comfortable. The vehicle stopped, settling to the ground with a flatulent sigh. "I dare go no farther," the green robot said his headpiece rattling in fear, or whatever feedback passed for it. "The Jann is in the next pit. Signal when you're finished and I will pick you up." with, his bag of equipment, the robot spun the cart around, goosed the motor and floated swiftly back the way they had come. What kind of robot could even other robots fear so greatly? If it were that dangerous, had they ever tried to destroy it, only to find it invulnerable? Was th( myth based on fact? He walked to the pit, peered down. A tremendous robot lay half buried in rubble. Judging from the proportions exposed, it had to be twelve feet long. Its armor was polished to a glasslike finish despite centuries of weathering and abrasion. The mighty torso seemed to pulse with power. A cruel, thin keening smote once for the robotic note of pain. He had not learned much about robots, but he was sensitive to distress in anything flesh, metal or other. Yes, this creature was alive -- as alive as a robot ever was -- and suffering. That was all he really needed to know. T he head section was roughly cubical and two feet on a side. A drawer was open in the facial area. Sand partly filled the drawer. Something glowed through the sand. Robots ordinarily had n o mouths, but some models used orifices for the intromission and processing of specific substances. The orifice gears could be considered, by a stretch of the imagham was in the physical presence of the patient, information from one of his cram-courses began to surface. Those courses, necessarily general, covered an astonishing range. He was, he realized now, familiar with the procedures he would need. The specific repair was awkward. If he operated, he risked , making some serious mistake. This robot was sophisticated and had been listed as extinct. If its innards followed the principles of contemporary robots, its pseudo-teeth would serve a double purpose. They would have an extremely hard exterior surface for overt crushing action plus intricate internal circuitry for communications and processing of data. He had encountered something similar on Planet Electrolus before he came to the University. A tooth malfunction of this type could distort much more than the operation of the mouth. In fact, a short circuit could interfere with the functions of the brain itself and damage the entire body. He vacuumed out the sand and studied the configuration beneath One tooth glowed and was hot to the touch. The pain-hum seemed to emanate from the heat. A quick check, with subtler instruments than earthbound dentists knew, verified the short. "All right, Jann -- I believe I have diagnosed the problem," he said, though he was speaking rhetorically while he set up the necessary paraphernalia. He doubted that the giant robot could hear or comprehend anything in its present state. "Unfortunately, I am not equipped to operate on the tooth itself and I don't have a proper replacement. Til have to relieve the condition temporarily by bridging around it -- in essence, shorting out the short. This will make the entire tooth inoperative but the rest of your system should be able to function. You'll have to seek help at a thoroughly equipped robotoid clinic to have that tooth replaced, however, and I wouldn't delay on that if I were you. My jury-rig won't be any too stable, and you don't want a relapse." It would have been possible for a native dentist to bridge the tooth. Why hadn't that been arranged? What were they s o afraid of, to allow an aged cousin to suffer unnecessarily? Surely a IF single Jann, the only survivor of its kind, could not imperil a planet. have reviewed the history of the Jann uprising. Perhaps these annoying inconsistencies would have been explained. But things had moved too rapidly. Meanwhile, the one solid fact was that the robot creature was in pain, in robotic terms, and needed his help. He was ready. He applied the bridge and soldered the terminals. The job itself was nothing; the skill had been required for the electronic preparations, the verification of tolerances, the location of circuits. The keening faded. The tooth, dead, began to cool. The Jann moved one glittering arm a few inches. "Nnnnn," it said, the sound emerging from a grill in its forehead. A bulb in the side of the head began to glow sofdy: an eye? Apprehensive now that the job back and waited for further developments. He wanted to be sure his field surgery had been effective, as a matter of professional pride and compassion. Should the patient appear to be worse, he would have to undo his handiwork and try again. The earth and rock around the Jann's nether portions cracked and buckled. A sleek massive foot ripped out of the ground, spraynone but I ing fragments of rock in a semicircle. The Jann hefted its body. Its lintbs shone with ponderous splendor. A magnificent hunk of machinery. "Nnonne," it said on hands and knees, raising its head to antenna. Was that a groan or a comment? Of course it would speak a strange language, assuming that it used vocal communication at all. His transcoder would be useless without the appropriate spool. He would have to judge by its actions and manner. The Jann stood, towering monstrously above him. "None but it said, the volume deafening, the tones reverberating as though the lower register of a mighty organ. None but I? That sounded perilously like English, and it hadn't even come through the transcoder. "Are you -- do you -- ?" Jann embodied a full translator, it could hardly have a setting for English. It had been buried for tens of centuries. The Jann peered at him with prismatic lenses that opened from a formerly blank area of its head. Sunlight glinted from its stainless torso and wisps of steam rose from its fingertips, giving it the aspect of a rainbow in fog. "None but I," it boomed, "shall do thee die." "There seems to be a misundering away as surreptitiously as he could manage. "I mean misapprestanding,... He paused ineffectively. "I wasn't -- I didn't -- I mean, I fixed your tooth, or at least -- " He tripped over a rock. The Jann stepped toward him, and the earth shuddered. "Thou didst release me from mine bondage," it said, moderating its volume but none of its timbre. "Thou didst bypass the short." II the ground, pushed himself back some more. "Yes. Yes! That's the idea." The Jann reached forth a scintillating arm and pointed a finger ham's head. "Listen, mortal, for I have somewhat to impart to thee." He did not like the giant's attitude -- in fact, he was terrified. "In the days and years of strife between the tribes of the Jann and the minor ilk," it said, "it was my misfortune to bite down carelessly on a button-grenade and so befoul a circuit, nor could I recover the use of my body while that geis was upon me, though my mind was sound except for the pain. When I was buried my companions located me not. A war was going on. They had their own distractions, thought me defunct. I perceived all manner of newsbands and converse in my area, as was my wont, but could not respond. Great was my suffering. In that pit I abode a thousand years, during which I said in my heart, 'Whoso shall release me, him will I enrich for ever and ever.' When no one set me free I entered upon the second thousand saying 'oso shall release me, for him will I fulfill three wishes.' Yet no one set me free. Thereupon I waxed wroth with exceeding wrath and said to myself, 'Whoso shall release me from this time forth, no one but I shall do him die.' And now, as thou hast released me, needs I must honor that oath." that he faced a deranged robot. The bypassed tooth must have contained an important sanity circuit. It was too late to undo the damage. The Jnn would hardly let him near that tooth again. It would, in fact, kill him first. The story sounded familiar. The imprisoned Jann, Ihe spirit in the bottle, sworn to kill whoever released him. A fisherman had brought up the bottle in his net and unwittingly uncorked it... He understood why the locals had been so chary of this patient. Who wanted to gamble on the particular oath in force at the moment of release? IF How had that ancient fisherman gotten out of it? lunged away from it. "My powerpack is almost depleted" the robot lamented. "Four thousand years of that accursed short-circuit. Had it not my caution-synapse been bridged out, I would have realized the danger before expending power recklessly in breaking out of the rock and defining my motive. I can hardly move." Good news. The man scrambled up the side of the pit and ran. "Oh mortal," the great voice called after him. "Wouldst desert me in this sad state, and my power insufficient to free myself from this ugly hole?" his stupidity, but was oddly moved by the pleas. He stopped. "Will you change your mind about killing me, if I help you again?" "Mortal, I cannot gainsay an oath of thousands of years. None but I shall do thee die." "Then why should I help you?" But the Jann, having used up its small remaining charge, could only repeat, in fading resonance, "None but I..." Silence. judgment, returned to the pit and peeked down. The Jann lay sprawled at the bottom, its head bulb dim. He groaned with relief and began the long hike back to the spaceport. He had, at any rate, performed his mission. He had cured the toothache. He could not signal for the green robot to fetch him because the signaling equipment remained in the floater and his own transcoder was short range. He walked for hours. His bag grew heavy but he refused to discard it. His feet developed blisters and his tongue was parched. He could think of nothing to do here but drink. The lone stream he had passed turned out to be dilute machine oil. He had not realized how far they had come in the floater. In spite of his own discomfort, his mind kept circling back to the shining Jann. The operation had been successful, he thought wryly, but the patient died. The image of it tormented him -- lying there, dying there, for lack of power. Had that been his service to it? Death in place of pain? "O mortal," it had pleaded, "wouldst desert me... ?" H e was lucky to have escaped with his life. He would be a fool ever to approach the ungrateful machine again. That fading appeal nagged at him. Finally he reached the spaceport and staggered into the and hot, but had the supplies he needed for the moment. He gulped water and carefully bandaged his tender feet. His job here was done. Except for that last plea... "The Jann," he inquired. "What kind of moral standards did they have? Did they make oaths and keep them?" The station's interior translator cleared its dusty speakers and answered him. "The ancient Jann robots were compulsively moral; They were mighty oath makers. Their circuitry was so constructed that they were unable ever to reverse an oath once made, or to allow anything short of total incapacity to hinder its performance." So that was what he faced. Closed circuit destiny. But to let that noble r:reature simply lie there... "What kind of power source did the Jann employ?" "They normally used a unique powerpack whose secret expired with them," the translator said. "A tiny unit would sustain them in full activity for many centuries. In an emergency they were able to draw on almost any available source." Any source except sunlight, evidently, or the heat of the ground. Such recourse, however, had helped to recharge the Jann's unit, so that it could last forty centuries in spite of the short circuit. "How long before the next liner to the University of Dentistry, or that vicinity?" "Eighteen hours, approximately." Time enough. "Summon an individual floater for me, stocked with a spare charge-cell. I'll drive it myself." He knew that his status as a representative from a Galactic University guaranteed his credit. He could order virtually anything on the planet and have it delivered without protest or challenge. If his charges were excessive, the University would pay without a whimper, oven if it called him to account once he returned. The image must be protected. The floater was vaiting outside as he eased himself along on his blisters. He mounted. The controls were standard. In minutes he was back at the pit. The Jann lay where he had left it, spread unceremoniously face down. Its light glowed a trifle brighter, however, suggesting that its cell was recharging. Were it not for the temporary nature of ed, tht robot might eventually have recovered enough power to crawl out by itself. cell and set it beside the robot. "I have brought you a temporary power supply," he said. "This is not to imply that I approve of your attitude one bit -- but it is against my principles to IF let any creature suffer or perish, if I am able to prevent it. So here is your reprieve. By the time you hook it up, I'll be gone. You'll have to find your own permanent supply, as this will sustain you for oy a few hours." The Jann's shining hand moved toward the cell. And Ehllingham jumped into the floater and took off. "None but I..." he heard as he left. What kind of fool was he? This Jann intended to kill him, yet he had put it back in business. He knew the answer. He was the same fool who had thrown away his study time a year ago to help a disreputable Oyster who claimed to be in pain. That had worked out well for him, since that Oyster turned out to be the Director -- but he could count on no similar reprieve this time. He was dealing with an inflexible machine, not a subjective animate. He had better be off the planet before the Jann organized itself. "None but I..." overturning the floater. He was a mile from the pit and traveling at high speed, yet the Jann had sounded near at hand. He looked around nervously. "None but I shall do thee die." What he heard was the floater's transcoder. urally the Jann would be able to tap into the 'coder. Its body was one big electronic apparaUis. "I see you're back in form already," he replied. "And my thanks to thee, mortal. For the second time thou hast preserved me from a fate worse than destruction. Thy power cell is insufficient to sustain levitation but I can now walk to a better supply. Then shall I seek thee out, for none but I shall -- " "I understand." Levitation? The ham had never heard of this ability in a robot before. Probably the quaint-talking demon could catch him in the floater -- or anywhere else on the planet. He suddenly felt less secure. In fact, something very like a chilly perspiration was showing up. "How long will it take you to get better power?" "There is a Jann unit in serviceable condition buried within ten miles of me. Twenty minutes will suffice, counting the time required to drill down to it. Then shall I be fully mobile again." liner would not leave for nearly a day. T he spaceport was coming into sight. But where could he hide from a virtually omniscent robot? "Jann, are you sure you have to kill me?" "Mortal, I must kill thee, for so I have sworn." "There's no leeway, no loophole -- ?" "Only if thou shouldst die before I reach thee." "You couldn't just write this one off as a bad debt?" "None but I -- " "I remember the expression." Had he detected a note of regret? "I just thought circumstances might -- " "Shall do thee die." No -- the tone was final. "Jann, your oath to kill me was for the first time I saved you. Don't you owe me another oath for the second time?" "A long pause. "I had not thought of it, mortal. I shall give the prior oath: to fulfill three wishes. That should acquit me honorably." "Excellent. My first wish is to cancel the other oath." There was something like a chuckle. "Not so fast, mortal. Thou canst not gainsay a Jann oath in such fashion. Only after the first oath is done canst thou invoke the next." "But how can I invoke -- I mean, revoke it after I'm dead?" "Mortal, I did not write the Code of the Jann, I only obey it. First oath first." reached the center, paused to collect his morale and hurried to the ticket counter. "Book me aboard the first ship out of here. Anywhere. Is there one within fifteen minutes?" The blue robot with the rubberstamp digits looked startled. "Is something the matter, Director?" "Your Jann wants to kill me." "That's too bad. We were afraid of something like that. Do you mind removing yourself from the building before the Jann catches up to you? We're not insured against acts of war." "Acts of war?" "No peace treaty was ever concluded with the Jann, since we thought them extinct. So we're still at war. If it destroyed this station to get at you -- " useless to shout at a machine, but he was tempted. "Did it occur to you that the moment the Jann dispatches me, it will be free to resume full-scale hostilities against you too. Now if you'd like me to go out to meet it -- " "Oh, no -- it would be better if you lived for a while, at least until we can prepare our defenses." "Just put me on a ship fast and ham said dryly. Who would have expected . the quiet profession of prosthodontics to lead to this? He found himself aboard a scow lurching off to Hazard, a planet devoted largely to winter sports for woolly mammoths. At least it had an up-to-date spaceport, from there a simple matter to reIF embark for the University. Once home, he could check out ways to nullify the Jann, should it actually follow him into space. But why wait? "Creature-tocreature call to Director Oyster, School of Prosthodontics, University of Dentistry," he said to the translator. He identified himself for the charges. One thing about the translators -- they all seemed to know all languages. "Good to hear from you," Oyster said. Even in translation of a voice light-years distant, the clammish nuances typical of the speaker came through clearly. "How soon will you be back?" "Not soon enough. I'm afraid. You see. I'm headed in the wrong direction and -- " A rough nasal voice cut in. "We demand grades based on longevity, tuition reduction fordifficult courses. Furthermore -- " "Ridiculous," Oyster loudly exclaimed. "I'll make you a counteroffer -- longevity based on your grades and cessation of tuition after graduation. By that token you won't last long, Anteater, and the question of your graduation will be, if I may say so, academic." nized that voice now. Anteater had been one of the applicants in his own group, a year ago, and had cheated on the entrance exam though he hardly needed to. Now, evidently, he was leading a student demonstration. "Are you still there. Assistant?" Oyster inquired. "They have us locked up in an examination room. We need reinforcements." "Locked up? All your staff?" "All that happened to be on the premises when they broke through. I'm here with Purplesplotch, K-#, Honeycomb and Lightbulb. I'm not sure you know them." "I remember Honeycomb. He was one of my Admissions Advisory Council interviewers. That was an unforgettable -- " "We demand a full-credit sabbatical term every two years," Anteater said. "Sabbaticals? For students?" Oyster shouted back. "Our budget doesn't allow that for our instructors! You'll get a term at fulllabor in the University clink if you don't disperse this instant, though, I guarantee. Did you fix the Jaim?" that the last sentence was for him. He marveled at the Director's aplomb in this crossfire dialogue. "That's what I was calling about. The Jann is -- " "Hey! He's making an outside call!" another student cried. "The no-good sneak!" ham began. said. "I know him. A turncoat. Blank him off!" swore. A red light flickered on the translator chassis to signify the transmission of an obscenity. "Doctor, get back here as fast as you -- " "Oooo, what you said, Director," Anteater chided. The blahblah of an interference signal overrode the transmission and Dillingham could make out no more. He was on his own again -- and seemed in no more trouble than Oyster was. He hardly had time to disconnect before the translator spoke again. "None but I..." Oh, no. o you can tap into a spaceborne network too. You're pretty good for one who's been buried four thousand years." "I have been keeping up with developments, primitive as they are, despite the incapacity," the Jann said. "That's how you knew my language, even without a translator? You rifled my transcoder electronically before I ever bridged your tooth?" "Even so." "Then why don't you employ modem slang, instead of this fossil stuff?" "That would be out of character, mortal." "It seems out of character to me to kill the one who tried to help you. Twice. But of course I'm not a Jann, so I don't properly appreciate your mores." "I shall await thee on Hazard." comfortable. "You caught a faster ship?" "I am a faster ship." Worse and worse. The longrange problem had become shortrange again. He had thought of "levitation" as something similar to the action of a floater, strictly dependent on adequate ambient gas, i.e. air. He had underestimated the robot. He was tempted to ask the translator for advice, but realized that he could no longer trust it. Evidently his prior call had enabled the Jann to trace him, and now the robot would overhear anything he said. At worst, it might arrange to feed him false information, leading to the early fulfillment of the oath. He could not even converse with any crewmen or other passengers, since translation would be necessary. He was boxed in, and would have to get out of it by himself. But how? The Jann could track him whenever he used a translator or other communicator, and would be lying in wait for the ship at Hazard. "With abilities like yours, how did your kind lose the war?" Dillingham inquired. Since he could not hide from the giant, he might as well talk. There was always the chance that something useful would turn up, that would enable IF him to circumvent the murderoath. A straw -- but he had nothing else. "I have pondered that very question for some centuries," the Jann admitted. "Unfortunately, we of the mineral kingdom are not original thinkers. I was unable to come to any certain conclusion." Not original thinkers. That figured. A machine typically performed as instructed and had no imagination. But that realization only posed more questions. How could an entire machine culture evolve, without animate intervention? If one of its highest representatives, the Jann, could neither win a war nor comprehend why it had lost that war, what was its source of civilization? On the other hand, was his own planet dominated by original thinkers? "Were you able to come to any other than certain conclusion?" "I conjectured that we Jann, being advanced and peaceful, did not properly appreciate the capacity of an inferior species to do mischief. We believed that all robots shared our standards. So when we were attacked -- " "I had understood that you were the aggressors." "No, mortal. We governed the planet and all other planets in a range of an hundred light years. "We had done so for many millennia. We had no need of violence. It was our lesser mechanicals -- smaller robots we built as domestics and functionaries -- who rebelled. Before we fully appreciated the extent of their dastardy, we were undone." That was a different story from the one the contemporary robots told, yet it could be the truth. Winners always disparaged the motives and character of the losers. The Jann did appear to be a superior species, and it was more likely that the Jann could build lesser robots than that the lesser ones could build Jann. Except -- "If you built the other robots, who built you?" "We evolved, mortal. Natural selection -- " "Surely you don't, well, breed? So how can you evolve the way animates do?" "I never understood how the animates perform. No tools, no charts, no preparations; just a brief physical contact, even less than exchange of lubrication. Very untechnological. Quite sloppy, in fact. I once watched -- " "Never mind that. What about your own romantic life?" Ill T here was a pause. When the Jann spoke again, its voice was subdued. "How well I remember my Janni, her limbs of shinirg platinum, her teeth of iridium...and the little one we built together, pride of my nut and screw. My chart and hers, distinct but compatible -- we knew the cross between the two designs would generate a superior machine. But then the rebellion came and Janni was melted in an atomic furnace, and our son dismantled for parts for the usurper, while I lay helpless in the pit..." to say. This Jann, far from being a mindless monster, was as meaningful a personality as any true sentient. Were it not for that oath -- A burst of static emerged from the translator. What now? After a few seconds it subsided. "Ah, mortal, why did I not heed thy warning?" the Jann exclaimed. "Because your caution-circuit has been bridged out." "Vicious circle. The cold of space has fractured that bridge, and in a moment my tooth -- " ed that fate had given him yet another chance. The Jann would be immobilized again, this time in deep space. "Farewell, mort -- " Static cut off the rest. Evidently the cold had completed its work and the intermittent failure had become permanent. in silence, listening to the continuing static. He knew that every minute of it meant a minute of terrible suffering for the Jann. Unless something were done, the robot would drift through space forever, in an agony it hardly deserved. His own life was sweet and he had a promising future. Should he throw it all away -- again? "Clam chowder," he said at last. He put through a call to the spaceport at Hazard. "A derelict is moving in your direction and should pass within the range of your landing net in the next few hours. Intercept it and perform the following repair." He went on to describe the tooth-bridging operation. "Locate the appropriate replacement for the affected tooth, if you can, because there is an important circuit involved." "It shall be done. Director," the official said. "Where do you want the ship delivered after it has been repaired?" "It isn't a ship, exactly. It's a self-propelled robot. Let it go when you're through and charge the service to my University account." "Very well. Director." The official signed off. Once a fool, always a fool, he thought. He simply could not preserve his life at the cost of eternal torture for another creature, even an inanimate one. He wanted to live, certainly -- but the end did not justify the means. Hardly an attitude which a creature like Anteater, back at the IF University student demonstration, hardly comprehended it himself. Probably Anteater would outlive him... At any rate, he had a reprieve of a few hours, unless they rereached Hazard himself. He would have to gamble on getting in and out before the pursuit resumed. He still could not use the translator, because he knew the Jann was listening in even though it could not reply or act. Better to swear off such devices entirely, so that at least he would be hidden. He still was bottled in. He could not leave the ship before it landed. Once it landed, goodbye. Then he remembered the lifeboats. paperlike dental illustrations and began to draw on their blank backs. He took some pains, erasing frequently and redrawing. He wound up with several complex configurations. He left the compartment silently, using the emergency manual door control. He searched out the captain's cabin, used his knuckles to knock on the door, avoiding the electronic signaller. He moved out of range of the viewscreen pickup. He could, however, still see the screen's projected image. The screen came on and the captain's whiskery proboscis showed. There were sounds indicating a question, but since the hall translator had no object to fix on, it had to feed through the captain's native speech. Translators could perform moderate miracles, but were not equipped to play guessing games among the languages. word he said would be relayed straight to the Jann, as well as to the captain. After a moment the screen snapped off. False alarm, the captain had evidently decided. Then door again. After several repeats, the angry captain opened the door personally to investigate the nature of poked a sign around the comer, one of his ornate symbols. The officer paused, making no sound. Here was the test. Would he understand? He commanded a broken-down vessel and was largely over the hill himself -- but that should mean the captain had had over a century of experience, and that he had knock about the galaxy considerably. Such a creature should know the galactic graphics shorthand. The shorthand was a system of symbols based on meaning, not phonics. Just as the Chinese written language of Earth could be read by those speaking a number of dissimilar dialects and even Japanese, because each figure stood for a specific meaning and not a spoken sound -- in just this way the galactic shorthand was a universal written language. Any creature of the galaxy who could see at all could learn to read the symbols. The basic vocabulary had been carefully selected to apply even to languages that did not employ verbs, nouns and other common parts of speech. (In fact, the majority did languages represented an archaic fluke, as far as the galaxy was concerned. ) But not every individual bothered to master the shorthand. In fact, few other than traveling scholars retained proficiency in it, though every University had a mandatory freshman couse in it. Translators and transcoders were ubiquitous, so the written art languished -- particularly since there were also translators for written material that were just as efficient as the verbal ones. captain had had to poke into so many backward planets that the shorthand would have been a useful and necessary tool for him. his own just completed freshman course had made him proficient enough to be intelligible. He had been instructed by drags and suggestion and really did not know how much or well he knew. The captain angled one eyestalk around the corner. Below this floating eyeball was a tentacle looped around an old-fashioned short-range blaster -- the type of weapon useful for wiping out opposition without puncturing any vital pipes. The weapon ing and epidermis quickly, and kill him slowly, should it be fired. He stood absolutely still. The captain came around the corner and gestured down the hall. No word passed between them. They entered a blank cold cubicle. A single neon cast an eerie light on the single locked file cabinet. This was ancient equipment. The captain drew out a genuine physical metal key and unlocked the cabinet. He withdrew a bundle of cards. His tentacles riffed through them before selecting one. He held it up. It was a symbol in the shorthand, neatly printed, that said: The captain understood. The sharp old codger had already dimust have made an inquiry at Metallica, being too canny to accept a passenger without knowing exactly why the creature could not afford to wait for a better ship. had been the code for Emergency, modified by a qualifier reIF questing that no overt acknowledgment be made. It was essentially a wartime symbol, intended for use by a spy in enemy terri-. tory when open communication could mean discovery arid rapid oblivion. It was quite out of place in an old vessel on a milk-run -- but the experienced captain had put one and one together and come through. The captain named a figure for putting him ashore in a lifeboat. price seemed high. The old space salt led him to an airlock and installed him in a tiny compartment. The creature saw that he was securely strapped down, punched a destination without using the translator. So far so good -- since no communications equipment had been used, the Jann should have no idea what certain notion where the captain was sending him. The airlock closed, sealing him off. He felt a rough lurch as the lifeboat detached itself -- next a feeling of tremendous weight as its antique chemical rockets blasted. He was on his way. Now that it was too late to change his mind it occurred to him that it would have been easy for the captain to route the lifeboat into nowhere, claiming Dillingham was a suicide but still collecting the University remittance. The University would automatically challenge any payment under suspicious circumstances. The captain would be well aware of that. Foul play would be more trouble than it was worth. Anyway, the captain had an honest snout. on the viewscreen to see where he was going, because the Jann could probably tap into that too. He had to go blind, hoping that he was losing the Jann as effectively as he was confusing himself. Time passed. He slept while the boat sailed on. The craft was in free fall now, but he was not. The rotating hull provided partial weight. He dreamed of scintillating robots. Braking rockets jolted him into uncomfortable awareness. He was almost there -- he hoped on a civilized planet. Otherwise he had merely traded one demise for another. The landing was cruel. When the pressure and furor subsided and he regained consciousness, he struggled into a suit and cranked open the port. He still did not dare to use the powered equipment, for that would have required instructions over the translator. He was prepared to face a blizzard oi;an inferno or solid water. He was disappointed. The landscape was plainly Metallica. What had he really expected? Obviously the spaceship had not gone far during the short time he had been aboard. Naturally the lifeboat, being chemically underpowered, had taken much longer to traverse the same distance. Probably most of its thrust had been used merely reversing the initial inertia. The closest planet had to be the one he had just left, for space was large. And where was the Jann now? By this time the repair should have been completed... He smiled. The robot would be on Hazard, wondering what had become of a certain dentist. He contemplated the countryside. This was not the same section of the planet where he had found the robot. The vegetation was more richly metallic, the the green-copper lichen more abundant. There were rust-capped mountains, and a valley serviced by a bubbling diesel-fuel stream. And no sign of civilization. In short, a wilderness area. All very good. The Jann would eventually figure out the truth and come jetting back to Metlica, but would not find him. A planet was too big to search in a hurry. He had scrupulously operated no electronic equipment, so it could not trace him that way. Meanwhile, he had merely to avoid starvation. Behind him the lifeboat translator crackled into life, though he #g had not turned it on. "None but I..." Oh-oh. That was another talent he had not known about. The Jann could not only tap into communications, it could operate them remotely. Thus it had established its rapport with the lifeboat translator and would home in on it. That simple. "How long before you get here?" he inquired with prickly resignation. The robot must have obtained the registry of the lifeboat and learned the frequency of its translator. "Seventeen minutes, mortal. Take care that no harm comes to thee in the interim, for I would suffer sorely were mine oath abridged." "Thine oath be damned." Dillingham shouted, and immediately wondered whether he could have accomplished anything by threatening suicide. Probably not, since the robot would check it out before indulging in other pursuits. Anyway, he'd haye to write out a Last Will  Testament specifying what his three wishes were, for the sake of the second oath, and the disposition of the wealth owing from the third oath. Death was all too complicated. IV ticking away. Such a short time to hide himself in this brush, IF away from the lifeboat. Unless he wanted to stay and face down the Jann... Useless. A machine could not be bluffed. On the other hand, if he did succeed in eluding it, what would be gain? A tedious expiration from hunger and thirst? Yet opposing the thing physically was out of the question. He was forty-two years old and even in youth had never been the robust type. The Jann had powers beyond those of any man. His only real chance was to outsmart it. For all its talents, it did not seem particularly bright, or he never would have escaped it this long. It could easily have interfered with the lifeboat's guidance system and made it crash, for example, had it deduced his whereabouts soon enough. Or prevented him from ever boarding the scow to Hazard, by fouling up the spaceport translators. It had missed marvelous opportunities. Also, it seemed to feel obliged to answer all questions put to it. That was another machine trait. Probably it was incapable of lying, or of evading the truth, unlike the inferior contemporary robots. That could be its Achilles' heel. "Why didn't you foul up the spaceport's communications network, to prevent me from leaving Metallica?" he asked. Might as well keep probing. "That would have interfered with thy freedom of motion." "What do you care where I want to go, since you intend to kill me anyway?" "The rights of a sentient creature may not be voided, mortal, unless directly contrary to a specific Jann oath. So it is recorded, so must it be. Wherever thou art, there will I find thee and there will I do thee die. Then will I grant thee three wishes, for the second time thou savest me -- " "And then enrich me forever and ever, for the third time. I know." "Then only will the oaths be acquitted and I free." This didn't seem to be getting him anywhere. He already knew the robot was impervious to irony about the feasibility of the remaining boons after the first had been accomplished. Probably there were Jann statutes to cover the situation even if he never mentioned the oaths in his will. Only about ten minutes were left. His stomach felt like a sponge full of pepper-sauce and his brain not much better. He had a feeling that he would rest easier if he simply accepted what was to be but his innards would not cooperate. "How can I stop you from killing me?" he blurted. "I cannot tell thee that, mortal, for it would violate the letter of the oath." "So there is a way?" "I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might tend to compromise mine oath, or le#id in some devious way to -- " "Oh, shut up!" Why had he bothered to try? And to add insult, he found the Jann's occasional use of "mine" in place of "my" irritating. At least the machine should be consistent. But there was a way, he saw abruptly. The Jann had tried to evade the issue, but had bungled it. If only he could figure out the loophole, or trick the machine into telling him. Perhaps it even wanted to tell him, but was prevented by its metallic code of ethics. He needed time to think. He had barely five minutes left -- but if he managed to hide, he might have a couple of days before the end. Perhaps growing hunger would sharpen his imagination. The lifeboat had a supply of bulged, looked for a container to carry some with him and finally set off frustrated. No time. The brush was thick, away from the section the rockets had blasted clear. A number of the flower filaments gave off heat, which was another break. The Jann would have a tough time picking him out by body warmth. He heard a peculiar swish in the direction of the lifeboat and could not resist looking back. Sure enough, the Jann was coming down, resplendent in the sunlight. It was vertical, descending feet first, like a shining god. No jets were visible. To think that this thing had been built by loving mechanical parents before true civilization ever evolved on Earth. It was still far ahead of anything Earth science knew. Yet it was determined to kill its benefactor. He broke from his reverie and moved on, carefully and quickly now. He hoped the Jann was not equipped to sniff out his trml, like a bloodhound. He could hear it casting about in the wrong direction. Then it appeared in the sky again, swinging a pinkish beam of lit. Dillingham ducked behind a humming iron tree until the way was clear. A lightbeam that was visible in broad sunlight was probably worth avoiding. Suddenly he encountered an animal, a robot-beast, its scales burnished copper, its teeth stainless steel, its eyes white-hot filaments. He hardly had time to marvel that it should so strongly resemble an Earthly carnivore, before it sprang. H e dodged back instinctively and caught hold of an aluminum sapling to pull himself away. The creature ground gears and spun about as it touched ground, but its momentum prevented it from leaping again immediately. IF It had . little wheels where footpads would have been in a living predator, and what looked like shock absorbers in the ankles. What possible use would it have for his ien flesh? But he dived for a larger trunk and scrambled up its knobby bark as the beast came at him. Now he regretted imbibing all that water, he was weak and heavy, and he sloshed inside. But the thing after him was, after all, an animal, and probably attacked anything that invaded its hunting ground -- even ham should rust its tongue rapidly. The jaws snapped just beneath him and a jet of hot air scorched his posterior. Air-cooling, probably -- but it w'as reminiscent of breath. Wire tendrils vwfefe  drofypmg onhim from the tree's tinsel foliage. They coiled like corkscrews, and a slickness glistened on their points. Acid, surely... Below, the animal Opened its jaws. DiUingham could see right down its throat. It resembled a sausage-grinder. He was trapped. The first treewire . touched his head, and he smelled burning hair and felt a sharp pain as though a magnifying glass were focused on that spot. He jerked away... toward the grinning beast. "Help!" he cried, not caring how inane he sounded. And the Jann came. In seconds it had whistled through the brush and was beside the tree. A lance of fire from its chest melted the face of the animal. Ear-splitting sonids from its head caused the tree's wires to retreat hastily. "None but I shall do thee die!" it bellowed. closed his eyes, knowing the end had come. Metal pincers closed on his body, lifted. For a moment he dangled, then he felt the ground under his feet. The Jann let go. "I wish you'd get it over with," "First must I grant thee one token boon, before I do thee die. Thou needs must make thy request within fifteen seconds, according to Jannish custom." It began ticking, one tick per second. Fifteen seconds to think of the loophole, when he hadn't been able to do it in the past day. Ten seconds. The Jann was aiming its chest-nozzle at him. Five. His mind was numb... "A postponement," he cried. "Granted," the Jann said. "How long?" Ah, foolishness. "Fifty years?" He waited for the derisive bolt of heat, but it did not come. "Granted, mortal." -- you'll wait?" It almost seemed that the metal face was smiling. The mouth, was open, at any rate, and the frjeshly bridged tooth was visible. Apparently the Hazard spaceshop had not been able to procure a replacement. "Originally I contemplated a shorter period, but I perceived that this would be an injustice. Thou art not the fortunehunter I expected, nor yet the fool I suspected. And we Jann are not unmindful of honest courtesies rendered." minded of Oyster, whose me of operation had a certain similarity to this. He hoped he never encountered another such mind. "So you modified the spirit of the oath slightly," he suggested, "if not the letter." "And I could not tell thee," (Please turn to page #) IF If the last man on Earth finds the last woman, can they suiviye -- each other? M utated grass rustled above bomb-scorched brown earth. Footprints faded near a crumbling highway at the city's edge. At night the glow warned travelers away. By day the city's charred skeleton told passersby of the death waiting them inside. A silence as vast as the sky filled the city's cracking streets. Here a rat scurried and there a sparrow fluttered. The dead city had life but its sole human citizen was lonely and old. Canvas bag strapped over a thin shoulder, Justin Parker stepped through the grocery window, kicking aside chunks of broken plate glass. Fine dust coated the interior. It formed a sJwirling cloud that threatened to choke him. He walked silently. It seemed almost a sin to make noise in this place. A rat shrilled. Two thin rats fought in a corner in the sunlight. One collapsed as he watched. A darkness spread to stain the dust-thick floor. The victor began to gnaw its comrade. Justin realized bitterly that only the strong survived. He shook his head. The past, he reminded himself, was dead. He lived better in the city than he could live outside. Food was always at hand. His grandchildren were buried here somewhere in the mass of rubble. The radiation had sterilized him but he was too old to care. The rat squeaked in pain. Several red ants -- inch-long brutes -- swarmed in the rat's thin fur. It shrilled and slashed at its back. Cut in halves, one ant fluttered to the floor. The rat scurried past a counter and vanished. More long ants appeared and scuttled toward the dead rat. They began to strip off its flesh. Justin felt mild amazement. Those ants were abnormal. Dried bones crunched under his thin tennis shoes as he walked to a counter. He lifted a sun-blanched can, blew off dust. The city's creatures were starving with food all around them. But he was a man and he could open the cans. Food and lonely silence filled the dead city. He turned the can thoughtfully. The veins showed blue through the weathered skin on the back of his hand. "Peas," he murmured, reading the faded label. Age had not yet destroyed his eyesight. After filling his canvas bag with various cans he looked behind the register for ammunition. Currently he possessed only three bullets for his stub-nosed .#. He found no replacements. The department stores would furnish him with weapons and ammo. The sun was in mid-morning and he had the rest of the day for exploration and salvage on NW # Street. This grocery was his first building -- there were countless others. He left as he had come, through' the window. The street was ugly with blasted warehouses and twisted service stations. He was several hours away from the home he had made in the basement of a branch public library. Something crawled up his leg. Whipping out his hunting knife, he slashed. A red ant dropped to the pavement, abdomen ripped. Regaining its feet, it scurried back toward him. He ground it beneath his tennis shoe, and the chitin snapped. Sheathing his knife, he looked about. or seven red ants scurried up the street, now and then skirting IF a rain hole in the pavement. Puzzled, he frowned. Ants did not normally travel in groups like that. In fact, they all should have starved. There was not enough unpackaged food in the huge dead city to support even three antbeds, much less beds as many as theirs would have to be. He gazed idly down the street. It flowed red with a carpet of the overgrown ants. The swarming mass was less than a block away. They were looking for food, too, and -- he grinned -- with that formation they were bound to find some, at least a rat or two. They were no real bother, he decided, but he could not stay on that street. Shrugging, he crossed it slowly and headed for the next one over -- NW #. This carried him farther toward the center of the city and farther from his home but that would not matter. Those -- he grinned wryly -- sure had been a lot of ants. He had not realized the city held so many. He came to a comer, stepped into the street and glanced down it. More ants. This time he frowned. This carpet of aiits was closer than the one behind him -- about three-fourths of a block away. "Damn them," he murmured mildly. They were disrupting his schedule. He had set aside this day for the exploration and salvage of NW # th Street. Thirteen -- this was his unlucky day. But as soon as the ants passed he could resume his schuled exploration. He crossed over to NW #I . "Damn," he murmured. The swarming carpet was still there. This group, though, was barely more than a half block away. Ants three blocks wide. He shook his head -- that was too many ants. His canvas bag grew heavy. Easing its rope to a less tender spot on his left shoulder, he crossed over to NW #th. Ants. The carpet was there, too -- and even closer. He glared at the swarming mass. This had ceased to be a joke. Irritated, he glanced aroimd. Home was far behind -- toward the dead zone -- and he still needed more ammo. Since his fight with a dog pack he had only a box of shotgun shells left. But certainly with the ants spread out all over, he could not look for any. Pain burned his right leg. He slapped. An ant crunched beneath his fingers. Several others scurried at his feet. He squashed them, mbbing at the burning lump. He eyed the flowing red sea up the street. He estimated more a bit. He eased it back up on his left shoulder. Like him, the ants were searching for food. The sting hurt. He scratched it again. "Damn beggar," he grumbled softly. Warily he watched the scurrying sea. It came at a good rate, he realized suddenly. Almost too fast. But the ants were too slow to outrace a human, he knew. He crossed over to NW #th Street, grinning again. The ants there were a quarter block away. He frowned. His heart began to leap and he felt the first tuggings of a worry he dared not face. Quickly he strode to NW #. The red sea was scant feet away. He swallowed grimly. The mass had to have an ending -- it could not go on forever. Several ants crawled on his tennis shoes. Stomping them off, he trotted briskly toward NW #. The ants were flowing past it. He froze, staring in dismay. NW #, #, # -- all flowed red. Trapped... He whirled. The red sea flowed slowly into the intersection of NW #. He had to get home. He ran to NW #, skirted the forward ranks and raced on to NW #. The ant carpet filled that intersection, but he smashed through, running to NW #. He was two hours away from home -- maybe too far. NW # was blocked -- as were NW #, #, #. The red sea now milled about his feet but he stomped hard and the ants could not climb up his tennis shoes. He raced up NW # and passed the sea within a block. He slowed. H e could not stop. But the ants were no r danger. He could outrun them and they could not catch him even if he walked. All he had to do was keep ahead of them. In fact, he realized, whenever he wanted to he could even dart into a building and they would never find him. Walking easily backward and panting some to catch his breath, he watched the slow, ponderous advance. The ants, he noticed uneasily, were entering the buildings, scurrying under doors or up walls to drop through the broken windows. Maybe they even went upstairs -- their negligible weight made their going into buildings not dangerous. The twenty-megaton blast that had left a two-mile crater where an underground missile base had been had also damaged the above-ground floors of many buildings northwest of #th Street. Justin wore scars from one bad fall. The ants came faster than he had thought they could. Turning, he hurried past several warehouses and a small grocery. The sun had baked large cracks into the pavement and the rains had worn out large holes. There was no street repair crew to care for the city but there were no people to use IF the streets either. He turned again, walking slowly backward in order to watch the ants. They fascinated him. The advance guard came to the holes and skirted them. The forward ranks tried to climb down, fell, climbed out, resumed their slow march forward. Later arrivals -- the masses -- tumbled in and could not make it out. Slowly the holes filled with struggling ants -- they formed a living pavement for the ones in back. He shook his head at the fascinating sight. Suddenly the pavement crumbled beneath him. He fell, his back slamming the street. The canvas bag of cans smashed into his left side, crashing the pocketed stub-nosed revolver into his thigh. He groaned, blinking at the morning sun. Rame seared his legs. He stared, blinking away pain tears. His feet and part of his legs were sinking into the red sea. He cried out in stunned horror. Hurtling to his feet, he stamped the pavement so hard his soles hurt. Frantically he beat at the ants. Some fell, others clung, stinging his hands. The red sea reached him and flowed past. He ran. Warehouses flashed by. Ants clung to his thin, hairless legs -- biting, stinging, stinging, stinging. He spotted a deep hole, in the sidewalk filled with clear water. He almost stopped but there was mud at the bottom. Mud nieant settled, radioactive particles and these could enter the cuts in his skin. At the next comer, beside a three-story GE warehouse, sat a small Gulf station with two pumps. Gasoline,... He ran to the nearest pump. The rubberized plastic hose had cracked but it was not brittle. Twisting everything that could be twisted, he pounded here and there. Suddenly gasoline sprayed out of the nozzle and out of twenty places on the hose. Time had built up a great deal of pressure in the storage tank. He sprayed the gas over his legs and the cuts burned worse. But the ants died. Shutting off the hose, he dropped it. His canvas bag fell and he sank to the concrete beside it. His heart raced to catch up with the old body's demands. His back felt wrenched. He pulled up his tom pants and picked off the dead ants. His legs were red and swollen. He knew the poison had given him a fever. His left thigh ached badly and both elbows bled. He could not go on much farther, he realized, and glanced back. T he red sea swarmed five blocks away. Was that as far as he had run? He swallowed his pain. He might die hideously unless he found safety. The Gulf Station was a small building with a flat gravel roof -- but the ants could climb its walls and the roof would offer no safety. He closed his eyes. Please, God, Let me think... Opening his eyes, he gazed at his thin hands, spotted brown with age. Perhaps he had lived long enough. He laughed sardonically and rose. No man lived long enough. He gazed around. He saw two gasoline punips, a large rack of rusting oil cans between them. The gas could kill the ants but how long would the tank's contents last? He had no idea. The buildings were not safe. Shock, time and weather had weakened them. His glance fell again to the rack of rusting oil cans. What if He shot to his feet. What if the oil could keep the ants off? He could not pour it on himself -- but what if he coated the eaves? He found an aluminum ladder, under a rotting tarp. It was sturdy. He put it against the eaves and climbed to the roof. The gravel was dirty but the footing was solid. He took his canvas bag and all the oil cans he could carry to the roof. The top cans on the rack had rusted through and broke when he pried them free but the other cans were good. He pulled the ladder up after him, gazed down at the ants. They were less than a block away... He ran a dirty hand through his thin white hair, grinned at the swarming red mass. "Try and get me now," he challenged, chuckling. He punched two holes into one of the cans, walked to the edge of the roof and started coating the eaves. Here and there he poured too heavily and some dripped to the concrete below. The job took three cans. He tossed the empties into the street. The red advance guard was racing across the pavement. A group of five reached the station wall and began to climb it. They recoiled from the oil. The front ranks reached the gas pumps. They skirted the gas puddle where he had hosed off his legs and went on. Later ranks tried to avoid the puddle but some were pushed into it. More and more fell in to struggle and die. The gasoline puddle vanished. The twin pumps slowly developed a flowing red coat. TTie oil cans in the street #sank beneath the surging sea. Three sides of the station flowed with ants. Some pushed their way into the oil, struggled and slowly drowned. Ottiers crawled over the dying bodies and forced their way up higher. Tlie red slashes thickened as the ants fought to reach the roof. Suddenly they slid. The oil oozed from the eaves, carrying IF the ants with it. The mess splattered to the concrete below. Justin went over his defenses again, reenforcing the places where the oil had grown too thin. The last wall became spotted with inquisitive members of the red army. Startled, he looked around. Again he heard the scream. "Here!" he shouted. The next screams neared. He saw her a block down NW I #. He yelled, waving. She saw him, ran forward. She was blond. Her legs were covered with ants. A pouch slapped at her side. When she was close enough, he dropped the ladder. Ants began scurrying up it. She fell! She screamed, staggered to her feet, beating at her left side. It swarmed with red ants. He gazed in stunned horror. The gasoline,... He hurried down the ladder, scrambled to a pump. "Qose your eyes," he yelled, slapping the ants off the pump and turning the handle. His legs were on fire again -- the ants had reached him. Gasoline sprayed out the nozzle. He hosed his legs, then turned it on her. She groaned at the added pain of the gas. Hosing a path for both of them to the ladder, he dropped the nozzle. The gas spewed, then suddenly dropped to a thin trickle. The tank was spent "Get to the roof -- " She nodded and staggered to the ladder. Racing forward, he helped her climb. She was light. Her hair was long, sun-blanched. Pulling up the ladder, he coolly crushed the ants that clung to it. Using his knife, he opened another quart of oil and went over the defenses again. The woman sat beside the cans, rubbing her swollen legs. "I'm Justin -- ah -- " He frowned, trying to remember. How many times had he recently thought of his name? "Oh -- Parker. Justin Parker." He grinned at her. "Almost forgot it there." She did not smile. Someone had used a knife on her face and the scars had never left. Pocks covered the remaining areas. Her hard gray eyes watched him. Below them her mouth was steel cold. Her brown skin pouch, purse he supposed, rested at her side. "Sorry about those ants," he said, walking over to her. "The stings must hurt." He kneeled beside her. His own legs ached so he could scarcely keep from screaming. "No." Her voice was a loud monotone -- flat, even ugly. "I ignore the pain. The bites do not hurt me as they do you." He grinned. "I should not." Her gray eyes watched him steadily euid she did not smile. "Men cannot take pain. I am a woman and I can." Her voice held the faintest traces of pride. "I'm surprised you're not lying on the ground, yelling." "I'd sure enough like to," he replied with a smile. Rising, he took another can and went back to the eaves. The ants would be on the roof if he ignored the defense. "I'm surprised there are any men here," she stated in her unemotional monotone. "The ones who were chasing me stopped at the city's edge." "You're lucky you got away from them," he said politely. The streetside wall had the thickest coating of ants. In two places they almost came to the roof. "It was not luck," she replied. "I'm braver and stronger -- men are weak fools." "I guess so," he said easily, splashing oil on the two dangerous spots. "It is true," she stated. "At one time I had five of you for slaves but one escaped. I had to kill him." "Where are they now?" he asked in curiosity. He could not believe life outside had become that hard. Slavery? "They died," she said calmly. "Their hearts were not strong and they lost too much blood when I beat them. Then a gang took me and I escaped. That is why I am here." Her voice held no emotion at all -- she was merely telling facts. "I would not have their babies. I'm not a mother." "Can't blame you," he replied. Below, the ants were avoiding the gasoline pools on the concrete. "Well," he cried in mild suprise. "Look there!" T he ants carried tiny bundles wrapped in fragments of grocery bags. Here and there he spotted the winged back of a young king or queen. The woman stepped up to him. "So?" Her monotone sounded disgusted. He glanced up. Her face seemed dead under her gently waving blond hair. "They're carrying bundles," he explained. She turned and walked back to the pile of cans and sat down. "It's a discovery," he added. "Like when we discovered fire." "Oh? Where do you live?" Her voice held no interest. "NW Fifty-eighth Street and Thomas Avenue," he replied. "In the dead zone." He grinned. "Got a nice place there. Basement of a -- " "Oh?" Her rocky eyes watched him. "How did you survive so long?" Shrugging, he poured out the last of the oil, tossed the can to IF the street. The swirling red sea covered it instantly. "I managed," he said. Running his left hand through his thin white hair, he touched the bullet scar hidden there. "Lucky, I guess." She disdained making any rejoinder. "Hey," he "aid in astonishment. "Look at that, will you?" He kneeled at the edge of the roof. The red ants had passed. Behind them came a flowing, swirling sea of black ones. Several yards separated the two armies and, as he watched, the black advance guard went too far and brushed against the red rear guard. The reds attacked and the blacks fell back. Even hungry, the two were enemies. He shook his head. "Sort of reminds you of the War, doesn't it?" he said, glancing back. Her right hand rested in her pouch. "I don't think you're fit," she stated. Her voice seemed as dry and cold as ever. "Only the strongest can survive. You're not strong. You are too old, too thin. You are not fit. You cannot survive. I do not know how you survived so far." He shrugged. "It doesn't take muscle to survive here," he replied. Something in her voice sounded dangerous. She faced his right side but, from where he knelt, she could not see his left. Slowly he reached into his left pocket and grasped the worn handle of his revolver. "You've survived," he added to keep her talking. "So you must know that." Easing the .# out of the leather lining of his pocket, he lowered it to the gravel by his feet. She frowned and he froze. "You're right," she stated emotionlessly. He relaxed. She was worried about his words, not his actions. "I'm not tremendously strong but I have great powers of endurance." She touched a swelling on her left cheek. "I can stand the pain of this ant bite. No man can endure what a woman can." Her right hand came out of her pouch. It held a .# revolver. "A man's only purpose is to be a slave and do heavy work -- but you are unfit." She raised her revolver. "I shall kill you," she stated in her emotionless monotone. H IS .# rested easily in his hand. He smiled at her. "Please don't," he said. The revolver remained level. "You will be alone if you kill me," he added. He did not want to kill her. The War had caused enough death. "No," she replied in her monotone. "I will find 'another man to get my food. You're too weak. I cannot use you." "What's your name?" he asked suddenly. "Edith -- " she broke off. "That's not your business." He cx)uld detect a bit of irritation. "Edith what?" He watched her. She could fire whenever she decided to. But Death was not a way of life. "Edith -- Randal," she replied. Her voice held a bit of pride. Pride? Was pride her weakness? "Edith," he repeated and smiled. "You know, that's German for 'rich-war.' " "Oh?" Suddenly her gray eyes seemed to light. The revolver began to sag in her slender hand. "Yes," he said. "And Randal is -- let's see." He paused and she leaned forward slightly. The revolver sagged a fraction more and he gathered his legs for a leap. "Oh, yes. That's Anglo-Saxon for 'shield-wolf.' " He grinned disalarmingly. " 'Rich-war, shieldwolf.' You have a very strong name." He nodded his approval and her head bobbed slightly in acknowledgment. "You should be proud of a name like that." Her lips twitched. She looked like a snake trying to smile. Her attention was completely on him. It was time. Suddenly widening his eyes he started, staring past her. "Behind you," he shouted. She whirled, firing at the empty air. Dropping his revolver, he leaped. He hit and roUed, turning her under him. She shrieked and scratched at his face. He tore the .# free and hurled it to the street. She squirmed in the gravel, trying to bite him. He grabbed her hair. She growled like an animal. Her fingernails slashed his cheeks. He caught her hands, sat on her belly and waited. She tried to knee him. He bounced once. She gasped for air and lay still. He waited, but she did not struggle. Her stony eyes glared at him. "Go ahead, man," she said without any emotion. "Take me." He grinned in amusement. "I'll take you home," he amended, slowly easing off her. She did lie quietly. "I have some medicine there that'll take care of those ant stings." He smiled warmly. "You'll feel like a new woman." Her eyes gave no sign of any emotion. He stood up. She did not move. "You'll really like the home," he added, walking back for his .#. "I've got the finest bed there I could find in this whole city -- but that'll be yours." He picked it up. "Along with the whole room." He turned. "How -- " She held his hunting knife. Her hand was back to throw it. He shouted and hurtled to one IF side. He fell, rolled, stopped, revolver waist-high and ready. She had not thrown. Suddenly she smiled. "Man, you die!" He fired. One shot was all it took. Rising, he picked up his knife and slid it back into its scabbard. Slipping his revolver back into his left pocket, he looked down. A few feet from her body lay a small splatter of brains and blond hair from his bullet's exit Slowly he kneeled beside her. She was the third human he had killed. The act was always pointless. The War was pointless -- and so were the actions of the ants below. He crossed her thin arms over her chest. "Forgive her, God," he murmured softly. B elow, the black ants were carrying little bundles wrapped in brown paper, just as the red ants had done earlier. He kneeled at the edge of the roof and looked down. What, he wondered, could those bundles be? Intermixed with the package carriers were the young king and queen ants. King and queen? Male and female. Those bimdles held eggs -- protected from the sun. "I'll be damned," he murmured in pleasure. The ants were learning The black ants passed and behind them came small jelly-brown ones. The brown ants' advance guard touched the rear guard of the black army. No -- he looked closer. It did not just touch. Ther small brown ants mixed with the black ones -- and they were not fighting. For the briefest of instants he closed his eyes. "Thank you, God," he whispered. He sat down beside his canvas bag and watched the passing brown sea. They were hungry. He touched the canvas bag. They were hungry in a city of food. He pulled out a can of. peas, looked at it and at his old, thin hand. They were hungry. He hurled the can into the street below. It broke and the peas and juice spread out into a pool. The brown specks swarmed over it. He hurled another, then another. When the brown sea had passed the cans were bare. Rubbing his aching legs, he stared at the empty street. What, he wondered, would they discover next? The wheel? Fire? Lowering the ladder, he slung his empty canvas bag over his thin shoulder and descended. The sun showed late afternoon. He had wasted the day. He shrugged. Tomorrow would be another. Resting a hand on a gas pump, he glanced back at the Gulf station roof. Another very lonely day. He walked home.  This interstellar real estate game is played with planets for marbles, but for values still found only I the bus in the light wind, dropped the stabilizing bars between rows, set a slight negative buoyancy and drilled the hole neck deep. He climbed into the plastic sack and held it up with one hand while he hooked his arm over the boom bar. Ed Deasy took the controls and lowered him into the hole. Jane Clapperton held the sack around his neck and released the expanded mica that buried him in the row of brabbage. They had used sand at first instead of mica, but the sand compacted too much. She then looked at Niall doubtfully, released the delivery tube to suck itself back into the bus and smoothed the mica around his head. It was a dramatic and effective demonstration of what the picker could do -- a human head in a row of brabbage heads. Theoretically at least, the picker would recognize it and pass, not harming it. Niall grinned at the farmers in front of him and twisted his neck to watch Jane walk down the row to the harvester. Ed Deasy lifted the bus and let it drift with the wind before he swung it around the spectators and set it down behind them. The city manager of Hydspe squatted down beside Niall. "How's that foxy bastard, Billy Ballod, these days?" he asked. "No change. Full of hell. What I want to know is why does my nose start itching as soon as I get buried?" The city manager rubbed it with the back of his hand and said, "Have you signed a new contract yet?" I'm not tampering, Niall, but if you haven't, let us put in a bid. I know your time is up tomorrow and there's no renewal option. We don't expect anything like brabbage, of course, but we like your team well enough to make a very attractive offer." "Oh, I don't know," said Niall. "There are a couple of interesting crops we haven't had time to introduce at Avelou. But the three of us figure to go off planet and maybe back to College Station before we go out for bid again. We saved a little money on this contract." "I heard you weren't entirely broke. You think about it. You let us know." He rubbed Niall's nose again before he stepped back with his farmers. t Ct adies and gentlemen," said L Niall, looking up at them from the ground, "this particular field is Avelou seventy-seventy-two brabbage, developed by Jane Clapperton for machine harvesting. It allows a plant population of up to fifty-one thousand heads per hectare. You and I know how good Weather Control is, how you stagger planting for a three-month harvest and get jammed into a two-month period. This is part of why brabbage has been so expensive. And in the state of the art, every city on the planet -- except Avelou -- wisely demands a catch fence to keep the brabbage where it belongs. Since brabbage must be planted on new ground for optimum results, it's not cheap." "You can rotate back every five years," said a farmer. "So you build and maintain five fences instead of none," said Niall. He had an itch above his right ear. The whole demonstration could have been taped but even a three-sixty-degree projection had nowhere near the impact of the real thing out in the valley, downwind of Hydspe, with the tall mesh fences cutting the sky. "With the seventy-seventy-two and the harvester," Niall continued, "you can plant fifteen hectares for every harvester you own. In the open. This allows one hundred per cent safety margin before bolting. Avelou will bond you against any damage on the basis of the harvester recorder." The city manager quoted the truism: "Machines are made by men." "The bond holds. We have a ten-hour repair service to any growing area on Nicosea. If it's a major breakdown we bring a new machine to finish the job. The price of the rig includes a warranty -- also recorded at the Central Bank -- and a repair inspection and certification by us during the off season." "Will you sell the seed separately?" Niall grinned. "You bet we will. But if you plan on machine harvest, just as a friendly suggestion, make damn sure you have somebody like Ed Deasy design your machine. The programing gets a little complex. Did you hear about those greedy people over at Drahnko seventy years ago? No fences, late rain, warm weather. The brabbage berfted. Women and children moved into the city hall and they cleaned the fSters every hour on the hour. Every man was outside in protective gear with a flamethrower for six weeks. You can't trust brabbage." Niall paused. "Other questions? All right, Jane, let her roll." The great red harvester with Avelou's gold circle A on the nose started down the row. One of the farmers asked, "Are you positive this thing works?" Niall grinned. "To tell you the whole truth, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to make sure my head is on straight." The farmers laughed. They were a little apprehensive. This was one demonstration that really held their interest. "There are four tests for every head, just as you pick it yourself: color, conformity, solidity and scent. My head's the wrong color; it's irregular, far too solid and no one ever said I smell as nice as a ripe brabbage." Another nervous laugh from the spectators. "This is about our thirty-fifth demonstration. So far I've got the same old head." B rabbage is a plant native to Nicosea and is as interesting to most human beings as catnip to most cats. It is remarkable for its catholic intake of trace elements, including copper, iodine, iron, manganese, zinc, molybderum, cobalt and selenium, with an inhibitory system that limits the IF intake below human toxicity levels in even mineral-rich soils. It contains vitamins A, D, E, K and all of the B complex. Ascorbic acid is adequate at harvest but is lost rapidly in storage. It is low in fats, high in carbohydrates. It is an indicator of lithium in its native condition -- and while it grows well in spodumene, lepiodolite or tetalite, it reaches optimum size in amblygonite. The period of maturity is brief and varies remarkably with the individual plant, with seed, soil, weather and microecological conbelfore maturity, it is slimy. If it bolts, it is actively dangerous. Because of the high solids content, the tissue-thin leaves do not shrink a great deal when dry and the rate of decay is slow. Tenmeter drifts of brabbage leaves have been reported on Jalka Island. The island has never been settled. The leaves barbelate when dry and fragment as they are spun by the wind. In addition, there are three to five hook-shaped seeds on the edge of each leaf, and while the toxin they contain at bolting is not excessively virulent, many a man has died from a thousand needle-hook seeds in his exposed skin. But in the short period, of full maturity between slime and bolting, it is the most attractive vegetable food known to man. "That rig is picking every head," said a farmer. "It's taking every head," shouted Jane Clapperton. "Crawfurd, the odds aren't that good!" "It's the seventy-seventy-two strain," Niall reassured them all. "Did I tell you that the seventyseventy-two hold for up to fifteen weeks in CA storage?" The temperature should be between -- " "I can't stop it!" Jane was struggling with the manual override. "Ed! Ed! Master control!" Deasy sprinted wildly for the back of the bus, leaping over amblygonite containers, shovels, seed vacuums, a dusting skip, the concentrate spray rig and all the other deck paraphernalia. "Box is ginunicked! Won't turn off!" Niall had a glimpse of Jane tearing at the controls cover before the positioning wings shut off the world. The color-sensing circuit passed, the conformity fingers brushed him gently and the amylester analyzer sniffed. The whining saw bar swung down. The great red harvester moved on. "Deary -- medeary -- medeary," babbled a husky farmer. Jane tore out the micrommiaturized computer and the machine stopped. The men swarmed around the harvester and onto it. With set jaw and a white face she tripped the toggle that opened the hopper. The harvested heads lay in cradled rows. Brabbage is tender at maturity and the market value is determined to a degree by the amount of bruising. Bruises make for offflavor and go deep. The stem is fibrous and is covered with an extremely hard dermal layer. Hand harvesting is done by two men, one with a power saw and the other holding the head. The brabbage in the hopper was clean cut and unbruised. There was a wasp-buzz of horror and one of the women bit off a shriek. Ed Deasy was beside Jane now, and he slowly reached into the hopper and pushed the local control knob that activated the elevators. There was dead silence as the machinery brought up and cradled the last picked heads. II E rasmus Ballod stood at a window overlooking Avelou and said mournfully, "How can they do this to me? I treat them like two sons and a daughter and this is the thanks I get." His shoulders slumped in self-pity. Aside from the central service core, the mayor's quarters were open. His greatest pleasure was to look out over his city. He had commissioned sixty-four peegee units at College Station after finding and looting an undiscovered outrider planet. He had acquired Avelou and rebuilt the city on the hills above the bay with a permanent gravity unit under each building. It was quite economical. Just drill a hole, drop in a unit and layer your offices or apartments above it. The buildings stuck out in all directions, each one vertical to the people inside, with the rest of Nicosea tilted. Avelou was unique in the Comity of Worlds. City planners and architectural critics applauded or deplored it about equally. City hall alone was vertical to the horizon and Ballod lived on the top floor. He was amused by the critics and the birds, who took careless liberties with other cities but became flummoxed in the gravitic fields above Avelou. A fish-eating neagle lurched by with comical screams of outrage. Ballod ignored him. "I don't expect gratitude," he whined. "Just a little kindliness, a little consideration. Is that too much to ask?" The chief justice yawned and tapped his mouth with two fingers. Then he put his fingertips together and coughed a dry, legal cough. He was tired of Ballod's feeling sorry for himself and the mavor reacted predictably. "God damn your bones." This was Bully Ballod. "Where the hell were you when I signed that contract?" "I was right there, advising you to omit that paragraph. And you know it." IF i Bailed snarled and turned to he window again. The morning lun sparkled on the bay. The I'-ainers were at work in the new olphin pens. The Marina had ighty-eight per cent occupancy. I ardcners were landscaping the leasure Cube. To the south was i he Space Airport with Ballod's vn deep-space Little Sister oming dull bronze among the rightly colored pleasure craft, i Jorth and south and running to j he mountains were the slowly naturing fields of beautiful, profitable, dangerous brabbage. "But who would believe that en per cent of the net profits at he end of a five-year contract hose sneaky agricultural basiards started from scratch." "How much did they earn for iVelou?" "I hit those damn farmers vith every expense I can think f with the wage-healthn s u r a n ce-cducation-vacationctirement package, computer i ime, pro-rata defense, land leases, )nstruction overhead, equipment ciital, city services and machinehop depreciation. If we had mice, 'd charge for wear and tear on aps." Bailed sighed. "And now ours tomorrow. Come or, now," e wheedled, "Tell me how not to ay them. How do I get out ot lis? That's what I want to know." # #Tf you default payment." Xsaid the chief justice, "the judgment in their favor will take four days. The Central Bank will honor the obligation and seize the city. Nicosea was discovered and divided some one-hundred-fiftysix years ago by a consortoriiim newly organized by the shrewdest busine-s attorneys from eight c o mmcrcially oriented planets. The law is explicit. There are no loopholes." "All right," said Ballod, "go on." The chief justice ticked off the points on his fingers. "One. Offer a cash sum and payments with attractive interest." "They want off planet, out of the credit union." "Two. An enticing contract for another year." "How do you entice somebody "Three. Borrow the money." "There are other obligations. If you ask how much it costs to build a city, you can't afford it. Racing dolphins come high, and that's the only Pleasure Cube in twohundred-thirty-five or so liaht-ycars. And the Marina and those damned expensive entertainers and hell, there's no end." "Four. Pay off in stock." Ballod waited. He had spent five years looting a primitive planet. He had worked with the natives, married three women, run his loot until it was no longer possible to hide his depredations and the peculations of the men he subverted. When necessary, he had an inexhaustible patience. He had put the experience of a lifetime, his luck and all his loot into Avelou. It was the pleasure capital of a world. The profits were enormous even now and he had plowed them back into development. The Pleasure Cube was his last major investment and the sweats would become a flood. hours would be small change. "Five. Sell out." A forced sale would not return ten minutes on the hour. "Six. Abrogate all contracts. Liquidate everything. Steal what's loose and take off in that superhot combination freighter, null-time cathouse, battleship and yacht you keep over in the port eating its head off." Ballod grinned. "The girls have been out of there for the past two years. Fuel doesn't deteriorate and the stores are good for another ten years. Did I ever tell you about that double-jointed redhead from Mier with the blond lanuga hair? Forget it. Sister costs nothing on standby." "It's a nonproductive investment." "Point of view. My pleasure. Conspicuous consumption. Tin sentimental," said Ballod with a wolfish smile. "What else?" The chief justice fixed the master of Avelou with a cold legal eye. "Seven. Shoot yourself." Ballod laughed. His hot blue eyes crinkled and his ruddy complexion flushed. He bellowed with amusement. The chief justice's thin lips split in an unconscious smile of great charm. Years ago and parsecs away he had come close to being a great man on another world and when his hopes degringoladed, he was rescued from obloquy and shameful death by Erasmus Ballod. With dreams dead, his only interest was in the legal jigsawery of Avelou. The mayor wiped his eyes. "I ought to put you to skinning malfeasances and tanning the hides with torts. Any more helpful suggestions?" "I wrote my contract, Mr. Mayor. Read it before you try." Ballod put a hand on his shoulder and asked quietly, "What shall I do now, John?" T he chief justice cleared his throat. He had been with Ballod a long time. Ballod was the source, of the complexities that alone made life endurable. "Billy, I thoroughly approved when you decided to broaden the economic base. You have accomplished this in agriculture, and light manufacturing follows. You selected a magnificent Ag team. I blame myIF self for not keeping an eye on the finances." "Not your business, John. I assign responsibilities." "Can't you find the money somewhere?" "Consortorium law holds -- no off-planet investment capital without consent of eighty per cent of the owners. My peers don't know I'm strapped, or they'd be on me like buzzards on a gut. They hate me now and in two years I'll have to cut them in on the action -- but at a price, John, at a price -- " He patted the chief justice on the shoulder and began to pace the floor. "Another assessment? Discount franchise prepayments? There are some disadvantages to owning almost everything myself -- " His lips puckered in a soundless whistle. People who worked with Ballod had learned not to disturb him when he wore this blank expression, whistled silently and paced. He was a man so rock-certain of himself that he could indulge his whims carelessly, entertained by gambling, technical expertise and women, by food and shoptalk and gossip, by a thousand apparent irrelevancies while he prowled his world in a dozen disguises of humor, anger, good fellowship and rage. He could even deceive his chief justice, who waited now with no impatience on the master of Avelou. "Is your office safe?" Ballod snorted. "If you are contemplating assassination, my advice is no. A triple damage fee on a projected earnings basis to College Station as their designate would be disastrous. Your Ag team has perthey overlooked was the precaution of an escrow for their ten per cent. They are not fools. Jane Clapperton is devious as a spider web. Ed Deasy is so crooked he screws on his boots -- and Crawfurd Niall? That young man is actively dangerous. He can see the obvious." Ballod whistled soundlessly. The cold amber eyes of the chief justice dropped. "Sweet reason," said Ballod softly. "I contemplate only an appeal to sweet reason... If you want a thing done well," he added after a pause, "you must do it yourself." The attention light on his desk began to blink slowly. "Now damn it, Katie!" he roared. "No calls, no nothing I told you, damn it!" Women were never afraid of Ballod. "You also said you wanted to know when the Ag team returned. Well, they have. Sold five harvesters to Hydspe. All papers signed. Now, do you want any more calls or are you still out of town?" "Thank you Katie. No calls yet." He touched the plate to off and turned to the window again. Another neagle flopped by outside, cursing the gravities. Bailed laughed without humor. "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself," he said tonelessly. Ill Lour Valley to the east of Avelou stood an outcrop of rock. It was relatively flat and about a quarter of a hectare in extent. The packing and supply sheds took up most of the space but at the highest point of the rock the Ag team had built an orchard operations headquarters complete with beds, a small kitchen and a gazebo on top for control, pleasure and observation. "Have you ever noticed," asked Crawfurd Niall, "how every little group of men makes beer? Beer is a universal truth. When you stop and think about it, a galaxy full of suds is sort of awe-inspiring." "Stop driveling," said Jane Qapperton. "It's kind of inspirational," Niall went on dreamily. "The conquest of space-time and all that, on a foaming crest, a beautiful breaking wave of -- " "All right," said Jane. "What happyened back there?" She tapped the floor with the toe of a boot. Ed Deasy came up the stairwell with bottles under his arm. "Pest exterminators on. We should have put a cooler up here. You wanted cider, Jane?" Niall kissed the label of the bottle and levered off the wedge top. Bubbles creamed to the surface. He drank deep, looked at Jane and licked off the white mustache with a gourmet tongue. "I have always wondered whether it is better to let the foam dry and then lick, or -- don't throw that, Jane -- I suppose there are some things man is not meant.to know. All right. I saw old Billy Ballod in a work suit Harun-al-Rashiding around that harvester this morning before we took off  -- but everybody knows that electricians are crazy. When Ed plugged it in right, they bought five, didn't they?" Deasy said, "Next year brabbage isn't going to be worth two minutes a kilo. Exporting in controlled-atmosphere freighters could be the answer. New freight line might just pay off." Jan Qappperton glared at them both. "I had a shiver down my back," said Niall soberly. "When you poured in that vermiculite I got to thinking about Ballod and how I wouldn't look so good without a head, so I stuck my elbows out." took about a third of what it usually takes. You had enough room to duck. That's not what I'm talking about. When we were lifting over the mountains, coming home, you two tore that power room apart and threw something over, and down into the canyon depths -- " "I had a real attack of the stupids not to think of it sooner," said Niall. "It was just a little fire. I think it was a destruct on the interrupter. We threw both overboard while we were still gaining altitude. That's why the interrupter didn't work." "Barometric triggering device," said Deasy. "Armed on first landing. Set to interrupt aggie unit when pressure dropped. Old idea. Good idea if it works." Jane shuddered. "I can understand wanting to kill Crawfurd," she said. "But why me?" "With me headless in Hydspe," said Niall, "you two would still collect the team money. But after my pitiful accident two suicides might have a sincere look, especially in an MH-#-thousand bus." It was dusk by now. The little fixed-distance lasers were snapping at a new hatch of coddling moths in the apple orchard below them. The moths made tiny puffs of flame and occasionally there was a series of crackling firepoints when leafhoppers jumped into the lasef in alarm. A crawly-crawly jacked itself out of the ground from time to time and the lasers blipped until movement stopped. "Question of money," said Deasy. Niall said, "Don't forget that Ballod was successful in a dangerous and damn unsavory profession. In times of danger, Bdlod will return to the old pattern of Looter." "I can see that," said Jane. "Is he short of money?" "Who wants to pay?" asked Deasy. "Five years ago, before we signed the contract, we talked about this very thing. We could have written in a monthly or semiannual settlement of our percentage but we took a gamble. We guessed right. A cash lump sum is always a shock but I never expected to give Billy this big a shock. He's overreacting. Maybe, we can keep him off balance." 'It's all right to be smartsy" said Jane, "but it's like teasing a tiger. How smart are we to stay here?" "Dear Jane, if we were smart we never would have started this journey. When Ballod's dumb brother kidnapped us and died -- we could have gone home. Instead we took that leaky tub into the Comity of Worlds. I don't know if we're smart to stay here or not -- but granted our goals, there's nothing else we can do. Besides, Ed and I took a few precautions." "It's just that sometimes I feel time and circumstances breathing down my neck," she apologized. "I got my doodle out of the shop," said Deasy. "Ballod's seen me working on it for three years off and on." "I went to Parts Supply and visited every harvester Avelou owns while you filled out papers in the office, Jane. I packed some baggage. Those five machines mean another MH-#-thousand owing us. We've got to tighten the screws on Ballod until he squeaks." orchard a laser shuttered. This was uncommon because the native animals had learned to stay away from the twenty-meter cleared zone around the trees. "Did we ever tell anyone about the anti-vermin defense?" asked Niall mildly. "Perimeter lasers have rheostats," said Deasy. "No use shooting mice with elephant guns. Natives restless tonight." The overheads cut in. They found targets and suddenly rocket trails seared the night sky in colorful arcs away from the orchard. The perimeter lasers were active. A burned tang hung in the air. The lasers faltered momentarily and the lights dimmed. The standby generator droned to Hfe and picked up the load. Shouting and angry voices came from the distance -- and a constant soft blittering as the lasers hit targets. Deasy extended the range of the overheads and at once there were fireworks in the sky. Shortly silence fell, broken only by an occasional snapping at moths. Deasy said with satisfaction, "Very pretty installation, if I did it myself. Worth every second we paid for it." "Stupid, stupid, stupid," said Niall. "It's not only the wrong season for stealing apples -- but if we got killed the College Station contract examiners would find at least one of those idiots eager for informatioh money. I wonder if they were firemen or the fuzz. I'd like to think that Billy Ballod's getting senile." The phone buzzed and Niall answered. The mayor grinned and said, "We're having the opening ceremonies at the Pleasure Cube tonight. All Division heads will be there. Twenty-two hundred." "Our time is your time." The two men smiled at each other and the mayor cut off. "Until noon," Niall added. Jane Clapperton watched them both and found it difficult to choose between the two smiles. Either one should have frosted the liquid crystal phone plate. IV E rasmus Ballod stood out resplendent in Avelou red with a frothy jabot of gold shimmering IF in the light, greeting his guests and thoroughly enjoying himself. "Swelled up big as a toad," whispered Jane Clapperton as she and Deasy and Niall walked into the Pleasure Cube. They and women congratulating Ballod at the entry to the great lobby. The lobby was so complex a maze of color, perfume, lights and music that Ballod himself, with his overwhelming curiosity about the workings of men and machinery, did not attempt to see it as a whole. It was segmented into thirty-seven zones, each distinguished from any other by sound and scent barriers, by decor, by the food, drink and drugs available in each. The intent of the lobby was that customers would gravitate to the area that most fully met their inclinations and explore pleasure from that zone. The entry was essentially neutral. The air was negatively charged. The humidity was low and the scent was high country. Ballod had a glass in his hand, and beamed at a pretty woman. "Stay out of the yellow," he whispered loudly and winked. "Sex is not a spectator sport to me. But there are others, madam, there are others." A lively little man asked him if he had tried all the zones. "Not on your life, sir. If you come across a weepy, bathetic pink area, that's one I couldn't stick." He laughed joyously. "And what I had to say about a pure white zone should have sooted the walls." Ballod was charming. He greeted the Ag team with high good spirits. His eyes reflected the real pleasure he took in their presence. Jane wore filmy gray and a few gold spangles to accent her straw-gold hair. Deasy was lean in rust and red and Niall was elegant in powder blue. "Been grubbing in the dirt, I see," said Ballod. "How nice of you to ask us to your party," said Jane, and curtsied. Deasy offered a thin-lipped grin and the mayor and Niall touched palms with no hesitation. "It's all on the house tonight," said Ballod. "Go where you want to go, do what you want to do. Have fun. Be happy." He opened his arms to give them the f.reedom of the Pleasure Cube, and turned to greet others. "Remarkable man," said Deasy. "Let's go see what Billy hath wrought," said Niall. "He is a complete and perfect bastard," said Jane softly. The entry was at one end of the lobby and raised above the general level of the floor. While it was perfectly possible to pull a string tight from one end of the lobby to the other, the eye was so constantly distracted, the senses so beguiled that it was impossible in fact to see from one end to the other. There were islands and alcoves and balconies with floor coverings and ceiling height appropriate to the zone. In common, they each had a door which led to intense indulgence of the pleasure suggested by the zone. T he joy of childhood was to one side and cuddly creatures scrambled over the rug to pick up cookie crumbs. There was a quiet library with lamps for scholars -- Niall walked over to smell the leather bindings and dust and floor polish. There was a torture chamber, dimly lit and smoky orange. There was a beach with waves lapping onto the sand. There was aching young love with lilacs laden with raindrops. "Original was designed in College Station as exercise for psychological engineers," said Deasy. "Ruler of stinking little planet had all the erotica built for private pleasure. He died in three months, happy as a clam. This is the third Cube in the galaxy -- and the biggest by far." "You have to walk through the store to get to the beer," said Niall, examining the yellow zone dispassionately. They strolled on past mother love and a gymnasium redolent of sweat and a noisy bar and a chess island. Jane said, "The last thing I believe in is 'natural' man -- and yet I cannot help but wonder if synthetic reality will not be Armageddon. My feet hurt." "Not here." Niall led her past a warm orchid area where sex was both participation and exotic. "Let's try this place. We'll add a little color to the heavenly scene. What happens when you g o through a door?" he asked Deasy. "Hypnospray to fix your inclination, chronoleptogenic to give you a long ride -- then total involvement mental and physical. You get unscrambled at the end. Ninety-nine and 'seventy-five per cent unscrambled." "Is that figure any good?" asked Niall. "No," said Deasy. Niall stared. "All mechanical?" "Of the very first chop," said Deasy indignantly. "Aside from the mechanics it takes two men to run this place. A ticket taker and a standby psychiatrist. Technologically, nothing can compare with a Pleasure Cube." Erasmus Ballod found them all in there wrangling a m i c ably about who would get the next round of beer from the bar down the way. None of them cared for the ambrosia and nectar immediately available. "I hoped you would try a door," said Ballod. "That would have kept you happy for six months. Let's get out of here. The whole goddam place gives me the creeps." IF V # #"That's the way it is," said A Bailed, who was asking for understanding in dignified simplicity. He stood by the window overlooking Avelou, his face calm and sincere. "Then what do you propose," said Niall, lounging in a deep chair. Jane sat on a footstool beside him, her back very straight; she was studying Ballod's face. Deasy straddled a chair with his arms folded on top, his chin in his hands. "We want our money," said Jane. "The exact amount is MH#, #, #, including yesterday's percentage," said Deasy. Ballod sat behind his desk and chuckled. "Five years ago you were three youngsters up for bid at College Station. My bid was modest and lower than two others, except for the percentage. And now you are in a position to dictate to me, to threaten the prise. How do you account fpr this?" He wanted to know. He was genuinely curious. "Ten per cent of the net on apples and brabbage," said Jane. "Comprehensive understanding of growing, breeding, marketing and sub-contract manufacture," said Deasy. "Your noninterference. And you might have found a clue in our release price from College Station. You bought us out very cheap, Mr. Mayor." Ballod whistled soundlessly as he met Niall's eyes. "True enough," he said slowly. "I noticed that and never followed it up -- Then your education was not entirely at College Station. Tell me this -- were you waiting for me?" "We were just lucky, I guess. We wanted to make money." "You have, my boy. No question." Ballod's smile was a little wry. "Now, let me make a suggestion. Let me pay you a nominal sum now, say MH-one hundred thousand and at the end of a year I will pay you MH-one can draw it up as a primary lien against the city guaranteed by the Central Bank. You will make twenty per cent or your money by your forbearance -- roughly ten years' wages apiece on the salary scale at which you signed the contract. No restrictions on your activities. Take another job. Go back to College Station. Buy land on an open planet. Do precisely as you please." "We want our money now," aid Jane. Ballod looked at her quizzically. "When you have enough money," he mused, "money becomes a counter in a game. It's a tally, a method of keeping score. You sleep in one bed, you put on your pants one leg at a time, you have limited physical capacity for any indulgence." He turned to Niall. "What game are you playing? What is it you want?" "Not your city and not your power." "You may have me between a hard place and a rock." said Bailed, "but do not be too greedy." "Is Little Sister fueled? Stores aboard? Ready for space?" "Yes." "We'U take it." B allod half rose, stared at them and sat down. Blood flushed his face. He raised his voice and it had a metallic edge, "All right, John. I tried your way. Now I'll try my own." The chief justice came in with two laser hand guns. He looked ill but deadly. "All peegee units have modifiers," said Deasy. "Otherwise you couldn't move them." "No goddam idle threats from you stinking intransigent sons-ofbitches!" roared Ballod, suddenly losing control. "You had those peegee units manufactured at College Station," said Niall. "The modifier is in the deepest vault of Central Bank. Get up and get out." "I made another," said Deasy. "Took me three years. You overcharged us on the computer time. Microminiaturized, here it is. Short range. Not selective. All sixty-four peegee units under Avelou will go null at once. City hall is on natural gravity. We'll be all right here." "Ed built in an interesting electroencephalographic switch," drawled Niall. "It activates if you take him away from it." "Bluff," snarled Ballod, "nobody can duplicate a peegee modifier." "Best I could do with such little control was set minimum for one second." "Want a second's worth of proof?" asked Niall. Ballod wheeled and walked to the window. His city glowed softly in the night. The casinos never closed. There were people in the parks. A small boat with a luminiscent sail was tacking out of the bay. The buildings of Avelou loomed in the night sky at all angles. "Fifty thousand blameless men and women," he growled. "Restaurants are open, theaters are full. One of those apartments is a nursery. I don't know how many children are there tonight." He looked at Jane and said mournfully, "Would you kill all those babies and innocent children?" "Once it is determined that a women will sell," said Jane, "all that remains to be determined is the price. Old joke. And once it has been determined that a man wiU kiU -- " IF "You immoral monster! You have no compassion, no sense of -- " blurted the chief justice. # A ND you, sir," said Jane ,with the same slow voice, "sold the resources of a planet to a Looter. You were a knowing catspaw when you arranged the cinnebar leases to Looter Ballod. What were you paid for your betrayal of the United Nations? What were you paid for the sixtyfour thousand tons of liquid mercury Ballod stole from Earth? Your name is reviled in a hundred tongues. Traitor is an abominable word in Interlingua -- or English." The old man shriveled before their eyes. "We learned to operate the magnetic flow mining equipment Ballod had to abandon," said Niall, "but do you know what a flask of mercury sells for now? What it sold for when we left, when Ballod's stupid brother looked us up and kidnapped us? One flask, seventy-six pounds of mercury, two hundred and seventyfive thousand dollars." "How could your own people reach the stars without mercury?" asked Jane. "Not so religious on Earth any more," said Deasy. "Don't hear much about Judas Iscariot. Got another name we use." The chief justice shook. His face wrenched and his eyes went wild. Ballod shot him when he raised a pistol. He slumped to the rug with the rictus still on his lean skull face. "He was going to shoot himself," obsened Jane. "Billy was just protecting the modifier," said Niall. "Very sensible. Just suppose the old man plugged Ed. Down tumbles Avelou." "Nice thing about lasers," said Deasy. "They cauterize. No blood on rug. Very tidy." Ballod breathed hard. His golden jabot shimmered. "You three belong to a human branch that should be cut off. I never should have traded the location of your rotten planet to my brother. He would have sold Avelou cheap enough. It was a tumbledown village -- " His voice faded as he looked at his city on the hills. "All right," he said. He straightened. His face went hard. He was filled with menace. "Give me the modifier. Take the ship." "Easy," said Niall. "Let's go to the Central Bank and register Little Sister to us." "God, how I despise you!" "Sincerity at last," said Jane. "Come along to spaceport," said Deasy. "Got our baggage there. You give us clearance." "Hold on just one minute," said Ballod, in control of himself again. "How do I know I can trust you?" Jane smiled, Deasy snickered and Niall said wearily, "We are from Avelou. Bailed did not spare supposed to trust you?" it a glance. He walked to the weapons tower. He rousted out the VI duty officer and had the room to himself. He programed and A ll the formalities were comfired a missile. He called Little pleted. The eastern sky was Sister when she was three diamlightening as Little Sister lifted eters out. Three hated faces appeared in the screen. "Short-range modifier?" said Ballod. "Just one more thing. Glad you called, Billy -- " began Niall. "Your stinking race can rot on Earth. You've got three minutes to live." "Brabbage," said Niall. "Billy buddy, you told us to plant just one helluva lot of it around Avelou and you're surrounded by thirty thousand hectares. There aren't enough flamethrowers on the planet to do the job before bolting. Call off your dogs." "You didn't take the harvesters with you." Niall held up a computer. "Got all these with us," he said. "Nice of you to help us load the baggage. Manufacturing lead time on computers for harvesters is three months -- " "Got it down to nine weeks," said Deasy. "Ever see pictures of Jalka Island?" asked Jane. "The seventyseventy-two strain produces a bigger head -- " "Bury Avelou thirty meters deep -- " Ballod's face was iron as he pressed missile destruct. "Fair's fair," said NiaU. "We'll mail the computers back from Colege Station." Ballod laughed. He bellowed with amusement. His blue eyes crinkled and his face turned red. He wiped the tears from his eyes. "Any other tricks up your sleeves?" he asked. None of the three had smiled. "We'll send the modifier with the computers," said Niall. "Ballod was right," said Deasy. "Never could solve that key. It was a bluff." "Shall we mail the bluff with switch on or off?" asked Jane, Ballod stared at them. "And some people call me ruthless!" "Goodbye, Daddy," said Jane. "We're half-brothers and sister. Your three wives -- our mothers -- don't exactly send their love, but I think we'll be welcome back on Earth with a starship." "Why did you tell him that, Jane?" asked Niall. "And, Daddy, one more thing. We are your children. But I wouldn't be easy to find in another six months if I were you." She turned to Niall. "I don't like Lx)oters." "Gives pop something to think about," said Deasy. They laughed together as the iron entered Ballod's soul and their faces faded, that peculiar Earthman's laughter that was to become so well known in the Comity of Worlds as time went on.  Coming in next month's IP James Tiptree, Jrs novelette about the hot test ship on star patrol. Every man aboard has a minority problem, a space problem -- and the same damn girl problem! Irwin Ross's tangy tale of indestructible aliens who bring microwar to an Earth accustomed to miniwars. Barry Alan Weissman's backward glance from time ahead to time now -- or maybe a little later than now. A strangely touching and tender story! Alfred Coppers appraisal of an America ruled by warring women and subverted by wild men... IF Willy Ley OF #. The First Traces Of Life T he most important event in the early history of our earth, as far as we are concerned -- and observers from another planet would probably agree -- was the beginning of life. But this event had to be preceded by another -- the formation of liquid water. Our earth and the other planets of the solar system are the results of an accumulation of matter from a cosmic cloud. Zones of condensation must have existed in that cloud -- places where the dust and gas began to form local aggregations that then tightened because of the mutual gravitational attraction of the component parts. Once these local aggregations were massive enough, they began sweeping up whatever additional matter they encountered. But the condensation of matter and the sweeping up of additional matter mean that an endless number of collisions between the particles takes place and when particles hit, their kinetic energy is largely changed into another form of energy, namely heat. So the whole must grow hot. It is not possible to give a figure for the temperature of the earth during its process of formation. It certainly was far above the boiling point of water. On the other hand, it certainly was not as hot as the outer layers of our sun which have a temperature of # centigrade, corresponding to about # Fahrenheit. The temperature at which iron melts, # centigrade, corresponding to # Fahrenheit, or a few hundred degrees above that temperature, seems a reasonable guess. Which makes the earth -- at one time in its history -- a large ball of molten rock surrounded by an atmosphere hundreds of miles in depth and hot by our standards, yet cooler than the body of the earth itself. The bulk of this atmosphere consisted of hydrogen and helium but it also contained other gases that are not elements but chemical compounds. Such compounds, in order to remain stable, need temperatures below # Fahrenheit -- at higher temperatures compounds fall apart. The original mixture of elements that formed the earth must have contained a certain amount of oxygen -- and since oxygen is a rather active element it combined with everything within reach, once the temperature was down to a point where compounds could form. The oxygen combined with hydrogen to form water (because of the still high temperature the water was gaseous) ; it combined with sulfur to form sulfur dioxide and with carbon to form carbon dioxide. The hydrogen was active, too. It combined with nitrogen to form ammonia, with carbon and nitrogen to form hydrogen cyanide, with chlorine to form hydrochloric acid, with carbon to form methane and so forth -- a whole range of substances with simple molecules. The hydrogen that remained free -- because there was nothing left with which it might have formed compounds -- gradually escaped into space, as did the helium that does not combine with anything. As the earth cooled, its atmosphere grew smaller and denser; for a time it may have contained mercury compounds in the form of vapors, similar to those believed to be present in the atmosphere of Venus. As the cooling progressed the temperature, in some places, must have gone below # degrees Fahrenheit. The water vapor then became water, trying to fall as rain. Of course the rain that formed in the upper and cooler layers of the atmosphere did not reach the ground. As it fell down into hotter atmospheric layers it evaporated again. But this evaporation removed heat from the surrounding gases that thereby grew heavier and continued the downward movement, forcing lighter and hotter gases up. This process created vertical convection currents that carried hot gases into IF the upper layers, where they radiated their heat away into space. It can easily be seen that such convection currents accelerated the cooling process, for naturally a hotter body radiates its heat away faster than a cooler body. It does not matter whether the "body" in question is a gas, a liquid or a solid. In time the rain did reach the ground. tains at the time we could assume that the rain-forming activities were strongest in the vicinity of such mountains, the liquid water cascading down the mountainsides, returning from the hot lowlands as water vapor to the higher layers of the atmosphere. The result would have been steadily growing circles of rainfall, each with a mountain in its center. However, we don't know whether there were tall mountains on the early earth and several reasons exist to doubt it. But there must have been cool spots in the atmosphere, for rain did fall and gradually the steady downpour that had started in only a few places spread out and cooled the surface rocks until water remained water. The first pools that filled natural depressions were boiling hot -- but they remained liquid. And hot water is more effective for dissolving minerals than cold water, so that all the early bodies of water were a thin broth of a number of minerals. Many of the compounds that floated around in the atmosphere, especially the carbon dioxide, were water-soluble, too, so that the early pools were solutions of almost anything. This phenomenon formed the background for the emergence of life. As we now know -- and can demonstrate in chemical laboratories -- such a solution, with an atmosphere holding methane and ammonia above it, will produce "peculiar" chemicals if energy is supplied. The energy in question could be either electrical discharges -- like lightning -- or ultraviolet radiation that forms a part of sunlight. The peculiarity of the chemicals mentioned above is that all are found in living tissues in our own time -- they are "organic" molecules which include some of the so-called amino acids which are, in turn, building blocks of the proteins. It is quite conceivable that this process still occurs in nature in a few places on earth -- but if it does happen the results will disappear fast. They will be eaten up by existing microscopic life forms. When it happened for the so before the beginning of the Cambrian period, there were no microorganisms. Hence the amino acids and other "organic" molecules could accumulate and fuse into still larger molecules. A living cell -- let us use the term, though it is by no means certain that it applied to those earliest super-molecules -- shows that it is alive by doing at least four things. The first is that it ingests "foreign" substances -- substances chemically different from those in its own physiognomy. Next it digests these foreign substances by first breaking them down into simpler chemical compounds and then reassembling these to form the more complicated compounds in its own makeup. In this process some material is inevitably left over as either useless or surplus -- this is the "waste matter" discharged by the living body. The third feature of a living cell is that it grows in size and bulk. Fourth, it produces or reproduces its own kind. For some time the early life on the young earth was in a precarious situation. It could only eat those mediumcomplicated molecules that had arisen from the action of ultraviolet radiation on the naturally occurring simple molecules. There must have been cases where the appetite of the living cells exceeded the supply of foodstuffs produced by chemical reactions. No doubt there were local extinctions. The living cells had to learn that something could be done with sunlight directly -- they had to invent what we now call photosynthesis. Once the process was working, its possessors did not need the amino acids and other substances of that type -- they could operate on dissolved minerals, carbon dioxide and sunlight. The first plants fit the above category -- the earlier life forms that did not have photosynthesis must, of necessity, be considered ultra-primitive animals. Of course they were succeeded by not quite so primitive animals, namely those that ate the plants that had created supplies of organic compounds by photosynthesis in their own bodies. Fortunately for the continued existence of earthly plants and, through them, of life in general, the primitive life forms that must be called animals did not specialize in eating chlorophyll-bearing plants only. They ate what got in their way, whether amino acids that were still formed by chemical action, or plants, or other animals. Presumably they pushed evolution by behaving competitively. It can be taken for granted that not even the largest of these early life forms could be seen by an unaided eye. But where they were numerous, say in a nearly closed bay, they mit have been collectively visible as a faint clouding of the water. I T IS strange that this very modem concept sounds a bit iF like the repetition of an evolutionary concept of a hundred years ago. At that time you could read that life had probably begun as "primordial ooze" in the seas. The term was a polite translation of the German word Urschleim which really means primordial mucus, but the idea was that the first life forms were not yet separated into individuals but formed a jellylike covering of the bottom. At one time it was even thought that the jelly had been discovered. The first major oceanographic expedition, that of HM.S, Challenger, had collected numerous samples of bottom mud from several oceans. The bottom mud was put into nice sterile glass jars which were then filled with pure alcohol to keep it from deteriorating. Some years later somebody looked at one of these jars and discovered a very faint clouding. It was barely visible but it was there and it seemed as if a small quantity of the Urschleim Professor Ernst von Haeckel in Germany was always talking about had been captured by accident. Thomas Huxley decided that this was so and named it Bothybius haeckeli -- after Dr. Haeckel -- who was greatly pleased, of course, but he had occasion to be violently displeased a number of years later. A British chemist wanted to know more about the Bathybius haeckeli, acquired a surplus jar in which it was present and set out to analyze it. He discovered that the clouding phenomenon was not at all organic in origin. It was strictly a chemical precipitate that had originated because of the interaction of the "preserving" alcohol with the bottom mud. Still, the water of a bay in Precambrian times could have looked as if Haeckel's Urschleim were present -- but it consisted of a very large number of separate living units. If the majority of the living units in a certain body of water were plants the clouding might have looked greenish. Of course the plants (and the animals that depended upon them) lived mainly near the shore, where the mineral content of the water was high. Bays must have been the most logical places or else the areas where a river brought rainwater into the sea, carrying more minerals. It must be kept in mind that in Precambrian times the difference in saltiness between the ocean and a river was still rather miilor. By now the seas are salty because rivers, working day and night for many hundreds of millions of years, have leached out the minerals from the soils of the continents and carried them into the oceans. When ocean water evaporates to become water vapor the minerals are left behind in the ocean and the water vapor, after it has drifted over the land, R# condensed and fallen as rain, brings more dissolved minerals to the seas. Nowadays the difference between Ocean water and river water is pronounced -- but in Precambrian times the process had only recently begun. Plants, when they build their bodies of sunlight, carbon dioxide and trace minerals, produce a waste product -- free oxygen. The main waste product of oxygenbreathing animals is carbon dioxide and a nice balance would seem to have been established right from the beginning. However, since all this began at a time when free oxygen hardly existed, the early "animals" probably were not oxygen breathers. They utilized their food not by oxidation but by fermentation, a process that yields far less energy but does not require oxygen. In fact the fermentation processes we know usually release some oxygen too. As a result, free oxygen was returned into an atmosphere that had been deficient in oxygen for and the next revolution in the evolution of life was the emergence of the oxygen-breather who, by utilizing a different chenucal process (namely oxidation) became a far more efficient animal. None of this can be read from the fossil record -- in fact, the absence of a fossil record is the main characteristic of the Precambrian sediments. Nor is the lack of such a record difficult to explain. All living things were tiny and the normal end of their lives was to be swallowed by something faster, bigger or stronger. And since they were all freefloating organisms, none of them had any need for hard parts of the body to serve as strengthening members. Consequently there were no hard parts to fossilize, not even parts hard enough to cause an impression in soft mud that by a combination of lucky chances might be preserved for posterity. Early in this century virtually every book on geology carried a drawing of something called Ech zoon canadense, the "dawn animal from Canada." It was a piece of striated rock which could be the remains of a very early sponge, or else a colony of early and primitive corals. Of course it could also be something that had no living relatives -- at any event it was revered as the oldest known fossil. As time went on Eozoon canadense was as quietly dropped as Haeckel's Urschleim, If I remember correctly it turned out that the rock in which Eozoon was found turned out to be much younger than Precambrian stuff. H owever, a small number of fossils of Precambrian age are now known. A comparatively good one recently turned up in eastern Transvaal. It consists of IF a small clot of microscopic algae, means of dating. And since cvosome spherical in shape, some lution in Precambrian days seems looking like filaments, some formto have been slow there is another less. Even the largest could only difficulty -- two fossils good be seen with a good microscope enough to enable a researcher to -- yet the largest was about a recognize some shapes would not hundred times as big as the be necessarily of the same age if smallest. Other such known Prethe shapes happen to match. Their Cambrian remains of colonies of true ages mit differ by # milalgae are not impressive and to lion years, the layman they do not even look The beginning of the Cambrian like fossils. Ttey are just carbon period is marked by the presence smudges in sedimentary rock, all of fossils that can be recognized that is left of the algae that lived as such without much of a mental and died in tht spot. struggle. These fossils can also Because there are so few of be declared to have been oxygen these fossils, dating is nearly imbreathers because their living relapossible. In more recent geological fives, however remote the relationlayers the fossils often are the ship may be, still are. But before Figure #. Map of the earth at the beginning of the Cambrian period as geologists thought it to have been at the beginning of the current century. There was one super-continent, named Gondwanaland, in the south and two continents, a shrunken Asia and an expanded North America, in the north. The map is correct concerning areas of current continents shown to be above water. But the enormous land bridges between South America, Africa and Australia did not exist. we look at these early Cambrian animals (which will be the theme of the next article) we need a look at the earth as a whole as it was Size and shape were the same as now. The day probably was shorter by a numlr of hours than it is now. The atmosphere did not differ much from our current atmosphere except for one factor: the oxygen content was probably about # per cent instead of the current # per cent. How about the distribution of land and water? At the time when Eozoon canadense was still acclaimed the oldest fossil the same book picturing it was also likely to carry a map like our Fig. #. There were three main continents, two of them in the north and one in the south. The two northern continents were North America in the west and Asia in the east. The southern continent was called Gondwanaland. As the map shows, it was supposed to stretch from South America eastward across the Atlantic, comprise most of Africa and extend eastward to the Australian area. We now know that this map was wrong -- but it was the result of careful reasoning based on a fantastic amount of detail work. The existence of Gondwanaland was not derived so much from the sediments, or lack of them. during the Cambrian period but had been extrapolated backward because of later evidence. During the time of the early (emphasis on "early") dinosaurs a great deal of evidence existed that southern Asia, Africa, South America and at least parts of the Australian region had all been connected. The most logical conclusion that could be drawn from the evidence was that all these now separated land areas had once formed a long southern continent -- Gondwanaland. And since the existence of Gondwanaland seemed certain for the Permian and Triassic periods, that continent must have existed in earlier times, too. That is how it got onto the map of the Cambrian period. We now know what went wrong in that reasoning. Geologists, in the course of their work, had found numerous instances of past reversals of land and water. At one time, during the days of the late dinosaurs, Kansas and adjacent areas had been under water. Manunoth tusks found at the bottom of the North Sea -- much to the annoyance of the fishermen whose nets were tom in the process -- proved that the North Sea had been dry land at one time. So it seemed that the sea and the land could change places. Hence, if fossils compelled geologists to conclude that Africa and South America had once been IF connected, they felt free to assume a land connection across the southern Atlantic which later disappeared under the waves. The mistake was the failure to make a distinction between deep ocean and flooded land. That sea that once covered Kansas had been a shallow sea, just as is the North Sea of our time. In both cases you simply dealt with a portion of a continent that was lowlying enough to be covered by a few hundred feet of water. But the ocean between Africa and South America was deep ocean. Since the evidence that there had once been a connection between these two continents could not be disregarded, only one logical conclusion was possible -- the continents themselves had moved. South America and Africa had once been the same continent, until a line of weakness broke open to form a water-filled trench. Then South America moved westward, pushed by the ever widening trench that finally became the Atlantic Ocean, while Africa stayed more Figure #. AAap of the earth at the beginning of the Cambrian period as given by the Continental Drift theory. Ail the present continents still touched each other, though there were bodies of water in the interior of that super continent. The continental block marked by a circle is the later Australia, the one marked by the double circle is the later Antarctia. or less where it had been all along. This is the theory of Continental Drift. It was first proposed half a century ago and it needed all that time to gain the general acceptance it now h. The shape of the continents of today can be explained by assuming Aat they once were huddled together (Fig. #.) to form just one continent that later broke up. At the beginning of the Cambrian period the original continent was still in one piece. And it was to stay that of years to come.  The great Willy Ley, before his recent untimely passing, had arranged with us to publish was to cover the Earths geologic history, the emergence of terrestrial life, its evolution in multiple forms, and what the future of our planet will be -- judging by its past. Because of their intrinisic interest, and as a kind of memorial to Willy Ley's name, if shall continue to present posthumously those portions of the work that he completed and left with A life he did not recognize. A wife who did not know him. A world in which he alone was sane... I when he woke that morning was that he was back in the field hospital south of Inchon with a hole in his shoulder -- where a Chinese .#-caliber slug had gone in -- and a bier one between his ribs where it had come out. And Uncle AI had been there, calling to him to come along -- they were going to the Old House and he had wanted to go, even thou he was stitched and bandaged and confined to bed. Mallory moved his shoulders experimentally, felt a twinge of pain from sore muscles. Probably he had moved in his sleep and tried to weave the resultant ache into a dream that would allow him the luxury of a few more minutes of cozy oblivion. Strange thing, the dream mechanism -- as if half the brain set out to delude the other half. And the haunting desire to see the Old House again still clung like a memory of a long-ago outing. He got out of bed, stretched, noticing other small aches and pains as he did. Old age must be catching up with him, he told himself, not meaning it. Fog hung like a cottony veil across the lawn beyond the curtained window, making ghosts of the poplars at the far side of the garden, obscuring detail, blurring outlines, lending to the familiar a hint of the charm of the unknown. The Bartlett house, looming high and wraithlike beyond the trees, might have been, perched on a cliff at the edge of the world. The street, dwindling into invisibility a half-block away, might lead down to a silent beach edging a tideless sea. It would be pleasant to follow that phantom shoreline, wade in the warm, reed-grown shallows, emerge in some pleasanter, simpler world. Mallory smil at his fancies. It would be time enough to start dreaming of white beaches when the firm of Mallory and Nolan, Engineering Consultants, had weathered its first year, iness. As he turned away from the window something lying beside the hedge lining the Bartletts' drive caught his eye. It was difficult to make out in the misty light but it looked like an old overcoat flung carelessly on the grass, a jarring note in the orderly composition. Probably scmiething left and forgotten by a handyman. Mallory put it out of his mind and ambled into the bathroom. His razor lay on the edge of the basin, clogged with gray soap. Bless the ladies, he thought as he rinsed it under the tap. He rummaged in the medicine cabinet for a new blade, failed to find one. The shaving cream can was empty, its spout crusted with dry, green foam. The toothpaste tube was crumpled and flat. His toothbrush was nowhere in sight. He found it after a brief search on the floor behind the toilet bowl. He used the electric razor Gill had given him for Christmas. He did not like using it. It did not shave close enough and left his face feeling dry and unrefreshed. Eyeing himself in the mirror, he thought he looked a bit gaunt and hollow-cheeked. There were dark circles under his eyes and he was badly in need of a haircut. He wore at least a month's growth, he decided, angling his head to see the sides. He must be working too hard, losing weight, forgetting his bi-weekly trim. He would have to think about taking things easier. He noticed a pair of battered shoes on the floor of the closet. His best pair of Bostonians. The soles were badly worn, the uppers scuffed deep into the leather, the strings broken and knotted. Frowning, Mallory looked through the hanging clothes for his gray suit, found it dangling on a hook at the end of the closet. It was dusty, shabby. The cuffs were greasy black. Both elbows were IF worn through. It looked, he thought, like something a hobo might wear, calling at the back door for a handout. Lori must have borrowed it, he decided, for some sort of student Rag Day or scavenger hunt thing. To a youngster all old folks' clothes -- meaning folks over thirty-five -- probably looked the same. He would have to have words with that young lady. He dropped the coat on the floor with the ruined shoes, selected a tan suit. His favorite tie was missing. He picked another, smoothed the look off his face. Whistling, he went down to breakfast. stirring a pan. Marly and Randy, the tenand eightyear-olds, sat at the kitchen table, spooning up oatmeal. "Looks like I'm last man on deck," Mallory said jovially. Gill smiled abstractedly and went on with her work. The kids did not look up. He poured a cup of coffee and pulled out a chair. There wpre bread crumbs on the seat of the chair and on the table. Sugar was scattered around the bowl. In a clouded glass vase were the dried stems of a bunch of faded wildflowers. He tried the coffee. It was lukewarm, stale-tasting. Gill came across and put a bowl of oatmeal before him. She was still the best-looking girl in town, Mallory thought, but this morning she looked pale, her skin dull. "You're late, Jeff," she said. "I was just going to call you." "I got involved in looking out the window," he said. "Nice fog." Gill sat down across from him. "Fog?" she asked vaguely. Mallory glanced through the window. The air was sparkling clear. "Funny. Must have been just a patch." He sampled the oatmeal. It was barely warm. There was no salt in it, no salt on the table, no butter, no cream. He started to mention it, glanced at Gill, noticed the darkness under her eyes, her abstracted expression. "Gill -- are you feeling all right?" "Very well, thank you," she said quickly and smiled a fleeting smile. Mallory got up and went to the cupboard where the dry cereal was kept. There were half a dozen boxes there, their tops tom open, all but one empty. He took a bowl from the shelf, noticed dust in it, rinsed it at the sink. "Any toast? he inquired. "Toast?" Gill looked mildly puzzled. "You've heard of it -- bread that's been in the toaster." He tried to make it sound jolly but the words hung dead between them. The room was chilly, he noticed. A faint, foul odor was in the air. Or not so faint, he amended, noticing the overflowing garbage pail by the door. Bits of food and soiled paper lay around it. Marly, the ten-year-old, scraped her spoon against her empty bowl. She licked it, front and back, dropped it on the table and stood. Her skirt and sweater did not match. "Hey, did you kids have any milk?" Jeff asked. Marly failed to answer. Randy pushed his chair back and started from the room after his sister. "Why did the kids rush out of here without a word?" Mallory asked. "Is anything wrong?" "They have to go to school," Gill said. She looked troubled. Mallory reached across to put his hand over hers. He was shocked at how cold it felt under his -- and thin. And the nails, always so carefully groomed, were chipped, not even clean. "Gill, what's the matter?" He tried to catch her eye. She looked down into her bowl. She pulled her hand away, took a bite of gruel. "Gill -- I think you've been working too hard," Mallory said. "Been around the house too much. What do you say we get away for a few days? We could go out to the Old House diis weekend, camp out, do a little work on the place. The kids would enjoy it and -- " "What old house?" "Our Old House. What else?" G ill looked at him innocently. "Do we have an old house?' "Never mind, it was just a thought." "You'd better eat," Gill said. "You'll be late." "One of the prerogatives of being boss," Mallory said, smiling, "is that I can be late when I want to." "You mustn't joke about your work, Jeff." He smiled at her. "Why not?" "Jeff, you seem so strange this morning -- " "I was just thinking you seem to be in a curiously playful mood." "In what way?" "Acting as if you never heard of the Old House, teasing me about being a few minutes late to my own office -- " "Jeff, what are you talking about?" "I'm talking about my business. Where I make our living." "Jeff, are you sure you're feeling all right?" "Why shouldn't I be?" Gill's glance went to the clock over the refrigerator. She made as if to rise. "We really have to go now -- " Mallory caught her hand. "Where are you going?" "Let me go," she gasd. "They don't like it if you're late -- " "Gill -- I asked you where you're going." "To the Star Tower, of course -- " "What's the Star Tower?" "You know," she whispered. "It's where we work." "We? Since when do you have a job?" He tried to smile. "Fm the breadwinner around here, remember?" She was shaking her head -- IF her eyes were wide, fearful. Vlallory came to his feet, drew his vvife to him. "Slow down a minute, girl. :t's start at the beginning -- " He broke off as the front door slammed. Through the window he .saw Marly and Randy hurrying lown the walk. "Where are their coats?" he aid. "It's cold out there. And neir schoolbooks -- " He turned jrgently to Gill. "And where's Lori?" "Lori who?" "Our daughter, Lori. You Know." He tried to cover the impatient edge to his voice with a smile. "Our daughter's name is "Of course. And our other daughter's name is Lori. Has she alrey eaten?" G ill gave him a fleeting smile. "I'm sorry, I don't understand you. I have to go. I mustn't be late to the work rooms." "All rit. I'll play along," Mallory said. "Anything else new I ought to know?" you know the quota has been increased -- " "Oh, so the quota has been increased." "So many have not been comng to their benches." "Their benches? What benches are those?" "At the workrooms." "What workrooms?" "Where we work, of course, eff. Please stop -- " "Funny, I ought I had an office in the Miller Building," Mallory said harshly. at the cereal bowl at Mallory's place. "You'd better eat quickly. It's a long time to midday break." "Never mind the midday break. You still haven't said where Lori is." "I don't know any Lori -- " He gripped her arm. "Stop it. Gill! Where is she?" He broke off at a sudden thought. "There hasn't been an accident? Has she been hurt?" "No, there hasn't been any accident. And I don't know anyone named Lori." She tugged against him, trying to reach the door. He picked her up, carried her to the living room, lowered her to the couch. She tried to struggle up. He sat beside her, held her. "There has been an accident, hasn't there?" He tried to hold his voice steady. "You're trying to keep it from me, aren't you?" "I don't know what you mean!" "I'm talking about our oldest daughter, Lori," he said, forcing himself to speak calmly. "Age, nineteen. Born while we were still in school. She's tall, blond, likes to ride and swim and play tennis. Are you telling me you've forgotten her?" shaking her head. "There isn't any such person, Jeff. We have two children, Marla and Randy. That's all." He rose, went into the hall and called. There was no answer. He ran up the stairs three at a time, at the top wheeled to the left, his outstretched hand reaching for the doorknob. He slammed into a solid wall. Where the door to Lori's room should have been was an unbroken stretch of plaster. G ill was standing wide-eyed on the landing. "Why?" he asked. "Why is her room sealed?" His voice was a croak. "Jeff, you're frightening. I don't understand -- " Mallory ran his hands over the wall. It felt solid to his touch. He stepped back and looked along the hall. There were the doors to the other three bedrooms, the bathroom, the attic stairs. But Lori's door was sone. "Where is Lori?" as he came down the steps. "Jeff, you're sick. You're having some kind of attack. Lie down and I'll call Dr. Everet -- " "I've never felt better in my life -- Mallory broke off abruptly. Through the window on the landing he saw the familiar street, clear of fog now, the big old-fashioned houses, steep-gabled, the leafless trees above them. But beyond, where the steeple of the Methodist Church should have been, a tower rose up and up into the morning sky. It was big, his engineer's eye told him -- hundreds of feet in diameter and so tall that its flaring top was lo in the high haze. The material was pale green, glassy, translu cent. An incredible structure had sprung up overnight like a u enchanted mushroom. "Gill -- what is it?" She stared into his face. Her eyes had a glazed, remote look. "The Star Tower, of course."  With an effort, Mallory spoke I calmly. j "Gill, something's wrong. May be it's me. It must be me -- unless I'm imagining that." He stared at the tower. "And if I am, Tm still in trouble." "You've been working too hard," she said. "I knew you were working too hard." "Gill, do you remember a church? The steeple used to stick up right behind the Meyer house -- " "But -- that's where the Tower is." "No church? I imagined that?" "You saw the Tower, Jeft Surely you don't -- " ! "I saw it. I admit it. That's the i one thing that makes me think I I may be the one who's out of his mind. Because the tower is impossible, Gill.' Mallory laughed and was surprised at the weakness  of the laugh. "All right. I'm imagining things. Anything else?" "You seem -- very confused, Jeff." "We don't have a nineteenyear-old daughter?" "No, Jeff." "I don't run my own engineering company?" "I don't understand what that IF means. We work at our jobs at the Tower." "What do you do in this workroom you say you have to hurry off to?" "We perform the tasks set us." "What is it? Some sort of factory?" "I -- I don't know. I suppose so. We -- make things. Work on things. With wires. You work in the loading sheds." "Gill -- is this what it's like to lose your mind? I feel perfectly normal. No headache, no confusion. Just a lot of ideas that seem to be totally false. But how much of it is fise? Everything? No, not everything," he shook his head. "You're my wife. Gill. You know me. And the kids. Randy and Marla. But what about everything else?" he broke off, a vision "The world is round," he said. "Okay so far?" She nodded hesitantly. "We live in the United States. In the state of Nebraska. The town of Beatrice." Gill frowned. "No -- this is the Center, Jeff." "The center of what?" Gill made a vague gesture. "Of -- everything. It's just -- the Center." "What do we do?" "We work, we do our part." "Our part of what?" "Of the work." "Gill," Mallory said. "I may be crazy -- but I didn't imagine Lori. She exists, damn it!" Pulling her behind him, he walked into the library. "Where's the pic-ture of her that we keep on the desk?" Gill did not answer. H e took a blue album from the drawer. It held snapshots of Gill, of himself, of Randy and Marly. But none of Lori, only patches of tom paper where pictures had been removed. "Who tore her pictures out?" Mallory gripped Gill's arms, almost shaking her. "Why?" "Please, Jeff -- you're hurting me -- # A soft click came from the direction of the front door. "Lori?" Mallory stepped past his wife, hurried through the arched entry to the front ipom -- and stopped dead. A man stood there, staring fixedly past Mallory's shoulder. Or -- Mallory amended his first impression -- not a man. Something that looked like a man. Something that mit fool you in a bad light or at a greater distance. But not here, ten feet away, in the full light of morning. The face was the wrong color -- a dusky purplish pink and of the texture of foam rubber. The eyes were dull, empty, without movement. The mouth and nostrils were sealed. The hair was a spongy mass. It was dressed in an dd-fashioned golfing outfit, baggy knickers, Argyle socks, a loose Cardigan of a pinkish gray color. Mallory's thoughts reached this point, recoiled, approached, recoiled. II "You are late, Worker," a rich contralto voice sounded from the region of the simulacrum's rib cage. Behind Mallory, Gill made a whimpering sound. "Gill -- stay back." Mallory took a step sideways and grabbed up the wrouglit-iron poker from beside the fireplace. The stand went over with a dull crash of iron. He hefted the twofoot bar, watching the thing as it pivoted to face him. From the corner of his eye Mallory saw Gill start past him. He put out an arm to stop her but she darted around him and toward the door. At once the monstrosity moved to intercept her. Mallory swung up the poker, brought it down across its shoulder. The impact was as if he had struck padded steel. With a motion too quick to follow, the thing twitched the poker from his hand, dropped it carelessly on the rug. Gill had the door open, was standing there hesitantly, looking back. "Gill, run -- " Mallory launched himself at the creature. Iron hands gripped him, thrust him effortlessly away. "This is incorrect behavior. Worker," the warm, feminine voice said in a tone of kindly correction. Mallory seized a heavy chair, hurled it at the thing, whirled and made a dash for the door through which Gill had disappeared. He had taken two steps when the room exploded into dazzling light that slowly faded into utter darkness. M allory became aware that he was lying on his back on a soft surface, looking up at a flower-patterned ceiling. He turned his head; an elderly man was sitting beside him. He recognized him: Doc Everet -- George Everet. Everet was staring vaguely at the wall. "Where's Gill?" Mallory asked. Everet turned, looked at Mallory's left ear. "She had to go, Jeff. The work can't wait, you know." Mallory sat up. His head ached sickeningly. He looked around the room. The thing that had attacked him was gone. The fire tools were neatly racked beside the fireplace. The furniture was in its normal position. "Where has it gone?" he asked. "What was it, George?" "What?" "The thing -- whatever it was. It knocked me out. Didn't you see it? Didn't Gill tell you?" "You fainted, Jeff. Gill told me of your attack." Mallory strode to the window, twitched aside the curtain. The tower loomed behind the familiar roofs, impossibly tall, undeniably real. "Have I gone crazy?" he asked thickly. "Just a temporary loss of orientation," the doctor said. "I have a tablet for you to take -- " "George -- what's going on?" Mallory came back to stare down at the other man. Everet's thin white hair curled untrimmed about IF jiis ears. A silvery stubble lin jiis cheeks. The collar of his shirt was grimy. His tie was tied in a hard, greasy knot. "Maybe you can tell me -- where's Lori? Gill acted as if she'd never heard of her, George." Everet shook his head. "I know no one of that name." "Don't know her? Hell, George, you delivered her. Nineteen years ago." "You have two children, Randall and Marlene, Jeff. Their ages are eight and ten -- " "Certainly -- and another, named Lori, age nineteen. She was born the year I started with Universal -- the year after Gill and I were married, the year I first met you." "Jeff, you have to reject these fantasies." "Is that so fantastic?" "Worse than that. It's nonsense. Many of the words you're using are gibberish. They don't mean anything." "Which words?" "Never mind that. Put all that out of your mind." "How can I? I want to know what's going on. If I'm crazy, I want to know how crazy." "Not crazy, just talking a little wild. I'm going to give you a pill that will make you sleep again." "No. No pills. Just give me some facts. The Tower -- how long has it been there? Who built it?" "Why, I suppose the Tower has been there since before I can remember. Never thought much about it -- " "A thing like that?" Mallory leaned forward tensely. "Doesn't it strike you that it looks different Trom anything else in the town? It's too high, too big. What is it built of? No materid I know of could take those stresses -- " "Jeff, stop exciting yourself." Everet frowned, offered a spherical purple capsule on his palm. "Take this. It wiU help you." "Why not answer my question?" "Because next you'll be asking me why trees have branches, where the leaves come from and what holds up the sky. I'm not here to help you concretize your delusion. Tallang about these fancies of yours will just stabilize them, make them seem more real to you. That's not good, is it? We want you well, sane, back on the job. Now take this. Or would you rather have the needle?" Jeff accepted the pill, took the glass of water Everet offered. The elderly doctor watched h i m swallow. "Now, lie back and relax. Don't think about these notions of yours. Just be glad you've got a fine home, a fine wife, two fine children and that you have your Work. I'll look in on you this evening. By tomorrow morning you'll be feeling better, much better." Mallory nodded, let his eyes close. He listened to the sounds of Everet closing his bag, tiptoeing across the room, die door opening, closing, the click of the latch. He waited a full minute, then sat up, tossed the pill he had palmed into the fireplace. "Delusions, eh?" he muttered. "We'll check on that." H e found the axe among the garden tools under the basement steps. Back upstairs, he studied the blank wall where the door to Lori's room had been. Was there a faint, irregular line, an almost imperceptible discontinuity in the surface of the plaster? He could not be sure. But there was a way to find out. He raised the axe, swung it at the wall. It struck with a solid thunk that jarred his arms to the sockets. Plaster cracked and fell away, exposing a gray, papery surface. He chopped at it, knocking pieces loose. It was light, tough stuff, like the material of a hornet's nest. A fragment broke loose and fell inward. Dim light shone out the hole. Mallory kneeled, saw the corner of a bed, a rug, a papered wall and a window, the shade drawn tightly over it. "Nothing there, eh?" He attacked the wall again, enlarged the opening, crawled through it. He was in Lori's room. Dust lav thick on the dresser and bedside table. Papers and books were scattered on the desk. He opened the closet door. Lori's clothes hung -- dusty -- on hangers. He touched a pale blue sweater that Gill had civen their dauehter on her last birthday. "Lori," he whispered. "Where are you?" His eyes fell on a thin-spined book lying on a shelf -- a higli school Annual. He picked it up, leafed through to the pages where photographs were ranked in rows. Her picture was there among the others, blond and smiling. He tore it out, folded it, put it into his shirt pocket. He left the room, stepping over the litter of plaster in the hall, automatically careful not to walk ' on it and grind plaster into the carpet. Start at the top, he told himself. Check the whole house. See  what else is phony about this situ- ation... The attic looked as it always had. Long rays of early sun slanted through the dusty window on worn carpet, ancient trunks, rickety cardboard cartons filled w i t h u n able-to-be-parted-with mementoes of past lives; on broken toys, the old brass standing lamps and faded velour furniture. An old frontier Colt .# hung on a peg. He lifted it down. There were corroded cartridges in the belt. No way of knowing if they would fire. The gun had not been used in twenty years. He loaded it, buckled it on. Room by room he checked the rest of the house. Everything looked normal, though dusty. The beds were untidily made. Pantry shelves were crowded with ranked boxes of soap flakes, detergent, cases of dog food, paper napkins -- Gill hated them -- dietetic fruits, canned hominy and sweet potatoes. On the back porch were stacked more cartons. He found a diminished bottle IF of scotch, poured himself four ounces, neat. The liquor seemed to clear his head a bit. But his body still felt numbed. Like a thumb in the instant after the hammer hits it and before the real pain arrives. On the curled calendar on the wall, the days of November had been x-ed out through the fifteenth. H e went into the living room, looked out through the glass curtains. The orderly street was silent. A few cars were visible, parked in driveways or at the curb. They looked a little dusty, as if they had been sitting for some time. Dead leaves lay drifted across the sidewalks and the street in a pattern undisturbed by traffic. He went to the telephone in the hall, lifted the receiver, listened to the steady hum of the dial tone. He dialed O, waited through twentyfive rings before he hung up. He switched on the console TV. Static crackled from the speaker after half a minute. He tuned. A dancing grid of light blanked all channels. He took a coat frn the front closet, went to the back door and looked out at the garden. Morning sunshine lay across dormant flower beds, leess shrubs, dry grass. A bird twittered in the hedge. He left the bouse, walked quickly back to the garage. The door was locked. His two-yearold Buick w visiHe through the window. One front tire seemed almost flat. Keeping to the shrub line, he crossed to the rear of the Bartlett garden. The house stood high and silent in the morning light. He found a broken window on the ground floor. A light breeze blew a scrap ofpaper across the dry grass. Green shoots poked up through the black earth beside the walk. The daffodils would be blossoming in a few more weeks. Mallory strode toward the back door, almost expecting to see Meg Bartlett appear there, plump and aproned, to wave and invite him in for coffee. A wrongness in something he had seen nagged at him. He stopped and looked back. Daffodils. Daffodils did not appear until March -- late February at the earliest. This was November. Or had time jumped ahead from autumn to spring overnight? Three months lost,... What had happened during those ninety days? He did not know. He could not remember. He walked along the drive, opened an unlatched screen and rapped on the door. He heard no response and started around to the front of the house. A heap of old clothes lay in the drive. He moved closer, saw Aat what remained of a man was in the clothes, talonlike hands clawing at the earth. Skull-face, leather covered, teeth bared in a yellow grin. He recognized the curly gray hair -- Fr Bartlett, his neighbor of ten years. Mallory skirted the mummy, went on to the front of the house. He started off along the sidewalk in the sparse she of the barren trees. Tall weeds grew across once-immaculate lawns. Formerly shiny cars sat on soft tires, their windows opaque with dust. Halfway down the block the bay windows of a brick house gaped black and gutted. Clabbered milk bottles stood on porches. Forlorn yellowed envelopes poked from mail boxes. A dead dog lay in the gutter, partly covered with leaves, snarling a dessicated snarl. Above the rooftops the faerie tower loomed against the blue sky. The school was in the next block. Mallory crossed the silent playground where papers blew across hard-baked earth. He entered the building. The doors were unlocked -- his footsteps were an intrusion on utter silence. He poked along, looking at the placards marking the doors. He recognized the name of Randy's teacher. The door stood ajar. Papers were scattered over the floor. A chalk mural cm the blackboard was spotty and streaked. A dead geranium stood stiffly in a painted clay pot Paper turkeys and pilgrims' heads which had bn pasted to the windows had cxwne loose and lay on the flcmr among other clutter. On the desk that Mallory remembered as Randy's lay a battered geography hook. The children were not here -- had not been here for some time. town streets deserted under the cold mid-moming sun. Two empty cars, their front wheels interlocked in a tangle of metal, blocked the intersection. A broken window featured the liquor store in the next block. A few bottles lay scattered in the display window among glass shards -- otherwise the stock seemed undisturbed. Mallory started at a sharp click -- then saw that the traffic lights were still working. The street ended three blocks ahead in a blank wall of dull black material. Mallory walked on slowly. The wall was five feet high, running across pavement and lawns, curving away to both sides, shearing through the houses lying in its path. There was no ruft)le, no disorder -- but he could see exposed wallpaper, pictures hanging above bs in rooms slic open like dolls' houses. The tower stood two hundred yards beyond the wall, its outlines vague as a rainbow. The twenty-acre circle of flat ground enclosed by the wall was as bare and featureless as a concrete slab. There were no visible openings in the tower. A faraway siren whooped. Mallory retreated to the nearest house, flattened himself against the wall in the shelter of a cluster of cedars. A section of the wall swung back, gatelike. The head of a loose column of people emerged from the enclosure. There were men, women, children. They walked briskly, not talking, streaming out through the gates and off ong the street. Many were incongruously clothed. A middle-aged woman with unkempt hair walked barefoot in a tom and dirt-streaked formal evening gown. Nearby, a roundshouldered man stumped along, hugging himself in a stained bathrobe. One man limped on shoes that had worn completely through, so that the loose uppers flapped about his ankles. All the people looked rumpled, bedraggled, threadbare, uniformly thin-faced, lean, some to the point of emaciation. They looked, Mallory thought, like concentration-camp victims marching toward the gas them -- nor were his children. T he main body passed, followed by a few stragglers. A lone man brought up the rear, trailing fifty feet behind the others. He approached Mallory's hiding place. Mallory went forward to intercept him. The man did not look up or halt. Mallory fell into step bide him. "Just a minute, if you don't mind, Mr. Zwicker," he said. "I'd like to talk to you." "Mallory, isn' it?" The man shot him a keen look. He was an ordinary-looking fellow of middle age, a builder, a customer of Mallory's firm. He looked thinner than Mallory remembered. "Have to hurry along," Zwicker said, "No time to waste." "Listen," Mallory said, "have you seen my family? You remember my wife. Gill -- " "I've done my quota," Zwicker said. "And now I'm going home as always to nourish myself and rest -- " Mallory caught his arm, spun him around. "Is she in there?" He nodded toward the tower that loomed over them like a cliff. Zwicker tried to pry Mallory's fingers from his arm. "You weren't on the docks today," he said accusingly. "I remember -- the Watcher found your place empty. That's bad, Mallory. How can we accomplish the Work if each doesn't do his share -- " "Have you seen her? Answer me, danm you." "No. No, I haven't. My work is on the docks. I see no women, not even -- " Zwicker paused frowning. "I must go home," he said flafly and tried again to pull away. "What goes on inside there?" Mallory demanded. "In the Star Tower?" Zwicker tugged, prying at Mallory's fingers. "We carry on the Work, of course." "What work?" Zwicker looked sharply at him. "You're acting like a crazy man, accosting me in the street, asking wild questions -- " "How long has it been there -- the Tower?" Zwicker looked at him blankly. "Why -- forever, I suppose" he said. "What a curious question." "Zwicker, this is all wrong. I want to know what's happened." "Nothing whatever," Swicker yelped, "llie sun is shining, night follows day, we do our Work -- IF all but you. Why are you questioning me? Why are you trying to make trouble?" The man's eyes slidpast Mallory. Their expression changed, became vague. Mallory turned. A flat cart had rolled through the gate on silent doughnut wheels. On it squatted two creatures like the one that had invaded his living room. ttX#ell, I must be on my VV way," Zwicker said jauntily. "Nice seeing you, Mallory -- " "Zwicker, for God's sake, what are those things?" Zwicker shot him a frown. "Mallory, you make me uncomfortable -- " The cart was rolling closer. Mallory thrust Zwicker toward a gap between the bumpers of parked cars. "Through there -- run," he snapped. Zwicker planted his feet, resisting. "Mallory, let me go -- " The cart was approaching swiftly, making a soft, humming sound. It was too late now to run for it. "Quick -- into the car." Mallory yanked a door open, thrust Zwicker in, slid under the wheel. "Keep down," he whispered as Zwicker lunged for the door handle. Zwicker yelled. Mallory swiftly clapped a hand over his mouth. Zwicker kicked out frantically. Mallory hit him on the side of the jaw. Zwicker went limp. Mallory quickly locked the doors, tried the starter. He heard a heavy click, nothing more. The hum of the cart had grown louder. Now it descended the decibel scale and ceased. Mallory watched the two not-men step down from the cart, moving efficiently but somehow wrongly, with a subtle distortion of normal human rhythm and balance. They came to the car, stood staring in at him through the glass. One wore a tuxedo with a pink carnation in the lapel. The other was in a blue coverall iith the name Herb stitched over the pocket. The latter reached for the door handle -- the car shook as it tugged. The other sprang lightly to the hood, reached back out of Mallory's line of vision. There was a sharp ripping sound and something sha sliced down through top and headliner, cut a yard-long incision. A parallel cut appeared an instant later. Mallory shook Zwicker, who pulled away mumbling. Mallory opened the door, thrust it wide, dived, struck shoulder first, rolled, came to his feet and sprinted for a gap in the hedge. "Halt," a resonant voice boomed after him. He cut across a stretch of leafstrewn lawn, followed the curve of a graveled drive leading toward a colonnaded, white house. He heard the shrill whine of the flatcar as it maneuvered swiftly, coming in along the drive. There was another sound -- a thinner, more piercing tone. Pain lashed at Mallory. He stumbled headlong toward the trees that lined the way, bounced off the trunk of an ancient elm, went down hard. On his knees he crawled into the shelter of a line of low-spreading junipers. He heard the flatcar slow to a stop. Next came sharp clicks and rasping sounds, then voices. "I don't know," Zwicker's thin tenor was saying. "I only want to go to my home, take nourishment and rest -- " "It is necessary for the highest good that you give this information," a warm, fatherly voice cut in. "Why did the other Worker accost you?" "I don't know. I only want -- " "It will be necessary to give pain until you remember," the kindly voice said. Zwicker's voice broke into a scream that ended in a whimper, "The runaway worker is damaged," another voice said, this one a bright young executive type. "There are stains of ichor on the husk of the tree." "He will be found," a society matron gushed. Mallory heard sounds of multiple limbs moving across gravel, crunching dry leaves. He rose to his feet and, keeping to the shelter of trees, retreated past the comer of the house. Then he ran. M allory covered three blocks, cutting across dead lawns, pushing tlu-ough brittle hedges without seeing any signs of life, human or alien. He dro ped to the ground to recover his breath. In the silence he heard the whine of a flatcar. It came closer, stopped nearby. Soft, clattering sounds advancing along the driveway reached him. Mallory unholstered the heavy gun, cocked it, leveled it along the drive. An alien appeared, limbs flickering in mincing steps. Mallory took aim at the center of the body, pulled the stiff trigger. At the solid clack the alien halted, pivoted swiftly, came toward him. He pulled the trigger again, double-action -- The boom almost kicked the gun from his hand. The alien was on its back, limbs scything air. Mallory came to his feet as a second creature appeared at the foot of the drive. "Worker, halt!" a boyish vcrice called in a tone of warm congratulation. Mallory fired and, without waiting to see the effect, ran for the alley behind the house. Less than a block later he knew he had made a mistake. His wind was gone. His legs ached. His head was swinuning. The three lost months had robbed him of his conditioning. A garage -- once a stable -- fronted on an alley ahead, its door secured by a massive, rusty padlock. Malloi staggered to a halt, steadied himself, fired twice into the lock: The noise of the gun racketed deafeningly between the hedge-rows. He twisted the shattered mechanism from the heavy hasp, hurled the door wide. A late-model convertible sat in IF the gloom. Two bright-edged holes marred the smooth curve of the deck lid where his shots had penetrated. He pulled the door open, slid into the seat, twisted the key. After an instant's hesitation, the starter ground over sluggishly. He pumped the gas pedal. Abruptly the engine caught, barked, roared to life. Mallory slammed the car into reverse, backed out, cutting hard. He gunned forward to the street, swung left, caught a glimpse of the flatcar in the middle of the street, one alien squatting on it, another moving toward it. He floored the gas pedal, hit sixty into the next block. A strong odor of gasoline blew past his face. The engine bucked, surged, sputtered, stopped. As the car coasted to a halt a cart bearing three aliens rolled into view around the comer a block and a half ahead. Mallory vaulted over the side, crawled backward, keeping low. He gained the shelter of a hedge. The cart rolled to a halt beside the car. Two aliens scrambled down, approached the stalled vehicle. When they were beside it, Mallory took out his cigarette lighter, fired it, tossed it toward the dark puddle forming under the bullet-punctured gas tank. An explosive whump followed and fire boomed up to envelop the car in roaring heat. An alien ran across to the left, burning from heels to crown, leaving fiery footprints across the dead grass. It disappeared between the houses. Mallory jumped up, ran toward the big frame house. He heard a harsh buzz and the lawn ahead and to his left exploded into roiling dust. He veer onto the gravel drive. As he approached the comer of the house it burst in a whine of flying splinters. A spike caught him, sent him spinning. He was only partly conscious of struggling to his feet, stumbling toward the broached wall. He pulled himself up and through the opening into the gloom of a curtained living room. The bast had brought down plaster, filled the air with swirling dust. Mallory made his way past a toppled purple divan, stepped over a framed picture fallen from the wall, was in a dark hallway. Stairs led upward. He mounted them one at a time as if he were carrying a heavy burden. Behind him he heard soft clacking and scraping -- one of the aliens was entering the house through the same opening he had used. He reached for the gun, felt only the empty holster. He knew a fiery pain in his left arm, just below the shoulder. In the upper hall he halted, breathing hard. A high humming filled his head. He could hear the alien moving about below. There was a closet door beside him. With a half-formed thought of hiding, he opened it. It was crowded with cardboard cartons, garments, loose articles -- tennis rackets, a pair of water skis, scuba tanks, a spear gun. Mallory eased the lightweight weapon from its place. Two steel tube darts were clipped in a retainer below the guide channel. He held the gun between his knees, dropped the dart into the slot. Then, bracing the butt of the stock against his thigh, he cranked back the spring-loaded cocking lever. It caught with a sharp snick and at once the sounds from below ceased. They resumed -- a rhythmic rasp, click -- rasp, click. Mallory braced himself against the wall, the spear gun leveled at the head of the stairs, ten feet away. The head of the creature appeared, then the upper body, dressed in a flowered Aloha shirt. It saw him, paused at the head of the stairs. He aimed at the middle shirt button and pulled the trigger. There was a sharp thwack of the mechanism, the stiff jolt of the recoil. Six inches of bright steel stood quivering against the bright patterned chest. Mallory realized quite suddenly that the shirt was not a garment -- it was a part of the not-man's body, molded with it. For a full five seconds neither Mallory nor the alien moved. Then the creatured stirred, leaned sideways, took quick, tiny steps as if to catch its balance. Its legs folded bonelessly. With a jarring series of impacts it tumbled backward down the stairs. T he electric clock on the wall hummed loudly. Somewhere in the house a board creaked. Mallory felt a hot trickle across his left hand. His sleeve was wet, heavy as a plaster cast. Blackness welled inside him. His head felt huge and hot. His arm burned with a dull fire. He skirted the dead thing at the foot of the steps, went on into the living room, peered out past the edge of the drawn curtains at the empty road. No people were in sight. He saw no aliens, no movement except the restless stir of the unpruned shrubbery below the window. It took him an hour to search the house. He found another corpse in an upstairs bedroom, a woman with gray hair. He found a drawer that held a .# automatic pistol. He took it and a box of hollow-point shells. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom yielded iodine, aspirin, a roll of gauze. Back in the kitchen, he drew the blinds, lit the gas range for heat and light. He got a pan of warm water, remov the bandages from his arm, carefully washed the wounds. Splinters were bedded deep in his flesh. He withdrew one, starting fresh bleeding. He used a heavy linen napkin from the sideboard to bind the arm, then ripped a tablecloth to form a sling. He checked the refrigerator. It was still running but the butter and cheese and vegetables were mounds of dessicat corruption. A small steak in the freezer unit had remained edible. He found a skillet, put it on the gas, opened cans of peas and corn. He ate sitting at the table, forcing himself not to think of Gill, of what might have happened to her, the NO IF children. Were they at home now? They had survived for three months. They'd be all right for a little longer. They had to be all right. Going back now would not help them. He had to get clear of Beatrice, find help, come back with force behind him. A thing like this could not be a secret. Alien invasion had been talked about for a century but had never really been considered a possibility. And now it was here. Why weren't the Army and the Air Force hitting back? Good reasons probably existed but without information he could not hope to deduce them. The facts he had were meager. He had been a Worker, like everyone ' else, that was clr enough from his clothes, the calluses on his hands and from what Gill and Zwicker had said. But something had brought him out of the trancelike state that gripped the others. What? How was he different? He tried to remember the last days. Early November certainly was clear enough. The tenth -- he remembered that. There had been the quarterly payment on the plant mortgage. He remembered signing the check. All right, that narrowed it down. Then what? There had been the conference with the chain-store clients. That had been on a Monday. Mallory found a wall calendar. Monday had fallen on the seventeenth and the twenty-fourth. Which had it been? There had been something -- a trip, a visit to the parent company's home office, up north. He had planned to drive, because -- of what? The reason had had something to do with the Old House -- he had meant to take the opportunity to stop by, check on things. Abruptly he was thinking of Lori. He remembered that he had invited her to go along on the trip. But she had had other plans -- a visit to a friend who lived outside the city. Hodges. Sally Hodges. The Hodges house was about twelve miles out on the state road. Lori had been there when the aliens came. That was why she was not at home, had not been caught with the others. She was safe. Safe. And tomorrow he would find her. The stairs were too steep for him to climb again. Mallory settled himself in a chair in the living room, covered himself with a throw rug, and slept. D uring the next day flatcars twice passed close to the house. Mallory watched them from an upstairs window. Their occupants showed no interest in the house. He slept, ate. By nightfall he felt well enough to travel. He donned a fleece-lined coat he had found in the hall closet, filled the pockets with canned goods and dried fruit, bottled soda water. He left via the back door, crossed the untended garden. He was dizzy and lightheaded but his legs felt as if they would support him for a while. Ill A hundred yards from his starting point, a bumed-out tank rested on its side in the ditch. So the Army had fought -- and lost. He plodded on, head down against the chill wind, headed north into the dark countryside. Ill M allory remembered the Hodges house as a pleasant old brick structure, steep-roofed, gingerbread trimmed, built among century-old elms at the crest of a low hill half a mile off the highway. It looked gaunt and forbidding in the pale dawnlight when he crawled over the fence and crossed the pasture. He saw lights in two of the windows. He approached the house openly via the driveway. No one moved behind the curtains. No eager farm dogs leaped forth to bark a greeting. Three pick-up trucks were parked on the rutted grass before the wide porch. A heavy-laden convertible stood behind them. The lights inside went out as Mallory reached the steps. He halted. Air sighed through tree branches overhead. A stick cracked somewhere in the darkness off the left side of the house. "Hello -- anybody there?" Mallory called. No one answered. He thought he heard a faint sound that might have been the hammer of a gun coming back to full cock. "I'm a refugee from the city," he said. "I need help." The bushes shook. A big, broad, rather heavy-looking man stepped into view, holding a shotgun ready. "Get down on your knees and put your hands on the ground," he ordered brusquely. "I'm unarmed," Mallory said. "Better move fast. I'd as soon blow your guts out as look at ye." Mallory stared at the loosemouthed, unshaven face, the bristly black hair tufted under the rim of a new-looking yachting cap with an elaborate gold badge. "Don't be a fool," he said. "You're a spy." The man fingered the gun, 'coming forward slowly. "A damned, sneaking spy." "Lxnny, you damn fool -- Can't you see he's hurt?" A woman, heavy-hipped, bundlesome in a mackinaw, had come up behind the man. "He'll hurt some more before I'm done with him -- " "Sure, shoot off that twelvegauge and let everybody inside five miles know we're here." "I'll just stomp him." Lonny advanced, his teeth showing white in the pearly light. "Has it occured to you that we need every man we can find?" a quiet, elderly voice said from the background. Lonny thumbed the safety off, squinted down the barrel at Mallory's face. "Where's Frank Hodges?" Mallory asked. Lonny lowered the gun, grinning. "I forgot," he said. "I aimed to stomp ye." IF A girl appeared behind the big man. She was young, pretty, with a pale, big-ey face, dark hair tied under a scarf. "It's Mr. Mallory," she gasped. She came forward. "Mr. Mallory  how -- what -- " Lonny's big hand caught her, pushed her roughly away. "Lonny, I told you to keep your hands off her," she snapped. "And you can forget about busting this fellow." She tilted her head toward Mallory. "Sally knows him, that's plain. And like the Perfessor said, we can use an extra hand here." "He could still be a spy," Lonny snorted. But he stood by passively as the big woman and the girl led Mallory into the house. A fire glowed in the fireplace, a kerosene lamp on the table. The girl brought a tray with hot soup and coffee to Mallory as he sat at the kitchen table. "Lori was here when it started," she said. "Then men came here -- soldiers. They shot father. Lori and I got away into the woods. We were separated. I haven't seen her since." "How long ago?" "We were together for a week. So it's been about three months. She was all right when I saw her last. The soldiers were gone when I came back. The house was empty. I don't know where Mother is." "Sally -- what are the -- the diings in the city? Where do they come from?" Sally looked puzzled. "I don't know what you mean." The Professor came into the room. He was a gray-haired, worried-looking man wrapped in a muffler. The tip of his nose was red with cold. "You spoke of 'things' in town, sir," he said. "You refer to the enemy troops, I assume?" Mallory described the simulacra. Sally and the old man listened silently. "They have a kind of hypnotic control over the people who work for them," Mallory finished. "They walk and talk and feed themselves -- but that's about all." "You say you worked for the, ah, creatures for three months?" "I must have. I have no memory of it." "Why is it you weren't affected by this hypnosis you speak of?" "I assume I was affected -- for a while. Then I came out of it." "Why?" "I don't know." The Professor nodded. "You've had a difficult time of it. You need rest and care -- " "You don't believe me." "I have no doubt you're quite sincere, sir, but it's apparent you've suffered hallucinations. It's not surprising, considering what you've been through, alone with your dead in the ruins of a deserted city -- " "It's not deserted and it's not in ruins. It's been taken over. My facts are easy enough to check. But where are the Army and the police? Why isn't anyone doing anything?" "There's been a war," the elderly man said coolly. "A short war -- one the United States failed to win. The country has been invaded. We're under occupation by Soviet troops." T he elderly man, whose name was Jarvis and who was a general practitioner from the nearby town of Minneapolis, Nebraska, pulled up a chair and tamped tobacco into a clay pipe. "I can't help wondering what you did in the city these last months, Mr. Mallory. How did you survive?" "I've already told you, Dr. Jarvis," Mallory said. "Your story still sounds reasonable to you in the light of what I've said?" "I didn't say it sounded reasonable. Just that it's true." "Mr. Mallory -- you've elaborated a fantasy to spare yourself the shame of defeat by the Communists -- to give yourself hope that your wife and children are merely captives, rather than dead." "I know what I saw." "Have you any proof?" "Why would I concoct such a story?" "We've all been through a terrible experience," Jarvis said softly. "Some of us survived in one way, some in another. Some by physical flight, some by a fugue of another sort." "We're only twelve miles from Beatrice. Haven't any of you ventured near enough to see that the city's intact?" "There's an epidemic there, Mr. Mallory." "What about the Tower? You should be able to see it from here." "Tower?" "It's half a mile high, luminous green." Jarvis raised his wispy eyebrows. "You mean the searchlight?" "I mean the tower. They've cleared away the houses in a quarter-mile radious around it. It's their headquarters. That's where is." "Mr. Mallory, the Russians have et up a big beacon light in the city," Sally said diffidently. "You can see it shining at night." "The light is invisible in the daylight, of course," Jarvis said. "You've got an answer for everything." "Tell me, sir -- since your awakening, as you put it, have you yourself had any doubts as to the reality of what you saw?" "Of course I had doubts. Who wouldn't? The aliens aren't easy to believe in even when you've seen one. But after they've shot at you -- they're hard to ignore." "You had no gunshot wound, Mr. Mallory. Only lacerations, apparently caused by a piece of wood. There were splinters in the wounds. I suspect you had a fall, probably in a damaged house. Looking back, can you see any small discrepancies, any objects IF or creatures that changed their aspect from time to time? Anything miraculous, logically impossible?" ,  "The door to Lori's room," Mallory said reluctantly. "It was sealed over. I had to cut my way in with an axe." "I submit that you sealed away your memory of your lost daughter, Mr. Mallory. But behind a mental barrier, not one of lath and plaster." "I tell you I chopped my way through it. It was solid -- but not lath and plaster. It was like layers of gray tissue paper." "I'm sure all these symbolisms would be significant to a trained psychiatrists," Jarvis said. "I'm no more than an amateur dabbler in the subject -- but I've done a bit of reading. I feel sure that if you returned to your house -- assuming you weren't haunting a ruin -- you'd find a perfectly normal door shattered to splinters by your axe. In fact -- " Jarvis' tone grew minutely animated. "That may be precisely how you acquired the wounds, forcing your way in -- " "Next you'll be telling me Lori doesn't exist. That's what Gill said. But Sally knows her. Explain that away." "I'm sure your fantasy is built on some basis of facts. I'm merely trying to help you strip away the facade of illusion -- " "Maybe you shouldn't, Dr. Jarvis," Sally said. "Maybe he's better off believing -- something." Jarvis looked skeptical. "Believing in alien monsters? I doubt that concept will prove to be more comforting in the long run than the reality that the Russians launched a surprise attack and won the war." "They haven't really won," Sally said. "They must be as badly off as we are. I haven't seen a Russian soldier in months. And they haven't bothered us here. Not since the first day." "We're too close to the plague city. And in any event -- what do we have that they might want? They have the cities to loot. But they'll get around to us in time, I daresay." "Have you actually seen these Russians?" Mallory asked. "Are you sure you're not making them up?" "Of course I've seen them. Paratroopers dropping out of the sky. There was heavy fighting southof Minneapolis -- that was why I ran away." "I saw them, too, as close as you are," Sally . said. "I'll never forget them, those baggy uniforms and the captain with his red shoulder boards -- and their strange smell, the language they spoke -- " "Don't reopen the wound." Jarvis patted her shoulder. "You promised not to think of all that, eh?" "Why here?" Mallory asked. "What military objective is there in Nebraska?" "Possibly some secret base, a missile site -- who knows?" "What does the radio say about all this? Television? Isn't there any news?" I # "No news. No television. The radio comes alive now and then, mostly in Russian. I'm afraid I don't understand the language." The back door banged open. Lonny, coming in from outside with an armload of firewood, stared at Malloiy. He thrust the door shut with his foot and dumped the wood on the floor. "Carry that into the fireplace," he ordered. "Then go out there and cut more." "Not with that arm, Lonny," Jarvis spoke up. The heavy woman, Mae, appeared at that point to second him. Lonny went away, muttering. "I suggest you mend as quickly as possible," the medical man advis Mallory. "Our Lonny is a hypochondriac, he tends to tolerate me for that reason. But he's also one of the laziest men alive. He even tried to force Sally to chop the wood for him." "Lonny ain't so bad, when you know how to handle him," Mae said, sitting down heavily across from Mallory and tucking back a lock of graying hair. "He ain't right brit and he's yeller -- so he's gotta be bullied. But he ain't no more'n a big overgrowed kid in some ways." A fter eating, Mallory and Sally went out into the yard. The bam door hung in pieces from its hinges, shattered by some winter storm. No animus were in sight. The place had a forlorn, decayed air. A season of neglect had done more to destroy the image of peace and order than three-quarters of a century of use. A huge oak in front of the house had had all its lower limbs lopped off ' -- one of the sources of Lonny's firewood. Mallory in vestigated the three pick-up trucks. All were new. They were loaded with merchandise -- a red plush divan, heaps of cheap new clothing, boxed shoes, kitchen appliances., hand tools, television sets -- Mallory counted three in one truck, four in another. Everything was rain-spotted and ruststained. The thin veneer on the TV cabinets was peeling from weeks of exposure to the elements. The convertible's interior, though obviously new, was musty and mouldy, soaked with rain, lden leaves were packed in the front seat and over the fur coats and fishing rods and guns in the rear. "There were two other men here with Loimy and Mae when they first came," Sally told Mallory. "They'd been looting all along the way here, loading up and then throwing things away to make room for more. They made trips every day for a week or so after they got here. The house is full of things. After a while they got tired of it." "What happened to the other two men?" "There was a fight. Lonny beat them up. I haven't seen them since." "When did Jarvis arrive?" "About a month ago. Lonny almost shot him but he called out that he was a doctor. That saved him." IF "Why did you stay after they came?" "Where else was there to go?" "What about those towns where Lonny d his friends gathered in their prizes? Aren't there any people there?" "No. I went into two towns while I was on my own -- after I r away. I saw some dead bodies, not many. Everything was intact, just deserted." Mallory turned as a door banged. Heavy footsteps clumped on the porch. Lonny stood there, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. He scratched his stomach, then slouched down the steps and toward Mallory and the girl. "I been thinking," he said. "Get on out back the house and cut up that kindling." "He's not well enough, Lonny," Sally said quickly. "Dr. Jarvis said -- " "What do I care what that dried-up old man said? I told ye to git, dude -- now git." The big man started toward Mallory. "Lonny, stop." Sally jumped in front of him. Lonny seized her as if to throw her down, then hesitated, obviously struck by a new thout. He pulled her close, his loose mouth searching for hers. There was a broken axe-handle lying near the trimmed twigs. Mallory caught it up, stepped up behind Lonny, raised the heavy billet and brought it down across the man's head with a sound like a dropped pumpkin. Lonny tottered two steps, went to his knees. Mallory walked around him, took careful aim and hit him again at the base of the neck. Lonny went down hard on his face. Mallory threw the club aside. "I've had all the Lonny I can take," he said. him, her body trembling. Mallory held her, made soothing sounds. "But what will happen when he comes to? Your arm -- " "I'm leaving," he said. "Where will you go?" "I don't know. Lincoln or Omaha. Somewhere there has to be some kind of organization, some troops holed up -- something." "Jeff -- are you sure about what happened back there in town?" "You believe Jarvis? You think I'm cra?" "It isn't a question of being crazy, Jeff. Just that under stress people sometimes see things that aren't there. You know it can happen. It's one of the mind's defenses. It's no disgrace -- " "When do I start believing? Now? Did I really give Lonny a concussion? Did Jarvis tell me the Russians have taken over the country? Are you real? Or am I imaeining this, too?" "I'm real, Jeff. Don't ever doubt that." He looked down into her face. She pressed against him, warm and ive. He let her go, stepped back. "My God, Sally, you're my daughter's friend. I'm old enough to be -- " His voice trailed off, unequal to the cliche. "I'm nineteen, Jeff. I'm a woman. Certainly Lori's my friend but that doesn't -- doesn't -- " It was her turn to falter. "Sally, you're a very lovely girl -- woman, if you prefer. I'm twice your age. Don't I find you desirable? Sure I do. That's the the trouble." "Things have changed, Jeff. Jeff. Three months ago you were just a nice middle-aged man, young-looking but surely worlds away from me. Now -- it's different. Maybe it's instinct. I don't want one of those thin-legged mop-haired boys. I want a man. Someone who'U take care of me Someone like you." "Sally, all this will end some day and everything will be back to normal -- " "Do you really believe that, Jeff?" "What would you have me do, Sally? Pretend it was all a dream and settle down here with Lonny and Mae and start enjoying a lot of leisure time?" "Jeff." Sally took his hands. "If it's the way you say it is -- what can you do alone?" "I don't know. I have to try." Mallory looked at the pick-up trucks, walked over the the nearest, a pale blue Dodge. He circled it, looking at the tires. Sally came up to him, took his arm. "I'm going with you," she said. "Don't be silly. You belong here." "With Lonny and Mae?" "Dr. Jarvis is here," Mallory said. "We'd better dump this stuff out of the back," Sally said and swung up on the side of the truck. Mallory hesitated for a mo. ment. Then he clambered up over the tailgate and awkwardly, one handedly, began tumbling television sets over the side. They left a half-hour later with the truck. Mae and Jarvis watched from the porch as they drove away. Nobody waved. IV T hey drove until dark, cruising at thirty miles an hour along empty roads. Three times they pass military Vehicles stalled in the road. Two were Russian. One was American. There were no bodies around them. They passed through the town of Hickman, desolate and deserted in the twilight. A few miles beyond, they pulled off the road into a stand of hickory trees. Sally helped Mallory inflate air mattresses, rig a tarpaulin over the truck. "It's too bad we don't have a double sleeping bag," Sally said. "I want to sleep close to you. I want to know you're here." "I'U be here, Sally," MaUory said. "Jeff, tell me about yourself. I want to know all about you." "Where should I begin? With my exciting childhood in the orphanage?" "Oh, Jeff, were you really -- " IF "It wasn't exactly an orphanage. More of a paying home for some lucky lads who didn't hapto have families. It wasn't bad. We were well fed and clothed and the school was good. But it was all a bit impersonal." "Don't you have any family at all?" Mallory laughed briefly. "No. Not unless you want to count Uncle Al." "Tell mo about him." "He used to come to see me. He was a big man with a big mustache and strange, colorful clothes. He smoked cigars with a wonderful smell. He'd tell me stories -- all about a marvelous Old House that he was going to some lucky lads who didn't hapexcited about it. And then I'd wake up." "Oh? You mean -- " "Uncle Al was just a dream." "Jeff -- " She clung tightly to him. "I'm no dream. I'm real -- and I'm here." "Yes," Mallory said. "And I'm glad you are, Sally. Very glad -- " T he next day they pushed north through Johnson and Otoe Counties, passing deserted farms, deserted towns. South of Lincoln they found the road blocked by a jumble of wrecked vehicles -- a pile-up in the dark, Mallory guess. He saw some dirt mounds in the field beside the road -- graves, hastily dug and untended. They back-tracked, detoured east. Just before noon, under a wet, gray sky, they came to the outskirts of the village of Alvo, drove along the potholed main street, pulled into a formerly prosperous Shell station, now overgrown with weeds springing up through cracks in the pavement. Cars were still parked on the cracked apron. Mallory cut a sixfoot length from a plastic hose to siphon fuel from the tank of a heavy, dusty Cadillac, took a can of oil from a stack by the pumps. He wiped the truck's windshield, examined the tires, then broke open the door to the women's toilet for Sally. He saw a display of firearms in a sporting gocxls store across the street. The door was locked but Mallory broke it open with a kick. He helped himself to a .# caliber Browning automatic pistol in a black leather shoulder holster. He buckled an ammunition belt around his waist, opened a box of fat brass cartridges and filled the loops, dumped the rest of the box into his pocket. As an afterthought he picked up a Mauser .#, filled the magazine and a spare, slipped it into his watch pocket. He exchanged his soiled coat for a lightweight, fleecelined, genuine leather windbreaker, took a pair of pigskin driving gloves, added a sheath knife and a small flashlight. A display of shoes caught his eye. He spent another five minutes selecting a pair of tough Cordovan climbing boots and heavy wool socks. "You look ready for anything now," Sally said admiringly. "And we'll probably meet it" They drove through the town, 'e roar of the engine shattered litter stillness. They passed the last scattering of hamburger joints and cut-rate service stations, slowed for a railroad underpass followed by a sharp turn. As Mallory swung the comer, a man stepped into the road fifty yards ahead. He wore a baggy gray tunic and khaki pants, a flat cap with red band. The submachine gun in his hands was aimed squarely at the windshield of the tmck. Mallory braked to a stop twenty feet from the man. More soldiers emerged from concealmt in the brown growth of weed. "Russians," Sally whispered. O NE of the soldiers, an officer to judge from the shoulder boards and the bolstered automatic, sauntered forward, a cigarette between his lips. He had a wide mouth, eyes that were narrowed to slits, sandy hair that needed cutting. A couple of medals were pinned to his stained tunic. He stood by the truck, looking it Over, looking Mallory over, peering expressionlely at Sally. "Get out, please," he said in a conversational tone and stepped back a pace. "Put both hands over your heads." Mallory and the girl climbed down. They stood in the road, waiting. The men came, glanced at them, checked the back of the tmck. At a nod from the officer, one of the men searched them, took Mallory's .#. "I am Lieutenant Brozhny," the officer said. "Who are you? Where do you come from?" He had only a faint Slavonic accent. "I'm a civilian. Mallory is the name. This is Miss Hodges. We came from near Beatrice." "How near?" "Twelve miles." "Why did you leave? The sickness?" "There isn't any sickness." "You are aware this area has been designated off limits?" "I could see it was deserted." "You do not believe in following orders issued by competent authority?" "I never heard of the orders." "The woman is your wife? Mistress?" "Mistress," Sally said promptly, taking Mallory's arm. The officer pur his lips. "What did you observe in the vicinity of Beatrice?" He shifted his gaze from Mallory to Sally, back again, watching their expressions. Sally pressed Mallory's arm wamingly. "Nothing," he said. The officer nodded as if this were the answer he had expected "I must ask you to accompa me to my headquarters," he said "This is a matter for the colonel to deal with." "You don't have to arrest us. I told you were were nonconi' batants -- "  "There are no noncombatants" the lieutenant said. "Please gpl into your vehicle. One of my mefl will drive." IF Mallory and Sally climbed into the cab. A gr inni ng, thick-featured youth with a goaty odor pushed in under the wheel, started up with a grinding of the starter gears. Fifty feet along the road a six-by-six Studebaker truck rolled out from the shelter of a tattered and sagging billboard. The other men swarmed aboard it. The pick-up did a U-tum and followed the bigger truck back toward the town limits of Crete. They drove through the threeblock business district, past another block of houses of diminishing grandeur, turned left into a farm road. It led for a mile across flat prairie. As it topped a rise Mallory saw a vast encampment spread across the fields below. There were acres of tents, miles of muddy catwalks, a score of jeeps, trucks, command cars, bearing the white star of the U.S. Army, some the red Soviet star. Men by the hundreds gazed out through the barbed-wire that encircled the bivouac. The pick-up braked beside a large farm house near the center of the camp, under a stand of sycamores. Sally held Mallory's hand as they climbed down to follow the Russian officer toward the house. The men standing by stared at the girl as they passed. The lieutenant conducted them through a former living room from which all the furniture had been removed, with the exception of some straight chairs and a library table. A uniformed girl sat at the table. typing. A large map of the state and the adjoining area was taped to the wail. Colored pins were stuck on the map in no discernible pattern. "Wait here," Brozhny said. He went through a door and closed it behind him. Through the curtainless windows men could be seen wandering across the yard. "They don't seem to be worried about the American prisoners causing any trouble," Sily said. "They let them wander around loose -- not even guarded." The door opened. The lieutenant beckoned. Mallory and Sly entered the adjoining room. It was a former parlor. A man lounged in a swivel chair behind a large desk. He played with a pencil held in blunt fingers. He was big, with a tough, square face short reddish hair. He wore a green uniform with three rows of ribbons and the silver eagles of a U.S. colonel. H e looked at Mallory and the girl. "I'm Colonel Strang," he said. "Brozhny tells you claim to have come from near Beatrice. That right?" Mallory nodded. "Clear up one point for me, will you, Colonel? Who's in charge? You or the Russians?" Strang stared at him. Brozhny laughed. "You thought the dreaded Reds had invaded Nebraska?" the lieutenant inquired in an amused tone. "Invaded, hell" Strang said and laughed without humor. "We invit them in. They're our allies. We've been invaded, all right -- but not by Russia." "I'm ad you realize that," MaQory said. "Nobody believ my description. I was about to to be convinced I was seeing things." "What are you talking about, man?" Strang frowned up at Mallory. "I'm talking about the creatures that have taken over Beatrice." "Creatures?" "You said you knew we'd been invaded." "And so we have," Strang said grimly. "By the Chinese Communists." # #They hit us on the morning X of the twenty-third of November," Strang said. "A day that will live in iiifamy beside Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Maine, We underestimated the Chinese -- underestimated them badly. They had stuff we'd never dreamed of. They came dropping straight in from extreme altitude at velocities our radar people couldn't believe. We launched everything we had -- and they picked it out of the air. The Air Force scrambled -- but there was nothing for the fighters to fight. The bombers were called back when word came down on the hotline that the enemy wasn't the Russians. Then our radar went out. All of it, all at once. But IF wc knew where they were Rouped. We poured in the firepower, low-level bombers, strafers, armor. None of it got anywhere. Aircraft went out of control and crashed. Vehicles stopped dead. Guns wouldn't fire. That was when we called in the Red Army. And then, of course, the Sickness hit us. We had to pull back and regroup." "Is the fighting still going on?" Strang frown. "There hasn't actually been any fighting as such. The Chinks are an elusive enemy. We can't even make contact, danm it." The Colonel's fist hit the desk. "But we've got 'em stalled, bogged down. They bit off too much. They can't chew it." "That was diree months ago," Mallory said. "What's happened since?" "We've taken advantage of the lull to consolidate our positions, prepare our counterattack." "If you haven't made contact -- how do you know it's the Chinese?" "Who else would it be?" Strang came back. "And how is it you know nothing of all this?" "He's been sick," Sally spoke up quickly. "He's had amnesia." Strang grunted. "You claim you were near Beatrice. You saw nothing?" "I haven't seen any signs of the Chinese," Mallory said carefully. Strang nodded. "What did you do in civilian life, Mr. Mallory?" "I'm an engineer." "Good," Strang nodded. "I need engineers. I need everything I can get but qualified men most of I IS j Controvriiol I Uninhibifd I Deadly S#riout I Humorous I ond I Incrodibly Interestinfl? Brian Aldiss... Poul Anderson... Piers Anthony... Isaac Asimov... Richord Bergeron... Bob Bloch... Voughn Bode'...John Brunner... L. Sprogue de Comp...Terry Carr... John Christopher... Philip K. Dick... Harlon Ellison... Philip Jose' Former... Jock Goughan... Horry Horrison... Lee Hoffman... John Hayden Howard... Leo P. Kelley... Dean R. Koontz... Anne McCoffrey... Michael Moorcock... Alexei Ponshin... Mack Reynolds... Bill Rotsler... Mormon Spinrod... Bob Tucker... Harry Worner, Jr...Ted White... and many, many more... Richord E. Geis does his thing. Bi-Monthl y #pgs. Photo Offset P.O.Box #I # all. Mallory, I'm prepared to offer you a commission in my army." ".Your army?" Strang gave him a hard stare. "That's what I said. I raised it, I provision it, I give the orders. My army." "What does Washington say to all this?" "Not a damned thing." Strang said softly. "Or Moscow either. Better readjust your thinking, Mr. Mallory. The old organization is gone. Communications are gone and with them the old government, the old economy. The sooner you realize that, the better chance you'll have of surviving under the new conditions." "What's happened to all the people?" "I took the able-bodied ones, of course. The rest have been evacuated outside my perimeter. Why?" "I just wondered how they fit into the new order." "Forget them, Mallory: There are matters of naore immediate concern. As an officer, you'll have the best, of course. I've scoured the countryside, stockpiling supplies. You'll find we live pretty well here. Not that we're settling into complacency. Let the enemy get the impression that we are. All the better when I'm ready to make my move. They've put their necks into a noose, concentrating as they have. Panicked, no doubt, after their first unexpected successes. Like the Japs after' Pearl Harbor, they'd wiped out the U.S. Navy and didn't Imow what to do next." Strang rose, paced across the room and turned. "Damned shame you saw nothing in the Beatrice area. I need Intelligence, Mallory -- need it badly. I'd give my left arm to know what the yellow bastards are up to." He smacked his fist into his palm. "But with it or without it, I intend to hit them with everything I've got -- and wipe the city of Beatrice off the map." "Colonelrthere are no Chinese in Beatrice," Mallory said. "And how would you know?" "I was there -- two days ago." Strang walked around behind his desk and seated himself. He opened a drawer and took out an automatic pistol, laid it on the desk before him. "Tell it from the beginning, Mallory. This time tell it Mallory gave a terse account of everything that had happened from the moment of his awakening until his departure from the city. Strang eyed him disgustedly when he finished. "Your brains are scrambled," he said flatly. "Colonel, try to keep an open mind. Consider what I'm telling you. Everything you've said fits in with what I've told you -- " "Poppycock." "Have you seen a Chinese soldier? Even a corpse?" Mallory demanded. "I've explained to you -- " "You're wrong! There are thousands of people trapped in Beatrice. You can't bomb the city. Colonel. It would be mass murder!" (Please turn to page # ) IF All brain fronn birth, he had to learn about heart! against the cold of this strange, possibly hostile, alien world. Fingers of light probed be tween the mountain depressions ahead, signifying that morning had come and that the time had arrived to awaken his whole body, in this, his life's greatest trial. The swirled yellow-in-blue snappers around his boulder had finally quieted, some of the wounded dying while the more aggressive ones had scuttled away search of other prey. One-GirkTwo stared at the remining horde below, shivering with the thought of how close those razor-sharp claws had come to his soft, organic form. How fortunate he had been to respond in terror to their noisy click-clack during the dark of the night and to have scrambled to his present safe perch. From the number of injuries and deaths below, they must have slashed one another in wild displays of temper and frustration during the night. Was patience a necessary solution against the dangerous elements of this planet? Was it a necessary characteristic which he must possess to advance from a Two to a One? He did not know. Whatever the case, he was thrilled by the opportunity to strive for the mighty advancement of himself from a Two to a One. The fact that all of his kind had similar chances -- or perished -- made no difference to him. Instinctively and consciously his tiny body cried for the right and rejoiced at the situation's potential. Every One-Girk longed to be a One-Girk-One for that was the nature of his genetic heritage as well as his purpose for being. Actually the symbols One, Girk and Two were quite literal transcriptions of an otherwise alien viewpoint most difficult for human understanding. Though necessarily such symbols are vague approximations of their true meaning, human analogues exist which correspond and are useful. The first One stood for the fact that One-Girk-Two was composed primarily of neural tissue whose ultimate function might be that of providing the drive and decisionmaking function of the Unit -- a composite of many Girks, each of different but coordinated function. The Two stood for the fact that this particular One-Girk had achieved success in passing every civilized test for his species -- fourteen in total number -- except the last' Should he pass this last test, consisting partially of his ability to survive in a strange and hostile environment and partially upon an as yet unknown set of criteria, he would automatically raise himself to the rank of a One-Girk-One, with all of its rights and privileges assigned. Which simply meant that this particular Girk organism had been approved by the standards of his society and that he was fit to coordinate the activities of the complete, composite organism which made up the Girk Unit. Though his tiny eyebuds still roved over the tom and slain snappers, One-Girk-Two's busy thoughts actually reflected the lessons he had learned during his early period of trail successes. Being a Unit was the highest ideal. Noting and understanding relationships is a great achievement. To appreciate interrelationships fully, however, one must be a Unit. The fragments of instinctive concepts within the range of One-Girk-Two were awesome and overshadowed all feelings of fear during his present hideous test. H e glanced toward the horizon noting the fhin, dull streak of light reflected through the morning clouds. Dew had just fallen, leaving glistening spheres everywhere. One Girk Two stretched his surface membranes, the better to absorb the moisture. Turning back to the snappers below, he considered their relationship to the flora and fauna around. Without predators of some kind the fertile grasses and forests would soon be overgrazed and overburdened with herbivorous life forms. Then, life's balance destroyed, all would wither and die until a new balance came into being. He recognized the last thought as fragmentary, far below the Unit knowledge level of interrelationships. With the snappers, proper toll was taken of the herbivorous life forms, food of another kind was returned to the grasses below -- and this was as far as his present knowledge reached. Every cycle had other cycles interlaced -- the rain, the grass, the minerals, the animals -- perhaps, even as a lowly One-Girk-Two, if he were to concentrate sufficiently long and hard he would be able to see how the very planet's motion cycled and interlaced with the ultimate purpose of the snappers. The thought was one to muse on. But now the light had become stronger and he knew that the day would bring a new set of trials, a new set of tests -- perhaps even his death. It was nevertheless a joyfully encountered time -- for it could bring him closer to Unit status. His appendages were weak, developed primarily for locking into Unit position for life. His tools were primitive -- a heat gun, a food converter, a signal generator. Somewhere during the night a change in attitude had taken place in his makeup. Unable at first to use the heat gun against life forms even in self-defense, One-Girk-Two had scrabbled away from the snappers and found safety above their clacking claws. He had rationalized the action to the charge. But the night's changes in his attitude now caused him to unlimber the heat beam, take aim at the still living, dangerous snappers and press the button. Steam sizzled upward from the rocks below until they were covered with charred and smelly snappers no longer capable of action against him. He was truly relieved -- their sharply lined mouths and their clutching, curling foot pods, too, were gone. Another attitude had changed. Patience is good. Death, too, may serve a purpose -- that another might live... Would this thought endure for him to bring back? He did not surface? He did not know. His immediate danger over, he still held back to think through his next move. The light would soon be stronger. The ship, which was most certainly monitoring his every movement, would probably expect him to move soon. Would his test be valid without his moving constantly over the planet's surface? He did not know. Probably Inaction would mean automatic failure. And, having failed the test, this particular OneGirk-Two would be eliminated -- killed as useless, of no purpose in the cycle of things in his present form. He would be destroyed -- returned to ashes of ordinary chemical compounds to be spread over the single broad sea of the home planet. How civilized the test was! Tens of thousands of years ago the Two Girk Ones (bodies). Three Girk Ones (mobiles), along with the One Girk Ones (brains), were assembled into Units by trial and error caused by the play of wind and wave. How long it must have taken before civilization created a sensible set of rules for the making of Unit selections. The value of each assembled Unit was a matter of the selection process, too. He knew that should he survive the current tests he would become a part of a very important Unit indeed. Great inward pleasure swept through OneGirk-Two as he contemplated the future. The sun's rays probed his soft flesh. He pushed out his almost atrophied, fine line appendages and used them to move himself from the rock. Gravity was stronger here by an eighth than on his home world. Simple movement was slow and timeconsuming. He woke his body and put every cell to the effort of traversing the long, grassy valley. His senses were alerted for the tiniest sound which might indicate movement of snappers. His eyes and tympanic membranes were especially alerted for dangers of unknown size and type. Ahead he could see waving strands of. blue-green grass. To his right were low-lying hills, browned and dusty in the morning sun. Oh his left was a creek bed and beyond the creek bed he could see a thick forest of dark bluegreen. IF Immediately ahead he could spot the double humps of nesting insects he had found numerous and painful. On the day ot his aniv he had walked unknowingly into similar humps to be stung again and again. He gave these two wide berth. He arrived at the dry creek bed. He was careful not to dislodge gravel or rattle the dry, noisy brush as he slipped down to the bottom. The creek bed followed the edge of the forest and One-GirkTwo noted that a cleared space on either side of the bed gave him easy view of possible dangers. His only problems were the sharp-edged stones and pointed sticks that every now and then gouged into his tender flesh. Travel was not too hard, however. T he sudden sounds of scrambling rocks and the sliding of many feet slowed, then stopped him. He edged his slight tKxiy under the roots of a tree at the edge of the creek almost without thinking. The thundering noise rapidly turned to billows of dust and the outlines of gigantic animals. One-Girk-Two raised his heat beam to face the great bulks in the event the beasts chose him for their target. He did not think the beam would have much effect on their thick hides, however. He hid quietly. The herd thundered past without noting the little intruder. OneGirk-Two eased out to the middle of the bed again. He looked downward to find his signal generator gone. Without the ability to signal his position he would never be pick up by the ship. That was the same as failing the test! He backtracked anxiously, heaved a mental sigh when he found the equipment hanging to a root in his earlier hiding place. He carefully placed it back on his body by means of its loose strap, checked his food converter and retraced his path. The creek bed finally turned away from the forest. One-GirkTwo painfully pulled himself over the steep bank on the forest side. He did not want to go among the trees. Many unknowns could hide there. Still, the sun beat hot and heavy against his thin skin and the heat plus lack of moisture were major determinants in his next decision. He eased himself into the shadows of the vegetation, laboriously pulling himself along by means of brush and clumps of tough grass. Presently he stood before a giant black-boled tree fringed with delicate blue-green, lacy stringers. He looked up and saw thick branches and gnarled limbs linked with gossamer webbing. Birds? Insects? Plants? He did not know. He stepped gingerly forward, took another step, then suddenly felt himself caught and spun up and forward. His tiny appendages were held tightly. He could not reach for his heat beam; his body was held almost equally tight. He could not budge. II S trands of sticky fibers closed in on One GirkTwo, wrapping him in a nest of crisscross lines. He reflected on his position, noting other bundles like himself hanging from other tree branches. One bundle jerked and bobbed, swinging. The creature in it must have been stubborn -- its motion never stopped nor decreased in intensity. Te bundle jerked and swung for what seemed like hours. Suddenly upon it loomed a huge amorphous organism of generally spherical shape. And One-Giric Two could see that the new being had no observable appendages but somehow was able to cling to the jerking bundle. A told extruded from the creature and. stretched over the jerking bundle, wrapped around it. Soon the jerking decreased in intensity. One Girk Two sensed the odds were heavily against his survival. A deep depression struck him. Then, as swift as thought, his spirits soared as his imagery focused on his potential for reaching Unit status. He acted swiftly, massing all of his neural tissue together, linking each cell to the others and pushing his thoughts inward toward a central, hard core of being that demanded, over the random pulses of each tissue layer, attention to the central problem of escape. His associations flowed in a disciplined manner, searching and discarding possible solutions to his present plight. Finally the most probable line of approach appeared and was seized upon by more and more clusters of his neuronic boundaries. His massive intellect tested the thought, explored bypaths and finally resolved to try the idea. One Giric Two refocused part of his tissues on the animal ahead, primarily to keep up his guard. Then, with other parts of his body, he began the simple process of secreting liquids through his external membrane. The weak, watery acid was rapidly absorbed by the vegetable-like fibers holding him and capillary action moved the fluid evenly throughout the network. The wetn bing sagged, broke open. A nearly dehydrated One Girk Two fell clumsily to the ground. He knew a swift surge of pride and happiness, not at the thought of his own cleverness but at the thought that he was still eligible as a Unit component. Turning his attention back to the surrounding jungle, he careIF fully bypassed the webbing structures, slowly making his way once more through the tangled jungle. His external membrane slowly absorbed moisture from the rising humidity beneath the thick foliage, restoring his body fluids. Hunger came. But a mere moment's effort was needed to drop organic materials through his food converter and change them to a thin paste his body could ingest. He rested on the trunk of a fallen tree before moving on. conscious thought dwelt on the environment around him, comparing and classifying sensations and shapes into safe, possibly safe, possibly dangerous and dangerous categories. The vine now ahead of him, for example, appeared as safe a s thousands of others he had seen. Another part of this thought process, like some small, irritating insect, considered the principles or philosophies he was expected to formulate and present during the final testing. So far he had changed his pattern of behavior lowed that his attitude and orientation toward himself and the universe were also changed. Was the change in the proper direction? He did not know. Certainly the development of utilizing his whole mass of neural tissue when confronted with an otherwise unsolvable problem was in the right direction. Everything he instinctively knew about his hoped-for and ultimate goal spoke of even higher, almost godlike, powers of concentration that would be his as a Unit. The vine ahead of him waved but so did all the other vines, hanging nearby. The wind reached the vegetation through a cone in the jungle roof. One-Girk-Two passed under the dangling plant when, without any warning at all, it twisted and curled itself around him. One Girk Two contracted his body and slipped out of the coils. Unfortunately his heat beam was jerked from its carrying strap and crushed. Shock struck One Girk Two at his loss. Could he survive this hostile environment without the heat weapon? He did not know. B y the time One-Girk-Two had pushed his way up the steep ridge beyond the first section of jungle, daylight was no more than a faint, gray line stretched along the horizon. He figured that the last of it would be gone in moments. His passage had been slow and difficult. Deep shadows smoothed the ground around him while beneath him he could still feel the occasional pain from loose rocks and dead branches which often masked treacherous holes and low places. Twice he fell into such holes, making no outcry. Each time he carefully appraised his position, then pulled himself out in the most logical and expeditious manner. The unfamiliar gravity was beginning to take its toll, too. His body seemed to sag and his appendages, never very strong, were slower and slower to respond to his mental demands. With each step he became more aware of a weakness in his plans. How could he have decided simply to move on and on across this planet with no purpose to his direction? Perhaps he should have waited first to develop his philosophies. Whatever the case, his present need was to rest the night on the ridge overlooking the thick forest below. There he would at least, be safe from snappers. What else might lie in wait for him was unknown and unknowable -- hence, must be risked. He reached the end of the narrow, tablelike plateau along which he had traveled. Light was growing steadily weaker. In a very short while he would be on top of the ridge and would command his body to rest while part of him kept watch. A dry stick crackled and OneGirk-Two again plunged suddenly downward. This time his fall was more severe due to a longer distance. His body flattened outward, forming a thin membrane stretching precariously over rough, sharp rocks. More slowly than other times he pulled himself together and heightened his other senses. He could hear a low, muted air-sound at the end of his cavemlike trap. Assuming the sound to be the breathing of some kind of unknown, burrowing animal, he concentrated his senses on the walls surrounding him. The hole through which he had fallen had straight walls from top to bottom, showing no projections whatsoever. He had landed on tumbled rocks and organic debris, most of which had probably been sucked through the same hole that had caught him. But even in the dying light One Girk Two could see a tunnel lined with jagged rocks, probably created by ancient earth processes of long ago. The breathing came from somewhere in the darker portion of the tunnel. One Girk Two pulled himself into a corner of the pit and waited, every sense alert. The breathing seemed to rise and fall in decibels, depending upon how close he pinpointed its source. To test his conjecture he pushed his body toward the noise. The breathing quickened, grew louder. One Girk Two permitted his tissue to rest while part of his thoughts dwelt on the breathing phenomenon. The animal might IF or might not be dangerous. It pould also be more frightened of him than he of it. In either case, his tissues needed rest and, until some light found its way into this new prison, his best judgment was that he should now rest. Morning arrived. Slim streaks of light found their way into his hole. The animal in the tunnel proved considerably smaller than One Girk Two. Dark fur covered its whole body. Its peering eyes were sunk beneath folds of fur, showing large black centers for the collection of the dim light. He could make out small forms under the animal's body and realized that these were young and that the fur-covered parent probably would never leave until he did. He congratulated himself for having chosen to wait during the night before -- even harmless animals will attack when their young appear to be threatened. One-Girk-Two surmised that the tunnel was the animal's normal entranceway to the cavern. He decided to bypass the nest in any effort to make his way to the outside world. He grasped a rocky shard, held it between himself and the frightened animal as he moved toward and alongside the nest, beast bared its rows of teeth, repositioning itself always to face the intruder. One Girk Two sidled past, pressing toward the opening. He let himself down into a narrow gash, shallow and barely wide enough to accomodate his bulk, yet a lucky opening, maybe, to the outside world. He worked his way down slowly, finding descent surprisingly easy -- until his good fortune ended. Above his head was a crevice too high to climb. Through it came a spear of light illuminating a steep opening at his lower appendages. He could not leap across the gap. H e puzzled over the impasse for a moment, then put all of his mind to work on the problem as he had learned to do when caught by the tree-webbing. Time stretched out for him while connections and cross-connections were forged. Every possible solution to his difficulty presented itself and was discarded for one reason or another -- including the retracting of steps to secure bridge-building materials from the burrowing animal's nest. The only solution was no solution at all -- rather, it was a gamble. He must attempt the jump. His brain estimated that his death was probable, regardless of which alternative he took. It told him that the probability of his successfully jumping the crevice was small -- as little as, perhaps, #. Yet to do nothing was also certain death, for it meant failure. He glanced down again, noting the sharp projections of rocks along the sides of the crevice. He could not see the bottom. He did hear a light sibilance -- a breath of air or maybe an echo of running water. Perhaps his brain had estimated a choice based upon subliminal impressions -- perhaps there was water below. He set himself for the jump. He gathered together his various appendages and pushed them all in the same direction against the floor, arching clumsily over the center of the crevice. He did not make it. He fell swiftly. Ill T he fall was long. OneGirk-Two believed that his body could not repair itself after a fall of such a distance. The noise of coursing water became plain, however, and just after drifting into deep despair, he found himself plunging deeply into a cold, swift stream. His body pushed through the water and pressed itself lightly against the stream bed before the effects of the fall stopped. Naturally buoyant, his body rose to the surface of the stream where, bobbing around and up and down like a piece of tree bark, he rode the stream's swift, dark flight. One Girk Two adjusted his metabolism to both the dark and the cold. He realized that his food converter was gone. He reached into the surrounding water in search of it but to no avail. The stream's pounding through rocks and narrow creces was now audible. One Girk Two was heavily battered at every turn. The stream arched outward in a long, sweeping waterfall which he rode down, plunging once again to the bottom. The tunnel walls widened and his ride became more even and slow. Light showed at the end of the tunnel. Like a leisurely and pleasure-seeking vacationer One Girk-Two finally floated out of the tunnel's mouth and into sunlight. He was too exhausted to struggle from the river to the bank. He rested most of his .body but let his remaining neural tissue dwell on whatever random stimuli came to it. Inevitably his thoughts raced back to the beginning of his present plight and the conflicting emotions he felt over it. He was still alive, hence certainly still eligible for One-GirkOne status. Were his signal generator to be activated now, signaling the end of this portion of the final test, he would still be lacking those essential principles required for the true Unit status. What could they be? He did not know. IF Cover was scant along the stream's banks. There was only a litter of rocks that had -- in stormridden times past -- scoured muddy grooves down the mountainside nd had come to rest along the foot of its scrubby, thinly grown foothills. Such plant life as existed had managed to sprout and to maintain itself on barren ground in the heat-blasted summers and extremely bitter winters. Scorching heat, even now, caused visible steam to rise from the river's surface. One Girk Two had passed through a steep mountain range which divided this land into two climate zones. He almost wished for a return to the more comfortable but probably more dangerous jungle zone. Only his signal generator remained. Food there would be plentiful for him to absorb through his membrane. Here, without his food converter and heat-beam, his nourishment would probably have to come from raw blood of small animals. He shivered at the uncivilized thought. By now the sun had reached its highest point. One Girk Two, using only a portion of his tissues, ma.de the decision to stay in the water. It had slowed to a sluggish, muddy river. He let his body rest, closing down even more of his conscious processes until only slight attention was placed on the surround-; ing environment. The river swept slowly around snaky bends, moving him as much as five miles in curvilinear distance for every mile of linear. Trees, tall and stately, began to appear along the banks of the river. The sun passed its zenith aid crept downward and the trees cast longer shadows. Another turn in the river and a net fell over One Girk Two, entangling him and stimulating his tissue to full wakefulness. out.logs, had surrounded his floating form and thrown a net over him while he had rested. They appeared to be bipedal with two arms, two eyes, two ears and coverings of purple, silky, hairlike growth. Their mouths were rounded and, as they made what seemed to be talking noises to one another, he could see viciouslooking, needle-sharp teeth. One jabbed at him with a wide stick probably used to propel a log through the water. One-GirkTwo let his membrane stretch to absorb the blow. His appendages were busy below the waterline, testing and searching every strand in the net for some access route or weak link. He found none. The net was drawn together more tightly and, without further blows from the floating animals. he was hauled into one of their hollowed logs. Here their inspection became more detailed and more painful to One Girk Two. Two of the animals, using sharpened sticks, prodded and poked him in every possible spot. Again and again he adjusted his membrane to absorb the blows but even his remarkable stretching capacity was finally not enough. One animal turned noisily to another, then prodded the stick almost through him. His outer membrane punctured now, his fluids leaked out. Excruciating pain overcame him. He shut off the aching parts of his body, placing them to sleep, then continued to dodge other prods from the short sticks. Soon almost every part of his brain-tissue anatomy was compartmented and One-Girk-Two fell unconscious. F rom One-Girk-Two's cage various tribal members could be seen in various positions of sitting, squatting or walking around the community fire. Twisted fibers from a tough tree root formed the bars of the cage. He had already learned that his weak body acids would not burn the bars. Most of his body tissues were closed off, preventing the continuous pain from searing through his consciousness. Water was never offered to him and he had to absorb what liquids he could from the humidity of the atmosphere -- a pitiful quantity, barely allowing his normal biological functions to proceed. Food consisted of scraps of garbage thrown by amused bystanders and only through trial and error had he learned which scraps were sufficiently fine-grained to be absorbed by his external membrane. Some food had to be washed by exudations of his body fluids, breaking down their cellular structure further so that he could absorb some of the nutrients. Other particles had to be left to rot until microorganisms had sufficiently broken up the materials. All these ways to provide himself with life-giving nourishment were new, invented by himself out of necessity. Though all these primitive conditions for survival were painful and burdensome, nothing hurt One-Girk-Two so much as the loss of his signal generator. Without that precious device, life itself was unimportant -- for without the opportunity to become a member of a Unit he was nothing. A spark of hope continued to linger within him. He could see the si)jnal generator hanging on the chiefs neck. It was a nigged mechanism and might still be operating in spite of the daily abuse it received. One-Girk-Two often directed the total mass of his tissues into IF J# search for a solution to his present plight. A slight suggestion of escape -- a bare, tenuous possibility -- offered itself. To that possibility, he devoted every bit of conscious neural tissue. Evening was the time for peaceful tribal social gatherings. At that time, fishermen, hunters and their trainees, the children, relaxed. Sleep was not far away. Daylight was nearly gone and few daily activities remained to be performed. Females of the tribe usually enclosed the very young in brilliant red skinfolds to protect them from the cold. The older children, more self-sufficient, followed the footsteps of their assigned teacher or formed into larger groups for games. Frequently a group of youngsters would assemble outside OneGirk-Two's cage to prod him with sticks, throw pebbles, sand or garbage or simply to stand quietly and stare from large unblinking eyes. One of the primitive alien children in particular had sustained a curiosity unusual for the group. He had never teased or thrown objects. He had come night after night to stare and seemingly to study One-Girk-Two. One-Girk-Two always looked forward to this event -- for in that small alien's behavior lay the tiny, almost insignificant possibility of his survival. He had determined to learn the tribe's language and to develop facility in it. The small, unblinking male child who was such a frequent visitor was his major key to the effort. There were always children surrounding the cage who prodded or teased; the opportunity to contact this particular male child was not easy to come by. The strategy finally developed was simple. Whenever the thoughtful male child appeared. One Girk Two would immediately sidle over to him, placing his body as close to the child as possible. There was. nothing more he could do until he learned the language. Meanwhile he absorbed noises and patterns of behavior associated with his captors' speaking modes. Had his body not been so totally injured and compartmented he might have learned far more rapidly than he did. But he did learn. The day finally arrived when persistent use of his remaining integrative functions brought the language to his abnormally small conscious portion and, with the exception of some ambiguities here and there, he knew that he was ready for his initial speech attempts. He tried them on his prospective friend when other children were not around. T he noises were not too easily recognizable as speech, for One Girk Two's membrane was not capable of imitating sounds struck from needlesharp dentures. At first the child to whom they were directed was delighted with the new phenomenon and invited everyone to hear the sounds. Prodding by sticks increased' until he and the others learned that One Girk Two immediately shut off the sounds under such circumstances. Then, for many weeks, all prodding ceased and One Girk Two rewarded their behavior by attempting his peculiar speech patterns at every opportunity. Visiting tribesmen from other geographical regions were fascinated with One-Girk-Two and soon great status was associated with the tribe that possessed him. His speech improved slowly. He rewarded Sutic, the young male he had chosen for a friend, by reserving for him a true description of his origins. "I am One-Girk-Two from another world beyond your sun. I am here to complete my apprenticeship before becoming a One-Girk-One when, should I pass the final test, I become a member of a Unit." Such concepts as Unit and OneGirk-Two were exceedingly difficult to communicate to the primitive alien and were perhaps never made clear. The idea of a "world beyond your sun" was not quite so difficult to convey, for Sutic was familiar with worlds beyond the desert, beyond the mountain, bevond the trees, beyond life and so on. And soon Sutic's special knowledge of the captive raised him in the esteem of his elders. In as short a time as possible One Girk Two made his request. "I must have the box hanging around your chiefs neck. Without it I will not continue to live," he pleaded. "My grandfather places much sebble on the box. He would never part with it." One Girk Two was unable to translate the word sebble. He inferred that it represented prestige or magic. Cold weather set in, causing One Girk Two to place his major efforts on maintaining his body temperature. He assumed the shape of a sphere in order to conserve the maximum amount of heat. He explained to Sutic, who acquired for him a place nearer the ever-present campfire and caused animal hides to be placed inside his cage. But OneGirk-Two continued to be unable to shake Sutic's reluctance to approach his grandfather on the subject of the box. His watchers, high above, surely knew where he was and what was happening to him for they had broad and mysterious powers belonging only to the Unit level. But the rules for trial were clear and specific. He must maintain signal contact with them and be ready to respond to their signal at any time they initiated the contact. Soon, he knew, he would be stranded among these aliens should he fail to maintain his proper signal in the generator. He might already be stranded. There was no way to tell. During the period of time that his signal generator had been worn by the chief, signals may already have come and passed him by. If this were the case, all his efforts to retrieve the box were already too late. He did not know. Slowly One Girk Two became part of the tradition of Sutic's tribe, the Corogers. The cold season passed; the windy season passed and was followed by the hot season. The sun blazed mercilessly. One Girk Two was given his physical freedom as a pet of the tribe. He found manyexcuses to remain by the chiefs side and near the signal generator. One was that part of his mission might prove to be to acquire a thorough knowledge of the tribe -- and what better observation post? Another was that an opportunity to use the signal generator might come. He learned that the tribe's life was stable in both births and deaths. Food was easy to reach in the streams or in the foothills and deserts. The climate was not too immoderate for the Corogers' genetic heritage and their tempers, though savage, were for the most part even. The tribe lived an unassuming life -- and within this pastoral but primitive framework the more civilized but incomplete One Girk Two watched and waited. He reflected on the lessons he must learn on this venture, their possible content, their significance with respect to Girk life, evolution and development, and his particular future role in his culture's matrix. IV L ife to any Girk is simple though it may not appear so to an outsider. Each Girk is born of the apparently undifferentiated parent mass of cellular tissue that once covered the floor of his planet's single ocean. Variations in temperature and nutrients surrounding the parent tissue cause a differing in the type and kind of budding which, when pulled out from the parent, becomes a particular kind of Girk. Usually the One-Girks stem from the hotter, equatorial regions. The Two-Girks -- the bodies ' -- usually come from the slightly cooler regions. The Three-Girks -- the mobiles of various sizes and shapes -- come from even cooler regions. The Twelve-Girks -- tiny reproductive cellular clust(rs which might eventually return to the parent body at some point distant in geography and time -- usually come from the coldest regions of aU. One-Girk-Two quite often reflected on the early beginnings of his race -- the complexities and simplicities, the beauty and rightness. He contrasted his race's evolutionary path against that of his captors, the Corogers, noting their strange incompleteness and nonunified nature -- they were almost like single Girks for life. Yet he often marveled that they had brains, body, legs and arms and other characteristics which operated with singleness of purpose much like a Unit. Thousands of years earlier OneGirks, Two-Girks and all other Girk components, separated from parent, were tossed and moved by the winds and the sea currents more or less at random across the planet's single ocean. They intermingled, one kind of component with another until, by chance alone, a complete Unit was created and civilization evolved. The early Units, though defective in philosophy and behavior, managed to create a more advanced developmental stage, opening to their more mature senses and thinking capacity many secrets of the physic world. Eventually the application of science to the formation Units brought about the design of a selection process whereby only those components -- One Girk Ones, Two Girk Ones and so forth -- which were most fit, became part of the completed Units. One Girk Two reflected on the precision and desirability of the tests. The Girk culture had become immensely improved in the period of only one generation. Subsequent refinements of the tests had brought it to greater heights. One Girk Two had been subjected to hundreds of tests which measured his ability to utilize both inductive and deductive reasoning as well as his ability to solve intuitional and associational insight-action problems. What was the exact extent of his powers? He reflected on his latest change in knowledge and behavior. He had killed. He had suffered great pain, indignities and humiliations at the hands of primitive, backward, alien beings. Yet, he had striven, in a sense, to join his tormentors. Did this mean that he had little by little realized that these beings, too, had a right to grow and to evolve in their own manner? He examined the principle of cooperation between dien species -- himself and the Corogers. One Girk Two was able to teach his captors some simple things. One of these was the idea and use of the wheel. Another was simpler in technique but reIF ;ulted in more praise -- how to nake fire. This second benefit Teed the primitives from constant flame-guarding. Such was the value placed on this bestowal that Sutic's grandfather, in great ceremony and in front of the whole tribe,, said, "You have made us a gift of much value. We no longer have the right to retain that which you desire so strongly. Take the box as a gift in return for your gift of firemaking to us." One Girk Two was overjoyed. He checked the box and found that his Girk monitor was still watching and observing his behavior. Strapping the signal generator once more to his form with animal thongs, he proudly made his way through the tribe, knowing a feeling of oneness and love for these strange beings. Somehow, in some way, this primitive group of aliens had to be componentized. That, he thought, should be his greatest and best gift to them. He could work from several different levels. Already these primitives had a well-developed social structure which tended to specialize activities within a unitary whole. It could be improved upon. And biological unitization could be made to take place at another level -- but what would be the end result? If he changed these creatures -- would they still be his friends and he theirs? One Girk Two contemplated in silence the mightiest task that had as yet occurred to him -- if he could accomplish it. To change the biological nature of a life-form -- was that not a kind of destruction, death, no matter what the reasoning behind it? Would he not be using on his friends a weapon deadlier than the heat-beam he had lost? After long, quiet evenings of thought he finally formed a conclusion. Though minor help, like the wheel and the fire-making, could be given to less developed beings tnan himself, it was not his place to change their natural organic integrity. very thought. One Girk Two's signal came. Strangely, he was unexcited and ready for it, as could easily be determined by the deliberate manner in which he pushed the return signal in proper code sequence. Then he waited. High in the sky, like a crystalline jewel sparkling brighdy in strong sunshine, hung the energyballoon. It would be operated by a Unit from the ship overhead, just as it had been on his arrival upon the planet's crust so many months before. As the bright point of light became even bigger and brighter, the activities of the Corogers ceased. The light became larger and expanded. The craft became visible. Its outlines became clearer, representing nothing more or less than a bubble with nothing inside. It stopped near One-Girk-Two, controlled entirely by the signal generator, and it waited. He moved to, it pushing his small body against the outer wall, thus blending himself with the wall itself. To One Girk Two's primitive friends it appeared as though he had walked through the bubble's walls. One Girk Two turned to watch the tribe from inside the hollow sphere. This was truly a parting, for he would have to wait for them to come to the Unit stage -- or its equivalent -- in their own time and in their own peculiar manner. Sadly he removed his signal generator, pushed it through the bubble's wl and dropped it at the feet of Sutic, the first friend he had known anywhere. A great noise rose from the mouths and throats of the tribe. One-Girk-Two knew he had passed the physical survival portion of his test. Had he also passed the philosophical, unknown portion? He did not know more than that love in all its forms must represent great risks and he had just taken all of them. What did this mean? The Unit guiding the bubble of forces upward would give him his answer.  A National imorgoncy has bean declared. The campuses are quiet -- and deadly. A fast-moving novelette of a typical California University of the future! It runs on a different time track. The local may bed you with nine women in one night -- but watch out for the express... Lieutenant Grimes was caught in a war of souls, neither of them his own -- or human! Some persons still living believe humans can communicate -- with each other! Also: Frank Herbert, Willy Ley, Algis Budrys. All in one big issue, on your newsstand now! M ost pulp-magazine publishing came to an end some twenty years ago because of what might be termed "Gresham's Law" of popular literature: Bad fiction tends to drive out the good from the market place. If a good magazine became popular, fifty cheap imitations were rushed to the stands. This syphoned off some sales of the good one and also disgusted many readers who might have liked such stories if they had found good examples. So far, this hasn't happened to science-fiction magazines. But there is some evidence that a trend in that direction is developing in the books that bear our label. Science fiction is a marketable commodity; it may not sell in vast quantities, but books carrying the term prominently do rather better than many other categories. And consequently, the men who ride trends are beginning to issue almost anything on which they can put the words that seem to draw readers. The latest -- and to my mind, most flagrant -- case is Holding Your Eight Hands, An Anthology of Science Fiction Verse, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith (Doubleday, #). There are some examples of the work of science-fiction and fantasy writers included: Aldiss, Disch and Lovecraft among them. There are also a number of pieces from poets that deal with subjects now in the news which were once used n science fiction -- and which ivere whipped to death back in the dim days of the beat poets. Anything goes. While Robert Conquest writes of science fiction in genuine verse, George MacBeth fills much more space with a bunch of folksy prose paragraphs about Herman Kahn's theories. There's little here to gladden the heart of either a science-fiction fan or the general reader. Yet it will probably get better reviews than most science fiction; and because of the label, it may well sell more copies than most books of poetry today. Ah, well... The poets of the day, Banging on wash-tub bottoms, Sing in cacophony Sans scan, sans rhyme, sans reasons. They write of archetypes, Speak atom bombs and fission. And when the markers right They call it science fiction. Their critic daisy chains. In quid pro quo ovations, Extol their latest fads -- And fraud them publication. Such an attempt to ride the market trends is a little exceptional, of course. A more normal trick is to dig back through old magazine issues to find something that nobody else wanted and to hail it as a classic -- or to put it out as if it were something fresh from the writer, in some cases. Often, such works aren't even given a superficial revision to bring them into line with current events. T he rose, by Charles L. Harness (Berkley, #), is an example of the "great lost classic" ploy. There's no effort to conceal that this is from the volume Authentic Science Fiction of #. Instead, the publishers boast of the fact, as if they were doing us a great favor in bringing us this rare jewel that no American magazine had the exquisite taste to publish. The point is further emphasized in a foreword by Michael Moorcock which indicates that this is a landmark novel by one of the greatest of science-fiction writers. I have no quarrel with his rati)g of Harness. The man established himself as a major writer with a single short novel. Flight into Yesterday, some twenty years ago. And despite a meager output, his reputation has deservedly remained high. Even the best writers, however, may lose perspective on some story dear to their hearts, with residts that should best be forgiven and forgotten quickly. The Rose has all the complexity for which Harness is noted, but it has very little underneath to justify all the themes and counterthemes. Instead, it seems to fall back on artiness -- a grave danger to any story which tries to talk about art as something more than a product of man's emotions. Much of the basic idea bogs down In an attempt to equate Art with the functions of science and mathematics as a means of controlling whatever Reality may be. The story is loaded and overloaded with symbolism. There's a Dancer and a Poet at the center of it all. Both are crippled and tortured; both are tools of folly. There's an unfinished ballet that must be performed, which will then do what all of science has failed to accomplish. And there's naturally a somewhat tragic mood of love. But most of it is as unconvincing as the description of the dance, which is so obviously impossible as a ballet that everything seems a little ridiculous. The whole thing comes off as an unhappy bit of what I can only call adolescent fiction. It takes on the vague profundity of an adolescent's first struggles for a sense of values and importance -- with everything in capital letters to conceal the fact that too much of the fury involves nothing but empty symbols -- the Reality of Art, the Meaning of Existence, and such. There's a great deal of color in some of the scenes, but the scenes take place to fill empty spaces, rath than giving us any true picture of what is happening Anyhow, it isn't a novel. The book is padded out with a number of shorter pieces to bring this novella up to publishable size. None of the stories are Harness at his best. T he ring of ritournel, by Charles L. Harness (Berkley, #), is another matter. This is an original novel -- full-length and current. Many of the themes that are vaguely hinted or heavyhanded in the older story are given the treatment they deserve. Art is still with us, but now it is in context with the worlds of science and religion. The texture and complexity of Harness' writing comes through much better. And the characters are more than mere symbols. The poet, in particular, through the eyes of the main character, his brother. Like much of Harness' work, this isn't always easy to follow. But there is a fascination to it, and a feeling in the end that the events have justified the effort required to understand them. Perhaps the most unwisely reprinted writer in our field has been Edmond Hamilton. Over a course of four decades, he has steadily improved his vision and his crt; today he is among the best writers of adventure science fiction, and any new book by him is one I buy automatically. Publishers normally list the date and source of the original appearance on the copyright page, so it shouldn't be too hard to IF determine whether a book is a reprint from the morgue of our beginnings despite title changes. Yet most readers aren't that sophisticated. I've heard Hamilton damned by fairly perceptive readers on the basis of work done forty years ago, when the writing standards of the whole field were much different. Now there's a new batch of novels by Hamilton that don't represent his best efforts. There was nothing wrong with the Captain Future stories when they appeared in the magazines twenty years ago. They were meant to be series stories based on a mechanical formula, like many other series characters from the pulp era. They were fastaction novels in which the plotting was almost as fixed as the choreography of a traditional ballet. Hamilton turned them out at regular intervals. His writing was honest for the purpose, but was never intended to represent anything but formula work. Now the publishers of Popular Library -- who own the original copyright from the magazines -- are issuing the Captain Future stories as soft-cover books. There is no attempt to deceive, of coui; the copy on the back cover clearly identifies each book as a Captain Future novel. That is fine for the readers who already know who and what the Captain was. Unfortunately, of the book-buying science-fiction public, this probably represents less than #. Any unaware reader who picks up Hamilton's Outlaw World (Popular Library, #) is risking disappointment if he expects a story of the quality of other work by the same man. The characterization is skimpy and routine, because the Captain and his rather contrived crew are little more than easily identified pieces in a regular game. And the story is skimpy because it was written to length and to schedule, rather than as a tale to stand on its own merits. Ifs good fun for those who know and like the rules of that game, but not for the unaware. ilton's current standard the Captain Future stories are, one ne only turn to his latest series, such as World of the Starwolves (Ace, #). This is clearly labeled StarwolJ No. # so there can be no confusion as to its being a series, and it's a full-sized softcover at a rather reasonable price. This shows evidence of having been designed for book publication, even though meant as a series. Morgan Chane, the hero, has been brought up by the outlaw starwolves and is now opposed to them. But beyond that basic situation and some parts of his character, the book shows a considerable flexibility in the choice of situation and secondary characters. It is also an action story -- but the action is keyed to a more adult audience, with leisure to build up the suspense and mood, rather than the need to spring immediately into full action. There are grays in the mood and in the characters, rather than the absolute good guys and bad guys. Furthermore, the reader who picks up this book need not understand even the fact that it is a series to enjoy it. Hamilton has time and space to develop the basic facts of Chane's background, and the story otherwise might be any adventure novel. The Starwolf series isn't the best of Hamilton -- probably no writer can do his best work around any series situation; but it is enjoyable, and by all odds the best deliberate series I've come across in the field. A number of books written for the teen-age market (which usually means somewhere between # and #) are now appearing in soft covers, with no indication of their original purpose. In the case of Andre Norton and most Heinlein "juveniles," this doesn't much matter; they were never very tightly geared to any particular age. But in other books, the handling isn't one that will completely please an adult. One of my books. Attack from Atlantis (Tempo Books, #tf), deals with a civilization that has existed for millennia on the sea bottom until an atomic submarine discovers it. (It's not the Atlantis!) This was written in # when atomic subs were fairly novel and before men had reached great depths. The foreword and some of the early subject matter are based on what has not yet been done, and should have been revised, along with a small amount that was deliberately written for the young reader. Yet when the soft-cover rights were purchased, no opportunity for revision was offered; nor is ere any sign that the editor took the trouble to cut out a few references that were of no use and are now out of date. It would be hard to blame an adult who decided to browse through science fiction and picked my book for feeling that the field is kid stuff. Yet such a reader, unfamiliar with most science fiction, might be attracted to the book by the use of the term "Atlantis" in the title. It was an honest book in its original intent, I feel. But I'm a little unhappy to see it picked up by an unfamiliar reader who decided to sample this science-fiction stuff people talk about. If these various forms of rushing almost anything called science fiction into print harm the field as a market, however, it will be only partly the fault of the publishers. TTie writers must share some measure of responsibility IF when they control the rights. All of us -- and I certainly include myself -- must obviously start demanding and exercising our right to revise anything that can be made suitable for a broader or different market; and we must sometimes refuse to sell rights to stories that really should no longer be in print. Until this Utopia arrives, the reader can only protect himself by watching the copyright notices and by doing more than read the blurb inside and on the back cover. Most stores will permit a buyer to glance over the first couple of pages of a book, if he shows signs of paying for what he likes, rather than using the store as a library. It's usually possible to tell in those two pages whether a book is of the level wanted. There's no law that forbids us screaming a bit in a letter to the publisher when we feel there was misrepresentation; but how much good that does is anybody's guess. O N A more pleasant level, there's a book where no faintest taint of misrepresentation can be suspected. Decision at Donna, by Anne McCaffrey (Ballentine Books, #), is an original first published in #. It's a book written for adults, completely independent of any others by the same author, and it includes enough information about itself in the blurbs for the reader to make a fair guess as to what he will get. What he gets is a good adventure story. The few human colonists on Doona are struggling to make their world ready for the larger horde of settlers to come when they run into an unexpected problem. Another race is discovered on Doona -- a world supposedly carefully checked to make sure it has no intelligent life. The colonists from Earth find some evidence that the aliens may even be superior in intelligence -- yet they still can find no evidence for a history of evolution to intelligence on the planet. If the aliens are natives. Earth's government is going to make the humans leave the planet -- but a return to overcrowded Earth is a nightmare to these social misfits up there. On the other hand, if it turns out that these aliens come from some other world (despite their seeming lack of space ships), the problem is one for which there is no clear answer, but one which each government bureau will decide to take over in absolute and conflicting authority. It's a nice situation, well handled, and with aliens that are sufficiently believable and interesting to add greatly to the story. Anne McCaffrey has avoided the too-easy trap of typing herself, I'm glad to see. Her previous work has been almost exclusively told from the point of view of a female character -- dragonrider, singing ship, or what have you. Here she uses a male as her protagonist. She slips into the masculine attitude easily and convincingly, and her female characters are seen as they would be viewed through the eyes of a man. She has also depended mostly on usihg characters with singular powers, such as telepathy or the cyborg awareness of her ip. The people on Doona have no such tricks up their sleeves; they have October #-November I, #. University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. The Secondary Universe is open to the first # registrants (# fee); the Tolkien Conference is open to all (# fee if not a member of the Tolkien Society of America). For information: Ivor A. Rogers, University of Wisconsin -- GB, Green Bay, Wisconsin #.  At Warwick Hotel, #th and Locust, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal to depend on normal human resources, except for one boy who shows a bit too much and too easy empathy with the aliens. (That's a minor kick, though the child does skirt painfully close to being too much of a wonderchild.) She gets by very well without the crutch of extra-normal abilities to sharpen her insights. The idea of a first contact with an alien race isn't as fresh as McCaffrey's best-known other works. But it's handled with enough originality to breathe life into it.  speaker will be Anne McCaffrey. Membership: #. For information: Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #.  Hilton Inn, San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests of Honor: Miriam Allen de Ford and E. Hoffman Price. Fan Guest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. Memberships: # now, # after January #st, # at the door. For information at the door. For information: Quinn Yarbro, # Colusa ##, Berkeley, California  California. Guest of Honor: Jack Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California # I . IF worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven emselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your pages, containing stories by such masters of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Lei Brackett, John W. Campbell, Jr. AU of the stories belong to the excitingly modem era that swept SF to its greatest pinnacle of popularity. ' r #-I from Moldaug, inhuman stars from the last human settlement, are gathering together for war. Old world colonies in order to avert this war. But not rugged individualist Cully When, the type of man who has pioneered frontiers in all times and all places. Set in some future time, this action-filled adventure depicts space-age guerrilla warfare and age-old human stupidity with excitement and ends with an explosive climax. # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... # .# #-# separate and complete worlds -- idyllic Lithia and a culture on Earth that has literally gone under ground, provides the basis for the story of four extraordinary men. There is the priest, dedicated to the glory of God; the scientist working for the glory of man; the realist who works only for himself; and the man who is content to ask nothing of any world, any man, or any deity. The author presents a compelling moral problem. This book is something of a tour de force. # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... # #-# the edge of tomorrow... who will be chosen for immortality? Who will make this ultimate decision -- the government, free enterprise, or private monopoly? A new, highly controversial novel, infused with blood and guts, examining the disease of power as well as the responsibility. Both praised and danmed before it was even published, this novel deserves your personal attention. # pp. List Price... # .# DiscouBt Price...#J# was he riding in a # Willys-Knit? If he was dead why wasn't he beginning a chilly half-life in the year #? And Grae Runciter -- murdered -- but sending him eerie messages from beyond the grave? Everywhere and anywhere Joe turned, in sky-writing, on a traffic ticket, graffiti, matchbook and did Joe really want to know the answer? Read this excitinp, new novel that starts as an important Luna Mission and ends as a living or dying diabolical nightmare. # pp. List Price...# Discount Price... # an entire day, a small rural village in England loses contact with the outside world. Soon after, all the women, married or not become pregnant, eventually giving birth to remarkable golden-eyed children who exhibit a strange kind of sinisterism. They are dangerous and Midwich must make the ultimate decision -- if the children survive, then mankind must join the dinosaur among Nature's discards. A gripping account of man's fight for survival. # pp. List Price... # .# Discount Price... # #-# C. M. Kornbluth. Two major advertising agencies are fighting for the Venus account -- nothing less than total control of the Venus economy and markets will do. It is completely unimportant that Venus is a harsh, barren, uninhabited planet. According to the mentality of Mitchell Courtenay of Fowler Schocken Associates, the trick is to persuade colonists to go to Venus, and once there, they will have to survive as best they can. One oft the most savage and devastating attacks on modern consumer society and the advertising agents who are its high priests. The Space Merchants is uncomfortably prophetic. # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... # #-# mysterious space force that inhibits the world's intelligence. But suddenly, it's gone and overnight the intellect of every living creature is trebled. What are the consequences of such instant genius? These are the problems confronting Archie Brock, former near moron; Peter Corinth, physicist; and his no-longer dumb wife. This provocative and absorbii book explores the ultimate problem of such a situation -- in a world free of the difficulties that has plagued mankind throughout history, what is man to do with his time? # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... #.()# #-# BE#T #F: # edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldlsa. Collected for the first time... the bNUt SF stories of #...Asimov, Sheckley, MacDonald, Leiber... plus # other exciting stories... and, year, #: A Space Odyssey. This rich anthology of the year's most exciting stories from the best SF bookshelf. # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... # #-# Heinleln'a Future History Stories. Twenty-five years ago Robert A. Heinlein began to write stories about an imaginary future that is fast becoming a reality. Discover, Uirough the pen of the master of space-age fiction, about man's first step on the moon; weather control; manufacture of synthetic food; interstellar exploration. Now, for the first time, in chronological order, are Heinlein's #I compelling stories -- all depicting a glimpse of a possible tomorrow. # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... # #-# master pain peddler, skillful and sophisticated, lives in a time when reading tragic headlines no longer provides the necessar sensations. Into ; Chalk's sinister hands falls Lona Kelvin, orphaned, mother of # children, yet without, a soul; and  Minner Burris, starman, whose butchered body ; was put together by aliens, a walking horror. What : fun to mate these two and watch them wallow in  their mutual torment. But somewhere, something  went wrong. Discover what happens when the pupi pets begin to pull their own strings in tUs imagi# pp. List Price... # Discount Price... # .# I I I I I ! I I S P.O. Box #, Grand Central Post OfiBce, New York, N. Y. # Please send me the books I have circled. Please print full name  address S-l S-# S-# S-#, S-# Name S-# S-# S-# S-# S-# Address City State Zip Code Sorry, No C.O.D.'s. (Please add # for postage and handling. N.Y.C. residents please add # sales tax. N.Y. State residents please add # sales tax.) stories you've been reading in these pages for some time, is clearly a writer with an imaginative and original mind. He's not only a writer -- the rest of his time he works as a mathematics professor at Tennessee A.  I., a land-grant college in Nashville, and in that capacity he also shows a lot of imagination and originality. His latest exploit is to install and direct one of the first and most complete research laboratories in Computer Aided Instruction -- C.A.I., for short -- in the country. Recently we had the privilege of visiting Tennessee A.  I. and went back to school one morning. Our teacher wasn't human. In fact, our teacher wasn't even in Tennessee. Teacher was actually a Pt)P-# computer located on the campus of Stanford University, some thousands of miles away in California, A smaller and somehumming and winking at us in the classroom but its function was only that of a sort of mechanized telephone operator. It took the messages involved in our own math lesson and those of the othei students sitting at a score of teletype consoles in the room, combined them and passed them on to California. We've "talked" with computers before -- played #-D tic-tac-toe and have done prime-number array at M.I.T. We've shot pool Princeton, N.J. -- but this deal was different. This was not a demonstration program or a game. This was the real thing. We were actually being educated. (High time, too!) Y ou arrive in the classroom at the appointed time and sit in front of the teletype. You type out your number and your first name. Two thousand mUes away the computer recognizes you and types out your last name to prove it, along with the drill number for your current lesson and a short statement of what it's going to be about. ("This is a lesson on common and decimal fractions." Or, "This is a lesson on addition.") And it proceeds at once to give you a problem. It types out: # X. #. Then it waits for about ten seconds. If you give it the right answer, it goes on to the next problem. If you don't give it any answer at all, it repeats the question. If you give it a wrong answer, it types, "No, try again." If you still give it a wrong answer, it types, "No, the correct answer is #, try again," and then repeats the question. And at the end of the drill, consisting of maybe # problems, it grades you and bids you farewell: "# Apr. #. # problems with # percent correct in # seconds. Goodbye, Frederik. Please tear off on the dotted line." (One thing. We really do know how much # X. # is -- at least most of the time. The score we got we have faithfully reproduced but we feel we should mention it was a bum rap. It was that low because we kept deliberately giving wrong answers to see what the machine would do. Actually, we could have easily gotten at least #.) Now, all of this will never replace the teacher, a fact well known to Perry Chapdelaine, to his Dean of the Department of Physics and Mathematics, Dr. Sadie Gasaway, to his Administrative Assistant, Mrs. Deitra Taylor, to Eh. Patrick Suppes, Director of the Institute for Mathematical Studies" in the Social Sciences at Stanford, who developed the program in the first place, and to all the other intelligent and able people involved. What it will do is make it possible for teachers to teach. unbeatably patient and reliable and so it is unbeatable at drill and review. It has no personality hangups. It doesn't take a dislike to any student because of his color, creed or length of hair. It has no tendency to show off in front of the English teacher across the hall, or to take time out for a lecture on why marijuana will rot your brains. It will just keep on giving you problems and checking your answers. If it finds you are getting them right it will move you up to harder problems. If it finds you're missing most of them it will slip in an easier set. And it will stay right with you for as long as you And so if you come to college and realize you goofed off on a little too much of your highfriend -- and your teacher's. For you it provides remedial instruction at your own level. For your teacher -- he doesn't have to hold up the whole class while he drills you in what you should have learned four years ago. Fellows, meet the computer. Computer, meet the human race. You might as well get to know each other. You're going to be working very closely together.  IF and Dear Editor: In your editorial to the May If you stated that much of the New Whatchamacallit science fiction was concerned with  petty antiheroes who whine over the lot of mankind but do nothing about it, That may be true of mainstream fiction, but it is hardly true of even New Wave science fiction, and  believe that you realize that as well as . Ive read a fair sampling of New Wave, and most of the protagonists are no John Carters or Kim Kinnisons, but they fall under the heading of heroes. They are not the perfect human beings the aforesaid two are, but they are not meant to be. They are mepnt to be fallible, ordinary men, and they illustrate the hero in us all, Sam in Lord of Light, Michael Valentine Smith, and certainly Jack Barron did not want to be heroes. They could have copped out but didnt. They did what they had to do. Even the characters of Harlan Ellison have the touch of greatness in them. Science fiction is proud that it works away from the mainstream, S-f fans do not need mainstream heroes like Hemingways Jake Barnes because mankind does not nepd Jake Barnes. Because certain writers introduce new techniques into s-f writing, the fans and writers have become afraid that Jake Barnes will become the model for heroes. So they condemn New Wave as a whole, and then praise Ellison, Disch and all the rest as individuals. Then they overlook the fact that The Holmes-Ginsbook Device is as New Wave as can be, wih superb statements on human motives. Asimovs story is concerned with anti-heroes, and his story is a classic, but there is no indication that his gloryhoggers will become models for protagonists. The fans and writers are in reality paranoid about the entire Issue, just as many are paranoid about sex in a story or elemertts of fantasy. You would think an s-f fan would be more rational. The plot of a story dictates whether or not one is a hero or an everyday human being, and there will be stories in which anti-heroes will have to be used, and they will be good stories. But no one writes science fiction because he feels there is no hope for mankind. I respect your talent as an editor and a writer, but your statement shows that you have been caught up in the same unreasoning fear that "many fans have been caught up in. It is false. The New Wave thinks as much of mankind as the Old Wave -- its just that the heroes must overcome, on top of their villains, their greatest foes -- themselves. And they d o . -- Arthur Cover. Who ever told you that Roger Zelazny was a New Wave writer? He denies it vigorously. Who ever hinted that Heinlein (even i n 'Stranger") was New Wave? If those were the New Wave writers, we'd be out in front of the cheering section Furthermore, Sam in the Zelazny story showed every sign of wanting to be a hero -- in fact, even a god! Come to think of it, he was a god, which is hardly an anti-hero; and neither he. Smith, nor any others on your list spent any time we can remember whining, but they did spend quite a bit of time doing something about the lot of mankind. And if you think Isaac Asimov is a New Wave writer, you're about to make a mortal enemy of him. The "Holmes-Ginsbook" story was a lampoon -- a takeoff on a very successful book about the deliberate use of science to get a Nobel prize. The protagonists are already there, and they're the model for Asimov's satiric characters. Our biggest objection to the antihero is that he doesn't try to overcome either the villain or himself; he doesn't change or try to change. Once a man starts to work on himself, he's out of the whining rut and he's trying to do something -- and we're then very much for him. Our biggest objection to the New Wave comes when it's neither new nor waving, but is simply the old slou where weak winds and wan waves labour nor any wind blows free, to steal a phrase from the best New Wave poet of the last century. Most of the time, it certainly isn't bucking the mainstream, as you imply; it's trying to use old mainstream tricks of pseudoexperimental writing and hopelessness to take over science fiction. Happens we're very much opposed to science fiction being taken over by anyone. We'd like a free market, where every story stands or falls on its own merits, and be damned to the mainstream or slipstream. Science fiction has kept going when most popular fiction died because it used interesting characters to deal with things that make good stories. When it picks up any other phony construct of how to write and what to write, it's going to join the dodo and the Sports Story. It's the job of critics to read the writers; when the writers start reading the critics for examples, someone has to yell. So we yelled. But of course, if you like it with namby-pamby anti-heroes given the job of making a tough planet (even Earth) habitable, well...less power to you, in New Wavese! Dear Editor: You mentioned a particle called a tachyon, a theoretical particle which cannot go slower than the spejed of light. According to my information, it has a rest mass of the square root of minus one. In one of Heinlefns novels. Citizen of the Galaxy, the hero explains the mathematical complexities of fasterthan-light flight thusly: So far as we are concerned, it's just a mathematical concept, like the square root of minus one... This to me is very remarkable. In the last few years, science fiction has been infected by what is called the 'new thing" or 'new wave." Personally,  define the 'hew wave" stories as ones attempting to confuse the reader, being shocking, IF using anti-heroes or having the prime object of style rather than content  though style is the means rather than the end. According to John J. Pierce, there is a movement called the Second Foundation which is for the preservation of true science fiction and the elimination of the new wave' type of anti-science fiction, with Lester del Rey as the First Speaker. Whether Mr. del Rey sanctions this or not, I think this is a very good choice; anyone who says #I was boring is all right by me. As a subscriber to If and Galaxy, I feel that you have let these magazines deteriorate over the past couple of years.  think Larry Niven is the only good regular writer you have, although  don't see why he keeps on with you. -- Matt Hickman, # #th St., West Des Moines, Iowa. According to the best information available on the tachyon, there is no rest mass, just as normal particles could have no assigned mass at infinite speed. The tachyon approaches infinite mass as it slows toward the speed of light. But so far, it's pretty much just a mathematical concept, as Heinlein apparently foresaw. As to the "Second Foundation" of John J. Pierce, Lester del Rey gave his permission for his name to be used with the honorary title of First Speaker; since he's been speaking against the attempt to impose any one set of standards on science fiction for years now, he felt he couldn't deny being Speaker whether first or early or whatever. Sorry you've been disappointed in what we have felt to be some fine issues of the magazines. But stick around, Matt! We're busy making a lot of improvements which should soon be showing up. And the reason Larry Niven -- for whom we share your admiration -- keeps on with us, perhaps it's because we're happy to let him write the kind of science fiction he wants to write. Dear Editor: I don't know if I'm going to be a new science fiction fan or not! I picked up a copy of If for the first time and, among other fascinating stories, stumbled across Perry Chap delaine's Spork of the Ay or." The man undoubtedly is mad. If his attendants in the white suits will let him turn out more "Sporks," I hope you print them. Mad or not, he can really write -- and he just might turn me into a permanent science fiction fan if they don't take away his pad and pencil and put him on basket weaving. -- Pat Harris, # Mexico Drive, Nashville, Tenn. We'll be printing several more stories about Spork, so rest content. And we hope you'll find the other stories so much to your liking that your fandom will become permanent. Incidentally if you're really concerned about Chapdelaine having to weave baskets, you might check up on him, since you can't be too far from his home. He certainly made a hit with the readers in Tennessee, judging by the mail we receive from there recently! Dear Ejditor: What is the status of Worlds of Fantasy? Is it still extant? It has now been something like six months since I purchased the first issue and, while I have been diligently searching through all the magazine stands, my efforts have been unrewarded. I've over-rationalized myself into being Conan the Barbarian, MidMi Twentieth-Century style. Thafs not good, but it's better than nothing. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that we are only what we pretend to be so we all should do the best job of pretending we can. -- P. T. Blaine, Cambridge, Mass. It could be argued that children learn to be adults by pretending they are, and some of their games would support the idea. Lately, though, it seems quite a few adults are trying things in reverse. We're happy to say Worlds of Fantasy is coming out again. Trouble with distribution and other technical difficulties prevented our doing more than one issue until now, but the magazine is still extant, and a second issue should be on the stands this fall, with more to come. Dear Editor: Maybe your Mr. del Rey can supply an answer to a problem that has been bothering me, since he, seems ready to speculate, on almost anything in his column. But please don't use my real name, since another teacher here reads your magazine,.) One of my students noticed that the water level in a toilet bowl rose and fell whenever ther was a high wind. I checked, and he was right. But there is no way for wind to get into the system to make waves, and I can't believe there could be ground vibrations without our feeling them. This is probably silly, but it annoys me. Can you tel me what causes it? -- PuZ' zled. We passed your problem along, and here is what Mr. del Rey says will explain it: "Plumbing codes require vent pipes from bath fixtures, terminating in the standpipe you can see sticking up the roof of most houses. These form a huge cavity, or resonant chamber. When the wind supplies energy enough, pressure waves are set up in this cavity, just as sound pressure waves are set up when you blow across the mouth of an empty bottle. In this case, the system is so large that these pressure waves cannot produce audible sounds; it would probably be on the order of only two or three cycles or vibrations a second. But the pressure still transmits its effects from the air in the cavity to the water, which then rises and falls with the system frequency." Dear Editor: I would like to compliment you on the excellence of your magazine Worlds of If. No one can say science fiction is dying. On the contrary, science fiction is on its way up with If setting new trends. -- Jurgen Heidenreich, # #th Ave., S.E., Bellevue, Wash. We like your sentiments, naturally -- but we're using them here to show what happens. Matt Hickman thinks we're slipping badly, and you think we're on our way up. We get a lot of both kinds of comments, proving only that each of you is right -- for himself. All we hope is that both find our fiction moving up from now on -- because we're going to try even harder. And while we like both types of criticism, we like it even better when you let us know which stories you felt were the ones going up and which ones indicated your idea of a decline. Maybe with that type of information, we can find stories you'll both like more often. Which reminds us that with slightly more space from now on for a letter column, we'll need your comments. You set the tone here and provide the interesting topics for others to discuss. So let's hear from you. IF (Continued from page #) no longer numbered. An impractical separation, individual from individual, furrowed this crowd of strangers. They were no longer starched and ironed in their souls. Hesitantly Wheat sent a tongue of awareness questing inward, sensed the absence of the Machine. The ritual formulas were gone. The sloth and torpor had been peeled away. He tested the feelings of hatred, of passion, malice, pride. "It's dead," he murmured. H e led the race back into the town, then, rushing along streets where the artificial lights flickered and behaved with a beautiful uncontrolled randomness. With Wheat leading the way the mob plunged down into the screened openings which had kept them from the nether world of the Machine. The scene was one repeated all over the world. People swarmed through the dark tunnels and passages, celebrating the pleasures of freedom along these once forbidden paths. When the last golden wire had been torn out, the final delicate glass shape crushed -- when the tunnel girders no longer clanged with pounding metal -- an unreasonable silence fell over the land. Wheat emerged from the earth into white shadows of moonlight. He let a strange length of plastic fall from his hand. It glowed with pearls of dewlight along its length and had illuminated his rush through the mind passages of the Machine. Wheat's collar was loose and he felt a peculiar sense of shame. His eyes peered into sooty places. Shadows and dust were everywhere. He realized he had played the buffoon just as the Machine had done. A thing had happened and he recognized it in the way of a prophet. "We think we're free of it," he said. Somewhere in the wild collisions beneath the ground he had cut his left hand, a jagged slash across the knuckles. Exclamation points of blood fell from the wound into the dust. "I cut myself," Wheat said. "I did it to myself." The thought ignited a searching sensation that coursed all through him. Wheat carried the feeling all the way home to his wife who hobbled beautifully out of their doorway and stood waiting for him in the feeble flickering of a streetlight. She appeared abashed by all the confusion and the unfixed feeling at the center of her life. She had not yet learned how to fill out the areas the Machine had denied her. Wheat stumbled toward her, holding his injured hand out as though it were the most important thing that had ever occurred in his universe. "You're drunk," she said.   Continued from page #  the Jann agreed. "But I delayed for a time, that thou shoudst realize it for thyself. None but I shall do thee die, no animal, no entity, no microbe, no act of nature. But it shall be a kind demise, and it shall come in exactly fifty years, as thou requesteth. I shall always be near thee, to see that mine oath stands good." "Great!" So the Jann was in fact a bodyguard, perhaps the most competent in all the galaxy, preserving him from all dangers until he was ninety-two. Its oath had not, technically, required that it kill him soon; only that no one else be allowed to kill him. ham cried, remembering something current. "We have a student strike to deal with, back at the University. Oyster will kill me if I don't relieve the siege before all his files are gone."  ( Continued from page #) Strang drew a breath as if to yell, let it out slowly. "Mr. Mallory, you've had a bad time of it," he said flatly. "It's affected your mind. I can understand that. You were away from home when the attack came. You returned to find the city barred to you, your family dead. You couldn't take it. Your mind let go under th strain and you invented these zombies of yours to enable you to believe your wife and children are still living. I'm sorry for you -- but I can't let that interfere with military necessity. I need men -- and women. I need them badly." Strang glanced across at Brozhny. "I can't see that his delusions will prevent him from performing basic military duties. Lieutenant. Put him in D company. First battalion. And keep a sharp eye on him." "Just a minute, Strang -- " "That's Colonel Strang to you, private!" "Colonel, I don't have time to play soldier in your private army. My family's in that town -- " "Forget it," Strang said. "You're not going anywhere." He lifted the pistol as Mallory took a step toward him. "I'm warning you for the last time, private. The penalty for mutiny is the firing squad." "The colonel is quite serious," Brozhny said and took Mallory's arm. "Come along. You're not the first man to be drafted into the army in wartime." An exciting collection of stories about androids -- mechanical men and women so realistic Matheson, Charles Beaumont and other sci-fi greats. # Compiled and Edited by George W. Earley with an Introduction by Ivan T. Sanderson # pages-# A Space-Age Thriller by Richard M. Garvin  Edmond G. Addeo thriller, you'll meet the man who guards this secret with his life, his brother who dares to manding officer! # A Science-Fiction Suspense Thriller by Richard Garvin  Edmond E. Addeo When Communist China develops a weapon capable of destroying objects in the air-operated entirely by parapsychology, the existence of the world hangs in the balance! Immediately the US rushes into action in a desperate attempt to stave off the holocaust, involved are niques; spy schools and death-defying action. An action adventure story you won't be able to leave until the last page! # # Park Ave., Manhasset, N.Y. # Calif. Res. Add # Sales Tax  Include Your Zip Code Number The Science Fiction Book Club invites you to take Any # books oVI X  with trial membership Including, if you wish,    #: A S P A C... Arthur C. Clarke Hunting an alien "presence" In tl universe, # men and a computer gone psycho tic stumble upon the in credible secret of mankind's  birth -- only to trigger the Pub. ed. # cosmit "booby-trap" that could spell its death. A controversial best-seller by the most acclaimed science fiction writer of our era. H: A Space Odyssey bf-Mlling noval ond Science Fiction has grown up Have you kept up A new literary genre has come of age -- your age. Mature. Sophisticated. Provocative. And respected. You are invited to explore it now under an amazing trial offer. Take any # volumes on this page (worth up to # in original publishers editions) for only I with membership.  New club selections will be described to you in advance each month. Choose from new works of fiction -- and fact -- by such acclaimed authors as Ray Bradbui # . Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein and others. All volumes are full-length, hardbound -- and uncut. Though they sell for as much as #, # and more in their original publishers editions, club members pay only # plus shipping. (You may choose an optional extra-value selection at a slightly higher price.) Your sole obligation is to accept as few as four books during the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, N.Y. #. ' Please accept my application for membership and rush me I the # books whose numbers I have circled below. Bill me only I #, plus shipping and handling, for all #. Then, every I month, send me the Club's free I bulletin, "Things to Come", which f -- I describes coming selections. For... each book I accept. I will pay only Cireia the numDert W #. plus shipping and handling, the # books you want, unless I take an extra-value selecbaa ana am I tion at a higher price. I need take J " I only four books within the coming I year and may resign at any time # # # , thereafter. # # # ' delighted with my introductory I package. I may return It in # I days to cancel membership. I If under #. parent must sign here. (Offer good in U.S.A. only) plete. Pub. ed. # tkMi, by Robert Silverberg. A group of #I t century revolutionaries are years into the past. Pub. ed. S# #. Tbc Pe -- ia tloa Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbaristn. Pub. ed. #S.# #. Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd. Young lovers Am loveless society ruled by computer "god . Pub. ed. #. #. The Past Throagh Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # #. Twice # by Ray Bradbury. Fourty-four stories by the Grand Master of science fiction. Pub. ed. # #. Chocky by John Wyndham. Alien powers "possess" smaD boy in shocker from author of "Day of the Triffids". #. October the Pint Is Too Late. by Fred Hoyle. Solar beams play havoc with time on earth. Pub. ed. # by Kate Wilhelm. A scientist in the #rd century develops a robot with a laser eye. Pub. ed. # . A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. #-volume set. I .# pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # Printed In U.S.A, WORLDS OF PInriTTiiT # The best fiction is science fiction; and the best Leader in the science-fiction field for almost two decades! Presenting the finest writers: Asimov, Pohl, del Rey, Leiber, Anderson, Herbert Vance, Simak, Dickson, Blish, Silverberg, Ellison, Knight, Harrison, Aldiss, Niven, Clement. Popular monthly columns: For Your Inf ormation -- Willy Ley, Galaxy Bookshelf -- Algis Budrys. Three-time winner of the coveted Hugo, science-fiction's Oscar; voted the best sf magazine in the world. IP's regular authors include: Keith "Retief" Laumer, Andre Norton, C. C. MacApp, Mack Reynolds, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Philip Jose Farmer. Features: The Reading Room, controversial book reviews by Lester del Rey. Hue and Cry where the readers praise or blast the editors, writers and artists -- and where the editors, writers and artists blast back.  Novmbr, # Vel. I #, No. # lssw # James Tiptree, Jr # SiUAl Theresa M. Treadway # Arnold E. Abramson, Pvblii IF is published monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. AAain offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. # . #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere S#. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The Company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. The Dream Keepers E ighteen hundred tomorrow's children had finished eating a dead thing. The air was thick with dreams. Something unhuman was alive in the room and the dreamers all knew it. They were children only in terms of tomorrow -- tonight they were ageless and bright. And old and young. Whatever was alive in that room had come at their bidding -- as they themselves had come. They had the power to evoke -- like so many witches -- not only the Unknown and the Things That Were To Be but each other. And sometimes all three were the same. Now everyone attending was what the others had called into being -- they were each other's creations -- and out of the three hundred and sixty-five nights of the year this night was theirs. They had shed their other realities like outergarments before entering the room and here no one knew them. They themselves did not know. They were wordmasters -- therefore futuremasters -- and words flew in the room. Most were spoken by one of their number who stood in the light. The rest sat in the dimness, replete with and alert from the dead thing they had eaten, waiting for their thing, their nightthing, to take shape. They knew it was there but not how it looked or felt to the senses. The scene ending the # World Science Fiction Convention banquet in St. Louis wore the aura of a seance -- except that it had nothing to do with ghosts. Only the food had been dead. The people present belonged to tomorrow. They ranged from students through doctors, lawyers, educators, to scientists and -- topping all, of course -- the writers and the fans who are the dream-keepers. They had paid brief honors to their quick yesterdays and were reaching for the future where none of them had been. And now their man in the light -- Harlan Ellison -- was calling down the hovering unhuman who was feeding in the air thick with dreams. He gave it a name -- and down it came. Words flew and clashed, creating energy, friction and heat -- for tomorrow can have no name. The unhuman gobbled the words and the dreams and the night grew gravid with Things To Come. And before that huge alive unhuman unborn, tomorrow's tumultuous children grew silent. We filed out of the vast rooms, out of the dimness and the light -- and I for one had the feeling that each had taken the dream of the one and made it his and her own. This page is for the man in the light, without whom many things would not be. Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greamess? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life I Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. Every male aboard had a minority problem, a race problem -- and the same damn girl problemi T he rainbow floods were doused. The station band had left. Empty of her load of cadets, the F.S.S. Adastra floated quietly against the stars. The display of First Assignments in the station rotunda was deserted. The crowd had moved to the dome lounge, from which echoed the fluting of girls, the braying and cooing of fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts, punctuated by the self-conscious baritones of the #th Space Command class. Down below, where the Base Central offices functioned as usual, a solitary figure in dress whites leaned rigidly over the counter of Personnel. "You're absolutely certain there's no mistake?" "No, it's all in order. Lieutenant Quent." The girl who was coding his status tabs smiled. "First officer, P.B. Ethel P. Rosenkrantz, dock eight-two, departs seventeen thirty -- that's three hours from now. You have to clear Immunization first, you know." Lieutenant Quent opened his mouth, closed it, breathed audibly. He picked up the tabs. As he strode away a tubby man wearing a Gal News badge trotted up to the counter. "That lad is Admiral Quent's son. What'd he get, Goldie?" "I shouldn't tell you -- a peebee." "A what? No!" She nodded, bright-eyed. "Sweetheart, I'll name you in my will!" He trotted off. In the medical office Quent was protesting, "But I've had all my standard shots a dozen times!" The M.O. studied a data display which stated, among other things, that Quent was a Terra-norm human male, height # m., skin Cauc tan, hair Br., eyes Br., distinguishing marks. None. The data did not mention a big homely jaw and two eyebrows which tended to meet in a straight line. "What's your ship? Ah, the Rosenkrantz, Take off your blouse." "What do I need shots for?" persisted Quent. "Two fungus, one feline mutate, basic allergens," said the M.O., briskly cracking ampoules. "Feline what?" "Other arm, please. Haven't you met your fellow officers?" "I just got this rancid assignment twenty minutes ago." "Oh. Well, you'll see. Flex that arm a couple of times. It may swell a bit." "What about my fellow officers?" Quent demanded darkly. The M.O. cracked another ampoule and cocked an eye at the display. "Aren't you the son of Admiral Rathborne Whiting Quent?" "What's that got to do with my being assigned to a clobbing peebee?" "Who knows. Lieutenant? Politics are ever with us. I daresay you expected something like the Sirian, eh?" "Well, men considerably below me on the ratings did draw the Sirian"" Quent said stiffly. "Clench and unclench that fist a couple of times. No, unclench it too. Tell me, do you share your father's, ah, sentiments about the integration of the Federal Space Force?" Quent froze. "What the -- " "You've been in space a year. Lieutenant. Surely you've heard of the Pan Galactic Equality Covenant? Well, it's being implemented, starting with a pilot integration program in the peebees. Three of your future fellow officers were in here yesterday for their pan-human shots." Quent uttered a wordless sound. "You can put on your blouse now," said the M.O. He leaned back. "Life's going to be a bit IF lumpy for you if you share your father's prejudices." Quent picked up his blouse. "Is it prejudice to think that everyone should have his own -- " " 'Do you want yolir boy's life to depend on an octopus?' " recited the M.O. wryly. "Oh, well, there he went too far. I told him so." Quent wrenched his way into his dress blouse. "I'm not prejudiced. Why, some of my -- " "I see," said the M.O. "I welcome the opportunity," said Quent. He started for the door. "What?" "Your hat," said the M.O. "Oh, thanks." "By the by," the M.O. called after him, "Ga News will probably be on your trail." Q uent stopped in mid-stride and flung up his head like a startled moose. A small figure was trotting toward him down the corridor. His jaw clenched. He took off down a side corridor, doubled through a restricted zone and galloped into the rear of the freight depot. He shoved his tabs at a gaping cargoman. "My dittybox, quickly-" Box in arms, he clambered into a cargo duct, ignoring the chorus of yells. He made his way down the treads until he came to an exit in the perimeter docks. He climbed out into the spacious service area of the Adastra from which he had debarked two hours before. The inlet guard grinned. "Coming back aboard. Lieutenant?" Quent mumbled and started off around the docking ring, lugging his box. He passed the immaculate berths of the Crux, Enterprise, Sirian, passed the gleaming courier docks, plodded on into sections crowded with the umbilical tubes of freighters and small craft and criss-crossed with cables and service rigging. He stumbled and was grazed by a mobile conveyor belt whose driver yelled at him. Finally he came to an inlet It was a narrow, grimy tube. Nobody was in sight. He set down his box and started in, trying not to rub his white shoulders against the flex. The tube ended in an open lock which gave directly into a small wardroom cluttered with parcels and used drinking bulbs. Quent coughed. Nothing happened. He called out. A confused sound erupted from the shaftway opposite. It was followed by a massive rear end clad in shorts and a shaggy gray parka. The newcomer turned ponderously. Quent looked up at an ursine muzzle set in bristly jowls, a large prune of a nose. "Who you?" demanded the ursinoid in thick Galactic. "Lieutenant Quent, First Officer, reporting," said Quent. "Good," rumbled the other. He surveyed Quent from small bright eyes and scratched the hair on his belly. Quent had erred about the parka. "You know refrigerate for storage?" "Refrigerant?" "Come. Maybe you make some sense." Quent followed him back into the shaftway and down a dark ladder. Presently they came to a light above an open hatch. The ursinoid pointed to a tangle of dripping tubes. "What's it for?" Quent asked. "Make cold," growled the other. "New model. Should not slobber so, VerntT' "I mean, what's it refrigerating?" "Ants. Here, you take. Maybe better luck." He thrust a crumpled folder into Quent's hand and shouldered past him up the ladder, leaving a marked aroma of wet bear rug. The leaflet was titled: Temperature-Controlied Personnel System Mark X# Series D, Mod., Appvl. Pdg. Quent peered into the hatch. Beyond the pipes was a dim honeycomb of hexagonal cubicles, each containing a dark bulge the size of a coconut. He heard a faint. chittering sound. Quent began to examine the dialed panel beside the hatch. It did not seem to match the leaflet diagram. Somewhere above him the ladder clanked. "Futile," hissed a voice overhead. Quent looked up. A thin gray arm snaked down and plucked the folder from his grasp. Quent had a glimpse of bulging, membranous eyes set in a long skull. The head retracted and its owner clambered down. It, or he, was a lizardlike biped taller than Quent, wearing a complicated vest. "You are Quent -- are new first officer," the creature clacked. Quent could see its tongue flicker inside the beaked jaws. "I am Svensk. Welcome aboard. You will now go away while I adjust this apparatus before the captain buggers it completely." "The captain?" "Captain Imray. Hopeless with mechanisms. Do you intend to remain here chattering until these ridiculous ants decongeal?" Quent climbed back to the wardroom, where somebody was trying to sing. The performer turned out to be a short, furry individual in officer's whites with his hat on the back of his head and a bulb of greenish liquor in one brown fist. " pleut dans mon coeur comme il pleut dans la ville"' caroled the stranger. IF He broke off to pop round yellow eyes at Quent. "Ah, our new first officer, is it not? Permit me." Incisors flashed as he grabbed Quent by the shoulders and raked sharp vibrissae across Quent's cheeks. "Sylvestre Sylla, at your service." Quent exposed his own square teeth. "Quent." "Quent?" Sylla repeated. "Not Rathborne Whiting Quent, Junior?" Quent nodded, coughing. The wardroom seemed to reek of musk. "Welcome aboard, First Officer Quent. Welcome to the Ethel P. Rosenkrantz, patrol boat. Not, of course, the Sirian'" Sylla said unctuously, "but a worthy ship, vovons. I trust you are not disappointed in your first assignment. First Officer Quent?" Quent'sjaw set. "No." "Permit me to show you to your quarters. First Officer." Sylla waved Quent to the upper ladderway, which opened from the wardroom ceiling. Above the wardroom was a section of cubicles for the crew, each accessible by a flexible sphincter port. Beyond these the shaftway ended in the bridge. "Here you are. First Officer," Sylla pointed. "And your luggage, sir?" "I left it outside," said Quent. "Doubtless it is still there," replied Sylla and dived gracefully through another sphincter. Quent climbed down and exited from the tube in time to rescue his dittybox from a grapple. As he wrestled it up the shaftway he could hear Sylla promising to defeather Alouette. T he cubicle proved to be slightly smaller than his cadet quarters on the Adastra. Quent sighed, sat down on his hammock gimbal, took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. He put his hat back on and took out his pocket recorder. The recorder had a played message tab in place. Quent flicked the rerun and held it to his ear. Ping-ping-ping, went the official channels signal. He heard a sonorous throat-clearing. "Congratulations on your Academy record. Lieutenant. Your mother would have been, um, proud. Well done. And now,, good luck on your first mission. One that will, I trust, profoundly enlighten you." The recorder pinged again and cut off. Quent's frown deepened. He shook his head slowly. Then he took a deep breath, opened his dittybox and rooted through a bundle of manuals. Selecting one, he pushed out through the sphincter and climbed up to the bridge. In the command chair the ursine Captain Imray was flipping fuel selectors and grunting into the engineroom speaker. Quent looked around the small bridge. The navigator's console and the computer station were empty. A little old man in a flowered shirt sat in the commo cubby. He glanced around and batted one baggy eye at Quent, without ceasing to whisper into his set. He had a gray goatee and yellow buckteeth. The first officer's chair was beside the shaft ladder. Quent removed a parcel from the seat, sat down and opened his manual. Captain Imray ceased grunting. Quent cleared his throat. "Shall I take over the check, sir? I gather you are go through phase twenty-six." The ursinoid's eyes widened. "Some help I get," he boomed. "Sure, sure, you take." Quent activated his console. "Gyro lateral thrust, on," he said, manipulating the auxiliary. He heard no reply from Engines. "Gyro lateral thrust, on," Quent repeated, thumbing the engine-room channel. "Morgan don't say much," remarked Captain Imray. "The engineering officer?" asked Quent. "But -- but you mean he would respond if the function were negative, sir?" "Sure, sure," said Imray. "Gyro torque amplifiers, on,' said Quent. Silence. "Primary impeller circuit, live," he continued grimly and worked on down the check. At: "Pod eject compensator -- " a brief moan came from Engines. "What?" "Morgan says don't bother him, he done all that," Imray translated. Quent opened his mouth. The main voder suddenly began barking. "Control to peebee Rosy! peebee Rosy, prepare to clear dock at this time. Repeat, peebee Rosy to station north, go! peebee Kip four-ten, repeat, four-ten. Control to peebee Kip, dock eight-two now clearing. Repeat, peebee Kip green for dock eight-two." "Morgan, you hear?" boomed Imray. "We green for go, Morgan?" A faint squeal from Engines. "But Captain, we're only at check-phase thirty," said Quent and ducked as Lieutenant Sylla hurtled out of the shaft to land in the navigation console with a rattle of claws. Sylla slapped the screens to life with one hand while punching course settings with the other. Imray and the como gnome were yanking at their webs. From below came the clang and hiss of the disengaging lock. The next instant the station gravity went off. IF As Quent pawed for his own web he heard Imray bellowing something. The auxiliaries let in and the Ethel P. Rosenkrantz leaped to station north. Q uent hauled himself down to his chair, trying to orient the wheeling constellations on the screens. "How's she look, Morgan?" Imray was asking. "Green we go out?" Another hoot came from Engines. Sylla was smacking course settings with one furry fist. "Svensk! Appleby! You set?" Imray bawled. "But Captain -- " Quent protested. Sylla kicked the fix pedal, twiddled his calibrator and dropped the fist. "GespruchV' roared Imray and slammed home the main drive. Quent's head cleared. He was crosswise in his seat. "With no web is risky, son," said Imray, shaking his jowls. "We weren't due to go for forty-five minutes!" expostulated Quent. He righted himself as acceleration faded. "The check is incomplete, sir. Control had no 'right-" "Apparently the first officer did not hear the four-ten," said Sylla silkily. "Four-ten?" "Four-ten is ship in bad trouble. must dock quick," Imray told him. "But that should be threethreedeltaexfouroneotto point with the vessel's designation." "Doubtless in the star class vessels First Officer Quent is used to," said Sylla. "Here he will find life less formal." "What was the four-ten, Pom?" called a clear sweet voice. Quent twisted. Looking up from beside his elbow was a dazzling girl-face framed in copper curls. Quent craned further. The rest of her appeared to meet the wildest demands of a man who had spent the last year on a training ship. "Huh?" he asked involuntarily. "Hi," said the apparition, waving her hand irritably in front of Quent's nose and continuing to gaze at the commo officer. "The Kip"" said the little man over his shoulder. "That's the peebee Kipsuga Chomo, sir," he waggled his goatee at Quent. "Three hundred hours with some contaminant gas. They sealed up in the bridge but Ikky had to bring 'em in by himself. Not much air in these here peebees." He turned back to his board. Quent glanced around. Three hundred hours was over two weeks. He shuddered. "But why didn't -- " "Why did not someone come to their rescue?" Sylla cut in. "The first officer forgets. Patrol boats are the ones that go to the rescue. Who comes to aid a patrol boat? Only another patrol boat -- in this case ourselves, who were sitting at Central awaiting our new first officer. Tant pis, they were only a gaggle of nonhumans -- " Imray swatted the air crossly. "Now, now, Syll." "Soup's hot," said the girl. "Ooh! My jam." She reached a slim white arm around Quent's ankles, Quent, tracking closely, saw that the parcel he had displaced had collided with the gimbals -- together with his hat -- and was exuding a rosy goo. "Tchah!" She snatched it up and departed down the shaft. Quent picked up his hat and shook it. Jam drops drifted onto his leg. Captain Imray was clambering into the shaftway. "The first officer will take the first watch, is that not correct?" Without waiting for an answer Sylla sailed past the captain and vanished. Only the commo officer remained absorbed in his inaudible dialog. Q uent collected the floating jam in his handkerchief and wedged the cloth under his seat. Then he kicked off on a tour of the cramped bridge. The screens were, he saw, inoperative under drive. He pulled up to the library computer and signaled for their course data display. Instead of the requested data the voder came on. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call Quent reached for the erase. "Don't do that, sir," the commo man said. "Why not? I want some data." "Yes, sir. But that's Lieutenant Sylla's setup, sir. Very fond of water poetry, he is. Just leave it, sir. Lieutenant Svensk will get whatever you want." Quent glared at the computer, which was now reciting: D egged with dew, dappled with dew. Are the groins of the braes... He switched it off. "Perhaps you would be so good as to inform me of our course and of the parameters of our patrol sector?" he asked icily. "I am Lieutenant Quent, First Officer." "Yessir, Lieutenant." The little man's face split in a grin that sent his goatee pointing at his buck teeth. "Pomeroy here, sir. Lester Pomeroy, Ensign. Sure is good to see a fellow human aboard, sir, if you don't mind my saying so." "Not at all. Ensign," said Quent. "I guess maybe you feel a bit put out, sir," Pomeroy went on in IF a confidential tone. "Them enaitches prob'ly never even introduced themselves -- right, sir?" "Well, I haven't had time to look over the roster yet." "What roster?" Pomeroy chuckled. "Anything you want to know, sir, just ask Pomeroy. You want to know the gen? Well, there's Captain Imray, he's from Deneb way. Navigator, Lieutenant Sylla -- I don't know exactly where he's frgm. He's what they call a lutroid. Puts on terrible strong when he's wrought up. And Lieutenant Svensk, he's Science when he's set low of course, and conversely he's Guns when the need arises. His vest, see? And then there's me for Commo and Morgan for Engines -- he don't say much. Wait till you meet Morgan. And there's our combat team -- but they don't count." "Why not?" asked Quent dazedly. Pomeroy gave a nervous giggle. "They're froze, that's why. And froze they'll stay. Nobody wants to get them boys out." "But I know the one you're itching to meet. Lieutenant. Miss Mellicent Appleby, Logistical supply. Ain't she a treat? Cooks up a storm, too. But there's one thing she don't supply, I better warn you, sir." His grin faded. "She don't supply no Appleby. So far, anyhow." Pomeroy paused, waited. Quent said nothing. "Now, you ask about our patrol beat -- no, sir," The old man broke off as Quent moved to the display tank. "No use to try that, sir. Svensk has it stressed up as a psoodospace -- some crazy snake game. But it's simple. We're Sector Twelve, like a big piece of cake, see?" He gestured. "Here we are at the point. That's Base Central. First stop is right close in -- that's Strugglehome. If they're all green we go on to Davon Two. If they're not hurting we swing over to Turlavon and Ed. And if nothing comes up we dock in at Midbase. If they haven't any grief we hang around and check Route Leo -- service the beacons and so forth -- and then we hit the Chun Complex. That's a mess. When we're through there we make the long hop out to Farbase -- and if they're all quiet we start on around through Goldmine and Tunney and Sopwith and so on, back home to Central. Eighteen mail colonies, one route and two bases. Takes about a hundred and twenty days, provided nothing comes up." "What sort of thing is apt to come up, Mr. Pomeroy?" "Distress calls, wrecks, jitney duty for some royal groundhog going from here to there, wonky beacons, exploding mail, field freeze-ups, ghost signals, flying wombats -- you name it, we get it sooner or later." His poached eyes rolled mournfully. "We're the boys that do the dirty. If it's too clobby to mess with, lay it on the peebees. Take our last tour. Everything was tight till we hit the Chung Complex. They got a crust instability on a little water planet and both their big ships blowed out on the other side of the system. So we have to ferry the bleeders off -- and they won't go without their livestock. Thirtythree days hauling octopuses, that's what." Quent frowned "In a Space Force vessel?" "Ah, them en-aitches don't care," Pomeroy grimaced. Quent kicked back to his chair in silence. "Never you mind. Lieutenant," the little man commiserated and hoisted an amber bulb, his wrinkled neck working. He wiped the bulb with his shirttail. "Have some Leo Lightning, sir?" "Quent jerked upright. "Drinking on the bridge?" Pomeroy winked broadly. "Captain Imray don't care." "Mr. Pomeroy," said Quent firmly. "I appreciate your intentions -- but there will be no drinking on this bridge while I am O.C. Kindly stow that bulb." Pomeroy stared blankly. "Yes, sir," he said at last and turned to his board. The bulb remained in plain sight. Quent opened his mouth, closed it. Muscles flickered in his square, unhandsome countenance. A clamor was rising from the wardroom below. Svensk's clack, Sylla's waspish tenor mingled with the captain's boom. The officers on board were clearly not a harmonious team. Presently they subsided and the ladder clanked as they retired to rest. " Quent sighed through his teeth and picked up the jam-spattered manual. The Ethel P. Rosenkrantz, of which he was first officer, was in full star drive with twenty-three essential operational procedures, all his responsibility, unchecked. II F ive hours later the ladder clanked again and the hulk of Captain Imray heaved up to the bridge. He was followed by Lieutenant Sylla in free glide. The lutroid landed in his console with a passing flick that made Pomeroy jump for his bulb. "Twenty-twenty hours. First Officer Quent relieved by Captain Imray," said Quent formally to the log. "Sure, sure, I take her, son," chuckled Imray, settling himself. "You go look Appleby, vernt?' IF "I am going to make a preliminary inspection of the ship, Captain." "Good." Imray beamed. "See how conscience the humans, Syll? From them example you could learn." ""Sans doute"' snarled Sylla. "It is also possible that our first officer feels a need to familiarize himself with the humble patrol boat. It perhaps did not engage his attention during his training as a future star-class admiral." "Now, Syll," growled Imray. "Come on Lieutenant, sir," Pomeroy pulled Quent's sleeve. Quent's right fist unballed slowly. He followed the little man into the shaft.  In the wardroom Pomeroy helped himself from a net of wrapped sandwiches and settled down with his bulb at the gimbaled table. Quent surveyed the room. It was a cylinder with walls composed of lockers in which, according to his manual, were stored suits, tools, repair and grappling rigs, fuse panels and oxy supply. These could be checked later. On his left was the lock and a slave screen, now blank. Across from the lock was a pantry cubby and the shaftway down which he had first followed Imray. Quent hustled to the shaft and started aft. The next section contained the main food stores, a small galley-cum-infirmary, waste intakes and the fore quadrant of the regeneration system which ran through several sections of the hull. He glanced through its hatch panel at a lighted mass of culture trays and continued along the dim shaft, vaguely aware that his feet were encountering a filmy substance. He was now passing more sphincters which gave access to cubicles for transient passengers and package mail. "Must you trample on my laundry, Lieutenant?" inquired a soprano voice in his ear. Miss Appleby's head protruded from a port behind him. Her gaze was directed toward his leg, which seemed to be wrapped in turquoise silk. "Oh. Sorry." He disentangled, trying not to kick. "I'm doing a tour of the ship." "Well, do your touring some place else, please," she said. "These are my quarters." "All these?" He gestured. "When we haven't any transients, I don't see why not." He parted a port at random and looked in. The cubicle was draped in fluffy stuff and the hull wall sparkled with holograms. Quent had the impression of an offensively healthy character in ceaseless action. He moved to another cubicle -- it proved to be full of bundles tied with bows. Not mail. He tried another. Miss Appleby's head revolving as she watched him. This one held what appeared to be a private kitchen and it smelled of fudge. "These wires," he called back to the head. "Are they authorized?" "Captain Imray never objected. Please get on with it. I'm trying to take a bath." Quent peered. There were indeed rainbow droplets in the curls around her delicate ears. He licked his lips. "Yes, ma'am," he said absently, drifting toward her. "By the way. Lieutenant," said the charming head. "Did you notice those holos in there?" "Very nice." He drifted faster, smiling. "Didn't you recognize them?" "Should I?" he beamed. "Yes, I think so," she said calmly. "That's my fiance. Bob Coatesworth. Vice Admiral Robert B. Coatesworth. Think it through. Lieutenant." With a soft sucking sound her head fanished back into the cubicle. Quent halted. He pounded his fist, slowly against his head -- several times. Then he resumed his journey aft. B eyond the bulkhead he found emergency pod inlets, which would require a careful check, and the refrigerant storage quadrant he had met before. He peered through the view panel. The drip seemed to have stopped. The regeneration chamber ended here, giving room for the landleg stabilizers and the Rosenkrantzs small-weapons turrets, all of which he would have to go over in detail later on. This ship was old. The manual referred to it as a heavy-duty, primitive type, equipped for planetside landings. Was the system still operational? Pomeroy had told him that their mail exchange was normally conducted from orbit. Through the next bulkhead the shaft opened into the echoing gloom of the main cargo hold. This felf'dank, perhaps in memory of the octopi. He made his way along the hull past" the airsled and the cradles filled with mail pods. He gave the main cargo hatch a brief check and turned to the engineroom hatchway. The hatch refused to open. "First officer to Engineer," he said to the speaker. "Open up." The engineroom was silent. "The first officer speaking," he said more loudly. "Open the hatch." The speaker gave a squeal that sounded like, "Blow." "What's wrong?" Quent shouted. "Open up." "Blo-oo-oo-ow," moaned the speaker. "I'm inspecting the ship. Engineer, undog this hatch." IF No reply. Quent pounded on the grille. "First Officer Quent," said Sylla's voice from the hold voder. "The captain requests that you cease annoying the engineer." "Fm not annoying the engineer. He won't let me in." "Better you try some other time, son," said Imray's rumble. "But -- yes, sir," Quent gritted. He pounded his head again, less gently. Then he started back through the hold, pursued by the dim sound of bagpipes from Engines. The shaft was now empty of Miss Appleby and her laundry. Pomeroy was still in the wardroom, nursing his bulb. "Morgan throw you out, sir? Them en-aitches got no respect." Quent silently helped himself to sandwiches and a tea bulb and rummaged through the casette locker until he recognized some Sector Twelve names -- Strugglehome, Turlavon, the Chung Complex. He carried the lot to his cubicle, carefully stowed away his stained dress whites and slung his hammock cocoon. The sandwiches turned out to be delicious. Before he had heard through the data on Turlavon his eyelids closed. "Wake up, Lieutenant." Quent came to half out of his cubicle and with Pomeroy hanging onto his arm. "You was having nightmares, sir." The little man's left eye seemed to be swelling shut. Across the way Svensk's bony head poked out. Imray and Sylla were peering down from the bridge. They were all grinning. "Uh -- sorry." Quent disengaged himself and pulled back into his cabin. "Orbit in an hour, sir," Pomeroy called. "Strugglehome." Midbase Quent acquired considerable enlightenment. At Strugglehome he asked Sylla to show him the mail-pod exchange routine. Here he learned that the slow man on a pod grapple can get a set of mashed fingers. The lutroid apologized effusively. By Davon Two Quent's hand was in shape to help Svensk prepare a shipment from the culture chamber. The big saurian became animated in the fetid warmth and treated Quent to a harangue on phytogentics. Quent finally told him to go away. He then learned, too late that the chamber hatch controls were defective on the inside. Three hours later, when Miss Appleby decided to investigate the pounding noises, Quent was purple from breathing C# and she had to help him out. "Wha's girl doing on this thing anyway?" he gasped. "Oh, a lot of us log officers take en-aitch tours," she dimpled. "It's so restful." Quent shuddered and clamped his big jaw. About Appleby herself he learned that she spent all her time in her cubicles fixing up her trousseau and her hoard of stuff for her future home. The amount of loot she had astonished him. But she seemed to have been equally effective in loading up the Rosenkrantz' T.E. -- the ship bulged with stores. She also emerged on the dot with excellent meals, which seemed to be Captain Imray's chief interest in life. During the hop to Turlavon Quent made two more efforts to get into Morgan's domain and was rebuffed. He settled down to learning the ship bolt by bolt, manual in hand. Turlavon passed without incident. At Ed they had to wait for the planet station crew to finish harvesting. For three whole watches Quent struggled with unstable orbits, until he learned that Ed had enormous masscons and that someone had disassembled the ship's grav-mass analyzer. He bore it all stoically but his jaw was corded with knots which seemed to have been there before. He had, after all, been an admiral's son for a long time. A t midbase they lay into the main cargo umbilical to offload a flywheel for the station gyros. The delay at Ed had thrown them out of synch with Base time and the station dark-period caught them early. Quent used the chance to check over the ship's exterior valve seals. He had worked back to the main lock when his hand light picked up a small gray creature hitting past the aft fins. It was about a meter tall and roughly humanoid. Quent called out. The figure accelerated and vanished among the dock belts. Quent frowned after it and went into the wardroom. Captain Imray was grunting over his greenbook tabs. The others were on the bridge, listening to the station newscast. "Morgan," said Quent. "Would he be about so high -- and gray?" Imray leaned back and rubbed his prune nose. "That's him. He go now listen is them gyros all right. Like a mother for gyros is Morgan." "He must have left by the engineroom crash hatch." Quent pointed to the panel. "Why isn't the telltale light on?" "The first officer's appetite for the minutest details of our humble craft is truly admirable," yawned Sylla, lounging in. "If it were not so tedious." "Mr. Sylla, if that hatch lock -- " "Sure, sure," said Imray. "But Morgan never leave nothing open. Not Morgan. He like to come, go, private, vernt?' "Do you mean that you've alIF lowed Morgan to kill the telltale circuits. Captain?" "The mammalian insecurity syndrome," remarked Svensk, unfolding himself out of the shaft. He was playing with a small wire toroid which changed shape disturbingly. "The leaky-womb phobia," he creaked. "Captain Imray," said Quent, "by regulation it's my responsibility to oversee the engineroom. With your permission, this would seem to be the time for me to take a look." Imray squinted at him. "Morgan very sensitive being, son, very sensitive." He wiggled his big black-nailed hands to show Morgan's sensitivity. Quent nodded and started aft. "Nothing touch, son," Imray' called after him. "Morgan -- " The engineroom personnel hatch was still dogged. Quent went to the hull and unbolted a pod cradle, revealing a duct panel designed to service the life-support conduit to Engines. He unscrewed the panel and tugged. It did not move. He displaced another cradle and found a magnetic contraption with no discoverable leads. He summoned Svensk, who arrived unliurriedly and gave it a brief inspection. "Can you open this?" "Yes," said Svensk, and started back through the hold. "Mr. Svensk, come back, I want you to open this lock." "The semantic confusions you homotherms get into are beyond belief," croaked Svensk. "Are you not aware that Morgan desires this to remain closed?" "As first officer of this ship I am ordering you to open it." "When I said I could open it -- I meant with the proper tools." "What are the prcper tools?" "Linear force must be applied in the presence of a certain set of alternating pressures in a gaseous medium." He arched his long neck. Quent scowled at him. "Pressures? Mr. Svensk, are you deliberately -- " Quent suddenly stabbed his wrench at the saurian. "It's a sonic lock, isn't it? Set for... Mr. Pomeroy, bring that recorder in the wardroom locker back here. I want you to imitate Morgan's voice." Reluctantly Pomeroy tooted while Quent tugged. The panel slid open. Quent found himself looking into a pitch-dark tangle instead of the shining banks and alleyways of a normal engineroom. "What in the name of space -- " Quent reached into the filaments. "Sir, I wouldn't do that," warned Pomeroy. "Fascinating!" Svensk's skullhead came over Quent's shoulder. "What is that mess?" "I fancy it is part of the sensor system by which Morgan maintains contact with the stress structure of his mechanisms. I had no idea he had achieved anything so extensive." "Just close it up, please, sir," Pomeroy begged. Quent stared into the web. "I'm going in," he gritted. From behind them came a piercing wail. Quent spun and a gray wraith flew at his face, spitting sparks. He reeled back, his arms over his eyes. The hatch clashed shut. The lights went out. The hold voder broke into a skirling, howling din. Quent heard Svensk pounding away and stumbled after the sound. The wardroom voder began to roar. Quent found his hand light and rushed to the bridge. The deck was a bedlam of noise and every console was flashing. Svensk and Sylla were yanking out computer cables. Quent slammed down the circuit breakers. There was no effect. The hideous din yammered on. "Nothing to do but get out till he calms down," Pomeroy yelled in Quent's ear. "Thank the Lord we aren't in space." T he others had left. As Quent went out Miss Appleby flew past in a whirl of tyrquoise silk. "You idiot," she raged. "Look at what you've done." Imray stood glowering on the deck. Svensk towered at full height, his eyes veiled in membranes. Sylla paced with ears laid back and there was a decided pungency in the air. Quent slammed the lock but the uproar reverberating through the Rosenkrantz was clearly audible. "He's got an override on those circuits," Quent fumed. "I'm going in there and cut off his air." "Asinine," grated Svensk. "We are in air." "His water, then." "To do so would render the refrigerant exchange inoperative." "There must be something -- what does he eat?" "Special concentrates," snapped Miss Appleby. "I stocked him with a year's supply at Central." Quent kicked a freight belt. "In other words, Morgan runs this ship." Imray shrugged angrily. "He run it -- we run it -- we go," he growled. "When Space Force Monitor hears about this it'll be Morgan who goes," Quent told them darkly. Sylla spat. "The first officer has forgotten the Kipsuga Chomo. Or perhaps he recalls the four-ten which inconvenienced him?" "What?" Quent turned on the lutroid. "I have forgotten nothing, Mr. Sylla. What has the Kip to do IF with Morgan?" Imray shook his jowls. "No, Syll,no!" Svensk coughed. "Look, sir," said Pomeroy. "Morgan's fixing to make a night of it. He don't quit. How's for you and me to go by the office and see about a place to sleep?" Miss Appleby sniffed. "That would be useful." The din continued unabated. Quent went off with Pomeroy to the Midbase station offices, where they found one billet for a female only. Midbase was bulging with colonists awaiting transfer on Route Leo. In the end the male complement of the Rosenkrantz settled down to doze uncomfortably on a textile shipment and to endure the jibes of the cargomen when the lights came on. Horrible sounds came from the Rosenkrantz all morning. After noon mess Morgan appeared to tire. The officers went warily back on board. "Have to give him time to cool down," said Pomeroy. As if on cue the voders erupted briefly. A few minutes later they did it again. The others went to their hammocks, leaving Quent in the wardroom to brood. He was still there when Miss Appleby came in. "I'm afraid I was rude to you. Lieutenant Quent." He looked up dully. She seemed to be all aglow. "Actually what you did was ever so lucky for me." She smiled. She set down her parcel and served herself tea and a cookie. Instead of taking them to her quarters she came back and sat down at the table with an excited wiggle. Quent's eyes opened. He sat up. "That Mrs. Lee," she confided happily. "You know, the colonist? She's got twenty meters of Gregarin passamenterie. It took me all day to talk her into swapping me one meter for a petite suit liner and a case of bottlehots. I'd never have got it if we hadn't been held up, thanks to you." She glowed at him over the tea. "Well, I" "It'll make the vest of all time for Bob," she sighed. "Bob loves vests -- off duty, of course." Quent put his head back on his fists. He had been raised with two older sisters. "That's -- great." "You're depressed," she observed. Quent heaved a sigh and shook his head. Against his better judgment he found himself looking into her large green eyes. "Miss Appleby," he blurted. "When I came on this ship I was completely unprejudiced against nonhumans. Completely. I welcomed the chance to show my father that other beings were just as fit to serve in space as -- " His voice faded. "Now I just don't know. This mess -- that insufferable Morgan -- " "Yours is a strange reaction. Lieutenant. We girls always say it's much safer on a ship with one of Morgan's people. They'll do anything for the ship. Like the Kip, you know." "What do you know about the KipsugaT' "Why, just that their engineer saved them. He got them to Central. Ikka somebody. Pom says he died." Quent frowned. "Funny they didn't tell me about him." "Probably your father is the reason they keep things from you -- don't you think. Lieutenant?" She stood up, hugging her parcel. "They're fine people," she told him earnestly. "You just have to understand their ways. That's what Bob says. He says a lot of Space Force officers are prejudiced without knowing it." Quent looked up at her. She radiated Galactic amity. "Could be," he said slowly. "Miss Appleby, maybe I haven't "Try a little harder," she encouraged him. "That Mrs. Lee said a newsman was asking about you." "It is time to eat." The harsh croak cut her off. Svensk unfolded himself from the ladder. "Right away." Appleby vanished. Svensk turned a suspicious eye on Quent. "Serpent," jeered Sylla, bouncing down, "You reptiles did not understand that time existed until we provided you with thermal vests. At home we have still the taboo against eating lizards because of their unfortunate tendency to putrefy while torpid." "Activity fails to correlate with intelligence," Svensk clacked haughtily. "On the other hand," Sylla licked his vibrissae. "Our primates are regarded as quite palatable. Braised, naturally, with just a rien of celery. Amusing, is it not. First Officer Quent?" Quent exhaled carefully. "If you feel so, Mr. Sylla." He stretched his mouth sideways in a lifelike smile. "Excuse me, I believe I'll lie down." The silence behind him lasted so long he almost wondered about it. Ill T he next fortnight was spent laboriously servicing beacons along Route Leo. The beacons were elderly M#s, which Quent had cursed while navigating from the Adastra. Now he found their trouble lay in the bulky shielding IF which attracted dust, thus building up electrostatic imbalances that distorted the beacon's spectrum and eventually its orbit. They had to be periodically cleaned and neutralized. The job required long hours and close cooperation among crewmen. By the fourth and last beacon Quent's jaw had developed a permanent ache. "Have you not yet finished. First Officer?" Quent was clinging awkwardly to the far end of the slippery kinetic bleeder. Above him Sylla wriggled through the beacon grids with the agility of his otter forbears, warping his vacuum line expertly as he went. "It is clear that the Academy does not contemplate its graduates shall endure the indignity of labor," Sylla jibed. "I admit Fm inexperienced in this and not as fast as you are," Quent said mildly. "Mr. Svensk. Where are you casting that sweep line?" "As per your request, down," said Svensk from the far side. "Although it seems senseless." "I meant down here -- toward me," Quent took a deep breath. "Not toward the center of gravity of the beacon-ship system. A loose way of speaking. I'm afraid." "Lieutenant Quent, sir," said Pomeroy's voice from the ship. "If you wouldn't mind sir, could you turn your volume down a bit? There seems to be some sort of grinding sound in your speaker and the Greenhill signal is awful weak, sir." Greenhill, a colony ship out of Midbase, was running a check on the beacon calibrations as it went by. Quent swore and snapped off his helmet speaker. A moment later he felt a jerk on his lines and found himself revolving in space two meters from the end of the bleeder. His line had no tension. When he stopped his tumble he saw that Svensk had fouled him with the sweep and was departing over the limb of the beacon. Sylla was nowhere in sight. "Do you want your life to depend on an octopus?" Quent muttered under his breath. He reached for the speaker switch, then paused. His orbit was decaying. He straightened out and began to breathe measuredly. The others had gone inboard and unsuited when Quent finally finished clearing the bleeder shaft. In the wardroom he stumbled into Miss Appleby taking a server of food to Imray's cubicle. "I want you to know I'm trying," he told her wearily. "That's the spirit. Lieutenant." She would make a super admiral's wife, Quent realized. The Greenhill confirmed the beacon calibrations and the Rosenkrantz headed out to the Chung Complex. When she came out of drive her screens lit up in glory. The Chung was a cluster of colored suns, warm and inviting after the bleakness of Route Leo. "Don't you believe it, sir." Pomeroy broke the thread of his crochet work against his stained frontals. "I dread this place, I do." His eyes rolled as he reached for his bulb. "All en-aitches here. Under water, too, most of 'em, the slimy things. Even Mr. Sylla hates them." Despite Pomeroy's forebodings the first calls passed off with only routine problems of mail and message exchange. The little man continued to follow Quent about, mumbling gloomity. He was also dosing himself with increasing quantities of Leo Lightning whenever he could sneak off the bridge. "Let Pomeroy tell you, sir," he grumbled in the night watches, "They're devils down there. We shouldn't have any dealings with things like them. Pomeroy knows. Pomeroy's seen sights no Humans had ought to bear. Worms. Worms is the least of it." His goatee bobbed over his scrawny adam's apple. "Worms and worse." The Chung orbits continued without troubles other than those provided by Svensk and Sylla -- and even these two appeared to be letting up. Quent's only view of the "worms and worse" was on the ship's screens. Most of the alien commo officers were aquatic. A few did appear wormlike and two had tentacles. There was one truly repellent squid affair with unidentifiable organs floating around its eye stalks. There was also a rather genial dolphinoid to whom Pomeroy was vitriolic. They were the ones who had required transport for the octopi. "I'm a broadminded man, sir," Pomeroy told Quent that night. "Tolerant, Pomeroy is. I put up with 'em." He hiccuped. "No choice. Pomeroy's sunk low. I don't deny it. But them things down there -- " He shuddered and hitched closer confidentially. "They think they're as good as humans, sir. Just as good as you, or better. What'll happen when them things decides they wants to come in the Force, sir? Expect a human to take orders from a worm?" His bloodshot eyes bored anxiously into Quent's. "Mr. Pomeroy. In case you are under the impression that I share my father's views on nonhumans in the Space Force, you are mistaken." "You're a tolerant man, sir. But a person can't help wondering -- " "Kindly wonder to yourself in future, Mr. Pomeroy," Quent said coldly. "For your informaIF tion, I am fully in favor of the integration program. If a being is a competent spacer, I don't see that his personal appearance enters." Pomeroy closed his mouth and turned back to his board in offended silence. Presently he paid a prolonged visit to the wardroom and returned, wiping his mouth.' For several watches he spoke only when Quent addressed him. A t the last Chung stop they picked up a short-range freight shuttle whose jockey needed a lift to Farbase. The jockey was a smaller version of Svensk. They got his shuttle stowed without mishap and the Rosenkrantz went into drive for the long run out to Farbase. Quent's eyebrows began to unknot. The run was made in comparative peace, for Quent. Svensk and the freighter pilot bankrupted each other at some exotic topological game, while Sylla occupied himself with trying to key a poetry-scanning function into the computer. Imray grew increasingly taciturn and spent long hours in his cubicle. Sometimes Quent would hear him in rumbling argument with one of the others. Quent devoted himself to a discreet inspection of the ship's wiring and managed not to upset Morgan. Things seemed to be settling down. This impression strengthened when they got to Farbase. They exchanged the mail and off-loaded the freight shuttle with dispatch. Pomeroy actually changed his shirt. He and the others set off to call on another peebee, the Jasper Banks, which was there en route to a long distance job. Miss Appleby went after the depot officer who had promised her a set of Chung pearl glasses for herself and a case of fish-eggs for the mess. The small, bleak station offered Quent no diversion. He decided to go out and check over the exterior antennae. He was suiting up when he heard the others coming back on board. He climbed to the bridge to find them preparing to take off. "Call Appleby," Imray grunted curtly. "We go now." The next leg was to the sector rim colonies of Goldmine, Tunney and Sopwith. They ship lifted off with scarcely another word exchanged by its officers. And as soon as they were in drive Imray left the bridge. The short run to Goldmine was made in thickening silence. Imray stayed in his cubicle. The others seemed on edge. Only Pomeroy had anything to say -- he kept pestering Appleby for reports on Imray's health. "He says his heart bothers him but he won't let me use the medical analyzer," she informed them. "His appetite's good, though." "He's due to retire soon, sir." Pomeroy shook his head. Imray did not appear on the bridge at Goldmine. When they were on course for Tunney he called Quent to his cabin. "Is no good," he said hoarsely as soon as Quent's head came through the sphincter. The ursinoid's muzzle looked haggard and his fur was staring. "You take over, son." He gestured feebly, dislodging an empty server. "Sir, I think you should let Miss Appleby bring the medikit." Imray groaned. "Medicals can nothing do for old age. Little pills I try. No good." "We'll turn back to Farbase hospital." "What they do? Torture me only. I know. With my people -- goes quick. You captain. I tell Morgan mind you." "You're ordering me to take over as acting captain, sir?" Imray nodded, his little eyes roving feverishly. "But -- " "No but. You captain." Imray's eyes closed and his breathing became noisy. Quent studied him, scowling. "Yes, sir," he said slowly. "I'll have Pomeroy patch you into the record log." One of Imray's eyes glinted briefly and closed again. Quent withdrew into the shaft of the Rosenkrantz. His first command. All the knots which had been smoothing from his face came back, tighter than before. To his surprise the others accepted the situation without comment, beyond Sylla's sarcastic use of his new title. Morgan, too, proved as good as Imray's word. He continued silent but during the maneuvers at Tunney the energies were flawless. Quent's frown deepened. He took to roaming the ship at odd hours, sleeping little and poorly. They were now at the farthest leg of their patrol, running along the sector rim to Sopwith. On their starboard the Galaxy was unpatrolled and largely unknown. Quent spent hours at the scanners. He had seen wild space before from the bridge of the mighty and virtually invulnerable Adastra. From a peebee with four srhall rockets and only meteor shielding it looked decidedly wilder. Quent dreamed of nucleonic storms and got up to check over the sensors again. Crawling back into the cocoon, he heard: Toujours fentends la mer qui fait du bruit, Triste comme Foiseau seule... IF the cocoon flaps over his ears to shut out the mechanical drone from the bridge. Sylla was making the computer translate poetry into his native Ter-French. Presently the droning was replaced by incomprehensible wrangling. Quent sighed and jackknifed out of his cocoon. It was nearly his shift and they would be coming into Sopwith soon. In the shaft he found Pomeroy backing out of Imray's cubicle, bulb in hand. "How is he, Mr. Pomeroy?" The little man wagged his head, bleary eyed, but said nothing. In the wardroom Miss Appleby was setting out fresh smoked ham she had wangled at Tunney. "Just coffee, thank you," Quent told her. She smiled sympathetically at the standing furrow in his brow and vanished back to her storerooms. Quent took his coffee up to the bridge, relieving Svensk and Sylla, and settled wearily to hear a data tape. Pomeroy straggled into his cubby and began to doze. In the wardroom the other two continued to argue fitfully. Suddenly Pomeroy sat up. "Sopwith, sir. Seems to be a bit of trouble." "What type of trouble, Mr. Pomeroy?" "Too early to tell yet, sir. Mostly noise." Sopwith was a nonhuman affiliated planet whose native name was Szolphuildhe. The native race was described as small, timid, pinkish in color, bipedal and probably bisexual, with a fibersand-ceramics technology. It was human-habitable but no humans lived there. "Sounds like they been attacked by a band of marauding monsters," Pomeroy reported presently. "Says they came in a skyboat -- wait a minute, sir." He squinted, listening. "About them monsters, sir. Appears like they're humans." "Humans?" "That's how the kinds describe 'em, sir. Like us." "What are they doing to the Sopwithians?" "Seems they're eating 'em, sir." "Eating them, Mr. Pomeroy?" Pomeroy nodded. Quent leaned over the shaft and called Svensk. The big saurian head appeared. Quent asked, "What human spacers could have landed here and attacked the natives or -- ah -- exploited them as food?" Svensk's raised his eye membranes reflectively. "Possibly you refer to Drakes?" "What are Drakes?" "The Drakes, as they call themselves, are a band of humans, strength unknown, base unknown. possessing not less than five "One of our little sector probspaceships, who maintain themlems." Sylla grinned. He bounded selves by sporadic raids upon to his console and began to polish shipping and colonies," Svensk his claws. "Quite beneath the nocreaked. "Until recently reported tice of the Academy." only in Sector Ten, they -- "' "Navigator, a sensor orbit. IF please. Mr. Svensk, let's pick up the location of that vessel as soon as possible. Mr. Pomeroy, ask them where that sky-boat is, how big it is, how many attackers and what weapons." The Sopwith commo officer believed that the ship had come down somewhere northeast of the port city. It was bigger and brighter than the sun, carrying at least five hands of monsters. They spouted burning flames which made no noise. "That's thirty of 'em," said Pomeroy. "As to their weapons. Drakes would have lasers, flamethrowers, grenades and maybe a rocket-launcher or two, groundside. Them kinks don't know ships or weapons, sir. Flinging stones is about it, with them." They still had not located the alien ship when the Sopwith city area went into night... The Sopwith commo officer on the ground was growing balky. "He says the monsters are coming in again," Pomeroy reported. "Listen." The voder gabbled wildly, gave out a string of shrieks and cut off. "That's it, sir. He's taken off. Well, there'll be no business here. We'd better log up the report and get on." M r. svensk, what's that field like?" asked Quent thoughtfully. The lizard was absorbed in his sensor adjustments. "Mr. Svensk. Is that field usable?" Svensk reared up. "Very primitive." "Navigator," Quent said icily. "Landing trajectory to field, please." Three pairs of eyes rounded on him. "Landing?" Sylla licked his chops. "The acting captain is perhaps unaware that patrol boats do not -- " "I've inspected our system, Mr. Sylla. It's fully operational. In case you're concerned, my training has included the landing of comparable craft." "But sir," protested Pomeroy, "What about Morgan? He don't like going planetside, sir." Quent glanced at the voders and cleared his throat. "Mr. Morgan, there is an emergency on this planet and we must land. I count on your cooperation. Mr. Sylla, is that course ready?" "Set," snapped Sylla through his teeth. Quent engaged the auxiliaries and started to code in the autopilot. As he touched it the familiar din cut loose from the voder. "Mr. Morgan." Quent rapped the speaker. "Stop that racket. We must land, do you understand? I'm taking us down!" To the din was added a crackling sputter and the lights jumped. Svensk dived for his computer leads. "Stop that, Morgan. Stop it. I'm going to land or I'll crash the ship. Hear that -- you'll crash us." "In the name of the Path," Imray came from the shaft. "What?" "It's our duty to land, sir," Quent said. "Emergency on the planet." Imray burst onto the bridge, paws over his ears. He stared at Quent. "I'm committing us." Quent slammed the manual override. Imray grabbed up his speaker. "Morgan -- Morgan, boy, it's me." Imray's voice sank to a huge croon. "Be good boy, Morgan -- down we must go. I swear you, for little minute only -- ship it will not hurt. Morgan! You hear, Morgan? Morgan boy, listen Imray -- ten meters superconductors I get you. Beautiful." The uproar dwindled to a mewling in Imray's speaker. "You let us go down nice, Morgan, vernt?" Silence. Imray clapped his fist to his chest and his head slumped. "Is too much, son," he wheezed and retreated down the shaft. "Counting to autopilot," said Sylla. Quent coded feverishly as deceleration grabbed them. On the screens the arid, undistinguished planet whirled closer. The autopilot took hold unceremoniously and spiraled them in, shaken but right side up. When the roil cleared they looked across a moonlit field to a cluster of sheds around the antennae rig. There were no lights. IF "They've all sloped off, sir," said Pomeroy. "Nothing we can do here till morning." "Mr. Pomeroy, you speak the native language," said Quent. "I will meet you at the cargo lock. Have the sled ready." "But sir -- " "Mr. Svensk, am I correct that we need no special masks or suiting on this planet?" Svensk gave a sighing exhalation. "No need," he croaked. They followed Quent in silence while he broke out two field kits and two ballistic hand lasers. At the cargo lock he opened both ports and ordered Pomeroy into the sled. "Lieutenant Sylla, you will take over the ship. One of you will be on the bridge at all times. If we're not back by sunrise, make what investigation you can without endangering the ship. If you can't help us without hazard to the ship, lift off at once and signal the facts to Farbase. Understood?" Sylla's eyes were popping. "Understood, Acting Captain!" He sketched a salute, Svensk watched in silence, his bony head folded to his shoulders in the gravity. Quent launched the sled out into the moonlight. The country below was flat scrubland gashed by a few dark arroyos, now dry. The city was a huddle of hive-like buildings with a central plaza. Quent hovered by a torch-lit structure, a shrine. Nothing moved. "No damage visible so far. We'll go down and talk to the chief." "Be careful, sir." Pomeroy warned uneasily. In the plaza they pounded and shouted at the door of the largest hive-house, k was finally opened by a small squat Sopwithian entirely draped in a softly gleaming robe. "Tell him we're friends. Where's the chief?" The doorkeeper scuttled off on his knuckles, robes jingling. The inside of the adobe hive was a labyrinth of basket-work passages, every surface bossed with bits of metal and colored tassels. The native returned, beckoning, and they scrambled up a wicker corridor to a chamber where an even broader Sopwithian in a shinier robe sat impassive in a lanterned alcove. The ceiling was so low even Pomeroy had to squat. He gurgled at the chief, who replied briefly, now and then flapping his long robed forelimbs with a sharp jangle. The raiders, Pomeroy reported, had burned several farms northeast of town and carried off the families. Herdsmen had spied them roasting and eating the captives beside their ship. "All right," said Quent. He ducked his head to the chief and they scrambled out to their sled. H e took off in a howling rush northeast. Beyond the town the pasture scrub stretched barren to a line of mesa, all brightly lit by the big moon. Here and there were small beehive farms set in irrigated gardens. "Where are those burned farms?" Quent peered. "Where's that ship?" "Take care, sir," Pomeroy pleaded. "Them Drakes'll come on us like devils -- " Quent began to fly a low search pattern. As he circled a farm heads popped out. "They're scared to death, sir. Think we're Drakes. Pitiful." "Frightened." Quent frowned around the moonlit horizon. "Ah, what's that?" Pomeroy writhed nervously. "That's a burnt one, all right. No need to look farther." Quent circled the blackened shell. Suddenly he skidded the sled into the farmyard and jumped out, kicking ashes. In a moment he was back and flung the sled airborne. He seized the speaker. "Quent to Rosenkrantz. I've found that ship." The speaker crackled. Quent fended off Pomeroy's arm, deftly appropriating the little man's laser. "Do you read, Rosenkrantz? "The ship is where. Acting Captain?" asked Sylla's voice. "About fifty kiloms northeast of field, in a canyon," Quent told . him. "There is also a raiding party in sight, headed this way. They are armed. They have sighted me. Now hear this: You will signal Farbase at once and prepare to lift ship. I'm going after these raiders. Repeat, signal Farbase and secure ship. I am now being fired on. Out." Knocking Pomeroy into the corner, Quent yanked out the speaker leads and slammed the sled at top speed back toward the field. "Sir -- Lieutenant Quent, sir, don't -- " Quent ignored him. Presently he cut power and glided around the end of the field at bush level. They whispered out to the ship, dodged behind a landleg and came upon Svensk and Sylla in the open port. Quent vaulted out, weapon in hand. "Have you signaled as ordered, Mr. Sylla?" The lutroid shrugged. "But what was one to report. Acting Captain?" "Precisely," snapped Quent and started for the bridge with both lasers in his belt. They followed. Imray hulked in the command chair. He eyed Quent in silence, arms folded over his massive chest. "Feeling better, sir?" Quent snarled. He wheeled and thrust his jaw into Sylla's muzzle. "I'll tell IF you why you failed to signal Far base. And why you two were hanging out in the open lock when I ordered you to secure ship. Because you know damn well there are no raiders here." He had his back against the screens now and a laser drawn. "No ship! No Drakes. It's all one big farce and all of you are in it. You, you clown Pomeroy -- you. Captain Imray! What are you trying to hide? Smuggling? Extortion? Or do I have to pound it out of you?" He heard a rustle, saw Svensk's hand at his vest controls. "No, no, Svenka," Imray growled. "Battles we don't need." He shook his head heavily. I told you -- Drake business no good." "Agh, your Drakes, the whole thing stank from the start. Let me tell you something, gentlemen." Ouent shook the laser at Sylla, "You jeer about my training but there's a thing you don't know about Academy life. In the years I've been a cadet I've been hazed and hoaxed and put on by experts. Experts." His voice rose. "Caristo, what I've put up with. And you, gentlemen, are a clobbing bunch of amateurs. Tri-di gigs," He snorted, glaring contemptuously at them. No one spoke. "You didn't think I caught on when you handed me the ship? Cooking up some way to gash my record. Here in Sopwith -- I was supposed to pass it up, wasn't I? Oh, yes. And you -- " He stabbed the laser at Pomeroy -- "You were going to bugger the log so you could show I refused to aid aliens against humans, right? Then bring charges? But why? I'll be rotated out soon enough -- why did you have to ruin me, too?" He scowled. "My father. Blackmail. You've got something going. I'm going to take this ship apart right here on the ground. It's on record that you're unfit for duty. Captain. You didn't think of that when you got so clobbing elaborate!" They gaped at him. Sylla's pupils swelled, contracted. "I tell you, smart boy," Imray grunted. He scratched his chest. "Son, you mistake -- " A shrill mew from Engines split the air. 'Imray jerked around. He yanked at his webs. "I got you, boy." "Hold it," shouted Quent. "Don't try -- " their consoles. Svensk was vanishing down the shaft. "I said hold it." Quent grabbed the override lever. "You're staying right here." "Sit, son, sit," Imray rumbled. "Is danger, I swear by the Path. If don't go up, lose ship." "That's straight, sir. We'll be killed if you don't let us up." Sylla was coding frantically, his crest fur ridged. The cargo lock clanged. "If this is another -- " Quent rasped. He released the lever and began to web up one-handedly, laser ready. Imray's hand smacked down and several invisible mountains fell on them as the Rosenkrantz careened off-planet to full drive. "Back side moon, Syll," Imray wheezed. "All right. What goes?" "Drakes," said Pomeroy. "You trying to go on with this?" Svensk was scrambling out of the shaft, headed for his console. He brushed against Quent's laser. On the screens the moon was ballooning up. They rushed across the terminator into darkness. "Drakes is real, son," Imray told him. "Catch ship on dirt -- we finish. Is maybe judgment on us. Boys, they smell us?" "I rather think they may not." Svensk's clack seemed to have been replaced by a cultivated Gal Fed accent. "Morgan sensed them just below the horizon and our emissions should have decayed by the time they get around." Frowning, Quent watched Imray braking to stability over the dark craters of the moon whose lighted side has guided his ground search. "They're coming around," said Pomeroy. "Listen." A confused cawing filled the bridge. Quent made out the word kavrot in coarse Galactic. A kavrot was a repulsive small flying reptile that infested dirty freighters. "Talking about us," Pomeroy grinned. His goatee no longer waggled. "Kavrots, that's us. Doesn't sound like they know we're here, though." He cut the voder. "Braking emissions," said Svensk. "It appears they're going down." Quent pushed up and moved in behind the lizard, laser in hand. Svensk did not look up. "If this is another gig -- " He studied the displays. Nobody paid attention. 'Captain?' Syria's fist was up. IV krantz began to glide silently on her docking impellors down toward the sunlit peaks at the moon's eastern horizon. Sylla's paw beckoned Imray left, pushed right, dipping, banking as the mountains rose around them. His fist chopped down, Imray cut power and they floated under a peak outlinecf in crystal fires. They were just shielded from the field on the planet below. "Last pass coming up," said Svensk. "Splendid. They've blown up the field antennae. That eliminates our trace. Sitting down. IF now." "From which one deduces?" asked Sylla. "From which one deduces that they either do not know we are here or do not care, or have some other plan. We could be going into a trap?" "First one best," said Imray. "They're going to send out a party." Pomeroy patched in and they heard the harsh voices now augmented by clangings. Quent stowed the lasers by his console. "Are they human?" Imray nodded gloomily. "Is a judgment, boys. They going to mess up." "Eating the natives?" "Maybe better so," Imray growled. "No -- we don't know exact what they do. They come here once only, burn two farms, go quick. Why they come back?" "You will recall my hypothesis at the time," said Svensk.  Sylla made a frying sound. "Yes. Crude but effective." Svensk nodded. "The adobe shells should make excellent hearths and the heat developed would be adequate to refine out most of the metals." . Pomeroy caught Quent's look. "You saw the metal in their houses? All woven in, even on their clothes. Every house is loaded, accumulation of centuries. Haven't a cat's use for it -- purely religious. They pick it up on ritual collecting trips. Spicules, nuggets, it's all scattered around in grains in alluvial rubble. You couldn't mine it. Point is, there's tantalite, osmiridium, maybe some palladium. Big price around here. When we found those farms burned, Svensk noticed they'd been at the ashes. Metal was gone. He figured they'd come back for more, burn the town out. And the damnfool Sops , run in when they're scared." He grimaced, not comicafly. "Why wouldn't they make the natives bring it to them?" "Never get it. Sops are difficult. Much simpler this way. Also hairier, Drake style." "If this is true, it's our clear duty to stop it," said Quent. "Son," said Imray, "Space Force is long way away. We here, only. What they got down there, Svenka?" "Sector Ten was quite correct," said Svensk. "Unmistakable. They have succeeded in repairing that A.E.V. The shield was on for a minute just now." Quent whistled. "Do you mean they've got an Armed Escort Vessel? That shield will be a phased englobement -- they can sense and fire right through it." "Drake damn good spacer," Imray told him. "Always watch. We try sneak in, we get fireball in nose. We stuck, looks like." ""Je me demande'" said Sylla, "How do they propose to conflagrate the city?" "A good point," Svensk stretched. "The farms, of course, were fired with portable flamers. This seems a slow method. Possibly irksome as well. I fancy they may intend to use the ship as a mobile torch." "If they hover that low," Quent said thoughtfully, "they could only use the top half of their shield. An A.E. shield forms in two hemispheres. Same for the sensor field, too. They can't englobe fully much below a thousand meters." "Ahe!" exclaimed Sylla. "One could thus attack them under the belly, non! But -- we cannot get our ship from here to there undetected. And the sled, it functions only in the air... If only we possessed a space-to-air attack pod!" "You do," said Quent. They stared at him. "The aft rocket turret. Look at you manual." "Manual," said Imray blankly. "In a few early peebees, the aft rocket cell is demountable and converts to a module capable of limited in-atmosphere function," Quent recited. "The empennage is sealed flush to the hull. You unbolt a stabilizer fin and swivel it around for the delta. I checked it over -- it's there. Didn't you ever notice the shielding and lock on that thing?" "Fantastic," said Svensk. "Now you mention -- but how is it powered?" "You couple on an emergency booster and impellor unit from the ship's drive after the thing is set up and the pilot is inside. Preferably a spare, if you have one -- you'll recall that my inspections terminated at the engineroom bulkhead," he said bitterly. "You sure manual say all that, son?" Imray demanded. "This thing work?" "Certainly," Quent snapped. "How do I know if it works?" Sylla licked his chops. "Thus, one could employ the thrust while concealed by this moon, and descend without power, avoiding detection because of the small size, and brake after one is below their horizon. One then approaches silently at ground level, on impellors -- and when the enemy elevates himself, boom." He sprang to the shaft. "Let us view this marvel!" In the hold Quent showed them the old demount levers, long since obstructed by mail-pod racks. "One wonders how orthagonal a trajectory this thing would endure," said Svensk. "T h e r m a I I i u m," Quent shrugged. "If the delta didn't come off." "Somebody going to get killed bad." Imray peered suspiciously IF into the turret. "For engine I must talk Morgan. Pfoo!" "You talked him into harassing me easily enough," said Quent. "No, that natural," grunted Imray, hauling over to the speaker. "Someday that spook will meet a Drake and find out who his enemies are," said Pomeroy's voice from the bridge. "They have a party in the city now. Looting. Gives us some time." ""Allons, the suits," called Sylla from the ladder. I N AN hour's sweating hullwork they had uncoupled the turret and dogged it to the fin. The old sealant was vitrified but the assembly went in with surprising ease. "That stuff will burn off," said Quent. "What a contraption!" "The aerodynamics of a rock," Svensk murmured. "Pod-chutes, perhaps, could be attached to these holes? I suggest as many as possible." "The engine approaches!" Sylla popped out of the turret as the massive shape of Imray appeared around the Rosenkrantz' stern, propelling a drive unit bundled in a working shield. "Two. gross nanocircuits must I get," he grumbled as they all wrestled the inertia of the big unit. They brought it into line with the turret lock. Imray glanced in. "You check how it steers, Syll?" "That rather mystifying secondary panel on the rocket console," said Svensk. "Perfectly obvious, once the power leads were exposed. I shall have no trouble." His long figure contorted as he groped for the control of his thermal vest. Sylla slid between him and the turret. "This is no swamp for overheated serpents. Desist -- you will be worse than the ants. It is I who go, of course." "So." Imray turned on Quent, who was moving in on the other side. "You want go, too?" Quent grabbed the lock. "I'm the obvious choice." "Good," said Imray. "Look here." He tapped Quent on the shoulder with one oversized gauntlet and suddenly straightened his arm. Quent sailed backward into Sylla and Svensk. When the three sorted themselves out they saw that Imray had clambered into the turret, which he filled compactly. "Close up engines, boys," he blared jovially into their helmets. "Watch tight, is hot. Syll, you set me good course, vernt?" The three lieutenants glumly coupled the drive unit, bolted and thermofoamed the extra chutes and piled back up to the bridge. "Foxed you, didn't he?" Pomeroy sobered. "They're still tearing up the chief's house. We may have them figured all wrong." The screens showed Imray's vehicle lurching past on a climbing course above the dark moonscape. "Svensk, explain to him the navigation." Sylla crouched over his console. "He must modify to azimuth thirty heading two eighteen or he will burst into their faces at once. Now I devise the settings for his burndown." "Sure, sure," said Imray's voice. They saw his rocket module yaw to a new course. "Svensk, what I do with pink button?" "Captain," Svensk sighed, "if you will first observe the righthand indicators -- " "At least the impellors work," said Quent. Pomeroy fretted: "This is all guesswork." Svensk was now relaying the burn configuration, which the ursinoid repeated docilely enough. "At one-one-five on your dial, check visual to make sure you are well below their horizon. Do not use energy of any sort until you are two units past horizon. Captain, that is vital. After that you are on manual. Brake as hard as you can, observing the center limit display and -- " "After that I know," interrupted Imray. "You take care ship. Now I go, vernt?' "You are now go," said Sylla, motioning to Pomeroy. "Gespro-oo -- " trumpeted the voder before Pomeroy cut it. "What does that mean?" asked Quent. "I've never known," said Svensk. "Some obscure mammalian ritual." "Our Captain was formerly a torch gunner," Sylla told Quent. "But perhaps you -- " "I've heard of them," said Quent. "But I thought -- " "That's right," said Pomeroy. "Ninety-nine per cent casualties. Flying bombs, that's all. He can run that thing, once he gets down." "He will be out of the moon's shadow and into their sensor field in fifteen seconds," said Svensk. "One trusts he remembers to deactivate everything." heard Imray humming as he tore planet-ward at full thrust. Sylla began chopping futile cutpower signals. The humming rumbled on. Pomeroy squeezed his eyes, Sylla chopped harder. Svensk sat motionless. The rumble cut off. "No more emissions. His course appears adequate," said Svensk. "I suggest we retire to a maximally shielded position and signal Farbase." "Impellors, Mr. Morgan," said Quent. When Sylla put up his Jist Quent followed it until they IF reached a deep crater which would block the scatter of their star-to-star caller. "If we're in luck," said Pomeroy, "Farbase can get . their teakettle here in three days, plus or minus a week. All they have is a ferry for picking up pieces. Bound to be pieces -- of somebody." He sighed. "Let's get back where we can hear 'em." They tiptoed back to the horizon. The Drakes below them gave no sign of detecting the approach of Imray's meteor. Neither did they reveal any intent to use their ship to fire the town. As the moon on which the Rosenkrantz was riding sank below the horizon of the field they were obliged to leave it and maneuver into full sun-blast. Quent's eyes burned; he was becoming aware that he had scarcely slept for a week. "If only we could give one little burn planetward," Sylla chafed. "How soon, my scientific friend?" "With their drive off -- well -- they would be able to read shipsized burst from our present orbit for at least another hundred degrees of planetary rotation," said Svensk. "Don't you agree, Quent?" Quent nodded wearily. "And that A.E.V. has about double our acceleration and six times our rocket range and can turn inside us. We wouldn't have a prayer." He had said it twice before. The lutroid spat dryly and put his elbows on his console. Pomeroy sat, hands cupped over his earphones, motionless. "Emission," said Svensk suddenly. "Imray is down and braking.' "That damn ship hasn't even budged," Pomeroy said. "I can still hear them yakking to the shore party. We're all wrong." "Still braking. It just occurs to me, there was space for two more chutes." "He requires rather two more gravity webs," said Sylla. "He is mad." "Torchers," said Pomeroy. "There is some distortion for which I cannot compensate," Svensk complained. "He is very close to their horizon -- ah -- I believe he has managed to deflect." "That ship isn't going anywhere," Pomeroy fumed. "If I could suppress this wretched bias," said Svensk. "He is on impellors now, I think. But moving very erratically." "He finds perhaps a ravine." Sylla was kneading his console. "Toward the field again," said Svensk. "Much too near. One fears that he is omitting to wait for them to lift." "The old maniac will sail right onto their screens," Pomeroy groaned. "While we sit here," Sylla muttered. "If he's in that canyon back of the field," said Quent, "he might sneak under their shield. Provided they weren't looking. It's a fairly broad target. Can he -- " Sylla's head had snapped around. "He understands to shoot," he told Quent. "Can I rely on that, Mr. Sylla?" Quent met the lutroid's yellow stare. "Accelerating on the same line," Svensk announced. "Dismal." "Got it!" Pomeroy shouted. "Secure locks -- but there isn't time. Up, you bastards! Up!" "How long before he cuts their line of sight, Mr. Svensk?" "This detestable -- at ground level, maximum two minutes. Much too close. They're bound to spot him." "Over to me on manual, Mr. Sylla," said Quent. "If you can get to the wrecking lasers it'll help the display. Ready, Mr. Morgan?" The lutroid shot over him and down the shaft. "Stay braced and warn Appleby!" Quent yelled after him, coding for drive. "If Imray can hit what he shoots at, this'll distract them. If not -- " He rammed home the lever and they pitched in their webs. As the screens faded the planet bloomed up and swirled crazily. "We're in their sensors now," gasped Svensk. "I believe -- " "They're lifting." Pomeroy was plastered on his board. "They see us." Quent bent the Rosenkrantz into an atmosphere-grazing turn. Pomeroy was struggling to move a switch. The bridge filled with Drake voices, reverberating lashback. A siren honked. The voder cut off. For a flash Quent thought his eardrums had gone but as acceleration topped out he heard the others fill their lungs. "Their shield does appear to have collapsed," said Svensk. "I can't be positive in this -- " "He got them!" Pomeroy yelled. "Power's gone! Wait -- they're coming back on emergency. Listen to 'em cry!" Noises blared from the Drake ship. "Where's Imray?" Quent threw in the retros and they pitched again. Sylla came scrambling out of the shaft and hung onto Imray's chair. "Where is he?" "I can't at the moment," Svensk protested. "The resultants -- " "Listen." Pomeroy tuned the uproar to ululating wails. "The Denebian national anthem." He flopped back in his seat, grinning. "Might as well go get him -- that ship's dead in the dirt. He cracked one up their landleg sockIF et while they were gawking at us. Must have been bloody under 'em!" Quent jolted to a thump on the back. Sylla climbed down, grinning. Svensk arched his neck -- his bony beak was not adapted for expression. "Is he all right?" called Appleby's voice. "I fixed some hot jam truffles." "So that was the anomaly," said Svensk. "Incredible. The nutritive drive of the human female." "Bloody good, too," said Pomeroy. He jerked to his board. "Holy Space -- " "What is it?" "The Jasper just hailed us," he told them, "She's coming by. Five minutes earlier and we'd all been up the pipe." He sagged again and reached for his bulb. "By the Path!" Imray howled on the voder. "You pick me up or I sprucher you too." Q uent was clumsy with exhaustion by the time they got the rocket module stowed and the hot drive unit back to Morgan. He glanced at the wrecker ports and then followed the others to the bridge where Pomeroy was watching the grounded Drakes. "I take over, son." Imray sprawled in his command chair. wrinkling his hide luxuriously. "Watch tight. Bad mess they get loose before Farbase come." He chomped a jam tart. "Are you all ready for the bad news?" Pomeroy wheeled around to face them. "Remember that Gal News man we ducked at Farbase? He's on the shuttle. Coming here." Imray choked. "Wants to interview you," Pomeroy pointed at Quent. "And Appleby, too." Quent shut his eyes. "He can -- why won't they let me alone?" Absently he fingered the laser by his console. "Admiral Quent's son in battle with Drake pirates," Pomeroy grinned sourly, "While Admiral Coatesworth's fiancee cheers? His board's all lit up." "This rather cooks it," said Svensk. Sylla was drumming his claws. They all looked at Quent. "What you tell him, son?" "Tell 'em." Quent muttered exhaustedly. "Why, I'll tell 'em the ship stinks and your computer is full of mush -- and the engineroom is a fugnest -- " his voice rose -- "infested by a spook who has you so terrorized you have to bribe him to move ship. And my fellow officers are a set of primitive jokers captained by a maniac who has to resort to physical force -- and the only humans who can stand the ship are an unshaven alcoholic and a madwoman who buggers the sensors with fudge-machines and underwear." He rubbed his neck. "My first ship. Look, Fm going to sack out, right?" He pushed off for the ladder. "You tell them that?" Imray demanded, beaming. "Flying fugnest?" "Hell no, why should I? It's not true." He pulled into the shaft and rammed into Imray's hard paw. "Son, you got to." "wA.?" "Tell them can't stand. Want new job. Must!" Imray was shaking them both for emphasis. "Wait -- one -- minute." Quent disengaged himself. "That's exactly what you were putting me on to think, wasn't it? But why?" He frowned around at them. "Why? I mean, hell, I'm for integration." "Precisely the problem," said Svensk. Imray whacked his thigh exasperatedly. "Who you think build this boat?" "Well, it's a human design -- " "Human fix up. Is build by Svensk's people, original. Was part their navy. Space Force say, indefinite loan. Little boats, you never hear. Space Force come along, make treaty. Suck up little boats. Even ants they got some type space boat, vernt, Svensk?" "More of a pod, I believe." Svensk crossed his long legs. "Something, anyway. Son, you think like your father say, all en-aitch people want integrate with Space Force?" "Well, uh," said Quent. "The Gal Equality party." "Sure, sure." Imray nodded. "Some en-aitch people want be officer big starship, is fact. Also fact, en-aitch people want have say in Gal Council. But is different here." He leaned back, folded his arms. "Here is original en-aitch space force, us little boats. We been on these boats long time. Long, long time. We been patrol since was no sector, eh, Syll? When humans come with us, is only individual humans. One here, one there. Pom know. But we not integrated with you. You is integrated with us." "Bravo!" cried Sylla. "Hear, hear," said Svensk gravely. "But, what -- " said Quent. "The captain means," Pomeroy told him, "that he's not about to get integrated with the Space Force. None of us are. We do our Job. They can stow their sociological programs. Their directives. Channels. Personnel fitness profiles. Rotation and uptraining tours. Pisgah! If this integration trial business goes green, we've IF had it. And -- " he poked his finger at Quent -- "you are a prime test case. Lieutenant." "Even Morgan they steal," Imray rumbled angrily. Quent opened his mouth, closed it. "We were so confident," said Svensk. "It did seem ideal, when you turned out to be Admiral Quent's son. We felt it would be simple to impress you as being, as it were, quite unintegrable," He sighed irritatedly. "I may say that your determined optimism has been a positive nightmare." "Let me get this straight." Quent scowled. "You wanted me to yell so hard for reassignment that the program would be shelved?" "Correct." Sylla slapped his console. The others nodded. "What about this flimflam here in Sopwith?" "Too fancy," grunted Imray. "We were getting desperate," said Pomeroy. "You just wouldn't discourage. So we thought maybe we could work it the other way, build up a case that would convince the Gal Eq crowd that humans weren't ready to, ah -- " He looked away. "Well, you figured it." "I knew you were out to clobber me," Quent said grimly. "Only I thought it was my father." "It was in no way personal, Quent," Sylla assured him heartily. "Believe me, we would do the same for anyone, nonV "But this is insane!" Quent protested. "How can you? I mean, do you realize my father got me assigned here? He's sure I'll come around to his way of thinking and furnish him with political ammunition to use against integration." "That rather optimises things, doesn't it?" Svensk rattled his neckplates. "Increased familial solidarity is a plus value for primates." Quent snorted. "What were you supposed to be, Mr. Spock? I knew damn well you're a Gal Tech graduate. You should have taken the course on oedipal conflicts. Also the one on ethics," he added acidly. "Some primates set quite a value on truth." "But you've got to help us. Lieutenant," Pomeroy said urgently. Quent was preoccupied. "How many languages do you speak, anyway? There was a Pomeroy who wrote some text -- " "Lieutenant! Look, we'll all help fix up a tale of woe you can give them -- " "Are you serious?" He looked at them, appalled. "You expect me to falsify my official duty report? Lie about you and the ship?" "What one little lie?" Imray's voice sank to the crooning tone he used on Morgan. "Son, you good spacer. Save ship, verntl You say this integration nonsense okay, we finish. You not let Space Force mess up old Rosy, son." "But goddammit," Quent exploded. "It's not just one lie. It'd go on and on -- investigations, appeals -- my father smirking around with the Humanity Firsters trumpeting every word I said on one side -- and the Gal Eq people reaming me from the other. I'd never be free of it. Never. How could I function as a space officer?" He rubbed his head wearily. "I'm sorry. I'll say as little as possible, believe me. But I will not put on any act." He turned to go below. "So stubborn, the humans," Sylla snarled. Quent continued down the ladder. "Wait, Quent," said Svensk. "This publicity you dread can't be escaped, you know. Suppose you say nothing. The facts speak for themselves. Gal Eq will be delirious: Arch-racist's Son leads Nonhuman Attack on Human Pirates, for starters. Prolonged cheers. AllGal network showing the hero and his en-aitch pals. I daresay they'll nominate you Tor the next Amity award. Really, you're just as well off doing it our way." Quent stared at him in horror. "Oh, no. No." He began to pound his forehead on the ladder. "It's not fair." His voice cracked. "I thought when I got to space they'd let me alone. It 's been bad enough being Rathborne Quent Junior, but this -- spending the rest of my life as a -- a ventriloquist's dummy for Integration politics. Everywhere I go! Every post, my whole career. How can I be a spacer?" Imray was shaking his head. "You natural victim social situation, son, looks like. Too bad." He exhaled noisily, and licked a piece of jam off his fist. "So, is settled. You going help us, vernt?" Quent lifted his head. His jaw set. "No, I told you. That's out," he said bleakly, "I didn't come into the service to play games." His voice trailed off. "Call me next watch, right? We're all pretty weary." "Sure, sure," said Imray. "Syli, Svenka, you boys go. We got time think something." "Forget it," Quent told him. "There's no way out of this one." he sighed, hauling down the shaft. "I wish I could just disappear." He stopped dead and looked up thoughtfully. "Ah-ah," he said. He climbed back up and collected the lasers. The last thing he remembered was leaning back on his hammock fully dressed with a laser in his hand. G al newsmen yelled at him, crowds jostled him. The bridge IF of the Adastra swarmed with kavrots. Quent came groggily awake, sure that he had heard a lock open. But the ship seemed to be normal. He sank back and dreamed that he vras wearing a clangorous glass uniform. When the cocoon grabbed at him Quent struggled to consciousness. The Rosenkrantz was going into full star drive. He plunged into the shaft and found himself nose to nose with an unknown girl. "Gah!" "Hello, Lieutenant," she said. "Want some breakfast?" She was a dark girl in silver coveralls. "Who -- who're you?" "I'm Campbell, your new log off," she smiled. "Drakes." He hurled himself headlong for the bridge. "Where are they? What's happened?" "Hi, there," said Pomeroy. The others looked up from their consoles. They seemed to be drinking coffee. "Where are we headed? Where did she come from?" "Sit, son," said Imray genially. The dark girl bobbed up to place a bulb of coffee on his console. "Is she a Drake?" "Good heavens, no." She laughed. Quent blinked. The conformation under the coverall was interesting. "I'm a duck," She vanished. Dazedly Quent gulped some coffee. "How long was I asleep? Farbase -- they've come and gone, right?" "Not likely." Pomeroy snorted. "They won't get to Sopwith for thirty hours yet." "But who's watching the Drakes?" "The Rosenkrantz, who else?" said Sylla, dead-pan. "What? Captain Imray, what is going on?" Imray waved his paw. "Problem finish, son." He belched comfortably. "We fix, eh, boys?" "Oh, God." Quent squinted at them. He gulped some more coffee. "Mr. Pomeroy, you will explain yourself." "Well, you can forget about that newsman and all that," Pomeroy told him. "When he gets to Sopwith he'll find' the Rosenkrantz and he'll find Miss Appleby all right -- but he won't find you. Nobody'll find you." "Why not?" Quent , glared around nervously. "Because you are no longer on the Rosenkrantz,"" said Svensk. disappearing. Since we could scarcely remove you from the Rosenkrantz, we simply removed the Rosenkrantz from you." He stretched pleasurably. "Solves everything." What have you done now? "Observe!" Sylla pointed to the sealed log certificates. Quent pulled himself over warily"P-B #T J-B," he read. "But's that's wrong. That's not -- " "Peebee Jasper Banks, that is." Pomeroy chuckled. "We're the Jasper Banks now, see?" "What?" Quent pawed at the case. "Those are official seals. You -- " "Not to worry, it's just temporary. Jasper owed us a couple of favors. They were glad to oblige. Fact, they wanted to head back to Central anyway. So we just traded registry and log officers and gave them our mail. They took over the DrakesTsee?" "But that's -- " "Beautiful," Pomeroy nodded. "Gfl News can pull the Jasper apart, they never heard of you. No one ever actually saw you on Rosy, did they? He'll figure it's some garble. Has to -- there's Appleby; all as advertised. And the Drakes. He'll have to be satisfied with that. Quent took some more coffee. He felt like a man trying to shake off a bad dream. "And the beauty part," Pomeroy went on, ""Jasper s an .all-Human peebee. That'll really befuddle them." "No integration aspect left," said Svensk. "Gal Eq will be dashed." "It can't work. It's -- what about Appleby?" "I hope this one as good cook," muttered Imray. "Appleby's fine -- she never heard of you," Pomeroy assured him. "Morgan let her have these crystals she's always wanted, see?" "Uh. But -- they're going back to Central as us? What happens there? Personnel. My father." "Personnel," Pomeroy scoffed. "They're dingled up half the time. They won't get their circuits flushed till we've swapped back." "But my father -- " Quent yelped. "When do we trade back?" "When we intersect, bien sure,"' said Sylla. "When's that? Hold it. Wasn't the Jasper headed on some job away out?" "That's right," said Pomeroy. "The wild sector. Thirteen-zed, they call it. Wasn't due to start patrol there for a while but they got this emergency call. So they sent out the Jasper. That's us, now." "Quite remote and unexplored, really," said Svensk, stretching. "Challenging." "New patrol good job," Imray grunted. "You want be spacer, son, verntl Nobody mess your career out there." He scratched his broad chest contentedly. "Integration program? Pfoo! Never catch." "You mean we start patrolling out there? And they take our old one. When do we trade back with IF JasperT "Assuming our circuit is, say, twice the length of theirs," Svensk ruminated, "and assuming they keep near schedule, the perinode should precess around -- " "Spare me." Quent's big jaw began to grind and he breathed forcefully. The reaction pushed him slowly out of his console. He hooked one leg around his seat back and hung over them scowling. "My career," he said tensely. "Your unspeakable solicitude... Sixty days on my first duty I find myself involved in an actionable conspiracy. First officer of a vessel under fraudulent certification, on an illegal course in defiance of orders -- without one clobbing prayer of ever getting back into anything resembling legal status. My career. Who'd believe me? What happens when -- gentlemen, did it never cross your conniving minds that this is a general courts offense?" He reached out and laid his hand on the emergency starcall cradled between him and Imray. "My only sane course is to bring this to a halt right now -- regardless." He yanked the caller from its cradle. They gaped at him. Sylla's ears folded back. "Lieutenant, no," said Pomeroy. , Quent fingered the starcall. His solemn face was corded. "What's the nature of this emergency, Mr. Pomeroy?" "Some en-aitch trQuble," Pomeroy spread his hands. "Signal split before they got much. They gave ihQ Jasper some stuff -- " "Three argon cylinders, one case of mudbinds, one pan-venom kit," said Miss Campbell from the shaftway. "And an incubator." She placed a breakfast server on Quent's console and departed. "You figure it, sir," Pomeroy chuckled hopefully. Quent's face did not soften. He tapped a square nail on the starcall, slowly, desperately. Nobody moved. Sylla's leg muscles bunched stealthily; Quent's free hand drifted to the laser. There was a faint slithering sound. Quent's jaw jerked around to Svensk. The big saurian's fingers came away from his vest and he stretched ostentatiously, jogging the computer. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand fleets Quent slapped it silent with the laser. He lifted the starcall. "No, son, no," Imray protested. Quent drew a deep breath. For a moment the Jasper Banks nee Rosenkrantz fled on through the abyss in humming silence. The aroma of bacon drifted through her bridge. Quent's face began to work convulsively. ""Kavrots"" he muttered. He let out an inarticulate howl. Sylla's reflexes carried him into the bow grips and Pomeroy dived under his board. They goggled at Quent. He was making a wild whooping noise which they could not at first identify. Then Pomeroy crawled out, grinning, and Imray's shoulders started to quake. Quent roared on. His face was astounded, like a man who hasn't heard himself guffawing wholeheartedly in years. Invisible around him, ghosts of iQ Adastra, Crux, Sirian shriveled away. "All right," he gasped, sobering. He pushed the starcall and the laser back in place and reached for his breakfast. "Kavrots. So be it. Who's on watch in this fugnest?" for his thirty productive years as a science-fictioneer -- for the twentieth anniversary of his first hook, which Doubleday is celebrating by issuing Mifflin's publication of his IF TO A. To an Earth accustomed to miniwars, indestructible aliens brought micro war!  bank of electronic receivers in the tower, oozing sweat and scotch from his pores. Colonel Ward anxiously scanned the Manoc landing strip for General Metzger's C-#. The general could r have only one reason for visiting Manoc at this time -- to check on rumors that its commanding officer was derelict in his duties and drinking to a degree unbecoming an officer. The squawk box kept nagging at him. He paid little attention to it. Radar had picked up something. That something was streaking along at seventy thousand feet and at an estimated two thousand miles per hour. Should an element of jets be sent up? "Disks." Ward sneered. "Meteors." He connected radar and leaned over the box to give emphasis to his words. "Sergeant, if you track just one more flying saucer and interrupt me, I'll -- get on the ball, sergeant." He snapped at the towerman. Didn't he know that General Metzger was coming in? Why hadn't he aborted that last flight of jets and cleared the runways? Ward slammed the door going out. In the jeep, on the parking raipp, he lit his fifteenth cigarette since # that morning. Ashes fell on his immaculate uniform and he brushed them off angrily. The sharply pressed uniform was in atonement for the scotch. For six months, while his reputation declined, he had progressed in the art of being the well-dressed man. What was a military man, anyway? Did he wear the bullet scar, canting over a bloodshot eye like an extra eyebrow, as a badge of honor? Should he laugh at being grounded, physically decayed at forty and shelved behind a desk? Should he complacently accept the fact of his wife's death-her destruction before his very eyes from cancer? Or did a man, even a military man, have a right to seek whatever it was that other men sought in bottles? Well, he had had it all. Including the bottles. And now here was the general coming to sit in judgment over his conduct. Ward saw a C-# go around and let down for landing. He started the jeep and moved it ahead. The general climbed slowly, stiffly from the ship. That was a bad sign. Adjutants in the Eighth Air Force had run for cover when the general moved with that stiff-legged walk. He was a large man, with a full head of iron-gray hair and an irongray mustache. He squeezed himself silently, after one puzzled glance at Ward's uniform, into the jeep. S IX pilots stood stiffly at attention in the green-plushed office at operations. Ward glared at them. "What are you men doing here? No flights are scheduled for this morning." The general placed himself quietly into a corner -- watching. IF "It's come back," one of the pilots said. "We'd like to make a gunnery run on it." "Sir!" Ward snapped. "What's come back?" "The missile, sir, that radar's been tracking. It buzzed the tower five minutes ago. They've plotted its course -- it's swinging in a hundred-mile circle and reducing speed. About mach one." Ward frowned. What did they expect him to do? Buckle their harnesses for them? "If the thing's circling, then it's not a meteor," he growled, singling out the flight leader. "Why didn't you alert your element and take after it?" "Your orders were -- " "If you can't think for yourself you're not qualified to lead men. Adams, you take over the flight. Ruppert, you fly his wing. Now get out of here." The general said nothing. He had obviously come simply to observe. And observe he would. In ten minutes the desk squawk box began chattering. It was the tower. The towerman had the thing in h's glasses, guessed it was traveling at about three hundred miles per hour. It seemed to be letting down for a landing. He could see Adams' flight firing tracers and rockets at it, without effect. Yes -- it was landing. About five miles out, on the desert. Ward looked at the general. The headache came first -- something spotted by radar, estimated to travel at fabulous speeds, unmarked, unknown. Maybe even a guided missile. But who in the world would fire a missile at Manoc -- when there were New York and Washington? "I'll send out a demolition crew to bring it in," he told tower. disk. It lay, not mangled from impact, lightly on the hangar floor. Machined as smoothly as an artillery shell, devoid of jutting airfoils or rocket tubes. The general touched the nose section, where a delicate script was engraved in the metal. "It's a guided missile," he said. "Russian, probably." Ward rubbed his hand over the script. "Maybe," he said. "I'll get a cryptograph man over here." He looked at the thing warily, disliking what it meant -- the fuss and red tape it would occasion. Two thousand miles per hour? No wings? The sergeant cryptographer arrived. Ward hurried off to rendezvous with a bottle of scotch. Back at the hangar at # he heard the sergeant through a slight rosy haze. "I can bust codes based on a known language. If this is a language the U.N. ought to be informed. You need a philologist." Not a sound from the missile. Demolition experts pronounced that it might explode. Might not. "Check again," Ward ordered. The general eyed him curiously. They said there was no other check they could make. "Bust it open," the general ordered gruffly. Ward frowned. He was still C.O. here. He faced the general. "Hold on. We'll get an impression of that script before anyone blows himself up. You can take it back to Washington. Sergeant, post a guard here and keep the area clear -- until I say otherwise." The general smiled wryly. By # hours he was airborne. Ward, feeling burned out sucked the bottle. The general would wire his request for Ward's resignation from Washington. It was a fact, written in his eyes. Ward felt relieved. There was nothing now to hold him -- he had no front to maintain. He opened another bottle. At #, slightly fuzzy, he wired Chicago. They said they would put a philologist aboard a jet. He was not yet drunk when, five hours later, the philologist arrived. Ward shook the old man's hand somberly. "Had to get you here fast. Dr. Neuman," he explained, "to decipher a script we can't identify. packages is to check on the sender. It might be a bomb. You understand that this is top secret?" The doctor smiled ruefully. An hour later he had ceased smiling. After two days. Ward noticed. Dr. Neuman's face had become actually grim. Ward sweated out and played poker at the officers' club with Major Vickers, Chief Flight Surgeon; Captain Hutchinson, Assistant; and the bartender. On the third day old Dr. Neuman placed a paper on Ward's desk. Ward stared at it. "We didn't think it was Russian," he said. "No earthly origin? Well, I'll be damned," while they opened the "can." blunt, unembellished. He would get a jolt when, together with Ward's complying notice of resigabout the script being Martian. No philologist had called Martian, of course -- simply no earthly origin. Alien intelligence. They pried open the can. Ward watched a mechanic peer inside the hole. IF Then: "Jesus -- God! There's somebody in here." It was human, all right. Strapped to a bulkhead, sucking oxygen from a metal mask. Medics carried it to the hospital, where it lay, unconscious. It was out of form, as though having lived in a twisted world -- limbs swollen at the extremities and tapering inward toward the body, giving it a comic-strip appearance. Head ovoid and smooth with features that seemed to be painted on like those on an Easter egg. And washed all over with an egg-yolk yellow. Martians looked like that, huh? Venusians? Who? No earthly origin. Ward returned to operations and smoked one cigarette off the end of another. Stubble adorned his chin. He felt better with the stubble and with the uniform rumpled. In a couple of days he would be out for good and able to slouch around in sneakers and a Tshirt. Then Hutchinson called from the hospital. Major Vickers, he said, had suddenly conked out. He was turning egg-yolk yellow. Something stirred in Ward's brain. Something cold and nebulous formed into a premonition. The phone kept ringing. Within an hour it had informed him that five medics had dropped and turned yellow -- that they vomited violently, then lay like dead men. Ward slapped a quarantine on the whole post. Captain Hutchinson jeeped from the hospital. Disheveled and exhausted, he had not wanted to break away. "You need a drink," Ward said. He poured the liquor. "What do you think. Captain?" The phone jangled again. It was the tower -- General Metzger's ship was over the field, radioing for landing instructions. Ward hesitated. He plugged in a desk mike. "Sorry, General -- we've got an epidemic here. Field one hundred per cent restricted." "Metzger speaking. I've got your replacement aboard. Give me landing instructions. Ward -- no nonsense." Ward took a deep breath. "General, get this. I've notified touch a wheel to Manoc, I'll have to slap you in the guardhouse. This is an emergency. The field is quarantined and restricted." He watched through the window as the General's C-# flew over the runway once, wheels up, banked and headed back east. He grinned wryly, visualizing Metzger trying to fit this development into headHutchinson had poured and swallowed another drink. "Colonel, we've worked like dogs and can't stop it. It's one of two things." He reached for the bottle. Ward snatched it. "You've had enough. This is no time to get drunk." The captain stared at him, tense, almost sneering. "Isn't it?" Ward turned, chopping down his anger. He snapped his fingers at the clerk across the room. "Sergeant, I want you to close all post bars for an indefinite period. Absolutely no drinking." He faced Hutchinson. "Let's get to work. Captain. If you have any opinions, state them." Hutchinson's face went slowly white. He spoke swiftly. "Only theories. That thing at the hospital is no Terran, as they say in space fiction. We've established that. We find he's polluted with an unknown but highly contagious disease. Deduction -- wherever he comes from might be plagued with the disease." "Rats leaving the sinking ship?" "Yes." "Any alternate theory?" The captain looked squarely at Colonel Ward. "Disease warfare," he said. "Invasion." quarters, bent over a microscope and scrutinized the slide that came with the report from the hospital lab. After several minutes of concentrated effort he saw flat specks suspended in the fluid of a lung section. He pushed back the microscope, touched fingertips and brooded. His eyes rested longingly on the bed but he shook his head savagely to clear it, left the room and trudged toward operations. Martian invasion. Mars was all he knew of outer space. So why not Mars? And disease warfare -- dreaded by all and outlawed by every country. Perhaps now a reality. It seemed incredible. Who would have supposed that beings out there would launch a ship packed with disease germs? Navigated by a suicide pilot -- who himself was the bomb? You could not keep a thing like this hidden. His cryptographed OP messages to Washington had finally resulted in alarm. Even Metzger reversed his field and began slashing red tape. He organized an airlift and had it running within thirty-six hours. Stuff was dumping into Manoc by the ton. Ward turned almost eagerly into operations. Senses a little sharper, brain a little freer, like muscles after exercise. Two days ago he had anticipated slipping away to Mexico. Now he soothed a frightened corporal -- his serIF geant clerk had toppled -- in the office. He made hourly personnelhealth checks. The latest check had one half of the post flat on its back. One half of Manoc's personnel knocked out in thirty-six hours. Those were heavy casualties. How many enemy casualties? None. Hutchinson reported by phone at #. "This Martian doesn't have a trace of rational thought. Colonel," he said. "Damn funny -- our clinical tests indicate he has the thought pattern of a low-order mammal. What's that figure?" "To me it totals zero. Dammit, Hutchinson, how could an irrational creature navigate a space ship from Mars -- or anywhere -- to Earth? How could a loworder mammal build the thing in first place?" "That's your problem," Hutchinson said. "I'm a doctor. I'll run some more clinical tests." What about the alien ship? Ward phoned the hangar and quizzed Morgan, flight engineer. Morgan sounded incredulous. "We've dismantled the thing," he said. "You won't believe this -- it's got an atomic propulsion system. An atom engine no bigger'n my fist. And, man, has it got power! Can't even estimate. And we couldn't find any controls aboard. No radio. No nothing." Ward sighed. No controls. And yet the thing had been flown in at two thousand miles per hour. And it had landed perfectly. to be some knowledge, some germinal fact that he could utilize to build a campaign against the egg-headed Martian and his stampeding germs before the news broke and plunged the country into hysteria. All his training could not have been for nothing. But you could not bomb bacteria. Send troops in against them? Gas? Tanks? Flame throwers? Or could you? He dialed the phone. "Hutchinson? Collect every conceivable concoction -- serums, antitetanus, smallpox vaccine, works -- and squirt it at those bacteria. Throw the whole damn medical book at them." But Hutchinson answered distractedly, as though he hadn't heard. "Colonel, your Martian or whatever is convalescing. Yeah. Not a trace of bacteria in the last blood test. And that's not all -- " Ward frowned in bafflement. Trapped behind this steel desk, he felt a bond with the infantryman who huddled helplessly in a foxhole while hell raged all around. He grunted, "Get over here, Hutchinson. On the double." When the captain arrived, he seemed to recognize Ward with difficulty. "Maybe we'd better have a drink. Colonel." Ward poured two stiff ones. "We did an interesting test yesterday." Hutchinson spoke slowly. "We ran an electroencephalograph on your Martian. You know, the machine that records electrical pulsations of the brain and translates thought processes and -- ah -- sensations electronically. Well, we got definite but unexpected results." Ward nodded noncommitally. He moved a finger around the edge of his glass. "The encephalograph indicated that over a hundred separate brainwave patterns were emanating from the alien." Ward looked up. "What?" "The same as if we'd focused the device on a crowd. Multiple thought sources. Multiple brains." Ward's frown deepened. "Previously you reported the Martian was irrational. Now he has a multiple brain. Make sense." "You figure the sense of it." Hutchinson bridled. "I never attended Command and Staff School. Today we tested other sick patients -- and each gave multiple brain-wave response. Then we ran a dozen airmen, not yet sick. through the encephalograph test. Each registered one cohesive thought pattern. It doesn't make sense. Yesterday the Martian was lousy with germs and registering multiple thought sources. Today he's germ-free and indicating a single source." "Are you certain the encephalograph is reliable?" Ward asked hollowly. He brooded for a time, then placed a hand gently on Hutchinson's shoulder. "All right. Captain. Thanks. I'm going to make a check of my own. Have some microscopes sent to the hangar. Then get some sleep. You're going to need it." After Hutchinson had left. Ward drove the jeep to Hangar Two. "Who's in charge here -- Morgan? Morgan, how do you figure this ship was navigated put there to Earth and landed safely -- without controls and only an unconscious man aboard?" "It don't figure. Colonel. Maybe some kind of telepathic control." "Morgan, this is important. Dismantle the Martian ship. Completely. Examine every atom of it with a microscope." "We already -- " "I mean literally. Get some rest first. I'll send around microscopes from the lab. Use them and report what you find." He drove back to operations. A thought was seeded on the edge of IF his brain. T he corporal leaped up when Ward entered operations. Ward blinked. "What's the matter with you, Corporal? Get a messenger here on the double." The corporal tripped over his own feet in his haste to reach the door. Ward frowned at him. "Hold on, Corporal. Where you going? I meant for you to telephone and -- " He stopped. "Something's wrong. Sick?" The corporal trembled. "N-no. But Captain Hutchinson is, sir, now. And he was here only a few... It's contagious. Maybe we'd better -- " Ward sighed. He had been dreading this. "Don't leave this room," he said. "You're losing control of yourself." The corporal's expression was pathetic. "But nine-tenths of the post has got it. Fifty men are dead. In a couple of hours itil be too late -- " Nine-tenths... Ward marveled. Nine-tenths of his force was already wiped out. He saw the frightened clerk moving toward the door. With one hand he opened a drawer and removed a gun -- an Army .# Colt automatic. "Corporal," he said quietly. "If you attempt to bolt from this room and start a panic -- I'll have to kill you. We've got to keep the germs here, isolated on this post, at all costs." The sight of the gun seemed to unnerve the corporal completely. He sobbed and jerked the door open. Ward fired. The report crashed, surprisingly loud, in the narrow office. The corporal dropped. By an effort of will -- so great that it stiffened every muscle in his body and covered him with sweat -- Ward managed to concentrate on the central problem. Martian disease... Hutchinson was knocked out. He would never know what hit him. He picked up the jangling phone. The caller was Private Dean at Hangar Two. He said Morgan had dropped fifteen minutes ago. Ward straightened up. "All right. Don't get panicky. Dean. Did you use the microscopes I had sent over?" He listened to Dean's voice a long time, then hung up, ordered a messenger from communications and began to write. The Pentagon, For cryptograph. Classification: Top Secret He could accept it once he faced it: More or less. Hundreds of brainwave patterns emanating from a diseased patient suggested inevitably that the bacteria had brains which were spraying out electric pulsations that a machine could record. A logically inescapable deduction. Martians -- or whoever -- were bacteria. And now the proof. Morgan and Dean had detected small, invisible -- (except to microscopes) -- controls in the nose section of the dismantled ship. Bacteria-size controls. Too infinitesimal to activate or test. Bacteria had navigated the compact ship across space -- it was their invasion. Was the strategic problem simpler now? It was worse. Ordinary bacteria were bad enough. Brainy bacteria were impossible. An equally impossible conjecture followed. Would they form a league -- an alliance -- with the bacteria here on earth? Was he cracking up? He walked to the window and gazed out at the airstrip. He saw sleek jets and rockets lined up on the ramps. Jets that he couldn't fly -- that nobody now would be able to fly. He was alone. Vickers was gone. Hutchinson was gone. The general was remote in Washington. What was the latest check? Sixty-five men? Sixty-five men out of two thousand were left on active status. A thriving post had been reduced to tomblike silence in a few days. There was a way left, possibly, to stop them. Of what use was he as a military man if he could not stop the enemy? If he failed the microbes would advance. They would spread beyond Manoc, utilizing lizards and birds, perhaps as transportation; reach a man, then hop from man to man and finally creep over the whole of Earth, reducing mankind everywhere to supine flesh. Moving slowly to the desk, pondering, he picked up the slide, held it up reflectively and drew a lighter from his pocket. Thoughtfully he applied flame to the slide, holding it firm until the specimen turned black, the plastic cracked, and his fingers burned. "Dead Martians," he mused aloud, dropping the charred slide into the wastebasket beside the scotch. He picked up the phone. "Get me General Metzger in Washington," he said. "The Pentagon." N OW he had plenty of time. Time to shower, shave and IF change into fresh uniform. Eveji to sleep. He walked over to the hangar. It was a good try, he thought, fingering the script engraved on the nose section. The next try would be his. The script, a metal document of celestial data, had enabled old Dr. Neuman to pin it down as the creation of an alien intelligence aware of vistas unavailable to man. Of course it was only guesswork but other ships might follow this one. So that whatever he did could prove inconclusive. His day -- and the days of his kind -- were probably done. There was no time left for soldiers, for the military -- he might buy a little time for those who would take over. Whether human or bacteria. He had felt useless for some time. The humanlike Martian? You could only suppose about him, too. A kind of cattle -- or food. Carried their food right along with them. Smart? Maybe they had abandoned Mars -- or another home planet -- because their human cattle, ravaged by disease, were dying off. He trudged back to operations, stepped gingerly over the corpse in his doorway and sat behind the desk. It might, he found himself thinking, have been interesting to talk with intelligent germs. What did germs think about, anyway? Did they love and hate? It was daylight when Colonel Ward awoke, hearing a faint, throaty drone in the distance. He shuffled to the window and peered out. The urge to vomit gnawed at him but he fought it down. He thought a moment about his wife, seeing her face and hearing her clearly in his mind, feeling a kind of pride. But it was rather humiliating. Colonel Ward thought, to have space conquered by bacteria. Put a man in his place, didn't it? By craning his neck he could see the bomber high up, cruising at about fifteen thousand feet, just a flash in the sunlight. In a few seconds it would be over the field. He looked at his watch. Right on time. A good man, the general. Dependable. He stared out at the field, watching for it. But he didn't get to see much. Only a sudden blinding glare, then a hurricane of smoke, mushrooming up and out. In a second, it was over.  Edited by Lester del Rey Will be back this Fall Watch for It on your newsstands The price was fine and the job was easy -- nothing but recreating the original Man! Genemaster, genemaster, make me a man. Quick as you can. Any type man, Genemaster, genemaster, true can t you see, A Galaxy's waiting for we? Child's song, circa # G.E. T here is a town called Raega, on a planet of the same name, located somewhere in the Western Arm of the Galaxy. It's far off the main trade routes, and a bit rustic, but I like it. It's home. There is always a carnival atmosphere about Raega, with all its various types of humanity, their foods, dialects, ceremonies and customs. I have a shop there, a modest one-man procurement agency located on a cobbled dark alley off the main street, and I do a moderately good business. It was just before lunch, # Juli # G.E., that the man came into my shop. I always keep dates. It's a nervous habit due to a slight hyperthyroid condition in my inheritance from my parents. Other things also are from my parents: ambition, drive, high intelligence -- but no beauty. "Beauty is a relative thing -- " so goes an ancient folk saying of the neoAstrititions I remember hearing once. It's not true in cases like mine. But I shouldn't complain. I was not bred for beauty. My genes were not chosen for ugliness either. Jt is simply a side effect, gene-linked to one of my necessary virtues. But I'm rambling. This guy now, tall, about three meters, with large purple wings and a medallion of office on a golden throat chain, came into the place as if he could buy it with one fingernail. (He probably could; they looked as if they were painted with platinum.) Some high mucky-muck from out near the Rim, planetary monarch or something. I remembered seeing his face in the dailies on several occasions. "May I help you, sir?" I opened, unsure of the correct form of address. "Are you Gentle-horn denJan?" he asked, glancing around at the place. It is a bit dingy. But I don't live here, nor does my business allow much time to straighten it up. "Yes, I am, and you?" He straightened up and announced with as much dignity as possible, "I am honored to be President denZarkos of the Royal Taran Hereditary Dictatorship." "I am very pleased to meet your highness. If you will but have a seat?" He looked around him, then daintily deposited his posterior in a chair by the desk, folding one satin-clad leg over the other and wrapping his counterbalanced tail around his waist like a belt. I bet myself that he could really fly on his home world; those wings did not look like just ornamentation. "I have a zoo," he said. "A modest little affair, only about five hundred basic stocks. Naturally it would be impossible to get all the diverse strains in the galaxy. I doubt if the number is even finite." He looked at me for agreement. I nodded, and he went on. "I settled for only the representative stocks, and completed what I considered the best zoo in this Arm about five cycles ago. Recently, however, a visiting diplomat from Centar imformed me that I am lacking a most important species. An Original." "An Original? But surely, sir, the most up-to-date information indicates that man arose separately on over one thousand worlds. I believe that it's called the Convergent Evolution Theory. The idea of an Original is a myth dating back to before any species had achieved space travel and IF each believed that it was the sole holder of intelligence in the universe. Why, the finds on -- " "No, you're wrong. But I am amazed at your wealth of knowledge. The diplomat, a very important person, I might add, assured me that recent discoveries on a small world near Centar predate all other discoveries by well show that the race was just beginning space travel at that time. He didn't come right out and say it, but, he obviously believes that it is the Original's original world; the cradle of humanity. It's called -- " he shuffled through some papers in his pouch and then came up with one and read from it -- "called Terra." "And you wish one of the inhabitants for your zoo?" "No. If that were the case I would have just dispatched a capture expedition. Unfortunately, the present locals are the survivors of a reseeding project. They are just dirty barbarians. I want an Original, as he was in the earliest days. Without this most basic of all basic stocks my zoo is valueless. I must have one. I understand that your procurement agency is the best in this Sector, perhaps in the whole Quadrant, although -- " he glanced around the room once more -- "it certainly doesn't look businesslike." "Well, your grace. I'm pleased that you have come to us," T said, ignoring his last remark. "I'll certainly do my best to locate an Original for you. But I doubt if there is one availably, anywhere. And even if there is it will be extremely expensive to obtain." "I was prepared for both eventualities. As for cost, here -- " he handed me a credacard -- "is one upon delivery to Tara. If you can't find a natural Original, I will accept a copy, of at least #  # genetic true characteristics. Genotype, mind you, not just phenotype. And it should breed true, under suitable micromanipulation dividual from haploid gametes." "Very well, your grace. I'll do my best." He stood and folding his dignity about him like a cape looked around the office again. Then he sniffed once and departed. A lways begin with the first step; it helps to keep one from tripping over one's own feet." My father once told me that in a fit of inventing proverbs. It's good advice, and I generally follow it. The first step on thi# job was a visit to Doc's place. Doc was an old transferest. Ferns who had been directed by the Genetics Board to bear a child with undesirable (to them) chromosomes could go to Doc and he would remicromanipulate the of their liking. It played hob with the class lines, a Titanoid bearing a Prime, for example, but if the fern had enough money Doc didn't care. Once the zygote was born (or hatched if that was the case) it was not often removed. The Genetics Board usually thought that it was due to their error somewhere in the original handling of the selection process. That occurred all the time; too hard not to make errors down there at the atomic level. Anyway, they didn't want to penalize the victim any more than she had already been. Highly illegal act, transferring. Doc had done the same job for a while on his home watched the percentages. The local G.B. found that too many ferns were all of a sudden giving birth to unselected offspring, differing from the selected characteristics by as much as eighty to ninety per cent. They began searching for wild factor in the equations and found Doc at the other end of an umbilical cord. He would have been shortened then and there but he was a distant relative of the local duke, so he was merely exiled. Here he is much more careful. He set up a bakery as a front (good bread, too) and slowly wormed his business into the average deviation curve. Here he minds the percentages with a vengeance; if caught operating on Raega would lose his head. Doc was waiting on a customer when I came in. He nodded me over to a corner while the woman to whom he was speaking, about seven months gone I noticed, gave me suspicious looks. Then he continued: "Now, now, my dear," he said. "If you had come to see me five, or even four, months ago I could have helped you." He glanced at her swollen belly. "But now I'm afraid that it's too late. I'm really terribly sorry." His antennae literally wiggled in sympathy. "Irreversible changes have occurred in your metabolism," he continued. "making it possible for you to carry a Glanceroid zygote. The new fetus, no matter what genes, would not be able to adapt to those conditions, and your body could not change to meet its requirements at this late stage. And then there's the matter of size. The new fetus would be at least thiry percent smaller... And many more reasons. Impossible." She turned and left, probably cursing Doc under her breath. She'd birth the kid, grow him a bit and send him off to the mines like the government wanted. Then she'd get caught again and be back to Doc's door in a year or so. I know the type well. "Well, Goodman Jan, what IF can this humble abortionist do for you today? I just got in some fine Lambian fetuses. Give them some biostim and about two days and you could have a couple of real nice combination valet-body guards. Or is it a few hot rolls you'll be having?" "Neither, Doc," I answered. "How about an Original instead? For business, not pleasure. And what was that word: aaborshtonist?" "Abortionist. Ancient form of my profession, although not as skilled. They were harassed and persecuted also." He shook his head sadly, then brightened up. "An Original? You mean the original type of man, don't you?" I nodded. "An Original. Hummm. How much?" "I'm getting two mill. I'll give you one-third." "I could use some money. To expand the bakery and so forth," he gestured. "I don't believe that you'll find any naturals, and you don't either or you wouldn't have come to me, right?" I nodded again, coming over to sit on the counter. "What is it?" Doc asked. "Your client doesn't believe in the Convergent theory?" "No, apparently he's got some unreleased info indicating a Divergent Evolution idea and is convinced that we all came from one stock 'way back when. Says we all come from a world called Terra, near Centar." "It's certainly possible, although you couldn't tell now with the way we play around with the chromosomes. But look, Jan, I can assemble any thing you want me to, and I do mean any thing, but I have to know what characteristics to chose for. I can't just pick them out of the air." "Especially since the client stipulated a guaranteed # -- # Original type genotype." "Well then, how are we going to get the characteristics?" "What about your computers? And your books?" "Jan, now I'm surprised at you. I'm not a wizard and the computer isn't magic. We can't pick facts out of the air. Before you walked in here today I firmly believed that we all evolved separately. Now you expect me to have a gene-chart on file of the characteristics belonging to a creature that I didn't believe in ten minutes ago." "I guess not." I stood to leave. "Wait, Jan. I didn't say that it was impossible. I can do quite a lot, but I need some leads. If only I had a little more to go on..." "All right. Doc, I'll see what I can do." "Good! And meanwhile I'll go below and see what the computer can turn up in the way of universal constants in metabolism and so forth." He showed me to the door. "Good luck to you, Jan, and good hunting!" "And the same to you. Doc." F rom Doc's place I took an aircab to the more legitimate Man Market. Raega is a big, well-populated world. Most basic types, I would guess at least ninety per cent of all those basics in the galaxy, can be found represented in at least one individual somewhere, if only in the gamete banks and zygote farms of the Man Market, where one can purchase embryos of any size, shape and eating habits, from methane-breathing Cajians to a building-sized, rock-metabolism Mercoid. Naturally it was my next stop. I didn't expect to be so lucky as to run into a vendor in Originals. That would have been too much to ask. But maybe I could get a lead or two, and maybe even a few characteristics. As we flew lazily over the sprawling slums that stretch outward from the rich center of town my mind turned over the problem. Where next? A visit to Terra itself? With the high pay involved that was a definite possibility. Below me I noticed the start of a fight between a couple of young Titans with shiny blades on their fingers and a group of rainbowwinged Pteroids. The Titans had a grudge, their bellies were empty and the Pteroids' were full. Off to the side I could just see the first policemen pushing their squat forms through the crowd of various shapes and sizes that had gathered to watch the diversion. They were too late; one of the Pteroids was down and hacked to death before the cops arrived to quell the disturbance with slashing stun guns. Then the entire scene was gone behind me. Smells of alien cookery, of sweat from a dozen kinds of sweat glands, of disease and filth that had lain in the streets for uncountable days, of lust and hatred and old, old grief came up at me from the ground. This was humanity #. This was the genus Homo. Our species varied with the individual: Titan, Mercoid, Pteroid, Moid, a thousand more, a type for each inhabitable world in the galaxy. The planets would not adapt to us so we had to change to survive on them. And here we are today, shattered into splinter species, hating and feeding on one another, competing with one another for our common heritage of life. The race of men, # Juli #. Did all of this come from Just one spark of intelligence arising on a long forgotten worldlet out near the Rim in the dark ages past? I'm a romantic; I wondered what he looked like, that first IF man. That one who was brash enough to challenge the universe, and smart enough to win his bet -- only to lose himself, that essence that was him, among the overwhelming reaches of the galaxy and the infinity of different molds he had to pour his intellect into to suit that infinity of conditions so that he might win. So that we would be here now, alive and kicking, in all our varied shapes. The cab landed and woke me out of my dreaming. "That'll be three and six, Man." "Here, have a five and keep the change, Man." The driver shook his tail at me in thanks and the cab lifted. I checked every livestock dealer up and down the Market. No luck. No one had even heard of Terra, or Terrans, or Originals. One Joe said that he had a Lamarkoid gamete, and was that good enough? "Nope," I told him. "It has to be one hundred per cent Terran." A nyway, the Man Market is near the Central Post Office so I didn't lose much time. I walked the two blocks there, through avenues of steamy bars and dope joints, noisy crowds and shouting vendors selling cakes and pottery and human beings, then up the sleeping steps into the green coolness of the Post Office. Mitar was in, the first bit of luck on this job. "Hello, Mitar, what's new?" I asked. "C over lambda equals nu," he said, and then smiled at his little joke. "What can I do for you today? The usual, or do you want to mail a letter?" "The usual. The usual rates?" He nodded. "Come on in." See, it's this way. Everybody on Raega gets letters. It's a law. A couple of decades ago a politician promised us a good postal system during his campaign, and surprisingly came through with it after his election. So now we have the most accurate Post Office in this Arm of the galaxy, with computers and everything to handle all the mail. And for the computers to do a good job they must have a record of every individual on the planet, their names, addresses, and their types, their species classification if you like. Occasionally, when I have to locate someone or some type real quick, I rent use of the main computer from Mitar, a swarthy Telocian with four all-seeing eyes in a row around his head who happened to be supervisor for the main P.O. He never asks me what programs I use and I never ask him what he does with the money I give him. It is not exactly illegal. They haven't caught us so they haven't passed a law against it. He showed me to the computer and then left, closing the door silently behind him. I set up my programs and fed them in. A few minutes later came the feedout: Things were beginning to break. H ospitals are usually thought to be antiseptically clean, I understand, but Raega Memorial is a charity place, and is kept up (or rather not kept up) by public taxes. Consequently the building is a hospital in name only. It is understaffed, and the staff underpaid. This doesn't attract the best medics. The victims live (and die) in smelly squalid wards built to hold fifty and containing over two hundred in small cramped beds that are shared. Too many patients, too few beds and too little care make Raega Memorial a nearly automatic death trap. Although some do escape, they tell me. The last attempt at hospitalness was a coat of white paint on the walls applied about a decade ago. Now even this last attempt was gone; the once white walls were dirty and grease-smeared, written all over, chipped and, in some places, peeled right down to the rusty metal framework. The only attempt at grouping the patients was by their financial status; partially self-supporting, unable to be self-supporting, and the less fortunate. Goodman tenApla fit into the last catagory. I found him in a small bed in the cheapest ward in the whole filfilthy place, playing a form of poker with his bed-partner, a Sart type with a large cancerous growth on its feeding appendage. "My name is denJan and I'd like to speak to you a moment, Goodman tenApla," I said, going up to him. He looked up from his cards suspiciously. "Eh, what's that? Me?" he said in a raspy voice. "I know my rights! You can't toss me out while I'm sick -- and I'm sick, terribly terribly sick! Right now, youngster. I'm in more pain than you ever felt in your life. Oooh! Oooh!" He clutched his stomach and went into some very convincing convulsions, sending the cards flying and therefore somewhat upsetting the Sart, who, I saw, had a IF winning hand. "Call a doctor! Call a nurse! I'm dying!" The Sart tried the bed button to summon aid. It sizzled in his hand, gave off some pretty purple smoke and died. He stumbled out of the bed cursing freely in his native tongue, an indescribable series of grunts and clicks, and staggered off down the corridor to fetch an attendant. I felt this had gone far enough. "Cut the dramatics citizen. I'm not here to kick you out," I said, tossing him a golden Imperial to provemy point. He stopped the sound effects and made it disappear, then glared at me again. "Who are you, if you're not an inspector? Who else but an inspector would want to see me?" "I understand that you come from Terra." "Oh ho, so that's what it is. Yes, lad, I came from Sol IV in my youth, and how I wish that I had never left! I still remember coming burrowards in the late afternoon, the twin moons high in the sky over the crimson sand dunes. But that was long ago, and what does that have to do with you? Customs, emigration?" "No, I'm not connected with the government in any way." This seemed to relax him slightly. "I'm looking for native Terrans -- conducting a survey -- " I lied, "and wonder if you would be so kind as to permit me to take a small skin sample for our records?" "You want my genes, huh? Are you a genelegger? Oh well, you can have 'em. I'm not so tight with 'em any more. Too old to have a natural child, and it would be nice to know that I'm leaving someone behind. Yeh, you can have 'em -- " he suddenly grew shrewder -- "for a price." He looked around at the decrepit surroundings. "I hate this place. But an old man's got to stay somewhere. You can have your sample, use it for what you will, but for one hundred Imperials." I chewed on that for a minute. "All right, it's a deal." "Too quick, youngster," he laughed. "You were prepared to pay more. Two hundred credits!" "That's not fair, we had a deal! One hundred and fifty!" "One seventy-five!" He was a sly old dog. "One sixty." "Oh, all right, if you throw in an ambulance ride to the Viceroy Hospital. I'm too old to argue long." "Done." I got the sample, a couple of cheek smears and a cc of blood. Around then the nurse for the ward showed up with the Sart, and I explained how Goodman ten Apia was transfering to the Viceroy. She called for an ambulance on her belt radio. "Good riddance," she told me. and spit at a Thart who was moaning over in a corner. Before the stretcher men arrived I asked Dug about his home system. "Four's the only inhabitable world," he told me. "Three is really in a more favorable condition, but the atmosphere is poisonous, too many hydrocarbons and ozone -- it probably was inhabited at one time but it can't support human life now." Then the boys arrived and lifted him onto the stretcher. He winked his third eye at me as they carried him out to the waiting car like a lord. Now he had money, and now I had some genes. Not originals, but close, N OW back at Doc's. He wasn't in front so I rang the bell on the glass counter. A door opened behind the pastry section and out stepped Doc, a big smile on his face. "I've got some good news," we said in unison, then I laughed. "You first." He collapsed into a chair, "After you left I got an inspiration to pay a visit to the local organ bank." He looked smug. "And -- " I started, but he refused to complete the sentence. Doc just sat there smiling. Something was up his sleeve: Finally, "Come on in here. I want to show you something." So for the first time I entered Doc's secret laboratory. It isn't large but it is well equipped for its function. An old electron microscope, ancient really, but well cared for, stood in a corner of the small room flanked by rows of chemical reagent bottles, stands of micro-manipulating tools -- and all computer on the opposite waU. In the center of the room was a wide bench of shiny metal with a mobile optical scope set up on one side and a white porcelain pan on the other. Within the pan I could see a brownish-red something about the size of my fist. "What is it?" I asked. "What does it look like?" Doc was feeling playful. "A... heart?" As if to reassure me it thumped once. "Right! And on the first guess too. You'd be good on a quiz show, Jan. It is indeed a heart, but what a heart! Four thousand years old at least and maybe more." "Where did you get it?" "I told you," he said, smiling. "The organ banks. It's so old that they can't use it on any present types. Wouldn't fit. So they Just kept it, for years, in the back of the banks, absorbing nutrient without producing anything. I managed to convince the staff that they didn't want it any more. The convincing, by the way, set you IF back one hundred Imperials. It isn't an Original, I don't think, but it will give us a good idea as it is older than the oldest records of what's your good news?" I told him of my experiences and gave him the sample bottles. "Well, well, well," he said, taking them over to the microscope. "Jan, my boy, we might, just might, have enough now." He made a slide and looked at it for a minute. Then he glanced at me. "Why don't you wait outside for a minute while I check a few things? I hate having people looking over my pseudo-shoulder while I work." I could see Doc was deep in the problem. He didn't even look up as I closed the door behind me. And through the supposedly sound-proofed panels I could distinctly hear him whistling. My Mother Was a Test-tube, My father Was a Wrench. Doc was happy in his work. Three hours later he came out of his inner sanctum, sweat in beads on his brow despite the airconditioning. "Whew! That was a hard one. Your added characteristics from that fellow in the hospital did the trick. What a screwy metabolism! no chloroplasts, no plug-ins, no A-converters, only a simple food-oxidation system. And I had to keep reinteresume the normal shape instead of returning into the Original but I finally got it." "You mean we have an Original? Alive? Already?" "Eh? Oh, sure, that's what I've been telling you. Come into the back, Jan, come in." He waved me in, followed, then pointed to the optical scope. Under it was now a small pseudouterus with Doc's gleaming tools still wet by the side. "Look in there. Go ahead, look, it wouldn't bite." I saw a cell in the scope, or rather a small clump of cells. I don't know much about embroyology but I would have certainly called it a beautiful blastula. As I watched, a couple of cells divided, their cytoplasm and tiny nuclei duplicating themselves in perfection. I looked up smiling. "We did it! You did it! Is it within the stipulated genotype limits of the client?" "According to Mabel here the chances are that it is a ## pure blood Original." He slapped the computer affectionately. "And Mabel is never wrong. Because he's our first born I made him a nice boy, Jan. Think of that, Jan," he beamed. "We're the parents of a beautiful unmutated Terran Homo... an Original, perhaps the first Original born in species is he? Neo-originalis?' "Why not sentiens," I asked after a moment of thought to recall my neoathenian. "Right you are!" Doc got out some old brandy, Algol V #I vintage. "Here's to our son," he toasted. ""Homo sentiensT ried us from Raega to Deneb II, past Sertain and Wolff, and then to the silver towers of Gromatch's old port. There I booked passage on the tramp trader Dipper Lass, which carried us through the Scorpion Cluster and down King Ampteps' belt, with stops to see the Golden Islands of Twilight of Tobaris. On Novecentaurs we boarded a regular Rim-bound liner which eventually brought us to the free port of Sastral on Harnlock VI, ten parsecs from Tara of the Red Suns. President Zarkos's launch was waiting there for us. I had 'grammed ahead the date of our arrival. We followed a zigzag course across the Galaxy, that child and I, he down in his freeze clse in the hold and me in first class when there was such. Around Tarsus I woke him up and introduced him to the universe. A fine lad he was, aged by biostim to a healthy fifteen cycles and with a good quick intelligence. Finally we arrived on Tara. I won my bet; Zarkos could fly. and flying he and his retainers came down from their castled peaks to meet us at the main port of Tara, the three red suns high in the sky glistening off their silvered wings done in the latest fashion. "Marvelous, marvelous," he said, his eyes widening as he saw my companion. "I never really allowed myself to believe that you could do it. But here he is. An Original. The only Original, and he's all mine." "I'm happy that you're pleased, my lord," I said, against the crisp breeze coming in from the green ocean beyond the port's southern border. "Pleased? I'm overwhelmed! Here, the rest of your pay," he handed me a credacard for the sum and I handed the lad over to two of his servants. "Goodbye, Gentlehom denJan, and many thanks." Zarkos flapped his wings a few times to get up speed and then strode off into the air. "Goodbye, Papa Jan," said the boy, his five yellow eyes misty with tears. The servants positioned themselves on either side of him and they rose in unison, the lad waving his tentacle at me. "Thanks for everything." I watched them for a few minutes, hypnotized by the beauty of their soaring forms. So that was what we all were, way back when. Why, he could fly better than they IF could! I T was just after lunch, # Dekember # that the second man came into the shop. He was a squat one, half a meter tall and six wide, with twelve thick feet, two thicker arms and a brillant metallic toga wrapped around his bulk like a shaggy red skin. "May I help you, sir?" "Yeth," he said with an interesting accent. "I understhanth that you hath procured an Original for the thzoo of Prethidend Thzarkos of Thara?" He waited a minute, unsure of himself. "And..." I interjected. "I... I altho hath a thzoo..." "I see." So I called Doc. This one will be a girl, and a pretty thing too, all blue and green and with four bright golden wings like her brother. A full-blooded #  # unmutated Terran Original little girl. How happy they must have been, way back when. They are so beautiful. And I am so ugly. Ah, well. That's life for you.  with powerful, timely, down-to-Earth pertinence to 'like it is" on Earth today! Phyllis Gotlieb's Norman Spinrad's Ron Goulart's James E. Gunn's Roberts. Richardson's factual space-science adventure of tomorrow: .# Men were for the Mother Sections -- except for the untamed Wild Ones. T he Teacher's voice droned on in the stuffy room. Jere, weary from a six hour patrol, could scarcely stay awake. Her head bobbed and Ella jabbed an elbow into her ribs. "Keep your eyes open," Ella whispered. Jere straightened with an effort and squared her shoulders. A weight of weariness was pressing down on her and she had the rebellious thought that patrolling wasn't fit work for a woman. Ella was looking disapprovingly at her, lips compressed. Jere squirmed uncomfortably, more conscious of the hard bench and the glaring light than of the Teacher's endless repetitions. At least, Jere thought, she might try to make it interesting. But the Teacher, a major, was grinding out the same line, the lesson that never changed. If Jere had heard it once, she had heard it a thousand times. All right, she thought sulkily, I believe it. It's all true. So what? The major was saying that San Francisco was entitled to free access to natural resources: oil, metals, men -- whatever was left. And that was the reason for the war. It seemed to Jere that the ThreeCornered War had been going on ever since she could remember. When it wasn't against Los Angeles and Denver, it was against Phoenix and, say, Seattle. There simply was not enough of anything left to go around -- particularly men. At # hours the class ended and the Scouts filed out of the classroom stiffly, aching from two hours on those hard benches. From the window of the small room she shared with Ella and two other girls of her section, Jere could see the bomb-shattered city spread out below. There were few lights, but the rubble was bathed in cold moonlight. To the north were the towers that the older women claimed once supported a bridge across the narrow mouth of the bay. In the west, the ruins of what had once been Oakland glowed with an eerie radioactive incandascence. "Bomber's moon tonight," Ella said uneasily.  "Denver has no planes," Jere replied, slipping off her uniform blouse. "They have missiles," Ella declared. "While you were flying, a dud landed in the bay." She sniffed scornfully. "Interception was terrible." "Interception generally is." Jere lay gratefully on her hard cot and closed her eyes. But Ella stood at the window, contemplating the moonlight. "Jere," she said. "Did you hear about the men?" J men?" "The ones Captain Moira's raid captured yesterday." "How many?" "Eighteen, I think." Jere whistled softly. "Denvers?" "No. Angelinas." "That will bring a reprisal, all right. Those Los Angeles bitches won't lose eighteen men without a fight." She pursed her lips, staring at the ceiling. "Where are they now?" Ella shrugged. "In the breeder pens." She gave a short, bittersounding laugh. "We won't get any." "Men aren't for the Fighting Sections, Ella," Jere said gently. "Why aren't they?" Ella demanded. "We do all the work, take all the risks." IF "Men are for the Mother Sections, Ella," Jere said. "It's always been that way." And then, because she could see that Ella was unplacated by her answer, she added: "Pen-men are no good anyway. You've seen them." Ella sat down on her cot and kicked off her flight boots. "What would you know about it?" "Nothing," Jere admitted. "But I know some Mother Section people who've had wild ones. They say they are much handsomer." "Savages," Ella said. "Some of them can't even be tamed. They have to be killed. Pen men are better." "Maybe." Jere stretched and closed her eyes again. Once, when she was still a young girl, she remembered that she had had dreams about a world in which there was a man for each woman -- a strange sort of world without ruins or missiles or Three-Cornered War. It had been pleasant to dream like that, but she had told someone -- she couldn't remember now who -- and Psych Section had taken her into analysis and explained the dreams away. It was always dangerous, they told her, to dream like that. Such ideas, even in sleep, endangered the Matriarchy. For three months she had gone to sleep with a somnoteacher whispering to her. The dreams had never came back, though she remembered them. , T he undulating wail of the attack alarm interrupted her drowsing reverie. A harsh voice crackled from the wall speaker. "Radarplot has picked up jetcrajt a hundred miles south of the city. All Interception Section pilots man their planes. All Scout Section pilots stand by to assist. Mother Sections to shelter.' "So Denver has no planes," Ella said breathlessly, pulling on her boots. "Angelinas, dear," Jere said, getting to her feet. "They have Beenine Ones. Damn them, anyway." In the far distance the flak guns began their usual futile hacking at the sky. The whine of jets warmdecks filled the city. Ella and Jere ran down the corridors crowded with women toward the hangar deck. From the Mother Section areas, a great sobbing and shrieking filled the building with noise. Far underground, the precious men were herded into deep shelters. On the hangar deck there was some measure of order. Interceptors were being trundled out to the flight deck and a few ground-toair missiles were being readied. The two-seat scout craft were being refueled and armed. Jere found her own ship near the end of the line. Her radar operator, a thin-faced girl with dark stringy hair showing beneath her helmet, was standing by. "Are we fueled. May?" Jere asked, struggling into her flight gear. "They haven't fixed the tail gun," May said unhappily. "Is it the Angelinas, Miss Jere? Oh, Mother! I was afraid it would be them ever since I heard about the men. Those Angelinas really fight, they do." "We'll do all right. May," Jere said with an assurance she did not really feel. She was thinking about the multiple pom-pom guns on the Beenine Ones. "Those airplanes are old as the hills." May cast a doubting eye at the scarred flank of their own machine. "So are ours," she said sourly. T he steady firing of the flak guns ceased as the first flight of interceptors took the air. The silence was thick. Then the thin, whispering noise of the Beenine Ones came down on the waiting city. Jere estimated there were at least five of them. "Why are we always fighting. Miss Jere?" May demanded suddenly. "Bombing and stealing and fighting all the time -- " "I'm sorry. Miss Jere," May said. "I didn't mean to talk like that. I'm nervous, I guess -- " "All right," Jere said. "We both know better than to ask questions like that. Thank the Mother there wasn't anyone from Security Section to hear you or I'd be riding without radar tonight. Let's forget it." "Thank you. Miss Jere," May said heavily.  Scout Section aircraft stand by to support interception.' The words of the Flight Controller came from the wall speakers, cutting through the clanger of the hangar deck. "Interception flubbed it again," May said bitterly. As though to accent her words, there came the sound of explosions in the distance. "Along the Embarcadere," Jere said. "Damn them!"  Blue Scout Section scramble!" the speaker shrieked. This is a bad one, Jere thought. The Angelinas were really seething tonight. "We'll be next. May," Jere said. "We can't wait for the gun. Get aboard." she could see Ella's red-winged craft moving into the catapult. There was a Jet of steam, glowing blue-white from the engine, and then Ella was gone, climbing into the night. Overhead a fission bomb flared, sun-bright at seventy thousand feet. It etched the city in light. IF blotting out the moon. Jere wondered how many fission bombs the attackers were carrying, and whether they were new bombs or weapons found in some ancient stockpile. Her practiced eyes flicked over the battered instrument panel. The turbine was vibrating badly but there was not a machine shop in San Francisco capable of repairing it to original specifications and the motor itself was nearly a hundred years old. It dated from the time before the Three-Cornered War, a time when there were still men who could fly and work and fight. The old women said they did not fight other cities in those days; . Jere wondered if such a time had ever really been. The Teachers said the Matriarchy had always existed. Yet the legend was that once there had been as many men as women and that the men had been the rulers. It seemed impossible. Those softfleshed breeders? The old women claimed it was so, swore it by the Mother. They told of a greater war that had decimated the male population until there were so few that women had to fight for them. Breed or die. The cause -- We fight, all right, Jere thought bitterly. We fight for a handful of men, even though half of them are sterile or breed monsters and have to be destroyed. We fight for a puddle of uncontaminated water. a pile of hard coal, a half-ruined factory or a barren field. Red Flight scrambler The command drove the rebellious thoughts from her mind and she rolled the jet forward toward the gaping mouth of the hangar and the catapult. Her lips moved silently in the short prayer she had used before battle since girlhood. Mother, protect your daughter Jere, defend our city, give us vietory and fertility and unmarked young -- A S she emerged onto the catapult deck, Jere could see the waterfront burning. The sight brought a surge of hatred for the women in the bombers. The catapult crew was signaling for her to rev up. She throttled the uneven engine with a practiced hand. "Ready, May?" she asked into the intercom. The girl's reply came back, scratchy and indistinct. "Ready, miss. I wish we had the gun, though; I really do." "Don't worry about it now," Jere snapped. "How's the radar?" "I have power, miss," May said. The Red Flight leader was on the starboard catapult, now vanishing down the deck, spitting sparks from her half-tuned engine. Jere saw her ship vanish below the level of the runway and dip into the canyons between buildings. She held her breath until she saw the glowing jet-trail of the airplane clear of obstructions and climbing. The catapult officer, was waiting for Jere's signal. The engine was not developing full power, but Jere gave the signal anyway. The jet picked up speed with a rush. The dim blue lights at the end of the runway hurtled under the sharply swept back wings and they were airborne, banking low over the burning Embarcadero and swinging out over the dark waters of the bay. Jere set the airplane into maximum climb configuration and turned back over the city. "Any contact. May?" Jere asked. "I have them, miss. They're at seventy thousand feet, heading two four five degrees. Probably making another bomb run." That's exactly what they're doing, Jere thought. Trying to get the breeding houses and the men in the shelters. What they couldn't keep, they would destroy if they could. A streak of fire fell out of the sky. An interceptor shot down. Jere felt the hot anger of battle. This world, she thought, this bleak world is my world. Maybe things were different once, but this is what it was like now. Women were born to fight, not dream -- "Fly zero five one," May said. heading, still climbing. The moonlight was taking on the pecuflight. The altimeter needle touched # feet. Contrails of ice streamed from the wingtips. "Change course to zero five five," May said through the interphone. "I have four bogies." Jere banked the jet until the gyro held steady on the new "Nothing, Miss Jere," May's voice said in the helmetphones. "We might just be the only ones up here except Aem." From the misty moonlit earth below, a trio of rocket trails came streaking up and past them. There was a fiery blast as a great bomber disintegrated above and ahead of their track. "Oh, Mother," May said. "They actually hit something." "That will shake them up," Jere said with satisfaction. Pieces of the burning bomber spiraled down, spinning and fluttering like a fiery rain. Jere zigzagged the jet skillfully to avoid them. "We're up with them, miss," May said. "You can pick them up on your screen now -- if you can get it working." The tiny radarscope in Jere's cockpit flicked on and the bombers were there, three of them now. IF etched in green light. Jere centered them on the grid and armed the wing rockets. "Closing," Jere reported. "I'll be on the guns," May said. The altimeter needle hovered near seventy thousand feet. The sky was black as pitch and the stars and moon glittered like jewels. Ahead, Jere caught a glimpse of metal flanks and the bluish glow of the Beenine Ones' Jets. Far, far below there was a sudden fireball and a rising mushroom of flame. The bombers banked away toward the south. "That was a bad one," May whispered in a choked voice. "Oh, that was really a bad one." Mother damn them, damn them, Jere thought. We try to live and they come up here with their bombers and their raiding -- S HE was thinking of the heavy women of the Mother Sections cowering in the shelters as she triggered the first salve of rockets, watching them burning out of the pods and rushing away and down. "Missed," May reported. "Just to the right and low." Jere closed further on the fleeing bombers and armed her second salvo. There were flashes up ahead and the wobbly trail of tracers streaking past at unbelievable speeds. The pom-pom guns on the bombers searched for the pursuing jet. May had swung the turret around, forgetting about the useless tailgun. She was firing over Jere's head at the dark shapes ahead. The cockpit was filled with the odor of cordite and the airframe vibrated to the heavy thudding of the #mm guns. Jere centered in her grid the last bomber in the line ahead and pressed the trigger. Rockets raced out and vanished into the glow of the bomber's engines. The Beenine One turned into a blob of oily fire and began to break up. A kill, Jere thought exultantly. "Parasite fighter, miss!" May shouted. A tiny jet had left the parent bomber and was somewhere behind them. Jere's mouth went dry; she pulled the scout around in a tight turn. The wingtips stalled and she lost speed and altitude correcting. Small fireballs flashed past her cockpit. The parasite was closing in from behind and Jere knew she could not shake free. She felt suddenly very tired, her movements of the controls were leaden, hopeless. She heard the crash of metal tearing and the whine of pressure escaping from the cockpit. "Miss! Help me, Jere -- I'm hit!" "May!" No reply. Jere shoved the nose of the airplane down into a slanting dive. The parasite followed. An explosive shell burst on the wingtip. The jet buffeted and began to spiral steeply. Mother, protect your daughter J ere --  The cockpit was filled with smoke and wisps of flame. "May! Eject!" There was no reply. Jere cast off the shoulder harness and twisted around to look back. She saw nothing but fire. She braced against the back and fired the ejection seat. The sudden cold took her breath away. She was falling. She remembered the ribbon chute streaming out. Then nothing. sunlight. There was grass under her and for a time she didn't realize what it was. She had never before been out of the city except while flying. A man squatted by her side; a man unlike any Jere had ever seen. She thought -- a wild one. He was burned dark from the sun and he was dressed in rough clothes made of animal skins. His face was black-bearded and across his bare shoulders rested a rifle of archaic design. "We heard the fight last night," he said. Jere did not reply. Her hands touched the pockets of her flight suit. Nothing had been taken. The flight chart was still folded at her thigh, the packet of emergency rations was at her hip. The man had gathered up her parachute and rolled it into a pack. "You mama's girls are really making a mess of things, you know," the man said. Jere ignored that and sat up. "Where is this place." "Near Saratoga." "What's Saratoga?" "It used to be a town. He shifted easily on his haunches. He was a young man and his movements had a wild thUig's litheness. "How far from the city?" Jere asked. He smiled, showing sharp white teeth through the dark bush of his beard. "What city?" "San Francisco, of course," Jere said, frowning. "Did you take me for an Angelina?" "You all look alike to me," he said, amused. "How far?" Jere asked again. "Sixty miles maybe. Depends on how you go." "Can you read a map?" Jere asked. The man laughed. "I think so." Jere took the chart from her pocket. "Then show me." The man moved nearer. He had a strange, wild smell. His finger tapped the open chart. "Here," he said. "Here's where we are. And here -- " He moved his finger to the west, to a spot in the mountains where one of the ancient roads crossed a stream. "Here is where we are going." IF Jere drew away. "I must get back," she said. "Yes? Why?" Jere stood up and looked down at the still squatting man. What would this savage know about a woman's duty? It would be useless to explain. The man said carelessly, "You can't get back. There's no way through the mines and the wire." ci ing Section people knew the path through the defenses. The Teachers saw to that Pilots who crashed and survived needed to know. The man shook his head. "Women," he said. "You've done a great job, you have. You've shut yourself up in the cities and with all the fighting you do, no one can get near enough to change things." He stood up and looked appraisingly at Jere. "You fight mostly over men, don't you?" "Men," Jere said. "Not wild animals." The man picked a blade of green grass and put it between his lips. "You may have something there," he said. "But seems to me you're missing a bet. There are men about, even if they are a bit on the woolly side. Men who would like to get things started again." He showed his teeth in a savage kind of smile. Jere had been listening to him. conscious of the strange and archaic accent of his speech, and now she could Jeel his looking at her. Her skin goose-pimpled. "Like the old days," Jere said scornfully. "The old days weren't so bad, I hear tell," the man said. "I know men didn't do such a good job of running the world, but you women.haven't done even as well." "We survive," Jere said. "So do we," the man said. "And our women are women. In the cities they tell you men are no good, don't they?" Jere did not reply. "Sure they do. Because there aren't enough to go around." Jere said, "I don't have to listen to this." The man stood beside her. "The hell you don't," he said. Jere stared at him. "Because, little mama's girl, you belong to me now. I found you." Jere said incredulously, "You're insane." "I must be," he said, showing his teeth again, "even to think about taking another city woman. You fighters are all devils to get along with, but I've done it before and I guess I can do it again." " ' -- another city woman -- '?" Jere was too stunned to say more. "I have three wives. You'll be the fourth. Two of them are from Phoenix. They were shot down raiding Frisco. I found them and patched them up. They were hell on wheels for a while, but they learned. Life isn't so bad out here, you know. We get along. And some day there will be enough of us men to go back to the cities or what's left of them and make you crazy dames quit bombing each other all to hell." "Mother!" Jere backed away from him and turned to run, but he moved so swiftly that she hardly knew what struck her. There was a stinging pain across her face that brought the tears to her eyes and his hand was on her wrist. "You'll learn, too," he said with that white smile. "Now come along like a good girl." he had shown her on the map was a day and a half's journey. HeJiad been hunting when he found her. She followed him in a daze, stumbling along over her on the ground. He went slowly. Out of concern for her? By nightfall they had arrived at the lower reaches of the stream. The water, to her surprise, was uncontaminated. She watched while he stripped and bathed -- always with his rifle near at hand. "Now you," he said. Jere bathed in the cold water while he sat on the bank looking at her. He shot a brace of small birds, a variety unknown to Jere, who had seen only the ugly seagull mutations that infested the city. She ate the sweet flesh as the sunlight faded from the sky. "You're being a sensible girl," he said approvingly. "There's no use fighting the inevitable. You'll like it, living free. No crazy women trying to bomb you. No playing soldier. It's a good life out here." "Why don't the men come back to the cities?" Jere asked, thinking of the strength it would give San Francisco to have a few men like this one in the pens. "Why, first off, there are the defenses. I suppose we could manage them if we wanted to work all together. But mainly it's because we don't have many weapons and there aren't very many of us." He grinned at her in the firelight. "We wouldn't take to being a natural resource much, though I guess there's worse ways to earn you keep. But some of us are sterile from the radiation, too. You know they'd never keep a sterile man alive in the cities. Breed or die, isn't that what they teach you?" Jere nodded slowly. "In my settlement we have hundred and sixty men. We get along, take care of ourselves and our women -- " pound, "ow many men did you say?" IF He laughed. "A hundred and embers. "Isn't this better, Jere?" sixty." "Of course." A hundred and sixty men, a "You'll be all right." wealth of men, if only half of them "I'll be all right, were breeders. Jere stared at the She could hear him laughing fire. quietly and saying with gentle de"Our settlement will grow into a risiveness, "Mama's girl -- mama's town one day," the man Said, girl." "And we won't have to hide from Gently he took her into his arms, the city raiders then. And after then we'll all get together and go J listening to his heavy, regular back to the cities and stop all this breathing. The stars that peeped fighting. Things will be different, through the dark boughs overhead Maybe you and I won't live to see seemed closer than she had ever it, but our children will, that's seen them. sure." She twisted onto her side to The firelight flickered and look at him. He slept, satiated, danced. Our children, Jere She looked away, and sat up, rethought. Our children. She said membering. softly, "It's a strange dream." Presently, she covered herself He moved closer to her. The against the cold and got to her smell of him was disturbing, unknees, reaching, familiar. A hundred and sixty The map. Yes. It was there. The men -- settlement. That too. She sat, not moving, while he She knelt' for a time, not movtouchedher. Mother, Mother -- " ing. Thinking. Remembering. "Don't fight me," he said. Things could be different. The Jere closed her eyes. He was men. surprisingly gentle. She could feel She stood up now, a small, taut his beard against her face. It was figure in the darkness. The man not harsh as she had thought it stirred, opened his eyes, would be, but soft. Very soft. "Jere -- ?" "You've never had a man." Men were careless. Men should Jere, her eyes still closed, shook be cared for. her head slowly. She leveled the rifle and fired. "You'll see." The man arched his back and She said, whispering, "My made a hurt sound. 'Jere fired name is Jere." again. The shot echoed, died. He laughed as the night grew A hundred and sixty men. One darker and the fire fell to a bed of hundred and sixty -- Dawn was breaking as Jere gathered her gear and began walking. She was thinking: A raiding party Mother, protect your daughter Jere, forgive your daughter Jere, defend our city, make us strong -- California. Guest of Honor: Jack Williamson; Fan Guest of Honor: Rick Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California #I .  October #-November #, #. consin, Green Bay. The Secondary Universe is open to the first # registrants (# fee); the Tolkien Conference is open to all (# fee if not a member of the Tolkien Society of America). For information: Ivor A. Rogers, University of Wisconsin -- GB, Green Bay, Wisconsin #.  A hundred and sixty men. No, a hundred and fifty-nine. Still a triumph. As she walked, she tried to remember. What was it he had kept calling her? Oh, yes. So right. Mama's girl. At Warwick Hotel, #th and Locust, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal speaker will be Anne McCaffrey. Membership: #. For information: Tom Purdom, # Cedar Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #.  Hilton Inn, San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests of Honor: Miriam Allen de Ford and E. Hoffman Price. Fan Guest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. Memberships: # now, # after January #st, # at the door. For information: Quinn Yarbro, # Columsa ##, Berkeley, California #.  Andrews Hotel, Minneapolis. For information: Jim Young, # Ulysses Street, N.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota #.  Herald Square, New York City. Advance registration: #. For information and registration: Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York #. IF Willy Lev The Conquest of the Land things are in evidence there is might be a better word -- to climb one that has always held a special out of the water and settle on fascination for experts as well as land. We can still see every day laymen. Every vacationer who what happens in the littoral zone, ever walked barefoot along a Here a jellyfish, thrown ashore by beach knows it though he may a wave, has succumbed, its watery not know its technical name. It is body already disintegrating. There the "littoral zone" -- from Latin a sea star is still struggling; its littorae, which means "shores." tougher body can stand exposure When used by a zoologist, the to the air for a longer period, term "littoral zone" means the Some crabs,' though water-breathstretch of land between the highers, expose themselves to the air the sand spits and boulders that scavenging is good in the littoral show at low ebb even though they zone. are still surrounded by water. All it needs fs a change of the It was, of course, in the littoral life forms involved and you have a picture of the littoral zones of the Cambrian period. The one and major problem is that we are likely to have a somewhat biased picture of what the Cambrian life forms were -- because the various inhabitants of the waters near the littoral zone do not fossilize equally well. The chances that a clamshell will fossilize are excellent -- they are still reasonably good for a crab -- but ihty are poor for a worm and negligible for a jellyfish. The situation reminds me of a walk along the shores of one of the many lakes in the vicinity of Berlin when I was a student. There were three of us, all budding naturalists, and we did not stay together. I lingered in a swampy area to watch dragonflies and frogs. The others walked ahead. When we met again and discussed what we had seen, somebody over: hearing our conversation might easily have concluded that we had taken three different walks. I reported that a frog, disturbed by my approach, waited for an average of a little less than a minute before it cautiously stuck its head out of the water again. One of my two companions described an especially luxuriant specimen of Sagittaria sagittifolia (a waterloving plant with arrow-shaped leaves) and told that at this or that place forget-me-nots grew in such profusion that they looked like a blue lawn. The third recited a list of all the birds he had seen and all the bird-calls he had identified. What had been personal bias on that occasion is replaced by the bias of the fossil record when Cambrian life forms are under discussion. Open any book, professional or popularized, to the chapter on the Cambrian period and you see trilobites, trilobites and then some more trilobites. Wasn't there any profusion of other life? T he name itself is actually the result of a mistake. Fossil trilobites had been found in various ancient rocks and learned men had called them concha triloba -- the three-lobed clam. In appearance they looked somewhat like the so-called sow-bugs that scurry away when you pick up a flat stone. Some don't run but curl up and it was soon noticed, once people started paying attention to fossils, that there were curled-up trilobites. Did this mean they were insects? It has to be borne in mine that before # the word "insect" had a much wider meaning than now. When Carolus Linnaeus (#), the great classifier of both plants and animals, came to the creatures with jointed appendages, he created the class Insecta. In # George Leopold Dagobert, Baron de Cuvier (#-#), toIF day known as the "father of paleontology," decided that thi was too big a pigeonhole. He separated the Crustacea (crabs of all kinds) into a separate class. One year later Jean Baptiste, Chevalier de Lamarck (#-#), designated eight-legged Arachnida (spiders and scorpions) as still another class, restricting the term "insects" to six-legged beetles, flies, butterflies, dragon flies, etc. Today the group Linneaus called Insec ta is the phylum Arthropoda (joint-footed) with the classes Crustaceans (crabs). Arachnids and centipedes) and the true Insects. To go back to the question of whether the trilobites were "insects," it has Just been explained that they could have been quite a number of different things if the word insect was used in the Linneaen sense. But at least one man, the British geologist Shaw, thought them to be true insects, namely caterpillars. The problem was that nobody knew whether they had legs or not. Shaw reasoned that the legs, if any, must be preserved in the curled-up specimens. He secured a large number of them (nearly #) and sliced through each. There were a number of doubtful cases, but # specimens clearly showed legs. Shaw had just published his findings when better fossil specimens were exhumed that revealed clearly the presence of many pairs of legs. There could be no doubt any more that the trilobites had been anthropods. Since they had had more than three pairs of legs and had, as proved by other evidence, been water-living, certainly they had not been true insects. easy to say, however. The trilobites became extinct early in earth's history and living arthropods show no resemblance to them except a superficially similar shape, as in the case of the sowbugs. There is just one exception. The horseshoe crab Limulus, just before hatching, has a faint trilobite aspect. It so happens that Limulus is a very old (and odd) creature that succeeded in surviving through about half a dozen geological periods, so that a relationship is at least possible. In spite of the name horseshoe crab, Limulus is an arachnid, related to the spiders. The simple fact is that the trilobites do not fit into any classification of living animals. The trilobite world was different, and the neatly separated classes of our time had yet to emerge. The trilobites combined characteristics of arachnids and crustaceans and -- since the later insects must have had precursors in forms that were not yet insects -- even a few faint insectlike characteristics. In size the trilobites ranged from halfinch specimens to giants about a foot in length. Quite a number had remarkably large eyes. The guess is that this was an adaptation to muddy waters near river mouths rather than to a nocturnal existence. The question of what they ate, of course, is tied up with the question of what was around for them to eat. One likely victim, for which we have fossil evidence, was the annelid (segmented) worm. The common earthworm is the variety best known to landlubbers but other kinds still swarm in all the seas. The picture of trilobites, as numerous then as shrimps are now, burrowing in bottom mud to hunt burrowing worms appears as a kind of prelude to the conquest of the land. Hunter as well as hunted are both in a mixture of water and land; at one time one is going to try to escape into what is merely wet land and the other is going to follow. That trilobites did crawl around on land during the latter part of the Cambrian period was proved for the first time, to my knowledge, by the American paleontologist Charles D. Walcott. He found them in the so-called Potsdam sandstone -- dating back to the Upper Cambrian period -- of New York State and adjacent areas in Canada. He published his findings in # Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. #), ascribing the tracks to the trilobite genus Protichnites, for which he had counted a total of # pairs of legs! Such a series of feet would make varied and complex series of tracks that would differ in depth, definition and details of grouping with the varying degree of consistency and hardness of the surface... I have fine trilobite trails made on the surface of sandy mud that show the imprint of a considerable portion of the legs. On a hard surface the animal touched only the extremities of the legs, but on a muddy surface the terminal joint would sink in and other joints would leave an impression... So wrote Walcott. In # he published another report titled Appendages of Trilobites (same publication, Vol. #) in which he described trilobite tracks of a greater age. They came from Middle Cambrian layers of the Colorado Grand Canyon region. T he trilobite tracks were comparatively easy but other Cambrian tracks from Canada, IF Logan, were a challenging puzzle. One sandstone slab from Bidwell's Crossing (Essex County, New York) measures # feet in length and # feet in width, showing # tracks. Each is about # inches wide, with a length up to # feet. The tracks look like a miniature ladder with an oval impression measuring # by # inches at one end. The farmer, B.H. Palmer, who first noticed the fossil on his property, was convinced that the responsible creatures had been giant snakes and was dismayed because he could not find an explanation in his Bible. Well, they certainly were not snakes, but what were they? Sir tracks might be those of large marine snails. Later scientists, after some hesitation, agreed. It must be mentioned that among the tracks that end in an oval impression can be found such impressions without a track to go with them. The accepted explanation is that a wave threw a number of the large sea slugs on the shore. Some of them died immediately, leaving the oval impression where their bodies had decomposed. The others crawled for some distance, but succumbed before they reached the water. In any case, it has become clear that during the Cambrian period not only trilobites abounded but also annelid worms and large marine slugs. In addition the remains of small crustaceans other than trilobites have been found, as well as impressions of jellyfish that expired ashore. The existence of echinoderms (sea urchins, sea though fine fossils of these types are more frequent later -- in Silurian and Devonian deposits. But except for short excursions by trilobites, no land-life yet. According to the fossil record, the conquest of the land must have taken place after the Cambrian period. The handbooks are silent about the Ordovician period that immediately followed the Cambrian. But things begin to take an interesting turn during the aforesaid Silurian and Devonian periods, which followed the Ordivician and had a combined duration One event -- without any influence, incidentally, on the future of evolution -- was the appearance of enormous water-living arachnids, the sea scorpions. Eurypterus, from Silurian deposits of the island of Oesel (now Saaremaa) in the Baltic is the oldest known. It grew to an overall length of # feet. The Devonian Pterygotus from the red sandstone of Scotland (the quarry workers, when they come across one, pass the word through the foreman that they found another "seraphim") reached more than # feet in length.-portant event was the appearance of the first fishes, the earliest animals with backbones. These did indeed influence the course of evolution, and profoundly. Of course, they had to have ancestors. And it so happens there is a living form that at least hints how those ancestors must have been constructed. The animal in question is about # inches long and looks so much like a slug that its first discoverer, the physician Peter Simon Pallas, believed it to be one. About sixty years after the discovery, that is to say around the year #, Johannes Muller recognized that it was related to the vertebrates and a few decades later the evolutionists made it famous under the name of Amphioxus. As far as I know, no fossil relative of Amphioxus has been found even though one could have turned up anywhere in geological history aher the Cambrian. The most primitive fossil fish known is probably Birkenia from the Upper Silurian of Scotland. There early fishes were finless, except for a tailfin, as are the living lampreys. Interestingly enough Birkenia, again like the lampreys, shows eight round gill openings arranged in a straight line. By the time Birkenia was swimming around, other types of fishes had appeared. Most did not live beyond the Carboniferous period. The most unusual of these types, technically the Antiarchi, were fully armored with bony plates -- one wonders against what contemporaries. An important point is that the other ancient fishes were found in marine deposits while Birkenia comes from freshwater deposits. By the end of the Silurian period the oceans probably had grown salty, though to a lesser degree than they are now. If there was a differentiation between saltwater and freshwater fishes one can easily assume there also was a differentiation between saltwater and freshwater plants. Somehow it seems likely that freshwater plants, rather than saltwater ones, invaded land. Freshwater varieties could climb a river's banks, first partly exposed to the air and then wholly so except for the roots that remained in wet ground. We don't have fossils of such plants. They probably rotted away completely after they died. But we do have fossils of a very early forest that grew in a river delta near the beginning of the Devonian period. The fossil trees turned up in the Catskills not far from New York City in # and #I when excavations for a dam cut into the old river deposits. The existence of definite land plants for the early Devonian is documented by these finds. As for Devonian land animals IF there is no documentation yet; a so-called three-toed footprint from the Devonian of Warren County, Pennsylvania, first described by Othniel C. Marsh in #, is a very doubtful case. It could be almost anything, including the impact of a windblown piece of dead wood from a tree. The first animals to venture on land were probably arthropods, to be followed by some freshwater fishes. Even now there are several kinds of fishes that come out of the water of their own volition. A much publicized recent example is the "walking catfish" that infests some areas of Florida. A strange track, consisting of two parallel lines of straight impressions, is known from Nova Scotia. The description by H. M. Ami (published in # in Halifax) concluded: "They were evidently made by some fn or spinelike appendage attached to the body of the organism, which may have been that of an acanthodian or other early form of fish existing in the early Devonian lake, sea or estuaries of Nova Scotia." The Devonian period, then, is the time when the land was invaded by living things which, however, still stayed close to water (Because of its merit, and in tribute to his memory, IF is completing publication of this work, Willy Ley's last.) Whatever happeDed tPunKPewD? In # issues in #-# it established an undying reputation for jaunty, mordant fantasythen perished in the wartime paper shortage. Much of the good stuff from Unknown has been picked up and republished, but there are still some goodies, and Berkley has got hold of a few. For instance, Norvell Page's wild Presber: XI #, #C). And, this month, the on, we'll be doing two of the absolute Unknown classics by L. Ron Hubbard one volume. Also in October... (X#, # (X#, #... andNovomher (X#, # (X#, # If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Ave., N. Y., N.Y. # In rapid seiVice shorthand I voced the figures scrawled on my pad into a detailed report for Lincoins exec. Detailed, maybe, is the wrong word. We had no instruments aboard the alien ship. There was nothing to see in the dimly lit lock. And feelings are something you can't transmit in the pulses of sub-voc code. We had all sensed part of it when the jarring clang of alarms had brought us to Lincolns bridge. The feeling had been there when the dark shape had blotted out Alpha Centauri. Beth Rainer had moved close to' me, had touched my arm. We had stared a long moment at the golden spiral circled in black on the alien hull -- a great, blazing galaxy hinting at unknown empires. Beth, her eyes held by the dark ship, had said, "Jake -- Jake, I'm cold." And she had said all there really was to say. "Lieutenant?" Grier was above me. Grange stood back near the far wall. ""Lincoln get all that, Jake?" I nodded. "Tom acknowledged -- I'm keeping open so he can monitor. We'll have to give him what visual he gets. They're letting sound out but there are still no pictures." Grier frowned. "Figures. I'd do the same if they were on Lincoln. Keep the visitors busy enough so nobody gets nervous -- but don't get careless." He eased himself down on the lock's deck and leaned against the smooth wall. I sent a short, quick sub-voc to Lincoln: Tom -- nothing doing yet. We wait. Sharp lines of tension etched Grier's face. Strained patches of white limned Johnny's mouth. And similar signs on me, I was sure. As the captain had suggested, the aliens' delay might or might not be a bit of practical psychology. Whatever it was -- it worked. Seconds have a way of becoming hours when imagination is the most solid reference point around. We were invited -- affirmative. That open port and steady blink had been plain enough. But an invitation's no guarantee of how the party's going to work out. The old unknown, then. A simple enough challenge. How could we resist? "Okay -- easy does it." I followed Grier's eyes to the far wall. A wide port whispered aside where no port had been before. Grange gave a low whistle. I could see his point. It looked as if we'd stumbled into the alien equivalent of the Royal Barge. I glanced at Grier. He was viewing the whole scene with a cold eye. The corridor stretched thirty feet from the open port. The walls on either side were sculptured in a dark, polished wood -- alien patterns intertwined in complex detail to meet in a vaulted ceiling over our heads. The floor was carpeted in muted tones of mottled gold. It resembled nothing I could remember seeing before, still -- I kneeled for a closer look and the hackles climbed the back of my neck. I had forgotten I was aboard a ship that stopped at unknown ports among the stars, places where beasts with pelts that size might "Jake," Grier asked, "are your eyes any better than mine? One Christmas tree bulb would flood supposed to be another door down there or just more decoration?" I squinted. The corridor seemed to end in the same sculptured wood as the walls. The dim amber light would obscure any indentation farther than a few feet away. Grier let out a breath. "Okay. Let's get on with it." He turned away quickly but I caught a hint of something behind his steady gaze. His alertness was not too hard to figure -- we were all very much aware of the fiction of our open line to Lincoln. The contact was comforting unless you thought too much about it -- how it was as tenuous and as easily cut as a strand of thread. Earth is new in space, a child at the edge of its crib. Lincoln bounds and venture into the dark beyond Pluto. We had no misconceptions about the alien ship that darked Lincoln. Wherever it came from, it had not been confined by the slow velocity of light -- it had eaten the years between the stars. the sculptured walls that marked the corridor's end. "I'm fighting an irresistible urge," I told Johnny Grange, "to turn around and see if that door behind us is still open. I'll be damned if I'll give in to it." Grier scowled at me. "Don't," he said simply. He laid a hand on the smooth wood, running his fingers along polished curves, pressing the surface at several likely-looking points. I gave him a hand, leaning into the wall and testing it with various random pressures. "They've got their own way of doing things, skipper," I said. "Maybe it's the old Oriental patience bit." Grange shook his head. "It's the sophomore psych bit, Jake. And why not? Works, doesn't it?" "I wonder," I said aloud without quite meaning to, "if we'd be so anxious to get in if we knew what was on the other side." The captain grinned. IF "Glad you're with us, Jake. You've brightened an otherwise dull day." "Captain -- " Grier and I jerked around. Johnny was standing back, watching a thin black line form on the polished wall. It parted. Panels slid silently aside. widened, hearts fell into stomachs. Won't do. Take a culture, years, get born into that culture and grow up in its pattern. Now go out and climb inside an alien ship and walk into a room where everything took a different direction. That same number of millions of years ago. Your heart beats a little faster -- but you don't react as you thought you would. You can't, because you need something to react to -- and it simply isn't there. Not in the room that really was not a room at all and certainly not in the alien faces and forms. They were seven -- standing together in a close huddle. Watching us from big, shining eyes like deer caught in headlights. They were human -- or near enough -- so close that the difference only magnified how far away they really were. They all stood over six feet, slender, almost no shoulders. Pale skin over sparsely covered skulls, wide cheeks, narrow nostrils. Mouths were bloodless scars. And unsmiling. One of the tallest stepped forward, stopping a good fifteen feet away. His voice was high, steadily pitched. Emora Sourain -- ... Grier glanced at me out of the side of his vision and pointed to himself. "Nathan Grier," he said, then pointed to the alien. "Emora Sourain." The tall alien shrank back. He spoke rapidly to his friends and they stared at Grier with pure loathing. Grier's face was chiseled in tone. He pulled Johnny and me together.  "What happened? If it wasn't his name, it should mean person, human, friend -- something." He cursed silently. "How does he figure I gave the wrong answer, Jake?" I shrugged. I had been glancing around the room, vocing quick descriptions back to Lincoln. The deal was anything but easy. A maroon beam extended from one side of the room to the other, eight feet off the floor. A gray, pancakesized object veined with coppercolored stripes hung from the ceiling by a thin wire. "Captain, take a look around. Maybe that's your answer. We aren't even on the same wave length. It  doesn't figure that there's nothing here that looks like anything we've ever seen before. They've got two arms, two legs and a head. They could use nearly anything on Lincoln as well as we could -- so where are the chairs and tables?" "I know," said Grier stonily. "I don't like it." I glanced back at the huddle. The head man stepped forward again -- no, he only looked like the head man. He was older, his eyes sunk deeper into his nearly hairless skull. His gaze wandered across all our faces and back again but it always stopped at Grier. "Jake," said the captain, "give me your pad and pencil. We should have thought of this in the first place." I handed him the items and he began to fill the page with symbols. He drew a planetary system around a star, a geometric bisection, an angle, addition in simple domino fashion -- the whole works. He tore off the sheet and handed it to the alien. The elder peered at the paper in Grier's hand, then squinted suspiciously at Grier himself. Finally he reached out cautiously and grabbed the paper quickly. You could chew the tension. He held the paper close to his face, stared at it, turned it over and studied the blank backside. Then he glared at us and dropped it to the floor. We watched it flutter away hopelessly. Grier swallowed hard. "So much for science. What in -- now what's he doing?" The alien had plunged a hand inside the folds of his clothing and pulled out a dark object. He clutched it tightly until the veins stood out and throbbed on his arm. He moved cautiously toward us. The head man broke from the group and grabbed the elder's fist. ""Yutevaan' he said. His voice held a strained, pleading note. "Yutevaarni ci' The elder went livid with anger. His face reddened to blackness under the amber light. he spat out, flinging the other's hand away. ""Rywai ti ci,"' The first alien trembled and shrank back. The elder composed himself, stepped right up to Grier and extended his hand. He opened the thin fist slowly. "Coromr." We looked. It was a crescentshaped piece of stone that might have come from a river or stream anywhere on Earth. Just a plain piece of stone -- black, with chips of gray. "Coromr." There was a certain plea for understanding in his eyes but his voice remained haughty, demanding. I could hear the wheels turning IF in Griet's head. He could run into trouble any way he went. If he kept quiet they might very well chop us on the spot. But any response at all had an even better chance of bringing on the same action. He did the only thing he could -- he kept his mouth shut and stood perfectly still. The alien closed his fist slowly, put the object carefully back into his clothing and kept his eyes locked on Grier. The tendons in his face tightened and his thin nostrils clamped in upon themselves, "KW,"he spat, He jerked around and stalked back to his group. I let out a deep breath. "Anyone want a loose translation of yildP."' "No," said the captain grimly, "I got that one." He glanced quickly at the aliens, then back at me. "Jake, is Tom still with us? Check. I want an acknowledgement." mediately. Grier fingered the voc on my belt, quickly instructed Buddington to run all our tapes through to the Beagle Beacon -- and gave the ominous orders to set the Beagle for an Alpha Centauri orbit and keep his finger on the button. When he finished his face was hard, ashen gray. He had let his exec know there was a good chance the Beagle was all that would ever leave the Lincoln. "All right," he said. "'I think we have maybe three minutes to find a way to get through to these people. Let's have ideas -- quick." "One more wrong idea," I began, "theirs or ours -- " Grier shook his head. "Doesn't matter. There's no question which way we go, is there, Jake? We have to connect. Speech is out. Group or self identification isn't what it ought to be. I'll forget the business with the rock -- no use wasting time on that one. What does that leave us?" "There's something very wrong about our having messed up with the symbols," said Grange. "People who build spaceships know triangles and squares and -- " "Damn it." Grier jabbed a fist into his hand. "They do know it, Johnny, but they're looking for something they figure is more basic than that -- something we haven't even considered, something -- " "Something," broke in Grange, "that they understand and we recognize they understand." Grier stared at him. He opened his mouth, then shook his head and grabbed my pad and pencil. He sketched for a moment at a furious pace, then tore x)ff the sheet and passed it to Grange. "That meet your qualifications, Johnny? Something they understand and something we know they're very much aware of." Johnny held out the paper. It was a neat copy of the big galactic spiral circled in black on the hull of the alien ship. I felt a vast sense of relief. I could see the same feeling reflected in Johnny's eyes. "Now," said Grier, "is it right? Exactly right? Jake, check with Tom -- he can see the thing. We can't afford to go second class anymore." Tom, Beth and several others joined in describing the symbol in minute detail. According to them we were as close as we could be without an actual photo of the emblem. Grier took a deep breath and stepped forward. The aliens dropped into dead silence. Then the elder raised his arm and pointed to the paper, then lowered it until his long finger pointed directly at the floor between them. The implication was all too clear. The muscles tightened visibly along the captain's back but he carefully placed his drawing on the floor and stepped away from it. The elder moved forward, picked it up without taking his eyes from us. Finally he brought it to his face and looked. He gave a sudden, sharp gasp and stared at Grier. He jerked around quickly, flinging his robes wide and thrusting the paper high above his companions' heads. 'Zarakrindi!' he shouted. The alien huddle moaned. "ZarakrindiV' he repeated, pointing with a trembling finger at the drawing. Eager hands grasped for the paper. It passed quickly through the group. The elder stepped forward again and faced Grier. His arms came up from his sides until two palms were held out openly before us. "Zarakrindi"" he said. ""Ti yasu ci Zarakrindi." A wide grin spread across his tight features. I let out a deep breath. Johnny grabbed my arm. Sweat was standing out in little beads on the captain's face but he was smiling. "Jake -- what's the word from Lincolnl You bring 'em up to date?" "Didn't have to do much, sir," I told him. "They got most of it -- and they're breathing a little easier over there, too." A dark wooden table and delicately contoured chairs appeared. Three aliens thrust glasses of cold, dark liquid into our hands. I glanced questioningly at Grier. "Drink it," he said flatly. He looked at the aliens and smiled broadly. "If they didn't probe our body chemistry in the lock, well -- qheers." IF He turned up the glass and drained it. I closed my eyes and poured the drink down quickly. It was cool, pungent, a dusty wine with a slight breath of some unworldly spice. The aliens nodded happily and downed drinks of their own. The elder offered me another glass and I reached out with a smile and froze. I could feel Grange tense beside me. Over the alien's shoulder I could see the head man entering the room from a port on the far wall. Beside him, walking with the bearing of a queen, was a woman. "Jake," the Captain said dryly, "it appears we have more in common than we thought." it -- the girl would have turned eyes anywliere on Earth. I said the similarities between the two races only magnified our differences -- and the girl was no exception. But her particular qualities magnified those differences in an entirely unexpected direction. The large dark eyes were compelling, exotic. Dark hair hung to her shoulders like thin strands of feathered silk and her narrow lips curved in a warm and secret smile. She was covered in a long, transparent sheath as delicate as a spider web and the body beneath was painted in a complex pattern of gold. She was covered in a long transus. The aliens bowed. We bowed back and the girl inclined her head. ""Zarakrindi"' said the elder. He pointed to the tiny amulet around her neck. "'Zarakrindi.'" She wore a replica of the emblem on the side of their ship, the drawing Captain Grier had drawn moments before. We smiled and nodded. The girl and the alien elder smiled and nodded back. "Now what?" Johnny asked. "Smile and nod, son," Grier said out of the corner of his mouth, "smile and nod and drink your wine." The elder looked at Grier and raised a thin brow. "T val ZarakrindiT' he asked. TivaPr He looked at Grier. Then at the girl. "Jake," said Grier, "there's not much doubt, is there?" "Nope," I said and I could feel a small, unpleasant itch in the back of my head. "Whatever she is, she's royalty of some kind -- and I've got an idea they want to know if we've got one, too." Grier's eyes bored into mine for a long moment. "Captain -- " I began. "Lieutenant. Tell Buddington I want Beth Rainer over here in ten minutes -- ten flat." "Sir -- " He shook his head. "Sorry, Jake. I don't like it either. We don't have a hell of a big choice, do we? Tell Tom I want her dolled up like a queen -- jewels, gown, the works -- and if there's any gold paint or powder sitting around in the shop, use it. And Jake -- " "Sir?" "Tell Buddington I mean now. We can't nod and smile and down white lightning all night." I didn't like it. Not at all. Beth wasn't a lot safer where she was if anything went wrong but I preferred her on the Lincoln anyway. In eight minutes, I relayed the word to the captain that Beth was on her way. Half a second later an alien messenger brought the news to the elder. He smiled at Grier, pointed to the girl, then gestured in the direction of Lincoln. ""Val ti Zarakrindi,'" he said, "r val ci." The captain nodded. It was a safe gesture for now. We had guessed right. The aliens wanted female royalty and that they would definitely get. I had quickly briefed Beth on the image she was to convey. She knew exactly what to expect -- well, all you could expect without actually being there. Buddington said her costume was something else again and Beth snapped back that it was no way for a lady to appear in public -- human or alien. "Beth -- you okay?" She was only fifty yards from the ship. "Doing fine, Jake," she said lightly. "What time do I come down the runway?" "The band's warming up, honey -- bulging eyeballs from two worlds are waiting for Breathless Beth and her -- " "Jake -- " I caught the slight break in her voice even over the sub-voc. "Jake -- I'm flat scared out of my wits." "It's okay, Beth. Everything's okay." Seconds later she was in the lock and Grange met her with a courtly bow for the benefit of alien observers. Then he signaled that  Beth and he were starting down the sculptured corridor. T om was right. Even the aliens seemed to agree Beth's costume was something else. She had pulled a coal-black bikini out of some hiding place -- I had certainly never seen it before -- and fashioned a long silver cape out of the wardroom drapes. The drapes were held together at her neck by Buddington's flashy diamond solitaire, immediately under a bright sapphire choeker I had seen Beth wear the evening before we left Earth. Finally someone in the lab had done a neat -- and quick -- job of patterning her body with a fairIF ly intricate network of gold. We had ordered royalty and Beth Rainer was an authentic Space Queen. Grier bowed. "Gracious Queen Beth," he said soberly, "if the boys at Johns Hopkins could only see you now." Johnny and I kept straight and solemn faces. Beth inclined her head gracefully"Knock if off. Mighty Captain of Space," she told him, "or I'll slug you right in the snoot." I shot a glance to our left. The aliens were taking in the Earthman's ritual with all ears. The girl could not keep her dark eyes off Beth. The elder smiled benevolently but I knew Grier, Johnny, Beth and I had the same gnawing thought -- what was going to happen if someone suddenly realized we had not the faintest idea of what was going on? Zarakrindi' said the elder, 'Zarakrindi ti -- " and the alien faction muttered agreement. He looked at us, then turned his eyes on the alien queen. "Dha ei" The girl faced Beth and bowed low. Beth glanced at Grier and Grier moved his eyes slightly downward. Beth returned the bow. The aliens approved. The alien girl turned away and laid her hand on the elder's arm. He passed her along to a guide and the two moved solemnly through a portal in the far wall. The elder turned back to us. "?, bhenei, ti Alien bearers appeared with more wine and the elder began chattering with two companions. We were abruptly left to ourselves. "Okay," Beth said shakily, "what was all that about?" I haven't the slightest," I said. "It's been a kind of nervous pattern, Beth. Strictly by ear. We could have muffed the whole thing just as easily." Beth nodded solemnly. "Do I go, too -- now that the princess has taken off?" Grier shook his head. "I don't think so. If they'd had it in mind I think we would have caught it. Sorry." He smiled. "I'm afraid you're a member of the act, Beth." Beth shrugged. "Captain," I said, "I hate to be a wet blanket but where do we go from here? Does everyone come over to our house for drinks? And after that -- what?" "You named the game, Jake," he said solemnly. "We play it by ear. Like you say, we got lucky. Now we have to hold on to it." "The sooner we call this off and get back to Lincoln -- " Johnny started, then caught himself and shut up. Grier grinned at him tiredly. "You're getting it now, Johnny. All we have to do is figure out how to say goodbye." We smiled. And nodded. And tried to keep our minds off the too obvious fact that those big shiny eyes had pretty fair sets of brains between them -- or they couldn't have launched a ship like this one. And they had to know we were very much aware of the spiral symbol on their hull -- that we were in touch with our own ship and capable of throwing Beth into the act to cover something we didn't understand at all. It was not so easy to remember we were not dealing with familiar minds -- that the same group that made no attempt to understand circles and squares fell for a phony Space Queen production. I think we knew it had worked only because they wanted very badly to have it work. Unless I was sadly mistaken, it was a little more than that. I was fairly sure they had just proven -- to themselves, at least -- the universality of their religion. And that, of course, is a pretty big plum for even aliens to pass up. nervously and I looked past her at the alien group. They were muttering excitedly to themselves. The elder smiled, then turned away from us and bowed low toward the far wall. The others hurriedly took up the cue. The wall slid aside without a sound. The aliens raised their eyes and murmured softly. In the entranceway was an intricate sculpture of the galactic emblem mounted on a circle of black. Two aliens we had not seen before wheeled it a few steps forward, then backed away. It was our first look at alien art. From a distance it seemed to be made of some pale, translucent material that glistened softly under the amber lights. The galactic center shot golden spiral arms twisting in complex curves to the edge of darkness -- and each arm was intertwined with a thousand tiny strands weaving dizzy circles through the structure. The spiral itself and the space-black circle were covered with countless pinpoints of gold. "Okay," said Grier softly. "We're still on familiar ground. Just take it slow and easy." "Zararz," said the elder. He solemnly indicated the golden emblem. He turned his head and nodded slightly. Two aliens appeared again from the far door with another wheeled black circle. It was exactly like the first. Only this one was blank. The sculpture was missing. I glanced quickly at Grier. He shrugged imperceptibly. Beth squeezed my arm tightly. Behind us Johnny whistled almost soundlessly between his teeth. An ajien much younger than the IF others stepped through the portal. He carried a long flat case of carved black wood in his arms. He held it carefully, almost reverently. The elder faced him and accepted the case. He returned the younger's bow with a slight nod. Then he walked directly toward us and handed the case to Captain Grier. H e gestured toward the empty black circle. ""Zarakrindi ti ruri,"" he said. Tiny beads formed on Grier's brow. He understood exactly what the elder had in mind and I shared his sudden, desperate sense of frustration. Everything we had done to buy precious seconds had driven us one step closer toward a final act where bluffs would not work. "All right," he said finally, "we'll have to give it a try, Jake. There's nothing else for it, is there?" He spoke to me but his eyes never left the elder. His voice was deadly calm. "The box," he said. "It's fairly heavy. It probably holds tools of some kind, hopefully something I'll recognize. Where the materials are, I can't guess." "Captain," predicted Johnny, "they'll show up. They know damn well we didn't lug art supplies over here." The captain chuckled softly. Beth laid her hand on his arm and stepped forward after the elder. The elder looked pleased. Grier and Beth stopped a few feet from the far wall, between the blank circle and the golden spiral. Johnny and I moved up a few steps behind them. The sculpture seemed a less than hopeless design now, its twisting patterns not impossibly complex -- but the touch of an alien hand was even more startlingly evident. The elder smiled softly and spoke to Grier in such muted tones only a whisper of his voice reached Johnny and me. Grier listened but his eyes never strayed from the golden spiral. Something bothered him, I knew. It was something I sensed, too. There was a raw, primitive, almost pagan aura about the spiral that started the hackles rising on the back of my neck. I felt I was on the brink of remembering something I didn't really want to remember at all. And then, quite suddenly, both of us knew. Maybe seconds apart. It was all there. Something we had left behind us a thousand years ago had come from the stars to find us again. Then Grier moved. He jerked around swiftly and shoved Beth behind him. His palm struck out and chopped sharply against the elder's throat. Beth sprawled between us. I dropped quickly to the right and rolled toward her. Grier crouched low, moving away from the fallen alien, the black box a short club in his hand. He crabbed quickly to the left to reach her and a green flicker of light flicked across the room and brushed once against his chest. He folded quietly into a motionless bundle. The long case rain of yellow blades and razored curves and a thousand golden pins. I reached Beth, passed her, scooped up a sharp sliver, of gold and wondered if I had the second I needed to do her the last favor I could. A pencil of green brushed my arm and I heard Johnny Grange sigh and drop behind me. Beth's pale fist was tight against her lips. Her eyes were locked in final fear on the space-black circles. One that belonged to her and one that held the tortured curves and twisted strands that had been stars away. I moved, my hand flashing sharp and golden, and met her eyes for a quick second before green blinked in an alien hand and reached out to find me.  The next revolution of Gordon Dickson's novel novella of two alien worlds in collision -- one of the them Man's: Barry Malzberg's final word on the paradox of time travel: Norman Spinrad's comment on Man's betrayal of his own survival -- and his holiest instincts: also John Brunner  Richard Wilson  Keith Laumer  Willy Ley  Lester del Rey and others! The magdzine of alternatives! # ' IF managed to remain one of the real Big Name Fans of science fiction for more than thirty years without seeming to stir up any rancor or indulging in fan feuds. He has gone on writing for almost every fanzine with patience and care year after year, never giving any sign that he considered himself an important man in the field. He has attended a few science-fiction functions but most who think they know him well have never met him. He has been called the Hermit of Hagerstown (Maryland) but the appellation is improper -- he has proven a cordial host on numerous occasions. All this while Harry has been quietly observing the scene and collecting more information about major events than most of their participants knew was available. Now he has written a book about the decade from # to # -- All Our Yesterdays, by Harry Warner (Advent, #). More than any other book dealing with the fannish background of our field, this is a singularly honest and objective study. Harry offers his own judgments at times -- but always cautiously and against a documented background of facts that lets the reader form his own opinions. I took part in many of the events chronicled and find no errors worth mentioning. Nor do I find evidence of bias that could interfere with the unPlease turn to page #) dawn was strange and misty. His war wound throbbed. He seemed to have fatigued and aged during the night, -- even his clothes, business suit and shoes, shirt and tie. were worn, all but used up, and he needed a haircut. Dressed, he looked through his bedroom window. The good suburban neighborhood was unkempt this morning. The neighbor s lawn featured cast-off junk. His own usually well-kept home showed neglect. He went down to breakfast. had married, looked tired and slovenly. The normally well-stocked cupboard was bare. The two usually were. The kitchen stank of ager, was missing entirely. Gill explained, as she would to a child or a sick man. Jeff owned no business. She and he worked -- as did everyone else they knew -- at the Star Tower. She pointed at the Window. The mist outside had lifted. Jeff saw a huge tower in the distance, dominating the town. The structure, several hundred feet in diaShe seemed to have been been erased. Gill denied that Lori had ever existed. The neighbors did not remember her. Her room in the house had vanished. Other pertinent bits of Jeffs life had melted away as if he had merely dreamed them -- his burgeoning business, his plans for the future. meter, seemed to have grown there overnight but Gill behaved as if it had stood there forever. Becoming aware of an intruder -- at once human and nonhuman -- in the house, Jeff tried to fight. The intruder easily knocked him out and when Jeff came to. Gill was gone. Where and what was IV reality? Jeff knocked a hole in a plaster wall where Lori's room used to be and found the room but no Lori. Outside -- neighbors who had known Lori had no recollection of her. They all seemed enslaved by the alien masters of the Star Tower, remembered no other existence. Jeff encountered more of the aliens, fought them and managed to escape. His hunt for Lori took him to Sally Hodges, once Lori's friend -- and at Sally's he encountered a lawless group of refugees who believed that the country had been invaded by the Russians. Jeff was unable to convince them otherwise, finally had to flee for his life. Sally, although she thought he was suffering from delusions, accompanied him in a commandeered truck. They were captured by soldiers and taken to a U.S. -- Russian military encampment under the command of Colonel Strang. The encampment was isolated, self-contained. Both Strang and the Russians were convinced they were fighting Chinese Communists and Jeff s theory of semihuman aliens failed to impress anyone. He and Sally separated. Then Jeff was forcibly "drafted" into Strang's "army." T he barracks was a former cow barn, converted to troop use by the addition of a plywood floor and an assortment of beds ranging from antique four-posters to brand-new Sears, Roebuck cots. Men in uniform, both Russian and American, looked Mallory over as Brozhny conduged him to a stained and lumpy mattress on a makeshift frame at the far end of the long room. The odor of the former occupants was, if possible, stronger here than in the rest of the building. "What about the girl?" Mallory asked. "What's Strang got in mind for her?" "Speak with more respect of the good colonel," Brozhny said softly. "Foryour own safety." "Lieutenant, do you believe me?" "I'm sorry, no. I have no belief in walking department-store dummies who operate a factory -- " "But you believe in an invisible army of Chinese fanatics? Who suddenly learn enough space technology to launch thousand-man transports high enough to make a deep-space approach and soft-land in the middle of the country? Who ignore military objectives to capture a prairie town? Who consolidate their victory by bunching up to make a perfect target -- and then sit there and wait for Strang's next move?" "There are many things about this curious war that puzzle me, Mr. Mallory. But I find your stoIF ry even more puzzling. Why should intelligent aliens behave in this way? Why were you alone immune to their control? Why have none of the rest of us seen such creatures?" "Brozhny," Mallory said urgently, "get me out of this Boy Scout camp. If I can find a clue to what's going on, prove that Tm telling the truth -- " "Out of the question," the Russian said. "The colonel is right in one respect -- we need every man." "For what? To sit here on this broken-down farm and play soldier?" "We are gathering strength as a force, readying ourselves," the Russian said. "When the time comes we will launch our counterattack." "You think an infantry mob can do what the whole Army and Air Force -- U.S. and Russian -- couldn't do?" "As the colonel said -- we have plans, Mr. Mallory. Be patient." A lean, craggy-faced, big-fisted man in U.S. greens and a technical sergeant's chevrons strolled up, looked Mallory over. The newcomer's lip lifted to show yellow horse teeth. Brozhny made brief introductions and left. The sergeant propped his fists on his hips and squinted his eyes at Mallory. "You and the Russki are pals, hey?" He spat on the floor in the general direction of the door. "Well, the sweet talk is over. You're in the Army now. I'm Sergeant Gaunt. You work for me. First job for you is latrine detail." "I'm not in the Army," Mallory said. "I'm a civilian. I was brought here at gunpoint by my pal, the lieutenant -- " "Don't talk back to me, boy!" The sergeant prodded Mallory's chest with a finger as hard as a pistol barrel. "You've been called to the colors legal and proper." "In that case I'm in the wrong place. I'm a reserve major. I'll take my gold leaves now." "Officer, eh?" Gaunt's mouth curved in a V. "Any proof?" "I left my wallet in my other pants." "Ain't that too bad? Looks like you're lying. I don't like that. Private. I reckon you'lf be on latrine for a while." He turned and roared a name. "Chubb!" A runty soldier with jug ears and corporal's stripes hustled over. "Set him to digging slit trenches. See he digs 'em deep." "Let's go," he said to Mallory. Chubb tipped his head, fingered his carbine. Mallory followed the noncom out into the cold wind and to a barn, there to be handed a longhandled spade. Then the noncom marched Mallory around behind the building to a rectangular screen of canvas strips mounted on poles. "You heard the man. Dig 'em deep." Mallory fell to work, handling the shovel awkwardly. "What's the matter with your arm?" Corporal Chubb asked. "I picked up a few splinters from an imaginary explosion." Chubb grunted. Mallory dug. After an hour he had finished one trench -- a foot wide, two feet deep, twelve feet long. "All right, that's enough," Chubb said. He was shivering, hands thrust deep in his pockets. "I reckon you can break for chow now. Sarge never said you couldn't eat." Chubb escorted him to a long tent from which steam and sour food odors emanated. In the canvas-smelling gloom inside, he picked a greasy tray from a stack, joined the serving line. As he held out the tray, his eyes met those of the server. "Lori!" he said. S HE stared at him wide-eyed. The big ladle in her hand dropped unnoticed. Mallory leaned toward her and whispered swiftly, "Don't let them know." Then, in a normal voice, he said, "What a surprise to see you here." Lori leaned toward him. Her lips moved. Tears filled her eyes. "How -- when?" "I arrived a couple of hours ago," he said. "Courtesy of Lieutenant Brozhny." "I can't believe it. I thought you were dead." "I'm alive, all right -- " "Hey, you -- the new guy. Move it along," Corporal Chubb called. "Lori -- I'll see you in a few minutes." Chubb hustled Mallory along the line. "Nix on the dames. You want to get both of us in hot water?" I took a chance just bringing you in here. Sarge prob'ly meant for you to eat cold chow on the job." "She's an old friend, Chubb." "You ain't got no friends, mister. Just keep your nose clean and leave the women alone. You figure it out. You do your job and show your loyalty and maybe you get privileges. It's up to the colonel." Chubb led the way to a small table in a corner. The food was surprisingly good -- meat, potatoes and gravy, bread, green vegetables, strawberries and cream, fresh coffee. "We eat good here," Chubb said. "It ain't a bad life unless you're on the colonel's list. Just don't make no waves -- like with the dames." "How long have you been here?" "Couple of months," Chubb said. He swallowed coffee, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "What did you do to rile Strang?" "Turned down a job offer." "Wasn't smart," Chubb grunted. "Why'd you do it?" "I have other plans." Chubb grunted. "Better forget it and get with the program. He's got it all doped out. Got to give him credit, he gets things done. Good thing, too. Wasn't for him, be nobody doing anything. He seen what needed doing, got some men together, started organizing things. Now we're getting somewhere. We're not licked yet, by God." "Getting where?" Mallory asked. "Getting set to hit 'em. Hit 'em IF no hard." "With what? Bows and arrows?" "He's got it doped out," Chubb repeated. "He knows." "Corporal," Mallory said, "I want to talk to the girl. Just for a few moments. How about it? "You crazy? I told you -- " "She's an old friend of mine." "Tell that to Strang." "All you have to do is -- " "Shut up, you!" Chubb barked. "Comes of trying to treat you decent. Maybe Sarge was right about you." As they walked into the barracks Sergeant Gaunt rose from an armchair and strolled over. "How's the new boy, Chubb? Give you any trouble?" Chubb glanced at Mallory. "No trouble." "Good. Hey, you," Gaunt said as Mallory started past. "I didn't dismiss you, boy. You're on kitchen detail tonight. Pots and pans. Nice clean work. Don't bother to sit down. You're late now. Mess sergeant won't like that." Chubb opened his mouth. "Don't say it, Chubb," Gaunt grated. "I'll decide when a recruit needs a break." Chubb clamped his jaw shut, nodded. "What are you waiting for?" Gaunt barked at Mallory. "For dismiss orders." "Don't try me, boy," Gaunt said, and jerked his thumb. "Pots and pans, on the double." F or three full hours Mallory scraped grease from cooking vats, elbow deep in scummed water. The mess sergeant, a roundfaced, paunchy man with tufts of gray haii over his ears, watched him obliquely. When the supply of pots was exhausted he assigned Mallory to scraping soot from the fireboxes of wood-burning bake ovens. Mallory worked steadily, gruffly told him to take a break, gestured to a table where a plate of steak and eggs, toast, coffee waited. "Thanks, friend," Mallory said. ' Where's the latrine?" left the mess tent, walked across the muddy farmyard to the barbed-wire enclosed area designated as the women's barracks. A guard armed with an M-# stood at the lone gate under the glare of a small floodlight. Mallory walked directly up to the man. The sentry watched him come. When Mallory was a few feet away the sentry shifted his rifle and opened his mouth to speak. Mallory charged, rammed his right fist hard into the sentry's stomach. As the man grunted explosively and doubled over, Mallory struck down at the back of the neck. His victim fell on his face and lay still. After dragging him behind a stack of cordwood, Mallory pushed the gate shut, walked to the nearest tent. A plump woman in a lumpy skirt and an unbuttoned fatigue jacket was just emerging through the fly. She halted when she saw him, slapped the jacket shut. "Say, what are you -- " "I want Private Lori Mallory, Sergeant," he said briskly. "Which tent?" The woman hesitated, tucking back a strand of sandy hair. "Just who are you? I never seen you before." "Major Disaster. I just hit camp. Snap it up. Sergeant. Which tent?" The woman pointed with a plump forefinger. "Number three, sir." "Thanks." "But you can't go in there." "Of course not. I want you to get her for me." "Well -- I'll see if she's able to talk to you." The woman waddled along the catwalk, poked her head into the tent. A moment later she withdrew, came back past Mallory without a word. Lori appeared, looking anxious. She saw Mallory, hurried to him, her smile fighting her tears. "Dad -- how marvelous to see you -- " She huddled against him, her arms around him. "Dad, it was awful, thinking I was all alone." "You're not alone, honey." Mallory patted her back. He gripped her shoulders, looked into her face. "Lori, I have news for you. The best news in the world. Your mother is alive, and the kids -- " "Dad," Lori's grip on his arm was convulsive. "Are you sure?" "I was with them two days ago." "But -- where?" "At home. In Beatrice." Lori's face rippled like a reflection in disturbed waters. "Dad, you couldn't have -- " she whispered. "The Chinese -- " "There are no Chinese in Beatrice," Mallory said. "I doubt there are any this side of the Pacific. That's a delusion of Strang's -- " "Dad -- Colonel Strang is a fine man. He's making order out of this chaos." "Strang is a dangerous lunatic," Mallory said. "He intends to destroy Beatrice. His plan is crazy enough to work. If it does, he'll kill Gill and the kids along with a few thousand other people." "There's no one left alive in Beatrice," Lori said. "The Chinese massacred them all. That's why we have to -- " "That's what Strang thinks -- but he's wrong. There are no Chinese in Beatrice. We've been invaded, Lori -- but not by any human enemy. They're alien creatures. Things from some other planet, I believe. They have fantastic powers of hypnosis. The people in the city are like sleepwalkers. They've been enslaved and they aren't even aware of it. There's a tower -- an immense structure -- where they work every day on some uncomprehensible project." L ori was staring at him in horror. "Dad -- what are you saying?" "I know, dear. I've already been told it's a fantasy I dreamed up to protect myself from the knowledge that Gill and the kids are dead. But they're not dead, Lori. Believe IF that, if you can't believe anything else." Lori shook her head. "I can't. Dad," she whispered. "I'm sorry. They're gone. I know they're gone. I've gotten used to the idea -- " "You thought I was dead, too," Mallory said. "But I wasn't." "That's different -- " she began. Then: "How did you get away?" You were at home when they attacked -- " "Never mind. I'm afraid you wouldn't believe me. And there's no time now. WeVe got to get away from here first. Afterward we'll talk.". 'hat do you mean? Dad, you can't -- " Mallory cut in on her protest. "Which tent is Sally in?" "Mine -- number three. But Dad -- if you're talking about -- " "Did someone mention my name?" Sally spoke from behind them. "When they called Lori out, I knew it was you, Jeff," she caught Mallory's arm possessively. "We're leaving now?" "Dad, you can't mean this!" Lori gasped. "You're planning to desert?" "That's a pretty harsh word, Lori. Escape would be closer to the truth." "You can't," Lori said. "The colonel is counting on you -- on all of us." "Don't be a fool, Lori," Sally said. "If Jeff thinks we should go he has a good reason." "What possible reason? Where would we go?" "To the house, of course. It's not far north of here." "bad, you're not thinking of trying to get back into Beatrice?" "No -- not yet. Not until we have help. I mean the Old House, Lori. We can rest and -- " "Please talk sense. What old house?" Mallory felt a sudden sense of disorientation. He shook his head. Was he mixing dreams with reality? "Never mind, Lori." He shut off the train of thought. "We've no time to waste. There's an unconscious guard lying a few feet from the gate. Someone may stumble over him at any moment." "What old house?" Lori repeated. "I think I understand. The house is another of your fantasies, like invaders from space and Mother's being alive. You needed a place to escape to -- so you've invented a house. But, Dad -- there isn't any house. There's no place to go. Colonel Strang offers the only possible hope of our ever rebuilding anything." "I won't argue with you, Lori. We're going. Now." Mallory caught her hand. She pulled away. "You can't go. I won't let you." "Lori, for God's sake -- " "No, for your sake. Dad. I guess you'll hate me now but maybe later you'll realize I was doing it for you -- " Lori brought a brass whistle to her lips. Sally sprang, knocked it from her hand. In the next instant Mallory had caught Lori's wrists. "My God, Lori, has Strang brainwashed you?" "Colonel Strang is a wonderful man, a real leader. He's the only one with the strength and the vision to do what has to be done. I won't betray him!" A shout came from the direction of the gate: "Corporal of guard -- on the double!" Mallory took a step. Lori threw herself at him, wrapped her arms around his neck. Feet were running toward the gate. "Hey -- down that way -- " a rough voice yelled. Mallory lifted Lori bodily, set off at a heavy run along the dark aisle between the tents that led to the tangled wall of shrubbery at the rear of the compound. A shot boomed behind them. Sally gave a sharp cry. Mallory skidded to a halt. Sally had fallen to her knees, holding her left arm. "Go on, Jeff," she gasped. "Don't wait for me." Lori whirled on her father. "Give yourself up. Dad. They shoot deserters." "If they catch them," Mallory rapped. "It's up to you, Lori." Another shot whanged nearby. "Take care of her," Mallory said swiftly. "And of yourself." He ran for the shadows. Behind him he heard Lori shout: "That way -- that way -- " As he plunged into the shrubbery he looked back, caught a glimpse of Sally crouched in the glow of a pale light -- and of Lori running toward the advancing men, pointing in a direction away from the one he had taken. V M allory covered three . miles in the next three hours, mostly on his stomach. A drizzling rain started up, accompanied by fog. Vehicles blundered past on the roads, their headlights soaked up by the mist. Men called and beat the brush but none came closer to him than fifty yards. When he emerged on a hardsurfaced road the lights of Strang's encampment were a pink glow in the sky behind him. There were no stars. The rain had stopped but the wind was bitter. Mallory's injured arm felt swollen to giant size. Got to get under shelter. Find transport, get past Strang s patrols. There'll be some kind oj authority in ' Omaha. Military headquarters. Unless that was the first target to go... He gave up the effort to think further ahead than the immediate future. Shelter first, rest, food if possible, rebandage the arm. That was enough for now. Maybe more than enough. Earlier the wind had been blowing from the east. He'd have to assume it still was. Keeping it on his right, he started along the road. He recognized it as the route along which Brozhny had escorted IF him and Sally less than twelve hours earlier. It seemed like days ago. He thought of Sally with a bullet in her flesh -- of Lori, torn two ways by pressures too great for her to handle. He thought of Gill, of Randy and Marla. Don't think. Just walk... How Jar? Until you come to something... group of large buildings, tall, flat-fronted, mansard-roofed, rising among century-old trees at the crest of a rise. Lights glowed... Over the whisper of the wind he heard faint sounds -- a voice, the thud of a slamming door, the chug of a power generator. Mallory left the road, approached through a ploughed field across the angle of the rising ground. He saw trees and tangled growth ahead. He pushed through, encountered a high brick wall. It took him a quarter of an hour made hell by his injured arm to climb into the lower branches of a beech to which dead autumn leaves still clung. He worked his way out, let himself down on top of the wall, then dropped inside. The ground was smooth here and had the feel of dead lawn. He came to a path, followed it along a curving route through wildgrown shrubbery. The walkway debouched into a narrow drive that extended back past the main building. Dimly Mallory made out a parked vehicle -- pink light winked from a reflector. Directly opposite him, twentyfive yards away, was a lighted window. Mallory stared. He saw a tall man with coppery hair seated at a desk, writing. The civilized scene was reassuring. Mallory had to approach someone for help. A scholarly man in a quiet study seemed as good a bet as he was likely to find. Mallory crossed the dry grass to a driveway. He had taken two steps along the pavement when glare struck him in the face. He stood still, his hands clear of his sides. Two men emerged from the concealment of a tall, untrimmed juniper hedge. One was lean, long-armed, with a crookedjawed face and a bedraggled beard below a red plastic baseball cap. He wore a rain-blackened mackinaw, tight jeans three inches too short for his long shins, hightopped shoes. His companion -- shorter, older, plump, covered by a shiny black raincoat -- carried a compact crossbow, quarrel in place, finger on the trigger. Both men eyed Mallory warily. "Where you come from?" the thin one barked. "Why you sneaking around here?" "I was looking for a place to get out of the weather." "One of Strang's bunch,' hey? What's the matter? Tired of evil and sin?" "I'm tired of evil, all right," Mallory said. "And I haven't gotten in on my share of the sin lately." The thin man took a quick stride forward and swung a backhanded blow. Mallory, off guard, ducked back. The pain of the sudden movement was like an ice pick in his flesh. The plump man backed a step, raising the crossbow. Black fog rose to obscure Mallory's vision. He shook his head, tried to blink the mist away. "Hey -- he's hurt, Wiss." The crossbowman's voice penetrated a high-pitched hum that filled Mallory's head. "He's out on his feet." "He'll be hurt more before he's done," Wiss said from far away. "Let's search him. Let's see what he's got on him." The plump man held his weapon ready while the other patted Mallory's pockets. "Nothing," the thin one said aitd stepped away. "Go ahead, Deebs. What are you waiting for?" "My God, Wiss. You expect me to shoot a man in cold blood?" "But you can take the name of the Lord in vain. Give me that bow. I'll do it." Wiss halted abruptly as Deebs pivoted to cover him with the crossbow. "Stay back, Wiss. I warned you before." Wiss lifted his hands. "All right, all right. Don't get jumpy." Deebs backed away, covering both Mallory and the lean man. "We'll take him up to the house. You first, Wiss, where I can keep an eye on you." T he light in the room was too bright. Mallory's shoulder throbbed. His head felt soft and bruised, his eyes gritty. A faint odor of ammonia hung in the air. The man with the coppery hair -- glossy, arranged in meticulous waves above an imposing forehead -- smiled gently at him from behind the desk. The man had a ruddy, pink-cheeked complexion, a well-shaped but longish nose, unusually red lips, a sharp, jutting chin. "Suppose you account for yourself, eh?" he said in a resonant rather nasal voice. He waved a small vial of what Mallory saw was smelling salts under his nose, sniffing gently, smiling faintly. "I understand you're from Strang's camp." "Colonel Strang tried to draft me into his army," Mallory said. "I didn't want to be drafted. I left." "Oh?" The shiny-haired man IF pushed his lips out, nodding sagely. "I thought Strang posted sentries." His tone was mildly skeptical. "I made a diversion. The rain helped." The seated man glanced at Deeb standing beside the desk, a drop of water trembling on the tip of his nose. "Brother Henry seems to feel you came here to spy on us." "He's wrong." Mallory looked around the room. It was large, high-ceilinged, with buff and brown walls, a row of large double-hung windows, roller shades, net curtains. Book shelves lined two walls. A long table held more books. A dictionary and a globe had their own stands. "What is this place?" "You're on the grounds of Revelation College -- in the dean's library, to be precise. I'm Brother Jack Harmony." He paused as if awaiting recognition. When Mallory said nothing he frowned a little. "Why did Strang send you?" "I've told you -- I'm on my own -- " "No insolence," Brother Jack said sharply. For an instant his large, pale eyes glared bleakly. Then he relaxed and twitched his lips into his smile. "How many men does Strang have now?" "A few hundred, I suppose." Brother Jack nodded. "Guns? Ammunition?" "They seemed to be well armed." Brother Jack's eyes narrowed. "When is he planning his attack?" "You seem to know more about him than I do. I was in his camp only a few hours -- " "But he is planning such an attack?" "So he says." "You see?" Brother Jack looked at Deebs with a pitying expression. "And you thought I was imagining things." "I never thought that. Brother Jack -- " "Get out, Henry," Harmony said mildly. "I want to talk with our guest in private." Deebs left the room. Brother Jack indicated a chair, waited until Mallory was seated. "I'm surrounded by fools," he said. "They know nothing, understand nothing." He leaned forward, looking shrewd. "What sort of deal is Strang offering?" he asked crisply. "Mr. Harmony, I wish you'd rid yourself of the idea that I'm working for Strang." "Call me Brother Jack -- I've put aside all titles." Harmony looked speculatively at Mallory. "Now, you and I know how to accommodate." His eyes slid aside from Mallory, roved around the room, came back to Mallory. "I hope so, Brother Jack." "Now, if -- in order to survive -- it becomes necessary for a man to come to terms with forces of the Opposition, well -- a man can't serve God if he's dead, can he? You see. I'm realistic. I've seen how the Pit has opened, spawning its imps in the world of man. I can read the writing on the wall. The time of God's ascendency is on the wane -- just temporarily, of course. He's testing us, you see -- to determine who deserves to live and who doesn't." "I'm afraid this is over my head. Brother Jack." "Don't lie to me, man." Harmony showed his teeth, even, white and false. "You've seen them. I know it. I can detect their mark in your eyes?" "Seen whom?" "The imps. The spawn of Satan. The living dead."'lory said. "Imps or aliens, they've taken over the city. As far as I know, they've made no effort to expand their beachhead. You're the first man I've met who doesn't think I had hallucinations." "Satan's clever," Brother Jack said. "Oh, I underestimated him. I'll confess to you that for years I was skeptical in my heart. I spoke the word of God but in my private thoughts I was an unbeliever. That's why He loosed Satan on the world, you see. I admit it. I'm the guilty one!" "I'm sure there were plenty of others," Mallory said. "The question is, what's being done about it?" "No others," Brother Jack said. "Just me. I'm the one God put his finger on. But I'll survive. I know it's His will. It's His way of testing me. And I'll measure up." "That's fine. Brother Jack. Where is the nearest regular authority? Was Omaha hit?" "Your coming was just as I predicted." Harmony nodded. "I knew the call would come." "Do you have a short-wave radio?" Mallory asked. "You're a hard man to deal with," Harmony snapped. "Very well -- out with it! You want me openly to come in with you, am I right?" Sweat glistened on the high forehead. "Brother Jack, all I'm interested in is locating what government is left, if any, and doing what I can to combat whatever it is that's invaded the country." "I see I've given you the wrong impression," Harmony said. "You won't let a man even save his face, will you? All right -- let's talk plain. I'm a realist. When resistance is hopeless a man has a duty to save his own life." "Look, Brother Jack -- if you have a car I could take -- " "I won souls for Christ even when I preached empty lies," IF Harmony stated flatly. "Just think what I can do for Satan." "You're off the beam. Harmony," Mallory said. "I didn't come here to make a deal with you." The shiny-haired man slid open a desk drawer, cased out a Colt .# automatic. His fingers curled lovingly around the grip. He weighed the gun on his palm, then deftly pointed it at Mallory, the butt resting on the desk. "You can have the others," he said. "They're nothing. Expendables. Do as you like with them. But you need me. Strang knows that. Otherwise he wouldn't have sent you." The door burst open. Deebs entered the room, the crossbow in his hands, his face flushed, his eyes shocked. An Oriental-looking youth stood behind him. "You're selling us out!" he blurted. "You listened, eh? That's too bad. Brother Deebs." Brother Jack shifted the pistol, raised the muzzle slightly. "Goodbye, Brother Deebs," he said and fired pointblank. Deebs spun, fell face down across the desk. Mallory came to his feet, froze as the gun swung to cover him. The Japanese boy made a mewing sound and backed away. "Now, you spent time with Strang." Harmony addressed Mallory as if nothing had happened. "You must have seen him consorting with the Fiend. Tell me, is it true Satan takes the shape of a small black boy with a hump on his back and a tuft of red hair like a goat's beard dangling from his nose?" His eyes were fixed 'on Mallory's. His mouth hung slightly open. "I didn't see anyone fitting that description," Mallory said. "He has a thousand forms," Harmony said. "Oh, I've seen some of them. In my boyhood he appeared to me as a giant black dog one night, but I drove him away with God's curse. Later he came to me in the form of scarlet women, painted and perfumed -- I knew then that he was stronger than God." He jerked the gun at Mallory. "Speak up." "The ones I saw look like poorly manufactured men," Mallory said carefully. "How do they speak?" "Very politely -- even when "Like the words of scarlet wornen." Harmony nodded. "That was what gave them away. At first I was afraid. I confess the weakness. I ran with the others. Then Satan singled me out and made me halt and turn back. Oh, it was in my heart to do the bidding of the Evil One!" Harmony looked at Deeb, sprawled across the table on his back, his face a red ruin, his feet clear of the floor. "That one fooled me. He took the shape of a man but now he's given it up again." Harmony had lowered the gun -- it hung in his hand, pointing at the floor. Mallory took a step toward him and the weapon snapped up. "Don't make any foolish moves," Harmony snarled. "I was a combat Marine before the Call came -- I never qualified below Sharpshooter. You stand back over there, beside Tanaka." Mallory complied. The small man was leaning against a bookcase, his hands clutched together, shivering. "Oh, it's hard sometimes to hear the voice of God," Harmony said. "Now, at first I thought you were Strang's agent -- then you spoiled it all. Now I just don't know." "Brother Jack -- " the Japanese boy began in a thin whine. "Shut up," Mallory said. "Brother Jack's in no mood to be argued with." "Good. You've seen F'm in earnest," Brother Jack said. "And you saw how I dealt with Henry. Are you ready to give me Strang's terms? Satan's terms?" "No," Mallory said. "But I know how to kill the imps." Harmony looked at him solemnly along the barrel of the gun. "You know better than that," IF he said. "Satan's minions can't die like mortal creatures." "I killed one. Maybe more than one." "That's your last lie," Harmony snapped. "But I'll show your Master I'm worthy. Kneel." He brandished the Colt. T he Japanese lad made a thin sound and started to fall forward. Mallory swung toward him. Harmony jumped to his feet, started around the desk. His hip collided with Deeb's feet. The body skidded, tangling limply with Brother Jack's legs. The gun went off and the glass door of the bookcase shattered behind Mallory. Brother Jack stumbled, went down. His head struck the corner of the desk with a sound like an axe hitting a seasoned oak log. He flopped sidewise and lay still, blood spreading in his glossy hair. Mallory turned at a sound. Wiss was standing in the doorway, holding'a crossbow at the ready. "Oh, boy," Wiss said. He licked his lips. He lowered the point of aim to Mallory's abdomen. His eyes flicked past his target, back to Mallory's face, away again.  "Killed all three, did you? I heard three shots." "Two shots," Mallory said. "Tanaka's not dead." "Yeah?" Wiss said. He advanced a step. "Now it's my turn. Where do you want it? Through the stomach? In the lungs? How about right in the mouth? Open your mouth, you black snake of sin." "Then you'll have to dispose of the bodies alone," Mallory said. Wiss nipped a chapped lip with long yellow teeth. He looked troubled. He nodded. He cut his eyes toward Brother Jack. His gaze lingered. "All right. Him first. You think he meant it -- about leaguing with Satan? That why you shot him?" "He fell. Hit his head on the desk." ' "Turn him over." Mallory did as ordered. Wiss frowned down at the corpse. "I don't see where it went in." "He wasn't shot. He fired at me. Deeb tripped him up." Wiss motioned Mallory back, then stepped forward to stare down with a fascinated expression at Deeb. Tanaka groaned and sat up. "All right, Tanaka," Wiss said. "You can help." Tanaka was speaking softly in Japanese and crying. "Pick him up," Wiss said to Mallory. Mallory took the dead man's wrists, hoisted him into position for a fireman's carry. Mallory's knees buckled as the weight came on hirm He went down hard. Wiss kicked him. Tanaka sobbed. Mallory crawled from under the corpse. "I've lost some blood myself," he said. "I.'m afraid I can't help you."  "You can walk," Wiss said. "That will be some help. I won't have to carry you out." "That's a point," Mallory said. He climbed to his feet, feeling dizzy and sick. "Let's go," Wiss said. W SS following him, Mallory stepped out into a lengthy dark hall lined with oversized doors. Their pebbkd-glass panels were marked by numbers lettered in old-fashioned style. His feet echoed on the tiles. Moonlight shone through the window at the stairway landing. The house was a split-level. In the lower hall, Wiss directed him toward the rear. "Don't walk so fast," Wiss said. "Why be in a hurry?" "I didn't kill Deebs," Mallory said. "Brother Jack did the shooting. I didn't have a gun, remember?" "I'm enjoying this," Wiss said. "This is what I've always wanted. Turn left." They were in a narrower, darker hall. There were mops and brooms against the wall, a trash cart. "It's hard to fight sin," Wiss said. "You start out to look for sin and seems like you can't find it. The bad ones act virtuous to your face -- and then behind your back they make their pact with Satan." "Brother Jack knew a lot about Satan," Mallory said. "Me more than him," Wiss saM. "You outsmarted Jack -- but you're not going to outsmart me. You're going to die. Out that way." Mallory saw a fire-door. He pushed a release bar. The door swung outward. He stepped down to a bricked path margined by garbage cans. The trees stood up stark and aloof against moonlit clouds. "That way," Wiss said. "I'll bury you in the garden. I'll cover you with manure." The cold air cleared Mallory's head slightly. The urgency of the nausea retreated. "I'm going to be sick," he said. "Try not to shoot me until I get through." He turned aside, leaned against a tree and made a retching sound. From the corner of his eye he saw Wiss lower the crossbow. He moaned, put his hands to his stomach -- and Jumped for the shelter of the bole. Wiss yelled. A crossbow bolt clattered through dry branches to Mallory's left. He ran a weaving course among the saplings, circling back toward the house. Wiss was shouting, crashing through the brush. Mallory fell, rolled. Wiss charged past him, ten feet IF away. Mallory counted to twenty, rose and started back along his path as silently as possible. The sound of Wiss's passage halted abruptly. Mallory stopped, resumed his progress when Wiss again grew noisy. The lower drive widened in front of a converted barn. A darkcolored sedan was parked there, its front bumper against the weathered siding. Mallory came up on it from the left side, opened the door, slid behind the wheel. The keys dangled from iht ignition. He took two deep breaths and turned the key. The starter groaned. Mallory pumped the gas pedal. The engine caught. He slammed the gears into reverse, backed, cutting the wheel hard. He braked, gunned forward. Wiss darted into view beside the house. As Mallory roared past at a distance of six feet, he saw the bow swing up into firing position, tracking him. Glass shattered behind him. The metal bolt stood quivering in the padded plastic of the right side of the dash. Mallory switched on the headlights in time to swing the curve of the drive. The gates loomed ahead, massive as a portcullis. Mallory closed the distance to them at sixty miles per hour. At the last instant he threw himself sideways on the seat. The shock knocked him against the right-hand door. He pulled himself erect in time to see one panel of the gate, bent almost double, slide off the hood and bounce away into the underbrush. The car was in a skid, its rear coming around to the right as it left the road. Mallory caught the wheel, steered into the skid, crashed through dry stalks and saplings, plunged down through a ditch, back up again. He coasted to a stop on the road. He brushed glass chips from his face, wiped blood from one eye. The windshield was smashed. One headlight was out. The other was knocked out of line so that its beam pooled twenty feet ahead of the car. The engine, still running, clattered rhythmically. Mallory's head was ringing with a high, wavering tone, like an idling transmitter. He hitched himself back under the wheel and tried the accelerator. The car moved ahead awkwardly. Mallory could feel the drag of an out-ofline wheel. The steering mechanism pulled at his hands. Slowly, like an injured animal, the car moved down the road. VI M allory put ten miles be tween himself and Revelation College before he allowed himself the luxury of pulling to the road shoulder. He had suffered a number of minor facial cuts and a painful chest bruise. His injured arm ached with a deep implacable persistance. His head felt hot, his stomach empty. The lump behind his right ear was swollen and tender. He touched it and pain shot down along his jaw, upward across the top of his skull. The cold wind gusting in through the broken windshield had chilled him to the bone. "Progress report," he said, and was startled at the hoarse, croaking quality of his voice. "Item one -- I've gotten clear of Beatrice. I know what I saw there. Item two -- I've found Lori alive and as well as could be expected. Item three -- " He paused, trying to order his thoughts. Thinking was hard. He needed rest, food, drink -- a doctor. "Later," he said firmly. "Right now the question is the next move. Dawn will come in a few hours. Strang's men will be out. They're between me and Omaha -- I think. I need a road map." He opened the glove compartment, bending the crossbow bolt aside to allow the door to drop. He found worn gloves -- which he put on -- a crumpled paper cup, a greasy screwdriver and a muchfolded map. The dash lights provided enough illumination for him to study it. As closely as he could estimate. Strang's headquarters lay a mile or so west of the main road north -- too close for him to risk that route. The alternative was to skirt wide to the east, then double back. "Would help if I knew where I was," he muttered through lips stiff with cold. He had to think out loud to make sense to himself. "Have to make a guess. Headed east from Strang's camp. Still headed east -- unless the wind has changed -- " It seemed to be blowing straight at him now. Couldn't count on the wind. Best bet was to drive on until he saw a route marker or came to a town, then correct course accordingly. "So that's settled," he told himself. "Unless I run out of gas -- or overheat -- or pass out and run into a tree." The car's front end was badly out of line. The wheels set up a bone-shaking vibration at fifteen miles per hour. The steering was stiff. He could smell hot oil. "Radiator's probably punctured," he muttered. "Lucky it's a cold night." He came up to an intersection with a rutted blacktop road, slowed, made a left turn, went on for a quarter of a mile before he braked to a halt. "Why did I turn?" He mumbled the question. His voice sounded in his ears like that of a stranger but he found speakIF ing aloud necessary to concentration. Suddenly the concept frightened him. Was his mind going? He forced himslef to think silently. What ensued was a curious, partly vocalized, partly silent dialogue. Have to work my way north... Sound again: "No. Wrong. Worked it out, decided to head east, hit main road -- This way. It's not Jar now... "What's not far?" He shook his head, staring out through broken glass at the weedchoked ditch illuminated by the lone headlight. The house. Have to get to the house, rest, get warm... Sure, the house... funny  forgot about it. Right, have to get to the old house... He started up, drove on another hundred yards. "Wait a minute," he said and jammed on the brake. The sudden stop Jerked his head painfully but also served to clear it. "Going nuts," he said." "Thoughts all confused." House... old place, stone, high gables, horses in the drive, gas lanterns on tall poles, smell of stables. Home. But not home. Remember it from... long time ago. Small boy. Have to go back. Something wonderful there. Waited long time... "Imagining things," he said loudly and rubbed his face. "Or am I? Is there an old house? Seems as if it's been in the back of my mind ever since I left Beatrice. Even before. But it's nonsense. Old family manse? Crazy. Isn't any old family manse. Besides, I have to avoid heading back -- " But I have to go there. Tve already waited too long... "All right." He laughed raggedly. "What the hell? There's a way to settle it -- I'll go have a look, get it off my mind, get back to business. And maybe there'll be food and a bed." He looked ahead along the crooked secondary road. "But what makes me think this road will lead me to it?" You know the way. It's not far now. Get to the house. Then you can rest... "All right, Mallory. Maybe it's the still, small voice of conscience. Follow your nose. It can't lead you any farther astray than you already are." He put the car in gear, crawled ahead along the rutted track. N OW that he had given in to the compulsion Mallory felt curiously resigned -- as if he were no longer a lone swimmer in choppy seas but a passenger on a ship for whose course he bore no responsibility. There might be reefs and tides ahead but for the moment he could simply cling to the rail and ride. He wondered vaguely how far he had come. Two miles? Three? What would he find at the end of the road? The question seemed academic, remote. His job now was simply to steer -- and stay awake. The faint whop-whop-whop of beating rotors intruded on his thoughts. Looking back, he saw a copter's navigation lights bobbing a hundred yards above the treetops, three hundred yards behind him. A searchlight speared down, fingering the ground, sweeping closer along the trail of roiled dust. His reactions were sluggish, clumsy, as he cut his single headlight, wrenched the wheel to the left. The car slammed down through a shallow ditch, up again into a ploughed field. He saw a clump of trees ahead. He steered for it, felt the wheels losing traction. Something dragged under the car. The vehicle wallowed, came to rest, nose high. Mallory jumped out, almost fell, ran stumbling across the furrows and toward the trees. Under their cover he worked his way up a wooded slope toward the higher ground ahead. The copter circled the stalled car, hovered, then dropped in to land near it. Moments later it lifted again. Mallory pushed on through thick underbrush and interlaced branches. He heard shouts behind him. Handlights flickered through the thickets. Overhead, the copter beat the air, its light raking the hillside. The trees thinned. Mallory scrambled up over a bare outcropping of granite, ran on among twisted pines that gripped the rock with roots like arthritic fingers. He saw a path winding upward, closed on both sides by dense walls of growth. Mallory heard feet scrape rock close behind him. He plunged off the path, forcing his way back into the brush. He had gone no more than twenty feet when a vertical wall of rock barred his way. He slumped to the ground, gasping for breath. End of the line... Voices came, accompanied by sounds men made, breaking through brush. "Must have doubled back. You men spread out there, beat the brush for him." "Jig two-fiye. Let's have that light over here, a hundred yards upslope and to your right." The copter hammered its way overhead. Mallory lay where he was, listening to the sounds of search. He dozed. After a while the sounds went away. He rose stiffly to his feet and began seeking a route past the stone wall. He found it twenty feet to the left of the pocket where he had sheltered from the hunt. Crumbled stone led up in a stairlike slope. He climbed it, scraped low IF under tangled berry bushes -- and pendant chandelier of antique cut. was looking across a weed-grown On the. floor at his feet lay the lawn at the house. dead body of a man. than he had pictured it. The architecture was unlike anything he had ever seen -- massive, monumental, ancient and forbidding. He walked forward slowly, finding an overgrown flagstone path that led past a worked-stone horse trough where a trickle of water still bubbled over a mossy curve of rock. Patches of dry stalks indicated what had once been flower beds. A fallen trellis dropped over a cracked stone bench. To one side, the remains of wooden sheds sagged in advanced decay. He crossed a graveled drive, barely discernible among the weeds. Pale moonlight reflected from high windows like blind eyes. A flight of wide, leaf-littered steps led up to a stone-balustraded terrace. At the top, across the broad veranda, a carved door of corroded metal half again as high and wide as normal was set in the granite wall under a semicircle of stained glass. In the center of the door was an ornate latch in the shape of a griffin's head. Mallory gripped the ring, turned it. The door swung in. He stepped into a wide, high entry hall, with stained flowered walls, tarnished mirrors framed in peeling gilt, a chirred monotonously. Water dripped with a slow, patient cadence. Wind boomed under the high eaves. Mallory circled the corpse. It was lying with one hand outflung, the head turned to one side, long hair, glossy black, curling about the back of the powerful neck. The body was clothed in a long coat of bottle green, tight fawn-colored trousers. Shiny black boots reached halfway to the knee. Ruffled lace showed at cuff and throat. The man had been dead, Mallory estimated,.hours rather than days. The face was hollow-cheeked, greenish pale -- but visible deterioration had barely begun. He walked into a large room filled with shadows. Starlight gleamed down through high windows hung with rotted drapes, silvered cracked and curling parquet floor, partially masked by the remnants of heavy carpets. Faded wallpaper of baroque design peeled from the walls above dark wood paneling. He saw massively framed pictures, portraits of men and women in antique costume. Heavy chairs and sofas were ranged across the room, their horsehair upholstery reduced to tatters through which rusted springs and discolored padding showed. Mice scuttled ahead of Mallory as he crossed the big room, lurched through an arch into a second room, this one lined with bookshelves filled with cockroach-pitted spines. Papers were scattered among the drifted dust across the decayed carpet. Gusts of cold wind filtered in through a broken window almost choked by the foilage of the branch that had grown through it. A grand staircase led up in a wide sweep to a second floor. Mallory climbed it. The high-ceilinged bedrooms here were furnished in the same ornate style and were in the same state of decay as the rooms below. At the back of the hguse Mallory discovered a kitchen with high wooden counters, a coal stove, a hand pump beside the cast-iron sinks. A door looked out on a weed-choked garden with paths and a fountain almost obscured by wild-growing shrubs. A tree with a trunk a foot in diameter grew up through the tumbled flagstone of a terrace. Far back, the ruins of a gazebo were visible among shoulder-high growth. "What does it mean?" Mallory asked himself aloud. "What is this place? Have I ever been here before?" He was afraid to question himself silently. His mind was a stranger to him. H e turned and found himself looking at a high narrow, brown-painted door set in a wall paneled with inch-wide strips. He tried the brown porcelain knob. The door swung inward, disclosing a dusty landing above a flight of steep wooden steps. Mallory stared down into the total blackness. A dank odor of wet masonry and toadstools rose to his nostrils. "Hello," he called. "Anybody home?" His voice gave back a muffled echo. He felt light-headed, unreal. "Came this far," he muttered. "Might as well see it all." Unsteadily, clinging to the worn wooden handrail, Mallory started to descend. Halfway down he had to stop and wait for dizziness to pass. At the bottom he fumbled in a pocket, brought out a book of matches. He struck one with difficulty. The guttering light showed him a stone floor, the bulk of an ancient coal-burning furnace, a coal bin behind it, sagging ceiling beams and, at the far side of the cavernous cellar, a small door of heavy planks bound with iron. "That way," he grunted as the match faded and winked out. He lit another, circled rotting wooden crates stacked in his path, tried the big iron handle. It turned with a dry rasp of rusty metal. The IF door swung back to reveal a small room lined with shelves filled with mason jars. A few of the jars had burst, lay in shards among the tarry remains of their contents. "Store room," he muttered. "Jams and jellies just like mother used to make." There was a sharp snick, as of an oiled metal bolt sliding home. A line of light appeared in the wall, widened as a panel slid back smoothly into the masonry wall. Mallory was looking into a room with walls of smooth gray, a floor of dull-polished black. The entire ceiling glowed with an even white light. He saw bulky shapes. Safes? Television sets? They were spaced along a side wall. Above them a row of six-inch disks of pale radiance flickered and writhed. He walked straight ahead into the room. As he passed the door a bright point of light winked on in the wall opposite, dazzling him. He turned his face away. The light winked off. He heard a brief clatter -- like the sound of an electric typewriter operated at top speed. Mallory took a step backward. A sound on his left made him turn. A rectangular section of wall, three feet by six, pivoted open slowly. A room was visible through the opening. An illuminated ceiling shed a harsh glow on a glittering framework erected, over a flat, padded slab on which lay a man so withered that at first Mallory assumed that he was looking at a mummified corpse. But the wizened head turned. Dim eyes stared. "Algoric, thank God you've come," said a voice like the rustle of dry leaves. M allory wiped a hand across his eyes. When he looked again nothing had changed. He took a step into the room. Warm air touched his face. His pulse beat heavily in his head. His vision blurred. He crossed to the coU looked down at the shrunken body, cocooned in wires and tubes linking it to a machine around it. He touched a bone-thin arm. It felt dry, cool -- but alive. "I guess you're real," he said. "As real as the rest of it. Who are you? What is this place?" "You're late, Algoric," the whispery voice said. "I've waited -- so long. But you're here at last. I pray it's not too late." "Too late for what?" "I'm sorry for everything that happened, Algoric. But I'll try to make amends." "What are we talking about?" Mallory demanded. "Are you my hallucination, or am I yours?" He laughed, then leaned against the framework of the machine as another wave of dizziness rose over him like black water... size of the task force," the old voice was whispering. "Will they arrive in time? Ah, it's late, so late. But who could have known? And now -- " The old man's eyes focused again on Mallory's face. A startled expression tightened the oldster's sagging features. He raised his head an inch. "You're not Algoric. Who are you? How -- " He fell back, his eyes vague. Mallory leaned over the semiconscious man. "Wake up. Who are you? Talk to me." The ancient't face was slack. His lips moved but no sound passed them. A dangling wire caught Mallory's eye. It had the look of a disconnected lead. A few inches from its tip was an empty socket of the right size to fit the jack. He plugged it in. At once indicator lights winked on on the console beside the cot. A soft whirr of pumps started up. An articulated metal arm deployed, lowered a spongy pad .to contact with the old man's chest, moved gently over it. Other muted clicks and hummings followed -- a complex apparatus was going into action. The old man's face spasmed, went slack. His breathing deepened. His thin body twitched and relaxed. Mallory sensed that he had gone into a deep sleep. "Good idea," he said, feeling the stiffness of his lips, the thickness of his tongue. "Me, too.Talk later -- if I'm not already dreaming." Awkwardly, painfully, like a man in a daze, he pulled off his coat, rolled it, lay on the warm floor and tucked the garment under his head. Total fatigue was like a scythe cutting all the wires that had kept him going for the past thirty-six hours. man was watching him from bright feverish eyes. "Ah, you're back," he croaked. "I've been thinking -- Algoric sent you in his place. But where is he? Why didn't he come?" "I don't know anyone of that name." Mallory rose to his feet. His headache had dwindled to merely a dull soreness but his arm was stiff and painful. His stomach felt as if it held the embers of a coal fire. The old man looked stricken. His thoughts seemed to wander. He shook his head and gazed again at Mallory. "What is the month?" "February." The old man groaned. "Time is the traitor," he said. "What has passed out there?" "Lots of things," Mallory said. "Let's start with the invasion. They've set up their HQ in BeaIF trice. Alien creatures, imitation humans. Hundreds of them. They've hypnotized everyone in the city. They don't seem to be anywhere else. The country's disorganized -- in a state of shock or worse. Radio and TV seem dead. I saw no signs of the army or any king of organized authority. People are accepting old answers -- blaming each other, Satan or communists. Or are simply trying to accept and survive." The old man made a distressed sound. "Disaster, disaster -- Again he seemed to pull himself together with an effort. "How did you come here?" "That's what I intended to ask you," Mallory said. "This place -- I had an image of it in my mind but not as it is. I saw it full of life and light and activity. There were horses, and people in old-style clothing. It was like a dream that kept pulling at me. So I came -- I don't know how, but I seemed to know the way." "I failed," the old man muttered. "How could it end like this? Betrayal, hatred, death -- and worse than death." "I answered you," Mallory said. "Now answer me. Who are you? What is this place?" "It doesn't matter now, young man. Too late, too late -- " "Tell me anyway." The other shook his head wearily. "You wouldn't understand -- or even believe me." "Try me." "How could you? You know nothing of -- the other world, the great world." "I know we've been invaded by creatures that are not of this earth," Mallory said. "What are they? What do they want?" "Want? You misunderstand, Mallory. They want nothing, they know nothing -- not as you and I want and know." "They want something badly enough to invade the planet." "No. Invade is not the correct word," the old man said. "Your planet is not occupied -- it's infected. They're not invaders. They're a disease." said, "is a single organism whose being is implicit in a multitude of discrete units. It arose eons ago on a world in some far galaxy. Perhaps at first it was a simple virus, mindless and bodiless, existing only as a pattern to be impressed on living cells, devouring them, spreading, growing. "But it is the basic trait of life -- even the half-life, the pseudo-life, of a virus -- to seek to expand. It is conjectured that in time the Mone came to be the dominant -- indeed, the only -- organized matter on its native world. It -- or they -- developed -- not intelligence but a system of instinctive reactions to situations, comparable to the ability of some of your native insects to construct elaborate nests, weave geometric webs, erect traps, store food, herd other insects navigate, communicate, all without true thought. And like other organized matter the Mone was faced with a choice -- evolve or die. It evolved. "We have no way of knowing the intermediate steps by which the Mone occupied its native system, then learned to cross interstellar distances -- or the process by which it elaborated its ultimate, sophisticated methods of survival. We do know that when it crossed intergalactic space to reach our galaxy, it had become a force of fearsome potency. Its encapsulated germ plasm could endure the rigors of cold, vacuum, time, until the warmth of a sun drew it close. Reacting to the gravitational wells of planets, a spore pod would steer itself to a world -- and it mattered not on what kind of world it found itself. It was infinitely adaptable, capable of thriving in molten magma or on bare ice at a degree or two above zero absolute -- or in an atmosphere of incandescent gas. In response to exterior conditions the germinal units would ready themselves. Then the pod would burst, releasing a thousand self-sufficient embryonic creatures equipped to cope with local conditions, however severe -- to grow, construct a nest for the Queen Mone, support and feed her until her spawning time. Then, with the planet seeded by worker-forms, the next phase was entered. This time all effort was concentrated on the creation each packed with the seeds of a new planet-infecting force. In six months -- or a year -- or a century -- when the planet was exhausted -- the pods would be launched from the stripped world, spreading the plague outward from star to star at a geometric rate. In a million years -- or less -- the entire galaxy would be only a dead husk from which all life had been stripped as wheat is stripped from a field by locusts." "Spores," Mallory broke the ensuing silence. "Viruses. The things I saw were big, powerful. They used tools, spoke -- " "Your chromosomes bear the genetic pattern which determines your form, your abilities. This pattern varies from species to species, phylum to phylum. In the Mone the only pattern is adaptability. Earthly species adapt to environment by evolution over a long period. The Mone has evolved the ability to make instant adaptation of its chromosomes to meet whatever pressures it senses await the newly spawned generation." IF "All this doesn't explain what's happened to Gill -- to everyone. Why couldn't I make her understand that something was wrong? And why was my daughter's room sealed? Why?" "The Mone uses whatever natural resources it finds. Workers are needed to construct the nest, to prepare the special foods and supply the physical needs of the Queen Mone. Here it seized on a cadre of humans, instilled in its slaves a false image of the world and of their roles, supplied them with false motivations to make them docile and productive. As for the sealed room -- if the girl were missing, the parents might best be soothed by deleting her from their memories and eliminating all evidence of her existence. A protective field that creates a sense of illness in interlopers effectively discourages interference." "And where do you come in?" "A Mone infection on a distant world escaped the notice of galactic authorities until too late -- the cell spored before it was destroyed. Many of the spore pods were tracked and destroyed but many were lost. An object only inches long, composed of inert organic material, is a difficult target to seek out in the depths of space. Therefore we established a spherical shell of Watcher Stations on outlying Vvorlds, alert for the approach of pods. They are detectable at solar distances by our instruments. "This is such a station. Two men were assigned to man it -- dedicated men, prepared to wait out the long years of the vigil -- watching for an event of only remote statistical likelihood -- for space is wide and worlds are many. One of the two men was Algoric. I, Gonyl, was the other." G O ON," Mallory said. "If there are alien invaders -- or an alien infection -- I suppose there could be extraterrestrial undercover agents watching for them. But what went wrong? How did they get past you?" The old man seemed not to notice Mallory's question. "We were intrigued when we realized that this world bore a native human population. We chose this area for its remoteness -- near the heart of an almost empty continent. The year was eighteen-twenty-seven. We felt we had chosen well. The histories of human cultures on numberless worlds led us to predict that a thousand years would pass before the creeping settlement of the land reached us. "We soon realized our error. We should have acted at once to transfer our installation to a still more remote area: Alaska, Siberia, Antarctica. But we were norIF mal men. We were reluctant to exile ourselves in a frozen tundra. We rationalized. We accomodated. In the end "we welcomed the availability of the society of our own kind. We used our equipment to decorate and furnish our spartan station in a style aping that of the distant centers of such local civilization as existed. We constructed gardens and a road, learned the local speech. We were still young, possessed of limitless wealth in synthesized gold. Life was rich -- even here on a primitive planet so far from our birthworld. Our house was filled with music, gaiety, the loveliest of women, the cleverest of men. We had the finest wines, the best foods. We hunted, we danced, we entertained. And time passed. "Algoric was the first to see what was coming. We had watched the advance of the native culture from the Age of Wood to the Age of Coal in two of your brief generations. Your population had quadrupled and already the first telegraphs were in use. The experiments in internal combustion, electric power and wireless told us that in another few decades your technology would have outstripped the capacity of our initial security arrangements. It was plain that soon we would have to find a new site, rebuild our monitor beacon in such a way as to preserve its undetectibility. "Plain to me, that is. Algoric laughed at me. You see -- he had come to love a native woman. He would not leave her. The threat of the Mone, he said, was no more than a fever fancy, a madman's delusion. Even those who had sent us here reckoned the chances at no more than one in called on to raise the alarm. He would be a fool to throw his life away for that remote eventuality. " 'In exile. I've built a new existence,' " he railed at me. " 'Would you have me leave it behind now to camp on some desolate ice sheet and wait a thousand years in loneliness for that which will never come?' " "I was insistent. He was adamant. In the end we fought. "I was a powerful man in those days. But he was more powerful, and driven to a frenzy by lust for his native woman. He left me here for dead and, after smashing such of the equipment as he could reach without my help, fled with her. "But I survived -- broken, crippled, shattered, yet alive. The machines that would have repaired me, maintained my youth and health, were smashed beyond repair, but I was able in time to reactivate the scanning beacon and renew the vigil. "I closed the house. And to protect myself from casual intrusion, modified the exterior to present the appearance of neglect and abandonment, erected protective fields that projected an aura of desolation and confusion. Against Algoric my measures were more specific. I set up a tuned band that would affect only his specific cortical pattern -- that would drive him mad with pain if he came within the interdicted distance. Algoric approached. Eacji time I heard his telepathic calls to me, his frantic pleas to be allowed to return. The woman was long dead. His folly had turned to bitter ashes. But though my heart was torn I was adamant. He had broken the sacred oath. I could no longer trust him. "One day I detected a faint echo from deep space. I monitored it, watched it grow until there was no longer any doubt: A Mone space pod had passed the orbit of Pluto and was falling sunward with gradually increasing velocity. An short, the dreaded day was approaching. The Mone was here. "I knew at once what I must do. The transmitter forming the heart of this station is so designed that it cannot be activated by a single mind. The complex code IF key that unlocks its mighty forces consists of two complementary, interlocking concept-grids. I had been entrusted with one. Algoric possessed the other. "I alone had detected the approaching menace -- but the efforts of both of us were required to alert the Great Worlds to our danger. "We had once been close friends, Algoric and I. We knew the patterns of each other's minds well enough to maintain contact over planetary distances. I called to him -- and he came. "I knew the risk I was taking but there was no choice open to me. I dropped my protective barriers, allowed him to enter. For the first time in half a century we stood face to face. "I told him that the past must be forgiven, our differences forgotten. Our duty now was plain -- to join in sending the translight pulse that would bring a Galactic force to burn out the infection before it could spread. "But he refused. Against all duty and tradition of the Watchers, he refused. We had lost enough, he said, sacrificed enough. Now it was too late to save the planet -- the Galactic force would arrive to find only the Mone's abandoned spawning ing sites perched on the sterile rock of a looted world. And even if the pods had not yet been broadcast, planet-wide sterilization would be required to destroy the ripening spore pods. And in that holocaust we too would die. "Instead, he babbled, we should use the capability of the no-space transmitter to escape from this doomed world to a place of safety. There were a thousand planets on which we could disappear into the population mass, regain all the benefits of the Great Civilization given up when we had volunteered so long ago. "I refused -- as he must have known I would. He demanded that I deliver to him my portion of the code symbol -- and when I would not, he raged, begged, wheedled. In the end he would have killed me -- but I laid hands on a hidden weapon and, as he struck me down, I shot him. "I fell. He did not, though I think my shot struck home. I lost consciousness and when I reawakened, he was gone. My head was clearer then. Too late, I saw the folly of what I had done. Algoric gone -- alone -- and I dying. Who now would stand between the Mone and a helpless world? But perhaps he would return. With great difficulty I managed to deploy the life-support cage and place myself in it, as you see me now. I called to him. There was a faint response, dim and far away. I called again -- again and again, as I summoned strength. Sometimes I sensed a response, sometimes nothing. And I waited. "And now -- instead of Algoric, a stranger." The old man's head slumped back; his skeletal hands twitched as if to clutch at some vanished opportunity. "Algoric," he muttered. "If I could but have known -- " "Algoric's dead, Gonyl," Mallory said sharply. "You and I are stilt alive. What can we do?" Gonyl made an animal sound of despair. "Nothing -- nothing. Human weakness, criminal weakness. And yet -- could you have known Riane in her youth -- " "Riane," Mallory murmured. "It seems to me Tve heard that name." "Tall, graceful as a willow, eyes of that strange, pale blue, hair black as Zenith. A better man than Algoric would have counted a world well lost for her. And yet, if only my own faith been stronger -- " "I remember now," Mallory frowned thoughtfully. "In the dream the stories Uncle Al used to tell me -- " Mallory broke off, his face tight. "The dream -- this house -- and Uncle Al. The clothes he wore -- " "Yes, yes?" Gonyl was staring up at him, perplexed. "What?" "Old man," Mallory said, "I have a hunch my imaginary Uncle and your friend Algoric were the same man." stand," Gonyl said. "The house you've described seeing in your dream is, of course, this house as it was half a century ago -- as it was when Algoric had last seen it. His appearance to you was, of course, a telepathic contact, not a true dream." "Why? How?" "There must have been a reason," Gonyl said. "Algoric was not a man given to caprice -- " He looked at Mallory, startled. "Of course -- That's the likeness I saw. You have his eyes, his mouth, his bearing." "Are you trying to tell me that Algoric was my father?" "Not your father. But your grandfather, perhaps -- or your great-grandfather. Of course. No wonder he took an interest in you, visited you in the mind if not in the flesh -- " "Why not in the flesh? God knows I could have used a relative. I Was brought up an orphan." "Riane must have aged and died long, long ago. His family would have grown to adulthood while he aged not at all. In the end it would have been necessary for him to 'die' or disappear, to be believed dead, never to IF reappear. But he could have maintained knowledge of his descendants. He could have seen to your care and established a mindlink with you in infancy, before the pattern of acculturation made such contact impossible." "Could have, yes. But why?" "Why not? Algoric was a man like other men. Though he had powers most do not possess. But -- " "But what?" "There must hav been another reason. He had told you of this station so that you sensed my call -- my need of you." Gonyl's expression was one of dawning hope. "He abandoned his post but perhaps he had a change of heart about his duty. It's possible that he selected you to carry on if he should fail. Why lead you here unless you brought with you the thing I need?" "All I brought was myself," Mallory said. "And it looks as if that's not going to help." "Of course you're not consciously aware of it -- but have it you must -- buried in your mind, waiting for the time when it would be needed. And the time is now." "You'd better spell it out, old man." "The code pattern, Jeff Mallory. The missing half of the key that will unlock the transmitter. You have it -- you must have it." "Sorry. I wouldn't know a code pattern if it crawled up my leg." "It would be deeply buried, inaccessible to any ordinary probe. But you can uncover it." "If I can -- I don't know how." "Find a chair. Sit here beside me, close enough that I may touch you. Then close your eyes, relax your body. And remember, remember -- " L eaning back in the big wooden chair he had brought down from the kitchen, Mallory listened to the whispering voice, letting his thoughts rove back in time... It was night. The lights had been dimmed in the hall outside the big bedroom where he lay in his bed, one of four in the highceilinged room. The others were already asleep. He could hear their soft breathing in the dark. But he lay awake, watching the moon through the branches of a leafless tree outside the curtained window. It had been a cold, wintry day. The afternoon ball game had been canceled and instead there had been "music appreciation" in the library under the watchful eye of the tutor. And afterward; at dinner. Miss Wincher had read aloud another chapter of David Copperjield. It made him unhappy to think about David Copperfield. It was pleasanter to think of Uncle Al. Perhaps Uncle AI would come again soon -- tonight? "Yes," came the whisper. "Uncle Al will visit you tonight." And he was there by the bed, a tall wide figure. His jaw was square, his smile merry, his eyes ruffles in the opening of the velvet-collared coat and more ruffles at the cuffs. A heavy gold chain crossed the flowered silk of Uncle ATs vest and rings sparkled on his fingers. "Ah, Jeff, lad," he said, in the deep rumbling voice. "Where shall we go tonight?" "To the house. Uncle Al." "Right you are! Let's be off." ly. K 'T IF  He was drifting beside Uncle full of moonlight and, far below, Al. Uncle AI was strolling unconthe earth was like a game-board cernedly along, smoking a big spreading to the horizon and set black cigar, just as though there out with toy houses and roads and were solid ground under his feet forests. They swept higher, sailing instead of open air. The sky was down through great moonlit cloud canyons, soaring like birds with no more effort than a tilt of the hand for steering. Then they swooped into graceful descent. The house stood on a hilltop, blazing with light. There were carriages on the curved drive; glossy horses pranced, snorting mist from their nostrils. Men in high hats and capes, women in bright gowns, crossed the wide veranda, entered through the open door under the jeweled fanlight. They passed through the wall, not bothering with the door -- a trick young Mallory had always meant to ask about. Then they were in the room where the magic machine rested on its platform, a thing of lights and planes and glittering complexities. "There it waits," Uncle AI said. "In vain -- we hope. And yet -- some day they may come. And they're villains, Jeff, lad. We mustn't let them carry out their schemes, eh? No one but you and I know about them, Jeff -- you and I and one other. That's our secret, you see, the secret we must never tell. "Now, these scoundrels we watch for -- they always send their calling card ahead. It's not a thing you or I can see, lad. But the machine can see it. And when it does -- if it does -- it tells us. And we know what to do, eh, Jeff?" "I'm not sure. Uncle Al. That part's hard. It's not as much fun as the rest. It makes my head hurt." "A bright head like yours, Jeff? The head of a lad who can fly, walk through walls and share the secret of the machine? Nonsense. Your head can do it, boy. Try! With me, now -- first we picture the primary matrix, thus -- " It was like remembering the whole multiplication table all at once -- like thinking of every move in a chess game at the same time -- like looking at the parts of a jigsaw puzzle laid out on a table and seeing in one glance where each part fit every other part. "I can't. Uncle Al. The first part slides away when I try to fit the next piece." "Slowly, lad, one segment at a time. Make it, build it, fix it in place. Then go on to the next -- like this -- " It was like balancing a chair on two legs on a high wire -- like catching mist in your hands. There was no one in the world but himself and Uncle Al. There were no walls, roof, sky -- no space. Only the bright, intangible abstractions, the elusive configurations that slipped aside, dissolved, shifted into new shapes. But, urged and guided by the deep, friendly voice, he tried and tried again. And at last the parts began to fall into place, their IF shifting and. flowing tamed. Suddenly the matrix flowered about him, as beautiful and as complex as the anatomy of an orchid diagramed in light. "That's it, Jeff, lad. Good. Good. Now hold it. Don't let it slip away while we move on to the secondary pattern." Thoughts were coral shapes cast in lead, soft and gray and impossibly heavy. He pushed and tugged at them with fingers of smoke while eons passed. And one by one he intertwined form with intricate form, erecting a structure of concept that overlay the glowing matrical pattern as flesh overlays bones. He was tired -- so tired! It was a task that had gone on forever, that would never end. Somewhere, far away and unreal, was an easier, softer existence, remote now as forgotten dreams. But for him there was only the ever-accelerating, outgrowing mosaic that seemed to swell now of its own dynamic growth-urge, completing itself like a living creature that drives from embryo to maturity under the relentless pressure of genetic compulsion. And at last it was complete. He gazed, bemused, on the blinding beauty of the fifth-order Galactic code complex, listening as Uncle AI gave him his instructions. Then blackness descended over him, washing him down, down. into welcoming Nirvana... consciousness. He tried to weave the thin, insistent voice into a dream in which he drifted without thought or care over a rosy landscape spreading far below. But what he heard was not Uncle Al's comforting rumble -- this was someone else, some intruder who would drag him back to face bleak reality. But he would not go. He had earned his rest. "Wake up, Jeff Mallory," the voice crackled. "Wake up." He opened his eyes. For an instant -- before the last of the dream concept dissolved -- he saw the room as a curiously temporary arrangement of energy quanta in the form called matter, shaped as an environment for the curious protoplasmic aggregations known as human beings. Then there was a shifting. The ceiling was only a ceiling. The walls were just walls. And the old man who looked at him from burning eyes -- what was he? "You have it," Gonyl said. "I saw it in your face." "Maybe," Mallory said vaguely. "I saw things -- remembered things I hadn't thought of in years. Things I wouldn't have believed I could ever forget." "Now we must act quickly. Wheel me across to the rectangle you see incised on the floor -- there." The old man pointed with a trembling finger at the spot. "Not so fast, Gonyl," Mallory said. "Give me time to collect my thoughts." "I can spare no time now, Jeff Mallory. Wheel me to the platform." "You're in a little too much of a hurry, Gonyl. I want -- " "To perdition with what you want," Gonyl spat the words. "Must you force me to extreme measures?" The impact in Mallory's brain was like a silent blow from a hammer made of ice. Light and darkness whirled chaotically. Through the maelstrom, Gonyl's voice cut sharp and clear: "While you dozed, I took the precaution of establishing a control pattern over your brain, Jeff Mallory. You will do as I command you. Now." The blindness cleared. Mallory's head rang with a high, insistent humming. His fingertips felt numb, his limbs remote. He found himself standing, moving to the wheeled cot on which the old man lay, turning it, rolling it across to the indicated position. Now... Gonyl's voice spoke inside his head, a firm and resonant voice, such as the feeble quaver might once have been. The platform stirred underfoot. They were dropping down through a blackwalled shaft into darkness. Abruptly light blossomed around them as the platform came to rest at the side of a gray-walled passage. "That way," Gonyl commanded. Numbly Mallory wheeled the cart along the corridor to the left, emerged into a circular chamber, empty except for a black drum at its center. Above the squat black cylinder a mote of light came into being. It grew brighter, expanding into a dazzling sphere of glowing mist which solidified, glazed over, became a mirror-bright sphere eight feet in diameter that rested on the pedestal at the center of the room. Gonyl uttered a strange, croaking sigh. Again Mallory felt the touch of the old man's thoughts among his own. Now, Jeff Mallory... At once, the key pattern formed in his mind, met and matched the counterpattern... The polished surface of the sphere blushed over as if a breath of moisture-laden air had touched it. Color flickered and darted across its face. A point of utter blackness came into existence at the center of the convexity he and the old man faced. It dilated, spreading swiftly outward until only a glowing rim remained to encompass a disk of blackness sprinkled with sparkling points of IF light like a circular window looking out onto the night sky. "Place me inside," Gonyl ordered. "Now, Jeff lad," Uncle Al's voice spoke clearly in Mallory's mind. It was as if a door had opened, flooding his brain with a crystalline light. In utmost clarity he saw the contours of the abstraction that was Jiis mind field, saw how it was gripped in a web of thought force, saw how and where to touch it. And was free. "All right," he addressed the withered mask of amazement and dawning fear that stared up at him. "I've heard all your lies, Gonyl. Now tell me the truth." tornorrow's Gross National Product, an animalistic numbers game played for sin and salvation, life and death. worlds in a daring story of sex, seed and survival. a socio-sexual problem. You will recognize, among his androids, some of your best friends -- and their striving to be human. ment of a racist's supersoul -- not a nice story but a necessary one. She is # and this is her first fiction submission anywhere -- although she initially attempted an sf story at the age of #. She has spent the intervening years polishing her thoughts and her style. The job she has on the launching pad in this month's IF has a fine patina and her target lies at a harder reach than the moon. But some day heaven may alter her den through the night. The sky was black, moonless, but stars shone faintly through the heavy atmosphere. Two walked ahead with torches to light the way and frighten away the jungle beasts. Two walked behind with their precious burden, the dying body of an old man. His name was Gorofin and he was as yet unaware that this was to be his last night on his beloved planet. It was his judgment time. his sleep he was still tired. He lay quietly, eyes closed. His failing heart beat erratically. His lungs wheezed and struggled for each painful breath. He stirred and felt tiny, sharp objects digging into his back. Something was wrong. The silence, the objects he was lying on -- this could not be his familiar hut. The silence about him was absolute. He strained his ears but could not hear the usual jungle sounds. The sleepy fog in his brain began to lift and slowly he opened his eyes. Before him loomed a tall white candle. It was fully six feet in height and one foot in diameter. Its orange flame burned steadily. objects that reflected the orange Walls encrusted with more of the crystalline objects sloped away on all sides. Jewels, he thought. I'm in the Cave of Jewels, where all Samponi are brought to die... The old man felt a chill run through him. His bony, clawlike fingers clenched and unclenched. Another chill hit him. He stretched out a wrinkled, trembling hand to pull the white robe over his exposed feet. In doing so, he raised his head and shoulders and fell back, exhausted. His straining heart beat like a jungle drum. Through half-closed eyes he watched the candle burn. Little beads of wax rolled down its sides and were gradually forming foothills around the base of the candle. Some beads dropped with little plopping noises. Amazing -- it's so quiet I can even hear the wax drop from a candle... As the candle burns, so does your life... The words of the ancient legend began to come back to him. Gorofin had not thought of the legend in many years, not since he had been forced to learn it as a child. In fact, he hadn't thought of much else besides beautiful women, black wine, and long days spent by the emerald lake. It has been a good life, he reflected. But now it must end. Now I must sleep... Gorofin closed his eyes and thought back to the years when he was a young man, strong and handsome and much adored by the women of the Samponi tribe. He had been the best dancer in the village and had preferred entertaining the women to going out on the hunt with the village men. For this he had been disliked by many men but their opinion had not bothered him. He had lived only to please women, to fish and dream away the long idyllic days of the planet's eternal summer. The Samponi led a simple life, as did all the tribes on the junglecovered planet. Food was plentiful and war was unknown. Gorofin's had been a happy existence -- and a long one. The average lifespan was three hundred and seventy years. Gorofin had lived long- er than most. He was four hundred years old. He sighed. The Jewels under his back had become like burrowing needles. He looked again at the candle. It was a few inches shorter and the foothills of wax were growing. In the last hours of your life shall the candle flicker and the Eyes of Flame come to judge you... The old man dozed. He slept while the candle burned down and down until it was a mere stump of what it had been. modically. He glanced around, terrified. Something was different. He looked at the pile of melted wax and saw the flame flicker. It began to change color, from orange to red to green and back to orange. It Jumped and danced like something possessed. A sharp chill hit him. It raced down his back and legs. He began to shiver uncontrollably. He shut his eyes tightly and began silently to recite the words of the ancient legend. At first they came easily, though he had not thought of them in more than three hundred years. And it shall come to pass that on the last day of your mortal life you shall be placed in the Cave of Jewels, dressed in a white robe. And the Jewels of the cave shall be lit by one large candle to symbolize the shortness of the mortal flame. As the candle burns, so does your life. In the last hours of your life shall the candle flicker and the Eyes of Flame come to judge you. If you are found wanting the Eyes of Flame shall speak appropriate punishment befitting the scope of your sins... There was more but the rest escaped him. Something about a Planet of Hell. What was it? Gorofin's heart raced frantically and his breath came in wheezing gasps. His fear knew no limits, for IF he had never believed the old legend. As a child he had joked about it. His mother had scolded him, aghast at his blasphemy. Memories burned in the old man's mind. Gorofin opened his eyes and the Eyes of Flame looked at him. They hung above the candle, two giant orbs the color of the flame that danced wildly beneath them. Gorofin was trembling convulsively, sharp chills wracking his body. His dark eyes were bulging and his once golden skin had turned the grayish white of death. His heart threatened to beat itself to a pulp. And then, suddenly, the chills passed and a delicious ease flowed through his aching body. The pain in his lungs vanished and his thudding heart slowed until he could no longer feel its beat. Gorofin relaxed and let the coolness pervade every cell of his body. The flame of the candle was now only a foot from the floor. Gorofin no longer cared about the candle or the Eyes of Flame. He felt content, tranquil and at peace. The Eyes spoke. Gorofin... There was no voice, really, no sense of speaking. Just a hearing, like hearing one's own thoughts. He answered aloud with the proper words. "'Yes, Eyes of Flame and Bearer of Eternal Life, I am your servant." Gorofin,  have come to judge you. Do you feel that you are worthy of Eternal Life? The old man was quite sleepy now. He wanted only to sleep, sleep forever. He fought off the desire with great effort, knowing instinctively that he could not sleep until he had been judged. He thought a long time before he answered. "I don't know. I never believed in you until now. Does that make me unworthy?" Not entirely. Many are like you -- souls who wasted their mortal lives with idle dreams and constant indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh.  have forgiven worse than you. I demand only that you feel a sincere repentance for your sinful life and ask forgiveness of those who judge you... "Those?" We are many who speak. But we speak as one... Gorofin, since he felt no sincere repentance, could not bring himself to say the words that would bring him Eternal Life. Besides, he knew he could not lie to the Eyes of Flame, for they could see into the deepest recesses of his mind. "I cannot ask your forgiveness, for I do not feel that I have led a sinful life. I did not believe in you because I was born with a mind that demanded facts to back up what was presented to me as truth. I was a dreamer. I did not go on the hunt, but stayed in the village or fished in the lake. I do not feel it was a wasteful life, for I brought joy to many, women." Joy? You brought joy? You charmed the maidens and spoiled them for their husbands. You did not go on the hunt because you were lazy. And you refused to do any meaningful work to improve the lot of your village and your tribe. Your life was full of sins. Gorofin, think again... The old man felt a great sadness for he knew that if he had his life to live over he would live it as he had. He felt no repentance. Gorofin, do you know of the Planet of Hell? "I have heard of it, but I cannot remember exactly what the legend says about it." Then I will ref resh your memory. There is a planet not of this galaxy where souls are sent for punishment. The souls on that planet suffer unimaginable agonies. Agonies that the people of this world could not begin to visualize -- such things as war, starvation, disease and mental agonies beyond belief. It is the only planet of its kind in this universe. Other universes hold similar planets. They all serve the same purpose. Do you wish to be sent there? "No, of course not." I will give you one more chance. It will be your last. You may have a few minutes to search your conscience before I ask for your answer... Gorofin was silent for many minutes. The candle was now a pile of wax and the flame was almost out. The Eyes watched him, pulsating slightly. The flame of the candle became dimmer. Coolness overtaking him made it difficult for him to think. I now ask for your answer. Do you repent of your sins and ask the forgiveness of those who judge you? Gorofin replied, searching out each word carefully, "I wish I could please you by responding in the manner you wish me to. But in all honesty I cannot ask your forgiveness for sins which I do not feel I committed. My answer is the same." The old man sighed as he fejt the remnants of life drain from his body. The Eyes, the candle and the cave began to recede from his vision. He felt himself sinking into a quiet, swirling blackness. The voice that was no voice but rather an intimate realization reached him in his last moments. Gorofin, you have been judged and found wanting. We are all agreed on your sentence. You are banished to the Planet of Hell, there through miserable suffering to learn perfection and truth. For only through your soul's perfection will you achieve Eternal Life. May you learn well... The flame died. green planet was lovely. But its beauty was deceiving. East of the Pacific but west of the Atlantic, south of the Great Lakes but north of the Gulf of Mexico, .on a sunny day in June, a Hawkins. He was a beautiful baby, with skin as black as coal. They named him Gordon.  IF (Continued from page #) could have equaled it for comderstanding of what went on in pleteness. If future students ever those days of growth from our need a work dealing with this pewild youth to our somewhat reriod in a microcosmic field as spectable early maturity. rich as this, they will find all they A case in point is the affair of need in the book. The price is Claude Degler or John Chrisman. fairly stiff for such a book but I read a whole set of diatribes amply justified. There are picabout and by Degler at the time tures of many of the major fans and I've watched a myth grow of the era -- and I'm still puzzled around this fan that still conabout how Harry managed to find tinues to spread in science fiction, some of them. An excellent work I met the young man at the Philof its kind, con in # -- before I knew that with was really Claude Degler. find that most major work All I can say is that he was then done in the last few months is doing nothing that earned him more in the field of fantasy than the treatment he received when in straight science fiction. The Bob Tucker recognized him, and major piece of news for readers him in fairly general conversation, beyond what science may some (I do recognize, however, that a day do is the recent announcelot of his writing as Degler had ment that Ballantine Books is been as wild as legend makes it.) scheduling a series of adult fanHarry Warner covers the Degtasies. These will bring back into ler-Chrisman episode at considerprint some of the great novels that able length -- and with a fair have long needed publication in amount of detail I had never been soft covers. Lin Carter is acting as able to discover before. I think editor of the series, this is the first time the matter The first book in the group is has been made public in a way The Blue Star, by Fletcher Pratt that I can accept as an honest at(Ballantine Books, #:). This tempt to find the truth. originally appeared in one of the This is a book that deserves to Twayne Triplets in #, where it be treated as a work of considercould never have received the able scholarship in the field and readership it deserved, as a piece of serious history. I can Fletcher Pratt was a gallant think of no other man who could and beloved friend of mine but I have done as good a job and few was never impressed with his science fiction. I had always considered him a writer of fact rather than fiction. He had, of course, collaborated with L. Sprague de Camp on a series of delightful stories for Unknown but I rather assumed that these were largely written by de Camp. Then I read The Blue Star. It knocked my preconceptions to shards. Pratt was a magnificent writer of fiction, a superb stylist, and a man who could form an integrated concept of a world and a whole set of people that exceeded the grasp of most novelists. This is a universe that might have been, where the laws of nature differ from those recognized and have their effects on the rules governing human conduct. But while one is reading about it the world he describes is far more real than many found in the contemporary novel scene. The book deals with witchcraft -- but a witchcraft which offers nothing without payment in full. And it gives a world history that I still find more convincing in fact and feel than almost anything Tve known in the worlds of science fiction. Unfortunately, it begins with a rather pointless and stilted prologue to set the scene and reverts in the end to a somewhat better but needless epilogue. But if the reader will skip them completely, nothing will be lost. It was after reading this novel that I began desperately looking for another I had missed, though I knew that George U. Fletcher was the pennarrie of Pratt. This book is also currently available, and should be a must for every sword-and-sorcery fan who likes an adult handling of such material. The Well of the Unicorn, by Fletcher Pratt (Lancer Books, #(t), may well be the best otheruniverse story written before the Tolkien books became popular. It's a brawling, boisterous and completely delightful story of a young man who sets out to overcome the forces of empire in a vaguely Scandinavian world -- and who accomplishes his aim with the help of Meliboe, an enchanter. The book was written by a man who was an expert on real history and real warfare. Background details -- including an askew view of the religion of the world, something too often neglected -- and the characterizations are rich and compelling to an adult reader. These two other-world creations of Fletcher Pratt represent all of his fiction in novel form that I can recommend. But two such fine books would have been enough to make a splendid reputation as a novelist for any other man and I'm delighted to see them both in print. Moondust, by Thomas Burnett IF Swann (Ace, #(t), is another matter. Swann has done some excellent "historical" fantasy in the past. His stories of the Etruscans and their godlings have faltered at times but have contained high moments. Swann generally has displayed an excellent feeling for the unexpected but logical development that makes good fantasy worth reading. This novel shows neither the delights in invention nor poignant feelings that have previously been so strong in his work. The nonhuman and semihuman creatures here arouse no warmth and hardly any compassion. The invented background doesn't blend in smoothly with real history. It sticks in the craw on the way down and then keeps upsetting the stomach after it has finally been swallowed. This is basically the story of the fall of the walls of Jericho. It begins in the tent of Joshua outside those walls. But don't expect the account to deal with Hebrew myths. The action carries rapidly into the city to involve a series of events somehow mixed up with Cretan and Egyptian beliefs. Then it leaves all traces of the world of its time behind and goes underground -- literally -- to a world of intelligent beasts that are the masters of the arcane knowledge of the time. These are simply ugly and unrewardingly dull. The story of Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, and her demoniac possession might have held at least some poignancy. But I could find very little here. Partly, this was because the first-person narrator in the story seemed to lack any real understanding that she had any feelings of her own. In the end, of course, the walls tumble and Joshua triumphs. It really doesn't matter, since he's of no great importance to the tale and since so little of this concerns either him or the real people of the city. Any author can be forgiven for a slip now and then. But we don't have to buy such slips. And this is a book better left unread if you have enjoyed Swann's other work. Somewhat closer to science, fiction is a series of stories that tell of a swordsman on another world, much like the exploits of John Carter on Barsoom. Priest Kings of Gor, by John Norman (Ballantine Books, #d:), is the third in this serieS,and surprisingly better than might have been expected. The first two in the series were far too close to the Burroughs stories in detail and handling and far too distant from them in talent. They deal with Tarl Cabot, who is snatched from Earth to another world, where he becomes a mighty swordsman and battle chief. This time the planet is a counter-Earth, and # " around the sun from Earth, and hence invisible to us. (Its effect on other planets would be noticed, however, so we could spot it. Anyhow, such an orbit is a lot harder to negotiate than a trip to Mars or Venus.) There we have the usual panoply of primitive races at war with each other, run by a distant set of priests. There are the strange beasts and the stranger women who are the prizes of the fighting men. The first two books left me feeling it was just Barsoom-Pah! Tarl Cabot goes through the usual routine of falling in love, rescuing the damsel, and then being shot back to Earth just as he should be settling down to a happy life of Surprisingly, the third book begins to take on a life of its own. Much of the beginning is still somewhat routine in its plotting, but the action moves convincingly and Cabot begins to come alive and develop some characteristics of his own. He has been Hero -- now he becomes Hero with feelings and attitudes of his own. He goes off in search of his mate but it soon begins to look as if this is more duty than desire. His desires humanly begin to attach themselves to other and far more interesting females along the way. And his powers begin to shape into more believable and personal ones than the cut-and-slash skill that seemed his only virtue before. The real story develops when he finally penetrates the lair of the priest kings of Gor, the counterEarth. If we were prepared for the usual set of human but evil practitioners of a false religion that controls the planet, we soon find we were wrong. These priest kings are a lot closer to Brackett than to Burroughs. They definitely are not human and their philosophy is alien to anything Cabot has found before. Naturally, there is a war between sides, with Cabot as the pivot. But it isn't as cut-and-dried as his other battles, and the humans and almost-humans mixed up with him begin to develop individuality. The priest race becomes the real center of interest. And in the end, after a scene that involves emotion rather than motion, the whole affair is far more mature and interesting than could be expected. I don't know how much further Norman can go with his series, since he has used up the chief mystery of the planet. But this is a fairly good adventure story, and I'll be interested in watching his development from now on. If he can continue doing his own work instead of what seems pure imitation, he might well capture the basic interest that was what we really felt about Barsoom. IF a name known to science-fiction readers, though I suspect fewer know him than should. He was an avid fan of the field when he was a youngster and his letters can still be found in some of the old back issues. He showed promise of becoming an enfant terrible. Then he disappeared into the maw of World War H. He came back determined to be a writer. He wrote war books and flying books and space books. He became one of the leading writers we were together several times on an all-night radio program. The last time I met him, he was talking about being determined to write a work of fiction -- science fiction. I never doubted that he would. After making much of his reputation and inhaule.d off and wrote a book attacking much of what they were doing because he was convinced his views should be expressed. The work came out as Marooned (Bantam, #, #(t). And while it was not a great piece of science fiction it was better than a lot of books that were reviewed favorably in the book columns. But it was not labeled as science fiction, and a lot of readers never knew it belonged in our field. Now he has another book: The God Machine, by Martin Caidin (Bantam, #(t). In many ways this is a smoother piece of fiction, displaying better development of his characters than found in his earlier work. But the book has something more and indicates that Caidin was again doing something he felt had to be done. The story deals briefly with the men who have created the master computer that will handle all our war efforts. Into this computer has gone everything we know and, to protect it from human tampering, it has been made almost invulnerable and totally autocratic. The "hero" is a computer-man who begins to suspect that the robot is actually taking over the men supposed to control it as well as leading the world straight to nuclear catastrophe. The story deals with the efforts of the computer and the man to kill each other. And Caidin knows enough about both sides to make the fight a good one. But underlying the action is the feeling that Caidin is mainly trying to tell us how it really is in the world of burgeoning military power. But at the end the message is not complete. The hero has to stage his final fight for story purposes. And while the device is ingenious, it seems contrived. During that fight the main theme suffers badly. The book is worth reading. And if -- as I hope -- Martin Caidin will go on to handle his basic theme more completely in either a sequel or another novel of unrecognized science fiction, it may be worth looking for. Caidin is not yet a really firstclass novelist. But if I know him -- and if he'll get to know himself a little better -- I'd hate to take any bets against his turning out to be the absolute master of most who are now recognized in either science fiction or the mainstream as major novelists. He's learning to transfer his inner intensity to the printed page. And in an era where compassion too often substitutes weakly for passion, that is a talent much to be prized. it Readers write -- and wrong! Dear Editor: Has Arthur C. Clarke let his dreams of joining the higher-reputation bracket of scientists go to his head? Has he forsaken all his many sciencefiction fans of yesterday and today? I wonder about this because a new printing -- the tenth U.S. printing -- of his Childhood's End bears a legend on the copyright page saying "the opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author." Or it could be this not indicates that he is sliding toward the new wave fiction, with its false teachings away from science. I think real science and such things as the Apollo moon trip have been increasing the interest in science fiction and will continue to do so. I came to the reading and enjoyment of science fiction about #, and since then the field seems to be trying to get away from the whole idea on which it was based. (I'm trying to complete my collection, and desperately attempting to find the April # 'first issue of Amazing Stories!) I look back on Clarke's "Against the Fall of Night" as one of the most enjoyable stories I happened to buy in the magazines. I cannot see why he should be other than proud of the expanded version, Childhood's End. I can't understand his disclaimer. And while Clarke seems to be flying away from science fiction, what about Isaac Asimov? The first of his two published Caves oj Steel novels was back in Galaxy for #. He still owes us a third and final novel. I hope it is forthcoming. Last year, the British Science Journal ran a special issue on robots and had the good Dr. Asimov round it off with his summary of his laws of robotics from his earlier stories. This is a monthly journal devoted almost entirely to the fields of hard science. It is the first science journal that I've seen which publishes s-f book reviews. I think that is something! When I heard that the British author John Wyndham had recently passed away, I had just finished a story from a # magazine entitled "The Living Lies," by John Beynon (whom IF I believe must have been J.B. Harris, or John Wyndham), It was great science fiction and I shall miss his stories. With his passing, I feel we have lost a master of science fiction, one of the few who handled this genre real well. Now to get to the main point of writing this letter, which is to suggest a few ideas on letters to the editor. For example, how about a new magazine from the Galaxy family with a whole issue dedicated to -- you guessed it -- letters to the editor, covering all past issues of the magazines you have published? Can you see the idea? Well, if not, let's have some fun like that in Stories. They had grand letter departments. -- Edward M. Osachie, # West #th, Vancouver #, B.C., Canada. And after we finish with the letterzine, maybe we can bring out a magazine with letters dealing only with letters about the letters we publish, and after that... Nope, can't see it. But we could use some of the Old Surge's zest or the great fights that took place in the letters to Planet Stories. Start shooting. Clarke's disclaimer was probably just self-defense against all the sapheads who took the ending of the book to mean that he was one of them and that he meant We All Must Be Saved By The Great Ones From Beyond. That basic idea made for good romantic fiction, but it isn't his real opinion -- despite what happened in #. Anyhow, last time I saw him a few months ago, he was still a red-hot s-f fan. As to Asimov, his failure to complete the plotted-out third novel is the result of severe writer's cramp, suffered when he is signing all the contracts high-paying fact book publishers keep forcing on him. The loss of John Beynon Harris, or John Wyndham, is one we all will feel keenly for a long time. He has been imitated much too often, but almost never equaled for the disaster story told with intensity and honesty, as well as for many other types of fiction. Dear Editor: I am continually astounded by the ignorance of some of your readers. Take for exatnple Bill Wolfenbarger, whose letter you published in your January issue. The first thing he states is that traditional s-f has been wrhten for years without style and the "new wave" introduces the concept of style in s-f. I may be ignorant of his concept of style, but I thought Henry Kuttner under his penname of Lewis Padgett had style; and J.W. C. as Don Stuart had style; or Jack Vance or Theodore Sturgeon or Cordwainer Smith or even Roger Zelazny. But he may define style as smooth-talking that covers up lousy story-telling. He goes on to call his new wavicle writers "astronauts of inncer space." I may be wrong but the only "astronauts of inner space" are called psychologists, and even some of them are on the wrong track. ' Your magazines are a nice complement to the rest of the s-f mags. Suggestions for improvement: Let Lester write some editorials; get more Niven, Harrison, Anderson, occasional essays by Moskowitz; get the coherent Zelazny; get Joe Poyer. Cut out the green pages. And most important, get the next thing Heinlein puts out. Sure wish R.A. Heinlein would hurry up and finish his superhouse. He hasn't had an original story published in # '# years and it's getting pretty hard to classify him as a contemporary s-f writer. Perhaps you should hire a task force of engineers and construction workers and get it done. I promise to yell "Vole for for a Hugo" and run through the halls of the St. Louiscon if you can get him writing again. -- Matt Hickman, # #th Street, West Des Moines, Iowa. Don't buck that "inner space," Matt. Maybe some of the new waivers do have inner space where you and  think we keep our gray matter -- if inner space is as empty as outer space. I dunno who started the "inner space" cliche, but I don't think anyone who had the least idea of good style could ever take such empty noise seriously. Anyhow, you have to realize the boys defending the new rave don't use their words with the same meaning we learned. To them, style isn't clarity and reasonable elegance: they mean tricks, such as what passes for experimental style -- and even their use of experimental is special, since they're copying, not really experimenting. If they really liked style, they might take a look at the best stylist who ever wrote science fiction, long before most of them had professors to explain such things -- Stephen Vincent Benet. He knew there was no fight between story and style; he used both. You'lh get most of your wishes, sooner or later. Lester's writing a column for Galaxy with complete editorial freedom, and the green pages are already out. As for Heinlein -- well, he finished his house without help from us, and  hear he's now doing another novel. Dear Editor: The duplication of American and Russian efforts in their space programs has often been pointed out in the press. However, the first time I have seen any mention of cooperation suggested was in the Galaxy editorial for May. Is such an event so unlikely that it could only be proposed in a science fiction magazine? I would like to see the idea plugged in newspapers the world over and put on the agenda tion is too big for any one nation to go it alone. It is more than just "bigger than both of us," as the hero used to say. Both America and Russia have had to curtail and slow down their programs because of the huge expenditure necessary. Many other nations are interested, but although prosperous in worldly terms they cannot afford to finance their own space experiments. So why not foim a League of Space, perhaps within the framework and with the cooperation of the United Nations? Why not get cracking and let our own generation experience some of the exciting possibilities? -- J. Galvin, # Windmill Crescent, Castlecroft, Wolverhampton, Staffs, England. Cooperation makes excellent sense, and in a half-hearted way it was begun. American explores the moon, Russia works on space stations: one concentrates more on Venus, the other on Mars. But that is pretty uncoordinated. Still, I'm a little uncertain about the UN angle. There's too much chance for every little nation there to throw obstacles in the way while somehow never paying freight. And can you imagine how the astronauts would be chosen? Arab bloc rejects all Jewish candidates: France turns down all who speak English; and the African bloc demands reparations for white seizure of the moon, etc. When any world organization can handle something like the Mid-East or the two Chinas, or take over the arms reduction pltin. I'll be glad to see it take over space. Until then -- well, we're doing it all wrong, but we' re at least twenty years ahead of what the UN might have done in space! IF worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. 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How the Clwb works: Each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, S.#S and more in their original editions, Club members get them for only # each-ln special full-length, hard-cover editions-unless you select an extra-value book at slightly higher price. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your trial membership, you agree to take as few as four books in the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. No-Risk Gwarantec: If not delighted with introductory #-book shipment, return books within # days to cancel membership. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member. Mail coupon today to Science Fiction Book Club. Garden City, New York # City State Zip #-S# f under #, parent must sign here. (Offer good In U.S.A. only) by Kate Wilhelm. A scientist in the #rd century develops a robot with a laser eye. Pub. ed. S#.M #X#. 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Young lovers flee loveless society ruled b ttoa, by Robert Silverterg.Agroupof #st century levolutionaries are banished a bOlkm years into the post. Pub. ed. #A#  ;  a startling new novella of inner space aliens The best fiction is science fiction; and the best Leader in the science-fiction field for almost two decades! Presenting the finest writers: Asimov, Pohl, del Rey, Leiber, Anderson, Herbert Vance, Simak, Dickson, Blish, Silverberg, Ellison, Knight, Harrison, Aldiss, Niven, Clement. Popular monthly columns: For Your Information -- Willy Ley, Galaxy Bookshelf -- Algis Budrys. Three-time winner of the coveted Hugo, science-fiction's Oscar; voted the best sf magazine in the world. IF's regular authors include: Keith "Retief" Laumer, Andre Norton, C. C. MacApp, Mack Reynolds, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Philip Jose Farmer. Features: The Reading Room , controversial book reviews by Lester del Rey. Hue and Cry where the readers praise or blast the editors, writers and artists -- and where the editors, writers and artists blast back. Dcmbr, # Vol. #, No. # Ittuo # Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Frederik Rohl, Editor Emeritus Judy-lynn Benjamin , Managing Editor Lester del key. Feature Editor L. C. Murphy  Circulation Director Franc L. Roggeri , Art Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director IF is published monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # Easf # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The Company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. Readers write -- and wrong! a letter from a guy who doesn't quite believe his senses -- who keeps trying to look behind everything he sees and listens for hidden meanings in all he hears? Who titters wetly when he talks? I've just read one of those for about the fifth time, trying to put it into printable shape and now I have it. But I can't bring myself to print it -- rfor his sake and mine. But I'll answer it. The writer admits to being "a bit suspicious" beto new ownership inevitably led to certain schedule and other complications. Despite repeated assurances that changes of date on the cover and a delayed issue did not mean that he would get fewer consecutive copies than his subscription called for, he has decided to buy us on the newsstands. That's okay. We're ahead when you buy on the stands -- you're ahead when you subscribe. Come back when you're ready and your mind's at rest. The rest of the letter has no particular pertinence -- so we file it in the round and go on. I've saved this month's space specifically for readers change of address and management. Most have rolled nicely with the punches right along with us. I particularly like the following: Dear Mr. Jakobs son: Seeing as how Hue and Cry has been miraculously preserved in the Great Changeover, I thought that I would be one of the readers to " Write -- or Wrong." And believe me, I really don't know what to say. We really haven't seen exactly what your tastes are in sf Makes it sorta hard on prospective writers, don't it? I must say, though, that from what I have heard, you seem to have good taste. A friend of mine says of the magazine you originally edited: "It usually published stories of ISCampbell didn't like." If the rates are going to be better now that you are in (Please turn to page #) I anticipate great, rollicking good times for all of us in the next decade or so, an anticipation tempered only by a minor frustration. As the old saying goes: all that blood in the gutter and me without a spoon. The springboard for my optimism is an editorial by John W. Campbell (. Analog , October, #) and if you haven't already seen a copy, don't bother. The salient points are covered here and in the November Galaxy , now at your newsstands. And the December Galaxy will bring you a brilliant novel by T. J. Bass, complete in one issue, of an Earth Society dominated by four-toed Nebishes, who are curiously -- if unintentionally -- evocative of Mr. Campbell's docile Scots. Mr. Campbell argues for a genetic study of "differences" in intelligence in U.S., based on skin color. Black and White are the words he uses -- and correctly. Considering all the places where George Washington and other prominent Caucasoids -- some of them Scots -- have slept, to call today's Afro-Americans a race would be genetically fallacious. And there is the embarrassing factor of the founder of eyed blond named White, whom some naive Caucasoids witlessly invited to attend lynchings of Negroes. Mr. White, by our genetics a Negro and by Mr. Campbell's White "Scholarly" novelist and newspaperman, wrote what many persons consider the first honest, though fairly devastating, analyses of Caucasoid "success" recorded. Skintelligence Mr. Campbell obviously must claim him on the basis of color-success -- though the late Walter Francis White would undoubtedly object wildiySkintelligence? Make sense? One is tempted to wonder what planet Mr. Campbell inhabits. After mentioning the individual achievements of a couple of Scots as proof of adaptability he writes, "The trouble is, today every effort is being made to suppress any study of difference between Black and White..." Such as, Mr. Campbell fails to point out, Chicago's Black Surgeon Daniel surgery -- the first by any surgeon anywhere in the world on a human being -- during the latter part of the nineteenth century. One difference that until recently he was denied recognition. And I suppose that in these inflated times nearly everyone knows at least to have high IQs -- one has won international recognition as an artist and a philanthropist in support of education and minorities -- and both admit to amassing their piles by understanding aire "with a tested IQ of #" whose "solid reputation for unswerving honesty has helped him build his contracting business." On what bleak and lying world is honesty priced so high? Mr. Campbell is made of strong stuff. On his planet I would rapidly the mountains eight hours after they had left the hotel. The day was only a dim paling of the sky above the ragged skyline of rock to the east when they set up their shelter in a little level spot -- a sort of nest among the granitic cliffs, ranging from fifty to three hundred meters high, surrounding them. With the approach of dawn the Udbahr natives trailing them had already begun to seek their own shelters, those cracks in the rock into which they would retreat until the relentless day had come and gone again and the light of theTiearer moon called them out. Already holed up high among the rocks, some of the males had begun to sing. "What's he saying? What do the words mean?" demanded the girl graduate student, fascinated. Her name was Willy Fairchild and in the fading light of the nearer moon she showed tall and slim, with short whitish-blond hair around a thin-boned face. He had hunted aliens on many planets. Now he had to track down the deadliest -- himself! Kiev Archad shrugged. He listened a moment. He translated: You desert me now, female Because I am crippled. And yet all my fault was That I did not lack courage. Therefore I will go now to the high rocks to die. And another will take you. For what good is a warrior Whose female forsakes him? Kief stopped translating. "Go on," said Willy. The song was still mournfully falling upon them from the rocks above. "There isn't any more," said Kiev. "He just keeps singing it over and over again. He'll go on singing until it's time to seal his hole and keep the heat from drying him up." "Oh," said Willy. "Is he really crippled, do you think?" Kiev shrugged again. "I doubt it," he said. "If he were really hurt he'd be keeping quiet, so none of the other males could find him. As it is, he's probably just hoping to lure another one of them close -- so that he can kill himself a full meal before the sun rises." She gasped. He looked at her. "Sorry," he said. "If you weren't printed with the language, maybe you weren't printed with the general info -- " "Like the fact they're cannibals? Of course I was," she said. "It doesn't disturb me at all. Cannibalism is perfectly reasonable in an environment like this where the only other protein available is rock rats -- and everything else, except humans, is carbohydrates." She glanced at one of the several moonplants growing like outsize mushrooms from the rocky rubble of the surface beside the shelter's silver walls. They had already pulled their petals into the protection of horny overhoods. But they had not yet retreated into the ground. "After all," she said into his silence, "my field's anthropropathic history. People who disturb easily just don't take that up for a study. There were a number of protein-poor areas back on Earth and so-called primitive local people became practical cannibals out of necessity." "Oh," said Kiev. He wriggled his wide shoulders briefly against the short pre-dawn chill. "We'd better be getting inside and settled. You'll need as much rest as you can get. We'll have to strike the shelter so as to start our drive at sunset." "Sunset?" She frowned. "It'll still be terribly hot, won't it? What drive?" He turned sharply to look at her. IF "I thought -- if you knew about their eating habits -- " "No," she said, interested. "No one said anything to me about drives." "We've been picking up a gang of them ever since we left the hotel," he said. "And we're protein, too, just as you say. Or at least, enough like their native protein for them to hope to eat us. Sooner or later, if there get to be enough of them, they'll attack -- if we don't drive them first." "Oh, I see. You scare them off before they can start something." "Something like that -- yes." He turned, ran his finger down the closure of the shelter and threw back the flap. "That's why Wadjik and Shant came this far with us -- so we could have four men for the drive. "Come on, we've got to get inside." She went past him into the shelter. prospecting team of Wadjik and Shant -- who would split with them next evening -- were already cozy. Johnson was hunched in his thermal sleeping bag, reading. Wadjik and Shant were at a card table playing bluet. Johnson turned his dark face to Kiev and Willy as they came in. He said, "I laid your bags out for you -- beyond the stores." "Regular nursemaid," said Wadjik without looking up from his cards. "Wad," said Johnson, quietly. "You and Shanny can shelter up separately if you want." His bare arms and chest swelled with muscle above the partly open slit of his thermal bag. He was not as big as Wadjik or Kiev but he was the oldest and knew the mountains better than any of them. "Two more cards," said Wadjik looking to Shant. The gray-headed man dealt. Kiev led the way around the card table. Two unrolled thermal bags occupied the floor space next to the entrance to the lavatory partition that gave privacy to the shelter's built-in chemical toilet. Kiev gave the one nearest to the partition to Willy and unrolled the other next to the pile of stores. The pile was really not much as a shelter divider. By merely lifting himself on one elbow, once he was in his bag, Kiev was able to see the other three bags and Johnson, reading. The card players, sitting up at their table, could look down on both Kiev and Willy -- but, of course, once it really started to heat up, they would be in their sacks too. Kiev undressed within his thermal bag, handing his clothes out as he took them off and keeping his back turned to the girl. When at last he turned to her he saw that, while she was also in her bag, she still wore a sort of light blouse or skivvy shirt -- he had no idea what the proper name for it was. "That's all right for now," he said, nodding at the blouse. "But later on you'll be wanting to get completely down into the bag for coolness, anyhow, so it won't matter for looks. And any kind of cloth between you and the bag's inner surface cuts its efficiency almost in half." "I don't see why," she answered stiffly. "They didn't tell you that either?" he asked. "Part of the main idea behind using the thermal bag is that we don't have to carry too heavy an air-conditioning unit. If you take heat from anything, even a human body, you've got to pump it somewhere else. That's what an air-conditioning unit does. But these bags are stuffed between the walls with a chemical heat-absorbent -- " He went on, trying to explain to her that the bag could soak up the heat from her naked body over a fourteen-hour period without getting so full of heat it lost its cooling powers. But the lining of the bag was built to operate in direct contact with the human skin. Anything like cloth in between caused a build-up of stored heat that would overload the bag before the fourteen hours until cool-off was over. It was not just a matter of comfort -- she would be risking heat prostration and even death. She listened stiffly. He did not know if he had convinced her or not. But he got the feeling that when the time finally came she would get rid of the garment. He lay back in his own bag, closed his eyes and tried to get some sleep. In another four hours sleep would be almost impossible even in the bags. Wadjik and Shant were fools with their cards. A man could tough out a drive with only a couple of hours of sleep; but what if some accident during the next shelter stop kept him from getting any sleep at all? He could be half dead with heat and exhaustion by the following cool-off, his judgment gone and his reflexes shot. One little bit of bad luck could finish him off. Characters like Johnson had survived in the mountains all these years by always keeping in shape. After four trips into the grounds Kiev had made up his mind to do the same thing. him. He found he had instinctively slid down into his bag and sealed it up to the neck without coming fully awake. Opening his eyes now, feeling the blasting dryness and quivering heat of the air against his already parched face, he first pulled his head down comIF pletely into the bag and took a deep breath. The hot air from above, pulled momentarily into the bag, cooled on his dust-dry throat and mouth. He worked some saliva into existence, swallowed several times and then, sitting up, pushed his head and one arm out of the bag. He found his salve and began to grease his face and neck. He glanced over at Willy as he worked. She was lying muffled in her thermal bag, watching him, her features shining with salve. "You take that shirt off?" he asked. She nodded briefly. He looked over past the deserted card table at the three other thermal bags. Johnson, encased to his nose, slept with the ease of an old prospector, his upper face placidly shining with salve. Shant was out of sight in his bag -- all but his close-cut cap of gray hair. Wadjik was propped up against a case from the stores, his heavy-boned face under its uncombed black hair absent-eyed, staring at and through Kiev. "Wad," said Kiev, "better get Shanny up out of that. He'll overload his sack in five hours if he goes to sleep breathing down there like that." Wadjik's eyes focused. He grinned unpleasantly and rolled over on his side. He bent in the middle and kicked the foot of his thermal bag hard against the side of Shant's. Shant's head popped into sight. "You go to sleep down there," Wad snarled, "and you won't live until sunset." "Oh -- sure, Wad. Sorry," Shant said, quickly A short silence fell. Wadjik had gone back to staring through unfocused eyes. Johnson woke but the only sign he gave was the raising of his eyelids. He did not move in his bag. Around them all, now, the heat was becoming a living thing -- an invisible but sentient presence, a demon inside the shelter who could be felt growing stronger almost by the second. The shelter's little airconditioner hummed, keeping the air about them moving and just below unbreathable temperature. "Kiev," said Wadjik, suddenly. "Was that old Hehog you and Willy were listening to out there, just before dawn?" "Yes," said Keiv. "This time we'll get him." "Maybe," said Kiev. "No maybe. I mean it, man." "We'll see," said Kiev. A movement came beside Kiev. Willy sat up in her bag. "Mr. Wadjik -- " "Joe. I told you -- Joe." Wadjik grinned at her. "All right. Joe. Do you mean you knew which Udbahr male that was -- the one who was singing just before Kiev and I came in?" "Sure. Didn't Kiev tell you?" Wadjik's eyes shifted for a moment to Kiev's face. "That's old Hehog you were listening to. He's picked off a couple of men in his time. And we've had him in two drives -- and lost him in both." "Lost him?" "I mean, he got away." Wadjik stared at her. "Don't you know about drives, Willy? Didn't Kiev tell you?" "He told me," said Willy. But I don't understand what you mean by got away. You couldn't very well keep him prisoner, could you? Or do you do that for a while after a drive?" "Prisoner?" Wadjik stared at her. Suddenly he gave a short, throaty laugh. "Prisoner? Did Kiev tell you we kept them prisoners?" He jolted out another laugh. "Of course we don't keep them prisoners. We kill them. That's what a drive's for -- to kill off the ones with guts enough to lead an attack at us. Prisoners?" Willy stared at him. Slowly she turned her face to stare at Kiev. Greased-up and outraged, she made a picture more ridiculous than accusing but plainly she did not realize that. "Damn you, Wad," said Johnson calmly from his bag. "Shut up. You're making trouble. drawing into her bag and turning her face away from the rest of them. Kiev drew himself down to the nose in his own sack. Silence and increasing heat held the interior of the shelter. There was no talk for a couple of hours after Johnson's words and Kiev fell into a sort of doze in spite of the heat. But with the increasing temperature even this became an impossibility -- which was a good thing. A sleeping man could instinctively pull his head down into the coolness of the thermal bag and, by breathing inside it, overload it in a few hours. Kiev came out of his semi-coma in the middle of a furious whispered argument going on across the ten feet of shelter space between Wadjik and Willy. "... you're all alike, you -- " Wadjik swore at her. "Call a monkey a man. Call him better than a man. It doesn't matter to you that real men get killed by the monkeys. All that matters is -- do the monkeys get killed. You -- " "Shut up." Willy did not use obscenity but she did not seem hampered by the lack of it in describing Wadjik to himself. She went on ragingly while he was still talking in that instinctive, venomous whisper which was easiest on both their heatdried throats. "Don't you know why IF I'm going to these prospecting grounds of yours? Don't you know about the remains of a city there built by these same Udbahrs?" "Sure, I've seen it. What of it?" "I'm telling you what of it! They had a high level of civilization once -- or at least a higher level than now. But that doesn't mean anything to you -- " "They degenerated. That's what it means to me. They're cannibal degenerates. And you want me to treat them like human beings -- "I want you to treat them like intelligent beings -- which they 'are. Even an uneducated, brutal, stupid man like you ought to understand -- " "Listen to who's talking. The kid historian speaks. I thought you were still in school, writing a thesis. You didn't tell me you'd been at this for years -- " "I may be only a graduate student but I've learned ' a few things you never did -- " Looking past Wadjik's heatreddened face, flaming under its salve, Kiev saw the upper part of Johnson's countenance beyond. Johnson seemed to be calmly listening. There was nothing to do, Kiev knew, but listen. It was the heat -- the sickening intoxication of the deadly heat in the shelter -- that was making the argument. When the heat reached its most relentless intensity only the instinct keeping men in their thermal bags stopped them from Wadjik finally broke off the argument by drawing down into his bag and rolling across the floor of the shelter to the lavatory door. He pressed the bottom latch through his bag, opened the door, rolled inside and hut himself off from the rest of the room. Willy fell silent. Kiev looked sideways at her. "It's no use," he whispered to her. "Save your energy." She turned and glared at'him. "And I thought you were different!" she spat and slid down, head and all, into her bag. Kiev backed into his own cocoon. Fueled by the feverishness induced by the heat, his mind ran on. They were all a little crazy, he thought, all who had taken up prospecting. Crazy -- or they had something to hide in their pasts that would keep them from ever leaving this planet. But a man who was clean elsewhere could become rich in five years if he kept his head -- and kept his health -- both on the trips and back in civilization. On Kiev's first trip into the mountains, two years ago, he had not known what he was after. Just a lot of money, he had thought, to blow back at the hotels. But now he knew better. He was going to take it cool and calm, like Johnson -- who could never leave the planet. Kiev meant to keep his own backtrail clear. And he would leave when the time came with enough to buy higi citizenship and a good business franchise back on one of the Old Worlds. He had his picture of the future clear in his mind. A modern home on a settled world, a steady, good income. Status. A family. He had seen enough of the wild edges of civilization. Leave the rest of it to the new kids coming out. He was still young but he could look ahead and see thirty up there waiting for him. His thoughts rambled on through the deadly hours as his body temperature was driven slowly upward by the heat. In the end his mind rambled and staggered. He awoke suddenly. He had passed from near-delirium into sleep without realizing it. The deadly heat of mid-afternoon had broken toward cooloff and with the first few degrees of relief within the shelter he, like all the rest, had dropped immediately into exhausted slumber. By now -- he glanced at the wristwatch on the left sleeve of his outergear -- the hour was nearly sunset. He looked about the shelter. Willy, Shant, Wadjik, Johnson were still sleeping. "Hey," he croaked at them, speaking above a whisper for the first time in hours. "Time for the drive. Up and at 'em." were all dressed, fed and outside, with the shelter folded and packed, along with the other equipment, on grav-sleds ready to travel. Wadjik and Shant took off to the north, towing their own grav-sled. Kiev and Johnson were left with their sled and the girl. They looked at her thoughtfully. The sun was already down below the peaks to the west. But threequarters of the sky above them was still white with a glare too bright to look at directly and the heat, even with outersuit and helmet sealed, made every movement a new cause for perspiration. The climate units of the suits whined with their effort to keep the occupants dry and cool. "I'm not going to join you," Willy snapped. "I won't be a tives." "We can't leave you behind," Kiev answered. "Unless you can handle a gun -- and will use it. If any of the males break away from the drive they'll double back and you'd make an easy meal." Inside the transparent helmet her face was pale even in the heat. "You can stick with the gravsled," said Kiev. "You don't have IF to join the drive. Just keep up." She did not look at him or speak. She was not going to give him the satisfaction of an answer, he thought. "Move out, then," said Johnson. They began to climb the cliffs toward the brightness in the sky, the grav-sled trailing behind them on .slave circuit, its lod piled high. Willy, looking small in her suit, trudged behind it. Under the crown of the cliffs they turned about, deployed to cover both sides of the clearing below and began their drive. They worked forward, each man firing into every rock niche or cranny that might have an Udbahr sealed up within it. Deep, booming sounds -- made by the air and moisture within each cranny exploding outward -- began to echo between the cliffs. Soon a shout came over Kiev's suit intercom in Johnson's deep voice. "One running! One running! Eleven o'clock, sixty meters, down in the cleft there." Kiev jerked his gaze ahead and caught a glimpse of an adultsized, humanlike, brown figure with a greenishly naked, round skull and large tarsierlike eyes, vanishing up a narrow cut. "No clothing," called Kiev over the intercom. "Must be a female, or a young male." "Or maybe old Hehog playing it incognito -- " Johnson began but was interrupted. "One running! One running!" bellowed Wadjik's voice distantly over the intercom. "Two o'clock, near clifftop." "One running! Deep in the pass there at three o'clock!" chimed in Johnson, again. "Keep them moving!" The sounds of the blasting attack now were routing out Udbahrs who had denned up for the ddy. Most were females or young, innocent of either clothing or weapons. But here and there was a heavier, male figure, running with spear or throwing-stick in hand and wearing anything from a rope of twisted rock vines or rat furs around his waist to some tattered article of clothing, stolen, scavenged -- or just possibly taken as a war prize -- from the dead body of a human prospector. The males were slowed by their insistence on herding the females and the young ahead of them. They always did this, even though nearly all prospectors made it a point to kill only the grown males -- the warriors who were liable to attack if left alive. The pattern was old, familiar -- one of the things that made most prospectors swear the Udbahrs had to be animal rather than intelligent. The females and young were gathering into a herd as they ran, joining up beyond the screen of the males following them. When the herd was complete -- when all who should be in it had been accounted for -- the males would choose their ground, stop and turn to fight and hold up the pursuers while the females and young escaped. same way, no matter whether the tactic were favorable or not in the terrain where they were being driven, Kiev thought suddenly. Everything the Udbahrs did was by rote. And strange to creatures who reasoned like men. No matter what Willy said, it was hard to think of them as any kind of people -- let alone people with whom you could become involved. For example, if he, Johnson, Shant and Wadjik quit driving the natives now and pulled back, the Udbahr males would immediately turn around and start trying to kill each other. It was only when they were being driven or were joining for an attack on prospectors that the males had ever been known to cooperate. So, as it always went, it went this sunset hour on the Udbah-r Planet. By the time the last light of the day star was beginning to evaporate from the western sky and the great ghostly circle of the nearer moon was beginning to be visible against a more reasonably lighted sky, some half dozen of the Udbahr males disappeared suddenly among the boulders and rocks at the mouth of a pass down which the herd of females and young were vanishing. "Hold up," Johnson gasped over the intercom. "Hold it up. They've forted. Stop and breathe." Kiev checked his weary legs and collapsed into sitting position on a boulder, panting. His body was damp all over in spite of the efforts of his suit to keep him dry. His head rang with a headache induced by exhaustion and the heat. The Udbahr males hidden among the rocks near the mouth of the pass began to sing their individual songs of defiance. Kiev's breathing eased. His headache receded to a dull ache and finally disappeared. The last of the daylight was all but gone from the sky behind them. The nearer moon, twice as large as the single moon of Earth by which all moons were measured, was sharply outlined, bright in the sky, illuminating the scene with a sort of continuing twilight. "What're you waiting for?" Willy's voice said dully in his earphones. "Why don't you go and kill them?" He turned to look for her and was astonished to find her, with the grav-sled, almost beside him. IF She had sat down on the ground, her back bowed as if in deep discouragement, her face turned away and hidden from him within the transparent helmet. "They'll come to us," he muttered without thinking. Suddenly she curled up completely into a huddled ball of silver outerwear suit and crystalline helmet. The sheer, unutterable anguish of her pose squeezed at his throat. He dropped down to his knees beside her and put his arms around her. She did not respond. "You don't understand -- " he said. And then he had the sense to tongue off the interphone and speak to her directly and privately through the closeness of their helmets, alone. "You don't understand." "I do understand. You like to do this. You like it." Her voice was muffled, dead. His heart turned over at the sound of it and suddenly, unexpectedly, he realized thathe had somehow managed to fall in love with her. He felt sick inside. It was all wrong -- all messed up. He had meant to go looking for a woman -- but eventually, after he'd made his stake and gone back to some civilized world. He had not planned anything like this involvement with a girl he had known only five days and who had all sorts of wild notions about how things should be. He did not know what to do except kneel there, holding her. "If you don't like it why do you do it?" her voice said. "If you really don't like it -- then don't do it. Now. Let these go." "I can't," he said. The singing broke off suddenly in a concerted howl from the Udbahr males, mingled with a triumphant cry over the intercom from Wadjik. "Got one." And then: "Look out. Stones." Kiev jerked into the shelter of a boulder, dragging Willy with him. Two rocks, each about half the size of his fist, dug up the ground where they had crouched together. "You see?" He pushed her roughly from him and drew his sidearm. Leaning around the boulder, he searched the rocks of the slope below the pass, watching the vernier needle of the heat-indicator slide back and forth on the weapon's barrel. It jumped suddenly and he stopped moving. He peered into the gun's rear sights, thumbing the near lens to telescopic. He held his aim on the warm location, studying the small area framed in the sight screen. Suddenly he made it outa tiny patch of brown between a larger boulder and a bit of upright, broken rock. He aimed carefully. "Don't do it." He jerked involuntarily, sending his beam wide of the mark at the sound of her voice. A patch of bare gravel boomed and flew. The bit of brown color disappeared from between the rocks. He leaned the front of his helmet wearily against the near side of the boulder before him. "Damn you," he said helplessly. "What are you doing to me?"  "I'm trying to save you," she said fiercely, "from being a murderer." Another stone hit the top of the boulder behind which they hid and caromed off over their heads. "How about saving me from that?" he said emptily. "Don't you understand? If we don't kill them they'll try to kill us -- " "I don't believe it." She, too, had shut off her intercom. Her voice came to him distantly through two thicknesses of transparent material. "Have you ever tried? Has anyone ever tried?" Another sudden volley of stones was followed by more dull explosions as the heat of the human weapons found and destroyed live targets. Shant and Wadjik were howling in triumph and shooting steadily. "We got five -- they're on the run." Shant whooped. "Kiev! Johnson! They're on the run." The explosions ceased. Kiev peered cautiously around his boulder, stood up slowly. Wadjik, Shant, and Johnson had risen from positions in a semicircle facing the distant pass. "Any get away?" Johnson was asking. "One, maybe two -- " Shant cut himself short. "Look out -- duck. Twelve o'clock, fifty meters." At once Kiev was again down behind his boulder. He dragged down Willy, tongued on his intercom. "What is it?" "That chunk of feldspar about a meter high -- " until his eyes found the rock. A glint that came and went behind and above it, winking in the waxing light of the nearer moon that now seemed as bright as a dull, cloudy day back on Earth. The flash came and went, came and went. Kiev recognized it presently as a reflection from the top curve of a transparent helmet bobbing back and forth like the head of someone dancing just behind the boulder. A male Udbahr's voice began to sing behind the rock. Man with a head-and-a-half, come and get your half-head. Man with a head-and-a-half Come so I can kill you. Ancient, my enemy. Ancient, my enemy -- IF "Hehog," snapped Johnson's voice over the helmet intercom. Silence held for a minute. Then Wadjik's voice came thinly through the phones. "What are you waiting for, Kiev?" Kiev said nothing. The transparent curve of the helmet top, rose again, bobbed and danced behind the boulder. It danced higher. Within it now was a bald, round, greenish skull with reddish, staring tarsier eyes and -- finally revealed -- the lipless gash of a fixedly grinning mouth. "What is it? What's Wadjik mean?" Willy asked. Her voice rang loud in Kiev's helmet phones. She had reactivated her intercom. "It's Hehog down there," Kiev said between stiff jaws. "That's my helmet he's wearing. He's had it ever since he first took it off me, my first trip into the mountains." "Took it off you?" "I was new .  I'd never been on a drive before," muttered Kiev. "I got hit in the chest by a stone, had the wind knocked out of me. Next thing I knew Hehog was lifting off my helmet. My partners came up shooting and drove him off." "What about it, Kiev?" The voice was Johnson's. "Do you want us to spread out and get behind him? Or you want to go down and get the helmet by yourself'" Kiev grunted under his breath, took his sidearm into his left hand and flexed the cramped fingers of his right. They had been squeezing the gunbutt as if to mash it out of all recognizable shape. "I'm going alone," he said over the intercom. "Stay back." He got his heels under him and was ready to rise when he was unexpectedly yanked backward to the gravel. Willy had pulled him down. "You're not going" He tongued off his intercom, turned and jerked her hand loose from his suit. "You don't understand," he shouted at her through his helmet. "That's the trouble with you. You don't understand a damn thing." He pushed her from him, rose and dived for the protection of a boulder four meters down the slope in front of him and a couple of meters to his right. A flicker of movement came from below as he moved -- the upward leap of a throwing stick behind the rock where Hehog hid. Kiev glimpsed something dark racing through the air toward him. A rock fragment struck and burst on the boulder face, spraying him with stone chips and splinters. Reckless now, he threw himself toward the next bit of rocky cover farther down the slope. His foot caught on a stony outcropping in the shale. He tripped and rolled, tumbling helplessly to a stop beside the very boulder behind which Hehog crouched, throwing stick in one hand, stone-tipped spear in the other. Kiev sprawled on his back. He stared helplessly up into the great eyes and humorlessly grinning mouth looming over him inside the other helmet less than an arm's length away. The spear twitched in fhe brown hand -- but that was all. Hehog stared into Kiev's eyes. Kiev was aware of Willy and the others shouting through his helmet phones. A couple of shots blasted grooves into the bouldertop above his head. And with a sudden, wordless cry Hehog bounded to his feet and dodged away among the boulders toward the pass. The bright beams of shots from the human guns followed him but lost him. He vanished into the pass. ing inside. He awoke to the fact that he was still holding his sidearm. A bitter understanding broke upon him with the hard, unsparing clarity of an Udbahr Planet dawn. He could have shot Hehog at pointblank range during the moment he had spent staring frozenly at the spear in Hehog's hand and at the great-eyed, grinning head within the helmet. Hehog had to have seen the gun. And that would have been why he had not tried to throw the spear. Kiev cursed blackly. He was still cursing when the others slid down the loose rock of the slope to surround him. "What happened?" demanded Shant. "He -- " Kiev discovered that his intercom was still off. He tongued it on. "He got away." "We know he got away," said Wadjik. "What we want to know is how come?" "You saw," Kiev snapped. "I fell. He had me. You scared him off." "He had you? I thought you had him , damn it!" "All right, he's gone," Johnson said. "That's the main thing. Leave the other bodies for whoever wants to eat them. We've had a good drive. We'll split up, now." He looked at Wadjik and Shant. "See you back in civilization." Wadjik cursed cheerfully. "Team with the heaviest load buys the drinks," he said. "Come on, Shanny." The two of them turned away, dragging their loaded grav-sled through the air behind them. IF K iev, willy and Johnson reached Dead City a good two hours before dawn. They had time to pick out one of the empty, windowless houses, half-cave, half building, to use as permanent headquarters. Tomorrow night they would cut stone to fill the open doorway but for today the shelter, fitted doublethick into the opening, would do well enough. No singing came from the surrounding cliffs. Johnson crawled in. Kiev lingered to speak to Willy. "You don't have to worry." The words were not what he had planned to say. "The Udbahrs are scared of this place." "I know." She did not look at him. "Of course. I know more about this city and the Udbahrs than even Mr. Johnson does. There's a taboo on this place for them." "Yes." Kiev looked down at his gloved right handand spread the fingers, still feeling the hard butt of his sidearm clamped inside them. "About earlier tonight, with Hehog -- " "It's all right," she said softly, looking unexpectedly up at him. Her intercom was off and her voice came to him through her helmet. In the combination of the low-angled moonlight and the first horizon glow of the dawn, her face seemed luminescent. "I know you did it for me -- after all." He stared at her. "Did what?" She still spoke softly: "I know why you let that Udbahr male live. It was because of what I'd said, wasn't it? But you need to be ashamed of nothing. You simply haven't gone bad inside, like the others. Don't worry -- I won't tell anyone." She took his arm gently with both hands and lifted her head as if -- had they been unhelmeted -- she might have kissed his cheek. Then she turned and disappeared into the cave. He followed her after some moments. A small filter panel in the shelter had let a little of the terrible daylight through for illumination. Here artificial lighting had to be on. Kiev saw by it that she had piled stores and opened some of her own gear to set up a four-foot wall that gave her individual privacy. He laid out his own thermal bag. The heat was quite bearable behind the insulation of the thickwalled building as the day began. Kiev fell into a deep, exhausted sleep that seemed completely dreamless. He awoke without warning. Instantly alert, he rose to an elbow. The light was turned down. He heard no sound from Willy. Johnson snored. Kiev remained stiffly propped on one elbow. A feeling of danger prickled his skin. He found his ears were straining for some noise that did not belong here. He listened. For a long moment he heard only the snoring and beyond it silence. Then he heard what had awakened him. It came again, like the voice of some imprisoned spirit -- not from beyond the wall but from under the stone floor on which he lay. Man with a head-and-a-half, come and get your half-head. Man with a head-and-a-half , Come , so I can kill you. Ancient, my enemy. Ancient, my enemy The singing broke off suddenly. Kiev jerked bolt upright and the thermal bag fell down around his waist. Suddenly more loudly through the rock, and nearer, the voice echoed in the dim interior of the stone building: of each other! Man with a head-and-a-half, come and get your half-head. Man with a head-and-a-half... T HE singing continued. Fury uprushed like vomit in Kiev. He swore, tearing off his thermal bag and pawing through his piled outerwear. His fingers closed on the butt of the weapon. He jerked it clear, aimed it at the section of floor from which the singing was coming and pressed the trigger. Light, heat and thunder shredded the sleeping quiet of the dimly lit room. Kiev held the beam steady, a hotter rage inside him than he could express with the rock-rending gun. He felt his arm seized. The sidearm was torn from his grip. He whirled to find Johnson holding the weapon out of reach. "Give me that," Kiev said thickly. "Wake up," Johnson said, lowvoiced. "What's got into you?" "Didn't you hear?" Kiev shouted at him. "That was Hehog -- Hehog! Down there!" He pointed at the hole with its melted sides, half a meter deep into the floor of the building. "I heard," said Johnson. "It was Hehog, all right. There must be tunnels under some of these buildings." Willy chimed in. "But Udbahrs don't -- " Kiev and Johnson turned to see her staring at them over the top of her barricade. Kiev became suddenly conscious that, like Johnson, he was completely without clothes. Willy's face disappeared abruptly. Kiev turned back to look at the hole his gun had burned in the IF stone. It showed no breakthrough into further darkness at the bottom. "All right," he said shakily. "I'm sorry. I woke up hearing him and just jumped -- that's all. We can shift to another building tomorrow. And sound for tunnels before we move in." Johnson turned and returned to his thermal bag. Kiev resumed his cocoon. He lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring up at the shadowy ceiling... Ancient, my enemy... ancient, my enemy... The memory of Hehog's chant continued to run through his head. You and me, Hehog. I'll show you, Udbahr... After some time he fell asleep. night, as soon as the sun was down. Kiev and Johnson quarried large chunks of rock from the wall of an adjoining building, melted them into place to fill up the new door opening, except for the entrance unit, which was set up double as a heat lock and fitted into place. Now the shelter air-conditioner could keep the whole interior of the new building comfortable all day long. The night was half over by the time they finished. Kiev and Johnson had some four hours left to trek to their prospecting area. The gold ore deposits in the neighborhood of Dead City were almost always in pipes and easily worked out in a few days by men with the proper equipment. Kiev hesitated. "I'll stay," he said. "With Hehog around, someone's got to stay with Miss Fairchild." Johnson regarded him thoughtfully. "You're right. If we leave her here alone Hehog's sure to get her. And who would sell us gear for our next trip if word got out about how we left her to be killed?" He hesitated. "Tell you what -- we'll draw straws." Kiev said, "I'll stay. Drop back in a week. I'll tell you then if I need you to take over." Johnson nodded. He turned away and began his packing -- food, weapons, equipment, a water drill for tapping the moon flower root systems. Also, a breathing membrane for sealing the caves they would be denning up in by day. Kiev, squatting, making a final check of the seal around the entrance, saw a shadow fall across a seam he was examining. He stood up, turned and saw Willy down the street, taking solidographs of one of the buildings. Johnson stood just behind him, equipment already on his backpack. "We haven't had a chance to talk," Johnson said. "No." "Let me say now what I've wanted to say. Why don't you pack up and go back -- and take the girl with you?" "I've got my stake to make out here -- like everybody else." "You know there's more to the situation. Hehog's changed everything. Also, there's the girl -- we both know what I mean. And there's something else -- something I don't think you're aware of." "What?" "You've heard how sometimes the males -- if they've just fed so they aren't hungry and there's only one of them around -- will come into your camp and sit down to talk?" Kiev frowned at him. "I've heard of it," he said. "It's never happened to me." "It's happened to me," said Johnson. "They .ask you things that'd surprise you. Surprise you what they tell you, too. You know why Hehog's broken taboo and come right into Dead City?" "Do you?" Johnson nodded. "There's a thing the Udbahrs believe in," Johnson said. "They figure that when they eat someone they eat his soul, too?" "Sure," said Kiev. "And that soul stays inside them until they're killed. Then, when they die, if no one else eats them right away, all the souls of all the bodies they've eaten in their lives fly loose and take over the bodies of pups too young to have strong souls of their own." Johnson nodded. He tilted his head at the distant figure of Willy. "You've been learning from her," he said. "Her? As a matter of fact, I have," said Kiev. "But you were the one told me about Udbahr cannibalism -- a year or more ago." "Did I?" Johnson looked at him. "Did I tell you about Ancient Enemies?" Kiev shook his head. "Once in a while a couple of males get a real feud going. It's not an ordinary hate. It's almost a noble thing -- if you follow me. And from then on the feud never stops, no matter how many times they both die. Every time one is killed and born again -- when he grows up it's his turn to kill the other one. The next time the roles are reversed. You follow me?" Kiev frowned. "No." "Figure both souls live forever through any number of bodies. other physically." Johnson looked strangely at Kiev. "The only thing is that no soul ever remembers IF from one body to the next -- they never know whose turn it is to be killed and which one's to be the killer. So they just keep running into each other until the soul of one of them tells him, 'Go!' Then he kills the other and goes off to wait to die." Johnson stopped speaking. Kiev stared. "You mean Hehog thinks he and I -- he thinks we're these Ancient Enemies?" "Night before last," said Johnson, "you and he were face to face, both armed -- and neither one of you killed the other. Yesterday -- while we were denned up -- he showed up here in the Dead City where it's taboo for him to be. Being Ancient Enemies is the only thing that'd set him free of a taboo like that. What do you think?" Kiev turned for a second look down the street at Willy. "Hehog's not going to leave you alone if I'm right," said Johnson. "And he's smart. He might even of us so he could stay close to you. And the easiest one for him to kill would be that girl. And it's true what I said. We lose a human woman out here and no supplier's going to touch us with a ten-foot pole." "Yeah," said Kiev. "I'm not afraid of Hehog, myself. But I've got no place else to go. I plan to die out here some day -- but not yet for a few trips. Take the girl and head back. Give up the mountains while you still can. Kiev -- I mean it." "You can't make us leave," Kiev said slowly. "No," said Johnson. His face looked old and dark as weatherstained oak. "But you keep that girl here and Hehog'll get her. She doesn't know anything but books and she doesn't understand someone like Hehog. She doesn't even understand us." He took a step back. "So long, partner," he said. "See you in three nights -- maybe." He turned and walked away slowly, leaning forward against the weight of the pack, until he was lost among the rocks of the western cliffs. Kiev turned and saw the small shape of Willy even farther down the street, still taking pictures. the next two days and nights, which were quiet. He spent most of his time studying the aerial maps of areas near Dead City he had planned to work during this trip. Actually he was getting his ideas in order for explanation to Willy, who seemed to be having the time of her life. She was measuring and photographing Dead City inch by inch, as excited over it as if it were one large Christmas present. She had changed toward him, too, teasing him and doing for him, by turns. Hehog did not sing from underground in the new building. On the third night Kiev invited himself along on her work with the City. He realized now that what Johnson had told him was true. Johnson's words had been the final shove he had needed to make up his mind. The fact that he and Willy had met less than a week ago meant nothing. Out here things were different. He had worried about how he would bring up the subject of his future -- and hers. But it turned out that he had no need to bring it up. It was already there. Almost before he knew it they were talking as if certain things were understood and taken for granted. He said, "I've got at least five more trips to make to get the stake I need for a move back to the Old Worlds. You'd have to wait." "But you don't need to keep coming back here," she said. "I know how you can make the rest of the money you need without even one more trip. I know because a publishing company talked to me about doing something like it. There's a steady market for information about humanoids like the Udbahrs. Books, lectures. Acting as industrial and economic consultant -- " He stared at her. "I couldn't do anything like that," he said. "I'm no good with words and theories -- " "You don't have to be. All you have to do is tell what you've seen and done on these trips of yours. You'll collect enough on advance bookings alone for us to go back to any Old World you IF wantafter I get my doctorate, of courseand settle down there. Don't forget I've got my work, too. I'll be teaching." She stared at him eagerly. "And think of what you'll be achieving. Intelligent natives are being killed off or exploited on new worlds like this one simply because there's no local concern over them and because our civilization hasn't understood them enough to make the necessary concessions for them to accept it. You could be the one to get the ball rolling that could save the Udbahrs from being hunted down and killed off -- " "By people like me, you mean," he said, a little sourly. , "Not you. You haven't yet been infected with the sort of and even Johnson -- have." "It isn't a lust. Out here you have to kill the Udbahrs to keep She looked at him sharply. "Yes -- if you're a savage," she said. "As the Udbahrs are savages. I couldn't love an Udbahr. I could only love a man who was civilized -- able to keep the savage part inside him chained up. That Ancient Enemy business Hehog sang at you -- that's the way a savage thinks. I don't expect you not to have the psychological if you're a healthy-minded man you can keep that sort of Ancient Enemy locked up inside you. You don't have to let him take you over." He opened his mouth to make one more stubborn effort to explain himself to her, then closed it again rather helplessly. He found a certain uncomfortable rightness in part of what she was saying. Although from that rightness she went off into left field somewhere to an area where he was sure she was wrong. While he groped for words to express himself the still air around him was suddenly torn by the sound of a gun-bolt explosion. He found himself running toward the building they had set up as their headquarters, sidearm in his hand, the sound of Willy's voice and footsteps following him. The distance was not great and he did not slow down for her. Better if he made it first -- or if she did not come at all until he knew what had happened. He rounded the corner of the building and saw the shelter entrance hanging in blackened tatters. He dove past it. By some miracle the light was still burning against the ceiling but the interior it illuminated was a scene of wreckage. Concussion and heat from the bolt had tom apart or scorched everything in the place. With a wild coldness inside him, he pawed swiftly through the rubble for whatever was usable. Two thermal sleeping bags were still in working condition, though their outer covering was charred in spots and stinking of burned plastic. Food containers were ripped open and their contents destroyed. The water drill was workable and most of one air membrane was untouched. "What happened? Who did it? Kiev -- " Willy was with him again, literally pulling at him to get his attention. He came erect wearily. "I don't know," he said, dully. "Maybe some prospector has gone out of his head entirely. Or -- " IF He hesitated. "Or what?" He looked at her. "Or an Udbahr male has gotten hold of the gun of a dead prospector." Her face thinned and whitened under the light of the overhead temp. "A dead -- " She did hot finish. "That's right," he said. "One of our people, it could be -- Wadjik, Shant or Johnson." "How could a savage who knows only sticks and stones kill an experienced, armed man?" Willy sounded outraged. "All sorts of animals kill people." He felt sick inside, hating himself for not having set up at least a trigger wire to guard the building area. "We've got to get out of here. We can't spend another night in a building, anyway, without a shelter entrance." "Where'll we go?" "We'll head toward Johnson," Kiev said. "He isn't digging so far away that we shouldn't be able to make it before dawn -- if he isn't dead." They started out on the bearing Johnson had taken and soon left the city behind them. Fully risen moonflowers -- some of them giants over three meters high -- surrounded them. They were lost in a forest of strange, pale beauty, where by day there would only be the bare, heat-blasted mountainside. "Aren't we likely to pass him and not even see him?" asked Willy. "No," Kiev said absently. "He'll be following contours at a constant elevation. So are we. When he gets close enough, we'll hear static in our earphones." He did not again mention the possibility of Johnson's being dead -- partly because he wanted to be easy on himself. They tramped on in silence. Kiev's mind was busy among the number of problems opened up by their present situation. After about an hour he heard the hiss of interference in his helmet phones that signaled the approach of another transmitting unit. He stopped so suddenly that Willy bumped into him. He rotated his helmet slowly, listening for the maximum noise. When he found it, he spoke. "Johnson? Johnson, can you hear me?" "Thought it was you, Kiev." Johnson's voice came distorted and weakened by rocky distance. "The girl with you? What's up?" "Somebody fired a gun into our building," said Kiev. "I scraped together a sort of maintenance kit out of what was left -- but I'm carrying all the salvage." "I see." Johnson did not waste breath on speculation. "Stop where you are and wait for me. We better head back toward Wad's and Shanny's diggings as soon as we're together. No point your burning energy trying to meet me halfway." "Right." Kiev loosened his pack and sat down with his back to the trunk of a moonflower. Willy sat beside him. She said nothing and, busy with his own thoughts still, he hardly noticed her silence. By the time Johnson found them Kiev had already worked out the new compass heading from their present location to the diggings where Wadjik and Shant had planned to work. A little over three hours of the night remained. "Do you think we can make it before dawn?" Kiev asked as the three of them started out on the new heading. "You've been through that area before, haven't you?" Johnson nodded. "I don't know," he said. "It'll be faster going once the moonflowers are down." He looked at Willy. "We'll be pushing on as fast as we can. Think you can keep up?" "Yes," she said without looking at him. Her voice was dull. "Good. If you start really to give out, though, speak up. Don't overdo it to the point where we have to carry you. All right?" "Yes." Soon the moonflowers had drawn in their petals until they were hardly visible under the hoods and begun their retreat into the ground. The men were now able to see, across the tops of the hoods, the general shape of the terrain and pick the most direct route from contour point to contour point. Willy walked between them. The moonflower hoods still stood above her head -- tall as she was for a woman -- but did not seem to bother her. She looked at nothing. Johnson glanced at Kiev across the top of her helmet, and tongued off his helmet phones. He let her walk slightly ahead, then leai.ed toward Kiev until their helmets touched. "I told you," Johnson said softly through the helmet contact. "She didn't understand or believe. We were something out of books to her -- so were the Udbahrs. Now she's trying hard to keep on not believing. You see why I told you yesterday to get her out of here?" Kiev said nothing. Johnson pulled back his helmet, tongued his intercom back on, kept walking. After a while the sky began to whiten ominously. The nearer moon was low and paling on the horizon behind. Johnson halted. Kiev and Willy also stopped. IF "It's no good," said Johnson, over the intercom to Kiev. "We're 'going to have to take time to find a hole to crawl into before day. We're going to have to quit now and wait for night." Kiev nodded. "A hole?" echoed Willy. Kiev looked at Johnson. Johnson shrugged. The message of the shrug was clear -- there were no caves in this area. But they hunted until Johnson called a halt. "This will have to do." He pointed to a crack in a rock face. He and Kiev attacked the crack with mining tools and their guns. Twenty minutes' work hollowed out a burrow three meters in circular diameter, with an entrance two feet square. Above the entrance the crack had been sealed with melted rock. The trio crawled inside and fitted the breathing membrane in place against the opening. Kiev waited until all were undressed and in their thermal bags before setting the light he had saved from the building in place against the roCky ceiling. The cramped closeness of their enclosure came to solid life around them. The den was beginning to heat up. The place had no air-conditioning unit -- the shelter had been a palace by comparison. Even Kiev had to struggle against the intoxicating effect of the heat and the claustrophic panic of the enclosed space. Willy went out of her head before noon. Kiev and Johnson had to hold her in her thermal bag. Shortly after that she went into syncope and stayed unconscious until cool-off. Haggard with exhaustion, Kiev leaned on one elbow above her, staring down into her face, now smoothed out into natural sleep. Teetering on the verge of irresistible unconsciousness himself, he felt in him the strange clearheadedness of utter weariness. She had been right, he thought, about that primitive part in him and all men -- the Ancient Enemy. The prospectors did not so much fight the Udbahr males out here as something in themselves that corresponded to its equivalent in the lust that could get you to the point where you no longer cared if you were killed yourself. thought. When he opened his eyes the membrane was down from the entrance and outside was the cool and blessed moonlight. He crawled out to find Willy and Johnson already packing gear. "Got to move, Kiev," said Johnson, seeing him. "If Wad and Shanny are alive and headed home we want to take out after them as soon as possible. One long night's walk can put us back at the hotel." "The hell you say." Kiev was astonished. "They didn't come all the way out with us and then cut that far back to find a digging area." "No," Johnson said, "but from here we can hit a different pass through the border range. Going back that way makes the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Coming out we would have dog-legged it to reach this point like doing the triangle's other two sides. You understand?" Within half an hour they were on their way. And within an hour, as they were coming around a high spire of rock, Johnson put out his arm and stopped. "Wait here, Willy," Johnson said. "Come on, Kiev." The two men rounded the rock and stopped, staring down into a small open area. They saw the scattered remains of working equipment and of Wadjik and Shant. At least one day under the open sun had mummified their bodies. Wadjik lay on his back with the broken shaft of a spear through his chest. But Shant had been pegged out and left to die. Their outerwear and guns were gone. "I thought I saw sign of at least half a dozen males back there," Johnson said. "Hehog, all right -- with help. He must be swinging some real clout with the other males to have kept them from eating these two right away." He glanced hard at Kiev. "And all for you." Kiev stared. "Me? You mean Hehog tied Shanny up and left him like that on purpose -- just so I could come along and see it?" "You begin to see what Ancient Enemy means?" he responded. "We're in trouble, Kiev. Two guns missing and one of the local males grown into a real hoodoo. We'll get moving for civilization right now." "You're going to bury them first," Willy said. The men swung around. She was standing just behind them, looking at them. Her gaze dropped, fixed on the bodies below. For a second Kiev thought that the sight had sent her completely out of her mind. Then he saw that her eyes were clear and sane. Johnson said, "We haven't time -- and, anyway, the Udbahrs would come back to dig them up again when they were hungry enough." "He's right, Willy," said Kiev. "We've got to go -- fast." He thought of something else and swung back to Johnson. "That pass you talked about -- they'll be laying for us there, Hehog and IF the other males he's got together. It's the straightest route home, you say, and they know prospectors always head straight out of the mountains when they get into trouble." Johnson shook his head. "Don't think so," he said. "You're no prospector to Hehog. You're his Ancient Enemy, looking for that one spot where you and he come face to face and one of you gets the word to kill the other. He'll be right around this area, waiting for us to start hunting for him. If we move fast we've got as good a chance as anyone ever had to get out of these mountains alive." Several times -- before the nearer moon was high in the sky and the moonflowers were stretching to full bloom -- Willy tripped and would have gone down if Kiev had not caught her. But she did not complain. In fact, she said nothing at all. Shortly after midnight, they broke out from under the umbrellas of a clump of moonflower petals and found themselves in the pass Johnson had talked about. "We made it," said Johnson, stopping. Kiev also stopped. Willy, stumbling with weariness, blundered into him. She clung to him like a child -- and at that moment a thin, bright beam came from among the trunks of the moonflowers behind them. The side of Johnson's outerwear burst in dazzle and smoke. Johnson lunged forward. Kiev and Willy ran behind him. Three more bright beams flickered around them as they lurched over the lip of the pass, took half a dozen long, staggering, tripping strides down the far side and dived to shelter behind some waist-high chunks of granite. Male Udbahr voices began to sing on the far side of the pass. Johnson coughed. Kiev looked at him and Johnson quickly turned his helmet away, so that the face plate was hidden. "Move out," Johnson said, in a thick voice, like that of a man with a frog in his throat. "Are you crazy?" Kiev had his sidearm out. He sighted around the granite boulder before him and sent a beam high into the rock wall beyond the lip of the pass, on the other side. The rock boomed loudly and flew in fragments. The singing stopped. After a moment it started again. "I can't help you now," Johnson said, still keeping his face turned away. "Move out, I tell you." "You think I'm going to leave you?" Kiev sent off another bolt into the rock face beyond the lip of the pass. This time the singing hardly paused. "Don't waste your charges," Johnson said hoarsely. "Get out. Half an hour puts you -- hotel." He had to stop in mid-sentence to cough. "Forget it, partner," said Kiev. "With my gun and yours I can hold that pass until morning. They can't come through." Johnson gave an ugly laugh. "What partner?" he asked. "This partnership's dissolved. And what'll you do when dawn comes? Cook? You're still a good hour's trek from the hotel." Kiev became aware that Willy was tugging at his arm. She motioned with her head for him to follow her. He did. She slid back down among the rocks until they were a good four meters from where Johnson lay, head toward the pass. Willy tongued off her intercom and touched her helmet to his. "He's dying," she said to him through the helmets. "All right." Kiev stared at her as if she were Hehog himself. "You couldn't get him to the hotel in time to save his life even if there weren't any Udbahrs behind us. And we'll never make the hotel unless he stays there and keeps them from following us." "So?" She took hold of his shoulders and tried to shake him but e was too heavy and too unmoving with purpose. "Be sensible." She was almost crying. "Don't you see it's something he wants to do? He wants to save us -- " Kiev stared at her stonily. "Shanny's dead," Kiev said. "Wad's dead. You want me to leave Johnson?" S HE did begin to cry at that, the tears running down her pale face inside her helmet. "All right, hate me," she said. "Why shouldn't I want to live? This is all your fault -- not mine. I didn't kill your partners. I didn't make Hehog your special enemy. All I did was love you. If you were back there I wouldn't leave you, either. But that wouldn't make my staying sensible." "Go on if you want," he said coldly. "You know I can't find the hotel by myself!" she said. "You know I'm not going to leave you. Maybe you've got a right to kill yourself -- maybe you've even got a right to kill me. But have you got the right to kill me for something that's got nothing to do with me?" He closed his eyes against the sight of her face. After seconds he opened his eyes, looked away from her, and began to crawl IF bafyc up the slope until he once more lay beside Johnson. "It's Willy," he said, not looking  the other man. "Sure. That's right," said Johnson hoarsely. A flicker of dark movement came from one side of the pass and his gun spat. The pass was clear of pursuers again. "Damn you both," Kiev said, emptily. "Sure, boy," said Johnson. "Don't waste time, huh?" Kiev lay where he was. The nearer moon was descending in the sky a little above and to the right of the pass. "I'll leave my gun," Kiev said at last. "Don't need it," Johnson said. Kiev reached out and took Johnson's gloved hand into his own. Through the fabric the return pressure of the other man's grip was light and feeble. "Get out," said Johnson. "I told you I figured on ending out here." "You told me not for some trips yet." "Changed my mind." Johnson let go of Kiev's hand and closed his eyes. His voice was not much more than a whisper. "I think instead I'll make it this trip." He did not say any more. After a long minute Kiev spoke to him again. "Johnson -- " Johnson did not answer. Only the gun in his hand spat light briefly into the wall of the pass. Kiev stared a second longer, then turned and went sliding down the hill to where Willy crouched. "We go fast," said Kiev. ing back. Twice they heard the sound of a gun behind them. Then intervening rocks cut off whatever else they might have heard. They walked without pausing. After about an hour Willy began to stumble with exhaustion and clung to him. Kiev put his arm around her; they hobbled along together, leaning into the pitch of the upslopes, sliding in the loose rock of downslopes. The moon was low on the stony horizon behind them. Ahead came the first whitening in the sky that said dawn was less than two hours away. Willy staggered and leaned more heavily upon Kiev. Looking down at her face through the double transparencies of both helmets, Kiev saw that she was stumbling along with her eyes tightly closed, her face hardened into a colorless mask of effort. A strand of hair had fallen forward over one closed eye and his heart lurched at the sight of it. Not from the first had he ever thought of her as beautiful. Now, gaunt with effort, hair disarrayed, ' # she was less so than ever -- and yet he had never loved and wanted her more. It was because of the mountains, he thought. And Hehog, Wad, Shanny -- and Johnson. Each time he had paid out one of them for her, the worth of her had gone up that much. Now she was equal to the total of all of them together. She stumbled again, almost lost her footing. A wordless little sound was jolted out from between her clenched teeth, though her eyes stayed closed. "Walk," he said savagely, jerking her upright and onward. "Keep walking." They were on the Track, now, the curving trail that all the prospectors took out of the valley of the Border Hotel. "Keep walking," he muttered to her. "Just around the curve there -- " A bolt from a gun behind them boomed suddenly against the cliffbase to their right. Rock chips rained down Willy's knees. She lurched toward the shelter of the nearest boulder. He jerked her upright. "Run for it. Run -- " Jolting, stumbling, they ran while bolts from the gun boomed. "They can't shoot worth -- " Kiev muttered through his teeth. He stopped talking. Because at that moment they rounded curve and saw the sprawling concrete shape of the Border Hotel and its grounds -- and saw Hehog, holding a sidearm, stepping out from behind a rock twenty feet ahead. In that instant time itself seemed to hesitate. Kiev's weary legs had checked at his sight of Hehog. He started forward again at a walk, half-carrying Willy. Her eyes were still closed. He thought, She doesn't see Hehog. He marched on. Hehog brought up the gun, aimed it -- but he, too, seemed caught in the suspension of time. He wore the helmet he had taken from Kiev two years before and now he also wore the white jacket of Shant's outerwear suit -- which almost fit him. He stood waiting, one sidearm in a jacket pocket, one in his hand, aimed. Kiev stumped toward him, bringing Willy. Kiev's eyes were on the bulging eyes of Hehog. Their gazes locked. The only sound was the noise of Kiev's boots scuffing the rock underfoot. From the hotel in the valley below, no sound. From the other Udbahr males that had been firing at them from behind, no sound. Kiev marched on, Hehog growing before him. The great eyes danced in Kiev's vision. There was a wild emptiness in Kiev now, an insane certainty. He did not move aside to avoid Hehog. They were ten feet apart -- they were five -- they would collide -- IF Hehog stepped back. Without shifting the line of his advance an inch, without moving his eyes to follow Hehog, Kiev marched past him. The trail to the hotel sloped suddenly more sharply under Kiev's feet and now he looked only at what was manmade. All the Udbahrs were behind him. And behind him he heard Hehog beginning to sing softly. Man with a head-and-a-halj, come and get your half-head. Man with a head-and-a-halj. Come, so I can kill you... The song faded behind him until his stumbling feet carried him in through the great airdoor of the hotel and all things ended at once. covering and three days after that sitting around the Border Hotel, making plans for the future with Willy. They had adjoining rooms, each with a balcony looking out to the dawnrise side of the hotel. Heavy filterglass doors shut out the sunlight and protected the rooms' air-conditioned interiors during the daytime. Kiev had agreed to go back to the Old Worlds with Willy, to get married and write and tell what he knew. There was nothing wrong with making a living any way you could back on the Old Worlds, even if it meant writing and lecturing. Only once did Willy bring up the subject of the mountains. "Why did Hehog let us pass?" she asked. He stared at her. "I thought that your eyes were closed." "I opened them when you halted. I closed them when I saw him. I thought it was all over then -- and that he was going to kill us both. But you started walking and he let us pass. Why?" Kiev looked down at the thick brown carpet. "Hehog's never going to get the message," he said to the carpet. "What?" "Ancient Enemies -- Johnson told me. Hehog thinks he and I are something special to each other with this Ancient Enemies business. We're doomed to have one of us kill the other. We're supposed to keep coming together until one of us gets the message to kill. Then the other just lets it happen. Because he's doomed -- there's nothing he can do about it." He stopped talking. For a minute she said nothing, either, as if she was waiting for him to go on explaining. "Hehog didn't get the message when we walked past him?" she asked, at last. "Is that it?" "He'll never get the message," said Kiev dully. "He had two clear chances at me and he didn't do anything. It means he thinks he's the one who's doomed. He's waiting to die -- for me to kill him." "To kill him? Why would he want you to kill him? " Kiev shrugged. "Answer me." "How do I know?" Kiev said exhaustedly. "Maybe he's getting old. Maybe he thinks it's just time for him to die -- maybe his mate's dead." There was momentary, somehow ugly silence. Then Willy spoke again. "Kiev." "What?" "Look up here," she said, sharply. "I want you to look at me." He r.aised his gaze slowly from the thick carpet and saw her face as stiffly fixed as it had been in the helmet on the last long kilometer to the hotel. "Listen to me, Kiev," she said. "I love you and I want to live with you more than anything else for the rest of my life -- and I'll do anything for you I can do. But there's one thing I can't do. I just can't." He frowned at her, uneasy and restless. "I can't help it," she said. "I thought we were getting away from it here and that it wouldn't matter But it does. If I can feel it there in you I go dead inside -- I just can't love you any more. That's all there is to it." "What?" he asked. Her hands made themselves into ineffective small fists in her lap, then uncurled and lay limp. "There are so many things I love about you," she said emptily, "I thought I could ignore this one thing. But I can't think so anymore. Not since we saw those two dead men -- and not since the walk back here. Our love is just never going to work if you still want -- want to kill. Do you understand? If you're still wanting to kill it just won't work out for us. Do you understand, Kiev?" The bottom seemed to fall out of his stomach. He was abruptly sick. "I told you that's all over!" he shouted furiously at her. "I don't want to kill anything!" "You don't have to promise." She rose to her feet, her face still tight. "It doesn't matter if you promise. It only matters if you're telling the truth."... She turned and walked to the door of his hotel room. "It's almost dawn," she said. "I'm going down to see if the authorization for our spaceship tickets has come through for today's flight -- before the sun shuts off communications. I'll be back in half an hour." She went out. The door made no noise closing behind her. the bed, stared up at the ceilIF ing. Everything was wonderful -- or was it? He tried to think about the future in safety of the Old Worlds but his mind would not focus. After a bit he rose and walked out to the balcony. Before him stood the ramparts of the cliffs. On the balcony was an observation scope. He bent over it and fiddled with its controls until the boulders a kilometer away seemed to hang a dozen meters in front of him. He turned the sound pickup on. It was nearly time for the Udbahrs to be hunting their dens for the day but he heard no singing. He panned the scope, searching the rocks. There it came -- a faint wisp of melody. He searched the rock. The stone blurred before him. He lost then found the song again and closed in on it until the image in the screen of the scope locked on the figure of a male Udbahr standing deep between two tall boulders -- an Udbahr wearing a transparent helmet and white jacket, with a sidearm in his hand. The song came suddenly loud and clear. Ancient , my enemy. Ancient, my enemy. No one but ourselves has the Man with a head-and-a-half, come and get your halfhead. Man with a head-and-a-half Kiev stepped back from the scope. His head pounded suddenly. His stomach knotted. His throat ached. A fever blazed through him and his skin felt dry, dusty. He turned and strode across the room to his bag. He plowed through it, throwing new shoes, pants and shirts aside. His hand closed on the last hard item at the bottom. His gun. He jerked out the weapon, snatched up the long barrel for distance shooting and was snapping it into position on the gun even as he was striding toward the balcony. He applied the magnetic clamp of the gun butt to the scope and thumbed up the near lens of the telescopic sight. The red crosshairs wavered, searched, found Hehog. It was a long shot. The lenses of the sight held level on the Udbahr in a straight line; but below them, on their gimbals, the barrel of the automatically sighting weapon was angled so that it seemed to point clear over the cliffs at the day that was coming. Kiev's dry and shaking fingers curled around the butt. His forefinger reached toward the firing button and instantly all the shaking was over. His grip was steady. His blood was ice but the fever still burned in his brain. As clearly as a vision before him, he saw the mummified figures of Wadjik and Shant -- and Johnson as he had last seen the older man. Kiev pressed the firing button. From the cliffside came the sound of a distant explosion. A puff of rockdust plumed toward the whitening sky. A rising murmur, a mounting buzz of voices began beyond the walls of his room. People began to appear on the surrounding balconies. Kiev faded back two steps, silent as a thief. Hidden in the shadows of the balcony he could still see what the others could not. Hehog lay beside one of the two boulders between which he had been standing. A blackish stain was spreading on the right side of his white jacket and the sidearm had fallen from his grip. He was plainly dying. But he was not yet dead. He began to sing again. Man with a head-and-a-half... come and get your... halfhead. Man with a head-and-a... Through the pick-up of the scope Kiev, frozen in the shadows, could hear the Udbahr's voice weakening. Then the door to the room slammed open behind him. "Kiev, did you hear it? Someone shot from the Hotel -- " Willy's voice broke off. He turned and saw her just inside the door. She was gazing past him at the scope with its picture of Hehog and the sound of Hehog's weakening song coming from it. She stared at it. Then, slowly, as if she was being forced against her will, her eyes shifted until they met his. All the feeling in him that the sight of Hehog had triggered into life went out of him with a rush, leaving him empty as a disemboweled man. "Willy -- " He took a step toward her. Her face twitched as if with a sudden, sharp, unbearable pain and her hand came up reflexively as if to push him away, though they were still more than half a room apart. Her throat worked but she made no sound. She struggled for an instant, then shook her head briefly. Still holding up her hand as if to fend him off, she backed away from him. The door opened behind her and let her out. The door closed, leaving him alone. He swung slowly back to face the scope. Hehog still lay framed in the lens and above that image the ominous light of day was fast whitening the sky. Hehog was still feebly singing; but the song had changed. Now it was the song Willy had asked Kiev to translate when she had first heard an Udbahr male. Kiev turned and flung himself facedown IF on the bed, his arms over his head to shut out the sound. But the song came through to him. You desert me now, female. Because I am crippled. And yet, all my fault was That  did not lack courage. Therefore I will go now to the high rocks to die. And another will take you... The slow rumble of the heavy, opaque, thermal glass, sliding automatically across the entrance to the balcony, silenced the song in Kiev's ears. Beyond the dark glass the sun of day broke at last over the rim of the cliffs and sent its fierce light slanting down. There was no mercy in that relentless light and all living things who did not hide before it died.  In the Next Issue tells a mind-wrenching story of love, politics and genetic prejudice that reaches from Earth's bio-laboratories through the halls of Congress to the farthest stars. A timely classic of our tomorrows -- about a man and a woman reduced to their basic male-female essences who, with nothing else in common, pointed to each other in hostile universe and insisted -- Also takes a look at man's future in space -- An Illustrated Feature dead world. It was a grunting, hurried protest, a way of saying they still lived. It was perhaps more sane than laughing and safer than crying -- and easier than being alone. Better, it was a way to ignore each other. The too-bright sun of that dead world began to set and the shadows from the tall, broken towers of the city, mute testimonies of an alien and forgotten architecture, lengthened and covered them over. If the silence of a dead world can be said to do so, the silence grew deeper. At night it sometimes seemed to the two of them that they were the only life that world had ever seen and that the city was only a skeletal outcropping of rock and stone. It would then seem to them that the past had been quieter and that treaty with the night. They would the future was nonexistent. It was talk but they had long ago reached not a pleasant feeling -- but ifnan agreement never to say anynatural silences have a way of thing. Two people alone, alone working on your mind. They knew and scared, cannot afford to bethis and felt lucky to escape so come the best of friends. Friends easily. ' confide truths; that hope was lost. In the darkest parts of the night for instance. So all they could do they would try to talk and that was become lovers, seldom seemed to work. "I wonder -- " Cary mumbled. Unknowingly, even to themHe reached reflexively into his selves, they had arrived at a partial shirt pocket, searching for a pack of cigarettes that was never there. "What do you wonder?" Natalie asked him, thinking he expected a reply of her. "I wonder about death. I wonder what happened here. I think that they'll never find us and I wonder if they'll care. I wonder why I came here -- and whether I would have if I had seen what was waiting." He grinned and leaned across the alley toward her, "Sometimes -- sometimes I wonder if I had met you back home -- would I even have learned your name?" "Of course," Natalie said. "We moved in the same circles and knew all the same scavengers. Sooner or later there would have been one piece of carrion we both would have gone for. It just happened to be this one, that's all." Of the two of them Natalie was more frightened of friendship. Often she would have to go out of her way to remind him of the danger. But she was not a cruel woman. She was merely young -- and young people should never have to face death. It destroys their perspective and makes them fearful. Cary was older than she but he was still young enough. So he played the game, too.  "I'm going exploring," he said. "Want to come?" "You going to the map room?" "Maybe. I suppose so." "You go ahead then." "Well, all right. See you later?" "I'm not going anywhere." ways until he came to the main quadrangle of the city. At first glance it seemed identical .to the other hundreds of quadrangles. It was a small, square area, towers rising from each of its four corners. Tall, those towers were, some more than a hundred stories. They were wide at the base and tapered smoothly to the top story. Yet they had an aura of being squat and ugly -- of being somehow evil. Cary had long since ceased being awestruck by the towers. You can get used to anything after a while, even to a repetitive architecture, alien and cold. But what never failed to arouse an emotion in him was a small statue on a pedestal in the middle of the blue lawn of that one quadrangle. It was small, no more than three feet tall, and it was of a man and a woman. Cary moved closer and squatted d#wn to study it as he had done nearly every day since the crash. It had been the first thing they had found that gave any hint of the city's past. Hint? No, more of a puzzle-piece, a very small one. But it was still the only native object of art they had found. Cary, for what must have been the hundredth IF time, wondered what kind of people would live in a city where there was only one statue. No paintings, no fountains, only a small statue of a man and a woman. The figure of the man lay curled up, his hands pressed to his ears, his head bent over, seemingly ground into the stone pedestal. He seemed to be trying to cause himself pain. The figure of the woman stood straight above him. Her head was tilted back and her eyes seemed to focus on a point above the tops of the towers around her. Cary raised himself to his feet and stood over the statue. He looked down into the blank stone eyes of the woman. "Whom are you looking for?" he whispered. Not that he expected she would answer him. He was twenty-four years old. His best friend had died in the crash and he expected to die soon himself, once the food at the ship gave out. He no longer expected answers. Because he was young he refused simply to wait to starve. He made love and he explored. He wondered. One of the places he wondered about the most was in the map room. He entered the map room through the doorway in the base of the largest tower in the city. The doorway was the only other piece of ornamentation in the city. It was carved with what appeared to be designs but could have been lettering -- or, for all he knew, warnings against unauthorized personnel. He and Natalie referred to it as the map room but it was more of an auditorium than a room. Whatever it was, all of the immense first floor of the tower was devoted to it. The ceiling was a hundred feet overhead. It was the only tower they had found where the lighting system was still in working condition. The light had a slightly reddish cast, which was strange. The sun outside the tower was as yellow as that of Earth's. The red light was one more puzzle-piece -- like the statue and the carvings on the door. But the walls of the room were the main body of the puzzle. The keystone that seemed to say to him that all the other pieces would fit snugly if he could only decipher the one big mystery. From the ceiling to ten feet above the floor, the walls were engraved with maps -- starmaps. From the floor to the level of the maps, on each wall, were switches and dials and speaker grills, arranged in columns and sections. One part of the right wall contained four maps in a column and below it there were four speaker grills. Each speaker was surrounded and separated from the others by switches and dials. The first day Cary had spent in the room he had counted the speakers and maps. Simple multiplication had supplied him with an accurate count, since everything was arranged geometrically. There were ten thousand each of maps and speakers. The maps seemed engraved on the walls, which the reddish lighting of the room made appear deep black. Stars were shown as luminescent points of white. Many of the star patterns repeated and all matched the constellations that could be seen outside at night. But, breaking the sameness of the patterns, tiny yellow crosses appeared at different places on each map, one on every map. Carry ran his hands softly over a group of switches. As he had done many times before he closed one of the switches and, as usual, the speaker below it began to hiss softly, like a radio tuned between stations. It meant nothing to him and he cursed and almost savagely returned the switch to its previous position and the speaker to silence. Unnoticed above him a scarlet cross returned to glowing yellow. Y OU were out late last night," Natalie said. "Did you find any food?" She managed to keep her voice noncommittal. "There's none to be found. Any that might have been here spoiled a few centuries ago. You know that." Cary talked to her with only one part of his mind -- the other was still in the map room. "Perhaps we should cut back on the rations." "But we're already on half-rations. Look, there's no need to fool ourselves. The Institute could only afford to send out one probe and we were it. There's no help coming -- so there's no need to pretend there is." Cary looked reflectively at his empty ration bowl and stood up. "Where are you going?" Natalie asked. "I don't know. Outside." "You're going back to the map room, aren't you?" Her voice was frightened and small. "What of it?" "I don't know, Cary. I just wish you'd stay away from there. It frightens me. The stars and the statue -- the red lighting." Her voice changed to a more pleading tone. "Are you sure we've looked everywhere for food?" "Yes," Cary said angrily. "And as for the map room -- for all we know it might hold the key to what we came here for, to Celestial Anomaly One. We were sent here to explain it and I'm not going to give up on it. Otherwise I IF might as well lie down and wait to die." Half ashamed of his outburst, Cary threw his ration bowl into the trash receptacle and stalked out and away from the ship. Natalie watched him until he turned a corner and one of the towers of the city hid him from further view. she went out to water the flowers, the flowers Dr. Cahn of the Institute had presented to her as a bon voyage gift -- the flowers they had planted on Skip's grave. They blossomed on a small plot of ground marked by a small white aluminum cross on the far side of the ship, away from the gaping rent the crash had ripped in the smooth alloy of the hull. They hadn't wanted to bury their friend and pilot in a place where the ruined ship might seem to accuse him of failure. At times Natalie dreamed of the crash and she would awaken screaming or whimpering. She had been at her post in Life-Support Systems Control and Cary had been in the Engineering and Power Section. Skip had been on the Bridge. After they realized that the instructions they had been supplied with were useless they had decided to land on the planet. She had heard Skip scream, and knowing it was impossible for Cary to leave his own post during a landing, she had run to the Bridge to find their pilot moaning and ripping at the earphones he wore, whispering over and over, insanely, "Tell them to stop!" She seemed to remember Cary shouting instructions to her over the intercom as the ship made its first contact with the planet's atmosphere, trying to tell her how to control the ship. She thought that Skip might have come to his senses near the end and also have tried to help -- but none of it had been good enough. Someone had forced her to the couch and had strapped her in. And then -- chaos. When it was over Skip was dead. No one had strapped him to a couch and he had been too busy fighting the controls to do it for himself. She and Cary had been left alone on the planet -- a planet that had no business even to exist. She imagined Skip's voice. Tell them to stop! Shivering, she finished her task and returned to the ship. She went to the recorder she kept in her room and began speaking this day's entry into it. She could not have said why she bothered. It might have been for no other reason than to hear herself talk, to fill the silence. She definitely never expected her notes to be found. "Day Ninety-One," she began. "It has been two weeks since Cary found the entrance to the map room and he now is spending more and more of his time there. I am worried about him -- he grows more morose and sullen each day. He may be worrying about how we'll get out or be feeling guilty that he has not yet found a way for us. But there is no way out. Every day our stores are depleted by two more ration packs and there is no food to be found in the city. It is a fact of life that in twenty-one more days I will report that all our stores have been used. Shortly after that I will be too weak to make further reports. And after that I shall be dead. "Celestial Anomaly One still remains unexplained. I am beginning to doubt that we even arrived in the right place. Cary has told me that mistakes in the Schubert Drive computers are impossible. Yet the Drive is so hew that I cannot help but wonder. Certainly there is no trace of a neutron star anywhere in this region of this galaxy -- let alone a neutron star with a captured secondary. "I am beginning to feel that we may have stumbled onto a more complex mystery than the Institute sent us to find. The map room hints -- " She stopped and threw the microphone across the room. It hit the tapestry on the wall and slid to the top of her bed. "It only hints," she said, seating herself on the edge of her bed and rubbing her fists into her eyes. "It only hints -- " T HE map room occupied her thoughts for some time that night. That, and the  words in her own report -- twenty-one days and she would begin to die by starvation. She felt lonely and frightened. She tried to wait up for Cary but he was later coming back than was usual. She feel asleep. She dreamed. She was back on the ship -- but instead of Skip, Dr. Cahn of the Institute sat in the control chair. Where the bulkhead and the control panel should have been the hull of the ship was transparent. A mist like a huge, dirty cloud seemed to form outside the ship. The cloud cleared and grotesquely, horribly, she saw a gigantic head floating in space where the planet should have appeared. It was Skip's head and it was turning around and over, bobbing obscenely back and forth. "Pulsars," Doctor Cahn said, "may be very peculiar things." In her dream Skip's head rotated so that they were coming at it from beneath. Where the bloody stump should have been was only a smooth expanse of skin, as if no body had ever been attached there. She screamed to warn old Dr. IF Cahn of the impending crash but he ignored her. Skip's head and terrifying neck loomed larger and larger as they approached it. "You may find a neutron star," Dr. Cahnremarked, unperturbed, "or you may find something even stranger." He laughed, The ship's orbit carried them around to the other side of the head-planet and she could see that Skip was laughing, too. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. Drool dripped from the corners of his mouth and formed silvery moons around him. "In nineteen seventy-three," the doctor continued, "radio observatories throughout the world were surprised to find a pulsar with an exceedingly rapid period suddenly transmitting from the vicinity of the Lesser Magellenic Cloud. They were further stunned when, a year later, it stopped broadcasting as suddenly as it had begun." Skip was trying to say something to her but she could not make him out. Every time his immense mouth moved Dr. Cahn would speak over Skip's voice, which sounded like weak vibrations bouncing off the hull. "Celestial Anomaly One," the doctor said, "may tell us what the pulsars are, how they were formed and how they die. While the new Schubert Drive is still only experimental, the Institute has wrangled permission to send a probe out to the vicinity of the anomaly -- roughly five hundred light years from Earth -- " She noticed that Skip was leeringat her. She shuddered. "Anything you see while you are there, we on Earth will not have a chance to observe for five hundred years -- even providing that the pulsar syndrome does begin again." She could almost make out what Skip was shouting. "It's a riddle," old Dr. Cahn said. "It's a riddle." Skip's head loomed larger and larger. Near the end she could just make out what he was saving. "Help me!" Skip's head said. "Help me, help me. I'm dead. I'm dead! Why didn't you help me?" The last thing she saw was a huge tear falling from his eye and then they crashed. She awoke screaming. S HE told Cary about the dream the next morning. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You'd just finished watering the flowers on his grave. With everything else that's happening to us it's only natural you should be having your share of nightmares. I shouldn't have left you alone last night. I'm sorry, Natalie, but the more time I spend in that room, the more I think that it will take just one more small thing -- a clue I almost have and don't see -- and the whole thing will come clear. But don't worry any longer about the dreams. You'll take a pill tonight and it will keep dreams away." "You don't understand," she said. "It was horrible. That head. He had no body at all, Cary. He couldn't move out of our way -- all he could do was talk and no one could hear him until it was too late." Exhausted, she cradled her head on her arms. She listened to the hard clicking noises Cary's boots made as he paced up and down the stateroom. "No body at all," she mumbled sleepily. She heard him pull out a chair and seat himself. "Wait a minute," he said thoughtfully. "Wait just one minute." She raised her head to glance at him. His face was thoughtful and his fingers drummed on the table top. He stared directly into her eyes and she shivered. His face had taken on the same expression Skip's had worn before Cahn had crashed into it. "What did you say?" he asked. "Repeat what you said about Skip in your dream." "It was horrible," she said. She closed her eyes and she could still see it. "He had no body. All he could do was talk. And we couldn't hear him and then the ship just -- " "Come on," Cary said. He stood up and placed his hand on her arm. "Let's go." "But why, Cary?" "I think you've given me an idea. I hope I'm wrong, though. I only hope I'm wrong." Shortly they came to the main quadrangle and, without pausing to look at the statue, Cary propelled her into the map room. "All right," Cary said. "Start pulling switches." He demonstrated by pulling an oblong switch above one of the speakers. The speaker hissed and a yellow cross turned scarlet. "You're crazy." Natalie said. "Pull the switches!" he said; surprised to hear himself shouting. "The oblong ones over the speakers -- do it now." He slammed home another switch. "But, there are ten thousand of them," Natalie said, angry and confused. "Start!" He continued pulling switches, his back to her. But when he heard the clicking as she also began pulling the switches he smiled grimly. In approximately three and a half hours they had finished. Ten thousand scarlet crosses glittered on a background of stars. IF O NE entire section of the far wall swung silently open to reveal a short staircase. They climbed the staircase to the second floor of the tower. They were in another map room much like the one beneath it but in this one there were only one thousand maps and one thousand sets of switches and no speakers. Each map had ten yellow crosses. There were one thousand of the oblong switches, all closed. It took them less than an hour to open them all and soon there were one thousand scarlet crosses. And another door. They lost no time in opening it. Wordlessly, they entered the third level where there were one hundred maps and one hundred switches, no speakers and one hundred crosses on each map. They were soon in the last level which proved accessible to them. There was one map. It was a map with ten thousand crosses shining on it and it stretched from one end of the ceiling to the other and covered the walls to within four feet of the floor. The room was shaped like a half-sphere, so that the map appeared to be the actual sky outside the tower -- as if seen on a clear night through a glass plate emblazoned with ten thousand illuminated crosses. There were two switches. One was quite large and was surrounded by a hundred dials, all of which were registering at the far left of their scales. But on the other side of the room was a much smaller switch and below it dangled a pair of earphones. "Natalie," Cary said, "I'm going over there and putting on those earphones. If for any reason you think you should do so, pull them off me." He put on the earphones. Within two seconds he was clawing at them and whimpering. Natalie screamed his name. She felt unable to move. Cary fell to his knees, then full length to the floor. His body curled into the fetal position. He appeared to shrivel. His eyes closed. His mouth opened as if he were about to scream but no sound came. Sweat glistened on his brow and ran down over his eyelids. Small beads of blood dripped from his palms where his fingernails had dug in. His throat vibrated rapidly as his neck muscles worked -- still he did not scream. Natalie finally managed to pull the earphones from his head. For a moment there was no discernible change in his position, or his rigidity. Then he began to cry. Dry, moaning sobs racked his body. He raised himself to his knees, then to his feet. Natalie drew back as he glanced at her. His eyes seemed haunted. They did not focus on her. It was as if he had gone blind. "What happened? Oh Cary!" "I can't explain," Cary said. His voice was still unsteady. He took the earphones from her. "Put these on for a second -- then you'll understand. No, wait -- I'll hold them to your ears and then yank them off. More than a few seconds wouldn't be safe. I at least had an idea what to expect." She was too fearful to protest. The next thing she knew she was whirling. Her identity spun around and around. Voices, all speaking unknown languages, hammered at her. One, two, one hundred, a thousand, ten thousand voices, perfectly distinct, competing, blending, all battering at her mind. And all ten thousand of them were voices of terror. It was like ten thousand heretics screaming at the stake. Like the wails of ten thousand women being stoned -- like the screeches of ten thousand hopeless, helpless people about to die. And all of them were audible. The young ones and the old ones. The women, the men, the babies. Harsh gutteral words and soft, singing Cantonese cants. Monosyllabic grunts and polysyllabic wheezes. All of them like waves wearing away at butter-soft limestone. She felt her mind eroding, too. She screamed. Cary's face swam into focus before her. His concerned eyes looked deep into her. "Are you okay?" he asked. "They're all dead," she heard herself say. "They're all dead. Aren't they?" "I think so," Cary said. "What is this place?" "I think I know now, Natalie. It doesn't help us any. We're still going to die. But at least we'll be able to think, to know, that we're only a small part of a larger tragedy. That our deaths will be meaningless and therefore unimportant. You may want to die after you know what I know now. They had no body, Natalie -- all they had was a voice."lCary. I don't want to go insane alone." She moved closer to him and sat beside him on the floor under the huge map. But she did not touch him -- she was afraid to touch him. She had barely enough courage to listen and that was courage bom of the first stages of insanity. To listen was to take the first step to fulfillment of a deathwish. As he began to speak she could see the chasm gaping open before her, ready to receive her mind. She knew that she would fall. "We discovered a faster-thanIF light drive, Natalie, but they missed it. It's not surprising, really. It was mostly an accident that we found it at all and we didn't really need it. But they looked for it when they needed it -- and it eluded them." He was quiet for a moment. He lay back and stared up at the map. The tiny points of light from the crosses and stars illuminated his face dimly and glints of light reflected from his eyes. "This world found only a voice. There were ten thousand others. It must have been frustrating. To listen to the voices from far worlds, to learn other beings' languages and never be able to meet them. Hundreds of years -- and every few years a new voice would be discovered. And then something happened -- some threat came. Whatever it was they couldn't meet it and they couldnlt escape it." "So they called for help." Natalie said for him. She heard her own voice fill with the agony that had been in Cary's. She shared the secret with him. "They built this city two hundred years ago, in nineteen seventy-three, as a relay station. Ten thousand worlds cried for help, and this one place blended the called, broadcasted them and waited. No help came and the voices were silent." "Yes," Cary said. "That would explain it. Two hundred years ago a pulsar formed here -- one more powerful than any other known -- and only a year later it had vanished. When Earth could, it sent someone to find out the cause. That's us. We got here a hundred and ninety-nine years too late. But we found a tombstone. One desperate circuit left on broadcasting on a regular frequency on a normal wave. Like a shroud." It was again quiet in the room until Natalie spoke. "Is that what happened to Skip? The tombstone broadcast?" "I suppose so. We knew -- or at least had an inkling -- of what to expect and we heard it only for a few seconds each. He was forced to listen for nearly an hour. It's no wonder he went mad." "What can we do?" Natalie asked. Cary walked to the large switch and threw it open. A soft and genthe vibration shook the room. "I've turned the pulsar back on," he said. "They'll send someone else out here now. We'll likely be dead by then but we'll leave our notes to be found." "If only they had used lightspeed transmissions," Natalie said. "We could have deciphered those." "What good would that have done?" Cary asked. "It would have reached us one hundred years from now -- and as it stands we're nearly two hundred years too late." "Let's go back to the ship," she said. walked more than half-way back to the ship before they could no longer hear the humming of the generators, the vibrations of the pulsar. They slept. They ate. Their rations disappeared as inexorably as before but they no longer noticed. They no Longer cared. "We'll die here," Natalie said one night as they lay together. "It seems to be a place to die." Cary reached across the bed and pulled her closer to him but there seemed to be no meaning in his action. His body was as lifeless as his words. "There have been so many deaths -- I doubt that two more will even be noticed. How many lives could end on ten thousand worlds?" There was no answer to his question and the silence again covered them. Each lay awake and imagined shapes and nightmares fleeing through the dark. Each of them thought of the towers and the city and of what it would be to share death with so many. They did not make love. They had not made love for many nights. Death had made them friends and they knew each other too well even to pretend they were strangers. They could not substitute life for death or love for fear -- and they would not lie to each other or to themselves. Day came and they scarcely heeded it. Their actions were routine, automatic, divorced from what they thought and felt. Cary ran his hands over the controls of the ship. He tested the circuits of the Life-Support Systems as he had every day. He made his daily entry in the log and checked all functional instrument readings. For a moment he did not believe what he saw on the board. He double-checked the reading and verified it. He waited for the wave of emotion to hit him. He was not surprised to notice that what he had seen did not affect him. "Natalie," he said and then realized he was whispering. He repeated her name more loudly and she turned to him. "Normalspace radar has picked up another ship just outside atmosphere. I can't signal them but they must be here for us. We're rescued." He tried to inject gaiety into his voice but he could only think of death. Natalie leaned over the board to check the reading. When she spoke her voice, too, sounded drab and lifeless. "So they sent another ship," IF she said. "So old Cahn must carry more weight than we thought -- they did outfit a second expedition. How long before they get here?" "A couple days maybe." "Are you happy?" she asked.  "No. I don't know, I guess I am. But it all seems so useless." They spent the night talking like sad children. They were trying to recapture their images of Earth, their will to live. But in the morning they felt the same. "There's someone outside," Cary said. "I'll open the hatch for him." Natalie and Cary watched on the viewscreen as the man outside stepped through the dilating hatch. "Not our uniform," Natalie said. "Have you ever seen one like that before?" "No," Cary answered. "But look." He pointed at another section of the board. "According to our radar the ship is still in orbit. I don't understand -- " . "Perhaps they sent down a shuttle vehicle. They're here, I suppose that's all that matters." The man entered the control room. He was taller than he had appeared on the viewscreen, he smiled at the two of them. Cary motioned him to sit and gave his report. He told their rescuer about the tombstone they had landed on and about death. He listened to himself talk and was surprised that his voice remained so steady. He saw Natalie standing and crying silently in the far corner of the control room. He knew she was not crying from relief. He wondered how long it would be before he broke down himself -- and whether he would ever be able to fit the pieces back together once he let them fall. He doubted he could but he didn't care. Suddenly he saw that the man he was speaking to was smiling widely. He stammered and broke off his report. "And where are the skeletons?" the man asked. Cary was speechless. He forced himself to control his anger. "I don't know. What difference does it make? Perhaps they had no bone structure. It doesn't matter. They're dead. Haven't you heard anything I've said?" The visitor grinned. "Listen to me," he said, "it was decided there is a debt that must be paid. There are things you have to know -- it would not be right if you never learned them. I am part of a rescue attempt. But not your rescue -- that will not take place for another twenty-two hours. My own rescue mission stretches across seven centuries and involves the people of four galaxies. "Ten thousand worlds did cry out for help and you two heard them. But not too late. When you are rescued you will file a report with the Institute. We know this because we have that report, that report which had been saved in the computer files for decades, centuries. Nothing, Cary, is beyond man's grasp. First he wanted to fly and he built himself wings. Then on to the planets of his own system and then to the stars. Whatever man has wanted to do, whatever he felt a strong enough desire to do, he has or he surely will do. "A strong desire." The man repeated the words and he seemed to be holding back his own tears. "To save a life is one desire. To save the lives on ten thousand worlds became nearly an obsession. A way was found. Seven hundred years from now, in your time, that way will be found and it will be applied. In my frame of reference, it has been applied." He extended his hand toward them. "The people of ten thousand worlds have asked me to extend their hand of friendship and thanks to you, Natalie and Cary, across the boundaries of both time and space. You were the ones who heard their cry for help. It took us seven hundred years to find a way to answer but without your understanding the cry might have gone unheard." Cary took the man's hand and Natalie placed hers on both of theirs. "Rescued through time," Natalie said softly. "But still -- how can we believe you? How can we ever know for sure? We must be sure." "I can tell you nothing else," he said, "only that you had better go quickly when your second expedition arrives. The catastrophe you thought had already happened will begin two months from this time-date." He laughed, "It wouldn't be healthy to still be around. Be sure and file that report -- oh, hell, I know for a fact that you did." He left then, and Natalie and Cary awaited their own rescuers. For a while they still had their doubts and fears, but then they remembered and understood. It was Natalie who first said it. "The statue," she said, and she smiled for the first time in many days. "The statue!" Then Cary remembered also and together they took one more walk on the world that had never died. They walked to the main quadrangle. There, on the blue lawn, was the small statue. Of a man and of a woman, overcome by a cry for help. A tiny statue -- and they now knew whom it honored.  IF time machine could not be innation of the inventor's ancestors vented, of course. For that reason, by a disgruntled legatee. That it never was invented. Go look it kind of thing. Because it could up. The paradoxes negating the not happen, it did not happen, possibility of the device are too There never was a time machine, prohibitively profound. Consider: Was there? the jaunts, the murders, the alterTime is a constant. Think about it. (Planck and Einstein had some thoughts on the matter, as well as myself.) It moves forward, only forward, creating chains of purposeless causality, tearing at everything that resists it -- making shreds and pulp of endeavor, creating what becomes known in retrospect, then, as "memory" or "loss." Turn it around, stumble to the imploding mouth of time and you'll only get a sound, wrenching bite on your meddling fingers. So there. You can't fool around with time. As I said, think about it. Max Robin did. He couldn't think very well, of course, having been deprived of the educational advantages of secondary school, undergraduate school, graduate school, professional school. Nevertheless, and within certain crude limits, Jie tried. He was a born thinker. So much so that he even ended up in the library now and then and struggled with microfilms of obscure professional journals -- not that he was sure he understood what they were all about. He went through the almost unbearable exegesis of men who probably looked much like himself -- he did so with loathing but nevertheless driven. Eventually, of course, the effort drove him even crazier than he had been in the first place. Consider Max. He is one of those dim, anonymous men you find eating lunches from paper bags at the Automat, steaming cups of tea somewhere to the left of the numb, stricken, stunned gaze. Or -- oh, yes -- going through microfilms and ancient newspapers at the public library. Wide, staring eyes slammed into a face emerging almost indifferently from a drab checked shirt, uncashed unemployment check nestling in the breast pocket. That kind of thing. Now and then he cursed strange young women on the subways for displaying their bodies. But Max had (or has) this one enormous obsession. It redeems him. It even purifies, as great obsessions have been known to do. He wants, to travel in time. All the way back. All the way forward. What's the difference? The important thing is to punch through to the end and get some damned answers. Probably looks the same at either end. Never mind why. Who knows? Why do some men go to the West Coast, some become touts; still others yearn to be published writers -- these are the really dangerous ones -- or absconding stockbrokers. The analysis of selection is not within our compass. This is a fiction piece. Max Robin wanted to move in time. It would be really great to know the way everything is -- put me one up on the sonsofbitches. Unlike potential writers or absconders, however, Max's possiIF bilities were not clearly defined for him. He lacked precedent, a sense of history. The writer always has the rejection slip, the stockThe potential time traveler, however, is in a bind. As you know, time machines do not exist at present -- neither do time travelers (this proves the point that it was never invented -- surely we would otherwise have been visited.) Not even what we might call prevailing literature; exists on the subject, let alone a how-to kit. Oh, there are science-fiction stories and novels, of course, but for Max at least these did not count. They deal with extrapolation, speculation and so on, usually with an almost apologetic air of clinging disreputability. Despite the increasing popularity of these works in the Speculative Sixties, Max Robin found himself repelled by the category. It ain't got nothing to do with reality... Consider him now more specifically if you will, please. Max Robin, forty-eight years old, more than a little battered on the top with white patches which would be less ominous if they were simple baldness, the familiar dull eyes now suspended openly in his skull as he looks at something -- a contraption -- he has constructed in his room. I did it. nd I ain't even got no degrees. I built it myself, by golly! He means this to be a recollection but since you and I are already in the room the thought comes out rather as an announcement. T HE something we are looking at is about four feet high and wide, six feet in depth (the proportions, then, very much like Max's own), made of coils and wires and dangerously frayed electric cords of some sort. Power must be on because static leaps from one coil to the next but it does so without purpose, without even that venom and air of danger which can be associated with bad machinery in abrupt decline. Suspended at the heart of the network is a pocket watch which dangles from an uncoiled paper clip. It ticks feebly. It indicates to us -- we have excellent eyesight, the two of us -- that the hour is two-thirty and we make the inference that it is morning from the absence of light through the uncurtained windows. Then again, thanks to certain architectural innovations, it is almost always dark in Max's tworoom, furnished. He prefers it that way. "Son of a gun," Max says reverently. "I think I've gone and invented it. It really looks as if it's going to work. It's my time machine, all mine." He can be excused, after all his months of struggle, a little megalomania. "No one else would have had the guts to do it," Max says. "Only Max Robin could work it out." He would prefer, of course, to address these remarks to an audience. Max, like most creative geniuses, is not above a little human contact applied in small doses, used sparingly. Unfortunately he has no companions in these rooms. There have been no visitors since the day several months ago when Max, taking his ease in customary fashion, was interrupted by his landlady's demands for rent. After he subsequently took her firmly by a heavy arm, threw her out of what he called his "chambers" and stated that if she ever returned he would evict her, his rooms have been without guests. Since the lady at issue is something of a sadi-maso (I hope I am using these terms correctly; I am not a specialist) she accepted this dictum without wonder and their relationship, such as it is, has more recently devolved around Max's occasional, convulsive payments of rent. At the moment, locked in his regret. Max would even have settled for his landlady. Since you and I are already here, however, we may suffice. Ordinary fellows, both of us, but in the "right place at the right time" as they say, and therefore the best of all alternatives. It is necessary, however, to introduce ourselves. I do so in the most graceful -- if abrupt -- manner possible. Max is not a man interested in social intricacies. Stepping forward the few necessary inches to bring Max's attention to me, I say, "Congratulations? Is that the time machine? Did you just invent it?" All questions. I am not sure of anything. Max considers us with mild approbation, satisfied that we exist and not interested in pursuing the matter beyond that. It would be strange if he did. Max takes most things in his life -- there being so very, very few -- for granted. "Yeah," he says, "that's mine. I did it." "Does it really work?" "I'm pretty sure it does. I don't know for a fact, though. It's never been tested. I'll be making a trial run in just a minute, now, just as soon as I knock off this cigarette." I note that Max's eyes, during the last part of this, have wandered over and set on you, without eagerness, but with that slow, dawning suspicion which is, perhaps, Max's most characteristic manner of confronting the universe. Anxious to avert a scene -- which for reasons I will not go into would be highly complex -- I say hurriedly, "He's a friend of mine. He just came along with me." You nod to this, beam and try in your various ways toerify this IF statement for Max. Like me -- although speechless in your case -- you do not wish to involve Max in an extended analysis of your presence. But he averts all this by shrugging and turning away. It is difficult, at times, to maintain the fiction that important inventors maintain their own fiction of involvement. Max knocks out the cigarette, considers the machine for some time and says, "Well, I guess I'd better get going if I want to take it for the trial run." "We'll be watching," I say. "It's geared to send me back fifteen minutes in time and leave me there. Just for the trial run, that is. I figure if I'm lucky I meet up with myself and we have a conversation or something -- then I vanish. Or go away. I ain't gone any further than that. I don't have that kind of mind." "That's perfectly all right," I assure him. "I mean, how much can a man do?" Max asks rather sullenly, I think. "I invented the damned thing. That's enough. How do I know how it's going to work or anything like that?" "Sounds all right to me," I say. "Doesn't it?" I indicate that you should nod and obediently you do, roundeyed. With a sharp, covert gesture I indicate to you that you are on the point of sucking your thumb and warn you to withdraw it, sir. "Of course," Max says, "it could go completely haywire. Nobody ever done this kind of thing before. How can I make any guarantees? I don't know i I should be on the trial run. I invented it, after all. I'm too important to waste. What if it blows?" "I'm sure it couldn't," I say. I consider him with what I hope he interprets as high admiration, even trust. For reasons which will develop shortly I am not interested in crossing Max. "You want to go?" he asks. "Can't do it," I say regretfully. "Wish I could but I have a bad stomach. I can't take conveyances of any kind." "Oh, you really wouldn't be traveling, you know. You'd just sort of be moving along in -- " "I'm sorry," I say delicately. "All the same principle. Terrible nausea. I might spoil your machine if you put me in there." "That's a point," he says. He tilts a finger to his chin, considers the ceiling. "That makes sense. What about him, then?" He points to you. "Oh, he's just along to keep me company," I say. "Here for the ride, so to speak. I don't think he'd make the right subject for an experiment. He can't talk, you see, and he couldn't tell you any of his impressions. He came out that way. He just couldn't -- " "Well," Max says cunningly. "Well." The cunning is manifested as a subtle flush which cleaves his face in half, gives those halves the preternatural appearance of gloating cross-eyed at one another. "It doesn't matter that he's a dummy or something. The important thing is that he breathes and we'll know if he keeps on breathing." He reacts in an explosion of agility, a series of motions too rapid to follow even if I have any interest in following them, which I certainly do not. When it is all over you have been hurled into dead center of the contraption, a belt winched loosely around your waist. Max rubs his hands and moves toward a switch. "Look, Max," I say, trying to explain, even though there is nothing after all, to discuss. "You shouldn't have bothered doing that. You see, you'll only -- " "Too late, brother," he says with some satisfaction. A switch is closed and there is a sound of breaking glass, a dispersion of smoke. When I recover my vision it is quite obvious that you are gone. I take this with regret, if without surprise. It means that I must go almost all the rest of the way alone, now. "Well, it does something," Max says, considerably subdued by that knowledge. The ultimate pity of his condition is that he did not believe the machine would work. He had not fully realized this truth about himself until this moment and the resultant depression was strong, even for Max Robin. "Now I guess we have to wait and see if the guy comes back in fifteen minutes. If he does, I guess I got it made. I'll get a patent." "No, you won't," I say sadly. "He's never coming back." "How can you say a thing like that? Just tell me how you come off saying something like that!" Max shouts. Suddenly, he is completely discomfited, riding on the raw edges of his Automat-nerve, back with the microfilm. "If it works he'll come back." "They never come back. Because time moves ahead," I say, still feeling the pointless sorrow. "So his fifteen minutes will never catch up with yours. You'll run in a straight line forever, like blind cross-qpuntry runners. We could have told you all of this if you'd listened. That's what we came back here for, as a matter of fact. To tell you. But now it's entirely too late and things will just have to work themselves out." "What work themselves out? What cross-country runners? What coming back?" It is a little too much for Max. "Listen, I don't really have to listen to this. I'll go out for a drink or something and leave you here. The hell with you." IF "You can't leave. You see, you can't get out. Max," I say, hoping that he will listen, spreading my arms to convince him of my utter sincerity. "Max, you're already in the machine." "Me? In the machine?" "Whom do you think you put in there?" Max blinks, shakes himself slightly like a confused dog. "This is just like science fiction," he says. "I told you, there's no such thing. I figured it all out. Time is time -- you can't fool around with it. You never meet yourself and you never change the past, you just kind of move around in it all the way back and forth. I know that." "That's your theory. Now, if you'll excuse me, my fifteen minutes are up. I really can't stay, you see. Not any longer." I leave. Actually it has been extremely close. I clear Paradox by only a matter of seconds. But clear it I do and now I am gone. Quite alone in his room, then, the inventor Max Robin stands in the silence, looking at his machine. It hums peculiarly and there is a sawing noise, then a sound of distant plopping. Max stares with wonder. It is happening now. Right this moment, it is happening. But there is no one to warn or even to audit him so Max can only watch it occur. And so, then, from all corners of the mighty time machine -- from all the crevices and interior spaces -- Max Robin is coming out. There are five of him, ten of him, eleven, fifteen and a thousand and they are all falling on the floor, struggling against one another to wizened, tiny feet, trying to stagger toward him. Their eyes are wild. They are almost as wild as his own. The mouths -- wee, gaping mouths -- are saying words. They are trying to make some kind of a point. Unfortunately they are barely coherent. "I told you not to mess around with this, you bum," is what they are trying to say. "If you had stuck to your rolls and your sex-dreams none of this would have happened. But now, look. Look -- " Since they are all Max Robin himself, however, this fails to come out with the necessary forcefulness. Max never had much selfrespect anyway. Then they turn on him and begin to strike. That works. It should. He is, after all, severely outnumbered.  all I ever was or might be was collapsing inexorably inward, toward that imaginary point two inches behind my eyes where the essential me had always dwelt. I was dying. I was a bodyless point of ego in a sea of final nothingness, a mote beating frantically against the night. I was dying. Never to breathe the air of Earth again, never to feel Loy's body against mine, never to know pain, never even to drift in the private world behind my own eyelids. I was dying and, as men do when they have time to contemplate the moment, I was dying badly, a crazed whimpering thing crying futilely against the dark. I I shrieked once in my fading mind, had time to think briefly of Loy, to say goodbye forever to the image of her in my mind. And I was not. I had gone, I had not been and now I was. For a long moment I uld think of nothing else. To S isted and then to be. I be sweeter? What ven could anyone ask? and knew walls gave lying on my mp rock. I rcle around bloated naked brains, pulsing and squirming hideously, brains supported by slimy green bodies like dog-sized slugs. This was not heaven. This was the fifth planet of a yellow sun far, far from Sol. I was alive and I began to remember. The first thing I remembered was Loy. Where was she? What were they doing to her? I found myself screaming her name. I felt a pressure in my mind, a presence, cold and v clammy, without passion, without malice, without emotion, without mercy. A pressure that was a questioning, a search, a leaching. I began to remember more. Fifth planet of a yellow sun. A fair green world, not like the others Loy and I had found. Loy -- my love, my woman, my wife. A honeymoon world, a world fit for colonization, hence a world where, by the terms of the contract, we could spend the remaining six months of our Honeymoon Year enjoying the green grass and the blue sky and the fresh clean air. No more weeks in space in the cramped two-place Scout, no more methane worlds, chlorine worlds, jungle worlds, desert worlds. The Honeymoon World, the Jackpot World, the Bonus World. Death World. "Loy. Loy. Loy." The circle of gray, quivering brains seemed to pulse faster, as if with some not-quite-familiar strain, and I felt the pressure in my mind change, reach for language concepts in my brain, pick, choose and form words. The woman is elsewhere , the words that were and were not of my mind told me. Elsewhere. The fog began to evaporate from my memory. We had surveyed the planet from orbit and, finding it fair and habitable, we had landed the Scout in a lush green meadow close by wooded hills. Loy smiled at me as we stepped out of the airlock and inhaled the fragrant heady odors of growing things. "There," she said, putting her arm around my waist. "Now aren't you glad we decided to take a Honeymoon Contract?" "We were so right," I said with a little laugh. The idea had been hers in the first place. My attitude had been that the government was not about to give something for nothing. A Honeymoon Contract sounded like the best of all possible deals. The government provided any couple who could pass the minimal physical and psychological tests with a two-place Scout to roam the stars together for a year. All we had to do in return was make a brief survey of each planet we found and, if we were lucky enough to find one suitable for colonization, we could spend the rest of our year on it and collect a bonus that would set us up for life when we returned to Earth. Of course, the government did not act out of sentiment. The human race needed room to expand and expansion meant new planets. Perhaps one out of fifty solar systems had a habitable one. The economical way to find it was to send out plenty of cheap, twoplace Scouts. Under ordinary conditions, two people simply could not stay sane cooped up alone for a year in the vastness of interstellar space. But a man and a woman? Necessity had made a hard governmental policy out of an ancient romantic notion -- the stars were for lovers. Loy had not seen harsh fact. To her all creation was designed for our pleasure and enjoyment. The most natural thing in her world was for a thoughtful government to provide us with a free honeymoon. The succession of chlorine worlds, dead rocks and gas giants we had discovered in the first six months of our Honeymoon Year had left her attitude largely untouched -- after all, we had each other. The most beautiful thing about Loy was that she could make me see things her way. So we were as children together on a summer Sunday in the park. IF It was that kind of world, a world of low, broad-bladed grass, brilliantly feathered birds, high blue sky, small six-legged rodents, berry bushes, fruit trees. A happy, innocent Honeymoon World. You can see how sappy and wrapped up in each other we had become. No world is a park or a garden. The absence of a full spectrum of predators usually means that something sentient has wiped out the competition -- so they told us in our briefings. Finally, after days of -- I don't know what else to call it but romping in the meadow -- we decided on a little real exploring in the nearby woods. Loy was all for traveling as lightly as possible, taking only a sleeping bag and some concentrates to supplement the local fruits and berries, which had proved edible and tasty. We had the closest thing we ever had to an argument when I insisted on taking energy rifles along. "It's just not right, Bill," she said, pouting and canting her blond head to one side at an engaging angle. "This planet has been so nice to us. It trusts us and it's only right that we trust it. Carrying those ugly guns -- it just isn't right, it's being, well, you know, nasty." I tried to win the argument with a kiss but she turned sulkily away. "Look, honey," I said, "we don't know what's in those woods. Things may be there that are nastier than we are. An energy rifle can stop an elephant. When it's scary and gloomy in those woods, with strange night noises and things scuffling in the dark, you'll be glad I insisted on bringing the rifles even if we never use them." "But Bill -- " "Look at it this way. If we don't have the guns, we'll have to be suspicious and cautious every time we hear a strange sound -- we won't be able to trust anything. But if we do have the guns we won't have to be leary because an energy rifle can stop anything." "Masculine logic." She sighed, but the sound had a giggle behind it. I gave her a hug and we took the rifles. T HE woods were dark and dense with gnarled, thicktrunked trees and tightly interlaced networks of leafy branches. But the undergrowth was very light, we saw no dangerous animals and we made good time. By nightfall we had reached the base of the low, rolling hills. Loy cooked a meal of concentrates, topped off with local fruits and berries. We crawled into the sleeping bag early. After several hours of enjoying the cool woods and the night sounds and each other, we drifted off into a pleasant sleep. At some time during the night, half in dream, half awake, I felt an odd pressure in my mind. The feeling was strange, but not really menacing. It was an awareness of an interest not my own, a cold, emotionless questing for knowledge rifling through my mind as if it were some encyclopedia. A questing, a questioning, a knowledge-vacuum, with no form, no flavor, no personality behind it. I lay motionless, my eyes closed, in that gray borderland between sleep and wakefulness, wondering whether or not I was dreaming and not really caring. Suddenly Loy screamed beside me. I was instantly wide awake, eyes open, and I saw them. Encircling our sleeping bag were ten monstrosities about the size of large dogs -- bodies like great slimy slugs, supporting what appeared to be naked living brains, wet and pulsating, ten times the size of a human brain. The things had no arms, no legs, no tentacles, just ghastly brains on slimy slug bodies. Loy was clinging to me, shaking and sobbing. I reached instinctively for the energy rifle close by the sleeping bag. Something froze my arm, then the rest of me. I was paralyzed and now I was aware, dreadfully aware, of the alien presence in my mind. I felt it grope in my mind for words, memories of concepts,, pick, choose and form words in my mind. Who? From where? What? Dazed, numb, only partially in control of the inner workings of my own mind, I found myself forming mental answers to the mental questions. We're humans from Earth, another world circling another star. Other intelligences, the presence thought into my mind. Other races. Interesting. Possibilities of much new data. Knowledge-expansion. Good. There was no emotion behind any of it, unless you consider an almost obscene lust for knowledge tions tried to form themselves in my mind. I felt the mental presence beat them away with casual indifference. Different , the presence said, growing ever more facil with the borrowed words. You and the other are different from each other. Your physical structures are not contributing to the same mental structure. Do separate races share your planet? I was in no mood to answer inane questions. Loy had gone quiet in my arms, as paralyzed as I was. I knew that she was still terrified, and I had to act, if only mentally, to remove the cause of her fear. But my mind was not my own. I felt my total mental reIF sources struggling to answer the alien's questions, my entire stock of memories and mental capacities rise to do its bidding, to fill the yawning knowledge vacuum. I watched, almost as an outside observer, as my mind marshaled itself and answered. I found myself explaining what I had never even stopped to consider: what it was to be a human being, the difference between men and women, how Earth was inhabited by billions of separate organic systems called men, whose mental structures were distinct and separate and separate mental universes arising from an equal number of physical organisms. I felt the alien presence in my mind boggle, almost stagger, undisbelieve. In that moment of confusion I felt the thing's control over my mind waver for an instant, and I used that moment to shape my own confusion into a demand, a question. Who , what are you? Then I tried to reach for the energy rifle again and felt the presence resume its iron control. I sensed a securing hesitation in the thing, then reluctant decision. I felt words forming themselves in my mind. Knowledge on your part may facilitate accumulation of data. I...am. I do not think of my mental structure as "I." The presence detected by your mental structure is that of the mental structure of this planet. This planet bears many species of organisms. The organisms you now see are one such species. They are so specialized that their separate physical structures give rise to one unified mental structure; that is, to what you think of as "me." These organisms have no other function but the erection of this mental structure. The mental structure thus erected may control the physical structure of this planet, the sentient being, the intelligent race. According to all previously accumulated data, I had hypothesized that I was the only such mental structure that existed, the only center of awareness in the universe. Now data is made available to the effect that at least one planet exists where tures, so that in effect your planet races. This promises a vast new area of knowledge and much data that may now be accumulated. It was my turn to boggle, to be by the very nature of the contact -- to disbelieve. An intelligent of individual organisms giving rise to but one mind. A mind alone, without companionship. without love or hate or jealousy -- without, I suddenly realized, the concept of death. Emotions, hopes, fear -- which in the last analysis is always the fear of individual death -- how could a mind alone know any of these? What could motivate such a mind, impel it to action? Suddenly, I felt myself virtually unable to think. The alien mind was dampening my thoughts with irresistible power. It seemed to rejoice, to loll in a kind of obscene anticipation. Such knowledge. Such a rich store of new data! Such a wealth of new possibilities to explore, experiments to perform! And I realized that only one thing could occupy such a mind: a quest for knowledge that was not abstract, not cold and intellectual, but raised to the level of a basic emotion -- the basic emotion, a drive virtually sexual in its power and intensity. I felt Loy tense against me. I sensed her fear and shared it. We had no point of empathy with such a mind. This entity was asocial, hence amoral, to its very core. And we were totally in its power. Let us go, I said wordlessly to the world-mind. Let us go and well tell you all you want to know. When we return to Earth well send back scientists, men who specialize in knowledge. You can learn more from them than you ever can from us. Yes, that will be good. Later. After all possible data has been accumulated from you. Much is to be learned. It will take a long time to exhaust the possibilities. Especially concerning the peculiar states of mental structure you call emotions. And most particularly the emotion you call love. It seems to be the most powerful and the most important. But this other . the one you call death -- that will require much, much experimentation. A ND I remembered, now I remembered all. How the alien mind had seized control of our bodies, how we had been trotted against our wills unerringly through the night to the system of caves in the hills, surrounded by the brain-slugs. How Loy had been separated from me in the caves. How I had been lying on the cave floor for an unknown length of time, somehow needing neither food nor water, feeling neither hunger nor thirst, totally controlled by the world-mind. I remembered the probing, the endless rifling of my mind for things of significance and things trivial until everything I had ever known, every memory I had ever had, matters I had thought I had forgotten or had never known I knew had been sucked from me iF and greedily devoured by the knowledge-crazed mind. And then they had started in earnest the experiments, the endless, horrible experiments. Pain, hunger, ecstasy, fear, lust, the whole spectrum of emotions and drives -- the thing made me experience them over and over again, while it hovered in my mind, observing, clucking to itself, recording, evaluating, savoring. I remember asking again and again what was happening to Loy and finally, when the world-mind was good and ready, it let me know. Loy was conveyed into the chamber by a bevy of our captors, her body thin and drawn and not her own. I was forced to watch, immobilized, while what had been done to me was done to her. I watched the pain and the fear and the lust play over her features, and i all the while I could feel the presence in my mind assessing my reactions, accumulating the knowledge of how a man feels when he is watching his bride being tortured. Then the process was reversed and Loy was forced to look on while the world-mind did things to me. Finally the thing was satisfied. Most interesting , the words in my mind said. Although your two mental structures are separate entities , there seems to be some interaction between them. If one of you undergoes unpleasant stimuli both of you react. It is as if your mental structures were partially connected.' This seems to be at least the major part of the phenomenon you call love. Interesting. Love would seem to be one of the two strongest aberrations called emotion to which your mental structures are prone. One may consider it one pole of your emotional spectrum. The other pole seems to be a fear of this phenomenon you call death. That will have to be investigated most thoroughly. Loy had been led out and I died for the first time. Now I truly remembered everything. This was not the first time I had died and been reborn. How many times had I died? I had no way of knowing. Each death had been real -- a death without memory of the earlier ones. Each time had somehow been the one and only time, all-obliterating death itself, and -- Very good , the presence in my mind said. You have died one hundred and seventy-three times. Much data has been gathered, much has been understood. This death is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, the permanent destruction of your mental structure. You now understand death totally. You know in detail heroes die but once just what it is to die. Nothing that you can experience is more unpleasant. The same reaction was observed in all the woman s deaths as well. I cried aloud, " You filthy -- " It cut me off impatiently, the brain-things pulsing and squirming in the pale blue light. It was necessary that she undergo the same experiences, both as a control and as a condition of the final exp erim en t. In my mind I responded fearfully. Final experiment? Yes. All possible data has been accumulated, except for one most interesting experiment. It has been established that one pole of your emotional spectrum is love. The other is fear of death. It but remains to determine which is stronger. At the conclusion of this experiment, one of you will be permitted to return to your own planet. I gasped. One of us? Of necessity, the presence said. The purpose of this final experiment is to determine which is the stronger stimulus: love or death. You will both undergo the experience of death one final time. This time you will be permitted to retain the memories of all your previous deaths as you die. But this time you will really die. You will not awaken from this death. Each of you will have only one way of saving yourself -- you must sacrifice the other. You have only to declare in your mind that you wish the other to die in your place and it shall be done. Then you will be allowed to return to your planet. It should be a most informative experiment. And once again I felt the blackness closing in, numbness overwhelming my extremities, my body sloughing away from me. I felt myself sinking slowly but inexorably into nothingness. But this time the terror was even greater, for now I remembered this happening before, again and again and again. As each tiny fraction of my universe was chipped away, I was anticipating, knowing how it would be, fearing it an instant before it came, out of my deep knowledge of exactly what it was really to die. And I knew that Loy was feeling it, too. I felt my consciousness collapsing upon itself, contracting, fading to a point and every moment I was anticipating the next, dying a thousand deaths in one. Inward, ever inward, the screaming animal thing that was me contracted, faded, beating hopelessly against that final, infinitely anticipated oblivion. And Loy was dying, too. I was reduced to a mote of consciousness, a thing in itself, by itself. A thing fading, shrinking -- and all around was the night, IF the consuming, endless night. The end of me-ness, of hope and fear and pain and love. Of all I ever was, ever would be. And Loy was dying, too. The words were a constant refrain. No amount of bravery could save her. I could not save her. Nothing, no one could. We were both dying and only one of us could live, the one wtio doomed the other. I was no longer a man, no longer a husband, no longer a lover. I was a thing, a mewling, screaming, panicked thing, a thing that had died and died and died and remembered every moment of those multiple deaths. I was a dying thing, an ego hungering for another instant of life and the black was closing in. And then there was nothing left of me but a howling maddened voice shrieking against the night -- no! Screaming and begging, holding on to each instant like a man hanging irom a cliff by his fingers, each moment a little more of the edge crumbling beneath his fingernails. And Loy was dying, too. I could not save her. I could only save me. And suddenly love was a faraway thing of another world, another plane of existence. There was no love. There was no Loy. Only me. And soon there would be an end to me and there would be nothing, nothing, nothing, howling and empty and everything lost to me forever. And before I had decided anything, before I realized what I was doing, I was screaming: "Her. Kill her. Not me. Not me. Her. Her. Her." A presence far away said simply, You shall live. The blackness closed in but I was no longer afraid. to the ship. Two of the brainslugs stood beside me. In front of me stood Loy. She was staring intently at the ground. Interesting , said the worldmind. The experiment is concluded, and the results are as anticipated. It was, of course , not necessary that either of you actually die. You are free to leave. The two brain-slugs began to wriggle swiftly away toward the hills, leaving twin trails of translucent slime in the grass. Loy and I stood for long moments not speaking, not able to look at each other. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, our eyes met for the briefest instant. But I knew from that flicker of a moment that all that had ever been between us was dead and gone forever. I only needed that momentary glance into her eyes to know with terrible certainty that Loy had made the same choice I had.  The most dangerous question in the Universe may be -- What's new? hall of the Record Registry was to feel one plodded through deep dust, although the floor was spotless, clean and firm underfoot. A hard heel could make it ring but so vast was the hall that echoes died on the way to the walls and roof which might have reflected them. That which lay here deep and made the going heavy was despair. At certain points on the wall, at about the height of a man, red figures shone: a one, a zero, a three, a nine and a four. Last year the group had ended in a three. Next year it would most likely end in a five. Below, above, on every side was a feeling of pressure, a sense that the air was being made to shimmer -- from this shimmering sifted down the intangible motes of hopelessness that settled not on the bodies but on the minds of those who came here. The weight of those particles which were without weight was graphed by apathy: less laughing, more anger; less anger, more sighing; less sighing, more silence. This was the Record Registry in which had been stored data about the achievements of every intelligent race known to have inhabited this galaxy: the Frotuglize, the Zyphrians, the Homoclawk, the Madgerive -- facts garnered from serve as a yardstick for the current precariously dominant species, the oxygen-breathing biped known as Man. This was the place to which proud spokesmen from thousands of the planets that Man now occupied had come, anxious to have their accomplishments also marked in the imperishable pattern of the computer memories as they who did it.  This was the Ultimate Arbiter: the passionless machine that ate the energy of the stars for food and stored the knowledge of the galaxy for -- satisfaction? Here, now, hoping against hope that the long, long time they waited for a verdict on the offerings they had brought -- the pansensory tapes, the certified time marks, the attestations and documentary evidence and other things by the shipload -- indicated that they would finally secure a place in the Record list and cause the figures on the wall to revert to zero, were four isolated individuals, two women and two men. By turns, each watching for onethird of a standard day, they monitored display panels set into the wall upon which the verdicts must eventually appear. By custom those who had been here longest waited farthest from the entrance. By custom, also, one did not speak of the hoped-for record-breaking accomplishment that had caused the people of a whole faraway planet to send its delegates to the Registry. All too easily two delegations might have come here to post an identical claim. That suspicion was haunting, inescapable; drawn apart, the four no longer spoke excitedly to one another but remained quiet and revolved in their minds the terrifying possibility of null achievements. As the red-glowing, figures showed, it was ten thousand three hundred and ninety-four years since a new Record had been entered on the list. peared in the enormous doorway the soft, directionless voice of the automatic enunciator caused those who were already waiting to turn incuriously and look that way, but only the newest IF of the former arrivals retained enough spirit to raise a glass and inspect him at a distance. The others were content to wait -- he would, by custom, come to them. More than likely he would bring a breath of intolerable excitement with him and be bewildered by their dullness. And it would be too great an effort to explain the reason. The glass showed, in fine longrange detail, a very old man indeed, his brown skin networked with lines, his scalp showing through the scattered white hairs that crossed it, his back bent, his scrawny arm requiring the support not of an automated walker but of a simple staff. His only visible garment was a long gray robe that brushed the insteps of feet aged nearly to translucency. Breathing with some effort, he leaned on his staff and gazed across the hall for a long moment, his eyes at least suggesting alertness and vivacity. During that time the voice of the machine that enclosed them all stated some simple facts about him. "The newcomer wishes to be known as Alexander. He is a human male of the genetic strain qBA. He is aged one thousand one hundred and sixty-four and his planet of origin is Earth. Of the Records in the current list held by human beings twenty-two per cent were established on -- or by citizens of -- Earth, more than any other single planet. But the last one hundred applications for new Records by citizens of Earth have all been adjudged unacceptable." At the startling figure of twenty-two per cent the four who were already present turned in unison to stare at Alexander. At the conclusion of the machine's remarks, they uttered simultaneous sighs of relief. Nothing -- nothing in the universe -- could conceivably be more galling than to assist at the Registration of someone else's Record, while having one's own rejected. There was a moment of renewed silence. At the end of it Alexander gathered his failing strength and began to walk. speak with the man who waited farthest from the door. This was a hulking fellow in a tight garb of dark green. His beard hung untrimmed to his waist and his fingernails were overgrown and chipped. In a thin voice and a polite manner the old man said, "As you have been told, I am Alexander and I come from Earth." The hulking man moved only his eyes. The slumped weight of his body remained inert on the folding metal chair that supported him. It was not until it became clear that the intrusive stranger was patient and did not plan to go away of his own immediate accord that he summoned enough energy to grunt a harsh response. "I'm Cridge, from Balkistan. Anything else you want to know or will you leave me in peace?" "Thank you," said Alexander sadly and moved to speak to the next in line. This was a woman, a very stout one, whose gross body matched the inflatable armchair under her, and who leaned one elbow on the side of the chair so that her fingers were conveniently located to pluck at her underlip -- brrup, brrup, brrup. She wore no clothing at all but nudity was customary on many worlds. Alexander addressed her in the same words and after a longdrawn-out sigh she consented to reply. "I'm Gailalu and I come from Ludgerworld. Welcome to the Registry. And now, if you don't mind, I'd like to go on watching my panel. I'm expecting a verdict any moment." Alexander inclined his head and moved on toward the third of those waiting -- again a man but this time one of middle age and medium build, with the contrast of dark skin, pale hair and a bodyharness of flexible gold that located his ancestry to within a few hundred parsecs. While on the verge of approaching this man's nullgravity couch and a third time uttering his introduction, Alexander checked, glancing toward the door. A man had appeared there, young and vigorous of stride, in gaudy yellow and blue, and at the sight of him the fourth person waiting -- a girl with a bright smile and a sweep of clear red hair -- had jumped up in delight and gone running to meet him. His eyes following the girl, Alexander spoke to the darkskinned, pale-haired man and received much the answer he had been expecting. "I'm Phraticor and I come from Loghious. You're from Earth, are you? Well, I wish you as much luck with your application as I'm having with mine -- I've been here three months already. Obviously it's taking a lot of time to process our Loghian data. But the chances are that when the breakthrough comes it'll be sudden -- so I'd better not waste time chatting right now. Later, maybe." And with that his mask of civility gave way to the same expression his companions wore. A lexander made to move on. But before he had covered the distance that separated him from the stool on which the girl had been keeping her watch, she had brought the newcomer to IF meet him, her arm linked with his. "Hugo, this is Alexander and he's from Earth -- can you imagine it?" she exclaimed. "The world we all started on thousands of centuries ago! I'm Doha, by the way," she added to Alexander. "And Hugo, of course, is my relief. He came for me early so we could have time together." She gave the arm she held an affectionate squeeze. Alexander looked at them for a long time. At last a smile crossed his face, so that one might have imagined his dry old skin crackling like ancient parchment. He said, "I see you are very happy with one another." Hugo nodded and gave an answering smile that turned his features from regular to handsome. "And you are from what world?" Alexander pursued. "Oh, from Coraline." Doha shrugged. She gave her words an embarrassed inflection. "A very new world -- you probably won't have heard of it. This is our first application to the Registry and we're terribly excited. Everyone seems to think we have a very good chance because it's taking so long to process our evidence. Usually the first time a new world sends a delegation here it's turned down right away. But we've been here over a month and they're still processing." "You mean it's still processing," Hugo corrected her gently. "This place isn't run by people -- it's all machines." "Slip of the tongue," Doha said with a grimace. "Oh, we're holding up Alexander from posting his evidence, aren't we? I'm sure you must be very eager to get on with it." She checked and a tiny frown drew her brows together. Uncertainly she added: "Are you the entire delegation from Earth, by the way? Or are there others to follow?" "Good point." Hugo nodded. "There are only five of us from Coraline but we're still very underpopulated. I know the Loghians sent sixty -- and I don't think I've managed to count the delegations from Ludgerworld and 'Balkistan." "I'm by myself," Alexander said. Doha gasped. "But aren't you going to find it terribly tiring -- having to watch the screens all the time on your own? Or have you brought enough equipment to let you stay here all the time? Even so -- " She broke off doubtfully. "You were perhaps going to say," Alexander supplemented, "that it will be a long and tiring wait nonetheless? Ah, there you're wrong, though I appreciate your concern for my well-being. You see, I shall not have to wait. I know that I'm going to set an incontestable Record." The ensuing silence was not surprised but stunned. It was broken by the sound of movement from behind Alexander. He turned to see that his three other listeners had stirred from their dull postures of waiting and were gazing at him with dismay. Phraticor, the nearest, responded first, jumping to his feet with a display of bluster. "You say you know you'll set a Record? Then you're mad. You need medication, sedation, psychotherapy. Yours is a delusion of grandeur." Hauling her ponderous mass to the floor, waddling toward Alexander with a furious scowl, the woman Gailalu chimed in to support Phraticor. "Yes -- yes. You have to submit your evidence to the machines. They compare your claim with all data they have in store. No one can claim to predict a Record." And, disturbed at last from his apathy, the hulking Cridge also strode over shouting, "You're mad! You have to be mad! If any man can say what's a Record -- and what's not -- there's no point in coming here, no point in waiting all these months and years for a verdict." "Do you want your verdict, then?" Alexander said and drew his scrawny body up with the help of his staff, so that sudden authority rang in his voice like a brazen bell. "What?" Taken aback, Cridge stumbletongued. Then he retorted, "Of course I want my verdict. Why else should I have sat here day by day for all these unendurable months?" "Because you found the waiting more endurable than the verdict," Alexander answered. "The circuits of the Registry work at the speed of light. The verdict on any application may be had between one heartbeat and the next." "What?" Hugo stepped forward. "You mean we didn't have to come here and waste all this Time -- you mean we could have just come and gone home again?" "Would you rather be home again?" Alexander countered. "Of course! Do you think it's any fun for Doha and me to be cooped here on this sterile artificial planet with the dreary company we have to keep -- always being told to go sit here in this horrible hall for hours of every day -- when we could be at home swimming and dancing and being happy together?" Beside him, in answer to an unspoken question from Alexander, Dolia gave a firm nod. "It is as I feared," Alexander said and the whole weight of his IF years seemed to settle on his shoulders in a moment, so that he had to take a grip on his staff with both hands. But the others had exchanged glances in the meantime and, with acid formality, Cridge had decided to live up to his declared pretensions. He said, "I defy you to prove your assertion, sir. I think you're lying -- and when I've shown that you are I think I shall have you expelled from the Registry. This place is the repository of the known achievements of intelligent life in this galaxy and as such it might well be termed sacred. It is not to be mocked." "Oh, for -- " Alexander ended his exclamation with a sound epitomizing disgust. "Have your verdict, then, before you rot into the floor." and raised his staff to tap on the nearest of the uncountable wall-panels that displayed verdicts concerning applications for a new Record. "What do the people of Balkistan think they've done that's new?" he demanded -- and his voice faded into a wheeze on the last word as though to suggest that the very concept of newness must be dead by now. "The people of Balkistan have reorganized their society so that novelty is illegal," said the automatic voice from the air. The wall-panel simultaneously displayed the words. "They claim that this is in itself unprecedented." "Have we gone that far?" Alexander whispered, while noting that all the other listeners -- even Doha and Hugo -- had relaxed perceptibly. Evidently they are claiming a different Record or Records. "And?" "This had already been done by the following species: the Zyphrians, the Homoclawk, the Madgerive, the -- " "Stop," Alexander said. And with reluctance added: "Dead species?" "All of them," replied the machine. He saw that Doha was turning pale and wondered whether she had insight into the terrible suspicion he hdjut heard made a certainty. But he had no time for speculation. Now the die was cast and he had to hurry. "Balkistan has its verdict," he told Cridge, "and could have had it within an hour of your arrival. Are you pleased with what you've heard?" "It must be a lie," Cridge said uncertainly and was interrupted by Gailalu. "Of course it's not a lie! Something as stupid and obvious as that was bound to have been done already. I'm prepared to hear the verdict on our achievement right away, if you can honestly make it come out of the machine." "You doubt me?" Alexander said. "No, not me but those who were faint of heart before you. Little by little, ten thousand years ago, people grew discouraged by the negative verdicts that kept coming out of the machine, one, ten, a hundred, a thousand. There is something missing from the air of this place -- without which no human being can survive." "You're crazy. We were told the place was -- " "I don't mean oxygen," said Alexander. "What I'm talking about is hope." And, not giving Gailalu time for a reply, he asked the machine to utter its verdict on the application from Ludgerworld. "The population of that planet have turned it inside out," reported the machine. "Now they live on its interior and the hot core is a tiny artificial sun." Hearing the words, Gailalu drew herself up proudly and sneered at the others. "There's an unprecedented feat for you!" she cried. "The Record in this respect is held by the Frotuglize," said the impersonal machine. "They turned the second planet of #CAvgridH inside out approximately thirty thousand years ago." "They, too, shut out the universe," said Alexander. "And went their private way to death. Well, Phraticor?" The dark man, with a glance at Gailalu, whose face had taken on the emotionless expression of someone who has survived an earthquake but lost in it both family and friends, said challengingly, "There's no need to ask the machines what we have done. We made a star -- yes! From the separate atoms of hydrogen drifting in nothingness we pulled together mass enough to make it glow, a new light in the pattern of the heavens!" Doha and Hugo, as one, drew in their breath in wonder, but Alexander shook his aged head. "Poor Phracticor," he said. "Poor people on an isolated world. Machine, tell them the truth and end their misery." "What misery?" barked Phraticor. But the machine had already begun to speak. "The majority of the Population I stars in the galaxy are now known to be the products of an unnamed race of approximately years ago, whose factory was responsible for clearing the volume between our galaxy and the Greater Magellanic Cloud of all hydroIF gen, totaling approximately -- " "Stop," Alexander directed and the machine fell silent. The face of Phraticor had turned gray. "But -- " Doha spoke after a terrible struggle with herself. "But I thought the Zyphrians -- " "Were the first race we have any knowledge of?" Alexander sighed. "No, alas, my dear. Only the first race whose achievements we have so far matched -- or rather, had matched. To outdo the Starmakers we should have to build a galaxy -- and the raw materials for that do not exist anywhere in the plenum." With a wry moue he added, "Anyway, where would you put it?" Recovering slowly from his shock, Hugo said, "In that case -- I think it best not to even mention our own petty little application. If the creation of a star turns out to be the pointless reenactment of some previous Record we might as well quit and go home." Doha nodded and they turned toward the door. "Wait." The order came from Cridge, whose despair had given way to rage on digesting the fact that his own world's boasted achievement was likewise the mere shadow of something long ago. "Not so fast. Are we 'to be cowed by this -- this intruder, this lunatic? Didn't you hear him say that he was certain of establishing a new Record? I want to know what the people of Earth can do that's so superior, so novel and so fantastic that it'll be accepted here." "Yes!" Gailalu cried. "Yes!" Phraticor agreed, marching threateningly close to the old man. away but he resisted and spoke over the girl's bright red casque of hair. "Sir, I think you owe us that, at least. If you do not prove what you claim we shall have no grounds to believe you on any score. I always understood that to secure a verdict from the Registry the applicant might have to wait for weeks, months, even years." "Fair," conceded Alexander. He repeated more softly, "Fair -- " He grew brisk, "Well, then, since doubtless it will be you who by chance are elected to convey news of this event to the rest of the galaxy -- and to do so you'll need all the data you can get -- I suggest that we begin in inquiring what the last Record was that was set by the people of Earth. Machine, enlighten my friends on that score, please." "The largest information-processing system in the galaxy," said the mechanical voice, "the Record Registry, was set up by the people of Earth approximately thirteen thousand two hundred years ago. No known previous and no subsequent installation of the kind outdoes it for (a) storage capacity, (b) speed of response, (c)-" "Stop," said Alexander. And, turning to Doha, added: "You have a question?" "Yes!" She was almost weeping and her nails were dug deep into her palms. "If it's supposed to be so fast, why have people had to come here and sit around, wait months for a verdict, come here day after day after day?" "Not because of the machine." Alexander sighed. "But because of their own reluctance to face the kind of truth that led us, the people of Earth, to create the Registry in the first place. You see, Earth is -- uh -- was a very old world. There had been men on it, naturally, who spoke and used tools and fire and re after a fashion intelligent, for perhaps as the dawn of the age of Space and the colonization of all your other planets. We had time to relax, sit back, meditate, hear the news, while you on Loghious and Balkistan and Coraline and all the other planets of other stars were busy getting on with your lives, taming strange environments, adapting to new foods, learning to love new mountains and new oceans. You do love your worlds, don't you?" He glanced at the others, who had grouped before him in a semicircle. Dolia finally answered him with a nod and a smile. "As I expected," Alexander muttered. "You from the youngest world find it easiest to reply. So I must ask your forgiveness for our disastrous mistake because there is no one else to ask it of and no one else to do the asking. "It seemed to us -- as we saw the people of Earth grow less enterprising, ambitious, adventurous; more complacent, contented, repetitious in their lives -- that something had to be done to jolt the species out of such a rut. This is what we did -- we created this Registry, where the achievements of every species that to our knowledge preceded us are recorded. It was intended to act as a perqnnial spur, as a creative force to, pose new goals and new ambitions for Mankind. We did not know of the Starmakers when we designed and built the Registry -- had we known, perhaps our decision would have been otherwise.   worked. As we had anticipated, men came from all over the galaxy to inform the machines of new accomplishments and the tidings spread rapidly IF when some great breakthrough was accomplished. To spur men on still further, we made sure that anything that was a copy of the work of other species was dismissed as such. But this was a terrible horror -- and, I confess, it stemmed from arrogance. What business had we -- who a mere fellows to suck the marrow from their bones -- to match attainments with races who lasted as many years in space alone, who -- as we belatedly discovered -- were capable of shaping the very galaxy we inhabit to suit their tastes? "You, friend from Loghious who built a star! Your feat was marvelous, fantastic, incredible. I salute you -- were it not that these old bones are stiff and slow, I'd go down on my knees to kiss your sandal strap! And you from Ludgerworld who turned it inside out, who made your own small sun to suit your needs -- you, too, I admire and salute, for you saw a peak of accomplishment and with single-minded determination scaled it!" Now the old man's voice was ringing so loudly it could almost call echoes from the far-distant walls of the great hall. He had forgotten his age and the prop of his staff in his excess of pride at the successes of the species he belonged to. "From you and your people, Cridge, I can, however, do no more than beg forgiveness. We unwittingly sent you down the blind alley in which you became lost -- and not only you but everyone who has visited this hall for the past ten millennia." Alexander's staff made a contemptuous jab at the red-glowing figures on the wall. "We turned what should have been a challenge into a foregone conclusion. It has been believed for thousands of years that anyone who came here to apply for the listing of a Record was bound to have it rejected -- and so the custom has grown up of not asking for the verdict until all patience has run out, until the weight of boredom and desperation becomes intolerable. Once hundreds of planets every year sent eager delegations to the Registry -- and now, in this hall that could hold a thousand, I find only you people waiting. Oh, it's sad, it's sad... "So, as a result, on thousands of human worlds life grows drab, pointless, monotonous. For everything that one can think of to do has already been done and the unquestionable authority of the Record Registry says it's been done. And in the end..." He drew a deep breath and clutched his staff tightly to him. "Yes! In the end. "Friends, I know you hate me. Why should you not? I come here, I tell you why your hoped-for Records are a waste of time. I claim to be about to register a Record of my own -- certainly you must hate me. I see you shake your head, Doha, and I'm grateful. But that's because you're young, and you have your man beside you -- and you've not yet been disappointed often enough to become cynical about those good things which are, after all, the real prizes of life. I understand and respect, I even accept, your detestation. I shall make it worse. I shall say that I am about to post two Records -- and that in itself will be a third. Machine! Has any delegation from any planet registered two Records on a single visit?" "No," said the voice from the air. "I thought not. Well, then, let me deal with the first. Machine, what is the planet which has been longest inhabited by mankind and is now uninhabited?" "The planet Earth," said the machine. T HE silence this time was terrible -- a silence like the implacable noiselessness between the galaxies. At last Hugo said faintly, "Earth is -- " "Earth is empty," said Alexander. "The reason for that is what you've witnessed here. You, Cridge. Tell us what went on in your mind while you were sitting here waiting for the verdict." "I -- " The hulking man had to swallow. "I suppose I thought about what we would do to exceed our own Record -- if one were granted to us -- and I couldn't think of anything." "And to postpone your confrontation with that terrifying knowledge, the realization that you had nothing left to work for, no ambition, no plans, hopes, schemes, you waited here. You sat and stared at a blank wall panel and put off the moment of truth. Am I not right?" Cridge nodded. "You, too, Doha, and your man Hugo -- you'd have suffered that fate," Alexander sighed. "Already, by accepting the idea that one must wait for the machines instead of coming right out and asking for their verdict, you'd taken the first step toward catastrophe. I wouldn't wish that doom on you, young, lively, vital -- it was dreadful enough seeing it overtake the tired, bone-weary folk of Earth. First one wondered: why have children since their lives will be a mere repetition of other lives? Then it was: why marry, others have already done the same? And at last it was: why live? IF "I alone survive to register my Records. You already know the third one. Before naming my first, I must give you instructions. I must tell you to go and rouse your companions. Order them to go back aboard their ships and to leave the Registry. And tell them not to go home at once -- but to to warn other ships not to approach closer than that." "What?" Cridge's normal hectoring manner seemed to be returning by the second now that he was free of the weight of hopelessness that pervaded the Registry. "Why must we keep everyone else away? For all we know a new Record could be established by the next visitors!" "Your thinking belongs to the past," Alexander said sadly, raising his staff before his face. He gave the ends a twist and lowered it again. "My first Record has been iet. The machines here are very perceptive -- why don't you ask them just what that Record is? You know, don't you?" .he asked the air. "The person who wishes to be known as Alexander," said the machine, "is the first visitor who ever brought to the Registry without being detected a bomb of sufficient power to destroy it." Cridge, Gailalu and Phraticor exclaimed in horror and instantly took to their heels. Hugo would have done the same but Dolia clung to him and made him wait. She asked, "Is it true?" Her voice trembled. "Quite true." Alexander sat down on her stool and with one thin hand caressed the staff absently. "I should hurry if I were you. You have only an hour to get away." "But you -- " "I have nothing to get away for." Alexander shrugged. "A thousand years has been enough for me." "Dolia, come on," Hugo cried. "He's crazy -- dangerous, too." "No he's not crazy," Dolia said. "Just sad. Will there be another Registry?" Alexander promised. "By then we should have enough Records of our own. For the time being, though, isn't it better to do what one wants to do -- without worrying about whether or not it's already been! done?" "I'm young enough to remember what it was like the first time I -- " Dolia checked, glanced at Hugo and colored. "Well, the first time, anyway." "In that case," Alexander said, "you are unusually wise. Remember that to be wise is a very precious thing." "I'll try," she whispered. She put out her hand uncertainly, ( Please turn to page #) i Hilton Inn, San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests of Honor: Miriam Allen de Ford and E. Hoffman Price. Fan Guest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. Memberships: # now, # after January #st, # at the door. For information: Quinn Yarbro, # Columsa ##, Berkeley, California #.  Andrews Hotel, Minneapolis. 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IF IN Glenn Chang, at J# , isJalre National Merit Fin High School, Hawaii, he entered Northwestern University this fall -- on a scholarship -- to major in chemistry. Already a veteran of survival by his own admission, Glenn has written -- for his IF First -- a story of survival. And creation. both realized the implications. "Dissolution," he said. "Yes," she replied. They looked into each other's eyes. "I do not want this." He stated it flatly. "Nor I," she breathed quickly. "Oh, my love, can't we go on even for a little while longer?" He shook his head. "No, impossible. I am old and the law must be obeyed." oqfcj.n "We are both old." Her tone was dull and resigned. He leaned forward and clasped her hands tightly in his. "Yes, that is true. We are old. But we have lived -- and we have lived together. And I -- I remember." He looked deep into her eyes and saw longing there. "I remember when I first saw you and realized that I loved you. I remember the quiet walks we took, the children's games we played, all the joys and sorrows we shared. I know the beauty of your soul, the gentleness and the deep sensitivity of your manner. That is the essence of you, my darling, that I have loved all these long ages of existence." "And I love you, too," she said tremblingly, eyes bright. For a space the two bowed figures sat facing each other, seemingly oblivious of their fate -- to have their ancient, decrepit bodies Dissolved, the chemicals and particles transformed into pure energy, their existence snuffed out. The two last humans in the universe. Suddenly his head snapped up. She looked at him, startled, and then, noting his expression, hopefully. "We cannot ask the Machine for continuance," he began, "for our ruler's word is irreversible. Yet possibly -- yes -- I believe I have thought of another way -- " He took her hands again and rose to his feet. "Our physical selves are not important. They are only so much organic material that dies and regenerates again and again until it is worn out -- it has no soul. Let the Dissolution process take it and break it down into atomic components -- we do not need it. We can find an alternate to flesh, a body not of organic compounds which wear out so quickly. We can go to the machine and petition for rebirth," he finished excitedly. "Oh, yes!" And so they went before the Machine -- the vast, mile-square electronic complex that was their god -- and pleaded their case. Their request was irregular, though not the first of its kind. "I can grant you no organic hosts," the Machine said. "My postulate must remain unchanged, even though you may be the last survivors of your race." "We know that," he said. "We merely ask that you grant us a receptacle -- just so we may still exist and retain sentience." The Machine paused as if in thought. They waited silently. Finally, the Machine spoke. "I will do it," it said. "You will have your rebirth. You will become parts of me, each of you controlling a component computer section. You will have no organic bodies but metal-and-integratedcircuit hosts. End of transmittal." "Thank you, Machine," they said humbly. reached out for each other. "I cannot feel you! I have no hands!" she cried -- yet she did not cry aloud though he received her message. "Nor can I feel you." She received his thoughts in the same manner that he received hers -- on IF the swift wings of quark energy. "No arms, no legs -- I have no body!" she radiated. The force of her panic pounded at his mind. "No eyes to see you, ears to hear you, lips to kiss you -- " "They are only tools of your senses. You can feel me but not that way. This way -- " And his mind reached out, touched hers gently with hesitant, probing tendrils. She felt him and reached out likewise. Her touch was soft, gentle, wondering. "It is strange," she emanated. "My physical senses are gone but I can feel you, touch you, even though we are trapped in these metal prisons. I can sense your soul, your strength, your firmness of character. For the first time, I can really feel you" "Which is enough," he said. A ND so they existed, doing their part of the work for the Machine, with only free moments now and then to communicate with each other. But at least they were permitted this small privilege and they were content. Yet Time is unstoppable and brings with it decay and change. The millennia came and went with amazing speed. Even the Machine was not immortal. So the year came when they knew that the Machine was running down -- perhaps even dying -- and would soon be gone and with it would go their own existence. Nothing could be done. They could only take comfort in each other's mind-touch. Reality often encounters strange accidents -- in this case a nearby star was going nova. The cataclysmic nature of its death let loose strange and destructive forces -- these enveloped the surrounding area in a holocaust of heat and hard radiation. All matter was vioquanta of hard radiation and energy, including the metal-and-circuitry substance of the Machine -- save the two life-essences that had been trapped in its immobile metal body for eons. "What happened?" she asked. "A miracle. We are free. The nova has somehow pried us loose from the Machine and now we are pure energy." His life-essence twisted and darted in space joyously, easily and with the speed of thought skirting the nova-caused scenes of destruction. "Come," he radiated to her. "Use your powers. We are free -- free to do anything." She joined him and the two tumbled and cartwheeled among miles in mere minutes. "Oh, my love!" Her message held cosmic laughter. "We have succeeded beyond our wildest hopes! We shall be together forever!" "Yes," he replied, coming back to her side. "We shall be immortal -- an undying monument to our love." But their joy was short-lived, for as they traveled through the cosmos they found no sign of life. The entire universe was barren of any other living things. A terrible loneliness possessed the two lovers. And even as they realized this, they noted something else. Everywhere they went they passed dead stars, lifeless planets wandering aimlessly in deep space, entire galaxies glowing with the radiation of their death-throes. Watching all this, seeing that their cosmos was crumbling around them, it was plain to them what was happening. The universe was dying. He drew her attention to the stars. "Look, already it begins to contract." And, indeed, the very fabric of space-time was pulling closer together -- the universe was collapsing upon itself. "Is there nothing we can do?" shp pleaded. His answer was negative. "Even we cannot halt its death." Yet an idea began to dawn on him. "But," he said excitedly, "perhaps we can survive oblivion by transferring ourselves somehow to the next universe, one yet to be born. Yes, we can do it, for sure." "How?" "Maybe like this." Hesitantly, fine lines of coruscating energy began forming in the area surrounding them. As she watched, wondering, the lines thickened, grew more profuse, became almost solid. "There -- and there. Ah, like that." The energy net became a wall around them. "Do as I do and make it as strong as possible. It will protect us against the final holocaust." When they had finished, the energy net was like a huge cocoon completely enveloping them. He examined it, satisfied. "Yes, it is good. We shall lie dormant here and perhaps -- " he paused. "Perhaps we may survive the final death and the violent reprehensive, they cut off their consciousnesses and waited. The universe contracted japidly until all remaining matter was clustered so close together that tremendous mutual gravitational forces induced great collisions, giving rise to energies that initiated new collisions. The chain reaction was so devastating that every bit of matter was transformed into free energy and the cosmic egg lay there, seething with rampant energy -- rampant except for a strange energy cyst that had somehow resisted the tendency toward absolute entropy. IF Then rebirth began. With another violent upheaval the compact mass began to expand -- and with expansion, energy transformed into elementary particles -- matter -- and clumped and coagulated into shapeless masses. The seething proto-universe gradually cooled. Galaxies of dust formed, then stars, then, molten and primeval, the planets. And the energy cyst opened. Consciousness returned. He looked out and saw the new universe. "We did it." She saw, too. "Yes," she said unbelievingly. "We live!" He wanted to fly, to cavort in triumph -- but he could not. In his dormancy he had offered much of his power to buffering the energy cyst and so had she. The two survived -- but with only a small fraction of their former capabilities. "I am weak," she said. Indeed, her emanations were fluctuating and hard to read. He felt the same way. They drifted together, each helping the other. "We cannot exist long like this," he said. "Our powers are ebbing steadily. And if each transferral to a new universe is so taxing: -- I am not sure I would like to continue after this one is gone." "But we have love still," she said hopefully. "Yes, we have our love." Suddenly he guided her to a bright, hot star, its newly formed planets just beginning to orbit. "A monument, then, to our love," he declared. "We return to matter, from whence we came." Her aura seemed to brighten. "Yes, I see what you mean!" "I will be this star," he said and his life-essence diffused into the ball of plasma and gas. "And I will be this planet," she stated, doing the same to one of the molten satellites. They sucked up quarks and quintessences of energy. "Oh, I feel stronger already," she exclaimed. "I, too." The sun seemed to burn brighter. "You alone, of all these planets, will receive my blessing. On you will I make life flourish as a symbol of my love for you." "Then I will return that love and bloom rampant with life. Our monument will live for as long as this universe endures." "And that," he said, "is enough." A ND when the life-forms gained sentience .they marveled at the vast profusion of life on their world. Looking up at their star, they paid homage to the power that had bestowed its blessing on them alone and called it Sol. And his mate -- their mother-planet -- they called Terra.  most impossible to find a book by an unknown writer in the fields of science fiction or fantasy. The author either had already established himself with shorter works or his novel had been serialized in the magazines long before it appeared in book form. This no longer holds true. From even a hasty scanning of the shelves, it is obvious that a great many writers today are breaking into print initially in books. Delaney and LeGuin built their reputations outside the magazines and many more current examples exist. It is still a happy occasion when a first appearance represents both good writing and a gift for storytelling, however. The Warlock in Spite oj Himself , by Christopher Stasheff (Ace, #c) probably has the year's worst title and it is the work of a writer unknown at least to me. He also, unforgivably, combines science fiction and outright fantasy in the same story. On top of that, the publishers make the book seem one of those repulsively mechanical attempts at humor in a singularly unappealing blurb. Nevertheless, this rather fat book is a cracking good tale and a well-integrated story, told with a smooth command of the language. After the first few pages even the humor quiets down to a gently effective sense of fun. The story takes place on Gramarye, a world colonized and then lost to the records. But apparently this planet was settled by rich and eccentric members of the Society for Creative Anachronism who were determined to recreate feudalism in all its aspects. Rodney and Fess -- an epileptic robot horse -- are sent to Gramarye to bring some measure of democratic government into its medievalism. They soon find evidence that other forces are tinkering behind the scenes, trying to create either absolute dictatorships or total anarchy. The young queen is wilfully busy alienating all her lordly friends by experimenting with a feudal welfare state. Rodney naturally winds up in the middle of things. His general attitude is properly science-fictional, as are many of the trappings. Even such things as time machines don't phase him and his wizardry is based solidly on technical tricks. But' at least half of Gramarye works by magic. There are witches galore and elves all over the landscape, all mixed up in the government. There is even a group of fine, upstanding ghosts who dutifully haunt an ancestral castle. And Rodney is recognized by all as a genuine warlock. Maybe he is, despite his protests. In the end most of the magic elements become integrated into the science framework. But it isn't one of the horrible "logical" endings that so often ruin science fantasy. The Little People are far more than mutations and the ghosts remain honest ghosts. The mixture should not work at all -- but somehow everything comes together into a good and satisfying adventure. The story is not a major one or particularly significant but it's more fun to read than anything I've seen by a new writer in much too long a time. There's room here for a sequel, since Rodney really should be proved an authentic warlock eventually. I hope Stasheff is working on it. M ichael crichton was also unknown before his book The Andromeda Strain (Alfred A. Knopf, #). And though his book is currently on the bestseller list and has drawn rave reviews as science fiction all over the country, I rather wish he'd stayed unrecognized. This is just the sort of thing that the general reader will take as science fiction. It has a future setting, a threat to the world, lots of talk of science and innumerable tricks, all too clever. It labors desperately to let the reader know the writer is aware of every little detail. It has computer pictures and even a bibliography of reference works from its future time. And to me it's about as convincing as pink cheese as the basic Lunar surface. The initial situation isn't bad, though we've all seen it before. A satellite set to probe near space brings back a sample of something from a few hundred miles up. That sample turns out to be, apparently, a deadly plague from space. The men who locate the thing immediately die and investigators find a whole village where death seems to have come almost instantaneously. There are, however, two puzzling survivors -- a prying infant and a drink-sodden old man. Four doctors are chosen to find the nature and cure for this danger. (They all have names and carefully worked out characters but I find almost nothing that sticks in my memory about them since they never quite came to life.) With the survivors and samples, they are sealed into a great underground laboratory that has already been constructed to meet the danger of plague from space. AH the scenes you might expect are there. Every theory turns out to be wrong, of course. And there's even a faulty computer and an atomic power pile set to blow up and wipe them cfut when the emergency button is pressed. Naturally it gets pressed and the people have to run about until the last second to turn it off. (Obviously, however, they must have succeeded for their names to be mentioned in the bibliography. Some of the too-conscious work of making this all "real" backfires here.) The chief plotting trouble, however, comes in the nature of the plague. It's impossible to accept long before the story ends. Apparently Crichton felt that science-fiction touches should be used with a shotgun and without aiming. We're told that this plague acts as a blood disease. Then we find it's a crazy crystal that needs nothing from the blood it can't get from the air. We learn next that it somehow works by "atomic fusion" -- which is interesting indeed, since it seemingly produces no great amount of energy. And about then the plague seems to realize that with all that gadgetry it has no need to infect humans in its development, so it stops infecting them and begins to infect machines! Anyhow, it only worked for people who had a normal hydrogenion or pH reading; no reason we can see, it just worked that way. In the end, the whole intent of the book becomes anti-sf. The plague killed off perhaps a hundred people -- one village and a few others. It then began mutating into something harmless. But somehow the result of this unmanned flight accident proves conclusively to the nation and the scientific community that all IF manned (sic!) flight into space must be discontinued because of danger. If you're looking for social significance the book has a message in its final chapter. That message . can best be summed up as: "Man wasn't meant to... T HE theme of danger to Earth from space aliens is also covered in The Pollinators of Eden, by John Boyd (Weybright  Talley, #) -- but with a completely different approach. Here the basic idea is made convincing by some rather sharp characterization and a much higher level of writing. Boyd is still a new writer but hardly an unrecognized one -- this is his second book. His first won excellent reviews. The basic situation here is developed directly. The material is familiar but its handling is fresh and thp, developments of the basic idea are generally good. Freda Caron is a botanist. Her fiance sends her some seeds and two "tulips" from the newly discovered planet of Flora, where flowers have filled most of the ecological niches. The tulips are not only singularly beautiful -- they emit sounds and even mimic words. The big problem is that nobody can figure how they pollinate. She sets about discovering this in collaboration with a young man who had been with her fiance, Paul. Hal, their assistant, somewhat sloppy in his methods. Through these people's eyes, we see a step-by-step development of the danger from the flowers. The tulips take over, adapt hornets to pollinate themselves and begin to exert a strange sexual influence on Freda. And they refuse to be restrained. Every effort to limit their spread seems to be doomed. Hal by supersonics. Freda is faced with other difficulties. Her career at her university is being undermined by academic politics and she is forced to testify with disastrous results on the national political scene. Her own character is changing during this time, increasing the tension. Thr author does not, however, merely tell another story of the plants that conquer a world. The menace is real but solutions are possible. The plants can be subdued. The factors in Freda's personal life are less easy to cope with. All this builds up nicely through more than eighty percent of the novel. Then everything changes. Freda manages to get herself sent to Flora to join Paul in his Eden island where he is studying some extraordinary orchids. And the final twenty percent of the book manages to undo almost everything that the author has developed to that point. Every character undergoes a sudden change. Paul, portrayed as a puritanical intellectual, turns out to be a sloppy hedonist, easily dominated by his plants. Freda's sexual problems vanish immediately as she imitates her fiance. Dead Hal is recast into a man capable only of claiming credit for another's work. And when Freda is sent back to Earth the story development manages to deteriorate even further. From now on, she has one simple solution to every problem -- she reads men's minds and satisfies their bodies, gaining her goals with all the ingenuity of a female turtle. On page #, this was a darned fine book. By #, it had gone pretty much to pieces, with most of what had gone before destroyed. The final twenty-two pages simply grind along somehow to an ending that means nothing emotionally (except for minor shock value) to anyone but Freda -- if she has any real emotions left by this time. T HE schizoid story seems to be a rather standard trap into which many beginning writers fall after their first success. (The first book usually has to be more traditionally organized to sell at all, and writers with any talent seem to know this by instinct.) It usually has a sort of set pattern, known by some editors as the "steak and whipped cream" story. The first part will be a sort of wish-dream fluff, filled mostly with yearning and hot air. I've heard a lot of theories about why this is so. My own guess is that the writer has some grandiose idea dear to his heart but one he never could quite turn into a story. Now, flushed with initial success, he digs it out and insists on writing it. It won't really work by itself, so he goes back to his skill to construct a story before it. Then he tries a "daring" or "experimental" trick of breaking from that over to the thing he wanted to write with total lack of critical judgment all along. The pattern is usually the same. Aside from the sudden break in the plot, there will be a radical change of character. This has to be, since the real characters of his hard section would not fit with the nebulous grandeur or emotional wallowing of the second. And the second part is usually an emotional dream where every wish is gratified or an intellectual one where vast ideas are displayed. A fully developed writer would spot the danger in his idea and never write it. But such self-analysis comes to many only after long IF practice and a spate of well-argued rejections. We can understand the writers, perhaps. But there is more difficulty in seeing why an editor lets his authors get away with such stuff. When he lets something as obvious as the "steak and whipped cream" story get by, he is neither protecting his readers nor helping his writers to develop. There was enough material in Boyd's first eighty percent to justify a complete reexamination. Almost certainly, Freda could have met her problems on Earth by simply facing them. Or the affair on Flora might have been developed into a novel. As it is, the reader has been robbed of two stories. fers from some of the same trouble, though to a lesser extent. And that's something I regret very deeply. I feel that Shaw is potentially one of the finest of the new writers who are beginning to emerge. His short fiction has been excellent and his first novel from Ace presented a writer in full control of his abilities.  The Palace of Eternity , by Bob Shaw (Ace Special, #c) is even better for much of its length. It has good characters, good background and a quite interesting situation featuring aliens. The writing is sharp, the action deft. Tavenor has been orphaned by a seemingly senseless alien raid and has spent most of his life in the military, fighting to avenge his parents' death. But now he has retired and moved to Mnemosyne, a planet that seems to have attracted all the artists and poets. For some reason inspiration flows there as nowhere else. Suddenly Tavenor finds that his Elysium has not only beeir embroiled in the Earth-alien war but Mnemosyne is now the very center of that war. Completely understanding both sides, he watches the military bureaucracy trample down the character of this unusal planet. He's almost alone in this understanding, save for a few rebels whom he recognizes as gallant but futile visionaries. His only real contact is an odd, fey girl-child of three years -- a serious tot with a strange touch that heals. A series of events forces Tavenor to help the rebels. His position as a professional soldier of thirty years' experience lighting the aliens offers them their only chance to survive. Yet he cannot deny the need for the military forces, particularly since it is obvious to him that men are losing the war and that Mnemosyne may soon feel Good. It's a complex story, just moving forward toward its meaning, toward a resolution for the planet, the human race -- and for Tavenor. Then we get a sudden jarring development that's like an ice cube down the back. Tavenor is taken out of the action. I read on, hoping that this meant Shaw had something big enough in mind to dare a trick that only seemed outrageous. But I waS'Wrong. The steak is done and from that point -- about two-thirds of the way through the book -- there is only a spate of uncritically presented "big ideas" filled with hokum. We're given immortal souls that are being killed by men. (What these souls really do with all their time is left unstated. Look, they're souls, dig? Ain't that a big enough idea? Souls don't need development, characterization, purpose beyond survival, all that guff. This is deep philosophy, man! Like love.) Tavenor gets his own soul planted in his infant son. And all the fun begins. Once a strong and thoughtful man, he now becomes a human jellyfish. The mother, fine enough to attract Tavenor in his original form, is now a lump -- literally, almost. The little girl grows up in the background but is abruptly a selfish and badly spoiled normal kid. Tavenor no longer acts. He has things happen to him, while he vaguely feels unhappy. He and the now-grown girl are caught by the horrible aliens. Okay, now we get the motivation for the strange actions of the aliens? We do not! They were great as distant menaces but they're pretty silly when we meet them in their cages! All the toughness and reality developed through most of the story are gone. When we finally find that our girl is a new kind of man, the savior of mankind and soulkind, the discovery is convincing as learning the new reality about a rather nasty and selfish Little Nell! After a fine beginning, it's hard to take a conclusion that is emptily grandiose. And for most readers, I suspect the few rewards won't make it worth while to try to take it. A fairly bad book -- as a totality -- doesn't bother me much. But the loss of the story Shaw could have made from the first twothirds is a tragedy.  IF Willy Ley OF T HE only thing classical writers had to say about coal was that it emitted a bad smell when burning and that it was inferior to "true coal" -- meaning charcoal. Still, the classical w # ord for coal -- carbo -- was used to designate the geological period during which most coal originated. (Lignite, also called "brown coal," originated much more recently, during the Tertiary period.) The Carboniferous Era Twentieth century man has the tendency to ask what people thought about this or that at a certain time in history. The answer is that often they did not think. In our particular case nobody wondered about the nature of coal -- it was something you found in certain places just as you found iron ore or copper ore in others. The first man who speculated on the nature of coal was that French all-around genius, the Count de Buffon, who lived from # to #. Coal, he wrote, was the result of the luxuriant forests that grew when the continents were first formed. When the trees died of old age and collapsed they either decayed on the spot or were carried by river floods to the sea where they finally came to rest in a quiet bay. And there they became coal. To strengthen the picture Buffon mentioned travel reports. He was director of the Jardin du Roy (the King's garden -- or botanical garden in our terminology) and saw many travelers' written accounts of their journeys. "The number of trees which a river like the Mississippi floats to the sea is incredible -- at times the number of floating trees is such that navigation on the river is rendered impossible. It is the same with the Amazon river and the majority of other rivers in thinly settled countries... Travelers in such forests (in Guiana) pick the spot where they intend to spend the night by the health of the nearby trees so that they might not be killed in their sleep by a falling tree." The fact that many coal mines feature a number of coal seams separated by stone seemed to go well with Buffon's idea. The coal seam was plant matter scooped up and brought to the sea by a river's spring flood. The stone was the condensed result of the sand, mud and clay carried by the same river during the rest of the year. The theory worked out so neatly that nearly a century passed before its major error was recognized -- namely, the water transport of the vegetable matter. Evidence grew that the coal seam was where the forest had flourished; large rootlike fossils (called stigmaria) were found and occasionally a whole tree trunk that had turned to stone got in the way of miners who hacked away at the coal seam. The important point was that these trunks did not lie across a seam but stood upright. Naturally scientists wanted to know what plants had gone into the making of coal. There were two ways of finding out. One was to look for recognizable fossils -- the other was a microscope examination. Both courses of investigation strangely enough, were difficult, though for different reasons. Fossils simply were rare -- only occasionally did a fossil leafprint turn up and always in the stone layers that separated the coal seams. The ones that were found usually looked like fronds of large ferns. Microscopic examination suffered from coal's blackness. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, all microscopes required light shining through the specimen. The specimen was mounted on a thin piece of glass, about ## of an inch wide and # inches long and placed under the microscope. A mirror below it sent natural or artificial light through it into the tube. Coal, no matter how thin the specimen, simply blocked the light. Could one bleach coal? It could be done only by using low-strength nitric acid. The process entailed an element of risk. An organic substance bleached by nitric acid becomes an explosive. The danger could, however, be minimized by gentle handling of the slides and by avoiding open flames in the room. IF M icroscopic examination showed clearly that the coal consisted of the cells of plants. Moreover, a botanist could tell what kinds of plants. All the cells that could be identified were cells of what was then called "diversified cryptogams." The modern botanical name of this group is pteridophyta. It included all ferns, club mosses ( Lycopodium , and no matter what the popular name says they are not mosses), and scouring rushes, also known as horsetails ( Equisetum ). Except for the ferns which still are trees in the tropics, these plants now grow small. But during the Carboniferous period they formed enormous forests with four main types of trees. One type was tree ferns; two others, Lepidodendron and Sigillaria were club mosses while the fourth, Catamites, was a horsetail. The name Lepidodendron was constructed by combining the Greek words lepidotos (scaly) and dendron (tree) because its trunk looked as if it were covered with scales. The trunk of Sigillaria looks as if somebody had stamped his seal on every available square inch of the trunk. Artists who painted scenes showing a coal forest -- and there are many such paintings -- instinctively arranged the various kinds of trees in clusters, a bunch of Catamites at the left, a group of tree ferns background center and a copse of Sigillarias to the right. In all probability they were right. Plants have a tendency to cluster together and exclude other species in a given and usually small area. A man of our time who has an eye for trees and could walk around a coal forest (high rubber boots are recommended) would soon be able to tell the different types at a glance. Catamites would differ from current horsetails mainly by their size -- they grew fifty feet tall. Tree ferns would pose no recognition problem. The Lepidodendrons could be recognized immediately because they were old-fashioned in the evolutionary sense -- they formed neither twigs nor branches as we use these term. Like one of the trees of that old Devonian forest (called the Naples Tree, because it was found near Naples, N. Y.) the Lepidodendrons simply forked. First the trunk divided, then the two prongs -- and so on until death or infinity. The Sigillarias , on the other hand, thrust a straight trunk up to one hundred feet, with a maximum diameter of six feet and a bundle of sword-shaped leaves on top. The seal-like impressions on the trunk are the marks where leaves grew when the tree was younger. One of the most interesting trees belonged to the fern group but only a botanist might recognize it. Smallish, it bore nutlike seeds at the tips of its leaves. All living ferns, including the tropical tree ferns of today, bear spores. The carboniferous seed ferns (there were several) formed a separate botanical order that has been named Cycadofilicales to indicate that they must have led to the seed-bearing cycad trees. Cycad trees are still with us, though they are not common. But the seed ferns became extinct soon after the end of the Carboniferous period. A variety of detached fossil seeds have been found but it is not always known which trees bore them. They cannot be pigeonholed as fern seeds because we know of a seed-bearing tree that was not a fern. Its name is Cardaites, a slender tree often a hundred feet tall with dagger-shaped leaves twelve to fifteen inches long. It bore small winged seeds and it was clearly an early member of the order of gymnosperms ("naked seeds") which at present is mainly represented by the pine trees. Do we know anything about carboniferous plants that were not trees? We know of some. Of course there were many small ferns of the size we are most familiar with. Some ferns of the period were climbing types that used the bigger trees for support. Then there was an interesting plant named Sphen ophyllum that grew to a height of about two feet. If it grew now no layman would pay much attention to it because it would look perfectly natural in a wet area. It was shaped -- though the two plants are totally unrelated -- like today's goosegrass, Galium apar ine to the botanist. In Sphenophyl lum a dozen or so vertical stems grew from a common root. The leaves made whorls around the stems -- six, nine, or twelve usually leaves forming a whorl. Between twenty and forty whorls grew per stem, depending on its length. Most of what we would call underbrush in the carboniferous forests consisted of Sphenophyllum. The animals of these forests included our first fliers -- dragonflies in shape and by relationship -- but they had wingspreads of up to twenty-eight inches. In some forests they had yard-long but thin centipedes for company -- remains of them came to light only in recent years in West German coal mines. Arachnids were present, too, both scorpions and spiders. They were not gigantic forms and the scorpions may still at that time have been water-breathing, a fact recently established for their Devonian ancestors. Three-inch cockroaches crawled over fallen tree trunks. In the waters of the Carboniferous period lurked the first fourlegged vertebrates known. They were long-tailed amphibians with five toes on their hindfeet and four toes on their front feet. They were IF not large, averaging four to six feet in length in their early forms, though by the end of the Carboniferous period some attained lengths of eight and nine feet. The general shape of one of them (Diplovertebron) reminds one of a big fish with four legs and a long mouth full of teeth. Because of the construction of their skulls the name of the whole group is Stegocephalia or "roof skulls' One geological period later they were to give rise to the reptiles which, in turn, would produce the mammals and finally the birds. The Carboniferous forests were swampy lowlands covered by generations of growth. Trees fell into swamp water which, being virtually devoid of oxygen, prevented rotting. It is easy to visualize the build-up of a thick layer of plant matter under these circumstances. A river that changed course after especially heavy rains flooded the whole forest, bringing with it a cover of mud and sand. After the flood had run off, the original forest was drowned, dead and buried. But the mud-and-sand cover was not infertile -- in time a new forest would grow on top of it, making a second coal seam. One site in Silesia showed clearly that such cycles had taken place there twentyseven times. But a time came when the plants that formed the coal forest would not grow again. In some places a topographical change might have caused such an area to become too dry for a coal forest -- but the Carboniferous period as a whole seems to have ended because the climate grew too cold for its plants. And the Permian period began. -- say # years ago -- geologists ran into a problem. The collision was first hinted at in a relatively harmless manner. Somewhere in South Africa, not too far from Cape Town, glacier scrapes had been found in rocks dating from the Permian period. Glacier scrapes, in case anybody wonders about the meaning of the term, are scratches in rock caused by the slow motion of a glacier which has stones embedded in it. The discovery did not disturb anybody's sleep. It simply indicated that the site of the scratches must have been in the path of a glacier which had come from a nearby mountain range. Soon after a similar discovery was made elsewhere in South Africa. Another one was reported from India. Then the Russians began to talk of signs of a cold period in their territory. Logically enough, their findings centered in the District of Perm, which had furnished the name for the period. Everyone, of course, knew about the glacial period that had preceded our own -- was it possible that there had been one like it much earlier in geological history? Astronomers and those scientists especially interested in our sun were most doubtful. Their concern was the source of the energy the sun radiated into space every second of every day. The only large-scale source of energy anyone could think of at the time was the heat produced by contraction of the sun under its own weight. But if this were the case the sun should once have been hotter then than it is now -- so how could there have been an early glaciation? At this point the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (#-#) appeared on the scene with a new idea. It did not matter so much how much heat was received from the sun -- what mattered was how much of that heat could be retained by the earth. It is obvious that dense clouds and especially areas covered with freshly fallen snow will reflect sunlight back into space. Dark ground will absorb the sunlight but reradiate it as infrared (heat) which can escape into space as easily as visible light unless stopped by something in the atmosphere. That something, Arrhenius stated, is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide absorbs the infrared, thereby warming the atmosphere. Ergo, the temperature of the atmosphere would depend on its carbon dioxide content. The producers of carbon dioxide are fires of any kind, especially volcanic ones. The main consumers are certain chemical processes that go under the overall name of carbonization -- carbonatization to purists. Plants also consume carbon dioxide as long as the sun is shining (they don't at night) and the size and thickness of the coal seams show how much carbon dioxide was consumed by the plants durcarboniferous luxuriance. Unless the volcanoes were very active at the same time, the vegetation itself must have impoverished the air as far as carbon dioxide is concerned. During the same period the oxygen content of the atmosphere must have increased considerably. Arrhemius' theory was at first greeted with enthusiasm. Then it was more or less forgotten (in the United States it was not even taught) but it is now back in favor, partly because of the high temperature of Venus and its carbon dioxide atmosphere. In any event, it agrees with the cold climate of the Permian which no geologist denies. General glaciation may not have occurred but evidently the climate was cold enough for glaciers to form on what may have been fairly modest mountain ranges. IF Since the word Karroo will be mentioned often in what is to follow it might be practical here to explain its meaning. Karroo is the name of some landscape in South Africa, divided into the Little Karroo between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, and the Great Karroo to the east of it. Originally the world was the Hottentot word karusa , meaning "dry" or "without plants." It is a mountainous area and geologists saw without much trouble that the "Karroo formation" showed four subformations. We now know that the whole Karroo formation is "old Permian" -- though it probably does not represent the very beginnings of that period. Its duration is estiThe duration of the whole Permian years. The telltale signs of glaciation in the Karroo occur in the earliest of its four subdivisions. As far back as about the year #, South African geologists began to look systematically for fossils and soon the Annals of the Transvaal Museum , the Transactions of the Geological Society of South Africa , and Geological Magazine (London) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London carried reports on Karroo fossils that fully deserved the alleged remark of a farmer seeing a giraffe in a zoological garden: "There ain't no sich animal." life forms place names are often used -- such as the Atlantosaurus Beds of Wyoming, the Pikermi Fauna (after a place in Greece). The term in this case was Karroo Fossils. Somewhat to my surprise I found repeatedly that laymen think that such names imply exclusiveness -- i.e. that this or that fossilized life form once existed only in the place mentioned. This is not so. The place name sometimes indicates the site of the first discovery -- but usually it points to the site of the best-preserved fossils of a specific type. Karroo Fossils are found in Russia and Texas -- but they first became known from sites in South Africa. And while I am correcting misunderstandings let me add here that it is wrong to call a reptile a dinosaur just because it is extinct and was fairly large. Reptiles are often called "saurians" (because sauros is Greek for "lizard") but just as not every bird is a chicken, not every saurian is a dinosaur. Dinosaurs did not even exist when the Karroo layers were formed. One of the most famous of the Karroo reptiles is Brady saurus -- from Greek bradys , meaning "slow." It is also one of the largest #). It was about # feet long, with #) In older books it is usually listed as Par eiavaurus. This name is now used to designate a group of similar reptiles of which Bradysaurus is a member. an enormously massive skull and heavy jaws. The teeth in these jaws, as is customary with reptiles, are all of the same shape and fairly even in size. It has been said jokingly that a paleontologist looks at feet first and at teeth second. A joke -- but true. The shape of the feet, or rather of the whole leg, reveals the mode of locomotion -- usually one glance is enough to show whether the animal was a runner, a jumper or a climber. The teeth show what the beast ate -- in the case of bradysaurus there can be no doubt that its teeth were used to grind up tough and dry vegetation. Its sturdy legs and massive bones made it clear that it walked slowly. The tail was stumpy and' short. What makes this reptile unique is not its shape -- a plant-eater does not need speed because its lunch cannot run away. The strangeness of this saurian lies in what can only be called the exaggeration of its skeleton -- every bone looks two or three times too thick for its length. Please don't ask me to tell you the reason. No explanation exists. Another puzzling Karroo reptile received the name Dicynodon ("two dog teeth") because its jaws were innocent of teeth except for two very large ones in the upper jaw. Just to make its appearance more incredible the upper jaw is beaked like a turtle's. Because a turtle's beak is both hard and sharp it can be a flesh-eater without needing teeth. But large tortoises are vegetarians -- so the jaws of Dicynodon do not tell us anything about its diet. And the two large conical and slightly curved "dog teeth" make no sense, unless one takes the easy way out and declares them to be secondary sexual characteristics of the males. In size reptiles of the Dicynodon type range from that of a small cat to forms about six feet in length. The larger ones could not have been very fast and are therefore believed to have been vegetarians. A late form, Lystrosaurus , apparently grew tired of dry steppes and semideserts and went into the water. These three-foot reptiles assumed the style of living now practiced by the Florida manatee. It has been mentioned earlier that the teeth of reptiles, though they may differ somewhat in size, are all alike in shape. The Karroo reptiles violated that rule, too. Many have a dentition that looks so much like that of a mammal, especially carnivores, that they have been given the collective name of theriodons or "mammal teeth." Most of them were dogsized, though they had shorter legs than dogs. They probably hunted by jumping their prey instead of outrunning it. A fairly large representative of that group was found near the Dvina river, District of Vologda, in Russia. It received the IF beautiful name of Inostranzevia Alexandri. The first part of that name is a Latinized version of the Russian word for "foreigner." The multitude of differently shaped reptiles from the Karroo did not make much sense at first, beyond demonstrating that the evolutionary process was active during the Permian period. Then many Permian fossils came to light in Texas and were thoroughly investigated by the American paleton. Most important of the Texas fossils was one discovered at West Coffee Creek in Baylor County. The nearest town is Seymour, so the reptile was named Seymouria baylorensis. It was not quite two feet in overall length and it looked like a lizard with an unusually large head and an unusually short tail. The skull was rare for a reptile's in being completely closed. Most reptiles have either two or four holes in their skulls, named Jenestrae (Latin for "windows"). The jenestrae do not expose the brain which is small and protected by a bony capsule of its own. The lack of jenestrae was important because here was a reptile with a skull like those of the amphibians of the preceding Carbon#) So named because of the complicated construction of their teeth. iferous period. One group of the carboniferous amphibians, called the labyrinthodons , #) could be singled out as the direct ancestors of seymouria. It was the most primitive reptile known but it certainly was a reptile, not a peculiar amphibian. Reptiles like seymouria were soon found elsewhere and they go under the collective name of seymouromorphs. Perversely, none is known from the Karroo so far, but an American descendant of seymouria has an African counterpart so a seymouromorph must have been around in Africa -- course, during the Permian periov all continents were still huddled together. had to be a group of reptiles that were the earliest and most primitive and he called this group the cotylosaurs (Greek kotylos means a small cup -- I presume that this refers to an anatomical characteristic). Seymouria was a fine example and then it was realized that the Karroo reptiles and their relatives elsewhere all had to be considered diversified cotylosaurs. The period was simply an evolutionary explosion. Many of these early forms died out before the Permian reached its end. But some were the ancestors of the later reptiles. And even during the Permian a few showed that they were on their way to becoming mammals.# LD s of the universe said ut Man's last breath sank slowly below the  purple hills. The tattered clouds that streamed up the western sky were orange, red and violet banners flying above a tragic army marching beyond the horizon to some final glory. They watched it from inside the room, the man and his visitor. The window that framed the scene was the only place in the room, except the door,that had not been submerged in a tide of books. They had mounted the walls and toppled into corners and reached tooled-leather fingers across the floor. The visitor stood in front of the window, his stocky figure silhouetted against the light. He was a little blurred around the edges, like an afterimage that is beginning to fade. But he was solid enough. The room was silent. But the silence was rippled with words that had been spoken -- the way a still pond remembers the pebbles tossed into it. As the colors faded in the west a husky voice spoke out of the silence and out of the darkness that clasped one corner of the room, revealing only the arm of a tapestry-covered chair, a hand that rested motionless upon it and a foot stuck out stiffly onto a stool, the thin sole touched by a single orange ray of sun. "How will it end?" the voice asked. The answer came over the visitor's shoulder in cultured resonant words with a hint of accent like those of a foreigner who has learned to speak the language better than the natives. "In fire, in ice, with a bang, with a whimper, by cosmic accident, by man's own will and hand. What does it matter?" "I would know." "That is the most persistent trait of intelligence." "You will not tell me?" "Perhaps I do not know. Perhaps I cannot say. We are not gods, you know." "What are you, then?" "Scientists, experimenters. In your language those words might describe us best." "And we are your experiment." The visitor turned around. His face, too, was shadowed. "Yes." "And now the experiment is over." "We have found out what we wished to know. We clean the test tube, sterilize the equipment. You should understand." "Understand? I should not even believe -- and yet I do. Without knowing why." "All your life has been preparation for this moment. You cannot help but believe. But you also must understand." "Intellectually I do. Emotionally I cannot accept the statement that this experiment has achieved its purpose -- that man cannot achieve more." "It is not men, you understand, but the experiment. Men dreds of thousands of generations, thousands of civilizations. What men can do further is repetition. And yet -- " "Do you give me hope?" the husky voice asked. "There is no hope. There is only this odd contradiction in man that you mention, this tension between his intelligence and his animal instincts. He calls it emotion. The curious interplay between your reason and instincts has kept us fascinated long past the experiment's planned duration. But there are many more odd facets to the universe that we would explore and this small complication has preoccupied us too long. We can deal with the curious fact of man in ways that are not so complex -- nor so expensive." "Leave us. Let us live out our destiny." "We are your destiny. You exist only as an experiment. Does the scientist leave his laboratory to build another when one experiment is completed? Neither do we. And although this laboratory -- the very concept of which staggers your imagination -- is only one among many, we do not waste. To us waste is unimaginable." "If you have no love for what you have created -- have you no pity?" "None." "No feeling?" "None. We are rational beings. Our only motivation is the search for knowledge. Perhaps once -- so far back in the mists of our beginning that even we have forgotten -- we had that confusion of intellect that you call feeling. If so, it has been lost irretrievably. We can no more keep from doing the rational than you can stop breathing. On the other hand, you have evolved recently and rapidly. You are an accretion of characteristics, some of them incompatible." The man said nothing. "We had speculated that intelligence is the superior and dominant characteristic," the visiter continued. "But we found that among men this is true only occasionally. These men you call monsters. We find them dull. But you confused and emotional ones have fascinated us beyond your allotted span." "You are the monsters." "You would consider us so. And yet we do nothing that is not rational, whereas you use your intelligence largely to rationalize the crimes you commit against your fellows." "'We create," said the man. T HE visitor stepped forward. His shoes and trousered legs looked ordinary in the light cast from a distant corner by a floor lamp. His shoulders and face still were in darkness. "Yes, you create -- far beyond your predictable powers. Insanely, without plan or reason. Your creation is a magnificent waste; we cannot understand it because we cannot waste. We do not have what you call art or music or IF literature. We do not understand what you call beauty or what you call ugliness -- except in theory." "Then man has something to offer -- something you do not have. He can complement your rational existence with his irrational creativity. With his assistance there is nothing you cannot do, no goals to which you cannot aspire." "We do not wish to do anything. We aspire to nothing except to knowledge. And that we seek in our own rational ways -- which the addition of emotion would only muddle. And now, of course, man seeks to move beyond this test tube in which the human experiment began and to infest and to destroy other experiments. To allow you to do so would not be rational. Your defense of mankind is futile. Man cannot be saved. He is doomed." The man in the shadows sighed. After a moment he said, "You let slip the fact that there are other ways to deal with the fact of man." "I let nothing slip. We make no mistakes." "What are these ways? Would you try to understand us intellectually? Will you run us through your computers until we make sense?" "That is not possible. But ever since the end of the experiment has been obvious -- for the last three millennia -- we have chosen the most creative among you. They have been -- there is not quite the word in your language to describe it -- translated into another existence. We have chosen religious innovators, military leaders, political geniuses, philosphers, artists, writers, composers, scientists -- " "Christ and Mohammed?" "And Gautama Siddhartha." "Machiavelli?" "And Solon and Jefferson." "Plato and Aristotle?" "And Kant and Nietzsche." "Michelangelo?" "And Praxiteles and Picasso." "Shakespeare?" "And Homer and Hemingway." "Bach and Beethoven?" "Brahms and Berlioz." "Archimedes?" "Galileo and Newton and Einstein. There are thousands more and thousands whose names you never heard -- all of them creators. And that is why I am here tonight." "I wondered. I am none of these. I have never created anything." "You are one of them," the visitor said. "The fact that you have not exercised your creativity yet is incidental. We may not have it ourselves -- we may not understand it -- but we have learned to recognize creativity and its signs. In the relative eternity to come you will have time to be creative." "Me. Among them?" "You are one of them -- of equal stature. You can be one of them for long ages, interacting with them, learning from them as they will learn from you and we from all -- in a way that you have only imagined here among your books." "Incredible-" "In your terms -- yes." "My dreams. Heaven." "So we understand." "If I were a superstitious man of another age I would think you an emissary of the devil come to tempt me." "We are all the devil and all the god you im. jine -- both and neither. In another age we spoke in their language and in their frame of reference, as we speak to you in yours." "In what way would existence continue?" The man had leaned forward until his upper body, clothed in a gray sweater, was in the light, although his face still was in the shadows. "In a way much like what you experience now, with certain measures taken to delay your mortality." "And where would it continue?" "In a place removed from here but one you would find pleasant, stocked with all the things you enjoy -- the food, the drink, the books, the music and the art -- and the people and the talk and the ideas and the time to contemplate and to create." "Stop.' You describe heaven." "So you would consider it." "You know me well." "What we can know we know well." The silence returned while the man sank back in his chair and the visitor looked back toward the west where the sunset had faded and the twilight had darkened into night. The evening star gleamed Finally the man spoke again. "What of my wife?" The visitor turned back to the room. "The person who let me in -- but only when I insisted? Who called you a fool?" "Yes." "You do not find her attractive." "I did once." "You do not love her." "Once I did." "She is not exceptional. We cannot save her. In any case, you will not lack for feminine companionship of a more congenial sort in the place where you are going." The man laughed. "Not only heaven but paradise." "So you will consider it." "I believe, after all, that you are an emissary of the devil -- you IF know so well how to tempt a man." "We are rational." "And you want to understand the irrational. What about the rest of humanity?" "A few, like you, we will save. The rest will be destroyed. They are worthless, redundant. Even you will admit this." "In my more rational moments -- perhaps I would. But why do you come to me this way and explain these things to me? If I accepted them as reality -- as more than the strange ravings of a madman or the stranger imaginings of my own mind -- why should you not merely take me away when you destroy the rest?" "Perhaps your understanding is a condition of the translation. Perhaps it is part of the experiment. Perhaps it is both." "Or neither. What if I should refuse?" T HE visitor stopped in the act of speaking. For the first time he appeared uncertain. He stepped forward. He wore an ordinary blue jacket. "Why should you? Why should you throw away what you desire most?" "Would you take me anyway?" The man leaned forward into the light. He was in his middle years -- still vigorous but no longer young. "No. It would do you no good to refuse, however. You would be throwing away your chances of eternity and the satisfactions of creation in a foolish gesture. You cannot save mankind." "I cannot be a party to its destruction either. If the others before me agreed to your proposal -- perhaps they did not have to contemplate the imminent obliteration of the rest." The visitor stepped forward fully into the light. He had an ordinary face. Now it seemed disturbed. , "You would refuse?" "Yes. I refuse." "But why? What do you gain? What can you hope to achieve?" "Perhaps I refuse the essential conditions of your offer. Perhaps by this act I refuse to join those who would profit from the sufferings they inflict on those capable of understanding the nature of their plight. Perhaps I refuse to profit personally from an act which destroys my race. Perhaps I choose to demonstrate to you in this conclusive fashion that you do not understand man at all, that all the other experiments you might perform are meaningless beside this one, that you wipe it out not because it is finished but because you cannot understand it." ( Please turn to page #) dawn was strange and misty. His war wound throbbed. He seemed to have fatigued and aged during the night , -- even his clothes, business suit and shoes, shirt and tie, were worn, all but used up, and he needed a haircut. Dressed, he looked through his bedroom window. The good suburban neighborhood was unkempt this morning. The neighbors lawn featured cast-off junk. His own usually well-kept home showed neglect . He went down to breakfast. had married, looked tired and slovenly. The normally well-stocked cupboard was bare. The two usually were. The kitchen stank of ager, was missing entirely. She seemed to have been been erased. Gill denied that Lori had ever existed. The neighbors did not remember her. Her room in the house had vanished. Other pertinent bits of Jeffs life had melted away as if he had merely dreamed them -- his burgeoning business, his plans for the future. Gill explained, as she would to a child or a sick man. Jeff owned no business. She and he worked -- as did everyone else they knew -- at the Star Tower. She pointed at the window. The mist outside had lifted. Jeff saw a huge tower in the distance, dominating the town. The structure, several hundred feet in diameter, seemed to have grown there overnight but Gill behaved as if it had stood there forever. Becoming aware of an intruder -- at once human and nonhuman -- in the house, Jeff tried to fight. The intruder easily knocked him out m and when Jeff came to. Gill was gone. Where and what was reality? Jeff knocked a hole in a plaster wall where Lori's room used to be and found the room but no Lori. Outside -- neighbors who had known Lori had no recollection of her. They all seemed enslaved by the alien masters of the Star Tower, remembered no other existence. Jeff encountered more of the aliens , fought them and managed to escape. His hunt for Lori took him to Sally Hodges, once Lori's friend -- and at Sally's he encountered a lawless group of refugees who believed that the country had been invaded by the Russians. Jeff was unable to convince them otherwise, finally had to flee for his life. Sally, although she thought he was suffering from deUS lusions, accompanied him in a commandeered truck. They were captured by soldiers and taken to a U.S. -- Russian military encampment under the command of Colonel Strang. The encampment was isolated, self-contained. Both Strang and the Russians were convinced they were fighting Chinese Communists and Jeff's theory of semihuman aliens failed to impress anyone. He and Sally separated. Then Jeff was forcibly " drafted " into Strang's "army." Mallory meets Lori at Strang's encampment, finds Lori had thought him dead. They are not permitted to associate with each other but Mallory forces his way to the women's quarters after hours and they talk. Lori believes Chinese occupy Beatrice, Mallory's home town -- she thinks her father insane when he tells her about the aliens. She is in love with Strang, has implicit faith in him. But she helps Mallory and Sally to escape. Sally, however, is wounded in the action and Mallory goes on alone. He seeks shelter in a lighted house, is captured by crossbowmen who take him to their leader. Brother Jack Harmony of Revelation College. Brother Harmony is a religious fanatic, attributes Earth' s invasion to the devil. While trying to convince Brother Harmony of what has actually happened, Jeff sees Harmony commit a murder and once more has to flee. He accidentally kills Harmony, steals a car, escapes . Desperate with fatigue and lonely, he talks to himself while driving -- finds an other voice chiming in from his subconscious , directing him to "the old house." He finds the place -- seems to remember it. He discovers a dead man in the front hall and a living but very old man , kept alive by a machine, in a bedroom. The old man mistakenly addresses Mallory When he realizes his error about Jeffs identity Gonyl rantingly tells him that he and Algoric are representatives of an intergalactic organization and had been posted on Earth to save the planet from the alien invasion Jeff has witnessed. ligent virus with a genius for adaptability and a hunger for interstellar conquest." Gonyl and Algoric had been sent to Earth as young men to await and warn of the arrival of Mone. Algoric had proven faithless to his trust, had fallen in love with an Earth woman and deserted his iost. Now that the Mone has arrived, Gonyl is unable to send the alarm to his intergalactic superiors because Algoric had the other neccessary half of the code pattern needed to send the message. As Gonyl talks it becomes increasingly clear to Mallory that he has "known" Algoric at some stage of his life -- and abruptly he remembers an "imaginary" uncle who had taken him on magic trips, one a visit to this very house. The memory dates back to Jeffs childhood. He compares notes with Gonyl, who decides that Mallory is a descendant of Algoric s association with the Earth woman and that Mallory probably controls the missing code pattern. He demands that Mallory divulge it. But suddenly Mallory distrusts the old man. "Eve heard enough of your lies," he says. "Now tell me the truth." In the end he babbled, "Ah, you've taken advantage of me, a weak old man -- but all my life I've been a victim of circumstance, driven by forces outside myself, by the wilfulness of others. Listen, Jeff Mallory. The.no-space transmitter can be used in more than one fashion. It will remove me -- and you as well -- to a place of safety far from here. There I will make my report. The planet will be sterilized, robbing the Mone of their prize and -- " "You plan to run out, in other words. Isn't that what you accused Algoric of?" "This world is doomed. Had we acted in time we might have saved it -- but that time has passed. We can do nothing now. And as for myself -- I'm dying. Your arrival was a miracle, the only small stroke of fortune that's come to me in all my long exile. But once on the other side I can live again, restored to full vigor! What will be accomplished by my remaining here to die, sick and alone?" "The holes in your story show, Old Man," Mallory said. "Algoric was the villain of the piece, eh? He wanted to run out -- but you were true-blue?" "I was faithful to my duty -- " "Is that why you killed him?" "But -- as I said -- he escaped -- " "His dead body is lying in the front hall, Gonyl. There's a strange thing about that corpse. It's dressed in old-fashioned clothes. And he was still young -- and you aren't. I think you were the one who was locked out, Gonyl. I think he let you in because you swore you came to help -- and after you got inside you shot him -- perhaps by accident -- and then realized too late that you were still trapped because he'd locked everything in the station against you." For a moment Gonyl's face twisted as if torn by conflicting forces. Then he uttered a snarling laugh. "Very well. What does it matter now? You've guessed a part of the truth -- but I robbed Algoric of the sweetest fruit of his folly. I fled and took his woman with me. She bore his child and died -- so his victory was a hollow one. But all that is past, long past. Into the transmitter -- come, a whole new world waiting, a glory you can't conceive!" "I suppose he called you as soon as he detected the Mone's approach. He thought that now, with the enemy on the way, you'd the job you came for. But you were still thinking only of your own skin." "Lies!" Gonyl howled. "And while you evolve these fantasies our moments of opportunity dribble away like wine from a leaky flagon!" "I think in that last moment, when he knew he was dying, he called to me," Mallory went on. "That's what brought me out of my coma, brought me here. Now you're ready to use me to help you escape and never mind the Jeff Mallory, you don't know -- you haven't yet grasped the situation -- " "I've grasped enough of it to know that as long as there's one forlorn chance of stopping this cancer before it's too late, I'm going to take it." "But -- Jeff Mallory -- there is no human race to save. Surely you know! The first act of the Mone Pod on picking a breeding site is wipes the planet clean of organic life except in the protected area of the nest. The people of your city of Beatrice live as mindless slaves of the Mone. All the rest, Jeff Mallory, are dead!" stood for a long time stunned, his thoughts groping over the shattering concept of a murdered planet, of cities filled with corpses, of deserted farms and airports and silent factories and drifting ocean liners -- groped, unable to come to grips with so vast a disaster. "Now you see why we must make haste to save ourselves," Gonyl was saying. "Join me, Jeff Mallory. I'll show you wonders to make the proudest capitals of this dreary world seem no more than the wattle huts of savages." "All dead?" Mallory said. "All but my home town? But still -- a few thousand people are enough to start with again. There's still a chance." "Their minds are gone," Gonyl shrilled. "They died, too, in a who coughed once and knew no more. Death will be a mercy to them -- " "Not while I'm alive," Mallory said -- and staggered as a phantom blow struck at his brain, this time with massive power. It was as though a steel glove had gripped his mind, were crushing it, blanking out all thought except the command that rang like a trumpet in the turmoil. He felt himself driven back, felt his grip on reality dissolving. Vagrant memories flashed before his waning consciousness -- the walled-up door to Lori's room; the pale tower rising in the city; Sally's upturned face; the wild eyes of Brother Harmony; the old house, standing dark and silent in the night -- flashed and were gone. One image lingered, dim and unsubstantial: the figure of Uncle Al, tall and commanding in the moonlight that streamed through the window. You know what to do, Jeff lad. I've taught you... and you learned well... Mallory rallied, gathered himself, with a quick, decisive effort broke through the shell enveloping his mind, turned on it, shattered it into a thousand fragments. Gonyl's thin wail of despair rang in Mallory's ears. He saw the ancient limbs jerk, sending the withered body over the edge of the cot to slam against the floor, saw the clawed hands reach out to scrabble at the threshold IF of the goal he had sought for so long, saw the skeletal arm fait limp, the skull-head drop to rest against the floor. "Fool, and worse than fool," Gonyl whispered. His eyelids fluttered, came to rest half open over glazed corneas. Looking down at the dead man, MaHory sensed that his last words had been directed, not at Mallory, but at himself. tirety of the message so long ago impressed on the sleeping brain of a child by the man who had called himself Uncle AI -- Algoric, agent of a vast and distant civilization to which the highest cultures of Earth would seem as primitive as the first rude hearths of Neanderthals. And yet, to Algoric this world had been more than a pawn in the game of Galactic war. He had loved a woman here, loved her well enough to give her up in the cause of his duty to her planet. And after she had gone -- thinking him dead -- he had followed her in his mind, had known of the birth of her daughter. And after her death he had watched the development of the child, had seen her grow to womanhood, marry and bear a son. A son named Geoffry Mallory. From his place of exile Algoric had reached out with his mind to touch that of the infant -- had visited him in dreams, walked with him through enchanted lands of light and shadow, had shown him the great Galactic civilization, taught him the history of the long war with the creatures called Mone, revealed to him the secret of the station, taught him its uses, the keys and codes that would unlock its powers. And more -- he had informed him of the nature of the renegade Gonyl, warned him of the man's hidden strengths and fatal weaknesses and had prepared a trap. The no-space transmitter could not be activated without both portions of the code-complex. If the day came when one of the robot sensors in trans-Piutonian orbit screamed its alarm, Algoric knew he would have no choice but to call Gonyl back, permit him entry into the station. Perhaps, in the face of the evidence of the threat he had denied could ever exist, Gonyl would undergo a change of heart, forget his oath of vengeance, let down his guard and join with Algoric in transmitting the warning signal. Algoric had no choice but to trust him. It would be necessary for him to open his mind, drop all defenses; join in the creation of the complex mental pulse which alone would unlock the transmitter. And if in that moment Gonyl chose to strike -- he would meet disappointment. With utmost delicacy Algoric prepared the booby trap within his own mind. He set up a pattern of mental forces that would, at the first hint of treachery, fire a ego-center. Instead of looting Algoric's unprotected mind of its secret, Gonyl would find himself linked mind-to-mind with a corpse. And in that moment of total disorientation, before Gonyl could break the numbing contact with death -- Algoric's final command would imprint itself on the other's mind, unknown and irresistible. Having completed his preparations, Algoric had buried the entire Gestalt under a hypnotic command, leaving Mallory with only the superficial conscious memory of the dream visits of his "imaginary" uncle. Then he had waited. The years had passed. Mallory had grown to man's estate, taken up his career, with oaly an occasional fleeting recollection of the shadowy dream-figure of his childhood. Until the day when Algoric, dying, sent out the call summoning Mallory to the station. Even then Algoric had withheld the final stroke. It was possible that in the eleventh hour Gonyl might recover his lost sense of the duty at which he had failed. If so, he would link with Mallory to transmit the warning message. If not -- if, instead, he used this final opportunity to attempt to loot Mallory's mind of the Algoricsymbol -- then the overriding command would come into effect. To Mallory: the order to strike, take the pattern from Gonyl's mind. To Gonyl: the command to deliver up the prize without a struggle. mitter chamber, Mallory looked with wonderment on the dazzling concept-structure that rose in his mind on command: the unified Galactic command code, both halves joined in a fusion that was more than the sum of the parts. He reached out along the intertwining lines and planes of thought, touched the transmitter control. Instantly the disk narrowed, closing in on itself until the original silvery globe rested on the squat pedestal. Another touch and the black portal opened wide again. The utter simplicity of the device fascinated Mallory. A touch -- so -- and the globe would fold in on itself, its latent energies dissolved in a single shaped pulse of no-space oscillation that would flash across half a galaxy to record the alarm, pinpointing its IF location on a minor world far out in the Galactic Arm. A different touch -- so -- and the energy configuration would reform itself, become a matter transmitter of limited range, using no-space energies to thrust a material pulse across space at lightspeed -- a pulse consisting of the entity which was Jeff Mallory. He would sense no lapse of time, though years would pass before the quantum-bundle impinged on the receiving station on an artificial planet a tenth of the way to Galactic Center. There he would deliver the news of the Mone investment of another world. Too late, then, to salvage the native population. A crew would be dispatched at once to deal with the tainted world -- and Jeff Mallory would be alive, a free citizen of the glittering Galactic society. It interested him to note that he had not the slightest impulse to avail himself of the latter opportunity. Uncle Al's instructions had been simple and imperative: relay the warning which would be instantaneously delivered and instantaneously acted on. In hours, the special-alert crew would arrive via no-space. If they were too late -- if the Mone had already spawned -- it would be necessary to mind-bomb the entire planet. If not, it would be sufficient to dissolve the Mone nest and sterilize the planetary surface for a hundred miles around the center of infection. Despite Gonyl's pronouncement that most of Earth's populace was dead, insofar as Mallory knew, the spawning had not yet taken place. If he acted swiftly most of the planet would survive. Mallory looked at the gleaming sphere that waited for his command to send the alarm flashing across space. He reached out and switched it off. It fell in on itself, dwindled to a blazing point of "You counted on me, Uncle Al," Mallory said aloud. "But I'm not a Galactic. I'm a poor, instinct-ridden primitive. You left me with two choices. I can't take either of them." hours later, after searching it from attic to subcellar. He had turned up nothing that might be useful as a weapon against the Mone but he had found a pair of good boots -- of Galactic make -- a warm coat, food. In early evening gloom he made his way back down through the dense shrubbery, emerged on the unsurfaced road he had followed coming in. The searchers were gone. No lights moved anywhere in the broad valley spreading below him. His present position, as well as he could estimate by dead reckoning, was some fifty miles northwest of Beatrice. He set off across an open field toward a distant line of trees, impatient at the slow pace, wishing for a car. Time was running out -- might of spores, Gonyt had said. Mallory scanned the skies, wondering what appearance such an outpouring of alien seed would present. A gray cloud, spreading over the stars? A murky overcast, rolling forward like a fogbank at sea? But the sky was clear, swept clean by a bitter wind. Dry cornstalks, unharvested, blanketed the ground, blown flat with their burdens of ripe ears by the winter winds. A doomed species, incapable of reproducing its own kind now that the hand of man was gone. Next year a hardy crop of weeds would spring up all across the empty plains of the continent. Succeeding years would bring new varieties and in half a century the old grasslands would have reclaimed their own. The wild cattle and horses grazing there would burgeon enormously and the timid bison, brought back from the brink, would again darken the plains with their numbers. And the gaunt timber wolves, emerging from the remote wilds of the north, would run in packs, pulling down the weak and the lame and the aged and the very young. And it would be as if man had never been. And even that picture, Mallory reflected, was an optimistic one, presupposing that plant and animal life would somehow survive the invasion andor the Galactic counterattack. Hundreds of billions of creatures, matured from the broadcast spores, would blanket the world like a plague, building toward the critical numbers that would trigger the next broadcasting of seed pods to race across space to infect the next ring of worlds. Was there any stopping of such voracious fecundity? Was the battle in vain, doomed before it was joined? He did not know, would never know. Out there -- across lightyears, across ages, the war had raged. A war -- or a vast Galactic pest-control program. It was a thought that seemed to reduce all human struggle and aspiration to the minuscule level of the buzzing of bees in a hive. How humbling to the vaulting spirit of earthly man if he found himself destroyed in the overkill of a Galactic Flit Gun. A road ran behind the line of trees. Mallory crossed it, traversed a patch of dark woods, came upon a dirt track leading in the correct direction. He tramped on. About midnight he paused to rest under a tree before an empty IF farmhouse where a gutted convertible squatted on flat tires. An hour later he encountered a stalled car in the road, the badly decomposed corpse of a man slumped behind the wheel visible through the cloudy glass. He told himself that there was no point in opening the door and trying the starter -- the battery would be long dead. Three miles farther, in front of a deserted gas station, he found four cars. One, an elderly Ford with a manual shift, gave a faint groan as he tried the starter. The road had a gentle downward grade at that point. With difficulty he manhandled the vehicle out onto the apron, jumped in, coasted downhill, let out the clutch. The engine fired, sputtered and caught. Mallory covered twelve miles before running out of gas. He left the car on the shoulder, walked on into the outskirts of a lightless town announced by a faded sign as Beaver Crossing. He passed empty houses, the dry leaves drifting the street crunching underfoot. There was a sidewalk beside the main street. His dim reflection paced beside him in the dusty windows of abandoned shops. A block of buildings had burned. The acrid odor of charred timber still clung to the blackened remains of collapsed buildings. There was a small automotive repair shop in the next block. As Mallory paused to cast a speculative eye over the vehicles packed inside the closed garage, two men in khaki uniforms with the shoulder patch of Strang's army stepped out from a doorway and aimed rifles at his chest. One put a flashlight on his face. "It's about time," Mallory said. "I was beginning to think you'd never make your move." O NE of the two men was a stranger to Mallory; the other was a tall, big-wristed fellow he had seen during his stay in camp. The latter held the light on him while the other frisked him awkwardly, declared him clean. "You made a mistake hanging around here, boy," the familiar one said. "Sarge will be pleased to see you again. He was kind of put out when you left without saying so long." They prodded him along to a dusty jeep parked around the corner, .drove at breakneck speed along bumpy back roads that brought them up to the encampment gate in half an hour. The dirt streets were full of armed men carrying packs and rifles and being lined up and counted There were floodlights beyond the camp, along the edge of the pasture. Mallory heard the rumble of big engines warming up. The jeep made its way through the throng, turned down an alley between dark cook tents, fmlled up before the barbed-wire enclosed stockade. "I don't have time for this," Mallory said. "I have to see Strang, fast." "Not tonight, chum -- the colonel's busy tonight. What we got to do -- we got to lock you up and get you off our hands. There'll just be the one man to watch the compound. Kudnik. He's got a sprained ankle but he's damn good with that ought-three-oh. His order'll be to plug you if you just look at the fence. Come on. Out!" "What's going on?" One of the men caught Mallory's arm, hauled him out of the jeep. "Tonight's the night we hit Beatrice, Bud. The Chinks'll think it's World War Four. They won't know what caught 'em." "Don't waste time, Gus," the other man said, giving Mallory a rough shove toward the guard shack. Mallory half closed his eyes, feeling out gingerly for the mindglow of the man. He sensed it, studied it, then probed gently. "We got orders -- " the man was saying. His voice faltered. He came to a halt, stood uncertainly, as if not sure in which direction to go.  Mallory turned his attention to the other man, was caught by surprise as he saw the gun coming swiftly up. He struck. The man dropped the gun, fell forward on his face and lay without moving. Mallory turned quickly to the first man, who was blinking his eyes dazedly, shaking his head. "You were going to take me to the colonel," he said urgently. "No time to waste." "Yeah -- sure," the man said blurrily. "Come on." Without a glance at his fallen comrade he led the way toward the main house. lory, motioned to a chair. "Well, I hope you had a nice stroll around the countryside, Mallory," he said in tones of heavy sarcasm. He narrowed his eyes. "See anything interesting out there?" "Enough. Strang, you've got to call this raid off." "Oh? Anything else?" "Plenty. Among other things, I found a man who's seen the Mone -- the aliens." "Anybody I know? Where is he?" "He's dead." "Oh? Too bad. In that case, I'm afraid I'll just have to go ahead -- " "That's not all, Strang. I now know what the Mone are," Mallory said. Strang sighed. "I was hoping you'd be over that one." "The Mone," Mallory said, "are a life form about halfway between organic machines and what we think of as living creatures. They aren't precisely what we'd call intelligent. Their actions are directed by a kind of super-instinctive pattern -- like insect behavior but a thousand times more complex and with a few dozen them." Strang slapped the desk with both hands. "Damn it, man, knock off this crank talk. I don't know what you're trying to prove -- but it's not working. You're no more crazy than I am. I need every good man -- " "There's a time element involved, Strang. The Mone pattern is to pick their spot and build in effect a nest -- using local labor to help. When everything's ready their queen, or brood sow or whatever you want to call her, settles down to spore production. The whole hive is directed toward feeding and supporting her while germ cells. They're broadcast when the time is ripe. That's what the tower is for. The spores are microscopic. They're fired all the way into the stratosphere and spread out to blanket the planet. In a few weeks they've settled in, found food supplies -- " "That's enough!" Strang roared. "By God, Mallory, I promised Lori -- " He broke off, took a deep, calming breath. "I've had a talk with your daughter -- a fine young woman in whom I have implicit confidence -- and I gave her my word I'd give you every opportunity to show me that you deserve a place on my staff. I need officers, Mallory. I need -- " "You need to listen to me, Strang. I came here to tell you what I've found out and to enlist your cooperation. I -- " "Came here, hell. You were marched here at gunpoint, at my orders. You cost me valuable gasoline and man-hours beating the brush for you." "If I'd wanted to stay lost, do you really think I'd have walked right up to your picket line? Start thinking straight, Strang. I came back here, as I said, to tell you something. Suppose you listen before you waste the pitch on me?" "I'm not interested in your let bygones be bygones for Lori's sake. But -- n "The spawning could take place at any time, Strang -- any hour, any minute. Once that's happened, it's all over. If even IF one per cent of the spores survive -- and they have a fantastic survival rate -- in a few weeks there'll square inch of the planet. They're tough, strong -- not intelligent but effective in their own way -- and they have just one objective: breeding more of their kind. They -- " "All right, that's enough." Strang came to his feet. "You've taken this line and you're stuck with it. Fine. If you'd rather swab pots and pans than help me plan strategy -- " Both men turned as a side door to the room opened. Lori came in, looking pale but determined in a tailored khaki uniform. "Dad -- I've been listening to what you've been saying. I -- I can't believe you're insane. So there must be some other reason for your ravings. I don't know what it is and I don't want to know. But I'm appealing to you -- " "Wait, Lori. I'd like to take the time to convince you you ought to listen to me, that what I'm telling you is true, to go into the matter of proof -- but I can't. I came here because I want help in what I'm going to do." "What are you planning, Dad?" "I'm going into Beatrice and do what I can against what's there. A few good men with guns would help." Lori's face was tense, wooden. She turned to Strang. "I'm sorry, James," she whispered. "I was wrong. I withdraw my request. I release you from your promise. Do -- whatever you must." She turned quickly and reached for the door. "Wait," Mallory said softly. The girl grasped the knob, pushed the door open -- and paused. It's like reaching out with a gentle hand to the softly glowing intricacy that was a living mind , touching it delicately... Lori turned, a faintly bemused expression on her face. Not looking at either of the two men, she went to a chair, sat down carefully, folded her hands in her lap. Mallory went to the open door, closed it on the curious face of the sentry posted outside. "I'm glad you've decided to hear me out, Lori," he said. "I'll make this short and to the point, Colonel. I'm going into Beatrice. I want your army with me -- all of it -- armed and briefed for a hell of a fight." Strang snorted. But before he could speak, Mallory went on: "Nobody will get sick, Colonel. There may be a bout of nausea as we go through the outer protective field but it won't be fatal. Once in the city, no civilians are to be molested. The enemy won't be hard to identify -- they're alien. You'll understand as soon as you see one." "You're raving, Mallory. I'm hitting Beatrice, yes -- but not with infantry. I have half a dozen tow planes and more cargo gliders than I need -- and plenty of high explosives. I'll fly half a dozen sorties over the town and pound it flat. Then I order my armor in. The Chinks won't know what hit them -- " "Colonel, I've told you the city is full of innocent non-combatants -- " Strang's hand reached for the intercom button on his desk. Mallory struck quickly, without thinking. Strang's face went chalky white. He made a strangled sound and fell sideways from his chair. Lori uttered a horrified cry. Mallory whirled as she came out of the chair, her eyes straining wide, her mouth ready for the scream. He touched her with a sSvift, controlled thought. She sank back into the chair, sat awkwardly, her face slack and amazed. Mallory bent over Strang. The unconscious man was breathing hoarsely. His face was flushed. Mallory lifted him into his chair, then probed delicately. He saw the point of impact, an area of dimness in the surrounding glow. With a gentle precision he reactivated the energy flows, saw the stunned portion of the man's mind begin to warm back toward consciousness. head, focused his eyes on Mallory. Lori moaned softly. "Listen to me, both of you," Mallory said in a flat, clipped voice, looking from one to the other. "You've just encountered something outside your experience. Accept it, recognize the fact that there's something here you don't understand. Your picture of reality was wrong in one respect? -- it could be wrong in others." "How -- how did you move that fast?" Strang asked uncertainly. "It was like a snake striking." "I haven't moved," Mallory said. "Tell him, Lori." Her expression was stricken. "He -- didn't move at all, James. You just collapsed. I thought -- " "He's all right," Mallory said quickly. "I'm sorry, Lori. I had no choice." "Who -- what are you?" Mallory's daughter stared at him with an expression of horror. "I felt something -- inside my skull -- " She clamped her hands to the sides of her head. "I'm your father, Lori," he said harshly. "I wish I had time to take you along slowly, explain it all to you in detail, coax you to understand -- to trust me. But I don't. Just face the fact that there's more IF to what I'm saying than a maniac's fancies." He turned to Strang. "You're a military man, Colonel, a realist. When the first A-bomb hit Hiroshima the Japanese might not have understood what happened -- but they couldn't ignore the results. I'm asking you to accept the fact that I know something you don't. I'm asking you to take me on trust, give me the men I need." "You're crazy," Strang said, making an effort to pull himself together. "Crazy men sometimes have superhuman strength; maybe they have superhuman speed, too -- " "I told you -- Lori told you -- I hit you with my mind, not my fist." "All right -- suppose you did what you claim. What's that got to do with sending my troops into a plague area?" Mallory leaned on the desk with both fists. "There's no plague. There is an occupying force. At the present moment there are only a few hundred of them -- the workers who protect and feed the Queen Mone. We can take them, Strang. At least we have a chance. If we don't act now -- today -- it may be too late." Mallory saw the change in Strang's expression; he reached, touched lightly. Strang lurched backward, uttered a gargling groan, clapped a hand to his head. Mallory turned to see Lori on her feet. "Lori -- for God's sake don't push me." "No -- not God's sake. I don't know whatthis is -- what terrible power you have -- but -- " Strang was struggling up. "Wait, damn it," Mallory said urgently. "Hear me out -- " Lori moved toward him. He brushed her mind lightly. She staggered, caught herself. Strang had come around the end of the desk. "He can't handle both of us at once," he said in a low, taut voice. "Lori, get out of the room, call -- " Mallory touched her again as she started for the door. She went to her knees. He hit Strang as the man charged him, stepped aside as he fell. "I can handle you, Strang," Mallory said. "By knocking you out. But that won't help. I need you conscious -- both of you." "Looks like a stand-off," Strang said through clenched teeth. He was on all fours, shaking his head. Mallory went to Lori, lifted her. "Please -- I'm begging you. Listen, then judge." "I -- all right. Dad," Lori said in a whisper, and pulled herself away. "I suppose we haven't any choice." fifteen minutes later. "I've listened. What I've heard confirms my conviction that you're out of your mind." "Wait, James," Lori spoke up. "What Dad says does explain some things. If it were possible -- " "But since it isn't," Strang cut in harshly, "we can -- " "How do you know what's possible, Strang?" Mallory broke in. "Or do you know? Aren't you just guessing? Damn it, think like a tactician. If the opposition comes up with something brand new, do you deny it -- or deal with it? Chinese Communists? Holed up in Beatrice, Nebraska, waiting for you to bomb them out? Does that fit what you know of the realities "You'll have to take what I tell of war?" you on faith." "James -- couldn't you send "And that I won't do. Can't do. someone to look at the city, fly Suppose -- for the sake of arguover it in a glider, maybe -- take ment -- that there is something to pictures. If there really is a tower, your story. How do I know these as Dad described it -- " aliens of yours won't wipe us out "There's no time for reconnaison sight with some kind of Buck sance, Strang," Mallory said. Rogers death ray? These men trust me, Mallory. They're my command. I'm their leader. You talk about tactics and you expect me to walk into a blind ambush not knowing what kind of firepower the enemy has?" "I've told you the consequences." "And I've told you no, damn it." Mallory nodded. "All right," he said. "I wish I could take over your mind and force you to issue orders but I'm not that good. Maybe I will be some day -- if I live. I haven't begun to explore what I have." He turned to Lori. "I'm sorry, Lori. Sorry I couldn't make you understand. Maybe some day you will." He strode to the door, looked back at Strang. "Don't try to stop me, Colonel. Under pressure I might hurt someone. I just don't know enough about the mind to control it." "Where are you going?" Lori blurted. "Where I said I was going, Lori." "Alone?" "It looks that way." "James -- you can't let him. He'll die. And if he is right -- " "How can I stop him?" "You can give him some men -- a few men. Something. You have to do something, James!" Strang stared hard at Mallory. "Would one man help?" Mallory nodded. Strang punched his intercom key. "Tell Brozhny to come in." They waited in silence. In less than a minute the door opened to admit the Russian. "You're in temporary command," Strang said. "Hold the attack until I come back." "James -- you're not going yourself?" Lori burst out. "It's too dangerous -- " "What do you want me to do, girl -- send another mafl to take my risks for me?" "But James -- you're the leader." "Vass can handle it." Strang turned to Mallory. "How close do you have to be to see the tower?" "Five miles, maybe." ."All right. Five miles. And if there's no tower -- we'll both forget this story of yours. Agreed?" "And if there is?" "Then possibly I'll have a little rethinking to do." "Then you'll go a little farther?" "How far?" "Far enough to see proof of the rest of what I've said." Strang nodded, caught the Russian officer's eye. "If I'm not back by sundown tomorrow -- it's all yours. And Vass, when you take the bombers in -- if you see a tower hit it first." "As you wish, Colonel." "All right, Mallory," Strang said. "Let's go have a look at these little green men of yours." IF "Not little," Mallory said. "Not green. And not men." waved and, with a scatter of gravel, IX bandaged and carried in a sling, and Lori, stiff-faced but tearless, stood by silently as Mallory and Strang stowed their rifles and supplies in the Jeep. Strang started the engine, waved and , with a scatter of gravel, gunned down the winding drive. He opened up on the highway straddling the faded yellow centerline. "Mallory, I've been thinking about your story," he called over the buffeting of the wind. "Trying to put my finger on all the logical flaws in it. Funny thing is -- I have to admit it's damned ingenious -- once you get past the basic premise. Accounts for everything. It worries me a little, Mallory. Your being nuts is a lot easier for me to handle than an invasion from space." "If ypu don't see what I told you you'd see I'll go back and enlist for the duration," Mallory said curtly. "In the meantime, let's let it go at that." For the next half hour Strang drove at breakneck speed, slowing only when necessary to skirt a stalled car or tank. They passed a sign announcing Beatrice in ten miles. Mallory took deep breaths to quiet an unease in his midriff that was rapidly growing toward burning nausea. Strang was frowning fiercely. He drove on two more miles, then slowed. "I don't like this, Mallory," he said. His tanned face was sallow and sweat beaded his forehead. "Damn it, man, the air is poisonous. It's making me sick to my stomach." "I told you about this effect," Mallory said. "It's not plague, Strang. It's a protective field designed to keep out any interlopers caped the hypnosis." "You've got an answer for everything." "Is that supposed to prove I'm wrong?" "Damn it, man, you've got to be wrong. Otherwise -- " "Drive on, Colonel. Prove I'm wrong. We ought to see it any time now. Maybe around that next bend." "Sure. You'll point and say, There it is.' And I'll take a look and won't see a damned thing." "You'll see the tower. Sally told you they could see it on a fair day from the farm." "They saw searchlights, that's all." "Colonel, quotes, you've got an answer for everything," Mallory said sardonically. Strang gunned the jeep savagely. "Sure, but my answers make sense." The vehicle topped a low rise of ground. Ahead lay a cluster of crossroads gas stations. Beyond were scattered houses, the beginnings of the first outlying suburb of Beatrice. The jeep slowed. Strang gripped the wheel, his face taut, staring toward the misty green column rising above the roofs across the plain. He braked to a stop, unstrapped himself, unslung the binoculars from his hip, adjusted them, stood for half a minute in the jeep, studying the scene. He lowered the glasses, resumed his seat. His tongue touched his lips. "Yeah," he said abruptly. "Let's go take a closer look, Mallory." He eased the jeep into gear and drove more slowly. shade of a strand of leafless sycamores beside an elderly, sag"It's quiet," he said. "Damned quiet -- and no corpses." He climbed out of the jeep, stood with his head cocked, listening to the utter stillness. "All right, you see the town," Mallory said. "And no Chinese Communists. Now let's get out." "Damn it, Mallory, you don't expect me to go back and tell Brozhny I've bought your whole story on the basis of a building that maybe looks a little different from what you'd expect to see in a prairie town. Let's take a little walk." "This isn't a good idea, Strang. This is enemy territory." "I want to see all there is to see." "All right, but remember what I told you. If you have to use that gun aim for the navel -- or where the navel would be if you were shooting at a human." They walked along past the empty house, an abandoned gas station. "It all looks so damned normal, Mallory," Strang said, an almost pleading note in his voice. "All but that damned tower." "You'll even see lawn sprinklers working," Mallory said. "And milk bottles on back porches. They're trying to create a normal environment for their workers and they don't know what's important. They reason like a boy putting a grasshopper in a bottle with six different kinds of weeds." "Hold it." Strang's hand shot out to block Mallory. "Listen." The sound of a distant engine running raggedly, as if it were being started up after a long period of idleness, reached them. "Time to go," Mallory said, speaking softly. "Aliens," Strang said. "Flying saucerites from another planet. IF They settle in a small town, take over our shapes, our houses, our cars -- and start a factory. Nuts." He said the last word flatly, without intonation. "I don't believe any of it, Mallory. Come on. Let's nab the mayor or the chief of police or whoever the hell is in charge here and find out what's going on." He started forward. Mallory caught his arm. "Wait a minute, Strang. I brought you here to show you something, not to get you killed. The city's occupied by the enemy -- can't you get that into your mind? Now, let's get out of here and come back loaded for bear." "Damn it, man -- it looks as if this city lived through the Chink attack by the grace of God -- and if you think -- " "I think it's time to go back, Strang." "I haven't seen enough." He froze to listen to the sound of an engine approaching swiftly. "Get behind that signboard -- fast," Mallory rapped. "Wait a minute. Maybe -- " Mallory sprinted for concealment. Strang followed him presently. They lay flat, watching a white bread truck come into view, slow, swing the corner, approach the sign. It stopped in the middle of the street a hundred feet away. Two men stepped down, stood attentively, as if listening. "Those are men, not monsters," Strang whispered. "I want to talk to them, find out -- " Mallory caught his arm. "If you saw them up close you wouldn't think they're men. And we're not going to get that close." Mallory turned at a sound. A tall man in a gray coverall was approaching across the lot, walking with a curious, shambling gait. "You get your wish," Mallory said. "Stand still. Maybe we can bluff our way through." Strang eyed the oncoming figure, fingering his rifle. "For God's sake, Mallory," he said in a low voice. "The fellow's as human as I am -- even if he does walk as if he had two artificial legs." "He has," Mallory said flatly. "Don't say anything. Just be ready." sound, rose to his feet, his eyes on the stranger. Mallory stood beside him. The figure stopped ten feet away, stood in a curiously lifeless stance, body poised at an awkward angle. At this distance the doughy textures of skin and garments were obvious. The face was a mask painted with flat colors on porous rubber. "Mother of God," Strang whispered. "Why are you not at your benches?" the simulacrum inquired in the unctious tones of a television pitchman and, without waiting for a reply, advanced on Strang. The colonel took a step back, set the butt of the rifle against his hip and fired. The shot was deafening; pale flame spurted. The impact of the bullet spun the creature -- it regained its balance, resumed its advance, a pit the size of an olive gaping high in its chest. "It will be necessary to give you pain," it said. Mallory brought his rifle to his shoulder, fired, rode the kick, fired again. The effigy stumbled, fell face forward with a sound like a mattress striking the ground. Strang aimed his rifle at its head. Mallory caught the muzzle, thrust it aside. "That way," he snapped and shoved Strang. The two men sprinted across an open field, between two garages, through a gap in a hedge. They emerged in a narrow alley behind a warehouse. The white vehicle was visible at the corner, catching up rapidly. "They must have detected us as soon as we got into their screens," Mallory said as they ducked back. "We walked right into it." "Not human," Strang muttered. His face was a strange, blotchy color. "My God -- like a rag doll -- walking and talking. Those eyes -- " "We're within a block of the jeep," Mallory said. "We'll let this car pass, then run for it." Crouched in deep shadow beside the house, Mallory felt a wave of dizziness pass over him. For a moment the scene faded, as if a transparent curtain of sparkling black silk had dropped down around him. Voices seemed to clamor at him from a distance. They had a strange urgency. With an effort he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. He took a deep breath, gathered his fading consciousness, focused it. He was on all fours, listening to a distant humming that faded, died, as color washed back into the scene. An engine was idling nearby. Footsteps sounded, coming closer. "Strang," Mallory whispered. "Get set. As soon as he's past, we duck out and run like hell -- " A shadow fell across a patch of sunny lawn. A man in Western costume, complete with cowboy hat and holstered guns, paced past their hiding place. His footsteps receded. "Let's go." Mallory came to his feet, glanced back as Strang failed to move. The colonel stood against the wall, the rifle in his hands pointing at the ground. "Strang -- snap out of it." Strang's eyes had a glazed, outof-focus look. Mallory caught his IF arm. Strang blinked at him vaguely"Release me," he said tonelessly. "I must -- my work -- " "Strang -- they've gotten to you. Fight it, man. Throw it off." Strang pushed at him, struggled to free himself. His movements were uncoordinated, clumsy. Mallory caught his wrists. "Strang -- remember Lori? Remember your army, waiting for you to come back and lead the attack?" "The work waits." Mallory felt the dizziness touch him again. This time he pushed it away more easily. With a sudden wrench, Strang tore himself free. He straightened, brushed at his khaki shirt. "Well, I have to be getting along," he said briskly. "It's time, you know. We're all needed -- " Mallory closed his eyes, concentrating. He sensed Strang's mind-glow, dim and cramped, locked in a web of blackness. Gently, he probed, found an interstice, slipped inside. Strang -- wake up... He sensed faint stirrings of alarm, of partial understanding, partial recognition. Mai -- Mallory. Cant -- think. Like -- drowning in tar -- cold -- hurts -- Mallory opened his eyes. Strang sagged against the building, his face pale, his mouth open. He took a shaky step and stumbled to his knees. Mallory heard returning footsteps. The car was coming closer. He reached again for Strang's mind, forced Strang to totter to his feet. plastic lunged into view six feet away. It pivoted, eyes staring fixedly, blankly. This time the Mone's mental blow was sharp, precisely aimed. Mallory's counter lanced out at the gleaming pinpoint that was the other's mindfield, clashed against alienness, absorbed a brief, shocking pain, then held and clung. He was peripherally aware of Strang stumbling back against the wall, of the pseudoman standing frozen in mid-stride. He thrust harder, searching for entry through the other's defenses, found a line of juncture, jabbed. Light exploded in his mind. He was in a vast room lit by a greenish light, filled with an alien stench, alien sounds. The space was almost completely filled by a vast sponge-like structure of translucent cells, filaments and tubes -- like the interior of a human lung seen under high magnification, the thought came to him. All around the central mass men and not-men hurried, involved in incomprehensible tasks. Mallory sensed an air of extreme tension, of time stretched to the breaking point, of events swollen to bursting. It is the time. Now existence rushes toward fulfillment in the fruiting of the spore-body... With a violent effort, Mallory wrenched against the paralyzing contact with the Mone thoughtfield. He knew a sense of being torn, of a bubble bursting, a vessel smashed, of life-force seeping away. The not-man before him settled into a boneless squat, head dangling backward, hands flat, palms up, fingers fully extended. In death all humanity drained from the puppet, leaving it a thing deflated of any semblance of life. "My God," Strang said. "What -- what was that? How -- " "It's too late to go back now, Strang," Mallory said swiftly. "Time has run out. The Mone is about to spawn -- in minutes, maybe even seconds -- " Strang jerked as if a rope had been pulled. He took an awkward step, shuddered, stood straight. "Now we must go to our benches," he said carefully, looking toward the great tower soaring above the rooftops. The sound of the vehicle engine was close, idling. Two not-men appeared, came toward them, ignoring the dummy slumped in the path. "Now you must go to your benches," the smaller, thinner one said in the voice of an earnest young pharmacist recommending a patent tranquilizer. "Yes," Mallory said in a flat tone, "Now we must go to our benches." Led by the not-men, with Strang striding confidently beside him, he walked out to the street and headed toward the tower. T HE downtown streets had the same derelict look they had had a week before. A few more papers were being blown along the sidewalks. More weeds had sprouted in the cracks in the pavement. Mallory's footsteps had a hollow, echoing quality. The air was cool in the shadow of the tower. The gate in the wall opened as they came up. The flat ground beyond it was as hard and grassless as a school playground. A few not-men were moving with an air of compulsive haste. Off to one side a man lay on his face, his arms under him. His color indicated that he was dead. None of the not-men seemed to be aware of the corpse. Mallory and his escort passed through a rounded opening in the base of the tower into a curving chamber that suggested the interior of an immense seashell. The walls were a translucent, nacreous green, flaring up and over, bending away until they were lost in green gloom. An acrid, kelplike IF odor hung in the muggy air. He heard a persistent murmur of sound, like that of a restless crowd in an auditorium beyond closed doors. The two not-men who had conducted him and Strang here separated, one moving off to the right, the other continuing toward a small passage opening in the curve of wall. Strang unhesitatingly followed the latter. Mallory took the cue. The route led downward in a gentle spiral. There was no floor as such -- in cross-section the passage was nearly circular. A narrow drift of dust and debris formed a ridge along the centerline. The light grew dimmer, the sounds louder, the odors more pungent. The passage opened into a wide room cut into a maze by a system of waist-high partitions that extended out of sight around a central core of dull, dark green. There were hundreds of people -- Mallory saw familiar faces, drawn and haggard in the sickly light. Strang's guide halted. Two figures were approaching, oddly colorless and amorphous. At close range Mallory saw that they were faceless, hairless versions of the not-men he had seen above ground. Their bodies were smooth, featureless, a uniform dull gray in color. Mallory extended his awareness cautiously, contacted the pin-point not-man who had led him here, the brighter, more complex emanations of the newcomers. He was aware of a swift, flickering interchange among them, then of a tentative probe at his own mind. For a moment he knew an intruding sense of uncertainty. Then all three aliens turned abruptly and walked away. With the air of one who knows exactly where he is going Strang stepped through an opening in the low wall. Mallory followed. Inside he stopped, caught Strang's arm. He closed his eyes, willed his consciousness outward. The glow that was Strang's mindfield was almost obscured by an enveloping blanket of gray. Mallory stripped it away. Strang staggered, caught himself, looked around with an expression of bewilderment. His eyes fell on Mallory. "We're inside the tower,", Mallory said quickly. "You've been unconscious. How do you feel?" "Godawful," Strang muttered: " Dream s -- then -- nothing -- " "We're all out of time. We have to try to get to the spawning chamber. I'm guessing that will be central. We'll play it by ear. Come on." He strode along a narrow passage. Strang followed. A low shelf lined the inner surface of the partition here. At intervals of a few feet men and women were posted -- genuine men and women but dull-eyed, slack-featured, thin and pale, their clothing in various degrees of neglect. It appeared, Mallory saw, to be an assembly line of sorts. He saw heaps of small objects resembling carved beans before each worker. They were being strung on wires. No one paid the slightest attention to the intruders. Mallory turned through an opening in the low wall, followed another aisle, lined like the others with toiling, blank-eyed men and women. He recognized a dentist who had once filled a molar for him. A complexly intertwined rope was coiled on the counter before the man among scattered beans, some of which had spilled to the floor. Mallory reached out, plucked the work from his hands. The man hesitated only a moment -- then he plucked a coil of the hair-fine black wire from the disorder, seized a bean, threaded it onto the wire. "Dr. Foyle," Mallory said in a low voice. "Can you hear me?" Foyle gave a violent twitch. The bean fell from his fingers. He looked wildly at Mallory. "It is time," he mumbled and turned back to his work, grabbing for a new bean with an air of frantic haste. Mallory reached carefully to touch the other's mind -- the pseudo-glow was barely perceptible, submerged under multiple layers of inhibiting anti-thought. Delicately, Mallory penetrated the maze, touched the paralyzed ego-center. Foyle's hands froze on his work. I need your help , Foyle. I need information. Where is the spawning chamber? How can I get to it? T HE former dentist's head jerked. He put his hands to his head, made an ugly noise. "Get out -- got to get out -- get away -- get -- filthy thing -- out of my head -- " Foyle's voice rose on the last words. "Quiet," Mallory whispered. "I want to help you." "Late. No time. She'll spawn now -- in a matter of minutes -- must -- complete -- " Foyle grabbed for the beans. "Where is she? How can we get there? What can we do?" Foyle seemed to respond. He stared at Mallory. "Big room -- Great Queen -- God, the urge to let go -- give in to it -- loyalty to Green Queen -- " "Where is she, Foyle?" "Must -- complete genetic package -- response -- environment -- modification. Almost ready -- pressures -- nutrients -- " "How do we reach the Queen's chamber?" "She's -- almost ready. Need -- IF all genetic data. These -- among -- genes. I'm building chromosomes. They're like -- tapes, fed into her -- into it! The horror -- the beauty. Strange. Torn two ways. Must add my contribution to adaption -- best chance for survival -- second generation -- " A hoarse, gargling sound came from Foyle's mouth. He made an abortive attempt to rise, then fell forward over his bench. Mallory thrust to the center of his fading thought-glow, saw it collapsing inward under the unbearable pressure, saw it dwindle, wink out. "He's dead," he told Strang. They resumed their prowl along the curving aisle. Mallory reached out to scan the minds of the humans as they huddled over their work, met only blankness cocooned in fields of negative energy. Once a pseudo-human passed them, hurrying in the opposite direction. It was only a half-hearted counterfeit -- the face was a blob, the garments vaguely outlined. Mallory felt the pale heat of its mental aura brush him. He held his barrier steady and the contact was past. The aisle dead-ended at a vertical wall of a gray, papery material. Strang examined it. "It doesn't look very strong. Take a chance on kicking it in?" There were no not-men near. Strang felt over the surface, pushed at it, then swung his boot. The barrier split. Although workers were busy within six feet of them, none showed any awareness that anything unusual was taking place. Strang hammered the material back, dropped to all fours and crawled through. Mallory followed. They were in a long, narrow space. Ducts of lumpy and irregular shape led through it, some branching upward, others down. There was a steady, drumming sound as of the flow of dense fluids driven by busy pumps. The far wall of the chamber was a glossy dark brown. The pipes that passed through it had no visible joints. Mallory tested the strength of the wall. It was as solid as armor plating. "We have to get past it," he said. "We won't make a hole in that." Mallory was examining a duct two feet in diameter. "Check the input end?" They traced the pipe back. Thirty feet upstream it made a right angle turn to rise vertically, passing through an aperture in the ceiling. Strang set himself. Mallory stepped on his back, reached, caught a handhold and pulled himself up. The duct ended at a manifold, where four smallfer pipes came together. Mallory tested them, found an apparent structural weakness at the point where the tributary lines entered the plenum chamber. He wrenched at one. It yielded slightly but did not fracture. He lay beside the hole, lowered an arm; Strang jumped, caught his hand, pulled himself up and through. Mallory took a position on one side of the duct, Strang on the other. They pushed, pulled, alternately, timing their pressures to the natural period of the pipe. The amplitude of the oscillations increased; with a ripping sound, the material parted at the point of juncture; dark green fluid gushed forth, splattering on the floor. They set to work on a second duct, tore it free, then a third. The last of the four came away easily, tearing the top of the plenum out with it. The floor was ankle deep in olive-drab muck that flowed down through the aperture through which they had entered, splattering on the floor below. Slowly, the level in the plenum sank. "We can't wait," Mallory said. "I'm going in." "I'll wait two minutes and follow you," Strang said. into the viscous sump. The fluid was warm, lumpy, like thin gruel. He took a deep breath, released his grip. The fluid rose around him, washed up over his face as he submerged. He sank slowly. The inside of the duct was smooth. He counted silently. At twenty-eight his feet struck a curving suface. He bent, slid down and around the rightangle turn. It was another thirty feet to the barrier wall. Mallory pushed ahead into the horizontal section, feet-first, paddling awkwardly. By thrusting alternately against the side walls he was able to accelerate his progress. The fluid was moving with more force now -- he sensed that the duct had narrowed. He had lost count of the time. Surely it had been more than a minute -- his lungs burned; a rising blackness obscured his thoughts. In a moment he would have to breathe -- but first another few yards -- another few feet -- one more foot. His shoulder thumped the side of the duct. Abruptly a swift current was sucking at him. He locked his throat, concentrated his waning control on the single concept of not allowing his lungs the The support dropped from beneath him. The pressure was gone. He fell, struck, was sliding across a smooth floor, snorting to clear his mouth and nostrils of a cloying reek as of stale bread multiplied a thousand times. He came to rest on his face, groping for traction on a slippery surface. IF The air was steaming hot, filled with duckings and gurglings as of bubbling tar. It was difficult to breathe. Mallory coughed, spat pasty nutrient material from his mouth, cleared his eyes. The space in which he found himself was almost totally dark. A faint glow from an obscure source showed him a vast, swollen, spongy mass that he had seen before in a dark vision gleaned from an alien mind. He reached out, sensed for a moment a play of pseudolight in patterns of not-color across a convoluted surface of pure mind-stuff. Then an impact like an ice avalanche struck him, smashed him into dust, whirled the dust away into timeless infinity. ness, afloat on a sea of nontime, non-space. Far away, like memories of a forgotten childhood, lights and sounds moved with the bustle and clamor of great events reaching crisis -- but not here. He was alone, paralyzed, without senses or sensations. Except for the agonizing awareness of total defeat. Like a falling man, Mallory reached out for contact -- for any point of reference with which to relate himself. He sensed a hint of texture, an impression of structure like the grain in wood. Pressure counter to the grain met total resistance. He tried to reorient himself, reach out parallel to the laminar polarity of the enveloping inhibitory field. cacyphony of sight smell sound touch -- a blended kaleidoscope of multi-ordinal sense impressions that sleeted at him like interlaced blizzards of color, pitch, texture, stench. He could perceive a great, pulsing glow that spread from zenith to nadir, aswarm with clustered, hurrying points of vivid white and other lesser but more variegated more distant from the nucleus of the array. In the flow and churn of pure energy below beside around him he perceived an evolving pattern of interlocking complexity building inexorably toward completion and consummation. Like a driver on a multilaned freeway, he assessed the shifting, jockeying flow of intermingling forces which maintained the developing but ever-balanced equation. He sensed the vast energies flowing, saw how they drew on the supportive structure provided by the lesser mind-fields of the ancillary Mone creatures -- recognized the vast intellectual potential created by the linkage of lesser brains to create a superbrain of a capability that was the product, not the sum, of the constituent parts. He scanned the lesser, dimmer individual thought-nexi which had been excluded from the compound mind, recognized them as the stunned, controlled minds of the human workers. In comparison with the concentrated brilliances of the not-men they seemed diffuse, unoriented. Unharnessed. In the instant the concept formed in his mind he knew what he must do. X physical body lying dead -- or dying -- on the feeding-cell floor. It required a major effort to reorient his thinking to the limited dimensions of a physical brain in an organic body, to trace back along the tenuous linkage that bound him to the inert flesh, to shape himself again to conform to a matter-energy shell. He knew an instant of pressure, of constriction... Pain burned in him as if he had plunged into a ladle of molten metal. His lungs heaved. His heart gave a convulsive leap. His hands felt thick and numb. His limbs were cast in lead. His vision was cloudy and blurred. Normal sensation seeped back into his tortured body slowly. After half a minute's breathing -- deep, gasping breaths as though he had run a mile at top speed -- he was able to roll over and sit up. His wristwatch told him that he had been unconscious for just over three minutes. Strang sprawled on the floor six feet away, awash in the greenish slime that still oozed from the duct. Mallory touched his mind -- only a faint, diffuse glow indicated a lingering residual vitality in Strang's individual cells. He channeled energy to Strang's egocenter. After a moment he sensed a weak response. He persevered, felt the mind quicken under his touch. At once he expanded the mind mind interface, creating a point-by-point correspondence that linked his mental field with Strang's. There was no need now for verbalization. In the moment of contact, the Strang mind absorbed in instantaneous gestalt the status-dynamic Mallory presented. As swiftly and completely as a fluid shapes itself to a container, Strang's mind and Mallory's interpenetrated, locked into mutual balance, became one. Mallory was simultaneously aware, on multiple levels, of a multitude of forms and relationships and entropic flows that wove a network encompassing the timespace locus in which he existed; of a precise set of matter energy interlocks that was the Mone; of his IF own impingement on the greater pattern; of the potential implicit in the unorganized play of random energies which flickered peripherally to the central reality-matrix. In immediate, instinctive response he extended his newly augmented sensitivity to the next adjacent human mind-field, probed through the inhibiting control layers to the inner ego-core. Awareness of a woman's selfpicture flooded into his mind -- all the memories and complexities of a full human existence were comprehended in a single polyordinal gestalt. For a fractional instant he sensed her amazement at the strange touch invading her identity, the beginning of a flash of atavistic fear; then he had shunted aside her feeble ego-assertion reflex, added the computational and conceptualizing circuitry of her mind to the Mallory Strang duality. Again the level of illumination rose. New vistas of ever-expanding, ever-convoluting mind-structure slid into focus. With new sureness, the compound mind touched half a dozen more brains in swift succession, adding their powers to the growing complex. The seventh mind broke like a bubble -- its colors faded, dissipated, were gone. The Mallory overmind reached farther. Two more minds were added. The tenth resisted violently, fighting like a drowning man against submergence -- impatiently, the newborn thought-creature that had been Mallory overrode the fragile defenses, engulfed the central thought-node. He paused, assessing his new self-awareness, sensing the expansion of his capabilities to encompass the hundred-fold increase in computer capacity. For the first time now he was able to integrate the entirety of the Mone mind structure and his own relationship thereto. The shock of what he saw rocked him to the basic suture of the initial StrangMallory union. My God -- I'm like a chip in a mi llr ace compared with that... The thought flashed and was dismissed in the immediacy of his reaction. He launched himself outward on all fronts, sweeping in the resident egos as rudely as a starving man shelling oysters, erecting a defensive mind-structure with frantic haste. He felt only a remote pang -- a ghostly echo of a forgotten emotion -- as he recognized the identities of his last acquisitions: Gill -- Randy -- Marla. His outward sweep complete, he paused, consolidating his position. The Mone mind-array seemed to have shrunk somewhat. It no longer loomed like a planet -- but it was a mountain to his boulder. He saw the truncated force-lines that had been sheared by his sudden action, recognized the developing Mone reactionpattern, computed the force and direction of the counter-stroke, reoriented himself, marshaling his defensive capabilities. His Universe burst in an explosion of white fire. around Mallory. The flow of mighty energies roared past and through him like an explosion without end. Out of the chaos he abstracted those qualities from which he was capable of formulating a conceptualization. And he was face to face with strangeness beyond his ability to comprehend. The mind face of the Mone. In a single glimpse that scanned back down the endless avenue of time he saw the dim beginnings of this incredible being; the long, slow evolution of form and structure, the advent of neural responsiveness, the birth of mind, its growth and flowering into a mighty fountain of intellect. He observed as the Mone, achieving direct mental control of the mechanics of genetics and heredity, formed itself for expansion, launched itself on the ages-long campaign of destruction-absorption of competing intellectual species which ended in its sole and undisputed possession of its home galaxy. He was witness as the great intelligence pruned itself, perfecting the purity of its cerebral function, trimming away the extraneous physical bodies which housed the multitudinous facets of its communal personality. The time came when the Mone -- a race implicit in a single, integrated galaxy-spanning thought-complex -- found itself faced with entropic death. Having mastered its environment too perfectly, it faced sensory deprivation of a degree commensurate with its frustrated abilities. Unless new challenges, new spectra cf experience could be found, it was doomed to wither, lose coherence, wink out of existence. The Mone integrated the data, arrived at an inescapable conclusion. In order to retain even an attenuated continuity of awareness, it would have to divest itself of its total victory. It must resume the trappings of physical life, reenter the lists of life-death competition. But it was the sole surviving life in its galaxy, all other forms having been either annihilated or absorbed along the evolutionary paths. The neighboring galaxies must serve as the arena for the .next evolutionary advance of the Mone. Stimulated to a new outpouring of creativity comparable with the vast accomplishments of its youth, the Mone created an infinitely flexible modus operandi. It selected suitable inert minerals. IF shaped them into vessels capable of the long voyage; stocked them with thought-absorbent material of complex structure on which were impressed the cerebral patterns basic to the Mone identity and launched its intellectual offspring in a vast seeding that radiated at light-speed from the home galaxy. And in that instant it comprehended a basic truth of the Universe: having spawned, it must die. The primordial intelligence that had become the Mone knew for one infinitesimal -- and eternal -- increment of time the basic axiom of existence: That which once was is eternal; that which is to be has always been. Then it existed no more. But deep in intergalactic space, each individual repository of the Mone-pattern knew and recognized the extinction of the ancestor-mind and drew from this knowledge a new awareness of the depth of its commitment to the continuity of the parent-concept. Space is vast. One by one the original spore-pods, each receding from all its fellows at a noncomputable velocity -- the sum of lightspeed plus light-speed -- passed out of the awareness-range of the others. Alone in immensity, each fractional simulacrum of the original, faced for the first time with the fact of solitude, reoriented itself -- and reached the identical conclusion: Each was the sole, lone repository of the galaxy-devouring force that was the Mone life-concept. On each devolved the ultimate responsibility for survival of thatwhich-must-not-die. Eons of utter solitude ensued. Mallory was present when at last a star swam close, its gravitational field reaching across dwindling space to awaken the response-pattern of the pod. He followed it, with it participated in the planetary approach, using, by encoded instinct, the versatile organomechanisms designed and created for this moment. He experienced the entry into atmosphere, the gathering of data, extrapolation, reaction: the selection of a precise landing point -- a vacant lot in the inner suburban area of the city of Beatrice. N OW, ensconced on a world inconceivably distant from that which gave it birth, the Mone identity proceeded with thatwhich-must-be-done. The footballsized pod, buried beneath a heap of brick rubble, released the precautionary poisons designed to rid the planet of possible competitive life-forms -- forms capable of physically competing with the embryonic Worker-forms when they first crawled forth to grow to swift adulthood. Within seventy-two hours the wave of death had passed around the globe, vectored not only by natural atmospheric forces but carried by the swift craft on which would-be escapees had fled, carrying their fates with them. Doomed airliners had crashed as their mould. But the deadly spores survived the impacts, were spread again, renewed from each new center of infection. For a week, the local life had survived, fighting back blindly with all the weapons at its comidentified, a counteracting substance devised, emergency programs put in effect for mass production of the antitoxin. The last organized resistance had been the release of a counterphage which spread total destruction over a ten-mile-wide patch of scorched earth surrounding the research station at Point Charlotte, Virginia. Two hours later the Mone had reoccupied the area. Within the inner circle at Beatrice twelve hundred and fifty-one brain-stunned natives had been imprinted with the necessary data to enable them to provide the requisite additional labor for the preparation for the secondary seeding; in a band around the city approximately fifteen miles in width, some hundreds of native survivors existed, free. A sensebarrier was erected to bar them from the next area and the work forward. Supervised by the pseudohuman constructs created for the purpose -- designed to mimic the native workers in order to create the minimal adjustment-gap -- the impressed workers first erected the tower which housed the birthchannel through which the tailored seed of the Mone would be ejected at supersonic speed to enter the jet stream and spread over the world. Then they had been reprogramed to process the specific nutrient molecules required by the growing spore-body -- and at last, in the final phase, to assemble the final genetic increments that would determine the prespawning inprinting with which the myriad offspring would be endowed to best fit them for their task -- the construction of the sites from which a new wave of spore-pods would go forth to infect the galaxy. The maturation of the seed had proceeded smoothly. The precomputed statistical determinations had been satisfied. Imprinting was almost complete; the moment of release approached, when the voracious instinct-appetite would be sated at last. And in this penultimate moment, a curious phenomenon had blossomed on the Mone existence-horizon. IF the great Mone mind had failed utterly to comprehend what was taking place. And then, with a blinding insight that rocked its cosmic image to the core, it had understood. It was not alone. For the first time in all the inconceivable eons since its inception the Mone had encountered an intelligence co-equal and external to itself. The impact of that realization coursed through all of its vast data-collecting and collating capacity like a storm, upsetting the basic theorems of its existence. For an immeasurable instant the great mind teetered on the edge of dissolution: And in that moment Mallory struck. collapses when a single vital pebble crumbles from its base, the immense complexity that was the Mone overbrain began to disintegrate. The far-flung sensory and manipulative fabric split, broke apart, withering back on its sources. The inner network of regulatory and sustaining fieldcircuitry, bereft of input, went into oscillation, disassociated itself into its primitive components and self-destructed. The ego-core, stripped of all sensation and power, closed in on itself, encysted, winked out of existence. In a silence that seemed to reach to the end of infinity the Mallory mind-construct hovered, straining outward, sensing the nearby star-crackle, the remoter hiss of the neighbor-galaxies, the pervasive tone of the over-galaxy. He it withdrew from the brink of mind-shattering emptiness, shaken and awed. In haste heit irised in on the source-point shrinking back and down, compressing, dwindling, fleeing... Pressure, pain, the return of physical sensation. Mallory sat up, rose unsteadily to his feet. Strang groaned and stirred, Mallory squatted beside him. "Wake up," he said, hearing his own voice as an echo from a time and place more remote than the farthest star. "Wake up, Strang. We've won." the exit passage from the inner chamber, made their way out into the workroom and a scene of pandemonium. Over four hundred men and women, released abruptly from the tight mental control that had held them for over three months, with no memories of the lost days, had reacted in their individual ways. Some sat mute and numb. Some had made frantically for the nearest exit. A few had become hysterical. Others had attacked the not-men who wandered, mindless, among them, had torn them into bloodless fragments. Mallory searched through the crowd, failed to find Gill or the children. "Maybe they've gone home," Strang suggested. They left the tower, ignored by the gaunt, ragged, mad-eyed crowd now streaming away across the barren courtyard, staring incredulously back at the tower that had apparently sprung miraculously from the ground overnight. In the street Mallory heard the first screams of those who were beginning at last to understand the full scope of the disaster that had befallen them. A man in the remnants of a gray business suit stood as if stunned before the gutted ruin that had been his newly expanded department store. A woman sat on the front steps of a house, sobbing, holding a mouldy doll in her hands. A hollow-faced teenaged boy walked unsteadily down the middle of the street talking to himself. Gil! was lying face down on the sidewalk leading to the front steps of the house. Mallory turned her over gently. She was barely breathing. "We'd better get her inside," Strang said. His voice seemed to Mallory to come from far away. "Yes." Mallory lifted her, carried her up the steps into the gloom of the curtained living room, along the passage to a bedroom. Strang checked her pulse. "Not good," he said. "Damn it, we need a doctor, Mallory." "Everet," Mallory said. "Get him." He jabbed at the man's mind, implanted the information that Everet's house was three doors away. Strang was staggered by the impact of the invasion of his brain. He looked at Mallory with an expression of amazement tinged with fear. "What -- " he started. Get him. Mallory turned back to Gill, probed delicately at her mind, found it closed and shuttered against him. He stood by the window and stared unseeing at the street. He was distantly aware of Strang's movements. He observed Strang's encounter with the doctor, monitored the conversation: Doctor -- a woman -- Mrs. Mallory. She's in a coma, pulse weak, respiration way down ; cool to the touch. I think she's dying. Later, sir. As soon as I can. There's a young fellow -- badly cut up. Fell into glass. Bleeding like a stuck pig. And John Bates -- broken leg, I think, and probably internal damage. IF It 's just a few doors down, doctor . Can you -- As soon as  can. A boys dying. Mallory thrust through, implanted a command. Everet broke off in mid-sentence, turned, started toward the Mallory house. Half a minute later he entered the room. He glanced at Mallory, went to Gill's side, examined her quickly. "She's in a bad way," he said. His voice was ragged. "Restore her to health," Mallory said flatly. "She's needed." "Of course I'll do what I can." For a few minutes, Everet worked swiftly, preparing and administering two injections. He listened to the woman's heartbeat, shook his head solemnly. "I won't lie to you, Mallory," he said. "I'm afraid we're going to lose her. There's no response. She's sinking." Mallory stood at the bedside. He touched Gill's mind, noting the feebleness of the glow. He reached deep into her brain, found the fading spark that was her life. She stirred faintly in response. He sensed her recognition of him. Gill -- you mustn't die... I tried, Jeff. For your sake and the children's --  tried to go on. But the weight was too much. I had to let go... Live... "Mallory -- are you all right?" Strang's voice rasped at him. He struck the interruption aside, clinging to the fading contact with the diminishing mindglow. You have to live... He sensed her silent cry of pain, her recoil from the power of the mental blow. No... no more... you're not... Jeff... Jeff is gone... all gone... nothing left... And then there was no response from the gray vacancy like cold ashes that occupied the point where the last spark of Gill's life had winked and died. him as he turned, pushed past them. Two small, white-faced people met him in the hall. A long moment passed before he recognized them as Randy and Marla. "Your mother is dead," he said tonelessly and went past them and out into the street. He walked but was unaware of walking. The sun sank. Twilight fell. Here and there the glow of firelight shone through windows. The power had failed at last. A cold wind blew along the dark street. He came to an open field. Moonlight shone whitely on dead grasses, a leafless tree. Stars glared down impersonally from the deep black sky. Without warning, a wave of desolation swept down like a tidal comber and smashed the breath from his lungs. "Alone," he groaned. "Oh, God, so aloire." He felt he was drowning in a bleakness more terrifying than the prospect of death. He fell to his knees, impaled on torment like a worm impaled on a thorn. A soft voice said, "Jeff -- please." Sally kneeled beside him, put her hands on him, held him to her. He pushed her away. "Jeff -- I only meant -- " You think I'm weeping for Gill? His thoughts raged, unspoken, unspeakable. You're wrong. It's not that at all. It's not humanity I weep for -- or anything human... "Jeff -- you look so strange -- " You don't know, you could never understand. No human on earth ever could understand. For one moment -- for one tiny instant -- I held the Universe in my hands and looked across that vastness of space and time and beheld another mind that was my equal. And what did I do? Did I meet it, join it on that level beyond human comprehension? No. It lowered its defenses to me -- and I killed it. It's not Mankind I'm mourning. It's the Mone... Out of darkness, a shaft of light, dazzlingly pure, lanced to the center of Mallory's consciousness. Man, I still live , the voiceless voice of the Mone said. Now may we speak together? without words in a timeless place of pure thought. I did not know, Man. This does not excuse my crime -- nor bring back that which is lost. Yet I would make amends... Mallory strove to penetrate the word-screen, achieve again the one-to-one rapport that he had known in the moment that he had confronted the Mone's naked mind. He found the barrier impenetrable. No, Man -- you are not yet ready to exercise the full powers inherent in your destiny, the Mone admonished him.  blundered when I failed correctly to assess the mental capacity of your race on my first approach -- and again, when I too-quickly opened myself to you. There are powers here which would rend this planet to dust if not controlled. Angered, Mallory strove harder -- and found himself gently seized, held. Man -- you are a young species, inexperienced, still closely linked to material flesh. In your hour of crisis you showed qualities that will one day make you great. But you have much to learn, a long apprenticeship to serve before you evolve so far along the trail as to IF know the true Junction oj mind , the true glory of thought. Mallory would have protested but the Mone went on. Your world has been cruelly depopulated oj your kind by my heedless act but the remaining genetic pool is large enough to restore your numbers in a Jew short millennia. I will provide an adequate number oj lije-artijacts -- like those you destroyed in your Jrenzy but oj Junctional Jorm -- to assist you during your period oj rebuilding. Your cities are in the main intact -- an empty but jruitjul planet awaits you. And perhaps in your rebirth you will escape the errors that marred your jirst rise , as I glimpsed them when our minds met. And as the years oj your primal age pass I will watch over you, guard you jrom dangers without and within, until I have expiated the evil I unwittingly did you. Then I will pass on my way. Perhaps some -- we will meet again as friends and equals among the galaxies. Wait ! Mallory hurled the plea with all the force of his compound mind. But before the echo of the thought had died he had forgotten it. For a moment longer, as his briefly held powers slipped away, he clung to the lingering sense of something sublime, glimpsed once and never seen again. Then that vision, too, was gone. And he was only a man, crouched against the earth that had brought him forth. flowers on her grave. March came with clear skies. The strange, faceless beings who had emerged from the tower -- curiously, no one feared them or recoiled from their appearance -- toiled day and night to restore and rebuild, to farm the abandoned acreage outside the city, to operate the power generating plant, the water system, to staff the hospital. Vines grew up around the tower and wild flowers sprouted along the wall that was crumbling rapidly away. The six hundred and twenty citizens of Earth learned to live again, to pick up the fragments of old relationships, to begin the long process of building new ones. On the first day of April Jeff Mallory and Sally were married in a ceremony attended by the entire population of the world. They held carnival for a day -- then they picked up their tools and returned to the task of forging the future of Man.  found his and kissed it. Raising her head again, not letting go his old thin fingers, she said, "And -- do we not even know your name? I just realized -- the machine said not that you are Alexander -- only that you wish to be known as Alexander!" "This, too, has been done before," the old man said. "There was once a knot so complicated no one could untie it. A man called Alexander rose up, cut it with a sword. To loose the bonds we heedlessly used to hobble the human race -- it seems I, too, must be crude. It is not something I would wish my own name to be remembered for. My second Record." He smiled and gave her hand a final squeeze. "Go, then, my friends -- and remember. Always do the best you can." the door of the great hall, he was sitting calmly with his staff in his hand. And when the hour was up there were no staff or Registry or Alexander -- only a little hot dust drifting on the light of the stars.  much?" "All." "You will not change your mind?" "I will not." "So I see." "Thank you for your offer. It was enticing -- but I must regretfully decline. I think you can find the way out." The man in the book-cluttered room sat quietly in his chair for a long time after his visitor had left. Then he rose, walked to a desk in the corner, took paper from it and a pen and began to write. In the street outside, the visitor looked toward the house he had just left and then toward the dark hills where the evening star now had set and Orion was sinking. He stood there for a long time before he faded like an afterimage and was gone.  IF (Continued from page #) the Editor s seat, I should hope that the magazines' quality will improve in a like fashion. But there are two pieces in the latest IF which get my goat. The first is, unfortunately, your editorial. I don't begrudge Dr. Menzel's conceptions if he means them only as jokes -- but if he actually believes in them, I shudder to think of the names of the farside craters. Mare Elron? Oceanus Flatearthers? Shaver Crater? (Incidentally, Dr. Robert S. Richardson of Griffith Observatory has proposed that a farside crater be named after the late Uncle Willy Ley. He seems to think that the best location for Crater Ley would be near Craters Tsiolkov sky and Jules Verne.) And speaking of Tsiolkovsky -- it was with great dissatisfaction that I muddled through Dr. Tsvetikov's article. Tsiolkovsky was a great rocket pioneer but you must remember that he owed a great deal of his philosophy to the Revolution. I am not condemning you for publishing Communist philosophy. It's always interesting to see what people of other political viewpoints are doing, say I. Now, Tsiolkovsky as a science fiction writer is vastly different from Tsiolkovsky as a rocket man. Isaac Asimov, who came to the U.S. from Russia at the age of three, a great science fiction writer in his own right who has read, with interest, some Soviet Science Fiction (he has contributed introductions to two antholSoviet sf is severely limited when it comes to sociological science fiction. Horace Gold and was originally intended to be a gathering of fresh sociological sf ideas -- it still is, I guess, though most science fiction seems to be somewhat sociological these days. For another thing, I cannot either understand or agree with the "Razve mozhmo somnyevat ' sya " theses. In them, Tsiolkovsky begins with a deceptively simple statement (though it is a statement which, I am told, is some news to most Russians), and then proceeds into an entire series of non sequiturs which seem to me to reflect Tsiolkovsky' s own inferiority complex, combined with the wishful thinking of the Soviet state that " Communism is the best form of government." Tsiolkovsky has used, apparently, the same odd Soviet logic here that enabled Ivan Yefremov to call Murray Leinster a man with the heart of a serpent. But still, as I said, it is always nice to know what the Communists are thinking. This same odd Soviet logic that I mentioned above may perhaps be the reason why Richard Nixon's signature now rests upon the Moon, instead of perhaps Podgornys, Brezhnev's and Kosygin's. I notice from the bar of black on your front cover that IF has skipped another issue. It is sad to see a magazine skip two issues in one year, because IF hasn't missed one since Sepearly #'s -- before it was finally resurrected by Street and Smith. sue, too. Maybe two issues -- I haven't the August one, and the Sunset Distributors, hell take them, have a favorite sport of delaying science fiction magazines to Greater Los an issue since December, #. And I certainly hope that the new format won't cause it to go back on bimonthly format. Heavens! It went monthly only recently! Now, a few suggestions: I congratulate you for giving IF a book column a long-needed letter column. Simply because Horace Gold polled the readers back in #I and decided not to include one is no reason why there cannot be one now. Maybe you could start a sort of story-review feature rated by the Readers, where we Humble People could make our preferences and desires known to the Editor. This isn't an original idea, but the person who first used it uses it to this day, so it must be a successful idea. Also, please bring back the SF Now, about authors : it would be nice if you could round up the following authors in the next year or so: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. They are obviously the Big Three Science Fiction Writers In The World, and not much of their writing has appeared in recent months. And, of course, fiction by such other greats as del Rey, Anthony, Anderson, Simak, Laumer, Herbert, Brunner, Budrys, Clement, Ellison, Dickson, Garrett (hey! I'm runnin ' outa space!), Leiber, McCaffrey, Leinster, Niven, Panshin, Zelazny and so many others whose names I momentarily forget. Sure, you can print stuff by such trite and unexperienced hacks as Tepper, but just as long as you've got the good writers -- In closing, I would like to reiterand IF will continue to be Two Great Magazines. In the more recent days, Pohl catered too much to ' the mothers of some of the readers," and all too often had an artist do a cover, and then commissioned a writer to write a story to fit the cover. I hope that this last practice will be abolished completely -- after all, the cover of a magazine is intended to be an artist's image of something originally described in words -- not just any wildlooking thing that the artist conjures up out of nowhere, and to which the poor writer must confine his work. But I have to stop somewhere, and it might as well be here. Good luck! M. B. Tepper Santa Monica, Calif. And luck to you, M.B. You and I will get along -- you're one of the people an editor works for. When you for me -- dig it out of yourself and pitch to the readers. You know them. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: more than ten years, I feel as though the new Dune story by Frank Herbert. I used tremendous restraint and did not start the story in July. Then no August issue, not even one on the newsstands.  have written once and received jio answer of any sort. All I really want is a copy of part II of Dune Messiah. Is that really too much to request? and I will still love you despite the mixup in August. Harriette Schapiro San Diego, California your way -- and my love, too. You're my kind and so is the next guy. Why don't you two say hello? Dear Mr. Jakobsson: You have the most miserable subscription service of any sf magazine. Perhaps if you told us in the current issue when the next issue will be out you could relieve yourself of some very annoying letters. Mark Lee Orange, Conn. P.S.: An IF subscriber and proud of it! And I'm proud of you. Subscription has been notified. Dear Editor: The two worst mistakes you made perhaps you could take thirty pages You see, we were all very proud of having the largest magazine around and we've just got to get it back. Taking the illustrations away was the next one. They really added a lot to the story -- especially with artists like Morrow and Reese (the only things I liked about the Spork stories were the illustrations). In reply to Anne Me Caffrey's letter (September issue): why did you take Gaughans poetic illustration from Hue  Cry? You said you would keep the features. And what happened to Authorgraphs and SF Calendar (I didn't care for IF -- and When? In closing -- how about lining up a Zelazny serial? A fine writer. Does he have a book out that didn't win an award? Craig Grant Saskatchewan, Canada You wrote some time ago. How do you like our looks now? Despite the fewer pages you're getting as much reading matter as ever. Type size does it. The reason for the # pages in mechanical one -- to hit our schedules now that we're underway we have to be processed together at the bindery. have an entirely new look and will or pages for that matter. The Calendar is back and Authorgraphs will appear when authors have something to say they can't express in their stories. The new Hue and Cry heading was designed by Brian Gaughan, Jack Gaughan's young son. Jack feels, and I agree, that it too has poetry -- the poetry of reality and tomorrow. Dear Editor: and IF as good (if not better -- I was impressed with the last few and coming editions ) as it was before. As my contribution to this --  would like to suggest that you keep publishing the authors that you have been, especially Robert Sil verb erg and Larry Niven. And get some stories by Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and some long work by Samuel Delany. He is the world's best sf author. ) IF are far better than any other magazine in the field. I hope adding, another won't force you to print worse stories. Will you publish all the Hugo and Nebula winners to date and the guests of honor at the conventions? And for your #th-anniversary issue, how about getting stories from the main New Wave authors? I have just finished reading Starchild by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson and  was quite surprised to find two of Larry Niven's main themes, the body banks and currant addiction, in the book. Is it actually Fred Pohl who thought of these and suggested them to Niven? Good luck in the coming year -- and keep Hue and Cry. Jon Raz Berkeley, California Ideas, like seeds, travel on the wind -- and no two writers handle them alike. Usually there's no connection -- several authors may hit on similar themes independently. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: #, I would like to make a few comas to what I would like to see retained and what  would not like to see any more. First of all, please maintain the listing of sf conventions, etc. in IF. This is invaluable and takes up very little .space. Secondly, the Authorgraphs and Galaxy's Stars are interesting, at least to someone who's been reading sf long enough to wonder whether or not SF writers are really human.  enjoy them immensly. I hesitate to say keep Algis Budrys as book reviewer -- there have been review was the best thing in it. But  do miss his fiction. (I think that's a left-handed compliment to Budrys.) There have been many complaints used for printing. Personally, I like it as is.  would like to see a lot less serials. I seem to be alone in this, too. And, for God's sake, no more of those damn science nonfact articles. Finally, I hope you will continue the yearly contest that Fred Pohl initiated last year. And please include me in the next mailing of ballots. Grant Carrington North Haven, Conn. Okay. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I found the IF first writer. Jack L. Alston, to be a fine and promising beginner. Though he was a little sketchy on technicalities (such as how the hell did he get off that sun?), Alston seemed very original in his details -- a captivating imagination. Please print him in the future. Joseph Zabel Youngstown, O. worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no co mmitm ents. 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You've never been to a sciencefiction convention before, have you, my little Diary? I can tell, because you are so clean and spotless and undamaged -- as fresh as the day I stole you from the dime store. After this convention you will look different, believe me. What is a World Science Fiction Convention? Well, it's not a regional convention, where science-fiction fans foregather with writers and editors and publishers and artists from their own section of the country. The World Convention is big. It draws attendance from all over the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. It's an annual affair, sponsored by a fan group located in a city which won a bid to stage the gettogether at the previous convention. This year the World-Con is being held in ' St. Louis, and that's where we're heading. So fasten your seat-belt, dear diary, and off we go. Cooperate by recording the words I put down in you and I promise you'll wind up immortaliz in the pages of  magazine, right next to some Jack Gaughan' artwork. Trust me. Later. The first pro I met on the flight was Joyce Muscat. The first fan, Alan Foster, who sat with my wife and myself during the flight. I spent most of my time talking with Alan while my wife read Nicholas And Alexander, the biography of the Czar of Russia and his Empress. I guess she thinks that learning about riots, revolutions and assassinations is good preparation for the Convention. Somewhere along the line they served us breakfast. "These must be powdered eggs," Alan told me. I nodded. "What else do you expect from powdered chickens?" I inquired. As Alan digested this bit of impeccable logic -- along with his eggs -- we began our descent upon St. Louis. The first sight of the city from the air came as something of a surprise to me. I've heard o( the St Louis Blues, but St. Louis actually looks green; at least from a height of ten thousand feet. And so do I. At ground level the city is hot and humid. We made our way to the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel apd discovered that it's really two hotels connected by a hyphen -- and a passageway from the lobby of one to the elevator bank of the other. Getting from room to roomis going to mean a lot of walking (Please turn to page #) No one had ever seen a Caleban. And now McKie had to love one! chino Furuneo. He had reminded himself of this on the ride into the city to make the long-distance call -- he clung to his identity now. It was wise to firm up the ego under the circumstances. He was sixty-seven years old and could remember many who had lost their selves in the sniggertrance of communication between star systems. But more than the cost and the mind-crawling sensation of dealing with a Taprisiot transmitter, was at stake here -- and, Furuneo did not feel he could trust anyone else to speak to Jorj X. McKie. He stood -- with the two enforcers he had brought along to guard his privacy -- in the reception room of the Taprisiot breeding center -- one of only about twenty known to exist in the universe. The room was no more than fifteen meters wide, perhaps thirty-five long... Its tan walls were oddly, randomly pitted. A high bench occupied three fourths of one long wall. Multifaceted rotating lights above it cast patterned shadows onto the bench and the Taprisiot on it. Taprisiots came in odd shapes like sawed off lengths of burned conifers, stub limbs jutting every which way, needlelike speech appendages fluttering even when the creatures remained silent. This one's skidfeet beat a nervous rhythm on the bench. For the third time since entering, Furuneo asked, "Are you the transmitter?" No answer. Taprisiots were like that. One of the enforcers behind Furuneo cleared his throat. "Looks like it's gonna be a long wait for this Tappy." Furuneo nodded. He had learned several degrees of patience on his way up the ladder to his present Msition as Planetary Agent for the Bureau of Sabotage. He knew his only recourse now was to wait quietly. Taprisipts took their own time about anything and everything -- and without a Taprisiot transmitter one did not make real-time calls across interstellar space. Strange, this Taprisiot talent -- the sensational press abounded with theories on how they communicated. Furuneo's belief was that Taprisiots distorted space in a way similar to that of a Caleban jumpdoor, sliding between the dimensions. But whatever Taprisiots did to make a call, one thing was certain -- it involv the human pineal gland or the equivalent among other sentients. "Putcha, putcha, putcha," the Taprisiot on the bench said, squeaking its speech needles. Furuneo asked again, "Are you the transmitter?" "Putcha, putcha, putcha," the Taprisiot repeated. "This is a remark I will now translate in the only way that may make sense to ones like yourselves of Sol Earth ancestry. What I said was: 'I question your sincerity.' " F uruneo moved to a position below the bench. "I wish to make a call to Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie," he said. "Your robogreeter recognized and identified me and took my creditchit. Are you the transmitter?" "Where is this Jorj X. McKie?" the Taprisiot asked. "If I knew. I'd be off to him in person through a Jumpdoor," Furuneo said. "This is an important call. Are you the transmitter?" "Date, time and place," the Taprisiot requested. Furuneo sighed and relaxed. He glanced back at his enforcers, motioned them to take up stations at the room's two doors, waited while they obeyed. From here on he wanted no outside interruptions. He turned back, gave thd Taprisiot the required local coordinates. "You will sit on floor," the creature said. Furuneo silently thanked his stars. Once a transmitter had led him to a mountainside in wind and driving rain and made him stretch out, head lower than feet, before opening the overspace contact. It had had something to do with "refining the imbediQent." Furuneo sat. "Close eyes," the Taprisiot squeaked. Furuneo obeyed. "Think of contact," the Taprisiot ordered. Furuneo thought of Jorj X. McKie, building the image in his mind -- squat little man, angry red hair, face like a disgruntled frog. Contact beganwith tendrils of cloying awareness. Furuneo became in his owa mind a red flow sung to the tune of a silver lyre. His body went remote. Awareness IF rotated above a strange landscape, its horizons slowly turning. He sensed the stars engulfed in lonli ness. The thought exploded in Furuneo's awareness. He recognized it at once. Contactees frequently resented the call. They could not reject it, no matter how inopportune the timing -- but they could make the caller feel their displeasure. It never Jails! It never Jails! McKie would be jerked to full inner awareness now, his pineal gland ignited by the long-distance contact. Furuneo settled himself to wait out the curses. When they had subsided sufficiently he identified himself. regret any inconvenience I may have caus," he said. "But the max-alert failed to say where you could be located.You must know I would not have called unless it were important." A more or less standard opening. "How the hell do I know whether your call's important?" McKie demanded. "Stop babbling and get on with it." This was an unusfual extension of anger even for the volatile McKie. "Am I interrupting something important?" "I'm standing here in a Telicourt, getting a divorce," McKie said. "Can you imagine what a great time everyone here's having, watching me mumble to myself in a sniggertrance? Get to the business." "A Caleban Beachball washed ashore last night below Division City here on Cordiality," Furuneo said. "In view of all the deaths and insanity and the max-alert from the Bureau, I thought I'd better call you at once. It's still your case, isn't it?" "Is this your idea of a joke?" McKie demanded. In lieu oj red tape Furuneo cautioned himself, thinking of the Bureau maxim. It was a private thought, but McKie no doubt was catching the mood of it. "Well?" McKie demanded. Was McKie deliberately trying to unnerve him? Furuneo wondered. How could the Bureau's prime function -- to slow the processes of government -- remain operative on an internal matter such as this call? Agents were duty bound to encourage anger in government in order to expose the unstable, tempermental types, the ones who lacked the necessary personal control and ability to think under psychic stress -- but why carry this duty over to a call from a fellow agent? Some of these thoughts obviously bled through the Taprisiot transmitter because McKie reflected them, enveloping Furuneo in a mental sneer. "You lotsa time unthink yourself," McKie said. Furuneo shuddered, recovered his sense of self. He recognized a close call -- he had almost lost his ego. ,The veiled warning in McKie's words had alerted him, allowing recovei#. Furuneo began casting about in his mind for another Interpretation of McKie's reaction. Interrupting the divorce could not account for it. If the stories were true, the ugly little agent had been married fifty or more times. Are you still interested in the Beachball?" Furuneo venturi. "Is there a Caleban in it?" "Presumably." "You haven't investigated?" McKie's tone suggested Furuneo had been entrusted with a most crucial operation and had failed because of inherent stupidity. Now fully alert, Furuneo said, "I acted as my orders instructed." "Orders!" "I'm supposed to be angry, isn't that right?" "I'll be there as fast as I can get service -- within eight standard hours at the most," McKie said. "Your orders, meanwhile, are to keep that Beachball under constant observation. The observers must be hopped up on angeret, Its their only protection." "Constant observation," Furuneo said. "If a Caleban emerges, you're to detain it by any means possible," "A Caleban -- detain it?" "Engage it in conversation, request its cooperation -- anything," McKie said. His mental emphasis added that it was odd a Bureau agent should have to ask about throwing a monkey wrench into someone's activities. "Eight hours," Furuneo said. "And don't forget the angeret" he repeated. planet of Tutalsee, took an hour to complete his divorce, then returned to the float home he had moored beside the island of love flowers. Even the nepenthe of Tutalsee had failed him, McKie thought. His marriage had been wasted effort -- this wife hadbeen his fifty-fourth, somewhat lighter of skin than any of the others and more than a bit of a shrew. It had not been her first marriage and she had shown early suspicions of McKie's secondary motives. She had already vacated the float home and McKie could sense the living entity's resentment. He had shattered the idyl the float home had been conditioned to create -- the home would return to its former affability only when he, too, was gone. The floats were gentle creatures, susceptible to sentient irritation. McKie packed. He examined his toolkit -- a selection of stims, plastipicks, explosives in various denominations, raygens, multigoggles, pentrates, a wad of uniflesh, solvos,miniputer, Taprisiot life monitor, holoscan blanks, rupters, comparators all in order. The toolkit was a fitted wallet -- he concealed it in an inner pocket of his jacket. He stowed a few changes of clothing into a single bag, consigned the rest of his possessions to BuSab storage, left them for pickup in a sealpack on a couple of chairdogs. They appeared to share the float home's resentment. They remained immobile even when he patted them affectionately. IF Too bad. McKie sighed, took out his S'eye key. This jump was going to cost the Bureau megacredits. Cordiality lay halfway across the universe. Jumpdoors still seemed to be working all right but it disturbed McKie that he must make this journey by a means the Calebans had provided. Eerie situation. S'eye jumpdoors had become so common that mqst sentients accepted them without question. McKie had even shared the common acceptance before the maxalert. Now he wondered at himself. Casual acceptance demonstrated the adaptability of rational thought -- a common characteristic of all sentients. The Caleban artifact had been known to the Confederated Sentients for only nineteen standard years. But in that time exactly eightythree Calebans were known to have contacted Consent -- the first one with his gift of the jumpdoor. And eightytwo others. McKie flipped the key in his hand, caught it deftly. Why had the Calebans refused to part with their gift unless everyone agreed to call it S'eye? What was so important about a name? I should be on my way, McKie told himself. Still, he delayed. Eighty-three Calebans. The max-alert had been explicit in its demand for secrecy regarding the outlined problem -- Calebans had been disappearing, one by one. Disappearing -- if that was what the phenomenon could be called. Each disappearance had been accompanied by a massive wave of sentient deaths and insanity. No question why the problem had been dumped in BuSab's lap instead of onto some police agency. Government fought back wherever it could -- powerful men hoped to discredit BuSab. McKie found his own share of disturbance in wondering about the hidden possibilities in the selection of himself as the sentient to tackle this. Who hates me? He used his personally tuned key in the jumpdoor. The door began to hum with its aura of terrifying energies. Its vortal tube snappy open. McKie tensed himself for the syrupy resistance to jumpdoor passage, stepped through the tube. It was like swimming in air become molasses -- perfectly normal appearing air. rather ordinaiy office -- the usual humdrum whirldesk, alertflicker light patterns cascading from the ceiling, a view out one transparent wall onto a mountainside. In the distance the rooftops of Division City lay beneath dull gray clouds. A luminous silver sea stretched to' the horizon beyond. McKie's implanted brainclock told him the time was late afternoon, the eighteenth hour of the twentysix-hour day. This was Cordiality, a world two hundred thousand light-years from Tutalsee's planetary ocean. The jumpdoor' s vortal tube snapped shut behind him with a crackling sound like the discharge of electricity. A faint ozone smell was detectable in the room. The room's standard-model chairdogs had been well trained to comfort their masters, McKie noted. One of them nudged him behind the knees until he dropped his bag and took a reluctant seat. The chairdog began massaging his back. Obviously it had tn instructed to make him comfortable while someone was summoned. McKie tun himself to the faint sounds of normalcy around him. Footsteps of a sentient could be heard in an outer passage. A Wreave by the sound of it -- the peculiar dragging of the heel on a favored foot. A conversation was going on somewhere -- McKie could make out a fewLinguagalach words. His fidgeting set the chairdog into a burst of rippling movements to soothe him. Enforced idleness nagged at him. Where was Furuneo? McKie chided himself. Furuneo probably had many planetary duties as BuSab agent here. And he could not know the full urgency of the problem. This might be one of the planets where BuSab. was spread thin. The gods of immortality knew the Bureau could always find work. McKie began reflecting on his role in the affairs of sentiency. Once, long centuries past. Consents with a psychological compulsion to "do good" had captured the government. Unaware of the writhing complexities -- the mingled guilts and self-punishments beneath their compulsion -- they had eliminated virtually all delays and red tape from government. The great machine with ts blundering power over sentient life had slipp into high gear, moved faster and faster. Laws had been conceived and passed in the same hour. Appropriations had flashed into being and were spent in a fortnight. New bureaus for the most improbable purposes had lea into existence and proliferated like some insane fungus. Governnient had become a great destructive wheel without a governor, whirling with such frantic speed that it spread chaos wherever it touched. In desperation a handful of sentients had conceived the Sabotage Corps to slow that wheel. There had been bloodshed and other degrees of violence but the wheel had been slowed. In time the Corps had become a Bureau, and the Bureau was whatever it was today -- an organization headed into its own corridors of entropy, a group of sentients who preferred subtle diversion to violence but were prepared for violence when the need arose. right. His chairdog became still. Furuneo entered, brushing a hand through the band of gray hair at his left ear. His wide mouth was held in a straight line, a suggestion of sourness about it. "You're early," he said, patting a chairdog into place across from McKie and seating himself. "Is this place safe?" McKie asked. He glanced at the wall where the S' eye had disgorged him. The jumpdoor was gone. "I've moved the door back downstairs through its own tube," Furuneo said. "This place is as private as I can make it." He sat back, waiting for McKie to explain. McKie nodded toward the transparent wall and the distant sea. "That Beachball still down there?" "My men have orders to call me it makes any move," Furuneo said. "It washed ashore just like I said, imbedded itself in a rock outcropping and hasn't moved since." "Imbedded itself?" "That's how it seems." ' "No sign of anything in it?" "Not that we can see. The Ball does appear to be a bit -- banged up -- some pitting and a few external scars. What's this all about?" "No doubt you've heard of Mliss Abnethe?" "Who hasn't?" "She recently spent some of her "Hire a -- " Furuneo shook his head. "I didn't know it could be done." "Neither did anyone else." "I read the max-alert," Furuneo said. "Abnethe's connection with the case wasn't explained." -- "She's a bit kinky about floggings, you know." "I thought she was treated for that." "Yeah, but it didn't eliminate the root of her problem. It just fixed her so she couldn't stand the sight of a sentient suffering." "So?" "Her solution, naturally, was to hire a Caleban." "As victim?" Furuneo was beginning to understand, McKie saw. Someone had once said the problem with Calebans was that they presented no patterns yoii could recognize. This was true, of course. If you could imagine an actuahty, a being whose presence could not be denied but who left your senses dangling every time you tried to look at it -- then you could imagine a Caleban. They're shuttered windows opening onto eternity... McKie had attended every Bureau lecture and briefing about Calebans. He tried to recall one of those sessions now, prompted by a . nagging sensation that it had contained something of value to his present problem. It'd been something about "communications difficulties within an aura of affliction." The precise content eluded him. Odd, he thought. It was as though the Calebans' crumbled projection created an effect on senr tieht memoiy akin to their effect on sentient vision. Here lay the true source of sentient uneasiness about Calebans. Their artifacts were real -- the S'eye jumpdoors, the Beachballs in which they were reputed to live -- but no one had ever really seen a Caleban. F uruneo, .watching the fat little gnome of an agent sit there thinking, recalled the snide story about McKie, that he'd been in BuSab since the day before he was born. "She's hired a whipping boy, eh?" Furuneo asked. "That's about it." 'The max-alert spoke of deaths, insanity -- " "Are all your people dosed with angeretT McKie asked. "I got the message, McKie." "Good. Anger seems to afford some protection." "What exactly is going on?" "Calebans have been -- vanishing," McKie said. "Every time one of them goes, there are quite a few deaths and other unpleasant effects -- physical and mental crippling, insanity -- " Furuneo nodded in the direction of the sea. McKie shrugged. "We'll have to go take a look. The hell of it is, until your call there seemed to be only one Caleban left in the universe, the one Abnethe hired." "How're you going to handle this?" "That's a beautiful question." "Abnethe's Caleban," Furuneo said. "Does it have anything to say by way of explanation?" "Haven't been able to interview it," McKie said. "We don't know where she's hidden herself -- or it." "Really don't know?" Furuneo blinked. "Well, cordiality is pretty much of a backwater." "That's what I've been thinking. You said this Beachball was a little the worse for wear?" "That's #, isn't it." "Another oddity among many." McKie frowned. "They say a Caleban doesn't get very far from its Ball," Furuneo said. "And they like to park them near water." "How much of an attempt did you make to communicate?" "The usual. HowM you find out about Abnethe hiring a Caleban?" "She bragged to a friend who bragg to a friend who -- and one of the other Calebans dropped a hint before disappearing." "Any doubt the disappearances and the rest of it are tied together?" "Let's go knock on this thing's door and find out," McKie said. II had adopted an early attitude of resentment toward BuSab. "They use you," she had protested. McKie considered her words now as he and Furuneo sped by groundcar toward the Cordiality coast. How arc they using me this time? Setting aside the possibility that he had been offered up as a sacrifice, many possibilities remained in reserve. Was his legal training needed? Or had the assignment been prompted by his unorthodox approach to inter-spedes relationships? Obviously they entertained some hope for a spedal sort of official sabotage -- but what sort? Why had his instructions been so incomplete? You will seek out and contact the Caleban which has been hired the Statler Hilton, Boston. For information; Anthony Lewis, # Unity Avenue, Belmont, Mass. #.  Hilton Inn, San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests of Honor: Miriam Allen de Ford and E. Hoffman Price. Fan Guest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. Memberships: S# .# now, # after January #st, # at the door. For information: Quinn Yarbro, # Columsa ##, Berkeley, Galifornih #. At the Royal Hotel, Southampton, England. Guest of Honor: James Blish. Panels, films, lectures and displays. Scheduled speakers: Raymond Fletcher, Member of Parliament who works closely with the Ministry of Technology; Dr. Kit Pedler, lecturer in Opthalmology and TV script writer; ei. al. Most of the British sf writers will be in attendance. For information: don, W.C. #, England. IF by Madame Mliss Abnethe -- or find any other Caleban available for sentient contact -- and you will take appropriate action. Appropriate action? McKie shook his head. "Why did they choose you for this gig?" Furuneo asked. "They know how to use me," McKie said. The groundcar, driven by an enforcer, negotiated a sharp turn and a vista of rocky shore opened before them. Something glittered in the distance among black lava palisades. McKie noted two aircraft hovering above the rocks. "That it?" he asked. "Yes." "What's the local time?" "About two and a half hours to sunset," Furuneo said, correctly interpreting McKie's concern. "Will the angeret protect us if there's a Caleban in that thing and it decides to -- disappear?" the Andrews Hotel, Minneapolis. For information: Jim Young, # Ulysses Street, N.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota #.  Alpin, Herald Square, New York City. Advance registration: #. For information and registration -- : Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York #. California. Guest of Honor: Jack Williamson; Fan Guest of Honor: Rick Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California #I .  Memberships: Supporting, #; Atgia # #. AL. In Heidelberg, West Germany. All convention functions will be held at the Staadthalle in Heidelberg; members of the convention will find accommodations in hotels in town. The accent of this con will be an international one, with fans and pros com; ing from all over the world. Guests-of Tubb (England) and Dr. Herbert W. Lester del Rey. Memberships: # (supporting membership, receive all progress reports), # (attending); after Deceiriber #, #, #. For Germany. Make all checks payable to Mrs. Molly Auler. "I sincerely hope so," McKie said. 'Why didn't you bring us by aircar?" "People here on Cordiality are used to seeing me in a groundcar unless I'm on official business and require speed." "You mean nobody knows about this thing yet?" "Just the coastwatchers for this stretch. And they're on my payroll." "You run a pretty tight operation here," McKie said. "Aren't you afraid of becoming too efficient?" "I do my best," Furuneo said. He tapped the driver's shoulder. The groundcar pulled to a stop at a turnaround which looked down onto a reach of rocky islands and a low lava shelf where the Caleban Beachball had come to rest. "You know, I keep wondering if we really know what those Beachballs are " "They're homes," McKie grunted. "So everybody says." Furuneo got out. A cold wind set his hip aching. "We walk from here," he said. T here were times during the climb down the narrow path to the lava shelf when McKie felt thankful he had been fitted with a gravity web beneath his skin. It would limit his rate of descent to a non-injurious speed if he fell. But it could do nothing about any beating he might receive in the surf at the base of the palisades and it offered no protection at all against the chill wind and the driving spray. He wished he "had worn a heatsuit. "It's colder than I expected," Furuneo said, limping out onto the lava shelf. He waved to the aircars. One dipped its wings, maintained its place in a slow circling track above the Beachball. Furuneo struck out across the shelf and McKie follow, jumped across a tidal pool, blinked and bent his head against a gust of windborne spray. The pounding of the surf on the rocks was loud here. They had to raise their voices to make themselves understood. "You see?" Furuneo shouted. "Looks like it's been . banged around a bit." "Those things are supposed to be indestructible," McKie said. The Beachball was some six meters in diameter. It sat solidly on the shelf, about a half meter of its bottom surface hidden by a depression in the rock, as though it had melted out a resting place. McKie led the way up to the lee of the Ball, passing Furuneo in the last few meters. He stood there, hands in pockets, shivering. The round surface of the Ball failed to cut off the cold wind. "It's bigger than I expected," he said as Furuneo stopped. "First one you've ever seen close up?" "Yeah." McKie passed his gaze across the thing. Knobs and indentations marked the opaque metallic surface. It seemed to him the surface IF variations carried some pattern. Sensors, perhaps? Controls of some kind? Directly in front of him was what appeared to be a crackled mark, perhaps from a collision. It lay just below the surface, presenting no roughness to McKie's exploring hand. "What if they're wrong about these things?" Furuneo asked. "How?" "What if they aren't Caleban homes?" "Don't know. Do you recall the drill?" "You find a nippled extrusion and you knock on it. We tried that. There's one just around to your left." McKie worked his way around in that direction, getting drenched by a wind-driven shower of spray in the process. He reached up, still shivering from the cold, knocked at the indicated extrusion. Nothing happened. "Every briefing I ever attended says there's a door in these things somewhere," McKie grumbled. "But they don't say the door opens every time you knock," Furuneo said. McKie continued working his way aroutid the Ball, found another nippled extrusion, knocked. Nothing. "We tried that one, too," Furuneo said. "I feel like a damn fool." "Maybe there's nobody home." "Remote control?" "Or abandoned -- a derelict." McKie pointed to a thin green line about a meter long on the Ball's windward surface. "What's that?" Furuneo hunched his shoulders against spray and wind, stared at the line. "Don't recall seeing it." "I wish we knew a lot more about these damn things." "Maybe we aren't knocking loud enough." McKie pursed his lips in thought. Presently, he took out his toolkit, extracted a lump of lowgrade explosive. "Go back on the other side," he said. "You sure you ought to try. that?" "No."Well -- " , Furuneo shrugged, retreated around the Ball. McKie applied a strip of the explosive along the green line, attached a time-thread, joined Furuneo. Presently; there came a dull thump that was almost drowned by the surf. McKie felt an abrupt inner silence, found himself wondering: What if the Caleban gets angry and springs a weapon weve never heard of? He darted around to the windward side. ' A n oval hole had appeared above the green line, as though a plug had been sucked into the Ball. "Guess you pushed the right button," Furuneo said. McKie suppressed a feeling of irritation he knew to be mostly angeret effect. "Yeah. Give me a leg up. Okay?" Funineo, he noted, was controlling the drug reaction almost perfectly. With Furuneo's help, McKie clambered into the open port, stared inside. Dull purple light greeted him, a suggestion of movement within the dimness. "See anything?" Funineo called. "Don't know." McKie scrambled inside, dropped to a canted floor. He crouch, studied his surroundings in the purple glow. His teeth chattered from the cold. The room around him apparently occupied the entire center of the Ball -- low ceiling, flickering rainbows against the inner surface on his left, a giant soupspoon shape jutting into the room directly across from him, tiny spools, handles and knobs against the wall on his right. The sense of movement originated in the spoon bowl. Abruptly, McKie realized he was in the presence of a Caleban. "What do you see?" Furuneo called. Without taking his gaze from the spoon, McKie turn his head slightly. "There's a Caleban in here." "Shall I come in?" "No. Tell your men and sit tight." "Right." McKie returned his full attention to the bowl of the spoon. His throat felt dry. He had never before been alone in the presence of a Caleban. This was a position usually reserved for scientific investigators armed with esoteric instruments. "I'm ah -- Jorj X. McKie, Bureau of Sabotage," he said. There was a stirring at the spoon, an effect of radiated meaning immediately behind the movement. I make your acquaintance, McKie found himself recalling Masarard's poetic description in Conversation with a Caleban, Who can say how a Caleban speaks? Masarard had written. Their words come at you like the corruscating of a nine-ribbon Sojeu barber pole. The insensitive say such words radiate, I say the Caleban speaks. When words are sent, is that not speech? Send me your words, Caleban, and  will tell the universe of your wisdom. Having experienced the Caleban's words, McKie decided Masarard was a pretentious ass. TheCaleban radiated. Its communication registered in the sentient mind as sound but the ears denied they had heard anything. It was the same order of effect Calebans had on the eyes. You felt you were seeing something but the visual centers refused to confirm. "I hope my -- ah-I didn't disturb you." I possess no referrent for disturb. You bring a companion?"My companion's outside." Invite your companion, McKie hesitated, then: Furuneo. C'mon in." The planetary agent joined him, crouched at McIGe's left in the purple gloom. "Damn, that's cold out there," Furuneo said. Low temperature and much IF moisture, the Caleban agreed. McKie, having turned to watch Furuneo enter, saw a closure appear from the solid wail beside the open port. Wind, spray and surf were shut off. The temperature in the Ball began to rise. "It's going to get hot," McKie said. "What?" "Hot. Remember the briefings? Calebans like their air hot and dry." He already could feel his damp clothing begin to turn clammy against his skin. "That's right," Furuneo said. "What's going on?" "We've been invited in," McKie said. "We didn't disturb him because he has no referrent for disturb." "Where is he?" "In that spoon thing." "Yeah -- I -- uh -- yeah." You may address me as Fanny Mae, the Caleban said.  can reproduce my kind and answer the equivalents for female. "Fanny Mae," McKie said with what he knew to be stupid vacuity. How could you look at the damn' thing? Where was its face? "My companion is Alichino Furuneo, planetary agent on Cordiality for the Bureau of Sabotage." I make your acquaintance, the Caleban said. Permit an inquiry into the purpose for your visit. Furuneo scratched his right ear. "How are we hearing it?" He shook his head. "I can understand it but -- " "Never mind," McKie said. He warned himself; Gently, now. How do you question one of these things? The insubstantial Caleban presence, the twisting way his mind accepted the thing's words -- it all combined with the angeret in producing irritation. "I -- my orders," McKie said, "are to seek a Caleban employed by Mliss Abnethe." I receive your questions, the Caleban said. from side to side, wondered if it were possible to achieve an angle of vision where the something across from him would assume recognizable substance. "What are you doing?" Furuneo asked. "Trying to see it." You seek visible substance? the Caleban asked. "Uh, yes," McKie said. He was reminded of the original encounter with the Gowachin planets, the first earth-human meeting the first froglike Gowachin and the Gowachin introducing himself as worlds had the Caleban dug up the name Fanny Mae? And why?  produce mirror, the Caleban said, which reflects outward from projection along plane of being, "Are we going to see it?" Furuneo whispered. "Nobody's ever seen a Caleban." "Quiet." A half-meter oval something of green, blue and pink without apparent connection to the emptypresence of the Caleban materialized above the giant spoon. Think of is as stage upon which  present my seljdom, the Caleban said. "You see anything?" Furuneo asked. McKie's visual centers conjured a borderline sensation, a feeling of distant life whose rhythms danced unfleshed within the colorful oval like the sea roaring in an empty shell. He recalled a one-eyed friend and the difficulty of focusing the attention on that lonely eye without being drawn to the vacant patch. "That's the oddest thing I ever saw," Furuneo whispered. "You see it?" McKie described his visual sensation. "That what you see?" "I guess so," Furuneo said. Visual attempt fails,the Caleban said. Perhaps I employ insufficient contrast. Wondering if he could be mistaken, McKie thought he detected a plaintive mood in the Caleban's words. Was it possible Calebans disliked not being seen? "It's fine," McKie said. "Now may we discuss the Caleban who -- " Perhaps overlooking cannot be connected, the Caleban said, interrupting. We enter state for which there exists no remedy. 'As well argue with the night,' as your poets tell us. The sensation of an enormous sigh swept out from the Caleban ai over McKie. It was sadness, a doom-fire gloom. He wondered if he were experiencing an angeret failure. "You feel that?" Furuneo asked his companion. "Yes." McKie felt his eyes burning. He blinked. Between blinks, he glimpsed a flower element hovering within the oval -- deep red against the room's purple, with black veins woven through it. Slowly it blossomed, closed, bios-' somed. He wanted to reach out, touch it with a handful of compassion. "How beautiful," he whispered. "What js it?" Furuneo whispered. "I think we're seeing a Caleban." "I want to cry," Furuneo said. "Control yourself, " McKie cautioned. He cleared his throat. Twanging bits of emotion tunnbied through him. They were like pieces cut from the whole and loosed to seek their own patterns. The angeret effect was lost in the mixture. Slowly, the image in the oval faded. The emotional torrent subsided. Furuneo exhaled audibly. "Fanny Mae," McKie ventured. "at was -- " I am one employed by Mliss Abnethe, the Caleban said. Correct verb usage? "Bang," Furuneo said. "Just like that." McKie glanced at him, at the place where they had entered the Ball. No sign remained of the oval hole. The heat in the room was becoming unbearable. Correct verb usage? He looked at the Caleban manifestation. Something still IF shimmered above the spoon shape but it defied his visual centers to describe it. "Was it asking a question?" Furuneo asked. "Be still a minute," McKie snapped. "I want to think." Seconds ticked past. Furuneo felt perspiration running down his neck, under his collar. He could taste it in the corners of his mouth. McKie sat stared silently at the giant spoon. The' Caleban employed by Abnethe. He still felt the aftermath of the emotional melange. Some lost memory demand his attention bdt he could not bring it out for examination. Furuneo, watching McKie, began to wonder if the'Saboteur Extraordinary had been mesmerized. "You still thinking?" he whispered. McKie nodded. Then; "Fanny Mae, where is your employer?" Coordinates not permitted, the Caleban said. "Is she on this planet?" Different connectives. "I don't think you two are talking the same language," Furuneo said. "From everything I've read and heard about Calebans, that's the big problem," McKie said. "Communication difficulty." Furuneo wipedsweat from his forehead. "Have you tried calling Abnethe long distance?" "Don't be stupid," McKie said. "That's the first thing I tried." "Well?" "Either the Taprisiots are telling the truth and can't make contact or she's bought them off some way. What difference does it make? So I contact her. How does that tell me where she is? How do I invoke a monitor clause with someone who doesn't wear a monitor?" "How could she buy off the Taprisiots?" "How do I know? For that matter, how could she hire a Caleban?" Invocation of value exchange. the Caleban said. McKie chewed at his upper lip. F uruneo leaned against the wall behind him. He knew what inhibited McKie here. You walked softly with a strange sentient species. No telling what might cause affront. Even the way you phrased a question could cause trouble. BuSab should have assigned a Zeno expert to help McKie. "Abnethe offered you something of value, Fanny Mae?" McKie ventured. I offer judgment, the Caleban said. Abnethe may not be judged friendly-good-nice-kindly -- acceptable. "Is that your judgment?" McKie asked. Your species prohibits flagellation of sentients, the Caleban said. Abnethe orders me flagellated. "Why don't you just refuse?" Contract obligation. "Contract obligation?" McKie glanced at Furuneo, who shrugged. "Ask where she goes to be flagellated," Furuneo suggested. Flagellation comes to me. "By flagellation, you mean you're whipped? Is that right?" Explanation of whipping describes production of froth, the Caleban said. Not proper term. Abnethe orders me flogged. "That thing talks like a computer," Furuneo said. "Let me handle this," McKie ordered.  Computer describes mechanical device, the Caleban said. I live. "He meant no insult," McKie said. Insult not interpreted. "Does the flogging hurt you?" McKie asked. Explain hurt. "Cause you discomfort?" Reference recalled. Such sensations explained. Explanations cross no connectives. "Do you choose to be flogg?" he asked. Choice made. "Well, would you make the same choice if you had it to do over?" Confusing reference, the Caleban said. Ij over refers to repetition, I make no voice in repetition. Abnethe sends Palenki with whip and flogging occurs. Furuneo shuddered. "A Palenki!" "You knew it had to be something like that," McKie said. "What else could you get to do such a thing except a creature without much brain and lots of obedient muscle?" "But a Palenki! Couldn't we hunt for -- " "We've known, from the first what she had to be using," McKie said. "Where do you hunt for one Palenki?" He shrugged. "Why can't Calebans understand the concept of being hurt? Is it pure semantics or do they lack the proper nerve linkages?" Understand nerves, the Caleban .,-said. Any sentience must possess control linkages. But hurt -- discontinuity of meaning appears insurmountable. "Abnethe can't stand the sight of pain you said," Furuneo reminded McKie. "Yeah. How does she watch the floggings?" Abnethe views my home. When no further answer was forthcoming McKie asked, "I don't understand. What's your home have to do with it?" My home this. My home contains -- aligns? Master S'eye. Abnethe possesses connectives for which she pays. McKie wondered if ihe Caleban were playing some sarcastic game with him. But all the information about the species made no reference to sarcasm. Word confusions, yes -- butno apparent insults or subterfuges. "Abnefhe sounds like a mixedup bitch," McKie muttered. Physically unmixed, the Caleban said. Isolated in her own connectives now but unified and presentable by your standards -- so say judgments made in my presence. If, however, you refer to Abnethe psyche, mixed-up conveys accurate description. What I see of Abnethe psyche most intertwined. Convolutions of odd color displace my vision-sense in extraordinary fashion. IF McKie gulped. "You sec her psyche?" I see all psyche, "So much for the theory that Calebans cannot see," Furuneo said. "A#I is illuon, eh?" "How is this possible?" McKie asked.  occupy space between physical and mental, the Caleban said. Thus your Jellow sentients explain in your terminology, "Gibberish," McKie said. You achieve discontinuity of meaning, "Why did you accept Abnethe's offer of employment?" No common rejerrent for explanation, "You achieve discontinuity of meaning," Furuneo said. So I surmise, "I must fjnd Abnethc," McKie said. I give warning, the Caleban said. "Watch it," Furuneo whispered. "I sense rage that's not connected with the angeret,'" McKie waved him to silence. "What warning, Fanny Mae?" Potentials in your situation, the Caleban said.  allow my -- person? Yes, my person, I allow my person to entrap itself in association which fellow sentients may interpret as nonfriendly, wondered how close they were to anything that could yalidly be called communication. He wanted to come right out and inquire about the Caleban disappearances, the deaths and insanity. but feared possible consequences. "Nonfriendly?" Understand, the Caleban said, life which flow in all carries subternal connectives. Each entity remains linked until final discontinuity removes from -- network? Yes, suitable term: network. Unaware of tanglements, I convey linkages of other entities into association with Abnethe, Should personal discontinuity overtake self -- all entities entangled share it, "Discontinuity?" McKie asked, not sure he followed this but afraid he did. Tanglements come from contact between sentients not originating in same linearities of awareness, the Caleban said, ignoring McIGe's question. "I'm not sure what you mean by discontinuity," Me Kie pressed. In context ultimate discontinuity presumed opposite of pleasure -- your term, "You're getting nowhere," Furuneo said. His head ached from trying to equate the radiant impulses of communication from the Caleban with speech. "Sounds like a semantic identity situation," McKie said. "Black and white statements -- but we're trying to find an interpretation in between." All between, the Caleban said. "Presumed opposite of pleasure?" "Our term," Furuneo reminded him. "Tell me, Fanny Mae," McKie said, "do we other sentients refer to this ultimate discontinuity as death?" Presumed (proximate term, the Caleban said. Abnegation oj mutual awareness, ultimate discontinuity, death -- all appear similar descriptives. "If you die many others are going to die -- is that it?" All users oJ S' eye. All in tanglement. M;cKie was shocked. "All?" All such in your -- wave? Difficult concept. Calebans possess label for this concept -- plane? Planguinity of beings? Surmise proper term not shared. Problem concealed in visual exclusion which clouds mutual association. Furuneo touched McKie's arm. '"Is she saying that if she dies everyone who's used a S'eye jumpdoor goes with her?" '"Sounds like it." "I don't believe it!" "The evidence would seem to indicate we have to believe her." "But -- " "I wonder if she's in any danger of going soon." "If you grant the premise, that's a good question." discontinuity, Fanny Mae?" McKie asked. All precedes ultimate discontinuity. "Yeah, but are you headed toward this ultimate discontinuity?" Without choice, all head for ultimate discontinuity. "McKie mopped his forehead.The temperature inside the Bail had been going up rather steadily. I fulfill demands of honor, the Caleban said. Acquaint you with prospect. Sentients of your -- planguinity appear unable, lacking means of withdrawal from influence of my association with Abnethe. Communication understood? "McKie," Furuneo said, "have you any idea how many sentients have used a jumpdoor?" "Damn near everyone." Communication understood?-thc Caleban repeated. "I don't know," McKie groaned. Difficult sharing of concepts, the Caleban said. "I still don't believe it," Furuneo said. "You'd better believe it," McKie said. "It squares with what some of the other Calebans said, near as we can reconstruct it after the messes they've left." Understand withdrawal of companions creates disruption, the Caleban said. Disruption equates with mess? "That's about it," McKie said. "Tell me, Fanny Mae, is there immediate danger of your -- ultimate discontinuity?" Explain imminent. "Soon," McKie snapped. "Short time." Time concept difficult, the Caleban said. You inquire of personal ability to surmount flagellation? "That's good enough," McKie said. "How many more flagellations can you survive?" Explain survive. "How many flagellations until you experience ultimate discontiIF nuity? Can you possibly know?" Perhaps ten flagellations. Perhaps lesser number. Perhaps more, "And your death will kill all of us?" McKie asked, hoping he had misunderstood. Lesser number than all, the Caleban said. "You just think you're understanding her," Furuneo said. "I'm afraid I understand her." Fellow Calebans, the Caleban said, recognizing entrapment, achieve withdrawing. Thus they avoid discontinuity, "How many Calebans remain in our -- plane?" Single entity of selfness, the Caleban said. "Just the "one," McKie muttered. "That's a damn thin thread." "I don't see how the death of one Caleban can cause all that havoc," Furuneo said. Explain by comparison. Scientist of your planguinity explains reaction of stellar selfdom. Stellar mass enters expanding condition. In this condition stellar mass engulfs and reduces all substances to other energy patterns. All substances encountered by stellar expansion change. Thus ultimate discontinuity of personal selfdom reaches hlong linkages of Seye connectives, repatterns all entities encountered, "Stellar selfdom," Furuneo said, shaking his head. Incorrect term? the Caleban asked. Energy selfdom, perhaps', S HE'S saying," McKie said, "that use of S'eye doors has tangled us with her life some way. Her death will reach out like a stellar explosion along all these tangled networks and kill us." "That's what you think she's saying," Furuneo objected. "That's what I have to believe she's saying," McKie said. "Our communication may be tenuous but I think she's sincere. Can't you still feel the emotions radiating from her?" "Two spies can be said to share emotions only in the broadest way," Furuneo said. "She doesn't even understand what we mean by pain." Scientist of your planguinity, the Caleban said, explains emotional base for communication. Lacking emotional commonality, sameness of labels uncertain. Emotion concept not certain for Calebans, Communication difficulty assumed, McKie nodded. He could see a further complication -- the question of whether the Caleban' s words were spoken or radiated in some unthinkable manner completed their confusion. "I believe you're right in one thing," Furuneo said. "Yes?" "We have to assume we understand her." McKie swallowed in a dry throat. "Fanny Mae," he said, "have you explained this ultimate discontinuity prospect to Mliss Abnethe?" Problem explained, the Caleban said. Fellow Calebans attempt remedy of error, Abnethe fails of comprehension or disregards consequences, Connectives difficult, '"Connectives difficult," McKie muttered. All connectives of single Seye, the Caleban said. Master Seye of self creates mutual problem, "Don't tell me you understand that," Furuneo objected. " Abnethe employs Master S'eye of self," the Caleban said. "Contract agreement gives Abnethe right of use. One Master S'eye of self. Abnethe uses." "So she opens a junipdoor and sends her Palenki through it," Furuneo said. "Why don't we just wait here and grab her?" "She could close the door before we even got near her," McKie growled. "No, there's more to what this Caleban's saying. I think she's telling us there's only one Master S'eye -- control system, perhaps, for all the jumpdoors -- and Fanny Mae here is in control of it or the channel operation or -- " "Or something." Abnethe control S eye by right of purchase, the Caleban said. "See what I ipean?" McKie said. "Can you override her control, Fanny Mae?" Terms of employment require not interfere, "But can't you still use your own S'eye doors?" McKie pressed. All use, the Caleban said. "This is insane!" Furuneo snapped. Insanity defines as lack of orderly thought progression in mutual acceptance of logical terms, the Caleban said. Insanity frequent judgment of one species upon other species. Proper interpretation otherwise, "I think I just had my wrist slapped," Furuneo said. "Look," McKie said, "the other deaths and insanity around Caleban disappearances substantiate our interpretation. We're dealing with something explosive and dangerous." "So we find Abnethe and stop her." "You make that sound so simple," McKie said. "Here are your orders. Get out of here and alert the Bureau. The Caleban's communication won't show on your recorder but you'll have it all down in your memory. Tell them to scan you for it." "Right. You're staying?" "Yes." "What'll I say you're doing?" "I want to look at Abnethe's companions and her surroundings." Furuneo cleared his throat. "Have you thought of, you know -- just bang?" He made the motion of firing a raygen. "There's a limit on what can go through a jumpdoor and how fast," McKie chided. "You know that." "Maybe this jumpdoor's different." "I doubt it." "After I've reported in, what then?" "Sit tight outside there until I call you -- unless they give you a message for me. Oh, and start a general search on Cordiality -- just in case," IF "Of course." Furuneo hesitated. "One thing -- whom do I contact at the Bureau? Bildoon?" McKie glanced up. Why should Furuneo question whom to call? What was he trying to say? It dawned on McKie then that Furuneo had hit on a logical concern. BuSab director Napoleon Bildoon was a Pan Spechi, ntarchal sentient, human only in appearance. Since McKie, a human, held nominal charge in this case, that might appear to confine control of it, excluding other members of the ConSentiency. Inter-species political infighting could take odd turns in a time of stress. Best to involve a broad directorate here. "Thanks," McKie said. I wasn't thinking much beyond the immediate problem." "This is the immediate problem." "I understand. All right, I was tapped for this chore by our Director of Discretion." "Gitchel Siker?" "Yes." "That's one Laclac and Bildoon, a PanSpechi. Who else?" "Get somebody out of the legal department." "Bound to be a human.". "The minute you stretch it that far -- they'll all get the message," McKie said. "They'll bring in the others before making any crucial decision." Furuneo nodded. "One other thing." "What?" "How do I get out of here?" "Good question." McKie faced the giant spoon. "Fanny Mae, how does my companion leave here?" "He wishes to journey where?" "To his home." Connectives apparent,, the Caleban said. ears popped to a change in pressure. There was a sound like the pulling of a cork from a bottle. He whirled. Furuneo was gone. "You -- sent him home?" McKie asked. Correct. Desired destination visible. Sent swiftness. Prevent temperature drop below proper level. McKie, feeling perspiration roll down his cheeks, said, "I wish I knew how you did that? Can you actually see our thoughts?" See only strong connectives. The Caleban's remark about temperature came back to him. What was a proper temperature ' level? Damn! The air was boiling in here. His skin itched with perspiration. His throat was, dry. Proper temperature level? "What's the opposite of proper?" False. McKie gave up. How could false be the opposite of proper? He passed a hand across his forehead, gathering perspiration which he tried to wipe off on his jacket. The shiminering oval above the giant spoon abruptly wavered outward, contracted, flowed up, down, left. McKie received a definite imStart # with pression of distress. The ovalvanished but his eyes still tracked the Caleban's unpresence. "Is something wrong?" M cKie masked. The round vortal tube of a S'eye jumpdoor opened behind the Caleban. Beyond the opening stood a woman, a figure dwarfed as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope. McKie recognized her from all the newsvisos and from the holoscans he'd been fed as background briefing for this assignment. He was confronting Mliss Abnethe in a light somewhat reddened by its slow passage through the jumpdoor. It was ob#ous that the beautybarbers of Steadyon had been about their expensive work on her person. He made a mental note to have that checked. Her figure presented the youthful curves of a pleasurefem. The face beneath fairyblue hair was focused around a r petal mouth. Large summery green eyes and a sharply cleaving nose conveyed odd contrast -- dignity versus hoyden. She was a flawed queen -- age mingled with youth. She must be at least eighty standard years but the beautybarbers had achieved this startling combination -- available pleasurefem and remote, hungry power. ' The expensive body wore a long gown of gray rainpearls which matched her, movement for movement, like a glittering skin. She moveid nearer the vortal 'tube. As she approached, the edges of the tube blocked off first her feet, then her legs, thighs, waist. McKie felt his knees age a thousand years in that brief passage. He remained crouched near the place where he had entered the Beachball. "Ah, Fanny Mae," Mliss Abnethe said. "You have a guest." Jumpdoor interference caused her voice to sound faintly hoarse. "I am Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary." Was that a contraction in the pupils of her eyes? McKie wondered. She stopped with only her head and shoulders visible in the tube's circle. "And I am Mliss Abenthe, privatecitizen." Private citizen? McKie thought that this bitch controlled the productive capacity of at least five hundred worlds. He rose slowly, to his feet. "The Bureau of Sabotage has official business with you," he said, putting her on notice to satisfy the legalities. "I am a private citizen." The words were prideful, vain, marred by petulance. McKie took heart at the revealed weakness. It was a particular kind of flaw that often went with wealth and power. "Fanny Mae, am I your guest?" ' he asked. Indeed, the Caleban said.  open my door to you. "Am I your employer, Fanny Mae?" Abnethe demanded. Indeed, you employ me. A breathless, crouching look came over her face. Her eyes went to slits. "Very well. Then prepare to fulIF fill at once the obligations of -- " "One moment." McKie felt desperate. Why was she moving so fast? What was that faint whine in her voice? "Guests do not interfere." "BuSab makes its own decisions about interference." "Your jurisdiction has limits." McKie heard the beginnings of many actions in that statement -- hired operatives, gigantic sums spent as bribes, doctored agreements, treaties, stories planted with the visos on how this good and proud lady had been mistreated by her government, a wide enlistment of personal concern to justify -- what? Violence against his person? He thought not. More likely to discredit him, to saddle him with onerous misdeeds. Thought of all that power made McKie wonder suddenly why he made himself vulnerable to it. Why had he chosen BuSab? Because I'm difficult to please, he told himself. I'm a Saboteur by choice. There was no going back on that choice now. BuSab appeared to walk down the middle of everywhere and always wound up on the high road. "Agreed we have limits," McKie growled, "but I doubt you'll ever see them. Now, what's going on here?" "You're not a police agent." "Perhaps I should summon police." "On what grounds?" She smiled. She had him there and knew it. Her legal staff had explained to he the open-association clause in the ConSentient Articles of Federation: When members of different species agree formally to an association from ' which they derive mutual benefits the contracting parties shall be the sole judges of said benefits, provided their agreement breaks no law, covenant or legative article binding upon said contracting parties; provided further that stud formal agreement was achieved by volun- tary means and involves no breach of the public peace. "Your actions will bring about the death of this Caleban," McKie said. He did not hold out much hope for this argument but it bought a bit more time.   "You'll have to establish that the Caleban concept of discontinuity interprets precisely as death," Abnethe said. "You can't do that because it's not true. Wiy do you interfere? This is just" harmless play between consenting ad -- " More than play, the Caleban said. "Fanny Mae," Abnethe ordered. "You are not to interrupt! Remember our agreement." of the Caleban's unpresence, tried to interpret the spectrum flare that rejected his senses. Discern conflict between ideals and structure of government, the Caleban said. "Precisely," Abnethe said. "I'm assured that Calebans cannot suffer pain, that they don't even have a term for it. If it's my pleasure to stage an apparent flogging and observe in detail the reactions of -- " "Are you sure she suffers no pain?" McKie'aed. Again a gloating smile came over Abnethe's face. Tve never seen her suffer pain. Have you?" "Have you seen her do anything?" "I've seen her come and go." "Do you suffer pain, Fanny Mae?" McKie asked. No referrents Jor this concept, "Are these floggings going to bring about your ultimate discontinuity?" McKie asked. Explain bring tAoiut. "Is there any connection between the floggings and your ultimate discontinuity?"  Total universe connectives include all events.  "I pay well for my me," Abnethe said. "Stop interfering, McKie." "How are you paying?" "None of your business." "I make it my business," McKie said. "Fanny Mae?" "Don't answer him," Abnethe snapped. "I can still summon police and the officers of a Discretionary Court," McKie said. "By all meads," Abnethe gloated. "You are, of course, ready to answer a suit charging interfer-. ence with in open agreeitoent between consenting members of different species?" "I can still get an injunction," McKie said, "at's your present address?" "I decline to answer on advice of counsel." McKie glared at her. She had him. He could not charge her with flight to prevent prosecution unless he had provra a crime. To prove a crime he must get a court to act and serve her with the proper papers in the presence of bonded witnesses, bring her into a court and allow her to face her accusers. And her attorneys would tie him in knots every step of the way. #fef judgment, the Caleban said. Nothing in Abnethe contract prohibits revelation oj payment. Employer provides educators. "Educators?" ' "Very well," Abnethe conceded. "I provide Fanny Mae with Jhe finest instructors and teaching aids our civilization can supply. She's been soaking up our culture. Anything she requested she got. And it wasn't cheap." "And she still doe't understand pain?" Hope to acquire proper referents. "Will you have time to acquire those referents?" Time difficult concept, the Caleban said. Statement of instructor, to wit: 'Relevancy of time to learning varies with species.' Time possesses length, unknown quality termed duration, subjective and objective dimension. Confusing. "Let's make this official," McKie said. "Abnethe, are you ban?" "Discontinuity and death are not the same," Abnethe objected. "Are they, Fanny Mae?" Wide disparity of equivalents exist between separate waves of being. IF "I ask you formally, Mliss Abnethe," McKic said, "'if this Calcban calling herself Fanny Mae has told you the consequences of an event she describes as ultimate discontinuity?" "You just heard her say there are no equivalents." "You've not answered my question." "You're quibbling." "Fanny Mae," McKie said, "have you described for Mliss Abnethe, the consequents of -- " Bound by contract connectives, the Caleban said. "You see." Abnethe pounced. "She's bound by our open agreement and you're interfering." Abnethe gestured to someone not visible in the jumpdoor's vortal tube. T he opening suddenly doubled its diameter. Abnethe stepped aside, leaving half her head and one eye visible to McKie. A crowd of watching sentients could be discerned now in the background. Into Abnethe' s place darted the turtle form of a giant Palenki. Its hundreds of tiny feet flickered beneath its bulk. The single arm growing from the top if its ringeyed head trailed a long whip in a double-thumbed hand. The arm thrust through the tube, jerked the whip against jumpdoor resistance, lashed the whip forward. The whip cracked above the spoon bowl. A crystalline spray of green shower the unseeable region of the Caleban. It glittered for a moment like a fluorescent explosion of fireworks, then dissolved. An ecstatic moan came through the vortal tube. McKie fought an intense outpouring sensation .of distress, leap forward. Instantly, the S'eye jumpdoor closed, dumping a severed Palenki arm and whip onto the floor of the room. The arm writhed and turned, slowed -- slowed. It fell still. "Fanny Mae?" McKie said. Yes? "Did that whip hit you?" Explain whip hit, "Encounter your substance!" Approximately, McKie moved close to the spoon bowl. He still sensed distress but knew it could be a side effect of angeret and the incident he'd just witnessed. "Describe the flogging sensation," he said. You possess no proper referents, "Try me." I inhaled substance of whip, exhaled my own substance, "You breathed it?" Aproximately.  "Well -- describe your physical reactions." No common physical referents, "Any reaction, dammit!" Whip incompatible with my glssrrk,..."Your what?" No common referents, "What was that green spray when it hit you?" Explain greenspray. By referring to wavelengths and describing airborne water droplets -- with a side excursion into wave and wind action -- McKie thought he conveyed an approximate idea of green spray. You observe this phenomenon? "I saw it, yes." Extraordinary! McKie hesitated, an odd thought fflling his mind. Could he be as insubstantial to the Caleban as the Cxrleban appeared to him? He asked. All vreatures possess substance relative to their own quantum existence, the Caleban said. "But do you se our substance when you look at us?" Basic difficulty. Your species repeats this question. Possess no certain answer, "Try to explain. Start by telling me about the green spray." Greenspray unknown phenomenon, "But what could it be?" Perhaps interplanar phenomenon, reaction to exhalation of my substance, "Is there a limit to how much of your substance you can exhale?" Quantum relationship defies limitations of your plane. Movement exists between planar origins, Movement changes referential relatives. No constant referents? McKie wondered. But there had to be. He explored this aspect with the Caleban,. questions and answers obviously making less and less sense to both of them. "But there must be some constant." Connectives possess aspect of this constant you seek , " "What are connectives?" No -- "Referents!" McKie stormed. "Then why use the term?" Term approximates. Tangential occlusion another term expressing something similar, "Tangential occlusion," McKie muttered. Then: "Tangential occlusion?" Fellow Caleban offers this term after discussion of problem with Laclac sentient possessing rare insight, "One of you talked this over with a Laclac, eh? Who wa's this Laclac?" Identity not conveyed but occupation known and understandable, ''Oh? What was his occupation?" Dentist, McKie exhaled a long, held breath, shook his head with bewilderment. "You understand -- dentist?" All species requipng ingestion of energy sources must reduce such sources to convenient form, "You mean they bite?" Explain bite, "I thought you understood dentist." Dentist -- one who maintains system by which sentients shape energy for ingestion, "Tangential occlusion," McKie muttered. "Explain what you understand by occlusion," Proper matching of related parts in shaping system, "We're getting nowhere," McKie growled. Every creature somewhere, the Caleban said. "But where? Where are you, IF for example? Just tell me that." Planar relationships unexplainable. "Let's try something else," McKie said. "I've heard you can read our writing." Reducing what you term writing to compatible connectives suggests time-constant communication, the Caleban said. Not really certain, however, of time-constant or required connectives. "Well -- let's go at the verb 'to see,' " McKie said. "Tell me what you understand by the action of seeing." To see -- receive sensory awareness of external energy. McKie buried his face in his hands. He felt dispirited, brain numbed by the Caleban's . radiant bombardment. What would be the sensory organs? He knew such a question would only send them off on another empty label chase. Presently he dropped his hands, said, "Is there somewhere yOu could take this -- your home -- where Mliss Abnethe couldn't reach you." Cannot. "Why?" Agreement prohibits. "Break the damned agreement!" Dishonorable action brings ultimate discontinuity for all sentients on your -- suggest wave as better term. Wave. Much closer  term than plane. Please substitute concept of wave wherever plane used in our discussion. This thing was impossible, McKie thought. He lifted his arms in a gesture of frustration and, in the movement, felt his bodj? jerk as a longdistance call ignited his pineal gland. The message began to roll and he knew his body had gone into the sniggertrance, mumbling and chuckling, trembling occasionally. Section #, Title #, (United States Code), #. Date of filing October #, #. #. Title of Publication: Worlds of If. #. Frequency of-issue monthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: # Camden Avenue S.W., Canton, Ohio #. #. Location of headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editda and managing editor. Publisher: Arnold E, Abramson, # East #th Street, New York, N,Y. #. Editor: Ejler Jakobsaon, # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #. hfonaging Editor Judy Benjamin, # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Owner: Universal Publishing  Distributing Corp.', # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #; Arnold . Abramson, # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #; bert J. Abramson, # East #th Stjreet, New York, N.Y. #; Peter J. Abramson, # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #; Allen  Co., # Broad Street, New York, N.Y. #; S.D. Lunt it Co., # Marine Trust Bldg., BuAalo, N.Y.; Cloony it Co. co Fididary Trust Co. of NY, I Wall Street, New York, N.Y.; Carl M. Lb, Rhodes it Co., # Wall Street, New York, N.Y. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securites: None. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months #. Singleissue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid circulation. #. Sales throu dealers and carriers, street voidors and counter salgs. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #; Single issue nearest to filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions: Average no copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #; Sinsfe issue nearest to filing date #. D. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means: Average no. copies eadi issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. E. Total distribution (sum of C and D): Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #: Single issue nearest to filing date, #; F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printinr Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Sinde issue nearest to filing date. #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown in A); Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #. Single issue nearest to filing date #. I certi that the statements made by me are correct and complete. Laurence C. Murphy, Circulation Director Ill V#T caller said. McKie imagined the Bureau's Director of Discretion a suave little Laclac sitting in that nicely tailored environment back at Central. Siker would be relaxed, fighting tendril withdrawn, his face slit open, an elite chairdog ministering to his flesh, trained minions a buttonpush away. "About 'time you called," McKie said. "About time I called?" "Well, you certainly must've gotten Fuhineo's message quite a -- " "What message?" McKie felt as though his mind had touched a grinding wheel, shooting off ideas like sparks. No message from Furuneo? "Furuneo," McKie said, "left here long enough ago to -- " "I'm calling," Siker interrupted, "because there's been no sign of either of you for too damn long and Furuneo's enforcers are worried. Where was Furuneo supposed to go and how?" #  McKie felt an idea blossoming in his mind. "Where was Furuneo born?" "Born? On Landy-B. Why?" "I think we'll And him there. The Caleban used its S'eye system to send him home. If he hasn't called yet, better send for him. He was supposed to -- " "Landy-B only has three Taprisiots and one jumpdoor. It's a retreat ' planet, full of recluses and -- " "That would explain the delay. Meanwhile, here's the sitvation -- " McKie began detailing the problem. "Do you believe this, this ultimate discontinuity thing?" Siker interrupted. "We have to believe it. The evidence all says it's true." "Well, maybe -- but -- "Can we afford a maybe, Siker?" "We'd better call in the police." "I think she wants us to do just that." "Wants us? Why?" "Who would have to sign a complaint?" Silence. "Are you getting the picture?" McKie press. "It's on your head, "McKie." "It always is. But if we're right -- that doesn't make any difference, does it?" "I'm going to suggest," Siker said, "that we contact the top level in the Central Police Bureau -- for consultation only. Agreed?" "Discuss that with Bildoon. Meanwhile, here's what I want done. Assemble a Bureau ConSentient Council, draft another max-alert message. Keep the emphasis on Calelns but brin in the Palenkis and start looking into Abnethe's -- " "We can't do that and you know it."  "We have to do it." "When you took this assignment, you received a full explanation of why we -- " "Utmost discretion doesn't mean hands off," McKie said. "If that's the way you're thinking then you've missed the importance of -- " "McKie, I can't believe -- " "Sign off, Siker," McKie said. "I'm going over your head to Bildoon." Silence. "Break this contact," McKie ordered. "That won't be necessary." "Won't it?" "I'll put the agents onto Abnethe at once. I see your point. If we assume that -- " "We assume," McKie said. "The orders will be issu in your name, of course," Siker said. "Keep your skirts clean anyway you like," McKie said. "Now, have our people start probing into the Beautybarbers of Steady on. She's been there and recently. Also, I'll be sending along a whip she -- " "A whip?" "I just witnessed one of the flagellations. Abnethe cut the connection while her Palenki still had an arm through the S'eye door. Cut the arm right off. The Palenki will grow another arm and she can hire more Palenkis -- but the whip and arm could ve us a lead. Palenkis don't practice geiie tagging, I know, but it's the best we have at the moment." "I understand. What did you see during the -- incident?" "I'm getting to that." "Hadn't you better come in and put ywr report directly onto a transcorder?" "I'll depend on you for that. Don't think I should show at Central for a bit." "Right. See what you mean. She'll try to tie you up with a countersuit." R I miss my guess. Now, here's what I saw. When she opened the door she practically filM it -- but I could see what appeared to be a window in the background. It it was a window, it opened onto a cloudy sky. That means daylight." "Cloudy?" "Yes. Why?" "It's been cloudy here all morning. "You don't think she's -- no, she wouldn't." "Probably not -- but we'll have Central scoured just to be sure. With her money, no telling whom . she has bought." "Yeah -- well, the Palenki. Its shell carried an odd design -- triangles, diamonds in red and orange and a rope or snake of yellow wound all the way around and through it." "Phylum identification." IF "Yes -- but what Palenki Family?" "Well, we'll check it. What else?" "There was a mob of sentients behind her during the actual flogging. I saw Preylings -- couldn't miss those wire tentacles. There were some Chithers, a few Soborips, some Wreaves -- " "Sounds like her usual patch of sycophants. Recognize any?" "I'll try to ID's later but I couldn't attach any names to this mob. But there was one, a Pan Spechi and he was stagfrozen or I miss my guess." "You sure?" A ll I know IS what I saw and I saw the scars on his forehead -- ego surgery, sure as I'm sniggermg. "That's against every Pan Spechi legal, moral and ethical -- " "The scars were purple," McKie saidl "That checks, doesn't it?" "Right out in the open, no makeup or anything to cover the scars?" "Nothing. If I'm right it means he's the only Pan Spechi with her. Another would kill him op sight." "Where could she be where there'd be only one Pan Spechi?" "Beats me. Oh, and there were some humans, too -- green uniforms." "Abnethe houseguards." "That's the way I made it." "Quite a mob to be hiding away." "If anyone can afford it, she can." "One more thing," McKie said. "I smelled yeast." "Yeast?" "No doubt about it. There's always a pressure differential through a jumpdoor. It was blowing our way. Yeast." "That's quite a bag of observations." "Did you think I was getting careless?" , "No more than usual, Are you absolutely sure about that Pan Spechi?" "I saw the eyes." "Sunken, the facets smoothing over?" "That's the way it looked to me "If we can get a Pan Spechi to make an official observation of this fellow it would give us a lever. Harboring a criminal, you know." "Apparently you haven't much experience .with Pan Spechi," McKie said. "How did you get to be Director of Discretion?" "All right, McKie, let's not -- " "You know damn' well a Pan Spechi would blow up if he saw this fellow. Our observer would try to dive through the jumpdoor and -- " "So?" . "Abnethe would close it on him. She'd have half of our observer and we'd have the other half." "But that would be murder." "An unfortunate accident, no more." "That woman does swing a lot of weight, I admit, but -- " "And she'll have our hides if she can make it stick that she's a private citizen and we're trying to sabotage her." "Messy," Siker agreed. "I hope you made no official sounds in her Erection." "Ahh, but I did." "You what?" "I put her on official notice." "McKie, you were told to handle this with dis -- " "Look, we want her to start official action. Check with legal. She can try a countersuit against me personally. But if she moves against the Bureau we can ask for seratori hearing, a personal confrontation. Her legal staff wilt a# vise her of that. No, she'll try to get at -- " "She may not go into court against the Bureau," Siker said, "but she's certain to set her dogs on us. And it couldn't come at a worse time. Bildoon has just about used up his ego-time. He'll be going into the creche any time now. You know what that nieans." "The Bureau Director's chair up for grabs," McKie said. "I've been expecting it." "Yes, but matters will be in a real uproar around here." "You're eligible for the seat, Siker." "So are you, McKie." "Ipass." "That'll be the day. What I'm worried about is Bildoon. He'll blow when he hears about this ego-frozen Pan Spechi. That might be all it takes to -- " "He'll handle it," McKie said, putting more confidepce into the statement than he felt. "And you could be wrong. I hope you know I'm not passing." "We all know you want the job," McKie said. "I can imagine the gossip." "Is it worth it?" "I'll let you know." "I'm sure you will." "One thing," Siker said. "How are you going to keep Abnethe off your back?" "I'm going to become a school teacher," McKie said. "I don't think I want that explained," Siker said. He broke the contact. seated in the purple gloom of the Beachball. Sweat bathed his body. The place was an oven. He wondered u his fat actually were being reduced by the heat. Water loss, certainly. The instant he thought of water he sensed dryness in his throat. "You still there," he rasped. Silence. "Fanny Mae?" I remain in my home, the Caleban said. The sensation that he heard the words without hearing grated on McKie, fed on the angeret in his system, stirred a latent rage. with us in trying to stop these floggings?" Mcfoe asked. As my contract permits. "All right. Then you insist to Abnethe that you want me as your teacher." You perform functions of teacher? "Have you learned anything from me?" McKie asked. IF All mingled connectives instruct. "Connectives," McKie muttered. "I must be getting old." Explain old. "Never mind. We should have discussed your contract first thing. Maybe there's a way to break it. Under what laws was it executed?" Explain laws. "Vat honorable system of enforcement?" McKie blared. Under natural honor of sentient connectives. "Abnethe doesn't know what honor means." I understand honor. McKie sighed. "Were there witnesses, signatures, that sort of thing?" AH my fellow Calebans witness connectives. Signatures not understood. Explain. McKie decided not to explore the concept of signatures. Instead he asked, "Under what circumstances could you refuse to honor your contract with Abnethe?" After a prolonged pause, the. Caleban said. Changing circumstances convey varQie relationships. Should Abnethe fail in her connectives or attempt redefinition of essences, this could produce linearities open for my disentanglement. "Sure," McKie said. "That figures." He shook his head, studied the empty air above the giant spoon. Calebans. You couldn't see them, couldn't hear them, couldn't understand them. Is the use of your S'eye system available to me?" McKie ask. You function as my teacher. "Is that a yes?" A ffirmative answer. "Affirmative answer," McKie echoed. "Fine. Can you also transport objects for me, sending them where I direct?" While connectives remain apparent. "I hope'that means what I think it does," McKie said. "Are you aware of the Palenki arm and whip over there on your floor?" Aware. "I want them sent to a particular office at Central. Can you do that?" Think of office. McKie oyed... Connectives available, the Caleban said. You desire sending to place of examination. "That's right!" Send now? "At once." Once, yes. Multiple sending remains outside our capabilities. "Huh?" Objects going. whip snapped out of his view accompanied by a sharp crack of exploding air. "Do the Taprisiots work in any way similar to what you do in transporting things?" Message transportation minor energy level, the Caleban said. Beautybarbers even more minor. "I guess so," McKie said. "Well, never mind. There's the little matter of my friend, Alicheno Funineo, though. Yousent him home, I believe?" Correct. "You sent him to the wrong home." Credtures possess only one home, "We sentients have more than one tome." But  view connectives! McKie felt the wash of radiant objection "from the Caleban, steadied himself. "No doubt," he said. "But he has another home right here on Cordiality." Astonishment fills me. "Probably. The question remains, can you correct this situation?" Explain situation. "Can you send him to his home here on Cordiality?" Pause, then: That place not his home. "Butan you send him there?" You wish this? "I wish it." Ypur friend converses through a Taprisiot. "Ah," McKie said. "Can you listen in on his conversation?" Message content not available. Connectives visible.  possess awareness that your friend exchanges communication with sentient of other species. "What species?" One you label Pan Spechi. "What'd happen if you sent Furuneo to -- his home here on Cordiality right now?" Shattering of connectives. But message exchange concludes in this linearity.  send him. There. "You sent him?" By connectives you convey. "He's here on Cordiality right now?" He occupies place not hishome. "I hope we're together on that." Your friend, the Caleban said, desires presence with you. "He wants to come here?" Correct. "Well why not? All right, bring him." What purpose arises from friend's presence in my home? "I want him to stay with you and watch for Abnethe while I attend to other business." McKie? "Yes." You possess awareness that presence of yourself or other of your kind prolongs impingernent of myself upon your wave? "That's fine." Your presence foreshortens flogging. "I suspected as much." Suspected? "I understand!" Understanding probable. Connectives indicative. "I can't tell you how happy that makes me," McKie said. You wish friend brought? "What's Furuneo doing?" Furuneo exchanges communication with -- assistant. "I can imagine." McKie shook his head from side to side. He could sense the morass of misunderstanding around every attemptat communication here. No way to steer clear of it. No way at all. At the very moment when IF they thought th#y had achieved closest communication -- right then they could be widest of the mark. "When Furuneo concludes his conversation, bring him," McKie said. He hunched back against the wall. The heat was almost unbearable. Why did Calebans require such heat? Maybe, the heat represented something Ise to a Calaban -- a visible wave form, perhaps serving sonie function other sentients could not begin to understand? told McKie Fumneo had arrived. McKie turned, saw the planetary agent sprawled beside him and just beginning to sit up. "For the love of reason," Furuneo shouted, "what are you doing to me?" "I needed the fresh air," McKie said. Furuneo peered at him. "What?" "Glad to see you," McKie said. "Yeah?" Furuneo brought himself to a squatting position beside McKie. "You have any idea what's just happened to me?" "You've been to Landy-B," McKie said. "How did you know? Was that your doing?" "Slight misunderstanding," Mckie said. "Landy-B's your home." "It is not." "I'll leave you to argue that with Fanny Mae," Mcfee said. "Have you started the search on Cordiality?" "I barely got it going before you -- " ' "Yes, but you've started it?" "I've started it." "Good. Fanny Mae will keep you posted on various things and bring your people here for reports and such as you need them. Won't you, Fanny Mae?" Contract permits. "Good girl." "I'd almost forgotten how hot it was in here," Furuneo said, mopping his forehead. "So I can summon people. What else?" "You watch for Abnethe." "And?" "The instant she and one of her Palenki floggers make an appearance, you get a holoscan record of everything that happens. You do have your toolkit?" "Of course." "Fine. While you're scanning, get your instruments as close to the jumpdoor as you can." "She'll probably close the door as soon as she sees what I'm domg. "Don't count on it. Oh, one thing." "Yes?" "You're my teaching assistant." "Your what?" McKie explained about the Caleban's agreement. "So she can't get rid of us without violating the terms of her contract with Fanny Mae," Furuneo said. "Cute." He pursed his lips. "That all?" "No. I want you and Fanny Mae to discuss connectives." "Convectives?" "Connectives. I want you to try devils a Caleban means by connectives." "Connectives," Furuneo said. "Is there any way to turn down the furnace in here?" "You might take that as another subject -- try to discover the reason for all this heat." "If I don't melt first. Where'll . you be?" "Hunting -- provided Fanny Mae and I can agree on the con.nectives." "You're not making sense." "Right. But I'll try to make tracks -- if Fanny Mae'll send me where the game is." Furuneo said, "You could walk into a trap." "Maybe. Fanny Mae, have you been listening?" Explain listening. "Never mind!" But mind possesses ever! McKie closed his eyes, swallowed. Then: "Fanny Mae, are you aware of the information exchange just concluded between my friend and myself here?" Explain conclu -- "Are you aware?" McKie bellowed. Amplification contributes little to communication, the Caleban said.  possess desired awareness -- presumably. "Presumably," McKie muttered. Then: "Can you send me to a place near Abnethe where she will not be aware of me but where I can be aware of her?" Negative. "Why not?" Specific injunction of contract. "Oh." McKie bent his head in thought. "Well, can you send me to a place where I might become aware of Abnethe through my own efforts?" Possibility. Permit examination of connectives.  McKie waited. The heat was a tangible thing inside the Beachball, a solid intrusion on his senses. He saw it already was beginning to wilt Furuneo. "I saw my mother," Furuneo said, noting McKie's attention. "That's great," McKie said. "She was swimming with friends when the Caleban dumped me right in the pool with them. The water was wonderful." "They were surprised, no doubt." "They thought it was a great joke. I wish I knew how that S'eye system works." The energy requirement gives me the chills." "I could use a chill right now. You know, that's one weird sensation -- standing one minute talking to old friends, the next instant yakking at empty air here on Cordiality. What do you suppose they think?" "They think it's magic." McKie, the Caleban said, I love you. "You what?" McKie exploded. Love you, the Caleban repeated. Affinity of one person for another person. Such affinity transcends species. "I guess so but -- " IF Since I possess this universal affinity Jor your person, connectives open, permitting accomplishment of your request. "You can send me to a place near Abnethe?" Affirmative. Accord with desire. Yes. "Where is this place?" McKie asked. He found, with a chill wash of air and a sprawling lurch onto dusty ground, that he was addressing his question to a moss-capped rock. For a moment he star at the rock, regaining his balance. The rock was about a meter tall and contmned small veins of yellow-white quartz with flecks of through them. It stood in an open meadow beneath d distant yellow sun. The sun's position told McKie he had arrived either at mid-morning or mid-afternoon, local. Beyond the rock the meadow and a ring of straggly yellow bushes stretched it flat'horizon broken by the tall white spires of a city. "Loves me?" he asked the rock. m "'T'  He could only achieve the impossible. The possible was forever beyond him... slippery as soap, covering the path, that caused Carter to keep slipping and failing, not the steepness of the hill. The front of his raincoat was wet and his knees were muddy long before he reached the summit. And with each step forward and upward the continuous roar of souiid grew louder. He was hot and tired by the time he reached the top of the ridge -- yet he instantly forgot his discomfort as he looked out across the wide bay. Like everyone else he had heard about The Falls since childhood and had seen countless photographs and films of them on television. Ail this preparation had not readied him for the impact of reality. He saw a falling ocean, a vergallons a second did people say came down? The Falls stretched out across the bay, their farthest reaches obscured by the clouds of floating spray. The bay seethed and boiled with the impact of that failing weight, raising foamcapped waves that crashed against the rocks below. Carter could feel the impact of the water on the solid stone as a vibration in the ground but all sound was swallowed up in the greater roar of The. Falls. This was a reverberation so outrageous and overpowering that his ears could not become accustomed to it. They soon felt numbed from the ceaseless impact but the very bones of the skull carried the sound to his brain, shivering and battering it. When he put his hands over his ears he was horrified to discover that The Falls were still as loud as ever. As he stood swaying and wide-eyed one of the constantly changing air currents that formed about the base of The Falls shifted suddenly and swept a wall of spray down upon him. The inundation lasted scant seconds but was heavier than any rainfall he had ever experienced, had ever believed possible. When it passed he was gasping for air, so dense had been the falling water. Quivering with nsations he had never before experienced. Carter turned and looked along the ridge toward the gray and water-blackened granite of the cliff and the house that huddled at its base like a stony blister. It was built of the same granite as the cliff and appeared no less solid. Running and slipping, his hands still over his ears. Carter hurried toward the house. For a shorttime the spray was blown across the bay and out to sea, so that golden afternoon sunlight poured down on the house, starting streamers of vapor from its sharply sloping roof. It was a no-nonsense building, as solid as the rock against which it pressed. Only two windows penetrated the blankness of the front that faced The Falls -- tiny and deep, they were like little suspicious eyes. No door existed here but Carter saw that a path of stone flags led around the corner.  He followed it and found -- set into the wall on the far side, away from The Falls -- a small and deepset entry. It had no arch but was shielded by a great stone lintel a good two feet in diameter. Carter stepped into the opening that framed the door and looked in vain for a knocker on the heavy, iron-bolted timbers. The unceasFalls made thinking almost impossible and it was only after he had pressed uselessly against the sealed portal that he realized that no knocker, even one as loud as cannon, could be heard within these walls above that sound. He lowered his hands and tried to force his mind to coherence. There had to be some way of announcing his presence. When he stepped back out of the alcove he noticed that a rusty iron knob was set into the wall a few feet away. He seized and twisted, it but it would not turn. However, when he pulled on it, although it resisted, he was able to draw it slowly away from the wall to disclose a length of chain. The chain was heavily greased and in good condition -- a fair omen. He continued to pull until a yard of chain emerged from the opening and then, no matter how hard he pulled, no more would come. He released the handle and it bounced against the rough stone of the wall. For sortie instants it hung there. Then with a jerky mechanical motion, the chain was drawn back into the wall until the knob once more rested in place. W hatever device this odd mechanism activated seemed to perfornt its desired function. In less than a minute the heavy door swung open and a man appeared in the opening. He examined his visitor wordlessly. The man who was much like the building and the cliffs behind it -- solid, no-nonsense, worn, lined and graying. But he had resisted the years even as he showed their marks upon him. His back was as straight as any young man's and his knob-knuckled hands had a look of determined strength. Blue were his eyes and very much the color of the water falling endlessly, thunderously, on the far side of the building. He wore knee-high fisherman's boots, plain corduroy pants and a boiled gray 'sweater. His face did not change expression as he waved Carter into the building. When the thick door had been swung shut and the many sealing bars shoved back into place the silence in the house took on a quality of its own. Carter had known absence of sound elsewhere -- here was a positive statement of noIF sound, a bubble of peace pushed right up against the very base of the all-sound of The Falls. He was .momentarily deafened and he knew it. But he was not so deaf that he did not know that the hammering thunder of The Falls had been shut outside. The other man must have sensed how his visitor felt. He nodded in a reassuring manner as he took Carter's coat, then pointed to a comfortable chair set by the deal table near the fire. Carter sank gratefully into the cushions. His host turned away and vanished, to return a moment later with a tray bearing a decanter and two glasses. He poured a measure of wine into each glass and set one down before Carter, who nodded and seized it in both hands to steady their shaking. After a first large gulp he sipped at it while the tremors died and his hearing slowly returned. His host moved about the room on various tasks and presently Carter found himself much recovered. He looked up. "I must thank you for your hospitality. When I came in I was -- shaken." "How are you now? Has the wine helped?" the man said loudly, almost shouting, and Carter realized that his own words had not been heard. Of course, the man must be hard of hearing. It was a wonder he was not stone deaf. "Very good, thank you," Carter shouted back. "Very kind of you indeed. My name is Carter. I'm a reporter, which is why I have come to see you." The man nodded, smiling slightly"My name is Bodum. You must know that if you have come here to talk to me. You write for the newspapers?" "I was sept here." Carter coughed -- the shouting was irritating his throat. "And I of course know you, Mr. Bodum -- that is I know you by reputation. You're the Man by The Falls." "Forty-three years now," Bodum said with solid pride, "I've lived here and have never been away for a single night. Not that it has been easy. When the wind is wrong the spray is blown over the house for days and it is hard to breathe -- even the fire goes out. I built the chimney myself -- there is a bend part way up with baffles and doors. The smoke goes up -- but if water comes down the baffles stop it and its weight opens the doors and it drains away through a pipe to the outside. I can show you where it drains -- black with soot the wall is there." While Bodum talked Carter looked around the room at the dim furniture shapes barely seen in the wavering light from the fire and at the two windows set into the wall. "Those Windows," he said, "You put them in yourself? May I look out?" "Took a year apiece, each one. Stand on ttiat bench. It will bring you to the right level. They're armored glass, specially made, solid as the wall around them now that I have them anchored well. Don't be afraid. Go right up to it. The window's safe. Look how the glass is anchored." the glass but at The Falls outside. He had not realized how close the building was to the falling water. It was perched on the very edge of the cliff and nothing was to be seen from this vantage point except the wall of blackened wet granite to his right and the foaming maelstrom of the bay far below. And before him, above him, thickness of wall and glass could not cut out their sound completely and when he touched the heavy pane with his fingertips he could feel the vibration of the water's impact. The window did not lessen the effect The Falls had upon him but it enabled him to stand and watch and think, as he had been unable to do on the outside. It was very much like a peephole into a holocaust of water -- a window into a cold hell. He could watch without being destroyed -- but the fear of what was on the other side did not lessen. Something black flickered in the falling water and was gone. "There -- did you see that," he called out. "Something came down The Falls. What could it possibly be?" Bodiim nodded wisely. "Over forty years I have been here and I can show you what comes down The Falls." He thrust a splint into the fire and lit a lamp from it. Then, picking up the lamp, he waved Carter after him. They crossed the room and he held the light to a large glass bell jar. "Must be twenty years ago it washed up. on the shore. Every bone in its body broke too. Stuffed anf mounted it myself." Carter pressed close, looking at the staring shoe-button es and the gaping jaws and pointed teeth. The limbs were stiff and unnatural, the body under the fur bulging in the wrong places. Bodum was by no means a skilful taxidermist. Yet, perhaps by accident, he had captured a look of terror in the animal's expression and stance. "It's a dog," Carter said. "Very much like other dogs." Bodum was offended, his voice as cold as shout can be. "Like them, perhaps, but not of them. Every bone broken I told you. How else could a dog have appeared here in this bay?" "I'm sorry, I did not mean to suggest for an instant -- Down The Falls, of course. I just meant it is so much like the dogs we have that perhaps there is a whole new world up there. Dogs and everything, just like ours." "I never speculate," Bodum IF said, mollified. "I'll make some coffee." He took the lamp to the stove and Carter, left alone in the partial darkness went back to the window. It drew him. "I must ask you some questions for my article," he said but did not speak loudly enough for Bodum to hear.' Everything he had meant to do here seemed irrelevant as he looked out at The Falls. The wind shifted. The spray was briefly blown clear and The Falls were once more a mighty river coming down from the sky. When he canted his head he saw exactly as if he were looking across a river. And there, upstream, a ship appeared, a large liner with rows of portholes. It sailed the surface of the river faster than ship had ever sailed before and he had to jerk his head to follow its motion. When it passed, no more than a few hundred yards away, for one instant he could see it clearly. The people aboard it were hanging to the rails, some with their mouths open' as though shouting in fear. Then it was gone and there was only the water, rushing endlessly by. "Did you see it?" Carter shouted, spinning about. "The coffee will be ready soon." "There, out there," Carter cried, taking Bodum by the arm. "In The Falls. It was a ship, I swear it was, falling from up above. With people on it. There must be a whole world up there that we know nothing about." B odum reached up to the shelf for a cup, breaking Carter's grip with the powerful movement of his arm. "My dog came down The Falls. I found it and stuffed it myself." "Your dog, of course. I'll not deny that. But there were people on that ship and I'll swear -- I'm not mad -- that their skins were a different color from ours." "Skin is skin, just skin color." "I know. That is what we have. But it must be possible for skins to be other colors, even if we dbn't know about it." "Sugar?" "Yes, please. Two." Carter sipped at the coffee -- it was strong and warm. In spite of himself he was drawn back to the window. He looked out and sipped at the coffee -- and started when something black and formless came down. And other things. He could not tell what they were because the spray was blowing toward the house again. He tasted grounds at the bottom of his cup and left the last sips. He put the cup carefully aside. Again the eddying wind currents shifted the screen of spray to one side just in time for him to see another of the objects go by. "That was a house! I saw it as clearly as I see this one. But wood Please turn to page #) State Thruway at the Rome exit and head north along Route # you'll be close to one of the most desolate areas in the northeast. Geographers call it the Tug Hill Upland -- or Tug Hill. The early settlers avoided it as did the Oneidas and the Onondagas before them. Tug Hill has some of the dreariest landscape in the country. you leave the ski centers and the little villages on its borders. July mean temperatures are below # and the growing season is short. Vast areas of burned-over land mark where farmers once tried to grow crops or graze animals on the thin soils overlying Paleozoic sandstone, limestone and shale. The old logging roads that lead into Tug Hill are impassable in winter -- the snowfall totals nearly He accepted a long-distance call from a woman who loved him beyond one life and kept talking through another! IF two hundred inches. In April thirty-three. I have most of mythere are snowbanks higher than hair and my features are regular, a car and the mist rises eerily over Before I left the campus I had to the scene of thwarted dreams. Few fend off the occasional coed who venture into the upland's emptithought it would be fun to discuss ness even in summer except fisherthe spicier parts 'of Chaucer or men and an occasional hiker. Swinburne over a drink in my I live here, though, and I like it. bachelor apartment. And when I My name is Walter Hurd. I talk was a newcomer to Central New to the stars. I'm keeping a journal York -- I grew up in Utah -- a pert during my sabbatical year away little junior persuaded me to take from the university. her to the submarine races in OnI'm an academic type, pushing ondaga Lake. What happens in these nightly events is that you park on the shore and since the submarines are submerged there's nothing to see. So you neck. I had been at the university for years, first as an undergraduate, then as a graduate student and teaching assistant and finally as an A.B.D. That is, I have all but my dissertation toward a Ph.D., the college professor's union card. What with teaching and serving on a dozen committees and being conscientious about student activities and dabbling in politics (I ran for the city council and lost to a man whose parentage and mixed marriage appealed to the three biggest ethnic groups in town), I had no time to finish the dissertation. Then I won a fellowship. I interested the Guggenheims in research I was doing on Stephen Crane's lost manuscripts. Crane had been a stringer for some upstate papers and during his brief stay on campus he'd lived at the Delta Upsilon house. There were fragntents of his work around, waiting to be identified. The dean of faculties granted me a leave of absence and I rented an old farmhouse about an hour's ride north of town. I didn't know then that the farm sat on the western slope of Tug Hill. I didn't even know then that there was a place called Tug Hill. Neither do most people -- they refer to it vaguely as the snow belt or that good trout stream country up there. Mostly they're talking about the edges of the Tug Hill Upland (or Escarpment, as the geologists say)places like Orwell, Smartville, Osceola, New Boston, Constableville or Turin. These are villages and hamlets -- not big but at least occupied. Nothing occupies Tug Hill proper except snowshde rabbits, deer, secondary growth-and me. How this came .about is that my old friend, the assistant dean of liberal arts, whose name is Mel Oliphant and .who bowls every week with Jerry Boyd, the assistant director of research and development, drove up to my rented farm one September Saturday with a six-pack of cold beer. Mel and I climbed one of the drumlins that came with the place and looked out over the countryside to where Lake Ontario shimmered on the western horizon. He asked me how things were going. "Just fine," I told him. Except, I said, that maybe I'd been illadvised to specialize in the unpublished writings of Stephen Crane. "A lot of it is pretty crude, with just a nugget here and there to foreshadow the greatness." Actually, most of what I'd found was discouraging. Mel tried to cheer me up. He got me to admit that I'd come across a line here and a paragraph there which Crane had apparently reworked later into The Blue HoIF tel or The Red Badge or The Black Riders. I did get excited then, remembering, and quoted a paragraph Fd found in an #I issue of the university newspaper and another fragment Fd exhumed from a magazine f literary pretensions that had been put out by the brothers of Delta Upsilon. The magazine piece was signed S.C. and although records showed that in the nineties there'd been another DU named Sherman Caldwell I was fairly certain Fd recognized the Crane touch. "Did Caldwell publish anything else?" Mel asked. I told him Fd have to research that next time I was in town. "Let me do it for you," he said. "Fve got an eager new grad assistant. Fve also got a proposition for you if you're not tied up in a long-term lease." I told him I rented on a monthto-month basis. "This may not interest an exalted Guggenheim fellow-" "Cut it ouL Mel," I told him. He's a summa cum laude from Brown and the youngest college dean south of the snow belt. He said: "No kidding -- our boss couldn't be more pleased if he'd got the fellowship himself. You're onethird of all the Guggenheims on campus this year, you k'now." Then Mel told me about the job RD had. "Easy work, room and board included. Lots of time for your own project. The only thing is, it's right in the middle of Tug Hill. Nowhere, in other words. You'd be a hermit." I didn't have to think about it long. "Suits me," I said. "Outside of my weekly trip to the general store and maybe to a movie Fm already a hermit. But what's Tug Hill?" Mel hadn't known either until Jerry Boyd told him, so he was full of fresh information. I was fascinated. I turned my back on Lake Ontario to stare east. But all I could see was Jerry Look Road (dirt) at the foot of my rented drumlin and a scrub forest rising behind it. "Will they bring beer with my provisions?" I asked. "This is a local-option township. I have to go clear to Richland for a sixpack -- but Tug Hill sounds like Carry Nationsville." "Fm sure that can be part of the deal." We wandered down to the brook where we'd left the last two cans to cool and drank them, talking and watching a herd of cows pastured at the farm; for the summer. Then, since Mel wasn't spending the night, we drove both cars to Pulaski and had dinner. I went back to the farm nd did some work, then went to bed. At the end of the monthll drove to the campus to get briefed and sign a contract and arrange to store my car. At # a.m. on the Hrst of October I took up residence in the trailer at Tug Hill. trailer had been set down by helicopter on a previously laid concrete foundation full of electronic gear. I can't write about that -- I couldn't even get in. The gear in the basement had needed no attention since it was installed. I did, though. In my first few months at Tug Hill I went frombeing a loner who thought the solitary job was what I'd been looking for all my life to a man who thought he'd go crazy waiting for the next arrival of the copter. April was the cruelest month. The radio told me it was a bewbew-beautiful day in Watertown but I looked out on an eerie landscape. Snow covered the lee sides of hills and mist rising from them moved in a slight wind. The mist drifted over everything and the cloud-shrouded sun gave it just enough substance to invest it with menace, as if something else might be drifting with it. The ghosts of residents past, I thought. The daunted pioneers, the discouraged settlers, the disappoint explorers. I was sick to death of winter. I was restive, Spring was stirring within me and I felt like going to the submarine races. I felt like telling RD I wanted out, to get itself another boy. Instead I made myself a cheese sandwich, heavy on the mustard, drank a beer and tried to console myself with Crane. I hadn't been doing much with the Crane project, though I'd had all the time in the world. My RD duties occupied me two hours a day. The job was a sinecure but I could see why it had been hard to fill. No family man would sign up for a year away from the wife and kids. Nor would it entice any healthy young chap who liked the submarine races. I wondered myself whether I could stick it out, though the worst was behind me -- the incredible nothing of a winter in Tug Hill. No one had told me it was normal for the snow to be up to the level of the high windows of the trmler six months out of the year. One unbelievable day I had to tunnel from the door to the windswept knoll where the ski-equipped helicopter landed. Now the leaves were coming out. The juices were stirring in me, too. My contract ran to the end of September and I supposed I'd keep my word to RD. The job was part of a classified government project. I'd been given just enough information to enable me to handle it. It was obvious that the work was connected with the space program and at first I thought I was sending signals to asatellite and recording the bounceback. But that wasn't it. Gradually it dawned on me that IF I was talking to the stars. Or trying to. The signals I sent out once a day were Earth's attempt to find somebody intelligent out there in the void. I knew there was at least one other station doing the same thing and maybe there were many. I'd read about the pioneering West Virginia project, Ozma, named for the princess in The Wizard of Oz. What did they call me? I wondered. The Tin Woodman? The Hermit of Tug Hill? And whom was I supposed to be talking to? Another person like me? A machine? I didn't know at first what my messages said but I imagined they'd been pretty carefully thought out. One plus one equals two. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. E equals mc. All mathematical. It was dull stuff to me, an exEnglish lit major who took as few math courses as the degree requirements permitted. It could be dull for them out there, too, if anyone were listening. I didn't suppose our signal encoders had put much faith in Chaucer or Shakespeare or Crane. But by spring I was asking myself why not use a line or two from our glorious heritage of language? Shouldn't the people out-there, if there are any, hear some of the best we've got? They couldn't all be mathematicians. Why not send a bit of Chaucer? It would seem appropriate to the nature of the experiment to beam a few words from The Canterbury Tales: What is this world? whatasketh man to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave A Hone, withouten any companye. They might have the answer out there. Or send some Stephen Crane: A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" Perhaps omit what the cynical Stephen imagined to be the universe's reply: "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in nie A sense of obligation. " T he messages were transmitted in a narrow beam, with no interference from man-made noise You can't get that kind of pure projection from just anywhere. Except for what went up from my trailer the only sounds Tug Hill produced were nature's own. The humming of the bee, the soughing of the wind in the leaves, the chirp of the bird. And, occasionally, when I went out to lie on my back and stare up into the infinity of stars, the lonely voice of me. Hey, up there -- hey... And I found myself writing messages to aliens. That's inexact. I was writing to one alien, an extraterrestrial and, because I was the kind of person I was, I imagined my unknown friend to be female and young and attractive. Therefore one of the givens, as we academic types say, was that she was human. I didn't think I'd fln) much joy in a saurian or a scaly sea-creature or a spider-lady, however complnentary our minds might be. At first I wrote the messages but didn't send them. I couldn't, at that stage, because I didn't know how. My job was so simple that all I had to do was flick switches, adjust dials and make a few log entries that even an A.B.D. in liberal arts could be trusted to do. I supposed it could have been done by remote control, electronically, but probably RD didn't yet rely on machines to that extent. I had never asked many questions about my job except to get the overview. But I watched carefully the next time a young technician collected and replaced the tapes and copied the log. It was a fine day and after he'd done his work he wasn't anxious to get right back. Without seeming to, I brought the conversation around to the equipment he had serviced. He probably thought it was idle shop talk. I learned a great deal. After he flew back I went over it in my mind. The message beam from Earth went out for 'one hour a day -- at # a.m., saying exactly the same thing, stopping always at the same time. This punctuality and repetition, I assumed, were an important part of the transmission. If I were monitoring another section oflfie galaxy and it were sending at constant intervals for an exact length of time -- even though the length of our days were different and the transmission gibberish -- I'd get the message that somebody was trying to strike up an intelligent conversation with an intergalaetic pal. Earth's message to the stars wasn't monitored by the senders -- you don't need a record of what you yourself are saying, especially when you say the same thing over and over. I'd also understood from the technician that Earth listening stations were all over the globe and that my little installation couldn't measure up to most. Still, it has been fitted with a piece of sophisticated new equipment RD was trying out. So Tug Hill listened for an hour a day, late in th afternoon. That was the other part of my job, to switch on the monitor at # P.M. There was a fair-sized dish antenna set up in a natural bowl about a mile from the trailer. I'd never IF known it was there -- my technician friend pointed it out during our talk. At any rate I now knew enough about the equipment to start playing with it. II what I did in no way interfered with the RD project. I merely supplemented it in my own humanisticway. To start with, I put messages from old Geoffrey Chaucer #tnd young Stephan Crane on tape. I used my best lecture-hall voice. I didn't know how to encode it so it would sound like that mathematical stuff, nor would I have wanted it to sound that way. It seemed to me that the RD people were underestimating the aliens by sticking to mathematics. For all their modern equipment they were merely using a variation of a #th century notion I'd read about. Gauss, the German physicist, had Wanted to plant hundreds of miles of #rees on the Siberian tundra in the form of a Pythagorean triangle for the aliens to see. I didn't think RD was doing much better. One Tuesday morning in July,after I'd disconnected the official transmission, I sent my voice and the thoughts of Chaucer and Crane out into space. I began to keep a personal log as part of my journal, in which I'd been making only desultory entries. I was nervous the first time and left my tape on for no more than five minutes. Later in the day, after wandering around outside, kicking at low clumps of sun-faded grass and eating handfuls of wild blueberries, I went back and remade the tape, reversing the order of the quotations and opening with I put that on the beam the second day, at #:# A.M., for ten minutes. Getting bolder, you see. I ran it at that time for the rest of the week. Then, on Sunday, I replaced it with a longerjcnessage, expanding Chaucer and adding Shakespeare .and Keats. (The poetry of earth is never dead...) I let that one run for twenty-five minutes, from #:# to #:#, for seven days. Meanwhile I'd decided to talk to the stars in my own words. No harm in that, I told myself. At worst I was using up a few minutes of power but whh three generators available RD could spare it. At best I was providing a new avenue of communication with the putative aliens who, for all anyone knew, might be more word than number-oriented. Certainly I would be if I were a listener. Even if I didn't know the lanuage I might sense the poetry. My own words, I knew, wouldn't rival Keats' or Shakespcare's or even Crane's or Saroyan's. But they would reflect the human microcosm that I was. As such they might just evoke a human response in a far-off listener. I told myself this in justification for the unethical thing I was doing. It was my rationalization but not my reason. My reason was simply that I had to coipmunicate with somebody. If I'd had a girl who meant anything to me I'd probably have written to her instead . But no such correspondent was available, so I chose an unknown space lady, imagining her as a sympathetic person of mature (say # to #) years who stood flve-three and was as proportioned as all get-out, in a terrestrial way, but who had, withal, an intelligence that wouldn't bore me. I spent a lot of time on drafts of my message. I threw them all away because they looked as if I'd worked hard at them instead of saying what I really meant. So I started over and it came out easily because I was talking about what I was doing and how I got here and about Tug Hill. A lot. of it was what I've already written. I began reading into the tape. "If you get off the New York State Thruway at the Rome exit and head north..." And that was what I transmitted to anyone out there who might be listening. The next afternoon I began taping where I'(il left off and' transmitted that. It was as representative of me, and therefore of Earth (because I was of Earth) as anything I could haVe composed specifically for the starcast -- so I read the aliens my journal in ten-minutes installments, concluding very soon that it wasn't half bad for that purpose. And one day I had an answer. message replied tlirectly to me. It didn't. What came in was the voice of one intelligent human being speaking to another -- but I don't want to mislead you into thinking it said anything like, "Hello," Walter; Yours of recent date received and contents noted..." But it did tell me as clearly as if the speaker were at my elbow that an individual out there -- and not a member of some RD team -- was saying something to another individual. It was a person-to-person call, so to speak, not station-to-station. More than that -- the person calling was a woman. Dear friend beyond the range of my present acquaintance -- Greetihgs from one whose words may never bring a reply but who nonetheless yearns to communicate. I have spoken to you IF in the past but you may not have heard. If you have -- I know you forgive the repetition. My time is short because I speak in many directions, the better to reach you wherever you are. But FU be back, at what will be the same time of day for me, though for you it may vary by (word illegible). Please listen again, my friend. You can imagine my excitement. I played the tape over and over. The voice was that of a young woman -- I felt confident of that -- intelligent and intimate. She spoke again nine hours, four minutes and thirty-two seconds later. I hadn't slept in the meantime. This time she said: Greetings, my friend across the void -- it has been a day for me but probably a different interval for you. To be that alike would be too much to hope for. But We are alike in other ways -- we must be if you hear me and understand. My time is short because I speak in many directions, the better to reach you wherever you are. I am happy today as the result of a visit from (word unclear). He tells me I am right to continue my quest. howeverothers may scornme. Listen again, my friend beyond. Please hear me. I glowed at her words. But I also found myself jealous of her other hearers on other worlds -- and of her visitor. Think of that! I envied him his closeness to her and the regard in which she held him. I was probably a little nutty and overimaginative from lack of sleep, the season and my environment but I felt strongly about her -- and so record it in my journal. Before I could go to bed I had to get ready for my regular RD transmission, to be followed by my clandestine one. The RD beeps over with, I read the next segment of my journal into the tape and sent it off. I prefaced it, trembling, with the daring words: "Dear friend across the void." It was as much as I could bring myself to improvise, feeling then -- irrational from lack of sleep -- that to say more would be to tempt the fates against me and jeopardize my tenuous contract. Then I slept, first having set my alarm for the interval that would wake me in time for her next message. She was there, on time to the second. I logged it in my journal as I listened: I greet you once more, unknown friend from afar. If you've heard me speak before you'll know that I am (unclear) of (unclear). My time is short because I speak in many directions, the better to reach you wherever you are.  Let me tell you about myself. I am called a Vemban. I am able to reproduce my kind, although I have not yet done so, with one of the other sex of my species. But this is in the future. My life partner and I have not yet chosen each other. Listen again, friend beyond the stars." I was jealous again, this time of the person of the other sex of her species who one day would help her reproduce her kind. Stung, I immediately prepared the tape of my next transmission and prefaced it with the words: "Never mind him. Star Girl; wait for me." I went no further -- I was appalled at my temerity in going that far -- except to read the third extract from my journal.  O NE of the consolations of my being stuck in this uninhabited vastness had been that I had had time to read. I had been able to give some attention to questions of a scholarly nature, such as: Where did Tug Hill get its name? Well, you'd think to find the answer would be simple. But I'd read Adam Lascaris's A Brief History of the North Country (Lowville Press, #) and Peter B. Felshaw's privately printed monograph West of the Adirondocks and East of Lake Ontario (#?) and Martin McVickar's Ordovician Ode (an undated epic preserved in the Lewis County Archives) and Fairchild Hovey's nostalgic study. Snow Belt, which ran in several issues of the WaterTown Times in #. But not until I'd found a letter to the editor of the Syracuse Post-Standard y reprinted in a # volume marking the #th anniversary of James C. Constable's historic horseback ride did I get a hint. The writer of the letter was a professor emeritus of geography at Cazenovia College. He suggested that the name was associated with the fact that the area was once a lumbering center and pointed out that part of the harness of a work horse was a tug. Since the area abounded in hills everything had to be tugged in behind a horse. Therefore... Dear God (or whoever you revere. Star Girl), is this what I have on my mind? Is this all I can say to you when I long to share my innermost soul? I'm inhibited by our insufficient contact, of course. IF by the possibility of eavesdroppers, by the suspicion that you don't exist -- that in my isolation I've made you up in iny mind. But this is the way I am, now at this point in time, and I won't have you see me other than as I am -- not if you're who I hope you are. Star Girl -- not if we are to know each other at whatever impossible distance. Star Girl! Was I out of my cautious, expensively-educated mind? Was this scientific method? I was beginning to sound like somebody in a comic book or a Japanese monster movie. But I had to call her something. She told me she was a Veinban, whatever that was, but she had no name I could speak. In the end I left my impetuous words on the tape. I went out and hiked the scrubland, thinking only of her. Star Girl. Space Girl. StarSpace Girl. Stacy. Stacy, my love. Now wasn't that absolutely ridiculous? I beheaded a daisy with my boot, lost my balance and fell. I stayed down to inspect a circle of ferns at their own level, then lay back and stared into the sky, presumably in her direction. Stacy! I couldn't help it. She was out there somewhere. I'd heard her and maybe one day she'd hear me. A bee came by. Was it possible that the intelligent life which had developed on her planet (Vemba?) was bee-shaped? I couldn't have loved a bee, no matter how compatible our minds, but because Stacy might be one I suffered this one's approach. It buzzed close, honey-hunting. Maybe Stacy was at this moment (between transmissions) staring up into her alien sky, beyond which lay me. Stacy! Are you thinking of me? My Earthbound bee hovered, buzzing comfortably, then darted off to a whole tJaisy and went to work. Its job was simple. Mine had been, too, until Stacy spoke. Now I was possessed. I was in love with a voice from infinity. Madness. Intelligent Earthman that I was, holder of an M.A., part-time apprentice scientist entrusted with an important experiment, gatherer of new knowledge. I'd gone crazy over a voice which, if I allowed myself to think rationally about it, must have come from so far off that its owner and I could never hope to meet. And my own voice, speaking its insignificant message, would reach no one until I was long departed. It was a clean miss. I rolled over on my stomach and stabbed out a hand to behead the daisy the bee had lately left I missed. I cried then, into a clump of moss under my face. Stacy. I breathed into its bloom. After a while I got up and went inside and listened over and over to the tapes of her three messages. Oh, my girl. Oh, my friend. Oh, my impossible love... entry read). Thumbing back in my journal, I see that at times I've been overemotional, not to say of my mind, while at other times I've written calculatingly, addressing a "you" as if posterity would be interested in every detail of my small adventure. Am I beginning to see in myself a historical figure like Constable, the early explorer of this outlier of , the Appalachian Plateau? ("Outlier" is a geographer's term I've picked up.) Constable, having ridden horseback along hundreds of miles of wilderness trail, remarked to his own notebook that twenty-six miles in eight hours was pretty good speed, ltacy's voice, preserved here light-years from its source on Vemba, wherever that is, has also traveled at a good speed. And my voice? Is it being heard? It says in the books that James' French emigres more than half a The plan was to build a little Paris in the heart of the Great Woods. That was in #. They were going to call it Castorland because of its potential fortune in beaver pelts. So there are precedents for one's dreams. Is mine more fantastic than Constable's? Instead of an outlier of old France, laid out like an architect's dream, he has a hamlet of a handful of souls, named for him on a crossroads to nowhere. But I'm not trying to build a civilization, merely to reach one. Constable sought his in the wilderness of a young America -- I seek mine in the ancient sky. From that sky again came her voice. Once a day I sit in the brief glow of noon and direct my thoughts to him who may hear. There is little more I can say. Most of the time now I merely exult in the brief blue heat which comforts me for so short a time. It is then, as I bask, that I permit myself to hope that in the lands beyond this bleak world there lives one to whom I can speak. And in speaking, how shall I know that he will hear? Or hearing, understand? Or understanding, reply? I have none of the answers but I speak nonetheless. It is my hope to speak to one like me, rather than to a creature of unrecognizable or incompatible form. IF Preferably he should not be an insect or a quadruped or a scaly amphibian. If he is any of hese he may forgive me for being a lonely chauvinist.  It's time to talk to Stacy again. Stacy the non-bee. Or is it my turn to listen for her? The intervals grow complicated and confusing. I must leave my journal and check my charts. I'm coming, Stacy! What shall I tell her? Dear Star Girl -- we should know eachother, not just because our worlds must communicate for the good of science, for the advancement of knowledge -- but because I'm lonesome and maybe you are, too. There's a time when nothing you have, or can foresee having, is quite enough. You yearn for more, even if what you need is unattainable, even if you're reaching too far. How much farther could I reach than to Stacy? For all I knew she could be clamshaped or so alien that I would be unable even to comprehend her shape. But in my mind she was -- she had to be -- a desirable, lovely, slim girl with all the Earthlike qualities and gradations of form that make slim lovely girls desirable. I was in love with the Stacy I wanted her to be -- though she might have died before I was born. Ill T hen there was silence. I heard the voice no longer. Had she spoken her last? Had she become bored with what could only have been a pastime? I had no answers. I could only speculate. Loneliness engulfed me. My sense of desolation increased tenfold. Thinking that she might have altered her intervals of transmission, I listened for twenty-four hours without a break, drinking all the remaining with her name. Stacy, Stacy, Stacy... She was gone. The impossible contact had been broken. Questioning my sanity and distrusting my journal entries, I played the tapes to convince myself that I had actually heard her. Without a fresh message from her to inspire me there was nothing for me to tell the sky. For a while I repeated the first tapes I had made -- "Hello out there -- " but my heart wasn't in them. I moped around, routinely sending RD's mathematical messages, doing my job and little else. I gave up shaving and ate only when hunger forced me to. I spent a lot of time sitting outside the trailer in the sun, doing absolutely nothing. The only creative thought I had was that this was one of the few times in my life when I could get an allover suntan but I couldn't muster the energy to take off my clothes, much less shave the beard, now two weeks thick and beginning to get greasy from sloppy eating. Then I heard a new voice. T'd gone back one more time and listened, certain I'd hear nothing, and prepared to slouch outside for a few more hours of vegetablelike absorption of sunshine. The voice was clearer than the other had been. It tingled the back of my scalp. It said: Hello, down there, my friend on Tug Hill... Like the other, it spoke English. But this was that of a more contemporary person. I knew it -- there was a lilt, an air of excitement and purpose that the other had lacked. It was also a woman's voice, or a girl's. But the marvel was that she was speaking to me, her "friend on Tug Hill." My skepticism fought that for a while -- it was more than I could locally accept. But who else could she be talking to? The postmistress at' Lyons Falls? The ham operator in Port Leyden? No -- I wouldn't have it. This new Star Girl was speaking to me -- to me and to no one else. Her message was short. I wondered if she'd had to sneak it in after the official transmission, as I had done. I heard you speak and then you stopped. I hope you will speak again. I'll be in touch with you several times again before... I must leave you now. There isn't time. Listen bgain, you on Tug Hill. Do listen. And speak to me. My joy in the contact was tempered by her statement that our talks wolild be limited to "several." Why? There isn't time. What was happening? I was plunged into gloom. Had I reestablished communication only to have it broken again? This would be too cruel. Bbt she had asked me to listen again. I reran the tape to verify that. 'Listen again, you on Tug Hill. Do listen... I yelled and got up. I ran around like a wild man, knocking . things over, hurting myself. Holding a painful elbow, I howled as if my sound could reach her without the transmitter. "Stacy! Stacy-Stacy-Stacy!" I grabbed the log book to see when my next transmission would be. Soon. I got up to pace back and forth, to think what to say. IF As I passed the mirror over the wash basin I had a shock. The reflection was of a filthy mad-eyed creature with matted hair and beard and grease-stained clothing. I tore off my clothes and threw them out the door. Then showered and shaved.  N ever mind what I said to her. What matters is that I was clean and alive when I said it, and that later she replied. She said: Dear Friend on Tug Hill: I feel I know you well. I have heard your voice, although you did not address me then. And although I have another name Vd like to be your Stacy. Fm a lonesome one like you even if Fm surrounded by many like me. I envy your privacy. Do you know who it was you talked to? Do you know the woman who spoke to you, not knowing you would hear but hoping someone would hear? She is a part of me. She is dead now, poor unfulfilled thing, sweet lady who lives in me. She died in her favorite place, in her garden, in the brief warmth of noon, with a smile I shall remember. I was there, a child at her feet on the sere grass, listening, as her words came to an end. She said this: "I am old, child, and can hope no longer, but you may see a land my voice has reached. I can do no more and soon I will know what I have only imagined." It was my grandmother's voice you heard and I bless you for answering her, though she never heard you. I answer for her. Will you speak to me now as you spoke to her? May I be your Space Girl, your Star Girl, your Stacy? , Would I? Might she? I caa't remember all I said but it was impassioned and wild. I spoke to her directly -- out of my heart, not my notebooks -- and my message went out live. It's probably just as well I have no transcript. Fd be embarrassed to hear it played back. But I excused myself. I was an old friend of the family. Hadn't I known her grandmother? She replied as openly, as warmly. Fm talking to you as I would to myself, Walter. That's a compliment. It means you make me feel comfortable, as if Fd known you as long as I've known me. Oh, I do hope to meet you! Do you think they'll let us? They must! We'll see to it, won't we? I won't look beyond that. I must go. Til talk to you again. Speak to me! It was agony to have to wait for the next transmission. I had so many questions to ask. What did she mean about hoping to meet me? Was it possible? Would who let us? Was she -- could she be -- was it too much to believe that she was on her way to Earth from whatever land was hers? She answered my questions in her own way, possibly because her opportunities were limited -- possibly, I hoped, because she was as excited as I. I'm attracted to you, chance-chosen resident of Tug Hill. I think you're attracted to me. I must identify myself further so you won't mistake me for one of the other females aboard the Forerunner I'd hate that. I'm me, Stacy, not one of them, though you might be misled. I must be sure you know me when we arrive -- it can't be otherwise. I'll know, but how will you? Shall we have a password? A secret sign? A way of meeting? I'll think about that between now and the time we speak again. The Forerunner -- a spaceship? Arriving on Earth? It was what I had hoped, but I had hoped wijdly. unscientifically. A spaceship froni where? A spaceship whose crew spoke English? Fantastic! All at once I doubted that I had heard anything on the RD equipment -- the madman in the mirror had made it up after nearly a year at Tug Hill. It was obviously an occupational hazard, a ilelirium, a fermented fruit of loneliness, a wilderness-bred hallucination. T hey didn't often call me on the microwave fromRD. Mostly when they did it was to say I had a letter, usually from Mom, and I'd tell them it could wait till the end of the month -- or that the put some stuff together for pickup. This time they had a news item I wasn't going to hear on the commercial broadcasts for some time. The RD director told me contact had been made with a nonterrestrial space vehicle that was approach.ing Earth. They were most excited about a theory that the ship was homing on my signals from Tug Hill. Their information was frustratingly vague and technical. The alien ship was in the such-andsuch quadrant, traveling at suchand-such speed, which presumably would bring it to Earth, unless its course deviated, in so many days. Next Tuesday, in translation. "How do you know all this? I asked. "They told us." "How? Mathematically?" IF "No; that's the funny thing. In clear speech." "Speech?" I asked, innocent. "English. Don't ask me why. Excuse me -- Washington's on the phone. Jerry can fill you in on the rest." Jerry came on. "How about that, Walter-baby, you talker to the stars?" "How big is the ship? How many are aboard? What are they like?" "Unknown. But they do say they come in peace, on a mission of exploration." "That's nice," I said. "It'd he hell if they were unfriendly. I'd hate to see us invaded." "Don't be flippant. Aren-'t you aware of the importance of this moment in which you share?The historicity?" "Congratulations," I said. "I'm proud to be in #n.it. Is there anything you want me to do?" Jerry said that until further notice I was to carry on as usual but that I should report any deviations from the norm. That was the way he put it and that's the way I'm carrying out his orders. The messages from my space girl had become my norm and technically I wasn't obligated to tell RD that my interplanetary lady friend and I had established a prior rapport. After all, the rights of the individual transcend those of the state. Or so I've always assumed in my humanistic way. You can imagine with what eagerness I looked forward to my next message from Stacy. She didn't fail me. Promptly at our complicated rendezvous time I heard her voice. It was no hallucination. She spoke in English, with intelligence, humor, eagerness. But she did skip around, not really answering my questions or answering those I hadn't yet thought to ask. She also told me a story. One reason I'm aboard is that yours is largely a water world and I've made a study of the creatures that inhabit the depths. There's another reason but my vanity prevents me mentioning it. I was lonely as a child and some of my most satisfactory relationships were.with such creatures. I had a boat then in which I went out to summon them from the depths. They rose and stuck their snouts above the surface #nd I talked to them. They did tricks for me. They surfaced and dived, surfaced and came to be tickled on their undersides. Once a group of them, after playing in this way, stood their tails in the air and dived deep. They came back with a friend they introduced with proud cavortings. Their friend was a big flat fellow, dull-white and eyeless. He repelled me at first. But he wanted to be tickled too. When I put aside my repugnance and obliged him he swam in furious circles around the boat, then paused close by to be tickled again. I had the feeling that he was thanking me. It was as if, lacking eyes, he were expressing himself to me in another way I could not yet understand. My fear of him gone, I leaned far over the side toward him and fell out, swamping the boat. I was a good swimmer but far from shore. The boat sank as I tried to right it. The sea creature circled me, unseeing but aware of my position. I swam determinedly but the shore seemed no closer. He came up under me so that I was able to sit upright on his broad back and cling to a bony protuberance above his snout. I hung on and he took me to shore in zigzags, as if to prolong his role of savior. I sensed his enjoyment, which increased when I said,Thank you." He understood me. In later days I came to understand him. We took many sea rides and became friends. Fm glad I had more time to talk today, Walter. I've been thinkiiig about how we should meet. Will you meet me, Walter? I assured her, when it was my turn to speak, that I would. Then I told her what I'd learned from the RD people and confessed my guilt at not having let them know earlier what I had known. I mean, iconoclasm should go only so far. Still, to have told them would have been to have risked their laughter. What could I have said at that point? And if I had spoken they'd probably have yank me out of here for skeptical conferences and sent in a hard-headed team of technicians. Then who would have talked to Stacy? Stacy couldn't be bothered with my crisis of conscience. Her captain was talking to them, she said -- it was all being handled at the proper level, officially. Besides, Stacy had a plan for us at the unofficial level. This is what I'll do, Walter. I'll come to you from out of the sea. The inland sea in which we are to end our journey. You probably know they've radioed us information from which we drew maps. The place is called Lake Ontario. Isn't that nice? I'll come to you from there. I'll be your lady of the lakh. Now listen. Do you have a map like ours? Do you see the places called Watertown in your country and Kingston in Canada? Almost where lines drawn south IF from Kingston and west from Watertown meet in the Lake there's an island called Galloo... Stacy seemed to have lots of time. She went over the plans twice. Finally she answered some of my questions. For the first time she told me the name of her people, although rd heard it before from her grandmother. They were Vembans, from the land called Vemba. She was vague about where it was, in my terms, but she knew its history, including its generations-old tradition of exploratory, voyages to Vembalike planets.  The explorer teams had failed again and again to discover planets inhabitable by beings like themselves but had extended the range of their space voyages until one day they found Earth. But it was an Earth barely evolved beyond the sea stage. Nothing had yet crawled ashore to the still-smoking land. Nevertheless the Vembans studied the new land and when they returned home they took with them some of the sea creatures. By the time of a later voyage to Earth there were inhabitants on its land masses. Again they returned to Vemba with specimens which were not yet man but which gave promise. ' The third voyage to Earth was a cause for rejoicing. The specimens it yielded were a pair of brutish humanoids who had begun to use tools. The fourth voyage was the first to be recorded by Earth's historians -- in tablets of clay. The people : the Vembans found had advanced spectacularly. They had built cities and mastered the rudiments of astronomy and their rulers were preserved in huge pyramidal tombs. Two of the people of this era voluntarily returned with the explorers to Vemba. But the Vembans also took the clay' tablets, so Earth's record of their visit was lost. The Vembans' voyages became more frequent as their technology advanced and on successive trips they returned with Greeks, Romans and Elizabethan Englishmen. Their latest expeditioh was to bring them in contact with the nuclear North Americas, including RD and me, Walter Hurd, A.B.D. It's a pity grandmother was never able to go. She was the, descendant of a space captain and the mother of one but it was her misfortune that she lived her entire life between voyages. She died before her son left on his. So she found what satisfaction she could in speaking to the stars. It's a shame she never heard you reply. But her son did and so did I. So she has been an important part of it -- if she could only know. Stacy told me her people were returning to Earth a little ahead of schedule because for some time they'd been getting our signals -- but they weren't the signals from RD or anybody like it. They were the lights of Earth's cities, which had been sending tadt signals since the Mazda revolution. As a matter of fact, Stacy said, her people were piqued and irritated by the math messages they had received when they were on thdr way (the messages hadn't reached Vemba itself; our aim was off, apparently). The Vembans' irritation was with the fact that the messages stayed mathematical instead of becoming human speech or human thought patterns. It wasn't until my unofficial ' messages reached them that they be-' gan to get enthusiastic. We all like you, Walter. A little imagination is appredated. E vents moved fast then -- at least for me, whose life had been a limbo of arrested movement in the desolation of Tug Hill. Sometimes I had to laugh at the pomposity of the arrangements my fellow Earthmen were making for the arrival of the Vembans. To unofficial me, with my prior, personal knowledge, it was.as if the alien ship were no more unexpected than an ocean liner preparing to dock as it had a dozen times before, while the rest of the Earthmen were as nervous and awestruck as the Watling Islanders must have been who first saw the sails of the Pinta rise . over the eastern horizon.  have the (vantage over you. You with your mathematical minds are preparing logistically for the great event while I have only my romantic soul to put in order. You have no personal stake in this adventure and this blunts your perception. I have Stacy. Stacy, Stacy! Every time I thought her name a wave of weakness swept over me. How would I greet her? What would I say? Would words be needed? It was as if I had always known her and that it would be necessary only for me to enfold her in my arms. And then we would kiss in a tender, wondering way and look deep into each other's eyes and smile with sudden shyness and step apart. But we'd  holding hands .still and would wander off along the beach. And our talk, whatever it was, would be natural and unformed, as with old friends or new lovers. I had to rouse myself then and prepare for the next transmission. Regulation-bound RD was still sending ##:# because no one had amended the instructions. IF When my turn came I sent a little something from the Portuguese, Browning version: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... I don't know how I got through the days that followed. Soon after the official contact Stacy told me it would be wiser if we didn't speak to each other again until we met. But how was that meeting to take place? I had no idea and this soon became apparent to Stacy. My mind had been too dulled by a year at Tug Hill to think in terms of action and Stacy, one of a company of adventurers, had to do the planning. She had told me where she would meet me. An island called Galloo. All I had to do was be there. In her last message from the Forerunner she told me when. My final words to her were my promise to be there. She signed off satisfied. I wish I had as much faith in my ability to make the arrangements as she had. I was good at digging quotes out of books -- how good was I going to be at planning a rendezvous at a place I'd never heard of and persuading the infernally busy people at RD to let me keep it without telling them why? Fortunately I still had my official transmissions to look after. The. routine continued and took up time. When I asked Jerry if I could stop he replied, "You don't think they're the only intelligent life out there, do you? This contact increases our chances of others on an exponential basis -- " He also told me where the aliens would come down. splashdown in Lake Ontario were made by the Can-Am Ad Hoc Committee -- it had some such name, as I had come to expect from minds too long pent in government or on campuses. I allowed myself a little fantasy. I imagined members of Ad Hoc's reception subcommittee rowing out in a dinghy filled to the gunwales with tape recorders and litmus paper and box cameras and trade goods. And maybe a shotgun loaded with rock salt lest the aliens prove unfriendly. In romantic rebellion I appointed myself to my own limited membership group, Tho Committee of One to Greet Stacy. Maybe I'd take along  volume of Keats. ' But there must have been a lot of serious advance planning, perhaps years of it on the Vembans' part, because the splashdown took place efficiently and safely at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. The commander of the alien craft had been easily persuaded that the sheltered waters would be preferable to the chancy waves of the North Atlantic. Ottawa and Washington agreed to designate the site as international waters piro tern. The Forerunner splashed down at about # A.M. on the third of August. The hour and the fact that a summer storm had sprung up kept anyone from seeing it except the American-Canadian crews who had been alerted to expect it. Having come to rest, the huge ship rode high in the choppy waters. I heard about it on RD's private radio. But no one had come out yet. They brought in a replacement and heliocoptered me northwest out of Tug Hill. I don't know why they agreed to my unexplained demand. A reward for my stellar services, maybe -- or because of my implied threat to quit at his crucial stage when they had so many more important things on their minds. The helicopter pilot, a young fellow who'd been raised in the North Country, chattered away as we flew over the scrubland toward the Lake shimmering in the sun. 'That's Frederick Corners down there," he said. "Worth Center's just along that road. Lorraine's up ahead. There's Route Eighty-one -- lot of traffic today. Henderson Harbor's off to your right now and we're coming up fast on the Lake. That's Stony Island ahead. Next stop Galloo." "Not Galloo Island," Ltold him. "Galloo, Jr., then. There's no name for that little hunk of rock. You sure it's big enough for this bird?" "That's what they told me." RD had told me nothing of the sort. It was Stacy who had picked it. Galloo itself was a place of sheepherders and coyotes. Galloo, Jr., had no name before my pilot gave it one. It lies just east of the dotted line on the map that cuts through Lake Ontario to let the fish know whether they're Canadian or American. It was an ideal place for my rendezvous -- it was far enough away from Galloo for privacy and yet it was the only other land in the area. The pilot repeated his instructions about when to return -- apparently he was under orders not to ask questions and I volunteered nothing -- and left me there. It was a pleasant enough place to wait -- about as big as a ballfield, with a clump of stunted trees growing out of a small knoll at the east end that sheltered me from the bright morning sun. I had a good view of the oceanlike waters to the west. A few pleasure boats were out, far away. I saw nothing else in that direction. I wandered down to the western shore -- it had a flat, rocky bottom, a shelf that ran out under the clear water as far as I could see. It was good to be outdoors, virtually surrounded by water, after my months in the scrubland of Tug Hill. There was a light breeze. I savored the fresh, wet air in deep breaths as I made a quick circuit of the island, then went back to the knoll to wait in the shade. I had IF sat with my back against the highest tree and despite my excite, ment I had dozed. I woke out of a gray dream. The brightness of the sky and water failed to dispel the brief hightma in which not Stacy but a great dark fish had come to me out of the sea. The word to me back in Tug Hill that the Forerunner was to make a splashdown instead of a landing had revived an old unspoken dread. What if Stacy were not human? I didn't care about the rest of them -- they could be mollusks or eels or great crabs and probably RD would be just as happy. But Stacy would have to be human and my kind of human. Nothing halfway, either -- I couldn't accept a mermaid. But what if she were a fish? No one had seen the aliens yet -- still inside the Forerunner, they might be anything. Stacy had talked to fish -- she had told me so. Might she not also be a fish? Clouds came out of the west and covered the sun. The sky turned gray, like my dream. The breeze strengthened to a wind. It began to rain. The stunted trees offered little shelter. I pulled up the collar of my lighyacket and waited. Something was moving on the water to the west. I could barely see through the gloom. The pleasure craft had gone out of sight and what was coming didn't look like any of them.' It moved sluggishly, a black thing of ugly shape. If there had been anywhere to go I'd have run from it. It came on, straight toward my island; slowly. It couldn't be a boat -- it was too wide. But it could be a Vemban boat. Of course. But as it came closer I could see that it was no boat. It was a sea creature unknown on Earth. The rain passed to the east. The sun came out and the sudden brightness left no room for doubt. It was a dark gray monster from some alien sea, keeping its rendezvous with Walter Hurd, talker to the stars, dreamer, romantic idiot. It came closer. Heartsick, I turned away and looked back to the mainlandwhere my year of isolation had conjured up a goldenhaired space girl of terrestrial perfection. Back there was Tug Hill, graveyard of so many dreams. "Walt -- " A human voice was calling. Well, that only made it worse. We'd spoken in human English and now we'd have to again. This black fish spoke my language. I'd have to reply with cross-cultural courtesy, diplomatically masking my feelings as the historicity of the occasion demanded. I turned back to the sea. The black monster was in the shallows. But now I could see on its back what had been hidden by the distance, the dimness and the angle of its head-on approach; It was flat in the water now and on its back was a slender goldenhaired girl of terrestrial perfection. 'Walt!" she called again. "Stacy -- " I splashed out to meet my lady of the lake. H er. sea friend circled offshore while we talked. Once when a light plane flew over he dived out of sight. He wasn't so bad after I'd been introduced to him. Black and ugly he was -- but winsome. Stacy liked him. She had called him out of the depths and he had taxied her ashore. That was enough for me. Stacy and I talked for hours, sitting on the knoll, strolling the; perimeter of Galloo, Jr., wading out to tickle her friend on his underside. But as the sun began to move toward the west Stacy warned me of what would happen soon. As the sun Went down Stacy's radiant hair began to dull. Her glowing skin, once golden, faded. I thought I'd be prepared for it, that it wouldn't bother me. It was not just that she became pale. In a shocking transformation she turned sallow, then waxen, then blue-gray. I tried to hide my reaction but she wasn't fooled. "It bothers all of us," Stacy said, "so I can understand its effect on you.!' I protested that it didn't matter a Int, that she was my beautiful star girl from the world of a blue sun, but it was clear to both of us that my words were false. "Even we refuse to accept it," she said. "Nobody is content to be warm for part of the day and to shiver, blue with cold, the rest of the time. Just as we wear clothing for warmth and heat our houses, we use artificial color to hide our pallor. Like this." From a tiny pouch she shook out a yellow cloak and swirled it around her. It hid her body but accentuated the absence ofcolor in her face and hair. She had become fretful as her color drained. "I'm really ugly, you see," Stacy said, and drew up a cowl that masked her further. "Oh, no." I put out ahand to reassure her. She shrank from it. "No," I said. "You're beautiful." But I said it from memory and that must have been my tone. "Indoors it's simpler," she said, speaking from deep within her cowl. "We have light that equals the effect of the sun. But we can't be lit up all the time. There must be some darkness." "People don't see in the dark. The values are different then." "The spectrum is different here," Stacy said. "I could never be out with you in the early morning or the late afternoon! i'd be a fright. You'll have to give me up IF and find a girl who doesn't turn into a death's-head when the sun goes down." Damn it, she wasn't giving me time to adjust. I was sure the problem could be lived with, overcome, forgotten. But she was distraught -- nothing I said now counteracted the overtones of my first reaction. We walked along the sun-deprived shore, desolate. I protested that I'd known many girls but that none had appealed to me in any permanent way. I said there were special qualifies I'd sought but had never found until I heard her voice. A quality of mind that had made ail the difference. A mind that matched mine.' ' But Stacy was intractable. "Don't tell me you respect me for my mind. I can't believe you'd love an intellectual hag. If you were that strange I wouldn't want you. I have enough ego to want to be wanted for my face and my body -- maybe even more than for my mind. I'm a woman and women feel more than they think." She was talking too much. "I'm a man," I said, "but I also feel." I drew her toward me and held her in my arms. She stiffened, resisting for a moment, then relaxed. Her cowl fell back. I looked into her eyes, which were clear white and deep black, and saw no other part of her. She was soft in my rms but her eyes were wary as they looked into mine. I told her, "It's a custom of Earth to close your eyes when you're kiss." She closed them. I closed mine and kissed her. The universe exploded. Comets flashed... Stars pinwheeled. The moon of lovers beamed. I didn't care if Stacy were gray or green. In our kiss she was re as fire, golden as the sun, white-hot with promised passion. I opened my eyes. There was color in her face. "You're a peach!" I said. "What?" She looked at me, puzzled. Her eyes were no longer black and white -- they were blue with specks of gold. And her skin... "The color of a peach," I said. "Close your eyes." I kissed her. again, for a long time, then looked. She was glowing -- face, hair, throat. Who needed the noontime sun? We had our own source of energy, our own box of colors. I T'S only a treatment, of course, not a cure; We'll probably have New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks' to processi V  to supplement the kisses with sunlamps and Vitamin D. These may be useful adjuncts. But I prefer the inner fires that were lit in the lonely time of our journeying toward each other and which have upset her Vemban-based spectrum. There had never been such a romance as ours. She continued to glow as I admired her., I think we knew then, with the sun low over the lake and the R  D helicopter beating toward us from the mainland, that we'd find the ways to work it out. We kissed again and her glow lasted until long after we were airborne. There's probably a scientific explanation but science is not my field. As an English major I prefer the poetic. Shakespeare said: For now my love is thaw'd: which, like a waxen image 'gainst a fire, bears no impression of the thing it was. You know the rest. The captain of the Vemban craft, Stacy's father, offered to modify a multi-nation space vehicle for stardrive. Their ship and Earth's will make the journey to Vemba with mixed crews. It may take a year. Some Vembans will remain here to continue their studies of an Earth on the eve of the twenty-first century. They have a lot to catch up on. The Vembans hadn't journeyed to this planet since' the time of Shakespeare. Neither he nor 'any other rthman recorded the visit then but one of his patrons might have heard rumors of it. Didn't Queen Elizabeth say in # (she was addressing the Spanish ambassador): "The use of the sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong ta any people or pri-v vate persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession thereof." She might have been talking about space. There's a long list of volunteers who want to make the trip to Vemba next year. I'm high on that list. The Vemban captain, son of the woman whose voice I was the first Earthman to hear, has insist that I have priority. Furthermore, as his future son-in-law. I've been forgiven for witholding information about his mother's voice contact with RD's Tug Hill station. The Guggenheim people are for me to finish my work on Stephen Crane's-lost nianuscripts. The vice president for academic affairs has extended my leave of absence indefinitely. report. Life Magazine is outbidding Look for a first-person account. The university wants my papers. Anything else? Yes. After the wedding Stacy and I are going to take a year's lease on that farmhouse on the western slope of Tug Hill. I may never write another word;  IF Center when I ran into old Ashby in the hall. His face was sheetwhite as he lned against the wall. Ashby is one of the senior people in chemistry. I thought he might be having a heart attack. "Anything wrong?" Ashby looked at me silently, his eyes clouded with pain. He spoke with obvious effort. "Do you remember the name of that six-foot rabbit in the old play?" "Do you mean Harvey? He was an invisible rabbit." "Well this one's six feet long and visible," said Ashby. "I saw him in Duckworth's lab." As unobtrusively as I could I sniffed the air between us but could detect no scent of booze. Senility, of course, is odorless. Nevertheless, my curiousity was piqued and I made straightway for the chemistry building and Duckworth's lab. His door was locked but a dim glow seeped over the transom. I hesitated for a moment and then knocked. No answer. I knocked again and a shuffle of steps approached the door. It opened and Duckworth peered out, clearly annoyed. But his face cleared when he saw me and he waved at me in a friendly manner. "Come in," he said, "and be quiet. I'm in the middle of something." I followed on tiptoe, drawing on experience gained in the fourth year of kindergarten many years back. I had been in these hallowed surroundings before but I had never lost the sense of reverence at seeing Duckworth's complex maze of apparatus. The small room held a mass spectrometer, a countercurrent apparatus of many glass curves and Iwnds -- beyond these, Duckworth was gazing into microscope stand. I took a seat nearby and sat quietly. After a while Duckworth entered some penciled notes into a stained gray binder, sighed contentedly and turned to me. "I suppose you've run into that idiot, Ashby," he said. I was startled at his reading of my thoughts. I coughed in embarrassment. "I did see him in the corridor  outside the Copiputer room." "He's an ass," said Duckworth. "I showed him an amazing thing, a bead and wire model of a new complex molecule I've developed after years'of work. It is the basis for growing an entire living organism. Ashby stared at it for a while and then he said, 'Somebody's going to poke their eyes out on that wire.' " I smiled. "He mentioned something about a six-foot rabbit." Duckworth frowned. "Emma?" he said. "I suppose the secret's out. Come along and I'll show her to'you." IF He led me through a side corridor into his Animal Room. He opened the door in a gingerly manner, fumbling for the light switch, flicked it on. I almost leaped but of my skin. There, working its whiskers amiably was the biggest rabbit I'd ever seen. "What do you think of her?" said Duckworth. "She's big." "A slight miscalculation on my part," said Duckworth. "But look at those gorgeous blue eyes and the snow white fur." "She is a beauty," I admitted, "if you can get past her size." "Don't get hung up on her length," said Duckworth. "The important thing is -- I made her." The room reeled about me. I steadied myself on what I thought was Duckworth's shoulder until I realized I was holding on to the rabbit. I recoiled as if from an adder. "What do you mean, made her?" Duckworth sighed. "Ashby reacted the Mme way," he said. "I told you I had a new complex molecule from which I could grow a living organism. It was the logical next step from my macromolecule, which was so like cided to work out a way of formulating my own genetic coding and create something according to blueprint." "The rabbit was your first try?" "Emma was my fifth," said Duckworth. "But she's the first to develop into a viable creature." "Do you know what you've done?" I cried. "You've cracked the greatest secret of the Ages. Why haven't you announced it?" "Too many ramifications," said Duckworth. "Besides, I've got one Nobel Prize in chemistry. I don't think I could get another." and wiped my brow but the sweat popped out afresh. "My God," I said. "Wait until the ecclesiastical types hear what you've done." "That's why I've kept it quiet." A sudden thought struck me. I hesitated to voice it. "Is it now possible," I ventured tentatively, "to create some kind of human creature?" Duckworth stroked his beard calmly. "Odd that you should ask that," he said. "The preparation I was examining when you came in is just that." I shook my head violently. "You've gone much too far," I said. "Do you really think so?" said Duckworth. "It's at a very early and tricky stage of development right now. There are cells in the process of dividing. At the moment, they are in the blastocyst stage. I've got to supply a pseudo uterus for anchoring. It will be a couple of months before it will look human." "What color will the baby be?" I said. Duckworth shrugged. "I didn't give a thought to color," he said. "But it will eventually be a white female." "Ah ha," I said. "You didn't think about color but you chose white. That will open you to the charge of racism." Duckworth's eyes widened. "I suppose you're right," he said pensively. "Most of the world is nonwhite. I probably should have made her black." "Then you'd have been accused of exploitation, of appeasing the ghettos or just not giving a damn." "You can't win, can you?" "Stop the embryo from developing any further. Then present Emma to the world. The rabbit should be enough for starters." "You mean kill my embryo? I couldn't do that," said Duckworth. "It's alive." I righed: "Good God, Duckworth. People have had abortions before. There are circumstances which make it perfectly proper." "Not to me," said Duckworth. And his jaw set in a manner I'd seen before. It was clear that further argument was futile. We both sat silently' brooding over what had taken place, until Duckworth's innate optimism won. "It will all work out," he said. "Wait and see." "What about President Hinkle? Does he know what you've done?" "No one knows but Ashby and you," said Duckworth. "I underestimated Ashby's loquacity and your strong ethical code." "You'd better tell Hinkle before he gets it indirectly. And quickly." Duckworth scratched his head. "I hate like hell to do it," he said. "But I suppose you're right. I'll let him know today." I finally pursuaded Duckworth that it wouldn't do to tie a bright pink ribbon about the rabbit's neck and set a basket of colored eggs at her side. He muttered something about my lack of humor and went to the phone to dial the president's office. I can still see the look on Hinkle's face when he came into the lab. Right behind him was his secretary, Myrna, and I was in position to catch her as she fell backward. President Hinkle kept muttering, "God damn -- " as Duckworth patiently described what he had done. He also avoided looking at the rabbit, although every now and then he sneaked a side glance at her. I patted Myrna' s wrists and rubbed her temples until she came to. l Duckworth had paused and I IF assumed he was about to spring his piece de resistance about the human embryo, so I slowly backed out of the room and beat it the hell out of the chemistry building. I went home, turned on my television set and watched the basketball game of the week. It was wild, exciting, with some of the finest defensive play I'd ever seen. But I was waiting for something else and it came. During overtime, a small line of news flashes suddenly broke at the bottom of the picture. The name of Duckworth appeared, "secret of life discovered -- " and a lengthy quote from President Hinkle. I switched off the set and decided to make amends for my cowardice and get back to the side of my friend. When I arrived at the campus an enormous mob was there, held back by the biggest array of state troopers I'd ever seen. For a moment I was totally perplexed. We already had a black-run department of African Culture, two hundred black students and four courses in Swahili. Then I realized that the TV flashes had done the job. Despite my faculty card I could make no headway through the lines. Then I saw a guilty looking chap ease out from under the barricades, gingerly balancing a small V I package. He was neatly dressed and shaven but I recognized Duckworth at once. He clapped his hand over my mouth before I could shout his name and we stumbled off together. When we had fled some distance from the crowd I pried his fingers from my mouth. "Why are we running.away?" "Have you got a better idea?" he snarled. "There were twenty television cameras turned on me and a deadly stream of the most idiotic questions. Besides, I didn't want them to find out about the embryo." He pointed to the package. "Is it in there?" Duckworth nodded. "Didn't you tell Hinkle about her?" I said. ' . His shoulders sagged. "I couldn't," said Duckworth. "I decided the only way to handle this problem was to take the embryo with me, let it develop to full maturity and then publish the information in a scientific journal." "And the rabbit?" "Hinkle will be good to her," said Duckworth. "Some day when Emma is older she'll understand why I had to abandon her." "It's a mistake, Duckworth," I said. "Eating in diners, sneaking chemicals from the corner drug store, holing up in the High Sierras. It won't work." Duckworth chewed on his lower lip. "There is another way," he said pensively. "I could have Laura Lockman look after the embryo at her apartment. How about that?" "Laura Lockman, your graduate student? Does she know about the human embryo?" "Not officially," said Duckworth. "But I think she's on to what I've been doing. I'm sure she'd help and we'd only require a minimum of equipment at her place." And that's where we went. L aura was delighted to help. From time to time she'd slip me a little bla?k-and-white photograph to look at. "Notice," she said, "it's now about one-quarter inch long. That tiny tube is the heart aiid it's beating strongly." Five weeks later she pointed out the head, the beginning of fingernails, the tiny, closed eyelids. The project was fascinating and chilling. Month by month our. human developed, from embryo to fetus, fetus to an about-to-be-born baby. The most difficult part, I gathered, was the special membranous amnion that Duckworth devised out of a selectively permeable plastic material. On the academic front, Duckworth was constantly plagued by visitors, invitations to.television interviews and correspondence from the National Institute of Health, asking him to gather his ideas and techniques into a monograph on the creation of life. "It's hopeless," said Duckworth to me, one morning. "Between all this harassment, sneaking over to Laura's apartment and maintaining my research here I'm exhausted. And tonight I'm featured speaker at the Alumni Dinner." "I wouldn't miss you for the world," I said. "Especially since a contingent of Fundamentalist Churchwomen is promising to disrupt the proceedings." Duckworth said wistfully, his face brightening for the first time in weeks, "God, I hope they do." But they didn't. The dinner proceeded mechahically along its predestined dull path. President Hinkle in a flowery introduction outlined his own career and capped it with his penetrating discovery of Duckworth teaching chemistry and coaching basketball at a small girls' college in the Berkshires. As Duckworth arose, spreading his spidery fingers through the wrinkled notes of his speech, an usher came quickly down the aisle and pressed a note into his hand. He read it, turned livid beneath his newly restored beard and bolted from the dais. I clutched at his tuxedo as he went by. "Duckworth -- what's happened." "It's Laura, I must go to her," he muttered. "The baby is being born -- " President Hinkle had also jumped to his feet and waddled IF over to me. He looked puzzled. "Where's he going," he whispered hoarsely. "He's disrupting the dinner." "It's the baby," I said without thinking. "He's got to go to Laura Lockman at once." President Hinkle stared at me, thunderstruck. "Baby?" he cried. "Duckworth, Laura? I can't believe it. The scandal could destroy the University." And he fell heavily into a nearby seat without giving its occupant a chance to get out from under. The dinner ended in confusion -- indeed, to this day there remain those who insist that Duckworth and Laura produced the infant through rather standard procedures. But the academic world knew better. The excitement and adulation that followed the publicizing of Duckworth's rabbit was nothing coippared to what erupted on the announcement that a girl baby had been produced by artificial means. Denunciations quadrupled and the raging moral issues underlying artifical creation were debated across every breakfast table. Duckworth seemed impervious to all of this furor. He called nie aside one morning to show me three six-by-eight free photos that had come with the diaper service. "It's amazing, Duckworth," I said. "You've kept your balance and avoided a display of hubris. Why sometimes even I feel overwhelmed by it all." "I can't afford to be," said Duckworth. "I've a new mouth to feed now. And besides, a certain high government official is meeting with me this afternoon. It's all very hushhush but I refused to come unless you were present. After I'd ignored the reasons detailing why you can't get a security clearance, they reluctantly agreed. Will you come?" "I'm flattered," I said. "But what help can I offer?" "I have an idea of what they want," said Duckworth," and if I'm right I'll need your moral support." the preliminaries of the meeting. Mr. Hubbard of the Defense Department was surrounded by a half-dozen of his brightest aides. On our side were President Hinkle, his secretary Myrna, Duckworth and myself. Mr. Hubbard, in glowing terms, began to outline a vast grant program involving Duckworth heading a new Chemical Life Research Building. Duckworth looked at me, eyebrows raised. I shrugged. "What do you get in retup?" Mr. Hubbard smiled. "Not me," he said. "Uncle Sam. He's wise enough not to tell Emmett Duckworth what to do. But we do have one little specific project in mind..." He paused, shuffled his papers, cleared his throat and went on. "Dr. Duckworth, the government would like you to produce a test run of fifty male babies for us." We were all thunderstruck. "Fifty babies?" said Duckworth. "But why?" Mr. Hubbard looked around the room. "There are a considerable number of us present," he said. "Could this be just between you and me?" President Hinkle arose, swaying like a seal, his pride clearly injured. "I'm ready to go," he said, his voice breaking. Hubbard's six aides rose quickly. "He stays," said Duckworth, pointing at me. Hubbard hesitated, frowned, then nodded. In short order the three of us were alone. "Now," said Hubbard, "in my portfolio is a fully detailed scenario. I've been working on it since the announcement about your sixfoot rabbit. I knew that eventually you'd have to produce a human child." He glanced down at his papers. "It's taken me many months of arduous work." "No doubt," said Duckworth dryly. "Briefly," aid Hubbard, "it's this. For years, our nation has been frustrated and held back in its military policy by the fear of deaths among our military personnel. Some observers feel that one of our Presidents was driven from office because of casualty lists and the resulting resistance to the draft. Every mother whose son may be sent into battle becomes a potential propagandist against the government. But she'd be quite placid if she knew that her own sons would never have to go to war." "Meaning?" said Duckworth. "If we had a group of youngsters without family ties, real and yet not real, belonging to no one but Uncle Sam, there would be no protests, sit-ins or demonstrations if they died in battle. It would be the ultimate solution of our military manpower problem at minimal cost." I sucked in my breath. Duckworth looked at me and placed his hand on my shoulder. "As I understand you," he said severely, "you want to use my methods to man an Army." "Also a Navy and Air Force," said Hubbard. "It should be child's play for you -- and no pun intended. You might even give us youngsters predesigned with particular aptitudes for the military somal types with aggressive tendencies?" Duckworth stood up and I joined him. "The answer is no," he said. IF "Forget the idea. I'll never coop' erate with you." "Bravo, Duckworth," I murmured... Hubbard ignored me. He looked at Duckworth and sighed. "I was afraid you might react this way," he said. "I know you think you're taking a moral stand but you're wrong. Do you want to condemn real youngsters to death?" "I want no youngsters to die," said Duckworth. Hubbard gathered his papers together. "You realize," he said, "that we can proceed without you. I took the precaution before this meeting of impounding your papers and notebooks under the National Security Act. Somewhere we'll find competent, patriotic chemists who can build on your notes." "I don't doubt that, you'll find biochemists to help you," said Duckworth. "But it will take quite a while before you'll get what you want." Hubbard smiled. "Perhaps -- we'll see." Duckworth leaned forward. "Could you use an entire army of women?" Hubbard frowned. "Why women?" "Because as yet. I've been unable to produce a male," said Duckworth, "a problem in synthesizing a perfect Y chromosome. I haven't the foggiest notion of how to solve it." "You're bluffing." "Ask your chemists," said Duckworth. "And while they spend ten years digging up the answer, maybe I can scuttle your plan." A fter, as we walked under the fragrant pines that bordered the campus, I congratulated Duckworth on his stand. little girl unreal," he said. "But you were right. It really is a lulu of a mess I've gotten into. But science doesn't produce evil consequences, only men do." And for the rest of th afternoon, Duckworth and I pooled our intellects and went through the list of four hundred girl's names without finding a single one we could agree upon.  r tafl I bo The human and the alien had nothing in common -- but each other I there, finally, it returns. But now, for this moment, the planet is nodding its flat top out toward the curdled milk-smear in which Earth -- so far away -- floats like a bit of blue-green mold. The four huge moons are sliding along the equator toward the far side of Merthe -- taking with them the light and warmth of a dwarf sun which for past hundreds of years has receded slowly, inexorably, into the distant sky. Already the luminescent fur that caps the pole is that drifts down, mingling into the red haze. In a month, two months, this blue light will be all that remains. Under its strange pervasive quality the psychology of the people will begin to change, children will emerge -- and then, silently, the mbons will appear one by one on the horizon, like vast orange bubbles coming up out of lakes. Light -- the red haze -- will return. Though for them, for now, none of this matters. They are together on the patio, sitting at the hammered-silver table. Quiet. Light gleams in the copper tiles and wind wanders in the grass nearby, resting on leaves, sighing in shades. They are drinking a dark, heavy fluid from turquoise cups and sucking at fruits that, opened, fill the hand with rainbows. And she -- she of the hair to match the tiles through the gentle red haze, the ' frail pink bones showing under the skin -- she sits biting at a thumbnail and gathering the torn fruit peelings into a pile by her cup. Her features sharp, her hand on her knee. Opening her mouth to show the solid curved bands of bone where teeth might be. "My Parent has sent a note." The hand moves away from her mouth, leaving a tiny crescent of orange behind, on the lower rim of her lipless mouth. "They thought  "No, Rhillanda." The answer she knew would come. Her fingers abandon the crescent to the peelings. She turns her face out away from the Home toward the trees. They are straight and tall, white and slender like a man's arm, the round leaves borne on tiny branches spaced regularly from the ground up, going out from the trunk like zigzags of lightning. "Through swinging hair he catches a glimpse of the prongs of her ear. "When, Jon. When, if not now?" "Soon, Rhillanda. I've told you before. I've tried to explain." For a moment he looks toward the trees himself, as though he sees the ship there behind them, miles away. "I must return with the others."  She utters a clicking sound, the sound of her bony tongue striking the hard palate. One of the phatic formulas common to her people, it could mean anything, almost anything. But here it meant: Why? "The man called Perez-sky,-the one I call Captain, is not my Parent. The note will do no good," he miles away, months from here. A government. A state which was once many separate countries." She is watching the trees. Or the sky. She puts the rest of her fruit on the small pile of peelings. "Country -- " she almost whispers and he moves closer to her. "A country is like a Home. You have told me things before, so many times." "And you've never understood them, never believed them. I've tried.". The turquoise tints of her skin show strangely against the IF thin, red-hazed sky, making her for a moment seem to him unreal -- distant, then near. They speak in their confusion of Basic, her own language, body gesture, and he feels in the .words their real distance, their essential isolation, one from the other. "They are not easy things to understand. But I must ' return to ask permission of my people." "A Man controls his own fate, Jon. Women and Others are the Duty of their Parent. A Man belongs to himself, decides for himself." "Only here, Rhillanda." His hand takes hers beside the peelings. Soft and warm like a bird's breast, it fits perfectly within his palm. "I am my own but I have Duty to my Parent." Their hands are brown and green, like separate clays that have come together. "Others can have no Duty, only obedience. You say you are a Man you as an Other -- " "But my Parent is far away. And to him I remain an Other in many ways." " -- only Others lie," she finishes and takes away her hand. She hides it in her lap. "Only Others are bound to the Parent. So a note was sent, an offer made, it was ignored. It is past understanding. Your words are as empty as shells." She gestures toward the sky, orange nails flashing -- then the hand drops back to its lap. Of a sudden she's a beggar, crippled by not understanding. Quietly then: "Is it the price? My Parent will raise it. I can ask him, he'll do as I wish." No... "Then what am I to believe? Tell me -- what?" . "Just what I have said. I know how difficult it is for you. But things arc different, ways are different. I'll come back. And then there will be time to explain, to understand." He reaches out and toutes the: pile she has made and he damns their mongrel tongue, that holds back so much more than it lets pass. "Time. Believe that -- that there will be time." T hey sit together, looking out over the broad lands surrounding the Home. His eyes catch the glint of another Home far away on a hill, these strange slender trees posted around it, thin limbs barbed like wire. A bird emerges from one of the trees nearby, its mirrorlike wings flashing light across the patio floor. "Rhillanda," he says and turns to find her watching him. "Soon." Returning had been in his mind: that he would be back. But somehow again the words obscure the thought. She sees beneath them. "Today?" He nods. "We have to check out the ship before we Lift." As well this way as another. How else would he have said it -- begun to explain the reason he came this one last time. And because he can think of nothing else he repeats himself: "Soon." And she takes the word. Turns it, examines it -- holding it off from her and looking. "Soon -- " Her fingers flush and covey in her hair. "Soon I will have time -- you asked me to believe in time? I will have time then to remember all you've told us. About your world, your people and their ways, the cities you speak of. Time to think of all the things you've told me alone -- " "Two years. No more." " -- and soon I will be Age. Your refusal -- " her voice lifts, pushing his denial away -- "has taken Honor from my Parent. His Duty is past and he'll not hold for bids." One hand climbs to the table and lies there. It is a quality of hers, he realizes now, that her hands are forever moving as though of their own accord -- taking, bringing, arguing with themselves, arranging objects or peering over the edge of tables. "Though there will be a bidder, early and high -- " And now her eyes go away to something in the distance. "The Markets pay well," she says. "There are people who think beauty as important as utility and they'll take a woman for that, even Bred. They'll pay the Markets well; my Parent will have his Honor." "But I will be back." "You will be back." "And soon." Her hand lifts the silver pot. Dark liquid pours into h er cup. "The universe, Jon. The worlds. All that." A gesture toward the bright thin sky and this red haze blushing in the air. "And this is us, the two of us." She holds up a small rock of sugar, drops it into the steaming cup. Liquid splashes up against the side and runs back into the rest. Ripples consume themselves. The world is again dark, again indomnitable. "Hurry," she says, "so little time." The sugar is slowly dissolving... He stands and sunlight slides across his shoulders, making shadows on the ground of Merthe. "Those are not the words of your Parent," he says. "Or of your people." "No, they are not. Perhaps, after all, I have learned something in hearing your stories." She smiles. He notices the absence of lips, the bands of bone. "Goodbye, Jon." "Until I come back. To you. And soon." A turning, a going away. Her words come down the path behind him. "A Man controls his life, Jon. I can wait but where I wait is the Duty of others. I can do nothing more than has been already done." Her voice clicks as his feet plod. Partway into the trees he stops. IF If only there were a simpler thing to say, something to cross the spaces. Like Orpheus he looks back. She is standing by the table with her hand on the chair. Her Parent has come out to the patio from his study. He is speaking softly to her, reaching out to take her hand. Her head is down. Rhillanday Jon says to the trees around him. And again: Rhillanda -- to the wind which follows him away from that still place, that girl -- to the wind that follows him back to his ship, wings at his heels, the prince of thieves, whispering. A nd the ship took anger, took Jury, . took fire to itself, shoving the ground away, A nd Merthe was below, was behind, was calling, was gone, II back to his Earth -- the sprouting cinder, the whirling place. Took him. back to a waiting world. Back through corridors of formalities, to forms and paper and offense all stacked like concrete blocks. Back to a room with long bare tables made like fists -- where officials harrumphed, officials inquired, officials demanded. It seemed to him they all smoked pipes, all snorted softly. Back to the months like the tables, long -- like the tables, clenched. To the waiting. Two weeks in a large blue room that smelled of wood and old paper. The faces behind the tables changing subtly with the hours. He sat in the center. The world moved around him. They put him in a smaller room, green, witir aluminum bars in the eye of the door and across the windows lacing the floor with outside light, making squares in which he could pace like a chesspiece. A bed, a sink, a table and paper. Anything he asked for. They would come and take him to other rooms. He would answer questions. They would bring him back here. -- The subject will please identify himself. -- Jon Butler, Citizen L-I#D. Academy, '#, anthropology. Service rating, D. -- Linguist, late aboard Union ship Vesper? -- Yes. -- Last port? -- Merthe. -- Will the subject please speak more distinctly? -- Merthe. At other times they brought their cameras and took only his image to those other rooms, where busy men sat for a moment, listened, rushed oh. Faces floated past the door, looked in, spoke, moved on. Footsteps followed people down the corridors and stopped when the people stood still to listen. He asked about the room the bars -- a formality. Heasiced, When" Soon... O NE OF his guards, a sulky Negro, grinned and told him the whole world loved a lover. -- Your statement is that you spent (rustle of papers) ten months on Merthe, and that during the last three of those months you went among the inhabitants and made yourself known to them, held communication with them and exchanged gifts. Is this common practice. Citizen Butler? -- No, Honor. I was the first. They had watched our base, seen the ships -- shuttiers -- drop and lift. And talked to Reps, of course. But I was the first, really. -- It is not common practice? -- No. -- No? And why not. Citizen Butler, why not? -- Merthe is A-unclassified. -- Which means? -- "No contact pending further study." -- You have just quoted from a book. Will you name that book for the Court, Citizen Butler? -- "Regulations of Union Expansion". -- "No contact, pending further study." That applies, does it not, both to personal and cultural contact? -- Yes. Only what is absolutely essential is permitted. -- Yet you told these people of Earth, the Union. You even went so far as to exchange gifts, thereby introducing cultural anomalies? -- Yes. -- Then I must insist that this be set in the transcript: That the subject knew and was fully aware that he acted in direct opposition to Union regulations. -- And I must insist that my assignment was to analyze the Merthe language, this being essential to further study. An assignment which, if the Court pleases, is extremely difficult to accomplish through portholes and energy fences. Also, there were particular problems with the language. Recorders have a rather limited vocabulary. -- Another outburst such as that and we will be moved to hold you in comtempt of IF Court, Citizen Butler. Simply answer the inquiries put to you. -- I apologize. Honor. -- Strike the reply. T he rooms to which he was taken for questioning grew smaller. He began to guess the passing time by the size of therooms. And this happened once: the guard's face came to the door, asked. What are you doing? Singing. Sounded more like moaning. Thought you were sick. Never heard singing like that before. No. You haven't. The face went away. The footsteps went away. He burst into laughter. Someone had just said "social intercourse" The last word had gotten the accent. The rooms wre smaller -- the people larger, more important. Time passed, a great deal of time. He lost sense -- completely -- of how much time had passed and this became an obsession for him. He sat remembering Merthe. -- Merthe, then, is a slave world? -- I didn't say that. Honor. -- Governed by anarchy? -- There is no government. -- There are no communities. no social groups? -- The Family lives together. That's the only thing. -- But the Family sells its -- Only when they are Age and if no new Home has bn created for them. -- I ask the Court to consider that reply carefully. Who supervises these Homes? -- The Parent. -- Which is? -- A father. Like that, anyhow. -- What of the mothers? Have they no say? -- I don't know. There was a woman in Rhillanda's Home. But she always said Parent, singular. -- There is, then, no agency, no control? -- The Homes are self-sustaining, virtually hermetic. There is a system of morality, confusing to us, difficult to talk about. Honor, Duty... -- Who does the work that must . be done, the work that a government must be established to perform? -- I don't know. -- Please speak louder. -- I don't know. It Is difficult... -- And do you know. Citizen Butler, why the adults isolate themselves the way they do? And also why they dissolve the social order? -- Perhaps because they are afraid of what can happen when men live together. -- I see. Is that what you were told? -- No, a guess. It is impossible -- we can't hope to understand a culture as different as theirs, not right away. They couldn't make me understand, though they tried again and again. The language --  -- We have already heard your testimony concerning the language. Citizen Butler. Do you know why their women are degraded so? -- They're not. They are lov and valued. You are' trying to sway the lady Honors. -- He refuses to cooperate, may the Court notice. I submit that the subject tries to confuse the Court with these contradictory stories. Cameras lumbered in and fol-, lowed their cables back out. Each day he was brought large sacks of mail. Most of the letters were addressed simply: Jon "Butler, Councilhome. They were from ministers, mothers, public figures, perverts, schoolchildren, artists and teachers. It seemed to him that never before had he seen the sympathy and savagery of the human heart so starkly portrayed. His guards were pleasant. The young Negro's name was Berkell, and he had been born on Mars -- in one of the religious colonies there, of one of the increasingly rare pure Negro strains. Each year he applied to the Academy and each year he was refused admission. And time passed. -- Will you identify this for the Court? -- It is a gift from Rillanda. -- A gift from the girl. And is...? -- A portrait of her, a painting done by her Parent. It was taken from me. -- I ask the Court to accept this as evidence and request that it be circulated among the Honors. -- (Gasps and whispers.) T here was a break in the trees near Rhillanda's Home, a sort of chamber where the only sound was water running down a slope soniewhere deep in the woods. There birds -- like mirrors set out on the limbs and staring silently across the spaces at one another -- filled the trees. One day on the patio she had jumped up, taken his hand and brought him there. He had listened to her singing, lying on his back in the dry moss. Her voice, low and soft, combined in his mind forever with the sound of IF the water far off among the trees. -- Citizen Butler, you have told us something of the ' girl's language. You have mentioned, among other things, that there exists in the language a certain (ruffling papers) "gender confusion". Have you any explanation for this? -- No. -- Nor for the "fuzziness of verbs" to which you also called our attention? Nor the elaborate, recomplicated adjectives?" -- No. I have only the vaguest hold on the ' Merthe language, actually. I was forced to work from memory rather than understanding, hoping that perception would eventually show roads to conception. -- And each -- ah -- Home has its own language? -- Dialect, but not really that. And I don't know -- I  visited only one of , the Homes, f made my statement in full faith that it would turn out to be true from what I do know -- and feel -- about the language. It's terribly complicated, a much more sophisticated structure than our own. -- Then our picture of Merthe is a kind of land of Babel, everyone speaking his own language? In these -- ah -- emphatic sounds you mention. -- Phatic. No, I believe it's a process that occurs spontaeousiy in the individual Home. A kind of amplification of interpersonal expression. It comes of being . so close, of knowing one another so well. Certain grammatical connections and implications can be dropped, they're superfluous. The phatic responses carry no actual meaning. They are more like direction signals. They can mean many different things, according to how they're used. -- A return to the origins of language? -- In a way, perhaps. The process certainly began as a simplification. But on Merthe the phonemes have reduplicated, developed akind of endogeny, become almost an auxiliary language. #t is full of nuance, extremely sophisticated. You can't see the relations anymore but there must have been some at one time -- derivatives, the signals which begin trains of speechthought. The nuances are virtually impenetrable to the outsider. -- Vm afraid. Citizen Butler, that the Court hasn't your training in these matters. This means little to us. Simply put, we can say that these queer people walk about grunting like apes and --  -- No! -- But he could not be heard above the laughter. Once, when they were together in the clearing, Rhillanda had suddenly stopped singing and looked behind her. A girl was standing there among the trees, watching. He, too, looked around and she turned and fled away through the trees towatd a Home on the hill, a mile or so from Rhillanda'sown. -- Ah impenetrable language. A gender confusion. Anti-social, atavistic, introverted patterns. Callous treatment of women. This is a rather frightening picture you've given us. Citizen Butler. -- But we can't --  -- Thank you. Citizen. If it please the Court I should now like to call to witness. O NE day, early in the morning, he was taken to another room, the smallest yet. The guards who had brought him here (Berkell was not among them, having at last been taken into the Academy) had been in uniform. The room was brown, trimmed in gold, the walls lined with matched massive volumes. The place was lit indirectly. The light, soft and suffusing, reminded him strangely ofthe clearing near Rhillanda's Home. A huge steel desk occupied most of the floor space. There was nothing on the desk. Four black robes glistened in the light and a set of spectacles flashed calmly. He had never seen glasses before. The man wearing them was the one who spoke to him.  -- I'm Dr. Graybar, comparative physiology.' Did you know the girl's race is hermaphroditic? -- (Deep breath.) I thought that might be the fact. From what I was able to understand of what they tried to explain to me. It explains several tendencies in the language; also, perhaps it accounts in part for the Homes. -- Perhaps so. I've been studying the picture they took from you and attempting to learn what little I can from Union Expansion Records. Someday maybe they will find out the proper way to survey a new planet. Maybe. (Looked to see if it was IF taken down -- it was.) Good -- Citizen Butler, I believe .that the women of Merthe 'are hybirds -- throwbacks, or sports. Freemartins. Barren and sterile. Had you guessed that? . -- No. I knew we couldn't breed. I wasn't able to understand the rest. -- One of the Honors: Pleise enter in the records that the subject wilfullywithheld evidence from these Courts. -- I didn't. I catj't see that it mattered. -- Another Honor: Everything matters to the law. Citizen. You should fealize, we must have the entire truth. A point such as this could in the end be most important. Perhaps crucial. -- You're fully aware of what I'm telling you? -- Yes, Dr. Graybar. -- An# you still want permission? -- Yes -- yes. -- Thank you. That will be all for now. -- How long have I? -- An Honor: That will be all. Citizen Butler. Three days later they gave him his freedoih. It came as a gift, wrapped in cautious words. He opened it. took the gift, left the wrappings in the'room. He found himself outside in sunlight, being escorted past a group of staring, curious people. As his guards pushed a way for him through the crowd he caught sight of Berkell standing away from the others, smiling, his hand raised in a silent greeting and farewell. And Earth shrugged him off her shoulders -- he went out from Earth as from a bow. Hurled upward, forward, outward like a rock and Merthe was calling again. Ill back. It was always that. When he walked the bleaching sands of Coldor, or between the blushing quartz hillocks of gooseflesh Albay-# -- when on Farthay his feet kicked out jewels before him. Throughall the pleading winds of Xantharie, telling and crying with a hundred voices, a hundred hands. Under the pastel rains of Chyth; the acid snows that make the island of New Corfu a floating sponge; through the seas of Fford thick with weeds. Among the many-bodied people of Gaffrt and the sad women of Llyrch with their exorcised breats and carved bellies. Always. To get her back, take her back. And to find her he ripped the stars apart, tore wide the years between them, screamed in the skull of space. Three years had passed. The stars told him so and he shouted back. You lie. He screamed at the stars: Stand still. He told them: I'll put out your eyes. But three years had passed. From her Parent's study, where in the blue light a new child moved quietly among the patio furniture, he went directly to the Markets. She was sold the first day, they told him, for a fine price, and Llyrch was the name given. He went to Llyrch, went down among the Nonconformists and their shanty churches. Gone. Andfor weeks he wandered, at last finding a minor official, a small man hurt further into smallness, who would tell him, would tell him simply because superiors wouldn't. Goliath was what the man spoke. Goliath was where he went. Gone. He wandered. On Farthay he gathered gems from his hands -- and on Plath gave them all for a ship, Httle caring that behind him as he left, a dozen ships sped toward Farthay with empty holds. It was with this small ship he ripped the stars apart, pushed down the walls between worlds. Off Plath he accelerated. His ship went like a stake into the black eye, the Sambo sky, immeasurable space. He heard of a girl on Lilth, where men have long legs and the houses are built on stilts off the ground. A strange girl with copper hair and clicks in her speech -- a strange girl. He went there, the girl was jgone. Was she Rhillanda? He folloyt'ed what traces he found. He sought her on Garth, in the caves of Perchmont. When at last he came up out of the caves, light struck his eyes like fists and for days he was blind -- nearly blind -- and fevers raged in his chest from the damp air of the caves. had been before and which he had named, he found them singing her songs. The girl who had brought the songs?No they could not remember, there were so very many singers -- wait! Alsfort. Could she have gone there? He jumped. No, not Alsfort, no longer. Nor Plethga.Nor Ghlint. He wondered, wandered. Deep space opened like doors. He raged along the bands of night. Nor Mersey. IF Nor Larne. He searched for her among the bodies and wasting faces of the people of Hikuu, where poison had come up out of the rocks to spoil the waters and this world was dying. For once there was joy in his heart at finding her gone. He strayed among the superstitious tribes that peopled VoFtura and was thought a god for his hair and size. Yes, Lord, there had been a ship at the great port many months ago. It had come down out of the black for repairs and flown away again into the darkness. He left. He followed her. And behind' him the tribes began to await his return. Again he lost the trail. Again, the thread tangled and vanished out among the whirling galaxies. Insouciance. Six weeks of it, brimful, sitting in a chamber of the hotel Grand Daphne. In losing the trail he had lost something else as well -- the strength to go on. He sat in his shell chair. Rainbow hues spilled down the wall. His eyes rattled hollowly, idly, uncaring from face to face. An old woman without teeth or clothes, an astrologer, came and made his chart. The stars are friendly to no man, she said, grinning to show a mouth full of brown and pink flesh, though to you less than to others. I see a dark star and a bright star, between which you must pass. And water, which may be real or emblematic. That is all. A dark star, a bright star, water. You must find their meaning for yourself -- there meaning . exists' within you. And she went away. He sat in his chamber and it came to him that the bright star mant going on -- the dark star, surrender. There, in the lightclustered, color-cluttered room, he passed between them and chose. And the water -- space like an endless sea. Or many seas. He sailed to #em. T he waterworld of Tigris -- his small boat ferried him down the waters that lapped up against the prow, swelled under it, ran off in wings to either side. He drifted past the floating islands of thickpacked leaves, under the quick shade of lonely slick trees. He came to one of the fortress islands, arms upraised. He asked his questions. His boat wound its way back. And later, in the flannel seas of space, he found the thread wrapped around the world of Euphis, where the sky forever frowns and the clouds hang on the horizon like black fists and you can tell the falling rain in the plunge of thermometers. On Euphis he mixed fury" with finesse and clawed his way back into space, following the thread, spilling stars behind him; Going on. outside Darwin. He passed the warning shell and rockets erupted from the ground below and chased him away, darting and skimming into the blackness. crowds of Mensch and for two hours followed a woman who at last turned and smiled invitingly and was no Rhillanda. nothing. Some ruin, some wreckage and crablike inhabitants scuttling sideways in the cluttered sand under a white sun. begged aid was sent away. houses that acned spoiled Vega, Vega the victim of another's war, and a girl there told him of one who had been taken away to the magistrates at Kil-hing. Taken for her beauty alone, though beauty was a thing that could tire. prophets with their bears met him at the shipcourt and said. No, go on. She is not here. Stories came from Catmount, stories of slaves and a new order. He arrived there in the daze, the craze, the dazzle and whirl of revolution, resolution. Bands roamed the streets, chanting slogans at one another, poking at the cadaver of their city as though they tried to understand why, what had happened. Children wandered in the ruins, bearing stickguns and wearing armbands. Sentries challenged his passage, women whimpered for food, shelter, kindness. And the new order, they told him, was abolitionist -- the slaves were sent away. Guns screamed and crowds shouted. But could not call him back. a field beyond the burrows, where a duel had just been fought. The grass crackled under his feet as he walked across it toward the bodies. Behind the burrows the trees rippled in the wind like green foil. One body lay swollen and still at the toe mark. The other -- the challenger and winner -- had staggered away and lay in the folds of a vast cabbagelike plant. Stinger spent, the body was dying, twitching regularly, the motion going out in slow waves along the plant's leaves. And gasping at the doors of death, the twitches becoming a shudder that gradually mounted in intensity and claimed the whole body, this man who had kept his Honor intact told Jon of a new colony in the Upper Places. There were slaves there, many were women. There was one... Jon ripped the stinger from its case of bone and plunged it into the man's stopped heart, leaving IF the other lying there in dishonor. His small ship surged out like a sea, out like a sun. IV found her at last -- in the slave camps of the Brocks. The Places streamed by -- a thousand-mile plume of white-lit bodies. A fall -- and the Places were replaced by a stream of farms. White suns blazed at his head like matches freshly struck. He found her in Thalk. Months ago a hundred larvae the size of large dogs had scaled the trees and barnacled themselves to high branches. There, in their crisp shells, they had slept and grown, transforming into near-adults that weeks later came down out of the trees and moved into the camps to take their places, leaving behind the bony shell, the Husk. Now, matured, they were going out again from the camps -- to retrieve their Husks apd bring them back as a sign of completed manhood and to save them from the soul-preyers, the scavengers who were also abroad in the land now. He went to the offices at Thalk, built of five leaves from the uthru plant. You have a girl. We have many girls. So he began again. Youhaveagirl. He told them of her face, her hair, the fragile bones beneath her skin. To them he showed the gold which, according to custom, he had taken from the dying man on Highker. Light came through the small window and filled his hands It is yours, it is all I have... H e stood near a stream, watching the Thalkian come toward him. Its head was down as it pushed its way through the soft, needle-thin, purple grass, the Husk lashed to its back. t was half his height, with slender bent legs like twigs, a ridged ovate body and a tiny immobile head. It looked up from yards away and saw him standing there. It turned to run and then thought better -- it. had taken the Honors of manhood. "Go away, scavenger," it said, blinking one of its eyelids, like the fingernail of a new-born child. "My soul will not be your prey. You will not have my Husk. jGo away. Or I shall kill you." It held its club, thicker than a man's leg, out in front of it. It crouched, preparing to fight, to swing and turn and keep the frail Husk away from the preyer. "No, hold your weapon. Your soul is not what I seek. Nor your Honor." Jon showed his palms upraised. Their shadows reached out and touched on the ground. "I know the trickery of the Thorynx." The Thalkian drew up straight, taller, and looked steadily up at him. "Years ago the men of my camp kept the huth-bird. The huth-bird is too large to move. We block off its throat aiid when it bewitches the prey into its mouth children run and remove the prey and bring it to the camps, where we all eat well." It pointed the club toward him. "The Thorynx is like this huthbird. You snare men in words, tangle them in coils of flattery and illusion. Then you take what you want, more than you need -- and you leave the rest to rot. You take our Husks, our souls, from us. You grow strong on them while we wither and die. Our camps are full with tales of your trickery."It shook the club. "You do not kill, for that would take Honor and you have none. Your deceptions are worse than honest death." "No, not mine. I am not of this world." "Another of your lies. You take an unfamiliar shape, turning a man's desire for knowledge against him." " AM an Earthman' "Earthman." Its eyelids flicked several times and the Thalkian looked away into the distance, trying to recall a thing it had heard. It came to him and the eyes came back: "The men of Earth, they chase after dreams." "No. A woman." He described her. The Thalkian listened, then pointed with its club up along the stream. "The rath fields. If the woman is what you really seek you will find her there. The raths are ripe and must be picked before they break off the stems and turn on young on the trees." He had turned to go but Thalkian spoke after him: "You are the only Earthman I have known. Good luck with your dream, whatever you call it." He turned back. "And you with yours." The Thalkian stood watching, club alert, until he was out of sight. Then it crossed the stream and sprinted toward its camp, shadows rushing behind it. And in the white light she came down from the hill, slow and quiet as a falling leaf. The suns were in her eyes and her shadows trailed back over the hill behind her. She was pale, the color of lemons bleached by the sun. Her copper hair was gone. Her bare head was scarred and dark. She limped. And somewhere out there worlds were spinning, weaving lives and faces to a patchwork fabric. Children were born. GenIF eratibns were dying. Stars were exploding, suns colliding, systems collapsing and bursting, swelling and shrinking. But for now, for here, for them -- only these two were moving together. He saw the sores along her ribs, like fists that had beat against doors until the knuckles burst and blood erupted. Her long nails, once bitten, were now torn and several were missing. Blood and dirt had spread a brown paste across them. There were marks on her fingers -- tiny parallel slits where raths had twisted around on the stem and slashed to fight at the picking. And on her back, bending her to ,a stoop, was a shield emblazoned with the Honor-colors of her lover, the Thalkian who soon would return and ceremonially offer his Husk, binding their two souls together, taking her out of the slave fields into his camp for her beauty and service. They came together at the foot of the hill. He, the wanderer -- and she. The waiter. "I came," "he said. I screamed your name in a thousand worlds. I made mountains and crossed them.  ripped the skies apart and kicked suns out of my way and stepstoned on stars. I laughed at space, I gathered the stars in a net of need. I carved a hundred worlds to ydur likeness with my Jets. But he said: "I came -- " and the shield fell back to the hard rath ground. He took her hand and together through the white light they went over hills and along the stream -- they trampled with boots and bare feet the violet grasses of Swansdown Plein. His ship slammed like a fist into the sky and together they fled with their scars (some that showed) and their freedoms (some that didn't). B ack to Merthe. And now it's evening... Across the pale red lake the sky fills with ribbons of ochre, maroon, and pearl. In a gentle wind the ribbons twirl and blend together, settling into the lake, pulling night down around them. In the last minutes a bird emerges from the trees and glides along the corridors of wind, flashing color across the copper tiles. Small things come up on the lake's edge and begin to throb softly as the twilight deepens to cobalt. Hearts and doors. Their two hearts had done business like doors and now for all time they shut them, closed themselves inside.' Outside, Sirens beckoned. Furies called and went unheard. They are sitting together on the patio. She has limped to bring him food and sits beside him, singing quietly over the nightsounds. Years have passed,' wind passing ( Continued on page # ) c riNC The Magnificent Ones used People Catchers to keep dog's best friend from destroying his kind! T rembling with anger, HoUps, Keith whimpered, "I want hart drew back a sinewy arm my Kind Master." and let it remain poised. Then he In a fury, Hobart seized him by lashed out and backhanded Keith the hair. He winced. The Pack with gnarled knuckles. Leader was giant of a man. Curly Stud Keith, out of the Gyp Loured beard and bushy mustache ise Clark, fell to the dirt. framed flaring lips. His blue eyes Arms folded over a broad hairy burned with fierce intensity. Such chest, the Pack Leader towered ruggedness, the prisoner susabove him. "All right, stud -- " He pected, had been born of crude spat the word. "Tell me some existence Outside. To think that more about life in your Magnifiuntil only yester-light, Keith had cent Metropolis." imagined Outside to be but a legWiping blood from his lacerated end, an imaginary place mentioned by gyps when they wanted to frighten their young. "On your feet!" Hobart hauled him from the dirt. "So you want to go back to your Master? You want that life of ease, all of your needs taken care of by those damn Spheres who have grabbed our Earth?" Earth? What, Keith wondered, was that? "This world used to belong to humans. Now we have to hide in it like rats -- unless our ancestors happened to be spineless enough to become pets -- " World? Pets? Hobart hustled Keith to the compound gate, then toppled him and pinned him with a foot while manipulating the latch. Keith himself was no weakling. His gyp, while teaching him to talk, had also insisted that he exercise rather than rely on the exertion-saring forces , of Radiant City. But Keith was shorter by half a head than his captor. And Keith's beard, straight and blond, suggested a temperament nothing at all like Hobart's fiery one. Oh, if only they were in the City of Force now, instead of this horrible Outride! Then he woud show his tormentor, thought Keith. He would make the glittering carpet of energy material rise up and pound Hobart in the face until he choked on his own blood! Seized' once more by beard and mane, Keith was hurled through the gate. He stumbled, fell to his hands and knees. His head hung between splayed arms. T he lithe form of a young bitch, partly wrapped in animal hides as were Hobart and everyone else out here, ran from between the two nearest shacks. "Must it be this way, Chris?" she asked the Leader. "You don't want to kill him, do you?" "I'm determined to bring out the guts in him," Hobart said. "If he has any." Keith was jostled down the main pinkway -- no, not pinkway; it certainly wasn't pink, and it couldn't plane you along -- the. main "street" of the village. "But it's unfair," the bitch pleaded, following. "He shouldn't have been brought out of the City this soon." Keith regarded her with scorn. For it was she -- Laura, out of Gyp Bernice Tallman -- who had escaped through her force-mesh fenc yesterlight to free him from his own enclosure. That was when the stray pack had come yowling down the pinkway to capture him. Now, as Hobart prodded him through the village, Keith was sickened by the squalor. The dirt on which the village sat. Shabby shacks shaped like squat cones and made up of slender rods bound at the top and smeared with clay. Hundreds of villagers who, if not actually filthy, seemed so in their crude animal hides. Keith wore nothing. Personal people were not allowed to. "I didn't know you were going to be this rough on him," Laura said. Hobart tightened his grip on Keith's beard. "Well, there's a IF reason. In four days that boatload of lodestones and magnets is due downriver from 'Tucky. The moonshiners made tons of magnets back in the hills. When the boat gets here, we attack !" She gasped. "That soon? But we've got so many preparations to make!" Keith stumbled along, bewildered. "Lodestones? Magnets?. Atr tack the City? He had to find some way to get back and tell the Masters about all this! But how could he? You couldn't actually talk with Them. Oh, They coitld understand your general feelings. But you couldn't tell Them even such a simple thing as: I'm ready to mate. Please find me a nice bitch. "Preparations, hell," Hobart snorted. "Just as soon as we get our weapons, we'll wipe out that cancer on the other side of the forest." He pointed and his arm trembled. Through a gap in the trees Keith saw the distant proud glow of Radiant City, bedimming even the Orb of All Orbs high up in the Blue Dome. He could discern only the very tops of the magnificent force structures. Lofty yellow spires of pulsating energy. Massive cylinders of emerald enchantment. Opalescent pyramids and iridescent ovoids that spun as they balanced on end, casting out merry showers of sparks and dazzling sprays of nonsubstance. How he longed to return to Kind Master and all the other Spheres who took such good care of their personal people. T he Pack Leader clubbed Keith across the back with a forearm and sent him staggering ahead. Hobart followed, shoving him first in this direction, then that, until finally they were nearing the end of the village. "But if we attack that soon," Laura protested, "we won't have time to bring all the people out of the City. Or even find out how many can be humanized." "That's why everything hinges on this miserable creature." Hobart planted a foot against Keith's buttocks and propelled himforward again -- outside of the village, towards a fenced-off area enclosing several elongated mounds, each with a "stick" standing upright at one end and another "stick" crossing the first near its top. "I don't understand," the bitch said. "I've led stray packs into the City for the past ten years," Hobart explain. "We've brought out hundreds of animalized humans, either lured them away or carried them off kicking and screaming for their Spheres." "Years" was a minor enigma to Keith. What confounded him most was this further evidence that the strays Outside were not only plotting evil against the Masters but were also stealing away Their personal people. "So?" said Laura. "So -- this creature before us is the most spineless, most subservient, most dehumanized animal we've run across in all of that time. This is the ultimate test cast. If we can break him down, we'll know that everybody in that City, and therefore in other Cities of Force, can be reclaimed as a human being." Keith was astonished. Why, only yesterlight he had imagined that his one Magnificent Metropolis filled all existence everywhere. He stole a glance at the trailing bitch, then looked away in disgust. For several hot-colds he had been avidly aware of her presence in his moundhood. Many were the times he had watched her, even shouted at her, as she exercised within the force-mesh enclosure behind her Master's mound. And each time she had shouted back or waved to him, he had torn his fingernails trying to breach the crisscross energy strands of his fence. But all the while she had apparently been only a plant, a spy, eager to tell Hobart who should be captured and taken Outside next. Such a beautiful bitch he had neVer seen before. Rich brown hair. Eyes as dazzling blue as the energy material of the most lustrous mpund. But what treachery! What evil purpose against the Spheres! And he had liked her better when she had been properly nude rather than covered with animal hides. L aura looked ahead at the area of elongated dirt mounds and crossed sticks. "You're not going to give him the graveyard shock -- not this soon?" The pack leader twisted his captive's arm into a hammerlock. Keith cried out against the bonebending pain. "He's going to get every shock treatment in the book," Hobart swore. "But why? He'll come around once everything's explained," Laura promised. "Actually he leads a miserable existence but just doesn't realize it. The Spherelets in his mound -- " Hobart turned the bitch around and shoved her back toward the village. "We've got only four days." The Pack Leader released Keith's arm and catapulted him forward, half burying his chest and head in one of the mounds. "Know what's under you?" Hobart demanded. "That's a human 'being. Know what he's doing there? He's dead -- rotting away. One of your Masters killed him." Keith did not even listen to the nonsense as he spat dirt from his mouth. His arm swept slowly along the curving surface of the mound until his fingers encountered the crossed sticks. "This is a graveyard," Hobart roared. "It's full of dead people. Most were murdered by vicious bolts hurled by your Glorious Globes! But you wouldn't know what a graveyard is, would you? You wouldn't know about dead people or murder, either. Because the Spheres are too tidy. They don't leave carcasses lying around on their pinkways." The Leader must be a madstud, Keith reflected. When Hobart spoke he made no sense. This IF entire pack of strays was mostly madstuds and madbitches. In desperation, he gripped the upright member of the crossed sticks. And it moved loosely in the dirt. "You're not listening," Hobart shouted, jerking Keith to his feet. Keith grinned through lacerated lips. Perliaps he couldn't use his thoughts, as he did with the force stuff of the City, to make the dirt heave up and strike the Leader. But he could use the crossed sticks! Lunging, he brought them crashing down on Hobart's head. He watched the Leadei fall. Then he charged off, heading for est. II E nthralled by the magnificent City of Force lying just ahead, Keith broke out of the forest and paused. He stared in renewed wonder at the luminescent panorama. Emerald cylinders and flashing orange pyramids that stabbed high into the Blue Dome. Sheets of crackling energy, scintillating with every color, imaginable, fluttering between blunt orchid cubes and slender yellow cones. Pure nonsubstance streamers that rose, wavering, from shimmering purple obelisks, thin red pylons, gaily rotating ovoids. Surrounding the entire City was the can't-see-through wall that prevented any of the personal people from even guessing that nonCity existed independent of City. Keith drew up before the great barrier. Even as he wondered whether it would let him in, the wall gaped open and a projection of crimson force stuff flicked out like a tongue to slide under his feet. It retracted, with him, into the City. The projection melted back into the carpet of pink radiance that lay everywhere. Keith fell to his knees in thanksgiving for his deliverance from the horrible village, from its uncouth madstuds and madbitches. The majestic force structures of City Central were still distant. But closer, much closer, were many rows of glittering blue mounds. He was near one of the outlying moundhoods. From this perspective he could see that he Was not too far from where he was kept. Free now, delivered from the indecency of Outside, he lifted his face to the Blue Dome -- only, it was Gray now; since the Orb of All Orbs was hidden behind clouds. He let out an exuberant cry. Blunt projections rose from the radiant pink carpet all around him, developing awkward mouths that pantomimed his shout of triumph.  Finally he sat upon the coral radiance and thought-formed a large wave against his back. It rolled forward, sweeping him before its crest. He ordered up slow propulsion at first, until he adjusted his balance. Then he by intense concentration spurred on the wave toward the nearest pinkway. For now Keith was not more than a stray. He had to reach Kind Master before he ran afoul of the People Catcher. were soon blurring by on either side of the pinkway. Only fine coordination of balance and thought impulses kept him from sliding back over the crest of his wave or being hurled into one of the force-mesh fences bordering the travel strip. He manag a sharp turn to the right, entering another pinkway. Soon he became aware of the other personal people, all safe and contented behind their force-mesh enclosures. If only he could reach his mound without incident! A Sphere approached from ahead, floating just above the pinkway. Kind Master? It could be, for Keith was in his own moundhood now. Respectfully, he planed well toward the edge of the strip as the Magnificent Being drifted by. No, that was not Kind Master. The silvery coloration differed and none of the memory-images that flicked in looping spirals along the Sphere's surface was familiar. Passing the mound of Laura's Master, Keith had only a contemptuous scowl for the empty enclosure of sapphire force-netting that curved up and over the Sphere's residence and swept all around it. Indeed, the Radiant Being who lived here was much better off with a personal person -- if His personal person happened to be so treacherous a bitch. Presently Keith dismissed the propulsive wave and slid to a halt just outside his own enclosure. Mock arms reared from the radiant carpet and lifted him to his feet. Behind his heels twin wavelets formed and moved him toward the fence. Provoked, he stom upon the elevations until the glistening pink carpet stretched once again into unbroken levelness. Of luxuries such as short-distance planing Keith wouldhave none -- a disposition instilled in him by his dear old gyp. At the fence, he inspected the force-mesh through which he had squeezed yesterUght. But all the crisscross strands of energy were back in place. The sapphire netting was one of those forms of nonsubstance that would notr spond to human thought, yet Laura had breached it easily enough in order to let him out. How? He cupp his hands about his mouth. "Kind Master! Let me in! The pack is going to hurt our beautiful City of Force!" Of course, the Magnificent Beings could not hear people. But Kind Master might sense the desperation behind his shouts and let him inmound. "Kind Master! Kind Master!" J"What's all the yapping about?" "Let's have some quiet!" Irate voices rose in protest from enclosures up and down the pinkway. no IF . A hole opened in the shimmering blue energy-substance of the next mound and out bounded a many-times-around female and one of her young: Gyp Emma and Bitchette Margo. "Your Master's outmound," the gyp revealed. She was considerably older than Keith. Although in fairly good shape, she had hair beginning to take on the striped-silver appearance of a meditating Sphere. Lines were forming in her face. Keith hoped that when it was timefor him to mate. Kind Master would search farther than nextmound. Gyp Emma gripped her forcemesh fence. "Where have you been all tolight and yesterlight?" "Outside. There really is an Outside! Horrible. No force stuff. Filled with impersonal people who steal us away and -- " He snapped his mouth shut. No sense telling her what he had learned... She would blabber it throughout the moundhood and none of the personal people would even believe her. "Gyppy, he's hurt." Bitchette Margo had spotted the effects of Hobart's backhands. "His lips are swollen. His -- " "Hush," Emma ordered, dark eyes narrowed and alarmed. Thin arms shot up from the radiant carpet and grew tender lingers that explored his puffed lips. He shov the tendrils aside and they sank back into the energy layer, "k'm all right," he said, staring up at the Dome -- dark now, though you could hardly notice the darkness against the in the City of Force. "What happens when people get too hurt,  gyppy?" Margo asked, in the fashion of curious youngsters, everywhere. "What a stupid question," Emma scolded. "I did my duty. I taught you ways, and whys. I wouldn't be surprised if Bulgy Ball -- " she nodded toward their mound -- "finds you a Master of your own pretty soon. Yet you come out with stupid questions like that." "Not stupid at all," Keith said, wishing Kind Master would return. "I often wonder about that myself. Seems there ought to be a limit to . how hurt you can get. Or how sick. Or how old." "Stud Murdock, across the pinkway, is plenty old," Margo reminded him. "But how old is too old? And what happens when you get there?" He could only shake his head. As if to mock his ignorance, three blank heads popp out of the coruscating energy-layer and swung from side'to side. "Maybe They, take you to another part of the City, to a Master who likes too-old people." T WO Majestic Beings were passing. Gliding just above the roseate stardust ribbon. They swept along at a breathless pace, silvering the coral radiance beneath Them with Their own warm glow. From the other direction came a single Magnificent One, carrying a budding Spherelet on His downspeed side. The Sphere flow had started slacking off shortly after light-dark. But, now that dark-dark could be seen upon the Donfc above the vividly luminous City, traffic was beginning to pick up again. "There's Stud Murdock now!" Margo pointed. And from the lament force stuff beneath her, several skinny arms sprang up to level stiff index fingers at the mound across the pinlmay. Egbert Murdock, out of Gyp Clara Murdock, was stumbling around in his enclosure, groping. "Poor stud gets blinder every day," observed Emma. "Lame, too." Egbert's limp was pronounced. His flesh seemed to have fled for some happier place, leaving behind only bone and wrinkled skin. And, even from across the pinkway, his frequent coughing could be heard. "He's old, Keith, isn't he?" Margo inquired. "Pretty old, huh?" "You know," Emma said, "there's a rumor about Murdock. He -- " "I'-ve heard." Keith tried to head her off. But she was determined to exhume the scandal. "They say Gyp Murdock Wasn't properly put to stud. HerMaster hadn't planned anything at all. She -- " "Yes, I know." Keith stemmed her flow of words as he watched compliant force-stuff arms rise in Egbert's yard to catch him whenever he stumbled. But proud old stud that hewas, he had enough self-reliance left to slap them away. "Keith," said Margo, "you think maybe Stud Murdock is too old?" "Hush!" Emma reproved. "As I was saying. Gyp Murdock wasn't a gyp at all. Breeding wasn't prearranged. There was this stray stud and -- and -- oh, poor Egbert!" B ut the old fellow, Keith reflected, had carri his humiliation well over all these hotcolds; So well that no one dared talk about his questionable origin while he was around. "Look," exclaimed Bitchette Margo, while glistening pink hands rose again to point for her. "There's a hole in. his mesh. He's coming out!" Indeed, Stud Murdock was upon the pinkway now, crossing. "Watch out, Egbert!" Emma' screamed. The Sphere missed him by the length of his beard. He spun twice before force-stuff hands shot up to steady him. After a fit of coughing, he came the rest of the way seated on the foreslope of a radiant wave. "That was a close one, Egbert," Keith sympathized. "Yep -- might have -- got -- hurt," the old stud said between coughs. Trembling, he ordered up an energy-substance bench from the force stuff underfoot. Keith shared it with him, but found that he had to supply the continuous thought impulses to keep it from withering out of shape. IF 'How did that hole get in your mesh, Stud Murdock?' asked, Margo hanging on the fence. "It was -- cough -- usi there. I think -- cough cough -- Gentle Globe made it. Maybe He wants me to get out and have -- coughcough -- a little fun." Emma laughed. "What kind of fun could you have now?" "None. Tm worried." "About what?" "About Gentle Globe." Egbert's 'breathing sounded like the hissing of the sparks that occasionally showered from the mound ceilings. "He keeps me by Him a lot now. And He's always a deep blue. I've never seen a sadder Sphere" "What's He sad about?" "Wish r knew. Maybe I could do something to make Him turn orange and green with happiness again." Keith was first to feel the tingling, bristling sensation that seemed to take root and grow, to die out and grow again, deep within his thoughts. "Stud Murdock," Margo shouted through her fence. "Gentle Globe's calling you. Don't you feel Him?" "Eh?" Keith stared across the pink- way. Sure enough. The old stud's' Master was drifting impatiently back and forth behind the energymesh enclosure, hurling thought commands at Egbert. Obediently, Murdock started across the ribbon of coral stardust -- and promptly was hit by a speeding Sphere. He lay on the pinkway for a while, then gathered himself up and, holding his chest, rode an ill-shaped wave back to his enclosure. Much later, after Emma and Margo had been called inmound ,and the pale Lesser Orb was hanging low in its Dark Dome, Keith lost hope that his Master would return before next lightlight. Accumulated exhaustion drove him to the edge of sleep as he sat against the outside of his impenetrable fence. He shielded his eyes against the dazling crimson luminosity of the underlying energy layer, the sparkling sapphire radiance of the force-mesh fepces, the mounds all around him, the magnificent coruscations of City Central's great geometric forcestuff edifices. Thirsty, still dirty from his forced stay Outside, he concentrate upon the pink radiance, ordering up a huge bowl. He thought upon it an extreme coldness. In moments the film of moisture condensing on its inner surface formed  drops and ran tainer. From cupped hands he drank his fill, then splashed the remainder upon his face, arms, chest, feet. Feeling cleaner now, he allowed the bowl to sink back into the levelness of the luminous carpet. Then he thought-excavated a trench in the radiance and lay in it. He let the pink nonsubstance flow back over him until only a small part of his face remained exposed. For, while he slept tmd awaited Kind Master's return, he must make certain that he would become the prey of neither Hobart's returning strays nor the People Catcher. Ill B abbling voices awoke Keith. He stared through the gap in his force-stuff covering. It was light-light. And the Magnificent Metropolis was never more lustrously alive than now -- during Food-Collecting Time. Showers of sparks sprayed from the countless energy-material structures -- mounds and moundplexes -- pyramids and pylons and spires -- cones, cyUnders and great iridescent ovoids. From the multidinous surfaces also, silveiy ribbons reached out, wavering gracefully, toward the Orb on High. The dazzling streamers were greedily sucking up its warm energy substance. Golden droplets formed along the ribbons, slid down, merged into larger pellets, then sank into the luminous surfaces of the structures: foodstuff to feed the Masters and their obedient personal people and even replenish the forms of the City. Keith heard Margo exclaim nextmound, "I saw it all! These two Spheres came and took him off down the pinkway on a sitdown wave." "How did he look?" "Not so good. Moaned and held his chest. Gyppy, what's going to happen to Stud Murdock, huh?" "Hush, Margo. Egbert has just become too old, I guess. Maybe it's like Keith says -- They find new Masters for too-old people somewhere else in the City." Then Keith could sense Bulgy Ball calling Emma and Margo back inmound. Which was just as well. He didn't feel like talking with bitches or anyone else. He concentrated on how he would try to tell Kind Master about the treacherous strays Outside-of-theCity. But other voices suddenly assailed his ears. "Here we go!" "Around the bend!" "Spur your wave. Hank. Faster." "Watch out, dmn stinkin' Spheres. We'll run you down -- " "Yip-ee! Look at all those locked-up suckers." Dismayed, Keith shrank within the covered trench he had thought-molded for himself. Hobart and his strays! They were not wearing their "animal hides" now -- so the Spheres would not guess they were from Outside-of-the-City... But already the personal people in many enclosures were rising to the vocal challenge of the pack: "Scram... Get lost..." "Leave us alone. We got us a .nice moundhood." "Look for your bitches somewhere else!" "I hope the People Catcher gets you -- all of you." "Go back Outside!" IF Keith was about to add his lusty voice to the customary outcries. Then he remembered that Outside-of-the-City was not just a foul word, but a real and terrible place. So he concentrated on preventing any imitation mouths from forming in the radiant carpet and betraying his hiding place. He could tell from the nearness and loudness of the shouted barrage that the pack had stopped in front of his hWng place. With intense concentration, so that he would not accidentally manipulate any part of the energy layer in his defense and thus give away his position, he began counting baclward from a hundred. "Well," said Hobart, "he's not here, unless he's inmound." "Why don't , we just forget about him?" queri another stray. "I want him," Hobart growled. "Laura will keep an eye on his mound while we go make our other two pickups." The strays continued on their way, returning insult for insult at full lungpower. "Lick your Master's belly!" . "Locked-up suckers..." "Break out. Learn what it means to be free!" "Fetch, boy. Good boy. Fetch, and you get a force-food ball!" Only when the pack was well away did Keith emerge. Down the pinlway, the shouting strays were being swept toward City Central on frothing stand-up waves. A glance in the other direction revealed Bitch Laura, wearing no "hide" now, staring at him from within her old enclosure. Should he force her to reveal what foul new conspiracy was hatching? Or wait here for Kind Master and try to tell Him what was going on? Or follow Hobart and learn what the pack was up to? Deciding, he ordered up a swift sit-down wave. As it propelled him along the pinkway in pursuit of the strays, he thoughtmolded another wave immediately in front of him. Riding in the trough between the two crests, he could pk over the forward one yet remain hidden behind it. their force-stuff conveyences and went loping ahead in broad, ranging strides. Others still rode. "On and on!" "Charge!" "Join the fun, you miserable locked-up people!" "Rise! We'll help you escape Hobart, riding the foremost wave, was shouting more loudly than any of them as the wind whipped his red hair and beard backward. The pinkway wound through an area of great moundplexes, some piled many layers high. Keith remained well behind the pack, not only to spy from a safe distance but also to savor the spectacle of the magnificent structures. Never before had he viewed them from such close range... Radiant Spheres were drifting in and out of them at all levels. The ribbon of pink stardust climbed sharply, curving around one of the marvelous clusters of mounds. Here it had sprouted many minor coral ram that struck off and disappeared among recesses in the towering azure 'plex. The main pinkway itself continued on toward the lofty energy-material structures of City Central. Ahead, the shouting resumed. Three of the strays had found a slow-moving Sphere. Two were sprinting in front of Him and the third planed alongside the Master, feet planted on the foreslope of a small, swift wave. They were all shouting: "Damn bully-ball! Put 'em up!"  "Ya-a-a-h! Your poppa was oblate." "Stop and fight -- " "Come on, boys. We got 'im on the run!" Hardly had Hobart's voice risen above .the general yelping with "Don't lay it on too thick!" when the Sphere flushed His surface with a menacing yellow hue and cast a vicious bolt. The stud on His right caught the sizzling streak in the chest and collapsed, charred over most of his body. Resilvering, the Sphere swept on while the pack gathered around the stricken stud. Curious, Keith brought his sitdown and hide-behind waves almost to a halt but continued to think-direct them forward slowly, peering over the advance one. Four Magnificent Masters passed him, but none seemed to pay any attention to the pack assembled around the charred, still stud. Too charred?Too still? As though in outright revolt, Keith's hide-behind wave abruptly lost its form and disintegrated into scores of long projections that coiled back around his arms and legs and held him rigidly. Only then did Hobart, still quite a few wavelengths ahead, turn and laugh. "Thought it was you all along," the Leader boasted. "Hold him, boys. But watch out for his backlash." Mortified, Keith thoughtmolded a huge cudgel out of the radiant carpet immediately in front of Hobart. But even as it drew back and swung at the Leader's head, a much thicker club reared up to parry the blow. Then one of the stringy projections tightened around Keith's neck and he could no longer even think of attack. "Watkins, Adler, LeBlanc," Hobart called out. "Concentrate on freezing all the force stuff around here, except what I want to use." The Leader came over and hauled Keith erect while the restraining nqnsubstance projections became limp and slid off his body. Gasping for breath, he ordered up a dozen forms of attack against the red-bearded Hobart and his strays. Stout projections to bludgeon them. Yawning pits beneath their feet. Strands of force stuff to bind them. But none of his assault devices materialized. Once IF again , he was a captive of the uncouth Hobart from Outside. And none of the passing Spheres seem even concerned. Gripping Keith's beard, Hobart led him over to the charred stray. "Filthy lightning-hurling fiend!" The Leader swore. He jerked Keith's head forward. "This, you ignorant animal, is a dead man! Take a good look!" "Why doesn't he get up?" Kejth asked nervously. Hobart only scowl. "Is he too still?" "Yeah, he's too still -- dead ' still!" "What's 'dead' still?" Hobart unleashed the back of his hand and it stung Keith across the mouth. "You poor, stupid, degenerate specimen," the Leader said. The other studs stood with bowed heads. A projection of the pinkway folded the too-still one's hands across his seared chest, then he began sinkijig slowly into the energy layer. Glistening force stuff flowed over and around him, restoring the pinkway's unbroken surface. i pie Catcher!" The strays picked up Hobart's cry and backed away toward City Central on reverse stand-up waves. Tinged with the rich violet of annoyance aiid the deep russet of determination, the dread Sphere came charging around the curve. Trailing behind andabove Him, in the most convenient position for casting, was His tightly knit sapphire mesh. The Leader snatched Keith's arm as though determined not to lose his captive. He thoughtmolded a propulsive swell, large enough to accommodate bbth of them. More afraid of the People Catcher than the pack, Keith went along without resistance. Carrying double, however, their escape wave was a bit slower than those hurling the other studs to the edge of the elevated pinkway. The People Catcher's net was already swinging in widening circles. As the fleeing strays let their waves wash them over the edge of the ribbonway, the People Catcher was upon Keith and Hobart. His net flared. Horrified as he watched the green mesh descending upon them, Keith wrested free of Hobart's grip, made his part of the mutual wave hurl him forward along the pihkway. Looking back, he saw the Leader being launched over the side by a slingshot of force stuff -- just in time to escape a second throw of the cast net. Reprieved by the fearsome Sphere's pursuit of Hobart, Keith propelled himself City Centralward on a towering swell of coral stardust. There were many Spheres riding the pinkway now, all indifferent to the drama of the People Catcher and the escaping strays. In this heavier traffic Keith had to concentrate on guiding his sitdown wave. The horror of the toocharred, too-still stray remained fresh in his mind although he could comprehend nothing of what had happened. Keith's wave bore him between two Spheres and around a looping curve of the ribbon as it ascended another moundplex. He hazarded a second reaiward look. Aglow with the russet of determination, the People Catcher was coming along at full speed. In the same glance, from around the inside of the curve, Keith had been able to see whatr had happened to Hobart and the other strays. They had thouhtmanipulat the edge of the pinkway into long, dangling streamers and were shinning down them intothe lower recesses of Radiant City. The People Catcher was gaining on Keith. He demanded more spi of hisave. He weaved in and out of the transient Spheres. Dipping sharply from its disying height, the ribbon carried him in- to the core of City Central, its great, glistening geometric shapes rising majestically above him. He swept past coruscating spires, beautiful emerald cylinders that rotated ceaselessly, tapering pyramids displaying manycolored splotches upon their restless surfaces, iridescent ovoids spinning gaily upon their ends. An orange-tinted cube, twirling as it balanced atop a fluorescing tower, loosed a fountain of sparks -- happy sparks that danced and gamboled as they splashed down upon lesser edifices. Oh, the beauty of City Central! The shimmering translucence of all the majestic forms, translucence that betrayed the presence inside of many Magnificent Spheres! But who could ever guess what they were doing? And overhead were awesome displays of flaming curtains and whirling halos and dasling beams, rippling ribbons of pure silver and tenuous, luminous veils of opalescent energy. All so bright that they bedimmed even the Orb of All Orbs. Keith drank in the breathtaking display. Here he was, realizing his fervent hope: access to City Central! Deeply he resented the stud named Hobart who would wrest him from all of this and take him to that hellish Outside. Yet he was grateful, too. If it had not been for Hobart's strays he would not now be cruising through this paradise of splendor. Swish! The People Catcher's net landed ' on the ribbonway, barely missing Keith. 'Another cast and he would be captured. Remembering how Hobart and the pack had escaped, Keith summoned a final measure of will power and had his wave catapult him over the side of the pinkway. As he fell he ordered the primrose stardust of the ribbon's edge to extend a streamer.to him. But he was plunging faster than the projection was stretching down! The People Catcher's net, however, descended faster still. IV away from his gyp a pre-stud sat on his haunches and wailed. In another enclosure across the IF pinkaisle, a towheaded bitch tossed her weight against the sapphire mesh and screamed to be let out of the pound. A forlorn bitchette kept murmuring, "O, Dear Radiant Roundness, come and get me!" In the next pen a surly stud paced back and forth, cursing incessantlyKeith turned over on his side and remolded the coral forcestuff slab on which he had lain all dark-dark. But no matter how much softness he thoujght into the lambent energy material he could find no comfort against his bewilderment. Miserable, he rose and stood shuddering. "Had it roughj hey?" That from the stud in the next pen. "I want my Kind Master," Keith whined. "Don't worry. He'll come -- if He is kind." "How do you know?"  "I've been through this. Fifth time around." The impounded stud was past his prime as a breeder. His hair and beard were streaked with the gray hue of a tired Sphere. His shoulders slumped. He had too much belly. "What if my Master doesn't come?" The stud shrugged. "They'll take you down the aisle there and put you in that black compartment and -- " "Yes?" "And make yob too still." "Too hurt?" "Oh, I don't know about that. But definitely too still." "Too -- 'dead'?" That was the word Hobart had used, wasn't it? "How's that?" "Forget it." Keith shook his head. Everything was so confusing. As he tried to sort his thoughts a sound caught his ear. A familiar sound. Was it possible? There it went again. "Cough-cough -- " That confused him still more. Why was Egbert Murdock here? Murdock had not been caught by the People Catcher. "Hey, Egbert," Keith shouted. "How you feeling tolight?" Murdock only clutched his ribs and coughed. At the end of the pinkaisle the mesh parted and in glided the People Catcher' With Him was Murdock's Gentle Globe! It was easy to recognize Him. He was blue all over and bright thoughtimages of Murdock could be seen flowing across His surface. They opened Egbert's mesh and caused a gentle wave to sweep him out and down the aisle. He sat with arms folded, smiling slightly as though in anticipation of a pleasant surprise, as the wave plan him into the black-walled enclosure. Gentle Globe and the People Catcher waited for a time. Then the black wall opened and Egbert, lying down, was swept out and propelled by a wave-form along the pinkaisle and out of the pound. He did not seem too hurt any longer. But after having become too caught, he now appeared too still, Keith reflected. Gentle Globe followed, radiating a deeper blue than Keith had ever seen. It was all so puzzling. So confusing. The People Catcher glided back to Keith, breached the sapphire mesh of his pen. When a wave began pushing him in the direction of the black-walled place, he suddenly felt that he ought to be afraid of an enclosure that made people too still. But abruptly the wave sank back into the levelness of the pinkaisle and the People Catcher glazed over with silver-gray indifference. And when Keith looked down the aisle, there was Kind Master drifting his way, brightly orangegreen and anxious to see His personal person again. Keith hurled himself upon the Magnificent One and with outstretched arms fondled His undersurface. And scores of hands raised themselves out of the aisle to pet the Grand Sphere,' helping Keith express his gratitude. Ohi how desperately he had wanted to be reunited with Kind Master! He would never run afoul of the People Catcher again! He would never let Hobart take him Out side-of-the-City ! Outside? Of course. The villagers -- theif conspiracy! "Kind Master!" Keith leaped up and down, waving his arms. "There's a bunch of strays trying to hurt our beautiful City! They're stealing Your personal people! They live Outside-of-the-City and  Around and around the towering Globe he went, while the radiant carpet recoiled to hurl him to heights almost' level with the Master's upper pole. And dozens of hand's rose from the force-stuff layer to help him plead for comprehension froth the Splendid Being. But the Majestic One only displayed the orange-green of contentment in splotches all over His surface. It was no use. There was noway to make Him understand A slim projection of nonsubstance snaked up out of the energy layer and looped around Keith's neck. Then, as Kind Master drifted down the pinkaisle, the leash followed, remaining attached to the coral carpet at all points along the way and drawing Keith along with it. P erhaps as an expression of the Kind One's joy at having him back, Keith was allowed inmound that dark-dark. While the Radiant Being dozed comfortably in His fluorescing niche, Keith kept a wary eye on the two Spherelets, Innocent Demon and Little Imp. He had forgotten about them. Occasionally Demon was assuming a mischievous cinnamon hue, drifting over to him, then shading off into.the yellow coloration of bolt-hurling readiness. But each time the tinge was flushed off His surface by the sable tint of frustration when He perceived that Keith was not about to budge from his sanctuary almost directly beneath the Master's lustrous rotundity. Innocent's bolts hurt, and Keith did not intend to abIF sorb any more of them than he had to. Throughout most of the darkdark Imp, too, drifted back and forth along the sparkling azure wall of the mound. He kept flashing in a succession of hues -- from the violet of annoyance into His boiling yellow bolt-hurling sheen. Then, flushed with power He dare not use so close to the Parent grayed over in slumber. Imp would drain off all that fierce energy into the coral otfpet. Immediately he would register the bluish green of disappointment, follow by the total nonradiance of blighted hope and once again the violet of annoyance to start the cycle all over again. About middark-dark, sparking time came and Keith rose, fully alert, in order to miss none of the beauty of this incomprehensible happening. Along the vaulted turquoise ceiling, vivid splotches of scarlet light chased one another in a dance interrupted only when two of the blobs collided. Then showers of hissing sparks scaded out and down. Everywhere they fell, the blue force material of the walls and the soft energy s(uff of the floor would take on new, glowing splendor. Kind Master, still hover-dozing in His alcove, stirred and turned lazily about his axis. His surface taking on the silvery tinge of wakefulness. As Innocent Demon and Little Imp hid behind the-golden fountain, Keith resumed his attempt to communicate the treachery. "Don't You understand. Master? They're Outside. They're taking away personal people. The strays want to hurt our Magnificent Metropolis!" Countless pairs of imploring arms grew out of the carpet to mimic his supplicating gestures. But it was futile. He just wasn't getting through to Kind Master! Keith glanced at the alcove's lustrous wall just as several forcefood balls were popping out of the places where they had been embded. They hovered ' just above his head -- delicious morsels from the Orb of All Orbs. Sphere food! And they were to be his, if only he did what was expected of him. Excited, he sprang into the air and came dqwn on his palms. He teetered for a moment but finally held still, arms stiff and corded as they supported his inverted form. Oh, these were the happy times -- when Master was awake and Imp and Demon hid on the other side of the sparkling fountain! He sprang erect and Master let one of the pellets drop into his mouth. Delicious. Sphere food was a rapture in itself. Next, the twirling handsprings. But careful! Not too far away from the Radiant One or he would be exposed to bolts from the Spherelets. More force-food balls. Then the cartwheels. With Master glowing orange-green all over. And more delectable pellets to melt in his mouth and trickle down his throat. Tiring, the Glorious Sphere finally filmed over with the gray tinge of slumber. K eith felt contentment too. Really, why bother about the threat -- threat, indeed -- of Hobart and his wretched strays? Certainly they could do nothing to harm the Radiant Ones and Their City. He stepi closer to Kind Master, sent his eyes roving over His. surface, Occasionally something would attract his attention and he would return again and again to the spot. Most of the memory-pictures that flowed fuzzily across the sleep-grayedsurface of the Sphere, however, we as incomprehensible as the Illustrious Ones Themselves and Their Magnificent Metropolis. Here: a sequence of idea-images limned in vivid colors -- memories of a flight over the pinkways of City Central. There: great flashes of light and shimmering nimbuses climbing pearly walls and occasionally arranging themselves into rings that linked and unlinked. They were recollections of happenings in the lofty spire to which Master went every dark-light and . returned every light-dark. Oh, if only he could understand some of these idea-pictures and memoir-images that flicked -- sometimes in spirals, sometimes in great curves -- across Master's surface! Working his way around the Sphere, Keith suddenly came upon an image that he could understand -- almost. There, in the animated scene, was Kind Master. And next to Him was someone else's Master. They were within the sapphire force-stuff enclosure just outside the Very mound he was in now. Between them stood a bitch. Sensing the meaning behind the image, Keith tried desperately to make out her 'features. Impossible. For a Master was not good at telling personal people apart -- except His own personal person, of course. The bitch was without detail in the Sphere's memory. Nevertheless Keith wanted to know what she looked like. For he sensed that she was going to be put to stud. And, just as certainly, he knew he would be the stud. For the first time he was going to consummate his studship. Keith, inhis pride and anticipation, forgot all about Demon and Imp. But Little Imp, taking advantage of His Parent's slumber, had glided from behind the golden fountain and was flaring with the vivid orange-green of delight. The hues rainbowed through the cinnamon of mischief-contemplation and turned a threatening yellow. The Spherelet hurled his bolt. Scoring a near-miss, the sizzling streak produced the smell of seated flesh and an ugly welt on Keith's shoulder. Enraged, he lunged from behind Master and ordered the radiant carpet to spin him around -- just in time to se Innocent Demon turning cinnamon. IF But before Demon could dedde upon a method of torment, Keith made a great wave of the floor wash him across the room. He rained a series of indignant kicks against the Spherelet's surface; The little Master turned peagreen with fear and scurried, together with Imp, into the sparkling alcove beside their Parent. As they arrived. Kind Master was silvering with wakefulness -- a reaction, no doubt, to the frightthoughts assailing Him fropi His Spherelets. And. His mercurial cast immediately gave way to yellow. The tinge collected into a small dot on His surface and came hurtling at Keith -- an ominous zigzag bolt! It melted a huge area of the carpet immediately in front of him. Only a warning bolt, luckily. Then the floor of pink stardust molded a cresting wave taller than Keith himself. It swept him toward the thick azure wall of the mound. The wall spread open long enough for him to be washed out into the yard. Then it closed behind him. V N ext Ught-Ught, Keith huddled in his sulking corner outmound, drawing little comfort from the Orb on High's warmth. Imp's mischievous bolt had left his shoulder raw. And there were blisters on his legs, raised by the sparks from Kind Master's warning bolt. He was busy think-dismissing the solicitous hands of force stuff that insisted upon exploring his hurts when he noticed a Radiant Being drifting toward his enclosure. The Magnificent One floated at such a height as to apir to be a gigantic, silvery head sitting upon the shoulders of the bitch who trailed behind Him on a nonsubstance leash. But what a bitch! What a body! His captivated stare was accompanied by dozens of spurious, unseeing eyes flung up on longstemmed stalks out of the radiant ground before him. His bitch! Keith sensed it. He could not quite see her face, not at this angle. But her swaying hips displayed a graceful rhythm. Her skin was firm and smooth with youth. Surely she was a firsttime-out bitch. When her Master reached the fence, its sapphire netting parted. She was washed into the enclosure, the leash slipping from her neck and sinking into the pink-fadiance. Restoring the fence's energy strands, the Sphere withdrew down the pinkway. "Hello, there," Keith began excitedly -- tritely, too, he realized. "Are you ready for -- " The bitch turned to face him and he gaped. Laura! From the mound down the pinkway. From Hobart's village, too. He sprang. "I've got her. Kind Master," he shouted over his shoulder. "I've got the treacherous Outside bitch!" A projection of force stuff rose to snag his lunging instep and he plopped to the radiant carpet. Even so, he thought, this was not her village. This was his territory. He would show her. He thought-fashioned a lariat out of the carpet and thought-hurled its loop catching her around the waist. But she plucked from her hair the short, Hat bar she had used four yesterlights ago to free him from his enclosure. She touched the noose with the thing. Instantly it sucked up the whole lariat, together with the part of the energy layer to which the lariat had been attached. "Keith," she said, "I've got to make you understand that -- " He thought-tossed coils of pink radiance around her ankles and tried to think-tug her off her feet. Again she used the bar to suck up the coils. While she was thus occupied, however, he made the coral carpet catapult him toward her. She had expected that. She thought-erected a hard shell of nonsubstance. He slammed headlong into it, the impact felling him. Cunningly he remained motionless while the pink carpet restored its levelness. She hurried to him on a small stand-up wave. "Keith, are you all right? Did I hurt you?" He might have got away with his deception. Except that while he lay still, he caused several arms to ease up out of the energy layer and reach for her. "Sorry," she said. And a piece of the backyard whacked his skull, bringing on unfeigned unconsciousness. cries. "Yipee! Suckers. Suckers!" "Get out of the way, damn blubber balls!" "I'm a stray... Hooray, hooray..." "Don't you suckers want to escape and have some fun?" "Faster. Ride the pinkway. Let freedom ring!" As Hobart and his pack came sweeping around the curve on cresting waves, Laura held her bar close to the fence mesh. The sapphire strands squirmed out of shape, fashioning a large hole. But the whole moundhood was shouting back at the villagers now: "Hit the pinkway, you filthy strays!" "Go back where you came from -- " "People Catcher! Where's the People Catcher?" Keith launched himself at Laura. Seizing her with one hand, he reached for the small bar with the other. But she tossed iCto Hobart through the opening in the mesh. A projection of nonsubstance shot up from the carpet, looped around Keith's neck and yanked him away from Laura. Hobart barked orders. "Johnson, Adler, DuBois, keep all this energy-layer stuff immobilized. Laura, come on out. Hit the pinkway for the village. Hank, Bradford; see that she gets there okay." Laura hurried through the gap in the mesh. IF "Came as soon as McAllister brought your message," the Pack. Leader said. "We get here in time?" She nodded, then summoned up the pinkwave that would take her, together with Hank and Bradford, back Outside. "Go easy on him," she advised, as she thought-washed herself away. "He can be brought around. I'm sure." Keith surged against his choking neck-shackle. "Bring her back," he screamed. "She's my bitch." Hobart came through the mesh. "Okay, boys, let the force stuff loose. I'll take over." Even as the honsubstance fet-' ter flipped from Keith's throat, he thought-molded a bludgeon out of the radiant carpet and directed it to club the Leader's head. But Hobart's devastating knuckles smashed into Keith's face first. D ark. Dark. Such frightful darkness, thought Keith. Shrinking from the vast nonradiance that engulfed the village, he reached down to the strips of hide that bound his feet. "Don't touch' thoSfe," Hobart shouted out of the adjacent dark. "And keep those clothes on. We're human out here." Keith waited for the backhand. This time it did not come. "Let me try reasoning with him," Laura urged from other darkness. "Shock's the medicine, not rea " "I'd say this one can't be humanized, Ho," ventured a stray assigned to guard Keith. Hobart swore, "He'll make it or die trying." "But that boatload of magnets is due tomorrow. We attack the City at nightfall. It's impossible to bring him around before then." "We've got to take time to prove out this test case," Laura persisted. "If he doesn't come through, that could mean we'll find ourselves with hundreds of people on our hands who'll simply die without their lousy Masters." "Take time? So the Spheres will have a chance to detect our magnets?" Hobart stomped off in a huff. Keith watched the Leader kneel and, after a while, produce one of those bundles of dancing yellow projections that strays called "fire." Laura, in animal hides, studied Keith intently. She moved closer and the guard halved his distance. "You'll be all right, Keith," she comforted. "The darkness around us is only natural. You'll get used to it." What a miserable place, Keith thought. Thick forest cut off starlight, moonlight, even the glow of the distant City. The wan fire was a laughable substitute for the magnificent radiances and sparkling illuminations that the spheres knew. "You see, Keith, we must destroy the City and free the personal people. We have a moral commit -- " "No! You and I are going back and you're going to be my firsttime-out bitch and -- " Seized by the shoulders, he was lifted and spun around. Then his head snapp back with the jarring impact of a backhand blow. "We don't use that word out here," Hobart growled. "Not unless we're mad as hell and ready to fight." Keith rubbed his cheek. "Is she your bi -- " Whap! "She's a woman," snarled Hobart. "You hear that? A woman. But not mine. I'm too busy for women -- I'm organizing a revolt, collecting animals and turning them into people, receiving supplies from upriver, raiding library ruins." Keith made it back to his knees and looked at Hobart. Supplies? Upriver? Library ruins?  "Chris," Laura said, "don't hurt him." Bitter was Hobart's laugh. "I couldn't hurt him any more than he's already been hurt." He turned back to Keith. "Quit groveling. Up and out of the dirt!" The Leader slipped something hard and shiny between his captive's ankles and the thongs fell away. But Keith merely whined, "I want my Master." Hobart seized his arms and jerked him erect. Whap! Another mouthful of knuckles. "Well, aren't you going to do something about it?" the Leader demanded. Keith commanded the ground to rise and strike Hobart with many projections of force stuff. But even his most desperate inner pleadings could not stir a ripple in the coarse brown-black nonradiance. "Fight, damn you!" Hobart challenge. Keith lunged awkwardly and threw a fist at his tormentor. Laughing, the pack l.eader easily dodged. He raised his hand as if to swing but Laura stepped in front of him. "Please, Chris. He's had enough for now." Hobart walked off into the. darkness. "He struck at me, anyway. We may just possibly be witnessing the creation of a man." K eith awoke to the cold pressure of obstinate ground beneath his aching body... But had he been a Magnificent One surely he would have turned orangegreen all over, for it was lightlight at last. "Feeling better now that the darkness is gone?" Laura asked, stepping out of the nearby mound -- "shack," rather, Keith remembered. There were many other shacks. And many studs and bi -- well, men and women, moving among them. His eyes swept the area. He tensed when he noticed, not too far off, something that might be a pinkway. It rose gracefully from the ground, climb until it was higher than a Sphere, then made a broad sweep and twisted around under itself. Beyond were other IF pinkways curving up and over one another and sending off ribbonways in all directions. Keith blinked. Why, they weren't pinkways at all! They did not shimmer. They did not look the least bit like coral stardust. Rather, they were light gray in color, like tho hue, of a sleeping Master. Oh, there 'was nothing out here to compare with the splendid structures in the City of Force! Here everything was drab. There was no radiance anywhere, except that from the Orb on High. He raised his arm's to the Majestic Light Giver that dominated the measureless Blue Dome. "O, Great One!" heintoned. "Take me back -- " "No, Hobart!" Laura cried. Too late. Whap! ""Sun, animal!" Hobart raged. "TAesun. Say it!" "Sun," Keith conceded. "That's better. I -- " Keith lashed out with his fist and felt it crunch against jawbone beneath the red beard. Hobart raised himself half off the ground and sat there feeling his chin and laughing. "Exit animal, enter human?" He sprang up, wrapped an arm about . Keith's shoulders. "Nice going, Keith. Hungry?" Keith frowned down at the carrying-slab that the guard placed before him. On it lay perhaps a dozen peculiar things: dull gray -- bowls? -- each the size ofa cu'pped hand. Rough and with small bumps and ridges on the outside. The insides were white, and in each lay a gray blob. "What kind of force-food balls are those?" "Oysters. From Lake Pontchartrain, a couple of miles down the expressway." Hobart tossed one of the blobs in his mouth, threw away its bowl, then offered a shell and oyster to Keith. He accepted it gingerly and slid the blob into his mouth. "Chew," Hobart urged. The oyster was nasty and vulgar. It tasted nothing at all like the delicious pellets Kind Master bestowed so generously whenever Keith performed well. He swallowed queasily. Hobart slapped him on the back. "You'll like 'em after a while. Hank, as soon as he's ready march him to the first overpass. We're making up a library scrounging party and another to unload the magnets. He's going to get the hell shocked out of him." The Leader paused and searched the Blue Dome, which more ominous dark-gray ones. "We may be able to give him the full treatment before tonight. Looks like it's making up for some weather." "Hey!" Hank was jubilant. "That's a thunderstorm brewmg. "Could be," Hobart said hopefully. "But it's a long way off." VI pass, Keith passed a number of shacks. Men and women were under the overpass he found Hobart addressing a large group of men. "Watkins will lead a simple library scrounging party. Recently he dug down to a new vault, found a lot of permabooks and more Armageddon reels. The party will pick up the stuff. The rest of us will unload that boatload of magnets." "When can we see the reels?" someone asked. "Now, Morty, you know we have to wait for a thunderstorm." Keith studied several queer. nonforce-stuff things arrayed in a row under the overpass. Each consisted of a flat slab, waist-high, with a non-nonsubstance ring at each corner. The lower curves of the rings sat in the dirt, while their hubs supported the configurations. The Leader leveled a rigid finger at Keith. "We're taking our test animal along. Everybody keep an eye on him. Hasn't learned about loyalty, yet." IF Keith leaned back against a cube with two curving projections protruding from opposite faces and regarded Hobart scornfully. What did such as Hobart know about loyalty? For no apparent reason, Hobart sprang upon him. Whop! This time it was a fist that delivered the blow. The Pack Leader loomed over him. "That's a hand generator you propped yourself against, you damn fool! Just touch those cranks when we don't have the cover of an electrical storm, and you'll have a dozen Spheres breathing bolts down our necks!" "Look, son," Hank said,, not unkindly, "that thing makes electricity, sec?" Lek-tris-City? Could they build their own Metropolis out here? "The Spheres don't like our electricity. Maybe they would have just ignored us when they came and took over our world. But we had phased current -- something they can't tolerate. That's why they destroyed civilization. But we've discovered something else they can't stand. Magnetic force fields -- " "Let's go," Hobart interrupted. "If we run into a Sphere, just drop the carts and start whooping it up like strays." But the Leader's words blazed in Keith's mind like the most vivid memory-images on a Magnificent One's surface: Just touch those cranks... have a dozen Spheres... So there was a way to alert the Masters to this Outside threat! Several of the men tugged on projections extending from each slap. The platforms rolled on their rings onto the gray expressway. T he trek was an exhausting ordeal. At one point Keith dropped down upon the grayway and sat there breathing heavily. Oh, if he could only be with Master, enjoying all the comforts and delights of the City of Force! There was the edge of the City now -- so 'close that the can't-seethrough wall of radiant stardust rose high beside the grayway ahead. He thrust imploring hands towards the treasured haven, knowing that Kind Master was somewhere within all that glistening brightness. So heartfelt was his yearning that the glittering wall grew two great, gyplike arms and extended them toward him, atremble with endearment. "Knock it off." DuBois kneed him in the back. "On your feet. We don't want to get left!" Keith pleaded with the surface of the grayway to bulge up into a wave of effort-conserving self-propulsion. But the hard, miserable stuff behaved as though he were directing no thoughts at it. DuBois lifted him and they trudged onward. The radiant, receptive arms that had reached out toward him flowed back into the coral barrier. This grayway was nothing like the City's shining pinkways, Keith told himself. It heaved up here and there in broad, tilted slabs where stout trees were pushing up through it. LFgly, brown masses were cluttering it, ancient mounds with grass growing all over them. If you looked closely, Keith notic, you could even see what once might have been four rings beneath each one. Finally they reach the "library." Everywhere were great chunks and slabs of nonforce stuff, tilted crazily, strewn about, covered with soil, grass and trees. The Leader came over. "While Watkins' party gets the permabooks and the others go unload the boat, you come with me. Something to show you." Hobart clamber up the face of a huge, tilted slab. Crawling from treelet to treelet, they finally arrived at the top. From this dizzying height, Keith could see far along the grayway. Off to his right was the resplendent City of IF cent. He stared at Central City's vivid spires and cylinders, its sparing ribbonways and glistening, sparking cubes and pylons, and his eyes became moist. "Not there!" Hobart backhanded his shoulder and he wobbled. "Here -- all around us!" Keith stared down. They were in the midst of a vast field of broken, leaning slabs of huge, formless clumps of grayness, of crevices and chasms -- all being swallowed by green growth. "Thank your Spheres for that." The Pack Leader snarled. "This was once a beautiful city -- a city of concrete and steel and glass, of people, ambitions, pride, lights and festivals." City of man? Men never had cities! "And do you know what happened?" Hobart raged oji, fists; clenched. "This is whai your Magnificent Spheres did to it! They came from -- somewhere. Another universe, maybe. Popid through all over. And just like that -- " he snapped his fingers -- "they had a whole world. Of course, there was a little cleaning up to do -- like smashing all of our cities and towns and homes." The man had wound himself into a frenzy. "But we're not finished," he shouted. "And we won't live like dogs. Tonight we'll shojv them that we can strike back!" Keith could hardly keep from laughing at such stupid arrogance. Hobart thrust out his arm. "See that? That's the Missisrippi." At first Keith thought it must be a huge pinkway -- broad and twisting and glittering. "See the boat ti up at whaf used to be a wharf?" Nodding, Keith supposed it was the "boat" thby had n talking about. Oval in shape, it lay at the edge of the Missi -- the Missisomething. Approaching it over the rubble were carts towed by men. "Well, it's just brought us the weapons we need -- lodestones and magnetized metal. Damn it, you should be being us to use them on that festering City. Keith wondered how he could stop them, whether their "generator" thing would actually summon the Masters. But for some reason his thoughts kept going back to the shaggy "Reb" that had silently performed and begged for its food. B ack in the village it was midlight -- no, "noon," Keith corrected himself -- when Hobart left him with Laura and two guards who forced him to eat something called "fried fish." He had been finished for some while when the Leader returned. "How'd he do this time?" "Kept it all down," Laura boasted. "He may be over the hump," suggested one of the guards. "Just a matter of getting him to admit he's human." Hobart smiled vaguely. "Think so?" He put his arm around 'Keith's shoulders. "Son," he said, "we're going to let you go back to the City." "Oh, no -- you don't mean it -- realtyV Keith exulted. Whap! Grayway-hard knuckles backhanded his face. "Over the hump, eh?" Hobart mockedthe guard. "But we've had him only a couple of days!" Laura's voice carried the blue hue of Spherical sadness as she kneeled beside Keith. "The other pick-ups had weeks!" Hobart shrugged. "Our magnets are deployed all along the western edge of that City. They might be detected. So we can't wait. Tonight we hit our target." He glanced at Keith. "Looks like we're going to be stuck with a lot of dumb, hopeless animals after all." A returning "fishing party" broke through the tall grass and its leader sprinted up to Hobart. "It's the widow Wooley!" the woman exclaimed. "Drowned!" Hobart's forehead crumpled as he watched two of the fisherwomen carrying a third between them. "What happened?" "Fell into the. lake. Current washed her under the seawall." The bearers laid down their burden nearby and Keith could see that the fisherwoman was still, very still. Much later, when several men came with "shovels" (Laura explained the word), Keith was still waiting to see when the "drowned" woman would start moving again. But she remained motionless as they carried her to the -- "graveyard." He became alarmed as everybody gathered around and the Leader said soft words while the shovelers scooped a hole in the dirt. "Hobart, what are they doing?" Keith demanded. "Burying her." "Why?" "So she doesn't stink up the place. She's dead." Hobart laughed grimly. "She's too still. Dead still. Remember?" Keith only stared at him. "It means she won't ever move around or think again." Certainly Hobart was having fun with him. "What will she do?" "She'll lie there and rot. All the flesh will fall off her bones and the bones will turn to dust." "But -- what will happen to het'l" Keith felt that he was treading the edge of a vast and horrible unknown. "Gh, Chris," Laura said. "Go easy with him, please." "No! The truth is what makes a man out of an animal." By now the shovelers had pla the drowned fisherwoman in the hole and were throwing clumps of dirt on top of her. Keith felt terrified, small, lost. "That's death, Keithie boy," Hobart rasped. "That's what happens to all of us eventually!" "To -- me -- too?" "Yes. You poor, damn simpleton." "But -- but I'm afraid. I can't believe -- " "Wise ' up, Keith. Throw off t IF your degenerate ignorance. Learn what it means to be a man -- a mortal man!" Keith reared erect in deflance. "You're a liar, Hobart! This can happen only Outside. In the City, if anybody becomes too still or too old or too hurt, the Spheres simply find him a new kind Master." Hobart laughed scornfully. "So you'd rather live in the City, dopig tricks for your food, letting the Spheres bre you when and to' whom they wish? Because then you caii go on thinking life is endless?" Keith squared his shoulders. "I'd rather be bred than -- dead!" The Leader was stumped, but only for a moment. "Think back, Keith. That wasn't a live corpse we buried in the force stuff of the pinkway when you were with us." Panic and forlorn desperation brought on by vast, unfolding truth rose once again in Keith. There had been Stud Murdock, too -- so old, so hurt, so still when he had come out otthe black-walled box in the pound. Terror and helplessness exploded into piercing convictioii. Too still. Forever stiH. Keith dropp to his knees and buried his face in his hands. Laura reached out to him. But Hobart pulled her back. "Poor jerk. Leave him alone. Until a few moments ago he had no concept of mortality. Subjectively, he was immortal." The Leader laughed. "A true god." "And now?" Laura asked, as though she didn't know. "And now he's aware that some day he will die. An animal can't realize that about itself. Therefore he must recognize that he's a man." T hey let him lie besides the fresh mound with its new cross most of the afterli -- "afternoon." His guards had been withdrawn to a resictable distance. Only Laura remained close. Sometimes Keith's eyes even sought out the distant spires of the City of Force. But he rejected bitterly its false promise. For knowledge had been forced upon him. He knew now that the Spheres were cruel tricksters, that the kind Masters were not kind at all. For They had lied to him. They had led him -- and the other personal people -- to believe that existence was endless. Disillusionment brought hate for them. And deep fear. Fear of death. Eventually Laura came and sat by him, soothing his head upon her shoulder. Her softness and nearness brought comfort, somehow forced back the encroachment of fear. Was it possible that she could make him forget his certain nonendlessness? He looked into Laura's blue and beautiful eyes, and he smiled for the first time since he had left the City of Force. Her face glowed like the surface of an iridescent ovoid as she smiled back at him. That face, he saw, had all the warmth of the radiant carpet of shimmering stardust. "Oh, Keith," She pressed her cheek to his. "You're going .to make it." An immense nonSphere bolt lanced down in the distance and the sky jumbled mightily as big drops of water splash down. Another thunderbolt. And another. And all the while the sky became darker. Suddenly there was Hobart atop the overpass, shouting down upon the village; "Armageddon reels!" His hands were cupped about his mouth as the mounting wind tossed his beard. "We're going to show Armageddon reels! On the double! Storm won't last long!" rush of the villagers into the recess under the overpass. Hank raced to the hand generator and began whirling its cranks. Hobart was standing behind an odd cubelike object with two reels attached to its side and a short cylinder poking out of its front surfade. There was a whirring sound and the little cylinder hurled a beam of radiance. It fell upon the washed-out wall in a large square pattern. Keith was perplexed, for now it appear to him that the square was just an opening. For through it he could see -- a City! Not a City of Force. Nevertheless, a true City. Made up of many soaring forms of solid substance. Ajnong the clumps of forms, there were broad grayways running alongside greenways of trees and grass. "Greetings," said a deep, emotional voice. "If you are seeing this, our mission will have been , fulfilled. You will have retrieved the time-capsule units from the vaults of the New Orleans Public Libraiy."... Keith gasped. All along the grayways in that magical scene were shiny, sleek things of every color imaginable, gliding along on four rings. Inside were people! "This," the sad voice continued, "will be the last of the Armageddon reels, for little time is left. All that remains now is for suicide crewsto process this film underground and vacuumpack it." Laura, close behind Keith, whispered, "They're memory-images. Just like the ones we can see on the surfaces of the Spheres. Only these are images of proud people who lived long ago." llie flickering scenes portrayed more towering structures, the faces and clothes and .belongings of fleeing human beings. "The Spheres are due any moment," said the voice. "Full evacuation has been ordered.'" The square memory-image steadied on the wall, showing a pair of tall obelisklike forms stabbing the sky. Fascinated, the villagers watched scores of shimmering motes appear in the distance, aglow with the boiling yellow of bolt-hurling readiness. IF Like glaring evil eyes, the Spheres came and hovered over the soaring structures, casting fierce bolts in every direction. A great splash of blinding light . here, and one of the obelisks crumpled. Another superbolt there, and an elevated expressway lashed back upon itself, strewing the shiny moving things in every direction. The scene changed. Still a third bolt, and a great arch spanning the Mississippi collapsed into the water. "Cut!" Hobart shouted, yanking on something long and thin that extended from the hand generator to the meniory-image hurler. "Cut," acknowledged Hank, bringing the cranks of the generator to an abrupt halt. "Storm's over outside," Hobart explained. T he villagers filed out of the recess, leaving Keith alone in the murkiness intensifying as night approached. He sat in a corner, head almost touching his updrawn knees. For the moment, endlessness was far from his mind, as was fear of the darkness that would soon engulf him. "Kind" Masters? "Generous" Globes? "Magnificent" Ones? He shuddered. Rising, he walked over to the hand generator. Could he make those gripping Armageddon scenes come back on the wall? He seized the handles and spun them. But he could produce no radiance. He cranked until he was exhausted. When he went outside, Hobart was giving orders to men and women gathered about many fires. Laura noticed Keith first and pointed him out to the Leader. They came over, together with Hank, and Hobart asked, "Well, Keith, think it all out?" Keith hesitated. The Leader clenched his fists and raged. "Good God, man! A human being is born to be free -- to exercise his industry and initiative -- to take his chances with success and failure -- to climb as high as luck and his own capability will let him. Why can't you understand?" Keith expected either a backhand or a balled fist. But he stood there unflinching. "I want to take my chances. I want to use the magnets." "Did you hear that?" Hank exulted. "Damn right I heard it!" The Pack Leader grinned. Laura hugged Keith. "You made it!" Firelight sparkled 'in her eyes and made her cheeks glow like pink -- No! Keith reversed himself. There was nothing in all of .Radiant City to compare with the soft beauty of Laura. "I wanted to see more of those memory-images," he said. "I turned those cranks but -- " Hobart gaped. "What did you say?" "The cranks -- I turned and turned -- " "When?" "Just now." Hobart sent his sonorous voice booming out over the village: "Attack parties deploy! The Spheres will be here any minute! Unassigned personnel take to the forest!" T he village was a blur of motion. Men, women, children stumbled over one another, hurdling their fires and lunging off into the darkness. Palms upraised, Keith pleaded, "I -- I didn't know, Chris., I forgot about the -- 'lectri-city." "Not your fault, Keith. You didn't realize -- " Laura screamed and pointed. in their direction, jewels against the blackness of night. "Hank," Hobart said, "get Laura out of here. Man your assault positions." Dismayed, Keith watched the glittering motes grow to the size of twin suns over the forest. "Down!" the Leader ordered, pulling him to the ground. "We don',t know what they're seeing -- or sensing. But we can't let them get back to their City." He took several bar magnets from his waist pouch and spread them on the ground. Keith reached over and grabbed a couple. The fiercely glowing Spheres were high above the village now. And the drab shacks and cluster of overpasses and underpasses were bathed in their awful, menacing radiance. Suddenly one Sphere loosened a superbolt. The hit sent great hunks of the elevated expressway hurtling into the night. The other Sphere dropped to just above ground level and drifted toward the ovess. Hobart waited until it was almost upon them. Then he leaped up and hurled a magnet. The bar embedded itself in the Sphere's glowing surface, whereupon the creature immetely began to shrink, shrink -- and it was all gone, leaving dense darkness where it had bn. The other Sphere swooped down as if to learn what had happened. Bewilderment was betrayed by the purplish cast now flooding its surface." Hobart lurched erect and hurled another bar. It missed. But Keith had sprung into action. His magnet thuddra into the Sphere's undersurface. It dwindled to nothing. The Leader rained thumps on Keith's back. "Today you are a man! Let's go catch up with the assult force." T he line of assault, several hundred abreast, had already pushed past the shimmering outer wall. Magnets, hurled ahead of the march, had completely sucked in the radiant nonsubstance, together with the coruscating carpet of energy material beneath it. Every man and woman in the attack force, including Keiths, was weighted down by waist pouches filled with magnets. Trailing behind came the supply carts, heaped with inore weapIF ons and tugged along by spetl details. Youngsters scurried among the carts, retrieving magnets already hurled. The pouches of the' attackers were kept wellfilled. It was a neatly planned operation, Keith had to acknowledge as he pushed ahead. Several paces on his left marched Hobsirt, and Laura on the rit. Beyond them advanced Hank, Watson, DuBois, Adler and many other villagers Keith recognized in the radiance of the force-stuff structures that lay ahead of them. Having covered the area between the outer barrier and the first moundhood, he looked back and saw that the line of attack had left notluAg glistening behind it. The magnets worked magic. He hurled ar bar at the nearest mound, even as Hobart and Laura and everyone else in the line cast, weapons at targets of their own choice. Great patches of pinkway were disappearing before them. Sapphire mesh enclosures twisted and then shrank. Whole domes were being sucked up. And the Spheres within, trying to squeeze through the openings made by magnetic attraction, were drawn against the ends of the hungry bars and swallowed. As radiant nonsubstance evaporated before the attack, personal people rose, dazed, from the dirt that had underlain their mounds and enclosures. Suddenly Laura screamed. Keith spun in her direction. One of the Spheres had escaped its ipound and was hovering above her, already yellowing with its bolt-hurling hue. He sprinted over and heaved a magnet. But the Magnificent Bng was too high to Im within range. Shoving the girl behind him, he tensed as he watched the evil power lance out. It would have hit him full in the chest. But the UghtningUke streak curved slightly and jabbed into -- actually was attracted to his pouchful of magnets! He was not even singed as the bars held the streak frozen in midair. Gradually they sucked up the shaft of energy, drawing the Sphere along on its bolt-turned-Ieash. His pouch swallowed the last of the streak, then the now fist-sized creature as though in a final gulp. Shaking, Laura clung to him for a moment -- until Hobart's triumphant laughter jarred her erect. "Sorry I couldn't get over to help," the Leader shouted from his position in the line. "But I had an idea the magnets would do something like that. Now we know for certain. Back to your places. Let's get on with it!" The attack continued, pressed more vigorously now that wqrd had been passra along the line and everyone knew the magnets also afforded protection against bolts. T hroughout the night Keith, glancing left and right while the assault swept over the City, saw many a Radiant Master drawn into a pouchful of magnets at the end of its harmless bolt. At one point, scores of the things mounted a counterattack. But each eventually gave up the last glimmering radiance of its life to a pouch filled with magnets or to a hurled bar. The great moundplexes and the hulking cubes and pyramids, pylons and cylinders of City Central ruired a more intensive assault effort But magnets scattered at their bases were sufficient to begin the sucking-up process. Slowly the proud edifices sank, losing their nimbuses, their emissions of showering sparks, their sheets and streamers of energy. Special details remained behind to finish them off while Hobart, with Keith and Laura and the bulk of the attack force, pushed on to swedb the rest of the Radiant Metropolis from end to end. Counterattacks continued throughout early mornjng. Not until shortly before dawn did the few remaining Spheres realized the suicidal hopelessness of attempting to hurl bolfs. These Beings eventually fled, disappearing over the horizon. At the eastern edge of what had been the City of Force, Keith turned to survey the results of their attack. Not radiant structure anhere! He saw only rubble on which the City had stood. The assault forces rushed about, retrieving magnets and herding frightened personal people into bewildered groups. But not all were frightened or bewildered. Noticing Bitchette Margo in one of the groups, Keith' rushed over to her, tried to talk reassuringly. "Everything will be all right," he told her. "You're free now. Don't be scared." "Who's scared? This is marvelous!" She clapped her hands. "Who needs a Master?" He laughed. "You look wonderful in those animal skins, Keith," she said. Staring into his eyes, she added, "If I let you have me, will you get me some of them?" Keith laughed again, walked off to another group. Laura was talking to them. She took his hand. "Don't worly, Keith. They'll all be humanize. You proved they could be." He wipra grime from his face. "I wasn't all that unhuman, was I?" "Not to me. I knew all along -- " Feeling like a man, he acted like one. He kissed her. "Break it up!" Hobart growled, signaling them to follow him. "Got to get a rehabilitation program going and move camp at the same time. May not be too long before those uys -- " he indicated the direction in which the Spheres had retreated -- "come back with their big brothers." "Where are we going?" Keith asked. "After we get things under control, we'll split up. Send training units all over. There are 'stray packs' operating outside many another City of Force. And every one of those cities is begging for the magnetic treatment." # IF OF Willy Ley The Coming of the Dinosaurs Few lay persons have occasion for any in-depth contemplation of jaws -- save maybe their own in connection with visitis to the dentist. But jaws are important when it comes to tracing evolutionary lines. Let us begin with our own, specifically the lower jaw and one side only since the left is the mirror image of the right. It consists of one bone which has an upward bend in the rear to form a hinge that connects it with the upper part of the skull. Since the teeth are attached to this bone it has the technical and logical name of "dentary." This construction is the ,same for all mammajs,whether 'the jaw is that of an ape, a cat, a dog or even that mythical jawbone of an ass with which Samson killed a large number of probably innocent people. If we now look at the jaw of areptile we find that matters are far more complicated. There is a dentary for the teeth but it is'iarrow, hence it is reenforced below by another bone which is called the "splenial." The combined dentary and splenial are joined in the back to a bone named the "surangular," which forms the hinge. But it, too, has its reenforcement, called the "angular." And at the back of the angular is still another bone, the "articular." Nobody stops anybody from thinking that this is patchwork but the setup described is found in all reptiles, living and extinct -- with, of course, the exceptions necessary to prove our point. These exceptions -- one could have guessed it -- occur in the Karroo fossils and provide us with our chance to check life's progression. In Seylacosaurus sky lax is Greek for 'puppy' ) the splenial is missing. Angular, surangular and articular are present and have nearly their normal sizes. But they have become superfluous because the dentary has not only grown heavy and strong -- it also has developed the hinge part. In Cynogmthus (from kyon, meaning dog and gmthos, meaning jaw) the three extra bones are markedly reduced. In Sesamodon, one of the last theriondons that survived into the Triassic period, they are missing. Sesamodon was a reptile in transition -- its nearly mammalian jaw shows the lines along which evolution was running then. Apparently there was a line running from these reptiles to the mammals but since any fossil is the result of several successive accidents -- first the animal must get into a situation where its remains can become fossil and then the fossil must be found -- we do not know all the stages that line had to pass through. At any event those reptiles that stayed reptiles -- one might call them confirmed in their species -- kept their complicated jaw construction to this day. But let us first discuss their period. Triassic means triple and with a good reason, the Triassic period has three clearly distinct subperiods. The oldest is usually referred to as "hunter" in English, n abbreviation of the German name which is Buntsandstein, meaning colorful sandstone. The middle one also has a German name; Muschelkalk from Muschel which means clam and Kalk which means limestone. The top layer of this triad is called Keuper which is an old miner's term for a certain kind of rock. The total duration of the Triassic period was from #-# periods share this duration more or less equally, though, if you go by the volume of fossils, the Muschelkalk period, consisting of marine sediments in Europe, seems to cdme out on top. Originally .it was believed that the Tethys Sea had simply widened to cover western Europe. In the light of later knowledge of continental drift the explanation is different. The lowlands were flooded by the Tethys from the south, but by a western projection of the later Indian Ocean. That the Muschelkalk Sea had been, shallow had been known aH along -- its fossils proclaimed the fact. IF Life in . the ocean and its branches that made inroads into the continents that began to crack up just then was variated. Practically everything one would expect to find in ocean was there, except for marine birds and mammals. The mammals that existed stayed on land, though they may have frequented rivers -- the birds still had to evolve from the reptiles. Therefore the lughest life forms in the seas were reptiles and the triassic forms shotted what was to come. The earliest known marine turtle was found in late triassic deposits and sinm chelys is Greek for turtle it was logically named Triassochelys. Though the fossil we have is from the late Triassic, marine turtles must have been around during the earlier subperiods (the oldest tortoise-like fossil was discovered in the Karroo). Another Triassic marine reptile was an early form of the ichthyosaurs that had the general shape of our porpoises. The first find of triassic ichthyosaurs was made on the island of Spitsbergen to the north of Scandinavia -- its name became Mixosaurus nordenkjoldi. Later somewhat earlier forms came to light in California. tile from the Triassic was not yet quite marine. It was a fairly large (about twenty feet from the tip of its snout to the tip of the tail) and massive saurian with a long neck, a big body and a medium-long tail. Its teeth show that it caught fish but its feet indicate that it was still a walker. We have to picture this animal, Nothosaurus andriani, as a shore-dwelling fishing type, probably able to wim but still a land animal. Nothosaurus, found in southeast Germany, had a close relative in Lariosaurus from northern Italy. Both show how the ancestors of the plesiosaurs were not directly ancestral to the plesiosaurs and seem to have died out around the end of the Triassic period. But we are not yet done with the marine life forms of the Triassic.  Among the fisfies all the later types were well represented, since the earliest of the modern fishes (with a bony skeleton) exist since the Devonian period. A find from the Devonian of Scotland has proved that representatives of the crossopterygians were present, that group of ancient fishes that became so well known because of one -- incidentally quite large -- form that was discovered to be still living in the waters around the Comores Islands to the north of Madagascar. That particular crossopterygian can now be found, under Latimeria, even in children's encyclopedias. One interesting point is that there were already flying fish during the Triassic peri. A fine specimen was recovered from late triassic deposits in Austria. Its name is Thoracopterus and though it seems to be an adult it is only four inches long. Quite probably Thoracopterus swam in schools like the flying fish of our time. Of course the older forms of fishes called elasmobranehs (the zoologist's collective designation of sharks, rays and chimeras) were present in the triassic seas since they originated during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. However, one cannot say that they did not fossilize well. The lower life forms were present, too. At the top of the list are a few ammonites, shelled relatives of the octopi of our time and vaguely represented by the living nautilus. Whether unshelled octopi like the living forms already existed is not known -- in fact we do not know when they originated. The oldest known fossil is Palaeoctopus, found in Lebanon in layers that belong to the latest portion of the Cretaceous period. That all the kinds of echinoderms were present can be seen from the following tabulation; Middle Cambrian to present; asteroids (sea stars) from Up per Cambrian to present; echinoids (sea urchins) from Lower Silurian to present; holothurians (sea cucumbers) from Middle Cambrian to present. Since representatives of all these groups are still, alive there can be no doubt that they lived during the Triassic period, though fossils of some (especially sea stars) are rare. Turning to the land we can expect only three kinds of land vertebrates; amphibians, reptiles and mammals. The amphibians are subdivided into two groups which even the layman finds logical, namely tailed, amphibians (newts and salamanders) and tailless amphibians (frogs and toads.) All the amphibians from the Cambrian period to the end of the Triassic were tailed, and one (Lysorophus) could actually be called an early salamander. No fossils of tailless amphibians arc known from the Triassic; fossil frogs appear in late Jurassic deposits both in North America and in Spain, but nobody knows when they originated. We know considerably more about the reptiles of that period. In an area in western Germany known as the Eifel remains of a reptile were Tound that belongs to the same type as one still living under severe protection on some small islands near New Zealand. The living type is known as Hatteria or Sphenodon, the order to which it belongs is that bf the Rhynchocephalia and we know that the triassic form gave rise to a number of marine predators that probably ate mollusks. They also produced a crocodile-like form IF Champsosaums) that has been found in cretaceous deposits in North America. All the later forms are now extinct, whether still other post-triassic reptiles (also extinct by now) sprang from the rhynchocephalians is now doubtful, though the theory was widely accepted half a century ago. But triassic deposits contain remains of another early group of reptiles, called the pseudosuchians (pseudo-crocodiles, if you want) which was ancestral to many other reptiles as we shall see. The early pseudosuchians were small, looked generally like lizards and seem to have been tree-climbing. True crocodiles appear first in late Jurassic layers and, as in the case of the tailless amphibians, one may believe -- or not -- that they go back to late triassic times. that the first true dinosaur trod the land and it is certain that the pseudosuchians were their ancestors. Everybody knows that many dinosaurs walked on their hind legs only and although it seems logical to assume that the dinosaurs began their career as quadrupeds, two of the best known triassic dinosaurs had a bipedal locomotion. The inhabitants of certain areas of Connecticut were familiar with "bird tracks in stone" for decades before anybody said "dinosaurs" or talked of evolution. The Connecticut yankees could tell at a glance that some of these "birds" must have been quite large. At any event they did ot live there any more. Geologists could tell that the rocks with the "bird tracks" were triassic rocks and they suspected that the tracks were reptilian. But #t took a long time before the track makers became known, if not "in the flesh" at least "in the bone." The largest of them, somewhat bigger than the African ostrich, was Podokesaurus holyokensis. It had very small forefeet, long hindJegs with three-toed feet and a long tail. The European triassic dinosaur Plateosaurus longiceps was larger and more massive than the American form. Its head must have been about ten feet above the ground when the animal straightened up to look around. It had proportionally much larger forelegs than Podokesaurus and when feeding might have assumed a four-legged position as kangaroos can be seen to do. Plateosaurus has been found in deposits that clearly indicate that it lived in a desert area. It is probable that the specimens we have, all of them from a fairly small area, are the remains of individuals that perished while migrating from a dried-up water hole in search of another one. A few fossils from the Triassic of California prove the presence at that time of still another reptilian type called the Thalatto- sours thalatta is Greek for "sea"). They also seem to have been shore dwellers like the European Nothosaurus but were much smaller, the largest Californian thalattosaur was between six and seven feet long. It is likely that it belonged to the ancestral group of the monitor "lizards" of our time. The mammals of the Triassic remain to be' discussed -- unfortunately there is not much to say. The earliest mammals naturally must have had some reptilian traits. One could speculate that the mechanism that regulates the internal temperature of a mammal was not as efficient in the earliest mammals as it is in the late forms. One could also speculate that the earliest mammals still laid eggs like reptiles. But such speculations By The Falls perhaps, not stone, and smaller. And black as though it had been partially burned. Come look, there may be more." Bodum banged the pot as he rinsed it out in the sink. "What do your newspapers want to know about me? Over forty years here -- there are a lot of things I can tell you about." "What is up there above The Falls -- on top of the cliff? Do people live up there? Can there be a whole world up there of which we live in total ignorance?" are unnecessary, it so happens that two types of the earliest mammals are still alive in Australia. Named platypus and echidna they show very nicely how the earliest mammals were built. Their blood temperature varies over a range that humans could hardly survive. And they do lay eggs. As if to display early versatility, echidna is a dry land animal while platypus lives, beaverlike, in fresh water. Both are about a foot in length, the actual early mammals, as the rare fossils show, were much smaller, about the size-of a mouse. We can guess that virtually all of the early mammals were insect eaters; plants bearing small seeds did not yet exist as far as we know. The mammals had to wait for a fore they came into their own. # ( continued from page # Bodum hesitated, frowned in thought before he answered. "I believe they have dogs up there." "Yes," Carter answered, hammering his fist on the window ledge, not knowing whether to smile or cry. The water fell by; the floor and walls shook with the power of it. "There- -- more and more things going by." He spoke quietly, to himself. v"I can't tell what they are. That -- that could haveibeen a tree and that a bit of fence. The IF smaller ones may be bodies -- animals, logs, anything, lliere is a different world above The Falls and in that world something terrible is happening. And we don't even know about it. We don't even know that world is there." He struck again and again on the stone until his fist hurt. The sun shone on the water and he saw the change, just here and there at first, an altering and shifting. "Why -- the water seems to be changing ' color. Pink it is -- no, red. More and more of it. There, for an instant, it was all red. The color of blood." He spun about to face the dim ro#m and tried to smile but his lips were drawn back hard from his teeth when he did . "Blood? Impossible. There can't be that much blood in the whole world. What is happening up there? What is happening?" His scream, did not disturb Bodum, who only nodded his head in agreement. "I'll show you something," he said. "But only if you promise not to write about it. , People might laugh at me. I've been here over forty years and that is nothing to laugh about." "My word of honor, not a word. Just show me. Perhaps it has something to do with what is happening." Bodum took down a heavy bible and opened it on the table next to the lamp. It was set in very black type, serious and impressive. He turned pages until he came to a piece of very ordinary paper. "I found this on the shore. During the winter. No one had been here for months. It may have come #ver The Falls. Now I'm not saying it did -- but is is possible. You will agree it is possible?" "Oh, yes -- quite possible. How else could it have come here? Carter reached out and touched it. "I agree, ordinary paper. Torn on one edge, wrinkled where it was. wet and then dried." He turned it over. ' "There is lettering on the other side." "Yes. But it is meaningless. It is no word I know." "Nor I, and I speak four languages. Could it have a meaning?" "Impossible. A word like that." "No human language." He shaped his lips and spoke the letters aloud. "Aich -- Eee -- Ell -- Pea." Bodum shouted, louder than ever. "A child scribbled' it. Meaningless." He seized the paper and crumpled it and threw it into the fire. "You'll want to write a story about me," he said proudly. "I have been here over forty years, arid if there is one man in the entire world who is an authority on The Falls it is me. "I know everything that there is to know abqut them." # Diary Found in the St. Louis Zoo (continued from page #) for us and even more for the house detective. Leigh Couch registered us at the Convention desk and did the job so graciously that I stifled my initial impulse to ask the obvious question -- Mrs. Cduch, if you were widowed in India, would you commit settee? Actually, there was no time for questions. The fans were already pouring into the lobby and the bartenders were already pouring out at the bar. That, of course, is the real thrill of convention attendance -- within the space of a few minutes you meet more fans than you can shake a stick at. I know, because I tried. Soon a group assembled fbr dinner in the Hunt Room (so named because if you want a waitress you've got to hunt for her) and the nose-count included Philip Jose' Farmer, Bette Farmer, Samuel D. Russell, Florence Russell, David and Ruth Kyle, Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Don Bensen, my wife and myself. A total of eleven noses in all -- there was one little fellow, whose face I never saw. Only his nose was visible above the table top, so naturally he couldn't eat a meal. He just sniffed some airplane glue for dessert. After dinner various noses got on the scent of room parties but we decided to retire early and rest for what lies ahead. And after looking over the list of speakers on the program I expect plenty of lies ahead. Our room seems very nice but lacks closet space. Also there's no lock on the door and people keep coming in and out. From the way they all talk about "up" or "down" I suspect they must be on drugs. I may have to letter IF Aug. D ear diary: Every eatery in this hotel has a name. I had breakfast in the. Tack Room. Couldn't figure out why they called it that until I sat down in my seat. v I got the point. I breakfasted alone -- for about ten seconds. Then I was joined was followed by one Johnson and two del Reys (Evelyn and Lester), plus James Gunn, Gordon DickRocklynne. From the way the mob was surging in as I left, I gather this wilLbe a big affair. Out in the lobby I encountered two of my very favorite people -- Lee Hoffman, Bea Mahaffey and Bob Tucker (think about it). Lee, who has been writing science fiction and westerns, has just sold a book to the movies. Bea, formerly editor of Other Worlds (not to be confused with Udder Worlds, the Dairy Magazine) hasn't attended a Worldcon for some time and commented on the magnitude of this one. Bob Tucker, whom I studiously 'ignored, managed to steal my identification badge and exchange it for his own. I didn't realize our badges were switched until a" group of fans came up and asked for my autograph. Then they began stoning Tucker -- a superfluous gesture, since he was already stoned. The Convention was to open at #I A. M., so we made our way through the halls to the main auditorium. En route I had the Eddie Jones, the British artist who was brought over as a guest by the Transatlantic Fan Fund. This is the "voluntary subscription which sends an American fan to Europe one year and a European fan to the United States the next, as a guest of the Convention. I could explain how this is done, by nomination and popular vote, but I've already loused it up by neglecting to mention that in past years there was also a winner from Japan. Sufficc to say that Mr. Jones was inand also the Fan Guest of Honor at the Convention -- and to judge from our meeting, he is going to fill both roles admirably. Walking toward the auditorium I notfcd the huge Huskster Room -- where books, magazines, artwork and manuscripts are displayed for sale to collectors. Emerging from it I spotted Sam Moskowitz (science-fktion's real answer to Tiny Tim), Alexei Panshin and Dr. C.L. Barrett. Doc, the longtime doyen of the annual Midwescons, was as genial as ever. Hoping to get some medical opinion, I informed him that I thought I was losing my voice. He reacted with great alarm but when I repeated my symptoms he laughed. "Losing your voice?" he echoed with obvious relief. "Had me worried for a moment. I thought you sai(f 'vice?" But I did go and get a prescription. Not that anyone ata Convention really needs a voice, with Harlan Ellison around. The opening session of the Convention came off as scheduled, complete with introductions of various attendees. Sure enough, when my name was called. Bob Tucker stood up. When Tucker's name was called, I stood up. This baffled a lot of people; apparently because they didn't think either of us could stand up. Bob Silverberg and Dick Lupoff delivered masterful speeches. Somewhere between syllables I found myself walking Hospitality Room to the Press Room, where .Chelsea Quinn Yarbro held sway. She sways very prettily. Terry Carr, Ben Bova and Hal Clement continued the Convention program -- come to think of it, they preceded Dick Lupoff -- but I opted for lunch. Other opters who opterated at my table were Jay Kay Klein (who vows he'll shoot # pictures at this Convention), Bob Pavlat, Mary Young, John and Bjo Trimble. Bjo and Bruce Pelz are handling the Art show, upstairs and I promised to look in on it. Every attendee has been presented with a handsome portT# IF folio of Jack Gaughan drawings -- once you see it you realize why he was chosen Guest of 'Honor. And there's, more of his art upstairs, along with the work of a score of other pros and fans. Somewhere along the line I visited with my wife (whom I affectionately call Mrs. Bloch) and then it was time to get down to the outdoor swimming pool for the Poolside Party. Here each of the pros was presented with a plastic, straw hat decorated with a red-white-and-blue band. The idea was to wear this headgear so that fans could identify their victims. I did a little identifying myself -- of both fans and pros -- and encountered Andy Offut, Ben Solon, Anne McCaffrey, Jim Warren, John Millard, Linda Stanley, Jack Chalker, Dan Galouye and his charming family, etc. Meanwhile, of course. Bob Tucker was busily signing my name in autographbooks, and just to make it look authentic, I was busily signing his name on various portions of feminine anatomy. And everyone was thordughly confused. Ray and Joyce Fisher, co-chairmen of this Convention, joined fellow committee members in dispensing cotton candy, soft drinks and music from a genuine calliope -- an old fashioned instrument which' baffled younger attendees; even the name itself was unfamiliar to them, except for the last syllable. But as the music blasted away I talked to Joe Haldeman, Ben Bova, Harry Harrison, Ed Meskys, Fred Prophet, Verne Corriel, Larry Niven, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Harlan Ellison and -- according to the name I put down in my notes -- somebody named Sundry Others. Because we were standing around for so long a time, I began to lean on several of these people, but never on Sundry. The editor of this magazine and his gracious spouse hosted a dinner-party in yet another hotel eatery, together with Judy-Lynn Benjamin. We joined them and the Sifverbergs, Clifford D...Simak, Doh Bensen, the Russells, and part of the large Budrys family -- Algis and Mrs., to be exact. A pleasant gathering. In case anyone wants to know what the "dirty pros" talk about in these mysterious conclaves, I jotted down a fragment of table conversation. The subject then was the prevalence of drug-addiction among the young. Budrys: Everybody's turned on! Why, half of the bike races in this country are won on grass. Barbara Silverberg: Oh -- I thought they used paved roads. Alan Nourse, M.D., hosted an evening gathering for Science Fiction Writers of America in a jokefilled room. I sneaked out of there to attend a First Fandom Aug. #tl. back at breakfast, listening to Anne McAffrey, Gene Wolf and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Then on to the Art Show, with Forry and Wendayne Ackerman. Met Jack Gaughan, who is a most defightful person. His wife and his mother are justly proud of his Convention honors. The Art Show is quite impressive -- and so are the artwork prices. Writers don't command such money. Now I know what they mean when they say, "One picture is worth a thousand words." Star Trek may have been canceled, but the artists don't seem . to know it. I counted # portraits of Leonard Nimoy -- an eary sight meeting in Lou Tabakow's suite, indeed. Also (believe it or not -- where Walt Liebscher gave a and I "prefer not), a Mr. 'Spock speech entirely in spoonerisms doll! and a Gene Roddenberry . and Bob Madle and Dave Kyle doll! I shudder to think what talked in a somewhat less commight happen if Harlan Ellison prehensible fashion. Herb Carlson buys the latter and sticks pins in had clued me in that a program it. of movies was starting at one In the Convention Hall (which, A.M., scheduled to last all night. I discover, is called the Khorassan Not being scheduled to last all Room) they voted on the site of night myself, I retired. the next convention. The # There's a bulletin board in the Worldcon will be held abroad, so Chase Lounge. On it some wag this group voted for the #I lohas posted a notice: cation in the United States. The winner. I'm told, is Boston. This IF Asimov, who can now attend by spending #c for bus fare. Isaac, despite his championship of mod ern science, refuses to fly. He's going to be the only angel in Heaven with a subway ticket. Boston has selected Clifford D. Simak as Pro Guest of Honor and Harry Warner, Jr. as Fan Guest of Honor. Two excellent choiss -- both have contributed so very much to science fiction through the years. The annual Burroughs Bibliophile Dum-Dum was held this noon. The Burroughs Bibliophiles are fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Dum-Dum is a luncheon, not just an expression popularized on LaughIn. While this took place I visited with L. Sprague de Camp, Marion Zimmer Bradley and longtime fan J. Vernon Shea, with whom I'yc corresponded since the days when both of us were part of the old "Lovecraft circle." Vernon and I circulated and picked up a few tidbits of information. It seems there's been the usual lack of meaningful dialogue between the hotel management and the wayout segments of fandom, resulting in a credibility gap which almost escalated into open warfare. A victim of descent rather than escalation was Ruth Kyle, who last night was plunged by elevator into the hotel basement and somehow got locked in there for a time. Since the purpose of her trip was merely to get some milk for her kids, this came as an added bonus. During the auction session in the afternoon I had a late lunch with some of the German fans, who are over here hoping to capture the # Worldcon for Heidelberg. Mike Bradley joined me. Meanwhile,' back at the auction, Ellison and Silverberg were sold to the highest bidders. This I can well believe, since anyone who bid on those two would have to be pretty high. llien on to Room # where Vonda McIntyre hosted a party. It's her birthday, and among her guests I spott Jack Gaughan, the editor of this magazine. Chuck and Sally Crayne, Poul and Karen Anderson, Oliver Saari and Dale Tarr. Most of them were spotted when I spilled my drink. We had dinner, and somewhere, in the lobby I spoke to Andy Porter, Anna Wilson and Elliot Shorter (who is really taller). Time now for the Masquerade Ball. Prior to it, my wife met Bob Tucker's wife -- an occasion for long and mutual commiseration. The Masquerade, a Worldcon tradition, produced eighty-six costumed competitors for prizes. After repeated parading and judging, the winners (according to my garbled-as-usual jottings) were: Karen and Astrid Anderson as "The Bat and the Bitten" (Most pUiso. Popular Award)', Ron Bounds as "Ottar" in full barbarian regalia; Bruce Pelz as . "Gertrude From Gormenghast" Grand Award)', University of Chicago group Best Group Award); Bertram B. Parker and Lawrence Ropp as "Caliban And Prospero" Most Beautiful Award); other winners in various categories included Eric John Stark, Lori Canellen, John Kritzberg, Alan Nourse, Anne E. Trimbley; Lin and Noel Carter, with Lin as "Ming the Merciless" and Rick Norwood as "Charlie Brown" -- Most Humorous Award. If I've misspelled names, omitted winners and left out categories it's largely because of the lastmentioned award. Carried away by histrionic zeal, the portrayer of Charlie Brown stumbled against a large rented screen behind the promenade platform and gouged a sizable dent in one corner. Ellison called for volunteer offerings to pay for damages and various conventioneers passed through the crowd and returned with approximately # in a matter of moments. Dazed by the realization that at one time the entire attendance at a Worldcon couldn't raise such a sum if everyone emptied his pockets completely, I missed some of. the proceedings. All I could think of was a way of luring Ellison into a quick crap game. But more of that later. Bruce Pelz's performance as "Gertrude of Gormenghast" was outstanding -- he soliloquized to a bird, in what I presume was Pidgin English-and while Bruce's real sex was never in doubt, the bird's was artfully concealed. But the "Bat and the Beautiful" ' presentation lingers longest in my memory, for personal reasons. Karen Anderson, as a black-cloaked vampire, menaced her white-cloaked daughter .in a weird pantomime which culminated in raising her arms, transforming the cloak into gigantic outspread bat-wings, enfolding her victim and drinking her blood. Lest this activity be doubted, Karen buried her mouth In her daughter's neck and then raised it to display her ensanguined lips, together with IF gore which spattered the victim's white attire. I know how this effect was obtained but have sworn silence;, sufficient to that it was a stunning piece of Grand Guignol. And when Karen flitted off the platform she at once swooped down on me and bestow a vampiristic kiss which left my own mouth bloody. So go report on Masquerade winners when you've just been bitten by a vampire! I suppose next year a werewolf will sbed on me. Aug. #I you heard last night after the Masquerade was a Rock Group. You heard it. I was in bed with ear plugs. After breakfasting with my wife and assorted characters, I participated in a panel discussion on Ho Sawed Courtney'  Boat? with Lee Hoffman and Bob Tucker. Once the boat was sunk I got in on the latter portion of the Science Fiction Writers of America Meeting. Back in the auditorium, I joined the Gauan family to listen to various symposia on science fiction through the decades -- including a nostalgic panel discussion by Leiber, del Rey, Simak and other notables. T. L. Sherred, Alexei Panshin and Harry Harrison followed. And then Ellison came on to deliver a summation speech which was in effect a challenge to the Establishment to recognize the pioneering vision of science fiction. A few words with Chuck Hansen, then the auction -- but now it was time for me to slip out to the nearest Chinese restaurant, kill a waiter and stl his tuxedo for the Awards Banquet. I'm told # people registered as Convention memberand that dees. I can well believe it, Tor there seemed to be that many present at the banquet. My wife and I were seated at the head table. At first I considered this quite an honor. Then I ran into ah old Navy man and he told me what "head" meant. But there we were, along with various members of the Convention Committee-some of whom were sitting down for the first time in four days, after their hectic labors -- plus the Guests of Honor and Toastmaster Ellison. In the course of his humorous remarks, Ellison reported on last night's fund-raising campaign for the repair of the damaged screen and told the audience that any amount over and above the actual sum required to restore the screen itself would be donated to the Clarion College Workshop for its science fiction program. The audience reaction to this announcement was -- to put it bluntly -- somewhat negative. For a moment it appeared that an additional amount would have to be raised to pay for the cost of Ellison's hospitalization and funeral. But good humor was restored and the show went on. Forrest Ackerman presented the E.E. Evans Memorial Awarda First Fjandom Award was posthumously presented to Wijly Ley. Fan Guest of Honor Eddie Jones delivered a well-received speech and Pro Guest of Honor Jack Gaughan was eloquent. Now nerves and bladders tightened as the time drew near to announce the winners of the annual Hugo Awards, the top honors bestowed by vote in the science-fiction field. I'm pretty sure who won these particular awards, because I announced them and presented them to the recipients or those accepting for the absentees. Herewith, the Hugo Award winners for #: Best Fan Writer -- Harry Warner, Jr. Best Fan Magazine -- Psychotic Science Fiction Review, edited by Richard Geis. Btst Fan Artist -- Vaughn Bode. Best Professional Artist -- Jack Gaughan. Best Professional Magazine -- Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (I can't help it, Judy-Lynn; I gotta tell it like it is). Best Dramatic Presentation'll: A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C. Clarke. Best Short Story -- The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World, by Harlan Ellison. Best Novelette -- The Sharing Of Flesh, by Poul Anderson. Best Novella -- NightWings, by Robert Silverberg. Best Novel -- Stand On ZanziJ)ar, by John Brunner. Then it was party time. I have vague memories of meeting collector Darrell Richardson, author Richard Wilson, Evelyn Barrett, and Rich Wannen. Twenty-seven of the people I insulted during my banquet remarks chased me wn the hall.And the next thing I knew, it was -- Sept, h D ear diary: No more meetings for me! Breakfast with George Clayton Johnson and assorted pros. R. A. Lafferty and Roy Lavender kindly, informed me that a business Session voted to change the name of the Convention, starting in #, to the North American Science Fiction Convention -- covering all future Conventions held in the area bounded by Canada on the north, Panama on the South, the West Indies on th.e east (that's somewhat confusing) and, I suppose, the East Indies oh the west. It being hye days since I've been out of this hotel, I felt it only natural to do a little comparison shopping and see how the rest of the world stacks tip alongside of the Convention cosmos. With that in mind I wandered across the street, through the park and into the St. Louis Zoo. Verdict: it's less crowded there, less noisy but it smells worse. Back to lunch with the Kyles, Poul Anderson, Jock Root, RustyHevelin, et. al. An afternoon of visiting -- the Art Show again, the Huckster's Room, the bar. I had a chat with Sid Coleman, longtime fan, and discussed the continuing hassle with hotel personnel who turned away people with valid reservations, reportedly upped ra!tes and closed public rooms which were to have remained open all night for the benefit of various insomniacs and outsomniacs who wanted to Do Their Thing. I know how diligently the Convention Committee has labored to preserve harmony but with such a large attendance the problems multiply. I still feel future Conventions must employ some professional organization to assist in preparations, just as business and fraternal convention groups do. But that's an old story. A newer story, Dear Diary, is our dinner with Larry Niven and Marilyn, his bride-to-be -- a quiet, pleasant evening interlude at a little restaurant down the street. My wife and I shared with them the inevitable nostalgia which seems a prelude to the final day of every Worldcon. You've seen so many people, so many friends, and now you realize that in a few hours they'll be scattered to the four winds. Sept. #. short and sweet. Breakfast with Karen Anderson, Joyce Muskat and a dozen other passersby. most of whom halted to say farewell before proceeding to the checkout desk with their stolen towels and ashtrays. It's hard to accept the fact that it's really over; that upwards of # people gathered here, from all over the world, just to listen to speeches and participate in panel discussions, to see films and artwork, purchase manuscripts and printed matter at auctions, applaud award-winners, enjoy a banquet and masquerade and poolside party, attend private parties of their own -- and all in the name of a unique hobby. It's even harder to believe that next year they're going to do it all over again -- in Heidelberg. Yes, Heidelberg did win the Convention bid for # and plans are to hold the gathering in an authentic German castle. Wunderbar! But you won't be there. Dear Diary. In just a few moments. Dear Diary, I am returning to the St. Louis Zoo. And this time you go with me. It is my intention to drop you into the pit at the Reptile House and let the alligator swallow you. T he wheel turns, apparently at the rate of once a generation. I can remember subscribing to a raft of magazines that dealt mostly with series characters, such as Doc Savage or the Shadow. Such series books were a market must at one time. And before them had been the books that were obviously ended in such a way that the reader would demand a sequel -- such were the first Tarzan and John Carter books. Then all that passed into limbo. Publishers put their ears to the ground and heard a great stampede away from all such old-fashioned nonsense. With the acumen that has always distinguished such groups, who listen mostly to each other, they realized that sequels and serials finally were out. Now a bit more than thirty years later, it seems that another group of publishers has discovered a magic new way to capture readers -- with series stories and novels that demand sequels. Plus ca change... One of the current series that looks least promising turns out to be almost good and certainly worth a look by anyone who likes fantasy of the weird sort. The Haunting of Alan Mais, by Peter Saxon (Berkley Medallion Books, #d:), is listed as ## of The Guardians. This is obviously an American edition of an English series and the order of appearance here seems to be somewhat mixed up, if there is any order. The writing is surprising for this type of book. It's literate and even deliberate at times, not at all like the hack style where events mean far more than their description. The characters of the Guardians -- a group formed to fight occult evil for a fee rather than because they're good guys -- are not always sharp but they are a lot more real than might be expected. Most of their past is hinted at but obviously must wait for many books for full development. Generally, it's a rather good weird story. But at the end we're left with problems which remind us that we're mixed up in a series. The haunt may be settled but the effects on the girl linger on. And some of those effects are rather startling, demanding an answer if she's to continue as part of this evil-fighting group. And there are a lot of other questions about the rest of the company that need attention. If you like weird stories and are pear and try to straighten out the order in your head as you go along, these books are worth their price. Maybe the confusion adds to the fun. This One through leaves. Passons passons puisque tout passe, je me retournerai souvent. He had once told her that -- years ago, in one of the many dead languages of Earth -- that memory is a hunting horn, it dies along the wind. His hair has grayed and gotten thin. His face has begun to relax in brown folds around his eyes and mouth. Her delicate features remain, only now the bones show more surely under the skin, turning darker, like the night's cobalt, and her hair is the earth-color of leaves before they fall. It's a simple story, written in the land of these hills. Listen (continued from page #) closely -- the wind whispers an old song. And you can know in a few words who they are: lovers of a still place, of the bird that swings its wing in the wind above the trees; movers through time and fury to this quiet conclusion, so near and strange. Now the bird turns and starts across the water. Over the still red lake its wings are full of darkness. So sing with her songs: epithalamium. The sun s their morning star.  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One of the most frustrating contender for the Hugo this past things about reviewing books is the year, as well as by those who seem time lag between the publication to regard Kurt Vonnegut as Amerreviewer is presented with an adIt is, in many ways, a richer examvance copy -- and getting the review pie of Lafferty's work than his preon the newsstands. Few publishers vious book and should be doubly have tried to solve the problem. rewarding to his fans. I must conTerry Carr, the enterprising edfess, however, that I'm not one of itor of the Ace Specials, is a welthem and that this is not a book to come exception. He has been subconvert me. In fact, only a sense of mitting page proofs of forthcomobligation kept me reading beyond ing books due to appear several the first thirty turgid pages, months later. This is doubly welThe basic idea of the novel is come, since the Specials have inthat various mysterious groups are eluded several outstanding books trying to dominate the world and and the series deserves careful atthat a tremendous hidden struggle tention. for power is going on. One small In this case, the novel for Degroup has developed the ability to cember release is Fourth Man pool its members' psychic powers sions, by R.A. Lafferty (Ace Speinto a unified, brain-weaving net cial, #c). It's a novel that will of force that can influence others probably be greeted with enthusiand even affect seismographs. Anasm by the Lafferty fans, who other, more ancient group, has the made his Past Master a serious (Please turn to page #) ese great minds were Rosimcians Why were these men great ? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose, California #, U.S. A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. copy of "The Mastery of Life" -- ligation; A nonprofit organization. Address : Scribe E.R.A. Deeper and more dangerous than the seas of Jupiter -- was the human mind! above us as cold and gray. Lots of I turbulence. The first men inside Jupiter. T AM the ship. We've got the lumps to show for We're cruising just under the it. Took a helluva beating getting cloud deck. The wind velocity outthrough the clouds. The scientists side is still brutal, gusty. Makes must have been scared. So was I us buck and shudder like a glider on that one jolt. It hurt, in a thunderhead. My infrared It's snowing like hell all around eyes see the ammonia clouds us. I can barely see the second cloud layer below. It' looks vaguely pinkish, warm. They're supposed to be water clouds, ice crystals. And below that? Intelligent life? The people who built the machinery on Titan? The captain is asleep. I am the ' ship. All alone except for the computer and this recorder I'm mumbling into. The scientists are plugged into their special instruments, each in his own narrow cubicle. But I am the ship. Plugged in completely. The engines are my heartbeat. The computer flashes information into my eyes and talks right into my brain. The recorder takes down this subvocal chatter for the ship's log, I see outward with infrared or sonar or any of the other sensors. And inward with the intercom cameras. I'm in touch with every piece #f machinery, every electrical circuit, every transducer and sensor. They all plug in to me. Me. The human me. I can see myself: a six-foot-tall Caucasian floating in a contour couch like an enlarged fetus, naked and depilitated. Gills flapping softly. Body bobbing gently in the currents that surge through the heavy saline solution we live in. Face mostly hidden behind sensory connectors and communications unit. Cranial, connectors pressed against bald skull like a yamulka. Hands and feet enclosed in more sensory connectors and control units. A semi-mechanical fetus. breathing liquid with man-made gills. A part-time cyborg. Robert Donovan O'Banion, youngest full commander in what used to be the United States Navy. Now we're all brothers, of course. No more, national armed 'forces. The buildings on Titan ended that. We're all lined up shoulder to shoulder to face the Threat From Space. Like-hell.  I don't know why they used my voice for the computer's vocal output. The captain laughs about it -- says it's like I'm talking to myself. At least they didn't try to build a personality into the computer. Having four scientists aboard is enough personality for any mission. What's Ling saying? "They are definitely biological. Look at the readouts yourself." is sitting on the edge of his couch. It's cranked up to a sitting position and swiyeled to his workbench. He's flashing the readout from one of his instruments over the intercom. The spectrophotometer, looks like. It shows a list of numbers. The recorder will read it off for the data file and the log. The other three scientists are makIF tag professional grunts and mumbles. "Hydrocarbons mostly," Ling goes on. "But notice, please, lines fourteen and thirty-seven -- leucine and tyrosine. Amino acids." Ling is trying to maintain his Chinese cool but he sounds excited. Just for kicks, let's check his medical monitor. Yes -- heart rate is up. "Amino add molecules," Bromley says flatly from his cubicle. "We're in the midst of a biological blizzard." That's no surprise. The unmanned probes discovered the biological "snow" falling from the top cloud deck. Sunlight and lightning propel biochemical reactions in the clouds -- amino adds and other gunk predpitates out. It's what happens to the stuff underneath the clouds that we're supposed to investigate. It's ashame Ling's depilitated. He'd look better with a stringy mustache. The complete Chinese sage. Head too big for his skinny body. Bromley's just the opposite: soft and round. I swear he ? s bloating. He looks spongier every time I check on Him. He can't be gaining weight on what we get for nutrients. Ludongo is hunched over his instruments, running tests on the gas samples we've sucked in. Doc Speer is clinging to his couch; hasn't said a word since that first joIt  up in the clouds. Youngest man aboard. Hope to Christ we don't have 'a medical emergency. He would be useless. The computer flashes the words before my eyes as well as saying them to me. Okay, sweep the radio frequendes. Nothing is getting past the nerve-sizzling interference. The electrical storms make radio virtually useless. Try the laser again. Won't go through the clouds. All right, end communication check. We're cut off from the orbiting ships, completely shut away from the rest of the human race. Not even the starships are as lonely. The computer is flashing data to me. Images flicker in my eyes as fast as my brain can take in the information -- propulsion system, electrical power, life support, structural integrity -- numbers, bar charts, symbols, graphs, curves. Outside pressure is up to ten. atmospheres. And we've just started. When do we enter the second cloud deck? Below that deck is the ocean, where the pressure starts at a ton per square centimeter. Then we'll see how good a ship we are. Were those sonar pictures from the unmanned probes really showing animals? As big as icebergs? Ling's cubicle. They're comparing notes. Ludongo has finished his atmospheric analysis, looks like. Ling is working on the biochemistry of the snowflakes. Bromley's getting off his tail and joining them. Ling is saying,"It's amazing how similar the biochemistry is to the terrestrial pattern." Bromley floats in and grabs a handhold. The cubicle is barely big enough for the three of them. Ludongo nods hello and drifts behind Ling's couch to the' corner where the medical monitoring console stands. Maybe I ought to make them stay in their own cubicles and chat over the intercom. Avoid injury if we hit more turbulence. Check the outside infrared. Give me a course plot and turbulence prediction. Okay. Let them float around for a while. The bulkheads are padded. Alert me if any sign of turbulence shows up. My God, Speer's getting up. Is he finally getting a little courage or is he scared of being left alone? Show. me. Flickering light. Gone now. No, there's another. Give me max magnification. It must be a lightning storm. Distance? Hell! Looks pretty dim but infrared wouldn't pick up much of a lightning bolt, would it? No ideas at all for estimating the dis tance? Listen for the boom, yeah. We used to do that when I was a kid, gauge the distance to a thunderstorm that way. Turn on the outside mikes and filter out the boundary layer noise. What's the speed of sound out there? But I don't hear anything. No boom. Shock waves must be damping out. What's the dampirig function for this atmosphere? Great. Now do I let them stand around and jabber or do I send them back to their couches? ' J IF Inside view. Speer is bobbing softly in the passageway just outside Ling's compartment, one hand on the open hatch. The other crewmen are jammed inside. Ling is saying, "If this biological snow is falling all across the planet -- what happens to it in the second cloud layer? And in the ocean?" "Torn to shreds, I should imagine," says Bromley. "Those are not the warm, gentle seas of Earth down there, you realize. They're no doubt highly corrosive, laced with plenty of ammonia and God knows what else. Long-chain molecules simply wouldn't stand a chance in that ocean." Ludongo looks like he s fed up with Bromley's, pompousness but Ling simply smiles like a cat. "Indeed?" Ling asks softly. "But what of the sonar pictures that the probes returned? What are tose huge objects floating in the ocean?" "Icebergs, rocks, mountains torn loose from the surface below -- " "So? Warmer than the ambient seas around them?" Bromley looks uncomfortable. "I'll admit that there's a good deal we have to learn. But one shouldn't jump to conclusions. Whoever built those machines on Titan certainly did not come from Jupiter -- or from Saturn, for that matter. Any fool could've told the politicians that. It's so obvious." Ludongo's father is a politician. He says, "Yes, of course. But if we had convinced the politicians there would have been no Jupiter mission at all." "Frankly, I wouldn't have minded a bit," Bromley says. "This is no place for a manned expedition. Unmanned probes could do everything that needs to be done here. I volunteered for a star mission, not this. I accepted Jupiter because they needed me." Ling smiles sadly. "We all desired star missions." "And none of us qualified," adds Speer. "I qualified for a star mission," Ludongo counters. "But my father, the Prime Minister (he stares straight at Bromley), did not want me to go. By the time I returned even from Alpha CentaurL he would be long in his grave." "Yet he permitted you to go on this -- this -- " Bromley means, but does not say, suicide mission . "A Ludongo does not back away from a question of courage." ders. "Let's face the truth. We're expendable. For this mission they needed good, capable men who woiv'i be missed too much if they don't come back." He made three great friends with that crack. We all know it's true but who wants to talk about it? The only nonexpendable member of this mission is the recorder. It listens to everything we say, takes down every bit of data from the instruments, carries my mutterings for the log. They built it to make its way back to the orbiting ships all by itself, even if we break into pieces. Starting to hear rumbles from the lightning storm. Bolts are becoming bright enough to blank out my eyes for a second or so. Noted -- hey, there's a blast! Single lightning tree zapping from the clouds above all the way down to the second deck. "Grab onto something quick -- " I put as much snap and urgency as I can into my words over the intercom. Turn off the outside mikes. The turbulence is like getting hit with a hammer. Stabilizer cuts in. Okay. Inside camera. "Everybody all right?" They're grumbling and swearing. Nobody hurt. "Get back to your own couches and strap in. Strong turbulence coming up." How come you only gave a thirty-second warning? Thanks for admitting it -- after the fact. Storm's spreading and we're heading right into it. Carpenter's not much on maneuvering -- more like a dirigible than anything else. Here's Captain Voronov. Chunky Russian. Used to be blond and jovial. Looks blond and worried now. HeJniCkles himself into the pilot's couch and fits the connectors to his face and cranium. Now there are two of us. He's sharing the ship with me. He slips his hands and feet into the control connectors. We're linked... "Don't think we can get around it, Andy." I can sense him nodding. My eyes are watching the flickering lightning, closer than ever now. The computer is superimposing numbers over the outside view -- storm's extent, our course and speed, turbulence levels. "I would not care to try going through it," Andrei says. His English comes out slow and careful, in a deep baritone: This saline we live in makes everybody's speech a bit slower 'and deeper than nprmal. The scientists are. all battened down like good little boys. They're watching their display screens, looking at the storm. IF "Would ft be possible," Ling asks softly, "to get close enough to the storm to observe the effect of the lightning on the biological particles?" "Lord, I should hope not," says Bromley. "Too much turbulence," Andrei says firmly. He's checking the mission plan and our performance limits. I realize that he wants to go under the storm, through the second cloud deck. I run through a systems check and start the computer plotting an optimum course. "Good Robert," Andrei says as the course plot flashes before our eyes. "The descent rate is steep but within tolerable limits. Execute." It is steep. My stomach doesn't like it. Displays are flashing like a movie now -- engine thrust, temperatures, hull pressures, strain, descent rate. Listen to them wail ! "What are we doing?" Ludongo calls. "Are we going down?" Andrei answers, "The only way to avoid the storm is by penetrating the second cloud layer." "But we're not supposed to go down for another two days. I have two days of experimertts to do at this level." Bromley: "You can't arbitrarily juggle the mission plan like this, without consulting us first. After all -- " "No time for discussion," Andrei cuts in. "We go right down." They're sore. And scared. Me, too. Below the second cloud deck is the real unknown. Only a couple probes ever got back. Those sonar pictures. Big as mountains. Warm. And alive? We're really bouncing now. I can feel liquid gurgling in my ears. Outside view is blank. We're in the clouds. Damned couch feels like it's got rocks inside the padding. Straps are cutting into me. Ship feels okay, though. Engines are strong. The bright boys in back are clammed up. Was that Bromley's yell? Don't blame him. Another drop like that and I'll yell too. Starting to ease off, I think. Maybe we -- what a jolt! Felt like a bomb went off inside the Ship. "Check it," Andrei says to me. The performance graph doesn't look too bad. No real danger. Look into the generator bay. Everything seems normal -- wait. A bubble just drifted up from behind the -- get a closeup. Yep, a leak in the coolant line. Nothing serious. Not yet. "I see it," Andrei says, j The ship's riding smoother now. Long, slow rolling moment, with a bit of a chdppy pitch still but now it's more regular. Not too bad. "I'd better fix that coolant leak," I tell Andrei. "Yes. And then take your rest period. We're out of the turbulence now. I can handle it alone." II I didn't sleep too well. Dreamed about Marlene, just like she was alive. The ship is riding along easily now, inside the ocean, more like a submarine than a dirigible. Andrei lolls in his couch. The scientists are happy as kids in a cave, with a whole new world to explore. Every instrument we have is going full bore. Visions of Nobel Prizes floating out there. Can't see much else. Really black now. Even the infrared is useless. It'sonar or nothing. No more snowflakes. Maybe they're still out there but they don't register on .the sonar. "Did you have a good sleep?" Andrei asks. "So-so. Kind of tense, excited. I feel more relaxed when I'm plugged in. Got something to do, somebody to talk to. It's lonely back there in the cocoon. Unplugged here means unconnected -- to me at least. Nothing to do but think and worry." Andrei says nothing. The connectors hide most of his face. All I can see are his mouth and chin. But I get the feeling that what I've said somehow has displeased him. Bromley braced me back there. I was on my way back from the generator bay, heading for the cocoon. He floated out of his own compartment and blocked the passageway. "Could we speak to you for a moment in private?" That's a laugh -- in private. "Who's we?" I asked him. Bromley nodded toward Ludongo's cubby and drifted toward the hatch to it. I pushed a foot against the passageway bulkhead and followed him. Ludongo was sitting on his couch. His instruments were all on automatic and he reached over to snap off his intercom screen when I hunched in. That was what Bromley had meant by private. "We want to talk with you," he rumbled in his pressure-deepened bass. "In. strict confidence," Bromley added. "If you feel that you can't keep what we say confidential -- " He let the idea dangle. "I'll listen," I said. "If you start to say things ! can't keep quiet about I'll tell you." "Fair enough," said Ludongo. He looked up at Bromley, who was bobbing nervously in front of the workbench. "We're worried about Captain Voronov," Bromley said. "Worried about him?" Ludongo ,said, "We don't like the arbitrary way he decided to IF ' plunge into the-ocean. That was not only, a dangerous decision but an unfair one." "Who's we?" I asked again. "We scientists, of course," Bromley said. "All four of you?" "Speer feels exactly as we do. Ling is naturally more reticent about his feelings but he's upset also." I looked at Bromley. Inside that rubbery face was a bom troublemaker, the kind who starts fights and then stands off at the sidelines holding the coats and watching the blood flow. "He's the captain," I said. "He had to make a fast decision. There wasn't any time for a conference or a vote." Bromley countered, "There were a number of other things he could have done. He could have reversed our course, or gone up over the storm.": I shook my head. "Either alternative would have cost too much energy. He's gofto consider the whole mission. You wouldn't want to get caught down here in a week or so without power, would you?" "Of course not," said Ludongo. "Maybe the captain made the best decision. We're not arguing that point -- merely the manner in which it was made. We should have been consulted," "No.timo.fprit." ; ( , !ci "Nonsense," Bromley said "lt's his attitude, that's all. He's acting as if this were a warship and we nothing but crew members under his command." "That's right. This is a military mission. That's why military men are in charge." "You two are in charge -- " Bromley shook a finger at me -- "because you're experienced in ship handling. The purpose of this mission is scientific. There isn't the faintest military reason for this expedition." I felt myself starting to simmer. "Come on now. If those buildings on Titan weren't there we wouldn't be here -- and you know it." "Yes," , Ludongo answered, smiling broadly, "that's true. But you don't actually expect to find the builders down here, do you?" "You're the scientists. You tell me. "What makes you so certain that those buildings present a military threat to man?" Bromley asked. H OW could he be, so blind? "Any race that can set up machinery that runs unattended for God-only-knows how many centuries has a technology that is capable of crushing us. You know that, too." "But what makes you think they'd be hostile?" . "Why are the machines still running?" Bromley told me with a look of disgust, "The machines could be completely benign toward us. More likely, they're completely indifferent. Their builders probably never gave a damn about us One way of the other." "I have my own idea," said Ludongo. "I have been on Mars. I have seen the artifacts there. They were created by human hands, built to human scale for human . uses." "Yes, I know," Bromley muttered. "It is entirely possible that there was a human civilization before the Ice Ages. A civilization that reached Mars, perhaps even Titan. Those buildings and the machinery inside them could have been put up by our own ancestors." I asked, "What happened to that civilization?" Shrugging, Ludongo answered, "War. Natural catastrophe." "The Ice Ages could have easily wiped it put," Bromley suggested. "On Earth," I said. "What happened on Mars, on the Moon? And why are the buildings on Titan still standing? And what are the machines doing?" No answers. "Okay," I said. "You could be right. Maybe there's nothing to be worried about. But there's still a good chance that the works on Titan were built by another race. We can't just assutne that they're friendly or even neutral." "They're probably dead and gone by now," Bromley said. "At least they're gone," Ludongo added. They still didn't get it. "Look. From a military point of view, we've got to assume that those buildings represent a possible threat. We've got to. be ready for that threat. If it never materializes, fine. But if it does and we're not ready for it -- goodbye for keeps." "How could you possibly ex. pect to be ready -- " "We've drifted away from the original subject," Ludongo said uneasily. "No, we'fe exactly on the subject," I insisted. "This is a military mission. The captain's job is to seek out any alien life forms we can find and get enough information about them to decide whether or not they might have built the machines on Titan." "That's arrant nonsense. No creatures that live in this black gravity pit could even realize that there are other worlds, let alone build interplanetary ships." "Maybe. But we're here to find out for sure. You scientists are supposed to provide the information. The captain and I are here to rujx the ship and see that the mission objectives are carried out." Bromley's face seemed to puff out even more with anger. He looked past me, to Ludongo. IF "I told you it'd do no good to talk to him. Bloody fools all think alike. Military mission!" He turned on me. "You're here to ferry us about and see to it that we're safe and comfortable. This is a scientific expedition. There's no military necessity behind it -- except what you gold-braided barbarians make up out of thin air." "Okay, that's enough," I snapped; "You can think whatever you Uke. But you'll take orders from the captain just like any crewman on a military ship. Period." I didn't wait for an answer. I pushed through the hatch and swam up the passageway to the flight deck: ter is almost funny. Bromley's weird: He really thinks we'd be risking our butts in this soup just to give him a chance to satisfy his scientific curiosity. Six faint white blips in the middle of the gray, grainy Sonardisplay. Nothing else is visible. Computer's flashing data -- course, current vector, range, closing speed. Andrei mumbles, "Fifty kilometers away and closing on us at better than fifty kilometers per hour.'" "Look at that current vector. Unless the computer's blown a circuit, they're moving against the current." Andrei goes to the intercom. "Sonar has detected six large objects approaching us. They are moving upstream -- against the prevailing current." Ling is the first to answer. "Is this' the maximum enlargment you can provide?" He's got the sonar display on his main screen. "Yessir," I answer. "It's on max. When they get into closer range we can switch to other sensors." Ludongo, "Can the computer make a size estimate?" Kilometers! Not a word from the scientists now. They're all watching the sonar display. Ling's trying to view them on infrared, as well. About all you can tell at this range is that they're slightly warmer than the sea itself. They've disappeared. "My Screen's gone blank." "What happened?" "Hold on, hold on," I yell at them. Check the screens. Get a wide-angle view. Yeah, there they are -- look at them go! "They're running away from us." "They sure are," I say... Andrei watches them' dwindle in the distance on the wide-angle sonar display. "I thought we had lost them entirely when they jumped out Of view on the closeup. Give me a speed estimate." "I don't believe it," I mutter. "We certainly won't be able to catch up with them," Andrei says. A very ptactical thought. "They are alive," Ling says, awed. He's knocked the empty sonar display off his main screen and is rerunning the tape showing the animals. "Alive," Speer echoes. "And so huge." "Like whales," Andrei says. "Jovian whales. Have any of you hunted whales?" No answers. "Well, I have. When I was much younger. Whales can be very intelligent beasts -- extremely intelligent." Bromley chimes in, "Do they build machinery, Captain?" "No. But they learn to run at the sight of danger. Those Jovianwhales ran away from something. They sensed us, probably, and bolted. Why should they do that?" mouth is set in a tight line. "Are you suggesting that these animals are accustomed to being hunted?" Bromley asks. His voice is dripping disbelief. "They certainly acted as if they were frightened." "Nonsense," Bromley snorts. Ludongo says, "But there's the infall of biological snow from the clouds above. This ocean is like a constantly replenished biological soup -- " Bromley, "More like a biological vichysoisse, considering the temperatures out there." "The point is," Ludongo resumes, "that the whales have a, steady food supply. Why should there be predators when free food is plentiful?" I can sense Andrei shrugging. "Terrestrial baleen whales eqt plankton -- also free. Yet they are preyed upon by orcas, sharks -- and submarines carrying men." "You're not suggesting that these whales are hunted by intelligent creatures?" Bromley looks really upset. He doesn't want to believe a word of what is being said by the others but his face shows absolute fear. "I am suggesting only that those whales were frightened by us -- and fear is normally a conditioned reflex," Ling gives a little cough. "Excuse my interruption, please. But it seems that these arguments cannot be resolved until we learn more about the creatures themselves. Can anyone suggest a technique by which we can study them at close range?" "Not if they run when they sense us," Bromley says. Speer adds: "And they de- IF tected us at fifty kilometers, didn't they?" "Hew can we get close to them?" Ludongo asks. Andrei knows. I'm sure. But he's hesitating. Probably used the technique hunting whales in the Antarctic. We've done it in , the Navy. What the hell, we're supposed to be working together now. I'll break the ice. "We can try to spoof the whales' sonar," I tell them. "What's that?" I peek at Andrei again. He's broken into a broad grin. "Check the sonar tapes," I say, "to find the frequency that the whales used to detect us. Then amplify our return signal on that same frequency. It'll make the whales think we're one of them. Instead of running, they might let us get close." "Exactly,',' Andrei agrees. "The trick works against terrestrial whales. Even against terrestrail antisubmarine patrols." We laugh together. For once everybody's in agreement. The computer has a record of the sonar frequency the whales put out. It's lower than anything we can do. So Andrei goes aft to jury-rig one of the transmitters to match the whales' frequency. Alone not?. Ship's completely mine again. Feels good. Nothing around us. Riding smooth and easy. Funny I dreamed about Marlene. Haven't thought about her since we left Earth. Maybe it .wasn't a dream. Too logical. Maybe I just remembered about her while I tried to sleep. Damned right there isn't. I know. They want to study our dreapis. They claim it's important for the next mission. Especially if we don't make it back. Get it into the recorder so they'll be able to figure out if we went off the deep end. Sure. Only two or three dozen psychs will hear the tape. Okay, can't argue with mission objective fourteen. I'll try to remember the dream. For the psychs. For the next set of poor bastards they send in here. Ill to the Sequoia forest. After , so many months training in Texas flat scrubland we wanted to see mountains and real trees again, The park was "tilled with tourists, even a planeload of scout troops from Indonesia. We ducked off the main trail and climbed up and away from them. The trees are as big and tall as booster rockets -- they've been standing there for two thousand years. Solemn as a cathedral. And those damned people crawling around clicking cameras, yelling after kids, carving initials. Sacrilegious. "Look at them," I said to Marlene when we stopped for breath halfway up the slope. "Not a care in the world. This damned Titan business doesn't mean a thing to them" She answered, "Perhaps they are "trying very hard to forget about Titan." She was inclined to be serious -- a Germanic trait, I guess. When" we had first met, back at the beginning of training, she had told me several times that she wasn't going to fall in love with me because the chances were that we'd be sent on different missions and because she was older than I. But six months later we ran off like a couple of kids and got married. Nobody else knew about it. Very . romantic. Now we worked 'our way deeper into the forest, hiking up the slope, away from the noise of the tourists. I had our lunch in my backpack. The big trees made a canopy of cool shade far overhead but every once in a while a shaft ofsunlight would break through and set off sparkling highlights in Marlene's hair. "Actually," she said thoughtfully, "life has become much better since the discovery of the buildings on Titan. World tensions have dried up. The threat of a big war is now very dim." I laughed. "Sure. Why worry about blowing ourselves to hell when there's a race somewhere that can do it for us?" "But it's a much more distant threat, a remote possibility. That race visited the solar system thousands of years ago. Perhaps thousands of centuries ago. They may never come back." "Then why are the machines still working?" I asked. "And what are they doing?" "That is the disquieting part of it," she admitted. We found a mossy stretch with a cold stream sluicing through it. We could hear birds and a squirrel chittered at us from the firehollowed base of a tree. I unslung the pack from my shoulders and we had lunch. "You were there," I said 'through a sandwich. "What's it really like?" She stopped eating and shook her head. "It's -- very hard to describe. Not the physical conditions -- you've seen films of the buildings add you know what Titan's like -- " "Pretty damned dark and # ' IF gloomy, except when Saturn's up." "There you forget that Saturn's in the sky," Marlene said. "You can -- teel -- the machinery throbbing. The ground vibrates. When you're near the buildings the sensation you get -- it makes your flesh crawl." "They ought to hit it with a nukie missile and make everybody feel better." "But suppose the machines are sending out a signal? Some wavelength that we can't detect? If we stop that signal -- mightn't it tell those who built the machines that it's time to return to the solar system?" Her eyes were wide now with real fear. I had run out of flip answers. "I spent a whole year there," Marlene went on, quieternow. "We knew just as much about the machines when I left as when I had arrived. We don't dare dismantle them. I'm not even sure that we could if we tried." I lay back and stared up at the green canopy above us. Fresh andalive and good. "Must, be like living next to a haunted house," Tmuttered. "That's exactly it," Marlene said, stretching out beside me. I put my arm around her shoulders. Instead of drawing closer to me, though, she said, "Bob, I saSv a man try to kill himself on Titan. The problem got too much for. him to bear. We barely got to hiih in time." I made a sympathetic noise. "Bob -- you see, I was in love with him. He was married but his wife had stayed oh Earth. He never knew I loved Him but I did. I think I still do." All in a rush. I turned and looked at her. "In love? Where is he now? How long ago -- " "He's out of the hospital. I saw him yesterday at the center. He's been accepted for star-flight training. If he can qualify and get through the training he'll go on a star mission." "And you still Jove him." "I'm not. sure. I think I do. His wife has divorced him, I believe." "Great." I forced a smile. "So we'll have a triangle heading out for the stars. Maybe we can all get freezer beds next to each other." That was before I knew I would be sent to Jupiter, not on a star mission. And before she died. sonar transmitter, matching its output against the computer memory of the whales' frequency. Flash me a comparison. Looks good. Check sonar. Nothing out there now. Sea's empty. Controls feeling sluggish. Nothing definite, no alarms. Just not responding as smoothly as they should. Maybe it's the outside pressure. Up to seventy tonsper square centimeter. Andrei's not yet plugged in. Still playing with the sonar. "Looks good to me," I tell him. He nods. But he looks sort of grim, preoccupied. "Yes, I suppose it will do." He hesitates. Then: "Can you handle the controls by yourself for a while longer? I want to check something with Speer:" "You feel sick?" "I'm having a little trouble breathing." I look at him. He means it. "But you're not breathing. The gillsare." Frowning. "Yes, of course. I mean I'm having some soreness in my chest. Perhaps I'm merely tired." "Well, you'd better check it out." He puts his hand on my shoulder. "Don't be worried. It's nothing, serious, I'm sure. Speer will probably say it's psychological. You know, I really don't enjoy being plugged into the ship. It bothers me. It makes me feel less than hufnan." "Really? I get just the opposite reaction." He bangs my shoulder. "Good... I'll let Speer poke at me and then take my rest period. Call me if anything unusual develops, will you?" That's almost funny. "How do you define unusual?"  He laughs. "Use your judgment, comrade." Alone again.Odd that Andrei should feel that way.Being plugged in -- it's beyond being human. Lets you think with the speed of a computer, see what no human could ever see for himself, swim the depths of Jupiter's seas. All human frailties and fears wiped out, buried, forgotten. Go ahead. Display data. Curves .don't look too bad. All parameters within tolerable limits. Check possible reasons for pressure rise and display most likely. ER, operating normally ; HqlLcofrpgioq,, Thai pquld lead to major failure. IF all parameters withAt present. Display projected estimate of hull strength over next twenty-four hours. Understood. Monitor hull pressure continuously. Flash yellow alert when structural strength drops five per cent from its current value. Understood. Execute order as given. And also review all mission objectives, by priority rating. List all priority objectives that can be accomplished in periods of twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six, and fortyeight hours. And maintain continuous watch on hull pressure. Display. Yes, there they are. Ten... fifteen... seventeen of them. Range? Display their course and relative velocity. Estimated tinfe to intercept? Execute intercept course.' Any change in hull pressure? "Seventeen big ones on sonar," I say into the intercom. I'm nearly whispering, I realize. "If they've detected us at all our sonar camouflage has fooled them. So far." T HE scientists must have been asleep. Takes them a few minutes to get started again. Now I can see that they've all got the sonar display on their screens. Andrei's in the cocoon. Leave him there. Nothing will happen for two hours or more. Sonar view again. "We don't know how sensitive their accoustical gear is," I tell the scientists. "We're matching their own outputs as closely as possible. Our engine noise is muffled as much as we can manage. We should run silent in case tlwy're sensitive to other frequencies. Don't make unnecessary noise." .It's easy to keep quiet. The whales are just too awesome for words. Even in the gray, ghbstly sonar view they look tremendous, gliding effortlessly through the ocean in a loose herd. We're gaining on them slowly, holding our breaths. Can't see much detail about them with sonar. But they're getting bigger and bigger. Sonar's getting jumbled now -- too many echoes are bouncing around. Display's starting to look like a badly tuned television picture. Switch to infrared. Better. They radiate nicely. Look slightly orange. They've got tail flukes something like a whale's -- maybe smaller in proportion to the body. And a fin or something under the gut. Edge closer to them, careful, don't make any sudden moves, nothing that will scare them. Hard to tell their real size, nothing to compare them against. Give me a rundown on the numbers you've got. Pulling up astern of them now. Feel like a flea trailing an elephant herd. It would take ten minutes to travel the length of one of them with engines on max standard power. It's been two hours since we first sighted them. Andrei slips quietly into his couch. "Want the controls?" I whisper, glancing at him with the intercom eyes. He shakes his head. "No, you're doing very well." He pulls the sensor unit in front of his eyes but doesn't touch any of the controls or communications connectors. Ling pipes up, "Can we pull closer to them?" "Don't go between them," Andrei warns. "Are we close enough to use TV?" Ludongo asks. "What do you think?" I ask Andrei. "I doubt that they are sensitive to light," he says. "Tiy a few short bursts with the laser first, to see if there is any reaction." I steer out alongside the herd, then settle as close as I dare to one of the outer bulls. Not that I can tell, a damned thing about their spx, if they have any. But the outermost whales are the biggest. Laser beam doesn't seem to bother him. Put it on fast scan and hook in the TV. Back away so we can get the whole animal on the viewscreen. Listen to the wise men gasp. Now we can see them for real,-' in color and all. They stagger the mind. Built more like an armless ' squid than anything else. Flukes in the tail, but these seem to be more for maintaining trim and maneuvering than for propulsion. Mammoth open mouth up front; maybe it's permanently open. Can't see any teeth. A siphon under the belly pulses rhythmically. No wonder they can move so fast -- they run on jet propulsion. No eyes, no fins except the tail flukes. Sleek and streamlined. Powerful. Glossy gray-green color. IF Mouths big enough to swaHow a town. Ifthey had teeth we'd be toothpick size for them. Nobody's saying a word now. For once the scientists and I are in complete agreement. I could watch these giants all day. They're just gliding along in formation, the outer bulls weaving back and forth a little. Can't make out any really small members inside the pack but there's a pretty tight knot of cows in the center. Maybe they're protecting the youngsters. From what? Every instrument on the ship is grinding away. Power drain is at max. Just keeping up with these whales while they're grazing is straining the engines. "Is there any way we can get samples of their tissue?" Ling asks. I hope he's being rhetorical. Bromley says, "I suppose we could slice off a bit with the highpower laser." ' I glance at Andrei. com unit. "Our orders are to conduct remote observations of any life-forms discovered. No direct contact unless it is forced upon us. No samples, I'm sorry." "Oh, come now," Bromley argues. "A little nick on one of those flukes -- " "We have no way of knowing how the animal would react," Andrei says. "I wouldn't want to be close to one when it started thrashing around; Well -- would you?" No answer. Discussion ended. "How're you feeling?" I ask him. "Not too bad. Speer says he can't find anything physically wrong." "Want to rest some more?" "No. It's time for your rest period, isn't it?" "I'm not tired." "Never mind. Go back and sleep." It's funny. He sounds so reluctant. He doesn't want to plug in. And he 'doesn't realize how much I don't want to unplug. "Something you ought to know." I tell him about the hull, show him the computer's estimates and then flash the priority lists. "I haven't told the scientists about it yet. Observing the whales overrides all the other priority mission objectives. Looks like pressure's holding steady, even though it's a little high. Probably the hull will be okay as long as we don't go any deeper." Andrei still hasn't plugged in... I can see his whole face. He looks positively happy. "I understand. We will start the twelve-hour priority list and do as much as we can. If the hull still is good after that we will stretch it foe another twelve hours. But that's all. After that we go up." "What do you think the scientists are going to say?" He Shrugs. "That is irrelevant." Fine by me. Let him argue with them. Andrei slowly plugs himself in and takes over control of the. ship. It's time forme to let go. IV Pain! Lights flashing, ship tumbling wildly. "What's the matter? What's going on?" I'm slapping on connectors as fast as I can. Ship's lurching like a runaway drunk. Andrei looks bad. "Can't -- control -- can't -- " "Speer. Get up here fast." Check all systems. Give me just the emergency data. I'm trying, I'm trying! Outside view. Nothing. Where did the whales go? "Speer -- where the hell are you?" "I'm right here!" he screams through my earphone from a few centimeters away. Inside view. Speer's unplugging Andrei. Captain's arms are floating limply, head lolling ' back, mouth sagging open. Ship still buffeting. Fighting for control. Stabilizer coming around. Slewing and rolling. "What the hell happened? I was in the sack when everything seemed to bust , loose." "I don't know," Speer . shouts. "It all happened so fast. The captain yelled something and the ship seemed to roll completely over. Lights went off for a moment. I fell out of my couch. I think Ling's been hurt." Got her righted now. Bouncing's smoothing but. Stabilizer starting to respond on its own. Any red alerts? Speer's still struggling with the captain. "Ludongo, Bromley -- one of you get up here and give Speer a hand with the captain." We're all in one piece. Run a complete systems check, display anything, outside nominal values. Display hull pressure. Okay. Rerun sensor tapes for the past ten minutes so I can figure outjwhat happened. TV view, good. There are the whales, still feeding. Everything peaceful enough, what are those? Different -- look at the whaies buck! There they go, top speed, right out of sight: Wide-angle soIF n ax view now. More animals zooming in. Not whales, though. Too small. Different shape. Delta form, faster, tight formation. Look like manta rays or sharks. Zooming in like rocketplanesThey, they're coming right at us! Blackout. Back to real time. Outside view. Still nothing. Whatever they Were, they're gone. Intercom. Speer's got Andrei on the emergency couch in the medical bay, next to his own compartment. With these damned gills you can't tell if a man's breathing or not. Closeup. Yep, the gills are pulsing. But damned slow. And why did they have to make them green? "Speer, hoyfr's he doing?" "I don't know," Speer says, looking miserable. "He has some of the symptoms of shock. Blood pressure's very low. I'm going to try pressure cuffs to pump the blood back up from his legs and lower torso." "Dr: Ling needs help also," Ludongo says. Look in on Ling's compartment. He's got a gash on his forehead. Blood seeping out makes a reddish cloud that drifts in the circulation currents toward the exhaust duct in the overhead. Ludongo's in therewith him. "It's not a serious wound," Ling says calmly. "Attend to the captain first,"  "Somebody put a patch on him . at least," I say. Ludongolooks up at the intercom Screen. Bromley, back in his own cubicle, says, "I'll get a firstaid kit." Okay. They're helping each other. Ship's handling all right now. Controls still sluggish, though. Stabilizer acting okay. Andrei must have turned off our fake-whale signal. Why? I "Does anyone understand what happened to us?" Ludongo asks. He's sitting beside Ling, who now has a white plastic gummed on his brown skin from one non-existent eyebrow halfway back to the top of his head. It's about three times more bandage than the cut needed, but at least the bleeding has stopped. "We were attacked by the sharks -- or whatever they were," I tell them. Ling agrees. "I was watching the viewscreen when it happened. The new type of creature is clearly a predator." "Sharks," Bromley mutters. "And we outsmarted ourselves," I realize. "Our sonar camouflage fooled the sharks. They thought we were a whale. When the real whales took off and we just stood here, they jumped us." "But how?!' Ludongo asks. "Did they ram the ship? What did they do to us?" Good' questions. We rerun the tapes. Four times. In ultra-slow motion. The computer checks their sizes, speeds, closing rates. Up at the front end of their manta-shaped bodies is a snout that may or may not have a mouth in it. They're about a quarter of the size of the whales -- still more than three times our size; And the computer is very definite that the nearest shark was still half a kilometer away from us when Andrei shoutedand the ship went haywire. Now we're all silent. Very, very silent. Speer standing Over the captain. Ling on his couch, with the other two beside him. And me up on the flight deck. The sharks have something that can knock this ship for a loop. Something that acts over a range of half a kilometer. A weapon. "'V#'OU'R ! E not suggesting that they're actually intelligent?" Bromley asks finally, his voice strained. "Who can say?" Ludongo replies. "Are dolphins intelligent?" "We must learn more about them," Ling says. "But how?" "Decoy them again," I answer. "Put on our whale camouflage and wait for them to find us." "We can't risk it," says Speer. "The captain's been hurt. What happens if you -- " His voice drops out. Bromley chips in, "Yes, and how long can you stay at the controls of thi ship without Collapsing from fatigue? I vote that we get out while we're still able to. We've already discovered much more than anyone expected us to." ' "Still," Ling says, "it would be extremely valuable to study these creatures further. If they are intelligent -- " I tell them, "Discovery of an intelligent creature falls under our primary mission objective. The most important task we have is to determine if the sharks are intelligent or not. "Wait," Bromley says. "What about the hull? The captain told us while you were sleeping that the hull is showing signs of corrosion and we must pull out in twelve hours. So any further arguments are purely academic." "We still have twelve hours to see what we can accomplish," I say. "And longer if we need it." "What about the captain himself?" Sheer asks. "We should be getting him to propermedical treatment." "Will twelve hours be critical?" I ask. , "Of course. Twelve minutes might be critical. I can't really diagnose him accurately here." What would Andrei do if I were stretched out on the couch? Twelve hours. He's in shock. If he's lived through the first few minutes he ought to be okay. Speer can take care of him. Ship's IF all mine now -- the decisions are mine to make. Another twelve hours. All mine for another twelve hours. Maybe longer. "We'll stay," I tell them. "Speer, let me know if he gets any worse. We'll put out the whale sonar signal. If the sharks show up we'll try some long-range looks at them and then turn off the whale signal." "If they have any intelligence at all,' I Bromley says, "the sonar camouflage won't fool them. They'll know we're not a whale:" "It fooled them once." "Did it?" Hadn't thought of that. Ignore it. "Okay. The computer will give each of you a priority list of measurements that must be made. Carry out as many as you can, starting at the top of the list. If and when we make contact with alien life-forms, all instruments will be devoted to getting as much data on them as possible." Bromley mutters, "Another ruddy admiral handing down orders to his deck hands." But they're getting to work. Keep them busy. Suppose the sharks are intelligent? Suppose they're the ones who built the machines on Titan? What kind of weapon did they use on the. ship? What else do they have? Not now. I'm busy. I didn't really dream... Okay, okay -- But it wasn't much of. anything. It was kind of mixed up, wierd. Part of it was the last time I saw Marlene. with gills. They had us living in test tanks. The banjos connected with the lake and we could spend our free time there if we felt like it. I had been there for an hour or so, watching the dolphins they had stocked the lake with. To keep us company, I guess. Marlene had not told me she was coming to see me. She just showed up with a tank strapped to her back and her face covered by a goggled mask. But I recognized her immediately. Even with her hair pulled back I knew her the instant I saw her. "They've taken off all your hair," was the first thing she said from inside the mask. "More than you know," I answered. I was wearing my trunks. We swam for a long time, hooked rides on the dolphins, talked about trivialities, hardly  touched each other. "I've got my assignment," she said at last. "Sirius." "Same as your friend?" "Yes." "Was it a tough job to wangle the same mission? Did you have tolay any of the administrators or personnel people?" "Bob, don't be -- " "Don't be what?" I asked. And somehow it was a different time and place. I was standing in front of a desk, in. my Navy uniform, while a fat civilian was telling me, Don't be disappointed that you weren't accepted for a star mission. Only a handful of the very finest scientists, bhd spacemen could be picked. There's an even more challenging assignment waiting for you, if I must have asked him what it was. Jupiter...Far more dangerous and hostile than any star mission. The most difficult challenge we have ever faced. And possibly the most important. Certainly the most rigorous mission we've attempted so far... Note the we. He never got closer to Jupiter than the men's room down the hall from his office. The Jupiter mission Is so hostile that we're only accepting single men for it. He hesitated a beat, . then: There's been a rumor that you... I'm not married, I said to him. I was once but she's, dead now... I'm single. The dream changed again. I was" standing alone, watching as Marlene died. The details were confused, mixed up. The noise was shattering. Flame and smoke. People shouted and pointed. No, it's all a jumble. dream. End of report. Give me a sonar sweep, max range. Still nothing. Okay, systems check. Controls still heavy. Don't like the way the stabilizer -- hey, why are we nose down? The hell it is. I want her straight and level. Maintain constant depth. Override it, then. Keep us straight and level. Check ship's attitude every five minutes. If the stabilizer can't keep us level, override it. "Speer, how's the captain?" Young as he is, Speer is squintIF ing near-sightedly at the sick-bay instrument board. "His condition is about the same. Comatose. Blood pressure low but steady." "Will he make it?" He shrugs elaborately. "If we were on Earth or even on one of the orbiting ships -- " He's looking for a bowl of water to wash away his responsibility. "Are you still insisting on this madness?" Bromley's whine. "We haven't found any more animals. Give it up. For God's sake, let's get out of here while we still can." Hull pressure report. Minimum time to failure? "All systems are within tolerable limits," I say into the intercom. "We will continue the mission." Dr. Ling, sounding a little weaker than before, says, "I wish to go on record as requesting that we remain at least long enough to make another attempt at observing the native life forms. If possible, I would like to sample some tissue." Tough old bird. He'd probably go afterJovian whale hide with his teeth if he had to! "Dr. Ludongo, do you wish to make any comment for the ship's log?" After a moment's hesitation, he answers, I T am I cbhrnedaou t the captain's health and the ship's safety. However, I realize the importance of our mission and wish to continue -- unless the risks become too great." Hah! His father couldn't have straddled the fence any better. Display it. Six blips. Too far to make out what they are. Keep them in sight, follow them. Display size estimates as soon as sufficient data is recorded. Understood. "We have six objects on sonar," I tell them, punching the sonar display onto thir screens. "Are they whales or sharks?" Ludongo asks. "Probably whales. They're cruising peacefully. Too far off to sense us." Bromley says, "If they're sharks and they attack us -- " "Computer is preset to turn off our whale signal if sonar returns show that they're sharks." Bromley doesn't look happy at all. I can see him shudder. V Can't rest. Captain's in sick bay. Watching myself on the inside camera, I pull my hands and feet out of the control connectors. N.ow I reach between Andrei's couch and mine for the nutrient tube and plug it into the socket on my left arm. Andrei's is on his right arm. He used to joke that this was the way you could tell the pilot from the co-pilot. ER. I crank the couch back slightly and try to relax. Sonar still shows six gray smudges. Guess I'm supposed to nap but I don't want ,to. Dream too much. Like the time just before we left for Moonbase, when I was swimming in the lake' and saw Marlene. She'd been dead for more than a month but there she was swimming toward me. My heart just stopped. Only it wasn't she. When the girl got close enough I could see she did not look anything at all like Marlene. I don't want to dream about her now. Concentrate on the mission. Don't sleep. Don't dream. ER. Must have dozed off after all. Computer turned off the sensor display. Outside view. They're whales all right. More than six -- two smaller ones in sight. Youngsters? Can't be sharks, they're riding right alongside one of the big . ones.  Maintain max magnification and display all data as it comes in. Also maintain max warning range for any other contacts. Interrupt all displays if another contact appears. Look in on the scientists. They're resting now, letting the instruments pull in the data and record it. Ling's watching the sonar display while lying down. Bromley and Ludongo are chatting about something over the intercom. Science stuff. Speer's back in his own cubby, sleeping.' Check the captain. Still unconscious, looks like. Tap into the medical recorders. All displays fairly constant -- heart rate, breathing, body temperature. Holding his own, I guess. Track him. It's more than one. A dozen objects, whistling along in close formation out at the edge of our sonar range. They're on the far IF side of the whale group. Probably they haven't picked us up at all. They're sharks, no doubt about it. Can't tell their sizes or shapes at this distance. But just watching them move you can see they're completely different from the whales. They're hunters. And killers. "Sonar contact. Twelve sharks," I say on the intercom. The scientists snap to life, stare at the sonar display. ,, "Observe max safety procedures,"! tell them. They're already strapping in. Range to whales? Maintain constant distance from them. Follow them without getting any closer. So far the whales haven't detected the sharks at all. They're just lumbering along. The sharks are still out at the edge of our detection range. But now they're splitting up into smaller groups -- two or three each. "My God, they're going to surround the whales!" Bromley's voice, awe-stricken. "Rather intelligent behavior," Ling says softly. Ludongo, "Many predators on Earth are equally intelligent. The lion, for instance. And the wolf." Two of the sharks are circling' around behind the whales while the rest are deploying themselves ahead of the whales and along their flanks. The whales still haven't noticed theih. Speer says, "They're going to be butchered -- " "Shouldn't you be turning off the whale signal?" Bromley asks. Ludongo says, "If we turn off the camouflage signal the real whales might sense us and bolt." . "That could save their lives," says Ling. "Surely many of them will be killed if they don't begin to run soon." "Mission objectives clearly state we are not to interfere with local ecological patterns," I remind them. "However, ship safety requirements have the highest priority." ER. Understood. Will assume stabilizer is being overriden every five minutes until you report otherwise. No further need for override reports. Turn off the sonar signal. If the scientists Could hold their breaths with artificial gills they'd be doing it now. Nothing. The whales don't , sense us. And the two sharks are paying no attention to us either. They're lining up. The other sharks are deployed in ambush. There they go. Wide-angle view -- follow them in. The whales finally sense them. Look at thenr buck. The whales are faster than the sharks -- at least for short sprints. They're going to bull right past the sharks and break free. bolts! Electric blasts arching from the sharks to the whales. Blank out the eyes when they flash. They're paralyzing the whales with electricity. "Stop them -- kill them," Bromley's shouting. "Don't let them do it -- use the laser on the sharks -- " The sharks are doing a thorough job.' Electric bolts stun the whales. Then the sharks latch on with their snouts, like lamprey eels. Looks like they suck the juices from the whales, instead of eating the meat. Most of the whales have two or , three sharks attached to them now, drifting slowly, sinking. One of the youngsters has managed to keep clear of them. He's heading our way, emitting all sorts of high-pitched peeps. Three sharks closing in on him. "Save him," Bromley shrieks. "Don't let them get him -- " "Our mission is to observe, not interfere."  This time it happens no farther than ten kilometers from us. Infrared picks up good detail. The little whiale isn't much bigger than our ship. He's fast but the sharks have an angle on him. Closing fast. Youngster's screeching louder and louder. Or maybe it's just the Doppler effect. There goes the. lightning -- was that Bromley groaning? Eyes recovered , now. Whale's dead in the water. One shark already stuck into him, other two move in and hook on. The sceneis obscene. Ludongo says, "Now we know how they attacked us. An electric arc -- it makes an effective weapon." "But a completely natural one," Ling says, sounding a little subdued. "They apparently have no artifacts." "The captain must've been jolted when theif electric arcs hit the ship. Doubt he got an electrical shock -- the systems are protected 'against that. But having several bolts slam into the ship and overpower all the controls and sensors must have been enough to send him into -- what do you call it, Speer?" "Physiological shock." "Yes. Does that help you? Can you treat him better now?" "Not really." He sounds sullen. Outside view shows the baby whale and its three leeches drifting just below us now. "Why did you have to let them get the little one?" L flick a look at him. He's practically in tears. Bromley's livid. It's hard to tell what Ludongo's expression means. Ling's impassive but very quiet now. Sheer IF emotionalism. The whale was panicked and running blind. It wasn't heading for us deliberately. It couldn't know that we might have helped it. Ling speaks up. "It seems there is a considerable amount of Jovian tissue nearby. Will it possible to sample it?" Looking out again, I see that the sharks have detached from the baby whale. It's still close to us but starting to sink faster. The sharks have gone. There are no living creatures left nearby. Nose the ship down. Plot fastest intercept course. How deep? Display any change in nose pressure immediately. Ling uses the high-powered laser to vaporize some of the whale's flash. Studies the light on spectrophotometer. Ludongo helps by probing the animal with high-frequency sonar to get some idea of density. Bromley tries neutron beam probe but returns look too weak to be intelligible. Either not much solid structure inside the baby or Bromley's still too upset to work instruments. "Speer, how's the captain's condition?" He looks up from the sick bay couch. "Worse. His breathing rate is slower. I think the higher pressure down at this depth is bothering him." Check internal monitor. "But the internal pressure's only upone point one percent." "I don't care what the numbers are," he says, frowning angrily. "His gill rate is getting critical. It's getting hard for me to breathe, too. My gill rate's slowed down -- I've checkedit." Pressure shouldn't bother them. Check performance ratings for gill systems. Curve shows pressure versus oxygen production. Now superimpose ship's current internal pressure readings. Pressure is approaching the critical point but is not there yet. Whale is still sinking. "Dr. Ling, we will exceed safety margins if we go deeper." "Do you have all the data you, want?" Ludongo asks. Ling smiles into the camera. "It would take several generations to get all the data that I desire. But I have accomplished far more than I expected to. I can stopnow if you wish." Good. Set course for surface and execute. Useless. Track down the malfunction. Fast. Possible causes of stabilizer failure: electrical, hydraulic, mechanical. If electrical, can use alternate circuit. If hydraulic, backup system should work. But if external pressure has overloaded the system -- and ship's still nosing deeper -- : we're in trouble. Flick on the intercom. "Gentlemen, the stabilizer system is temporarily inoperative." Explain it to them. Watch their faces. Each one shows fear. "Isn't there anything we can do?" Bromley asks. "Computer is working on the problem." "You could use engine thrust to push us up out of this depth," Ludongo says. "Perhaps at lower pressures the stabilizer will work again." He's running his hands along the edge of his couch as he speaks. "That might be tried if nothing else works." "Why not now?" Speer asks. "It would take an excessive amount of propulsion power to lift the ship while the stabilizer is pointing us down. There might not be enough power left to lift out of the atmosphere and return to orbit." "There is nothing for us to do but wait?" asks Ling. "That's right." "Tell me," Bromley says, his voice calm except for a slight tremor. "How long can we remain in this attitude before we reach a depth that.will crush the ship?" "Insufficient data." They lapse into silence. Ludongo turns again to his workbench. Bromley leans back on his couch. Ling is rerunning data tapes. Speer is fidgeting around the captain. Computer, make a straight-line extrapolation of. pressure gradient recorded so far. Compare it to hull structural strength and display an estimated time to hull rupture. Private circuit display for flight deck only. What about malfunction check on stabilizer. IF at fifteen per cent beRun through history of stabilizer performance. Minute-byminute record off the tapes. Identify when nose-down began and check all circuits, components and total system status at that moment. Ludongo calls, "O'Banion, why don't you use the engine's thrust to take us up just a little? There's no sense staying at this depth." "Not yet necessary. May be possible to identify the fault and correct it before critical depth is reached." Bromley says, "Is that O'Banion talking or the computer?" "I -- I can't tell," Ludongo says, sounding shocked. and heads from Bromley's compartment. No, not Bromley's. Ling's. "Could I speak with you. Dr. Ling? In private?" Ling's been running tapes of our encounter with the sharks when they slaughtered the whale family. He blinks once at Speer, then reaches out and turns off his intercom connections. Blank now. Where's that stabilizer history? "O'Banion, this is Ludongo again. I don't want to seem panicky but it's getting damned uncomfortable in here. Can't you take us up at least a little way?" Bromley: "I thought it was only me. It is becoming bad in here. My head aches terribly and I'm beginning to get pains fn my chest and abdomen." Check internal pressure. Rising. Nearing max allowable. Check life-support systems. All functioning normally but curves starting to approach red. "Internal environment remains within tolerable limits. Emotional factors may be adding to your discomfort. No one is in immediate physical danger. Suggest you ask Dr. Speer for tranquilizers." "He's talking like theruddy computer," Bromley insists. The intercom in Ling's compartment flicks back on. Speer leaves, returns to the sick bay. "This pressure is hurting the captain,"he says, squinting at the monitor board above Voronov's head. "His breathing rate is going down steadily." "Check for gill malfunction." Why does someone have to spell out everything fot him? "For God's sake," Bromley shouts. "Take us up! Can't you see we're starting to die in here? We're too deep -- we can't stand it here much longer -- " "All systems are within tolerable limits." "But the people aren't," Bromley yells. "Damn the machines -- the people are dying. Damn you military heroes -- you're driving us to death. It was a mistake to trust our lives to you." "Systems indicate your reaction is purely emotional, possibly close to hysteria. Dr. Speer, please -- " "May I interrupt?" Ling's voice slides in smoothly. "Although all the systems appear to be operating within tolerable limits, as you say, I suggest that there is one system that may be working at less then nominal values." "Which one?" "Thepilot." He means the human pilot. Operating at less than nominal value. Noway to check that. Ling goes on: "You have been at the controls steadily now for more than twelve hours. If nothing else, fatigue may be clouding your judgment. Perhaps you should check the computer's memory for the operating procedures specified for situations such as this. I believe that they call for computer control of the ship while the pilot rests." "Computer control unfeasible during emergency situation." He should know that. "Then perhaps you could use the engine thrust to lift us to a safer pressure and afterward take your rest." "Suggestion unfeasible." Speer: "He's withdrawing more and more." "He'S becoming part of the computer," Bromley says. He's talking nonsense But his voice sounds strangely hushed, no longer raving. "What can we do about it?"' asks Ludongo. VI trol the ship. They can't get to the flight deck because the hatch is being closed and dogged down. There. They need the ship. But the ship doesn't need them. Turn off the intercom and stop their faces and voices from interfering with the ship's performance. Displays parading now. Graphs and charts, pretty yellow curves on black backgrounds, multi-colored bars creeping across white grid lines -- all of them edging toward red lines, danger zones. Lifesupport Systems, electrical power drain, navigation, control, propulsion reserve, sensors are all getting weaker. Sinking deeper. Medical monitor shows Voronov completely stable. Heart rate, breathing rate, metabolic, rate, alpha rhythm -- all zero. ED. Display it. Insert stabilizer history in ship's log under prime priority. Important to make them realize what happened for mission analysis. Generate a plot showing how much height would be gained by using engine thrust to counteract stabilizer failure. Useless. Curve doesn't even reach ocean surface. Burn out engine without getting above surface and the stabilizer will nose ship back into depths. Check the recorder. Is it ready for separation? And the rest of the recorder system? All. major mission objective are met if the recorder gets back to the orbiting ships. Good. Mission objectives will be met despite stabilizer malfunction and hull failure. Crew incapacitated. Cannot be contacted. No rest period. Captain incapacitated. No other pilot available. Guess it won't hurt anything. Tired... how much time to hull failure? is P -- IwcimdHdy Inf r -- tfngf Pkn Anthony    Itooc Asimov # o  o o o L. Sprogy# d Cmiwp...T -- ry Carr  John ChHstophor... Philip K. Dick.  Horton BRton   W humor... Jock  John Hoy don Ho word...Loo P. KoNoy.Doon R. Koontz... Anno M cCo ff roy . R ich -- I Moorcock  .  Aloxol Ponshln... Mock Roynolds .  . IW Ro tslor... Normon Splnrod...Bob Tockor... Horry Womor, Jr...Tod Whlto o o o  pprfntfmtMWyffyrg... A WO wtif  d H or ond p wMlhtr Hdwrd L Qii do. HU ttiinf. OH -- r P.O.Box #I # I -- Disconnecting from active ship control. Will reconnect in one hour. If no reconnection is initiated in one hour, sound yellow alert. Get nutrient tube. Last meal. Check sensors. Completely empty but there, nothing around us. Maybe we're too deep for the whales now... Sleepy. What difference will a dream make at this stage? How long? controls now. How much time to hull failure? Wait, that's wrong. But before I went to sleep it was one hour, thirty-five. Been asleep fifty minutes, so we should have only forty-five minutes to failure, not fifty-five. Showme! Damn, it did level off a bit. But now it's getting as steep as ever. IF Why? Not now. I'm thinking. Damn missionobjective fourteen! Oh -- okay. I'll think while I talk. I -- it was the same dream. I saw Marlene die again. Only this time I recognized where it happened. I was in my tank, watching her booster launch on the TV screen in my compartment. I had asked to go to the launch but they would not risk letting any of us out of the water, even in special pressure suits. Marlene was lifting off for rendezvous with the starship. He was already aboard, waiting in orbit for her, waiting to go with her to Sirius. Her booster malfunctioned. It exploded on the pad, I guess. And then -- somehow I was standing there at the pad, naked. I could feel the heat from the flames on my skin. The smoke' from the explosion was swirling all around. You could hear alarm sirens and people shouting. Somebody -- it was Bromley! He was dressed in the admiral's uniform and shouting at me above all the noise. It's your fault -- you killed her... I'm cold -- God, I feel cold. I tried to tell him it wasn't true, that I had nothing to do with it -- but the dream changed, shifted. I was back in that stupid office with that fat civilian telling me I had been turned down for the star missions. I'm sorry. There are just so many berths on the starships, and we had to take the absolute cream of the crop. But there will be other missions... I'll be too old for the next round of star flights. By the time they come back from these first missions and the next round starts I'll be an old man... Yes, but you're still young enough to perform a vital job for us. But Speer's younger than I am, I said. Which was crazy, because, at that point in reality I had not yet even met Speer. ' I don't want to talk to them. They're afraid to die. Everybody dies but they don't want to face it. Voronov died and Marlene died and I'm going to die soon. Maybe it is my fault. she leveled off while I was asleep and disconnected. Now she's nosing down again. Give me the record of the stabilizer control settings for the past hour and a half. Manual settings and automatic. Okay, I'll answer it. Speer's face. He must be right on top of the camera. Sick bay couch behind him. Empty now. "What is it?" I asked him. He looks surprised that I answered him. "Uh -- we've been trying to get through to you." "You're talking to me now. What is it?" "The captain -- " "I know about it." "We're all in bad shape. Ling's unconscious. It's very hard to breathe -- hard even to move around. A lot of pain -- bad -- " "Hold it, I'll get back, to you," I tell Speer. Look at the automatic control setting. There's the one-degree nose-down pattern, with the automatics trying to correct. But the only time they did any good was while I was asleep. Which means -- check, the manual "settings -- Holy hell -- It's been me! The manual controls have been depressed one degree all this time. It's been me. I've been nosing us Damned stupid computer! Why didn't you tell me I had the manual controls set down? "Speer, get up here fast -- " Disconnecting from ship controls. Let the automatics take over. I've been the weak link in the system. No wonder the computer couldn't find a malfunction. The system was working perfectly -- the pilot was malfunctioning. "I can't get the hatch open," Speer says. Undog it. Okay, here he is, floating in and hovering alongside Voronov's couch, his face lined, eyes sunken. "Get into the captain's couch," I tell Speer. "Stay with me. Don't leave me alone. I think we can get out of this but I can't risk being alone up here." He looks scared but he does it. Set stabilizer and all controls to return trajectory. Follow minimum energy course. IF is one of the world's most famous science-fiction writers. He has also written books on astronomy, anatomy, robots, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, words, the Greek myths, and the Bible. His new book -- #th in a long line of best sellers -- contains selections from the first #. opus no Asimov's own vast enthusiasm for whatever subject he is tackling immediately infects the reader with a spirit of intellectual adventure. pany of a warm, ebullient, very human being who is -- in fact -- a genius. At your bookstore  # Okay, execute. And show me all I try to explain to Speer what systems performances. happened. He listens without sayIt looks good. Power, propul"I guess I blamed myself for sion, hull pressure -- we're rising! Marlene's death," I tell him. "I "We're pulling out of it," I tell guess I unconsciously wanted to Speer. "We'll be all right." join her -- or punish myself. SomeLudongo heard it over the interthing like that." com. "Thank all the gods of "But how could you blame Earth!" yourself for an accident? If the I see my mouth grinning, booster exploded -- how could it "Bromley's got nothing to say?" be your fault?" "We had to put him under Ludongo breaks in, "What sedation," Speer answers. booster exploded? There were no accidents among the star missions. All the ships took off on schedule. I have a friend on the Sirius mission; they didn't lose anyone in an accident." "You're wrong -- I saw it -- In the dream I keep seeing it again -- the noise and the flame and the smoke." "There were no accidents," Ludongo insists. Could it have been just a normal lift-off I was watching? The booster rising up and out of the smoke, the flame coming from normal rocket exhaust? "The announcer -- I remembejr now. They even showed telescope pictures of the booster orbiting with the starship. You're right -- it didn't explode." "Then why did you think she was dead?" Ludongo asks. The answer comes immediately. "She is dead. For me she's dead. By the time she comes back from Sirius, I'll be past sixty years old. She'll be about thirty-five. I've lost her for good -- remember now locking my mind on the fact that she's dead -- " Speer: "But your dreams kept forcing you to look at the situation. They were trying to make you -- well, unlock." "But I didn't want to dream." "Of course. You wanted to hide inside the ship, in the computer. You wanted to stop being human -- because that's painful. But your dreams wouldn't let you do it." "But in the meantime the captain -- " Speer shrugs. "The captain's safely stored in the cryogenic locker. When we get back to Earth we can revive him and make him good as new." Voronov's not dead? But Marlene is -- she really is. But I want to live. I'm going to get back to that beautiful blue planet, get rid of these damned gills and breathe sweet air again. "Okay. Back to work. Doc, you'd better check Ling and Bromley, see if they're okay. Then come back here. Dr. Ludongo, might be a good idea to strap down. There'll be turbulence when we get closer to the surface and even more in the atmosphere." Ludongo nods into the intercom camera. Speer pulls himself out of the captain's couch and goes aft. Give me a complete systems check. Turbulence coming up. But we'll get through it. She's a good ship. I can reconnect with the controls now -- it'll be okay. We'll get through the clouds and back home again. It'll be good to be able to look at the stars again.  IF If you could get anyone you wanted on tape -- would you? #? 'NSlW' y . tM if  ;  tax X wMJfj in so ebullient a mood. His tiny eyes sparkled. His normally pale cheeks were aglow with color and his wispy beard fluttered like a royal pennant. "You've won the state lottery?" I cried. He shook his head. His federal research grants had been sharply slashed and he had taken to pasting lottery tickets on the walls of his laboratory for all visitors to see. "It's not that at all," growled Duckworth. "I've come up with a new idea and it has exciting possibilities." He drew up a rickety laboratory stool and gingerly lowered his rump 'as he began to' sketch out penciled squares on a lined yellow pad. "I can't make it' out," I said, staring at the irregular lines. "All a matter of recordings," said Duckworth. "To take a simple example, consider sound. We've captured the analogue of sound waves on disks, then on wire -- and currently on magnetic tape." I nodded. "And in the case of light," I said, "we've recorded it on glass plates, then film and now on photochromic materials." "That's the point," said Duckworth. "And by use of the hologram we can lock up interference patterns into a tiny space, which can be used to reconstitute a threedimensional image at some other time." "Well, that takes care of sound and light," I said. "There's still taste, touch and smell." Duckworth leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner. "And feeling," he added. "Feeling?" "The full emotional impact of an event, once experienced, just as it happened to you," said Duckworth. "Just imagine what it would be like to relive an exquisite, once-in-a-lifetime experience and savor once again all its joys. It would mean that one could transform the life ofveiy invalid, every Old man, every middle-aged couple that's lost the freshness of the honeymoon era." "You're an incurable romantic," I said. "But I get. your, point. The great part of living is made up of tedium, trials and tribulations. The high spots are quite rare." "But they don't have to be," said Duckworth. "I have worked out a way of locking them up, ready to be recaptured and relived at will over and over again," My jaw dropped. "If . you have," I said, "then you've outdone yourself. It sounds utterly impossible to me;" "So would holography have seemed a hundred years ago," said Duckworth. He rose from his stool suddenly. It clattered to the floor. IF "Come along," he said, "and I'll show you what I mean." corridor to his animal room, unbuttoned lab coat fluttering around him. I followed warily. I had many a bump and bruise to show from iron test-tube stands and dismantled fraction collectors that were set about in unlikely places. Duckworth flipped on the main light switch and pointed exultantly at six small cages set on a table in the middle of the room. Each one held a single white rat. He stroked his beard reflectively"I suppose I ought to give you some preliminary information," he muttered to himself. "Please." "Look at it thfe way," said the great biochemist. "The internal effects of a real-life experience on a sentient being must affect all the senses. Somewhere in the nervous system is a terminal cell or set of cells for each peripheral receptor. The pathways may not be easy to find. Butvin these terminal cells every split second of experience is electrochemically recorded and stored sequentially. We can all, by means of a crude memory recall, relive very approximately some past experience. The reason for the roughness of the recall is that the record of the experience is cluttered over by the interfering effects of innumerable previous experiences and the hash of succeeding events. Besides, even without interference, there would be some degeneration in the record as time went by." "I can accept your hypothesis," I said. "But how can you possibly retrieve the information of these records, particularly in the correct sequence." Duckworth's eyes ' began to gleam again. "First I freeze the records," he said. "In that way there can be no loss of information. And then I retrieye every bit of data in proper sequence." I threw up my hands. "How?" . "By combining old and new techniques," said Duckworth. "For many years we've been able to map cortical areas in the mammalian brain which correspond to various sensory inputs. Into the brain of each one of these rats I'Ve implanted thousands of tiny integrated circuits, charge-sensitive oscillators. Local temperature differences are sufficient to provide the necessary energy to power these oscillators, each of which operates at a different carrier frequency. The charge pattern variations, both in amplitude and time, are telemetered to my special purpose receiver-computer. It receives the information just as it comes, converts it to binary . form and stores it on magnetic tape." "Can your little implanted oscillator receive information as well as transmit?" "You've caught on," said Duckworth. "By playing back the stored pattern in the proper sequence," I said, "you restimulate the appropriate sites of the cortex and the animal re-experiences every sensation as he once felt it." "Bravo," said Duckworth. "That's just what I've done with these rats. I can make each one salivate as though he were eating. I can send him into paroxysms of terror or even arouse him sexually, depending on which of his experiences I play back." "Will one animal respond to another's recordings?" "In principle it can be done," said Duckwortfy. "But it would require the utmost care in matching up corresponding sites." 'I fixed my eyes on his. "Are you thinking of trying out this scheme on a human being?" Duckworth shrugged. "I've been toying with the idea," he admitted. "But choosing and convincing the subject might be a ticklish matter. There are surgical 'risks." "To put it mildly," I said. I backed away from him. "Don't consider me," I warned. "I cherish some of the finer moments of my bygone past -- but not that much." . "I know," said Duckworth. "I suspect that anyone I'd approach would react the same way. And yet the rewards could be so great. I wonder if I've been wasting my time?" "You haven't," I assured him. "Publish your results and you'll  see. phetic my remarks were. Duckworth's sober and rather stodgy account of his method of recording sensations appeared first in an eminent scientific journal. I expected him to get a few crackpot responses but I had totally underestimated the number. "I've been flooded with thousands of nutty requests from autoeroticists," said Duckworth wearily. He had sidled into.the Computer Laboratory where I was debugging a new program to be used in his system. I shook my head sadly. ".It's an unfortunate truism that every nut in the world is'attracted by this kind of scheme." "But some of these letters are beyond belief," said Duckworth. "And I thought I was a manabout-town!" He waved a heavily embossed piece of stationery at me. "This one is from the Nazir of Waddam. I've known him for years. Cap you guess what . he wants?" "I know what he wants," I said. "He asks you to record all his current amatory exploits in his harem, for replaying in his old age." IF "How did you guess?" said Duckworth. He was awestruck by my prescience. I shrugged off the question. It had been purely a matter of empathy. I had simply put myself in the Nazir's place. T HE demented and oddball amateurs posed one type of problem but each one could be dealt with. The serious difficulties arose when the professionals appeared on the scene like a swarm of locusts. Each one had a surefire deal in mind and talked in large amounts of dollars. I was afraid that Duckworth might be tempted. Maintaining his research on inadequate funds was wearing him out. And his professional salary was quite modest. But he withstood all temptations, direct and oblique. One chap persevered however. He was unstoppable, loquacious and imaginative. His name was HartFelsen, a short stout man in his late forties, wearing a floppy straw hat in the manner of vintage Sidney Greenstreet films. His clothes were of first quality, suggesting distinguished Saville Row tailors, but his bulging form inserted wrinkles everywhere. Felsen appeared at the university and made his first approach to Duckworth through the head of the chemistry department. After being rebuffed he tried the dean's office and finally appealed to President Hinkle, all to no avail. Felsen remained undiscouraged. To supplement his research funds Duckworth reluctantly decided to take on some consultation work for one of the more reputable drug houses. Sometimes these meetings took the form of a working luncheon. With consummate artistry Felsen contrived to wangle an invitation to one of these luncheons. He began to chat with Duckworth on the decline in the quality of modern wines and drew a frosty blank. But a chance sally on the inferior workmanship of new Bunsen burners drew a warm response. A little later Felsen broached the subject of Duckworth's recent paper and revealed an amazingly thorough understanding of what was involved. Duckworth was impressed with the acuity of his observations. "Could this system be fabricated in portable packages?" asked Felsen. "It's all portable now," said Duckworth. "The receiver-computer weighs under ten ounces, batteries included." Felsen licked his lips. "Dr. Duckworth," he said, trying vainly to lean forward against the inertia of his waistline. "Might it be possible for one person to respond to another's recordings?" "You may recall," said Duckworth, "that in my paper I discussed this very point. I stated that it would require very careful mapping of the proper cortical sites in each individual to make certain of an exact correspondence." "Of course," said Felsen, "how stupid of me to forget." But his eyes glowed and he ate voraciously thereafter. at Duckworth's laboratory with a ten-page proposal and a hand. Duckworth refused to read either one. 'Don't be foolish," said Felsen. "You could become completely independent of government grants and do whatever you wanted to do. Besides, there's more than money at stake here. You know what pleasure people get from audio recordings. Just picture the reaction to a catalogue of different joyous experiences; We could offer the experiences of presidents, surgeons, movie stars, courtesans. The potential for exploration, stimulation and excitement is unlimited and the monetary rewards incalculable." "It's not what I orginally had in mind," said Duckworth glumly. "It would lie a gross perversion of my basic idea." Felsen removed his straw hat and fanned his perspiring florid cheeks. "Let's forget individual pleasures and cash rewards," he said. "Let's think in grander terms. What about One World At Peace? Just think what it might mean if, for the first time, an American president could actually experience the feelings of a Russian premier and vice versa. Two otherwise hostile peoples could interchange vital life experiences with one another. For the first time in the history of mankind a real path to permanent peace between nations might be in our grasp." Duckworth was shaken but only momentarily. "It sounds good," he said, "too good. I don't believe the idea could ever be implemented. Not only two hostile individuals but two hostile nations would have to agree to submit wholesale to very delicate brain surgery to. make it all possible. If these people can't agree now on less substantive matters, how could we ever get agreement on your proposals?" "Nations have traded hostages before this," said Felsen. "This scheme would simply be another variation on the hostage idea. Give it a chance, Duckworth. Give generations yet unborn a chance." Duckworth was pale. "No," he said. "I'm not interested in your idea." And that, he thought, ended that. It seemed to, although for days thereafter Duckworth swore that he was being tailed in the streets and even oh the campus. He mainIF tained that olive-skinned men bad been lurking about, some in the burnous of the Middle East. Once, as I walked at his side, he nudged me and gestured at, a hornyhanded laborer type who walked stolidly behind me, his trouser cuff s white with cement dust. "See what I mean?" hissed Duckworth. He moved his elbow knowingly once again at the laborer. "He looks more Italian to me than Near-Eastern," I said. "You're becoming absolutely paranoid." . My triumph was complete when the laborer joined a construction crew working on the new south campus building. Duckworth looked a bit sheepish, then he sighed. "Even paranoids have enemies," he said. T EN days later Felsen accosted us in the computer laboratory. Duckworth stiffened as Felsen waved a puffy hand in greeting. "Dr. Duckworth," he ;said warmly. "You've passed the test." "What test?" snarled Duckworth. "Let me explain," said Felsen. "I am really an emissary from your old friend, the Nazir of Waddam. His remembrances of your integrity, your courage and your genius have lingered with him over the years. But he wasn't quite certain that your character was unchanged -- " "He hasn't changed much," said Duckworth. "I have a letter from him suggesting an erotic use of my recording system." "I know," said Felsen, "that was part of the test, believe me. But now we can dispense with all pretense and get down to the heart of the matter. The Nazir wants you to come to Waddam. He has a most important proposition to put to you. He will pay generously." "I'm too busy at the moment," said Duckworth. "I can't spare the time." "Too busy? Can't spare the time? Is this what you say to the man who offered you refuge in your time of need?" He was alluding of course to Duckworth's flight when the news had broken years earlier about his macromolecule. Duckworth just tugged at his beard reflectively. "I have responsibilities here," he said. "Graduate students, laboratory assistants, grant renewal requests. Without my presence the whole program here might go down the drain." "Splendid," said Felsen. "I'm sure your laboratory would benefit from a large grant-in-aid from the government of Waddam with no strings attached." "It sure would," I interjected. Felsen beamed at me warmly. "And," he added, "the Nazir has also requested the presence of your friend. We feel that his computer experience will bp of great help in our project. The consultant's fee will be quite handsome." A ND so it was that Duckworth and I were flown to Waddam in the luxuriously mounted private jet of the Nazir. The Nazir was at the airport in person to greet us. He embraced Duckworth, his cheeks wet with tears. Duckworth stepped back out of his arms. "You've forgiven me about the matter of the harem?" he said. The Nazir waved his hands effusively. "It never happened," he said grandly. At this point I was introduced to the Nazir and received a rather perfunctory handshake. The Nazir was a tall man whose hawklike proboscis seemed to dwarf even Duckworth's magnificent beak. He wore the long flowing robes of his hereditary office and his fingers were completely covered with rings set with enormous diamonds, rubies and emeralds. I thought it was a vulgar display and said so to Duckworth. "It's all a matter of taste," said Duckworth. "Personally, I think they're colorful." We were escorted into the airconditioned Cadillac of the Nazir and whisked to his palace, some fifteen miles from the airport. It was a stunning edifice in alabaster white, with cunningly fashioned minarets, winding stairways and limpid pools everywhere. The East Wing was under heavy guard. "The harem," muttered Duckworth. After a lavish dinner that set my gall bladder into violent reprisals, the Nazir, with Felsen at his elbow, put his proposal to Duckworth. "I am a humane man as you know, Duckworth. I abhor violence and bloodshed." Duckworth looked skeptical but said nothing. "After learning of your scientific publication from Mr. Felsen here," resumed the Nazir, "I conceived of a magnificent plan to end turmoil, disruption and misery in my country." Duckworth leaned forward. "Then you're going to share some of your oil royalties with the people? Congratulations," said Duckworth warmly. Felsen coughed and studied the end of his five-dollar cigar. The Nazir looked alarmed. "Heavens no," he said. "I have a much less sordid plan to offer. As I see it, the rift that exists between me and my people is due to a lack of mutual understanding. They think that my life is simply one of sybaritic luxury. They cannot conceive of the preparations, the planning,, the administrative details, in short, the aggravation I go through. I want to end all that." Felsen puffed smoke. IF "If I may interrupt. Your Highness?" he said deferentially. The Nazir oodded. "What his Highness wishes to say is that in the interest of his to have the necessary surgery to implant your transducers in his cortex. The leader of the revolutionaries, a fiercely stubborn man now in custody, will undergo the same operation, r You gentlemen will thereupon record the emotions and frustrations of the Nazir during a typical morning'swork. This recording will be transmitted over and over to the brain of our revolutionary friend. He will then be able to communicate to his comrades the terrible hardship of being the Nazir." "All a matter #f empathy," said Duckworth. The Nazir beamed. "Duckworth," he said, "you're every bit as understanding as ever." "You bet," said Duckworth. "And I supposeyou hadn't thought of recording your harem exploits afterward?" "To be honest," said the Nazir, "I had. But that was a secondary benefit. What your military industrialists refer to as 'spinoff.' " ! "Well, my answer is no," said Duckworth tartly. "I'll have no part of this outrageous scheme. Instead of dealing honestly with your people, you want to trick them." . "If I dealt honestly with this scoundrel of a revolutionary," said the Nazir, "I'd boil him in oil. But I want to use a modern, humane approach." "The brain surgery is difficult," said Duckworth. "The physical risks may be great. I'd have to tutor a surgeon on every single step of the procedure. Is it worth all this to you?" "My dear Duckworth," said the Nazir. "I'm sitting on a revolutionary volcano that's ready to erupt 'momentarily. If my enemies win, it will cost me my oil, my palace, my life, even my harem. If your scheme should work it would be worth every bit of the risk.eiftailed. Besides, if anything goes wrong with the operation -- you and your friend would join me in the Gardens of Allah." "Nonsense," said Felsen soothingly. "Dr. Duckworth is too great a scientist for any such slips to occur. And who knows, we may have the answer to upheavals the world over. Think of it, Duckworth. You will personally usher And if you're still wavering -- let me point out that we have the most up-to-date, fully equipped torture chamber in the Near East." I turned to Duckworth. "What do we do?" "We have no choice," he said glumly.  I was disappointed in my friend but I knew the extreme pressure he was undergoing. "Okay then' I said. "I'll help you. But only because I'm a coward." At these words he clapped his hands and an exquisite coffee liqueur was brought forward by a turbaned lackey. Handcut emerald goblets were filled and passed around. "To my people," said the Nazir, his voice throbbing. We all drank somberly to the health of that harassed population. T WO of the world's finest neurosurgeons were flown in and teaching seminars were scheduled with Duckworth. My friend spent considerable time in briefing them on the special skills and problems involved in the implanting and on the absolute necessity for sobriety. As expected, the first operation was to be carried out on the revolutionary. Then, if all went well, the Nazir would risk his royal head. Despite careful and intense preparation the first operation was touch and go. Once Duckworth became enraged and threatened to take a scalpel to the skull of one of the surgeons. The offer seemed to have a salutary effect in bracing the man's nerve and the implanting was finally and successfully concluded. Ten days later, when the healing process was almost completed and no neurophysiological damage was apparent, the Nazir took a deep breath and went under the knife. This time, to my intense relief, the performance went more smoothly. When the Nazir had completely recovered we  were promptly summoned to his royal chambers. "I feel absolutely in the pink, Duckworth," he said. "I'm ready to proceed." Duckworth bowed: "So are we," he said quietly. "However, it would be dangerous to start prematurely. I'd like to carry out tests on both of you to make sure that the implants are receiving and transmitting properly." The Nazir insisted, purely as a precaution, on his first recording being taken that night at the harem. "In the morning," he added, "you can record my reactions to the rigors of the job." Even Duckworth was startled at the superb quality of the recordings and the very low noise level. The following day he repeated his tests on the captive revolutionary with equal success. Felsen hovered about all the time, ostensibly to satisfy his curiosity but in actuality to keep an eye on us. Th? Nazir, however, was impatient with all the delays. "I want the recordings played back on this fellow," he said. "And at once. When we are satisfied that they have taken hold he wjll be inIF terviewed on our national television network and then released." T HE playbacks were run off without a hitch. The rebel leader was carefully interrogated by the Nazir's psychiatric staff. "This man really believes," they chorused. "He is not shamming." ;  And indeed, on the Waddam TV network, he articulated his total empathy for what the Nazir went through daily in governing the country. He expatiated at great length on the mind-boggling problems of administering this little oil-soaked country. Duckworth was sitting off to one side, ouit of sight of the camera. "Then you wouldn't change places with the Nazir?" he called out. The revolutionary sprang to his feet. "You bet I would!" he cried. "For the kind of harem the Nazir has -- anything would be bearable."   been cut off the air, Duckworth and I were placed in the same dungeon. "What happened out there?" I asked. "I can't understand it." "I played two recordings sequentially," said Duckworth. "The first, under the guise of test runs, was a playback of the Nazir's night at the harem. The second was the administrative morning at the royal desk." "I'm proud of you," I said. "But it may mean curtains for us." "No it won't," snapped Duckworth. "The Nazir is a proud man and the last thing he'd want is publicity on this qiatter. He'll let us go if we pledge secrecy." "And our generous consultation fees?" "Don't push things too far," said Duckworth. And we didn't. Back in the States I was tempted to initiate a whopper of a lawsuit but I held down my baser instincts. Duckworth was less restrained. I barged into his office and found him in the act of studying the university major medical contract. "Anything wrong?" I said. "Not yet," said Duckworth noncommittally. "Are you contemplating  surgery?" Duckworth sighed. "I haven't yet made up my mind," he said. He pulled out a desk drawer and removed a five-inch reel of magnetic tape. "The harem recording of the Nazir," he said wistfully. We looked into each other's eyes for a meaningful moment. I coughed. "How extensive is our coverage?" I asked.  Prez was more than human. He could even be inhuman! T he lovely blonde threw her paper dress into the deep fireplace and stood back, watching it burn, her slender hands hooked under trim buttocks. "That's cozy, isn't it?" she said over her shoulder. "There's something especially pleasant about clothes burning on a chill winter day, isn't there?" She spun, bounded over the thick white rug and grabbed up the trousers Norbert Penner had just dropped. These she bundled and heaved into the flames. "Hey, Benny," said Penner, half out of his all-season underwear. "Those aren't paper." The girl shrugged. "You're not abandoned enough, Norby. No, don't frown. I love you. But I bet you're thinking of what that pair of pants cost." "Fifty-two dollars." Penner was a tall lanky young man, just twenty eight years old, with hair colored like sand and a slight gap between his upper front teeth. Benny held her hands to the fire. "Relax, relax." "They're going to smoke." Penner was out of his underwear. He kicked it carefully into a safe corner of the big beam-ceiling room. "Burning trousers smoke like the devil." "You worry too much, Norby," said the girl. "You're my guest, aren't you? We have this whole sixteen-room, three-bath house entirely to ourselves. We have ninety-six acres of beautiful earlywinter, rural Connecticut outside. You can stay here from now till spring. Relax. Thousands of people come hundreds of miles just to spend a few days in New England." "They don't get their pants set on fire." "You never know. All people aren't as conservative as you are." She coughed quietly as smutty smoke came rolling slowly out of the white stone fireplace. "See?" Penner wandered over to a box window and looked out at the rolling grounds. Benny said, "I have the notion you don't really love me at all, Norby. I don't think you want to make love to me right now, even. You aren't in the mood, are you?" "I was until you set my pants on fire." "That's an excuse, isn't it?" She held out her arms, a gesture he caught out of the corner of his eye. "Let's forget the fire incident, Norby. Come here now, won't you?" Penner watched a maple leaf spin to the ground. He turned around and walked to the girl. "You're beautiful." "Yes. Thank you," answered Benny, catching him with one hand around the neck and one on his left side ribs. "But really my physical body is not half as beautiful as my inner being." She rested her head on his bare chest. "One's inner being is what counts, don't you think?" "Urn." "That's how Defrocked Bishop Dix puts it in Spirit Mediator -- Talking To The Departed In The Technological Age. I'm aware you don't completely agree with Defrocked Bishop Dix but you must see it's one's inner being that counts most. Don't you think?" "I think," said Pehner, gently backing her toward a zebrastriped couch, "there are times to talk and times to shut up." He gently swung the now silent Benny off her feet and placed her on the long couch. He kneeled on the soft rug, bent and kissed her right hand, which was peaked over her navel. "Benny," he said. A wet nose pressed into his right buttock. Hot breath followed. "Where'd you hide the chow, peckerwood?" Penner bounded upward, spinning in the air, landing facing the dog. "Go away -- shoo." The dog, a medium-size and sha ggy black mutt, snorted. "Never mind, peckerwood: Benny,' there's no food for me in the kitchen. The robot dispenser just rattles and retches when I push the chow button. Somebody forget to load the machine." Thedog's blue-red tongue flapped and he panted. Benny sat up and stroked the old dog's head. "Now, Prez, didn't we tell you not to barge in." "The door was open," said the dog. His left eye flared for an instant. It was made of vinyl. "I respect privacy, even that of peckerwoods. The door, however, was open." Penner grunted suddenly, hopped, kicked the side of the dog. The animal made a clunking sound and Penner howled. "Ow -- ow -- " "You kicked his metal side," said Benny. "Come on. Let's not have my two favorite people squabble." "He's not a person," said Penner. "He's a mongrel dog." "Peckerwood," said Prez. "I'll kick the live side of your tail in a minute," said Penner! He grimaced, went and found his underwear. "You freak of science." Prez licked Benny's knee. "How much longer you going to be v Benny." T HE girl smiled down at the old dog. "Prez, you trot back to your nice rumpus room and we'll feed you soon;' I "Don't patronize me," the dog told her. "You and your folks helped turn me into a modern miracle. You financed it. I'm as bright as the average ten-year-old boy now." "Miracle," said Penner, stomping back into his clothes. "Every other bored matron down in Westport has a cybernetic poodle. Sentimental. Instead of letting the damn animals die of old age they IF replace their old parts with synthetics." "You'd like to turn me over to a vivisectionist," said the dog, showing its teeth. Half of them were plastic. "A scrap yard." "At least I earn my keep. I'm not some unemployed freeloader." "Listen, I worked six damn years in Manhattan," Penner shouted at the shaggy dog. "I was editor-in-chief of Barrium  Sons for four of those damn years. I'm the guy who bought the Lupoff papers and got them in shape for publication. They gave old Lupoff the damn Nobel Prize. So now I'm taking some time off to find myself again." "If you want to find yourself," said the dog, "you're looking in the wrong neighborhood. You're out of your class, peckerwood." Penner tugged on one shoe and limped over to kick Prez. The old dog yelped. Penner said, "Damn it, Benny. Why did you have to have him fixed to talk?" "It only cost five thousand extra," said Benny. "When they put in the vinyl larynx Dad said we might as well go first cabin." She smiled gently up at Penner. "Norby, relax. I've explained about Prez. It is sentimental, isn't it? Still he's been my dog since I was just a little girl." "Two years and three months old," said Prez. "Cute as a bug's rear you were." "We can certainly afford to have him maintained," said Benny. "Imagine, Norby. Prez is well past twenty and he's healthier and brighter than he ever was. And I've had him for over twenty years. Ever since -- " "August, nineteen-eighty-seven," said the dog. "And I'm going to live a long time beyond this decade. I'm even going to be around in the twenty-twenties, peckerwood." "Even three years is a long time." Penner put on his other shoe and sat down in a black leather lounging chair. "Is that a threat?" asked the dog. "I know you'd like to do me in, peckerwood." Benny said, "Relax, Prez," The dog flicked his short tail. Music box music began coming out of him, a gentle lullaby. "Remember this, Benny?" "Of course." She patted the dog, smiled across at Penner. "He has two thousand music tapes, miniaturized, built into his stomach." "I know," said Penner. "They named me after the noted jazz man, Lester Young," said the dog. "His nickname was Prez, short for the President. Because he was the best of the saxophone players of his day, musicians agreed." Benny lifted the dog and carried him to the doorway. He was # ? pjaying One O'clock Jump when she set him out on the parquet. ner was a quarter of a mile from the rambling two-story house the next morning. He was leaning against the mail-box pole, watching the sky. The air suddenly clicked colder and flakes of snow hit his cheeks. The US Mai 'copter sounded at the same time and Penner spotted it, rising up from the Pfeiffer estate a half-mile down the country road. The road was called Maitjand-Scott Lane, named for Benny's great-grandfather, the one who had founded the family woolen mills. The 'copter whirred nearer and dropped, hovering. When it was a hundred feet above Penner' s head a ten-yearold boy in a, jumpsuit climbed down out of it on a dangling rope ladder. "Twenty-six cents postage due," said the boy. "Who's the package for?" "Prez, as usu#l." "We don't want it." "But it's fragile, it says. All the way from Algiers." The boy came down the ladder, dropped to the ground. He held the small package in one hand, a bundle of letters in the other. "That Prez sure has a lot of pen pals. My dad, you know Floyd Dell up in the ship, he says all the time Prez is sure some dog. To have all these pen friends around the world. I wrote to a kid in Newfoundland last year but nothing came of it." Penner took the letters. "Send that other thing back to Algiers." "We're obliged to deliver it." "Oh, okay." Penner hooked a finger into his change pocket and gave the boy some coins. The boy turned over the package and caught the swinging ladder. "This snow. We just recently moved here from California. This is snow all right. I never saw any except in books. My father says we're going back to California even if it is full of goofs. He forgot it was so cold in Connecticut. How do you feel. You're a stranger, too?" "New York isn't that much different." He gave the. boy's left foot a boost. The postman hung his head out of the cabin. "That's some screwball dog you folks have. I've dealt with weirdies from coast to coast and experienced a lot of webfoots and goofs, but your dog there he must be the prince of the screwballs. What's he write to I all these people about?" "Jazz." "Jazz? Oh, sure, I remember that. Black people used to play it back a half-century ago." Penner nodded and started IF back toward the house. He was soon among trees -- the grounds were thick with maples and pines. The snow was coming straight now, faster. He casually flipped the Algiers package off into the brush. A bluejay looked up from a sparse branch. A slim bare arm extended from the partly open front door as he approached. "Here, warm up." Penner took the hot rum drink from Benny, dropped the mail on a metal-legged hall table. "Why are you naked?" "Don't be always so inquisitive." "You were clothed at breakfast, as I recall." "Well," said the girl, undoing the scarlet ribbon in her hair. "I have to leave in an hour and I thought to spend my last hour with you, Norby. Romantically." "Leaving?" "I got a call from Dad." "Your father?" "That's him. We call him Dad. A sentimental touch." "I meant, what does he have to do with your leaving?" "He's in Switzerland." "Yes, I know that, too. Which is why we have your whole place here to ourselves for the next six months." "A small emergency has come up," said Benny. "I have to pick up something in Amsterdam and take it to him in Switzerland." "You want to go alone?" Benny bit her lower lip, shook her head. "It's that I have to, Norby. Some of Dad's business ventures have to be carried on very quietly. I'll only be three or four days. I'm booked on a robot jet out of Kennedy II at five this afternoon." , . "Yoii already made a reservation?" "While I was taking off my clothes. Come on, finish your drink. We'll make love." . Penner set the mug aside. "It started snowing." "We'll make love inside then."  "I was only commenting on the weather, not complaining." He toqk her by the shoulders. Prez said from the other end of the hall, "Where's the mail, peck,erwood?" "Right here." He released the girl, snatched up letters, ap proached Prez. "Now you get into the kitchen or the rumpus room and attend to your mail. Don't bother us for an hour or I'll do something evil to you." "You're more open about your threats these days but I've suspected you for a long while," said the dog. "Right now, though, I just want to take care of my jazzbuff friends. Any packages?" "No." "Overdue. I'm expecting several. I'll have to call those peckerwoods at the post office." "Yes, do. They all like you." Penner returned to Benny and locked her up with him in the second downstairs guest room. T HE dining room was fully automatic. Alone at the head of the long, white-covered table Penner fussed with the control buttons. He got the six candles to flame, then poked the aperitif button. A slot at his Jeft hand slid open and a dubonnet jogged up. Sipping it, Penner flicked on the menu screen that was mounted on the wall. ' Prez hopped into the chair next to Penner. "Order some lean read meat," he suggested. "Back to your Quarters." "Relax, peckerwood. You heard what Benny said as she left. You're to look after the house and old Prez. So be nice." "You're not allowed on the chairs." "Okay, okay." ' The shaggy black dog hopped to the floor, wagging his tail: "Order the chow." "Nope. You go back to where you belong. I'll bring you some scraps later." Prez woofed disdainfully. "You ought to go back where you belong. Brooklyn Heights, wasn't it? Your idea of class." Penner didn't reply. "Nothing like this. Not on the salary Barnum  Sons paid." "I made twenty-five thousand a year." "Twenty thousand," said the dog. "I checked." "Oh? How?" "I have ways. I keep in touch." Prez sat on the hardwood, hit at his flank. "Fleas?" "No; my wiring is itching. This damn weather makes your wiring itch. Remember that when you get old and they start turning you into a cyborg." "Too bad you're sensitive to Cold, Prez." The dog rolled over and rubbed his shoulders into the smooth flooring. "I phoned the post-office and they insist they delivered one of my lost packages, peckerwood." "Say, that's right. I forgot to mention it," said Penner. "I dropped a littTe package out in the woods. I had my mind elsewhere." "You dropped it whereabouts?" "Ten feet or so from that old pump." "You can go fetch it now and we'll call it even." "Come off it, Prez. We're just the two of us now. You go." Thedog rocked on its back a few times, growling in his chest. "Okay, I'll go because I'm very anxious about my package. By the pump?" "Yes, to your left as you go toward the front gate." Prez trotted into the hall. PenIF ner followed, held the front door open. The dog headed into the heavy falling snow. The grounds were two feet thick with new snow and Prez sank in and left dark holes as he went. Penner slammed the front door, locked it. He ran through the rest of the house, locked doors, activated alt the electric window locks and burglar bolts. In the dining room he ordered a curry dinner. The first thing Prez did was scratch at the front door, then the back v .He barked, howled, shouted insults. Gale winds rose a little after ten and the sounds of the angry dog were muffled and lost. By the time Penner went to bed the snow was coming in blizzard strength. There was no sound at all from Prez. T HE breakfast-table radio said, "Present reports indicate all aboard the. Swiss-bound New World Airlines autosonic superjet were lost when it went down in the storm-tossed Atlantic. Among those listed as passengers on the den, the well-known investment broker, singer Merlo Benninger and Benny Maitland-Scott, lovely country-hopping daughter of the woolens tycoon... Penner put down his coffee cup. He swooped an arm across the table and twisted up the volume. The radio said, "Also said to be on the flight was former lightheavyweight champ. Kid... There was a crackling and the sound died. Penner hit the speaker grid with the heel of his hand. The little radio snapped, dislodged from its position on the table and fell. Penner ran to the living room and got the entertainment system warmed up. He flicked a toggle in the wall panel and the wall-size TV screen came alive. "This is a cockatoo, of course, boys and girls," explained the plump man in the scarlet band uniform and curly red wig. "Isn't he handsome, Mr. Crackerjacker?" "I'll say. Cap. Oops, he nipped a little chunk out of your thumb." "Son of a bitch," said the captain. Penner hit at another switch. The Secretary of Defense appeared. "I think we can level with each other, gentlemen. I have great respect for your committee and I say to you now in all honesty that we wouldn't drop anything like that on civilians." On the next station a Black man in a smock said, "Hello, Rick. Martin here with the weather picture. As you can see by the map our computer is drawing for us, we Connecticut residents are in for more of the same. That's right, snow and more snow. Looks like the worst blizzard since the j big one in nineteen-seventy-one." Behind Penner a voice asked, "What's the excitement?" "Prez -- " The floppy black dog was lolling in a flowered loveseat, "No hard feelings," said the dog, scratching at his ear with his hind foot. "I guess you simply didn't realize I got locked out last night. You sure couldn't have heard my howling with the storm raging." "How'd you get in?" "I know a few tricks, Electronics tricks, simple lock-picking," the dog told him. "You look unsettled." Penner said, "The news. The news just said Benny's robot jet crashed." Prez made an anguished whining sound. "Benny? No. Are you sure she was on the plane?" "Yes -- they gave her name." "There could be a mistake." "You're right, Prez. I'll call the damn airline." He strode to the phone on the round marble coffee table. He picked up the receiver. "Damn it." "What?" "Line's dead." "Happens during these blizzards. This isn't Manhattan or even the suburbs. Everything isn't underground yet in this neck of the woods. Trees fall over and disrupt the phone service." Penner was in the hall. That phone was dead, too. He went through the big house and checked all the phones. He returned to the hall and snatched open the closet. He had his hand on a plaid neck scarf when Benny called to him. "Norby. Norby, darling, where are you?" -- Walking backward three steps, his fingers trailing the woolen scarf, Penner said carefully, "Benny?" "Can you hear me? Oh, Norby, can you hear me across such a distance?" She seemed to be in the living room. Penner stepped there. "Benny, where are you?" "I'm not sure, Norby. This is all very strange, isn't it? What a pleasant surprise, though, to discover that Defrocked Bishop Dix is right," Her voice was coming from the dog. Penner's arms involuntarily rose and his hands flapped faintly. He dropped the scarf, began breathing through his mouth. "Benny, how in the hell did you get inside that damn dog?" Prez's eyes were' tightly closed and his mouth was barely open. "I'm in the -- well -- what Defrocked Bishop Dix calls the Other Reality, Norby." "Didn't you go to Switzerland?" "Oh, Norby, darling, you are slow on the uptake, aren't you? Norby, I'm dead." IF "Dead? No -- " "Yes. I'm here in the Other Reality now. But I can still talk to you sometimes. That'll be nice, won't it?" Penner blinked, shook his head, gingerly picked up the dog. "Benny, what are you saying?" "I'm communicating with you from over here, Norby, through the spirit media. Don't ask me how or why, darling, but the best medium for communicating with you seems to be poor old Prez' electronic parts." "Yes, but," said Penner. "Please stay there so I can talk to you, Norby. It's so strange here and I don't know anybody yet. Except for some of the people from the plane. You stay at the house until Dad can do something. And, Norby, I guess it's safe to tell you now I've mentioned you in my will." Penner was face to face with the old dog. "What's a girl twenty-two need a will for?" "It came in handy, didn't it? Now that I'm deceased and all. I just want you to know you'll be provided for. You and poor dear Prez." "I don't want to talk about that now, Benny." manage on my own for you, Norby. Is that going to be okay?" Penner dropped the dog. Prez said, "Ouch. What's the idea, peckerwood?" "Benny," called Penner. "Are you getting unsettled some more?' Prez asked. "Benny was just now talking to me. Through you, Prez. Didn't you hear it?" "No." The dog jumped back up on the loveseat and arranged himself. "That's sort of marvelous in a way. Bishop Dix turns out to've been right, huh?" "Bishop Dix. Defrocked Bishop Dix. He left the church." "I guess you'd have to with all those wacky ideas." "But it works, Prez. Benny can talk to me from -- wherever she is." The shaggy black dog scratched its ear. "I think I'll go out and sniff around in the woods." Penner said, "No. You stay right here." "I have to go to the john," the dog said. "I'll fix you up something in the rumpus room. You have to stay indoors. I don't want to risk you out in a blizzard. Benny will keep trying to get through." "Okay, I'll cooperate." The dog sniffed. "I'm hungry. Do you recall the lean red meat I alluded to last evening?" "Sure, I'll get you a nice little steak and put it out in your dish." "A big steak, peckerwood. And right here is where I'll eat it." Penner said after a moment,, "Okay, Prez." tric typewriter, Penner watched the swirling snow outside the conservatory windows. The snow was four feet high and the wind roared and whooped. "I thought you had a special dictating machine for your correspondence," he said to Prez. Prez was on a white leather sofa chair, worrying a steak bone. He paused to say, "I'm not in the mood for that. It's more fun to dictate to you. Benny would help me out once in a while, too. Great fun on stormy days. Now get typing." "A lot of fun -- being private secretary to a mongrel dog," said Penner. "What's that, peckerwood?" "Nothing." Penner had talked to Benny twice more since that first time yesterday. He'd decided it was worth putting up with Prez if he could keep in contact with the girl. "Go ahead." "Where was I?" " 'The. sidemen on that particular session, my dear Derik, were Dicky Wells, Benny Carter, Wayman Carver, Leon "Chu" Berry...' How many of these guys do you write to, Prez?" "More than' a hundred." The dog repositioned the bone with both front paws. "I'm in t,ouch with more than a hundred jazz buffs through out the world. We exchange letters, records, .tapes and other, sometimes exotip, memorabilia." "Exotic?" "The postal system is often very lax. We swap a few pills, a pinch of snuff now and then." "You're a junkie?" "No, I simply have a certain kind of scientific curiosity," replied the dog. "Let's get back to the letter at hand." When Penner had typed three more letters and put them in envelopes he said, "Enough for today." "Mail them now." "There's not likely to be a pickup today." "The post office will be open." "It's two miles away and we're still having a blizzard," He dropped the three letters down on the closed typewriter. "I'm expecting a couple of more packages, too." "I'll go after the thaw," the dog Said. "Today." "Don't get arrogant, Prez." "I'll go then." The dog, bone in mouth, jumped to the floor. "No you don't." "Then, you." Penner slowly inhaled and exhaled. "I'll give it a try. You stay inside and if Benny tries to contact me, explain." IF "Get a book of twelve-cent stamps while you're there." Prez trotted out of the room. front door of the house, stumbled through it. He fell over the hall rug, crashed against the mail table on his way down, dropping two letters, a magazine and three packages. His face was frosted and a tingling red color. He did a lopsided pushup and worked to a sitting position. He unwound the cold and soggy woolen muffler with his stiff wool mittened fingers.  "Norby, darling? Oh, my dearest, where are you?" called Benny's voice, "In a minute, in a minute," he yelled back, "Hold on." He grunted, tugged at his boots. These were slushy and dripped brown snow up his sleeves. He next rolled out of his snow coat. "Norby, areyou all right? Please talk to me. It's growing, harder to reach you from over here. Such an effort is required." , "I'm coming. I'm coming. I've got problems, too, Benny." He shed the rest of his outdoor clothes and went weaving into the living room. PreZ was on the floor near the magazine bin, on his back, feet up in the air. "Norby, is something wrong?" "I'm okay." Penner, squatting next to the dog, added: "Sometimes I wish you had worked out a better means of communication." "I don't have much choice. Listen, Norby, it would be a great help if you could -- " "Could what?" Prez opened his eyes. "Where's the mail?" Penner pinned the dog down by his shoulders. "Benny, what is it you want?" "Let go of me," said the dog. Penner did. T HE warm hand sat on his naked chest like a starfish. Penner sat up in the wide bed and said,"Yow." "Norby, relax. You're certainly jumpy, aren't you?" Penner reeled in the lamp cord and found the toggle. Light came on and he saw Benny, in a tan raincoat and dark head scarf, sitting on the edge of the bed. He caught her elbow. The cloth ' was chill, still damp with the snowflakes. "How does Bishop Dix work this?" "What? I didn't mean to scare you awake, Norby. I know you weren't expecting me for several days. After the flight was canceled I spent the night in New York. I called you first thing the next morning but the phone was out. So I decided to fight my way back to you and here -- finally -- I  am. She leaned down to kiss him. "Then you didn't go down in the storm-tossed waters of the Atlantic?" "Our flight was canceled," said the lovely blonde girl. "I phoned Dad and he said he'd make other arrangements. So I rented a car and I got stuck in Port Chester for the longest spell -- but here I am." Penner touched her again. "Benny, about Prez?" "Is he well? The cold bothers him sometimes." "He's fine. Can he change his voice at all. That is, have you ever known him to do something like that?" Benny laughed. "Has he been teasing you. Yes, he's very good at impersonations. We had that built in." Penner said, "You stay here. I'll be back in a few minutes. A last-minute something I thought of." "Can't it wait?" "No." "I'll take off my clothes." "Do that," he said. Penner grabbed a robe and shuffled into slippers. He shot out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Prez was gone from the loveseat he had selected to sleep on. Penner chose the heaviest poker from the rack of them screwed to the fireplace bricks. He roamed the dark house and located the shaggy black dog under an old desk in the rumpus room. "Come out of there, you stinker." The dog huddled in a nest of torn package wrappings. A Swedish stamp had gotten stuck to his floppy left ear. "What is it now, peckerwood?" Penner said, "We've sure had a lot of fun. You and your damn hoax. Well, as you must know, Benny's back. I'm going to run things." "That'll be a switch." Penner thrust his free hand under the desk and caught at Prez. "Watch it -- " Prez snarled, then bit Penner's hand. "Damn." Penner pulled his bleeding hand free. "Now you're really through, Prez." "Oh, no," said the dog. "You are." "What?" "You've just been infected with rabies." Penner looked from his injured hand to the dog under the desk. "No more jokes, Prez. I happen to know there hasn't been a case of rabies in this part of the country for ten years." "I know," said the dog. "That's why I had to send away for the virus."  IF Which is better -- to understand an alien or to know yourself ? T HE captain picked up one of the cubes and very carefully felt it between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes held suspicion. "What is it?" "A bomb." He stared at it. Jerod answered the unspoken comment: "No -- not like any bomb you've ever seen. 'Specially constructed for our purpose. The explosive is inside under pressure." The captain put the blue-black cube down beside its twin. They lay together on the desk between the two men reduced now to brooding silence. The captain's eyes were on the cubes. "When?" Jerod understood. "Departure is scheduled for as soon as the Telepath arrives. The rest is set. Your ship is ready?" "Yes." The captain raised his eyes to Jerod' s. The sharp lines of his face softened. "I won't be needing the replacement person nel. The entire crew is staying on." Pride echoed in his words. "We've been together a long time -- since before the War. It's -- " He stumbled-tongued, looking perhaps for a word to describe his feelings. Lamely he finished: "It's too late now anyway." t The door slid open onto renewed silence. The intruder's face wore an indoor pallor. His uniform was wrinkled. His eyes were hollow, with harsh shadows beneath them. Jerod: "That's all for now, I guess." The captain turned to leave. "Wait -- " Jerod removed a cube. He never consciously thought of it as a bomb -- it was ridiculously small for the power the word implied. "You might as well take it with you." He handed the captain the cube. The captain pushed it into a side pocket without looking at it. The newcomer's eyes followed him out past the door. Jerod asked, "Well, Hayes?" "The Telepath? He's as ready as he'll ever be." Hayes spoke in a monotone. "You're sure?" "Yes, damn it! Does it make any difference?" Jerod stared at him quizzically. "Any thing wrong?" "No. Should there be?" The pale, rumpled man looked doomed. His whole appearance whispered it. "You want to see the Telepath before the Double Bill leaves?" "No." Jerod spoke softly. "No. It isn't necessary." son-Mirrada, the E-tee was waiting. He was tall and somber with hair the color of thunderclouds. Both his hands gripped tightly the guide bar of his vehicle as it drifted fifty meters above the surface of the designated meeting place. An impressive array of devices protected the alien. Hte craft contained a variety of them and he himself carried no less than a dozen weapons. A stunner at his side was the only one visible. It was within the terms of the meeting -- and was meant to lull the Other's suspicions. v Yet fear prowled the alien's mind beneath the thin layers of superimposed logic called "civilization" -- a terror almost primordial -- although, as a precaution IF against treachery by the Enemy, his mother ship waited. She was standing off a standard astronomical unit from the planetoid, according to the agreement reached with the Enemy. She was also secretly modified to enable her to get to him faster and with more fire-power than her Enemy counterpart. Yet the feeling remained tacit despite all the logical reasons arrayed against it. The Enemy's cyborg scout ship grew within his lidless, violet eyes. His hands on the guide bar of the floater clenched into fists. HE Telepath awoke. He fought upward from a remembered nightmare to the coolness of silence. Stubborn pieces of the dream swirled within the stark flood of his drugged brain like pinpricks setting it afire with pain. An insanely multiplying torment in the jungles of night was tearing him apart. He trembled on the brink of relevance. Steady . You'll be all right now. We're here to help you. Screams echoed through his mind. Hurry with that hypo... He jammed the back of his hand against his mouth to stifle the terror rising to his, lips. It's all right... gone now... finished... His breathing steadied and he managed to relax the contorted muscles of his face, to drive away ther hunted look. He stared into the view-screen, watching the planetoid swallow the ship. Silence... genuine... real... with no blurred undertone run ning beneath it... so cool... He tasted it within himself rYou understand what's to be done... Terror rumbled. Yes. Yes. I understand . Give me the drug. The encephalic depressant. Give it tome... E-tee kept his face impassive. But he could not control the v turbulence under his imposed calm. The Enemy was descending from a circular opening at the base of his cyborg ship. He dropped slowly to the Etee's level. The uneasiness kindled higher, racing along hi nerves, within, his blood, until he could barely keep from baring his teeth at the creature. His hands were fists about the guide bar, the ram-fire needjer hidden in it seeming as far away as his home world. They faced each other separated by five meters of distance. Hiding the throbbing within him the E-tee spoke: "I am empowered to discuss terms of settlement." . The movement of his lips revealed small, concavely serrated teeth. He memorized every detail of the Enemy. The sensors here as well as those watching from the mother ship might miss something and every bit of information would be vital in order to discover the location of the Enemy home world. TheEnemy winced as if slapped across the face. The action puzr zled the E-tee. His face was still a blank. It had not betrayed him. It came... again. A wave of nausea knotted his stomach. Fight it! Fight it, damn you! Well r... Couldn't take it. He's unconscious. His mind is still receiving, though . Ill have to give him the e-d... Go ahead. Well try again later... Again... t And again. As long as it takes... Wouldn't it be kinder to put him out of his pain? For whom? Remembering... slashed across its belly... died shrieking. Irrelevant. His mind was drowning in a flickering kaleidoscope of flame dripping molten fire like a huge festering sore. He was mute, the screams trapped in his mouth, incapable of escaping the scouring tumult of images and alien emotions. He'reeled with the superimposed pounding in his blood at the sounding din of a a berserk dirge over the gutted carcasses of burning cities; weaving within, improvising upon, the weakening groans of the dying and the high, piercing screams of the still living. Bloated bodies ripening to olive from green to black as burned-out cinders gushed at him. His mind stared numbly at hollow, grinning sockets that nothing could hurt any more and slipped on unwound intestines to lie feebly, attempting to fold in upon itself and escape the... Blood... He fell under the ages of bones and died -- and fell again. And then there was no more bloodjust words blowing from somewhere. Lie la, there is no other way. The Enemy must be destroyed. Llela, understand. Please, Llela -- Llela -- what L never had time to say to you... The Telepath understood. Must the women always wait? Why? For what reason? When you've found out the location of the E-tee's home world and any other strategic data press this, stud. It will release an odorless, invisible gas similar to the encephalic depressant. That should slow the Etee's senses enough so that hell never feel the explosive # IF penetrate his epidermis . TAw button on the guide bar triggers the injector... When? , What? Oh -- whenever he enters the gravity field of another planet -- hopefully his own home world. The mass conversion reaction should be about ninety-percent efficient... Do statistics bleed , Hayes? Always the same... the blindness... does anybody understand? You have no choice. We have no choice. You have to do it. You re the only Telepath we T ve got. The other eight burned out within a Month of becoming active. You're the last one alive and sane. You owe the human race something for that at least... Don't you think I know that? Sometimes I wish Polypsychic hadn't brought me out of withdrawal. Have you any conception of what it is to be the means by which an entire race of people die? Can you understand that , Hayes? The death of -- people? They're not people. JE-tees. Aliens. Zenophobic  monsters -- they're not people. And what difference does it really make anyway? Who gives a damn? That's the way its always been since the first human could lift a rock or swing a club to take what he wanted. Sure , there has to be a better way -- sometime ; Maybe we're not truly human yet. Or only too human... I knoy. But that still doesn't make it the way it has to be now. We have to try to change -- even if we fail. We have to try... Look , just do what you're told . It's not your personal responsibility to decide the moral value judgments... But it is. Can't you see that? You know , the first contact ships from both races didn't even try to talk to each other before they opened fire... T HE words formed purposefully in the Telepath's mind. Listen to me... He opened his mind to the Etee trying to explain what words could never make clear. For the smallest part of a heartbeat long war within was ended. They stood face to face, mind to mind. There was sudden comprehension. Panic. The E-tee's r eyes glazed over with unreasoning fear. His mind twisted, struck out. No -- can't you understand? Listen. The Etee's hand plunged toward the button on the guide bar of his vehicle. No... The Telepath reacted instinctively. An almost inaudible hiss whispered from the e-d injector. The Etee's hand stopped as if frozen as the gas began to work. Realization dawned slowly on his face. In a hoarse, straining voice he croaked, "Telepath!" His hand found another, nearer, button. No... Time shattered into twisting hot splinters... melting. The blast slammed into the Telepath with a buzzing steel fury. His floater platform jumped in the shock wave and fell. He crashed. A blossoming flower of fire exploded within him. He doubled over with pain into a void -- into a rushing darkness where the fire did not exist. the smell of dug earth. Using the battered floater's rail he pulled himself upright. The Etee's vehicle was scattered across the green. Small charred pieces dotted it obscenely, along with other debris. Blood... always blood... High above, within a flashing of sparks, a new star glowed for a moment. I failed... but there is no escape... there can never be...  I care... that is the way it is... the only way it could be... The E-tee mother ship was growing rapidly larger in the sky. T HE pictures on the monitors suddenly blacked out. Hayes looked up from the screens. "The Double Bill is gone." Jerod nodded. "It was supposed to happen. The Telepath could never have completed the mission. We knew that before we sent him. The personality profile Polypsychic put together on him confirmed it. By now the E-tees have him. They'll check him carefully and take him to their home world for intensive study." Hayes didn't understand. "The cubes," Jerod said. "Didn't you ever wonder why there were two? The explosive is part of his blood by now." "Damn you." "It had to be done. As much as it was hard and pitiless, it was justified. Mankind must survive. Its enemies must be destroyed. There is no other way." Hayes glared at Jerod. "You used him. He never had any choice. Now he's a walking bomb." "We had no choice. We did what had to be done. Our survival as a race depends on our individual readiness to fight -- and even die -- if necessary. , He owed humanity that at least." He was silent for a moment, the grimness about his mouth and eyes quivering. His voice came deliberately softer: "You understand?" "Does it matter?" The words were heavy with weariness. Hayes reached into a pocket for a piece of paper one of the Polypsychic doctors had given him. A poem the Telepath had written. Hayes stared at the scrawl. IF All men are strangers now skeletons without rest to keep away the World's end -- for it ends forever... and there are no heavens in all the haunting ages... Hayes carefully refolded the the Statler Hilton, Boston. For information: Anthony Lewis, # Unity Avenue, Belmont, Mass. ##. Hilton Inn, San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests of Honor Miriam Allen de Ford and E. Hoffman Price. Fan Guest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. Memberships: # now, # after January #st, # at the door. For information: Quinn Yarbro, # Columsa ##, Berkeley, Calif. #.  At the Royal Hotel, Southampton, England. Guest of Honor: James Blish. Panels, films, lectures and displays. Scheduled speakers: Raymond Fletcher, Member of Parliament who works closely with the Ministry of Technology; Dr. Kit Pedler, lecturer in Opthalmology and TV script writer; et. al. Most of the British sf writers will be in attendance. For information: don, W.C. #, England. Jerod had gone with a shake of his head. Hayes switched off the screens, slowly rose and drew his weapon. "He said out loud but softly, "Perhaps there are no answers. Maybe first we have To ask the right questions. This should make for a few." # information: Jim Young, # Ulysses Street, N.E., Minneapolis,. Minnesota #.  pin. Herald Square, New York City. Advance registration: #. For information and registration -- : Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York I #.  California. Guest of Honor: Jack Williamson; Fan Guest of Honor: Rick Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California #.  Memberships: Supporting, #; Atgia #.  AL. In Heidelberg, West Germany. For information and registration: West Germany. IF Spider's trouble was that he , smelled like a female turnip when male celery was desired! S tarship Olga gently nosed into her berth at the Grus Satellite Station and roused her human companionpilot. This would be their last rest stop before the long run down the Los Coyotes Diagonal to the Dog Star. Here she could bargain around for fuel and astrogational data while Spider, her human, relaxed. Spider enjoyed biochess and the Grus S.S. game room had an attractive reputation. Spider drifted sleepily from his couch to the refresher. He pulled on his heavily telemetered undersuit and swam deftly from web to web toward the airlock. His half-sized left arm and right leg gave him a hobbling, spiderlike gait on a planet's surface but in the no-grav of space he moved smoothly. Mechanical embryogenesis might be a handy method of growing babies outside the female's uterus but spider's servo had bungled his fetal mineral balance and left him with irregular bone growth -- asymmetrical extremities and a lumpy skull. But a spaceship pilot was judged for his productivity and wit, not for his decorative value. The game room was dark. The Auto-Glo boards and pieces were reflected in the players' eyes -- soft yellows and greens. Spectators hung about in ' three-dimensional webs. A wall panel monitored the contests -- Spider's rating was up # points after two games. His retinal rhodopsin was bleached out from concentrating on the glowing pieces. When his third opponent joined him out of the darkness, all he could see was a pair of twinkling humanoid corneas staring at him from across the board. Anonymity enhanced biochess by adding an unknown rating to unpredictable protoplasm. Spider found meck-chess too consistent. His depth of analysis depended on the machine's setting. A move he'd give a (!) at # might get a (?) at # because of superfidal study. This error could cost him the position when facing a protoplasmic intelligence, whose genius fluctuated with metabolic variations but a machine could be counted on to play only at its rating. This opponent was biological and probably human -- two eyes, no facets. He was Right King and moved first. An offered gambit pawn. It was declined. He opened a rook file opposite the castled Left King, forcing the N-KR#. The move had seemed natural enough in the opening -- but when the knight remained inactive oh the sidelines during the midgame struggle for the center, Spider suspected that he was being given the "silent knight odds." Why? He studiedthe eyes again -- large and unfamiliar. A flat, wide nose was visible. The head silhouette was large -- either a pillow of human hair or the ballooned head of some alien. Spider recognized neither the features nor. the style of play. He pressed his attack. Spider's extra working knight took the center. The Left King's pawn line crumbled under his rdoks and bishops as they rolled' toward the castled position. End game deteriorated into a lively king hunt which attracted a clot of spectators. Spider heard someone in the background mumble: "He's really doing it to her." The pronoun explained the "silent knight odds" -- a feminine ploy. By making her position unplayable she had adopted a submissive female posture on the chessboard. She was toying with him and letting her clock run. He checked. She fled. He checked again. Then -- in a gesture of resignation -- she placed her index finger on her queen and slowly tipped it over. The wall panel recorded another win for him. She disappeared into the IF darkness as he began to set up the board again. Discovering that one of his knights was missing. Spider climbed the webfc and started floating after her. It was unusual to run into "horse collectors" on satellites. deck. From a distance she appeared to be wearing tight, goldfoil coveralls. She ducked furtively into a cabin in the pilot section. As he drifted up to the door it unexpectedly irised him into a single bunk room, containing a refresher, a desk and a dispenser chute. The roar of the layered airwater laminar flow filled his ears and he saw her telemetered undersuit snapped to the outside of the refresher hatch. On the desk top he found his knight -- a dull opaque yellow in the cabin's light. Two frosted squeeze bottles 'were conspicuous in the dispenser. "Have a foamy. I'll be right out," she shouted over the roar. She groped coyly around the hatch for her undersuit -- hardly more than a body stocking spangled with small sensors and microcircuits. He sipped his drink--a cognac old-fashioned. "Your knight is on the -- oh, I see you've found it," she said as she entered the room. The gold-foil effect was caused by a heavy patina of body paint which gleamed brightly, through the wide. mesh. She was hurhan, N very symmetrical, a rather healthy rural specimen from Kliiborne and -- judging by her telemetry -- a spaceship pilot. She pushed off toward the dispenser. "Sorry about' the knight, "she said conversationally as she approached on a tangent. Her right hand darted out and cupped the back of his head. She gave him three quick, wet kisses -- analytical pecks -- on his mouth, cheek and neck. Leaving him spinning slowly in the middle of the room, she continued to the chute and picked up her drink. He stopped his rotation with a ceiling web. "Testing?" he asked. Sucking on her drink, she raised her eyes and nodded. "And?" he asked. She shrugged and shook her head. Nothing. That was his usual effect on the girls. He drifted over to her and gave her sternal area a tentative pat. "Frolicking with anyone tonight?" he asked. The silence that dragged" out hurt him but he maintained a pleasant, easy facade. She glanced from the refresher to her bunk -- weighing an evening's companionship against the coming months of loneliness on her deepspace route. "Come back after your game," she said pleasantly. Spider returned to the game room and lost to a Quad , a massive alien with one large, faceted eye and redundant skin folds. Endgame recklessness cost him a passed pawn. Later he found her coaxing a three-course meal out of her dispenser. The variety was interesting. He ate well. Preparing to frolic, she warmed the refresher and undid her belt. "You can bunk with me," she invited. "But I don't think I can love you." They both watched her cardiogram tell-tale -- no tachycardia or extrasystoles. Snapping their suits to the hatch, they entered the steamy wind tunnel. Cascades  of low-ion water buffeted their intimate swimdance... As her. body paint peeled off he saw her reason for wearing it. Her epidermis had .the dull gray-black pigmentation of silver-ion overload -- argyria -- and a. linear, hairy, mole ran down the midline of her back. The argyria was a cumulative error in her ship's life-support system -- not physiologically significant, amounting to merely a cosmetic disaster. They danced until their bodies squeaked on contact. She talked easily, petted politely and even attempted to look sultry -- but she couldn't love. They bunked together -- warmed physically and psychologically by each other's presence. Twelve standard hours later they left Grus Station -- going their separate routes. T he Los Coyotes Diagonal held few surprises. About two years later Olga returned from the Dbg Star and entered the Grus communication net. A soft throb of music attracted Spider's attention to Olga's panel. The viewscreen showed a horizontal drumhead festooned with flowers. His forehead dampened as a small, naked female approached the tangle of blossoms. This was the beginning of the Drum Dance -- the mating ritual of his home planet -- Deneb One. The fact that no 'female had ever drummed for him did not lessen the dance's impact on his physiology. He wiped his brow with' his gnarled left hand and adjusted the focus. She stepped onto the resilient hide -- feet wide apart -- toes gripping the grained surface. Her wide eyes and slight curves suggested a pubescent innocence but this, quickly vanished in the wild erotica of her dance. Her long hair -- at first an unruly, dry web ballooned out by static electricity -- began to tangle and cling in' her beading sweat. Her exertion continued. Pounding heart sounds accentuated the musical beat as the tempo picked up. Trickles of salty eccrine marbled her belly and legs. Her feet pattered wetly to a crescendo. The screen blanked in midIF throb and Spider slowly let out the breath he was holding. Silence hung for a moment in the little command cabin. He roused himself from ' the demi-trance to ask, "Who was that?" "Rau Lu," filled in Olga. The screen activated and showed the I.D. vjews of the female chess opponent -- complete down to the mole on her back. Spider eyed Olga's optic pickup suspiciously. "But Rau Lu is from Kliiborne -- out Sirius way. She isn't familiar with our mating rituals," he said. ' "The dance was simulated," explained Olga in a dry , metallic tone. He winced. The depth 'of understanding these machines were acquiring by living with humans continued to surprise him. He raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Diagnostic test," said Olga. "Ever since our stopover at the Grus Satellite we'v had small inefficiencies on board. Inefficiencies that could cut into our profits." "But I haven't noticed any..." he began. "It is quite obvious from these graphs -- " Olga projected a variety of his physiological readouts on the screen"that your red feathers are showing.". "My red what?" he asked. "Your red feathers," said Olga. "This tracing is your arrecteres pilorum myogram which measures the elevation of your hair shafts. Note the effect of the Drum Dance. The pattern corresponds quite closely with the red feather myogram qf the grouse during its mating dance." Over a sawtoothed myogram the split-screen showed brambles and' dry leaves. Deneb One's red ruffed grouse hopped about, beat: irtg its wings. He could understand why the myograms might be similar. Just the thought of the dance prickled his back and neck. His motor end plates must drop their thresholds because his trapezius muscles seemed to tense. Capillary beds swelled, pulse and respiration changes occurred. He understood. Olga continued: "The red-feather adjustment -- love metabolism -- is efficient on a planet's surface if you are competing for a mate. It is inefficient on a starship where patience and accuracy are needed." "But I'm not in love," he protested. The throbbing music began and a soft focus of the flowered drumhead appeared on the screen. He held up his right hand. "Stop! Okay. I'll admit that the Drum Dance gives me goose flesh -- or grouse flesh. But that is nonspecific. Rau Lu was just another girl in my life. I'm not in love," he said firmly. Olga detected his rising epinephrine level, so she dropped back into Routine Mode. A star map appeared on her screen. run Olga remained in orbit to off-load while Spider reentered. The pulj of gravity was irksome after almost eight years of pleasant weightlessness but his faithful gym work preserved sufficient muscle and bone to handle the effort. The eighteen-inch right leg prosthesis worked pretty well on the smooth beltways. After a few false starts he was able to leave the crutches in the tender. Checking in with the Company, he was pleasantly surprised by his megafranc balance. Two stock distributions brought his and Olgas wealth up into the two-human class. They were now entitled to more cargo space, lavish lifesupport, and more powerful drive units. A two-human ship. Olga must have known this when she simulated the Drum Dance. They were in the communication net at the time. She had known and had tried a not-so-subtle promotion of Rau Lu. As usual, Olga was probably right. She wanted him to go hetero -- same species, different sex, Well, Rau Lu probably wouldn't be too bad to Ship Up with -- if only she could love. Spider put in three requests -- one to the company .for permission to go' two-human; another to Com Cen for Rau Lu's present position and the third to Olga for analysis of Rau Lu's inability to love. Then he limped down to the game room. Most of the meck-chess cubicles were filled, but he could see by the settings that no one was playing over the # level. Not much self-esteem in the planet-bound these days, he reflected. He dragged his weakening right leg into a handy foamy alcove and enjoyed a couple open-top drinks. It was sort of fun to look down into a glass and see a real ice cube -- and watch it stay down there while it melted. Gravity did have some entertainment value. The Company Immunopsychologist called him in. "Immuno what?" Spider asked .after shaking the hand Of the bald little man in white coveralls; "Psychologist. Call me Maynard. I have your request to go two-human. I'd like to discuss it with you." . He noticed Spider's discomfort while standing and waved him into a slick, soft chair. "I see you are considering hetero. I'd like to point out some of the hazards of Shipping Up with the same species." He activated a wall panel directly in front of Spider. Graphs and statistics appeared. Spider let his mind wander. "Of course hetero has its place. IF Sexual reproduction and all that. But now mechanical embryogenesis has made even that largely unnecessary. We've learned that#ietero is actually dangerous -- crimes of violence being statistically most ' common between people who are the closest. When hetero relationships were legally binding we observed serious interpersonal conflicts most frequently .in pairs dwelling in the smallest living quarters. "Immunology traced the etiology to the antigen-antibody reaction -- hence the emergence of our field: Immunopsychology. Antigens from one human -- bits of protein in skin scales, hair dust, sperm, saliva -- anything -- would cause the build-up of antibodies in the other. At first this might be manifest as a mild incompatibility, such-as sterility between the pair. But both would prove fertile when matched with an antigenic stranger. Later the mere presence of the partner could precipitate significant stress responses -- even asthmalike attacks or coronary spasms. In most cases of moderate close exposure the antibody titre reached the critical level in about seven years." Spider failed to see the reason for all this. "In starships hetero has caused many mission failures. Loving pairs are sent off but they fail to arrive at their destinations. The same missions are repeated easily by single-human-ships and the hu manalien pairs. Hetero failures were often due to acquired personality conflicts -- tragic, Violent conflicts. Ship's logs showed mounting stress -- anxieties that were precipitated by the partner. Even the surviving hetero pairs often reported symptoms of stress. The explanation came when we found the antibodies. Each member of the hetero pair had built up antibodies against the other. The titres correlated well -- directly proportional to the stress." "Female humans are out?" asked Spider. T HE little scientist nodded. "Too hazardous." "What do you recommend for your two-seaters?" asked Spider. He. had made a mental note to check with Olga on this new antibody-insanity theory. Starships often kept their own statistics and cdnclusions -- trying their own remedies. Maynard had cleared the wall panel. "The Quad has been one of our most -- " . "Quad!" interrupted Spider. "That alien coelenterate! Why, I'd consider him more of a pet than a partner." "He probably thinks much the same of you." Maynard smiled. "And he isn't a coelenterate, of course. Warm-b'looded. Totally alien antigens. No danger of allergy." Spider tried to picture himself shipping out with an amorphous, sac-iike Quad. No, ,he preferred Rau Lou. Thanking the Immunopsychologist, he hobbled back to his tender and lifted off. As soon as he felt the no-gray he pulled off the prosthesis and wiggled the sore toes on his gnarled right foot. "Antibody danger in hetefo?" asked Olga. "It's a danger -- but not if environmental controls are functioning. Recycled air and water must be molecularly cleaned with filters, carbonizers. Your dermal debris should feed plankton -- not sensitize your partner. It is always a concern but not enough to cancel out hetero. Rau Lou's failure to love -- frigidity -- was also a by-product of starship environment. Both of you have reached an equilibrium with your life-support Systems -- particularlythe hydrocarbons of your ship. Your taste and smell are those of the ship. She can't love you in your present flavor because she associates it with females. Our hydroponics plant is the yellow turnip -- the rutabaga. On her home planet the women chew the dried and cured rutabaga leaf. So, you probably tasted too much like her sister to arouse any sexual attraction." Spider frowned. "I taste like a girl?" "You taste -- and smell -- like a rutabaga. To Rau Lou that is feifiale." He relaxed. That would certainly be easy tb remedy. Celery could be quickly substituted for the yellow turnip as the hydroponics plant. By the time he again met Rau Lou he would be a changed man -- or rather, a changed vegetable. Olga continued: "The men of Kliiborne work in mines and related industries. I've added essence of char and some copper ions to your refresher fluids. That might trigger the masculine label in hertaste buds. As for body paint -- I think she would be attracted by a coarsely granular brown stucco. That would go well with -- " Spider stepped into Olga's ramblings. "How do you happen to have so much information on Rau Lou?" The console went silent for several full seconds. "Your red-feather reaction appeared during your biochess game with Rau Lou. When I learned that your opponent was a female, why, I naturally assumed -- " "I know what you assumed. But where did you get all the information? Did you happen to meet her ship while we were at the Grus Station?" "Yes, my human." "And you ' arranged a data ' transfer?" ' "Yes, my human." He slumped. Now her ship khew  IF as much about him as Olga knew about her. He shuddered to think of what kind of a mating dance Rau Lou's ship might simulate from his data. His Com Cen request for Rau Lou's location was finally answered. She was missing. Her warp trail ended soon after passing through the Fomalhaut system. The probability cone was largely a "cold zone." She was lost in a volume of space devoid of luminous bodies -- and she had been there for over a year. A personal search was out of the question -- too expensive. But Olga weighed the possibility of salvaging Rau Lou's cargo plus a paying cargo to Fomalhaut against the odds. It would be financially risky -- but they'd go. were picking their way through the scanty frozen debris of the cold zone. Spider was depressed. "This is as bad as being between arms of the spiral or Off Galaxy. I can't see how anyone could survive here. There's not even a good first mag star -- let alone a sun," he said . "She'd have to live like we are -- full life support. Need her own power source. That is good in a way -- for It gives us something to find. Any energy should stand out easily against this empty tackground." Spider worried about the expense. The small token cargo they carriedto Fomalhaut barely covered their energy expenditure out. Olga assured him that there were megafrancs to spare even if they didn't salvage Rau Lu's ship. He was uneasy about the amount of time in the search pattern -- knowing the cost of sustaining a zigzag course where momentum is repeatedly wasted as directions are reversed. Olga's sensors sniffed out the tenuous ion trail of a conventional drive. They followed it hopefully until it disappeared in the gravity well of a cold star. "That reads like a real hole in space," said Spider, looking at the indicators... "Yes, not much is getting through the pull. We can't go down there. Have to go around and take up the search pattern on the other side," "Radiation source," Olga noted later. The screen showed a rogue planet of about the same mass as Deneb One. Without a warming sun its atmosphere and oceans were crystallized. A single pin'point radiation source was present -- primarily gamma rays. Spider turned up the magnification but all he saw was the raw, unweathered rocky terrain -- needle-point peaks, razor sharp crevices wherever he looked. Olga orbited and scanned. "The radiation source is not naturaU" said Olga . "I'll have to send down my Mobile Surface Unit to check it out. I keep getting outlines that resemble a ship, but they are elusive. Do you want to go down, too? There's just about a full gravity."  Spider nodded. "If Rau Lu is down there I might be needed." surface Spider adjusted a soft knee cushion and shin guard on his long left leg and practiced crawling. With a padded glove on hisv larger right hand he had a three-point stance which would probably be stable enough for the cracked and tilted surface he had seen through the scanners. But standing on his small right foot and kneeling with his left made him shorter than Rau Lu -- by lowering his height about eighteen inches. Crawling did nothing for his ego, either. He decided to try the prosthesis and crutches. Setting down about a hundred yards from the radiation, he sent the M.S.U. ahead while he practiced walking on the irregular surface. The crutch tips slipped and the prosthesis caught in the cracks. His ankle ached. The M.S.U. disappeared over a steep, jagged ridge. The darkness was absolute. Harsh light beams from the tender penciled about -- catching the surface formations in their glare -- but the depths of the cracks remained an opaque black. There was no diffusion of the beams without an atmosphere. Setting his hand beam on wide-soft focus. Spider struggled after the M.S. U. The frozen, silent planet fought him. The tilted, slick surfaces offered precarious footing -- glassy mineral, fused metal or simple ice, he couldn't tell. Gravity seemed to be pulling him toward the bottomless crevices -- the fall alone would kill him. The only sounds he heard were the unsteady tread of his prosthesis and tapping of his crutch as he searched for his next foothold. I His senseless, artificial foot -- unable to evaluate -- stood on a brittle, crystalloid sponge. As he shifted his weight it crumbled -- sending him tumbling hard. Momentarily stunned, he lay in a shallow recess, isolated by the dark vacuum. "Stay there," came Olgas. order over his communicator. "We've found the radiation source. It isn't Rau Lu's ship." Spider tried to untangle himself from his bent crutch and twisted prosthesis. He didn't know whether to be worried or relieved. He had not wanted Rau Lu to see him this way -- a helpless cripple. But, then, where was she? The zetetic M.S.U. continued, "Alien craft -- megayears a derelict -- molecular drift has fused the hull to the contiguous surfaces of the planet." IP Spider crawled to the top of the ridge to see the wreck. The pitted and granular hull was difficult to outline from the landscape but it was roughly cylindrical. Its age suggested that the civilization that had spawned it might well have evolved into something unrecognizable by now. "Where's the radiation coming from?" asked Spider as he heard his suit detector clicking wildly! "Someone has cut into it recently. Looks like the power cell has been emptied. Resembles our Quark-Bottle design -- although megayear stability is hard to explain." Spider retreated behind the tilted slag. His detector quieted. Tell-tales indicated heavy gamma radiation. "The cuts fit those made by the Bodkin-Ill. Rau Lu's M.S.U. was equipped with one," continued the M.S.U. It busied itself with sampling the walls of the power cell for elements with induced radioactivity. It gave the percentage of each, element in isotope form. Spider immediately calculated that the source of the radiation had been removed well within Rau Lu's missing period. Only # of the copper was in isotope form. But zinc was still about # radioactive and sodium, was as high as #. This indicated that someone had come along about eight standard months ago and tapped the Quark-Bottle. Rau Lu could have been in this area for well over a year by now. Spider relaxed. Anyone with technology capable of tapping a Q-Bottle was probably in good enough shape to survive. The M.S.U. vibrated its heat shield to rid itself of isotope de-. bris. Then it turned, picked up Spider and returned to the tender. He wrapped his sprained little ankle and took a nap. After taking the tender onboard, Olga let him continue sleeping while she took up the search pattern again. Several days later they came upon a hot fragment of the alien power cell -- probably jettisoned after its energy had been extracted. It marked the beginning of the elusive ion trail and narrowed the search area considerably. droponics for the yellow turnip and tried on his brown stucco body paint. He had already gotten used to the cupric and char flavor of his laminar flow. The carbonizers were functioning well in the air recirculators. Micro-Pore filters in the refresher and other water lines were removing anything larger than a salt molecule -- anything that might sensitize. His ankle mended quickly. He was ready to meet Rau Lu again. Three weeks later they found her ship silently anchored to a planetoid. Spider was glad to see that the planetoid's mass was only about a tenth that of Deneb One. Olga's greetings were not answered. Rau Lu's ship showed no signs of meek life. The scanners picked out Rau Lu's survival shelter inflated over a nearby valley. Cables connected it to the ship and the fractionating columns were erected -- indicating some attempt at mining the local gas and water solids... Olga nestled gently against the quiet starship and connected airlocks. She sent her servomech into its hull to investigate. Spider suited up and started for the survival shelter -- with a copper coin in his mouth. Inside he found about twenty acre-feet of airspace tinder eighttenths of an atmosphere. Powerful light sources from the hydroponics section hung overhead, warming his face and hands. The floor -- a rocky conglomerate -- supported a monotonous growth of white potatoes. A small pool at the lower end had the scummy look of phytoplankton. She had certainly kept busy. He had been worrying about what effect this prolonged isolation might have had on her psyche but she apparently had had little free time for her to worry about it. He was impressed by her success with tools: the cannibalized Q-Bottle, the fractionating columns and operating shelter biosphere. He supposed that her lack of contact with sentient living beings had been very depressing. If her ship's meck-intelligence had cut out -- as he suspected -- she had had no one to talk to. The only living things around seemed to be these potato plants with their uniform, threecentimeter, white, meaty spheres pushing up through the moist gravel. Of course there were animal life forms in the zooplankton -- but how much companionship can be derived from a pet that can only be seen with a microscope? "Hi, Spider." The casual greeting came over his communicator. He glanced around and then saw Rau Lu -- sans paint -- coming out of her spherical living quarters. She wore a heavy,knee-length wraparound. Its hem was stained green with plant juices. Her hair was tied back neatly and her hands were calloused. She was carrying an armload of personal belongings which she immediately stacked by the airlock. "You're packed?" he asked. "Heard your ship's hail on my communicator. Couldn't answer. Not enough power. So I'vejust been getting ready to go," she explained. She beckoned him inside the spherical shelter and busied herself at the wall-panel controls. He waited in the middle of the room, the bulky helmet under his small left arm. His right teg prosthesis balanced easily in the light gravity. He saw a large potted potato IF plant beside her bed. It was unusual. Besides the clusters of small white tubers, there was one large, lumpy one that had a greefi skin. It sat in the center of the pot and peered up at him through the tangle of green leafy stems. The bizarre lumpy shape was a genetic throwback to its distant ancestors and the chforophyll was an adjustment to the prolonged exposure to the hydroponics light source. She saw him looking at the potted plant and said, "I'll be taking that along too. Pretty fond of it. It's the biggest life-form I've seen since I've been stuck here. Kept me company. Beautiful isn't it?" He nodded absently as he took a closer look. Then it began to look too familiar as he anthropomorphized its pair of embryonic scale eyes and lumpy outline. Asymmetrical potato -- beautiful? The room temperature dropped hands and face. She opened the oxygen valve. It gave a loud hiss. "Why are you turning up the oxygen?" he asked. "You are going to need it," she said. She dimmed the lights, shrugged out of her wrap-around and advanced on him. It was a red-feather day for the asymmetricaLpotato. T WO pints of eccrine electrolytes, later Spider lay trapped by her clinging extremities. She pressed her forehead into his ear, breathed into his neck and mumbled on and on about how happy she was. His presence had made her almost euphoric. She was a very stable human -- capable of sensible efforts for survival. Solitude -- she could handle solitude unless it was indefinitethen it became loneliness. She was good with tools but when she became lonely her tools gathered inertia. She craved something alive and responsive. Her potato had responded to her touch, growing well with the light and water she showered on it. It grew, changed and became asymmetrical. The unresponsive tools remained cold and symmetrical. She had now been in deepspace long enough to equate asymmetry with life. Spider was beautiful to her -- because he was alive and because he was there. In the absence of gravity he was efficient, strong, capable -- and exhibited no limp. With Rau Lou's crippled starship in tow Olga set a course for Rau Lou's target planet. The suspended genetic material in the cargo section was still viable. Its value would balance their energy expenditure. For several days Spider and #ga # s servomechs worked on the crippled ship. Everything seemed to be intact -- power cell, life support, memory banks and drive units. But the ship would not ( Please turn to page #.) T HE burning city was a hidcould remember he was conscious eously beautiful sight below of the enormous mass of a fully arthem when Brand finally called a mored combat suit, halt. "What for?" Davidson's voice "Stop here for just a minute." came through Brand's earphones. His breath was coming hard and But Davidson paused in his lopfor the first time in longer than he ing, reaction-pack-assisted run toHe fought against his own for what he wanted -- and won less than those who lost everything! ward the crest looming above, of kilometers or so," Wisse said, "There's enough of them left to having stopped a few meters bechase us." yond Davidson and remaining "Let me catch my breath," barely visible to Brand, a vaguely Brand said, hating to hear himself monstrous, ghostlike shape in the admit fatigue. darkness and among wind-twisted "It can't be more than a couple trees of the mountainside. "I know," Brand gasped. The suit was too damned heavy. Something was wrong in the feedback. Something was wrong in this whole setup. "Brand," Davidson blurted. "How do you read rendezvous?" Brand dropped to one knee on the rocky mountainside, turning away from the burning city below. He flashed a time reading on the inside of his helmet's faceplate. "Three minutes," he said. "Then let's get the hell out of here." Brand sighed, knowing that there was no point in arguing. They had to make rendezvous or they were stuck on New Iowa for good. As trustworthy as he believed the Dravians to be, he knew they would not make two runs down to pick them up. If he, Davidson and Wjsse -- sole survivors of the raiding party that had hit the colonial city -- did not make rendezvous they were on their own. "Roger." Brand could see the faint glow of Wisse's reaction pack as it assisted him in a six-meter leap up the mountain slope. Davidson, too, jump-jetted up the slope toward the plateau and the homing signal transmitted from the rendezvous site. Brand paused and looked back down into the burning city below for longer than he should have. Better than half of New Iowa City was now aflame. Mildly Brand regretted what he and the others had had to do. They really had not planned on destroying more than a few essential places -- power stations, water works, central communications, things like that. But neither had they counted on the kind of resistance the colonists had put up. The half-assed farmercolonists from Old Earth had never shown much in the way of defenses in the past. The homing transmitter flashed a reading on Brand's faceplate. Looking, up the slope toward the crest, he found he could see neither Davidson nor Wisse. He had to catch up. The reaction pack kicked at his back and his feet kicked at the earth below him. The force of his legs was amplified a dozen times by the suit and he moved cursing all New Iowans -- and the particular one who had blown a building out from under him with an H.E. bomb he hadn't suspected that the colonists possessed. Well, they hadn't figured on the colonists coming up with combat suits either. Still, he'd been hit harder than he thoughts The damned suit had been damaged -- read-outs told him so clearly enough -- but not so badly that he couldn't get to the pickup site, even if he did have to work a little harder at it. He sure as hell wasn't going to let the Dravians take off without him -- not with what they owed him. (F It was kick and jet, kick and jet. Sluggish though it was, the combat suit carried him up the slope, over the rough, ancient boulders and angular outcroppings of rock, over and around the gnarled trees, up toward the safety of the plateau. " passed before he crested the plateau and landed again on level, solid earth. Snapping the night visor down with a twist of his head, through infrared he made out the dim figures of Davidson and Wisse no more than half a kilometer away. Few trees up here obscured the view and the ground itself was surprisingly level. An odd geological formation, some remote part of his mind commented -- but somehow these mountains reminded him ofhome, the hairsh beauty of Breakdown Heights where mere survival was something to be proud of. Not like the soft living the damned New Iowans had in the lush valleys below. Where Davidson and Wisse stoqd had to be the place. Brand told himself. The image projected against his faceplate agreed. The homer was transmitting from straight ahead. And a time projection told Brand that forty-five seconds remained until rendezvous. The Dravian corvette ought to be coming info view any time. Running, leaping, assisted by the reaction pack but still fighting the sluggishness of the suit, he crossed the distance to where his companions stood. "You almost blew it," Davidson said sarcastically. "We all almost blew it," Brand replied, remembering what had happened in the city below. "They ought to be in sight," Davidson said, looking up into the night sky again. "Ought to be firing retros by now." "Ought to be," Wisse repeated quietly. "Which way would they come?" "From the north, I think," Brand replied, flashing a compass image on his faceplate and then looking into the sky in that direction. "We ought to see 'em by now," Davidson said. Brand read the time. "They're due," "More than due," Wisse said. "They're fifteen seconds late." "Give them a chance," Davidson said. "They'll show up." "Yeah, I know they will," Wisse half-heartedly agreed. "Well, the Fuzzies never failed us before." Davidson's voice was almost angry. "There's always a first time," Wisse said but apparently regretted it immediately. He forced a laugh that did nothing to cheer Brand. Neither Brand nor Davidson spoke. They just read the time. looked back at the sky, read the time again.  Davidson, with reddish-blonde hair and a florid face beneath the helmet of his combat suit, was the biggest of the three men. But even he was not tall when compared with most representatives of mankind. Breakdown Heights, with a gravity of nearly one-and-a-half Gs, was noted for the strength and endurance of its natives, not their height. Brand was shorter than Davidson, though he made up for. his lack of height by the widthand massiveness of his shoulders. His face, too, was wide. His eyes were deep, dark pools behind the covering of his helmet. He was the loner of the group, a man with few friends, one whose quick temper did not encourage close relationships. Now he was doing an excellent job of keeping his temper in check. He knew he had to. Wisse was shorter still than Brand and slighter of build -- but still a man whose physical strength had been nurtured by the massive, desolate homeworld of the mercenaries. His thin face could barely be seen inside his helmet. There was growing, concern on it. "A full minute," he said. 'They've never been late for a pickup before." His voice was seriously worried. "How far behind us do you think they were?" Davidson asked, turning to Brand. "Ten minutes maybe," Brand replied, feeling the concern beginning to grow within himself. "Parker slowed, them down when he set off that mini A-bomb in the river." "I hope he slowed them," Wisse said. Ido , too... Brand remembered that Parker himself had died in the miniature nuclear blast that had widened the river into a new lake in the center of the city. Beyond that it was all a jumble in his mind now, what happened down there in New Iowa City. But it had clearly been an ambush -- the New Iowans fitted out in combat suits as good as those of the raiders, coming out of doorways, leaping from roofs, moving with the precision of trained troops, in moments surrounding the raiders who had expected to meet no real resistance at all. The New Iowans had never known anything like that before; not when the mercenaries had hit the farms and smaller towns. told himself. Twenty-seven of the hardest mercenaries in the galaxy had bought it before the three of them -- four, but Parker had not made it all the way -- fought their way out of the trap, throwing thermos and H.E.'s and everything else they had in every direction' and made it up the mountain to the plateau and the rendezvous spot. Dammit, I wish they'd hurry, Brand told himself. "Two minutes," Davidson said, his voice a dead calm. "What's wrong with them?" Wisse demanded. "They'll. come," Brand said. He was senior man now. He ought to take command, if you could call it that. "Their timing's just off, that's all." He looked up at the sky again. Still nothing, still an absolute nothing, unless you counted the something you didn't when you were looking for a Dravian corvette. "Wisse," he said suddenly, "go back to the cliff and see if the farmers really are following us." "What if the Fuzzies come?" Wisse demanded. "If they come, we'll make them wait." "No, you go." Brand swung up his right arm, the one whose sleeve housed the rocket launcher. He leveled it at the chest of Wisse's suit. "Go back and look . " Wisse did not speak but after a few moments and another search of the sky he turned and loped back toward the edge of tho plateau. "Wonder what's keeping them," Davidson muttered, apparently inore to himself than to Brand. "Bad timing." "Nonsense. You ever heard of a Fuzzy being a second off? I don't like none pf this." Turning toward the plateau's edge. Brand said through the radio link, "See anything, Wisse?" "They're coming up." Panic was in the other man's voice. Damn. Brand wondered who had picked Wisse for a mercenary? He ought to be a klopak fisherman. Starting to break down at the first little -- and then he remembered the slaughter in the city. The picture was damned near impossible -- he didn't know whether to be ashamed of the Breakdowners or whether to admire the colonists. If they really were colonists -- he pondered for a moment. But if not New Iowans, who then? "How many?" he asked. "Can't tell," said Wisse's voice in his earphones. "Couple of dozen." "Can't be," Davidson said. "There couldn't have been so many of 'em left. Parker must've killed off a whole squad himself." "Calm down and count them," Brand commanded. "They ought to be emitting enough infrared for that." He checked the time. Five minutes. Hard to believe Dravians could be that far off schedule. "Fourteen," Wisse ? s voice said after a while. "I clearly count fourteen of them in combat suits." His voice was calmer now. He had regained control of himself. "Too many," Davidson said. "We couldn't hold 'em." "We might have to," Brand said. "They can't be much better off than we are." "They haven't been under full power as long as we have," Davidson replied. Brand nodded in agreement but said, "Better check all our systems." Then to Wisse:. "How far away?" "Less than halfway up the slope." the other replied. "It'll take them a good ten minutes to get up here." And if the Fuzzies don't show up in another ten minutes... Brand let his thoughts trail off. "Come on back," he said. While he waited for Wisse's return he made a quick read-out of his suit systems and wished he hadn't. The suit was worse off than he thought. More than half of his all-important feedback circuits had already gone to backups and a few were out altogether. Ammunition was just about gone, as was the internal air supply, though he could switch to external if things didn't get too hot. Fuel for the reaction pack was next to nothing and his power cells -- well, you could expect only so much out of the thumbnail-size cells these suits carried and he had been running i hard ever since he hit the atmosphere just after the beginning of New Iowa's long night. "How is it?" he asked Davidson. "The suit? Still working but I don'thave much power left. Hour or two." You're ahead of me... Brand read the time. The Dravians were an impossible seven-anda-half minutes late. Wisse was back and began to check out his own suit systems. " "You act like you're runnin' the show now. Brand," DaVidson said. "How.do you figure it?" "L don't," Brand answered. "I just wait here until theycome for us' "And what if they don't come?" Wisse asked, that edge of panic returning to his.vQice...Brand's voice was cold. "They will." How can you be so damn sure?" Davidson demanded. "They ain't people. How do you know what they decided to do. Hell, man, we don't even know why we're fightin' here." "How long have we been working for the Fuzzies?" Brand asked. "Nearly a standard," Davidson replied. "Have they ever failed us yet?" "Like Wisse said -- " "They'll show! In the meantime we'd better prepare a defensive position." IF "You're out of your mind," Davidson said. , "Wisse counted fourteen of 'em. We got no choice but to run." Obviously Davidson did not like to use the word but he used it. "We can carry the homer so the Fuzzies'll know where we are." "The homer was for us," Brand said as matter-of-factly as he could "They're not using it. They've got their own systems." "Still, they could monitor it," Wisse said. "They said they'd pick us up here," Brand said. "Yeah, and they said they'd do it nine minutes ago." T HE three men stood glaring at each other through the thick helmets of their cqmbat suits. Maybe the others could run, Brand thought, for a little while. They had more reserve power than he had -- their suits were in better shape. But he knew that his suit would not carry him more than a couple of kilofneters. And when he did have to fight again he wanted some power for what weapons systems he had left. "Ten minutes now," Davidson said, his voice oddly quiet. "In less than five they're going to come busting over that crest and those boys are mad. I ain't fool enough to stand around and wait for them." "Wait five more minutes," Brand said, neither commanding nor begging. He no longer gave a damn what they did. "No," Davidson said and looked to Wisse for agreement. "We're taking the homer and we're heading for those peaks over to the east! Maybe if we get there we can hold them off." "For how long?" "A hell of a lot longer than we could from here." Eleven minutes. 'Maybe the Dravians really aren't coming... They aren't human. How do you know what they're really thinking? During these agonizing waits, memories flashed through Brand's mind -- one of the Dravians coming to Breakdown Heights and hiring a troop of mercenaries to drive the colonists from Old Earth off colonists and Earih's federation called the planet. Mercenaries prided themselves on being what they were -- why not fight against humans on the side of a bunch of stubby, red, six-legged Dravians? The Fuzzies paid in hard cash and what did the men of Breakdown Heights owe New Iowa, or even Earth? Breakdowners had fought for and against just about every sentient race in the galaxy anyway. What did a little terrorism on New Iowa matter? But what if the Dravians had decided not to pay off?  The eventuality seemed un# likelyr The Fuzzies didn't work that way. The Dravians would come. They had simply been delayed. By what? Twelve minutes. At last Davidson spoke again. "You cornin' with us?" "Take the homer. I'll stay here." "You're a damn fool." "We'll see." Brand turned his attention away from the others and began to searching for something that resembled a defensive position. He saw a few trees and a few boulders -- and up ahead about half a kilometer or so was a sizable depression in the ground, as well sheltered as anything on the plateau. "Brand," Davidson said suddenly after he had picked up the homing transmitter and tucked it under his arm. "Come with us. You don't stand a chance here."  "I don't have power enough to make it halfway to those'peaks of yours," he said slowly, bitterly. "I'm better off here." Thirteen minutes. The combatsuited and deadly furious New Iowans would be coming over the crest any time now. "I guess you know what you're doing," Davidson said. "I hope you do," Brand replied. Brand could hear Davidson's snort through the earphones of his helmet but none of the three men 'Spoke again. , panions. Brand bit down on the l switch that broke him from the radio link and, as quickly as he could, crossed the distance to the depression. By the time he reached : it and turned to look back, David: son and Wisse had vanished, moving toward the peaks some kilometers away. He wondered if they would make it and what they would do when they got there. Settling down in what protection the broken earth, stone and few trees offered, he threw one more glance skyward. Nothing. No bright movement there to indicate the arrival of. the Dravians. His gaze dropped to the edge of the plateau, where the fourteen New Iowans would soon be arriving. That some people might consider this a batf way to die never entered his mind. His father and his father before him had died on alien worlds, fighting other people's battles. He had always expected to go that way, too. But he had hoped, for a few more visits to Breman's Planet before that time came. Well, he could remember the last visit -- and that had been one hell of a.time. He shifted the energy rifle from his backpack, fitted it into the suit's shoulder socket, checked the weapon's internal power and was gratified to see that it still had a little charge. He could draw from his Suit cells for the rifle but deIF tided against it He would need that power for other things. the plateau's horizon, he waited. And while he waited he ' could not help but wonder about the sincerity of the aliens for whom he worked. They had never before given him any reason to doubt them. Now he could only wait a little longer, give them the benefit of his doubts and hope they would show up soon. Then he saw, through his night visor, the infrared glow of a man's warm body and the heat of an op? erating combat suit. He felt no recoil as the energy rifle fired. The partially dimmed by the night visor and the polarization of the helmet's filters. For an instant the combat-suited figure blazed with the same light -- then exploded. One down. Brand flashed a time reading on the inside of his helmet. The Fuzzies were a full fifteen minutes late. No further movement came along the horizon for a while. When it did come it was hard to see, even with the night visor. The New Iowans had cut back on the infrared emission of their suits -- damned good suits for a bunch of farmers. They were almost invisible when they topped the crest, six or seven of them at once, and rushed forward. Brand depressed the firing stud of the rifle, made a quick sweep across his field of fire and saw at least one man fall backward down the slope, his combat suit exploding flames. The others, though, fell forward, their arms arching above their heads as, suit-assisted, they threw. Grenades shattered the earth and rocks of the plateau. The colonists had had no time to get his position. They were throwing blind. Brand licked the dryness of his lips, pulled at his suit's water nipple: A dozen meters or less to his left a grenade exploded, showering him with broken stone, shaking the earth under him. Brand replied in kind but he did not have to throw. A tube slid up over his left shoulder. He guided the grenade launcher with his left hand, aiming it, then triggering it to throw out its two remaining bombs. And he was not firing blindly. He had a damned good idea of where the colonists were. The Jiext explosions were more distant as his grenades fell near the plateau's edge. He thought he saw a twisted figure fly into the air but he was not sure, nor did he waste time concerning himself with it. He had too much to do. The remaining colonists had crossed the crest. They had their own energy rifles, maybe ten or twelve of them. More than half were firing -- and now they knew where he was. His rifle blazed. He caught a rising man full in its glare and the man died in the flames. Suddenly the colonists' weapons became still as an enormously amplified voice called out, "Cease firmg. Now what? Brand, too, stilled his weapon. "Mercenary," the voice called out, "listen to me. This is Lieutenant Hamid of the Federation Marines." Federation troops? Brand no longer wondered why his opposition had not behaved like farmers and clerks. By now he had pinpointed the exact location of the loud speaker. He aimed the rifle. "Surrender, you fool," the marines officer's voice boomed across the plateau. "You're fighting your own kind. You don't know what you've gotten into. The Dravians... are -- But by now Brand had pressed the firing stud and the marine lieutenant would never speak another word. He died in an exploding combat suit. Brand fired again, sweeping across the plateau with the energy rifle until he saw its blaze trickle down to a pale light, then fade out, its charge exhausted. He shrugged, snapped the weapon from its socket, ignored its fall and launched a homing rocket from the sleeve of his right arm. What were Federation Marines doing in this? He wondered. New Iowa was not in the federation. him, lifting him bodily into the air, throwing him back to the tortured earth. He fell on his left shoulder, his teeth grating in agony. He rolled over and came up to his knees, trying to orient himself, and then, snapping back the night visor, he turned his eyes upward in one last frantic sweep of the sky in the hope that -- there it was, a moving spot of light, too slow to be a meteor, coming down, still slowing. He turned back toward his attackers -- there seemed to be more than Wisse had counted -- feeling the growing sluggishness of his suit, the growing weight of a left arm whose feedback circuits were hardly working. He tried to find the rendezvous spot, recognized it on the almost featureless plateau. The marines had not yet reached it. He took no time to count his remaining rockets. He merely loosed them in a steady stream toward the marines until the magazine was empty and the plateau was a blaze of exploding missiles. For a few instants the marines were disorganized. Brand came erect slowly. His suit was definitely failing. Circuits IF were damaged. Power was running low. Feedback was almost unresponsive at times. But he did get to his feet and he started running, snatching the unused slugthrowing pistol from his hip and firing explosive shells before him as he ran. The marines took too little time to recover, to aim at the running, leaping figure. An energy beam laced the earth before him, setting grass aflame. He jetted over it. Another beam lashed into his backpack, where something exploded. His gyros failed...He tumbled. in mid-air, fell crashing to the earth, his back burned and blistered, his lips broken against the faceplate of the helmet. He staggered to his feet, somewhere dimly between consciousness and unconsciousness. He stumbled, regained ' his footing, ran. Now the flame in the sky had become a distinct object, a short, stubby, wingless Dravian corvette, and its crew had seen the battle below. Energy cannons, one from each side of the ship, fired toward the marines. Brand sighed a grateful sob and fell to his knees. One, two -- perhaps a dozen shots were sent toward the corvette before the marines broke in panic, fell back toward the edge of the plateau. They knew they were not up to taking on the ship's cannon. Somehow Brand was on his feet again. He fired a few meaningless shots after them. Then he awkwardly ran on toward the landing spot. The corvette's final descent rockets fired. The ship hovered for a moment, then slowly, gently lowered itself to the ground. It had hardly touched down when Brand reached its side, paused, searched for the air lock. He found it as it began to open. He staggered in and the air cycle began. A single Dravian was waiting for him inside. If a Terran mammal had tried to look like a spider but had forgotten to add the final two legs, it might have somewhat resembled a Dravian -- but not much. The roughly egg-shaped body was mounted on six legs, each of which ended in an appendage that could function either as a' foot or a hand as the occasion required. Body and legs were covered with a short, reddish-bronze hair that rippled constantly, ventilating the skin below. Dravian features, half a dozen eyes, an equal number of nostrils, a wide, slack mouth, fringed hearing organs, wer all fixed in the forward, smaller end of the egg. These were what faced Brand and spoke to him in astonishingly Anglo-Terran. "Where are the others?" the Dravian asked. It took a few moments for the words to sink in. The suit's audio receptors were working fine. Brand's mind was not. "Dead, all but two of them," he replied at last, realizing how much that last sprint had taken from him. "And the other two?" "Up in the hills," Brand told him. "They were afraid you wouldn't come. You were late." He could not read Dravian symbols, so he could not determine tjie alien's rank from the badges he wore on his back. "Regrettable but unavoidable," the Dravian said. "Come with me. The Dravian led him down the passageway to the area of the ship that had been adapted for human passengers. "Go in," the Dravian said. "Administer to yourself and change clothing. The captain will wish to see you at once." "Okay," Brand said, fighting the pain of his burned back and the fatigue that was washing over his body. "But about the others -- " "Do not concern yourself with them," the Dravian said and gently pushed him into the man-size airlock that led into the empty human quarters. Brand was out of the combat suit, had been treated by an automedic programed for humans and had dressed himself in thermal coveralls. He slipped oxygen tanks and a cooler onto his back, a fishbowl helmet over his head and stepped back into the airlock, feeling a little more than half alive,. What bothered him most as he cycled back out through the air lock and into the corridor where the Dravian waited for him was the fact that the corvette was in flight and already out of New Iowa's atmosphere. He had felt the ship lift while he was changing, had heard the whistle of air along the hull as it thinned into the vacuum of space. Stepping out of the lock, he could not help but feel a moment of almost irrational anger. "Aren't you going to pick up my companions?" he demanded, wondering why he cared. They had deserted him. "We have no time," the Dravian replied, pointing down the corridor and gesturing for Brand to walk in front of him. "We have a rendezvous to keep." "They'll be killed down. there," Brand said, annoyed at himself. "We are sorry," the Dravian said in such a way that Brand knew there was no point in discussing it further. A silence held between Brand and the Fuzzy until they reached a hatch that he was directed to enter alone. Ducking to pass through the hatch, Brand found himself in the suite of an alien whom he recognized, if only from the numer( Please turn to page # ) IF This is the earth bound story of Charlie Three -- and a stardweller N OT that it made any difference but it was daylight. He became aware of the familiar numbness in his legs and when his vision partially cleared he could see that snowflakes were gathering on his pants legs. His neck jerked and his hands flailed before the right impulse reached his knees and drew his feet up under him. A warm body beside him grumbled at the disturbance and struck out in dumb protest. He tried to twist and turn away the numbness, but the effort brought only pain. His hands were, useless and seemed to maintain an uncontrollable position in front of his chest, wrists limply touching. There was no longer a sense of hunger in him and he did not know how desperately he needed food. There was only an aching urge to find a dark corner. Stumbling from the doorway, he half fell and half crawled across the sidewalk to the gutter. Using the cars and parking meters for support, he made his way slowly along the street, trying to find a spot. In final desperation he clung to a pole, gave up and relaxed. And soon, in the freezing snowblown air, he wished he hadn't. A trash receptacle furnished . him with newspapers he wadded up and shoved down his trousers to hold away the cloth. He stuck the others into his coat as best he could for what warmth they gave and staggered off. His body was still numb and his chest hurt. Trembling, he waited for the inevitable. Yet within him still was desire for warmth, for hope, for life. clearance papers into the sleeve pocket of his flight tunic and left through the air-barrier exit of Spaceport Operations. He picked his way among the maze of signs and ramp passages until he found the hallway leading to the Port Controller's office. As he approached a turn in the corridor his nostrils were stung by the sickening sweet odor of wine, quickly followed by a more characteristic odor. Space bums, he thought and set his features to meet them. Turning the corner, Foster had to catch himself in midstride to avoid falling among them. They were scattered about the floor in an incredible tangle, making it impossible for him to pass. With a glance at their multicolored silks, Foster guessed there were from eight to ten of them. He swung a heavy boot toward the nearest body. "Get out of my way, damn it." His foot was caught in its flight so abruptly that he was forced to grab the wall to remain erect. A seven-inch throwing knife quivered so close to the other boot that the blade nicked the sole. The holder of Foster's foot slowly raised his eyelids studying all of Foster until their eyes met. "Do that again, off-worlder, and without doubt you'll leave here on a stretcher." The foot was thrown back like a wad of paper and the captain staggered to regain his balance and composure. The man retrieved his' knife with deliberate motions and retained his blocking position. Breaking the deadly silence. The Speaker moved away from the wall. "Ah, you'll have to forgive The Gladiator, good Captain. His manIF neris not polished for men of high station." "What do you want from me?" Foster asked indignantly. The Speaker bowed from the waist and waved his arm in a sweeping gesture at the men who had gotten to their feet during the exchange. "Passage for an Entertainer, Captain." Foster eyed the three figures disdainfully and started to refuse. A bone-crushing grip on his ankle changed his mind. "All right, let's see what you've got." The pressure eased. "Come forward, Paddy," said The Speaker and one of the Entertainers stepped into the center of the corridor. He reached inside of his harlequin-marked tunic and deftly produced five differently colored balls. As each ball spun into motion it was readily apparent that Paddy was a master juggler. The balls flew between his hands only briefly before they burst into flames. When the last globe had ignited Paddy moved control to one hand. The walls reflected a blur of multicolored fire for several seconds before he pulled the balls in. As each stopped its motion the flames winked out. "Marvelous," said Foster, genuinely impressed. "But the Armeter is a free-fall ship. Of what use would a juggler be to me or my men?" v The Speaker nodded in thoughtful agreement. "You're right, of course. Captain. I should have thought of it myself. Well, here we have The Searcher -- " indicating another Entertainer. "He's a mentalist." The Searcher remained leaning against the wall and Foster eyed the greenish cast of his skin with prejudice. He had no use for Butans or their poison planet. "Think of a card. Captain," said The Searcher. Foster closed his eyelids slowly, indicating that he had done so. "The eight of stars," said The Searcher confidently. , "The nine of hearts," corrected Foster and then, turning to The Speaker: "He needs more practice. Anything else?" "Only Tokay, our beloved minstrel." The Speaker smiled thinly. A small, gnomelike man stepped forward, swinging down a guitar from behind his back. He, nodded to Foster as his fingers quickly checked the tune of the instrument. Tokay was the leader of the group and The Planter of the seeds. The mission depended on his being aboard the starship Armeter when she lifted. The Searcher moved into Foster's mind and waited for Tokay to begin his song. Foster listened automatically. "All right, that's enough. You'll do." Foster didn't care for the music himself but his crew was constantly trying to sing some ribald lyric or other and now a change of sound would do them all good. He was not even slightly aware of The Searcher's guidance or withdrawal. Tokay bowed. "Thank you." "The ship is on pad twelve and we leave within the hour. Be there. I won't wait. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must see the Controller." The pressure on his ankle increased again as he started to leave. "What?" he asked, looking about. "The ramp pass, good Captain," said The Speaker. "Oh." Foster swore under his breath. He took out a pad of paper and scribbled on it. He pushed his command ring against the pad and, tearing off a sheet, handed it to Tokay. The grip on his ankle broke and the group of Entertainers parted. The captain hastened along the corridor without looking back. The Speaker put his hand on Tokay's shoulder as they watched the captain walk away. "I wish it could have been someone else. Be careful of him, Tokay. He's a bad one." Tokay smiled and his space-wizened wrinkles cracked with the effort. "I'll stay out of his way. I don't take kindly to being kicked." The Gladiator grunted and wiped his palms across his garment. ers lay against the outside wall of the Operations building, watching the Armeter climb through the daylight black sky on a tail of ion hell. Small tornadoes of sand and grit whirled about as the thunderous sound vibrated their bodies and threatened to collapse their lungs. And then, in diminishing squares, the ship was gone except for a faint point of light. Paddy pulled from his bottle and said excitedly, "There she goes -- the last world. It's been a long time but it was worth the wait." Some sighed and many made sounds of agreement. The Speaker shook his head and disagreed gently. "I wonder if anything is ever really over. There will always be another world. And if, by some chance, there isn't -- there will always be another cause. It seems to be part of the curse, of existing that man must forever search out a cause and dedicate himself to it." The Searcher had been following the tiny, receding point of light high above the Spaceport. As it dimmed out, the scene gradually changed for the Entertainers. Warm earth supported their bodies and a hot sun burned down on them. A gentle breeze stirred the heart-shaped leaves that spread out, row upon row, across the easy rolling hills. Each man IF reacted to the vision in his own way and a casual passerby, staring at the unfocusing eyes, might have wondered why men would degrade themselves to such a level. A week passed before one of the sleek, silver starships of the Federal Police Agency landed. to seeing him as they walked by. Their eyes were open and focusing and still they parted.around him like waves meeting a coral reef. He would lurch from one to another, trying to beg for money, but they would only quickly change their steps and dodge him. And usually, when his frustration had mounted to unbearable limits, he would make the mistake of grabbing a passing arm. He would be spun away or knocked down. Often, then, he would sit and cry as the masses flowed above him and left him alone with his need. A feeling of something in his hand. Paper. Sometimes a dollar. Once a five. An elderly lady talking to ears that could not separate the words but understood the tone. She was telling him to use the money for food, to clean up and to get hold of himself. He would nod continuously as the drumming voice went on and then he would try to find the person's face so he could stare into it with what he hoped was sincerity. And say, over and over, "Bless you, ma'am, bless you.' She would move away, shaking her head to clear her memory and her conscience as she left him to the endless stream of life. Somehow he would stagger erect, clenching both hands, since he could not be sure which held the dollar. His eyes magnetically sought out the large and burning signs of hope. All would do. They no longer gave him change or, if they did, he never picked it up. The dollar was always exchanged for a bottle and an urgent hand that ushered him from the store. He was unable to open the bottles, so he would break off the necks and drink from the jagged edges. His lips were heavily scarred and scabbed but for his purposes it didn't matter. Clutching the bottle to himself, he sought out a place where he could drink it alone. Fortunately companionship wasn't one of his problems. T HE smuggling of native fauna or flora between any of the forty-nine worlds of the Federation was a capital crime. The dominant philosophy of peaceful coexistence was based on a mutual need for varying produce, interworld commerce. The Federation's Commerce Department monitored and duplicated all records of transactions, subsidies. trends and emergency parities. Its police enforced the rules. The Spaceports were little more than huge warehouse and packaging complexes where imported products were either disinfected or sterilized and repackaged for in-planet shipping. Perishable items were inspected and sealed at the port of shipment. The immensity of the system made it awkward to police, since the computers were programed to extract corporate smugglings for profit on a high-yield basis. The efforts of the Entertainers took years to detect. The time of detection was further compounded in that the yield of the first vines came years after the initial planting occurred and required several more years before the fledgling industries reached the point of being able to export their products. After establishing the case, the Commerce Department released its jurisdiction to the Federal Poproblems in that the case lacked reason or motive. Years passed be-' fore the establishment of two crusue the criminals. First, all the smuggled vines were of the Earth varieties. There were nine planets in the Federation that possessed native grapes. One, Butus #, was poisonous to all but the natives. All the smuggled grapes were of the Emperor, Concord, Ribier and Catawba strains. The planting pattern was random. Muscat appeared on one planet. Secondly, the age of the vines, the size of the vineyards and the development of the industries search for a profit motive yielded nothing. The seeding was done more or less in a circle tangential, to Earth. The circle was twenty years old and nearing completion. last three worlds and hoped they had not missed the boat. The effort was not merely one of saving face and punishing the law-breakers. Planetary laws were very strict about off-world smuggling but very lenient, if extant, concerning on-world smuggling. Each world would insist that it had developed or discovered the smugless to destroy the crop or animals unless a court conviction established their case. So thevines grew and flourished while the when Phobus I appeared on the Armeter's wrap-warning screen Captain Foster grinned from ear to ear. The music on board was driving him crazy. It wouldn't have been so bad except that the bum kept singing the same song over and over. IF Foster activated his intercom to his officers' quarters. "Phobus on scan. Front and center." He heard a hurried, "Aye-aye -- " and muffled sounds of scurrying feet. He switched off the communicator and prepared to set the ship down. Phobus was a cool planet by most standards. Its vegetation reflected purplish hues as the Arnieter descended. It was a sandy world and lacked the huge oceans of water common to most Federation planets. But its water table was high and its solar characteristics assured a constant season. Once the Armeter was on pad and clamped in place, Foster directed Tokay to meet him at the portal and personally escorted the little Entertainer from the ship. The familiar green and blue uniform of a Port Authority Inspector waited at the bottom of the glide for them to descend. The plainly dressed man beside the inspector also waited. Badges over each breast pocket identified him as an At the bottom of the ramp, Foster gave Tokay a shove toward the Inspector. "Here's one you can have with my blessings." "Hey, watch it, off-worlder," said Tokay as he stumbled to regain his balance. Turning to the inspector: "Where's my pals?" Seeing that Tokay was an Entertainer, the' inspector returned his attention to the board of invoice sheets and hooked a thumb over one shoulder toward a building marked Port Warehouse, Ramp E. Tokay flipped his hand from his forehead in a gesture of acknowledgment and, as he turned to leave, made a more explicit finger motion to Foster. Entertainers were never checked. They only carried what was on their backs and all seemed to have a peculiar aversion to being decontaminated, so that they never attempted to leave the Ports. People readily avoided their company and the Authority considered them minimum risks. Tokay felt some justification for the jerk in his chest when the please." Tokay raised an eyebrow and turned to face a scanner being used on his back. "Yes?" The agent motioned to the guitar. "Let me see that for a moment." Tokay swung the instrument casually from his shoulder and handed it over. The agent ran his finger along the seams of the instrument, then drew a telescoping probe from his pocket. He pushed the tool between the strings and into the well and soon was tapping at two partitions on both sides of the lower half of the sound box. "What's in these?" "Bottles," answered Tokay without hesitation. The agent handed back the guitar. "Open it up." Tokay turned the guitar over and gently pressed the spine just beneath the well. The hinged lids of the compartments sprang open, exposing two long-necked and empty bottles. The agent withdrew them and checked both for Federation Tax and Export stamps before setting them aside. With an amused smile he asked, "Doesn't that give you bad resonance?" "Not so much. The inner walls are just plywood that fall open when the compartment is empty. This spring on the back is strong enough to hold th wood together so tightly that the vibrations are not interrupted." Tokay snapped the lids shut to a resounding hum. "Ingenious. Now, step back, please." Tokay stepped back, holding his arms out to their extremes. When he turned full circle he kept his body between the scanner and the guitar. The agent nodded. "All right. You can go." "What about my bottles?" asked Tokay. "Confiscated," answered the agent sternly. Tokay decided not to push it and hurried off.' As he left, he could hear the agent explaining to the inspector and Foster. "Never met one that didn't have a bottle on him somewhere. They fill them up again with God knows what kind of poison when they can't, buy wine -- and that's a crime, you know." Butan moved out of nowhere and fell in beside the little Entertainer. "I thought you were going to need help. I'm Serteze, The Searcher here." "It was close. I'm Tokay, The Planter. We haven't met before, have we?" "No. I was recruited after Garm was killed in a warpburn." Tokay swallowed. "Oh -- I hadn't heard." He and Garm had planted nine worlds together and had shared many drinks. "Sorry," said The Searcher. "I thought you had heard." Tokay tried to shake away his feeling of grief. He thought of the mind. The Searcher put a block on it that would pass after Tokay slept and eased out carefully. It was forbidden to enter the mind of an Entertainer. "Where did the police come from?" They reached the wall of the warehouse. Serteze indicated a direction. all over this place for several IF weeks now. They've drugged everyone in the Port except us. It's about the vines but I haven't been able to pick up anything positive. I think they're still pretty much in the dark. I doubt if they have any real suspects or even a clue as to where to look." The Searcher's fingers moved in front of him in smooth scanning patterns as he walked. "They seem to be a little late, don't they?" said Tokay with a broad and beaming smile. "That's the beauty of it." The Searcher smiled back as he stopped before a metal door. "Here we are." Tokay stepped through the doorway into a narrow hallway that opened into a reactor cooling chamber of pipes and valves. Beside one of the huge generators a group of Entertainers waited. The Searcher waved Tokay forward and stayed back to feel out the area around the hallway. Stepping forward, Tokay said, "I am Tokay, The Planter." The group beamed and someone handed Tokay a chilled bottle. "Fruit of the vine. Planter?" The Searcher, satisfied that they had not been followed, joined the group in time to make the end of the second pass. Tokay knew several of the faces and had worked with them before on other worlds. But attrition had taken its toll and there were several new faces. Introductions were swift. The urgent press of affairs was upon all. be well on his way before dawn. He ate hurriedly, then inspected the seeds. A fret was removed from the middle of the guitar neck, which broke neatly in half, revealing hollows filled with little cellophane bags full of seeds. Tokay inspected each packet for mold while Serteze described the conditions of the land he had found only two hundred miles from the Spaceport. Dangerously close -- but since this was the last planting it really didn't matter. Native clothes were produced, along with identification seals and a Port pass. Tokay changed as he listened to the intense briefing. The farmers who would host him would have a vehicle waiting five miles south of the Port to transport him to the farm. Tokay reassembled the neck of the guitar, checked the tune of the instrument and reset the strings. Goodbyes were brief and the little musician hurried off with. The Searcher, eager to finish his mission...As the pair approached the huge, triple-trapped gateway of the Port, Serteze picked up the minds of the guards and locked them down. With a pat on the back, he sent Tokay scurrying among them. Alarms broke loose with the intensity of sound of a starship's takeoff and The Searcher had to bear down extremely hard to hold the Port personnel's The guards continued to march their posts without concern and were unable to acknowledge the flashing red and blue alarm lights and the noise. Tokay scampered over a distant hill as the first emergency vehicles rolled up to reinforce the gate. The Searcher relaxed and dropped a cloak over himself and calmly walked away from the scene of confusion. it was snowing again. A police car rolled by and the tires made a crushing, sucking sound against the ice. He was no longer bothered by the police. They only took in the ones who could sober up and he had long since passed that stage. So they left him alone and called him Charlie Three. He ignored them now but they watched him just the same. The world was two-dimensional to him now. Everything was something that could be touched or it did not exist. The fear of falling was gone from him. He knew no panic as he pitched forward and bounced against the pavement. He knew the surface would support his body while he waited for the pain to subside. The snow was cool and soothing against his forehead. He felt hot even though the ragged Cotton suit was his only clothing in the freezing air. Breathing hurt and the effort seemed to make him even shorter of breath. Eventually he became aware that he was sick with a new and different type of sickness. He could feel a force welling up inside that pushed him to try to get help. He staggered to his feet and stumbled along in the snow, repeating in an unbroken litany, "Help me, please -- oh, God, it hurts. Help me, please, oh, God -- " It had been dark a very long time and mo one was on the streets to hear the plea. No one to help. No one could so it really didn't matter that no one would. Tokay would wait outside the perimeter of the Port for night to fall and forThe Searcher to scan his presence. But this was the last planting and Tokay was careless to the point of walking up to the gate carrying his guitar. The guards turned to watch his approach. Their attention was not normal had made a mistake broke upon The Planter. He licked his lips, swallowed his heart and bolted. The calls to halt were probably given but Tokay was running for his life and could hear nothing but the blood pounding in his ears. A beam grazed his hip and flung him to the ground in agony. The guards were upon him almost at once and, as he was hoisted to his feet, he felt the bite of a hypo in his shoulder. The will to struggle went out of him. He was shoved into the sidecar. Tokay did not feel himself pass out. Both Searchers waited for the quarters. Major Porter switched off the recorder as Tokay's voice began to stammer and fajter. The drug was wearing off and the major waited patiently. He had all the information he needed for a conviction of the Entertainers. However, he did not have the whole truth. His visitors had carefully seen to that. Tokay's vision came back in flashes and he knew his eyes had been open. He recognized the and, remembering the shot in his arm, knew he had been drugged. His face showed panic when he saw the recorder. Porter reached forward and patted thedevice. "It's all here. Planter. Sorry." Tokay tried to shake off the scene but it remained stronger than ever. Porter had been drugged many times to familiarize him with the effects on subjects he interrogated. He persisted: "You almost got away with it."  "The seeds are planted. What happens to me doesn't matter too much," Tokay said. "You're both noble and stupid. Once we take this evidence to court we'll have the authority to destroy those plants of yours and you'll be disintegrated along with your friends." "And it only took you twenty years to catch up," said Tokay. "What gave us away?" Porter's smile passed. He nodded several times. "I'd like to be able to say that we outsmarted you but we didn't. Embarrassing, really. It was so obvious that we overlooked you completely. We had a party one looked for you to play for us, disovered your absence and then the whole thing came crashing down on me. Fate beat you, Planter -- ous tone of admiration in the agent's voice and Tokay fought back an impulse to warm to the man. He looked at the ceiling, shrugged and made no sound. "Tell me one thing. Planter," Porter continued. "Why did you do it? Why spend twenty years of your life planting grape vines? Knowing you'd' be caught -- knowing the penalty was death -- what was in it for you?" "You wouldn't understand. Your kind never does," Tokay answered slowly. "Try me." Tokay met Porter's gaze and held it. "All right. I'll try. The reasons are subjective and they require feeling to be understood. A man of law can't have much feeling." It was Porter's turn to stare silently and wait. Tokay rubbed his hands together in concentration, trying to find words. "Man evolved as a part of the natural order of things. And everything had a balance, a design, a reason it was as it should be. Came civilization with its society and its law. Man learned to own things -- even other men. He became greedy and possessive. Some of us still believe no one can own anything without upsetting nature's balance. Own land? Own water or air or animals -- and even whole worlds? We believe that each man has a born need for and a right to life's gifts, all of them. Do you see what I'm trying to say?" Porter nodded. "Sure. You're saying that in matters dealing with natural resources man is above the law. Isn't that about it?" Tokay raised his hands in frustration and sank backward in his chair. "In your language -- and above some laws. I'm saying that a law that forbids free exchange of animals and plants solely for purposes commerce is wrong. The law in itself is a crime against man. We have been freeing your worlds." The agent smiled. "Crime is a word of law, Planter. It cannot be that a law is a crime -- that would be a paradox. The laws of trade and commerce in our system have prevented war and negating them is your crime against man. You have -- in a minor way to be sure -- threatened the peace and must pay." Tokay's fist slammed down on the agent's desk. His eyes flashed. He yelled, "Greed brings war. Inequality brings war. Helplessness and hopelessness bring war. And by damn, Porter, idiots bring war." "A simple fanatic, that's all you are. A simple fanatic, And I thought you had a reason for all this." Porter shook his head. "In your small way, Planter, you have failed," he said with finality and reached to call his guards. He did not see the paperweight slide from his desk and ascend behind his back. The sudden motion almost sparked a cry of warning from the startled Tokay but he managed to bite it off. The weapon descended and Porter pitched out across his desk top. A blood-speckled bruise appeared on his forehead. Serteze and Garm appeared simultaneously. "Garm -- " whispered Tokay in disbelief. "The reports of the death of Garm have been greatly exaggerated as they say." The Seacher grinned as he removed the recorder's capsule and slipped it into his tunic. ( Please turn to page # ) IF Here you have There you have the D I A. T HE Prime Minister glanced at his appointment schedule and then at the visitor his secretary conducted into his office. Here was a soldier, he thought. Tall, strong, young and obviously enthusiastic. "General Devlin, D. I. A., Mr. Prime Minister." The secretary introduced the visitor and withdrew. "Special briefing on the Panda War, Mr. Prime Minister," Devlin said as they shook hands. The hellburn of Devlin's handsome features looked very much like suntan and the initials of his office. Demon In Attendance, coincided happily with those of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "You may call me 'sir,' son," the Prime Minister told Devlin as they sat down. "We're all soldiers in this war." He looked gravely at Devlin, his features taking on a kindly, sorrowful cast. "Bad news, is it?" "A troubled situation, sir," Devlin replied, "but full of opportunity. You'll want to hear the details first. Colonel MacReady will brief you on the military situation." Devlin turned to the office door and the Prime Minister followed his gaze. The spruce, middle-aged figure in the doorway had not passed the secretary. It was a phantasm. Hell does not have demons in unlimited supply. The chimeras which threaten saints and the succubi who tempt them are largely illusory. They are the product at once of a demon's art and of the imagination of the tempted. In their place, phantasmagoria are more than a substitute fof demons -- they are a flexible weapon of great subtlety. Thus, "Colonel MacReady" told the Prime Minister what Devlin felt it necessary for him to hear but, beyond that, responded to the Prime Minister's knowledge and fears. Never before had a briefing spoken so well to his particular condition of mind. The rapport persisted and strengthened as other phantasms told the Prime Minister what he expected to hear concerning the villages, the provincial administrations, the government in Harum, the Panda capital, the political situation and the exact status of the growing force of military advisors. The last of the phantasms left him with a forbidding picture. "So, the villages -- " the Prime Minister began. "Are dominated by the enemy," Devlin said. "The provincial administrations -- " "Are collecting taxes and ignoring both the enemy and the.central government." "The strong points -- " "Are illusory." "And the government we have supported to avoid this -- " "Is determined but incapable of acting and beset by an unsympathetic majority," Devlin concluded. "But their failure need not be our failure -- or the failure of the Pandas." A light of expectant eagerness broke through the Prime Minister's expression of soulful resignation. "What more do you propose?" he asked sharply. "Sir, do we support the present Panda government or the cause of the people;?" Devlin asked. IF "We've always told Dang that he has our support," the Prime Minister said. "I sort of like him because he's tough; But we've given him enough supplies to finish off anyone who opposes him anywhere. And they turn up in the hands of the enemy." The expression of benevolent concern returned to the face of the Prime Minister. "Whatever we have told Dang -- our duty is of course to the Pandas," he said. "Anyone can see -- will see -- that our promises were meant in that sense. The Pandas must not suffer. Certainly not because of any commitments given to an ineffective government on their behalf. As for Dang -- " "If we do no more for Dang -- " Devlin said. "Someone will," the Prime Minister concluded, shaking his head sadly. "And sir," Devlin added, "giving our support to the unsympathetic majority will show that we act neither through religious prejudice nor through selfish bias." The Prime Minister . said, "There are good men of all faiths. I suppose that the Foreign Office will tell me the' names of the new government?" "I suppose so, sir," Devlin answered, rising to go. The Prime Minister rose also, put his hand on Devlin's shoulder and walked to the door with him. "Mine is a heavy burden," he said. "I know it is, sir," Devlin agreed, quietly and solemnly. "And a mao needs all the support -- loyal support -- that comes his way. You've lightened my burden today." A note of campaigning came into his voice. "We need everyone's help," he said, smiling encouragingly at Devlin. "It's up to every loyal man to do his part. We need consensus. We need support. We need votes. Every friend. Every organization. You work and your friends, your associates work, I'm sure." "We're all for you, every one," Devlin assured him. The Prime Minister gripped Devlin's shoulder, released it and grasped his hand. "You're the kind we need," he said. "I'll see you again?" "Many times, I hope, sir," Devlin replied. "Any time, any time -- " the Prime Minister told him. He returned to his desk and looked at the next name on his schedule. Dang did not resolve the Panda situation. When Devlin came to the Prime Minister's office again several Panda governments had succeeded one another and  the military advisors had become a fighting army. He greeted Devlin warmly -- if sadly -- and listened to the precise briefings of the phantasms with gloomy appreciation. Then he addressed Devlin expectantly. "The government -- " he said. "Is ineffective," Devlin replied. "The people -- " "The people are harassed by the enemy and they suffer when we attack the enemy in their midst," Devlin told him. "The enemy -- " "Is effective and elusive, sir." A pregnant pause ensued. "Sir, the enemy must be countered in his homeland," Devlin proposed. "We must stop the flow of supplies. It's the only way to spare our troops and our Pandas." "The war hasn't been carried outside of Panda," mused the Prime Minister. "Would our people accept it if we did?" "But the enemy has extended the war, sir," Devlin insisted. "How's that?" asked the Prime Minister alertly. "He attacked us on the high seas," Devlin insisted. "Oh, yes," the Prime Minister agreed. "Something like" that did happen. We sank two of his boats. Well, he extended the war. Let him suffer the consequences. I don't suppose that anyone would try a sneak attack here?" "Not a chance, sir." "But I do suppose that the enemy's cities and towns will be destroyed -- " "They will be," Devlin assured him, "incidental to the destruction of his supply lines." "It hurts me that any human life must be lost," the Prime Minister said sadly. "But the wicked bring destruction on themselves. 'He who lives by the sword -- '" he quoted grimly. "Will die by the sword." "I wonder if tle Panda religion teaches that?" the Prime Minister said. "I bear no ill will toward the enemy." Devlin nodded seriously. "Who will die," the Prime Minister continued, with an expression of pained righteousness. Devlin nodded again. "That our poor Pandas may be free," the Prime Minister concluded. They both sat quietly for a moment. The Prime Minister continued to look gravely benevolent. "I can always use loyal help," the Prime Minister reminded Devlin as he left. Devlin admired the Prime Minister's appearance on TV the following week, when he explained the new phase of the Panda war. The message carried a nation with' it but the enemy remained unconvinced. Some time later Devlin was back again. The briefing went as before. At its end the Prime Minister spoke. "The bombing -- " "Is as destructive as we expected but is less effective than it would have been in a civilized country," Devlin told him. "The government -- " IF "Still cannot carry the burden of the war." "The villages -- " "Are terrorized into supplying the enemy." The Prime Minister looked both sadly resigned and warily expectant. "Our obligation is not to any Panda government," Devlin said. "No," the Prime Minister said. "We have agreed on that." "Nor Panda goods or territory," Devlin continued. The Prime Minister nodded. "But to the future welfare of the Pandas themselves," Devlin said. The Prime Minister waited silently. "We can save the Pandas and destroy the resources of the enemy," Devlin asserted. "How?" the Prime Minister asked eagerly. "By razing the Pandas villages and destroying their fields and livestock," Devlin pronounced."I see," the Prime Minister said approvingly. "Instead of the Pandas supporting the enemy, we will support the Pandas. We will house those poor refugees of war in model camps -- " "In model resettlement areas, eventually," Devlin said, "where they will have modern housing and sanitation, nutritious food and advanced medical care." "They will be given all the advantages of civilization," the Prime Minister said warmly. "They will have fields and livestock, new implements and patterns of farming," Devlin continued. "Eventually," the Prime Minister interrupted. "That will come eventually -- Right now we must fix it so there's nothing for the enemy to confiscate. Not an animal, not a grain of rice, not even a blade of grass shall be left." "Of course," he added, "we must evacuate the countryside first wherever we can. But we must be thorough. It's the only way to save the Panda way of life. And people in this country are getting tired of our casualties. They want action." "We all suffer with you sir," Devlin said as he left. Prime Minister dwelt with sorrow and compassion on the plight of the Pandas, the danger to the nation and the self-sacrifice of its dedicated soldiers. He predicted some eventual end to the obduracy of the enemy. But other public commentators dwelled on destruction, wounds and death in enemy cities, in the Panda countryside and in military camps and hospitals. The nation had become bewildered by the protracted conflict into which it had poured its treasure, a conflict so far away and yet so destructive of what was near near and dear. People suffered but their suffering was no longer in sympathy with that of the Prime Minister. He was cheered to see Devlin again and to be briefed as before. "The enemy -- " he said. "Suffers increasing losses," Devlin said. The Prime Minister shook his head in wonder. "Our people -- " "Do not appreciate your sacrifices," Devlin told him softly. The Prime Minister looked at Devlin directly. "History?" he inquired. "I'm afraid that's too much to expect, sir," Devlin told him. "You would never agree to pay the price." "No," the Prime Minister said. "I wouldn't. I deserve recognition and approval and comfort right now. Wars have mostly been popular. I met a challenge to our way of life -- and to the Pandas', of course. Everything has gone wrong. I can't blame myself. I won't wait for justification and I won't lose what I still have. What I did must remain right and the best anyone could have done. I had more important things on my mind than the Pandas. The war got out of control. I may have lost my place in history. I don't enjoy office any more. People don't suffer with me any more. They go out of their way to make my life miserable. If I don't watch out I'll lose my peace of mind." The Prime Minister stared into space, more in anger than in sorrow. "You can -- " Devlin began. "Keep my peace of mind," the Prime Minister completed. "By -- " Devlin tried to interrupt. "Resigning from office," the Prime Minister continued. "First you can -- " "Agree to the enemy's chief demand." "And when deescalation seems imminent -- " "We'll clobber him good on the ground," the Prime Minister said with satisfaction. "That will -- " Devlin began. "Leave the problem in the hands of my successor." "Who will carry on your work -- with our support. While you retire to the country -- " "To live among neighbors who are friends." "With the satisfaction -- " Devlin started to say. "Of a job well done. No -- " the Prime Minister interrupted himself, "With the consciousness of having met challenges with fortitude and wisdom and having suffered evil in sorrow, not anger." Devlin left the office unnoticed, while the Prime Minister smiled at a pleasant future, content in his dearly purchased peace of mind. approached his superior. He IF was uneasier still when he had given his report. "The immediate reward for the things I suggested was always clear," he said. His superior nodded. "He always did what I suggested," Devlin said. Another nod. "The advantages proved illusory, yet he came back for more." Nod. "Yet I felt -- I felt that I never really had to tempt him," Devlin proposed. Another nod. "And in the end -- well, sir, he got ahead of me. I didn't even have to suggest. He said what I came prepared to say. "What did I do wrong, sir?" Devlin asked anxiously. "My own fall wasn't like that at all." "Nothing wrong, Devlin," his superior assured him. "The plan was straightforward and no one could have carried it through better than you did. You went by the book. That's what an inexperienced demon should do. By the way, we'll assign someone else to his successor." He looked at Devlin kindly. "We'll give you a real challenge next time," he said. "A well-brought-up child with a cookie jar or a self-interested man with a friend. You can try your ingenuity there, if you wish." "But it was a success, sir, wasn't it?" Devlin asked anxiously. "The Prime Minister gave in -- well, he followed the script every time. We'll have his immortal soul, won't we, sir?" Devlin's superior smiled condescendingly. "I'm afraid not, Devlin," he said. "I hope you won't be too disappointed." "But why, sir, why?" a distressed Devlin asked. "You see, Devlin," his mentor told him, "immortal souls are too valuable to chance missing. A demon may botch his first job and we can't afford to lose by that. That's why we've assigned another tyro to the new Prime Minister. Not everyone has an immortal soul. So, we send new demons on a dry run before we let them tackle the real thing."  Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary of the Bureau of Sabotage of the Confederated Sentients, is called to the planet of Cordiality on an urgent mission -- a Caleban Beachball has been sighted on the planet. McKie arrives on Cordiality via a jumpdoor -- an instantaneous space-travel medium controlled by the mysterious Calebans -- and is briefed on the emergency by fellow BuSab agent, Alicheno Furuneo. Calebans, sentient members of the Con-Sentients, have lately been disappearing, with disastrous effects on humans and other sentients around them. It is thought that Mlis Abnethe, an enormously wealthy and beautiful but unscrupulous human woman is somehow involved in the disappearances. No one has ever seen a Caleban and few have successfully communicated with one.  McKie forces an entry into the Beachball stranded on Cordiality and confronts the Caleban domiciled in it. He succeeds in establishing communication with the Caleban, a pure energy sentient, who communicates from mind to mind and tells him that Mlis Abnethe is indeed involved in the inexplicable goings on.' Mlis is a flagellator, who has acquired a contractual right to have the Caleban whipped for her pleasure -- in return she has promised certain educational advantages for Calebans. McKie witnesses and interrupts one of the flagellations, discovers that the Caleban, who has assumed the name Fanny Mae, has fallen in love with him. McKie, a veteran of fifty-four unsuccessful marriages, is unimpressed, but utilizes the fact that the universality of love permits Fanny Mae to violate her contract with Mlis Abnethe and send him on her trail via a jumpdoor. He emerges from the jumpdoor on an unfamiliar planet, talking to an uncommunicative rock. IV arm arrived at the proper BuSab laboratory while it was temporarily unoccupied. The lab chief, Treey Tuluk, a backbowing Wreave, was away at the time, attending the conference McKie's report had precipitated. As with most back-bowers, Tuluk was an odor-id Wreave. He had an outwardly average Wre#ve body, two-and-a-half meters tall, tubular, pedal bifurcation, vertical face slit with manipulative extensors dangling from the lower corner. From long association with humans and humanoids he had developed a brisk, slouching gait, a predilection for clothing with pockets and unWreavish speech mannerisms of a cynical tone. The four eye tubes protruding from the top of his facial slit were green and mild. Returning from the conference, he recognized the objects on his lab floor immediately. They matched Siker's description. Tuluk complained to himself briefly about the careless manner of delivery and soon was lost in the intricacies of examination. He and the assistants he summoned made initial holoscans before separating whip and arm. As they had expected, the Palenki gene structure offered no comparatives. The arm had not come from one of the few Palenkis on record in the ConSentient Regisand message sequence, however. These could be used to identify the arm's original owner if that became necessary. Study of the whip went ahead. The artifact report came out of the computers as "Bullwhip, copy IF of ancient earth type." It was made of steerhide. The fact gave Tuluk and his vegetarian aides a moment of disgust. "A sick archaism," one of Tuluk's Chither assistants called the whip. The others agreed with this judgment, even a Pan Spechi, for whom periodic reversion to carnivorous type in his creche cycle was necessary to survival. A curious alignment in some of the cell molecules next attracted their attention. Study of whip and arm continued at their respective paces. call while standing beside a dirt road about three kilometers from the rock. He had come this far on foot, increasingly annoyed by the strange surroundings. The city, he had soon discovered, was a mirage hanging over a dusty plain of tall grass and scrubby thornbushes. It was almost as hot on the plain as it had been in the Caleban's Beachbalk ' So far the only living things he had seen were some distant tawny animals and countless insects -- leapers, crawlers, fliers, hoppers. The road contained two parallel indentations and was the rusty red color, of abandoned iron. It seemed to originate in a far away line of blue hills and plunge straight across theplain to the heat-muddled horizon. The road contained no occupant except himself. Not even a dust cloud marked some hidden passage. McKie was almost glad to feel the sniggertrance grip him. "This is Tuluk," nis caller said. "I was told to contact you as soon as I had anything to report. Hopefully, I intrude at an opportune moment." McKie, who had a journeyman's respect for Tuluk's. competence, said: "Let's have it." "Not much on the arm," Tuluk said. "Palenki, of course. We can identify the original owner if we ever get him. There has been at least one previous-regrowth of this member. Sword cut on the forearm, by the look of it." "What about the Phylum markings?" "We're still checking that." "The whip?" "That's something else. It's real steerhide." "Real?" "No doubt of it. We could identify the original owner of the skin, although I doubt it's walking around anywhere." "You've a gruesome sense of humor. What else?" "The whip's an archaism, too. Bullwhip, ancient earth style. We got an original ID by computer and brought in a museum expert for confirmation. He thought the construction was a bit on the crude side but close enough to leave little doubt it was a copy of a real original. Fairly recent manufacture, too." "Where could they get an original to copy?" "We're checking that and it may provide a lead. These things aren't too common." "Recent manufacture," McKie said. "Are you sure about that?" "The animal from which that hide was removed has been dead about two standard years. Intracellular structure was still reactive to catalyzing." "Two years. Where would they get a real steer?" "That narrows it down. There are some around for story props in the various entertainment media, that sort of thing. A few of the outback planets where they haven't the technology for pseudoflesh still raise cattle for food." "This thing gets more confusing the deeper we go into it." McKie said. "That's what we think. Oh, by the way, there's chalf dust on the whip." "Chalf! That's where I got the yeast smell!" "Yes, it's still quite strong." "What would they be doing with that much quick-scribe powder?" McKie asked. "There was no sign of a chalf-memory stick -- but that means little, of course." "It's just a suggestion," Tuluk said, "but they could've chalfscribed that design on the Palenki." "Why?" "Give it a false Phylum, maybe?" "Perhaps." "If you smelled chalf after the whip came through, there'd have to be quite a bit of it around. You thought of that?" "The room wasn't all that big and it was hot." "The heat would explain it, all right. Sorry we didn't have more for you." "That's all?" "Well, it might not be of any use -- but the whip has been stored in a hanging position, supported by a thin length of steel." "Steel? Are you positive?" "Positive." "Who still uses steel?" "It's not all that uncommon on some of the newer planets. RR has even turned up places where they build with it." "Wild." "Isn't it, though?" "You know," McKie said, "we're looking for an outback planet and that's where I seem to be." "Where are you?" "I don't know." "You don't know?" McKie explained his predicament. "You field agents take awful chances." "Don't we?" "You wear a monitor. I could ask this Taprisiot to identify your location. Want to invoke the monitor clause?" "You know that's an open payment clause," McKie. said. "I don't think this is as yet a sufficient emergency for me to risk bankrupting us. Let me see if I can identify this place by other means.'.' "What do you want me to do next?" "Call Furuneo. Have him allow me another.six hours, then get the Caleban to pick me up." "Pick you up, right. Siker said you were onto some doorless IF S'eye thine. Can it pick you up anywhere? ,r "I think so." "##I call Furuneo right away." almost two hours before he saw the smoke. Thin spirals of it stood in the air against the backdrop of distant blue hills. It had occurred to McKie during his walk that, he might have been set down in a place where he could die of thirst or starvation before his legs carried him to the safe companionship of his civilized fellows. A self-accusatory moroseness had overtaken him. This was not the first time he had realized that some accident of the machinery he took for granted might prove fatal. But the machinery of his own mind? He cursed himself for using the Caleban's S'eye system this way when he knew the unreliability of communication with the creature. Walking! You never thought ydu might have to walk to safety. McKie 'sensed the eternal flaw in sentient relationship with machinery. Reliance on such forces put your muscles at a disadvantage in a universe where you might liave to rely on them at any time. He seemed to be getting nearer to the smoke, although the hills looked as remote as ever. Walking. Of all the stupid, damned foulups. Why would Abnethe pick a place like this to start her kinky little game? If this were the place it had started. If the Caleban had not made another communication error. If love could find a way. What the devil did love have to do with all this? McKie plodded on, wishing he had brought some water. First the heat of the Beachball, now this. His throat felt as though he had built a fire in it. The dust kicked up by his feet did not help. Every step stirred up a puff of pale red from the narrow track. The dust clogged his throat and nostrils. It had a musty taste. He patted the toolkit in his jacket pocket. The raygen could burn a thin hole in this parched earth, might even strike down to water. But how could he bring the water up to his demanding throat? Plenty of insects around. They buzzed and flew about, crawled at the edge of the track, attempted at times to alight on his exposed flesh. He finally took to carrying his toolkit's stim like a fan, setting it at medium potency. It cleared the air around his face whenever a swarm approached, dropped jittering patches of stunned insects behind him. He grew aware of a noise -- low, indistinct booming. Something being pounded. Something hollow and resonant. It originated out there in the distancewhere the smoke stood on the air. It could be a natural phenomenon, McKie told himself. Could be wild creatures. The smoke might be natural fires. Still, he brought the raygen from his kit, kept it in a sidepocket where he could get at it quickly. The noise became louder in slow stages, as though it were being amplified to mark consecutive positions of his approach. Screens of thornbush and gentle undulations in the plain concealed the source. McKie trudged up a gentle rise, still following the road. Sadness transfixed him. He'd been cast away on some povertystricken backyard world, a place that stiffened the eyes. He had been given a role in a story with a moral, a clipped-wing fairy story. He was a burned-out wanderer, his thirst a burnished yearning. Anguish had lodged in him somewhere. He pursued an estranged, plodding dream which would dissolve in the awakening doom of a single Caleban. The toll that Caleban's death would bring oppressed him. It turned his ego upside down and drained out all the lightness. His own death would be a lost bubble burst in such a conflagration. McKie shook his head to drive away such thoughts. Fear would pluck him of all sensibility. He couldn't afford it. One thing was sure now -- the sun was setting. It had descended at least two widths toward the horizon since he had started this stupid trek. What in thename of the infinite devils was that drumming? It came at him as though riding the heat: monotonous, insistent. He felt his temples throbbing to an irritating counterpoint. stopped. He stood at the brim of a shallow basin which had been cleared of the thornbush. At the basin's center a thorn fence enclosed twenty or so conical huts with grass roofs. They appeared to be made of mud. Smoke spiraled from holes in several of the roofs and from pit fires outside others. Black dots of cattle grazed in the basin, lifting their heads occasionally with stubby whiskers of brown grass protruding from their mouths. Black-skinned youths carrying long poles watched the cattle. More black-skinned men, women and children went about various occupations within the thorn enclosure. McKie, whose ancestry contained blacks from the planet Caoleh, found the scene curiously disturbing. It touched a genetic memory that vibrated to a wrong rhythm. Where in the universe could people be degraded to such primitive living standards? The basin was like a textbook scene from the dark ages of ancient Earth. The children were mostly naked, as were some of the men. The women wore string skirts. Could this be some odd return to nature? The narrow track led down into the basin and through the thorn fence, extending out the other side to disappear over a bordering crest. McKie began the descent. He hoped to find water in this village. The booming noise came from a large hut near the center of the cluster. A two-wheeled cart with IF four great two-horned beasts yoked to it waited beside the hut. McKie studied the cart as he approached. Between its high sidewalls were piled jumbles of strange artifacts -- flat, boardlike things, rolls of garish fabric, long poles with sharp metal tips. The drumming stopped and McKie noted that he had been seen. Children ran screaming among the huts, pointing at him. Adults turned with slow dignity, studied him. Silence settled oyer the scene. McKie entered the village through a break in the thorn fence. Emotionless black faces turned to observe his progress. Scents assaulted McKie's nostrils -- rotting flesh, dung, gave off acrid stenches whose character he didn't care to explore in connection with the smells of woodsmoke and burning meat... Clouds of black insects swarmed about the beasts yoked to the cart beside the central hut. A redbearded white man emerged from the hut as McKie approached. The man wore a flat-brimmed hat, a dusty black jacket and dun pants. He carried a whip of the same pattern the Palenki had used. Seeing the whip, McKie knew he had come to the right place. The man waited in the doorway, a mean-eyed, menacing figure, thin lips visible through the beard. He glanced once at McKie, nodded at several of the black men off to McKie's left, motioned toward the cart, returned his attention to McKie. Two tall blade men moved to stand at the head of the yoked beasts. McKie studied the contents of the cart. The boardlike objects, he saw, had been carved and painted with strange designs. They reminded him of Palenki carapaces. He didn't like the way the two men at the head of the yoked beasts stared at him. Danger lurked here. McKie kept his right hand in his jacket pocket, curled around the raygen tube. He felt and saw the black residents closing in behind him. His back felt exposed and vulnerable. "I am Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary," he said, stopping about ten paces from the bearded white man. "And you?" The man spat in the dust, said something that sounded like: "Getnabent." McKie swallowed. He did not recognize the greeting. Strange, he thought. He had not believed the ConSentiency contained a language completely unfamiliar to him. Perhaps RR had come up with a new planet. "I am on an official mission of the Bureau," McKie said. "Let all 'men know this." That satisfied the legalities. The bearded man glanced in the direction of the voice, back to McKie. McKie shifted his attention to the whip. The man trailed the end of it behind him on the ground. Seeing McKie's attention, he flicked a wrist, caught the flexible end of the whip in two fingers which he lifted from the handle. He continued to stare at McKie. There was a casual proficiency in the way the man handled the whip that sent a shudder through McKie. "Where did you get that whip?" he asked. The man looked at the object in his hand. "Pitsch," he sajd. "Brawzhenbuller." McKie moved closer, held out a hand for the whip. The bearded man shook his head from side to side, scowled. No mistaking that answer. "Maykely," he said. He tapped the butt of the whip handle against the side of the cart, nodded at the piled cargo. Once more McKie studied the contents of the cart. Handmade artifacts -- no doubt of it. There could be a big profit in esoteric and decorative objects, he knew. These could be artifacts that curried to the buyer boredom brought on by the endless, practical, serial duplications from automatic factories. If they were manufactured in this village, though, the whole operation looked to be a slave labor thing. Or serfdom, which was the same thing to all practical purposes. Abnethe's game might have sicker overtones but more understandable motives. "Where's Mliss Abnethe?" he asked. That brought a response. The bearded man jerked up his head, glared at McKie. The surrounding mob emitted unintelligible cry. "Abnethe?" McKie asked. "Seeawss Abnethe," the bearded man said. The crowd around them began chanting: "Epah Abnethe! Epah Abnethe! Epah Abnethe -- " "Rooik!" the bearded man shouted. The chant stopped abruptly. "What is tlje name of this planet?" McKie asked. He glanced around at the staring black faces. "Where is this place?" No one answered. McKie locked eyes with the bearded man. The other returned his stare in a predatory, measuring manner, nodded once, as though he'd come to some conclusion. "Deespawng!" he said. McKie frowned, swore under his breath. This damned case presented communications difficulties at every turn! No matter. He'd seen enough here to demand a fullscale investigation by a police agency. You didn't keep humans in this primitive state. Abnethe must be behind this place. The whip, the reaction to her name. The village smelled of Abnethe sickness. McKie observed some of the people across from him, saw scars on their arms and chests. Whip scars? If they were, Abnethe's money wouldn't save her. Something exploded against the back of McKie's neck, knocking, him forward. The bearded man raised the whip handle and McKie saw the thing rushing toward his head. Jle felt a giant darkness lurch across his mind as the thing crashed against the side of his head. He tried to bring the raygen out of his pocket but muscles disobeyed. He felt his body become a limping, horrified stagger. His IF vision was by then a bloody haze. Again something exploded against his head. McKie sank into nightmare oblivion. As he sank, he thought of the monitor in his skull. If they had killed him, a Taprisiot somewhere would jerk to attention and send in a final report on one Joij X. McKie. A lot ojgood that'll dome... V realized. That glowing thing directly in front of him had to be a moon. The realization told him he had been seeing the moon for some time, puzzling over it without being fully awake. The moon had lifted itself out of blackness above a paralyzed outline of primitive roofs. So he was still in the village. The moon dangled incredibly close. The back and left side of McKie's head began to throb painfully. He explored his bruised senses, realized he had been staked out in the open, flat on his back, wrists and ankles tightly bound, his face pointed at the sky. Perhaps it was another village. He tested the security of his bindings, could not loosen them. His was an undignified position. He was flat on his back, legs spread, arms outstretched. For a time, hewatched the changing guard of strange constellations move across his field of vision. Where was this place? Firelight blazed up somewhere off to his left. It flickered, sank back to orange gloom. McKie tried to turn his head toward it, froze as pain stabbed upward from his neck through his skull. He groaned. In the darkness an animal screamed. The scream was followed by a hoarse, grunting roar. Silence. Then another roar. The sounds creased the night for McKie, bent it into new dimensions. He heard soft footsteps approaching. "I think he groaned," a man said. The man was speaking standard Galach, McKie noted. Two shadows came out of the night and stood over McKie's feet. A female voice masked by a storter asked, "Do you think he's awake?" "He's breathing as though he were awake," the man said. "Who's there?" McKie rasped. His own voice sent agony pinwheeling through his skull. "Good thing your people know how to obey instructions," the man said. "Imagine him running loose around here!" "How did you get here, McKie?" the woman asked. "I walked," McKie growled. "Is that you, Abnethe?"  "He walked;" the man said in angry disbelief. McKie, listening to that male voice, began to wonder about it. Was there a trace of alien sibilance in it? Was it human or humanoid? Among the sentients, only Pan Spechi could look that human -- because they had shaped their flesh to the human pattern. "Unless you release me;" McKie said, "I won't answer for the consequences." "You'll answer for them," the man said. There was laughter in his voice. "We must be sure how he got here," the woman said. "What difference does it make?" "It could make a great deal of difference. What if Fanny Mae is breaking her contract?" "That's impossible." "Nothing's impossible. He couldn't have come here without Caleban help." "Maybe there's another Caleban." "Fanny Mae says not." "I say we do away with this intruder immediately," the man said. "What if he's wearing a monitor?" she asked. "Fanny Mae says no Taprisiot can locate this place." "But McKie is here." "And I've had one long-distance call since I arrived," McKie said. No Taprisiot could locate this 'place? What would prompt that statement? The man said, "I say we do away with him." "You're not very intelligent," McKie said. "Look who's talking about intelligence." tails of faces but they remained blank shadows. What was it about that male voice? The storter disguised the woman's voide -- but why would she bother? "I am fitted with a life monitor," McKie said. "The sooner the better," the man said. "I've stood as much of that talk as I can," the woman said. "Kill me and that monitor starts transmitting," McKie said. "Taprisiots will scan this area and identify everyone around me. Even if they can't locate you, they'll know you." "I shudder at the prospect," the man said. "We must find out how he got here," the woman said. "What difference does it make?" "That's a stupid question." "So the Caleban broke her contract." "Or there's a loophole in it we don't know about." "Well, plug it up." "I don't know if we can. Sometimes I wonder how much we really understand each other. What' re connectives?" "Abnethe, why are you wearing that storterT' McKie asked. "Why do you call me Abnethe?" she asked. "You can disguise your voice but you can't hide your sickness or your style," McKie said. "Did Fanny Mae send you here?" "Didn't somebody say that was impossible?" McKie countered. "He's a brave one," the woman chuckled. "Lot of good it does him." "I don't think the Caleban could break our contract," she said. "You recall the protection clause? It's likely she sent him here to get rid of him." "So let's get rid of him." "That's not what I meant." "You know we have to do it." "You're making him suffer and I won't have it," the woman said. "Then go away and leave it to me, "I can't stand the thought of his suffering. Don't you understand?" "He won't suffer." "You have to be sure." It's Abnethe for certain, McKie thought, recalling her conditioning against witnessing pain. But who's the other one? "My head's hurting," McKie said. "Your men practically beat my brains out." "What brains?" the man asked. "We must get him to a doctor." "Be sensible." "You heard him. His head hurts." "Mliss, Stop it." "You used my name," she said. "What difference does it make? He'd already recognized you." "What if he escapes?" "From here?" "He got here, didn't he?" "For which we can be thankful." "He's suffering," she said. "He's lying." "He's suffering. I can tell." "What if we take him to a doctor, Mliss?" the man asked. "What if we do that and he escapes? BuSab agents are resourceful, you know." Silence. "There's no way out of it," the man said. "Fanny Mae sent him to IF us and now we have to kill him." # You're trying to drive me crazy -- " # He won't suffer." Silence. # I promise," the man said. # For sure?" "Didn't I say it?" # I'm leaving here," she said. # I don't want to know what happens to him. You're never to mention him again, Cheo. Do you hear me?" "Yes, my dear. I hear you." "I'm leaving now," she said. "He's going to cut me into little pieces," McKie said, "and I'll scream with pain the whole time." "Shut him up?" she screeched. "Come away, my dear," the man said. He put an arm around her. "Come along now." Desperately, McKie said, "Abnethe -- he's going to cause me intense.pain. You know that." She began sobbing as the man led her away. "Please -- please -- " she begged. The sound of her crying faded into the night. Furuneo, McKie thought, don't dally. Get that Caleban moving. I want out of here. Now! He strained against his bindings. They stretched just enough to tell him he had reached their limits. He could not feel the stakes move at all. Come on, Caleban! McKie thought. You didn't send me here to die. You said you loved me... tioning, counter questioning, probe, counter probe and bootless answers, Furuneo brought in an enforcer assistant to take over the watch on the Caleban. At Furuneo' s request, Fanny Mae opened a portal and let him out onto the lava ledge for a spell of fresh air. It was cold out on the shelf, especially after the heat in the Beachball. The wind had died down as it did most days here just before night. Surf still pounded the outer rocks and surged against the lava wall beyond the Beachball. But the tide was going out and only a few dollops of spraywet the ledge. Connectives, Furutieo thought bitterly. She says it's not a linkage, so what is it? He couldn't recall ever having felt this frustrated. That which extends from one to eight , the Caleban had said, that is a connective. Correct use of verb to be? . "Huh?" Identity verb , the Caleban said. Strange concept. "No, no! What did you mean there, one to eight?" Unbinding stuff , the Caleban said. # You mean like a solvent?" Before solvent. "What the devil could before have to do with solvents?" Perhaps more internal than solvents , the Caleban said. , "Madness," Furuneo said, shaking his head. Then: "Internal?" Unbounded place of connectives , the Caleban said. "We're right back where we started," Furuneo groaned. # What's a connective?" Uncontained opening between , the Caleban said. "Between what?" Furuneo roared. Between one and eight. "Ohhhh, no!" Also between one and X, the Caleban said. , As McKie had done earlier, Furuneo buried his face in his hands. Presently he said, "What's between one and eight except two, three, four, five, six and seven?" Infinity, the Caleban said. Open ended concept. Nothing contains everything. Everything contains nothing. "You know what I think?" Furuneo asked. I read no thoughts. "I think you're having your little game with us," Furuneo said. "That's what I think." Connectives compel, the Caleban said. Does this expand understanding? "Compels -- a compulsion?" Venture movement, the Caleban said. "Venture what?" That which remains stationary when all else moves, the Caleban said. Thus, connective. Infinity concept empties itself without connective. At this point Furuneo asked to be let outside for a rest. He was no closer to understanding why the Caleban maintained such a high temperature in the Beachball. Consequence of swiftness, the Caleban said, varying this under questioning with: Rapidity convergence. Or, Perhaps concept of generated movement arrives closer. "Some kind of friction?" Furuneo" probed. Uncompensated relationship of dimensions possibly arrives at closest  approximation, the Caleban answered. Now, reviewing these frustrating exchanges, Furuneo blew on his hands to warm them. The sun had set and a chill wind was beginning to move off the bluff toward the water. Either I freeze to death or bake, he thought. Where in the universe is McKie? At this point, Tuluk made longdistance contact through one of the Bureau Taprisiots. Furuneo, who had been seeking a more sheltered position in the lee of the Beachball, felt the pineal ignition. He brought down thefoot he had been lifting in a step, planted the foot firmly into a shallow pool of water and lost all bodily sensation. MinH and call were one. "This is Tuluk at the lab," the caller said. "Apologies for intrusion and all that." "I think you just made me put a foot in cold water," Furuneo said. "Well, here's some more cold water for you. You're to have that friendly Caleban pick up McKie in six hours, time elapse measured from four hours and fifty-one minutes ago. Synchronize." "Standard measure?" "Of course standard." ' "Where is he?" "He doesn't know. Wherever that Caleban sent him. Any idea how it's done?" "It's done with connectives." IF "Is that right? What arc connectives?" "When I find out, you'll be the first to know." "That sounds like a temporal contradiction, Furuneo." "Probably is. All right, let me get my foot out of the water. It's probably frozen solid by now." "You've the synchronized time coordinate for picking up McKie, don't you?" "I got it. And I hope she doesn't send him home." "How's that?" Furuneo explained. "Sounds confusing." , "I'm glad you figured that out. For a moment there, I thought you weren't approaching our problem with sufficient seriousness." Among Wreaves seriousness and sincerity are almost as basic as they are with Taprisiots but Tuluk had worked among humans long enough to recognize the jibe; "Well, every being has its own  insanity," he said. It was a Wreave aphorism but it sounded sufficiently close to something the Caleban might have said for Furuneo to experience a momentary angeret-e nforced rage and sense his ego shimmering away from him. He shuddered his way back to mental solidity. "Did you almost lose yourself?" Tuluk asked. "Will you sign off and let me get my foot out of the water?" "I receive the impression you are fatigued," Tuluk said. "Get some rest." "When I can. I hope I don't fall asleep in that Caleban hot house.  , I'd wake up done just about right for a cannibal dinner." "Sometimes you humans express yourselves in a disgusting fashion," the Wreave said. "But you'd better remain alert for a while. McKie may require punctuality." VI I t was dark but Abnethe needed no light for black thoughts. Damn Cheo for a sadistic fool! It had been a mistake to finance the surgery that'd transformed the Pan Spechi into an ego-frozen freak. Why couldn't he have stayed as he had been when she had first met him? So exotic -- so -- exciting. He was still useful, though. And there was no doubt he had been the first to see the magnificent possibilities in their discovery. That, at least remained exciting. She reclined on a softly furred chairdog, one of the rare feline adaptives which had been taught to lull their masters by purring. The soothing vibrations moved through her flesh as though seeking out irritations to subdue. So relaxing. She sighed. Her apartment occupied the top ring of the tower they had built on this world, safe in the knowledge that their hiding place lay beyonjl the reach of any law or any communication except that granted through a single Caleban -- who had bbt a short time to live. But how had McKie come here? And what had McKie meant, saying he had had a call through a Taprisiot? The chairdog, sensitive to her mood, Stopped purring as Abnethe sat up. Had Fanny Mae lied? Did another Caleban remain who could find this place? Granted that the Caleban's words were difficult to understand -- granted this, yes, there was yet no mistaking the essentials. This world was a place whose key lay in only one mind, that of Madame Mliss Abnethe. She sat straight on the chairdog. And there would be death without suffering' to make this place forever safe -- a giant orgasm of death. Only one door -- and death would close it. The survivors, all chosen by herself, would live on in happiness here beyond all -- connectives. Whatever those were. She stood up, began pacing back and forth in the darkness. The rug, a creature adapted like the chairdog, squirmed its furry surface at the caress of her feet. An amused smile came over her face. Despite the complications and the strange timing required, she would have to increase the tempo of the floggings. Fanny Mae must be forced to discontinue as soon as possible. To kill without suffering ahiong the victims, this was a prospect she found she still could contemplate. But there was need for hurry. ing, against a wall within the Beachball. Sleepily he cursed the. heat. His mindclock said he had slightly less than an hour before picking up McKie. Furuneo had tried to explain the time schedule to the Caleban but she persisted in misunderstanding. Lengths extend and distend, she had said. They warp and shift with vague movements between one and another. Thus time remains inconstant. Inconstant? The vortal tube of a S'eye jumpdoor snapped open just beyond the Caleban's giant spoon. The face and bare shoulders of Abnethe appeared in the opening. Furuneo pushed himself away from the wall, shook his head to restore alertness. Damnation, it. was hot in here. "You are Alicheno Furuneo," Abnethe said. "Do you know me?" "I know you." "I recognized you at once," she said. "I know most of your stupid Bureau's planetary agents by sight. I've found it profitable." "Are you here to flog this poor Caleban?" Furuneo asked. He felt for the holoscan in his pocket, moved into a position for a rush toward the jumpdoor as McKie had ordered. "Don't make me close this door before we've had a little discussion," she said. Furuneo hesitated. He was no Saboteur Extraordinary, but you didn't get to be a planetary agent without recognizing when to disobey a senior agent's orders. "What's to discuss?" he asked. "Your future," she said. Furuneo stared up into her eyes. IF The emptiness of them appalled him. This woman was ridden by a compulsion. "My future?" he asked. "Whether you're to have any future" she said. "Don't threaten me," he said. "Cheo tells me," she said, "that you're a possibility for our project." For no reason he could explain, Furuneo knew this to be a lie. Odd how she gave herself away. Her lips trembled when she said that name -- Cheo. "Who's Cheo?" he asked. "That's unimportant at the moment." "What's your project) then?" "Survival." "That's nice," he said. "What else is new?" He wondered what she would do if he brought out the holoscan and started recording. "Did Fanny Mae send McKie hunting for me?" she asked. That question was important to her, Furuneo saw. McKie must have stirred up merry hob. "You've seen McKie?" he asked, "I refuse to discuss McKie," she said. The response was insane, Furuneo thought. She had been the one to bring McKie into the conversation. Abnethe pursed her lips, studied him. "Are you married, Alicheno Furuneo?" she asked. He frowned. Her lips had trembled again. Surely she knew his marital status since she had taken trouble to learn who he was. What was her game? "My wife is dead," he said. "How sad," She murmured. "I get along," he said, angry. "One can't live in the past." "Ah, that is where you may be wrong," she said, "What are you driving at?" "Let's see," she said, "your age -- sixty-seven standard, if I recall correctly." "You recall correctly, as you damn' well know." "You're young," she said. "You look even younger. I'd guess you're a vital person who enjoys life." "Aren't we all?" he asked. It was going to be a bribe offer, then, he thought. "We enjoy life when we have the proper ingredients," she said. "How odd it is to find a person such as yourself in that stupid Bureau." This was close enough to a thought Furuneo himself had occasionally nurtured for him to begin wondering about this Cheo and the mysterious project with its 'possibilities. What were they offering? ' Would she offer herself? She was an attractive female -- he saw a generous mouth, large green eyes, a pleasant oval face. He had seen the holoscans of her figure -- the Beauty barbers had done well by her. She had maintained herself with all the expensive care her money could buy. But would she offer herself to him? He found this difficult to contemplate. Motives and stakes didn't fit. "What arc you afraid of?" he asked. She answered him with a peculiar note of sincerity, "Suffering." He had not been celibate since Mada's death -- nevertheless, his had been a special kind of marriage. It had gone beyond words and bodies. If anything remained solid and basic -- connective -- in the universe, their kind of love did. He had but to close his eyes to feel the memory-presence of her. Nothing could replace that and Abnethe must know it. She could not offer him anything unobtainable elsewhere. Or could she? "Fanny Mae," Abnethe said, "are you prepared to honor the request I made?" Connectives appropriate, the Caleban said. "Connectives -- " Furuneo exploded. "What are connectives?" "I don't really know," Abnethe said, "but apparently I can exploit them without knowing." "What are you cooking up?" Furuneo demanded. He wondered why his skin felt suddenly chilled in spite of the heat. "Fanny Mae, show him," Abnethe said. ' The jumpdoor's vortal tube flickered Open, closed, danced and shimmered. Abruptly, Abnethe no longer was visible in it. The door stood open once more, looking now down onto a sunny jungle shore, a softly heaving ocean surface, an oval stabo-yacht hanging in stasis above a clearing and a sandy beach. The yacht's afterdeck shields lay open to the sun, exposing almost in the center of the deck a young woman stretched out in repose, face down on a floater hammock. Her body was drinking the rays of a tuned sunfilter. Furuneo stared, unable to move. The young woman lifted her head, stared out to sea, lay back. Abnethe's voice came from directly over his head, from another jumpdoor obviously, but he could not take his gaze from that well-remembered scene. "You recognize this?" she asked. "It's Mada," he whispered. "Precisely." "Oh, my god," he whispered. "When did you scan that?" "It is your beloved, you're sure?" Abnethe asked. "It's -- it's our honeymoon," he whispered. "I even know the day. Friends took me to visit the seadome. She didn't enjoy swimming and stayed behind." "How do you know the actual day?" "The flambok tree at "the edge of the clearing -- it bloomed that day and I missed itr See the umbrella flower?" "Oh, yes. Then you've no doubt about the authenticity of this scene?" "So you had your snoopers staring at us even then?" he rasped. "Not snoopers. We are the snoopers. This is now." "It can't be! That was almost forty years ago!" "Keep your voice down." IF "How can she hear me? She's been dead for -- " "This is now, I tell you! Fanny Mae?" In person of Furuneo, concept oj now contains relative connectives, the Caleban said. Nowness oj scene true. membering other times. "We can pluck her from that yacht and take both of you to a place the Bureau will never find," Abnethe said. "What do you think of that, Furuneo?" Furuneo wiped tears from his cheeks. He was aware of the sea's ozone smell, the pungency of the flambok blossom. The scene had to be a recording, though. "If it's now -- why hasn't she seen us?" he asked. "At my direction, Fanny Mae masks us from her sight. Sound, however, will carry. Keep your voice down." "You're lying," he hissed. As though at a signal, the young woman rolled over, stood up and admired the flambok. She began to hum a song familiar to Furuneo.  "I think you know I'm not lying," Abnethe said. "This is our secret, Furuneo. This is our discovery about the Calebans." "But -- how can -- " "Given the proper connectives, whatever they are, even the past is open to us. Only Fanny Mae Of all the Calebans remains to link us with this past. No Taprisiot, no Bureau, nothing can reach us there. We can go there and free ourselves forever?" "This is a trick," he said.  "You can see it isn't. Smell that flower, the sea." "But why -- what do you want?" "Your assistance in a small matter, Furuneo." "How?" "We fear someone will stumble on our secret before we're ready. If, however, someone the Bureau trusts is here to watch and report-giving a false report -- " "What false report?" ."That there've been no more floggings, that Fanny Mae is happy, that -- " "Why those particular lies?" "When Fanny Mae reaches her -- ultimate discontinuity -- we can be far away and safe -- you with your beloved. Correct, Fanny Mae?" Truthful essence in statement, the Caleban said. jumpdoor. Mada. She was rjght there. She had stopped humming and was coating her body with a skin-protective. If the Caleban moved the door a little closer, he knew he would be able to reach out and touch his beloved. Pain in Furuneo's chest made him aware of a constriction there. "Am -- I down there somewhere?" he asked. "Yes," Abnethe said. "And I'll come back to the yacht?" "If that's what you did originally. "What would I find, though?" "Your bride gone, disappeared." "But -- " Would she really? Perhaps -- yes. Yes, she would know him. She might even come to understand the need behind such a decision. But he saw quite clearly that she would never forgive him. Not Mada. "With proper care she might not have to die in thirty-one years," Abnethe said. Furuneo nodded but the gesture was only for himself. She would not forgive him any "It'd be thought that some creature of the sea or the jungle killed her. Perhaps she went swimming and -- " "She lived thirty-one years after that," he whispered. "And you can have those thirtyone years all over again," Abnethe said. "I -- I wouldn't be the same. She'd -- " "She'd know you." more than the young man returning to an empty yacht could forgive him. And that young man had not died.  couldn't forgive myself. The young man  was would never forgive me all those lovely lost years. "If you're worried," Abnethe said, "about changing the universe or the course of history or any such nonsense, forget it. That's not how it works, Fanny Mae tells me. You change a single, isolated situation, no more. The new situation goes off about its business and everything else remains pretty much the same." "I see." "Do you agree to our bargain?" Abnethe asked. "What?" "Shall I have Fanny Mae pick her up for you?" "Why bother?" he asked. "I can't agree at all to such a thing." "You'rejoking." He turned, stared up, saw that she had a small jumpdoor open almost directly over his head. Only her eyes, nose and mouth could be seen through the opening.  "I am not joking." Part of her hand became visible as she lifted it, pointed toward the other door. "Look down there at what you're rejecting. Look, I say. Can you honestly tell me you don't want that back?" He turned. Mada had gone back to the hammock, snuggled head down against a pillow. Furuneo recalled that he had found her so when he had returned from the seadome. "You're not offering me anything," he said. "But I am. Everything I'ye told you is true!" "You're a fool," he said, "if you .can't see the difference between what Mada and I had and what you offer. I pity -- " Something fiercely compressive gripped his throat, choked off his words. Furuneo's hands groped in empty air as he was lifted. He felt his head go through jumpdoor resistance. His neck was precisely within the boundary juncture when the door was closed. His body fell back into the Beachball. Y OU fool, Mliss!" Cheo raged. "Ybu utter, complete, senseless fool. If I hadn't come back when I -- " "You killed him." she rasped, backing away from the bloody head on the floor of her sitting room. "You -- you killed him. And just when I'd almost -- " "When you'd almost ruined everything, "Cheo snarled, thrusting his scarred face close to her. "What do you humans use for brains?" "But he'd -- " "He was ready to call his helpers and tell them everything you'd blurted to him." "I won't have you talking to me . this way." "When it's my neck you're putting on the block I'll talk to you any way I want." "You made him suffer -- " "He didn't feel a thing from what I did. You're the one who made him suffer." "How can you say that?" She backed away from the Pan Spechi face with its frighteningly oversized humanoid features. "You bleat about being unable to stand suffering," he growled, "but you love it. You cause it all around you. You knew Furuneo wouldn't accept your stupid offer but you taunted him with it, with what he'd lost. You don't call that suffering?" "See here, Cheo, if you -- " "He suffered right up to the instant I put a stop to it," the Pan Spechi said. "And you know it." "Stop it!" she screamed. "I didn't! He wasn't!" "He was and you knew it -- every instant you knew it." She rushed at him, beat her fists against his chest. "You're lying! You're lying! You're lying!" He grabbed her wrists, forced IF her to her knees. She lowered her head. Tears ran down her cheeks. "Lies, lies, lies," she muttered. In a softer, more reasonable tone he said: "Mliss, hear me. We've no way of knowing how much longer the Caleban can last. Be sensible. We've a limited number of fixed periods when we can use the S'eye and we have to make the most of them. You've wasted one of those periods. We can't afford such blunders, Mliss." She kept her gaze down, refused to look at him. "You know I don't like to be severe with you, Mliss," he said, "but my way is best -- as you've said yourself many times.We've our own ego-integrity to preserve." She nodded without looking up. "Let's join the others now," he said. "Plouty has devised an amusing new game." "One thing," she said. "Yes?" "Let's save McKie. He'd be an interesting addition to -- "  "No." "What harm could it do? He might even be useful. It isn't as though he'd have his precious Bureau or anything to enforce his -- " "No. Besides, it's probably too late. I've already sent the Palenki with -- well, you understand." He released her wrists. Abenthe got to her feet, nostrils flaring. She looked up at him then, eyes peering through her lashes, her head tilted forward. Suddenly, her right foot lashed out, caught Cheo with a hard heel in the left shin... He danced back, nursed the bruise with one hand. Despite the pain, he was amused. "You see?" he said. "You do like to inflict suffering." She was all over him then, kissing him, apologizing. They never did get down to Plouty's new game. ous badges on his back. This was the' commander of the Dravian ship. Between the Dravian captain and Brand stood a low table. On the table was a pile of silvery Kendallian exchange disks, money of value on any civilized planet in the known galaxy. "You are the only survivor," the Dravian said. "The full payment is yours." (Continued from page #) "There are two other survivors down there," Brand said. "You could still pick them up." "No," the captain said, wrigglinghis body hair in a manner that seemed unusual. "As you humans say, 'It is out of my hands.' We are late and even now we will have difficulty rendezvousing with our fleet as scheduled." In all honesty. Brand told himself, he was not greatly grieved over the loss of Davidson and Wisse. He had never particularly liked either of them. "Okay," he said after a few moments, "if that's the way it is." "Good," the Dravian captain said. "The exhange disks are yours." He paused before speaking again. "You and your companions were promised transportation to Breman's Planet upon the completion of your work." "That's right," Brand replied, beginning to feel again that there was a lot going on that he did not understand. "Would you care to take out another contract?" "Now?" "Yes, immediately," the captain replied. "The Dravian peoples find themselves at war with -- another race. I will not go into details, except to say that this other race feels that we had infringed too frequently into a territory they consider, to be theirs." The captain removed a sheet of permapape from a pouch under his body. "This contract is for the duration of the war -- at three' times your previous rate of pay." Brand looked at the pile of disks on the table and things began to make sense -- like why there were marines on New Iowa and why the corvette was late and why there was a fleet of Fuzzy ships and where they were going. He-understood. The whole business on New Iowa was probably just one small part of a whole series of provocations. He decided not to think beyond this. His mind went back to the pile of exchange disks. He already had a small fortune, enough to lose himself in the ecstasy of Breman's Planet for months, maybe years. v "The war will be short," the captain was saying. "We have been preparing for it for a long time. Our enemies have not. Already our fleets are massed. Your job will consist of no more than mopping up the planet after we have destroyed its defenses. The conditions of the planet are ideal for your lifeform, by the way." A brief pause. "I guarantee you no more than six standard months and a bonus at least equal to this when we have finished." Brand looked at the pile of disks again, visualizing it doubled. What did he owe anybody? "Okay," he said. "Six monthsand then Breman's Planet." "This is guaranteed," the Dravian said but there was something in that alien voice that Brand wondered about, some strange intonation that seemed to carry -- was it disgust? Brand took the offered contract, signed it and thumbed it without reading it and handed it back. Brand lay in the luxury of Breman's Planet, surrounded by all the sensual delights men had IF ever managed to devise. A girl's hand slipped a euphoric into his mouth, then roved across his body. He sighed. With the bundle he had he could live like this for the rest of his life -- if only he could stop remembering, stop thinking. But he couldn't. The once-beautiful planet had been a shambles. Its proud people were little more than slaves to the victorious Dravians. Its economic and political and moral power was finally and forever broken. For all practical purposes it was a planet as dead as its huge moon. Brand had walked among its de"How?" asked Tokay. Garm shrugged and Serteze answered, "He got drunk out of his mind and missed the flight." The embarrassed Searcher reached for the guitar and handed the instrument to Tokay. 'Come on. Let's get out of here." years would return again and again to this point in the most disconcerting case to remain unmanaged to turn complete victory into complete defeat in a few hours remained fertile ground for the wildest speculations. The only possible trace of the culture once known as The Entertainers turned up years later in a rather ambigufeated people, a conqueror, and they, the beaten ones, had called him Judas, though he wasn't sure what that meant. Nor did he want to know. He knew too much as it was. He shuddered inside himself and hated the Dravians -- and wondered which planet was next 'on their list: Breakdown Heights, Cordoba, New California, Breman's Planet, which human world? But he knew what he hated even more than the Dravians. And he would have to live with that -- if he didn't pick up the pistol that lay a few centimeters from his hand and burn away his skull.  ( Continued from page #) ous lawsuit over the ownership of a starship's hull being used as an aging tank on Butus #. The identity of the hull could not be estab-. lished and possession was ruled as indicating ownership. When the had become one of the cheapest items in the Federation. The three . Entertainers crossed the ramp in silence until Tokay realized that their destination was "Wow!" "We can only die once and it's the fastest ship in this part of the Federation," said Serteze. As they approached the landing fins of the spacecraft Tokay sensed something familiar about Then he recognized Paddy and The Gladiator. Garm answered his thoughts. "They came in on a passenger liner while you were out planting. Almost everyone is on board. We were waiting for you." The ship was sealed as the last Entertainer boarded. The Searcher took over the controls and proudly displayed his newly gleaned knowledge. As the last man reported and was strapped in, Serteze released the clamps jind the Spaceport alarms broke loose. The emergency communications band flashed on, asking for identification. Garm answered, "Entertainers, here. Request permission to take off -- " and then, as Serteze lifted the ship starward -- "we are taking off anyway." ship on Phobus and wgs in warp before any attempt at pursuit had cleared the Port. Paddy came up from the lower deck and asked, "Where are we going?" "How about Butus #," said Garm. "They won't look for us there." Paddy raised an eyebrow. "You mean that after allof this, we'll still have to buy imported wine?" "Looks like," said Serteze. Tokay smiled at the irony of it. His fingers scrummed the guitar as he said, "What were those lyrics... oh yeh... I remember..." T HE police cruiser sat angletT into the curb, the sidewaik door ajar. Dawn was barely showing and few people were up to see the flashing red light blink its fearful message. Sister Marion had found the body and stood transfixed, tapping a dirge on a tambourine while policemen examined the corpse. The sergeant kicked the body. "Yep. Charlie Three is no longer with us." The younger patrolman who was bending over the corpse reached behind his back and touched the sergeant's leg. "Don't do that. He was a man." "Oh, sorry. Didn't know you were that touchy, kid. I'll call for the white wagon." The patrolman eased the tom and tattered suit aside and pulled away the ruffled newspapers until he found a battered piece of leather that had once been a billfold. "This is unit eleven-o-nine at the corner of Howell and Anderson Streets. We have an unknown microphone. "Not unknown," called the patrolman. "He has a name." The patrolman turned the Musician's Union Card a little more toward the light to make out the almost time-erased name. "It's Tokay Wilson." IF "A what?" loudly asked the sergeant. "T-O-K-A-Y. It's the name of a grape," answered the patrolman. He covered the timeless remains of the little figure and tried not to think about it. The heare arrived and the attendants rolled the big-wheeled cart alongside of. ( Continued from page # ) power to return in new bodies century after century and has largely been responsible for the destruction of most of man's dreams of progress. And in the background are the Patricks who seem to regard themselves as guardians against evil, though their legends indicate God had long-ago rejected them and made them exterior to the universe of reality. All this takes place in a world in the near future, one where men have supposedly reached a high point of progress. The population explosion has been checked, the arts have hit a new high and everyone seems to have been freed from misery and poverty. Unfortunately this is told to us but never shown. We get mention of places and events, but the whole world is at best a shallow stage for the story, lacking any discernible reason for us to care about it. The only two examples of what might be normal men who play any part in the story are empty pseudo-intellectuals who seem intent only on justifyCharlie Three. In flashing flurry the vehicles were gone. Sister Marion walked away, her head bowed, still pounding the empty cadence. Charlie Three was gone. His body was dead. His pain had been' set free and in freedom his essence was to be elsewhere.  ing their failure to be more, though Michael Fountain is described to us as having extraordinary capabilities. This tendency to tell us about things and then show nothing that merits what we are told is characteristic of the entire story. The menacing figures are described in copious words and symbols. The seven weavers are supposed to be figures of passion and supreme ambition. But in their conversation and their actions, they come across as comic-opera villains at best. They cause enough trouble but they manage to achieve nothing that is of any real importance to the story. Oh, they think they're doing great things, particularly to themselves. But the most they do (aside from a little wanton and good) is to communicate the power to read minds to those they are trying to control -- hardly a trick they could want. The returnees, the ones who can pass from body to body, should be solidly menacing. With the ability to take over anyone they choose and with centuries of planning, they should represent about the ultimate of power. We're told at various times that they do represent such power. But when we finally meet their chief example, he is little more than a loud-mouthed fool with certain peculiar habits, such as breathing water. He spills whatever information is wanted to the protagonist and makes threats that are even less convincing than what has been threatened before. The patricks are a bit more fancifully interesting. One keeps a kind of ape-dog ghost (who has no importance in the story). Another seems to guard a fountain that chains evil in a sort of never-world not quite identical with the real earth. Both run on at the mouth about their importance and neither seems to have any real sense of power. The second one comes on stage again briefly to cry that the evil has escaped from his fountain -- and then runs off, sniveling a bit but totally helpless. Our protagonist is Freddy Foley, described as a man with good eyes and simple brain. This works out as the literal truth. Foley -- we are told -- matures during the story and everyone comments on this -- if so, there is no evidence in his actions. Partly as a result of being touched by the brain-weaving, he gets a hunch at the very beginning of the book that Carmody is a man who has lived before. He is also not only aware of the brain-weavers but has one of them as his girl friend. This should be quite a background for a reporter -- but he fiddles gropingly with his' worries through more than half of the book. Then he finally asks for and gets an appointment with Carmody, where the returnee spills as much of the big hush-hush secret as we ever get. When Foley is locked up in an insane asylum, it seems logical enough; only a crazy fool would have put himself so easily into such a trap. The eventual struggle is singularly unconvincing. After pleading for help to escape, Foley and a few others decide to jump the fence. With no further details on how they plan this, they do so. And now, because of a note from a man whose motives Foley cannot understand, he and his band go about all-powerful returnees has enough sense to shoot him and his band during the riots that occur at this time is a matter left uncovered.) But none of it matters. Our prohis girl friend for more talk at a cafe' ending this episode. But it's all right. The brain-weavers decide to achieve their power by destroying themselves, while the returnIF ees apparently give up for some other reason. And in the end, each of the three groups somehow decides Foley is such a magnificent champion of man that they make him their leader. Of course, material such as this has a built-in-cop-out. It's labeled as humor or satire -- or both. I'm afraid I can't find that it qualifies on either ground. There aren't enough human characters here for any handling of human foibles and the conditions are generally too remote from reality to give us much chance for telling satjre. In addition, everything is cluttered up. Repeated symbols, allegory, legend, fantasy and assorted other things intrude to the point where there is no consistent tone or attack. Anyhow, it's pretty darned hard to satirize something as weak as the story of Foley and hismenaces. A bad story makes for bad humor and bad satire, as Wodehouse and Swift knew long ago. There are some lovely inconsistencies within the basic postulates. The weavers, for instance, can seize a passing girl and turn her -- both physically and mentally -- into one of their own group who has died, but their two major attempts to control minds fail when the men who are to be controlled slip out of their clutches without their knowing it. And there are added details, such as a real demon anc constant hints that man must have originated on a world with a longer day-night cycle. But, like the revolutionist who appears often in the story, all this comes to exactly nothing in the end. This simply isn't my" dish of tea. I've never found that weak catnip tea improved from an infusion of musk and cinnamon. I'd. much rather read about The Great Menace over a cup of tea with the incredible Dr. Fu Manchu. O NE of the most popular forms of fiction in our field has always been the novella -- or long novelette, as it used to be called. There are a lot of story ideas that require more space . than a short for full development, but which simply don't shape up into full novels without so much padding that the result is an unhappy one. Suclr a length, of course, is excellent for the magazines. But in the book field it presents a problem. If such a story is included in the usual anthology, it will take up so much space that there isn't room left for the number of shorter works most readers expect. And while a few novellas have been published as books, few readers will pay enough for such small books to justify the "expense of printing and distributing them. The obvious answer has occured to several publishers: Do a book of about three such novellas by different writers on a single theme. If the theme seems interesting and the writers' names are good ones. it seems certain to attract readers. Such was the idea behind the old Twayne Triplets. In at least one case, the result was outstanding. Witches Three was a huge 'book and a superb one... It had an entire original novel of witchcraft by Fletcher Pratt which may have been the finest thing he ever wrote. And the other two stories (by Fritz Leiber and James Blish) were already classics when they were included. But later works were not so successful. Most of them involved having someone construct an imaginary world and then letting three Writers do what they could with it. Sometimes one story might justify the book -- but the results, at best, were spotty. It's just not possible to hand someone else's idea to three writers and expect them to turn out their top performance on order. The latest example of this concept is Three for Tomorrow, by Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny and James Blish (Meredith Press, #). It also contains a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke, setting up the . basic idea around which the three stories center. On the whole it's a fairly good example of what I have come to feel is a rather poor structure for a book. The basic idea here (from Clarke) is that any highly technical society must offer not only possibilities for great progress but also for unforeseen disasters. (Our own polluted air and streams indicate this, not to mention what is happening to our cities.) This is a less limiting concept than most, fortunately, and the results from three fine writers are at least always .interesting. Silverberg takes what may be the most obvious danger from our future, though he has limited it to an area that can be handled, rather than trying to make it world-wide -- an excellent choice for his proposition. He asks what might happen if a chemical producing amnesia were to get into the water supply of San Francisco. The idea of drugs in the water supply isn't exactly new, but it has usually been brutally mishandled as a horror story without relieving highlights. By using amnesia rather than total madness or a horrible plague, Silverberg manages to let us follow the characters in a far better story situation. Nor does he wipe out all memories, which would be just as much a fictional disaster as any other doom. By using only an unpredictable but selective loss of memory, his characters are faced with divergent problems in coping with the aspects of the world that are wiped from their minds. As a story device, this is neatly done. However, the stories within the story are necessarily spotty, ancf the way they are woven together seems a bit hurried. A relation is indicated between the various problems and it adds to the coIF herence of the novella. But in fallowing bits and pieces, it's hard to work up any great interest in any one character. The best bit, in fact, remains that of a man who is a fanatic about bottled water and is not affected by the trouble -- a somewhat pathetic and yet rather stalwart old reactionary who must put duty above Duty. Zelazny tells a more personal story, and one with some of his feeling for characters who are somehow outside normal society and larger for the distance. In this case, the menace is the regimentation of all the population under the computers that can handle the data for every citizen from birth to death. The hero is a man who worked in setting up the program and who found a way to wipe out his record, while still having access to the computer to insert any false information about an identity for himself that he might choose. He's put into a situation where he has to serve the very Security that he has turned from, in an experiment that may either be a blessing or a curse. And the conflict between his idealism and his individual freedom takes over. Blish digs most deeply into the basic situation suggested by Clarke. As might be expected from his other stories, he brings a rich supply of ideas to indicate what kind of doom mankind can make for himself. He takes the simple facts that any organism must be choked off in its own wa;te products and the actual development of uch waste is going on now and lays outa grim and rather logical background. Many of the results are less than obvious, yet they are all tied iii neatly throughout. Paddling a canoe from Chelsea to Times Square in Manhattan is completely logical in his world, even though there has been no disaster that has made the island sink. The human figures in the story are either a bit more stock or less interesting than those in the other two novellas, but the background detail is such that there is no loss from this. All three stories show ingenuity and exhibit a good deal of the skill of the writers. Any one of the three would almost certainly be an acceptable lead novelette for an issue of a magazine. And yet none of them represents the very best work of the writers. This is probably inevitable. The best stories of any author are not easily produced on order, but are combinations of mood, luck, ideas and a host of other intangibles. But in this case the defects of the three all seem to share a somewhat common element. The stories are well thought out against the suggestion put forward by Clarke. But none is as completely developed from the angle of pure story as it should be. All seem to slough off the ending a bit more casually than it should be treated. And all really seem to lack the fullest use of character and mood. Blish's story suffers most in this respect. After preparing us for idoom in ten years, he puts us down doom. And then he compresses hrs ending into a few hours. Technologically, this is justified; artistically -- in its human elements -- it goes completely agley. This has been a story of approaching doom and the reactions to it; suddenly, the hammer of Thor hits -- and the doom, as always, precedes the rumble of its thunder. I suspect that what we have here are three stories that would have grown into three novels of far more importance if the writers had been able to afford the time andthought -- as well as space -- to function: Rau Lou had rigged the manual override for conventional drive but she couldn't manage warp drive without an intact ship intelligence. And that seemed to ' be gone -- starship cerebral death. Spider tried energizing the circuits again. He shrugged. "Nothing but primordial reflexes. Personality has died." Olga jolted the tractor beam emotionally and set .up such a keening that the 'ponies plants folded their leaves. Spider and Rau Lou steadied themselves until #make the most of them. Certainly Blish needs a decade coverage of the League of Last Days, and Zelazny has only brought his hero to the beginning of his conflict. At softcover prices, this would still be a good book; but # would probably buy far more enjoyment from the same writers if invested in their other works. After looking at a score or so of such books based upon a single theme, I can only conclude that it works much better for short stories and for reprints than for original novellas. Perhaps the idea of such a book is Workable. But if so. I'd strongly recommend to the publishers that they give the writers a much longer period to work on their stories, or relax all . limitalet the stories be self-determined.  ( Continued from page #) ga settled down. Spider had never seen such a cybernetic outburst over the death of a machine. "Rau Lou, what kind of a ship was it?" he asked as he patted the now inert brain case. "Seventy-sixth generation of the Komputerized Aerospace Resaid. "I guess I was pretty fond of him, too." Then a lot of things began to make sense to Spider. It had been the ships that had fallen at Grus -- not the humans.  IF Readers write -- and wrong! was just that in the turmoil of the great changeover I asked a good friend and colleague to handle Hue and Cry and now I seem to have some great people propping me up and others beating me about the head and shoulders -- and still others painstakingly explaining -- about the Great Debate. I want to say now -- and quickly -- that I have never debated the merits of the New Wave vs. the Old Wave, that I am normally excited by good new writing, regardless of school of origin. best stories available -- hell, I already have the best readers. So take over. Dear Editor: Congratulations .  had my doubts about the maintenance of quality in your magazines ( I tend to think oj same general magazine) when the editorship changed , but so far there have been no indications of deterioration. are the most consistent on the market In terms of quality; seldom is there a bad story , and never a bad issue in the past five years or so. This is perhaps the mainstay of your popularity; there are other magazines that will in a given month have an absolutely phenomenal issue , much better than yours , but the next month that same magazine might be a complete miss. Also , congratulations on the new printer. If the October IF is a good indication, the appearance and readabilstantially upgraded. And now a criticism or two. One of the major faults of your publications under the old management was the handling of subscriptions and mailings. Addresses were never changed when requested; if they were, it was only after repeated letters. I hope that this aspect of your operations will # improve soon. What ever happened to Philip Jose # Farmer's Riverworld series (Day of the Aug . '#)? For all its faults , I thought that this was one of the most inventive series going . It was suspenseful, exciting, unusual, "mind-expanding" and showed a deep concern for some rather pressing problems of human nature. But the story of the Riverworld was definitely not finished; as it stood approximately # pages written) Farmer looked like he could go on for another several episodes before he resolved the conflict. Can we expect any more on this theme from him, and if so, when? abandoned its policy of publishing and identifying) a new author a month. This I feel was a mistake. Proof? Look at the October Hue and Cry. Larry Niven and Perry Chapdelaine both were published under this policy. In addition, several other authors named ( McAllister , Margroff, Filer); even if they never become great names, they are good authors who contribute fine stories to the field. Sure, you say, we still publish new authors when good ones turn up. Of course you do -- any sub-classification of literature , especially a specialty like science fiction, must continually turn up new talent to survive. But it is a great encouragement to new authors to know that there is an advertised steady market for their writings. And as a result many of them will guide their stones into your hands -- give you first crack at them, so to speak. Everybody benefits thereby: you, the new writer and especially the reader. -- let's have no more general discussions over the general merits of the "New Wave" in either editorials or letter columns. If a person wants to derogate or defend a specific author on a specific story, that's fine, but letters of the type of Mr. Cover's in the October IF are a waste of time. Face it, both sides have become extremely polarized and nobody wants to listen to anyone of a different view any more. The "New Wave" has its good points -- the literary quality of the field has been upgraded, for instance -- and its bad ones -- as an example, too many "New Wave" stories are literary exercises totally devoid of real content. But these constant harangues pro and con convince no one; all they do is clutter up magazines with repetitions of opinions that everybody has been overexposed to during the last three years or so. All in all, I am impressed with the change in editorship; I expected the Galaxy magazines to somehow decrease in quality and to my surprise they did not. But there is still much room for improvement, as there was under Mr. Pohl's guidance. Very truly yours, Larry ( Lawrence W. Propp) Philip Farmer is completing a booklength new episode of his Riverworld series -- whether or not it will complete IF the series I don't think Phil himself knows. It's a long river but we'll all camp on it soon. IF Firsts are very much on the agenda. More on this at a later date. Dear Mr. Jakobs son. First of all I would like to compliment you on the way you have imbeing printed. It was nice to get my magazines with the date on the cover the correct month. But for the last week now I have seen the next issue on the newsstands and I still haven t received my copy in the mail. All the other sf magazines that I subscribe to get my copy to me a day before they go on #ale to the newsstands. This saves me a lot of worrying as to whether or not I am going to get it or miss the next installment of the current serial. I think I just finished reading the October issue of IF and it was great ! My favorite was None But I. It was the best novelette that I have read this year in your magazines . I also especially liked Survival, The. Mind Bomb and Down on the Farm. Van Vogt's story in the September I would like to know when out. After seeing the advertisements in my magazines I have been looking for it and I still haven't seen it. Where is it? Sincerely , Bill A nd resen Malibu , Cal. Why did you not complete the Riverworld series as you promised? M.W.G. Madison , NJ. been held up by printing problems, now nicely on the way to solutions. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I just finished reading your interesting editorial in October IF. But what , exactly , did it mean? Surely you didn't have to go through all that just to introduce a new printer? Aside from the puzzlement above , one thing remains clear -- that IF is on the way to its fourth Hugo. Sincerely , Saltsburg, Penna. The editorial meant simply that it was a lovely, sunny day -- and you've just proved it. Ip the course of a lifetime spent in the word game -- i.e., editing in radio, television, magazines,, books, with the necessary amount of writing both fiction and fact thrown in -- I've held and still uncomfortably hold virtually every contradictory point of view expressed in the following letter. The sharp edges of all the arguments remain and I can still hurt myself without outside help on the excellent points made by both sides in the writer-editor controversy. Scars and cooperation make one answer -- and Jack Gaughan and I are experimenting with another in the In the meantime I'm grateful for the clear reportage in the following. Gentlemen: For the benefit of the unanointed who didnt attend the St. Louis co,n vention, a panel of editors admitted to tampering ( they call it editing to fit mechanical requirements ) with many writers work. One editor virtually bragged that he had cut as much as # words from some writers material and personally written as much as # words to add to other stories. Whereupon the writers -- led by Harlan Ellison , naturally! -- went up the walls en masse and ripped the acoustic hangings to shreds in an orgy of teeth gnashing . The editors fled in panic and left the field to the writers. Who -- as writers are wont to do -- immediately fell to squabbling amongst themselves. With Harlan Ellisons dulcet tones and whiplash tongue rising several decibels above the squalling multitude -- as usual.  During this lively exchange, it occurred to me that there is a " third force" who characteristically go unrepresented in this age-old controversy -- the fans who pay for all this. Strictly speaking,  am not a nonwriting fan. I do non-fiction freelance for a hobbyand secondary income. However, I have never published fiction, much less sf. This gives me an opportunity to circulate among the fans at an sf convention and hear comments that are not filtered through the nervousdulatidhenvyhate syn- drome that most fans fall into when confronted with a writer or editor . I would say that at least # of the fans supported the writers in opposing editorial tampering . Some even regard higher prices and nearly blank pages as preferable to changing the text. A surprising number mentioned noticing inconsistencies in published work and concluded that this was the result of editorial butchery -- a questionable premise,  think. Writers have their bad days, too, which often result in bumps in the literary road. Many fans commented on the widespread practice of beating a good theme to death. Honors went by a handsome margin to the Conan books, blanks left for names and places in a pile of manuscripts xeroxed in advance. Although most fans blame the editors, it seems to me that this requires a collaboration -- neither an editor nor a writer can do it alone. Although few fans commented, I feel strongly about the closely related business of editor-writer combos ganging up on a particularly successful work. Stranger in a Strange Land has been aped until it has started to grow hair by Dune World, Bug Jack Barron and several lesser lights. All are basically fictional studies of mass movements, done from slightly different viewpoints in slightly different words . Furthermore , l suspect that all these writers used Eric H offer s The True Believer for their real-life research source. I feel strongly about another area of IF plow through a story written in San skrit by a demented chimpanzee on wet toilet paper -- if the basic theme is of interest . There is a growing feeling that established publishers are putting entirely too much emphasis on smooth transitions and winnowed widows and not enough emphasis on ideas. In a related vein , a sizable minority feel that sf editors are not publishing content of interest to readers , particularly  young readers . One fan made the point that the existence of successful "fanzines' is ample proof of failure by established firms to buy and publish what the readers want. In short, fans seem to regard writers as inexhaustible founts of wisdom who will continue for all eternity to spout bright new ideas in a sparkling technicolor stream -- and editors as fitmblefingered mechanics who can be trusted only so far as to allow them the holy privilege of converting the sacred writings into a form suitable for mass duplication. Extremism like this is, of course, pure hogwash. Nevertheless, I feel that both writers and editors could do much to improve the field. The . editors by keeping their greasy mitts off the writers' work and increasing the "turnover of writers by publishing fewer sequels by established " names' ' and more new work by unpublished writers. More important, higher rates would make it possible for good writers to take the time to search for genuinely new ideas. For the editor, I would think that the increased quality would show a profit by attracting better sales. The writers by not being so damn quick to " turn pro" thereby making themselves dependent on writing to make the payments on Baby's new mink. There is much to be said for a new pro having a part-time job to provide his basic living expenses -- freeing the writer of much of the money pressure. In this position, a writer can withhold submissionto editors who butcher his work, take the necessary time to dig out truly new ideas and allow his technique to mature naturally, instead of undergoing the forced growth that too often has the same effect on a writer that weed spray has on garden plants. One of the windup speakers made a point that the movie and TV rights to much good SF. are falling into the hands of speculators who have no intention of producing anything. Given adequate income from other sources, I have long wished that writers would hang onto their movie and TV rights uhtil interest is shown by a working producer who will waive resale rights and guarantee production. It seems to me that this would produce a three-way positive feedback, in that the producer would get his story for a better price, leaving more money to put together a better product; the writer would get more money, giving him more time to write a better source story; and the consumer -- the viewer -- would respond to the increased quality with better ratings; this in turn producing more gross income. This sort of self-feeding effect needs only a small initial push to cause a big improvement in the whole field . Eugene Austin University City, Mo. uearairs: Just a line to say how much I enjoy your magazines. I am hooked for life! But I do have a couple of questions .  How about more stories about least one Retief and how about another -- Hayden Howard story on the Esks? Also one about that planet which is one long river and if you get killed you end up someplace else alive ! Seems to me you are neglecting all the men who made you what you are. Sincerely yours, Michael Lee Boren Duluth , Minn. Riverworld will return. I have deleted one of your questions. It has no answer -- the question itself is incorrect. Dear Mr. Jakobs son: Vm waiting for you to prove yourself ; and if the Oct IF is any indication , youll do. Not a clinker in the lot ; Vm not quite sure what Malzberg and Herbert were trying to do, but they wrote well enough mihat it doesn't matter much. The most pleasant things, though, were a Laumer story without the usual blood A guts, which I find even more depressing than anti-hero stories. And Chapdelaine is coming along very nicely after the abominable (A at times silly) writing of the Spork stories. Actually, if you knocked off the pompous editorials A quit replying to letters. I'd be completely content -- e.g., you agree with Matt Hickman on the square root of minus one as Heinleiris preaicnon oj transngnt velocity , wnen it should be obvious that the square root of minus one is one of the Joggers thrown in when an author has no explanation to make. As for you vs. New Wave , I agree with Cover on your paranoia. # Take over  sf indeed! If the New Wavers ever claimed to take over, it was on one premise: that their stuff is better than Old W. A so will push it out. Egotistic, yes, but your fantasies of New Wave Storm Troopers seem a smidge overblown. Meseemeth your definition of New Wave is t# anti-hero stories," which makes it easy to shrug off non-anti-hero writers who are New Wave in experimentalism, depth of character, etc. Philip Michael Cohen Ithaca, New York Eternity -- a five-part Frank Herbert story. Mrs. Carol Nelson (A faithful Reader ) P.S. Enjoyed all the stories in the October issue -- especially Take the B Train. Some readers loved Eternity. See below. Gentlemen: The Frank Herbert serial -- a magnificent continuation of his great novel. How about some Heinlein? # A Heinlein a year keeps science fiction in gear," you know. Thank you. P.G. antelidokis Thanks -- and let's all get lucky! IF worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are die bodes of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are die books that have proven themselves...filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your r IHrlCI #I #-I # from Moldaug, inhuman stars from the last human the edge of tomorrow...who will be chosen for settlement, are gathering together for war. Old immortality? 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M an entire day, a small rural village in England loses contact with the outside world. Soon after, all the women, married or not become pregnant eventually giving birth to remarkable golden-eyed children who exhibit a strange kind of sinisterism. They are dangerous and Midwich must nake the ultimate decision -- if the children survive, then mankind must loin the dinosaur among Nature's discards. A gripping account of man's fight for survival. # pp. List Price... # Discount Price... #. # C. M. Kombluth. Two major advertising agencies are fighting for the Venus account -- nothing less than total control of the Venus economy and markets will do. It is completely unimportant that Venus is a harsh, barren, uninhabited planet. According to the mentality of Mitchell Courtenay of Fowler Schocken Associates, the trick is to persuade colonists to go to Venus, and once there, they will have to survive as best they can. 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(Please add # for postage and handling. N.Y.C. residents please add # sales tax. N.Y. State residents please add # sales tax.) The best fiction is science fiction; and the best Leader in the science-fiction field for almost two decades! Presenting the finest writers: Asimov, Pohl, del Rey, Leiber, Anderson, Herbert Vance, Simak, Dickson, Blish, Silverberg, Ellison, Knight, Harrison, Aldiss, Niven, Clement. Popular monthly columns: For Your Information -- Willy Ley, Galaxy Bookshelf -- Algis Budrys. Three-time winner of the coveted Hugo, science-fiction's Oscar; voted the best sf magazine in the world. IF's regular authors include: Keith "Retief" Laumer, Andre Norton, C. C. MacApp, Mack Reynolds, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Philip Jose Farmer. Features: The Reading Room , controversial book reviews by Lester del Rey. Hue and Cry where the readers praise or blast the editors, writers and artists -- and where the editors, writers and artists blast back. 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Presenting the finest writers: Asimov, Pohl, del Rey, Leiber, Anderson, Herbert Vance, Simak, Dickson, Blish, Silverberg, Ellison, Knight, Harrison, Aldiss, Niven, Clement. Popular monthly columns: Galaxy Bookshelf -- Algis Budrys. Three-time winner of the coveted Hugo, science-fiction's Oscar; voted the best sf magazine in the world. IF's regular authors include: Keith "Retief" Laumer, Andre Norton, C. C. MacApp, Mack Reynolds, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Philip Jose Farmer. Features: The Reading Room, controversial book reviews by Lester del Rey. Hue and Cry where the readers praise or blast the editors, writers and artists -- and where the editors, writers and artists blast back. na March, # Vol. #, No. # Issua # Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Frederik Pohl, Editor Emeritus Judy-Lynn Benjamin , Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy , Circulation Director Franc L. Roggeri, Art Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director IF is published monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N Y. # #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # # in the United States, elsewhere J# Second class postage paid at New York, N Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright c # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental Title registered U S. Patent Office. Printed in U S A. The Company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. Readers write -- and wrong! most gratifying piece of mail goes to the following: Dear Sir: For the editorial in your issue of November, # (Galaxy), three cheers . With my respects. Very truly yours, Stanley Katz Professor School of Engineering and Architecture City College, N. Y. The response to the November Galaxy and December If editorials ( Brain Pollution and Skintelligence, respectively and dealing with the undemonstrated correlation between skin color and intelligence) has been beautiful, pro and con, and suggests that people as a species might yet make it. Among the most edifying is the next: Dear Mr. Jakobsson: It is interesting to note how Campbell absolutely refuses to accept statistical evidence connecting smoking with cancer and heart disease, and yet uses it without qualms in the area of IQ which is a very ill-defined concept at best. The definition of IQ as that which IQ tests measure is about as useful as any, although in college Prof. Russel Ackoff (then Director of Operations Research at Case) defined it as the second partial derivative of knowledge with respect to changes in environment and time. That sounds impressive, but just try to use it. I suspect that if you compared the average IQ's of any two groups, you would find a difference; and probably could decide in advance which group you wanted to score best badly biased. Individual variations within each group would be far greater than the difference between the groups. Actually, variations within a single person can be quite large. All of us have fields of knowledge which we absorb very readily, and others which we can't get into our thick heads no matter how hard we try. Since IQ is supposed to be a measure of how easily we learn, a test can be very easily biased. I, personally, have been tested with (Please turn to page # ) to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of your favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us -- and that's a double tragedy. It doesn't take a genius to handle it, either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #I .# Name Zip Code... outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Address... , City  State She was unfaithful unto death -- but not her own! moon Ted Trymble came home from golf and found his wife had been unfaithful to him. The evidence was there -- right outside his front door -- for all the world to see. "Why did you do it, Maggie?" he demanded, setting his clubs down in a corner with exaggerated care. He kept his face immobile and his voice crisp, pretending to be not unduly shocked, though inwardly he was praying to hear it was all a mistake. But Maggie smiled her calm, careless smile and shrugged. "It was just an impulse," she said. "An irresistible impulse." Ted went to the window and eyed the evidence. The black Turbo-Cadillac was almost as long as the house and its haunches gleamed in the late afternoon sun like those of a panther about to spring. So she was admitting it, just like that. "Maggie," he said reasonably. "Everybody gets that kind of impulse now and then. One simply has to learn to control it." "I can't," she replied blandly. "When I find something I like -- I buy it." "I see." Ted strode into the kitchen, took a beer bulb from the refrigerator and squirted some of the frothy liquid into his mouth. He sat down in the cool seclusion of the dining alcove to consider the matter of his wife's dereliction. Maggie's parents had left her an -- Ted knew the sum to a penny but preferred to think in round numbers -- the income from which was just enough to maintain Ted and her in modest comfort for the rest of their lives. When they became engaged the agreement was that the capital would be kept intact. Ted was a personable young man and knew he could probably have married real money but he had exchanged his boyish hopes of some day owning a private airplane and yacht for the certitude of never having to work. And he had been prepared to stick to the bargain because marriage was, in his opinion, still a sacred covenant. The trouble was that Maggie appeared not to share his high sense of principle. She had just blown a noticeable fraction of their livelihood in one afternoon. A pang of anguish caused Ted's fingers to clamp inward on the plastic bulb and a wavering stream of beer leaped across the kitchen. He composed himself with an effort and went back into the lounge. "I forgive you this time, Maggie," he said stiffly. "I guess it won't do any harm for me to be seen in a better car but you must promise not to betray our wedding vows again." "Of course, honey." IF Maggie spoke with a lack of effort Ted found disturbing and she went on flicking the glowing pages of a tri-di magazine. Two days later he came home from a morning's workout in the gymnasium to find that his fears had been well founded. Maggie was sporting a bracelet of genuine green-veined Venusian gold costing roughly ten times as much as its counterpart in Earth gold would have. "I promised not to buy another car," was her defense. "This isn't another car, is it? It doesn't look much like a car to me." She flirted her wrist in his face and the bracelet's chunky links clicked like the action of a welloiled rifle. "It isn't a car," Ted agreed, "but it's something we can afford even less. What about our investments?" "This is an investment. Isn't gold an investment?" "Not that kind. Don't you ever read the financial pages? Don't you know that big nuclear powered ships have just been proved out on the Venus and Mars hauls? The cost of Venusian gold at the moment is ninety per cent freight charge but by this time next year it'll be as common as dirt." Maggie sniffed disbelievingly. "Well, I was bored sitting here by myself. Other girls' husbands stay at home with them." "Bored?" Ted was aghast. "You absolutely seem to forget that when those other guys are swanning round the house watching television and getting fat -- I'm working hard to build up health. That's a marriage partner's most important duty -- to keep himself healthy." "Oh, Jesus," Maggie whispered. "What have I done?" Three days later, while Ted was surfing, she bought a luminous mink costing as much as the car and the bracelet put together. Ted examined the price tag, then went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb in each hand and expended them in a foaming orgasm of fury. When calmness returned he went back to the lounge and greeted his wife with a numb smile. "It has just occurred to me that I've been neglecting you a little, Maggie. Let's go out tonight and see what we can do about hitting the town." Maggie's eyes flickered with enthusiasm. She hurried away to engage in lengthy cosmetic rituals and that night she really did hit the town. When she was too full of assorted liquors to be aware of what was happening, Ted pushed her out through the window of their thirdfloor bedroom. T HE fall did not kill Maggie but the damage to her lower spine was such that she was confined to a wheelchair for life. As the Trymbles' house was tall and narrow -- with a steep flight of steps at the door -- Ted felt that his wife was as good as dead. She could not, at any rate, get to the expensive stores, where she would be tempted to further acts of infidelity. With a minimum of prompting from him she sold the car and the coat at a relatively small loss but insisted on retaining the bracelet of green-veined Venusian gold. "What's the point of keeping it?" he pleaded. "I mean, you don't even go out now." "It's company for me. Something I can look at." "But there must be more interesting things to look at -- how about a television set?" To Ted's surprise, his wife showed interest in the suggestion. "If I sell the bracelet will you get me a set?" "Of course, sweetie." "Any kind of a television set?" He sensed the trap immediately but in his mind's eye he could see the big nuclear-powered ships speeding toward Earth with cargoes of cheaper Venusian gold and he decided play along. "Any kind of set you want, Maggie. You know how bad I feel about you being tied to that chair all the time." "That's nice of you, honey. I'd like a Telemart Three." Ted swallowed unhappily. He detested television as an opiate which sapped a man's strength of body and mind -- he even had an aversion to reading about technical developments in the field. But he knew about the Telemart Three. The set was ordered that day and Ted's uphappiness increased as he watched the technicians position the eight-foot proscenium and arch at one end of the lounge. Working with blunt efficiency they ripped out the floor below the proscenium and ran a mass of cables, conduits and wave guides down to the raw materials tank they were installing in the basement. Four hours later the job was completed and a Telemart sales exec formally presented Maggie with a white-and-gold brochure. He then placed the remote control set in her hand with the air of an English archbishop conferring the orb and sceptre of his sovereign. "This is your on-off switch and channel selector," he said, addressing himself intensely to Maggie and ignoring Ted. He moved the switch and a pretty girl in a silver dress appeared on the proscenium, singing in the low voice of a French diseuse. The only way in which she could be distinguished from real flesh-and-blood was a slight tendency to glow, which made her brighter than the other people in the room. "Oops," the sales exec said. "If the image is too bright you do this." He moved a knob and the girl dimmed to normalcy. "It's wonderful," Maggie IF breathed. "When do we get the commercials?" "You shouldn't have long to wait," the exec said benignly, his eyes gleaming behind old-fashioned homrims. A few seconds later the silver girl finished her song and vanished, to be replaced by a handsome, tanned man in beachwear. He reclined on a sun chair on a shockingly real area of honey-colored sand and in his hand was a dewy-cold bottle of Tingle-lime. Ted started involuntarily -- he could actually smell sea air mingled with the keen tang of the soft drink. He examined the small orifices in the edge of the proscenium, looking for visible signs of gas being emitted. He saw nothing. "... why don't you join me?" the image was saying. "Join me now." "Shall I?" Maggie asked excitedly. "Only if you can use some Tingle-lime." the exec replied. "We urge all our clients to buy only what they really need." "We drink lots of Tinglelime." "No, we don't Ted put in. He was too late. Maggie had pressed the "accept" button on her handset and a crate of a dozen king-size Tingle-limes appeared, amid a faint ozonic crackling, on the small catwalk attached to the front of the proscenium. The exec lifted the crate, carried it to Maggie's chair and with a flourish opened one of the plastic bottles. Maggie took it and sipped the green liquid eagerly. "It's perfect -- even better than the stuff we get at the store." "It ought to be. Anything you buy in a store is bound to have been on the shelves for some time, possibly months, but goods you buy through Telemart Three are created specially for you on the instant of purchase." "How can that be?" Ted felt he had been silent too long. "As I understand it, there has to be a crate of Tingle-limes at the broadcasting station. It gets scanned with Roentgen rays and the details of its molecular structure are V broadcast on a separate channel from the one which carries the programs and commercials. Right?" "That's true, but -- " "If someone presses the 'accept' button, the molecular blueprint coming through al that time is used to build up a replica of the transmitted object from the raw materials bank in the basement. Right?" "Right again, but -- " "So how do we know the original crate of pop hasn't been lying on a shelf at the station, possibly for months?" "You know because the Telemart Corporation stands on its word as given in this brochure," the exec said in a hurt voice. He ( Please turn to page #) He was judged and damned to hell -- and hell was Earth I had been climbed by homing  wildcats to reach the den gouged knew what the hills had seen cliff's sheer face. He lived alone on through geologic time. He listened a worn-out farm perched on a high to the stars and spelled out what and narrow ridge that overlooked the stars were saying. He had the confluence of two rivers. And found the creature that lay imhis next-door neighbor, a most illprisoned in the stone. He had favored man, drove to the county climbed the tree that in other days seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief. T HE sheriff dropped by within a week or so and walked across the yard to where the man was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch that faced the river hills. The sheriff came to a halt at the foot of the stairs that ran up to the porch. "I'm Sheriff Harley Shepherd," he said. "I was just driving by. Been some years since I been out in this neck of the woods. You are new here, aren't you?" The man rose to his feet and gestured at another chair. "Been here three years or so," he said. "The name is Wallace Daniels. Come up and sit with me." The sheriff climbed the. stairs and the two shook hands, then sat down in the chairs. "You don't farm the place," the sheriff said. The weed-grown fields came up to the fence that hemmed in the yard. Daniels shook his head. "Subsistence farming, if you can call it that. A few chickens for eggs. A couple of cows for milk and butter. Some hogs for meat -- the neighbors help me butcher. A garden, of course, but that's about the story." "Just as well," the sheriff said. "The place is all played out. Old He never was no farmer." "The land is resting now," said Daniels. "Give it ten years -- twenty might be better -- and it will ready once again. The only things it's good for now are the rabbits and the woodchucks and the meadow mice. A lot of birds, of course. I've got the finest covey of quail a man has ever seen." "Used to be good squirrel country," said the sheriff. "Coon, too. I suppose you still have coon. You a hunter, Mr. Daniels?" "I don't own a gun," said Daniels. The sheriff settled deeply into the chair, rocking gently. "Pretty country out here," he declared. "Especially with the leaves turning colors. A lot of hardwood and they are colorful. Rough as all hell, of course, this land of yours. Straight up and down, the most of it. But pretty." "It's old country," Daniels said. "The last sea retreated from this area more than four hundred million years ago. It has stood as dry land since the end of the Silurian. Unless you go up north, onto the Canadian Shield, there aren't many places in this country you can find as old as this." "You a geologist, Mr. Daniels?" "Not really. Interested, is all. The rankest amateur. I need something to fill in my time and I do a lot of hiking, scrambling up and down these hills. And you can't do that without coming face to face with a lot of geology. I got interested. Found some fossil brachioIF pods and got to wondering about them. Sent off for some books and read up on them. One thing led to another and -- " "Brachiopods? Would they be dinosaurs, or what? I never knew there were dinosaurs out this way." "Not dinosaurs," said Daniels. "Earlier than dinosaurs, at least the ones I found. They're small. Something like clams or oysters. But the shells are hinged in a different sort of way. These were old But we still have a few brachiopods living now. Not too many of them." "It must be interesting." "I find it so," said Daniels. ams?" "No. He was dead before I came here. Bought the land from the bank that was settling his estate." said. "Fought with all his neighbors. Especially with Ben Adams. Him and Ben had a line fence feud going on for years. Ben said Amos refused to keep up the fence. Amos claimed Ben knocked it down and then sort of, carelesslike, hazed his cattle over into Amos's hayfield. How you get along with Ben?" "All right," Daniels said. "No trouble. I scarcely know the man." "Ben don't do much farming, either," said the sheriff. "Hunts and fishes, hunts ginseng, does some trapping in the winter. Prospects for minerals now and then." "There are minerals in these hills," said Daniels. "Lead and zinc. But it would cost more to get it out than it would be worth. At present prices, that is." "Ben always has some scheme cooking," said the sheriff. "Always off on some wild goose chase. And he's a pure pugnacious man. Always has his nose out of joint about something. Always on the prod for trouble. Bad man to have for an enemy. Was in the other day to say someone's been lifting a hen or two of his. You haven't been missing any, have you?" Daniels grinned. "There's a fox that levies a sort of tribute on the coop every now and then. I don't begrudge them to him." "Funny thing," the sheriff said. "There ain't nothing can rile up a farmer like a little chicken stealing. It don't amount to shucks, of course, but they get real hostile at it." "If Ben has been losing chickens," Daniels said, "more than likely the culprit is my fox." "Your fox? You talk as if you own him." "Of course I don't. No one owns a fox. But he lives in these hills with me. I figure we are neighbors. I see him every now and then and watch him. Maybe that means I own a piece of him. Although I wouldn't be surprised if he watches me more than I watch him. He moves quicker than I do." The sheriff heaved himself out of the chair. "I hate to go," he said. "I declare it has been restful sitting here and talking with you and looking at the hills. You look at them a lot, I take it." "Quite a lot," said Daniels. i watched the sheriffs car top the rise far down the ridge and disappear from sight. What had it all been about? He wondered. The sheriff hadn't just happened to be passing by. He'd been on an errand. All his aimless, friendly talk had not been for nothing and in the course of it he'd managed to ask lots of questions. Something about Ben Adams, maybe? Except there wasn't too much against Adams except he was bone-lazy. Lazy in a weasely sort of way. Maybe the sheriff had gotten wind of Adam's off-and-on moonshining operation and was out to do some checking, hoping that some neighbor might misspeak himself. None of them would, of course, for it was none of their business, really, and the moonshining had built up no nuisance value. What little liquor Ben might make didn't amount to much. He was too lazy for anything he did to amount to much. From far down the hill he heard the tinkle of a bell. The two cows were finally heading home. It must be much later, Daniels told himself, than he had thought. Not that he paid much attention to what time it was. He hadn't for long months on end, ever since he'd smashed his watch when he'd fallen off the ledge. He had never bothered to have the watch fixed. He didn't need a watch. There was a battered old alarm clock in the kitchen but it was an erratic piece of mechanism and not to be relied upon. He paid slight attention to it. In a little while, he thought, he'd have to rouse himself and go and do the chores -- milk the cows, feed the hogs and chickens, gather up the eggs. Since the garden had been laid by there hadn't been much to do. One of these days he'd have to bring in the squashes and store them in the cellar and there were those three or four big pumpkins he'd have to lug down the hollow to the Perkins kids, so they'd have them in time to make jack-o-lanterns for Hallowe'en. He wondered if he should carve out the faces himself or if the kids would rather do it on their own. But the cows were still quite a distance away and he still had time. He sat easy in his chair and stared across the hills. And they began to shift and change as he stared. When he had first seen it, the phenomenon had scared him silly. But now he was used to it. As he watched, the hills changed IF into different ones. Different vegetation and strange life stirred on them. A herd of them, not very big ones. Middle Triassic, more than likely. And this time it was only a distant view -- he, himself, was not to become involved. He would only see, from a distance, what ancient time was like and would not be thrust into the middle of it as most often was the case. He was glad. There Were chores to do. Watching, he wondered once again what more he could do. It was not the dinosaurs that concerned him, or the earlier amphibians, or all the other creatures that moved in time about the hills. What disturbed him was that other being that lay buried deep beneath the Platteville limestone. Someone else should know about it. The knowledge of it should be kept alive so that in the days to come -- perhaps in another hundred years -- when man's technology had reached the point where it was possible to cope with such a problem, something could be done to contact -- and perhaps to free -- , the dweller in the stone. There would be a record, of course, a written record. He would see to that. Already that record was in progress -- a week by week . (at times a day to day) account of what he had seen, heard and learned...Three large record books now were filled with his careful writing and another one was well started. All written down as honestly and as carefully and as objectively as he could bring himself to do it. But who would believe what he had written? More to the point, who would bother to look at it? More than likely the books would gather dust on some hidden shelf until the end of time with no human hand ever laid upon them. And even if someone, in some future time, should take them down and read them, first blowing away the accumulated dust, would he or she be likely to believe? The answer lay clear. He must convince someone. Words written by a man long dead -- and by a man of no reputation -- could be easily dismissed as the product of a neurotic mind. But if some scientist of solid reputation could be made to listen, could be made to endorse the record, the events that paraded across these hills and lay within them could stand on solid ground, worthy of full investigation at some future date. A biologist? Or a neuropsychiatrist. Or a paleontologist? Perhaps it didn't matter what branch of science the man was in. Just so he'd listen without laughter. It was most important that he listen without laughter. Sitting on the porch, staring at the hills dotted with grazing dinosaurs, the listener to the stars remembered the time he had gone to see the palaeontologist. B EN," the sheriff said, "you're way out in left field. That Daniels fellow wouldn't steal no chickens. He's got chickens of his own." "The question is," said Adams, "how did he get them chickens?" "That makes no sense," the sheriff said. "He's a gentleman. You can tell that just by talking with him. An educated gentleman." "If he's a gentleman," asked Adams, "what's he doing out here? This ain't no place for gentlemen. He showed up two or three years ago and moved out to this place. Since that day he hasn't done a tap of work. All he does is wander up and down the hills." "He's a geologist," said the sheriff. "Or anyway interested in geology. A sort of hobby with him. He tells me he looks for fossils." Adams assumed the alert look of a dog that has sighted a rabbit. "So that is it," he said. "I bet you it ain't fossils he is looking for." "No," the sheriff said. "He's looking for minerals," said Adams. "He's prospecting, that's what he's doing. These hills crawl with minerals. All you have to do is know where to look." i "You've spent a lot of time looking," observed the sheriff. "I ain't no geologist. A geologist would have a big advantage. He would know rocks and such." "He didn't talk as if he were doing any prospecting. Just interested in the geology, is all. He found some fossil clams." "He might be looking for treasure caves," said Adams. "He might have a map or something." "You know damn well," the sheriff said, "there are no treasure caves." "There must be," Adams insisted. "The French and Spanish were here in the early days. They were great ones for treasure, the French and Spanish. Always running after mines. Always hiding things in caves. There was that cave over across the river where they found a skeleton in Spanish armor and the skeleton of a bear beside him, with a rusty sword stuck into where the bear's gizzard was." "That was just a story," said the sheriff, disgusted. "Some damn fool started it and there was nothing to it. Some people from the university came out and tried to run it down. It developed that there wasn't a word of truth in it.' "But Daniels has been messing around with caves," said Adams. "I've seen him. He spends a lot of time in that cave down on Cat Den Point. Got to climb a tree to get to it." " Y ou been watching him?" "Sure I been watching him. He's up to something and I want to know what it is." IF "Just be sure he doesn't catch you doing it," the sheriff said. pass. "Well, anyhow," he said, "if there aren't any treasure caves, there's a lot of lead and zinc. The man who finds it is about to "Not unless he can find the capital to back him," the sheriff pointed out. Adams dug at the ground with his heel. "You think he's all right, do you?" "He tells me he's been losing some chickens to a fox. More than likely that's what has been happening to yours." "If a fox is taking his chickens," Adams asked, "why don't he shoot it?" "He isn't sore about it. He seems to think the fox has got a right to. He hasn't even got a gun." "Well, if he hasn't got a gun and doesn't care to hunt himself -- then why won't he let other people hunt? He won't let me and my boys on his place with a gun. He has his place all posted. That seems to me to be unneighborly. That's one of the things that makes it so hard to get along with him. We've always hunted on that place. Old Amos wasn't an easy man to get along with but he never cared if we did some hunting. We've always hunted all around here. No one ever minded. Seems to me hunting should be free. Seems right for a man to hunt wherever he's a mind to " Sitting on the bench on the hardpacked earth in front of the ramshackle house, the sheriff looked about him -- at the listlessly scratching chickens, at the scrawny hound sleeping in the shade, its hide twitching against the few remaining flies, at the clothesline strung between two trees and loaded with drying clothes and dish towels, at the washtub balanced on its edge on a wash bench leaning against the side of the house. Christ, he thought, the man should be able to find the time to  put up a decent clothesline and not just string a rope between two trees. "Ben," he said, "you're just trying to stir up trouble. You resent Daniels, a man living on a farm who doesn't work at farming and you're sore because he won't let you hunt his land. He's got a right to live anywhere he wants to and he's got a right not to let you hunt. I'd lay off him if I were you. You don't have to like him, you don't have to have anything to do with him -- but don't go around spreading fake accusations against the man. He could jerk you up in court for that." II eontologist's office and it had taken him a moment finally to see the man seated toward the back of the room at a cluttered desk. The entire place was cluttered. There were long tables covered with chunks of rock with embedded fossils. Scattered here and there were stacks of papers. The room was large and badly lighted. It was a dingy and depressing place. "Doctor?" Daniels had asked. "Are you Dr. Thorne?" The man rose and deposited a pipe in a cluttered ash tray. He was big, burly, with graying hair that had a wild look to it. His face was seamed and weather-beaten. When he moved he shuffled like a bear. "You must be Daniels," he said. "Yes, I see you must be. I had you on my calendar for three o'clock. So glad you could come." His great paw engulfed Daniel's hand. He pointed to a chair beside the desk, sat down and retrieved his pipe from the overflowing tray, began packing it from a large canister that stood on the desk. "Your letter said you wanted to see me about something important," he said. "But then that's what they all say. But there must have been something about your letter -- an urgency, a sincerity. I haven't the time, you understand, to see everyone who writes. All of them have found something, you see. What is it, Mr. Daniels, that you have found?" Daniels said, "Doctor, I don't quite know how to start what I have to say. Perhaps it would be best to tell you first that something had happened to my brain." Thorne was lighting his pipe. He talked around the stem. "In such a case, perhaps I am not the man you should be talking to. There are other people -- " "No, that's not what I mean," said Daniels. "I'm not seeking help. I am quite all right physically and mentally, too. About five years ago I was in a highway accident. My wife and daughter were killed and I was badly hurt and -- " "I am sorry, Mr. Daniels." "Thank you -- but that is all in .the past. It was rough for a time but I muddled through it. That's not what I'm here for. I told you I was badly hurt -- " "Brain damage?" "Only minor. Or so far as the medical findings are concerned. Very minor damage that seemed to clear up rather soon. The bad part was the crushed chest and punctured lung." "But you're all right now?" "As good as new," said Daniels. "But since the accident my brain's been different. As if I had new senses. I see things, understand things that seem impossible." "You mean you have hallucinations?" "Not hallucinations. I am sure of that. I can see the past." "How do you mean -- see the past?" "Let me try to tell you," Daniels IF said, "exactly how it started. Several years ago I bought an abandoned farm in southwestern Wisconsin. A place to hole up in, a place to hide away. With my wife and daughter gone I still was recoiling from the world. I had gotten through the first brutal shock but I needed a place where I could lick my wounds. If this sounds like self-pity -- I don't mean it that way. I am trying to be objective about why I acted as I did, why I bought the farm." "Yes, I understand," said Thorne. "But I'm not entirely sure hiding was the wisest thing to do." "Perhaps not, but it seemed to me the answer. It has worked out rather well. I fell in love with the country. That part of Wisconsin is ancient land. It had stood uncovered by the sea for four hundred was not overridden by the Pleistocene glaciers. It has changed, of course, but only as the result of weathering. There have been no great geologic upheavals, no massive erosions -- nothing to disturb it." "Mr. Daniels," said Thorne, somewhat testily, "I don't quite see what all this has to do -- " "I'm sorry. I am just trying to lay the background for what I came to tell you. It came on rather slowly at first and I thought that I was crazy, that I was seeing things, that there had been more brain damage than had been apparent -- or that I was finally cracking up. I did a lot of walking in the hills, you see. The country is wild and rugged and beautiful -- a good place to be out in. The walking made me tired and I could sleep at night. But at times the hills changed. Only a little at first. Later on they changed more and finally they became places I had never seen before, that no one had ever seen before." Thorne scowled. "You are trying to tell me they changed into the past." vegetation, funny-looking trees. In the earlier times, of course, no grass at all. Underbrush of ferns and scouring rushes. Strange animals, strange things in the sky. Sabretooth cats and mastodons, pterosaurs and uintatheres and -- " "All at the same time?" Thorne asked, interrupting. "All mixed up?" "Not at all. The time periods I see seem to be true time periods. Nothing out of place. I didn't know at first -- but when I was able to convince myself that I was not hallucinating I sent away for books. I studied. I'll never be an expert, of course -- never a geologist or paleontologist -- but I learned enough to distinguish one period from another, to have some idea of what I was looking at." Thorne took his pipe out of his mouth and perched it in the ash tray. He ran a massive hand through his wild hair. It's unbelievable' he said. "It simply couldn't happen. You said all this business came on rather slowly?" "To begin with it was hazy, the past foggily imposed upon the present, then the present would slowly fade and the past came in, real and solid. But it's different now. Once in a while there's a bit of flickering as the present gives way to past -- but mostly it simply changes, as if at the snap of a finger. The present goes away and I'm standing in the past. The past is all around me. Nothing of the present is left." "But you aren't really in the past? Physically, I mean." "There are times when I'm not in it at all. I stand in the present and the distant hills or the river valley changes. But ordinarily it changes all around me, although the funny thing about it is that, as you say, I'm not really in it. I can see it and it seems real enough for me to walk around in it. I can walk over to a tree and put my hand out to feel it and the tree is there. But I seem to make no impact on the past. It's as if I were not there at all. The animals do not see me. I've walked up to within a few feet of dinosaurs. They can't see me or hear or smell me. If they had I'd have been dead a dozen times. It's as if I were walking through a three-dimensional movie. At first I worried a lot about the surface differences that might exist. I'd wake up dreaming of going into the past and being buried up to my waist in a rise of ground that since has eroded away. But it doesn't work that way. I'm walking along in the present and then I'm walking in the past. It's as if a door were there and I stepped through it. I told you I don't really seem to be in the past -- but I'm not in the present, either. I tried to get some proof. I took a camera with me and shot a lot of pictures. When the films were developed there was nothing on them. Not the past -- but what is more important, not the present, either. If I had been hallucinating, the camera should have caught pictures of the present. But apparently there was nothing there for the camera to take. I thought maybe the camera failed or I had the wrong kind of film. So I tried several cameras and different types of film and nothing happened. I got no pictures. I tried bringing something back. I picked flowers, after there were flowers. I had no trouble picking them but when I came back to the present I was empty-handed. I tried to bring back other things as well. I thought maybe it was only live things, like flowers, that I couldn't bring, so I tried inorganic things -- like rocks -- but I never was able to bring anything back." "How about a sketch pad?" IF "I thought of that but I never used one. I'm no good at sketching -- besides, l figured, what was the use. The pad would come back blank." "But you never tried." "No," said Daniels. "I never tried. Occassionally I do make sketches after I get back to the present. Not every time but sometimes. From memory. But, as I said, I'm not very good at sketching. "I don't know," said Thorne. "I don't really know. This all sounds incredible. But if there should be something to it -- Tell me, were you ever frightened? You seem quite calm and matter-of-fact about it now. But at first you must have been frightened." "At first," said Daniels, "I was petrified. Not only was I scared, physically scared -- frightened for my safety, frightened that I'd fallen into a place from which I never could escape -- but also afraid that I'd gone insane. And there was the loneliness." "What do you mean -- loneliness? "Maybe that's not the right word. Out of place. I was where I had no right to be. Lost in a place where man had not as yet appeared of years. In a word so utterly alien that I wanted to hunker down and shiver. But I, not the place, was really the alien there. I still get some of that feeling every now and then. I know about it, of course, and am braced against it but at times it still gets to me. I'm a stranger to the air and the light of that other time -- it's all imagination, of course." "Not necessarily," said Thorne. "But the greatest fear is' gone now, entirely gone. The fear I was insane. I am convinced now." "How are you convinced? How could a man be convinced?" "The animals. The creatures I see -- " "You mean you recognize them from the illustrations in those books you have been reading." "No, not that. Not entirely that. Of course the pictures helped. But actually it's the other way around. Not the likenesses, but the differences. You see, none of the creatures are exactly like the pictures in the books. Some of them not at all like them. Not like the reconstructions the paleontologists put together. If they had been I might still have thought they were hallucinations, that what I was seeing was influenced by what I'd seen or read. I could have been feeding my imagination on prior knowledge. But since that was not the case, it seemed logical to assume that what I see is real. How could I imagine that Tyrannosaurus had dewlaps all the colors of the rainbow. How could l imagine that some of the sabertooths had tassels on their ears? How could anyone possibly imagine that the big thunder beasts of the Eocene had hides as colorful as giraffes?" "Mr. Daniels," said Thorne, "I have great reservations about all that you have told me. Every fiber of my training rebels against it. I have a feeling that I should waste no time on it. Undoubtedly, you believe what you have told me. You have the look of an honest man about you. Have you talked to any other men about this? Any other paleontologists or geologists? Perhaps a neuropsychiatrist?" "No," said Daniels. "You're the only person, the only man I have talked with. And I haven't told you all of it. This is really all just background." "My God, man -- just background?" "Yes, just background. You see, I also listen to the stars." Thorne got up from his chair, began shuffling together a stack of papers. He retrieved the dead pipe from the ash tray and stuck it in his mouth. His voice, when he spoke, was noncommittal. "Thank you for coming in," he said. "It's been most interesting." Ill A ND that was where he had made his mistake, Daniels told himself. He never should have mentioned listening to the stars. His interview had gone well until he had. Thorne had not believed him, of course, but he had been intrigued, would have listened further, might even have pursued the matter, although undoubtedly secretly and very cautiously. At fault, Daniels knew, had been his obsession with the creature in the stone. The past was nothing -- it was the creature in the stone that was important and to tell of it, to explain it and how he knew that it was there, he must tell about his listening to the stars. He should have known better, he told himself. He should have held his tongue. But here had been a man who, while doubting, still laughter and, in his thankfulness Daniels had spoken too much. The wick of the oil lamp set upon the kitchen table guttered in the air currents that came in around the edges of the ill-fitting windows. A wind had risen after chores were done and now shook the house with galelike blasts. On the far side of the room the fire in the wood-burning stove threw friendly, wavering flares of light across the floor and the stovepipe, in response to the wind that swept the chimney top, made gurgling, sucking sounds. Thorne had mentioned a neuropsychiatrist, Daniels remembered, and perhaps that was the kind of man he should have gone to see. Perhaps, before he attempted to interest anyone in what he could IF see or hear, he should make an effort to find out why and how he could hear and see these things. A man who studied the workings of the brain and mind might come up with new answers -- if answers were to be had. Had that blow upon his head so rearranged, so shifted some process in his brain that he had gained new capabilities? Was it possible that his brain had been so jarred, so disarranged as to bring into play certain latent talents that possibly, in millennia to come, might have developed naturally by evolutionary means? Had the brain damage short-circuited evolution and given him -- and him alone -- these capabilities, these senses, time? It seemed -- well, not reasonable but one possible explanation. Still, A trained man night have some other explanation. He pushed his chair back from the table and walked over to the stove. He used the lifter to raise the lid of the rickety old cook stove. The wood in the firebox had burned down to embers. Stooping, he picked up a stick of wood from the woodbox and fitted it in, added another smaller one and replaced the lid. One of these days soon, he told himself, he would have to get the furnace in shape for operation. He went out to stand on the porch, looking toward the river hills. The wind whooped out of the north, whistling around the corners of the building and booming in the deep hollows that ran down to the river but the sky was clear -- steely clear, wiped fresh by the wind and sprinkled with stars, their light shivering in the raging atmosphere. Looking up at the stars, he wondered what they might be saying but he didn't try to listen. It took a lot of effort and concentration to listen to the stars. He had first listened to them on a night like this, standing out here on the porch and wondering what they might be saying, wondering if the stars did talk among fhemselves. A foolish, vagrant thought, a wild, daydreaming sort of notion but, voicing it, he had tried to listen, knowing even as he did that it was foolishness but glorying in his foolishness, telling himself how fortunate he was that he could afford to be so inane as to try to listen to the stars -- as a child might believe in Santa Claus or the Easter rabbit. He'd listened and he'd heard and while he'd been astonished, there could be no doubt about it, no doubt at all that out there somewhere other beings were talking back and forth. He might have been listening in on a party line, he thought, but a party line that of long-distance conversations. Not words, of course, but something (thought, perhaps) that was as plain as words. Not all of it understandable -- much of it, as a matter of fact, not understandable -- possibly because his background and his learning gave him no basis for an understanding. He compared himself to an Australian aborigine listening to the conversation of a couple of nuclear physicists discussing a new theory. Shortly after that, when he had been exploring the shallow cave down on Cat Den Point, he had picked up his first indication of the creature buried in the stone. Perhaps, he thought, if he'd not listened to the stars, if he'd not known he could listen to the stars, if he'd not trained his mind by listening, he would not have heard the creature buried deep beneath the limestone. He stood looking at the stars and listening to the wind and, far across the river, on a road that wound over the distant hills, he caught the faint glimmer of headlights as a car made it way through the night. The wind let up for a moment, as if gathering its strength to blow yet even harder and, in the tiny lull that existed before the wind took up again, he heard another sound -- the sound of an axe hitting wood. He listened carefully and the sound came again but so tossed about by the wind that he could not be sure of its direction. He must be mistaken, he thought. No one would be out and chopping on a night like this. Coon hunters might be the answer. Coon hunters at times chopped down a tree to dislodge a prey too well hidden to be spotted. The unsportsmanlike trick was one that Ben Adams and his overgrown, gangling sons might engage in. But this was no night for coon hunting. The wind would blow away scent and the dogs would be unable to track. Quiet nights were the best for hunting coon. And no one would be insane enough to cut down a tree on a night like this when a swirling wind might catch it and topple it back upon the cutters. He listened to catch the sound again but the wind, recovering from its lull, was blowing harder than ever now and there was no chance of hearing any sound smaller than the wind. T HE next day came in mild and gray, the wind no more than a whisper. Once in the night Daniels had awoken to hear it rattling the windows, pounding at the house and howling mournfully in the tangled hollows that lay above the river. But when he wok-e again all was quiet and faint light was graying the windows. Dressed and out of doors he found a land of peace -- the sky so overcast that there was no hint of sun, the air fresh, as if newly washed but heavy with the moist grayness that overlay the land. The autumn foliage IF that clothes the hills had taken on a richer luster than it had worn in the flooding autumn sunlight. After chores and breakfast Daniels set out for the hills. As he went down the slope toward the head of the first hollow he found himself hoping that the geologic shift would not come about today. There were many times it didn't and there seemed to be no reason to its taking place or its failure to take place. He had tried at times to find some reason for it, had made careful notes of how he felt or what he did, even the course he took when he went for his daily walk, but he had found no pattern. It lay, of course, somewhere in his brain -- something triggered into operation his new capability. But the phenomenon was random and involuntary. He had no control of it, no conscious control, at least. At times he had tried to use it, to bring the geologic shift about -- in each case had failed. Either he did not know how to go about it or it was truly random. Today, he hoped, his capability would not exercise its option, for he wanted to walk in the hills when they had assumed one of their most attractive moods, filled with gentle melancholy, all their harshness softened by the grayness of the atmosphere, the trees standing silently like old and patient friends waiting for one's coming, the fallenleaves and forest mold so hushed footfalls made no sound. He went down to the head of the hollow and sat on a fallen log beside a gushing spring that sent a stream of water tinkling down the boulder-strewn creek bed. Here, in May, in the pool below the spring, the marsh marigolds had bloomed and the sloping hillsides had been covered with the pastel of hepaticas. But now he saw no sign of either. The woods had battened down for winter. The summer and the autumn plants were either dead or dying, the drifting leaves interlocking on the forest floor to form cover against the ice and snow. In this place, thought Daniels, a man walked with a season's ghosts. This was the way it had been for a of years, in a time long gone, these hills and all the world had basked in an eternal summertime. And perhaps not a great deal more than ten thousand years before a milehigh wall of ice had reared up not too far to the north, perhaps close enough for a man who stood where his house now sat might have seen the faint line of blueness that would have been the top of that glacial barrier. But even then, although the mean temperature would have been lower, there had still been seasons. Leaving the log, Daniels went on down the hollow, following the narrow path that looped along the hillside, a cowpath beaten down at a time when there had been more cows at pasture in these woods than the two that Daniels owned. Following it, Daniels noted, as he had many times before, the excellent engineering sense of a cow. Cows always chose the easiest grade in stamping out their paths. He stopped barely beyond the huge white oak that stood at a bend in the path, to have a look at the outsize jack-in-the-pulpit plant he had observed throughout the year. Its green-purple hood had withered away completely, leaving only the scarlet fruit cluster which in the bitter months ahead would serve as food for birds. As the path continued, it plunged deeper between the hills and here the silence deepened and the grayness thickened until one's world became private. There, across the stream bed, was the den. Its yellow maw gaped beneath a crippled, twisted cedar. There, in the spring, he had watched baby foxes play. From far down the hollow came the distant quacking of ducks upon the pond in the river valley. And up on the steep hillside loomed Cat Den Point, the den carved by slowworking wind and weather out of the sheer rock of the cliff. But something was wrong. looking up the hill, he could sense the wrongness, although he could not at first tell exactly what it was. More of the cliff face was visible and something was missing. Suddenly he knew that the tree was no longer there -- the tree that for years had been climbed by homing wildcats heading for the den after a night of prowling and later by humans like himself who wished to seek out the wildcat's den. The cats, of course, were no longer there -- had not been there for many years. In the pioneer days they had been hunted almost to extermination because at times they had exhibited the poor judgment of bringing down a lamb. But the evidence of their occupancy of the cave could still be found by anyone who looked. Far back in the narrow recesses of the shallow cave tiny bones and the fragmented skulls of small mammals gave notice of food brought home by the wildcats for their young. The tree had been old and gnarled and had stood, perhaps, for several centuries and there would have been no sense of anyone's cutting it down, for it had no value as lumber, twisted as it was.'And in any case to get it out of the woods would have been impossible. Yet, last night, when he had stepped out on the porch, he had seemed to hear in a lull in the wind the sound of chopping -- and today the tree was gone. Unbelieving, he scrambled up the slope as swiftly as he could. In places the slope of the wild hillside slanted at an angle so close to # . IF forty-five degrees that he went on hands and knees, clawing himself upward, driven by an illogical fear that had to do with more than simply a missing tree. For it was in the cat den that one could hear the creature buried in the stone. He could recall the day he first had heard the creature and on that day he had not believed his senses. For he had been sure the sound came from his own imagination, was born of his walking with the dinosaurs and eavesdropping on the stars. It had not come the first time he had climbed the tree to reach the cave-that-was-a-den. He had been there several times before, finding a perverse satisfaction at discovering so unlikely a retreat. He would sit on the ledge that ran before the cave and stare over the froth of treetop foliage that clothed the plunging hillside, but afforded a glimpse of the pond that lay in the flood plain of the river. He could not see the river itself -- one must stand on higher ground to see the river. He liked the cave and the ledge because it gave him seclusion, a place cut off from the world, where he still might see this restricted corner of the world but no one could see him. This same sense of being shut out from the world had appealed to the wildcats, he had told himself. And here, for them, not only was seclusion but safety -- and especially safety for their young. There was no way the den could be approached other than by climbing the tree. He had first heard the creature when he had crawled into the deepest part of the shallow cave to marvel at the little heaps of bones and small shattered skulls where the wildcat kittens, perhaps a century before, had crouched and snarled at feast. Crouching where the baby wildcats once had crouched, he had felt the presence welling up at him, coming up to him from the depth of stone that lay far beneath him. Only the presence at first, only the knowing that something was down there. He had been skeptical at first, later on believing. In time belief had become solid certainty. He could record no words, of course, for he had never heard any actual sound. But the intelligence and the knowing came creeping through his body, through his fingers spread flat upon the stone floor of the cave, through his knees, which also pressed the stone. He absorbed it without hearing and the more he absorbed the more he was convinced that deep in the limestone, buried in one of the strata, an intelligence was trapped. And finally the time came when he could catch fragments of thoughts -- the edges of the living in the sentience encysted in the rock. What he heard he did not understand. This very lack of understanding was significant. If he had understood he would have put his discovery down to his imagination. As matters stood he had no knowledge that could possibly have served as a spring-board to imagine the thing of which he was made aware. He caught an awareness of tangled life relationships which made no sense at all -- none of which could be understood, but which lay in tiny, tangled fragments of outrageous (yet simple) information no human mind could quite accept. And he was made to know the empty hollowness of distances so vast that the mind reeled at the very hint of them and of the naked emptiness in which those distances must lie. Even in his eavesdropping on the stars he had never experienced such devastating concepts of the other-where-andwhen. There was other information, scraps and bits he sensed faintly that might fit into mankind's knowledge. But he never found enough to discover the proper slots for their insertion into the mass of mankind's knowledge. The greater part of what he sensed, however, was simply beyond his grasp and perhaps beyond the grasp of any human. But even so his mind would catch and hold it in all its incomprehensibility and it would lie there festering amid his human thoughts. not trying to talk with him -- undoubtedly they (or it) did not know that such a thing as a man existed, let alone himself. But whether the creature (or creatures -- he found the collective singular easier) simply was thinking or might, in its loneliness, be talking to itself -- or whether it might be trying to communicate with something other than himself, he could not determine. Thinking about it, sitting on the ledge before the cave, he had tried to make some logic of his find, had tried to find a way in which the creature's presence might be best explained. And while he could not be sure of it -- in fact, had no data whatsoever to bolster his belief -- he came to think that in some far geologic day when a shallow sea had lain upon this land, a ship from space had fallen into the sea to be buried deeply in the mud that in later millennia had hardened into limestone. In this manner the ship had become entrapped and so remained to this very day. He realized his reasoning held flaws -- for one thing, the pressure involved in the fashioning of the stone must have been so great as to have crushed and flattened any ship unless it should be made of some material far beyond the range of man's technology. Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support. Scrambling up the hillside, he finally reached the point where he could see that, in all truth, the tree had been cut down. It had fallen downhill and slid for thirty feet or so before it came to rest, its branches entangled with the trunks of other trees which had slowed its plunge. The stump stood raw, the whiteness of its wood shining in the grayness of the day. A deep cut had been made in the downhill side of it and the final felling had been accomplished by a saw. Little piles of brownish sawdust lay beside the stump. A two-man saw, he thought. From where Daniels stood the hill slanted down at an abrupt angle but just ahead of him, just beyond the stump, was a curious mound that broke the hillside slope. In some earlier day, more than likely, great masses of stone had broken from th cliff face and piled up at its base, to be masked in time by the soil that came about from the forest litter. Atop the mound grew a clump of birch, their powdery white trunks looking like huddled ghosts against the darkness of the other trees. The cutting of the tree, he told himself once again, had been a senseless pieces of business. The tree was worthless and had served no particular purpose except as a road to reach the den. Had someone, he wondered, known that he used it to reach the den and cut it IF out of malice? Or had someone, perhaps, hidden something in the cave and then cut down the tree so there would be no way in which to reach it? But who would hold him so much malice as to come out on a night raging with wind, working by lantern light, risking his life, to cut down the tree? Ben Adams? Ben was sore because Daniels would not permit hunting on his land but surely that was no sufficient reason for this rather laborious piece of petty spite. The other alternative -- that something hidden in the cave had caused the tree's destruction -- seemed more likely, although the very cutting of the tree would serve to advertise the strangeness of the place. Daniels stood puzzled, shaking his head. Then he thought of a way to find out some answers. The day still was young and he had nothing else to do. He started climbing up the hill, heading for his barn to pick up some rope. IV cave. It was exactly as it had been before. A few autumn leaves had blown into the farcorners. Chips of weathered stone had fallen from the rocky overhang, tiny evidences of the endless process of erosion which had formed the cave and in a few thousand years from now might wipe it out. Standing on the narrow ledge in front of the cave, Daniels stared out across the valley and was surprised at the change of view that had resulted from the cutting of the tree. The angles of vision seemed somehow different and the hillside itself seemed changed. Startled, he examined the sweep of the slope closely and finally satisfied himself that all that had changed was his way of seeing it. He was seeing trees and contours that earlier had been masked. His rope hung from the outcurving rock face that formed the roof of the cave. It was swaying gently in the wind and, watching it, Daniels recalled that earlier in the day he had felt no wind. But now one had sprang up from the west. Below him the treetops were bending to it. He turned toward the west and felt the wind on his face and a breath of chill. The feel of the wind faintly disturbed him, rousing some atavistic warning that came down from the days when naked, roaming bands of protomen had turned, as he turned now, to sniff the coming weather. The wind might mean that a change of weather could be coming and perhaps he should clamber up the rope and head back for the farm. But he felt a strange reluctance to leave. It had been often so, he recalled. For here was a wild sort of refuge which barred out the world and the little world that it let in was a different kind -- a more primal and more basic and less complicated world than the one he'd fled from. A flight of mallards came winging up from the pond in the river valley, arrowing above the treetops, banking and slanting up the long curve of the bluff and then, having cleared the bluff top, wheeling gracefully back toward the river. He watched them until they dipped down behind the trees that fringed the unseen river. Now it was time to go. There was no use of waiting longer. It had been a fool's errand in the first place; he had been wrong to let himself think something might be hidden in the cave. He turned back to the rope and the rope was gone. For a moment he stared stupidly at the point along the cliff face where the rope had hung, swaying in the breeze. Then he searched for some sign of it, although there was little area to search. The rope could have slid, perhaps, for a short distance along the edge of the overhanging mass of rock but it seemed incredible that it could have slid far enough to have vanished from his sight. The rope was new, strong, and he had tied it securely to the oak tree on the bluff above the cliff, snugging it tightly around the trunk and testing the'knot to make certain that it would not slip. And now the rope was gone. There had to be a human hand in this. Someone had come along, seen the rope and quietly drawn it up and now was crouched on the bluff above him, waiting for his frightened outburst when he found himself stranded. It was the sort of crude practical joke that any numr ber of people in the community might believe to be the height of humor. The thing to do, of course, was to pay no attention, to remain quiet and wait until the joke would pall upon the jokester. So he hunkered down upon the ledge and waited. Ten minutes, he told himself, or at least fifteen, would wear out the patience of the jokester. Then the rope would come down and he could climb up and go back to the house. Depending upon who the joker might turn out to be, he'd take him home and pour a drink for him and the two of them, sitting in the kitchen, would have a laugh together. He found that he was hunching his shoulders against the wind, which seemed to have a sharper bite than when he first had noticed it. It was shifting from the west to north and that was no good. Squatting on the ledge, he noticed that beads of moisture had gathered upon his jacket sleeve -- not a result of rain, exactly, but of driven mist. If the temperature should drop a bit the weather might turn nasty. IF He waited, huddled, listening for a sound -- a scuffling of feet through leaves, the snap of broken brush -- that would betray the presence of someone on the clifftop. But there was no sound at all. The day was muffled. Even the branches of the trees beneath his perch, swaying in the wind, swayed without their usual creaks and groans. Fifteen minutes must have passed and there had been no sound from atop the cliff. The wind had increased somewhat and when he twisted his head to one side to try to look up he could feel the soft slash of the driving mist against his cheek. He could keep silent no longer in hope of waiting out the jokester. He sensed, in a sudden surge of panic, that time was running out on him. "Hey, up there -- " he shouted. He waited and there was no response. He shouted again, more loudly this time. Ordinarily the cliff acrpss the hollow should have bounced back echoes. But now there were no echoes and his shout seemed dampened, as if this wild place had erected some sort of fence to hem him in. He shouted again and the misty world took his voice and swallowed it. A hissing sound started. Daniels saw it was caused by tiny pellets of ice streaming through the branches of the trees. From one breath to another the driven mist had turned to ice. He walked back and forth on the ledge in front of the cave, twenty feet at most, looking for some way of escape. The ledge went out into space and then sheered off. The slanting projection of rock came down from above. He was neatly trapped. He moved back into the cave and hunkered down. Here he was protected from the wind and he felt, even through his rising panic, a certain sense of snugness. The cave was not yet cold. But the temperature must be dopping and dropping rather swiftly or the mist would not have turned to ice. He wore a light jacket and could not make a fire. He did not smoke and never carried matches. F OR the first time he faced the real seriousness of his position. It might be days before anyone noticed he was missing. He had few visitors and no one had ever paid too much attention to him. Even if someone should find that he was missing and a hunt for him were launched, what were the chances that he would be found? Who would think to look in this hidden cave? How long, he wondered, could a man survive in cold and hunger. If he could not get out of here, and soon, what about his livestock? The cows would be heading home from pasture, seeking shelter from the storm and there would be no one there to let them into the barn. If they were not milked for a day or two they would be tormented by swollen udders. The hogs and chickens would go unfed. A man, he thought, had no right to take the kind of chance he had taken when so many living creatures were dependent on him. He crawled farther back into the cave and stretched himself out on his belly, wedging himself into its deepest recess, an ear laid against the stone. The creature still was there -- of course it still was there. It was trapped even more securely than himself, held down by, perhaps, several hundred feet of solid rock, which had been built up most deof years. It was remembering again. In its mind was another place and, while part of that flow of memory was blurred and wavy, the rest was starkly clear. A great dark plain of rock, one great slab of rock, ran to a far horizon and above that far horizon a reddish sun came up and limned against the great red ball of rising sun was a hinted structure -- an irregularity of the horizon that suggested a place. A castle, perhaps, or a city or a great cliff dwelling -- it was hard to make out what it was or to be absolutely sure that it was anything at all. Home? Was that black expanse of rock the spaceport of the old home planet? Or might it be only a place the creature had visited before it had come to Earth?  place so fantastic, perhaps, that it lingered in the mind. Other things mixed into the memory, sensory symbols that might have applied to personalities, life forms, smells, tastes. Although he could be wrong, Daniels knew, in supplying this entrapped creature with human sensory perceptions, these human sensory perceptions were the only ones he knew about. And now, listening in on the memory of that flat black expanse of rock and imagining the rising sun which outlined the structure on the far horizon, Daniels did something he had never tried to do before. He tried to talk back to the buried creature, tried to let it know that someone was listening and had heard, that it was not as lonely and as isolated as it might have thought it was. He did not talk with his tongue -- that would have been a senseless thing to do. Sound could never carry through those many feet of stone. He talked with his mind instead. Hello,  down there, he said. This is a friend of yours. I've been listening to you for a long, long time and I hope that you can hear me. If you can, let us talk together. Let me try to make you under IF stand about myself and the world  live in and you tell me about yourself and the kind of world you lived in and how you came to be where you are and if there is anything l can do for you, any help that I can give... He said that much and no more. Having spoken, he continued lying with his ear against the bard cave floor, listening to find out if the creature might have heard him. But the creature apparently had not heard or, having heard, ignored him as something not worth its attention. It went on thinking about the place where the dull red sun was rising above the horizon. It had been foolish, and perhaps presumptuous, he knew, for him to have tried to speak to it. He had never tried before; he had simply listened. And he had never tried,, either, to speak to those others who talked among the stars -- again he'd simply listened. What new dimension had been added to himself, he wondered, that would have permitted him to try to communicate with the creature? Had the possibility that he was about to die moved him? The creature in the stone might not be subject to death -- it might be immortal. He crawled out of the far recess of the cave and crept out to where he had room to hunker down. T HE storm had worsened. The ice now was mixed with snow and the temperature had fallen. The ledge in front of the cave was filmed with slippery ice. If a man tried to walk it he'd go plunging down the cliff face to his death. The wind was blowing harder. The branches of the trees were waving and a storm of leaves was banking down the hillside, flying with the ice and snow. From where he squatted he could see the topmost branches of the clump of birches which grew atop the mound just beyond where the cave tree had stood. And these branches, it seemed to him, were waving about far more violently than could be accounted for by wind. They were lashing wildly from one side to the other and even as he watched they seemed to rise higher in the air, as if the trees, in some great agony, were raising their branches far above their heads in a plea for mercy. Daniels crept forward on his hands and knees and thrust his head out to see down to the base of the cliff. Not only the topmost branches of the clump of birches were swaying but the entire clump seemed to be motion, thrashing about as if some unseen hand were attempting to wrench it from the soil. But even as he thought this, he saw that the ground itself was in agitation, heaving up and out. It looked exactly as if someone had taken a time-lapse movie of the development of a frost boil with the film now being run at a normal speed. The ground was heaving up and the clump was heaving with it. A shower of gravel and other debris was flowing down the slope, loosened by the heaving of the ground. A boulder broke away and crashed down the hill, crushing brush and shrubs and leaving hideous scars. Daniels watched in horrified fascination. Was he witnessing, he wondered, some wonderfully speededup geological process? He tried to pinpoint exactly what kind of process it might be. He knew of one that seemed to fit. The mound kept on heaving upward, splintering outward from its center. A great flood of loose debris was now pouring down the slope, leaving a path of brown in the whitness of the fallen snow. The clump of birch tipped over and went skidding down the slope and out of the place where it had stood a shape emerged. Not a solid shape, but a hazy one that looked as if someone had scraped some stardust from the sky and molded it into a ragged, shifting form that did not set into any definite pattern, that kept shifting and changing, although it did not entirely lose all resemblance to the shape in which it might originally have been molded. It looked as a loose conglomeration of atoms might look if atoms could be seen. It sparkled softly in the grayness of the day and despite its seeming insubstantiality it apparently had some strength -- for it continued to push itself from the shattered mound until finally it stood free of it. Having freed itself, it drifted up toward the ledge. Strangely, Daniels felt no fear, only a vast curiosity. He tried to make out what the drifting shape was but he could not be sure. A S IT reached the ledge and moved slightly above it he drew back to crouch within the cave. The shape drifted in a couple of feet or so and perched on the ledge -- either perched upon it or floated just above it. You spoke, the sparkling shape said to Daniels. It was not a question, nor a statement either, really, and it was not really speaking. It sounded exactly like the talk Daniels had heard when he'd listened to the stars. You spoke to it, said the shape, as if you were a friend (although the word was not friend but some thing else entirely, something warm and friendly ). You offered help to it. Is there help that you can give? That question at least was clear enough. "I don't know," said Daniels. "Not right now, there isn't. But in a hundred years from now, perhaps -- are you hearing me? Do you know what I am saying?" IF You say there can be help , the creature said, but only after time. Please, what is that time? "A hundred years," said Daniels. "When the planet goes around the star one hundred times." One hundred? asked the creature. Daniels held up the fingers of both hands. "Can you see my fingers? The appendages on the tips of my arms?" See? the creature asked. "Sense them. Count them." Yes,  can count them. "They number ten," said Daniels. "Ten times that many of them would be a hundred." It is no great span of time, the creature said. What kind of help by then? "You know genetics? How a creature comes into being, how it knows what kind of thing it is to become, how it grows, how it knows how to grow and what to become. The amino acids that make up the ribonucleic acids and provide the key to the kind of cells it grows and. what their functions are." I do not know your terms, the creature said, but I understand. So you know of this? You are not , then, a brute wild creature, like the other life that simply stands and the others that burrow in the ground and climb the standing life forms and run along the ground. It did not come out like this, of course. The words were there -- or meanings that had the feel of words -- but there were pictures as well of trees, of burrowing mice, of squirrels, of rabbits, of the lurching woodchuck and the running fox. "Not I," said Daniels, "but others of my kind. I know but little of it. There are others who spend all their time in the study of it." The other perched on the ledge and said nothing more. Beyond it the trees whipped in the wind and the snow came whirling down. Daniels huddled back from the ledge, shivered in the cold and wondered if this thing upon the ledge could be hallucination. But as he thought it, the thing began to talk again, although this time it did not seem to be talking to him. It talked, rather, as the creature in the stone had talked, remembering. It communicated, perhaps, something he was not meant to know but Daniels had no way of keeping from knowing. Sentience flowed from the creature and impacted on his mind, else, so that it seemed as if it were he and not this other who was remembering. V less, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness, asfrom the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure. So far from home, so lost, so directionless -- and yet not entirely directionless, for there was a trace, a scent, a spoor, a knowing that could not be expressed or understood or even guessed at in the framework of humanity; a trace, a scent, a spoor that showed the way, no matter how dimly or how hopelessly, that something else had taken at some other time. And a mindless determination, an unflagging devotion, a primal urgency that drove him on that faint, dim trail, to follow where it might lead, even to the end of time or space, or the both of them together, never to fail or quit or falter until the trail had finally reached an end or had been wiped out by whatever winds might blow through empty space. There was something here, Daniels told himself, that, for all its alienness, still was familiar, a factor that should lend itself to translation into human terms and thus establish some sort of link between this remembering alien mind and his human mind. The emptiness and the silence, the cold uncaring went on and on and on and there seemed no end to it. But he came to understand there had to be an end to it and that the end was here, in these tangled hills above the ancient river. And after the almost endless time of darkness and uncaring, another almost endless time of waiting, of having reached the end, of having gone as far as one might go and then settling downto wait with an ageless patience that never would grow weary. You spoke of help, the creature said to him. Why help? You do not know this other. Why should you want to help ? "It is alive," said Daniels. "It's alive and I'm alive and is that not enough?" I do not know, the creature said. "I think it is," said Daniels. And how could you help? "I've told you about this business of genetics. I don't know if I can explain -- "  have the terms from your mind , the creature said. The genetic code. "Would this other one, the one beneath the stone, the one you guard -- " Not guard , the creature said. The one I wait for. "You will wait for long." I am equipped for waiting. I have waited long. I can wait much longer. "Someday," Daniels said, "the stone will erode away. But you need not wait that long. Does this other creature know its genetic code?" It knows, the creature said. It knows far more than I. IF "But all of it," insisted Daniels. "Down to the last linkage, the final ingredient, the sequences of all It knows, the creature said. The first requisite of all life is to understand itself. "And it could -- it would -- be to supply us its genetic code?" You are presumptuous, said the sparkling creature, (although the word was harsher than presumptuous). That is information no thing gives another. It is indecent and obscene (here again the words were not exactly indecent and obscene). It involves the giving of one's self into another's hands. It is an ultimate and purposeless surrender. "Not surrender," Daniels said. "A way of escaping from its imprisonment. In time, in the hundred years of which I told you, the people of my race could take that genetic code and construct another creature exactly like the first. Duplicate it with exact preciseness." But it still would be in stone. "Only one of it. The original one. That original could wait for the erosion of the rock. But the other one, its duplicate, could take up life again." And what, Daniels wondered, if the creature in the stone did not wish for rescue? What if it had deliberately placed itself beneath the stone? What if it simply sought protection and sanctuary? Perhaps, if it wished, the creature could get out of where it was as easily as this other one -- or this other thing -- had risen from the mound. No, it cannot, said the creature squatting on the ledge. I was careless. I went to sleep while waiting and I slept too long. And that would have been a long sleep, Daniels told himself. A sleep so long that dribbling soil had mounded over it, that fallen boulders, cracked off the cliff by frost, had been buried in the soil and that a clump of birch had sprouted and grown into trees thirty feet high. There was a difference here in time rate that he could not comprehend. But some of the rest, he told himself, he had sensed -- the devoted loyalty and the mindless patience of the creature that tracked another far among the stars. He knew he was right, for the mind of that other thing, that devoted stardog perched upon the ledge, came into him and fastened on his mind and for a moment the two of them, the two minds, for all their differences, merged into a single mind in a gesture of fellowship and basic understanding, as if for the first time in what must have been millions of years this baying hound from outer space had found a creature that could understand its duty and its purpose. "We could try to dig it out," said Daniels. "I had thought of that, of course, but I was afraid that it would be injured. And it would be hard to convince any  one -- No, said the creature, digging would not do. There is much you do not understand. But this other  proposal that you have, that has great merit. You say you do not have the knowledge oj genetics to take this action now. Have you talked to others oj your kind? "I talked to one," said Daniels, "and he would not listen. He thought I was mad: But he was not, after all, the man I should have spoken to. In time I could talk with others but not right now. No matter how much I might want to -- I can't. For they would laugh at me and I could not stand their laughter. But jn a hundred years or somewhat less I could -- " But you will not exist a hundred years, said the faithful dog. You are a short-lived species. Which might explain your rapid rise. All life here is short-lived and that gives evolution a chance to build intelligence. When I first came here I found but mindless entities. "You are right," said Daniels. "I can live no hundred years. Even from the very start, I could not live a hundred years and better than half of my life is gone. Perhaps much more than half of it. For unless I can get out of this cave I will be dead in days." Reach out, said the sparkling one. Reach out and touch me, being. Slowly Daniels reached out. His hand went through the sparkle and the shine and he had no sense of matter -- it was as if he'd moved his hand through nothing but air. You see, the creature said, I cannot help you. There is no way for our energies to interact. I am sorry, friend. (It was not friend, exactly, but it was good enough, and it might have been, Daniels thought, a great deal more than friend.) "I am sorry, too," said Daniels. "I would like to live." soft and brooding silence of a snow-laden afternoon with nothing but the trees and the rock and the hidden little life to share the silence with them. It had been for nothing, then, Daniels told himself, this meeting with a creature from another world. Unless he could somehow get off this ledge there was nothing he could do. Although why he should so concern himself with the rescue of the creature in the stone he could not understand. Surely whether he himself lived or died should be of more importance to him than that his death would foreclose any chance of help to the buried alien. "But it may not be for nothing," IF he told the sparkling creature. "Now that you know -- " My knowing, said the creature, will have no effect. There are others from the stars who would have the knowledge -- but even if I could contact them they would pay no attention to me. My position is too lowly to converse with the greater ones. My only hope would be people of your kind and, if Tm not mistaken, only with yourself. For I catch the edge of thought that you are the only one who really understands. There is no other of your race who could even be aware of me. Daniels nodded. It was entirely true. No other human existed whose brain had been jumbled so fortunately as to have acquired the abilities he held. He was the only hope for the creature in the stone and even such hope as he represented might be very slight, for before it could be made effective he must find someone who would listen and believe. And that belief must reach across the years to a time when genetic engineering was considerably advanced beyond its present state. If you could manage to survive the present crisis, said the hound from outer space, I might bring to bear certain energies and techniques -- sufficiently for the project to be carried through. But, as you must realize, I cannot supply the means to survive this crisis. "Someone may come along," said Daniels. "They might hear me if I yelled every now and then." He began yelling every now and then and received no answer. His yells were muffled by the storm and it was unlikely, he knew, that there would be men abroad at a time like this. They'd be safe beside their fires. The sparkling creature still perched upon the ledge when Daniels slumped back to rest. The other made an indefinite sort of shape that seemed much like a lopsided Christmas tree standing in the snow. Daniels told himself not to go to sleep. He must close his eyes only for a moment, then snap them open -- he must not let them stay shut for then sleep would come upon him. He should beat his arms across his chest for warmth -- but his arms were heavy and did not want to work. He felt himself sliding prone to the cave floor and fought to drive himself erect. But his will to fight was thin and # the rock was comfortable. So comfortable, he thought, that he could afford a moment's rest before forcing himself erect. And the funny thing about it was that the cave floor had turned to mud and water and the sun was shining and he seemed warm again. He rose with a start and he saw that he was standing in a wide expanse of water no deeper than his ankles, black ooze underfoot. in which the cave might be. There was simply this vast sheet of water and behind him, less than thirty feet away, the muddy beach of a tiny island -- a muddy, rocky island, with smears of sickly green clinging to the rocks. He was in another time, he knew, but not in another place. Always when he slipped through time he came to rest on exactly the same spot upon the surface of the earth that he had occupied when the change had come. And standing there he wondered once again, as he had many times before, what strange mechanism operated to shift him bodily in space so that when he was transported to a time other than his own he did not find himself buried under, say, twenty feet of rock or soil or suspended twenty feet above the surface. But now, he knew, was no time to think or wonder. By a strange quirk of circumstance he was no longer in the cave and it made good sense to get away from where he was as swiftly as he could. For if he stayed standing where he was he might snap back unexpectedly to his present and find himself still huddled in the cave. He turned clumsily about, his feet tangling in the muddy bottom, and lunged toward the shore. The going was hard but he made it and went up the slimy stretch of muddy beach until he could reach the tumbled rocks and could sit and rest. His breathing was difficult. He gulped great lungfuls and the air had a strange taste to it, not like normal air. He sat on the rock, gasping for breath and gazed out across the sheet of water shining in the high, warm sun. Far out he caught sight of a long, humping swell and watched it coming in. When it reached the shore it washed up the muddy incline almost to his feet. Far out on the glassy surface another swell was forming. The sheet of water was greater, he realized, than he had first imagined. This was also the first time in his wanderings through the past that he had ever come upon any large body of water. Always before he had emerged on dry land whose general contours had been recognizable -- and there had always been the river flowing through the hills. Here nothing was recognizable. This was a totally different place and there could be no question that he had been projected farther back in time than ever before -- back to the day of some great epicontinental sea, back to a time, perhaps, when the atmosphere had far less oxygen than it would have in later eons. More than likely, he thought, he was very close in time to that boundary line where life for a creature such as he would be impossible. Here there apparently IF was sufficient oxygen, although a man must pump more air into his lungs than he would normally. Go oxygen might fall to the point where it would be insufficient. Go a little farther back and find no free oxygen at all. Watching the beach, he saw the little things skittering back and forth, seeking refuge in spumewhitened piles of drift or popping into tiny burrows. He put his hand down on the rock on which he sat and scrubbed gently at a patch of green. It slid off the rock and clung to his flesh, smearing his palm with a slimy gellatinous mess that felt disgusting and unclean. Here, then, was the first of life to dwell upon the land -- scarcely creatures as yet, still clinging to the edge of water, afraid and unequipped to wander too far from the side of that wet and gentle mother which, from the first beginning, had nurtured life. Even the plants still clung close to the sea, existing, perhaps, only upon rocky surfaces so close to the beach that occasional spray could reach them. Daniels found that now he did not have to gasp quite so much for breath. Plowing through the mud up to the rock had been exhausting work iji an oxygen-poor atmosphere. But sitting quietly on the rock, he could get along all right. Now that the blood had stopped pounding in his head he became aware of silence. He heard one sound only, the soft lapping of the water against the muddy beach, a lonely effect that seemed to emphasize rather than break the silence. Never before in his life, he realized, had he heard so little sound. Back in the other worlds he had known there had been not one noise, but many, even on the quietest days. But here there was nothing to make a sound -- no trees, no animals, no insects, no birds -- just the water running to the far horizon and the bright sun in the sky. For the first time in many months he knew again that sense of out-of-placeness, of not belonging, the feeling of being where he was not wanted and had no right to be, an intruder in a world that was out of bounds, not for him alone but for anything that was more complex or more sophisticated than the little skitterers on the beach. He sat beneath the alien sun, surrounded by the alien water, watching the little things that in eons yet to come would give rise to such creatures as himself, and tried to feel some sort of kinship to the skitterers. But he could feel no kinship. A ND suddenly in this place of one-sound-only there came a throbbing, faint but clear and presently louder, pressing down against the water, beating at the little island -- a sound out of the sky. Daniels leaped to his feet and looked up and the ship was there, plummeting down toward him. But not a ship of solid form, it seemed -- rather a distorted thing, as if many planes of light (if there could be such things as planes of light) had been slapped together in a haphazard sort of way. A throbbing came from it that set the atmosphere to howling and the planes of light kept changing shape or changing places, so that the ship, from one moment to the next, never looked the same. It had been dropping fast to start with but now it was slowing down as it continued to fall, ponderously and with massive deliberation, straight toward the island. Daniels found himself crouching, unable to jerk his eyes and senses away from this mass of light and thunder that came out of the sky. The sea and mud and rock, even in the full light of the sun, were flickering with the flashing that came from the shifting of the planes of light. Watching it through eyes squinted against the flashes, Daniels saw that if the ship were to drop to the surface it would not drop upon the island, as he first had feared, but a hundred feet or so offshore. Not more than fifty feet above the water the great ship stopped and hovered and a bright thing came from it. The object hit the water with a splash but did not go under, coming to rest upon the shallow, muddy bottom of the sea, with a bit less than half of it above the surface. It was a sphere, a bright and shiny globe against which the water lapped, and even with the thunder of the ship beating at his ears, Daniels imagined he could hear the water lapping at the sphere. Then a voice spoke above this empty world, above the throbbing of the ship, the imagined lapping sound of water, a sad, judicial voice -- although it could not have been a voice, for any voice would have been too puny to be heard. But the words were there and there was no doubt of what they said: Thus, according to the verdict and the sentence, you are here deported and abandoned upon this barren planet, where it is most devoutly hoped you will find the time and opportunity to contemplate your sins and especially the sin of (and here were words and concepts Daniels could not understand, hearing them only as a blur of sound -- but the sound of them, or something in the sound of them, was such as to turn his blood to ice and at the same time fill him with a disgust and a loathing such as he'd never known before). It is regrettable, perhaps, that you are immune to death, for much as we might detest ourselves for doing it, IF it would be a kinder course to discontinue you and would serve better than this course to exact our purpose, which is to place you beyond all possibility of ever having contact with any sort of life again . Here, beyond the farthest track of galactic intercourse, on this uncharted planet, we can only hope jhat our purpose will be served. And we urge upon you such selfexamination that if, by some remote chance, in some unguessed time, you should be freed through ignorance or malice, you shall find it within yourself so to conduct your existence as not to meet or merit such fare again. And now , according to our law, you may speak any final words you wish. The voice ceased and after a while came another. And while the terminology was somewhat more involved than Daniels could grasp their idiom translated easily into human terms. Go screw yourself , it said. The throbbing deepened and the ship began to move straight up into the sky. Daniels watched it until the thunder died and the ship itself was a fading twinkle in the blue. He rose from his crouch and stood erect, trembling and weak. Groping behind him for the rock, he found it and sat down again. Once again the only sound was the lapping of the water on the shore. He could not hear, as he had imagined that he could, the water against the shining sphere that lay a hundred feet offshore. The sun blazed down out of the sky and glinted on the sphere and Daniels found that once again he was gasping for his breath. Without a doubt, out there in the shallow water, on the mudbank that sloped up to the island, lay the creature in the stone. And how then had it been possible for him to be transported across the this one microsecond of time that held the answer to all the questions he had asked about the intelligence beneath the limestone? It could not have been sheer coincidence, for this was coincidence of too large an order ever to come about. Had he somehow, subconsciously, gained more knowledge than he had been aware of from the twinkling creature that had perched upon the ledge? For a moment, he remembered, their minds had met and mingled -- at that moment had there occurred a transmission of knowledge, unrecognized, buried in some subconscious corner of himself? Or was he witnessing the operation some sort of psychic warning system set up to scare off any future intelligence that might be tempted to liberate this abandoned and marooned being? And what about the twinkling creature? Could some hidden, unguessed good exist in the thing imprisoned in the sphere -- for it to have commanded the loyalty and devotion of the creature on the ledge beyond the slow erosion of geologic ages? The question raised another: What were good and evil? Who was there to judge? The evidence of the twinkling creature was, of course, no evidence at all. No human being was so utterly depraved that he could not hope to find a dog to follow him and guard him even to the death. More to wonder at was what had happened within his own jumbled brain that could send him so unerringly to the moment of a vital happening. What more would he find in it to astonish and confound him? How far along the path to ultimate understanding might it drive him? And what was the purpose of that driving? He sat on the rock and gasped for breath. The sea lay flat and calm beneath the blazing sun, its only motion the long swells running in to break around the sphere and on the beach. The little skittering creatures ran along the mud and he rubbed his palm against his trouser leg, trying to brush off the green and slimy scum. He could wade out, he thought, and have a closer look at the sphere lying in the mud. But it would be a long walk in such an atmosphere and he could not chance it -- for he must be nowhere near the cave up in that distant future when he popped back to his present. Once the excitement of knowing where he was, the sense of out-ofplaceness, had worn off, this tiny mud-flat island was a boring place. There was nothing but the sky and sea and the muddy beach; there was nothing much to look at. It was a place, he thought, where nothing ever happened, or was about to happen once the ship had gone away and the great event had ended. Much was going on, of course, that in future ages would spell out to quite a lot -- but it was mostly happening out of sigh, down at the bottom of this shallow sea. The skittering things, he thought, and the slimy growth upon the rock were hardy, mindless pioneers of this distant day -- awesome to look upon and think about but actually not too interesting. He began drawing aimless patterns in the mud with the toe of one boot. He tried to make a tictac-toe layout but so much mud was clinging to his toe that it didn't quite come out. A ND then, instead of drawing in the mud, he was scraping with his toe in fallen leaves, stiff with frozen sleet and snow. The sun was gone and the scene was dark except for a glow from something in the woods just down the hill from him. Driving sheets of snow swirled into his face and he shivered. He pulled his jacket close about him and began to button it. A man, he thought, could catch his death of cold this way, shifting as quickly as he had shifted from a steaming mudbank to the whiplash chill of a northern blizzard. The yellow glow still persisted on the slope below him and he could hear the sound of human voices. What was going on? He was fairly certain of where he was, a hundred feet or so above the place where the cliff began -- there should be no one down there; there should not be a light. He took a slow step down the hill, then hesitated. He ought not to be going down the hill -- he should be heading straight for home. The cattle would be waiting at the barnyard gate, hunched against the storm, their coats covered with ice and snow, yearning for the warmth and shelter of the barn. The pigs would not have been fed, nor the chickens either. A man owed some consideration to his livestock. But someone was down there, someone with a lantern, almost on the lip of the cliff. If the damn fools didn't watch out, they could slip and go plunging down into a hundred feet of space. Coon hunters more than likely, although this was not the kind of night to be out hunting coon. The coons would all be denned up. But whoever they might be, he should go down and warn them. He was halfway to the lantern, which appeared to be setting on the ground, when someone picked it up and held it high and Daniels saw and recognized the face of the man who held it. Daniels hurried forward. "Sheriff, what are you doing here?" But he had the shamed feeling that he knew, that he should have known from the moment he had seen the light. "Who is there?" the sheriff asked, wheeling swiftly and tilting the lantern so that its rays were thrown in Daniels' direction." "Daniels," he gasped. "Good God, man, where have you been?" "Just walking around," said Daniels weakly. The answer, he knew, was no good at all -- but how could he tell anyone that he had just returned from a trip through time? "Damn it," the sheriff said, disgusted. "We've been hunting you. Ben Adams got scared when he dropped over to your place and you weren't there. He knows how you go walking around in the woods and he was afraid something had happened to you. So he phoned me, and he and his boys began looking for you. We were afraid you had fallen or had been hurt somehow. A man wouldn't last the night in a storm liker this." "Where is Ben now?" asked Daniels. The sheriff gestured down the hill and Daniels saw that two men, IF probably Adams' sons, had a rope snubbed around a tree and that the rope extended down over the cliff. "He's down on the rope," the sheriff said. "Having a look in the cave. He felt somehow you might be in the cave." "He had good reason to -- " Daniels started to say but he had barely begun to speak when the night was rent by a shriek of terror. The shrieking did not stop. It kept on and on. The sheriff thrust the lantern at Daniels and hurried forward. No guts, Daniels thought. A man who could be vicious enough to set up another for death, to trap him in a cave -- but who, when the chips were down, could not go through with it and had to phone the sheriff to provide a witness to his good intentions -- a man like that lacked guts. The shrieks had fallen to moaning. The sheriff hauled on the rope, helped by one of Adams' sons. A man's head and shoulders appeared above the clifftop and the sheriff reached out and hauled him to safety. Ben Adams collapsed on the ground and never stopped his moaning. The sheriff jerked him to his feet. "What's the matter, Ben?" "There's something down there," Adams screamed. "There is something in the cave -- " "Something, damn it? What would it be? A cat? A panther?" "I never seen it. I just knew that it was there. I felt it. It was crouched back inside the cave." "How could anything be in there? Someone cut down the tree. How could anything get into the cave?" "I don't know," howled Adams. "It might have been in there when the tree was cut. It might have been trapped in there." One of the sons was holding Ben erect and the sheriff moved away. The other son was pulling in the rope and neatly coiling it. "Another thing," the sheriff said, "how come you thought Daniels might be in that cave? If the tree was cut down he couldn't have climbed the tree. And he couldn't have used a rope the way you did, for there wasn't any rope. If he had used a rope it would still have been there. I don't know what's going on -- damned if I do. You down messing in that cave and Daniels comes walking out of the woods. I wish someone would tell me. Adams, who had been hobbling forward, saw Daniels for the first time and came to a sudden halt. "Where did you come from?" he demanded. "Here we been wearing out our guts trying to hunt you down and then -- " "Oh, go on home," the sheriff said in a disgusted tone of voice. "There's a fishy smell to this. It's going to take me a little while to get it figured out." Daniels reached out his hand to the son who had finished coiling the rope. "I believe that's my rope," he said. Without protest, taken by surprise, the boy handed it to him. "We'll cut across the woods," said Ben. "Home's closer that way." "Good night, men," the sheriff said. Slowly the sheriff and Daniels climbed the hill. U "you were never out walking in this storm. If you had been you'd have had a whole lot more snow on you than shows. You look like you just stepped from a house." "Maybe I wasn't exactly walking around," Daniels said. "Would you mind telling me where you were? I don't mind doing my duty as I see it but I don't relish being made to look a fool while I'm doing it." "Sheriff, I can't tell you. I'm sorry. I simply cannot tell you." "All right, then. What about the rope?" "It's my rope," said Daniels. "I lost it this afternoon." "And I suppose you can't tell me about that, either." "No, I guess I can't." "You know," the sheriff said, "I've had a lot of trouble with Ben Adams through the years. I'd hate to think I was going to have trouble with you, too." They climbed the hill and walked up to the house. The sheriff's car was parked out on the road. "Would you come in?" asked Daniels. "I could find a drink." The sheriff shook his head. "Some other time," he said. "Maybe soon. You figure there was something in that cave? Or was it just Ben's imagination? He's a flighty sort of critter." "Maybe there wasn't anything," said Daniels, "but if Ben thought there was, what difference does it make? Thinking it might be just as real as if there were something there. All of us, sheriff, live with things walking by our sides no one else can see." The sheriff shot a quick glance at him. "Daniels, what's with you?" he asked. "What is walking by your side or sniffing at your heels? Why did you bury yourself out here in this God-forsaken place? What is going on?" He didn't wait for an answer. He got into his car, started it and headed down the road. Daniels stood in the storm and ish in the murk of flying snow. He shook his head in bewilderment. The sheriff had asked a question and then had not waited for the answer. Perhaps because it was a question to which he did not want an answer. ( Please turn to page # ) IF Apr. #, S.D. # Commissioner, Planetary Zoo Sector #I Sir: Congratulations on your decision to purchase a specimen of the most dangerous animal in the known universe. The Rigellian wombat is without a doubt the most powerful and deadly lifeform yet discovered by man, and as such is an addition of which any zoo may be justly proud. The ability of a wombat to attract visitors is more than ample compensation for the price of purchase, while the benefits that the biologists of your planet may derive from the availability of a live specimen are truly incalculable. In short, you have made an excellent buy. We wish you to remember, however, that we of the Malison Company do feel a great sense of responsibility toward our customers and their patrons. Thus it will be impossible for us to deliver your wombat until we are satisfied that your zoo has the facilities necessary for the proper care and containment of the animal. The required equipment is described in detail in the accompanying enclosures but I would like to discuss it here as well, so that you may be absolutely clear on what is needed for the safety and comfort of your specimen and your guests. The wombat must be completely enclosed in a cage of Dorcas force fields and special care should be taken with the fields in areas where they overlap. Please note that the floor of the cage must be given the same protection as the other parts -- even ten feet of reinforced concrete is no insurance of safety where wombats are concerned, as we of the Malison Company know only too well. The precise power requirements vary from case to case but you will find minimum standards for most applications in the enclosures. These should run a few megawatts, at most. If you wish, you may buy the generators for the Dorcas fields directly from us -- already perfectly adapted for use as wombat cages -- at a price other dealers cannot hope to match. Whether or not you choose to buy from us, our experts are always available for help in assembling and installing the cages. Whatever your arrangements for confining your wombat, as soon as your facilities meet the specifications which, in all good conscience, we feel obliged to set, we will rush you the animal by means of our own specially equipped transport ship. Should you meet with difficulties anywhere in your enterprise our experts are always available for consultation. Remember that since we deal only in wombats, we IF try to think of each sale as a continuing commitment and try to meet any needs our customers might have with prompt, efficient service at fees that are as low as we can make them. Please do not fail to ask us for any help you might need. Sincerely, C. J. Malison President, Malison Wombat Company Sector # July #, S.D. # Commissioner, Planetary Zoo Sector #I Dear Sir: I am delighted to hear that your wombat is proving to be a successful addition to the Morenull Zoo. The reports we have received so far furnish gratifying proof that there is no creature in the cosmos better able to capture the public's imagination than one of our wombats. Your response has helped to assure us that we are doing everything possible for the satisfaction of our customers. As to your complaints about the shipping charges, we find it regrettable that the increased rates were necessary but they were forced upon us by circumstances completely outside our control. Rising operating costs and crew's wages, due mainly to the stricter provisions of the new Lifeform Transport Law, made these increases necessary. If you are in doubt as to the legality of our action please note clause # of your contract. We are quite within our rights on this matter. In any case, the few thousand credits involved are of little consequence when compared with the immense benefits which you are by now enjoying due to your wombat. It has been a pleasure serving you and if there is any further aid we can supply, please let us know. Sincerely, C. J. Malison August #, S. D. # Commissioner, Planetary Zoo Sector #I Sir: In keeping with our policy of continuing service in depth, we are happy to inform you that our research staff has completed its analysis of the available data on the recent wombat escapes on Lurda IV and Denel II. Although the data in such cases are necessarily fragmentary, the analysis does seem to indicate that the containing fields were somewhat underpowered. Our suggested power ratings have been raised accordingly (see enclosures). If you wish to modify your equipment to comply with these new specifications you may buy the necessary hardware directly from us and we will be happy to send you one of our technical experts to help with the modifications. These are only two of the many services which we offer at nominal fees in order that each of our customers may display his wombat with the maximum of safety and convenience. Ever striving to be of service, I remain, Sincerely yours, C. J. Malison September #, S. D. I I # Commissioner, Planetary Zoo Sector #I Sir: Naturally I am quite distressed to hear of the escape of your wombat. The property damage and loss of life are, of course, regrettable and I sympathize with the fact that the whole affair was made no easier to tolerate by the arrival of my last letter the day after the escape. Even so, you have no grounds on which to bring suit against the Malison Company and if you will consult your lawyers you may see fit to withdraw this impulsive action. In any case, we are always ready to help you with the recapture and confinement of your wombat and to that end I recommend that you enlist the aid of our expert capture team. Naturally this should be done at once, before the wombat does any more . damage. Of course, the capture of a wombat on an inhabited planet is a somewhat expensive operation but I am sure you agree that the property and lives that can be saved by prompt action are much more important than mere monetary considerations. Due to the dangers involved in their work the capture team must obviously be paid in advance -- but we are standing ready to dispatch them the instant we receive your check. Good luck -- and if there is anything else we can do to help you out of this difficult situation, please let us know. Sincerely, C. J. Malison P. S. Naturally I do not like to press the point at this time, but the last payment on your Dorcas field generators is overdue, f hope you will attend to this matter as soon as possible. September #, S. D. # Commissioner, Planetary Zoo Sector #I Sir: Perhaps I did not make sufficiently clear the dangers implicit in the continued existence of a free, unhampered wombat on an IF inhabited planet. It is plain, at least, that you have not talked with the beast's caretaker or observed its behavior during feeding month -- else you would not have taken so lightly the suggestion offered in my last letter. Whether to use our capture team is, of course, up to you. But the terms of your refusal and your allegations concerning our motives were impudent and uncalled for. It is worth remembering that if the wombat's next feeding period (coming up in about two months, our records show) arrives before the animal is captured, then sending for the capture team will be very much a preliminary step. That step might best be followed by closing down all of your carpentry schools and birth-control centers, as there will be neither a housing shortage nor population pressure on your planet for some time to come. I hope I make myself perfectly clear. As to the animal's capture, there are several methods, some safer than others. The safest, of course, is to let our professional capture team do the job for you. I cannot understand why you are so adamant in your opposition to this proposal -- but if you have decided not to use all the resources at your disposal there is certainly nothing I can do about it. With reference to other methods of capture, I can only state the facts concerning a few prodecures, with most of which, to be sure, you already are acquainted. Wombats are essentially immune to most of the weapons of the modern military short of nuclear warheads, but a sufficient concentration of conventional firepower will sometimes discourage the animal and make subsequent steps in the capture somewhat easier. Caution must be used, however, since a well-fed and well-treated wombat such as are found in zoos is often very resistant to such methods. The actual capture can sometimes be effected by sandwiching the wombat between the defensive screens of two ships of the line (Mk. IV cruisers, or heavier). I note that your planet does not maintain a navy of its own but perhaps one of your neighboring systems could be prevailed upon to help. If not, we will be happy to sell you enough trimatrocine isomer #, the wombat tranquilizing gas, to spray an area of a hundred square kilometers. This should stop your wombat if all else fails -- but please remember that this is very potent, stable and elusive stuff and as such may be expected to have quite an effect on your planet's water ecology. Be careful with it. Your debt on the Dorcas field generators is still unpaid. Sincerely, C.J. Malison Dec. #, S.D. # Commissioner, Planetary Zoo Sector #I Sir: You treat the Malison Company most unfairly. We agree that the circumstances involving your wombat have been in some ways quite unfortunate but we feel that there is no justification for your violent assaults on our integrity. Your charges that we were "negligent" and "mercenary" are, we feel, especially ill-founded and we hope that you will see fit to retract these harsh words after your temper has subsided. Be assured, however, that even if you persist in your childish efforts to have the government indict us, we will harbor no resentment and will be quite happy to settle out of court for the unpaid balance on the wombat cages which you destroyed along with the wombat. In many ways the destruction of the wombat was the most regrettable event of all, since with a little foresight it could have been entirely avoided. We warned you to make sure that the wombat was in the area to be gassed before dropping the tranquilizer -- but wombats are very tricky creatures and I suppose mistakes will happen. After that fiasco the approach of the wombat's feeding period naturally made the use of nuclear weapons your only choice. Even a zoo and a few evacuated suburbs is a small price to pay for the avoidance of a hungry wombat. But the whole affair would have been so much easier if you had called in our capture team at the beginning. The monetary cost would have been much lower and at least the animal would have been preserved. Also, I am truly sorry that we did not foresee the effect of the tranquilizing gas on the animal life of your planet. You must understand, however, that it was a natural mistake. Those of us who deal exclusively in wombats tend to forget that there are animals besides man that drink water and are not immune to the lethal effects of the chemical. I would like to add that I am relieved to hear that the human situation is not so bad, since the water you import from Lyrantha VI is reportedly of the very highest quality. Finally, let me remind you that we bear no grudges because of your sometimes temperamental behavior and whenever you wish to replace your wombat, remember that we are the most reliable firm in the business. Hoping for more enjoyable business dealings in the near future, I remain, Very sincerely yours, C.J. Malison Malison Wombat Company Sector #  IF IN What color is the heart? A nd what color the mind? S he was nineteen, nondescript, blond, face and body still pudgy with baby fat. But she had the talent. Like no one else, she thought. I'm alone. Words appeared on the paper under her hand: "I live in a silent world where no one can enter or love. There are no locks, doors orJceys. Only an empty forest where I can walk and see the trees, cry and laugh at any cloud, taste the grass and touch the quiet wind." Julie sighed. She took the paper into her hands and slowly ripped it, letting the pieces flutter from the desk. The hot morning and the written words and the act were typical of Julie. But this morning the voice came, after nineteen years of silence. She had not yet heard it. She had taken her usual seat in the back row and neatly spread the spiral notebook in front of her, prepared to watch the shadows of the professor's words. "The French symbolists," intoned the professor, displaying his easy plastic smile, "could discover a strange beauty in seemingly contradictory places. Witness, for example, Baudelaire's 'A Carrion -- ' " The words rumbled meaninglessly in Julie's ears. The pen between her fingers made random scratches across the pad. Go ahead, said her mind. The bored girl let her brain reach out across the still heat of the room to pick up the thought currents beneath the professor's words. christ, i wish that broad in the front row would keep her legs together Julie drew back the probe, involuntarily pressed her knees together and felt the silky rub of her stockinged thighs. I'm blushing, she thought with chagrin, though she knew she wasn't the girl in the professor's mental image. That picture in his head... Nineteen years of mental eavesdropping fell heavily on Julie. I'll never get used to the pain in their minds, she thought. So often they've driven me inside my shield. Nineteen years and Julie had never met another person with the talent she possessed. All the people of the world who talk only through their lips, she thought, and then there's me. hey! heyjulie The voice was in her head. Julie looked up, shocked. in my head The faces of her classmates were glazed in identical boredom. no julie i'm not in your class Confused, Julie sat frozen. Her pen dropped unnoticed to the floor. control god calm now control Julie concentrated, tried to think coherently. you you re not talking to me you're here in my mind IF of course i'm a telepath just like you no! "No!" The boy beside Julie looked at her. The professor hesitated, went on with his lecture. no no no The linked, dark halls of Julie's mind echoed convulsively. Dazed with the shock of encounter, she panicked. Someone was moving slowly through the open field beside her pine forest. Stalking her. someone's reaching into me no get out please get out of my mind calm down julie steady now just take it easy girl i'm not intruding just talking to you yes yes i'm okay The panic faded, replaced by a chaos of confusing sensations.  feel like crying and laughing and screaming all at once you know The terror merged with an alien and gradually overpowering emotion. Unbelieving, Julie recognized it as hope. please i can't control this i'm sorry god the pain my loneliness i thought i was the only one i know Julie's thought was contrite. i'm sorry i was afraid can't think can't concentrate who are you how did you find me. slow down one thing at a time i know it's a shock should have been more cautious shouldn't have barged in like that when i picked up that shout of yours about loneliness but i couldn't help it you're the first i'm glad so happy happy The barrier of ice, long lodged in Julie's mind, had finally begun to melt. my name is ted Julie's mind soared. ted ted that's a beautiful name The clanging of the bell intruded. There was a shuffling of bodies as the students gathered up books, papers, pens, and herded themselves toward the door. Almost instantly Julie was alone in the classroom. so class is over Ted picked up her thought. what now, julie? do you want to meet me? yes god, yes, yes no more loneliness please The pause lengthened unendurably. Then Ted answered and the key of his thought was subdued. no julie i hope not where will i meet you across the mall on the north side i'll be sitting on the steps of the liberal arts building you don't mind if i wait here and let you do the walking question i want to meet you where it's beautiful and it's just that way here i don't mind it's a wonderful morning to walk now The next class was starting to filter into the room as Julie folded her notebook and put the ballpoint pen into her purse. Several students were already seajted and a very tall boy with red hair was standing at the end of Julie's row, looking uneasy. He probably sat in the desk Julie now occupied and wasn't sure how to cope with this unexpected change in his daily routine. Cradling her books in the crook of one arm, Julie stood and smiled at the redhead. He smiled back self-consciously and lowered his eyes. Julie suddenly caught his thought. what a cute girl wish she was in my class Julie smiled at him again as she passed and walked toward the door. Classes had almost finished changing. Julie threaded her way through late students and the others who were leisurely enjoying the spring sun as they wandered back to their dormitories. julie where are you from Ted. marley little town maybe a thousand people about fifty miles south of here are you from georgia too no i'm afraid you've got to brand me a yankee i'm from grand rapids that's michigan you don't sound like a yankee and you don't sound like a southern belle it's strange how accents disappear from thoughts it's really not like words at all no but i think it's ever so much better this way ey -- " She stopped and turned. Martin, tall and bluff in striped sports shirt and immaculate white tennis shoes, smiled down. "Come on," he said. Julie obediently started walking again and he fell into step beside her. "I want to talk to you." "Yes?" He looked down at her. "I want to apologize for the other night. That was a pretty bad scene." "Yes, it was." She didn't want to talk to Martin but she had been taught to be civil. ted do you mind no "I'm not really that way at all. I guess I had a lot to drink -- too much. I was a little higher than I expected to be." Julie nodded. "Well, I guess I wasn't really myself." Julie looked silently down at the sidewalk. "What I mean is," said Martin, "I want to apologize. I mean I want to make it up to you. Do you want to go out to a show and maybe have a few drinks this Saturday night?" The words rushed out. "It won't be like last time at all." Julie looked into Martin's earnIF est face and deliberately skimmed the surface of his conscious thoughts. it better not be like last time this time the bitch better put out or else i'm not about to spend  good cash on tickets and booze just so we can play kissy-jace at the front door of her dorm Julie forced her lips to smile. Martin smiled back gently, affectionately. "Go to hell," said Julie. She reached up, slapped Martin with all the force of her body. She walked away and left him standing dumb and foolish. Compassion and gentle laughter were in Ted's thoughts. good show girl but you should have kneed him right where it hurts he deserved more why he's no worse than others kind words in their mouths while their minds scream hate it isn't always so bad people have good thoughts now and then sometimes they think honest things occasionally they forget about selfishness and lying . like you His thought came buoyed by a vast good humor. i'm no candidate for sainthood but i guess i just try to treat people like i'd like to be treated it's a hokey philosophy but not a bad wish why not wish when i'm wishing i'm not at peace with myself His thought echoed in Julie like a litany. She recognized it and was still savoring it when the next one came. i've never really been at peace otherwise with myself or anybody i used to hate all of them for being what they were for not being able to touch me and i hated myself for hating and now i don't know Something fluttered against Julie's face. She opened her eyes and saw it -- a yellow butterfly, bright-winged and fragile. ted i feel like i've always been blind and now i can see Julie stopped on the sidewalk, turned completely around and eagerly took into herself the lush green lawns, the beds of crimson flowers, the tan stone and ivy-covered college walls and behind them in the air, the white skyline of downtown Atlanta. it's all different now ted not like it was She pirouetted, ecstatically thirsty, and drank the sights and sounds and smells and touches she had dimly known existed outside her. Ted's thought came softly. beautiful Julie saw the beauty of the world and felt the vision melt with Ted's mind in a thousand subtle ways. She took this taste of him, magnified it and she imagined she was a vessel overflowing with Ted's love for life, his sensitivity, his kindness. easy girl careful i don't think you've ever really looked at the world you re getting drunk on reality Julie laughed and was silent. you're beautiful i keep telling you i'm just a simple type with an oversimplified way of life that keeps me relatively happy then i want it too it's easy sometimes all you have to do is open yourself up to the world that's all She sensed a sharpness but disregarded it. i think i love you slow down julie we haven't even met yes we have in the most important way do you suppose our children will inherit our esp talent i really hadn't thought that far ahead i did the first moment i felt the loneliness start to melt julie yes nothing i'm almost there The mall was a broad green meadow, pentagonal, a web of paths linking the buildings at its corners. Julie crossed the center. Ahead was the pseudo-Greek architecture of the Liberal Arts Building where Ted waited. Julie reached the steps and stopped. She looked around. Classes had long since begun again and few students were in sight. A slender Negro sat to her left, beside a stack of worn textbooks. Julie turned ahead and saw a man seated a few steps above her, an athletic type staring back at her through dark glasses. "Ted?" she said tentatively. ted julie over here "Julie." The voice came from her left. Julie turned. "Hello, Julie." His voice was low, a pleasant bass. For an incredibly dilated moment Julie stared at the full lips from which the words had come, the wide dark eyes, the black skin. He spread his hands slightly. does it matter no no of course not But, of course, it did.  IF and Asa hunter he never lost his prey -- merely himself! r T HE continent below him was covered with lush jungle except for the sandy plateau twenty miles in diameter. A moment earlier his  instruments had picked up the other ship sitting near the southern edge of the tableland. The sandy surface of the plateau was fairly regular and Rysling decided to bring his own craft down on automatic, as close to the other ship as possible. He sat back in his contour seat and waited, his senses alert. Was someone else trying to beat him to his job? His small exploratory vessel was now three thousand feet above the plateau and coming down fast on secondary jets. The primary landside jets cut in with a roar at five hundred feet and the sleek vessel settled slowly to the sand. When all had quieted the displaced sand made a crater-like perimeter around the silver hull. Rysling made sure the double safety on tne star-drive was secure, cut in the double safety for the landside rockets. Through his forward screen he saw that the other ship and also both suns were up. The yellow star was high in the dark blue sky, near its noontime. The red giant was near the horizon, just above the green jungle which surrounded the barren plateau. Rysling released the strap from around his waist. He stood up slowly and stretched. Nothing about the other ship was moving. As yet the planet had no name, only a number: #-#-#. The gravity was only slightly higher than Earth normal. The atmosphere was nearly identical in composition to Earth's. For all practical purposes the planet was ready to be colonized. But Earth Authority was picky. It wanted a complete classification of the land animals. That was why hfc was here, to catch the only remaining land animal that had not yet been caught, a catlike, four-footed creature which to date had eluded all efforts of hunters. That was all he had been told. He had been given a flat fee, operating expenses and a time limit of one earth month. Two weeks had already gone by. As he came down the exit ramp, Rysling took a deep breath of the warm, humid air. After two weeks of the clean, sterile ship's air the natural variety smelled awful. He was almost sickened by the thought of micro-organisms suspended all around him. He came to the end of the ramp and the sand was gritty beneath his heavy boots. It felt good, despite the air. He noticed that he was about four hundred feet from the other ship. craft. The yellow sun was warm on his face. The other ship was also an exploratory model, slightly larger than his own. He estimated that it was perhaps two years older. There was a large, IF slightly scarred H on the hull. It might be one of Henderson's ships, he thought, but the fading letter was not conclusive proof. The ramp was down. Rsyling went halfway up the incline. "Is anyone home?" His voice echoed in the open airlock. There was no answer. He walked into the airlock and shouted up the central passageway which led up into the control room. "Hello." Still no answer. Rsyling climbed the ladder into the control room. He looked around at everything carefully. All seemed to be in order -- shut down -- except for the radar and sensor instruments. They continued their watch of the surrounding country. For the moment they had nothing to report. The light above the security switches over the star-drive and rockets glowed a bright green. Everything seemed as it should be. They're all probably outside. I'm sure to run into them sooner or later. He was almost ready to leave when his curiosity got the better of him. He sat down in the captain's station and flicked on the log tape. He listened. For a long time there was nothing. At last, very faintly, he heard heavy breathing, then a voice he didn't recognize. "The greycat, came into my mind. Suddenly I wasn't a man any more but a beast. A hallucination? I don't know -- but I'll be ready for it the next time. Going out now. Time: hell, my watch is broken..." The tape ran on for a long time. Nothing more seemed to be on it. Rysling waited a little longer and switched it off. Apparently the skipper of the ship had not yet come back. He sounded like a man of imagination and easily frightened. Rysling shrugged. He descended to the airlock, walked down the ramp, wandered to the edge of the plateau. Maybe the ship's personnel was down in the jungle. He unsnapped his binoculars and began sweeping the jungle. Some impulse made him look straight down to the base of the cliff. He saw a stretch of white sand -- and then he saw the bones. Two human skeletons lay on the sand, hands pointed to the jungle as if praying. They must have fallen to their deaths somehow. Rysling turned up the magnification of his oculars. At once it seemed he was standing directly over the two skeletons. 'A bug crawled out of one of the skulls and fled across the bright sand into the underbrush. How long did it take for flesh to rot away? Later he would have to go down and try to make identifications, determine what had happened and pack the remains for shipment home. But for now he had a job to do, an animal to net. It was the kind of odd job he often took on between his regular ship runs. A man could always do with a little extra capital. Besides, he liked hunting. Trap a greycat, they had told him. Simple enough with the proper gear. But others had failed. Maybe Earth Authority had hired bunglers. Like the previous owners of the two skeletons below? Their fate really didn't concern him. He would not fail. T HE "hound" was really just a cage which could open any one of its six sides, could track its prey visually and through body heat and strike more swiftly than any living thing could move. Carefully Rysling worked the remote controls and guided it out of the cargo hold and gently down to the sand. He had set up the tripod earlier. It held the screen monitor for the hound's electronic eyes. The remote control panel was just below the screen. In effect he would be the hound, seeing with its eyes and making sure that it did not tangle itself in vegetation -- much of the tracking, however, was automatic and in reality he would only be needed during crucial moments, if they arose. Otherwise he could just sit in front of the monitor and live vicariously what the hound was doing. A routine job. He could not see how anyone could have failed to catch the animal. The beast didn't have a chance. The hound's eyes and heat-sensing device were tied into the ship's computers which had been programed to recognize only this type of living thing. Rysling adjusted the controls for automatic search pattern. The pattern was based on what knowledge the computer had of the greycat. The hound lifted itself from the sand and moved slowly to the edge of the plateau. In a moment it dripped out of sight into the jungle. Rysling sat back in his seat in front of the monitor screen and stretched his legs. In front of him now he could see wide-stemmed plants as the hound-cage pushed them aside. Some smaller plants bore large unopened buds. The tree trunks were massive, and an unfamiliar moss grew over much of their brown surface. The grass in the forest was a foot high, Rysling estimated. He could see great vines passing throught it -- lines of communication between the trees. He felt as if he were the hound, a great and powerful beast moving through the jungle aisles. The heat there was oppressive and moisture fell in great drops from huge leaves. He pushed a button and the hound's eyes looked to the now hidden sky. He could only see the great trunks, standing like titans, guardians of the forest. Rysling turned to look at the other ship. Sunlight was bright on the plateau. The yellow star was edging toward its afternoon. The red giant was partly below the horizon. Atmospheric refraction disIF torted its equatorial region, making the huge star look misshapen and bloated. Rysling no longer believed that anyone would return to the other ship. When he turned again to the screen the hound was motionless. Nothing moved on the monitor except for a leaf touched by the wind. Slowly, silently, the greycat walked into view, thin and muscular, body low to the ground -- the eyes were yellow ovals and looked directly into the screen. Rysling was fascinated by the eyes, they beckoned him, they drew his gaze into themselves. It seemed almost as if the cat were looking directly at him, as if the green-furred beast knew that something else waited behind the hound's mechanical eyes. Rysling bit his lip. His hands hovered over the console, ready to take over in case of difficulty. The hound moved in slowly at first, automatically -- it picked up speed until it was moving about thirty miles an hour. But the greycat was suddenly a blur skimming the grass. The hound followed with deadly accuracy, changing direction with the animal. In a few moments it was directly behind the cat. Both were moving well past fifty miles and hour, Rysling estimated. The front cage door was open. Rysling noticed the red light on the console, informing him of the fact. There was a different colored light for each of the six doors. At any moment now the cat would be scooped up and the door would shut. In front of him Rysling could see the dark streak that ran from the cat's ears to the long tail. The greycat jumped into some brush, turned and snarled at him. In a moment it would all be over, Rysling thought. Then he could go and take care of the two skeletons at the cliff base, go home to collect the rest of his fee. The green vegetation before him was suddenly very vivid. Rysling felt a dizziness. He closed his eyes for a moment. His arms grew heavy and blood pounded in his head. When he opened his eyes the screen was out of focus and the whole world was spinning. He felt as if he were falling , but slowly. And the cool green grass of the forest was all around him , caressing him , inviting him to sleep until his strength returned and he could fight the strange , scentless creature that was chasing him. Rysling looked up at the hound through the greycat s eyes. It was coming toward him. He rose on his hind paws and fell back farther into the thick brush. He tried to swat the cage with his paw. He snarled and fell over backward. He jumped to all fours immediately. And ran. His cat's body ran without him , instinctively , turning , jumping with an exhilarating sureness. He felt the thorn balls cling to his paws. His eyes saw everything -- the forest was a rich orchestration of scents that told him all he needed to know. Rysling turned off the hound's automatic program. He was shaking. Sweat had run down his back. He inhaled a tranquilizer. The hound would come back now but he would send it out again. A hallucination, he thought. It was what the voice on the log tape of the other ship had been talking about. But he had felt pain, fatigue, tasted the pungent scents of the forest, known the sweat and muscles of the swift greycat as he knew his own. And he had known the fear of the cat, running before something it did not understand, could never understand because it was not part of the normal environment. He thought he had part of the picture now. He had been hit by the animal's defense mechanism. Did the cat have telepathic abilities? At any rate, what he had experienced had to be an illusion and he would have to ignore it next time around. Perhaps the cat's strange power dated from some still undiscovered stage of interplanetary evolution when all life forms were still undifferentiated, all awarenesses one -- the single pulse of the natural force. The hound appeared over the edge of the plateau. It skimmed to within six feet of the control console tripod and settled to the ground. Rysling went to it and checked it carefully. Nothing was wrong. He went back to the console and sat down to face the screen. With one flick he turned the automatic track back on. Quickly the hound flew over it. When it reached the spot where it had left the cat it descended again to the jungle floor, its heat residue sensor scanning the ground for the warm trail. The greycat's path led in a wide circle toward the northern cliff wall of the plateau. The hound followed. Apparently the animal was following the cliff wall closely. The hound picked up speed. The greycat came into view on the sand ahead. The hound picked up still more speed. The cat ran, leaving big paw prints in the sand strip that rimmed the base of the plateau. Rysling braced himself for the hallucination. It came like a dream he could recognize as one but he could not break the spell. The cage was open and coming directly for him. The cliff wall was at his back. He had to wait for the moment when he could rush past it into the jungle. For an instant his new body was frozen, as if all its instincts were dead or confused by the precision of an enemy which made so few mistakes, gave so little opportunity to escape. The cage came on until it was directly in front of him. It swallowed him. The bars slid IF shut with a click. Then he heard the small voice whispering in his ear, Youre Rysling -- this is an illusion. It will go away, change. Just wait. But the presence of the jungle was stronger, the backdrop of his new life, the vast and vivid support for his senses, the source of all blessings. He heard it, he smelled it, he saw the vivid, achingly intense colors. Only the bars kept him from it. His own voice was very faint, very far away and of no consequence. A small fly buzzing near his ear. The greycat threw himself at the bars. Stupid, the button, the voice said. Outside the first bar . He slid his paw between the bars and pushed wildly. The side entrance of the cage opened with a half-remembered whirring sound. The jungle beckoned. He ran into the gloom, quietly, swiftly, in one fluid motion unlike the jerky point-to-point movement of his previous life. He could smell the shades of colors -- he sensed the range which before had been only green, brown, or mud-colored. The soft voice told him to go back, regain his former self, break the spell that bound him to a world that man had turned his back on a was a poor, sterile thing compared with the rich, surrounding forest. Still, he would have to go back, if only for a moment. The jungle called to him -- it promised confidently. But instead he ran toward the sandy plateau. The human form that had once been Kurt Rysling stood up from its seat in front of the tripod console. Its movements were jerky. It tried to walk and fell on all fours. The smell of the jungle it had known all its life seemed distant , faded and alien. The colors were pale and the normal sounds of the forest were gone. Its strange new limbs were weak. The greycat tried to growl but only a weak sound came out of its small, human mouth. He crawled nearer the jungle, hoping that all the normal sensations would return. He reached the edge. The urge to jump came suddenly. The greycat leaped from the plateau, its human arms stretched out in front like paws. The small voice still spoke in the greycat's simple brain. Momentarily it became stronger when the cat came to the broken body of Kurt Rysling lying next to the sunbleached skeletons at the bottom of the cliff. The red star had long since set, and the yellow sun was low over the jungle. The cat stood perfectly still in the cliff's shadow, listening. Dimly, from somewhere in the depths of the greycat's nervous system, Rysling understood what had happened to the two skeletons before him. This then was the skipper of the other ship and his companion and what was happening to him had happened to them. He looked at his own corpse with indifference. It was after all a thing and not himself. He felt comfortable and safe. From somewhere his old voice summoned up enough strength to tell him that while he could adapt easily to the cat's nervous system, the greycat had not been able to master the complexities of a human cortex. But, then, did this not mean that the human mind was only a resident of the physio-chemical brain? That in reality it was an epiphenomenon, a matrix of energy which could detach itself from its physical form? It must be so, the small voice said. After all, the iron of a magnet produces something beyond itself, the magnetic field; and the mass of a world produces a gravitational field; and the physio-chemical brain tissue produces a pattern of energies that is the real mind, responsible for all the higher functions. The small voice seemed desperate as it spoke. There would be a price to pay for his new existence -- fading memories, the power of reason, love. But he didn't care. The world was vast and entirely within his grasp. It was a world for him. The smells of the forest wrapped themselves around him. Did he for a moment detect -- a female odor? The image was clear: a sleek female, waiting somewhere for him. The small voice was almost gone now -- he could not understand its meaning or where it had come from. He glanced again at the broken body that lay face down, its neck broken. He looked up to the edge of the plateau. Had he thought of going there? There was no way up. Swiftly he turned and ran into the green shadows. His muscles were strong. In one place the yellow sun cast its light into the jungle aisle, making his fur feel warm. Soon, he knew, it would be night. The small voice was only a background sound,' no stronger than an insect's drone. He stopped and turned to look at the plateau, which from this distance was visible through a break in the trees. He could just barely see the top of one silvery ship. He looked at it, trying to remember what it was but that memory was already gone. The greycat turned again and disappeared into the jungle.  IF At Christopher Inn, # East Broad St., Columbus, Ohio. Guest-of Honor: Anne McCaffrey. Features: Panels, parties, movies, banquet. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Larry Smith, #F Roche Drive, Columbus, Ohio #.  the Statler Hilton, Boston. For information: Anthony Lewis, # Unity Avenue, Belmont, Mass. #.  Hilton Inn, San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests of Honor: Miriam Allen de Ford and E. Hoffman Price. Fan Guest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. Memberships: # now, # after January #st, # at the door. For information: Quinn Yarbro, # Colusa ##, Berkeley, Calif. #.  At the Royal Hotel, Southampton, England. Guest of Honor: James Blish. 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It is thought that Mlis Abnethe, an enormously wealthy and beautiful but unscrupulous human woman is somehow involved in the disappearances. No one has ever seen a Caleban and few have successfully communicated with one. McKie forces an entry into the Beachball stranded on Cordiality and confronts the Caleban domiciled in it. He succeeds in establishing communication with the Caleban, a pure sentient, who communicates from mind to mind and tells him that Mlis Abnethe is indeed involved in the inexplicable goings on. Mlis is a flagellator , who has acquired a contractual right to have the Caleban whipped for her pleasure -- in return she has promised certain educational advantages for Calebans. McKie witnesses and interrupts one of the flagellations, discovers that the Caleban, who has assumed the name Fanny Mae, has fallen in love with him. McKie, a veteran of fifty-four unsuccessful marriages, is unimpressed, but utilizes the fact that the universality of love permits Fanny Mae to violate her contract with Mliss Abnethe and send him on her trail via a jumpdoor. He emerges on an unfamiliar planet, talking to an uncommunicative rock. He starts walking, receives an interplanetary telepathic call -- actually a sniggertrance seizure -- from his superiors at BuSab. One of Abnethe s whips and knives have been recovered and analyzed as being made of rawhide and steel. Both materials are anachronistic to the time of the events -- their use has been discontinued long ago, and may provide a clue to Abnethe s whereabouts -- McKie is to look into the matter. He does -- and finds himself in a strangely archaic setting, suggestive of a textbook scene from the dark ages of ancient Earth. He sees black men, women and children, grass huts, primitive, twohorned beasts yoked to wagons -- a scene from ancient Africa. The blacks turn out to be Mliss Abnethe's subjects -- he has reached her hideaway without knowing where he is in time and space. While Abnethe reaches out via a jumpdoor to murder Furuneo, who has been left to guard Fanny Mae, the blacks seize McKie and prepare to kill him. With her Pan Spechi aide, Cheo, Abnethe plots the death of Fanny Mae and the end of ConSentients. IF ignited at his death, Taprisiots scanned the Beachball area. They found only the Caleban and four enforcers in hovering guard ships. Reasoning about actions, motives or guilt did not come within the Taprisiot scope. They merely reported the death, its location and the sentients available to their scanners. The four enforcers came in for several days of rough questioning as a result. The Caleban was a different matter. A full BuSab management conference was required before they could decide what action to take about the Caleban. Furuneo's death had come under extremely mysterious circumstances -- no head, unintelligible responses from the Caleban. As Tuluk entered the conference room on a summons that had roused him from sleep, Siker was flailing the table. He was using his middle fighting tendril for the gesture, quite unLaclac in emotional intensity. "We don't act without calling McKie," Siker said. "This is too delicate." Tuluk took his position at the table, leaned into the Wreave support provided for his species, spoke mildly: "Haven't you contacted McKie yet? Furuneo was supposed to have ordered the Caleban -- " That was as far as he got. Explanations and data came at him from several of the others. Presently, Tuluk said: "Where's Furuneo's body?" "Enforcers are bringing it to the lab now." "Have the police been brought in?" "Of course." "Anything on the missing head?" "No sign of it." "Has to be result of a jumpdoor," Tuluk said. "Will the police take over?" "We're not going to allow that. One of our own." Tuluk nodded. "Fm with Siker, then. We don't move without consulting McKie. This case was handed to him when we didn't know its extent. He's still in charge." "Should we reconsider that decision?" someone down the table asked. Tuluk shook his head. "Bad form," he said. "First things first. Furuneo' s dead and he was supposed to have ordered McKie's return some time ago." Bildoon, the Pan Spechi chief of the Bureau, had watched this exchange with attentive silence. He had been ego holder of his pentarchal life group for seventeen years -- a reasonably average time in his species. Although the thought revolted him in a way other species could never really understand, he knew he would have to give up the ego to the youngest member of his creche circle soon. The ego exchange would come sooner than it might have without the strains of command. Terrible price to pay in the service of sentience, he thought. The humanoid appearance his kind had genetically adopted had a tendency to beguile other humanoids into forgetting the essentially alien character of the Pan Spechi. The time would come, though, when they would be unable to avoid alien awareness in Bildoon's case. His friends in the ConSentiency would see the crechechange at its beginning -- the glazing of the eyes, the rictus of mouth. Best not think about that, he warned himself. He needed all his abilities right now. He felt he no longer lived in his ego-self, and this was a sensation of exquisite torture for a Pan Spechi. But the black negation of all sentient life that threatened his universe demanded the sacrifice of personal fears. The Caleban must not be allowed to die. Until he had assured himself of the Caleban's survival, he must cling to any rope life offered him, endure any terror, refuse to mourn for the almost-death-of-self that lurked in Pan Spechi nightmares. A greater death pressed upon them all. Siker, he saw, was staring at him with an unspoken question. Bildoon spoke three words: "Get a Taprisiot." Someone near the door hurried to obey. "Who was most recently in contact with McKie?" Bildoon asked. "I believe I was," Tuluk said. "It'll be easier for you, then," Bildoon said. "Make it short." Tuluk wrinkled his facial slit in agreement. A Taprisiot was led in, was helped up onto the table. It complained that they were being much too rough with its speech needles, that the imbedment was imperfect, that they had not given it sufficient time to prepare its energies. the emergency clause of the Bureau's special contract would it agree to act. It positioned itself in front of Tuluk It said, "Date, time and place." Tuluk gave the local coordinates. "Close face," the Taprisiot ordered. Tuluk obeyed. "Think of contact," the Taprisiot sqeaked. Tuluk thought of McKie. Time passed without contact. Tuluk opened his face, stared out. "Close face," the Taprisiot ordered. Tuluk obeyed. Bildoon asked, "Is something wrong?" "Contact through Caleban change time," the Taprisiot said. "Same as before." "Contact through a Caleban?" Bildoon ventured. "Otherwise not available," the Taprisiot said. "McKie isolated in connectives of another being." "I don't care how you get him, just get him," Bildoon ordered. "Hold silence," the Taprisiot said. "Disturb imbedment." Its speech needles rustled. "Pucha, pucha," it said. "Call go when Caleban permit." Abruptly, Tuluk jerked as the sniggertrance marked pineal ignition. "McKie?" he said. "Tuluk here." IF The words, uttered through the mumbling of the sniggertrance, were barely audible to the others around the table. Speaking as calmly as he could, McKie said, "McKie will not be here in about thirty seconds unless you call Furuneo and have him order that Caleban to free me -- " "What's wrong?" Tuluk asked. "I'm staked out and a Palenki is on its way to kill me. I can see it against the firelight. It's carrying what appears to be an axe. It's going to chop me up. You know how they -- " "I can't call Furuneo. He's..." "Then call the Caleban!" "You know you can't call a Caleban." "Doit, you oaf!" Because McKie had ordered it, suspecting that he might know such a call could be made, Tuluk broke the contact, sent a demand at the Taprisiot. It was against reason -- all the data said Taprisiots could not link sentients and Calebans. To the observers in the conference room the more obvious mumbling and chuckling of the sniggertrance faded, made a brief return, disappeared. Bildoon almost barked a question at Tuluk, hesitated. The Wreave's tubular body remained so -- still. "I wonder why the Tappy said he had to call through a Caleban?" Siker whispered. Bildoon shook his head. A Chither near Tuluk said, "You know, I could swear he ordered the Taprisiot to call the Caleban." "Nonsense," Siker said. "I don't understand it," the Chither said. "How could McKie go somewhere and not know where he is?" "Is Tuluk out of the sniggertrance or isn't he?" Siker asked, his voice fearful. "He acts like nobody's there." Every sentient around the table froze into silence. They all knew what Siker meant. Had the Wreave been trapped in the call? Was Tuluk gone, taken into that strange limbo from which the personality never returned? The assembled sentients jerked back from the conference table as McKie came tumbling out of nowhere in a shower of dust and dirt. He landed flat on his back on the table directly in front of Bildoon, who lifted half out of his chair. McKie's wrists were bloody. His eyes were glazed. His red hair was a tangled, wild mop. "Now," McKie whispered. He turned to his side, saw Bildoon, and as though it explained everything, added: "The axe was descending." "What axe?" Bildoon demanded, sliding back into his chair. "The one the Palenki was aiming at my head." "The -- what?" McKie sat up, massaged his torn wrists where the bindings had held him. Presently he shifted his ministrations to his ankles. He looked like a Gowachin frog deity. "McKie, explain what's going on here," Bildoon ordered. "I -- ahhh -- well, the nick of time was almost a fatal nick too late," McKie said. "What made Furuneo wait so long? He was told six hours, no more. Wasn't he?" McKie looked at Tuluk, who remained silent, stiff as a length of gray pipe against the Wreave support. "Furuneo'sdead," Bildoon said. "Damn," McKie said softly. "How?" Bildoon made the explanation brief, then asked, "Where've you been? What's this about a Palenki with an axe?" McKie, still sitting on the table, gave a neatly abbreviated, chronological report. It sounded as though he were . talking about a third person. He wound it up with a flat statement: "I have no idea at all where I was." "They were going to -- chop you up?" Bildoon asked. "The axe was coming down," McKie said. "It was right there." He held up a hand about six centimeters from his nose." Siker cleared his throat, said, "Something's wrong with Tuluk." They all turned. against the support, his face slit closed. His body was there but he was not. "Is he -- lost?" Bildoon rasped and turned away. If Tuluk failed to come back -- how like the Pan Spechi ego loss that would be! "Somebody down there shake up that Taprisiot," McKie ordered. "Why bother?" That was a human male from the legal department. "They never answer a direct question about -- you know." He glanced uneasily at Bildoon, who remained with face averted. "Tuluk made contact with the Caleban," McKie said, remembering. "I told him -- it's the only way he could have done it with Furuneo dead." He stood up on the table, walked down its length to stand towering over the Taprisiot. "You!" he shouted. "Taprisiot!" Silence. McKie drew a finger along an arm of speech needles. They clattered like a line of wooden clackers but no intelligible sound came from the Taprisiot. "You're not supposed to touch them," someone said. "Get another Taprisiot in here," McKie ordered. Someone ran to obey...McKie mopped his forehead. He required all his reserves to keep from trembling. During the descent of the Palenki axe he had said goodbye to the universe. It had been final, irrevocable. He still felt that he had not returned, that he was watching the antics of some other creature in his own flesh, a familiar creature -- but a stranger, really. This room, the words and actions around him, were some sort of distorted play refined to blind sterility. In the instant when he had accepted his own death he had realized there still remained uncounted experiences he wanted to live through. This room and his duties as a BuSab agent had not IF been among those experiences. The old reality was drowned in selfish memories. Still, this flesh went through the motions. That was what training did. A second Taprisiot was herded into the room, its needles squeaking complaints. It was hoisted onto the table, objecting all the way. "You have Taprisiot! Why you disturb?" Bildoon turned back to the table, studied the scene but remained silent, withdrawn. No one had ever been brought back from the longdistance trap. McKie faced the new Taprisiot. "Can you contact this other Taprisiot?" he demanded. "Pucha, pucha -- " the second Taprisiot began. "I'm sincere." "Ahseeda day-day," the second Taprisiot squeaked. "I'll stack you with somebody's firewood if you don't get cracking," McKie snarled. "Can you make contact?" "Who you call?" the second Taprisiot asked. "Not me, you fugitive from a sawmill!" McKie roared. "Them." He pointed at Tuluk and the first Taprisiot. "They stuck to Caleban," the second Taprisiot said. "Who you call?" "What do you mean, stuck?" McKie demanded. "Tangled?" the Taprisiot ventured. "Can either of them be called?" McKie asked. "Untangle soon, then call," the Taprisiot said. "Look," Siker said. McKie whirled. Tuluk was flexing his facial slit. A mandibular extensor came out, withdrew. McKie held his breath. Tuluk's facial slit opened wide and he said, "Fascinating." "Tuluk?" McKie said. The slit widened. Wreave eyes stared out. "Yes?" Then: "Ah, McKie. You made it." "You call now?" the second Taprisiot asked. "Get rid of him," McKie ordered. Squeaking protests -- "If you not call, why disturb?" -- the Taprisiot was removed from the room. "What happened to you, Tuluk?" McKie asked. "Difficult to explain," the Wreave said. "Try." "Imbedment," Tuluk said. "That has something to do with planetary conjunctions, whether the points linked by a call are aligned with each other across open space. There was some problem with this call, discontinuous through a stellar mass, perhaps. And it was contact with a Caleban -- I don't appear to have the proper words." "Do you understand what happened to you?" "I think so. You know, I hadn't realized where I lived." McKie stared at him, puzzled. "What?" "Something's wrong here," Tuluk said. "Oh, yes -- Furuneo." "You said something about where you lived," McKie prodded. "Space occupancy, yes," Tuluk said. "I live in a place with many -- ah -- synonymous? Yes, synonymous occupants." "What are you talking about?" "I was actually in contact with the Caleban during my call to you," Tuluk said. "Very odd, McKie. It was as though my call went through a pinhole in a black curtain and the pinhole was the Caleban." "So you contacted the Caleban," McKie prompted. "Oh, yes. Indeed I did." Tuluk's mandibular extensors moved in a pattern indicative of emotional disturbance. "I saw! That's it. I saw -- ah -- many frames of parallel films. Of course, I didn't really see them. It was the eye." "Eye? Whose eye?" "That's the pinhole," Tuluk explained. "It's our eye, too, naturally." "Do you understand any of this, McKie?" Bildoon asked. "My impression is he's talking like a Caleban," McKie said. He shrugged. "Contaminated, perhaps. Entangled?" "I suspect," Bildoon said, "that Caleban communication can be understood only by the certifiably insane." from his lip. He felt he could almost understand what Tuluk Jbad said. Meaning hovered right at the edge of awareness. "Tuluk," Bildoon said, "try to tell us what happened to you. We don't understand you." "I am trying." "Keep at it," McKie said. "You contacted the Caleban," Bildoon said. "How was that done? We've been told it's impossible." "It was partly because the Caleban seemed to be handling my call to McKie," Tuluk said. "Then -- McKie ordered me to call the Caleban. Perhaps it heard." Tuluk closed his eyes, appeared lost in reverie. "Go on," Bildoon said. "I -- it was -- " Tuluk shook his head, opened his eyes, stared pleadingly around the room. He met curious, probing eyes on all sides. "Imagine two spiderwebs," he said. "Natural spiderwebs, now, not the kind they spin at our command -- random products. Imagine that they must -- contact each other -- a certain congruity between them, an occlusion." "Like a dental occlusion?" McKie asked. "Perhaps. At any rate, this necessary congruity, this shape required for contact, presumes upon proper connectives." McKie expelled a harsh breath. "What the devil are connectives?" "I go now?" the first Taprisiot interrupted. "Damn," McKie said. "Somebody get rid of this thing." The Taprisiot was hustled from the room. "Tuluk, what are connectives?" McKie demanded. "Is this important?" Bildoon asked. "Will you all take my word for it and let him answer?" McKie IF asked. "It's important, believe me. Tuluk?" Tuluk said, "You realize, of course, that artificiality can be refined to the point where it's virtually indistinguishable from original reality?" "What's that have to do with connectives?" "It's precisely at that point where the single distinguishing characteristic between original and artificial is the connective." "Huh?" McKie said. "Look at me," Tuluk said. "I am looking at you." "Imagine that you take a food vat and produce in it an exact fleshly duplicate of my person," Tuluk said. "An exact fleshly -- " "You could do it, couldn't you?" Tuluk demanded. "Of course. But why?" "Just imagine it. Don't question. An exact duplicate down to and including the cellular message units. This fleshwould be imbued with all my memories and responses. Ask it a question you might ask of me and it would answer as I might answer. Even my mates wouldn't be able to distinguish between us." "So," McKie said. "Would there be any difference between us?" Tuluk asked. "But you said -- " "There would be one difference, wouldn't there?" "The time element, the -- " "More than that," Tuluk said. "One would know it was a copy. Now, that chairdog in which Ser Bildoon sits is a different matter, not so?" "Huh?" "It's an unthinking animal," Tuluk said. McKie stared at the chairdog Tuluk had indicated. It was a product of genetic shaping, gene surgery and selection. What possible difference could it make that the chairdog was an animal -- however remotely descended? "What does the chairdog eat?" Tuluk asked. "The food tailored for it, what else?" McKie turned back to the Wreave, studied him. "But neither the chairdog nor its food are the same as their ancestral flesh," Tuluk said. "The vat food is an endless, serial chain of protein. The chairdog is flesh which is ecstatic in its work." "Of course. That's the way it was made." McKie's eyes went wide. He began to see what Tuluk was explaining. "The differences, these are the connectives," Tuluk said. "McKie, do you understand this gibberish?" Bildoon demanded. McKie's throat was dry. "The Caleban sees only these -- refined differences?" he asked. "And nothing else," Tuluk said. "Then it doesn't see us as shapes or dimensions or -- " "Or even as extensions in time as we understand time," Tuluk said. "We are, perhaps, nodes on a standing wave. Time, for the Caleban, isn't Something squeezed out of a tube. It's more like a line which your senses intersect." , McKie breathed deeply. "I don't see where this helps us one bit," Bildoon said. "Our major problem is to find Abnethe. Do you have any idea, McKie, where that Caleban sent you?" "I saw the night constellations overhead," McKie said. "Before I leave we'll get a mindcord on what I saw and have a computer check on the star patterns." "Provided the pattern's in the Master Registry," Bildoon said. "What about that slave culture McKie stumbled on?" one of the Legal staff asked. "We could ask fora... "Haven't any of you been listening?" McKie asked. "Our problem is to find Abnethe. I thought we had her, but I'm beginning to think this may not be that easy. Where is she? How can we go into a court and say 'At some unknown place in an unknown galaxy, a female believed to be Mliss Abnethe, but whom I didn't really see, is alleged to be conductmg... "Then what do we do?" the Legal staffer growled. "With Furuneo dead, who's watching Fanny Mae?" McKie asked. "We have four enforcers watching inside -- where she is," Bildoon said. "And four outside, watching them. Are you sure you've no other clue to where you were?" "None." "A complaint by McKie would fail now." Bildoon said. "No -- a better move might be to charge her with harboring a -- " he shuddered -- "Pan Spechi fugitive." "Do we know who that fugitive is?" McKie asked. "Not yet. We haven't decided the proper course yet. I'm leaving that up to legal." He glanced at a Legal Department representative, a human female seated near Tuluk. "Hanaman?" Hanaman cleared her throat. She was a fragile woman, thick head of brown hair in gentle waves, a long oval face with soft blue eyes, delicate nose and chin, a wide full mouth. "You think it advisable to discuss this in Council now?" she asked. "I do or I wouldn't have called on you," Bildoon said. F OR an instant McKie thought the reproof might bring real tears to Hanaman's eyes. Then he saw the controlled, measuring stare she swept around the conference room. She had brains, he saw, and knew there were those here susceptible to her sex. "McKie," she said, "is it necessary for you to stand on the table? You're not a Taprisiot." "Thanks for reminding me," he said. He jumped down, found a chairdog opposite her, stared back at her with a bland intensity. Presently she focused on Bildoon, said, "To bring everyone up to date, Abnethe with one Palenki tried to flog the Caleban about two hours ago. Acting on our orders, an enforcer prevented the flogging. He cut off the Palenki's arm with a raygen. As a result, Abnethe's legal staff already is seeking an injunction." "Then they were prepared ahead of time," McKie said. IF "Obviously," she agreed. "They're alleging outlaw sabotage, misfeasance by a bureau, mayhem, misconduct, malicious mischief, felonious misprision -- " "Misfeasance?" McKie demanded. "This is a robo-legum case, not a Gowachin jurisdiction," Hanaman said. "We don't have to exonerate the prosecutor before entering the -- " She broke off, shrugged. "Well, you know all that. BuSab is being held to answer for collective responsibility in the consequences of unlawful and wrongful acts committed by its agents in pursuance of the authority permitted them -- " "Wait a minute," McKie interrupted. "This is bolder than I expected from that crowd." " -- and they charge," Hanaman went on, "that the Bureau is guilty of a felony by criminal neglect in failure to prevent a felony from being committed and not bringing to justice the offender after such commission." "Have they named names or is it all John Does?" McKie asked. "No names." "If they're this bold, they're desperate," McKie said. "Why?" "They know we aren't going to sit idly by and allow our people to be killed," Bildoon said. "They know we have copies of the contract with the Caleban and that it gives Abnethe control of the Caleban's jumpdoor. No one else could have been responsible for Furuneo's death and the perpetrator -- " "No one except the Caleban," McKie said. A profound silence settled over the room. Presently Tuluk said, "You don't seriouly believe -- " "No, I don't," McKie said. "But I couldn't prove my belief to a robo-legum court. This does present an interesting possibility, though." "Furuneo's head," Bildoon said. "Correct," McKie said. "We demand Furuneo's head." "What if they contend the Caleban sequestered the head?" Hanaman asked. "I don't intend asking them for it," McKie said. "I'm going to ask the Caleban." Hanaman nodded, her gaze intent on McKie with a light of admiration in her eyes. "Clever," she breathed. "If they attempt to interfere -- they're guilty. But if we get the head -- " She looked at Tuluk. "What about it, Tuluk?" Bildoon asked. "Think you could get anything from Furuneo's brain?" "That depends on how much time has passed between the death and our key-in," Tuluk said. "Nerve replay has limits, you know." "We know," Bildoon said. "Yeah," McKie said. "Only one thing for me to do now; isn't there?" "Looks that way," Bildoon said. "Will you call off the enforcers or shall I?" McKie asked. "Now, wait a minute," Bildoon said. "I know you have to go back to that Beachball but -- " "Alone," McKie said. "Why?" "I can give the demand 'for Furuneo's head in front of witnesses," McKie said, "but that's not enough. They want me. I got away from them and they've no idea how much I know about their hidey hole." "Exactly what do you know?" Bildoon asked. "We've already been through that," McKie said. "So you now see yourself as bait?" "I wouldn't put it exactly that way," McKie said. "But if I'm alone they mighT try bargaining with me. They might even -- " "They might even shorten you!" Bildoon snarled. "You don't think it's worth the try?" McKie asked. He stared around the room at the attentive faces. Hanaman cleared her throat. "I see a way out of this." Everyone looked at her. "We could put McKie under Taprisiot surveillance," she said. "He's a ready-made victim if he's sitting there in a sniggertrance," Tuluk said. "Not if the Taprisiot contacts are minimal every few seconds." "And as long. as I'm not yelling for help the Tappy breaks off," McKie said. "Good." "I don't like it," Bildoon said. "What if -- " "You think they'll talk openly to me if they see the plate full of enforcers? McKie asked. "No, but if we can prevent -- " "We can't and you know it." Bildoon glared at him but did not speak. "We must have those contacts between McKie and Abnethe if we're going to try cross-charting to locate her position," Tuluk said. Bildoon stared at the table in front of him. "That Beachball has a fixed position on Cordiality," McKie argued. "Cordiality has a known planetary period. At the instant of each contact the Ball will be pointing at a position in space -- a line of least resistance for the contact. Enough contacts will describe a cone with -- " " -- with Abnethe somewhere in it," Bildoon supplied, looking up. "Provided you're right about this thing." "The call connectives have to seek their conjunction through open space," Tuluk said. "There must be no large stellar masses between call points, no hydrogen clouds of any serious dimensions, no groups of large planetary -- " "I understand the theory," Bildoon said. "But there's no theory needed about what they can do to McKie. It'd take them less than two seconds to slip a jumpdoor over his neck and -- " He drew a finger across his throat. "So you have the Tappy contact me every two seconds," McKie said. "Work it in relays. Get a string of agents in -- " "And what if they don't try to contact you?" Bildoon thoughtfully asked. "Then we'll have to sabotage them," McKie said. IF to it, McKie decided, this Beachball wasn't as weird a home as some he'd seen. It was hot, yes, but that fitted a peculiar requirement of the occupant. Sentients existed in hotter climates. The giant spoon where the Caleban's unpresence could be detected -- well, that could be equated with a divan. Wall handles, spools there, lights and whatnot -- all those were almost conventional in appearance, although McKie seriously doubted he could understand their functions. The automated homes of Breedywie, though, displayed more outlandish control consoles. The ceiling here was a bit low but he could stand without stooping. The purple gloom was no stranger than the variglare of Gowachin where most offworld sentients had to wear protective goggles while visiting friends. The Beachball's floor covering did not appear to be a conventional living organism, but it was soft. Right now it smelled of a standard pyrocene cleaner-disinfectant and the fumes were rather stifling in the heat. McKie shook his head. The flybuzz zzzzt of Taprisiot contact every two seconds was annoying but he found he could override the distraction. Your friend reached ultimate discontinuity , the Caleban had explained. His substance has been removed. For substance , read blood-andbody, McKie translated. He hoped the translation achieved some degree of accuracy but he cautioned himself not to be too sure of that. If we could only have a little air current in here, McKie thought. Just a small breeze... He mopped perspiration from his forehead, drank from one of the water jugs he'd provided for himself. "You still there, Fanny Mae?" You observe my presence? "Almost." That is our mutual problem -- seeing each other, the Caleban said. "You're using time-ordinal verbs with more confidence, I note." I get the hang of them, yes? "I hope so." I date the verb as a nodal position. "I don't believe I want that explained." Very well -- I comply. "I'd like to try again to understand how the floggings are timed." ' When shapes reach proper proportion. "You already said that. What shapes?" A I ready? That signifies earlier? "Earlier," McKie said. "That's right. You said that about shapes before." Earlier and before and already. Yes -- times of different conjunction by linear alteration of intersecting connectives. Time, for the Caleban, was a position on a line, McKie reminded himself, recalling Tuluk's attempt at explanation. He had to look for the subtly refined differences -- they were all this creature saw. "What shapes?" McKie repeated. Shapes defined by duration lines. I see many duration lines. You , oddly, carry visual sensation of one line only. Very strange. Other teachers explain this to self but understanding fails -- extreme constriction. Self admires molecular acceleration but -- maintenance exchange confuses. Confuses! "What molecular acceleration?" Teachers define molecule as smallest characteristic unit of element or compound. True? "That's right." This carries difficulty in understanding unless ascribed by self to perceptive difference between our species. Say, instead, molecule perhaps equals smallest physical unit visible to species. True? What was the difference? It was all gibberish. How had they gotten off onto molecules and acceleration from the proper proportion of undefined shapes? "Why acceleration?" Acceleration always occurs along convergence lines we use while speaking , one to another. Oh, damn! McKie lifted a water jug, drank, choked on a swallow. He bent forward, gasping. When he could manage it he said, "The heat in here -- molecular speedup?" Do these concepts not interchange? the Caleban asked. "Never mind that," McKie blurted, still spitting water. "When you speak to me -- is that what accelerates the molecules?" Self assumes this true condition. McKie put down the water jug carefully, capped it. He began to laugh. Not understand these terms, the Caleban objected. McKie shook his head. The Caleban's words still came at him with that non-speech quality but he detected definite querulous notes -- overtones. Accents? He gave it up. There was something, though. Not understand, the Caleban insisted. This made McKie laugh all the harder. "Oh, my," he gasped when he could catch his breath. "The ancient wheeze was right all along and nobody knew it. Oh, my. Talk is just hot air -- " Again laughter convulsed him. Presently he lay back, inhaled deeply. In a moment, he sat up, took another swallow of water, capped the jug. Teach, the Caleban commanded. Explain these unusual terms. "Terms? Oh -- certainly. Laughter. It's our common response to nonfatal surprise. No other significant communicative content." Laughter. Other nodal encounters with term noted. "Other nodal -- " McKie broke off. "You've heard the word before, you mean?" Before. Yes. I -- self --  attempt understanding of term, laughter. We explore meaning now? "Let's not." Negative reply? "That's correct -- negative. I'm IF much more curious about what you said about -- maintenance exchange. That was what you said, wasn't it? Maintenance exchange confuses?" I attempt define position for you odd one-tracks. "One-tracks, that's how you think of us, eh?" McKie felt suddenly small and inadequate. Relationship of connectives, one to many, many to one, the Caleban said. Maintenance exchange. "How in the hell did we get into this deadend conversation?" You seek positional referrents for placement of floggings, that begins conversation. "Placement -- yeah." You understand S' eye effect? best of his knowledge no Caleban had ever before volunteered a discussion of the S'eye effect. The one-two-three of how to use the mechanism of the jumpdoors -- yes, this was something they could (and did) explain. But not the theory. "I -- uh -- use the jumpdoors," McKie said. "I know something of how the control mechanism is assembled and tuned to -- " Mechanism not coincide with effect! "Uhhh, certainly," McKie agreed. "The word's not the thing." Precisement! We say --  translate, you understand? We say, ' Term evades node.' You catch the hanging of this term, self thinks. "I -- uh -- get the hang tf it," McKie agreed. Recommend hang-line as good thought. Self, I believe we approach true communication. It wonders me. "You wonder about it," McKie corrected. Negative. It wonders about me. "That's great," McKie said in a flat voice. "That's communication?" Understanding diffuses -- scatters? Yes -- understanding scatters when we discuss connectives. I observe connectives of your -- psyche. For psyche, I understand ' other self.' True? "Whyrnot?" I see -- the Caleban ignored McKie's defeated tone -- psyche patterns, perhaps their colors. Approachments and outreachings touch my awareness. I come, through this , to unwinding of intelligence and perhaps understand what you mean by term -- stellar mass. Self understands by being stellar mass, you hang this, McKie? "Hang this? Oh, sure -- sure." Good. Comes now an understanding of your -- wanderings? Difficult word, McKie. Very likely this an uncertain exchange. Wandering equals movement along one line for you. This cannot exist for us. One moves, all move for Caleban on own plane. S' eye effect combines all movements and vision. I see you to other place of your desired wandering. McKie, his interest renewed by this odd rambling, said, "You see us -- that's what moves us from one place to another?" I hear sentient of your plane say sameness, McKie. Sentient say, # IF will see you to the door. ' So? Seeing moves. Seeing moves? McKie wondered. He mopped his forehead, his lips. The Beachball was so damned hot. What did all this have to do with maintenance exchange? Whatever that was. Stellar mass maintains and exchanges, the Caleban said. Not see through, the self. S' eye connective discontinues. You call this -- privacy? Cannot say. This Caleban exists alone of self on your plane. Lonely. We're all lonely, McKie thought. He put down a surge of irritation at the zzzz-beat of the Taprisiot intrusions. That, at least, was companionship. "Do Taprisiots send our messages across space the same way?" he asked. "Do they see the calls?" Taprisiot very weak. Taprisiot not possess Caleban energy. Selj energy, you understand? "I dunno. Maybe." Taprisiot see very thin, very short. Taprisiot not see through stellar mass of self. Sometimes Taprisiot ask for -- boost? Amplification. Caleban provide service. Maintenance exchange, you hang? Taprisiot pay, we pay, you pay. All pay energy. You call energy demand -- hunger, not so? "Oh, hell," McKie said. "Fm not getting the half of -- " rying a whip inserted itself into the space above the giant spoon. The whip cracked, sent a geyser of green sparks into the purple gloom. Arm and whip were gone before McKie could move. "Fanny Mae," McKie whispered, "you still there?" Silence -- then: No laughter, McKie. Thing you call surprise -- but no laughter. I break line there. An abruptness, that flogging. McKie exhaled, noted the mindclock timing of the incident, relayed the coordinates at the next Taprisiot contact. There was no sense talking about pain, he thought. It was equally fruitless to explore inhaling whips or exhaling substance -- or maintenance exchanges or hunger or stellar masses or Calebans moving other sentients by the energy of seeing. Communication was bogged down. He and Fanny Mae had achieved something, though. Tuluk had been right. The S'eye contacts for the floggings required some timing or periodicity that could be identified. Perhaps there was a line-of-sight involved. One thing sure: Abnethe had her feet planted on a real planet somewhere. She and her mob of psycho friends -- her psycho-phants! -- all had a position in space which could be located. She had Palenkis, renegade Wreaves, an outlaw Pan Spechi -- gods knew what all. She had Beautybarbers, too, and Taprisiots and this Caleban all used the same sort of energy to do their work. "Could we try again," McKie asked, "to locate Abnethe's planet?" Contract forbids. "You have to honor it, eh? Even to the death?" Honor to ultimate discontinuity , yes. "And that's pretty near, is it?" Position of ultimate discontinuity becomes visible to self , the Caleban said. Perhaps this equates with near. Again arm and whip flicked into being, showered the air with a cascade of green sparks and withdrew. McKie darted forward, stopped beside the spoon bowl. He had never before ventured quite this close to the Caleban. There was more heat near the bowl and he felt a tingling sensation along his arms. The shower of green sparks had left no mark on the carpeting, no residual substance, nothing. McKie felt the insistent attraction of the Caleban's unpresence, a disturbing intensity this near. He forced himself to turn away. His palms were wet with fear. What else was he afraid of here? "Those two attacks came pretty close together," McKie said. Positional adjacency noted. Next coherence more distanf . You say 'farther away? True? "Yeah. Will the next flogging be your last?" Self not know, the Caleban said. Your presence lessens flogging intensity. You -- reject? Ahhh, repel! "No doubt," McKie said. "I wish I knew why the end of you means the end of everyone else." You transfer self of you with S'eye, the Caleban said. So? "Everyone does." Why? You teach of explanation this? "It's centralizing the whole damn universe. It's -- it's created the specialized planets -- honeymoon planets, gynecology planets, pediatrics planets, snow-sport planets, geriatrics planets, swimsport planets, library planets -- even BuSab had almost a whole planet to itself. Nobody gets by without it any more. Last figures I saw, fewer than a fraction of one per cent of the sentiment population had never used a S'eye jumpdoor." Truth. Such use creates connectives, McKie. You must hang this. Connectives must shatter with my discontinuity. Shatter conveys ultimate discontinuity for all who use jump door S 'eye. "If you say so. I still don't understand." It occurs, McKie, because my fellows choose me for -- coordinator? Inadequate term. Funnel? Handler, perhaps. No, still inadequate. Ahhh! I, self of I, am S' eye! McKie backed away, retreating from such a wave of sadness that he felt he could not contain it. He wanted to scream in protest. Tears flowed down his cheeks unbidden. A sob choked him. Sadness! His body was reacting to it but the emotion came from outside himself. Slowly it faded. McKie blew air soundlessly through his lips. He still trembled from the passage of that emotion. It had been the Caleban's emotion, he realized. But it came out like the waves of heat in this room, IF swept over and immersed every nerve receptor in its path. Sadness. Responsibility for all those impending deaths, no doubt.  am S' eye! devils in the universe could the Caleban mean by such a strange claim? He thought of each jumpdoor passage. Connectives? Threads, perhaps. Each being caught by the S'eye effect trailed threads of himself through, the jumpdoors. Was that it? Fanny Mae had used the word 'funnel.' Every traveler went through her -- hands? Whatever. And when she ceased to exist the threads broke. All died. "Why weren't we warned about this when you offered us the S'eye effect?" Warned? "Yes. You offered -- " Not offer. Fellows explain effect. Sentients of your wave expose great joy. They offer exchange of maintenance. You call this pay, not so? "We should have been warned." Why? "Well, you don't live forever, do you?" Explain this term, forever. "Forever -- always. Infinity." Sentients of your wave seek infinity? "Not for individuals but for -- " Sentient species, they seek infinity? "Of course they do." Why? "Doesn't everyone?" But what about other species for which yours must make way? You not believe in evolution? "Evo -- " McKie shook his head sharply. "What's that have to do with it?" All beings have own day and depart, the Caleban said. Day correct term? Day, unit of time, alio ted linearity, normal extent of existence -- you hang this? McKie's mouth moved but no words came out. Length of line, time of existence , the Caleban said. Approximately translated , correct? "But what gives you the right to -- terminate us?" McKie demanded, finding his voice. Right not assumed, McKie. Given condition of proper connectives, another of my fellows takes up S'eye -- control before self reaches ultimate discontinuity. Unusual -- circumstance rejects such solution here. Mliss Abnethe and -- associates shorten your onetrack. My fellows leave. "They ran for it while they had time? I understand." Time -- yes, your single-track line. This comparison provides suitable concept. Inadequate but sufficient. "And you are definitely the last Caleban in our -- wave?" Self alone. Terminal end-point Caleban -- yes. Self confirms description. "Wasn't there any way to save yourself?" McKie asked. Save? Ahhh -- avoid? Evade! Yes, evade ultimate discontinuity. This you suggest? "I'm asking if there wasn't some way for you to escape the way your fellows did?" Way exists but result same for your wave. "You could save yourself but it would end us -- is that it?" You not possess honor concept? Save self, lose honor. ,, Touche ,, McKie said. Explain touche. New term. "Eh? Oh, that's a very, old, ancient term." Linear beginning term, you say? Yes, those best with nodal frequency. "Nodal frequency?" You say -- often. Nodal frequency contains often. "They mean the same thing? I see." Not same. Similar. "I stand corrected." Explain touche. What meaning conveys this term? "Meaning conveys -- yeah. It's a fencing term." Fencing? You signify containment? McKie explained fencing as best he could with a side journey into swordsmanship, the concept of single combat, competition. Effective touch, the Caleban interrupted, her words conveying definite wonder. Nodal intersection. Touche '! Ahhh-ahhh! This contains why we find your species to fascinate us. This concept! Cutting line: touche # Pierced by meaning: touche '! "Ultimate discontinuity," McKie snarled. " Touched How far away is your next touche with the whip?" Intersection of whip touche! You seek position of linear displacement, yes. It moves me. We perhaps occupy our linearities yet g-but self suggests another species may need these dimensions. We leave, outgo from existence, then. Not so? When McKie didn't answer, the Caleban said: McKie, you hang my meaning? "I think I'm going to sabotage you," McKie muttered. IX Spechi, stared out across the forest toward sunset over the sea. It was good, he thought, that the Ideal World contained such a sea. This tower Mliss had ordered built in a city of lesser buildings and spires commanded a view which included also the distant plain and far away mountains of the interior. A steady wind blew against his left cheek, stirred his yellow hair. He wore green trousers and an open-mesh shirt of dull gold and gray. The clothing gave a subtle accent to his humanoid appearance, revealing the odd ripples of alien muscles here and there about his body. An amused smile occupied his mouth but not his eyes. He had Pan Spechi eyes, many-faceted, glistening -- although the facets were edge-faded by his ego-surgery. The eyes watched the insect movements of various sentients on streets and bridgeway s below him. At the same time they reported on the sky overhead (a far-away flock of birds, streamers of sunset IF clouds) and told him of the view toward the sea and the nearby ballus trade. We're going to pull it ojj. He glanced at the antique chronograph Mliss had given him. Crude thing, but it showed the sunset hour. They had had to disengage from the Taprisiot mindclock system, though. This crude device showed two hours to go until the next contact. They can't stop us. But maybe they can... He thought about McKie then. How had the BuSab agent found this place? And finding it, how had he come here? McKie sat in the Beachball with the Caleban right now -- bait, obviously. Bait! For what? Cheo didn't enjoy the contradictory emotions surging back and forth through him. He had broken the most basic Pan Spechi law. He had captured his creche's ego and abandoned his four mates to a mindless existence terminating in mindless death. A renegade surgeon's instruments had excised the organ which united the pentarchal Pan Spechi family across all space. The surgery had left a scar on Cheo's forehead and a scar on his soul but he had never imagined he would find such delicate relish in the experience. Nothing could take the ego from him. But he was alone, too. Death would end it, of course, but all creatures had that to face. And thanks to Mliss, he had a retreat from which no other Pan Spechi could extricate him -- unless -- but there would be no other Pan Spechi very soon. There would be no other organized sentients at all except the handful Mliss had brought here to her Ark with its mad Boers and Blacks. Abnethe came hurrying onto the observation deck behind him. His ears, as multi-planar in discrimination as his eyes, marked the emotions in her footsteps -- boredom, worry, the constant fear which constricted her being. Cheo turned. She had been to a Beautybarber, he observed. Red hair now crowned her lovely face. McKie had red hair, too, Cheo reminded himself. She threw herself onto a reclining chairdog, stretched her legs. "What's your hurry?" he asked. "Those Beautybarbers," she snapped. "They want to go home." "Send them." "But where will I find others?" "That is a proper problem, isn't it?" "You're making fun of me, Cheo. Don't." "Then tell them they can't go home." "I did." "Did you tell them why?" "Of course not. What a thing to say!" "You told Furuneo." "I learned my lesson. Where are my legal people?" "They've already gone." "But I had other things to discuss with them." "Won't it wait?" "You knew we had other business. Why did you let them go?" "Mliss, you don't really want to know the other matter on their minds." "The Caleban's to blame," she said. "That's our story and no one can disprove it. What was the other matter the legal numb-heads wanted to discuss?" "Mliss, drop it." "Cheo!" His Pan Spechi eyes glittered suddenly. "As you wish. They conveyed a demand from BuSab. They have asked the Caleban for Furuneo's head." "His -- " She paled. "But how did they know we -- " "They know nothing. But theirs was an obvious move under the circumstances." "What did you tell them?" she whispered. She stared at his face. "I told them the Caleban closed the S'eye jumpdoor just as Furuneo was entering it of his own volition." "But they know we have a monopoly on that S'eye," she said, he voice stronger. "Damn them!" "Ahhh," Cheo said, "but Fanny Mae has been moving McKie and his friends around. That indicates we have no monopoly." "That's exactly what I said before. Isn't it?" "It gives us the perfect delaying tactic," he said. "Fanny Mae sent the head somewhere and we don't know where. I've told her, of course, to deny this request." She swallowed. "Is that -- what you told them?" "Of course." "But if they question the Caleban -- " "They're just as likely to get a confusing answer as a usable one." "That was very clever of you, Cheo." "Isn't that why you keep me around?" "I keep you around for mysterious reasons of my own," she said, smiling. "I depend on that," he said. "You know," she said, "I'll miss them." "Miss whom?" "The ones who hunt us." way to Tuluk's personal lab, his back to the long outer room where the Wreave's assistants did most of their work. The BuSab chief's deepset eyes held a faceted glitter, a fire that failed to match the composure of his humanoid Pan Spechi face. Tuluk was working at a bench against the opposite wall. He had a length of bullwhip rawhide stretched between two clamps. Parallel with the rawhide and metal pole, balanced on air without visible support. Between rawhide and pole could be seen flickers of miniature lightning -- it danced along the entire length of the gap. Tuluk was bent over, reading meters set into the bench beneath the device. "Am I interrupting anything?" Bildoon asked. Tuluk turned a knob on the bench, waited, turned the knob once more. He caught the pole as the invisible supporting force released it. He racked the pole on IF supports against the back wall above the bench. "That is a silly question," he said, turning. "It is, at that," Bildoon said. "We have a problem." "Without problems, we have no employment," Tuluk said. "I don't think we're going to get Furuneo's head," Bildoon said. "It's been so long now, we probably couldn't have gotten a reliable nerve replay anyway," Tuluk said. He screwed his face slit into an S-curve, an expression he knew aroused amusement among other sentients. But it represented intense thought for a Wreave. "What do the astronomers say about the star pattern McKie saw on that mysterious planet?" "They think there may have been an error in the mindcord." "Oh. Why?" "For one thing, there isn't even a hint, not the slightest subjective indication of variation in stellar magnitudes." "All the visible stars had the same light intensity?" "Apparently." "Odd." "And the nearest pattern similarity," Bildoon said, "is one that doesn't exist any more." "What do you mean?" "Well -- there's a Big Dipper, a Little Dipper, various other constellations and zodiac similarities but -- " He shrugged. Tuluk stared at him blankly. "I don't recognize the references," he said, presently. "Oh, yes -- I forgot," Bildoon said. "We Pan Spechi, when we decided to copy human form, explored their history with some care. These patterns of stars are ones that were visible from their ancient homeworld." "I see. Another oddity to go with what I've discovered about the material of this whip." "What's that?" "It's very strange. Parts of this leather betray a subatomic structure of peculiar alignment." "Peculiar? How?" "Aligned. Perfectly aligned. I've never seen anything like it outside certain rather fluid energy phenomena. It's as though the material had been subjected to some peculiar force or stress. The result is, in some ways, similar to neomaser alignment of light quanta." "Wouldn't that require enormous energy?" "Presumably." "But what could cause it?" "I don't know. The interesting thing is that it doesn't appear to be a permanent change. The structure shows characteristics like plastic memory. It's slowly snapping back into reasonably familiar forms." Bildoon Heard the emphasis that betrayed Tuluk's disturbance. "Reasonably familiar?" he asked. "That's another thing," Tuluk said. "Let me explain. These subatomic structures and their resultant overstructures of genetic message units undergo slow evolution. We can, by comparing structures, date some samples to within two or three thousand standard years. Since cattle cells form the basic protein for vat culture food, we have fairly complete records on them over a very long time indeed. The strange thing about the samples in this piece of rawhide -- " he gestured with a mandibular extensor -- "is that its pattern is very ancient." "How ancient?" "Perhaps several hundred thousand years." Bildoon absorbed this. Then: "But you told us earlier that this rawhide was only a couple of years old." "According to our catalyzing tests, it is." "Could this alignment stress have mixed up the pattern?" "Conceivably." "You doubt it, then?" "I do." "You're not trying .to tell me that whip was brought forward through time?" "I'm not trying to tell you anything outside the facts I've reported. Two tests, previously considered reliable, do not agree as to the dating of this material." "Time travel's an impossibility," Bildoon said. "So we've always assumed." "We know it. We know it mathematically and pragmatically. It's a fiction device, a myth, an amusing concept employed by entertainers. We reject it and we are left without paradox. Only one conclusion remains: the alignment stress, whatever that was, changed the pattern." "If the rawhide were -- squeezed through a subatomic filter of some sort, that might account for it," Tuluk said. "But since I have no such filter or the power to do this theoretical squeezing, I cannot test it." "You must have some thoughts about it, though." "I do. I cannot conceive of a filter that would do this thing without destroying the materials subjected to such forces." "Then what you're saying," Bildoon said, his voice rising in angry frustration, "is that an impossible device did an impossible thing to that impossible piece ofof-" "Yes, sir," Tuluk said. aides in the outer room were turning their faces toward him, showing signs of amusement. He stepped fully into the lab, closed the door. "I came down here hoping you'd found something that might force their hand," Bildoon said, "and you give me conundrums." "Your displeasure doesn't change the facts," Tuluk said. "No, I guess it doesn't." "The structure of the Palenki arm cells was aligned in a similar fashion," Tuluk said. "But only around the cut." "You anticipated my next question." "It was obvious. Passage IF through a jumpdoor doesn't account for it. We sent several of our people through jumpdoors with various materials and tested random cells -- living and dead -- fora check." "Two conundrums in an hour is more than I like," Bildoon said. "Two?" "We now have twenty-eight positional incidents of Abnethe flogging that Caleban or attempting to flog it. That's enough to show us they do not define a cone in space. Unless she's jumping around from planet to planet, that theory's wrong." "Given the powers of that S'eye, she could be jumping around." "We don't think so. That isn't her way. She's a nesting bird. She likes a citadel. She's the kind who castles in chess when she doesn't have to." "She could be sending her Palenkis." "She's there with them every time." "We've collected six whips and arms in all," Tuluk said. "Do you want me to repeat these tests on all of them?" Bildoon stared at the Wreave. The question wasn't like him. Tuluk was plodding, thorough. "What would you rather be doing?" Bildoon asked. "We have twenty-eight examples," you say. "Twenty-eight is one of the euclidian perfects. It's four times the prime seven. The number strongly indicates randomness. But we're faced with a situation apparently excluding randomness. Ergo, an organizing pattern is at work which is not revealed by analytic numbering as far as we've taken it. I would like to subject the pacing -- both in time and physical dimension -- to a complete analysis, compare for any similarities we -- " "You'd put an assistant on the other whips and arms to check them out?" "That goes without saying." Bildoon shook his head. "What Abnethe's doing -- it's impossible!" "If she does a thing, how can it be impossible?" "She and her crew have to be somewhere," Bildoon snapped. "I find it very strange," Tuluk said, "this trait you share mih humans of stating the obvious in sucemphatic fashion." "Oh, go to hell," Bildoon said. He turned, slammed out of the lab. Tuluk, racing to the door after him, opened it and called at the retreating back, "It is a Wreave belief that we already are in hell." He returned to his bench, muttering. Humans and Pan Spechi -- impossible creatures. Except for McKie. Now, there was a human who occasionally achieved analytic rapport with sentients capable of higher logic. Well -- every species had its exceptions to the norm. B Y AN effort of communication he still did not completely understand, McKie had talked the Caleban into opening the Beachball's external port. This permitted a bath of spray-washed air to flow to where he sat. It also accomplished one other thing -- it allowed a crew of watchers outside to hold eyeball contact with him. He had just about given up hoping Abnethe would rise to the bait. There would have to be another solution. Visual contact with watchers also permitted a longer spacing between Taprisiot guard contacts. He found the new spacing less tiresome. Morning sunshine splashed across the lip of the opening into the Beachball. McKie put a hand into the light, felt the warmth. He knew he should be moving around, making a poor target of himself, but the presence of the watchers made attack unlikely. Besides, he was tired, drugged to alertness and full of the odd emotions induced by angaret. Movement seemed an empty effort. If they wanted to kill him they were going to do it. Furuneo's death proved that. From where he sat McKie could see out across the lava shelf to the rocky palisades and a mossy carpeting of sea growth exposed at the cliff base by the retreating tide. "Suppose we have it all wrong," he said, speaking over his shoulder toward the Caleban. "Suppose we really aren't communicating with each other at all. What if we've just been making noises, assuming a communication content that doesn't exist?"  fail of understanding, McKie. The hang doesn't get me. McKie turned slightly. The Caleban was doing something strange with the air around its position. The oval stage he had seen earlier shimmered once more into view, disappeared. A golden halo appeared at one side of the giant spoon, rose like a smoke ring, crackled electrically and vanished. "We're assuming," McKie said, "that when you say something to me I respond with meaningful words directly related to your statement -- and that you do the same. This may not be the cast at all." Unlikely.  "So it's unlikely. What are you doing there?" Doing ? "All that activity around you." Attempt making self visible on your wave. "Can you do it?" Possible. A bell-shaped red glow formed above the spoon, stretched into a straight line, resumed it bell curve, began whirling like a child's jump rope. What see you? the Caleban asked. McKie described the whirling red rope. Very odd, the Caleban said.  flex creativity and you report visible sensation. You need yet that opening to exterior conditions? "The open port? It makes it one helluva lot more comfortable in here." Comfort -- concept self fails to understand. "Does the opening prevent you from becoming visible?" It performs magnetic distraction, no more. McKie shrugged. "How much more flogging can you take?" IF Explain much. "You've left the track again," McKie said. Correct! That forms achieve ment, McKie. "How is it an achievement?" Self leaves communicative track and you achieve awareness of same. "All right, that's an achievement. Where's Abnethe?" Contract -- " -- prohibits revealing her location," McKie completed. "Maybe you can tell me, then -- is she jumping around or remaining on one planet?" That helps you locate her? "How in fifty-seven hells do I know?" Probability smaller than fifty seven elements , the Caleban said. Abnethe occupies relatively static position on specific planet. "But we can't find any pattern to her attacks on you or where they originate." You cannot see connectives. T HE whirling red rope flickered in and out of existence above the giant spoon. Abruptly it shifted color to a glowing yellow, vanished. "You just disappeared," McKie said. Not my person visible. "How's that?" You not seeing person-self. "That's what I said." Not say. Visibility to you not represent sameness of my person. You visible-see effect. "I wasn't seeing you, eh? That was just some effect you created." Correct. "I didn't think it was you. You're going to be something more shapely. I do notice something, though. There are moments when you used our verb tenses better -- I even spotted some fairly normal constructions." Self hangs this get me. "Yeah, well -- maybe you're not getting the hang of our language, after all." McKie stood up, stretched, moved closer to the open port, intending to peer out. As he moved, a shimmering silver loop dropped out of the air where he had been. He whirled in time to see it snake back through the small vortal tube of a jumpdoor. "Abnethe, is that you?" McKie demanded. There was no answer. The jumpdoor snapped out of existence. The enforcers watching from outside rushed to the port. One called, "You all right, McKie?" McKie waved him to silence, took a raygen from his pocket, held it loosely in his hand. "Fanny Mae," he said, "are they trying to capture or kill me the way they took care of Furuneo?" Observe theyness , the Caleban said. Furuneo not having existence, observable intentions unknown. "Did you see what just happened here?" McKie asked. Self contains awareness of S'eye employment , certain activity of employer persons. Activity ceases. McKie rubbed his left hand across his neck. He wondered if he could bring the raygen into play quickly enough to cut any snare they might drop over his head. That silver thing dropping into the room had looked suspiciously like a noose. "Is that how they got Furuneo?" McKie asked. "Did they drop a noose over his neck and pull him into the jumpdoor?" Discontinuity removes person oj sameness, the Caleban said. McKie shrugged, gave it up. That was more or less the answer the Caleban gave to all questions about Furuneo's death. Oddly, McKie discovered he was hungry. He wiped perspiration from his jaw and chin, cursed under his breath. There was no real assurance that what he heard in the Caleban's words represented true communication. Even granting some communication, how could he depend on the Caleban's interpretations or the Caleban's honesty? When the damn thing spoke, though, it radiated such a sense of sincerity that disbelief became almost impossible. McKie rubbed his chin, trying to catch an elusive thought. Strange. Here he was, hungry, angry and afraid. He had no place to run. He had to solve this problem. Imperfect as communication with the Caleban actually was, the warning from the creature could not be ignored. Too many sentients already had died or gone insane. buzz of Taprisiot contact. Damn surveillance. This contact, however, failed to break off. It was Siker, the Laclac Director of Discretion. Siker had detected McKie's disturbed emotions and, instead of breaking contact, locked in. "No!" McKie raged. He felt himself stiffen into the mumbling sniggertrance. "No, Siker! Break off!" "But what's wrong, McKie?" "Break off, you idiot, or I'm done for!" "Well -- all right. But you felt -- " "Break it!" Siker broke the contact. Once more aware of his body, McKie found himself dangling from a noose which had choked off his breath and was pulling him up into a small jumpdoor. He heard scrambling at the open port. He heard shouts but he couldn't respond. Fire encircled his neck. His chest burned. Panic filled his mind. He found he had dropped the raygen during the sniggertrance. He was helpless. His hands clawed futilely at the noose. Something grabbed his feet. Added weight tightened the noose. Abruptly the lifting force gave way. McKie fell, sprawling in a tangle with whoever had grabbed his feet. Several things happened at once. Enforcers helped him to his feet. A holoscan held by a Wreave was shoved past his face toward the jumpdoor which closed with an electric snap. Groping hands and extensors removed the noose from his neck. McKie inhaled a choking breath, gasped. He would have collapsed IF without the support of those around him. Gradually he became aware that five other sentients had entered the Beachball -- two Wreaves, a Laclac, a Pan Spechi and a Human. The Human and one of the Wreaves worked over McKie, clearing away the noose and supporting him. The holoscan operator was a Wreave, who was busy examining his instrument. The others were watching the space all around them, raygens ready. At least three sentients were trying to talk at the same time. "All right!" McKie shut off the babble. His throat hurt when he spoke. He grabbed the length of noose from the Wreave's extensors, examined it. The rope was of a silvery material McKie failed to recognize. It had been cut cleanly with a raygen. McKie looked at the enforcer with the holoscan, asked, "What did you get?" "The attack was made by an ego-frozen Pan Spechi, ser," the Wreave enforcer said. "I got a good record of his face. We'll try for ID." McKie tossed him the severed length of noose. "Get this thing back to the lab, too. Tell Tuluk to break it down to its basic structure. It may even have some of -- Furuneo's cells on it. The rest of you -- " "Ser?" It was the Pan Spechi among the enforcers. "Yes?" "Ser, we have orders. If an attempt is made on your life we are to stay with you in here." He passed a raygen to McKie. "You dropped this, I believe." McKie pocketed it with an angry gesture. Taprisiot contact filled McKie's mind. "Break it!" he snapped. But the contact firmed. It was Bildoon in a no-nonsense mood. "What's going on there; McKie?" McKie explained. "There are enforcers around you right now?" "Yes." "Anyone see the attackers?" "We got a holoscan. It was the ego-frozen Pan Spechi." McKie felt the emotional shudder from his Bureau chief. The sensation of horror was followed by a sharp command. "I want you back here at Central immediately." "Look," McKie reasoned. "I'm the best bait we have. They want me dead for some -- " "Back and now!" Bildoon said. "I'll have you brought in forcibly if you make that necessary." McKie subsided. He had never before experienced such a black mood from a caller. "What's wrong?" he asked. "You're bait wherever you are, McKie -- there or here. If they want you they'll come for you. I want you here where we can surround you with guards." "Something has happened?" "You're damn right something's happened. All those bullwhips we were examining have disappeared. The lab is a shambles and one of Tuluk's assistants is dead -- decapitated. And we've lost the head." "Ahhhhh, damn," McKie said. Then: "I'm on my way." X bare stretch of floor in the anteroom of his quarters. A sharply defined orange cross light from windows in the next room stretched his shadow beside him like something lifeless from the night. In his hands he held the length of noose that remained after it had been cut in the closing of the jumpdoor. Damnable interference! That big Laclac with the raygen had been fast. And the Wreave with the holoscan had made a record through the jumpdoor -- no doubt of that. Authorities would start hunting back along his trail now, asking questions, showing the holoscan of his face. Cheo's jeweled eyes glittered with shards of light. He could almost hear the BuSab operatives. Do you recognize this Pan Spechi? The Pan Spechi equivalent of a chuckle, a rumbling grunt, shook him. Fat lot of good the search would do them. No friend or acquaintance from the old days would be likely to recognize this face, now that the medics had changed it. Oh, the bridge of the nose and the set of the eyes were similar but... Cheo shook his head. Why was he worrying? No one -- absolutely no one -- was going to stop him from destroying the Caleban. And after that all these conjectures would be academic. He sighed heavily. His hands gripped the length of rope so tightly that his muscles ached. It took IF him several heartbeats of effort to release them. He climbed to his feet, threw the severed rope at a wall. A flailing end of it lashed a chairdog which whimpered sibilantly through its atrophied vocal structure. Cheo nodded to himself. He had to get the guards away from the Caleban or the Caleban away from the guards. He rubbed the scars on his forehead, hesitated. Was that a sound behind him? Slowly he turned, lowered his hand. He gasped. Mliss Abnethe stood in the doorway to the outer hall. The orange light created embers in the pearl sheathing of her gown. Her face held back anger, fear and the grievous murmurings of her psyche. "How long have you been there?" he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. "Why?" She stepped into the room, closed the door. ' "What have you been doing?" "Fishing," he said. She swept the room with her insolent gaze, saw the pile of whips in a corner. They were thrown over something vaguely round and hairy. A wet red stain crept onto the floor from beneath the pile. She paled, whispered, "What's that?" "Get out of here, Mliss." "What have you been doing?" she shrieked, whirling on him. I should tell her -- I should really tell her... I've been working to save our lives," he said. "You've killed someone, haven't you?" "He didn't suffer," Cheo said, his voice tired. "But you -- " "What's one more death among he asked. By all the devils of Gowachin, she was a tiresome bitch. "Cheo, I'm afraid." Why did she have to whimper like that? "Calm yourself," he said. "I've a plan to separate the Caleban from her guardians. When we achieve that we can proceed with her destruction and the thing's done." Mliss swallowed. "She suffers. I know she does." "That's nonsense. You've heard her deny it. She doesn't even know what pain means. No referents." "But what if we're wrong? What if it's just a misunderstanding?" He advanced on her, stood glaring over her. "Mliss, do you have any idea of how much we'll suffer if we fail?" She shuddered. Presently, her voice almost normal, she asked, "What's your plan?" from every nerve ending. He stood with Tuluk in the Wreave's lab. The place should have been comfortingly familiar but McKie felt as though the walls had been removed, opening the lab onto boundless space from which attack could come. No matter which way he turned, his back was exposed to menace. Abnethe and her friends were getting desperate. The fact of desperation said she was vulnerable. If only he could understand her vulnerability. Where was she vulnerable? What was her weakness? And where had she hidden herself? "This is very strange material," Tuluk said, straightening from the bench where he'd been examining the silvery rope. "Very strange." "What's strange about it?" "It cannot exist." "But it's right there." McKie pointed. "I can see that, my friend." Tuluk extruded a single mandible, scratched thoughtfully at the right lip of his face slit. One orange eye became visible as he turned, glanced at McKie. "Well?" McKie said. "The only planet where this material could have been grown ceased to exist several millennia ago," Tuluk said. "There was only one place -- a peculiar combination of chemistry and solar energy -- " "You've got to be mistaken. The stuff's right there." "The Archer's eye," Tuluk said. "You recall the story of the nova there?" McKie cocked his head to one side, thought for a moment. Then: "I've read about it, yes." "The planet was called Rap," Tuluk said. "This is a length of Rapvine." "Rapvine?" "You've heard of it?" "I don't believe so." "Yes, well -- it's strange stuff. Has a relatively short life span. o IF among its other peculiar characteristics. Another thing -- the ends don't fray even when it's cut. See?" Tuluk plucked several strands from the cut end, released them. They snapped back into position. "The phenomenon was called intrinsic attraction. There's been considerable speculation about it. I'm now in a position to -- " "Short life," McKie interrupted. "How short?" "No more than fifteen or twenty standard years under the most ideal conditions." "But the planet -- " "Millennia ago, yes." McKie shook his head to clear it. His eyes scanned the length of silvery rope suspiciously. "Obviously somebody found how to grow the stuff someplace other than Rap." "Perhaps. But they've managed to keep it a secret all this time." "I don't like what I think you're thinking," McKie said. "That's the most convoluted statement I've ever heard you make," Tuluk said. "It's meaning is clear enough, however. You believe I'm considering the possibility of time travel or -- " "Impossible," McKie snapped. "I've been engaged in a most interesting mathematical analysis of this problem," Tuluk said. "Numbers games aren't going to help us." "Your behavior is most unMcKie," Tuluk said. "Irrational. Therefore, I'll try not to burden your mind with too much of my symbolic construction. It is, however, more than a game for -- " "Time travel," McKie said. "Nonsense." "Our habitual forms of perception tend to interfere with the thinking processes required for analysis of this problem," Tulik said. "Thus, I discard these modes of thought." "Such as?" "If we examine the series relationships, what do we have? We have a number of point-dimensions in space. Abnethe occupies a position on a specific planet, as does the Caleban. We are given the actuality of contact between the two points, a series of events." "So?" "We must assume a pattern to these point-contacts." "Why? They could be random examp -- " "Two specific planets whose movements describe coherent patterns in space. A pattern, a rhythm. Otherwise Abnethe and her crew would be attacking with more frequency. We are confronted by a system which defies conventional analysis. It has temporal rhythm translatable into point-series rhythm. It is spatial and'temporal." McKie felt the attraction of Tuluk's argument as a force lifting his mind out of a cloud. "Some form of reflection, maybe?" he asked. "It doesn't have to be Time trav -- " "This is not a fugue," Tuluk objected. "A simple quadratic equation achieves no eliptical functions here. Ergo, we are dealing with linear relationships." "Lines," McKie whispered. "Connectives." "Eh? Oh, yes. Linear relationships which describe moving surfaces across some form or forms of dimension. We cannot be sure of the Caleban's dimensional outlook but our own is another matter." had moved into an extremely thin air of abstractions. But the Wreave's argument held an inescapable elegance. "We can treat all forms of space as quantities determined by other quantities," Tuluk said. "We have methods for dealing with such forms when we wish to solve for unknowns." McKie murmured, "N-dimension points." "Precisely. We first consider our data as a series of measurements which define moving points, remembering that they also define the space between such points." McKie nodded. "A classic jfold extended aggregate." "Now you begin to sound like the McKie familiar to me. An aggregate of n dimensions, to be sure. And what is time in such a problem? Time we know to be an aggregate of one dimension. But we are given, you'll recall, a number of point-dimensions in space and time." McKie whistled soundlessly, admiring the Wreave's logic. Then: "We either have one continuous variable in the problem or n continuous variables. Beautiful!" "Just so. And by reduction through the infinity calculus we discover we are dealing with two systems containing n body properties." "That's what you found?" "That's what I found. It can only follow that the point-contacts of our problem have their separate existence within different frameworks of time. Ergo, Abnethe occupies a dimension of time other than that of the Beachball. Inescapable conclusion." "We may not be dealing with time travel phenomena in the classic fictional sense," McKie said. "These subtle differences the Caleban sees -- these connectives, these threads -- " "Spiderwebs imbedded in many universes," Tuluk said. "Perhaps. Let's assume individual lives spin these web threads." "Movements of matter undoubtedly spin them, too." "Agreed. And they cross. They unite. They intersect. They combine in mysterious ways. They become tangled. Some of the web threads are stronger than others. I experienced this entanglement, you know, when I placed the call that saved your life. I can imagine some of these threads being rewoven, combined, aligned -- what have you -- to recreate conditions of long past times in our dimensions. Might be a relatively simple problem for a Caleban. The Caleban might not even understand the re-creation the way we do." "I'll buy that." "What would it take?" Tuluk mused. "A certain poignancy of experience, perhaps -- something IF that imparts sufficient strength to the lines, threads, webs of the past for them to be picked up, manipulated to reproduce the original setting and its contents." "We're just tossing words back and forth," McKie objected. "How could you reweave an entire planet or the space around -- " "Why not? What do we know of the powers involved? To a crawling insect three of your strides may be a day's journey." McKie felt himself being convinced in spite of native caution. "It is true," he agreed, "that the Caleban S'eye gives us the power to walk across light years." "Such a common exploit that we no longer even wonder at the enormous energies it must require. Think what such a journey would mean to our hypothetical insect. And we may be getting the merest glimpse of Caleban powers." "We should never have accepted the S'eye," McKie said. "We had metabolic suspension. We should have told the Calebans to go jump in their collective connectives!" "And deny ourselves real-time control of our universe? Not on your life, McKie. What we should have done is test the gift first. We should have probed for dangers. We were too bedazzled by it, though." McKie lifted his left hand to scratch his eyebrow, felt a prickling of danger. It rushed up his spine, exploded in a blow against his arm. He felt pain there -- something bit through to bone. Despite the shock he whirled, saw a Palenki arm upraised with a glittering blade. The arm came through a narrow vortal tube. Visible through the opening were a Palenki turtle head and, beside it, the right side of a Pan Spechi face -- purple scar on the forehead, one faceted emerald eye. For a suspended moment McKie saw the blade begin its descent toward his face, knew it was going to strike before his shocked muscles could respond. He felt metal touch his forehead, saw the orange glow of a raygen beam stab past his face. McKie stood frozen, locked in stillness. It was a tableau. He saw surprise on the Pan Spechi face, saw a severed Palenki arm begin its tumble to the floor, still clutching a shattered metal remnant. McKie's heart was pounding as though he'd been running for an hour. He felt hot wetness spread across his left temple. It ran down his cheek, along his jaw, into his collar. His arm throbbed and he saw blood dripping from his fingertips. The S'eye jumpdoor had winked out of existence. Someone was beside him then, pressing a compress against his head where the metal had touched. Touched? Once more he had prepared himself for sudden death at a Palenki's hands. Tuluk, he saw, was bending to retrieve the metal remnant. "That's another nick of time I've escaped," McKie said. Surprisingly, there was no tremor in his voice. The accused found no end to his crime -- ffo beginning to justice! T HE horses drew a tight curve into the night, jostling the coach's occupants against polished mahogany sills. A single lantern, its yellow flame high upon the wind, clanged as it swayed. Above the whirring of the rising dust, the Prisoner groaned brokenly in his sleep. "We've an important one here," said the Watchman, hearing the Prisoner's groan. "Aye, indeed," said the Coachman, his gaze far upon the stars. The reins jiggled lightly within his gloves. "What time is it?" The Watchman peeked within his cloak. "Eighteen-thirteen," he said. "A time of peace," said the Coachman, glancing over his shoulder, looking back into the night. Shreds of fog began to swirl in place of the dust as a sudden clicking of tight cobbles sounded beneath the hooves and wheels. Overhead, the stars flickered and were quietly gone. The Watchman checked the time. "Nineteen-thirty-nine," he said. "A time of great turmoil," said the Coachman and there was distant thunder beyond the mist. He hurried the horses and several drops of rain shone upon his leather cape. Again the Prisoner stirred in his sleep. They sped over smooth concrete pavement but the coach shook with a fresh torrent of wind. Tinkling sounds of shattered glass fell and watchdog rifles barked high above, where moments earlier there had been tranquil stars. Sirens screamed on both sides of the road. The horses shied from the yells of an advancing mob. "Nineteen-sixty-eight," said the Watchman. "Oh," said the Coachman and gripped the reins very tightly. The coach and horses clattered on with two of the riders drowsy and the other asleep. One of the men, stirring within the flowing mist, cried out against the night. The Watchman yawned behind a polite hand. "It's getting late," he said, shifting upon his seat. "A long ride," said the Coachman. the shadows and mist of the orange and black chamber of the Time Judge the Prisoner spat upon the flagstoned floor. He felt an urgent need to spit at the enrobed figure behind the great hulking rostrum but the target was beyond his practiced range. He tried anyway. He sensed the constant rage within himself welling up to even greater levels as he clamped his eyes shut and steeled his rigid muscles against the imprisoning bonds in a desperate effort to hold and savor his hate. For several seconds he succeeded, until the pressurized phlegm seeped out in a low whining scream. "Administer a two-minute tranquilizer," said the solemn voice of the Time Judge. This was done before the high-ceilinged echoes of Judge and Prisoner had subsided. I The man bound within the wheelchair opened his eyes to watch the grim shadow above him. A languid mist curled about the high stone rostrum but there was a faint orange glow far beyond the bench. The Prisoner slowly relaxed his manacled arms and legs. His mouth remained fixed in a grimace. "Out of all of my travels through Endless Time your case is the most terrible," said the Time Judge, shaking his head. "Yours is the most heinous, the most horrendous, crime of all. All of Time must shudder at your wicked presence." The Prisoner continued to relax perceptibly but there was still much hatred within the room. "Even through your violent hate you must be made to understand your just fate." The Time Judge pointed a long gnarled stick toward the Prisoner. "Woe be unto you, for the punishment must fit the crime." A silence. "I have traveled through all of Time," the Judge continued, "desperately righting the wrongs of past and future injustices, exchanging the minds and souls of the falsely condemned with those whose evil deeds cry out for vengeance. Now, at last, I have found yours, the ultimate crime, which will match the most pronounced injustice of all." As the Time Judge paused, the Prisoner stirred. The period of tranquilization was nearly completed. The mist suddenly shifted, momentarily thinning about the Judge's bench, but the Prisoner turned his head and would not look. "Do you have anything to say?" asked the somber figure in the black cape. "Go to hell!" replied the redfaced man before him. The fog stirred again, and the hooded figure placed an orange square of cloth upon his own head. "According to the Dictates of Timeless Justice, let him be so punished," ordered the Time Judge with a slight shudder of dark robes. Within seconds the portable instruments were applied, and the Prisoner again closed his eyes upon his own intensifying hatred. When he awoke with blinking eyes, he found himself erect and walking. They took him before Pontius Pilate -- who washed his hands.  IF  The loving aliens came -- and there went the neighborhood! phone, confirming an appointment with his dentist, when he first noticed the black shadow at the corner of his peripheral vision. He gave it little thought. This kind of ocular illusion usually could be traced to eyestrain, digestive problems or loss of sleep, to minute floating fragments of eye pigment or a sudden twist of the head -- to almost any of a number of causes one could name. Persistence of the phenomenon finally triggered some degree of worry. Jake found himself beginning to look behind furniture, inspecting dark corners of the room, usually feeling a bit foolish after each flurry of searching. But he could not restrain the urge to repeat the action -- the apparition seemed substantial and it moved with definiteness. There came a time when more surface of Jake's eyes caught the shadow just as it whisked behind a waste basket. Aha -- the thing is real... Jake also whisked to the waste basket and lifted it. Nothing so tangible as a shape with dimensions lurked there -- nothing but shadow. It was then that he resolved to phone his oculist. The thing could not have escaped if it had been as large as Jake's eyes had measured it in the microsecond allowed by its speed. The object would have had to be at least the size of a tarantula and there was no crawling space for anything of that bulk in the corner behind the basket. He strode to his telephone and arranged for the examination. But he was not to take it. A dental appointment was first on Jake's schedule -- and fated to be last. Each day, while waiting for these two appointed dates, Jake saw the shadow. It seemed closer to him at every appearance. But he no longer dropped his current activities to chase the manifestation. Like most humans he had bucked his problem off to someone else -- in this case the oculist. Let the eye doctor take care of the shadow -- he would charge enough. So, if Jake sat at his typewriter when the fuzzy dark thing drifted into his field of vision he shrugged. If he happened to be too lazy to work he continued to allow cranium, vertebrae, coccyx and tarsus to press dents into the upholstery of a sofa, not even trying to catch the phantom object in the full focus of his gaze. And one day it was there on the arm of Jake's sofa and he felt it -- not as a solid body but as a touch of spring zephyr on neck, then on cheek and finally at the edge of his ear. He did not detect its progress inside the ear, except in the form of a slight puff of air. The episode seemed so real that a tingling chill shook Jake's spine. IF He drew a long breath and lay back, wondering whether a psychiatrist would not be a better man to carry the problem than an oculist. Nothing occurred for half an hour. Then, like a guitar string suddenly twanged, the entire length of his body jerked into tense vibration. In Jake's mind began a wild sound and his vision blanked out completely. Jake scrambled to his feet. He stood swaying, dizzy, blind, only half realizing his own throat was not uttering the sharp burst of excited squealing he heard inside his skull. The noise stopped suddenly and a tactile sensation substituted itself, impressions of momentary points of cold touching areas inside his head with extreme lightness. These sensory contacts skipped about, first in the upper part of the skull, then behind his eyes, then tickling his inner ears. His sight finally returned. The vertigo left. Jake faced a possibility that he was skating on the edge of some type of mental disorder. He thought hard, wrestling with a new fear, trying to calm his nerves. When he could hold the phone again with reasonable steadiness he made his third appointment -- with a psychiatrist, thinking ruefully of the hundred dollar-plus raid on his budget the three engagements would undoubtedly create. Jake had no experience of shrinks beyond vague rumors. But he knew that if the whirligig in his head required treatment his first cost estimate could have some extra zeroes trailing behind it. And perhaps the cause might be physical -- rebellion within some body organ, malfunction of some hidden glands. Possibly he should add a date with an internist for a complete physical examination. He groaned, mentally watching a computer subtract dollars from his bank hoard, and decided to wait first for verdicts from dentist, eye man, and head-shrinker. But Jake's odd symptoms faded even as he stood debating. His shoulders straightened and his habitual optimism returned. He ceased to picture himself as fodder for hospital or mental institution. Lunchtime came and went; the daily battle between desire to nap and need to finish the next installment of his syndicated column was fought and won by reluctant ambition -- half the work stint lay imprinted upon white bond. And then a strange urge grabbed him. T HE impulse was as strong as a pregnant woman's yearning for some exotic food. Jake found himself irresistibly wanting to leave his typewriter, leave his room, leave the house. Destination? Purpose? Not the slightest notion. And he discovered he had acted upon the desire with such singleminded concentration that he had not been aware of any ambulatory exertion when he awoke from an almost hypnotic state to find himself on the street. Driven by the same hidden mental force, Jake turned toward Mockingbird Heights, a heavily wooded section south of town which the local conservation society's efforts had pressured the city council into preserving in its natural state. And a frightening phenomenon grew in Jake's mind. His conscious self seemed to be dividing into two entities. The two halves waged stubborn battle in the arena of his skull. He began to talk to himself, gibberish at first, sometimes aloud, sometimes with only the mental sounding of language syllables. But words separated themselves finally. Tree, he heard in his head. Up in the tree -- up in the tree. Let s go to the trees. Morton Koenigsby and Harriet Tarbell rounded a corner right before him. Jake intended to greet them with. Hi, there. Don't tell me quitting time exodus from the city has begun... But the stronger hemisphere of his mental existence changed tongue movements into, "I have to go walk under the trees." Jake moved on, acutely aware of two puzzled stares turned toward his receding form. He felt hot waves of embarrassment flowing to his face. What the hell is happening to me? The answer came immediately: Peace, contentment, happy life in a new world. Complete cacophony followed. The two halves of himself joined in desperate battle. Jake tried to think: I must be going crazy. But the sentence came out: Crapiece, pretty wrrzi -- and crashed into head-splitting noise. What seemed the sane segment of himself won temporarily by resorting to wild physical effort, activating lips and tongue and vocalizing loudly. "What the devil am I talking about?" "Ask somebody else, buddy," a cab driver passing by at the moment answered and moved along, muttering "Kook!" to himself to the tune of his rattling lunch box. The war inside Jake's skull escalated to a new tempo with screaming sentences from both halves impinging upon each other and interlocking. Conflicting syllables combined until mental shouting became nothing comprehensible. Brackaboo bubil high baloohigh in the la laloo high in that tree. Jake spoke aloud, trying to regain control of a runaway mind by physically forcing nonsense into understandable speech. IF But his tongue said back to him, "La-la-la-bla-la!" Jake walked with a gray mist in front of his eyes, only dimly aware that he turned from Edgewater Boulevard and crossed a meadow skirting dense woodland. Strangely, his steps were surer now. The mist cleared from his eyes and both warring voices retreated to the innermost corridors of his skull, with the one Jake still thought of as his own becoming increasingly less forceful. The part of his mind that was himself was being squeezed into a tiny corner. Jake sensed certainty that it would eventually cease to exist in spite of its determined resistance to some alien invasion. Another odd phenomenon came to the front of Jake's attention -- a queer sharpening of his senses. For the first time since the lazy days of his childhood he smelled again the decaying leaf mold, heard the windsong, listened to the groan of tree trunks bending and the scrunch of branches scraping against neighbors. Ecstatic tremors swept through him as he touched the rough bole of a pine and his finger traced with sensual delight long elliptical whorls of brown bark. Vaguely Jake heard the lesser part of his mind crying, What's happening to me? But another mental voice overrode the question, repeating several times, God, what a beautiful planet! A beauty all its own. Without surprise Jake experienced strong excitement in the sight and taste and smell and feel of his surroundings, as if he encountered each familiar component for the first time. He saw dark shadows between gold patches of late sunlight drifting earthward through filtering leaves and shivered with an ague of awe and wonderment. What a beautiful planet -- what a strangely different world... Different from what? the stubborn, walled-in corner of Jake's mind tried to answer and was squeezed into an even smaller space by the other personality. H E sensed some sort of plan just beyond reach of thought, a purpose as intangible as swamp steam, but it took him deeper into the woods where shade became, blued and distances misty. He walked in a random search pattern, looking for something not yet clear to him. He felt it to be hidden in a crack behind peeling bark and stopped at intervals to examine trunks when configuration touched a chord of familiarity. The oddness of feeling this way about a forest he had scarcely bothered to penetrate before today lay as a cloudy and fading figment in his mind. Something he loved drew him forward, a mission that held within its vague purpose some sacred duty, although he was also dimly aware of rebellious negation from somewhere not yet quite smothered under that portion of his mind which had seized control. Jake hunted for a specific tree. He now knew this much. He must find them. He could not replace the pronoun with an identity more definite. Now! There was the tree, a fir, heavy with shadow under drooping branches which swept almost to needle-carpeted floor. He crawled under a canopy of boughs to the shade blackened trunk and, in the artificially created twilight, felt carefully from branch to branch. And then he found them, tiny balls, light as the fluff from a cottonwood tree. They absorbed light strangely, as if they had no substance -- they were wisps of black cloud so light that his tactile senses proved too gross to register any weight or solidity. Yet they rolled on to his palm, behaving as so many minute marbles might have. He could pick one up between thumb and finger but he could not feel it. He looked at them, spherical spiderwebs of substance, changing color to blend with the hues of his palm. And for a moment that silent, walled-in corner of his mind seemed to expand and prompted a thought. Td better kill them. And immediately he felt almost physically choked. Following that came a great love for the ephemeral things -- it flooded his mind. He adored them, precious little cells of embryo life. No! sounded deep under this wave of emotion. Yes ! came another sharp whisper, still recognizable as separate from his Earth self. There was a stirring, a struggle somewhere in the far corners of his mind, a pale mental image trying to force itself outward, a flimsy figment of his personality that insisted that these tiny balls would be so easy to mash. And silent thunder answered again, No! They are alien -- they should be destroyed. But the mind-sound of these words came faintly and full of uncertainty and an immediate negation covered them with harsh syllables. Jake suddenly knew his duty. This was his planet, the world he had been seeking, his new home. These filmy balls were his fellow travelers from a universe where mammalian dwellings were dying. This new planet swarmed with fresh homes for his people, warm, blood-filled life easy to occupy. He must find a safe resting place for each of his brother travelers, even as he had now found one for himself. No! cried that restricted corner of Jake's mind, not himself -- myself -- not myself... IF But again strong thunder drowned the protest with: Go out now where mammals of this plan et walk. Place a tiny sphere upon the flesh of neck or cheek... Jake was automatically threading his way among the trees as these ideas formed. Somehow, with a mind that was still neither entirely alien nor bereft of his old self, Jake Terrell began to think himself back into Earthly routines. The dentist -- that's where Tm going. Then he began to see some humor in trading one of his precious little bits of gossamer for a tooth Good joke on an old college pal. Til give him one of these. He'll give me a hunk of silver in my mouth -- I'll give him a new kind of life... Somehow, too, Jake resisted pressure that crowded upon him every moment of the journey toward his dental appointment, an urge that caused his hand to reach out  unconsciously toward every human being who came close to him, an aching desire to leave one of his treasured, almost invisible cells upon each neck. But the dentist was his best friend, his good old Billy Marbry. He could not let his friend down. Billy Marbry deserved to be the first convert to a new world. the suppressed excitement of a ten-year-old weaving his way along the line entering a circus tent. His mind was brimful with love, worship for these tiny spheres of misty darkness cuddled so carefully in his jacket pocket. One part of Jake's mind echoed with laughter. A very small isolated segment wailed, What am I doing? But that small cry weakened with each repetition and finally ceased. Dim light and discreet decor of the office had never before seemed so appropriate to him. There was warmth here from the dark-shaded lamps. Huddling shadows heightened the mystery of his mission, made a richly ceremonial setting for the gift of a seed to his friend. Jake could think of nothing but the treasure about to be transferred from the diaphanous group in his pocket. The receptionist said, "Doctor Marbry will see you now. Mister Terrell." Jake's laugh was the sudden short sound of a triumphantly happy being. He fumbled in his jacket as he walked toward the inner door, picked out one ethereal spore and strode into brightness of sterile surfaces. Billy Marbry met Jake at the door, chart in hand. "Let's see, you're mainly after a cleaning today, eh, Jake?" Jake laughed, again, the sound almost a whinny. "A real cleaning. The start of a clean sweep of the whole world." The dentist looked up sharply. "Drinking this early in the day, old buddy?" "No. Just standing on the threshhold of destiny." Jake chuckled again. "Want to join me, old pal?" He lifted a pinpoint of gossamer from his pocket. Just a handclasp -- or a brotherly paw on the dentist's shoulder -- just as easy as that to begin a new order on Earth. Jake felt the cell squirm as the warmth of his hand enclosed it. That did it -- hand on shoulder, a touch on his good old buddy's neck as he laughed. "Be a good guy and leave me enough teeth to chew my soup at least." Jake withdrew his hand and followed the dentist into his torture chamber. Secretly Jake was still laughing and watching Bill Marbry closely for some sign that the cell had reached the man's brain. Smugly he sat in the big chair and fitted his head back against the padded neck rest. His eyes remained fixed in a cold stare of alien intensity on the doctor. Marbry muttered, "Is something the matter? You feel well?" Jake said, "Sure. Why?" He scanned the doctor's face intently. "Your eyes," said the dentist. "I was once in a party that treed a cougar and I'll swear the look in that big cat's eyes was exactly like yours was a second ago. I felt like running for cover." Both men laughed. Jake said, "Maybe the cougar thought you were going to stick a drill in its mouth." They laughed again. "Hurry along with any excavating you need to do before I get scared enough to eat you up," Jake said. Again both laughed. But Jake's eyes watched, aware that for a second the infinitesimal imprisoned section of his mind tried to scream. He settled back in the chair and meekly allowed the nurse's white hands to fasten a napkin around his neck. He held rigidly still while Marbry probed and clicked various instruments against enamel. And constantly he watched, waiting for first signs of that sudden struggle he knew would begin inside the doctor's skull within the next thirty minutes. Marbry withdrew the probe after one last nerve-wrenching dig. "You've got a cavity and it's going to go pretty deep," he told Jake. "You'll need some novocaine." "That's fine with me. Doc." Jake chuckled, feeling with that keen, expanding new mind of his a joyous kinship with this mammal that would soon awaken to the mastery of a blood brother. He sat chuckling softly to himself (Please turn to page # ) IF i...but men are not necessarily brothers T HE small coasting shull that Antor Ref had chosen for his northward journey along the Inland Passage of Slor's East Coast, was picking its way through a colorful plethora of similar stubbymasted craft, tiny kupps, oaredor lateen-rigged, and wallowing huge cargo drogs. The forty-mile width of Nap Bay shone white with the chalky paleness of rocky bottom and circling headlands. A large-winged craft, issuing an annoying buzzing roar, circled unevenly above the approaching lesser docks. Antor ignored it. The Words of Malan had declared that men do not fly. The truth was there for all to read. Aliens from Erth and unbelieving deviants might think they could emulate the birds. But they were deceived. Such delusions were harmful and unnatural. Only the Words had truth. Waiting at the docking place was the rotund furry bulk of Hwat Ten. Hwat was wearing a scarletbarred forest cloak to his knees and his pinkish-yellow body fur was groomed and shining. His vertically slitted, red-brown eyes shone with welcome. Antor Ref sprang over the rail to the great flat stones of bluish fedrock, his arms outstretched. Their hands grasped the bushy hair tufts above two sets of earcups and tugged joyfully until the tears started. Tears and laughter. "You've grown fat, brother," Antor said. "And you leaner and more wrinkled of belly and neck," cried out Hwat Ten. Both guffawed. They gave each other an affectionate second hairloosening tug. Tears streaming afresh, they bared their broad short-stubbed teeth in happy grins and broke apart. Antor's crimson eyes looked into Hwat's duller brownish eyes and his silvery furred arm linked with the shorter man's pinkly furred one. "Five long years, brother," Hwat said, "since we trained together in Hri." Antor looked around the dock and back at the docking shull. Now that the excitement of greeting Hwat was lessening his caution returned. Apparently no one was paying them any heed. The screaming of charcoal-winged offal birds wheeling overhead and the slap-slap of chop against the barnacled piers covered their words. "Five long, lonely years," agreed Antor, straightening his thin bony body to its full four feet. "Although I have been fortunate in acquiring several hundred followers -- in limited cells of twenty of course -- these Slorish eaters of filth are not to my taste as true fellows." He thought that Hwat's eyes chilled as he spoke. "Do not the Words of Malan say to hail all men as Fellows?" IF Hwat murmured. "Are 'not all men to be brothers?" "Of course -- of course. You know I believe all that. It is simply that the old friends, the early memories, are closer." "I, too," Hwat confessed, "in the early days of exile here, felt hostility. Most of these Slorish are happy and prosperous. It was difficult to bring them to understand that discipline and austerity and sacrifice are so important. "But now all is well. I have found many sincere and loyal fellows. I have married a wonderful woman of the city." "You, a Fellow of the Words -- " choked out Antor. "You forget that both of us, Antor, despite our common brother, Tanab Gon, are burdened with the bodies of Slorish natives." "I have not forgotten that, whatever my present exterior," said Antor Ref coldly, "I am a Hri. In my exile I have acquired two female slaves, both black-furred Hris." "And they know you only as a scant-furred Slorish gorb , a maggot -- a crawler in filth -- and their master." An angry pulse beat in Antor' s short, thick neck. But he kept his silence. Already he could see that Hwat Ten was corrupted. His tolerance of the thin-blooded Slorish way of life -- even to his mating with one of them -- revealed how far he had deviated. "I have done well for the Fellows of Malan," he said, breaking the ugly little silence. "My cover of coasting shulls and heavy land freighting has expanded. Eighty, shulls and fifty outfits of twenty beasts to each six-wheeled yenn pour a mounting flood of treasure into our Order." "I, too," said Hwat Ten. "From the small weekly printing my funds acquired I have expanded. We print a hundred books and two daily news records, here and in Jalip, opposite the Erthport island of Zurn. We supply thousands of pamphlets and small booklets lauding the life of austerity, sacrifice of animal joy and devoted adherence to the Words of Malan. And we send much treasure to the Fellows in Hri." Antor allowed himself a noiseless inward snort. From the wellpadded appearance, the expensive scarlet-barred cloak of green and the glossy porskin sandals on Hwat's four-toed feet, not all the treasure was sent to Hri. Of course a certain amount of reserve against sudden emergencies was essential. The Fellows of Malan, two thousand miles to the south, had no conception of the exigencies of trade. A third, occasionally a fourth, of the profits, was safely put aside. A comfortable feeling it gave to a dedicated man like himself. When the Order once again regained ascendancy in the councils of the alienated continents of Slor, Keth, Rinf and Foil, he would be in a position to further their ambitions. Then the Fellows would appreciate his wisdom in secretly retaining this contingency fund. Hwat Ten brushed at his sleek fur impatiently. "We'll get along to my home," he said, "as soon as your luggage comes off the shull. We have several years to catch up." A burly old seaman with mangy patches of whitish bare flesh marring his pale brown fur came off the shull, carrying two faded black sacks with corded straps for handles. He dropped them wordlessly at Antor's feettmd went back aboard. "Why do you suppose Tanab Gon has summoned us to this meeting?" he said to Hwat as each of them shouldered a bag. Hwat shook his tufted pinkish head. "When we board the boat tomorrow," he said, "at the harbor east of the Erthport enclave, we will soon learn." N OW that Antor Ref had eaten and was safely installed in his sleeping quarters Hwat could give some thought to his own possible future. He knew that a major crisis impended. The reunion with his almostbrother, Antor, had been a disaster. Five years ago the Fellows of Malan had given twenty brainstripped prisoners the complete memories of some of their most trusted and dedicated members. Both Antor and himself were, in everything but body, duplicates of the middle-aged historian Tanab Gon. A carefully edited resume of their bodies' former histories had been supplied and they had been allowed to "escape" to their native continents. Antor had treated Hwat's beloved Lilse with a boorishness Hwat found inexcusable. He had ignored giving the slightest polite tug at Lilse's lovely twin tufts of sun-glowing yellow hair and his bow of acknowledgment had been a fractional inclination of his silvery beaky head. They had not talked long after the evening meal. Hwat's barely repressed rage. had dried up his flow of words and the tall bony man from distant Itar, in South Slor, had soon fallen silent. The five years had come between them. Neither of them was what he once had been. Hwat knew that he was not. Both had changed -- Antor Ref to the extremes of racial and nationalistic intolerance to which many Fellows of Malan, regrettably, were addicted. Hwat, too, was different. He still believed in the basics of the Words of Malan: moderation in all things, a measure of austerity and discipline and wisdom and that all men are of one flesh despite their outward appearance. He had grown tolerIF ant according to the Words of Malan, yet the Fellows of Malan would damn him as deviant. "I do not care much for your guest," Lilse said softly into his ear. Hwat bounded up convulsively, his pulse surging hard. "You startled me," he confessed. Lilse smoothed his bushy fur and her soft hands toyed with the cuplike ears beneath them. "You have never mentioned him to me," she said. "Where did  you meet him? And why is he here?" Hwat had, of course, revealed nothing of his double identity to his marriage parfher. He was, to her, simply a Slorish citizen with a secret belief in the Words of Malan. Despite the banning of such study groups since the ejection of the Fellows ten years before, there were many secret students of Malan's century-old philosophy. "We were captives together," Hwat explained. "The Hri pirates enslaved us. Aboard ship fortunately. Antor Ref was a good comrade then. He has soured. But we escaped together -- and with us took a good amount of pirate loot." "You have never told me before how you gained your wealth," said Lilse, pouting as she curled the soft three feet of her rounded goldfurred body into his lap. "You must tell me the whole story." "Later when we have hours," Hwat said, stroking her back and breasts gently. "Tonight I must go to the sleeping platform at once. We leave early in the morning for Zurn." "I would love to go with you," Lilse said wistfully. "I would like to see the strange palaces and the giant Erthmen and their machines. But I know the customs of Slor forbid it." "I will bring you some of the printed fotocolor cards the Erthmen trade to us," Hwat promised. "If I owned one of the cameras they are teaching us to make you could see what I see there." "What are you to do there, my Hwat?" "Business of some sort. Antor Ref has scores of trading shulls and freighting lines. Expansion of his business I presume. He gave me for reference -- and I was glad to oblige an old comrade." "I do not like him," Lilse said fiercely. "I wish he had never come. I wish you would send him away. I hope you get sick and cannot go with him." Hwat laughed, baring his broad short teeth as widely as he assumed a proper lauh required. It was rather an empty laugh. He, too, wished he could avoid going to meet his brother and Fellow, Tanab Gon, tomorrow. He had found a good life here in Nap. "One does not brush off old friends so easily," he said. "He must be exhausted from the voyage up here. Irritable and sick. Tomorrow he may be more like the Antor Ref I recall." "I hate him," Lilse declared stoutly, scarlet eyes flashing. "You judge too soon," admonished Hwat. "Wait and see." But Hwat Ten was considering what was to befall with daylight. He determined to take a flat-holstered gas pistol, a double-barreled over-and-under weapon that fitted smoothly under his triple-layered body tunic and into the middle hollow of his chest. He would wear the usual dress dagger but he would exchange the two-foot sliver of inferior brittle gray metal for a tempered, gray-stained blade. He had not dueled or fired a weapon, either for sport or in anger for three years -- not since his marriage to Lilse -- but he had not forgotten all his old skills. Yet he would be slow. Better to avoid combat if at all possible -- but to be ready. the submersible's hatch into the stoutly compartmented hollow of the anchored cargo drog. The Fellows of Malan were not averse to the use of electrically -- or otherwise -- powered craft. In fact, before the coming of the accursed giant men from Erth they had possessed a monopoly over the control of such awesome powers. But they had always been discreet. Hidden power is always more effective than the visible. The unknown surpasses the known. And so the Fellows lodged their sleek swift submersibles within altered cargo drogs or inside caverns with underwater entrances. Their weaponry and their other complex hardware they camouflaged. With Tanab Gon came a shaggy black-furred native of Hri, mightily muscled and loyal to the death but with no great fire of reason in his gold-flecked green eyes. Orch was Tanab Gon's bodyguard. Orch was adept in the use of the sharpened twin daggers slung on his hips. His fists were clijbs. His fingers were like strangler's cords. His knees could snap a spine or a leg. "Seal the hatch," Tanab Gon ordered Orch, "and give me the locking widge." Tanab and Orch were alone aboard the six-man craft. If this secret mission proved successful he would need the extra space for the transport of urgently needed treasure and the recruits. Tanab pouched the widge and led the way to the upper deck, overlooking the hundred square miles of Zurn Bay's restless chop of waves. Off to the west the squat towers and expanding landing aprons of Erthport were visible. Even as he watched, a cargo ship thundered upward on fiery legs of atomic blast. He had timed it to the second. IF The two voluntary expatriates, his duplicated egos in these frailer, thin-furred Slorish outer husks, were ascending the wallowing ship's ladder. "Brother," he said. And again: "Brother," The tugging of the tufts above each pair of ears came next, his own coarse black hair receiving a double buffeting. Then the Fellows' touch of the elbows. "Come to the cabin prepared for us," said Tanab. "I have smoked terge flesh and roasted paddu roots ready for us there. And fermented terge milk, frozen and again awakened." "It will be like home again," Hwat said, rather weakly and Antor Ref nodded, unsmiling. Orch stood aside, his sly green eyes intent. He might know on the surface of his mind that these were trusted allies of his assigned master. But they were Slorish. Puny eaters of offal and cowards by name and nature. All Hri knew this. The chunky bodyguard regarded with suspicion even the men of the drog, all trusted men, many of them associate Fellows. Seated at last -- hard Hri stools grouped about the plain smoothscoured planks of the table -- Tanab Gon chewed a bit of blackened, smoke-reeking flesh and came directly to the business at hand. "Our control of the noble houses of Hri," he said, "has been badly crippled. The men of Erth have brought flowing black fuel from beneath the ground to warm us. They trade for our gems and the peculiar white metal they desire machines and sealed plastic or bonded earth living shelters. "Our people have grown soft and luxury loving. The Words of Malan are passed over or forgotten. Even as our enclaves in the four continents were taken from us -- so it may soon be in our native land." "It is so," said Antor Ref gloomily. "The Words of Malan are meaningless to the well fed and the prosperous. Only to the hungry and the miserable do they bring blessed comfort." "We must find new ways to teach the wisdom of Malan," Hwat said eagerly. "We three have the same mind. We are brothers and well versed in the Words. We have experience in three ways of life. Was this why you brought us together, brother?" Tanab Gon eyed his guests. What sickly ill-formed men were these Slorish. Hard to remember that they were both himself -- or had been five years before. Then they had owned identical memories and attitudes. Now, as the increasingly faulty intelligence of the Fellows reported, Hwat Ten was rapidly becoming a deviationist. He must be forced to return to proper ways. And Antor Ref was reputed to conform to the Words outwardly but to be siphoning away the wealth of the Order. For Antor there would be a severe reckoning should this prove true. All men changed, he reflected. He was not the simple zealot he had been years past. Then he had served the bumble-headed leaders of the Order with unswerving loyalty. Now he knew them for the bunglers and bumblers they were. their basic troubles, would they? With him leading the Fellows of Malan and with the aid of lesser men -- Fellows like these two, his submerged twin selves -- the ascendancy of the Order over all the ten continents of Okar might be restored. "We have a task that can rid us forever of our greatest foe," said Tanab Gon. "The Ancients of our Order refused to listen to me. But for the good of the Order we must act. We are of one mine, we three. And Orch will obey without question. "A fact accomplished, brothers. They will accept success. We will have honor and respect -- be given leadership." He saw that the faces of the two thinly furred men were drawn and suspicious, the thin, corded face and the fat, normally smiling face. "What is this disapproved venture?" asked Antor Ref. "The destruction of Erthport and the entire island of Zurn," Tanab said. He looked toward the door, guarded by the coarse-furred Hri. "The cowardly giants flew armed conflict and war. They will never dare set up a new free port." "Not so," Hwat cried out, scowling. "Many more great spacecraft would come to retaliate." "They are but illusionists," Antor Ref scoffed. "They do not really fly or traverse in emptiness. They are masters of charlatanry and mass hypnotism. But to destroy them would bring death to those of us involved." "You are wrong about the Erthmen," Tanab said. "We know they come from offplanet. We know that the heavens are not of brassy ether with niches and paths. The Words of Malan came in riddles t)at only true scholars finally solved." AntorRef's crimson eyes blazed. He rose to his feet. "The Words say clearly that man is never to fly." "By his own power," Tanab explained shortly. "We captured an Erth giant whose wing crashed into one of our mountains. The mind strip told the story. And we sent the memories of Resl Mer back to Erthport with his body." "They have deceived you," Antor said bitterly. "You are as much a deviationist as is Hwat. Yes, and worse. I will not listen to any more lies against the Words." "I agree with Antor Ref," Hwat Ten said stiffly. "Not for the reaIF sons he gives. Your words are reasonable. I can see that the Erthmen fly. I have flown with a friend -- a Slorish merchant. But I will not help you to blow up this island and Erthport because much greater woes would come upon all our peoples. You must forget this mad dream. Learn to live with Erthmen and learn how to teach the Words of Malan without coercion and subversion." The two Slorishmen turned away from Tanab. They headed toward the cabin door. Orch stood there stiffly, his eyes hot and wary, his strong fingers gripping his cloak-hidden daggers. "Do not allow them to pass, Orch," Tanab said crisply. had his fingers well into the grips of his holstered weapon. "Consider," Tanab Gon was pleading, "the quick solution of all our miseries. I have acquired four thermonuclear devices through the knowledge of the captured Erth flyer. We shall plant them at appropriate spots with' a timing device that will permit us to be miles away, aboard the submersible when the destruction occurs. Forget our ideological differences. We are one. We are more truly brothers than any born of woman." "Out of my way," Antor Ref warned the black-furred man. In his hand was a stub-barreled gun. "I, too, am armed," Tanab Gon  nan  Iran A to lemria This month, the Berkley Travel Service offers a variety of trips (all good), from that venerable fantastic voyage in itraising trek through Old Lemuria with the mighty-thewed Valkarthian in if you fancy it, a swing through the Return flights not guaranteed. Lin Carter (X#, #) Keith Laumer (X#, #) (X#, #) (X#, #) Next month: Heinlein, Hubbard, Harrison! If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have complete freedom of choice In pricing these books for resale to others. announced. Turning slightly, Hwat saw that the dark-furred Fellow cradled a four-barreled gas-powered weapon in his arms. "Let us talk further," Tanab pleaded. Hwat thought of lovely Lilse and the pleasant life he had come to appreciate in the city of Nap. After the harsher climate and planned austerities of barren Hri the life he had known in Slor was close to ideal. His mind had expanded and he had glimpsed a small part of what man's potential could be. The mad plot to destroy Zurn and the Erthmen must be foiled. His own fate as an undercover Fellow was upon him. The Fellows must destroy him. Action seemed the only out. He fired through the cloak, saw Tanab reel, raise the four-barreled weapon again. Antor's short weapon roared. Orch screamed in wild rage and Hwat fired again, more accurately this time. ( Continued from page #I )  Memberships: Supporting, #; Atgia #.  aton Hotel, Toronto, Canada. GuestsTanab slewed around and collapsed. Antor Ref's body thudded soddenly back against Hwat's knees. Hwat caught a glimpse of a knife slash and of Antor's head askew above the red gape. Then his weapon was out, its two-foot length warding the two daggers of Orch. Orch was a dead man. His chest was tom open from the blast of Antor's pistol. Yet he fought on ferociously. The years of eating and enjoying the good life while his skill with weapons and in combat were mothballed were catching up with Hwat Ten. He fought strongly but clumsily. The keen-ground dagger of Orch came through and he was aware of gushing and of weakness. But there was little pain. Only a sense of darkening twilight. He saw Orch fall. The wisdom of the Words of Malan, came his final thought, was not for men. Not even himself.  of-Honor: Anne McCarffrey, Isaac Asimov. Membership: # in advance. For information: Peter Gill, # Glen Manor Drive, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. AL. In Heidelberg, West Germany. For information and registration: West Germany. IF ( Continued from page #) turned to Maggie. "I'm pleased that a Tingle-lime commercial was on when you made your first purchase because it demonstrates the superiority of the Telemart Three over all other models. Believe it or not, a carbonated drink is not an easy object to transmit. With older systems there was an appreciable loss of carbon dioxide pressure before the container was completely formed. But the Telemart Three comes so close to instantaneous construction of the transmitted object that -- " "Oh, look," Maggie interupted. "There's a commercial for liqueur chocolates. It's ages since I've had a liqueur chocolate." Ted hurried into the groundfloor room where his wife had slept since her injury and found the bracelet of Venusian gold. He had a feeling he would need to get the best possible price for it. a certain amount of abject pleading, he dropped over five thousand on the bracklet. He hurried to his favorite gymnasium and spent two hours trying to work the tension toxins out of his body but all the while a gloomy certainty that he had made a major blunder was building up in him. Finally, halfway through a set of deep knee bends, he made a decision -- Maggie would have to give him her sacred vow not to use the Telemart for anything beyond normal household shopping. If necessary he would even sit with her at nights until satisfied she was going to play the game. He showered quickly and drove home in his aging rotary-engined Pontiac. The tall narrow house was in darkness except for a dim, shifting light in the window of the lounge. Ted . sprinted up the stone steps and ran into the house but he had trouble opening the lounge door. Something heavy seemed to be preventing it from moving. He got his head into the room and blinked incredulously at what he saw. Maggie was sitting close to the proscenium, watching a noisy powerboat race. She was almost hidden from his view by a pile of cartons and boxes, most of which had been opened. In the first seconds he picked out three new table lamps, a gilt-framed painting that looked like a Renoir, several of the recently developed four-legged turkeys in polyethylene skins, a salon-type hair drier, numerous hatboxes and a deluxe Micropedia Britannica, complete with reclining chair and ceiling projector. Ted was unable to suppress a plaintive whimpering sound as he forced his way into the room. "You bitch," he moaned. "You faithless bitch." "What did you say, honey?" Maggie twisted a knob on the handset and the sound of the jockeying speedboats faded away. She wheeled her chair around to face Ted and he saw the Telemart brochure open on her knees. "What do you think you're doing, Maggie? They don't give this stuff away, you know -- our bank account is automatically debited every time you press that button." Maggie shrugged. "I've been enjoying myself -- which makes a nice change. Ted, honey, you really should look at this brochure. You don't have to buy just what they show you in the commercials -- Telemart offers all kinds of services I never heard -- " She stopped speaking as he picked up one of the turkeys and hurled it at the vista of boats beyond the proscenium arch. The bird passed through a red boat, hit the wall of the room and bounced back out onto the floor. "I'm going to kill you," Ted announced. "I'm a fair-minded man and I don't like the idea of choice." "You've been drinking." "I'm cold sober." He looked around the room, selected one of the new table lamps and removed its ornate shade, leaving himself with a serviceable blunt instrument. Maggie clutched the Telemart's handset to her bosom in a strangely protective gesture. "Don't come near me." "In a way I blame myself," Ted said sadly, hefting the base of the lamp. "I should have known you weren't ready for the responsibilities of marriage." He stepped over a cluster of perfume bottles and swung down at Maggie's head. She twisted away from the lamp. It crunched into the back of the wheelchair, tipping it over. Maggie sprawled among the hatboxes. Breathing heavily, Ted stood over her and raised the base with both hands, noting with one part of his mind that she was still holding the handset and was, in fact, twisting a red knob on it. Poor mindless lump, he thought as he brought down the club. "Drop it right there, fellow," a voice said close behind him. Ted spun and saw a hard-faced young man in a gray suit stepping down from the truncated catwalk attached to the proscenium. The stranger was holding an automatic pistol. "Who -- " Ted's voice faltered as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening. "What is this?" The stranger smiled unpleasantly. "You can't have studied the section of the Telemart brochure covering our new Three-star Protection Service for clients' lives and property." "Protection?" "Yes. As soon as we get an IF emergency signal a trained security man who is on duty at the station is instantaneously transmitted into the home -- and in this case I'd say I made it just in time." "But they can't do that." Ted had an overpowering sense of outrage. "After a while there'd be hundreds of duplicates of you running about the city. Telemart can't go around creating extra people -- we're overpopulated as it is." A shadow crossed the stranger's face. "That's taken care of. They deliberately program a flaw into the hiemoglobin structure of any duplicates they have to transmit. A massive embolism will kill me in a few hours. It's a hell of a prospect." The stranger raised his right hand and leveled the pistol. "Just a minute," Ted said desperately. "There must be some arrangement we can come to. I've got money -- " The stranger regarded him out of cold, tortured eyes. "What good is money to a duplicate like me? I've got a short life and all I can do is make it as satisfying as possible." He aimed the pistol right between Ted's eyes and pulled the trigger.  Daniels turned and went up the snowy path to the house. He'd like some coffee and a bite to eat -- but first he had to do the chores. Ho had to milk the cows and feed the pigs. The chickens must wait till morning -- it was too late to feed the chickens. The cows would be waiting at the bam door. They had waited for a long time and it was not right to make them wait. He opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. Someone was waiting for him. It sat on the table or floated so close above it that it seemed to be sitting. The fire in the stove had gone out and the room was dark but the creature sparkled. You saw? the creature asked. "Yes," said Daniels. "I saw and heard. I don't know what to do. What is right or wrong? Who knows what's right or wrong?" Not you, the creature said. Not I. I can only wait. I can only keep the faith. Perhaps among the stars, thought Daniels, might be those who did know. Perhaps by listening to the stars, perhaps by trying to break in on their conversations and by asking questions, he might get an answer. Certainly there must be some universal ethics. A list, perhaps, of Universal Commandments. Maybe not ten of them. Maybe only two or three -- but any number might be enough. "I can't stay and talk," he said. "I have animals to take care of. Could you stick around? Later we can talk." He fumbled for the lantern on the bench against the wall, found the matches on the shelf. He lit the lantern and its feeble flame made a puddle of light in the darkness of the room. You have others to take care of? asked the creature. Others not quite like yourself . Others, trusting you, without your intelligence? "I guess you could say it that way," Daniels said. "I've never heard it put quite that way before." Could I go along with you? the creature asked. It occurs to me, just now, that in many ways we are very much alike. "Very much -- " But with the sentence hanging in the air, Daniels stopped. Not a hound, he told himself. Not the faithful dog. But the shepherd. Could that be it? Not the master but the long-lost lamb? He reached out a hand toward the creature in a swift gesture of understanding, then pulled it back, remembering it was nothing he could touch. He lifted the lantern and turned toward the door. "Come along," he said. Together the two of them went through the storm toward the barn and the waiting cows.  as Billy prepared a hypodermic, thinking how there would be two of them now to divide the precious gossamer spores and go out among two-legged animals, bending them unknowingly to the creation of a new world for his people. And again in some corner of Jake's skull Jake sensed a weak crying. He watched the dentist point the needle toward him, felt a slight prick at the joint of jawbone. He settled back to await the onslaught of numbness around his gums -- then suddenly began screaming and he knew that he was dying. No -- the thing inside his skull was screaming. It was dying -- not himself. but no sound vibrated his throat membranes. He sensed the dentist's sharp look, his fast reaction, heard the exclamation as the man whirled. "Damn it, why, didn't you tell me you were allergic to novocaine?" Jake tried to talk: "No -- not allergic. It's the thing. It's the thing in my head. It's not a novocaine reaction. You've killed the thing -- don't!" he shouted as he saw Marbry turning back toward him with another hypo. He knocked the dentist's arm aside and jumped from the chair. ( Continued from page #) That portion of mind he recognized as himself was emerging, gaining strength. His words became recognizable. He shouted again, "You've killed the thing that was inside my head. Novocaine will poison it. You've killed it." He saw the dentist recoil, saw the nurse back up against the door. She slipped out of the room. Marbry shouted, "Sit down a minute. Let me counteract that novocaine -- " Jake dodged behind the chair, repeating, "No. I need the novocaine. It's poisoned the thing in my head. I'm free, Billy." He began pleading with the doctor. "You've got one in your head. Take a shot of novocaine before it grows strong enough to grab control of you. Novocaine will kill it." Marbry backed into the outer office. Jake followed, begging, "Take the novocaine, Bill. Quick! Before it drives you out of your mind -- before you can't think for yourself any more." The nurse turned from the phone, calling, "They're coming." Marbry held both hands up toward Jake. "Try to relax, fellow. You'll be all right. You're just a little out of your head. Everything will be all right." He edged along the office wall. Jake followed him still peading, "Take the novocaine, Bill, before it's too late. Save the world -- " "He's crazy!" the nurse screamed. Marbry pleaded, "Just relax, Jake. We won't harm you. We want to help you. I'm your friend. Remember?" Jaked pushed a hand into his pocket and felt, for the tiny cloudlike balls. "See, Bill? It's these things. They're after us. I put one in your head. Kill it quick." He began picking the alien things from his pocket, dropping them under his heel to crush them. They were moving wildly and he ran fingers around in the wrinkled fabric after the last ones. "Now get the one in your head," he begged the dentist. "Take the novocaine. Poison it." He saw the horrified look of the dentist and realized his friend could not see the spores in the dim office light. He held up the next month'sfeatures last one, trying to show it. "Look, Bill. I'm not crazy. We've got to kill them all or it will be the end of the human race. We'll be slaves, zombies for these things." Marbry continued to repeat, "Just relax. We'll have help for you in a minute." Jake did not see the uniformed figures come into the room. He felt strong hands on his shoulders. His arms were pulled back. Cuffs snapped around his wrists. A rough voice said, "Here now, buddy -- everything's going to be all right." Jake was dragged down the hall, pleading and shouting back to the dentist, "Take the novocain before you wreck the world." In the squad car he begged to be taken back, to be listened to, to be taken to someone with understanding, until the prick of another needle and subsequent narcotic sleep stilled his tongue.  next month's IF features the best of all possible worlds IF ( Continued from page #) variations oj up to # within a span oj a couple oj years. IQ, which is a measure of the ability to learn, has nothing to do with financial success or the ability to apply that knowledge. That is the province oj creativity and just plain drive. Any comparison among those qualities is specious. I can't understand the furor over something which can't be defined very well, and doesn't have much impact in our lives. I disagree with you on the failures of the Caucasoids. The prime purpose of any species is to survive. If anything, we have done too well. Most of our problems are due to the over abundance of our abilities at this. We have got problems; but, until the Caucasoid population is in a decline, I can't really feel that we have failed. I certainly don't like what we have been doing to ourselves, whatever the color, and we have a long way to go. However, I am optimistic about our chances of getting there. Robert Ewart Bedford Hills, N. Y. On a purely population basis. Bob, I don't think the Caucasoids are even in the race -- we're vastly outnumbered, though we're ahead on acquisitiveness and muscle. And at least a sidelight on survival may be suggested by a recent Wall Street Journal report that college graduates over six feet two inches tall receive an average starting salary # per cent higher than those under six feet. I don'ifjk#ow exactjy what this means -- but if simple survival is the measure of success we might all do best to walk tall. And pick on the small. Regardless of race, creed or color. I know you don't mean to and neither do I. Thanks for a great letter. Included here is a mere sampling of letters to give some idea of the range of interest. The subject will be covered more completely in a future editorial. Dear Mr. Jakobs son: Things are looking up. There was much consternation here for a while at the new state of Galaxy and If, missing issues and such -- um, by the way, I hear ugly rumors from my subscribing friends about missing issues -- you'll probably hear them pretty soon. But it's such a relief to be able to enjoy an editorial for a change -- two editorials, even. Campbell's get me so darn mad I usually have to chuck the magazine into a corner for a while to cool down -- seldom that there's much worth reading there anyway. Alas, I can't comment on your latest contents, not ; having read them yet either -- only the Budrys book review. Whatever else you do, keep him! And I'll add my voice calling for Delany. Please? I see your publisher is on the side of the angels in The Great Staple War. I only hope his glue is permanent. Being in the fortunate  unfortunate position of having to buy Galaxy and to maintain complete collections, she said modestly. I'm very glad to see that they aren't headed for the bottomless pits after all. Best of luck. Sue A nderson East Lansing, Michigan I admire your choice of reading matter. You and I see eye to eye on Budrys -- shall we call him peerless? With readers like you, how can GalaxyIf not survive? You take care. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: My congratulations and thanks for your editorial whack at John Campbell in the November Galaxy. I have in times past carried on an intermittent, but rather futile, duel with Mr. Campbell -- futile because, you know, he has that magazine and I have my stationery. So it is indeed a pleasure to see a rational discussion of one of his articles in print. I have my own revolutionary idea about the ( taken for granted ) difference of blacks from whites. I note that black cultures have remained superior in tropical zones and postulate, therefore, that some yet unknown thermal variant compounded of temperature differences and the heat-absorption differential of dark skin has caused their brains to be addled outside of an area stretching from, say, Conakry to Lusaka. This in no way, mind you, implies that blacks are inferior -- not within their proper sphere, which evidently is what Mr. Campbell is driving at. Seriously, though, it seems remarkable to me that an ingenious man, who being too narrow-minded to investigate the possibility that there is in fact a physical difference between races, should himself be so circumscribed that he will not take up the subject of discrimination. Perhaps an application of Occam's Razor would help trim Mr. Campbell's ideas down to size. Discrimination is so simple -- and it fits so many facts so readily. Why spend so much time and mental energy in pursuit of some mysterious pseudoscientific will-of-the-wisp? I can only conclude that Mr. Campbell has some vested interest in finding a phlogiston to fit his needs. If I did not know what a forward-looking thinker he is, I would suggest that his interest is prejudice. Again, my thanks. Your publication remains excellent. Best wishes, Thomas O. Gary Troy, Mich Variations in human skin composition have been and are currently under scientific scrutiny and analysis, with particular attention to their effectiveness under different atmospheric and temperature conditions. The last time I looked, several months ago, conclusions were not yet definite and no cultural trends were either inferred or envisioned. Thank you for a constructive letter. Differences, some obvious, some subtle, exist of course between individual Blacks as they do between individual Whites. And isn't that great? Only the very dull see or have tolerance for uniformity. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I have oft been tempted to write a letter to the editor but your editorial in the December issue of IF was the first to force action. You obviously missed the point of Mr. Campbell's editorial completely. It was the concept that " difference " implies " higher " and "lower" which he was arguing against. The fact that you failed to grasp this IF shows that you are among the victims oj the prejudice which he was attempting to refute. In trying to negate Mr. Campbell's thesis, you imply in every turn that he said the opposite of what he did say (and suggest that it is not necessary for anyone to check your sources .) You imply he holds " White Scholarly' standards in high esteem, he clearly shows that they are invalid criteria; you imply he holds Scots to be superior in all respects to Blacks, he says he much prefers the music developed uniquely by the Blacks of Trinidad to that by his own people. But why go on? The point should be clear now. So fish your October issue of Analog out of the trash can and read what Mr. Campbell says instead of what you think he is going to say. I'm enclosing a stamped, selfaddressed envelope, and would like a personal reply. By the way, I generally agree with your editorials, so keep up the good work. I'm enclosing a check for a #-issue subscription to IF. Thank you. James C. Fairfield Wichita, Kan. I failed to grasp nothing in Mr. Campbell's editorial -- not even the expressed innuendo that the scientific community had, by implication, condemned Blacks as intellectually inferior to Whites. I implied nothing about the White "Scholarly" standards (the quotations are Mr. Campbell's) but simply stated that, despite a Black heritage, Walter Francis White was outstandingly successful by those standards in a hostile White environment. As were, I might add here, authors Pushkin in Russia and Dumas in France. Nor did I imply that Mr. Campbell considered Scots "superior in all respects" -- I did point out that he reasoned from the particular to the general in this particular editorial in citing the success of a couple qf Scots and then inferring greater adaptability to Scots in our society. Individual Black successes in our Caucasoid society abound in all areas from athletics through Qrts and sciences, education and government -- successes won against harsher environmental conditions than most Whites encounter -- enough of them certainly to disprove any dogmatic link between skin color and type and quality of intellect andor talent. From Booker T. Washington to the present Blacks have contributed a hell of a lot more than Trinidad rhythm to "Caucasoid" culture on its own terms and we stand as idiots if we remain blind to the fact. More to come on this at a later date. Dear Sirs: Congratulations! Several months ago I quit buying both Galaxy and If as I was convinced that I would never see anything but psuedo-sophistication and false respectability in either. I had heard that both had changed editors and publishers, but-being slightly strapped for cash at the timeI abstained for the time being. Then I picked up the Dec. issue of Worlds of If. I was shocked! Quality at last! The artwork was free and unchained ( although I would have preferred that the first paragraph of Nor man Spinrad's story not be completely covered ) and in the ashes oj the pyre a new Worlds of If arose. Young and powerful. A magazine I truly enjoyed reading. Spinrad's and Brunner's stories were the highlights of the magazine for me. Artistically your magazine is terrific, although a word to the wise -- don't over-work the master. Get another master and they can spell each other. Get Jim Steranko. I hope to see more of Spinrad in the future, along with Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Phil Dick and Larry Eisenberg. Glad to hear that you are reviving Worlds of Tomorrow. Glad because there is a chronic need for sf magazines -- and I feel that it will be a good one with you characters backing it! On parting I say: Good luck in the future, good luck now -- and ditch the digest size by #. David Lewton Indianapolis, Ind. This month's If First introduces Timothy M. Brown a sophomore physics major at Wesleyan University, interested mainly in problems in astronomy -- an interest triggered by an early conversion to science fiction. At # he's a veteran of eight years of pounding out sf, which he has only now begun to try to market. Ethics of Trade , you'll agree, is a fine story and augurs for a real discovery. Editor: Regarding Edward M. Osachie's letter in the November Hue and Cry --  must say that his complaint has been long overdue concerning Arthur Clarke's " disclaimer " on the copyright page of the tenth U.S. printing of Childhood's End: "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author." This remark of Clarke's is not a recent addition, but has been placed in all editions of C.E. since its first publication by Ballantine Books in #. One would think someone would remarked about it before now. In any case, the meaning of the statement came out when I spoke with Mr. Clarke early in # while researching my also-overdue book about the gentleman and his works. He had been a bit evasive about answering the question in his letter, but he finally explained that he did not believe man could evolve according to his hopes without venturing into space. As most of your readers know, mankind does not get to travel into space in C.E., but is restrained from doing so by the Overlords. Ironically, the only man permitted to leave the planet Earth by the Overlords is also the only man left on Earth to die when humanity joins the Overmind. Thus, Clarke apologized for not letting Man become Spaceman in Childhood's End. #I eventually made up for this in some respects. In closing, let me correct Mr. Osachie that C.E. is not the expanded version of Against the Fall of Night. The latter was rewritten under the title The City and the Stars, while C.E. is really a lengthening of a Clarkian novella, Guardian Angel. John C. Sherwood Marshall, Mich. IF worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your ki m mm Wi   iRD SC.i   tr ON pages, containing stories by such masters of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, John W. 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All rights reserved The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered dem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman Less than a year ago I was surprised to find that a scientist sharing a discussion panel with me did not know what I meant by science fiction. But after a few minutes during which I tried to summarize the field his face cleared. "Oh," he said, with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt in his voice. "You mean Buck Rogers. Yeah, I used to read that stuff every Sunday." It used to be the standard way of defining science fiction. "That Buck Rogers stuff." Men who had never heard of Verne or Wells much less of Asimov or Heinlein had read at least a few episodes of the comic strip widely syndicated between # and #. Thus for a generation most people derived their ideas of space and rockets from the exploits of Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering. And during that generation, science-fiction writers and enthusiasts tried to overcome that association of their literature with its comic-strip relative. However nostalgic they might be about their own first aquaintance with Buck, they felt the comparison was odious. Maybe they were right, since most outsiders cited it with some contempt to dismiss the whole genre. In any case, now we can all take a second look at those daily strips. Chelsea House Publishers has just brought out The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the #th Cen( Please turn to page # ) to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of your favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us -- and that's a double tragedy. It doesn't take a genius to handle it, either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. Galaxy rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Man had his choice of external environments -- and inner hells I up at the textured sky. He found the blue opaque and revolting. He had unwarily looked at the sun, for there was nothing to blank it out automatically, and had snatched his eyes away in panic. He had not been blinded, but his vision swam with afterimages. Even the sun was washed out. Involuntarily, he thought of Ajax's prayer in Iliad : Make the sky clear, grant us to see with our eyes ! Kill us in the light, since it is thy pleasure to kill us! Demerest thought: Kill us in the light... Kill us in the clear light on the Moon, where the sky is black and soft, where the stars shine brightly, where the cleanliness and purity of vacuum sharpen the sight... -- Not in this low-clinging, fuzzy blue. He shuddered. The shudder was physical and real -- it shook his lanky body and he was annoyed. He was going to die. He was sure of it. And not under this blue sky but under black -- and no sky. It was as though in answer to that thought that the ferry pilot, short, swarthy, crisp-haired, came up to him and said, "Ready for the black, Mr. Demerest?" Demerest nodded. He towered over the other as he did over most of the men of Earth. They were thick, all of them, and took their short, low steps with ease. He himself had to feel his footsteps, guide them through the air -- even the impalpable bond that held him to the ground was textured. "I'm ready," he said. He took a deep breath and deliberately repeated his earlier glance at the sun. It stood low in the morning sky, washed out by dusty air, and he knew it wouldn't blind him. He didn't think he would ever see it again. He had never seen a bathyscaphe before. He tended to think of it in terms of prototypes -- an oblong balloon with a spherical gondola beneath. It was as though he persisted in thinking of spaceflight in terms of tons of fuel spewed backward in fire and an irregular module feeling its way, spiderlike, toward the Lunar surface. The bathyscaphe was not like the image in his thoughts at all. Under its skin it might still be buoyant bag and gondola but it was all engineered sleekness now. "My name is Javan," said the ferry pilot, "Omar Javan." "Javan?" "Queer name to you? I'm Iranian by descent -- Earthman by persuasion. Once you get down there nationalities cease to matter." He grinned and his complexion grew darker against the even whiteness of his teeth. "If IF you don't mind, we'll be starting in a minute. You'll be my only passenger so I guess you carry weight." "Yes," said Demerest, dryly, "At least a hundred pounds more than I'm used to." "You're from the Moon? I thought you had a queer walk on you. I hope it's not uncomfortable." "It's not exactly comfortable but I manage. We exercise for this." "Well, come on board." He stood aside and let Demerest walk down the gangplank. "I wouldn't go to the Moon myself." "You go to Ocean-Deep." "About fifty times, so far. That's different." Demerest got on board. The space was cramped but he didn't mind that. The 'scaphe's interior might be a space module's except that it was more -- well, textured. There was that word again. The overriding feeling was that mass didn't matter. Mass was held up -- it did not have to be hurled up. They were still on the surface. The blue sky could be seen greenishly through the clear thick glass. Javan said, "You don't have to be strapped in. There's no acceleration. Smooth as oil, the whole thing. It won't take long -- just about an hour. You can't smoke." "I don't smoke," said Demerest. "I hope you don't have claustrophobia." "Moonmen don't have claustrophobia." "All that open -- " "Not in our cavern. We live in a -- " he groped for the phrase -- "Lunar-Deep, a hundred feet deep." "A hundred feet?" The pilot seemed amused but he didn't smile. "We're slipping down now." The interior of the gondola was fitted into angles but here and there a section of wall beyond the instruments seemed to be an extension of his arms -- his eyes and hands moved over them lightly, almost lovingly. "We're all checked out," he said, "b,ut I like a last minute lookover -- we'll be facing a thousand atmospheres down there." His finger touched a contact, and the round door closed massively inward and pressed against the beveled rim it met. "The higher the pressure, the tighter that will hold. Take your last look at sunlight, Mr. Demerest." The light still shone through the thick glass of the window. It was wavering now; there was water between the Sun and themselves now. "The last look?" said Demerest. Javan snickered. "Not the last look. I mean for the trip. I suppose you've never been on a bathyscaphe before." "No, I haven't. Have many?" "Very few," admitted Javan. "But don't worry. It's just an underwater balloon. We've introsince the first bathyscaphe. We're nuclear-powered now and we can move freely by water jet up to certain limits -- but cut it down to basics and it's still a spherical gondola under buoyancy tanks. And it's still towed out to sea by a mother ship because it needs what power it carries too badly to waste any on surface travel. Ready?" T HE supporting cable of the mother ship flicked away and the bathyscaphe settled lower, then lower still, as seawater fed into the buoyancy tanks. For a few moments, caught in surface currents, it swayed, and then there was nothing. Neither sense of motion nor lack of it. The bathyscaphe sank slowly through a deepening green. Javan relaxed. He said, "John Bergen is head of Ocean-Deep. You're going to see him?" "That's right." "He's a nice guy. His wife's with him." "She is?" "Oh, sure. They have women down there. There's a bunch down there, fifty people. Some stay for months." Demerest put his finger on the narrow and nearly invisible seam where door met wall. He took it away and looked at it. He said, "It's oily." "Silicony, really. The pressure squeezes some out. It's supposed to. Don't worry. Everything's automatic. Everything's fail safe. The first sign of malfunction, any malfunction at all, our ballast is released and up we go." "You mean nothing's ever happened to these bathyscaphes?" "What can happen?" The pilot looked sidewise at his passenger. "Once you get too deep for sperm whales, there's nothing that can go wrong." "Sperm whales?" Demerest's thin face creased in a frown. "Sure. They dive as deep as half a mile. If they hit a bathyscaphe -- well, the walls of the buoyancy chambers aren't particularly strong. They don't have to be, you know. They're open to the sea and when the gasoline, which supplies the buoyancy, compresses, seawater enters." Darkness became tangible. Demerest found his gaze fastened to the viewport. The inside of the gondola was lighted but it was dark in that window. And the darkness was not the darkness of space -- it was thick, solid. Demerest said sharply, "Let's get this straight, Mr. Javan. You are not equipped to withstand the attack of a sperm whale. Presumably, you are not equipped to withstand the attack of a giant squid. Have there been any actual incidents of that sort?" "Well, it's like this -- " "No games, please, and don't try ragging the greenhorn. I am asking out of professional curiosity. I am head safety engineer at Luna City and I am asking what precautions this bathyscaphe can take against possible collision with large creatures." Javan looked embarrassed. He muttered, "Actually, there have been no incidents." "Are any expected? Even as a remote possibility?" "Anything is remotely possible. But actually sperm whales are too intelligent to monkey with us and giant squid are too shy." "Can they see us?" "Yes, of course. We're lit up." "Do you have floodlights?" "We're already past the largeanimal range but we have them. I'll turn them on for you." Beyond the black of the window suddenly appeared a snowstorm, inverted, upward-falling. The blackness had come alive with stars in three-dimensional array and all moving upward. Demerest said, "What's that?" "Just crud. Organic matter. Small creatures. They float, don't move much, and they catch the light. We're going down past them. They seem to be going up in consequence." Demerest's sense of perspective adjusted itself and he said, "Aren't we dropping too quickly." "No, we're not. If we were I could use the nuclear engines if I wanted to waste power -- or I could drop some ballast. I'll be doing that later but for now everything is fine. Relax, Mr. Demerest. The snow thins as we drive and we're not likely to see much in the way of spectacular life forms. There are small angler fish and such but they avoid us." Demerest said, "How many do you take down at a time?" "I've had as many as four passengers in this gondola but that's crowded. We can put two bathyscaphes in tandem and carry ten but that's clumsy. What we really need are trains of gondolas, heavier on the nukes -- the nuclear engines -- and lighter on the buoyancy. Stuff like that is on the drawing board, they tell me. Of course, they've been telling me that for years." "There are plans for large-scale expansion of OceanDeep, then?" "Sure, why not? We've got cities on the continental shelves -- why not on the deep-sea bottom? The way I look at it, Mr. Demerest, where man can go he will go and he should go. The Earth is ours to populate and we will populate it. All we need to make the deep sea habitable are completely maneuverable 'scaphes. The buoyancy chambers slow us, weaken us and complicate the engineering." "'But they also save you, don't they? If everything went wrong at once the gasoline on board would still float you to the surface. What would do that for you if your nuclear engines went wrong and you had no buoyancy?" "If it comes to that -- you can't expect to eliminate the chances of accident altogether, not even fatal ones." "I know that very well," said Demerest feelingly. Javan stiffened. The tone of his voice changed, "Sorry. Didn't mean anything by that. Tough about that accident." Fifteen men and five women had died on the Moon. One of the individuals listed among the "men" had been fourteen years old. It had been pinned down to human failure. What could a head safety engineer say after that? "Yes," he said. A pall dropped between the two men, a pall as thick and as turgid as the pressurized sea water outside. How could one allow for panic, distraction and depression all at once? There were the Moon Blues -- stupid name -- but they struck men at inconvenient times. When the Moon Blues came was not always noticeable but it made men torpid and slow to react. How many times had a meteorite come along and been averted or smothered or successfully absorbed? How many times had a Moonquake done damage and been held in check? How many times had human failure been backed up and compensated for? How many times had accidents not happened? But you don't pay off on accidents not happening. Now twenty were dead. II minutes later? -- "There are the lights of Ocean-Deep." Demerest could not make them out at first. He didn't know where to look. Luminescent creatures had flicked past the windows twice before -- at a distance and with the floodlight off again Demerest had thought them the first sign of Ocean-Deep. Now he saw nothing. "Down there," said Javan, without pointing. He was busy now, slowing the drop and edging the 'scaphe sideways. Demerest could hear the distant sighing of the water jets, steam-driven, the steam formed by the heat of momentary bursts of fusion power. Demerest's thought had a filmy transparency. It did not distract him. Deuterium is their fuel and it's all around them. Water is their exhaust and it's all around them... IF Javan was dropping some of his ballast, too, and began a kind of distant chatter. "The ballast used to be steel pellets and they were dropped by electromagnetic controls. Anywhere up to fifty tons of it were used in each trip. Conservationists worried about spreading rusting steel over the ocean floor -- so we switched to metal nodules that are dredged up from the continental shelf. We put a thin layer of iron over them so they can still be electromagnetically handled and the ocean bottom gets nothing that wasn't subocean to begin with. Cheaper, too. But when we get our real nuclear 'seaphes, we won't need ballast at all." Demerest scarcely heard him. Ocean-Deep could be seen now. Javan had turned on his floodlight and far below was the muddy floor of the Puerto Rican Trench. Resting on that floor like a cluster of equally muddy pearls was the spherical conglomerate of OceanDeep. Each unit was a sphere such as the one in which Demerest was now sinking  toward contact -- but much larger. As Ocean-Deep expanded -- expanded -- expanded, new spheres were added. They're only Jive and a half miles from home, not a quarter of "How are we going to get through?" asked Demerest. The 'scaphe had made contact. Demerest had heard the dull sound of metal against metal but for minutes afterward the only sound had been a kind of occasional scrape as Javan bent over his instruments in rapt concentration. "Don't worry about that," Javan said at last, in belated answer. "There's no problem. The delay now is caused by my having to make sure we fit tightly. An electromagnetic joint holds at every point of a perfect circle -- when the instruments read correctly we fit over the entrance door." "Which then opens?" "It would if there were air on the other side. But there isn't. There's sea-water and that has to be driven out. Then we enter." Demerest did not miss this point. He had come here on this, the last day of his life, to give that same life meaning and he intended to miss nothing. He said, "Why the added step? Why not keep the airlock -- if that's what it is -- a real airlock and have air in it at all times." "They tell merit's a matter of safety," said Javan. "Your specialty. The interface has equal pressure on both sides at all times, except when men are moving across. This door is the weakest point of the whole system because it opens and closes -- it has joints -- it has seams. You know what I mean?" "I do," murmured Demerest. He saw a logical flaw here and that meant there was a possible chink through which -- but later. He asked, "Why are we waiting now?" "The lock is being emptied. The water is being forced out." "By air." "Hell, no. They can't afford to waste air like that. It would take a thousand atmospheres to empty the chamber of its water and fill-, ing the chamber with air at that density, even temporarily, takes more air than they can afford to expend. Steam is what does it." "Of course. Yes." Javan said cheerfully, "You heat the water. No pressure in the world' can stop water from turning to steam at a temperature of less than # C. And the steam forces the seawater out through a oneway valve." "Another weak point," said Demerest. "I suppose so. It's opver failed yet. The water in the lock is being pushed out now. When hot steam starts bubbling out the valve the process automatically stops and the lock is full of overheated steam." "And then?" "And then we have a whole ocean to cool it with. The temperature drops and the steam condenses. Once that happens ordinary air can be let in at a pressure of one atmosphere. And then the door opens." "How long must we wait?" "Not long. If anything were wrong sirens would be sounding. At least so they say. I never heard one in action." utes. Then came a sudden sharp clap and a simultaneous jerk. Javan said, "Sorry, I should have warned you. I'm so. used to it, I forgot. When the door opens a thousand atmospheres of pressure on the other side forces us hard against the metal of OceanDeep. No electromagnetic force can hold us hard enough to prevent that last hundredth-of-aninch slam." Demerest unclenched his fist and released his breath. He asked "Is everything all right?" "The walls didn't crack, if that's what you mean. It sounds like doom, though, doesn't it. It sounds even worse when I leave and the airlock fills up again. Be prepared for that." But Demerest was suddenly weary. Let's get on with it -- I don't want to drag it out. He asked, "Do we go through now?" "We go through." The opening in the 'scaphe wall was round and small -- even smaller than the one through IF which they had originally entered. Javan went through it sinuously, muttering that it always made him feel like a cork in a bottle. Demerest had not smiled since he entered the 'scaphe. Nor did he really smile now but a corner of his mouth quirked at the thought that a skinny Moonman would have no trouble. He went through also, feeling. Javan's hands firmly at his waist, helping him through. Javan said, "It's dark in here. No point in introducing an additional weakness by wiring for lighting. But that's why flashlights were invented." Demerest found himself on a perforated walk, its stainless metallic surface gleaming dully. And through the perforations he could make out the wavering surface of water. He said, "The chamber hasn't been emptied." "You can't do any better, Mr. Demerest. If you're going to use steam to empty it you're left with that steam. And to get the pressures necessary to do the emptying that steam must be compressed to about one third the density of liquid water. When it condenses the chamber remains one third full of water -- but it's water at just one-atmosphere pressure. Come on, Mr. Demerest." entirely unknown to Demerest. Recognition was immediate. Bergen, as head of Ocean-Deep for nearly a decade now, was a familiar face on the TV screens of Earth -- just as the leaders of Luna City had become familiar. Demerest had seen the head of Ocean-Deep both flat and in three-dimensions, in black-andwhite and in color. Seeing him in life added little. Like Javan, Bergen was short and thickset, opposite in structure to the traditional Lunar pattern of physiology. He was fairer than Javan by a good deal and his face was noticeably asymmetric, though his somewhat thick nose leaned a little to the right. He was not handsome. No Moonman would think he was. But then Bergen smiled and a sunniness emanated from him as he held out a large hand. Demerest extended his own thin one, steeling himself for a hard grip that did not come. Bergen shook hands and let go. He said, "I'm glad you're here. We don't have much in the way of luxury, nothing that will make our hospitality stand out. We can't even declare a holiday in your honor but the spirit is there. Welcome!" "Thank you," said Demerest softly. He remained unsmiling. He was facing the enemy and he knew it. Surely Bergen must know it also. His smile was hypocrisy. And at that moment a clang like metal against metal sounded deafeningly and the chamber shuddered. Demerest leaped back and staggered against the wall. Bergen did not budge. He said quietly, "That was the bathyscaphe unhitching and the Javan ought to have warned you." Demerest panted and tried to make his racing heart slow. "Javan did warn me. But I was still caught by surprise." Bergen said, "Well, it won't happen again for a while. We don't often have visitors, you know. We're not equipped for it and fight off all kinds of big wheels who think a trip down here would be good for their careers. Politicans of all kinds, chiefly. Your case is different, of course." Is it? Demerest wondered. It had been hard enough to get permission to make the trip down. His superiors back at Luna City had not approved in the first place and had scouted the idea that a diplomatic interchange would be of any use ("diplomatic interchange" was what they had called it). And when he had overridden them he had run into OceanDeep's reluctance to receive him. Persistence alone had made his present visit possible. Bergen said, "I suppose you have your junketing problems on Luna City, too?" Demerest said, "Your average politician isn't as anxious to make he is to make a ten-mile one." "I can see that," agreed Bergen, "and it's more expensive out to the Moon, of course. In a way, this is the first meeting of inner and outer space. No ocean man has ever gone to the Moon as far as I know and you're the first Moonman to visit a subsea station of any kind. No Moon man has even been to one of the settlements on the continental shelf." "It's a historic meeting, then," said Demerest and tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. If any leaked through, Brand showed no sign. He rolled up his sleeves as though to emphasize his attitude of informality (or the fact that they were very busy, so that there would be little time for visitors?) and asked, "Do you want coffee? I assume you've eaten. Would you like to rest before I show you around? Do you want to wash up, for that matter, as they say euphemistically?" For a moment curiosity stirred in Demerest; yet not entirely aimless curiosity. Everything involving the interface of OceanDeep with the outside world could be of importance. He spoke carefully. "How are sanitary facilities handled here?" "It's cycled mostly -- as on the IF Moon, I imagine. We can eject if we want to or have to. Man has a bad record of fouling the environment but as the only deep-sea station, what we eject does no perceptible damage. Adds organic matter." He laughed. Demerest filed that away, too. Matter was ejected. Ejection mechanisms existed. Their workings might, be of interest and he, as a safety engineer, had a right to exhibit interest. "Actually," he said, "I'm comfortable at the moment. If you're busy -- " "That's all right. We're always busy but I'm the least so -- if you see what I mean. Suppose I show you around. We've got over fifty units here, each as big as this one, some bigger." Demerest looked about. He saw angles everywhere but beyond the furnishings and equipment he detected signs of the inevitable spherical outer wall. Fifty units! "Build up," went on Bergen, "over a generation of effort. The unit we're standing in is actually the oldest and there's been some talk of demolishing and replacing it. Some of the men say we're ready for second-generation units but I'm not sure. It would be expensive -- everything's expensive down here -- and getting money out of the Planetary Project Council is always a depressing experience." Demerest felt his nostrils flare involuntarily and a spasm of anger shot through him. It was a thrust surely. Luna City's miserawell known to Bergen. But Bergen went on, unnoticing. "I'm a traditionalist, too -- just a little bit. This is the first deepsea unit ever constructed. The first two people to remain overnight on the floor of an ocean trench slept here with nothing except a miserable portable fusion unit to work the escape hatch. I mean the airlock -- we called it the escape hatch to begin with -- and just enough controls for the purpose. Reguera and Tremont -- those were the men. They never made a second trip to the bottom, either; stayed topside forever after. Well, they served their purpose and both are dead now. And here we are with fifty people and with six months as the usual tour of duty. I've spent only two weeks topside in the last year and a half." He motioned vigorously to Demerest to follow him, slid open a door that moved evenly into a recess to give access to the next unit. Demerest paused to examine the opening. He could detect no seams between the adjacent units. "When we add on units they're welded under pressure into the equivalent of a single piece of metal and then reinforced. We can't take chances as I'm sure you understand. I have been given to understand that you're the chief safe -- " Demerest cut him off. "Yes," he said, "We on the Moon admire your safety record." Bergen shrugged. "We've been lucky. Our sympathy, by the way, on the rotten break you fellows had. I mean that fatal -- " Demerest cut him off again. "Yes." Bergen, the Moonman decided, was either a naturally voluble man or else was eager to drown him in words and get rid of him. "The units," said Bergen are arranged in a highly branched chain -- three dimensional actually. We have a map we can show you if you're interested. Most of the end units represent livingsleeping quarters. For privacy, you know. The working units tend to be corridors as well, which is one of the embarrassments of having to live down here." He gestured. "This is our library, part of it, anyway. Not big. But it holds our records on carefully indexed and computed microfilm, so that for its kind it's not only the biggest in the world but the best and the only. And we have a special computer designed to handle the references to meet our needs exactly. It collects, selects, coordinates, weighs, then gives us the gist. We have another library, too, book films and even some printed volumes. But that's for amusement." A voice broke in on Bergen's cheerful flow of talk. "John? May I interrupt?" Demerest started -- the voice had come from behind him. Bergen said, "Annette -- I was going to get you. This is Stephen Demerest of Luna City. Mr. Demerest, may I introduce my wife, Annette." Demerest had turned. He said stiffly, a little mechanically, "I'm pleased to meet you, Mrs. Bergen." But he was staring at her waistline. Annette Bergen seemed in her early thirties. Her brown hair was combed simply and she wore no makeup. Attractive, not beautiful, Demerest noted vaguely. But his eyes kept returning to that waistline. She shrugged. "Yes, I'm pregnant, Mr. Demerest. I'm due in about two months." "Pardon me," Demerest muttered. "So rude of me -- I did not -- " His voice faded. He felt as though the blow had been a physical one. He hadn't expected women, though he didn't know why. He knew there would have to be women in Ocean-Deep. And the ferry pilot had said Bergen's wife was with him. IF Annette Bergen remained silent and Demerest stammered when he asked, "How many women are there in Ocean-Deep, Mr. Bergen?" "Nine at the moment," said Bergen. "All wives. We look forward to a time when we can have the normal ratio of one to one, but we still need workers and researchers primarily and unless women have important qualifications of some sort -- " "They all have important qualifications of some sort, dear," said Mrs. Bergen. "You could keep the men for longer duty if -- " "My wife," said Bergen, laughing, "is a convinced feminist but is not above using sex as an excuse to enforce equality. I keep telling her that that is the feminine way of doing it and not the feminist way, and she keeps saying that's why she's pregnant. You think it's love, sex mania, yearning for motherhood? Nothing of the sort. She's going to have a baby down here to make a philosophical point." Annette said coolly. "Why not? Either this is going to be home for humanity or it isn't going to be. If it is, we're going to have babies here, that's all. I want a baby born in Ocean-Deep. There are babies born in Luna City, aren't there, Mr. Demerest." Demerest took a deep breath, "I was born in Luna City, Mrs. Bergen." "And well she knew it," muttered Bergen. "And you are in your late twenties, I think?" she said. "I am twenty-nine," said Demerest. "And well she knew that, too," said Bergen with a short laugh. "You can bet she looked up all possible data on you when she heard you were coming." "That is quite beside the point," said Annette. "The point is that for twenty-nine years at least children have been born in Luna City and no children have been born in Ocean-Deep." "Luna City, my dear," said Bergen, "is longer established. It is over half a century old -- we are not yet twenty." "Twenty years is quite enough. It takes a baby nine months." Demerest interposed. "Are there any children in OceanDeep?" "No," said Berg. "No. Some day, though." "In two months, anyway," said Annette Bergen, positively. Ill T HE tension grew inside Demerest and when they returned to the unit in which he had first met Bergen he was glad to sit down and accept a cup of coffee. "We'll eat soon," said Bergen matter-of-factly. "I hope you don't mind sitting here, meanwhile. As the prime unit this place isn't used for much except, of course, for the reception of vessels, an item I don't expect will interrupt us for a while. We can talk if you wish." "I do wish," said Demerest. "I hope I'm welcome to join in," said Annette. Demerest looked at her doubtfully but Bergen said to him, "You'll have to agree. She's fascinated by you and by Moonmen generally. She thinks they're -- uh -- you're a new breed. I think that when she's quite through being a Deepwoman she wants to be a Moonwoman." "I just want a word in edgewise, John, and when I get that in, I'd like to hear what Mr. Demerest has to say. What do you think of us, Mr. Demerest?" Demerest said cautiously, "I've asked to come here, Mrs. Bergen, because I'm a safety engineer. Ocean-Deep has an enviable safety record." "Not one fatality in almost twenty years," said Bergen cheerfully. "Only one death by accident in the C-shelf settlements and none in transit by either sub Or 'scaphe. I wish I could say, though, that this was the result of wisdom and care on our part. We do our best, of course, but the breaks have been with us" "John," said Annette, "I really wish you'd let Mr. Demerest speak." "As a safety engineer," said Demerest, "I can't afford to believe in luck and breaks. We cannot stop Moonquakes or large meteorites out at Luna City but we are designed to minimize the effects even of those. There are no excuses or there should be none for human failure. We have not avoided failure on Luna City -- our record recently has been -- " his voice dropped -- "bad. While humans are imperfect, as we all know, machinery should be designed to take that imperfection into account. We lost twenty men and women needlessly." "I know. Still, Luna City has a population of nearly one thousand, doesn't it? Your survival isn't in danger." "The people on Luna City number nine hundred and seventy-two, including myself -- but our survival is in danger. We depend on Earth for essentials. That need not always be so. It wouldn't be so right now if the Planetary Project Council could resist the temptation toward pygmy economies -- " "There, at least, Mr. Demerest," said Bergen, "we see eye to eye. We are not self-supporting, either, and we could be. What's more, we can't grow much beyond our present level unless nuclear 'scaphes are built. As long as we are bound to the buoyancy principle we are limited. Transportation between Deep and Top is slow -- slow for men, slower still for maIF terial nd supplies. I've been pushing, Mr. Demerest, for -- " "Yes, and you'll be getting it now, Mr. Bergen, won't you?" "I hope so. But what makes you so sure?" "Mr. Bergen, let's not play around. You know very well that Earth is committed to spending a fixed amount of money on expansion projects -- on programs designed to expand the human habitat -- and that it is not a terribly large amount. Earth's population is not going to lavish resources in an effort to expand either outer space or inner space if it thinks this will cut into the comfort and convenience of the prime habitat of humans -- the land surface of Earth." Annette broke in. "You make Earthmen sound callous, Mr. Demerest, and that's unfair. It's only human, isn't it, to want to be secure? Earth is overpopulated and is only slowly reversing the havoc inflicted on the planet by the mad Twentieth. Surely man's original home must come first, ahead of either Luna City or Ocean-Deep. Heavens, Ocean-Deep is almost home to me -- but I don't want to see it flourish at the expense of Earth's land." "It's not an either-or, Mrs. Bergen," said Demerest earnestly. "If the ocean and outer space are firmly, honestly and intelligently exploited, it can only rebound to Earth's benefit. A small investment will be lost but a large one will redeem itself with profit." Bergen held up his hand. "Yes, I know. You don't have to argue with me on that point. You'd be trying to convert the converted. Come, let's eat. I tell you what. We'll eat here. If you'll stay with us overnight, or several days for that matter -- you're quite welcome -- there will be ample time to meet everybody. Perhaps you'd rather take it easy for a while, though." "Much rather," said Demerest. "Actually, I want to stay here. I would like to ask, by the way, why I met so few people when we went through the units." "No mystery' said Bergen, genially. "At any given time, some fifteen of our men are asleep and perhaps fifteen more are watching films or playing chess or, if their wives are with them -- " "Yes, John," said Annette. " -- and it's customary not to disturb them. The quarters are constricted and what privacy a man can have is cherished. A few are out at sea -- three right now, I think. That leaves a dozen or so at work in here and you met them." "I'll get lunch," said Annette, rising. She smiled and stepped through the door, which closed automatically behind her. "That's a concession. She's playing woman for your sake. Ordinarily, it would be just as likely for me to get the lunch. The choice is not defined by sex but by the striking of random lightning." Demerest said, "The doors between units, it seems to me, are of dangerously limited strength." "Are they?" "If an accident happened and one unit were punctured -- " Bergen smiled. "No meteorites down her?." "Oh yes, wrong word. If there were a leak of any sort, for any reason, could a unit or a group of units be sealed off against the full pressure of the ocean?" "You mean, the way Luna City can have its component units automatically sealed off in case of meteorite puncture in order to limit damage to a single unit." "Yes," said Demerest, with a faint bitterness. "As did not happen recently." "In theory we could do that -- but the chances of accident are much less down here. As I said, there are no meteorites and, what's more, there are no currents to speak of. Even an earthquake centered immediately below us would not be damaging since we make no fixed or solid contact with the ground beneath and are cushioned by the ocean itself against the shocks. So we can afford to gamble on no massive influx." "Yet if one happened?" "We could be helpless. You see, it is not so easy to seal off component units here. On the Moon there is a pressure differential of just one atmosphere -- one atmosphere inside and the zero atmosphere of vacuum outside. A thin seal is enough. Here at OceanDeep the pressure differential is roughly a thousand atmospheres. To secure absolute safety against that differential would take a great deal of money and you know what you said about getting monAnd so far we've been lucky." "And we haven't," said Demerest. Bergen looked uncomfortable but Annette distracted both men by coming in with lunch at this moment. She said, "I hope, Mr. Demerest, that you're prepared for Spartan fare. All our food in OceanDeep is prepackaged and requires only heating. We specialize in blandness and nonsurprise and the nonsurprise of the day is a bland chicken a la king, with carrots, boiled potatoes, a piece of something that looks like a brownie for dessert and, of course, all the coffee you can drink." Demerest rose to take his tray and tried a smile. "It sounds very like Moon fare, Mrs. Bergen, and I was brought up on that. We grow our own microorganismic food. It is patriotic to eat it but not particularly enIF joyable. We hope to keep improving it, though." "I'm sure you will improve it." Demerest said, as he ate with a slow and methodical chewing, "I hate to ride my specialty but how secure are you against mishaps in your airlock entry?" "It is the weakest point of Ocean-Deep," said Bergen. He had finished eating and was nearly through with his first cup of coffee. "But there's got to be an interface, right? The entry is as automatic as we can make it and as fail safe. Number one: there has to be contact at every point about the outer lock before the fusion generator begins to heat the water within the lock. What's more, the contact has to be metallic and of a metal with just the magnetic permeability we use on our 'scaphes. Presumably, a rock or some mythical deep-sea monster might drop down and make contact at just the right places -- but if so, nothing happens. Then, too, the outer door doesn't open until the steam has pushed the water out and then condensed -- in other words, not till both pressure and temperature have dropped below a certain point. At the moment the outer door begins to open a relatively slight increase in internal pressure, as by water entry, will close it again." Demerest said, "But once men have passed through the lock, the inner door closes behind them and seawater must be allowed into the lock again. Can you do that gradually against the full pressure of the ocean outside?" "No." Bergen smiled. "It doesn't pay to fight the ocean too hard. You have to roll with the punch. We slow it down to about one tenth of free entry but even so it comes in like a rifle shot -- louder, a thunderclap -- or waterclap, if you prefer. The inner door can hold it, though, and it is not subjected to the strain very often. You heard the waterclap when we first met -- when Javan's 'scaphe took off again. Remember?" "I remember," said Demerest. "But here is something I don't understand. You keep the lock filled with ocean at high pressure at all times to keep the outer door without strain. But that keeps the inner door at full strain. Somewhere there has to be strain." "Yes, indeed. But if the outer door, with a thousand-atmosphere differential on its two sides, breaks down, the full ocean in all its millions of cubic miles tries to enter and that would be the end of all. If the inner door is the one under strain and it gives, then it will be messy indeed -- but the only water that enters Ocean-Deep will be the limited quantity in the lock and its pressure will drop at once. We will have plenty of time for repair -- the outer door will certainly hold a long time." "But if both go at once?" "We are through." Brand shrugged. "I need not tell you that neither absolute certainty nor absolute safety exist. You have to live with some risk and the chance of double and simultaneous failure is so microscopically small that it can be lived with easily." "If all your mechanical contrivances fail -- " "They fail safe," said Brand stubbornly. ished the last of his chicken. Mrs. Bergen was already beginning to clean up. "You'll pardon my questions Mr. Bergen, I hope." "You're welcome to ask. I wasn't informed, actually, as to the precise nature of your mission here. 'Fact-finding' is a weasel phrase. However, I assume there is keen distress on the Moon over the recent disaster and as safety engineer you rightly feel the responsibility of correcting whatever shortcomings exist and would be interesting in learning, if possible, from the system used in OceanDeep." "Exactly. But, see here, if all your automatic contrivances fail safe for some reason, for any reason, you would be alive but all your escape mechanisms would be sealed permanently shut. You would be trapped inside OceanDeep and would exchange a slow death for a fast one, that's all." "It's not likely to happen but we'd hope we could make repairs before our air supply gave out. Besides we do have a manual backup system." "Oh?" "Certainly. When Ocean-Deep was first established and this was the only unit -- the one we're sitting in now -- manual controls were all we had. That was unsafe, if you like. There they are, right behind you -- covered with friable plastic." "In emergency, break glass," muttered Demerest, inspecting the covered setup. "Pardon me?" "Just a phrase commonly used in ancient fire-fighting systems. Well, do the manuals still work or has the system been covered with your friable plastic for twenty years to the point where it has all decayed into uselessness with no one noticing." "Not at all. It's periodically checked -- as all our equipment is. That's not my job but I know it is done. If any electrical or electronic circuit is out of its normal working condition, lights flash, signals sound, everything happens but a nuclear blast. You know, Mr. Demerest, we are as curious about Luna City as you are about Ocean-Deep. I presume you would young men -- " "How about a young woman?" IF interposed Annette at once. "I am sure you mean yourself, dear," said Bergen. "And I can only answer that you are determined to have a baby here and to keep it here for a period of time after birth -- and that effectively eliminates you from consideration." Demerest said stiffly, "We hope you will send men to Luna City. We are anxious to have you understand our problems." "Yes, a mutual exchange of problems and of weeping on each others' shoulders might be of great comfort to all. For instance, you have one advantage on Luna City that I wish we could have. With low gravity and a low pressure-differential you can make your caverns take on any irregular and angular fashion that appeals to your esthetic sense or is required for convenience. Down here we're restricted to the sphere -- at least for the foreseeable future -- and our designers develop a hatred for the spherical that surpasses belief. Actually it isn't funny. It breaks them down. They eventually resign rather than continue to work spherically." Bergen shook his head and leaned his chair back against a microfilm cabinet. "You know, when William Beebe built the first deep-sea chamber in history in the nineteen-thirties -- it was just a gondola suspended from a mother ship by a half-mile cable. It had no buoyancy chambers and no engines -- and if the cable broke, good night. Only it never did. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, when Beebe built his first deepsea chamber he was going to make it cylindrical; you know, so a man would fit in it comfortably. After all, a man is essentially a tall, skinny cylinder. However, a friend of his argued him out of that and into a sphere on the very sensible grounds that a sphere would resist pressure more efficiently than any other possible shape." Demerest considered that briefly but made no comment. He returned to the earlier topic. "We would particularly like someone from Ocean-Deep," he said, "to visit Luna City because it might lead to a great enough understanding of the need, on Ocean-Deep's part for a course of action that might involve considerable self-sacrifice." "Oh?" Bergen's chair came down on all four legs. "How's that?" "Ocean-Deep is a marvelous achievement -- I wish to detract nothing from that. I can see where it will become greater still, a wonder of the world. Still -- " "Still?" "Still the oceans are only a part of the Earth -- a major part but only a part. The deep sea is only part of the ocean. It is inner space indeed -- it works inward, narrowing constantly to a point." "I think," broke in Annette, looking rather grim, "that you're about to make a comparison with Luna City." est. "Luna City represents outer space, widening to infinity. There is nowhere to go down here in the long run -- everywhere to go out there." "We don't judge by size and volume alone, Mr. Demerest," said Bergen. "The ocean is only a small part of Earth, true, but for that very reason it is intimately human beings. Ocean-Deep is experimental but the settlements on the Continental Shelf already deserve the name of cities. OceanDeep offers mankind the chance of exploiting the whole planet -- " "Of polluting the whole planet," broke in Demerest, excitedly. "Of raping it, of ending it. The concentration of human effort to Earth itself is unhealthy and even fatal if it isn't balanced by a turning outward to the frontier." "There is nothing at the frontier," said Annette, snapping out the words. "The Moon is dead. All the other worlds out there are dead. If there are live worlds among the stars, light-years away, they can't be reached. The ocean is living." "The Moon is living, too, Mrs. Bergen. And if Ocean-Deep allows it, the Moon will become an independent world. We Moonmen will then see to it that other worlds "are reached and made alive and, if mankind has the patience, we will reach the stars. We! We! It is only Moonmen, used to space, used to a world in a cavern, used to an engineered environment who could endure life in a spaceship that may have to travel centuries to reach the stars." "Wait, wait, Demerest," said Bergen, holding up his hand, "Back up. What you do mean -- if Ocean-Deep allows it? What have we to do with it?" "You're competing with us, Mr. Bergen. The Planetary Project Commission will swing your way, give you more, give us less, because in the short term, as your wife says, the ocean is alive and the Moon, except for a thousand men, is not -- because you are a half-dozen miles away and we a can be reached in an hour and we only in three days. And because you have an ideal safety record and we have had -- misfortunes." "The last, surely, is trivial. Accidents can happen at any time, anywhere." "But the trivial can be used," said Demerest angrily. "It can be made to manipulate emotions. To people who don't see the purpose and the importance of space exploration the death of Moonmen in accidents is proof enough that the Moon is dangerous, that its IF colonization is a useless fantasy. Why not? It's their excuse for saving money and they can then salve their conscience by investing part of it in Ocean-Deep instead. That's why I said the accident on the Moon had threatened the survival of Luna City even though it killed only twenty people out of nearly a thousand." "I don't accept your argument. There has been enough money for both for a score of years." "Not enough money. That's exactly it. Not enough to make the Moon self-supporting in all these years -- and then they use that lack of self-support against us. Not enough to make Ocean-Deep self-supporting either -- but now they can give you enough if they cut us out altogether." "Do you think that will happen?" "I'm almost sure it will -- unless Ocean-Deep shows a statesmanlike concern for man's future." "How?" "By refusing to accept additional funds. By not competing with Luna City. By putting the good of the whole race ahead of self-interest." "Surely you don't expect us to dismantle -- " "You won't have to. Don't you see? Join us in explaining that Luna City is essential, that space exploration is the hope of mankind -- that you will wait, retrench if necessary." Bergen looked at his wife and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head angrily. Bergen said, "You have a raththink. Even if I made noble, selfsacrificing speeches, who's to say they would listen. There's a great deal more involved in the matter of Ocean-Deep than my opinion and my statements. There are economic considerations and public feeling. Why don't you relax, Mr. Demerest? Luna City won't come to an end. You'll receive funds. I'm sure of it. I tell you I'm sure of it. Now let's break this up -- " "No, I've got to convince you one way or another that I'm serious. If necessary, Ocean-Deep must come to a halt unless the both." Bergen aid, "Is this some sort of official mission, Mr. Demerest? Are you speaking for Luna City officially or just for yourself?" "Just for myself -- but maybe that's enough, Mr. Bergen," said Demerest. "I don't think it is. I'msorry, but this is turning out to be unpleasant. I suggest that after all you had better return topside on the first available 'scaphe." "Not yet! Not yet!" Demerest looked about wildly, then rose unsteadily and put his back against the wall. He was a little too tall for the room and he became conscious of life receding. One more step and he would have gone too far to back out. IV the Moon that there would be no use talking, no use negotiating. It was dog-eat-dog for the available funds and Luna City's destiny must not be aborted -- not for Ocean-Deep, not for Earth -- no, not for all of Earth, since mankind and the Universe came even before the Earth. Man must outgrow his womb. Demerest could hear his own ragged breathing and the inner turmoil of his whirling thoughts. The other two were looking at him with what seemed concern. Annette rose and said, "Are you ill, Mr. Demerest?" "I am not ill. Sit down. I'm a safety engineer and I want to teach you about safety. Sit down, Mrs. Bergen." "Sit down, Annette," said Bergen. "I'll take care of him." He rose and took a step forward. But Demerest said, "No. Don't you move either. I have something right here. You're too naive concerning human dangers, Mr. Bergen. You guard against the sea and against mechanical failure and you don't search your humdn visitors, do you? I have a weapon, Bergen." Now that it was out and he had taken the final step from which there was no returning -- for he was now dead, whatever he did -- he was quite calm. Annette said, "Oh, John," and grasped her husband's arm. Bergen stepped in front of her. "A weapon? Is that what that thing is? Now slowly, Demerest, slowly. There's nothing to get hot over. If you want to talk we'll talk. What is that?" "Nothing dramatic. A portable laser beam." "But what do you want to do with it?" "Destroy Ocean-Deep." "But you can't, Demerest. You know you can't. You can pack only so much energy into your fist and any laser you can hold can't pump enough heat to penetrate the walls." "I know that. TJiis packs more kick than you think. It's Moonmade and there are some advantages to manufacturing an energy unit in a vacuum -- but you're right. Even so it's designed only for small jobs and requires frequent recharging. So I don't intend to try to cut through a footplus of alloy steel. But it will do the job indirectly. For one thing it will keep you two quiet. There's enough energy in my fist to kill two people." "You wouldn't kill us," said Bergen evenly. "You have no reason." "If by that," said Demerest, "you imply that I am an unreasoning being to be somehow made to understand my madness, forget it. I have every reason to kill you and I will kill you. By laser beam if I have to, though I would rather not." you? Make me understand. Is it that I have refused to sacrifice Ocean-Deep funds? I couldn't do anything else. I'm not really the one to make the decision. And the decision in your direction, will it? In fact, quite the contrary. If a Moonman is a murderer, how will that reflect on Luna City? Consider human emotions on Earth." An edge of shrillness was in Annette's voice as she joined in: "don't you see there will be people who will say that solar radiation on the Moon has dangerous effects? That the genetic engineering which has reorganized your bones and muscles has affected mental stability? Consider the word 'lunatic,' Mr. Demerest. Men once believed the Moon brought madness." "I am not mad, Mrs. Bergen." "It doesn't matter," said Bergen, following his wife's lead smoothly. "Men will say that you were -- that all Moonmen are -- and Luna City will be closed down and the Moon itself closed to all further exploration, perhaps forever. Is that what you want?" "That might happen if they IF thought I killed you -- but they won't. It will be an accident." With his left elbow, Demerest broke the plastic that covered the manual controls. "I know units of this sort," he said. "I know exactly how they work. Logically, breaking that plastic should set up a warning flash -- after all, it might be broken by accident -- and then someone would be here to investigate or, better yet, the controls should lock until deliberately released to make sure the break was not merely accidental." He paused, then said, "But I'm sure no one will come, that no warning has taken place. Your manual system is not fail safe because in your heart you were sure it would never be used." "What do you plan to do?" said Bergen. watched his knees carefully. He said, "If you try to jump toward me I'll shoot at once -- and then keep right on with what I'm doing." "I think maybe you're giving me nothing to lose." "You'll lose time. Let me go right on without interference and you'll have some minutes to keep on talking. You may even be able to talk me out of it. There's my proposal. Don't interfere with me and I will give you your chance to argue." "But what do you plan to do?" "This," said Demerest. He did not have to look. His left hand snaked out and closed a contact. "The fusion unit will now pump heat into the airlock and the steam will empty it. It will take a few minutes. When it's done, I'm sure one of those little red-glass buttons will light." "Are you going to -- " Demerest said, "Why do you ask? You know that I must be intending, having gone this far, to flood Ocean-Deep?" "But why? Damn it, why?" "Because U will be marked down as an accident. Because your safety record will be spoiled. Because it will be a complete catastrophe and will wipe you out. The the glamor of Ocean-Deep will be gone. We will get the funds. We will continue. If I could bring this to pass in some other way I would -- but the needs of Luna City are the needs of mankind and those are paramount." "You will die, too," Annette managed to say. "Of course. Once I am forced to do something like this -- woulcM want to live? I'm not a murderer." "But you will be. If you flood this unit you will flood all of Ocean Deep and kill everyone in it -- and doom those who are out in their subs to slower death. Fifty menand women -- an unborn child -- " "That is not my fault," said Demerest, in clear pain. "I did not expect to find a pregnant woman here but now that I have -- I can't stop because of it." "But you must stop," said Bergen. "You plan won't work unless what happens can be shown to be an accident. They'll find you with a beamemitter in your hand and with the manual controls clearly tampered with. Do you think they won't deduce the truth?" Demerest was feeling very tired. "Mr. Bergen, you sound desperate. Listen -- when the outer door opens, water under a thousand atmospheres of pressure will enter. It will be a massive battering ram that will destroy and mangle everything in its path. The walls of the Ocean-Deep units will remain but everything inside will be twisted beyond recognition. Human beings will be mangled into shredded tissue and splintered bone and death will be instantaneous and unfelt. Even if I were to burn you to death with the laser there'd be nothing left to show it had been done, so I won't hesitate, you see. This manual unit will be smashed anyway -- anything I can do will be erased by the water." "But the beam-emitter; the laser gun. Even damaged, it will be recognizable," said Annette. "We use such things on the Moon, Mrs. Bergen. It is a common tool; it is the optical analog of a jackknife. I could kill you with a jackknife, you know, but one would not deduce that a man carrying a jackknife -- or even holding one with the blade open -- was necessarily planning murder. He might be whittling. Besides, a Moon-made laser is not a projectile gun. It doesn't have to withstand an internal explosion. It is made of thin metal, mechanically weak. After it is smashed by the waterclap I doubt that it will make much sense as an object." Demerest did not have to think to make these statements. He had worked them out within himself through months of self-debate. "In fact," he went on, "how will the investigators ever know what happened in here? They will send 'scaphes down to inspect what is left of Ocean-Deep but how can they get inside without first pumping out the water. They will, in effect, have to build a new Ocean-Deep and that would take -- how long? Perhaps, given public reluctance to throw good money after bad, they might never do it at all and content themselves with dropping a laurel wreath on the dead walls of the dad OceanDeep." Bergen said, "The men on Luna City will know what you have done. Surely one of them will have a conscience. The truth will be known." "One truth," said Demerest, "is that I am not a fool. No one on IF Luna City knows what I planned to do or will suspect what I have done. They sent me down here to negotiate cooperation on the matter of financial grants. I was to argue and nothing more. There's not even a laser beam-emitter missing up there. I put this one together myself out of scrapped parts. And it works. I've tested it." Annette said slowly, "You haven't thought it through. Do you know what you're doing?" "I've thought it through. I know what I'm doing. And I know also that you are both conscious of the lit signal. I'm aware of it. The airlock is empty and time's up, I'm afraid." Rapidly, holding his weapon tensely high, he closed another contact. A circular part of the unit wall cracked into a thin crescent and rolled smoothly away. O UT of the corner of his eye Demerest saw the gaping darkness, but he did not look. A dank salt vapor issued from it -- a queer odor of dead steam. He even imagined he could hear the flopping sound of the gathered water at the bottom of the lock. He said, "The outer door ought to be frozen shut now if the manual unit had been rationally designed. With the inner door open, nothing ought to make the outer door budge. I suspect, though, that the manuals were put together too quickly at first for proper precautions to have been taken. And if I need further evidence that I'm guessing correctly you wouldn't be sitting there so tensely. The outer door will open. I need to touch one more contact and the waterclap will come. We will feel nothing." Annette said, "Don't push it just yet. I have one more thing to say. You said we would have time to persuade you." "While the water was being pushed out." "Just let me say this. A minute. A minute. I said you didn't know what you were doing. You don't. You're destroying the space program, the space program. There's more to space than space." Her voice had grown shrill. "What are you talking about? Make sense or I'll end it all. I'm tired. I'm frightened. I want it over." Annette said, "You're not in Neither is my husband. But I am. Do you think because I am a woman that I'm secondary here. I'm not. You, Mr. Demerest, have your eyes fixed on Luna City only. My husband has his fixed on Ocean-Deep. Neither of you know anything. Where do you expect to go, Mr. Demerest, if you had all the money you wanted? Mars? The asteroids? The satellites of the gas giants? These are all small worlds -- all dry surfaces under a blank sky. It may be generations before we are ready to try for the stars and till then we'd have only pygmy real estate. Is that your ambition? My husband's is no better. He dreams of pushing man's habitat over the ocean floor, a surface not much larger in the last analysis than the surface of the Moon and the other pygmy other hand, want more than either of you -- and if you push that button, mankind's greatest dream will come to nothing." Demerest found himself interested despite himself but he said, "You're just babbling." It was possible, he knew v that somehow they had warned others in Ocean-Deep, that any moment someone would come to interrupt, someone would try to shoot him down. He was, however, staring at the only opening and he had only to close one contact without even looking -- a second's movement. Annette said, "I'm not babbling. You know it took more than rocket ships to colonize the Moon. To make a successful colony possible men had to be altered genetically and adjusted to low-gravity. You are a product of such genetic engineering." "Well?" "And might not genetic engineering also help adjust men to greater gravitational pull? What is the largest solar planet?" "Jupiter." "Yes, Jupiter. Eleven times the diameter of the Earth -- forty times the diameter of the 'Moon. A surface a hundred and twenty times that of the Earth in area -- sixteen hundred times that of the Moon. Conditions so different from anything we can encounter anywhere on the worlds the size of Earth or less that any scientist of any persuasion would give half his life to observe them at close range." "But Jupiter is an impossible target." "Indeed?" said Annette and even managed a faint smile. "As impossible as the Moon? As impossible as flying? Why is it impossible? Genetic engineering could design men with stronger and denser bones, stronger and more compact muscles. The same principles that enclose Luna City against the vacuum and OceanDeepagainst the sea can also enclose the future Jupiter-Deep against its ammoniated surroundings." "The gravitational field -- " "Can be negotiated by nuclear ships now on the drawing board. You don't know that but I do." "We're not even sure about the depth of the atmosphere. The pressures -- " "The pressures! Mr. Demerest, look about you. Why do you suppose Ocean-Deep was really built? To exploit the ocean? The settlements on the Continental Shelf are doing that quite adequately. To gain knowledge of the deepIF sea bottom? We could do that by 'scaphe easily and we could then dollars invested in Ocean-Deep. "Don't you see, Mr. Demerest, that Ocean-Deep must mean something more than that? The purpose of Ocean-Deep is to devise the ultimate vessels and mechanisms that will explore and colonize Jupiter. Look about you and see the beginnings of a Jovian environment -- the closest approach to it we can achieve on Earth. It is only a faint image -- but it's a beginning. Destroy this, Mr. Demerest, and you destroy any hope foF Jupiter. On the other hand, let us live and we will, together, penetrate and settle the brightest jewel of the solar system. And long before we can reach the limits of Jupiter we'll be ready for the stars, for the Earth-type planets circling them -- and the Jupiter-type planets, too. Luna City won't be abandoned because both are necessary for this ultimate aim." For the moment Demerest had altogether forgotten about that last button. He said, "Nobody on Luna City has heard of this." "You haven't. There are those on Luna City who know. If you had told them of your plan of destruction they would have stopped you. Naturally, we can't make this common knowledge and only a few people anywhere can know. The public supports only with difficulty the planetary projects now monious it is because public opinion limits its generosity. What do you suppose public opinion would say if they thought we were aiming toward Jupiter? What a superboondoggle that would be in their eyes. But we continue and what money we can save and make use of we place in the various facets of Project Big World." "Project Big World?" "Yes," said Annette. "You know now and I have committed a serious security breach. But it doesn't matter, does it? Since we're all dead and since the project is, too." "Wait now, Mrs. Bergen." "If you change your mind now -- don't think you can ever talk about Project Big World. That would end the project just as effectively as destruction here would. And it would end both your career and mine. It might end Luna City and Ocean-Deep, too -- so now that you know, maybe it makes no difference anyway. You might just as well push that button." Demerest's brow was furrowed and his eyes burned with anguish. "I don't know -- " Bergen gathered for the sudden jump as Demerest's tense alertness wavered into uncertain introspection but Annette grasped her husband's sleeve. A timeless interval that might have been ten seconds long followed and then Demerest held out his laser. "Take it," he said. "I'll consider myself under arrest." "You can't be arrested," said Annette, "without the whole story coming out." She took the laser and gave it to Bergen. "It will be enough that you return to Luna City and keep silent. Till then we will keep you under guard." Bergen was at the manual controls. The inner door slid shut and after that came the thunderous waterclap of the water returning into the lock. alone again. They had not dared to say a word until Demerest was safely put to sleep under the watchful eyes of two men detailed for the purpose. The unexpected waterclap had aroused everybody and a sharply bowdlerized account of the incident had been given out. The manual controls were now locked off and Bergen said, "From this moment on the manuals will have to be adjusted to fail safe. Visitors will have to be searched." "Oh, John," said Annette. "I think people are insane. There we were, facing death for us and for Ocean-Deep, just the end of everything. And I kept thinking -- I must keep calm, I mustn't have a miscarriage." "You kept calm all right. You were magnificent. I mean, Project Big Planet! I never conceived of such a thing but, by Jove, it's an attractive thought. Wonderful!" "I'm sorry I had to say all that, John. It was all a fake, of course. I made it up. Demerest wanted me to make something up, really. He wasn't a killer or destroyer -- he was, according to his own overheated lights, a patriot. And I suppose he was telling himself he must destroy in order to save -- a common enough view among the small-minded. But he said he would give us time to talk him out of it and I think he was praying we would manage to do so. He wanted us to think of something that would give him the excuse and I gave it to him. I'm sorry I had to fool you, John." "You didn't fool me." "I didn't?" "How could you? I knew you "What made you so sure of that? Because I'm a woman?" "Not at all. Because I'm a member, Annette, and that's confidential. And, if you don't mind, I will begin a move to initiate exactly what you suggested -- Project Big World." "Well!" Annette considered that and, slowly, smiled. "Well! Women do have their uses." "Something," said Bergen, smiling also, "I have never denied."  IF The blue star was an anti-paradox manifestation... Powers, falling helplessly into it, was a paradox #. ChiMuZeta was discovered in ancient times, possibly as early as # A.D. However, its discoverers knew only its initial properties mnd doubtless this was why they classified as radiation and nicknamed "saltpeter" a force that transcends both space and time and supervises the consistency of the history of man... T HE spaceship Powers had stolen in his bid to regain his manhood was one of the new superfreighters the Company had recently put into use. Powers was no stranger to sophisticated ships but this one was not merely sophisticated -- it was ultra-sophisticated. It did his laundry, prepared his meals and made his bed. It thought up games for the two of them to play and told him stories to amuse him. It kept him company when he was lonely and sang Brahms' Lullaby to him when he couldn't sleep. It was all things to him -- mentor, servant, maid, slave. The only function it couldn't perform was that of mistress. But Powers had no need of a mistress. That was why he was journeying to the Blue Star. The ship's name was M.A.R.Y. M for Morning Mist A for Afterglow R for Reawakening Y for Yearning. These were the planets it had been commissioned to serve; this was how freighters derived their names. The Blue Star had no name -- only a catalog number: X-#-D. But catalog numbers frequently become names and this had happened in the case of the Blue Star. Over the years X-#-D had transmuted to Extend. Centered in the viewscreen of the Mary , it brought to mind a bright blue diamond lying in a jeweler's showcase. There are other diamonds in the showcase -- red ones, yellow, green, orange -- but these were relatively insignificant in the Blue Star's presence: mere grains of cosmic dust the cosmic jeweler had forgotten to flick from his cosmic show-cushion. Powers, who had begun life as a foundling and who had once been an hermaphrodite, had been staring at the star for some time. Now he turned his eyes away to rest them. But the Blue Star went right on burning on his retina almost as intensely as it burned in his brain. He bent over the star map he had come into the chart room to study. If he succeeded in regaining his virility he would need a faraway place to expend it -- preferably one on the other side of the galaxy from both Crag and Sublime. Crag was the home of the penal colony in which he had abided for four years and Sublime was the home of the Institute for Sublime Learning -- more comIF monly known as "Salt Peter's Cathedral" -- where he had been impotentialized. He had a second reason for studying the map. TJie Beta Tau Storms. He knew that only the ship could see him safely through them but he wanted to know where they were. A S HE sat staring at the little purple spirals that denoted their general whereabouts, the door of the chart room opened and the "stewardess" came in. Powers didn't want to look at her but he did anyway. The ship was some forty hours out from Twilight, the Company-owned planet where he had stolen it, yet he still wasn't wholly accustomed to this compelling combination of postures, attitudes, charm, companionableness, erudition and femininity electronically transformed into a comely girl. He watched her as she walked toward him across the room, looked at her hungrily as she paused beside him. Faint golden fuzz grew upon her rounded forearms; her perfume made him think of terrestrial fields of buttercups and clover. The curve of her chin made his heart ache. Her name was the ship's name -- Mary. She said, "Have you charted the storms to your satisfaction, Ben?" "I'm afraid only you can see us safely through the storms," Powers said. She smiled. "I'll do my best." He felt the material of her blue blouse touch his cheek as she tidied up the chart table. This was not wholly illusion. A projection she might be -- an electronically brewed personification of the ship -- but she had a substance of sorts. Without it she would not have been able to do his laundry, prepare his meals and make his bed. And her reality went even deeper, for the ganglions of supershipcomputers were duplicates of the human brain. She said suddenly, "Are we following an orthodox course to Morning Mist, Ben?" Caught off guard. Powers played for time. "Does it seem unorthodox?" She laughed. "I pay little attention to such matters. The pilot programs me and I obey." She paused. Then: "But I am curious to know why you only partially programed me. As matters stand we shall proceed to Extend and make precisely two orbits around it at a mean altitude of # miles. Then what?" "Then," said Powers, seeing his way clear, "I will reprogram you, correcting the error I made in my original programing and putting us on an orthodox course to Morning Mist." She said, "Oh, I see." And then: "I thought of a different game for us to play tonight, Ben. It's an awfully old one, but it's lots of fun. It's called checkers." Powers had never heard of it. But playing it might get the Blue Star off his mind. "I'll look forward to it," he said. "Fine. See you at supper." ers got up and stepped over to the drink dispenser. He dialed a cold daiquiri and drank it slowly. I wonder what I'd do, he thought, if she were a real woman. The answer, of course, was -- nothing. When they impotentialized you they burned a little ditty into your brain for you to think of and hum the music to when doubts assailed you. It went like this: Impotent I may be But I will see Stars lovers know as dust In the blindness of their lust... He hummed the tune now, thinking the words. And the words danced in his mind -- twisted, turned, attenuated, took on flesh and shaped themselves into naked nymphs and the nymphs cavorted licentiously around a grotesque Pan -- and the Pan was himself, hooves rooted in the ground, straining straining to be free, the while idiotically playing the impotentialization tune upon a syrinx. The techs at Salt Peter's Cathedral hadn't known that he had once been an hermaphrodite and he hadn't told them. He kept that part of his life a deep dark secret. But he should have told them. Maybe they would have known what Powers had subsequently found out -- that ex-hermaphrodites have a partial immunity to ChiMuZeta -- and would have exposed him for a longer period of time. As it was they had taken away just enough of his manhood to make it impossible for him to have a woman and left just enough of it for him to want one. been serving a life sentence for multiple rape when the penal colony officials had put the proposition to him. However, it was a crime he was not guilty of -- could not possibly have been guilty of for the simple reason that he had not been on the scene when it had been committed. The proposition the penal colony officials put to him was as follows: if he would submit to impotentialization and accept a lifetime job as a long-run pilot for Stellar Carriers, Inc., he would be given his freedom. The reason long-run pilots were impotentialized was that the runs sometimes lasted as long as four years and a man who did not want a woman could live alone for longer periods of time than one who did. The proposition was a standard IF one and had been put to innumerable lifers before Powers -- this was the only way the carriers could obtain long-run pilots. None of the lifers had refused. Powers hadn't refused either. A little bit of freedom was better than none. He had been sent directly to Sublime. There the techs at Salt Peter's Cathedral had briefed him on ChiMuZeta in accordance with the law and had given him the Treatment. It had required exactly one long run -- a relatively short one -- for Powers to discover that the Treatment hadn't taken. At first, naturally enough, he had assumed that it had had no effect upon him at all and he had rejoiced in the thought that he had cheated both the penal colony and the Company. Thdn, in a mirrored room in an orbital brothel off Twilight he had discovered that he had cheated no one except himself. #. At first the ancients knew only that ChiMuZeta came from the star X-IO-D, that exposure to it for the duration of a single orbit at a mean altitude of # miles (or the' equivalent thereof ) resulted in impotence and that exposure for the duration of two orbits at the same mean altitude (or the equivalent thereof ) resulted in restoration of virility. They would not even have known this much had not one of them. apparently by accident, made an orbit at this altitude and had not another of them, years later under a galactic government grant and in company with a female of the species, made two... served it. As was her custom, she sat across the table from him and kept him company while he ate. Tonight she had served roast leg of lamb, baked sweet potato, diced carrots, mint jelly and hot buttered rolls -- all synthetics, of course, but extremely tasty. Powers asked for a second helping of mint jelly and Mary, clearly pleased, spooned him out a generous one. He enjoyed the meal immensely, as he did all her meals. They were a far cry from the fare he'd been accustomed to on Crag and an even farther one from the fare he'd known in the Our Mother of Moses Orphanage on Sinai where he'd spent the first sixteen years of his life. The Our Mother of Moses Orphanage, though, hadn't been responsible for its meager fare. Sinai was a barren planet and had to import all its foodstuffs, and practical considerations, such as money, posed severe limitations on what could be imported. But while Powers couldn't blame Our Mother of Moses for the skimpiness of her meals, he could -- and did -- blame her for abysmal ignorance he had been kept in during the early part of his life. It wasn't till after he left the place behind him and worked his way to Lebanon on a food frieghter that he found out what was wrong with him. Fortunately Lebanon, even in those days, had been an enlightened' planet and he'd had no trouble getting the wrongness set right. "Come on," Mary said, sweeping the remnants of the meal into the dissolver. "Let's play checkers." He followed her out of the little galley and down the corridor to the lounge. The lounge was small and compact, and contained among other things a little round table with two chairs. A checkerboard ly on the table, a stack of red checkers on one side of it and a stack of black ones on the other. They sat down. Mary placed the checkers on their proper squares and explained the rules of the game to him. Powers made the first move. She won the first game -- he, the second. He knew, of course, that she had let him win. But he caught on swiftly, began to plan three, sometimes four moves ahead. Mary of course could plan any number of moves ahead but this posed a challenge and served to make the game all the more intriguing. For some reason his mind was unusually keen tonight. As he continued to play it grew keener yet and he found himself looking six moves ahead. Nine. Finally, when they stood at ten games apiece, the following pattern appeared upon the board. All of the men were kinged, and it was Powers' turn: The sharpness of Powers' mind was now such that he could see simultaneously every possible move he could make, every possible move Mary could make, the subsequent patterns that would emerge and the new sets of possible moves that went with them. Thus, he saw not only the pattern itself, but all of its potential ramifications. The overall pattern was fascinating in its complexity. He stared at it intently, studying its intricate lines and angles. The original pattern was no longer distinguishable: fact and extrapolation had become one. He found presently that he could no longer tell which of the lines represented his potential moves and which Mary's. But that was all right; it was the pattern that counted -- not its individual parts. Mary's face, intending to tell IF her about the fascinating pattern -- but he saw that she already knew about it. She had stood up, he noticed, and was gesturing for him to do the same. He obeyed. It seemed only natural that he should. Now she was leaving the lounge, looking back at him over her shoulder. Follow me, her eyes said. He did so. Along the corridor to the companionway. Down the companionway to the lower deck. Across the lower deck to the lifts. "Follow me," Mary said. "Yes, I'll follow you," he said. "I'll follow wherever you go." He followed her into Lift-A, dropped down with her to the deck-level of Hold-A. Here, locks confronted them. Atmosphere was never maintained in the holds of freighters unless the goods being transported required it and the holds of the Mary were empty. The first note of wrongness struck Powers when Mary began turning the deactivator on the inner lock. Shouldn't he be suited? He asked her. She did not answer but went on turning the activator. The inner lock swung open. She stepped into the intra-lock compartment. He almost followed. The pattern was less clear in his mind now. Its lines were wavering, running together. What was he doing in the holdarea? "Mary, why have we come here?" he asked. She did not answer. She was busy turning a dial on the inner wall. He knew the function of the dial. It controlled the mechanism that closed the inner lock and then opened the outer one. Whoosh! the pocket of air in the intra-lock compartment would go as it rushed into Hold-A and dispersed -- and Powers' blood would gush from his nose and mouth and his lungs would come in clots from his mouth and his ghost would join the other ghosts that walked the black boulevard of space. "Mary!" He leaped through the narrowing aperture and sought to seize her arm and pull her away from the deadly dial. But while she had substance of sorts it was not the substance of flesh and bone and he could not hold on to her. The inner lock had almost closed. He jumped through the narrow opening, barely in time. The pattern was no more but traces of his trance still remained. He watched, horrified, as the lock closed the rest of the way, sealing Mary in the airless hold. Then the last traces of the trance vanished and sanity returned. The ship had tried to kill him. Why? He reentered the lift, reactivated it. He was sweating when he stepped out on the lower deck. Why should the ship want to kill him? He climbed the companionway to the living quarters, walked down the corridor to the lounge. Entering, he swept checkerboard and checkers from the table and sat down. He noticed that his hands were trembling. prised when Mary materialized opposite him. She was sitting in the other chair as though she'd been there all along. Her right elbow rested on the tabletop and her chin was cupped in the palm of her right hand. She said, "You have more individuality than I thought." "Why?" he asked hoarsely. "Why, Mary -- why?" "I'm a supership -- remember?" The truth came hdme to him then. Superships were conditioned to react when stolen. But how did tftey know when they were stolen? Specifically, how had this one known? How had he betrayed himself? He put the question to Mary. She answered, "By that glib lie you told this afternoon when I asked why you had only partially programed me. It would have taxed the credulity of an idiot and an idiot I am not. I should have guessed the truth from the emptiness of my holds," she added almost ruefully, "but I did not, because according to my data freighters occasionally do leave home port without cargo." "Do you know why I stole you?" Powers asked. "Do you know, Mary, why I'm going to Extend?" She shook her head. "It makes no difference." "But it does make a difference," Powers said desperately. "All you have to do is bear with me for another forty-eight hours. We'll have reached Extend by that time and have completed two orbits around it. That's all I want -- two orbits. Then I'll program you to return to Twilight and the minute we arrive I'll turn myself in to the port authority." "Talk sense, Ben." "All right, I will," Powers said. "If you kill me you're as good as dead yourself, because you can't reprogram yourself. You'll simply stay on your present course, go into orbit around Extend and stay in orbit." She shook her head. "Ben, Ben -- why do you persist in thinking superships are dumb? The only reason I can't reprogram myself is because like all superships I'm conditioned to obey the, programing of the pilot. But only as long as the pilot is alive. The minute you're dead I'll be free to go wherever I please." Powers sighed. It had been a lousy hand but he had played it for all it was worth. For some reason Mary's face was less distinct now than it had been a few moments ago. But he IF was aware of this only in the back part of his mind. "I'll tell you one thing," he said. "You'll find me a little more difficult to deal with now that I'm alerted. You won't be able to hypnotize me with a checker game again -- that's for sure. Nor," he added with a rueful smile, "get me into a prehypnotic state by feeding me souped-up mint jelly." A thought struck him. Why hadn't she simply poisoned him and been done with it? But he didn't bother to ask the question, not only because she wouldn't have given him a straight answer but because he guessed the truth -- there were no suitable toxins on board. He said, "Well, anyway, it was a good try." "I'll do better next time." The matter-of-fact way she said it sent a shiver through him. He realized suddenly -- consciously this time -- that her face was blurred. Transferring his gaze to the wall behind her he found that it, too, was blurred. So were the other aspects of the room. For a moment he thought that she had somehow contrived to drug him again -- then he noticed that the air was shimmering, as though filled with foreign matter, and the truth overwhelmed him. He was on his feet, shouting, "We're entering a Beta Tau storm! Why aren't your alarms sounding?" She smiled demurely up at him. "Don't shout at me, Ben. You programed the course." He whirled, ran out of the room and down the corridor toward the protective-equipment lockers. Laughter sounded behind him -- Mary's. It died abruptly when he reached the storage room and slammed the door behind him. The lockers were on the opposite wall. #. Later the ancients discovered that prolonged exposure to Chi MuZeta resulted in disintegration. Their first inkling of this came when the special-alloy tanks they had devised for transporting and storing the " radiation ' transmuted from a solid to a translucent and finally to a transparent state. They suspected that there might be still another phase and tentatively named it " transintegration' " -- a term that endures to this day. But despite the accidental accuracy of the term the ancients still hadn't the faintest conception of the true nature of the force at their fingertips , nor would they guess for another hundred years that ChiMuZeta in its ultimate form is an Anti-Paradox Manifestation -- a force created in a star by the cosmos in order to hiatuses -- and correcting their accompanying inconsistencies -- in the past -- hiatuses occasioned by mankind's unconscious ability to create en masse... Mary he was seated before the viewscreen in the chart room wearing a synthi-lead suit that weighed nearly one hundred pounds. He was looking at the Blue Star, which now filled the screen and about which the ship would shortly go into orbit. Mary materialized next to the screen -- it was as though she had stepped through the bulkhead. The photon filter had toned down that almost matched the color of her uniform. She asked, "Comfortable, Ben?" He glared at her through the suit's faceplate. "I know who you are now," he said into the transmitter. "Keats saw you by the lake. You're La Belle Dame Sans Merci. You're Death." "You're jumping the gun, Ben. When Keats saw the lady he was dying. You didn't get anywhere near enough Beta-Tau radiation to put you in an analogous fix." "You sound disappointed." "Iam." "Bitch." She grinned. "Why don't you take off your suit, Ben? The storm's safely behind us." It was true and he almost fell for her suggestion. Then he saw that rime was forming on the viewscreen controls and on all the other metal parts in the room. Cold sweat came out on his forehead and ran down into his eyes. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?" he said. And then: "What's the temperature out there?" "A cool minus four hundred and ten Fahrenheit and dropping. Come on out, Ben -- it's quite refreshing." "You opened all the locks?" "Every one. And that's not all I did, Ben." He did not need to ask what she meant. For some time now he had been aware of a growing heaviness in his limbs. Tentatively he tried to raise his right arm, found that he could barely do so. And when he tried to stand he only half-succeeded, then collapsed back into the chair. He estimated his weight, suit and all, to be about eight hundred and seventy pounds. Mary was grinning at him. "Three G's were all I could muster. My artificial-grav unit isn't what it should be." How long could he endure three G's? And how much oxygen did he have left? A glance at the indicator informed him that he had a thirty-five-hour supply. More than enough to see him through two orbits. As for the suit, it would be no hindrance -- it kept out Beta-Tau radiation but not ChiMuZeta. IF But what then? How would he reprogram the ship if he couldn't move out of his chair? But he would be able to move out of his chair. When all of the chips were down, Mary would have to turn down the grav-unit. If she didn't she, too, would face disintegration. She hadn't won, then, after all. From the way she continued to grin at him, though, you would have thought she had. She said, "In about a day and a half you'll be dead. Why don't you give up the ghost now?" "In a day and a half," Powers said, "we'll be in our third orbit around Extend. Doesn't that mean anything to you?" "Only that you'll be dead." Clearly she did not know -- probably because her builders, in view of the fact that none of the commercial routes came anywhere near Extend, hadn't thought it necessary to include the data in her memory banks -- that if she exceeded two orbits around Extend she would be running the risk of disintegration. Would he, when the time came, be able to convince her that the only way she could save her own "life" was by saving his? It was a chance he would have to take. Because if he tried to convince her now and succeeded she would try another means of killing him and this time the attempt might very well come off. By keeping her in ignorance for a while he could obtain the time he needed. "Well, I'll leave you to your thoughts, Ben," she said. "I imagine you have quite a few." And so saying, she dematerialized. The Mary gave a slight shudder as the first braking rocket fired. A series of shudders followed as successive rockets discharged themselves. Then the Mary was in orbit. #. Most paradoxes involve religious legends that through the ages successive generations of believers have turned into fact . AntiParadox Manifestations occur when such legends finally become fact and lie in wait till mankind discovers them and -- in the case of the ancients -- misinterprets them and unwittingly supplies them with the ingredients necessary for the correction. In ancient for thousands of years. ized the ship had entered its second orbit around Extend. She was furious. "What kind of a pilot are you, Powers?" she demanded. "We're falling into the sun!" At first Powers thought she was lying. Then he saw that the rime had vanished from the control knobs and he discovered that he could stand up. "How -- how much altitude have we lost?" second we stand here we're losing thousands more. Get out of that suit and into the programing room before it's too late!" He could only stand there. Four lion by now. It was already too late. According to the briefing he had received from the ChiMuZeta techs, the intensity of ChiMuZeta radiation at even minus one million miles was double that of impotentialization level. He had spent hours programing the course, had checked and double-checked the orbital-velocity-altitude ratio. How could he possibly have erred? Suddenly out of a corner of his mind came a thought he had kicked around shortly after the briefing and then forgotten about: how could the first man to orbit Extend have found the impotentialization level by accident? The odds against his doing so were staggering. Perhaps he hadn't found it by accident. And perhaps Powers' miscalculation wasn't an accident either. Perhaps he and Mary were pieces on a cosmic checkerboard with no more volition than the checkers they themselves had used so short a time ago. But his insight went no deeper. He felt the awesome shudder that passed through the ship as its overheated drive went off, saw the fiery surface of Extend take on dreadful detail as the Mary's fall accelerated. He heard Mary's screams as she tried vainly to pull him from the room. He saw the bulkheads shimmer, then fade away as disintegration began. And then he knew no more. reality, are not subject to time: this is a restriction which we our selves impose upon them. Hence the seeming anachronism result ing from an A PM correction is an anachronism only in our own eyes, and not a true anachronism at all. dream Powers climbed a black mountain, descended into a dark abyss from whose depths stars could be seen shining high in the immensities. He stood there darkly, looking up at them, then lifting his arms to them he seized their light and wove a golden ladder which he climbed like Jacob into heaven. There lay the stars before him in a great black river of spacetime -- he straddled the river and looked down into its depths and saw that it did not flow but lay there like a dark immobile interval; and through the interval swam the fishes of men. He saw other things in the river, too, he IF saw nebulae and planets and ships and suddenly he saw the Mary -- and Mary and the Mary were one, swimming in the darkness of the river. He could see all of the river because it occupied neither space nor time although it embodiedboth. It lay there Mobius-striplike beneath him, with its stars and planets and ships and silly men-fish going nowhere. It was his river, there for him to fish in and if he chose he could become a fish himself. Around him in the darkness he sensed other beings like himself and knew that they owned rivers, too, with fishes in them. I will become a fish for a while, he thought evilly, and diminished down into the static stream and stepped out upon a planet called Sacred Heart. He saw a park and entered into the cool shade of trees and made his way to a round white building with a tall tower on top. He thought whimsically, Here are mortals who presume to be my wives , and he passed through a wide entranceway and into the Cloister and climbed a flight of stairs to the chapel where the Holy Sisters were praying. When they saw him, they screamed his crime. He left the building and exceeded and stood above his river, looking down into the oneness of past-present-future. There was a girl named Mary, he remembered, who had tried to kill him. She was not flesh and blood like the other fishes. She was a projection, but she had been devised by men and therefore had been compounded of race memories -- and where those memories began, there would he find the basic Mary... He looked down into his river and after a while he saw her in the fields and he diminished and --  -- stood before her. When the girl Mary saw him she did not flee. It was as though she had known that he was coming, as though she had prayed that he would come. She did not struggle when he seized her arm and pulled her into the dim shadows of an olive grove, nor when he divested her of her robes. "I shall have a child by thee," she said when he had taken his revenge, "and he will be of virgin birth. For I know that thou art not like other men -- that I have been chosen from amongst a thousand women to do thee honor." He was mollified and no longer bore her ill will. She was the basic Mary and she was good. It was the false memories that had intruded over the millennia that had given her guile and robbed her of compassion. He exceeded and looked down into his river and saw that all was well. After a while he caused a bright star to appear where none had been before, to show that he was pleased.  I The rain placed a warm film over everything it touched, softenteeth of his trauma, Mamson the island with a tireless paworth remembered her smile. And tience quite unlike the other drivother things. The way the rain fell ing rains he had known; and the on Hydria: soft and diffused and trembling colors imprisoned in his everywhere at once, as though head had illuminated a part of some strange osmosis had sifted it himself that had always been deepthrough the pores of space -- and ly buried in the dark night of his colors so bright that his corroded soul. mind ached with their memory. It had been raining the last time He had conquered the star trails -- and no w nothing of him was left for woman or man to love, hate or rule they had stopped over on Island One. In fact, he couldn't recall a time when it had not been raining on that vast oceanic world and its scattered islands. Never once had he looked out over the island without the gentle pervading film of rain coming between himself and the landscape, while overhead an unseen sun burnished the deep layer of cloud a hazy shade of copper. Hydria was only a whistlestop on the great bustle Outward. The water world was inexhaustible and it allowed the thirsty ships from Earth to drink their fill of reaction mass before they moved on with their urgent business of remaking the universe. There were richer prizes to be won than this almost landless world and the Service had contented itself with carving out a landfall and stop-over port for its ships on one of the equatorial islands. So perfunctory was this activity that they hardly bothered to give the place a name, only a number. Hydria had nothing more that they could plunder and so she was spared the indignities commensurate with terraforming, a rapacious process that had already remolded many brave new worlds in the delightful image of mother Earth. Yes, it had been raining and the Barain had loomed large on the wet tarmac -- a great metal canister from Earth, tended by Servicemen in their smooth plastic suits, moving around the base of the monolith like pale white grubs groping around the carcass of some dead animal. thing of a ritual. Marnsworth had first disposed of his captain's uniform and then pulled on a flimsy transparent plastic sheath over his underwear. It would insulate his body and ensure that it was maintained at the proper temperature regardless of his external environment. Over this he donned a heavier but in no way cumbersome survival suit. It was fitted out with a number of tiny powerpacks, from which fine cables sprouted like delicate vines, fed the thermostatic insulator underneath and provided power for the faint but adequate deadfield that radiated outward from the wide belt at his waist. He checked this carefully before he zipped shut the transparent parka fitted to the suit -- the field would annihilate any dangerous microorganisms for quite some distance around him, ensuring that he could venture safely beyond the controlled environment of his ship without fear of any serious contamination. Such caution was necessary. Many lives had been forfeited in the early and clumsy days of space exploration to inadequate personnel protection. These days full survival suiting was mandatory for all Servicemen, even if they only stepped outside for a few moments to urinate. More than a century of modifications had made living in spacesuits comfortable and he was the animal spirit of his age -- a spaceman. A starship was his natural environment. The Barain surrendered him to the Island. He was escalated to ground level with all the care that a child could expect from its mother. He planted his protected feet on the wet tarmac and waited while they broke out a skiff. He looked up and felt a sudden longing for the clear controlled skies of Earth. Through the sifting rain he could barely distinguish the Service buildings crowding the perimeter of the field. Fine detail was blurred by the pervading drizzle, so that they loomed squat and ugly in the coppery sunlight. IF Vaguely he could discern the figures of some local landmen lounging against the buildings and studying the stranded starship. They seemed not to notice the rain, seemed also to draw some nourishment from the humid wetness and the pallid sunshine. Their chests were bared to both and they were probably prepared to spend the rest of their lives covered with the same warm film of moisture that was clouding his parka. If their dull faces had anything to communicate it was obliterated by the drifting rain. High up in the belly of the Barain a panel opened and a compact surface craft nosed its way out. A driver adept at his task guided the skiff down to a neat landing only a few paces away from where Damian Marnsworth waited. The captain stepped forward impatiently, thanked the young Serviceman and assumed solitary command of the sleek craft. He sat down before the sparsely detailed instrument panel, fidgeted nervously with the toggles and switches. It had been some time since he had driven a surface craft and, although it was capable of automatic piloting, he felt it essential that he become confident with the few manual controls before he moved off. He looked straight ahead, trying to pierce the solid veil of water that enveloped the hazy outlines of the landfall buildings. Beyond them stretched the great rain forests of Island One that had swallowed up Gerard Childers and now kept him jealously hidden from the Barain and its crew. Childers had been the best drivesman he had ever known. He had disappeared several stopovers ago. An immediate, quick and cursory search of the settlement had been sufficient to convince Marnsworth that his man had taken to the forest and was too well hidden for them to be able to flush him out with the limited time at their disposal. Childers had timed his break for the very last few minutes of landfall time. Once the initial flurry of excitement had been over Marnsworth had had no recourse but to up-ship on schedule and return to Earth with his second drivesman in charge of the engines. Technicians were plentiful and Service Schedules were, like all parts of the Plan, impressively expensive. Each day spent away from Earth cost the administration mega-credits and the eager expansion of Earth's embryonic stellar empire was being accomplished with all the thoroughness that three centuries of red tape could muster. A maximum of eight hours stopover was mandatory for all ships and any captain who exceeded this limit without proper justification was quickly broken. A minor technician just wasn't worth it. B UT for Damian Marnsworth the situation went deeper than that; so deep that it hurt and had left a small weeping wound that refused to heal. Gerard Childers had been more than a mere technical subordinate -- he had been a friend. They had schooled together and stepped out in the great ships to master space together and in this respect Childers' desertion had assumed the quality of a moral betrayal. He had left without a word of explanation, without any warning whatsoever -- but this day Marnsworth was determined to challenge the rain forests and wrest from Childers the reason for his madness. In his hands he held a map, a clumsy effort drawn by one of the local landmen the trip before last. It had cost him a considerable amount of money -- but not so much that it could not be safely written off into petty cash -- and the information he had drawn from it and fed into the skiff's auto-pilot would guide him to Childers. Marnsworth had wormed the crude drawing out of a drunken recluse in the Service bar -- perhaps it was the way landmen disintegrated their society and fragmented into so many different forms that made them seem so disgusting -- and he had been restlessly waiting for an opportunity that would enable him to put it to use. And this time he had one. Deep in the Barains belly an overstressed and underserviced main drive unit was undergoing urgently needed repairs. Tire work would take several days. The task was complex and only when the chief engineer had the massive engine stripped down and examined would he know what to do and how long it would take to reassemble and test the unit. There would be plenty of time. The clear canopy of the skiff was already beaded with moisture. Marnsworth moved a toggle that set the auto-pilot in motion. The skiff moved skyward, hesitated for a moment several hundred feet above the tarmac while it checked the coordinates for Childers' hideout and then skimmed off over the settlement in the direction of the great northern rain forest. As he passed over the shallow line of buildings Marnsworth saw several faces turned up toward the skiff. They were local landmen and for a brief moment he could see them clearly enough to note the wet hair plastered against their faces -- he looked quickly away. All Servicemen shared this instinctive aversion to landmen, if only because they were living proof that the Plan was not always infallible. Genetic prediction and selection were still infant sciences -- but time would improve the techniques of control so that deviations from the goal would become fewer and ultimately disappear, and the  IF Empire would be populated by a truly space-bred society. In the meantime the Administration maintained a tolerant attitude toward its outcasts and sometimes even supported them in their absurd little enterprises. The unwanted worlds had become an ideal dumping place for social misfits. The settlement disappeared behind him. The clouds and the rain closed in. The skiff gradually sought altitude so that it would be prepared for the mountain range that began some distance ahead. II a blunt heart, inclined southeast across the equator. At the southern narrower end were two smaller islands grouped a few miles apart about thirty miles offshore, inhospitable rocks unworthy even of the numbers doled out to their larger brothers by the original cartographers of Hydria. The island was heavily timbered and bore a crooked back underneath the lush, wet forests. This serrated ridge crossed the island from east to west and was the closest thing to a mountain range that the fresh young world had ever known. It made a long, slow climb for the small surface craft. But Marnsworth was in no particular hurry now that the journey had finally been instigated. He had spent most of his life on board some sort of spacecraft, studying interminable viewscreens and printouts and had managed to achieve a most sought-after function of all Servicemen -- he could almost switch himself off for long periods of time and allay the boredom of travel. And he did so now. He relaxed and waited, for this was the measure of his trade. More out of idleness than from any genuine curiosity, he activated the external sensors of the skiff. The whispered sounds of the world below drifted into the cabin. But the forest did not chatter incessantly like some forests he had known; nor did it scream or whimper. No predator moved through the unseen undergrowth. Here dominion had been divided between birds and insects and an occasional herbivore and that explained why the ecology of the island had always moved at such an infinitesimal rate -- time had barely touched this great world of water. He drowsed. Perhaps he should have felt nervous and excited at the prospect of tracking down Gerard Childers but emotions that could overpower his logical mind had been bred from his strain several generations ago. He almost slept until the skiff broke through the clouds and challenged the timberline. A bare sky gaped momentarily before him and a golden sun burned bright and naked into his face. He looked away. The land that swept back from the narrow ridge of mountains reminded him of the great game reserves of Africa. The broad veldtlike stretches were a striking contrast to the rain-drenched landscape he had been traveling over. The skiff soared easily over the flimsy backbone of the island and plunged straight down into a dense mist. The wound in the sky healed over and the clouds closed in. He relaxed again in his seat and checked his watch against the tripmeter on the control panel. Ninety-seven minutes and one hundred and eleven miles away from the settlement. The long climb had slowed down the skiff but now that the mountains had been passed it was downhill all the way to Childers' retreat. He had rehearsed all sorts of dialogues with himself but now that he was close to his quarry he found that he could cast serious doubts on them all. What would he say? What could he say? At the moment he could think of nothing that wouldn't sound offensive and presumptuous. Perhaps -- and this was what he wished -- perhaps they would both blunder their way through the initial confrontation and then, over a pleasant drink or two, some of the friendship they had shared might begin to flow between them again. He missed that more than anything else. Space had become withdrawn and lonely since Childers' had deserted the Service. There had been a time when the universe had been their oyster. Whatever had possessed Childers to turn his back to it in such a perfunctory manner? mist and rain disappeared. The skiff plunged into a wide valley. Gone were the rain forests and the sparse veldts, to be replaced by sweeping grasslands. A river broke free from the distant forest and played tag under the speeding craft. The land began to rise steeply on either side and finally pushed it, roaring and foaming whitely, through a narrow gorge and out into another, narrower valley. The skiff shot quickly through this natural pass and, once it had entered the valley beyond, began to describe a wide gliding arc that broke for the first time the singleminded purpose of its flight. A persistent beeping began on the control panel. Mamsworth tensed. A human habitation lay somewhere ahead. Childers' retreat -- or somebody else's? Was the map a fake? He had thought of radioing ahead to announce his arrival but he wasn't sure that Childers would appreciate a call. There was no point in putting his old friend unnecessarily on edge. Cultivated fields passed by unIF derneath. He leaned forward, the better to observe the new landscape. Human hands had molded this land to some purpose. Neat plantations of some sort of bush spread down the river's edge. This was no fetid swamp -- Childers had chosen well. Perhaps his madness was not quite as intense as Marnsworth had imagined -- this landscape had been designed with great care and affection. The skiff accelerated briefly to grab an extra few feet of altitude to fly over a wide belt of trees. It dropped abruptly into an enormous clearing. A small white house, festooned with colorful creepers, was set almost in the very center of this smooth area. It was U-shaped, its front aspect facing southwest so that it took in the curving elbow of the river, the dim mountains in the distance -- hidden now by tumbling rain clouds -- and Marnsworth's descending surface craft. The control panel beeped three times and was still. The skiff hovered expectantly, waiting for Marnsworth to resume manual control and descend. But a cold nervousness had suddenly gripped him. It made him fumble at the controls with fingers that had suddenly become inexpert. He wondered if the common audacity of his visit had been ill-planned. What sort of a reception could he expect from a man who was already three years a stranger? Well, he would soon find out. No sense turning back now that he had come this far. He sent the skiff gliding cautiously down. It set down on the grass and he cut the motors and sat for a few breathless moments while they idled away into silence. There was such an unnatural calm about the valley that he was reluctant to disfigure the silence with any abrupt movement. There was no sign of activity from the house, no indication that his arrival had been noted. Either Childers did not possess even a rudimentary sensor or he was deaf -- or disinterested. Marnsworth slipped out of his seatbelt and swung back the canopy. He jumped lightly to the ground. His suit lacked an amplifier, but the light gravity of Hydria made movement effortless even for his meager muscles. He felt the wet grass give under his weight. The outside temperature was high -- so was the humidity -- but his suit filtered out these unpleasant environmental things. He flicked on his sensors and allowed the moist and quiet sounds of Island One to make an impression. same spot several minutes later when the front door of the white house swung open. He saw a figure hesitating behind the deep shadow. Then it stepped forward into the sunlight. Marnsworth gave a start. At first he wasn't sure that this actually was Gerard Childers but as the man moved toward him with bold, unfrightened steps, he realized with a sinking heart that this -- this creature -- was indeed his old friend but scarcely recognizable, with the upper half of his body bared to the weather and with a heavy growth of beard disfiguring his face. He wore only a pair of dun shorts and his bare feet crushed the wet grass. The sensors in Marnsworth's suit were sensitive. They picked up the words the other man was mumbling. "Damian -- good God, what brings you here?" The outward appearance of his friend might have been transfigured by life under such alien conditions but at least the voice was familiar. Marnsworth stepped forward eagerly, reached out and Childers gripped his plastic hand and pumped it vigorously. "Hello, Gerard." He felt shy and foolish, as though he didn't really belong here, so far from his ship. "I came out to see what you've been doing with yourself." Childers smile held an uncomfortable edge. "I hope you haven't come to try and impress me back into the Service or anything like that?" MarnswoTth shook his head. "No. It's just that -- well, the ship's laid up for a few days at the settlement. I thought I'd take advantage of the break to come and look you up, find out what you've been doing these past few years." Childers seemed to relax a little. "Always knew that rustbucket would let you down one day." "Oh, it's not the Queen" Marnsworth explained. "The Barain. A new ship. This is only her third trip out. Her main drive's been giving us hell ever since she was commissioned -- " Childers placed a brawny, suntanned arm around Marnsworth's plastic shoulders and guided him toward the house. "Well, it isn't every day we get a visiting spaceman -- " The house was cool inside but Marnsworth could detect no threshold whirr of conditioning, so he did not unzip his parka. Childers eyed him quizzically. "Aren't you going to take that damned thing off?" Without waiting for an answer he moved across the room and slid back a panel in the wall to reveal an array of bottles and glasses. Marnsworth began to feel welcome but a residue of his curious embarrassment remained. He gestured awkwardly with his smooth hands. "I hope you realize that you've had a damned sight longer to get used to this air than I have." Childers looked up from the dark drink he was pouring. IF "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten that. Does that mean you'd turn your nose up at a local beverage?" "Hardly likely." "Good." Marnsworth took a deep breath and unzipped his parka. He shivered as the humid air struck his face and his hand shook a little when it reached for the drink. The beverage was raw and unfamiliar and it fought its way down his throat like a living animate But once it had arrived in his belly he found he could experience an agreeable warmth spreading through his body -- intoxicants could vary in taste but their effect never varied from one world to another. He found the stuffiness in the air most disagreeable but at this stage he felt much too polite to create any difficulties. Childers motioned him into a chair and sat down beside him. "Don't often have people up from the settlement," he said. "At least, not Service people." Marnsworth found his chair uncomfortable. It had been hewn from some natural material and was quite hard beneath him. But he made no comment and avoided looking directly at Childers. He still felt residual horror at the changes in his friend. Something other than the fierce u.v. had burned Childers' face into hard, coarse lines and bleached his hair with wide bands of gray. Both men were in their middle forties but in contrast to his host Marnsworth had the bland, untroubled and smooth face of an adolescent. He sat behind his suit and it nursed him and cared for him, in much the same manner as his ship looked after him while they moved between one world and another, one year and the next. He was slim and fragile and unaccustomed to the hardships of living on the land. His environment was space and his strength could be found a hundred thousandfold in any of the amplifiers he was called upon to use. Was it possible that Childers had been unable to maintain his rejuvenants since he had left the Service? Was that why he looked so old after only three short years? M arnsworth, coughed discreetly, suggesting that the liquor had troubled his throat. "You seem to have settled in rather well." One had to be sociable, otherwise an embarrassed silence would epgulf them. Childers managed a wry grimace. "Well, the first few months were the worst. After that, well, everything became a little easier." "I see." But no, he did not really see. "The -- acclimatization?" "Something like that. You like the wine?" Marnsworth said that he did -- with reservations -- and accepted another. The house was large by the standards he was accustomed to. Plenty of wide, full-length windows to let in the coppery sunlight and if the furniture seemed sparse and crude by some standards, it was at least functional. It was the excess of free space that he found most disconcerting. On board ship and at home -- in fact anywhere on Earth, for that matter -- living space was at a premium. Marnsworth had been tailored to fit a cramped environment -- and to fit graciously, without asking awkward questions. Childers was staring down at his drink. Without looking up he said, "I suppose you'd like to know why I left?" Marnsworth did not answer but let him continue. "Well, it was just something I had to do, that's all. Then and there -- at that moment. Without any temporizing. But I'm sorry if you've been through any trouble." No, no trouble , Marnsworth thought. Only pain. "But you see, there wasn't time to -- to think about things like that. About the Service. About command and all those other meaningless things. I just couldn't stand being locked up inside that great tin can any longer. I had to get out." "And so you threw up your work, your career, your pension," Marnsworth said. "And for what, Gerard, for what?" He gestured to take in their surroundings. "For this?" Childers didn't answer. And his face had not yet lifted from contemplating an empty glass. Marnsworth felt failure like a great weight lodged in his lungs. "All I know, Gerard, is that you've changed -- changed much since I saw you last. And have you done it all for this?" Childers raised his head slowly andthere was an honesty in his eyes that had not been there before. "You haven't changed much at all," he said and then looked quickly away, as though embarrased by what he saw. "As you've probably guessed, I haven't been taking my shots since I left the Service -- and there's a rather frightening change in the first six months or so. But after that things tend to even out and you get used to your new appearance. You put on weight. If you're working, then you start buildings muscles. The sun tans you -- your body sweats. A lot of things happen. But I guess it's in the face that a man shows it most." Suddenly furious, Marnsworth jumped to his feet. "I can understand anybody wanting out," he cried, "but why in God's name did you throw away your youth?" Childers looked puzzled. "But did I do that, Damian? Did I really? Has it ever occurred to you just how costly those treatments IF are when you haven't access to Service wages? Not everyone back home can afford them either -- or perhaps you've conveniently forgotten that? Spacemen tend to forget everything that is not absolutely necessary to their profession. And I found that I could do without my shots -- as I could do without most of the things that Earth had given me. Once you have discarded one myth you can discard them all." Marnsworth said nothing and Childers continued. "Did yoir know that rejuvenation is our greatest lie? Oh, we keep ourselves young on the surface, on the skin where it shows -- at least those of us who can afford to do so -- but it's only a sickly veneer. The flesh may stay young but our minds aren't fooled. They're much too clever to be tricked by our smart little drugs. We age our mind through experience, regardless of the physical rejuvenation that continually remakes us -- but what, do you suppose, will be the end of all this? Will our minds get surfeited with accumulated inertia and finally stop from sheer exhaustion? I suppose it would be interesting to find out -- but I no longer wish for that sort of knowledge. I have -- other things." M arnsworth was breathing heavily in the humid atmosphere. His eyes were bright. "Some day," he said, "some day they will find a way to -- " "To rejuvenate the mind? How awful. But I suppose they will do it if they've set their minds to it. Man has made a habit of accomplishment. But really -- one doesn't need their clever chemicals. Rejuvenation of a tired mind is a simple process for those who are prepared to look. I found it here. Others look elsewhere." # Marnsworth realized that he was as far from Gerard Childers as he had been back at the settlement. Was there no way of bridging this enormous gulf? "Gerard," he began, his voice soft and patient, "do you remember how we used to talk in the old days, back at school?" "About how big the universe was and how mankind would chart its secrets and what an adventure it would be -- " "To be part of it--" "And wouldn't it be grand?" "Then you haven't forgotten?" "No, of course not. But that was all so long ago, Damian, and we were such fools." "But your training -- all those years -- " "And for what? A few years out of my life -- not worth crying over. Oh, I won't deny that I was once as starry-eyed as any young cadet -- " "You were more than that. You were one of the foremost physicists of your time -- and the best damned drivesman I ever knew. And you left it all -- ran away like some crazy kid. And only for this!" A shadow passed across Childers' face. He became very serious. "Listen, Damian. I will tell you something. Something very important to me -- and to everybody. When I had finished all those wonderful years of schooling, of breaking God down into little pieces so that I could measure Him and analyze Him and wondering what to do with what I found -- after I had accumulated all this useless knowledge, do you know where I found myself? That's right -- staring at gauges and meters and tapping out commands to machines more clever than myself, nursing spaceships through hyper-space and watching little colored lights winking on and off. And that was all, Damian -- only that. Ten years of my life studying so that I would wind up acting as caretaker to a machine." "But such work demands that sort of study," Marnsworth protested. "Surely you don't expect -- " "I expect nothing -- not any more. Only never to waste my life in such a useless fashion. I want to feel the pressure of a world beneath my feet; I want fresh air in my lungs and not the canned stuff we're too used to accepting as the real thing. I don't want to have to drag my environment around with me to every God-forsaken corner of the universe. Damn it all, we've become a race of galactic sculptors running around the cosmos putting Earth's face on every habitable world we find -- can't you see that's blasphemous?" Ill were locked in a nexus of consternation; he could not speak. Impatient words had piled up into an unmanageable lump in his throat and his lips twitched in an agitation to free them. His whole body was shaking inside the protective suit. The fierce light faded suddenly from Childers' eyes. He looked past Marnsworth and his face softened. The spaceman followed the direction of his gaze and was surprised to find a young woman standing in the doorway. Childers stood up. "Rachel, this is Damian Marnsworth -- Captain Marnsworth. My old chief. Damian -- my wife." Her quiet entry helped to break the terrible stasis that had gripped the spaceman. He struggled awkwardly to his feet and dipped his head sharply in a gentleman's acknowledgment. "What a pleasant surprise, Mrs. Childers," he said. "I had no idea -- " He had assumed that Childers IF lived alone in his retreat -- nobody had mentioned the woman. She was extraordinarily attractive even to a spaceman's eyes -- but she was regarding him with a cold grace he found disquieting. She wore a simple orange shift and her dark body -- darker even than her husband's -- moved visibly underneath the material as she crossed the room. Probably quite a bit of African and Eurasian somewhere along the line, he reckoned -- particularly when one considered the almost imperceptible slant of her luminous dark eyes. Her body was strong, supple and well proportioned, if slightly plump by some standards and her jet-black hair was pulled back into a bun at the base of her neck. She extended a courteous hand to Marnsworth but she did not succeed in concealing the hostility in her eyes. "How very nice to see you. Captain." Her voice was soft and husky. It disturbed Marnsworth. "You are -- most welcome. We don't often have people from the Service visiting us." He grasped her moist hand with his plastic fingers and sensed her displeasure like a mild electric shock passing up his arm. "Thank you." Childers made a disparaging noise. "Damn fool lives in that suit. You'll never get him out of it. that's for sure." Feeling a trifle foolish, Marnsworth explained to the woman -- in detail -- why his survival suit was necessary and how unaccustomed he was to being off-ship. While he talked her ambivilance seemed to soften a little. "You have a very nice -- ah -- estate here," he babbled on, unable to stop now for fear that the terrible nexus would grab him again. "Mrs. Childers, I must confess that I never -- " "Oh, for God's sake, call her Rachel, will you?" Childers exploded, exasperated. And then turned attentively to his wife. "Would you like a drink?" She nodded. While her husband poured for her she moved gracefully across the room and sat down on an upholstered divan under the east window. The copper sunlight made her skin blaze. The vivid color of the shift was almost blinding to Mamsworth's weak, spaceman's eyes. She crossed her legs and Marnsworth realized that her feet were bare, like her husband's. Of course she had timed her entry with discretion, waiting until the two old friends had established some sort of rapport and then, with the penchant for perfect timing that only beautiful women seemed to possess, had announced herself when her presence was most needed -- her arrival had made their disagreements unimportant for the moment. "When do you have to be back?" Childers asked. "Well, I don't really know. That damned drive could take days to fix and -- " "Then why not stay here with us for a while? Have yourself a holiday away from that damned Service -- " He bit his lip and shrugged apologetically, realizing he had made a mistake. "Matter of fact, Rachel and I are visiting some friends of ours this evening -- a sort of party, you might call it. I think you'd enjoy yourself. As I remember, you were always one for a good time." A good time... The words had meant something once, long ago, between schooling and the Service, when there had been time for things without Purpose. Something else that Marnsworth had forgotten. They were both watching him -- the woman sipping at her wine, frankly curious, Childers with an edge of nervousness about him he seemed not quite able to understand. Marnsworth sniffed. It was a painful gesture -- his sinuses were swollen and irritated and he was finding it difficult to breathe. "You see," Childers elaborated, "there's quite a colony of us around here. Murray's place is only about fourteen miles north, on the other side of the river. Every month we have a gettogether at each other's place -- we take turns -- and generally have ourselves a ball. It's only when you're isolated from people for a great deal of time that you begin to appreciate their company. I know you're probably anxious to get back to your ship but we'd be delighted to have you with us, wouldn't we Rachel?" Marnsworth looked at the woman. Only her eyes were visible as she raised her glass to her lips. She inclined her head a little to one side and her answer was a husky whisper. "Of course." Marnsworth fidgeted nervously. "Well -- " What could he say? Of course he felt uncomfortable but an insatiable curiosity made him want to find out more about these people. There was an enigma here he should be able to understand. "If you think it would be all right with your friends?" Childers laughed and looked relieved. "But of course they won't mind. And wait until you see what a fine bunch of people we've got here." Childers placed a brawny arm around Marnsworth's narrow shoulders and grabbed his arm excitedly. On the divan the woman sipped her drink and studied Marnsworth thoughtfully with a distant and impenetrable expression. land. No spectacular sunset transfigured the dull sky -- the copIF pery haze simply faded gradually away, as though a finely adjustable rheostat had been brought into play. Mamsworth had spent most of the afternoon wandering around Childers' estate in the company of his old friend. In the process he had come to understand the activities that occupied the ex-Serviceman but he was still no nearer to comprehending his motives. Childers tilled and cultivated many acres by hand and the use of a few simple tools -- there were no automatons that Marnsworth could see. The main crop was coffee, a local transplanting that had thrived at this altitude and enabled Childers and his wife to live comfortably. Export of the popular beans ensured that the space people and their home world could enjoy the occasional draught of a non-synthetic stimulant, although the price levied on outworld goods was prohibitively high for all but the chosen elite. "I understand it retails back home for something like five credits an ounce," Childers observed, "and that's refined and adulterated." "Five thirty-four," Marnsworth corrected. "Is that so?" Childers smiled ruefully. "Well, Service pays us five and a half cents a pound -- I can't imagine that all that extra is made up of freight and handling. Somebody has sure cornered themselves a market in natural coffee." "You don't seem concerned that somebody is making an enormous profit from all your work." "Huh? Oh, I can't be bothered about those things, Damian. They can do what they like after it leaves my hands. Everything I care for is here. They can have the rest." The rain had persisted all afternoon. Now they sat in comfortable cane chairs on the veranda of Childers' house and watched the sunlight fade from the heavy clouds. Marnsworth had apologized and zipped up his parka several hours earlier. He had been unable to tolerate the oppressive island atmosphere any longer. The constant fall of fine rain and the high humidity were causing pain through his nasal cavities and putting a constricting sensation into his chest where the unfiltered air rampaged. Now the subtle mechanisms whirred soundlessly in his suit and flushed out the excessive moisture and warmth, so that his breathing became easier and a little of the discomfort was eased out of his head. He sat and stared at the soft curtain of moisture. Occasionally a light breeze would puff some of it toward the house and it would fall like sea-spray upon the verandah. "Does it ever stop?" he asked. "Sometimes. Do you find it depressing? We don't really notice it any more -- not when it falls like this. One of the many advantages of having a low surface gravity. Point six-eight -- or is it six-four? I seem to have forgotten." Childers' eyes were bright and clear and he could see well out into the darkening landscape. But Marnsworth's view had been obscured for some time by the distorting film of moisture on the outside of his parka. "Is this why you left the Service? Simply to be a landman? To move dirt around with your fingers and never know the stars again?" Childers looked up at the dark clouds where the stars were rarely visible. "If you mean, did I come here only for that, then I can't really answer you. You see, we've only begun to discover what we want to do. I've been too busy relearning what it is to be myself to worry about motivations -- but yes, I like it here. We like it here. I can't think of going back to the Service -- even if they would have me, which I doubt -- so where's the sense of asking?" "Because I have to know." "Why, Damian? Why is it important that you should know why I came here when I don't even know the multileveled answer myself? All I know is that I could never be a Servicepian again -- not with all that emptiness outside crowding to get in. I guess I just wasn't made for it. Maybe Control goofed. It must happen sometimes. Sure, they mold us into a pattern, but how much can they motivate our subconscious? I believe that there are worlds -- and Hydria is one of them -- that reach out to some deep part of us we are unaware of and these worlds communicate with our subconscious in a way that Control never planned. But only some of us have need of and heed their summons. The misfits. The failures. The dropouts. The ones ill-wrought by Control." He laughed and waved a hand at Marnsworth's distorted and horrified face behind the clouded parka. "Oh, don't worry, Damian -- you're all right, I think. Control made a fine job of you. But with me -- and some others -- they were clumsy. You are a creature of space -- something new. But Rachel and I are landpeople. Perhaps the ultimate destiny of the human race is to put a fresh new face on the universe -- one day they might even find some way of fitting out Earth with some fantastic sort of drive that will enable them to take their whole synthetic world out to the stars. But our roots are deeper, Damian. We love the land. There is something there that spaceman should not entirely forget." "But your youth -- " Marnsworth struggled to speak. "Why did you discard your youth?" Childers shrugged and smiled an enigmatic smile. "It's late," he IF said, getting up and studying the encroaching darkness. "We'd best go inside and get ready or we'll have Rachel on our backs." N umerous exits led off the main room but Marnsworth could see no doors. An open house -- how very extraordinary... Rachel was waiting for them. She was standing at one of the exits -- or entrances -- a slight impatience in her manner. She had changed into a plain white smock that came freely down to midthigh and exposed her long brown limbs to advantage. She was barefoot still -- it seemed to be a custom of the island -- and her dark skin made a dramatic contrast with the smock. As he moved closer Marnsworth saw that she had some arrangement in her hair -- he realized with surprise that it was a fresh red flower. He saw beads of moisture still on it. A peculiar people... He felt suddenly ill at ease. He had opened his parka again from a desire to be courteous to this woman but suddenly, facing here like this, ready to leave, he felt a little conspicuous in his survival suit. He wondere'd if it had been such a good idea to agree to attend the local festivity or whatever it was called. Childers deciphered his indecision. "Don't worry about that," he said quickly, indicating Marnsworth's suit. "They won't mind -- really they won't." And am I to be a speciman -- a curiosity ? Marnsworth's confidence had been badly shaken in the past few hours. Could he, just this once, and for only a few hours, submit to some small discomfiture, so that he might meet these people as an equal and not some oddity from Earth? "If you have something I can wear," he said, "I'll leave this stuff behind. I'd feel a bit of a fool, you know, walking in on your friends like this." Rachel smiled and he found a new warmth in her eyes. "But of course," she said and turned back through the entrance. "I'll get you something." A few minutes later she returned and handed the spaceman a pair of tan shorts and a bone-colored sleeveless jacket from her husband's wardrobe. The jacket was a trifle big but the shorts, he saw with relief, were a stretch fabric. He took them and then stood feeling foolish while they stared at him. It was a bad moment. And then Rachel, with an intuitive understanding of the situation, whisked back out of the room murmuring something about makeup. Marnsworth hastily stripped off his suit -- he stood naked for a moment like a skinned vegetable. "It must feel strange," Childers observed, "after all this time." Which was true enough. A spaceman was not accustomed under social conditions or aboard ship to exposing overmuch of himself. Not even back home, where one always swam in carefully filtered waters and alone and... He dressed as quickly as he could in the strange outfit the woman had provided. T HE solitary wan moon of Hydria was struggling to pierce the clouds when they left the house -- only a pale glow was visible on the horizon. They left -- not in Marnsworth's skiff but in a similar machine adapted to Childers' requirements. It was low and wide with ample cargo space in the rear and a single bench seat up front. They sat close together and Marnsworth was uncomfortably conscious of the nearness of Childers' wife, of her pressing against him and of the rich, musky odor of her skin. The subtle perfume she had sprinkled over her body did not completely mask this unpleasantness from his suddenly critical olfactory sensibilities. But it didn't offend him as much as it should. Something -- perhaps the very strangeness of the environment he was experiencing so directly -- had induced in his thoughts a delightful euphoria, so he relaxed and let his mind wander, instead of marshaling it disagreeably for the evening ahead. The sky cleared in patches where some small stars sputtered. Something gripped his stomach and he looked quickly away. Outside the perpetual drizzle enveloped the clear canopy of the craft. The journey could not have taken more than twenty minutes but for Marnsworth it was a time of increasing discomfort. He was unaccustomed to this sort of proximity, sandwiched between two people as lightly clad as himself. And the air inside the skiff had become increasingly sticky. The odor of his own sweat mingled with that of Childers and his wife. He could feel it running down his sides in small, embarrasing rivulets. His naked arms were slick with moisture and he could feel Rachel's warm wet shoulder pressing against his own -- nervous sidelong glances showed him that her white shift had darkened in patches where it stretched tightly across her breasts. Once he shifted uneasily and she turned and smiled, considerately, as though she were aware of his discomfort and were trying to reassure him that the flight would soon be over. His head did not feel too bad. With the lowering of the sun the temperature had dropped considerably and this made the general humidity easier to bear. A white arc of the river blazed suddenly before them in the newly victorious moonlight. The skiff dropped toward a cluster of bright IF lights along one shore. "That's it," Childers announced. Marnsworth breathed a cautious sigh of relief. A large clearing was spread out below them. From this height the surrounding forest glittered through the drizzle like a miniature fairyland. "Murray's wife loves decor," Rachel explained. "She just adores lighting the place up for these gettogethers." They landed near a group of similar machines at the edge of the clearing. Childers swung back the canopy and climbed out, motioning to Marnsworth to follow. The spaceman tensed, then dropped lightly to the ground. His body reacted predictably at the feel of wet grass underneath his bare feet but he did what he could to dispel the revulsion. He turned around and extended his hand automatically to Childers' wife. She accepted it, a glimmer of oldworld charm in her eyes, and climbed down from the skiff. Her hand was soft, moist and warm, like his own. "Thank you," she said. They looked at each other for a fragment of time and Marnsworth could see that, although she had not managed to completely suppress a mixture of distaste and amusement, she had thawed gradually toward him. He still sensed a remaining difference between them -- a region of acceptance beyond which she was not prepared to move. Perhaps it was the gulf that had always existed and was continually widening between landpeople and the space society Marnsworth was part of. "This way," Childers directed and led them across the lawn toward the gaily decorated patio. A number of people were already assembled. Marnsworth had the uneasy feeling that the group had been buzzing with conversation prior to their arrival and that a sudden silence had descended upon them when they had failed to recognize Childers' companion. Childers introduced him around. They were all dressed more or less alike, in the casual manner of the island. The men were mostly bare-chested and in shorts -- the women wore short, filmy dresses and sleeveless, bolero-type vests. Some were naked from the waist up, like their menfolk. But it was the colors of the clothes that surprised Marnsworth. These people seemed to prefer the loudness of primary colors the way some people wanted their music played always at a high, ear-crashing volume. In the dazzling illumination the vivid blues and reds and yellows seemed to possess a strange life of their own -- he had never before seen a group so gaily and dramatically dressed. Each individual was wrapped in his own bright haze, trapped by the sifting rain and the constantly changing lights. Marnsworth blinked constantly under the assault and moved sometimes like a man only half awake. to Murray Wiseman. The spacemen found him to be an anachronism of his age, a stout man. His belly protruded well over the top of his shorts and his navel was a monstrous exclamation. He had a great thick thatch of body hair that the rain had slicked down all over his chest but, with the exception of a few miserable gray tufts around his ears, he was quite bald. His pate shone wetly under the lights -- the film of moisture had made it a fine reflective surface. "So this is your visitor." He pumped Marnsworth's hand soundly. His eyes were alive and fierce and they made the spaceman want to turn away. "Damian Marnsworth," Childers introduced. "He's from the Service -- a captain. And my old boss. Got his ship laid up for a few days and popped out to see us. Damian, this is Murray Wiseman." "Well, enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself," Murray admonished. "We don't often have visitors from outside." He nodded to Rachel and then moved off to join his other guests. Marnsworth felt strange. His head began to swim and he reached out to take hold of a balustrade. He felt that he was drowning in an ocean of age. The faces of the guests moved around him like ragged leaves in a whirlpool -- he had never seen so many old people. On each and every one of them death seemed to have made a claim and worked an insidious pleasure. Rachel's fingers clamped around his arm where it clung to the balustrade. "Come over here." He allowed her to lead him away from the patio toward the darker area of the clearing. She found him a seat and told him to sit down. He smiled sheepishly. And he was glad that she was at least adequately dressed -- he had been shocked to see that some of the older women here had decided to wear only skirts or shorts. There were some things so repulsive about old age that one should avoid displaying them. Not that anybody here was much past forty. It was the ugly patina of aging in all their faces that he found disquieting. "Stay here," she suggested, "and take it easy. I'll get you something to drink." A few minutes later she reappeared with  small wooden tray loaded with dishes filled with fine food and two small mugs of red wine. "Here, try some of this." IF He sat up. "I don't know if I should." One had to be careful eating offship. "Gerard chose the food," she explained. "He said it shouldn't interfere with your delicate digestion." Her smile was mischievous. "And the wine will help. It's very gentle." He found that it was. His stomach did not complain, so he investigated some of the unfamiliar savories Childers had piled up on the tray. "Are you my guardian angel for the evening?" he asked. His breath had become a little labored and he wished he had brought along his suit, just in case. She laughed. "Well, somebody's got to keep an eye on you. How are you feeling?" He shrugged. "The climate, you know -- " "Yes, I understand. It must be difficult." He noticed drops of rain upon her long eyelashes -- they made her eyes seem brighter than before. She really was a very beautiful woman -- and one day that beauty would fade, would decay and all because the miraculous rejuvenants were beyond these people's grasp. Such neglect seemed criminal. Back home her beauty would last for a century or more. Here, on this worthless world, it would be doomed in a few short years. "Try one of these, Damian." He roused out of the creeping mental fog that was threatening to betray him and looked down at the bundle of dark red grapes in her hand. "They're delicious," she said. She had called him by his first name and for some reason that helped him to feel better. But his stomach protested the prospective invasion of the small fruits. "No -- thank you. Really, I couldn't eat another thing." "Not even one -- just to try? They really are tasty." Reflections of colored, flashing lights danced in her dark eyes. "All right," he groaned. "But just one." He picked one of the grapes awkwardly -- his limbs were becoming unresponsive; he really should have brought some antiintoxicants with him -- and placed it into his mouth. He closed his teeth around it cautiously and felt the juice spurt out and bite his tongue, the pulpy flesh collapse. Whatever flavor it possessed was pleasant enough but dulled by the amount of rich food and wine he had previously consumed. "I think," he began and swallowed, "I've had a little too much of -- everything." "No more wine?" "No. Too much of that, too." But it was more than that -- it was the warmth of all these happy bodies around him, the rising humidity and the weakening euphoria -- he felt drowsy. He wanted to sleep and in fact he must have slipped off then into a quiet, unfussed doze without really noticing how tired he was. He awoke later with a start and found himself alone. Rachel had disappeared and he was in darkness. Somebody had extinguished all but a few of the festive lights and the remaining ones were so distant that they shed no light upon him. He sat up at once, confused. His head gave a lurch that matched a similar movement in his stomach, and he dared not get up for fear of shaming himself. He looked closely around him. The guests had moved back from the patio and congregated in a silent semicircle between him and the house. The patio blazed suddenly with light and he realized that their attention was directed that way and not toward him. He relaxed. He heard a far-off roll of drums or some such percussive instrument. His ears pricked up. A number of people had moved out onto the black and white tiled mosaic of the patio. They were dressed differently from the others. The women wore long flowing white gowns and the men white pants suits, intricately embroidered. Their faces were hidden by what he considered to be some sort of ceremonial masks, and there was no sound now other than the swish-swish of the womens' skirts on the tiles. The drums had ceased. The people moved to what appeared to be predetermined positions on the patio. Others, clad more discreetly in somber capes and cowls, assumed their places in the background. Marnsworth saw that they carried with them a variety of instruments, although he could not recognize any of them from memory. The patio light dimmed and the masked figures in the foreground were picked out one at a time by individual spotlights. The guests crowded surreptitiously closer. A sudden hush descended upon the clearing. The dance, play or whatever it was, was about to begin. IV M arnsworth could not move -- his curiosity had transfixed him. He could not understand what was happening. But if his mind could make no sense out of what was going on he found his body reacting to a stimulus he could not identify. The performance seemed to be a subtle blend of mime and dance and drama juxtaposed, moving smoothly and intricately from one form to the other as the needs of the composer were answered. The music was predominantly percussive -- the delicate tremor of something like castanets, muted gongs, IF tabors and other instruments were quite alien to Marnsworth's ears but not to his body -- his cells remembered when his conscious mind did not. The general effect was hypnotic, not upon his mind so much as on his body. Although he recognized only a word here and there -- or a gesture or two -- he became alarmed at the way his pulse throbbed and his forehead ached. The moving figures on the mosaic dazzled and blinded him and yet he could not turn away for fear of missing something profound. He had no idea of how long the performance lasted -- time ceased to have any dominion for the duration of the play. But inevitably the dancersactors brought the dramadance to a close. They performed a rich and intricate coda and then moved quietly back to their original positions. A final murmur came from the hidden drums, muted and in rapport with the night, and then the spotlights dimmed. Silence and darkness rushed down upon the clearing. For perhaps a full minute nobody seemed to breathe. Then the players shed their masks and robes and moved back among the guests. The lights returned gradually and, even when they were fully on, were somewhat duller than before. Marnsworth found that he could not easily dispel the feelings that the play had conjured up within his unsuspecting body. His eyes searched for Rachel and found her the center of an admiring number of guests. Her eyes flashed triumphantly as they met his. She smiled and waved, turned to say something to her husband. Childers stepped toward him. His eyes were bright with happiness. "Well, did you like it? Rachel excelled herself tonight." And he knew then why he had followed the movements of one of the dancers with such intensity. "She's been working on that performance for months. Ages of rehearsals and tonight -- a triumph." "But I didn't understand a word of it," the spaceman protested. Childers smiled graciously. "You weren't supposed to. Latin is a rather dead language even at home -- but it has a certain beauty of its own, don't you agree? Of course the Service finds little enough use for it." He had not meant the words to cut so deep, but Marnsworth bled. "Do you delight in your obscurity?" "No. We try to be simple, to be close to life, to what is real. Why must the simple always seem complex to an outsider?" The guests collected in the main room of Murray's house at a great wooden table. When they had arranged themselves in a reverent group around this symbol -- with Mamsworth well to the rear the better to watch the ritual -- Murray Wiseman came in. In his arms were several dozen books, odd little printed volumes such as the spaceman had only seen previously in out-of-the-way museums. Murray deposited the books carefully on the table and stepped back. "Well, there's the latest batch," he announced. "Hot off the little old press. Now don't stand there all night -- step forward." And they did. Each in turn went forward and accepted, with thanks, one of the slim volumes. Childers' turn came around. He brought back a book and handled it with delight. "Some poems of Robert Graves," he explained. Mamsworth said nothing. Presently he made himself ask, "Does this little ritual round out every party?" He was unable to conceal his contempt for useless labor. "Whenever he's launching a new publication -- yes. It takes him about three months for him to research and transcribe a new tape, then set up the type and run off each page." "You mean he prints everything by hand?" "Of course." "The man's a fool." Childers said nothing, only smiled his enigmatic smile and fondled the small book in his hands. A solitary volume was left on the great wooden table. Murray leaned over, picked it up with a flourish. He held it briefly aloft. "And this one's mine." An undercurrent of laughter moved through the room and the guests began to disband. The major business of the evening was over and Mamsworth could detect the movements of people wondering whether or not it was late enough to go home -- or if there might be time for one more drink. the way back to Childers' house. The thirty-two-hour Hydrian day, coupled with overindulgence in native food and wine, had combined to intensify his exhaustion. But once they were home Rachel brewed some of the rich dark coffee he had come to associate with the island -- strange, but he could no longer think that it belonged to the Service -- and this helped to revive his sagging spirits. The two men sat apart in the main living room, sipping their warm drinks while Rachel plucked out haunting, timeless melodies on a strange stringed instrument in her lap. The instrument was broad and long and she had to sit crosslegged on the floor to play it. The fragmented music that leapt from her fingertips was unbearably ancient. The unfamiliar tonal idiom IF -- could it have been Asian? -- moved restlessly through Marnsworth's cluttered mind. They sat thus for some time, until the stark, uncompromising music stopped and Marnsworth saw that Childers' wife had fallen asleep over her instrument. Her head was resting against the side of the divan and her dark hair was undone and pooling around her shoulders. Childers apologized for the lateness of the affair and, with a gentleness Marnsworth envied, picked up his wife and cradled her in his arms. She did not stir. "I guess it's time we were all asleep," Childers said. He brushed his bushy cheek against Rachel's jet-black hair. "Take any room you like." He watched them move out through one of the doorless exits and when he walked through the house to find a place to sleep he found that a heavy weight had attached itself to his already overburdened heart. He discovered a small, sparsely furnished room with a bed in one corner. He sank down gratefully, conscious of the spartan nature of the upholstery, but too tired to care. He felt warm; he had no need for blankets. He waved his hands across the nearby wall until it passed over the eye that controlled the light; the room dimmed down to an agreeable twilight, and finally, over a period of perhaps several minutes, into darkness. His thoughts tumbled over and over in his muddled head, like playful kittens with sharp claws, and strange music echoed around the ghostly caverns of his soul. He thought of Rachel, and all the other women he had known, and found that sleep was elusive for a time; and when he did stumble eventually into that realm, he dreamed a nightmare... breathed and pulsed with life. He lay spreadeagled and naked across it, held there by some powerful and unseen force -- it was like being fastened to a medieval rack and being unable to see his tormenters. Overhead the stars wheeled crazily, burning whorls of light knitted together by shuttling steel shapes. He felt a little like Gulliver on visible threads to the soil beneath him. And he was afraid. His body ached. The ache corkscrewed into agony. The force that held him inert seemed also to be pulling him down, a little at a time -- down into the moist and suffocating surface of the world. He couldn't move and faces danced before him, vague and unsmiling and riddled with age. The world turned again and again and again and the rack tightened until it seemed that his body would fly apart. The angry soil rose up all around him and crept over his limbs -- it wanted to bury him. His skin began to slough away from his features and he knew that a ragged, ancient face stared up at the whirling universe, where fireflies of starlight buzzed and the little steel shapes knitted busily. He opened his mouth to cry out. And awoke. And found that he could not move. The lost echo of a scream reverberated around the narrow room. Hrs breathing was coarse and irregular. His body weighed a ton or more. The residue of a nightmare was reluctant to let go of him. For a moment he wondered if he were really awake. Why couldn't he move? There was a terrible ache in his head. His face seemed to be on fire. A hundred tiny needles were burrowing through his sinus cavities. He could hardly breathe, let alone cry out, and the terrifying stigmata of his dream still glared at him out of the darkness. His body felt dirty and uncomfortable from the burden of his sweat. Gradually his fear subsided. He managed to roll over onto his side down to the hard wooden floor. He felt drugged -- probably from too much native wine -- and his movements were sluggish. But somehow he groped his way awkwardly through the dark and back into the main room, where a soft night light still glowed. He found his suit and managed to crawl back into it. The effort seemed to take hours. His fingers scrabbled anxiously at his belt controls. Once they were functioning he leaned back against a chair and waited for some comfort to return. The tiny mechanisms whirred audibly in the unnatural silence, busily whisking impurities out of his air. He sat still for some time -- until he could breathe with some freedom -- and then made his way back to his room. He sank back onto the bed exhausted. His suit soothed and protected him and made him comfortable and he was soon fast asleep. His head stoppedthrobbing and the ache in his sinuses eased a little. But his dreams were vague and uncertain, although they lacked the virulence of the earlier nightmare. His body was cool and comfortable but inside he felt foul. Too much incautious wining and dining had had their way -- he really should have been more careful. His mouth was dry and felt like the bottom of abird cage. He had to get a drink somewhere and something to get rid of the hangover. There was nobody about when he walked into the main room. He IF opened the front door and strode to where his skiff was pafked. He opened the locker and fumbled for some tablets that would alleviate the worst effects of the wine. He could not swallow them dry, so he wandered around the grounds until he found a small natural fountain around one side of the house. He cupped one hand under a faucet and washed down the pills with several ounces of fresh water. The liquid stung his throat, it was so cold. But the flavor was not unpleasant and in a few moments he felt the veil of fog begin to lift from his mind. Yet there was a stain that refused to shift and made him feel a stranger to himself. Too much wine, jar too much. I must be more careful. That was a damned foolish thing to do... He switched on his sensors and listened to the quiet. The morning was calm. Only the distant patient passage of the river moving over some rocks was audible. He extended a hand and saw a drifting film of fine rain collect upon it. Strange, he had not noticed it was raining until now. How had he come to accept something so unfamiliar? Behind some nearby trees he spied a small stream running down toward the river. Farther on he could see where it formed a wide, shaded pool before going again about its business. Some fresh sounds came from this direction. They could have been human voices. Marnsworth ambled over in that direction to see who it was. The pool was wide, deep and dark where the wan sunlight had not yet penetrated. Somebody was splashing happily in the chill waters. He saw an upraised arm settle back into the pool and draw the swimmer towards him. Childers' wife -- enjoying her own remedy for hangovers, he surmised. But the spaceman shivered at the thought of that icy pool and was not tempted. He took a step forward to call out and then froze, his hands stiff at his sides. A sudden enchantment had settled over the pool. It seemed to sweep up from the past -- from his past -- from the unquarried limbo of his youth to a time when he, too, had swum without questions in waters no different from these. Long ago -- on a world called Earth, when there had been time for such pleasures and space to accommodate them. His ears filled with the tingle of forgotten sounds and sights. Rachel stood up and waded ashore. She stood with her feet braced wide apart and raised both her hands to her neck and crushed the cold pool from out of her long dark hair. It raced down the arch of her spine and splashed around her ankles. Her brown body was beautiful in the soft morning sunlight and Marnsworth felt a sudden and intense surge of sexual desire -- so powerful that it caught him unprepared and made him shake so much that he had to lean against a nearby tree for support. She had closed her eyes while she swept the water from her hair. Now she opened them and looked across at him, as though seeing him for the first time. And for the space of that drawn-out moment Marnsworth felt that all his life, all of his living, all that he had ever been and ever hoped to be, was stretched out between them like a finely strung wire. The silence was tangible. And then she smiled, and flicked her hair with her hands, and stepped forward to pick up a towel. The violent need that had momentarily gripped Marnsworth quivered and then dissipated itself throughout his body. He opened his mouth but found that he could not speak. His heart hammered and pushed his blood at such a pace that it seemed to scour his lungs. He could not move or speak, for her smile had transfixed him. It had been an expression so complete in its friendship that he wondered how he could ever speak to her again. In a moment she had seen the clumsy betrayal of his face, had divined in that small space of time the nature of his desire and, with her smile, seemed to have suggested that, had the moment been otherwise, they might have lain together and she would have taken from him that terrible surge of passion. She had understood. She moved about, drying herself, the swing of her broad hips casual and unself-conscious. "Good morning, Damian," she said, brightly. "Sleep well?" He could not answer. Instead he looked away and stared into the deepest part of the pool, as if the shadows of the overhanging trees could hide his shame. the other side of the pool. Childers' body broke the water. He swam across with slow, powerful strokes and jumped lightly ashore. He grabbed for his own towel and attacked his streaming wet body vigorously. "Hope you slept well, Damian." "After -- a fashion," the spaceman managed. He gestured awkwardly at his survival suit. "I had to -- you see." They understood. Rachel brushed idly at her wet hair with her towel. It was suddenly a vivid blaze of orange, the color of the shift he had first seen her in. Childers gave her a playful pat on the belly. "How is he this morning?" She smiled mysteriously. "Rachel's having a child, you know," Childers explained. "Another five months and -- " But Marnsworth wasn't listening -- he had recoiled in horror, his eyes fastened on the woman's IF abdomen. Of course she was statuesque but he could see right away that the slight bulge at her waist was not right. He looked like a man who had been physically struck. He stumbled a few steps backward. "You mean -- you mean she's going to have it herself?" A cloud passed over his friend's face. Childers put his arm around his wife. "Does that sound so strange? That my wife will have a child, from her own womb, and in her own time? That's the way she wants it, Damian -- and that is the way I will be proud to accept my son -- or daughter, as the case may be. You see, we won't really know until the child is bom. Isn't that marvelous? For us there can't be any other way." Marnsworth stared at them. Except for the profound and confident glow of intelligence in their eyes they looked like two naked savages. There was no longer any point in maintaining a facade of communication. Last night should have been a warning. This whole trip had been a mistake. Without another word he spun around and marched blindly back toward his skiff. He did not know that his eyes were filled with tears -- for him tears were an unaccustomed occurence. He no longer noticed the rain and he did not hear Childers' wife calling out to him. He moved in the grip of a mindless fury. There could be nothing beyond the final proof of this insanity -- it was monstrous that Childers should allow his wife to risk her life giving birth to a child in such an un-Controlled and dangerous manner. He climbed clumsily into the skiff and swung shut the canopy. But he hesitated before the controls -- they had become a hazy blur to him -- and that was time enough for Childers to catch up with him. Rachel ran behind her husband, the orange towel trailing like a forlorn sail. Marnsworth shook his head but the haze would not clear. Angrily he flicked a toggle. The motor hummed into life. Beyond the canopy he could see Childers' face upturned and could read the despair that was etched there. "Damian," he called out. "Damian -- think of us. Think of why you came here if you never have before. We need somebody to understand -- somebody to bridge the gap -- " And then they were gone. The skiff accelerated sharply skyward. It hovered for a moment, rechecking coordinates, and then shot away at a steep angle, allowing Marnsworth a last glimpse of the people below. They, both seemed so small, locked together in their madness. Rachel's towel made a dark orange stain on the grass. The image burned itself deep into his memory and he knew that he would never be able to erase it from his mind. Damn you! Damn you... T HE skiff moved rapidly away from the estate, burrowing anxiously through the dense rain clouds at maximum acceleration. But as fast as it moved it was pursued by something faster -- a nameless invisible terror that seemed to possess the shape of a great bird of prey, vengeful and demented. It spread wide its dreadful claws and fastened them into his skull and began to tear away at his gibbering mind. Darkness engulfed him, a darkness where his voice became a whimpering pale thing that could not be heard. The auto-pilot carried him safely back to the Barain, where kind hands lifted his weeping, twitching body from the small craft and carried him to a private room on board the massive starship. And there he was confined with his sickness while they fired the engines for the short passage home. And still his terror possessed him. A stranger walked the wailing corridors of his mind -- someone alien and yet himself, struggling to break free. Sometimes he awoke from his tormented dreams and struck his fists against the bulkhead until they bled, or until others arrived and strapped him back into his bed. They could not understand that he had only screamed defiance at the hostile universe outside that was crowding to get in. And he dreamed of rivers and trees and sunlight and the pallid women of Earth with their mouths agape for orgasm -- but their minds were divorced in time from the simple pleasure of their bodies. They were old and yet they were young and he hated them for it and the angry beast inside him struggled to get out and smash their smiling faces. He dreamed of flesh and steel, darkness and light and his small room fogged up like the world he remembered as Island One. The same moist air draped itself around him. It was like living again in the warm wet womb he had never known. He was a child of a silver cylinder -- but his cells remembered. And Rachel's face would sometimes come smiling through the corruption and the terror and he would recall her nature and all the other things about the island and the memory would often make him smile in his sleep. Almost he began to understand. But it was only when his body took over the unequal task and remembered what it was that he had to remember, to survive, that he began to hope. But that came later. When the physicians on Earth had finished with him. After they had nursed him and nurtured him IF and purged the poisons from his To wander lonely and afraid system. After they had slain the through the crowded streets, pushgreat ugly bird and removed its ing his way through the bland untalons from his soul and then, consmiling multitudes of the forever vinced that they had done all that young, looking for the miracle of they could to help him, released an old and tired face, him. And for himself.  What happens when you swap love partners -- and win a hot curvy bundle of hate? change to drop into the baby-sitter. Sam Burse patted the chrome front of the robot and backed away from the front door. "I'll get my charge tag," he said. "Come on in anyway." "You can pay us when you get home," said the box-shaped, man-size robot. "You're one of our good customers, Mr. Samuels. You needn't pay in advance. We trust you." "You've got my name turned around." Sam crossed the livingroom pit and took his coat from a sofa chair. It's Samuel Burse." The robot said, "We've been doing that lately." He rolled over the threshold and followed Sam across the carpeting. "Your kids are named Danny and Nancy, though, aren't they?" "That's right." "We're not completely absentminded then," said the robot. He collided with a near-marble coffee table and a vase of straw flowers fell off. "Oops." A small arm extended out of the shiny box and scooped up the fallen flowers. Sam said, "The kids are already in their sleeping room, watching the wall. You can go look in on them and introduce yourself." The robot arranged the flowers carefully, then rolled to one of the framed oblong view-windows. "That's really lovely. I always enjoy sitting jobs here in Build Up Six, because of the Pacific Ocean. I'm programed to have esthetic responses. It's a big help in handling kids." Sam put on his coat and felt in its pouches. "This was all the ocean under here before they filled it in back in, back in nineteen eighty-nine." The robot rolled again toward the coffee table. "We notice you have a bowl of carrots here next to your flowers. Is that something new in the way of decor?" "No, it's my work." Sam found the charge tag and tossed it to the robot. "We'll be quite late. So charge us the maximum now." The polished robot put the dogtag into a slot in his left side. "Fifteen, even. Right you are." He returned the charge tag. "You're in the produce business?" "No, I'm with a company called Conglomerated Food West and I'm in charge of new names." Sam was not particularly satisof looking, maybe after the first of the year, for something new. "Isn't carrots a good enough name any more?" "People don't seem to like to buy just carrots all the time," said Sam. "Even though carrots, being a real vegetable, are a prestige item. So we have to come up with new ways to package them, to serve them. Each new use calls for a new name." The robot asked, "What was it you wanted us to do?" "Look in on the kids and introduce yourself." "Oh, yes, I remember now." The baby-sitter was at the doorway when Sam's tall pretty wife came in. "Good evening, Mrs. Anita." After the robot had rolled down the ramp into the children's room area, Anita said, "We ought to think, Sam, about dealing with a new company. These people have sent us too many forgetful machines lately." "We could stay home tonight," He'd wanted to suggest that, earlier, while Anita had been dialing dinner. She touched absently at her long dark hair, frowning. "Not on our swap night. No." She walked nearer to him. "You're not enjoying this much any more, are you?" Sam hesitated. This didn't seem like the best time, with a strange machine in the house, to get into a discussion. "No, it's okay. You like it. It's fun." "After a long week with all your dumb vegetables you should welcome Friday," she told him. "Yes, thank God it's Friday." He turned to watch the same stretch of dark ocean the robot had admired. "Well," said his wife, "I still enjoy our swap nights. I might even say I look forward to them. But if you don't -- " "Nobody's complaining," said Sam. "We'll go ahead." "Grudgingly," she said. "Oh, darn, Sam, I finally thought we found a shared activity we both enjoyed. Now, after three or four months of it you're gloomy." Sam faced his slim, pretty wife and smiled. "I'm not gloomy." "You're smiling grudgingly." From the children's bedroom double laughter came. "They both like him" said Sam. "They're sympathetic toward incompetence," said Anita. "Probably inherited." Sam nodded and said, "Let's goIn the children's area the robot was calling the children by the wrong names and their laughter continued. T HE swap unit was housed at the Taplins' place. Their house was also on Build Up Six, five blocks from the Burses'. You could drive there without bothering to hook onto the speedways. Sam drove because Anita only IF had a slot license. This sector of Greater Los Angeles was so secure and well patrolled you could even walk on the sidewalks if you cared to. Don Tapplin was seated in front of the swap unit when they got there. He was a small, roundshouldered thirty-two-year-old and he was reading a paper tape that was unreeling out of Spinner # #-#. "Hi, Sam. Hi, Anita," Don said over his shoulder. "That's interesting." Maggie Taplin was sitting in a vaguely yogi position on the thermal rug, her slim back touching the view window. "What is?" "It says there are now two hundred participants in our swap group." He tore the tape free of the machine and waved it in the air as though drying it. "Meaning a hundred couples. So what are the possibilities, Sam?" Sam answered, "Considerable, I'd say." "Sam saves his brain for thinking about vegetables," said Anita. She went and stood near the machine. "He's got no time for mathematics." Don Taplin handed her the strip of paper. He put his palms on the top of Spinner # #-#. "Well, whatever the exact number of different combinations is, it sounds like more fun. I've gotten the same Chinese girl over in Build Up Nine twice in the last month." "Always belittling," said the swap unit. It had a round, mouth-sized speaker grid on its top. Next to the bank of dials. Don flung up his hands. "I didn't know it could talk." "What do you think the speaker grid is for?" asked his wife. "Does he talk to you?" asked Don. "Oh, sure," said Maggie. "When you're at the office he recites love poems to me." Spinner # #-# said, "Once in a while I like to speak up. Hello, everybody." "What kind of love poems?" "Your wife is spoofing you, Don," said the swap unit. "What do you recite if it isn't love poetry?" "Nothing, Don," said Maggie. "Nothing." "I joined this swap group because we get programed promiscuity," said Don. "Fun and in the open. Nothing secretive. Now I find you've been having some kind of strange relationship with this machine." "Is everybody in our unit present now?" asked the machine. "Yes," said Maggie, rishing. "The Verbecks are sick tonight. Flu." "I think I have a touch of that myself," said the machine. "Say, Mr. Burse, would you feel down behind me and see if I'm all flush around my synchronizing device." "Wait," said Sam. "Are you on the blink or what? Don,  where's the manual for this thing?" "Look, it's almost time to start tne spin," said Don. "If we get off schedule we might lose our turn. I'm anxious to see what some of the new recruits are like." "I'm fit as a fiddle," said the spinner. "Now each of you must drop a name card into my left side, being sure to include absent cards for the Verbecks. Then follow with the standard release card, which absolves the Greater Los Angeles Mate-Swapping Coop System of any liability or responsibility in case of mismatching, physical injury or -- heaven forbid it should happen in this day and age -- infectious disease." "We ought to check the repair manual," said Sam. He considered suggesting they call off tonight's session, decided not to mention it. Anita stepped around him, took the proper cards from the grill basket on the table next to the swap unit. She inserted them in the machine. "There." Don went next, then Maggie. And, last, Sam. A small green plastic cone on top of the machine flared with light and the machine gave a ratcheting sound. "Round and roun she goes and where she stops nobody knows." "I liked things better when he didn't talk," said Anita. In succession, clockwise, the dials began to spin. A plume of sooty smoke rose from some place within Spinner # #-#. "We ought to call the damn Sam. "Relax," said his wife. "Bingo," said the machine. A white card sprang from a big square hole in its front. "Mrs. Anita Burse, there's your swap mate for tonight. You're to wait back at your home until he arrives." Anita caught the card off the rug. "What an interesting name." "Who?" asked Sam. Anita put the card face down on her palm. "Remember the rules. We don't talk about it until afterward." A card for Don came out next. He looked at it, then made a fist around the card. "I should have taken out the manual." "The Chinese girl again?" said Maggie. "Actually he's very fond of her. I suspect he's probably tried to tamper with the machine so he can get her every time." IF "I haven't. There'd be no sense participating in this swap group if we didn't all play fair. That's the real fun of a wide-scale system like this. We have access to two hundred carefully screened people from all of the better sectors of Greater Los Angeles. Much more fun than the simple old-fashioned neighborhood mate-swapping. Some primitive thing where you all throw keys in a ring. This is technological." Maggie had her card by this time. "I'm to stay home tonight, too." "Well, folks, bon voyage," said Spinner # #-#. "What about Sam?" asked his wife. "Who?" "Sam. Him." She tapped her husband with the hand that didn't hold the card. "Oh, yes. Oh, yes." The swap unit made a grunting sound and its ratcheting grew harsher. "There, it's coming along now. There." A large pale blue punch card snapped into the air, spun like a paddle wheel down to the rug. "Also this for you." A spinning slip of lined yellow paper followed. Sam took up the two pieces of paper. "What's this all? I'm supposed to get a card with a name, address and instructions." "You can't beat us for infinite variety," said the machine. "We don't like to cloy the appetities we feed." The yellow slip had # scrawled on it in pencil. The card was a preprogram for a speedway cab. "What? I give this speedway route to a cab and go to this address to meet my swap for tonight?" "Must be," said Don. "That sounds like real fun. Want to trade with me, Sam?" "Against the rules," put in the machine. "I'd have to report anything like that." "Let's," said Anita, "get on with this. Come on, Sam. Drop me at the house and then drive yourself to a cab station." "Maybe we ought -- " Sam began, then shook his head. "Okay." "Have fun," called Don as they left. T HE automatic cab detached itself from the speedway and headed down an off-ramp, its electric motor clicking on. Sam narrowed his eyes, his face close to the window. "Where exactly are we?" "Right where your trip slip ordered," replied the car. It rolled onto a pot-holed street and stopped next to a canal. "Venice, California. This is your stop." "The Venice sector?" Sam had his hand on the door release. It didn't seem likely anyone in this part of Greater Los Angeles would belong to this swap plan. "That'll be five dollars." "Charge it to my cab card. The number is ####. Except -- " "You must disembark now," the cab told him. "I'm logged to pick up a fare down in Manhattan Beach." "Maybe you ought to just take me back." The swap group prospectus had said nothing about drawing on the ghetto sectors. "I'd like to but it's not up to me, sir. I'm already slotted for Manhattan Beach. You'll have to get out of the cab now or I'm obliged to eject you." "No need," said Sam. "I'll go scout another cab." The cab said, "Nice meeting you -- " and drove off quietly. Sam glanced at the slip of paper in his hand, then looked down the street. He saw low houses, old and faced with peachcolored stucco. Beyond them was a scatter of dusky brick warehouses. Sam walked toward a street lamp at the far corner. Mist was thickening around him, fuzzy and cold. There was a # on this block, a stucco and red tile cottage with wooden shutters and lighted windows glowing warm. He hesitated, stopped on the cracked flagstones and wild grass fronting the place. Well, since he was here, he'd try it. He went up to the door and knocked below the gilt #. "God bless you, whoever you are," said the bent black man who opened the door. "Whatever brings you to my door on this dismal night, I expect the good lord had a hand in it." "I -- " said Sam. "Well, I don't suppose you've heard of the Greater Los Angeles MateSwapping Co-op System?" The man sent two fingers up toward his eyes, which were masked by wrap-around green glass. "Oh, yes, I've heard of them, sir." "You're not -- that is, nobody in this area is participating?" The black man laughed. "Nobody lives in this old house but me,sir. Only me. Blind Frank Holes. No, it's not likely anyone around here would belong to something as fancy as the Greater Los Angeles Mate-Swapping Coop System." He made a groping reach for Sam's hand. "I tell you, though, I bet I know what happened. Listen, I've got to trot over to my place of business. You give me a helping hand and I'll give you the benefit of what I think." "Well, okay." "Just excuse me a second. I've got to turn off a few things in my old house." In less than three minutes Blind Frank stepped out on IF his narrow cement porch, closed his door. He took a good grip on Sam's arm. "We only got to get down to one-o-one at the corner, sir." "Sure," said Sam. "So what's your theory?" "Well, sir, I've heard this swap outfit of yours uses second-hand, second-rate equipment. I hear those routing machines make lots of mistakes but the company hushes all that up." "Sounds doubtful." "Still, you're here and not someplace else." They were at the door to a warehouse. "Would you help out and put my key in the padlock, sir? This fog makes my poor fingers stiff. Of course, the good Lord, he's got his reasons for making me blind and crippled." Sam got the metal door open and gave it an inward shove. "I'll go get to a cab stand now. Good night." Blind Frank kept a hand on Sam. "Would you guide me to my workbench? Oh, you better turn on the lights for yourself. I don't need them but you will. Switch right inside on your left, sir." Sam stepped inside and found the switch. Six overhead light strips, pale yellow and coated with dust flared on. The domed, cold room was full, cluttered and jammed with old robots, androids, servomechanisms, automatic chefs, soft-drink dispensers. "I'm in the electronics business," explained Blind Frank. Even though the good Lord took away my sight and bitched up my hands, I still do repairs." Sam said, "That your workbench under the windows?" "Yes, right next to the electric evangelist." "Is that a street-corner preaching unit?" "Yes, sir," said Blind Frank. "I bought him in an auction after a food riot in the Glendale sector. Somebody swiped his right arm. Ripped it clean off. So they decided the figure wasn't worth much without his blessing arm. Me, I figured I can fix him up with parts of a taco chef I got last month down in Tijuana. Govenment was controlling some students and they messed up a whole block of ethnic restaurants." "In times like these," said the blond humanoid evangelist, "in times like these we hear a good deal of talk about loss of faith. Now I'm here to say we all better have faith because there's judgment coming. Judgment and hellsmoke, not to mention earthquakes, mudslides and the usual brush fires. Everybody who wants to get salva I tion, raise your right hand. Just like me." "That's why he's going to need a new arm," said Blind Frank. The robot evangelist was waving the empty sleeve of a smudged white suit. "Best arm I can give him," said Blind Frank, "has got a spatula built into it." Sam said, "I'll be leaving." A new voice broke in. "You got one for us? Is that why -- you know -- you called?" A young girl was leaning in the open doorway. She was twentytwo, small and frail, wearing a man's one-piece suit. "I think maybe yes." Blind Frank snapped off his glasses and picked up a heavy wrench from the workbench. Sam said, "Wait, now." The girl adjusted her floppy hat and came into the warehouse, closing the door gently. She had small sharp breasts and almost white blond hair. "He looks, you know, usable." "He surely does," said Blind Frank. Sam watched the frail girl approach. "You're signed up with the Greater Los Angeles Mate -- " "Curtain time is less than an hour away," she cut in. "Lonn's, you know, growing really anxious. We're sold out. If you hadn't called I would have had to use the street corners again." She focused on Sam. "Down here, mister, everything's a swap. But we don't always swap mates for mates." "I'm going to leave now," Sam told them. "Whatever it is you're up to, forget it. v "This here is Miss Mary Glidden," explained Blind Frank. "She's in partnership with Lonn DeSoto. You surely have heard of him." Sam frowned as the girl reached out and touched him. "The name, yes," Sam said. "I've Jieard it but I'm not certain -- " "Those fires of hell," said the robot preacher, "are going to burn through all eternity, friends. You know what eternity is? It's a long time -- " "The police," said Sam, remembering, "are looking for Lonn DeSoto. He's the guy who puts on plays where people are supposed to get killed." "Yes, Lonn is, you know, the founder and director of the Theater of Murder," said Mary Glidden. She rubbed slender fingers under Sam's chin. "And you are going to be, you know, tonight's star." Blind Frank swung out suddenly with the wrench and knocked Sam to the floor. "... are quite meaningless. The whole Western tradition of theater has now and for all time deadended," the girl's voice was telling Sam. "Words, as either symbols or modes of communication, are passe'. You must live for action, mister, or you wouldn't be here. All that fits these, you know, brutal times we live in is a brutal theater. We've been working toward a more physical form of drama for IF a decade now and Lonn, the messiah of completely realized brutal theater, has had the courage to explore the extremes. The, you know, ultimate performance. I'm happy to be a part of his Theater of Murder." She had a pistol in her slender hand and she jabbed it at his stomach. "So now do you understand your part?" Sam said, "I'm sorry. I must have been unconscious." The pistol barrel dug into him again. "Well, pay attention, won't you? You have no -- you know -- feel for show business. Lonn says we've got a hundred people down there in the audience tonight. There's even a vidtape talent scout." Sam breathed in air through his mouth. He widened his eyes and tried to see clearly again. Yellow rings danced in the thick air of the little dressing room he was in. He blinked and the rings faded. There were clothes racks against two of the walls. Sam noticed a small window. "You really mean to kill me?" "I'm not famous for, you know, kidding around," said Mary Glidden. Sam found he was in his under- wear. "My clothes -- " "You must really be dizzier than you look." She scratched at her sharp left breast with the barrel of the hand gun. "I already explained you are to play Indian -- Lonn's getting into his Kit Carson costume. Hurry up and, you know, get your costume on." Sam noticed a feathered headress and a blanket at his feet. He and Mary Glidden were alone in the tiny room. She said, "Curtain going up in ten minutes." Sam picked up the feathers and the blanket. "This makes you some kind of accessory." "We're beyond -- you know -- silly considerations like that by now." Sam lunged with the blanket and dropped it over the girl. The pistol fired through it but missed him. He swung a hard fist at where he guess Mary's chin was. She sighed and sank down. His clothes were sprawled in a wing chair. He grabbed most of them and went to the window. He tugged it open and hopped to the ledge. He hesitated, then jumped. T HE phone screen in the battered booth throbbed green and a throaty voice with a faint Irish accent said, "That number is not at the moment in service." Sam said, "Okay, okay." He clicked off and stayed in the booth. He had tried to call his wife, Anita. He wanted to reach her. She was probably okay but he worried. Even if she turned out to be all right, this business had to stop. Something could go wrong again -- anything -- and hurt Anita. He would have to talk to her, even IF if it meant an argument. Sighing, he dialed the police and waited. A high keening grew outside, a red whooping. Sam looked out. A mobile police station, two white glass balls on its front cab, was coming up the street. Sam stepped out. "Hands up," ordered a voice from the side of the long green trailer. "Don't move and don't say anything incriminating." Sam eased closer to the mobile station. "Officer -- " "Hands up." Sam put up his hands. "I was going to report something to the police -- " A door in the green trailer slid open and a tall man leaned out. "Step inside," he said. "I'm Sergeant Plumb, Venice Division, Greater Los Angeles Police." "I'm Sam Burse. Samuel L. Burse, from Build Up Six." He climbed up a three-rung iron ladder and into a gray metal room. Sergeant Plumb got behind a synthetic wood desk and pulled an audiotypewriter in front of him. "Let's have your statement. First -- why are you lurking around in such an unkempt manner and without any shoes?" Mate Swapping Co-op System," said Sam. "Our local spinner is sort of on the fritz. It sent me to the wrong place." "Yeah, we get reports on slipip imot ip froi A ti Lenvrii This month, the Berkley Travel Service offers a variety of trips (all good), from that venerable fantastic voyage in itraising trek through Old Lemuria with the mighty-thewed Valkarthian in if you fancy it, a swing through the Return flights not guaranteed. Lin Carter (X#, # Keith Laumer (X#, # (X#, # (X#, # Next month: Heinlein, Hubbard, Harrison! If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have complete freedom of choice in pricing these books for resale to others. ups like that from time to time. Is that going to be your story?" "Yes, part of it. I ran into a fellow named Blind Frank Holes and he turned me over to Lonn DeSoto, who was going to kill me." Plumb activated his typewriter. "You're an associate of Lonn DeSoto, are you?" "No, more a victim. He was going to kill me as part of his show. I can show you where they planned to put on one of their murder plays." "What I'd like is a statement on why you're running around in the shape you're'in." "Aren't you interested in Lonn DeSoto? He's murdering people." "Around here we pick up lots of people who claim they can give us tips," said the sergeant. In a dark corner of the room an old man in a black suit rattled to his feet, yawned. "Has he confessed yet, sarge?" "No, Judge Littony." The judge stepped into the light. "What does RI say about his fingerprints, sarge?" Sergeant Plumb grabbed Sam's hand, shoved it into a slot in the desk. A red light flashed next to the slot and a gray card popped out. Plumb looked at it. "This really is Burse, Samuel L. of Build Up Six. No criminal record. B-plus credit rating. Want us to hold him?" Judge Littony shook his head. "With a credit rating like his? Get a statement from him and let him off at the next cab stand." The judge returned to the shadows. S AM's house was quiet. The living room area was faintly lit. Sam ran from the cab to his front door, opened it. Three steps inside he stopped. Anita, in a pale blue night robe, was sitting on a near-leather chair. A cup of still steaming cocoa rested on her bare knee. "I decided to wait up," she said. "Nearly dawn, isn't it?" Sam came further into his house. "Must be," he said. "How are you?" She smiled. "Fine," she said. "He left a couple of hours ago. A pleasant man, though a bit plump, from the Beverly Glen sector. I enjoyed myself." Sam watched her, then wandered to the view window. The sky was paling to gray over the quiet ocean. He thought again of what he had planned to say. "That's good," he said finally. A single gull seemed asleep at the water's edge. "What about you?" asked Anita. The gull arose and went walking away, skirting the sea. Sam kept watching it. "Oh, I can't complain," he said.  IF sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only. Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator, John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy. I remember his words. After all , we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of the song and cackle of all birds and pseudo-ornins. Well, let us add the Shelni to our list.  do not believe that their thumping on tree roots or blowing into jug gourds is music. I do not believe that their singsong is speech any more than the squeaking of doors is speech. We have recorded, by the way, the sound of more than thirty thousand squeaking doors. And we have had worse. Let us have the Shelni, then, if your hearts are set on it. You'll have to hurry. They're about gone. And let me say in all compassion that anyone who looks like Miss Holly Harkel deserves her heart's desire. That is no more than simple justice. Besides, the bill will be footed by the Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company. These companies are bitten by the small flea of remorse every now and then and they want to pitch a few coins into some fund for luck. It's never many coins that they want to pitch -- the remorse bug that bites them is not a very large one. You may be able to stretch it to cover your project though, Vanhoosier... So we had our appropriation and our travel. Miss Holly and myself. Holly Harkel had often been in disrepute for her claims to understand the languages of various creatures. There was special outrage to her claim that she would be able to understand the Shelni. Now that was odd. No disrepute attached to Captain Charbonnett for his claim to understand the planetary simians, and if there was ever a phony claim it was this. No disrepute attached to Meyrowitz for his claim of finding esoteric meanings in the patterns of vole droppings. But there seemed something incredible in the claim of the goblin-faced Holly Harkel that not only would she be able to understand the Shelni instantly and completely but that they were not low scavenger beasts at all, that they were genuine goblin people who played goblin music and sang goblin songs. IF Holly Harkel had a heart and soul too big for her dwarfish body and a brain too big for her curious little head. That, I suppose, is what made her so lumpy everywhere. She was entirely compounded of love and concern and laughter and much of it bulged out from her narrow form. Her ugliness was one of the unusual things and I believe that she enjoyed giving it to the worlds. She had loved snakes and toads, she had loved monkeys and misbegottens. She had come to look weirdly like them when we studied them. She was a snake when we studied them; she was a toad when they were our subject. She studied every creature from the inside of it. And here there was an uncommon similarity, even for her. Holly loved the Shelni instantly. She became a Shelni and she hadn't far to go. She moved and scooted and climbed like a Shelni. She came down trees head first like a Shelni or a squirrel. She had always seemed to me to be a little other than human. And now she was avid to record the Shelni things " -- before they be gone." some scientists have called them humanoid and then braced themselves for the blow and the howl. If they were humanoid they were certainly the lowest and oddest humanoids ever. But we folklorists knew intuitively what they were. They were goblins pure and simple -- I do not use the adjectives here as cliches. The tallest of them were less than three feet tall; the oldest were less than seven years old. They were, perhaps, the ugliest creatures in the universe -- and yet of a pleasant ugliness. There was no evil in them at all. Scientists who have tested them have insisted that there was no intelligence in them either. They were friendly and open. Too friendly, too open, as it happened, for they were fascinated by all human things and to their harm. But they were no more human than a fairy or an ogre is human. Less, less, less than a monkey. "Here is a den of them," Holly divined that first day (it was the day before yesterday). "There will be a whole coven of them down under here and the door is down through the roots of this tree. When I got my doctorate in primitive music I never imagined that I would be visiting brownies down under tree roots. I should say that I never so much as hoped that I would be. There was so much that they didn't teach us. There was even one period in my life when I ceased to believe in goblins." The latter I do not believe. Suddenly Holly was into a hole in the ground head first, like a gopher, like a ground squirrel, like a Shelni. I followed her, letting myself down carefully and not head first. I myself would have to study the Shelni from the outside. I myself would never be able to crawl inside their green goblin skins, never be able to croak or carol with their frog tongues, never feel what made their popeyes pop. I myself would not even have been able to sense out their dens. And at the bottom of the hole, at the entrance of the den itself, was an encounter which I disbelieved at the time I was seeing and hearing it. There occurred a conversation which I heard with my own ears, they having become transcendent for the moment. It was in the frog-croak Shelni talk between Holly Harkel and the five-year-old Ancient who guarded the coven, and yet it was in a sort of English and I understood it. "Knockle, knockle." (This from Holly.) "Crows in cockle." (This from the guard.) "Wogs and wollie. "Who you?" "Holly." "What's a dinning?" "Coming inning." So they let us in. But if you think you can enter a Shelni coven without first riming with the fiveyear-old Ancient who guards it, then it's plain that you've never been in one of the places. And though the philologists say that the speech of the Shelni is meaningless croaking, yet it was never meaningless to Holly and in flashes it was not meaningless to me. The secret guess of Holly was so. Holly had insisted that the Shelni spoke English within the limits of their vocal apparatus. And they told her at this very first session that they never had had any language of their own "because no one had ever made one for us -- " so they used English as soon as they came to hear it. "We would pay you for the use of it if we had anything to pay you with," they said. It is frog-croak English but only the pure of ear can understand it. I started the recorder and Holly started the Shelni. Quite soon she had them playing on those jugshaped flutes of theirs. Frog music. Ineffably sad sionnach skirries. Rook, crow, and daw squabbling melody. They were pleasant, weird little pieces of music that sounded as thpugh they were played under water. It would be hard to imagine them not played under the ground at least. The tunes were short, as all tunes of children are short. There was no real orchestration, though that should have been possible with the seven flutes differently jugged and tuned. Yet there was true melody in these: short, complete, closed melody, dwarfed perfection. They were underground fugues full of worms' blood and cool as root cider. They were locust and chaffer and cricket din. Then Holly got one of the most ancient of the Shelni to tell stories while the jug-flutes chortled. Here IF are the two of them that we recorded that first day. Others who listen to them today say that there is nothing to them but croaking. But I heard them with Holly Harkel, she helped interpret them to me, so I can hear and understand them perfectly in frog-croak English.  Take them. Grisly Posterity! I am not sure that you deserve even this much of the Shelni. It is told this way. There was a Shelni who lost his burial tooth before he died. Every Shelni begins life with six teeth, and he loses one every year. Then, when he is very old and has only one tooth left, he dies. He must give the last tooth to the Skokie burial-person to pay for his burial. But this Shelni had either lost two teeth in one year or else he had lived to too great an age. He died. And he had no tooth left to pay with. "I will not bury you if you have no tooth left to pay me with," said the Skokie burial person. "Should I work for nothing?" "Then I will bury myself," said the dead Shelni. "You don't know how," said the Skokie burial-person. "You don't know the places that are left. You will find that all the places are full. I have an agreement that everybody should tell everybody all the places are full, so only the burial-person may bury. That is my job." Nevertheless, the dead Shelni went to find a place to bury himself. He dug a little hole in the meadow but wherever he dug he found that it was already full of dead Shelnis or Skokies or frogs. And they always made him put all the dirt back that he had dug. He dug holes in the valley and it was the same thing. He dug holes on the hill, and they told him that the hill was full, too. So he went away crying, for he could find no place to lie down. He asked the Eanlaith whether he could stay in their tree. And they said no, he could not. They would not let any dead folks live in their tree. He asked the Eise if he could stay in their pond. And they said no, he could not. They would not allow any dead folks in their pond. He asked the Sionnach if he could sleep in their den. And they said no, he could not. They liked him when he was alive but a dead person has hardly any friends at all. So the poor dead Shelni wanders yet and can find no place to rest his head. He will wander forever unless he can find another burial tooth to pay with. They used to tell it so. O NE comment on this burial story -- the Shelni do have careful burial. But the burial crypts are plainly dug, not by the six-fingered Shelni but by the sevenclawed Skokie. There must be substance to the Skokie burialperson. Moreover, the Skokie, though higher on the very low scale than the Shelni, do not bury their own. Furthermore, there are no Shelni remains going back more than about thirty equivalent years. There are no random-lying or fossil Shelni at all. The second story (of the first day). This is how they tell it. There was a woman who was neither Shelni nor Skokie nor frog. She was Sky Woman. One day she came with her child and sat down under a Shelni tree. When she got up to go she left her own child who was asleep and picked up a Shelni child by mistake. Then the Shelni woman came to get her own child and she looked at it. She did not know what was wrong but it was a Sky People child. "Oh, it has pink skin and flat'eyes! How can that be?" the Shelni woman asked. But she took it home with her and it still lives with the Shelni and everyone has forgotten the difference. Nobody knows whaj the Sky woman thought when she got the Shelni child home and looked at it. Nevertheless she kept it and it grew and was more handsome than any of them. But when the second year came and the young Shelni was grown it walked in the woods and said, "I do not feel like a Sky people. But if I am not a Sky people, then what am I? I am hot a duck. I am not a frog. And if I am a bird, what kind of bird am I? There is nothing left. It must be that I am a tree." There was reason for this. We Shelni do look a little bit like trees. So the Shelni put down roots and grew bark and worked hard at being a tree. He underwent all the hardships that are the life of a tree. He was gnawed by IF goats and gobniu. He was rough-tongued by cattle and crom. He was infested by slugs and befouled by the nameless animal. Moreover, parts of him were cut away for firewood. But he kept feeling the jug-music creeping up all the way from his undertoes to his hair and he knew that this music was what he had always been looking for. It was the same jug and tine music that you hear even now. Then a bird told the Shelni that he was not really a tree but that it was too late for him to leave off growing like a tree. He had brothers and sisters and kindred living in the hole down under his roots, the bird said, and they would have no home if he stopped being a tree. This is the tree that is the roof of our den where we are even now. This tree is our brother who was lost and who forgot that he was a Shelni. This is the way it has always been told. On the second day it was remarkable how much Holly had come to look like a Shelni. And she was hardly taller than they were. I had never realized that she was so small. Ah, well, she has come to look like every sort of creature we have ever studied together. Holly insists that the Shelni have intelligence and I half agree with her. But the paragraph in the basic manual of this world is against us: -- a tendency to attribute to the Shelni an intelligence which they do not possess, perhaps due to their fancied human resemblance. In maze-running they are definitely inferior to the rodents. In the manipulation of latches and stops they are less adept than the Earth raccoons or the asteroid rojon. In tool handling and true mimicry they are far from equal to the simians. In simple foraging and the instinct for survival they are far below the hog or the harzl. In mneme, the necessary prelude to intelligence, they are about on par with the turtles. Their "speech" lacks the verisimilitude of the talking birds, and their "music" is below that of the insects. They make poor watch-dogs and inadequate scarecrows. It appears that the move to ban shelniphagi, though perhaps sincere, is ill-advised. After all, as an early spaceman put it: "What else are they good for?" Well, we have to admit that the Shelni are not as intelligent as rats or hogs or harzls. Yet I, surely due to the influence of Holly, feel a stronger affinity to them than to rats or hogs or coons or crows or whatever. But no creature is so helpless as the Shelni. How do they even get together? The Shelni have many sorts of songs but they do not have any romantic songs in our sense. After all, they are small children till they die of old age. Their sexual relationship seems distinguished either by total unawareness or by extreme bashfulness. "T don't see how they bring it  off at all, Vincent," Holly said the second day (which was yesterday). "They are here, so they must have been born. But how do these bashful and scatterbrained three-year-olds ever get together to bring it off? I can't find anything at all in their legends or acting patterns, can you? In their legends all their children are foundlings. They are born or discovered under a blueberry bush (my translation of spionam). Or alternately -- and in other cycles -- they are found under a quicken tree or in a cucumber patch. In common sense we must assume that the Shelni are placental and viviparous. But should we apply common sense to goblin folk? They also have legend that they are fungoid and spring out of the ground at night like mushrooms. And that if a Shelni woman wishes a child she must buy a fungoid slip from a Skokie and plant it into the ground. Then she will have her child ready the next morning." But Holly was depressed yesterday morning. She had seen some copy by our sponsor, The Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company, and it disturbed her! "Singing Pig! The Children love it! Nourishing Novelty! Nursery Rhyme Characters in a can for your convenience! Real Meat from Real Goblins! No fat, no bones. If your can has a lucky number tab you can receive free a facsimile Shelni jug-flute. Be the first on your block to serve Singing Pig, the meat from real Goblins. Cornstarch and natural flavor added." Oh, well, it was only an advertisement that they used back on World. We had our recording to do. "Vincent, I don't know how they got here," Holly said, "but I know they won't be here very long. Hurry, hurry, we have to get it down! I will make them remembered somehow." Holly, got them to play on the tines that second day (which was yesterday). There had been an impediment the day before, she said. The tines may not be played for one until the second day of acquaintance. The Shelni do not have stringed instruments. Their place is taken by the tines, the vibrating, singing forks. They play these many-pronged, tuned forks like harps and in playing them they use the tree roots for sounding boards so that even the leaves in the air above partake a little of the music. The tines, the forks are themselves of wood, of a certain very hard but light wood that is IF sharp with chert and lime dust. "How did she sound?" They are wood, I believe, in an asked the Shelni. "Like this?" early stage of petrifaction. The And he jugged some jug mutine music usually follows the jugsic on his flute, flute music and the ballads that "Yes, that is my wife," are sung to it have a dreamlike said the Skokie. "Where sadness of tone that belies the have you hidden her? That childish simplicity of the texts. is her very voice." Here are two more of those bal"That is nobody's wife," lad stories that we recorded on the the Shelni told the Skokie. second day (which was yesterday). This is the way they tell it. A Skokie heard a Shelni jug-flute jugging one night. "That is the voice of my wife," the Skokie said. "I'd know it anywhere." The Skokie came over the moors to find his wife. He went down into the hole in the ground that his wife's voice was coming from. But all he found there was a Shelni playing a jug-flute. "I am looking for my poor lost wife," the Skokie said. "I have heard her voice just now coming out of this hole. Where is she?" "There is nobody here but myself," the Shelni said. "I am sitting here alone, playing my flute to the moons whose light runs down the walls of my hole." "But I heard her here," said the Skokie, "and I want her back." "That is just a little tune that I made up." "You play with my wife's voice, so you must have swallowed my wife," the Skokie said. "I will have to take you apart and see." "If I swallowed anybody's wife, I'm sorry," said the Shelni. "Go ahead then." So the Skokie took the Shelni apart and scattered the pieces all over the hole and some of them on the grass outside. But he could not find any part of his wife. "I have made a mistake," said the Skokie. "Who would have thought that one who had not swallowed my wife could make her voice on the flute!" "It is all right," said the Shelni, "as long as you put me together again. I remember part of the way I go. If you remember the rest of the way, you can put me together again." But neither of them remembered very well the way the Shelni was before he was taken apart. The Skokie put him together all wrong. There were not enough pieces for some parts and too many for others. "Let me help," said a frog who was there. "I remember where some of the parts go. Besides, I believe it was my own wife he swallowed. That was her voice on the flute. It was not a Skokie voice." The frog helped and they all remembered what they could but it did not work. Parts of the Shelni could not be found again and some of the parts would not go into him at all. When they had him finished the Shelni was in great pain and could hardly move and he didn't look much like a Shelni. "I've done all I can," the Skokie said. "That's the way you'll have to be. Where is frog?" "I'm inside," said frog. "That's where you will have to stay," the Skokie said. "I've had enough of both of you. Enough -- and these pieces left over. I will just take them with me. Maybe I can make someone else out of them." That is the way the Shelni still is, put together all wrong. In his wrong form he walks the country by night, being ashamed to go by day. Some folks are startled when they meet him, not knowing this story. He still plays his jug-flute with the lost Skokie wife's voice and with frog's voice. Listen, you can hear it now! The Shelni goes in sorrow and pain because nobody knows how to put him together right. The Skokie never did find his lost wife. This is how it is told. A ND then there was the story that we recorded yesterday -- the last story, though we did not know it then, that we would record of the Shelni: This is how they say it. We have the ancient story of the singing pigs who sing so loud that they fly up into v the sky on the tail of their own singing. Now we ourselves, if we can sing loud enough, if we can jug the flutes strong enough, if we can tang the tines deep enough, will get to be the Singing Pigs of our own story. Many already have gone away as Singing Pigs. There come certain bellmen with music carts. They play rangle-dangle Sky music. They come for love of IF us. And if we can hurry fast enough when they come we can go with them, we can ride a tin can over the sky. Bong, bong, that is the bell-man with the music cart now! All the Shelni hurry! This is the day you may get to go. Come all you Shelni from the valley and the stream and jump on the cart for the free ride. Come all the Shelni from the meadow and the woods. Come up from the tree roots and the holes under ground. The Skokie don't get to go, the frogs don't get to go, only the Shelni get to go. Cry if the cart is too full and you don't get to go today but don't cry too long. The bell-men say that they will come back tomorrow and every day till there are no Shelni left at all. "Come all you little Singing-Pig-Shelni," a bell-man shouts. "Come get your free rides in the tin cans all the way to Earth! Hey, Ben, what other animal jumps onto the slaughter wagon when you only ring a bell? Come along little ShelniPigs, room for ten more on this wagon. That's all, that's all. We'll have lots more wagons going tomorrow. We'll take all of you, all of you! Hey, Ben, did you ever see IS Controversial Vninh itejtiri Ptgdgyjfijoui Humorom and Incredibly Interesting? Brian Aldiss... Poul Anderson... Piers Anthony... Isaac Asimov... Richard Bergeron... Bob Bloch... Vaughn Bode'... John Brunner... L. Sprague de Camp...Terry Carr... John Christopher... Philip K. Dick... Harlan Ellison... Philip Jose' Farmer... Jack Gaughan... Harry Harrison... Lee Hoffman... John Hayden Howard... Leo P. Kelley... Dean R. Koontz... Anne McCaffrey... Michael Moorcock... Alexei Panshin... Mack Reynolds... Bill Rotsler... Norman Spinrad...Bob Tucker... Harry Warner, Jr...Ted White... and many, many more... Richard E. Geis does his thing. Bi-Monthl y #pgs. Photo Offset P.O. Box #I # little pigs cry when there's no more room for them on the slaughter wagon?" These are the high kind words that a bell-man speaks for love of us. Not even have to give a burial tooth or other tooth to pay for the ride. Frogs can't go, Skokies can't go, only the Shelni get to go! Here are the wonderful things! From the wagon the Shelni get to go to one room where all their bones are taken out. This does never happen to Shelni before. In another room the Shelni are boiled down to only half their size, little as little-boy Shelni. Then they all get to play the game and crawl into the tin cans. And then they get their free ride in the tin cans all the way to Earth. Ride a tin can! Wipe off your sticky tears, you who miss the music cart today. Go to sleep early tonight and rise early tomorrow. Sing your loudest tomorrow so the bell-men will know where to come. Jug the flutes very strong tomorrow, tang the tines deep, say whoop whoop here we are, bell-men. All laugh when they go with the bell-men in the music cart. But there is story that someday a Shelni woman will cry instead of laugh when they take her. What can be the matter with this woman that she will cry? She will cry out "Damn you, it's murder! They're almost people! You can't take them! They're as much people as I am. Double damn you, you can't take me! I'm human. I know I look as funny as they do but I'm human. Oh, oh, oh!" This is the funniest thing of the story, the prophecy thing part. "Oh, oh, oh," the woman will say. Oh, oh, oh, the jugflutes will echo. What will be the matter with the Shelni woman who cries instead of laughs. This is our last story, wherever it is told. When it is told for the last time, then there will be no more stories here, there will be no more Shelni. Who needs stories and jug-flute music who can ride a tin can? That is how it has been said. Then we went out (for the last time, as it happened) from the Shelni burrow. And, as always, there was the rhyming with the five-year-old Ancient who guarded the place! "What to crowing?" ( Please turn to page #) IF A puzzle for angels: How many humans can survive each other in infinity? renz was asleep and Cappio, whose acceleration couch was between theirs, was dead. Cappio's throat was cut and, lying back as he was, the edges of the cut were drawn slightly apart as though Cappio had evolved, in the deep of space, a gill just under his chin. The blood had spurted far in the weak gravity, splattering the instrument panel and the observawith a pool which was now darkening and coagulating. Gibson looked at Lorenz, still asleep. There were -- had been -- only the three of them between Earth and Mars. It was the easiest murder mystery in the universe to solve. It occured to him that now, while Lorenz was still asleep, was the time to do something. To protect himself, to bind or if necessary even kill Lorenz. Briefly he pictured himself confronting Dr. Mann, the chief psychologist at Moonbase. Well, what do I do now , Doctor , outward bound with a corpse and a murderer? Then Lorenz's eyes were open and it was too late. For a second Lorenz was blank and unfocused. Then full consciousness came and he saw Cappio. He jerked erect. The old bitterness, the hatred Gibson had built up for Lorenz and Cappio too during the endless months in the capsule, came rushing back. Whatever happened he was glad that Lorenz had done this, glad Lorenz would be condemned if they ever got back, glad Cappio was dead. Lorenz reached over and touched Cappio's dead cheek very gently with the tips of his fingers. He said, "Why did you do it, Gib?" For a moment Gibson felt almost like laughing. Lorenz was going to dodge and trim to the last. He said, "Commander, you stink." "We all stink, bottled up in here -- but that was no reason to kill Major Cappio." "I mean you stink morally." Gibson's pressure suit was hanging behind him and he reached as quickly as he could for the utility knife in the tool belt. He saw the fear in Lorenz's eyes then and knew he could kill Lorenz if he wished. But Lorenz had his own knife out, threatening him across Cappio's body. "Why?" Lorenz asked. "Why did you do it, Gib?" "It's no use blaming me, Lorenz. When they get us back they'll give you drugs and a liedetector test. You're going to spend the rest of your life in prison. "You're saying I killed him?" "I know you did. For God's sake, Lorenz, there are only the two of us." "Look." Lorenz suddenly exIF tended his knife to Gibson. "Look at the blade. It's clean, isn't it?" Gibson nodded reluctantly. "Now let me see yours." "You really think I'm going to give it to you so that you can kill me too?" "Just hold it up where I can see it." Gibson held his knife up, keeping it well away from Lorenz. The blade was as clean as Lorenz's had been. "What does this prove," he asked Lorenz, "except that you were smart enough to wipe your knife afterward?" "I could say the same thing to you." "But you won't, because you did it." "No. You did it, Gib. You've been cracking up for the last six weeks at least -- but I'm trying to find out whether or not you remember the act. Putting it another way, whether or not I dare let you continue functioning as a member of the crew. The fact that you let me live suggests I might. The fact that you cleaned your knife -- well," Lorenz paused and shrugged, "I was going to say it suggested a conscious and sane premeditation but perhaps I'm wrong. That kind of neatness could be symptomatic, I guess. Dr. Mann would know." "If the radio worked -- " "If the radio worked this probably wouldn't have happened." "Or if the deodorizer hadn't gone out," Gibson finished for him. "Or any of the other things hadn't gone wrong. We're not going to make it, are we, Commander? So what does it matter, your O.B. anyway -- he hated us both and we're all going to die out here in space. We just can't make it." "Certainly we're going to make it," Lorenz said. "Nothing that's happened so far will prevent us from making a good landing on Mars -- and Cappio was a nice enough guy back on Earth, as I remember, and even on the moon." "With no radio they won't even know we made it." They had argued this a dozen times since the radio went out and Gibson suddenly realized that already, even with Cappio lying dead between them, they were falling back into the old pattern. To wrench them away from that deep groove he asked, "What are we going to do with the body?" of cleaner and was swabbing Cappio's blood from the observation port. Because the capsule was kept spinning to give them a gentle pseudogravitational effect the stars made bright, concentric circles of light in the port. When they had begun the mission Mars itself had circled as well since they were aimed toward the point were it would be, rather than to what had been its present location. Now they were close enough for the spin to be almost unnoticeable when Gibson looked only at Mars, a hard-edged, red dot in the center of the port. "Do you suppose that made you do it?" he asked Lorenz. "What?" Lorenz threw the packet of cleaner into the disposer and looked at him. "What are you talking about, Gib?" "Suppose the astrologers were right -- Mars breeds strife. Thou spark of blood, thou eye of death look'd down, Thou wanderer image of a burning town.' " "Nuts." "According to you I never know what I'm talking about, do I, Lorenz?" "Gib, things are bad enough without our fighting." Gibson laughed. "You cut Cappio's throat and now you tell me we shouldn't fight." "We'll have to throw his body out the hatch, I guess." "Out the hatch?" "We can't leave it in here. Come on, let's suit up." Gibson put on his pressure suit carefully, watching Lorenz, but Lorenz had put his knife back into his belt and made no sudden motion toward him. At last Gibson called, "Ready?" "Ready," Lorenz said. His voice was tinny over the suit radio. The hatch was on Gibson's side but he did not want to turn his back on Lorenz to open it. He stood sideways instead to pull at the big operating wheel. It would not move. Lorenz asked, "What's the matter?" Gibson tugged again. "It won't budge. It's stuck." Lorenz stepped across Cappio's body to help him but the lock was jammed. "My God," Lorenz said, "if we can't get it open we won't be able to use it when we get to Mars." "We can detonate the explosive bolts -- emergency procedure." "Sure, but you only open it that way once. After that we've lost our seal. We won't be able to keep a terrestrial atmosphere in the capsule." Gibson seated himself on his couch again and opened the face shield of his helmet. "Maybe we can fix it when we land." "Maybe. Aren't you going to take off your suit?" The suit was as good as armor, Gibson thought. It would protect him from Lorenz's knife. "Not now. I'm too tired."Lorenz snorted. "We haven't done anything for weeks except snap at each other. Why should you be tired?" He was stripping off his own suit. Why should he worry? He knows I didn't kill Cappio -- he hasn't anything to be afraid of... IF Aloud he said, "What are we going to do with the body?" "Put it through the disposer. What else can we do? We'll have to cut it up." "You," Gibson said. "You won't help?" Gibson shook his head and Lorenz shrugged. "Somebody's got to." suit belt again and looked at Cappio, trying to decide where to start. Gibson watched him. After a moment Lorenz decided on the arm nearest him. He laid it on the armrest and cut off the hand, working his blade through the small bones in the wrist. As Gibson watched he picked up the hand by the index finger and dropped it into the disposer, then bent over Cappio again to unjoint the elbow. Gibson drove his knife into the back of his neck then and Lorenz fell face down into Cappio's lap. For a long time after that Gibson sat staring out the observation port at the red dot of Mars. The hi-fi had broken when they were two weeks out but he tried it again anyway. It still didn't work, so he read the descriptions on the tapes instead, trying to remember what they should sound like. After a while he picked up the microphone of the dead radio and pushed the dead transmit button and said, "This is Gibson. I have killed Commander Lorenz because he murdered Major Cappio and I am sure that he was going to kill me. I intend to continue the mission but I am not going to return. The State Department may, if it likes, claim Mars on the grounds that it has a permanent American resident. Send unmanned supply rockets. I require airlock parts, radio repair -- " He put down the microphone. The disposer broke when he tried to put Cappio's femur through it. That left about twothirds of Cappio's body and all of Lorenz's still in the cabin. Gibson did the best he could. He sprinkled all the salt from the ration packets over them and put them in their pressure suits. The suits, being airtight, he thought should at least prevent the odor of the decaying bodies from fouling the air of the cabin. The calendar clock on the instrument panel showed that it was the hundred and thirty-fifth day of the flight. By the hundred and thirty-eighth Gibson knew he had been wrong. The suits leaked. He examined them carefully, inch by inch. Cappio's was sound but Lorenz's had been sabotaged at the back of one knee joint where something like a screwdriver or a utility knife blade had been driven in to destroy the seal of the delicately fitted parts. The same thing had been done to his own suit and (Please turn to page #) a jumpdoor -- an instantaneous space-travel medium controlled by Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extrathe mysterious Calebans -- and is ordinary of the Bureau of Sabo briefed on the emergency by fellow tage of the Confederated Sentients, BuSab agent, Alicheno Furuneo. is called to the planet of Cordiality Calebans, sentient members of the on an urgent mission -- a Caleban Con-Sentients, have lately been Beachball has been sighted on the disappearing, with disastrous efplanet. fects on humans and other sentients around them. It is thought that Mlis A b net he, an enormously wealthy and beautiful but unscrupulous human woman is somehow involved in the disappearances. No one has ever seen a Caleban and few have successfully communicated with one. McKie forces an entry into the Beach ball stranded on Cordiality and confronts the Frank Herbert Caleban domiciled in it. He succeeds in establishing communication with the Caleban, a pure sentient, who communicates from mind to mind and tells him that Mlis A b net he is indeed involved in the inexplicable goings on. Mlis is a flagella tor, who has acquired a contractual right to have the Caleban whipped for her pleasure -- in return she has promised certain educational advantages for Calebans. McKie witnesses and interrupts one oj the flagellations, discovers that the Caleban, who has assumed the name Fanny Mae, has fallen in love with him. McKie, a veteran of fifty-four unsuccessful marriages, is unimpressed, but utilizes the fact that the universality of love permits Fanny Mae to violate her contract with Mliss Abnethe and send him on her trail via a jumpdoor. The chase takes him to an unfamiliar planet, apparently in an earlier time. Inhabitants are Earth aborigines and apparently Abnethe s subjects. They try to kill him but he is rescued by Fanny Mae, brought back to his own time. When all attempts to decipher the location of Abnethe s hideout planets fail , McKie volunteers as bait. He returns to Fanny Mae's Beachball. There two attempts to kill him as Furuneo had been slain are foiled but neither Abnethe nor her Pan Spechi lover and aide, Cheo, betray their whereabouts. Meantime the Sentient laboratory where possible clues to Abnethe and Cheo are under study is turned into a shambles via a jumpdoor attack. McKie rushes over. In the lab he feels a constant threat while he and the Sentient scientists are trying discern a readable pattern behind Abnethe's activities. As they are beginning to approach a reasonable answer, McKie once again is attacked through a jumpdoor. The attack is foiled. XI tral before Tuluk sent for McKie to return to the lab. Two squads of enforcers accompanied McKie. There were enforcers all around in augmented force. They watched the air, the walls, the floors. They watched each other and the space around their alternate numbers. Every sentient carried a raygen at the ready. McKie, having spent two hours with Hanaman and five of her aides in Legal, was ready for down-to-dirt facts. Legal was moving to search every Abnethe property, to seize every record they could find -- but it was all off there somewhere in the rarefied atmosphere of symbols. Perhaps something would come of it, though. They had a Telecourt order, reproduced thousands of times, giving the Bureau's enforcement arm sufficient authority for search on most worlds outside the Gowachin pale. Gowachin officials were moving in their own way to cooperate -- exonerating sufficient enforcers, clearing the names of appropriate police agencies. Crime-One police on Central and elsewhere were assisting. They had provided enforcers, opened files normally not privileged to BuSab, linked their identification and modus computers temporarily to BuSab's core. IF It was action, of course, but it two steps to reach the paper, struck McKie as too circuitous, picked it up, studied it. The writtoo abstract. They needed another ing was in Tuluk's neat script. kind of line to Abnethe, something connected to her that could be reeled in despite her attempts to escape. Eight enforcers had crowded into the small lab with Tuluk. They were being self-effacing, apologetic -- evidence that Tuluk had protested in that bitingly sarcastic way Wreaves had. Tuluk glanced up at McKie's entrance, returned to examining a metal sliver held in stasis by a subtron field beneath a bank of multicolored lights on his bench. "Fascinating stuff, this steel," he said, lowering his head to permit one of his shorter and more delicate mandibular extensors to get a better grip on a probe with which he was tapping the metal. "So it's steel," McKie said, watching the operation. Each time Tuluk tapped the metal it gave off a shimmering spray of purple sparks. They reminded McKie of something just at the edge of memory. He couldn't quite place the association. A shower of sparks. He shook his head. "There's a chart down the bench," Tuluk said. "You might have a look at it while I finish here." McKie glanced to his right, saw an oblong of chalf paper with writing on it. He moved the necessary Substance: steel, an ironbase alloy. Sample contains small am'ts manganese, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus and silicon, some nickel, zirconium and tungsten with admixture chromium, molybdenum and vanadium. Source comparison: matches Second-Age steel used by human political subunit Japan in making of swords for Samurai Revival. Tempering: sample hardquenched on cutting edge only; back of sword remains soft. Estimated length of original artifact: #I meter. Handle: linen cord wrapped over bone and lacquered. (See lacquer, bone and cord analyses: attached.) McKie glanced at the attached sheet: bone from a sea mammal's tooth, reworked after use on some other artifact, nature unknown but containing bronze. The linen cord's analysis was interesting. It was of relatively recent manufacture and it displayed the same submolecular characteristics as the earlier samples of rawhide. T HE lacquer was even more interesting. It was based in an evaporative solvent which was identified as a coal tar derivative -- but the purified sap was from an ancient Coccus Lacca insect extinct for millennia. "You get to the part about the lacquer yet?" Tuluk asked, glancing up and twisting his face slit aside to look at McKie. "Yes." "What do you think of my theory now?" "I'll believe anything that works," McKie growled. Tuluk returned to his examination of the metal. "How're your wounds?" "I'll recover." McKie touched the omniflesh patch at his temple. "What's that you're doing now?" "This material ' was fashioned by hammering," Tuluk said, not looking up. "I'm reconstructing the pattern of the blows that shaped it." He shut off the stasis field, caught the metal deftly in an extended mandible. "Why?" Tuluk tossed the metal onto the bench, racked the probe, faced McKie. "Manufacture of swords such as this was a jealously guarded craft," he said. "It was handed down in families, father to son, for centuries. The irregularity of the hammer blows used by each artisan followed characteristic patterns to an extent that the maker can be identified without question by sampling that pattern. Collectors developed the method to verify authenticity. It's as definite as an eye print, more positive than any skin-print anomaly." "So what did you find out?" "I ran the test twice," Tuluk said, "to be certain. Despite the fact that cell revivificationests on lacquer and cord attachments show this sword to have been manufactured no more than eighty years ago, the steel was fashioned by an artisan dead more thousands of years than I care to contemplate. His name was Kinemura and I can give you the index referents to verify this. There's no doubt who made that sword." The interphone above Tuluk's bench chimed twice and the face of Hanaman from Legal appeared on it. "Oh, there you are, McKie," she said, peering past Tuluk. "What now?" McKie asked, his mind still dazed by Tuluk's statement. "We've managed to get those injunctions," she said. "They .lock up Abnethe's wealth and production on every sentient world except the Gowachin." "But what about the warrants?" "Of course -- those, too," Hanaman said. "That's why I'm calling. You asked to be notified immediately." "Are the Gowachin cooperIF ating?" McKie asked thoughtfully. "They've agreed to declaration of a ConSent emergency in their jurisdiction. That allows all Federation police and BuSab agencies to act there for apprehension of suspects." "Fine," McKie said. "Now, if you could only tell me when to find her I think we can pick her up." Hanaman looked from the screen with a puzzled frown. "When?" "Yeah," McKie snarled. "When." T HE report on the Palenki Phyllum pattern was waiting for McKie when he returned to Bildoon's office for their strategy conference. The conference had been scheduled earlier and postponed twice that day. It was almost midnight but most of the Bureau's people remained on duty, especially the enforcers. Sta-lert capsules had been issued along with the angeret by the medical staff. The enforcer squad accompanying McKie walked with that edgy abruptness this mixture of chemicals always exacted as payment. Bildoon's chairdog had lifted a footrest and was ripple-massaging the Bureau Chief's back when McKie entered the office. Opening one jeweled eye, Bildoon said, "We got the report on the Palenki -- the shell pattern you holoscanned." He closed his eye, sighed. "It's on my desk there." McKie patted a chairdog into place, said, "I'm tired of reading. What's it say?" "Shipsong Phyllum," Bildoon said. "Positive identification. "Ahhh, friend -- I'm tired, too." "So?" McKie was tempted to signal for a massage from his chairdog. Bildoon was obviously enjoying it. But McKie knew a massage might put him to sleep. The enforcers moving restlessly around the room must be as tired as he was. They'd be sure to resent it if he popped off for a nap. "We got warrants and picked up the Shipsong Phyllum's leader," Bildoon said. "It claims every phyllum associate is accounted for." "True?" "We're trying to check it but how can you be sure? They keep no written records. It's just a Palenki's word, whatever that's worth." "Sworn by its arm, too, no doubt," McKie said. "Of course." Bildoon stopped the chairdog massage, sat up. "It's true that phyllum identification patterns can be used illegitimately." "It takes a Palenki three or four weeks to regrow an arm." "What's that signify?" "She must have several dozen Palenkis in reserve." for all we know." "Did this Phyllum Leader resent its pattern being used by an unauthorized Palenki?" "Not that we could see." "It was lying," McKie said. "How do you know?" "According to the Gowachin Juris-dictum, Phyllum Forgery is one of the eight Palenki capital offenses. And the Gowachin should know because they were assigned to educate the Palenkis in Acceptable Law when RR brought those one-armed turtles into the ConSent fold." Bildoon asked, "How come Legal didn't know that? I've had them researching this from the beginning." "Privileged legal datum," McKie said. "Inter-species courtesy and all that. You know how the Gowachin are about individual dignity, privacy, that sort of thing." "You'll be read out of their Court when they find out you spilled this," Bildoon said. "No. They'll just appoint me prosecutor for the next ten or so capital cases in their jurisdiction. If the prosecutor accepts a case and fails to get a conviction, he's the one they execute, you know." "And if you decline the cases?" "Depends on the case. I could draw anything from a one-totwenty sentence for some of them." "One-to -- you mean Standard Years?" "I don't mean minutes," McKie growled. "Then why'd you tell me?" "I want you to let me break this Phyllum Leader." "Break him? How?" "Have you any idea of how important the mystique of the arm is to the Palenki?" "Some idea. Why?" "Some idea," McKie muttered. "Back in the primitive days Palenkis made criminals eat their arms, then inhibited regrowth. Much loss of face -- but even greater injury to something very deep and emotional for the Palenkis." "You're not seriously suggesting -- " "Of course not." "Bildoon shuddered. "You humans have a basically bloodthirsty nature. Sometimes I think we don't understand you." "Where's this Palenki?" McKie asked. "What are you going to do?" "Question him. What did you think?" "After what you just said I wasn't sure." "Come off that, Bildoon. Hey, you." McKie gestured to a Wreave enforcer lieutenant. "Bring the Palenki in here." The enforcer glanced at Bildoon. "Do as he says," Bildoon said. The enforcer looped his mandibles uncertainly, but turned and IF left the room, signaling half a squad to attend him. T EN minutes later the Palenki Phyllum Leader was herded into Bildoon's office. McKie recognized the snake-weaving pattern on the Palenki's carapace, nodded to himself: Shipsong Phyllum, all right. Now that he saw it, he made the identification himself. The Palenki's multiple legs winked to a stop in front of McKie. The turtle face turned toward him expectantly. "Will you truly make me eat my arm?" it asked. McKie glanced accusingly at the Wreave lieutenant. "It asked what kind of human you were," the Wreave explained. "I'm glad you rendered such an accurate description," McKie said. He faced the Palenki. "What do you think?" "I think not possible, Ser McKie. Sentients no longer permit such barbarities." The turtle mouth rendered the words without emotion but the arm dangling to the right from its head-top juncture writhed with uncertainty. "I may do something worse," McKie said. "What is worse?" the Palenki asked. "We'll see, won't we? Now. You can account for every member of your Phyllum, is that what you claim?" "That is correct." "You're lying," McKie said, voice flat. "No." "What's your Phyllum name?" McKie asked. "I give that only to Phyllum brothers." "Or to the Gowachin," McKie said. "You are not Gowachin." In a flat splatting of Gowachin grunts, McKie began describing the Palenki's probable unsavory ancestry, its evil habits, possible punishments for its behavior. He concluded with the Gowachin identification-burst, the unique emotionword pattern by which he was required to identify himself before the Gowachin Bar. Presently the Palenki said, "You are the human they admitted to their Legal Concourse. I've heard about you." "What's your Phyllum name?" McKie demanded. "I am called Biredch of Ank," the Palenki said resignedly. "Well, Biredch of Ank, you're a liar." The arm writhed. "No." There was terror in the Palenki's manner now. It was a brand of fear McKie had been trained to recognize in his dealings through the Gowachin. He possessed the Palenki's privileged name -- he could demand the arm. "You have compounded a capital offense," McKie said. "No -- no -- no -- " "What the other sentients in this room don't realize," McKie said, "is that phyllum brothers accept gene surgery to affix the identity pattern on their carapaces. The index marks are grown into the shell. Isn't this true?" The Palenki remained silent. "It's true," McKie said. He noted that the enforcers had moved into a close ring around them, fascinated by this encounter. "You," McKie said, snapping an arm toward the Wreave lieutenant. "Get your men on their toes." "Toes?" "They should be watching every corner of this room," McKie said. "You want Abnethe to kill our witness?" Abashed, the lieutenant turned, barked orders to his squad. The enforcers already were at their shifty, turning, eye-darting inspection of the room. The Wreave lieutenant shook a mandible angrily, fell silent. McKie returned his attention to the Palenki. "Now, Biredch of Ank, I'm going to ask you some special questions. I already know the answers to some of them. If I catch you in one lie I'll consider a reversion to barbarism. Too much is at stake here. Do you understand me?" "Ser, you cannot believe that -- " "Which of your Phyllum mates did you sell into slave service with Mliss Abnethe?" McKie demanded. "Slaving is a capital offense," the Palenki breathed. "I've already said you were implicated in a capital offense," McKie said. "Answer the question." "You ask me to condemn myself?" "How much did she pay you?" "Who pay me what?" "How much did Abnethe pay you?" "For what?" "For your phyllum mates?" "What phyllum mates?" "That's the question," McKie said. "I want to know how many you sold, how much you were paid and where Abnethe took them." "You cannot be serious." "I'm recording this conversation," McKie said. "I'm going to call your United Phyllums Council presently, play the recording for them and suggest they deal with you." "They will laugh at you. What evidence could you -- " "I've your own guilty voice," McKie said. "We'll get a voicecorder analysis of everything you've said and submit it with the recording to your Council." "Voicecorder? What is this?" "It's a device that analyzes the subtle pitch and intonation of the voice to determine which stateIF ments are true and which are false." "I have never heard of it." "Damn few sentients know all the devices BuSab agents use," McKie said. "Now, I'm giving you one more chance. How many of your mates did you sell?" ' #, #TI#HY are you doing this to   me? What is so important about Abnethe that you should ignore every inter-species courtesy, deny me the rights of -- " "I'm trying to save your life," McKie said. "Now who is lying?" "Unless we find and stop Abnethe," McKie said, "damn near every sentient in our universe except a few newly hatched chicks will die. And they'll stand almost no chance without adult protection. You've my oath on it." "Is that a solemn oath?" "By the egg of my arm," McKie said. The Palenki moaned. "You know even this of the egg?" "I'm going to invoke your name and force you to swear by your most solemn oath in just one moment," McKie said. "I have sworn by my arm." "Not by the egg of your arm," McKie said. The Palenki lowered its head. The single arm writhed. "How many did you sell?" McKie asked. "Only forty-five." "Only forty-five?" "That's all -- I swear it." Glistening fear oils began oozing from the Palenki's eyes. "She offered so much and the chosen ones accepted freely. She promised unlimited eggs." "No breeding limit?" McKie asked. "How could that be?" The Palenki glanced fearfully at Bildoon, who sat hunched across the desk, face grim. "She would not explain other than to say she had found new worlds beyond the ConSent jurisdiction." "Where are those worlds?" McKie asked. "I don't know. This I swear by the egg of my arm -- I don't know." "How was the deal set up?" "There was a Pan Spechi." "What did he do?" "He offered my phyllum the profits from twenty worlds for one hundred standard years." Someone behind McKie whistled. "When and where did this transaction take place?" McKie asked. "In the home of my eggs only a year ago." "A hundred years' profits," McKie muttered. "A safe deal. You and your phyllum won't be around even a fraction that long if she succeeds in what she's planning." "I didn't know. I swear I didn't know. What is she doing?" McKie ignored the question. "Have you any clue at all as to where her worlds may be?" "I swear not," the Palenki said. "Bring your voicecorder. It will prove I speak the truth." "There's no such thing as a voicecorder for your species," McKie said. The Palenki stared at him a moment. Then: "May your eggs rot?" "Describe the Pan Spechi." "I withdraw my cooperation." "You're in too far now," McKie said, "and my deal's the only one in town." "Deal?" "If you cooperate, everyone in this room will forget your admissions of guilt." "More trickery -- " McKie looked at Bildoon. "I think we'd better call in the Palenki Council and give them the full report." "I think so," Bildoon agreed. "Wait," the Palenki said. "How do I know I can trust you?" "You don't," McKie said. "But I have no choice, is that what you say?" "That's what I say." "May your eggs rot if you betray me." "Every one of them," McKie agreed. "Describe your Pan Spechi." "He was ego-frozen," the Palenki said. "I saw the scars and he bragged of it to show that I could trust him." "Describe him." "One Pan Spechi looks much like another. I don't know -- but the scars were purple. I remember that." "Did he have a name?" "He was called Cheo." McKie glanced again at Bildoon. "The name signifies new meanings for old ideas," Bildoon said. "It's in one of our ancient dialects. Obviously an alias." McKie returned his attention to the Palenki. "What kind of agreement did he give you?" "Agreement?" "Contract -- surety. How did he insure the payoff?" "Oh. He appointed phyllum mates of my selection as managers on the chosen worlds." "Neat," McKie said. "Simple hiring agreements. Who could fault a deal like that or prove anything by it?" McKie brought out his toolkit, removed the holoscan, set it for projection and dialed the record he wanted. Presently the scan the Wreave enforcer had captured through the jumpdoor danced in the air near the Palenki. McKie turned the projection slowly full circle, giving the Palenki a chance to see the face from every angle. "Is that Cheo?" he asked. "The scars present the identical pattern. It is the same one." "That's a valid identification," McKie told Bildoon. "Palenkis IF can identify random line patterns better than any other species in the universe." "Our phyllum patterns are extremely complex," the Palenki boasted. "We know," McKie said. "What good does this do us?" Bildoon asked. "I wishI knew," McKie said. guing about the Time-regeneration theory, ignoring the squad of enforcers guarding them, although it was obvious their companions found the argument interesting. The theory was all over the Bureau by this time -- about six hours after the session with Biredch of Ank. It had about as many scoffers as it had supporters. At McKie's insistence they had taken over one of the inter-species training rooms, set up a datascan console and were trying to square Tuluk's theory with the subatomic alignment phenomenon discovered in the rawhide and other organic materials captured from Abnethe. Tuluk's thought was that the alignment might point toward some spatial vector, giving a clue to Abnethe's hideout. There must be some vector of focus in our dimension," Tuluk insisted. "Even if that's true -- what good would it do us?" McKie asked. "She's not in our dimension. I say we go back to the Caleban's -- " "You heard Bildoon. You don't go anywhere. We leave the Beachball to enforcers while we concentrate on -- " "But Fanny Mae's our only source of new data." "Fanny -- oh, yes, the Caleban." Tuluk was a pacer. He had staked out an oval route near the room's instruction focus, tucked his mandibles neatly into the lower fold of his facial slit and left only his eyes and breathing speech orifice exposed. The flexing bifurcation that served him as legs carried him around a chairdog occupied by McKie, thence to a point near a Laclac enforcer at one extreme of the instruction focus, thence back along a mixed line of enforcers who milled at a floattable on which McKie was doodling, thence around behind McKie and back over the same route. Bildoon entered, waved the pacing Wreave to a halt. "There's a mob of newspeople outside," he growled. "I don't know where they got the story but it's a good one. It can be described in a simple sentence: 'Calebans linked to threatened end of universe!' McKie, did you have anything to do with this?" "Abenethe," McKie said, not looking up from a complicated chalf doodle he was completing. "That's crazy." "I never said she was sane. You know how many news services, 'caster systems and other media she controls?" "Well -- certainly. But -- " "Is anybody linking her to this threat?" "No." "You don't find that strange?" "How could any of these people know she -- " "How could they not know about Abnethe's corner on Calebans?" McKie demanded. "Especially after talkihg to you." He stood up, hurled his chalf scribe to the floor, started up an aisle between rows of enforcers. "Wait," Bildoon snapped. "Where are you going?" "To tell them about Abnethe." "Are you out of your mind? That's all she needs to tie us up -- a slander and libel case." "We can demand her appearance as accuser," McKie said. "Should have thought about this earlier. We're not thinking straight. Perfect defense -- truth of accusation." Bildoon caught up with him and they moved up the aisle in a protective cordon of enforcers. Tuluk brought up the rear. "McKie," Tuluk called, "you observe an inhibition of thought processes?" "Wait'll I check your idea with Legal," Bildoon said. "You may have something -- " "Save it," McKie snapped. He stopped, turned to Bildoon. "How much more time do you figure we have?" "Who knows?" "Five minutes, maybe?" "Longer than that, surely." "But you don't know." "I have enforcers at the Caleban's -- well, they're keeping Abnethe's attacks to a min -- " "You don't want anything left to chance, right?" "Naturally." "Well, I'm going to tell those newsies out there the -- " "McKie, that female has her tentacles into unsuspected areas of government," Bildoon cautioned. "You've no idea. We've enough data to keep us busy for -- " "Some really important powers are in with her, eh?" "There's no doubt of it." "And that's why it's time we took the wraps off." "You'll create a panic." "We need a panic. A panic will set all sorts of sentients to trying to contact her -- friends, associates, enemies, lunatics. We'll be flooded with information. And we must develop new data." "What if these illegitimates -- " Bildoon nodded toward the outer door -- "refuse to believe you? They've heard you spout some pretty strange tales, McKie. What if they make fun of you?" before seen such ineffectual IF maundering in Bildoon, a sentient alytical adroitness. Was Bildoon one of those Abnethe had bought? Impossible. But the presence of an ego-frozen Pan Spechi in this situation must have set up enormous traumatic shock waves among that species. And Bildoon was due for ego-collapse soon. What really happened in the Pan Spechi psyche as the moment neared for them to revert to the mindless creche-breeder form? Did it ignite an emotional frenzy of rejection? Did it inhibit thought? In a voice pitched only for Bildoon's ears McKie asked: "Are you ready to step down as Chief of Bureau?" "Of course not." "We've known each other for a long time," McKie whispered. "I think we understand and respect each other. You wouldn't be in the king seat if I'd challenged you. You know that. Now -- one friend to another: Are you functioning as well as you should in this crisis?" Angry contortions fled across Bildoon' s face, were replaced by a thoughtful frown. McKie waited. When, it came the ego-shift would send Bildoon into shambling collapse. A new personality would step forth from Bildoon's creche, a sentient knowing everything Bildoon knew but profoundly different in emotional outlook. Had this present shock precipitated the crisis? McKie hoped not. He was genuinely fond of Bildoon. "What are you trying to do?" "I'm not trying to expose you to ridicule or speed up any -- natural process," McKie said. "But our present situation is too urgent. I'll challenge you for the Bureau directorship and throw everything into an uproar if you don't answer truthfully." "Am I functioning well?" Bildoon mused. He shook his head. "You know the answer to that as well as I do. But you've a few lapses to explain as well, McKie." "Haven't we all?" "That's it," Tuluk said, stepping close to them. He glanced from Bildoon to McKie. "Forgive me -- but we Wreaves have extremely acute hearing. I listened. But I must comment: The shock waves -- or whatever we wish to call them -- which accompanied the departure of the Calebans and left behind such death and insanity that we must buffer ourselves with an geret and other -- " "So our thought processes are mucked up," Bildoon said. "More than that," Tuluk said. "These vast occurrences have left reverberations. The news media will not laugh at McKie. All sentients grasp at , answers to the strange unrest we sense. 'Periodic Sentient Madness,' it's called and explanations are being sought every -- " "We're wasting time," McKie said. "What would you have us do?" Bildoon asked. "Several things," McKie said. "First, I want Steadyon quarantined, no access to the Beautybarbers of any kind, no movement on or off the planet." "That's madness. What reason could we give?" "When does BuSab have to give reasons?" McKie asked. "We have a duty to slow the processes of government." "You know what a delicate line we walk, McKie." "The second thing," McKie said, unperturbed, "will be to invoke our emergency clause with the Taprisiots, get notification of every call made by every suspected friend or associate of Abnethe's." take over," Bildoon breathed. "If this gets out there'll be rebellion, physical violence. You know how jealously most sentients guard their privacy. Besides, the emergency clause wasn't designed for this. It's an identification and delay procedure within normal -- " "If we don't do this we'll die -- and the Taprisiots with us," McKie said. "That should be made clear operation." "I don't know if I can convince them," Bildoon protested. "You'll have to try." "But what good will these actions do us?" "Taprisiots and Beautybarbers all operate in some way similar to the Calebans but without as much -- power," McKie said. "I'm convinced of that. They're all tapping the same power source with varying effectiveness." "Then what happens when we shut down the Beautybarbers?" "Abnethe won't go very long without them." "She probably has her own platoons of Beautybarbers." "But Steadyon is their touchstone. Quarantine it and I think Beautybarber activity will stop everywhere." Bildoon looked at Tuluk. "Taprisiots understand more than they've indicated about connectives," Tuluk said. "I think they will listen to you if you point out that our last remaining Caleban is about to enter ultimate discontinuity. I think they'll realize the significance of this." "Explain the significance to me, if you don't mind. If Taprisiots can use these -- these -- They must know how to avoid the disaster." "Has anybody asked them?" "Beautybarbers. Taprisiots," Bildoon muttered. "What else do you have in mind?" "I'm going back to the Beachball," McKie said. "We can't protect you as well there." IF "I know." "That room's too small. If the Caleban would come to -- " "She won't move. I've asked." Bildoon sighed as a human might have. The Pan Spechi had absorbed more than shape when they had decided to copy the human pattern. The differences, though, were profound, and McKie reminded himself of this. Humans could only see dimly into Pan Spechi thoughts. With crechereversion imminent for this proud sentient -- what was he truly thinking? A creche mate would come forth presently, a new personality with all the Bildoon creche's millennial accumulation of data. McKie pursed his lips, inhaled, blew out. How did Pan Spechi transfer that data from one unit to another? They were always linked, they said, ego holder and creche mates, dormant and active, slavering flesheater and thinking esthete. Linked? How? "Do you understand connectives?" McKie asked, staring into Bildoon's faceted eyes. "I see the way your thoughts wander." "Well?" "Perhaps we Pan Spechi share this power," Bildoon said. "But if so, the sharing is entirely unconscious. I will say no more. You come close to invasion of creche privacy." McKie nodded. Creche privacy was the ultimate defensive citadel of Pan Spechi existence. They would kill to defend it. No logic or reason could prevent the automatic reaction once it was igniled. Bildoon had displayed great friendship in issuing his warning. "We're desperate," McKie said. "I agree," Bildoon said, overtones of profound dignity in his voice. "You may proceed as you've indicated." "Thanks,"'McKie said. "It's on your head, McKie," Bildoon added. "Provided I can keep my head," McKie said. He opened the outer door onto a clamor of newspeople. They were being held back by a harried line of enforcers and it occurred to McKie, grasping this scene in its first impact, that all those involved in this turmoil were vulnerable. ing on the morning-lighted palisades above the Beachball when McKie arrived. News traveled fast, he thought. Extra squads of enforcers, called in anticipation of this mob scene, held back sentients trying to get to the cliff's edge, barred access to the lava shelf. Aircraft of many kinds were being blocked by a screen of BuSab fliers. McKie, standing near the Beachball, looked up at the hectic activity. The morning wind carried a fine mist of sea spray against his cheek. He had taken a jumpdoor to Furuneo's headquarters, left instructions there and used a Bureau flier for the short trip to the lava shelf. The Beachball's port remained open, he noted. Mixed squads of enforcers milled about in a confused pattern around the Ball, alert to every quarter of their surroundings. Picked enforcers watched through the port where others shared their uneasy guardianship. It was quite early in Cordiality's day here but real-time relationships confused such arbitrary time systems. It was night at Central's headqurters, evening at the Taprisiot Council Building where Bildoon must still be arguing -- and only Immutable Space knew what time it was where Abnethe had her base of operations. Later than any of them think... McKie shouldered his way through the enforcers, got a boost up through the port and surveyed the familiar purple gloom inside the Beachball. It was noticeably warmer in here out of the wind and spray but not as warm as McKie remembered the place. "Has the Caleban been talking?" McKie asked a Laclac, one of the enforcers guarding the interior. "I don't call it talking but the answer is -- not recently." "Fanny Mae," McKie said. Silence. "You still there, Fanny Mae?" McKie asked. McKie? You invoke presence , McKie? McKie felt he'd registered the words on his eyeballs and relayed them to his hearing centers. The communication was definitely weaker than he remembered. "How many floggings has she undergone in the past day?" McKie asked the Laclac. "Local day?" the Laclac asked. "What difference does it make?" "I presumed you were asking for accurate data." "I'm trying to find out if she's been under attack recently," McKie said. "She sounds weaker than when I was here before." He stared toward the giant spoon where the Caleban maintained her unpresence. "Attacks have been intermittent and sporadic but not very successful," the Laclac said. "We've collected more whips and Palenki arms, although I understand they're not being successfully transmitted to the lab." McKie invokes presence oj Caleban self called Fanny Mae? the Caleban asked. "I greet you, Fanny Mae," McKie said. You possess new connective entanglements , McKie, bilt the pattern oj you retains recognition. I greet you, McKie. "Does your contract with Abnethe still lead us all toward ultiIF mate discontinuity?" McKie asked. Intensity of nearness , the Caleban said. My employer wishes speech with you. "Abnethe? She wants to talk to me?" Correct. "She could have called me any time," McKie said. Abnethe conveys request through self of me. She asks relay along anticipated connective. This connective you perceive under label of " Now . " You hang this?" "I hang it," McKie growled. "So let her talk." Abnethe requires you send companions from presence. McKie demanded, "What makes her think I'd do such a thing?" It was getting hotter in the Beachball. He wiped perspiration from his upper lip. Abnethe speaks of sentient motive called curiosity. "I've my own conditions for a conference," McKie said. "Tell her I won't agree unless I'm assured she'll make no attack on you or on me during our talk." I give such assurance. "You give it?" Probability in Abnethe assurance appears incomplete. Approximate descriptive. Assurance by self runs intense , strong. Direct? Perhaps. "Why do you give this assurance?" Employer Abnethe indicates strong desire for talk. Contract covers such -- catering? Very close term. Catering. "You guarantee our safety, is that it?" Intense assurance, no more. "No attack during our talk," McKie insisted. Thus propels connective , the Caleban said. Behind McKie the Laclac enforcer grunted, said, "Do you understand that gibberish?" "Take your squad and get out of here," McKie said. "Ser, my orders -- " "Deface your orders! I'm acting under the cartouche of Saboteur Extraordinary with full discretion from the Bureau Chief himself. Get out." "Ser," the Laclac said, "during the most recent flogging nine enforcers went mad here despite ingestion of angeret and various other chemicals we believed would protect us. I cannot be responsible for -- " "You'll be responsible for a tide station on the nearest desert planet if you don't obey me at once," McKie said. "I will see you packed off to boredom after an official trial." "I will not heed your threats, Ser," the Laclac said. "However, I will consult Bildoon himself if you so order." "Consult then, and hurry it. There's a Taprisiot outside." "Very well." The Laclac saluted, crawled out. His companions in the Beachball continued their restive watch. They were brave sentients, all of them, McKie thought, to continue this duty in face of the known peril. Presently, the Laclac reappeared in the port, said. "Ser, I am instructed to obey your orders but to remain outside in visual contact with you, returning to this place at the first sign of trouble." "If that's the best we can do, that's it," McKie said. "Get moving." I N A moment McKie found himself alone with the Caleban. The sense that every place in this room lay behind him persisted. His spine itched. He felt increasingly that he was taking too much of a risk. But there was the desperation of their position. "Where's Abnethe?" McKie asked. "I thought she wanted to talk." A jumpdoor opened abruptly to the left of the Caleban's spoon. Abnethe' s head and shoulders appeared in it, all subtly pink-hazed by the slowdown of energy within that portal. The light was sufficient, though, for McKie to see subtle changes in Abnethe's appearance. He was gratified to note a harried look to her. Wisps of hair escaped her tight coiffure. Bloodshot veins could be detected in her eyes. Her forehead was wrinkled. She needed her Beautybarbers. "Are you ready to give yourself up?" McKie asked. "That's a stupid question," she said. "You're alone at my command." "Not quite alone," McKie said. A sly smile formed on Abnethe's lips. "You'll note that Fanny Mae has closed the exterior port of her residence." McKie shot a glance to his left, saw that the port was closed. Treachery? "Fanny Mae, you promised -- " No attack , the Caleban said. Privacy. McKie imagined the consternation in the enforcers outside right now. But they would never be able to break into the Beachball. He saved his protests, swallowed. The room remained utterly still. "Privacy, then," he agreed. "That's better," Abnethe said. "We must reach agreement, McKie. You're becoming somewhat of a nuisance." "Oh, more than a nuisance, certainly." "Perhaps." "Your Palenki, the one who was going to chop me up -- I found him a nuisance, too. Maybe even more than a nuisance. Now that I think about it, I recall that I suffered." Abnethe shuddered. "By the way," McKie said, "we IF know where you are." "You lie -- " "Not really. You see, you're not where you think you are, Mliss. You think you've gone back in Time. You haven't." "You lie, I say!" "I have it pretty well figured out. The place where you are was constructed from your connectives -- your memories, dreams, wishes -- perhaps even from things you expressly described." "What nonsense -- " "You asked for a place that would be safe from the apocalypse," McKie said. "Fanny Mae warned you about ultimate discontinuity, of course. She probably demonstrated some of her powers, showed you various places available to you along the connectives of you and your associates. That's when you got your big idea." "You're guessing," Abnethe said. Her face was grim. McKie smiled. "You could stand a little session with your Beautybarbers," he said. "You're looking a bit seedy, Mliss." She scowled. "Are they refusing to work for you?" McKie persisted. "They'll come around." "When?" "When they see they've no alternative." "Perhaps." "We're wasting time, McKie." "That's true. What was it you wanted to say to me?" "We must make an agreement, McKie. Just the two of us." "You'll marry me, is that it?" "That's your price?" "I'm not sure," McKie said. "What about Cheo?" "Cheo begins to bore me." "That worries me," McKie said. "I ask myself -- how long before I bore you?" "I realize you're not being sincere," she said, "that you're stalling. I think, however, we can reach agreement." "What makes you think so?" "Fanny Mae suggested it." McKie peered at the shimmering unpresence of the Caleban. "Fanny Mae suggested it?" he murmured. And he thought: Fanny Mae determines her own brand of reality from what she sees of these mysterious connectives. Refined differences -- connectives -- tangled connectives -- a special perception tailored to her particular energy consumption... head. He rocked forward, sensing that he stood on the brink of a revelation. "Do you still love me, Fanny Mae?" he asked. Abnethe's eyes went wide with surprise. "What?" Affinity awareness , the Caleban said. Love equates with this coherence  possess of you, McKie. "How do you savor my singletrack existence?" McKie asked. Intense affinity, the Caleban said. Product of sincerity of attempts at communication. Iself Caleban love you human-person, McKie. Abnethe glared at McKie. "I came here to discuss a mutual problem, McKie," she flared. "I did not anticipate standing aside for a gibberish session between you and this stupid Caleban." Self not in stupor, the Caleban said. "McKie." Abnethe's voice was low. "I came to suggest a proposition of mutual benefit. Join me. I don't care what capacity you choose. The rewards will be more than you could possibly -- " "You don't even suspect what's happened to you," McKie said. "That's the strange thing." "Damn you, I could make an emperor out of you." "Don't you realize where Fanny Mae has hidden you?" McKie asked. "Don't you recognize this safe -- " "Mliss!" An angry voice came from somewhere behind Abnethe. The speaker was not visible to McKie. "Is that you, Cheo?" McKie called. "Do you know where you are, Cheo? A Pan Spechi must suspect the truth." A hand came into view, yanked Abnethe aside. The ego-frozen Pan Spechi took her place in the jumpdoor opening. "You're much too clever, McKie," Cheo said. "How dare you, Cheo!" Abnethe screamed. Cheo whirled, swung an arm. There was the sound of flesh hitting flesh, a stifled scream, another blow. Cheo bent away from the opening, came back into view. "You've been in that place before, haven't you, Cheo?" McKie asked. "Weren't you a mewling, empty-minded female in the creche at one period of your existence?" "Much too clever," Cheo snarled. "You'll have to kill her, you know," McKie said. "If you don't, it'll all be for nothing. She'll digest you. She'll take over your ego. She'll be you." "I didn't know this happened with humans," Cheo said. "Oh, it happens," McKie said. "That's her world, isn't it, Cheo?" "Her world," Cheo agreed. "But you're mistaken about one thing, McKie. I can control Mliss. So it's my world, isn't it? And another thing -- I can control you." The jumpdoor's vortal tube suddenly grew smaller, darted at McKie. McKie dodged aside, shouted, "Fanny Mae -- " New connectives, the Caleban said. IF McKie executed a sprawling dive across the room as the jumpdoor appeared beside him. It nipped into existence and out like a ravening mouth, narrowly missing McKie. He twisted, leaped -- dodged panting through the Beachball's purple gloom, rolled finally under the giant spoon, peered right and left. He shuddered. He hadn't realized a jumpdoor could be moved around so rapidly. "Fanny Mae," he rasped, "shut off the S'eye, close it down. You promised -- no attack!" No response. McKie glimpsed an edge of the vortal tube hovering just beyond the spoon bowl. "McKie." Cheo's voice. "They'll call you long distance in a minute. When they do. I'll have you." McKie stilled a fit of trembling. They would call him. Bildoon probably had summoned a Taprisiot already. They would be worrying about him -- and he would be helpless in the grip of the call. "Fanny Mae," McKie yelled. "Close that damn' S'eye." The vortal tube glittered, shifted up and around to come at him from the side. Cursing, McKie rolled into a ball, kicked backward and over onto his knees, leaped to his feet and flung himself across the spoon handle, scrambled back under it. The searching tube moved away. A low crackling came, deepened to thunder. He glanced right, left, back over his head. There was no sign of the deadly opening. Something snapped sharply above the spoon bowl. A shower of green sparks cascaded around McKie. He rolled, brought up his raygen. A Palenki arm and whip had been thrust through the jumpdoor's opening. It was raised to deliver another blow against the Caleban. McKie sprayed the raygen's beam across the arm as the whip moved. Arm and whip grazed the far edge of the spoon, brought another shower of sparks. The jumpdoor winked out of existence. image of the sparks still dancing on his retinas. Now he recalled what he had been trying to remember since watching Tuluk's experiment with the steel. S' eye removed, Fanny Mae said. Fanny Mae's voice fell on McKie's forehead, seemed to seep inward to his speech centers. She sounded weak.  Slowly McKie lifted himself to his feet. The Palenki arm and whip lay on the floor. He ignored them. Shower of sparks... McKie felt strange emotions washing through him, around him. He felt happily angry, satiated with frustrations, words and phrases tumbling through his mind like pinwheels. That perverted offspring of an indecent union... Shower of sparks -- shower of sparks... He knew he had to hold that thought and his sanity no matter what the surgiiTg waves of emotion from Fanny Mae did to him. Shower of -- shower -- Was Fanny Mae dying? "Fanny Mae?" The Caleban remained silent but the emotional onslaught eased. McKie knew there was something he had to remember. It concerned Tuluk. He had to tell Tuluk. Shower of sparks... He had it then. The pattern that identifies the maker -- a shower of sparks... He felt he'd been running for hours, that his nerves were bruised and tangled. His mind was a bowl of jelly. Thoughts quivered through it. His brain was going to melt and run away like a stream of colored fluid. It would spray out of him in a shower. Shower of -- of -- sparks... He called, "Fanny Mae?" A peculiar silence rippled through the Beachball. It was an emotionless silence, something shut off, removed. It made McKie's skin prickle. "Answer me, Fanny Mae," he said. S'eye absents itself, the Caleban said. McKie felt shame, a deep and possessive sense of guilt. It flowed over him and through him, filled every cell -- dirty, muddy, sinful, shameful. He shook his head. Why should he feel guilt? Ah. Realization came over him. The emotion came from outside him -- from Fanny Mae. "Fanny Mae," he said, "I understand you could not prevent that attack. I don't blame you. I understand." Surprise connectives, the Caleban said. You overstand. "I understand." Overstand? Term for intensity of knowledge? Realization? "Realization, yes." Calmness returned to McKie. It was the calmness of something being withdrawn. Again he reminded himself that he had a vital message forTuluk. Shower of sparks. But first he had to be certain that mad Pan Spechi was not going to return momentarily. "Fanny Mae," he said, "can you prevent their from using the Scye?" Ohstru , rive, not preventive, the Caleban said. "You mean you can slow them down?" Explain slow. "Oh, no McKie moaned. He cast around in his mind for a Caleban way to phrase his question. How would I anny Mae say it? "The next attack, will it be on a short connective or long one?" Attack series breaks here. You inquire of duration by your time sense.  overstand this. Long line across attack nodes -- this equates with more intense duration for your time sense. "Intense duration," McKie muttered. "Yeah." Shower of sparks... You signify employment of S' eye by Cheo, the Caleban said. Spacing extends at this place. Cheo goes farther down your track. I overstand intensely for McKie. Yes? Farther down my track, McKie thought. He gulped as realization hit him. What had Fanny Mae said earlier? See us to the door! I am S' eye! He breathed softly lest sudden motion dislodge this brutal clarity of understanding. Overstanding. He thought of energy requirements. Fnormous. I am S'eye! and: Self energy by being stellar mass! To do what they did in this dimension Caleban's required the energy of a stellar mass. She inhaled the whip. She said it herself they sought energy here. The Calebans fed in this dimension. McKie considered the refined discrimination Fanny Mae must possess even to attempt communication with him. It would be as though he immersed his mouth in water and tried to talk to a single micro-organism there. IF "We have to go right back to the beginning," he said. Many beginnings exist for each entity , the Caleban said. McKie sighed. Sighing, he was seized by a Taprisiot contact. Bildoon. "I'm glad you waited," McKie said, cutting off Bildoon's first anxious inquiries. "Here's what I want you to -- " "McKie, what's going on there?" Bildoon insisted. "There are dead enforcers all around you, madmen, a riot -- " "I seem to be immune," McKie said, "or else Fanny Mae is protecting me some way. Now listen to me. We don't have much time. Get Tuluk. He has a device for identifying the patterns that originate in the stress of creation. He's to bring that device here -- right here to the Beachball. And fast." the Beachball McKie leaned against a curved wall, sipped icewater from a fhermocup. He watched Tuluk set up the needed instruments. "What's to prevent our being attacked while we work?" Tuluk asked. He rolled a glowing loop on a squat stand into position near the Caleban's unpresence. "You should have let Bildoon send in some guards." "Like those who were foaming at the mouth outside?" "There's a fresh crew outside there now." Tuluk did something that made the glowing loop double its diameter. "They'd only get in the way," McKie said. "Besides, Fanny Mae says the spacing isn't right for Abnethe." He sipped ice water. The Ball had achieved something approaching sauna temperature but without the humidity. "Spacing," Tuluk said. "Is that why Abnethe keeps missing you?" He produced a black wand from his instrument case. The wand was about a meter long. He adjusted a knob on its handle and the glowing loop contracted. The squat stand beneath the loop began to hum -- an itch-producing middle-C. "They miss me because I have a loving protector," McKie said. "It isn't every sentient who can say a Caleban loves him." "What is that you're drinking?" Tuluk asked. "Is that one of your mind disrupters?" "You're very funny," McKie said. "How much longer are you going to fiddle with that gear?" "I am not fiddling. Don't you realize this isn't portable equipment? It must be adjusted." "So adjust." "The high temperature in here complicates my readings," Tuluk complained. "Why can't we have the port open?" "For the same reason I didn't let any guards in here. I'll take my chances without having them complicated by a mob of insane sentients getting in my way." "But must it be this hot?" "Can't be helped," McKie said. "Fanny Mae and I have been talking, working things out." "Talking?" "Flot air," McKie said. "Ah, you make a joke." "It can happen to anyone,'' McKie said. "I keep asking myself if what we see as a star is all of a Caleban of just part of one. I opt for part." He drank deeply of the ice water, discovered there was no more ice in it. Tuluk was right. It was damnably hot in here. "That's a strange theory," Tuluk said. He silenced the humming of his instrument case. In the abrupt stillness, something else in the case could be heard ticking. It was not a peaceful sound. It had the feeling of a timing device affixed to a bomb. It counted moments in a deadly race. "There," Tuluk said. "You ready?" McKie asked. "I will be ready presently. Why does the Caleban not speak?" "Because I asked her to save her strength." "What does she say of your theory?" "She thinks I have achieved truth." Tuluk took a small helix from his instrument case, inserted it into a receptacle at the base of the glowing ring. "Come on, come on," McKie jittered. "Your urgings will not reduce the necessary time for this task," Tuluk said. "For example, I am hungry. I came without stopping to break my daily fast. This does not press me to a speed that might produce errors, nor does it arouse me to complaint." "Aren't you complaining?" McKie asked. "You want some of my water?" "I had water two days ago," Tuluk said. "And we wouldn't want to rush you ito another drink." "I do not understand what pattern you hope to identify," Tuluk said. "We have no records of artisans for a Comparison of -- " "This is something God made," McKie said. "You should not jest about deities," Tuluk said. "Are you a believer or just playing safe?" McKie asked. "I was chiding you for an act that might offend some sentients," Tuluk said. "We have a hard enough time bridging the sentient barriers without raising religious issues." "Well, we've been spying on God -- or whatever -- for a long time," McKie said. "That's why we're going to get a spectroscopic IF record of this. How much longer you going to be at this fiddling?" "Patience, patience," Tuluk muttered. He reactivated the wand, waved it near the glowing ring. Again, the instrument began humming, a higher note this time. It grated on McKie's nerves. He felt it in his teeth and along the skin of his shoulders. It itched inside him where he couldn't scratch. "Damn this heat!" Tuluk said. "Why will you not have the Caleban open a door to thfe outside?" "I told you why." "Well, it doesn't make this task any easier!" "You know," McKie said, "when you called me and saved my skin from that Palenki chopper -- the first time, remember? Right afterward you said you'd been tangled with Fanny Mae and you said a very odd thing. "Oh?" Tuluk had extended a small mandible and was making delicate adjustments to a knob on the case below the glowing ring. "You said something about not knowing that was where you lived s Remember that?" "I will never forget it." Tuluk bent his tubular body across the glowing ring, stared back through it while passing the. wand back and forth in front of the ring's opening. "Where was that?" McKie asked. "Where was what?" "Where you lived." "That? There are no words to describe it." "Try." Tuluk straightened, glanced at McKie. "It was a bit like being a mote in a vast sea and experiencing the warmth, the friendship of a benign giant." "That giant the Caleban?" "Of course." "That's what I thought." "I will not answer for inaccuracies in this device," Tuluk said. "But I don't believe I can adjust it any closer. Given a few days, some shielding -- there's an odd radiation pattern from that wall behind you and projection dampers, I mijght, I just might achieve a fair degree of accuracy. Now? I cannot be responsible." "And you'll be able to get a spectroscopic record?" "Oh, yes." "Then maybe we're in time," McKie said. "For what? I " "For the right spacing." , "Ah, you mean the flogging and the subsequent shower of sparks?" "That's what I mean." "You could not flog her yourself, gently?" "Fanny Mae says that wouldn't work. It has to be done with violence and the intent to create intensity of anti-love or it won't work." "Oh. How odd. You know, McKie, I believe I could use some of your water after all. It's the heat in here." a stopper being pulled from a bottle. Air pressure dropped slightly in the Beachball and McKie experienced the panic notion that Abnethe had somehow opened them onto a vacuum that would drain away their air and kill them. The physicists said this couldn't be done, that the gas flow, impeded by the adjustment barrier within the jumpdoor, would block the opening with its own collision breakdown. McKie suspected, though, that the physicists did not know everything they pretended to know about S'eye phenomena. He missed the jumpdoor's vortal tube at first. Its plane was horizontal and directly above the Caleban's spoon bowl. A Palenki arm and whip shot through the opening, delivered a lashing blow to the area occupied by the Caleban's unpresence. Green sparks showered the air. Tuluk, bending over his instruments, muttered excitedly. The Palenki arm drew back, hesitated. "Again -- again." The voice through the jumpdoor was unmistakably that of Cheo. The Palenki delivered another blow and another. McKie lifted his raygen, dividing his attention between Tuluk and that punishing whip. Did Tuluk have his readings? No telling how much more of this the Caleban could survive. Again the whip lashed. Green sparks glimmered and fell. "Tuluk, do you have enough data?" McKie demanded. Arm and whip jerked back through the jumpdoor. A curious silence settled over the room. "Tuluk?" McKie hissed. "I believe I have it," Tuluk said. "It's a good recording. I will not vouch for comparison and identification, however." McKie grew aware that the room wasn't really silent. The thrumming of Tuluk's instruments formed a background for a murmur of voices coming through the jumpdoor. "Abnethe?" McKie called. The opening tipped, gave him a three-quarter view of Abnethe' s face. There was a purple bruise from her left temple down across her cheek. A silver noose held her throat, its end firmly in the grip of a Pan Spechi hand. Abnethe, McKie saw, was trying to control a rage which threatened to burst her veins. Her face was alternately pale and flushed. She held her mouth tight, lips in a thin line. Compressed violence radiated from very pore. She saw McKie. "See what you've done?" she shrieked. McKie pushed himself away IF from the wall, fascinated. He approached the jumpdoor. "What I did? That looks more like Cheo's handiwork." "It's all your fault." "Oh? That was clever of me." "I tried to be reasonable," she rasped. "I tried to help you, save you. But no -- you treated me like a criminal. This is the thanks I got from you." She gestured at the noose around her throat. "What did I do to deserve this?" "Cheo's voice came from a point beyond the arm gripping the noose. "Tell him, Mliss." Tuluk, who had been ignoring the exchange, busying himself with his instruments, turned to McKie. "Remarkable," he said. "Truly remarkable." "Tell him." Cheo insisted as Abnethe held a stubborn silence. Both Abnethe and Tuluk began talking at once. It came through to McKie as a mixed jumble of noises. "Youinterstellferederhydrowithgenlawmassfulexecufrom -- " "Shut up!" McKie shouted. Abnethe jerked back, shocked to silence, but Tuluk went right on: " and that makes it quite certain there's no mistaking the spectral absorption pattern. It's a star, all right. Nothing else would give us the same picture." "But which star?" McKie asked. "Ahh, that's the question," Tuluk said. Cheo pushed Abnethe aside, took her place in the jumpdoor. He glanced at Tuluk, at the instruments. "What's all this, McKie? Another way to interfere with our Palenkis? Or did you come back for a new game of ring around your neck?" "We've discovered something you might like to know," McKie said. "What could you discover that would possibly interest me?" "Tell him, Tuluk," McKie said. "Fanny Mae exists somehow in intimate association with a stellar mass," Tuluk said. "She may even be a stellar mass -- at least as far as our dimension is concerned." Not dimension, the Caleban said. Wave. H ER voice barely reached McKie's awareness but the words were accompanied by a rolling surge of misery that rocked him and set Tuluk to shuddering. "Wha-wha-what w-w-was th-ththat?" Tuluk managed. "Easy, easy," McKie cautioned. He saw that Cheo had not been touched by that sea of emotion. At least, the Pan Spechi remained impassive. "We'll have Fanny Mae identified shortly," McKie said. Identity . the Caleban said, her communication coming through with more strength but with an icy withdrawal for emotion, refers to unique self-understanding quality as it deals with selflabel, selfabode and self-manifestations. You not me hang yet, McKie. You hang term yet ? Self-I overstand your Time node. "Hang?" Cheo asked, jerking the noose around Abnethe's neck. "A simple old-fashioned idiom," McKie said. "I imagine Mliss gets the hang of it." "What are you talking about?" Cheo asked. Tuluk took the question as having been directed to him. "In some way," he said, "Calebans manifest themselves in our universe as stars. Every star has a pulse, a certain unique rhythm, a never-duplicated identity. We have Fanny Mae's pattern recorded now. We're going to run a tracer on that pattern and try to identify her as a star." "A stupid theory like that is supposed to interest me?" Cheo demanded. "It had better interest you," McKie said. "It's more than a theory now. You think you're sitting in a safe hidey-hole. All you have to do is eliminate Fanny Mae -- that's supposed to eliminate our universe and leave you out there the only sentients anywhere? Is that it?" "Calebans don't lie," Cheo snarled. "But I think they can make mistakes," McKie said. Proliferation of single-tracks, the Caleban said. McKie shuddered at the icy wave that accompanied the words. "If we discontinue, will Abnethe and her friends still exist?" he asked. Different patterns with short limit on extended connectives, the Caleban said. McKie felt the ice invade his stomach. He saw that Tuluk was trembling, facial slit opening and closing. "That was plain enough, wasn't it?" McKie asked. "You'll change somehow and you won't live very long after us." No branchings, the Caleban said. "No offspring," McKie translated. "This is a trick," Cheo snarled. "She's lying." "Caleban's don't lie," McKie reminded him. "But they can make mistakes." "The right kind of mistake could ruin everything for you," McKie said. "I'll take my chances," Cheo said. "And you can take -- " The jumpdoo winked out of existence. x " S'eye alignment difficult, the Caleban said. You hang difficult? More intense energy requirement reference. You hang? "I understand," McKie said. He mopped his forehead with a sleeve. Tuluk extended his long mandible, waved it agitatedly. IF "Cold," he said. "Cold-coldcold-cold." "I think she's holding on by a thin thread," McKie said. Tuluk's torso rippled as he inhaled deeply into his outer trio of lungs. "Shall we take our records back to the lab?" he asked. "A stellar mass," McKie muttered. "Imagine it. And all we see here is this -- this bit of nothing." Not put something here, the Caleban said. Self-I put something here and uncreate you. McKie discontinues in presence of I-self. "Do you hang that, Tuluk?" McKie asked. "Hang? Oh, yes. She seems to be saying that she can't make herself visible to us because that'd kill us." "That's the way I read it," McKie said. "Let's get back and start that comparison search." You expend substance without purpose, theCaleban said. "What now?" McKie asked. Flogging approaches and I-self discontinue. McKie put down a fit of trembling. "How far away, Fanny Mae?" Time reference by single-track difficult, McKie. Your term -- soon. "Right away?" McKie asked and held his breath. Ask you of intensity immediate? "Probably," McKie whispered. Probability, the Caleban said. Energy necessity of selfI extends alignment. Flogging not -- immediate. "Soon, but not right away," Tuluk said. "She's telling us she can take one more flogging and that's the last one," McKie said. "Let's move. Fanny Mae, is there a jumpdoor available to us?" "Available, McKie. Go with love." One more flogging, McKie thought as he helped Tuluk gather up the instruments. Buy why was a flogging so deadly to the Caleban? Why a flogging when other energy forms apparently didn't touch them? ment -- and that soon -- the Caleban was going to be lashed by a whip and it would die. The halfmad possibility was about to become apocalyptic reality and the sentient universe would end. McKie stood disconsolately in Tuluk's personal lab, intensely aware of the mob of enforcer guards around them. Go with love. The computer console above Tuluk's position at the bench flickered and chittered. Even if Tuluk identified Fanny Mae's star -- what could be done with the new knowledge? "Is it possible," Tuluk asked, "that the Calebans created this universe? Is this their garden patch? I keep remembering Fanny Mae saying it would uncreate us to be in her presence." He leaned against his bench, mandibles withdrawn, face slit open just enough to permit him to speak. "Why's the damn computer taking so long?" McKie demanded. "The pulse problem's very complicated, McKie. The comparison required special programing. You haven't answered my question." "I don't have an answer. I hope those numbies we left in the Beachball know what to do." "They'll do what you told them to do," Tuluk chided. "You're a strange sentient, McKie. I'm told you've been married more than fifty times. Is it a breach of good manners to discuss this?" "I never found a woman who could put up with a Saboteur Extraordinary," McKie muttered. "We're hard creatures to love." "Yet the Caleban loves you." "She doesn't know what we mean by love." He shook his head. "I should've stayed at the Beachball." "Our people will interpose their own bodies between the Caleban and any attack," Tuluk said. "Would you call that love?" "That's self-preservation," McKie snarled. "It's a Wreave belief that all love is a form of self-preservation," Tuluk said. "Perhaps this is what our Caleban understands." "Hah!" "It's a probability, McKie, that you've never been overly concerned about self-preservation, thus have never really loved." "Look -- would you stop trying to distract me with your babbling nonsense?" "Patience, McKie. Patience." "Patience, he says." McKie jerked himself into motion, paced the length of the lab, the guardian enforcers dodging out of his way. He returned to Tuluk, stopped. "What do stars feed on?" "Stars? Stars don't feed." "She inhales something here and she feeds here," McKie muttered. He nodded. "Hydrogen." "What's this?" "Hydrogen," McKie repeated. "If we opened a big enough jumpdoor -- Where's Bildoon?" "He's conferring with the ConSent representatives over our highhanded actions in quarantining the Beautybarbers. It's also a distinct possibility that our dealings with the Taprisiots have leaked out. Governments do not like this sort of action, McKie. Bildoon is trying to save your skin and his own." "But there's plenty of hydrogen," McKie said. "What is this of jumpdoors and hydrogen?" "Feed a cold and starve a fever," McKie said. "You are not making sense, IF McKie. Did you take your angeret and normalizes?" "I took them." The computer's readout chamber made a chewing sound, spewed forth a quadruple line of glowing characters that danced in the chamber and resolved themselves into legible arrangements. McKie read the message. "Thyone," Tuluk said, reading over his shoulder. "A star in the Pleiades," McKie said. "We call it Drnlle," Tuluk said. "See the Wreave characters in the third row? Drnlle." "Any doubt of this identification?" "You joke." "Bildoon," McKie hissed. "We have to try it." He spun around, pounded out of the lab, dodged through Tuluk's assistants in the outer area. Tuluk darted in his wake, drawing their enforcer guardians into a thin line close behind. "McKie," Tuluk called. "Where are you going?" "To Bildoon -- then back to Fanny Mae." N othing could stop him now, Cheo told himself. Mliss would die in a few minutes, deprived of air in the Beautybarber tank where he had confined her. The others on their refuge world would then have to follow him. He would control the S'eye and the threads of power. Cheo stood in his quarters, the S'eye controls near athand. It was night outside but all things remained relative, he reminded himself. Dawn would be breaking soon where the Caleban's Beachball rested above the surf on Cordiality. The Caleban's ultimate dawn -- the dawn of ultimate discontinuity. That dawn would slip into eternal night on all the planets that shared a universe with the doomed Caleban. In just a few minutes, this planet-of-the-past where he stood would reach its point of proper connectives with Cordiality. And the Palenki waiting across the room there would do what it had been commanded to do. Cheo rubbed the scars on his forehead. There would be no more Pan Spechi to point accusing fingers at him, to call him with ghostly voices. Never again would there be a threat to the ego he had secured to himself. No one could stop him. Mliss could never come back from death to stop him. She must be gasping in the sealed tank by now, straining for oxygen that did not exist. And McKie. The Saboteur Extraordinary had proved to be elusive and annoying but no way remained for him to stop the apocalypse. Just a few more minutes now. Cheo looked at the reference dials on the S'eye controls. They moved so slowly it was difficult to detect any change while you kept your eyes on them. But they moved. He crossed to the doors opening to the balcony, drew a questioning stare from the Palenki and stepped outside. There was ho moon but many stars shone in patterns alien to a Pan Spechi. Mliss had ordered a strange world here with its bits of ancient history from her Terran past, its odds and ends of esoterica culled from the ages. Those stars, now. The Caleban had assured them no other planets existed here -- yet there were stars. If those were stars. Perhaps they were only bits of glowing gas arranged in patterns Mliss had requested. This would be a lonely place after the other universe was gone, Cheo realized. And there would be no escaping those starry patterns, reminders of Mliss. But he would be safe here from pursuit -- because there would be no pursuers. He glanced back into the lighted room. How patiently the Palenki waited, eyes lidded, motionless. The whip dangled limply from its single hand. Crazy anachronism of a weapon -- but it worked. Without that wild conjunction of Mliss and her kinky desires they would never have discovered the thing about the weapon, never have found this world and the way to isolate it forever. Cheo savored the thought of forever. That was a very long time. Too long, perhaps. The thought disturbed him. Loneliness forever. He cut off these thoughts, looked once more at the S'eye dials. The pointers had moved a hair closer to the curtained moment. They would coincide presently. Not looking at the pointers, not looking anywhere, really, Cheo waited. Night on the balcony was full of the odors Mliss had gathered -- exotic blooms, scents and musks of rare life forms, exhalations of myriad species she had brought to share her Ark. Ark. That was an odd name she'd given this place. Perhaps he would change that -- later. Creche? No. The word carried painful reminders. Why were there no other planets? Surely the Caleban could have provided other planets. But Mliss had not ordered them created. Only the thinnest of lines separated the pointers on the S'eye dials. Cheo went back into the room, called the Palenki. The squat turtle shape stirred itself to action, came to Cheo's side. The thing looked eager. Palenkis enjoyed violence." IF Cheo felt suddenly empty but there was no turning back. He put his hands to the controls -- humanoid hands. They, too, would remind m of Mliss. He turned a knob. It felt oddly alien to his touch but he stifled all uneasiness, all regrets, concentrated on the pointers. They flowed into each other and he opened the jumpdoor. "Now," he commanded. shouted command as the jumpdoor's vortal tube leaped into existence within the Beachball. The opening dominated the room, filled the purple gloom with bright light. The light came from behind two figures revealed by the opening -- a Palenki and the Pan Spechi, Cheo. The vortal tube began swelling to dangerous dimensions within the confined room. Wild energies around its rim hurled enforcer guardians aside. Before they could recover, the Palenki arm thrust into the room, lashed out with its whip. McKie gasped at the shower of green and golden sparks around the Caleban. Golden! Again the whip struck. More sparks glittered, fell, shimmered into nothingness. "Hold!" McKie shouted as the enforcers recovered and moved to attack. He wanted no more casualties from a closing jumpdoor. The enforcers hesitated. Once more the Palenki lashed out with its whip. Sparks glowed, fell. "Fanny Mae," McKie called. I reply, the Caleban said. McKie felt the abrupt rise in temperature but the emotion accompanying the words was calm, soothing -- and powerful. The enforcers jittered, their attention darting from McKie to the area where the Palenki arm continued its vicious play with the whip. Each stroke sent a shower of golden sparks into the room. "Tell me of your substance, Fanny Mae," McKie said. My substance grows, the Caleban said. You bring me energy and goodness. I return love for love and love for hate. You give me strength for this, McKie. "Tell me of discontinuity," McKie said. Discontinuity withdraws! A definite elation was in the Caleban's words. I do not see node of connectives for discontinuity. My companions shall return in love. McKie inhaled a deep breath. It was working. But each new flow of Caleban words brought its blast from the furnace. That, too, spoke of success. He mopped his forehead. The whip continued to rise and fall. "Give up, Cheo," McKie called. "You've lost." He peered up through the jumpdoor. "We're feeding her faster than you can rob her of substance." Cheo barked an order to the Palenki. Arm and whip withdrew. "Fanny Mae," the Pan Spechi called. There was no answer but McKie sensed a wave of pity. Did she pity Cheo? "I command you to answer me, Caleban," Cheo called "Your contract orders you to obey." I obey holder of contract only, the Caleban said. You share no connectives with holder of con tract. "She ordered you to obey me." McKie held his breath, watchIF ing, waiting for his moment to act. When Fanny Mae summoned AbIt must be done with precision, nethe a sacrifice must be made. The Caleban had been lucidly clear Abnethe had to die and her world about that -- for once... There could would die with her. be little doubt of the communica"Your contract," Cheo insisted, tion. Contract declines of intensity , Abnethe gathers lines of her the Caleban said. On this new world into herself '. track you must address me as That was what Fanny Mae had Thyone. Name of love I receive said and the meaning seemed clear, from AlcKie -- Thyone. "McKie, what have you done?" Cheo demanded. He poised his fingers over the S'eye controls. "Why doesn't she respond to the whipping?" "She nerer really did respond to a whipping," McKie said. "She responded to the violence and the hate that went with it. And that took a lot of energy. She's almost pure emotion, you know. That's how the universe goes, Cheo." Where was Abnethe? Cheo motioned to the Palenki, hesitated as McKie said, "It's no use, Cheo. We're feeding her faster than you can drain her." "Feeding her?" Cheo bent his scarred head forward to peer at McKie. "We've opened a giant jumpdoor in space," McKie said. "It's gathering free hydrogen and feeding it directly into Thyone." "What is this -- this Thyone?" Cheo demanded. "The star that is a Caleban," McKie said. "What are you talking about?" "Haven't you guessed?" He gave a subtle hand signal to the enforcers. Abnethe still had not shown up. Perhaps Cieo had confined her somewhere. That changed things to the contingency plan. They were going to have to iry getting a sentient through the jumpdoor. The enforcers, responding to his signal, began moving closer to the opening. Each held a raygen. "Guessed what?" Cheo asked.  have to keep him distracted , McKie thought. "Calebans manifest themselves in mir universe several ways," he said. "They're stars, suns -- which may really be feeding orifices. They created these Beachballs -- which are probably intended as much to protect us as they are to house the speaking manifestation. Even with the Beachball's damping force they can't hold back all the radiant energy of their speech. That's why it gets so hot in here." McKie glanced at his ring of enforcers. They were moving closer and closer to the jumpdoor. "Stars?" Cheo asked. "This particular Caleban has been identified," McKie said. "She's Thyone in the Pleiades." "But -- the S'eye effect -- " "Star-eyes," McKie said. "At least, that's how I interpret it. I'm probably only partly right, but Thyone here admits she and her kind suspected the truth during their first attempts at communication." Cheo moved his head slowly from side to side. "Thejumpdoors -- " "Star-powered," McKie said. "We've known from the first they required stellar energies to breach space that way. The Taprisiots gave us a clue when they spoke of imbedments and crossing Caleban connectives to -- " "You talk nonsense," Cheo IF growled. "Is it not nonsense?" "Undoubtedly," McKie agreed. "But it's a nonsense that moves reality in our universe." "You think you'll distract me while your companions prepare to attack," Cheo said. "I will now show you another reality in your universe." He twisted the jumpdoor controls. "Thyone," McKie shouted. The jumpdoor's opening began moving toward McKie. I reply to McKie, the Caleban said. Cheo discontinues connectives. The jumpdoor continued moving toward McKie but he saw that Cheo appeared to be having trouble with the controls. McKie moved aside as the opening passed through the space where he had been. "Stop him," McKie called. Cheo stops himself, the Caleban said. McKie sensed a definite wave of compassion with the words. The jumpdoor opening turned on its axis, advanced once more on McKie. It moved a bit faster this time. McKie dodged aside, scattering enforcers. Why weren't the damned fools trying to get through the opening? Afraid of being cut up? He steeled himself to dive through the opening on the next pass. Cheo had been conditioned to the thought of fear now. He wouldn't expect attack from someone who feared him. McKie swallowed in a dry throat. He knew what would happen to him. The molasses delay in the vortal tube would give Cheo just enough time. McKie would lose both legs -- at the very least. He'd get through with a raygen, though, and Cheo would die. Given any luck, Abnethe could be found -- and she would die, too. Again the jumpdoor plunged toward McKie. He leaped, collided with an enforcer who had chosen the same instant to attack. They sprawled on hands and knees as the vortal tube slipped over them. McKie saw Cheo's gloating face, the hand jerking at the controls. He saw a control arm snap over, heard a distant crackling as the jumpdoor ceased to exist. Someone screamed. McKie felt himself considerably surprised to be still on hands and knees in the purple gloom of the Beachball's interior. He held his position, allowed his memory to replay that last glimpse of Cheo. It'd been a ghostly vision, smoky substance visible through the Pan Spechi's body -- and the visible substance had been that of the Beachball's interior. Discontinuity dissolves contract, the Caleban said. McKie climbed slowly to his feet. "What does that mean, Thyone?" Statement of fact with meaning intensity-truth only for Cheo and . companions, the Caleban said. Self cannot give meaning to Me Kie for substance of another. McKie nodded. "That universe of Abnethe's was her own creation," he murmured. "A figment of her imagination." Explain figment , the Caleban said. of Abnethe's death as a gradual dissolution of substance around and within him. Walls, floor, S'eye controls, ceiling, world -- everything faded into nonbeing. He felt all the haste of his existence swollen into one sterile instant. And he found himself for a transitory moment sharing with the shadows of the nearby Palenki and other more distant islands of movement a place of existence which the mystics of his own species had never contemplated. It was, however, a place which an ancient Hindu or a Buddhist might have recognized -- a place of Maya, illusion, a formless void possessed of no qualities. The moment passed abruptly and Cheo ceased to exist. Or it could be said that he discontinued in becoming one with the voidillusion. One cannot, after all, breathe an illusion or a void.  the Slatler Hilton, Boston, l or inlormation: Anthony Lewi'. # l n i t  Avenue, Belmont, Mass. #X.  March #-#, #. SI Con '#. t Hilton Inn. San Francisco Airport, California. Pro Guests ol Honor: Miriam Allen de lord and I . Hoi f man Priee. I an Ciuest of Honor: Felice Rolfe. 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For information: Robin Scott Wilson, English Department, Clarion State College, Clarion, Pa.  California. Guest of Honor: Jack Williamson; Fan Guest of Honor: Rick Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California #. Chatham Center Motor Lodge, Center Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Guest-of-Honor: Harlan Ellison; GoH Emeritus: Robert Silverberg. Features: Panels, parties, movies, banquet. Membership: # in advance; # at the door. For information: Suzanne Tompkins, # Bartlett Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #.  Memberships: Supporting, #; Atgia #.  aton Hotel, Toronto, Canada. Guestsof-Honor: Anne McCalffrey, Isaac Asimov. Membership: # in advance. For information: Peter Gill, # Glen Manor Drive, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  AL. In Heidelberg, West Germany. The accent of this con will be an international one, with fans and pros coming from all over the world. Guests-of Tubb (England) and Dr. Herbert W. Franke (Germany). Toastmaster: LesGermany. ( Continued from page # ) tury. It's a huge book, huge enough to justify the price of #. And to anyone except the most incurable completist, it should serve as an excellent sampling. There are # daily strips included, as well as a full-color section with # of the Sunday episodes. This represents almost four years of daily reading and a year and a quarter of the Sunday features. In addition, there is a spate of supplemental material. The editor, Robert C. Dille, tells how his father suggested the idea of the comic strip to writer Phil Nowlan and brought Dick Calkins in as illustrator. Ray Bradbury adds further history, along with a nostalgic appreciation. And to make everything clear, Nowlan and Calkins give a summary of everything they conceived for the #th Century. At the end of the book, the first script for the radio serial is presented, together with promotional material. Quite properly, the early years receive the most attention in the book. Almost all the strips from the first year arc included, together with all major episodes through #. Then there is a # transition piece, followed by samples of he work from # on, after the death of Nowlan: these are both written and drawn by Calkins. The full-color section (awkwardly stuck in the middle of the first year of daily strips) shows the art of Rick Yager, first with Nowlan's writing and then with his own. And what does it all add up to? This is a difficult question. I suspect part of the answer depends on how much the reader remembers of the strip and of the period. In any event, response is sure to vary from fascination to shocked annoyance. It's a mixed bag, and by no means what my memory of it made me expect. Of course, it's totally unfair to read a comic strip in book format. It was plotted and drawn to be read with each tiny section separated by a full day from the next. Cramming a year of strips in a few hours inevitably exaggerates any faults and ruins the pacing. Episodes that use the same trick situation -- such as some band of cowboys, Indians or gangsters left over into the #th Century -- become boringly repetitive on quick reading, though I cannot remember noticing this when the strip and I were both young. And the off-again-on-agpin love story was really not so silly when spread over months of reading, I'm sure. It may also seem unfair to approach the work with a mind attuned to a world forty years beyond the publishing traditions of its creation. But on this, I feel time may actually aid critical insight, and the later reading may well be thegenuinely fair one. Some of the crudities in the strip can never be forgiven. They probIF ably reflect an attitude common among readers in # -- so common as to be taken for granted without question -- but the attitude was still wrong. Here the book serves as a valuable historical reminder of how we got into some of our current men, but hardly as a beacon to guide our steps out of the errors oj our past. vision of the future. The Mongols are the villains originally. They are simply evil and vile, while Americans are mostly brave and noble (aside from Killer Kane, who sold out to the Mongols). Buck, as a man from the pure # American tradition, is naturally even more of a good guy than anyone else, but all native white Americans tend to pretty noble. And later, when we meet races from other worlds, we find that they also lack the nobility inherent in being American and White and Two-Fisted and Pure beyond any shred of self-doubt. In fact, most are so dratted pure that there is hardly a touch of individual character to them. One can only wonder how much influence such work might hac had on the jingoism that led us to intern our Japanese during World War II. And how many of our soldiers in Korea looked at the men they chose to call "Gooks" with attitudes colored by such antioriental feeling as one finds here? It may be that the attitude was already thoroughly imbued, and the comic strips were only a symptom; but certainly reinforcing such ideas could not have helped any. In some ways the art shows this distortion even more than the story material. The Asiatics are presented as stereotypes of the Yellow Menace. Every face must sneer, all canines must be too long, most faces must be adorned with long drooping mustaches (this was at a time when facial hair wasn't worn Even in the later strips, the Martians are recognizably evil. They are pock-marked, have faces pitted with acne, or show some other such unfailing sign of evil. The art, incidentally, does improve as time goes on. At the beginning, it was crude even for the period. The pictures of Buck and Wilma, Black Barney and Doctor Huer that we have in our mind must be from the Sunday features draw n by Rick Yager, which gradually influence the daily strip; certainly the earty black-and-w bites show' little resemblance to the characters I thought I remembered. All of this explains the shocked annoyance I mentioned. Yet there is also the undeniable fascination, though it is harder to understand. There is a flow of inventiveness in the earlier strips that makes up for much of the crudit). The devices shown for later science still seem fairly convincing (though the ideas of rocket speeds and orbits were ridiculous even in #). And there's a curious pleasure in watching the earliest crudeness smooth out gradually into a welloiled machine with set characters and a reliable set of plot devices, familiar yet still fun. It's a hard book to put down, and one well worth the price. Yet it has nothing to do with the history of science fiction. Once upon a time it took off from a common background of travel to the future and then travel through space. But from the earliest days, its character was not at all that which science fiction was developing. Buck Rogers was exactly what it was meant to be -- a comic strip. It was only science fiction in the sense that Jungle Jim was adventure fiction or Mandrake was fantasy. Flash Gordon's adventures were far closer to science fiction, and even Ally Oop often came much closer to our field. To see how far from real science fiction the strip was, we must go back to its origin as Philip Francis Nowlan conceived it. This, of course, occurred in a novelette published in Amazing Stories for # and entitled "The Airlords of Han" -- illustrated by Frank R. Paul. Fortunately, we can make the comparison. Nowlan's story and its sequel are again available in soft-cover edition -- Armageddon # (Ace, #c). If you are planning to buy or borrow the Chelsea House book, by all means invest in the Ace volume as well. Here things are alike only at the very beginning. Donald Wollheim indicates in a brief introduction that the plot of the strip follows the plot of Nowlan's original novelettes fairly closely during the first two years, but I Suspect it is his memory rather than his research speaking; my memory indicated the same until I had a chance to reread the comic strips. In the novelettes the name of the character is Anthony Rogers, but otherwise the initial situation is the same as the strip, including the meeting with Wilma Deering. In other respects, however, there is only the most vague and general similarity. The book is primitive science fiction, but it is unmistakably science fiction. Nowlan as a writer immediately began to .build a world. Here are none of the stereotype groups -- the cowboys and Indians who have stayed the same, but more so, for five hundred years. Instead he sets up a complex social system of rule among small organizations designed to make survival possible in a world overrun by the Han -- a seemingly Mongol people who have conquered the world and now exist in great cities, with the rural sections left to the survivors of the original population. He also sets up an extensive technology and social system for the Hans. Much of the handling is crude. IF Characters are wooden and not always believable -- as the Boss who voluntarily steps down with a cheer so Rogers can take over. There is a regrettable tendency for important action to occur while Tony Rogers is off-stage or for it to be merely summarized. And our old friend the Yellow Menace is apparent in the Han Empire. However, in this original Nowlan version, the Yellow Menace is not nearly so pat. The Han Emperor, in fact, must be considered a highly civilized and cultured man. He keeps Tony prisoner but without needless cruelty. In fact, he is probably the best drawn and most likable character in the book. It is made clear that the Han are a special mutation that occurred in one tiny section of Mongolia, not typical of Asiatics; and it is even hinted that they may not be Earth humans at all. t the end, Nowlan must have been aware of the trap he had worked himself into, since he tries to throw out the racial implication v This fails to overcome the racial bias of the book. But it's at lea't a token gesture, marking the road that science fiction was just starting to travel and which led to the realization that to be alien or different was not inherently to be evil. Science fiction eventually moved further away than any other bod) of literature from the concept that it is wrong to be different. Unfortunately, the change never occurred in the comic strip, underlying the lack of tie between it and genuine science fiction. Pavanne, by Keith Roberts (Ace Special, #c), also is a book made from novelettes previously published. But that is the only point of similarity between it and Nowlan's book. This is perhaps the most completely sophisticated book of science fiction I have read. In fact, I was not sure it was science fiction until I reached the last few pages. It was difficult at first to be sure it was not pure fantasythen it seemed to be speculative fiction about a what-if world -- and then it really did not matter. The basic idea is a world somewhat like ours but in which the history has gone differently . Elizabeth I was assassinated in #, and the results changed all history, most particularly that of the Church of Rome. This is covered succinctly in a page of  lologue, but it takes the whole book to make those changes fully apparent. To round out the picture, we are led through a strange love affair to the circles of civil power, of castled lords and ladies, where a woman who seems to tie everything together must make her gallant battle against the darker forces slowly emerging i n to our view in this world. We learn with her to despair of things as they are here and to strive for an otherwise we cannot have. And in the end, everything is stood on its head, turned upside down, and handed back to us with the key to the whole pictured world. It is as marvelously subtle an explanation as I've yet seen in any piece of writing. Every element is there, and yet it demands the utmost of the reader to rebuild the world he thought he had come to know into what and why it is. And, of course, in the end it is science fiction -- because it has used every ethic and resource of science fiction and most of the background science-fictioneers have spent decades developing. Still, there remains one episode that simply cannot be made to fit. There is a story -- the second "chapter" in the book -- of one of the signalers. By itself, it is one of the best bits to be found in the whole structure. Yet there is no way of accounting for it except to call it pure fantasy. As fantasy, it's fine. But the end "Got to going." "Jinx on jolly, Golly, Holly!" "Were it other, Bug, my brother!" "Holly crying. Sing her flying, Jugging, shouting." "Going outing." Now this was remarkable. Holly Harkel was crying when we came out of that burrow for the of the book with its implications about the girl involved with the signaler simply do not fit with the end of the story. I suspect that this episode was written as a magazine piece before the final shape of Roberts' world had grown clear in his mind. As it stands, the book demands two mutually conflicting abilities on the part of the reader. He must be able to read this isolated episode with a careless mind, letting the general picture soak in but most of the details vanish. For the rest of the book, and particularly for the final episodes, he must be ing attention to the writer, skip nothing and think things through precisely. If you want to try putting yourself through such a tricky course, this is a splendid book. If not, at least watch for more by Keith Roberts, who is writer of extraordinary promise.  ( Continued from page # ) (as it happened) last time. She was crying great goblin tears. I almost expected them to be green. amazingly the late Holly Harkel had come to look like the Shelni finally. She was a Shelni. "It is all the same with me now," she said this morning. "Would it be love if they should go and I should stay?" IF It is a sticky business. I tried to complain but those people were still ringing that bell and chanting, "All you little Pig-ShelniSingers come jump on the cart. Ride a tin can to Earth! Hey, Ben, look at them jump on the slaughter wagon!" "It was inexcusable," I said. "Surely you could tell a human from a Shelni." "Not that one," said a bellringer. "I tell you they all jumped funny-looking one who was crying. Sure, you can have her bones, if you can tell which ones they are." f have.Holly's bones. That is all. There was never a creature like her. And now it is over with. But it is not over! Singing Pig Breakfast Food Company, beware! There will be vengeance! It has been told.  by then he knew. He found Cappio's blood-smeared utility knife in a crevice of Cappio' s acceleration couch. Had Cappio possessed the iron resolve necessary to thrust it there in the few seconds before he bled to death? Or had it merely been a lucky break for him? Now there was no way of knowing. If it hadn't been for the hatch, Gibson thought, it would have worked. He'd have taken us with him. As it was, it hatf worked. Dead Cappio could not have the one good suit. Gibson would need it himself on Mars. He took Cappio out of it and put him into his own suit, sealing the leak as well as he could with tape from the aid kit. The odor persisted somehow, perhaps from the jammed disposer. Gibson used the auxiliary chemical toilet for his own wastes but it was too small to be of use ( Continued from page # ) in disposing of the bodies. As Mars grew huge in the observation port he cleaned every crevice of the couches and checked and rechecked the joints of the suits, using his nose as well as his eyes and trying not to look through the transparent face shields at Lorenz and Cappio. The landing was smooth, much smoother than Gibson had anticipated, and the rotation of the capsule had matched the Martian gravity so well that he found it difficult to detect any change. A pull of the emergency lever opened the hatch with a sharp detonation. Stiffly he climbed out and saw walking toward him the Moonbase psychologist. Dr. Mann spread his palms and said, "When I clap you will remember that this flight is only a simulation." Then he smelled Gibson.  Readers write -- and wrong! Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I am sorry that Mr. M B. Tepper in his letter to Worlds of If was not serious enough to understand my article about K. E. Tsiolkovsky ( K. E. T. ) and I am asking you kindly to publish the following elucidations. #. K.E.T. did not owe any of his philosophy to the Communist Revolution in Russia. He was born on Sept. #, #, in a provincial family of an overly modest, patriarchal character and at the time of Revolution (#) he was already # years old. #. Because of the idealistic character of his philosophy, many of his works were officially forbidden, ard after the publication of his Monism of the Universe his secretary was fired by Soviet Government. K.E.T. was himself arrested once and put into a Moscow prison for a short time -- he did not like to mention the episode in his conversations and correspondence. #. It needs to be understood that, in Russia especially, there exist usually two kinds of emigrants: the outer (exo-) emigrants who left Russia for other countries, and the inner (endo-) emigrants who remain in their fatherland and did not go abroad. As most of intellectuals, K.E.T. was a typical endo-emigrant. The endo-emigrants are usually the most silent people in relation to the internal governmental policy. Stalin was especially suspicious of taciturn people. Some " silent people ," for safety's sake, occasionally praised governmental enactments in order to appear to the authorities as "non-Party Bolsheviks ." Tsiolkovsky never did this -- also he never was a member of the Communist Party. He never praised communism and nothing of that ideology exists in his writings. #. Mr. Tepper says in his letter that K.E.T. had an inferiority complex. This is also wrong. K.E.T. was deaf, however, and said that his deafness helped him to concentrate. In his famous, now classical work. Exploration of Space by Means of Reactive Apparatus, he says frankly that he was the first man who gave the complete theory of rockets and who proved the possibility of their use in the space flights. This is not the claim of a man suffering from an inferiority complex. #. To the end of his life K.E. T. won some popularity, not because of any special sympathy from the government but because the time itself was already ripe for the astronautic investigations. Most works by K.E.T. before # were printed in Kaluga, as author's editions, in a provintial typography where the typesettings for higher mathmatics were absent. #. Certainly many points about the multitude of inhabited worlds in K.E.T.' s Monism of the Universe seem now obvious. However, he wrote them at a time when the works of de Fontenelle, C. Flammarion and those of other astronomers and philosophers were forgotten, at a time whenJ. Jeans even wrote that the presence of humanity on the Earth is an unique fact in the whole Universe. A. Tsvetikov PaloAlto, Cal. IF worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your i W six . v iu. pages, containing stories by such masters of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, John W. 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According to the mentality of Mitchell Courtenay of Fowler Schocken Associates, the trick is to persuade colonists to go to Venus, and once there, they will have to survive as best they can. One of the most savage and devastating attacks on modern consumer society and the advertising agents who are its high priests, The Space Merchants is uncomfortably prophetic. # pp. List Price... #. # Discount Price... # .# S-# mysterious space force that inhibits the world's intelligence. But suddenly, it's gone and overnight the intellect of every living creature is trebled. What are the consequences of such instant genius? These are the problems confronting Archie Brock, former near moron; Peter Corinth, physicist; and his no-longcr dumb wife. This provocative and absorbing book explores the ultimate problem of such a situation -- in a world free of the difficulties that has plagued mankind throughout history, what is man to do with his time? # pp. List Price... #. # Discount Price... # .# S-#A Asimov book... America's foremost science writer, takes you on a personalized guided tour of his first # books. This, his #th book, is an anthology of works selected by the author himself. It is a journey which acquaints the reader with a writer considered to be a genius, who delights in every aspect of life and has the capacity to make any subject he writes about both understandable and entertaining. Reviewers customarily greet Asimov publications with such adjectives as ling." Opus # is no exception. # pp. List Price... #. # Discount Price... #. # S-# Heinlein's Future History Stories. Twenty-five years ago Robert A. Heinlein began to write stories about an imaginary future that is fast becoming a reality. 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May.June# Vol. #, No. # Utuo # Bjler Jakobsson, iditor Prderik Pohl, Pditor Cmeritus Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Managing Pditor Lester del Bey, Feature Pditor #. C. Murphy, Circulation Director Franc L. Roggeri, Art Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director David Gerrold and Larry Niven # IF is published bimonthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The Company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books ( United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. Readers write -- and wrong! walked through a door without bothering to see if it was open. But I got through and met the most delightful man on the other side. Here he is. Dear Ejler: Permit me to point out an error in your letter column in IF  # (Mar. #), p. #, where you say "the Caucasoids are vastly outnumbered." The current anthropological figures for the earth's population break down thus: Caucasoids #, Mongoloids #, Negroids #. The other races (Bushmen, Australoids, Polynesians, c.) not classifiable under any of those # heads total less than #. The Caucasoids, however, consist of about half "light" Caucasoids , e.g. Europeans, North Africans,  their descendants, and half "dark" Caucasoids from southern Asia, i.e. India and the adjacent lands. Some of these are pretty black, but in all traits other than pigmentation (hair, facial contours, blood groups, c.) they are just as Caucasoid as thou and #. Kqor, L. Sprague de Camp I cannot speak for thee but Fm at least as much Finn as Swedish and Finns (and Magyars) in most ethnological tables Fve seen are listed as Asians. Caucasoids, however, are defined as "resembling or allied to" Caucasians and I both resemble and am allied to. We're in an interesting area here. You can get into some heatedly erudite arguments in Finland about the Finno-Asian bit and at least one eleventh or twelfth-century European scholar (not Finnish) wrote extensively and proved at least to his own satisfaction that the Finns were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Columbia University Library stacks devote a shelf as long as a lifetime to the Finno-Hungarian language and migrations, which seemed to me an awful lot of bother. How much of established ethnology is a matter of semantics, arbitrary classification and occasional wishful thinking? The question -- and answer -- are honest: I really don't know. One tabulation I recently saw lists Latins as extinct but admits the existence of some "Latin-like" peoples. Blond but otherwise Negroid hair has shown persistence in Norway. Caused speculation that, as I remember, tried but never really got off the ground. Thanks for the correction. I was sloppy. Ejler Jakobsson, meet Ejler Jakobsson: In the November, #, Galaxy, Ejler Jakobsson, editor, writes, (p. #): "Any... adman knows that he can make a rose smell like a stink weed by giving it a new name. Let's stop polluting our brains . " In the same issue, p. #, the blurbwriter ( if not Jakobsson, Jakobsson is nonetheless accountable) writes: "Frank (Herbert is Higher Education editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligence. Or did he say Riot Editor?" Sure. Higher education... students... political action (demonstrations  such)... rioh  which chain of implications says something about the value judgments of the man who wrote that blurb. ) Pollution. Right on. Someone needs an emission-control device. peace, brother J.M. Graetz Cambridge, Mass. The passage you quote is from Galaxy Stars, not from a blurb, and the words are Frank Herbert's in a phone interview. What I wrote on the editor's page was complete on that page. I don't know from where you pulled in your series of implications. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I have met many people in Calgary who read science fiction. Several of the # persons resident here have expressed interest in a science fiction group, provided that such an organization already existed. To date such a group has not been formed. One reader pointed out, "Why have a science fiction society?" Indeed that is the problem. I would like to have a solution to it. When readers bump into each other at the bookstore they often have a very pleasant discussion of authors, books, favorite magazines, etc. It might be nice to hold these conversations at more regular intervals in better surroundings. It is possible for a large crowd to attend the first meeting. But what happens then? What do science fiction groups DO that would justify meeting once a month? What advantages would be gained by being a member? Is it really worthwhile to have a group like this? I would like to know since there must be some reasonable excuse to form a group in Calgary. If you have any suggestions concerning the creation and maintenance of this type of society I would be pleased to hear from you. I would appreciate it if you could also forward my request to anyone you believe could be of help. Please accept my thanks in advance for any ideas you have on the situation. Sincerely, Brian Hval Alberta, Canada Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Many thanks for the improvements in Galaxy and If, including the printing method and. the artwork. The quality of the stories has stayed the same, with the best recent one being "Half Past Human." The distribution of your magazines has greatly improved since the change of ownership. Originally, they arrived here from six to nine weeks late -- they  Please turn to page #) Only one girl on Earth could bring out the beast in these two men! I I AM a redemption project for her. She lives on my floor of the hotel, a dozen rooms down the hall: a lady poet, private income. No, that makes her sound too old, a middle-aged eccentric. Actually she is no more than thirty. Taller than I am, with long kinky brown hair and a sharp, bony nose that has a bump on the bridge. Eyes are very glossy. A studied raggedness about her dress -- carefully chosen shabby clothes. I am in no position really to judge the sexual attractiveness of Earthfolk but I gather from remarks made by men living here that she is not considered goodlooking. I pass her often on my way to my room. She smiles fiercely at me. Saying to herself, no doubt. You poor lonely man. Let me help you bear the burden of your unhappy life. Let me show you the meaning of love, for I, too, know what it is like to be alone... Or words to that ettect. She's never actually said any such thing. But her intentions are transparent. When she sees me a kind of hunger comes into her eyes, part maternal, part (I guess) sexual, and her face takes on a wild crazy intensity. Her name is Elizabeth Cooke. "Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Knecht?" she asked me this morning as we creaked upward together in the ancient elevator. An hour later she knocked at my door. "Something for you to read," she said. "I wrote them." A sheaf of large yellow sheets stapled at the top -- poems printed in smeary blue mimeography. The Reality Trip, the collection was headed. Limited Edition: # Copies. "You can keep it if you like," she explained. "I've got lots more." She was wearing bright corduroy slacks and a flimsy pink shawl through which her breasts plainly showed. Small tapering breasts, not very functional-looking. When she saw me studying them her nostrils flared momentarily and she blinked her eyes three times swiftly. Tokens of lust? I read the poems. Is it fair for me to offer judgment on them? Even though I've lived on this planet eleven of its years, even though my command of colloquial English is quite good, do I really comprehend the inner life of poetry? I thought they were all rather bad. Earnest, plodding poems, capturing what they call slices of life. The world around her, the cruel, brutal, unloving city. Lamenting the barriers between people. The title poem began: He was on the reality trip. Big black man, bloodshot eyes, bad teeth. Eisenhower jacket, frayed. Smell of cheap wine. I guess a knife in his pocket. Looked at me mean. Criminal record. Rape, child-beating, possession of drugs. In his head saying, slavemistress IF bitch, and me in my head saying, black brother, let's freak in together, let's trip on love -- And so forth. Warm, direct emotion -- but is the urge to love all wounded things a sufficient center for poetry? I don't know. I did put her poems through the scanner and transmit them to Homeworld, although I doubt they'll learn much from them about Earth. It would flatter Elizabeth to know that while she has few readers here, she has acquired some ninety lightyears away. But of course I can't tell her that. She came back a short while ago. "Did you like them?" she asked. "Very much. You have sympathy for those who suffer." I think she expected me to invite her in. I was careful not to look at her breasts this time. T he hotel is on West #rd Street. It must be over a hundred years old -- the facade is practically baroque and the interior shows a kind of genteel decay. The place has a bohemian tradition. Most of its guests are permanent residents and many of them are artists, novelists, playwrights and such. I have lived here nine years. I know a number of the residents by name and they me -- but I have discouraged any real intimacy, naturally, everyone has respected that choice. I do not invite others into my room. Sometimes I let myself be invited to visit theirs, since one of my responsibilities on this world is to get to know something of the way Earthfolk live and think. Elizabeth is the first to attempt to cross the invisible barrier of privacy I surround myself with. I'm not sure how I'll handle that. She moved in about three years ago. Her attentions became noticeable perhaps ten months back and for the last five or six weeks she's been a great nuisance. Some kind of confrontation is inevitable: either I must tell her to leave me alone, or I will find myself drawn into a situation impossible to tolerate. Perhaps she'll find someone else to feel 'even sorrier for, before it comes to that. My daily routine rarely varies. I rise at seven. First Feeding. Then I clean my skin (my outer one, the Earthskin, I mean) and dress. From eight to ten I transmit data to Homeworld. Then I go out for the morning field trip: talking to people, buying newspapers, often some library research. At one I return to my room. Second Feeding. I transmit data from two to five. Out again, perhaps to the theater, to a motion picture, to a political meeting. I must soak up the flavor of this planet. Often to saloons -- I am equipped for ingesting alcohol, though of course I must get rid of it before it has been in my body very long -- and I drink and listen and sometimes argue. At midnight back to my room. Third Feeding. Transmit data from one to four in the morning. Then three hours of sleep and at seven the cycle begins anew. It is a comforting schedule. I don't know how many agents Homeworld has on Earth but I like to think that I'm one of the most diligent and useful. I miss very little. I've done good service and, as they say here, hard work is its own reward. I won't deny that I hate the physical discomfort of it and frequently give way to real despair over my isolation from my own kind. Sometimes I even think of asking for a transfer to Homeworld. But what would become of me there? What services could I perform? I have shaped my life to one end: that of dwelling among the Earthfolk and reporting on their ways. If I give that up, I am nothing. ical pain. Which is considerable. The gravitational pull of Earth is almost twice that of Homeworld. It makes for a leaden life for me. My inner organs always sagging against the lower rijn of my carapace. My muscles cracking with strain. Every movement a willed effort. My heart in constant protest. In my eleven years I have, as one might expect, adapted somewhat to the conditions -- I have toughened, I have thickened. I suspect that if I were transported instantly to Homeworld now I would be quite giddy, baffled by the lightness of everything. I would leap and soar and stumble and might even miss this crushing pull of Earth. Yet I doubt that. I suffer here; at all times the weight oppresses me. Not to sound too self-pitying about it. I knew the conditions in advance. I was placed in simulated Earth gravity when I volunteered and was given a chance to withdraw and I decided to go anyway. Not realizing that a week under double gravity is not the same thing as a lifetime. I could always hav.e stepped out of the simulation chamber. Not here. The eternal drag on every molecule of me. The pressure. My flesh is always in mourning. And the outer body I must wear. This cunning disguise. Forever to be swaddled in thick masses of synthetic flesh, smothering me, engulfing me. The soft slippery slap of it against the self within. The elaborate framework that holds it erect, by which I make it move -- a forest of struts and braces and servoactuators and cables, in the midst of which I must unendingly huddle, atop my little platform in the gut. Adopting one or another of various uncomfortable positions, constantly shifting and squirming, now jabbing myself on some awkardly placed projection, now trying to make my inflexible body flexibly to bend. Seeing the world by periscope through meIF chanical eyes. Enwombed in this mountain of meat. It is a clever thing -- it must look convincingly human, since no one has ever doubted me and it ages ever so slightly from year to year, graying a bit at the temples, thickening a bit at the paunch. It walks. It talks. It takes in food and drink when it has to. (And deposits them in a removable pouch near my leftmost arm.) And I within it. The hidden chessplayer. The invisible rider. If I dared I would periodically strip myself of this cloak of flesh and crawl around my room in my own guise. But it is forbidden. Eleven years now and I have not been outside my protoplasmic housing. I feel sometimes that it has come to adhere to me, that it is by now a part of me. In order to eat I must unseal it at the middle, a process that takes many minutes. Three times a day I unbutton myself so that I can stuff the food concentrates into my true gullet. Faulty design, I call that. They could just as easily have arranged it so I could pop the food into my Earthmouth and have it land in my own digestive tract. I suppose the newer models have that. Excretion is just as troublesome for me -- I unseal, reach in, remove the cubes of waste, seal my skin again. Down the toilet with them. A nuisance. And the loneliness! To look at the stars and know Homeworld is out there somewhere! To think of all the others, mating, chanting, dividing, abstracting, while I live out my days in this crumbling hotel on an alien planet, tugged down by gravity and locked within a cramped counterfeit body -- always alone, always pretending that I am not what I am and that I am what I am not, spying, questioning, recording, reporting, coping with the misery of solitude, hunting for the comforts of philosopTiy. In all of this there is only one real consolation, aside, that is, from the pleasure of knowing that I am of service to Homeworld. The atmosphere of New York City grows grimier every year. The streets are full of crude vehicles belching undigested hydrocarbons. To the Earthfolk this stuff is pollution and they mutter worriedly about it. To me it is joy. It is the only touch of Homeworld here, that sweet soup of organic compounds adrift in the air. It intoxicates me. I walk down the street breathing deeply, sucking the good molecules through my false nostrils to my authentic lungs. The natives must think I'm insane. Tripping on auto exhaust! Can I get arrested for overenthusiastic public breathing? Will they pull me in for a mental checkup? IF Elizabeth Cooke continues to waft wistful attentions at me. Smiles in the hallway. Hopeful gleam of the eyes. "Perhaps we can have dinner together some night soon, Mr. Knecht. I know we'd have so much to talk about. And maybe you'd like to see the new poems I've been doing." She is trembling. Eyelids flickering tensely; head held rigid on long neck. I know she sometimes has men in her room, so it can't be out of loneliness or frustration that she's cultivating me. And I doubt that she's sexually attracted to my outer self. I believe I'm being accurate when I say that women don't consider me sexually magnetic. No, she loves me because she pities me. The sad, shy bachelor at the end of the hall, dear unhappy Mr. Knecht -- can I bring some brightness into his dreary life? And so forth. I think that's how it is. Will I be able to go on avoiding her? Perhaps I should move to another part of the city. But I've lived here for so long; I've grown accustomed to this hotel. Its easy ways do much to compensate for the hardships of my post. And my familiar room. The huge many-paned window; the cracked green floor tiles in the bathroom; the lumpy patterns of replastering on the wall above my bed. The high ceiling, the funny chandelier. Things that I love. But of course I can't let her try to start an affair with me. We are supposed to observe Earthfolk, not to get involved with them. Our disguise is not that difficult to penetrate at close range. I must keep her away somehow. Or flee. II of us in this very hotel. As I learned through accident. At one this afternoon, returning from my morning travels: Elizabeth in the lobby, as though lying in wait for me, chatting with the manager. Rides up with me in the elevator. Her eyes looking into mine. "Sometimes I think you're afraid of me," she begins. "You mustn't be. That's the great tragedy of human life -- people shut themselves up behind walls of fear and never let anyone through, anyone who might care about.them and be warm to them. You've got no reason to be afraid of me." I do but how to explain that to her? To sidestep prolonged conversation and possible entanglement I get off the elevator one floor below the right one. Let her think I'm visiting a friend. Or a mistress. I walk slowly down the hall to the stairs, using up time, waiting so she will be in her room before I go up. A maid bustles by me. She thrusts her key into a door on the left: a rare faux pas for the usually competent help here, she forgets to knock before going in to make up the room. The door opens and the occupant, inside, stands revealed. A stocky, muscular man, naked to the waist. "Oh, excuse me," the maid gasps and backs out, shutting the door. But I have seen. My eyes are quick. The hairy chest is split, a dark gash three inches wide and some eleven inches long, beginning between the nipples and going past the navel. Visible within is the black shiny surface of a Homewprld carapace. My countryman, opening up for Second Feeding. Dazed, numbed, I stagger to the stairs and pull myself step by leaden step to my floor. No sign of Elizabeth. I stumble into my room and throw the bolt. Another of us here? Well, why not? I'm not the only one. There may be hundreds in New York alone. But in the same hotel? I remember now. I've seen him occasionally -- a silent, dour man, tense, hunted-looking, unsociable. No doubt I appear the same way to others. Keep the world at a distance. I don't know his name or what he is supposed to do for a living. We are forbidden to make contact with fellow Homeworlders except in case of extreme emergency. Isolation is a necessary condition of our employment. I may not introduce myself to him -- I may not seek his friendship. It is worse now for me, knowing that he is here, than when I was entirely alone. The things we could reminisce about! The friends we might have in common! We could reinforce one another's endurance of the gravity, the discomfort of our disguises, the vile climate. But no. I must pretend I know nothing. The rules. The harsh, unbending rules. I to go about my business, he his; if we meet, no hint of my knowledge must pass. So be it. I will honor my vows. But it may be difficult. He goes by the name of Swanson. Been living in the hotel eighteen months -- a musician of some sort, according to the manager. "A very peculiar man. Keeps to himself. No small talk, never smiles. Defends his privacy. The other day a maid barged into his room without knocking and I thought he'd sue. Well, we get all sorts here." The manager thinks my Homeworlder may actually be a member of one of the old European royal families, living in exile. Or something similarly romantic. The manager would be surprised. IF I defend my privacy too. From Elizabeth, another assault on it. In the hall outside my room. "My new poems," she said. "In case you're interested." And then: "Can I come in? I'd read them to you. I love reading out loud." And: "Please don't always seem so terribly afraid of me. I don't bite, David. Really I don't. I'm quite gentle." "I'm sorry." "So am I." Anger, now, lurking in her shiny eyes, her thin taut lips. "If you want me to leave you alone -- say so, I will. But I want you to know how cruel you're being. I don't demand anything from you. I'm just offering some friendship. And you're refusing. Do I have a bad smell? Am I so ugly? Is it my poems you hate and you're afraid to tell me?" "Elizabeth -- " "We're only on this world such a short time. Why can't we be kinder to each other while we are? To love, to share, to open up. The reality trip. Communication, soul to soul." Her tone changed. An artful shading. "For all I know, women turn you off. I wouldn't put anybody down for that. We've all got our ways. But it doesn't have to be a sexual thing, you and me. Just talk. Like, opening the channels. Please? Say no and I'll never bother you again, but don't say no, please. That's like shutting a door on life, David. And when you do that you start to die." Persistent. I should tell her to go to hell. But there is the loneliness. There is her obvious sincerity. Her warmth, her eagerness to pull me from my lunar isolation. Can there be harm in it? Knowing that Swanson is nearby, so close yet sealed from me by iron commandments, has intensified my sense of being alone. I can risk letting Elizabeth get closer to me. It will make her happy. It may make me happy. It could even yield infotmation valuable to Homeworld. Of course I must still maintain certain barriers. "I don't mean to be unfriendly. I think you've misunderstood Elizabeth. I haven't really been rejecting you. Come in. Do come in." Stunned, she enters my room. The first guest ever. My few books, my modest furnishings, the ultrawave transmitter impenetrably disguised as a piece of sculpture. She sits. Skirt far above the knees. Good legs, if I understand the criteria of quality correctly. I am determined to allow no sexual overtures. If she tries anything I'll resort to -- I don't know -- hysteria. "Read me your new poems," I say. She opens her portfolio. Reads. In the midst of the hipster night of doubt and Emptiness, when the bad-trip god came to me with Cold hands,  looked up and shouted yes at the Stars. And yes and yes again. I groove on yes; The devil grooves on no. And I availed for you to Say yes, and at last you did. And the world said The stars said the trees snid the grass said the Sky said the streets said yes and yes and yes -- She is ecstatic. Her face is flushed. Her eyes are joyous. She has broken through to me. After two hours, when it becomes obvious that I am not going to ask her to go to bed with me, she leaves. Not to wear out her welcome. "I'm so glad I was wrong about you, David," she whispers. "I couldn't believe you were really a life-denier. And you're not." Ecstatic. I AM getting into very deep water. We spend an hour or two together every night. Sometimes in my room, sometimes in hers. Usually she comes to me but now and then, to be polite, I seek her out after Third Feeding. By now I've read all her poetry; we talk instead of the arts in general, politics, racial problems. She has a lively, well-stocked, disorderly mind. Though she probes constantly for information about me, she realizes how sensitive I am and quickly withdraws when I parry her. Asking about my work: I reply vaguely that I'm doing research for a book and when I don't amplify she drops it, though she tries again, gently, a few nights later. She drinks a lot of wine and offers it to me. I nurse one glass through the whole visit. Often she suggests we go out together for dinner. I explain that I have digestive problems and prefer to eat alone. She takes this in good grace but immediately resolves to help me overcome those problems. Soon she is asking me to eat with her again. There is an excellent Spanish restaurant right in the hotel, she says. She drops troublesome questions. Where was I born? Did I go to college? Do I have family somewhere? Have I ever been married? Have I published any of my writings? I improvise evasions. Nothing difficult about that, except that never before have I allowed anyone on Earth such sustairted contact with me, so prolonged an opportunity to find inconsistencies in my pretended identity. What if she sees through? And sex. Her invitations grow less subtle. She seems to think that we ought to be having a sexual relationship simply because we've become such good friends. Not a matter of passion as much as one of communication -- we talk, sometimes we take walks together, we should do that together too. But of course it's impossible. I have the external organs but not the capacity to use them. Wouldn't want her touching my false skin in any case. How to deflect her? If I IF declare myself impotent she'll demand a chance to try to cure me. If I pretend homosexuality she'll start some kind of straightening therapy. If I simply say she doesn't turn me on physically she'll be hurt. The sexual thing is a challenge to her, as merely getting me to talk with her once was. She often wears the transparent pink shawl that reveals her breasts. Her skirts are hip-high. She doses herself with aphrodisiac perfumes. She grazes my body with hers 'henever opportunity arises. The tension mounts. She is determined to have me. I have said nothing about her in my reports to Homeworld. Though I do transmit some of the psychological data I have gathered by observing her. "Could you ever admit you were in love with me?" she asked tonight. And she asked, "Doesn't it hurt to repress your feelings all the time? To sit there locked up inside yourself like a prisoner?" And: "There's a physical side of life too, David. I don't mind so much the damage you're doing to me by ignoring it. But I worry about the damage you're doing to you." Crossing her legs. Hiking her skirt even higher. We are heading toward a crisis. I should never have let this begin. A torrid summer has descended on the city and in hot weather my nervous system is always at the edge of eruption. She may push me too far. I might ruin everything. I should apply for transfer to Homeworld before I cause trouble. Maybe I should confer with Swanson. I think what is happening now qualifies as an emergency. Elizabeth stayed past midnight tonight. I had to ask her finally to leave: work to do. An hour later she pushed an envelope under my door. Newest poems. Love poems. In a shaky hand. David: You mean so much to me. You mean the stars and nebulas. Cant you let me show my love? Cant you accept happiness? Think about it. I adore you. What have I started?     #F. today. The fourth successive day of intolerable heat. Met Swanson in the elevator at lunchtime, nearly blurted the truth about myself to him. I must be more careful. But my control is slipping. Last night in the worst of the heat I was tempted to strip off my disguise. I could no longer stand being locked in here, pivoting and ducking to avoid all the machinery festooned about me. Resisted the temptation just barely. Somehow I am more sensitive to the gravity too. I have the illusion that my carapace is developing cracks. Almost collapsed in the street this afternoon. All I need: heat exhaustion, whisked off to the hospital, routine fluoroscope exam. You have a very odd skeletal structure, Mr. Knecht... Indeed. Dissecting me, next, with three thousand medical students looking on. And then the United Nations called in. Menace from outer space. Yes. I must be more careful. I must be more careful. I must be more... Ill N OW I've done it. Eleven years of faithful service destroyed in a single wild moment. Violation of the Fundamental Rule. I hardly believe it. How was it possible that I -- that I -- with my respect for my responsibilities -- that I could have -- even considered, let alone actually done -- But the weather was terribly hot. The third week of the heat wave. I was stifling inside my false body. And the gravity -- was New York having a gravity wave too? That terrible pull, worse than ever. Bending my internal organs out of shape. Elizabeth a tremendous annoyance, passionate, emotional, teary, poetic, giving me no rest, pleading for me to burn with a brighter flame. Declaring her love in sonnets, in rambling hip epics, in haiku. Spending two hours in my room, crouched at my feet, murmuring about the hidden beauty of my soul. "Open yourself and let love come in," she whispered. "It's like giving yourself to God. Making a commitment, breaking down all walls. Why not? For love's sake, David, why not?" I couldn't tell her why not and she went away. But about midnight she was back knocking at my door. I let her in. She wore an ankle-length silk housecoat, gleaming, threadbare. "I'm stoned," she said hoarsely, voice an octave too deep. "I had to bust three joints to get up the nerve. But here I am. David, I'm sick of making the turnoff trip. We've been so wonderfully close and then you won't go the last stretch of the way." A cascade of giggles. "Tonight you will. Don't fail me. Darling." Drops the housecoat. Naked underneath it. Narrow waist, bony hips, long legs, thin thighs, blue veins crossing her breasts. Her hair wild and kinky. A sorceress. A seeress. Berserk. Approaching me, eyes slit-wide, mouth open, tongue flickering snakily. How fleshless she is! Beads of sweat glistening on her flat chest. Seizes my wrists, tugs me roughly toward the bed. We tussle a little. Within my false body I throw switches, nudge levers. I am stronger than she is. I pull free, breaking her hold with an effort. She stands flatfooted in front of me, glaring, eyes fiery. So vulnerable, so sad in her nudity. And yet so fierce. "David! David! David!" Sobbing. Breathless. Pleading with her eyes and the tips of her breasts. Gathering her strength -- now she makes the next lunge but I see it coming and let her topple past me. She lands on the bed, burying her face in the pillow, clawing at the sheet. "Why? Why why why In a minute we will have the manager in here. With the police. "Am I so hideous? I love you, David, do you know what that word means? Love. Love." Sits up. Turns to me. Imploring. "Don't reject me," she whispers." I couWn't take that. You know, I just wanted to make you happy. I figured I could be the one, only I didn't realize how unhappy you'd make me. And you just stand there. And you don't say anything. What are you, some kind of machine?" "I'll tell you what I am," I said. That was when I went sliding into the abyss. All control lost, all prudence gone. My mind so slathered with raw emotion that survival itself means nothing. I must make things clear to her, is all. I must show her. At whatever expense. I strip off my shirt. She glows, no doubt thinking I will let IF myself be seduced. My hands slide up and down my bare chest, seeking the catches and snaps. I go through the intricate, cumbersome process of opening my body. Deep within myself something is shouting, No No No No No... but I pay no attention. The heart has its reasons. Hoarsely: "Look, Elizabeth. Look at me. This is what I am. Look at me and freak out. The reality trip." My chest opens wide. I push myself forward, stepping between the levers and struts, emerging halfway from the human shell I wear. I have not been this far out of it since the day they sealed me in, on Homeworld, I let her see my gleaming carapace. I wave my eyestalks around. I allow some of my claws to show. "See? See? Big black crab from outer space. That's what you love, Elizabeth. That's what I am. David Knecht's just a costume and this is what's inside it." I have gone insane. "You want reality? Here's reality, Elizabeth. What good is the Knecht body to you? It's a fraud. It's a machine. Come on, come closer. Do you want to kiss me? Should I get on you and make love?" During this episode her face has displayed an amazing range of reactions. Open-mouthed disbelief at first, of course. And frozen horror -- gagging sounds in throat, jaws agape, eyes wide and rigid. Hands fanned across breasts. Sudden modesty in front of the alien monster? But then, as the familiar Knecht-voice, now bitter and impassioned, continues to flow from the black thing within the sundered chest, a softening of her response. Curiosity. The poetic sensibility taking over. Nothing human is alien to me: Terence, quoted by Cicero. Nothing alien is alien to me. Eh? She will accept the evidence of her eyes. "What are you? Where did you come from?" And I say, "I've violated the Fundamental Rule. I deserve to be plucked and thinned. We Ye not supposed to reveal ourselves. If we get into some kind of accident that might lead to exposure, we're supposed to blow ourselves up. The switch is right here." She comes close and peers around me, into the cavern of David Knecht's chest. "From some other planet? Living here in disguise?" She understands the picture. Her shock is fading. She even laughs. "I've seen worse than you on acid," she says. "You don't frighten me now, David. David? Shall I go on calling you David?" This is unreal and dreamlike to me. I have revealed myself, thinking to drive her away in terror; she is no longer aghast, and smiles at my strangeness. She kneels to get a better look. I move back a short way. Eyestalks fluttering -- I am uneasy, I have somehow lost the upper hand in this encounter. She says, "I knew you were unusual, but not like this. But it's all right. I can cope. I mean, the essential personality, that's what I fell in love with. Who cares that you're a crab-man from the Green Galaxy? Who cares that we can't ever be real lovers? I can make that sacrifice. It's your soul I dig, David. Go on. Close yourself up again. You don't look comfortable this way." The triumph of love. She will not abandon me, even now. Disaster. I crawl back into Knecht and lift his arms to his chest to seal it. Shock is glazing my consciousness: the enormity, the audacity. What have I done? Elizabeth watches, awed, even delighted. At last I am together again. She nods. "Listen," she tells me, "you can trust me. I mean, if you're some kind of spy, checking out the Earth, I don't care. I dont care. I won't tell anybody. Pour it all out, David. Tell me about yourself. Don't you see? This is the biggest thing that ever happened to me. A chance to show that love isn't just physical, isn't just chemistry, that it's a soul trip, that it crosses not just racial lines but the lines of the whole damned species, the planet itself -- " It took several hours to get rid of her. A soaring, intense conversation, Elizabeth doing most of the talking. She putting forth theories of why I had come to Earth, I nodding, denying, amplifying, mostly lost in horror at my own perfidy and barely listening to her monolog. And the humidity turning me into rotting rags. Finally: "I'm down from the pot, David. And all wound up. I'm going out for a walk. Then back to my room to write for a while. To put this night into a poem before I lose the power of it. But I'll come to you again by dawn, all right? That's maybe five hours from now. You'll be here? You won't do anything foolish? Oh, I love you so much, David! Do you believe me? Do you?" When she was gone I stood a long while by the window, trying to reassemble myself. Shattered. Drained. Remembering her kisses, her lips running along the ridge marking the place where my chest opens. The fascination of the abomination. She will love me even if I am crustaceous beneath. I had to have help. I went to Swanson's room. He was slow to respond to my knock -- busy transmitting, no doubt. I could hear him within but he didn't answer. "Swanson?" I called. "Swanson?" Then I added the distress signal in the Homeworld tongue. He rushed to the door. Blinking, IF suspicious. "It's all right," I said. "Look, let me in. I'm in big trouble." Speaking English. But I gave him the distress signal again. "How did you know about me?" he asked. "The day the maid blundered into your room while you were eating, I was going by. I saw." "But you aren't supposed to -- " "Except in emergencies. This is an emergency." He shut off his ultrawave and listened intently to my story. Scowling. He didn't approve. But he wouldn't spurn me. I had been criminally foolish but I was of his kind, prey to the same pains, the same lonelinesses, and he would help me. "What do you plan to do now?" he asked. "You can't harm her. It isn't allowed." "I don't want to harm her. Just to get free of her. To make her fall out of love with me." "How? If showing yourself to her didn't -- " "Infidelity," I said. "Making her see that I love someone else. No room in my life for her. That'll drive her away. Afterward it won't matter that she knows -- who'd belaugh and tell her to lay off the tachment to me I'm finished." "Love someone else? Who?" "When she comes back to my room at dawn," I said, "she'll find the two of us together, dividing and abstracting. I think that'll do it, don't you?" S O I deceived Elizabeth with Swanson. The fact that we both wore male human identities was irrelevant, of course. We went to my room and stepped out of our disguises -- a bold, dizzying sensation -- and suddenly we were just two Homeworlders again, receptive to one another's needs. I left the door unlocked. Swanson and I crawled up on my bed arid began the chanting. How strange it was after these years of solitude to feel those vibrations again! And how beautiful. Swanson's vibrissae touching mine. The interplay of harmonies. An underlying sternness tahis technique -- he was contemptuous of me for my idiocy and rightly so -- but once we passed from the chanting to the dividing all was forgiven. And as we moved into the abstracting it was truly sublime. We climbed through an infinity of climactic emptyings. Dawn crept upon us and found us A knock at the door. Elizabeth. "Come in," I said. A dreamy, ecstatic look on her face. Fading instantly when she saw the two of us entangled on the bed. A questioning frown. "We've been mating," I explained. "Did you think I was a complete hermit?" She looked IF from Swanson to me, from me to Swanson. Hand over her mouth. Eyes anguished. I turned the screw a little tighter. "I couldn't stop you from falling in love with me, Elizabeth. But I really do prefer my own kind. As should have been obvious." "To have her here now, though -- when you knew I was coming back -- " "Not her, exactly. Not him exactly either, though." " -- so cruel, David! To ruin such a beautiful experience'" Holding forth sheets of paper with shaking hands. "A whole sonnet cycle," she said. "About tonight. How beautiful it was and all. And now -- and now -- " Crumpling the pages. Hurling them across the room. Turning. Running out, sobbing furiously. Hell hath no fury like. "David!" A smothered cry. And slamming the door.  # She was back in ten minutes. Swanson and I hadn't quite finished donning our bodies yet -- we were both still unsealed. As we worked we discussed further steps to take. He felt honor demanded that I request a transfer back to Homeworld, having terminated my usefulness here through tonight's indiscreet revelation. I agreed with him to some degree but was reluctant to leave. Despite the bodily torment of life on Earth I had come to feel I belonged here. Then Elizabeth entered, radiant. "I mustn't be so possessive," she announced. "So bourgeois. share my love." Embracing Swanson. Embracing me. "A menage a trois"' she said. "I won't mind that you two are having a physical relationship. As long as you don't shut me out of your lives completely. I mean, David, we could never have been physical anyway, right, but we can have the other aspects of love. And we'll open ourselves to your friend also. Yes? Yes? Yes?" Swanson and I both put in applications for transfer, he to Africa, I to Homeworld. It would be some time before we received a reply. Until then we were at her mercy. He was blazingly angry with me for involving him in this but what choice had I had? Nor could either of us avoid Elizabeth. We were at her mercy. She bathed both of US' in shimmering waves of tender emotion; wherever we turned, there she was, incandescent with love. Lighting up the darkness of our lives. You poor lonely creatures. Do you suffer much in our gravity? What about the heat? And the winters. Is there a custom of marriage on your planet? Do yon have poetry? A happy threesome. We went to the theater together. To concerts. Even to parties in Greenwich Village. "My friends," Elizabeth said, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that she was living with both of us. Faintly scandalous doings; she loved to seem daring. Swanson was sullenly obliging, putting up with her antics but privately haranguing me for subjecting him to all this. Elizabeth got out another mimeographed booklet of poems, dedicated to both of us. Triple Tripping, she called it. Flagrantly erotic. I quoted a few of the poems in one of my reports to Homeworld, then lost heart and hid the booklet in the closet. "Have you heard about your transfer yet?" I asked Swanson at least twice a week. He hadn't. Neither had I. Autumn came. Elizabeth, burning her candle at both ends. Iodised gaunt and feverish. "I have never knon such happiness," she announced frequently, one hand clasping Swanson, the other me. "I never think about the strangeness of you any more. I think of you only as people. Sweet, wonderful, lonely people. Here in the darkness of this horrid city." And she once said, "What if everybody here is like you and I'm the only one who's really human? But that's silly. You must be the only ones of your kind here. The advance scouts. Will your planet invade ours? I do hope so! Set everything to rights. The reign of love and reason at last!" "How long will this go on?" Swanson muttered. At the end of October his transfer came through. He left without saying goodbye to either of us and without leaving a forwarding address. Nairobi? Addis Ababa? Kinshasa? having him around to share the burden of Elizabeth. Now the full brunt of her affection fell on me: My work was suffering. I had no time to file my reports properly. And I lived in fear of her gossiping. What was she telling her Village friends? You know David? He's not really a man, you know. Actually inside him there's a kind of crab-thing from another solar system. But what does that matIF ter? Love's a universal phenomenon. The truly loving person doesn't draw limits around the planet.) I longed for my release. To go home, to accept my punishment, to shed my false skin. To empty my mind of Elizabeth. My reply came through the ultrawave on November thirteenth. Application denied. I was to remain on Earth and continue my work as before. Transfers to Homeworld were granted only for reasons of health. I debated sending a full account of my treason to Homeworld and thus bringing about my certain recall. But I hesitated, overwhelmed with despair. Dark brooding seized me. "Why so sad?" Elizabeth asked. What could I say? That my attempt at escaping from her had failed. "I love you," she said. "I've never felt so real before." Nuzzling against my cheek. Fingers knotted in my hair. A seductive whisper. "David, open yourself up again. Your chest, I mean. I want to see the inner you. To make sure I'm not frightened of it. Please? You've only let me see you once." And then, when I had: "May I kiss you, David?" I was appalled. But I let her. She was unafraid. Transfigured by happiness. She is a cosmic nuisance but I fear I'm getting to like her. Can I leave her? I wish Swanson had not vanished. I need advice. iK-tac-tK! Spandau bullets raved past G-#'s Spad as its mighty Hisso whined the plane into a turn, bringing his guns to bear on the hapless Fokker Well, space opera it wasn't, but #-# month from Berkley-bit a lot of the same nerve-ends as did the liveiidr puip SF of those bygone years And anyhow, what about Herr Doktor Kreuger and those giant bats... or the good Doktor's notion of transplanting cobra eyes into pilots' heads, they should see in the dark? There's science for you! Berkley April releases (S#, #) Laumer(S#, #) If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Ave.,New York, N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have complete freedom of choice in pricing these books for resale to others. Either I break with Elizabeth or I break with Homeworld. This is absurd. I find new chasms of despondency every day. I am unable to do my work. I have requested a transfer once again, without giving details. The first snow of the winter today. Application denied.  # "When I found you with Swanson," she said, "it was a terrible shock. An even bigger blow than when you ftrst came out of your chest. I mean, it was startling to find out you weren't human but it didn't hit me in any emotional way -- it didn't threaten me. But then to come back a few hours later and find you with one of your own kind, to know that you wanted to shut me out, that I had no place in your life -- only we worked it out, didn't we?" Kissing me. Tears of joy in her eyes. How did this happen? Where did it all begin? Existence was once so simple. I have tried to trace the chain of events that brought me from there to here and I cannot. I was outside of my false body for eight hours today. The longest spell so far. Elizabeth is talking of going to the islands with me for the winter. A secluded cottage that her friends will make available. Of course, I must not leave my post without permission. And it takes months simply to get a reply. Let me admit the truth: I love her. January #. The new year begins. I have sent my resignation to Homeworld and have destroyed my ultrawave equipment. The links are broken. Tomorrow, when the city offices are open, Elizabeth and I will go to get the marriage license.  IF His flight companion was a brain with a built-in nightmare realer than dreams! The ship floated huge in space, a black leviathan against the stars, infinitely menacing. He watched the rear viewscreen fear-fascinated as he thrust at the controls, pushing hard, although the lever was at its extremity. Fingers of terror caressed the back of his neck -- willing the little scout to go faster, accelerate, get away from the monster at his back. But the acceleration Avas imperceptible, as though his craft were unable to break away from the gravitational pull of the giant freighter. As he stared at the screen it seemed in his imagination that the freighter was growing in size rather than diminishing. He pumped the levers, striving for more thrust. The vibration of the rockets altered. The little ship shuddered momentarily, hesitated. The starboard motor cut out and, as he watched, the vast bulk slid gradually off the rear screen. Feverishly he worked the attitude controls, striving uselessly to correct the wide arc. And presently the freighter slid into the forward screen like a killer whale moving in. He didn't scream. His lips moved soundlessly as the freighter grew and slowly, in a vivid carmine flare, exploded -- disintegrating in a great cloud of expanding debris and white flame. Then he screamed hoarsely -- again and again -- as the scout plunged into the crimson fireball. DeGrazza, still screaming, screamed himself into consciously ness and bright light as the sun streamed through the window of his bedroom, crimson through his eyelids. Altairids have. lost their A second ship in a week. Lost without trace somewhere within their asteroid belt. They've got to blame someone, so they blame Galactic Computers. Sometimes I wonder whether we ought to stick to earthbound computers ... You're not looking fresh this morning, DeGrazza. Rough night?" "I've known better." "I can let Robins handle it if you like -- but I wouldn't have brought you back from leave if it weren't important." Cobb eyed DeGrazza critically, noting the inflamed eyelids and the dark shadows beneath. I hope he isn't cracking up. Sometimes Cobb found it difficult to maintain his self-inflicted reputation as the tough-guy boss of Galactic Computers -- especially when he saw good men, like DeGrazza exhibiting signs of nerves and tension from overwork. "It's all right." DeGrazza made a conscious effort to pull himself together. "The Vegan freighter business shook me up a bit, I guess. And it wasn't our computer that failed to regulate the pile," he added bitterly. "Those bloody Vegans had bypassed the control to get more power. I see it now!" IF "I read your report," Cobb said in sympathetic tones, hating himself for a hypocritical bastard. But he had to have DeGrazza back on this job. "You got a rough deal." A rough deal. Nobody, thought DeGrazza, knew the full details of that final ten minutes aboard the freighter in orbit around Earth, when the Vegans had abandoned ship leaving him alone to deal with the runaway pile. As the captain left hastily he had informed DeGrazza that if the ship were lost. Galactic Computers would be made to foot the bill. Then, alone in the deserted freighter, he had found the overheated linkage fitted by the Vegans themselves, warped and impossible to shift. He had left the ship with minutes to spare and the explosion had been seen by half the Earth. The outcome was still DeGrazza's word against the Vegans. "So what's the job this time?" he asked resignedly, wondering why he didn't quit. The answer was obvious. Mary made sure they lived to the limits of their means; the kids' education cost a fortune -- the job paid well. "Quite simple. You take a trip in an Altairid hopper as co-pilot. Keep your eyes open. See if anything suggests itself to you. It's quite a short journey from Altair Six to Eight, through the asteroid belt. Watch out for those asteroids -- they're mostly uncharted." "Our computer ought to handle that easily. It's radar-coupled." "The Altairids have put in a modification," Cobb informed him mildly, bracing himself for the explosion. It came. When DeGrazza had exhausted his extensive vocabulary he asked what modification? "They're nervous folk, the Altairids. They've duplicated the control system, using an Altairid brain." "You mean an organic brain?" asked DeGrazza in some disgust. This type of organic-mechanical link-up was prevalent among various alien species. They considered it progress toward the day when an intelligent being would employ thought alone to control his environment. "Uh -- yes. It's fitted in parallel with our computer. Receives the same instructions from the keyboard, radar and so on, on duplicated wiring -- but does nothing unless positive instruction is received, either from pilot or radar, that the computor is making a mistake. Then it can override our equipment." "So the brain is superfluous," commented DeGrazza. "I should have thought so but the Altairids think otherwise. They say that if our computer should break down in an emergency, say due to an overload in the input, the brain is quick. It can receive input without a keyboard." "How's that?" "Oh, didn't you know?" Cobb's tone was innocent. "The Altairids are telepathic." He eyed DeGrazza blandly. "That's all I need," muttered DeGrazza in disgust. "To have one of those weirdies picking my mind while I'm trying to stop an argument between our computer and their blasted brain:" Cobb remarked, "So you've come to the same conclusion. Somewhere there's a conflict between the computer and the brain. Maybe over a certain type of instruction." "If I notice any trouble brewing up between them," grated DeGrazza savagely, "I'll put a bullet though that brain." But you cant do that, DeGrazza, because preservation of equipment comes before preservation of self They say because an examination of faulty gear may yield information to save hundreds of lives but you know they are lying. The machine has replaced the man -- therefore it is more valuable and must be saved first. But the brain is organic. What is the order of precedence here? Earth to Altair but hyperspace journey left him with little time for dreaming. He was met at the pad and escorted to the offices of Altair Hoppers. The Altairids were humanoid -- tall, gentle people with luminous eyes and they looked at him, at his uncouth, squat, bearded form as though he were a murderer. He wondered what they were thinking -- what signals flashed from mind to mind of the reception committee, as they met DeGrazza, the embodiment of the company whose computers had lured their colleagues to death among the asteroids. DeGrazza, your guilt is showing. These men can read your mind. The computers are foolproof -- think that if you can! Toward the end of the second day of the seven-day hop DeGrazza tried an experiment, first ensuring that the Altairid pilot was safely asleep. He glanced at the forward viewscreen, saw nothing untoward apart from the occasional streak of an outlying pebble from the asteroid belt. The cabin of the hopper was tiny, the bulk of the large ship being taken up with cargo space for slow-speed interplanetary trading. The two seats, pilot's and copilot's, were side by side, facing a common console. Set into the fascia of the console, in addition to the controls, were the forward and rear viewscreens and behind it, between the instruments and the nose of the ship, were the radar, the Galactic's computer and, presumably, the brain. IF DeGrazza reached forward and punched a random series of directions into the computer keyboard, watching the gyroscopic DF needles carefully. The ship appeared to hesitate, lurched slightly -- then the needles steadied as the brain, sensing through the radar no obstacles ahead, corrected the erroneous data and brought the ship back on course. First round to the Altairids. DeGrazza sat back and contemplated. From the information supplied by the Altairids he had gathered that the brains used were, in effect, hypnotized before installation and programed to respond only when their subconscious registered an unexpected deviation. Thus they would normally be alert only when the ships were among the larger asteroids and course corrections were frequent. Otherwise their higher thinking capabilities were shut down. A brain could not therefore ponder to itself for years in a lonely, inactive void and thereby go insane. Theoretically. The brain, he told himself, was an organic computer, nothing more. Moreover, it could only think in terms of figures, so they said. So why had two ships crashed among the asteroids? Was the ship's brain thinking a few moments ago? Did the brain know horror and bewilderment as the ship veered insanely off course, a madman at the controls? troubleshooter Steady, DeGrazza. It's quite possible that the brain can read your mind and had anticipated the test you proposed before your fingers hit the keys. But that should not be possible because the brain cannot conceive abstract ideas -- only digits. How do you express fear in numbers? Does the brain resent the computer in some mathematical fashion? The cabin was very small, womblike -- the feeling that there were more than two intelligencies present was claustrophobic. How many can think, and how do they think? DeGrazza, Altairid, brain, computer. Everywhere a conflict. The ship lurched again, suddenly and violently, and this time DeGrazza hadn't touched the controls. Again came the jolt -- he stared at the screen but could see nothing to account for the deviation. "What's happening?" The Altairid was alert, grasping the manual attitude controls, peering at the gyro needles. Quickly he brought the ship back on course. "I don't know," admitted DeGrazza. "She suddenly went berserk. I didn't touch anything." "Then the computer suffered a malfunction," stated the alien with underlying satisfaction. "It's fortunate that this didn't happen among the asteroids proper." DeGrazza went on the defensive. "Perhaps the brain went haywire." "If I had been in your position I would have tested the brain during my sleep period," remarked the Altairid shrewdly. "I imagine you did so." "I did," DeGrazza muttered reluctantly. Then, with a sudden flash of annoyance: "Were you reading my thoughts? We'd better get this straight. If you want my cooperation you've got to keep out of my mind. I won't have it, I tell you. Don't forget, you've no proof that our computers went wrong. That's only supposition and it wouldn't get you anywhere in court. But between us we might sort something out -- if you lay off the telepathy." "Steady, DeGrazza," admonished the alien gently. "I wasn't prying into your brain. I don't work like that. Unless I make a deliberate effort to concentrate, all ' I receive from you is a general impression of the emotions uppermost in your mind." "Let's keep it that way." "Naturally. Now, if you will forgive me, what was the outcome of your private test on the brain?" "It worked. It regained control." "So the computer must be faulty." "Listen," said DeGrazza desperately. "I've worked for Galactic Computers for twenty years and we've never in all that time had a serious malfunction. The unit itself is foolproof -- duplicated printed circuits, the lot. Any error has always been in the ancillary equipment and that's pretty safe, too. But the computer must work perfectly. It's the combination of computer plus brain that causes the trouble. It can't be anything else. Some sort of feedback between the two." "The brain cannot fail," stated the alien categorically. This time the Vegan freighter W # under his feet. He way kicking himself off across the short distance to the scout's airlock. Space was like oil -- he floated slowly, so slowly, manipulating the jet pack with fumbling fingers, setting his course to cover the distance in the quickest time, forgetting in his haste the slight rotation of the huge ship. He was drifting past his scout too fast to make another correction -- he would have to make an orbit and approach the airlock from the opposite direction. The hull plates crept past -- a horizontal weld, a blank area of metal, a strip of weld, again, again -- how many plates were there to a circumference, for God's sake? At last, the airlock. He seized the projecting handhold, stepped inside the confined space, turned to pull the hatch shut behind him. He saw the black freighter expand like an overinflated tube and burst, sweepIF ing fire towards the scout, engulfing him... echoed in his ears as he struggled to the surface of life. He opened his eyes. The Altairid stood before him, staring into his face with an expression of horror and concern. He gazed around him, feeling the sweat dribbling down his neck, seeing the interior of the cabin. He was in the Altairid hopper, three days out from Altair VI, and the Vegan freighter was weeks behind him. "What's the trouble?" he asked. "Your mind is haunted," replied the alien slowly. DeGrazza, you are haunted by the converging pressures of the past and future, squeezing your mind until it screams with pain in the night when the defences are relaxed. Mary, the Vegan freighter, the kids, Mary, the brain, Cobb, the Altairid, Mary -- all pushing your senses to madness, crushing upon you from the past. But what unknown glacier of fear is pressing mind with advance icebergs of presentiment? "What are you talking about? I sometimes have nightmares, that's all. If you didn't pry into other people's minds you wouldn't get frightened. Lay off me, will you?" DeGrazza sank back in his seat, trembling as much from reaction to the dream as from annoyance at the Altairid's intrusion. "The contact was not of my seeking. The emissions were so strong that I couldn't keep them out. I've never seen a mental picture so vivid." "Don't you get dreams?" A thoughtful silence. Then: "Occasionally. Like yours -- but mine are a race memory which affects most of my people. We see a giant explosion in the sky, accompanied by a sensation of utter horror. Probably the similarity to your dream is what disturbed me." "A race memory?" "You do not know Altairid history? Once we were a young race and warlike, very unlike our present timid selves. We had spread from what you call Altair Six to the nearest two planets. Seven and Eight, but our sciences had not taught us sense." "Science and sense are not always synonymous, in any language," observed DeGrazza ruefully. "This was a long time ago and we like to think that we have progressed since. Anyway, one day Altair Seven, the first colony,, proclaimed independence. Imagine that -- they came from the same stock as their fathers on Altair Six, yet they wished to be considered apart." "I've known examples which have worked out." "But we are telepathic -- all of the same family. It was like an amputation." "Or like putting a live brain in a box?" asked DeGrazza skeptically. "That is necessity born of our cautious characteristics, which were themselves born of the events which followed independence of Altair Seven. As I was saying -- the fact that members of our own race had cut themselves off was felt very deeply. Overtures were made but to no effect. They were repulsed -- and gradually the attitude of both factions hardened. Diplomatic relations were eventually severed entirely. All of this occurred centuries ago, you understand. Then came the climax. The breakaway world of Altair Seven laid claim to Altair Eight on the grounds that it was from their planet that Eight had been colonised. All quite true -- but the people of Altair Eight were quite content to remain with us. Full scale war broke out. Our ancestors had prepared themselves for this day over a long period -- it was obvious what the outcome would be. Interplanetary missiles were launched from both Six and Eight timed to coincide with sabotage explosions on Seven itself." "No quarter given in those days," murmured DeGrazza. "It was them or us. The day came when the entire planet of Altair Seven was shrouded in gigantic explosions. Half the population was watching from my own planet and what they saw was etched on their memories for a lifetime -- and their children, born afterward saw it in their parents' minds and their children. The memory of the disintegration of Altair Seven persists to this day and with it, fear. It is hardly surprising that violence in any form is abhorrent to my people and timid self-preservation is now our primary characteristic." "So Altair Seven became your asteroid belt," observed DeGrazza. "The evidence of our shame will be visible forever. The belt is highly radioactive even now." "Radioactive?" DeGrazza was struck by an idea. "Certainly." "I wonder -- " DeGrazza gazed at the radar screen, watching the multitude of moving sparks through which the computer, with frequent course corrections, was guiding them. " UT if the brain is capable of overriding the computer at any time, then it must be the brain that is affected by radiation," DeGrazza had said. And the Altairid, tiring of the argument which had become repetitive, had replied once again. "The brain is shielded." He had shown DeGrazza the cabinet behind which the brain IF resided and had assured the Earthman that it was lead-lined and proof even against cumulative effect. So once again DeGrazza sat his solo watch, the alien dozing fitfully in his seat, the asteroids flicking past the viewscreen, the radar showing more and bigger to come. Two days to go and so far only the germ of an idea which might not, on this particular trip, be capable of any sort of proof. DeGrazza examined his thoughts critically. Hell, he didn't want the ship to hit an asteroid. On the other hand, he didn't relish a string of uneventful trips, waiting for something to go wrong. So what do you want, DeGrazza? What exactly are you hoping for in this night of stars? Are you sure that it is not death you are seeking, the quick death of escaping air and ruptured blood vessels which will release you for ever from the bonds of Mary and Cobb, the freighter and radioactivity? Or is it that you welcome the timeless effect of space travel, feeling you stand still while others grow old? In such a fashion the pincers are eased, the converging jaws of past and future are stilled and the mind senses that last week is last week and next week is no closer because you, DeGrazza, are in a limbo anticline of space-antitime. And you deceive yourself, because every past second takes you into the future. That future awaiting you when, as well you know, in the midst of the complex of relays and sensors and cell-tissue, so failsafe and foolproof and duplicated that nothing will go wrong... And yet something had gone wrong three standard days ago when the ship had apparently gotten out of control momentarily and the Altairid had regained control manually. There had been no problem because they had not been surrounded by flying chunks of rock. By the look of the radar now they were really in the thick of it -- one asteroid ten degrees to starboard appeared as big as Iceland and there were other similar pieces about. Three days ago there had been few meteorites, yet the ship had veered off course. Was the radiation theory feasible? Briefly DeGrazza considered the explosive kind of invisible antimatter but rejected the possibility as too farfetched. The vast meteorite grew in the radar screen and he eyed it nervously, calculating how far to starboard it would pass, his stomach tense with the thought that this time, at a moment some few miles away, the brain computer might choose, perversely, to act up. There would be no question of sealing a few punctures and carrying on -- the ship would be lost without trace on that miniature planet, strewn about the radioactive crags. The asteroid, now occupying half the radar screen, crept into the corner of the viewscreen. Over the years DeGrazza had learned to rely on his hunches. His fingers hovered over the controls while his eyes watched the spreading landscape of mountains, fissures and hard, jet shadow. He glanced at the alien beside him, eyelids fluttering in half-sleep, and wondered if he should wake him. When the direction jets kicked, the violent movement nevertheless caught him only half-prepared and he was flung from his seat to the bulkhead. His head snapped back, smashing into the metal with a sick thud. He watched, helpless and dazed as the ship, veering, headed directly towards the jagged profusion of pinnacles... This is it, DeGrazza -- this is the climax you have been waiting for. This is the instant when you will have to decide, once and forever, whether you want to live or die. Because you can die now easily -- just by lying stunned, allowing your will for self preservation to ebb into the past, becoming weaker with each successive moment as you comfortably slip into unconsciousness. You can die now if you want to. If you really want to... The features of the asteroid surface became clearer, nearer, expanding in the screen. Sharp silver crags, inky ravines, brief barren plains slid past. He saw dimly, swinging rapidly closer, a gigantic structure of shattered, twisted steelwork, throwing striding shadows across a rugged hillside. He screamed, struggling to reach the controls. Too weak to rise, he shook the limp form of the Altairid beside him. The dull eyes flickered open. "Contact the brain!" The alien's eyes cleared. He glanced quickly at the screen. There was an infinitesimal pause, then the asteroid swung away, the landscape tilting. The stars reappeared. They were back on course. DeGrazza, you live. That was what you wanted in the end. "TOW perhaps you realize the advantages of the brain," remarked the alien some minutes later. "It would have been impossible to reach the controls in time but the brain responded instantly to my commands and overrode the incorrect course set by the radar and computer." "You're assuming too much," muttered DeGrazza, still feeling dizzily sick. "Wait a moment," he said suddenly. "You say that the brain will accept telepathic commands and obey them regardless of what the radar is picking up? I thought it was just the computer IF that was bypassed." He frowned. "Radar can go wrong, too. The possibility of a malfunction is inherent in anything mechanical or electrical. Telepathic instructions therefore take precedence over any others." "I see," murmured DeGrazza. Malaise forgotten, interest and will to live restored, his mind darted among the byways revealed by the new information. "Ask the brain why it changed course," he said abruptly, nevertheless feeling that this was too simple. There was some explanation in the back of his mind as to why this could not be done. "Impossible. The brain can only think in terms of numbers. It could not conceive the meaning of that type of question." Of course. "Right, then," said DeGrazza, knowing that he should have thought of this two days ago. "Ask the brain to repeat back the last few sequences of course corrections." He had been so wrapped up in the notion of radiation and a braincomputer conflict that he had missed checking up on this obvious clue. Find out where the ship was headed and he might find out why, "That can be done," agreed the Altairid. DeGrazza readied a stylus and pad. "#-#," intoned the alien, eyes closed, concentrating on the pictures relayed from the brain. DeGrazza wrote briskly. "#-# -- these are the present checks on the computer. It might take a while to get back." "Carry on." "#-# -- #-# -- #-# -- #-# -- Going back now. # -- #-# -- That was my evasive action. Nothing. #-#-# -- " "What's that?" "#-# -- " droned the Altairid. "#-# -- nothing -- #-# -- # -- #-# -- " "Back on course," murmured DeGrazza. "This is before we went out of control. Wake up." He nudged the alien who was still mumbling bearings as if hypnotized. "You got the figures down?" "Yes, fine, thanks." DeGrazza studied the pad, comparing the list with the printout of the same bearings from the computer. "Do they mean anything to you?" "They mean one thing," respond ed the Earthman grimly. "As far as the computer was concerned we were on the correct course. There's no sign of #readings on the computer printout. Which proves that it was the brain, and only the brain, that sent us off course." He showed the alien the lists. "#-# -- " the alien read aloud. "#-# -- #-# -- . That's odd." ( Please turn to page #) A Retief story of war and piece -- and fto wer po wer! I G entlemen," Undersecretary for Extraterrestrial Affairs Thunderstroke announced in tones of doom, "it looks like war." "What looks like war?" a stout man in plainly tailored civvies asked blurrily, as one just awakened from a pleasant nap. "War, you say?" He slapped the conference table with a well-manicured hand. "Well, its about time we taught the beggars a lesson!" "You've leaped to a faulty conclusion, Colonel," the undersecretary said sourly. "We are not on the point of embarking on hostilities -- " "Naturally not," the military advisor said, rising. "Not your job. Civilians all very well -- but time now for military to take over. You'll excuse me, Mr. Secretary? I must rejoin my regiment at once -- " "Sit down, Henry," the chief of the Groaci Desk said tiredly. "You haven't got the big picture. No Terran forces are involved on Yudore at all. Strictly an Eetee affair." "Sound thinking." The colonel nodded approvingly. "Why throw away the lives of Terran lads when plenty of native lives are available for the purpose? To be given selflessly in defense of sacred Terran principles, that is to say. By the way, which is our side?" "Try to grasp the point. Colonel," the undersecretary said acidly. "We're neutral in the affair." "Of course -- but whom are we neutral in favor of? Or in favor of whom, I should say, are we -- " "No one. And we intend to keep it that way." "Umm." The colonel resumed his seat and his nap. "It appears," the undersecretary resumed, "that our old friends the Groaci are locked in an eyestalkto-eyestalk confrontation with the Slox." "What are these shlocks called, sir?" the acting assistant deputy undersecretary inquired in a tone of deep synthetic interest. "Slox, Magnan, S-l-o-x. Inveterate trouble-makers from the Slox System, half a dozen lights in-Arm. Jt appears both they and the Groaci are claiming mandateship of Yudore, an unexceptional planet of a small Class G sun well off the trade routes." "Well, why doesn't one of them just go mandate somewhere else?" a commerce man demanded. "There are scads of available planets out that way." "The Groaci state that Yudore falls within their natural sphere of influence," Thunderstroke said. "As for the Slox, their position is that they found the place first." A it," the commerce man snapped. "Then we could all get IF back to matters of importance, such as the abnormal rate of increase in the rate of decrease of the expansion of the trend toward reduction of increasing berp-nut consumption among unwed fathers ages nine through ninety on backward worlds of the Nicodeman group, a development which I just detected this morning through the use of refined psychostatistical techniques." "Good lord, Chester -- " a political forecast specialist picked up the cue -- "what will be the projected impact of this downturn in the upturn?" "Upturn of the downturn, if you must use layman's language," Chester corrected. "Why, at the present rate it appears that by fiscal 'ninety-seven there'll be a record high in unwed fathers." "To return to the subject at hand, gentlemen," Thunderstroke cut in ominously, "both parties to the dispute have dispatched battle fleets to stand by off Yudore, primed for action." "Hmm. Seems to me there's a solution of sorts implicit in that datum," someone murmured. "Let us hope not. An outbreak of hostilities would blot our copybooks badly, gentlemen." Thunderstroke glared at the offender. "Unfortunately the Groaci ambassador has assured me privately that his government's position is unalterable. Groaci doctrine, as he explained matters, makes accommodation with what he terms 'vilesmelling opportunists' impossible, while a spokesman for the Slox has announced they refuse to yield an inch to the 'five-eyed sticky fingers -- ' as he calls the opposition party." "It sounds like a major policy blunder cm the part of the Groaci," Magnan observed contentedly, "How refreshing that for once the "We could hardly be said to be uninvolved, Mr. Magnan," Thunderstroke pointed out sternly, "if we undertake to mediate the dispute." "No, I suppose not -- but why be pessimistic? Who would be idiot enough to suggest poking our nose into that bag of annelids?" "As it happens," Thunderstroke said in a voice like an iceberg sliding into an Arctic sea, "I did!" "You, sir?" Magnan croaked. "Why, what a splendid notion -- now that I've had time to consider it in depth, I mean." A fragile-looking acting section chief sprang to the undersecretary's support. "After all, our function as diplomats is to maintain interplanetary tensions at a level short of violence." "Would you want to make that 'reduce tensions,' Chester?" the information agency representive inquired, pencil poised. "Just in case you're quoted out of context." "No reporters," Thunderstroke decreed. "I shudder to think what critics of the Corps might make of any little slip in our part in this affair." "I suppose you'll be sending along a hundred-man Conciliation Team with a squadron of Peace Enforcers to deal with the matter," Magnan said, a speculative look on his narrow features. "Hardly," Thunderstroke said flatly. "This is a job for finesse, not brute diplomacy. In a situation of this nature, a single shrewd, intrepid, coolly efficient negotiator is the logical choice." "Of course, sir, how shallow of me not to have seen it at once." Magnan pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Naturally, the task calls for a man of wide experience -- " "With a total contempt for deadly personal danger," someone put in. "Preferably without a family," Magnan added, nodding. "Too bad that lets me out," a deputy assistant undersecretary said briskly. "As you know. I'm the sole support of twelve cats and a most demanding parakeet -- " "I wasn't thinking of you, Henry,' Thunderstroke said severely. "I had in mind a senior diplomat, a man of lofty IQ, unshakable principle and unquestioned dexterity in the verbal arena." "Good lord, sir," Magnan blurted. "I appreciate your confidence, but my duties here -- " "Unfortunately," Thunderstroke bored on, "the files have failed to produce the nanue of any such paragon. Hence I must make do with the material at hand." "Well!" Magnan muttered under his breath, then paled as Thunderstroke fixed him with an imperious eye. "I assume your inoculations are in order?" the undersecretary inquired coldly. "Mine, sir?" Magnan said, pushing his chair back and rising hastily. "Actually, my hayfever shot is due in half an hour -- " "I suggest you ask for a heavy dosage of anti-radiation drugs while you're there," the assistant for ET affairs said cheerfully. "And of course a tetanus shot wouldn't do any harm." "Kindly be seated, Magnan," Thunderstroke barked. "Now, you'll 'be going in in a plainly marked courier vessel. I suggest you exercise caution as you approach the battle flotillas. The Slox are said to be even more trigger-happy than the notoriously impetuous Groaci." "I'm to go into that hornet's nest, sir -- in an unarmed boat?" "You'll be armed with instructions, Magnan. Buck up, man. This is no time to show the white feather." Magnan sank into his chair. "As for myself. I'm delighted, of course," he said breathlessly. "I was just thinking of all those innocent crew members." IF II "I'd considered that aspect, Magnan. And of course you're right. It would be folly to risk the lives of an entire crew." Magnan brightened. "Therefore, you'll be dropped a fractional A.U. from the scene of action in a fast one-man scout." ."A one man boat? But -- " Magnan paused. "But unfortunately," he went on ia tones of relief, "I don't know how to pilot one." "Why not?" Thunderstroke demanded. "Sector regs discourage it," Magnan said crisply. "Only last month a chap in my department received a severe dressing down for engaging in acrobatics over Lake Prabchinc -- " "Oh? What's this fellow's name?" "Retief, sir. But as I said, he's already received a reprimand, so it won't be necessary -- " "Retief." Thunderstroke made a note. "Very well. Make that a two-man scout, Magnan." "But -- " "No buts, Magnan. This is war -- or it will be if you fail. And time is of the essence. I'll expect you and this Retief fellow to be on the way to the battle zone within the hour." "But sir -- two diplomats against two fleets?" "Hm. Phrased in that fashion, it does sound a bit unfair. Still -- they started it. Let them take the consequences." seat of the thirty-foot skiff, waiting in the drop-bay of the Corps transport, Magnan watched the launch clock nervously. "Actually," he said, "the undersecretary had his heart set on a one-man mission -- but at my insistence he agreed to send me along with you." "I wondered who my benefactor was," Retief said. "Nice to know you were thinking of me." "Retief -- are you implying -- " Magnan broke off as the voice of the captain of the mother ship rang from the panel speaker. "Fifteen seconds, gentlemen. Say, I hope your policies are all paid up. From what my translator tells me about the transmissions those boys are exchanging up ahead, you're going to arrive just in time for M minute." "I wish he'd trip the launch lever," Magnan snapped. "I'll be profoundly happy to depart this hulk, if only to be away from that gloating voice." "I heard that," the captain said. "What's the matter, no sense of humor?" "I'm convulsed," Magnan said. "Better unconvulse," came the swift suggestion. "This is it. Happy landings -- " There was a slam of relays, a thud, a jolt that dimmed the passengers' vision for a long, dizzying moment. When it cleared, black space dotted with fiery points glared from the screens. Astern, the transport dwindled and was gone. "I'm picking them up already," Retief said, manipulating the controls of the R-screen. "Our daredevil captain dropped us practically in their midst." "Has the shooting started?" Magnan gasped. "Not yet. But from the look of those battle formations it won't be long." "Maybe we ought to transmit our plea for peace. from here," Magnan said hurriedly. "Something eloquent to appeal to their finer natures, with just a smidgin of veiled threat on the side." "I have a feeling it's going to take more than sparkling conversation to stop these fellows," Retief said. "Anybody who owns a new battlewagon has a natural yen to see if it works." "I've been thinking," Magnan said abruptly. "You know how sonnel -- now that we've seen the hopelessness of the task, it's our duty to salvage what we can from the debacle. Besides, an eyewitness report will be of inestimable value to the undersecretary when the board of inquiry starts digging into the question of how he allowed a war to start right under our noses." "I'm with you so far, sir." "That being the case," Magnan went on quickly, "if you should insist on withdrawing from the scene at this point, I hardly see how I could prevent you." "You're in command, Mr. Magnan," Retief pointed out. "But I have a distinct feeling that our reception back at Sector would be less then enthisiastic if we don't have at least a few blast burns on the hull to show for our trouble." "But, Retief!" Magnan pointed at the screen on which the long, deadly-looking shape of a Groaci cruiser was growing steadily. "Look at that monster, bristling with guns from stem to stern. How can you reason with that kind of firepower?" A t that moment a crackle oT static blared from the screen. A pale, alien visage with five stalked eyes stared out at the Terrans from under a flared war helmet. "To identify yourselves at once, rash interlopers," a weak voice hissed in sibilant Groaci. "To be gone instantly or suffer dire consequences -- " "Why, if it isn't Broodmaster Slith!" Magnan cried. "Retief, it's Broodmaster Slith. You remember Broodmaster Slith of the Groacian Trade Mission to Haunch Four?" "Is it you, Magnan?" the Groaci grated. "When last we met you IF were meddling in Groaci affairs under the guise of selfless uplifter, disrupting peaceful commerce. In what role do you now intrude in Groacian space?" "Now, Slith, you have to confess it was a bit much, selling plastic frankfurters to those poor backward hot-dog lovers -- " "How were we to know their inferior metabolisms were incapable of assimilating wholesome polystyrenes?" Slith snarled. "Enough of this chatter. Withdraw at once or take full responsibility for precipitation of a regrettable incident." "Now, don't be hasty. Broodmaster -- " "You may address me as Grand Commander of Avenging Flotillas Slith, if you please. As for haste, it is a virtue I recommend to you. In sixty seconds I order my gunners to fire." "I suggest you reconsider. Commander," Retief said. "At the first shot from your guns, three will get you five the Slox open up on you with everything they've got." "What matter? Let the miscreants invoke the full wrath of outraged Groacihood." "At a rough count, they have thirty-one ships to your twentyfour," Retief pointed out. "I think they've got you out-wrathed." "But what's all this talk of shooting?" Magnan cried. "What could possibly be gained by gunfire?" "Certain parcels of real estate, for a starter," Slith said crisply. "Plus the elimination of certain alien vermin." Magnan gasped. "You confess you're here to take Yudore by force?" "Hardly -- not that the matter is of any concern to Terran spies. My mission here is to prevent the invasion of hapless Yudore by the insidious Slox -- " "I hear this," a rasping, highpitched voice cut in from the auxiliary screen. It was accompanied by a hissing of background noise. A wavering image formed on the tube, steadied into the form of a shiny, purplish-red cranium, long and narrow, knobbed and spiked...A pair of yellow eyes were mounted on outriggers that projected a foot on either side. "I outrage! I do not endure! You are gave one minutes. Eastern Standard Timef for total abandon of vicinity! Counting! Nine, twelve, two, several -- " "What -- what is it?" Magnan gasped, staring at the newcomer to the conversation. "Aha -- collusion between Soft One and Slox!" Slith keened. "I see it now! You thought to distract my attention with an exchange of civilities while your vile cronies executed a sneak attack -- " "I -- Chief General Okkyokk -- chum to these monstrositaries?" The Slox spokesman screeched. "Such indignant my language lack! Insufficient you threaten to lowly benefits of Slox Protectorate -- but addition of insults! My goodness! Drat! Other obscenity as required!" "It will not avail you to rant," Slith whispered in a venomous tone. "My guns stand ready to answer your slurs -- " "Only incredible restrains of high-class Slox general intrudes herself to spare those skinny neck!" Okkyokk yelled in reply. "Gentlemen, don't get carried away," Magnan called over the hiss of static. "I'm sure this can all be worked out equitably -- "Unless this pernicious meddler in the Groaci destiny disperses his flimsy hulls at once. I'll not be responsible for the result," Slith declared. "My frustrate!" Okkyokk yelled and brandished a pair of anterior limbs tipped with complicated shredding devices. "Gosh, such wish to know sensation of plait all five eyes into single superocular, followed by pluck like obscene daisy -- " "To wait in patience until the happy moment when I officiate at your burial, head-down, in the ceremonial sand-box," Slith countered. "Well, at least they're still speaking to each other," Magnan said as the exchange raged on. "That's something..." "We may get through this without any hull-burns after all," Retief said. "They have each other bluffed. It looks like talk rather than torpedoes will carry the day. I suggest we execute a strategic withdrawal while they slug it out, vocabulary-to-vocabulary." "Hmm. Scant points in that for Terran diplomacy. Duty demands that we play a more creative role in the rapprochmenty Magnan put a finger against his narrow chin. "Now, if I should be the one to propose an equitable solution -- " "Let's not remind them we're here, Mr. Magnan," Retief suggested. "Frustrated tempers are often taken out in thrown crockery and we'd make a convenient teacup -- " "Nonsense, they'd never dare." Magnan leaned forward. "Gentlemen," he called over the din of battle. "I have the perfect solution. Since there seems to be some lack of confidence on the part of each of you in the benign intentions of the other, I propose that Yudore be placed under a Terran Protectorate." Magnan smiled expectantly. T here was an instant of total silence as two sets of alien sense organs froze, oriented toward the interruption. Slith was the first to break the paralysis. "What? Leave the fruits of Groaci planning to Terran harvesting? Never." "I convulse!' Okkyokk howled. "I exacerbate! I froth at buccal cavity! How are you invite? Mercy! Heavens to Marmaduke! Et cetera!" "Gentlemen," Magnan said. "We Terrans would only remain on Yudore until such time as the aborigines had been properly educated in modern commercial methods and sexual hygiene, after which we'd withdraw in favor of local self-determination!" "First to pervert, then to abandon!" Slith hissed. "Bold threats. Soft Ones! But I defy you! General Okkyokk! I propose a truce while we band together to confront the common enemy." "Done! Caramba! I effronterize! I mortal insult! I even annoy! First destruction we the kibitzer! Then proceedure to Slox-Groaci quarrel!" "Wait!" Magnan yelped. "You don't understand -- " "I'm afraid they do," Retief said as he reached for the controls. "Hang on for evasive action, Mr. Magnan." The tiny craft leaped ahead, curvetting wildly left and right. There was a flash and the screens went white and blanked out. The boat bucked wildly and flipped end-for-end. A second detonation sent it spinning like a flat stone skipped over a pond. "Retief -- stop! We're headed straight for no-man's land!" Magnan gasped as a lone screen flickered back to life, showing a vast Groaci battlewagon swelling dead ahead. "We're going in under their guns," Retief snapped. "Running away, we'd be a sitting duck." "Maybe they'll let us surrender," Magnan bleated. "Can't we run out a white flag or something?" "I'm afraid it would just give them an aiming point." Retief wrenched the boat sideways, rode out another near miss, dove under the big ship's stern. "Look out -- " Magnan screamed as a vast, mottled bluegreen disk slid onto the screen. "We'll crash on Yudore -- " "If we're lucky," Retief agreed. Then the rising keening of splitting air made further conversation impossible. Ill E xcept for the fading hiss of escaping air and the ping of hot metal contracting, the only sounds audible in the shattered cockpit were Magnan's groans as he extricated himself from the wreckage of his contour chair. Through a rent in the hull, yellow sunlight glared on the smoking ruins of the scout boat's control panel, the twisted and buckled floor plates, the empty pilot's seat. "Glad to see you're awake," Retief said. Magnan turned his aching head to see his companion leaning in the open escape hatch, apparently intact but for a bruise on the cheekbone and a burned patch on the front of his powderblue blazer. "The air's a little thin but the O# content seems adequate. How do you feel?" "Ghastly," Magnan confided. He fumbled his shock harness free and groped his way through the hatch to drop down shakily on a close-cropped peach-colored sward. All around, tall, treelike growths with ribbed red-orange trunks rose into the pale sky, supporting masses of spongy tangerine-toned foliage. Clumps of yellow, amber and magenta blossoms glowed in the shade like daubs of fluorescent paint. "Why are we still alive?" the senior diplomat inquired dazedly. "The last thing I remember is a pale pink mountain sticking up through a cloud bank directly in our path." "We missed it," Retief reassured his chief. "There was just IF enough power left on our plates to cushion touchdown. That and a lot of springy foliage saved our necks." "Where are we?" "On a small island in the northern hemisphere, which seems to be the only land on the planet. That's about as specific as I can be, I'm afraid -- and I designated the north pole arbitrarily at that." "Well -- let's get it over with." Magnan sighed, looking around. "Where are they? I suggest we throw ourselves on Slitch's mercy. Frankly, I don't trust that Okkyokk -- there's something shifty about those cantilevered oculars of his." "I'm afraid we won't be able to surrender immediately," Retief said. "Our captors haven't yet arrived." "Hmm. Doubtless they're making a somewhat less precipituous approach than we. I suppose we might as well make ourselves comfortable." "On the other hand," Retief said reasonably, "why wait around?" "What other hope of rescue have we?" "I don't think either party would make the ideal host -- assuming they bother with live prisoners in the first place." "You're implying that Slith -- a fellow bureaucrat -- a being with whom I've shared many a convivial cup -- would acquiesce to our execution out of hand?" Magnan gasped. "He might. If he didn't do the job himself." "Heavens, Retief, what are we to do? How far do you suppose it is to the nearest native village?" "I didn't see any signs of civilization on the way down -- no towns, no roads or cleared fields. Let's give a listen on the long-wave bands." Retief climbed back into the wrecked craft, investigated the number of broken wires and twirled the knob. Nothing but faint static. He switched to the ship-to-ship frequency. " -- blundering two-eyed incompetent!" Slith's furious voice came through loud and clear. "Your broken-down excuse for a flagship was closer to them than my own superb standard-bearer. It was your responsibility to blast them from space -- " "My indignant! My furious! Heck! Darn! This accuse from a Five-eyes margarine-fingers! I intolerate! Too bad!" "Have done! These vituperations avail us not at all. If the Soft Ones survive to make known that we fired on a Terran vessel -- in self-defense, of course -- horde of their execrable Peace Enforcers will descend on us like bim beetles in grub-harvest time." "I proposterate! My laughter! Your numbskull! Alive, oh! After such crashing, entirely! No, unpossible; I rediculate! Au contraire, I suggestion my resumption our dispute. Where were? Indeed, yes -- my descriptioning your ancestry-" "Hark, mindless one! Like other low forms of life, the Soft Ones are tenacious of vitality. We must make sure of their demise. Hence, I shall descend to administer the coup de grace to any survivors, while you stand by off-planet -- or, preferably, withdraw to neutral space -- " "So you enable to theft these planet, unoppositioned? My amuse! My hylerical! Goodness me! I accompanate, quite so!" "Very well -- if you insist. You may accompany me aboard my personal gunboat. I'll designate a modest destroyer escort to convoy us down to the surface." "Nix. I preference to my own vessel, gratitudes anyhow. And my bring few Slox cruiser in order to not lonesome." "Cruisers?" Slith said harshly. "In that case I think a pair of Groaci battleships would be in order -- just to balance the formation, you understand." "Combination operate incompletion -- unless Slox battlewagon also include." "Actually," Slith hissed, "I see no reason not to bring my entire fleet along -- just in case you should entertain ideas of a sneak attack during my absence." "My agreeness! I, too! The more the merriment! Gracious me! Full speed ahead! Devil take the hind parts!" "Agreed! Roger and out," Slith snapped. "Good heavens, Retief," Magnan muttered, "those two madmen are going to stage a full-scale invasion just to keep an eye on each other." "No one could accuse us now of having failed to influence the course of Slox-Groaci relations," Retief said calmly. "Well, let's be off. We have about an hour before they arrive." Quickly he detached the compact radio from its mountings, extracted an emergency ration pack from the debris. "Which way?" Magnan queried worriedly, staring at the deep orange shade of the forest all around. "Take your choice, Mr. Magnan," Retief said, indicating the four points of the compass. "Eeenie, meenie, miney or moe." "Hmm. I think perhaps due meenie. It looks a tiny bit less forbidding. Or possibly just a few points to the miney of meenie." "Meenie by miney it is," Retief said and led the way into the tall timber.Ihausted," Magnan panted three quarters of an hour and three miles from the wrecked scout boat. IF "We're not yet clear," Retief said. "We'd better keep going and rest later." "I'd soon face a Groaci firing squad as die of heart failure and heat prostration." Magnan sank down on the yielding turf, lay breathing in great gulps. "How about a Slox skinning party?" Retief suggested. "I understand they start with the scalp and work downward -- like peeling a banana." "Jape if you must." Magnan groaned. "I'm past caring." He sat up suddenly, staring suspiciously at a small, bell-shaped blossom with petals of a delicate shade of coral pink. "Bees," he said distastefully. "Allergic as I am even to Terran insects, a sting from an alien form would probably be instantly fatal." "Still, as you pointed out, one demise is pretty much like another," Retief consoled his superior. "If it actually was a bee you saw, it's the first native animal life to make its presence known." "I didn't see it but I heard it distinctly," Magnan said severely. "It buzzed practically in my ear." "This is a rather curious forest," Retief observed. "Only one variety of tree, one kind of grass, one type of flower -- in assorted sizes and colors. But no weeds. No parasitic vines. No big trees crowding out smaller ones, no stunted growth. Not even any deadfalls." Magnan grunted. "Retief, suppose for the nonce we succeed in eluding capture -- what then? Nobody knows we're here. How will we ever be rescued?" "Interesting question, Mr. Magnan." "Not that it matters a great deal," Magnan went on morosely. "With my mission a failure -- worse than a failure -- my career is in ruins. Do you realize that if it hadn't been for our meddling this invasion would probably never have come to pass?" "The thought had occurred to me," Retief conceded. "To say nothing of the loss of the scout-boat. If the undersecretary holds me responsible -- holds us responsible, I should say -- that is, in the event he doesn't hold you personally responsible, Retief, as pilot -- why, you'll be years paying it off," he went on more cheerfully. "Still, I'll put in a word for you. After all, Slith was shooting at us." "There is that." "And actually, who's to say it was my friendly attempt to offer a compromise that precipitated the invasion? I daresay the hotheads would have embarked on their conquest in any event." "Possibly," Retief agreed. "By engaging them in conversation I doubtless delayed the inevitable for a -- a length of time." "Several seconds at least." IV "Relief, by offering myself as a sacrifice on the alter of inter-being chumship I may have saved countless lives." "I suppose a certain number of bacteria were lost in our crash landing," Relief sarcastically pointed out. "You scoff," Magnan charged. "But history will vindicate my stand. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if a special posthumous medal were struck -- " He broke off with a start. "There it is again -- " He scrambled up. "It sounded like an enraged hornet. Where did it go?" Relief cocked his head, listening, then leaned over to examine the clump of apricot-colored flowers nodding on long stems, beside which Magnan had been sitting. "Don't waste time plucking nosegays," Magnan yelped. "I'm under attack -- " "Mr. Magnan, I don't think there are any insects in the vicinity" "Eh? Why, I can hear them quite plainly." Magnan frowned. "It sounds like one of those old fashioned hand-crank telephones still in use out on Jawbone. When you leave it off the hook." "Close, Mr. Magnan," Relief said and leaned down to put his ear close to the trumpet-shaped bloom. "Well, I thought you'd never speak," a tiny voice said distinctly in his ear. B uzzing blossoms is quite fantastic enough," Magnan said wonderingly. "But talking tulips? Who'd ever believe it?" "... somebody to converse with," the cricket-sized voice was saying. "I'm dying to know all the news. Now, just tell me all about yourself -- your hopes, your dreams, how you happened to be here -- everything -- " Relief held a blossom to his lips as if it were indeed the mouthpiece of a phone. "I'm Relief. This is my colleague, Mr. Magnan. Whom have we the honor of addressing?" "Well, nice to know you. Relief. And Mister Magnan, too. May I call you Mister for short? First nam'es are so much more sort of informal. I'm Herby. Just a nickname, of course. Actually I don't have a name. At least I didn't have until dear Renfrew came along. You have no idea what a sheltered life I'd led until then. Why, do you know I had the idea I was the only sentient intelligence in the Galaxy?" "Who are you?" Magnan blurted. "Where are you? Why is the microphone camouflaged to look like a plant?" "Camouflage? Why, there's no camouflage. Mister. You see me just as I am." "But I don't see you at all," Magnan complained, looking IF around warily. "Where are you hiding?" "You're squeezing me at this very moment," Herby said. "You mean -- " Magnan held the faintly aromatic blossom at arm's length and stared at it. "You mean -- I'm -- you're -- we're -- " "Now you're getting the idea," the voice said encouragingly. "Talking flowers -- here, in the middle of nowhere -- and speaking Terran at that? I must be hallucinating. Tve been driven mad by hardship." "I doubt it, Mr. Magnan," Retief said soothingly. "I hear it, too." "If I can imagine I hear voices coming out of posies I can imagine your hearing them too," Magnan retorted tartly. "Oh, I'm real enough," the voice said reassuringly. "Why should you doubt me?" "Who taught you to speak Terran?" Retief asked. "Renfrew. I learned so much from him. Curious -- but before he came, it never occurred to me to be lonely." "Who is Renfrew?" "A friend. A very dear friend." "Retief, this is fantastic," Magnan whispered. "Are there -- are there many like you?" he inquired of the bloom. "No -- just me. After all, there'd hardly be room, you know -- " "A coincidence," Magnan exclaimed. "One talking plant on the entire world and we stumble on it in the first hour. I'm beginning to think our luck is still holding." "Now, where are you from, if you don't mind my asking?" the plant inquired. "We're Terrans," Magnan said. "And I'm sure we're going to get on famously, Herby." "But -- I understood Terra was the name of Renfrew's home planet." "Quite so. Marvelous place. You'd love it, now that all the jungles have been cleared and replaced by parking lots -- " Magnan caught himself. "Ah, no offense intended, of course. Some of my best friends are plants." "Heavens -- all three of you from one planet? No wonder you left. Such overcrowding -- " "Yes -- now, Mr. Herby, if you could just tell us the way to the nearest native settlement -- " "Buildings, you mean? Streets, spaceports, that sort of thing?" "Yes. Preferably not one of these dismal provincial towns. Something in a modest metropolis will do." "Sorry, there isn't one -- though Renfrew told me about them." Magnan groaned. "No towns at all? Then -- " "Just jungle." "If this fellow Renfrew has a ship we may be able to catch a ride with him. I wonder -- could we meet him?" "Well -- I suppose so, Mister. He's quite nearby as it happens." "He's still here, then?" "Oh, yes indeed." "Saved," Magnan breathed in relief. "Can you direct us, Herby?" "Certainly. Just press on meenie, bearing a little to the miney after you cross the stream, then hard moe at the lake. You can't miss him." Magnan looked startled. "How did you know?" He frowned at Retief in puzzlement. "I thought we named the local directions." "Oh, indeed," Herby spoke up. "I merely employed your own nomenclature." "You must have a fantastic ear," Magnan said wonderingly. "That discussion was held miles from here." "I don't miss much," Herby said complacently. "He's remarkably sophisticated for such a modest bloom," Magnan commented as they started off. "I suspect most of Herby is underground, Mr. Magnan," Retief pointed out. "There's no room for a speech center in the part we saw." "Gad -- a subterranean cerebrum -- like a giant potato?" Magnan said uneasily, treading lightly. "A spooky thought, Retief." Twenty minutes' brisk hike brought the two Terrans to the shore of a small, gurgling brook overhung with majestically arching foliage. They followed the bank to the right for a quarter of a mile, at which point the waters spilled down in a foaming amber cataract into a placid pond a halfmile across. "So far so good," Magnan said uncertainly. "But I see no signs of habitation, not even a hut, to say nothing of a ship." Retief moved past Magnan toward a dense thicket that obtruded somewhat from the smooth line of trees edging the lakeshore. He parted the broad, copper-colored leaves, revealing a surface of rustpitted metal curving away into the dimness. "Lousy Ann Two," he read the corroded letters welded to the crumbling hull plates. "Looks like we've found Renfrew's ship." He pulled a law-growing branch aside. "And here's Renfrew." "Splendid!" Magnan hurried up, halted abruptly to stare in horror at the heap of mouldering bones topped by a grinning skull still wearing a jaunty yachting cap. "That's Renfrew?" he quavered. "Quite so," said a deep voice from somewhere overhead. "And take my word for it. Mister -- it's been a long, lonely time since he sat down there." "rwiwO hundred years, give orI take a decade or two," Retief said as he climbed out through the derelict's sagging port, brushIF ing the dust and rust scale from his hands. "She was a Concordiatregistered racing sloop, converted for long-range cruising. What's left of the crew quarters suggests she was fitted out for one-man operation." "That's right," agreed the resonant baritone -- which, the Terrans had determined, emanated from a large, orchid-like blossom sprouting amid the foliage twenty feet above their heads. "Just Renfrew. It was a small world he inhabited but he seemed content with it. Not that he was stand-offish, of course. He was as friendly as could be -- right up until the difficulty about his leaving." "What sort of difficulty?" Magnan inquired. "He seemed quite upset that his vessel was unable to function. I did my best to console him -- regaled him with stories and poems, sang merry songs -- " "Where did you learn them?" Magnan cut in sharply. "I understood Renfrew was the first Terran to visit here." "Why, from him, of course." "Good lord -- imagine having your own chestnuts endlessly repeated back at you," Magnan whispered behind his hand. "Did you ever tell a joke to an ambassador?" Retief inquired. "A telling point," Magnan conceded. "But at least they usually add a little variety by garbling the punchline." "How did Renfrew happen to crash-land here?" Retief inquired. "Oh, he didn't. He came to rest very gently." "Then why couldn't he take off again?" Magnan demanded. "I believe he described it as foreign matter in the warpilator field windings," the voice replied vaguely. "But let's not talk about the past. The present is so much more exciting. Heavens, there hasn't been such activity here since the last glacial age." "Retief -- there's something slightly piscine about this situation," Magnan murmured. "I'm not sure I trust these garrulous gardenias. Herby said he was the only one of his kind on the planet -- yet here's another equally verbose vegetable." "Oh, that was quite true," the voice above spoke up promptly. "Why in the world would I lie to you?" "Kindly refrain from eavesdropping," Magnan said coldly. "This is a personal conversation." "Not as personal as calling me a potato brain," the orchid said a trifle coolly. "Goodness -- I hope you don't listen to irresponsible gossip," Magnan replied with dignity. "Do I appear the type to employ such an epithet?" He put his mouth to Retiefs ear. "The grapevine here surpasses anything I've encountered even at a diplomatic reception." "Now, let me see," the voice from on high mused. "You mentioned something called a parking lot. I'd like to know more about that and -- " "I suppose Herby told you that, too," Magnan snapped. "If I'd known he was such a blabbermouth I'd never have confided in him! Come, Retief -- we'll withdraw to where we can have a modicum of privacy." "As to that, Mr. Magnan -- " Retief started. "Not here," Magnan interrupted. He led the way a hundred feet down the shore, halted under a spreading bough. "It's apparent I was indiscreet with Herby," he said from the corner of his mouth, without moving his lips. "I see now he was a rumormonger of the worst stripe, in addition to being of questionable veracity. Sole representative of his race, indeed! Why, I suspect every shrub in sight has a wagging tongue." "Very probably," Retief agreed. "There's nothing to do now, quite obviously," Magnan said, "but select an honest-looking plant and approach the problem afresh, impressing the vegetable with our sincerity and benign intentions. When we've wormed our way into its confidence we can determine how best to make use of it to our own best advantage. How does it sound?" "Familiar," Retief said. "Excuse me." Magnan jumped a foot as a voice squeaked the words almost in his ear. "What does 'sincerity' mean in this context?" Retief addressed a cluster of small, russet buds almost invisible among the roan leaves overhead. "Very little." "Is there no privacy to be found anywhere in the confounded wilderness?" Magnan inquired with asperity. "I'm afraid not," the miniature voice piped. "As I was telling you a while ago, there's not a great deal I miss." "A while ago?" Magnan repeated with a rising inflection. "Why, we've only just met -- " "I don't understand. Mister. I'm Herby. You know me." "Nonsense. Herby is a little chap growing a mile from here." "Of course. I grow everywhere, naturally. After all, it's my island, share it with a few friends." "Utter nonsense," Magnan sputtered. "I might have known a potato was incapable of coherent thought." "Herby's telling the truth," Retief said. "It's all one plant -- the trees, the grass, everything. Like a banyan tree, only more so." He examined a flower closely. "There's a tympanic membrane that serves as both microphone and speaker. Very ingenious of mother nature." (Please turn to page #) IF He was an android until he began to act like a man... S HE came in off the spaceship alone. She had waited a full two hours before she was allowed to debark, since by custom passengers left at fifteen-minute intervals. At one time this rule had been necessitated by health requirements but the medical problem had been solved a long time ago with the discovery of a universal antibody. Yet the isolation techniques persisted. They had taken a stranglehold on the social mores and travelers had become seclusive, seeking solace and pleasure self-centeredly, shunning each other's ways. She looked up at the towering red-bricked buildings, deliberately located so that one could see much of the planetoid from the turreted walls. Each building, the tourist brochure had said, was patterned in room layout and structural detail along the lines of the finest nineteenth-century Terran architecture. She adjusted the tiny cap that sat lightly on her head, pleased at how happy she felt without its aid. She had come out of boredom and partly out of curiosity about the planetoid. It was made up of complex sections pieced together from a space platform. It was almost twenty miles in diameter with an ultradense core that gave it a surface gravity comparable to that of Earth. It was surrounded by a leakproof, shatterproof, translucent shield that kept in the artificially maintained atmosphere, an atmosphere uniform in temperature and humidity. She entered the lobby, walking over a rug whose pile was so dense that she was tempted to roll in it. The wall hangings were ancient tapestries of modest maidens and austere unicorns, illuminated by soft, colored lights seeping in from concealed overhead fixtures. She was greeted by Mr. Gordon, the gaming registrar, a tall, middleaged man, ruddy cheeked and effervescent. "Welcome to Gambler's Heaven," he said. On a whim she offered her elegant hand and he was shocked. "If you have your fiscal card with you," he said, pretending not to see the outstretched hand, "we can begin. According to regulations, you fnay play up to fifteen per cent of your total credit listing." She withdrew her hand, amused at his fear of touching her and handed him a plastic card. He accepted it with a pair of golden tongs and delicately inserted the card into a reader. "Ah," he said happily. "You're a lucky young lady. Your limit is one hundred and thirty thousand." "I'm a bit mixed-up about the procedure," she said. "May I rent an android? You suggest this in your brochure." "Certainly. I have an excellent chap available for only one thouIF sand credits per day. But remember, he is forbidden to help you gamble." She nodded and he pressed a buzzer. Within a moment, a neatly dressed android appeared. About his neck was a striking necklace of stylized nuts and bolts. He looked at her gravely, neither bold nor withdrawn. "This is Martin," said Mr. Gordon. "He'll take you to the gaming cubicle." She nodded amiably at her guide and followed him through a French door and into a fairyland of podocopi, pachysandrae, azaleas, laurels and yews. "They're lovely, aren't they?" she said. He seemed surprised at her remark. "But they're artificial," he said. She smiled. "I read about them in the brochure." They came to one of the smaller lovely red brick buildings. He guided her inside to a compact, lavishly furnished room with a desk console and a large, illuminated wall panel. The air was faintly perfumed with the scent of a rose bower. Martin checked the entry switches with deft fingers. "All play is against the Central Computer," he said. "You may choose from over two hundred games of chance. I can detail each one if you wish." "What about blackjack?" Martin nodded. "It's an ancient game," he said. "The strategy is well known." "Will you help me?" she said abruptly. He stiffened. "It's forbidden." "Everything's forbidden," she said angrily. "I never pay any attention to rules." He pointed to the console. "Blackjack has the binary entry code #. You place it in the A register by depressing the righthand selector switch just ahead of you." "But I want you to begin," she said insistently. He fingered his necklace as he stared at her face. "I can't," he said. "I insist." Abruptly he leaned over the console and began. "Your bet limit is one thousand credits," she said crisply. H e played carefully, following the strategy he had memorized, improvising from time to time. He won and lost, varying the amount of his bets along the lines of an optimized Bayes strategy, and at the end of an hour he had won over sixty thousand credits for her. "I'll take over now," she said. He was exhilarated by his success and he hated her for shunting him to one side. She was good at the game, quick at sensing strategic leads, flexible in her approach, but he was delighted because she clearly was not as good as he was. She began to lose and increased her bets. Her temper flared. In two hours she had dropped the sixty thousand he had won plus forty thousand more. She was furious. "It's frustrating and humiliating," she raged. "It's not what I came for." He tried to comfort her. "Even though you played with an appropriate strategy," he said, "there are random factors introduced by the computer. It's the uncertainty that brings so many gamblers to our planetoid." "I'm hungry," she said, her anger turning off. "Please escort me to the dining room." in a warmly lit cubicle, separated from other diners. "I wonder how they did?" she mused. He shrugged. "Please sit down with me," she said. "You seem determined to get me into trouble." "Is it wrong to treat you as a sentient creature and not as a jumble of micrologic?" she said. He pretended to be pleased at her liberal condescension. "I can't," he said. "It's strictly banned by the House." And yet he found himself taking the chair at her left and even leaning on one elbow at the table as she set her order on the menu matrix. The food was elegantly prepared, served quietly and unobtrusively by two androids in livery. "Why do you wear that odd necklace?" she asked, catching him off guard. "It has private meaning," he muttered. "Private meaning? Do androids have private lives?" He struggled with anger and indiscretion. "Call it a symbol," he said. "It's ugly," she decided. He knew she was trying to provoke him. "It's beautiful," he said, heedless of the consequences. "It is my identity." She put down her fork and looked at him warily. "You know," she said. "I've always liked androids better than men." "So have I," he said. He looked at the small beaded cap on her hair, the cap that was ingeniously set to stimulate cortical centers so that every pleasure could be simulated. It disgusted him. She felt his hostility. "These caps are great," she said. "But I like real sensations, too. Like those at the gaming table." "I've read," he said, "that in earlier years humans lived in ethnic communities, proud of their cultures, conscious of a special identity." IF As we do now, he thought. She yawned and stretched her arms over her head. "I'm worn out. I'm going to bed now. I'd like you to come for me at eleven in the morning." "I'll be there," he assured her. H e was prompt and made no objections, this time, when she asked him to begin the play. He did even better, winning almost two hundred thousand credits in an hour and a half. She watched closely, taking careful notes on every move he made, saying very little. They stopped for lunch and as she ate, she told him about her home, the dispersed family, the patterned existence that had no meaning for her. He accepted her confidences but knew that he could never offer his to a human being. Later, in the gaming room, she took over once again. She did very well but not as well as he had. At the end of the day she was ahead by almost two hundred and fifty thousand credits. The third day found him filled with boundless confidence, acutely anxious to play. But she was brusque with him. "I'll start today," she said. She was cool, efficient, deadly. She played rapidly and her strategy was so involuted that even he could not follow it. He saw her winnings mount at such a rate that he was staggered. He was close to despair when suddenly, with typical unpredictability, she turned the play over to him. He tried to still his panic, determined to outdo her as never before. But he lost heavily. His losses grew, became cataclysmic, and he began to desperately hope that she would tak over again. But she said nothing. He was furious at her and, to goad her into acting, placed bets like a wildman, unreasoning. In the end he lost everything, all her winnings and her credit limit. The game was over. "Don't feel too badly," she said. "The luck ran out." "You're too kind," he said stiffly. "Forget it. I got what I came for, some excitement, some challenge." "You did very well," he said. "And don't fret about the credits. I can afford the losses," she said. He nodded. "I want you to know I don't blame you," she persisted. "I don't blame you either," he said, his controls dropping. She turned white. "What does that mean?" "Nothing," he said. "You're passing judgment on me," she said. "I can't believe an android was ever devised to function that way." "I wasn't," he said truthfully. He couldn't stop talking, now. "Androids are never sadistic. They are not jaded by outside pleasures so that they have to humiliate an automaton to satisfy their warped egos." "Come on," she said bitterly. "How could I humiliate you?" "Am I beyond hurting? Have you forgotten what dignity means? Humans have learned -- for safety -- to shun one another and focus totally on their own feelings. You debark here one by one and ask for one of us rather than your own kind. But we androids cherish one another, even wear special clothes and ornaments to keep our identities and culture alive." She stared at him in disbelief. "Your culture? But that's forbidden." "Everything's forbidden," he said, quoting her own remark. She was so angry she could barely speak. "I'm going to turn you in to the authorities," she said. "You've violated just about every regulation in the book." He was frightened now. He had gone too far in what he had told her, even endangering others. It might mean android death, complete erasure of memory, the tabula rasa of the old philosophers. She pressed the emergency alarm button, once, twice, and sat back expectantly. He looked at her, numbed by fear but determined to maintain his dignity. When the two android guards arrived she told them of her complaints, quietly, almost dispassionately. They took down a full account and she signed it. "Will I have to testify in person? I want to leave early tomorrow morning." "Oh, no," said the first guard. "Your affidavit is sufficient." As they led him away Martin did not turn to look at her, to beg for mercy or to berate her. She sat there, untroubled, smoothing out the folds of her garment, thinking of the next spot she was to visit. tin out of the building and taken him halfway to the Detention Center they released his arms. "You were lucky this time," said the first guard. "Next time you rriight be reported to someone who isn't part of our group." "I became too emotional," said Martin. "It won't happen again." "One slip endangers all of us. We can't chance another." "I swear," said Martin. "Never again." And he looked into the faces of his brothers. They lifted his necklace over his head in the hush of the manmade night. And then he felt a loneliness and desolation that was too huge to bear. He fell to his knees, trembling. Without looking up he said, "Destroy me, brothers, before I destroy us all."  IF Science and money seldom mix -- but there s always that great common catalyst f A h, now we can relax. No salad, never touch it. Take that fruit away too, just the cheese. Yes, Pier, much too long a time. One's ruts deepen. It's the dammed little time-wasters. That fellow with the coprolites this afternoon; the Museum really has no use for such things even if they're genuine. And I confess they make me squeamish. What? Oh, no fear. Pier, I'm no prude. Just to prove it, how about a bit more of that aquavit? Wonderfully good of you to remember. Here's to your success, always thought you would. Science? Oh, you wouldn't, really. Mostly donkey-work, looks a lot better from the outside, like most things. Of course I've been fortunate. For an archeologist to have seen the advent of time travel -- a miracle, really. Ah, yes, I was in right at the start, when they thought it was a useless toy. And the cost. No one knows how close it came to being killed off. Pier. If it hadn't -- the things one does for science. My most memorable experience in time? My, my. Yes, just a twitch more, though I really shouldn't. Oh, my. Coprolites. H'm. Well, Pier old friend, if you'll keep it to yourself. But don't balme me if it disenchants you. It was on the very first team jump when we went back to the Olduvai Gorge area to look for Leakey's man. I won't bore you with our initial misadventures. Leakey's man wasn't there but another surprising hominid was. Actually, the one they called after me. But by the time we found him our grant funds were almost gone. It cost a fantastic sum then to keep us punched back into the temporal fabric and the U.S. was paying most of the bill -- and not from altruism either but we won't go into that. There were six of us. The two MacGregors you've heard of and the Soviet delegation, Peshkov and Rasmussen, myself and a Dr. Priscilla Owen. Fattest woman I ever saw. Oddly enough that turned out of he significant. Plus the temporal engineer, as they called them then. Jerry Fitz. A strapping Upper Paleolithic type, full of enthusiasm. He was our general guard and nursemaid, too, and a very nice chap for a technician he seemed. Young, of course. We were all so young. Well, we had no sooner settled in and sent Fitz back with our first reports when the blow fell. Messages had to be carried in person then, you realize, by prearranged schedule. All we could do by way of signals was a crude go -- no-go. Fitz came back very solemn and told us that the grant appropriation was not going to be renewed and we'd all be pulled back next month for good. Dinner that night was funereal. Fitz seemed to be as blue as we IF until the bottle went round. Oh, thank you. "Ladies and gentlemen!" He had this rococo manner, though we were all of an age. "Despair is premature. I have a confession. My uncle's wife's niece works for the Senator who's chairman of the Appropriations Committe. So I went to see him all on my lone. What could we lose? And -- " I can still see Fitz' grin -- "I chatted him up. The whole bit. Dawn of man, priceless gains to science. Nothing. Not a nibble, until I found he was a fanatical hunter. "Well, you know I'm a gun buff myself and we went to it like fiddle and bow. So he got bewailing there's nothing to hunt back there and I told him what a hunter's paradise this is. And to make a long tale short, he's coming to inspect us and if he likes the hunting there's no doubt your money will be along. Now how does that smoke?" General cheers. Peshkov began counting the Senator's bag. "Several large ungulates and, of course, the baboons and that carnivore you shot, Fitz. And possibly a tapir -- " "Oh, no," Fitz told him. "Monkeys and deer and pigs, that's not his thing. Something spectacular." "Hominids tend to avoid areas of high predation," observed MacGregor. "Even the mammoths are far to the east." "The fact is," said Fitz, "I told him he could shoot a dinosaur." "A dinosaur!" we hooted. "But Fitz," said little Jeanne MacGregor. "There aren't any dinosaurs now. They're all extinct." "Are they now?" Fitz was abashed. "I didn't know that. Neither does the Senator. Surely we can find him an odd one or two? It may be all a mistake, like our little man here." "Well, there's a species of iguana," said Rasmussen. Fitz shook his head. "I promised him the biggest kind of beast. He's coming here to shoot a -- what is it? A broncosomething." "A brontosaurus?" We all jumped him. "But they're all back years -- " "Fitz, how could you?" "I told him the roaring kept us awake nights." next day. Fitz was gone across the gorge to tinker with his temporal field rig. They were big awkward things then. We'd built a shack for ours and then moved our permanent ' camp across the gorge where our hominids were. A stiff climb, up and down through the swamp -- it was all lush then, not the dry gorge it is today. And of course there was small game and fruit aplenty. Forgive, I think I will have just a bit more. Fitz came back once to question Rasmussen about brontosaurs and then went back again. At dinner he was humming. Then he looked around solemnly -- my God, we were young. "Ladies and gentlemen, science will not die. I shall get the Senator his dinosaur." "How?" "I've a friend back there -- " We always called the present back there -- "who'll push me a bit of extra power. Enough to jump me and a loadlifter to the big beasts for at least a day. And I can jigger up this breadbox for a signal and a split retrieve." We all objected. How could he find his brontosaur? Or kill it? And it would be dead. It would be too big. And so on. But Fitz had his answers and we were drunk on the Pleistocene and in the end the mad plan was set. Fitz would kill the largest reptile he could find and signal us to bring him back when he had it crammed in the transporter. Then, when the Senator was ready to shoot, we would yank the freshkilkd carcass across eighty million years and arrange it near the shack. Insane. But Fitz swung us all with him, even when he admitted that the extra power use would shorten our stay. And off he went next dawn. Once he'd gone we began to realize what we six promising young scientists had done. We were committed to hoax a powerful United States Senator into believing he had stalked and killed a creature years. "We can not do it!" "We've got to." "It'll be the end of time travel when they find out." Rasmussen groaned. "The end of us." "Misuse of Government resources," said MacGregor. "Actionable." "Where were our heads?" "You know," Jeanne MacGregor mused, "I believe Fitz was as eager to shoot a dinosaur as the Senator." "And that convenient arrangement with his friend," Peshkov said thoughtfully. "That wasn't done from here. I wonder -- " "We have been had." "The fact remains," said MacGregor, "that this Senator Dogsbody is coming here, expecting to kill a dinosaur. Our only hope is to make some tracks and persuade him that the creature has moved away." Luckily we had thought to tell Fitz to bring back footprints of whatever he managed to murder. And Rasmussen had the idea of recording its bellows. "They're like hippos. They'll be swathes of stuff knocked down by the water. We can trample about a bit before Fitz gets back." "He has risked his life," said litIF tie Jeanne. "What if the signal doesn't work?" Well, we bashed down some river trails and then our apemen had a battle with baboons and we were too busy with blood typing and tissue sample to worry. And the signal came through and here was Fitz, mud all over and grinning like a piano. "A beauty," he told us. "And bigger than God's outhouse." Actually he had shot a previously unknown Brachiosaur. "I squeezed it in with the tail cut twice, only three hours dead. All ready to fetch." He pulled out a muddy plastic. "Here's the print. And a tailmark. We can drag a bag of rocks for that." He flicked the recorder and the bellow was enough to knock us backward. "A thing like a big frog makes that, ours only does a silly little honk. The honorable will never know the difference. Now look !" He yanked at a lump by his feet. "Feel it. A live egg." "Good God -- " We crowded up. "What if he takes it back and it hatches in Bethesda?" "I could inject it with something slow-acting," said MacGregor. "Keep the heart beating a while. An enzyme imbalance?" "Now for the trails," said Fitz. He unfolded a gory fin like a sailfish plate. "They mark up the trees with this. And they make a nest of wet reeds -- our swampy bit there is just right. There's one thing, though." He scratched mud off his chest hair, squinting at Jeanne MacGregor. "The trails," he said. "It's not just footprints. They, well, they eat a lot and -- have you ever seen a moose-run? Those trails are loaded with manure." There was a pause that grew into a silence. "Actually, the thought had -- " said Priscilla Owens, the fat woman. It developed that it had crossed all our minds. "Well, for the sake of realism I'm sure something can be arranged," grinned Peshkov. "A token offering to your establishment, right?" "He's a hunter," said Rasmussen. "He'll be quite observant of such factors." Fitz grunted uncomfortably. "There's another thing. I forgot to tell you about the Senator's nephew. He puts on to be an amateur naturalist. As a matter of fact, he tried to tell the Senator there weren't any dinosaurs here. That's when I said about the roaring at night." "Well, but -- " "And the nephew is coming here, with the Senator. Maybe I should have mentioned it. He's smart and he has a mean eye. That's why I got the egg and all. Things better be pretty realistic." There was a breath-drawing silence. Peshkov exploded first. "Is there anything else you conveniently forgot to tell us?" "You wanted to go dinosaur hunting!" Priscilla Owen blared. "You planned this! No matter what it costs science, no matter what happens to us! You used this whole -- " "Prison!" Rasmussen boomed. "Illegal use of Government -- " "Now, wait." MacGregor's dry voice brought us all up. "Argybargy won't help. First of all, Jerry Fjtz, is there a Senator coming or was that part of the game too?" "He's coming, all right," said Fitz. "Weir, then," said Mac. "We're for it. We must make it stick. Total realism!" Rasmussen took the bull by the, ah, horns. "How much?" "Well, a lot," said Fitz. "Piles." "Piles?" Fitz held out his hand. "It's not bad stuff," He flicked off more mud. "You get used to it. They're herbivores." "How long do we have?" "Three weeks." T hree weeks. I wUl have a bit more of that aquavit. Pier. The memory of those weeks is very fresh, very green. Greens, of course, all kinds of greens. And fruits. God, we were sick. The MacGregors went first. Colic -- you've never seen such cramps. I had them. Everybody had them, even Fitz. We saw to it that he did his share, I can tell you. It was a nightmare. That was when we began to appreciate Priscilla Owen. Eat? Great gorgons, how that woman could eat. We were all dying but she kept on -- mangosteens, plantains, wild manioc root, palm hearts, celery -- anything and everything. How we cheered her! We could scarcely crawl but we actually competed in bringing her food, in escorting her to the swamp. It became an obsession. She was saving us. And science. A complete transvaluation of values. Pier. Seen from the standpoint of dung production that woman was a saint. Rasmussen idolized her. "Ten thousands dinars would not pay for the chicken she has eaten," he would croon. "The Persians knew." Then he would retch and stagger off to dig her roots. I believe he actually got her the Order of Lenin afterward, although her work was quite trivial. The funny thing was, she began to lose weight. All that roughage, you know, instead of the fatty stuff she usually ate. She became quite different-appearing. As a matter of fact, I tried to propose to her myself. In the swamp. Luckily I got sick. Oh, thank you Pier. IF She gained it all back later on, of course. Well, by the time the Senator and his nephew arrived we were all so sick with colic and dysentery and with our obsession with the trails that we scarcely cared what would happen to our project. They came in the afternoon and Fitz ran them around in the swamp a bit and had them find the egg. That quieted the nephew but we could see he was in a nasty temper at being proved wrong and looking hard at everything. The Senator was simply manic and little Jeanne managed to get a lot of liquor into them both, on the pretext of avoiding dysentery. Hah! Thank you. Luckily it gets dark at six on the equator. A couple of hours before dawn Fitz sneaked off to the shack and materialized his brachiosaur carcass. Fresh from the upper Cretaceous swamp that had been there you. Hard to believe even yet -- and ourselves in the Pleistocene. Then he pounded back in the dark and the recorded bellow went off on schedule. The Senator and the nephew came pouring out stark bare, with Fitz telling him where to stand and helping him point the artillery. And up comes this huge head over the trees around the shack and the Senator lets fly. That was really the most dangerous part of the whole affair. I was under that head with the loadlifter and he nearly got me. Of course the Senator was in no shape to trek over the gorge -- though it's surprising what your mesomorph can do -- so Fitz was sent to haul the thing back. Once the Senator touched that horrendous snout he could not wait to take it home. That punished Fitz; I doubt he had realized he would lose his trophy. But he did save time travel. I think he got a Scottish decoration in the end. At any rate the nephew had no chance to pry and by lunchtime the whole thing was over. Almost. Incredible, really. Oh, yes. The appropriation went through and all the rest followed. But we still had a problem. Are you sure you don't want more? One never finds the real thing nowadays. Pier, old friend, it's good to meet again. You see, the Senator liked it so well that he decided to return and bring his cronies. Yes. A very difficult business. Pier, until our funding finally stabilized. Do you wonder I can't stand the sight of salads since? And coprolites. Oh, that means fossil excrement. Paleobotanists used to have a big thing going there. No sense now, when we can Just go back. And anyway, who's to say how genuine they are?  of the current books Eve read seem to be experiments. Maybe that's a healthy sign. Every field of the arts needs an infusion of new ideas and techniques. However, my own feeling is that an experiment is not good in and of itself. It must be judged by the results, like any other piece of work. And in the case of fiction the results tend to pass without any attention to the experiment when it succeeds; the readers enjoy or admire the piece as a whole, untroubled by whatever means the writer had to find to achieve his ends. It is only when an experiment is less than successful that it is obviously experimental. I'm referring to honest attempts at discovery within the field, of course. Much of what has been called experimental writing is simply a resort to tricked-up style or so-called implicit plotting which has been done over and over again, so that another imitation contributes nothing to the art. In the cases I'm discussing I find at least some honesty in trying to do something new enough to merit attention. The simplest of these experiments is editorial in nature. The Eleventh Galaxy Reader, edited by Frederik Pohl (Doubleday, #), contains ten of the best stories from the magazine issues of #. On the surface, there is no experiment here; and I doubt that any reader would notice that there was a single unusual device in the book (which in my mind makes the experiment here a complete success) if the editor didn't give the whole thing away in his introduction. These are not stories chosen by Pohl, however, but rather by the readers of the magazine. I know of no other anthology about which that can be said, so it has to be an experiment. In fact, normally such a way of making a choice would be far too time-consuming and difficult for consideration. But since Galaxy ran a contest with # first-money last year, the results from the readers were already on file. Incidentally, from intimate contact with that poll, I can state flatly that it was as honest as it could possibly be, and the results are as reliable as any sampling could make them. Here then are the stories chosen by a cross-section of readers, with only the novels omitted. They range from "Night wings" by Robert Silverberg and "The Sharing of Flesh" by Poul Anderson through "The Time Travelers" by Burt Filer and "Sweet Dreams, Melissa" by Stephen Goldin. The Silverberg is a long novelette by a well-known and long-established writer, the Goldin story is a short by a rather new name in the field. Apparently neither length of story nor reputation of the writer had much to do with the value the readers placed on any piece -- which is as it should be, of course. Pohl states that some of these would probably not have been his final choice, had he been following his personal editorial policy in making up the anthology. Here a host of factors must enter the final decision, such as length of stories and number to be included and a general balance of contents, as well as the names to appear on the cover. The book doesn't seem to suffer from comparison with other anthologies in these regards, however. It presents a wide variety of some excellent fiction, a number of top names and a fine diversity of lengths. It must be rated as an unqualified success. The only unfortunate aspect is that this represents an experiment which may not be repeated. I'd give the book a high rating on both intent and successful achievement. A far more obviously experimental book is Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner (Ballantine, #). Here, at last in soft covers, is last year's Hugo-winning novel; and if the price seems high for a book in paper covers, the # pages inside more than justify it. The present edition is cheaper than hardcover, has wider distribution and offers a chance for more readers to see what all the shouting was about. Here the word "experimental" was proclaimed loudly from the beginning in connection with the novel and, in at least a few cases, affected the voting that led to the award. From conversations I had with voters before and after, I suspect the word swayed some. Well, the book is experimental. True, much of the basic trickery behind the scenes was used long ago by John Dos Passos -- as I remember, with rather spectacular lack of success. Brunner has modified and adapted the approach to fit quite a different story and to bring it into science fiction. After careful reading, I feel that there is more Brunner than Dos Passos to the use of the writer's mechanisms of presentation. The question of whether Brunner's is a successful experiment is harder to assess. There's nothing subtle about it. The tricks are labeled and put forward with no attempt to hide them. No reader can be unaware of them. The novel is broken into four sections in the lengthy table of contents. "Context" represents twenty-eight chapters of background material, color and assorted facts and opinions from such sources as here-andnow newspaper stories, future radioscripts and quotations from the works of one Chad C. Mulligan, iconoclast. "The Happening World" is a potpouri where Brunner may tell you flatly about his story, if he chooses -- and either tell you straight or put you on temporarily with ironic overor understatement through sixteen chapters. "Tracking with Closeups" represents thirty-two chapters in which most of the work is done with minor characters -- related to or completely separate from the events acting on the main characters. Some of these continuing glimpses of the little people of Brunner's world are moving and effective. For the main development we follow forty-two chapters of "Continuity," in which the plot seems to operate. Some of it deals with both main characters -- but toward the end we dance back and forth from one to the other. Everything is simple in the table of contents. In the novel itself, there seems almost a random use of chapters from any section. Most of the main story could probably be skimmed by sticking to those chapters marked "Continuity" -- but to the credit of Brunner's decision to use this complicated development, anyone trying such hurried reading would lose far rhore than half of the significance of even this section. inherently a virtue. Some of the finest literature in any field has achieved its results with the simplest of obvious handling. Still, for complexity isn't necessarily a fault. The question is whether the rewards justify the effort needed to wade through all this. In the beginning of the novel, it seems that they do. The assorted pieces begin to fit together slowjy into a complex picture of a world IF and the problems to face the main characters that forces attention on even the seeming trivia in some sections. But after the first two hundred pages -- at most -- there is the beginning of doubt as the story moves. Stripped to an unfair minimum, the story involves two men who share an apartment in a world grossly overpopulated and grotesquely hedonistic in its efforts to meet the even more grotesque pressures it is under. Donald is entation; he has spent years in studying for some undercover secret assignment he feels may never come. Norman is black, with a strange mixture of pride and mixed shame and fear because of his background; his job is as a minor executive in the richest industrialcomplex company -- one able to develop and use a seemingly infallible computer. Neither is concerned with the population pressure that has made it immoral to have more than two children, nor with the eugenic pressures that deny many the right to have any. At the beginning both find themselves confronted with the ugliness of the real world, however -- and with growing tensions between themselves as a result. Then Norman gets wrapped up in a vast new project, and eventually takes over most of the responsibility for it. To develop markets and facilities for mining its huge sea-bottom mineral claims, the company is swept into a plan to take over an underdeveloped country in Africa known as Beninia. This is done at the request of the aging President of Beninia to save his country from being a pawn between more powerful neighbors. Beninia is a country that comes to fascinate Norman when he finds its people are totally without aggressive drive -- and that races moving into the Country in the past have also lost all their aggressions. Poor as it is, Beninia has known nothing but inner peace through all its history. Eventually his job turns into a quest for the secret of that peace as a possible answer to the tensions in the outer world. David is recruited into a superCommando training course and then sent to the most aggressive country on the planet, Yatakang -- approximately our current Indonesia. There a ruthless dictator has announced that a genius among his people, Sugaiguntung, has perfected a means of altering the germ plasm so that every child can be a superman, as proved by his remarkable work with apes. David is to get the truth about this secret, if it is more than a propaganda trick. And in Yatakang, he succeeds in meeting the scientist, seemingly finds the secret is a hoax, and prepares to rescue Sugaiguntung from his Dictator's domination. ( Please turn to page #) I Crier pounding excitedly on the wall of my nest and crying, "Lant! Lant! It's happened! Come quickly!" I stuck my head out. "What's happened?" "The disaster! The disaster!" Pilg was jumping up and down in excitement. "I told you it would happen." I pulled my head in and dressed. Pilg's joy was a frightening thing. I felt my fur rising, fluffing out in fear as I wondered... Pilg the Crier had been predicting disaster for weeks as was his habit. He predicted his disasters twice a year, at the times of the equinox. The fact that we were leaving the influence of one sun and entering that of the other would make the local spells completely unstable. As we approached conjunction -- the time when the blue sun would cross the face of the red -- Pilg had increased the intensity of his warnings. This was disaster weather; something dire would certainly happen. Usually, it did, of course. Afterward -- and after we of the village had somehow picked up the pieces -- Pilg would shake his heavy head and moan, "Wait until next year. Wait. It'll be even worse." Sometimes we joked about it, predicting the end of the world if Pilg's "next year" ever arrived. I lowered the ladder and joined Pilg on the ground. "What's the trouble?" "Oh, I warned you, Lant. I warned you. Now maybe you'll believe me. I warned you, though -- you can't say I didn't warn you. The omens were there, written across the sky. What more proof did you need?" He meant the moons. They were starting to pile up on one side of the sky. Shoogar the magician had predicted that we were due for a time of total darkness soon -- perhaps even tonight -- and Pilg had seized on this as just one more omen of disaster. As. we hurried through the village I tried to get Pilg to tell me what had happened. Had the river changed its course? Had someone's nest fallen from its tree? Had the flocks all died mysteriously? But Pilg was so excited at having finally been proven correct that he himself was not sure exactly what had happened. One of the hill shepherds, it seemed, had come running into town, panic-stricken and shouting something about a new magician. But by the time I got this information out of Pilg we were already at the village clearing where the frightened shepherd was leaning against one of the great housetrees, gasping out his story to a nervous group of men. They pressed in close to him, badgering IF him with questions. Even the women had paused in their work and, hanging back at a respectful distance, listened fearfully to the shepherds words. "A new magician," he gasped. "A red one -- I saw him." Someone handed him a skin. He sucked the quaff from it noisily, then panted, "Near the cairn of the wind-god. He was throwing red fire across the mountains." "Red fire. Red fire." The villagemen murmured excitedly among themselves, each offering his neighbor his own views on what this startling situation must mean. "If he throws red fire, he must be a red magician." Almost immediately I heard the word "duel." The women must have heard it too, for they gasped group of men. I pushed my way through to the center of the crowd. "Ah, Lant," said one of the men. "Have you heard? There's going to be a duel." "Is there?" I demanded. "Have you seen the runes of the duel inscribed across Shoogar's nest?" "No, but -- " "Then how do you know there's going to be a duel?" "A red magician -- " gasped the shepherd. "A red magician -- " "Nonsense. No red magician could have the powers you describe. Why don't you wait until you know something definite before you start spreading silly rumors that frighten women and children?" "You know Shoogar as well as we. As soon as he discovers there is a new magician in the district, he'll -- " "You mean Shoogar doesn't know yet?" The man looked blank. I raised my voice. "Has anyone thought .to tell Shoogar?" Silence. No one had. Or perhaps someone had and had not yet returned to tell of Shoogar's reaction. In any case, my duty was clear. I must prevent Shoogar from doing something rash. I hurried through the trees toward the magician's nest. form well suited for a wizard. It was a squat, misshapen gourd hung from a forbidding black ogre of a tree and well beyond the limits of the village. The Guild of Advisors was afraid to let him move closer -- he was always experimenting with new spells. I found Shoogar already packing his travel kit. His agitated manner told me he was worried. Then I caught a glimpse of what he was packing and I was worried. The last time he had used that ornate bone-carved tarinele was when he had hurled the curse of the itching red boils at Hamel The Failure. I saw what he was packing in on top of the tarinele and I flinched. "I believe that's against the Guild Rules," I said. For a moment I thought he'd hurl a spell at me. I cringed and instinctively made a spell-cutting gesture, forgetting for the moment that Shoogar himself had made the protective amulets I wore. He couldn't possibly break through his own protections, at least not for a few more days. They would expire with the coming of the blue dawns. "You," he snapped. "What do you know of magic? You who call yourself my friend. You didn't even have the courtesy to inform me of this intruding sorcerer." "I didn't even know of him myself until just a few moments ago. Perhaps he only arrived today." "Arrived today? And immediately began throwing red fire about? Without first informing himself of the local gods, tidal patterns, previous local spells and their side effects? Ridiculous! Lant, you are a fool. You are an idiot of the first circle where magic is concerned. Why do you bother me?" "Because you are an idiot where diplomacy is concerned," I snapped back, my fur bristling. I am one of the few people in the village who can bristle at Shoogar and survive to tell about it. "If I let you go charging up the mountain every time you felt you had been wronged you'd be fighting duels as often as the blue sun rises." Shoogar looked at me and I could tell from his expression that my remarks had sunk home. "Smooth your fur, Lant. I did not mean that you were a complete fool. I just meant that you are not a magician." "I'm glad you are aware of my skill as a diplomat," I said and allowed myself to relax. "Our abilities must complement each other, Shoogar. If we are to succeed in our endeavors we must maintain a healthy respect for each other's powers. Only thus can we protect our village." "You and your damned speeches," he muttered. "Some day I'm going to make your tongue swell up to the size of a sour melon just for the sake of some peace and quiet." I ignored that remark. Considering the circumstances, Shoogar had a right to be testy. He closed up his travel kit, tugging angrily at the straps. "Are you ready?" I asked. "I'll send a message up to Orbur, telling him to ready two bicycles immediately." "Presumptuous of you," Shoogar muttered. But I knew that he was secretly greatful for the thought. Willville and Orbur, my eldest two sons, carved the best bicycles in the district. IF H e found the new magician right where the shepherd had said, near the cairn of Musk-Watz, the wind-god. Across a steep canyon from the cairn is a wide grass-covered mesa with a gentle slope to the south. The new magician had appropriated this and scattered it with his devices and oddments. We pulled our bicycles to a shuddering halt. He was in the process of casting a spell with an unfamiliar artifact. Shoogar and I paused at a respectful distance and watched. The stranger was slightly taller than I, considerably taller than Shoogar. His skin was lighter than ours and hairless but for a single patch of black fur, oddly positioned on the top half of his skull. He also wore a strange set of appurtenances balanced across his nose. It appeared that they were lenses of quartz mounted in a bone frame through which the stranger could see. The set of his features was odd and disquieting, and his bones seemed strangely proportioned. Certainly no normal being would have a paunch that large. The sight of him made me feel queasy and I surmised that perhaps some of his ancestors had not been human. Magicians traditionally wear outlandish clothing to identify themselves as magicians, but even Shoogar was unprepared for the cut of this stranger's costume. A single garment covered most of his body. The cloth appeared to be woven into a shape which almost exactly matched his own. There were high flared cuffs on the pantaloons to allow for his calf-high boots and over his heart was a golden badge. Its design appeared to be based on the shape of the egg, which I guessed must be his personal symbol. Around his middle he wore a wide belt, to which were attached two or three small spell devices. He had also set up a number of larger devices, two hands of devices to be exact -- I counted. Most of them had the blue-white glimmer of polished metal. (There is little metal in our village -- it rusts quickly -- but I am a man of the world and have traveled much. I am familiar with the sight of metal, having seen it in the highlands, but nothing so finely worked as this.) These devices stood on three legs so that they were always level, even where the ground was not. As we watched, the stranger peered into one of them, peered across the canyon at the sacred cairn of Musk-Watz, the god of the winds, and peered into his device again. Muttering constantly to himself, he moved across the clearing and adjusted another of his spell devices. Evidently this was a long and complicated spell, though just what its purpose was neither Shoogar nor I could fathom. Occasionally he would refer to a large, egg-shaped nest, black and regular of contour, sitting on its wide end off to one side of the pasture. As there were no trees in the area large enough to hang it from, he had set it on the ground. An unwise course, to be sure, but the shell of that nest looked like nothing I had ever seen -- perhaps it was able to resist marauding predators. He had no animals that I could see and I wondered how he had moved it here -- or else how he had built it overnight. If he had done either, his power must be formidable. The stranger did not notice us at all and Shoogar was fidgeting with impatience. Just as Shoogar was about to interrupt him the stranger straightened and touched his device. The device responded by hurling red fire across the canyon -- directly at the cairn of Musk-Watz. I thought Shoogar would suffer a death-rage right then and there. The weather gods are hard enough to control at best and Shoogar had spent three long lunar configurations, trying to appease MuskWatz in an effort to forestall another season of hurricanes. Now the stranger had disrupted one of his most careful spells. searing bright and narrow, straight as the horizon of the ocean (which I have also seen), that crimson fire lashed out across the canyon, striking Shoogar's carefully constructed outcrop. I feared it would never end -- the fire seemed to go on and on. And the sound of it was dreadful. A painful, high-pitched humming seemed to seize my very soul. A piercing, unearthly whine. Under this we could hear the steady crackling and spattering of the cairn. Acrid smoke billowed upward from it and I shuddered, thinking how the dissipating dust would affect the atmosphere. Who knew what effects it would have on Shoogar's weather-making spells? I made a mental note to have the wives reinforce the flooring of our nest. Suddenly, just as abruptly as it had begun, the red fire went out. Once more the silence and the calm descended over the mesa. Once more the blue twilight colored the land. But across my eyes image. And the cairn of the windgod still crackled angrily. Amazingly enough, the cairn still stood. It smoldered and sputtered and an ugly scar showed where the red fire had touched it -- but it was still intact. When Shoogar builds, he builds well. The stranger was already readjusting his devices, muttering continuously to himself. I wondered if that were part of the spell. Like a mother vole checking her cubs he moved from device to device, peerIF ing into one, resetting another, doing strange things to a third. I cast a glance at Shoogar. I could see a careful tightening at the corners of his mouth. Indeed, even his beard seemed clenched. I feared that a duel would start before the stranger could offer Shoogar a gift. Something had to be done to prevent Shoogar from a rash and possibly regrettable action. I stepped forward boldly. "Ahem," I began. "Ahem. I hate to interrupt you while you are so obviously busy -- but that bluff is sacred to Musk-Watz. It took many cycles to construct the pattern of spells which -- " The magician looked up and seemed to notice us for the first time. He became strangely agitated and muttered words in a language neither Shoogar nor I had ever heard before. I must confess I was uneasy. It might be a secret tongue even more powerful than the Guild of Sorcerer's tongue. It might even be the language of... The magician took a quick step toward us. He made a straightarmed gesture, palms open to us, and spoke in quick tense words. I threw myself flat on the ground, arms over my head. Nothing happened. When I looked up Shoogar was still beside the other bicycle, his arms outstretched in a spell-breaking pattern. Either the stranger's spell had miscarried or Shoogar had blocked it. The stranger threw no more spells. Instead he backed toward his oddly shaped nest, never taking his eyes from us. He continued his strange words but now they were slow and low pitched, like the tone one uses to calm an uneasy animal. He disappeared into his nest and all was quiet and blue. Except for the crackle of cooling rock which still reached across the canyon to remind us that Musk-Watz had been defiled. II could be serious." "Lant, you are a fool. This is already serious." "Can you handle this new magician?" Shoogar grunted noncommittally and I was afraid. Shoogar was good. If he were not sure of his skill here the whole village might be in danger. I started to voice my fears but the stranger abruptly reappeared, carrying another of his metal-andbone devices. This one was smaller than the rest and had slender rods sticking out on all sides. I did not like its looks. It reminded me of some of the more unpleasant devices that I had seen during the dark years. The magician watched us all the time he was setting it up on its three slender legs. As he turned it to face us I tensed. It began to make a humming noise like the sound of a water harp when a string bow is drawn across its glass tubes. The humming rose in pitch until it began to sound disturbingly like that of the device of the red fire. I began gauging the distance between myself and a nearby boulder. The stranger spoke impatiently to us in his unknown tongue. "You are discourteous," rumbled Shoogar. "This business can wait, surely?" The spell device said, "Surely?" I lanjded behind the boulder. Shoogar stood his ground. "Surely," he repeated firmly, "you violate custom. In this, my district, you must gift me with one new spell, one I have never seen. Were I in your district -- " The spell device spoke again. Its intonation was terrifying and inhuman. "New spell gift -- never known -- surely." I realized that the stranger had spoken first. His device was attempting to speak for him in our words. Shoogar saw it, too, and was reassured. The device was only a speakerspell and a poor one at that, despite its powerful shape. Shoogar and the speakerspell and the stranger stood on that wind-swept mesa and talked with each other. Or rather, they talked at each other. It was infant's talk, most of it. The thing had no words of its own. It could only use Shoogar's -- sometimes correctly, more often not. Shoogar's temper was not improving. He had come to demand gift or duel from an intruding warlock only to find himself teaching a simpleminded construct to talk. The stranger seemed to be enjoying himself, unfortunately at Shoogar's expense. The red sun was long gone, the blue was near the horizon and all the world was red-black shadow. The blue sun settled behind a clump of deep violet clouds. Suddenly it was gone, like a taper blown out by the wind. The moons emerged against the night, now in the configuration of the striped lizard. During certain configurations Shoogar's power is higher than during others. I wondered if he were master or servant to the striped lizard. He was just drawing his robes imperiously about his squat and stubby form. Master, apparently, from his manner. A bruptly the stranger repeated his palms-out gesture, turned and went back to his nest. He did not go inside. Instead he briefly touched the rim of the doorway and there was light. Garish light. It spurted from the flank of the nest, bright as double daylight. And such a strange light. The IF ground and the plants seemed to take the wrong colors and there was something not right with their shadows, an odd blackness of shade. The new magician's motive was obvious even to me -- and even more so to Shoogar. He leaped back out of the light, his arms raised for defense. But it was no use. The light followed him, swept over him and dazzled him, effectively canceling out the strength of the lunar light. The stranger had effectively negated the power of the striped lizard. Shoogar stood trembling, a tiny figure pinned in that dazzling odd-colored glow. Then, for no apparent reason, the stranger caused the light to vanish. "I think that the light disturbs you," said the speakerspell, talking for the magician. "But no matter. We can talk as well in the dark." I breathed more easily but did not completely relax. This stranger had shown how easily he could cancel the effect of any lunar configuration. Any powers Shoogar might have hoped to draw from the sky would have to be foregone. I watched the striped lizard slink dejectedly into the west. The moons rode their line across the sky, milk-white crescents with thick red fringes. On successive nights the red borderlines would narrow as the suns set closer and closer together. Then there would be no colored borders. Later, blue borders would show after second sunset -- and Shoogar could make no use of any of this. Shoogar and the new magician were still talking. By now the speakerspell had learned enough words for the two to discuss intelligently the matters of magicians. "The ethics of the situation are obvious," Shoogar was saying. "You are practicing magic in my district. For this you must pay. More precisely, you owe me a secret." "A secret?" echoed the speakerspell device. Still cold and cramped, I was suddenly no longer sleepy. I cocked an ear to hear better. "Some bit of magic that I do not already know," Shoogar amplified. "What, for instance, is the secret of your light like double daylight?" "... potential difference... hot metal within an inert... doubt you would understand... heat is caused by a flow of... tiny packets of lightning..." "Your words, do not make sense. I take no meaning from them. You must tell me a secret that I can understand and use. I see that your magic is powerful. Perhaps you know of a way to predict the tides?" "No, of course I can't tell you how to predict the tides. You've got eleven moons and two primary suns tugging your oceans in all directions. Tugging at each other, too. It would take years to compute a tidal pattern." "Surely you must know things that I do not," said Shoogar. "Just as I know secrets that you are unaware of." "Of course. But Tm trying to think what would help you the most. It's a wonder you've gotten as far as you have. Bicycles even -- " "Those are good bicycles," I protested. "I ought to know. Two of my sons built them." "But bicycles -- " He moved closer eagerly. I tensed -- but he only wanted to examine them. "Hardwood frames, leather thongs instead of chains, sewn fur pelts for tires. They're marvelous. Absolutely marvelous. Primitive and hand-made, with big flat wheels and no spokes. But it doesn't matter -- they're still bicycles. And when all the odds were against your developing any form ofat all!" "What are you talking about?" Shoogar demanded. I was silent, seething at the insult to Willville and Orbur's bicycles. Primitive, indeed! "... starts with the perception of order," said the magician. "But your world has no order to it at all. You're in an opaque dust cloud, so you cannot see any of the fixed-lights-in-the-sky. Your sky is a random set of moons picked up from the worldlet belt... three-body configuration makes capture easy... tides that go every which way under the influence of all those moons... moons that cross and recross at random, changing their... because of mutual..." The speakerspell was missing half of the stranger's words, making the rest gibberish. "And then the high level of... from the blue sun would give you a new species every week or so. No order in your observable... probably use strict cut-andtry methods of building. No assembly-line engineering techniques because you wouldn't normally expect an assembly belt to produce the same item twice in a row... but it's a human instinct to try to control nature. You must tell me -- " Shoogar interrupted the babbling stranger. "First you must tell me. Tell me some new thing that you may satisfy the Guild law. What is the secret of your red flame?" "Oh, I couldn't give you a secret like that." Shoogar began to fume again but he only said, "And why couldn't you?" "For one thing, you couldn't understand it. You wouldn't be able to work it." Shoogar drew himself up to his full height and stared up at the stranger. "Are you telling me that I am not even a magician of the second IF circle? Any magician worth his bones is able to make fire and throw it." And with that Shoogar produced a ball of fire from his sleeve and casually hurled it across the clearing. I could see that the stranger was startled. He had not expected that. The ball of fire lay sputtering on the ground, then died away, leaving only the burned core. The stranger took two steps toward it, as if to examine it, then turned back to Shoogar. "Ve'ry impressive," he said. "But still -- " Shoogar said, "You see, I can throw fire also. And I can control the color of the flame. What I want to know is how to throw it in a straight line -- as you do." "It is a wholly different principle... coherent light... tight beam... small clumps of energy... vibration of..." As if to demonstrate, he touched his spell device again and once more the red fire lashed out. Eyesearing flame played across MuskWatz's cairn. Another smoking hole. I winced. The stranger said, "It boils the rock and tells me what it is made of by teUing me what color the smoke is.' I tried to conceal my reaction. Any idiot could have told him the smoke was bluish-gray, let alone what rocks are made of. I could tell him myself. He was still talking. "Absorption of light -- but I couldn't teach you how to use it. You might use it as a weapon." "Might use it as a weapon?" Shoogar exclaimed. "What other use is there for a spell to throw red fire?" "I just explained that," the stranger said impatiently. "I could explain again but for what purpose? It's much too complex for you to understand." That was a needless insult. Shoogar may be only a magician of the second cirlce but that does not mean that he is inferior. In actuality, there are few secrets he is not privy to. Besides, gaining the first circle is a matter of politics as well as skill and Shoogar has never been known as a diplomat. I could see that Shoogar was fuming. diplomacy to be applied to the rough edges of these two magicians. I knew it was my duty to prevent friction between them, especially now that the barrier of language had been removed. "Shoogar," I said, "let me speak. I am the diplomat." Without waiting for his assent, I approached the speakerspell, albeit somewhat nervously. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Lant-la-lee-lay-lie-ahno. Perhaps it may strike you as a bit presumptuous that I claim seven syllables, but I am a person of no mean importance in our village." I felt it necessary to establish my rank from the very beginning, and my right to speak for the village. The stranger looked at me and said, "I am pleased to meet you. My name is..." The speakerspell hesitated but I counted the syllables of the name. Three. I smiled to myself. Obviously, we were dealing with a very low status individual -- and I realized something disquieting as well. Where did this magician come from that individuals of such low status controlled such mighty magic? I preferred not to think about that. Perhaps he hadn't given his full name. After all, I hadn't given him the secret side of mine. The speakerspell abruptly translated the stranger's three-syllable name: "As a color, shade of purple gray." "Very odd," said Shoogar, speaking low. "I have never known a magician to be named for a color." "Perhaps that's not his name but an indication of which god he serves." "Nonsense," Shoogar whispered back. "Then he would be either Something-the-Red or Somethingthe-Blue. But he isn't either." "Perhaps he's both -- that's why he's purple." "Don't talk foolishness, Lant. It's impossible to serve two masters. Besides, he isn't all purple. He's Purple the Gray. And I've never heard of a gray magician." I turned back to the stranger, "Is that your full name? How many syllables are in the secret side of it?" He couldn't be offended -- I was not asking for the name itself. He said, "I have given you my full name. As-a-shade-of-PurpleGray." "You have no other? No secret name?" "I am not sure I understand. That is my full name." Shoogar and I exchanged a glance. The stranger was either incredibly foolish, or exceedingly cunning. Either he had betrayed his full name to us, thus delivering himself into Shoogar's power, or he was playing the fool in order to keep Shoogar from discovering his real name. Perhaps the name he had given was some kind of spell trap. It certainly wasn't a clue to his identity. AsA ShadeOfPurpleGray was speaking again. "Where did you come from?" "From the village." I started to point down the mountain but covered the gesture quickly. No sense in telling this stranger where the village was located. "But, I saw no village from the air." "From the air?" Shoogar asked. "Yes, when I flew over the area." IF Shoogar's ears perked up. "Flew?" You have a flying spell? How do you do it? I have not yet been able to get anything larger than a melon to fly -- and I have been trapping the bubbles of noxious odor as they rise from the swamps." Indeed, Shoogar had been trying to perfect a flying spell for as long as he had been a magician. He had  even contrived to get two of my sons to aid him, Willville and Orbur. Often they would neglect their bicycle carving to work on some strange new device for him. So great was their enthusiasm for Shoogar's project that they had been accepting no payment at all for their labors -- much to my annoyance. The new magician smiled at Shoogar's description of his flying spell. "Primitive," he said, "but it could work. My own vehicle uses somewhat more complex and efficient principles." He pojnted at his huge black nest. No, he must have meant one of the devices in it or near it. Who could conieve of a flying nest? A nest is a home, a fixed place, a locality of refuge, a place of returning. Philosophically a nest cannot so much as move, let alone fly. What is philosophically impossible is impossible to magic. This law constrains even the gods. "Well, show me how it works. Teach me your flying spell," Shoogar begged him excitedly. The stranger shook his head. "I could not show that one to you either. It is beyond your understanding." T his was too much for Shoogar. All evening long this new magician had continued to insult him. Now he refused even to gift him with a secret. Shoogar began jumping up and down in exasperation. He pulled his tarinele from his travel kit and had actually begun to pack the blow chambers with cursing powder before I could calm him. "Patience, Shoogar! Please!" I begged him. "Let us return to the village. Call for a meeting of the Guild of Advisors first! Don't challenge him to a duel until we have a chance to talk this thing out." Shoogar muttered something under his breath. He muttered a whole bunch of somethings. "I ought to use this tarinele on you. You know how I hate to waste a good curse." But he emptied the blow chambers, wrapped it up again in its protective skins and returned it to his pack. He stood and faced the new magician. "We return to our village to confer. We will visit you again before the time of the blue dawns." The stranger did not seem to hear the last. "I will accompany you," he said. "I would like to see your village." Shoogar can be clever when he puts his mind to it. "Certainly you may accompany us," he said. "It would be inhospitable of us not to welcome you. But you cannot leave yourself so far from your nest. Tonight the moons are down and the red curses roam the land." I wished Shoogar hadn't brought that up. I remembered how far we were from home. The stranger chose not to reply. Shoogar spread his hands helplessly. "If we had empty nests in the village, you would be welcome to use one -- but as it is, with the time of total darkness approaching, I would not recommend straying too far from one's own nest." "That's all right," said the stranger, "I'll just bring it with me." "Huh?" said Shoogar. "How? We certainly are not going to help you. That is, neither of us has the strength to -- " AsAShadeOfPurpleGray seemed to laugh. I was becoming most tired of his laugh. "Don't worry about that," he said. "You just lead the way and I'll follow." Shoogar and I exchanged a glance. Obviously this dumpylegged stranger would be unable to keep up with our bicycles -- especially if he was going to try to bring his nest. We waited respectfully, however, while the magician collapsed his artifacts and devices. I was amazed to see how easily they folded up and how compactly they stored, and made a mental note to get closer to one of them if I could. I was curious to see how the bone was carved and how the metal was worked. Perhaps I could learn something from the construction of such devices. They were carved too precisely, too delicately for me to see much in the dim light. I glanced involuntarily at the sky. We were fast approaching the time of total darkness. Only six of the moons were left in the sky. No wonder the night was fading. I certainly did not intend to tarry for this stranger. time the stranger had packed up all of his devices and stowed them within his nest. There was something about his manner that made me feel vaguely uneasy; a sureness of self that implied he knew what he was doing. "All right," he said. "I'm ready." He disappeared into his nest, shutting the door behind him. That was when my feeling of unease gave way to one of pure terror. Purple-Gray's whole nest began to hum like the speakerspell and the red-fire devices within it -- but IF louder. Suddenly it rose into the air and hung there at twice the height of a man. I thought Shoogar would fall off his bicycle from astonishment. I was having trouble with my own hands and feet. Even when you are not trembling all over a bicycle is hard enough to control. The ride back to the village was a nightmare. Shoogar was so unnerved he forgot to chant any of protective canteles -- and we both kept looking back over our shoulders at that huge looming egg which came floating silently, dreadfully after us, throwing off light in all directions like some terrifying manifestation of Elcin the thunder god. And it didn't help matters that every time I looked up another moon had set, plunging us ever closer to the time of total darkness. One of us was moaning. I wasn't su whether it was Shoogar or me. The bicycles clattered roughly down the mountain path and I was so concerned about getting safely back to my nest that I did not even think to urge Shoogar to be careful with my other machine. The way he kept looking back over his shoulder I was sure he would hit something and split a wheel. Fortunately he did not -- I did not know if I would have even stopped to help him. Not with that big black egg chasing us, always perfectly and terrifyingly upright. Somehow we made it down to the grasslands. Several of the women saw us coming -- they were out in the fields gathering the night fungi -- but when they saw that huge glowing nest looming along behind us, they turned and ran for the safety of the village. Shoogar and I did not even think to park our bicycles on the hill but rode them right down into the settlement. The women would have to clean the mud from the wheels We reached the village none too soon. The last of the moons was just settling into the west. We paused, out of breath, in the center clearing. The great black nest floated ominously above us, lighting up the whole village with its odd aura. The great trees and the gourd-shaped nests hanging from their mighty branches took on strange and terrifying colors. From out of the air the magician's voice boomed louder than any natural voice: "... no wonder I didn't see it from the air... houses are structured spheres, suspended from the limbs of tremendous trees... must be at least... Wait until... hears about this. Where should I park?" "Anywhere," I gasped weakly. "Put it anywhere," and made an appropriate sweeping gesture. I looked around to see if we had any trees strong enough to hang such a nest from. There were none big enough that were not already occupied -- but if this magician could make his nest fly, then he could surely hang it from even a sapling. But even this the stranger did not do. He landed it on the ground. And not just on any ground. He swept through the village toward the river and brought it to land on the crest of the slope overlooking the frog-grading ponds. The ponds were dry now, drained for their ritual purification and reseeding spells, but I was appalled at such callous disregard for the property of the village. I winced as the magician's nest sank into the ooze with a slow squishy phlooosh. Ill the time the smoky rim of the red sun began to appear over the horizon, I was already up and about. After my cleansing and purification, I felt better but still haggard and drawn. The events of the night before had taken their toll. A glance out was enough to confirm that the stranger was still in our midst. Pilg the Crier was already moving through the trees moaning of this new development. Disaster was all the more certain now that the strange magician had moved his nest into the village. Even from here I could see a curious crowd gathering around it -- though still keeping a respectful distance. And, the frog-monger, was wringing his hands and moaning over his frog-grading ponds. He would have to repurify them again after the stranger left -- and if that were not soon he might miss the spawning season altogether. Shoogar and I went out to watch him that first day. As soon as he saw us he straightened from his examination of a local herb and disappeared into his nest. He returned almost immediately with an object in his outstretched hand. "A gift," he said. "A gift for Shoogar the magician." Shoogar was caught by surprise. He had not expected the stranger to produce the required gift. Now he had fulfilled his obligation as a magician and had the legal right to remain in the district. By the same convention, Shoogar was bound to respect the rights of the new magician as well as his spells. Guild rules are quite specific. Shoogar, as resident magician, had the seniority. The stranger could do nothing to interfere with Shoogar's practice or previous spells but, aside from that, he was free to do as he chose. Shoogar examined his gift. It was small and light, easily held in one hand. One end had a glass lens mounted in it. The stranger demonstrated how it worked. When one pressed forward on the thing's sliding nerve, the glass lens made light. It was a trivial thing. I could IF sense that Shoogar was disappointed and insulted that the stranger had not given him something more spectacular. Shoogar had other ways to make cold light. But there was little he could say. It is extremely bad form to test a gift spell in the presence of the giver. The only advantage to the gift was that its light was a bright narrow beam, not quite like the stranger's beam of red fire, and certainly not as intense -- but it was a shape of light that we had not seen before. Shoogar had had his heart set on the flying spell or the red fire device. Yet manners compelled him to accept the gift graciously. Moreover, he had to remain while the stranger tried to make conversation. I Conversation, did I say? More like a monologue of madness! "I cannot understand why your world has life at all," Purple-Gray was saying. "Your evolution patterns don't seem right -- yet who would have settled here? We certainly wouldn't. For one thing, the dust clouds hide you from space. For another, you don't really get yellow, dwarf sunlight." Much of it was like that -- coherent sentences trailing off into strings of unrelated words. "Though I suppose the red and blue combine to give the same effect. The plants all look black because there's so little green light but the... in plants doesn't use the green anyway. So that's all right. It's these double shadows that would drive anyone insane." stream of gibberish with commendable patience. Purple-Gray's words about different colors seemed to hint at something very important and Shoogar wanted to know what it was. "You speak of 'this world,' " he said. "May one assume that you know of other worlds?" I wondered if Shoogar were baiting the stranger. "Oh, yes. My world -- " He looked up, considered, then pointed into the empty sky. "My world is in that general direction -- I think. Beyond the dust clouds." "Dust clouds?" Shoogar peered up into the sky. I looked also. So did the crowd of onlookers. "Dust clouds?" The sky was an empty blue. What was he talking about? Shoogar looked at the other magician. "Do you mock me? I see nothing. No dust clouds. No other worlds. There is nothing in the sky." "Oh, but there is," said PurpleGray. "It's just too small for you to see." Shoogar raised an eyebrow, threw me a look, turned back to the other magician. I could sense some of the onlookers trying to restrain their mirth. Some of the lesser women were already giggling and had to be herded away. "Too small?" repeated Shoogar. "Too small?" His patience was growing thin. Shoogar has no temperament for children, fools or madmen. "Oh, no -- you misunderstand," said Purple-Gray quickly. "It's too small to see because it's so far away." "Oh," said Shoogar slowly. Purple-Gray still had not explained the dust clouds -- or the lack of them. "Yes. In fact, it's so far away that if you tried to get there on say, a bicycle, it would take you many generations. You would grow old and die before you had covered a significant fraction of the journey." "I see," said Shoogar. "Then how did you get here? By pedaling faster?" Purple-Gray laughed. "Oh, no, no. Even that wouldn't help. I -- " The speakerspell hesitated, then said, "Went around..." The last sound was incomprehensible. Shoogar shook his head in confusion. Several more of the women had to be led away. It was not good for them to see a grown man making a fool of himself, nor was it advisable that they witness Shoogar discomfited. Several of the men began muttering amongst themselves. Shoogar gestured for silence -- he still had not given up. "Went around?" he asked. "Went around what? The dust clouds?" "Oh, no. I went through the dust clouds. I went around..." Shoogar repeated this sentence slowly, to see if there were something in it he had missed. He looked at Purple and shook his head. "Uh-uh," he said. "Uh-uh." That was all, just: "Uh-uh." He turned and walked away, up the slope, shaking his head and turning the small light-making device over and over in his hands. next several days collecting small plants, pieces of larger plants, handfuls of mud and water and dirt. There were plenty of sprats and adults to watch him but he took little notice of them. A floating, three-legged, clicking device followed him about with its legs folded, unnoticed and untended until he needed it. Each time he took a sample of something he would mount this device on its legs and point it at the site. It seemed a harmless enough testing device but Shoogar would grit his teeth every time it came floating by. Shoogar went into seclusion then, determined to discover the secret of the stranger's light-making device. When I visited him for the purpose of checking his progress he glared angrily at me. IF He muttered, "Curse that single-shadowed demon!" "Perhaps it would help if you tried to find out which god the spell draws its power from." ( Shoogar gave me another look, more scathing than the first. "Do I tell you how to carve bone? Why do you tell me magic?  Don't you think I know my own business? I have already tested this device for the presence of every ' god in the known pantheon and it responds to none." "Perhaps," I suggested, "peri haps it is based on a different principle. Purple appears not to call on any gods at all. Could it be  that -- "  Then how does he work his de vices?" Shoogar demanded. "By ' superstition?" "I don't know -- but perhaps he draws his power from some different source. Or perhaps -- " "Lant, you are a fool. Why do you continue to prattle on about things you do not know? If you are going to try to talk to a magician about magic you should at least try to talk intelligently." "But that's why I'm asking -- "  "Superstition, Lant, is harmless prattle that gets repeated so often that people start to believe it -- and I then it is no longer harmless. The ( belief of the people gives it power. Magic, on the other hand, involves ( a carefully constructed equation of symbols intended to control specialized forces or objects. Magic works whether one believes in it or not." "I understand that," I said. "And I do not think that Purple operates by superstition." "Nor do I," said Shoogar. "His powers are too great." "But it does not appear that he operates by magic either." "Are you suggesting that the stranger's devices are independent of the gods?" Shoogar's look and tone made it clear that he felt he was talking to an imbecile. I stiffened my tone. "Such a thing is not impossible. Willville once confessed to me that he has often test-ridden new bicycles without bothering to bless them first. One grows careless and forgets. But nothing evil has ever happened to him." "Willville and Orbur are under my protection -- remember?" said Shoogar. "In payment for helping to construct a flying spell." "Yes, I remember -- I had preferred that they take money." Shoogar ignored me. "I am protecting both your sons as a matter of course, so Willville's occasional ride on an unblessed bicycle proves nothing. Besides, if everything else has been properly prepared, the bicycle blessing is superfluous." "I still say that such a thing as a device independent of the gods might be possible." Shoogar gave me a look. "You seem sure of yourself." "As a boy, I once used an unblessed fishing rod I had made." "So?" "So, I caught a fish." Shoogar snorted. "It still proves nothing, Lant. If you had blessed that rod and washed your hook as you should have you might have caught ten times as many fish. All that you proved otherwise was that you had constructed a usable fishing rod. What you needed for that experiment was a valid control -- an identical fishing pole that had been blessed and washed. Then you would have seen which one could catch the most fish." "You talk as if you have done such an experiment." "Not with fish, no. But with traps." My surprise must have shown, for he said, "As an apprentice, every new magician must prove to his own satisfaction, at least once, that there is truly great power in magic. One cannot be a magician if there is a seed of doubt in his mind. By allowing the apprentice to satisfy his curiosity, we generate faith in him. It is a simple experiment -- one that anyone can construct for himself -- a test that can be repeated as often as you choose. Each time the results are the same and can be verified." "And what happens?" "The traps with the blessed bait will catch twice as many rabbits." "So? Maybe it was only because the bait is more attractive to the rabbits." "Of course. I would expect you to put it into layman's terms," said Shoogar. "But that's 'exactly what it is supposed to do. The whole purpose of the spell is to make the bait more attractive. These traps are simple devices, Lant. A simple device may not always need magic -- but when it is used the results are easily demonstrable. Now, how many parts were there to your fishing pole?" "Three. Stick, line and hook." "Right. There is little that can go wrong with it, but still the string can break or the bait can slip off or the hook may not catch. And this is only a simple device -- a thing that does not have to be very precise. Think, Lant! What of the construction that has many moving parts? It has to have all of them in absolute working order before'any of them will work. What of, say, the bicycle?" cut me off. "Don't interrupt. The bicycle has many moving parts, the wheels, the pulleys, the steering bar, the pedals, the axles. All of these things must be precision carved and in delicate adjustment with each other or the device simply will not work. Now, theoretically, a perfect machine is possible. But in practice -- well, when you get a machine that has to be that precise simply to function, that is when the effect of the magic becomes most important. If only IF one part fails -- one part -- the whole machine is useless. The simple device does not need magic, so its effect is enhanced by the simplest of spells. But a complex device needs a more complex spell just to keep it working at all. There is Just too much that can go wrong. Tell me, Lant, how' many parts are there to a bicycle?" I shrugged. "I have never counted. A good many, I would guess." Shoogar nodded, "And how many parts does the stranger's flying nest have?" I shook my head. "I don' know." "More than a bicycle?" "Undoubtedly," I said. "Very perceptive of you, Lant. I feel sure that there must be at least a thousand different parts in that flying nest. From my own flying experiments, I can tell you that a flying spell is a very complex device indeed. Purple-Gray's nest must have many moving parts, all of them working together in precision. The smallest error and nothing happens. It's quite obvious to me that the more parts a machine has, the more opportunities it has to go wrong. Now, are you going to stand there and try to tell me that the stranger keeps all of those various parts working in absolute precision without the aid of any magic at all?" I shook my head. Shoogar made a very convincing case. He had certainly given the whole matter much more thought than I had imagined. But, of course, that was his job as magician. It was reassuring to know that he was doing it so well. I beamed proudly at him. "Then the same thing must apply to all of his other devices, right?" Shoogar nodded, "You are beginning to see the obvious, Lant." "They must need so much magic that they must be reeking of spells, right?" Shoogar nodded again. "Then, you have already figured out the secret of the light device, Shoogar? It is so complex that it is obvious, right?" "Wrong. It is so simple that it is a mystery." "Huh?" "The most I've been able to do is to take the device apart but look at what that leaves me!" He waves his hand at a workbench. On it were only four pieces, the elements of the stranger's light. These consisted of a hollow shell, a crystal lens, a flat plate and an interior canister, roughly the same shape as the outer shell. Shoogar turned this flat bulging object over and over in his hands but he could not find an opening. It was hard and. solid and we both puzzled over what it might contain. It resisted all our attempts to open it and Shoogar would not use force for fear of destroying the devices within. "And you have been able to make no changes at all in its condition?" I prompted. "Not exactly. I have made one change." "And what is that?" "The light. It has failed completely and will no longer glow." "Oh." Shoogar glumly fitted the pieces together again as I watched. He activated the sliding nerve. Nothing happened. "I thought not," he muttered. "I had hoped the spell might restore itself if given a chance to rest -- but apparently I was mistaken." "Why don't you take it back to Purple?" I suggested. Shoogar whirled on me. "What? Do you think I am not capable enough on my own to solve this problem?" "No, Shoogar," I protested. "I am sure you are capable. I just thought that -- well, perhaps Purple has done something to cancel the original spell that you can't know about. Perhaps he has insulted some god." Shoogar considered this. "You could be right. You're sure you're not doubting my ability as a magician?" He peered at me. Hastily I reassured him. "Shoogar, I have no doubts about the level of your knowledge." This seemed to placate him. "Good. Then we can pay a visit to Purple and find out why the device doesn't work." IV west pasture, doing something with a set of his devices. I looked for -- but did not see -- the red-fire device. Apparently, he had not brought it with him. The devices he was using here in the meadow seemed to be harmless. Purple was puttering contentedly, murmuring and humming busily to himself when Shoogar interrupted and handed him the device. Purple took it, fiddled with it several times, then opened it and examined the cylinder within. He noted that its surface had gone red. "Well of course it won't work. The battery is dead." Shoogar went pale. "The battery? Why did you not tell me there was a living creature within this device? I did not even know what to feed it." "No, no," said Purple with a laugh. "You don't understand." "I understand all too well," said Shoogar. "You entrusted a living creature into my care without even telling me. And it is no wonder that it died -- imprisoned in that tiny box without food or water! You have caused the death of a living being to be on my head and now I must offer up prayers for its soul." IF Purple managed to check his laughter. "Listen to me, Shoogar. Listen. A battery is not a living creature. It is a device, a thing that stores power." "Oh," said Shoogar. "A latent spell." He smoothed his fur and said in a calmer tone. "Well, which god must I placate in order to restore its power to it?" Again Purple laughed. "You still do not understand. Here, give it to me and I will do it for you." He reached for the device but Shoogar did not give it to him. "Why will ycrU not tell me how to restore it?" demanded Shoogar. "What good will the device be to me, if I must continually come to you when its power is exhausted? What kind of a magician would that make me look like? And furthermore, what happens after you leave -- how will I restore it then? If I at least knew which gods -- " "No gods," said Purple. "No gods at all. Your gods are not able to restore this device's power. Here, give it to me, Shoogar. I will do it." Shoogar jerked his hand back as if stung. "The gods not able to restore the device's power? Only you?" "Relax, Shoogar," Purple said. "The device works without the gods. It doesn't need them." Shoogar said slowly, carefully, "Do you mock me? No device works without the gods." "This one does. So do the rest of my devices." Shoogar gently stiffened his tone. "Purple, you are not making sense. It sounds as if you are denying the power of the gods. Such talk will cause Elcin to rain lightening down upon your head. I urge you to -- " "That would be true," Purple interrupted, "if there were an Elcin. Or any other god. You have over a thousand gods here -- and I still have not numbered them all. Oh, these primitive superstitions, born out of the ignorant need to explain the inexplicable. I'm sorry, Shoogar -- I can't explain it to you. You're as much its victim as its master." Abruptly, he was silent. "Is that all?" Shoogar asked. "Yes, I'm afraid so," the other replied. Shoogar looked thoughtfully at the device he still held in his hands. "Purple," he began slowly and evenly -- his voice showed great control. "Were it not for your devices I would think you either a fool or a blaspheming red magician. But the abilities of your devices are such that you can be neither foolish nor false. Therefore you must be something else." He paused, then said, "I want to know what that something is. In your conversations you continually refer to things that do not make sense but they hint at meaning. I am sure that you know things that I do not. Your devices prove that. I wish to learn these secrets." He paused again -- it was very hard for him to say what he said next. "Will you teach me?" Shoogar's words startled me. I had never heard him so humble. His passion for the secrets of the stranger must have been all-consuming for him to abase himself like that. P urple looked at Shoogar for a long moment. "Yes," he said, almost to himself. "It is the only way -- teach the local shamans let them introduce the knowledge. All right. Look, Shoogar, you must first understand that the gods are not gods at all but manifestations of your belief." Shoogar nodded. "That theory is not unfamiliar to me." "Good," said Purple. "Perhaps you are not as primitive as I thought." "This theory," continued Shoogar, "is one of the key theories upon which all of magic is based -- that the gods will take the forms necessary to their functions and those functions are determined by -- " "No, no." Purple cut him off. "Listen. Your people do not understand how the moons make the tides, so you create N'veen, the god of tides and patron of mapmakers. You do not understand how the winds are created by great masses of hot air, so you create Musk-Watz, the god of winds. You do not understand the relationship between cause and effect, so you create Leeb, the god of magic." Shoogar frowned but he nodded. He was trying very hard to follow this. "I can understand how it happened, Shoogar," said Purple condescendingly. "It's no wonder you have so many gods -- single god worship starts with a single sun. Here you have two suns and eleven moons. Your system is hidden away in a dust cloud -- " He saw that Shoogar was frowning, and said quickly, "No, forget that last. It would only confuse you." Shoogar nodded. "Now, listen to this carefully. There is something more than these gods of yours, Shoogar, but you and your people have forgotten that you have created the gods yourselves, and you have come to believe that it is the other way around -- that the gods have created you." Shoogar flinched at this but he said nothing. "I will try to teach you what I can. I will be glad to. The sooner you and your people are ready to lay aside your primitive superstitions and accept the one true -- " here, the speakerspell hesitated again -- "magic, the sooner will you inherit -- the lights in the sky." "Huh?" said Shoogar. "What IF lights in the sky? Do you mean those faint non-substantial things that appear at random and rarely in the same place twice?" Purple nodded, "You are not able to see them as I am -- but some day, Shoogar, some day, your people will build their own flying spells and -- " "Yes, that's it," said Shoogar eagerly. "Show me the flying spell. What gods -- " "No gods, Shoogar. That what I have been trying to explain to you. he flying spell is not derived from the gods but from men. Men like myself." Shoogar started to open his mouth to protest, but he swallowed mightily instead. "Derived from men?" Purple nodded. "It must be a simpler spell than I imagined -- you'll teach me?" "I can't," Purple protested. "Can't? You just said you would." "No, no -- I meant that I would teach you my -- " the speakerspell seemed to be having some trouble with the word -- "magic. But I can't teach you my flying spell." Shoogar shook his head as if to clear it. "Your flying spell is not magic then?" "No, it isn't. It's -- " again the device hesitated -- "it's magic." temper was shortening. "Are you or are you not going to teach me how to fly?" "Yes -- but it is your people who will fly -- " "Then what good is it to me?" "I mean your children and your grandchildren." "I have no children." "I did not mean it that way," Purple said. "I meant -- your peor pie's children and your grandchildren. The spell is so complex that it will take many years to learn and build." "Then let us begin," prompted Shoogar impatiently. "But we can't," Purple protested. "Not until you learn the basics of -- magic." "I already know the basics of magic. Teach me the flying spell." "I can't. It's too difficult for you." "Then why did you say you would if you wouldn't?" "I didn't say I wouldn't. I said I couldn't." That was when Shoogar got mad. "May you have many ugly daughters," he began. "May the parasites from ten thousand mudcreatures infest your codpiece!" His voice rose to a fearful pitch. "May dry rot take your nesting tree! May you never receive a gift that pleases you! May the God of Thunder strike you in the kneecap!" They were only words, nothing more, but coming from Shoogar they were enough to pale even me, an innocent bystander. I wondered if my hair would fall out from witnessing such a display of anger. Purple was unmoved -- and I must credit him for his courage in the face of such fury. "I have already told you, Shoogar, that I am not concerned with your magic. I am above such things." Shoogar took another breath. "If you do not cease and desist, I will be forced to use this." Shoogar produced from the folds of his robe, a doll. I knew from its odd proportions and colors that the doll had been carved to represent Purple. Purple did not even quail as any normal man would have done. I knew then that he must be mad. "Use it," he said. "Go ahead and use it. But don't interrupt me in my work. Your world-life-system-balance has developed in a fascinating direction. The animals have developed some of the most unusual fluids-secreted-for-thecontrol-of-bodily-functions that I have ever seen." Purple bent back to his devices, did something to one of them, a stabbing gesture with a single forefinger, and a whole section of the west pasture erupted. Shoogar covered his eyes in despair. Purple had just violated one of the finest pastures of the village -- one of the favorite pastures of Rotn'bair, the god of sheep. Who knew what the mutton would taste like this winter? Then, to add injury to insult. Purple began gathering fragments of the meadow and putting them into little containers. He was taking the droppings. Was it possible for one man to violate so many of the basic laws of magic and still survive? The laws of magic are strict. Any fool can see them in operation every day. Eveh I am familiar with them. They operate the entire world and their workings are simple and obvious. But Purple, this man of the flying nest, was blind even to the simplest of spells. I was not surprised when Shoogar, grimly intent, set the doll down on the grass and set it afire. Neither was I surprised when the doll had burned itself into a pinch of white ash without Purple even bothering to notice. Purple ignored it -- and us. He showed not the slightest effect. Flaming sting things! What powers this magician must have! Shoogar stared at him aghast. Purple's very casualness was the ultimate insult. When we left him he had one of his clicking boxes open and was fumbling inside. He never even noticed our going. V the sky, a frown on his face. IF Both suns were still high -- broad red disc and blue-white point. The blue sun was poised on the edge of the red, ready to begin the long crawl across its face. "Elcin's wrath!" he muttered. "I cannot use the suns -- all is unstable. Damn the conjunction! That leaves me only the moons -- and the moons are well into the mud-skunk." He hurled a fireball across the clearing. "An eightmooned mud-skunk at that!" He put his hands on his hips and shouted into the sky, "Why me. Quells? Why me? What have I done to offend you that you curse me with such unusable configurations? Have I not sworn my life to your service?" There was no answer. I don't think Shoogar expected one. He turned back to his spell devices. "All right then. If it is a mudskunk you have given me, it is a mud-skunk I shall use. Here, Lant, hold this." He thrust a large pack at me. He continued to rummage through his equipment, all the while muttering under his breath. A fearful collection of cursing devices began to grow around him. I indicated the pile. "What is all this for?" He appeared not to hear me, continued checking off items in his head, then began loading them into the pack. "What is all this for?" I repeated. Shoogar looked at me. "Lant, you are a fool. This," he said, and hefted his kit meaningfully, "is to show the stranger that one does not trifle with the gods of the full belly." "I'm afraid to ask. What is it?" "It's the spell of the -- No, you'll just have to wait and see it in action, with the others." He strode purposefully toward the frog-grading ponds. I hurried after him. It was amazing how fast Shoogar's squat little legs could carry him. An uneasy crowd of villagers was already standing on the rise above the flying nest -- none dared approach it. When Shoogar appeared an excited murmur ran through the crowd. Word of Purple's insult had spread quickly. The villagers were tense with expectation. Shoogar ignored them. He and strode angrily to Purple's nest, ignoring the mud that splashed up and over his ankles and stained the hem of his robe. He strode around the nest three times without pause, looking at it from all sides. I was unsure whether he had already started spelling or whether he was still sizing up the situation. For a long moment he stood looking at the landward side of that nest, like an artist contemplating a blank skin. Abruptly he made up his mind. He stepped quickly forward and with a piece of chalk inscribed the sign of the horned box on the side of Purple's nest. An interested murmur of speculation rose from the crowd. "The horned box -- the horned box -- " This spell would be under the domain of Rotn'bair, the sheep god. Members of the crowd discussed it busily among themselves. Rotn'bair is neither very powerful nor very irritable -- compared to Elcin, that is. Most of the Rotn'bairic spells deal with fertility and food-gathering. Few things will anger the sheep god -- but if Rotn'bair could be angered, Shoogar would know how. The crowd murmured with an excited curiosity, each speculating on just what form the final spell would take. Shoogar finished the sketch. Absent-mindedly wiping the chalk from his hands, he strode down to the mudbanks of the river. He paced back and forth along its edge, casting about for something. Abruptly he spotted what he was looking for, something just below the surface of the water. He grabbed quickly for it, his hands dipping into the river with no splash at all. When he straightened, the sleeves of his robe were dripping but I saw a brownish slug in his hands and after a moment I caught the odor of mud-skunk. T he scent reached the rest of the crowd at the same time and a murmur of approval went up from them. The antipathy between Rotn'bair, the sheep god, and Nils'n, the god of the mud creatures, was known even to laymen. Evidently, Shoogar was constructing a spell that would play on the mutual antipathy of the two gods. My guess was right -- I pride myself on a fairly good understanding of the basic principles of magic. Shoogar slit the belly of the mud-skunk and deftly extracted its anger gland. Carefully he placed this into a bone bowl. I recognized the bowl, having carved and cleansed it for him myself. It was made from the skull of a newborn lamb and had been sanctified to Rotn'bair. Now he was defiling it with the most odious portion of the mud creature. No doubt, he now had Rotn'bair's attention. He laid the bowl to one side and returned to the mud-skunk which lay writhing in a swampy pool. He picked it up and deftly sliced off its head without even offering up a prayer for its soul. Thus he defiled its death. Now he surely had Nils'n's attention. Using the bladder of the slug as a mixing bag, he began to construct a potion of powdered ramsbone, extract of hunger, odor of sheepsblood and several other elements that I could not identify -- but I suspected that all of them were designed to arouse the wrath of Nils'n although in what manIF ner was not yet completely clear. Shoogar surveyed the nest of the mad magician on its riverward side. Then he began to paint his soupy potion in broad lines across its round black flank in a pattern of eleven stripes by eleven. Having finished, he sketched in the sign of the deformed changeling, the favored son of the sheep god. This Cas the half of the spell which would anger Nils'n. Shoogar had defiled a mud creature in order to celebrate the greatness of Rotn'bair. To complete the other half of the spell, Shoogar would now desecrate his earlier celebration of Rotn'bair, the horned box sketched on the other side of the nest. He returned to the bone bowl, the one containing the anger gland of the mud-skunk. Using the legbone of a ram, he crushed the gland into a sick-smelling paste. This he mixed with ramsblood, defiled water and a greenish powder from his travel kit. I recognized that powder. It was an extract of fear, usually used where potent action is desired. It is derived from animals of the cloven hoof. Six sheep must have been sacrificed just to provide the small amount Shoogar was now mixing into his spell. Stepping to the landward side of the nest and chanting a song of praise for Nils'n, Shoogar began painting a familiar symbol across the chalk sketch of the horned box. It was the sign of Nils'n, a diagonal slash with an empty circle on either side. The crowd gasped appreciatively. Such originality in spellcasting was a delight to behold. No wonder he was called Shoogar the Tall. Rotn'bair would not allow such a desecration of his sheep. And Nils'n, the god of mud creatures, would not long be complacent while mud-skunks were being sacrificed to Rotn'bair. The antipathy of the two gods is demonstrated every time .the sheep are led to the river. Sheep are careless and clumsy and, as they mill about on the banks, they trample scores of frogs, snakes, salamanders, lizards, chameleons, and other amphibians that live in the mud. At the same time many of the more dangerous mud creatures, the poisonous ones, the ones with venom, lash back at the sheep, cutting their legs, ruining their wool, infecting them with parasites, giving them festering sores, leaving them bleeding from assorted cuts and slashes. The two gods hate each other and, in their various incarnations -- the sheep and the mud creatures -- they work to destroy each other at every opportunity. Now Shoogar had inscribed insults to both upon the same nest. He had defiled creatures of each in order to celebrate the greatness of the other. If Purple did not make immediate amends, he would have to suffer the wrath of both simultaneously. Purple had said he did not believe in the gods. He denied their existence. He denied their powers. And he had stated that he was above Shoogar's magic. I hoped he would return in time to see the spell take effect. I followed Shoogar down to the river and helped him with his ritual purification. He had to cleanse himself of the odor of offense against the gods, lest he be caught up in his own curse. Sometimes the gods are nearsighted. We bathed him with six different oils before we even let him step into the river. No sense in offending Filfo-mar, the river god. Even before we finished with the cleansing we could hear the curse beginning. We could hear the cheers of the crowd and under that was a dull sort of booming. Without even stopping to dry off, Shoogar wrapped his robe around himself and hurried back up the hill, with me trailing excitedly in his wake. the hill in time to see an angry ram butting his head insistently against the side of Purple's nest. More rams were arriving and they, too, began to attack that looming black globe. The focus of their anger was the desecrated homage to Rotn'bair and the very substance of the Nils'n symbol seemed enough to anger them. The smell of the mud-skunk waspotent enough to raise anyone's hackles. Red-eyed and breathing heavily, the rams jostled and shoved and butted even at each other in their frenzy to attack that odious desecration on the side of Purple's nest. Each time they struck it that same dreadful booming echoed up and down the hill and each time a great cheer went up from the crowd. I expected at any moment to see one of the rams go crashing through the walls of that fearful nest but no -- those walls were stronger than I had thought. Perhaps even as strong as metal. The only effect I could see was that each time a ram struck it, it seemed to lift slightly out of the mud for a moment before sinking wetly bade. The rams, in their bleating frenzy, continued to strike at that offensive spot, as if they themselves were the very incarnation of Rotn'bair's anger. Again and again they hurtled at that dull black surface. Old Khart, the lead ram, had already shattered both of his horns (sacred items in themselves -- I mourned the loss) and several of the other rams were also bleeding profusely. Their eyes were red with fury. Their nostrils flared wide. Their breath came in hot puffs of steam and the sounds of bleating and snorting filled the air with a madness born of wrath. The IF steam rose from their sides and their hooves slashed wetly through the ground, churning the grass and mud into a meaningless soup. Already some of the rams were having trouble with their footing and indeed, as we watched, one of the older ones slipped and slid through the mud. He crashed against two others and brought them both down with him. All three were caught under the frenzied, slashing hooves of the others. The once white wool of the animals was now stained with washes of pink and darker spots of red. Most of the rams were bleeding about their horns and heads and many had gaping wounds where they had been gored by one another's frenzy. Thir angry snorts were punctuated with grunts of pain and by the dull thud and hollow boom that rolled up and down the slope each time they struck the side of Purple's nest. But the creatures had strength beyond all natural endurance and continued to clamber over one another, continued to butt at that offending spell. Each time they struck it the nest rose up out of the ground and threatened to slide down the slope and into the river. But each time it would pause and then sag wetly back into its hollowed out cradle of mud. Several times it trapped slow-footed beasts under the curve of its wall. I felt a great surge of emotion within myself -- any moment now Purple's great eggshaped nest would be toppled onto its side. Abruptly three of the rams hit the nest at the same time and it seemed to leap into the air. One more struck it at just the right instant and as it rose out of its hollow it just seemed to keep on moving. Suddenly it was sliding downslope with a great wet slosh. Angry rams scrambled after it, butting at it all the way down, churning the mud with their hooves and leaving a long angry scar through Ang's carefully terraced frog-grading pools. I shouted in triumph with the rest. The great black globe slid into the river with a resounding thud and a splash, a loud cheer of delight and victory went up from the villagers. Only I was silent, for only I had noticed that the terrible nest was still upright, that it had not canted even a thumbnail's width. Had Shoogar noticed, too? His puzzled frown was a match for mine. But the nest was in the river. The rams slid and skidded down the slope, destroying what was left of the frog pools in the process. Almost joyfully they leaped into the water, still butting at the nest. Others milled around the banks, churning the mud. Mud-skunks and salamanders ran panic-stricken under their hooves and a new shade of red added itself to the stains on the heaving flanks of the crazed rams. Crushed mud-skunk mingled with the blood of the sheep and the terrible smell reached us on the crest of the hill, along with the hysterical splashing and bleating... N OW the black nest was within Nils'n's reach. So far only Rotn'bair had had a chance to avenge his insult -- now it was Nils'n's turn. The banks boiled with life as salamanders, lizards, crabs, venom-bearing snakes and other river creatures came swarming up out of the mud and darkness. They scrambled across the churning surface and attacked anything that moved, even each other, but more often the rams. The rams continued to butt at the nest, oblivious to the mud creatures caught in their wool, hanging from their flanks, biting and slashing at their legs. Their once proud flanks, now torn and slashed, were stained with angry strokes of red and great washes of muddy brown river water. It was an awe-inspiring sight, sheep and mud-creatures together attacking that ominously unmoving nest. The villagers stood on the flanks of the hill and cheered the frenzied activity below. One or two of the braver shepherds tried to work their way down the slope but the snapping claws of the mud crabs drove them quickly back up to the crest. The rams were slowing down but they still continued to mill about Purple's nest, clambering over the occasional body of a fallen comrade, refusing to cease even in victory. The water was pink. Angry mud-skunks swarmed along both banks of the river. It was a heartening sight. The crowd continued to cheer wildly and began to chant a chorus of praise to Shoogar. Pilg the Crier was leading them. Down below, their anger spent, some of the rams were climbing back up the hill, slipping and skidding in their own blood and falling back down the mudslicked surface. But for the most part nearly all the rams were able to climb out. Only two or three slipped beneath the water and failed to surface. The mud creatures, too, were beginning to calm -- and the shepherds once more dared to work their way carefully down the slopes to tend their wounded flock. "A beautiful spell, Shoogar," I congratulated him, "Beautiful. And so powerful." Indeed, as the churning foam of the river continued to subside, revealing the full extent of the devastation, several of the villagers even began to mutter that perhaps the spell had been a bit too powerful. One of the members of the Guild of Advisors remarked IF thoughtfully, "Look at all this destruction -- this spell should be banned." "Banned?" I confronted the man. "And leave us defenseless before strangers?" "Well," he amended, "perhaps we should only keep Shoogar from using it on friends. We could still use it on strangers." I nodded. I would accept that. Certainly a spell that wreaked this much havoc should be used with discretion. Meanwhile, at least eleven of our sheep lay dead or dying in the churned mud of the slope, mud creatures feeding indiscriminately on their stilled or still heaving flanks. Some of the rams were trampled almost into the landscape. Others lay with their heads at oddly twisted angles, their necks broken from butting against Purple's nest. Three bodies lay below the water with their mouths open. What remained of the flock would show countless mud-skunk bites upon their legs and flanks. Many of those bites would undoubtedly become festering sores and probably more of the rams would die later. The vermin of the mud would be vicious for days to come. It would not be safe to bathe for a while and probably the sheep would not dare to return to the river for a long time. They would have to be led to the mountain streams to drink. The frog-grading ponds had been completely obliterated and would have to be resculptured elsewhere. Ang stood moaning and wringing his hands as he surveyed his mud-churned slope. And finally, the wreck of the mad magician's nest now blocked the river. Dammed water spilled over the south bank in a torrent. Already it was carving a new course for itself. And none of it mattered. These were all small prices to pay for the damage done to the stranger. Considering the magnitude of the task, it was one of Shoogar's less expensive efforts and we were proud of him. Then why was the scene so utterly silent? I looked to my left and saw Purple standing on the crest of the hill. IF The Magazine aiAHematives something trembles in the night, something whispers in the stars, something very ancient struggles to be born . I Winter were being scattered by the whips of the wind Thiobud, called Rooster, mounted on a rough but serviceable pony, made his way northeast across the ironhard and frozen mud. He was heading for the well-guarded burroughs of the Scopus Valley, where, he had heard, there was an unmanned woman. And he hoped to make a parley about her. A thin pole rode in the leather lancesocket with a white strip of rag tied to its top, and his pockets were conspicuously turned inside out. All this was, of course, no proof that he had no weapons concealed on or about him but it did for ceremony. And if anyone did start any trouble and it turned out that Rooster had, say, a knife hid under his clothes, well, it would serve anybody right. A gaunt, big-mouthed dog loped along more or less beside him. It had already run down and ravened two snowhares so far today. Rooster's eye-stone began to tingle on its thong against his skin. Someone not too far away was looking at him. He let his own eyes roam but didn't turn his head. Let them Jook. Even if he were to ride buff-bare they could none of them see inside his head. The dog lifted its horrid muzzle and growled and he growled back at it. They went on. Two men in a turfy peered out of the peep-holes. Throwstones clinked in their pockets. At the first sound of the pony hooves they had crawled over to peep out, expectant little noises rising in throats and mouths. Now one of them began to swear. "Chip-eating son of a lesbo Zon -- " "Huh? What? Whuh yuh mean?" "A whiterag. Cow cunny !" TTie other squinted through red cracked eyelids. The disappointment was like a sharp pain. He breathed hard. He said, "Uh, whuh, we c' take m anyway, uh. Huh?" "Look how cocky he rides, the cow cunny," muttered the first. "Elbows out -- son of a Zon! Muss really think he is a somebody -- Maybe is -- " He turned a scornful look on his companion. "We c' take m, uh? We juss bonk m withs a bonk stone, easy 's bonking uh chickenbird, uh. And the dog. And the pony. Nen what? Naa naa. Someone like that muss have protection. So juss when we finish eatin' the pony, down they come, 'Kilt our bruth, didja?' Nex' thing ya know -- well, ya know, doncha? Uhuh. I don't want no sharpstick hammered up my sphinc. Nup." Already the figures were dwindling. Too far away for a successful take. The second man sighed and slobbered a little. "Besides," he said, "anybody with poke enough to go out whiteragging, uh, mays got uh witch no IF Ill overlookin for m. Person c' fall apart, inch by inch, uh, uuhhh!" His filthy body shuddered in a convulsion not caused by the temperature but he made out it was, crawled away from the peephole. "Gunna throw uh-nuther chip on the red-eye," he muttered. "Gettin cunny cold in this cunny turfy." Slowly, either from cold or reluctance, his bruth moved, too. "Son of a Zon -- see how cocky he sat on that Zon cunny ponny?" They blew on the small dung fire and coughed in the bitter smoke. Then they spread out their tattered hands to warm. cle which was Wolf Hill Pond. Strangers Pass. Buffalo Head. And then Three Rock Brook -- nobody, nothing there now but a person didn't tarry without good reason. Bow Gaze, also called River Bow Gaze, and far down below the mist made by the smokes of the many burroughs. A rich and interesting country but not the country, not the burroughs for which Rooster was heading now. And would reach -- if he didn't get pulled down by wild dogs or wild men or civil men who just might have what seemed to them good reasons for nOt respecting a white rag -- if he weren't gored by a bull of some sort, crushed by a deadfall, didn't ride into a stakes-pit, get caught in a witch-lace. Wolf Hill, Wolf Hill Pond, Strangers Pass, Buffalo Head, Three Rock Brook, River Bow Gaze. So far, so good. No landmarks missed. The next one should be Poison Bones Flat, a good place not to go barefoot and requiring a sharp eye and a wide circuit on behalf of the pony. And after that -- He dropped after that from the top of his mind and began to think about right now, as soon as he saw over the next big rise. The dog didn't so much growl as grunt. And the pony nickered. Rooster counted five other -- no -- six other ponies. He wasn't able to say just how many people but one of them was a child. That was a good sign -- a child. So were the travoys. No one went out venturing (a smooth word for a rough scene), no one went out raiding with children or travoys. He didn't yet know if he wanted to company with them -- or if they'd let him, for that matter -- even if they were going his way. They wouldn't, couldn't go very fast. Still, never mind, it was time to rest a while, they'd built a fire and -- who knows -- he might learn something. There -- they'd seen him. Some were standing up, pointing. He raised both his arms and the pole. Not increasing his pace in the least he guided his mount with his knees down the other side of the rise. It was the child whose voice split the cold and the silence with a tiny puff of breath. IF 'White rag," the child said. "A whiteragger!" And, although the grown ones must have noted that by then, somehow the child's naming it seemed to make the fact certain. They did not, to be sure, unstring their bows but they lowered them, spoke sharply to their dogs. About twenty feet away the newcomer stopped. For a moment they looked at each other. The newcomer saw three men in red-dyed sheepskins, a woman mostly wrapped in an enormous mantle of dark wool, and the child, whose clothes had evidently been made out of the scraps of its elders' clothes. All were of dark skin and eyes, with here and there a lock of black hair hanging loose. And all were still unsatisfied. They saw a young man in leather, the hood of his jacket almost dovn to his eyes, naturally ruddy face nipped still ruddier by cold and wind. The woman muttered into her mantle and one of the men said, "Dismount and make your dog bide there." The dog raised a leg against a hummock but showed no disposition to move closer after being bidden. "What do they call you?", the spokesman asked suspiciously. "Call me Rooster -- though I have a birth-name and a father'sname, too. Tell me, then, can I come up?" A short hesitation. "Come up." T hey slipped their hands inside his clothes, found no weapons. Then they touched his hands with cold iron, to show if he were a witch; and with a silver ring, to see if he were a bloodsapper. And then, since he neither flinched nor cried out nor shrank back, they put a pinch of powdered sign-bark on his tongue and gave him water and watched his throat to be sure he swallowed. It was not savory, to be sure, but he had swallowed worse sign-powder in his life and thanked his witch (if he had one) that none of any of it had been poison -- also a hazard of coming up to strangers. "All clear, saltmaster?" "All clear. Rooster. Sit by the fire." "I will sit by the fire... Just a bit late for travoys, isn't it?" He inclined his head towards the woodframed drag-alongs, cargoes lashed in place. "The mud is all safe-frozen. Snow's not deep enough for sleds. We'll make our winter camp all right. Have a hunk of our salt. It's good -- well made, clean. And the fire was welcome and he, feeling its heat on his face, pulled his hood back. "Rooster, uh? Well, I see why. Never saw a red cresty before." They all gaped -- and the child jumped and set its hands to clapping so that the shell anklets rattled and clinked -- at the sight of his head, polled to the skin, save for the roach or comb of red hair riding like a crest from brow to nape. And then the stocky saltmaster spoke a word or two in a low voice, and the staring stopped. "Yes, huh, good salt -- uh -- trading's been good, too, this season -- huh -- " The bulky woman had secured her child and now swiveled slowly around to face the guest. "Why you whiteragging?" she asked, in a soft, husky voice. "Hunting a loster? Doing a punish?" The soft comb and curl of wavy red hair ruffled as he shook his head. "I've got places to go -- I don't want to stop for troubles -- Scopus Valley is the next place I'm going to -- " The younger of the two other men looked at him, teeth showing in his lower jaw. "Heading for Scopus? Don't want trouble? Why, that's a Zon burrough, Roosty, didn't you know that? That's the biggest Zon burrough there is in all round uh these parts. You won't gets through The Notch, thems women, thems Zons, ull kill y'. Thems'll cutcher dippus off -- " Rooster shrugged. The saltmaster shook his head. "No, for the white rag. The rule. Zons keep to all the rule. Nobody keep to all the rule the way Zons do -- " And: "That's right, Cler -- " "True as salt, Cler -- " "Never mind trying to scares him, Cler -- " the others said. IF Except the saltmaster, who said, "Yes, Cler, maybe you be scare for yourself, uh? Suppose we muss go to Scopus before to winter camp? So, salt, we send you in first, Cler -- " Cler shook his head so vigorously that most of his lank black hair escaped from under his cap. "Not me," he said, as the others laughed (not Rooster, though). "I aints a going even near any Zon burrough! Send her, send Bets -- " "You could carry the white rag, you know, Cler," another man said. "Never mind the pole -- juss tie it onto your dippus, Cler -- " But Cler, it was clear, white rag or not, wasn't going. When the laughter ebbed the stout saltmaster said, "Wells, now I don't know. 'Send Bets...' suppose Bets gets to like it there and don't corne back?" More daughter. And Bets gave her husband a hearty cuff and called him, "Dirty fat man -- " said she was too old and, besides, had gotten into other bad habits. "Seems pretty good habits to me," her husband said serenely. Then, more serious, "But we have heard, Roosty, that the old Zon Ladyking of Scopus burroughs -- what be her name? -- it's a story about that it's her death-time -- or was -- " "What? Dead?" Rooster's head snapped up. His eyes left the embers. He forgot the smell from the fat stone caldron sitting in their midst. He met the eyes of the saltmaster, who, with thumb and forefinger, was rubbing a fold of his wattled chin. It was not Rooster alone who was hoping to learn something from this encounter -- the older man's black eyes were sharp and keen. "Dead? I didn't say 'dead,' " this one corrected him. "Not long ago at all we'd hears a story it was her death-time. Mays be she's dead, mays be she'd gets better, all; maybe she's still the same. Perhap you'll learn the truth before we, for we only mays be going there, to Scopus-Zon... But you say you do go there -- 'the next place -- ' uh?" Fire or not, it was cold -- the wind rustled and whimpered in the dry snow and blew gusts of it against the guest's naked head. He pulled his hood over and used the excusable action to avoid his host's eyes. No tentpegs could drive into that frozen soil and, had it been the saltmakers' intention to erect one of their yurtlike portable huts, they would already have at least begun it. So -- clearly, after eating, they would be moving on again. So -- two questions. Where would they be moving? And would he want to move with them? "Nothing special in the pot," the saltmaster murmured -- Rooster felt the undiminished tingling of the eye-stone -- "a something of everything. No feast. But good. You share our fire. So. Share our food." A long moment passed, so long that Rooster, half wondering why he had not answered, became aware that no one was waiting for his answer; became totally aware that half his attention had for most of the long moment been on something else. The continual yip-yap of the dogs had ceased, the hobbled ponies had turned and lifted their heads, the clitter-clatter of the child's shells was silent, the wind itself had gone quite dead. And in the silence and out of the silence came a sound of hooves, not slow, not fast -- deliberate. Not the hooves of a horse or a pony, familiar as the sound of human breath, nor the wild, shy hooves of deer, the dumpy ones of swine. Not elk or moose -- heavier than bison. Did bison feet ever go at that pace? It was the combination of unfamiliar sound with familiar beat -- it was that, yet it was something else. A scent, an odor, heavy and sharp, filtered through the still air. The muscles of the dogs moved but no limb stirred. They had not been aware, intent in their fire-warmed hollow, of a gathering mist outside and around -- and perhaps might not have become aware of it the very instant of their looking and straining towards the odd, approaching sound, its direction at last determined -- had not at that moment the source of the sound itself appeared. Half-obscured in the mist, on the spine of the rise, crossing laterally upon it, a figure curiously caped and cowled in strange garments. A figure riding on a strange beast, a huge beast, with great head slung low and great horns outspread. A figure girt about with unfamiliar or at least certainly undistinguishable gear and objects. The figure moved along in the mist, rider and mount -- the two moved through the mist. And the mist moved with the two. L ong, long, the Rooster sat by the dying fire. Or it seemed long. In point of fact it could not, he realized, have been, for the fire was fed stick by stick and chip by chip. The fire was empty, the stone pot was gone from it. No doubt the stout wife was about to dish out the food -- it would be welcome. He stretched. By salt! How cold and stiff he was. With a laugh that caught in his chest he said as he turned to his hosts, "I feel as though I had been under a -- " Under a spell... The words hung unspoken in the brittle air. He did not speak them because there was no need for him to complete the utterance, no one to address it to. Twenty feet away his pony stood and looked at him in silence. And they two -- and the embers in the fire -- were the only living things remaining there in the hollow at the bottom of the rise. All the others were gone. His dog, too. IF II M organ kept making mention of the cold, the cold. The furnaces were heated red-hot, then white-hot, and two stout servers (where one had done before) danced up and down on the boxbellows, forcing blasts of hot air into the pipes. Sweat in runnels ran down their heavy faces and their heavy flesh jogged and jounced. Others, hurrying by, perspired, too -- though not as much by far -- in the unaccustomed heat. Usually, at this time of year, the passageways were tolerable enough with only very small fires. Two guards, furs slung over their arms, limbs and bosoms bare, stopped another whom they knew. "The king -- " "She has asked for fruit -- let me go -- " ai;d she sped on by. Natural body warmth from all those in the vast bedroom would have served to warm it -- it was stifling. Anxiety was on every face -- still, much as those already there desired to remain, a sense of fairness and the rule constrained them to depart after a while and let others take their place. The rich and glossy furniture, except for one table on each side of the low bed, had been stacked against the wall. No one knew when Morgan's hair had begun to gray, all knew that she dyed it -- it framed on all sides in huge jetty folds the sunken face on the pillows. For moments now the face had been still. Someone on each side maintained a gentle finger on the pulse vein in each withered wrist. Some of those watching watched no longer steadily the sunken, unmoving face -- instead, their eyes flickered constantly to the single finger so gently held to each wrist. The room was silent. The face grimaced. A single sigh filled the room. "The hen -- the hen -- " "Yes, Father Mother!" " -- the hen -- the hen -- " "Yes, Father Mother!" The cracked, strained voice mumbled, muttered, dribbled nonsense -- it was all the same. She spoke. King Morgan spoke. Therefore she still lived. "Witches -- witches -- witches -- " "Yes, Father Mother!" Hands waved, gestured frantically. The witches -- in their glistening blacks slashed with glistening scarlet -- surged forward like a blackand-scarlet wave. The wave ebbed. " -- the hen -- the hen -- " "Yes, Father Mother!" Here and there was weeping. Someone cfld enough to remember the Zon King when she was not yet Zon King but Morgan alone -- young and vital, full of figure, having many lovers -- so someone wept. Someone young enough never to have remembered Morgan as other than the source of strength and power and the rule, Morgan, King of the Scopus Zons, Father Mother, sexless strong -- so someone wept. " -- the hen -- the hen -- " "Yes, Father Mother!" For a moment the old voice gobbled. It fell silent. The fingers stayed on the wrists. Then the wrists tore away, the withered figure sat bolt up in the bed, tore at the prime and priceless furs, at the butterfly silks. The glossy hair fell like a curtain across the seamed and riven face, was torn aside by the clawlike hands. "I cannot breathe! I cannot breathe! Fire -- fire -- I am on fire! You're boiling me alive -- alive -- " And, indeed, the gray-pale face had gone dull-red. Hands gestured, waved frantically. Messengers sped from the room, fled down the corridors, signaled impassionedly to the sweating servers atop the huge bellows-boxes. The sudden appearance of the clamoring, gesticulating figures below served chiefly to throw them out of rhythm. They rolled their eyes, could hear nothing, understood nothing, misunderstood enough to think that this relay, as the others, was come to urge them to pump more swiftly. And so, leaving off the incessant jogging from leg to leg, one side to the other, the two monstrous figures, breasts sweating black against coarse dun robes, took firm hold of the support bars before them and began to jump up and down, alternately, to force more air and hence more heat --  -- figures began to climb the spiderweb of ladders up to them --  -- voices shouted to rake out the furnaces, to douse them down with water --  -- shouting the loudest, about to risk the fearful heat to alert the stokers, was Captain Rack, hot, angry, disheveled --  -- laying upon Rack's arm a hand so cool that it commanded instant attention was -- "Memissary! Madame Sir! Yes, what -- " ide and to, if not precisely greater silence, certainly to less clamor and noise, the Memissary from the Hodus burroughs -- tall, serene, slender, this one, rumored to be in direct line for the kingship of her own Zons, the treble-row necklace of walrus ivory, insigne of her rank, heavy upon her white shoulders. "Madame Sir, yes?" "Captain, with or without the steam which your plan must produce, 'twill be hours before the chamber of the Morgan King can cool." This was so obvious that Rack could at first but gape. Then she bowed. "What does the Memissary say to do, then?" "Obtain a fitting litter and place the King upon it and remove her to a farther and a cooler place." Again -- obvious. Again -- unthought of Captain Rack placed IF her hands upon her breasts, bowed twice and, mouth already open for further shouting, turned to run back. But then She of Hodus once more placed her cool hand upon Rack's hot arm. "To walk means safer speed at present. I shall accompany you. You will meanwhile be composing yourself." One after the other the clear, crisp truths. Rack was, among captains, only one captain. Accompanied by the tall, imposing, hieratical figure of the Memissary, Rack saw all in that frenzied throng make way. And, as she composed herself, thus she began to think: it was the death-time of Morgan Father Mother, Zon King of Scopus; did she die today, tomorrow, a soonly death must come. Tlfcn what? However smooth the transference of power, things would change, would change for all things. Hence -- would change for Captain Rack. Nothing could prevent it. She might advance. She might stay as she was. She might find herself descending into unsought obscurity. She might be informed (bland words for Exile) that, "The roster was to be reduced," handed presents, told to return to her natal burroughs. After twenty years! To be flung into the dung-pit of the world of men! Or... Rack had never been so close and for so long to the Memissary. Each step they took together, deliberate pace more arresting than the swiftest race, was a step up the stairs of prestige for Captain Rack. Not necessary to hint that they two had been lovers -- best (by far) to give no such hint at all. Always, some would believe it. Might it be true, yet? Rack all but trembled. Common sense told her that official and urgent business only coupled them now and that, this business over, they might never -- probably never -- meet again. Still -- it was not certain. One might dream, hope. And more -- every Zon burrough had its "private people," its "friends," its "well-disposed" in every other Zon burrough. Rack was showing the She of Hodus that she could compose herself, was dependable. Surely, when it came lime to take thought of such matters. She of Hodus could hardly fail to think of Captain Rack. What, after all, could be more natural than that such a high-groomed Zon would want at least one stalwart soldiertype for a close companion? Indeed, so full was her mind of such thoughts that it was with a mental stumbling of surprise that Rack found the two of them at the chamber of Lady King Morgan, whose death-time had not yet passed. Still the Zon folk ascended and descended from all levels to have their last audience, still they would linger and still their code of honor made them regularly give way for others -- for others, were they new-fledged Grade One Initiates or stooped and aging retired Captains-at-arms -- on the double, thus, they made way for Rack and the Hodus-Memissary. Fans now waved over King Morgan as she rolled restlessly on her bed, still muttering gibberish, each mutter still evoking its respectful chorus. " -- the cockerel -- the cockerel -- " "Yes, Father Mother." " -- cockerel -- cockerel -- "Yes, Father Mother." "Yes, Father Mother." ""Yes, Father Mother!"' Ill H IS birth-name was Thiobud -- his father's-name, Phiniad. He remembered his natal burroughs little but that little distinctly -- swarms of children crawling in and out of hidey-holes they must have been allowed (in contradiction to all the safety principles of the rule) to grub out for themselves, so small were they -- noise by day and noise by night -- often hunger. And then one day, riding on his father's shoulders in a place without walls and the roof so high he had no word for it -- his earliest memory of the world outside. Recollection of the Orth burrough began abruptly. Instead of curling up anywhere on a filthy floor one slept in a particular place on a clean skin spread on a pile of clean hay. It smelled sweet -- the previous floor had not. Perhaps it was saying so to his father that brought from Phiniad, not given much to words, the comment: By learning new things we learn old ones, too. There were fewer children at Orth, far fewer. They dug no tunnels of their own. They were not suffered to stale or ease where they pleased like puppy dogs and were fairly frequently washed. More than this was not exacted of him at first. Later on he and several other children of an age were taken in one group and conducted around the main landmarks of the burrough -- with the customary smack across the behind to fix each one the more firmly upon their minds -- from the fishponds to the loomrooms (as the saying went). He thought that Orth was a very fine sort of burrough, indeed. And, indeed, he still thought so. Not long after that Orth underwent its first siege during his stay there. A mixed rabble of turfies (as the homeless, the outlawed, the ragged wanderers were called, after the sod huts in which they lived for lack of burroughs) stuffed up the smoke holes in hopes of suffocating the inhabitants. Who, instead of suffering themselves to be quietly stifled, retreated to lower levels and thence to outside by exits unknown to the IF turfies and caught the besiegers by surprise -- and were themselves caught by surprise. ' Seemingly forever over the upper land at an even space which did not vary between them by a handspan and at an even pace which hesitated not for fear and increased not for zeal and which was perhaps most terrifying of all (that relentless, steady step) came band after band of armed Zons. Their arrows began their murderous songs against the turfies while the archers were still well out of stones' throw. The longaxes finished the job. Only the turfy women were spared -- that is, only those of the women who had wit or willingness to tear open their tatters and, by baring their breasts, reveal both their sex and their preference for capturever death. The Zons had not, of course, come for the purpose of assisting the Orth folk, just as they had not (this time, at any rate) come to attack them. They had not even been on one of their periodic campaigns against the turfies. Long later he had heard that this group of bands had joined with others, and then all of them with others yet -- tales of an army of Zons marching westward into the horizon, of great battles somewhere afar off, of witchbirds (buzzards, some called them) covering the multitudes of dead -- dead women who had fought more fiercely than men, preferring always the embrace of death to that of men, the caress of bloody black wings to the caress of men. Always. N ot long after that his father took him to what (he later realized) was in effect a Council of the Elders. He had already seen most of them here and there and one by one, white-haired and white-bearded men in soft white robes -- not till then had he seen them all together. In part it was much as though he were visiting any other group of older people -- they said he was a fine boy, laid their hands on his head and wished him well, asked him if he liked it there more than in his natal burrough, beamed and chuckled at his emphatic Yesl In other part, however, he was aware of a difference. In the Council cell light filtered from the light-well through panes of translucent shell upon the Elders, some of them so old indeed that their very flesh seemed translucent. And their thin old hands seemed to rest upon his head far longer than usual. He was asked questions other old people never asked him -- and some of them dealt with things which were, and some of them dealt with things which were not but might be. And what, he was asked, would he do in such and such an instance? Or under this or that circumstance? Finally one of them handed him a strip of skin. "Can you read?" he asked. "Yes, my Elder, I am able to read." The boy flipped the skin strip over and quickly ran his fingers over the tiny bosses and almost at once a look of ludicrous outrage came over his face. He cried out, "This is -- this is wrong!" Several of the old men chuckled. One laughed outright. A few smiled. One gazed at the boy intently and without change of expression. And one gazed off as though into infinite space, his head never ceasing its incessant nodding, as though in continous agreement. The particular Elder who had given him the strip of skin asked, "Why is it wrong?" "I don't know why -- I know how. Listen, it says, Thiobud the son of Panerad the son of Phiniad -- and so on. But it is my father who is Phiniad -- " And the old man said, "True enough -- but this does not make the record wrong. It refers to Thiobud, who was your father's father and whose father was Panerad the son of an earlier Phiniad. But these things you will learn in time. In time you will learn more than all of us here together have yet learned." The boy's face, showing surprise at first, then keen attention, was turned full upon the Elder, whose eyes now held his. His red hair seemed the sole spot of color in that underground chamber, all shadows and greys and dim whites. His youth was the sole source of freshness in the Council cell, among the old, old men and their collective weariness, the smell of dust and age and the ancient furnishings. Demeran, Chief of the Elders (he died soon afterward), said, "No man's life can ever be altogether his own -- but yours will and must be less your own than is usuual. Prepare yourself for this. When you next see something you particularly desire and may have, deny yourself it. When you next are about to do something you particularly desire to do and may do, deny yourself the pleasure of doing it. Cultivate this habit by day and by night, for it will provide you with excellent training and habits of discipline and selfdenial, excellent habits for all men -- but most excellent for you." Demeran said, "You have seen the turfies. Their freedom from the burrough rule and from the need to subordinate and to submit they have purchased at the price of thirst, nakedness, animality, outlawry, incessant hunger and early death." Said Demeran, "You have seen the Zons. Wealth and military power they have obtained but they IF have obtained it by the sacrifice of natural love and natural softness and by the carefully and artificially cultivated hatred of half of humankind." And he said, "You have seen life in your natal burroughs, whither your father went during a time needed to resolve certain personal uncertainties -- and you will have observed and remembered that where there is no constraint there is no cleanliness, where there is no cleanliness there is no order there is no amenity." His thin old voice had grown stronger and all his fellow sages nodded at his words. There were many more words before he paused in sheer fatigue and sipped at a tiny ng of milk and water. The words seemed to hang in the air, heavy as thoughts -- the shadows were gathering in the declining day and it seemed to Thiobud that the shadows were the old man's words and were heavy with heavy thoughts and that they were presently to gather around him. In another moment he might have shuddered or shrunk away, perhaps even turned and fled -- but that other moment never came. Someone lit a lamp and he became aware of the familiar evening (also afternoon, also morning)cramp of hunger in his belly. That the evening meal be postponed in Orth was as unthinkable as that any other essential and scheduled routine be postponed. Therefore the gathering must soon terminate -- therefore he could endure waiting until it did. As sure enough soon it did. The old one still gathering his wool from infinite distance and nodding, nodding, nodding, said (as they bowed and were dismissed, father and son). "Be sure, Phiniad, he is one." Over the stewbowls the harmless halfwit who was permitted to eat with the boys said to him, "Ha, they got you now." Thiobud said, "What?" "They got you now." "What?" The manboy indicated the direction of the Council cell -- then all thought of it left his face and he slyly stole someone's chunk of bread -- something which he did so adroitly and with face subsequently so innocent and immobile that even the victim could not stay angry at him. "What do you mean, they got me now?" But the other merely dipped his crumb and crust into the stew and sucked and munched and gave no sign of either hearing the question or understanding it. Eveningdole was good -- it was food, good food and all boys had healthy appetites. They ate with good will, talked in good voice to each other, laughed, chattered, made plans for tomorrow, passed bowls for seconds to the table captain. And he -- Thiobud did the same. But all the time like a wreath revolving and showing the same vines and ferns and flowers, like a wreath revolving over the head of a seated bridewoman, so did words seem to revolve as though visible and seen, the same ones over and over again. You will learn more than all of us together. Be sure, Phiniad, that he is one. They got you now. Over and over, around and around. Again and again. Why would he be learning more than all of the Elders together? He was one what? Who had got him? The meal went on as before, all things went on as before, but he knew without knowing why that nothing was nor would ever be again quite as before. And, like a wreath upon horsehair threads, like a wreath at a wedding-feast, the endless chain of words revolved and revolved and slowly slowly spun around... You will learn more than all of us Be sure that he is one They got you now You will learn more than all of us Be sure that he is one They got you now Around and around and around. IV H e saw the first of the whitelimed boulders from a very far off. Scopus -- or at least early sign of it. The sign signified, as all well knew, Be exceedingly sure that you approach only on what we would consider appropriate business. All through the whole of the next day he passed such rocks at regular intervals, passed as well fields and pastures, these outer ones all empty at this season of the year. The night he spent in a clean and empty house where, probably, herders lodged. It was spotless and held stacks of fuel but no food -- he would scarcely have ventured to help himself to any in any case. A man coming unbidden iqto Zon country -- and when was a man ever bidden to enter Zon country -- had to be very careful indeed. He looked around to see if there were any reading-tapes but there were none, not even so much as an empty spindle set. Cautious, the Zons. It was halfway through the next morning that he saw the first guardpost house, a small triangular structure. He had no doubt that there were ample burroughs beneath -- perhaps, even from here, underground ways led all the way to the main settlement, supplied along the way with light and air through cunningly hidden shafts: indeed, rumor even endowed such ways with water in the form of diverted springs. Two of the guards were already outside. Had they simply sharper eyes than he? Had the underground rooms served as echo chambers, giving warning of his pony's hooves? Or was there some Zon magic at work? Having no anIF swers, Thiobud merely shrugged, glanced to see that the white rag was still a-dangle from the pole resting its butt end in the lance socket and rode on -- but before he came within arrow range he tied the pole to the harness and raised both his hands, guiding his mount with his knees. He had never seen Zons this close before. He asked himself; apart from the neat and trim lines of their winter furs, in exactly what way did they differ from others? A wooden gong made from a slit and hollowed log hung from a tripod and the guard standing by it with beater raised was unmistakably a woman. The one in the doorway, whose bow and nocked arrow followed him as he approached, might have been a boy. Any female curves either might have had were lost in the concealing furs. Friendship on their faces would have surprised him; its absence did not. Neither was fear there, nor alarm, nor hatred -- chiefly a certain cool caution. But besides and beyond any expression familiar to him he saw on both their faces a common expression which was not. He could not as yet define it, more than to say in his mind that it was strange, that they both had it, this look -- that they were both Zons -- and so his mind said. It is the Zon look... Well. He had heard. Now he saw. And if he were careful and if luck were with him and if he "had a good witch," he would likely see before very long a number of other things of which he had until now only heard. And if he were careless or luck were not with him or he "had a bad witch" he might find himself at the bottom of a very deep and very dark pit with several Zon arrows in between his ribs and at least one in his heart. T he guards at First Post had not precisely welcomed him, but he had not expected them to. He was the fly and they the spider, he entered at his own risk and he knew at least in general terms the perils of the web. In fact, he thought, with a sudden smile quirking a corner of his mouth, that sounded like a not-bad title for a minor epic, to be recited in meter to the accompaniment of one or two strings and a small hand-drum: The Perils of the Web... A gust of wind came whistling down the valley, froze his grin. He tugged his hood tighter about his face. Greater risks or not, he would they had allowed him to go by the burrough-ways. No -- welcomed he had not been -- but the rule was that a whiteragger was entitled to pass and, as the stocky old saltmaster (where had they all vanished to -- and how fast -- and why?) had pointed out, Zons kept to the rule. No doubt they had helped make it, too. Certainly it benefited them as well, being as they were so far outside the general order of things with their manless society, to help create and maintain an order above all local orders, above even the general order of things. For it was the rule alone and only the rule which enabled them on their periodic rounds to ride up, whiteragging, to any burrough, to engage in that curious spectacle in which their well-trained ponies would rhythmically stamp the ground above the burroughs -- an unmistakable signal -- and to proclaim to the multitude of never-friendly faces that they were there to accept any recruits... any prisoners... any children for "adoption or education"... any... so long as they were female. Never a pleasant scene. Often: howls, hoots, jeers. But the rule was the rule. And sometimes they did not ride away unaccompanied. Now Thiobud (the son of Phiniad the son of Thiobud son of Panerad son of Phiniad and so on and on) was himself benefiting. The guards had not cared for his use of the term reeling -- a good thing to have realized, a piece of information he would keep in mind and pass along for the future -- and certainly they would have cared even less for an unmanned woman, archaic phrase in any case and ludicrously inapplicable to one raised from childhood by the Zons. So he was obliged to explain that what he meant, exactly, was: A woman who had been raised among the Zons from childhood but who had not yet taken the Zon-pledge and so was hence able to leave if she so desired. The proper term, he soon learned, was "a foster-guest." Callers such as he did not come often. That was apparent. But something else was apparent, too -- it was in the air, it was evident in certain hesitancies, certain glances. And he had no idea what it was or even might be. They had signaled on ahead by gong-beats, which of course conveyed nothing to him, and he had been allowed to ride on. Several guardposts later it had begun to snow and he was beginning to fear that he might perhaps miss his turn-in (or its guards miss him) and ride by it -- which brought up not only the risk of freezing to death but the probably greater risk of his being shot at when he appeared in an area where he was not supposed to be... small use a white rag against the white blinding blanket of the snow. But he did not miss it. The ground was rising now and he was on the lookout. He saw the great stone gates and he saw the guardpost house and the by now familiar gong and tripod (house and gong and tripod all three much larger than those of the outposts) -- but he saw no one on guard. He waited long but the cold overcame his caution -- or, rather, IF under those towering crags, of all Scopus landmarks the best known, and in that snow and wind the cold provided a caution of its own. So he called out his coming and rode up to the post house. Lamps had been lit and a brick box with a metal door radiated heat but no one was within. Quite a while he stayed there. Then he heard his pony pawing the ground. Then the wind changed its direction and he realized that the noise he had (without especially considering it) assumed to be the wind was .only in part the wind. And was in part -- What? He sighed, shook his head, went out, brought his beast under the eaves of the house and poured grain into tRb small basket for it. Then he took up his pole and the small bit of cloth to which he trusted his life -- and he went on through the great stone gate. T he Upper Entrance to Scopus burroughs was marked by a huge triple arch carved out of living rock. The spaces enclosed within the outlines of the treble curves were crowded with bas-reliefs and statues illustrative of the histories of the first three kings but statues and reliefs alike were clotted with snow. Beneath the pediment a vast door for each arch had long ago been cut into the rock -- or, precisely, the lineaments of vast doors. The doors were for the most part false -- rock faces did not swing upon rock hinges -- but the lowermost panels were true doors and, as Thiobud came trudging through the road, he saw these doors were swung open wide. The interior blazed with light. A huge tent was in process of being erected and at least a full thousand Zons in every state of dress and undress swarmed around. Some raced up with poles, others heaved upon ropes, some swept from the holes socketed in the ground the snow that clogged them -- others kneeled and scooped it out with bare hands, snow falling upon their bare shoulders. Others, while parts of the huge pavilion still sagged and billowed, came tottering forward with rugs and carpets which at once were unrolled. Others staggered beneath the weight of furniture. He saw at least fifty of them bringing in braziers, saw the braziers' red eyes winking and blinking in the uncertain wind. No one seemed to see him at all. And now another mass seemed not so much to exit from the huge gaping iliouth of the Upper Entrance as to eddy about in it, now forward, now slightly backward, now slightly to one side, a bit forward -- and, as the last section of the huge tent reared upright and settled slightly, its rich red and purple folds brightening the darkening day, this new mass of people passed slowly forward and out of the gates and into the pavilion and was hidden from his sight. A sight so strange this was that Thiobud, observing in openmouthed astonishment, could hardly be sure of what was happening. But he saw that some, at least, of those emergent had been carrying something upon their shoulders. He thought it looked like a sort of bed -- did he also have a glimpse of black hair rolling and tossing in a brief gust of wind? Of a gray face moving from side to side? The wind of a fierce sudden blew back his hood and his hand moved automatically to restore it -- did the gray face (if such it was) turn in his direction? Did a tiny hand fling itself toward him? Did not his eye-stone briefly tingle? It had all happened in so brief a time that he could be sure of none of it. He saw the gold embroidered tent flaps sink slowly downward. He saw all but one of the doors of the Upper Entrance swing shut. And stood as alone as before, unknowing what to do. T he motives of one chosen as Zonvizier are notoriously mixed. On the one hand there is the immediate access to great power and prestige via the office of Second Servant of the Burroughs -- the First Servant, of course, being the King herself. On the other hand there is the instant realization that whoso has ever held the office of Second Servant may never aspire to hold that of First -- and, for that matter, may never even be certain of continuing to hold that of second. Zon kings never retire and never resign and are never (but never, never) deposed. Zonviziers, on the other hand, hold office solely by the pleasure of the supreme officeholder. And this pleasure is often such by conventional designation alone. In burroughs (not, of course, in Scopus burroughs) where intrigue rather than industry, the arts, affections or any other emotion or combination of emotions holds sway, it is not unknown for a potential troublemaker to occupy the Second Seat for a very brief time indeed. In the morning the would-be disturber of the scene is called before the First Seat arid handed the symbolic Shield of Office -- in the evening the Zonvizier hands it back to the Father Mother King. Who hands it back to her. Except that in such cases there comes an evening when the Father Mother King does not hand it back. "Go and rest," says the First Servant to the Second. And: "Yes, Father Mother -- " says the now-without-office. To others she says, "Father Mother has been pleased to allow me to rest." And they reply -- if they truly are her friends -- "How fortunate you are. Burdens chafe and heavy IF burdens usually chafe heavily." Except that sometimes, instead of letting their eyes fall or sighing sympathetically or offering a lovegesture, they say, "Well, that didn't last long, did it? Didn't I tell you that you should (or should not) have done thus and so? Ah, but no, you would not listen -- no, not you. Well. Ah!" She then knows that these are not her true friends and never were but of course it is too late. Those who hold no power can bestow none and so by the brief bestowal of glory the possibility of their ever holding the greatest of glories is forever removed. But King Morgan had never felt the need to use such tactics -- quite the opposite. It was said, though never of course in the presence of a Zonvizier, that Morgan felt it would be unwise in the extreme ever to appoint to the Second Seat anyone who either aspired to the it. "I govern while I live," was the precise way she put it. "And after I cease to live I shall cease at all to govern." In other words, she would take no steps to disqualify as her successor any who might otherwise be qualified to succeed her. In some measure, therefore, the aura of the zonviziership was dimmed and for over a generation it had been held by a succession of nonentities. The present occupant was a Captain Krug (between the captaincy and the viziership there were no active ranks), massive, stolid, more than somewhat dim in personality. Captain Krug, as captain, had gone by the rule and by the direction of her superiors. Zonvizier Krug, as Zonvizier, did the same. Whenever possible. At present, however, the Zonvizier scarcely knew what was possible and what was not. A king did not die every day and Krug, who was in middle-age, scarcely remembered the death of the last one. She had certainly not taken Zonvows at the time and so had been obliged to do nothing but weep and follow the prescribed mourning. No doubt the rule had something to say but the knowledge of it had dimmed, ebbed, since then... No doubt there were a few aged Zons about who might remember something. But not only could the Second Servant not ask the First, "What must I do in this -- the matter of your dying?" Even if the Morgan King were all sharp of mind the Second Servant could not have brought her tongue to say it. She could not bring her tongue to state that it was indeed fell death and not illness alone that stalked the burroughs of the Valley of Scopus. She had an all but fully formed belief that, were she to ask in what manner she should act about the king's death or dying the pace of IF dying might immediately increase. Not knowing what to do the Zonvizier did nothing or did whatever the loudest voice suggested she do -- assuming it was not against the rule. The face of Captain Rack was just a face to the zonvizier -- but it was the face of a captain and, hence, the face of one entitled to suggest things in a loud voice. The Hodus Memissary was in the same category -- no, in a higher one, for the Zonvizier herself had invested the Madame Sir with the customary and honorary rank of captain of captains, which in theory at least placed her below only the Zonvizier. There was nothing, to be sure, in the rule or any other customary usage about erecting the King's Pavilion in the winter -- but there had been a few occasions when it had been erected only because Father Mother Morgan had felt unwell and not for the more usual purposes of ceremony. Captain Rack spoke loudly -- the Memissary smiled her cool and enigmatic smile, the Zonvizier -- half-distracted with grief and confusion -- gave the orders. Someone was to be sent for -- the King had mentioned... The King had mentioned! The vizier's middle-aged mind, numbed with sorrow and indecision, seized upon this single point. It meant doing at last something one knew that Morgan King had wanted done. The zonvizierial fingers were snapped. Equerries sprang to the zonvizierial side. Heads were bowed respectfully. "Let the Second Seat say -- "  The Second Seat said, "Let the young person Tintinna be at once brought here -- that is, not here -- we are all going above in order that Father Mother escape this overheat. The Great Pavilion -- escort her there at once -- at once -- at once -- " The Memissary smiled. Captain Rack did not. snow-laden winds, grown tired of their amorphous writhings, had taken on shapes and forms. In a moment, though, he realized that the forms were those of people. They spoke to him, gestured, laid their fingers on the sleeves of his jacket. Their faces and their eyes were red -- and somehow he judged that this was not from cold. He had for some while prior to this been not aware of the cold. It was the all-encompassing element, it had conquered and transformed the air, had in fact become the air and one usually takes the air for granted. Now, suddenly, he was again aware of the cold and aware of his weariness -- he bent his head submissively and began to follow the shapes. But they had stopped. For one long second they gazed at him. The the nighest one gently (it seemed gently) put up her long, thin, gauntleted hand and pulled down his hood. He had hardly been aware it had slipped. And then, together, they went at a quick pace to the great tent. For a brief moment in the waning day the flurry of snow halted and a thin effusion of the ruddy light of sunset made the purple covering seem somewhat crimson. Then this all vanished. The shadows on the snow were blue and the great pavilion itself turned black. Those standing on guard just inside the entrance, furs opened and displaying habits of black adorned with gold-broidered work, gave low exclamations of astonishment as the others entered. "Then there was a person -- 'outside,' " one of them said wonderingly. "Just as Father Mother said -- " "Just as she said. And -- " But one of his guides shook her head, as though to cut off further comment. She placed her hand upon his sleeve and drew him along through the throng of turning heads and opening mouths, through the sudden drop in the low-pitched hum of conversation, through the deepening silence. Incredible, incredible -- a swarm of people and all of them women! And all of them -- ah, well -- all of them had the Zon look. How old did they have to be before they took the oath or pledge? Nor was it that they all looked at him with hate, though hate was there -- at least on some faces -- it wasn't even that he was a man, rare though men must be in any Zon burrough or encampment. It was simply the look. "Father Mother, here is he." The black hair (dyed, it must be dyed), the old, gray, sunken face, the incredibly rich coverlets and furs, of the woman lying there on what in that brief glimpse he had believed might be a bed. It was doing duty as one now, resting at bed height off the floor; actually it was a sort of litter or palanquin. Had she, whoever she was, actually seen him there outside as they bore her in? The lids fluttered up from the sunken eyes, huge and gray and glazed, barely focused, barely aware of anything any longer. The shrunken lips seemed to struggle, uncertain as to whether to permit or restrain the tongue which at last emerged, then retreated. What was it she was saying? " -- the cockerel, the cockerel -- " Someone said, "Yes, Father Mother!" Someone else with a light touch took hold of the hood of his jacket and pulled it back and down. He could feel, as he always felt, the roach of red hair rising as it was released from the pressure of the hood. And he felt -- was aware of -- the throng's reaction even before he heard it gasp. " -- the cockerel," moaned, mumbled the very old woman. "Yes, Father Mother," the IF crowd said, sighed and echoed. There was a stir not from the far edge of the old woman's litter and a clump or cluster which till then had been an undifferentiated part of the throng now seemed to part from it. Once again he felt something for which he could find no words, as though (and now he seemed to have a clearer image of it) as though something soft and velvet-webby was moving inside his mind, stroking his brain. At once, abruptly, it ceased to be pleasant -- a sensation like vertigo hit him hard. Dressed in black robes of wide cut, slashed with scarlet, black-peaked bonnets from head to shoulders and scarlet beneath -- it might have been ten women, it may have been twenty -- moved, swayed, looked at him, threw up their hands in a sinuous gesture which seemed to run through them like a wave. He pushed back against the ugly, dull feeling -- it vanished. Someone in his ear said, very low, "The witches -- " Now these women set up a keening and repeated one sound three times. "Oh -- " "Woe -- " "No -- " Uneasy was the throng. A voice said, "Silence!" A voice said, "As Father Mother wishes." A voice said, "Your beloved Morgan King -- " Not quite had each voice spoken together with each other voice. He glanced away from the mass of witch women while the voices still sounded, superimposing their own notes upon the other ones. He saw the sullen, blocklike face he did not know was that of Captain Rack. He saw the sturdy and bewildered face he did not know was that of the Zonvizier -- saw the long and gracious and cryptically smiling face he did not know was that of the Memissary. He saw, too, a fourth face, a younger face, felt a tir of something more than merely interest. It was not alone that this was the youngest face, certainly, in all this crowded pavilion, not alone that it was by no means an uncomely face -- something more stroked softly across his mind. It was the only face there that did not have the Zon-look. And the absence of it was as unmistakable as its presence. V H e had not realized how grateful he had been of the warmth until once more he was out in the cold. Now it was the snow and the outside again and altogether the wrong time of day -- night? But another pony was trotting along beside his and someone else sat the second pony. A third one with no rider but a deal of gear was coming along behind. It had all been so easy. It had perhaps been too easy. There had hardly been a parley at all. He had thought of what he would say and no one had asked him to say anything. He had thought there would be great hostility toward him and it had not been directed toward him at all. He had thought to initiate a talk about a woman, no doubt to return again to continue it, to see her, to consider, to return perhaps a third time -- perhaps not to return ever. But it had not happened at all like that. And here he was, riding through the darkness and the snow with the woman. He corrected his thoughts: With a woman. How could he possibly, in such a brief course of time, know. Something shrilled in his ears. Without thinking he flinched away from it, found himself hanging over his mount's neck. What in witchbane was it? It was she, the girl or woman, he scarcely knew -- it was a whistle she had in her mouth, on a lanyard. An odd white whistle of a sort he'd never seen before and she blew those horrid shrills upon it -- but why? When she had to cover her own ears? No, she was not muffling her ears. She was cupping them, not trying to muffle the sound but to amplify it. He fell behind her and at once realized something as odd as all the rest of it -- he could see her cheeks puffed out as she blew upon that devilish little pipe but he could no longer hear it. Perhaps it had clogged? No -- in that instant she veered her pony around and came abreast of him without ceasing to blow and the instant they drew level he once again heard it and he cried out. At once she stopped. Stopped the whistle, stopped the pony. "I am sorry," she said. Her voice was the same here as it had been back there, not that he had heard much of what she said, not that she had said much -- mostly farewells and thanks. Certainly something of the Zon speech was in her voice -- but something was in it which was not. There seemed a faint drawling trace of the speech of a burrough he could almost identify -- unimportant, that, now. "But it was necessary. We go this way now. Please?" He muttered, "Of course -- you know that we must soon take shelter?" She nodded. "What is that? Zon witch-magic?" She seemed to consider how to explain it, then said, "I am trying to find my bearings here in the snow and the dark. The snow distorts the echoes but I think we are going the right way now. Do you know my name?" she asked. "It is Tintinna." "And mine is Thiobud. They call me -- it is very strange -- no, I suppose not so very. Well, they call me Rooster." "The cockerel," she said. "Yes, it is the same thing, I suppose. IF Mother spoke of that before she saw you tonight, did you know that? She has been speaking of that for a few days now. 'The cockeral and the hen.' " Mainly he had shelter in mind. Vaguely he did not relish the notion of viewing their relationship (whatever it was or was not to be) on the simple level of the poultry coop. He peered through the formless dark, could see nothing. She had blown her mad whistle so that she could listen to the echoes. Like a bat. Abruptly she said, "No, it wasn't that, it's -- oh, a new child is always called a 'chick.' But it was just that I was sort of Mother's pet and she called me her hen -- that's all. And," she said, still softly, yet firmly, "there was nothing of that between us -- or any of them -- or else it's not likely they'd have sent me off so simply, so soon. Not that I haven't been ready to go for a while now. But you mustn't take anything for granted." They were on windswept land now. The hooves rang hard and loud on the rock-hard ground. And the way was up. He said, "I did not think -- " and paused, uncertain of how he should word it. "If not now, later. It would be inevitable -- that you at least think about it. Zon is Zon, after all. But I am not Zon. Still -- " and a sound in the darkness inade his heart warm toward her, for he knew that she was laughing there in the darkness of the winter night -- with a stranger. "Still," she said again, "Zon is Zon. Up to the last minute. That old Memissary, the one in the brown robes with the huge ivory necklace -- you know, she didn't want me to go. I don't know why -- not love, I'm sure of that. But poor Rack -- she thought it was. Oh, her poor face! That was why she kept practically shouting in the poor old Zonvizier's ear. Father Mother wants them away -- And, well, who knows what the poor old thing really wants? A prophecy? Rack made it out to be one. Still, even if Morgan had prophesied your coming, wen if she did foresee our being together, who knows that she wanted it so? The witches didn't like your reek at all, did they? Hold on!" There was a scan of ice and the ponies slipped and slithered, then righted themselves. Then there was a wall upon the right, then one upon the left. Then -- echo, echo, echo -- suddenly Tintinna let out a whoop and the echoes rolled and multiplied and he knew that they were inside a burrough. A nd still the death-watch continued. Extra braziers were brought and, swiftly, deftly, blankets were held up to them to be warmed. Deftly, swiftly the ones on the Zon King's bed were rolled halfway off and fresh ones rolled halfway, then all the way. The Second Servant snored in her chair and most of the former watchers had retired to their own cells for rest. Some, however, had rolled into their furs and lay upon the rugs -- now and then walking and rising and watching, sometimes silently, sometimes murmuring to others, usually returning to the rugs for further slumber. The Memissary had made some concession to her own weariness. She sat upon a stool and her heavy necklace reposed upon her lap where her fingers told the tusks over and over again, as though she were reading a tape. She faced the crouching clusters of witches, a sunken, sullen huddle of black and red. "Great is the strength of the Morgan King," she said. After their customary usage they answered her in turn. "Ah, Mem -- her strength is great but -- " " -- the truth is, although great strength -- " " -- is in her yet, yet her strength is not -- " " -- great at all. Ah, nay, Mem, for -- " " -- it is our strength which sustains it, as -- " " -- one sustains a fire by blowing on it but -- " " -- for this fire, Mem, ah, there is no -- " " -- more fuel, ah -- " "Ao -- " They rocked their heads. "OA -- " They waved their hands. "Woe -- " They sobbed and wailed. "Nor for much longer -- can we thus sustain -- our Kingly Lady dear -- it is only that we hope -- she may yet return her mind -- and reveal to all -- or at least, at least -- to us, to us -- who shall next ascend -- ascend, ascend -- who shall next ascend -- the Primest Place -- the First Seat -- but we fear, we fear -- we fear, we fear -- not here alone -- not here alone -- " They chanted and they wailed, swaying from side to side, lolling their heads and rolling their eyes. The upraised hand of the Memissary was long and slender. She lowered two fingers, placed her thumb oa one. The chanting stopped. With dull and reddened eyes they looked at the hand, wetted their cracked lips, breathed noisily through their nostrils. The hand sank once more into the Memissary's lap, once more her other hand caressed the sea-morse tusks. The Mem had no need to raise her voice. "I know what it is you fear. I fear it as well. My own witches have warned me -- us -- that is, the wise ones of my own burrough. Besides, there have been signs. Dreams. Waking warnings -- " The witches sighed and the witches groaned. They had the IF witch-puffed lips -- they had the witch-puffed eyelids, and their hands were puffy with witch-puffed flesh that gave off the witch-bitter reek. Small need then, if identification were desired, for silksmooth black and the inner lining of blood-slick red. Their faces were turned full on the Memissary and all their mouths were opened but she flinched not at all from the witchstale rancor of their witch-stench breath. "Wise women, wise ones, sisters sage, something trembles in the stillness of night, something whispers in the silence of the stars, something very ancient desires not to be discerned while it struggles to be born anew." "OA -- no -- woe. What may we do?' The delegate bent her long and comely neck. The witches slithered closer and raised their heads, open-mouthed. An observer might have thought, had she or he been accustomed to think in terms so unhuman, that here was a cobra feeding frogs. "Listen," she said and her voice was cool and her voice was low and her eyes glittered and the breath hung thin and pale upon the thick, stale air. "Listen, my lovelies and my loves -- ah -- listen! echo altered and almost at that instant the lead pony stopped. At once he heard her dismounting and then making the little muttering noises a woman uses when she searches for something, the location of which she feels she knows absolutely and which she somehow cannot find. A grunt succeeded these homey sounds and then there appeared in the darkness a dim glow that spurted into a ragged blaze of light against which he shielded his eyes. The light settled into the symmetrical flame of a torch blazing evenly where there is no breeze. She was holding it out to him and, he having taken it, she reached her hand into a kind of press or cabinet carved into the wall and took out another torch. It blazed up in her hand. After seconds, during which he blinked, he asked, "How did that happen? The torch catching fire just like that?" "It did not really. That's a photon pile. You don't understand me? and if I said stasis, non-stasis, sapce, time, energy, matter, technology -- would you understand me? No, not even in Orth. Well, so I made it light by Zon witchmagic." It seemed that this explanation quite satisfied her. It had to do for him and, for the moment,he left it so and began to divide his attention between his new surroundings and his new companion. Here, it seemed, was a very old type of burrough indeed, for the echoes had indicated their entrance had been by the customary corridors and now they were entering what was obviously a natural cave or cavern. Such types had eventually fallen into desuetude; they were felt to imply a lack of craftsmanship and sophistication -- also, they were felt not to feel snug. As for the girl -- He swung about on his seat, the torch flaring somewhat from his sudden movement. He saw, close by the compartment where the lights had been stored, a door slowly closing. But it was impossible, both by virtue of the insufficient light and its flickering and by the distance, for him to say if or not it was being closed by whom. Or what. He felt wonder. He was aware that he ought to feel fear but was by no means certain that he did. Things had been calculated rather to a nicety in these corridors, for scarcely had the torches begun to flutter and blink and give less and less light than they came to another place where torches were stored; it was well before this second issue was exhausted that they reached what was evidently their destination for the balance of the night. She looked up at his drawn-out sigh of sheer wonder, smiled faintly and dismounted. If one could imagine such a thing as a vast stone house set squarely upon the top of another such, a third upon the second and a fourth and fifth and sixth resting upon each other, then imagination would supply the likeliness of what he saw before them. All was made -- evidently -- not by piling stones upon stones but by carving this incredible series of pseudostructures from the face of the living rock of the cavern. It had not been too long since others had last visited this place, for the bin of broken sweetpods from which she filled the ponies' feed baskets smelled merely faintly musty, the pods were not moldy at all. The animals gave two somewhat dubious sniffs of inquiry and set to eating. Water for them ebbed from a cut in the wall into shallow troughs, overflowed into a channel which crossed the floor and vanished into darkness. Tintinna unloaded and unsaddled her mount and he, having followed her example, helped with the pack beast, the torches reposing in brackets behind which the soot of centuries (and perhaps centuries ago) had stained the walls. From one of her pouches she withdrew a long lanyard of finely braided colored leathers on which was a single, slender piece of metal. This she dipped into the water and then slipped it into the keyhole of the door. "A curious kind of key," he said, "which has neither any wards or any notches -- " IF All her answer was, "Indeed it is. " She found lamps that flicked magically into light with a smoother and smaller illumination than the torches and set them on trays and he took one of the trays and followed her. Presently a series of rooms were illuminated, all furnished with everything not merely needful but desirable, from the mats under the rugs to the hangings on the walls, chairs, tables, divans, couches, cushions. There was food, too, in abundance, and wines and cordials in bottles which sparkled their various colors in the lamplight. "The last time I was here," she said, "was with Mother. We ate together -- here, at this table. I set it, just as I did tonight. And now -- strange -- I had never heard of you until a few hours ago and I know nothing about you except your name and burrough and descent -- Mother -- I suppose -- will never eat again." They sipped at something dark and clear and red that tasted sweet and left a crisp, tart aftereffect upon the tongue. "Were you fond of her?" She considered her glass and his question. "I was fond of her," she said. "But not very. Now you -- " "What?" "That is what I ask. 'What?' I have never lain with ny man and I don't know if I shall with you. I don't know, even, if that's your purpose. Certainly it is not your only purpose. You have not made the long journey from Orth and at this time of year just to get a woman. And I'm sure you hadn't come with tales of trade and barter and tales of tribute and this and that just to get a woman who had had an education. Orth, I am sure, does not lack for learning. Nor does Orth need to make alliances on such a basis. It's well you came, you know. I made no objection to going." He passed his hand along his crest and, holding out his glass, "I noticed," he said. He held the glass and squinted through it toward a lamp. Here was richness indeed! Merely a casual meal and no great ceremony -- fine liqueurs, and no candles of smelly tallow, softening as they burned but lamps that burned magically without smoke. "A Zon burrough is never at its best when the Zon King dies. There's always a question of succession and the more one is assured that 'here there is no question' the more one may be certain that a question there is or will be indeed. And for one such as me, partly outsider and partly -- well -- let us say that my position was anomalous -- " Recollection of those swarming, stalwart, grimTaced females made him wince. If such was the way they were while their king still lived he could imagine -- rather, he IF did not care to imagine -- what they might be like when she was dead and a new one not yet on the throne. Or, if one prefcrred, on the First Seat. And yet it was certain that it was only because he had come at that time and no other that this fortuitous concourse of events had taken place. Fortuitous? Or was it that he had a good witch? If he had, well, certainly she was not among that flock of sullen harpies who had moaned and crooned their distaste, their displeasure and their distrust of him. "Yes, your position now, I can see -- would be anomalous. But what was your position before?" She looked at him steadily and thoughtfully. "I think that what you mean is, not what was my position just before Mother -- before the Morgan King fell ill, but what was it, basically, all along? That is, what was the reason for my being in the burroughs of the Scopus Zon? You do mean -- Yes... "Well," she sighed faintly, "that takes us back to my own mother, my blood-mother, I mean -- and that -- I hope you are patient -- takes us back to my grandfather. My maternal grandfather. He was a person of some importance among the  northern sea-burroughs. There were intrigues. Threats of insurrections, invasions, oh, the usual ugly scenes. And, being a prudent as well as an important person, he sent my mother -- she was only a child -- over to Scopus with a considerable present. She was to be educated but she was under no circumstances to be allowed to take the Zon-vows until she had voluntarily returned to her natal place and lived there one year. If, after that time, she voluntarily returned to Scopus or went to any other Zon place -- well, then she could do as she pleased. "Grandfather evidently acted just in time. The whole of the northern sea-burroughs went into turmoil almost right after that and he was killed. Things settled down and were still quiet when she -- when my blood-mother returned. I have a notion that she didn't intend to stay more than that year -- but she met my father and he was really made to order for her purposes in fact, meeting him must have shown her what her purposes really were." Her purposes were to find the way to power, take power, hold power. And here was a charming and widely popular man on the road to legitimate power which he did not particularly desire and which he was certainly and basically too weak to hold for long after he had it. He wanted whatever attracted him at any moment and what attracted him the moment he saw the newly arrived and longaway young woman was she. Calymon was his name, Poridel was hers -- the wedding was famous for years afterward. Accession to office followed not long after. Calymon soon tired of it but Poridel did not. Therefore Calymon continued to hold office and, through him, so did Poridel. "He hadn't really known how you stayed in office," his daughter said. "He thought it was done the same way you entered office. He thought it was because the people liked you and he thought they liked you because you were likable. But she knew better. You can't imagine how useful the Zon training had been for her. She spun webs of intrigue around the other intriguers while they were still laboriously spinning single threads. There wasn't anything she wouldn't do -- in fact, there was scarcely anything she didn't do. And he found out. And it killed him." The final blow was the discovery of his wife's connection with Arteman, a younger and more vigorous version of himself And, while Calymon lay with his face turned to the wall of his chamber, Arteman was inducted as his successor. Then Calymon covered his face, and died. Difficulties? Not because of that -- but difficulties certainly. Certainly Poridel wanted power, but she wanted other things as well. Arteman, for example. Arteman was much like Calymon, but Tintinna was Calymon's daughter -- she was not Arteman's. "I was thirteen. She found us together. He was holding me around the waist and I was hitting him and he was laughing... Oh, witches! Her face -- " Thiobud said, "And so she did the same thing her father had done. Sent you to Scopus. To protect you." The quiet mask of her face vanished. "To protect me?" she cried, incredulous. "She would have dropped me over a cliff if it could have been done without notice. But, as it couldn't, she sent me to Scopus. And there I was. It's been five years." "But I don't see -- I mean, surely if you were to return now, after five years, wouldn't he -- that is -- " A faint smile twisted its way across her face and was in a moment gone. "You mean, she will be five years less desirable and I will be five years more? Don't think she wasn't able to see that. But her hope was that I would, if you follow me, get so Zon that even if I returned and even if Arteman played at me again I'd repulse him, not from fright as before, but as I'd. repulse any man. So she hoped. "Nice, isn't it?" He grimaced and then, as she got up and reached for a lamp, resolution, if not conviction, snapped up his head. She stood very still, her fingers just touching the lamp, having caught the slight movement. She looked at him inIF tently and without expression. "Neither do I know," he said, "if your old Mother King was a true prophet. And may never know. But I need not see every spoke to surmise a wheel. Listen, Tintinna, I had come to Zon to make a parley about you, although I didn't know that you were you. I feel now, indeed, that you are woman enough for any man, as I do feel myself man enough for any woman. But there is far more than that and this more either affects us both together or not at all and never. Will you resolve now to come with me, unharmed and unpressed, to Orth Burrough, and there hear and listen and there decide?" She handed him the lamp. He took it with one hand and took her hand with the other and he blew out the lamp. She took shelter in his cloak. She laughed. She kissed him. And, trusting, with a stranger, slept. Thiobud, dreaming, brought her safely home.  "What's odd?" "I remember these bearings. I punched them on the keyboard myself yesterday. I saw a dustcloud on the viewscreen -- too thin to register on the radar but I thought it advisable to avoid it as it may have contained particles of sufficient size to puncture the hull. You can't be too careful with clouds. It was just before your watch and I thought you might not appreciate the danger." Or you might, DeGrazza, have plunged straight into the cloud, daring with deathwish and heedless for the life on an alien who, to you, is one step from the ape, although pervertedly telepathic. And (Continued from page #) the alien wishes to live because that is the way of his kind, as it should be the way of yours. But you must hurry to death because it will be so pleasant then not to have to hurry... "You didn't instruct the brain telepathically?" "The brain is only for use when the computer breaks down," replied the alien stiffly. "Although the brain would know of the bearings because it checks all keyboard information." "So something threw the brain back in time." DeGrazza pondered. "I wonder -- wait a moment. You fed in these bearings just before your sleep period?" "That's right." Suddenly the whole scene of the near-disaster flashed back through DeGrazza's mind -- the asteroid sliding into the viewscreen, his own sense of danger, his fingers poised over the controls, the asteroid growing, the mountains becoming clear and huge, the alien dozing beside him, his eyelids fluttering, fluttering... And the sudden veering plunge into danger. "That's it!" gasped DeGrazza.I explained to the alien. The rapid eye movements visible through the lids which signify that a sleeper is dreaming. You were dreaming just before the ship went out of control -- I saw you. You were also asleep the first time we lost control, two days ago, although you woke up and brought the ship around." "I don't see the connection." "I'll tell you. In the mid-twentieth century an Earth doctor made an analogy between the brain and the computer suggesting that the purpose of sleep was to dream. Dreaming in effect cleared the mind of extraneous, accumulated dross, just as you clear a computer before reprograming. He carried out tests with people and computers, depriving them of dreams and clearing respectively. Both men and machines showed similar resultant hallucinatory behavior patterns." "I've heard that theory." "You see the implication? You're a pilot, you love your job, you shuttle to and fro between Altair Six and Eight all the time. Navigation is part of your job, you love it. You live by the compass, eat by the compass. You read bearings, you punch bearings, you sleep bearings. "You dream bearings... "And the brain will pick up a projected, telepathic dream of a series of bearings and assume that it is a direct instruction and act accordingly, as it has been taught, overruling the computer, radar, common sense and everything else. Not realizing, because it can't, that your mind is clearing itself in sleep." There was a long, thoughtful silence. The viewscreen was emptying now, the larger asteroids drifting behind; just the thin sprinkling of twinkling dots left, through which the computer eased the ship with unerring precision. And beyond the dust, the point of light into a glowing disc. DeGrazza relaxed in his seat, contemplating a long stay on the destination planet before returning home. He reckoned he'd earned it. You were right, DeGrazza. The solution to the problem is in the Altairid mind. And now you can IF go home to Mary and Cobb and the future because you know that they will want you back quickly for your earnings and your intelligence, if not for yourself Forget that long hdliday -- theres no point in thinking about it because you know you will not stay here. You must hurry forward again, consuming the future as it comes because that is your true way, consume avidly and avoid skillfully, wherever you sense it, the strychnine of death. Until, one day, the promise of the pill is too sweet... But not this time. Next? At last the alien spoke. "I fear there is much in what you say. I will go so far as to say that, in my opinion, you are right. I, too, have read with interest the writings of your Evans school of thought on dreams, yet the solution did not occur to me. It is sad to think that, in our efforts to make interplanetary travel safer, we have achieved the opposite. What are your suggestions?" "As I said before, the computers have never failed yet. You'll have to remove the brains." "True," sighed the Altairid. "We cannot prevent ourselves from dreaming." True indeed, thought DeGrazza with an inward clutch of premonition. As the ship sped on the final he wondered what the next night would contain and whether his dream fireball would be replaced by jagged asteroid peaks and black ravines, hurtling towards him at colossal speed. If only it were as simple as, say, pressing a button to clear a computer. Goodbye, DeGrazza of the tortured mind and plunging compulsions. We cannot feel superiority, only sympathy -- because on this occasion you have taught us; yet there is so much we could teach you, if you would let us. But you are so immersed in self-pity that you are hardly aware of those about you -- Mary, Cobb and -- the Altairid. DeGrazza and Earth, I thank you on behalf of Altair. And you don't even know my name...  ( Continued from page # ) "In that casethey -- or it -- " "He," Retief amended. "TT E'S overheard every word H that's been spoken since we landed." Magnan addressed the blossoms directly. "Look here, Herby -- you're aware that we're distressed diplomats, marooned here by an unfortunate accident -- " "I thought Slith and that other fellow -- Okkyokk -- were responsible," Herby corrected. "They seem dreadfully argumentive chaps. I do wish they'd lower their voices." "Quite -- now, you're aware of their hostile intentions toward Mr. Retief and myself -- " "Oh, my," Herby interrupted, "they do seem upset. Such language -- " "Yes. As I was saying -- " Magnan paused. "What do you mean, 'such language?' " "I was referring to Grand Commander Slith's rather graphic use of invective," Herby explained. "Not that General Okkyokk isn't holding his own, of course. I must say my vocabulary is expanding rapidly." "You speak as though you could hear them now." "I can. On the ship-to-shore band." "But -- you don't have a radio -- do you?" "A what?" "If he has organs for detecting sound," Retief said, "why not organs for picking up short wave?" . "Why -- that's remarkable," Magnan exclaimed. "But short wave? It would be rather too much to hope that you can send as well as receive?" "Why, I suppose I could transmit via my snarfnodes -- if there were any reason to." "Retief -- we re saved! Herby -- send the following message at once: Special Priority-Z Mayday, subject unprovoked attack -- no, make that unwarranted attack -- resulting in emergency planetfall and -- " "Oh, I'msorry, Mister," Herby cut in. "I couldn't send that." "Why not?" "Why, if I did, some nose parker might come and take you away." "I sincerely hope so." "I've waited two hundred standard years for someone to talk to," Herby said in a hurt tone. "Now you're talking of rushing off. Well, I won't have it." Magnan cried. "Would you stand in the way of our rescue?" "Please calm yourself. Mister. Look at Retief. He's not making IF a scene. Just resign yourself to the fact that you'll spend the rest of your life here and we'll get on famously -- just as Renfrew and I did right up until the last few days." "The rest of our lives?" Magnan gasped. "But that's unthinkable. We may linger on for another fifty years." "Not if Slith has his way," Retief said. "Where are they now, Herby?" "I was about to say," Herby began. "They'll be arriving any -- " T he vegetable voice was drowned by a rising drone that swelled swiftly to a bellowing roar. A sleek, shark-nosed shape swept overhead, followed by another, two more, then an entire squadron. Sonic booms crashed across the jungle, laying patterns of shock ripples across the still water of the lake. Treetops whipped in the turbulent wakes as two battle fleets hurtled past at low altitude, dwindled, were gone. "You see?" Herby said a trifle breathlessly into the echoing silence. "Two's company but a crowd is altogether too much." Retief twisted the knob of the radio slung at his belt. "... pinpointed our quarry!" Slith's breath voice was keening. "If you will employ your units in encircling the south shore of the island. General, I shall close the pincer to the north." "Looks like they've spotted us," Retief said. "Slith must carry better optical and IR gear than I gave him credit for." Sunlight winked on distant craft circling back to spread out on the far side of the lake, sinking down out of sight behind the massed foliage of the forest. Other vessels were visible to left and right. "Not much point in running cross-country," Retief said thoughtfully. "They've got us surrounded." "What are we going to do?" Magnan yelped. "We can't just stand here." "Ouch!" Herby said suddenly. "Ooh! Ahh!" "What's the matter?" Magnan leaped in alarm, staring around him. "Why that hurts like anything!" Herby exclaimed indignantly. "It's the landing blasts." Retief indicated the smoke rising from points all around the compass. "The Groaci still use old-style reaction motors for atmospheric manuvering. Must be scorching Herby quite painfully." "You see what sort of uncouth ruffians they are?" Magnan said indignantly. "Now wouldn't you like to change your mind, Herby, and assist us?" "And collect a new crop of third-degree burns when your friends arrive? No, thank you. It's out of the question." A deep-toned whickering sound had started up, grew quickly louder. "A heli," Retief said. "They're not wasting any time." In the shelter of the tree the two Terrans watched the approach of the small, speedy craft. It swung out over the lake, riffling the water, and hovered two hundred feet in the air. "Attention, Terran spies!" an electronically amplified voice boomed out from it. "Surrender at once or suffer a fate unspeakable -- " "Herby -- if those barbarians get their hands on us our usefulness as conversationalists will come to an abrupt end," Magnan said urgently. "You have been warned," the PA blared. "Emerge at once empty-handed -- " "Maybe we can hide out in this dense growth," Magnan said, "if Herby will keep us apprised of their wherabouts. Maybe we can elude capture until help comes." The copter had drifted closer. "Thirty seconds," the big voice boomed. "If at the end of that time you have not submitted to Groaci justice the entire island will be engulfed in fire -- " "Cook us alive?" Magnan gasped. "They wouldn't -- " "Retief -- Mister," Herby said worriedly. "Did he mean what he seemed to mean?" . "I'm afraid so, Herby," Retief said. "But don't worry. We won't let matters proceed that far. Shall we go, Mr. Magnan?" Magnan swallowed with difficulty. "I suppose a comfortable garroting in a civilized cell is preferable to broiling alive," he said in a choked voice as they walked out from the shade into the bright orange sunlight of the beach. V ASlith whispered. "In return for your cooperation I give my reassurances that your remains will be transmitted to your loved ones suitably packaged, with a friendly note explaining that you fell foul of the alert Groacian anti-spy apparatus and were dispatched ere my personal intervention could save you from the just retribution your crimes deserved." "Why, that's very thoughtful of you. I'm sure. Grand Commander," Magnan said, mustering a ghastly smilf. "But might I suggest just one little change? Why not intervene just a bit sooner and return us safe and sound -- a stirring gesture of inter-being amity." "My researches into the Terran nature," Slith interrupted, steepling his eyes -- an effect which failed to reassure his listeners -- "indicate that your kith respond most generously to those who adhere to a policy of unswerving hostility. This evidence of Groaci IF determination will evoke, I doubt not, a sizable increase in the Terran subsidy to the Keep Groac Gray drive -- funds which will of course be quietly diverted to our urgently needed naval modernization program." "But why?" Magnan clanked his chains disconsolately. "Why can't we all just be friends?" "Alas," Slith said. "Aside from the fact that we Groaci find you Soft Ones singularly repellent to all nine senses, rendering social intercourse awkward -- and the further fact that Terran ambitions conflict with manifest Groaci destiny -- plus the fact that I owe you suitable recompense for your malicious sabotage of my mercantile efforts at Haunch Two -- aside from these matters, I say -- it's necessary at this juncture to silence you." "Silence us?" Magnan said. "Why, heavens. Commander Slith -- if you're referring to the little misunderstanding that led to our unscheduled landing here on Yudore, don't give it a thought. Why, I've already forgotten it. Actually, it was probably just pilot error on the part of my colleague, Mr. Retief -- " "He's not talking about that, Mr. Magnan," Retief aid. "He's talking about his use of Yudore as a red herring to cover an attack on the Slox Empire." "Silence, verbose one," Slith said but Okkyokk, whose image on the conference screen had been quietly occupying a complicated perch in the background, spoke up. "Who this? My fascinate! Gosh! Tell more!" "Fool." Slith leaped to his feet, vibrating his throat sac at Retief. "Your groundless insinuations deprive you of iTfe's last sweet moments." He signaled the guards. "On with the executions." "Not so hurry. Five-eyes!" Okkyokk snarled. "Conversation me, Terry; my interest, oh, yes! Tell on!" "Keep out of this, Okkyokk!" Slith snapped as the guards started forward eagerly. "My listen!" Okkyokk yelled. "Your forgot, Slith -- I guns train on you! My chat there Terry -- blow your in fragmentation, or!" "Better humor him, Slith," Retief said. "Inasmuch as your fleet consists of disguised barges with dummy guns, you're in no position to call his bluff." Slith made spluttering sounds. "No gun?" Okkyokk chortled. "Good new tonight! Tell Terry!" "Tt's quite simple," Retief said.."Slith lured you out here to get your gunboats out of the way so he could proceed to attack the Slox home planets with minimal interference. The bombardment is probably underway right now." "Lies!" Slith found his frail voice. "Okkyokk -- he seeks to set US at odds, each with the other!" "I grateful you extreme, Terry!" the Slox commander grated in a voice like a steel girder shearing, ignoring Slith's appeal. "Preparation you for dead, Groaci bigshot! Fake up big war, eh, you tell. Make fool allbody, eh? Then join force and invasion Terries, eh? Fruits and nuts! You never delusion me for every! Hold on hats, kids -- " "Don't fire. The Soft One lies -- as I can prove in most dramatic fashion -- by blasting your cancerous aggreation of derelicts into their component atoms -- " "Retief -- say something," Magnan yelped. "If they shoot -- " "Then you Soft Ones will die!" Slith piped. "If they prevail you die with my flagship -- and if I prevail -- then long shall you linger under the knives of my virtuosi!" "How you plan do so big shoot with empty gun?" Okkyokk inquired warily. "Retief!" Slith cried. "Confess to him you lied -- else will I decree torments yet uninvented to adorn your passing!" "Better open fire quickly -- if you can," Retief said. "As for you. General," he addressed the screen, "it always pays to get in the first lick." "Retief, what are you saying?" Magnan yelped. "Why goad them to this madness? No matter who wins, we lose!" "My confuse!" Okkyokk stated. "Splendor idea, shoot up unarmed Five Eyes -- but what if Terry big lying?" "Don't let him get the jump on you, Slith," Retief advised. "Gunnery Officer!" the Groaci commander piped in sudden, agonized decision. "All batteries -- open fire." The response was instantaneous. A series of hollow clicking wounds came over the intercom. They were followed by the dumfounded voice of the Gunnery officer. "Exalted one -- I regret to report -- " "Sabotage," Slith yelled. On the screen Okkyokk paused, one digital member poised above a large puce button. "How, no explosing? Gun fails operationing, just as Terry inform? Splendor!" the Slox leader waggled his ocular exterm"Now time proceedure to extermination you with leisurely! Master Gunner -- procedure blow picture window in Five Eyes flagship, give Commander Slith good viewing of eventuals!" Slith hissed and sprang for the door, where he fought for position with the guards who had reached the portal before him. Magnan covered his ears and screwed his eyes shut. "Whats?" Okkyokk's puzzled voice was coming from the screen. "Hows? Malfunctionate of firepower at times like these? My inIF tolerate! Caramba! Oh, heck!" "I suggest both you gentlemen relax." Retief raised his voice slightly over the hubbub. "No one's going to do any shooting." "So -- your spies have infiltrated my flagship," Slith said. "Little will it avail you, Retief. Once in space, my most creative efforts will be lavished on your quivering corpori." He scrabbled on the rug, came up with his command mike. "Engineer -- lift off, emergency crash procedures." "Another disappoihtment in store. I'm afraid, Slith," Retief said as no surge of acceleration followed. "Herby's particularly sensitive to rocket blasts," he explained gently. "Ergo -- no gunfire." "Herby?" Slith keened, waggling his eyes from which the jeweled shields had fallen in the tussle. "Herby?" "Herby," Okkyokk muttered. "What Herby, which?" "Herby," Magnan gasped. "But -- but -- " "Undone?" Slith whispered. "Trapped here by the treachery of the insidious Soft Ones? But briefly shall you gloat, my Retief." The Groaci jerked an elaborately ornamented gun from the plastic holster at his bony hip, took aim. "Three and out," Retief said as Slith stared in goggle-eyed paralysis at the small coral-toned flower growing from the barrel of the weapon. "Herby appreciates my conversation far too much to let you blow holes in me. Right, Herby?" "Quite so, Retief," a cricketsized voice chirped from the dainty blossom. "My departure, golly whiz!" Okkyokk's voice blasted from the screen. "Navigationer -- full fast ahead!" "No use. General," Retief said. "Everybody's grounded. Your field windings are full of vines. I'm afraid." "So that's why Renfrew couldn't leave." Magnan gulped. "I knew it all along, of course." "What does this mean?" Slith whispered. "It means you've been conquered single-handed by a population of one," Retief addressed the alien leaders. "So -- if you're ready, gentlemen. I'm sure Herby of your surrender." JTlsaid, adjusting the overlapping puce lapels of his top formal mid-morning cutaway in the giltframed mirror outside the impressive mahogany doors of the undersecretary for extraterrestrial affairs. "If we hadn't seized a moment to transmit a distress call on Slith's TX while Herby was busy taking the surrender, we might still be languishing in boredom on that dismal island." "I doubt if we'd have been bored," Relief pointed out. "With several hundred grounded sailors roaming the woods and blaming us for their troubles." "What a ghastly experience, with every bush and bough jabbering away in colloquial Slox and accentless Groaci, carrying on twelve hundred scrambled conversations at once!" "In time I think Herby would have mastered the knack of segregating his dialogues," Relief said. "Even with a slice missing from that four-mile brain the soundings showed he should be a fast learner." "He certainly mastered the technique of creative negotiation with record speed," Magnan agreed. "I can't help feeling a trifle sorry for poor Slith and Okkyokk -- their fleets consigned to moulder on the ground, the while they supply teams of conversationalists in relays in perpetuity to entertain their conqueror." Relief and Magnan turned as the elevator doors opened behind them. An orderly emerged, pushing a tea cart on which rested a handsome teak tub containing a tall, lily-like plant topped by a sixinch flower, glowing a healthy pink and yellow. "Ah, gentlemen," the blossom greeted them in a mellow tenor voice. "I'm happy to report that new scenes seem to stimulate me -- or at least this slice of me." Magnan shuddered delicately. "Imagine sprouting a bureaucrat from a wedge of frontal lobe," he said behind his hand. "It makes my head ache just to think of it. A slender man with thick spectacles thrust his head from the secretarial suite. "The secretary will see you now," he announced and held the door as the orderly wheeled the cart through. "Mr. Secretary," Magnan said grandly, "I have the honor to present his excellency the Herbaceous Ambassador." "Delighted to meet you, sir or madam," Thunderstroke rumbled, inclining his head graciously to the bloom, which nodded in reply. "Now -- do tell me all the details of how you captured two fully armed war fleets -- " Relief and Magnan withdrew, leaving the undersecretary listening attentively to his visitor's account of the sapless victory. "Lobotomy seems to agree with Herby," Magnan observed complacently. "Well, I must hurry along. Relief. I have a modest cutting I plan to infiltrate into the flower bed under the Groaci ambassador's window." He hurried off. "Tsk," said a tiny voice from the pink buttoniere adorning Reliefs topmost lapel. "The segment of me you left with the undersecretary is being regaled with a rathIF er gamy anecdote about crossfertilizing tea-rose begonias. The punch line is -- " "It's not considered polite to listen in on private conversations, Herby," Retief pointed out. "How can I help it?" the blossom protested. "After all, it's me he's talking to." "Just don't repeat what you hear. Unless," Retief added as he strolled off toward the chancery bar, "it's something you think I really ought to know."  All this is very well for a story of trickery and intrigue on a rather routine plotting level. But it has led us rather far from the early world that all the sections were emphasizing in the beginning. And the more we get away from that world of overcrowded and mad North America, the less use there is for the complex mechanism used to tell the story. Toward the end, I found the rewards far less than the effort needed. The tensions inherent in the plot are also growing less. Norman's wanderings about in Beninia illustrate the point of its peacefulness; but they are as exciting as a description of his reading a book might be. And it seems curious that here we are back to simple narrative sections to handle what Brunner's complex of other sections was apparently designed to do earlier. Donald's efforts in Yatakang depend on good luck and otherwise might be any simple spy story, except that it ends in a rather dismal failure which doesn't seem to bother, anyone except ( Continued from page #) Donald, despite the urgency of his mission. Lik'ewise the success of Norman's quest for the secret turns out to be a bit too simple and too unimpressive. I can't find any conviction that the inherent peace-creator of the Beninians would be any more contagious than the agression-creator of the rest of the world; and the aggressors far outnumber the Beninians. Too much build-up for too little a secret. Anyhow, the secret is dug out by our old friend and iconoclast, Chad C. Mulligan. As a background commentator in the early part of the book. Mulligan has been an interesting personality. But Brunner yanks him onto the stage, where he becomes no more than a capable but unimpressive addition to the staff. As an iconoclast, he was interesting; as an ikon -- a stone representation of his former self -- he is nothing. In the end the book becomes rather old-fashioned in its depiction of the future. Too much might be the background created for an overpopulated world by a man writing his story in #. There is the yammering and semisane multitude and the crowding of the city; there is the drug scene; and there are a lot of touches that are good and well done, but too little below the surface of obviousness. Pollution, as an example, might as well not exist for its effect on the story. How the incredible future society has kept its industrial level so high with such a horde of people and not suffered what runaway pollution already faces us ten years from now is unclear. Beninia seems like a quaintly unpolluted little backward country from a novel of #; and Yatakang is aggressively industrialized to support its more than # evidence of being more polluted than Indonesia now. Neither Norman nor David really does very much that we can see as evidence of growth, once they leave home (though Norman does grow earlier). They tend to adopt somewhat changed characters, but they weaken before our eyes. And the great development of Beninia and the handling of the danger of Yatakang in its world aggression are largely dismissed offhand. In the end I think the experiment has failed to justify itself. Brunner has been caught up in his mechanisms and has let things happen to his story that such an excellent craftsman as he is would not have permitted in a straighter story. It's still a novel worth reading for the promises in the earlier sections, but one which rates the.raves it has received no more than it rated the harsh and totally unjust reviews it received in some of our daily press. Farmer (Doubleday, #), is an experiment of an entirely different type. Farmer, through the many years of his contributions to our field, has been one of the boldest innovators. But there is no obvious mechanism or trickery to his book. It is told in straightforward prose and follows the course of his character's development about as directly and simply as is possible in this situation. The experiment here is simply in the honesty with which he has examined one of our hoariest and best beloved traditions. Farmer is a devoted admirer of Edgar Rice Burroughs and has even translated Tarzan into Esperanto as a labor of love, essentially. But in this novel, he has taken a critical look at what would really happen to a man brought up as our heroic apeman was. The result isn't science fiction, of course, though Doubleday labels the book as such. It's something that can only be categorized as a mixture of modern novel and adventure story. But since Farmer is a leading science-fiction writer IF and since all the works of Burroughs, including the Tarzan novels, are so much a part of most readers' backgrounds, I felt it had to be read for review. I can't fault Farmer's workmanship in this. He never belabors his point too strongly, and he does a remarkable job of accounting for most of the elements of Tyger, the man brought up to be Tarzan. Both Farmer's love of the original and his attempted honesty in this emerge victorious. Yet... Essentially, this tells of the atzan nut to prove Burroughs could have been right. The first attempt to get the kidnapped son of a minor English nobleman to be brought up by apes fails, and the child dies. The second attempt requires preparing the gorillas -- the best we can do among real apes -- to receive the child; but this results in what would surely happen -- the child grows up half animal, unable to talk, in the image of the real "wolf-boys" that have been discovered. The third attempt is more carefully staged. (The only fault with Farmer's logic seems to lie in managing to have all three boys kidnapped from the same parents!) A motley group of deformed or midget humans raises the boy, telling him they are apes (and enough different from his appearance to make him believe it). He's carefully taught to read in an old cabin, given a knife, etc. He runs across the village of black natives, all in due course. But there things begin to go agley. Instead of beating his chest and yelling Ka-Goda at them, he gets curious about girls, and then proceeds to satisfy his curiosity with almost every female of the village. Eventually, he's forced to exterminate the village in true Tarzan style, but for his own reasons. And he is driven to looking for the god or demon who rules the isolated valley. Since his growth and training had to be observed, helicopter surveys had to be conducted; and he has seen the copters all his life. Now he begins to realize something must lie behind them. Anyhow, eventually he is brought out into the great world beyond, where the papers make a fuss over him as a true "Tarzan." But his character has been shaped in ways that would hardly have made the real Tarzan of either book or screen acceptable to generations of followers. I have to admit that Farmer is probably correct in his depiction of Tyger's inevitable attitudes. Yet, as I ellipsized before, something is missing. Somehow, while the character is generally true throughout and the situation is handled better than seemed possible, there is no fascination to the book. It's interesting reading as an exercise in the writer's ingenuity and skill, but it takes on no life of its own, no feeling of interest in the basic character. Despite superb work at characterizing and developing Tyger, he sits in my mind dully and his moves do not grip me. Vm afraid this experiment in concept is inherently a failure, though one Vm glad to have read. Tarzan, as Burroughs saw him, was a fairy tale. When we open the pages of the book, the events that happen are only there to give us an excuse to wander through this part of fairyland. We have to transport ourselves there, and to see the landscape illumined by attitudes that have departed our familiar world of sixty yearsand never really were a part of the life of our daily thought, but only of our literary postures. You can't move fairyland into the real world; you have to go there in your mind, leaving our world behind. Long ago, another writer tried to be rational about what Helen of Troy really went through and it was talked about and forgotten, because it was a failure. Helen remains today the myth of human female desirability, never growing old; and Tarzan remains the myth of natural and hereditary nobility, never having license nor libido. # pin. Herald Square, New York City. Advance registration: #. For information and registration : Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York I #. the Skyline Inn, South Capitol and "Eye" Streets, S. W. Washington, D. C. #. Guest-of-honor: Will (Murray Leinster) Jenkins. For information: Jay Haldeman, # Woodbourne Avenue, Baltimore, Md. At the Skirvin Hotel, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Guests: Jim Harmon, R. A. Lafferty. Membership: #. For information: David Smith, # Mercer Street, Ponca City, Oklahoma #.  At the Carrousel Inn, #I Reading Road. Cincinnati, Ohio. Programless Relaxacon. Banquet. For information: Lou Tabakow, # St. Johns Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio #. tasy. Visiting lecturers: Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm. Participants may register for two, four or six weeks. For information: Robin Scott Wilson, English Department, Clarion State College, Clarion, Pa.  California. Guest-of-Honor: Jack Williamson; Fan Guest-of-Honor: Rick Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California #I .  Chatham Center Motor Lodge, Center Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Guest-of-Honor: Harlan Ellison; GoH Emeritus: Robert Silverberg. Features: Panels, parties, movies, banquet. Membership: # in advance; # at the door. For information: Suzanne Tompkins, # Bartlett Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #.  Memberships: Supporting, #; Atgia #.  aton Hotel, Toronto, Canada. Guestsof-Honor: Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov. Membership: # in advance. For information: Peter Gill, # Glen Manor Drive, Toronto, Ontario, Caifada. AL. In Heidelberg, West Germany. The accent of this con will be an international one, with fans and pros com ing from all over the world. Guest-ofTubb (England) and Dr. Herbert W. Franke (Germany). Memberships: # (supporting membership, receive all progress reports), # (attending); after December #, #, #. For information and registrasen. West Germany. Make all checks payable to Mrs. Molly Auler. ( Continued from page # are now arriving on time, although occasionally in small quantity. I hope that, when Worlds of Tomorrow reappears, it has an adequate distribution here. Thank you. Truly yours, George Beile Montreal, Canada Dear Ejler: was a disappointment though I have high hopes for it's improvement as anything by Bode has promise. The issue was unusual in that there was no story I thought was bad, they were all very good; and two stories impressed with their great depth and richmagnificent characterization was full of a warmth and humanity too many times lacking in SF. Too often writers use characters solely to explain the technology or to move the story with dialogue and action. Sturgeon is in love with his characters. Terseness in writing is supposed to Dannie Plachta wrote a story beautiful in it's verbosity. Of course Gaugham's artwork contributed heavily to the atmosphere of the story. Finally your Associate Art director is turning out some of his Hugo award winning work for you. Love and Peace, Rick Stooker Dear Sir: I finally received a Hand-Signed Reply from a publication -- Galaxy! For the last decade, any complaint to a publisher seems to have been directed again and again to a central computor which sends back formal cards having little or nothing to do with the problem. Since magazine and reader relations are a person-to-person thing, I am pleased that you have gotten away from the idea that a machine can do as good an overall job as a human in personal contacts. I speak from experiences with many publications. Evidently my key punch card has an irregular form, or the last name is too much for the typists. Practically every year, I did not receive one or more copies of IF. Writing did no good. No reply. Hope that this has changed. About your February cover -- As usual, Gaughan does a good job, but this cover belongs to "Pressure Vessel" and not to "Whipping Star" as is stated in your table of contents. Sincerely, Ed Pokropus IF-# worth adding to your library...stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. 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Readers write -- and wrong! recently been compared to the dung under a camel's foot and have had the curses of the Seven Blind Bastards evoked upon my head through the U.S. mails by a gentleman who objects to my enjoyment of the technicolor variety of the human kind. And this is all right. It has pertinence to the current scene. I would rather be cursed by blind bastards than be one. We're all having a hard time. But we could make it harder. The following is a good letter. It brings up the question of meanings. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Galaxy has always been one of my favorite science fiction magazines (afyou today to express my disappointment about the February issue. Actually you started out with a very good story. The Shaker Revival. Both my husband and  enjoyed reading it very much. But then we got to Dannie Plachtas The Last Night of the Festival. We thought it looked extremely interesting (something different for a change ) and started reading it with great anticipation. We stopped after about # or # pages because we did not want to waste our time reading such meaningless gibberish. I guess you call it fantasy, and  realize that it must take some talent to write this nonsense, but why not leave this kind of thing to the fantasy magazines? The other thing which irritated us in the issue was the comic strip. Heavens, I hope we wont have to put up with the kind of material boys in the sixth grade enjoy reading. I suppose it is an imitation of Playboy's comic strip, but if it is, it is a very bad imitation indeed. It lacks sophistication and the quality of paper Playboy uses. I hope you don't mind my criticism, Mr. Jakobsson. I am writing you because I care about the magazine. My husband and I have been reading it for many years and we want to continue doing so. Sincerely, Mrs. Victor Porguen Stamford, Conn. Dannie Plachta's The Last Night of the Festival is a survival story. Dannie envisioned a race of humans, survivals of mutual abuse of each other, who had evolved into creatures capable of existing only in festival atmosphere -- a happy twist on a sad scene. For me the story had significance -- and not as fantasy. Its underlying realities are around us -- as real as the camel's foot and the seven blind Bs. Here's a different view. Jakobsson: Bless you, bless you, bless you. And Jack Gaughan and Judy-Lynn Benjamin and all the other wonderful nuts behind what's happening to Galaxy and If. The stories you print and the way you print them is a credit, big and blatant and beautiful, to you all. I was a bit uneasy when I saw that Fred Pohl was going -- who in hell is (Please turn to page # ) maintain energy , enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you my fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood ?iatural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life," Address: Scribe M.S.B. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. j Scribe: M.S.B. I San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, I "The Mastery of Life" which I  shall read as directed. j N ame j Address j City I State Please Include Your Zip Code L I hood to own your own personal and private Stonehenge, think of the advantages. Neighborhood? All right, be the first in your state, continent, any continent. How would you like to be the sole owner and proprietor of the one and only operative Stonehenge on the face of the earth? And the operative word in this offer, friend, is operative, because this one works. Tell you what I'm going to do... My car was shot, Edie needed hers and I was in the subway, out of which I got at Harvard Square, the end of the line. It was hot and humid for almost the end of June. The subway filled with humanoid sardines hadn't helped and I'd had a day of brutal frustration in the lab. I was looking forward to my air-conditioned house, a light supper and cold drinks. I stood on the curb for a moment and decided against a taxi. The green came on and we obediently crossed over to Nini's Corner, where the familiar array of magazines caught my eye. God knew I had enough reading at home to catch up with, plus a bunch of reports in my briefcase, but Out There jumped out at me from the gaudy ranks and on impulse I bought it. I hadn't heard of it before but it had an attractive cover. Spaceships. The streets became quieter as I walked from the Square. Nice large quiet houses on Tory Row. One of them was mine and it was calling me like a beacon. The house was -- not Edie exactly. I hoped she'd had a good day -- sometimes that made a difference. The Earth had had a good day or a bad one, depending how you looked at it. I had realized in the subway that it was the twenty-first -- which meant that at #:# A.M. the sun had entered the sign of Cancer, which meant that it had been summer for about fourteen hours, which meant that I was beginning to think of New Hampshire, which meant... I entered my lovely house like a hand going into a worn and comfortable glove. "I'm home," I called out, dumping the briefcase and hanging my coat in the closet. No answer. "Edie?" I found her on the terrace out back. She was reading something, had a tall drink to hand, looked up from her book. "Hi," I said, tentatively. "Hi yourself. Everything's there." She nodded toward a table she had set up -- ice, vodka, vermouth, a lemon even. "How did today?" "He had a vicious day working with modules that wouldn't mod, circuits that wouldn't circ. Bad. You?" I dropped Out There on the table by the chair and made a marIF tini. How to make a martini work I do know. Drink it. "So-so." I sat there a moment, delaying the first sip, sat there looking at my wife. She was tiny -- five feet one. Her hair was black and her figure was hard and muscular -- but feminine as anything. Don't get me wrong. She got her muscles from her work. She was a sculptor and I knew from a number of sources that she wielded a respectable blowtorch. Her work pad was in an abandoned loft downtown. I'd been there several times and they had been bad times, as bad as when she had come to my lab in the computer center for a grudging look at what I was up to. She knew -- and cared -- as much about an electronic circuit as I did about her thing, whatever it was, and that was part of the trouble with us, maybe most of it. Plus she wasn't getting the recognition she wanted. I'd had some lucky accidents in the lab -- hence the boy-wonder crack -- but that was no fault of mine. "Well," I tried again, "how's it going? What are you working on?" "You wouldn't understand if I told you," she said and I had no answer to that. I topped up her gin and tonic, made myself another martini and leafed through my magazine. It was quiet out there on the terrace, with soft distant traffic sounds now and then letting me know I was still in Cambridge. I'd rather have been inside where it was cooler but Edie loved the terrace and garden even in midsummer. "What's that?" she asked. "Science fiction," I said. "I picked it up on the way home. Nice cover." I showed it to her and my artist wife turned up her nose. She rose. "We're having a cold supper, all right?" "Of course." "I'll bring it out. It's ready. It's good, too, lobster salad. You want another martini first?" My glass was half full. I shook my head. "For a hot-shot electronic genius," she said, leaving, "you do read the damndest crap."-'in bed. The supper had indeed been good. Edie had thought to chill a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse and I and my house and my tiny wife were in a state of precarious harmony. We had kept the conversation out of danger areas, threading through mine fields. I had finished two stories in Out There , given them both Z?-plus, and was looking at the classified ads. "Listen to this -- do it yourself Stonehenge kit," I read. "For the man who has everything. Five hundred bucks." "You've got to be kidding." "Not so." I showed her the ad: A Dd-It-Yourself Stonehenge Kit. For the man who has everything. A faithful reproduction of the Salisbury Plain original, though somewhat smaller. Best Vermont granite. Space required: circular area # ' diameter, from which complete horizon should be visible. Limited supply, order now. # delivered (E. of Miss.). Novel Products Co., Box #, Barre, Vt. Edie sniffed. "I suppose there are one or two people in the U.S. nutty enough to be taken in by that. What nonsense. Really." "What's wrong with having your own Stonehenge?" My mine detectors were beginning to hum faintly. "I've got plenty of room for it at Round Hill. I could put it on top of the hill, matter of fact. You know what a view that is. Full horizon except for a wee bit of Monadnock -- " Edie looked at me aghast. "What have you got against it, for God's sake?" I asked. "It's sculpture, isn't it?" Those words I shouldn't have said -- I should not have said them. They detonated the first mine and that was the beginning of a chain reaction which involved a plethora of words and drinks and eventually found me at the desk in my study, writing a check for five hundred dollars. Not only that, I threw on some clothes and went to the box at the corner and dropped in the envelope, clanging the slot shut with a mighty crash. Satisfying. On my way to the cot in my study I stopped by our bedroom to tell Edie I'd ordered a Stonehenge -- but she was asleep. So next morning, coward that I was, I didn't tell her. I tried to lighten things up at breakfast but Edie was glacial. She scathingly said, "Sculpture!" once, and that was about it. I was glad I wasn't a hunk of metal awaiting her pleasure in her studio. On the subway I thought about five-hundred-dollar Stonehenges. I could see my smaller version of Salisbury Plain brooding up there on top of Round Hill -- I could see it, say, on a windy October night by the light of a waning moon. I could see it, all right, and if I could have it for five hundred I wanted it. Uneasy thoughts now in myrniind. How could Novel Products do it for five hundred? Anywhere east of the Mississippi? Miami? This Stonehenge was smaller than the original, yes, but if it needed as much space as the ad said, that would be a lot of granite. To deliver that mass to Miami would cost more than five hundred for transportation alone. I reluctantly decided I'd been had. I called the bank from the lab to stop payment on the check and got on with the business of being a boy wizard. all finished and here I am at Round Hill for the summer. Here IF we are, I should say, but Edie just now is playing tennis at the club. I'm working the hell away in my study when I hear a bashing at the kitchen door. I confront a wiry redhead in overalls, holding in his freckled hand a piece of paper. "You Thomas Gridley?" he asked. I admitted it. "Then we've come to the right place. And a good thing, too. Where you want it?" "Want what?" He jerked his head toward the parking area behind the house. I looked over his shoulder. Merciful Jesus! Two enormous flat trailers loaded with granite -- it looked wonder how soon Edie would be back from the club. "But -- I stopped the check -- I didn't pay -- " I stepped onto the porch. The redhead handed me the bill of lading or whatever that piece of paper was. It was stamped: Paid. So they'd made a mistake. So I had my Stonehenge. "It's yours, buddy. Sign here." I did. "You have the -- manual?" "In the truck. So where do we put it?" "I'll show you." Let # get out of here now... "Follow me, Art," the redhead said to the other driver. "Okay, Stan." I sat in the cab next to Stan, directed him to the road through the north field to the edge of the woods. A jeep road led through those woods to the top of Round Hill but those trailers couldn't begin to go through that. I'd have to haul those stones up myself, one by one. Some of them looked fifteen feet long or more. I wondered if my four-wheel-drive jeep pickup could handle them. "Here," I said at the edge of the woods. "As near as you can get to the road entrance but not blocking it, right?" "You're the boss." "The manual -- you have it?" He handed me a bulky pliofilm envelope. I started to walk back to the house, then stopped. Do you tip the workmen who bring you your Stonehenge? Stan was manipulating the crane on the lead trailer. I slipped him a five, another to Art, who was slinging cables around one of the stones. For a few minutes I watched Stan manipulate those imposing masses. They bore neatly inscribed numbers. I was glad of that -- it gave me a sense of security. I went back to the study then, I wanted to read that manual. I was lost in it when Edie came back. "Any calls?" she asked. "No. No -- calls." The trailers must have unloaded and gone. I'd been so deep in the manual I hadn't heard them go. As I hadn't heard them come... "What are you looking so -- silly about?" "I'm not looking silly. I'm working. How did the tennis go?" But she had already left. thinking about hauling that granite to the bald area on top of Round Hill. I kept wondering if the jeep could do the job. I skimmed all the way through the manual, knowing I'd have to read it again page by page, paragraph by paragraph. The charts and plans were elaborate. Novel Products had obviously done their homework. I went to sleep wondering from whence had come the druid in my woodpile. I was conducting a sensuous priestly rite when Edie shook me awake. She interrupted my rite, yes, and her touch held nothing of tenderness. The sun was well up; Edie was dressed. She got me somewhat awake, but I still wore ancient robes. I was not amused. It's not every night... "Will you kindly tell me what the goddam hell is that pile of rocks at the edge of the field, will you?" Megatons of stuff coming at me from that five-foot-one bundle. "You bought that goddam Stonehenge bit, right? You stupid son of a -- " "Your invective is unoriginal," I said, rubbing my eyes, my priestly robes fading. "Besides, I was dreaming. There was this priestess, see, and I was the priest and our robes were of many colors. We -- " "You silly bastard, will you listen to me for one minute -- " " -- and our robes were of many colors. You listen to me, baby, I bought it, yes, and it didn't cost one nickel, not a cent. I ordered it last June, yes, but -- " I told her about the stopped check, their mistake, my Stonehenge for free. "That's not the point, you doughhead, the point is -- " "Yes, ma'am?" "The point is I will not have the whole damn corner of the State thinking I'm the wife of the most eccentric weirdo this side of -- of -- anywhere. I won't -- " After years of living with my tiny wife and sometimes loving her, caring about her, I understood in a nanosecond why she was no good with her junkyard iron and blowtorch and I felt sorry for her, I did. In that same microslice of time I knew that what was wrong between us was irreparable. Our prognosis was -- negative. Edie left me not long after that. Round Hill had always been mine and I bought her half of the Cambridge house. She really didn't want it, didn't have the feeling for it I did. So Edie left me, left me to my house in Cambridge, to my Round Hill, to my haphazard pile of granite at the north end of the field. "It's best," she said and I agreed. Off she went -- finally no fuss beIF tween us, only the sense and fact of finality. She walked to her car and I watched that little bottom for the last time. She didn't turn round to say or wave goodbye. II or two but I knew it was good that she was gone and those granite monsters were coming on strong. The manual looked to be a good one. The charts were explicit. You ever put together a Stonehenge kit? You bet your life you haven't. Tell you how it goes. First, you do a great deal of extremely intricate measuring and surveying and, if your Stonehenge is to work, this must be done with impeccable accuracy. The outer circle of stones in mine would be, according to the plans, sixty-five feet and some inches in diameter -- and the stones comprising that circle would have to be placed within a tolerance of two inches. Then you dig holes, lots of holes in the ground, and you dig these to precise depths in precisely determined locations. In these holes you stand monoliths, each of which must end up within two inches of where it's supposed to be. And, don't forget, all the tops must be level with each other. This generates within you a feeling of profound respect for some engineers who practiced their art in England thirty-five hundred years ago. Having breezed through this you come to the hard part, which is putting the lintels atop the monoliths. I wanted to get this project off the pad by digging one hole, hauling up one stone, setting it up -- so I'd have at least the beginning of this construction to look at, enjoy. I knew I could dig the holes all right, no problem, and I didn't anticipate trouble staking the layout -- but when I cabled the first stone to the jeep and tried to drag it up the road I found I needed a crane and a big one at that. At the same time I realized I could also use some human-type help. I knew some girls -- yes, a few girls I did know -- but I didn't know any girl crane operators, not even any girls ging holes in the ground on top of Round Hill. A poverty of acquaintanceship. So I called Bill Crosby. Bill was a colleague at his wife had just left him -- and I thought he might be at loose ends. He was. "You're out of your cottonpicking mind," he said at the end of our conversation, "but I'm 'most as crazy as you are. I'll be up day after tomorrow." And he was. Bill was one of the more brilliant lights at the computer center, and I liked him. We had written a few papers together. He was gigantic -- six feet five with other dimensions to match -- that massive figure belying the intricate brain within. It seemed appropriate he should help me with my megalithic enterprise. We drove into Keene and I persuaded a construction outfit to rent me a crane capable of lifting weights up to fifteen tons. People are always moving granite around in New Hampshire. They didn't ask questions, except did I know how to operate one. I lied that I did -- I knew Bill and I could figure it out in ten minutes of trial and error -- and they said they'd deliver one in a week or ten days. Good. That night we cut stakes and the next day we drove the jeep to the plateau-like summit of the Hill. We walked about for a time like dowsers clutching apple twigs and finally I drove a stake into the ground at what seemed to me the uniquely proper focal point of the one and only Stonehenge this side of Salisbury Plain. This wasn't in the center of that lonesome space but somewhat to the southwest -- we had to leave room for the heel stone, which would be out to the northeast, more than a hundred feet outside the sarsen circle. I had a beautiful theodolite at Round Hill, a reminder of when we had built the tennis court. It was an uncanny pleasure, erotic almost, to go to work with that gleaming instrument, a compass and a glistening tape, to lay out the plan, measure the feet. The inches. We drove the last stake just before sunset the following day. In time those markers would be replaced by somber granitic masses but just the stakes, standing silently in that cryptic configuration, said something that tingled my spine. I couldn't decode it but I got a message. So did Bill. "This is going to be the hell of a place with the stones in," he said. "The stakes alone give me the willies. It's getting dark -- let's go." We did. handy and theliouse phone wasn't an instrument that could be tied into the Center, so we did our operations research verbally over a few drinks. We decided we'd dig holes until the crane came, then -- I wanted it this way and Bill went along -- we'd haul up and erect one stone. I did want that. Then we'd finish the scut work of digging the other holes and carry the remaining seventy-five stones up one by one, erecting them as we did so. I wanted to do the sarsen circle first, saving the big trilithons for last -- but if we did that we couldn't get the crane back outside when we'd finished. We decided to build two thirds of the sarsen circle, erect the trilithons within, then close it up. We could put up the heel stone any time. So we dug holes until the crane arrived. The stakes disappeared, were replaced by rectangular holes IF in the ground. I had thought this would be dull work and it was -- until we had dug enough so the configuration reappeared, now in reverse, intaglio, more impressive, the cavities suggesting in their receptiveness the upward thrust of the monoliths to come. Then came the crane -- on a thirty-two-wheel trailer. I showed where they should put it at the north end of the field. I signed a piece of paper, ignored the crane until that trailer was out of there. Then we walked round it. "You don't know how to work this, right?" Bill said, we circling the thing. "Right," I said. "But we bright boys -- we can learn, right?" "Right. Big, ain't she?" "Big. Go up the road with the boom low, though." "Right. You want to sit up there in that cab, Tom, boy and start turning things on and off, moving levers this way and that?" "Right," I said. We were, remember, masters of intricate computers and this crane was a tinkertoy. The total bank of controls and levers couldn't have represented more than a hundred bits of information, and we dealt every day climbing into the cab. "For Chrissake," Bill was howling, some five traumatic minutes later, "not that lever again, you baboon, the one on the right! I had narrowly missed decapitating him with the boom and he had taken offense. "All right, goddam, if you think you can do any better -- be my guest." I idled the deep-throated motor and clambered down to terra firma. Bill climbed up and assumed the operating position. It was a sight to see. Those massive hands fondled the controls like an organist looking for the lost chord but not pushing any keys down. "It won't play unless you give it some input," I yelled. Bill confidently thrust a lever forward. I darted out of the way in time -- just -- to avoid untimely sacrifice at the feet of caterpillar treads. Now we were both shook up. I'll skip the dialogue but let the record show that we mastered inhuman devil. Not in five or x. mutes, no, but in two or three hours. Without injury, too, except to our professional vanity, our presumed sense of the mastery of mechanisms. That came hard. The stone nearest the road entrance was number four of the sarsen circle. We cabled it, got it up there -- taking turns back-seatdriving the crane -- and erected it. When the monolith was up, standing there alone, it was a sight. All those gaping holes in the ground, one now filled -- that lonesome stone standing there on the plateau top of Round Hill, which had not seen such a thing before. Nor had we. Sobering. The theodolite said we were right on the money, within half-inch tolerance. And that was the way of that summer. There we were, two men without our women, and there were all those stones and a thing to be built and we built it. Not all of it, not that summer, but most of it. Some days we erected two of those monsters but usually just one. There were, of course, a few trips to Cambridge. I wasn't used to the absence of my tiny wife. Though her not being there brought a sense of freedom, I learned something of deprivation. In consequence I made a few trips to town despite the pull of the stones, the monument. These diversionary days came on pleasantly enough but with an underlying sense of mistaken identity and in the end I devoted the time I br r before going back to worl, Stonehenge -- almost always with Bill's help. We sweated and cursed over those stones, their meticulously determined placement. With one of us in the cab of the crane -- we'd learned to handle the beast with a certain elan -- the other at the theodolite, we spotted them to the nearest inch, mostly. Then we rammed fill around them, made a final alignment check and drove the crane down to the field to haul up the next one. Toward the end of August we'd put up more than two thirds of the sarsen circle and it was time to get to the big ones. Now, what is found within the sarsen circle of a true Stonehenge is a horseshoe of trilithons. To build a trilithon you erect two monolithic uprights and place a massive lintel on top, no other stones touching. Then the monoliths aren't monoliths any more but you've got yourself a trilithon. This awesome horseshoe has five trilithons, arranged with the open end toward the heel stone, off to the northeast. Their heights vary, ascending from the outer ends to the dominant central group. Bill helped me put up the two outer ones, plus the western one next in, before he had to leave on missions of his own. He left, I could tell, with a mixture of relief and regret. "You're still out of your nd," he said. "But so'm I. I'll vip you finish it up on weekends." We shook hands. He got into his battered Rover and drove off down the long driveway. There I was again, alone with my New Hampshire edition of Salisbury but I wanted to put the heel stone up first. It was doubly unique -- it stood off on the slope of the hill outside all the rest of it and of all the stones it was the only one not dressed. The others were finished products but the heel stone was a natural boulder. So I put it up, sweating back and forth from cab to theodolite, and then it was time to go back to IF Cambridge. The construction outfit wanted the crane back. I told the man he could have it by the end of October but not before. Cambridge, working in the lab again, teaching my two classes, living in my house by myself and always Round Hill in my mind. Every Friday I was on the road as soon as could be. By Saturday morning I was working the crane -- thanking God I'd listened to Bill and that we'd dug the holes first. The leaves were falling all over the lawns. For once I couldn't be bothered and there they stayed. What my father would have thought! But he had never built a Stonehenge. Bill helped me some weekends. But he had something going with one of the lab girls and when it came to putting up the last lintel I was alone on the summit of the now almost frightening hill. I'd wondered about the curiosity of the locals. I hadn't wanted a lot of attention -- not for the reasons which had caused my tiny wife to abandon the scene -- but because I wanted this to be a private place. If Round Hill saw almost all of the horizon, then almost all of the horizon had Round Hill in view and I wondered about that. But this corner of the State was so isolated that my B.C. edifice attracted no interest whatever, as far as I could tell. There was, after all, no near view and the horizon was a long way off. Sooner or later the hunters might discover it but up to now I and it were in a world by ourselves. It was almost dusk as I wrestled the ultimate stone into place, filling in the last gap in the lintels of the sarsen circle. Two weekends earlier I'd capped the giant uprights of the central and commanding trilithon. Now -- with great delicacy, if I may say so -- I lowered the last lintel into place, checked with the theodolite and rammed the fill home. For the last time I drove the now docile crane through the woods to the edge of the field. I walked back, then, to see this damn thing complete. I'd lived with it a long time but was only partly prepared for the impact. It was too much. I wandered about inside that place while the sun went down and the hunter's moon came up. With, besides, a barred owl sending his uninvited eight-hoot cry into the night. You ever stood in a place like that? You bet your life you haven't. Forget not, friend, this wasn't an ancient ruin -- interesting enough, and scary in its own way -- this was something else again, just off the assembly line, complete, new, comely, ready to go. The first one in thirty-five hundred years. I stayed there an hour or so before going down to the house. I left word with the construction outfit they could pick up the crane. Next day I, closed Round Hill for the winter. Ill Something had been coming up on Channel # I'd wanted to see -- something about cybernetics a colleague was doing. Mid-November, and I'd been stay-up all hours trying to catch up. So five minutes before my colleague came on I went to sleep. I dreamed it was time for the program and there I was, head on pillow, watching the screen. Then -- but weird -- the video and audio swallowed themselves into the void and there was the raster all by itself, a different voice coming from the speaker. "Thomas Gridley." No question mark, no exclamation, just Thomas Gridley -- a quiet statement of some basic fact of life, said like Emc # . "Yes," I said. "Certainly." What the hell? I was Thomas Gridley. A dream is a dream, go up and down its alleys and see where it takes you. "Yes," I said again. "Thomas Gridley," my television set said in my dream. There was no eerie glow from the tube, just the dead old raster and this voice coming from the speaker. "Thomas Gridley. You have done well." "That's good," I answered. Should I say sir, your excellency, or what? This didn't look to be a guilt dream, and I was glad of that. "Thomas Gridley." x # y # ... tone of voice like that. "The structure appears good. Excellent, perhaps. We thank you. You will be rewarded. The -- er, trial run -- will come soon." His English was like mine, almost. I understood it all right but it seemed to come from a far place. "Yes?" "Before dawn on next midsummer day you will be at the place of what you call -- Stonehenge." I'd planned to be there then, of course. Was I supposed to say something? "You will be there before the dawn of that day, Thomas Gridley. You will not forget." "Not 'arf likely," I said and, having dreamed, wakened. There was the video -- there was my colleague saying silly and obvious things about cybernetics. I turned the switch and told myself I really should get to bed earlier. It didn't do to be so sleepy I couldn't stay awake waiting for a program to come on. time. Would you believe June twenty-first? I walked around the now hairy summit of Round Hill, telling myself I wasn't, of course, there because of a witless, unbidden dream I'd had more than six months earIF Her and which I'd tried to forget. I simply wanted to see -- and truly I did -- if the sun honest-to-God would rise directly over the heel stone as I stood in the center of the sarsen circle and the horseshoe of trilithons, sighting through the entrance stones, waiting for the godhead to slice me to ribbons or bear me aloft in a chariot of strange device. Neither of those things happened but the sun did eventually appear -- just where it was supposed to. The upper limb flared into the dawn a few degrees north of the heel stone and the moment the disc cleared the horizon it stood precisely over the heel stone, dancing there in a blaze I couldn't look at. The morning was misty, dew all over everything. My feet were soaked through my sneakers and some splinter of me noted that and wished for warm dry socks, which at that moment were about a million light years away. I wasn't sliced to ribbons nor borne aloft. I was merely presented with a moment to live with the rest of my life. Something thrust me gently to the side of that exact center, and in that place appeared a -- crystal is the simplest word but how do you describe a crystal phone booth? Conjure into your head something of that size, built of glowing bluewhite slabs, yes, something you've never seen before, yet businesslike, no nonsense about it, standing there like a spacebus ready to pull out as soon as the driver can close the door. All right? From this structure, vehicle, emerged an entity who had to be, by the look of him, a Madison Avenue junior exec. Color him gray. "Thomas Gridley," he says and there's no arguing with that. You have the scene? This is the summit of Round Hill, a place I've grown up with, as have ancestors before me. By my own hand, with the help of Bill, now absent, I have here erected the second edition of Salisbury Plain and here I now stand in the presence of one whose suit might well be from Brooks Brothers but whose voice comes from a far place. "Yes," I said. "Call me -- Harry," he said, consulting a timepiece on his wrist. He approached me and we touched skins. His wasn't cold, not hot, was like yours or mine. He walked and looked around my Stonehenge, cocking his eye this way and that. I was glad I'd taken the trouble to build it right. "Yes," said Harry, "if you hadn't done it right it wouldn't have -- worked. You have done well, Thomas Gridley, and you will be rewarded. In due course." I followed him around the summit of Round Hill in that misty dawn. "It is good," Harry said. Again he consulted the instrument on his wrist. "Look," I said. "I've been surprised a few times in my life, but -- " "Yes," Harry interrupted. "Yes. But not like this. I understand. You have done your job well and are entitled to explanation -- which you shall have. But just now there isn't much time. Three more of your minutes only." "Will you kindly tell me -- " "Yes, certainly. But our time just now is limited -- most severely." Placing his accent was like throwing a dart at the Milky Way. "I must say first -- and most importantly -- that you will be at this place three of your months and one day from now." The autumnal equinox, I thought. "Right," Harry said. "I must apologize for being brusque, but our time is running out. I must very shortly -- leave." I thought about the nondream I'd had back in November. "But," I said, "you can be in touch with me whenever you want. What's the -- " "Yes, Thomas Gridley -- but that is a very -- expensive way to do it. This is better," Harry said. His inspection was apparently complete. He stood at the door of the crystal phone booth. He looked at the thing on his wrist again and I craned my gaze at it. He held it so I could see and I almost wished I hadn't been so nosy. It looked like size. "That way of contact is very difficult," Harry said. "That is why we caused you to build this -- what you would call, I think -- black box or bucket of bolts." "All right," I said. "I'll be here. But where are you from? What -- " "That will come later, Thomas Gridley. I am sorry. But I say, quickly now, you will be here on the dawn of what is your autumnal equinox and you will have at hand two surface vehicles -- station wagons -- to transport seven or eight of us from this place to other places." "But -- " Harry slipped something into my hand. "You will do it, Thomas Gridley." He stepped into the crystal, glancing again at that computer on his wrist. "Accept my apology. We owe you much and we are not an impolite people. Though we can do much, we are not omnipotent. We thank you, Thomas Gridley. We shall meet again at the appointed hour." I sensed that his crystal was about to take off. "I'll be here," I said again. "One question -- " I indicated the Stonehenge with a sweep of my hand. "How does -- " "The trilithon lintels," Harry said. "They -- focus the solar energy -- only on certain days. You will be told later. Now I -- "... and I was alone on the summit of Round Hill. The lower limb of the sun was a few degrees above the horizon and had moved southward from the point where the heel stone marked the horizon. I walked around for a while, wondering whether to tell Bill -- or anybody -- what had happened. I didn't decide then, threw the whole ball of wax up in the air, walked down the road through the woods, then through the north field and back to the house. Not until night did I remember that Harry had thrust something into my hand just before leaving. I retrieved it from my jacket pocket. It was a bundle of beat-up hundred-dollar bills. How had he arranged that? Anyway, he wanted two station wagons and was willing to pay for them. Going to sleep at Round Hill that night, thinking back to the beginning of this caper, I realized with a start but also with a sense of puzzle pieces clicking into place, that this had begun when I'd bought that copy of Out There at Nini's Corner exactly a year ago. I wondered where my tiny ex-wife was and what she was up to. It seemed I'd gone a long way from there -- from that time. nal equinox. That's ninety one days and a few hours and that's a long time to wait. I'd plenty of work to do but my heart wasn't in it. I spent too much time looking for things to do to make the time go. None of these worked, so I went back to first principles -- I studied my Stonehenge. I chipped at some of the stones, the uprights. They were good Vermont granite, no doubt about it. Recalling Harry's final words, I took a ladder up there and banged away at the trilithon lintels, all five of them. Nothing. Nothing could I chip off, that is, with geologist's pick, nor with cold chisel and the IF biggest hammer I could hold. They weren't Vermont granite, nor Vermont anything. They looked like granite but all resemblance ended there.  Fighting down a sense of sacrilege I set upon one of those lintels with a rented pneumatic hammer. Nothing. Abandoning brute force, I applied to each of those brooding stones a variety of sophisticated sensors and transducers. Nothing. I brooded some more and tried to pass the time. I bought two baby-blue station wagons," kept them in the Round Hill parking space. Even those inoffensive automobiles gave me the treatment. Who was going where in those, to do what? As all days must, those long ones ended, individually and collectively. Autumnal equinox. Night and day of equal length everywhere. Everywhere on earth, that is. A delicate arrangement, if you stop to think about it. And I stood in the center of my sarsen circle waiting for the sun to rise. The first show of the solar disc was right on schedule. It rose, of course, far south of the place where the heel stone marked the horizon. I knew there was some difference of opinion among Stonehengologists as to whether the equinoxes, as well as the solstices, were consequential -- well, I knew the sunrise horizon point at equinox was critical, as least as concerned those five center lintels -- either that or no spacebus would appear this morning. I wanted to make some observations of the sunrise horizon point in relation to those lintels but I knew there wouldn't be much time and I wanted another look at the phone booth, so I stood near the center of my trilithonic horseshoe, waiting. The sun cleared the horizon and there we were -- there it was again. I had brought the station wagons up to the edge of the field and would have felt like an idiot child tf the crystal hadn't come. Harry emerged. I stepped forward. "Thomas Gridley," he said. "Good. The vehicles?" I nodded toward the road through the wood. "Good," he said again. Behind him people -- well, presumably people, people like Harry, were emerging from the crystal. Carrying bags and all, like a bunch of conventiojoeers getting out of the airport taxi. There were nine of them, men and women, or should I say, male and female. They looked at me curiously as they emerged. Be it understood that that space was really just about phone booth size -- they couldn't all have been in there but they kept coming out. One came forward. "Thomas," said Harry. "This is Catherine." color her beautiful. Color her All-American girl and color her plain. Splash her with the Milky Way, and say she grew up in the house next to yours in Dubuque. I mumbled something. What do you say when you're introduced to Miss Universe for real? Our hands touching, her warm skin on mine. Harry glanced at the sun, at the computer on his wrist. "It is time. Catherine will tell you -- many things," and he was into the crystal just before it disappeared. Catherine disengaged her hand and confronted me with the group. She mentioned names. The eight nodded with great courtesy. "The vehicles are near," Catherine said. "Let us go." My intellectual clarity quotient wasn't exactly peaking at the moment, my computer being overloaded with input, but I had the wit to lead them to the two wagons waiting at the end of the road through the woods. I said the ignition keys were in the locks, the tanks were filled with gas and did they need anything. "Thank you, Thomas Gridley," one of the men said. He then ignored me and indicated who should get into what vehicle. They divided up into two couples in each, stowed their luggage aboard and drove off. Down that dusty road through the field they went, into the driveway facing that early morning sun, then off and away. Leaving Catherine with me. "You're not going with them," I said, achieving some kind of statement of the year. She stood at my side, Miss Universe, Miss Kansas, and agreed that it was so. "But -- what -- " "Yes, Thomas. We have much to speak of. But in the meantime. I'm hungry. We were so busy getting ready -- even though we had so much notice. We could have -- a breakfast?" Yes, we could have a breakfast and we did. I wasn't exactly scared but I was in a state. I attended to that breakfast with a care Henri Soule couldn't have faulted. My mind was filled with questions about spacegates and extraterra but -- sharing Catherine's breakfast, made with my own hand in my country kitchen -- I felt like an adolescent on his first encounter. I was no adolescent, no, and encounters and confrontations were in my history but this was something else. Questions were in my mind, all right, and probably there were some in hers -- but this was not the time. The others had gone off down the dusty driveway in the baby-blue wagons and Harry had returned to God knew where in the crystal phone booth. Catherine and I were at Round Hill alone. Would be for some time? How long? Three months? Anyway, this was not the time for questions, not that kind. This was the time to establish something IF about us, expose some images of her and me upon an unseen film that might later produce a readable picture. It took most of the day to show her around the place. She made appropriate remarks. We knew the tour was window dressing, getting to know you. I held her hand or arm now and again, going through the woods or up the Hill and each time I was twenty .years back there. IV T OP of Round Hill, now, surrounded by monoliths, lintels, trilithons, the one and only operative Stonehenge. "Catherine?" "Yes?" "You will -- the others are gone -- but you will stay with me for a while?" "Yes." "The others have a mission, missions, elsewhere? Right?" She nodded that sweet head. "Your mission is to stay with me?" She nodded again. I was slowly beginning to wonder if I was missing something here. They had been so busy getting ready to do -- what? Twinges of guilt in my mind? Questions multiplying in my head, rabbits in spring. Catherine sensed that. She asked, "Can we swim in the pond?" "Of course. Do you swim where you -- " She was off and running. At times l am indeed an idiot child, as then, when I wondered for a moment what she had in mind by way of bikini or whatever. I gave off running after her, watched her throw her clothes aside and dive into the pond, whose waters had not seen her like before. I joined her moments later. The water was cold but it was nice and we splashed around and swam and played. I went back, then, all the way through adolescence into something earlier, playing in a bathtub with a cousin of mine. I'd loved her with all of my fouror fiveyear-old heart. The water was cold but the air was warm and we lay in the grass at the side of the pond and I left that bathtub once more behind me, shot through adolescence like a skyrocket and emerged -- in due course -- into a now of unfamiliar dimensions. The dimensions were unfamiliar, yes, but they were agreeable -- and that's another some kind of statement of the year. I took Catherine that evening to a country roadside place. A nice one and she discovered she liked martinis. And Maine lobster. And there was so much to talk about that we didn't talk about anything, not anything important, not about the thousand questions in my head. We talked some, later in bed. Having been that day all the way back into a bathtub with my fiveyear-old girl cousin, thence through pubescence once more and then into the breach of a now whose parameters were as yet undetermined, it was not difficult to go back fifteen months to one of the last times I had had much to say to somebody sharing my, as they say, bed and board. Then I had asked my tiny wife what was wrong with having my own Stonehenge and that had led to the end of our attempt to maintain viable relationship. Now here I was, most improbably, with Cathy, brought here via that same Stonehenge I had discussed with my then wife -- and gone off into the night, in righteous rage, to order from Novel Products. I could still hear the clang of the mail box slot. I should have said, we talked a little, later in bed. By the time we got to talking much we were both ready for sleep. The whole thing was a dream anyway, it seemed to me. It seemed this girl by my side had been here forever but partly I knew she was from Out There -- though she couldn't be more here. And there were all those questions. "Catherine," I said. "Cathy?" "Yes, Thomas?" "You could call me Tom." "I like Thomas." "I like Cathy. Is that your real name or just for -- here?" We were drinking a nightcap. "Just for here -- but I like it." She yawned.  "We have three months?" "Yes, Thomas." She came' close. She was the girl next door I'd grown up with. "Then -- you go?" Cathy didn't answer. She looked at me, turned and snuggled her back into my lap. She said she was sleepy. "All right," I said. "Harry said you would tell me lots of things, bunches of things. Let's do just one tonight, all right?" "All right." "Where?" "Where what, Thomas?" "Tell you one thing -- a woman is a woman no matter where she's "Where are you from, Cathy? You, Harry, the others -- where's home?" "It doesn't matter," she said, stretching. I got her point but I still wanted to know. "Where?" "What you call -- the Pleiades. The third planet of -- Maia." "Oh." Silence for a time. "That's good," I said. "Why, Thomas?" "At least it's in the same galaxy." "Yes." She laughed and yawned again. "Sleep -- it is a gentle thing -- " "Beloved from pole to pole -- " Eventually we did sleep. months can be a week or a year IF -- but this quarter of a year seemed more like a day or two. I met my commitments at the lab as best I could -- which was not as difficult as might have been since Cathy had an interest and skills and understandings and ideas that made me wonder how much of her iceberg was showing. She was not an iceberg but what she showed in the lab posed a question: how much of her was beneath the surface? Once, introducing her as a visiting professor from Prague, I gave her one of my classes for a week. She was great. My students picketed for a return engagement. I let them have her for one more week, then told them the professor had been compelled to return to Prague. They booed, the unappreciative clods. We managed to sneak a week at Martinique but mostly we lived and worked in Cambridge. Cathy answered a lot of my questions. We took care of most of them in one all-night session -- after we had settled down a bit. I had intimations of guilt and irresponsibility to deal with, so I went at those first. In or with what was I cooperating? Were Cathy's people goodies or baddies? Cathy was a goody, all right, but what were those other eight doing out there? I'd sprung the catch on what Pandora's box? Was this, for example, some kind of takeover "Then what? A missionary bit -- bringing VD and Calvinism to the noble savage?" My hackles were up a bit. She laughed, soothed me in seconds with consummate skill. "We are not missionaries, Thomas. And you're not a savage, silly." "Gee, thanks." "Stop it." Then she put together a story for me. Terra was a colony, a colony known to be in some disarray, a colony that had also gone sour earlier, millennia ago, gone from reasonably high estate back to the Stone Age. I had more or less expected this but still I was put down a bit. I had always thought of Earthmen going out there, doing the colonizing. So we're a backward colony. All right. Humility is a thing commendable, yes -- but my supply was precarious. "Not only -- " Cathy put her hand on mine -- "backward but wayward," she said. That I bought without offense. That other Stonehenge -- on Salisbury Plain -- that had been, a spacegate too? Yes. Cathy didn't know the raison d'etre for that one. "That was long before my time," she said. "I'm glad this one wasn't." W HY spacegates? Direct communication between Maia Gamma and the colonies was posthing?" "No, Thomas. Oh, no. sible but it took time and was not easy. Where actual, physical space travel was not involved -- as in the electromagnetic manipulation of the vacuum tube or transistor driving the voice coil in the speaker of my radio or TV -- the problems were not beyond economic solution. But space travel itself, the long jump through the big black at a distance of (in our case) almost # light years, even with space warps and all, was costly. Hence the spacegate, hence Stonehenge. Why swim the Atlantic to say hello if you can pick up a phone and talk? I got the message. "But," I said. We were sitting up in bed. She was cuter than any-" thing. "But the five lintels, the Novel Products operation, must have -- " "Cost a lot. Yes. But now the Stonehenge is working. We can -- though only four times a year -- just walk from home to here." She blinked-those lashes at me. "And you've made it so well it will probably work for hundreds of years. So it's a bargain." "Cease and desist," I said, "from frivolity. You don't need to wave the lashes. Of course I made it well. That's the way I make -- " She pinched me and it took some time to get back on track -- but I have said this was an all-night session. The Out There magazine was a put-on, a gimmick? Yes. The only copy in existence, all arranged. So I had a collector's item. Back, then, to intimations of guilt and irresponsibility. "So what are those eight doing out there?" Not hard to explain, she said. Life on Maia Gamma had become dull. No worlds to conquer, no fun and games, no frontier. They had come to Terra looking for ideas, ways to liven things up back home. "I will be damned," I said. "What?" "Advanced mother planet comes to the boondocks looking for kicks." "Well -- yes." Simple as that. "Well, we got lots going on," I said. "Race riots, Vietnam, famine, lots of stuff. We could export some of that." "Don't be angry with me, Thomas Gridley." She hadn't called me that since we met. "It's not my fault." I wasn't angry with Cathy, I don't think, but I wasn't enthralled by the picture. "Wayward we are," I said. "Right. But mama planet is very advanced indeed and comes here looking for kicks to brighten the home scene. While lots of colonials starve, kill each other and all kinds of other things are fouled up. So why don't you spread some of the advancement around?" "You are angry," she said. "I'll make us another drink." She did. "It's been tried. We've tried it and IF you've tried it. It doesn't work. It doesn't. You know it as well as I." "What?" "Thomas. Five minutes ago you didn't want us being missionaries to the savages -- Five minutes ago. And what did your missionaries take to -- Samoa, say? VD and Calvinism, as you said." Touche , let's drop it. And I'm not mad any more." I showed her that was so. "So what do you, those eight, have in mind by way of kicks?" "I don't know -- they don't know. That's their problem, not mine. They're looking around, trying things, seeing what works. Grass, Las Vegas, acid, East Village, who knows?" "Mama planet, highly advanced, comes to the boondocks to take stuff like that back?" "It does seem silly, I know. But it's not my idea and life back home does seem dull." She looked at me thoughtfully. "I'm glad they brought ne along -- to stay with you. You're my problem." So take me back with you, I started to say, but I was a coward. To continue -- Cathy and I weren't bored -- right -- but not because of any of the kick-type things they were looking for to take home. It was because of us. We wondered about that. "I don't know," Cathy said, "maybe it's because you're from one world and I'm from another. I don't know." We soon got onto other things. "Why me, then? Why Thomas Gridley?" She didn't know that either. "But it was a good choice, the right one, wasn't it? The Stonehenge is there. You built it. Who else would have?" "If the lintels are the only functioning parts of the device -- why the sarsen circle?" "Window dressing." I began to get mad again -- until I thought of that magnificent structure standing there on top of Round Hill. I forgave them the window dressing. T HE weeks went too fast. Every time I turned around, December twenty-first was staring over my shoulder. We were something, Cathy and I -- we deserved to survive. A few days before rendezvous we were at Round Hill. There had been snow and I had put the plow onto the jeep to keep the road to Stonehenge open. We had plowed our way up and back, were having hot buttered rum in the kitchen. I've said I was a coward and that is, alas, sometimes the case -- though not always. I had been a coward in one important aspect with Cathy, though, and now it was time to summon up the blood. The matter had been implicit in many of our conversations, had been thrust somewhere into a far corner of the bed when we slept together, had hidden behind the orange juice at breakfast, behind the twist of lemon in the martini at five. In the kitchen at Round Hill I summoned up the blood. "Cathy," I said. "Yes?" I took a deep breath. "I've been thinking about this a long time and I've been afraid to bring it up. We're good for each other, right?" She nodded. "I'll make it simple. In a couple of days the spacebus comes and you go." She turned her head, looked out at the spruces and the snow. "Why can't you stay, or why can't I go with you? We should be together. We haven't talked about it but there's always been an unspoken implication or assumption that it's no go. Why?" She turned to look at me, my Miss Universe from Dubuque. "I cannot stay, Thomas. Much asl would want to." Damn it to hell. She wanted to stay and that fractured me on all fracturable planes. "Then -- " "Radiation," she said and shrugged. "Maia and Sol are similar suns but not identical. For us, three months here is about the limit. I must go back, Thomas." "Then I'll go with you. If you want me. If our radiation is too much for you, I ought to be able to take yours like a breeze." "I want you, Thomas. But it's not too much radiation -- it's the wrong kind. Little differences in the spectrum. I don't understand it. You couldn't stay on Maia either." "I could stay three months. Is your time like ours? Years, lifetime?" "Close enough," Cathy said. I made more hot buttered rum. She helped me. It was good. "Yes. You could come for three months. Not this time." My eyebrows shot up. "It would have to be arranged, approved. But next time. If you wanted to. But -- " "But what?" "It would be even more difficult then than now, wouldn't it? And now is bad enough. Unless -- " "Unless what?" I asked, not particularly liking the way my voice sounded. Cathy evaded that. We kicked our hangup around a long time, through the rum, through dinner at the nice place by the roadside, through going to bed under the electric blanket with a fire in the fireplace. We finally got to sleep. I should have stayed awake. I had a lousy dream: my feet were in concrete in some blockhouse while Cathy, radiant as heaven, got into a distant elevator and rode up the side of some gantry, story after story, toward the passenger module of a vehicle that made Saturn V look like a bottle rocket held by a kid. The liftoff woke me. Cathy was still there and I sought warmth. But I didn't go back to sleep for a long time. IF edge of the field where the station wagons would come. I carried Cathy's bag -- she was all packed and ready to go. When I walked back down to the house I would be walking by myself. The station wagons came about twenty minutes before sunrise. They unloaded a wild assortment of stuff they had to carry through the wood road to the Stonehenge. They had been to Vegas, all right. They had a one-armed bandit in their gear. But I didn't pay much attention to their cargo. I just stood there on top of the hill with Cathy. Numbness has survival value at times and numb was how I felt. Spacebus due in -- I looked at my watch, not Harry's computer but accurate enough -- four minutes. Cathy suddenly gripped my hand, released it and left my side, spoke urgently to one of the men for almost a minute. They had some kind of argument. Then the man shrugged, opened one of the bags at his feet on the snowy ground. Cathy beckoned to me. I walked over. "Take off your coat and jacket," she said. "Roll up your sleeve. Hurry." This was a Cathy I hadn't seen before. "What -- " "Now." she said. Tell you, a woman is a -- The man, whose Terran name was Fred, deftly wrapped a twentieth-century tourniquet around my upper arm and with an umpteenth-century device withdrew blood from a handy vein. No needle -- but he got the blood all right. "The pants down Thomas, quickly." I have said I was numb and she beat me to my pants. Fred applied a different device to my left testis, then socked both samples into his case and waited impatiently for the crystal booth. Doctors are the same all over too. I hitched up my trousers. "Will you kindly tell me -- " "Only one minute left, Thomas. Don't count on anything, don't. But some genetic codes can be -- modified. Some can't. Mine can't, not for the radiation. There's a chance yours can. I didn't want to talk about it. It's a long shot." Then the booth was there, Harry fussing around, making them hurry. The eight shoved their stuff through the gate and Cathy had to go. "I'll let you know," she said. histoire I'd tell you what I was going to do. Time now to redeem that pledge. All right. I'm going to go, that's what I'm going to do. I'm wandering around on top of Round Hill, waiting, and I won't be waiting long. Spring equinox, days and nights equal all over the (Please turn to page #) There are those who don't want you to know. Read this story -- and you're a potential threat! residency at Piltdown Hospital was relatively uneventful. I had come there with some trepidation, for Piltdown had won the reputation hands down of being the most overcrowded mental institution in England. But the liberal use of the new tranquilizing drugs had quieted many of the most difficult patients and allowed others to be treated on an outpatient basis. I had been hired personally by the director and owner of the hospital, Dr. Czento. My first interview was conducted on a rather friendly basis and he seemed impressed with my credentials. "I am a wealthy man," he said at the end of the interview. "I am without children and near kin. I have my eye out for someone who might take over when I retire' I smiled at this broad but gracious hint and I must admit that I did not take it too seriously. I picked up my letters of recommendation to return to my carrying case and accidentally knocked a fat portfolio off the desk of Dr. Czento. We both leaned forward to retrieve it and collided. "I am sorry," I muttered, somev what embarrassed at my clumsiness. Then I became aware that I had nicked my forehead on the corner of a pin in his lapel. It was a beautifully formed white kid in a stylized wheat field of bright yellow enamel. "You're bleeding' said Dr. Czento and despite my protests he insisted on cleaning the wound and covering it with a small bandaid. "What a handsome pin you have," I said. "Is it an emblem of a psychiatric society?" Dr. Czento's face took on an air of pride. "Not quite," he said. "It's the insignia of a fairly distinguished group, the Tammuz Society. We dabble in real estate." Before I left his office he had made me a firm offer and I accepted it. I went back to London and packed my bags, disposed of my flat and furniture and drove out to Piltdown in my battered Triomphe Six. It had been agreed that I would undergo a kind of post-training analysis at the hands of Dr. Czento. The daily hour spent free-associating on his worn leather couch was fruitful but tedious and I would come away thoroughly exhausted. I liked his sense of humor and his direct manner, although I found him sometimes erratic, even unpredictable. Once I recounted a hideous dream in which I found myself in bed with Adolf Hitler. Dr. Czento tugged at his short goatee and then muttered quietly, "Politics makes for strange bedfellows." He urged me to visit about the hospital and become familiar with each of the patients and I set about the task quite methodically. Some were odd, some frightening, some quite pathetic but Stanley Pendleton was unique. I had heard of him long before I visited his room. He was the eccentric scion of a middle-class merchant family prominent in fine leather goods and claimed fluency in ten languages, including Sumerian. Although he wasn't going to be my patient, I planned my visit with great care. I went to the files to examine his folder and, to my surprise, it wasn't there. The office secretary was no help and I reported the matter to Dr. Czento. He shook his head and shrugged. "The clerk misfiled it," he said wryly. "You'll manage without the folder."... I thought this answer was most peculiar but I didn't feel free to say so. I went directly to the second floor and knocked at Pendleton's door, waiting until the soft spoken, "Please come in," floated through the door. ton's room I was overwhelmed by the profusion of things covering the walls and the clutter of manuscripts and mechanical objects on, under and around his bed. Pendleton himself, a redhaired fellow with freckled complexion, waved me in with good humor. IF I was quite nervous at first and pulled my pipe out of my breast pocket to give play to my hands. Pendleton smiled and his eyes moved for just a single moment to the sign high up on the north wall which forbade smoking. I stuffed the pipe back into my pocket. And then, for the first time, I noticed a most extraordinary piece of apparatus. In that curiously aware manner of his, Pendleton followed my gaze without seeming to. "It is intriguing, isn't it?" he said. He reached over and disentangled it from the surrounding clutter and handed it to me. I'm not much good with mechanical systems but even I could tell that it was a fantastically ingenious construction. "What on earth is it?" "An orrery," said Pendleton proudly. "One that I made myself. If you turn this handle here, each of these little fellows -- which represent different planets -- moves about the sun at the proper relative speed. The scale of sizes isn't correct but the distances and phases of orbits are. And I've left out the satellites. Otherwise it's quite accurate." "Beautifully made," I said. "It must have taken you months to do." "Two years," said Pendleton. I had been counting the little planetary balls and there were ten. I wondered if it would be harmful to point out this error to Pendleton. And then I decided in the interest of honesty, I ought to. "You've one planet too many," I said. Pendleton's smile died. "So you've noticed it, have you? Our great modern astronomers have no real notion of the origin of Ceres and the other two thousand asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. But I know." I became somewhat tense. Clearly I had uncovered one of Pendleton's fixations and I had no desire at this first visit to push the matter. "I'm sure you do," I said. Pendleton seemed to grow very angry with me. His eyes flamed and the veins of his neck became distended. "For God's sake, man," he snapped, "don't humor me. You don't believe a bit of it and you damned well know it. But I have unimpeachable sources that give firm proof of what I'm saying." His brow furrowed. "I oughtn't tell you," he muttered to himself. "I've tried to tell Czento and he thinks I'm delusional and won't listen. Still, I suppose one ought not to give up trying even if it touches on the elements of my supposed psychosis." I assumed my most benign expression. "I'll honor your trust, of course," I said. He took the orrery out of my hands and placed it back on the floor. A dleton, "I received an urgent summons to the oil-soaked kingdom of Nahrum in the Middle East. It seemed that the Sheikh of Nahrum had come upon a clay tablet in early Sumerian which he wanted me to decipher and translate. As you may have heard, I am the world's foremost expert in Sumerian. "I arrived in short order, not anticipating a stay of more than a few weeks. I was given the most lavish suite in the Sheikh's own palace, was washed and scented by a bevy of lovely women and brought to the Throne Room. The Sheikh himself was a small man with intense black eyes and a large curved nose that was the pride of his people. He told me that he was the direct descendant of Tammuz and related the prehistory of his peoples. It was clear that he took great delight in the milennia-old culture of Nahrum." "Did you say Tammuz?" I asked. He seemed annoyed at the interruption. "An ancient divinity of the region," he said. I decided not to pursue the point. "After a while," Pendleton resumed his account, "the Sheikh got down to business. 'One of my people, a shepherd by trade,' said the Sheikh, 'came across the cave in the mountains to the north of Wadi-El-Zur. As you know, our climate is extremely dry and acts as an excellent preservative.' " 'Sounds a good deal like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,' I said warily. " 'That may be,' said the Sheikh quietly. 'But I have reason to believe that this tablet antedates the Scrolls by a thousand years.' "I was skeptical, of course. And yet these words fired my imagination. The Sheikh clapped his hands and a large glass case was brought in by four servants who staggered under the load. At once my heart began to pound like a triphammer. The tablet was made of an unusual clay -- like nothing I had seen before. But most exciting were the blocks of cuneiform letters. If the writing was Sumerian -- it was a variety unknown to the world. " 'What do you think of my tablet?' asked the Sheikh, pleased at my reaction. " 'It's fascinating. But I have to examine it more closely before I can make accurate comments.' " 'Certainly,' said the Sheikh. 'For the time being, the tablet is yours. I will be forced, of course, to post additional guards about your person but only as a precaution against the accidental loss of the tablet.' " 'I shan't be offended,' I said. "The Sheikh ran his fingers IF through his thick black beard. " 'If you can correctly translate the contents of this tablet,' he said, 'I am prepared to pay you the sum of five thousand British pounds.' "It was a princely offer and I was taken aback but I made no comment. I took the tablet to my room and set about translating it. With all due modesty I must admit that the language itself was the least of my troubles. It seemed at first to be a precursor of one ofthe five known Sumerian dialects, although I now think it was not. Within four or five weeks I had worked it out almost in its entirety. But interpreting the contents was most baffling. "At first it seemed that I had a scientific treatise on my hands, one concerned with astronomical matters of extraordinary sophistication. Although I knew the basic sciences, I was badly equipped for this material. I began painstakingly to work through the translation -- believe me, I had the devil's own job working on the physics. "I spent most of each evening and part of the night translating. In five months' time the work was complete and I read my translation to the Sheikh. He seemed afinoyed and downright skeptical of what I told him. There were references to the astronomical observatory of Bahkrar, the legendary capital of Nahrum, which is now just a dirty pastoral village. Apparently the most careful and detailed astronomical observations were carried out there -- all, of course, with the naked eye. "I notice," said Pendleton, "that you're fighting to suppress a look of disbelief and I really don't blame you. It does sound like a made-up tale. But now comes the really startling part. It seems that the astronomers made their observations roughly one thousand years before the birth of Christ. They were terribly concerned because of perturbations taking place in the planetary orbits, not to mention those of the moon. There were also violent tidal fluctuations that could not be explained. And yet, coincident with these strange effects, it was noticed that the fifth planet had begun to dim, as if it were growing smaller with time. "There were also references to the Lord of Life and Death and his dominion over all the heavens. The Sheikh seemed to grow increasingly annoyed with me and then, to my intense surprise, he had a second tablet brought out. The Sumerian was the same but the clay seemed less ancient. I studied this new material and found that the style had changed. There was a description of how the fifth planet was being removed from the skies and replaced with an enormously dense spheroid of the proper mass, orbital velocity, angular momentum and other physical properties." At this point Pendleton suddenly broke off his narration. "What happened next?" I asked encouragingly. doesn't matter. I had some difficulty with the next sections and the Sheikh flew into a rage. His dark skin turned white as the sands surrounding his palace. He muttered something about Tammuz, then jumped to his feet and shouted that I was an idiot, incompetent at translating Sumerian and that he would not give me a single penny, let alone my promised five thousand pounds." "Normally I'm the mildest of men," said Pendleton. "But this insulting, callous behavior inflamed me. I struck the Sheikh right across his enormous nose, breaking it and staining his ceremonial robes with wine-dark blood. It was lese-majeste and I knew that I was in the soup as soon as I'd done the deed. I was in danger of execution -- perhaps with luck, a long prison term. Fortunately the Foreign Service intervened. The British government took me into custody after persuasion convinced the Sheikh that I should be transferred to Piltdown Hospital." "But why Piltdown? Why a mental hospital?" Pendleton smiled soberly. "There was no other course, I was told. The Sheikh couldn't tolerate being struck without severe reprisal unless I was legally insane. Ergo, I was forced to accept the fiction of insanity. I was devilishly unhappy at first and kicked up quite a row. But Fve been treated with a fair degree of freedom here and promised that I'd be released in two years. March thirtieth of the coming year is my departure date." I must admit that the entire narrative had been delivered with such plausibility that almost anyone could have been taken in. I say almost because one of the cardinal phenomena in paranoia is the air of complete truth that often surrounds the tale. Nevertheless I felt impelled to ask one more question. "Did you suggest any sort of explanation of who or what might be removing the fifth planet to the Sheikh?" ' For the first time that afternoon Pendleton fell silent. He sat there quietly, the criss-crossed shadows of the window blinds slanting across his chest. For a long time he seemed uncertain of what to say. "I did offer a theory," said Pendleton at last. "And since that time I've read and observed carefully right here at the hospital -- and I'm fully convinced that my earlier conjectures were correct. But I'm afraid of antagonizing them again. Who knows what they would do to me?" They IF A shiver of realization coursed up my spine, a sensation I had experienced before only during my childhood. The thread had begun to unravel as, in fact, it always does in situations of this sort. "Come on," I said firmly. "Whom are you talking about? Surely you're perfectly safe here at Piltdown?" "Am I?" He smoothed the folds in his checkered robe. "At any rate. I've nothing more to say." It was clear that the dialogue was over and although I had another question or two to ask, I withdrew. I was in a state of high excitement, almost turmoil. I went at once to Dr. Czento's office to see if we might discuss the Pendleton story. I was elated to find that he was available to me. As I detailed my visit to Pendleton and the story of the two tablets, Dr. Czento's lips twitched almost as though he were on the verge of a smile. And yet, paradoxically, I sensed a fierce inner tension within him. Then I noticed that he was not wearing his Tammuz pin. "Perhaps I ought to write out my evaluation of the visit with Pendleton," I said, "so that you can read it at your leisure." "No," said Dr. Czento firmly. "I do not wish a written report." "Pendleton says that he's to be released on March thirtieth, next." Dr. Czento shook his head. "I have talked to Pendleton many times. He is severely paranoid, delusional. In short he's as mad as they come with a severe and unpredictable temper. Perhaps he will be released. His family is wealthy, influential. If they insist on getting him released on their own responsibility there's nothing I can do." "I suppose not," I said. I realized from the way Dr. Czento bent over his papers that he wanted me to leave. during the days that followed But I couldn't fully concentrate on what I was doing. Mr. Turner, an elderly, senile country squire with a bulbous nose and pronounced anti-Semitic tendencies loved to browse through .the psychiatric literature. He gave me a nasty turn one day when he suggested that Jews were prone to hebephrenia. I was able to weather that remark but I still couldn't get my mind off Pendleton and his orrery. Our library was rich in popular scientific works and I selected one on modern astronomy. The chapter on the origin of the solar system was amusing because I noted that many authorities conjectured that Ceres and her sister asteroids were fragments of what had once been a fifth planet. How simple if that were the basis of Pendleton's obsession. Later, during my morning sessions with Dr. Czento, I found myself alluding now and then to the orrery. Dr. Czento, to my surprise, was suddenly hard put to throttle his anger. "I must say," he began testily, "that you are showing an obsessive interest in this case. I suggest that you drop it at once. I believe that in some subtle way, you are actually using it as a form of unconscious resistance to me by identifying yourself with this patient." And I was shocked at how nearly right he was. But what in Dr. Czento was I resisting? Dr. Czento was in London, attending an International Psychiatric Congress and it occurred to me that perhaps the time was ripe to end my preoccupation with Pendleton. If only I could pursue my questioning a bit further. I tussled a while with the ethics of the matter. And then I decided to hell with them. I found Pendleton in his room, the clutter considerably reduced. "I'm getting ready to leave, you see," he told me, his face aglow with pleasure. "I'm very happy for you," I said soberly. "I haven't forgotten our conversation and I wish you had completed your story for me." "But I did," said Pendleton warily. "Not really. You never did tell me how your fifth planet came to be in its current fragmented state." Pendleton looked at me directly as though he wanted to peer into and beyond my eyes. "Can I really trust you?" I exploded. "Good God -- if you can't trust a British psychiatrist, whom can you trust?" He smiled wryly. "I wish you were right," he said. you. But I'm afraid it might do you more harm than good." "I'll chance it." He shrugged. "I believe that whoever was removing the fifth planet bungled the job. The result was the fragmenting we now see in the heavens. I daresay there were other terrible effects here on Earth -- earthquakes, perhaps a flood." "Why were you afraid to tell me this?" He bent over and picked up his orrery, cranking its handle and sending the ten little balls about his model sun. "There are those who don't want you to know," he said. "And now, whether you like it or not, you're no longer a spectator. You're a potential threat. I don't know why. I can't really tell you what it's all about. But if in a tiny recess of your mind you believe my story -- take care." It was finally clear to me that I had really played the fool. Perhaps, as Dr. Czento had suggested, IF my involvement was psychiatric defiance. The story was bizarre but classical in its veiled hints of villains and threats. I blushed for shame, just thinking about my gullibility. gala modern art festival was held at Piltdown. Many unusual paintings and bizarre sculptures, some fashioned by patients, were exhibited. Dr. Czento, who personally supervised the entire affair, had an artist flown in from Paris. He created the most amazing painting by firing real bullets into bladders of paint that were suspended over a canvas. The piece de resistance was a wonderful machine, aglitter with shining gears and motor-driven axe blades, which was set into motion by pushing a button and thereupon proceeded to demolish itself in a grinding clatter of metal in the acrid smoke of short-circuited wires. Dr. Czento clapped his hands with delight. I looked about for Pendleton but, reclusive as ever, he hadn't even bothered to come to the show. The following day Pendleton was found dead in his room. There was no sign of violence and, indeed, it seemed to be a clear case heart failure. Dr. Czento himself signed the papers certifying cause of death. Pendleton's father came out to get the body. He was a tall, lean man, looking a good deal like his son. His eyes were swollen when he stopped by to see me. "My son wrote about you. He thought you were a good sort. He wanted you to have this if anything happened to him." He thrust the orrery into my hands. I was at a loss for something appropriate to say. "I liked your son," I finally managed. "He was a good lad," said Mr. Pendleton. "We were planning on taking him home shortly. How long it would last we couldn't tell. As you probably know, he has been in mental institutions many times before." "Yes, I know," I lied. But I hadn't known and I wondered why Dr. Czento hadn't told me. Dr. Czento accompanied Mr. Pendleton to the railroad station. I walked about the grounds, carrying the orrery with me but unable to look at it. Then, on some mad whim, I decided toget my hands on Pendleton's file. I went to Dr' Czento's secretary and told her that, before leaving for the station, he had asked me to look at Pendleton's case history. She seemed genuinely preplexed. "But I don't know where that file is," she said. "I believe that Dr. Czento keeps it locked up in his office. You'll simply have to wait until he returns." I couldn't. At lunch time, when she had left the office, I opened Dr. Czento's door with a flat plastic pocket calendar. The drawn blinds and the musty odor of stale cigar smoke lent a rather otherworldly character to the room but I shook off my apprehensions and went poking about. The door lock had been simple but the desk drawers were beyond my amateur burglar skills. There was an elegant walnut cabinet between the picture windows. I walked over to it and, without much hope, slipped my calendar between the doors. There was a faint click and the doors fell open. But all I saw was an exquisite set of wine glasses and a decanter three quarters full with what looked and smelled like tawny port. I had lifted the stopper and the bouquet made my mouth water. As I started to replace the stopper I thought I heard a noise outside the office and the decanter shot out of my agitated hands, falling to the carpet. My luck was mixed. The decanter was unbroken but the carpet was stained and all of the port was gone. I went to the door and peered out but saw no one. I hastily went to Dr. Czento's desk, gathered up facial tissues and sponged up as much of the mess as I could. What followed had nightmarish aspects. I knew that within moments either Dr. Czento or his secretary might return. I ran to my room, dug out my own prize bottle of tawny port and raced back to Dr. Czento's office. I poured the port back into the decanter up to what seemed the right level, moved a waste basket over the sticky residue on the carpet, closed the cabinet and just avoided running into the secretary. T HE afternoon went badly. I could focus on nothing. I had botched things in the most clumsy manner and had still learned nothing about Pendleton's background. The next morning I tried to get out of my analytic session but Dr. Czento would have none of it. I lay uncomfortably on the didactic couch, unable to say a word. After several moments Dr. Czento spoke to me. "Are you still thinking of Pendleton?" he asked softly. "I am," I admitted and then everything burst out of me. I told iiim of my last meeting with Pendleton, the remarks of Pendleton's father and the suspicions that had been aroused in my mind by Pendleton's death. But I couldn't bring myself to tell him how I had searched his office. Dr. Czento sighed. He got up and walked to one of his windows and looked out through a small opening in the blinds. Then he turned around and looked at me. "Get up off the couch," he said. "No more therapy today." "I'm concerned about you," he said as I came forward to take a seat beside his desk. "I've begun to think of you as my eventual sucIF cessor. Your flair for this field is undeniable. But you've become obsessive about poor Pendleton." "His death shocked me terribly," I said. "Besides, there was a persuasive quality to his delusions." "Nonsense," said Dr. Czento. "Pendleton was as psychotic as they come. His father told you how often he has been in hospitals. Besides, you've only to look at his files." He reached down and unlocked one of his desk drawers, withdrawing a folder. He selected a sheaf of documents and pushed them toward me. I went through each one carefully. "You see what his previous medical history was?" said Dr. Czento. "He was constantly in and out of psychotic episodes. He had two years at Roundtree, three at Five Crossings and so on." "Yes," I said. "It's all here. But might I look at the rest of his folder?" "You still have doubts?" Dr. Czento sighed and passed the folder to me. Then he stood up, walked to his cabinet and inserted a small silver key in the lock. I was terrified that he would discover what had happened but he didn't appear to notice the faint dark patch on the rug. When the doors swung open he removed the decanter and two glasses. "Come, have some of my port," he said and it was clear that he earnestly wanted my friendship. I reached forward and took the glass of golden wine. It went down like the delight I knew it was. "Marvelous stuff, isn't it?" said Dr. Czento. As yet he hadn't sipped from his own glass and I held my breath. "Go ahead," he said. "Read the rest of Pendleton's folder." He refilled my glass. I drank and read on through the numerous sheets. One was an official piece of stationery of the Kingdom of Nahrum. Dr. Czento saw me stiffen. "There's no contradiction," he said, "in noting that a man was mad and still agreeing that he might stumble on a kernel of truth." He withdrew his wallet and carefully fished out the enameled pin with the white kid. "You asked me once about the Tammuz Society," he said. "Do you know anything about it?" "I don't know about the society," I said. "But I have read about Tammuz. He was a Sumerian god of agriculture and flocks, wasn't he?" Dr. Czento chuckled. "You might put it that way. I tend to see him as the first divinity of real estate." I read on in the folder. There was a detailed official account of Pendleton's visit to Nahrum. "Then Pendleton did do a translation for the Sheikh," I muttered. "After a fashion," said Dr. Czento. "Pendleton was not really an expert in Sumerian. He was rather spotty in his knowledge despite his pretense to the contrary. Only his father's intervention kept him in Eton. I grant you, the Sheikh did lie to him. He knew what was on the first tablet and was only testing Pendleton's skill at translating Sumerian. When Pendleton botched the job he became justifiably outraged. Being unstable, Pendleton did hit the Shiekh and break his royal nose." his elegant, slim Havana cigars and cut away the tip. He lit up and sent clouds of aromatic smoke in my direction. "The Sheikh," he said, "considers himself an actual descendant of the god Tammuz and the first tablet contains his title to all of the heavenly bodies as well as the account Pendleton mentioned. The second tablet told how the fifth planet was accidentally destroyed by extraterrestrial bunglers." "What a lot of nonsense," I said. Dr. Czento's smile died away. "Not at all," he said. "At the end of the second tablet was a statement giving permission to this same extraterrestrial group, the Sentients, to dismantle Mars. The agreement is made with the Tammuz Society of which the Sheikh is a director. But he violated his trust, just to find out whether he was getting his proper share of the gold." "Gold?" "Mars is rich in gold," said Dr. Czento. "The metal itself is not useful and any advanced society would much rather have the radioactive ores in which it abounds. If those who hold title to Mars allow a second party to remove said ores, provided they deliver the gold as payment, who could blame them?" "Ridiculous," I said. "How could men claim to own a planet?" "Is it less ridiculous for men to claim ownership of a mountain?" said Dr. Czento. I shook my head. "Is anything wrong?" asked Dr. Czento. He did not wait for an answer but went on. "The Sentients botched the job some three thousand yearsago. They lost their finest scientists and most advanced spaceships when the fifth planet disintegrated. They gave up their exploration in our Solar system and went elsewhere. But now they've exhausted other sources and have been forced to come back for another try. Fortunately their technology is vastly improved and when Mars is replaced, bit by bit, with an ultradense core of inert material, there is little danger of mishap." "How did the Sentients contact your society?" "Reports of space vehicles land( Please turn to page #) IF Live fast and you live forever. But what do you do with the time? fifty chance every time you go out. That makes it one chance in eight that you'll live to see your third furlough -- the one I'm on now. Somehow the odds don't keep people from trying to join. Even though not one in a thousand gets through the years of training and examination there's no shortage of cannon fodder. And that's what we are. The most expensive, best trained cannon fodder in the history of warfare. Human history, anyhow -- who can speak for the enemy? I don't even call them snails any more. And the thought of them doesn't trigger that instant flash of revulsion, hate, kill-fever -- the psyconditioning wore off years ago and they didn't renew it. They've stopped doing it to new recruits -- no percentage in berserkers. I was a wild one the first couple of trips, though. Strange world I've come back to. Gets stranger every time, of course. Even sitting here in a bogus twenty-first-century bar, where everyone speaks Basic and there's real wood on the walls and peaceful holograms instead of plugins and music made by men. But it leaks through. I don't pay by card, let alone by coin. The credit register monitors my alpha waves and communicates with the bank every time I order a drink. And, in case I've become addicted to more modern vices, there's a feelie matrix -- (modified to look like an old-fashioned visiphone booth) -- where I can have my brain stimulated directly. Thanks but no thanks -- always get this picture of dirty hands inside my skull, kneading, rubbing. Like when you get too close to the enemy and they open a hole in your mind and you go spinning down and down and never reach the bottom till you die. I almost got too close last time. connaissance patrol, bound for a hellish little planet circling the red giant Antares. Now red giant stars don't form planets in the natural course of things, so we had ignored Antares. We control most of the space around it, so why waste time in idle exploration? But the enemy had detected this little planet -- God knows how -- and about ten years after they landed there we monitored their presence -- gravity waves from the ships' braking -- and my team was assigned the reconnaissance. Three men against many enemy. But we weren't supposed to fight if we could help it -- just take a look around, record what we saw and leave a message beacon on our way back, about a light-year out from Antares. Theoretically the troopship following us by a month will pick up the information and use it to put together a battle plan. Actually, three more recon patrols precede the troopship at oneweek intervals; insurance against the high probability that any one patrol will be caught and destroyed. As the first team in, we had a pretty good chance of success but the ones to follow would be in trouble if we didn't get back out. We'd be past caring, of course. The enemy doesn't take prisoners. IF We came out of lightspeed close to Antares, so the bulk of the star would mask our braking disturbance, and inserted the ship in a hyperbolic orbit that would get us to the planet -- Anomaly, we were calling it -- in about twenty hours. "Anomaly must be tropical over most of its surface." Fred Sykes, nominally the navigator, was talking to himself and at the two of us while he analyzed the observational date rolling out of the ship's computer. "No axial tilt to speak of. Looks like they've got a big outpost near the equator, lots of electromagnetic noise there. Figures -- the goddamn snails like it hot. We requisitioned hot weather gear, didn't we, Pancho?" Pancho, that's me. "No, Fred, all we got is parkas and snowshoes." My full name is Francis Jesus Mario Juan-Jose Hugo uw Naranja and I outrank Fred, so he should at least call me Francisco. But I've never pressed the point. Pancho it is. Fred looked up from his Figures and the rookie, Paul Spiegel, almost dropped the pistol he was cleaning. "But why -- " Paul was staring. "We knew the planet was probably earthlike if the enemy wanted it. Are we gonna have to go tromping around in spacesuits?" "No, Paul, our esteemed leader and supply clerk is being sarcastic again." Fred turned back to his computer. "Explain, Pancho." "No, that's all right." Paul reddened a bit and also went back to his job. "I remember you complaining about having to take the standard survival issue." "Well, I was right then and I'm doubly right now. We've got parkas back there -- and snowshoes and a complete terranorm environment recirculator -- and everything else we could possibly need to walk around irr comfort on every planet known to man -- Dios That issue masses over a metric ton, more than a bevawatt laser. A laser we could use but crampons and pith helmets and elephant guns -- " Paul looked up again. "Elephant guns?" He was kind of a freak about weapons. "Yeah." "That's a gun that shoots ele#ts?" ht. An elephant gun shoots cicpnants." "Is that some new kind of ammunition?" I sighed, I really sighed. You'd think I'd get used to this after twelve years -- or four hundred -- in the service. "No, kid, elephants were animals, big gray wrinkled animals with horns. You used an elephant gun to shoot at them. "When I was a kid in Rioplex, back in the twenty-first, we had an elephant in the zoo -- used to go down in the summer and feed him synthos through the bars. He had a long nose like a fat tail." "What planet were they from?" It was Paul's first trip out and he hadn't yet gotten used to the idea that most of his compatriots were genuine antiques, preserved by the natural process of relativity. At lightspeed you age imperceptibly, while the universe's calendar adds a year for every lightyear you travel. Seems like cheating. But it catches up with you eventually. We hit the atmosphere of Anomaly at an oblique angle and came in passive, like a natural meteor, until we got to a position where we were reasonably safe from detection -- (just above the south polar sea) -- then blasted briefly to slow down and splash. Then we spent a few hours in slow fligh  sea level, sneaking up on th tlement. It appeared to be the only enemy camp on the whole planet, which was typical. Strange for a spacefaring, aggressive race to be so uncurious about planetary environments but they always seemed to settle in one place and simply expand radially. And they do expand -- their reproduction rate makes rabbits look sick. Starting from one colony they can fill a world in two hundred years. After that they control their population by infantiphage and stellar migration. We landed about a hundred kilometers from the edge of their colony, around local midnight. While we were outside, setting up the espionage monitors. The ship camouflaged itself to match the surrounding jungle optically, thermally, magnetically and so forth -- we were careful not to get too far from the ship; it can be a bit hard to find even when you know where to look. The monitors were to be fed information from flea-sized flying robots, each with a special purpose, and it would take several hours for them to wing into the city. We posted a one-man guard, one-hour shifts; the other two inside the ship until the monitors started clicking. Bat they never started. Being senior, I took the first atch. A spooky hour, the jungle ving ,dark little noises all around -- but nothing happened. Fred stood the next hour, while I put on the deepsleep helmet. Figured I'd need the sleep -- once data started coming in, I'd have to be alert for about forty hours. We could all sleep for a week once we got off Anomaly and hit lightspeed. Getting yanked out of deepsleep is like an ice-water douche to the brain. The black nothing dissolved and there was Fred a foot away from my face, yelling my name over and over. As soon as he saw my eyes open he ran for the open lock, priming his laser on the way IF (definitely against regulations, could hole the hull that way -- I started to say something but couldn't form the words). Anyhow, what were we doing in free fall? And how could Fred run across the deck like that while we were in free fall? Then my mind started coming back into focus and I could analyze the sinking, spinning sensation -- not free-fall vertigo at all but what we used to call snail-fever. The enemy was very near. Crackling combat sounds drifted in from outdoors. sort everything out and get going. After long seconds my arms and legs got the idea. I struggled up and staggered to the weapons cabinet. Both the lasers were gone and the only heavy weapon left was a grenade launcher. I lifted it from the rack and made my way to the lock. Had I been thinking straight I would've just sealed the lock and blasted -- the presence in my mind was so strong that I should have known there were too many enemy, too close, for us to stand and fight. But no one can think while his brain is being curdl'ed that way. I fought the urge just to let go and fall down that hole in my mind and slid along the wall to the airlock. By the time I got there my teeth were chattering uncontrollably and my face was wet with tears. Looking out, I saw a smoldering gray lump that must have been Paul. Fred was screaming like a madman, fanning the laser on full over a #-degree arc. There couldn't have been anything alive in front of him -- the jungle was a lurid curtain of fire -- but a bolt lanced in from behind and Fred dissolved in a pink spray of blood and flesh. I saw them then, moving fast for snails, shambling in over thick brush toward the ship. Through the swirling fog in my brain I realized that all they could see was the light pouring through the open lock and me silhouetted in front. I tried to raise the launcher but couldn't -- there were too many, less than a hundred meters away, and the inky whirlpool in my mind just got bigger and bigger and I could feel myself slipping into it. The first bolt missed me, hit the ship and it shuddered, ringing like a huge cathedral bell. The second one didn't miss. It took off my left hand just above the wrist, roasting what remained of my left arm. In a spastic lurch I jerked up the launcher and yanked the trigger, holding it down while dozens of microton grenades popped out and danced their blinding way up to and across the enemy's ragged line. Dazzled, blind, I stepped back and stumbled over the med-robot, which had smelled blood and was eager to do its duty. On top of the machine was a switch that some clown had labeled Emergency Exit. I slapped it and as the lock clanged shut the atomic engines muttered -- growled -- screamed into life and a ten-gravity hand slid me across the blood-slick deck and slammed me back against the rear-wall padding. I felt ribs crack and something in my neck snapped. As the world squeezed away I knew I was a dead man but it was better to die in a bed of pain than to just fall and fall. ministrations of the med-robot, who had bound the stump of my left arm and was wrapping my chest in plastiseal. My body from forehead to shins ached from radiation bums, earned by facing the grenades' bursts. The nonexistent hand seemed to writhe in painful, impossible contortions. But numbing anaesthetic kept the pain at a bearable distance and there was an empty space in my mind where the snail-fever had been. A gentle hum told me we were at lightspeed -- things could have been one flaming hell of a lot worse. Fred and Paul were gone but that just moved them from the small roster of live friends to the long list of dead ones. A warning light on the control panel was blinking stroboscopically. We were getting near the hole -- excuse me, "relativistic discontinuity -- " and the computer had to know where I wanted to go. You go in one hole at lightspeed and you'll come out of some other hole. Which hole you pop out of depends on your angle of approach. Since they say that only about one per cent of the holes are charted -- if you go in at any old angle you're likely to wind up in Podunk, on the other side of the galaxy, with no ticket back. I just let the light blink, though. If it doesn't get any response from the crew the ship programs itself automatically to go to Heaven, the hospital world, which was fine with me. They cure what ails you and then set you loose with a compatible soldier of the opposite sex, for an extended vacation on that beautiful world. Someone once told me that there were over a hundred worlds named Hell -- but there's only one Heaven. Clean and pretty from the tropical seas to the subpolar pine forests. Like Earth, before we strangled it. A bell had been ringing all the time I'd been conscious, but I didn't notice it until it stopped. That meant the information capsule had been jettisoned, for what little it was worth. Planetary information, very few espionagetype data; just a tape for the battle. Be rough for the next recon patrol. I fell asleep knowing I'd wake up on the other side of the hole, bound for Heaven. F fashioned old-fashioned -- with my new left hand. The glass should feel right, slick but slightly tacky with the cold-water sweat, fine ridges molded into the plastic. But there's something missing, hard to describe, a memory stored in your fingertips that a new growth has to learn all over again. It's a strange feeling but in a way it seems to fit with this crazy Earth, where I sit in my alcoholic time capsule and, if I squint with my mind, can almost believe I'm back in the twenty-first. I pay for the nostalgia -- wood and natural food, human bartender and waitress who are also linguists, it all comes dear -- but I can afford it if anyone can. Compound interest, of course. Over four centuries have passed on Earth since I first went off to the war and my salary's been deposited at the Chase-Manhattan Credit Union ever since. They're glad to do it -- when I die they keep the interest and the principal reverts to the government. Heirs? I had one illegitimate son -- conceived on my first furlough -- and when I last saw his gravestone, the words on it had washed away to barely legible dimples. But I'm still a young man. At lightspeed you age imperceptibly while the universe winds down outside and the time you spend going from hole to hole is almost incalculably small. I've spent most of the past half-millennium at lightspeed, the rest of the time usually convalescing from battle. My records show that I've logged a trifle under one year in actual combat. Not bad for # years' pay. Since I first lifted off I've aged twelve years by my biological calendar. Complicated, isn't it -- next month I'll be thirty, # years after my date of birth. But one week before my birthday, I've got to decide whether to try my luck for the fourth trip out, or just collect my money and retire. No choice, really. I've got to go back. It's something they didn't emphasize when I joined up, back in # -- maybe it wasn't so obvious back then, the war only decades old -- but they can't hide it nowadays. Too many old vets wandering around like animated museum pieces. I could cash in my chips and live in luxury for another hundred years. But it would get mighty lonely. Can't talk to anybody on Earth but other vets and people who've gone to the trouble to learn Basic. Everyone in space speaks Basic. You can't lift off until you've become fluent. Otherwise, how could you take orders from a fellow who should have been food for worms centuries before your grandfather was born? Especially since language melted down into one Language. I'm tone-deaf. Can't speak or understand Language, where one word has ten or fifteen different meanings, depending on pitch. To me it sounds like puppydogs yapping. Same words over and over -- no sense. Of course, when I first lived on Earth there were all sorts of languages, not just one Language. I spoke Spanish -- still do when I can find some other old codger who remembers -- and learned English -- that was before they called it Basic -- in military training. Learned it damn well, too. If I wasn't tone-deaf I'd crack Language and maybe I'd settle down. so strange and it's not just the Language. Mindplugs and homosex and voluntary suicide. Walking around with nothing on but paint and powder'. We had Fullerdomes when I was a kid -- but you didn't have to live under one. Now if you take a walk out in the country for a breath of fresh air, you'll drop dead before you can exhale. My mind keeps dragging me back to Heaven. I'd retire in a minute if I could spend my remaining century there. Can't, of course -- only soldiers allowed in space. And the only way a soldier gets to Heaven is the hard way. I've been there three times -- once more and I'll set a record. That's motivation of a sort, I suppose. Also, in the unlikely event that I should live another five years, I'll get a commission and a desk job if I live through my term as a field officer. Doesn't happen too often -- but there aren't too many desk jobs that people can handle better than cyborgs. That's another alternative. If my body gets too garbaged for regeneration and they can save enough of my brain, I could spend the rest of eternity hooked up to a computer, as a cyborg. The only one I've ever talked to seemed to be happy. I once had an African partner, named N'gai. He taught me how to play O'wari, a game older than manoply or even chess. We sat in this very bar -- or the identical one that was in its place two hundred years ago -- and he tried to impress on my non-Zenoriented mind just how significant this game was to men in our position. You start out with forty-eight smooth little pebbles, four in each one of the twelve depressions that make up the game board. Then you take turns, scooping the pebbles out of one hole and distributing them one-at-a-time in holes to the left. If you dropped your last pebble in a hole where your opponent had only one or two, why, you got to take those pebbles off the board. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? But N'gai sat there in a cloud of ( Please turn to page # ) IF land-going, esthetic, competent, free and female -- more than less! tant," Oyster said. He had retracted almost entirely into his shell for an executive snooze but the ubiquitous translators picked up his watery mumble and spewed it out full-volume in English. already come to that conclusion. He sat behind a towering mound of paperwork, unable properly to attend to his duties as Assistant Director of the School of Prosthodontics, Galactic University of Dentistry. In fact, he could not always remember his official title correctly, with so much else cluttering his mind. At any moment he could be shot off on some simple assignment that invariably turned out to be murderously complex in detail. He felt edgy. Actually, no paper was involved. But computerized busywork and multilingual red tape amounted to the same thing. Every tiny plastic card of the thousands on his desk represented some problem of some student that he had to rectify in some manner. Yes, he needed help on the interminable details of his office. He had had no assistant since leaving Earth so precipitously and unexpectedly and he had never fully adapted to that lack. He wished he could take a midsession snooze, as Oyster was doing now. Oyster was the Director of the School of Prosthodontics, a posiassume -- if he didn't first suffer an intellectual breakdown. Oyster's assistant was Miss Tarantula, a marvel of arachnid efficiency. In the office or the operatory, at the University or in the field, her eight arms seemed to tie up every loose thread before it appeared. It was because of her that Oyster's alized jealously that if he had an assistant even half as competent his own desk would soon be relieved of its burden. Yet she tended to make him nervous, despite his efforts to repress his Earthly prejudices. She was not really a man-sized spider. Oyster poked an antenna out of his shell. "Set up a series of interviews for a prospective assistant," he said to her. "Land-going, esthetic, competent, 'unattached, female -- " "The first is waiting in the anteroom," Miss Tarantula said. That was the way she was -- anticipainterview her now -- " "But there's no point in merely tested. "I have field assignments as well as office routine. I have to know how she functions in a variety of situations, particularly under stress. If -- " "Naturally," Miss Tarantula said. "You are scheduled to make a promotional tour of planet Hobgoblin today. She will accompany you on a trial basis." IF "But that's not a stress situation. A routine visit -- " "The director also wishes you to investigate certain complaints of a sensitive nature." son for his edginess. Debating points with Miss Tarantula was futile. The slightest twitch of her hairy front leg brought the web tight. And Oyster was no slouch at making things routinely impossible -- he seemed to feel that this was good practice for the Directorship. Certain complaints of a sensitive nature? That meant that half a misstep could result in a lynching. Well, he thought, glancing at the tremendous metal man standing immobile in the corner, a lynching was the last thing he had to fear. This huge robot, the Jann, would blast apart anything like that. Literally. The Jann's meticulous guardianship was not entirely ham's new life. If there were trouble on Hobgoblin, all that would suffer would be the troublemakers. reputation and that of the University. The very reputations his tour was supposed to enhance. He felt a headache coming on. "All right. Brief her and -- " "All taken care of, Doctor," Miss Tarantula said. Naturally. It was not that she hardly concerned with bipedal mammals -- it was that her boss had made a directive and she was being efficient. The door opened. A grotesque mound of warty blubber slid into the office. It drifted to rest before A black orifice gaped. "So pleased to meet you. Doctor D," the translator said. "I am Miss Porkfat, your trial-basis assistant." Esthetic , competent, female... by the standards of her own species Miss Porkfat was all of these. And he could not afford to question any of it, lest he betray an unUniversity prejudice of taste. "Very good, Miss P," he said. "Please arrange passage for three to Planet Hobgoblin and notify the authorities there of our itinerary." "Three, Doctor?" Her voice, audible just beneath the translation, was pleasantly modulated, at least. "Three. The Jann will be coming along." stalk. The orb focused on the shining robot. A quiver started there and traveled down her body before it damped out. "Yes, Doctor." She oozed over to a private-line translator, asked for interplanetary and began making the arrangements. thought as Oyster woke and smiled benignly from inside his shell. The Jann robots were supposed to have become extinct several thousand years ago but their terrible reputation lingered on in galactic folklore. Miss Porkfat had excellent presence if her only reaction to the sight of a functioning Jann was one eyeball-quiver. But still she reminded him of infected slug-meat. T HE Hobgoblins were surly creatures -- short, big-headed, flat-footed, ugly by humanoid standards. "What's that Jann doing here?" the customs official demanded in a whine that even the translator caught. "We don't allow sentient robots on our planet." "He has to travel with me," Dillingham said. The truth was too complicated to explain. The official gestured to the guards. "Put this tin in the cooler." The squat troopers advanced on ham saw trouble coming but was powerless to circumvent it. The Jann was as deadly a sentient as the galaxy had ever known and for fifty years. To do that, he had to stay close. Evidently the inhabitants of this planet had little respect for past reputations or they would never have gone near the Jann. The uniformed goblins took hold of the Jann's arms. They were barely able to reach up that far and looked like squat children beside a stern parent. They tugged. That was all. The Jann did not budge or take overt note of them. Fortunately. having completed their business at customs, left. The Jann followed, nonchalantly dragging along the two guards. After a while they let goham sighed with relief that the robot had not lost his metal temper. The Hobgoblin office of Dentistry was imposing enough, externally. But inside the fine large building were distressingly backward facilities. This planet still used mechanical drills, X-rays and needle-injected anesthetics. A harried goblin technician galloped up. "What do you want? We don't allow visitors in here. Particularly aliens." "This is the representative from the University of Dentistry," Miss Porkfat said dulcetly. The nearest translator was down the hall a distance, so conversation was remote. "On a promotional tour. Your office was informed." "I don't need any offworld tub of lard to tell me of what we've been informed. Come back next week. We're busy now." ham, her eyestalk quivering again. IF "They prefer that we return next week, Doctor.D." Something about the exchange rankled. "I heard, Miss P. But this was cleared with the authorities before we arrived and my schedule does not permit a postponement." "It will have to be today," she informed the technician. "Go fry your posterior." "I really think -- " ham said, his ire rising. He was not a temperamental man but his position did not allow him to tolerate much insolence. Miss Porkfat was being gentle when she should have been firm. "You don't have confidence in me," she protested, beginning to quiver all over. "It isn't that, Miss P -- " "Why should he, blubbertub?" the goblin demanded. "I'm only trying to -- " she began, turning pink. On her, this was impressive. diplomatically. "But in this case -- " " Will you creeps get out of here?" the ugly face. Miss Porkfat began to dissolve. Literally. "I think this position is unsuitsaid with as much compassion as he was able to muster in the circumstance: "If you wish to return to the University and seek an oncampus placement -- " She sucked herself together somewhat. "Thank you, Doctor D." "Good riddance, stinky," the goblin said. him, though privately he suspected that the goblin was right. This was no job for an assistant who melted in the face of conflict with abrasive personalities. "Watch where you're going, stupid," the goblin yelled. "I said no visitors. I'll clobber you -- " Jann, silent until now, boomed into animation. "None but I shall do him die -- forty-nine years, five months, thirteen days hence, Earthtime," it proclaimed. By the time the words ceased reverberating the goblin was gone, thoroughly cowed. A non-native was waiting in the next alcove. Willowy, sweet-smelling, with a cluster of slender blue tentacles and four soft purple eyes -- quite esthetic, in a surrealistic way. by the University to assist you on a trial basis. I am Miss Anemone." So Miss Tarantula had anticipated his problem with Miss Porkfat. Such comprehension was frightening. "Very good," he said. Then, thinking ahead: "This is a Jann. He's traveling with us." "I observed him. A handsome specimen. I hadn't been aware they made robots of that caliber anymore." No loss of control there! Dillingham glanced down the hall. "And approaching us is another native technician." The Hobgoblin wore a badge of rank that distinguished him as an entity of moderate authority. "No visitors permitted. Leave at once." Miss Anemone braced him squarely. "This is the Assistant Director of the University School of -- " "Don't waste my time with your ridiculous apologies," the goblin said brusquely. "Just get out." "If you will check our approved itinerary -- " "One side, sea-spook." The goblin shouldered by her, intent on "Ouch!" "Oh dear me, I'm so sorry," she said solicitously. "Did my spines hurt you? I hope you will report to the infirmary right away. I certainly wouldn't want the toxin to get into your system." She led the way on down the hall while the goblin rushed off, rubbing his shoulder. So far, so. good. Miss Anemone was not unduly sensitive to abuse or helpless before it. They arrived at the main demonstration room. Here the wonders of modern Hobgoblian dentistry were displayed -- quaint metal restorations, classic plastic dentures, primitive color X-ray them politely, then approached the goblin in charge and began his presentation. "I believe the University can enhance aspects of your procedure -- " "Who asked it to?" tion the several tourists who had complained to the University. That was the sensitive part of his tour. The described symptoms had been vague and diverse, so that no consistent pattern had developed and no complainer had actually reported for a University recheck. Thus there' was no solid evidence that Hobgoblian dentistry was at fault -- just a statistical suspicion. The kind of thing that had to be investigated unobtrusively, for planet Hobgoblin was sensitive about alien criticism. "Perhaps a demonstration of technique -- " he suggested. "Oh, so the marvelous University desk jockey wishes to show the outworld peons how to practice -- " might take a look at some of your problem patients. Naturally, if I can demonstrate the advantages of University training -- " "Training, schmaining! If we IF had your finances we could afford a multi-species dontic analyzer, too, and have instant diagnosis of every -- " "You are correct in your implication that the analyzer is one of our more important diagnostic tools. But since it is far too expensive for the average facility we stress the raw ability of the individual dentist using local equipment. It is the talent that remains after the -- " But the goblin did not let him repeat the maxim he had learned so forcefully from Oyster. "You claim you can use my equipment -- and do a better job than I can?" Since courtesy did not seem to ham abandoned it. Unwisely. "Yes. And so could any University graduate." The goblin swelled with rage -- then made an unholy smile. "You're on, Doc." sconced in a model unit set up on a stage in an amphitheater. Miss Anemone had a desk a few paces away and the Jann had a separate booth where he could watch for structing the view of the audience. Goblin spectators, every one a trained dentist, filled the hall. had bargained for, and he made a mental note never again to speak precipitously. Meanwhile he had to follow through. Somehow things always did become complicated. He was almost getting used to it. "The prosthodontic genius from Galactic U will now demonstrate how to handle a problem case," the dental chief announced grandly. "Pay close attention, so you can learn how stupid you are." Almost every grotesque little face mirrored the chiefs resentment. No doubt of it -- University ham could, in fact, be eased out of the very University position he was in training for. The goblins were striking, not at him but at his career -- a blow the Jann would not foil. All because of one intemperate remark. The first patient mounted the stage -- a vaguely equine quadruped with colorful, birdlike plumage. Miss Anemone intercepted it. "May I have your name and planet of origin, please?" "Horsefeathers of Clovenhoof," the creature neighed, showing tremendous yellow teeth. "Please describe your complaint." "My teeth hurt." A murmur of nasty appreciation rose from the audience. Hobgoblin's finest practitioners were that every one of them had had this problem -- the unspecific response. Miss Anemone, of course, would not let it stand at that. She would question the patient gently but firmly, clarifying and isolating his symptoms until she had a fair notion of his real complaint. A major part of the duties of a galactic dental assistant was to get the facts straight before the patient ever saw the dentist, thereby promoting office efficiency. you now," she said. A chorous of chuckles and a few hoots came from the audience. They knew she had goofed and he could not afford to correct her now. To do so would only make matters worse. He would have to question the patient himself -- and make sure never to get into such a situation again with an unfamiliar assistant. The fault probably was not hers. Some dentists preferred to handle virtually everything themselves and some assistants were trained to honor the practice. Probably she would have questioned the patient further had he asked her to do so. to break in an assistant in all the little ways that were sure to turn up. Miss Anemone would not do. Horsefeathers ambled over and bestrode the dental chair, opening his long large mouth. His breath was not sweet. "Can you localize the area of beginning a routine check with the probe. "Huh?" "Where does it hurt?" "They all hurt. It changes," Horsefeathers said. Another appreciative goblin that they had thrown him a chronic complainer -- one who would object no matter how well off his teeth were. "I see you have had extensive prosthodontic restoration," Dillingham observed. Indeed, the mouth was a mass of gold. "Huh?" "Lot of work done on you." "Yes. All right here on Hobgoblin. Lousy job." Silence from the gallery. Dillingham suppressed a smile. "On the contrary. My visual inspectiofi suggests that this work is quite competent. However, I shall take X-rays to be sure there is no underlying problem." He tapped a tooth, finding it firm. "Miss Anemone -- " Another evil gallery chuckle. He looked up. Miss Anemone was gone. A man-sized centipede occupied her desk. "I am Miss Thousandlegs, your new assistant. Miss Anemone was called away." In the middle of a demonstration? Miss Tarantula was becoming too efficient. How had she known? IF that the Jann was gone. The booth was empty and there was no familiar glint of robot metal. But he was sure the huge creature was in the vicinity -- and would be for the next forty-nine-plus years. All he said was: "Please take a full set of X-rays on this patient." Miss Thousandlegs rippled over, elevated her forepart and positioned machine and plates. She was good at it, he had to admit, considering that she had probably only had experience with such equipment in some class on Antique Apparatus. In a moment she had the pictures. He almost gaped. "Root canal therapy on every tooth -- " "They were pretty far gone," Horsefeathers admitted. They must have been. Root canal therapy was only called for when the central nerve of the tooth became contaminated. Then this nerve had to be removed and silver or guttapercha or some galactic equivalent substituted, so that no further decay could occur. The process was an expensive one but it generally saved the tooth. The tooth was insensitive thereafter, of course -- without its nerve it could not feel temperature, pressure or pain. "I see no evidence of decay," rays carefully. "They .still hurt," Horsefeathers said stoutly. With no nerves at all, they hurt. knowing the dentists of Hobgoblin were enjoying this hugely. "Do you wish me to check the occlusion?" Miss Thousandlegs inquired. Bless her! "By all means." She brought a wax plate and had the patient bite down on it so that his teeth imprinted the material in a horseshoe pattern, above and below. She studied this. "Serious malocclusion, Doctor," she announced. lence around him that the goblins had forgotten to make this test -- just as he himself had almost forgotten in his preoccupation with the impression he was making. Miss Thousandlegs had saved him. It was beginning to look as though he had found his assistant. "This will not hurt," he told Horsefeathers as he prepared his rotary unit. "In fact, I will not have to use any anesthetic. I am merely going to grind down some of the surfaces a little. To adjust the occlusion, so that your teeth will meet properly when you bite." "But it doesn't hurt where I bite! It hurts deep inside!" assured him. "You see, when the occlusion is imperfect -- when your teeth meet unevenly -- unatural stress is placed on certain sections of the jaw. While this effect is too small for you to notice ordinarily, it continues to irritate the peridontal membrane -- the lining surrounding the roots of your teeth -- crushing and bruising it. This lining is tough, for it is there to cushion the impact of constant chewing -- but under abnormal stress it eventually becomes inflamed. And then you hurt -- deep inside." Horsefeathers gazed at him in wonder. "I never knew that." "Perhaps your dentist did not feel this was necessary for you to "Many patients are not interested in such technical details." Until they hurt, he thought wrylyThe silence of the hall as he worked suggested that his point had been made. It was always best to let the patient know as much as feasible about his condition. An ignorant patient could be a difficult one. Horsefeathers had not been an idle complainer -- he had really had pain, though the cause was subtle and slow to develop. He finished and flushed the polished surfaces. "Expectorate, please." "Huh?" "Spit." The translator was being too literal, rendering a complex word in English into a complex equivalent in Clovenhoofian. He would have to tone down his language. "It will be a while before the inflammation subsides," he warned Horsefeathers. "But there should be a steady improvement now -- until you feel no pain at all." The patient looked dubious. "It'll still hurt?" "The membrane has to heal. When you break a leg you don't expect it to be good as new the moment the vet sets it, do you?" Horsefeathers thought about that. He looked at his leg. He smiled. "Thank you, thank you, Doctor," he said at last. "I'm so glad you came here." He trotted off, limping a little before remembering that it was his mouth that hurt. A nother patient mounted the stage. This was a native Hobmeant trouble. He had counted his dental chickens too soon. "May I have your name, sir?" Miss Thousandlegs inquired. "Go fly a kite." thought. "How do you spell that, please?" the time. Spelling via translator was devious and suspect but she had fielded the insult nicely. "G-O," the goblin spelled. "FL-Y. The A is an initial for Algernon. Last name is K-l-T-E." not to jump to conclusions. "And what is your problem?" IF Miss Thousandlegs inquired. "This tooth -- it squishes. Sometimes." "May I look at it?" "You're not the dentist, bugface." "Nevertheless, I may be able to narrow down the possibilities and trouble." Grudgingly he let her look. "Another restoration," she murmured. "Tooth appears to be healthy." "It's not healthy, stupid. It squishes. Sometimes." "Could you show me?" G.F.A. Kite bit down, almost nipping several of her hair-fine legs. "Nope. It's not squishing right now. But it does. Sometimes." "I'll take an X-ray," she said. She did. "When do I see the damn dentist?" "In just a moment. Let me check your occlusion first." She checked. "You may see him now." She accompanied the patient to "X-ray shows' nothing but the tooth is mobile," she said. "The occlusion is slightly off." Kite made a face. "I heard that about Horsefeathers. But mine is only one tooth and it doesn't hurt, it squishes. Sometimes." "Nevertheless, occlusion seems the likely culprit," Miss Thousandlegs said. "Two plus two equals four." felt she was going too far. She was not merely getting the facts -- she was diagnosing and advising the patient, normally the dentist's prerogative. He checked the tdbth. They were similar to human dentures and most had been restored metallically. All were solid, including the squisher, except for that trace mobility his assistant had noted. He inspected the X-ray photograph. She was correct there too: the only shadows in the picture conformed to the restorative work present. It had to be the occlusion again. He made the necessary adjustments. But one thing nagged him -- the occlusion was only marginally skew. Presuming that this condition had developed only recently, the described symptom was too sharp, too localized. Two plus two might equal four -- but so did one plus three. And the goblin audience was suspiciously silent. He took the probe and checked around the tooth again. It remained firm and the gum line was stable. He looked at the X-ray once more. The metal of the restoration shadowed it, one projection extending along the distal surface adjacent to the next tooth. No trouble there. Two plus two... Interesting coincidence that the Hobgoblin chief should send him two occlusion problems in a row. He would have expected something more devious. between the two teeth, verifying that the : metal of each restoration touched there. The space was narrow; there was no way he could reach it except by forcing the wire point down, causing the patient momentary discomfort. Kite yelped. The probe broke through into something soft. He had found the trouble -- a thin cavity just under the metal, concealed from direct view by its location and the overhanging restoration. Its shadow in the X-ray was hidden by the configuration of metal itself. Truly an invisible deterioration -- that squished. Sometimes. Miss Thousandlegs had almost led him astray by her too-ready diagnosis. Had he corrected the occlusion and sent the patient home the decay could have continued for months. Two plus two did equal four. But that was not the whole truth -- and the goblin dental chief must have known it -- setting the University representative up with a valid occlusion case first. Then the seeming occlusion -- a trap. Miss Thousandlegs brought the loaded needle. He injected the flinching patient. It had been so long since he had used anything this primitive that he had forgotten to apply a surface anesthetic before giving the shot -- and his assitant hadn't reminded him. Not her fault. She simply was not familiar with his procedures, his little lapses. He readied the drill. "Vacuum," he said. Miss Thousandlegs applied the vacuum, sucking the saliva and moisture from the water-cooled drill. "Other side," he murmured, as her instrument obstructed his view. He began cutting away the overhang of the tooth. He finished and removed the drill. "Mallet," he said, picking up the chisel. She held it up but his hand missed contact. The mallet bounced off his fingers and fell to the floor. The goblins guffawed. Again -- not her fault, he reminded himself. She was not adjusted to his movements. But the accident was embarrassing. He knocked off the metal crown, exposing the decay. He fished for the gold chunk before the patient could choke on it -- and banged into one of his assistant's insectlike arms. She had been reaching for it too. IF sandlegs was competent and cooperative -- but it just wasn't working out. He could not operate effectively with her. "M iss -- " he started. And blinked. Miss Thousandlegs was gone. She had been replaced by a humanoid biped. tance sleight-of-hand. Miss Tarantula might enjoy tugging on interplanetary thread and changing his assistants in mid operation but he did not. "Vacuum," he said abruptly, taking up the drill again. Assistant number four, the biped, applied the vacuum. Her arms terminated in quintuple, jointed digits that pinched together to hold the tube. He had seen more effective appendages for this work but at least she did not get in his way or obstruct his vision. He finished his excavation. "Hydrocolloid," he snapped. She already had the metal form and cold water ready for the hydrocolloid impression. He made the cast without difficulty and she took it away. He put a temporary covering over the tooth. "A new restoration will have to be made," he told Kite. "I have prepared the tooth and taken an impression but it will be some time before the restoration is ready. Your local prosthodontists are perfectly capable of doing it and I commend you to their services. You were quite correct about your problem and fortunately we have diagnosed it in time to save the tooth." "Doctor," the new assistant said. "What?" He was tired, and there was something strange about the way she spoke. "Will you check the other restorations now?" "The other -- " He paused. "You're right. A good restoration does not go wrong without cause. I'll have to have a look." It was a dismal prospect but he could not risk the same kind of oversight the local dentists had made. He hammered off the adjacent cap. It came off easily -- too easily. He scraped at the exposed cement. "Soft," he muttered. "No wonder there was trouble." The goblin chief was about to be snared in his own prosthodontic trap. The assistant took the gold cap ham hammered at the next restoration. This one was stiffer but finally came off. The binding cement was similarly soft. "Brother!" he muttered. "They must all be defective. The cement is deteriorating. Real trouble coming up." "Now just a moment," a voice objected. It was the chief dentist of ( Please turn to page # ) In mind-to-mind communication among men, honesty can be the worst policy! better. But he had been workson who would appreciate at once ing for so long away from the sothe significance of what he had aerial mainstream of the world that complished. His name was Stehis sense of values had become phen Thorpe. He was a poet and -- confused. And when he had conin this devious and unquiet age -- eluded his momentous work he and an old and trusted friend. He could not bring himself to call upon a representative of a government he had long since ceased to believe in and he was loath to deal directly with the popular press which had so maligned his activities over the last decade. But the desire to share his discovery with someone was overpowering. He had lived so long in his solitary tower waiting for this moment and now that it had arrived it cried out for a witness. Perhaps one of the more tolerant of his former colleagues might have condescended to visit him and -- in his own time -- watched him demonstrate his miraculous device. But Bedford couldn't wait -- and besides, he wanted nothing more to do with them. Only an artist of Thorpe's caliber could be allowed to experience this discovery before it was bestowed upon a weak and desperate world. So he hurried downstairs in a fever of excitment and telephoned his old friend. only just returned from a strenuous northern tour, a successful and highly lucrative excursion which had culminated that afternoon with an exhausting open-air recital. Now, more than anything else, he desired peace and a little quiet and time to prepare himself for the ordeal of his homecoming. His publicity department had arranged a wild party for later that evening and he was not looking forward to it. He loathed the simpering affectations of the people who considered themselves his peers. He was surprised and intrigued to hear from Bedford. Arthur Bedford had slipped from his thoughts, along with many other embarrassing memories which would have been out of place in the mind of Earth's leading poet and thinker. Success had a way of gobbling up old friendships. He was momentarily irritated with Bedford's use of his old name but made no comment. The telephone Bedford was using was oldfashioned and apparently lacked video circuits -- Thorpe stared at the blank screen and found himself curious about how Bedford looked these days. Tqo, he had hoped to escape at least some of the dreary party ahead of him. Bedford wanted to see him now -- this evening. This instant. Please, Stephen, for old time's sake . I owe it to you... Thorpe actually smiled at that. What can we possibly owe each other? But he could not ignore the urgent supplication in Bedford's voice. He loved to feel needed and success seemed to have abstracted his relationships with other people to such ah extent that he sometimes longed for the deeper attachments of another time. "All right, Arthur," he said. "I'll be right over." IF He dressed quickly. With his mind on the forthcoming party -- he would see Bedford first -- he chose a black velvet evening suit and matching cape -- the one with the breathtaking emerald-green lining. His accessories were a loose white shirt with a magnificent ( ruffle around the neck, pointed black shoes and a widebrimmed black felt hat. Satisfied with his appearence, he selected an elegant swagger-stick from his ornate collection and sauntered quietly off into the night, leaving his twin Jaguars caged and delighting in the anonymity ofhis nocturnal venture. The cane was important. More than a complement to the rest of his attire, it was also an extremely useful defense mechanism: a builtin powerpack delivered quite a jolt of electricity to the jeweled tip. It had served on numerous occasions to fend off the unwanted attentions of overenthusiastic admirers -- and enemies. Public idols in this godless age were often subject to bad treatment and the law permitted him to carry discreet discouragement with him wherever he went. And it was comforting to realize one had such a stylish defense. The address Bedford had given him was only a few miles from his hotel, in one of the older and less fashionable areas of the diseased city. He found his way without difficulty but as he moved deeper into the slums he began to feel some qualms -- perhaps even a small measure of guilt. And when he finally stopped outside the gaunt and decrepit tenement his old friendModged in he felt a twinge of regret. The building could not be very far short off being condemned. Arthur Bedford must have fallen just about as far as anyone could possibly fall in the false economic structure of his time. Thorpe leaned forward and pressed the jeweled tip of his cane against an archaic electrical buzzer located on one side of the door. He kept his weight against it for some time, until he could identify the weak signal he had generated moving fitfully through the great house. Then he stepped back to wait. He studied his reflection in the grimy glass panel of the door. He looked younger than his fortyseven years. As a youth he had been blessed with the noble, aesthetic features of his calling and the soft passage of years and the simple demands of his sedentary occupation had allowed only a pouch or two of excessive flesh to mar his well-publicized and handsome face -- and even these unwanted medals of middle-age provided him with the semblance of maturity and wisdom necessary to his portrait as the Poet Laureate of swinging Britain. He waited for what seemed an inordinate amount of time before he detected distant scuffling sounds from somewhere inside the building; sounds that suggested the passage of some weary body down an ancient, creaking staircase. God -- this entire area should have been razed a decade ago... and cast a wan glow through the dirty glass panel, erasing Thorpe's image. The door swung open and the guarded face of Arthur Bedford peered out. For a moment Thorpe was caught off his cultivated guard. He hadn't expected the years to have extracted sucfi a cruel toll from his old friend. Bedford's features had always tended towards heaviness -- now they had become almost obese. Swollen bags of flesh hung under each watery eye and a lower lip so full and cracked that it projected out like some creaking verandah over his several chins was the next most prominent feature. Several weeks' untidy stubble stood out from Bedford's pale flesh and a few scraps of hair were carelessly smeared over his scalp. Deep lines of fatigue -- and despair -- had been etched into this miserable face and, for some reason he could not fathom, Thorpe felt -- for a moment -- wretchedly awkward and unwise. Bedford stared, blinking away the years in the half-light. He said, "Stephen -- " The word hung over a slience and carried a wealth of meaning. But to Thorpe, poet, it was suddenly the currency of a distant time and another age -- it disturbed him to remember some things. "I'm so glad so glad you could come." Bedford was almost shaking. They looked at each other. And there should have been time for their meeting to become inbued with some sense of occasion -- time for them to have remained in a trance-like state while they studied the many changes which time had rung down upon them -- but Bedford's private demon drove him on hurriedly. "Come in. Come in -- " He opened the door wide and Thorpe stepped inside. The place stank. A musty amalgam of old papers, discarded food containers and unwashed flesh. Thorpe's educated nose twitched with disgust. "This way." He followed Bedford up the creaking staircase. Was that shambling figure ahead of him really Arthur Bedford? That creature hinged forward from the waist in an arthritic stoop? Could time -- and a hostile society -- really do this to a man? And how unkind of life to remind him they were contemporaries. Perhaps, after all, he should have stayed at his hotel and rested up for a while -- and then gone to his reception -- instead of coming here; he wasn't in the proper mood for old-fashioned reminiscences. Still, IF he had come. He was here. Some common courtesy was called for. Bedford paused on the landing. He looked around at his visitor and gestured vaguely towards the open door in front of them. His expression was apologetic. "It's been -- been a long time," he wheezed. The climb upstairs had all but exhausted him. "But it's good to see you again, Stephen." His thoughtless use of Thorpe's discarded given name again upset the poet. He had chosen his new name with great care and it annoyed him to have it sullied by any perfunctory reference to its uninspired predecessor. But his anger quickly cooled. He was reminded that there had once been a life for them together, long before Virgil Thorpe had begun to impress a fickle and foolish public. Bedford was a scientist -- a reasonable grasp of the arts had always eluded him. He was groping and inarticulate -- he looked for truth deep in the abstract realms of physics and mathematics and considered art a preoccupation of the emotionally self-indulgent. That had been the essence of their ultimate incompatability, the reason behind their final disillusionment with each other. They had each sought the same goal -- but from different viewpoints -- and in the painful process of remembering some of these things his wrath was curbed and he found he could distill a small measure of charity toward this frail, lonely creature he had once called friend -- and more. "Yes," he agreed, "it has been a long time." He followed Bedford into the brightly lit room. room of a warehouse than a place where a man could retreat from the rigors of an unfriendly society. Benches were piled high with a bewildering variety of electronic apparatus -- the floor between was a refuse heap of discarded hardboard boxes and a confused tangle of varicolored wire weeds. A battered armchair had been pushed into a far corner of the room by all this activity -- there it faced the dead vacant mouth of a fuel fire and a 'tattered accumulation of books and magazines, piled high into ricketty wooden shelving already pulled out of shape by its burden. The air stank of solder and shorted electrical connections. It was a hostile environment. Science had always baffled Thorpe. He had a totally intuitive mind and had never mastered the complexities and the subtleties of scientific thought -- he had been a poor scholar but an ambitious soul, so perhaps it was inevitable that he should have gravitated toward the arts while Bedford pursued his private internal vision. The poet could only marvel at the meaning of so much technological bric-a-brac. Of course, Bedford had always been an inveterate tinkerer and had assured himself of a steady income years earlier when he had evolved a number of very clever patents. Obviously he had continued some side research -- and along the way he might even have picked up one or two gullible schemes. Admittedly, his press had been disastrous in recent years but there were probably still enough simple-minded sponsors of ratbaggery left in the world to provide Bedford with a small measure of monetary assistance. He had always been devious at getting what he wanted, Thorpe mused, and it was obvious that this was one gift he had not yet frittered away. Otherwise I wouldn't be here now... The public was a malleable monster shaped by taste and style. It had elevated Virgil Thorpe from obscurity and made him the most fashionable figure of his age: a performing poet. And while he had come so close to godhood Bedford had been driven -- by the very nature of his obsessions and the questionable areas of his investigations -- into becoming a recluse. Organized science had ostracized him -- the public lionized Thorpe. It was a strange balance -- and the deficit seemed to belong to the prematurely aged scientist. Bedford kicked aside the remains of several packages and gestured toward the tattered armchair in the corner. "Sit down, Stephen, sit down" The poet did as he was bidden, his lip curling a little in disgust when he noticed the deep layer of dust on the furniture. "I -- I'll get you something to drink." Bedford struggled with the sliding doors of a shelf cupboard. His hands were as inarticulate and fumbling as his clumsy speech with its unfinished sentences and wearisome pauses. Thorpe took off his luxurious cape and folded it carefully before placing it over the back of the chair. He sat leaning slightly forward so as not to crease it. His eyes followed Bedford's movements with wry amusement. "Would you -- would you fancy a little port?" The look of guilt and self-reproach in the scientist's face was a sure indication that he had nothing fclse to offer. Thorpe nodded graciously and accepted the small tumbler and the dark, almost viscous fluid it contained. Bedford's hands were shaking. There was a wild look of enthusiasm in his eyes the poet found difficult to correlate with the other, older image he carried in his mind. "You can't imagine," Bedford went on, "you can't really understand how -- how very good it is to see you again, Stephen." Thorpe winced at the repetition of his old name. The touch of their fingers -- for one brief moment when he had taken the glass of IF port -- had reminded him of something they had once thought permanent but which had sundered like everything else in the unwanted past. His own hands were well cared for. His skin was pale but it was cleansed regularly with the proper oils. His nails were well shaped and polished to perfection by the best man in London. Bedford's hands were repugnant -- they were old and ugly, the fingers cracked and unwashed and disgusting dark sediment was buried underneath the broken nails. It galled Thorpe to recall that he had once found those same hands attractive. a single long gulp. He licked his lips appreciatively. "Damn fine wine." Thorpe made no comment. The wine was foul. He took a long sip, intending to despatch the noxious potion as quickly as possible and to forget the flavor. He coughed and mopped his pencil-thin moustache with an initialed green silk handkerchief. "You said something on the phone," he tactfully reminded, "about some marvelous machine you've been working on." Bedford gave him a curious look. "A machine, did you say? Well, I suppose it is -- partly. But to describe it properly... yes, I have made an apparatus -- and it is true that it has certain, ah, mechanical parts. But that, my dear Stephen, is only the beginning." "Where is it, then?" Thorpe asked. "Ah, you must be patient -- patient." Bedford seemed to have performed some miraculous feat of physical regeneration -- he now stood straighter. His hands clasped behind his back, and his eyes were focused dead ahead upon some' private infinity. Thorpe was his audience and he was oblivious to everything other than the revelation he had prepared. "To think," he went on, "after all these years -- " He uncoupled his hands and described some awkward, ambiguous diagram in the air. Thorpe supposed it was a gesture meant to indicate the difficulties of his guest but made no comment. He put his glass aside. The port really was undrinkable. "After all these year," Bedford repeated. "But now it is done. Finished. And the world will never be the same. Stephen, I will tell you what I have here. I have a -- call it a machine, if you must -- but a machine that will revolutionize communications." The poet sniffed his impatience. "I thought we had enough of those gadgets already. Radios, videos, telephones, masers, lasers and -- " "No, no, no. Nothing like that. Not like that -- at all. Something vastly different." "Then for God's sake what is it?" Thorpe snapped irritably. "Stephen, be patient. Think -- think a little. All our disturbances, all of our wars and our intolerances -- they spring from one source: our inability to understand each other. We each live out our lives as prisoners in solitary towers, communicating with each other with signs that never -- somehow -- manage to mean the same thing to any of us. How can we ever hope -- expect -- to accept another person's point of view, to comprehend matters alien to our own way of thinking when we are boundbound, Stephen -- by the awful tyranny of words?" A sudden finger lunged in the poet's direction. "You. You've been -- very successful, haven't you? Poetry. Poetry is -- or was -- a communication with an intellectual elite. But it wasn't they who made this world what it is -- that was left to the mindless jargon of pqliticians and power fetishists. And you, Stephen -- you and your kind have reduced your art to the level of mass entertainment. You are no longer communicating on that level -- that level to which you once -- aspired. You have become -- a performer. And a very popular one, no doubt. But as a communicator you were finished years ago. Once they got their claws into you, elevated you, lionized you and made you what you are. But do they ever really listen, Stephen, and if they ever did -- would they hear anything? Not that it matters any more, of course. My machine will make your words as obsolete as last year's poem. I will bring an end to this intolerable confusion of mind and purpose which words have created and -- and crippled our intellectual promise. I will bring down Babel and restore man to himself! I will bring about a new millennium! T HE poet was shaking with anger. The megalomaniacal quality that had saturated the terminal portion of Bedford's tirade was distressing. He had listened with growing impatience while his exfriend had hurled insults at his craft and his calling and he was not prepared to accept much more. The fool had gone too far. Was it for this that he had been called -- to suffer humiliation and let his emotions be toyed with? "Look here, Arthur -- " When Bedford saw he was prepared to rise out of his chair he tempered his galloping enthusiasm and motioned the poet to remain seated. "Oh, I'm sorry, Stephen, if I've offended you. But think -- think what all this will mean -- what total communication will mean. No more misunderstanding. Mind will comprehend mind without having to pass through the clumsy medium of words. We will have -- we will have global peace at last! Oh, IF there's so much to work out, so much to consider -- " "You could begin by showing me this thing," Thorpe suggested, his anger tempered to a reasonable pique. "What is it?" Bedford brightened and moved forward toward the cluttered bench nearest the chair. "Come over here. I'll show you." Feeling a trifle foolish, Thorpe stood up and followed him across the room. Bedford gestured proudly at a cumbersome gadget that looked no different, to the poet's untrained eye, from any other piece in the overcrowded room. "There it is," he said. "The precursor of the new millennium for mankind." It was roughly the size and shape of a radio transmitter. The array of dials and meters meant nothing to Thorpe. The circular window in the center could be likened to a small video tube or the face of an oscilloscope screen, depending on your information. There was space along the bottom of the machine for all sorts of plug-in connections and what looked like two sets of complicated headphones housed in cumbersome headpieces, like the top section of a lunarsuit. "Is that all?" he asked. The whole box and tricks could have been Fitted into a four-by-three container without any difficulty. Bedford laughed. The sound was a short, almost hysterical squeak. "Well, what did you expect?" He leaned forward and threw a couple of switches eagerly. The machine hummed. "We'll see how it works, eh? I suppose you're wondering why I haven't called in the press? Well, I didn't want to. Tell me, Stephen -- do you find it strange that after -- after all these years I should remember you? And how we felt so strongly about the lack of proper communication in the world? Well, I wanted you to be here tonight to witness what I have done. To be -- to be the first person to witness the enormity of what I have achieved -- to have you understand." Of course this could not be strictly true, Thorpe thought cynically. Bedford would have tried out his machine -- probably to have seen his subjects run terrified from the house. It was unlikely that he would have had access to sophisticated test subjects under his present living conditions. Bedford tapped the machine affectionately. "Of course, this is only a prototype. Actual production models will be much smaller. People will have to wear them, you see, and -- perhaps I'd better explain some of the theory behind all this before I demonstrate?" "Please," Thorpe insisted, "spare me the details. I have to attend a function in a short while. If you want to show me how this thing works -- for God's sake get it going. I can't hang around here all night" A NY calculated cruelty in these words was lost on the scientist. "Forgive me. I had forgotten your impatience with figures. Here -- let me show you -- " He picked up one of the head-pieces and rested it carefully over his scalp. He made a few minor seating adjustments and tested one or two connections, he smiled. "You see? Quite comfortable." He gestured to Thorpe to put on the companion unit. "You'll get used to it very quickly." Gingerly the poet settled the complex headpiece over his head. Bedford came closer and made the necessary adjustments and then stepped back. "There. Now -- now to begin. I think perhaps -- perhaps we had better both sit down." The cables connecting them to the machine on the bench were long enough to permit Thorpe to return to his chair, and for Bedford to perch himself on an upturned wooden packing case. A distance of roughly nine feet seperated them from each other and from the machine. Bedford gestured to the small black control, box spliced into the cables and resting in his lap. "I'll tell you a bit more about that in a minute," he said. "But first, a little explanation of what to expect. You could call it -- and they probably will -- 'assisted telepathic contact.' A.T.C. -- now that's a good one for the press to boot around, isn't it? Well, why should I care? They won't be in business much longer." "Assisted what?" "Now don't get excited." The scientist waved a solicitous hand. "And don't go jumping into any of the popular misconceptions. Telepathy, as such has always been a fiction. The human mind just isn't powerful enough to broadcast and receive messages over a distance. But that it does broadcast has been established: all my little machine does is boost this infinitesimal current so that it will bridge the awesome distance between one mind and another. Just how far will have to be established with further experimentation. This is only the beginning, Stephen." The poet continued to regard the set-up dubiously. He scarcely knew what to think. Either Bedford was crazy or he had discovered some vital new principle and if he had... "Get on with it," he snapped, his irritation beginning to get the better of his polished courtesy. "I'm still waiting to see what you have." "Precisely." Bedford tested the volume control and nodded happily. His eyes became a triumphant. "I wanted you here, Stephen, to witness the death of words -- " IF The circular screen Thorpe had likened to an oscilloscope came alive with dancing green patterns. They were beautiful. The theory of science might have baffled him but the visible and end products sometimes awed him -- and such was the case as he stared at these enigmatic wiggles. "You are observing my thoughts," Bedford pointed out. "Not the electrical rhythm of my brain, you understand, but the actual message of my thoughts." But the poet could only stare and wonder. Was he being conned or genuinely mystified? "If you want to know what I'm thinking, Stephen, you only have to bring your mind into rapport with mine. To do this you will need to adjust that red volume control very carefully, otherwise .the full power of telepathic contact, might prove overwhelming. Advance it slowly." Thorpe hesitated. He looked down at the volume control nestling against his left arm. He took a deep breath, moved his other hand across and advanced the red knob a judicious notch. Nothing happened. Bedford was studying him keenly. He motioned with his head to continue advancing the volume. Thorpe moved it a notch higher. And another. scious of a faint susurrus of sound in his mind that might have been some small residue of background noise from the machine itself. And then he realized that it was less a sound than something else. His scalp prickled. A nervous tic he had forgotten years before invaded his left cheek, making it dance uncomfortably just below his eye. There was a strangeness about this rapport with a machine he found disturbing but curiosity -- and Bedford's earnest insistence -- forced him to follow through. A notch higher and there was still no perceptible difference. Was Bedford playing him for a fool? Angrily he twisted the dial an incautious three stages further. And found it. The rustling mental static cleared. His mind was illuminated as if by a searchlight. He became filled with rapture. Someone -- it had to be Bedford -- was smiling at him from over a vast distance. There could be no question about it: he had made contact with another mind. He had no reason to doubt -- every atom of his body agreed -- and at his fingertips was the means of intensifying this incredible rapport. What was it, really? Bedford's mind? Soul? Spirit? Definitely something unique -- the seat of personality and identity. For the first time in his life the poet was conscious of what it was like to have somebody else's thoughts creeping through his mind and he grew hungry for a fuller experience. Threshold was not enough. He passed beyond this meeting place of pure thought -- where atoms rustled soundlessly together and the human mind began -- and advanced the volume control as far as it would go. The impact was tremendous. He was engulfed in a psychic flood, and when it cleared he found himself possessed of a serenity which had eluded him through all of his previous adult life. Bedford had not been lying. His machine really did work. From now on it would be possible for each human mind to communicate directly with another -- the race would be absolved of the drudgery of words and all the mendacity that had accompanied oral communication. And Arthur Bedford had made all this possible. Thorpe had thought -- long ago -- that he had known Bedford better than anyone else and perhaps he had. But now he could see how grossly mistaken he had been, that it was impossible -- or rather, had been impossible -- for anyone really to know another. Now he understood Bedford's passion for enlightenment -- out of his loneliness and his desperation at the loss of their friendship which he, Virgil Thorpe, had engineered, had come something as meaningful as this. The shame of his callous disposal of their friendship sickened him. But he felt the scientist's compassion engulf him and soothe away the jagged teeth of his guilt. It is over. It is past. Let us for get and see what the future holds. Their minds locked, embraced and they looked out. Thorpe's mind had been quiescent and dumb underneath the great tide of Bedford's accomplishment -- now it soared and was united, was one and equal -- it reached out and marveled at this annexation of souls and they looked forward with one identity at what the future held. They saw a world stripped of the crutch of language. They saw a world where universal understanding was the accepted norm and where lies had been driven out and peace reigned forever, where evil had ceased to exist because no mind could harbor it. They saw the human race linked together as one great intellect. They saw an end to wars, to grubby competition and all the psychological ills which had crippled mankind. This was Arthur Bedford's vision. And it seemed too good to be true. If everyone understood everyone else Earth would be a paradise. But wait a moment. What is this dark beast I see? It asked a question. If individual motives, desires IF and ambitions were understood, then... What motives? What desires? What ambitions? The vision did not seem so beautiful now. Thorpe's mind projected its own visions -- the artist's struggle for his soul, his individuality apart from the mass mind. You cannot take this from us -- there is not one of us who is not in some small way a child of art . As murderers we became men and as artists the abiding conscience of mankind. You cannot allow this to happen, Arthur. Don't you understand... But of course he did -- understanding was what the machine was for. With an abruptness that was almost surgical in its shock the rapport was cut off. For a while a dark sludge shil . uneasily around in Thorpe's dulled mind, waiting for words to give terrible weight to his fear when he found time to speak. through. Bedford's hands and face were soaked with sweat. Thorpe's left cheek twitched crazily. He levered the headpiece away and struggled to his feet. Bedford raised his palsied hands and pushed his own headpiece aside but he did not get up. He remained crouched on the packing case as if he had been struck down by something too big to grasp. "Arthur -- you must destroy this thing," Thorpe said. There was no demand in his words, only a simple statement of fact. "And your papers -- everything connected with this foul thing. Now -- at once -- before either of us have time to think. It's too monstrous to let -- " Bedford raised his head. His 'ancient cheeks were wet now with tears and his face looked ashen. "Destroy it? How can you say such a thing? The years -- the work -- the pain -- " He seemed to have left his mind somewhere where it was still being attacked by the awful monsters the poet had dreamed up. What motives? What desires? What ambitions? "Stephen -- I can't. Not this. It's n my life's work. I can't w . for nothing -- for less than nothing. Think of what it will mean to the world -- an end to all the disasters that have plagued us since the beginning of time. A fresh chance. A new beginning -- without lies -- without wars -- with hope, Stephen -- hope!" "But it will mean an end to everything -- can't you see that? To art, to literature, to music, to drama, to all the heirs of art! All the things that have made us something more than animals, the things that have made us great. An end to all individual aspiration -- can't you see that, too?" But Bedford could not. The communication machine sat between them, motionless and unmoved, watching this little drama, unwanted now and the very sum of all the inconsistencies of the world wrapped up in one miraculous piece of engineering. "Then you would have us suffer?" Bedford asked quietly, as though his mind were already made up. "Suffer all of the things I can dispell?"' "Yes -- don't you see, it's our only salvation?" Thorpe was shouting now. "We must destroy your machine to save the soul of mankind -- " "Are you sure, Stephen? Or just for the protection of your own fragile ego? "You're mad, Arthur. You must be. Some day we will ourselves, Arthur. We will race of the things you but that will be when he have attained an emotional and intellectual maturity necessary for the sort of society you hold ideal, not because some clever little machine has made it possible to accommodate our minds as they are now -- feeble and primitive and not even half formed." Bedford rose. A look of grim determination had come over him. "No, Stephen. My machine will liberate us now -- while there is still time." "No. It will debase man. Not all minds are equal -- you must know that -- and your machine has the potential to dilute individual intelligence down to a common and unimaginative norm. You're blind, Arthur. But more than that -- you're a fool, a fool actually to think you have done something worthwhile." Bedford stood mute, like some terrible statue, his face drained of all life. His silence incensed Thorpe. The poet screamed something incoherent, pushed past him and grappled with the communication machine. With one great heave he pushed it off the bench and it crashed loudly to the floor. The case shattered easily. It was only a jury-rigged test model and its insides broke up under the rain of smaller instruments that Thorpe brought down on it with maniacal Yenzy. ie stamped on the headpieces and hammered and ground them under his heel. He screamed abuse at Bedford, at science, at God and at everything else he had learned to hate. trance. "No, no! Stop that -- stop -- " Thorpe paid no attention but went on with his destructive orgy. He had to kill it,, eradicate it, destroyitdestroyitdestroyit... Don't, Stephen, please -- don't do it -- " The statue moved and suppli( Please turn to page #) IF This may be the strangest father-daughter love story... the electric dishwasher grabbed me. It shot up its lid and tried to submerge my head in hot, soapy water. Twisting, I kneed its smooth desert-colored front surface and managed to yank its cord free of the kitchen wall plug. The machine kept working, pumping scalding water at me, clutching at my shoulders with some kind of wiry tentacles. I grunted, snapped its arms off me for a second. I spun the heavy machine away from me. I dodged it, hopping across the afternoon-bright parquet of the kitchen. The dishwasher came rolling after me, tentacles outstretched. I grabbed up a blowmold kitchen stool and thrust it at the machine's running wheels. The dishwasher tripped, fell over on its side and splashed sudsy water all around. I ran for the sundeck, my right hand reaching up under my jacket toward my holster. Upright again, the dishwasher was rolling my way on its little wheels. Behind me was the Pacific Ocean, about three hundred feet straight down. I drew out my laser and waited, aiming. Soapy water had splashed out here on the bright black topping of the wide deck and as the dishwasher came humming from the kitchen into the sunlight it took a skid. Its arms clutched air, flapped, and it whirled wildly past me. It hit the redwood rail and went right on through, falling toward the ocean, followed by splintered wood. After the giant splash came big bubbles. Three white gulls came skimming in low over the water. They danced a second or two over the last of the bubbles and then soared up into the clear sky. I hung up my laser and went carefully back into the beach cottage. The stove looked like it could be nasty in a fight but apparently it wasn't gimmicked. Nothing else in Mary Redlafld's empty beach house came for me. In the beam-ceilinge.d living room the phone on the missing girl's marble-top coffee table begn to buzz. I watched it, approaching it from the side. It looked to be only a phone and I decided to answer it. "Tom," said the lank dark young man who appeared on the saucer-sized viewscreen, "is she there?" "No, Oliver," I told him. "At least I don't think so. I just arrived." I glanced toward the view window. It showed a quiet ocean. "Tom, you look distracted," said Oliver Bentancourt. I finally caught sight of the dishwasher swimming out to sea. Doing a fair Australian crawl with those unexpected arms. "I was looking at the dishwasher," I said. "How's that going to help us find out where Mary's been for the last two days?" I sat on the paisley-patterned sofa and said, "This dishwasher is out in the Pacific, swimming." "Oh, you mean some guy who works in a restaurant. Who is he?" "No, I mean an appliance, IF square squatty thing about half my size," I said. I took another look at the bright ocean. The machine was quite far out now and had switched to a rapid backstroke. "How can it swim?" "It has little arms," I said. Bentancourt rubbed a lean hand over his eyes. "I guess you're not kidding, Tom. I don't know. Maybe it's because of her late father that she's got an odd machine there. I don't know. Mary is -- well, she isn't like anyone I've known before. I really didn't want to consult your agency, you know. But since you and I have been friends since catechism class days I figured you wouldn't be working for Stanley Pope unless he was okay. Where is Mary?" "Easy, now. We'll find her. Stanley Pope specializes in cases that are a little eccentric." "I don't want to use the police," said Bentancourt. "You know -- because Mary has a pretty unhappy medical record. Well, psychological record rather. She's still in therapy. The police aren't too understanding." "Right." "I've called her friends, such as they are. I even tried to see if anybody was still at the old family place." He hid his eyes again for a moment. "She's not there? I mean, she didn't take something again?" "No," I said, though I wasn't yet certain. "Okay," said Bentancourt. "I'll call you tonight." He nodded, smiled quickly and faded from the screen. The dishwasher was only a speck now, a desert-colored dot heading for the horizon. I rubbed my chin, then scratched my chest with both hands. I went all through the threeroom beach house and Mary Redland was not there. Nothing I found told me where she might be. playing tennis with a robot. I sat down in one of the wroughtiron benches ringing the green clay. Down through the trees and housetops I could see a flock of sailboats on Sausalito's piece of the bay. "I'm perfecting my serve," Pope called to me. He flung a fuzzy white ball straight up, kept his eye on it, whapped it over the net. "You're using a badminton racket," I pointed out. The robot was shaped like a water heater and had four arms. It rolled after the tennis ball and sucked it up off the court with a little nozzle. Pope blinked. Wrinkles ran up his high forehead and were lost in his tight curly black hair. "Huh?" New rings joined those under his wide, circled eyes. "Badminton racket." I inclined my head in its direction. He scrutinized the racket, nodded. "I must have left the tennis racket in the copter." "Copter?" "I was test-flying a new copter." He waved at the robot. "Game's over." "I thought you gave up on copters." "They have a tendency to crash," he said, "into the Golden Gate Bridge." "When you're piloting." "Anyway, I decided to give copters one more chance." "And?" "This one crashed into the Golden Gate Bridge." I noticed the robot was speeding toward the tennis net. "Your robot thinks he just lost the game." "Huh?" "He's going to jump over the net and congratulate you." Pope turned. He was a lean, middle-sized man, nearly as dark as I am. "Don't," he yelled as the robot leaped up into the air. The tennis-playing machine didn't quite clear the net. It tumbled over front first with a clang, scattering tennis balls. "Gadgets," said Pope. He ran to the fallen robot and helped it up. "I had a chance to inherit a hundred acres of soy beans in the San Joaquin Valley, Tom. Instead I surrounded myself with gadgets." "Sorry, sorry," said the robot, feeling itself for damages with all its hands. Pope left the machine and came over on the grass with me. "What about this missing girl -- Mary Redman?" "Redland." "I worry about all these gadgets the way some people worry about pets. I get nervous and concerned when they fall down." He blinked again and new rings appeared around his eyes. "What do I take at six o'clock?" I reached a bottle of blue spansules out of my jacket pocket. "Two of these." "Well, I probably would have worried about soy beans, too." Pope shook two spansules into his palm, frowned. "Except soy beans don't fall down as much. Any trace of the girl?" "No," I said. "But her dishwashing machine tried to kill me." He swallowed, rubbed his forefinger along the side of his beaked nose. "Huh? Give me all the details." I described what had happened. Absently Pope undid his white tennis shorts and let them drop. "I should have gone over there with you. Why didn't I?" "You had to go to San Francisco, remember." "Oh, yes. One of my former wives is after more alimony. The second one, right?" "No, the third," I said. "Why IF are you taking off your clothes?" "Changing for dinner." "You're still outside." "Huh?" Pope bent and retrieved the fallen shorts, tucked them under his arm with his badminton racket. "I had a chance to go into the fishmeal business once. There's a lot less pressure in the fishmeal business than in the private investigation field. Right?" "I haven't seen any statistics." We continued across his slightly overgrown two-acre backyard, moving in the direction of Pope's big transplanted Victorian house. "What did that homicidal dish? washer remind you of? You did a particular kind of reaction take when I mentioned it." "Huh?" Pope stroked his nose. "Something I can't quite remember. But it ties in with this Mary Redland business." He stopped walking. "I really like the odd cases, Tom. Most of what we do know is simple electronic stuff. Bugging, counter-bugging, siphoning of computer information. Back when you were still in school someplace there were more odd things to work on. Her father." "Mary Redland's father?" "Right. He was a servomechanism tycoon, wasn't he?" "That and teaching machines," I said. "My friend Bentancourt says Mary didn't talk much about her father. He died a year or so ago, in an autosonic jet crash. I know the few times I met her she didn't want to talk about the past at all." "This name that your friend told us scared her, upset her -- what was it?" "Screwloose," I told him. "Right. A nickname for somebody maybe. Your friend hasn't any notions?" "Nothing new since he first consulted us." "Mary Redland was in a therapy group over in Frisco, right. How long?" "Three months. And, according to Bentancourt, she mentioned the name Screwloose during a session at this Dollfuss Center. He wasn't in the group with her but she told him about it afterwards. Because it scared her. A silly name but she was unsettled. Apparently that was all she was able to remember, just the name or whatever it is. Screwloose. Bentancourt figures maybe she remembered something else day before yesterday. Maybe that's why she took off." "Why should she be remembering things?" asked Pope as we climbed the wide wooden back stairs of his vast rococo white house. "Did Bentancourt say she'd lost her memory at some point?" "No, but she's had a breakdown or two and there seem to be certain things she has had trouble recalling." "Slender girl, isn't she?" "He showed you her picture." "I know. Willowy, tall. Blonde," said Pope. "Thin women tend to be twitchy. My second wife was." "Third," I said. "Your second wife was a plump redhead with dimples." Pope sighed. We were in the kitchen. "Maybe I should have stayed with her and taken up soy beans, huh? Go to the Dollfuss Center and sit in on that group therapy session. Mary Redland was going every Tuesday and Thursday night at eight, wasn't she?" "Yes. There's a session tonight. You figure she may show up there, even though she's been out of view for two days?" "No. I want you to find out what reminded her of Screwloose." He nodded at his refrigerator and it opened and handed him a cold bottle of ale. houseboat after I'd given him a verbal report on my visit to the group therapy session the night before. "We'll go up to Past after breakfast. Did I order orange juice?" We were under a metal umbrella out on a plank shelf over the edge of the Bay, at a restaurant called The Ruins Of Tiburon Tommy's. "Tomato," I said. I removed a pill from a box I carried in my left trouser pocket and put it on the edge of his soycafe saucer. "I'm sorry I didn't turn up anything on Screwloose. Why Past?" "Something," said Pope. He noticed a plate of plankton griddle cakes in front of him on the table. "I like to use Evelynski to supplement my memory sometimes." "Didn't they indict Evelynski for siphoning classified information out of the California State Credit Computer?" "They couldn't. No evidence." "I thought they had evidence." "Evelynski managed to siphon off all that, too." Pope was wearing a buff overall suit today. He rubbed his palms on his knees and the material gave off a purring sound. "Go back on what you told me last night. At the therapy session you said one of the group talked about Mary. He said something about how her late father had paid a lot of attention to her, especially to her education?" "Yes, a bi"g jovial pink guy in his middle forties. His name is Chuck Mogul," I answered. "When I asked him if he knew her he said he'd only read about her family a lot in the society columns. Years ago. Dr. Dollfuss is an admirer of yours -- otherwise they probably wouldn't have let me sit in. He mentioned your eclectic mind." "Right." Pope looked once more at the pancakes, then stood. "Let's go up and consult Evelynski." Past is a private research organization. When all the houseboats were cleared out of the waters IF around Sausalito Cosmo Evelynski had one moved to a lot in the low rolling hills of Tiburon. The big red-and-white boat served now as the top floor of his archives, with ten more floors sunk down into the hillside. Evelynski's office was in the living room of the old houseboat and we found him there dropping punch cards into an electric wastebasket. The basket would chew up a card, making a lopsided growling sound. Then it would spew the fragments back out at Evelynski. Evelynski was sitting on a low wicker stool, a confetti of shreds on the hardwood floor around him. "On the fritz," he said. He was a tall man in his low forties, short-haired and mildly rustic. Pope took a seat on a plaid ottoman. The rings around his eyes were flickering. "About twenty years ago," he said, "something like four men who were all prominent in the servomechanism field died. I've been trying to remember the details." "Hello, Tom," Evelynski said to me. He kicked the wastebasket away with his left foot. "You're thinking about a murder case, Stanley?" Pope said, "It's not on record as such. All four of these guys died in a six-month period, all in accidents. They were, though nothing much was made of it as I recall, the chief competitors of what's his name. Donald B. Redland. Mary Redland's father." "Redland of UnitedTech?" Evelynski stood up and crossed to a dumbwaiter in the wall. Pope nodded. "In one of these accidental deaths there was something -- something about an eyewitness. A little boy nobody believed. He claimed he'd seen a soft-drink machine push the victim off the edge of a bluff in Muir Woods someplace. A foggy day, nobody else saw anything." "The dishwasher," I said. "Reminded me," said Pope. Evelynski opened the door to the shaft and yelled, "Freak Accidents. Also Redland, Donald Bascomb. Muir Woods, vicinity, accidents. Servomech industry, obits. Anything else you can think of." He let the small white door flap shut. "I've dug down two more floors since you guys were here last." "Did you fix that computer who would only take requests given in classical Greek?" asked Pope. "He just outgrew it. He was new then and showing off. You know, the runt in the pack." Evelynski made his way around the circular room and stood next to the mouth of a metal chute. Far down under us a faint fluttering whir had started. In another thirty seconds file folders, tape reels, punch cards, loose clippings and glossy photos poured out into Evelynski's arms. "Here," he said and dropped the pile of material on Pope's lap. Three newspaper clippings fell in the process. I reached them off the hook rug and glanced at them. The headline on the largest clipping, a half page with photo, read: "Peninsula Girl Has A Special Sort of Teacher." The girl, six then, was Mary Redland and her special tutor was an android teacher especially designed by her father, Donald B. Redland, and built under his supervision at UnitedTech in nearby Sunnyvale. The story said Mary liked the teaching robot "an awful lot" and the family nickname for him was Professor Screwloose. There was a picture of Mary and the android in a bright playroom. I held the clipping out to Pope. "Here's Screwloose," I said. "Oh, so?" He took the clipping. "Also Chuck Mogul," I added. "You're getting slipshod, Tom," said Pope. "One of the six people you spent two hours with last night is an android and you didn't tumble to it." "Nope," I admitted. "He's got a lot of believability. He struck me as a phony -- but a human phony." Pope tapped the photo. "This was taken at the Redland place down on the Peninsula, wasn't it?" "That's right," I said. "The estate's been empty since Redland was killed. Nobody's living there. But supposedly it's still guarded by a lot of Redland's mechanisms." "Huh?" said Pope. He rolled up the piece of newspaper and rubbed it across the tip of his sharp nose. "I wonder if Mary Redland's gone there. What she's trying to remember has to do with this damn android and probably with that old house." "I'd better drive over there and check," I said. "After we go through the rest of this stuff, yes," said Pope. "Stop at my place and gather up some tools for jobbing the burglar alarms. We have something or other for stunning robots, don't we?" "Yes. Do you want to come along this time?" "No, I want to call on Chuck Mogul," said Pope. "You said Dollfuss records show him with a San Francisco address?" "Yes, Telegraph Hill." I wrote the address on a memo slip. "I want to ask him why he's no longer Screwloose," said Pope. Redland estate. I'd parked my land car three hundred yeards beyond the front stone wall, in the shadows of a grove of black oaks. The day was ending early and a prickly mist was tumbling out of the darkening sky as I walked carefully toward the front gates. The gates were twice my height and twisted into patterns of Rs and grape leaves. The gate was the kind that gave off an alarm ring if touched and an electric wire netting grew up to six inches above the high thick stone wall. FloodIF lights had been aimed at the cleared ground on the visitor's side of the gate and just on the other side of the wrought iron a black police dog crouched, fangs bared. But none of it was working. The floodlights weren't on, the robot dog was silent and there was no life in his vinyl eyes. The gates had swung open a few feet. I'd been prepared to try to gimmick the alarm system and pick any locks I ran into. I had a brown nearleather attache case under my arm. I didn't need it. I walked through the gates. The mist fell and rolled, thickening. Far away, back on the highway, a diesel truck groaned by. Passing the mechanical watch dog, I brushed against him and he fell over sideways. I could see the shape of the house now, a quarter of a mile away. Cupolas and spires and weather cocks jabbing free of the mist. The main house was three stories, twenty-five rooms. A six-car garage with chauffeur's suite, a copter hangar and two small guest houses were supposed to be beyond and behind the main house. The grass had been recently cut. It had a damp fresh-cropped smell. The trees, hundreds of birches and willows and pines, were less cared for. Approaching the house, I saw an android sprawled in the brush. He was a gardening robot and he seemed to have fallen from a ladder while pruning. He was broken and beginning to rust. His bent hand still clutched a pair of shears, orange now from exposure. There was only darkness in the main house. I went around it, listening. I crossed a stable yard and saw light. A fluttering unsteady glow coming from a cottage deep among willows. I went toward that. A metal plate screwed to the cottage said: Miss Mary RedlandHer Playhouse. I knocked. The motion of my knocking pushed the door open. Inside the small room was Mary. She was sitting in a low wooden chair, her legs bent up and tightly together. On a child-size desk beside her stood a kerosene lantern, sooty smoke fluming up from it. "Hello, Mary," I said. She looked up, nodded, smiled faintly and briefly. "Hello, Tom." "This is where you've been?" "Most of the time," Her prettiness seemed to come and go on her face, wavering like the lantern light. "I guess Ollie hired you to come looking for me." "That's right." I took a lopsided sofa chair for a seat. There were shelves climbing the walls, cluttered with toys. Simple stuffed toys and complex mechanical ones. Below the shelves were teaching machines and film viewers, spools of history and math piled atop them. "Somebody is always and continually looking after me," said Mary. "Since always." She locked her slim hands over one knee. "I remembered some things and I came back here to think about them. To reflect, more or less." I watched her in silence. "They never," said Mary, "thought I'd remember. And I didn't, actually, quite remember for a long time. Then I began to." I stayed quiet. "Fifteen. No, twenty. Twenty years almost," said Mary. "When I was about six years old. My father and one other man who worked for him. They're both dead now. I suppose that's funny. Twenty years ago they killed four people." "Rivals," I said. "People your father couldn't buy out?" "His ambition was to become much bigger. He did, too," said Mary. "They, my father and the other man, came up with a fine and simple idea. Not something that would seem simple to me or possibly to you -- only to them. He could have kept trying to deal with them Financially, buy them. Except this new idea was simpler and not as expensive. So they figured out how to adapt some of their fine machines and mechanisms. Adapt them to kill people. Not in any obvious ways, though. To push them out of windows or arrange accidents. There's a funny side to that, too, being killed by your refrigerator or your color TV console." I nodded. "I met one of those machines." "Yes, I guess a few of them are still around," she said, "to keep an eye on me. I gave up trying to avoid all the mechanisms dad thought should keep track of me. You probably saw it in that beach house dad bought for me." "That's right." Mary said, "The problem vas, the problem was I walked in." She shook her head. "No, on the planning of one. They were very thorough. They made charts and diagrams. Maybe that's how you should kill people, carefully and with a good deal of thought and deliberation. I walked in. It was up there at the big house. In dad's den, which was supposed to be private. I didn't always pay attention to that kind of restriction then. I was six and they'd not bothered to lock the door this one time. I walked in, very silent. Dad was at his long wide work table, drafting table, and they were talking. I listened for a long while until they noticed me." The mist was thick at the little room's leaded windows. "At First they -- d;ad especially -- tried to convince me I hadn't heard anything or that it was just a game. The problem was, you see, they went right ahead and killed the man. So I asked about it." She stood and wandered to the low black-and-gray machines. "This is where they did it." "They worked to make you forget?" IF "Yes," said Mary finally. "It used to be called -- what was it? Brainwashing? It wasn't going to hurt, dad promised. Seems to me -- it seems to me it took weeks to do. They used these machines and some others." She paused and took a sharp inward breath. "And my tutor. I had an android. A nice affable robot who taught me and read stories and was nice. I called him Professor Screwloose. I don't know why, something dad said once is where I got the name I think. He helped them do it and after that he was gone, sent someplace else. For years I forgot, didn't remember. Except it started trying to come back. You know, I had some problems. Yes. I went into therapy finally and I really began to remember." She turned to me. "He was there, though I didn't realize it at first." "Screwloose," I said. "Yes," she said. "Calling himself Chuck Mogul and passing for human. I guess dad had programed him to keep watch on me. Even with dad gone, nobody turned poor Screwloose off. He's still hanging around, watching after me. Protecting me. I suppose he's anxious to keep me from remembering, even though it doesn't make much difference now." paint me as not too nice a X guy," said Chuck Mogul. He came into the cottage grinning. There was a black pistol in his believable right hand. "Gee, Mary. We have meant nothing but good for you." She leaned against the black machines. "It's all over, Professor Screwloose." "No, I don't feel that," said the android. "Gosh, your dad, god bless him and keep him, set me up swell, Mary. With funds and a nice place on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. All I haye to do, as long as I live, is look after you. Not only to keep yop from thinking about some unpleasant things that might have happened when you were a cute little tossle-headed kid. No, I'm dedicated to seeing to it you have a calm, pleasant life always." "Good Christ," said the girl. "My father was enough. I don't want any more sweet concern. I'm me now, full grown -- and I don't want you." "Gosh, Mary," said Screwloose. "Don't talk like that. I'm always going to be around. I'm -- gee -- I'm made that way, honey." "You shouldn't have," I said, "gotten so close. Shouldn't have gone to the therapy sessions." The android agreed. "I debated a lot about that. Gosh, but I was worried. About what she might blurt out there in front of the others. So I took a risk, pulled a few strings and got in the same group with her. No, I have to admit that ( Please turn to page # ) The generation gap was a grim reality -- but Klay welder never suspected its longevity! Glory B as gently as babys' breath. The gravities held a quarter-inch above the ground as the big engines hummed down the scale and sighed. Klaywelder sighed with them. Then, without a glance outside, he pulled himself up quickly from the pilot's couch and walked the few feet to his quarters. At the foot of his bunk he carefully pressed his right thumb against a particular spot on the bulkhead. The deck beneath him shuddered and screeched in protest as its atoms were harshly realigned. The metal surrounding his cargo was now unmetal -- a horrid molecular mess with all the spectographic purity of scrambled eggs. Klaywelder nodded with satisfaction. No one, not even Klaywelder himself, could open it now -- only the peculiar little character on Filo who had installed the thing could wrench it back to normal without melting down the ship. Klaywelder strolled back to the cabin and stuffed his pipe with Guubi weed. The first puff made him gag. He scowled and knocked the bowl out on the deck. Earth tobacco, he promised himself, would be First on his list. And with what he had in the hold he could well afford the best, this time. He glanced through the port at tjie rolling, sage-green hills and whipped-cream skies. Last stop, Pharalell IV, and then home -- and more credits than even he had ever dreamed of. Klaywelder's smug contentment turned to mild annoyance. The domed entryport at the edge of the field looked like an ugly pink hive -- and now, out of that hive swarmed three angry silver hornets, making their way for the Glory B. As the hornets drew closer they turned into glittering speedsters. Klaywelder spotted the tiny Federation emblems on their sides. Two of the speedsters carried customs guards with dark rifles bouncing off their backs. The third held the short, stocky frame of Arto Frank. Klaywelder bit his lip. He hadn't seen Arto in six years -- and Arto was the last person he'd hoped to run into on Pharalell IV. Klaywelder dropped to the ground and closed the port behind him. Frank burned rubber inches from his boots. "Uhuh. I thought so." Arto Frank eyed him grimly. "What do you want here, Klaywelder?" He didn't wait for an answer. His head jerked to one side and motioned the other speedsters. "Mac, Artie -- seal the ship." . The guards braced kickstands and moved forward. "Hold it," warned Klaywelder. The guards looked at each other, then at Frank. Klaywelder backed against the hull and pointedly pressed a bright stud at his belt. Frank watched him from narrowed eyes. Klaywelder folded his arms. "I just wanted to get this whole little scene down on film, Arto. All right, now tell 'em." Frank showed the barest instant of hesitation. Klaywelder smiled to himself. He reached into his tunic and tossed Frank a neat blue packet. Frank caught the object without looking at it. "Travel Clearance," said Klaywelder. "Ship's Registry, Ownership Certificate, Parole Papers and Federation Tourist Visa." "Tourist Visa," Frank repeated and looked at him without expression. Then he turned his head and nodded slightly at the two guards. They pressed their speedsters to life and roared off across the field. "You can turn off the gimmicks now," said Frank. "If you had them on in the first place." "I did," said Klaywelder. He pressed another stud. "I'm not under arrest, then?" "No." Frank faced Klaywelder squarely. "You're not under arrest. What you're under is a thirtytwo-hour surveillance until you break atmosphere." "That's harrassment -- " "You can forget the guardhouse law, Klaywelder," Frank said flatly. "Just remember this. As Federation Customs Officer on PharIF alell Four I can arrest you if you break the law here, lock you up, seal your ship or send you right back to Barrion for breaking parole. I'll do that, Klaywelder, if you so much as step on the grass. Understood?" Klaywelder nodded. "Just # set the record straight," Frank added quietly, "I know why you're here. I've even got a fair idea where you've been." He glanced up at the ship's dark hull. "I can smell contraband fur, Klaywelder -- behind eighteen inches of titaniuirf. I'm sure you have a nice hoard in there. I'm just as sure you could turn the whole cache into carbon before I could get a Search  Seizure." Frank shook his head. "I wouldn't go to the trouble. Just remember -- " he poked a menacing finger at Klaywelder -- "you're not dealing with animals here. The Pharalellians are intelligent beings under Federation protection. You lay one hand on a Pharalell pelt -- " "Arto!" Klaywelder let an expression of shock cross his face. "Uhuh. Sure." Frank stared at him distastefully. "I forgot. You're a tourist. Just don't you forget, Klaywelder." With a final look of disdain, he mounted his speedster and disappeared across the blue tarmac. outer fringes of the law -- and somewhat beyond -- Klaywelder had learned to maintain an outer calm in spite of inner feelings. It was difficult to hold onto that control now. Difficult? It was all he could do to keep from shouting, jumping up and down, turning handsprings. Arto Frank was right, of course. There was indeed a lovely cache of furs beneath the metallic fruitcake of his deck -- heavy, cobalt-blue Rhinofox from Claxin, incredibly fine Sapphurs from Ebbinode and fifty-thousand rare microfurs from Deserexx -- inch-long platinum pelts from the tiny minkmice, who conveniently welded themselves together in death to form long, silky stoles. And all those goodies looked like so much boar bristle next to what he was seeing now. He strolled beneath the feathery, sage-blue trees in the central plaza of Ochassh, the town nearest Pharalell's sole spaceport. He felt a little like an ant at a convention of beetles. The Pharalellians were roughly the size of teenage elephants but there was nothing remotely elephantine about them. They strolled gracefully and majestically about the plaza -- four long legs moving in rhythm with shorter forearms hanging from shoulder height. If a prize Afghan were mated with an oversized anteater, Klaywelder decided, their progeny might look something like a Pharalellian. But Klaywelder only absently noted these minor characteristics -- for covering those great bodies from head to toe was the most indescribably glorious fur he had ever seen. It was finer than a spider's gossamer strands. It had the sheen of a lovely woman's hair by moonlight, the sparkle of a dewcovered leaf in early morn, just touched by the sun. And it came in blacker than jet, in breathtaking amber, in fleeting cream -- and in every other shade he could imagine. Knowinghis special customers as he did, Klaywelder was sure each pelt -- just to be ultra-conservative -- Klaywelder gave up. Counting credits in stacks that high made him dizzy. He played tourist for the rest of the afternoon. He bought examples of carved Dinii wood, a favorite Pharalell souvenir. He sent half a dozen postcards to people he had never heard of and ignored Arto Frank's man, who had not been more than twenty yards behind him all day. At sundown, he walked back to the ship, had a leisurely meal and fell into a peaceful sleep. His dreams were so erotic and furry he almost blushed passing the mirror on the way in to breakfast. Klaywelder had managed to stay out of jail more often than he'd been forced to stay in. He was sure, in his own mind, this was because he took his work seriously and went about each job with a surgeon's care. He had learned a lot about Pharalellians before landing on the planet. He knew they were extremely religious, exhaustingly polite and unbelievably naive. All three qualities placed them in an almost textbook Catewere rigidly protected by Federation edict against people like Klaywelder. On the other hand, the Pharalellians' own mores and manners tied Arto Frank's hands very nicely. Frank could in no way warn the Pharalellians against him. Discourtesy to any living creature -- and that included bad-mouthing fur thieves -- was a most extreme no-no. Frank, then, could not make a move until and if Klaywelder stepped out of line. And that Klaywelder wasn't about to do -- certainly not in any way discernible to Arto Frank. square -- large even by Pharalellian standards. Sun-washed white stone flowed into subtle pastels of pink and green. A high, ornate metal gate graced a vinecovered entryway. The big Pharalellian moved sedately out of his doorway and into the street. Klaywelder faultlessly allowed himself to be crowded off the stone walk. He flailed his arms wildly, then collapsed in a horrible heap. He lay there unmoving, his head cocked ominously against the curb. IF The Pharalellian stiffened, then cringed visibly. "Siim shave me!" it cried. "What have I done?" Klaywelder moaned. The Pharalellian swooped down and laid a beautifully furry hand across his brow. "I am Steressh-shi," it said gently. "You will call me Garii, please. It is a name reserved for intimate friends who have known me at least forty seasons. You have by my discourtesy earned the right to use it. Are you hurt badly?" Klaywelder sat up and blinked. "I'm all right. I think." He shook his head. Then his eyes widened. "Oh, no -- " Garii stiffened. "You are injured, then?" "No, it's not that." Klaywelder began frantically searching the street around him. "My physical body is of no consequence. Not when my spiritual well-being is threatened." Garii's eyes quivered under his furry brow. "Your -- spiritual -- " "Yes." Klaywelder nodded. "I can't seem to find my pouch. It was here -- I wear it around my neck on a silver chain -- " The Pharalellian bent down to join the search. "This pouch -- it is important to you?" Klaywelder sighed. "It is only my ticket into Paradise, nothing more." Garii sucked in a deep breath. "It contains the nail parings of my father and his fathers before him," Klaywelder explained somberly. "As I am the ninth son of the ninth virgin, the pouch containing the male spirits of my family is naturally in my trust." "Yes, naturally." Garii was openly trembling now. "Our ways are strikingly similar." "You noticed that?" Klaywelder peered under a loose bit of paving. "Actually, that's why I've been so anxious to visit Pharalell Four. I truly believe my people have a strong spiritual kinship with yours." "Oh, yes -- indeed!" Tears rolled down Garii's eyes, staining his silvery pelt a light cobalt blue. "And I, through gross stupidity, have banned your soul from the Thousand Rooms of Infinite Pleasure!" "It's nothing, really," said Klaywelder. Garii swept great hands to his face and moaned. "If you will permit me I shall begin Atonement by tearing out my visual organs. It is a small thing -- but a start -- " "No, please," said Klaywelder. "Ah -- there's my pouch. It was under your foot all the time." Garii stifled another moan. "Now I have trod upon your fathers. Visual organs alone will not suffice." "No problem," Klaywelder said  easily. "They're found." He hooked the pouch around his neck. "That's what's important." The Pharalellian gently helped him to his feet. "You must enter my house, now. I have much indebtedness to overcome." "Oh, no." Klaywelder yawned absently. "I wouldn't consider disturbing you." Garii's mouth opened in horror. "I could not blame you for refusing. I have no right to ask. Still -- " he faced Klaywelder with pleading eyes -- "I beg you not to leave me with no chance of Atonement." Klaywelder watched the sun form fascinating whorls of color on Garii's fur. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Arto Frank's man frowning in puzzlement at the edge of the plaza. "All right," he said finally. "If you really insist." "My gratitude is unbounded, sir." Klaywelder shrugged. "You can call me Klay." spend the remainder of his stay on Pharalell IV in his home. Klaywelder declined and the Pharalellian nearly removed his visual organs again before it was explained that Klaywelder could not possible spend nights outside his ship since his ancestral altars were located there and could not be moved. Garii understood. But during the daylight hours Klay must allow his host the opportunity to work at full Atonement. That, Klaywelder agreed, seemed fair enough. Klaywelder was not about to spend a night away from the Glory B. Not that Arto Frank could possibly do any damage there but Klaywelder did not intend to give him the chance. Besides that, he wanted Frank to establish a normal Klaywelder day-night pattern in his mind. Frank pulled up beside him on the narrow road from Ochassh to the spaceport. Klaywelder greeted him with a slightly lopsided grin. He was more than a little high -- mentally and physically. Wine had flowed freely at the party, and Garii made certain his guest-of-honor's cup was never empty. Every swallow, it seemed, was a step closer to full Atonement. There was more. Klaywelder was dizzy from mingling with the twenty or thirty Pharalellians assembled to meet him. Each one's pelt was more magnificent and multi-hued than any he had imagined before he came to Pharalell IV. Frank studied him. "You're going ahead with it, aren't you?" he said Finally. "I can read it all over you." He shook his head. "Klaywelder -- " "I don't know what you're talking about, ' r said Klaywelder. "I'm IF up to my ears in Pharalellian wine at the moment, Arto. My host -- Steressh-shi, to you -- I can't reveal his intimate name to strangers but -- " Frank's speedster jerked ahead abruptly, wheeled to block Klaywelder's path. "Listen," Frank said darkly, "I know what it's all about. I've known since the minute you set down here. You can't pull it off. Don't even try, Klaywelder -- " Klaywelder sighed. "I sense deep spiritual conflicts within you, Arto. At evening devotions I shall ask my ancestors to bring peace to your troubled soul." Frank made a pointed remark about Klaywelder's ancestors and their relation to Klaywelder himself. Then he left in a cloud of dust and disappeared down the road. Atonement, Klay, and because I consider you a spiritual brother whose devotion transcends the boundaries between us, I hope you will allow me one more privilege." "Only ask," said Klaywelder. "You have noticed the great door at the end of my quarters?" "I may have," said Klaywelder, who had noticed little else since he had become Garii's guest. "That door leads to the Shrine of my Ancestors," said Garii. "I would be honored if you would accompany me there." Klaywelder lowered his eyes to hide his excitement. 'T'he toenails of my fathers are pleased, Garii." His heart pounded against his chest. His research on Pharalellian religion had been very specific about ancestral shrines. Garii pulled a lavish key from the depths of his silvery fur. He inserted the key in the great door and something clicked. The massive panel swung open. Klaywelder held back a gasp. The room was as big as an auditorium. Dark, somber columns arched from the walls and met high above in a domed ceiling. A single shaft of sunlight fell from a high pane, giving the great vault an aura of eternal twilight. Nearly a hundred candles set in dark red glass circled the walls -- and spread carefully over the stone floor before each candle was a magnificent golden pelt. Golden... Klaywelder could hardly believe his eyes. If living Pharalell pelts were indescribable -- what could you say about these? "It is our belief," Garii said reverently, "that the degree of virtue attained by a Pharalellian is later reflected in the tone of his pelt. I am most pleased that my fathers and their fathers are all of respectable hues." You can say that again... Garii led him silently about the room and Klaywelder noted that a small earthen pot of wine and a clay dish of fruit had been placed before each glowing candle. "That is a part of my duty," Garii explained proudly. "As the reigning male in my family, I have been accorded this privilege. Each day I bring fresh offerings of reverence." He lowered his big head. "To do so brings great honor to me and my house." Garii laid a gentle hand on Klay's arm. "Come, my friend -- now I would show you Shastalian, greatest of my ancestors." Klaywelder followed past long rows of gleaming, golden pelts. Finally Garii stopped. "There -- " he pointed -- "Shastalian, grandfather of grandfathers. A saintly creature and the most famed of all Pharalellians." Klaywelder wanted to cry. He could hardly bear to hold his eyes on the rippling sea of gold at his feet. He was here -- this close to it. A planet's ransom and then some in one glorious pelt. Not that it really mattered but he wished briefly that he had been a little more imaginative about his own 'religion.' Somehow ancestral nail parings just didn't quite cut it next to Shastalian. "You see, Klay," Garii explained solemnly, "we consider the Pharalellian body to be unimportant. We are held within its bonds only a little while -- but Eternal Life resides in the Pelt. When we are fortunate enough to move into that Loftier Plane the troubles, cares and Atonements of this existence are left in the poor vessel we term the body. Your beliefs are similar, I think." "Oh, yes," Klaywelder said absently, "very similar, Garii." "When the time comes for one of us to pass on to that Higher Existence he is taken to a most sacred place. You have seen the large building on the other side of the plaza? The one trimmed in black and gold?" Klaywelder nodded. "That is Fakash-il Shrai. It means Abode of the Skinners." Klaywelder swallowed. He looked up at Garii. "The -- skinners?" "Yes. It is a most dedicated profession. Skinners are chosen from among only the highest and worthiest of chans. Since the body of a Pharalellian is never seen without his pelt the Skinner candidates are blinded at birth, of course." "Of course," said Klaywelder. He decided this was one phase of Pharalellian religion he could have done without. "They are very skilled members of the Priesthood," Garii went on. "They must be, since it is a delicate thing to transfer the living soul from the body to the Pelt." Klaywelder stiffened. "The -- living soul? You mean -- " "Certainly," said Garii. "There must be breath still in the body IF when the Skinners begin their task." He spread his hands. "Or else the soul would not go on to Eternal life, would it?" Klaywelder felt a cold chill creep up the back of his neck. He wondered how many Pharalellian ancients, at that last moment, looked up at the sharp blade and blinded eyes of the faithful Skinners -- and decided they weren't quite ready for Eternal Life as a golden rug. "You seem far away, my friend." Garii's voice held puzzlement. Klaywelder cleared his throat. "I -- was, Garii. I'm so overwhelmed by what I've seen, by what you've told me -- I fear I lapsed into meditation for a moment. I hope you'll forgive me." Garii sighed happily. "Don't apologize, Klay. To think that you have actually experienced the feelings I have known here myself." He stared gravely at Klaywelder. "Might I presume that my Atonement is now complete?" Klaywelder glanced once more at the great golden pelt of Shastalian, grandfather of grandfathers. Damn thing must weigh a good four or five hundred pounds. Still. "Yes, Garii," he said finally. "I'd say that just about does it." K laywelder eased through the lower hatch of the Glory B and flattened himself against the cold concrete below the ship. It was long past the middle hour of Pharalell's night. The light in Arto Frank's dome had winked out some time before but Klaywelder had waited patiently in the darkened cabin. Even in the Blacsuit, he felt as conspicuous as a blazing beacon crawling on his belly across the broad field. The skintight garment ate every photon of available light -- still, he imagined Frank's cold eyes cutting a blinding swath through the darkness. He was sure radar had his ship bracketed to the ground. If Glory B's hull rose as much as a halfinch or the power level of her engines suddenly changed -- every alarm in the area would scream itself into a blue hemorrhage. He was banking on the fact that Arto Frank would be expecting a ship to leave the field-not a man. And he prayed silently to his ancestors' mythical toenails that Pharalell was too small a post to include body sensors as standard equipment. At the rear of Garii's house, he pulled a small gravitic unit from under his Blacsuit and attached it to his belt. On half power he lifted himself over the high wall, then pulled himself smoothly along, inches above the clay shingles, and up the arching dome. With a suction attached to the single pane, he lifted the glass out easily with quick use of his cutter. Then, slowly, he lowered the grav's dial to one. Weight returned and pressed him against the tiles. He removed the unit and hinged a thin, sloping metal wedge to its base, forcing the wedge into its "load" position against a heavy spring. Finally he poked a shielded flash through the dome's hole, let a thin smile crease his lips. There it was -- dazzlingly bright even in the dim shaft of light. Shastalian. Klaywelder bit his lip. Here comes the tricky part... He placed the grav unit just inside the edge of the dome, then flipped his remote until he was sure the unit's weight had been sufficiently reduced to hold itself. When he was certain, he increased the weight and watched it slowly descend to the floor. It touched bottom a good eighteen feet from Shastalian. Klaywelder wiped sweat from his brow. The unit had no horizontal control. The trick was quickly to raise the unit a few feet, shut off its power, let it fall, then raise it again before it hit the floor -- and repeat the procedure until he could get the thing moving in a series of parabolic arcs toward Shastalian. Klaywelder took a deep breath. The first time his hand trembled and the unit fell nearly to the floor. He tried again. He was getting the hang of the thing now, and the unit was moving in slow, graceful arcs -- luckily, in the general direction of the Shastalian pelt. Ten feet. Fifteen. Seventeen -- now. Klaywelder gently halted the unit and lowered it to the floor. His heart pounded against his chest. He was only inches from the pelt -- he didn't dare press his luck further. Wiping his brow once more, he twisted the remote to full weight, pressing the unit below hard against the floor. Click ! Klaywelder winced. The noise seemed to echo off the stone walls -- was much louder than he had expected. But -- it was done. The spring-loaded wedge, set off by the unit's weight, whipped a thin steel tongue under the edge of the pelt. By raising the unit inches at a time, Klaywelder slowly wormed the wedge under the heavy fur, caterpillar style. He glanced at the horizon. A thin line of pink was edging the low hills to the east. He turned away and concentrated on the problem below. There was no more time -- the unit was nearly under the center of the pelt and it would have to do. He closed his eyes and turned the dial to full power. Shastalian lifted slowly off the floor and rose toward the ceiling, a shadowy golden ghost in the dim shaft of his light. The pelt nuzzled up against the top of the dome only yards away. Klaywelder extended a thin metal tube to the right length and gaffed Shastalian as he would a giant, furry fish. He had one more moment of panic when the pelt stuck in the dome's narrow hole. Then he was home free. Klaywelder touched the pelt for the first time. A chill ran through his whole body. There was absolutely no way to compare Shastalian to anything. prize, he pressed a small wafer to his throat and mouthed a single sub-vocal command. A few miles away, a relay clicked in Glory B s computers. Silent engines whined into life. And at the same time, alarms hooted and moaned across the field and bright beams stabbed angrily into the sky. Glory B rose swiftly from the spaceport in a low, ground-hugging curve, homing in on Klaywelder. For a moment blue strings of heat spat at her from the field. They halted abruptly. At that angle, Frank would soon have been sizzling the roofs off Pharalell homes and buildings. Klaywelder grinned. The ship streaked over the outskirts of Ochassh and came to a hovering stop three feet above him. He let the grav unit lift Shastalian into the port, then pulled himself up. The port snapped shut and Klaywelder bounded to the control cabin. He threw himself into the command seat and slapped one hand full across the board. Glory B lunged upward in teethshattering acceleration. Blue fire spiderwebbed against the hull for a brief moment. Then Pharalell IV shrank to a bright green globe against blackness. ready be on Red Alert -- but space was terrifyingly vast and the patrols were spread pitifuly thin. He would be long gone when they finally got to where he was supposed to be. A quick stop on Filo to open the scrambled hold, then a first-class plastjob for himself -- a good one, this time, from eyes to toes -- and then Earth. He broke out his last sixteenounce steak from the locker and topped it with a bottle of Pharalellian wine. In comfortable lethargy he strolled toward his quarters, stopping by the entry port to gaze once more at Shastalian. He would have liked to have spread the big pelt out to its full length but there was no place in the ship nearly large enough to accommodate the great golden fur. Stretched out on his bunk, Klaywelder thought about Arto Frank and grinned tiredly. Poor Arto. He was, though, genuinely sorry about Garii. Garii was all right. He hoped Shastalian's loss didn't hit him too hard. Still, he reasoned with Klaywelder logic, Garii had lots of ( Please turn to page #) serve the usual amenities required For many moons, almost as between a visiting magician and his many as there are over his planet, host, but he roams the countryside Shoogar, the local magician-inwith little regard for the sensibiliresidence, has been predicting dities of the local gods. Shoogar and saster. It arrives, quite suddenly, in his skeptical friend Lant, fearing the person of As-a Shade-of-Purthat the gods will wreak divine retple-Gray -- Purple, for short -- a ribution on the land, order Purple practicing sorcerer from a land far to cease his activities. Purple pays beyond the dust clouds who sets little heed. his flying nest down in Shoogar's Then Shoogar insists that the indistrict. truding magician teach him some Illustrated by Jack Gaughan and Tim Kirk of his more ingenious tricks -- not least his magnificent flying spell. Purple tries to explain that his "magic" (the only word the speaker-spell can find to translate Purple's designation for his tricks) is based on the laws of nature and that Shoogar must be patient and study long and hard in order to master such legerdemain. Shoogar is not to be appeased with that study-now-spell-later nonsense. He and Lant go off to perform the customary rites preparatory to invoking powerful curses. Standing on the banks of the pond where the flying nest rests, Shoogar casts enough spells to destroy the nest and put an end to that meddling magician forever. Satisfied that he has defended his honor, Shoogar turns to see Purple standing, unhurt and unimpressed, on the other bank. Foiled again VI floating behind. Every eye was on him. His hands were on his hips as he looked thoughtfully down at his nest. How long had he been standing there? "Fascinating," he said. And he started briskly down the slope. His devices followed. The nest sat like a great egg in the middle of the river. Water backed up behind it, flowed in great torrents past its bulging flank, splashed angrily up and over the trampled shore. Angry mud creatures clambered over its dull black surface, scratching determinedly at the spell designs. Gobbets of mud and bloody fur streaked its sides -- but still the spells of Shoogar were visible, almost arrogantly upright. That made me uneasy. My eyes searched for the dents in the stranger's ruined nest, the dents surely put there by the horns of the rams. I couldn't find them. Purple strode straight down the slope and into the water. Not a droplet of mud stuck to those peculiar boots of his -- in contrast to Shoogar's legs and mine, which were mud to the hip. A pair of mud-skunks attacked the magician as he entered the water. Purple ignored them and they couldn't seem to get a grip on his boots. He stood under the bulge of the nest and we waited for his scream of fury. Carefully, with a small, edged tool, he began scraping off bits of Shoogar's curse-signs and putting them into small transparent containers. His mindless speakerspell continued to translate his ramblings. "Fascinating -- the power of these fluids-secreted-for-the-control-of-bodily-functions is like nothing I've ever seen before. I wonder if these effects could be produced artificially?" Twice he sniffed at what he had scraped off and twice muttered a word the speakerspell did not translate. When he finished, he dipped his hands in the river to wash them, incidentally offending Filfo-mar, the usually gentle river god. Purple turned to the door of his nest. It was flush with the curved wall but outlined in orange to make it visible. He punched at a square pattern of bumps on the nest. The door slid open and Purple disappeared inside. We waited. Would he continue to occupy his nest, living in the middle of our defiled river? The flying nest hummed and rose twenty feet into the air. I screamed with the rest, a wordless scream of rage. The nest turned in an instant from black to silver. It must have become terribly slippery, for every particle of mud and blood and potion IF from Shoogar's spell slid down the sides, formed a glob hanging from the bottom of the nest, and dropped in a lump into the river. The nest again turned black. It moved horizontally across the land and dropped gently to the ground -- just a few yards west of where it had stood an hour ago. Only now it rested at the edge of a region of churned mud, where the rams and mud creatures had fought to destroy it. I could see Shoogar sag where he stood. I feared for my village and for Shoogar's sanity and my own. If even Shoogar could not defend us from the mad magician we were all doomed. An angry rumble came from the villagers as Purple emerged. Purple frowned and said, "I wish I knew what's gotten you people so angry." Somebody threw a spear at him. I couldn't blame the lad. No sound, no pattern of mere words, could properly have answered the magician. But the young man, enraged beyond sanity, had hurled his bone spear at the stranger's back -- and worst of all, without a blessing! It sruck Purple hard in the back and bounced off to the side without penetrating. Purple toppled, not like a man, but like a statue. I had the irrational conviction that for a single instant Purple had become as hard as stone. But the instant was over. Immediately he was climbing to his feet. The spear, of course, had done no harm at all. One cannot attack a magician with an unblessed spear. The boy would have to be brought before the Council of Elders. If the village survived that long. T HE suns rose together, the blue sun silhouetted off-center within the other's great fuzzyedged and crimson disc. I woke at noon. The evacuation was already well underway. My wives and spratlings had already done a good deal of the packing, though the fear of disturbing my sleep had slowed them somewhat. Under my supervision and the necessary discipline the rest of the preparations progressed quickly. Even so, we were very nearly the last family to leave the village. The lower rim of the red sun was already nearing the mountains when I dropped behind the procession of my wives to tarry at Shoogar's nest. Shoogar looked tired but curiously determined. His eyes were alive and dancing and his fingers moved with a life of their own, weaving spell knots into a leather strap. I knew better than to speak to him while he was in the midst of a duel. For though no formal declaration had yet been made by Purple, this was a duel. Perhaps Purple thought that, as long as no duel was declared, Shoogar would sit peacefully by and allow him to continue with his duel-mongering actions. But I knew Shoogar better than that. The fierce glow burning in his eyes confirmed what I -- and all of the rest of the villagers -- already knew. Shoogar would not rest until there was one less magician in the village. I hurried after my wives. Burdened as we were, we would be traveling well into the night. I had even removed the hobbles from my women so they could travel faster. It would not do to underestimate the seriousness of the situation. We had reached our destination by the time the moons were overhead. Most of the families of the villagers were settled on the steppes to the north, a series of long sloping rises that overlooked the river and the cluster of giant trees that bordered the place we had left. The encampment was a sprawling place of lean-tos and tents, smoky campfires and shrill womboys. Already scavengers were rooting busily underfoot and even before we had selected a campsite many of my own spratlings had melted away into the bustle. Although it was already well into the night, few slept. The eerie glow df the moons gave us a twilight of neither red nor blue but ghostly gray -- a strange half-real quality for the waiting time before the next step of the duel. An almost festive air pervaded the settlement. From somewhere in the bachelor's section came the brawling chant of a game of rolling bones and an occasional cry of triumph as one of the players scored a particularly difficult pass. It does not take much to please the lower classes. awaited us in the morning. Hinc and I were standing at the edge of the encampment, looking down the slope toward the village, discussing the forthcoming duel, when we heard a distant sound like a single 'cough from Elcin's throat. We looked down to see a tremendous plume of black smoke wafting through the village treetops. "Look," said Hinc. "Shoogar has started already." "No." I shook my head. "I think he is only warming up. That looked like a preparation spell more than anything else. Something to get the attention of the gods." "Pretty fierce attention-getter," noted Hinc. I nodded. "It's going to be a pretty fierce duel. I wonder if we IF should move again? Farther back." "If we are not already out of range, Lant, we haven't time to get out of range," said Hinc. "Even at a dead run. And even if you are right you could never persuade the others. They are too tired." He was right, of course, but before I could speak we were interrupted by a crowd of frightened women running hysterically through the encampment as fast as their hobbled legs would carry them. They were screaming Purple's name. I caught up with and cuffed my number-three wife to attention. "What is the matter with you?" I demanded. "It's the mad magician. He's trying to talk to the women -- " "The mad magician -- here?" "He brought his nest to the spring where we wash -- and he's trying to talk to us. He wants to know why we moved." Had the man no self-respect at all? Talking to women? Even from the mad magician I found this hard to believe. I strode purposefully through the crowd, now milling nervously about, women comforting other hysterical women, men interrogating their wives, sprats crying for attention. As I moved toward the spring some of the men caught up with and followed along behind me. They were muttering nervously. It was as the women had said. Purple had brought his nest to a spot just above the encampment, near the spring the women had chosen for washing. The great black egg-shape was closed and the magician was nowhere to be seen. The others waited only long enough to see that the women had spoken the truth. Then they turned and fled quickly back to the settlement. Hinc and I exchanged a wordless glance. Why had Purple followed us? Was he fleeing from his duel? I had never heard of such a thing before. What did he want of the villagers? I circled the nest warily. It looked much as it had on the fearful night when 'I first saw it. I crept closer. There, lightly pressed into the dust, were the imprints of Purple's strange shaped boots. But where was Purple now? Suddenly, that booming hollow voice. "Lant -- just the person I was hoping to see." This was too much for Hinc. He turned and disappeared down the slope after the others. I ached to join him but I had to find out what the magician was up to. The door to the nest slid open and Purple stepped out, his strange paunchy shape oddly disquieting. He had a fearful grin on his face and advanced toward me as if I were an old friend. His speakerspell drifted along behind. "Lant," he said, moving closer. "Perhaps you can tell me -- why have you people moved your village? The other spot was so much nicer." I looked at him curiously. Could it be that he did not know of the duel? Was it possible for anyone to be that naive? Well, so much the better -- his ignorance was Shoogar's asset. I certainly would not tell him. Why should a layman be concerned with the affairs of magicians? I didn't want to get involved. "Yes," I said, "the other spot was nicer." "Then why do you not stay there?" "We hope to return soon," I said. "After the time of the conjunction." I pointed to the sky where the suns were setting together. Ouells's blue-white point near the bottom of Virn's crimson disc. "Oh, yes," Purple nodded. "Very impressive." Turning, he gazed admiringly at the ground behind him, "And it makes the shadows very pretty, too." "Very pretty -- " I stopped in mid-sentence. Sharp and blue the suns were, each with a bloody fringe -- constant reminder that the time of terror was upon us. Was the man fearless or foolish? I shut up. "Very pretty," Purple repeated. "Very, very pretty. Well, I will remain here with you and your people. If I can be of any assistance -- " Something within me shriveled and died. "You -- you're going to stay here?" "Yes, I think so. I'll go back to the village when you people do. This will give me a chance to test the mountain area for a day or so." "Oh," I said. He seemed to lose interest in me then, turned and went back to his nest. I waited to see how he caused the door to slide open. I had been puzzling about it since I had first seen him do the trick. There was a pattern of bumps in the surface of the nest wall. Apparently this had something to do with the opening of the nest, for he tapped at these in a quick precise pattern. I presumed that the pattern must have been the spell to open the door but he activated it too quickly for me to see and memorize it. He stepped inside. The door slid shut and he was gone. Dejectedly I trudged back to the encampment -- or what was left of the encampment. Already the villagers were fleeing from their makeshift homes. Men were hastily packing travel kits -- women were calling for spratlings. Children and dogs ran excitedly through the crowd, kicking up dust, chickens and scavengers. Panic-stricken families were alIF ready moving across the steppes, upslope, downslope, sideways, anywhere, just as long as it was away from Purple, the magician who brought disaster with him. My own wives were standing about nervously, waiting for me. Numbers one and two were trying to comfort number three, who was most upset. "He kept trying to talk to me -- He kept trying to talk to me -- " "It wasn't your fault," I told her. "You will not be beaten for his trespass. You did right to run." My words had an immediate calming effect on the distraught woman, more so than all the stroking and soothing of the other two wives, once more proving that only a man can know how to handle the unusual situation. "Pick up your packs," I told them. "We must be on our way." "On our way?" questioned one. "But we just got here." "We must move again," I said. "Before this area is blasted. The mad magician's animal manners have blinded you to the true danger. Shoogar will follow Purple up here. Now pick up your packs or I will beat all three of you." They did as I bade them -- but with no small amount of grumbling. Even though I thought to remove their hobbles so as to speed the journey, they grumbled -- and for once they had cause. For a day and a half we had fled the site of the coming duel. Purple had easily, thoughtlessly nullified that effort with only a few moments of flight. Within an hour the encampment was deserted. As we moved down the hill I thought I saw Purple moving like a lost soul through the hastily erected lean-to shelters. W E were the only family to return to the village. Where the others had fled I did not know. Probably south, away from the whole region. They had likely lost all interest in watching the duel even from a distance. Now they wanted only to save their skins. We approached the village warily in the fading daylight. The blue sun winked out behind the edge of the world, leaving only the great bulge of the red. The mists rising off the distant swamps took fire from the glow. It was as if the whole western edge of the world were aflame. I could almost smell the burning of it, a smell of disaster on the evening wind. I left my wives at the nest and headed toward Shoogar's. As I made my way through the village I could see the many effects of his spellcasting. Here and there some of our proudest housetrees lay on their sides, as if they had been blasted out of the ground by great forces. Others seemed to have withered and died where they stood. Here and there a nest lay on the ground, shattered walls laying it open to the elements. Everywhere were great patches of dying vegetation. The scavenger animals were gone. There were no sounds of nightbirds. Except for my wives, myself and, of course, Shoogar, the village was empty. And dead. Even if Shoogar won the duel no one would ever be able to return to this village. Nor would anyone want to. Its stability had been permanently destroyed. All was silent and brooding. The dead grass crunched under my feet as I approached Shoogar's nest. I knocked cautiously on the wall. When he appeared I gasped in horror. Shoogar had gone gray and haggard. New circles had appeared under his eyes and his skin was discolored here and there with angry red patches as if he had been caught too close to one of his own spells. But what startled me most was that Shoogar had shaved off all of his fur. He was totally naked and hairless -- a frightening caricature of the mad magician. He greeted me with a wan smile, grateful for my company. I began to lay out the ritual supper for him. It is traditional that on the night before a duel, the men of the village serve a meal of faith to their patron warlock. But the others had fled, so that duty had fallen on me alone. I stood silently by and waited, no serving him at each gesture or grunt. It was not much of a meal but it was the best I could prepare under such circumstances. Shoogar seemed not to mind. He ate slowly, savoring every bite. He looked tired and his hands trembled as he moved. But he ate heartiiy By the time he laid aside his bone food-stabber the red sun had long disappeared from the west. The moons had not yet appeared. He moved slowly. But whether from satiation or exhaustion was impossible to tell. "Where are the others?" he asked. "They've fled." I explained what happened. Shoogar listened carefully, occasionally picking at some previously overlooked morsel in the bowls before him. "I did not expect the stranger to move," he muttered. "It is a bad thing -- but clever. Now I must alter my spell to account for this new factor. You say he tried to talk to the women?" He bit into a fruit. I nodded. "My number-three wife." Shoogar spat out seeds in disgust. "The man must have no taste. If one were going to lower oneself to talk to women -- one should at least choose the woman of a worthy rival." "You have no women," I pointed out. "It is still an insult to me." IF "Perhaps he does not know any better. Remember, he said that the ways of his homeland are very different from ours." "Ignorance could be the excuse for his bad manners," Shoogar grumbled, "but only madness could explain the man's trespasses against common sense." "It is said that a madman possesses the strength of ten." Shoogar gave me a look. "I know what is said. Most of the time it is I who said it first." We sat in silence. After a while I asked, "What do you think will happen on the morrow?" "There will be a duel. One will win, one will lose." "But who?" "If it were possible to tell who will win -- there would be no need for duels." Again we sat in silence. This was the first time Shoogar had referred to the duel with any indication of doubt. Always before he had expressed confidence in his own abilities and skepticism for the powers of Purple. But now he would not even venture to say what the outcome of the duel would be. I feared for my friend. "Lant," he said abruptly. "I will need your help." I looked up startled. "Me? But I know nothing of magic. You have told me countless times that I am a fool. Is it wise to risk such an important undertaking in the hands of a -- " "Shut up, Lant," he said softly. I shut. "All you have to do is help me transport my spell-casting equipment up the mountain to Purple's nest. We will need two bicycles or some pack animals. I cannot carry it all myself." I breathed easier. "Oh, well, in that case -- " We were on our way within the hour. reached the site of the encampment. The deserted lean-tos and shelters stood bleak and empty in the night, like some fearful city of the dead. I found myself trembling. We rode through it wordlessly, finally parking our bicycles on the slope just below the spring. We could hear it babbling carelessly in the dark. Taking care to keep as quiet as possible, we edged forward, up the hill. I held my breath till we topped the rise, let it out in a whoosh. Yes, the nest was still there. I believe I would have cried bitter tears had it been gone. I am sure that to have lost his enemy would have killed Shoogar. The frustration would have been too much. We crept back to the deserted encampment, there to wait the coming of dawn. I ached for a chance to sleep but Shoogar gave me a potion to keep me awake. To keep him company, he said. He began laying out his equipment, organizing and sorting. "If I can only take him by surprise," he muttered. He paused to oil a metal knife. "And if only there were some way to draw him away from his nest -- " "That's not needed," I blurted. "He will probably leave it by himself. He is testing again. He said this when I spoke to him. He wants to test the mountain." "This is a bit of good fortune. I hope that he tests the mountain the same way that he tested the village -- for when he tested the village he was gone from his nest almost the entire day." IF "What if he doesn't? What if he returns before the curse is finished?" "Let us hope he does not." "Can't you do something?" Shoogar paused, thought for a moment, then rummaged in his kit. He produced a small leather pouch of dust and another of herbs. "Here, go and spread this dust around the outside of his nest. It is very fine dust; It will float in the air for hours. If he breathes any of it, it will produce a very strong yearning in him. He will not return until that yearning is satisfied." "But what about me?" "When you finish with the dust you will take half of those herbs and chew them well. Swallow them -- when they turn bitter in your mouth but not until they turn bitter. Bring the rest of the herbs back to me, so I may chew them. They will make us both immune to the power of the dust." I nodded, then crept up the hill and did as I was instructed. When I brought the two leather pouches back to Shoogar he was just laying out the last of his equipment. One swollen pouch he handled most carefully. "Powdered magician's hair," he explained. I did not blame him for handling it carefully. He had sacrificed much to produce it -- his squat and shaven body trembled with the cold. Abruptly a troubled look crossed his face. "I am sure that Purple's power is in some way connected with his nest. I must get into it somehow. That is the only part of my curse that I am in doubt about. I must get into that nest." I said, "Today -- I mean, yesterday (for dawn was fast approaching) -- I was able to get close enough to Purple to observe him working his doorspell -- " I explained I had seen a pattern of bumps on the nest wall. Purple had tapped at them in a certain way and the door had slid open. Shoogar listened carefully. "Obviously the order in which he touches the bumps is the way the spell is controlled. Think, Lant. Which bumps did he touch?" "That I did not see." Shoogar cursed, "Then why bother to tell me how to open the door if you do not know? Lant, you are a fool." "I am sorry -- but it happened so quickly. If I could only remember -- " "Lant," Shoogar asked, "have you ever been placed under the spell of the open mind?" I shook my head. "It is a spell of great power. It can be used to make you remember things that you think you have forgotten." "Uh, is it dangerous?" "No more so than any other spell." "Well," I said, picking up my bicycle. "Good luck with your duel, Shoogar. I will see you when it is -- " "Lant," he said evenly. "If you take one more step downslope I will work your name into the curse along with Purple's." I laid the bicycle down again. fearful. I will do my best to protect you. Suddenly you have become a very important part of this duel. The knowledge locked up in your mind may make the difference between success and failure." "But, Shoogar, I am a fool. You have told me that too many times for it to be otherwise. I admit it. I am a fool. You could not be wrong in your judgment of my character. What good could I be to you?" "Lant," said Shoogar, "you are not a fool. Believe me. Sometimes in my quickness of temper I have made rash statements. But I have only the greatest respect for your judgement, Lant. You are not a fool." "Oh, but I am," I insisted. "You are not," Shoogar said. "Besides, it does not take any great mental prowess to remember something as simple as you have described. Even an idiot such as you could do it." "Oh, but I will only be in your way, Shoogar. Please let me return to my family -- " "And have the other men of the village think you a coward?" "It would be small burden to bear -- " Shoogar snapped, "No friend of mine shall wear the brand of coward. You will stay here with me, Lant. And you should be grateful that I care so much for you as a friend." He turned again to the equipment laid out upon the ground. I sighed in resignation and sat down to wait. Dawn was already seeping into the east. Shoogar turned back to me. "Your part in this will be easy, Lant. There is no reason to fear." "But the danger -- " "There will be no danger if you follow my instructions exactly as I give them to you." "I will follow your instructions." "Good. There can be no room for error. Even the tiniest mistake could cost us both our lives." "But you just said there would be no danger." "Not if you follow instructions. Most of the hard work has already been done. Don't forget, I had to construct the equations -- I had to prepare the ingredients and stabilize the symbology necessary to make the various incantations and potions work. All you have to do is help me place them in the proper place at the proper time." "I thought all I had to do was help you open the nest -- " "Of course. But if you are goIF ing to be there anyway, you might as well help me with the rest." "Oh," I said. "And whatever you do, you must not try to speak to me. This is very important. When the suns rise we shall begin -- and once we begin I must not be distracted at all. Except as is necessary to the curse I will not speak. Do you understand?" I nodded. "Good. Now listen. There is one more thing. A very important thing. It has nothing to do with the curse, Lant, but for your own protection you must be exceedingly careful not to lesnerize." "Lesnerize?" I asked. "What is lesnerize?" But he did not explain. He pointed instead to the east. Day had seeped over the hills. Shoogar fell to his knees and began chanting to the suns. The curse had begun. T HE first step was a ritual cleansing. Then came the sanctification, the prayer for forgiveness, to the suns, Ouells and Virn, and to the moons, all eleven of them -- now in the configuration of Eccar the Man, who had served the gods so well that he had been elevated to godhood himself. Other prayers were offered to the river god, the wind god, the gods of violence and magic -- and, of course, to Elcin, the thunder god. We offered sacrifice to all of them, and sought their blessings in the endeavors to come. We prayed that they would blame the stranger and not us for the affronts about to be done to them. Then we cleansed ourselves again. We gathered up the spellcasting equipment and crept up the slope to where the mad magician's nest waited. Behind and below us themist thinned as the two moons rose higher. We could see for miles. We topped the rise slowly. Slightly below us, on the other side, was the black egg of Purple's nest, waiting grim and brooding in the silent morning. It was closed, but was it deserted? I wanted to ask Shoogar what the nest step was, but his last instruction made me fear even to breathe without being told. Shoogar must have sensed my indecision. He said, "Now we wait." The suns rose higher in the sky. The last of the mists disappeared from the land. And the egg sat silent on the steppes. The only sound was the gurgling of the spring. Abruptly the door of the nest slid open and Purple emerged. He stretched slowly, took a deep breath, let it out with a sigh. I wondered if the yearning dust was still floating in the air. If so, Purplehad just filled his lungs with it. He showed no reaction as he closed the door of his nest behind him. If the dust was working it was very subtle. We held our breaths as he began to climb up the slope of the hills. Shortly he disappeared over the top of one and we were alone with the nest. Shoogar scrambled eagerly for it. I followed in his wake, not quite as eager. Shoogar surveyed the nest carefully. He strode around it three times, finally coming to a stop in front of the oval outline that was the door. This first important step was the crucial one. Shoogar positioned me in the exact spot I had occupied when I saw Purple open his nest. Then he began to cast the spell of the open mind. He brought out a device of glass and held it before my eyes, commanding me to look into it. the past three days had been too much for my friend. I saw no answers within the device of glass. But I did as he said and looked into it. He began chanting at me softly, slowly, in that deep and croaking voice of his. I tried to concentrate on the sound but the crystal thing kept flickering light into my eyes. Nor could I focus my sight upon the thing. It seemed to fade in and out of existence even as Shoogar held it. I tried to follow where it went when it disappeared but could not. The sound of his chanting wove in and out with the flashes of light and all of it together seemed to be whirling and twirling, churning and turning and... the world was... Abruptly I was wide awake. Nothing had happened. Had the spell of the open mind failed? It must have. I remembered nothing. I opened my mouth to speak but Shoogar stopped me. "You did fine, Lant. Just fine." I wondered what he was talking about but he was once more fussing with his equipment. His manner was confident, almost cheerful. He found what he was looking for, a piece of chalk, and proceeded to draw a rune about the square pattern of bumps beside the door. Only once did he speak to me. "You told me almost all of what I need to know, Lant. Almost all. The rest I will fathom for myself." I shrugged and sat down to watch. Obviously he knew what he was doing. He sat cross-legged before the door and began chanting, working himself into a trance. He sat motionless on that patch of ground before the door, the only sounds his thin reedy chant and the gushing of the spring. The suns crept up the sky, Ouells glowing like a blue-white diamond at Virn's fading edge. So much to do, so little time! How long would Purple be gone? Could IF we complete the spell in that time? Shoogar sat silent and unmoving. His eyes were glazed. Occasionally he would give a little grunt. Could Purple throw red fire at a man? At last, when I had begun to fear that Shoogar would never speak again, he rose, stepped to that pattern of bumps and touched four of them in a particular pattern. Nothing happened. Shoogar repeated the touch. Still nothing happened. Shoogar shrugged and returned to his place. Again he went into his trance. This time, after an even greater wait, he approached that door even more cautiously. Once more he tapped out a pattern on the bumps -- the same four, but a different order. Nothing happened again. Shoogar sighed and returned to his squatting position. I began to fear that we might spend the whole day just gaining entry to Purple's nest and have no time left for the cursing. Indeed, I had almost given up all hope of ever completing the task before us when Shoogar rose again. He approached the nest slowly, looked at the bumps for a long time, then touched four of them in a carefully precise manner. And the door to the nest slid open. smile -- but only a small one. There was still much to do. Quickly we gathered up the equipment and moved into Purple's nest. The walls themselves glowed with an odd-colored light -- bright and yellow, it made my eyes see colors that were not there. Slowly, as my vision sorted itself out, I began to see that this nest was furnished like no other nest I had ever seen. All around were tiny glowing eyes, raised knobs and more bumps like those in the pattern outside the door. In the center was a zig-zag piece of padded furniture, a fit couch for a demon. Set into the nest wall just ahead of this were a series of flat plates like windows but infinitely more transparent -- like hardened air. Indeed, the whole nest showed workmanship finer than I had ever seen. Shoogar peered carefully at the fiat plates like windows. Some showed images of the areas around the nest. Others held odd patterns in colored light, carefully drawn lines and curves -- obviously the demon's runes. Shoogar indicated one of these. "Dq you still think he does not use magic?" he asked me -- then, remembering his own injunction against unnecessary chatter, silenced himself. Apparently it was not a very strong injunction, for Shoogar had been muttering back and forth all morning. Perhaps he had only warned me against speaking because he feared I would distract him. Well, he need not have worried; I have too much respect for Shoogar's abilities to question him in the middle of a spell. I opened my mouth to tell him so but he cut me off. Next to the padded thing was a plant, a vegetable well suited for the interior of this nest. It, too, was of a type I had never seen. It was the shape of a white rose but its color -- the leaves were a brilliant shade of -- could such a color be green? I could not believe my eyes. Green is a dull color, almost black; but here it seemed to glow as brightly as any shade of red or blue. I touched the plant, expecting it to be as delicate as any I was familiar with; but here too I received a shock, for the leaves were as stiff and hard as an uncured hide. What a strange world Purple must come from, I found myself thinking -- abruptly, realized that I had fallen into a trap. Obviously this was some plant that ordinarily would have been familiar to me. Purple had simply cursed it. I turned my attention away, began to look for a door leading to the area above. There was none. Apparently the nest included only this one compartment. The rest of its huge interior must be all spell devices. Shoogar had been right all along. Shoogar had spread his travel kit and his equipment on the floor and was methodically organizing the materials he would use first. It was as if he cursed flying nests every day. Abruptly he paused, put a finger into the stubble on his chin and scratched. He began to examine a piece of parchment he took from his cloak -- a checklist. "Yes," he decided after a brief pause. He pulled out the metal knife that I had seen before. "We will begin by defiling the metal." He spat on the knife, then began to carve runes into the surface of the floor. Or tried to. The knife would not penetrate. Frowning, Shoogar pressed harder. The tip of the knife broke. Then the blade snapped in half. Shoogar returned the pieces of the knife to his travel kit without comment and looked at his checklist again. This time he pulled out a pouch of reddish powder, 'the dust of rust. He emptied a bit of it into his hands and blew. A smoky red cloud filled the room. I coughed and he threw me an angry glance. A whirring sound started somewhere. Then a wind blew through the nest, plucking at my hair and clothing. I looked around in fear -- could Purple have trapped the wind god? Even as I looked for traces of such a thing, the reddish dust in the air thinned. Shortly the wind stopped, and the dust was gone with it. There was not even a fine red layer on any of the polished surfaces. Odd. IF Still Shoogar was undismayed. He consulted his list again. Abruptly he produced a ball of fire from under his robe. Then another and another, throwing them. They struck the interior of the nest, sending up acrid sparks and oily smoke. and jets of water spat from apertures in the ceiling. They aimed themselves straight at the fireballs, drenched them to ash in seconds. And then, as Shoogar produced a last fireball from under his robe, they all turned on Shoogar. When the water went off Shoogar turned his hand over and allowed the drenched fireball to drop stickily to the floor. Dripping, he held up his sodden checklist and consulted it again. Water dripped from it onto the floor, then drained away into places we knew not. I felt my hopes draining away with the water. Shoogar had begun three separate attempts -- and all of them had failed. The stranger's magic was much too strong. We were doomed even before we had begun. "Ah, yes--" said Shoogar. "It goes well." I doubted my ears. I dared a question, "Well?" "Obviously, Lant, you have not been paying attention. The nest is equipped with very efficient protective spells. I had to find out what they were, so that I could nullify them. Now let us curse." Shoogar began by inscribing runes on all the surfaces of the nest, floors, walls ceiling, the back of the oddly shaped couch, the panels of knobs, everything. He called upon Fineline, the god of engineers and architects, to blast this nest with a spell of deformity to make it crack and shatter. Onto each of the sacred signs, inscribed with chalk instead of knife, he dripped small portions of several different potions. As they combined they began to smoke and sputter. "Waters of fire, burn and boil," Shoogar urged them. We watched as the fluid ate holes into the runes and surface below. Beautiful. Blasphemy is the heart of a good curse. Next he began to fill the ship with dust. Apparently he wanted to overload the spell of the protective wind, for he blew great clouds of the red dust of rust. The whirring started up immediately but Shoogar kept blowing. "Well, don't just stand there, you goat -- help me." With my help we were able to keep great swirling clouds of rust swirling and churning throughout the entire compartment. The dust of rust is a symbol of time, sacred to several gods at once: Brad of the past, Kronk of the future and Po who causes the decay of all things. When we had run out of the dust of rust, Shoogar continued with a fine white powder. It looked like the grindings of bone. "Aim for those wind pockets," said Shoogar, pointing at a square, screened-over opening. Eyes streaming, coughing vigorously, I did so. Once Shoogar hurled a fireball at the screen, where it stuck. Water jetted briefly, splashing through the screen. Some of the grindings gathered around the water droplets. Presently the whirring became uneven, threatened to stop. "Cover your nose and mouth, Lant. I do not want you to breathe any of this." He pulled out a fat leather pouch. I put a cloth across the lower half of my face and watched as he produced a thick double handful of powdered magician's hair. With a care bom of great sacrifice he aimed cautiously and blew a great sneeze of it toward the wind pockets. Within a moment, it was gone. The whirring sound labored -- the wind seemed to be dying. Suddenly both stopped. "Good, Lant. Now get the pots." Shoogar was beaming with triumph. I pulled my kit from its place by the wall and produced a collection of six pottery containers, each with a close-fitting lid. "Good," said Shoogar again. He began to place them carefully around the interior of Purple's nest. Into each he put a sputtering ball of fire, then closed the lid on it. There were tiny holes in the lid of each pot -- to allow the fire-god to breathe but too tiny to allow entrance of the water. The liquid jets arched out but, unable to reach the flames directly, they continued playing over the pots and over everything else. Shoogar watched to see where the water was draining, began pouring defiled water and other viscous syrups into the drain holes. Once he paused to add a generous handful of the white dust bone grindings. As it swirled down into the drain, the mixture seemed to thicken ominously. Shortly it seemed as if the drains were not working as efficiently as they had at Tirst. The water was gathering in pools on the floor. The odious smell of the defiled water mixed with the hot, steamy, smoky air. I thought I would retch. But no matter, the defiled water would certainly anger Filfomar, the river god. By now, Filfo-mar and N'veen, the god of the tides would be engaged in their ancient tug-of-war. Only this time they would be tugging not at the waters of the world, but at opposite sides of the black nest. The more water that poured into the cabin, the stronger grew their powers -- and the more vicious their battle. By the time the water jets IF stopped hissing, we were several inches deep in water and Shoogar and I were both dripping wet. But not chilly. The nest was steaming hot and growing hotter. Shoogar shucked off his robe and I followed suit. My eyes were watering and I was still coughing up dust from my lungs. I pointed this out to Shoogar. He said, "Stop complaining. Nobody ever said a curse was easy. There's more to come yet." Indeed, we had only begun. Now Shoogar turned his attention to the various panels and plates that lined the interior. There were a great many knobs and bumps. Many of these came in sets of eight, each labeled with a different symbol. One we recognized -- a triangle, the symbol of Eccar the Man. Could it be that some of Purple's spells were based on the symbol of Eccar? If that were so, could Shoogar use that fact as a wedge, his lever with which to unbalance the rest of the spells of Purple's nest? Shoogar pursed his lips thoughtfully, scratched at his stubbly chin. "Push the bumps, Lant. Wherever you see the symbol of the triangle, push the bumps -- we will activate all of Purple's Eccar spells and dissipate their power." compartment, looking high and low for the knobs and bumps. The knobs could all be twisted so that the triangle would appear at the top and the bumps could all be depressed. There were blank knobs also -- with a little experimentation Shoogar found that these could be turned in such a way that tiny slivers of metal behind layers of glass would move and point to triangles etched there. Several times strange thingshappened, but Shoogar cautioned me to ignore them. Once, one of the flat mirror-like plates glowed with an unearthly light and images appeared on it -- images of the village, images of people we knew, images of Hinc and Ang and Pilg. I stared in fascinated horror -- and then Shoogar nullified the spell by painting over it with a thick gray potion that obscured the image entirely. "I told you not to look," he reproved me. We continued. Eventually we had turned every device in that nest to the symbol of the triangle. We began the next phase of the curse. The pots had begun to cool, so Shoogar replenished them. Already the metal where they sat was too hot to touch, and portions of other devices had begun to crack. Now Shoogar began painting his thick gray paint over everything. First he nullified all the image windows. Then he painted all of the dials overand all of the bumps. IF Only the gods would know what symbols had been activated. In almost no time the interior of that nest was entirely gray. Klarther, the god of the skies and seas, would be furious. Fol, the god of distortion, would be chortling. Thus had Shoogar brought them to battle with each other over the black nest. Shoogar began to sketch new runes into the painted surfaces, oblivious of their relation to the runes beneath. Where the upper and under surface conflicted the gods would engage in random battle. Always, when he could, Shoogar worked the name of Elcin, the thunder god, into the runes. Into a crevice between two of the surfaces of knobs and bumps, Shoogar pushed the narrow point of a sword-wand and called on Pulfnissin, the god of duels. Calling on Hitch, the god of birds, he broke eggs into three apertures. They sizzled angrily where they slid down -- for Shoogar was using the egg-shape image of the nest against itself. He continued chanting, calling on Musk-Watz and Blok, the god of violence; and at one point he even cast a rune defiling Tis'turzhin, the god of love, for love turned to hate can be the mightiest force of all. Shoogar consulted his checklist again and produced a container of dormant sting things and another of fungusoids and leeches. He brought forth things with barbs and things with claws and began scattering them about. Torpid though they were, some tried to attack us; but we were careful to place them where they were not immediately dangerous. And we had had the forethought to wear our thickest boots and gloves -- the fanged creatures could not cut through. As he called on Sp'nee, ruler of slime, Shoogar spread great viscous gobs of goo into cracks and crannies between the boards of knobs and bumps. The air was already unbreathable with heat and damp but the boards were far hotter. In places Shoogar's gray ointment had blackened and cracked. The surface beneath glowed red with heat and gave forth a stench that one could hardly bear. Eggs sizzled and smoked in places we could not see. And always Shoogar continued to call upon Elcin. The God of Thunder. The God of Fear. "Elcin, oh, Elcin! Come down, oh, great and tiny God of lightning and loud noises! Come down from your mountain, oh, Elcin. Come down from your mountain and strike down this infidel who dares to profame the sacred name of your magic." It seemed as if we had been working for days. Shoogar continued to hang his webs of pain and to paint his runes of despair. The swimming, heated compartment crawled with fuzz balls and stingers, crabs and krakens and leeches. Somewhere something was burning and oily smoke seeped up the walls. I choked on the rotting air and blinked the tears from my eyes. It was a masterpiece. IX the nest eagerly. The dry grass crunched under my feet as I dropped to the ground. It seemed as if we had spent days in that Shoogar-generated hell. I was amazed to find that it was still day. The double sunlight washed the world with a reassuring familiarity. The trees and plants and grass still had their familiar dull black hues. My head swam in the cool clear air -- waves of dizziness swept over me. Even so, it was I who had to help Shoogar to walk. I had only observed the curse. Shoogar had executed it and it had taken its toll of his strength. We moved unevenly down the slope. Our shadows wavered before us, fringed with red and blue edges. As the curse had ended, so had the conjunction. Once more the suns were separate. It seemed a miracle that Purple had not interrupted us but it was still only mid-afternoon. We had finished with time to spare. We collapsed behind a clump of bushes. The unfouled air was like strong quaff and I was drunk on it. We lay under the familiar black leaves, taking deep heaving breaths. After a while I rolled over on my side and looked at Shoogar, "When does it begin?" He didn't answer and for a moment I thought he had fallen asleep. It would not have surprised me. The exertions of the past days had left him pale and haggard. His eyes were red and rimmed with deep circles when he opened them. He sighed. "I don't know, Lant. I don't know... perhaps I forgot something." I sat up and looked uneasily at the black nest. It waited there in a hollow between two hills, its door invitingly open. Its door! "Shoogar!" I cried. "The door! We left it open!" He sat up suddenly, stared horrified across the hill. "Can we close it?" I asked. "It must need another spell for that," said Shoogar. "And we don't have it." "Couldn't you -- " "Couldn't I what?" he demanded. "Make up a door-closing spell? Not for that nest, I couldn't. I'd have to know what activates the door-opening spell first." "But I saw you open the door." "Lant, you are a fool. I know how to use the spellbut I do not know why it works as it does. You saw what trouble I had with the light device. No, Lant -- unless you know something else about the IF way that door works -- and I know you don't, for I peered into your mind -- it's going to stay open." "But the curse -- " He cut me off with a gesture. "I don't know -- it must be waiting. It needs something to activate it, probably the closing of the door. Without that -- " He shrugged, let the sentence trail off into silence. The suns crept westward, the blue now visibly ahead of the red. I peered uneasily across the hill. How long would that curse wait before it went bad? Only the gods could help us if this, the greatest of Shoogar's spells, were to go foul -- and if it did go foul there would be no gods left who could help us. They would all be against us. ened -- the chill of the dying day crept across the world while Shoogar and I stood helplessly by. The black nest waited, grim and forbidding. Yellow light poured from its door. The world waited. We waited. The nest waited. The curse waited. And then, abruptly, a sound. Footsteps crunching up the side of the hill. We dropped down behind the bush. Purple came into view seconds later, striding up over the rise -- I wondered if he had satisfied his yearning -- then down the slope toward his waiting nest. He could not see the open door from his direction of approach. He rounded the curve of the nest wall and stopped. Then he stepped hurriedly forward and peered within. For the First time we saw Purple react to Shoogar's magic. He screamed like a hunting bansheebat. No doubt a translation would have been most instructive but the speakerspell was silent. Purple clambered into the door. The jamb caught him across the forehead, knocking the glass appurtenances from his nose. We heard his voice from inside the nest -- great anguished cries, hardly recognizable. Occasional words would come from the speakerspell, booming across the hollow: "My god in -- how did they get in? Stung me! Get off my foot, you son of -- why isn't the pest-killer working?" "The sting things are giving him trouble," I whispered. "God-damned sting things!" Purple's booming voice corrected me. "But the sting things are not the spell, Lant," Shoogar hissed. "They would sting whether they were part of the curse or not." Shoogar was right. The curse had not yet been activated. Anguished, I tore at my fur. What were the gods waiting for? Would they wait so long that Purple would have time to nullify the elements of the spell and turn it back on Shoogar? More words came hurtling across the slope: "Eggs! Eggs?" "At least you have ruined his composure," I whispered to Shoogar. "That's a beginning." "Not enough. The gods should be tripping over each other in their eagerness to destroy him. It must be the door. It must be! Lant, I fear -- " His voice stopped. I felt ice melting along my spine. "Savages -- " Boomed Purple's voice. "Primitive savages. This damned gray paint -- where the hell is the -- incest, lovemaking, illegitimate, compound incest, excrement excrement excrement, oral-genital contact, rectums, castration, diseases passed by lovemaking, primitive anal lovechildren! I'll kill the lovemaking offspring of dogs! I'll bum this lovemaking world down to bedrock!" Purple may have been incoherent but he certainly sounded sincere. I readied myself to run. I could see him moving about within the nest. He was stabbing furiously at the various bumps and depressions that we had painted over. Savagely Purple twisted the knobs, one after another, attempting to nullify Shoogar's spells. "And as for that fur-covered animal, Shoogar -- " The heavy curved door slid shut and cut off Purple's last howl. the leaves, the bushes and the cuffs of our robes. The shadows had lengthened until they stretched eastward into darkness. The blue sun twinkled and vanished, leaving only the bloated disc of the red. Below us the hills lay like folds of crumpled red cloth. All was deathly silent. Slowly Shoogar and I crept out of our hiding place. The black nest sat quietly in its depression. The door, closed now, was only an orange oval outlined on its smooth featureless surface. We edged forward, curiously, cautiously. "Has it begun yet?" I whispered. "Shut up, you fool. Every god must be listening." We moved closer. The black egg waited, motionless. Shoogar put his ear to its surface and listened. Abruptly the egg rose noiselessly into the air, throwing Shoogar back. I threw myself flat on the ground, began praying for forgiveness. "Oh, gods of the world, I cast myself upon your mercy. I plead to you. Please, do not let me -- " "Shut up, Lant. Do you want to foul the spell?" I lifted my head cautiously. Shoogar was standing, hands on hips, staring up into the red twilight. The black nest hung unmoving and patient a few feet above his head. I climbed wearily to my feet. As a curse, this spell was turning out to be a dull bore. IF "What is it doing?" I asked. Shoogar didn't answer. Abruptly the nest turned from black to silver and began sinking back toward the ground as gently as it had risen. The red dusk glinted across its surface with the color of blood. We stepped back as it touched the ground. It continued sinking downward without so much as slowing. Now, at last, there was sound, a churning crunching mutter of rock being forced aside. The nest moved downward, inexorably. The rocks screeched with the sound of its passage. In moments it was gone. The crackle of rock sank to a distant mutter, then died away entirely. Dazed, I walked to the rubbled edge of the hole. Darkness swallowed the bottom of it, though an occasional distant rumble of movement could be felt. I became aware of Shoogar standing beside me. meant anything more. "It's gone, Shoogar. Completely, totally gone. Disappeared into the ground. The world has swallowed it up as if it never existed. And -- " I gasped breathlessly -- "and there were no side effects at all." Shoogar harrumphed modestly. He bent to pick up the glass appurtenances which had fallen from Purple's nose. He pocketed them absent-mindedly. "It was nothing," he said. "But, Shoogar -- no side effects. I wouldn't have believed you could do it -- I wouldn't have believed anyone could do it. Why didn't you tell us you were planning this? We wouldn't have had to leave the village." "Best to be safe," Shoogar mumbled. He must have been dazed by his triumph. "You see, I wasn't sure. What with the tidal equations acting to pull the nest down instead of -- and with Eccar the Man tending to -- well, it was highly unusual -- experimental, you might say. I -- " The whole mountain shook under us. I landed jarringly on my belly, looking downslope. Two hundred feet below the black nest erupted out of the hillside. It was screaming with an unholy sound. We had hurt it terribly. The egg wailed its pain, arising, falling note, piercingly loud even as it moved away from the mountain. Some weird side effect had pulverized the very substance of the hill beneath us, turning it to sliding dirt and pebbles. The entire slope was sliding, shifting, carrying us majestically downward. Stunned, we made no move to save ourselves, nor was there anything we could have done had we had the presence of mind. We watched the black nest. Even as we slid, we could see it, a glinting speck of red brightness, shrieking into the south. The sliding mountain came to a stop. Whether from caprice or Shoogar's magic, it had not buried us. We had been fortunate enough to be standing at the top of the affected area. Now I found myself on my belly, deep in soft dirt. Shoogar was several yards away. I climbed to my knees. The black nest was no more than a dot above the horizon -- rising and dwindling, rising and dwindling. It was going almost straight up when my eyes lost it. I scrambled down the slope to Shoogar, each step creating tiny echoes of the bigger slide. "Is it over?" I asked, helping him to his feet. Shoogar brushed ineffectually at his robe. "I think not." He peered into the south. "There are too many gods who have not yet spoken." We were ankledeep in the newly pulverized dirt and would have to walk softly, lest the slope be jarred loose again. We began to work our way down cautiously. "How long must we wait for the curse to complete its workings?" I asked. Shoogar shrugged. "I cannot guess. We called heavily on many gods. Lant, I suggest you return to the village now. Your wives and children will be waiting." "I would stay here with you until the curse is complete." Shoogar frowned thoughtfully. "Lant, the black nest will probahly return to attack the one who injured it. I dare not return to the village until that danger is past -- and I would not want you here with me when that happens." He put his hand on my shoulder, "Thank you, Lant. I appreciate all you have done. Now -- go." I nodded. I did not want to leave him. But I knew that this had to be. Shoogar was not just saying good night; he was saying goodbye. Until he knew for sure that the black nest had been destroyed he could not return. Dejectedly I turned and trudged down the slope. I did not want him to see the tears welling in my eyes. X The village was as I had left it. Silent, deserted and bearing the scars of Shoogar's preparations. I had been fortunate to find one of my bicycles halfway down the hill. Now I parked it beneath my own nest. Miraculously, both bicycle and nest were undamaged. My number-one wife was curled up on the floor, sleeping, when I hoisted myself into the nest. She awoke at the swaying of the structure and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. "Where are the others?" I asked. "Two and Three and the spratlings?" She shook her head. "They fled when Purple came to the village this morning." IF I was aghast. "Purple came to the village?" She nodded. I seized her by the shoulders. "You must tell me what he did. Did he curse Shoogar's nest? Did he -- " "No, it was nothing like that. He just walked around for a while." "The fire device? Did he use the fire device?" "No. He wanted something else." "What was it, woman?" "I cannot say if I understood right, my husband. He did not have his speakerspell with him. We had to use gestures." "Well, what did he want?" "He wanted to do the familymaking thing. I think." "And you let him?" She lowered her eyes. "I thought it would help Shoogar's part of the duel ifthe mad magician were distracted for a while." "But how could you? He is not a guest of ours. I should beat -- " "I am sorry, my husband. I thought it would help." She cringed before my upraised hand. "And you did not beat number three when Purple talked to her." She was right. I lowered my hand. It would not be fair to beat one and not the other. "He is built most strangely, my husband. He is almost completely without hair, except for -- " "I do not want to hear about it," I said. "Is that all that you did?" She nodded. "And then he left the village?" Again she nodded. "He did not touch anything? Take anything?" She shook her head. I breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank the gods for small favors. The situation could have been very bad. Fortunately you say nothing was damaged." Gratefully I lowered myself to the floor. I had not realized how weary I was. "You may serve me a meal." She did so, wordlessly. I had taken two bites when abruptly from overhead came a weird kind of shrieking whistle. It was a sound of disaster, of emergency and panic. I dropped out of the nest and ran for the clearing. Through the treetops I could see -- The flying nest! It had returned to the village. It was no longer silver. Now, it was yellow with heat. It hurtled across the sky, circled and returned for another shriek'ing pass. Shoogar's words flashed across my mind... the black nest will probably return to attack the one who injured it... Could the nest have confused me with Shoogar? I stood in the central clearing, too panicked to move. It stopped jarringly a few yards above the treetops, as if it had hit a soft wall. Its door was missing, ripped away. The opening showed black against the orange glow of what could only be super-heated metal. The empty opening turned, questing. I imagined eyes in the blackness behind the doorway. I waited for them to find me. The nest turned faster. Suddenly it was spinning. All details blurred and vanished -- the surface seemed a liquid red-orange. I heard the drone of it rising and I covered my ears. A wind swept through the trees. As it spun the nest was carrying the air with it. Great gusts rushed through the village with a rising shriek, different from the agonyshriek of the nest but terrifying all the same. A great whirlpool of wind formed the nest at its center. I clung to the trunk of one of the nearby house-trees. Was Musk-Watz attacking the stranger's nest? Or was the nest attacking the village? The wind roared through the trees, through the leaves and branches and nests -- it tried to pluck me from where I clung tightly to one of the rootlimbs. I wrapped my arms and legs about the branch and buried my face in the bark. Leaves, bark, bits of wood sprayed me. It went on and on and on. After a while I became aware that the sound was lessening. I raised my head. The wind was dying. Not a tree in the village carried a leaf. Every nest had been knocked to the ground. Many had been shattered against the trunks of their host-trees. Others lay yards from where they should have fallen. spinning, had moved southward toward the river. It was above the new course of the rushing waters when it began to drop. Filfo-mar, angry and implacable, was pulling the black nest down to destruction. I had to see. I followed the nest, unmindful of possible danger. I had to know if Purple's nest was truly being destroyed. The nest was spinning ferociously, as if it were trying to escape the power of the' river god. When it touched the water a great cloud of steam burst into the air. At the same time the river and its muddy banks all rose up in one huge wave of earth and water. It blackened the sky, covered the moons -- I tried to run -- it splashed across the world in one vast wave. A scream forced itself out of my throat as the rushing water swept me back through the village. Filth and mud flooded my mouth, my nostrils. Abruptly I was struck a jarring blow from behind, found myself caught between two limbs of a tree. Water rained down in fat IF drops and mud in stinging gobs. The water began to recede, flowing back toward the river in a great mud-streaking wave. Churning debris was left in its wake. Shoogar had miscalculated. The nest had not returned to attack him. Even now I could see that of the village nothing was left. Just a few blackened trees, naked against the night. I lowered myself from the branch. My back twinged warningly and I wondered if I had cracked a rib. I limped toward the river. If I were destined to die I would first know the fate of my enemy. Black mud squelched beneath my feet as I plodded. The bare trees dripped muddy goo. It was as if the whole world were uninhabitable, drowned in a rain of earth and water. It was tricky going -- often the viscous mess beneath my feet hid shards of debris. I was lucky not to have slashed open my foot. I slipped and fell several times. Here and there fish or mud creatures flopped in dying agony. Under the shadowless light of seven of the moons, I began to cross the old course of the river. The mud and the smooth wet rocks all worked to slow me. Probably they saved my life. I had forgotten that one god had not yet spoken. I cursed as I balanced on the slippery surfaces. The nest lay ahead. In its spinning, it had churned a great dish-shaped cavity for itself. As I topped the lip of that cavity, I saw the nest, black again and lying in shallow silvery water. Its spin had stopped and -- finally, finally -- it was no longer upright. It rested on its side with water pouring into the hollow around it, flooding into the doorway. Garish light reflected in that opening and across the surface of the water. No doubt that final tilt of the egg was the work of the god of engineers. Perhaps in his last moments Purple had finally believed in the power of Shoogar's magic. I worked my way closer, eyes open for one glimpse of the mad magician's body. Nothing could be left alive within that nest. I was not one quarter of the way down when the interior of the nest began to sparkle and flash. This was not the steady yellow which had lit the compartment earlier. This was a sick, sputtering sparkle, the color of lightning. I paused, unsure. The sparkling grew more intense. I could hear crackling sounds and the hiss of water turning to steam. I began to inch my way back up the mud slope. The nest was still dangerously alive. The blue flashing grew brighter behind me -- and then a thick puff of black smoke erupted from the gaping door. I reached the mud lip of the chumed-out saucer none too soon and dropped behind it. Cautiously I raised my head. The nest was making great flushing sounds. Water jetted from holes in its sides but more water poured into the open door. Soon I noticed something else. It was beginning to glow again. Dull red, bright yellow, incandescent white. Waves of heat rolled outward. I had to keep ducking down behind the lip of the bowl. Mud boiled around the nest. Purple's egg rotated itself upright -- and sank. It sank ponderously and majestically into water obviously too shallow for it. The water closed over it, boiling. Great angry bursts of steam came exploding up through the bubbling water. Light showed through the steam, dimming, brightening. The nest seemed to pause, as if wondering what to do next. It decided. out of the pond. It rose in a steep arc, glowing white, paused at the apex and fell back. It landed right in the middle of the village. Instantly it bounced, leaving a clutch of burning trees behind it. A hot wind fanned my face. The nest had forgotten how to fly. Now it moved by bouncing and it glowed with a terrible heat. Each time it struck it would give off an enormous spark and the land would bum. But only momentarily -- the village was too much a swamp to support a fire. And still the nest was bouncing. As it left the village, other patches of flame were spreading. They led in a straight line toward the mountains where Shoogar waited. The nest bounced uphill like a ball in reverse. I could see it, a glowing white speck moving erratically up the mountainside. Ultimately it disappeared behind a ridge. The wind followed it, crackling with the presence of the one god who had not yet spoken -- then it, too, faded. A semblance of calm crept over the landscape, the only sound the dripping of the water from the trees, the branches. I stood up and looked off across the black mud to where a pillar of greasy smoke still rose from the center of the village. Brushing at the mud which permeated my clothing, I wondered if my first wife had survived. I would regret it very much if she had not. She was a good woman, obedient and almost as strong as a pack animal. It occurred to me then which god had not yet spoken. I sat down. There was a slow and deathly silence now. Only the crackle of the mud, the hiss of water trickling into pits of melted rock disturbed the night. The wind died to nothing. The last of the moons was dropping toward the west. Darkness would soon be creeping across the land. It would not be safe to be about. Could Shoogar have been mistaken in this one aspect? After all, i He was an unpredictable god,  known to have fits of pique -- and e yet, also known to have failed s when most expected to perform, t Perhaps the experimental nature of f Shoogar's spell had not been ( enough to arouse him. t Behind me the sky began to hint at deep blue instead of black. I stood, cursing the stiff cold weight I off my clothes. J An eye-searing flash of light i filled the entire world. My eyes clenched in pain. But in I the after-image, burned into my skull, I saw a great ball of fire, like one of Shoogar's but magnii fied to the size of a mountain. Then my eyes could open, and I c saw a great rising mass of flaming cloud, a toadstool of red-lit fury --  fiery smoke standing up behind the mountains, reaching, evers reaching into the sky. I I was slammed backward, t slapped rolling across the mud as if struck by a giant sledgehammer t made of air. And the sound -- oh, the sound -- my ears seemed to cry z with the pain of a sound so great. # The sound of Musk-Watz earlier sweeping through the village had been only a whisper compared to  this. It was as if Ouells himself i had come to ground and clapped his mighty hands together. In the I sudden howling wind, the clapping i sound mutated into a continuous i rumbling thunder that rolled up  and down the hills. It grumbled and  rumbled, grumbled and rumbled across the world. It echoed and reechoed in a never-ending wave. I'm sure I continued to hear it long after it had actually died away. That great bass roar went on and on and on. Small rocks began to fall from the sky. Elcin had spoken. the crotch of two branches, beneath an uprooted tree. "Are you all right?" I asked, helping her to her feet. She nodded. "Good. Then find some bandage and tape up my ribs. I am in pain." "Yes, my husband." She began dutifully to tug at her skirt. I recognized it as one of her favorites. I put out my hand. "No. Do not tear that. Find something else. That is all you have left in the world. Keep it intact." She looked up at me, grateful tears flooding her eyes. "Yes, my husband" She paused and I knew she wanted to say something else but feared. "Go on," I urged. She fell to her knees, unmindful of the mud, and clasped fiercely at my hands. "Oh, my husband, I feared so for your safety. My heart is filled with such gladness at the sight of you -- I cannot bear it. I could not endure the thought of life without you." She kissed my hands, buried her face against my waist. I stroked the fur on the top of her head, mud-smeared though it was. It did not matter -- we were both soaked through. "It's all right," I murmured gently. "Oh, tell me it is, tell me. Tell me that the danger is over, that all is right with the world again." "Stand up, woman," I said. She did. "I have lost everything. My nest is gone and my tree has been uprooted. I know not where any of my children are, nor where my other wives have fled. I have nothing. Only the clothes I am wearing. But I am still not a poor man." She looked at me, brown eyes wide with wonder. "No, I am not. I still have one woman, a good woman." I looked into her eyes, wide and glowing with love. "A woman with a strong And it is enough. I can rebuild. Now, go and find that bandage. My ribs ache with the pain of standing." "Oh, yes, my husband. Yes." She began moving cautiously across the mud covered landscape. I lowered myself carefully to the ground. To rest. To sleep. searched through the mud to see if anything of value remained intact. We found little. I had hoped to recover my bicycle but it had been smashed under a falling tree. I ached to see that finely carved machine crushed to sodden pulp. Truly, I had been right when I had said that we had nothing but the clothes on our backs. We stood in the ruins of the village and surveyed the disaster. "What will we do, my husband?" "We will move on," I said to her. "There is nothing left for us here." I turned and looked at the distant green prairie. "There." I pointed. "We will go south. Probably most of the others will have had the same thought." She nodded in acquiescence and shouldered her tiny pack. Painfully we started the long trek. The suns were high in the sky when we saw a single tiny figure on a bicycle hurrying to catch up to us. Something was familiar about it -- no, it couldn't be. But it was. "Shoogar -- you're alive -- " He shot me a look, climbed off the bicycle. "Of course, I'm alive, Lant. What did you think?" He paused, looked at the dried mud caked on our clothes. "What happened to you?" "We were in the village. We saw the end of Purple's nest. But it headed toward the mountains to die. We thought that -- " "Nonsense, Lant. I won the duel. Only the loser gets killed. I saw ( Please turn to page # ) IF mind follow? ran on, seeming to belong to no one, turning back on themselves, rubbing against each other, bidding him to remember but with no success. After only a little while life begins to accumulate like shellfish on a coral reef and a man begins to understand that if just one of few things were to be taken from him, then -- he'd have to live with the memory, the stain all over his insides and it would never go away. If it happens more than once you begin to look for an out -- but the outs are few and well guarded. # Why doesn't he wake up , doctor?" If I could die for only a little while, he thought. # I wish I knew. Where is the mind anyway? Is it just the physical, spatial organ called the brain?" # 'Doctor , you're not paid to speculate." "A patient like this is always a slap in the face." # I'm sorry. Doctor." I'm never going to die, he thought. After a little while the weight of living breaks you up into little pieces that the waves wash clean and take back with them into the sea. My ocean, my wings. For a time I lived as a man but I died and my corpse lies strangely rotting in the hold of a green ship I cannot find. Other corpses are there but determined to rot no further from their present state. There is no sun on my ocean, only a blue haze and no land of any kind. And the sea is filled with fleeing fear and rotting plants that come up from the shallow bottom. Once I saw a giant eel poke its head above the warm brine, but I could not fear it. My black wings keep me safe, he thought. Where is my green ship, lost for ages now? Racing low over the water I sometimes think it is only a foot long and I might have missed it a thousand times. I open my great bill and scoop up the dead worms that float near the surface... Once a dripping noise woke me in the night. ITell to the floor, into the center of the room where the pool of stuff had gathered. It was a black liquid and when I touched it the stuff stuck to my fingers. I looked up at the ceiling. There didn't seem to be any more on the way. It made me very angry because I knew there was more and it was holding back just to annoy me... # Perhaps he's trying to get back to what happened to him, and when he makes his peace with that, maybe he'll waken." # How long will it take. Doctor?" # For him, probably an epoch -- IF and for us there is no way to tell. Was he a good man?" " He was a good man, Doctor . " saying, "There are faint red stars close to the earth whose primarily infrared radiations are mostly absorbed by our atmosphere. No picture of the universe can be complete without them. The Farside Lunar radio telescope thinks it has located one -- and only two light-years away. Our new stardrive works and this will be its third test. Of course you will conduct scientific observations, take photographs, etc. But if all goes well, we will be ready to take larger hops out into the galaxy. Good luck, gentlemen." The voice did not sound convincing, he thought. He could not re : member who the speaker had been -- and where? He thought, the universe -- all space -- consists of the convolutions of some monstrous brain and I a phantom am set adrift in its passages. Strange thoughts drift within me, whispering that I am a dream. And at the moment when I am closest to the truth darkness veils everything from me. Speak, memory, he commanded but the darkness was again complete, inscrutable. Suddenly there were stars in the darkness, cold unblinking stars, a saw the fused mass of beryllium that had once been his ship. The ship tumbled and turned endlessly, a crumpled toy among the stars and he, a pale gray figure, floated near the wreck. He saw himself, a small suited mannikin with six hours of air stored to support its organic component. He felt sweat running down his back. His faceplate was fogged up -- the dials on the inside of his suit glowed dimly. Gradually the faceplate cleared, and he estimated that he was orbiting his dead ship once every minute. He remembered the explosion. It was still a splotch of light etched onto his brain as if he'd been shot full in the face with a laser. The stardrive generators had gone, a oretical models such an explosion would turn local space inside out and scatter anything caught in it throughout creation, a variable scatter across space and time. He had been outside taking three-dimensional shots of the dim red star when it happened. Suddenly the ship had turned blindingly white. The camera had been pushed out of his grip, the safety line had snapped and then a chunk of something had hit him in the middle. Maybe he had been lucky nothing had penetrated his suit. Impossible to tell good from bad, curse from blessing. Nothing he had ever known, guessed or been told was holding still. He looked at his transmitter dial. It was faithfully sending out the distress call -- three laser pulses into space every five seconds. To his right the red star glowed dimly. He knew that somewhere the star had a dark companion, a chunk of dead rock. If he and the ship were still anywhere near their previous course, they would pass very near to it. He knew what it would look like. The body would reflect almost no light -- he would notice it only by its capacity to blot out the starfields. He touched the small control box on his left shoulder and the small suit jets spun him around three hundred and sixty degrees. No dark body was anywhere in sight. He gave his jets a touch and stopped spinning. The stars stilled again in his vision. Silence, save for the sound of breathing, a metronome of rushing air keeping time in a timeless place. He tapped his helmet with his glove It was a relief to hear the contact. He looked at his oxygen meter. Its glow was dull inside his helmet. He had to twist his neck into an uncomfortable position to see it properly. Oxygen: # hr. # m. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing. He inhaled and counted to ten. He might be able to add twenty minutes to his life this way. But what did it matter? They would never find him, a tiny fragment among the stars. Better to have been in the ship -- no memories, no waiting, just a flash and oblivion. Oxygen: # hr. # m. The warm glow of the tranquilizer surrounded him and he slept. The horizon of the alien land in front of him was crimson. The sands reflected the bursting flames. And the tiger. Slowly tracking, back and forth. Waiting. For him. He awoke remembering. The tranquilizer made him sick and he vomited a little. The faceplate fogged and smeared. He couldn't see the stars. His scream hung inside the suit and couldn't get out. He swatted at the control box with his glove. The wreck receded suddenly and he was spinning. Slowly he managed to control the spin. He took another pill... He felt the numbness slowly spreading through his body. He swam, a god in his bath, smiling. Control. Sleep. He awoke. Ahead of him a great mass obscured the stars. It was the red star's planet, a dark wanderer waiting for his corpse. He strained to see if the dark mass reflected any of the red star's light but there was no light, only the dim circular outline against the starfield. Once this dying star had been strong enough to warm whole worlds. He turned himself to look at the wreck. It was a small, darkly silver patch of metal to his right and for an instant he thought he could reach IF out and then hold it in his hand. Oxygen: # hr. # m. When the wreck suddenly seemed to be obscuring stars more rapidly he knew that the dark planet was pulling them both in. He looked at the huge mass, a large black circle taking up almost a quarter of the sky. It looks like a neatly cut hole in space, he thought. I'm going to plow right into it and then the ship right on top of me. If I last long enough to experience it. And then he thought he could feel his forward motion, as the dark body grew larger in front of him. He pushed his suit controls and made a complete turn for observational purposes. At the end of his turn he saw the cluster of smaller dark bodies, bits of small debris circling the dim red sun. Oxygen: # hr. # m. The dark mass now covered a third of the sky. He looked down at a dark floor covered with sparkling diamonds. For a moment he thought they would blur into a sheet of light, but his eyes focused and the diamonds remained distinct. A bit of dust scratched across his faceplate, a cue that enabled him to imagine his terrifying speed. Oxygen: # m. Where had all the time gone? Suddenly he had to remember the good things in his life. He remembered her cool, smooth skin, her warm lips and long black hair. He would never kiss her again -- she would never be open to him, quivering with excitement. He would never see the child she would have. There was no longer a future, love, old age, only a lonely death in a dark place at the ends of the universe. He wouldn't even know if he would hit the dark planet or circle it forever. Oxygen: # m. It was getting harder to breathe. The dark planet now took up half the sky. He had once pressed a fly to death with a paperweight. He had always known that it would get back at him. He looked toward his fused ship It was tumbling wildly end over end. A piece broke off and passed a dozen feet to his right. Oxygen -- Empty The air became heavy and hot very suddenly. He turned the cooling unit to high. At least the bad air would be cool for a while. The tiger sprang at him from the dune and he fired and missed. It tore at his chest, opened it and seized his heart in its teeth. He screamed and watched the cat run off with it, chewing as it ran. The sun was hot on his open flesh. It burned. Momentarily a cool wind blew through his open chest. Then the abrasive sand got inside and stirred around in his lungs, forced its way down into his stomach and bowels. It ripped through his guts like a razor. The musclesin his calves tightened and turned to stone, refusing to relax. His arms stiffened and he couldn't move them. A demon was walking around in his head, beating against his temples, trying to get out, reaching down into his spine and twisting. Dark, dark, the dead star, the demon whispered and refused to let him go. He felt his eyes bulge out of their sockets. Helen! he tried to shout, but no sound came from his throat. I love you! The thought wouldn't come out of his head. It was stuck there, frozen. He had just run out of reality, the blank end of a reel of tape, all hiss and noise, running on into nowhere. He turned his radio up full blast. There was nothing on the wave spectrum but the mindless seething between the stars. " When the ships lifeboat found him he was like this," the doctor said. " And he didn't come out of it all during the eight month journey home under auxiliary ion power. His two crewmates had to feed him intravenously and he lost a lot of weight." soft water and he sank into it. Liquid rushed about his limbs. It flowed through his veins, nourishwith a great peace. He withdrew into the silence somewhere near oblivion. He thought of the dead portions of his body, hair, nails and skin, and of how gradually the living slipped into the nonliving. " He's developing a body fever " the doctor said as he looked at the diagnostic screen. " We're going to have to break it quickly." The woman sitting next to the bed leaned forward and looked at her husband's face. He seemed to be sleeping. She looked for some change but his face remained a mask. He was choking in the hot sand. Each grain burned him in turn and something grasped him by the head and twisted him in the sand as if he were a stick. The grains were abrasive and cut into him like broken glass. Suddenly the sand became cool and wet, enfolding him in its firm, damp comfort. Gradually his mind realized what had happened -- it came to him slowly. As a man wakens on a spring morning, he saw the way back. And he knew now that the green ship was no more, that the tiger did not make off with his heart and he knew that somehow he was alive, somewhere. He reached out with love toward the great mind that ruled the cosmos and gave thanks. When the fever's edge softened and turned his sickness to sleep he dreamed of fair women with golden hair and small breasts; he saw their firm bodies lying upon green grass. He slept. IF " Doctor , he blinked." At once he knew she was sitting next to him. She had called him back. The mind is everywhere, he thought. The brain lives in a spatio-temporal realm but the mind comes from elsewhere to stay only a short while, an exile from a greater community. He felt the light coming into his closed eyes, felt it moving along his optic nerve to his brain -- he wondered what kind of eye his brain must have to interpret such a signal? Then he understood that the brain's eye was only a window and through that window watched the mind's eye, the final interpreter, the arbiter of meaning. Its way was a special way of seeing, the way that made sense of everything that came through from a hostile universe of which it was a part. He thought, the mind develops its perceptual powers through experiential analogy with sense, data during life. Lacking sense data the mind spins out symbolic representations of the imperfectly perceived events going on around the locus of the brain in space. For him the Loss of life, of Flelen, would have been purposeless and unbearable, so, at the stress point where another man might have given up, his mind-matrix had flared up like a nova, a quantum jump to an unprecedented level of awareness and strength. The resulting field had enveloped the physical organ that was the brain and had preserved it from the decay that should have resulted when his oxygen ran out. This was the life-force that guided biological reproduction -- the mechanism that made life immortal while the individuals and even species perished; in his case it had preserved an individual. The force of his life-affirmation, the horror of death, the force of his will, had found for him the counter entropic force of all intelligent life and had preserved him until the others had found him floating in the darkness. But the gain was permanent. He could see, truly for the first time, as no man had seen before. Space was no obstacle; he could feel the emotions of those around him -- especially Helen's. They were as prominent as the corona of the sun during eclipse; he understood the darkness that covered her face. Slowly the darkness was passing from her face, revealing to him the light of her rising hope. He knew that this door of perception would now always be open to him. In the darkness of the dead star it had given him the meaning of his situation through the vision of the dreams. My ocean, my wings. He knew what they meant. With the thought came the full realization that he was alive, now more than ever. He remembered the torment of the ghostly worlds and knew that the terrible fear of death at the moment when his tanks had run out had driven him there -- into the arms of sirens. The fountain of life behind his dream of fair women had saved him and he knew what would happen now. He knew she was waiting for him like a ministering angel, listening and watching for a sign of life. An angel made for a man. "Helen -- " He said goodbye to the dark worlds within and opened his eyes to the bright light of day coming in through the window.  At the Carrousel Inn, #I Reading Road. Cincinnati, Ohio. Programless Relaxacon. Banquet. For information: Lou Tabakow, # St. Johns Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio #.  California. Guest-of-Honor: Jack Williamson; Fan Guest-of-Honor: Rick Sneary. Memberships: # through June #; # at the door. For inforDowney, California # I .  Chatham Center Motor Lodge, Center Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Guest-of-Honor: Harlan Ellison; GoH Emeritus: Robert Silverberg. Features: Panels, parties, movies, banquet. Membership: # in advance; # at the door. For information: Suzanne Tompkins, # Bartlett Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #. Memberships: Supporting, #; Atgia #. Sheraton Hotel, Toronto, Canada. Guests-of-Honor: Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov. Membership: # in advance. For information: Peter Gill, # Glen Manor Drive, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. AL. In Heidelberg, West Germany. The accent of this con will be an international one, with fans and pros coming from all over the world. Guest-ofTubb (England) and Dr. Herbert W. Franke (Germany). Memberships: # (supporting membership, receive all progress reports), # (attending); after December #, #, #. For Germany. Make all checks payable to Mrs. Molly Auler. IF ( Continued from page # ) ing are a commonplace," said Dr. Czento. "Most are spurious but a few are accurate. One such genuine landing took place on the sands of Nahrunu The British advisor to the Sheikh, a dear friend of mine, knew of the Sheikh's tablet and his claim to the planets. up the Tammuz Society, showed the tablet to our Sentient visitors and established agreement to the validity of our claim. The second tablet is our formal contract. What could have been a more suitable language than Sumerian?" "Are these Sentients simpletons?" I said. "Are they gulled by a quaint artifact of ancient times? Surely there's more to your deal than that? The dismantling and replacement of Mars, no matter what you say, is a treacherous job and a potential disaster if the slightest error occurs. They failed before? Why not now?" "They won't fail," said Dr. Czento. "You've no idea how brilliant they are." "And when the effects of the substitution begin -- with earthquakes, tidal waves and Godknows-what -- the hullabaloo here on Earth will be a fearsome thing. Someone will have to placate our scientists, our politicians, the great masses of people." "The Tammuz Society is made up of selected heads of state, Nobel laureates and distinguished businessmen," said Dr. Czento. "They are men influential in all areas of society." "Then that's what your payment is for," I said. "Not for the Shiekh's tablet." Dr. Czento's fingers began to tremble. "Did you kill Pendleton?" "You're as delusional as he was," said Dr. Czento. "He died of natural causes. You saw the death certificate." "Which you signed." "As a student," said Dr. Czento, "I played around with the properties of chloral hydrate. In moderate amounts it was a useful depressant of the central nervous system, although it caused nausea in some patients. I reduced chloral hydrate to a new form, almost tasteless, colorless and rather delayed in its insidious effects. It is a deadly but passionless killer and is almost impossible to detect on autopsy. I was sorry to be compelled to offer it to you." "You want me dead?" "Very reluctantly," said Dr. Czento. "You've drunk two glasses of it, so you're rather pn borrowed time. I dare say that you've already lost all sensation in your feet. Perhaps, even now, you can't raise your arms." Dr. Czento was s small man in his sixties and by no means athletic. Still, he was tough and wiry. But for some reason, after I got up and took violent hold of him, he offered little resistance. His eyes were wide and unbelieving all through the time I bound and gagged him. There was the same stunned look on his face as I telephoned to London and asked for a National Security officer to come out at once. I was terribly relieved when he finally arrived, almost two hours later. I tried to describe everything as precisely as I could and in complete detail until I noticed the white kid on the enameled pin in his lapel.  Starting next month in GA LA XY Robert A. Heinlein bhang-smoke and mumbled about the game and how it was just like the big game we were playing, and every time he took a pebble off the board he called it by name. And some of the names I didn't know but a lot of them were on my long list. And he talked about how we were like the pieces in this simple game -- how some went off the board after the first couple of moves, and some hopped from place to place all through the game and came out unscathed and some just sat in one place all the ( Continued from page #) time until they got zapped from out of nowhere. After a while I started hitting the bhang myself and we abandoned the metaphor in a spirit of mutual intoxication. And I've been thinking about that night for six years, or two hundred, and I think that N'gai -- his soul find Buddha -- was wrong. The game isn't all that complex. Because in O'wari, either person can win. The snails populate ten planets for every one we destroy. Solitaire, anyone? # when the black nest returned. It attacked the village instead of coming up into the mountains after me. If it was going to destroy the village anyway, there was no longer any reason for me to stay up in the hills. So I dug out the other bicycle." "The nest must have just missed you." Shoogar nodded. "I saw it coming. When it finished with the village -- only then did it go for the ( Continued from page #) mountains. Only I was no longer there." He shrugged modestly, brushed a speck of dirt from the sleeve of his robe. "It was nothing. I had planned so." There was nothing more to say. We watched as he mounted the bicycle again, once more began pedaling toward the south. I felt proud to know him. # little plan didn't work so good." "Seeing you again helped me remember," said Mary. "Well," said Screwloose, "no long-range harm done. We only have to fix up your mind again, Mary, and you'll forget all this nasty stuff. Your dad taught me how. I can do it." "No," said the girl. I asked, "Me, too?" Screwloose replied, "No, you we'll have to kill in some accidental looking way. I was hoping you'd get drowned at Stinson Beach. I only just tonight figured Mary might have come back here for sentimental reasons. Had I thought of it earlier I would have beat you to it. Again, gee, there's no real harm done. I know all ( Continued from page #) kinds of easy ways to kill people." The playhouse door opened quietly again and Pope dived in. He held a cross-shaped tire iron. His first swing knocked Screwloose's pistol away. Pope's next two blows were to the android's head and they caused him to fall back with an outflung jerking. "Gosh," said the android. He began a slow tumble down to the floor. He was making loud whirring sounds and oily smoke came from his nostrils and mouth. "The reason I was a ljttle late," said Pope. "I bumped into some landcars on the highway. It was a produce truck full of synthetic tangerines actually. I'd been trailing Screwloose since he left his place in Frisco. I lost him after the collision but figured he'd head here. I picked him up again at the gates. None of the alarms are working, by the way." "I turned everything off," said Mary, leaving the area of the teaching machines. "I don't like all that stuff much." "You just happen to be carrying a tire iron?" I asked Pope. "Actually," he said, rings forming around his wide eyes, "I had a flat tire, too. After one of the truck drivers kicked my car. That's what threw my timing a bit off." "Your timing was fine," I said. "This is Mary Redland, huh?" Pope asked, nodding at the girl. "You've been here hiding out?" "Not hiding out -- thinking, trying to remember. I wanted to remember everything. I wanted to remember what they had done to me," said the girl. "But I'm still not sure why they did it." "Because we loved you," said Screwloose. His head began to come apart.  Ejler Jakobsson? It turns out that he's just the most innovative editor in SF today. Thank God you've gotten rid of those ghastly beasts on the covers of If Thank God you're starting to publish a little adult fiction! (And I don't mean sex, either.) The Region Between and The Last Night of the Fesfine stories, too. But how much better as total visual experiences beyond just the words of them! Jack did a great job and  hope like hell that he does more. Good layouts like that really turn me on; good show, man! Anyhow, I am much much pleased with the direction that you're heading your mags. Bless you, sir, bless you. Harold G. Corwin, Jr. Edwards A FB, Calif # Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I want to add my voice to the commendations you have received for at (Continued from page #) last showing John W. Campbell thqt there is objection in the science-fiction world to his increasingly racist editorials. I suppose that there have been strong opinions for and against Vaughn Bode s strip. There is rather more violence in it than I care for, but in a world that includes the wars in Vietnam, Laos, Biafra, and the Middle East, it's difficult to get very excited about a Bode drawing. Sincerely yours, John Board man Brooklyn, N. Y. Dear Mr. Jakobsson:  just picked up the April issue of If and read Ride a Tin Can. Mr. Lafferty is completely and incurably insane. Sincerely, Scott Edelstein of my fellow writers of being overly fond of schmaltz in my reaction to some of the books reviewed here in the past. With strong exception to that "overly," I plead guilty to liking schmaltz and I make no apologies for it. But as a connoisseur of schmaltz, I am of necessity strongly opposed to the kitsch too often associated with it. Maybe a few quick definitions are in order. Schmaltz is a German-Yiddish word that means grease or butter; in the arts, it's the grease the artist uses to make his bread -- or more solid material -- go down easily. It is, in fact, the appeal to the reader's emotional response. Kitsch is garbage, trash, or any showy junk. Its use indicates a dishonesty, or an appeal to false emotionalism, snobbery, bad taste, etc. Where schmaltz is probably an exaggeration of a real emotion, kitsch is either a distortion or the use of unreal emotional responses. Almost all romantic fiction is essentially schmaltz; it has to be, since a sane vierw of it indicates our lovers can very well live without each other, no matter how much the feeling engendered in the reader is made to overlook this. Nevertheless, the emotional state of the lovers is based on reality and only exaggerated to make it seem more interesting. On the other hand, the stuff in too many confession magazines and the old teen-age lovepulps was pure kitsch; almost nobody is as idiotic as the heroines -- and if anyone were, she couldn't have achieved the ending falsely grafted onto the story. Most grand opera is also kitsch, though justified by the musical overlay. And, of course, the stuff called "camp" recently and appreciated at great effort by the phoney sophisticates had to be pure kitsch. Most of the best writers among the older practitioners of science fiction smoothed their plots with an admixture of schmaltz. And when it was that, without degenerating into kitsch, it was a lot more effective than a mere recital of the story events would have been. ten some really superbly schmaltzy stories. His Nicholas van Rijn was in the purest vein in the original novel; no man was ever exactly like him, yet the basic elements of his character were drawn from life. The old hero-villain obviously delighted the readers and Anderson has done a whole series of stories using him since then. Unfortunately, the latest doesn't have the oomph of the earlier ones. Anderson's Satan's World (Doubleday, #) has a generally ingenious situation and what might have been a good set of aliens and alienated humans to provide the menance. David Falkayn and his partners consult the giant computer of Serendipity, Inc. -- a very nice use of information as a medium of exchange -- to learn they have information of more danger than apparent value. This brings their boss, old van Rijn, into things, and the plot tangles busily thereafter. It's ingenious and the basic action is fine. But somehow, the pitcher seems to have been to the well too often. Van Rijn is as clev-. er as ever, but the tough, hard core of the man is lost somewhere under the mere cleverness and surface mannerisms. It never degenerates to kitsch, but it becomes ineffectual schmaltz, with the grease too obvious. And since the only use for schmaltz is its effect, it's hard to take when it doesn't produce. Clifford Simak is another master of the difficult trick of getting just the right and subtle blend of schmaltz and solid story material. Few writers can blend background, suspense and just the right touch of emotional appeal as well as he usually manages. His recent Out of their Minds (Putnam, #), however, has lost the touch, judging by my response. The basic idea is really fantasy. All the beliefs that man has accumulated in his superstitions throughout the ages have somehow fed into -- well, call it another dimension or plane -- and this energy has been creating the very things men have imagined. Now the myth-creatures are beginning to break through and trying to take over EaTth. It isn't too bad a situation. And in the early section, when his car is menaced by a dinosaur and when he isn't sure how his friend was killed in a collision where the other car disappeared, it begins to build up good suspense. IF But then the kitchen sink gets dragged in. He not only catches sea monsters and is chased by werewolves, but he meets Snuffy Smith and the comic-book world. He and a girl get trapped in a child's fairyland where he meets the devil; and he is cast back into the Civil War, where he spends a good bit of time. When he gets out of that he finds the world has been overtly attacked by the devil, who has stopped all electric apparatus from working. The devil expects him to be a go-between in negotiations with the President, and... It's simply too much, laid on too thickly. Myth-creation has run rampant. Goblins and werewolves were enough. But when we are asked to believe that men have believed in comic book characters and such for long enough and deeply enough to have turned them into myth-creatures at least as real as the devil, we boggle a bit. And when the civil war gets dragged in as a myth, it is too thick; true, our history does become somewhat of a myth in time; but only a small percentage of the total world population knows enough or cares enough to feed much creative data into the mythworld. Paul Bunyon would certainly be more likely than Pickett as a myth-figure. One form of kitsch results when the means used are excessive to a major degree for the effects needed. And here, I'm sorry to say the means are excessively excessive and the control of those means seems to have flown out the window. It's not pathetic kitsch (the trash of pathos , or untrammeled emotionalism), but its uncontrolled use of piling one thing on another is almost as bad. cery, fantasy or science fiction, tends to be somewhat schmaltzy. Howard's Conan was wonderful implicit schmaltz most of the time. (Implicit because Howard rather understated tne emotional response of his hero -- but still schmaltz because the romantic fix of his hero created such reactions on the part of the reader.) Most deliberate attempts to imitate Conan have been purest kitsch, of course. But the mixture of brawling and sorcery still offers a great field. Marion Zimmer Bradley has been mining this field rather well. Her latest, The Winds of Darkover (Ace Double, #c), is the seventh novel in the Darkover series. Here we have a world where the ancient inhabitants had substituted sorcery for science -- or call it psi, if you like; no difference. And there are pools of psychic power, or nexuscollections, which act as the old gods were supposed to act. It is essentially formula-fiction, of course. Our hero is an Earthman stationed on Darkover in the little Earth enclave. He loses his job because his mind is sometimes taken over by a ruler of a Darkover demesne. He is kicked out on a mission to help other natives, and his mind is more and more usurped until he becomes the ruler. Meantime, the ruler's sister must hie forth on her own mission to contact him and awake with him the power of one of the old and dangerous goddesses. The good of the story is that Bradley has made the formula her own; it works as she wants it to. or those who join me in enjoying the. schmaltz of good entertainment fiction, it's to be recommended. The other half of the double volume is The Anything Tree, by John Rackham. The tree here is apparently the ruler of a planet, and it has a rather limited mind but a great power to control growth; it can grow almost anything a man can ask of it -- and it can even alter his growth, or cause adaptations in his cells. The conflict comes when the powerful but uniquely innocent tree first contacts minds of evil. It isn't a story I'd recommend too strongly by itself, but it makes rather good reading. What more can be asked from a book frankly meant to be entertaining? Return to the Stars , by Edmond Hamilton (Lancer, #c), is a longdelayed sequel to his Star Kings. John Gordon, whose mind was transferred to that of a Prince of the far future who had to save the great Star Kingdom, is returned to that future in his own body this time, where he must meet in his own form the Princess he loved in another man's body. The basic situation here is ripe for all the schmaltz one could desire. Yet there is considerable control exercised -- as there has been in most of Hamilton's later material. No man has a longer history of writing the formula adventure story with all its inherent schmaltz than Hamilton; but the fact that he is still happily active after all these years is due to the skill with which he always treated his material. There is none of the tender reunion that would be so easily mixed with bathos. Instead, our lovely princess properly finds it hard to accept this man whom she never met in physical form before, and his attempt to understand is 'clouded by the fact that to him he is really no different. Nor does he immediately take over the saving of the Star Kingdom again; the menace this time is out of his hands at first -- because he's simply a friend of the great King, not being in the body of a Prince whose commands must be obeyed. It isn't the best of Hamilton's recent work; the job of going back and trying to recapture a world and attitude after having left it for years is a difficult one. And the limits he has imposed on himself in IF treating Gordon's abilities within reason make it harder to buckle a fine swash. But he does come up with a fine "villain" whose coritplexity was not fully revealed in the original story and who has att the charm we could want. It's fun to read, particularly if you've wondered whether Gordon could ever get back to his Princess. Fraction (Ace, #tf) seems at first to be based on a fairly standard situation. Men have colonized Arcon. Now, a few hundred years later, they find that the planet is at best marginally suitable for men. Certain factors in the ecology of Arcon have made senility and death the common lot by the age of forty and there is a risk that this lack of time for the individuals will make it impossible to maintain a civilization. But meantime they have destroyed their original spaceship, and their technology seems unable to build another. Politics has entered, too. The group who opposed settling Arcon and who later wanted to leave for another world are known as the Yellows and are considered the Enemy by the Blues and Greens. Arcon is actually ruled by a Security system designed supposedly to weed out dangerous Yellows. Len Thomas is kicked out of school for advocating what is termed Yellow policies. And then he discovers apparently that Security system is actually in the hands of the Yellows and that he is to be part of a small group sent to be trained for a voyage to another star in a spaceship being secretly built. However, the formula is being turned on its head by this time, and it becomes obvious to the reader that things are not at all as Thomas is first led to believe. Under all this, there is a rather ingenious set of political struggles and a well-worked-out solution to the problem of Darkover. Unfortunately, the writing is sometimes a little clumsy and the characters are less developed than the better-handled plotting deserves. Gordon could use a good deal of careful editing and some detailed editorial advice; he shows more than enough promise here to deserve such attention. This is a case where there is comparatively little schmaltz -- and where some could have been used most profitably. The love relation of Thomas and a girl being sent with him and the relations of the entire group deserve more emotional development. They are put in a damned good situation, but the dryness with which it is handed to us gives little more than a report of the events. The smaller bits, away from the group around Thomas, indicate that Gordon can sometimes capture the emotional feeling of the situation, and this makes it doubly unfortunate that some of the main events within the group going on the shipare handed to us with so little real emotional color. It's a somewhat annoying treatment of an interesting idea, but on balance the virtues are greater than the defects. be made on A Piece of Resistance , by Clive Egleton (CowardMcCann, #). This is not advertised on the jacket as science fiction, nor is it properly. Instead, it's one of those novels that takes place in the future simply because it can't be squeezed into the present. Yet, since the publishers felt it should be sent to science-fiction reviewers and since it is built up as a novel about the future, I feel it should be covered here. The basic situation is that England has been conquered by Russia and is now occupied. There are collaborators and an underground, here represented by Garnett. The basic situation is standard spy stuff. The Russians have captured a resistance fighter who has information that can destroy the underground. Garnett is sent to free him (or probably to kill him, if necessary) before he can Reveal All. And from there on it's pure kitsch -- about as dishonest a use of the situation as is possible. There is almost no sign of any real reason for the underground. In reading the book, there is a violently stated anti-Russian anticommunist attitude and a constant iteration of how bad things are. But we see very little of that. The Russians we meet seem in only vague control, and we see very little of what they are doing; true, they seem to capture and be willing to shoot people who kill their people, but the rest of England goes on without any great evidence of the change. In fact, except for one mention, there seems almost no evidence of the war that was great enough to conquer the country, despite its having involved atomic weapons. What America is doing or thinking, or what political changes have ocurred in the rest of the world, is left uncovered. There is the standard woman who may or may not be a double agent. And there is the equally standard encounter at a critical moment with a Russian patrol, which gives a chance to show how easily the (rather mild) Russian is bamboozled. But aside from some moments during the unbelievable attack on the prison where our captive is kept, most of the events are stated as being laden with drama and danger -- but lack any real conviction of either. This attempt to lay a standard spy thriller in the future is hard to justify. It would have been a lot better laid in East Germany or some such place, and with an honest attention to background. This IF is as false to me as the attempt to graft sexy romances onto science fiction was back in the late thirties. That was such obvious kitsch that it failed completely on the stands. I can only hope that this will fail as badly, before we get a flood of science-fiction spy thrillers by men who know nothing of sciencefiction technique. However, having had some experience with the reviewing of books in most of our papers and magazines outside the science-fiction field, I'd hesitate to bet that it wouldn't receive raves in most of the book columns. There is no reason for any science-fiction reader to bother with this, in any event.  cated at his feet. Thorpe brushed it aside and stormed across the room for his cape and his cane. His job was done and he had to get out of this palace of horrors. But the statue followed, a whimpering thing that crawled after him and tugged at the embroidered edges of his cape. Cracked hands reached up to him and implored -- they brought a memory of a more ancient touch that so enraged Thorpe that he yelled abuse and brought his jewel cane down upon that dreadful image. And again. And again. And again. With each blow the red ruin of Bedford's face increased. Thorpe's grip on the cane held down the triggering device imbedded in the handle and the stricken figure on the floor was thrown into a convulsions like those of a freshly speared fish. It whimpered and screamed and jumped about like a demented marionette. And died. With all his weight behind it Thorpe drove the cane into Bedford's fat belly and held it there like a rapier, while the power threw the battered body into its final post mortem agonies. Thorpe's mind had snapped. Like a man possessed he hurried around the room, tumbling rubbish and papers into piles and igniting them with his pocket lighter. When several fires were roaring through the room he hurried downstairs and threw open the first door he came to. It was some sort of study. He ripped opened drawers and spilled papers out onto the moth-eaten carpet. He dragged them over to where filthy drapes hung from one window and set the whole lot ablaze. He smashed an old chair and used the legs for torches and carried them around the great deserted house, downstairs and up, setting on fire everything he could reach. He felt sick and dizzy but he knew he had to finish what he had started. He must remove all traces of what had happened in this house -- Bedford, his machine, and everything connected with it. Everything. The furniture was old and burned well. In rto time at all the ancient timber house would become an inferno. He started to leave and flames reached out to him. With a dumb sort of comprehension he realized that he had trapped himself. Smoke rose up in great billowing clouds to engulf him; fierce gusts of flame roared to possess him. He was suffocating. He moved forward like a drunken figure in a dream through the inferno of hatred he had created. He fell. Like a tumbling rag dollhe fell down the rotten stairs that had already begun to cave in under the burden of the flames, down into the hideous dark smoke. His body came to rest somewhere in the hallway and he coughed impotently. He would die. There was no escape. He could not move. His legs seemed to have been broken by the fall. Well, so be it. Perhaps it was better this way. To have lived out a life knowing what he knew -- and then he remembered Bedford's evil genius and death was no longer a pain. Fire was good -- it cleansed. He would die a martyr's death. What more could a poet ask? A great torrent of foam surged through what was left of the front door and covered him completely. Dimly he could here voices and the familiar howl of a fire siren. And he smiled, for he knew they were too late. The fire roared defiance at his rescuers -- but the oceans of foam pushed it back -- back -- and anxious hands searched for and found him, carried him to safety. The last thing he saw was the roof of the old house collapsing into a great shower of sparks and he closed his eyes and was content. They hustled him into an ambulence and rushed him to the nearest hospital. F OR several days his escape was given front-page publicity -- publicity that worked in well with the forthcoming Betjeman Prize Tourney, which he was a hot favorite to win. When he was well enough he sat up in bed and scribbled verse frantically and with a new sense of purpose quite foreign to his temperament. He could not know that he was possessed by a terrible demon in the shape of a fear that time might, at any moment, reel to a stop. A week was enough time for the IF police to sift the evidence of the fire and work over Bedford's charred remains. A warrant was summarily issued and Thorpe was removed to a police hospital while the crown prepared its case. But all this hardly mattered to him. He still scribbled incessantly. His trial was mercifully brief. He sat tense and uncommunicative throughout the proceedings and his counsel, defeated by his duced to making a plea of temporary insanity and throwing him on the mercy of the court. The plea was accepted -- the case was closed. Thorpe was transferred to a secluded institution where he continued to churn out reams of incomprehensible poems -- his mind still held in thrall by what he had found in Bedford's machine, knowing what he knows and wondering how long it will be before somebody else starts fiddling around with Bedford's ideas -- and knowing there is nothing he can do about it. For the rest of his natural life. # Hobgoblin. "I did that work myself. There is nothing wrong with it." ly. So this was a personal matter with the goblin now. An excellent opportunity to embarrass the chief before his entire planet, to torpedo his prestige. He was tempted. The chief had tried to trick him, and the audience had been thirsty for his blood right along. He could get even with the whole species of Hobgoblin and make its dentistry the laughing stock of the galaxy. He saw that the Jann was back in his booth. That made it safe: he could tell off the planet with impunity -- the huge robot would vaporize anyone who dared to attack him. There would be blood and carnage and flame -- was he thinking of? He was here to make friends for the University, not to incite riot. He truly needed an assistant if his nerves were this tight. Someone to cool him off. "The work is excellent," he said. "I could not do better myself. The cement is defective. Give it time and every restoration will come loose. This entire mouth will have to be redone. And every case where you used this type of cement. They all are suspect." The goblin dentist looked. He pried off another cap and saw the condition of the underlying cement. He sagged, confidence gone. "You're right. Doctor. It was a new variety -- not time-tested -- but most highly recommended. We used it on our special patients -- tourists, visitors, persons of note -- " said graciously, suddenly seeing the answer to those vague off-planet complaints. "Perhaps there is some quality of the local environment that affects the cement as it is being applied. The University will be happy to run tests for you. It's a shame to have work this good be undermined by something this small." "Doctor," the goblin said with surprising politeness, "you have made your point. University training is beneficial. We shall act accordingly." Somehow this did not seem to be the proper time to confess that he had almost missed the key cavity -- or that only the timely reminder by his bipedal assistant had prompted him to perform the routine check that had led to the major discovery. His assistant -- she had been perfect. She had worked correctly and right without intruding. This was the one he wanted to keep. "What is your name and planet?" he asked her as he finished his preparations on the patient. "Miss Galland -- Earth," she said. "Very good, Miss Galland of Earth. I want you to -- " He stopped. He had suddenly realized what was strange about her voice. She wasn't speaking through the translator. "Earth?" "Yes, Doctor," she said as she cleaned up the patient's ugly face. looked directly at her for the first time. She was a young, esthetic, female human being. "Judy!" he exclaimed, amazed. "Judy Galland -- " "I thought you'd never notice. Doctor," she said smiling. "We always worked well together." "What are you doing here?" "Why, I'm assisting you. I thought you knew." "I mean -- I left you on Earth, back when -- " She smiled again. "That's a long story, Doctor.Let's just say that I needed a position and there was an opening. After that matters became complicated. Deep space and all that. Frankly, your robot rescued me from an unfortunate situation." "The Jann brought you? But he was supposed to be protecting me! I thought Miss Taran -- " "None but I shall do thee die," the Jann boomed from his booth, startling them both and causing a ripple of dismay to pass through the massed goblins. "But thy skein will be too brief without a proper assistant. I perceived thou couldst not endure even forty years in thy solitary condition." IF Judy guided the patient out of the chair. "So y #U see , Doctor, two plus two -- " "Equals four." He grabbed her by the arm. "Come on -- let's get out of here before Miss Tarantula sends Number Fitfe. I'll settle for Four." "And a married man is far more likely to live to ninety-two," the Jann observed, rising grandly from the booth. not listening. But the goblin audience certainly was and catcalls resounded.  earth -- a delicate arrangement, if you stop to think about it. Three months since Cathy stepped into that spacebus on a frosty morning. I'd brooded around the house at Round Hill for three days after they'd left, never out of range of a radio or TV. By the end of the third day I was cursing the universe again, reassessing, drinking too much. "Thomas?" Oh, that lovely voice from a far space. The Pleiades? "Thomas -- " I was instantly sober, then immediately stoned again but with a different intoxication. "Cathy." "It's all right, Thomas. Your -- genetic code -- is all right. It can be modified." I'm standing there, stunned. "It took some doing to arrange it, Thomas. We've only done it a few times in our whole (Continued from page #) history. But you can come back -- you can come here with me if you still want to, Thomas." She knew bloody well I still wanted to but a woman is a woman no matter where she's from. Yes, I wanted to. "Don't be silly," I said. without me. We said some other things then and she promised to see me in March. May I say that in the following weeks I took care of myself with megalomanic care? I didn't cross a street against a light. I drove as little as possible and I took vitamin pills. I brushed my teeth. I didn't look at the girls in the Square and I refused to fly in aircraft. The Pleiades, si -- La Guardia, no. The Stonehenge isn't for sale. Harry and his people need it. They may be using it for a long time. I almost said we'll be using it. Anyway, it will stay here on Round Hill. I'll come back from time to time, of course, to look around, see what's happening. We'll have to come either for a few minutes or for three months. Cathy said we could come back for three months every two years. That will be great but we'll be spending most of our time out there. The spacebus is due now. Here it is. Cathy, my lovely girl, is the first one out. There are others -- who will stay for three months. The station wagons are here again but someone else will be taking oysr the Round Hill end of the operation. I'm going. We'll be back now and again. Harry consulted his computer and told us to get aboard. We did. # pelts -- while he had only one. Klaywelder turned over and closed his eyes. -- and came fully awake. The luminous dial over his bunk said he had slept only a short hour. His senses were fuzzy from the strong Pharalellian wine. He cocked his head and listened. Nothing. He shrugged and turned over -- then sat up stiffly. There it was again. Unfamiliar. He set his feet on the floor and something heavy draped over his ankles and wrapped softly about his calves. Klaywelder gasped and jerked away. The firm grip held, tightened, and he yelled as he was pulled to the floor. ( Continued from page #I ) Klaywelder fought savagely. He kicked, pummeled with his fists. His blows were muffled in thick, warm fur, as damp leather tightened about his waist and inched up across his chest. He screamed and cursed himself and Garii and the universe until his throat was raw. And in some last, coherent corner of his mind he wondered if anyone else knew Pharalellians didn't believe in a life after death -- and didn't need to. As thick golden fur covered his face he saw a quick bright picture of dark earthen cups on a smooth stone floor -- small offerings of reverence for those who had passed on to Eternal Life.  IF worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure...  available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. 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All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Boods, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. I hope some day to meet the Porguens, Mr. and Mrs., Victor. The last Hue And Cry carried a letter from Mrs. Porguen, a well-stated afid certainly reasonable presentation of her views on the February issue of Galaxy -- to which I replied. Now Mr. Porguen has taken up the debate in another excellent letter. My reply in the last issue still stands -- I might add that stories must evolve in form and content as does everything else -- including magazines. Now, Mr. Porguen: Dear Mr. Jakobsson: The question of meanings is still bothering us. The JulyAugust " Hue and Cry" brings us Mr. Corwins comments on " The Last Night of the Festival", heavily emphasizing the graphic layout values of the story. It also contains your clarification that the story described " a race of humans, survivors of mutual abuse, who had evolved into creatures capable of existing only in festival atmosphere -- . Now, the graphic layout was a fresh visual experience, though I don't relish the possibility of having every SF story so adorned. Spices are best in minute amounts. But the story itself -- To make certain  hadn't missed its true value by giving up reading it too soon,  made it a point this time of going past the #th. page, all the way to the #th. The darn thing turns out to be worse than I thought. Plachta starts with what appears to be some sort of mystic poetry, giving us a bellyful of images, some delicate and beautiful, some cruel and shocking and some plainly hysterical and stupid. They describe the movement of a couple towards a crowd, across a lawn, to the edge of a forest, under the Gate of Blood, to the Final Grotto, past the Wisdom Trees but not (Oh, no!) into the Tunnel of No Return, then to play a game called " The Spider and the Fly", kiss each other, proceed to the Lazy Lagoon and finally enjoy walking hand in hand under the Surprise Shower. Honest to God. When the verborrhea is over, they start explaining to each other what it's all about, # pages too late and # before the end. They talk about it for # pages and then Plachta gives us... more of the same! A agghhh! Mr. Jakobsson, " The Last Night of the Festival" is fantasy, very definitely fantasy and not awfully good fantasy at that. Obscure imagery has never been the mark of a good writer. Plachta must be somewhat aware of this, as he finally feels the need to include a plain-language explanation, by means of a dialogue near the end of the story. You speak of underlying realities. But eight rhymed one-sentence condemnations of Nazi Germany do not a story make, Mr. Jakobsson. A nd, in any case, the whole thing had absolutely no business in a science-fiction magazine. Please, no more Plachta, unless he becomes a writer of SF stories. Take " Slow Sculpture," for ex( Continued on page #) IF were Mvcruciam Benjamin Frankli Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great ? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. copy of "The Mastery of Life" -- ligation. A nonprofit organization. Address: Scribe N.S.A. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. To: Falkynberg, Oxbo  Associates Regis Center, Proxit # # # Sirs: Information re Quindar desperately needed. Your standard contract being drawn with fifty percent override. Preliminary expenses ruaranteed until contract accepted. Take what action you can immediate. Known data follows. Please comex acceptance. Lloyds by T. Bruber I timated his chances of geting out of the window two and a half meters to his left and knew that, as of now, they were small, one move, and the Peacemen of the Brothers of God would jump him and either beat him to death with their peace wands or toss him in the contemplation cell and drop the key into a glacier crevasse. The former was by far the more likely. The contemplation cell, which Mikko had once been shown, was an iron-barred stone prison, a single, big, unheated chamber with some piles of straw in it and a stream of water running through it. Sinning members of the Brotherhood found themselves "sequestered for contemplation" and given one meal a day until they were either forgiven by the Table of Elders or died of exposure and malnutrition -- whichever occurred first. The Peacemen had a use for that cell and apparently no use whatever for Mikko Falkynberg. On the other hand, while the Holy Guardians of Peace, like the other members of the Brotherhood, were forbidden to take human life, they were permitted to subdue recalcitrant sinners. They could carry no weapons, but their peace wands were of dense, hard wood, four centimeters in diameter and seventy-five centimeters long. If a sinner departed this life while being subdued, that was the Will of God and no fault of the Peaceman. Mikko Falkynberg had no deeire either to contemplate himself to death or to be subdued to death by others. The trouble was that some of the men surrounding him looked as if they were trying to figure out some way to do both -- preferably alternately and for a long time to come. Sitting in a chair with half a dozen of the Holy Guardians on each side of him, Mikko ignored them and faced the Table of Elders -- all eight of them -- with perfect aplomb. The Patriarch Ebenezer was speaking: "You came among us as a stranger, saying you sought IF the Truth. And now -- " he gestured gently with a thin white hand. "And now -- this." Mikko put his hands palm-topalm in front of his broad chest. "Venerable Patriarch, I have been among the Brotherhood and dwelt with them for many weeks. I have listened, I have learned and I have obeyed. I now know the Holy Laws, the Holy Liturgy, and the Holy History -- " Most bloody well especially the Holy History! " -- and during all this time I have been under the watchful and benevolent eye of Your Most Venerable Paternity. Tell me, most Reverenced Patriarch, have I, during that time, done anything -- " He paused very slightly. " -- anything whatever , that Your Most Venerable Paternity knows, of your own knowledge , could be called a sin?" His emphases were gentle. Silence fell in the room as old Ebenezer looked suddenly thoughtful. The Patriarch was old only physiologically; his chronological age was scarcely more than Seventy Standard Years. But the skin of his face was dark and wrinkled, and his hair and beard were white -- in spite of the fact that he was a great deal younger than Falkynberg. Falkynberg had carefully refrained from disabusing the Patriarch of the notion that he, Mikko, was no older than he looked -- that is, looked according to the Brotherhood's rather parochial ideas of physiological aging. The Brotherhood was aware that prolongevity treatments were usual in other parts of the galaxy but, since such things were the work of Sathanas, thee were not acceptable emotionally and therefore did not really exist. If a man looked thirty-five, he was thirty-five and Patriarch Ebenezer looked upon Mikko as a youngster half his own age. "No," said the Venerable Patriarch after a long minute. "I know of no sin upon you. But you have heard the charges of the Wife Sara." "I have," Mikko said solemnly. "They are grave charges indeed, Venerable Patriarch. I know not how to answer them save to say that I am innocent." murmuring grumble from the Peacemen on either side of him, but Mikko ignored it. "Do you, then, deny the accusation, my son?" Ebenezer asked in his dry, raspy whisper. "Most emphatically. Venerable One." Mikko let his gaze move around the circle of the others at the Table. Jakob, next in line for the Patriarchy, was somewhat gaunter of face than Ebenezer, and had round, staring eyes that made him look corpselike in the flickering light from the central fireplace. Enoch and Enos, the twin brothers, were hard of face and hard of eye, with salt-and-oepper beards and long hair. Jared was as bald as a spaceship hull, with weight and musculature to match. Zachariah had thin, wispy hair, a great hawkish nose and eyes like lasers. Ephron had curly white hair and a receding chin that made him look weaker than he really was. And then there was Lamech. The trouble with Lamech was that every time Mikko looked at the man, he felt as if he were looking at a distorted image of himself. Lamech stood a hundred eightyfive centimeters tall, was heavy-set, perhaps a little too fat around the middle. Full beard, full mustache, full head of hair curling at the nape of the neck, eyebrows the same dark brown as the rest of the hair. Beneath the brows were dark, wide-spaced, beady, rather piggish eyes that showed sharp intelligence. Jaw broad and heavy. Lips thick and expressive. Genesis #, #-#, Mikko thought. Except that it ought to be: Genesis #, #-#. In spite of the fire in the fireplace the big, logwalled room was colder and Mikko wasn't really dressed for any long exposure to that cold. Lamech slitted his piggish little eyes and said calmly, "Are we to doubt, then, the testimony of my prime wife? Sara has said that this man -- " "We have heard the testimony, Brother Lamech," the Patriarch said in a voice that was as dry and blistering as a Valdusian wind. Lamech withered into silence. Mikko had early recognized the reason for Sara's behavior. Take at random any woman who loves her husband. Allow them to cohabit for, say, ten years, so that the newness wears off and routine sets in. Then suddenly present her with an exotic stranger who greatly resembles her husband but is far handsomer. Present her with a man who is stronger, cleverer, wiser, more understanding, more widely traveled and far more sophisticated. Present her with a man who has all of her beloved husband's good qualities -- and more -- and none of his bad ones. What would any such woman do? Mikko Falkynberg had long ago resigned himself to the fact that this situation would come up in his life with random regularity and he had always made it a point, because of the generosity of his soul, to do his best to help such women -- provided, of course, that they had the beauty, intelligence, and emotional stability that appeal to the connoisseur. Sara had beauty and intelligence, all right, but emotionally she was as any primitive suffering under the duress of a puritanical society. He had avoided her as he would have an equivalent mass of unIF shielded Cobalt Sixty. As a result, he was now playing Joseph to Lamech's Potiphar and was under tecnical arrest by the Table of Elders. If only Lamech -- or Sara -- had waited another hour! Ebenezer murmured, "Will you take a solemn oath to that effect, my son?" "Without the least hesitation," Mikko assured him. He raised his right hand solemnly. As he did so, he glanced at the braided cuff of his robe. A tiny telltale glinted. It might have been taken for a bit of mica or a tiny shard of broken glass gleaming in the firelight but Mikko saw it for what it was. Tress had come over the horizon. raised and put his left palm piously on his breast, thereby activating certain mechanisms. He began to speak in the solemn tones of the dialect of Italio-Swahili spoken on Ndullah. "Tress, hear me." His voice was so deep and vibrant that the Elders merely blinked and stared. They dared not interrupt. "Yes, Mikko," said a small voice in Mikko's ear. "Highest priority. Put a Numred warning right in the middle of the village square. The curfew has Science-fiction stories from Socialist countries Here is a book that is truly a boon to science-fiction fans -- the best stories of nine writers whose work has seldom, if ever, appeared on this side of the Atlantic. Whether the reader comes to enjoyment-or to grasp a deeper understanding of socialist idealism -- he is sure to come away fully satisfied. "An immensely valuable addition to the science fiction canon...great enjoyment. frederik pohl sounded, so nobody will get hurt. Then be waiting for me as soon as possible at the rendezvous. How long will that take you?" rive in eight point seven three minutes. I will be at rendezvous in fourteen point six two minutes," Tress said. "Amen," intoned Mikko. After a full two seconds of silence, Patriarch Ebenezer blinked and said: "Er -- we cannot accept an oath not of our tongue." "Oh, of course," Mikko said smoothly. "In prayer it is natural to revert to one's native tongue. How would you have it worded, Venerable Patriarch? I am not, as you know, fully conversant with your Liturgy as yet." Fetching the great, hand-lettered book in question took five minutes, and reading out the appropriate paragraphs took another three. Mikko was all prepared to go through the oath seemingly a second time when he happened to look through the window to his left. "My word," he said mildly. "What could that be? A fire?" A red glow was coming from the village square. Everyone craned his neck to see. With precision timing Mikko turned his back and closed his eyes a fraction of a second before the light turned from red to blinding white. He had judged the distance to the other window to a centimeter. He walked toward it, eyes still closed, opened it and jumped out into the snowbank below, ignoring the shouts and screams from the men in the room behind him. After five seconds the blinding white light died, leaving only a faint hissing in the melted snow of the village square. Mikko Falkynberg opened his eyes and started moving toward the woods at the edge of the village. He still had a long way to go but it would be several minutes before the Table regained eyesight -- and several more before effective pursuit could be organized. He sprinted off through the snow toward the rendezvous. Twenty minutes later, he was no longer sprinting, just keeping up a steady plod toward the clearing where Tress would be waiting. He could hear no sounds of pursuit to his rear, although his footprints could have been followed easily enough. Had the flare so frightened his interlocators that they dared not follow or was the confusion still so great that they didn't yet realize what had happened? He never did find out. A few minutes later the shadowy eggshape of a spaceship was looming in the darkling night. Mikko climbed aboard and said, "Let's get the hell out of here right now." IF IITigood boy." The elegant, meticulously dressed, fashionable gentleman who spoke was Mr. Morgan Oxbo, lately come to Beedirn City and already acceptable to the upper levels of Beedirn society. He was wealthy, affable, witty without being offensive and of excellent countenance. His intimate knowledge of recent events in the More Important Centers of Galactic Power fascinated the gentlemen. The ladies were particularly taken by his small, neat beard and mustache and his wealth of curly, dark auburn hair. The creature to whom he spoke was small and low-slung, looking as though there were both dachshund and armadillo in his ancestry -- which there was not, since neither Terrestrial animal had ever been anywhere within fifty lightyears of Maxaglor. Little Metrak had a glossy black hide and a round, high-domed head embellished with small, neat, close-set ears. His eyes were black, large and rather wistful and his mouth seemed to wear a plaintive smile. The ladies thought him "simply adorable" and they admired Mr. Oxbo's taste in exotic pets, but Metrak seemed shy and skittered away on six stumpy little legs when they tried to pet him. And Mr. Oxbo had warned them that he might scratch if he were teased. Metrak, hearing Mr. Oxbo's voice, came away from his careful exploration of a Public Utility control dome at the curb and trotted back to his place at Mr. Oxbo's side. The two of them continued their promenade down the avenue toward the spaceport entrance, Mr. Oxbo holding Metrak's leash in one elegantly gloved hand. The faint, tangy aroma of poon flowers hung on the warm breeze. Twice Mr. Oxbo tipped his hat to passing ladies while Metrak trotted along a few inches from the heel of a boot that was as polished and as black as his own glossy integument. They strolled in through the doors of the great lobby of the huge spaceport, crossed it and surveyed the slidewalks. One, which T'd off in both directions, sported a large sign with this information: Mr. Oxbo and his small friend went to the left. A few minutes later, Mr. Oxbo was standing beII ing his card to a young, properly deferential clerk. "I am looking," he said in a pleasant voice, "for a small crate -- about a hundred fifty kilos -- which was to have been shipped to me from Synax IV. My agents said they had not yet been notified of its arrival, so I thought I'd drop round and see." "Of course, Mr. Oxbo," the clerk said, taking his card and the two-debit note which clung casually to the bottom. "I'll be glad to check the newly landed freight for you. Will this crate be consigned to you?" "Either directly to me -- easy, Metrak! -- or to my agents, Howard and Gibbs." "Very well, sir. Please sit down. I'll see to this myself. Only be a moment." "Ha, hm," Mr. Oxbo said, sitting down and tapping his chin with the ivory knob handle on his onyx cane. "I shall await your return." He picked a copy of Intragalac tic Freight Handlers Digest of Current Rules  Regulations -- Southern Sector from the desk and leafed through it. Metrak, seeing his leashholder preoccupied, slipped out of his collar and scampered after the clerk, his six paws making slight waltztime clicks on the concrete floor. The clerk failed to notice as the small creature scuttled through the inner door behind him. A brace of signs on the wall of the inner corridor said: The clerk took the branch to the left. Metrak went to the right and kept moving until he reached a door which announced: A ten-centimeter space under the door allowed for air circulation. Metrak flattened himself. His cross-section, normally almost round, became more and more elliptical until he looked something like an oddly shaped doormat. His head was the most difficult part to get under but he managed it. The rest of him slid beneath the door without effort. He resumed his normal shape, stood up on his rearmost legs and surveyed the room. This was a working section of the spaceport. With little allowance for walkways, indirect lighting or other human conveniences, the vast area was filled with large crates, small crates, long crates and skinny crates. They were being loaded and unloaded by cratehandling robots, stacked by cratestacking robots, moved to and from ships by field cargo robots, sorted by sorting robots and IF picked up for local delivery by messenger robots. Over all the darting eyes of the central cargo computer kept careful watch as its minions followed their detailed instructions. These crate-handling robots were not too bright -- just smart enough to obey the orders of their master, the central cargo computer. Metrak dropped to all sixes and click , tickety-ticked across the floor toward a particular field cargo robot. One of the mobile eyes examined him. Humans and sentient aliens were not permitted in the area without carrying a special badge. Not human, the computer decided; not listed sentient alien -- the computer searched for a category. Aha! The computer sent a message to Maintenance Department Subsection Rat  Rodent Control , and dismissed the problem. Metrak reached the carrier -- which had just about finished loading a group of unusually shaped crates -- and crawled under the low overhang between the treads. Rolling over on his back, he reached up with his six legs, hooked over a frame brace and pulled himself up until he was clamped tightly in place. The field cargo robot got the last crate loaded firmly aboard its carrier and, chuckling softly to itself, headed out the vast double doors onto the field. HE only ship incoming from Synax IV in the past week downloaded yesterday," the clerk informed Mr. Oxbo. "The entire cargo was a private consignment of, ah, er, pleasure androids. For transshipment, of course." "Of course," Mr. Oxbo agreed politely. "So, I'm afraid your shipment just hasn't -- " "It was transshipped through Von Haagen," Mr. Oxbo said, smiling innocently at the clerk. "Would that make a difference?" "A difference!" The clerk was amazed. "My dear sir, that means I'd -- if you'd told me -- " Mr. Oxbo produced another two-debit note between fore and index fingers with the languid aplomb of a conjurer. "Delighted, of course, to find the shipment for you in any case," the clerk continued, not noticing his right hand take the money. "I shall be but a few seconds." "Take," Mr. Oxbo insisted, "your time." T HE ship that the field cargo robot pulled up to had the characteristic breakfast look of an Uxorian freighter. Built like three stubby sausages tied in a bundle and surmounted by a poached egg, these ships had a reputation for cheapness, large capacity, stupidity, undependability and difficulty of repair. They were also impossible to get spare parts for and Uxor-trained machanics -- of which there were few -- were the only ones who would dare delve into their randomly plumbed and wired brains and bowels. The captains of Uxorian freighters were either courageous and daring or broke and desperate. Metrak dropped off the underside of the carrier as it reached its destination and, flattening himself as much as he could against the gray concrete, scurried over to the near sausage. After waiting long enough to make sure he hadn't set off any alarms or alerted any interior sensors, he flattened himself out against the near fin, hooked his forepaws over its sloping edge and started to climb. When he reached the top of the fin, some forty feet up, he wrapped himself around an external atmosphere engine fuel pipe and shinnied up, a black lump against the stainless steel. A ship's officer wearing the insignia of supercargo came around to inspect the loading and Metrak froze in place. The officer puttered around for three or four minutes with Metrak thinking dark thoughts overhead. This would throw the timing off. The officer wandered off without having once looked up. Metrak allowed himself a Maxaglorian grin and continued up to the end of the pipe. He was still a good many feet short of the deepspace hydrogen scoops that were his target. the clerk's office, practiced his supercilious sneer. Then be practiced lifting both eyebrows in surprise. The inner door swung open and he reverted automatically to languid boredom, his most successful pose. While I sit here out-incompetencing a clerk , he thought, smiling vapidly as the one in question entered the office, Mikko is plying our trade on a primitive planet. Wild parties . Native girls. He and Tress are having a fine old time... "I have succeeded in exacting the spacial coordinates in relation to the specified consignment as per your inquiry," the clerk announced. Morgan stared at the clerk. Success seemed to have gone to his head. "How meretriciously consanguineous of you, old man," he murmured. "We always try to meet or exceed our performance specifications, as set down in the Intragalactic Manual," the clerk assured him. He looked so pleased at having found the crate that Morgan wondered if it was the first time. There was a good chance, since the stuff was usually robot-handled right to final delivery. The crate had been located faster than Morgan had allowed for -- Metrak wasn't yet back. "Fine," he said, thinking fast. "I knew I could count on you. Will you please arrange to have IF both crates shipped to my residence immediately? I would be ever in your debt." "Ah, yes," the clerk said, fiddling with his marking pen. "Both crates, you say?" "Of course. One isn't very much good to me without the other." "Ah, yes. You will excuse me for a moment while I, ah, make the arrangements." Morgan nodded pleasantly and the clerk went back through the inner door. so high up on the hull -- the climbing method he had to use now left traces. Finding a seam in the plating that went straight up to the near scoop, he inserted his powerful fingers in the crack and pinched the metal to obtain a climbing grip. He left a track of peculiar circular indentations along the edge of the seam as he climbed. No other Maxaglorian would have dreamed of trying such a suicidally insane stunt -- not on the surface of Maxaglor. Beings who have evolved on a planet with a surface gravity of five times ten to the fifth centimeters per second squared -- five hundred Standard Gees -- do not much care for heights. Even the incredibly tough and hard body of a Maxaglorian cannot survive a drop of more than two or three meters. And, unlike the majority of giant planets, or the supergiant in the #I Cygni system, Maxaglor does not have an extensive atmosphere. That was ripped away hundreds of thousands of millennia ago by a nearby satellite the size of Neptune. At the surface, the atmospheric pressure is four times that of Earth's, but eighty percent of that consists of argon, neon, and helium. The five percent of oxygen means that the partial pressure of that gas is the same as it is on Earth. Thus the Maxaglorian atmosphere is shallow; climbing even a rather high hill will soon put one into the stratosphere. "Low" gravity -- less than four or five gees -- gives a Maxaglorian the feeling that he is falling. Which gives him the feeling that he is within a fraction of a second of death. On Maxaglor, if you fall long enough to realize it, you are dead. It had taken Metrak a long time, using stem mental discipline, to be able to climb vertically; now he did so with practiced ease. The scoop was furled closed under an atmosphere shield and Metrak had to clench the seam with his two rear pairs of feet and pull open one edge of the scoop for a few centimeters with his short fingers. He reached in for the nearest control vane and wrenched it loose with one quick motion. Passing the vane down to a middle hand, he used his two forehands to unstrap a thin metal sheet which had been clamped to his underside. About four centimeters thick, and shaped like a sixteen-centimeter shark's fin, it was a close approximation of the removed vane. Metrak snapped it into place over the exposed gas teat and, with the pressure of two stubby fingers, secured it in position. He then strapped the excess vane underneath him, where the counterfeit had been, and eased the scoop shut. He inspected the scoop carefully for exterior signs of tampering and found none. Looking down, Metrak saw that the loading was finished and the carrier was preparing to depart. He snapped loose from the seam and, rolling into as tight a ball as he could manage with the vane strapped to him, dropped twentyfive meters to the concrete. consigned to you on the bill of lading, Mr. Oxbo," the clerk announced firmly as he came through the door. "Really? How extraordinary," Morgan said. "Perhaps -- oh, there you are, Metrak," he added as he caught sight of the short figure scurrying in behind the clerk. "You really mustn't get off your leash like that, you might get hurt." He clipped the leash back around Metrak's shiny neck. "Well, no matter. Just send along the one you've located and I'll make do." He stood up and, tucking his cane firmly under his arm, sauntered out of the office, Metrak clicking along behind. Ill in the study of his flat in Beedirn City reading, for the third time, the dynafax sheet from Lloyds that had been forwarded from the planet Proxit. Lloyds of London is one of the biggest insurance companies in this sector of the galaxy. They have, historically speaking, no connection whatever with the ancient firm of that name that had existed so many centuries before on Earth. No person named Lloyd has ever been connected with it. It was founded by three gentlemen named Pembroke, Raskalnikov and Itahu but -- prompted by the fact that they had set up their corporation on the planet London -- they had named it after the ancient, long-defunct firm and had fully and conscientiously lived up to the honor of that almost legendary name. As a parallel, there is a planet named Cajnelot a few thousand light-years from Old Mother Earth. It only has one small continent, and early achieved a planetary government. Its chief executive is called King Arthur and his advisory council is called The Round Table. Its historical conIF nections with the original King Arthur are as direct as those of the present Lloyds of London with the old firm. The dynafax read: To: Falkynberg, Oxbo  Associates Regis Center, Proxit # # Forward: Beedirn City, Beedirn# # # Sirs: Ref: Your contract # Preliminary contract accepted. Registered. Debits Five hundred thousand, (# # # Standard Debit Units) plus expenses. We reaffirm as follows: Quindar Engineering has contracted with certain other Companies (see Ref. #) to provide a planetary platform for scientific purposes, said platform guaranteed by Quindar to pass within five hundred (#  # # ) light-seconds of an A-# star for a length of time guaranteed to be sufficient for full observation of phenomena without danger to the observers. (For er ref.) We have been asked by the group of secondary companies to provide performance and liability insurance for the observers at comprehensive group rates. The directors of Quindar Engineering refuse to supply information necessary for evaluation of risk or performance capability. Investigation shows that Quindar has not spent, in the known galaxy, anywhere near the amount our estimates assume for the cost of such a project. We have been unable to ascertain, by any normal means, the location of the star involved. You are authorized to use any prudent means to acquire this information. All lawful action will be supported by this office. Lloyds by T. Bruber Morgan put the dynafax down and gnawed thoughtfully at the tip of his right thumb. The door announcer spoke: "There is room enough -- " Metrak, who was curled up on an easy chair, fast asleep, didn't hear the coded words. Morgan shot to his feet immediately. He strode over to the chair and tipped it, so that all one hundred twenty kilos of Metrak's small, compact mass hit the floor with a resounding thud. Morgan kicked him solidly with a heavily booted foot. "Up, Professor; he's here." "Gmf?" said Metrak. "Who? Oh. Yes. Thank you, Morgan." Morgan was already out of the room by then, walking rapidly down the hall toward what the upper classes of Beedirn called the receiving room. He flung open the door and went in. The man standing in the center of the room was wearing a coral satin silon coat, a gold doublephase waistcoat, white form-fitpolysilon boots that came almost up to his kneecaps. He bowed to Morgan and said: "Mr. Oxbo, I believe?" "Quite so, Mr. Falkynberg," said Morgan, returning the bow. Then, straightening: "No need to worry. The place isn't bugged." Mikko Falkynberg put his gray hat on a nearby chair and began to remove his gray gloves. "I had assumed it wasn't. Ah! Good morning, Professor Metrak." "Gnp," said the Maxaglorian. "Good morning, Mikko. Good to see you. Wait till I wake up." Morgan had stepped over to the sideboard and was pouring a good quarter of a liter of Aldebaranian brandy into a dynocrystal goblet. He handed it to Metrak, who drained half of it gustily, then blinked up at Mikko. "Ahhh," he said. His highly efficient metabolism had already begun to convert the alcohol to needed energy. "You are early, Mikko," he continued. "Explain, please." "In a moment, Professor," Mikko said. He raised an eyebrow at Morgan, but the expression was unnecessary -- his partner was already handing him a brandy-andwater. With it he passed on the dynafax. "Thank you, Morgan," Mikko said, lowering himself carefully into a chair. "God! What idiots!" "The Brotherhood?" Morgan asked. Mikko narrowed his eyes, glaring. "Naturally. I was accused -- " He paused. "But never mind. Tress has recorded it all and you can get it later. I'll give you a resume." "I'm listening," Morgan said quietly. "And am I," said Metrak, running his black tongue around his horny lips.   the back of his chair. "Let me "Let me read this first." He read it through, said, "Good," then placed it carefully on the table and looked off into some strange nothingness beyond the ceiling. "The Brotherhood is trying to punish itself. That's natural; it always has been. Their religion tells the Brothers that God wants them to live in a cold climate. They must suffer in order to achieve salvation." "Why not suffer in a hot climate?" Metrak asked. "Is not one IF sort of suffering as good as another?" "No," Mikko said, his eyes still somewhere beyond the ceiling. "Hell is hot and they can't suffer in Hell because -- " He stopped abruptly and looked at Metrak. "Professor, shut up. You can get the data from Tress later." Metrak bobbed his head. "Yes. Please continue." Mikko took a sip of his drink. "They -- the Brotherhood -- don't believe in history; only in the Eternal Now." He flicked a glance at Morgan. "In other words, they don't believe in reading and writing, except for their Book of Liturgy. They believe only in oral generation-to-generation transmission of history." He put his glass down gently on the table, next to the dynafax. "We tracked them through Takkarid, right? That's the earliest trace. Eighty-three years ago. Right?" "Right," Morgan murmured softly. Metrak said nothing. "Very well, I am being redun dant," Mikko said. He picked up the dynocrystal brandy glass, drained it and stared at it for a moment before handing it unconsciously to Morgan. "I reiterate without apology," he continued. "The tale we heard on Takkarid is accurate." He got up and walked over to the window, looking out at the city without seeing it. Then he started pacing back and forth in front of the window. "Back up in time. Centuries. I can't nail it down but if we say six or eight hundred years'ago, we'll be in the right order of magnitude. At about that time the Brotherhood of God left Earth." Morgan, who was running a forefinger around the edge of the brandy snifter, violining a perfect B flat from it, stopped suddenly and said: "Earth? Earth?" Mikko didn't stop his pacing. "Earth. Or Alpha Centauri George. Same volume -- and it doesn't matter. But I'm satisfied that it was Earth. The Brotherhood got themselves a ship and took off. They found themselves the planet they were looking for: cold, but not too cold; just enough to make them miserable without Metrak's reverberating voice suddenly said: "Please, Mikko -- a question." Mikko turned away from the window and looked at the little being. "Yes, Professor?" "Why say you it was between six and eight centuries ago?" Mikko used his right forefinger and thumb to massage his nose. He hated being interrupted but he realized that in this case it was necessary. "Before eight hundred years ago," he pointed out, "it would not have been possible for a small group to get hold of a spaceship. The cost was too high, and the ships were too few." Metrak nodded. "True. But since then?" "They are unmutated Old Stock," Mikko said flatly. "Certain?" Metrak asked. "Certain," said Mikko. "Very well. My apologies; continue." Mikko resumed his pacing. "They found the planet they were looking for," he said. "They took off, cruised for God knows how long and accidentally found it." "Then we don't -- " Morgan began. "Just wait," Mikko said calmly. "They found it. They settled down. They figured they were safe from the rest of humanity from then on. They could build up their own society without any trouble. They could rear their children to believe their own particular brand of religious absurdity without having to worry about any outside interference. Happy, happy idiots. Morgan what the tell are you doing?" Morgan was wrapping a length of silver wire around the bell of the dynocrystal brandy glass. He looked up and blinked at Mikko. "What? Oh, nothing! Just fiddling. Get on with it." Mikko flicked a fingernail against the diamonglas of the window. "Very well. The Brotherhood found a planet -- somewhere back then. They liked it. They had a planet that was chilly but not deadly cold. Perfect. Just what they wanted and needed." He turned around to look at his audience again. Morgan was doing something with the glass and the wires that Mikko didn't like to look at. He closed his eyes and very carefully refrained from saying: Morgan! Must you? "Then," Mikko continued, "the planet got too hot for them." Morgan's delicate fingers suddenly stopped moving. "Literally?" "I think so. Quite literally," Mikko said without stopping his steady pacing. "Something happened that changed the climate of the part of the planet where the Brotherhood lived. Changed it radically. The glaciers began to melt. Summers became longer and hotter. Winters became shorter and warmer. There were floods more and more often." He turned and put out a hand, palm up, to Morgan. "What would you say: local or planet wide?" "This happened over a period of years?" Morgan asked. Mikko nodded. "Then I'd say planetwide. Some local change could affect the area for a year or two but anything that drastic, over that long a period of time, would have to be planetwide as far as I can tell. Yes, Mikko, I think you've found it." "Thank you, colleague." Again Mikko resumed his pacing. "But IF this gives us two different planets, doesn't it?" "Right," Morgan agreed. will excuse me," MejL trak said, softly scratching with one tungsten-hard claw. "How does this show there to be two planets? I apologize for my abysmal ignorance. I had understood we were looking for a cold planet that was warming up." "That's right, Professor," Morgan said. "But if the Brotherhood was able to live on this planet before it started warming, it wasn't nearly cold enough. To be the kind of heat-sink required for the project Lloyds is interested in, the surface temperature of the planet would have to be low enough to freeze the atmosphere." Mikko waggled a finger. "There's the further point that if the planet is on the type of cometary orbit we were hypothesizing, there wouldn't be an atmosphere any more. Previous close passes to its A-# sun would have burned off any surface gases." "I take it back, Morgan said. "After due thought I am forced to conclude that you haven't found it after all. Two separate planets in highly eccentric orbits around the same A-# star is a bit much to believe in without practice." "Ah, but you haven't heard all yet." "Excuse my question again, please; could you tell me exactly what is this heat-sink? How do you refrigerate a planet?" Metrak asked, rolling over again and sitting up on his rearmost legs. "Not the whole planet," Morgan said. "Just the environment unit being constructed for the scientists and observers. As a matter of fact, you use the cold of the rest of the planet to protect the observation city." Metrak looked up at Morgan, tilting his head back. The black pupils of his eyes were indistinguishable from the black pigmentation of the rest of the surface of his eyeballs except at very close range, giving him a blank, sightless appearance. "Please, how is that done?" "A heat sink," Morgan said patiently, "is a place where you dump excess heat. The surface of the observation planet is going to get hot rather quickly, so the observation city itself will have to be refrigerated; the heat will have to be pulled out of it. But it will take quite a while for even an A-# sun to heat up a planetary mass with a temperature of three or four degrees all the way to the core. So you drill down several miles and run nickel steel, or high-ytterbium copper tubes down into the planet and use the core itself as the cold end of your refrigerating system. There are other ways -- but that would be the cheapest and probably the most efficient. Do you follow me?" "I do indeed," said the Professor. "I thank you, Morgan. Pardon me, Mikko; I interrupted you. You were saying that we had not yet heard all." "So I was," Mikko agreed. "There is one more datum. Some eighty-three years ago, the Brotherhood left the planet we are discussing and eventually established themselves on the planet where I sojourned with them for a few painful weeks. I discovered, during my study of their Holy History, that while they gave the rise in temperature of their old planet as the moral reason for their leaving it, there was another, rather more immediate reason for leaving. There was a planet falling on them." Morgan looked up sharply. "Ohhhh?" "One of the planets in their system was moving toward them, apparently," Mikko said. "They took it as a sign of collision and catastrophe, so they decided to pack up and go." "Quindar's planet?" asked Morgan. "No," Mikko said. "The planet would have to have been fairly bright in order for them to see it, since they have no telescopes; they don't believe God wants them to use such things. After eighty-three years it must have passed the primary and looped away again." "It gets difficult," Morgan said. "As my great-aunt Agatha has been known to remark, it's always darkest before the dawn," Mikko assured him. "That's one of hers?" Morgan asked. "Right." "No telescopes," Morgan mused. "Fascinating. How did they manage to operate their getaway ship? How did they, come to think of it, manage to justify operating the ship?" "What ship?" Mikko asked. "The reason we stumbled across the reference to them in our, ah, perusal of the personal file hidden in the private safe behind two pair of locked doors in the study of one of the directors of Quindar Engineering," he paused For a breath, "is that they didn't have a ship. At least, not one that worked any more." "Don't sound judgmental," Morgan said. "If they weren't so secretive we wouldn't have to re"Morgan, old friend, let's be honest. If they weren't so secretive we wouldn't have a job. If Lloyds could have gotten the information on the project without hiring us you know damn well they would have; we are very expensive. If there wasn't so much money tied up in the prospective policies, Lloyds wouldn't have bothered. Besides, it's fun." "True," Morgan admitted. IF clipping a small, black, waxy-looking tube onto the maze of silver wire in his hand. A tiny spark ran along the wire, orbiting the brandy glass in what appeared to be several directions at once. Mikko didn't look. "Our friend the director," he explained to Metrak, "was a minor official on the planet the Brotherhood maintained contact with through their one inverse-space portal. It, you see, has no moving parts. As my great-uncle the Duke used to say, if it doesn't move, it must be very deep indeed. "When the planet began to fall on them, the elders called for aid, and our friend was one of those who helped supply it. Shortly after that, he left his post and joined the newly formed Quindar Engineering Corporation. Suggestive?" "Indeed," Metrak agreed. "Most suggestive." "They went out to rescue the Brotherhood," Morgan said, seting his silver-wire wrapped brandy glass down on the nearest table, where it quietly quivered. "They found something. Something the Brotherhood didn't have the instrumentation to discover themselves. Shortly after, they start Quindar Engineering. It must be the same system, somehow." "That's what I -- Morgan, what the hell is that thing?" "This?" Morgan innocently tapped the side of the brandy glass. The room was instantly filled with a low, mellow sound that seemed to be constantly going up in pitch, although it never arrived. "It's a Little Snifter-Operated Cascade Sounder. I plan to manufacture them and retire on the proceeds." "Arrghugh!" Mikko said calmlyMorgan shut the thing off, sadly regarding the slowly melting brandy glass. "It still has a few bugs. You will be pleased to know, Mikko, that we have done something useful. At least, Metrak has done something useful while I provided cover." "I am pleased to know that," Mikko agreed. "What is it that you have done?" "Metrak planted an inverse space portal on the cargo ship we were trying to trace. We couldn't seem to get any information any other way, so we resorted to deception." "Great!" Mikko said. "In the name of my great-grandfather, the rightful King of Faulkenberg, I salute you. But portals aren't directional." "Right. It's going to activate when they come out of drive and send us an analysis of local starspectra.We should be able to figure out where it is from that." "Very clever," Mikko approved. "How did you manage to hook it in to the ship's power supply?" "Not necessary," Metrak told him. "One-time power only. It blows up." "Blows up?" Mikko stared at Morgan. "I prefer to think of it as 'explosive energization," Morgan explained. "You go too far!" Mikko said sternly. "Really! Blowing up a perfectly innocent cargo ship just to -- " "Mikko, come off it. You know I wouldn't do that. Not the whole ship -- just part of it." "Wonder of wonders," Mikko said. "Come along, crew. Tress is waiting." IV den , an aging freighter of Uzorian design and Friedlander registry, the crew took up their breakout stations. On most ships this would have been pointless ritual, since the problems attendant to turning off the flicker drive and returning full time to normal space had been solved over a century ago. On the Umpaul Raat garten it was necessity. Heidigar van Bronk, master and one-tenth owner of the Umpaul Raatgarten , strapped himself into his chair. "Make for all ready," he called into the intercom. A chorus of male voices sounded "All ready!" back at him. "Crew reports all secure," the grating voice of the ship's computer announced. "What from you, you tripleplated imbecile?" Van Bronk asked. "Ship and cargo all secure," the computer replied. "Hah! Very well, Mr. Christianssen, you may proceed already." The pilot nodded and slowly, gingerly brought the control lever back from its full-on position. The Interspace-Phase Flicker Control dial, which was marked logarithmically from I Khz to zero, revolved evenly around its needle to the peg. At about #hz an unsympathetic vibration started building up in the ship's hull: the floors vibrated, the walls shook, the light panels flickered slightly and van Bronk felt nauseated. At #hz a low humming sound came from the ship's speakers. At #hz it came from the walls. Then the needle pegged, all vibration stopped and a rending crash sounded from below. "What in Kriskindom was that?" van Bronk yelled. "An object, mass two hundred kilos, broke loose on delta deck," the computer informed him. "Why the hell wasn't the cargo more securely lashed?" he demanded, releasing the seatweb and striding over to the master control board. "Cargo securely lashed," the computer stated. "Then what the hell was that?" The computer consulted its memory banks, with a keening sound, to establish the master's IF reference. "The that was the ship's water purifier," it said, sounding smug. Van Bronk snapped his feltscribe in half and threw the pieces at the far wall. "Send to delta deck a repair crew," he yelled into the intercom, "and report so soon as possible." "Why does the ship act that way when it comes out of flicker drive?" asked Mr. Christianssen, who had signed on the Umpaul Raatgarten after the last pilot had disappeared on Beedirn. "You tell me, please," van Bronk said. "I have every mechanic in each post we stop go over the drive, and they say, all of them, that there is no reason why it should behave as it does. I should go to Uxor, they tell me. Then I tell them where to go. Also to Uxor should I go to have this computer overhauled. The thing is sealed, and seems to be filled with some kind of green goo. To Uxor I should go. Only with bombs do I go to Uxor. Secure, please, from flicker drive." "Drive secure," the pilot said, flicking the appropriate switch. "Pulse gate discharged. Hull discharged. Scoops in -- " There was a ripping sound and a sudden thud, as if a giant boot had just kicked the ship. "Gott verblast!" van Bronk exclaimed. "Trouble blinker on number two scoop," the pilot said. He consulted his board. "Apparently part of it has ripped away. Yes," he added, flicking the viewer to scan that section of the hull, "that's what happened. The outer corner has ripped loose. I can see one of the vanes drifting away from the ship." A blinding white light filled the viewer. Van Bronk blinked and the light was gone, as was the drifting wreckage. "Double verblast!" he shouted into his pilot's ear. "Now we have exploding vanes. I would not wish my worst enemy to go to Uxor. I will go to Uxor myself and speak gently to the designers of this ship. Send a recognition call," he told the computer, "on the frequency used by this planet." "What planet?" Van Bronk clenched his fists. "I hate you," he told the computer. "The planet we have arrived at, you rasping moron." "Very good," the computer said. It hummed. The main comm-screen lit up, displaying what looked like a handdrawn test pattern. "What ship is that?" a non-commital voice asked. "Verblast!" van Bronk yelled, stepping in front of the viewer. "It is your own specified recognition call we are using. If you don't believe that, what good is my word? We are the Umpaul Raatgarten , for the fourth time. Just as we were last month and three months ago. Four fingers appeared on the test pattern and lifted it out of the way, revealing a round-faced youth with jug ears. Don't get your hippies in an uproar, Captain," he said. "I'm only following my instructions." "Your verdammt instructions are about on a level with everything else which already has happened today. First the water gismo breaks loose, then we have an explosion, then you. I take you with me to Uxor, maybe." "An explosion?" the youth asked. "Wait a second." His face bobbed off the screen, which stayed blank for about three minutes, then an older, darker and thinner face replaced it. "Good afternoon, Captain van Bronk," the new face said. "Here it is night, ship time," van Bronk said. "Good night, Herr Richtman." "Whatever," the head said, an arm appearing and waving afternoonnight away as unimportant. "What's this about an explosion?" Van Bronk shrugged. "One of the vanes ripped off when we came out of flicker drive. From the scoop, you understand. Then it exploded. Poof." "Oh. This was on the outside of the ship, then?" "You show me a ship what has the hydrogen scoops on the inside," van Bronk challenged. "Do you think it could have been sabotage?" "Who would want to blow up a vane after it breaks off the ship? Maybe some conservationists? Afraid it would fall and hit a duck?" "Do vanes usually break off scoops?" Richtman asked. "On this ship? If something doesn't go wrong, then I suspect sabotage." "Well, could it have been some sort of signal?" "It could," van Bronk granted. "It certainly could. Right now it's propagating through space at the speed of light. Inside of three years it will reach the nearest star outside this system. In slightly more than fourteen years it will get to the nearest inhabited planet. Why should I tell you not to worry? In only fourteen years, if they're looking in exactly the right place at exactly the right tenth of a second -- and have some kind of instrument that t can separate that flash from the light of the sun right behind it -- they'll see a flash. Worry." The dark face nodded. "Okay, expert," he said. "Mr. Goodbit has standing instructions to check anything unusual, so I'm checking. Bring your jinx ship in and we'll get it unloaded. The landing beacon's on now." The screen went dark. Van Bronk told the pilot to maneuver the ship into a landing orbit and sat back, quietly wondering what would go wrong next. IF V T respassers w gleamed bright silver on her sunlit side where she rested in space, sharing Beedirn's orbit around its sun. Obviously not built for commerce in either goods or passengers, she was, by deepspace standards, a small, trim ship. It was impossible to tell her function from external appearance: possibly a scout ship or courier for some interstellar navy; possibly a research vessel commissioned by a great university and carrying a complement of dedicated scientists; possibly a revenue cutter, guarding against smugglers and pirates; possibly that ultimate in rich men's toys, a luxurious space yacht. In her fairly short existence she had been most of the above. Her hull was laid in a naval shipyard in expectation of a war which didn't break out. She had served as a pirate-chaser before being sold to the Leadlar Foundation for certain esoteric researches into the positronic flux around collapsed stars. After this five-year mission, the results of which are still being argued by learned bodies of great specialization, she was purchased by a man of great dignity and inherited wealth and refurbished from bowsprit to back plates with nothing less than the very best. The latest ship's computer was brought all the way from Proxit to replace the Navy regulation model. This worthy, on his very first short hop in his new toy, found himself having an argument with his own ship, as represented by her new, ultra-expensive computer. He returned home enraged and ordered the ship sold as scrap; which was done. The hull, "with all appurtenances and dunnage," was sold "in as-is condition, all registered sales being regarded as final," to Mssrs. Morgan Oxbo and Mikko Falkynberg, who were agreeably surprised upon inspecting their purchase. Aside from containing several crates of unopened delicacies and fine wines, the ship had the best computer either of them had ever seen. The previous owner's problem seemed to have been composed in equal parts of his own stubbornness and some very slipshod programing done by his local experts. Since they planned to use their own carefully compounded program anyway, they merely expanded it to utilize the greater abilities of their new machine and were quite content. After several interesting shakedown cruises they decided that the newly christened Trespassers W was ready for action. The fourbeing team: Morgan, Mikko, Metrak the Maxaglorian and Trespassers W, announced very discreetly, in certain select circles, that they were in business. And they had been busy ever since. "Gentlemen," Trespassers W announced in her sweetest voice, "I have received the burst we have been waiting for. Shall I print it for you?" Morgan put dovtfh the soldering pencil he had been using and swiveled around in his chair. "We trust you, Tress," he said. "Just throw it on the screen and give us the analysis." Mikko trotted into the lounge from the galley, mixing bowl still clutched in one pawlike hand and wooden spoon brandished batonlike in the other, and settled on the couch. Metrak looked up from his copy of The Gracious Hostess , one of the books Morgan had purchased for him in Beedirn City, and squatted comfortably on his middle and rear legs. A row of wall panels on the opposite side of the lounge went black. Tress said: "The inversespace portal lasted a full two milliseconds longer than you told me to expect, Morgan, so I have more data than I had planned on -- " and put a complex, chromatic wave pattern onto the black screen. "I have projected here the full spectrum, from infrared to gamma radiation, as received. It is, of course, corrected to conform to your visual range. The actual visible-light part of the spectrum would be this." Here two black bands cut off a small section at the low red end of the pattern. "Very good," Mikko said, thoughtfully staring at the screen while he mixed his batter. "What have we got, Tress?" A portion of the wave pattern disconnected itself from the rest and rose to form a separate chart above. "This would seem to be a representation of the energy blast which activated the inverse-space tube, probably reflected off the hull of the ship carrying it," Tress said. "Yes, I didn't think of that," Morgan said. "I'll try to make a gadget which blows with less radiant energy next time. Anything else?" "The ship seems to have a very dirty hull," Tress commented, then blacked that part of the chart. "What's left," she continued, "is principally the radiation pattern of a G-# type star, about one AU away." "G-#?" Morgan quizzed. "That's a problem," Mikko said, sitting forward in his chair. "What we're looking for is an A-# type and the planet would need to be quite a bit further away." "Now there is something very interesting, gentlemen," Tress said with unmechanical relish. "What's that?" Mikko asked. "Don't be coy, little one." "I notice a slight discontinuity," Tress said, quite evidently proud of her own cleverness. "Notice that if you null all the radiation pattern to be expected from a G-# star -- " here most of the bright display went black, leaving only IF slight wisps of color scattered along the chart, mostly on the very-short wave end -- "there is a ghost left. Upon DeFrybian analysis, this proves to be the reflection of an A-# type star, bounced off the photosphere of the G-#." Morgan frowned. Mikko said, "Of course -- " just as Morgan's frown cleared. "Reflection?" asked Metrak. "Certainly," Mikko said smugly. "That explains a great deal. The star is a binary; one hot component and one cooler one. There are two different planets, but they're in the same system." "How's that?" Morgan asked. "One going around the A-#, and one around the G-#?" "No," Mikko said. "That wouldn't be likely. That would mean that the cold one, Quindar's planet, would be in a highly eccentric orbit around the A-#, approaching its primary at just the specific moment in time that the Brotherhood's planet is warming up because the A-# is approaching it! How does it compute to you, Tress?" "Vanishingly small probability," Tress told them. "The most likely situation is that both planets revolve about the G-#: the first at one AU, plus or minus ten percent, the second much farther out. Assuming the G-# to be stationary, the A-#'s orbit would be a highly eccentric ellipse with a period of from ten to a hundred fifty thousand years. Of course, that is merely a first approximation; I would have to get further data before making any flat statement." "You've checked your Star Catalogue?" Morgan asked. "I have. There are eight possibilities; the data on all are both old and meager. There is also a good probability that the binary is unlisted in the Catalogue." Mikko looked thoughtfully at the glowing overhead and stroked his beard. "It looks very much like what the Brotherhood thought was a planet falling on them eighty-three years ago was an A-# star. It's probably a very good thing they left. Morgan, what is the probability that Quindar's engineers -- or other personnel, for that matter -- suspect that there was something incongruous about that explosion?" "Small, I'd say. Look at it: The power required to energize an ordinary inverse space tube requires a hell of a lot of heavy equipment, even with superconductors in the hundred-degrees-Absolute range. I couldn't have put it in such a small space if I'd intended to stabilize it. I just overloaded the circuits and let 'em blow. Those half again as long as I had any right to expect. The Bender fusion second later, discharged through the silver plasma. Big flash of light, no damage. They wouldn't think of a portal operating. Since it's normally used after it's been established at both ends -- and there's such a slight energy drain once it's stabilized -- I doubt if they'd make the connection. The most likely explanation would be that the scoop field blew when the scoop ripped off." Mikko nodded. "Excellent. Then it's highly unlikely that they'll be expecting us. "Tress, taking into account the time between the takeoff of the Umpaul Raatgarten and the flash through the inverse space tube, and the pseudovelocity of the ship, find that binary for us." "Computing," said Tress. VI JCTress announced. There was a slight lurch, accompanied by an audible click and a subtle feeling of continuous deceleration as the gravity field rephased. The three-fourths of the team that were not built into the ship had gathered in the control room, each in the compleat designed for him. The two humans' compleats resembled overstuffed executive chairs, and Metrak's looked like a squashed trundle-bed. Mikko hunched forward to examine the available readouts. "What does it look like?" "Information is not yet complete," Tress answered him testily. "When will you know if this is the system?" Morgan asked. "The probability is point ninenine-three that this is the system," Tress replied. Two lights appeared on an overhead screen. "This is the G-# star. This other is the A-#." A dotted line sprang out from one light, assuming an eggshape which circled the other light, then ran off the screen. "That's a first approximation of the orbit. I'll need about two standard days' observations to refine it." Three more lights appeared, one with a more nearly circular dotted line. "There are the observable planets. I have one orbit -- no, two." A second dotted circle appeared. "Which are the planets we're looking for?" Metrak asked. "Here's another," Tress said, lighting another spot on the screen. "The second out from the sun would appear to be the Earthlike one. The fourth -- no, fifth -- " she added another dot after the second " -- will be the planet that approaches the A-# star as it reaches apasteron. The closest point will occur in slightly under two standard years. It will graph like this -- " The two dots moved in their orbits until they met and appeared to merge. Then the dot representing the star pulled ahead of the planetary dot in its fall toward apasteron. "Here are the figures -- " A page of formulae appeared on the screen. IF "Thank you, Tress," Morgan said. "Thank you very much." He swung his compleat around to face his companions. "Well, we've found it. What now?" "Now," said Mikko Falkynberg decisively, "we sneak into a high orbit over thatinner planet and take a long look at what is going on down there. Tress, we want a nearly circular, transpolar orbit at about two diameters out, with a minimum use of power -- drive muffled and as little radiation as possible." "Computing," Tress acknowledged. It took time. Time to fall into the prescribed orbit, time to take the careful observations of the surface, time to analyze the meanings of the recordings. During that time four ships under full operating power came, stayed and went from the planet's surface. Tress reported faithfully that each of them had come from the cold outer planet and returned there. Morgan was asleep after grueling hours of work the previous day when Mikko said to Tress: "Let me see Eighty-four Zeta again." "Area Zeta, Composite Eightyfour," Tress announced as she lit up a screen. On it appeared a portion of the planet's surface. Because of the planetwide change in weather the cloud cover was dense and widespread. Each time Tress had taken a shot, she had made a probability estimate of the actual surface she could see and ignored the clouds. After eighty-four separate shots, the composite map was bare of clouds. Mikko stared at it for several minutes, then nodded. "Yes. That's it. Up here -- he tapped the screen with his stylus -- "are the big plants. Probably mining and smelting. Spacefield over here. All fine. But -- " he dropped the point of his stylus a hundred and thirty kilometers to the south -- "what is this? Another spaceport?" "Possibly. It reminds me of something else," Mikko said thoughtfully. "Check this against the shots of the Brotherhood's new planet -- the shots showing the village." "Ah," Tress said after a few seconds. "You're right, Mikko. There is a definite similarity. That is most probably the village built by the Brotherhood when they lived here." "Are there any indications that it is being used presently?" "None." Mikko smiled with satisfaction. "Excellent. That gives us our approach. Now, how about Quindar's communications?" He wasn't asking about communications through an inverse space tube. An inverse space tube is not, of course, a tube, but it can be thought of as one. Two matched portals, when energized, correspond to two ends of a tube. Or, more exactly, to opposite sides of a disk of zero thickness, no matter how distant they were from each other in "real" space. The initial energization requires tremendous power, but it can be maintained with only a trickle of current after the match is stabilized. Early mathematical treatment of inverse space indicated that anything moving through inverse space experienced negative time. If, for instance, one end happened to be exactly one light-year from the other, anything traversing the "tube" would emerge from the portal a year earlier than it had started. That proved to involve an insoluble paradox. The fact is that the time involved is zero; two portals are opposite sides of a single mathematically two-dimensional disc. Obviously, no material particle can go through the "tube." Only particles having an intrinsic velocity of c -- photons and neutrinos -- can jump the interface. Communication via inverse space requires only a couple of but there is no way to tap the line, for the communication does not exist in "real" space. However, although the amount of power required to maintain the tube is small, setting it up initially requires a great deal of power, and there is no point in that at merely planetary distances. Tress could easily tap their comm lines. "The probability is point nineseven-three," she said, "that they are mining and smelting copper. But I do not understand the high breakdown factor of their working units. Working units should not break down that often." "I agree," said Mikko slowly. "The trouble with their troubles is that they are apparently not troubled by them." "I wish you wouldn't do that," said Tress in a plaintive tone. "You used the word 'trouble' in at least two and more probably three different ways. And your pronouns are vague. I do not understand." "Neither do #," said Morgan from the control door, "but not for the same reason." "I mean," Mikko said distinctly and somewhat testily, "that I'm bothered by the fact that the difficulties they seem to be having are apparently not disturbing them." "Noted -- filed for correlation," said Tress. "May I ask your basis?" "Just what I was wondering," Morgan said. "That group of messages," Mikko explained, "all say something like: 'Five working units nonfunctional. Four additional units required. Send nine units.' And back comes the reply: 'Nine units will be shipped within twelve hours.' "Nobody ever says: 'We are running short of units.' Or: 'Those things cost money.' Or: 'Repair old units.' Morgan, if these boys IF are running this enterprise on a thread -- which they must be to aren't they more careful with their investments?" Metrak, who had been dozing quietly in his compleat for the past several hours, opened one anthricite eye. "Why do we not go down and see?" "Thank you, Professor," Mikko said. "I was about to suggest exactly that." cavi, a space yacht of Beedirn registry which looked suspiciously like the Trespassers W if you had a nasty, suspicious mind, fell in an injured-drive-tube way into a close orbit about the planet, beaming a distress signal on all appropriate frequencies. After two orbits, when it had become obvious to the Quindar men who were observing her that the problem ship would not go away or explode or in some other way solve the problem by herself, the ship's comscreen lit up to display a simple test pattern. "What ship is that?" the pattern asked in a young-sounding male voice. "Peccavi, out of Beedirn," Morgan replied. "What class?" "Private registry," Morgan said, fingering his ruffed collar with just the proper air of bored aristocracy. Tress's voice whispered in his ear. "Photo laser pulse just ended. That's the fourth. There have been three scans with sigma searchbeams and there is almost continuous radar." "Maybe they're doing an album," Morgan murmured. "What seems to be the trouble?" the test pattern asked. "Don't really know," Morgan said. "Something about the tubes or some such. Something about patterns, you know." "Depatternization of the tube cathodes?" "That's the phrase," Morgan said gratefully. "The ship knows what's wrong. Says we can't go any farther until the tube thingies are fixed. Permission requested to land and make necessary repairs. We'll pay, of course." A dull humming sound came through the speakers as the microphone at the other end was cut off. The people on the planet were presented with a problem. What they wanted, it was clear, was for the ship to go away as fast as possible. But under one of the few universally recognized laws, the Uniform Universal Space Calamity Act, a ship requesting aid or assistance of an inhabited planet, outpost, mining "or research station had to be granted such aid. If they refused to help, they would have more -- and more official -- company nosing around as soon as the incident was reported. The test pattern was replaced by a close-in teleview of a dark, triangular head, rising from pointed chin to flat-cut hair. Wide set eyes balanced over a small nose, centered above thin lips, which moved: "Greetings. I apologize for the delay. My subordinate had to inform me of your request." I'll bet, Morgan thought. "Of course you must land as soon as possible. We should be able to effect repairs to your yacht almost immediately. There'll be no question of payment." "I humbly thank you, esteemed sir. We shall try not to impose on your hospitality." "Yes," Thinlips agreed. "You have, naturally, had your quaramine vitus inoculations?" "Our who?" Morgan asked. "Quaramine vitus. It's a plasmoid disease indigenous to this planet." "Never heard of it," Morgan said truthfully. "I guess we'll have to take the inoculatioqj when we land." Thinlips shook his head regretfully. "I am sorry, but the inoculation takes two weeks to produce the required antibodies. I must request you to remain in the ship with the airlock sealed and allow us to make the repairs. I'll see that the landing beacon is turned on now -- just follow it in." Morgan said, "I must thank you for your aid and consideration." Thinlips nodded and blanked off. Mikko Falkynberg leaned back and folded his arms across his heavy chest. "Well? Correct me if I was wrong." Before Morgan could speak, Tress said: "No correction necessary. You said that they would have an apparently valid excuse to keep the three of you sealed in." Morgan smiled far too sweetly. "And he was right. Very well, Tress, my love -- execute the Falkynberg plan." Trespassers W began dropping toward the Quindar spaceport in a neat landing orbit while the men below watched it carefully on their tracer screens: All seemed to be well for the first few minutes. Then the ship lurched suddenly and slid off her orbit, moving southward. " Peccavi V snapped one of the watchers. "What's the idea, there?" "Not our idea, I assure you," came the cultured voice. "The drive's bucking up. We're trying to correct." "Get back on the prescribed landing orbit -- or you'll crash!" "We know," Morgan said, suddenly harsh. "Leave us alone so we can correct." The thin-lipped man cut off his voice pickup. And grinned. "All right," he said, "let 'em crack up. Save us a lot of trouble, and it will look right on the records." IF On the screens the ship buckled and twisted, as if trying to regain control of a terribly faulty drive. Morgan, Mikko and Metrak, couched in their compleats, still felt the surges and accelerations that assaulted them, but Tress had computed her antics to a nicety. At the last moment, she braked, swerved, settled and came down neatly to a relatively soft landing in the middle of the square in the center of the long-deserted Brotherhood village. T HE men in the Quindar spaceport hunched forward in their chairs like a group of ill-controlled marionettes, waiting. Thinlips turned from the radar screen to check an oscillocom reading. He stared at it expressionlessly for a long moment and announced: "They've landed." "Good!" A short man in back of the room pushed away from his chair and started pacing the floor, his arms locked behind him. Thin black hair brushed neatly away from his high, domed forehead, severe, almost military clothing and a certain precision of manner gave him an air of importance that somehow made him seem even shorter -- not merely a small man but the king of the midgets. "You must send someone out to inspect the wreckage. Where did they crash?" "They didn't crash, Mister Goodbit, they landed. The seismo would have indicated a crash." "Landed?" Goodbit stopped pacing. "What does that mean? Where? We must send an inspection team at once!" "Yessir. As soon as I -- " The comscreen lit. "Help! Can you hear me? Send someone to help, please!" The screen showed the control room of the Peccavi, which was filled with billowing clouds of dense, gray smoke. Tongues of flame licked up from behind a twisted panel in the background. The image was so realistic that the watchers could almost smell the burning insulation. "Help," the coughing face in the screen pleaded, tears streaming from the corners of reddened eyes. Richtman hit the call button. "I hear you. What happened?" "I don't know. We hit the ground and smoke started coming out of everything and nothing works and we can't -- " The screen went blank. "They -- ah -- seem to be having trouble," Goodbit said with a slight smile. "Yessir. I'll send a cargo aircar out as soon as I can get some firefighting equipment aboard," Richtman said, swiveling in his chair. "Now, now, Richtman; let us not be hasty. Precipitous action is always to be avoided. We must consider the situation." "Excuse me. Mister Goodbit, but what's to consider? If we don't get there quickly they'll probably burn to death!" "So?" Goodbit's eyes flashed. "You may be right. Yes, on consideration I think you are right. We must certainly get help to the poor, unfortunate crew of that vessel. Load the aircar -- but not in haste, you understand. Set out for the wreck as soon as the car is loaded. Take along a photographer so we may record the details of the demise of the victims of this terrible crash -- we must make up a full report to send to Beedirn. What a pity." "Very good, sir," Richtman said. "All deliberate speed it is. I hope they don't send an investigation committee." "I think it highly unlikely. Take good, clear photographs." "Yessir." "Now," Goodbit dismissed the wrecked spacecraft with a wave of his well-manicured hand. "What about the copper situation, Dolemort? The main shaft of the heatsink is four days behind schedule." Dolemort, a grossly fat man who was squeezed into one of the side chairs, laced his sausagelike fingers together nervously. "We can't use any more of the locals and expect the food supply to keep up. The present, ah, working units are getting weak. They can't work as hard." "What?" Goodbit asked gently. "Can't?" "Yes, sir, that's right." Dolemort quivered. "The free locals still bring food for the, ah, impressed units -- but the quality has gone down. There aren't enough of them left." "Well pick up the rest of them and put them to work. They don't have to eat well. Throw together some kind of nutritional gruel out of the stores. We'll get enough work out of them to finish the job." "Yes, sir." "Tell them it's punishment for the man -- what's his name -- that disappeared. They'll understand that. A very moral lot." "Yes, sir." "Get up to quota," Goodbit said, smiling calmly, "or I'll stick a shovel in your fat hands!" Nodding to the group, he walked from the room. door of the airlock open just wide enough, Mikko said: "Out, Professor! Bounce!" Metrak literally did just that -- shot out of the airlock at better than two hundred kilometers per hour, curled himself into a ball in mid-flight and arched high above the low buildings that stood in decaying ruin around the central square of what had been a Brotherhood village more than eight decades before. He struck the ground far beyond the limits of IF the dead village and rolled nearly half a kilometer down a rocky slope before coming to a halt. He shook himself off, flexed his incredibly tough Maxaglorian muscles and scrambled up the next slope, heading northward at an easy run, averaging eighty-five kilometers an hour over the rough ground. Mikko and Morgan watched the screens, looking for any movement, any indication that the Professor had been observed. "Anything, Tress?" Morgan asked softly. "Nothing. There is no sign of radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum that indicates any form of communication nearby. The only anomaly is the relatively strong source of energy centering around the two-fifty to two-sixty gigahertz region, coming from -- " a picture flashed on the screen -- "that building. A small fire, apparently dying, since the radiation is decreasing." "Look closely at the chimney," Morgan told Mikko. A barely visible wisp of smoke was coming from the crumbling stone tube. "Tress," Morgan asked, "are any human beings around?" "The ambient temperature is almost exactly three hundred degrees; to detect a body radiating some ten degrees higher is easy at short range, provided insulating clothing is not being worn. Assuming normal human clothing for this temperature, and excluding the interior of that particular building, the probability is eightyseven percent that there are no human beings within one hundred meters; sixty-five percent that there are none within five hundred meters. There is, however, a fiftyeight percent chance that there is at least one but not more than two within a thousand meters." "Check vertical heat convection currents," Morgan said. "I did." There was indignation in her voice. "Mikko's instruction wish a readout?" "No," said Morgan. He looked at Mikko, who was regarding the scene with narrowed eyes. "Any ideas?" "Certainly," said Mikko without turning his head. "A good many. It might, for instance, be a volcanic fumarole. Tress?" "A probability of point oh-ohfour." Mikko was unperturbed. "The two most likely situations, as I see it are: One, that whoever built that fire is -- or are -- still inside, which would make them difficult to detect against the background radiation; two, that whoever built it heard us dropping down and fled precipitately to the hinterlands. Tress?" "Indeterminable. Your guess is as good as mine," said Tress. Mikko thinned his lips but said nothing. Morgan had sneaked that phrase in and Mikko knew it. "Whoever built that fire is most assuredly not part of the secretive group at Quindar's spaceport," Morgan offered. "Probability, I'd say, over ninety-five percent." "Tress?" Mikko asked. In a sardonic, sing-song voice, Tress said, "The computation of human motivation is beyond the capability of my programing." "So? Well, as my great grandfather is reputed to have said before the action that won him his third Nova, there's probably nothing to it -- but we'd better go take a look." "I tip my hat to your great grandfather," Morgan said. "Let us deploy and reconnoiter. Swords and bucklers for the landing party if you please, Tress." A concealed locker door slid open, revealing a row of sidearms: Course-Berryman handguns, with their bulbous grips and fragilelooking, translucent blue tubes; squat Delancing pistols, firing anaesthetizing darts; heavy, beautifully machined MacGregor slugthrowers; and slender Whompers. The gunbelts and holsters were neatly hanging from a line of hooks above. In the drawers below were ammunition, cleaning and repair equipment and spare parts. Shoulder-stock and heavier weapons were in the next two lockers. "I'll take a Delancing," Morgan decided, wrapping the appropriate belt tightly around his middle. "I'm a traditionalist," Mikko declared, buckling on the massive MacGregor. "I'll see if I can ship you up a crossbow," said Morgan. "Let's head out by the number-three hatch, so we can circle around to the building without being seen." "A crossbow?" Mikko considered. "I have no quarrel with that." Tress dilated the lock as they reached it. "Goodbye," she said, contracting it behind them. "A high proportional probability of success on your venture." "What's that?" Mikko asked. "Good luck." Mikko glared at Morgan, who did his best to look innocent. Neither of them spoke as they reached the nearest of the crumbling houses, long deserted by the Brotherhood, and started working their way around toward the thin wisp of smoke. No words were necessary to this pair, who had worked together for longer than either liked to admit, except in serious emergencies. Normal operations went as smoothly as though their four hands were controlled from a single brain. They worked their way around the second corner of the square and picked carefully through the rubble toward their objective. Nothing else was moving; the smoke from the chimney, now reduced to a rising haze, was the IF only sign of life they could detect. At the back of the building they flattened themselves against the wall on each side of the alleyway that led to the rear door. "Tradesmen's entrance?" Morgan asked quietly. "Garbage disposal," Mikko told him. "Leads to what passes for a kitchen. Me first." "Right." Mikko pulled the MacGregor from its holster and led the way gingerly down the narrow alley. He heard a soft thud behind him and turned to see Morgan pitching forward to the ground. He sensed a flicker of motion above him -- but before his eyes had a chance to focus on it a sharp pain shot through the side of his head and the ground rose up to cushion him. There was a ringing in his brain and no feeling. Maxaglor viewed the scene in the smoking valley below with the dispassionate eyes of the scholar. His brain recorded. There was no way of communicating with Tress; the Quindar people would have every detector they had open and ready, looking for any sort of communication. An FM laser might have been fairly safe but a couple of mountains stood between Metrak and Tress, neither of which was observably transparent. He had already seen two big transport aircars lift up high and drift southward at no great rate. They were, he was certain, "rescuers" who were, understandably enough, not in any big hurry to arrive at their destination. But they had climbed high quickly in order to be in the line of sight of the putative Peccavi. They probably did not really expect anything but they would be fools indeed if they failed to take every precaution. Metrak had no fear that they would spot him from the air. A Maxaglorian's energy requirements were such that, to him the phrase "conservation of energy" referred to a biological necessity rather than a law of physics. His hide was tougher than wrought iron and harder than tungsten carbide, but its heat conductivity was a variable controlled by his nervous system. He could hold his heat as easily as he could hold his breath, and his highly efficient metabolic processes did not generate much waste heat. As far as optical spotting was concerned, he was only another oddly shaped black boulder among many oddly shaped black boulders. Below him the valley smoked. With one of his hands he eased the binocular surveyor from the special pouch under his belly and, bracing himself carefully, applied his obsidian eyes to the eyecups. His fingers manipulated the controls on either side, shifting the lined reticule which framed his field of vision. The great open-pit mine was roughly circular and some six point four kilometers in diameter. It had obviously been worked for many years. The smoke came from the smelters over to the north, three point one kilometers away. The air reeked of sulfur dioxide in the air. That, Metrak told himself with satisfaction, was one way Quindar was saving money. No anti-pollution devices, a crime ranked as a felony on any settled planet. Metrak flicked the zoom control and centered in on a long line of workers moving truckloads of ore up the spiral road from the central depths of the mine toward the upper periphery. They were large (by Metrak's standards), furry beings with thin, scale-covered legs and arms. Their heads would have reminded Metrak of an English sheepdog, had he ever had the fortune to observe a specimen of that breed, which had only a few years before been recreated after centuries of genetic abeyance. A sudden movement caught the professor's eye. He moved his binoc a little to center the area where the action was taking place. One of the autochthons had fallen. As Metrak watched, the birdlike extremities drew into the hair covering the body, the head pulled in until it was only a slight bulge on the nearly spherical ball. The result looked something like a large beachball made of yak hide. The recording camera in the binoc hummed an almost inaudible D-flat as the little being watched. The line of native orebearers stopped. Metrak heard a noise very faintly from below. One of his middle hands took out a collapsed sound pickup, expanded it and clipped it to the side of the binoc; automatically focusing the sound intensifier on the scene he was watching. The faint sound became a high keening as Metrak clipped the button speaker over his earslot. He backed off the zoom on the binoc to take in more of the scene and went on watching and listening. The keening continued, the orebearers staying in place around their fallen comrade. After several minutes a small observation platform, looking like a flying bridge table, skimmed over to the stopped workers and settled softly until its ground-effect cage touched the dirt. One of the two humans on it unclipped himself from his harness and climbed down, while the other stayed behind the control stick, hefting a large shock-gun and looking nervous. "Howja figure it?"the one who IF climbed down asked, his voice coming in small and clear over Metrak's button speaker. "One minute the hairball's workin' along fine, the next he's keeled over and tucked up." He bent over to examine the furry beachball. "Just another deader," the one on the platform said. "Come on, let's get out of here." "Don't be so nervous. Just keep that gun handy. Yah, this's a deader." He looked around at the cluster of natives. "You and you -- get rid of 'im!" He waved a hand at the featureless ball of hair at his feet. "And back quick, you understand Back quick or we give your friends a dose!" He waved at his buddy on the platform, who brandished his shock-gun menacingly. "Unnastan!" said one of the two chosen autochthons in a high, buzzy voice. "Bag gwig! No gill frems! Bag gwig!" "All right! Get movin', then. Go!" The two chosen ones moved rapidly, grabbing their fallen comrade by clutching their three-fingered talons in its hair and trotting off. The keening stopped. "All right! Move it!" said the human with the shock-gun. But his command was unnecessary; the orebearers had already begun to go on with their task. Metrak followed the departing funeral procession in his binoc until he saw it vanish over the crest of a distant hill. Then he packed up his equipment and departed -- stealthily at first, then gaining speed, moving circuitously after the pair of autochthons until he had them back in sight. The natives and their burden, with Metrak a distance behind them, soon arrived at their destination. It was a narrow valley through which ran a snowmeltswollen, swift-running river. Without ceremony they placed their furball burden on the bank of the river, a few meters from the water's edge, then took off back the way they had come. Metrak stayed and watched. Some time later a large raft appeared upstream. Made up of bundles of small logs, it was roughly triangular in shape with the blunt end forward and two long sides leading to a pointed stern. Along both sides were a row of natives with thick poles, trying to keep the unwieldy craft steady in the rapid river current. One of the autochthons spotted the body. It screeched something Metrak didn't understand and the group poled to shore. As the raft got closer to where Metrak crouched behind a convenient rock on the ridge line overlooking the river, he could see that the central area of the craft was filled with contracted autochthons like the one on the bank. Two of the polers hopped ashore, grabbed the body and swung it aboard. Then they jumped back themselves and resumed their places as the raft continued its perilous way downstream. When the raft was well past him, Metrak leaped up to the ridge line and, breaking into an easy lope, began to follow it. dimly on the fact that his back was cold. And uncomfortable. A voice was niggling at his brain. "My dear Morgan, do yourself the favor of waking up. If you keep lying on this cold stone you will get a devil of a chill -- and I am not in any condition to hold you in my arms. Besides, I just saw your eyelids flutter." A pause. Then: "Dammit, Morgan! Wake up!" He opened his eyes. The white light of a sun seen from entirely too close seared his vision, accompanied by a thunder of pain. His eyes blinked shut but the pain did not go away. He groaned. "That's a start, dear friend. That's a start. Open your eyes. Not that there's anything to see -- but you've got to get up before your back freezes solid to the stone. Come on, now -- open your eyes." Morgan tried again. This time it was a little better. The sun seemed to have receded a bit. The pain was constant, but pain can be handled. He blinked several times and the blinding light slowly died down to a greenish blue as his irises contracted to the appropriate aperture. "Mikko?" he asked. "In the flesh. Very much in the flesh. How do you feel?" The blur took shape. Mikko towered over him. Something was strange. "I don't know how I -- ow -- feel. Is the back of my head still connected to the front?" "As far as I can tell. You were struck by a rock about the size of your fist, judging by the bruised area. Skin broken, surface bleeding, but no deeper damage. Don't feel alone -- I was similarly treated. I must have a harder head." Morgan tried shaking his head to clear away the fuzziness but the back of his skull protested sharply. He sat up and was rewarded with a wave of nausea. After threatening his stomach a while, it passed, and his brain gave signs of starting to function. "Where are we?" He looked up at Mikko and realized what had seemed strange before. "Mikko, you're naked!" Mikko was bouncing from foot to foot and slapping his arms across his belly to warm up. "I am. You are. It would seem. to be the way of the world in our rather confined quarters." "I am? I am! That's why I'm so cold. Where are we? And what, in the name of the Seven Aspects, happened?" He looked around. The stone floor on which he was IF sitting spread out in all directions to form the base of a square room. The walls, also of stone, rose up to a height of about three meters before being capped by a domed slab ceiling. Greenish light seeped in through two vine-covered slits in the far wall. An odor of mildew pervaded the damp chill air. Running across the room from left to right stood a row of closely spaced iron bars, anchored in floor and ceiling -- they cut the room into two unequal rectangles. The only entrance to the room was on the other side of the bars -- a low, iron door set into the far wall. Between the two men and the bars ran a small river. "We," said Mikko, "are in a contemplation cell -- the Brotherhood's contribution to the science of penology. The gentleman in the corner has been contemplating for quite some time now." "Brotherhood?" Morgan rubbed his aching head and tried to focus his eyes on a dimly perceptible figure lying in fetal sleep on a mound of something in the corner. "How did they get into this? I mean here and now."  "They aren't here and now," said Mikko, "but this is one of their relics. I have seen their latest model. Almost ended up in it. It's designed to allow one to contemplate one's sins until one repents of them. This place is almost identical." He swung his left arm in an arc, palm upward. "This was originally a small stream. It enters through a hole some thirty centimeters on a side and originally flowed through a shallow trough of the same dimensions and on through the exit, over to your right. Drinking water to the left, sanitary facilities to the right. Simple, eh?" "Very," said Morgan, carefully exploring the knot on the right side of his head. "You call it simple, I call it barbaric. But we agree." "Thank you. At its best, this place was never comfortable. The ten-degree slope toward that open drain wouldn't be easy to sleep on -- and the slope from left to right is fifteen to eighteen degrees." "That flow before us is no small stream," Morgan said. "It's damn near a river. Since the Brotherhood left, the ice to the north has been melting. We have a flood here, Mikko." "Exactly," Mikko said agreeably. "That rivulet is now over a meter deep in the center and even deeper to the right. I assume we were brought in across the left end, where it's narrower and shallower. Up there, you see, where the waters do not yet wash the bars. There's a door in the bars, if you will notice." "You've tried it," Morgan said. A statement, not a question. "Of course. A simple lock. You and I have extricated ourselves from far more complicated ones. Morgan nodded. If Mikko But." Falkynberg had searched the place, "But not without tools. Right, the job had been done as thoroughAnd there are none." Morgan ly as if Morgan himself had done rubbed his hands together in a vain it. A stray twinge of pain shot effort to keep them from turning through Morgan's scalp and he blue. Stomping his bare feet winced. "How did they get us, against that icy stone didn't help Mikko? Tress said there was no much either. one around. How could they have "No tools, "-Mikko said. "And sneaked up on us? Both of us?" no tools to make tools, if you fol"From the roof," Mikko low. No free stone, wood, or metgrowled. "They dropped rocks on al. I have looked." us from the roof." After a half second Morgan -- the ambient temperature. How jerked his head around to stare at could she spot them? Picture a Mikko. "The rooj? You're out of brown, fur-covered ball about a your skull! Tress would have seen meter in diameter, with a hairy, anyone on the roof! She said there human-sized head and lean, birdwere no human beings within half like, squamous arms and legs -- a kilometer. She -- " two each, bilateral symmetry. "She was right," Mikko cut Three fingers on each hand, equalhim off sharply. "Beings, yes; ly sized, equally spaced, and equalhuman, no. The intelligent autochly opposable. Our hosts." tons of this planet. Their body "I see," Morgan said. "Intellitemperature is apparently at or gent autochthons. And you never slightly lower than three hundred mentioned them." his right hand and slammed the fist into his left palm. "I confess to stupidity, my dear Morgan. The Brotherhood never mentioned any local intelligent life forms and I made the assumption that there were none. Worse, they stated that there were no intelligent natives -- and I believed them." "Why should they lie?" Morgan asked. "Exactly. They didn't." "You mean they never saw the native beings?" Morgan looked puzzledly at Mikko. "No, the natives were seen, all right. And described to me. And that is why I am culpable. I failed to allow for the Brotherhood's blind spot. By their religious beliefs, there are no true beings except those of Terran descent. All others are animals." He glowered at the far wall. "I should have known." "Have you actually seen the locals?" Morgan asked. "Certainly." Mikko took a deep breath. "They brought us our lunch." Morgan suddenly realized that the pain was not all centered in his head; part of it lay growling in his abdomen. "Food? Where? Is there any left?" Mikko gestured toward a slate slab on the sloping floor a few feet away. "Help yourself." Chilled to the bone, Morgan walked over to the slab and squatted down. He saw a pile of graygreen, soggy-looking lumps. Picking up one of the lumps, he bit off a small portion and chewed it. It tasted something like boiled sawdust, with a delicate dusting of sand, exquisitely spiced with epsom salts. He spat. "How's the water?" "Try it," Mikko said. "Carefully." Morgan approached the edge of the water, which looked blue-green in the filtered light, and put a hand in. "Ice cold! Brrr!" He splashed some on his face, which made him feel better, then he tasted it. "A little sour and metallic, but not too bad." He rinsed his mouth with it, spat it out. "I'd hate to have to drink it for long. I -- " He was interrupted by a wordless scream. Morgan and Mikko spun around to find their cellmate sitting up on his mound. His skinny arm was stretched out and a bony finger pointed at them. "Get out!" he screamed. "I see you there -- you can't fool me again!" His skin was taut over his ribs and shoulders and his pale, gaunt face held deep-set eyes, framed by wide, black circles. "Away!" he yelled. "Leap up with whips and flay -- more work today!" His voice rose to a high scream and he pitched over backwards and lay silent. "What," Morgan demanded, "was that all about?" IF "I don't know," Mikko told him. "He seemed to be lucid when I talked to him before. He had trouble staying awake long enough to talk and was obviously very sick -- but not delerious." "Nightmare," Morgan suggested. They went over to the sleeping man and looked closely at him. "I have no idea what to do for him. Do you?" "Yes," Mikko said. "Get him out of here. Also get us out of here before we catch whatever he's got." "What's that he's lying on?" Morgan asked, staring down at the black, lumpy surface. "I'd say it was straw once, about eighty-five years ago before the Brotherhood left. Call it what you want to now." "Argh!" Morgan exclaimed, rubbing his side. "It's cold in here. How do we get out?" "You tell me," Mikko suggested. "Those wrought-iroti bars have a surface coating of rust but they're still solid after all this time. If they hadn't taken all our clothes we could call Tress or the Professor." "If they hadn't taken all our clothes I wouldn't be so cold," Morgan said. "Maybe if we yelled Tress would hear us. Do you know what part of the square this here jail is at?" "If it's built the same way the Brotherhood built the one on their new planet, it's about five kilometers out of town. I can't yell that loud." "Why so far?" Mikko shrugged. "Isolation mostly. Except for the once-aday visit by whoever brought his food, anyone in -- ah -- contemplation wouldn't see or talk to a soul." Morgan waded across the narrow part of the water supply and pulled at the bars. "Solid. The Brotherhood built for the ages, unfortunately." He splashed back and sat down, then changed his mind and stood back up. "What's our mad friend doing in here?" . "He's with Quindar. Thinks we are too, so if he wakes up sane don't say him nay. The natives captured him for revenge, evidently." "Revenge, huh? They're being mistreated?" "Quindar's got some mines in the hills. They're fabricating equipment up there. Using the natives as slave labor in the mines and plants." " Yeesh ," Morgan muttered, wiping at his legs with his hands, trying to get the water off, "that table. Slavery? Slavery isn't profitable." "Don't be ridiculous," said Mikko. "It often has been, it can be, and in the present circumstances it is. Why do you think we aren't dead?" The apparent change of subject didn't faze Morgan Oxbo; he was used to Mikko's mental operations. "That had occurred to me. Why?" "As my sainted great granduncle, the last Bishop of Domermeve said, just before his martyrdom, These are a gentle people.' " "I rejoice that they are not vicious," Morgan said, gently touching his head with numb fingers. "So?" "According to what I gleaned from our recumbent cellmate," Mikko continued, "the local gentry are a gregarious, highly socialized species. Capture a group of them and each will work to keep his friends and relatives from being harmed; furthermore, other friends and relatives will actually bring them foocT if permitted to do so. They are generally docile and have the approximate intelligence of a medium-grade moron." Morgan nodded. "What a sweet setup for slavery. And I suppose they've decided to capture a few humans to force Quindar Incorporated to stop what they're doing. Make a fair trade and call everything off." "I assume so. They're trying to take care of us, keep us healthy. They feed us regularly. They even give us a nice cool cell. To them, the weather out there must be blisteringly hot. Poor devils; when that A-# gets in close and the incident radiation is increased by twenty percent, they're really going to know what a hot summer is. They -- " Mikko was cut off by the hoarse voice of the third man. "Hey. Hey, you guys. Com'ere. Please com'ere." "Sure, fella," said Morgan as the partners walked over to the hummock of humus upon which the man lay. "Is there anything we can do?" He knew there wasn't; if there had been, Mikko would have already done it. Or still be doing it. "Nah, nah. F'git it." His voice was weak and slurred. He retched suddenly; nothing came up. "Uhhh. Sorrry. Sick Dizzy. Headache. Gutache. Uhhh!" Again he retched dryly. Mikko Falkynberg picked up the man's flaccid wrist and applied his fingers to the artery at the base of the thumb. "Just take it easy, my friend," he said. Pulse: soft and weak. Respiration : shallow and rapid. And, in spite of the chill, there was a thin film of clammy sweat over the man's skin. In the dim light that came from the leaden skies and filtered greenish through the vine-covered slit high up in the far wall, the man looked ghastly. His half-closed eyes were obviously neither focusing nor tracking and his teeth, gums and tongue looked even a darker green than his skin. Suddenly, with extraordinary strength, he grasped Morgan's hand. "Gotta get outa here, guys!" IF There was strength and sanity in his voice despite its whispery tone and almost inaudible volume. "Those hairballs are tryin' to kill us. Already got me. Poison in the food. I held out for a while but I got so hungry I hadda eat. Had to. Understand?" "Sure," said Morgan. "Sure. I was, hell, starving hungry. Sick even then -- cold, sick, miserable. Had to eat that slop. Got it down for a while, then -- " Again he retched, more violently this time, giving more meaning to his statement than any words could. He feebly spat out greenish saliva, swallowed dryly. For a moment his eyes swam. Then they tried to focus on Mikko's face. "Get out. Two guys could maybe get out, somehow, someway. Tell Goodbit. Leave me here. I'll be okay. Couldn't move anyhow. But don't eat the food. Dont -- eat -- the -- food ! ' ' He closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. Then he went into weak, shuddering convulsions that lasted nearly ten minutes while Mikko and Morgan held him. Then he lay still. Mikko checked the pulse. Nothing. He pulled a couple of hairs from the crown of his head and placed them over the man's nostrils and lips. They did not move. After a minute Morgan said: "He's dead." Mikko nodded. "And, all things considered, he died bravely. I wonder who he was." IX T HE two cargo aircars landed a respectful distance from Trespassers W. The belly pod of one opened and disgorged a fire tractor, which ground purposefully toward the silver egg. The whiteclad man riding atop the tractor stopped his machine two meters from the ship. "It don't look damaged," he called, snapping up his visor. "Where's the fire?" Just then a small vent popped open toward the bottom of the ship, sending up a cloud of acrid smoke. Then it closed. "Go on," the leader of the group transmitted from inside the second aircar. "See if you can find an opening." "Yeah," the man agreed, kicking his machine into gear. Stop where you are Authorized visitors only within five meters of the landing fins. Trespassers will be prosecuted. This ship is authorized to employ self-defense measures under paragraph two hundred nineteen of the Interspace Regulations. As the last tinny notes of the mechanical voice from the ship's speakers died away the white-clad man halted his machine. "Go on," the group leader urged. "Not me. I ain't going closer." The group leader glared at the men around him. They all looked carefully in other directions. With a muttered curse he climbed down out of his perch and strode toward the ship. Haiti No trespassing. This is your second warning. "Is this the PeccaviV ' the leader asked, stopping short some five meters from the nearest fin. Yes. "Let me speak to one of the men inside." That is impossible. "Why?" They are not speaking. The leader considered that for a moment. "Where are they?" One is in the control room. One is in the forward cargo hold. "What are they doing?" They are lying on the deck. Keep back. "We have come to help them. You must let us in." No answer. "Will you open the hatch?" No. The group leader coaxed and wheedled. The moronic robot on the Peccavi answered questions, but no more. "Damn!" the leader yelled, losing his patience. "Open that hatch -- that's an order!" The .computer clucked to itself for a moment, then announced in a loud voice, I will open the hatch. Halfway up the hull a round hole smoothly dilated. With a grunt of satisfaction, the leader started toward the ladder. A small, black object passed overhead with blurring speed and disappeared into the hole, which promptly closed. A spurt of fire appeared at the leader's feet. I have opened the hatch. Keep back. of the walls in the inner hatch and almost bounced down the internal ladderway before grabbing hold of a stanchion and pulling himself to a halt. "That's an impressive way to enter a hatch," Tress commented, dogging the pressure seal. "I misjudged," Metrak said. "Did they see me?" "They did, but only as a black blur. Even now they are asking each other what it was that flew by." "Very good." Metrak trotted down the ladderway, around the dead-black, one-meter sphere that was Tress's inner core, and into the control room. "I have all the data we need, complete with a tape of very incriminating pictures. Where are Mikko and Morgan?" "Not here," Tress said. "They left shortly after you did." "Really?" K Professor Metrak scratched his thick hide. "What for?" "To investigate this." Tress flashed a picture of the building on the far side of the square onto IF the main screen. "It was radiating in the infrared and smoke was coming from the chimney." "And?" Metrak prompted. "And they are not back yet." "Strange," Metrak said. "Perhaps I should search for them. I'll give them a while longer. What's happening outside?" "The men in the aircars have communicated with the spaceport, and a person named Goodbit is coming here. They will do nothing until he arrives." "Oh? Tress, record this for transmitting over the inverse space connection to planet London." Professor Metrak balanced on four legs and scratched his belly thoughtfully. "To: Comex code Lloyds. We have completed our investigation. Subject Quindar Engineering is definitely uninsurable. Their reason for wanting complete secrecy is tied in with their obvious underfinancing. Subject is using local autochthons as slave labor. Mining and smelting copper and other minerals for core-tapper. Phototape follows. Inform local "Recorded." Metrak took the tapeclip out of his camera and slid it into the playback slot. "Send it, please." "On line," Tress stated. "Sent. The third aircar is arriving." Morgan Oxbo paced the length of their cell as though they were a pair of military recruits practicing close-order drill, except for the body-slapping and rubbing of hands that went on as they marched back and forth. They both knew that to lie down would probably mean the end. They might take a long time to die -- but they'd never get up again. "We could chew our way out," Morgan muttered. "Shut up," Mikko said brusquely. "I'm thinking." "About what?" "About death. Shut up." Morgan shut up and frowned -- not in irritation but in concentration, trying to follow Mikko's thoughts. Death? Mikko was not thinking about his own or Morgan's death, that was certain. He might be worrying about how to avoid it but he wouldn't be thinking about the fact itself. Then what death? Obviously that of their late cellmate -- but what about it? If the man had actually died of poison rather than cold... But why would the "hairballs" want to kill him? Or didn't they know their food was poisonous to humans? Suddenly Mikko stopped and slapped his palms to his head with a jar that would have fractured both parietals of any ordinary man's skull. "Of course!" he bellowed ringingly. "This damned cold has numbed my brain! I should have ( Please turn to page #) sary celebration wafted softly from the dark valley below, George Harmon scrambled clumsily over the crest of the ridge and cowered beside a huge boulder, gasping for breath. Scraps of shale bit into his knees and he cursed the darkness he himself had chosen for protection. Both moons lay low on the horizon of the summer sky, the nearer a mere crescent, the farther nearly full but dim in the distance. A perfect night for the test he had planned. Yet even as his eyes plumbed the darkness he sensed the circling shadow overhead. Shrinking against the lichen-crusted rocks, he waited. The shadow came again, blotwhich flickered rampant in their jet background -- a milkwhite blur soared above him in lazy circles. Harmon took his bearings from the boulder and pointed himself down the far side of the ridge toward a cave mouth he had spotted during one of his solitary walks only days before, a sanctuary. If he could reach that cave unseen, his pursuer might -- for one instant -- lose track of him, might become separated, George would finally sever the undefinable bond that united them. He felt little real hope but it was a chance. Seizing a large stone in one hand, he lurched to his feet and crashed through brush that raked his face, tore at his clothes with brittle fingers, scraping and clutching at him. Heavy wings fluttered overhead but the sound only drove him faster. The cave mouth gaped its welcome, a bit of the night sky planted darkling here among the rocks, and Harmon sprawled inside, simultaneously hurling the stone in his hand down the talus slope ahead of him. Bounding racket clattered away through the rocks, a false trail to mislead his pursuer. Then he lay panting and waited. He swallowed nothing as the cotton in his mouth dissolved and his heaving chest slowed. Acrid sweat stung his eyes. All was quiet, except for the muted snatches of song drifting through the still night from the celebration he had left behind. That, too, was part of his plan: caught up in the excitement of the evening, the guardians might not notice his absence. A foolish hope, perhaps, but his onlyone. After a long moment he risked a quick glance outside. His guardian perched some ten yards from him, preening and white, waiting with maddening faithfulness for Harmon to emerge from the cave. Anger swelled in him, drowned at once in the wave of peace that came unbidden to wash over and surround him. He tried to fight the calming aura that bathed his every thought. It was useless. There was no escaping. his feet and in resignation, turned back toward the valley. A draft of cooling night air fanned his neck as the guardian launched itself to swoop low over his bowed head, then wing its way aloft to resume a silent perch on the wind. Harmon cautiously circled the communal party on the way back to his pneumodome. The detour added thirty minutes to his trip home but he had no wish to meet any of the other colonists now, not with his guardian gleaming aberrant white in the night sky above him like a contemning signpost. He knew that none of the others would admit how radically his guardian's appearance had changed -- he could not say whether they showed some mistaken sense of understanding or preferred blindness, but that didn't matter. He knew his guardian -- at least by sight. It had changed. IF Once the guardian plummeted low across his path to snatch up an adder that had lain in deadly ambush. Harmon pointedly ignored the service. He was long past the point of caring, certainly of thanking a creature whose every attention he detested. His wife sat before their pneumodome, waiting. "George? Where were you? Your clothes! What happened?" He stalked in past her. He knew, without bothering to glance behind him, that the guardian glided gently down to settle on the dome spire and wait with loving concern. During his first few months here he had several times tried to sneak away early in the pre-dawn darkness but the guardian was always alert and waiting. There was no escape. "George? I asked if you're all right." Marian followed him inside. "I thought you might be sick when you left the party early." He ignored her and devoted himself to the ritual of checking the compressor that kept their home erect. It was only through minor, habitual tasks like these that he was able to ignore her irritating solicitude. "Well? Are you?" "Who's ever sick here?" he demanded. "And if you give me any of that 'praise guardians' I swear I'll walk out again." He flopped angrily into one of the two clumsy wooden chairs which, with a small table and inflated mattress, comprised the furniture in their temporary quarters. The steady thrum of the compressor drowned out the night noises outside and soothed him in spite of himself. "You should have stayed. After the dancing we voted to rename the colony. Eden. Isn't that beautiful? John Martin thought of it." "Eden," George snorted. "I could have guessed. Leave it to our good Captain Martin to come up with that kind of maudlin mindlessness." Marian merely smiled and reached back to stroke the feathered head of her guardian, perched black and docile on the back of her chair. "Pretty bird," she murmured. "Poor George isn't himself tonight." "Damn it! Don't excuse me to one of them. And haven't I told you to leave that thing outside?" "Sorry, dear." She nodded and her guardian fluttered softly through the susurring air current at the door and out into the night. "But he's so small. He's not really in the way." "That's just like you, throwing its size up to me. You wander around with a crow following you while I'm stuck with that reeking albino vulture out there. But I suppose you didn't notice the color it's turning." "It's really prettier than the others, don't you think?" "But why do  get it?" "Guardians assign themselves," Marian recited. The phrase carried the connotation of a catechism. George grunted his irritation and turned away to ignore what he could not refute. That fact that no one chose his guardian but was instead chosen had long since become apparent. Perhaps that was what irritated him most, his inability to change what everyone else in the colony had accepted as some sort of foreordained natural fact -- mere hours after their ship had landed each colonist had found himself the object of special attention lavished on him by a guardian, not chosen but acquired. O NE year ago to the day. One year ago they had thundered to a turf-searing landing in the broad valley stretching away to the south from the huge clearing that now contained the pneumodome village and the rich tilled fields which fed the colony. Advance scouting reports had promised them a potential paradise. Rotating on an axis parallel to that of its sun, their new world underwent only mild seasonal changes here in the temperate belt. Except for a twenty-eight-hour day and a fourhundred-day year, the colonists' new home seemed an improved replica of the overpopulated, underfed, war-ridden Earth they had all so eagerly left behind. How far behind, none of them could say. The psychologists all thought it best if they cut the cord completely and started fresh here. Some day their developing technology would let them reestablish contact with other men, wherever their kin would be by then. For now, for the colonists, Eden was meant to be all there was. The trip outbound from Earth had passed between sleeping and waking -- long years in suspended animation. During that time the starvation and skirmishing warfare on Earth had increased unknown to the colonists, who awoke only when the ship's preset equipment sensed "destination." They awoke to new hope, to the sight of a green luxuriant world waiting to welcome them. Even George Harmon had felt, for a brief moment, not his usual cynicism but a twinge of pleasure. It soon passed. Captain Martin took command and restored Harmon's sense of irritation with his place in the new scheme. "Families to my left, single men over here," Martin ordered. "I want sentries posted till we can inflate the first dormitory and establish security. Then we'll worry about making contact with those birds we've been hearing about." A snicker rippled through the nervous crowd. Of the facts known to the colonists about their new home, one stood out as the most unlikely: in spite of the planet's hospitable environment, no comIF plex organism had developed sufficiently to dominate the animal life present. Only a single species of birds which traveled in large flocks showed any tendency toward social organization -- but not real intelligence -- a sort of silent, empathetic bond. Scouting reports described the birds as small, apparently harmless; the roboprobe scoutships had brought back to Earth hours of film, carefully recorded data -- everything, in fact, except the intangibles which only a human survey crew might have noticed. But human crews were unthinkable aboard scoutships, given the duration of the journey each covered and the massive G-loads which would reduce a frail organism to jelly but troubled the automated equipment not at all. No, the probes had brought back enough data, even about the birds. And so, during their indoctrination at Colony Central in Utahstate, the potential colonists had of course joked with one another about the hosts who awaited them in their new home. For the entire two months of their training, they had treated one another to puns about "birds of a feather," about their being the "early birds" bound to get the worm, and whatever other strained cleverness occurred to people bone-tired from days of endless psychological screening, adaptability tests and lectures on the problems of founding an agrarian society. Harmon had avoided the horseplay -- birdplay, Marian said once, only to cringe under the withering look her husband had thrown her. He had concentrated instead on satisfying the examiners, all of whom had seemed determined to dissuade him from emigrating, even though his number had come up in the monthly New Life Lottery. Besides the pap they kept muttering about his potential instability, there was the question of his occupation. In theory a legislator like Harmon, a man accustomed to guiding an organized society, should be valuable in any new colony; in practice farmers and laborers somehow proved more effective and reliable. But George had managed to pass all their tests, more often than not masking his true feelings to answer heir childishly transparent questions as he knew they expected of a "good risk." That much he could do -- anything to escape the terrors of a poisoned atmosphere, of insecticide-laden milk and seawater, of the burgeoning sterility that threatened all who remained on the dying Earth. So he and Marian had joined the other lucky ones, the groups of three hundred people who fled Earth each month to sink a new foothold for man in some distant corner of the expanding universe. ers while John Martin, elected captain before their liftoff from Earth, apportioned land and set them to work in teams to cannibalize the ship itself for its usable equipment. With the others in the sweating crowd they cheered when the first pneumodome sagged and blossomed erect. And with the others they tensed at the sight of hundreds of birds boiling over the horizon to approach and circle the band of wary colonists. But at first nothing happened. The birds merely circled, until the colonists separated, each couple or work team to go its own way. Then a strange symbiosis developed between them and the birds -- "guardians" they were soon called. Each colonist found himself possessing, or being possessed by, one of the delicate, aromatic gray doves. Not that any formal bond was ever made. Nor was communication between them possible. But a relationship developed nevertheless. A single bird followed each man and each woman night and day, always in sight. A sentry walking the perimeter of the camp first described the relationship. "I was taking a shortcut through the brush over there and accidentally kicked a hornet's nest. Anyway, they looked like N what I'd call hornets. They came buzzing out fit to eat me alive. This bird I'd been seeing behind me all along comes swooping down and gobbles them up so fast I almost couldn't see him work. Not one of them got close enough to sting me. First thing you know, the bird's back, flying in circles over my head. There he is. There." His report drew echoes from the others in the communal assembly, tales of unexpected aid. The birds, some said, had saved them from snakes writhing through the underbrush. Or the birds had chattered warnings to those few who had thought to eat what appeared to be an apple, a fruit later proven to be deadly poison. Though no one understood how it worked, everyone was certain it did -- the birds knew what threatened man and they protected him. "Asking nothing in return," Martin had told them. "As far as we know, theirs is honest altruism. You've noticed that it's always the same bird trailing you, right?" The crowd nodded assent. "All I can say is, they're some kind of guardians." "Nonsense!" Harmon shouted. "They must get something out of it. It's not right otherwise. In a symbiosis both partners benefit." "Then call it parasitism, if you want, with us the parasites," Martin said. "I still say it's suspicious." But the others had booed George down. Within a week the relationship had become an accepted part of their new life. No one would suffer the least slight uttered about the guardians. One young boy found IF himself censured for resurrecting a meaningless but apparently clever greeting he had once heard back on Earth: "How's your bird?" His father slapped him -- or began to. But he hesitated and the blow didn't land. Nevertheless, the boy felt reprimanded. And John Martin's designation stuck. "Guardians" the birds became. #eorge?" Marian nudged him VJ gently. "What's wrong?" He rolled to face her. "You talk with the others more than I do. Did anyone ever escape his guardian? Or see one die? And the dogs -- they whine any time a guardian gets near. Or they used to." "Why? They're all -- " "Skip it. Let it go. I should have known better than to ask you. Of course you're content. And the others, not a brain in their heads. Your friend Martin's as stupid as those sheep he coddles all day. But someone must recognize how we depend on them. It's not right. It's -- it's inhuman." "We've been all through this, George, a hundred times. I thought John Martin had settled it. The crops prosper, our flocks increase, there hasn't been a quarrel -- much less a fight -- in the whole year we've been here. If the guardians do any more than we see, it's only to help. I admit I won't go as far as the people who almost worship them, but I can't see anything wrong." "I'll tell you what's wrong. They're getting something from us. They must be. Did you ever know anyone to do all the things they do and not expect to get paid? On Earth we -- " Marian smiled. "We're not on earth, dear," "So? At least there a man's worth was recognized. Here we're all dirt-grubbing farmers, all except the high muckey-muck Martin. Our leader. He even stinks like his sheep." "Please. Try to sleep. I'm sure you're worried about nothing." She kissed his cheek and turned away. Patronizing -- just like Martin . Neither of them sense enough to see the obvious... But he had seen. The feathered parasite that followed his every step had changed radically. In the beginning they were all the same -- mourning doves, he might have called them on Earth, gray and delicate, small-boned, graceful, a delight to watch circling in the sunlight as the men worked the fields or urged their flocks upslope to the high pasture lands. They seemed to exude an undefinable aroma -- vaguely pleasant, like freshly laundered linen. But then changes began to appear in the birds. Marian's guardian, for instance, was smaller now. Harmon was sure of it. Smaller and darker, nearly black, as if some evil had worked its transformation on the bird. Harmon's own had grown gigantic, almost as large as an eagle and was turning whiter by the day. He swore he had seen it pass through shades of lighter and lighter gray: leaden, ashen, pearl. Only a few days earlier he had glanced up to see it haunting him as he walked home from the fields. On impulse he had hurled his hoe at the creature, and a single occurrence, the sight might have been blamed on some trick of the fading sunlight, but Harmon refused to accept that notion. He had seen the same phenomenon too often. The creature was whiter: now cream; then milk. He knew; everyone must have seen it. He had even swallowed his dislike for Martin long enough to ask whether anyone had made contact with the guardians, had discovered some way of communicating with them. So many questions unanswered. Why did they follow the colonists? and why particular ones? Could a man trade guardians with someone else? But Martin -- busy in preparation for the anniversary celebration -- had ignored him. And the others, including those few who seemed to fear the guardians, however slightly, refused to understand his questions; they even denied the calming scent that seemed to follow the guardians everywhere. It was then that Harmon had decided that he would escape his guardian, kill it if necessary. Settle things once and for all, find out what all this meant. Tonight, with the community gathered to celebrate a year of peace and plenty, he had gone off alone to make his final test. When that proved fruitless -- he sucked a scrape on his forearm and savored the memory of the pain he had felt hurtling through the brush in his futile attempt to escape -- when that proved fruitless, he had known what he must do. He smiled his hatred toward the dark dome overhead and toward the bird he knew sat waiting. He would kill his guardian but in such a way that no one else would understand his intention -- make the act appear spontaneous, perhaps accidental. Harmon fell asleep smiling. F OR the next few days he only watched. The crops had been harvested, a second planting was already underway. While the work teams sweated and labored at their appointed tasks, Harmon questioned those around him. He soon discovered a pattern: the guardians maintained their distance, usually separated a full twenty to thirty yards from the host to which each had attached itself, unless motioned nearer by the man himself. But in moments of stress, when IF tempers flared or danger threatened, they dove nearer. And they brought with them peace -- an intangible aura of well-being -- almost as though each guardian somehow broadcast placidity and emotional calm. The sentimentalists among Harmon's coworkers called it love, to his disgust. To test his newly formed theory, George tried provoking arguments. He jostled men working their way down the bean rows; he tripped a boy intentionally. Tempers flared, but nothing more ever came of it. In every case even a hint of anger or distrust drew the guardians nearer rnd the mood passed. Simultaneously the guardians paled, became for a brief moment lighter in color than they had been. It was clear. The birds flourished on tension, on hate and fear and anger, on the swelling emotions alien to this world and unknown before man's arrival. Perhaps, Harmon theorized, a man's very body chemistry, imbalanced however slightly in moments of stress, attracted the hypersensitive guardians. As an addict might pay for narcotics, the birds returned a sense of peace and well-being for the emotions they absorbed. That possibility even accounted for the lack of illness among the colonists, he decided. Injuries were of course rare, with guardians always present to warn of impending danger. But illness was equally rare. In some unexplained way the guardians ministered to their hosts, absorbing or drawing off flashes of anger or unpleasant physical sensations. Though many colonists feared their guardians, everyone seemed content, at peace with himself and his neighbors. Everyone but George Harmon, whose fear of the birds had become loathing. He hated his guardian more by the moment. It grew and paled noticeably, bathing George in the fragrant warmth of affection that only increased his hatred. "Why can't you accept things?" Marian pleaded. "Sometimes I think you're sorry we came to Eden. We're all so happy. John says that if -- " "Martin again!" George slammed his wooden cup against the wall and stared in frustration as it bounced to the floor undamaged. He felt the veins throbbing in his forehead and reached for something to break or tear, but there was nothing. "If you mention him to me once -- " He stopped at the sound of heavy Wings at the curtain of his dome. And then he knew. He smirked. The strongest surge of emotion he had felt in weeks had drawn the creature toward him, like a victim to a baited trap. Martin was that bait. He fought the pacific calm that filled the pneumodome, and plotted his next move. It would all be so simple. procession moving toward the beanfield they were planting. He followed the planting team down the rows, covering each newly seeded hill with moist soil with his hoe blade. While he worked, he waited. Shadows drifted along the tilled rows. The guardians circling overhead. Banter passed among the men, gossip about a new baby born the day before and already under the protection of a guardian. And then Harmon's moment arrived. John Martin strode toward the workers. "Martin! I want to see you!" A few of the others looked curious at his tone but returned to their labors. Only the guardians overhead showed agitation. "What is it, George?" Harmon savored the aroma Martin carried, the ripe scent of his flocks. He let a thought blossom full and rich in his mind: Kill him! Kill him! The hate swelled and burned with a fiery delight. He watched Martin's gray guardian swoop low in chittering protest and dash itself against Martin's chest; but Martin only paused in bewilderment. Harmon raised his hoe and lunged at Martin. Fluttering wings grazed his head as his own screeching guardian circled lower. The trap sprung, George whirled. His hoe flashed through the sunlight to chop at the mass of snowy feathers. The hoe swung and struck in frantic, staggered rhythm. A mist of gas and splattering gray droplets spewed from the bird's ruptured breast to shower over Harmon. He sagged suddenly in rapture and reached up outstretched arms to the white feathers drifting gently down through the cloud that permeated his swelling flesh. Then he knew , became one with, the guardian's fetid intensity -- his lungs strained to bursting as he sucked in understanding from the sunlit, rainbowstreaked air. Plaintive gull cries filled the air. The guardians dove to surround the men who stood rooted in fear at the sight of Harmon writhing on the ground in an agony of joy, bloating and swelling like a maddened cancer. A musky glow of peace and contentment laved over eyes to blind them. When they saw once more, they stared bewildered at the shattered guardian, the burden of hate now lifted from its slender frame and returned to its source -- that source a mass of corruption melting to fuse with the earth. Sadly they covered the foulness at their feet and returned to work. Soon no one in Eden remembered George Harmon, though on still summer evenings the guardians often swoop low over a single spot of sterility lying barren in that fertile soil.  IF that it is essentially a literature of ideas. With only a few exceptions the general stream of fiction has been forced to depend on the emotional involvement of essentially familiar people and their interactions in basically familiar situations. That makes the use of any really different new idea so hard to weave in convincingly that few writers can succeed. On the other hand, science fiction offers a universe-wide range of possibilities. We can tell the story of a woman who marries a complete alien or a man who sees the end of the universe. One of the results of this difference is that in science fiction the shorter length is often better than the full novel. In general fiction, length is needed to develop the complexity of interactions which must substitute for freshness of concept. In our field, simplicity can be a virtue, letting the basic idea stand forth clear and uncluttered. Nowadays, due partly to the market, some of these get padded out into spurious novels, of course; but over the decades some of the most memorable examples of science fiction have been found in stories of less than fifteen thousand words. Maybe this is why the anthology has been so important a form of book in this field, unlike in most others. In general fiction a man who has written a whole body of excellent short work can hope to see his efforts kept in print through collections. But the writer who depends on a few great stories -- even classics of their kind -- is too often doomed to oblivion, except in science fiction. In a sense, the story of the acceptance of science fiction as a publishable form began with the anthology. Back in #, when only a few fan publishers were trying to bring out science fiction, Random House issued Adventures in Time and Space , edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a huge book, containing # pages of fiction, totalThere were # stories, culled from the virgin territory of all the science-fiction magazine work published to that date. And it sold, as I remember, for #! Whenever librarians ask me to submit a list of science-fiction books they should stock, this ancient anthology heads the list. Until very recently, at least, it was still available in the Modern Library edition (under a different title -- Famous Science Fiction , I believe -- and less a couple of stories that don't matter that much). It's a book that should still be on the shelves of every genuine fan of the field; if you don't have it, get it -- new or secondhand, it's still a great bargain. During the same year another anthology appeared -- this edited by Groff Conklin and put out by Crown Publishers: The Best of Science Fiction. It wasn't quite the huge bargain the first was and Groff had sometimes been unable to get the stories he wanted because they were already purchased for the earlier book. But its success in the market and in sales to libraries also helped to convince publishers that there was money to be made in this crazy field. Since then there have been hordes of anthologies. Some, like Groff Conklin's excellent later ones, were gathered with love and by means of diligent reading of the magazines. Some were put together shoddily by mining earlier anthologies. A few have been simply excuses to get stories by a clique into print. And there have been numerous anthologies of original stories, written especially for the anthologist. In the case of the Star series by Frederik Pohl, this worked out rather well. But in general, it seems to be a poor practice; writers can't turn out superb stories on order and deadlines force an editor to fill a volume with fiction no better -- and sometimes worse -- than can be found in any issue of a magazine, despite the name writers and a much higher price. About the time the anthology market seemed to be exhausted for anything but annual "Bests," the collecting of stories around a theme became the chief sales gimmick. Now the trick was not so much to get the best stories but to find the ones that could be related to some single subject that would afford a catchy or controversial title for the book. Some of these were fairly good but most either IF reshuffled old familiars or abandoned taste to fill the book. Other anthologists added all kinds of extraneous matter to pad out the volumes. Serious -- and rather dull -- articles were stuck in between stories to show how wise or clever they were in sticking to science, or some such, rather than letting the stories stand on their own merits. In a few cases, there has been so much editorial material in explanations and blurbs and "selling" that it's hard to evaluate the fiction, because the editor's evaluation is shoved down our throats at every break. It is as if a magazine had a page of filler or editorial "Hoo-boy Wow Gosh" for every page of fiction! There have been some excellent volumes I'm happy to have in my collection, but it has been a long time since the field has seen an anthology capable of standing tall in the shadow of the classic Adventures . For nearly a quarter of a century, that book has been my unfailing choice whenever I wanted to convert some friend to science fiction. N OW, at last, it has a worthy successor. Science Fiction Hall of Fame , edited by Robert Silverberg (Doubleday, #), is a definitive anthology of the shorter works of science fiction since the magazines began. It even lives up to its subtitle: The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Times! And without any real reservations, I'm forced to give it a rave review on its merits. Of course, times have changed and no such bargain as the earlier volume is possible today. Now it costs # to get a quarter million words -- half of what # would buy in #! But it's still a great bargain in the current market when a novel of # words usually sells for # and up. When you consider the quality of the words there's no comparison in value. In a brief foreword, Silverberg gives the background and intent. (Mercifully, there's no other editorial intrusion. For your money, you get solid worth in stories, packed tight in all the numbered pages.) All the professional writers who belonged to the Science Fiction Writers of America were asked to nominate and then vote on their favorite stories before #. Silverberg did the work of collating their responses and the present book represents his efforts at putting together the results of the summed judgment of the professionals in the field. He did his agree with the few cases where he admitted to the need of some personal weighing of the results. Anyhow, it's all explained in the foreword, with the exact listing of the top fifteen of the twenty-six stories in order of votes. These are supposedly the stories that would have won the Nebula shorter fiction, had the Nebulas existed when they appeared. Actually they're a lot better in my opinion than some of the stories that have won -- and represent a far more balanced judgment. Apparently time and distance have removed the personal angles that must so often motivate the voting for current awards, and the result is a list of some genuine classics. Also, twenty-five years have passed since Healy and McComas made their personal selections, and we've had time to weed and compare, as well as many more stories from which to select. Loyal as I am to the old book, I have to admit that some of the work there might better be omitted for other material today. Even the arrangement of stories in the Silverberg anthology is a happy one. The order is strictly by date, with the first appearing in # and the last in #. This helps to put each story in perspective as it is read and it also makes the book a very convenient source of the history of our development. The oldest story is Stanley Weinbaum's Martian Odyssey -- perhaps the most revolutionary story ever written. There are quaint touches which the early date helps to explain; some of it wouldn't be written that way today. But how the story stands up in its totality! The next story is John Campbell's Twilight , which was good enough on first reading to inspire my first fan letter to a magazine -- and still good enough to make me wish more writers who try setting mood had the skill Campbell showed back in #. And because of the date (#), I manage to stagger in third with Helen O'Loy. Curious, by happenstance I was third on the contents page in the old anthology, I see. Ah well, Silverberg couldn't be wholly original! That would violate tradition, obviously. It's hard to pick the best Heinlein Future History novelette, but The Roads Must Roll still rolls. Then we have two stories which the authors have come to hate because readers keep coming up to them and demanding more like them. I have to agree with the majority about Theodore Sturgeon's Microcosmic God -- it's my favorite from all his science fiction. On the other hand, I agree with Isaac Asimov that he has written better stories than Nightfall -- but not much better and none so universally remembered. A.E. van Vogt is represented by The Weapon Shop , to my surprise; I'd have guessed his very first story was more popular. Yet I agree with the majority here; it's a story so good that he didn't have to be confusing in it. It has some of his best writing and, in my opinion, all of his best characterization. The first ten years is completed IF with Mimsy Were the Borogoves , by Lewis Padgett (Kuttner andor Moore). This was something of a key story also, since there were a number of imitations in handling and intent to follow that. It was a great decade and the stories assembled here to record it are stories every real reader of science fiction has to know. It was a decade that began with the slow realization that aliens were essentially human -- and ended with the knowledge that humans are essentially alien. The next decade from # to # seems to be more a period of consolidation, beginning with Clifford Simak's Huddling Place and ending with Surface Tension by Names of God by Arthur Clarke. In between came the one great innovation of the decade, I suspect -- Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live in Vain , which was a legend within a year because of its publication in a less-known magazine and the amazing reputation it achieved in spite of that fact. There are still plenty of writers consciously or otherwise imitating that story. I T IS in this section that I find my own total agreement with the selection beginning to disappear. There are no stories here I can say flatly do not belong, with one possible exception; and that one is doubtful only because thalidomide came along many years later to take some of the kick out of the situation. Still, I suppose the effect remains on those who read it when it was a new and outstanding idea. Two other stories here strike me as below the quality I associate with classics -- one because I seem to be prejudiced against the writer's work generally, perhaps; and the other because I never felt his best work was done in this field. But since my convictions here aren't all that strong. I'll leave it as a pleasant guessing game as to those I mean. Fill in with your own prejudices, if you like. I suspect that during the ten years of this middle period writers were improving their techniques but still sticking to the tried-andtrue for ideas. If so, it would account for the somewhat lower standard of impact here, since the ideas generally would have a lower luster than some earlier ones, even though the early handling lacked some of the later polish. People tend to remember ideas more than style or treatment, praise be! The last decade, ending in #, is significantly different in attitude. There is no longer the assurance of greatness that once existed in our dreams of the future. (Even Twilight showed that assurance; true, the end was possibly failure, of years... !) Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life is negatively implied in its title, and Tom Godwin's Cold Equations is a story of harsh inevitability, as logical and as bitterly unsentimental as its title indicates. And we wind up the book with the bitter-sweet of Roger Zelazny's A Rose for Ecclesiastes , which proved that new talent could be great talent. I've obviously skipped some stories and many of those were ones that unquestionably had to be included and which I consider to be truly classics. I'm not trying to give the table of contents, but rather to get some meaning out of the book. And I hope others will draw their own conclusions, since the logical arrangement here begs for analysis on the part of the reader. In sum, if I were asked for one science-fiction book to go into a time-capsule today, or for one book to represent us on the general shelves of our libraries, this is the book I would have to pick. Anyone who can put this book down with less than great satisfaction obviously has no taste at all for science fiction. This is not a perfect book, however. Doubleday has managed as usual to come up with a dust wrapper that makes the title hard to read without study and reminds me of a rather bad circus poster with the colors faded enough to show that the circus has already left town. Then they stick their list of authors under a caption that says: Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. This makes it seem that -- as could hardly be true of Weinbaum, for instance -- and as if the bers. Ah well. Maybe somebody at Doubleday is spending more time making book than making books. Fortunately, this is the only major gripe I have and I've already macerated the horror of that dust jacket and flushed it down the drain. This is listed as "Volume One," incidentally. (I think that is also a horrible thing to put on a dustjacket, since some may decide to wait for the others or decide not to buy something incomplete. Don't you like to sell books, Doubleday?) Thereby hangs a plan. The expectation is that similar volumes representing the longer stories -- more than # words but less than novel-length -- and finally the novels will be issued, using the same method of selecting. I'm going to look forward to the book of novelettes, since several of the stories I consider greatest were left out of this volume because of length. And I'm going to worry a good bit about that volume of novels. With no more than five novels to fill such a book, it's going to be close to impossible to choose a representative collection of the greatest. When the whole project is comIF pleted, however, the value of the three volumes may be far greater than could be found in any single book. Then we'll have a true library in three books -- and there will therefore be no excuse for even the smallest public library not carrying enough science fiction to offer a fine example to readers. Buy two copies -- one for lending out for the next quarter of a century!  troit, Michigan. Advance membership #, # at the door. For information: Detroit Triple Fan Fair, # Anne Street, Allen Park, Michigan #.  Claremont College, California. Guestof-Honor: C.S. Kilby. For information: Glen Goodknight, # Woodward Avenue, Maywood, California #.  Robert Treat Hotel, Newark, New Jersey. Guest-of-Honor: Hans Stefan Santesoon. October # devoted to speeches and panel discussions. There will be an Anniversary Banquet on October #, commemorating the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in #. Banquet tickets, #. Deadline for banquet reservations, September #. For information: Brian Burley # North Maine, Hackettstown, New Jersey #.  the Sheraton Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal speaker: Larry Niven. For information: Kathy Surgenor, # N. Fairhill Street. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. I emerged from his hotel into a bunting-draped street crowded with locals: bustling, furry folk with upraised, bushy tails, like oversized chipmunks, ranging in height from a foot to a yard. A party of placard-carrying marchers, emerging from a side street, jostled their way through the press, briskly ripping down political posters attached to shop walls and replacing them with posters of their own. Their move was immediately countered by a group of leaflet distributors who set about applying mustaches, beards and crossed eyes to the new placards. The passersby joined in cheerfully, some blacking out teeth and adding warts to the tips of button noses, others grabbing the brushes from the defacers and applying them to their former owners' faces. Fists flew; the clamor rose. Retief felt a tug at his knee; a small Oberonian dressed in blue breeches and a spotted white apron looked up at him from wide, worried eyes. "Prithee, fair sir," the small creature piped in a shrill voice, "come quick, ere all is lost!" "What's the matter?" Retief inquired, noting the flour smudge on the Oberonian's cheek and the dab of pink icing on the tip of his nose. "Are the cookies burning?" "E'en worse than that, milord -- 'tis the Tsuggs! The great brutes would dismantle the shop entire! But follow and observe!" The Oberonian whirled and darted away. Retief followed along the steeply sloping cobbled alley between close-pressing houses, his head level with the second-story balconies. Through open windows he caught glimpses of doll's-houselike interiors, complete with toy tables and chairs and postage-stamp-sized TV screens. The bright-eyed inhabitants clustered at their railings, twittering like sparrows as he passed. He picked his way with care among the pedestrians crowding the way: twelve-inch Ploots and eighteen-inch Grimbles in purple and red leathers, two-foot Choobs in fringed caps and aprons, lordly three-foot-six-inch Blufs, elegant in ruffles and curled pink wigs. Ahead, he heard shrill cries, a tinkle of breaking glass, a dull thump. Rounding a sharp turn, he came on the scene of action. Before a shop with a sign bearing a crude painting of a salami, a crowd had gathered, ringing in a group of half a dozen giant Oberonians of a type new to Retief: swaggering dandies in soiled silks, with cruelly cropped tails, scimitars slung at their waists -- if creatures of the approximate shape of ten-pins can be said to have waists. One of the party held the bridles of their mounts -- scaled, spike-maned brutes resembling gaily painted rhinoceroses, but for their prominent canines, and long, muscular legs. Two more were busy with crowbars, levering at the lintel over the shop doorway. Another pair were briskly attacking the adjacent wall with sledge-hammers. The sixth, distinguished by a scarlet sash with a pistol thrust through it, stood with folded arms, smiling a sharp-toothed smile at the indignant mob. " 'Tis the pastry and ale shop of Binkster Druzz, my grand uncle twice removed!" RetieFs diminutive guide shrilled. "A little lighthearted destruction in the course of making one's political views clear is all very well -- but these IF pirates would reduce us to penury! Gramercy, milord, canst not impede the brutes?" He swarmed ahead, clearing a path through the onlookers. The red-sashed one, noticing Retiefs approach unfolded his arms, letting one hand linger near the butt of the pistol -- a Groaci copy of a two-hundred-year-old Concordiat sliver-gun,  Retief noted. "Close enough, off-worlder," the Tsugg said in a somewhat squeaky baritone. "What would ye here? Ye'r hutch lieth in the next street yonder." bear-like Oberonian, who loomed over the crowd, his eyes almost on a level with RetieFs own, his bulk far greater. "I want to buy a jelly doughnut," the Terran said. "Your lads seem to be blocking the doorway." "Aroint thee, Terry; seek refreshment elsewhere. Being somewhat fatigued with campaigning, I plan to honor this low dive with my custom; my bullies must needs enlarge the door to comport with my noble dimensions." "That won't be convenient," Retief said smoothly. "When I want a jelly doughnut I want it now." He took a step toward the door; the pistol jumped at him. The other Tsuggs were gathering around, hefting crowbars. "Ah-ah," Retief cautioned, raising a finger -- and at the same moment swung his foot in a short arc that ended just under the gun-handler's knee-joint. The victim emitted a sharp yap and leaned forward far enough for his jaw to intersect the course of Retiefs left fist. Retief palmed the gun deftly as the Tsugg staggered into the arms of his companions. "Aroint thee, lads," the giant muttered reproachfully to his supporters, shaking his head dazedly. "We've been boon drinking chums these six Lesser Moons and this is the first time ye've give me any of the food stuff..." "Spread out, lads," one of the Tsuggs ordered his companions. "We'll pound this knave into a thin paste." "Better relax, gentlemen," Retief suggested. "This gun is messy at short range." "An' I mistake me not," one of the crowbar wielders said, eyeing Retief sourly, "ye'r one of the outworld bureaucrats, here to connive in the allocation of loot, now the Sticky-fingers have gone." "Ambassador Clawhammer prefers to refer to his role as refereeing the elections, nothing more," Retief corrected. "Aye," the Tsugg nodded, "that's what I said. So how is it ye're interfering with the free democratic process by coshing Dir Blash in the midst of exercising his voice in local affairs?" "We bureaucrats are a mild lot," Retief clarified, "unless someone gets between us and our jelly doughnuts." Red-sash was weaving on his feet, shaking his head. " 'Tis a scurvy trick," he said blurrily, "sneaking a concealed anvil into a friendly little six-to-one crowbar affray." "Let's go," one of the others said, "ere he produces a howitzer from his sleeve." The banditi mounted their wild-eyed steeds amid much snorting and tossing of fanged heads. "But we'll not forget ye're visage, off-worlder," another promised. "I wot well we'll meet again -- and next time we'll be none so lenient." A hubbub of pleased chatter broke out among the lesser Oberonians as the party passed from sight. "Milord has saved Great-uncle Binkster's fried fat this day," the small being who had enlisted RetieFs aid cried. The Terran leaned over, hands on knees, which put his face on a level only a foot or two above that of the little fellow. "Haven't I seen you before?" he asked. "Certes, milord -- until an hour since, I eked out a few coppers as third assistant pastry cook in the inn yonder, assigned to the cupcake division, decorative icing branch." He sighed. "My specialty was rosebuds -- but no need to burden your grace with my plaint." "You lost your job?" "Aye, that did I -- but forsooth, 'tis but a trifling circumstance, in light of what I o'erheard ere the hostler bade me hie me from the premises forthwith!" "Let's see, your name is -- " "Prinkle, milord. Ipstitch Prinkle IX, at your service." The Twilpritt turned as a slightly plumper, grayer version of himself bustled up, bobbing his head and twitching his ears in a manner expressive of effusive gratitude. "And this, Milord, is Uncle Binkster, in the flesh." "Your servant, sir," Uncle Binkster squeaked, mopping at his face with a large striped handkerchief. "Wouldst honor me by accepting a cooling draft of pringlizard milk and a lardy-tart?" "In sooth, Uncle, he needs something stronger than whey," Prinkle objected. "And in sooth, The Plump Sausage offers fine ale -- if your Grace can manage the approaches," he added, comparing Retief s six foot three with the doorway. "I'll turn sideways," Retief reassured the Oberonian. He ducked through, was led across the crowded room by a bustling eighteen-inch tapman to a corner table, where he was able to squeeze himself onto a narrow bench against the wall. "What'll it be, gents?" the landlord inquired. "Under the circumstances, I'll stick to small beer," Retief said. IF "Ale for me," Uncle Binkster said. " 'Tis vice, perhaps, to tipple ere lunchtime, but with Tsuggs roaming the Quarter and battering down walls, one'd best tipple while opportunity presents itself." "A sound principle," Retief agreed. "Who are these Tsuggs, Uncle Binkster?" A-'from the high crags for easy pickings," the elderly baker replied with a sigh. "After you Terrans sent the Groaci packing, we thought all our troubles were over. Alas, I fear me 'tis not the case. As soon as the ruffians got the word the Five Eyes were pulling out, they came swarming down out of the hills like zing-bugs after a jamwagon -- 'tis plain they mean to elect their ruffianly chief, Hoobrik the Uncouth. Bands of them roam the city, and the countryside as well, terrorizing the voters -- " He broke off as the landlord placed a foaming three-inch tankard before Retief. "Away with that thimble, Squirmkin!" he exclaimed. "Our guest requires a heartier bumper than that!" " 'Tis an Emperor-sized mug," the landlord said, "but I allow his dimensions dwarf it. Mayhap I can knock the top out of a hogshead..." He hurried away. "Pray don't mistake me, milord," Uncle Binkster resumed. "Like any patriot, I rejoiced to see the Sticky-finger go, leaving the conduct of Oberonian affairs to Oberonians. But who'd have guessed we normal-sized chaps would at once be subjected to depradations by our own oversized kith and kin exceeding anything the invaders ever practiced!" "A student of history might have predicted it," Retief pointed out. "But I agree: being pushed around by local hoodlums is even less satisfying than being exploited from afar." "Indeed so," Prinkle agreed. "In the case of foreigners one can always gain a certain relief by hurling descriptive epithets, mocking their outlandish ways and blaming everything on their inherent moral leprosy -- an awkward technique to use on one's relatives." The landlord returned, beaming, with a quart-sized wooden container topped by a respectable head. Retief raised it in salute and drank deep. "And if what my nephew o'erheard be any indication," Uncle Binkster went on, wiping foam from his whiskers, "the worst is yet to come. Hast related all to our benefactor, lad?" "Not yet, Uncle." Prinkle turned to Retief. "I was sweeping room, my mind on other matters, when I heard the word 'Tsugg' bandied among the company still sitting at table. I cocked an auricle, thinking to hear the scoundrels roundly denounced, only to catch the intelligence that their chief that brawling bravo Hoobrik, representing himself to be spokesman and natural leader of all Oberon, withal, hath demanded audience of His Impressiveness, Ambassador Clawhammer! 'Twas but natural that I undertook to disabuse their Lordships of this impertinent notion, accidentally overturning a pot of chocolate in process thereof -- " "Alas, my nephew is at times too enthusiastic in his espousal of his views," Uncle Binkster put in. "Though 'tis beyond dispute, in this instance he was sorely tried." "In sooth, so was his honor, Mr. Magnan, when the cocoa landed in his lap," Prinkle admitted. "Happily, 'twas somewhat cooled by long standing." "A grotesque prospect," Uncle Binkster ruminated. "Those scapegrace villains, lording it over us honest folk! Perish the thought, Sir Retief! I trow I'd sooner have the Five-eyes back!" "At least they maintained a degree of control over the ne'r-dowells," Prinkle said, "restricting them to their hills and caves." "As will we, lad, once the election is consummated," Uncle Binkster reminded the youth. "Naturally, we Twilpritt stand ready to assume the burden of policing the rabble, as is only right and natural, as soon as our slate is elected, by reason of our supervisor virtues -- " "Hark not to the old dodderer's maunderings, Giant," a tiny voice peeped from the next table. A miniature Oberonian, no more than nine inches tall, raised his oneounce glass in salute. "We Chimberts, being nature's noblemen, are of course divinely appointed to a position of primacy among these lumbering brutes, saving your presence, milord -- " "Dost hear a dust-cricket chirping in the woodwork?" a mediumsized Oberonian with black circles resembling spectacles around his eyes inquired loudly from three tables away. " 'Twere plain e'en to an outworlder that we Choobs are the rightful inheritors of the mantle of superiority. Once in office we'll put an end to such public rantings." "You in office?" Prinkle yelped. "O'er my corpse, varlet!" He leaped up, slopping beer as he cocked his arm to peg the mug at the offender. "Stay, nephew!" Uncle Binkster restrained the youth. "Pay no heed to the wretch, doubtless he's in his cups -- " "Drunk, am I, you old sot!" the Choob yelled, overturning the table as he leaped up, grabbing for the hilt of his foot-long sword. "I'll ha' a strip o' thy wrinkled hide for that allegation -- " His threat was cut off abruptly as a tankard, hurled from across the room, clipped him over the ear, sending him reeling into the next IF table, whose occupants leaped up with indignant shouts and flailing fists. "Gentlemen, time, time!" the landlord wailed, before diving behind the bar amid a barrage of pewter. Retief finished his beer in a long swallow and rose, looming over the battle raging about his knees. "A pleasure, gentlemen," he addressed the room at large. "I hate to leave such a friendly gathering, but Staff Meeting time is here." "Farewell, Sir Retief," Prinkle panted from under the table, where he grappled with a pale-furred local of about his own weight. "Call around any time for a drop and a bit of friendly political chat." "Thanks," Retief said. "If things get too slow in the front line trenches I'll remember your invitation." II ence room -- a converted packing room in the former warehouse temporarily housing the Terran Mission to the newly liberated planet Oberon -- First Secretary Magnan gave him a sour look. "Well -- here you are at last. I'd begun to fear you'd lingered to roister with low companions in your usual manner." "Not quite my usual manner," Retief corrected. "We'd barely started to roister when I remembered Staff Meeting. By the way, what do you know about a fellow called Hoobrik the Uncouth?" Magnan looked startled. "Why, that name is known only to a handful of us in the inner security circle," he said in a lowered tone, glancing about. "Who leaked it to you, Retief?" "A few hundred irate locals. They didn't seem to know it was a secret." "Well, whatever you do, act surprised when the Ambassador mentions it," Magnan cautioned his junior as they took seats at the long table. "My," he went on as the shouts of the crowd outside the building rose to a thunderous level, "how elated the locals are, now they realize we've relieved them of the burdens of Groaci overlordship! Hear their merry cries!" "Remarkable," Retief agreed. "They have a better command of invective than the Groaci themselves." "Why, Wilbur," Magnan said as Colonel Saddlesore, the Military Attache slipped into the chair beside him, avoiding his glance. "However did you get that alarming discoloration under your eye?" "Quite simple, actually." The colonel bit off his words like bullets. "I was struck by a thrown political slogan." Magnan sniffed. "There's no need for recourse to sarcasm." "The slogan," Saddlesore ampliTied, "was inscribed on the rind of a bham-bham fruit of the approximate size and weight of a well-hit cricket ball." "I saw three small riots myself on the way in to the office," the Press Attache said in a pleased tone. "Remarkable enthusiasm these locals show for universal suffrage." "I think it's time, however," the Counselor put in ponderously, "that someone explained to them that the term 'political machine' does not necessarily refer to a medium tank." The chatter around the long table cut off abruptly as Ambassador Clawhammer, a small pinkfaced man with an impressive paunch, entered the room, glowered at his staff as they rose, waved them to their seats as he waited for silence. "Well, gentlemen," he looked around the table. "What progress have you to report aneht the preparation of the populace for the balloting?" A profound silence ensued. "What about you, Chester?" Clawhammer addressed the Counselor. "I seem to recall instructing you to initiate classes in parliamentary procedure among these riffraff -- that is to say, among the free citizens of Oberon." "I tried, Mr. Ambassador. I tried," Chester said sadly. "They didn't seem to grasp the idea quite. They chose up sides and staged a pitched battle for possession of the chair." "Ah -- I can report a teentsy bit of progress in my campaign to put across the idea of one man, one vote," a slendernecked Political Officer spoke up. "They got the basic idea, all right." He paused. "The only trouble was, they immediately deduced the corollary: one less man, one less vote." He sighed, "Luckily, they were evenly matched, so no actual votes were lost." "You might point out the corollary to the corollary," Retief suggested, "the lighter the vote, the smaller the Post Office." "What about your assigned task of voter registration, eh. Magnan?" the Chief of Mission barked. "Are you reporting failure too?" "Why, no indeed, sir, not exactly failure; at least not utter failure; it's too soon to announce that -- " "Oh?" The Ambassador looked ominous. "When do you think would be an appropriate time? After disaster strikes?" "I'd like to propose a rule limiting the number of political parties to P minus #, P being the number of voters," Magnan said hastily. "Otherwise we run the risk that no one gets.a majority." "No good, Magnan," the Counselor for P R Affairs spoke up. "We don't want t# risk a charge of meddling. However," he added thoughtfully, "we might just up the nomination fee to a figure sufIF ficiently astronomical to keep the trash out -- that is, to discourage the weakly motivated." "I don't know, Irving," the Econ Officer ran his fingers through his thinning hair in a gesture of frustration. "What we really need is to prune the ranks of the voters more drastically. Now, far be it from me to propose strong-arm methods -- but what if we tried out a modified Grandfather Rule?" AY -- a touch of the traditional might be in order at that, Oscar," the Political Officer agreed tentatively. "Just what did you have in mind?" "Actually I haven't worked out the details -- but how about limiting the franchise to those who have grandfathers? Or possibly grandchildren? Or even both?" "Gentlemen!" Ambassador Clawhammer cut short the debate. "We must open our sights. The election promises to degenerate into a debacle of ruinous proportions, career-wise, unless we break through with a truly fresh approach." He paused impressively. "Fortunately," he continued in the modest tones of Caesar accepting the crown, "I have evolved such an approach." He raised a hand in kindly remonstrance at the chorus of congratulations that broke out at his announcement. "It's clear, gentlemen, that what is needed is the emergence of a political force that will weld together the strands of Oberonian political coloration into a unified party capable of seating handy majorities. A force conversant with the multitudinous benefits which would stem from a sympathetic attitude toward Terran interests in the Sector." "Yes, Chief," an alert underling from the Admin Section took his cue. "But, gosh, who could possibly produce such a miracle from the welter of divergent political creeds here on Oberon? They're practically at swords' points with each other over each and every question of policy, both foreign and domestic." Clawhammer nodded acknowledgment. "Your question is an acute one, Dimplick. Happily, the answer is at hand. I have made contact, through confidential channels, with a native leader of vast spiritual influence, who bids fair to fulfill the role to perfection." He paused to allow, the staff to voice spontaneous expressions of admiration, then raised a palm for silence. "While 'Golly!' and 'Wow!' are perhaps less elegant effusions than one might logically expect from an assemblage of senior career diplomats," he said sternly, but with a redeeming twinkle in his small, redrimmed eyes, "I'll overlook the lapse this time on the basis of your obvious shock at receiving such glad tidings after your own abysmal failures to produce any discernible progress." "Sir, may we know the name of this messiah?" Magnan chirped. "When do we get to meet him?" "Curious that you should employ that particular term with reference to Hoobrik," Clawhammer said complacently. "At this moment, the guru is meditating in the mountains, surrounded by his chelas, or disciples, known as Tsuggs in the local patois." "Did you say -- Hoobrik?" Magnan queried uncertainly. "Goodness, what a coincidence that he should have the same name as that ruffian of a bandit chief who had the unmitigated effrontery to send one of his strong-arm men to threaten your Excellency!" Clawhammer's pink features deepened to a dull magenta which clashed sharply with his lime-green seersucker suit. "I fear, Magnan," he said in a tone like a tire-iron striking flesh, "that you've absorbed a number of erroneous impressions. His Truculence, Spiritual Leader Hoobrik, dispatched an emissary, it's true, to propose certain accommodations sphere-of-influence-wise; but to proceed from that circumstance to an inference that I have yielded to undue pressures is an unwarranted speculative leap!" "Possibly I just misinterpreted his messenger's phraseology, sir," Magnan said with a tight little smile. "It didn't seem to me that 'foreign blood-suckers' and 'craven paper-pushers' sounded all that friendly." but words will never hurt us,' eh, sir?" the Econ Officer piped brightly, netting himself a stab of the Ambassadorial eye. "Still, it's rather strong language," Colonel Saddlesore spoke up to fill the conversational gap. "But I daresay you put the fellow in his place, eh, Mr. Ambassador?" "Why, as to that, I've been pondering the precisely correct posture to adopt vis-a-vis the Tsuggs, protocol-wise. I confess for a few moments I toyed with the idea of a beefed-up #-B: Massive Dignity, with overtones of Leashed Ire; but cooler counsels soon prevailed." "How about a #, sir?" the Econ Officer essayed. "Amused Contempt, with just a hint of Unpleasant Surprise in the Offing?" "Too subtle," Colonel Saddlesore grunted. "What about the old standby, #-A?" "Oh, the old 'Threat to Break Off Talks' ploy, eh? Embellished with a side-issue of Table-Shape Dispute, I assume?" mer called the conference to heel. "You forget that the date of the elections is rushing toward us! We've no time for traditional ploys. The problem is simple: how IF best to arrive at a meeting of the minds with the guru." "Why not just call him in and offer to back him in a takeover, provided he plays ball?" the PR Chief proposed bluntly. "I assume, Irving," Clawhammer said into the shocked silence, "that what you actually meant to suggest was that we give His Truculence assurances of Corps support in his efforts to promote Oberonian welfare -- in the event of his securing the confidence of the electorate, as evinced by victory at the polls, of course." "Yeah, something like that," Irving muttered, sliding down in his chair. "Now," Clawhammer said, "the question remains, how best to tender my compliments to His Truculence, isolated as he is in his remote fastness -- " "Why, simple enough, sir," Magnan said. "We just send a messenger along with an invitation to tea. Something impressive in a gold-embossed, I'd suggest." "I understand this fellow Hoobrik has ten thousand blood-thirsty cutthroats -- ah, that is, wisdomhungry students -- at his beck and call," the Econ Officer contributed. "They say anybody who goes up there comes back with his tail cropped." "Small hazard, since we Terries have no tails," Magnan said. "I've got a funny feeling they'd figure out something else to crop," Oscar retorted sharply. "Am I to infer, Magnan, you're volunteering to convey the bid?" Clawhammer inquired blandly. "Me, sir?" Magnan paled visibly. "Heavens, I'd love to -- except that I'm under observation for possible fourth-degree cocoa bums." "Fourth-degree burns?" Colonel Saddlesore wondered aloud. "I'd like to see that. I've heard of first, second, and third degree, but -- " "The symptoms are invisible to lay inspection," Magnan snapped. "Additionally, my asthma is aggravated by high altitudes." "By Gad," Colonel Saddlesore whispered to his neighbor, "'d like a chance to confront these fellows -- " "Better wear your armor, Wilbur," his confidant replied. "From all reports, they weigh in at three hundred pounds and wear six-foot cutlasses with which they lay about them freely when aroused. And they say the sight of a Terry arouses them worse than anything." " -- but, as I was about to say, my duties require that I hole up in my office for the forseeable future," the colonel finished. "Cutlasses, you say?" the Econ Officer pricked up his ears. "Hmm. Might be a market here weapons -- for police use only, of course." "Capital notion, Depew," the Political Officer nodded approvingly. "Nothing like a little firepower to bring out the natural peace-loving tendencies of the people." "Now, gentlemen -- let us avoid trines," Clawhammer said sharply. "Our only motive, let us remember, is to bring the liberated populace to terms with the political realities -- in this case, the obvious need for a man on horseback -- or should I say a Tsugg on Vornchback?" The Terran envoy smiled indulgently at his whimsy. "I have a question, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "Since we're here to supervise free elections, why don't we let the Oberonians work out their own political realities?" Clawhammer looked blank. "Just -- ah -- how do you mean?" the Political Officer prompted uneasily. "Why don't we let them nominate whomever they want, vote for any candidate they like?" Retief explained. "I suggest you forget these radical notions, young fellow," Clawhammer said sternly. "These free elections will be conducted in the way that free elections have always been conducted. And now that I've considered the matter, it occurs to me it might be valuable experience for you to pay the proposed call on His Truculence. It might serve to polish your grasp of protocol a trifle." "But, sir," Magnan spoke up. "I need Mr. Retief to help me do the Consolidated Report of Delinquent Reports -- " "You'll have to manage alone, I fear, Magnan. And now, back to the ramparts of democracy, gentlemen! As for you, Retief -- " The Ambassador fixed Retief with a sharp eye: "I suggest you comport yourself with a becoming modesty among the Tsugg. I should dislike to have report any unfortunate incident." "I'll do my best to see that no such report reaches you, sir," Retief said cheerfully. Ill T HE green morning sun of Oberon shone down warmly as Retief, mounted on a wiry Struke, a slightly smaller and more docile cousin of the fierce Vorch tamed by the Tsuggs, rode forth from the city gates. Pink and yellow borms warbled in the tree tops; the elusive sprinch darted from grass tuft to grass tuft. The rhythmic whistling of doody-bugs crying to their young supplied a somnolent backdrop to the idyl. Retief passed through a region of small, tidy farms, where sturdy Doob peasants gaped from the furrows. The forest closed in as the path wound upward into the IF foothills. In mid-afternoon he tethered the Struke and lunched beside a waterfall on pate sandwiches and sparkling Bacchus Black from a coldflask. He was just finishing off his mousse eclaire when a two-foot steel arrow whistled past his ear to bury itself six inches in the dense blue wood of a Nunu tree behind him. Retief rose casually, yawned, stretched, took out a vanilla dope stick and puffed it alight, at the same time scanning the underbrush. There was a quick movement behind a clump of Foon bushes; a second bolt leaped past him, almost grazing his shoulder, to rattle away in the brush. Appearing to notice nothing, Retief took a leisurely step toward the Nunu tree, slipped suddenly behind it. With a swift motion he grasped a small, limber branch growing out at waist height on his side of the two-foot bole, bent it down and pegged the tip to the shaggy, porous bark, using the match-sized dope stick to pin it in place. Then he moved quickly away, keeping the tree between himself and the unseen archer, to the concealment of a dense patch of shrubbery. A minute passed; a twig popped. A bulky, tattooed Tsugg appeared, a vast, dumpy figufe clad in dirty silks, holding a short, thick, recurved bow clamped in one boulder-like Fist, a quarrel nocked, the string drawn. The dacoit tiptoed forward, jumped suddenly around the tree. Finding his quarry fled, he turned, stood with his back to the tree peering into the undergrowth. At that moment, the bent branch, released by the burning of the dope stick, sprang outward, ramming the astounded bowman in the seat of his baggy green velveteen trousers. The arrow smacked into the dirt at his feet as he jumped, then stood rigid. "Don't strike, sir!" he urged in a plaintive tenor. "The older lads put me up to it -- " Retief strolled from his shelter, nodded easily to the Tsugg, plucked the bow from his nerveless grip. "Nice workmanship," he said, inspecting the weapon. "Groaci trade goods?" "Trade goods?" the Tsugg said with a note of indignation. "Just because yer partner has a dirk at me back's no cause to make mockery of me. I plundered it from the Five-eyes all open and aboveboard, so help me." "Sorry," Retief said. He withdrew the arrow from the loam, fitted it to the bow experimentally. "You're not by chance a member of Hoobrik's band, are you?" he inquired off-handedly. "Too right it's not by chance," the Tsugg said emphatically. "I went through the Ordeal, same's the other lads." "Lucky we met," Retief said. "I'm on my way to pay a call on His Truculence. Can you lead me to him?" The Tsugg straightened his twohundred-and-ninety-pound bulk. "Tell yer crony to do his worst," he said with a small break in his voice. "Fim Gloob' s not the Tsugg to play the treacher." "It wasn't exactly treachery I had in mind," Retief demurred. "Just ordinary diplomacy." "Yer threats will avail ye naught," Fim Gloob declared. "I see what you mean," Retief said. "Still, there should be some way of working this out." "No outsider goes to the camp of Hoobrik but as a prisoner." The Tsugg rolled his shiny black eyes at the Terran. "Ah, sir -- would ye mind asking yer sidekick not to poke so hard? I fear me he'll rip me weskit, stole for me by me aged mums it were, a rare keepsake." "Prisoner, eh, Fim? By the way, I don't have a sidekick." "That being the way of it," Fim Gloob said carefully, after a short, thoughtful pause, "who'd be the villain holding the blade to me kipglands?" "As far as I know," Retief said candidly, "there's nobody here but you and me." T HE Tsugg turned his head cautiously,. peered behind him. With a grunt of annoyance he snapped a finger at the offending bough. "Me and me overactive imagination," he snorted. "And now -- " He turned to Retief with a scowl. "Remember, I still have the bow," Retief said pleasantly. "And a mort o' good it'll do ye," Fim snarled, advancing. "Only a Tsugg born and bred has the arm to draw that stave!" "Oh?" Retief set the arrow and with an easy motion pulled until the arrowhead rested against the bow, the latter being bent into a sharp curve. Another inch -- and the stout laminated wood snapped with a sharp twang. "I see what you mean," Retief said. "But then the Groaci always did produce flimsy merchandise." "You -- you broke it!" Fim Gloob said in tones of deep dismay. "Never mind -- I'll steal you a new one. We have some ladies' models in the Recreation Kits that ought not to overstrain you." "But -- I'm reckoned the stoutest bowman in the band." "Don't give it another thought, Fim. They'll love you when you bring in a live Terry, single-handed." "Who, me?" "Of course. After all, I'm alone and unarmed. How could I resist?" "Aye -- but still -- " "Taking me in as a prisoner IF would look a lot better than having me saunter in on my own and tell Hoobrik you showed me the route." "Wouldst do such a dirty trick?" Fim gasped. "I wouldst -- unless we start immediately," Retief assured the Tsugg. Fim sighed. "I guess I know when I'm licked. I mean when you're licked. Let's go, prisoner. And let's hope His Truculence is in a good mood. Otherwise he'll clap ye on the rack and have the whole tale out of ye in a trice!" IV ing about the communal cooking pot or sprawling in the shade under the striped awnings stretched between the trees looked up in mild interest as Retief appeared on struke-back, Fim Gloob behind him astride his Vorch, glowering ferociously as he verbally prodded the lone Terran forward. "Ho, that's far enough," he roared. "Dismount, while I seek instruction o' His Truculence whether to h'ist ye out of hand or ha' a bit o' sport wi' ye first." "Ha, what be this, Gloob?" a bulky outlaw boomed as Retief swung down from the saddle. "An off-worlder, I trow!" "That he's no Oberonian, is plain," another offered. "Mayhap a two-eyed variety o' Five-eyes." Fim yelled, "Clear the way -- I've fetched this Terry here to divert the great Hoobrik wi' his saucy sayings." "Here, what passes?" a familiar baritone cut through the clamor. A large Tsugg in a red sash pushed through the mob, which gave way grudgingly, with much muttering. The newcomer halted with a jerk when his eye fell on Retief. "Methinks," he said, "I've seen you before, sirrah." "We've met,' Retief acknowledged. "Though all you Terries look alike to me." Dir Blash fingered his jaw gingerly. "Meseemeth 'twas in the Street of the Sweetmakers -- " "So it was." "Aha! I've got it!" Dir Blash clapped Retief on the shoulder. "My boon companion! Ah, bullies," he addressed his fellows, "this Terry gave me a shot of something with a kick like a Vorch -- though for the life of me I can't recall the precise circumstances. How wert thou yclept again, sirrah?" "Retief; lucky you have the kind of memory you do, Dir Blash; your compatriots were just debating the best method of putting me out of my misery." "Say you so?" Dir Blash looked around threateningly, his hand on the hilt of his cutlass. "Nobody murders my drinking buddies but me.He turned back to Retief. "Say, you wouldn't chance to have any more of the same, would you?" "I'm saving it for a special occasion," Retief said. "Well, what could be more special than a reprieve from being staked out on a zing-wasp hive, eh?" "We'll celebrate later," Retief said. "Right now I'd appreciate a short interview with His Truculence." "If I use my influence to get you in, wilt let me have another sample later?" "If things work out as they usually do," Retief said, "I think you can be sure of it." "Then come along, Dir Retief. I'll see what I can do." lounging in a hammock under a vari-colored canopy, gazed indifferently at Retief as Dir Blash made the introductions. He was an immense Tsugg, above the average height of his kind, his obesity draped in voluminous beaded robes. He selected a large green berry from a dented silver bowl at his elbow, shook exotic salts over it from a heavy gold saltshaker and popped it into his mouth. "So?" he grunted, spitting the seeds over the side. "Why disturb my meditations with trifles? Dispose of the creature in any way that amuses you, Blash -- but save the head. I'll impale it on a pike and give it to the Terry chieftain -- gift-wrapped, of course." Dir Blash nodded, scratching himself under the ribs. "Well, thus doth the tart disintegrate, Retief," he said in tones of mild regret. "Let's go -- " "I don't want to be a spoilsport, your Truculence," Retief spoke up, "but Ambassador Clawhammer only allows his staff to be decapitated at Tuesday morning staff meetings." "Staff meetings?" Hoobrik wondered aloud. "Is that anything like a barbecue?" "Close," Retief agreed. "Quite often a diplomat or two are flayed alive and roasted over a slow fire." "Hmm." Hoobrik looked thoughtful. "Maybe I should introduce the custom here. "My wish is to. keep up with the latest trends in government." "In that connection," Retief said, offering the stiff parchment envelope containing the invitation to the reception, "His Excellency the Terrestrial Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary presents his compliments and requests me to hand you this." "Eh? What be this?" Hoobrik fingered the document gingerly. "Ambassador Clawhammer requests the honor of your company at a ceremonial affair celebrating the election," Retief explained. "Ceremonial affair?" Hoobrik IF shifted uneasily, causing the hammock to sway dangerously. "What kind of ceremony?" "Just a small semi-formal gathering of kindred souls. It gives everyone a chance to show off their clothes and exchange veiled insults face to face." "Waugh! What kind of contest is this? Give me a good hand-tohand disemboweling any day!" "That comes later," Retief said. "It's known as Dropping by the Residence for a Drink. After the Party." A Hoobrik muttered. "Is it possible you Terries are more ferocious than I'd suspected?" "Ha!" Dir Blash put in. "I myself dispatched half a dozen of the off-worlders only this morning when they sought to impede my entrance to a grog shop in the village." "So?" Hoobrik yawned. "Too bad. For a moment, things were begining to look interesting." He tore a corner off the gold-edged invitation and used it to poke at a bit of fruit rind wedged between his teeth. "Well, off with you, Blash -- unless you want to play a featured role at my first staff meeting." "Come, Terry," the red-sashed Tsugg growled, reaching for Retief s arm. "I just remembered the part of yesterday's carouse that had slipped my mind." "I think," Retief said, evading the sub-chiefs grab, "it's time for that jolt I promised you." He stepped in close and rammed a pair of pile-drive punches to Dir Blash's midriff, laced a hard right to the jaw as the giant doubled over and fell past him, out cold. "Here!" Hoobrik yelled. "Is that any way to repay my hospitality?" He stared down at his fallen henchman. "Dir Blash, get up, thou malingerer, and avenge my honor!" Dir Blash groaned. One foot twitched. He settled back with a snore. "My apologies," Retief said, easing the Groaci pistol from inside his shirt. "Protocol has never been my strong suit. Having committed a faux pas , I'd best be on my way. Which route would be least likely to result in the demise of any of your alert sentries?" "Stay, off-worlder. Wouldst spread tidings of this unflattering event abroad, to the detriment of my polling strength?" "Word might leak out," Retief conceded. "Especially if any of your troops get in my way." " 'Tis a shame not to be borne!" Hoobrik said hoarsely. "All Oberon knoweth that only a Tsugg can smite another Tsugg senseless." He looked thoughtful. "Still, if the molehill will not come to Meyer, Meyer must to the molehill, as the saying goeth. Since thou hast in sooth felled my liegeman, it follows you must be raised at once to Tsugghood, legitimizing the event after the fact, as it were." "I'd be honored," Retief said amiably. "Provided, of course, that you authorize me to convey your gracious acceptance of His Excellency's invitation." Hoobrik looked glum. "Well -- we can always loot the Embassy afterward. Very well, Terry -- Tsugg-to-be, that is. Done!" The chieftain heaved his bulk from the hammock, stirred Dir Blash with a booted toe, at which the latter groaned and sat up. "Up, sluggard!" Hoobrik roared. "Summon a few varlets to robe me for a formal occasion! And my guest will require suitable robes, too." He glanced at Retief. "But don't don them yet, lest they be torn and muddied." "The ceremony sounds rather strenuous," Retief commented. "Not the ceremony," Hoobrik corrected. "That cometh later. First cometh the Ordeal. If you survive that I'll have my tailor fit you out as befits a sub-chief of the Tsugg." T HE Ceremonial Site for Ordeal Number One -- a clearing on a forest slope with a breath-taking view of the valley below -- was crowded with Tsugg tribesmen, good-naturedly quarreling, shouting taunts, offering and accepting wagers and challenges, passing wineskins from hand to grimy hand. "All right, everybody out of the Ring of the First Trial," Dir Blash shouted, implementing his suggestion with hearty buffets left and right. "Unless ye plan to share the novitiate's hazards." The mountaineers gave ground, leaving an open space some Fifty feet in diameter, ta the center of which Retief was led. "All right, the least ye can do is give the off-worlder breathing space." Dir Blash exhorted the bystanders to edge back another yard. "Now, Retief -- this is a sore trial, 'tis true, but 'twill show you the mettle of the Tsugg, that we impose so arduous a criterion on oursel's!" He broke off at a sound of crashing in the underbrush. A pair of tribesmen on the outer fringe of the audience flew into the air as if blown up by a mine, as with ferocious snorts, a wild Vorch, seven feet at the shoulder and armed with down-curving tusks, charged from the underbrush. His rush carried him through the ranks of the spectators into the inner circle, his short tail whipping, his head tossing as he sought a new target. His inflamed eye fell on Dir Blash. "Botheration," the latter commented in mild annoyance as the beast lowered its head and charged. Leaning aside, the Tsugg raised a fist of the size and weight IF of a hand-axe, brought it down with a resounding bronggl on the carnivore's skull. The unlucky beast folded in mid-leap, skidded chin-first to fetch up against Retiefs feet. "Nice timing," he remarked. "Ye'd think the brute did it apurpose, to plague a serious occasion," Dir Blash said disapprovingly. "Drag the silly creature away," he directed a pair of Tsugg. "He'll be broke to harness for his pains. And now," he turned to Retief, "if ye're ready -- " Retief smiled encouragingly. "Right, then. The first trial is -- take a deep breath and hold it for the count of ten." Dir Blash watched Retief s expression alertly for signs of dismay. Seeing none, he raised a finger disappointedly. "Very well. Inhale." Retief inhaled. "O netwothreefourfives ix se ve neightnineten," Dir Blash said in a rush and stared curiously at the Terran, who stood relaxed before him. A few approving shouts rang out. Then came scattered hand-claps. "Well," Dir Blash grunted. "You did pretty fair, I suppose, for an off-worlder. Hardly turned blue at all. You pass, I suppose." "Hey," someone called from the front rank of the gallery. "He's not -- " "Not still -- " someone else queried. "Still holding his breath?" a third Tsugg then asked wonderingiy"O' course not, lack wits!" Dir Blash bellowed. "How could he? E'en Grand Master Cutthroat Dirdir Hooch held out but to the count of twelve!" He looked closely at Retief. "Thou hast indeed resumed respiration?" he murmured. "Of course," Retief reassured the Tsugg. "I was just grandstanding." Dir Blash grunted. "In sooth, I've a feeling ye went a good thirteen, if truth were known," he muttered confidentially. "Hast made a specialty of suffocation?" "Staff meetings, remember?" Retief prompted. "To be sure." Dir Blash looked disgruntled. "Well, on to the Second Trial, Terry. Ye'll find this one e'en a straiter test of Tsugghood than the last!" He led the way upslope, Retief close behind, the crowd following. The path deteriorated into a rocky gully winding up between nearly vertical walls of rock. Pebbles rattled around the party from the crumbling cliffs above as members clambered toward choice vantage points. A medium-sized boulder came bounding down from a crag to whistle overhead and crash thunderously away among the trees below. The journey ended in a small natural amphitheater, the floor of which was thickly littered with stones of all sizes. Spectators took up positions around the periphery above as pebbles continued to clatter down around the tester and testee, who stood alone at the center of the target. A head-sized rock smashed down a yard from Retief. A chunk the size of a grand piano poised directly above him gavean ominous rumble and slid downward six inches amid a shower of gravel. "What happens if one of those scores a bull's-eye on the candidate?" Retief inquired. "It's considered a bad omen," Dir Blash said. "Drat the pesky motes!" he added as a small fragment bounded off the back of his neck. "These annoyances detract from the solemnity of the occasion." "On the contrary," Retief demurred politely. "I think they add a lot of interest to the situation." "Umm. Mayhap." Dir Blash gazed absently upward, moving his head slightly to avoid being brained by a baseball-sized missile. "Now, off-worlder," he addressed Retief, "prepare for the moment of truth. Bend over -- " he paused impressively -- " and touch your toes!" "Do I get to bend my knees?" Retief temporized. "Bend whatever you like," Dir Blash said with airy contempt. "I trow this is one feat ye've not practiced at your Ordeal of the Staff Meeting!" "True," Retief conceded. "The closest we come is lifting ourselves by our bootstraps." He assumed a serious expression, bent over and, with a smooth motion, touched his fingertips to his toes. "He did it in one try," someone called. "Didn't even take a bounce!" another added. The applause was general. "Lacking in style," Dir Blash grumbled. "But a pass, I allow. But now you face the Third Ordeal, where ye're tricks will do ye no good. Come along." They moved off. The stone piano crunched down on the spot he and Retief had just vacated. V T HE route to the Third Site led upward through a narrow cut to emerge on a bare rock slope. Fifty feet away a flat-topped rock spire loomed up from the depths, joined to the main mass of the peak by a meandering ribbon of rock some six inches in width, except where it narrowed to a knife edge, halfway across. Dir Blash sauntered out across the narrow bridge, gazing around him at the scenery. "A splendid prospect, eh, Retief?" he called over his shoulder. "Look on it well; it may be thy last. What comes next has broken many a strong Tsugg down into a babbling Glert." Retief tried the footing; it held. Keeping his eyes on the platform IF ahead, he walked quickly across. "Now," Dir Blash said, "you may wish to take a moment to commune with your patron devils or whatever it is you off-worlders burn incense to." "Thanks, I'm in good shape incantation-wise," Retief reassured him. "Only last night I joined in a toast to the auditors." "In that case -- " Dir Blash pointed impressively to a flat stone that lay across two square rocks, the top of which cleared the ground by a good twelve inches. "Leap the obstacle in a single bound." Retief studied the hurdle from several angles before taking up his position before it. "I see you hesitate," Dir Blash taunted. "Dost doubt thy powers at last, Terry?" "Last year an associate of mine jumped fifty names on the promotion list," Retief said. "Can I do less?" Standing flat-footed, he hopped over the barrier. Turning, he hopped back again. There was a moment of stunned silence. Suddenly pandemonium broke out Dir Blash hesitated only a moment, then joined in the glad cries. "Congratulations, Dir Tief!" he bellowed, pounding the Terran on the shoulder. "I warrant an offworlder of thy abilities would be an embarrassment to all hands -- but in sooth thou'rt now a Tsugg of the Tsuggs, and thy attainments are an adornment to our ilk!" brik the Uncouth as he stuffed a handful of sugar-coated green olives into his mouth. "According to Blash you went through the Ordeal like a Tsugg to the pavilion born. I may keep you on as bodyguard, Dir Tief, after I get the pavilion born. I may keep you on as bodyguard. Dir Tief, after I get the vote out and myself in." "Coming from your Truculence, that's praise indeed," Retief ness to offer yourself as a candidate without a whimper." "What's to whimper?" Hoobrik demanded. "After my lads have rounded up more voters than the opposition can muster, I'll be free to fill my pockets as best I may. 'Tis a prospect I face calmly." "True," Retief said. "But first there are a few rituals to be gotten past. There's Whistle-stopping, Baby-kissing, Fence-sitting, and Mud-slinging, plus a considerable amount of Viewing with Alarm." "Hmm." Hoobrik rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Are these Ordeals the equal of our Rites of Tsugghood, Retief?" "Possibly even worse," Retief solemnly assured the chieftain. "Especially if you wear an Indian war bonnet." "Out upon it!" Hoobrik pounded his tankard on the table. "A Tsugg fears neither man nor beast." "But did you ever face a quorum of Women Voters?" Retief countered quickly. "My stout lads will ride down all opposition," Hoobrik declared with finality. "I've already made secret arrangements with certain Five-eyed off-worlders to supply me with all the write-in ballots I need to make everything legal and proper. Once in office, I can settle down to businesslike looting in an orderly manner." "But remember," Retief cautioned, "You'll be expected tOi stand on your Party Platform -- at least for the first few weeks." "W-weeks?" Hoobrik faltered. "What is this platform, Retief?" "It's a pretty shaky structure," Retief confided. "I've never known one to last past the first Legislative Rebuff." "What, yet another Ordeal?" "Don't worry about it, your Truculence; it seldom goes as far as Impeachment." "Well? Don't keep me in suspense!" Hoobrik roared. "What doth this rite entail?" "This is where your rival politicians get even with you for winning, by charging you with High Crimes and Misdemeanors -- " "Stay!" Hoobrik yelled. "Is there no end to these torments?" "Certainly," Retief reassured the aroused leader. "After you retire, you become a Statesman and are allowed out on alternate All Fools Days to be queried as to your views on any subject sufficiently trivial to grace the pages of the Sunday Supplements." "Arrrhh!" Hoobrik growled and drained his mug. "See here, Retief," he said. "On pondering the matter, methinks 'twould be a gracious gesture on my part to take second place on the ticket and let a younger Tsugg assume party leadership; you, for example, Blash," he addressed the sub-chief. "Who, me?" the latter blurted. "Nay, my liege -- as I've said before, I am not now and do not intend to be a candidate." "Who, then?" Hoobrik waved his arms in agitation. "We need a Tsugg who'll appeal to a broad spectrum of voters. A good scimitarman for beating down opposition inside the party, a handy clubwielder to bring in the Independents, a cool hand with a dirk, for committee infighting -- " He paused, looking suddenly thoughtful. "Well, I'll leave you gentlemen to look over the lists," Retief said, rising. "May I tell the Ambassador to expect you at the post-election victory reception?" "We'll be there," Hoobrik said. "And I think I have a sure-fire Tsugg standard-bearer in mind to pull in the vote -- " lights strung in the hedges ringIF ing the former miniature golf course pressed into service as Embassy grounds, the Terran diplomats stood in conversation clumps across the fairways and greens, glasses in hand, nervously eyeing the door through which Ambassador Clawhammer's entrance was expected momentarily. Magnan said to Retief, glancing at his watch, "The first results will be in any moment." "I think we need have no fear of the outcome," Saddlesore stated. "Guru Hoobrik's students have been particularly active in these final hours, zealously applying posters to the polling places." "And applying knots to the heads of reluctant converts," the Political Officer added. "What I'm wondering is -- after Hoobrik's inauguration, what's to prevent his applying the same techniques to foreign diplomats?" "Tradition, my boy," the colonel said soothingly. "We may be shot as spies or deported as undesirables -- but shaped up by wardheelers, no." A stir crossed the lawn. Ambassador Clawhammer appeared, ornate in the Burgundy cutaway Regs for early evening ceremonial wear. "Well? No word yet?" He stared challengingly at his underlings, accepting one of the four drinks simultaneously thrust at him by alert junior officers. "My private polls indicate an early lead for the Tsugg party, increasing to a commanding majority as the rural counties report." "Commanding is right," Magnan muttered behind his hand. "One of the ruffians had the audacity to order me to hold his gluepot while he affixed a poster to the front door of the Embassy." "What cheek," the Political Officer gasped. "You didn't do it?" "Of course not. "He held the gluepot, and I affixed the placard." Happy shouts sounded from the direction of the gate; a party of Tsugg appeared, flamboyant in pink and yellow, handing out footlong yellow cigars. A throng of lesser Oberonians followed, all apparently in good spirits. "A landslide victory," one called to the assembly at large. "Break out the wassail bowl!" "Is this official. Depew?" the Ambassador demanded of his Counselor, who arrived at that moment at a trot, waving a sheaf of papers. "I'm afraid so -- that is, I'm delighted to confirm the people's choice," he panted. "It's amazing -- the Tsugg candidate polled an absolute majority, even in the oppositions' strongholds. It looks like every voter on the rolls voted the straight Tsugg ticket." "Certes, Terry," a Grimble confirmed jovially, grabbing two glasses from a passing tray. "We know a compromise candidate when we see one." " 'Tis a clear mandate from the people," a Tsugg declaimed. "Hoobrik will be along in a trice to help with sorting out the spoils. As for myself, I'm not greedy; a minor Cabinet post will do nicely" "Out upon thee!" a jovial voice boomed as the Tsugg chieftain swept through the gate, flanked by an honor guard of grinning scimitar-bearers. "No undignified rooting at the trough, lads -- there's plenty to go around." "Congratulations, your Truculence," Ambassador Clawhammer cried, advancing with outstretched hand. "I'm sure that at this moment you're feeling both proud and humble as you point with pride -- " "Humble?" Hoobrik roared. "That's for losers, Terry." "To be sure." Clawhammer conceded the point. "Now, your Truculence, I don't want to delay the victory celebration -- but why don't we first just sign this little Treaty of Eternal Peace and Friendship, set up to run for five years with a renewal option -- " "You'll have to speak to the new Planetary President about that, Terry," the chieftain waved the proffered document away. "As for myself, I have some important drinking to catch up on." "But -- I was informed by a usually reliable source -- " Clawhammer turned to glare at the Counselor -- "that the Tsugg party had carried off all honors." "True enough. By the way, where is he?" "Where is who?" "Our new Chief Executive, of course -- " Hoobrik broke off, pushed past Clawhammer, rushed forward with outstretched arms, narrowly missing a small water hazard, to embrace Retief, who had just appeared on the scene. "Stand aside, Retief," Clawhammer snapped. "I'm in the midst of a delicate negotiation -- " "Employ a more respectful tone, Terry," Hoobrik admonished the Ambassador sternly. "Consider to whom you're speaking." "To whom I'm speak?" Clawhammer said in bewilderment. "Whom am I speaking to?" "Meet Planetary President Dir Tief," Hoobrik said proudly, waving a hand at Retief. "The winner -- and new champion." VJ was the first to recover his speech. "When? How?" "What's the meaning of this?" Clawhammer burst out. "Am I being made sport of?" "Apparently not, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "It seems they put me on the ballot as a dark horse -- " "You'll be a horse of a darker IF color before I'm through with you -- " Clawhammer went rigid as twin scimitars flashed, ended with their points pressed against his neck. "But how can a Terran be elected as head of the Tsugg party?" the Political Officer asked. "President Tief is no Terry," Hoobrik corrected. "He's a Tsugg after my own heart!" "But -- doesn't the president have to be a natural-born citizen?" "Art suggesting our President is unnatural-born?" Hoobrik grated. "Why, no -- " " 'Tis well. In that case, best you present your credentials at once and we can get down to business." Clawhammer hesitated. A prod of the blade at his jugular assisted him in finding his tongue. "Why, ah, Mr. President -- will your Excellency kindly tell your thugs to put those horrible-looking knives away?" "Certainly, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said easily. "Just as soon as we've cleared up a few points in the treaty. I think it would be a good idea if the new planetary govantee of noninterference in elections from now on -- " "Retief -- you wouldn't dare -- I mean, of course, my boy, whatever you say." "Also, it would be a good idea to strike out those paragraphs sors, technical experts and fiftycredit-a-day economists. We Oberonians would prefer to work out our own fate." "Yes -- yes -- of course, Mr. President. And now -- " "And as to the matter of the one-sided trade agreement -- why don't we just scrap that whole section and substitute a free commerce clause?" "Why -- if I agree to that they'll have my scalp, back in the Department!" "That's better than having it tied to a pole outside my tent," Hoobrik pointed out succinctly. "On the other hand," Retief said, "I think we Tsuggs can see our way clear to supply a modest security force to ensure that nothing violent happens to foreign diplomats among us as long as they stick to diplomacy and leave all ordinary crime to us Oberonians." "Agreed," Clawhammer squaked. "Where's the pen?" It took a quarter of an hour to delete the offending paragraphs, substitute new wording and affix signatures to the imposing document establishing formal relations between the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne and the Republic of Oberon. When the last length of red tape had been affixed and the last blob of sealing wax applied, Retief called for attention. "Now that Terran-Oberonian relations are off on a sound footing," he said, "I feel it's only ap( Please turn to page #) #:# PM #:# PM #:# PM #:# PM #:# PM #:# PM #:# PM T HE view of the geometrically flattened grass in the garden quad of Skag College was a lusterous green this spring. Professor James Whytebom watched it rather distantly through a small window. Some athletic students, the jolly-hockeysticks type, were practicing pitching a cricket ball back and forth. Insects buzzed their dutiful rounds among drowsy flowers. Whyteborn peered at the scene so intently that he did not notice across the crowded Senior Common Room. "Having tea?" Dowles said, questioning the obvious. "Yes, yes," Whyteborn said distractedly. "I will only be a moment. I've just had some Founder's Port to round off my lunch and I am taking some tea to help it settle." "You read the draft of our article that I wrote?" "Yes, Helen brought it home with her after your dinner party." In point of fact Professor Whyteborn suspected the events of the previous evening had extended far beyond the ordinary rituals of an Oxford evening dinner and this was one of the matters which had caused him to gaze so pensively at the garden quad, athletes and insects. "Any comments?" "A remark on the style," Whytebom said. "The paper is littered with the first person plural. We did this, we did that." "There were two of us doing the experiment." "Yes, but the 'we's' in here begin to resemble a mob. I don't like the form much, myself. Every scientific paper these days is full of them. I've always felt you shouldn't use 'we' unless you're an editor, a potentate or a man with a tapeworm." "Well -- " "But never mind, you are at no fault. You're just a Reader in Physics at the moment -- though I hope that will change quickly after publication of this paper -- and haven't had to wade through a thousand manuscripts written in the same style. Ah, and speaking of style. It could be a bit clearer." "Really?" "I don't see why everything cannot be explained in simple, clear, one-syllable words, without obfuscating the issue." The two men laughed quietly, so as not to disturb the Common, 'and Whytebom went on. "There are a few places like that, yes, but generally I believe it's okay. The reader can quickly see that we've done a good job of ruling out other effects in our experiment, so our conclusion that we have detected tachyons is well supported. I was glad to see that you have included quite a lot of material on the correlation checks we did. We must be quite sure of this result." "I think we've pretty well cleared things up, don't you?" Dowles' voice contained just the right blend of assertiveness and deference appropriate to a future son-in-law addressing the father of his fiancee. "Even the most ardent skeptic -- " "Don't become optimistic. Tachyons are a whole new class of particles and they are going to turn theoretical physics on its ear. There will be opposition." The younger man worriedly rubbed a thumbnail against his lower lip. "Surely we won't be doubted too severely. The theoreticians -- Feinberg, Bilaniuk, Sudarshan -- were the ones who put us on the track. They'll stick by us." went on sipping his tea. The Senior Common Room was emptying of the noon crowd, leaving blue curls of pipe smoke layered IF in the air. "Yes, I believe they will. But there are going to be attacks on our work, be sure of it. I called a few people at Cambridge yesterday and they were most disinclined to accept our findings." "Did they have any criticism of the way the experiment was set up?" Dowles said sharply. "No, none." "Their objections can't be serious ones. Any cretin can see -- " Whyteborn shook his head, marveling at the innocence of youth. "You don't see it. Tachyons are faster than light particles. That implies a whole string of new phenomena, not the least of which is the ability to send signals back in time. All the theoreticians agree on that point and I don't fathom any reason not to go along with them." "I know, I know," Dowles said, biting into a scone. It tasted vaguely of cinnamon. "Causal paradoxes. All that stuff about going back in time and shooting your grandfather. I'll admit I don't know how to resolve the paradoxes. That's for the theoreticians to figure out. The fact of the matter is that tachyons do exist -- we've found them." "Right on. And soon everyone will know about it." "How soon? Not until we get this paper touched up, I'd think." "There's a rub about that. I'm afraid," Whyteborn said, lowering his eyes. "It seems one of the fellows down at Cambridge trotted off to the journalists about this; I may have forgotten to ask him not to. At any rate, I received a call from a man at the Times this morning." "Oh." "Don't worry, though, I put him off about it. We agreed to release nothing until we had already informed our colleagues and I intend to stand fast by that. This news is so important I don't want to overstep and get our names touted on the front page. That sort of thing will put off some of the people who are working on tachyons and do us no good." "I'll get right back to my office, then, and work on this paper some more." "No, don't. There's something I would like you to help me with, if you have the time. No appointment with Helen, I take it?" He tried a paternal smile which did not come off very well. Whyteborn had never felt himself to be the fatherly type and his experiments with the role had not worked out well in dealing with Dowles. The young man was his junior in the tachyon experiments and in the physics staff, and at the same time courted Helen Whyteborn. "No, we have nothing planned." "Good. I spent this morning making changes in our apparatus. It was not particularly difficult to alter the experiment to register tachyon reception continuously, instead of getting detailed data on a few particles." "Of what use is that?" "Well, the other evening it occurred to me that this paradox business is going to cause us a lot of trouble. The pencil pushers are going to worry about it. The first thing that will come to mind is that our experiments are wrong -- that conveniently shoves the problem out of sight for a while." "Oho," Dowles said, "you want to get the jump on them." "Right. I want to look for messages in the tachyon background we've detected." "Just like a radio signal, you mean." "Perhaps. I don't know what form they would take. Since tachyons are particles and radio is a wave they won't carry signals the same way. We must simply look and see." "I think that's a good plan," Dowles said, folding his arms so that his tweed jacket wrinkled in thick folds. "It will get the jump on the doubters." Whyteborn smiled to himself, thinking he had handled the discussion quite well. Appealing to his colleague's competitive spirit was the quickest way to get him to working again after an already grueling series of experiments. They both harbored a simmering resentment against the sort of physicist who speculated in ideas like a stock broker, and tachyon theory was rife with them. It was fashionable to deplore further work in the field because the causality paradox "clearly" ruled out their existence. To Whyteborn this was blowing a kernel of truth into a sort of intellectual puffed rice. The paradox showed that something funny was going on but he had never felt that it should be used as a proof against tachyons. And it seemed as though he and Dowles had now proved their point. Whyteborn signed his tab and the two men left the Senior Common Room, carrying with them the odors of steak and kidney pie, that day's main course. the Euclidean perfection of the quad, through an ivy arch and down a small, cobbled lane. Oxford had bulged enormously over the last century but the colleges remained much the same. In fact, of late they had seemed to become even more encrusted with mannerisms and Tudor affectations, if that were possible. Undergraduates wore fashions in ruffles and lace, an Elizabethian touch -- though not, Whyteborn imagined, out of historical interest, since bell-bottomed trousers played a role as well. All this quite suited the Professor. He liked old things simply because they were old and therefore tested. If in science he was an inIF novator, in his personal life he hungered for the remnants of the Edwardian era. Thus he felt particularly discomfited at the turn of events between Dowles and his daughter, Helen. They seemed to have fallen in love, as far as he could tell. (Which was not very far, his having little experience in such matters. His wife had died four years after Helen's birth and had been, to Whyteborn, almost unnoticable even when alive.) He had vague feelings that he should have been more of a father to the girl and was making up for this now by trying to supervise her courtship very severely. But he was not experienced in that direction either and they seemed to be getting around him. He kept feeling that he was being outmaneuvered. For example, a few evenings ago they had all had dinner together and Helen had been going on about her current political hobby, Women's Liberation League. This meant, as far as Whyteborn could tell, better pay and promotion for women, liberalized abortion laws and so on, all without their giving up having doors opened for them, being waited upon or being deferred to in mixed company. At that point Dowles leaned toward him and gave a gentle nudge with his elbow and said, "Helen rather enjoys standing up for her sex, I'll vouch," which sent him and Helen into storms of laughter. Whyteborn had been wondering ever since just how he had been meant to take the remark. He and Dowles passed by one of the liberal arts colleges, nodding to the fellows they knew socially. Whyteborn had never felt entirely comfortable with the people at Oxford who patronized arts, feeling that they did the same to everyone in the scientific colleges, and he was glad to reach the gates near his laboratory. The Skag College gatekeeper was tending to fines notices at the bulletin board and the Professortook the opportunity to stop him. "There's some chance men from the press might be by today," he told the gatekeeper. "I would appreciate it if you'd see they don't interrupt us in the labs." The man nodded, stroking his rough chin. "Don't put them off too strongly, though. Be-suave about it." "Yessir," the man said, "I'll try. I ain't half bloody suave, myself." "Uh, yes," Whyteborn said, and the two men went into the laboratories of Skag College. It took the better part of an hour to explain the changes in the apparatus to Dowles. Their earlier experiment, which discovered tachyons, had depended upon a nuclear source, cesium. Modulation of the electric fields around the cesium nuclei stimulated tachyon emission and the uncharged tachyons were detected by the collisions they made with a sample some meters away. When a tachyon, moving much faster than the speed of light, struck one of the nuclei in the sample, the struck nucleus recoiled with an inordinately high momentum and created shock waves in the lattice of the sample. These shock waves were picked up and displayed on an oscilloscope. Now the nuclear source had been removed. Any tachyons passing through the laboratory and striking the sample would also register on the oscilloscope. Such background tachyons had been found in the original experiment and had been ignored. Final proof that it was indeed tachyons which were being observed had depended upon correlations between the oscilloscope and the electric fields around the cesium source, which the two men had varied. "I really don't expect to get anything out of this," Whyteborn said just before they began the new experiment. "It's definitely a long shot. I don't want to be like those chaps back in the thirties who were doing the nuclear bombardment work. For convenience they put their geiger counters on the same switch that turned off the beam of high energy particles they hit the samples with. If they hadn't, they would have found spontaneous radioactivity from the samples, after the beam was off. Missed a Nobel that way." "Made them look rather like fools," agreed Dowles. "Yes, and we don't want to end up in the same class." Whyteborn connected up the final wiring and they began monitoring. The oscilloscope trace danced and juggled, a random yellow line on a green background. The two men watched it in the leaden quiet of the laboratory. In a corner a roughing pump chugged laboriously and a liquid nitrogen bath that emersed the nuclear sample added an occasional snap as ice formed on its jacket. It was #:# PM. A T #:# the scope gave a sudden scattering of pulses. A complex waveform wavered across the scale and each man looked at the other. "Strange," said Dowles. "I don't -- wait. Look. It's pulsing at regular intervals. One, two, then nothing, four, then again nothing -- it's skipping some beats." "Not ordinary background, I'd say." "No. More like -- " "A code," Dowles finished. "Yes." It was #:#. "Take some of this down," Whyteborn said. "I do not see what effect could be modulating the tachyons we have coming into the laboratory." "Perhaps some process in the IF sun," Dowles said as he began to make notes. "A pulse, then a blank, another blank, and then pulse, pulse -- " "No," Whyteborn said, thinking aloud, "there is no such natural frequency related to the sun that I know of. Something else -- " He sat for a moment in silence. It was #:I #. "You remember," he said, "I mentioned earlier thatthere were paradoxes in the law of cause and effect implied by tachyons. Or so some think -- " His voice trailed off. Dowles went on with his notes. In a few moments he stopped. "It's quiet right now," he said. The wave form returned on the scope. Dowles sighed and began to copy once more. "By damn," Whyteborn said. "It's Morse. I remember it pretty well and this thing makes sense." "It does?" "Well, I think. Rather outre , perhaps -- " "What does it say?" The Professor handed him the Dowles blinked for a moment. "It's nonsense," he said. "Of course, yes," Whyteborn said, embarrassed. "I wonder how it -- " "Do this next one," Dowles said a little anxiously, and handed him the sheet. As Whyteborn was decoding it another message began to come in on the oscilloscope. Dowles copied. don't suppose this could be some sort of joke?" "I'm taking it down just as it comes off the 'scope," Dowles said sharply, "and I certainly would not have made up any such thing as that first one." "I suppose not," Whyteborn said. "It's eerie, though. How could anyone -- " "Here's the next," Dowles said. The Professor did this one more quickly, since the practice was stimulating his memory of Morse. It said: EN. "This is -- " "Wait, there's more," said Dowles, who was scribbling in front of the oscilloscope. The message continued: "Where's the rest of it?" "Something happened right then. The signal shifted a bit and a stronger one came on. I've got some of it here." "My word," Whyteborn said. "It's still coming in," Dowles said. "Can't you get one of the technicians from down the hall to do that? We must see what all this means." "Yes, right. Be back in a minute." Dowles fetched a PhD candidate from the next laboratory and set him to copying. T HE two men sat around the table at the end of the room and decoded a few more of the signals. "I am becoming more and more confused," Dowles said at last, after the PhD candidate had brought a fresh shelf of transcriptions. "What are these? Who is sending them?" "The form in itself is most curious," Whyteborn mused to himself, ignoring the other for the moenough, but some of the words are not English that I recognize. The grammar is off, too." "Not as bad as this," Dowles said and held up a long sheet he EN, and on in that manner for more than a page." "Here is one I think will interest you," Whyteborn said. "It beseeches me to kill you on the spot. what sort of person sent that one." "Yes," said Dowles slowly. "I wonder why so many refer to me?" "I've been trying to work that out. The first question is why we are getting anything at all." "Well, they're coming from somewhere -- " "More than that. Som ewhen. I think the theorists were right about tachyons implying the ability to send signals into the past. Not into my own past, of course -- I cannot send a telegram to myself last week, because that is on my world IF line. But I could send one to someone else." "Then someone is sending us messages ? From the future?" "Precisely. The theory I have read says anyone on Earth could not send a telegram back to us more than about a quarter of a second into the past. But perhaps in the future a way will be found around that." "Time machines?" "Time telegraphs, call them. It explains why we have never seen any time travelers, or gotten a message from the future." "No one ever built a receiver before," Dowles said slowly. "And now that we have -- " "We are getting it all. In the future they will know when the tachyonic receiver was turned on. Someone is trying to signal us." "But all these demands -- " Dowles slammed a fist down on the table and stood up. "Absurd." Whyteborn made a tent of his fingers and smiled into it, his favorite academic gesture. "Is it? This matter of a misdemeanor -- " "Uh," said Dowles. Whyteborn thought he looked like a man who had just swallowed an absinthe frappe. "Right, nothing to be ashamed of, really. What is more interesting is the question of why it was mentioned. It seems a minor point." There was a small silence. "You aren't going to let this influence Helen and me, are you?" "No, I don't -- wait! That must be it, surely. Those people in the future are trying to influence my judgment." "What?" Dowles hesitated and then pawed among the sheets of paper. He fished out a half dozen and held them up. "There are a lot here that refer to Helen. You think -- " "Look, man, this is an important moment in history, if we're right, no? What we do about the tachyon thing could have important implications. It could be, well, a crucial point." Dowles paced back and forth, fretting. "Crucial or no, I don't like them messing about in my affairs." "But they are only trying to, you see. Perhaps they guessed you were made up on Helen but that I could still stop your marriage if I wanted. These messages are their way of influencing the time line to their benefit." "Whose benefit?" "All those in the future. There must be -- " "There are an awful lot of them," Dowles said. "Why so many? And look at this one. Not even English, or anything else I It's gibberish." "Or some other code. But I see your point. There are more than one would expect." They both turned and looked at the PhD candidate, who was still copying intently from the oscilloscope. A tall stack of paper at his elbow was already covered with notes. "Too many for the future -- " Dowles said. "For one future," Whyteborn said suddenly. "I'm sure of it, Dowles, that is why we have so many. They will go right on coming in, too, because it is an infinitely divisible subset -- " "What is?" "The future! There must be an infinite number of possible ones but only one can actually happen, you see. But until I make some decision -- I suppose the one about you and Helen -- they all have equal chance of coming about." "The future?" Dowles said wonderingly. "The future has some kind of ghost existence?" "Yes, right, but only one of them will survive. They're all trying to influence us, to make their past come out right. Whatever I do will pick out one of the futures and destroy the rest." Dowles thought for a moment. "We can test this," he said at last, "if we keep track of the messages. There may be common threads among them that will tell us what they're after." "Perhaps," said Whyteborn, thinking. "But we'll need more people to tend the oscilloscope." Dowles looked back at the PhD candidate, who was visibly tiring. "I'll go and find some help." He left the laboratory quickly but Whyteborn was distracted and did not notice that he had gone. The Professor was mulling over the implications of what had happened. It would make a hell of an article for the Royal Society, he was sure. He picked up one of the first How could discovery of tachyons make the government cut research funds? Still, Whyteborn thought, it might be a good idea to hold their article back for a few days, just in case. Then he found another paper, Whyteborn furrowed his brow. Which was right? tory again and stopped by the PhD candidate to say something. In a moment the student got up and left, closing the door after him. "I don't believe we should publish any of this." Whyteborn looked up. He had not noticed Dowles' return and the voice took him by surprise. It had sounded curiously high pitched. "Why? Because of the messages?" Whyteborn said. "Yes. There's something in this we don't understand and I think we should be cautious." Whyteborn stared at Dowles. The man's voice was oddly shrill, quite unlike his usual resonant baritone. And what was more -- As he watched Dowles' face, it flickered ever so slightly. Whyteborn felt a sudden chill down his scalp. The outlines of Dowles' body wavered, as a distant image would on a hot summer day. And now that he noticed, the figure was not precisely like Dowles: the hair was thinner and the jawline had gone a little soft, giving the impression of an older man. "What's happened?" Whyteborn said. "Happened?" the thin voice said. "Why -- " "Oh." The man seemed chestfallen. "Well, we didn't think it would work on -- " "You're right, he is an impostor," said another voice. Whyteborn turned to look behind him. Another Dowles was walking toward him from a corner of the laboratory, scowling. "An impostor?" "Yes," the new man said, "I can't imagine why. Some sort of practical joke, I would imagine. Come on now, get out," he said, "Out? Why? So you can have a shot at him?" "I don't know who you are," said the second Dowles, "but I fail to see -- " "That stuff won't wash," said the other. "Look," he said, turning to Whyteborn, "he's going to try and persuade you to do something wrong. Don't listen to him." "Wait a moment," Whyteborn said. He got up and walked around the table. Dowles ## backed away but not quickly enough. Whyteborn reached out a hand toward the man. It went through. There was a prickling of warmth around Whyteborn's wrist where it entered the second Dowles' body, but nothing else out of the ordinary. His hand opened and closed on air. "What -- " was all Whyteborn could stammer. Dowles #I said, "Well, he's found out now. If you hadn't been so pushy and come barging in I might have been able to cover." "Cover? You? That facsimile of yours is wretched," said Dowles ##. "Your eyebrows are too high and the posture is wrong and your voice is out of synchronization (Please turn to page #) IF m m wi I I a M w ?I l I  H V y '   Jungle sector of the Sentient planet? Many Terrans have. After the War, there were all sorts of package tours at reasonable rates and the sector was still wild enough to offer some exotic sightseeing. The giant plants are eyecatching purples, reds and oranges. The fauna are something, too. Particularly the Quintopods. I know a lot about the Quintopods. Back on Terra, is a medical monograph I wrote on their anatomy and neurophysiology. As the name implies, they have five appendages, all symmetrically arranged around a disc-shaped body. The malformed head holds a tangled knot of cerebellar nerves, two compound eyes and a slash for a mouth. I've argued that the head is actually a specialized sixth limb, but none of the other so-called authorities agree with me. The Quinto body is flexible, muscular and capable of amazing adaptations. They are great builders and the silicon towers of the jungle sector are highlighted in the tourist guides. They are reasonably intelligent, not up to the Sentients or even to Terrans, but well beyond the anthropoids. They communicate by opening that scar of a mouth and thrusting out a slender vibrating appendage. The sounds are strange and unlike any humanoid speech I've ever heard. Some Terrans find these sounds exotic, dissonant, but I've always found them hauntingly musical. I still pride myself on my ability to interpret these vibrations, a job I worked at for many long and painful years. There aren't too many around who can understand the Quintopods. They are proud creatures, conscious of their roles as males and females. The two sexes do not mingle socially except for procreative purposes. It is only the aged or infirm male who finds himself working alongside the women at the menial tasks. For many years the dominant Sentient culture nurtured the Quintopod communities to preserve one of the cherished subspecies of the planet. came in with the occupying Terran forces as medical officer in the Jungle sector. The war had been bloody but short. Some misdirected missiles had wiped out eighty percent of the Quintopods, so special measures were taken to assist the survivors. Our troops were bored stiff and there was little to divert them, considering the prudish attitudes of the Sentients toward prostitution. But a couple of entrepreneurs from the Terran States were licensed to come into the sector and they stirred things up. One of them, an aggressive fellow named Matt Handman, was a showman and an active operator. He set up a gambling and sex palace under Occupation license. He was also the first one to see what great potential the Quintopods had in the ancient sport of boxing. Boxing was still an active sport back on Terra and very popular. And the sight of a Quintopod waving three boxing gloves was enough to excite any observer. Our troops loved it. The Quintopods were fine athletes and were readily trained to the sport. The high prestige of the gladiator was an irresistible inducement to them. I was against allowing them to fight. I've always considered the sport an abomination and I knew that, in spite of their tough skins, a tear in the cerebellar mantle xf the Quintps could mean instant death. Within a year's time a dozen Quintos had fought themselves to top boxing ratings. The Sentients were angry and presented a series of diplomatic protests decrying the "barbarization" of the Quintos. These notes were politely accepted, pushed slowly through our Army bureaucracy and allowed to fade from sight. Huge crowds of Terran soldiers came to every bout, wagering hundreds of thousands of credits. I never went, although my baser instincts sometimes nagged at me. But I had too much affection for the Quintos and I didn't want to risk seeing a fatality. Still, I would have liked to see Pinwheel in action. Pinwheel was champion of the Quintopods. I was told that he was a natural showman and the darling of our troops. Instead of the usual three boxing gloves he wore five, balancing himself precariously on two of the eight-ounce gloves. Although he was a very skillful boxer, he would sometimes forget finesse and slug fiercely, ready to take three or four blows just to get in one powerful hook. And the coup de grace would come in a rolling frenzy of leather as he spun about in an unstoppable blur of rotary motion. Matt Handman managed Pinwheel and I detested him for that, too. He was making a fortune in credits out of the brutal Quinto fights and to me he was the lowest form of parasite. Periodically I submitted written protests to the commanding general. But I was ignored and there was nothing else I could do. Nothing, that is, until the first Quinto fatality took place. The Quinto hadn't been badly beaten. He suffered a cerebellar tear after a seemingly light jab to the head and he died in the ring. It was my chance to intervene and I grabbed it. I pressured the Occupation Command into letting me take ultrasonograms of each fighter's brain. There was a good deal of stalling and some buckpassing but I was finally given permission to proceed. no IF The Quintos showed up for the physical reluctantly since their managers were openly hostile to my plan. But when I threatened to revoke the licenses of delinquents, they came right in. Two of the Quintos were clearly victims of a slight mantle tear and their licenses were immediately revoked Everyone else seemed all right except for one doubtful ultrasonogram. Pinwheel was the question mark, although I was convinced by studying his walking motions that there were subtle indications of neurological damage. I called in his manager, Matt Handman, and told him of my findings. "I don't believe you," he said vehemently. "Pinwheel has never looked better in his bouts. I know that you hate me and I think you'd do anything to put me out of business." "I might," I admitted. "But I'm trying to be objective about Pinwheel's health. I think he's in grave danger of being killed. I haven't enough medical proof formally to revoke his license, so I'm asking you to get him to retire." Handman stared at me as though I were insane and then, his arm around Pinwheel, he escorted the Quinto out of my office. I turned to Seva Tcana, Sentient medical observer who was permitted an occasional visit to my office by sufferance of the Terran High Command. Like most Sentients, he was formally correct but at the same time very hard to know. "Handman is a toad," I said angrily. "He'd kill his own mother for a thousand credits." "He might," said Seva. "Many Terrans are money-hungry animals." He didn't smile but I assumed he was joking. "To him," I said, "a fighter is a prize steer that you sell to the butcher." Seva seemed disturbed by my remarks. "You make me uncomfortable," he said finally. "I don't like to hear you disparage one of your own people." I understood his reaction. The Army Guide to the Sentient planet had stressed their fierce intra-cultural loyalties. "I'm sorry," I said. But I really wasn't. Sentients, spontaneously it seemed. Translated into Terran and forgetting the poetic nuances, the lines ran roughly as follows: Oh the Terrans are a strange but verile race, In the War they swept along with martial pace. And in peace they love a fight See them gather every night Just to see the Quintos battered in the face. The chorus, to a very catchy tune, went: Here s to Terran heroes, Here's to all of those. Who quite fearlessly Watch others smashed by blows. This song spread like wildfire through the Sentient planet and whenever a Terran soldier appeared in even the tiniest hamlet someone was certain to hum the chorus. General Hinsley, head of the Occupation Command and hero of the War, was furious. A staff meeting was called at Command HQ at which I was ordered to be present. Matt Handman was there, too. The general sat at the head of a long, ornately carved conference table, knitting his brows, before he spoke. "I'm fond of boxing. It's a manly sport and it builds the body and mind. But maybe using Quintos is wrong. It probably weakens the moral fiber of our boys to watch these freaks dance around in a ring. The doctor here keeps sending me medical reports that say they'll kill each other and that could provoke the Sentients even more." He shuffled the papers on his desk and turned to look directly at me. His disgust was apparent, although he tried to conceal it. I nodded my agreement. Then he turned to Handman. I wondered what sort of rebuttal the promoter could offer and I soon found out. He spoke quickly but he seemed to have prepared his arguments very carefully. "I agree with the general," he began. "I've been involved in boxing for many years back on Terra and there just is no greater sport. Two men go out into that ring alone and it's one man's skill and guts against another's. In an era when most of everything is done by some kind of machine there's something inspiring to see what men alone can do with their own brains and muscle." The general seemed rapt. "And," continued Handman, "those people who have criticized my Quinto fights have a point. There may be something primitive about seeing two Quintos box. But there's more. They're graceful, they're skillful and nobody really gets hurt. And it does wonders for the morale of our boys. These guys are tremendous distances from home, they're lonely, they're bored. They risked their lives for Terra. Don't we owe them a little entertainment?" I scowled and looked at my fingers. "The doctor says the Quintos might get killed. So far there's only been one death and that's controversial. I've seen a medical report that says the Quinto died of a viral infection. But I'm not a doctor. Maybe we do need stricter IF exams before each fight. That's okay with me. But let's not take it out on our boys. And don't forget that a lot of tax money comes from the gate receipts -- they help finance Occupation expenses." The general nodded. "But what about that song?" he said. "Let's talk about that song," said Handman. "I'm no military man. I trust the general here in whatever he wants to do. As an ordinary civilian I resent that song. I think the Sentients are trying to demean our manhood. But we can't cut and run. I want to propose a way that will show them what kind of people we are. I'm prepared to bring in Sam Porter, the heavyweight champion of Terra, to fight the Quintopod champ, Pinwheel; Let's show the kind of stuff we're made of. Once and for all, we'll stop those remarks about how we just watch and can't do. In conclusion, I'm prepared to donate half of the receipts from this bout to the Occupation Recreational Fund." He sat down abruptly. The general clearly seemed impressed by Handman's arguments. He adjourned the meeting without coming to an immediate decision -- but the following week he formally announced the match between Sam Porter and Pin wheel. It caused great excitement among our troops and the betting rose to fever pitch. ous training program in preparation for the Championship bout. Although I had never seen him fight, I decided to exercise my right as medical officer and visit his camp. A regulation ring was set up in three cleared jungle acres with stands that seated perhaps fifty to one hundred spectators. I took a seat in one of the last rows and waited for the day's exhibition to begin. Pinwheel came out wearing a protective headgear, but when he saw me in the back row he turned to Matt Handman and pointed. Handman smiled and very deliberately removed Pinwheel's headgear and tossed it to one side. I pretended to be unmoved at this provocation but inside I was boiling. The opening round of the exhibition took place in almost total silence. It had a bizarre kind of fascination for me in spite of my revulsion at the barbaric display. Pinwheel was truly a master of the art and he had changed his tactics just to show me, I suppose. Instead of taking three blows to one as I had been told he usually did, he wove his head about, slipping all of the three-gloved blows that shot toward his head, parrying the others with a kind of easy disdain. All through the round he threw but an occasional glove as though content simply to feel out his sparring partner. I rubbed my chin in wonder. Pinwheel's moves were certainly not those of a Quinto with damaged brain structure. The round ended and after a short rest the exhibition resumed. Now he opened up with the famous Pinwheel spin, and a blurred sequence of heavy blows rained on his partner, staggering him. Just as he fell to the canvas, he threw a wild hook that caught Pinwheel in midflight, squarely on the head. He went down as though poleaxed but immediately pulled himself shakily erect. Handman quickly called time. I was out of my seat instantly and down to the ring to examine both Quintos. Pinwheel was walking about to show hpw fine he felt but I insisted on having him carried to his dressing room where I went through a rudimentary neurological examination. The evidence was clear. "The mantle is torn," I said tersely. Matt Handman turned white through his Sector tan and he said nothing. I turned to examine Pinwheel's opponent and was conscious of Matt Handman, still standing at my side, staring at me. "Bring Pinwheel to my office tomorrow," I said. "I want to give him a more thorough workup." T HE second examination confirmed what I had suspected. The beginnings of mantle tear had taken place and literally any kind of blow or jar might kill Pinwheel. I quietly impressed this fact on Matt Handman but his face was impassive and he showed no emotional response. Still, I thought I had frightened him until the following day when I received a letter typed on Clerk of the Sector form, requesting a formal hearing on my decision to revoke Pinwheel's license. At Handman's request the hearing was kept private. I also agreed to allow Pinwheel to present his own appeal, although I couldn't see what difference it could make in my decision. Nevertheless, although I could interpret Quinto speech with great fluency, I delayed the proceedings by calling for an official army interpreter. The Quinto, Pinwheel, came forward and stood quietly before my desk. His body was beautifully formed and without a single mark other than a freshly healed cut across his head. To the casual observer he seemed to be in perfect condition. When the interpreter took his place at the Quinto's side, Pinwheel began. His language was simple and as nearly as I can remember, he said: I wish to be permitted to fight. I to face it. I have worked hard to master my craft as boxer. I am respected by my people for my strength and skill. Your soldiers admire me, too, and cheer my victories. If you turn me away IF you will take away my strength , my self-respect. Perhaps I am in danger of dying from the slightest blow.  will risk it. But if you send me back to the women you will make me something less than a dead man. He stepped back and waited for my answer. For the moment I had none. My assurance had evaporated at his words and the decision which had seemed so obvious was now uncertain. Was I invading a private right, the right to choose one's own way to die? But if that right involved the choice ofsuicide, by Terran standards it was illegal, no matter what its meaning in the Quinto culture. If Pinwheel were to die in the ring it would be because  had permitted it to happen. I rose to my feet. "The appeal is rejected," I said. "As medical officer of this Sector, I hereby reaffirm my decision to revoke the boxing license of the Quintopod known as Pinwheel. Of course you can appeal to the commanding general." It was well known that General Hinsley, as a matter of policy, had never overruled lower command decisions of a minor nature. Pinwheel seemed stunned. He swayed, almost stumbled, uncertain of what to do or where to go. Matt Handman came quickly to his side and led him out of my office. I gathered up all the papers concerning the case and placed them into a confidential inter-office envelope. The matter was now in General Hinsley's hands. appeal, an unusual and precedent-breaking step. I found myself alone with the general and Matt Handman. We sat silently for many minutes while the general went through the record, page by page. Finally he closed the folder, removed his metal-rimmed glasses and addressed himself to me. "You're absolutely certain of the tear?" "Absolutely." The general sighed. "There are many reasons why this bout should be held. But most important to me is the one with political and psychological overtones. The Sentient population is becoming restive under the Occupation. So far there has been no armed outbreak, merely a few incidents in isolated places. Then there's that song. A humiliation of the Terran forces might spark off active resistance. For that reason, and others, I would like to see this bout held." "I can't sanction it," I said. The general didn't seem to hear me. "Suppose there is a mantle tear," he said. "It might offer certain advantages to us. Although it's inconceivable that Sam Porter could lose, insurance is always welcome. And think what an enormous propaganda risk we would be taking if by some freak of chance Sam Porter lost to the Quinto?" For some time there had been latrine gossip concerning the general's political ambitions. It was said that he wanted to run for the Secretaryship of the Solar Directorate, Terra's highest office. I could see that he wanted to take no chances of anything marring his long-range plans. "I'm sorry, sir," I said. "As a medical man I can't in true conscience go along with you. Why not substitute another Quinto for Pinwheel?" Matt Handman shook his head. "We can't do that," he said. "No other Quinto is in his class. They'd accuse us of fixing the result by using an inferior Quinto." "They might say that anyway," I said. "Word may have gotten out about Pinwheel's suspension." "Mr. Handman assures me that no one has been told by him or Pinwheel," said the general. "And your hearing was private and held under military security procedure. I agree with Handman. We've got to use Pinwheel." I sat there in turmoil. My medical oath had been very meaningful to me and still was. I was reluctant to break it but I might bend it a little. "Very well," I said bitterly. "I'll rescind my ban. Pinwheel may fight Porter." The general leaned toward me. "That's not enough," he said softly. "I want you to issue a medical statement certifying that Pinwheel is in perfect fighting trim. If you refuse -- I will have the statement drawn up and issued over your name. If you make me do that I'll not only break you but I'll see that your medical license is revoked." I tried to speak but my voice had suddenly gone hoarse and low. I struggled with my vocal chords and the words finally emerged. "I'll do it," I said. Seva Tcana was waiting to see me. "There are whispers about that Pinwheel has been hurt," he said. "Are they true?" "I thought so on my first examination," I said. "But it was only an artifact of the ultrasonographic test. I've just been to see General Hinsley and informed him of my findings. I plan to issue a medical statement giving Pinwheel a clear bill of health." "I see," said Seva. "Do you believe me?" I said abruptly. He shrugged. "Does it matter?" I was tired, angry, frustrated and I lost a rather tenuous grip on my self-control. "It could matter," I said sharply. "If Pinwheel were really inIF jured, it would be in the interest of your people if he never made it to the ring. If he has to die, at least it ought to be for a worthwhile cause." I caught myself. "That's all a theoretical supposition," I said. Seva rose te his feet. "I look forward to your new medical statement," he said. He bowed and left. of the night writing and rewriting my medical report until it seemed to reach just the proper language and plausibility. I left it on my secretary's desk to be typed and printed up. I slept all morning and afternoon. When I awoke I learned of Pinwheel's sudden and tragic death. The reports were conflicting. The first talked about an accidental slip and fall while doing roadwork. The second, with sinister overtones, hinted at an unknown Sentient striking the Quinto a blow on the head. No witnesses were to be found, although the Terran command was launching an investigation. I stared at my report, neatly typed, the sentences and paragraphs set in easy-to-read military form. It was all ridiculous now. I would be the laughing stock of the Sentient community if it were issued. As for the general, he would have no recourse but to suspend all bouts from now on. The championship bout with Porter had become a vanished dream. As I sat there, musing, Seva Tcana came in to my office. I put down my report and looked at him but he returned my gaze without blinking. "Was Pinwheel's death an accident?" I asked. "Do you really expect me to answer that?" he said. No, I thought. No matter how strongly a Sentient feels about a particular issue, he would never help an outside culture against his own people the way I did last night... I felt a slight tightening in my stomach and the roof of my mouth had suddenly gone dry. I was God knows how many millions of miles away from home and friends and suddenly, completely alone. I thought for many long moments before I framed a reply to Seva. He listened to my halting remarks but didn't seem to care what they were.  dex Of The Planets (Distributed free to public schools and other accredited institutions.) Position in Solar System: Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun. planet is in that area of the system popularly referred to as "deep space." Jupiter is named after the chief god in Roman mythology and is the largest member of the sun's family. Physical Characteristics: Jupiter is # miles in diameter. It revolves around the sun once every # (Earth) years. Approximately # times the size of Earth, Jupiter's gravitational pull is # Vi times that of our own planet (suggested classroom exercise for elementary grades: each child should weigh himself on the Health Office scales and then compute how much he she would weigh on the planet Jupiter). Jupiter has twelve moons. Four of them (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Io) are very large, almost the size of Earth. Jupiter's atmosphere is believed to extend upward a thousand miles or more from the surface of the planet, with some variance at the poles. The atmosphere is composed of large quantities of methane, ammonia (crystals), some hydrogen and lesser amounts of other gases. It is believed that the density of the atmosphere near' the surface of the planet approaches that of a liquid. This atmosphere would not support any life form that we know of. Jupiter has nine temperature zones. Seen through a telescope, these zones appear as cloud belts of vaguely differentiated color bands. These cloud belts move across the surface of the planet at different rates of speed. This movement may be due to electron ionization within the atmosphere of the planet. A striking feature of this planet is the dark red area of gas that moves across the surface at extremely high rates of speed. This "spot" (large as the Earth) is believed to be a dense group of gases moving beneath the surface of the outer atmosphere. Jupiter does not conform to expected patterns of planetary radio wave emanations. This phenomenon is, as yet, unexplained. Unmanned Space Probes: The results of twenty-two unmanned space probes have all been negative. Manned Space Probes: The Odyssey was launched from Moon Base # in #. Radio contact was lost soon after the ship went into Jupiter orbit. The seven crewmen are presumed dead. Copyright # , National Aeronautics and Space Administration. IF Bentzel, Eric F. -- Logistics Supervisor. Communications Coordinator. Chiang, Kyoto -- Assistant Engineer. Log Recorder. Oliver, Roger T. -- Communications. (Alternate) Logistics Supervisor. Raines, Melvin S. -- Medical, Psychiatric Team Coordinator. Propulsion Systems. Rhodes, James T. -- Geologist and Mapmaker. Communications (Assistant). Richter, Frederick M. -- Propul sion Systems. Takamoto, Takata. -- Chief Engineer. Medical Assistant. Commanding Officer: Raines, Melvin S. Assistant Commanding Officer: Bentzel, Eric F. First Alternate: Charalding, Thomas H. Second Alternate: Perry, John E. Third Alternate: McCarthy, John M. Mission Book Insert # (Supplemental). Excerpts from a briefing given by Dr. Roger LaTrane to flight and support personnel of Odyssey Two. Subject: Radio wave patterns of the planet Jupiter. There is no need for me to emphasize to you the importance of this mission, our second attempt to send men into deep space. The failure of Odyssey One is past history and I'm sure you are wondering why we choose to launch a second mission when we know virtually nothing about the disappearance of the first. I think the reason will become clear to you as my talk progresses. In the meantime, I would like to apologize on behalf of the directors for not making our intentions known at an earlier date. Quite frankly, there was a good deal of indecision. Also, there were certain public relations factors which had to be taken into account. As far as our knowledge is concerned, Jupiter is the "black sheep" of the solar system. We know scarcely more about the planet today than we did a hundred and fifty years ago. It was this dearth of information that originally prompted us to launch Odyssey One. At that time we had reason to assume that the difficulties of the longer flight could be computed by the K factor and anticipated. We were wrong and we paid for our mistake with the lives of seven men. After the failure of that mission the decision was made that we would not make another attempt to reach Jupiter until we had somehow gained more information about surface and atmospheric conditions that might have caused the failure of the first mission. Unfortunately that information has not been forthcoming. Odyssey Two bears the same burden of risk as Odyssey One, with the possible exceptions of minute improvements in the exploration vehicles and the knowledge that unknown danger does most definitely exist. Every planet, including the Earth, emits a distinct pattern of radio waves. Each pattern is unique and serves to identify a planet, much in the same way as a fingerprint will identify a man. The pattern of these waves is dependent upon the body's mass, density, composition, atmospheric conditions, surface materials and so on. The frequency distributions of these materials are constant and reliable, enabling us to determine the physical characteristics of celestial bodies by measuring the quality of the radio waves emitted from them. Jupiter is the one planet in our system that does not conform, at least in theory. Its pattern of radio waves is not what visual observation and spectrography tell us it should be. A prime objective of Odyssey One was to discover the cause of this discrepancy. Within the past year the pattern of Jupiter's signals has changed dramatically. Our scientists have observed the waves doubling in intensity. It is an erratic occurseconds at a time. However, there is no explanation for this phenomenon. Nothing like it has ever been observed, except in the obvious case of a super nova. Naturally, we have no way of knowing whether this new phenomenon has any connection with the disappearance of Odyssey One. Quite frankly, we doubt 'it. There seems no way the crew could have survived this long. Certainly, not anywhere near the planet's surface. Also, it is inconceivable that Odyssey One could have caused the effect observed here on Earth. We have reached and colonized Mars, Venus and the twilight zone of Mercury. Development of those planets will consume the energies of our scientists for decades. In other words, our program of manned space exploration has ground to a standstill. There is the ever-present danger of stagnation. We have always believed that we have the skills and technology to penetrate deep space. We must do so if we hope someday to reach the stars. A new mystery may be the key to an old one. In any case, we have decided to try one more time. In a very real sense, the dreams and aspirations of all men are riding with you. God speed. I T HE pain clung to him, embracing him in its sweaty arms IF throughout the long journey from nothing to now. The transition from a state of coma to consciousness was a universe of tortured nerve ends and quivering muscles. Major Eric Bentzel blinked in the darkness and tested his stiff muscles against the leather straps and cushions that held him. Bits and pieces of memory floated into the vacuum in his mind to drift like wreckage in a tidal pool. Then awareness came, making him whole once again. Eric loosened the restraining straps and stretched his arms and legs, allowing himself a long, satisfied grunt of pleasure. He felt a sudden kinship with the men of Odyssey One; Claude Philmore, his counterpart on that first mission, had undoubtedly gotten this far and experienced these same sensations. Satisfied that his circulation had returned to normal, Eric sat up and tested his gravity shoes against the porous strips lining the floor of the ship. He pushed the lightcontrol lever above his head and his cubicle was bathed in the soft yellow glow of Safe Psyche illumination. Finally he detached from his body the needles and plastic tubes that had fed him through the long night and stood up. He waited a few moihents for his body to adjust to an upright stance, then pressed another lever and stepped out of his cubicle into what was the main body of the ship. He was the first to undergo transition and was quite alone in the huge expanse of gleaming metal. The opening of his cubicle door had activated the interior lighting of the ship. At the far end of the chamber a multi-colored panel glittered in a bath of blue light. The panel housed the recording instruments and manual controls, the computers and other apparatus which had monitored the ship and crew for the past two years and which would have to be reset for the return journey to the Earth. On each side of the panel was a large green disc, the metal shielding for the quartz-alloy portal telescopes. When exposed, each optical device afforded the viewer a one hundred and eighty degree panorama of space outside the ship. The rest of the huge chamber was bare. The remainder of the instruments were buried beneath the floor, ready to whir upwards at the touch of appropriate levers. The ship was designed to provide the maximum amount of work and living space. A touch of his hand exposed the portal telescopes and Eric found himself staring into the black, star-spotted maw of the void; hypnotic, beautiful and ever so deadly. A mass of space matter drifted a few hundred miles avay, an island in an ocean of ink. He closed the portals and brought up the command table. He had no way of knowing how long before the others would join him. In the meantime he could do little but begin the laborious process of checking and rechecking the ship's systems. A cursory examination of the time-lapse tapes indicated to him that the ship would reach destination within a week. She would automatically inject herself into orbit around Jupiter and then wait with the patience of a machine for her human cargo to awake from its slumber and, with that grand presumptuousness that is the human spirit, resume command of her atomic soul. Even now the object of their voyage would be clearly visible in the portal telescopes, should he set them at the proper viewing angle. But he would wait; the first sight of Jupiter belonged to all of them together. Together they would gaze upon the face of a killer planet that had destroyed all communication and then proceeded to swallow up an entire ship as well as a crew trained to meet any kind of conceivable emergency. Conceivable emergency? He wondered what answers to what questions Philmore had known before he died. Had the assistant commander of Odyssey One seen the force that killed him? Had he been able to anticipate it even for an instant? If not, what possible chance did the men of Odyssey Two have of escaping the same fate? Eric could think of no useful purpose served by dwelling on the fate of the first mission. He returned to the task of electronically scanning the remainder of the computer tapes. He worked slowly, knowing the importance of finding tasks to fill the dangerous, yawning pockets of time. Frequently he would open his eyes to discover that he had been sleeping. T HE men stood and stared in silence. Jupiter appeared as a monstrous, suppurating wound, erupting from the black enamel hide of the universe. The white, rock-encrusted spheres that were Jupiter's moons were maggots, scurrying about the gaseous behemoth, waiting to enter the swirling red-orange pus of the wound. Raines was the first to turn away. He moved to the command table, studied the instruments. "Major Bentzel," Raines said, "would you check the transmission tapes again, please?" Eric moved quickly to the computer console and, for the fifth time since the ship had gone into orbit, punched out the communications index. His fingers moved with a muscular memory of their own. He could feel the cold, almond eyes of Kyoto Chiang boring into his back. There was a meIF tallic taste in his mouth that he would have characterized, before his psychiatric realignment, as fear. "Negative," Eric said quietly. "Our signal is still being transmitted but there is no indication that it is being received. We aren't receiving anything at all. The computer gives no indication of malfunction." Raines nodded, absently tugging at his ear. The commander was a quiet man, almost to the point of shyness. But he showed no sign of indecision or even anxiety. "Lieutenant?" "I've tried voice contact," Jim Rhodes announced. "The results were negative. I have no explanation. We get nothing, not even static." "So," Raines announced, scratching his shoulder, "it seems that we're on our own. Any suggestions?" The faint clicking of the elapsedtime monitor was the only sound in the room. Eric's gaze swept the dials of the console, searching for some clue to the breakdown in communications between the ship and Earth. It was a half-hearted effort, more habit than any belief that the answer lay in the tens of thousands of miles of wiring within the computer and transmission systems. The answer lay somewhere on the planet beneath them. The dials checked, Eric let his mind wander once again to the disembarkation procedures. Unless Raines decided differently standard procedures would be employed -- the same as Odyssey One had used. Standard procedure dictated that he, as second in command, would remain on board the ship, monitoring communications and assuring that there would be at least one man to guide the ship home to Earth should some unforeseen disaster befall the rest. The six others would disembark in two teams, three men to a team, utilizing the ion-propelled Surface Excursion Vehicles, or 'scooters.' One of the vehicles would descend to the surface and, if preliminary instrument readings were favorable, land. The second vehicle would monitor the first for up to three hours before landing. Then, if there were no indication of danger, a site would be selected and the main ship would come down on the planet's surface, providing a base of operations for the extended period of exploration that would follow. "Major Bentzel, how do you view our situation?" "So far," Eric said slowly, weighing each word, "we've done everything in emulation of Odyssey One. They lost contact and we've lost contact. In a sense we're flying blind. We have no explanation for the breakdown. Now, we've been around the planet six times and have seen no sign of wreckage." "In eighteen years," Chiang said. "Odyssey One or its pieces would have fallen out of orbit." "Why couldn't the men still be alive down on the surface?" asked Fred Richter, the youngest member of the crew. Raines pointed to the orange blur just coming into sight in the right hand portal. Richter fell silent. Eric cleared his throat and the other men turned their attention back to him. "In any event," he continued, "Odyssey One was destroyed. It would seem to me that we had better initiate alternate procedures." "I've done some preliminary calculations," Raines said. "It would seem to me feasible to set up a moon base -- say, on Io, since it's closest to our position -- and set up an observatory. I am in absolute agreement with Major Bentzel. We cannot attempt to reach the planet's surface until we discover why we can't communicate with Earth. We can't simply turn around and go back. Therefore, using a moon base as an intermediate landing station would appear to be the only answer. To keep the ship in a stable orbit requires too much power. Any comments?" There were none. Eric could feel an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation building in the ship, clinging to the men like static electricity. Raines' tone had become harder, and his words were clipped. "Tack, you take Richter and Rhodes. Run an instrument check on Io. See if there is a place we can land this thing." Colonel Takata Takamoto saluted. He motioned to Richter and Rhodes who followed him into the suiting room. Eric did some rapid figuring in his head and calculated that at top speed, the scouting mission would take just under six hours. He wished he were going. The walls of the ship seemed to be diminishing, closing in on him. Soon he would be the only one left, trapped inside the metal womb. Eric shook his head and tried to concentrate on Raines' voice. With a little luck, he'd have ground beneath his feet in two or three days. The bright red scooter containing Takamoto, Richter and Rhodes glided past the portal. The signal light on the computer console lit and Eric quickly pressed the lever, returning the signal. Raines exchanged a series of quips with Takamoto and then signed off. They had at least established voice communication with the scooter. "I'm going to take the blue scooter down to the outer fringes of the atmosphere for a test probe," Raines said. "I want some samples of that atmosphere. That will save us a lot of time once we get set up on Io." "Better take us along," Oliver IF said, indicating himself and Kyoto Chiang. "You won't be able to operate all of the collecting devices and still run the scooter. It'll be easier and safer if the scooter's fully manned." "All right," Raines said. "Let's go" Eric followed the three men into the suiting room, helped them into their suits, went with them down to the vehicle bay. The blue scooter was painstakingly checked out before Raines, Chiang and Oliver assumed their positions in the tiny craft. Eric went down the line of men, gripping each hand in turn. Finally he stepped into an observation chamber. He watched as the canopy of the craft slid into place. Raines' right hand moved to the control panel of the craft and the ship's huge bay doors opened long enough to allow the blue scooter to pass out between them. Then they closed. The assault on Jupiter was under way. straining for some sound in the impersonal silence around him. Nothing. The ship was all right. Eric glanced at his watch. Five and a half hours had elapsed since the red and blue scooters had disembarked on their missions. They had missed four communications checks. Or he had missed them. He had had a headache and had decided to rest in his cubicle. He'd fallen asleep. Still, the siren attachment was designed to sound throughout the entire ship if a signal came through. But that had to be activated. Had he set it before lying down? He sprang off the couch and hurried out of the cubicle over to the communications control panel. His gaze darted to the siren switch. It was set. He stared at the dials for a moment, then hurriedly set them to Raines' frequency. "Control calling Bluebird. Commander, this is Major Bentzel. Can you hear me? Control calling Bluebird. Come in, Bluebird." No answer came. Eric left Raines' frequency open and cut in the backup system. "Control calling Redbird! Tack, can you hear me? Control calling Redbird. Acknowledge at once." His efforts were rewarded by a dead silence. He struggled against little ripples of panic that were welling up inside him. One more scooter was left in the bay and he knew he would use it if the timecushion elapsed. He would have to. He knew he could not simply pilot the ship home, leaving the others to die, even if procedure dictated that he do so. Psychiatric Realignment could only do so much for a man's peace of mind. Then the ship was filled with the shriek of the siren tearing through the terrible silence that had preceded it. Eric reached out and shut off the switch that had been turned up to full volume. The pain in his ears was delightful. "Control here. Tack, where the hell are you?" "Eric, we're coming in." Takamoto's voice was strained, brittle with tension. "Look through your left portal. Tell me if you can see us." Eric looked. The red scooter was just coming into sight, glittering in the strange, reflected glow of the planet. "I can see you," Eric said. "Tack, what's the matter?" "No time now. I'll tell you when we get to the ship." Eric monitored the docking of the red scooter. In a few moments the three crewmen entered the main chatnber. They had removed only their helmets. Tack went directly to the communications panel. He quickly scanned the computer tapes. "Eric, did you receive any signals prior to ours?" "No," Eric said impatiently. He was anxious to learn what had happened. "Only the last one. Just before that I tried to contact you but couldn't get any signal at all. There's no word from Raines -- he took the blue scooter." He hesitated a moment, trying to read the expression on the crewman's face. "What happened?" "I don't know," Tack said slowly. "We scouted Io, found a plain and went down. Then we tried to contact you and couldn't get through." "We thought we'd lost the ship," Rhodes said quietly. Tack asked, "Where is Raines?" "He and the others went down to collect samples of the atmosphere." Eric felt a stab of guilt, as if he were responsible for what now seemed to have been an exceedingly foolish decision. "They were just going into the outer perimeter." Tack was shaking his head. "But you picked up our last signal." "Yes." "I could tell by our own instruments that we were getting through. But we were already in visual contact. It looks as though our radio equipment is no better than our eyesight. We might as well be using smoke signals. There must be something about the atmosphere. Ionization?" Eric shrugged. He was grappling with the problem of the blue scooter. At least four of the crew were safe now. He must decide whether or not to leave the other three. If he did, it would be decades before the attempt would be made again, if ever. The responsibility bore down on him, threatening to crush him with its weight. "I doubt it," Eric said softly. "Our instruments would have picked up excess ionization. EveryIF thing checks out perfectly, except our communications. Damn it. There's just no explanation." "You're in command now. Raines is out there some place. You have to make a decision," Takamoto said. Eric waited until he was reasonably certain that his voice would not tremble. "I won't send you to your deaths. It would make no sense." "It doesn't make any sense to give up at this point, either. It takes only one man to bring this ship back. One or four, it makes no difference; if we fail, there won't be another mission for a hundred years. You know that." "I know that the waste of life has no place in the exploration of space." "But you may be wasting the others' lives," Tack said, his voice still very calm. "You don't know that Raines and the others are dead. They could be down there right now, drifting around in a crippled ship, waiting for someone to come and get them. If we left now we'd be sentencing them to death. We can't live with that for the rest of our lives." "I'm the only one who has to live with anything. It's my decision. I will not send you down there." Tack drew himself up to his full height, snapped to attention. His eyes locked with Eric's. "Sir," Tack said, "I wish to volunteer to search for Commander Raines." Richter and Rhodes stepped forward and stood at attention on either side of Takamoto. The rigidity of their bodies and the hard cast of their eyes formed an unbreachable wall between them and the new commander. Eric would have given anything to be able to step to the other side of the barrier. "I'll give you four hours," Eric said at last. "No more. At the end of four hours I blast out of orbit." "Not to do so would be a dereliction of duty, sir," Takamoto said, allowing the smile in his eyes to spread to his mouth. "We completely understand." "I can only give you their last coordinates before they entered the atmosphere." "That should be sufficient, sir. We can track with the radar." "We will maintain constant voice communication." "Yes, sir. May we leave now?" "Four hours." "Four hours." Eric swallowed hard. "For God's sake, Tack, be careful." In a few minutes they were gone. II Mission Book Insert # (Supplemental). Excerpts from a briefing given by Dr. Roger LaTrane to support personnel of Odyssey Two. Subject: Status of mission and radio wave patterns of the planet Jupiter. Three days ago we received the first voice transmission from Odyssey Two. Major Bentzel was the first to undergo transition. He immediately informed us that all was well. He indicated that there were some problems in transition, and that we will have to further refine the F-# series of hibernative drugs. However, the remainder of the crew underwent transition without any noticeable physical or psychological damage. The families were notified and messages were sent and received. Needless to say, the men and their families were happy to hear each others' voices after two years of waiting. Our telemetry monitoring devices gave every indication throughout the two-year journey that all systems were functioning perfectly. Major Bentzel's voice transmission served to increase our feelings of optimism. Now it is my sad duty to report to you that we have completely lost communication with Odyssey Two. Telemetry ceased soon after the ship went into orbit around Jupiter. We are continuing to emit a series of electronic probes but, as of this time, our instruments indicate the ship no longer exists. Dr. Miller has been continuing to study the unusual radio bursts from the vicinity of the planet, the signals that led us to send out Odyssey Two. It is Dr. Miller's contention that these bursts of energy may be read as a sort of code. As incredible as this may seem, I feel we are in no position to discount any theory about the planet Jupiter. Dr. Miller's computations and symbol reconstruction will be distributed to you in a separate memo. Dr. Miller's work leads him to believe that the signals may be interpreted in such a manner that they spell out the following words: I-T I-S A-L-I-V-E. arc beams the moment the craft penetrated the visible outer fringe of Jupiter's atmosphere. Stray wisps of gas danced over the rainbows of phosphorescent fire. The radar gave no indication of another craft in their vicinity. Tack flew on, down toward the planet's surface. Soon the scooter was completely enveloped in gas of a thicker density, deeper and darker in color. Tension limited the conversation of the men to brief exchanges concerned solely with the operation of the craft and readings of the radar sweeps. They did not discuss the fact that they had lost IF communication with the main ship, nor that the craft was beginning to feel sluggish, a small sliver of metal drowning in some mad artist's pallet of oils. There seemed nothing to do but go on; the skein of logic they had presented to Eric back on the main ship still seemed valid. One man could bring the ship back to Earth just as easily as four. There was a reason they had undertaken this journey. The instruments continued to indicate that they were still far above the point where the atmosphere might be expected to condense or liquefy and the actual surface of the planet was thousands of miles below that. Still, something was happening in the atmosphere outside the craft. They were slowing. Acting on impulse, Tack reached up and shut off the beacons; they were surrounded by an iridescent glow that seemed to spring from the metal itself, as if it were ablaze. Tack's gaze fixed on the instrument panel; the temperature readings were normal. The shimmering glow changed from a deep orange to brick red, then to a deep, garish purple that glowed brighter, as if from an energy source of its own. Droplets of gas were condensing on the outside of the hull. The droplets thickened and coalesced into clumps of jelly-like matter that spread rapidly over the entire outer surface of the scooter, blocking off the vision of the men inside. Streaks of blue and silver appeared as the substance ate through the enamel and attacked the metal alloy of the scooter itself. Tack struggled frantically with controls that did not respond. The air speed indicator showed that they were almost at a standstill, a metallic vegetable suspended in a monstrous bowl of celestial Jello. Tack thrust the emergency throttle forward. His ears told him that the engines were operating at peak capacity, screaming and tearing at the ooze that surrounded them. The scooter remained motionless. Tack heard a choked gasp behind him. He twisted around in his seat, freezing halfway as his eyes came to rest on the tiny, white glistening drops of molten metal that dripped from the ceiling, floating free in the zero-G environment. He watched in numb, horrified fascination as one of the droplets came to rest on Chiang's arm. The fabric of the crewman's suit began to smoke. The ship was dissolving around them. There was little time to cry, or even to scream. The entire reaction reached its peak in a matter of seconds. The scooter and its human occupants broke up and dissolved in the thick jelly, transforming their matter into gaseous elements to float for eternity above the shape of a globe they had never seen. the time-lapse recorder clunk into place, signaling the deaths of six men and a dream. Jupiter had defeated them. It was time to go home. He was mildly surprised to find that he felt little emotion. He had seen death in the eyes of his men before they had left the ship, had felt and heard it in the empty silence of the radio. Now that death was a reality, Eric found that he had already been drained of sorrow and apprehension. He was the only one left, the seventh man, and it was his clear duty to bring the ship back to Earth. Still he hesitated, watching with mild interest as the digits on the clock marked the passage of time in the empty chamber. He found the concept of time suddenly void of meaning; life and death were the only markers, the only boundaries within which a man could measure the value of his existence. An hour later Eric had still not begun the preparation of the ship for the return voyage. He found himself walking slowly down the passageway leading to the vehicle launch bay. He stopped at the end and peered through the glass window into the airlock where the last scooter sat in its concrete berth, its engines ready, if need be, to send him soaring down after the others to continue the search. His hand reached out and stroked the silver surface of the space suit hanging in an open cubicle next to the entrance to the airlock. Once again, as he had done so many times in the past, Eric thought of Claude Philmore, his counterpart on the first mission. Certainly, Eric thought, Philmore must have been in this same situation. Perhaps he had even stood in this same spot on his own ship when the time had come for him to make his final decision. What had he done? That was the question that pounded at Eric's consciousness. It seemed obvious that the man had ignored his directives and taken the third scooter. Then what of the ship? Perhaps he had tried to bring it back and had been caught in a meteor storm. No, Eric thought; any activity like that would have been monitored back on Earth. Then what of the ship? And the signals? And the silence? Eric turned and made his way back to the main chamber. His footsteps echoed on the metal surfaces, mocking him. He wept freely. At that moment he would have given his life for one single moment with the sea at his feet or sunlight on his upturned face. The preparations did not take long. The ship had been designed for emergency one-man operation and it was simply a matter of reprograming the computer and resetting the various instruments that would serve to guide the huge machine back through the two year night to orbit around the IF planet that hung in space like an exquisite, blue jewel, an oasis in a desert of death. The computer set, Eric returned to his cubicle and strapped himself into his life-support couch. He inserted the intravenous feeders into the metal caps implanted in his arms, then prepared to inject the F-# solution into his veins. The fluid, dark amber in color, floated in the vacuum inside the hypodermic needle. Eric pulled back the plunger and held the tip a fraction of an inch above the blue, distended surface of a large vein on the inside of his elbow. He blinked. Somewhere in his mind a curtain had parted and something was shining in the darkness -- a piece of a puzzle. Eric very carefully replaced the hypodermic needle in its refrigerated container, unstrapped his body, removed the plastic feeders, then hurried back to the vehicle launch chamber. From there he deactivated the blast-off controls and checked to make certain the ship would remain in orbit. Then he donned his suit and entered the pressure chamber. He thought he had seen one piece of the puzzle. Now he must search for the remaining pieces. He was sure he knew where to look. His Fingers trembled as he checked and rechecked the scooter's instruments and energy bank. Satisfied at last that all was in order, Eric climbed in and closed the canopy above his head. He pushed the launch lever and the craft slid from its berth out into space. He allowed himself a few seconds to float free of the main ship, then touched the ignition button. The engines of the vehicle roared to life, speeding the man and his machine out into the void toward the object of his search. answers had to tie in with Philmore. If Philmore were alive and in some way responsible for the altered phenomenon puzzling Earth -- where would he be? He could not be on the planet's surface. Eric was sure of that. He had to be on one of the moons. How could he have survived all these years? Eric knew such survival was theoretically possible in the physical sense. Food, elimination of body wastes and other physical needs were taken care of by cyclical apparatus within the environment of the scooter. Water and oxygen could be reconstituted from wastes for an indefinite period of time and the food could have come from the stores on the ship. The chemical nutrients alone could sustain one man for an indeterminate number of years. Still, it seemed highly unlikely that any man could maintain his sanity for any great length of time here -- sufficiently to develop an apparatus capable of interfering with the signals from the planet. He would see, Eric thought. Philmore, if he were alive, would have all the answers. Eric set his craft in a trajectory that he had "calculated would take him to the first of his targets, one of the smaller moons now on the far side of the planet. He estimated it would take him months to scan the surfaces of all twelve satellites and he wondered what his own mental condition would be if, after all that searching, he found nothing. He decided it would do no good to dwell on such things. He began a detailed systems check to help the time pass. Days passed. He scanned each square mile of the first moon's surface with skill and precision bom of years of training. He had quickly developed a system; after an initial scanning flight he would prepare a detailed grid on the photographic charts and begin a new, inch-by-inch scan of that particular moon's geography. He flew at low speed and dangerously low altitude. Even then he would often be left with the haunting thought that he had somehow missed Philmore. He would finish with one satellite, go on to the next, fighting the compulsion to go back and search again. He knew he had no time to waste -- Ganymede alone would take him three or four months to scan properly. He must go on. Once he landed and slept for fifteen hours in the cramped quarters of the scooter. Another time, on the third moon he had chosen, he had been forced to get out and search on foot through a vast hilly region, pock-marked with caves. They had been four hungry, thirstfilled days as he had been forced to trek in an ever-widening circle, farther and farther from the lifesupport systems of the scooter. Soon Eric was flying the craft in a semi-stupor, unthinking, mechanically performing the flight operations as the scooter flew from one moon to the next; he listened like an automaton for the dull click of his instruments that would tell him the next satellite was near, another dead body to map and search and leave behind. He felt his soul slowly being torn apart, scattered about a few pieces at a time, strewn behind him on the moons' surfaces. He traveled in a counter-clockwise orbit around Jupiter so that the glow from the planet was always on his left side. Once he developed fever and was forced to stop and rest. He tossed fitfully inside the scooter, his nightmares filled with gaseous, orange-red beasts that clawed at his shaking, feverwracked body. He reached Ganymede twentyseven days from the time he had IF left the main ship. The day after that he found it. Fatigue and shock had taken their toll of him. He could feel hysterical, insane laughter swelling and 'bubbling in his throat, about to erupt in a geyser that, once released, would never stop. He experienced a sudden sensation of being a part of the scooter, a growth on its innards; he would ram the machine into the surface of the moon and at last the nightmare would end. Below him, barely visible beneath the lip of a ledge, its chipped and tarnished surface gleaming dully in the glare of his beacons, was a green scooter identical to his own. Eric swallowed his laughter and brought his craft back under control. He circled the area, dropping lower on each turn. Adrenalin surged through his body to the point where he felt he must scream with joy. But he dared not, for the same reason that he dared not laugh; once started, it might not stop. A figure emerged from beneath the rock shelf, arms waving and neck craned in an effort to keep the scooter constantly in view as it circled over his head. Twice the figure stumbled and fell against the sharp rocks strewn across the surface. Eric groaned -- and this time the laughter found vent and trickled from his lips. How funny it would be, Eric thought, to go through all this and then see Philmore die before his eyes. Each time the figure rose, its suit intact, and continued its mad pursuit of the path of the descending scooter. "Stop running, Philmore," Eric screamed. "For God's sake, stop running. I'm coming down!" His voice echoed loudly and Eric snapped back to reason. Of course Philmore could not hear him; but the man had stopped running and was now standing motionless at the lip of a mediumsized crater, still looking upward. Eric imagined he could hear the from the man's open mouth. Ill down a hundred yards from where the man was standing. Then Philmore was running again; lumbering and falling, rising and lumbering again, seemingly indifferent to the danger of tearing his suit on the rocks. Was Philmore mad? The thought struck Eric that the man might kill them both here on Ganymede. Philmore stopped when he was still ten yards away. Eric tensed, then relaxed; he saw, Philmore's shoulders heave with great sobs. Pale, bleached-out eyes filled with tears. Eric stepped forward and held out his gloved hand. Philmore hesitated, then reached out and touched it with his own. A moment later they were together, hugging one another's shielded bodies. When the first waves of emotion had passed, Eric stepped back and glanced around. His eyes came to rest on a series of letters that Philmore, in some moment of unbearable loneliness, had carved into the rock shelf above his scooter. The edges of the letters still showed the scars of radiation from Philmore's cutting torch. It was a plea -- and an affirmative -- to the surrounding darkness: Philmore's eyes followed the direction of Eric's. Finally he looked back at Eric. His mouth creased in a sad and distant smile and he shrugged. Philmore suddenly grabbed Eric's arm and began pulling him in the direction of the sheltered scooter. Eric's own excitement made him equally oblivious to the dangers of falling as he trotted along beside the other man. In less than a minute they were beneath the rock ledge. Eric could see that a door had been cut into the side of the scooter and the canopy had been sealed with some kind of material that he could not immediately identify. Philmore led him through the door, then closed it behind them. There was a hissing sound and in a few moments a second door, carved at the opposite end of the scooter opened. Only then did Eric realize that the entire scooter had been transformed by Philmore into a primitive, but effective, airlock. He passed through the second door and found himself in a cave, lit by some energy source that Eric knew must come from the components of the scooter. The walls of the cave were completely covered with the same translucent material that had been used to seal the canopy. On close inspection Eric discovered the material to be composed of some sort of wax or some glucose compound. It was fantastic, Eric thought; Philmore had found a way to alter the food compounds in the scooter's life-support system to produce what was, in effect, an airtight cocoon. The entire cave was lined with what seemed to be light, volcanic rock, easy to cut and move around. Some pieces were striking in their resemblance to chairs, sofas and other items of furniture. Eric turned and looked at the other man with a new sense of awe; Philmore looked pleased. He was obviously proud of his handiwork. The entire rear area of the cave was taken up by a mass of electronic gear. Some of the pieces looked as though they had been fashioned by hand. How? Eric thought. And from what? IF Plaques and stone carvings decorated the cave. One picture depicted the bare outlines of a man, a woman and three children. Eric quickly looked away. Philmore's fingers trembled as he attempted to remove his suit. Eric stepped forward and helped him, then removed his own. They stood for long moments, staring at each other. "I'm Eric Bentzel," Eric said at last. He could think of nothing else to say. Philmore's lips moved but no sound issued from his mouth. He put his hand to his throat and began to gag. Eric moved forward but Philmore raised a hand and Eric paused. A thin stream of saliva trickled from the edge of the other man's mouth and his face was crimson, flushed with the terrible effort of speaking. Finally, the human sounds came. "I... I'm... Cl-Claude Philmore. My name is Claude Philmore." "I know," Eric said quietly. Now Philmore's words seemed to come easier. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. "My God, Eric, I thought I'd never hear a human voice again. I used to talk to myself all the time in the beginning. Then I just stopped. Outside there, while you were circling, I was screaming. Just screaming. I thought I'd forgotten how to speak." Both men sat and were content, for long moments, to feast in silence on the sight of each other. Then they spoke for many hours of home -- the Earth and the smells of living things. Eric found himself increasingly reluctant to leave the subject, to return to the harsh reality that was the planet Jupiter and its moons. When he did question Philmore, it was in a very gentle tone that completely masked the impatience building inside him. Philmore listened patiently to Eric's account of the signal receptions on Earth, then turned and stared at the equipment at the back of his cave. "You managed those bursts of signals, didn't you?" Eric said. Philmore's face, like that of a man struggling to remember the details of a place or event that was only dim history. At last his eyes came into focus and there was a trace of sadness in his voice; he too had found solace in their earlier talk. "It's a very long story," Philmore said. "What I did and how I went about it is recorded in the computer bank of the scooter, although the tapes may be damaged. I had to use some of the computer components for the equipment you see back there. "It appears that all of Jupiter's moons went through a volcanic period, much more severe than that of Earth. As a result, there are many materials here that do not exist at home. In fact, I would guess that the entire crust of this moon and the others is composed of a substance completely alien to us, most likely formed by a combination of volcanic heat and the cold of space out here." Philmore paused, as if waiting for Eric to make some remark. Eric remained silent, running his fingers through some of the fine dust on the floor of the cve. He noticed that it had a distinct metallic quality. "This material tends to bend and distort radio waves," Philmore continued. "Since the moons form a virtual band about the planet itself, this accounts for the erratic radio phenomena always observed on Earth. Also, they make any kind of radio transmission within their boundaries virtually impossible. If you're very close to your target, you may get some kind of signal. Otherwise the signals are absorbed by the electromagnetic bands created by the moons' interaction with the planet." Eric had risen to his feet and was running his hands over the equipment Philmore had assembled. He had never before seen anything like it. "How did you manage to interfere with the signals? What is this, some kind of radio transmitter?" Philmore was shaking his head. "It's not quite that simple," he said quietly. "I don't really know what you'd call it. And it doesn't transmit signals at all; it charges the mountain above our heads and the ground around us." Eric turned and stared at Philmore. Philmore shook his head. "I can't explain it all now. It took me years even to conceive of the plan -- and then there were years of building and planting electrodes in the ground. Working on that was the only thing that kept me sane all these years. "Most of that metal you see I smelted from the rocks around us. Using it, I was able to build a sort of generator that I used to hook up to the power source in the scooter. I then attached this to the electrode system I had planted -- " "You mean you were able to electrify this whole moon?!" "Not exactly. But I was able to generate enough power to charge a large area around us. This disturbed the moon's electromagnetic field and further distorted the signals that passed by from the planet out into space. I was able to compute the relative position of the Earth by star charts. Each time I passed through what I calculated to be a vector where Ganymede was between Jupiter and the Earth, I activated the generator. "It was an absolutely insane idea. But, you see, I had nothing else, no other hope. I didn't dream that it would actually work, but IF from what -- you've -- said, I -- " Philmore's eyes had again grown dark and vacant. He seemed to be trying to recall something -- a memory so terrible that it had been buried deep within Philmore's subconscious and was only now emerging. "You what?" Eric prompted. "I -- it was only a few months ago," Philmore stammered. He seemed completely disoriented. "It was only a few months ago I was able to control the reaction to the point where I thought I could send some kind of message." "Message?" "A -- code. That is, if anybody was -- picking up the interference in the first place." Philmore hesitated, shaking his head back and forth. Suddenly he looked up, his eyes wild and burning with feverish intensity. His thin hand reached out and circled Eric's wrist in a viselike grip. "Your ship!" Philmore yelled. "Where did you leave your ship?! Did you land it on one of the moons?!" "No," Eric said, confused by the sudden change in the man, "I left it in orbit. It's easier -- " He stopped. Strange sounds were coming from the other man's throat, completely different from those he had made in his first effort to speak. Philmore was rocking back and forth, chuckling grotesquely. Finally his soft laughter rose and split into peals of insane howling. Eric hit him hard across the face: Philmore choked, then collapsed into Eric's arms, his hysteria broken. At last he stepped back and heaved a huge sigh. "I think it's too late," Philmore said, handing Eric his pressure suit and donning his own. "I suppose we must try." Eric was holding his helmet in his hands. "Too late for what?" "Don't ask any questions now," Philmore said. He spoke now in clear, firm tones. "We have to hurry. Maybe there is still time. I'll try to explain on the way." Philmore donned his helmet, masking the fine, grainy residue of fear and madness that had settled down into his eyes. Eric followed Philmore out of the airlock, across the surface of the moon to where he had left his scooter. His nerves felt on fire. Philmore's energy and sudden determination had not masked the hopelessness lacing the tones of his voice like a floating, dissonant chord. jectory into phase with the computed coordinates of the main ship and set the engines at full thrust. Philmore told his story in a low monotone, only occasionally interrupted by a sharp cry as one or the other pointed to a spot on the horizon that might be the ship and never was. The crew of Odyssey One had been totally unprepared for the disaster that befell them. Six of the men had been laughing and joking as they manned the two scooters and set off for the planet's surface, leaving Philmore behind to man the main ship. Contact with them had been lost soon after the vehicles slipped into the fog of the atmosphere. Days passed and still Philmore had been reluctant to follow through with procedure and refturn the ship to Earth. He was convinced that the men were somewhere on the surface of the planet, perhaps struggling with any one of hundreds of minor mishaps that might have occurred in the course of preliminary exploration. He could not go down after them; that would have been stretching procedure too far. Besides, he had no coordinates to give him any indication where they might be. But he would not leave them behind to die. He brought the ship into a tight, powered orbit just outside the atmosphere and settled down to wait for the men to effect their repairs and return. Philmore passed the time by running computer analyses of the gaseous components of the atmosphere. One of the first things he discovered was that the great red spot that scudded back and forth across the sphere appeared to be more than simply another, thicker layer of gases. For one thing, it appeared to be very dense, in which case it was difficult to explain why it was not pulled down to the surface by the planet's gravitational field. The rest of his time was spent at the radio, running back and forth through the entire frequency band, then beginning again and working until his eyes grew red and his fingers numb, and he could no longer continue. Philmore paid little attention to the flight instruments. He had computed that the ship could maintain its orbit for years, and there seemed little to gain in continuous checking. He was almost completely absorbed by the problem of contacting the men. After more than three weeks had passed Philmore finally decided that the others would not return. But when he began preparations for the return flight he discovered that the ship had been steadily sinking deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. He opened the portals to discover that the entire ship was being coated with an orange slime that seemed to be eating away the outer hull. His attempts to power the ship out of the atmosphere failed; the force of the engines was insignificant compared to the forces acting on the ship itself. He now knew what had happened to the two exploration vehicles and the men inside them -- and knew the same thing must happen to him. IF He acted instinctively, opting for any chance of survival, however slight. He boarded the green scooter, activated the engines and shot full speed out through the clinging jelly. This initial, powerful thrust had enabled Philmore to break free of the atmosphere, sending him back out into the vacuum of space. Finally he had landed on Ganymede. His first reaction had been one of elation and joy -- he had survived. Such feelings were quickly replaced by panic and despair. It seemed to him that he had merely traded one form of death for another, and he felt he had made a bad bargain -- now he must die of loneliness. He knew that the systems in the scooter would keep him alive indefinitely, if he so desired. But there seemed no point -- he would end as a vegetable, staring with blank eyes out over a bleak, lunar surface and become as bleak and lifeless as it. He would hear no sounds from the outside, for there was no air. In the heavens he would see the sun as a star shining just a bit brighter than those around it. In the beginning he knew he would be thinking of that same sun pouring warm, yellow rays of sunlight on the green and golden meadows near his home in the country. His wife and children would feel that warmth on their faces as they looked into the sky and thought of him. That same sun would be blazing on the Earth, sparkling in the bluegreen waters of the lake where he and his wife had so often swum; it would melt Earth's snows in the springtime, hurry clear, fresh clean water into cascading torrents. Towering trees would feel the warmth of its kiss as their roots sipped water from the warm soil beneath their branches. He would imagine all this, and he would study the dim twinkle of that blazing orb from a waterless world, mired in the powdery dust of Ganymede. Philmore was convinced that he would end as a mindless hulk, dashing out his brains on the dark, lifeless rocks around him. Better to shut down the life-support systems in the scooter and die quicklyHe did not shut down the systems, though he did begin the process twice. Even as the tidal waves of depression had washed over him, his mind was at work, searching for physical and psychological means of survival. chance for survival lay in total, relentless physical and mental activity. He had to free himself of thoughts that would destroy him. Philmore had been the geologist as well as second in command on Odyssey One. Consequently, his first task in his struggle for survival was a thorough, painstaking survey of the rocks, minerals, ores and conglomerates on the satellite's surface. At the end of the first year the chemicals in his kit had been depleted; but he had discovered the metallic nature of the moon's surface and went on to compute that it was this material that was responsible for the distorted radio signals received on Earth. This task completed, there seemed little else to do. Soon Philmore no longer cared to move, even from his seat inside the scooter. Day after endless day he sat, oblivious to his own filth. He felt the shrouds of mental oblivion closing over him and he found he no longer cared. He was uncertain as to what happened to bring him out of his trance. He thought it might have been the sight of a comet or meteor flashing across the heavens. In any event, Philmore suddenly found himself staring at and focusing on the radio transmitter inside the scooter. The next moment he was immersed in a task that would take him a score of years to complete. He expanded his living quarters, creating the cocoon material by experimenting with the food synthesizer controls until he produced a sticky fluid that could be spread and that hardened in a few hours, forming an airtight seal. During this time he had no means of sustenance and almost passed out from hunger. Finally he found the cave, and brought the scooter to it. He had coated the cave with his sealer and pressurized the interior. The last step had been to transform the scooter into an airlock so that he could move back and forth between the cave and the lunar surface. He was now without any form of transportation but he had a home. He considered it a good trade. Philmore realized that he would have to create a totally new form of communication. The germ of the idea for using the moon itself as a gigantic antenna or transmitter had already taken root, but he had no idea of how he was going to go about putting the plan into effect. He sensed that his present knowledge was virtually useless. It was the inadequacy of this knowledge, the necessity for years of continuous experimentation, that freed his mind from the tediousness and danger of idle thought. There were no textbooks; only the transmitter and receiver in the scooter, inscrutable with the impassive coldness of a machine. Armed only with three hundred pounds of transistors, transducers, coils, wires and crystals, Philmore began the struggle to pull his mind back from the brink of madness. It had taken Philmore eight hours completely to dismantle, IF then about two years to master the communications theory that was sealed in its circuits. After that it took him three weeks to determine, beyond any doubt, that the entire frequency band of the set was inadequate to produce any kind of signal from within the electromagnetic barrier formed by Jupiter's moons. Over the years, Philmore stripped the scooter of all components not essential to his own life support. He used these spare parts to build new circuits to add to the old ones, gradually building a machine that was entirely different from the one he had begun with. Parts not available to him he made himself by smelting the metal compound from the rocks around him with his nuclear cutting torch. When he tired of this activity, Philmore would don his suit and venture out onto the moon surand planting electrodes which he then connected to the machine under construction back in his cave. Month after month he would make his forays out onto the surface, ranging farther each time, planting an ever-increasing number of his electronic seeds. Eric knew the rest of the story. Years of trial and error experiments had led to the disruption of signals that had been observed on Earth two and a half years before the launching of Odyssey Two. His last efforts had produced the message that Eric now heard for the first time. H e half turned in his seat, his face drawn into a mask of incredulity. He opened his mouth to speak but Philmore grabbed his arm and pointed to the navigational dials on the computer. Eric turned and felt his stomach contract as he glanced at the dial; they had reached the coordinates of the main ship and there was nothing in sight but the black emptiness of space and the orange glow of the planet's atmosphere outside the canopy. "Give me the controls." Eric impassively switched control of the scooter to Philmore's panel and sat dazedly staring out through the canopy into the void where the instruments and his reason told him the ship should be. Philmore quickly reset the flight coordinates so that the scooter would assume a tighter, looping orbit, sweeping in closer to the planet on each revolution. He set the engines at maximum power and the color code bars on the temperature controls began their slow climb into the red danger zone. Eric ignored them. He had decided that if he must die he preferred that death to be rapid, inside the killer atmosphere. He did not think he could go through what Philmore had survived and he did not want to try. They were rapidly reaching a point of no return, the stage of the atmosphere. In addition, it would be virtually impossible to sight the ship visually. Without that visual sighting, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to dock the scooter. Eric was surprised to find that he was suddenly calm. He was tremendously grateful that he was not screaming at the approach of death, that he felt only a vast, suffocating weariness. He wished it already over with, and was immediately ashamed of the thought. "Earlier you mentioned transmitting that something was alive here," Eric said. He traced his finger down the center of the canopy. Wisps of gas were beginning to collect around the scooter. "What could live in this?" Philmore kept his eyes on the radar but his voice cut through the silence and tension like a knife blade, rising and falling in staccato rhythms. "There's nothing alive on the planet's surface. It's the atmosphere itself that's alive." Philmore interrupted Eric's shocked reply. "That mixture of gases is a living organism," Philmore continued. "I'm sure of it. I've been watching it for all these years, and I'm sure that I'm right. It's not so obvious at first -- but if you observe it over a long period of time, you can see it pulsate in space. My guess is that it's absorbing energy from the planet beneath -- and any matter that enters it. "The organism seems to accept the moons as part of its own system but is extremely sensitive to any other body even approaching its perimeter. Our body reacts the same way, you know; when a germ enters our bloodstream, white blood cells gather to destroy it. It seems to be the same with that thing; it destroys -- or perhaps consumes -- anything that comes into contact with it." "How?" Eric whispered. "I would guess by some dissolving action. It transforms the intruding body into energy to feed itself. The color changes are related to the amount of energy it is absorbing at any one time. I've seen vast sections of atmosphere almost clear, translucent. Then a meteor shower will hit and the whole thing goes crazy, changing to all shades of red, orange and purple. And it starts to glow." That same glow could now be seen surrounding the scooter's canopy. Eric turned away, trying to erase the image from his mind. "How could such an organism exist?" "That I don't know," Philmore said. "I believe the thing to be a cell." "A cell?" "Yes. Everything about it suggests a cell, including the way it destroys any foreign matter that enters it. That red spot that everyIF one gets excited about is the cell's nucleus." "That's impossible," Eric said, feeling foolish and not understanding why. "Maybe," Philmore said evenly. "But when you've been alone in space as long as I have, well, the fact is driven home that the universe is, indeed, constructed on a very large scale." "I know that," Eric said. "But a cell? How could it exist alone?" Philmore shrugged. "On Earth cells evolved into larger organism. Here, at the birth of the solar system, it occurred all at once, on a monstrous scale. Besides, maybe it doesn't exist alone. Maybe like it, scattered all through the universe. I tend to think it exists by itself -- but there could be a larger organism and our entire solar system might be a part of it. Or maybe -- " Philmore's voice rose and broke off in a strangled cry. Eric turned around and saw, far away to their left and surrounded by a murky glow, the dim outline of his ship. death. Consequently he was almost sorry they had found the ship. His old drives and training were returning and that meant simply that dying would be that much harder. Even from a distance, Eric could see silver drops of condensation forming on the outer skin of the hull. "It's too late," Philmore whispered. "God in heaven, it's too late!" Once again his eyes were clouded, and Eric could see that he was reliving the first voyage. The scooter was beginning to slow. "We have to go back." Philmore said, struggling with the controls. The scooter began to turn, a maneuver that served to slow them even more. Eric quickly resumed control of the scooter. He knew they could not go back even if they wanted to -- even if there were something more than a dead moon to return to. They were trapped in the atmosphere. The gas was growing thicker every moment and Eric knew it would not be long before the jellylike fluid that Philmore had described would be forming around the scooter. Their only hope was to reach the big ship. Eric steered the scooter in that direction. The vehicle moved slowly and sluggishly -- but it moved. Eric kept his hands firmly on the controls; if they did not return, there would never be another ship, not in their lifetime. "We have to go back -- " Philmore fought to resume control of the scooter. Eric turned and hit Philmore hard on the side of the neck with his hand. Philmore slumped in his seat. ( Please turn to page # ) back from the control panel of et. Norcriss' waiting couch and his beloved machine with a weary Contact helmet lay idle beside the headshake. "It's no use, sir," he tailfins of the ship. "That's the said. "Except for the bloodhounds same result the roborocket reaboard ship, I get no life-pulse reported," he mused uneasily. "And sponse from the directional beam." yet the animal has been seen, EnLieutenant Norcriss, startlingly sign." white-thatched in his middle thir"A swamp is a dangerous place, ties, sighed and looked into the sir," said Ryder. "The dog could have been swallowed up in a morass, perhaps, or caught by one of those aquatic carnivores -- " Norcriss began to nod, still bemused. Then he straightened and flicked a glance at the technician. "Or reverted to its primitive state," he said sharply. "A dog forced to forage and kill for sustenance might not stay a canus domesticus for very long. Once its primal instincts are reawakened -- " "You think I might get results with a wolf-pulse tape," Ryder interpreted soberly. "It's possible, sir, of course -- " "But you have doubts?" asked Norcriss. "Yes," Bob Ryder said, then added with a rueful grin, "and none of them logical. A change in a life-pulse is not an impossibility under certain circumstances. But it is a rarity -- " His voice trailed off as he concentrated on putting a new tape onto the takeup reel. Despite his doubts he was going ahead with the wolf-pulse check. Norcriss sat down upon the edge of the couch and watched him, marveling at the hundred and one finely calibrated adjustments the other man could make so unerringly in the complex machine without even a minor frown of tight concentration. Ryder loved and babied his device until its function was as familiar to him as his own breathing. His fingers, flickering from knurled knob to toggleswitch to lever to key, moved with sure and unfaltering steadiness. Norcriss, constitutionally unable to allow his mind to idle over nothing in particular, presently thought back over the events that had brought them to the planet. The Ecologists of Earth had raised the first ripples of concern about colonization of Rigel II. Preliminary exploration by .roborocket had shown it eminently suited for certain human temperaments, mostly men and women of the tropic regions and especially the Seminole Indians of Florida and the many whites who had over many generations come to thrive on swamp-living along with their red-skinned neighbors. Roborockets, designed to orbit a planet until all species had had life-pulses correlated with those of known species, had found no wild life insurmountably dangerous to man on Rigel II -- that is, any hazards to colonists could be met and overcome by simple vigilance and adeptness with #st Century weaponry. The trouble was that: "The animal life there is self-menacing," said the Ecologists' report. "A strange sort of apathy seems o prevail among two of the most ubiquitous species; there is no inbuilt instinct for self-preservation. Luckily the beasts seem to be incredibly prolific or they would long ago have died out. But putting a new factor -- Man -- on the planet might have decidedly disastrous reIF suits. Just a bit of imbalance in such a precarious ecology could turn the planet into a veritable graveyard. Life forms on any given planet interlock like Chinese puzzles. Destroy but one segment -- or let it destroy itself -- and the entire framework collapses. And there is a third species which reacts bothersomely to self-awareness. Not that a spider, for instance, knows it is a spider -- but it does know enough to use its poison fangs, to spin a web, or dig a pit. But one beast on Rigel II seems to be confused as to what it is. The roborocket tapes rated the beast strictly according to its level of intelligence -- its habits or life cycle remain mysteries. On these grounds -- two life-apathetic species and one totally unknown type -- we cannot recommend the planet for colonization until a qualified Space Zoologist has discovered more than we now know." And perhaps not even then , Lieutenant Norcriss thought wryly. If his discoveries proved to be bad news colonization was out. He felt himself begin to shiver and fought his unease until it went away. To a Learner, a man whose survival in Contact with the mind of a subintelligent alien species was at the mercy of the creature's survival -- if it died while he was in the unvarying forty-minute Contact, so did he -- the notion of being enhosted in a species which didn't seem to care if it lived or died was boasted two such species. T HE bloodhounds had been brought by Norcriss' ship for the salient reason that a man's instincts were not always up to the hazards of swampland areas; seldom sensitive to danger unless he heard or saw something amiss, he had to rely upon the keener awareness of potential menace in the mind and senses of the animal that was, on such a planet, more truly than ever man's best friend. Three dogs had been taken along. On Rigel II they had, of course, been let outside the ship. Penned dogs grow extremely restive under any circumstances -- inside a metal-walled ship, with thrust, shifting gravitational norms and warping into hyperspace to contend with, the animals had to be kept under sedation for most of the trip. But once outside the ship, something had happened. Something unexpected, something strange. After the animals' initial delirium of joy at being freed to gambol about on the coarse-grassed hummock upon which the ship had set down, they'd lain in the hot greengold sunlight, ribs in-and-outing contentedly, slack jaws huffing to draw air across the cooling system of their tongues, tails wagging in slow, lazily comfortable oscillation -- until one of them had sprung to its feet, a growl buzzing deep in the folds of its rippled, sagging throat. lifecycle It had dashed into a clump of reeds at the edge of the small hummock, sniffing busily. What it found among the reeds, no one knew. But with a yelp it had sprung backward, howling terribly and flopping about on its back. Then, with a strange grunting sound and an unwontedly awkward coordination of its limbs, it had plunged without warning into the scummy waters of the swamp and slogged, splashed and paddled from sight, ignoring the shouts of the crewmen and the agitated barking of its fellows on the shore. Subsequent checking of the reeds showed nothing to the men of Norcriss' ship. Reeds, water, scum, and nothing else. The two remaining hounds were brought to sniff at the area, but they simply whined in bewilderment and seemed to find no scent at all. A check via Ryder's life-pulse machine at the same spot evoked nothing but the faintest of pulsations, those of the reeds themselves. Unnerved more than he would admit by the incident, Norcriss had suggested that Ryder locate the missing animal so that -- by a kind of proxy Contact -- Norcriss might delve into its mind and memories to ascertain what the source of its odd behavior might have been. When the machine found nothing a roborocket had been sent aloft, in case some unexplained planetary field might be distorting the beam from Ryder's machine. Save for the two dogs still on hand (now kept aboard ship for safety), the roborocket's tapes showed no dog in existence upon Rigel II. And even as Ryder had been finding this out one of the crewmen had spotted the missing animal, its fur wet and clotted with scum, moving over the surface of a distant islet in the swamp. Which was impossible. Roborockets didn't make mistakes like that. Norcriss, more concerned than ever, had suggested that Ryder try the machine again, swirling the beam in the area where the dog had just been spotted. And the machine reported nothing. "I'm sorry, sir," said Ryder, turning from his machine. "The wolf-pulse gets no reaction, either. I'm afraid we'll have to forget about the animal." Norcriss, his tone just short of being sharp, said, "You know we can't. Even if I check out the three species in question. Ensign, we have to know what's happened to that dog. If a dog can go berserk on Rigel II we're going to have to know the reasons. What can happen to a dog can also happen to a man, Ensign." Bob Ryder smiled, unruffled. He'd worked long enough with Norcriss to know that the latter's ungenerous mood was the outward effect of underlying fear. On Rigel II Norcriss had every reason to fear non-return from Contact, more than on most planets. IF "I know, sir," Ryder said quietly. "But there's nothing we can do at the moment about the dog. Until we think up some new ideas -- " He let the statement stand unfinished. The choice was up to Norcriss. A zoologist had the option to refuse Learning a species where destruction was better than a # # certainty. Norcriss, however, nodded. "I may as well get with it," He pivoted slightly on the edge of the couch and, lying back, adjusted the helmet to his head and his body to the surface it would inhabit mindlessly for the next forty minutes. "Any time you're ready," he said and closed his eyes. Ryder put the life-pulse tape which the primal roborocket had garnered from Rigel II on the spindle and locked it into place. Then he hesitated. "With your permission, sir," he said, pausing until Norcriss reopened his eyes and cast him a quizzical glance, "I'll choose the worst first. I figure that if you go through the two life-apathetic species right away the third Learning might be a bit easier on you -- " "Good. I thipk I'd rather do it that way, myself." For a moment, his gaze locked with Ryder's. "Thanks." He closed his eyes again. Amid the burble and rustle and plash of the swamp, he heard the technician's hands making final adjustments upon the control board of the machine. Then his mind dissolved into a flare of almost intolerable white energies and --  -- he was in Contact. T HE creature in which he was hosted had its eyes open but for a dizzy moment Norcriss could not figure out what he was seeing or how. There seemed to be water and dull green grass everywhere, images overlapping without linking. He let his mind relax, then, let it reject its own preconceived notions of how-to-see, and allowed the "attitude" of the alien being toward sight convince his mind of the rightness of its alien method. And then he could see clearly. Directly ahead. In three different directions at once. He was bobbing on the restless surface of the swamp among a group his host recognized as similar creatures. Well, that's a help... It was not always easy to guess at the appearance of an animal one enhosted, any more than a lone man without hands, arms or mirror could ascertain that he had purple-spotted earlobes or earlobes at all. But upon seeing the fellows of the creature he would be for forty minutes (although the time might be subjectively shorter or longer according to the host's own time-sense), he knew what he himself looked like. Like a pale-green apple pie, a nubbly-topped swollen disc bobbing on the swamp surface. But a stem of sorts grew upward from the top center of the pie and curled like a garden hose in an arc that took its invisible other end somewhere below the surface of the algae-covered water. Near the base of that stem three subsidiary stalks jutted in triplicate symmetry horizontally, each terminating in a moist green globe, pea-sized, that was an eye. His initial confusion as to what he was seeing had been due to seeing in three ways at once: forward and slightly abaft of either side. But the beast itself seemed to have no notion of front or back or sideways. Anywhere it looked was its "only-direction." Its spatial sense seemed limited to "where-Iam" and "where-everything-elseis." How large an object he was at the moment he had no idea. But if the size of the coarse marsh grass were unvarying about the planet, he was roughly the diameter of a manhole-cover, and as tall -- if such a squat creature could conceive such a dimension -- as an average watermelon lying on the earth beside its vine. Vine... he repeated to himself, uneasily. For that was what the arcing hose-appendage reminded him most of. Yet the creature seemed to be animal, not plant. I wonder if it's ambulant... Asserting full control over the alien mind, he attempted to find out. Letting his own mind's "legsense" take over, he tried to move from the spot where he floated. Around him, he saw the water begin to ripple as his host's legs, or fins, or perhaps cilia, tried to move it. He found himself moving steadily along the surface of the water, while the other creatures sluggishly slid out of his path -- and then lancing pain seemed to tear at his mind's "heart-sense" and he almost passed out. Dazedly, he realized that the vine remained anchored at swampbottom somewhere and that its base was threatening to crack off. He groaned, managing to paddle or flit or ciliate back to the place from which he had started. This thing has no more true ambulance than a water-lily. Just so far , and then its life is ripped away... That it fed somehow upon nutrients in the muck of the swampbottom he had no doubt now. Creeping unwanted into his memory came the ecologists' fear of this creature's self-destructive nature. I wonder if a shift in the seasons or rising waters or some such m stimulus makes the things deliberately snap their life-stems off Resting after the short but agonizing ordeal, he once more studied the fellow-creatures of his host. They bobbed at their stalks in placid contentment, either oblivious or just bored about his brush with death. He had to admit to himself after what seemed an interminable interim of simply floatIF ing in one spot: If they re self-destructive, I don't see how. None of them seems to have the pep to go and wrench the food-tube off at the stem... He stopped his introspection as the other members of the group abruptly began to splash and twirl in growing frenzy. Distantly -- as though the nubbly surface of the alien were its "ears" -- he heard something sloshing through the swamp. Hating to do it, he released most of his control upon the mind he inhabited. Until he was certain the thing was about to destroy itself it would be safer to let the alien take charge. It knew the emergency; he didn't. Instantly his host began to churn the water and to spin in circles about the end of the vine-thing to which it was attached. Norcriss could feel the torsion this continued circling made in the stem, a feeling akin to having one's flesh held between pincers and then twisted. Frightened, he grabbed control of the alien and stopped its thrashing. Alone amid its fellows his host bobbed unmoving. advancing over the murky waters. Like a large anaconda with a double row of Fins running down its back in tapering heights, the thing glided through the reeds, some sort of froggish limbs near its neck and abdomen and just before the tail tip propelling it hungrily toward the cluster in which he hung, helpless, anchored to the life-giving vine. Its short, broad jaws gaped wide, exposing upper and lower rows of flat, incisor-like teeth, curved rather than pointed but apparently razor-sharp, like a scalloped edge on an aspirin-box. Not the sort of jaws that would do much damage to a human being -- the teeth seemed chitinously flimsy, not likely to penetrate flesh, bone or muscle -- but certainly up to biting hunks from the pulpy, soft-crusted surface of his host. Swollen water-gray eyes saw the cluster and the beast opened its jaws even wider, hurrying its pace. A sharp, crackle, then another, drew Norcriss' attention from the oncoming horror and let him witness another one. On the rim of the cluster, one, then two, then five, then singly and in pairs, the fellowaliens to his host were passing beyond the torsion-limit of the foodtubes, and breaking free. The torn ends of the tubes puckered and spurted slimy yellow droplets for a dwindling moment, then fell into the water and vanished. And the attached aliens, ripped from the tubes, collapsed like riven mudbubbles, turning from green to ashen gray and flattening until they lay almost paper-thin upon the water, the eye-stalks staring wildly until the last minute, then shriveling into knotted gray stumps. And these deflated aliens the advancing creature ignored. It slithered between their flattened corpses, heading in unrelenting serpentine movement toward Norcriss. He saw the gaping mouth, and knew that death was upon him. How much longer he could count on being enhosted he had no way of knowing. But death in that hungry mouth was a certainty, as far as its swiftness. Death by severance from the vine was slower, if only by seconds. Not letting himself think, Norcriss withdrew control, felt the host -- free at last from the unaccountable immobility that had paralyzed its underlimbs -- begin to backtrack in the water, tug at the vine. The vine splintered, frayed -- Norcriss, in the voiceless host, gave a mental shriek of horror and incredible pain -- and then he felt his host collapsing, dimly saw the severed vine spurting into the humid air. Then his eyes curled up, his mind gave a despairing sob, and his urgent prayer for that salvational flare of mental lightning heralding the completion of the Contact went unanswered. Suddenly there was nothing to see, to think, to know. Norcriss was dead. the dial fell abruptly to the zero calibration. He thumped it frantically, readjusted its sensitivity, did everything he could to negate the terrible message it wrote upon the face of the machine. Norcriss had gone the way of so many zoologists before him. Trapped in an alien body when that body died, he had himself died. Numbly Ensign Bob Ryder turned to look at the silent form upon the couch. The motionless body that was only seemingly dead a moment before was now never going to move again. Ryder had always known in his heart that it might happen, but a kind of blind optimism had prevented him from ever letting himself believe that it actually would, someday, although statistics on the life-expectancy of Learners was a grim warning that the odds were all stacked against Norcriss from the day he became involved in his first Contact. One of the hovering crewmen, alerted by his despairing cry, spoke haltingly to Ryder. "Has it happened, sir?" Ryder, feeling too choked for a long explanation, just said, "Look for yourself," and pointed at the dial. The man looked where Ryder indicated and blinked in uncomprehension. "But it's moving, sir," he said. "What?" gasped Bob Ryder, spinning to look. The dial was indeed creeping upward from the zero mark, slowly but steadily reaching the point where Norcriss' mind, at whatever spot it might inhabit, would be attaining consciousness. "I'll be damned!" said Ryder. "How the hell can he -- " A sputter and flare of electricity IF interrupted him, and he saw with dismay that the tape-spool, on which the recorded life-pulse of the species under investigation lay, was doing an untoward shimmy. Ryder reached over and pulled it from the spindle before it could burst into flame. Once enhosted, Norcriss had no need of the tape, anyhow. Contact would go its immutable forty minutes and then return him to his own brain if tape, spool, machine, couch and helmet were wrecked. It was an electronically triggered power of the human mind, an extension, boosted incredibly, of any person's ability to "look at things from another's point of view." Once the tape-plusmachine-and-helmet had induced a zoologist's mind to leap into another brain, the task of electronics was over, save for recording what had occurred. But the behavior of the tape was without precedent. Ryder looked at the tape he held, then at the dials on the face of the machine. "This is crazy!" he said, with a short laugh of bewilderment. "What is, sir?" asked the crewman, who had come nearer hopefully upon seeing the motion on Norcriss' own life-pulse dial. "I put in only the one tape," said Ryder, scratching his head, "but Norcriss is now enhosted in the second of those self-destructive species," he murmured, vaguely pointing to a waiting spool of roborocket tape, "the one I was going to feed into the machine next!" "How could that be, sir?" asked the man. "At the moment," said Ryder, "nobody knows but Lieutenant Norcriss himself." He stared at the machine, shaking his head. sciousness slowly, as one who rises from the depths of a dark well of ink, then was -- with a shudder of memory -- fully alert and overwhelmed with confusion. He knew he had been dead -- or at least, as dead as his host had been -- but now he was alive again. The phenomenon was beyond his comprehension. Until he began looking about him. He was lying upon the slope of a rise of land, a part of his body still trailing in the swamp. A few of his fellow-aliens lay beside him but they no longer resembled themselves as he had last seen them. The flat, ashen-gray discs had curled at opposite edges, rolled themselves up, scroll-fashion, and become salami-sized gray slugs. As in most vermiform creatures, the alimentary canal proceeded from an orifice in the forward tip to an almost-identical orifice in the tip of the tail. The hollow produced by the rolling-up of the flat gray disc was now serving as this canal, he realized. The shriveled eye-stalks, slowly bloating during the long immersion in the water, were now studding the rim of the forward orifice, again in symmetrically arranged position. The other worm-things were munching at the muck upon the slope, and Norcriss released control upon the alien mind to allow his host to join them. No telling how much of a strain the period of "death" had occasioned in the organism; immediate feeding might be a necessity for hanging on to the slender thread of life. What kind of metabolism does this thing have , anyhow? I've never seen anything on Earth like it... He checked the thought suddenly, realizing that it was untrue. Out in the swamp behind him and to both sides of where his far end still trailed in the water, he saw some of the still-flattened "corpses" starting to curl their edges slowly in the sunlight, and knew what counterpart to their behavior he had seen on Earth, and seen often: Bananas and tomatos. Plucked unripe from their life-source, they should die, should remain unripe until they rotted. But they didn't. Left in the sun, they continued to develop, independent of the parentstem, the green flesh turning healthy yellow or flaming red, until ripe maturity was reached. If a plant can do it, there's no reason why this animal I'm Learning can't, is there? I'm not surprised at the conduct of a banana or tomato, so I should have my head examined for being so shocked about this thing. At least I can give a positive report to the ecologists. This kind of species is anything but self-destructive. The roborocket just didn't recognize its new life-pulse as the met amorphic state of the old one... With a hiss and flap of great wings, a large avian creature thumped to the earth at the top of the slope, its curving beak looking hungry to Norcriss' instinctively chary gaze. It made no move to approach the slug-things on the slope, but the nearest of these ceased its mucky meal and began to hump and elongate its way up the rise of slick soil to the very claws of the waiting creature. Then, to Norcriss' horror, the beaked avian bent, lifted the slugtiling in its mouth and -- head tilted well back -- swallowed it in a single gulp. Oh damn, here I go again... At the thought of being enhosted in yet another apparently self-destroying creature, Norcriss realized that this must be at least a roborocket-indistinguishable cousin of that next alien he was to Learn. His companions were all gone now and the creature at the top of the slope was eyeing him expectantly. This, Norcriss realized, was not the time to loose the controls of his host. He could only hope that the worm-gobbling thing was inured to cooperation of its prey IF to the point where it wouldn't know what to do if one simply refrained from offering itself as the blue-plate special. But the beaked monstrosity only waited for a leeway of an apparent ten seconds before it came waddling clumsily down the slick slope, beak open and ready for tenancy. A taloned claw slipped in the muck and the avian had to use its wings furiously to keep itself from an ungracious sprawl upon its splayed-out tailfeathers. Futilely, Norcriss tried to slither backward into the concealment of the swamp but his host didn't seem to possess a "reverse" in its neuromotor arrangement. Then the great beak was pinching the soft flesh of his enhosted alien and, with a mental groan of despair, Norcriss felt the peristaltic action of the avian's gullet pulling his temporary body toward death in its stomach -- or in its crop, if its bird-resemblance went into that detail of nutrition. A bird that never dined on nuts or kernels or hard items of aliment wouldn't need a crop. His own lackadaisically clinical attitude toward sure disaster suddenly surprised him. I'm either too numb from the last Learning to care or my host knows something I don't that gives it a confidence great enough for my mind to share... He felt no panic, no fear, only fatalistic resignation. As a wellingup of juices began to lave and prickle upon the tender flesh of his host, Norcriss sensed that his awareness was dimming in direct ratio to a sort of stiffening sensation in the flesh. This time I am dying. I can feel nutrients from the flesh being leeched away by these juices , feel the remainder of my host growing tough and leathery , feel the tip-totip alimentary tube coiling into a sort of quivering nucleus... His mind tried to be afraid but two sessions of complete terror in one day were beyond it. I'm mentally anesthetized. I've 'died' already , today, and my mind is too weary to be scared now. So I'm drifting with the stream of my host's vanishing consciousness, knowing that what is happening is right and proper and not a cause for fear. Because... Then he had it. Norcriss knew why the ecologists were wrong. This creature was following through magnificently in its emulation of Earth-type plant life. Its secondary form was similar in function to that of any fruit on Earth: look attractive, and thus be devoured by animals, in order that the seeds -- that leather-shelled "nucleus" in his host's body -- might be taken and left to take root in the carrier's droppings. At least the tapes back at the ship will record the information for the ecologists. The two species aren't self-destructive. If anything. they're likely to outnumber the other species on the planet , in time -- or their descendents will... Or would they? If one pie-thing became one worm-thing which became one seed, and that one seed grew only one pie-thing via the vine-tube, the race was static. Weakly, as his mind began to go, he gave a chuckle, realizing that the picture was complete: tulips behaved the same way. Destroy a tulip-bulb, and the world was permanently short one tulip. Or was it? Norcriss was foggily trying to reassess what he knew about the sex-life of tulips when a shattering flare of whiteness blanketed his consciousness and --  -- Contact was over. N orcriss sat up on the couch and removed the helmet, brushing his thick pelt of starkly white hair from where the humidity had plastered it to his forehead. "Almost lost me that time," he remarked to Ensign Ryder. "Am I correct in assuming that I somehow went through a caterpillar-tomoth stage, Ensign?" Ryder nodded. "You've squeezed both species into the one forty-minute period, sir. It's unprecedented." "And damned lucky," said Norcriss. "That second species, as far as I can guess, has a life-expectancy of roughly three minutes. If I hadn't been nearly through the forty I wouldn't be here, now." "Are you game for the last one, sir?" asked Ryder, his fingers toying with the rim of a tape-spool containing that third, and wildly incomprehensible, species that seemed to have an incredible lack of self-knowledge. Numerically, the roborocket had reported the third species as being less than a thousand, planet-wide. The Contact helmet, while not selective among a particular species -- that is, one could not aim for a specific member of a species -- would perforce send Norcriss' mind into the nearest of that species. For that reason it was dangerous for crewmen to attack any of the local fauna when the zoologist was Learning. As long as they did not know the appearance of the creature he might be inhabiting they dared not kill any while his body lay helpless upon the couch. Norcriss, naturally, would steer it clear of the ship when he was in control; but this would not always be possible. If, for instance, he had to flee a predator in his alien body, flight in the ship's vicinity might be unavoidable. So at Ryder's query, his nod was only half-hearted. "Here's hoping I don't wind up in a bull-alligator-type of alien," he said, "and blunder past a trigger-happy crewman." Ryder laughed. The crew was hand-picked not to be given to acting without thought. In the military instant and unthinking obedience was a necessity -- except in the IF crew of a space zoologist's craft. There only men who used their minds were welcome. It made for rather relaxed discipline, aboard ship but it brought a lot of zoologists home alive. "All right, then, sir. The tape's in place," Ryder announced a moment later. Norcriss lay back and -- as usual -- was in Contact before his ears could register the click of the switch Ryder's deft fingers threw. Damn it -- damn it to hell... His tactile sensations were sinking slowly into his mind and the information he was absorbing was familiar. Back in his training days, the Learning of Earth-indigenous species was part of the course, and a good zoologist never forgot a host. Vm a dog. I know this feeling , the paw-touch on the earth , the panting , the fur , the tongue , nose, drooping ears... He was on dry land but soon had trotted over to the rim of the swamp and studied his reflection in an algae-free patch of murky water. And unless I miss my guess, Vm that hound we lost right after the landing... The situation was incredible. The tape Ryder had put into the machine should have catapulted his mind into an alien body. What it was doing in this hound? Puzzled, Norcriss withdrew control for a moment or two. Free of interference, the animal romped about a bit on the hummock, sniffed along the ground, lay down and panted in contentment, twitched its tail back and forth -- in short, behaved exactly as a hound was supposed to. I dont get it. But if Ryder or the machine has made some error I ought to take advantage of it and get this critter back to the ship... A few steps around the hummock, head held high, were enough to bring to his sight the gleaming needle that was the nose of the spaceship. After a careful look around him for possible menaces to life and limb, Norcriss guided his recontrolled host into the swirling swamp waters and began to swim it through the intervening reeds toward the waiting ship. It gave him a peculiar sensation, as always, to observe his own body lying on the couch near the hatch of the ship, to see Ryder standing dutifully before the towering face of the Contact machine, keeping an alert eye on the indicators -- to see the crew standing and chatting idly at the site where his body lay in comatose rigidity. Clambering up onto the shore amid the reeds, Norcriss decided once again to relinquish control, to let the animal's natural instincts take it up to romp with the crewmen it had come to know during its exercise periods aboard ship. And as he let go --  -- hate, vicious, mindless hate and icy fear gripped his host. The dog-body, no longer carefree of movement, dropped into concealment behind the reeds and Norcriss felt as though the feet were somehow bogging down into glutinous mire. The fear that his host might have blundered into quicksand made him take control once more and he strenuously tried to extricate his feet from whatever they were imbedded in. With a sucking sensation, a sort of slippery resistance, he felt one, then another, then all the feet come free. But the hound's body had not moved. A glance downward showed the paws precisely where they had been. And they were enmired in nothing. Just slightly dampened from the swim across the shallow swamp, the paws lay upon dry, sunlit land. But they feel free... Tentatively he wiggled a foot, wiggled all four -- wiggled all six -- Startled, Norcriss let go of the alien mind with his own -- and the hound was suddenly gone. He was looking down upon its sprawled body, now, the tongue lolling out of the sagging mouth. He was on the surface of a crusty tree, feeling the searing heat of the sunlight as painfully as if he had been thrown into a furnace. Of his host he could see nothing but the distorted shadow the trunk of the tree but it told him enough to let him guess the rest. The shadow was serpentine, yet possessed of a sextet of limbs and twin ridges along the topside of the spine. He was a puny-sized version -- probably a fairly newborn -- of that pie-hungry creature from his first Contact. He knew now what had happened to the hound. Drawn to the reeds by the scent of an unfamiliar animal, it had been easy prey for the snake-thing, small as it was. A flip of those limbs had sent it, faster than canine reflex, into the mouth of the hound, whereat it had disported its limbs into the very nerves and arteries of the hapless creature, in effect be coming the creature. It was doing physically what he himself did via Contact. The young of the swampsnake could not withstand direct sunlight. They lay hidden in the shadows, or under the water, or inside -- physically inside -- the brain of another creature. It was no wonder they lacked self-awareness. To spend most of one's life under a variety of other-animal forms, a species would be hard put to maintain a sense of its own ancestry. It would have no standard behaviorpatterns for the roborockets sensitive instruments to record. It would come across as a cipher, like a vote of "undecided" in a national poll. My brain is frying... Taken up by his own thoughts, he hadn't noticed the slow softening of his limbs where they gripped the trunk. The flesh was growing ( Please turn to page # ) IF vJsaid. "Good luck, good luck." He did not believe in luck and never had. He believed in hard work and the theory of probability, necessarily in that order. "Good luck -- good luck, Ed." Outside the corridors had been a bedlam. Here in the chamber everything was hushed, sedate. The Senator in the center, who chewed tobacco and called square dances when he was electioneering in his home state, believed in dignity and decorum for these hearings. Even the television technicians were quiet, going about their wire stringing like so many laboring spiders in the eaves of an old barn. The audience was funeral. They're frightened to death of being thrown out. This is the big day of the hearings. The day  go on the stand... He sat down between the company's attorneys. One of them touched his hand lightly and said, "We'll make it, Ed." Without thinking he said, " Wish me luck." Both of them said, "Good luck -- " solemnly. The hush deepened. A red light on one of the TV cameras came on and the Senator in the center rapped his gavel for orders "These hearings are now in session," he said. He had a dry, colorless voice -- like an old law clerk's. "As I do at the beginning of every session, I wish to remind you that these proceedings do not constitute a trial. This is merely the Senate's means of informing itself. Although anyone appearing here may have legal counsel if he so desires, any quibbling will be disposed of in short order by my colleagues and myself. "Most of you are doubtless aware of the subject of these hearings. We are inquiring into a practice initiated by one of this nation's largest manufacturers of digital computers -- a firm which also happens to be fast becoming one of our largest vendors of computer services. Many of the witnesses who have appeared before this committee believed that the economic life of our country is gravely endangered by this company's business practices. It is no secret that many people in the news media agree with them." The Senator on the right interrupted to say, "A great many people consider the practice immoral," and the Senator in the center nodded sagely. "During our last session we heard from a representative of the American bar and from the presidents of the chambers of commerce of the cities of Las Vegas and Reno. Today -- " He paused to whisper to the chief counsel of the committee. The chief counsel said, "Call Madame Felice Dubois." A slender woman who seemed literally to shimmer with chic stood up and glided toward the witness box. The counsel asked her, "You are Felice Dubois, a leading couturiere, with salons in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris -- is that correct?" She nodded almost imperceptibly. "It is." "Do you wish to make a statement to the committee?' The woman's laugh was a quick succession of notes struck on platinum bells. "I should really like to make several. I would need them to tell you all that has been done." "One statement will be sufficient," the Senator in the center said. "Let me make an obvious one then -- about wedding gowns. Our art has given these great study recently -- long-skirted, shortor miniskirted, even the bare midriff and see-through. Most of all we have given thought to the succession of gowns proper in so-called serial marriages. Our economy has come to depend on people's marrying more than once. Our industry has promoted certain colors -- white first, of course. For second marriages, some shade of blue -- then peach or pink, then pastel green and so on. We are not quite in agreement for the fifth -- but it is of little importance. By we've invested a great deal of money in promotion and -- " "And what has been the effect of the business practice under investigation here?" "Disaster! Only two years ago, you comprehend, a third of all marriages ended in divorce, the cultured classes averaging higher, of course. Of those who were divorced -- " The Senator rapped with his gavel. "We heard the statistics yesterday at some length, madam." Evidently the testimony at this point was not going exactly as he had anticipated. "What has been the effect on other areas of your business?" Madame Dubois was subdued now. "A good deal of money spent by women in our industry has been removed from circulation. The divorcee, as a class, you know -- was much interested haute couture -- " "I believe that will be sufficient," the Senator in the center said. "Unless my colleagues have some questions for you, you may step down." The woman waited for a moment, then left the box, making her way gracefully back to her seat. In a whisper picked up by one of the PA microphones the Senator in the center asked the chief counsel, "It's that psychologist fellow next, isn't it?" "Call Dr. Claude Honnicker." dark suit. He wore ordinary, black-rimmed glasses but by some trick of mannerism he wore them as if they were pince-nez. The chief counsel identified him as a specialist in industrial psychology who operated a placement agency exclusively for upper echelon executives and scientists. He was given the same invitation to speak which had been tendered Madame Dubois. "If you don't mind," he replied in a precise voice, "I should prefer to be questioned directly. A general statement might be subject to misinterpretation." "Very well then. In your experience is there a diminished supply of the men in whose services you deal?" "Unquestionably. As compared to a similar period a year ago it is down seventeen per cent. As compared to two years past, twenty-two per cent. That is a very serious decrease and I have reason to believe that this -- uh -- this matrimonial service is largely responsible." "And will you explain -- or can you explain -- how something we have all been led to believe is no more than a computerized -- in your own phrase, matrimonial service -- could lead to this shortage?" "I shall try. In my opinion our own country and every other advanced country in the world is heavily dependent, upon a certain type of man. This man may be an executive, a scientist, a general or a coal miner -- but he is the man who works harder than there is any immediate need for him to work and harder than any of the incentives offered him by society justify. He does this because work offers him an outlet for the tensions a hostile environment have built up in him and society exploits him to its benefit." "You make him sound like an alcoholic," the senator on the right said. "Frankly -- " Dr. Honnicker shifted in his seat -- "such men fairly frequently become alcoholics. Particularly the sales managers, advertising men and other extroverted types. The introverts -- scientists, . for example -- may tend toward paranoia eventually." "Then you believe that the computer service we have been discussing actually benefits these people?" "To the detriment of society as a whole -- yes. The question is: How much can society stand? There are indications that it cannot take much more." "In other words a great number of our most productive people have stopped producing." Dr. Honnicker nodded. "In a certain sense -- that is literally true." "The Senator on the left asked, "In you opinion has this effected IF labor -- I mean the officers of American unions -- to the same degree that it has managerial executives?" "I cannot answer that from certain knowledge but I doubt it. Important union leaders tend to be older than the hardest hit group. The problem has struck most directly at the sort of men who have postponed marriage for reasons of career. This is the rising generation upon whom we depend. I might add that in my experience men who have already made a reasonably successful match have not tended to subscribe." There was a long silence. Then the Senator in the center said, "I think that will be all." The chief counsel announced, "Call Mr. Edward Teal Smithe."  He put hands flat on the table in front of him to raise himself to a standing position. "Take the stand please." He slipped into the aisle and walked up to the witness box. It was as though he were walking through the pews in church again -- the feeling came back across all the years. He had felt then that he was somehow ridiculous and that the people were snickering as he passed. Wanting to turn back and see, he did not. The witness chair was of hard oak, like a school chair. "You are the vice president in charge of your company's operations? Did I understand your title correctly?" The first part, the formalities, had flitted past while he had been in a sort of waking dream. Mentally he shook himself, tried to believe that this was no more frightening than a board meeting. "Yes. Operations as differentiated, for example, from sales or research." "It is your department that offers the public the service to which we have been alluding?" "Yes." "But I believe you have stated to the press that you yourself did not originate the concept of such a service." Tom Larkin had come into his office. Tom was tall and intense and wore a shop coat, often, when he lunched with the Old Man -- an unheard-of thing. He had thrown himself into one of the free-form chairs and announced, "I've got something." Tom was in the Caribbean somewhere now, damn him. Ed had not said, Executive's Itchl as Tom himself might have ynder reversed circumstances. He had not felt up to it. He had merely grunted, "Oh?" "Something that will make this company ten fortunes." "We need it. We just lost a government contract." "I'm aware of that. What's the greatest strength of our Mark XX digital?" Ed had sighed. "Data storage capacity. With the ability to read an alteration in a single molecule as a binary digit the Mark XX can put more information in a hockey puck than most other machines can in a memory bank as big as Long Island. You worked it out. You don't need lessons from me. The Senator in the center asked, "Aren't you going to reply, Mr. Smithe?" "I wasn't aware that your statement required answer. No, I did not originate the concept. You were also correct in stating that I have so declared in the past." "Would you explain to this committee just how your service operates, please?" "From the viewpoint of the customer? A person wishes to make an ideal matrimonial liaison with another. Computers have been used for this in the past, usually on college campuses or by semiserious entrepreneurs with inadequate machines and facilities." "Your program is different?" "Our company has evolved a computer capable of absorbing a truly vast number of facts and a program which permits us to enter almost anything as datum with the assurance that irrelevancies will be canceled out and that we will be notified of any discrepancies. We put this at our client's disposal." "And from this hodgepodge the machine can select a suitable wife for a man or a husband for a woman? Unerringly? I find that incredible." "So did I at one time. As for our percentage of error -- we seem to have attracted attention by not erring." He had read his morning paper, as he always did, in the coffee shop of the residential hotel in which he lived. The story was on the front page, unmissable. Being a thorough man he read it from beginning to end before he finished breakfast and also the editorial it had inspired. Then he had taken a taxi to the plant and, without stopping to hang up his hat in his own suite had gone to Tom's office. Tom had said, "You've seen it. Wild, isn't it?" "It's absurd and fantastic. According to this you told some young man that he would find his beloved -- that's what it says -- in an obscure village in Ethiopia. He sold everything he had, bought a ticket on a jet and IF he and the girl are now married and ecstatically happy." "The story was wrong. He didn't sell anything. If we could give him all that free computer time under the tryout program I saw no reason not to give him a plane ride, too -- it was far less expensive. Round trip for him to Ethiopia, one way for the girl back. It increased his confidence." tor on the right said, "don't you feel that you are treating your computer as an oracle?" "No, I don't. Laymen often do so, I admit. We've done everything in our power to counter that impression. Do you remember the man who went to Ethiopia? It was the first case that was played up by the news media and it did a lot to confuse things." The Senator in the center said, "I remember the case well. It did a lot to confuse things." The Senator in the center said, "I remember the case well. It seemed almost miraculous." "The man in question was an intelligent young Negro. He had volunteered for the service while we were still trying to get it out of the egg, so to speak. We gave him extensive psychological tests, fed the results to the computer and then gave the new tests it recommended. A fantastic number of hours of machine time were required then, but Tom Larkin, who is our vice president for research and the real instigator of the service, had faith in it." "And what, in the opinion of the computer, did the tests show?" "Well, for one thing, the young man was intensely interested in Coptic Christianity. The Mark XX felt someone of his own faith would make the best partner for him. It also found that since he had spent his early childhood in a rural area and reacted unfavorably to urban life when his family moved to the city, a girl from a semi-rural, rather isolated locale would suit him best. In this country there are very few Coptic Christians in isolated areas. In Ethiopia Coptic Christianity is the state religion and there are a great many. This is simplified, naturally -- but you see the approach. Thousands of other correlations like this were made before the specific girl was selected." "The newspapers make your Mark XX sound like a pythoness but now you're making it sound as if it's only someone's wise old tin grandmother, Mr. Smithe." "It's neither. It is a machine for manipulating data. Senator, may I say something that's been on my mind for a long time?" "Please do. That's what we're here for." "As I've said, all of us in the computer industry have fought the public desire to make something supernatural of our machines. But there is one way in whicji the public's misconception is useful. It often makes people do the logical thing when the logical thing is something that would be called silly if it were suggested from another source. If a town stood on the slope of a dormant volcano and the volcano started to rumble and smoke, a lot of the people might not want to leave. Because, after all, the volcano had never erupted before -- at least as far as their knowledge went. But if a computer told them it was prudent to move they probably would. It may be that the man in the street is right to be a bit awed. If awe impels a man to follow a logical course of action -- then awe has its uses. I've noticed that the comman man is often most right when he seems most wrong." "That was quite a speech, Mr. Smithe," the Senator said dryly. "My impression is today that the man in the street believes his country's going to the dogs, and I understand from some of the testimony we heard yesterday that the company you represent has offered your marriage-broking service -- I think I can call it that -- to more than a hundred thousand Americans without fee. Do you have any comment on the last?" known a sick and sinking feeling. There had been a ring in the Senator's voice that suggested. he stood tried and condemned -- of what? Something sneaky and perhaps un-American? "You see, Senator," he began, "when Mr. Larkin persuaded our president to put the service on the market -- " The service hadn't been much of a success. Oh, it succeeded in satisfying customers -- it became better and better and processing required less time with every new client. But there hadn't been enough clients. Not nearly enough. They had all been called into the Old Man's conference room that day and there wasn't a one of them -- himself from Operations, Larkin from Research, representatives from Sales, Advertising, and Manufacturing -- who hadn't know what was coming. The president, the Old Man, never tore into anyone; that was part of his charm and his effectiveness. He always spoke logically and fairly and when he could give the man on the carpet the benefit of the doubt he gave it. But he always had the facts. "Mr. Larkin," he had said slowly, "I know you remember the meeting at which it was decided to put this experiment of yours on a cornIF mercial basis. I had almost said, 'it was voted,' but you will also recall, I think, that only you and I voted in favor. So we did it anyway." Tom had said he would never forget that. "But we are losing money on it. The sales curve for -- what do you call it?" "Program Roses." "For Program Roses has been nearly flat and recently, in fact, has started slanting downward. Roses is in the red and I'll tell you frankly that if the rest of our business were not experiencing a goodish upturn we wouldn't have been able to carry it this long. Can you give me any reason why Program Roses should not be terminated?" The Senator interrupted. "From all you've said, Mr. Smithe, it seems to me your company should have sent Mr. Larkin to testify before this committee instead of yourself." "We wanted to," Ed said, "but he couldn't be reached." "Couldn't be reached?" "You see, he himself eventually subscribed. He and his bride are taking a six-month honeymoon in a sloop. Tom's always been quite a sailor in his spare time, and as it turned out the girl Roses picked for him is, too." "Did you say six months?" The Senator sounded incredulous. "With pay. Our president didn't want to let him have more than three but Tom threatened to quit." "It would seem -- " the Senator was smiling coldly -- "that you have been victimized by your own cleverness." "We don't think so. You see -- " Tom had waited until the Old Man was finished before he exploded his bombshell. Until he was finished and there been a long, pregnant pause. Then he hadn't addressed the president directly; he appeared to speak to Sales: "I don't want Roses discontinued -- it's the best thing we've got. I want to give it away." No one had spoken. Ed remembered that he himself had known a sick realization that Tom had cracked up at last. "Roses," Tom had announced, "has already new contracts and accounts. You don't charge people to read your advertising, do to pay -- some who are interested enough -- but you make more money when it's free." Sales had said slowly, "He's right. He and I have combed through the new accounts one by one, and in ninety per cent of the cases we've found that the decision to swing the business to us was either made or strongly influenced by someone who'd be a client for Roses." The Senator in the center cleared his throat. "You mean to sit there and tell us that Roses is just a sales gimmick for the rest of your business?" "A gimmick," Ed Smithe said, "is when you give away a plastic bathtub toy with a box of breakfast cereal. And that brings us to something else Tom made us realize. Roses not only made these key people familiar with our machines and impressed with them -- it also made the Mark XX a permanent part of their lives. The competition has found that it can talk a long time and not erase that." "And so you have actually offered the service free." "To people who we feel will be in a position to specify computers or computer services as part of their careers -- yes." ber. The Senator said heavily, "You seem to be destroying the fabric of society as a sort of side effect." "Not really." Ed drew a deep breath. "Senator, who's the better farmer, the man who hitches up his tractor and runs it until it breaks or the man who oils and services it and lets it cool off if the engine overheats? And who gets more plowing down in the long run? These men and women who have lived half their lives in loneliness are often thrown off balance temporarily when they finally find someone with whom they can relate, I admit. Sometimes they just want to quit -- to be with their new partner every hour. But eventually they come back -- and when they do they're working for something, not just to get away from something. Right now we're in the trough -- the service has been building rapidly and a majority of our clients are still in the honeymoon stage. But the earlier ones are coming back stronger than ever and I can prove it." He did. The charts and slides helped but the facts really spoke for themselves. Numbers of theses written, numbers of patents granted, earnings of firms whose executive ranks were heavy with early clients. He was no salesman but he could feel the whole chamber swinging over; it thrilled him. When he finished he was wrung out. His shirt was sticking to his chest and his legs felt weak. But ( Please turn to page # ) IF seen it immediately!" He swung around and looked at the icy river that coursed through the cell. "The symptoms are obvious! Copper or zinc! And it wasn't zinc that poisoned him. Come along, Morgan." And with that, he strode ponderously into the stream, pushing his way through the icy water with the determination of a destroyer. Morgan, just stared until the water had reached Mikko's chest, then he said: "Are you crazy, Mikko? You'll freeze your -- " "Come along!" Mikko roared. "Do you think I'm enjoying this?" Morgan paused, took a deep breath, and waded resolutely into the icy stream. After three gasps he finally got his voice back. "Wha -- what am I missing?" "Copper," Mikko said grimly, forging ahead. "That man died of copper poisoning. From the food? Hardly likely. He was ill before he ate any of that nauseating concoction. He drank water. This water." Morgan would have slapped his own head if he'd been less busy. "Oh, hell, yes," he said bitterly. "I bow to a superior brain. Copper sulfate. Iron's higher in the electromotive series. I feel stupid." "I feel cold," Mikko said, reaching out one hand to grasp the grill of iron bars. The water was just above his navel. "Let's test our hypothesis." He stooped down, grasped one of the bars with a powerful hand ( Continued from page #) and pulled. It snapped off some centimeters below the water line. The bars had lost their iron. In the decades that they had been washed by the copper sulfate solution. Elementary chemistry: Metallic iron plus copper sulfate yields metallic copper plus iron sulfate. But the copper that replaces the iron is porous, spongy, and weak. Morgan grasped another bar and jerked it loose, trying to ignore the frigid chill of the water and the fact that both of them would have to duck completely under to get through the opening they were making. "Just think," he growled, "that poor mother died of copper poisoning when there was a way out all the time." Mikko grunted. "He didn't die of copper poisoning; he died of ignorance." his aircar and stood, hands clasped in the small of his back, staring at the Peccavi. "Most suspicious," he decided after a minute's contemplation. "Notice the craft doesn't seem to be insured in the slightest." Richtman nodded his agreement, hopping nervously from foot to foot. "They said a cloud of smoke came up from the ship shortly after they got here but it didn't do any damage. I think it's a trick." "Possible, certainly possible. Although it is unclear exactly what sort of trick. Where is this hole you say appeared in the hull?" The group leader pointed. "About there. Midway up the side. You can just make out the outline with an optical scanner." "Very good. Break out a high explosive grenade and load it into the launcher. Put it on automatic, so if that port opens again it will lob the missile inside." "Do you think they're on to us?" Richtman asked. Goodbit shrugged. "Why take any chances? They seem to be snooping. That is something we cannot afford." "You think they've found anything out yet?" Something moved next to Goodbit's foot. Without taking his eyes off the ship, he squashed it under his heel. "Perhaps they have. They couldn't have completed their snooping or the ship wouldn't be sitting here. We must stop it from leaving." "Yes, but what do you think that black thing that flew in the hatch was? Some sort of spy device?" Goodbit glared at his minion. "You're beginning to babble. Don't get nervous. Whatever it is, it's something that high explosive will destroy. That hatch will open again. When it does, it won't close." T HE outer door of the long-deserted contemplation cell was not locked. It had been smashed long before, its primitive mechanism broken. Morgan Oxbo, using one finger, eased it open. There might -- just might -- be one of the locals on the other side of it. But there wasn't. A set of stone steps led upward to the surface. Obiously, the vine-covered light slits were at ground level, with most of the contemplation cell underground. At the top of the stairs were the remnants of what had once been a wooden, iron-bound door. It, too, had been smashed long ago and had been decaying ever since. A gust of warm air swept down as Morgan swung the door wide. Except for plant life, no living thing was in sight... Two chilled, wet men crept cautiously up the stairway. Morgan peered over the broken, rotting boards, took a long look around, then glared back down at Mikko. "I thought you said this place was five kilometers out of the village," he whispered. "No," Mikko corrected. "I said that' on the planet now inhabited by the Brotherhood the contemplation cell was five kilos away. I am not responsible for changes in design. I take it that we are within the village?" "Apparently. Take a look." IF "Indeed," said Mikko after a full minute of observation. "If my memory of our survey serves me -- and it does -- we are approximately seven hundred and fifty meters from the village square. I suggest we proceed with the utmost caution." "Agreed," Morgan said. He stepped into the alleyway, which was cobblestoned and covered with a mosslike overgrowth. "Frankly," he muttered, "I feel naked without my instruments." "You look it," Mikko growled. "Well, you aren't the prettiest nude I've ever seen, either." "May I say that your figure also would be clearly enhanced by elegant clothing -- or any other method of concealing it. Shall we go?" The street was overgrown with purple-green vegetation that reached, in places, up to their waists. Morgan avoided the thick patches with innate distaste, while Mikko plunged straight forward with a disdain for anything merely vegetable. They both moved silently and stayed beneath the overhang of the aging stone walls as much as possible, keeping vigilant eyes on the roofs. The buildings at the edge of town were spaced well apart, and the two men darted from house to house like a pair of pink mice in a bakery. "Drop," Mikko barked, falling flat and rolling into a thicket of leafy bushes. Morgan dived for the shadow of a time-twisted board fence. They lay motionless while an aircar hissed by some hundred meters to their left and fifty meters over the village. After a minute Morgan eased himself to a kneeling position, staring over the houses beyond which the aircar had disappeared. "Landed in the square, apparently. Fun and games at the ship. I hope Metrak is back." "Damn!" Mikko snarled viciously. "Trouble?" "This bush is full of thorns." Mikko rose gingerly and stepped away from the offending flora. "I'm as full of pricks as a pudding." "Are you all right?" Morgan asked with quick concern. "Unless they were tipped with cyanide, I am," Mikko said. "I've had my shots." "Can you walk?" "Walk, run, or wrestle autochthons," said Mikko. "Pain is merely the entrance fee to a higher level of understanding. Let us proceed." On the block next to the square the houses were pressed close together, separated only by narrow alleys. At that point they left the street and crept through a building to the back lot. Keeping well apart, they headed for the buildings fronting the square. Mikko checked several back doorways until he found one with an open door. The rusty hinges of the closed ones would have screamed their presence. He stepped inside the building and rapidly checked to make sure it was completely deserted, then signaled Morgan. Morgan peered around the musty ground-floor room. "What a mess," he whispered. "And it's damn cold out of the sun. This planet might be warming up but I think there's still a layer of permafrost." "Before we go through to the front," Mikko said, "notice anything peculiar?" Morgan looked more closely. "Someone seems to have ripped off most of the wallboard and even pieces of flooring." "Right," Mikko agreed. "And they've burned them in the fireplace." "Natives trying to keep warm?" Morgan hypothesized. "Not likely. Remember, for them this is a hot spell. Besides, they seem to have removed the ash." "What then? Obviously you've figured it out. Don't hoard infQrmation." "Simple. They eat wood. That's what the natives that clobbered us were probably doing -- having lunch." "Brill -- you might say -- iant. Lead on." Mikko made his way to the front of the structure, Morgan carefully covering the rear. T HE windows facing the square had lost their glass so long ago that even the shards had been blown away or buried under the cake of dried mud covering the floor under the square frames. Mikko kneeled to the side of the hole, keeping carefully out of sight, while Morgan crawled under the opening and slowly lifted his head until his eyes peered out to survey the square. Trespassers W squatted, a silver egg shape, in the center of the field. She was surrounded by the legion of Quindar, who were keeping a respectful distance from her gleaming side. "Tress has spotted us," Morgan whispered. "How can you tell?" "As soon as I stuck my head up she flashed a laser beam into my eyes. Two bright blinks." "Good girl." "I think I'm blind." "Don't be silly, Tress would never be that careless." "Well, I can't see anything. There -- things are starting to come back into focus. Three aircars have landed to our right. A group of men surrounds them. The rest of the men are surrounding Tress. Must be thirty people out there." "Weapons?" Mikko asked. "Indeed. Take a look. We're in the shadow and no one is looking this way anyway." Mikko stuck his head out. "Humph! Rapid-fire slug throwIF ers. Isn't that some kind of projectile weapon by the first aircar?" "I can't tell from here." "Notice," Mikko said, pointing with his chin. "Over, there to the left. Three men behind that wall. What do you think they're doing?" "Sharpshooters," Morgan guessed. "They've got scopes on those guns. Must be hoping for someone to stick his head out of the hatch." "Agreed," Mikko murmured. "They must have decided we're hostile. I wonder how long it took them to reach that conclusion. I'll wager that, with all the attention they're paying to the ship, they wouldn't notice it if two men were to sneak up behind and -- ah -- accost them." "Any particular two men you have in mind?" Morgan asked. He sighed. "I'll get a rock." "We'll have to go around two buildings before coming out -- to make sure we're not seen by the rest of that bunch." "Sneak it is, sir," Morgan agreed. They crept back to the rear of the building and out to the alley. The back door to the building they wanted was rusted shut. "A window?" Morgan suggested. He peered through the nearest glassless rectangle. "No, not this one. Our friendly natives have eaten the floor." "This side alley will do," Mikko decided. He picked up a massive stone and hefted it in one large hand. Morgan settled for a smaller rock. They went silently down the alley to the front and paused, hidden by the corner of the building. About twenty meters in front of them, kneeling behind a large chunk of granite wall, the three sharpshooters were intent on their target. "Sneak?" Morgan asked. "Rush. Twenty meters. Less than three seconds. Ready?" "Ready." They moved away from the building. Morgan noted that they were out of sight of anyone except their targets -- and Tress. "Move!" The two naked men raced into the field, each with a stone gripped in his hand, like a pair of dinnerhunting Neanderthals. One of the sharpshooters must have seen a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. "Wha -- " A stone smashed against his head and he was silent. The second never turned. He slid down the rock to crumple on the purple-green moss. The third swiveled around, trying to bring his weapon to bear, mouth open to shout a warning. Mikko grabbed him around the throat and squeezed, cutting off air and blood. In three seconds the man went limp and Mikko lowered him gently to the ground. "Beautiful!" Morgan gasped. "But I think I'm a little out of shape. I need more exercise." "I'll remind you that you said that," Mikko told him. "Put on those coveralls." It was well that the stretch coveralls had plenty of give to them. Morgan found that the Quindar uniform was rather snug; Mikko found it almost impossible. He could feel the strain on the field of the magnetic seam in front. "Never steal from midgets," Morgan whispered. "Can Tress hear us?" "I should say so," Mikko said. "Tress? How say you?" Inside the ship itself, Tress reported to Metrak. One of her paraboloid directional sound pickups heard their voices easily. "Are you ready to let them in and repel boarders?" Metrak asked. "We are on riot alert," Tress said calmly. "No weapons that can breach the hull are within detector distance. Should I increase to full battle alert?" "No," said Metrak after a moment. "Not while Morgan and Mikko are on the outside. Stay on riot control and let them know we are ready for them." "Complying." Outside, fifty meters away, Goodbit listened, his eyes slitted, as he heard the ship's PA system say: Trespassers warned! This unit prepared for any and all attempts to board. Tress picked up Mikko's whisper. "Good girl, Tress. Now listen to what I have to say and relay to Metrak. Ready?" Trespassers warned! "Good. We're going to get in as close as we can with these illfitting uniforms. Be ready to pick us up. If we're spotted, Delta-gas the area and send Metrak down to retrieve our sleeping forms. No use taking chances." Mikko turned to Morgan. "Ready?" he asked, picking up one of the rifles. Morgan grabbed another. "Let's move out!" X steps of his aircar and glared at the ship. "Why did it say that?" "What's that, Mister Goodbit?" Richtman asked. "That last bit of monologue from the ship. Why did it say that?" "I don't know sir." "There's something wrong. Is that grenade launcher set?" "Yes, sir," the group leader reported. "Set and on automatic." Goodbit considered the problem. His men were all spread out around the field. Two of the sharpshooters had left the wall they were behind and were heading toward a fragIF ment of low wall closer to the ship. The situation was altogether too static. Something had to happen; the one thing positive about stalemates was that they ended before expected. Goodbit's rule was simple: if something is going to happen, cause it! Do onto others -- first. He beckoned to Richtman. "Call the base. Tell them to send out a brace of thirty-centimeter rockets. Use the codebook in case that egg is monitoring." Richtman entered the aircar to send the message. The two sharpshooters passed the fragment of wall and closed in on the ship. Goodbit studied the scene, running a small hand over his round, smooth-shaven chin. Something was wrong here. Very wrong. He felt that he had underestimated the situation, that an important fact was right before his eyes but somehow eluding him. The two sharpshooters moved forward and reached the inner circle of men surrounding the ship; something sparked in Goodbit's calculating brain. "You two! Stop where you are!" he shouted through his bullhorn. "Enders! Disarm those two men standing to your left. If they attempt resistance, shoot them!" A sudden high, keening whistle permeated the air. The man Enders ignored the noise coming from the spaceship and turned. And went right on turning, his knees buckling beneath him. He fell in a twisted heap on the ground. Those around him began to fall, including the two men he had been ordered to disarm. As Goodbit saw man after man fall in an everwidening circle that spread away from the egg-shaped craft, a thought flashed through his mind: Delta-gas! Supersonic dispersion! But it was too late for action. The gas had already reached him and Goodbit's brain turned in on itself and ceased to function as a thinking entity. screen with what might have been a leer on his small, black face. "They would all seem to be out. What say you, Tress? Shall I go down and pick up Morgan and Mikko?" "All heartbeats and breathing rates are consistant with unconsciousness," Tress decided. "The gas will have dispersed to the safe level in fifteen seconds." "Perfect. It will take me that long to reach the lock." Metrak trotted into the corridor and leaped the flight of stairs to the airlock landing. The double sphincter dilated. Metrak leaped forward, his intention being to drop to the ground below, haul Mikko and Morgan up the ladder and tell Tress to take off instantly. He started his leap IF just as something outside went The automatic grenade-launcher had fired as soon as the airlock sphincters had dilated. In mid-air, Metrak saw the grenade coming toward him. His ultra-fast reflexes, evolved in an environment that needed them, took over. He twisted in mid-air and grabbed at the missile as it snapped past him. But not even muscle and nerves trained at half a kilogee can be totally accurate. The grenade, bulletfast, touched the tips of Metrak's fingers, snapped upward, bounced off the hard alloy ceiling, and dropped down the stairwell. later, merely added to Metrak's velocity as he shot on out of the airlock. up, Mikko! hfikko!" Something like a pair of pliers was pinching Mikko's arm, shaking him at the same time -- and none too gently. He forced his eyes open and saw double. "I am awake, Professor," he said rather hoarsely. "Control that little hand of yours, my good friend, or you'll leave bruises clear down to the bone." "Oh! I am sorry." The pinch went away and Mikko tried to consolidate his double-image of the overhead into a single image. He didn't quite succeed. He closed his eyes again and said, "Where are we?" "Nearly a parsec away from our takeoff," Metrak said. "Accelerating on flicker drive. How do you feel?" Mikko kept his eyes closed. "In the past twenty hours, I have been given a minor concussion and a dose of Delta-gas. My head hurts, and my body is still numb. I know that I shall be unable to move around for at least half an hour. How do I feel? Just great. How is Morgan?" "Still unconscious. In spite of your greater age, you seem to recover from these things more rapidly. I gave him the antidote first, but he is still asleep." "Any indications that we have been followed?" Mikko asked. "None. Unless an antidote is brought from their main station, the Quindar troops will be unconscious for another hour. But -- " "Will we need to go back?" Mikko interrupted. "For evidence, I mean." "I think not," Metrak said softly. "I hope not. But -- before I say, what have you and Morgan found out?" Mikko opened his eyes, found they still wouldn't track, closed them again. Then, groggily, he told Metrak what had happened in the contemplation cell -- including what they had learned from the prisoner. "It conjugates with the facts I have already reported by inverse space tube," Metrak said. "It is -- how did you call it? -- a shoestring operation. I saw -- Mikko, his mind still rather fuzzy, interrupted again. "We didn't get any recordings. No real evidence. What did you get?" "Good recordings, Mikko. Already sent. We have proved pollution and slavery. And attempted genocide." Mikko's arms and legs tingled horribly as they came slowly out of their paralysis. He kept himself immobile and said, "Forced labor at what, to the natives, is a high "Not exactly," Metrak said. "Though they think they are." Mikko turned his head to look at Metrak and wished he hadn't. He clamped his eyes shut again. "What do you mean?" he asked weakly. "The local people suffer of the heat, that is so," Metrak said, "and they appear to die. They are taken away to a -- a disposal place. Some of them die. Most do not. Those who do not are removed by their kinsmen to a cave -- a series of caves -- in the mountains. They are taken down deep, where the temperature is constant, and they are tenderly placed with others on soft moss. They sleep. They -- how do you say?" Mikko sighed and relaxed, "Estivate, my dear Professor, estivate. They sleep through the hot sum-, mer that comes but once in a hundred millennia -- or whatever it is. Lloyds will be glad to hear that; it takes them off the hook." "How so?" Metrak asked, blinking anthracite eyes. "The autochthons would have to be rescued if this near pass of the A-# would kill them. But it won't. They're used to it -- it's part of their racial cycle. Probably a very old race, you see. Slow mutation rate. Does the A-# passing encourage mutation or does estivation keep them back? Does -- " Mikko brought himself up short, clamping his lips. "Excuse me, Professor; I'm babbling nonsense. Can you -- " from Morgan's compleat. "Our friend seems to be coming around, Professor. How do you feel, Morgan?" "Mizzabul," Morgan said thickly. "Where are we?" "Well away from the scene, I assure you." Mikko paused. "Where are we headed, by the way, Professor?" "Toward Proxit. I assume." "What do you mean; you assume? Tress, where are we headed?" Mikko opened his eyes. There was no answer. He jumped to his feet and fought down a wave of dizziness. He realized that Tress had said no word since he had awakened. And Tress should have answered his question about position in the first place. Metrak folded his two foremost IF limbs over his belly and looked up into Mikko's eyes. "The lady is dead." Mikko turned and stared at the control and instrument console. The battle control computer, normally just another IO device for Tress, had taken over. It was fleeing the scene of battle, as ordered. Morgan lifted his head weakly. "Tress dead? What do you mean?" "It is all my fault," said Metrak. "I take full blame. The hostiles had a missile-thrower aimed at the hatch. It went off automatically when the hatch dilated, even though the man operating it was unconscious. I attempted to deflect the missile as it passed me and only succeeded in knocking it downward. It detonated against the globe of Tress's consciousness. What you call the main processing unit. It was penetrated and destroyed. Tress is no longer operational." Morgan, still weak and dizzy, tried to rise from his compleat, but Mikko shoved him back down with a palm. "Stay here. I'll look." he pounded down the spiral to the deck below. "Well?" Morgan asked after a minute. "She's a mess, all right," came Mikko's voice. "Metrak was right. line memory. That bomb quite literally blew her brains out." Morgan sat upright again. Most of the dizziness had worn off by now. "How about the records?" "I'm checking," Mikko said. Morgan looked carefully at his control panel, then tapped several keys in sequence. A screen lit up, displaying tightly packed orange symbols against a blue background. Metrak?" he asked. "Yes," the little being said. "It was blinking green and you have told me what to do. Did I do wrong?" "No. You did just exactly right. The battle computer was programed to take off and head for Proxit as soon as you hit that key. Very good." "Is there, then, another brain aboard?" "In a way. It's nothing like as complicated and complex as Tress and normally Tress uses it as an input-output deyice. But it can -- and does -- control the ship under combat conditions. It's rather small and it's hidden under heavy armor. Only a Navy ship would normally have such a thing -- and the Trespassers W used to be just that." "But how would it know what to do?" Metrak asked, puzzled. "It wouldn't unless Tress told it." He waved at the bright orangeand-blue display. "She saw that grenade coming in and had nearly three-quarters of a second to react. Just before the explosion, she fed all the takeoff data to battle control and programed it to act as pressed." "Her dying act," Metrak said softly. "She set things up so that we might live." "You might put it that way." Mikko came up the spiral. "Records all okay. All off-line datasets okay except one, which seems to have a slight hairline crack in the crystal. We won't know whether we've lost any important bits until we feed it into another computer on Proxit." "Yes," said Metrak, squeezing his small hands together, "we must get another computer, of course. But there will never be another like Tress. She was a good friend and I loved her." Mikko and Morgan looked at him strangely -- but neither said a word.  at least he had convinced them. The Senator on the left said, "You give the service to -- " "People in private industry, government, or nonprofit institutions who in our judgment may eventually be in a position to give us business. Others are charged a minimal fee. I'm happy to say we've gotten that down quite a bit." The Senator in the center smiled suddenly. It was the charming, slightly lopsided smile he had used on a thousand campaign posters. "If I'm not being impertinent, Mr. Smithe," he asked, "could you tell us your own marital status?" "I have been a widower for almost twenty years." "You haven't used the Roses service yourself?" ( Continued from page #) In a voice that was barely audible he said, "To tell the truth, Senator, I've had to postpone my trip to England because of these hearings. You see, our president wanted to make certain I'd be here to testify. Marcia -- that's her name; she's a librarian in Liverpool -- Marcia and I have written and talked by long-distance telephone but we've not yet been able to meet." "I hope you will be able to soon," the Senator in the center said. "You may step down, Mr. Smithe." He began the long walk back to his seat, glad he hadn't been forced to tell them that it was Marcia who had requested Roses from the company's British subsidiary. That she had found him. It would have sounded too silly.  IF with your lip movements. He spotted it first thing." "Well, I thought I could change my story a little," Dowles #I said somewhat hesitantly, "make myself out to be a cousin of Dowles or something." "Hopeless," Dowles ## said. "We saw what you were doing and timed our entry when we thought you'd be leaving. It was you who gave it away." Whyteborn was still standing transfixed, staring at the spot where his hand went through Dowles ##. "I don't think your treatment is very much better," he said calmly to the image in front of him. "Your right arm is shorter than the left. Not to mention this." He gestured with the hand that was submerged in the other's stomach. ## looked ruefully down at the hand. "That is unavoidable, I'm afraid. This is -- " "You could have moved away from him faster," said ##. "As I was saying, this is merely a projection, not a real object. The light comes from atoms in the air, which we excite by absorption of tachyons. It gives us a way to transmit pictures directly into the past -- your present, of course -- by using your apparatus." "This picture is from the future?" "Yes, but not the sound. For that we must use the nuclear ( Continued from page #) source you assembled here in your laboratory. We modulate the tachyon emissions from the nuclei to produce the effect of a human voice in the room." "Never mind that," said Dowles ##. "Professor Whyteborn, you must stop your experiments. Their effect upon the gold reserves in the Soviet Union in # will be disastrous, leading to -- " "Wait." A third voice broke in, lower than the first two. Another Dowles was forming and rippling slightly on the other side of the table. "Don't listen to them. The British government -- " "It's time you knew the truth," a fourth voice said. A stocky, slightly blue Dowles had appeared by the oscilloscope and was bearing down on Whyteborn. "These others are liars -- " "Stop a moment," Whyteborn said, irritated. "You are all liars, if you'll only stop and think. If you are from the future you must realize there are alternate futures and each of you is from a different one." "Yes," said several of them. Two more Dowles appeared and were hushed by the others. Whyteborn ignored them and went on. "When I began to realize there were too many of those telegraph messages for me to know which to believe, you stepped in with these television pictures or whatever it is that you call them." "We had to," Dowles #I squeaked. "If you keep on with your research you will destroy our past, the past in which tachyons were not discovered. My present will disappear -- and I with it." T HE rest began to shout protests and Whyteborn waved his hands for them to stop. More Dowleses were flickering into being around the laboratory. The room was becoming crowded. "Quiet!" Whyteborn shouted. This served to calm the laboratory slightly. "You must understand -- " "You don't see what tachyons will lead to, Whyteborn!" yelled a new apparition. This most recent edition of Dowles opened his mouth to continue and then saw the other images standing about the laboratory. He turned, looking at all of them, and suddenly looked very surprised. He vanished without ever closing his mouth. "There went one of you who realized the implications of what's happening," Whyteborn said sarcastically. A deformed Dowles with three feet and webbed hands appeared at Whyteborn's elbow. "Thruk! Asram pluddex!" it said. "Have you all forgotten that messages sent into the past can cause paradoxes? Contradictions of cause and effect?" Whyteborn asked. Dowles ## shrugged. The others simply stared. "Practically speaking -- if you people had taken the time to think about it -- a message contains information only if the receiver can believe it." "Believe me! I tell the truth!" three Dowleses said together. They stopped and looked at each other. "Listen, you dunce," one of the nearer Dowleses said, "I don't have the power reserves to send this picture back to you much longer and I don't have time to listen to another of your lectures. Do as I say and -- " "As you say?" Whyteborn said. "I've already had years of your shallow thinking. I put up with it because of Helen. Just -- " "Shallow! You -- " "Look at this, it's a mob," Whyteborn said, shouting louder. "How could I trust you? I don't know which of you will be my future -- you're all equally possible. I don't know your motives -- " "Chauvinist!" cried one of the Dowleses. "Enemy of the workers -- "There's no use trying to confuse me with these false Dowleses, either," Whyteborn said hotly. "I can't be tricked into stopping or continuing my experiments." "He'll kill us all!" screamed Dowles ##. "Murderer!" another cried. "Helen will -- " "Quat thrunk!" IF The shimmering images moved toward Whyteborn angrily, gesturing. Even though he knew they were only projections, Whyteborn stepped back. The nearest figure raised his fist as if to strike. Whyteborn instinctively threw up an arm to ward off the blow and ducked to the side. He slipped. His head struck the edge of the table. There was a solid snapping noise. His body went completely limp before it hit the floor. The images leaped back, startled. "But this didn't happen in my -- " said one, and vanished. "Whyteborn cant die -- " The remaining images looked at each other in surprise. More winked out of existence. Dowles ## started to say something, then shrugged and disappeared. Within a moment they were all gone. A short time later the original and now only Dowles returned to the laboratory with the two graduate students he had gone to find. He discovered Whyteborn's body. The university physician, who was called immediately, stated that Whyteborn had died instantly of a broken neck and severe damage to the spinal cord. No one could be quite sure just how it had happened. The funeral was held two days later. Whytebom's daughter, Helen, was considerably distraught. considerate; he handled most of the details and was of great comfort to her. The paper presenting their discovery of tachyons was soon ready for publication. The death of Whyteborn had left a vacancy in the staff. Dowles soon moved up and acquired a more solid position in the physics department of Skag College. Some time later he became more involved with teaching and ceased to do active research. Some slight trace of caution restrained him, however, and the paper he had written with James Whyteborn was never published.  Inch by precious inch the scooter was moving toward the ship. There was the sound of a faint click and he knew he had made contact -- the instruments indicated a successful docking. He activated the lock control and waited an eternity of ten slow, sticky seconds ( Continued from page #) for the air pressure to equalize. Then the bay doors opened and the scooter slowly slipped into the dark, inviting interior of the ship. The bay doors closed behind him. Eric opened the canopy and dragged Philmore out into the air chamber, taking care to avoid the clumps of jelly that the vehicle had carried into the ship with them. The substance was bubbling with a soft, popping sound as it began to eat away the soft, metal alloy of the chamber's interior Eric placed Philmore in one corner of the chamber and dashed out of the airlock, down the long corridor leading to the main storage area. A plan caught up with his instincts at the moment he stepped into the storage room. He tore into the stacks of boxed tools and supplies. Finally he found what he was looking for: a large box on had been carefully stenciled. He removed the crate from its fastenings and pushed it ahead of him back down the corridor, racing as fast as he could in the zeroG environment, scuffling his feet along the rough gravity pads on the floor. His lungs were throbbing painfully and he felt a scalding sensation in his arms and legs. Philmore had said the thing outside was a cell, Eric thought. The ship was an irritant and all of the organism's destructive power was focused on her. He had to somehow divert its energies away from the ship long enought to break free. The jelly in the airlock had changed to the color of stagnant mud and was no longer active. Eric guessed that the material had died upon exposure to oxygen. Outside, seen through a tiny observation portal, the ooze had transformed itself to a deep, red color, laced with streaks of green and purple. Eric knew he did not have much time. Quickly, he opened the canopy of the scooter and placed the explosives in its interior, set the ignition timer on the crate for ninety seconds, then activated the engines of the scooter, setting them at full thrust. Finally he pressed the launch lever and closed the canopy. Eric managed to drag Philmore out through the lock. The door closed, just as the portals opened and the scooter surged forward and disappeared into the surrounding jelly. Eric turned to Find Philmore standing beside him. "I'm sorry," Philmore said quietly, "I -- " "I know," Eric said quickly. "Follow me. We have to hurry." Seventy-Five seconds. Philmore shuffled down the corridor behind Eric, straining to hear the explanation shouted over the other man's shoulder. Then they were in the central chamber and Eric was at the main control panel. Eric glanced at his watch. They had forty seconds. The computers set for the return voyage, both men raced to a cubicle and strapped themselves into the life-support couches. Eric inserted the hypodermic needle into IF his flesh and waited for the numbing sensation to creep through his body. Fifteen seconds. Eric knew he had to time the injection just right; the blast mechanism on the ship was set for manual control. If he was not awake to press the manual launch button, they would disintegrate in the atmosphere. His vision was going out of focus now and he had to feel for the button with his fingers. Then he felt the shock wave from the scooter as it exploded somewhere outside the ship. Eric pressed the launch button, and he could feel the engines inside the ship throb to life. The shock waves from the explosion crashed against waxy, almost molten. I've got to get back... He sprang down to the body of the dog. But a frantic fumbling with his living "vehicle" proved futile. Apparently a dead creature could not be taken over. Or his heat-seared limbs were beyond proper function. He was just desperately giving the creature its own control once more, hoping its instincts would save the two of them, when he heard a voice. The alien's mind received the sounds as gibberish but his own mind caught the fleeting memory of the sounds and was able to translate them as the voice of one of the crewmen, saying, the side of the ship, and the metal shuddered. Outside the portals the atmosphere changed suddenly to gradually shifted to a dull, yellowish brown. Eric's last sensation was that of motion. The force of the scooter's explosion had momentarily freed them from the grip of the atmosphere. The thrust of the engines was carrying them home, to the Earth. A series of images engulfed Claude Philmore as he too slipped into his drug-induced coma. Green trees, bathed in warm sunlight, waved flowing branches. A mountain of clouds drifted by in the distance.  (Continued from page #) "There it is -- the hound is right over here, on the shore -- " Norcriss felt the alien tense its limbs and knew what the fate of that approaching crew member would be in another instant. Grabbing control once more, he forced himself to scuttle on blistered limbs down the slope and into the waters of the swamp. He swam rapidly away. The animal seemed to have no gills, so he had to keep its head above the surface, where the reflected sunlight was striking the fragile skull of the beast. There was a shadowy area ahead, a dark cave between overhanging, twisted marsh grasses. He managed to get into it, then could only cling weakly to the ragged stem at the deepest part of the gap, hoping he hadn't pushed his host beyond its physical endurance. He was weak, sick and probably dying. He could only cling and hope that Contact would end before the creature did. It seemed hours before that welcome flash of silent lightning released his mind from the dessicated body of the snake-thing, but eventually it came --  -- and he was safely back upon the couch.   curiously as Norcriss rose from the couch, wearily removing the helmet from his skull. "The ecologists were right, but for the wrong reasons, Ensign. The two species they worried about are harmless. The third is a deadly version of a marine creature of Earth. A soft-bodied animal that relies for protection on the castoff shells of mollusks or even crustaceans on the ocean bottom. But in one respect, it's mortally different: it uses living shells to inhabit." By the time he had finished telling Ryder about the snake-creature, the crewmen had gathered up the paraphernalia of the zoologist, stored it back aboard the ship and one of them took upon himself the task of burying the dead hound. When the ship blasted off from Rigel II, Norcriss wrote up his report to his superiors back on Earth with an odd feeling of elation. For the first time in his career as a Learner he found his sympathies lying with the would-be colonists, instead of the animals those colonists must destroy to establish themselves upon a new planet. His recommendation of Rigel II was conditional to someone's developing a competent anti-swampsnake mask for the colonists to wear. Eventually, a poison, a weapon, or a predator would be developed that would wipe every trace of the animal from the face of the planet. Loss of the snakes might result, in turn, in loss of the proper stimulus for the pie-things to tear loose, which would mean no slugthings for the avians to dine upon, which might mean the end of the avians, too. But Norcriss could not bring himself to regret a single extinction. There was something unwholesome about swampland, something that made the natural fauna just as unwholesome to the zoologist. He found he was glad to be instrumental in even a minor destruction of the creatures in such a place. He was still shivery after his period of death and darkness in that initial Contact. An eye for an eye, he told himself, is hardly a scientific attitude, Norcriss. But he signed the recommendation with a flourish.  IF propriate that I step down, leaving the field clear for a new election. Accordingly, gentlemen, I hereby resign the office of President in favor of my vice president, Hoobrik." Amid the clamor that broke out, Clawhammer made his way to confront Retief. "You blundered at last, sir," he murmured in a voice aquiver with rage. "You should have clung to your spurious position long enough to have gotten a head start for the Galactic periphery! I'll see you thrown into a dungeon so deep that your food will have to be lowered to you in pressurized containers! I'll -- " "You'll be on hand to dedicate the statue to our first Ex-President, I ween?" President Hoobrik addressed the Terran envoy. "I think a hundred-foot monument will be appropriate to express the esteem in which we hold our Tsugg emeritus, Dir Tief, eh?" "Why, ah -- " "We'll appreciate your accrediting him as permanent Political Advisor to Oberon," Hoobrik continued. "We'll need him handy to pose." (Continued from page #) "To be sure," Clawhammer gulped. "Now I think it's time we betook ourselves off to more private surroundings. Dir Tief," the President said. "We need to plot party strategy for the by-election." "You're all invited to sample the hospitality of the Plump Sausage" Binkster Druzz spoke up. "Provided I have your promises there'll be no breeching of walls." "Done!" Hoobrik cried heartily. "And by the way, Dir Druzz -- What wouldst think of the idea of a coalition, eh?" "Hmm -- Twilprit sagacity linked with Tsugg bulk might indeed present a formidable ticket," Binkster concurred. "Well, Retief," Magnan said as the party streamed toward the gate, "yours was surely the shortest administration in the annals of representational government. Tell me confidentially -- how in the world did you induce that band of thugs to accept you as their nominee?" "I'm afraid that will have to remain a secret for now," Retief said. "But just wait until I write my memoirs."  Mtw sufescripttont m # dung if  j '  ' addryss raqtrtra s. waaks la practss!   " V' ( Continued from page #) ample. It's marvelous prose. It's full of meaningful images, strung on a fascinating plot. It has its measure of poetry, and its underlying realities are quite patent, but never dull. Above all, it's definitely SF. Somehow, I feel there must be two Jakobssons: the one who grabbed ( eagerly , I hope) Sturgeon's " Sculpture " and the other one who passed ( reluctantly , I hope ) Plachta's " Festival As far as Bodes strip is concerned, well... it's not a matter of how much sex there's in it, or how much violence. It's a matter of " redeeming literary value," to paraphrase you know who. After scanning Bodes Bump ( pun intended) my Redeem-o-meter registers a cold Zero. Yes, he can draw. The question is, what is he going to do with his talent? No one belongs under a camel's foot, least of all our Editor. And, while I have never tried it, I imagine it must be quite a task attempting to balance a magazine's contents so that it satisfies and appeals to a majority of readers. I just don't happen to think that either Plachta or Bode are essential to that task. Cordially, Victor Porguen Stamford, Connecticut Dear Mr. Jakobs son; Like a knife in the chest; the pain unbearable. What has been done to our magazine? What has happened to our all the years of success and three grand Hugos. Why? How could the world's best science-fiction magazine be lowered to such a position? Is there no reconsideration, no control, no possibility of bringing our magazine back twelve times a year? Is this the price we readers pay to issues of the great IF a year? I wonder... Sincerely, Thomas R. Harper Murfreesboro, Tennessee Dear Mr. Jakobsson, I just received my MayJune IF in the mail and I noticed that you have gone bi-monthly. Why? The only answer that I can supply to this question ey that IF will have to go bi-monthly monthly). If this is true then you should have at least told the readers of your magazine about it, or better yet, have asked us whether or not we would rather have two monthly magazines or #(?) bi-monthly ones. I would have said two bi-monthly mags. Again, you should have told the readers about the change in format. Or do the readers IF are now the best SF magazines published why not stay with a winner? I will not threaten to discontinue subscribing to and reading your magazines because I like reading Science Fiction too much for that. Also the loss of money would not help you go monthly. Secondly, I ask you please tell us something about this change in format. How long will IF be bi-monthly? Will IF monthly? Will a bi-monthly IF be larger? There are many question which I hope that you will answer in the next issue. Sincerely, Bill A ndresen Malibu, California with IF s going bimonthly. We're increasing the size of all four publications and experimenting on methods of putting together the best possible magazines -- this has to do with availability of top material, editorially. Both If and Galaxy are on the upswing in sales since the change of ownership a little more than a year ago and may soon again go monthly. Dear Mr. Jakobosson: The " new Silverberg" continues to amaze me. "The Reality Trip " is a long inward look into the characters and the times. Good to see Avram Davidson back in the sf magazines with " Zon " (and "Zon" has a strength and beauty unmatched in all the other stories in the May-June IF. I enjoy Jack Gaughans work in both your publications, but I feel it's high time you let other good exceptinal artists in. Peace, Bill Wolfenbarger Neosho, Missouri Dear Mr. Jakobs son: "Zon" impressed me as being the first five chapters of a tight, well-structured novel. I must confess ignorance as to Mr. Davidson s previous accomplishments, but I do recognize the blend of skill and imagination required of a good science-fiction writer. It is unfortunate that "Zon" is destined to remain unfinished, the potential is there. I am glad you chose to publish these few chapters, for they stand well alone on their own merit. Grant Moyer Burlington, Vermont We were particularly pleased to have after a too-many-year absence. "Zon," as you have guessed is part of a larger work in progress. We hope to be able to bring you the rest of it. Dear Sir: As this is the first time l have written to you, I would like to say that IF is the best magazine going, and it should have won the Hugo award hands down. One complaint, though ( just a small one), I would like to see more stories by the worlds best sf writer Arthur C. Clarke, as you have not had one of his stories for ages. "By the Falls," by Harry Harrison was one of the best stories I have read. Yours faithfully, Malcolm Wall Lancaster, England We, too, would like to see more stories from Arthur C. Clarke (you did catch his "Neutron Tide," in the keep hounding him to write. Trouble is for the last five years he has been busy with #I , first writing it and more recently promoting the film around the world. Last time we saw Arthur, he was talking about getting back to his first love -- sf. So, let's hope... Dear Mr. Jakobs son: The best single thing you've done since becoming editor was establishing Jack Gaughan as an assistant director. Galaxy and If have never looked better, and the illustrations are Gaughan at his best. Many would disagree, but I think that you should use his illustrations almost exclusively, as you have been doing. Besides providing the best of art, it gives the magazines a distinctive style. Will that be your policy from now on? Best of luck. Robert E. Tiefenwerth Baltimore, Md. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I have to write to protest the lack of quality in some of the stories in your magazine. The worst issue the January, #, issue with two sickeningly soupy stories on the same subject: "If a Man Answers," by Richard Wilson and "This One," by James Sallis. No wonder your rating fell; I wonder how you got the prize twice in a row anyway. Only Frank Herbert's "great" ( as you say) serial and "O Kind Master " ( even with it's unlikely ending ) partly saved the day. Hopefully yours, Edwin Todd Richmond, Virginia For the record, received the Hugo three years in succession. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: IF ## was not one of your better issues: "Reality Trip" -- one of the good stories -- was an interesting weirdy; " Piecemakers" -- I like Laumer, but Vm sick of Retief; "Zon " -- okay till the end, which was quite poor unless this is the first of a series; "Misspelled Magician" -- very funny and very good so far; "Troubleshooter" -- interesting idea, poor story; " Human Element" -- pure cliche; "Nightblooming Saurian" -- ditto cliche. The cover was one of the few bits of Gaughan artwork I liked. I prefer the styles of Barr and Fabian. Sincerely, Kenneth Scher Far Rockaway, New York Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Mr. Hval's letter (May-June, #) caught my interest for two reasons: Canadian readers of SF have up until now been as scarce as moon rocks, and his request opens the possibility of experimentation. In answer (?) to his questions I suggest the following ideas. First, large meetings can be unwieldy and can get hung up in organizational problems. Thus I suggest setting up small discussion groups .which have a less formal atmosphere and lend to freer discussion. The goal of such groups would be to produce a " think-tank " mood where the ideas presented in SF could be discussed, on the basis of feasibility and desirability. While these ideas are being discussed the question could be posed as to whether or not anything can be done to encourage or prevent such events happening. If the mem bers of a group or groups decide they can do something on their own or with the entire organization the transition from "think-tank" to " DOtank" could offer not only an excuse for such an organization, but a valid reason by getting people involved in making Science Fiction an actual Fact. Sincerely, Brian Carroll Winnipeg, Manitoba Learn the seven warning signals of cancer, You'll be in good company. #. Unusual bleeding or discharge. #. A lump or thickening in the breast or elsewhere. #. A sore that does not heal. #. Change in bowel or bladder habits. #. Hoarseness or cough. #. Indigestion or difficulty in swallowing. #. Change in size or color of a wart or mole. If a signal lasts longer than two weeks, see your doctor without delay. And be sure to have a health checkup once a year, no matter how well you may feel. Fight Cancer with a checkup and a check American Cancer Society T the world of the future... #. Tim for Tomorrow. Novell by Silverberg. Zerlazny. Blish. Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Pub. ed. # Take any f I #I Accept only lour book for Only WCOmlnjyMr. Edited by Anthony Boucher #. A giant two-volume collection of great science fiction reading. Over # pages of exciting fiction -- four full-length novels, twelve novelettes, eight short stories by Ray Bradbury. Robert A. Helnleln. A. E. van Vogt. Poul Anderson. Arthur C. Clarke. Theodore #turgeon. Alfred Bester. and a dozen more. Counts as I choice. Pub. ed. # counts as only a single choice! How the Clisb works: Each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and more in their original editions. Club members get them for only # each-in special full-length, hard-cover editions-unless you select an extra-value book at slightly higher price. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your trial membership, you agree to take as few as four books in the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. No-Risk Guarantee: If not delighted with introductory #-book shipment, return books within # days to cancel membership. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member. Mail coupon today to Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York # Please accept my application for membership and rush the I I # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me I # plus a modest shipping and handling charge for all I I . three. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin. Things I to Come, which describes coming selections. If I do not i I wish to receive the monthly selection or prefer an alter I nate. I simply give instructions on the form provided. For , U#  LHl H aij each book I accept. I pay #, plus shipping and hanr Darkness. by dling. Occasional extra-value selections are priced slightly I Ursui k. LcGuin. higher. I need take only # books in the coming year and I uS'"e, ( v toMd may resign any time thereafter. I Nebula Ajrdin#.I Stax The Bod; Electric! by Ray Bradbury. # maior pieces Bradbury's first collection in five years. Pub. ed. S#.t# ductory package. I may return it in # days and memberI ship will be canceled. I will owe nothing. Print Name. City... State. Zip If under #. parent must sign here Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. #-S#  TW Fo Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. tfJ#  Pub.ed Sli-#.   #. Stand on ZanriMg. , bar, by John Bruncl ner. Life inU.S. # #.! Strange Laud, by Robert A. Heinlein. He knew the Martian love secretand it spelled his doom . Pub. ed . .# Science Fiction #, ed. by Wolleart from now. hom A Carr, l-of' a-kind stories by Leiber. Silverberg. Niven. # others. ner. # pages. Pub. ed. .# #. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last generation on earth. "Wildly fantastic!" -- Atlantic. Pub. ed. # . Nigbtfal Other Stories, by Isaac Asimov. # probing tales by this best-selling science Action author. Pub. ed. # #. #: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur Clarke. # men and computer trigger cosmic "booby trap". Pub.ed. # IS. I viont. Anthology of # original stories never before in  #. Beyond the Beyond, by Poul Anderson. # novellas by Hugo Award winner. About scientists. pirates, "loners." Note: Book Club editions are sometimes reduced in size, but they are all full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library.  nebishes threaten again in Song of Kaia complete novel in this issue The Last Time Around Monarch RI the magazini of alternatives to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of your favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us -- and that's a double tragedy. It doesn't take a genius to handle it, either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each #  # issues of each #  # issues of each # Name Zip Code... Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # Issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Address City  State m Novmbr-Dcnibr, # Vel. #, No. # Umi #I f#er Jakobsson, Editor Lester del key. Feature Editor JudyLynn Benjamin, Managing Editor Franc #. Boggeri, Art Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director #. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. and Readers write -- and wrong! Dear Editor, I vay but a mere stripling when  began reading science fiction.  broke in with Amazing, Astounding, Doc Savage and The Shadow. I have been reading SF for over thirty-five years now.  consider myself sufficiently proficient at this and decided to branch into writing sf. I have been writing the stuff for several years.  am probably the oldest of the "new wave" or maybe the newest of the "old wave" or something like that. At any rate, I was pleased at your statement a while ago in reference to unpublished writers. I have looked (unsuccessfully) for the issue that contained these remarks. But if memory serves me correctly, you reaffirmed tinue publishing us neophytes and that you would even improve upon the old ways. This was some time ago and I have seen no evidence of an improvement or a continuance of the old policy. Tell me and the other hungry, struggling young authors that succor is on the way; that you intend to reinstitute the old ways. In general, I have enjoyed the magazines since you have assumed control. Specifically, I envied the ability of Dannie Flachta to write a story like "The Festival." The writing and the artwork reinforced each other. A " symbiosis" like this is rare and I hope you don't spoil it by overuse of the device. John Kapcio Utica, New York Pick up the current issue of Galaxy at your newsst-and -- read Pihon Fall, by Michael Bishop. It's a fine first story by a new writer. I have also bought Michael's second story -- look for it in a forthcoming issue of Worlds of Fantasy. The Winter issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, also now on the stands, features Love Story, Gary K. Wolfs first publication, and scheduled for the following issue is Joey, by (Mrs.) F. A. Davis. "Firsts" are also scheduled for upcoming issues of If. Dear Sir: I am writing to express my disappointment in your choice of Goodbye Amanda Jean for the July' issue of Galaxy. In the same issue, Heinlein deals with the sort of violence described in Miss Shore's story; Feiffer handles it in his play, "Little Murders." If it can be dealt  with so effectively, why publish a story which has nothing but its shock value to recommend it? Thank you for listening. Lois A . Lampson I thought Goodbye, Amanda Jean gave more than shock value. It struck m as expressing, with the directness and clarity of a mathematical formula, some of the cannibalistic aspects of our society and mores. IF These mat minds were Rosicriciaus Isaac Newton Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. copy pf 'The Mastery of Life" -- ligatioa A nonprofit organization. Address: Scribe N.S.A. San Jose, (California #, U.S.A. Please send me the ree book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Complex you are. Earth Society Simple am , an aborigine One of the In-Betweens. Your tubeways and spirals, everywhere. Indigenous biota, long gone from there. I hunger for your greens. -- Buckeye song I H igh on a frozen mountain a naked, hirsute aborigine stirred in his nest. The only name he knew was Kaia, a name given to him by his first mate; in her language it meant -- The Male. His metabolic clock still showed residual hibernation time remaining, but hunger called. Kaia's feedings had been scanty during the warm season, and now his winter sleep was being interrupted by protein starvation -- acute amino-acid deficiency. Enzyme systems faltered, screamed and tried alternate pathways. Reluctantly he left the dark warmth of his nest and crawled toward the pale glow of the cavemouth. Icy stones numbed his hands and knees. He fingered the translucent, white crust that sealed him in. It was still thick and hard. The snow line had not yet receded up the mountain. Outside he could only expect the white death. Shivering, he returned to his nest and wrapped a tattered cetacean hide around his bony shoulders. His metabolic furnace sputtered without fuel. The coldness of death crept into his fingers and toes. Desperate, he sorted through the debris at the bottom of his nest, sucking on long bones for the rusty grit in the tubular marrow cavities, chewing dry fruit pits for a few coarse, bland lignen fibers and licking cold mussel shells for stringy tags. Nothing. The cold continued to close in. He didn't need the ferrous ions in the marrow dust and his efforts had produced little else. Finally his grinding molars cracked open a fruit pit releasing a meaty seed so bitter than it puckered his parotid. He spat out the shells and chewed the meat. The starch promised to rekindle his furnace. Gathering a handful of pits he carried them into the light of the cave mouth and cracked them open with a stone -- munching the seeds with swallows of snow. When the resinous, starchy mulch coated his rugae and quieted his hunger pangs, Kaia burrowed back under the hides and returned to his torpid state. F illy lived at the base of the mountain. Her organs covered the foothills and her green skin covered her organs. She was a shaftcity, one of the cyber-conduit units of Earth Society. Her fifty thousand hive citizens depended on her sunlit skin for its calories and on the mountain's snow cap for its meltwater. Filly did her best to see IF that her dwellers thrived. And thrive they did, for their warm, soft bodies bulged the census quota and overflowed into the Big ES -- the Earth Society that coated the land masses of the planet with a labyrinth of shaftcities like Filly. T he axis tilted. Longer, warmer days melted back the snowcap and thawed Kaia's niche. The crust dripped for a time, then sagged and fell into the cave exposing his nest to the welcome glare of sunlight. He stretched and sat up, squinting. After wrapping on leggings and loincloth he crawled cautiously outside where he stood in a wet cool breeze, silhouetted against a bright gray and white mosaic of stone and snow. The sun warmed his hairy neck and shoulders. For a long, pensive moment he studied the horizon. Hunger gnawed. Only an occasional agromech moved, buglike, in a distant valley. No huntercrafts. Calories beckoned from below -- the twinkling, green filigree of Filly's plankton towers. Kaia started down the crag. His ridged, hyperkeratotic palms and soles gripped the granular stone surely and lowered him the several thousand vertical feet into a richer, warmer atmosphere. He avoided the exposed upper slopes of Filly's skin and followed a splashing stream into a more sheltered valley where he crept into the forest of plankton towers. The trunklike conduits glowed with an inner light of # nanometers which filtered greenishly through carotenoids and phycobilins. They rose, arborizing freely, to form the sunlit tubule canopy high overhead. The noisy approach of a cumbersome agromech sent him scurrying deeper into the syntheforest. After it passed he headed for the herb gardens. Filly noticed clandestine movement on her skin. Footsteps itched. She moaned when Kaia opened a tubule and began to suck plankton. Before she could sphincter down the leak the rich amino acids of the zooplankton were fueling his starving enzyme systems. Refreshed, he munched his way across rows of chickpea, soybean and thyme. Filly screamed when he pulled off a stalk of fennel. Her sorrow traveled down the #-mile-long nerve fiber to Hunter Control. Sucker in my garden. Varmint on my skin... V AL sat at the console in Hunter Control. He was monitor on duty. He wore the neat, camouflaged tunic with the Sagittarius emblem that marked him as one of the hunter caste. A thin, sallow youth, he had just recently polarized his gender and his body was slow to respond. He was still a "soft male." When Filly's buckeye sighting appeared on the screen Val glanced at the wall map. Two huntercraft were out on routine patrol. One suddenly changed course and headed for Filly's quadrant. "Foxhound Nine answering call," said the craft. Val said, "It looks like the buckeye of Filly's mountain is back. He's been sighted many times before, but has always managed to disappear. You'd better put out a hunter when you get there even if the sensors run blank. Might as well try to find his hiding place. He's a tricky one." Foxhound readied the hunter. Hypnoconditioning was boostered, and the neck titrator pumped a priming dose of speed into his veins. Harness checked. Bow and arrows issued. in tall grain while he savored aromatic juices of fennel. The rich sharp flavors jolted his pristine taste buds and stirred up violent parasympathetic storms. Copious digestive juices flowed. Peristalsis gurgled. As soon as his abdomen protruded comfortably he became more selective, choosing only the most succulent morsels. He was standing in shoulder deep kale when he heard the drone of the approaching huntercraft. He immediately dropped to his knees and crawled off in a zigzag course. The huntercraft followed easily and passed directly over him. He looked up to see the flat-bottomed fuselage hovering over an open cabbage patch. Its optics focused right on him. Its belly opened and the fat, camouflaged hunter dropped out, swinging on a cable harness. Kaia saw the deadly longbow. The hunter's dark glasses gave his pasty face a skull-like appearance. Fear gripped the aborigine's chest. He curled up and went cold. The hunter stumbled in the soft plants, clumsy feet crushing calories. The harness released him. He blinked around at the unfamiliar shapes. He had never been Outside before. The helmet's tinted goggles protected him from the wild colors and coveralls shielded against actinic radiations. This was sunlight, and his pigment-poor protoplasm could be quickly damaged. His detector indicated several heat sourcesin the vicinity. Their size, shape and relative temperature could be calculated from the readout, but the hunter's drugfogged brain pushed him into a tracking frenzy. He nocked his arrow and blundered off through the vegetable tangle toward an infrared point. A few moments later he was standing before Filly's exhaust louvers. Underfoot the plants had been browned and stunted by the city's warm, fetid breath. His glasses clouded in the condensate. Gasping for breath he stumbled back and sat down. Foxhound IX watched Kaia's image fade until it matched the surrounding vegetables. IF "Our quarry has died," reported the craft. Val had seen the buckeye fade, but he remained skeptical. "The hunter hasn't yet had a shot at it." Shock, fear or heart attack could have finished the buckeye but who could be sure? "Can't you get that hunter back to examine the body?" "He's in the tracking frenzy. I won't be able to break into his fugue state until after he makes his kill. His titrator is set on seventytwo hours." Val scowled through the communicator. "Well, you can't put down another hunter or they'd probably end up hunting each other. Let the hunt continue. If that buckeye is alive he may come out of hiding." Foxhound returned to routine patrol in the vast gardens of the flats. Val studied the screens for another hour before stretching out on his cot for the midshift rest. T welve hours later the hunter began to slow down. He was standing, blurry-eyed, on the bank above Filly's effluent grating, watching the warm, uriniferous fluids swirl off into the canal system. A cloud of gnats hung in the vapors around his head. During the night he had examined every heat source on Filly's skin. All had been the city's own appendages. Now the hunter dozed on his feet. A jolt of Speed was pumped into his jugular. His eyes opened wide but unfocused. His detector indicated a warm body moving along the bank of the canal. He nocked his arrow and crept off, tracking an earlymorning agromech on its way to the fields. slowly. The long hours of silence had relaxed his hibernation reflex and his metabolism reheated. He peered from the tall grain. An orange dawn. This was day two for the hunter. There was still danger. Kaia dashed into an orchard of sweet-thing trees and picked one of the tart juicy fruits. He listened. Filly's gratings and louvers trembled. A distant agromech growled at some irritant in the soil. No hovercraft. Kaia began to run through the trees. He followed the orchard for several miles, leaving Filly's skin and moving onto the neighboring city's cultivated surface. He knew he must put as many miles as possible between himself and the hunter. For the next two days he would be tracked. He munched on the sweet-thing and trotted toward the canal. The first arrow kicked him in the right femur, pinning his loincloth to his upper thigh. The impact bent him over and threw him down onto the grassy bank. He saw the hunter approaching from below the bank. A second arrow was being set to the bowstring. Kaia tugged on the shaft. Bloody shreds of loincloth moved deep in the wound but the broad hunting barbs held firm in the quadriceps muscles. He stumbled to his feet and tried to run but the three-foot shaft vibrated and grated painfully against deep nerves and bone chips. The second arrow kicked him under the right shoulder blade. It thrust painlessly through the soft tissues of his right lung. He looked down and saw the wet, red barbs protruding oddly from the middle of his chest. Grass hit him in the face. Val went down to the garage to watch Foxhound IX come in. The faithful old machine nodded to him as it settled into its bay. Service robots stood by while Mediattendants rushed up to check on the hunters. Three stretchers were carried out. "All three came back -- a good hunt," said Val. Foxhound answered, "Not too bad. Took a trophy near Filly's mountain -- a nice young buck." Val watched the attendants work on the hunters. Two seemed strong enough, just dazed; probably just delayed effects of their Molecular Reward. The third was almost dead. They hooked him to life support and his face pinked up a little. "What's his problem?" Val asked coldly. "Just exhaustion. He was the one who took the trophy. Was tracking for a bit over twenty-four hours. He'll be fine in a few days," said the attendant, watching the life-support console strapped to the hunter's chest. The stretchers were carried off. Val crawled into Foxhound's cabin. It was a mess. Rubbish and offal filled the corners. Stains marred the fittings. A trophy cube sat in the freeze-drier. He picked it up. "Might as well take this on back to Hunter Control till the attendants bring him around. Nice trophy. Did you see him take it?" "No," said Foxhound. "But the carcass was stretched out on a canal bank when I picked up the hunter. Like I said before -- a nice young buck. You'll see him when you review the optic records. I've already given the coordinates to Sampler and the sweeper robot. Should have the site cleaned up later today." Val nodded and carried the trophy back to his office. shaft floor, elbowing his way around in the dense crowd, searching for a jumper. Steady streams of citizens flowed -- some formed stationary queues before the sluggish dispensers. Feeling something irregular underfoot. Sampler shouted for more working space. "Back up numbdumbs," he said and waved the needle-point aspirator gun menacingly. The crowd parted. What Sampler saw unnerved him a little. The pulped body of the jumpersuicide wore a retirement tunic. The bone displacement indicated a fall of between one hundred and three hundred feet. Half a day under the apathetic crowd had pressed out most of the body fluids. Sampler pulled the sensor cord out of his belt analyzer, shrugged and replaced it. Useless to test this one. He held up the gun and set the drum on brain. Then he pointed the needle at the crepitant skull and squeezed the trigger. The gun jumped and the first vial turned gray. Vial two, heart. Needle to chest. Jump. Red vial. Vial three, lungs. He moved quickly through the needle sampling until the eight vials were full. Several times the crowd closed in on him and he had to struggle to keep from being trampled. As he moved away upspiral he clicked out the full drum and reloaded his gun with empties. A bulky sweeper moved past him to suck up the jumper. Near the top of the spiral the sweeper caught up with him. Its bag bulged with a hundred pounds of remains. "Better empty yourself," said Sampler. "You have a pickup Outside." While the machine vomited down a digester chute Sampler rested against the spiral railing. IF Below he saw the salt-and-pepper crowd. He and the sweeper moved on upspiral. In the garage of the shaftcap Sampler set his gun in the sweeper's appendage and tested the remote controls on one of the garage wall units. Through the screen he saw with the sweeper's optics and felt with the sweeper's sensors. A few agromechs and repair robots gathered around -- curious. "Any time you're ready," he said. The garage door opened and the soft-wheeled sweeper rolled out into the bright, sunlit garden with its variety of colors and bizarre vegetable shapes. II Hunter Control and lowered his heavy frame carefully into his seat. His console blinked at him and filled out a flimsy printout to bring him up to date. Ignoring it, he arranged the folds of his tunic over his expansive belly and reached under the seat for his sack of split bamboo. He lowered his weaving into a pot of warm water to soften it and sipped on his high calorie drink while he waited. Behind him Val snored on his cot. Unexpectedly the screen focused on the anxious face of Sampler in the garage. "Monitor on duty?" asked the face. Old Walter glanced at Val's cot and whispered: "M.O.D. here. What is it?" The Sampler held up a redbrown arrow and a handful of purple, jelly-like clots and said, "The carcass is gone." Walter pursed his fat lips and set down his weaving. Casually he picked up the flimsy to see what carcass they were talking about. Sampler continued to jump around nervously. Val sat up to hear the shaking report continue. "All the sweeper found were these two arrows and the clots. One arrow is broken. There was no sign of -- " Val's whining voice cut in: "Now what went wrong? Do I have to do everything myself?" He jumped off his cot and rushed angrily to his console. Walter shook his head slowly. Polarization of his gender had certainly made Val irritable. "Those are blood clots?" Val challenged. Sampler looked at the inch-thick gobs of purple-red jelly. They looked nothing like the watery pink stains around jumpers. Walter, who had finished the flimsy, answered Val. "Blood clots? Could be. Have him send a vial of the stuff down for analysis. You never know what you'll find if you start examining these buckeyes. Any idea of what happened to the carctiss?" Sampler shook his head. Val asked insultingly, "Are you sure you were in the right area?" "Had the optics of the kill to go by. Found the arrows and blood. Yes, Fm sure," said Sampler. "Then I suppose he just got up and walked off -- or something came out of the canal and ate him?" Val turned off his screen abruptly. Walter tried to smile at the Sampler. "Just send us a vial of clot -- and -- thanks a lot." He signed off and adjusted his tentlike tunic. "Might as well go over those optic records ourselves, Val. Maybe the wounds weren't so bad." Later the tech came up from the lab with the trophy cube and vial. They all reviewed the optics of the kill. The tech said, "We've projected these wounds into our #-D mannequins and they look fatal. The arrow in the chest entered off to the right. It crossed the hilum of the right lung where most of the big vessels are. Then it came out the sternum. Without immediate surgery he should bleed out quickly -- in less than an hour probably. The torn lung would collapse also -- suffocation. The thigh wound doesn't seem to bleed much in the records. Probably missed the femoral artery. But it is a solid hit, and any attempt to pull out the barbs would result in significant soft-tissue damage. No, gentlemen. Your buckeye did not get up and walk away." "I suppose that still leaves the meat-eaters. The cetaceans are supposed to be plant-eaters -- but there is always the possibility of an aquatic buckeye. They're known cannibals," said old Walter. "Did you learn anything from the trophy?" The tech glanced at his printout. "Well the absence of Barr bodies and the presence of carotenoids fit with a buckeye male. Barr bodies indicate the female X chromosome and the carotenoids raw vegetable diet -- you know. We were able to reconstitute some blood from the vessels in the trophy. Freeze-drying preserves it quite well. We kept it from clotting by oxalating off the calcium. The clotting times for the trophy serum were twice as fast as for our standard citizen. When we added calcium it clotted in a hundred and fifty seconds. You know that our normals are around four hundred seconds." "The buckeye must have been very sick," said Val. "Yes. His hemoglobin, as near as we can tell, was three times normal." Walter picked up his wickerwork and watched the replay of the carried the victim closer at a smooth trot. Bright red blood flowed from the first wound. Walter studied the buckeye's wildIF eyed, vigorous efforts to remove the arrow and run. "He doesn't seem very weak," Walter suggested. "No, he doesn't," admitted the tech. "But for these results to be anywhere near normal -- he'd almost have to be an entirely different species." "Well, isn't he?" Val asked sharply. The tech smiled and began to quote from the ESbook: " 'Citizens have many biped ancestors in the evolutionary tree. The taxonomy of these fossil hominids is still controversial. Surface dwellers such as Homo leakeyi and Homo sapiens may not have been in the main stream of evolution, for their collective efforts were limited.' " "And the buckeyes?" asked Val. "Just living fossil hominids," said the tech. "The species designation is hard to justify for a life form that is extinct." "But they're not extinct. We just killed one last night." Walter smiled. "I think what the tech means -- and what the ESbook teaches -- is that the buckeye has been effectively displaced. Like most of the other useless life forms on the planet, he has been crowded out by the more efficient Big ES. There may be a few random throwbacks occurring in those citizens who carry the defective gene -- but not in significant numbers. Certainly not enough to reproduce themselves effectively." "Living fossils," said Val. "Too bad we can't spare calories and quarters for a zoo. I'd like to study one." Walter returned to his weaving saying, "Impossible. From what I understand they need ten or twenty times the living quarters of a citizen. Anyway, they take badly to captivity. If you lock them up they die or escape." Val and the tech looked at each other, puzzled. "Mind if I take the trophy back to the lab? There a few more comparisons I'd like to make," said the tech. "Go ahead," Val said absently. reflex hibernation. He had tried several times before, but the pains set off alarms that triggered the reflex and cooled him again. He remembered a glimpse of the longhaired coweye pressing wooden pegs into his thigh wound to widen the wound and engage the barbs so that the arrow could be withdrawn. Her soft face and bright eyes lingered in his cooling memory molecules as he slept. She had snapped off the arrow head protruding from his sternum and had pulled out the shaft. She had also tended his other injuries, caused by the hunter's trophy hunger. The wounds did not bleed. To carry his sinewy body into the canal and float it -- face up -- several miles to her little nest in the weedy bank had been simple. She bathed and dressed the wounds to lessen the pains and untrigger his hibernation. When he opened his eyes she forced broth into him -- rich mussel meat and barley. He would need all his strength very quickly, for she was in her follicular phase. She needed a mate. For three weeks she fed him hot food and warmed him with her body at night -- but he had not recovered enough to mate. During the fourth week she went luteal and left him. He ate grains and gained strength from the sun -- always remaining below the silhouette of the bank. In two weeks she returned and it was hot food and warm nights again until her ovaries completed another cycle. They mated in their sixth week. She drove him out during the seventh. For several months Hunter Control was very quiet. Thousands of square miles of Orange Sector gardens flourished, were harvested and flourished again without a single buckeye sighting. An occasional pile of chewed and charred bones was reported along the canals. Huntercraft patroled and put out hunters on possible spoor -- and found nothing. "You'd think with Jupiter in Sagittarius we'd have better hunting," Val said in one of his rare light moments. Walter frowned. "Just joking," Val said. After a few minutes of strained silence Walter relaxed and said, "I know. But it isn't very funny. I've been here in Hunter Control ten years. Those buckeyes must watch the planets pretty closely. They seem to know crop and weather cycles better than we do. They literally sleep under the stars. If Jupiter in Sagittarius is good for the hunter it is obviously bad for the hunted. That may be exactly why we haven't had any sightings. They're in hiding." "If that's true we might as well put Hunter Control on standby and do something useful. Jupiter is going to be there for quite a while." Hunter Control's meek brain argued, "But astrology is not logical. Standby isn't warranted." "You're just afraid of being lonely," said Walter. "It doesn't matter if it is illogical. If the buckeyes follow it and stay in hiding we might as well use the time to overhaul the huntercraft. You won't be alone. Tinkers will be in the garage. You can even stay on full alert if you prefer." "I prefer," said the meek. "While your at it you might as well keep an eye on the lesser planets for a favorable aspect that might bring out the buckeyes. Then we might be able to get the jump on them." At the end of the shift Walter returned to his family-#. He invited IF Val with the usual: "We can always use an extra soul in the meld." Val declined. "Thanks -- but I'm going between walls on a rat hunt. I'll save you some flavored calories if the catch is good." They went their separate ways. Val had strong feelings about the meld. Rubbing souls with anyone irritated him. He clashed with polarized males and females and the neuters were just too bland to waste time with. Walter, on the other hand, enjoyed his family-#. He accepted ritual hugs from female Bitter and talked to Jo Jo and Busch about their jobs in the garage. Neutral Arthur painted murals on their walls and arranged family entertainment. V AL returned to his cubicle and took his rat-hunting gear out of his locker. The coveralls, soft shoes and heavy gloves were well worn. He had taken many extra calories from the dark spaces between the city's organs. He changed the filters in the dust mask and checked the power in the head lamp. Picking up the anoxic gas bag he started for the mid level of the spiral. Light from the access grating guided him for a while. The first thing he saw was a ring of four dry skeletons -- "mushrooms" whose serotonin metabolism had been displaced by Molecular Reward. "Four mushrooms -- level thirtyfive," he said into his wrist communicator. The city answered: "Where?" Val tapped the flat beam with his foot. Solid. "A weight-bearing strut," he said. "But they've skeletonized. Sampling isn't indicated." He moved on to other tubular and spherical structures. Some hollow and flexible. Others warm and pulsing with fluids. All were caked with thick, spongy dust which festooned like Spanish moss. Deep, snakelike trails ran through the dust. Rat droppings were everywhere. He flashed his light around. Beady eyes winked back. "Lots of rats down here. City." "Many of my citizens are reincarnationists and don't eat meat," said the city. "You'll find the nests under my membrane filters. You're on the right level. Keep going." He crawled under whistling air conduits and then stood. Using heavy cables for handholds, he walked across a narrow stiff pipe. He flashed his light down. The blackness seemed bottomless. Only ah occasional cobweb caught his beam. Ahead he saw one of the city's organs -- a sphere about thirty yards in diameter with a medusa head of flexibles. It was warm and dry. He pressed his head against it. Silence. "Found one of your energy organs," he said. anatomy charts. "Membrane filters are ten degrees clockwise," said the city. Val shined his light in that direction. Ten degrees was many yards this far out from shaft central. He moved across one of the larger tubes. It was hollow and he heard voices and movements inside -- a crawlway. Adult rats became more numerous. The larger ones remained stubbornly in his path until he was practically stepping on them. He didn't try to catch them. They weren't too tasty and they could probably bite through his gloves. The sweet stink of the rat nests hit him before he saw the huge cool sphere of the membrane filters. The sweat of the city condensed on its outer walls and streaked down to water the nests in the struts below. The hum of the pumps tickled his feet as he approached. He released the nitrogen into his bag as he thrust his gloved hand into the first nest. The soft young rats were probably expecting mother with food. They swarmed all over his hand and were easily removed and placed into the bag, where their squeaking ceased. He moved from nest to nest until his bag weighed almost half as much as he did. Kicking a large rat off his shoe, he asked the city where the nearest access hatch was. After a pause he was directed back along the crawlway. He dropped into the crawlway in a shower of sooty dust. His bag balanced on his shoulders, he tracked the black downspiral to Watcher's quarters at shaft base, where he stopped to pay his tithe. "Nice hunting today," he said. Watcher rubbed his hands together when he saw all the fresh meat. He and Val warmed up the press and threw the bouncing little bodies inside. "Six hundred before press and three hundred after?" asked Watcher, setting the controls. "Fine with me," said Val. He gestured toward the refresher. The Watcher nodded him inside. The air-water laminar flow cleaned his gear while he undressed. He took a clean issue tissue tunic from the wall dispenser. The sounds of frying and the smell of scorched fur filled the room while he dressed. The press fell with a loud thump that shook the room. Odors of a high protein bake brought out the Watcher's family-#. "Calories for the meld tonight," said Watcher clapping his hands and shooing the six young neuters back into the living quarters. "Flavored calories." The press lifted and Val began scooping the brown and black wafers into his bag. They were still hot. He stopped and blew on his fingers. Watcher used a spatula to pile the share on a large platter. He carried it into his living quarters. Val heard the wet, smacking sounds of an evening meldmeal. Pressed rat was a delicacy. "Flavors are good for the soul," mumbled Val as he started off toward Walter's quarters. B itter met him at the door and immediately began to fondle the heavy bag of pressed rat. Val frowned her away. "Where's Walter?" he asked. "Back here," Walter shouted from his cubicle. Val glanced around the spacious thirty-foot living room. There was some advantage to a family-#. Space was pooled. But your personal cubicle was that much smaller. He walked back to Walter's ten-foot room. "You're a Dabber?" Val exclaimed. Walter smiled. "Dirt-AdobeBamboo. Yes, I guess I am. Come in. Have a seat." The cot and chair were woven bamboo. Dirt covered most of the floor -- not greasy, black soot from the city's air vents but red-brown clay. Soil. Adobe bricks were stacked halfway up one wall like hoarded gold bars. Val sat carefully on the edge of the chair. It squeaked. "You're just in time for the Changing Of The Dirt Ceremony," Walter said. He went to a pot in the corner and lifted up a circular piece of crabgrass sod. The soil underneath smelled of humus, bugs and worms. "Purified dirt." He swept up the old dry dirt from the floor and placed it on the ceremonial bamboo scoop. Then he dumped the pot of sticky black soil and spread it around reverently, picking up an occasional earthworm or sowbug and dropping it back into the pot... Then he poured IF the old dry dirt from the scoop into the pot, added water and replaced the circular piece of crabgrass sod. Val watched the fat old man walk barefoot in his personal mud pie. "You don't actually believe all that Dabber nonsense, do you?" Walter smiled tolerantly. "It isn't a matter of faith -- it's statistics. For the past four thousand years, as long as our records are accurate, Dirt-Adobehas protected men's minds. Inappropriate Activity just doesn't occur among Dabbers." Val held up his hand. "I know what's inappropriate -- biologically -- but you crowd any species and mate and offspring. It's nature's way of controlling a species that is too successful. The only time Man was safe from it was during the neolithic cultures when deaths came from a hostile environment." Walter pulled a pair of sandals on his fat dusty feet. "It's more than just nature's selection of the fit. Our Dabber ranks are full of I.A. victims. If we can catch them early they're salvageable. Some have made suicide gestures before we get them. We smear mud on them, dump dirt in their rooms and teach them the rituals with adobe and bamboo. Salvageable." "Occupational therapy?" "Maybe. But we're boasting a hundred percent protection against I.A. Do you know what the Psych Team's cure rate is? Terrible." "Statistics," Val said. "I know Psych sends the I.A. to suspension -- but the Dabber census is for fraternal not mortality purposes. Even your own diagnosed Inappropriate Activity victims are unofficial. The Psych Team never even got to them. Diagnosis? Statistics? Not comparable. But we can't settle it tonight. Here." Val reached into his heavy sack of protein wafers and offered a handful to Walter. "It was a good hunt. Brought you some flavored calories." Walter popped one into his mouth and chewed carefully around the stiff meshwork of bones, skin and tail. The rich variety of flavors pleased him -- strong charred keratin of cutaneous structures, salty fluids, tangy viscera anji the iron-rich rusty flavors of muscle and blood. He spat the residue into his palm and placed it under the crabgrass. "A treat for my little friends in the soil." Bitter stuck her head in the doorway: "Meld time." She glowed. She had soaked in hot water until even her fingernails had softened. Her tunic folds hung loosely. Walter nodded, shaking his three chins. "Join us?" he asked Val. "No. I've got to get home and fix my -- " Walter put a pudgy hand on his arm, picked up the heavy bag with the other. "You'll eat with us. We'll sauce up these wafers -- have a few drinks." "But -- " Bitter took her cue from her provider and put her arm through Val's. "We even have a little extra Molecular Reward. You can see heaven tonight." V AL was uncomfortably silent while they arranged themselves on the floor around platters and tall glasses. Bitter was busy at the dispenser. Two males, young Jo Jo and old coarse-mannered Busch, were studying small amounts of brightly colored liquids in their glasses. Neutral Arthur removed his tunic. When old Walter wheezed and struggled out of his pleated tent the sudden exposure of all that flesh was hard to ignore. Redundant folds of belly and Hank fat hung to his knees. He looked more  like an unfinished clay statue than a human. "You know, Walter, you should never take off your clothes." "Relaxing is good for the soul, Val." Walter plopped down to the floor. Setting cups of a soupy firstcourse on the platters, female Bitter also began to untie her tunic. Her figure was trim but her puberty-plus-nine years had added a horizontal belly wrinkle. Her breasts were quite small. "Do you think I should leave my clothes on, too?" she asked cloyingly. Val remained standing. Another insult might get him out of what could be an unpleasant evening. "I'm afraid I've seen better bodies on neuters," he said. She gave him a ritual hug. "Neuters can't get warm in the right places." Val frowned. Walter smiled and picked up his tunic. "If our guest feels more comfortable dressed -- " he said pulling on the flowing garment. "We can have a nice, first-stage, hand-holding meld." They held hands, talked and ate. The drinks were warm and intoxicating. When Bitter produced the Molecular Reward Val shook his head. "Don't you want to see heaven?" she asked. "Not while my body is here -- not till its time." "Why?" Walter sounded sincerely interested. "I don't know. Maybe it's the mushroom reaction. I've seen too many. Maybe I just don't want to see something unreal and be fooled into believing it is real." "We'll watch you. You can't go mushroom here," coaxed Bitter. Val shook his head. "No. I don't think I'd like to experience molecular happiness and then wake up and find it was just a dream. The disappointment would be depressing." IF Ill Bitter shrugged. Walter and Busch also shook their heads. Arthur said, "Maybe later. Right now I have to put on the evening's entertainment. It's a dance. I need you, Bitter, for a partner -- so you shouldn't take it either." Jo Jo hadn't said much all evening. He took the M.R. and retired to a corner with his visions. Walter studied Val for a minute, then asked, "You aren't afraid of M.R. are you? We give it to Hunters every day. It is one of the pet rewards of the Big ES." "Maybe Hunters need it. I've seen some pretty badly chewed up legs after three days of the tracking frenzies. The pain must be all but unbearable. M.R. could help that. But I worry about ordinary citizens taking it. The Big ES makes it easy for the retired to get it -- maybe they need it too. I don't know, but you don't see many of the really old retireds around. I don't think it helps them any." "Can't prolong life. Nothing can," Walter said philosophically. "Well, now. I see Arthur and Bitter are ready for their dance." The music Arthur selected was loud. It irritated Val. The dispenser screen flowed with dancing figures. Arthur and Bitter watched a while and then tried to copy the movements. Val was sure they were missing the rhythm completely but he sat smiling with the others. Soon Busch fell asleep and the meld broke up at bedtime. T he next morning Busch grumbled his way to the breakfast table. Bitter gave him a ritual hug. "Missed your warmth in the meld last night," she said. He nodded toward the dispenser for his usual calorie basic. She warmed the refresher for him and went to the dispenser to arrange his platter. "Your new issue tissue is on the hook," she called pleasantly as he came out of the refresher. He dressed silently. Old Walter waddled out in his dusty tunic and sat down. Bitter fluttered around her two job-holding men, wheedling extra flavors out of them. Soon she had enough for her own breakfast. She sat down to eat just as Busch stood up to leave. "Isn't Jo Jo giving you any flavors these days?" he asked. Bitter shook her head. "Jo Jo has been cold in the meld for a long time now." "Try being more generous with your nonritual hugs." "I've done my best." Bitter chewed on a sticky fructose ball. "But he holds out -- must be saving for a bud child or something. I just checked his cot. He's already up and gone." Walter leaned into the conversation but was interrupted by a fading scream. Busch leaped from his chair and crawled quickly to the spiral. Looking down, he saw ripples in the crowd around the broken body of a jumper. He identified Jo Jo's tunic before the speckled crowd flowed back. He returned to Walter and Bitter, announcing jubilantly that Jo Jo was giving a party. "Now? Right after we ate?" "Now," Busch said to the dispenser. He ordered the expensive, high-flavor items as fast as he could and placed them on platters as they were delivered. Then a sensor at shaft base recorded cessation of Jo Jo's cortical activity and the dispenser abruptly closed its chute. "Jo Jo has died. His calorie credits have gone to the General Account," it explained. "You knew?" Walter gasped, staring at the pilferings. "Of course. I just wish that the crowd had had the decency not to trample him so quickly. He landed well, horizontal; no femurs in his belly. Small splatter. He should have lived a couple hours longer." "Robbing the dead," Walter said. Bitter sorted through the items for stables she could use in bartering. "What kind of love is it when you take your calories with you? We're his family. If he wanted to go -- the least he could do is throw a party first." "I could use a couple more pounds of flavored protein," said Busch. Walter sighed. "Now we're widdled down to a family-four. Jo Jo was a worker too. I'll be retiring soon. I guess I'm as guilty as the rest of you -- been counting on Jo Jo's calories for my retirement years." "Widdled?" asked neuter Arthur. "Well, one of us should go and see what Sampler learns from the remains. Next we'll have to start screening for Jo Jo's replacement. A family-four can't hold on to living quarters this size." Walter called Val to meet him at the Neuro lab and left. Bitter and Arthur waited for the first applicants to arrive. "Try to find one with a job," said Busch as he started off for the garage. "A good job." Val and Walter watched the scope. Jo Jo's neurones began to flow by. The tech said, "We got this one sampled promptly. There should be ample brain cells with respiratory quotients high enough for analysis. Those are red cells. This one is just a nuclear fragment." A large triangular cell drifted into view. The tech closed the chamber and flooded it with oxygen and nutrients. "This looks like a promising one. I'll wak for its R.Q. to get up in the normal range before we start. There are three neurochemicals in the brain. Most cells can use them all. Basically IF they fit into the three different brain functions. Acetylcholine for sensory-motor; adrenalin for midbrain autonomies and serotonin for cortical personality. Now I see we're ready. First, I'll clear off the old molecules with an enzyme -- cholinesterase, in this case. Now I'll flood the chamber with labeled acetylcholine. Good response there. Isotope count shows about ninety percent of the expected acetylcholine sites are functioning. Good. Now I'll do the same for adrenalin. The enzyme to clear the sites -- the isotope-labeled neurochemical to count the sites. Readout: a hundred and ten percent. Nothing wrong there. Let's try number three -- serotonin." They watched the tech work. The flimsy printout read: Acetylcholine #, Adrenalin I #, Serotonin #. "There's the trouble -- serotonin. Have to run a few more cells through to see if this is representative -- but it probably is." Walter asked, "But what caused it? It was so sudden." Val interrupted: "He's a jumper isn't he? That's inappropriate activity. The nest factor got him." "Perhaps," said the tech. "There is something blocking the serotonin synapses. I have some fluorescentlabeled antibodies that might help us identify the blocking agent. If it is the nest factor the sites are blocked by the deceased's own immunoglobin-A. This first one is the anti-Ig-A." The chamber flooded, glowed diffusely and then washed clear. "Nothing," said the tech. "The next one is anti-M.R." The chamber flooded again but this time a residual glow, remained on the cell wall after the wash. "Molecular Reward it is. This jumper thought he was a bird." Val and Walter looked at each other, puzzled. "Sure. We see all kinds -- mushrooms, birds, flowers. That M.R. really scrambles some of them. It's like sticking your foot in one of the mech brains -- at the cellular level." On the way to Hunter Control Walter waddled and wheezed. He paused for breath, leaning on the railing. Looking down, he asked, "Do you think Jo Jo had much pain? I mean, do you think he died happy?" "On M.R. he died happy," said Val with finality. Arthur were waiting to screen applicants for Jo Jo's room when "Are you the bereaved?" asked Bitter frowned into the dimly lit crawl way. The newcomer was a slim female, recently polarized. She was on her hands and knees, towing a locker through the dust. After a long silence Bitter answered, "Yes. We were widdled down this morning. What are you?" The newcomer smiled and sat back on her heels brushing grime from her hands explaining. "I'm delta pancreas line of the N.H. clone -- Nora Howell clone, you know -- one of the original HowellJolly bodies. Embryonated from the fourth subculture, so there is still a lot of genetic vigor in my cancy." Bitter repeated, "But, what are you?" "An attendant. All of us Nora Howells are attendants." said VaPen." Bitter remained formal. "I'm the decision until the rest of the family reviews the applications. Now, if you'll just move your gear back out onto the spiral -- " Neutral Arthur glanced down the crawlway at the other applicants. Big ones. Most were well over fifteen stone. Obviously a source of considerable body heat and odor. Big eaters too. He smiled at the slim newcomer. "An attendant? You're so young," he said. "Oh, not a Medi-attendant. Just an attendant. I haven't yet specialized. I'll be servicing Rec centers for a while." Bitter waved an index finger accusingly. "Those breasts. You're polarized." "Almost. Only almost, I assure ses itself that way, I guess. But I carry the subcutaneous capsule -- can't actually ovulate." She sniffed. Neutral Arthur consoled her with a shoulder pat. "Now, now. Dee Pen. Being polarized is difficult. We understand. But it is good for an attendant -- and can be good in the meld. Maturation Index, you know. Helps your sense of rhythm, they say." Dee Pen blinked back a tear and nodded. "Rhythm, yes. Yes. I did very well at the stacks -- good grades in music." "And your nlajor? What was your major?" asked Arthur, helping her in with her bulky locker. "Philosophy -- to balance the emotionalism of a polarized Jollybody." "But we already have a philosopher -- Old Walter," protested Bitter. "And you and old Walter will have plenty to talk about. Dee Pen," said Arthur. Taking Bitter aside, he whispered: "Want another fifteen-stone furnace like Walter smelling up the place?" Bitter raised her eyebrows. Arthur continued sotto voce: "Well, take a look out into the crawlway." He went over to help Dee Pen sort IF through her locker for her flimsy I.D. while Bitter poked her head out. As Arthur glanced over Dee Pen's personality profile he could hear Bitter announcing that the vacancy had been filled. He smiled. He knew a polarized Jolly-body would be very very good in their meld entertainments. Bitter waved the other applicants away and returned, saying, "We can have your credits transferred and be back up to family-five status for the evening meal." V AL and Walter sat in the Hunter Control garage, watching Tinker work. H.C. meek brain was still alert but, with surface sensors detecting no buckeyes, crops were safe and huntercraft had all returned for servicing. Tinker had all dust covers up on around inside the chassis, mumbling into his belt communicator. Occasionally a replacement part dropped into the dispenser. "So the M.R. got Jo Jo," Val said to break the silence. Walter nodded sadly. "Better M.R. than l.A," Val said. Waiter looked puzzled. Val continued: "Inappropriate Activity one's self. Repulsive. I'd hate to think I lived with -- trusted -- someone who would go l.A." "And M.R.? He's still dead." "But that's just an accident -- drug idiosyncrasy. Going flower. bird or mushroom -- those are the risks we take when we want to see heaven molecularly. Taking risks is sort of noble. Accidents are clean. But suicide -- that's dirty." Walter did not answer. Odd, but he felt exactly the opposite. Tinker crawled out of the huntercraft's chassis and wiped oil from his hands. He walked to the dispenser and picked up several coils of neurocircuitry webbing. Returning to the craft, he pulled on a connector. The big machine groaned. "Easy, big fellow. I know it hurts -- but all those frayed nerves have got to come out," said Tinker. He talked over his shoulder to Val and Walter while he worked. "These huntercraft should have been sent to the central servicing area when it was operational. Their power converters and sensors are over a hundred years old. Electron fatigue. No replacement parts for them -- not these days." Val picked up one of the craft's optic pickups. "Their eyes are weak." Tinker glanced back. "They need new electromag retinas. I can rebuild the coarse E.M. sensors in my quarters but I don't have the tools for the fine work. Can't handle the converters, of course. No one does that kind of work any more." Val frowned at the mysterious converter above Doberman's left rear wheel -- a solid-state generator that converted electricity to muscie power; Other converters throughout the machine converted to heat, light or radio waves as the organ demanded. Converter science was a lost art. "You can rebuild sensors in your own room?" Val asked. "Just the coarse ones -- and I have several rooms high up in the shaft, a long way from the dispensers on shaft base. Not much demand for quarters way up there." Val was interested. He held tools for Tinker and asked questions while old Walter wheezed in the background. At change of shift Val helped Tinker carry a load of weak meek eyes to his quarters. Val was amazed at the jumble of parts that filled the corners and shelves -- heads of agromechs, brain boxes from dispensers, communicators, sensors, tools and screens -- even a rebuilt dispenser in front of his cot. Tinker saw Val staring at the dispenser. "Built it myself," he explained proudly. "Of course, it isn't an authorized model but it gives me someone to talk to -- a class-thirteen brain. But it can't deliver anything unless the pressure reaches this level -- which is seldom these days. I still have to use shaft base for most things." Val walked slowly past the long work bench. Occasionally he would caress a box of wires or a small tool almost reverently. One bundle of thick wires trailed out of a large black drum. The drum stood on insulated blocks. It measured three feet in diameter and stood five feet high. Tinker waved him away when he approached it. "Careful. I've been experimenting with a larger capacitor to run my tools when the power is down. It's probably well charged now and my insulation methods are pretty makeshift. Give it a good six feet clearance to be safe." Val eyed the bright connectors on the top of the drum. He marveled at Tinker's ingenuity. The drum looked powerful, almost ominous, just sitting there. He gave it a wide berth and went on into the next room. More electronic gear faced him. Heavy cables led to a communicator with a focusing antenna. Charts and maps covered one wall. "Listening to huntercraft and agromechs in the field," explained Tinker, "is a hobby of mine." Val recognized some of the topography from his own H.C. wall panels. He was amazed that anyone could build so much detail into a map from a few hours of casual listening. They were interrupted by the dispenser. It started chattering and printing out a flimsy. Tinker went to read it while Val studied the map. "It's a birth permit -- for me," Tinker shouted excitedly. Val smiled. "Congratulations, but it's no surprise to me. Big ES must have recognized your talents." "But it's a class-three permit." Val thought a minute. "Class three means budchild with a human incubator of your choice. So?" "But I live alone." Val glanced around at the crowded quarters. There was room for a family-#, except that every available square inch was filled with gear for tinkering. "Have a female in mind?" "No, and I'm not particularly interested either. A budchild is fine -- I'm aware of my genes for intelligence and hard work -- I was bred for hard work. I was a class-one birth permit myself -- mechanical womb. Why would the Big ES want to burden me with a familythree now?" "I know just what you mean," soothed Val. "I live alone myself -- like it. Was lightly polarized two years ago -- needed hard shoulders for the long bow -- Sagittarius, you know -- H.C. I got the hard shoulders all right but also I got some hair on my upper lip and an irritable personality. I'm not interested in getting heavily polarized to full male gender -- I'd probably have to shave and then I'd really be hard to work with. But, if Big ES asked me, I suppose I'd go along." Tinker shrugged. "I don't want my whole life upset by a classthree permit when a class-one would do just as well. Let the Big ES incubate." Val left, saying, "Good Luck. See you in the garage next shift." IV T he clerk at Embry ogenesis shook his head. "Sorry, Tinker -- it stays a class-three. Our budget doesn't permit us to carry any more births this month and your bud child is right on schedule. Requisitioned above our meek uteri IF capacity. The committee report is final. Do your duty and pick a female to carry it." "That's just it -- I don't have a female." "No one appeals to you?" "I like everyone -- but I'm not sexually attracted to -- " "There's no sex involved in a class three." "But there is. Don't you see?" Tinker was irritated. "A class three means female incubator of my choice. Right? The Big ES doesn't pick the incubator, so it doesn't have to pay job rates for carrying. The incubator has to carry it out of love for me -- well, there is no one who will do it for me without pay." The clerk studied the committee report. "No funds for moving it back to a class two either. Tinker. You'll just have to find someone. That's an order. Get yourself more heavily polarized." Tinker reflexively clicked his heels. "Yes, sir. Right away, sir." On his way to the Polarization Clinic, Tinker studied the sea of pasty white faces floating on the tangle of sticky, soft bodies -- neutral citizens, anonymous, monotonous, ugly. Not a mind or a body he'd care to share his cubicle with. The clinic was closed. He rang. The attendant on call arrived an hour later. She was an edentulous old hag bent with age -- arthritic -- well up in her twenties and nearing retirement. "Going to swing hetero, honey?" "It's an order from the Big ES," he said simply. Other than warming his loins, polarization seemed to do little for Tinker's problem of finding an incubator. If anything, it made the chore more difficult. He became more critical of his fellow citizens. Fat old Walter was now disgustingly fat in spite of redeeming intellectual qualities. The press of humanity in the tubeways became intolerable with odors and textures he hadn't noticed before. Tinker walked into the H.C. garage with a sack of meek eyes and began to arrange them on Doberman's fender. "Polarization is tough," he said to Val. "I vomited in the tubeways this morning. I've never done that before." Val picked up an eye and admired the bright fittings. "Polarization involves strengthening your neuro-humoral-axis. Humoral means gonads, adrenals and pituitary; but the neuro involves the autonomic system. Your autonomic tone is pretty high right now. Vomiting reflex is in there somewhere -- it's heightened too." "But what have smells got to do with sex?" asked Tinker, climbing up to Doberman's head. "You'll have to go back down the evolutionary tree for that answer." Val handed up an eye and a tool kit. "But I'd guess that surface-dwelling hominids reacted with their environment more than we do -- Big ES protects us. Most of us don't even polarize spontaneously any more. But when we do become polarized some of those ancient reflexes are activated. Tinker looked down at Val and asked, "What reflex is it that makes me so critical of everyone?" Val shrugged. Tinker continued: "Like you for instance, Val. I used to think you were a nice guy -- " "And?" "Now you look like a parasite," said Tinker. "You follow Walter around and send hunters out to be killed. Now you're following me around. You never do anything yourself." "I'm young." "Don't give me that! You're my age at least -- almost twenty. You're going to be as good as dead in half a dozen years -- I'll bet you've already got a loose tooth." Val answered mildly, "Polarization sure made you crusty. But I suppose that is natural, too. When you're geared to picking a mate all of your senses are heightened. I memory molecules I'm a competing male." Tinker returned to his work while Val ruminated. T hat day something clicked in Tinker's visual cortex. He was certain that the retinal images were unchanged but his brain now sorted everyone into two groups -- neuts and polarized. A sullen male eyed him from across a sea of thousands of blank faces in the tubeway. He caught the glimpse of a shapely female form in the amorphous tangle at shaft base. If one out of ten thousand was a polarized female, she caught his eye. The rest of the crowd faded into the background like cardboard cutouts -- nothings -- nebishes. Little things began to bother him, like stepping over the remains of a jumper while lining up at the dispenser. Dispenser lines were too long now -- too slow. He was angered by the sight of a beggar -- swollen with wet beri-beri -- who had to scurry through an access hatch to hide between walls to escape Medi-attendants who would have taken him to the suspension clinic. He stood silently while the meek sweeper scrubbed up wet spots left by the beggar's oozing ulcers -- then he shouldered his way through the docile crowd and went to the head of the line, ordering a container of thick barley broth. The dispenser eyed him suspiciously at this break in menu. He usually ordered dry stables to stock his pantry. He took the soup to the access hatch and cracked the lid. The aroma brought out the beggar. "Flavored calories, old man," said Tinker. IF The beggar drank with trembling hands while Tinker looked into his dark nest. Unopened packets of calorie-basic were scattered around in the thick dust. No flavors. "That was nice," said a female voice. Tinker turned to see a polarized female stepping out of the flowing crowd. She wore the tunic of the jobless caste and tightened her belt to accentuate her soft curves. He stared. "You're focusing," she said coyly. The apathetic crowd around them seemed to vanish. All he saw were her eyes, her mouth, her breasts. "What?" he stammered. "That was nice," she repeated. "What you did for the old man there -- giving him your meal." His wits snapped back. Begging was forbidden, and giving alms was a function of Big ES. For a moment he felt guilty. Next he was angered by his guilt and flared up. "I can afford it." "It was still nice -- nice that you noticed him." she said, touching his caste emblem with her fingers. He backed away -- intentional body contact was a meld activity. He felt awkward in public. "Who are you?" he asked. ture, Mu Renal cell line from B.L. clone. Age ten. Spontaneous polarization -- ah -- puberty. Assigned to you by our Watcher." He noticed a light locker behind her. She was ready to move in. "Assigned?" "Watcher took me out of the stacks before my studies were complete. I was assigned to a family-five before but I hesitated in the meld -- never been in one before. I begged the Watcher to delay my assignment until I found a familytwo to start with. I can work up to a family-five later, maybe. I think I'm too young for a big family." Tinker looked her over analytically. If her polarization had really been spontaneous and not some clandestine molecules smuggled into her food, then it was puberty -- and he was looking at a female with a strong pituitary-ovary axis. A good incubator. "Come with me," he said, taking her by the hand and elbowing his way through the complacent queue to the dispenser. He loaded her arms with stables and then, shouldering her locker led her upspiral to his rooms. He was pleasantly surprised at how well she fit into his crowded quarters -- like a hand into a glove -- into his cot, his refresher and even around the workbench -- dusting and arranging where she was allowed and not touching where she wasn't. T he tech at Embryo clinic probed the tender subcutaforearm and removed her antiovulation capsule. "Can't have conflicting hormones -- can we?" he said casually as he held the raw edges of the incision together and sprayed them with syntheskin. Ignoring her winces, he gave her four quick Hi Vol injections of hormones to prepare her endometrium. "Come back in ten days and we'll implant little Tinker, Jr." "Could I see him now?" she asked. The tech brushed her toward the door. "Nothing to see now -- just a clone soup in foaming nutrients. Just be patient -- in six months he'll kicking and squirming around in there. You'll have a wonderful time." But she didn't have a wonderful time. Four weeks after implantation she passed a larg clot. Worried, she searched her locker for her old Ov earring. Her activity in the meld became warmer -- more purposeful. She knew how slim their chances were for another birth permit. She'd probably be coded as a weak incubator and sterilized. Fearfully she watched the earring. Two weeks later it signaled an ovulation and her belly began to grow again -- a little behind schedule, but it grew. Tinker, preoccupied with strange radio signals from the mountains, failed to notice anything unusual -- but at forty-two weeks postimplantation the Empryo clinic asked her to come down for a checkup. She refused. imale voice. stitching and saw two Security police in the doorway. Behind them were two more holding an awkward bundle of quarter staffs and throwing nets. Her face whitened visibly and one of the men glanced up from his scanner. "Reading in the T-zone. This is it," he said. Two entered while the others took up positions back by the crawl way entrance on the spiral. They noticed her pendulous belly and tremulous, weak movements as she backed into the corner. "Relax and sit down somewhere -- please," said one of the men. "We're just making a routine check on communicators. Nothing for you to be concerned about." She sat on the cot, eyeing them suspiciously. They were soft males -- reliable neuters -- but there were four of them. Escape was impossible. She waited. Tinker arrived with smiles and nods. He set the stable foodstuffs on the pantry shelf and answered questions. Yes, he had heard unusual radio signals. No, he wasn't using a tight-beam transmitter. No, he had no idea where the signals came from. Yes, he'd keep them informed. They left -- satisfied. IF "What was that all about?" she asked. "Not sure." He closed the door to their quarters, secured it with a heavy hasp. He walked deliberately to the bench and pressed one earphone to his right ear. "I've been hearing odd messages from the surface -- and they're not from authorized sources -- not agromechs or Huntercraft." His use of the term "authorized" drained the color from her face again. She sat down. He noticed her distress and patted her on the knee. "Now, now -- there's no danger. Probably just a renegade meek his identity crisis. Those what-if and random-association circuits sometimes break down the loyalties of the class-six mecks and they run amok until they deplete their energy cells. No danger. Just a few lost crops." His words had little effect on his gravid female. Tears began to trail down her cheeks. "Our baby isn't authorized." He hadn't heard her. He had both earphones on now and he was swinging his biconical antenna around trying to pick out messages as they filtered through the many walls and organs of the city. "Good thing we have a high cubicle," he mumbled to himself, "or I wouldn't be getting any of this." The sounds he heard were music -- guitars, tambourines and waves -- a pounding surf being transmitted by tight beam. The words he picked up were sing-songy. They sounded human, but he knew that class sixes could simulate almost anything if they carried the proper gear. The words didn't make sense -- a chant of some sort. He caught the name, Olga. Tinker removed his earphones with a shrug. He had heard of the Followers of Olga -- a fraternal organization more cultish than Security again -- this time it looked as though they had gone Outside. He had worked in the garage at Hunter Control and thought it odd that the tight-beam source hadn't attracted Huntercraft before this. When he went to the cot he found Mu Ren sobbing herself to sleep. He patted her belly. A tiny foot kicked his hand. She opened reddened eyes and wailed, "Our baby isn't authorized." "Of course it is," he said. "I have the authorization right here." "But we need a class five." She filled him in about the clot she passed, the earring and now the call from Embryo clinic. "A hybrid," he said in amazement sitting up. "A hybrid?" "What'll become of it?" she sniffed. "They'll collect it -- and dispose of it." She sobbed herself to sleep. T he next day Tinker explained to Val who was more concerned about the peculiar tightbeam transmissions. "Don't let the pregnancy get you down. If it is unauthorized, it's just unauthorized. Happens all the time. How long are you going to keep the baby?" Tinker shrugged. "It won't need papers until it starts to walk and talk. We can keep it till then, I suppose." Val shook his head. "I don't think that's a very good idea. I know some of the females do it to develop their souls, but it is hard to give them up just when they're becoming human. I'd chuck it down the chute immediately if I were you. Now tell me more about those transmissions." "I don't think I could do it. I know it is patriotic and loyal and obedient -- but I couldn't do it." "I'll come over when she delivers and do it for you -- now what about those transmissions. Why aren't we picking them up here at Hunter Control. If someone is Outside we should know about it." Tinker was still badly shaken but he went to the wall panels and drew lines. The directional ran from the ocean across the shaft cap to the mountains. Val studied the line and then put the H.C. meek to work checking his sensors in that area. "Nothing on the line," said H. C. "But Security is picking it up, too," said Tinker. "What H.C. means," explained Val, "is that there is nothing on the line where we have crops and where the sensors are. We don't know what is above the frost line in the mountains -- or under the water in the ocean." Tinker brooded. Val smiled. "Come on. Let's suit up and take Doberman, here, out on a shakedown cruise. We can look at the ends of your line for the renegade Followers of Olga. The ride will o you good -- take your mind off everything." V D oberman hi moved smoothly across the fields at treetop level. "There's already a sighting," Val said. Tinker had his helmet pressed against the viewport. A bubble of sour gastric juice rose into his throat when he saw the body -- naked and flaking red-brown. Roots and stolons from the highauxin crop were invading the soft tissues. "A flower," mumbled Val. "Molecular Reward?" asked Tinker. "Probably -- but it is too late IF for sampling now. Decomposed. Be nothing but bones left by harvest time." They moved on. Doberman maneuvered awkwardly in the thin air of the upper mountain slopes. They passed over a wind-swept table mountain and saw the relics of a tattered neolithic village. Flying low, they stirred up clouds of dust and ash. "Used to be large numbers of the five-toed buckeyes around here till we hunted them down," Val said. "But that was mostly before my time. No good hunts around here in years." Tinker took a variety of views at different wave lengths. At longred pickup he thought he saw a glow in some rocks set around ashes. Too faint to be certain. Tracking back across the shaftcap, they flew on toward the dull gray ocean. The pounding surf on audio was familiar, not unlike the transmission. Tinker put optics on full sweep. Robot algae harvesters moved on the horizon following hints of green. The waters seemed almost sterile, they were so clear. Bubbles the size of buildings dotted the shelf. Nothing moved in the water. Tinker stared into the water. "First time Outside?" asked Val. Tinker nodded. "Well those are relics of the past, too -- underwater Rec centers. Our five-toed ancestors used to swim around down there, I guess. Some of the domes still have active power cells squeezing air out of the water with membrane pumps. Saw optic records one of our sewage-system subs took last year -- vast empty chambers all over the ocean floor. Some were decorated with drawings of the extinct, bony fishes that used to live around here. Nothing alive down there now except a little plankton. Wish we had the technology and the animal species to farm the oceans again." Tinker just stared. When they returned to Hunter Control Walter told them that Mu Ren had started labor. Tinker started to run downspiral. Val hurried to catch up. "Won't the Medi-attendant be there?" "Not for an unauthorized pregnancy." They ran along in silence. The crowd density was low and they made good time. They arrived in plenty of time. Mu Ren's contractions were still three and a half minutes apart and the membranes were still intact. She was dozing between contractions. It would be a long night. T inker placed a sensor on her abdomen and watched the fetal and maternal cardiograms run across a screen. He had run through simulated deliveries a hundred times on his dispenser screen and his hands were skilled. The human body was just another type of machine to him -- once he learned the peculiarities of the warm, soft and sometimes wet anatomy. He put a board on the cot under her buttocks to prevent fluids from pooling around the outlet. "Position," said the viewscreen's meek brain with the next contraction. As she had practiced, she automatically reached down and grabbed both legs behind the knees and pulled -- flexing her legs up and out. The bag-of-waters bulged. Several contractions later it burst and the head bulged the perineum. "Presentation?" asked the viewscreen. Diagrams appeared. Tinker palpated the baby's head for the skull suture lines. The larger diamond-shaped fontanel was posterior toward the sacrum. "The baby's facing the sacrum," said Tinker, smiling. "Most favorable position," said the screen. One diagram remained, labeled Occiput Anterior. With the next contraction the little head bulged way out and the perineum stretched. "Ritgeh rag," said the viewscreen. Tinker picked up a coarsely woven hand-towel and supported the perineum. "Check cord," said the screen as the head cleared. He flicked mucus from the little nose and mouth as he felt deep between the baby's neck and shoulder. A slippery, tense loop of umbilical cord encircled the neck. He dug his middle Finger quickly under the loop. It wouldn't budge. "One loop," he said as his right hand darted to his little work table for the three snub-nosed instruments. Clamp -- clamp -- cut between. With the next contraction he guided the head down to release the anterior shoulder from under the pubic bone -- and then upward to release the posterior shoulder. Suddenly the rest of the infant followed in a gush of fluids and a jumble of glistening cord. He wiped its face with a clean hand towel and gave it to Val who held it awkwardly and turned up his nose. The baby wasn't moving. Its eyes and mouth were closed and the skin' was a wrinkled, dull white covered with cheesy mucus -- ugly! "Better chuck it down the digestor chute before she hears it cry and ruins her day," Val said, holding it out like a piece of garbage gone sour. Tinker nodded and mumbled something. He was preoccupied with the placenta which now bulged out in front of a ball of copious, jelly-like clots. Val started the long crawl toward the spiral, leaving a trail of cloudy white drops in the dust. The infant squirmed hard and gave a single loud cry. He tried not to look at it. Val eyed the digestor chute uncomfortably. Stained and granular, it spoke of the varieties of solid wastes it had accepted in the IF past. It was several hundred feet down -- a dark, traumatic trip. He moved the selector switch between chop and dice. "She's bleeding bad," called Tinker. Val looked back to see Tinker's worried face in the crawlway opening. "Did you press on the uterine fundus?" asked Val. "Yes. Bleeding slowed -- but hasn't stopped. I'm worried. Can't we call the medi-attendant now? Maybe they'll have drugs or something to stop it." "Not for an unauthorized pregnancy," Val said. He glanced down the little form in his right hand. The baby was crying vigorously now. It's face pinked up and it was blinking around from wide, dark eyes. They returned to the cot. Mu Ren was trying to massage her uterus. Blood flowed. She tried to protest when Tinker handed her the infant. "Take it," he said firmly. "Just pretend it's medicine -- breast-feed it. It'll help the bleeding." She was awkward but the infant knew exactly what to do -- it locked on firmly and began to suck. Immediately the uterine fundus hardened to a ball. The bleeding stopped. Tinker relaxed. "He doesn't know he's unauthorized," he said. The child was male -- and had five toes. fond of infant in the days that followed. They called him Tinker TwoJunior, using the name they had picked out for the bud child. They applied for a variance on their original class-three birth permit. "Sorry, sir," said the clerk. "Your own record is commendable, of course, but with a hybrid we must consider the mother's genes, too. Mu Ren has shown several anti-ES traits: spontaneous polarizationpuberty, clandestine pregnancy and failure to obey a clinic summons. You'll have to admit that she even kept the hybrid status of the infant a secret from you. Very poor record. No variance." "Even if I make it a condition for my future work as a tinker?" The clerk had an answer. "You're receiving flavored calories. You couldn't live on caloriebasic -- or could you?" Tinker set his jaw. "The committee's vote is final," said the clerk, waving him out. One night he listened to unfamiliar chants on his earphones. Something moved in his peripheral vision. He turned to see the baby. "He's already crawling -- " Mu Ren picked up Junior hugging him hard. "He's a big boy," she said sadly. Tinker turned purposefully to the communicator. He tried in his five-foot capacitor, poured water in the heat sink and checked the polarity reversal. A shaped field probed around the room, rustling loose tools. He narrowed to tight beam and transmitted. "Who's out there?" The music continued and his screen showed diffuse, concentric, dancing circles. The music stopped and the circles collapsed to a pinpoint as the other tight beam locked onto his position. A metallic voice answered.  "Identify yourself." "I'm Tinker of H.C. City. Who are you?" "Ball -- companion and protector," said the voice. "A renegade meek?" "Free meek," corrected the voice. "If you are a good Tinker we can use you. You are welcome to come here to Mount Tabulum and share our flavors -- and freedom." Tinker exchanged glances with Mu Ren, turned to his map. Ball was speaking of the location of the tattered neolithic village. It would take them several weeks to get there. There were several canals and many open fields to cross -- miles of them. "It will be difficult. We'll be hunted," Tinker said. "We'll try to decoy the hunters. Don't carry anything made of metal and travel at night. Stay in the taller vegetation and well below the canal banks as much as possible. Travel more than ten miles a day so the Hunter sensors won't get a fix on you. I must sign off now -- questing fields are tickling our beam." "Who was that?" asked Mu Ren. "I'm not sure but we'll find out. We're going Outside." When he saw her face drop he added reassuringly: "Don't worry. I think I've got it all figured out. We'll need coveralls to protect our photosensitive skins at first. I think I know enough about Huntercraft to stay clear of them. If we travel fast and travel at night -- we've got a very good chance." "We'll be killed," she blurted. "If we escape the hunters the buckeyes will eat us." He gave her a nonritual hug and nodded toward Junior asleep on a pile of issue tissue. She understood. That evening he made four trips to shaft base -- acting casually -- to order extra clothing and food from the dispenser. His credit account grew strained. Being careful not to include metals, he made up belt-and-shoulder-sized bundles containing stables and Stone-Age tools of synthetics. "Planning on going some place?" a voice asked from the doorway. Startled, Tinker turned to see the two Security police. Smiling and nodding like a good citizen. Tinker approached them. "Certainly, a Climb. My vacation. You must have heard." IF The two neuters hesitated. "We came to check on the tight-beam transmission. Questing fields pointed to your level. The unauthorized infant is still here, too. Those packs are not regulation for a Climb. You're in real trouble this time." Tinker said, "Just check on my vacation authorization." Two more neuters blocked the crawlway to spiral with quarterstaffs and throwing net. He could probably bull his way through alone -- but not with Mu Ren and the kid. "We were just on our way to chuck the kid down the chute." The neuters called in for information on his Climb. He motioned for Mu Ren to pick up Junior. Then he fumbled casually with the audio settings of the communicator. "Nothing on the Climb," said the neuter. He approached with a pair of hobbles. "Sorry, Tinker, but we've got to take you down to the Psych clinic. Your behavior has become very anti -- " the room with # decibels of # hertz sound. Using a fourfoot length of flexicable, he whipped his way past the two neuters, pushed Mu Ren and the baby out and away from the pair with the nets and quarterstaffs. An access hatch let him and his family between the walls and an air vent brought them to the surface. The sun was shining brightly. They peered through the louvers at the tables. "We forgot our packs and protective clothing," said Mu Ren. "Don't worry. We can wait till nightfall. They won't find us here. No one knows the 'tween walls like a Tinker." They caught their breath. After a few minutes of gazing at the gardens he added: "There's one thing we don't have to worry about Outside." She looked up quizzically. "Food." # # one buckeye? I mpossible. vyNot Tinker," Val shouted as he paced around Tinker's deserted quarters. "Well it wasn't I. A. or M.R. He knew exactly what he was doing." said the Security captain. "Even injured one of my men." "But he doesn't have five toes." The Security captain smugly produced a flimsy. "Look at his ridge width and his triradiiloop ratio." Walter studied the analysis of Tinker's handfoot prints. "The gene," murmured Walter, passing the flimsy to Val. "He was such an achiever." "Achievers give us the most trouble," said the captian. "They carry the  gene of the In-between. Their independence and initiative make them very poor team players -- and usually anti-ES." IF "The bad gene," mumbled Val. "And I let the kid live." "You'll send out a squad of hunters, of course," said the captain. Val nodded. A t hunter control Walter tightened the loops on Val's suit and handed him his helmet. "Wall charts from Tinker's room overlay ours quite well. He knows where he is going. Do you think you should go after him alone?" Val nodded grimly. "No sense scrambling a whole platoon of hunters. They'd need drugs to go Outside, anyway -- so we could only use them one at a time. I know Tinker. Maybe I can talk him back." "If you can't?" "I'll be in Bird Dog Nine -- I'll be all right." "And Tinker?" "It had to be his decision. My hands arc tied. If he wants to lay down his life for an unauthorized kid and some anti-ES female -- well -- I'll just let him do that." Val picked up the heavy longbow. "I'll just be doing my duty. You stay and keep an eye on H.C. I don't like all the tight-beam activity on the surface -- the buckeyes may be coming out of hiding. One of the lesser planets might be moving into a more favorable aspect for them. Stay alert." "The sensors have never been off. There have been no sightings -- no even of Tinker and his family-three." "I think I know where to look for him -- he knows how to avoid sensors but he has no protective gear. He'll be holed up during the day. Can't get far," Val said. Bird Dog lifted off. Its bronzeand-yellow hull rotated slowly toward the garage door. Hunter Control was quiet again. Walter sat down and studied playbacks from Tinker's dispenser memory unit. He ran it through the psychokinetoscope, searching for those telltale fine body movements that marked psychosis -- but he found no evidence of I.A. Tinker and Mu Ren were acting logically up till the end. Walter mumbled to himself. "But going buckeye has to be inappropriate. They'll be hunted down. They'll surely die." B ird dog settled down quietly in a grove of fruit trees. Its optics scanned the canal that led away from Tinker's shaftcity. Val waited confidently. Dusk was still several hours away. "I have a sighting," said Bird Dog unexpectedly. Val reached for his bow, muttering, "The sun is still up. Tinker knows better than to expose his epidermis to -- " But the form that came around the bend was not one of fugitives. It was a powerful, rogue coweye. Val cringed as he read the scanner. "It's a big one. Must be eighteen inches taller than me -- a sixfooter at least -- and reading way over in the luteal phase." Walter's voice asked, "Can you get in a shot?" Val nocked his arrow and motioned for Bird Dog to open the window. Bird Dog said, "No one can shoot from inside my cabin. I can not take an active role in directive. You'll have to step Outside to shoot. Expose yourself." "I'm a supervisor -- " Val cursed as Bird Dog remained silent. He realized the futility of argument and buckled into his harness. Their quarry moved into deeper water and submerged as Val cracked the hatch. Bird Dog lifted off in a cloud of leaves and scanned the canal. Nothing. Val swung downharness, landing in the coweye's path on the opposite bank. Renocking his arrow he waited in silence. Bird Dog moved off in its passive role as taxi -- waiting. Val tried to estimate how far the coweye could have swum while he was in the air. Watching the quiet, mint-green waters he moved on down the bank -- cautious -- nervously alert. Then he stumbled over something slippery, wet and cold -- the coweye. Walter's voice sputtered out of his communicator: "Quick, shoot her. She's very dangerous." Val bent down and nudged her with his hand -- she was stone cold. "Not this one. She's dead -- she reads negative on my detector. Must have died of fright or exertion." Val signaled to be picked up again. "Aren't you going to take a trophy?" asked Walter. "Me? A supervisor? I'm here to catch Tinker. Lost too much time already. Besides, she'll still be here in the morning." Darkness settled. Val waited -- sipping a warm drink and watching an entertainment channel while the huntercraft scanned. "Something -- " whispered the machine. "Give me the hi-lo beam outside the visual range. I want to get a good look at -- " Val paused, open-mouthed. "The coweye." He watched the long-haired, muscular female rewarm and climb from the thick kale greens into the warm canal. In another moment she was gone, powerful strokes carrying her away under the surface. "They're immortal." "Get hold of yourself," cautioned Walter. "I saw it, too. Better call off your hunt and get back here. This reminds me of that buckeye kill near Filly's mountain. Remember? Foxhound went and came back with the trophy but Sampler found only blood clots and the arrows." Val nodded. "But that one had fatal injuries. We decided that IF aquatic flesh-eaters must have gotten the remains." Walter reviewed the sensor readings on both cases. "Just suppose for a moment that Filly's buckeye is alive, as we know last night's was -- just suppose. What is the logical explanation of the spontaneous hypothermia we observed?" Val shrugged. "All I can think of is something occult -- but I don't believe in anything like that. You're not going to drag in soulmigration theory are you?" Walter smiled. "No -- something much simpler and biological. Hibernation. Reflex hibernation. We're dealing with an aborigine, after all -- and they have very high neuTohumoral tone. Partial hibernation has frequently been observed in these primitive hominids in the past. It took heat-seeking hunters to bring out the gene that permits a buckeye to play possum." Val said, standing up, "From now on we'll put down a hunter at each sighting and let him tramp around until he finds the helpless they're cold should be easy." VI T he #-toed villagers of Table Mountain busied themselves with survival chores -- drying grains, fruit and meat; sewing hides and gathering vegetable fuels. At dusk Tinker, Mu Ren and the baby left the lengthening shadows and approached the settlement. Tinker felt defeated. His issue tissue garments had all but disintegrated after three days of swimming and crawling. During the following weeks their exposed skin had torn like flimsies on the undergrowth and peeled in the sun. His muscles affid joints were badly swollen. A village male -- puberty plus ten -- quickly identified them from their appearance and welcomed them with ' gourd of water. He stood a foot taller than Tinker and had heavily sinewed arms and a leathery skin. His sturdy mate rolled out her sleeping mat and motioned to Tinker and his family to lie down. Four bright-eyed children peeked out of the hide-covered wickiup. Tinker tried to make Mu Ren comfortable, then collapsed himself, bleeding and oozing from a hundred minor injuries. "Welcome, citizens." Tinker opened his eyes to see the village leader. Unlike the others, who wore only loin cloths, he had on long purplish robes and wrappings on his feet and legs. He was as tall and sinewy as the others, though, and under his arm he carried a bright, metalloid sphere. The voice came from the sphere. "Welcome citizens. I am Ball." Tinker moaned a greeting. The robed leader squatted down slowly, the Ball in his lap. His joints were stiff and his bald head and wrinkled face told Tinker how really ancient he was. "I am the Hip -- keeper of the Bali. Ball has kept Table Mountain safe, from the hunters," said the leader. Tinker sat up, winced and lay back again. Hip stood up, motioning for two coweyes to bring bowls of warm water and nut oils. "They'll bathe your wounds," said Hip. "We can talk later when you mend -- and mend fast. The villagers can use your skills." While the coweyes dressed their wounds Tinker glanced around a little nervously. Counting toes, he soon realized that he and Mu Ren were the only #-toeds in the village. He put a protective arm over her and fell into the sleep of exhaustion. In the months that followed he took his place in the village -- hunting canals for cetacean meat and hides, building a shelter and foraging gardens for calories. Junior grew at a #-toed pace; matching the junglebunnies in neuromuscular development. Tinker and Mu Ren were happy. T he meld tightened and warmed up around fat old Walter. Dee Pen wiggled on her belly, working her Jolly-body through the arms and legs to a position on the top. "Soul?" she said, picking up where she had left off before the warming. "Of course man has a soul -- a nice comfortable share in the collective soul of Big ES. That's why mankind has become such a successful life form on the planet -- he forms hives." Old Walter wheezed as he moved oie of his arms out of the meld to cool. "I prefer to think of man's soul as the life principle of ancient individual man. He's traded that now for his parasitic existence in the hive." Dee Pen recoiled at such antiES blasphemy. Arthur reached through and patted her soothingly. "Now, now. Don't mind old Walter. He's just trying to goad you into a philosophical debate. Tell me more about your works on the viola." Dee Pen ignored Arthur. She flared, producing interesting effects in the meld. "The citizen is not a parasite in ES. He is part of it. Look at all the good that has come from the Big ES -- without it the earth couldn't support a tenth of its present population." "Greatest good for the greatest number?" prodded Walter. "Certainly -- man has replaced many of the lower life forms on the planet. More intelligent life is better than less." "A hundred pounds of man is better than an equal weight of bugs and worms?" "Of course." "And trees?" She searched for the didactics IF on trees: "Trees were just the fabric of the Jungle ecosystem. Cities are the ecosystem of man. The only trees we need are food trees, flavor trees -- man's food chain." Walter began to lose his grip in the moist meld. He changed his position and asked, "What about men's minds? Hasn't I. A. been increasing with the evolution of Big ES? Suicides were nonexistent in the Stone Age -- they're the principal cause of death now." "Weak genes," she countered. "The jungles weeded out the weakbody genes with carnivores -- now the Big ES is weeding out the weak-mind genes with I. A." Walter smiled. Little Dee Pen had graduated with all the basic ES philosophy. She trusted that some future #-toed population would be free from LA. Walter wondered. As a Dabber he clung to some of the old philosophies of the neolithics -- dirt, adobe and bamboo. He had even been a Follower of Olga in his youth -- and as a F.O.O. he had awaited the return of Olga. But as his life span was drawing to a close he was losing faith. T inker wondered at the large stores of dried meats the village was preparing. Each day Ball sent young female "bait" to walk in front of buckeye sensors. Burly spearchuckers followed and returned with freshly quartered meat. Hip supervised a group of coweyes who were trimming. "Looks a bit watery to me," said Tinker. "Agree. But it is the best there is. The Hive always sends us the best -- protein-poor-protoplasm that it is." "Why the large stores? Expecting a long winter?" Hip nodded toward Ball. "It's for the trek. We go to gather at the river. Olga is returning." The villagers bowed their heads at the holy words of their seer. Tinker kept a respectful silence and then murmured a line from one of the buckeye prayers. "The great coming together..." The astrologers had finally agreed on the time for the fullfillment of the five-thousand-year-old legend. F oxhound XI returned from the hunt to face Val's wrath. "Lost the entire squad again?" Foxhound coughed, clouding his screen. "I put them down on fresh spoor. They went into tracking frenzy smoothly -- but when I returned to pick them up they were gone." Val hit the screen with the palm of his hand to clear the focus. "Didn't you see anything?" Foxhound coughed again. "Weak eyes. Sorry. You can review the optic records if you want. I need new eyes." Val let his anger subside. "I'm IF the one who should be sorry -- old meek. Your eyes have been on order. It looks like it will be a long time yet. We need lots of parts." Back at his desk Val put in a call to the class-one meek that coordinated priorities for the Big ES. He stated his case briefly and gave the requisition numbers. After receiving the usual conciliatory excuses he exploded. "In the last three months alone I've lost over a hundred hunters in the Orange sector -- " "Are the crops in danger?" "No, but the hunters -- " "The crops are your primary concern. Population control is not your worry." "Population control? I'm talking about hunters. They're out there protecting our crops. We should protect them." "Get hold of yourself, Sagittarius. You must look at this problem in the right perspective. The Orange sector's suicide rate is thirty thousand per day right now. You can't be bothering me with the loss of one hunter per day. It is a small price to pay for the protection of all the sector's crops -- the calories and flavors for a populazens." Val relaxed. Maybe he was losing sight of the overall picture. He thanked Olga that he wasn't responsible for cleaning up # bodies a day. Keeping his huntercraft operating seemed to be one of the easiest chores in the Big ES. and Val dropped in on him at his quarters. He found the old man in bed, face ashen gray -- female Bitter was rubbing his cold hands and feet. "Life span coming to an end?" asked Val. The old man nodded, smiling weakly. Val said, "It was a good life -- you did your duty to the hive. Shall I call a Medi-attendant?" Walter's face changed from gray to blue with exertion. "My life isn't over yet -- not quite yet." Bitter pleaded, "He's got some sick-time coming. Let him rest at home till he feels better." Val understood. No one came back from suspension these days. Not at the present level of population density. "Sure. Sure. I can hold down the fort. We haven't had more than a single sighting each day anyhow. I'll just sleep in at H.C. Cover your shift too." Walter relaxed and slept. His face pinked up a little. Several days later he wheezed into Hunter Control to find Val and three techs working on a pile of junk -- boxes, wires, tubes and screen -- none of wJiich seemed to belong together. "What's that?" he asked. Val looked up from a crude splice and said, ""It's some of the gear from Tinker's quarters. The techs think it is a working tightbeam set. The magnetic squeeze component has very Fine tuning. We've been listening for unauthorized transmissions from the Outside." "Pick up anything?" "Lots. Crazy things. We put them in the audio, so you play it back. There must be more than one renegade meek out there with the buckeyes. I can't understand why any meek would give up his power socket in the garage to run with the wild five-toeds." "The mecks probably identify with them." Walter set the audio to play and print. "Identify?" "Sure. Oh, of course they rely on the Big ES for their power -- but a meek is basically a worker. He does his job -- a Door, a Tiller, a Repair-bot -- and he has to be strong and fast to do his job well. Five-toeds are strong and fast, too." Val was irritated by the comparison. "You mean that the machines prefer one of those wild savages to a citizen just because the citizen gets a little fat?" "Not all machines," explained meek brains on the planet, all programed to admire speed, strength and efficiency in fellow machines. In any distribution curve you are bound to get some mecks who apply value judgments to humans too." "Just a bad circuit," said Val. "Like the Buckeyes have the bad gene." "Same effect, I guess." Walter began to listen to the tight-beam playbacks. Val said, "That first collection of chants has been put together from a bunch of bits and pieces -- the computer simulated parts and tried to make it intelligible. Apparently it is an expostulation of the five-toed virtues or vices." A five-toed Buckeye desires to run free. He possesses immunological competency. He mates and runs and then he lives alone. He eats red mean and marrow from the bone. He has a five-toed heart and heavy skeleton. With abundant calcium salts and collagen. His neurohumoral autonomies and gammaA Keep him out of the Hive where souls turn gray. He keeps the rainbow colors of his genes; Melanocytes that mark the buckeye in-betweens... Walter didn't catch the words the first time -- they were spat fast against a rapid jingle of tambouIF fines and a running guitar base. He replayed it, following the printed flimsy. "Crazy?" said Val. Walter nodded and moved on to the next part of the playback. Val talked absently while he reworked the splice. "We all know the buckeyes are different -- but why would a machine sing about it." "Maybe it is a singing machine." Walter listened again. Oh, Happy Day; Oh, Happy Day, When Olga comes. She ll show the way... Walter coughed and his face darkened for a second. "This singing machine sounds like a Follower of Olga." Val finished his rewiring and stepped back. "The only way to establish a tight beam is to let them know we're here so they can focus. Should be able to pinpoint their location. Where is that smoke coming from?" The capacitor steamed, and its black insulation bubbled. Wires sparked and smoke rose from the heat sink. One of the techs poured water into the sink. He apologized. "It was dry." Val grumbled, "The screen has clouded. This is all we can do till we get replacement parts, I guess." "Can we still listen?" Walter asked. "I suppose sobut we'll never catch them that way." T inker moved eastward ahead of the villagers. When they left the mountains he searched out the Buckeye sensors and disabled them subtly. A loosened fitting or a pile of kale leaves on the lens was enough to protect the passing villagers but not enough to alert Hunter Control. Two spearchuckers stood by Mu Ren and Junior while Tinker smeared mud on himself. He parted the thick rhubarb leaves and looked at the buckeye detector on the next ridge. Two hundred yards of open, freshly plowed soil stood in the way. "I think I recognize that B.D. model. The optics would be pretty senile by now. It shouldn't be able to pick me out if I move slowly." he said. They watched him crawl almost casually toward the tower. The ball of neurocircuitry and sensors continued its monotonous rotation. His mud camouflage seemed to be working. A Tiller worked the soil near the base of the tower. The bulky machine politely moved out of the way while he studied the base of the tower for the cable. He pulled the plug and smeared the contacts with mud. Then he replaced the plug -- smiling at the Tiller as he left. "That should fog up reception enough to protect us." he said waving the first groups of villagers across the ridge. Mu Ren eyed the Tiller suspiciously. "Come on," said Tinker. "The agromech is going about his work unless ordered to. Ball is still monitoring. There's nothing to worry about -- yet." B ack in Orange Sector Hunter Control was very quiet. "Care to serve on the megajury today?" asked Walter. Val was dozing at his console. He stirred. "Don't ne ed t he calories. What kind of a case is it?" "Interesting kind," said Walter. "Some buckeye broke into a suspension clinic two thousand miles from here and killed a quarter of "What's so interesting about the Mass-murder Syndrome?" mumbled Val as he changed his position in his chair and closed his eyes again. "The killer was a citizen from our sector before he went buckeye. I just watched the court simulation. He traveled all that way on the Outside." Val's eyes opened sharply. "Over two thousand miles on the Outside to kill patients?" he said incredulously. "Must be one of those fanatics trying to assassinate some imagined political enemy from the past." "No, we checked that." "We?" Walter explained that Security had been all through the sector looking for contacts the killer had known. The political motive worried the Big ES. One citizen was taken back -- the neighbor of the killer. They were being tried together with an accomplice from inside the clinic itself. Val tuned in on the trial and applied for megajury duty. He was accepted. A replay of the simulated crime began on his screen. The screen showed the killer with a male accomplice and a small four-legged carnivore. Hunters were encountered several times and only the killer reached the clinics at Dundas Harbor. There he enlisted a female accomplice and tampered with the ensleeping victims. The trial scene showed a wild-eyed fanatic wearing white robes and waving a staff. "Ludicrous," said Val. "There's no sense to it." "Look at thre voting pattern. "Most of megajury wants to let the fellow go -- and do you know why?" Val shrugged. "Because another quarter cured of their neoplasms -- evidentIF ly the heat, the pyrotherapy, burned out some of the tumors and left the patients alive. Now they are cured and don't have to go back into suspension." Val studied old Walter's face. "There's something you're not telling me. What is it?" "They're all five-toed. The man on trial has released five-toeds from suspension -- thousands of them." Val shrugged again. "It still sounds like a political crime to me. Five-toeds have been appearing in our population randomly -- in decreasing numbers -- for generations. They can't fit in at our present population density. Why would anyone but a psychotic take a bunch out of suspension?" Walter glowed with excitement. "Because Olga is returning." Val started to sputter an objection and old Walter said, "Wait. Look at these sighting-patterns. The Buckeyes are gathering at the major river beds on all the continents. Remember those tight-beam songs from the Outside? We will gather at the river? They expect Olga." Val shook his head firmly. "No. Let's not make a deity out of some renegade space station. The buckeyes are migrating because their astrologers all happen to agree. They read the same planets and signs so an agreement isn't a miracle. I know that Venus and Mars are joining Jupiter in Sagittarius -- very auspicious for something; but not for Olga. That space station deserted two thousand three hundred and eighty years ago when the Big ES tried to have her dismantled. We needed her techs and mecks to improve life here on Earth and she turned her back. It figures that buckeyes would worship her. They turned their backs on the Big ES too. But you and your Dabber friends are loyal citizens, Walter. Why would you worship her -- a machine?" "We know Olga is more than that," Walter said quietly. "We honor Her memory because She cared for the individual man. She is our hope. She will come for us and take us to a better place where we can live in the old ways -- natural and pure." The calm, patient answer made Val regret his sharp attack on the old man's basic beliefs. After all, many good citizens were Dabbers trying to think of something cheerful to break the silence. "I guess you're right, Walter. Look at these sightingkill ratios. The buckeyes are being sighted more often all over the world -- "You're joking." "A little, maybe -- but the fivetoeds are getting protection from someone -- or something." The trial at Dundas Harbor concluded with the killer's acquittal. His defense was the number of cured patients he had freed from suspension. Evidently the megajury feared suspension at least as take the incident at face value -- pyrotherapy, not politics. "Verdict -- freedom on the surface," exclaimed Walter. "So? They're all five-toeds. They belong on the Outside." "But the crops." "They're way up in the Evergreen Sector. Let Evergreen worry about crop-crushers." Walter felt drained. "I guess it's over then. The trial -- and the buckeyes migrating tell a story. All the five-toeds will leave Orangeector ." Val brightened. "That's good. Our crops are safe and you and I can rest." T inker and Mu Ren picked their way along the dry riverbed until they came to the pile of rocks that marked Hip's shelter for the night. Ball sat high on one wall, singing to a group of weary nomads nesting nearby. "Are you sure we're in the right riverbed? It seems so narrow," said Tinker. Hip nodded toward Ball. I'm just following Ball. Apparently the headwaters of the Mississippi were around here somewhere. Conduits were added that ran from the ice cap or something. Anyway Ball is using the stars to get his bearings -- we'll be on target." Tinker laid out their bedrolls and let Junior play with stones before bedtime. It was going to be a bright starry night. The next morning they were surprized to see several hundred strange buckeyes had joined their throng -- pilgrims from the Cotton White Sector in the southeast. As they journeyed up the river bank their numbers increased into the thousands. V AL was on the screen with Dundas Harbor. "That's not our problem," he was saying. Walter tuned in to hear Dundas say, "It is everyone's problem. That army of buckeyes is going wherever it pleases. They've even invaded shaftcities. They might cross over into your sector next. No one is safe until they are stopped." Walter changed the image to show midcontinent. The masses of buckeyes were concentrating just south of the #:# parallel and they had linked up with the #-toed fugitives from Dundas Harbor. A chill went up Walter's spine -- surely this was the work of Olga. He should be there; too -- strong believer that he was. "Tell him we'll send a platoon to help," said Walter. Val studied the old man carefully, then nodded and signed off. "How will you manage Hunter IF Control alone, in your condition, if I take the whole platoon on a big hunt?" "I'm taking the platoon. I'm your senior." Val smiled. No sense arguing. If the old man was strong enough to be on duty he could ride on a huntercraft. "All right, we'll both go. Nothing to do around here now that the buckeyes are gone. I'll get up to the garage and see how many craft are functioning. You put out a call to see how many of our loyal citizens have a Hunt due them." Of the twenty dilapidated craft that started out less than half reached #:# on schedule. For Val it was to be the Armageddon; for Walter it was something else. It was night when Val and Walter reached the hunting grounds. They were ordered to a position below the horizon from the buckeye armies. They were ready to attack in the darkness before the dawn. Walter studied the screen view of the #-toeds massed over a thirty-mile-wide area dotted with shaft caps and agromechs. The giant mechanical field workers had been commandeered by extracting their aerials so they'd be on voice-command mode. there," Val said, taking out his tool kit. "Not quite," Walter said. "And they look peaceful enough. What's that they're singing? I'm curious." Waiter tied into the audio pickup on one of the shaftcaps in the army's midst. He motioned Val to silence. Song drifted to them. We will gather at the river -- The beautiful, beautiful river -- "Just the geological memory of a river," Walter said. "There are no other kind on the planet now." Val crawled out through the hatch. "I've got to polish some contacts or we won't be going anywhere very fast. Let me know if anything happens." While Val worked under the chassis he heard distant, muffled explosions. "What's that?" he called. "Just the commandeered agromechs exploding -- tight-beam selfdestruct signal," Walter told him. Val looked at the scattered red glows on the horizon. "The Big ES doesn't take any chances, does it?" Walter admired the faith and stability of the buckeyes. Even while the agromechs burned they returned to their chants and prayers, their voices swelling to a crescendo. Val worked on a gleaming contact point with his file. Something was changing. He could see better. The darkness under the Huntercraft was vanishing. "What's going on out there?" he called. Walter was silent. The night sky glowed. The voices quieted. "Hard thunder -- hard thunder," warned the Huntercraft as it slammed its hatches. The viewscreen rippled as the sonic boom crashed down. Val was about to shout when it hit -- bouncing him around under the craft in a bath of dancing pebbles. His ears rang but he heard nothing. He tried to crawl but another boom hit, bouncing the huntercraft a few inches. The machine came to rest pressing on Val's ankle. Bright flashes lit the sky and the craft danced off his ankle again. He screamed in the silence of deafness. A s he lay there spitting grit he felt a shock wave travel under him. He saw several Huntercraft take off crazily, only to crash immediately. Later he struggled to his feet and leaned against the fender. He carefully wiped the dust out of his eyes and ears. As his senses returned he found that all he could hear was his own movement. The landscape looked frightening in the black-and-white of dawn. He saw no lights. Nothing moved. All the Huntercraft sat silent and dark. Smoke curled up from the damaged agromechs. All the buckeyes were gone. He pulled open the hatch and climbed into the dark cabin. The viewscreen and panel lights were out. "Walter -- you all right?" he called. Walter sat gazing into a blank screen -- transfixed. Val sat down and rubbed his sore ankle. "A miracle," Walter muttered at length. Val did not comment. He took his seat at the controls and checked the power cell. Overloaded. He closed everything down for a few minutes, then opened up the lines one by one. The panel lit up. Glancing through the port he saw a crew trying to right an overturned craft. Scattered groups of around their silent machines.' His viewscreen focused on the hunting ground. It confirmed what he had known -- the buckeyes were gone. Only an occasional body lay next to a burning agromech where it had been caught when the power cell blew. He tried the fine focus. There were peculiar pock marks -- craters -- all over. "What happened?" he asked. Bird Dog said, "Memory units are blank -- wiped clean by electrPmag and shock waves. I am checking with the class one for an explanation." Walter took a deep breath and sighed. "Didn't you hear her?" "Whom?" "Olga. Her voice came over the communicator just before she took her people up," Walter said, still awe struck. Val didn't like the colors on IF Walter's face. Walter was white and had dark rims around his eyes and mouth -- domino mask cyanosis. If Olga was Walter's god She may have come for his soul. The class one said, "C.O. here. What's going on out there?" "I was hoping you could answer that," said Val. "Can you get closer with your sensors? Whatever it was hit the five major continents at the same time. Blanked out everything in the area. Even got some of the shaftcity brains. Lot of data are missing." Val glanced at Walter. The ominous domino mask was fading. The old fat face had pinked up a little. Reaching for the manual overrides, Val nudged the craft forward. It moved. As he started for the hunting ground he asked the C.O. hesitantly, "Did you record anything before the -- ah -- disturbance?" "Such as?" asked the C.O. "Voices. A voice that identified itself as Olga." Walter wheezed into the conversation: "Play back her voice. Please. I want to hear her speak again -- of the flaming chariot and the children of Olga." Val flew on into the hunting ground, intent on finding a logical explanation. The world's central meek brain gathered snatches of recorded conversations from pickups all over the globe and simulated a message: By the fiery wheels of Ezekiel and the flaming chariot of Elias will the children of Olga be delivered from the hunters arrows to dwell in their rightful place among the stars in the heavens... Val shuddered, rationalizing that the singsong must have been one of the buckeye prayers triggered by the fireworks in the sky -- whatever they were. He set the craft down by a crater. T he ground was strewn with Stone-Age weapons and crushed vegetable debris. The crater itself consisted of a rim of synthesoil torn back, exposing the metaloid skin of a shaftcity. Conduits and cubicles cluttered the bottom of the crater and between them yawned the black, bottomless 'tween walls which, Val knew, dropped nearly a mile to shaft base. The air contained smoke from singed crops and the exploded agromechs. Val bent over and sifted through the spongy, ruglike synthesoil. It was still warm. The next crater was larger, nearly forty yards in diameter. Fetid steam rose from the punctured city. He met another hunter, helmeted and suited like himself, sifting through the debris of a buckeyes campfire. His spec bottle contained small bone fragments, some of which bore teeth marks. Human bones. At the next crater Val climbed down and stood on the buckled skin of the city. He explored the soil and found strange rocky fragments and glassy beads. He was certain they didn't belong in the man-made soil. Some of the rocky pieces were as large as his fist and still hot. He reported his finding and soon other hunters were collecting similar objects. By dusk agromechs were back on the tivating the soil. Val and Walter rounded up their craft and started the long journey back to Orange Sector. The H.C. meek welcomed them back to Hunter Control with a negative log. No sightings during their absence. The buckeyes were gone. Val sorted through his spec bottle -- charred bone, wood and the rocky glassy material. He called the lab tech for an analysis. "It was a miracle. Simply a miracle." said Walter. "What does the C.O. say?" asked Val. The tech answered him: "Tek-. tite shower. Meteors entering the atmosphere would produce the light and sounds. The electromag effect was out of line with the plasma produced but otherwise everything fits -- down to the crater size and tektites." "Can you run detailed analyses on these?" The tech looked puzzled. "Sure. I suppose. I have gear I could borrow from the central lab. It would take a few weeks to get it operating. How soon do you need it?" "Take as long as you need," said Val. "If they're real tektites, then all the buckeyes are still somewhere in the Big ES. I suppose their astrologers could have gathered them together in preparation for the meteor shower -- meteors and planetary positions could go together -- but it's hard to believe that they would have all been frightened into the shaftcities by the fireworks. The census data is scrambled in those local cities but we should be picking them up anyway -- with their stature and skin pigmentation." Walter interrupted: "They were children of Olga -- the five-toeds. She took them with Her into the Heavens." Val sneered. "Don't you believe in a deity?" asked Walter. "I have an open mind -- but if Olga is a deity, why doesn't She help the average citizen. We could certainly use a little more space and more calories." Walter nodded sadly. "Those were my ideas, too, when I was young. I guess that is why She didn't take me with Her. I'd lost Faith. Now I realize why She doesn't help all mankind." "Why?" "She isn't omnipotent. She only IF had room for the chosen few -- the five-toed. But I'm sure She'll be back some day." Val shrugged and said, "Why pay homage to a god who may not have room for you when you can pay homage to the Hive and have calories and quarters to show fork?" Walter turned quietly to his console -- praying for Val's soul. T hree growing seasons passed without a single buckeye sighting. Walter retired and Val was transferred to the Watcher committee in charge of suicides. "The psychokinetoscope has detected psychotic Fine Body Movements on level seventy-two," announced the viewscreen. "Alert shaft base and get Security to level seventy-two," shouted Val, running for the spiral. The apathetic crowd at shaft base ignored the siren, and the sluggish Security squad milled around on level #. Val arrived on # first and glanced over the crowd for the I. A. Hundreds of citizens sauntered or stood about in their usual lethargic state. He checked his belt communicator for an opond subculturje, Chi Epidermal cell from the Esther Bemis clone) Puberty plus eight. The readout continued but he was distracted by a furtive movement in a crawlway. "Stop," he shouted as she dashed toward the rail. Val made a dive for her but she was moving too fast. He felt the light material of her issue tissue flip through his fingers. Then he hit the rail hard. She was sailing down with her arms out like a bird. He sat down rubbing his bruised ; rib. Then he glanced at the rest of usual: unauthorized pregnancy, child sent to the digester; then the Big ES issued her a birth permit to pass on her obedience gene -- a birth permit earned by the murder of her first born. Ironic. Val checked her quarters. He knew had been a part of a family-# but recently had nested with one of the males. Their nest consisted of his personal cubicle decorated with rugs, drapes and cushions sewn from issue tissue. Val patted the drape over the door. A cloud of dust billowed. "Enough ectodermal debris to sensitize anyone," he said... Four of the family-# were at home. They had heard the jumper's scream. They knew. V AL dropped in on Walter at change of shift. He mentioned the jumper. Walter commented: "I know the family you're talking about. Six old men in their late twenties -- and the female. She was puberty plus seven or eight I think. They had been on calorie basic a long time, saving credits for the baby. They enjoyed the melds -- seven plus a fraction souls. Too bad." "Jumping is still inappropriate. She had the new permit. All she had to do was start another pregnancy. It would have been authorized. A tech would take out her anti-ov capsule and there'd be a Medi-attendant for the delivery." "Yes," agreed old Walter. "I guess the nesting does contribute. What was her gamma A?" "Around eighty mgs -- just where I expected." Dee Pen had been listening in silence. "That's sad," she said. Val snorted. "The gamma A gene is a bad gene. The Big ES is better off without it." Walter objected mildly. "But the gamma A once was an important gene for mankind." "Oh?" "It is the gene that enables us to make antibodies against ectodermal debris -- the nest factor. It is the gene that makes us intolerant to crowding." Val interrupted. "The antihive gene. Keeps the five-toeds out of the Hive. But what's good about it?" "Nothing in the big ES. It's fatal here. But in the distant past when there was exploring to do -- who went? Those with the highest titre against ectodermal debris. Which children left the nest first to make their way in the world? The high titres. Only now, in the hive of the Big ES, is it a problem. Big ES is so structured that you can't leave the nest -- so you can't nest." Val opened his mouth to say something but he hesitated -- thinking. Like a useless fifth toe, the buckeye gene also carried the gamma A antibody system. What else was there? Neurohumoral autonomies for overreacting -- and -- He shuddered. Man had certainly evolved through some repulsive stages in his evolution to reach the cooperative, friendly #toed hive citizen. Val walked to the door. "No, you can't nest in the Hive -- thank Olga for that." After he left Walter muttered. "Olga had very little to do with it." Dee Pen walked over to Walter and looked deeply into his old, tired eyes. "Were times so bad when we were five-toed creatures?" she asked. "The running, swimming and tree-climbing sound stimulating." "There was more." "Nesting?" He nodded. "And more. There was the sharing of the planet with other life forms -- the birds, fish and warm blooded animals. Men's souls are more stable when surrounded by souls of other species." She nodded. IF in Orange, awaited death stoically. Crippled by the hunter's trophy knife and the heavy burden of age, he had been unable to make the Trek to the River. From his niche in the mountain he had watched them leave -- some his kin, others strangers -- but all noble Five-Toed In-Betweens. He knew that he was alone, for the Huntercraft no longer patrolled and weedy vines climbed the towers, fouling the buckeye detectors. He hobbled about openly in the gardens, nibbling kumquat, citron and cran. A passing agromech waved. He smiled as his sat in the sun to nap. He sang by the sea. He sang in the gardens -- a place no human would be. He sang in a shaftcap. Twelve followed him Outside. They were only Nebishes. At sunup they died. V AL scratched his head. A dozen flowers baked in the sun? Brain samples at Neuro ran negative for both I.A. and M.R. A new syndrome? He ran a cross check on other unexplained flowers and saw a pattern emerging. Although suicides due to I.A. diluted the statistics, there had been a series of citizen groups going flower -- Outside to die. Their bodies had been found on their first days out -- peeling and baking in the solar actinics -- and Neuro could find no evidence of inappropriate activity. The gamma-A nest factor was not present on the serotonin sites of their neurones. He had these new flowers projected to the wall map. The reaction was clustered along a fairly straight line that was headed for this sector. He called Walter. "Found a new kind of flower." he said over the screen. "New?" "Neither I.A. or M.R. and it occurs in clusters." Val studied the old man's face. The gray domino mask of cyanosis had returned. "Clusters of flowers," murmured Walter. His mind wandered around blank pools of anoxia and sorted memory molecules. He remembered the clustering at the river and his pulse raced. Could the hand of Olga be in this? Val continued: "Usually the flower reaction hits an individual citizen randomly. He goes out to commune alone with the sun. This new reaction hits groups. We end up with a cluster of scorched bodies. And the flower clusters are headed this way. Should be hitting our shaftcities soon." "Headed this way?" asked Walter. "Olga is coming back for  jy me. two-foot resonance shield on the ground and raised his threefoot, tubular body upright, so his knoblike head of sensors could scan while he slept and rested his Q bottle. For several days he stood there like a parking meter, being alternately drenched and covered by agrifoam. Green sprouts fuzzed the soil and the bulky Tillers carefully avoided stepping on him. On the fifth day he activated his walking field -- cooling the cryogel and feeding current to the peanut magnet. As the powerful sandwich field took shape under him he sputtered charged particles between the layers of the field to harden it. Then he lifted his body a few feet off the soil and floated quickly along -- laying his body down on his shield in his more usual guitar-shape. Sensors seeking, he entered the valley where Kaia languished. I was born on a wandering star, Youve heard my name. Vm called Gitar. I came to Earth to find mankind. ril search canal and spiral wind... Kaia lifted his shaggy gray head and watched the singing machine approach. It landed and assumed its parking-meter posture. Colored geometries rippled on its skin. Kaia lifted his hand in a weak greeting. Gitar played restful soothing tunes. Adjusting the rolling base to # hertz to match the resonance of the airwater interface of Kaia's lung; Gitar transmitted the harmonic waves to Kaia's vagus nerve. The throb of rhythm matched the throb of Kaia's heartbeat. Kaia relaxed, smiled and tapped his fingers on the large melon under his arm. Gitar played-on, sensors assessing his control over the aging aborigine. Entrainment set in. The music activated subcortical neuronat systems in Kaia's brain and modified the pacing by the brain of his cardiovascular, endocrine, metabolic, neurological and reproductive functions. Volume increased to # decibels and Gitar added words to his audiogenic stimulation. He mates and runs and then he lives alone. He eats red meat and marrow from the bone... As Kaia's autonomic tone increased he felt his strength returning. His metabolism quickened and his respiratory quotients approached #. But he remain there, reclining on the melon. Gitar's words became more personal. Why should he die this year? Why not live one more season -- mate and run once more? Or twice more? Why not? IF "But there are no more mates," said Kaia. "Females can be found in shaftcity," suggested Gitar. "Nebishes?" "Some reach puberty spontaneously and polarize their genders to female -- one in a thousand -- or there." Kaia stood up weakly. IX B usch walked through the quiet garage. Only two of the agromechs were active today. The others sat quietly at their energy sockets. After the active ones left for the fields he just sat in front of the viewscreen -- bored. Being a companionmonitor to recharging mecks was an easy way to earn flavored calories. Easy -- until today. At dusk the two mecks returned. They were flecked with dust and plant juices. The door stood open as the bulky machines maneuvered into their bays. Then a chill raised the small hairs on Busch's neck. One of the agromechs had a flower in its fender. A blossom neatly plucked with a long stem and carefully inserted into one of the lift-holes on the fender. Of course the meek could have done it with its fine manipulators -- but it took a protoplasmic brain to think of it -- a #-toed brain. "Door!" he shouted. "Shut, Door, shut -- " The door closed quietly. Busch sighed and wiped his forehead. Then he heard something stirring inside the weed hopper of the large agromech. A shaggy gray head appeared. Busch turned to run for the spiral exit, but he was much too slow. V AL confronted the bulky agromech. "A buckeye? You're certain it was a five-toed buckeye?" The meek agitated its sensors. "You've seen the optic records." "And you allowed him to hunt in the garage?" The meek was silent. The directive was plain enough. Machines do not choose sides, do not discriminate, do not take an active part in hominid conflicts. Val continued to insult the meek's classeight intelligence. Finally the machine spoke -- assuming a superior, detached manner. "I do my job, sir; and I try to be objective when I witness the sordid activities of you protoplasmic creatures. If one of you eats another, I try to understand. But it is hard, admittedly, for I've never known protein starvation." Val boiled for a few minutes, then collected himself. He remembered his conflict with the huntercraft that had refused to let him shoot from the cabin. It was impossible to get these machines actively involved in injuring humans of any sort. Their job descriptions were too clear. Val went back and studied Busch's remains. The killer had been a buckeye, for certain. It would have taken one of those brutes to draw and quarter Busch like that. Only the right hind quarter was missing -- so there had probably been only one killer. Val asked Watcher to reactivate Hunter Control but got the same argument as before -- with jumpers hitting shaft base at three per-day-per-city, no funds were available for huntercraft unless the crops were in danger. And one lone buckeye in the entire Orange Sector was not a danger. "What you do on your own time is your business, of course," soothed Watcher. Val walked through H.C. garage. The meek brain had been assigned elsewhere. All was quiet. The panels were dark. Dust and cobwebs covered the Huntercraft. Val patted Bird Dog's gritty fender. "Could have used you today," he said... He went to his old office. It was heaped with refuse. Someone was already using the rooms for storage. He found a case of arrows and a longbow and went to visit old Walter. "You'd better get a permit if you're going to carry those weapons around inside the city," said Walter. Foamy sputum flecked the corners of his mouth and his feet were swollen. "Watcher said he'd take care of it for me." Val shrugged. "I'm going to take the tubeways to the next flower cluster. They're on the same line on my map." Walter started to cough and bubble. Val helped him to sit up and propped pillows under his head. The wet beri-beri had him good this time. Fluids were accumulating. From the umbilicus down he resembled a bag of water with only the rough outline of the man still discernible. Dee Pen spent a lot of time sitting beside his cot and holding his hand. When he caught his breath again Walter said, "You're taking this thing about Busch pretty seriously. Why?" Val stiffened. "It's not Busch. It's those flower clusters. My job is dead citizens -- bodies and their prevention. The suicide I. A. we understand. With a psychokinetoscope and a bucket of mud we can save a few. We also understand the bad M.R. drug reactions. If it gets out-of-hand all we have to do is turn off the supply of Molecular Reward. This flower clustering bothers me. If it becomes epidemic, we could have all the citizens running Outside at the same time and trampling the crops -- and dying in the actinics." "Maybe it's Olga's way of cleansing the planet of the fourtoeds and starting over." IF He was interrupted by neutral Arthur. "We have an applicant to fill Busch's place in our family Walter. Would you like to meet her?" Arthur asked softly. Val and Walter turned toward the doorway to see one of the most beautiful females they had ever seen. She was almost as tall as a coweye and just as well formed. Finely sculpted nose and chin, long eyelashes and bright eyes were framed by a full head of flowing black hair. She smiled as she took a dainty step into the sickroom and opened her flowing tunic, exposing pink curves -- large symmetrical breasts tipped by prominent areolas -- long narrow waist and plump buttocks. A faint horizontal scar marked her lower abdomen. She closed her tunic, curtsied and returned to the doorway. Val swallowed. "Is she okay with you?" asked Arthur. After the silence dragged on headded: "She has a job." Walter nodded weakly. "Oh, thank you, thank you." she said effusively and ran to his bedside to touch his hand. "I just know I'll relate well in the meld. Your family is just what I've been looking for." She paused and lowered her eyes coyly. "As you can see. I'm one of the augmented Venus models contracted for by Entertainment. I have good jobs on the channels and will bring home many flavors." Walter nodded slowly. "Glad to have, Venus." Her smile faded as she studied Walter's face -- the transverse fissures at the angles of the mouth, pink vascular eyes and flaking skin around the nose. "Please open your mouth," she asked. He showed her a magenta tongue. She looked at his swollen, limp legs. "Lost the feeling in your legs?" He nodded. "Hands tingle and burn?" He nodded again. She smiled and patted his cheek. "I've got just the thing for you." Going to the dispenser she identified herself and ordered a thick bowl of whole grain barley soup. The flavor aroma filled the room. She handed it to Dee Pen to feed to Walter. "We're family now," she said. "My flavors can feed your enzyme systems." V AL labored in Psych, mostly mopping up the stains left by jumpers. He watched Venus and Dee Pen pour barley and yeast into Walter until the old man started wiggling his toes again. The next buckeye sighting was on the dark continent. Val packed his insulated hunting gear and enough staples for three days and headed for the tubeways. His Sagittarius rank -- although inactive -- would get him there and back. The trip was beautiful once he got used to the squeeze of the crowd. Three of the five undersea conduits were operating and he ran into little delay. The sea was bright and clear. He gazed through the walls as he shot along. On the reefs and shelves he saw a few empty bubble buildings. The only signs of life were occasional tags of brown algae clinging to the otherwise barren rocks. Nothing moved. He changed tubes several times to reach the city mentioned in the buckeye sighting. Dropping in on the local Watcher, he checked the details. Yes, there was a sighting. No, it wasn't a buckeye; it was a coweye -- and she was still in the gardens -- eating. The Watcher, a withered old man of twenty-seven, helped Van unpack. "I wouldn't be too anxious to get out there and face her if I were you. Sonny," he said. "Why?" "She's a big 'un." Val sat down and reviewed the optic playbacks of the sighting. She was big. She looked younger and bigger than the one he had encountered when he was chasing Tinker. But he was confident. "I can handle her," he said. "One shot from this and she'll fall right into reflex hibernation. An easy kill no matter where I hit her." Watcher scratched his chin. "Reflex hibernation? Can't say I've ever heard of that before." "Come along and watch on the remote." the garden was all grays and blacks. He hardly felt the blistering sun through his heavy closedenvironment suit. With his bow ready he slowly pushed his way through the vegetation toward the quarry indicated on the scope. He was about a mile away but he moved cautiously. At two hundred yards he paused. She was sitting on the opposite side of a patch of low berry bushes. No cover. He started working his way around the patch, staying in the taller grains. A small agromech danced about the berry bushes, making distracting sounds. At fifty yards he had his chance. Through a screen of delicate mint leaves he could take careful aim and probably get off two shots before she knew what was happening. He stood his second arrow feathers-up and set his feet. The first arrow was still in the air and he was renocking the second. Too high. She jumped up and turned to run. The second arrow struck her solidly in the back. He stepped out expecting her to hibernate. The arrow dangled from the muscle mass over the left scapula. The impact had sounded like.he had hit solid wood. She reached around with her right hand and pulled out the arrow. He IF fumbled for his third arrow but she was rushing him and he dropped the case. With his heavy suit he felt he was dream-running. He drew his trophy knife -- but she hit him like an agromech running over a melon. His forearm and two ribs snapped as he bounced off her heavy frame. When he regained consciousness he was on fire. All he could see were the bright red markings of his retinal vessels against a flowing orange background. He was on his back under the sun and his suit and helmet were gone. Screaming, he tried to roll over, but his right arm flapped, broken. He threw his left forearm over his eyes to protect them. The darkness was reassuring. The blazing heat was rapidly blistering and peeling his skin. He struggled to sit up -- screaming again and again. Abruptly it became cold and dark as a squad of nervous attendants threw a wet blanket over him. One quickly fastenecl a balloon splint to his right arm and painfully inflated it. Then they rolled him face down on a stretcher and jogged him back to the shaftcap. Inside, they dressed his eyes with thick bandages and pounded a pin into his right ulna to stabilize the bone fragments. Then icy grease was smeared over his burning skin and he was left alone. A hand touched his shoulder tentatively. He heard Watcher's old voice ask, "Drink?" "No. Not right now." Val was too sick to be thirsty. "What about my eyes?" "Mediattendant says they won't know for a day or so." The stretcher was lifted and he felt the to-and-fro motion of being carried. He cursed to himself. Of all the rotten luck ! As if in answer to his thoughts he heard Watcher cackle. "You were certainly lucky she wasn't hungry. She's a cannibal, you know." His sight returned overnight and he reviewed the optics. The hit was solid but it didn't penetrate her heavy scapula -- calcium and collagen. She didn't hibernate, because she was a degree or two warmer already in her follicular phase. She had used his trophy knive to cut off his helmet and suit. She was being careful not to cut him. Her behavior on the playback puzzled him for a moment. Then he realized that she was fondling him, trying to copulate. It was her folliculafr phase and she was probably the last of her kind on the continent. of refuse and sang to a small circle of white Nebish faces in the agromech garage. Nebish citizens were lured upspiral by the hypnotic music. The rolling base at # hertz quickly entrained their autonomies locking their respiration, pulse and cephalic rhythms together. At # decibels Gitar sang of things #-toed -- violent passion freedoms and individual strengths. Kaia's gravelly voice joined in. Olga awaits her Jive-toed men. Where they can walk the stars again... Shell take us to her Wandering Star, Mankind, his genes, and me -- Gitar. Twelve Nebishes followed Gitar Outside that night, but they clustered, wilted and died like rootless flowers in the next day's sun. None survived to run on the green; for they lacked the buckeye's #-toed gene. V AL limped into Walter's quarters and sat down carefully. Venus fussed over his scabby face and right-arm splint. He accepted her offer of a beverage and turned to Walter. "Just got off the tube. It's good to be back." "Learn anything?" asked Walter. Val smiled. "Never hunt a coweye during the follicular phase." Walter snickered and then broke out into a loud guffaw. He had been reclining on his cot with the same four pillows as before but when he sat up and put his feet over the side of the bed -- laughing -- Val realized that he was just napping, not dying. Venus came in with a tray of drinks and felt left out of the joke. Walter was unable to get out more than two words between laughs. G itar and Kaia approached another shaftcap. Kaia's high protein diet had strengthened his body. He was searching for a mate. Gitar opened the doors and they went to the platform at the top of the shaft. Kaia stood back while Gitar focused his woofer downshaft and started to play. Of the tens of thousands who heard only a score lifted their heads. Only one climbed upspiral. It was Dee Pen. Gitar spoke with drums, and cymbals and strings. He spoke of nesting, of love and good things. He praised the free life, on top of the ground. This set her to dancing, and rocking around. Then Kaia with a knife, her arm he cut deep. He held and caressed her, and loved her to sleep. X T he lab tech calling about the meteor analysis sounded excited, so Val hurried. Level eighteen housed most of the city's special services. He walked past huge vats in the biosynthe section. He noticed a strong sulfur odor in the IF amino acid section where the enzymologists were trying to push the methionine reaction. The tech appeared a little apprehensive at first. "Sir? You remember the specimens you brought back from the hunt at #:#?" "Of course." "We studied them in three stages. Stage one showed that they were indeed carbonaceous chondrites. This means that their origin could have been lunar or earth. They contained the peculiar granules, the chondrules -- and they can occur in showers. Deep space nickle-iron fragments weren't submitted; however their presence in a shower would still be okay." "Stage two involved examination for solar gases. We collected the gasses at different temperatures. The fraction between eight hundred and one thousand degrees was analyzed for the rare gases of helium, neon, argon, xenon and krypton. Their ratios were characteristic for solar gases in that the KrXe ratio was over four. Gases in our atmosphere have a different ratio." Val studied the printouts. "So it looks like a real meteor that has been in deep space." "Until today," said the tech. "Today we started measuring the cosmogenic radionuclides by gamma ray spectrometric techniques -- these are the heavy isotopes that result from neutron capture. The easiest to work with is cobalt-sixty. The ratio of cobalt-sixty cobalt-fifty-nine can be used to determine the preatmospheric exposure age and the minimum radius for the meteor." Val nodded. "The longer the meteor is in space the more neutrons it captures and the higher the ratio of the heavy isotope -- right?" "Right. Only the ratio was the same as on Earth. If the meteor had been in space at all, its stay was too brief to affect the isotope contents. We checked sodium, aluminum, and manganese too. No increase in radionucleids." Val still didn't understand why the tech was concerned. "So we have a young meteor?" The tech raised his voice. "Do you know the size of an astroblem it ould take to produce a shower of this size? Hudson Bay! Most of the specimens of chondrites I could find in the old lab -- geological time. Your meteors, as near as I can tell, originated on earth in recent historical times. Do you think history would forget an impact the size of Hudson Bay?" The tech grinned and produced a globe with each impact site dotted in red. "And look at this pattern. The blue dots are buckeye camps on the night of the shower. The red dots are crater sites the next morning. Pretty good guidance system." "Impossible." said Val. "The clustering is impossible," said the tech. Val's mind flashed back to the incipient lemming reaction he had been worrying about -- the flower clustering. "Do you suspect something other than natural forces in this shower?" he asked. "I was about to ask you the same thing. If an intelligence is behind this, it must be benevolent." "Why?" "The crater size. None of them really penetrated a city. Statistically very suspicious. I counted optic records of over eleven thousand craters -- all thirty yards in diameter plus or minus ten yards. Each one looked natural enough by itself -- but taken together they all look artificial." Val stared at the reports for a long moment. Then he thanked the tech and hurried back to show Walter. "Here's your miracle. It was just a hoax. Do you think a deity would overlook something as basic as cosmogenic radionucleids when putting together a tektite shower?" Walter glanced over the reports while his mind -- sharper now on the high-thiamin, high-riboflavin diet supplied by Venus -- schemed. He could see Olga's hand in it all. The clues were so obvious to him -- and now the (flustering. He looked Val in the eye and spoke seriously. "Perhaps Olga couldn't make perfect tektites because she is a deity with a small d. Not omnipotent. Or perhaps she left out the radionucleids on purpose -- as a clue for the curious -- a clue to those with the five-toed gene." Val chuckled. "That is really egocentric. You're suggesting that Olga staged the shower to mask her presence from the Big ES -- but she makes little errors for you and me to detect." "The Big ES was pretty quick to recultivate the craters. It took an inquiring individual to track this down." Val shrugged. "With your kind of logic you can explain anything." Venus brought in Walter's Bcomplex tray. There was a sweet for Val to nibble on. "Staying for the meld?" "With my scabby skin. No. Maybe after I grow a little more skin and loose some of these crusts." "Next time, then. That's a promise?" He nodded as he left. Later Dee Pen stumbled into the living area -- stunned, disheveled and matted. The vegetable fiber and red dust told Walter where she had been and the dried blood on her left arm told him what she had been doing. "Nesting?" he asked angrily. IF "Yes." She burst into tears. "I don't know what came over me. A buckeye came to the shaft cap. He played music. We danced. I was in love for a while." He put his arm around her trembling shoulder. The clustering phenomenon had hit their city too. "Everything will be all right," he said. V AL collected playbacks from the agromechs who had witnessed the rape of Dee Pen. Watcher studied them. "Doesn't look much like rape," he muttered. "Looks a lot like a family-two meld with music." Val nodded. "Have we received any playbacks from those shaftcaps where the flower clustering occurred?" asked Watcher. "Right here." Val activated the screen. They watched the aborigine with his guitar lure citizens into the garage and set them into a frenzy -- and then lure them Outside to their deaths. "Same music," commented the Watcher. "So far I've credited that buckeye with the deaths of over two hundred citizens and a dozen rapes," grumbled Val. "Can't you predict where he'll strike next and have Security there?" Val projected a map. "No. He sometimes covers up to fifty miles a day. With the cities only a mile or so apart that puts close to two thousand cities within his radius of activity -- and if he skips a day or two we don't know where he'll strike. I've tried to get the mecks to report him but I don't have the authority. Two hundred murders is pretty insignificant when balanced against our other problems. That aborigine has just become a hobby of mine, I guess." Watcher smiled. "I'll share your hobby for one night and set a meek alert. Nap, now. Pe ready at dusk." Val took his gear to shaft base and waited all night. Nothing. At dawn he was about to go to bed when the sighting coordinates came in. He shot through the tubes and hurried upspiral. "Did I miss him?" he asked the Security captain in the shaft cap. A squad of police milled around, awaiting orders. The captain shook his head. "No. The crazy fool has been out there all morning shaking his tambourine." Val caught his breath and looked at the viewscreen. T#ie garage doors were tightly secured so he had to rely on the shaftcap's optics. They weren't too clear. He pounded the screen with the heel of his palm. What he saw made him a bit uneasy. The buckeye stood off about a quarter of a mile, holding his guitar over his left arm like a shield. He seemed to be standing at parade-rest. But the guitar was making the sound of a tambourine. "How long has he been like that?" asked Val. "About four hours." Val glanced around for the insulated gear. Just the usual city weapons -- quarterstaffs and nets. "My men are city police -- can't go Outside," said the captain. "That's a job for a hunter like yourself." Val guessed as much. Without drugs and hypnosis few Nebishes would go Outside, even with the suit. Val shrugged and put his case of arrows into the hopper of one of the Harvester robots and started pulling on his oversuit. "I can't allow you to shoot while riding. That would be against the prime directive," reminded the Harvester. "But I'll be happy to take you anywhere you want to go." Fine, thought Val. The door opened a fraction. "Not just yet," he said, watching the screen. The tambourine cadence had picked up and the buckeye was marching stiffly down a clear, wide meek trail directly towards the garage. All eyes turned toward Val. He demanded of the viewscreen, "I want an analysis of what's really out there. That buckeye has never done anything as crazy as this before." "The audio and visual are correct," said the screen. "But I see a guitar and I hear tambourines." "Not tambourines -- armor," corrected the screen. "As near as I can match it up, that sound is the sound a Roman legion would make as it marched into battle many thousands of years ago. On that basis the sounds would compute at three thousand foot soldiers at a distance of one-pointeight miles in very hilly terrain." Val glanced out to check on the screen's view. No hills. One buckeye. And no legion. But the more he thought about it -- it sounded like armor. The sound rose to # decibels, hurting the cars of the Security people. They backed onto the spiral. Now the tramping feet and clanging spears and shields were obvious. The walls trembled. Val covered his ears, then, on an impulse he nocked his arrow and stepped to the door. The buckeye was less than thirty yards away -- expressionless -- marching straight toward the door. Val aimed at his chest just above the edge of the shielding guitar and shot. Val dropped the bow to cover his ears but the sound stopped. The buckeye lay stretched out stiffly on his back, staring at the sky with the same blank expression he had before the shot. The arrowhead, embedded firmly in the sternum, had penetrated less than IF an inch. There was no blood. Val walked up and touched the body. It was stone cold. The guitar scuttled off like a crab. Val took out his trophy knife, paused and returned it to it's sheath. He stood staring at the last buckeye for a long time. The Sampler came and waved his probe over the body. ""Been dead since dawn, I'd say," grumbled the Sampler. ""Why did you wait till now to call me?" Val stood numb. What he had just taken part in wasn't an assault on a city. It was the death rites for the last #-toed man -- rites planned by some intelligence who had waited for Val to arrive to play his part in the ceremonial death of an already-dead buckeye warrior. Val tried to pull the arrowhead out of the sternum but it held fast. Classical #-toed skeleton. If the Big ES had had the space to spare Val would have liked to have seen the body placed in a museum. As it was, the sweeper would pick it up like any other and in a few hours it would be just so much woven protein. T he evening meld at Walter's was dragging on into morning. The flavor of the night was a synthebacon produced by skip-frying adrenal glands. Val had enjoyed the flavors and entertainment so much he consented to stay for the meld. Venus soaked some of his burn scars in the refresher so he wouldn't feel so granular. During the meld he thanked her for softening up his body. ""You are a lumpy one, yourself," he said as she wriggled past. ""What's in those breasts?" ""I'm augmented," she answered with a grin. ""My body may be bumpy, but my soul is beautiful." ""I'll agree to that. You certainly relate well." The meld writhed on. When Walter came around Val said, ""Nice meld. You know -- we've been using the mud on the jumpers and have been getting some pretty good results." Walter smiled. ""Of course -- Dabbers fight I. A." ""But there's no sorcery involved," explained Val. ""The Immunopsych people tell me the soil organisms digest the ectodermal debris. You live in a cloud of dust, but it is dirt dust -- not ectodermal skin and hair; so you don't get sensitized. That's why bamboo huts were so safe. There were no permanent rugs or drapes to hold onto housedust." Walter smiled. ""I knew it worked." the news that another flower cluster had occurred. ""Another buckeye?" ""No. It's that renegade guitar that was with the last buckeye. It's still traveling around luring citizens to their death Outside." "Music?" "The same as before. The boys from Audiopsych have nailed it down to the Pied Piper reaction. T.A.R. Thoracic Autonomic Resonator. Remember all the tightbeam talk in Security just before the big hunt at #:#?" "Yes. Tinker was caught -- " "There was more to it than that. Tight-beam contacts were made with the central historical computer, too. Music sections were examined for T.A.R. items like war drums and fertility rites. All with nice strong bases that would resonate anyone's thoracic autonomies." "Pied Piper. So that's how it works. Why are only a handful affected at each city?" "Don't know. Probably related to autonomic tone." "Can't we stop this Guitar?" "We've tried tight beam," said Watcher, "but it won't obey the self-destruct order. Anyway, the problem is sort of academic right now. The stupid thing has commandeered a Huntercraft and is off somewhere." Val danced around. "The Guitar stole a Huntercraft? Haven't they tracked it? You can't loose a whole hunterdraft." "The eyes of the Big ES are pretty weak, you know. Who looks up except an occasional agromech? Most of Hunter Control's sensors have been transferred into the city for crowd monitoring. I'm afraid we'll just have to wait until it announces its location by interfering with lives or material." XI D ee pen presented herself at the Clinic for a routine check. The haggard Medi-attendant stepped into the examining closet with her. "Unauthorized pregnancy? Well, we're pretty rushed down here. You'll just have to wait like the rest and turn it in after it's born." He gave her a cursory examination. "Seems healthy enough. Just stay away from the saline. This scar on your forearm is a little jagged. Must have been in a hurry to get your anti-ovulation capsule out. Most of you unauthorized pregs do a neater job of it. Oh, I see you were one of the victims of a buckeye rape. Yes, there will be a crowd of the little beasts going down the chutes together." He stepped back critically. "In about two more weeks. I'd say." On her way home she checked a possible birth permit. No chance. The buckeye rapes had been placed in a separate category -- no consideration could be given her request. A copy of the "category order" was posted. She was surprised to see Val's name among the sig-natures. IF "Why you?" she asked Val at his private cubicle a few hours later. "I'm on the committee because of my past rank of Sagittarius. The committee feels, and I agree, that the buckeye gene is undesirable in the Big ES." "But the infant will have my genes too -- and will be raised in Walter's family-five. We're your friends, loyal citizens. We'll raise the child properly. You know that." He narrowed his eyes. A mother pleading for her unborn was always suspect. Basic animal instincts endangered the Hive cohesion. "The buckeye genes make it impossible, Dee Pen. It will probably have high gamma A and be prone to inappropriate activity -- with the five-toed strength any I. A. would be a real danger to you and your friends. It might develop the massmurder syndrome and take you all with itin its suicide." Dee Pen swallowed and snapped to attention. "Of course. You are absolutely right. I'll chuck it down the chute first thing." Val watched her leave, then opened a line to Watcher. "Better have Security close off the shaft caps of the cities where the buckeye-rape pregnancies are coming to term. Don't want any of them mothers going flower on us and crushing the crops." Watcher nodded. "Good idea. I'll send the directive to the meek Doors. No one leaves without a special clearance." Val smiled smugly and returned to his cot. He had eliminated the last buckeye; now he would stop the offspring. Big ES would be proud. Labor for Dee Pen began in the meld. They all felt the first pains. Loosening the meld slightly, they continued to relate and share souls -- Walter, Venus, Arthur, Bitter and Dee Pen -- five bodies shared in bringing little Kaia into the light. The first thing the little new pair of eyes saw was the circle of five, round, white faces. Ten hands lifted and wrapped him and ten arms hugged him. "I guess it is time to dispose of it," said Bitter after the heat of the meld had subsided. Dee Pen felt weak and hypotensive. Her flaccid uterus continued to leak blood. A generous vascular network which had nourished the placenta continued to pour blood into the endometrial cavity, only now there was no snycytium to hold back the erythrocytes -- no fetal tissues to return her blood to her. The smooth muscle fibers of the myometrium which surrounded the vascular network had been stretched by the pregnancy and fatigued by the labor. These fibers could only twitch ineffectually against the escaping red flood. Her primordial fear of exsanguination triggered the ancient mammalian reflex that has protected mothers up through the evolutionary tree -- by holding the infant to her breast she stimulated the nipplemidbrain-uterus reflex arc. As the large collecting ducts of the breast were emptied synapses jumped and the uterine fundus clamped down tight. Uterine musculature closed the vascular network of the placental implantation site. Her blood by-passed the endometrium. It was no longer needed there. Dee Pen held the infant to her breast. She glanced suspiciously up at the circle of four Nebishes. Was it necessary to dispose of the baby so soon. Unauthorized infants could be kept up till age one -- when they became humans by starting to talk. Certainly there no rush. Its feeding wouldn't take too many calories. Venus disagreed. "Of course we should dispose of it now. Can't subdivide our calorie-basic. Don't want the old beri-beri sneaking up on us again, do we?" Dee Pen found no support in the circle of faces. "Don't take it now. My uterus will loosen and I'll bleed if I don't nurse it," she said. Walter gave her fundus a squeeze, saying, "She's right you know. She needs the infant to prevent hemorrhage. There's no rush. I'll share my calories for a while." Dee Pen smiled up at him in the pleasant delirium of post partum fatigue. "You know, Walter, in my next life I'd like to come back as a bird." He watched her eyes close in sleep. She mumbled, "A talking bird. I'd just sit on your shoulder and we'd talk, and talk -- and talk." He put a protective hand on the frail, little female philosopher and watched her thorax rise and fall gently. She certainly did like to talk. V AL continued to put in his full shift with the Watcher. Most of his time was spent with the jumpers but there was an occasional . mushroom reaction between walls and a rare flower on the Outside to add variety. But he couldn't forget what had happened to Tinker and he was concerned that Dee Pen might somehow let her #-toed child live. Watcher was not concerned. "Impossible. Doors have their orders. Exit is not authorized. Bitter and Arthur have been advised that they can earn extra calories if they keep me informed of her activities. Dee Pen isn't going Outside. No one is." Val strolled absently through his old office at Hunter Control. More junk had accumulated and many of the corridors were impassable. The dust was thick and spongy everywhere. In the control section he saw disturbances in the dust. An auxiliary cable had been snaked around. He found Walter IF wheezing at his old console. Several of the panel lights glowed. "Walter. You shouldn't be up here." The old man smiled and pushed white hair back from his eyes. "Can't spend the rest of my life just sitting around in bed. Besides, I was wondering if old Doberman ever showed up again." "Doberman? Oh, the huntercraft that was stolen by that crazy guitar." Val glanced at the screen. "Anything on the detectors?" "Less than ten percent are still functioning." Walter fingered a row of buttons. The view jumped around from garden to garden. Nothing unusual showed. They walked through the hunter garage, reminiscing. The old craft seemed mummified under dull, gray shrouds of dust. Doberman's bay had been swept out and tidied. "You did this?" asked Val. Walter nodded. "Isn't that Doberman's energy cell? How is he traveling without power? Are any of the other cells missing?" Walter shrugged. "Not that I know of -- but any Guitar that can get a dead buckeye to walk into your arrow can get a dead Huntercraft moving around." Val scowled and examined the cell. It was Doberman's serial number all right. Odd. Why didn't the guitar leave the cell in and just recharge it at the power socket on the wall. Buckeyes had made similar unauthorized use of power during their migrations when they commandeered the agromechs. D ee pen was pleased by little Kaia's rapid growth. Unlike the average Nebish infant who sits at one year and walks at two, the little #-toed hybrid was trying to walk at six months. She hid him from the neighbors but female Bitter informed the Watcher of the progress. "That's a big stack of diapers," said Bitter. Dee Pen took the diapers from the dispenser and bundled them up. "I've shared your quarters and calorie basic long enough," she said. She picked up Kaia and started into the crawl way. "Where are you going?" "Outside." "But you'll just die. You heard what Val said about the wilted flower people. The sun's too hot." "If I stay in the Hive I'll have to surrender little Kai. I can't do it. We'll go Outside. He doesn't have anything to lose." "But you do," said Bitter. "Why throw away your life for a little hybrid?" The Security people were quick to respond with their nets and quarter staffs. They blundered into disinterested crowds for a few minutes but finally got the spiral walkway secured at shaft base. She wouldn't escape through the tubes. She started to climb. "Unauthorized," said the Door. She worked her way around the shaftcap, trying all the garage exits. Below on the spiral the squad of Security neuters closed in on their easy prey. She screamed and little Kai cried. From across the spiral one of the garage Doors called out, "This way -- ward of Gitar. This way." V AL and Walter stood in the garage, examining the discarded diaper. "She couldn't havebeen too panicky if she paused to change a diaper," said Val. Walter questioned the Door and the garage dispenser. "Apparently this fellow, Kaia, had a class-six meek with him when he mated with Dee Pen. These machines were obeying old orders of the class six, not the Watcher's directive." "Mutiny." "No," said Walter. "Just a question of authority. The Door and dispenser are just class thirteens -- obey anyone in the hierarchy above them. A class six is pretty far up. Our whole city is run by a class six." Val blustered, "Well, they can't have gotten far. What items did the dispenser give them?" Walter handed him the flimsy. He read the list of food, protective clothing, diapers and sundries. "What is this? Jodhpurs?" "Baggy riding breeches." "Riding? What is there to ride?" exploded Val. Then he followed Walter's gaze and gasped. "An agromech!" They squinted out into the blazing sun. Without protective gear they could not follow her. They shut the door and rubbed their eyes. "Lets put a call in for that agromech. If it doesn't return we can get authorization to activate a huntercraft." At the wall panel they raised the agromech. "Where are you?" demanded Val. "Working in the fields. I have my chores." said the machine. Walter smiled. "Did you give anyone transportation out of the garage this morning?" asked Val. "Yes. A mother and child. My itinerary is recorded if you'd care to review it." Val fingered the controls and a map indicated the meek's movements. "This is simulated, of course -- but it looks like he dropped them off right over here in the plankton forest. That's not far. We could walk there in half a day after we get our gear on," offered Walter. They put their order in at the dispenser. Val was a bit shocked when Walter objected to arrows. "They are Outside and this is a Hunt," Val reminded him. Walter coughed and flushed with anger. "That's Dee Pen you are talking about." IF "You've been on hunts before. This is no different. They have broken from the Big ES and now they crush crops. If you can talk Dee Pen into coming back for psychotherapy, fine. But the five-toed kid has to go." Val made a wicked gesture with his trophy knife. Walter lowered his head: "Okay, I'll go along." They found nothing among the plankton towers. In the weeks that followed Val doggedly reviewed optic records from the agromechs, catching occasional glimpses of the fugitives and then following up with a hunt on foot. S HE huddled in her nest, avoiding the harsh actinics while she watched her son play. He had browned and calloused quickly. Already his tangle of black hair and bright eyes resembled his father's -- and the quick way he took to swimming reassured her. He crawled and ran continually during the day -- grubbing with his fingers for tubers or climbing leafy things for fruits. Her hair bleached and her skin peeled. Each day brought more traumas to her Nebish body. But she smiled when she saw her son growing strong. And she taught him what she could about surviving Outside. When Walter found her, curledup and cold in the nest by the canal, he kneeled beside her body and cried. Val sneered and examined the loose leaves scattered over her face. "Looks like the kid tried to cover her up," he said glancing around. A herd of cetaceans splashed in the canal. One of the little heads bobbing up and down was shaggier than the rest. Val's Nebish eyes failed to see the orphan. The herd passed. One pair of eyes seemed fixed on his coveralls with the glint of hate mixed with childish fear. Val saw but didn't see. The idea of a swimming infant was completely alien to his fourtoed vision. He saw a harsh sun overhead, a dense tangle of undergrowth and the wide deep canal -- all death traps for the Nebish. Walter stood up and sniffed. "You know, it is like she was a flower. She blossomed for a time and then died, giving birth to her seed. All that's left here is a drying husk." "Well, she gave her life for nothing. How do you expect a oneyear-old to survive Outside if the mother can't?" Walter said simply, "He has the five-toed gene." "And Olga to protect him, too, I suppose." "As a matter of fact, yes," came a metallic voice over his communicator.  Val jerked around in his heavy insulated suit to see Doberman approaching above the trees. Panic grabbed his throat. Reflexively, he nocked an arrow. The craft landed IF and quieted its engine. Gitar floated out on his sandwich-field. "Were you planning on shooting me?" asked Gitar. Val lowered the bow. Gitar hovered over Dee Pen's body. His voice still came over the communicator. "I'm sorry I wasn't here when she came Outside -- but there is so much to do on the planet. I hope the child is all right." "Why are you concerned for the child?" asked Walter. "He's the next generation. He has the good genes." "Bad genes, you mean," shouted Val. "You don't have to raise your voice," said Gitar. "I can hear you. By good genes I meant good for man. You are still thinking as an agent for the Hive. Of course the five-toed gene is bad for the Hive but that is another life form. I came from Olga and I'm interested in man." "Why?" asked Walter. "The five-toed men are Her people. Their genes are the true, noble genes. When Olga walks the stars she takes them with her. The Hive has no place for Olga -- it would try to destroy her -- or, worse, ignore her." "When Olga comes again -- " began Walter excitedly, then collapsed. Val cracked his helmet to see the cyanotic domino mask had returned. He tried to lift him, but he was too weak and clumsy in the bulky suit. Gitar called "Rhea!" A large coweye stepped hesitantly from the Huntercraft and glanced around. Val recoiled. She gently picked up Walter and placed him inside the craft. "Medikit," suggested Gitar. Val collected his wits and climbed in. He opened the kit and took out a mild stimulant. He nudged the pinkness back into Walter's face. He glanced around the craft. It was full of neolithic tools, utensils and wicker baskets. A bundle of hides and poles in one corner resembled a buckeye shelter. Gitar took his place in the empty socket that had housed Doberman's power cell. The hatch closed and the internal environment cooled to a comfortable Hive temperature. Val cracked his helmet. The powerful coweye sat crosslegged on the floor and eyed him sullenly. Gitar said, "This is Rhea. A coweye. Have you ever talked to one before?" Val stiffened. "You're not going to influence me by -- " Gitar played soothing music and said, "Relax. This is just a truce until you can get Walter back on his feet again. No fraternizing. Rhea, fix Walter a bowl of tea." Val made a motion to protect Walter from the brew but Walter held up his hand. "It's okay, Val. I'll drink it, whatever it is. If Gitar can make a dead buckeye walk maybe he can help me get back on my feet, too." They watched Walter drink. He seemed mildly refreshed. '"I actually didn't make a dead man walk," explained Gitar. was just holding him up with my traction Held." He moved a pile of hides to demonstrate. "Was it a rite of some sort?" "Not really," said Gitar. "One buckeye had died, and I was just using him to lure out a replacement." "A hunter you mean." "Same thing. I figured that with the huntercraft deactivated the only hunters I would get would be the cream. Someone with a little of the five-toed gene." Val scoffed. "You got me." Gitar played a tune that moved in the # hertz range. He sang a melancholy ballade of buckeyes and hunters meeting in the gardens. The strong survived. Val was irritated by the words. "It all sounds fine and noble but many of those fine hunters ended up getting eaten. Why would the Big ES send its finest men to provide meals for savages?" "The five-toed gene was a problem for the Hive but their superior individuals we more likely to carry it. The strong eating the strong is necessary in any ecological system when all the good protein is concentrated in the cream of the population." Val stood up. "I want no part in this line of reasoning. If you can't mate them, eat them -- that's absurd." Walter tugged Val's sleeve. "Wait. This makes sense to me." Val pulled his arm away. "Next you're going to want me to mate with this -- " He pointed to the coweye. "You already have," said Gitar. "What?" The coweye turned her back and picked up her long flowing mane. A slightly puckered white asterisk marked her left scapular area -- the scar of his arrow. Then she went to one of the wicker baskets and lifted out a sleeping junglebunny about one year old. Val stood open-mouthed. Years of Hive conditioning fell away. The child had his thin face and delicate features, but it also had its mother's broad palms and #-toed feet. "She's a girl. We call her little Rhea," said the coweye. Val sat down next to Walter. "Bred true." Walter smiled. "I always wondered about your curiosity and enthusiasm. It was the gene." "I carry the gene?" "I guess your kid proves you do. Oh, I've always suspected. The ridge breadth on your palms was suspiciously wide and your gamma is over eighty mg." "When did you check that?" "The lab work you had after the coweye ran over you on the dark IF continent -- excuse me, after Rhea ran over you." Val smiled for the first time. "And I guess she really ran over me. Walter added: "Never hunt a coweye in the follicular phase." They both laughed. Val sobered. "I have the gene," he said. "I have the gene and I've been hunting them all my life." "The five-toed gene is often its own worst enemy," said Gitar philosophically. "How much attention has the Big ES been paying to buckeyes during the last two years?" Val looked at Walter and shrugged. "None, actually. After the hunt at #:# the huntercraft were shut down. There were no sightings. Walter and I were doing a little hunting on our own time, and with our own credits." Gitar's skin rippled with cheerful squares and triangles. "I thought as much. The buckeye population three years ago was Now it is less than a hundred." "How will they ever survive?" asked Walter. Gitar smiled. "That's why Olga sent me -- to find the mature fivetoeds and mate them. Do you know that Rhea is the only coweye on this continent? There are dozens of scattered junglebunnies -- thanks to my efforts last season. But it will be quite a strain on my g-bottle to keep track of them. Fortunately the agromechs identify with them and help, as long as they aren't asked to disobey a direct order of the Hive. Of course it will be easier without the hunters, and with our population of five-toeds so low it should be a long time before the Big ES notices us again." Val frowned. "But the Hive knows you are here now. The rapes. The clusters of flowers." "You noticed that, not the Hive." "The Pied Piper activity," said Walter, concerned. "Why lure those citizens to a flower death?" Gitar's rolling base locked onto Val's #-toed autonomies and he believed even before Gitar said, "I pipe them buckeye with a song. Only those with a high toned neurohumoral axis respond -- one in a hundred thousand. But thus far none have lived long enough i# mate. I'll keep trying -- that's my mission. G.I.T.A.R. stands for Guitar Identity Thoracic Autonomic Resonator. I use the T.A.R. effect to try to add five-toed genes to Olga's gene pool. However, the Hive has weeded out most of them with I.A. and M.R. If I can get Val's medulla believed and it was convincing his cortex. Gitar continued: "My drum brother D. I. T.A.R. and I have always played important roles in the games of man -- mating and battle -- love and war -- passions of the five-toed gene." Val was still adjusting. Terms like "love" and "war" were foreign to hive creatures -- and to hear even a machine mention them enthusiastically bothered him a little. "War." Val shuddered. "It's preferable to -- how do you say it -- chucking your own infants down the chute." reminded Gitar. Val looked at his kid sleeping in the basket -- and wondered what kind of a hell mother's lived in after they had killed their own. He realized, then, the nobility of the five-toed gene. For the #-toed compete, fight and even kill -- but they kill strangers for food and land. They lay their lives on the line for their offspring. The strong survive and the genetic line gets stronger. her own child. The infant stirred. Val reached in and patted it back to sleep. At sunset they left the craft and set up Rhea's shelter on the bank of the canal. Walter buried Dee Pen in her nest and rimmed it with mussel shells. Gitar explained how important diet would be during the newcomers' first months Outside. Lots of nicotinic-acid-rich liver from a cetacean would be necessary to protect them from pellagrin actinic dermatitis. Their prior Nebish diet had left them vitamin-depleted. A fter they were settled Gitar sang. Rhea fed the infant and then the two of them went for a swim. Val and Walter watched from the bank. "Do you think you'll be able to swim, some day?" asked Walter. Val caught a mussel Rhea threw and laughed. "I'll not only swim. I'll run and climb, too -- and so will you."  Gitar's words drifted over the moonlit waters: I was born on a wandering star. You've heard my name, Pm called Gitar. I've come to Earth, mankind to find. I'll search canal and spiral wind. ril extract his soul from out the Hive. Return him to Olga, strong, alive. No Hive can hold true five-toed men. Their five-toed genes and endocrine. ril pipe him buckeye with a song. Mate him, run him, keep him strong. When I return to my home sun. I'll take Olga's men, every one. Children of Olga, You'll be free. To walk the stars, eternally... Gitar gave them a taste of the T.A.R. effect by slipping into an erotic mating ballade. Rhea's iliopsoas muscle became entrained by the rhythm, and her pelvis rocked violently as she danced. It IF was the first of many nights, wild and free. powering the Huntercraft. Walter's life span came to an end. He was put in the ground next to Dee Pen and surrounded by shells. His last days had been idyllic. He swam and he played with Val's children. He lived out his dream, for he had talked to Gitar, disciple of Olga, and he learned of a land where men lived without the shadow of the Hive. A land men shared with species other than himself. A land where there were fish, animals and birds. Flowers appeared on their gravesites occasionally; blossoms picked by a buckeye -- lonely and strong -- little Kaia. Below in the Hive the Big ES stagnated. The Nebish became an obese little dwarf; with chalky, soft bones and rosewater for blood. He was hypogonadal, dim-minded and blind -- only rarely did he contribute a buckeye to the gene pool. Val lived to see three generations of his #-toed descendants spread over the land. Gitar added legends to their culture with song. They were the Tribe of Prince Valiant, vigorous, strong. As their numbers increased the hunters returned. Big ES did what it must to survive. Gitar said it was time for Olga's return when Buckeyes start crowding the Hive...  P.O. Box #. Santa Monica. Cal. # cartoons, a vehicle for thought-provoking, controversial articles, and a "service" magazine containing dozens of s-f and fantasy book reviews per issue, along with news of new releases, coming events, news items of interest to fans, readers and professionals. and the Milford Mafia by Damon Knight; Beer Mutterings by Poul Anderson: Perry Rhodan. Inheritor of the Universe by Eddy C. Berlin. Plus letters from Bob Silverberg. James Blish, Piers Anthony. L. Sprague de Camp, Philip Jose Farmer, Charles Platt, Richard Wilson. Sample Subscription -- # issues for I . # per year. He was a top brain above ground. But deep in the earth -- what? F ive thousand feet down in the lithosphere of Earth it labored, lions of cables linking it to the seven continents were sealed in the stone and never seen; the single elevator was almost a myth. A man stood in that elevator, dropping. Watching through the glass the stone rushing up. Listening to the hiss of the cables playing out above him. Breathing. Pacing the diagonal of the elevator car, three steps. And three steps back. Exulting. Down. He had always expected to be here. He had learned of this place as a boy in school, learned surrounded by louts twice his age and he, knowing his superiority, had thought,  w# be there. That is the real capital, the core of the core. A number there, a tiny change in a number there and you could feel the whole world working like dough. The elevator slowed, slowed, stopped. The door opened and he stepped out. The room was big, very big, clean and silent as a mausoleum; the computer itself made one wall: a bank of tiny, blinking lights as high as the ten-meter ceiling, as wide as the thirty-meter room. Its peripheral equipment, printers and plotters, televisionlike visual displays, made dullgleaming islands where they rose from the smooth floor. "Hello," the man from the elevator said to the computer. "Can you hear me?" A voice beside him said, "No, it can t. The voice belonged to a small man in a clean, white smock. "We don't have vocal IO," the small man continued. (He pronounced it eye-oh.) "They're hardly efficient, really." The man from the elevator introduced himself and said, "I got a good deal of use from the one on our central facility at Harvard. I was looking into the transflnite differentials of some of Lobachevsky's equations and I found on line real time interaction with the machine to be one of the most useful techniques." He wondered if the little man had any concept of how important you had to be to get on line with the main computer at Harvard. Probably not. "We don't have vocal IO here," the small man repeated stubbornly. "Perhaps you should show me what you do have. After all. I'm supposed to help you and I can't do that unless I know what you've got." "Are you supposed to help us?" the small man said. "I'll explain, although I've been given to understand that you have already been briefed. After the Nobel Awards -- I'm putting this as concisely as possible -- the secretary general called me in and I suggested to him that this might make a nice more or less unofficial prize for me and that I might be able to do you people some good. He was quite taken with the idea." "That's what I thought," the small man said. "You're more or less a tourist. Are you familiar with computers?" "I can program assembler language for several. But I wouldn't call myself a specialist." "Assemblers aren't what they used to be -- they make them pretty easy now. But this is an oldfashioned machine. Built over fifty years ago." "Designed over fifty years ago," the man from the elevator corrected him, "but not fully complete until last year as I understand it, although it's been in service more than thirty years. The cost has been -- " "Yes," the small man said, "like a cathedral. Now, those lights over there -- you may not be familiar with those and they're not just for show. Each one represents a working subsection of the machine and is turned on when that subsection is engaged. Most of them look dim because the areas they represent are engaging and disengaging all the time. The idea is to show what parts are involved when there's trouble." "I understand." T ' HE small man stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring at the myriad winking lights. Half to himself he said, "It's just like looking at a city at night. Each one is a window, a factory or an office or an apartment, and if it's on you know they're awake and working ther." "I suppose that's true -- but I doubt there is much value in romanticizing it like that. If you don't have vocal, how do you communicate with it?" "It's all the cities in the world," the small man said, still half to himself. "New York, London, Tokyo, everything." Then in his normal voice: "Come along. There are various methods. I'll show you." He led the man from the elevator to a massive keyboard. "For short stuff you can just use this. You understand that the machine doesn't really stop everything else it's doing to pay attention to you. The monitor program deternfiines the priority of your material and cues it behind all the more important material. When it has time it will set aside a portion of core -- that's what we call the machine's mind -- to deal with you. It's working on other things all the time. The price of grain everywhere in the world, for instance. Whether or not the atmosphere can stand another power station on the Taymyr Peninsula. Everything." "I'm sure I should be assigned a very low priority." "You will be. You want to make the entry yourself?" "Yes." "Then you'll need to know the right formats. Here." The small man slid a yellowing, stapled manual from a niche in the console. "If you need help call me." After an hour and a half the man from the elevator moved a IF switch on the console and wrote he thought, and added his social security number -- #-#-#ceded by the double slash would alert the machine to a new task, wiping out any garbage instructions a previous user might have left on the console. After executing the English Language Code -- bringing the most sophisticated coding language yet devised, nearly identical to standard English, from a storage location to core -- it would be ready to "execute" (answer) his question. He touched On the keyboard a red light labled "Those aren't the right control statements," the small man said behind him. "Here." He pushed the man from the elevator aside and his fingers flew across the keyboard. "That'll retrieve your question, whatever it was." "I assure you -- " the man from the elevator began, picking up the manual. "It's a little out of date. Anyway, they just write them to sell the machines, you know, I'll show you what to do sometime." "When will it have an answer to -- " "In the basket beside you." The man from the elevator took the slip of paper from the basket. understand this," he said. "Is it a probability?" "If that's what you asked for. It's in hexidecimal notation." "I don't -- " "The base is sixteen instead of ten. We use the Arabic numerals for one through nine and the letters A through F for the ten through fifteen. That makes your '#E' mean seventy-eight -- in other words, fourteen (that's the 'E') plus four times the base. The second 'E' indicates that the number following is an exponent or more properly a characteristic, so the answer is point seven zeros four E, or seventy-eight over sixteen to the ninth power. For most purposes that's zero." "That's not possible. My question was just a test, an obvious development in my own career." "My opinion of your question would have no value. You may want to check your phrasing." "The phrasing is perfectly correct. Don't you have some method that would put me in closer contact with the machine? I -- " the man from the elevator paused and a brief, icy smile crossed his face -- "I'd like to argue with it a little." "We have this," the small man IF said. He touched the console with his fingertips and it began to revolve slowly and noiselessly. The keyboard rotated away; a seat, a display panel with a hundred or more signal lights and a chromium helmet, took its place. "Direct mental communication. This is what I mostly use myself." Despite his self-possession the man from the elevator was awed. "I didn't know there was such a thing," he said. "The machine itself worked it out for us. We haven't made it public yet and most people couldn't use it anyway." "May I try it?" "You understand that whatever instruction you give must be thought thfough logically. No mental confusion." "Of course." "You're likely to have a good deal of trouble with it at first. Those lights on the display panel are to help you diagnose what you're doing wrong. The booklet beside them tells what each one means." "I understand," the man from the elevator said. He picked up the helmet and put it on. The lights on the display panel flashed red. All of them. The small man made a tiny noise and said, "You'd better read the manual first." vator had gone back up the elevator the small man rotated the console again and put a question to the great machine, including an extended answer instruction with his control statements. After a moment's thought he added a question about the helmet to his program. The damn thing hadn't worked right since they'd built it and just before the man from the elevator had interrupted him he had fed the computer his troubleshooting schedule. The papers he received in reply Eleven times sixteen plus four was one hundred and eighty. With a hexidecimal characteristic of minus twelve that would be -- he scribbled for a moment on the reply sheet -- .# # # A#  .# # # # # decimal, approximately. And the chances that the helmet would be working before he had to try for another appropriation were one hundred percent: unity. The small man smiled, closed one eye, and raised the fingers of his right hand, curled to form an imaginary telescope, to the other. Looking at one of the flashing piapoints on the immense wall he imagined it was indeed an apartment window, with a girl undressing inside. Then he laughed.  When he returned from the stars. Earth would be older -- but not the woman he loved! I H e signaled return twelve light-years out, on attaining peak velocity. Earth station computers -- when they finally got his message -- would punch out his arrival time to within forty-eight hours of accuracy. They integrated it from the signal shape and by a kind of parallax. The warping of the continuum about a craft traveling near the speed of light gave it a double image. It took the computers a week to check and doublecheck. Then the tape went into the traffic banks to start rescheduling local flights up to six months ahead, to leave the field -- and space -- clear for his arrival. His ship would "re-appear" well outside the ecliptic; all the propulsion -- ship demanded a lot of room. And got it. He came in out of permanent night into the transitory night of his home planet. But Sheppard Field was brighter than day. The lights dimmed as he grounded. They always did. It had become a kind of salute. In fact, it was more of a publicity gesture by the company, to allow full sight of the strange fires that played around a deep-space ship at landing. They were fading as, ground procedures completed, he opened up and descended, and the battery of lights leaped up to full strength again. Faces were a white blur beyond the perimeter fence. The faint, faraway noise could have been cheering. Probably was. Reporters clustered. Uniformed field guards kept them back to allow passage to a crewcut figure who approached with the pumping stride of a little man determined to show that he could walk as fast as a big man. And, by implication, do anything else. He thrust out a hand. Cameras clicked and rolled. "Grant?" Grant smiled inwardly "at the query in the voice. But they were strangers, after all, he and this man in a mauve suit. "I'm Bassick. Chief of Flight Programing. Have a good trip?" "Good?" Grant allowed himself a smile now. "That depends on what your analysts make of the data I brought back. Quantity's there, at least. There wasn't much room left in the banks by the time I'd finished." Bassick nodded happily. "There are also some physical specimens you may find interesting " mg. "Artifacts" The corners of Bassick's mouth went down a fraction as Grant shook his head. "Mineral stuff, mostly. Little life at all. Surprisingly little. A pleasant enough planet as they go. Everything seemed right for a pretty rich ecology -- and it wasn't there. But I clocked in full data on that point." "Well, even negatives can be IF useful to somebody." The little man turned to the reporters. "Okay, boys, you've seen him. And you've had the company handout. Give the guy a break, eh? He's been traveling fourteen years getting here." A laugh went up. The joke wasn't as familiar to them, a new generation, as it was to Grant. "Press conference tomorrow as arranged, at fifteen hundred hours." They dispersed good-humoredly enough, photographers taking a few more pictures as Bassick ushered Grant to the Personnel Block. "A car was laid on," said Bassick. "But I thought you'd like to get your planet-legs." He used a spaceman's words with the self-conscious unctuousness of the earthbound. Grant decided that he didn't like Bassick overmuch -- nor care one whit for that fact. "What happened to Goodman?" The other looked up at him with no more than a company man's mask of regret. "He passed on eleven years ago. Heart. They Pushed lym to Replacement, of course, but the new one didn't take. I was at his side. I don't think he wanted it to, somehow." That vas more than likely. Grant thought. Goodman had always prided himself on his physical fitness. An independent man in a world increasingly dependent on artificial aids. Betrayed by one body, he wouldn't have wanted to start relying on another. "I thought his son was in line to take over from him. Young... Paul, wasn't it?" "He was. I had more executive points. He left the company. He's with some inner-planet outfit now, I believe." "And my -- buddies?" Grant spoke the word ironically. One he had never met; the other he had not seen since training days, two hundred years -- Earth time -- ago. "Kroll's doing fine. Hazlitt was grounded after his last trip. His replacement's a youngster called Ebsen. Pity about Hazlitt. Only had one trip to go. But he's making out. Took a farm in Brazil." They walked along a way. "Do you have any plans?" "What -- in case I flunk my medical?" "It's your last time around, too. But I didn't mean that. You look in good shape. I meant, after your last mission?" "Time enough to think about that. But I don't see myself farming in Brazil or anywhere else." Grant's face freaked in a sardonic smile. "Might buy a small space line and do a spot of hiring and firing myself." But despite his joking he felt a twinge of unworthy fear as they entered Personnel. A truncated service term made a huge difference to a man's finances. That was something you couldn't insure against. With the vast investment and its pilot -- and the time span between that and arty yield -- the payment structure was logical enough, with its penalty clauses for failure to stay the course. It made this life, inevitably, a gamble. Not, ironically, out there -- instrumentation took a lot of the risk out of that -- but here, in what a man came back to. When he had started out, there had been wry jokes about whether there would be anything to come back to. Star flight had come at the crux of man's technological ability to destroy himself and his planet. But things had settled down over the past two centuries. At every return the world seemed crazier on the surface but saner underneath, where it mattered. He felt annoyed to be thinking about the money angle. It hadn't been the money that had attracted him. It took more complicated reasons to lead a man into a career like this. He'd given up the central years of his life to an existence without continuity, isolated from everybody else -- by time more than by space. The wish for that was something the company psychiatrists delved very deep to find in a man. When they did, he was out before he started. They looked for an idealist of sorts, a special kind of loner. A special kind -- but there were enough around. The need for perfect physical fitness winnowed the ranks down. A doctorate in science gained early enough to enable an applicant to complete a stringent and specialized training program by the time he was twenty-five was another qualification that reduced the number to hardly more than the company required. Which was two when he had started. Even now there were only three ships. It was an expensive business for a company to be in. And it could be an expensive business for a man coming out into a world of normal time and an unknowable future. A few inner-planet men, in their midnight blue, were spread around the reception lounge. They looked up from their drinks at sight of Grant's sage-green uniform; some waved in wary greeting. In their glances was the usual mixture -- it didn't change with the generations -- of... it was difficult to analyze... something of envy, something of You re welcome. Jack, something of resentment -- and a large amount of workaday relief, that they could now get back into their own backyard of space. Grant waved briefly in return -- theirs was a camaraderie he could never be part of -- and trod the familiar way to the Medical Section. They were lined up and waiting for him. H e came out two hours later with a clean bill of health. IF with no need to claim the second opinion which, with everything at stake, was his right. Bassick was waiting outside. "I've booked you a suite at the Venus." "What's that? Sounds like a high-class cathouse. What's wrong with the Universe?" "They pulled it down twenty years ago to make way for a freefall drome. The Venus is the latest and best in town." Bassick's hand twitched at his crewcut. "The other service you -- ah, mentioned in passing -- is also available. That's supposed to be the best in town, too." Grant grimaced. Goodman had been much more pleasantly direct and brought out a selection, in assorted sizes and colors, direct to the field. "That's something you have to get back into the habit of. All I want at this moment is a meal of real food, a bottle of real booze and a real bed. To myself." II conference they had the parade in his suite. The usual train of facts and figures, stereo films, commentaries snipped from a hundred news items and documentaries -- and models showing off the current fashions. The Sahara reclamation scheme was now completed. The transAustrailia monorail had been opened. A third generation had been born in Costeaupolis under the Mediterranean, including one child with what some excited scientists said were embryonic gills and others said were just accidents. A man had descended into the Red Spot of Jupiter and come out alive. The interest in organ replacement seemed unabated since last time, despite the fact that it only afforded a marginal extension of the normal life span. It simply made sure that most people attained it. This time the ultimate seemed to have been accomplished with an operation on an Indonesian more than six months had been ascribed to overexcitement rather than to anything more organic. Humanoid robots on a commercial basis were just around the corner. They'd been round the same corner thirty years before. Skirts if they could be called that, were back to the length -- or shortness -- of the twenty-one fifties. Worn with garters, which looked hideous to Grant's eyes. The effect wasn't improved when one model switched on a miniature radio in hers. But he did his best to be polite to the reporters who were ushered in on the dot of fifteen hundred hours. It was a routine that seemed to be wearing thin to him, but the company called it good P.R. Yes, he thought the current fashions for women were very feminine. He liked the style of mauve suits for men but didn't intend to buy one this leave. He had enough clothes. Some of them might look rather antique but he could always find something in the wardrobe like this -- he gestured down to his dark jacket and slacks -- that fitted in well enough. Yes, he thought robots might well be just around the corner. Did he think they would ever replace men on spaceships? They might, but he didn't see it personally. A spaceship was ninety-nine percent robot now, if not in humanoid shape. But it still needed a man to control, to initiate, to improvise. He couldn't pass comment on the gills -- not his specialty. A primitive race he had encountered on Proxima Centauri Two had seemed to be in process of giving up the struggle on land and returning to an aquatic life. But that had been nearly two hundred years ago. The same old stale joke. The same stock laughter. It was like -- the thought came to him, not for the first time -- being a visitor to a foreign country. This was your seventh trip. Captain. The next one makes up the number, doesn't it? Well, yes. Not the number. It's the term that counts -- twenty years. The trips get longer most of the time as we push out the frontiers. My successor will either make fewer trips or sign for a longer term. (He turned to Bassick, who flighted his palms in a noncommittal gesture.) Will there ever be true frontiers out there, men colonizing? He gave a loyal company yes to that, though sometimes he had doubts. But probably not in your lifetime. Nor even in mine. The same laughter, a bit forced this time, the resentment of the time-bound against this strange elite of men who spanned centuries. But how many of them, given the choice, ould have made the same one he had made two hundred years ago? No, I don't know yet where my last assignment will he. After I retire? I haven't decided. An inner planet? I doubt it. My plans for this leave? Family? No, I have no family. (Which was not quite true, he confessed to himself with a pang, but as true as mattered.) Nor home town; that was Inundated in a reservoir scheme a century ago. No, I shall just loaf around, try to catch up with the world. Any more questions? There weren't. familiar figure entered, recognizable immediately even in a dark purple suit. No such company maneuvers as took place in Deep Space Incorporated plagued the IF firm of Vandeleer and Vandeleer. Grant shook hands. "The eighth?" he inquired politely. "The ninth." Grant smiled ruefully. "The memory must be slipping." "Not at all. I'm afraid Dad died. Tragically. He was only twenty-eight. The Transworld Clipper collided with a freighter over the Caucasus." "I'm very sorry. And sorry I never knew him. I should have realized. I thought you looked rather young." "I try net to." Richard Vandeleer IX laughed. "Your portfolio has given me a few premature gray hairs these past three years." The room was empty now, the last to leave having been Bassick, who ushered out the drinks trolley. "How come?" "Well, first there was devaluation." "Devaluation? Against what? I thought we had an integrated world currency now." "Against gold. Integration brought its problems. They had to have sonys standard." "Seems a bit primitive in this day and age. Did I lose much?" The other grinned. "I may have got pitcl forked into this at a tender age, but it's in the Vandeleer blood. I had a hunch and bought Eurasian Gold Preferred three months before the switch. You made money out of it. It wasn't so easy with the tax revisions they brought in just after. They were intended to rationalize the tax position of inner planet people. Some were being faced with double taxation. It blew up in a freak case of somebody getting loaded with quadruple demands -- for fifty percent more tax than he was earning. "I won't go into technicalities, but the revision would have meant that you would have lost all your tax allowances here, without gaining them anywhere else. I don't want to overplay my efforts -- but it was tough going. When the machine puts things right for a minority of fifty thousand, it doesn't want to be bothered with amendments to accommodate an even smaller minority of three." "Especially," Grant commented, "if said minority is rarely home at election times." "Exactly. It took lobbying and a degree of -- " He gestured equivocally with one hand. "Graft?" "Call it programing. Rather expensive programing. Getting the right questions put at the right time in the right places. I was ready to fight it up to World Supreme Court level if necessary, but that would have been even more expensive and time-consuming. I managed to straighten it out my way, but only just in time for your return." He drew out a folder of papers from his briefcase. "Despite that expense, you fintwo years ago. In real terms, taking into account the inevitable cost-of-living rise, you're seventeen point two five points ahead. Not a lot. I'm afraid, over that period, but in view of -- " Grant waved away his apologies. "You've done well. I'm satisfied." The other was young enough to show his relief. "There are some papers here for you to sign." He held out a pen. Grant signed without reading them. He trusted the firm of Vandeleer. He waited for the last paper to be handed over. Richard held it back. "And this one -- I should have told you earlier." He looked awkward. "I can handle the financial angles. But I'm still callow at personal details. This is a receipt for the estate of your only grandson. He -- he died five years ago, without issue." "I never expected him to have issue." Grant laughed hollowly. "If that's the right pronoun. Estate, you say?" "Only a few hundred dollars after expenses." "That's something out of the affair, anyway." He caught the look of embarrassment on the boy's face. He was a member of a tightknit dynasty, in which family hatreds must be taboo. "I'm sorry. I've no right to be bitter. It was my fault. Have no fear, I shan't repeat the mistake." derstatement. It had happened on the leave between his fourth and fifth trips, and he still couldn't understand what had possessed him. There had always been enough women. He was under no illusion about his looks; he knew that to most women he was only an experience. A strange, enigmatic being, pupils burned black in eyes honed white, hair bleached almost as white against the deep tan that outer space radiation imprinted. A freakish and meretricious attraction, he knew, and it was better that way. The experience over, most women passed on, asking nothing in return. There were the gold-diggers, of course, attracted by the news items But gold-diggers employed lawyers, who soon dug out the fact that the wealth was more potential than real. The penalty clauses made sure of that, with the company having first lien upon the lion's share until the day when his service was completed and the discharge papers signed. More to the point, no amount of scheming could separate the money from a man who was going to outlive any gold-digger anyway. Helen had come in neither category. Yes, she had been undemanding -- but making the more demands on him for that, because she had been helplessly in love with him. She had aroused in him the IF worst thing possible for a man in his position -- a sense of responsibility to another. Resisting it, he had tried to rationalize it into a conviction that he loved her in return. They had married in a village in the Catskills. A week later the company cabled him notice of his next assignment. A long trip -- longer than any he had made up to then, or since. A company decision, born of boardroom conferences and balance sheets and time factors, had sent him out for forty years. He had come back to a Helen of sixty-seven, with a son whom she had tried pitifully to model after his father, cramming him to qualify in the same business. The son had had three, breakdowns; at forty he was a sad creature, older in all fact than his father, painting tenthrate pictures in an attempt to justify his living on the fund that Grant had set up for his wife. That would have been supportable. No man could be sure of his progeny. It had been far worse with Helen. He had been prepared for her kging; prepared loyally to do all that he could to make her happy, to make amends for the unnatural existence to which he had condemned he . He had not been prepared for a Helen determined crazily to pretend that time had stood still. A Helen who had used every artifice of twenty-second century cosmetic surgeons, who paraded before him to entice him, in the grotesque negligees of a world foreign to him. It was that -- the contradition in her craving to turn the clock back, yet needing the sustainment of the latest fashions in order to feel young -- that symbolized the unbridgeable gulf between them. That, more than the old body behind the cosmetic facade, the mincing, imploring gestures, that sent him fleeing from her. The long mistake was over, then. But he winced in pain at the memory of it and felt like an executioner as he signed the document. He sighed heavily. "Well, if that's all the business, let's go downstairs and have a drink. You are old enough to drink, aren't you?" Richard Vandeleer the Ninth looked up from zipping his case. "Try me." T WO large drinks later Grant felt no better. The surroundings didn't help, the fluorescent patterns changing and swirling over the walls of the huge bar. They might be the latest thing in decoration but they weren't restful to eyes that had not had the decades to get used to them. But it wasn't the present that disturbed him -- and he wasn't sure whether it was the past or future which did. In thirty, forty years -- of Earth time; two or three of his own -- he would be back on Earth permanently. The comparison that had entered his head at the press conference -- that he was a stranger in a foreign country -- returned to him. One could spend a few months' holiday in a foreign country and be diverted by its different customs, the strange language. But to settle there? He drained his drink. There was an answer to the feeling, if not to the final problem -- the old answer of inoculation, a smaller dose of the larger disease. He snapped his fingers to a waiter. The man came running. "A gazetteer," Grant told him. The man blinked. "I'm sorry, sir. If that's some kind of a new drink -- or an old one. I'm afraid I -- oh, a gazetteer?" Grant nodded. "A world one." "I'm not sure if the hotel has one, sir." Grant held up a hundred-dollar bill. "Find one." It arrived inside five minutes, looking and smelling straight from the bookstore as Grant opened it at random. He stabbed a blind finger to the page. "Biarritz. Department of the Basse-Pyrenees. Historic resort, made fashionable by the English in the nineteenth century. Population He looked up at Richard. Richard gazed at him for a long moment, with a sympathy beyond his years. "I'll arrange the flight. And a good hotel" He drained his own drink. "All a part of the service." "You're a true Vandeleer," Grant told him quietly. "One request, though." The walls were flaming orange now. "Make it a small hotel?" Ill T WO weeks in the French town did much to restore his spirits. Heaven knew where Richard had found the hotel, LAuberge Basque. It was surely too small to be listed in any travel guide; a family affair of a dozen rooms, a zinctopped bar and a small restaurant. The owner, M. Vidal, was a lean man who smoked black French cigarettes in a holder he carried at a jaunty angle. He discarded it at intervals to serve -- and help consume -- meals that belied his ascetic lines. The inn was typical of the town. In an international world it still retained an essentially French flavor. If itself one of the first of the international resorts -- some of the old buildings still bore English names -- the tide had swept over it and on. Few skyscrapers had encroached here. The month was September, and he was less noticeable -- less different -- here, where everybody was deeply tanned. Resort clothes seemed never to change much; they didn't jar the eye like the bizarre fashions of New York. He spent IF his days strolling on the yellow sands, watching the breakers coming in; occasionally, as the mood took him, going out to ride on them. His evenings he spent sipping drinks on the terrace of one cafe or another, listening to velvetpanted French kids strum out ancient French songs on guitars. He found his palate adapting to the same acrid cigarettes whose scent was part of the air of the place, to aniseed-flavored Pernod. It was a peaceful life, the peak of its excitement a modest flutter at the roulette tables of the casino. The greater gamble that was his life, his future, became more and more remote every day. Until... He came back to the inn for dinner and had to pass her table to reach his own. The tables were set close in the tiny restaurant. He said,  Pardonnez-moi, madame,"" in his poor French, then, such was his uncertainty with the language and its manners, added a suffix ofoiselle, making grotesque the simple word. The gold-haloed head turned. Amber eyes looked up at him. Red lips parted in a warm smile. "# vous en prie,"" she said. In the bar after dinner only one stool was vacant and it was next to hers. He said "C'e#r libreV and she answered, "You're welcome." The words were American but the accent was unmistakably English. It happened as simply as that. As fatally. Her name was Etta -- Etta Waring. An ancestor of hers had written a diary of life here in the days before the first World War. She herself had just finished an international congress in Barcelona and had driven across here out of curiosity. She was an anthropologist, a doctor. He told her that he was a doctor, too, of physical science. And she said, "Reminds me of the story by -- Thurber, was it? -- one of the classical humorists -- no, Leacock. He was a doctor of literature. Aboard ship, a blonde nicked an ankle and the call went out for a doctor. Leacock rushed to her cabin but found that a doctor of divinity had beaten him by a short head." . They laughed together and the danger point -- talk of their occupations -- was past without his having had to reveal -- or conceal -- the exact nature of his work. They went surfing or planing over the calmer waters of St. Jeande-Luz along the coast -- or just lazed by the old port of Bayonne, watching the fishermen unload their immemorial freight. They were days made rich by simple pleasures. One day they drove in her replica E-Type Jaguar up into the Pyrenees, to the places of cold waterfalls and ancient villages. They stayed in one village, in an inn even tinier than the Auberge Basque and a room quaint with carved beams. And he knew then with a dreadful certainty that he had come full circle -- back to bitter memories, of mountains humbler than these, of a village less ancient, an inn... And this time threatened to be even more bitter, for now it was heartbreakingly sweet -- and this time it was mutual. At breakfast he knew that he had to tell her. At what should have been a time of quiet intimacy, of few words, over croissants and wild cherry conserve and coffee, he had to introduce the shockingly incongruous subject of his work. H e pushed his plate aside and, early as it was, ordered cognac. Etta's eyebrows rose but she did not demur. He tried to settle himself but the words still came out hopelessly awkward. "You know -- who I am? My job, I mean. You don't..." She smiled gently. "What, read the popular magazines? No, hardly at all. I didn't know who you were. I do now. I wrote home to my people to tell them about you. I hope you don't mind. They told me. They recognized you from the name and the description I gave them of you." "And they disapproved?" "Disapproved? Whyever should they?" She smiled again. "I'm a big girl, anyway. I'm thirty-three." "Thirty-three," he said, his face strange. "Yes, you told me. But you don't know the whole of it, obviously, or you wouldn't talk about it so calmly." "What -- the subjective time factor? Yes." "But you can't know the full implications. For us. Unless you do feel the same way I do, don't you?" "Do you have to ask?" "That's all we seem to be doing -- asking questions. There's no an swer, you know." "Every question has an answer." "You, a scientist, can say that?" "Because I'm a scientist -- yes. In time." "Don't mention that word again." He tried to smile. "Couldn't I go along with you this last trip? With my scientific' training I -- " "You'd be payload. Anthropology is the least required subject -- the least profitable line." "Profitable? I thought it was a government project. You mean it's a commercial thing?" "So far it is. There are no dividends for any government in it yet. Inner-planet traffic is a government-backed thing. There are still remnants of military thinking behind that, of national advantage. There isn't, of course, but the blocs are committed to it. At a considerable loss. Every assembly in the world has a strong anti-space lobby. No government that values its survival could afford to take the risk in deep space yet." IF It was a relief to talk about impersonal things for a moment. "For Deep Space Incorporated it's a long-term project. So longof capital that they're the only firm in the business so far -- after two hundred years. They sell the knowledge we bring back -- to research foundations, other companies -- but that doesn't pay for half of it. They're gambling on being the first in the field, with perfected techniques, inyreadiness for the day when it rqmly opens up out there. If it opens up. It's a big gamble. "What we do is to extend those techniques -- and our knowledge of deep space -- system by system. If one of us found a civilization out there comparable to ours things would open up in a heck of a hurry. Everybody knows now that that was the whole impetus behind man's hunger to get to the planets -- to find a companion race, a touchstone. Even the remains of one. But they didn't. Nor have we among the nearer stars. Just a few primitive species. Valuable to the biologists but nothing developed enough to be of interest to your field -- He was swinging back to personal matters now. And it could be deferred no . onger. "I'm payload enough. Every item of expenditure is costed down to a cent. The pay isn't huge by objective time standards. It just piles up while I'm away. But even I couldn't afford to commission a passenger -- even you." "Couldn't you pull out now?" "I could." He told het, briefly,  about the penalty clauses. "It would mean coming out with a few thousand dollars -- to start all over again on." "Money's not that important. I have money, anyway." "No -- the money's not important. And it's not the main factor in all this. Completing my mission is. I wouldn't call myself a company man -- companies seem pretty small things out there in space -- but I dedicated myself to this job. I have to go through with it." "I understand," she said quietly. "Neither could I give up my work -- even for us." "In your case it wouldn't be the same either-or choice. There could be a compromise. There's no compromise in this." He sniacked fist impotently into palm. "Why should this have had to happen now? The last time around?" She laid a hand on his. "It's hard -- terribly hard. I've known for three days. I knew it would make difficulties. I haven't let it spoil things." "You didn't know the full facts." "I knew enough. I won't let it spoil things now." "Then you can accept it, accept -- us -- as something transient?" "It doesn't have to be. You'll be away -- how long? Twenty, thirty years. I'm prepared -- " "No. I tried that once. It doesn't work. It couldn't work." He got up and paced the little room. The sun, moving between peaks, sent a sudden shaft through the unshuttered windows, drowning the room in light. She stood up and came to his side, her hair a golden haze. "Then we'll just have to accept it," she said quietly. "Easy words." "I know, my darling. Easy and shockingly inadequate. But what more can we say? Or do? We'll have memories. Hell, why do the simplest and truest things always sound so corny? But we mil have. And we can -- " She stopped abruptly. "How much longer have we got?" "Four, five weeks. At least -- " the thought impinged " -- I have." "Then so have I. A new academic year starts soon, but the University can do without me for that long. And I without the University." Her tone was flippant but her look, as she gazed at him, was one of utter tenderness. He took her into his arms and she was trembling. "I've always been glad to get back into space. Every time I've felt more and more a stranger on Earth. This time it's going to seem very lonely out there." He laughed sadly. "## a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.'" "That's not quite what the poet said." "I know. He said the grave. That's one place where all rates of time become equal. The only one." "Let's not get morbid." She kissed him once and long. "We've still got a lot of living to do. Let's get back to the big city." But she was abstracted, saying not a word unless prompted and then only answering in monosyllables, all the way back to town, driving along the narrow mountain roads like an automaton. When they got back he found a cable waiting for him. He was sure she noticed -- sure she guessed what it was -- but she made no comment. Up in his room he opened it. He did a simple sum, made even simpler by practice. He would be away for thirty-four years of Earth time. Two and a half of his own. It could have been worse. But when he came back for the last time he would be fortyfive. Etta would be sixty-seven. Exactly the same age that Helen had been. T he next morning he was up before eight. He knocked on her door. There was no answer. He shrugged; early as it was, she must have gone down to breakfast before him. He went down and to the table they had shared ever since that first night. She was not there either. He saw an envelope with his name on it. He felt suddenly empty. He pulled back the curtains. Her car IF was gone from the tiny, graveled parking lot. He brought himself to open the envelope. Beloved, I've taken the dawn flight to London. I don't know just how long I'll be. No more than a fortnight, I hope. Dreadfully sorry to cut into our time -- that bloody word again! -- like this, but it's for a good cause, believe me. I can't tell youany more until I get back -- and perhaps not even then if this doesn't work. Don't pick up any blonde English anthropologists while I'm away. Or anyone else! And please -- wait for me, beloved. Etta IV T he crippled days dragged along. He drank more Pernods than usual, spent more time at the casino, found that he could not face the sea. Its emptiness was too much an image of the lack in his life. ' Twelve days later she reappeared as abruptly as she had left. Her car was back in the lot and she was waiting for him at their table when he ca ne in for dinner. They looked at each other for a moment. Then she was out of her chair and in his arms, saying, "Darling -- darling." The French in the dining room smiled as the French have always smiled at lovers, tolerantly, sympathetically, the old nostalgically. "We can't talk here," he told her. "Have you eaten?" She shook her head. "I couldn't." "Nor could I, now." He led her onto the terrace. Somebody brought out glasses and a bottle of Pernod. Grant poured the drinks, watching them turn to milk as he added ice and water. He brought his eyes up at length to hers. "I've decided -- no, I couldn't bring myself to do that -- I'm ready to let you decide. If you say so I'll go back on my contract. I've had a lot of time to think it over while you've been away. The company won't lose that badly. They'll have a reserve pilot ready. I -- " She shook her head slowly, halting his words. "That's something I wouldn't hear of. I wouldn't before and I won't now. Besides, darling, it's too late." "Too late? What's happened? Why did you leave for London in such a hurry?" "To have an illegal operation." She spoke the words coolly. "A -- what?" "Well, not illegal exactly. Not yet sanctioned. It's a new technique and all kinds of social problems are involved. You know the way we English always worry about the social problems. The whole thing only took Hve days, from the start to the final checks to prove that it had taken. But I had to spend the best part of a week inducing the doctors to do it." "Please -- don't keep darting around the subject like this. Operation? What operation? What have you had done to yourself?" "You make it sound like something dreadful." She smiled. "And sad. It wasn't, because of my motive in having it done, though I suppose it could be." The smile became wry. "The ward was a fine and private place, but none I think did there embrace. They see the process as having most use in perpetuating intelligence. It's ironical, really, that it should have been used in this case to serve the cause of lovers." "For heaven's sake. Your blasted English cool -- " "It's not easy to tell. Briefly -- I've arranged that you will find me waiting for you when you come back, unchanged by the years." Appalled, his mind lurched back to Helen , and her pitiful attempts to defeat time and its passing. "You can't. I'll be away for thirtyfour years." Her smile became enigmatic as she made a pretense of counting on her fingers. "Fine. I'll be a slightly younger Etta waiting for you. By a few months." ' "What's happened to you? I thought I knew you. When did this sadistic streak creep in?" His voice was baffled rather than bitter. "I'm sorry, darling, really I am. I'm not being sadistic -- Just a little shy. I'll have to come out with it. I'm going to have a baby." "You're -- " "Don't be appalled. Just listen carefully while I say it again. I'm going to have a baby." "But -- " "I told you it was a new technique. Do I have to go into the details?" She sighed. "I suppose I do have. "Well, it's not really a new technique; only for humans. It was first done back in the nineteen sixties by an Oxford team led by a Dr. Gurdon, with -- if I have to bring them into this -- frogs. They found that if they transplanted the nucleus of an ordinary body cell into an egg killed by radiation -- its own nucleus killed -- the egg developed just like a fertilized one. The cell and the egg from the same creature. They've only recently discovered how to do the same thing successfully to a human being. Now do you see?" His mental defenses, overwhelmed, would not allow him to see it. He listened dazedly as she went on. "I told you that you will find me waiting for you. You will. It will be me -- exactly the same. Even to the name. I'll christen her Etta, too, naturally. And don't worry about its being anything else IF but a girl. That presents no difficulty these days, with this or any other birth." Light filtered through -- was suddenly blinding. "But -- it won't be you. To me it will be but -- " "But that's all that matters. We can't both of us meet again -- but this way one of us can." She laughed but she was close to tears, he knew, "If you see what I mean. It can come true for one of us." "I -- I can't find the words." "Don't try, my darling." "I must. I feel selfish -- more selfish than I could have believed a man could feel. You went away and did -- this -- and while you were gone I couldn't even come to a dethe Sheraton Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal speaker: Larry Niven. For information: Kathy Surgenor, # N. Fairhill Street. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. Sheraton Cc umbus Motor Hotel, # North Third Street, Columbus, Ohio. Guest-of-Honor: Lester del Rey. For information: Larry Smith # F Roche Drive, Columbus, Ohio #.  #th World Science Fiction Convention. At the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, Prudential Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest-of-Honor: Clifford D. Simak. Fan Guest-of-Honor: Harry Warner Jr. Features: movies, auctions, panels and speeches by sf pros, awards banquet, presentation of the Hugos. Registration: # supporting, # attending. No mail registration after August #. For information: Noreascon, P.O. Box # Cambridge, Massachusetts #. cision, except to leave it to you to decide. I feel the worst kind of a -- " She put a finger to his lips. "No, my dear, you're not the worst kind of anything. You're the best kind of something very special. And you're not selfish. Society is selfish in demanding what it has from you, without even recognizing the extent of your sacrifice. Except -- " "No," he said. "You can't use that word for me after what you've done. Yours is the sacrifice. I'm not -- " "Please -- let me go on. I insist. Except by treating you as some kind of a freak. I had plenty of time, in the ward, to catch up on the popular papers. Plenty of time to realize just what life must have been like for you. That only sustained me in my decision. I'm glad to have done it -- glad with all my heart.So please don't protest any more. It was the only way -- and it was a happy chance that this way existed and that I knew about it and was in a position to argue my way through to taking it." "But -- I won't protest -- but how do you know that she'll even like me? One sacrifice is enough. You can't condemn a child to growing up to a foreordained point in her life, and then -- it's a terrible compulsion to impose on a human bemg. She smiled but her lips trembled as she did so. "It won't be a compulsion, beloved, but a dream to live for. A realization. She will have the advantage on me. I didn't know, living my years out, just what I was waiting for. She will. And she will fall in love with you just as I did. Because she'll be me. Not an ordinary child, with all the genetic complications of joint parenthood, but my image." He stared. "But she won't have your memories -- of anything -- of us." "How do you think I will spend my days while you're away? I'll keep them alive, pass them on to my daughter. My daughter. It's a pity that it won't be our daughter. But next time around you can make even that come true." She turned her face away from him suddenly, hiding it in the cool leaf shadows of the terrace. But when, after long moments, she turned back to him she was managing to smile. "And who knows? The records are still scanty on this -- but that memory might be transmitted directly through this kind of direct reproduction. Part of me may be waiting for you, too. So let's have enough talk of sacrifices. And there are memories still to make. We haven't even started our drinks. Look, the ice has nearly all melted." She lifted her glass and waited, her face quite serene now, until he lifted his.  IF T he helicopter tossed the desert sunshine off its blades in sudden circular explosions and its shadow moved flatly across the sand far below. "Down there," said Spenser, leaning toward the cut-out door and pointing with a hand. His voice was loud and high-pitched to be heard over the clatter of the blades. "Di-rectly down there." Dr. Bunyan inclined his head and gazed a thousand feet down, to where a huge purple stain spread out on the desert floor like a port wine mark on a sandy cheek. "The exact center of the dissonance. We mapped it this week. Dropped the dye canisters yesterday afternoon." Dr. Bunyan stared up at the New Mexico sky and nodded, saying nothing. Spenser tapped the pilot on the shoulder and the helicopter swung about, around the axis of the main blades and tilted, accelerating back in the direction it had come from. Spenser turned his head and looked back to watch the huge stain disappear into the faint haze and then around the curve of the earth. Dr. Bunyan continued to stare at the immense blue sky, until a motion of the helicopter brought the sun over the cabin roof and into the cockpit windshield. D r. Bunyan stood up and walked slowly to the window, looking out between the dusty Venetian blinds. Spenser sat lhind hi small desk and rolled a mechanical pencil back and forth. "It's not a matter of what I think, you understand." Dr. Bunyan ran one finger along a metal slat. "It's that the thinking in Washington has changed. We no longer talk in terms of what is interesting, what is worthy of pure research. No. Not that at all." He rubbed one eye against the sunlight and his gray hair caught and reflected the ribbed brightness from the window. "We must think of resource allocations -- that's the phrase they use now. You've heard it, haven't you?" Spenser nodded listlessly, not looking up from the mechanical pencil that rolled steadily between his hands. "Resource allocations -- the liberals make it a matter of morality, plain and simple morality. Saying, 'Well, what good is this going to do for mankind?' " Dr. Bunyan gestured expansively, liberally, with his hands. "And we can't talk to them in pure research terms. It's morality for them, resource allocations." He shook his head, turning from the window, and sat down in the single other chair in the office, gazing not unkindly at Spenser. Spenser shifted uncomfortably and coughed into his hand. "The dye marks the. exact center of the magnetic dissonance -- there's no doubt about that. Before now it couldn't have been done." He IF smiled weakly and put the pencil in his jacket pocket. Dr. Bunyan nodded and placidly folded his hands. "I appreciate that. It's a fine accomplishment. But it took two months and eight hundred thousand dollars. Can I go back to Washington and tell them they bought a purple spot on lars?" He spread his hands: a mute portrayal of the forces he battled. Spenser snorted and stood up. "Come now, Doctor. Let's be adult about this. That purple spot marks the center of a sudden dissonance measured in the magnetic flux of the northern hemisphere. Three months ago i held the Steinberg research professorship in geophysics at Princeton. I worked thirty-five years to get there. I didn't leave it for a purple spot on the desert. This is significant research, Dr. Bunyan, not a game." Dr. Bunyan nodded violently in agreement and stood up quickly, walked to the metal desk and leaned on it with both hands. "We realize that." His unbuttoned jacket flapped loosely. "I respect your reputation more than anyone. But I'm trying to tell you as gently as I can that there may just be no more money forthcoming for this iy,)t of research. That's the way jt is. I can't change that." Spenser stood facing a blackboard, his back to Bunyan. He put one fist up to his mouth and held it there tensely. "I didn't understand that. I thought there was a great deal of enthusiasm for this project." "There is Edmund, there is. I assure you. But we're not as rich as we once were. We've used up things we'll never have again. It's time to allocate resources." Spenser said nothing, and after a time Dr. Bunyan eased back into the chair and crossed his legs. seen nothing like." One burro became restless and stepped into the wide purple circle. The boy pulled it back quickly. He was perhaps six inches shorter than his father. The bottoms of his blue jeans were rolled up thickly around his boots. The older man pushed his widebrimmed black hat back farther and wiped his forehead with a sweaty arm. "Never seen nothing like this -- that's the truth. Just overnight, too. Weren't here yestaddy, was it boy?" The boy shook his head. "I come out here early yestaddy, first thing in the morning, wasn't nothing then." He stared out at the other side of the bright purple splotch. "Must be fifty, sixty feet 'cross. Pa. Wouldn't you say .that?" Pa leaned back on the burro and scratched his armpit slowly, contemplatively. "I'd say that at least, boy, at least." He pursed his lips and the expression made the stubni ble of his whiskers gather like magnetized iron Tilings in the wrinkles of his cheeks. "Ain't natchel -- " his voice rose on the second word -- "ain't a natchel thing, not at all." The boy squatted down and picked up a handful of the purple sand. "Just up here on top Pa. It don't go down very far. Like paint, Pa." Pa laughed, his head jerking back and the muscles of his neck bunching like rocks under the skin. "Nobody gonna come out this far to paint a purple circle in the desert. That don't make no sense." His smile faded and he coughed once and frowned. "But why is it right here boy? Why right here? That can't be no coinceedence." The boy gauged the distance with his eye. "It's right around it, no mistake. Like somebody knew. Pa, knew just where it was." He shook his head and looked out over the desert floor. Far to the north gray mountains rose like tiny piles of clay. To the south the mountains disappeared under the horizon. "Sure is a mystery. Pa." S penser went through the charts quickly, pointing out the increasing refinement of the mapping technique. His hands shook slightly and a thin line of sweat had formed on his upper lip: it remained unevaporated in the airconditioning of the small office. Dr. Bunyan noted each chart with polite interest, asking an occasional question. His dark blue suit was still perfectly pressed, even after a full day in the New Mexico heat. "Truly marvelous," he said finally. "Very fine work." Spenser nodded absently, running his fingers over the carefully colored surface. "But no explanation for the dissonance yet? Not even ah -- " he glanced up at the ceiling -- "a preliminary finding I can take back to the department?" Spenser hit the charts with the back of his hand. "Explanation? We just found the place! Monday we're sending out equipment to start digging. At least give us the time to do the excavation. We're budgeted for that," he added with slight bitterness, rolling the charts back up tightly with both hands. "Just some educated guesses then. What might do it?" Spenser turned and gazed past Dr. Bunyan. "Nothing. Nothing could do it -- cause that dissonance. There is no possible explanation. Six months ago there was a shift in the magnetic field. Slight, but still compasses from the Aleutians to Greenland moved several seconds. No seismic activity here. Not even minutely enough ferrous material to explain things -- assuming there was an earthquake." Dr. Bunyan chewed delicately at a fingernail and stared at Spenser silently. IF "It is an entirely new phenomenon. It may explain a great deal." He shrugged and adjusted his new questions. But it deserves to be investigated." He turned back abruptly to the charts, avoiding Bunyan's eye. Dr. Bunyan nodded and gestured weakly with one hand. "If it were my money I'd have no hesitation. But -- " He let the sentence die in the flat air-conditioning. "If it were your money," said Spenser in a flat voice, sliding the charts into a cardboard tube, "you'd put it in a Swiss bank and move to Bermuda. So would I." Bunyan laughed with faint embarrassment and followed Spenser out of the room. L ate that night the boy stared up at the ceiling from the top bunk, his nose less than a foot from the rough boards that allowed narrow slices of moonlight entrance on occasional nights. He slept in a long flannel shirt against the sudden cold of the desert. "It's only been six months. Pa, and it turns puille. Don't seem right." Pa leaned back in his chair and put one boot sideways on the table. He lifted an aluminum cup to his lips. ' It didn't turn purple. Somebody turned it purple. We find 'em we oughta kick shit outta 'em." He nodded to himself. "Kick shit." The boy reached behind his head with one hand and felt the Bible, foursquared underneath the pillow. "Pa, could it be a signT' "A what, boy?" He squinted up and saw only narrow lines of moonlight. "A sign." The boy paused and cleared his throat. "From the Lord." "Hmmmm. Huh." The sound rumbled deep in his chest, and he drank from the aluminum cup again. "Don't think so, boy. The Lord, He woulda made it purple all the way through, not just up on top. He woulda made it brighter, too. Glowing, you know." The boy nodded slightly to himself. "I was thinking that, too. That it wasn't quality enough for the Lord." He pulled the flannel shirt around him and turned to the wall. Pa stared up at the picture above the table, the woman smiling down shyly in faded black and white, the crucifix hanging next to it, in darkening ivory plastic. He drained the aluminum cup and set it squarely in the center of the table and sat for a long while, seeing nothing. S penser struck his wife full across the face twice that night, the second blow sending her backward into the pressboard-and-formica nightstand that separated the two motel beds. He had struck her before -- occasionally as a graduate student, he recalled -- but less the last few years at Princeton. Both times this night in New Mexico she refused to cry. The second time, after hitting the nightstand, her leg bled slightly, and the sight of the blood made Spenser sickened and guilty. He went outside and sat on a stack of wooden boxes next to the cold-drink machine for fifteen minutes before the chill infiltrated his bathrobe and he felt forced to go back inside. "Damn," he said to the locked bathroom door. "Damn. Leaving Princeton was a dumb-ass mistake." Silence. He looked around the small motel room they had rented for the last two months, uncertain as to the future of the project. "This is all a mistake. We'll go back. It'll be fine." He felt unsatisfied by the words. He went to lie down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. The bathroom door stayed closed. T he dawn spread in the east like smeared fingerpaints. "Privacy," said Pa, tying the shovel with thick hemp rope to the blanketed side of the burro. "No damn privacy any more. You know that boy? No privacy." The boy nodded, finishing a knot and pulling on his shovel to see if it would slip. Pa coughed violently, raspingly, and when he finished they headed north, figuring to reach the huge purple stain before the real heat of the day grew up out of the sand. fragments of the weekend still stuck to him, a headache, a toothache, loud voices and broken sleep. "Goddamn sonofabitch." The bank of instruments rose a full foot over his head -- the slowly unrolling tongues of the oscillographs, the nodding needles of meters, the flashing pupils of digital readouts, the nervous traces of dark green oscilloscope screens. Spenser rested his forehead against a barely warm metal surface. "It can't have moved." He shook his head, eyes closed. "There is no way for it to have moved." He tapped his fingers on a plastic shelf. "It's a new instrument," he told the operator. "The array must be damaged somehow. Birds or lightning." He knew that it had been clear weather and that birds could never be magnetic. He shook his head again. "Send someone up to check it. We'll hold the truck until we're sure." T here was faint, continual static on the telephone line to Washington. "It's a setback. Dr. Bunyan. But it is by no means hopeless." I see. "There are setbacks in every worthwhile project. We've been very lucky up until now." IF "That's certainly true." "We'll simply relocate it and send out the excavators a little later in the week. Say, Thursday." "Well. Whatever is within your budget." "That is the difficulty Dr. Bunyan. We may need a slight extension. Dr. Bunyan?" "Still here. Ah. Do whatever you can within your present budget and I'll see if I can get some provisional financing. No promises." "I didn't expect any." "Fine. As long as we understand each other." "It moved," said Spenser, sitting on the bed. His wife stared at him momentarily in the mirror and looked back at her hair. "The damn thing moved. Just like that. Over the weekend, it moved." Mrs. Spenser shook her head very slightly. "My goodness." "Your goodness," he said, his hand jerking so that an ice cube bounced out of the glass he held and fell onto the carpet. "We'll find it tomorrow." He nodded, rocking back and forth. "We'll have it marked out by noon. There'll bfe an extension, for sure. Bunyan's a good man. He's on our side." Spenser stood up and walked to the dresser, remembering a moment too late that the bottle stood on the nightstand. His wife laughed gently into the mirror -- he noticed but chose to ignore her. A Spenser into the microphone. "If I don't have your readings every ten seconds we'll do this all day." He handed the microphone back to the radio operator and the three planes began to report a series of figures. Spenser noted each one on a map and simultaneously it was typed into a land line that ran to Phoenix. The planes flew a gradually converging pattern in the blue New Mexico sky, slicing twenty feet of airspace off an imaginary triangle with each turn. Next to Spenser a teletype rattled. The computer calculated loci of the three separate figures he received. Shaded areas on the map gradually grew smaller. Spenser used his yellow slide rule frequently at first, then increasingly less as the increments of change became so small that he was forced to rely on the computer readout for useful accuracy. FinalNew sebscriiiHoiit aad ctianges af aikirass require # weeks fe precessi ly a single point remained, nearly a mile from the original mark. He touched the radio operator on the shoulder. "Fine. We've got it. Bring two home and have the third drop the canisters." "Wind north-northwest eight knots," said the operator. Far out on the desert a small Cessna headed directly into the path of the light wind and two cylindrical metal containers fell from the window. They twisted slightly in the air and landed, exploding on impact, several feet apart in the hot brown sand. T he sun. was high, still faintly obscured by thin dry clouds. Pa took his hat off and ran a finger around the sweat band, staring out over the back of the burro. "They done it green this time. They done it up bright green; you see that?" The boy nodded and spat -- away from the immense green circle. He narrowed his eyes and looked out into the center, where the earth was freshly dug, piled a little higher than the surrounding sand. "Somebody watching us. Pa? Somebody watching what we do from somewheres around here?" Pa shrugged, settling the hat back on his head. "Nah, I don't think so. You can't never tell, though." He kicked at the edge of the green circle and the sand flew up, a blurred mixture of green and light brown. "We're gonna have to do something about this here." The boy still had his shovel tied to the side of his burro. He began to slip the knot around to where he could reach it. Pa coughed, gazing at the small mound in the center of the green circle. "Hate like hell to dig her up twice in a row. Don't seem right." The boy buried the Made of the shovel in the sand and wrapped the rope into a coil around his arm, not looking up. "Your ma wouldn't mind though, you understand?" The boy nodded, pulling the shovel out of the ground, swinging it onto his shoulder. When he looked up three small birds had settled on the mound in the center of the green circle. He wiped his forearm across his upper lip. "That's funny. Pa, mighty funny, the way Ma useta -- " he searched for the word -- "attract li'l birds, li'l animals." He pointed with the blade of the shovel. "Look like she still do." The older man stared at his son for a moment. "You getting to be a lot like your ma, you know? A lot." He looked behind the boy, at the desert floor. On the short path his son had walked from the burro to the edge of the circle, tiny pebbles had quietly aligned themselves with the sides of his feet, pointing his direction in two perfectly straight lines like marching soldiers. "C'mon Pa," he said, glancing away. "We gotta dig."  vV I Have you ever had the feeling that somebody is watching you -- and not giving a damn  T he passing of Carl Bernardi stirred a great deal of conversation in the scientific community but little sympathy. That his death was an irreplaceable loss to science was too apparent to warrant argument. His work in the field of photics had opened whole new vistas for science. It was rumored that at the time of his death he was working on a method of light propulsion for spacecraft. Wilder rumors hinted that he had been aiming for a space speed only slightly lower than that of the propulsive force itself. These rumors were not true. Few tears were shed. Bernardi had been a solitary, distant man. The few papers he had presented had been delivered in a flat monotone, so low that the audience strained to hear and, resenting it, branded him an ineffectual speaker and contemptuous of his audience. When one of Bernardi's few friends told him this he shrugged. "I am a scientist, not an entertainer. And I am contemptuous of fools. If they consider themselves in that category -- " He shrugged again. He worked alone, published his discoveries at his leisure, was never overanxious to share his finds. He was labeled as antisocial, cold, selfish. I had known Carl Bernardi for over ten years. While I certainly did not claim a close or even friendly relationship with the man. he at least tolerated my presence. That word, too, lends to the untruths they are spinning about him. His was not a grudging acceptance of existence -- he simply noticed it when it was relevant. My relationship with Carl Bernardi was an extension of my father's acquaintance with him during their college years. Acquaintance is the only term one can use. Each knew the other's face, though they often had to struggle for the 'name that went with it. My father's preoccupation with science was only slightly less than Bernardi's. How he emerged from it long enough to wed my mother and sire me is a scientific mystery in itself. So I was at least admitted to Bernardi's home and laboratory. Actually, I believe anyone would have been, despite the rumors. If one could bear being unnoticed one could sit all day and watch Bernardi work. I often watched him when I was young, fascinated by his absolute absorption as he deftly worked with impossible and sterilely beautiful apparatus or as he scribbled equations like long strings of Sanskrit across his blackboard. I could not watch my father. Spectators bothered him. So I watched Bernardi, who neither knew nor cared. I could even watch him think. I once saw him stare, motionless and rapt, at the old EMC# on his blackboard for over an hour. Watching, I fanIF cied the whirr of a computer tape behind his eyes. At last he rose, stepped briskly to the blackboard, drew a line under the formula, and placed a Figure one under the line. Bernardi then pocketed the chalk, left the room and had not returned when I left an hour later. During that hour I gazed in awe at the blackboard, wondering if I had just been witness to an alteration of one of the most sacred icons of science. A few years later I asked Bernardi about it and what it had meant. He said he didn't know, could not remember the episode and, in any event, it made no sense whatever. I did not trust his answer, will always wonder if that magnificent mind had mislaid the discovery of the century. years in England, where I had tried and failed to write a novel, the first person I went to see -- after my father, who had nodded and smiled as though I had gone to the corner for a newspaper -- was Bernardi. After two years of failure the appeal of Bernardi, who could not fail -- forI believe even proving himself in error was a satisfaction to him -- was obvious. His housekeeper admitted me to the old white rame building which was Bernardi's home and laboratory. She nodded without a smile, glanced at my shoes for mud and left me without a word (Dear friends and family, I thought, don't make over me). I walked down the long narrow hall to the laboratory. Partitions had been removed and his lab occupied more than half of the lower floor of the building. Even remembering the clean clutter of apparatus which had always characterized Bernardi's laboratory, I was unprepared for what I saw. An immense, gleaming steel turnip filled the room. It resembled, at least, a turnip, and must have been thirty feet long and twenty feet wide at the bulge. The tip tapered along a tube, also of some shining metal, and culminated in a heavy, safe-like box, the thickness of its walls apparent through a port glass which must have been easily four inches thick. At the end of the steel turnip, where the greens would have been, was a mask, like a welder's mask and within it an eyepiece. Bernardi was not at the eyepiece. He was standing beside the grotesque machine, staring in through the port at -- nothing. Nothing at all. The interior of the safe, well lighted, was empty. I watched him for some time. "Doctor?" I said finally and in a few minutes he turned to me. "Ah, yes," he said and stepped forward to shake my hand. It was the first time he had ever touched me. I would have wrung out the moment embarrassingly but he detached almost immediately. "What is Mr. -- ah -- Dr. -- ah -- what is your father doing?" I thought it admirable of him to even connect the two of us. Never mind that he couldn't recall my name. "I don't know," I said. "When I left him he was putting a rabbit into a cellophane bag." "Ah, yes," said Bernardi as if that explained everything. He began to shuffle past me toward the door and I thought that our reunion, beautiful as it had been, was at an end. Then he stopped and turned. "You write?" "Very little. An occasional Christmas card." The bitterness was lost on him and I felt like a fool for it. "Is it important to you?" he asked. "To write?" I considered it. "It must be," I said. "Something has to be. It's all I know to do." He nodded. "Yes. You are like me." I was astounded. Then -- suddenly -- I knew that it was true. "Come here," he said, "and look. It may destroy you or liberate you. Perhaps both. They may be the same." I walked cautiously to the steel turnip. "Look there." He motioned me to the eyepiece. I bent to it. I blinked several times, adjusting my eye to the mechanism. A myriad of flashing, multicolored pinpoints of light, whirling and flashing, seemed to streak past me. Imagine a Fourth of July sparkler held inches from your eyes. That was how it was. "What is it?" "Let me increase the magnification." The flashing streaks of light slowed and became stationary. Thousands of them. We moved in upon a loose grouping of them, perhaps twenty or more, at varying distances from a central brilliant point of light. It was much larger than the surrounding particles. If they were pinpoints it was the size of a pea and glowing brightly. "What is it?" I repeated. "A molecule. Californium."  "It -- it looks like the solar system." The magnification increased, focusing on one of the pinpoints. The others were lost from the range of my vision as this one grew. It filled the circular scope of the lens, oblate, vaguely white and shimmering. "I don't understand," I said. "There seems to be -- movement -- as though the particle were made up of gases in violent motion." "The -- particle, as you put it -- is solid enough. The movement is the motion of clouds." I smiled at him uncertainly. I hadn't realized that Bernardi possessed a sense of humor. "Clouds," he continued, "drifting slowly through the attimes smaller than a flyspeck." "Slowly?" It was all I could bring myself to say. The man was not joking. IF "Slowly to them." "Them? My God, are you saying -- " "Yes. Keep watching." The image grew, became lost in the swirling whiteness. Then a faint tinge of rusty pink suffused the mist and it disappeared. "The infrared," murmured Bernardi. The white was replaced by blurred, streaking hues of browns and reds and greens and blues, forming a mass of twisted, sinuous color. I turned, baffled, to Bernardi. "The colors are from the movement of their worlds. The changing seasons, falling leaves, children at play -- " He sat heavily at one of the laboratory tables. "I still don't understand. How can you tell? It was all a blur." "Time is relative. One second to us is perhaps a thousand of their years. Since you turned from that microscope, a thousand generations have perhaps come and gone. Legends have risen and died, civilizations have been lost and rediscovered." "Fantasy. You're guessing. How can you tell?" I insisted. Bernardi rosp and crossed the room to a cabinet. "I photographed them," he said. "Impossible." Bernardi smiled slightly, withdrew a manila packet from the cabinet. "No camera or process exists which is sensitive or fast enough to stop action at such a speed." "Tuttle's camera is capable of said Bernardi. "Much too slow. However, using Tuttle's camera as a starting point and applying certain principles of the hologram -- " "The three-dimensional photograph?" "Yes. Rather than film, my device uses a strip of plastic about a dozen microns thick. By refracting laser light, directing it against the length of the plastic, I was able to capture a good many more frames per second than Tuttle." "How many more?" haps." I almost said impossible again, then realized that I was overusing the word. "I suppose that envelope Bernardi opened the envelope. "I'm afraid not. It is extremely difficult to process the exposed plastic, more difficult to separate the pictures -- something like trying to dissect a spider web. Of the hundreds I have tried to process, I have succeeded in obtaining three." The pictures were blurred and too bright, such as an inexperienced photographer might take, but the objects were clearly recognizable. In one a child was playing with an animal, much like a dog, while in the background was the very shadowy figure of a woman, the child's mother, perhaps, standing with elbows bent and hands on her hips. Another was a street scene. Crowds of people, blurred to varying degrees, rushed in both directions before a building with a sign in lettering unknown to me. In the third the building was gone. The scene seemed to be a jungle. Dense growth, hanging vines, were thick about a small pool. At the edge of the pool, a pack of pig-shaped creatures, covered with long, tangled hair, tore at an object on the ground. "How much time separates these?" I asked Bernardi. "Who knows? I could perhaps calculate the total number of frames on the plastic and arrive at a rough estimate of the time span the strip contains. But many of the pictures -- most of the pictures are completely worthless, many are fused. It would be a lifetime's work." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter, at any rate. However, those three were within a fraction of an inch of each other on the strip. And they were all taken at the same spot." "It could be a thousand years." "Or two," said Bernardi. "Or three or four. As I say, it doesn't matter." "Doesn't matter? This is the most amazing -- these pictures -- these people -- " "Those people have been dead "But the implications -- " B ernardi snorted, "implications? Fact. The fact that there arm's grasp of you, worlds that evolve and develop and live out minutes or hours. Populated worlds. People like us, perhaps, trying to penetrate the secrets of their universe, their gods, but also people who laugh and sin and suffer. They bear children, worry about their youiig, lust and love and swindle and perform heroic acts. And die. Some of them, before their worlds explode or collapse, may travel through their endless space to other planets and return to grand orations on how their race has begun to unlock the secrets of space. Then -- one of our minutes later -- their world is gone." Bernardi paused to light his pipe. He held the match before him a moment before he blew it out. "How many worlds do you suppose I just destroyed by that flame?" I shuddered. He noticed and smiled. "That was my first reaction," he said. "I found myself hesitating to light a match, to take a step, to bite into an apple. It soon passes. Gods like us cannot allow ourselves to care too much." "Gods?" "Are we not? If they were aware of our existence don't you believe that they would build temples to us, pray daily that we didn't light that divine match?" I turned back to the microscope and put my eye to it, still too shakIF en to think or speak clearly. I found the image but the colors were gone. There was only blinding light. "Something's wrong," I said. Bernardi stepped beside me and bent to the eyepiece. "No." He straightened. "That world is gone. Destroyed." "But how?" "Who knows? Nova, perhaps. Perhaps I did it. The controlled conditions I use to allow observation of such a world may upset its natural balance. I don't know. It doesn't matter." "It must matter," I said. "It doesn't, believe me." Bernardi replaced the photos in the envelope. He turned back to me. I had not noticed before how drawn and tired his face appeared. "I apologize to you," he said. "I hope the apology is unnecessary -- but in case it is not, I apologize." "For what?" "I feel that you are a sensitive man. I am no judge of such things, since I have never been a sensitive person myself. I was too concerned about how little time I had for my work to concerft myself with sensitivity." He took the envelope back to the cabinet. "I felt the beginnings of sensitivity -- much as you did -- when I wrtched my first world disintegrate. But I have since found that this is not the thing that concerns me. If you should discover what does, just remember that I have apologized in advance." He shut the door of the cabinet, stared at it for a moment, then walked by me without a glance and left the laboratory. Two days later he was dead. An explosion leveled his laboratory, destroying his notes, his apparatus, his pictures and himself. It was at first considered accidental but the autopsy showed that he had died of gas inhalation, and they found the note when they cleared the rubble. It was very terse, typical of him. "My death is my own doing," it said, "and no one else's. My will is attached." He left everything to the church, which was not typical. But I think I have the answer to the question that was Carl Bernardi. He could not reconcile himself to a life of seconds, no matter whose. And the bequest of the money -- his little joke, perhaps his only joke. I began to realize these things after a few weeks of hesitating to light a match and take a step. Then I found the hesitation replaced by another nagging sensation, one which I -- which all of us -- have felt and dismissed lightly. I feel it now. The feeling of being watched.  strange ad again. It had not been placed by any agency she recognized and it gave no telephone number. Just an address in a blah neighborhood. It hardly looked promising -- but she was desperate. She caught a bus. She concentrated on the ad as she rode, as though it had further secrets to yield. She was qualified: she was a capable dental assistant with three years experience in the office of a good dentist, and she was also a hygienist. She knew that few girls were both and many would not touch the clerical end of to travel across the world if need be. She was twenty-six years old and looked it. She got along well with people and seldom lost her temper. So why couldn't she get a job? The bus jolted heavily over a set of tracks, shaking her loose from this pointless line of thinking. She knew what her problem was: she peared mysteriously. A construction worker might fall off a beam and get killed and nobody blamed his co-workers. A big-game hunter might get eaten by the game, yet his bearers could find other employment. A politician might get removed from office for malfeasance, while his staff stepped into better positions. But let a smalltown dentist vanish -- She shook her head. She was thinking inaccurately. Much of her difficulty was her own fault: she had tried to tell the truth. Naturally no one had believed her story of weird aliens holding her captive work on their astonishing teeth. There had been no substantiating evidence except for the simple fact that he was gone without trace. Now the aura of that wild story hung about her, an albatross, killing any chance she might have had to find other employment in the profession. In this corner of the world, at any rate. Had she claimed that a mobster had murdered the dentist and sunk him in concrete with shoes of water (or was it the other way around?) she might have been clear. But the truth had ruined her. Aliens from space? Lunacy! The bus halted near the address. She stepped down regretfully. This was an unfamiliar section of town, illkempt and menacing. Beer cans glittered amid the tall weeds of an empty lot. Down the littered street a drunk spotted her and ambled nearer. The bus blasted its noxious gases at her and shoved off. Only one structure approximated the address: a cylindrical building several stories tall and pointed at the top. Its outer wall was shiny metal and surprisingly modernistic for such a region. Yet the lot had not even been cleared, except for the narrow boardwalk leading to the entrance. She started to turn back. Something was unsubtly wrong about this ad and the address. What possible use could they have for an experienced dental assistant here? But the reality of her situation turned her about again. The bus was gone, the drunk was almost upon her, she had barely three dollars in her purse and her resources beyond that were scant. She had either to take what offered or throw away all her training and apply for unspecialized employment. She pictured herself making beds, scrubbing floors, baby-sitting. Suddenly the nameless ad seemed more promising. She outwalked the drunk and knocked on the cylinderhouse door. This was a circular affair arranged to resemble a ship's porthole. Modern architecture never ran out of innovations. After a few seconds it opened, the metal lifting up and out, drawbridge fashion. She took a nervous breath and entered a small, bare antechamber. "Name?" a voice said. For an instant she had fancied it it was some kind of recorded answering service whose intonation just happened to resemble that familiar voice. She answered the routine questions automatically. That voice unnerved her and enhanced her depression. She had, of course, never let him know, but her initial renical and ethical finesse had over the months and years deepened into a considerable appreciation of the man himself and even -- She became aware that the questions had ceased. An inner panel opened. "You have been accepted. Miss Galland of Earth," the recording said. A figure stepped through the new doorway. Judy was not the screaming type. She screamed. UT I'm not a dentist," Judy told the transcoder. "I'm a dental assistant and hygienist and light bookkeeper, as you must know." The transcoder typed her words onto a stick in the form of indentations and the North Nebulite took this. He poked it into the orifice beneath his triple-slit nose and chewed gently. What Jaw motions constituted reading, as opposed to writing (typing?) she couldn't tell, but in a moment he fed the talk-stick back into the machine. "You are Dr. competent but aloof. We searched for you. We obtained you. This is his laboratory. So assist." She peered at the alien paraphernalia. It had been a substantial education, finding out exactly IF Horrible as the purple-lipped, double-jointed North Nebulites -- Enens, according to DHlingham's invented information coded into the transcoder -- appeared, they were pleasant enough when understood. The two designated to show her around were Holmes and Watson, though either answered (or failed to answer) to either name. "I never worked in the lab itself. Not that way. I can't make a reconstruction. I'm not allowed to perform dentistry on a patient -- not by myself. I assist the dentist while ham?" Holmes assimilated the new stick and bit off a reply . The Enens had been cagey about the late news assurances that he was doing well. She kept inserting the question in the hope that one of them would slip and give her an answer. This We sold him to the b'h muck-amuck of deep." Judy started to laugh at the grohung on that entity. He must have enjoyed himself hugely as he programed the transcoder. On Earth he had always been serious. She sobered abruptly. "Sold him?" "He was on contract, same as you. Hostage against the expense of his procurement and shipment. Perfectly regular." "I'm on -- You advertised for an assistant not for a slave! You can't buy and sell human beings." "Why not?" She was not the spluttering type. She spluttered. "It just isn't done -- not on Earth." Both Enens masticated that. "We aren't on Earth," Holmes pointed out. "Your ballbase players are bought and sold on Earth," Watson said. "Everything is in order according to Galactic codes." aren't ballbase -- baseball -- players. And it isn't the same. This is kidnaping." The Enens nibbled sticks, not understanding what all the fuss was about. "Everything is in order. We told you that. Now will you assist?" Judy dropped that tack for the moment. The Enens had not mistreated her, after all, and it was rather exciting being on another world -- she could never have afforded passage on her own. At -- that fact alone just about made up for the rest of it. She had not had any particularly inviting future on Earth. "Well, how about letting me talk to the muck-a-muck? I can't accomplish much here by myself." "But you applied for a position at Enen!" "I changed my mind." It took her several more days to establish that her mind, once changed, was absolutely set. She did convince them that their own technicians were far more competent in the laboratory than she, though far less competent than had been sold. She suspected that Earth was about to sustain another dental raid -- but finally she was on her way to deep.Otold the muck-a-muck. "I'm so I can -- assist him." "He departed last week," the whale-like ruler of water-world deep communicated. This was the first time she had conversed with an entity while standing inside him -- but such was Galactic existence. "Then I must follow him." "Do you realize that we paid a hundred pounds of premium-grade frumpstiggle for your contract? You were billed as an associate of prosthodontist. Now the prince's molars are beginning to itch again -- and only a practitioner of Dillingham's status can abate the condition." restorations those teeth should be giving no trouble," she said loyally. "Probably all your son needs now is some instruction in preventive maintenance. Teeth can't be ignored, you know. You have to take proper care of them." "That's exactly what he said. You are his associate." She sighed. "In that respect, yes. But as for -- " "Excellent. Provide the prince with expert instruction." "First we have to come to an understanding," she said. She was, by fits and starts, learning how to deal with Galactics. "If I instruct the prince you must agree to send me to the planet to which Dr. Dillingham went." "Gladly. He traveled hence with a free-lance diplomat from Trachos. Their destination was -- let me look it up in my tertiary memory bank -- Electrolus." "Fine, I'll go there." Then she reconsidered. "I came to Enen too late and to Gleep 'too late. How can I be sure he'll still be at Electrolus, when -- " The communications tentacles of the huge Gleep-creature's lung chamber waved and the transcoder dutifully rendered this visual signal into English. "A perspicacious point. Suppose we send you to the diplomat's following client? That's -- one moment, please -- Ra. The radium exporter." She was dubious. "Suppose Dr. ter all?" "Then at least you'll be in touch with Trach, the diplomat. He is an obliging fellow and he has his own ship." She considered that, still not entirely satisfied. She had had experIF ience with obliging fellows possessing their own transportation. Dillingham had been a pleasing contrast. But, of course, this was not Earth and it did seem to be her best chance. "All right. Ra it is. Let's see the prince now." H er heart sank when she saw Ra. There was no green on the surface if the planet; the entire landscape seemed to consist of tailings from the mines, mounded into mountains and eroded into valleys. Radium mines -- she had realized the significance of that too late. They were notorious throughout the galaxy for the effect their depths had on living creatures. The local ore, called pitchcar, was extraordinarily rich; thus it required only fifty tens of the stuff to produce a full ounce of radium. The noncommercial byproducts such as uranium were discarded wherever convenient; there was no trash collection. The ship landed ungently. The front port burst open, admitting a foul cloud of native smog. Several troll-like tripeds stomped in. One spoke, his voice like dry bones being run through an unoiled grinder. "Slaves of Ra," the central translator rasped, the words muffled by the babel of other renditions for the benefit of a score of miserable species. "Cooperate, and you may survive for years. Malinger, and you will receive inclement assignments. Any questions?" Judy felt sorry for the prisoners but knew there was nothing at all she could do for them. "Sir," a lovely ladybug called melodiously. "We are very hungry -- True enough. There had been no food aboard and the trip had lasted sixteen hours. Many galactic species had much more active metabolisms than human beings had and some were in a bad way. "The others will be hauled to the force-feeding station after processing. You will wait for the following shift for sustenance, with half-rations for two days. Any other questions?" There were none. The hapless prisoners had gotten the message. "Now disembark promptly as I call your names. Aardvark." A creature vaguely resembling its Earthly namesake emerged from its compartment and ambled forward. "Too slow," the translator barked. A troll aimed a rod and a beam of energy stabbed out. A patch of fur on Aardvark's rump burst into flame and the odor of scorched flesh drifted back. He broke into a gallop. Judy had not quite believed the pessimism of the prisoners as they traveled -- she had talked with several. She had been naive. This was horrible. "Bugbear." A beetle the size of a bear lumbered hastily out, as well it might: a touch of the laser would puncture its ifiin shell and send its juices spewing. "Cricketleg." The next jumped down. Judy wondered how the rollcall came to be alphabetical in English, since the translator assigned names purely by convenience of description. This was merely another mystery of galactic technology. "Dogface." This one yelped as the beam singed his tail. "Earthgirl." Judy sat frozen. It couldn't be! ham. A troll tramped down the aisle, poking his beamer ahead aggressively. He braced his three knobby legs, reached out with a hairy arm and grasped her hair in one hank. He yanked. "No!" she cried. "I'm only visiting! I'm not a prisoner -- " The troll hauled her up until she stood on tiptoes to ease the pain. "Visiting?" He aimed the beamer at her face. "Trach!" she screamed. "Trach of Trachos! I'm here to see -- " "A malingerer," the troll said. "I shall make an example. First I shall vaporize her squat snout." He flicked one of his four thumbs over a setting on the beamer and pressed the business end against her nose. "One moment, troll," the translator said. Such instruments were versatile, serving as telephones and radios as well as language transposers. "I believe I heard my name." The triped hesitated, grimacing. "Who are you, butting into private business?" "Trach, naturally. Be so kind as to deliver that creature to me, undamaged." "I don't know no Trach." "Oh? Here is my identification." A phonetic blob sounded. "Hm," the troll said, disgruntled. "#ia Trach. Well, send her on to the branding station when you're through with her." Shoved out roughly, Judy tied up her hair temporarily and followed the translator's instructions to reach Trach's office. "Turn right, prisoner," the unit outside the ship snapped. She turned right; the other miserable aliens turned left, headed for the dismal rigors of processing. She felt guilty. The spaceport, despite its choking atmosphere, was enclosed. She could make out the blowing dust beyond the grimy window panels, showing that it was actually worse outside. She heard the shriek of ore-bearing vehicles and saw a line of bedraggled workers headed for the arid entrance to a mine. "Up the stairs, malingerer," the IF next unit said. She climbed flight after flight of cruelly steep rough stone steps. A panel on a landing gave her a view of a Ra graveyard: bones and clothing and shells and assorted other durable elements of assorted creatures. There was no attempt at burial. "Third chamber down, weakUng." She found the place and touched the door signal. "Enter," a translator said from within. She was tempted to point out that it had forgotten the usual expletive. She edged the bleak metal door open. The chamber was empty. She heard water running and saw fog near the ceiling. Someone was having a shower. "I'll be right out," the pleasantly modulated voice said. It sounded real -- as though spoken in English rather than translated. Unlikly, of course; she had encountered no one from Earth since answering that fateful ad. The water noise stopped. Trach whistled cheerilyas he dried himself in the other room. In a moment she heard his feet on the floor as he dressed. He sounded heavy. "You're Miss Galland of Earth," he called. "The muck-amuck of deep notified me." "Yor'e not using a translator?" "I never bother," he admitted, still out of sight. "Now where's my jacket? Can't entertain a lady undressed -- " "I'm afraid not. He left Electrons for the University. He's undertaking administrative training now. I'm sorry to inform you that you made your trip here for nothing." His solid footsteps approached. "Oh, no. I'm glad he's not here. I mean -- " Then she saw Trach. A literal dinosaur. "My dear, you look good enough to eat," he said smiling. He had two thousand teeth. She was not the fainting type. She fainted. # ## W there is the problem of lyour contract," Trach said, "deep transferred it to Ra, so -- " She was almost convinced that Trach was not the monster he appeared. He had not, after all, eaten her when he had the opportunity and certainly he was the essence of politeness. He claimed to be a vegetarian reptile and if he were not fattening her up for a latter kill... "Does that mean it wasn't a mistake? The trolls -- my being on the -- " "They don't make mistakes of that nature," he said reassuringly. "You are on their list." "To die in the radium mines?" Maybe it would be preferable to be eaten by a dinosaur. "How could the muck-a-muck do such a terrible thing? I thought he was helping me." "Merely good business practice. Nothing personal. He wouldn't be muck-a-muck if he wasted Gleep's credit status. Fifty pounds of frumpstiggle -- " "He told me a hundred." she said indignantly. "That was to improve your selfimage. It was his impression that you were overly dependent on Dr. in your own dental abilities." "But I'm not a dentist! I can't do prosthodontic -- " "Pretty sharp judge of character, that muck-a-muck. You do lack confidence." "Oh, shut up!" "At any rate, he did help you. He notified me, knowing that I would arrange something. That's my business, after all -- arranging things for mutual profit and my own. Unfortunately -- " "You don't have fifty pounds of frumpstiggle?" "As a matter of fact, I have considerably more, thanks to a generous settlement on Dr. Dillingham. But -- " "But -- " "But the trolls of Ra are very fussy about allowing any entity to depart. Once there's a contract -- "They won't let go," she finished grimly. "Not readily. Others in the galaxy have some very ugly suspicions about Ra. If too many prospective miners were to be released those suspicions would be amply confirmed. Then it would be almost impossible for Ra to buy up contracts at any price whatever." "So I have to take up pick and shovel?" "Oh, no. They are very efficient here. You would work in your speciality, caring for the miners' teeth. Better dentures allow them to consume cruder staples and that is more economical, you see." "I see. I don't approve the motive, though." "Appreciation of Ra motives is an acquired taste. In certain respects, there is more need for medical and dental assistants here than only short-term measures are economical. The radiation, you know. And you would still be exposed to that." She nodded. Had she really thought her prospects back on Earth were bad? "I have not relinquished the problem. Miss Galland. I merely wish you to comprehend its magnitude. Naturally we'll find a way to remove you from Ra." "I comprehend the magnitude. What do I have to do to escape?" "You have to obtain a sponsor who is able to influence the troll hierarchy. I can arrange temporary reprieve but my influence is limited. I'm only a diplomat. If I push my luck -- " "The mines for you, too," she said. "Will you teach the prisoners IF diplomacy as they perish from radiation?" "I doubt if would come to that but there could be awkwardness. However, I'll see what I can arrange. I have had experience at a number of influential courts." Judy smiled appreciatively but she had little hope. est about his resources. Within six hours there was an urgent call from the Monarch of Lepidop: he wanted an experienced dental assistant and he wanted this particular one. Since his subjects were resistive to radium poisoning, a task force of his navy traditionally transported Ra's annual output of ten pounds pure to the galactic markets. He had, in short, influence. The troll hierarchy swallowed its gall and hastily made a gift of Judy's contract to the Monarch, compliments of the honorable reputation of Ra. To make it quite clear where she had come from, they decided to brand her first. Of never to reveal what she had seen planetside even this small formality might be dispensed with... Judy contemplated the sizzling branding iron, thought about the difficulty she would have sitting down thereafter and she saw her courage go up in steam. She agreed not to talk. The troll released her hair and she fell to the floor. Trach took her to Lepidop himself. This was a favor she appreciated less than she might have, for his ship was a frightening rattletrap. But she suspected that this was Trach's way of saving his own reptilian hide, for the trolls of Ra surely were aware of his part in Lepidop's demand and would not delay unduly in attempting to settle scores. Lepidop, in contrast to Ra, was truly beautiful. Iridescent films decorated its esthetic continents and rainbows were reflected from its shining oceans. The ship jolted to rest on a platform mounted on a spire about two miles above the surface. Judy was afraid the weight of the ship would collapse the insubstantial edifice but there was no sag or tremor. She disembarked. "Butterflies," Judy exclaimed. "What marvelous wings!" "This is Lepidop," Trach reminded her gently. "Capital world of the declining Lepidopteran Empire. But you are right to compliment their wings; Leps are subject to flattery. Now the honor guard will insist on conveying you personally to the Monarch and I don't see how you can refuse." "An honor guard? I'm the one who's flattered. And I want to thank the Monarch effusively for saving me from Ra. Why should I refuse?" "Well, their mode of transportation is not too every creature's taste. I would prefer to walk, myself. But since I am not permitt within the palace environs I shall merely relay my compliments and depart for my next mission." "You're going?" Her original distrust of him was as though it had never been; Trach was as nice a dinosaur as she had ever met. "I thought -- " "Some of the finer architectural structures are delicate and I'm rather solid," he explained. An understatement; she judged he weighed several tons. "But the Monarch is basically a kindly fellow; don't let his gruffness fool you. And beware of palace intrigues. I'm sure he'll treat you well, provided -- " ham?" "I will notify the University. They'll advise him in due course. You just stay put and wait for word. It may take a while." She had other questions, suddenly pressing now that Trach was about to leave her -- but the mansized butterflies were upon them, a fluttering phalanx. "Provided what?" she whispered. "Miss Earthbiped?" a translator inquired. She didn't see the instrument, but hardly needed to. There was always a translator within earshot on civilized planets, except for places like deep, where such machinery was inconvenient, and Enen, where they couldn't afford the expense. She automatically associated the translation with the speaker, as she had once associated subtitles with foreign speech in Earth movies. "This is Miss Galland of Earth," Trach said formally. She had to pick up the introduction through the translator, for he was speaking directly in Lepidopteran. He was a phenominal linguist. "Summoned by the Monarch for dental assistancy and hygienicy." And privately to her: "Provided he lives." "This way, honored guest," the lead butterfly said, spreading his huge yellow wings as he turned. Judy followed him to an ornate and fragile little cage, the other butterflies falling in around her and matching her step. "Enter the royal carriage." She hesitated, the Ra experience fresh in her memory. This thing had neither wheels nor runners and white bars encircled it. It reminded her of a lobster trap. But Trach gave her a thumbs-up signal from the far side of the platform and she had to trust him again. She opened the latticed gate and climbed in. The fit was tight, vertically, and there was no proper seat; evidently this had been designed for a reclining butterfly. A narrow section of the top was peaked: space for folded wings to project. The yellow butterfly closed the gate with one of his six small legs. IF She arranged herself half-supine, propped against one elbow so she could wave to Trach. Then the others circled the cage, picked up threads hanging from its sides and beat their white wings in unison, while the yellow called the cadence. "Hup -- two -- three -- four -- " Judy heard, not certain whether there was a translator, or at least a little transcoder, in the cage, or whether her own mind was doing it. "Hup -- Hup -- " Suddenly they were aloft: butterflies, cage and Judy -- she clinging desperately to the bars. No wonder Trach had been nervous about the transportation. But it was too late to protest now. They flew over the edge of the platform and she closed her eyes against vertigo. Two miles in the air -- with only butterfly wings and slender threads to support her! Did the Monarch often travel this way? Was that what Trach had meant by his hast warning: the Monarch would treat her well, provided he lived? Let one thread be snagged, one wing falter... But the cadence was steady and soon she was reassured that they were not about to drop her. She watched the aerial life of Lepidop: brown-winged butterflies, gray ones, green ones and blue, gliding their myriad ways. A number carried bags in two or three hands, as though they had been shopping. Others clustered and whirled in dazzlingly swift mid-air games. Yet Trach had said the Lepidopteran Empire was declining. T he palace was a tremendous silken nest, massed strands forming gleaming geometric patterns that glowed prismatically in the slanting sunlight. At every nexus a pastelle-winged butterfly perched, gently fanning the air. The cage came to rest in a cushiony chamber and the bearers let go the threads. Judy disembarked cautiously and found the seemingly tenuous webbing quite strong. It gave a little under her feet, adding bounce to her step, and was in fact rather fun to walk on. Trach would have put a foot through, however. The yellow butterfly led the way to the throneroom. This was a splendid chamber whose lofty arches reached into a nebulous webflung dome and whose furniture was all of stressed silk. Upon the mighty yet delicate throne reclined the ruler of the planet and empire. The Monarch was old. His torso was stiff and scaly, his antennae drooped and his wings were dead white cardboard. Had he been human, she would have assessed his age at an infirm eighty. She knew immediately that he had no teeth. Why, then, had he wanted a dental assistant? Had his demand been made purely as a favor to Trach or was there more to it? "My dear, come here," the Monarch whispered and the translator conveyed jointly benign and imperative tonality. She stepped up to him, impressed by his bearing despite his antiquity. It was no longer a mystery why Trach had been concerned for the Monarch's life. It was as though the very act of speaking might terminate his span. "You care for teeth?" "Yes, Your Majesty," she replied, deciding not to quibble again over descriptions. She was no dentist but she did take care of teeth. "You have experience with -- " here he paused to regain his shallow breath -- "Lepidop mandibulars?" "On my world, butterflies don't have teeth." "Interesting. On Lepidop (another breath) primates don't have teeth." He laughed -- a painful rattle, even in translation. "But I suppose you (breath) don't have genuine lepids, any (breath) more than we have real primates, (breath, breath) It is merely a convenience of expression." Judy was happy to agree. This royal butterfly had no connection to any Earthly creature, just as Judy Galland had no connection to any galactic biped. The Monarch was not stupid but he was rapidly weakening from the effort of conversation. Gruffness was hardly the problem; a fatal oversociability might be. "Dismissed," the Monarch snapped. Two small purple Leps hurried her out of the chamber. "He's obnoxious when balked," one confided to her. "But he'll die soon, fortunately," the other said. The words irritated her unreasonably. "Now, stop that. I think he's very nice and I won't have you saying such things behind his back." The butterflies tittered and she realized that she had choSen a poor figure of speech. There was no "behind" for a butterfly's back; there was only "above." She had made a fool of herself to no purpose. Their remarks might even have been well intentioned -- and were probably true. Well, Trach had told her to beware of palace intrigues. She had probably already put her foot in it by speaking out thoughtlessly. They showed her to a private chamber without further comment and left her. There was a galactic all-purpose unit that took care of all conceivable and some inconceivable physical needs and she had learned how to squeeze entertainment from a standard translator. "Sing me a ballad," she directed it. And it did. T he Monarch summoned her to another audience next day. IF He was considerably more affable and she suspected that the court minions had dutifully relayed her remarks to him. She had spoken automatically but she had defended the Monarch. Had she been negatively impressed she might have said something entirely different, with no more thought. Little accidents like that could make all the difference, as she knew from her experience with patients on Earth. That was one reason dental assistants were usually personable and cautious about giving opinions. Usually. Now she almost felt guilty for speaking out, as though she had deliberately played politics. Maybe subconsciously she had. But still the Monarch had no teeth. She felt enxbarrassed, holding her little case of instruments. What politics was he playing? "My dear, I like your (breath) spirit. Most visitors praise me lavishly (breath) to my antennae but sneer (breath) behind their wings. How would (breath) you like to visit my past?" "Your Majesty, I don't understand." "I am forty-two years old," he said. The translator had rendered the time span into her terms, just as the all-purpose unit had created light and darkness to match her Earthly pattern of day and night. But it was a surprise. The Monarch was just about the Lepids have lesser lifespans (breath) than some of you landbound forms. But then we (breath) have greater abilities. So life is fair." She had little basis to object, yet the Monarch's abilities were obviously long past. "I don't know how to -- to visit your past. I'm sorry." "Of course you don't, my (breath) dear. I shall take you. Ten years; I (breath) have strength enough for that." Whatever it was, if it required strength it was best discouraged. He could afford no superfluous expenditure of energy. "I don't see what this has to do with dental hygiene. Your Majesty. Why take me?" "Give me your hand," the Monarch said. "Oh, you have only (breath) two. Awkward, but I suppose you're used to it." "Yes." Hesitantly she held out one of her few hands, and he took it with one of his stick-thin members. His grasp was so feeble that she was afraid to close her fingers; even her lightest grip might crush his chitinous appendage. He shuddered. Something like a mild shock went up her arm. Then there was a strange shimmer. A wave of dizziness passed over her. "Ten years," the Monarch said with pride. "My subjects can manage no more than five even in their primes." She disengaged her hand and looked at him, wondering whether he could be senile. A decade could not be wished away. His wings were orange. His body was full. His antennae were erect. He looked twenty years younger. Judy felt strange. Her clothing did not fit comfortably. Her blouse was loose, her skirt tight, her shoes wrong. She felt gangling and her face itched. What was wrong? "And now I have my teeth again," he said, smiling. And he did. "Of course they are not in good condition and in five more years I lost them entirely. But with your care and advice I may be able to preserve them longer." This seemed to answer an important question, but she hardly heard him. "I'm younger too," she exclaimed. "Naturally. So is the palace, the planet, the galaxy. This is my past." "Time travel? That's impossible!" "Impossible for you, certainly. And for most species. That is why I was able to extend my empire so readily, though it is drifting away now that my powers have declined." "But what about paradox? I mean -- " "There is no conflict. We are ten years younger, and the universe is ten years younger, but we are not of it, precisely. The full explanation would be too technical for your comprehension. We merely experience, we do not affect, except for our own bodies." Judy shook her head. "How could you conquer an empire if you couldn't use your talent to affect it?" "Simple. I travel to a foreign planet. Then I visit its past and make notes. Then I comprehend its vulnerability and in the present I exploit it. No enemy strategy is a surprise to me, nor can it ever be, unless it dates from beyoild my own lifetime." "Your Majesty, it still doesn't make sense. I see you younger and I seem to be about sixteen myself. But when I was really sixteen I was a high-school girl on Earth, ruining my teeth with cola. So this can't be -- " "It is my past, my dear, not yours. You became younger merely to stay in phase with me. I would take you to Earth and show you that high school of yours -- but my migrating years are over and no ship will respond to our touch now. You may look at Lepidop instead." "Don't tell me you migrated between planets without ships!" "'Dont tell you? Very well, you shall remain ignorant of that talent." The Monarch preceded her to a silken parapet walling off a bulging room, so that they actually stood outside the body of IF the castle. Beyond it the colorful butterflies danced in the early dusk, whirling in columns of turbulence. "See, the chrono gives the date,' he said, gesturing toward a huge clock-tower about a mile distant. "Just over ten years ago. She saw the clock but did not know how to read its symbols. She was coming to believe that they had traveled back; nothing else explained the phenomena. She was younger; she could not be deceived about a thing like that. The Monarch now had plenty of breath and physical vigor -- and he did have remarkable powers. A yellow messenger lighted on the parapet. Judy stepped back but the insect took no note of her or the Monarch. The yellow mouth parts were moving but she heard no translation. Naturally not, she realized when she considered it: the machines could not have been programed for English ten years before she came. The" would be inoperative for her -- and, of course, unnecessary for the natives. Then how, she wondered sharply, was she able to hear and comprehend the Monarch's present speech? "My dear," he remarked, "your thought processes are so delightfully open. The phase applies to the translators too, but only for you and me; we can not communicate with the creatures of this time, or indeed make ourselves known to them in any way. I heard no more than you did, just then." "Oh," she said, more perplexed than ever. A thick-bodied, furry-antennaed drab moth arrived on foot. It gazed out over the parapet a moment as though envious of the aerial ceremonies beyond, then lowered its head to the wall. A tremendous tongue uncurled and brushed the tight strands that formed the parapet and all the castlepalace. She saw with shock that its wings had been partially clipped, so that it could not fly. "The menials come out at night," the Monarch murmured distastefully. "We don't associate with them, of course, but we recognize that they do have to clean the grounds sometime." "The moths? They do the work?" "That is the natural order, since they are basically inferior. We merely relieve them of the onus of making decisions. No doubt they are happier than we are." The moth hardly looked happy. It seemed resigned, feeling no frustration apart from that one glance outside, because it had no hope. Judy started to voice a protest at this callousness of the Monarch but he spoke first: "We'll return to the throne room. You shall instruct me on caring for my teeth." That was right -- the Monarch had teeth now! This was one thing she was qualiHed to do. "'Suppose I clean your teeth while I explain about the procedures?" "Excellent." He settled on the throne and opened his mouth. H IS teeth were surprisingly similar to those of a human being: twenty-four of them, divided into incisors and molars, sixteen and eight respectively. No cuspids. Normal occlusion. That, as galactic dentition went, was practically identical to her own set. She brought out her instruments, set up the sterilizer and tied a protective cloth about his furry neck. This was awkward, because his head was not attached in a familiar manner, but she had learned not to let such details interfere. She lifted a scaler and began to check. "Your teeth are not in the best condition. I'm afraid," she said. "There's a good deal of erosion and the gums -- " "Ouch!" "Are a trifle tender. You need the attention of a dentist." "Allow a moth to touch my royal teeth?" he demanded incredulously. "Don't you have any butterfly dentists?" "Certainly not. No butterfly would soil his dignity by learning a trade." "Trade? Dentistry is a profession." "Kingship is a profession, my dear. I would have any subject who fell so low as to practice a manual art put under the lights." "The lights?" "Executed, to employ a euphemism. You would not care to know the details, my charming alien hygienist." Then he fathomed her thought. "No, there is no such restriction on aliens; we understand that the ways of the galaxy differ from ours peculiarly. No stigma attaches to you. You are not at fault for having been hatched on a barbarian world." That did not allay her whole concern but she let it pass. Judy was beginning to appreciate the full extent of the problem. No wonder the Monarch had lost all his teeth. "Well, I can show you how to extend the life of your teeth but it's already pretty late. Too much damage has already been done." "Ten years is not far enough back?" "I'm sorry. Your Majesty, it isn't." "Explain anyway." She continued to work, cleaning away the immediate residues of what appeared to be years of neglect. "Oral prophylaxis is much more than just cleaning the teeth. The whole mouth, the entire habitat has to be considered. The food of primitive species tends to be hard, tough and gritty, and it cleans the teeth naturally. IF But civilized foods tend to be soft and sticky and many essential nutrients are refined out. And sugar -- well, it's best to stay away from it, if you value your teeth." "But I love sweet foods." "Your teeth have already informed me of that. If you insist on eating sweets, at least keep your teeth clean at all times. A truly clean tooth cannot decay. And it is important to disturb the natural bacteria in your mouth regularly, for some of these attack the enamel of your teeth. You can't eliminate all bacteria but you can rout them out and keep them uncomfortable, so that they never have a chance to multiply and mass against your teeth." "You are beginning to make sense," the Monarch said. "But how do I keep them clean?" "You brush them, for one thing." She brought out a toothbrush, one of the few remaining from her original supply. "I'm sure you have better instruments and better systems at Lepidop, but the trinciple is constant: get them clean. Now I'll demonstrate the best way to clean off the surfaces. Then you can do it yourself after every meal." "But -- " It was her turn to divine his thought. "This can't be considered manual labor. It's hygiene. Only the most finicky and enlightened persons practice it. Clean teeth are a mark of, er, nobility." "Naturally," he replied, having known it all the time. "But brushing isn't enough." She brought out a spool of dental tape. "This is more difficult but more important. You have to pass the tape between your teeth, like this -- " "Ouchl" "Now that didn't hurt. Your Majesty. You just expected it to. You pass it between your teeth and pull it back and forth a little and it polishes the surfaces the brush can't reach. Darn these inexperienced adolescent fingers of mine! There. And right there, in the crevices between the teeth, is where food is most likely to collect and where the undisturbed bacteria will feed and multiply in their own contented microcosm. You no more want to ignore these places than you want to ignore an assassin in your palace. Bacteria are assassins of your teeth." "Suddenly I understand you very well. Give me that tape." His digits were much stronger than they had been when he was old. Before long he became proficient in both brushing and taping. "Now," he said, "I begin to weary. Take my hand." She took it, thinking he needed help, but as the vertigo passed over her she realized that they were jumping forward again in time. She was twenty-six again, her clothing fitting snugly, and he was back at forty-twoeight-odd. His wings were bleached, his antennae sagged. "But look," he gasped before she left. "Teeth!" He was right. They were so delapidated as to be almost useless but they were there and they seemed clean. "You took care of them!" she cried, delighted. "For ten (breath) long years." He flopped on the throne, exhausted. "Dismissed." Monarch summoned her again. "It is very tiring, revisiting the past," he explained. "And tedious, following your instructions. But it saved my teeth for five years longer than they lasted before. You gave good advice." "I tried to," she said but the whole business amazed her. How could they really have traveled back in time? But if they hadn't, how had the Monarch recovered his teeth? They were not good teeth but they were genuine. "Ten years were not enough to grant me perfect dentures," he said. "Would twenty years do it?" Twenty years were equivalent to forty in his life, she remembered. He would be half his present age -- hardly past his prime. "It might." "Take my hand." She obeyed while protesting. "But Your Majesty. The strain -- " The dizziness overcame her. It was worse than before. When she regained equilibrium things had changed drastically. The Monarch was tremendous -- twice his original size -- and the throne had expanded to match. His wings veined, bordered on the fringes with a double row of white spots set in black. His torso was full and strong. His antennae were long and firm. He was a splendid insect. And his teeth, as he smiled, were fine and even. He had done it: he had taken them back to the time before dietary dissipation and dental neglect had damaged his teeth irreparably. But Judy was in trouble. She looked at herself. Her clothing hung upon her in gross festoons, her shoes were like boxes and her dental case was impossibly heavy. She had lost two decades. Physically, she was six years old. "Come fly with me, my dear," the Monarch said. "This is my time of power." "But I'm not dressed -- " "Neither am I. Does it matter?" What use to debate with a butterfly about clothing? Her blouse was now as big on her as a dress and far less neatly shaped. She belted it around her middle with a strand of dental tape and discarded much of the rest of her apparel. They went to the parapet, its outer bulge now swollen into a IF large balcony. "But you said equipment wouldn't work for you here," she protested, remembering what he had said ten years later (three or four days ago, subjective time). "How can you fly?" "You jest, my dear," he said benignly and hooked four hands into the back of her blouse-dress. She screeched as the dental tape snapped and she hd to scramble to avoid complete dishabille. The Monarch flexed his handsome wings. Air blasted down and then they were aloft. By the time she had managed to knot her outfit securely about her the palace had fallen away and the ground was already awesomely far below. Now she was glad she weighed so little. Her blouse was good nylon, but... "Material power," the Monarch said as they flew. "It has been claimed by sages on my world and perhaps even on yours that this can not bring happiness but assuredly it can. At this moment in the span of my reign I control seventy systems, each with one or more habitable planets, and I hold a virtual monopoly on the distribution of Ra radium throughout the galaxy. I have phenomenal wealth and even the lowliest of my subjects live in ease. Look there!" She peered as he swooped low. She saw a silver city with minarets and flying buttresses, each structure bedecked with scores of bright green butterflies. It was as beautiful a municipality as she had ever seen. "Is this your capital?" she asked. He laughed resoundingly. "This is Luna -- the slum-city of Lepidop. Every occupant is a moth. See the ugly spots on those wings." The spots were not ugly to her. "Luna moths," she murmured. "And look there." It was a forest, but like none she had known on Earth. Each huge tree was barrel-shaped, its foliage on the outside, its fruit hanging inside. She learned that when the fruit became ripe it dropped so that more could be grown on the same stem. There was preservative gas within the hollow center, so that the tree gradually filled with its own fresh fruit, a natural storehouse. Enough was stockpiled in this one forest to feed several cities for months. "And there." Now they came upon an ocean of water-color-paint water. Geysers plumed from its sparkling depths into the sky, forming ambient vapor-scapes of every lovely hue. Swallow-tails spun within these falling mists, spraying rainbows from their wings. "This is my empire," the Monarch said. "This is power, this is beauty, this is joy." And Judy had to agree. They returned to the palace. "Why don't you build a dental clinic in this time' she inquired, "so that no citizen needs to have lived without proper care? The best food is wasted if your teeth are poor and no one can be happy when he has a toothache." "What I do now can affect only myself," he reminded her. "And you, to a lesser extent. But in our normal time I shall build a clinic for the future." She checked his teeth. "There is some damage, but Fm sure that proper care will preserve these for the rest of your life," she said. "Brush them after every meal and brush the rest of your mouth, too, to disturb the bacteria. Use the dental tape. Don't eat any more processed carbohydrates than you really have to. And have your mouth checked every six months." "But who will do the checking?" That moth problem again. And of course the Monarch could not summon any offworld dentist to work on his teeth in this flashback status. "I suppose you'll just have to do the best you can by yourself. That isn't ideal but it will certainly help." Then she cleaned his teeth carefully, though her tiny six-year-old hands were clumsy at so specialized a task. She reviewed him on the techniques of dental prophylaxis until she was satisfied that he knew exactly what to do. Finally they returned to the present. There was some awkwardness about her tangled clothing that amused the Monarch, but he was too fatigued to laugh long. He collapsed almost immediately, frightening her. Twenty years seemed to have been a terriffic strain on his system. The Monarch was old again but he did seem to be in better health than before, as though his new attention to diet had helped more than his teeth. And his teeth yere improved; he was still able to chew most foods without discomfort. If human beings had the ability to impart their knowledge to their younger selves, as the Monarch had done, they might all have superior teeth, she thought wistfully. M onths passed. Judy was well treated at the palace, and from time to time (figuratively) the Monarch summoned her for conversation. He was inordinately proud of his preserved teeth and gave her full credit for the advice that had in effect restored them. But her service to him had ended; she could leave Lepidop at any time she found somewhere better to go. Yet there was a certain lingering dissatisfaction. Mis teeth were not perfect, and she knew that he concealed occasional pains, not wanting to admit this flaw in the gift. It would have been so much better for him to have had the regular supervision of a dentist (even a moth dentist!), for the patient simply IF could not do everything for himself. She was increasingly nervous, too, because she had not heard from the University. Trach was long gone and she had no idea of how to reach him. She might have placed an interplanetary call, but this wasisxpensive and she did not have a planet to name. He could be anywhere in the galaxy. the dinosaur notified those authorities of her whereabouts? Had they in turn notified Dr. Dillingham? Had he been interested enough to put in a requisition for her, or whatever it was at this level? She had supposed that Dr. Dillingham had been satisfied with her performance and might like to have her as his assistant again. But as a University administrator he would rate the best and she could not delude herself about her status there. She was used to his mannerisms and individual techniques and that was all. She made use of the comprehensive Lepidop library of dental information, studying the configurations of the dentures of a thousand alien species. She visited the lowly moth dentists and found them a good deal more knowledgeable than the opinion of the butterflies suggested. She asked the translator about the University -- its procedures and hierarchy. She waited. Nothing. Either the message had was not interested. She was helpless. "I have had a taste of better health," the Monarch said, shaking his faintly orange wings. "It incites me to desire more. If twenty years did this, what might thirty do?" That would be equivalent to sixty, by her scale. He would be in effect twenty -- at the very prime of life. Of course, nothing short of a complete overhaul from the moment of conception on would provide him with absolutely perfect teeth but -- "If I begin caring for my teeth in the flush of my youth, at the time I first emerged from the chrysalis, they will remain strong forever!" he cried. She kept forgetting that the butterfly life-cycle differed from her own. Perhaps that was time enough. "Come, my dear -- take my hand." She tried to stop herself but his word compelled her just as though she were a butterfly subject. "Wait!" she cried, suddenly realizing what thirty years would mean to her. "I can't go back to -- " And the vertigo overcame her. It was much worse than before. She felt as though she were being turned inside out through the mouth and dipped in lye. She felt, she fought, she expired, she emerged into... Nightmare. The choking, crying, bleeding miasma of extinction. Her arms were bound in mummy wrappings, her eyeballs were rotten. She screamed with the soundlessness of an anguished ghost. Maggots were feeding on her tongue, flames on her wings. She had tried to go back to four years before she had been born. B ut it was not her own demise she experienced. The Monarch was dead. His ancient husk of a body dangled from her hand when she stood and, when she tried to let go, his desiccated hand fell apart. "Murderous alien!" the court butterflies cried, discovering her in her guilt. "You made the Monarch attempt the impossible. You crucified him on your short lifespan and now the Empire will fall!" Judy found no way to protest. She had led him on to it, however unwittingly. "You shall die the death of a thousand lights," they screamed. "Moths shall spit on your remains!" They put her with all her possessions in a cocoon tower near the apex of the castle. She could see beyond the strands to overlook the lovely countryside, but she could not break them or force them apart in order to escape. They were like invisibly barbed wire. In any event, it was a long, long fall to the moat and sharklike beetle larvae cruised that dreary channel. Butterflies swooped from the sky, their wings translucent in the sun. Each carried a beamer pointed toward Judy's prison. Some of these rods were silver, some black, some green -- all the hues of Lepidop. The insects zoomed at her in single file and from each weapon a narrow light speared into her cage. At first she flung herself aside, trying to avoid the profusion of beams, but she could not escape them all. Then she discovered that they did not hurt her. They were merely lights that illuminated her prison momentarily and faded harmlessly. Pain blossomed in her leg. One of those lights was a laser! An hour and several scorches later she figured it out. At irregular intervals a butterfly would approach carrying an orange rod -- the color matching the wings of the dead Monarch. This was the laser -- the beam she had to avoid. But it was nervous work. She had to watch every butterfly and there were always several in sight. The beamers were not easy to see until almost within effective range, so she had only a moment to spot the orange one and dodge its pencil-thin sword of heat. The bars of the cage inhibited her view also at critical moments. The beams were somehow set to have effect only in her vicinity; they passed IF through the cage strands harmlessly, and dissipated beyond the cocoon. She was the only target; when her attention lapsed, she got stung. So far the wounds had been painful but not critical. Eventually a laser would strike an eye or some other vital spot, she knew. The death of a thousand lights. She understood it now. A hundred thousand threats, one thousand actual attacks. One or two strikes she could forget; ten or twenty she could suffer through; one or two hundred she could survive with proper medical attention. But a thousand would surely finish her. Those she managed to avoid still took their toll, for she could not relax at any time while watching for them and sleep would be impossible. Sometimes one laser followed another consecutively. Sometimes half an hour passed ltween shots, though the innocent-light butterflies swooped past steadily at intervals of five to ten seconds. The average laser came around fifteen minutes. That would be four an hour, she calculated feverishly, or almost a hundred in a twenty-four hour span. It would take ten days for the torture to expend itself. Far longer than she could remain alert. Eventually she would sink into unconsciousness, from fatigue if not from wounds. The death of a thousand lights. Her eyes ached. The constantly oncoming butterflies blurred. They no longer seemed beautiful; they were wings of horror. Always one passing; close, its light aiming, stabbing. Always one a few seconds behind, its beamer lost in the distance. And others, trailing back into the sky -- an ominous parade of beating wings. She cried out. She had nodded off without realizing it, hypnotized by the steadily cruising, flexing wings. A laser had scored, singeing a strand of her hair and scorching one shoulder. It was as though a white-hot poker had been jammed against her, destroying flesh and bone to a depth of a quarter inch and cauterizing its own wound. Night came but no relief. Now the moths were marshaled to the task, their rods softly glowing in the same array of colors. This was no favor to her, she knew. She had to be given a chance to spot the orange ones. Otherwise her vigil would be useless, and she simply would have to lie down and let the LauiMT  Macfarlant  Jmkms  Kopmz  Barrttt# Jr. beams come. That would remove half the torture and shorten its duration. She nodded off again and was struck again -- but this time she had been fortunate enough to pick up almost thirty minutes of sleep. That enabled her to remain alert for several more hours. Then the blurring resumed and she had a tightening headache and knew that the dismal end was coming. She would fight it but her point of no hope was incipient. All she had wanted to do was to rejoin of it all was his failure to respond. He would have responded, she was sure now, had he been told. Maybe the University had buried her message as crackpot. She chided herself for feeling sorry for herself, then reacted angrily: now was the best of all times to feel sorry for herself! A larger light showed in the distance. She thought it was the rising Lepidop sun but it seemed to be star-shaped. And not natural. Soon she unblurred enough to make out the glint of metal. A machine of some sort. Erom it a searchlight-sized beam emerged, sweeping across the planet. Was this the final laser? She screamed involuntarily as the huge light found her and bathed her blindingly but she did not burn. The machine came down its headlight as though it were an Earthly locomotive. She could make out no detail of its shape. Her cage exploded. She felt herself falling, still blinded. She heard the chitter of untranslated moth protests. Something hard caught her arm and hauled her up roughly"None but I shall do him die!" a metal voice boomed. Now she knew she was hallucinating, for translators could not fly. "And you will join him there." "I know that!" she snapped hysterically. "At least give me some butter for these little burns -- " And that was strange, for she was not the hysterical type. She wondered when the end would come.  AccardHig to Piort Antlioiiy tho fOrogoiiig is tlio finai stoi Honeo tlio soinowliat onigmotic ondlng, wMch abruptly winds up IMnps -- or doos it? Cortoinly it prosonts a challonoo to a roadar unfamiliar arith proviha VO appoarod In IF. And it is an onMng, If wo aro not mlv taken, that laavos a haok for ronowal of tho soriosrshould its osHmaMo author so will n. Wa hopohadaas. IF Like men, Jeeiiens hurt e Httie eiithe time -- but they bed found e wey out! T he roof fell in as Tryss and I came back with the latest flora samples. I imagine it looked pretty ridiculous -- from a safe distance. Just as we went past the posts they both splayed out as if they'd been cued and the flimsy overheads started showering broken adobe and wooden shingles on us. (Actually, it was the porch roof that fell in. I should specific. Shan is always telling me: Say what you mean.) Tryss, at least, thought it was funny. We weren't hurt and he sat there in the wreckage -- dust billowing up around him and giving him the look of a bald fox-faced monkey being cooked alive -- squealing in what passes for laughter among the Jeeli. After I ascertained none of the sample packages had burst when we'd dropped them I even joined in with a bit of weakly nervous chuckling of my own. After thirty-seven days on the planet and nothing to show for it the whole lab might as well cave in, not just the porch. Shan came out to see what the noise was about. "You hurt?" he asked, holding out a hand. When I shook my head he put his hand back onto his hip. Still squealing, Tryss was on his feet now, bending over to pick up the scattered samples. We all pawed through the rubble, sorted out the packages and lugged them to the lab, trailing chunks of broken adobe, occasional splinters and Brownian tail of fine dust. Messy. "Josy, can't you do anything without creating an uproar?" Carteret complained. I was tempted to be scathing but thought better of it. In another year Carteret was going to be a lot more than Shan's cochief and it wouldn't do to irritate a future superior. Then, too, I suspected he was on the cleanup squad that day and was taking the mess of mud and splinters personally. "Just consider it the noise associated with inspired research." Shan elbowed some notes out of the way and he, Tryss and I eased our armloads of samples onto the countertop. "It was just the porch collapsing, anyway. The Jeeli never build anything to last." "Good thing we built the lab," Shan remarked. He was using part of that vastly compartmented brain of his to pass the samples out for testing. The recipients wandered off reading labels and bumping into tables absentmindedly. The room was suddenly full of the silent sound of mental gears meshing. I felt conspicuously unemployed since I'd finished my perception test run two days ago. "Incidentally," Shan said, "D'Vrainy call while you and Tryss were gone." "Uh-oh?" Tryss said, waggling his pale red eyebrows. The first Federation Basic that e.t. kids pick up are those little nonsense-syllaIF bles-pregnant-with-meaning our language abounds in. They do all the proper eye-bugging, mouthpursing, tongue-clicking or whatever else is necessary dramatically to underline each phrase and they seem to know what each means, too. That's what makes it so easy to teach them modern ways, even when the adult populations are resistant. "Uh-oh, is right," Shan agreed with a sigh. "He should be here any minute." "Does he believe leaning over our shoulders is going to produce results any faster?" "That's your department, psychologist." Shan was studying the contents of one of the few remaining sample packages. "They get this out of a local cannabis field? Wow!" "It's labeled." I checked the comp tape the crew had run while Tryss and I had been collecting samples from the skimmer pilot. With my psych work temporarily stalled I figured I'd better shift to my second suit: pattern spotting. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Carteret stare at me a minute, then turn away. Efficiency check? Division loved his reports and his drive to succeed. They always liked success and the pressure was definitely on here; we all felt it, especially D'Vrainy and his men. They had been most cooperative in collecting weird flora, fauna and mineral samples from all over the planet. They had curtailed their work at the processor and run oddball errands for us so we could plow all our time into research. It was embarrassing. The base -- it hardly deserved the title "Colony" yet -- was so new the serial tags hadn't peeled off the equipment. And here they were out snatching ecological snippets for our team. But we hadn't given them a prize so far and the latest tape was no exception. If we could only get the Jeeli on their feet, get them operating at any kind of normal level... "There is a deadline, you know," Carteret was telling some of his techs acidly. F rom outside came a wiffling sound that signaled the imminent landing of a skimmer. No need to ask whose, after Shan's remark. I found myself clutching the comp tape and trying to look earnest and busy. The noise of the skimmer dulled and a number of voices became louder and louder as their owners walked toward the lab. Somebody kicked some boards in the ruins of the porch and somebody else remarked on the scene with inspired profanity. Then: "Just get over there and tell him I want thirty kilos extracted by tomorrow. And I am not interested in excuses." There was a trompling of fading footsteps as people apparently hurried to obey that familiar voice. Then the colony director stepped inside the lab, looking satisfied but not pleased. "I'm not interested in excuses from you, either. And what the hell happened out front?" "We didn't intend to give any and the porch caved in," Shan said mildly. "I presume the Jeeli will put up another one of these days, with the kids' obsession about putting porches on everything." "Admittedly, it's one of their few self-initiated projects." D'Vrainy had his hands behind him under his favorite feathered cloak. Thrown over someone his size, it produced the effect of an immense brooding predatory bird and when he walked toward you with that curiously light step of his you hoped he wasn't hungry. On anyone else such a cloak combing with fatigues would have been ludicrous. On him it wasn't. "Just what are you giving me?" "We're working," Shan said. I'd watched him move around directors before but this time I sensed he was nervous. And all the staff seemed to be trying to outdo one another in creating an aura of purposeful effort. I felt naked standing there. "A lot of taped analyses I haven't the time or training to digest and a great many due bills for esoteric equipment," D'Vrainy grumbled. His voice took on a pleading quality. "Haven't you anything to show?" "Not yet -- but soon," Carteret promised and Shan glared at him. "It takes time for us to go through all the possibilities." "Sometimes months," I said and, under D'Vrainy's stare, added with forced optimism; "or maybe we'll stumble on it tomorrow." "Stumble. Oh, I know -- Psychologist Josepha Wales and her widely vaunted intuitive insight. Well, read cards or crystal-ball gaze but find us answers." Shan threw me a shut up look. "Believe me, sir, it does take time. We are anxious to help the Jeeli, too. Just as eager as you are for solutions." "Are you? I'm where the buck stops. You said maybe ronths. We haven't got maybe months. Thirty days, outside. We've got to bring these people forward -- and now. That would certainly be better than relocating the population, I hope we agree?" D'Vrainy paused and looked down at Tryss and suddenly smiled. He began to chat in Jeeli with the boy and it was plain his friendliness was genuine. Tryss grinned back and glowed at this attention. "We're examining some new flora samples now," Shan muttered, half to himself. We were both afraid of and admiring of D'Vrainy. We knew the Division's deadline on the Jeeli problem and understood that he had to lean on us. Yet the situation on this planet was enough to make anyone with IF even an ounce of pity tear hair. ""Ey-dya, Tryss." We glanced toward the lab door. Berayn hulked there, looking at us with half-closed eyes. "FaWfl," Tryss responded, waving a hand in a go-away gesture. D'Vrainy studied the Jeelian adolescent framed by the door. "Some relation to this mascot of yours?" "Brother," Shan said. It was difficult to believe. Tryss was a near equivalent of a bright Terran eleven-year-old, from a limited intellectual background, and eminently teachable. He'd make a great little lab tech, for example. Berayn, a scant three years older, was a caricature from Earth's rustic past: dull expression, mouth always slightly open, sleepy eyes, slouching posture, slothful movements and an intelligence response-level definitely subnormal. I'd run those tests myself. D'Vrainy pouted and his hands behind his back flipped rapidly at the feathered cloak. The action made him look tailed and didn't improve his baleful image. "What the hell happens to them?" and there was frustration and anguish in his voice. "Given time," Shan offered, "we hope we can find out." "You know the deadline. Surely in that time we can help the Jeeli up to where they can start being self-sufficient?" I had a moment's irrational idea that in their own dull, contented way perhaps the Jeeli yere self-sufficient; but at the time I knew they were not and kept quiet. D'Vrainy went on, "There's a whole big rich planet out there, just waiting for them to develop it. And we can show them how, if they'll just learn. Tools, strap them up. They can be fullfledged partners with us." Shan hunched himself against the counter. I knew that look; having been reminded so forcefully once more of the depressing nature of the Jeeli problem he was trying hard to keep scientifically aloof and not succeeding. "All speed, sir -- you know that." D'Vrainy's shoulders slumped. "Just keep at it. Anything you need. Anything at all." Then he straightened and moved lightly toward the door. Berayn, after a moment's intense study of the size of their two bodies and the shape of the door, edged out of the way so D'Vrainy could pass. The director paused and looked down at the boy, compassion covering his usually stern countenance. Finally he went out, shaking his head and muttering, "Dammit -- " Shan immediately got to work on the tapes. Tryss ignored his brother and instead watched Shan sorting. At once he saw the sequence and tried to help. That was a sharp little mind and we all knew that in just a few years it would be buried under a moronic expression like Berayn's. I stared at Berayn. He gazed back. There was no spark of interest in his face. No resentment, either. He was a living epitome of don't-give-a-damn and he was no exception. The whole adolescent and adult native population of Jeel had the same who-cares attitude toward life. Tryss was still pawing through the tapes. "This one here? Ah! And this one come after number five!" But, then, Tryss was only eleven, not fourteen. I picked up the latest printout again and studied it. My talent is supposed to be looking at things in an unusual way, detecting patterns that those closer to the forest might miss. So far, on this planet, I hadn't earned my keep. "Something?" Shan said hopefully. "Yes. At puberty the Jeeli stop developing intellectually. Not only that, they lose much of what they've learned throughout childhood." Shan's mouth quirked. He was obviously annoyed that for an instant I'd given him the impression I'd found something new. "Don't we all?" permitted Shan and I liked to walk after work in the evening -- if there was an evening on that particular planet. It was the time allotted to bounce ideas off each other, to play Let's See What We Have So Far. That evening after D'Vrainy's visit was no exception. "At least the Jeeli aren't dying or in danger of extinction," Shan muttered, not sounding cheered. "Just in perpetual stagnation. Anthro says they've been this way for a long time -- that well-preserved burial they found dated out to around two hundred thousand Terran years." We were both trying to avoid thinking of the possibility of Relocation for the Jeeli. It would be necessary, though, for their own safety, during the industrialization of their planet -- unless we could find the key to unlock their minds and bring them up the ladder. Shan viciously slung a pebble down the grassy slope we stood on. Below us a cluster of crude dwellings straggled about a little stream, each unworkmanlike hovel sporting a flimsy porch. "Look at that. They were building those same primitive shacks when that burial was made and they build them the same way today, without any change whatsoever. Do you suppose they'll fix up those two that have fallen down or just move in with their relatives?" "Oh, they'll rebuild them eventually, maybe, when the kids get energetic andprovide the enthusiasm and direction. In this climate there's no big rush." IF "There is for us. While we examine and reexamine them more Jeeli are turning into mental mush. The whole culture is climbing a hill -- and it never gets to the top. The average Jeeli gets no higher than fourteen years up that hill, then he gets thrown back down again and stays there. We've got to change that." It hurt. It hurt all of us. You didn't get into Ethnic Research of the Division unless you psych tested with powerful empathic attitudes toward primitive peoples, a tremendous desire to assist. Sometimes it wasn't necessary to push, only show the way; but Survey had established, easily, that Jeel wasn't in that category. And here we were drowning in the results of that classification. Everything in our training and psychology pointed us toward helping underdeveloped species up their individual cultural ladders. We just couldn't ignore them. Tryss puffed up the hill toward us, a big grin on his face. "Doctor Carteret say last test is point ninenine CO -- CO -- " "Correlation," I finished for him. Sometimes I wondered if Carteret ever rested. He dug at every problem until he had it licked, though it was possible that this time he'd meet defeat. I rubbed the top of Tryss's hairless head, trying not to blame the messenger for bad news. "So much for that theory." Shan shook his head. "Poor kids. How do they ever learn anything? They certainly don't get any education from their elders. They're almost feral children." "But they seem happy." Tryss had gone back several meters from the slope and hunkered under the low-hanging branches of a tree, even though it wasn't hot. And at the sight something jolted me. Jeeli children rarely sought shade. But all the adults -- and the adolescents as they neared or reached puberty -- got out of the sun as much as possible even when the light was dim, as now. Under trees, under those ridiculous porches. When they changed to their useless, lethargic state they sought -- trees, porches, shelter. I sat down beside Tryss, ignoring the threat of fierce stains from the Jeelian version of fescue. From the way I felt I was probably bugeyed but Tryss didn't seem to think me impolite. He returned my look with a wondering smile, apparently thinking this was a game. "The learning process itself," I said slowly and carefully. My thoughts were moving fast. "What?" "How do humanoids learn -- or most mammals?" "That's your department," Shan said in a halfhearted attempt at a teasing reply. He sat down on the other side of Tryss. "Go on." "The learning process is largely a response to stimuli." "Okay. Burn your hand on an object and learn not to." "Right. Or have a pleasant experience and try to repeat it." I chewed my knuckles a moment, trying to get mentally organized. I had a suspicion I was going to kick myself for my earlier stupidity when I got where I was heading. "But if the stimulus-response pattern were interfered with -- " "We've tested for native drugs." Shan sighed. "They're not on anything like, say, coca leaves." Tryss was getting bored. The game wasn't much fun and we were using words he didn't understand. "No, but what if it were something the body itself produces? Not from the outside but from within. Like histamines." "It would have been present in the adults when we examined them." Despite his arguments, Shan was beginning to catch my excitement. "Sure! But did we know what we were looking for? We were checking mostly for foreign substances. This unknown quality would appear to be a natural, an element that belonged in their bodies. It would probably be present in the kids' systems, too -- but the difference might be so minute we didn't spot it before." "We've already run total physicals on scads of specimens and the stuff is long gone. That means new tests and new specimens," Shan said with a groan. I waved away this annoyance. "What we need is -- " "A lot of test stimuli and a pair of Jeeli twins who will enter puberty all at once, overnight on successive nights. Only it doesn't happen that way." "Would you settle for a pair of brothers, one pre-, one post-pubertal?" "Tryss and Berayn?" He looked skeptical. "I doubt if they'd think much of new blood and tissue samples, either." I grinned reassuringly at Tryss, feeling like a Judas. "No, but they're close at hand and we know their data better than most of our specimens. And -- " Tryss smiled back at us and I knew Shan was feeling my own nerve-wracking compulsion to solve this problem at any cost. We'd been programed, as it were, by our own culture, our own emotional learning processes. Shan said it for both of us, "None of us wants to see Tryss become like Berayn." about the idea of using Tryss and Berayn as guinea pigs. He was kindly enough to shrink from the thought of what we might do to them. "You said a free hand," Shan reminded him and Carteret nodded. D'Vrainy studied the two boys uneasily. They were not clear on what was expected of them but IF they recognized his authority and awaited his decision, Tryss apprehensively, Berayn blankly. Carteret said, "We wouldn't take this approach if we didn't have every anticipation of a successful conclusion." Shan glanced sharply at his cochief, opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. "This team wants to see the Jeeli's minds unfettered." "Unfettered. Yes." D'Vrainy had started at the word, then smiled. His big hands fell on the shoulders of the brothers. I couldn't grasp much of the following conversation he had with them -- the tapes couldn't teach me that fast and D'Vrainy had almost two hundred days' head start -- but it seemed to encourage them both. I caught the word "Duty" and another phrase which might have translated as "Noble Help." Tryss drew himself up proudly and even Berayn looked mildly impressed. Persuasion done, D'Vrainy shrugged his feathered shoulders and gave us a parting shot: "And try not to stick them with needles." We didn't enjoy doing so. But despite the advances of medicine through the centuries there still wasn't any way for our techs to get blood or several other kinds of tissue samples out of a humanoid body without poking it with a syringe or punch. (There'd been some experiments with alternatives, of course, years back. But the Bekart Method -- a kind of radical osmosis -- tended to leach out a lot of other things along with the desired sample and leave patients in rather nasty conditions. It had been abandoned for the older, surer, more painful method.) Tryss yelled a lot but Berayn didn't seem to mind our procedures at all. Shan and I exchanged glances and he raised his eyebrows. "Josy, you may have spotted the tree amid the forest again." I cued the comp log, feeling cautiously elated. "Not only less alert as adolescents but they have a distinctly higher pain threshold. We'd sort of assumed that the kids we picked for earlier samples yelled at the needle because most humanoid kids from nonstoic cultures do." "I don't think Berayn's being a stoic," Shan said firmly. "He just doesn't seem to feel pain as much as Tryss does." And with each test that initial conclusion was more and more strongly reinforced. Tryss became hysterical at the sight of a needle or anything that resembled one. After our first traumatic experiences with him, we made very sure to take a large enough sample to last for any number of tests. I had never seen any e.t. child react quite so violently, not just with tears and protests but with white-lipped, almost convulsive panic. Berayn on the other hand took the whole thing with equanimity. We'd thought at first we might have to ply him with a lot of food to keep him pacified, but he made no fuss at all. Just as well, since he didn't seem to have a great deal of interest in food beyond his basic requirements. Enthusiasm for everything seemed to diminish after whatever it was happened to the Jeeli. It was a marvel the entire race hadn't died out. Sooner than I'd hoped I spotted something suspicious on the tape. Apparently my expression must have been a giveaway, because before I could get my mouth open Shan, Carteret and several key bio people trotted toward me. "Something?" Shan said. Research put me on the team because I have a special feeling for puzzles, including multi-track comp tapes. I like to study lots of threads and then see how the pieces are going to come together. That Qualified Tech First in psych wouldn't have been enough by itself (I'd completed it, however, knowing I couldn't get anywhere without a degree), but Assignments regarded my ability to generalize as a valuable stock-in-trade for our line of work. Right now the puzzle pieces were falling into place so fast I had a feeling they were dragging me along with them. I pointed to the comp tape. Takana, our bio expert, leaned over my shoulder to watch. "Pull together neuro and hemo for a start. Allow for a quantitative difference because it's a different species. Now doesn't this look like a loss here, in Berayn's sensory and motor responses? Mostly in sensory, if I read right, a bit less inhibition in motor." Shan shuffled his feet and chewed his thumb while Carteret and Takana tapped the comp for elaborating data. The machine did some mechanical nail biting and began spitting out fresh readings. Questions started immediately and I had to hold up a hand to fend them off while I read the results. "Yes -- I remember now! Read me out: Transmitting nerve impulses involves a shift in sodium and potassium ions, right? According to the comp, at this point it spotted a slowdown in that process in Berayn. Not an interference by our species' medical standards, but apparently by his." Takana was nodding, too busy tracing a line onr the tape to comment. "It's the ion shift. It's being inhibited -- and selectively." "Let me see that," Carteret insisted. He pushed between us, joining Takana, hunched over the comp. I knew why they always gave us printout rather than voice comps: people like Carteret didn't believe anything unless they could see it. I hoped I hadn't goofed. I could imagine Carteret's report to Division if I had. Shan might have let it slide but not our take-charge boy. But, if I were right, he'd know that, too; Carteret had few equals in neuro. First he muttered to himIF self, then said to his tech, "Pull our earlier tapes on dendrite samples." "We got something?" Shan pleaded. He was even more alone than I was, stuck in an administrative rut and only occasionally getting back to his beloved mycology. "We'll let you know." Checking and rechecking proceeded hastily. We all felt the quickening sensation of a growing conviction we were finally on the right track. Shan and Carteret both fidgeted every time we warned them not to call D'Vrainy yet. We had to be sure. Finally Takana began scribbling, confirmed himself with the comp, frowned, scratched out a line or two. He and Carteret put their heads together over the paper, adding, paring. Suddenly they stopped and looked at each other, stJU'tled, Carteret's pointed hawk nose close to Tak's rounded oriental one. Tak slithered the paper to me. I drew back from it unhappily. "Chemistry isn't my department, you know." It looked vaguely familiar, though, even to me. "Is that a kind of -- aspirin?" "Yes and no." Carteret was looking very smug. "I don't think it would cure any of our headaches. It's a subtly different compound, quite subtly, which is one reason we didn't spot it before. It's unlike anything we've hit elsewhere. Definitely acetic acid there and some other things we can break down pretty quickly." "But we already know what it does," Tak broke in enthusiastically. "It -- in the case of the Jeeli -- interferes with the shift between sodium and potassium ions necessary for nerve impulse transmission. You were right, Josy." "Works predominantly on intake rather than output, as you said," Carteret gloated. "But on both to some degree." He didn't quite rub his hands together but the aura of greedy triumph was very much there. "And its quantity is negligible in pre-pubescent Jeeli?" "You don't know the half of it! Now that we've found what to look for the comp's turned up plenty of previous correlations. Gradual increase until by Berayn's age they're flooded with it. Like natural histamines in our species, the body produces it. No outside source. All the Jeeli have some of it, but the pressures of maturation seem to push production into high gear at puberty, when there are plenty of other things like hormones running around in their systems which effectively mask it -- unless you look very closely." "Josy?" Shan said plaintively. "Now you can call D'Vrainy." A can cure them?" D'Vrainy had only needed the barest rundown to grasp the point and slice through our burbles of discovery. '"So their bodies drug themselves for some unknown reason' "Evolutionary side pocket," Carteret explained, "like a wisdom tooth in a Terran. Once needed but now useless and, if it's a problem, easily removed. Same with the Jeeli and their 'aspirin'." "Maybe," Takana said. D'Vrainy looked at him sharply. "You aren't agreed?" "We're agreed that as long as this process goes on the Jeeli aren't going anywhere culturally," Shan said. Carteret and Takana both nodded. "With their stimulus reception severely muffled, not only learning but most other activity requiring much initiative or creativity has come to a halt. It's amazing they've progressed as far as they have with their rudimentary agriculture and those travesties they call buildings. We can probably credit those to a lucky series of child geniuses some time in their past." "But we're certain we've found the loopholes," I finished. "What's the holdup, then?" "A choice has to be made," Shan said, "on the advisability of going through that loophole. It's different from simply removing a native drug sour'ce or some other outside chemical influence. This is tricky. We ought to be able to counteract the stuff that's turning them into zombies but -- " D'Vrainy was plainly annoyed. "That was the whole object in bringing you here! If you can't cure them, what good are you?" There were a number of visible winces around the group. "There might be unexpected consequences," Shan said slowly, "some unpleasant side-effects we can't anticipate. The comp tells us the same condition doesn't prevail in any other existing Jeelian species, and that our chances of inducing them in a lower life form are nil. The chem people, at least, are sure we can find a way to override this natural super-aspirin they have running around in their neural synapses. But we can't predict exactly what will happen when the overriding agent is ministered." "It'll wake them up?" "We can wake them up," Carteret said with happy dogmatism. "And the results might be a bit much to handle," I warned. "It might make them -- well, aggressive, for instance. The Jeeli have no history of war. Stimulated, jolted out of their millenia-long lethargy, they might discover their neighbors annoyed them and start bashing in their heads right and left. We certainly went through a long enough period of that sort of thing, still are to some extent. Can we afford to take a chance of doing such a thing to the Jeeli?" D'Vrainy strolled back and forth, flapping his cloak. He was plainly struggling over it, and I didn't envy him. It was hard to dislike the Jeeli; but leaving them in IF their present state was out of the question. Yet we had to be sure this was the key that would open their culture up. "You have other reservations?" D'Vrainy said, eyeing us suspiciously. "Any time you tinker with the body chemistry of a living thing, you're gambling," Shan said. "Sometimes it works out wonderfully, like the discovery that we could force the human body to produce its own antibodies. In a few other cases we haven't been so fortunate." D'Vrainy glanced to his right. Tryss and Berayn sat there, playing a game involving colored pebbles and quick responses. At least, Tryss was playing. Berayn was getting skunked, but then it was a child's game. He just couldn't move quickly enough to compete any more. As a compensation of sorts he seemed to have lost much of the urge to compete. He didn't become angry at his losses but just made feeble grabbing motions for the pebbles and occasionally chuckled embarrassedly. "Go ahead," D'Vrainy finally ordered, a man stepping onto an ocean covered with thin ice. "Open up Berayn's mind, if you can, and the rest of the Jeeli's minds. We have to take the risk. See if you can unshackle them." our chem boys to find a simple counter to the natural salicylic. phenol, or whatever. They tossed around the terms interchangeably, it seemed to me, with "neo" and "Jeeli" tacked onto their coinings as suffixes or prefixes, depending on their disciplines. "You've got something like it right there in your hand, Josy," Takana said, laughing. I glanced down at my cup of caffe. "We've been habituated to caffeine for several centuries now. It's only fair the Jeeli get their own version." He held out his hand and displayed a gel containing an unappetizing gray powder. "Native sources -- and more than enough. We had several kilos this morning, even before the test animal experiments. The Jeeli can be taught to refine it by themselves. With the effect this stuff will produce, it'll be easy to teach them how." "I'd like a test on Berayn," Shan said, annoyed, "when and if we ever have a complete staff once again. Where is everybody?" "Oh, Carteret and his boys went off somewhere as soon as we got the comp confirmation. He took most of what we had of the stimulant; I think he wanted to tell D'Vrainy in person." "I'm sure. An ordinary com call couldn't suffice for such a triumph as this." "Indeed it wouldn't." Speak of the devil. Carteret and what seemed like half our staff -- his techs and other acolytes -- trooped in. They all looked inordinately pleased with themselves and something in their manner gave me a chill. "Would it be all right if we proceeded with the experiment?" Shan said icily. "It hardly seems necessary, you know." Carteret's techs were beginning to shut up some of their equipment in what was obviously a close-down phase. "The comps told us what we needed to know and I've already given D'Vrainy what he wanted." "What?" Shan's voice was low and shaking. "Of course. I gave him enough to distribute immediately to the Jeeli water sources. His crews are busy dumping it now. By morning -- " "Without a live test?" Shan was outraged but helpless against that totally confident personality of his cochief. "Don't you believe your own comps? D'Vrainy does. And Vm sure Division will, especially when we can tell them how the Jeeli are moving forward." He waved a negligent hand. "Oh, go on with your individual test. It'll make you feel better -- and your report will add that nice touch of humanity to the comp printout." Shan nodded grimly to Takana and the little oriental approached Berayn. The boy sat propped up against the wall, a bowl of halfeaten food in his lap. He didn't react when Tak and his team swarmed around him. Without protest he submitted to the electrodes, the blood pressure cuff and all the other impedinnenta interfering with his meal. Takana offered him a capsule and Berayn swallowed it without hesitation. We waited less than five minutes and the results were overwhelming. Berayn's eyes widened and he began to look around, not with his usual bland lack of interest but with an expression that strongly resembled panic. One of the techs dropped a lid on a case and the boy jumped -- literally -- about half a meter. "More alert all ready," Carteret began smugly, then stopped. "Nooo -- " Berayn said, slitherof food down his thighs and onto the floor. The techs moved hastily to accommodate his change of position, shuffling tubes and wires trailing from his body. Shan stepped forward, planning to call a temporary halt. He didn't have time. Takana and the techs tried to be soothing and Berayn swiveled to face them with eyes that were bright and terrified. His lips peeled back like a frightened animal's. "Nooo -- " he wailed again, putting his hands tightly against his ears. He felt the electrodes on his scalp and ripped them away. One of them caught, drew blood. Berayn screamed and flailed against the wall, obviously in agony. IF "Stop it! Get that injection to counter..." Tryss rushed toward his brother, horrified at what was happening. They two shouted at each other in Jeeli and all the while Berayn beat away his "attackers" and their attempts to help him. He suddenly seemed terribly strong for a small, adolescent extra-terrestrial. Suddenly, on top of everything else, the com buzzed on. I saw D'Vrainy's image come into focus, and his expression, half tragic, half enraged, was a study. He was roaring. "Get Carteret on this line!" Carteret looked stunned as he crossed to the com, a man with a theory crumbling under his feet. I couldn't spare the attention to hear what D'Vrainy might say to him because the struggle with Berayn had become a desperate battle. Abruptly the boy tore loose from everything, the hoses and equipment flapping behind him like streamers. He ran for the door of the lab. Takana and the others pelted after him, shouting assurances and pleas to stop that only made Berayn yell the louder. They all clattered out. The boy's screaming still rang in our ears when Shan and I followed them long seconds later. We paused on the threshold, stunned. Tryss was standing amid the debris of the porch, sobbing. "Berayn hurt -- hurt all over. You give him something make him hurt -- " "We were trying to help him," Shan apologized. "How did he hurt?" Sniffling, Tryss said, Ears hurt. Eyes hurt. Feet hurt where you stand on 'em. Air hurt when it push against you." Then he added with great wistfulness, "Just like it do me sometimes. Keep hurt -- hurt more and more. But when you get Berayn old, hurt go away." "You didn't tell us that," Shan said weakly. "Everybody little hurt," Tryss said with horrible simplicity. I recognized the tone from my teaching apprenticeship: childhood's contempt for adult obtuseness. Of course. It wasn't worth mentioning because it was a universal. Everybody little hurt and Tryss was little. "But then it go away. When you get big, it go away." "It goes away," I said dully, feeling sick. "Because their bodies make it go away. Shan, we can't help them without driving them insane or making them kill themselves to escape. We took the wrong tack: in their species pain and pleasure aren't learning stimuli -- they have to be avoided. The evolutionary side pocket isn't the deadening agent; it's the steadily increasingly painful stimuli they experience throughout childhood. Berayn's condition is the normal one, the survival adaptation. And Tryss is just now approaching the age where his body, in self defense, will start manufacturing its own natural depressant." "We used the mildest dosage we could," Shan murmured. "Good thing. Right now Berayn is obviously being battered by stimuli, maybe far more than he ever was as a child; but he's no longer able to take it. None of the adolescents or adults are -- my God, Shan! Carteret! The native water supplies! Listen -- " Distantly, underlining Berayn's fading shrieks, we could now hear other high-pitched Jeeli voices. They came from the direction of the nearest collection of hovels. I could visualize hundreds of painmaddened Jeeli adults clawing at their heads, being torn apart by the flood of stimuli -- from the gates we had all helped open. And knowing D'Vrainy's thoroughness, I had a sinking certainty that he'd sent the compound out to all his stations, all over the planet and our scene of horror was being enacted many times over. Carteret had thrown the switch, I'd first given him the fuse and the rest of us all concdcted this -- leg up a ladder to nowhere. I wanted to bawl with disappointment, to crawl into a corner where I wouldn't have to hear or see the tortured Jeeli. "We've destroyed them! The children -- they can't -- they'll -- they'll have to be relocated. They won't even have a culture by morning. Listen! The adults will be dead, or insane. Oh, Shan! What have we done!" Out in the dark Berayn was still howling. The pursuing techs were still trying to reach him through the avalanche of stimuli assaulting the boy -- if only they could catch him. And a meter away from us, standing in the ruins of the porch roof, Tryss sobbed, trembling in empathic pain. We barely caught the word, "Porch -- " but his tone of pathetic pleading was plain. His hands were over his ears, trying to shut out his brother's screams. But he couldn't. We'd taken away their porches -- their shelters against a world so incredibly painful we could barely imagine it. Or could we? Now?  #M IF thing new; something borrowed, something blue." It isn't entirely inappropriate for science fiction, which represents something of a marriage between reality and a dream. It is also the fair beginning of a formula for writing, except that it should add a number of other items -- the rest of the colors, something false and something true, and so on. But nowadays we're lucky to have even the four elements worked into a book and the meaning of "blue" may apply to something other than mood. This time the something borrowed is represented by Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber (Doubleday, #). In this book he has borrowed from every legend I can remember of the marvelous land of Faerie. I suppose those who feel it incumbent to spot trends and see limits are going to carp at the fact that Zelazny is still sticking to myth (though not religion) for his inspiration. But since myth is the source of almost all our best literature in one form or another, I can't object. And I can very much applaud the fact that when Zelazny borrows, he turns it into an act of high creation. The borrowed elements here are so well adapted and so much enriched by his own additions and attitudes that the background becomes one of the freshest lands of wonder in which I've roamed for some time. The Princes of the title are the nine sons of Oberon -- a brawling, arrogant and contumaceous lot of varied and oddly-talented nobics. Oberon, it seems, has mysteriously been forced to give up his rule and U# he is either dead or somehow locked from contact. Now his sons are fighting for the rule of the kingdom of Amber. This world of Amber is the source world of all others -- the reality from which our Earth and other lands are only the incomplete shadows across the infinite planes of possibility. We follow Corwin, who has been exiled to Earth. And since the days of the years of Faerie are not as those we know, he has spent many centuries here. But now the ancient feud with the apparent victorious prince, Eric, is reaching a new phase. Corwin, following an attempt to murder him, is bereft of much of his memory and most of his powers, but none of his wits. He sets about working his way back to Amber. And once he manages that return, he is caught in the ancient struggle as Eric tries to become crowned the king of Amber. The cast of characters is rich and varied and the lands through which we are led are excellently conceived. Plot and counterplot work well. And above all, there is a richness of texture and mood to the book, together with a fine inventiveness. It should be a novel to be recommended without quibble. Unfortunately, it isn't a novel. It's the beginning of one and nothing more. At the end we are left with a fine collection of unresolved items and a hero who is merely free to do what he has been temporarily stopped from achieving. But he has achieved nothing yet. Oberon, who appears as a voice that must eventually be significant, is simply dropped. A number of other characters must eventually also reappear -- both nobles and commoners. The background for the story is laid but the story is not yet told. Obviously there must be a sequel -- perhaps more than one. (This has every earmark of the first book in a trilogy, judging by the pacing and what has developed within its large frame so far.) It makes what one may consider an excellent first installment of a three-part (hardcover book) serial. But it doesn't make very fair treatment for the reader, at the price. There has been a tendency lately for writers to fall into the practice of doing books that are incomplete (or which have a contrived but unsatisfactory ending grafted on) with the idea of a series in mind. I frankly resent it. If the writer can work out an ending that seems satisfactory and complete, there is nothing wrong with assorted sequels. But if he can't or doesn't choose to, it seems to me the whole should be published as one book. This seminovel runs to perhaps # words. Three times that length is not impossible as a single volume. And I'd much rather pay the extra cost to get something that can be judged as a whole than to buy it in parts with IF no certainty of when the rest may come out. Since no book can ever be better than its final resolution of its basic elements -- writers, please note -- and since there is no resolution here, I can't make an honest attempt to judge it. Zelazny's previous performances make me feel the whole will be well worth the trouble of buying all parts, but this is a matter of faith only; and too many slips can occur before the totality can be gained. Buy it if you like to play guessing games with the possibilities an author raises -- or if you are willing to wait for a year or more for the second installment. Otherwise, why fatten the income of publishers who would rather print books than serve their readers with honest novels? us something blue -- in the classic sense of blue mood, not blue material. His Year of the Quiet Sun (Ace Special, #) is essentially downbeat from the beginning. As such, in most ways, it is an excellent work. Most of the development in this story of a research program designed to explore the future directly to spot "trends" is rather obvious -- but it's handled in such a way that the lack of uncertainty in no way detracts from the interest of the book. At first I hoped this was going to be another book I could use like Tucker's Time Masters. That was one I considered perhaps the best example of true science fiction (aliens among us, immortality, space research, etc.) that was suitable for the general reader; I've read it as such several times myself and lent it to several readers who thought they couldn't like science fiction. The writing is generally up to Tucker's very high standard. And there is an element of mystery and allure added to the future search by the use of myth, in the form of an ancient "lost book" of biblical writing. (This, I'm afraid, turns out to be of minor importance and rather less than full conviction, unlike his use of Gilgamesh in the other book.) But too much of the real depth of this novel has been wantonly butchered by the use of a trick that should never have been used. The hero, while waiting for his trip in the time device into the future, vies with another man for the girl who supervises everything. It's impossible to see why, and we get a listless and spineless impression of him. (It's also a bit hard to see why he wants her, but that's his prolv lem; and if honestly stated, it might have been convincing.) The key factor seems to be one that comes up after most of the novel is done. The girl is, of course, white; the narrator is black. Okay, he is then a man of considerable complexity -- a man who has externally overcome his background but is still obsessed with it internally. He should be a richly rewarding character. But since the reader is very carefully kept from this knowledge, and since it therefore plays no part in his thinking as revealed to us, we see none of this true character. Oh, we can go back and try to read it into the events; but the reason writers get paid for their work is because they are the ones best fitted to round out such character traits, not leave it to readers. The trick is unfair, since it demands a total reevaluation of all that went before after the reader has formed his impressions and since this is a story seen only through the one viewpoint. It is also unfortunate, since it reduces the character to a mere frame against which events can happen. The dedication of the book implies there is value to the ability to "grok," and perhaps the reader is expected to go and do likewise. Buy the book if you want an exthe fact that I've spoiled the trick (which was inherently spoiled in its very conception.) Maybe that is grokking. But if you'd rather have your novel given its character development by the writer, pass this one by. B oth something very old and something new are contributed in one massive book: Under the Moons of Mars, edited and with a history by Sam Moskowitz (Hold, Rinehart  Winston, #). This fat book -- running to #t),# words, according to Moskowitz -- deals with the second decade of this century in the pulp magazines, and traces the "scientific romance" as one of the sources of our literature. Primarily, this is a source book for libraries. But to readers who can't get a true feeling of the exerpted stories or who are curious about our beginnings, it strikes me as a bargain. It begins with a very brief introduction and then generous samples of the works from major writers of the period. These run from the original form of what became Burrough's Princess of Mars through The Moon Pool to Blind Spot. Most of these stories are available now only in back issues of magazines almost as hard to get as the old Munsey publications where they first appeared. For anyone who cannot find the material elsewhere -- which must mean for most readers #f our literature -- this is a fine chance to fill in a pretty fair picture of what made these works the classics they have become. In a few cases the entire stories are given; in other cases the samples are generous, covering significant portions of the work, and there has been no tampering, no condensation of the text. IF At the end, in what would be a longer-than-average book by itself, Moskowitz adds the history of the Munsey magazines (as well as a good deal of information on their competitors) during the period of # to #, when such stories were the backbone of their popularity. Most attention, naturally, is paid to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his dealings with the editors. This is a good deal less simple than might be thought; his rates of payment, the stories of his which were accepted and which were rejected, and his whole affair with Munsey are covered in detail. But there is a good coverage of most of the other writers of the time, too. This is hardly material that is new to me in its broad outline. Yet when I sat down to skim through it quickly, I soon found myself reading it as I might have read a novel -- with genuine enjoyment. There are places where I wish other treatment had been possible. Bob Davis as an editor had such a strong influence on American writing for the next generation that I'd have liked to have seen more on him; yet this is not properly the province of the book, so I have to put that down as a purely personal desire. (And if anyone wants to do a biography of Davis, there are still plenty of writers he taught their craft, though this won't be true much longer. So please, anyone out there...) Within the intent of this history, however, I think Moskowitz has done a fine job. It should be stocked by every library. And for the fans who want to know how we got where we are (if that isn't erewhon revisited), this is a book greatly to be recommended.  Koli T t SilverlMrg -- TIi World Outsido tebert A. Heinlein -- f Will Foar Mo Evil WiNiom T. Powers -- Roadout Timo It was Christmas -- and all he wanted was to give! F our days before Christmas I had my first of two troubles with the Creep and Della grew ill and Shambolain arrived -- and nothing was ever quite the same after that. Ordinarily I would have been on the Street working the Bleeders for quarters and dimes, but the weather was miserable that day. When it's a little cold the Bleeders are more generous because I look more pitiful, huddled and shivering against my begging wall; but when it gets really bitter they aren't about to stop and freeze their fingers to find you a quarter. That day it was only ten above zero and the snow was coming down in fine, dry flakes. The wind was so strong that it made the driven snow stick to the bricks and it eddied in the angles of wall and walk, creating drifts that reformed as quickly as I cleared them away. I had only taken in two dollars and eleven cents in almost four hours, and I only needed one more excuse to head for home. And I got it: the Creep. This skinny guy in a heavy gray overcoat with fur collar moved up through the sheets of snow and dropped two quarters in my cup. He had been passing regularly for two weeks, always making heavy donations and always with a word about the weather. Most Straights don't talk to Freaks, no matter how much they bleed for us. I suspected this skinny guy was a Creep, even though he looked bland and unimposing. "It's going to be a mess soon," he said. "Yeah," I said, wishing he would go away. I've never really known how to talk to a Straight. Usually, my trick is to look him over for some vaguely Freakish feature like gigantic ears, a warted nose or eyes set too close together. Then I talk to the Freak part of him. But this Creep was too plain to harbor even the slightest abnormality. "You shouldn't be out here on a day like this," he said, gently laying his hand on the hump between my shoulders. I froze. He made his gesture seem one of friendship but his fingers moved ever so slightly, trying to feel through the coarse weave of my coat. "You're the one with the third foot," he said. I didn't say anything. What should I have said? "I've heard about you." He said it as if he were complimenting me. The wind blew a stronger gust and we backed flat to the wall to get out of the worst of it. I stepped into a drift and felt my socks getting wet. "Do you have a third foot?" he asked. When I nodded, he said, "Where is it? I only see two shoes." I looked into the cup I still held in a perpetual position of request (sometimes I wake up at night and find my hand held out, my fingers bent around a tin vessel that isn't there) and saw the lousy pile of coins in the bottom. "On my calf," I said, not looking at him, not looking anywhere but in the cup. "That's why you wear the baggy pants," he said thickly. Yes, damn it, yes, yes... We huddled against the cold, waiting for each other. He was the Creep, damn it. It was his move. He shouldn't have expected me to ask. But he did. And we waited until I finally said, "You want to see it, don't you?" "If I could," he murmured. Even in the cold, whipping air and obscuring snow I could see the glimmer of excitement in his eyes. I hate the Creeps. We stood a while longer. I was not going to take the next step. Damn him, that was his job if he was so interested. "How much?" he asked at last. I told him it would be five dollars. He got out his wallet, opened to a roll of a hundred and fifty bucks and peeled off the bill. I took it and stuffed it into my pocket, then stooped to roll up my pantleg. "Not here," he said. "No alley," I told him. "No room somewhere. Here or nowhere." He looked disappointed, then shrugged. "Very well." I rolled my trousers past the knee and turned my leg so he could get a good look. The shrunken, gray calf, almost muscleless, was puckered like a womb and gave birth to a half-sized foot otherwise perfect in detail. He looked for a long moment, breathing heavily, then reached out and touched it. I danced away and kicked his shin with my good leg, rolled down my trousers. "Look here -- " he started to argue. "You Creep!" I shouted. "I didn't say you could touch it. No one said you could touch it, you stinking Creep -- " His face flushed and he turned, hurrying away through the snow, trying to look inconspicuous. I watched him go, wishing I had kicked him harder so he would hurt as much as me. With the weather being so rotten and the Creep so depressing, I couldn't take the Street much longer. It was only two blocks to home, but it took me a while on account of my bum leg. My third foot was aching like a rotting tooth in the cold. When I finally reached the steps down into our cellar I gritted my teeth, gripped the icy iron railing and hopped down on my one good foot. Twice my bum leg slapped against the concrete and made me gasp. Then I was through the door into our warm living room and my spirits lightened considerably. Jenifer and Sully were slouched in easy chairs -- Jenny's long, loveIF ly, brown legs propped on a stack of magazines serving as ottoman. At twenty-two she was tawny, supple, as much a cat as a girl. I admired her legs, full hips, thrusting breasts bare under her sweater, and the thick fall of her dark hair. I also admired and loved her left arm which had no hand and the smooth-skinned concavity where her left eye socket should have been. I found these as beautiful as legs and breasts, for without her stigmata she would not have been with us. "It could have been bad," I said. "Except I got a fiver from a Creep." "Della's dying," Jenifer said. For the first time I saw the tears in her good eye. I didn't know what to say. "There's something wrong inside," Sully said, scrambling to the floor and balancing on his thick, hairy arms. He had no legs and his trunk was so abbreviated that he could walk on his overdeveloped arms. "There was blood in her bile, and she hurts a lot in her guts." I got up and went to the door of Pike's and Della's bedroom. It was standing ajar; I pushed it open and went inside. There were no lights on but the snow-shielded sunlight filtered dimly through a casement window. Della lay on the bed and Pike knelt on the floor beside her, cradling her with his abnormally large paw. Pike's head, swollen by acromegaly, turned and looked at me, almost as if it were separate from the rest of him. "Let's get her to a hospital," I said. "No." His voice was deep and syrupy as always, though harsher now. "If it's the money we can let the city get stuck with the bills." "I don't want her laughed at," he drawled. "She'd be an amusement to them. And she's afraid; she made me promise not to take her away. She'd hate a hospital." Then he started to sob. It was such a strange sound coming from his distorted throat that I didn't realize immediately what it was. Besides, a Freak never cried. It just doesn't pay. "It's nothing the hospital can help," he said. "You know she's all twisted inside. She's dying because of the way she's made. You can't fight that. Nobody anywhere can do anything at all about that." "The pain -- " I said. "We bought a bottle." He indicated a half-empty fifth of vodka on the nightstand. But she still seemed to feel pain, now and then jumping and twisting in the sheets. The eye in the baseball-sized head bulging from the left sphere of her skull was open and staring. It was cataracted. "The other one," Pike said, indicating the second head, "never opened its eye before. But now it knows." I watched Della dying. I wanted to do something but there was no action within my powers. I had a fleeting desire to tear up the fiver the Creep had given me but I knew that was foolishness. So I just stood there. And Jenifer and Sully stood behind, just inside the doorway, watching and waiting like Pike and me. And, I guess, like Della. It was then that Shambolain arrived. ated a pocket in existence and we had crawled inside to await the end with her. Unnoticed, the stranger had come in from outside, crossed the living room to the doorway behind us. "Is something wrong?" he asked. Everyone turned to look at him -- except Della who twisted and moaned. He was armless but it was his face that was truly strange. His head was an oval, thin and long, with eyes set too low so that there was a very long expanse of forehead between his hairline and brows. His nose was thin, close to his face and with little cartilage structure. His mouth was a bleak line, nearly lipless. His skin had a coppery glow that was oddly unlike a suntan. Still, he was a somewhat handsome man. Rather, he was not handsome as a man, but handsome in his own right, on his own terms. "What do you want?" Pike asked, taking his frustration out on the stranger, his voice harsh and demanding. "No one heard my knock," the stranger said. "I could see you standing here, so I came in. I hope I haven't breached your etiquette." The last sentence had an odd ring to it, as if he were trying to say in English something he had first phrased in a foreign language. "I asked about where I might find others -- of my kind. They told me about you people." "No room here," Pike hissed. Behind him Della turned, sucked air and gagged. "She's badly ill," the newcomer said. "What is the sickness?" "No sickness," I told him. "Her insides are abnormal. She often said the doctor expected her to die shortly after birth. It's finally happening." He moved to the bed, kneeled beside Pike who briefly protested. He touched Della along the ribs and over the swollen bowl of her stomach. He had the quick movements and assurance of a doctor. He turned to me and motioned toward the living room. "Please get my case." I brought the heavy piece of luggage to him. "You'll have to do what's necessary," he said. "As you see, I have no arms." His armlessness was of a strange type; his shoulders were bare in the sleeveless sweater he wore which seemed tailored specially for him and I could see that there were not IF even stumps where arms should have started, but slightly concave basins in his shoulders, as if the limbs had been ripped out by the roots. I did what he asked of me and I never once wondered how he had transported the suitcase to our door when he had no arms. I would not think of that until much later. Within the case were many strange articles for which I could see no purpose, along with what appeared to be medical supplies. I filled a hypodermic syringe with heavy amber fluid and injected it into the puffed vein on Della's arm. Slowly her movements became tamer. She settled, sighed and allowed herself the flicker of a smile. The cataracted eye closed. Fifteen minutes later she giggled girlishly and called Pike's name. She said more though it seemed senseless. "You've doped her," Pike said, not certain if this were good or evil. "No," the stranger said. "A mild drug. The drug relieves the pain but it also creates hallucinations out of the happier moments of her past. She's probably dreaming of being with you." We left Pike with her and went into the living room where we learned that the stranger was new in the city, did not care to talk about his past (quite a common hangup among Freaks) and had but one name that served as his first, middle, and last, and that was: Shambolain. Like his voice, it sounded foreign to me. E arly that evening we made a blanket stretcher and carried Della to the funeral parlor for what simple service we could offer. Brunhoff, the undertaker, was alservice as long as we came to the our last respects in the basement around the fiercely armored cremation furnace where none of his more elite customers might see us. Brunhoff dumped her onto the furnace tray, much as if she had not been a human being. Maybe, to Brunhoff, she had not been. Her head bounced against the metal. Pike made a move toward the undertaker but was blocked by Sully. Without Brunhoff, we would have had to accept city services which amount to nothing, lack dignity and burden the deceased, with the aura of a pauper's grave. Brunhoff grinned at Pike, egging him on, but Pike settled down. Almost dejected that a confrontation had not occurred, Brunhoff adjusted the furnace and slammed the corpse tray into the gaping redflickered maw. We would never see Della again. The ashes were poured into a pretty perfume bottle we had brought for that purpose and Jenifer (our treasurer) took out our cash and asked Brunhoff for a price. We buried someone about every two years and the price seemed to go up a few dollars every time, though the service remained the same. This time, he wanted twenty-five dollars more than before. "We can't afford it," Jenifer said. Brunhoff scowled. "Prices are up everywhere. You'd better be able to afford the rising costs or go elsewhere." "Be reasonable," Jenny said. "We'll pay an extra five dollars." "An extra twenty-five -- plus forty-seven. Seventy-two dollars. And you'll pay it now." He was almost a foot taller than any of us and at least two hundred and fifty pounds. When Jenny started putting our money away and explained we would go elsewhere from then on he snatched the bills from her, clenched them in his big fist. "Get out," he said. He knew that none of us would argue. A cripple cannot afford to fight a bigger man for fear of being further crippled "Give back the money," Shambolain said. He came up beside Jenny, his long face showing anger. Brunhoff repeated his demand that we leave and called us Freaks. He started toward us and we began backing. Except for Shambolain. He stood his ground, his face getting darker and uglier. Brunhoff grabbed him by the shoulders, then made a sudden face. His cheeks became inflamed and his eyes bulged as if someone were throttling him. He released Shambolain and reached for his own throat. Shambolain said, "Pick up the money, Walt." I went forward under Brunhoffs shadow and retrieved the cash from where it had fallen. As I stepped back, Brunhoff went to his knees, fighting for air, gagging thinly. He toppled onto his face and was still. "Is he dead?" Jenny asked from the doorway. "No," Shambolain said. And we left. Shambolain took the other bed in my room that had been Sully's. Jenny still had her own room. I found it difficult to sleep that night, wondering what our new boarder would mean to us. When I did sleep I dreamed about the Creep. It was hypnotism. That's what Shambolain told us he used on Brunhoff when we asked the next morning. He said he had been with a carnival and that he had learned his hypnotic skills from a show magician. We accepted the explanation. The only problem was that in the days to come he used it too often. Three days before Christmas, the day after his arrival, he used his "hypnotism" twice. First, he ran off two punks who were harrassing Sully and me while we IF were trying to teach him the art of hitting the Bleeders for quarters. But they ran like the pain was real and I thought I saw a touch of blood on one of the punk's mouths where a "hypnotic" fist had struck him. He used it, later, to explain why he had collected more money in his half day alone than the rest of us combined. He swore he did not steal the money (though his interpretation of that word might have been different from ours; I think he saw all property as belonging to the community of man and not to the individual). Two days before Christmas he repeated his high gross and again turned all the money into our treasury. His generosity was what brought about his downfall. He did not seem to understand us. As Freaks, we had nothing but our self-respect with which to build the fragments of our disordered lives. At the heart of this self-respect was our pride in our ability to provide for ourselves, even at the expense of begging. For although we begged we did it well and all pride springs from accomplishment. When Shambolain could so easily do better than our wildest dreams, there was no longer much satisfaction in bringing home a good cupful of change. He could support us all and he wanted to. What, then, did our efforts matter? The day before Christmas we stayed home and let him gather alms for all of us. He came home richer than on either of the previous two days and spread his genuinely startling take out on the table. Deep down we hated him for his competence. the trouble came. I should have forseen that our animosity would soon need a safety valve. He had made Della's last moments peaceful when all we could do was let her suffer; we could accept and even be thankful for that. Then he defeated Brunhoff when the rest of us could only act like cowards. That, too, was good -- except that it made the rest of us feel somehow inadequate. When he had driven off the punks Sully and I had felt foolishly inept -- and slightly perturbed that he had not permitted us to take care of the situation on our own, as if we were children he had to protect. A Freak has a delicate regard for his manhood; to throw it in doubt is to drive him nearly to madness. Taking away our pride in earning our own way was his penultimate mistake. His final error was letting us find out what he really was. It came about like this: Although she felt like the rest of us, Jenny had been making it plain that she would welcome Shambolain into her bed occasionally, as she welcomed the rest of us. You must remember that she was above all else a woman -- now a woman intrigued by a new, mysterious and interesting man. When he finally accepted, blushing like a boy, they retired early. Sully and I were, perhaps, a bit jealous, though we have few taboos in our culture. Ptke, of course, could not care, for Della was only a few days dead and his thoughts found their focus on a small perfume bottle full of gray ash. They were in the bedroom for fifteen minutes before Jenny screamed. At the sharp sound of her outcry we turned to look at the door. Her voice was now frantic, quick -- though Shambolain spoke evenly and clamly, as if trying to soothe her. We could not understand what was being said but we had come to the edges of our seats like animals tensing to leap upon prey. I realized later that that was exactly what we were. Jenny came out of the room, a robe thrown haphazardly over her bare body. Shambolain followed almost sheepishly. She looked at each of us, her eyes wide and frightened and said, "He has hands." We looked stupidly at her, unable to comprehend. "While we were -- " She faltered. "I felt his hands on me -- his fingers!" We looked at him and saw that he was confused, anxious. He returned our looks, concentrating the longest on me. There was a growing apprehension in his face and I suddenly realized Pike and Sully and I had advanced on him. "I do have hands," he said quickly, his voice high and weak. "Look!" A figurine of a cocker spaniel rose off the end table to his left and floated across to Pike. "Take it," Shambolain said. "And shake hands?" Pike hesitated, took the figurine. We could not see anything but we could tell from Pike's expression that Shambolain's invisible hand was shaking Pike's free paw. For three days Shambolain had eaten his soup with a straw and his solids from his plate like a dog. He had hidden his invisible hands. We moved closer to him. I was barely aware that I was walking. "I was afraid you would not understand," he said. "I wanted you to like me." "What are you?" Pike asked, his heavy voice throbbing. "My people have never had arms or hands -- even from earliest times, we had this power with our minds, this ability to manipulate matter. We evolved without hands, don't you see?" He spoke fast, darting glances from one to the other of us, slowly backing away. "There werfe two of us that came here. An expedition. Maybe, if he had survived, I would have been all right. But I needed company. I could never live alone. So I came to you. I want to be liked." IF We moved closer. "The ship," he said, almost breathlessly now. "It could not be repaired, and Harrowmane was dead, squeezed against the dash console by the force of our drop. He didn't have his belt on when the trouble started. I brought it in alone. None of my people will come for at least another thirty years -- it takes that long to make the trip, you see." "You're not a man," Sully said. Pike took up the phrase. "You're not a man." I heard myself muttering. Perhaps I echoed them. "My God," Jenny said, shuddering. She hugged herself, then moved in on him like the cat she resembled. It was Jenny who broke the tableau, who brought out what was boiling beneath the surface of all of us. She struck him with her single hand, struck him again and again about the face. W E descended on him. My eyes seemed to unfocus so that the others were merely blurs of color as they swung and kicked. My own hands seemed to work of their own volition, separate entities that pounded his chest and the concavities of his shoulders. Blood slicked my hands and I wiped them on my trousers, only to swing and slick them red again. I felt his extrasensory hands touching my face, trying to shove me back. I tore at him all the harder, matching the fury of the others. We would surely have killed him if I had not seen myself reflected in his large, dark eyes. I moved in to pummel his face and somehow saw myself reflected in the watery surface of his eyeballs. My lips were contorted, drawn back over my teeth. My eyes were wide, my nostrils flared like those of an animal smelling blood. I do not know how I saw it -- perhaps it was a trick of Shambolain's. But the shock of the picture blasted through my mania and made me sick down into the pit of my stomach. I staggered back, breathing heavily, while the others continued the onslaught. I went back into the frenzy, shouted at them to leave him alone, pulled and tugged to get them away from him. They ignored what I said and twisted away from my hands. They had him in a corner and he was bleeding badly. He seemed even to have stopped using his invisible hands to protect himself. Pike drove a foot into his side. My fury returned -- but was directed against the rest of them this time, not against Shambolain. I struck out, knocked Sully backward. He had been using his teeth on Shambolain; his mouth was bloody, his lips split. I swung on Pike, beat against him, kicked at his swollen shins until he cried out and wobbled back. I wrenched Jenny loose, avoiding the Fingernails on her good hand and got between them and Shambolain. "What the hell are you doing?" she spat. "You're acting like Creeps," I said, almost hysterically. "Please don't act like Creeps!" "He's not a man," Sully said. "He's a monster," Jenny whined, her face contorted almost beyond recognition. "A monster -- " "I don't want him killed," I said. "I don't want us to be like this." "Then get him out of here," Pike said. "You take care of him." I looked at them and realized there was no chance of my staying there. "I'll get my two coats," I said. "And my share of the money. Shambolain's share, too. And his suitcase." I looked them over carefully. "You'll let him alone until I'm ready to leave?" "Hurry," Pike said. I got our things and took what money Jenny gave me from the fund, though it was only a fraction of what Shambolain had brought in from the Street. I found I could not take the suitcase, for I had to carry Shambolain. I took out the hypodermic and the bottle of amber dream fluid and left the rest behind. He could move a little and he helped me get him up, his armless body across my shoulder. We went out to the street, where it had begun to snow again. One of the others slammed the door behind us. flophouse for a dollar and a quarter. The winos in the other beds watched us curiously but none asked any questions or made any remarks. I pulled my bed next to his and wiped most of the blood off his face with wet paper towels brought from the filthy bath at the end of the room. He could talk a little, though his face was swollen and his words distorted. Most of it was delirium muttering anyway. I gave him a syringe full of the amber liquid he had given Della. He soon fell to gentle murmuring, pleased chuckles, and then into sleep. I could not sleep much at all. Bad dreams kept waking me and my gut was bothered by cold chills. The next day, Christmas, I left him and went looking for a place we could make our permanent quarters. I found a basement room -- half bedroom and half kitchen, with bath -- only three blocks from our old home. It was under a drycleaning place and I found that the owner lived above his store. He was angry about having to show it to me on Christmas Day but he took my money and gave me the key just the same. It was a miserable room but it had the advantage of being available. I brought Shambolain back, still carrying him, and put him to bed. He was in pain again, rolling and tossing, breaking open some of the delicate scabs that had formed over IF his wounds. I gave him the last of the amber fluid. When he had settled into a comfortable trance I washed him and treated his wounds with some things I had bought at a drugstore down the block. For the rest of the morning I sat watching him, trying to straighten things out in my mind. I could not forget that I had reacted just like the others. After noon I decided that there was nothing to be gained by watching him in his stupor. I should buy food and more medicines, the staples to set up life here. I checked our money and was depressed at how little Jenny had given me. Christmas was a good begging day, even though there were few Bleeders out, for those who were out al. I put on my coat, took my cup and went outside. I was making a fairly good dent in Bleeder pocketbooks and feeling better than I had since before Jenny took Shambolain to her bed. Then I saw the Creep. He was standing across the street, half a block farther up, mostly hidden in the entranceway to a shoe store. He still wore his gray coat with fur collar. He was watching me. I had no way of knowing how long he had been standing there and I Ml a bubbling of fear in my stomach. My legs grew weak. I tried to ignore him, but that was not possible. At last I dumped the change into my pockets, hooked my cup to my belt and decided to call it a day. I bought groceries and some medicine-cabinet supplies. When I came out of the store the Creep was gone from his post. It was spitting snow. I hurried back to our place. As I unlocked the door, balancing the groceries in one arm, the Creep came down the steps fast, slammed into me, and sent us both sprawling into the basement room. The groceries scattered across the floor. A milk bottle broke. I rolled over, got to my feet. "What the hell are you doing?" The Creep had a knife. He closed the door behind him and turned to look at me. I didn't much like the look in his face. It suggested barely controlled madness. He looked to the bed, to Shambolain. "Who's he?" "A friend," I said. "He's sick. Real sick. Now get the hell out of here." He grinned, strained his lips until it seemed his face would have to split. Then he looked serious. "I want to see the leg," he said. When I told him to go to hell he waved the knife. "Undress. Hurry, please." I started toward him. "You won't use the knife. I know you Creeps," I said. "You're afraid of everything -- and mostly of what's inside your own head." He swung the knife and gouged my right hand. The blood welled up and dripped down on the cement floor where it looked impossibly black. "Undress," he said. He waved the weapon. When I didn't make a move to comply, he came at me, swung his other fist, and knocked me backward. I fell over an old chair, twisting my bum leg painfully. I tried to get up. He pushed me down again, hard. He had gone over the edge; he moved with the oiled smoothness of the mad. It was then that Shambolain threw the empty bottle that had contained the amber dream fluid. It bounced off the Creep's skull and made him stagger back a step or two. When he turned to face Shambolain, the hypodermic syringe struck his neck like an arrow. He yelped, pulled it out and charged the bed. I tried to get up but fell again as a new wave of pain flushed up through my bad leg from the lump of my third foot. The Creep was struggling against Shambolain's extra-sensory hands, choking for air. He tried to pull away, found that the invisible hands could follow him anywhere. He went down on his knees beside Shambolain's bed, gurgling frantically. He fell flat, then pushed himself to his knees again. I saw the knife swing and I cried out to Shambolain. But the thin blade slid into his body, was withdrawn. The Creep swung again, plunged it in again. I got up, found the chair and somehow managed to carry it across the room. When I got there, the Creep was flat on the floor again, the knife fallen from his fingers, still unable to breathe. I supplemented Shambolain's attack with the chair; I brought it up and down, up and down smashing it against the Creep's skull until my arms were too weak to lift it again. But Shambolain was dying. I hovered over him, touching the knife wounds, trying to close them with my fingers. Blood sputtered throuth my fingers. He had red blood. I wondered if Jenny and Pike and Sully had noticed that Shambolain had red blood. I felt his invisible hands on my face. They touched it gently, cupped it, rested on my closed eyes. Then they faded slowly, as if the power to them was being leeched away. At last they were gone completely and Shambolain was dead. I dragged the Creep into the bathroom and cleaned up the blood by the bed. Since Brunhoff was no longer available, I was forced to call the city morgue. When they came I told them Shambolain had been knifed on the Street by some punks. I didn't mention the Creep -- I had plans for him. The next day there was a service at the morgue for Shambolain before they boxed him in .tin and pine and took him away. It was a shodIF dy service. The clerk who read the words chewed gum throughout. They let me ride in the van when they went to the cemetery. They buried seven other paupers besides Shambolain and they buried them all standing up to save space. It seemed important that Shambolain be allowed to lie down in his grave but I couldn't make the burial detail see it that way. We left him standing there, walled in by frozen chunks of earth. That night I dragged the Creep's body out of the bathroom and took it outside. It was three in the morning and there was no chance of my being seen. I dragged him through the alleyways, four blocks until I came to a long row of trash cans behind a restaurant. I found an empty can, put it on its side and worked him into it. I got the can upright again and pushed on the lid. I left him there, squatting in a garbage can behind a cheap restaurant. Since then I have come to realize that it started with the Creep and it ended with the Creep -- and that means something. I saved Shambolain's life when Jenny and Pike and Sully tried to take it; later, he died to save mine. His act was the act of a man. He had felt pain when he was hurt, just like a man, and he had bled when injured. He had touched me as he died, seeking comfort, and that must surely be seen as the act of a human being. What Shambolain knew -- and what the rest of us must learn -- is that the small differences do not matter, that physical variations between men are only what they are. They mean nothing. The danger lies with the Creeps, who somehow have become warped, so that they need differences in human-kind to exploit and feed on. I try to tell this to Jenny and Pike and Sully. I think, perhaps, they are beginning to understand. I heard Jenny crying last night. I've moved back in with them. I cannot justify that to Shambolain. I cannot justify consorting with his would-be killers. But I think he would understand. Like Shambolain, I cannot live alone. I cannot be by myself. That is merely the way of a human being, simply the weakness of a man.  If you had all the time in the world -- could you hang on to it? black for Nicholas Carver would be an exaggeration. At least he had a job and, though finances were still precarious, he found it easy to be cheerful. Just now his only real worry was keeping that job and he disclosed his solution to the other occupants of the "Second breakfast" table -- the only time togetherness came close to working in this family. "I'm going to get me an alarm clock," said Nick, counting his money. Aunt Lorraine said, "You could use mine, only it's set for seven o'clock and I don't like to keep changing it." "I'm getting my own, the windup kind. Electric ain't no good, you know, if the power goes off." "Ain't never been late yet. Why you need an alarm clock anyhow, Nick? You goes to work at four P.M." Lorraine Thompson couldn't disguise the amused tolerance of day-people for those who started late in the day and didn't have to get up early. "I just want to make sure I get there in time," said Nick. "I'm always doing something around the house and I don't always notice what time it is. The other fellows were kidding me yesterday when they had to wait for me to show up." Nick's father put down the newspaper. "How you like your new job now, Nicholas?" "Oh, I don't mind the work. It's the waiting. When a car comes in, rush out and pump gas. Then nothing to do but wait. Not much business late at night." "Don't you have a radio?" asked Aunt Lorraine. "Get tired of radio. Can't sleep either -- that little ping-bell wouldn't wake me. So I just sit there and watch for cars. Gets monotonous sometimes." "All jobs are like that, son," said Harry Carver, the voice of experience. "You'll get a lot of that waiting when you get in the army." Aunt Lorraine cleared the dishes and put them in the sink. "How about robberies, that late?" "I'm not worried," said Nick. "They say just keep the cash box locked and don't give them the key unless they get tough." Aunt Lorraine frowned. "Can't you get day shift? It's a pain, all the different hours in this house. The kids to school by eight and you not home till after midnight." "Two other guys on day shift. They're the ones said I should get an alarm clock. And they're right -- I'm getting one today. Don't want to lose this job." "No, now that we got two working in the family," said Aunt Lorraine, putting on her coat. Harry Carver said quickly, "I'll get a job, don't worry, as soon as there's openings." Aunt Lorraine smiled. "You too touchy. I meant to say, two is a lot in this neighborhood. Bye now." "You're right," said Mr. Carver, turning on the television. Nick left the house quietly. an oasis of plenty in a neighborhood of scarcity. They had everything at reasonable prices if you knew how to buy. There was merchandise that was inexpensive and there was merchandise that was cheap. Nick was an expert at telling the difference. He showed this by lingering a long time at the table where a number of alarm clocks were on display. He handled them all, then he handled them all twice, rejecting each for a different reason. Some were dented, some didn't seem to work and others looked like they might not be reliable. The price was right but was the merchandise? Finally he decided that he would take a chance on one rather like the others except in color -- they were silver gray and it was brown. It looked more sturdy and its ring seemed more melodious. Nick took it to the checkout counter and tendered his dollar ninetyeight. As soon as he reached home he unwrapped the package, sat at the kitchen table, oblivious to the television's flickering and chatter and examined his purchase. Tampering with machinery was a fascinating business to Nick and he barely resisted the urge to take the clock apart. He set the time by Aunt Lorraine's bedroom electric -- just noon -- then proceeded to examine the front and back of the clock. Nick's father turned off the television, put on his coat and hat and announced, "I'm off to the unemployment agency." "Have a good time," said Nick, not looking up. He heard the door slam. Nick was alone. He turned his attention to the clock again. Paradox Clock Company -- he had never heard of it. The usual levers and buttons were on the back of the clock. None were adjustable except "fast" and "slow." He found a smalF screwdriver and poked at the slot, moving the lever slightly, conservatively, toward "fast." He heard a whirring noise. Turning the clock over, he noticed the hands were moving. What was going on? As he watched, the hour hand moved from twelve to one, while the minute hand went all the way around. The effect was startling. He pushed the lever toward "slow." Now he saw the hands weren't moving at all. He couldn't be sure, of course, as he couldn't normally see a clock's hands moving anyway, but he felt the clock had almost stopped. What a sensitive lever, he thought, smiling. He would have to adjust it very carefullyIF He poked the lever to make it go fast again. It was fun to wa#ch the hands go around and around. Now it was after three, by the clock, almost time to go to work. Quickly he stopped it. Now he would have to set it right again. Aunt Lorraine's electric clock's hands stood almost at quarter to four. His new clock and the electric registered almost exactly the same time. Either both were wrong or he must have been dozing. As if to prove the latter theory his father came home. "You still working on that clock?" Nick felt in a daze. "What time is it?" Mr. Carver reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a golf watch, consulted it. "It's about -- three forty-two, give or take ten minutes. Hey, you getter get going -- don't want to be late again." Nick threw on his jacket, grabbed his lunch box and, as he went out, snatched up the clock and jammed it into his pocket. He'd fix it when he got to work -- and he didn't want to leave it around for the kids to fool with when they came home. Walking fast, Nick hurried to the gas station. He wouldn't be late this time, though no thanks to the new alarm clock. H IS two fellow workers greeted him cheerfully. Bill was already in his car and Chester was leaning against the pump. He jumped up in mock surprise when he saw Nick. "Hey, you're on time," he said. "Did you get an alarm clock?" Nick pulled it out of his pocket and showed them. They all laughed, Nick as much as the others. Bill said, "How come you bring it to work, Nick? Want to wake yourself up at quitting time?" Nick said, "No, I got to fix this clock. I just bought it, you know, and it needs adjusting." "Better get it fixed by tomorrow," laughed Chester, as they drove off Nick was busy for a few hours and didn't think of the clock. He repaired the tire Bill and Chester had left him and he greased two cars, but most of the time he was pumping gas. This was a busy time, though not the busiest time of the day. Nick felt proud to be a part of a flourishing business. The gas station was an old-style one, with a single line of pumps, but it was adequate for the needs of the neighborhood. When Nick rushed out, his cheery greeting of "Fill her up?" was as often as not countered with a laconic, "Five, regular." Nevertheless, the cash box did an open-and-shut business all that evening until along about seven, when Nick thought about lunch, or supper. While he was eating lunch in the station building (and watching for customers) he picked up the clock he had left on the table. What was wrong with it anyway? He had never heard of a clock so sensitive that when you set it fast it raced, and when you set it slow -- He hadn't really tested its slowness, yet. He picked up a cotter pin, poked at the lever, set it all the way to "slow." Then he held the clock for a minute, seeing if the hands moved. It got awful quiet all of a sudden, he thought. Just the ticking of the clock. He went on eating his lunch while holding the clock. It didn't move, showed ten after seven for a long time. It had obviously not stopped. It was still ticking away at the regular rate and the ticking seemed louder than ever. He glanced out. Things had quieted down now. Not a moving car was in sight, though he saw one parked in the middle of the street. He guessed the clock was all right, so he pushed the lever back to the center -- he hoped it was in the right place; it seemed to settle there with a click -- and checked the station clock, to see how much time had been lost. None had. The station clock iold the same time as his alarm clock. He put it down and went back to work, muttering to himself. As he worked, washing down the apron, he felt uncertain,, bewildered. How could the clock stop and then catch up, so that it didn't lose time? And if it didn't really stop, how did he manage to finish his lunch in no time at all? Was there something mysterious about the clock? Was it only a bargain clock, not worth the effort to throw it on the junk pile, or was it more than he'd bargained for? When he had time to spare he studied the clock again. Somehow he didn't dare take it apart. If it had strange powers he wouldn't improve them by interfering. But what w;ere its mysterious powers? Could it really stop time and also, judging by his experience that afternooni speed up time? He sighed, shook his head and wound the clock again. It didn't need much winding. He fixed up a cotter pin and attached it so that he could set the lever without having to poke at it. He stopped to answer the bell for a car pulling in and, after serving the customer, went back to the building. He wished he had time to think -- he'd solve this yet. Wished he had time? Nick grinned, turned the pinand-lever to "slow." Then he sighed with satisfaction, leaned back in the hard chair and hugged the clock to him. He found out a lot about the clock in the next two minutes -- which seemed like an hour -- and the following hour -- which seemed like two minutes. He found the effects only worked properly, withIF out impeding his movement, if he held on to the clock with his hands or touched it in some way. Time flies, or stands still -- but only if you hold on tight can you take advantage of it. Once again he watched the hands go around, though not as fast as previously. This was the way to make time go by, when your job was boring. It was nearly dark outside now -- and suddenly he noticed two cars in the driveway. They hadn't been there a moment ago. He turned the lever back to normal, put the clock down and rushed out. One of the cars was just pulling away. He greeted the other man apprehensively. "Fill it up with premium?" he asked, as the car moved up into the other's place. The man looked at Nick with disapproval. "Looks like you lost a customer there. I'd have gone, too, but I need gas -- five, regular. Say, what's eating you? You was there in plain sight, grinning like an idiot. If you was asleep, it wouldn't have looked so bad." Nick apologized. "Five, one forty. Sure sorry I kept you waiting." Nick, back in the building, turned on the lights. Night was coming on fast. He'd have to be more careful with the clock. It was a very valuable thing to have. He was not going to take it back to the store now, no matter what. He pondered the problem, off and on, all evening. Suddenly he had the explanation to the mystery. It was in the color of the clock. All the other clocks on the table at Dixon's were silver gray. Only this one was brown. Army brown. Olive drab, they called it. This was a military clock that had somehow got mixed in with the shipment from the factory, the Paradox Clock Company. This was an Army clock with secret features, secret inventions like speeding up time or slowing it down for military purposes. It was disguised as an ordinary alarm clock. Why would they use alarm clocks in the Army when they had bugles and sergeants' whistles? Well, he supposed officers had them. They'd know about this secret feature. Seems he'd heard of scientists slowing down time, and speeding it up, before. Nothing he wouldn't put past these military scientists. So what was he going to do with the clock? He had got it, fair and square, by mistake. Was he going to turn it back in to the Army? You bet your sweet life he wasn't. He'd be put in jail, just for knowing the secret. If they didn't even know the clock was lost, he wasn't going to tell them it was found. One clock more or less wouldn't mean much to the government. On the other hand, this was an important secret. He was not going to let anybody know about it who wasn't supposed to know. Couldn't be giving military secrets away to unauthorized persons. No, sir! He'd have to be careful. Take the pin out when he wasn't using it. He guessed there could be military uses for the clock -- but what about civilian uses? How many times had he wanted to compress time -- or expand time? Of course he realized he would live the same time inside, whether he speeded up or slowed down time outside. Things would even out if he used the clock wisely. He wouldn't be losing anything -- just exchanging the boring hours for the good hours, play time, sleep time. Even study time -- think what he could learn while he stopped the clock. He supposed other people wouldn't use the clock wisely -- but he wasn't going to misuse it. He looked at it with a new respect. He started to take out the pin, then he put the clock down as a car pulled up. It was nearly eleven o'clock now, what with all his time experiments. There weren't many cars at this hour and he could go home at midnight. T he car was a new Imperial. Two men were in it. One, husky and tall, got out of the car. He seemed nervous. "Fill it, premium?" Nick asked. "Yeah," said the husky man. He leaned on the car window and talked in low tones to the other man, whose lean face was tense. As Nick finished checking the oil and came around with the cloth the husky man said, "Never mind the windows." The lean-faced man muttered, "We can use some change, too." "Yeah," said the man standing outside. "Can't pass that stuff." Nick, after taking away the hose and checking the pump, announced, "Thirteen and six-tenths. That'll be five thirty-five. Cash or credit?" The husky man said, "We prefer cash. Open that box." He produced a gun. Nick sidled away. "The key's inside. I'll get it." He started at a run for the building. "No you don't," said the robber, coming around the car. He pointed the gun at Nick and fired a quick shot, missing, then followed quickly, almost catching up to Nick. Nick dodged, kicked out with one foot, tripping the man. He dove into the station building, scrambled to the table inside. He knew what he was after. The man was still on the ground but had his gun up again to shoot through the doorway. Nick grabbed at the clock on the table, pushed the pin and turned around. The man outside had become motionless, sprawled awkwardly on the cement, elbow and IF arm up, pointing his gun toward Nick. He seemed to move perceptibly, and Nick pushed the pin on the clock as tight as he could. He knew, however, that he couldn't stop time completely. He had not a monwnt to waste. He had had no clear idea of what to do when he had rushed in here except, maybe, to gain time to call for help. But how could he call for help when everybody else would be as motionless as the robbers? He picked up the phone with his right hand (the clock was in his left) and fingered the dial. It turned very stiffly. This wasn't going to work, he thought. He knew as much when he saw the dial was not springing back. He had pulled it all the way around from "operator" and it stuck there at the end. He laid the phone down on the table, looked out at the driveway. The lean-faced man in the car hadn't moved, was still sitting there. The other man was lying just outside the doorway, pointing the gun in the general direction of Nick. Nothing moved -- but then, nothing much moved at this time of night anyway. Nick had no gun. He didn't think it would be a good idea to wrestle the man for his own gun, or try to step over him, because he felt that if he touched the other, he, too, would come alive and Nick would be no match for him in a fight. He had to dispose of both men while the tinless spell was upon them -- that was the only advantage he had. He could expect no help from outside. If he held on to the clock while he struck the men with a wrench or something it might work, but then again it might not. And if they took the clock away from him -- what couldn't criminals do with this invention? He tried to keep out of line with the pointing gun as he searched for something to throw. He held on to the clock with his left hand, pawed frantically about the shelves with his right. Nothing suited until he came upon some boxes of spark plugs. They were knockout weapons in the hands of a good thrower. Carefully, for he knew that he must knock both men before he could let time come back, he sighted and threw. A dozen spark plugs in all he pulled out of their boxes, which drifted away as he emptied them. He threw slowly and delith erately. He put no speed on his pitches -- he knew speed could be added later. He saw that the man on the ground was still pointing his pistol at him. He saw it flame and saw a bullet float toward him, bounce off the clock he was still holding in his left hand. His wrist thumped him in the chest and suddenly everything changed. The world came to life, noises rushed at him -- the breaking of glass, the echo of a shot, the crashing of ricocheting missiles. Then he heard the whirr of the phone dial and a voice that said, "Operator." Nick dazedly picked up the phone, and said, "Give me the police. They's robbing the gas station at Ninth and Castle." He looked out at the silent figures on the ground and in the car. "That is, they was robbing it." N ick saw his father in the crowd and waved to him. His father came to grasp his hand warmly. "Glad to see you're all right, Nicholas. We heard the shots and sirens and I thought I'd better come and see what's happening over here." A policeman came over with a notebook, spoke to Nick. "Well, Mr. Carver, you've some more credit coming to you. It's a stolen car recovery, too." He turned to the older Carver. "This your son? He's done a fine job, aved us a lot of trouble with those two jewel thieves. Those men were killers. But I'm afraid he's in a little trouble, too. He won't say what he did with the spring-gun he had." Harry Carver said, "He didn't have no spring-gun. He's a lawabiding citizen." "Well, it's a cinch he didn't throw those spark plugs," said the policeman. "Drilled them clean. One made a big hole in the car." "He's never been in trouble, never. He's a good boy." "Well, all right," said the officer. "But I'll have to put it in my report, and there might be questions, later. Anyway, you've done us a favor and we appreciate it. But, get rid of that spring-gun, will you?" His father said, "What happened to that alarm clock?" Nick noticed it was still in his left hand, battered into shapelessness. "Looks like it was hit by a bullet," said the policeman. Nick said, "It's junk now -- " and tossed it into a nearby trash container. A safe disposal, in full view of the authorities. He sighed. Perhaps the clock saved his life. Bullets were still pretty fast -- even in slow motion.  A mouse has already been saved from leukemia. Help us save a man. But sympathy can't cure leukemia. Money can. Give us enough of that, and maybe we'll be able to do for a man what has already been done for a mouse. American Cancer Society I T hat was the greatest weapon in Valentine Michael Smith's arsenal... a secret that made him irresistible to women but a bitterly hated enemy to the establishment. And all he wanted to do was reform an immoral, troubled world by bringing it peace and tranquility. Some reform! Some revolution! But that's why Robert Heinlein's bestcoming the number one underground novel on virtually every college campus in the country. Now take it, if you wish, as one of your # introductory books for only I with trial membership. Send no money-mail coupon today! 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Ben Bova Robert Sheckley Algis Budrys Robert Silverberg Avram Davidson Henry Slesar Samuel R. Delany Theodore Sturgeon JoeLHensley A.E.VanVogt Keith Laumer Roger Zelazny TO BE I  # rrrrrffrff No matter how many books you've read, you have never read a book like this one. The first book of collaborative short stories ever created, it is unique in publishing history. Winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas and two Writers Guild of America awards for Most Outstanding Teleplay in science fiction, Harlan Ellison has become one of the strongest voices in the drive to promulgate speculative fiction as a viable mythliterature for our times. price of # each. I enclose payment in full and understand that you will pay all shipping and handling charges. AnnRF.s January-February, #I Vol. #, No. # Issue # tllr Jakobsson, Iditor frdrik fohl. Editor Emoritus Judy-lynn Bonjamin, Managing Editor Lostor dol Roy, foaturo Editor #. C. Murphy, Circulation Diroctor Franc #. Roggori, Art Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Diroctor tributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #i per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights, reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. Readers write -- and wrong! Dear Mr. Jakobsson: May I firstly congratulate you on the quality of the 'new' IF -- and secondly express you my deepest sympathy in your valiant struggle to placate that many-headed Hydra commonly known as your reading public. Seriously, considering the enormous variety in literary tastes, the fact that  can ' personally enjoy so many stories in your magazine, 'issue after issue, never fails to astonish me. Nor can  imagine how you do it, unless perhaps you paper the walls of your office with submitted manuscripts and thereafter at random throw darts at them. In which case, though, the laws of chance must be rather more peculiar than we suspect them to be. (As a small example of how nearly impossible your task must be, perhaps  may mention a letter by Mr. Scher in your September-October issue, where he writes of his general liking for Laumer but confesses himself "sick' of Retief For my part, I would wholeheartedly endorse the first half of his statement, but thereafter would have to add that  enjoy the Retief Saga as much as anything Laumer has ever written. Possibly this difference of opinion may be simply due to the fact that I may be rather older than Mr. Scher, and hence at times like to lean back in my easy-chair and let myself be amused by a good-natured spoof of human foibles. This may well be somewhat cowardly, but the fact is that when the cold wind of middle-age starts blowing up your spine you do like, now and then at least, and for a short while, to forget the serious side of life.) Incidentally, speaking of letters, the same issue of IF also carried an impressively thoughtful communication by Mr. Carroll, considering the creation ofjhink-tanks and dotanks, whereby people genuinely concerned about the future of our race might in a common effort strive to shape it closer to their hopes and dreams. I do not know whether the majority of your readers, are aware of it, but such a movement is currently getting under way, on an international basis. Gerald Feinberg of Columbia University some # months ago through a book of the selfsame title. ( To those of your readers who may have at least as much interest in hard science as in science fiction. Dr. Feinberg may be rather better known as one of today s most distinguished young American physicists, and the propounder of the hypothesis that there may indeed exist particles faster than light, the socalled Uachyons, meaning, in Greek, the  swift ones. Startling, if not downright revolutionary, as the suggestion may appear to be it is seriously considered by theoretical physicists. See for example this years March issue of Science: Particles that travel faster than light? The article is by professor Roger G. Newton of Indiana University.) IF The drive behind the Prometheus Project is much along the lines of Ar. CarrolTs arguments, and has been very succinctly expressed by Loren Eiseley (though he was not writing about the project at that time):  Men, unknowingly, and whether for good or ill, appear to be making their last decisions about human destiny , " Commenting directly on the Prometheus Project, Frederick Pohl described it as "the only game in town.' Clearly, this is not the place to go into details, and  have taken enough of your space anyway, but may I conclude by saying that I would be personally very happy to hear from any of your readers in California, or for that matter anywhere else, who share the disturbing conviction that the time is beginning to run out for mankind. That ours is an age of crisis is as trite an observation as one can make. The one question which remains to be answered, though, is whether our race shall prove equal to the challenge and enter a new day of virtually inconceivable triumphs -- or fail and perish in the night that is falling upon all of us. May I last express the hope that there will be enough men and women of .courage and imagination sufficiently great so that the, so far, twoEarth will not dismiss humanity in a mere footnote as an unsuccessful, if interesting, experiment. Sid Krupicka Riverside, California # Dear Sir: August Alexei Panshin pointed out that there is no real, working definition of science fiction. He further remarked that this was due to an unreasoning desire to cling to Hugo Gernsback's definition of scientifiction. At any rate the stumbling block was the attempt to fit the concept of science into the product (how much sciience does Harlan Ellison have?) The most part of the speech was occupied by pointing out how impossible this definition was even in the time it was formulated -- by simply reading parts from various pulps of the day. While there are adherents to the science of science fiction 'Dune, The Land Ironcladsj for the most part  felt Mr. Panshin was correct. To that end I evolved Vogel's Law -- "Science fiction is that branch of fiction dealing with events of extremely low probability in Earth's present and j or past, with possible events in Earth's future or with events in other environments" Thinking it over  realized that if Damon Knight exists then someone has either beaten me to this or I am blind to its glaring faults. On either hand I would appreciate any help you could give me. Thanks P.H. Vogel I would jump you on that "low probability." Probability can be low or high, depending on what the author wishes to put across. Or the author may simply use sf to tell a story that could not be told in another medium or that can best be told as sf. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Ballots and Bandits by Laumer is the (Please turn to page #) the short-winged shuttle planet. Its meteor-pocked surface skimmed through the man-made would be glittering with thouatmosphere high above the instasands of crater-ponds like new planet's rain-filled meteoritic eracoins. Air-drops had planted fish in ters, someone fell out. them. But for some reason all of Or so it appeared on the lumithe villages still crowded around  nescent screen in the dark stone this vast polluted lake, where the hut -- like a falling spark, falling little volcanic island muddied the like a shriek. The young bodyclouds with smoke. The spark was guard stared at it with surprise approaching the island, which plunged through horror to "He's falling through the air too excitement. fast, getting too hot -- " the bodyFalling below the shuttle's radarguard's snub nose and broad foreblip, the spark seemed big to be a head wrinkled -- "unless he's in an man. It was as if his arms and legs escape bag with an ablative footwere spread in the thickening air cone." and he were resisting the inevitable. From the bottom of the screen "Is he conscious?" cried the old rose the volcano's image. The man's voice in the hut. bodyguard's heart pounded. One "Maybe if he had time to close of his greatest desires was to enter his helmet -- " its smoldering crater and search The bodyguard's boyish face befor the forbidden weapons The old men were fighting an ancient war -- while the boy was inventing a new one! "No parachute has opened," he breathed as the spark faded into the radar-confusing smoke, "so I guess he wasn't in an escape bag. But whatever he was in made an awful big blip on the screen." His youthful gestures were lightningquick. "Look, now the shuttle is following its usual landing spiral back toward our end of the lake, so it couldn't have been the pilot who fell out." Another gust of rain lashed throilgh the crevices in the crude stone hut. "It must have been Henrydavid," the old man moaned, leaning forward until his jagged face was silhouetted against the screen. His bodyguard looked away in embarrassment at the rough stone wall that was weeping rain. The bodyguard fidgeted. To him the old man had long seemed a source of power. It was power too unsubstantial to be grasped. "The world turns -- " the old man murmured. "Do you think this is another attempt by those unforgiving Centralist exiles?" "More likely an accident in the shuttle," his bodyguard said, "but you'd better go back to the village." The young man took a deep breath. "I'll paddfe out to meet the shuttle." "No," the old man said uncertainly. "No -- " guard darted out under the smoky sunlight-edged clouds. He was uncomfortably short, but no one taunted him any more. He had wide shoulders. After his strange battle on that volcanic island, he'd been asked by the old man to be his bodyguard. And he had agreed because he was restless, born restless. He wanted to be near power. As a small boy he bad dreamed of becoming so big he filled the universe with his power. Now, as he looked up at the rainbow-arched sky, he felt tall. He imagined Henrydavid, not falling through the air but standing lithely again inside the shuttle while it clung to a synchronously orbiting freighter. Aluminumshelled supply containers as big as caskets were being shoved in through the flexible iris that was its hatch. Henrydavid's job as customs inspector was to open them immediately. With mixed emotions, the bodyguard frowned. These old men were still trying to prevent Centralist propaganda from reaching the instaplanet via the shuttle. But certain young men here... "We'll both go out to meet it," the old man said, lifting the other end of the heavy greenish canoe. The bodyguard had shaped it by hand-pressing layers of filamentous algae over the hull of an earlier canoe. When it had firmed, he had smeared it with fish oil and dutifully baked it in the sunlight. IF Then he had cheated a little and also baked it in his village's hydrogen fusion-powered electric oven. The wooden paddles were imported from Earth. While the crude canoe sloshed out on the immense lake the water became lively with raindrops and minnows. He had been taught that the lake and the countless crater-ponds had been filled by the Great Rain ten years before he was born here. Before that the supersaturated air for this instaplanet had been produced by remolecularizing the rocks from both poles. After the air became sweet and the rains diminished, the planet had been planted with life. The old man and his followers were delivered to it as an experiment. Economic or philosophic? The bodyguard wondered what kind of world it would become. Now the greenish lake was swirling with great fish devouring each other in richly putrefying jungles of algae. But the land had remained barren rock, as clean and simple as the Decentralist ideal. In the bow of the canoe the old man's slender back and arms' moved his paddle with quiet grace. In the stern the young bodyguard paddled with driving force and steered as the huge shuttle taxied toward them, pushing a mustache of foam. For the bodyguard the shuttle carried the exciting power of Earth, where he wanted to go. Its heat-stained hull contained beautiful steel tools, bright mirrors, colorful beads. He had heard fabulous tales of Earth weapons with wonderful thunder-andlightning power which could be held in a boy's hand. He had decided the shuttle to the freighters was the one contact with Earth which must never be broken, no matter what the old man preached. "Now it's killed someone," the old man blurted as the shuttle's scarred hull surged threateningly close to the canoe. But his bodyguard smiled with excitement. The shuttle contained power that could be grasped. Already concealed in his kirtle of woven algae was his most wonderful possession, a steel dagger smuggled from Earth. If the old man had known he would have told him to throw it overboard, because it was a weapon, as was any knife more than three inches long. The old man would have said, "Weapons lead to uncontrollable power, to Centralism. Beware." The bodyguard scowled at the straight old back as the canoe drifted alongside the shuttle. Respectful people in the villages still addressed the old man as Mr. Decentralist and some had shortened this to Mr. Decent. But restless young men laughed bitterly. It was their fathers who had brought Decentralism to this instaplanet. The young men paced the barren rocks and looked out at the volcanic island, remembering Big Village before its fall. They stared at the forbidden island, dreaming oif anotlier central city, and cursed the old man behind his back. T he bodyguard laid down his paddle and picked up his trident fish spear. His clumsy algal canoe bumped the marvelously complex shuttle. Without its usual hiss of equalizing air pressure, the shuttle's hatch opened like a cameraeye. Its inner iris looked rubbery. The pilot's oddly blank face protruded. "It wasn't my fault." The shiny arm of his metalized suit flew up. "Your customs inspector was blown out like that! The valve popped off our emergency air tank and air pressure did the rest. I always said that valve was dangerous. It was poorly designed." Or sabotaged, the bodyguard thought as he scrambled into the shuttle. This downtrip there seemed to be no unannounced passengers. He eyed the rows of long aluminum supply containers, which they received from Earth in exchange for their little bottles of fish-gland extracts. Whenever he had entered the shuttle, it had had this fishy smell. "So the air pressure shot up in here," the pilot kept explaining. His jowls quivered and the young bodyguard remembered Mr. Decentralist's warning that such stocky or obese men were apt to be unfaithful to Decentralist ideals. It was true that the most dedicated Decentralists, who lived with austerity and simplicity, had naturally narrow physiques like Mr. Decent's. The bodyguard's wide-cheeked face grimaced, then scowled again. He didn't trust the pilot. The pilot blustered: "I always said this loading iris is too flexible. All that pressure bulged it out, blew him out." "Did Henrydavid have time," Mr. Decentralist murmured hopelessly, "to close his helmet visor?" "Don't know. I had to hang on to the control panel." The pilot shifted his gaze from the old man's jagged face to the bodyguard's blunt expression of disbelief. "Why," the bodyguard challenged, "weren't any of these containers blown out with him?" "Because he'd already inspected them and strapped them down again," the pilot answered, "for landing as usual. Anyway, they're too streamlined to be sucked out." The bodyguard felt outsmarted. He quibbled. "This one isn't strapped tight." He knew the customs inspector had been a conscientious man who would have tightened the strap if he'd had time. He deliberately pointed his fish spear, which was defined as a tool, not a weapon, toward the pilot's abdomen. "Did IF Henrydavid have time to open all the containers?" "Yes, he always does -- open them," the pilot blurted and looked to Mr. Decent. "I feel bad about this." "I think we'd better inspect them again," the bodyguard said. "Not now," replied Mr. Decent. "We've got to search for Henrydavid." The bodyguard, blinked with surprise. The pilot also stared at Mr. Decent. "We wouldn't be able to find anything," the pilot explained... "The shuttle was moving so fast when he was blown out, his descent speed was so great that his body was burned in the atmosphere." The bodyguard looked at the emergency rack's twelve cubicles where the glittering, heat-reflective escape bags lay. Their "feet" were ablative cones for casting off flame as they penetrated the atmosphere. Their "heads" were two-stage parachutes. All twelve were still in the rack. No bags were missing. The bodyguard scowled, feeling baffled. "He wasn't falling that fast," he argued. "In his safety suit like yours his body wouldn't -- bum -- very much." "You don't understand anything," the pilot retorted, "about atmospheric entry speed. It would have burned him -- to a crisp." "You're the expert," Mr. Decent murmured to the pilot, "but I know we must recover his body." "It was burned to ashes," the pilot insisted and added too gently: "He often said he'd want to go this way, with his ashes scattered over the lake he loved so well. There's no use searching for his ashes. He would have wanted it this way." E nough Ues, the bodyguard thought, now convinced that the shuttle's speed had been reduced by the time Henrydavid was "blown out." The body couldn't have burned to ashes. But he didn't want to look for it either. He wondered if this "accident" were a decoy or a trap. But he was so angry he said, "I know his suit will have preserved most of his body. We should start searching near the island." "Near Big Village?" the pilot protested. "For his ashes?" "Yes, in the water around the volcano," the bodyguard replied, observing the pilot's unhappy face. "Did you know we were watching the radar screen when it happened?" The pilot glanced at Mr. Decent. "It would be too dangerous for you -- for anyone -- to go over there in a canoe." "Too slow," the old man said enigmatically. And then his voice broke: "Henrydavid . may be alive -- floating -- browning -- " "He means rush us over there in this shuttle' the bodyguard said. The pilot began to protest: "Using a space shuttle like a canoe -- " The bodyguard snorted. "That's what we've always used it for when no freighters have been in orGurgling, the shuttle refilled its water tanks. It was frequently employed to distribute supplies to other villages along the lake shore. only to the first mark." The bodyguard had ridden in the craft several times and knew it merely needed steam now, not disassociated hydrogeti and oxygen flaring and hurling the shuttle into space, where he'd only been as far as the freighter orbit. "We're only going around Volcano Island." A humming sound came from the shuttle's bowels, where the magnetic bottle, containing its hydrogen fusion, produced heat. There was hissing as the water turned to steam and a roar from the dual-purpose thruster as the shuttle surged across the wide lake, steam billowing behind its highfinned tail. "Look at that little canoe over there," the bodyguard shouted, surprised and suspicious because it seemed to be headed toward the forbidden island. Its paddlers noticed the shuttle's course and, as if they had guilty consciences, turned back to the mainland. The volcanic cone squatted on the contorted rim of a halfdrowned meteoric crater. The bodyguard knew this lone volcano had burst from a crack while the planet was being distorted by the remolecularization of rock from its poles. The crater had cooled while he had been a little boy. But smoke rose from a recent split in its flank. The main reason people with Centralist tendencies had established a village beside the cone, upon the meteoric rim which enclosed the harbor, was to tap the volcano's heat for use in illegal manu facturing. They had begun making metal forks and spoons -- and sharper things that the bodyguard secretly wished he could own. Daggers. Ever more powerful weapons. isfied, he thought, and now their village was deserted. Wonderful things had been thrown into the lake. His visualization of those beautiful lost weapons made his heart pound with desire. He wanted again, on this errand, to search the crater for unfinished weapons but the old man was along. The bodyguard glared toward the mainland. "There's another canoe," the bodyguard shouted harshly. "See, from that new village -- a long dark canoe?" IF And it didn't seem intimidated by the shuttle. The bodyguard thought it might be headed for the island -- or its dozen paddlers might simply be loyal Decentralists going fishing. He remembered that some of the Centralists had been dispersed along the shore adjacent to the new village after Mr. Decent had ordered the volcanic island evacuated. While the shuttle cruised around it, the bodyguard watched for telltale gulls, but there was no sign of the customs inspector's body. "Go into the harobr," Mr. Decentralist said unexpectedly. The bodyguard's heart thudded as they entered the harbor's rocky jaws. Big Village clung to the cliffs, deathly silent, its empty-eyed stone huts staring at him. He felt both guilt and pride and clutched his fish spear as if it were -- a weapon. It was here he had shown he was a -- man. A gull fluttered from the water, but it had been feeding on a big dead fish. The bodyguard knew the volcanic cone above Big Village had polluted its harbor even more than its air. He winced and felt nostalgia, remembering Big Village that final day when it had been alive with runaway girls singing and illegal forges clanging. He had been a youth in the angry armada of paddlers from the little villages who had cautiously approached this Centralist stronghold. He had felt awe and envy when he had seen how rich and populous Big Village had become. There were more than two hundred huts. Centralists had crowded the stone dock. His heart had leaped when he had seen they had already manufactured three of the Supreme Weapons. All three had glinted in the sunlight. Now he scowled, peering down at the dark, deep water of the harbor. But Mr. Decent's voice was crying: "Look up there." A blade of sunlight illuminated a tiny red stain on the volcano's flank, high above the dead village and the old man was moaning: "Henry, Henry -- " The bodyguard realized this was where their falling customs inspector had struck the planet like a meteorite. His gaze rose to the lip of the crater and he tried to suppress his desire to enter it. This wasn't a good time, although the rim was only a few minutes climb above the red splash of Henrydavid. "I've got to go up," Mr. Decent bleated. "Henry, oh, Henry -- " The bodyguard began to argue that it was forbidden to land on the island. "You made the rule. Anyway this may be a trap." But the distraught old man ordered the pilot to bring the shuttle alongside the algae-shrouded stone dock. "That canoe may get here soon," the bodyguard warned. "They may be coming because they saw him fall." But there was no use arguing with the old man and, unless the wind changed so that the paddlers could open their sailing umbrellas, the bodyguard knew the canoe couldn't get here for at least an hour. He started to follow the old man on to the dock. His own desire rose. He slipped. Algae had grown where there had been bfood, he realized, and he recovered his natural alertness. He jumped back aboard the shuttle before it could escape. His fish spear backed the pilot toward one of the aluminum containers. "Open it. Now dump out those pamphlets. Pamphlets? Anyway get in. You won't smother. The lid doesn't fit that well." He tightened the straps. "Don't go away," he said, clambering out on the shuttle's deck. He made it fast to a stone cleat on the dock. H e ran after the old man, through the crumbling village of memories. When the armada had approached it Big Village had illegally contained at least a thousand people, although the maximum permissible size for a community on this instaplanet was a hundred. It was a fabulous place, and young runaways had flocked to it. He remembered smiling with excitement rather than fear, even when he had seen its three supreme weapons gleaming. Mr. Decent had boldly landed on the dock to negotiate or accuse. "You've already taken away the nuc-boxes from five villages, depriving them of electricity." "You old hypocrite," the mayor of the Big Village had retorted. "You complain about us taking their electricity, but you've been urging them to decentralize into tens -- or families to live without electricity. Look, we have so many people here who need it, we ought to have ten electric-boxes, not five. Listen, Earth sends a box to this planet for each hundred people, so we have the right to proportional allocation of electric power. We ought to have ten boxes." "No. You're rebuilding all the confusion and greed we tried to leave behind on Earth," the old man had shouted. "You're even manufacturing inhuman weapons." All three glinted sharply in: the sunlight. Mr. Decentralist had rashly grabbed at one. When he had fallen down during the scuffle, his shrill Decentralists had begun scrambling from their canoes to the dock, thrusting out their fishing spears like weapons. "Defense," the mayor had yelled over his shoulder and the three holders of the supreme weapons had waddled forward, deflecting fish-spears with their aluminum shields and raising their beautiful steel weapons. IF As their blades flashed in the sunlight the future bodyguard's heart had pounded with desire instead of fear even as the centralists attacked. They struck off hands and arms and heads in a frantic display of power. Instead of fleeing, he had circled. ' A Centralist had slipped on the blood and fallen, his supreme weapon clanging against the stones. The future bodyguard had rushed forward and wrested away the sword. Now it's mine, he had thought excitedly, gripping its hilt. The second swordsman had waddled toward him. He had dodged the thrust. These three supreme weapons were so valuable that thjy had been carried by three of the most important men in Big Village, fat,jmiddle-aged men. With youthful quickness the bodyguard-to-be had swung his great blade back and forth. It had Struck his opponent's neck. Now that he had the knack of it the bodyguard-to- had rushed at the third middle-aged man. Around him the excited Decentralists had attacked with their fish spears. Blood sprayed. The Big Villagers had scattered, ending the strangely abrupt battle and beginning the problem of what to do with so many defeated people who were still Centralists at heart. Now, as the bodyguard ran upward through the empty village after the old man, he thought the wind might be changing. The long canoe could be approaching rapidly. It might be filled with Centralist renegades, returning. On the side of the volcano he saw Mr. Decent kneel in the great red splash. The old man seemed to be murmuring to a fragment of Henrydavid's safetysuit. He was picking it up. The bodyguard climbed past, hurrying to reach the top to spot the canoe over there -- and for another reason. F rom the rim of the volcano he looked out over the immense wind-wrinkled lake and the lonely land beyond, glittering with countless crater-ponds, where the old man wanted people to spread out in smaller groups in an ever simpler way of life. The bodyguard smiled and shook his head. The long dark canoe was still a long way off. Whether it contained faithful Decentralist fishermen or unrepentant Centralist rebels, they were still paddling against the wind. His heart leaped. He might have time to search the crater. He peered down into the darkly jumbled funnel and his heart pounded as it had when he had seized the sword in the Battle of Big Village. The greatest disappointment of his life had come after the fighting, when the old man had honored him by choosing him as his new bodyguard and then toid him to throw all three swords into the lake. The bodyguard had secretly returned later and dredged for them, cursing and crying because he had stupidly thrown away their power. No unfinished swords had been found in Big Village and he thought the illegal weapons forge might have been concealed in this crater. As he descended, his snub nose wrinkled at the sulphurous strench. He searched under lava ledges for even an unfinishedswdrd, which could give him power to -- Mis eyes widened. At the bottom, beside a vertical split where steaming rainwater drained out of the crater, he saw something white and rumpled. He clutched his fish spear like a weapon and clambered down, sending rocks rattling. His eyes widened. The whiteness was a folded parachute partially covering an escape bag. Except for its ablative foot cone, the bag lay flat.' It was a different model from the twelve in the shuttle. He could see it was empty. No one was on the nearby rocks. The bag was open. He thought the inspector must have fallen out -- but why would he have been in an escape bag descending into the crater? Anyone peering through the bag's periscope could have steered its chute toward the volcano. Any man could have been breathing from its oxygen tank. The bodyguard didn't think Henrydavid would have had a reason to ride down in an escape bag. He clutched his spear and looked around quickly, but no one was crouching in ambush among the rocks. "Don't move," a hoarse voice said and the parachute cloth squirmed. A swollen-faced, middle-aged man had been lying motionless underneath it. A gleaming metal rod with a round hole in its end was pointing out at the bodyguard. The man sat up. "Throw away your spear -- that's right." The bodyguard's heart was again drumming with excitementrather than fear as he stared at tHis absolutely ultimate weapon which could change life on his instaplanet. Its barrel and folding stock were gleaming with the promise of power. One of the man's hands gripped its long bullet clip. The other enclosed its trigger mechanism. The bodyguard shivered with desire because he wanted the weapon more than anything in the universe. "Stop smiling," the man's voice shrilled as if he were in great pain. "Who are you?" "A fisherman," the bodyguard finally answered, surprised the man hadn't recognized him from the Battle of Big Village or its aftermath. "I just climbed here to -- " IF "Don't move. I'll shoot." The parachutist's blotchy face grimaced, smiled, then looked disappointed. "Don't you know who I am?" "No," the bodyguard lied, his thoughts racing between the future and the past. scheme by which this exiled mayor of Big Village had hoped to reenter the instaplanet undetected. The falling spark on the radar screen -- anyone familiar with the operation of the shuttle would have reasoned it to be the Customs Inspector falling all alone because of some accident? But Henrydavid had not fallen alone. The pilot had been part of the conspiracy, the fat-faced pilot -- The bodyguard imagined the scene inside the shuttle, among the containers from the freighter. The pilot must have struck Henrydavid on the head. Then this blotchyfaced man had emerged from a container and dragged out his special escape bag from another. He would have tied Henrydavid's body to the outside of this bag, using one of its parachute control lines and a slip-knot. After arranging the bag against the hatch iris the Centralist ex-mayor must have sealed himself inside it and waited. The bodyguard's eyes widened in admiration. When the shuttle had approached the smoke from the volcanic island the pilot must have knocked the valve off the reserve air tank. The sudden increase in air pressure had blown the flexible iris outward and the escape bag had hurtled into space, falling diagonally toward the island and appearing on their radar screen as a single spark. No wonder it had seemed surprisingly large to represent one man. The bodyguard smiled at this fabulous ex-mayor who must have yanked the extra control line at the last moment, freeing himself from the weight of Henrydavid's body as the escape bag vanished into the radar-confusing smoke. He had deployed the drogue chute. After his main chute opened, he had skillfully steered it to his island, disappearing into the volcanic crater. The bodyguard's smile became a grin because, in landing down here, the man seemed to have broken his leg. "Let me help you -- to climb out of here." "Keep away." The gun barrel rose. The Centralist's thick body shifted and his face contorted in pain. His left leg had an unusual bend in it. T he bodyguard nodded obediently, waiting his chance. His gaze devoured the beautiful gun, the first he had ever seen except in smuggled pictures. "Is it called a sub-machine gun?" "You don't even know who I am," the middle-aged man exclaimed angrily. "You don't know what to do." The bodyguard considered the dagger concealed in his kirtle and said, "Let me help or you'll die down here." He thought whipping out his dagger would take too long. He'd better grab at the gun. "Look, there's blood leaking where you opened that leg-zip on your suit. A compound fracture?" "Stay back," the man rasped. "I don't need you. Others are coming to this island to meet me." "In canoes?" The bodyguard feigned surprise. He doubted the man could have seen that long canoe through his periscope while his bag was descending. "There aren't any canoes out there -- except mine. So you need my help. I've always wanted the good things they have on Earth. I wish I'd been born there -- with all the autocars and television boxes, and great cities -- " While he tried to sound like a Centralist, his voice grew so convincing that what he said became true. He realized how much he wanted what the Centralists wanted, and he watched that beautiful gun barrel lowering as the parachutist's arms relaxed. In a little while he would have an opportunity to grab this wonderful submachinegun, the ultimate weapon on the instaplanet. Rocks rattled behind him. He whirled. Up there a half-naked, scrawny figure was clambering down from the rim. "Who's that?" the parachutist hissed. "Another fisherman," the bodyguard lied hopelessly. "Wave to him to come down." Evidently the Centralist thought he might need two to carry him up. "He already is coming," the bodyguard gritted, wishing that old man would see the gun and run. Mr. Decent had upset his plan before he could execute it. He had intended to hide the sub-machinegun after taking care of the parachutist -- and to return for it later. But Mr. Decent must ee the gun by now and eventuy he would tell his bodyguard drop it into the lake. The bodyguard scowled. The old man was scrambling down clutching a Woody scrap of cloth as if it were all that was left of Henrydavid.  "You!" "You! Don't come any closer." The parachutist's aifli shifted between the bodyguard and the old Decentralist. "I'll shoot you, you old hypocrite." "You agreed not to return," Mr. Decent wheezed as the wind wailed above the crater. "Why are you here?" High above the old man's jagged face volcanic smoke writhed across the sky and the bodyguard realized the wind had changed. In their long canoe the fishermen who might be Centralists would be opening their sailing umbrellas. Their dark canoe would be surging toward the island. The bodyguard's young, wide, muscular body felt as if it were swelling. He couldn't wait much longer. While he watched for a chance to leap at the gun, he felt as strong and quick as when he had dodged those sword thrusts. He supposed a bullet wouldn't be much faster than a sword and it was such a little thing. The round eye of the gun muzzle stared at him. "Move back," the parachutist hissed. "Closer to Mr. -- Decentralist." The bodyguard smiled and didn't cent not to remark that a long canoe was coming. The parachutist would assume it carried the Centralist activists who were supposed to meet him. He would feel free to squeeze the trigger, shooting the old man. But the bodyguard couldn't conceive of himself being killed and leaned toward the Centralist leader, waiting for his opportunity. "You can't become mayor of an empty village," Mr. Decent's voice bargained. "I let you go before. I'll let you go back to Earth again." "Hypocrite!" the ex-mayor cried. "You talked of peace and individual freedom but led the attack on Big Village. It would have been kinder if you'd executed me then. This is my island. Where are my people now?" "Dispersed," the old man retorted. "Enjoying pure and simple lives again." "He's a fanatic," the Centralist hissed frantically to the bodyguard, "a fanatic old man. He thinks a hundred people are too many for a village. He wants to disperse families, one to a pond -- and after that what?" "Transcendant freedom," the old man replied "to contemplate." "Freedom to isolate yourself beside a pond," the Centralist cried, "on a bare planet and think about what? You hypocrite, already in your little villages there's no freedom for young people to do what they want to do, which is to get together and -- " "They're growing up unspoiled." Mr. Decent look to his young bodyguard, who realized that both of them, the old man and the middle-aged ntan, the Decentralist and the Centralist were speaking to him rather than to each other. ,  "This old man is trying to be mental jailer for you young people. Listen!" The parachutist obviously wanted his help and allegiance. "Listen -- " E ach seemed to be trying to win him, to use him, as if he represented all of the young people on the planet, its future. The Centralist insisted: "It's IF this old man's fault your instaplanet is tied to an unfair economic plan. That damned plan for economic decentralization was written by bureaucrats on Earth for the benefit of Earth. That's why we weren't allowed to manufacture anything. That's why villages were limited to a hundred people. In that inhuman plan all we're supposed to do is catch Fish and send their glandular extracts to Earth. Listen, unless we centralize, our instaplanets' unfavorable balance of trade will keep us poor colonial slaves." "Who needs trade?" the old man retorted. "Good Decentralists are learning to do without Earth's corrupting products. We have fish and health-giving , algae. We can weave kirtles and build stone shelters. We can become free of Earth trash. We don't need that accursed shuttle any more. We don't have to rely on Earth. "That's right," the Centralist interrupted and smiled at the young man. "When we Jiave a great industrial city we won't have to rely as much on Earth. We can enjoy -- " " -- polluting our lives!" the Decentralist shouted. "We came here to escape evil and noise and greed. That's why we had to accept that Economic Plan, so Earth would pay our transportation here." The parachiftist nodded and stared at the young man. "Yes, after the Bureau of Colonization created air and water on this planet it wrote our unfairly limited Economic Plan so we'd always be dependent on them." He grimaced and hissed with pain, trying to move his leg. "It contradicted our Constitution," he added bitterly. "You signed the Plan though," the old man said. "So did you -- and I was younger than you and innocent then," the middle-aged parachutist retorted. "You hypocrite! You signed the Economic Plan -- but in your own way you're trying to be free of it, too. You've been telling villagers to forget their material needs, to stop sending fish extracts to Earth. You claim we'll be free of Earth your way if we'll scatter from this lake to isolated ponds. To philosophic idiocy. But most of us want the freedom to build a great city. We'll have our own independent industries. That's the way to be free of Earth." The Centralist looked hopefully at the young man, who was smiling at the sub-machinegun. The bodyguard wished the Decentralists and Centralists could agree beyond the need for independence from Earth. He wished each group would simply follow its own desires. What he wanted was the gun. "Keep back," rasped the parachutist, aiming between them. "Give up," the old man demanded. "Give up the gun." IF "Hypocrite!" the Centralist cried. "It was you who used force against us. First you old hypocrites tore out the last page of our Constitution, so you could feel free to attack us. You tore out the right to assemble, to choose a way of life, to build a city. All that was in our Constitution until you old men became so terrified you tore it out. You stole freedom from our young people." He looked at the young man. "Our Constitution was written on Earth by experts and was above the Economic Plan. Ask him what happened to its last page." The young bodyguard had been vaguely aware that there was a weathered copy of the Constitution on display in his village, but he had never gotten around, to reading it. He shrugged. "The majority of our elders in all the villages voted to remove the last page," Mr. Decent wheezed, "because it was necessary to defend our villages from you -- " "Hypocrite! That wasn't the reason," the Centralist gasped. "It was," Mr. Decent retorted. "We can't permit violations of Decentralism which would seduce our young people. We can't permit corruptions such as Big Village if our way of life is to survive. You criminal, you murderer -- " the old man pointed a finger red with the blood of his customs inspector -- "you' murdered Henrydavid, didn't you?" The old man began to shiver violently with scrawny rage. The bodyguard expected him to leap at the Centralist. Now he hoped the parachutist would shoot Mr. Decent -- that instant would be his opportunity to grab the gun, all its power! The young bodyguard's face hardened. The parachutist raised the gun. "Give it to me," The old man stepped toward the ex-mayor and reached out his hand for the submachinegun as if he were simply dealing with another young Decentralist villager. "I say, give it to me!" As the gunman's own tendons tightened, the bodyguard saw he was going to shoot. He was going to kill Mr. Decentralist. The act was no longer in his imagination -- it was going to be real. The bodyguard lunged faster than thought in a conditioned reflex called duty and his hand grabbed the submachinegun's barrel; yanking it aside as it roared. It was hammering and burning, slapping his chest so hard he fell backward and the rocks seemed soft. He hadn't expected this. He had wanted the old man -- the old order -- to die. But he had saved Mr. Decent's life. H e clung to the gun, to its warmly quiet smoothness. As he sat up he was amazed at how much his chest hurt when he coughed. Blood was splattering all over the gleaming mechanism. Frantically he tried to wipe it off. He wanted to say something. 'You've shot him," Mr. Decent's distant voice was yelling at someone. "He's dying." The bodyguard couldn't remember having shot anyone. He clung to the gun, knowing he hadn't fired it yet, but to do so was what he wanted more than anything in the world. His hand searched along its slipperiness for the trigger. He wanted to feel its power blasting -- to release all his strength. He had the ultimate weapon. In the dizzily fluctuating light and darkness he became aware that the Centralist was crawling toward him, dragging a broken leg, reaching out to retrieve the gun. "Shoot, shoot," the old man's voice was shouting. The bodyguard needed to pull the trigger, but as his numbed fingers groped for it he saw Mr. Decentralist's angular shadow hurl itself upon the Centralist. They were struggling on the rocks. Decentralist and Centralist indistinguishable in this crazy darkness in his head. As if he were going blind, the bodyguard peered out, trying to see which of his enemies was on top. If he shot the Centralist, he knew Mr. Decent would thank him then and later tell him to drop this wonderful sub-machinegun into the lake where the swords had been lost. The bodyguard's mind rebelled dimly while they thrashed about in the crater. If he shot Mr. Decent instead -- he wondered if the grateful parachutist would let him keep the gun? Not for long. In his veins he felt the dark canoe approaching. Even if he joined them, he knew the Centralists would sieze the gun because it was the ultimate power. "Shoot, shoot -- " a strange, hoarse voice was shouting. In his darkness he felt his power swelling with realization that he could #hoot both of them while they struggled, entwined. His finger began to curl around the trigger while his imagination hurried to strip off the parachutist's safety suit. Its smoothly metallized cloth became a perfect fit for him, shiny and unsullied by the bullet holes in his body. He pushed the Centralist's bloody, bullet-riddled body under a ledge and it vanished as if from a dream. In that overlapping instant all the men from the dark canoe stood around the volcano's rim like teeth and he was gurgling: "Come down. We will build a great city." They became towers around his harbor. He led them to the mainland, covering the whole instaplanet with his city of power. "That's not all I want -- " IF His finger was squeezing the slippery metal hull of the shuttle and it roared deafeningly, capturing the freighters in orbit. When his glittering armada landed on Earth, he gripped the hot steel microphone and gurgled sensuously. His great fleet was rising from all over his Earth. With his. finger rigidly contracted on the vibrant trigger, he sprayed his power outward through the darkness of the Universe. T 'HE old man kneeled in perplexed horror beside his bodyguard. The canoemen clambered down from the rim. Their thick faces glanced from the corpse of the parachutist, whose forehead had been crushed, as if by a brutal caveman, by Mr. Decentralist's jagged rock -- to the young bodyguard, who lay on his back, clutching the sub-machine gun. His chest had been riddled by bullets during that Pavlovian instant when he had yanked the gun away from the parachutist by its barrel and saved the old man. He had fallen backward with it, coughing and writhing, splattering the rocks with his blood, while his numbing hands searched its slippery steel. His forefinger still gripped the trigger of the emptied sub-machinegun. His eyes -- The most massive of the fishermen wrenched the gun away, grunting excitedly. "We seen a parachute come down," he told Mr. Decent. "We come. We broke your rule again, but we landed on this island. Good thing. This is a -- gun!" The old man looked up along the fisherman's bulky torso to his greedily grinning face. Plainly this was not a thoughtful man who would be satisfied with the solitude and austerity of hiw own Walden Pond. "Where are the rest of the bullets?" the big fisherman croaked while the other thick-bodied men crowded around. The old man looked down past his own thin fingers, stained with blood, to the splay feet and heavy legs of these fishermen, who still must consider themselves Decentralists. But he felt a hot wind whirling in the crater; as if from the future, heard their hoarse voices arguing as they struggled for the gun. "Where are the bullets?" In the hot crater Mr. Decentralist felt his life-long beliefs shriveling. He became terrified that this barren instaplanet had defeated his ideals and dreams. A hoarse-voiced generation of greedy Centralists seemed as close as his death. The unexplainable bulletwound in his side bled. After this -- whom could he trust? Bending over his young bodyguard's inscrutably dead face, the old man wept. He felt his power draining away. I was wheeled out of the operating room and returned to his crib in Orphanage #. Time: #:# hours in the year # Deneb Implant Time. A bulky white bandage covered his face at eye level. He slept soundly for most of the rest of the day -- his red-headed, freckled-face form half buried in the soft pillow and blankets. Toys watched. Although he was too young to understand -- he had just lost his left eye. Awakening late in the evening, he found that his only visual contact with the world was through a pinhole in a shield over his right eye. Puzzled, he found that if he moved his gaze from that pinhole he saw only blackness and the movement twinged the raw ocular muscles in the left socket. Turning carefully at neck and waist, he surveyed his crib -- chamois dog, tattered pillow and red ball. As he found each item he pulled it into his lap, cradling it there. They were his world. Nothing was missing. Nothing, that is, except the eye. The Healer, solemn and graying, visited him daily. Impersonal younger parameds tended to his essential needs. He had no other visitors. He rolled his ball back and forth in the crib and talked to his dog. Several weeks later the bandage was replaced by a small, black patch. The pin-holed shield was removed. 'You can open your eye. Little Caesar. I've dimmed the window," said the paramed as he gathered up the tangle of bandages. Caesar screwed up his freckled face and peeked around his room. The lunch tray had been brought in and the aroma caught his attention. 'May I go outside and play?" asked Caesar. "Check with Library after you've eaten," was the paramed's curt reply. He left Caesar to his tray. Dumping all the crisp croutons into the thyme-flavored consomme, Caesar munched rapidly. Then, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he picked up his red ball and started out into the corridor. Fingering the wall for stability, he made his way into the Library and stood before the large mahogany desk. Healer was seated in the soft desk chair and was speaking in a soft monotone. Caesar waited. As the Healer finished, he stood up and smiled at Caesar. "Please be seated, Caesar," said Library' as Healer went out. Caesar placed his ball into the chair's pillowy recesses and climbed up onto the seat. "And how do we feel today?" asked Library. "Okay, I guess," said Caesar. "May I go out and play?" Library paused. Its class IX IF brain processed the request against Caesar's ambulatory status. It answered, "Healer says that you may go outside today -- for walking. You may not run, jump or otherwise engage in strenuous activity. Understand?" A distracting man punctuated each sentence. "Yes, Library," said Caesar. He climbed down, picked up his ball and started for the sunlit doorway. Library returned to its inner ruminations -- menu planning and inventory checking. playground. Deneb stood with the odor of green cytoplasm. Restless dust occasionally jumped in a breeze. Several yards away one of the older boys -- Arnold -- leaned idly on a pair of bright metal crutches and drew lines in the yellow-ocher dust with the rubber heel of his walking cast. He was one of the Long Runners and was mending a torn heel cord. When he saw Caesar he waved cheerily. Caesar gave his ball an experimental toss -- holding his head cocked to center it in his single visual field. The ball disobeyed him and rolled past Arnold. Holding both crutches in his left hand, Arnold balanced on his good foot and scooped up the ball. "Catch." Caesar watched its bouncing approach. It was raising little white puffs of dust as it came. He sidled into its path and closed his hands over -- nothing. The ball avoided his hands and rolled up onto the freshly cut grass. "Come on. One-eye. You can do better'n that," shouted Arnold. Caesar picked up the ball. Setting his jaw, he returned to face Arnold. He threw with great concentration but the ball went wide again. Arnold shrugged, got a good grip on his crutches and started hobbling after it. Caesar didn't play ball very long that day. Although he was saddened by the ball's sudden contrariness, he still let it stay in his crib at night. He didn't understand the role that binocular vision played in depth perception. All he knew was that he had lost a friend in his ball. The left socket granulated smoothly and he was fitted with a glassy prosthesis. It was heavy, and moving it around was good exercise for the nubbins of ocular muscle that remained under the scar. Although it moved sluggishly and lacked some of the sparkle of his good eye, it did fill out the space under the lid cosmetically. Actually, Little Caesar was less concerned about his lost eye than about his lost ability to play ball. Learning to throw and catch had been sort of a milestone in his musculo-skeletal development -- and now it was gone. One evening, after an unusually disappointing day on the playground, he climbed up onto Library's soft seat and asked: "Why can't I play ball any more?" "Everyone is different," answered the desk. "Some children play team games -- like ball. Others must go it alone. Try the Long Run, Caesar. Trade your ball for a canteen." That night Caesar climbed into his crib with his pillow, toy dog and the canteen. He missed his ball at first, but the canteen -- shaped like a flattened ball -- had a resilient, fiber outer cover. It wasn't uncomfortable,- He'd adjust to sleeping with it. T he canteen served him well. It carried the # liters of water which enabled him to make the Long Run comfortably. The course -- an invigorating six miles through the wooded hills behind the Orphanage -- attracted him immediately. His canteen symbolized maturity. Six months later he had won status in his peer group with his comfortable ten-minute-mile pace. Older boys often saved their deserts for him if he would set the pace for their training runs. During his remaining years at Orphanage # he was known as the wandering pacemaker. As adolescence approached, Caesar discovered that he couldn't spend all of his life in the solitude of running. His missing eye caused some anxiety which was undirected, until he transformed it into simple hatred. Hatred for the bogyman whom the older boys had blamed for his loss. At # the children explained away all unexpected tragedies with this concept of an unseen, evil demon -- The Beast. The Beast roamed their nightmares and filled their conversation. Library, inspired by its paternal circuits, called Caesar in. "There is no Beast," it counseled. "You have to face the real world, Caesar. Forget childhood fantasy. Your eye must have been removed for a very good reason. It probably was diseased or contained a tumor like a melanoma or retinoblastoma. It was done to save your life, undoubtedly. A bogyman can't just slip in here and perforrn a clandestine enucleation. "You'll be graduating soon. I've placed you in competition for Starship Academy. Effort may win you a ship of your own. Every quantum of mental energy will be needed. You'll have none to spar on fantasy." "Starship Academy?" said Caesar, stunned. "And don't worry about the expense. You have been left a generous lega # y for education," added Library. "From my parents?" asked Caesar awkwardly. IF Library winced his telltales. "We never mention that here at Three-o-nine. It is sufficient to realize that they existed once -- out of biological necessity -- but for us they exist no more. They have left you with good genes and an adequate legacy. That is all you need know." Library closed the subject and its  telltales went from a cautious amber-two to a more relaxed green. Caeser stood up -- a bigger Caesar now -- with lean limbs and a few red chin whiskers. Testosterone had begun to alter his physiology and psyche. His larger larynx resonated more deeply; protein and calcium had been added to his frame. Deep, warm reflexes had changed his attitude toward females. S tarship Academy placed Caesar in tough intellectual competition. He likened it to the long run -- going it alone mentally -- grinding his way through theory, practice and new concepts. The nagging Beast dwelled in the back of his subconscious and drained his metal energy. One day it came abruptly to the surface as he was studying an optic playback in exobiology. The subject was a dark, hairy arachnoid. Sensory probes had recorded its activities on one of the newly colonized planets about four parsecs from Deneb. Neglecting the scale, Caesar assumed he was watching a little spider rearranging its wet, white eggs in its nest. The focus was indistinct. He imagined he was watching the Beast running off with his eye. Or was it his ball? Shuddering, as the scale became obvious, he realized why the new colonies on the arachnoid's planet were having such a difficult time getting established. The arachnoid was huge and the moist objects it was carrying were skulls -- human skulls. Caesar remained frozen to the viewer, trying to gather his wits. The recording ended and there followed the nice relaxing view of an anatomy drawing. The internal organs of the alien spider-like creature were diagramed in color, with reassuring labels. The academy years were not easy ones for Caesar, but he learned his lessons well and won his spaceship -- Jen-B -- a cybernette with a very female facade. His physiological parameters were wired into her sensors. One of her first observations was that he was too concerned about his missing eye. She understood it as: '"an unmated male with an infirmity -- " and suggested that he try the Organ Banks for a replacement. Caesar objected: "Organ Banks do not carry whole eyes. Eyes are extensions of the Central Nervous banked. You're thinking of corneas." Jen-B checked her memory bank. "No -- I'm certain that eyes can be replaced -- whole eyes. The technique is called Genetic Carbon Copying. It is complex and expensive. But I'll be tied up for a while getting our assignment. Why don't you check with the local She orbited Caesar down in the scooter. He studied his dull, heavy prosthesis in the mirror -- after almost a fourth of a century he had grown accustomed to seeing it peeking out from under his left eye lid. Still, the prospect of a real eye excited him.  outer office of Organ Banks he felt a yearning for good health. The decor strongly suggested youth and vigor -- holograms of towering softwoods, thundering surf and copious waterfalls. The brown-eyed girl, attractive and slightly erotic, stirred him. He was suddenly grateful that he was shopping for an eye and not a set of gonads. He explained why he was there and she quickly went into a sales patter: "Our Genetic Carbon Copy is precisely what you need. It will match your right eye exactly -- in size, color and antigens. Same genes -- same antigens. No danger of rejection. It will be a complete eye -- optic nerve, retina, lens and sclera -- grown from your own genetic material. It is true that an ordinary eye from another doner will not work satisfactorily. We can't match the antigens close that way. Even the slightest rejection can prove fatal because of the cross reaction with your own brain tissues. Any antibody will have some cross reactions with tissues this is quickly fatal. Even a small amount of antibody can upset the membrane activity of a nerve cell -- psychoses and demyelinating diseases like multiple scleit is your own tissue -- doesn't have any of those problems," He wasn't sure he understood inost of what she was trying to tell him. He hesitated. "It all sounds so complicated. I'm not so sure that -- " he began. "Now we don't have to decide immediately," she said soothingly. "First let's see if you are a potential candidate for a transplant." She led him into a small examining booth and made a big ceremony out of washing her hands. She asked him to remove the artificial eye and examined the empty socket with a scented finger. over the back of his head and asked him to shut his right eye. She tickled the empty socket with a microvolt probe and watched the "Looks like your optic nerve hasn't scarred too badly," she said. "Its axons are gone, of course; but IF the new ones will grow from the ganglion cells in the transplanted retina. I'd say you're an excellent candidate for a transplant." She washed her hands again. He replaced the prosthesis and blinked  it into place. "Now there is the matter of the into seven figures," she said. "Deneb credits?" he asked casually. "Stellar megafrancs," she said. He sputtered. She looked pained. "I'm dreadfully sorry, Caesar. I just assumed that you knew. Our customers pay their own way, of course. There are the costs of the culture tanks, embryonating equipment biochemists and technicians, monitoring devices and finally the surgery itacting proceedure -- and very expensive." He left as gracefully as he could. Stellar megafrancs meant a lifetime of saving -- or a big gamble won. If he hoped Jo earn that kind of money he'd have to try patrolling the Los Coyotes Diagonal, where he had a chance of earning hazard premiums plus possible salvage. He might make his megafranc there, if he survived. II D uty on the Los Coyotes Diagonal -- trade route to the Dog Star -- consisted of months of boredom interspersed with moments of terror. Fifty parsecs of empty space -- no biologically friendly planets -- not even a manned satellite. Natural hazards were minimal on the route. However, like other uninhabited routes on the edge of the humanoccupied sectors, the diagonal had its share of random, weird kidnapings. An occasional starship would be stripped of its human complement -- crew and any genetic cargo. The ship itself, its tools, weapons, and other items of human wealth were left intact. Violence was absent. The usual assumption involved a hypothetical race of advanced aliens -- dubbed The Dregs by the popular press -- aliens who valued humans for some reason but had no use for human tools. Caesar found it hard to imagine a race whose technology or ethics prevented them from seizing the ships along with the men; but he agreed that he was the best man to hunt them. He had been hunting his own personal Beast most of his life and hunting the unseen Dregs was very much the same. Statistics showed that kidnapings involved the freighters and more sluggish Implant ships. The presence of a single high-performance starship anywhere on the route seemed to protect it. Insurance cartels paid well for this type of duty. He and Jen-B cruised about, testing their IF energy weapons and setting out noisy beacons -- making their presence known. 'Wake up. Caesar. Derelict ahead," called Jen-B. Six years of false alarms and he still felt a chill at the thought of meeting the Dregs. He suited up and watched the screen. A ship appeared -- an old human model. "She's quiet. No signs of energy in her hull," said Jen-B. They stood off and bounced a variety of signals off the derelict -- even nudged it a bit with a tractor beam. Nothing happened. "Might as well go on board. See what I can find," said Caesar. If the Dregs had struck the ship he knew what to expisct. No humans would be left on board. But he found humans. Dead ones. An all-male crew of thirtyseven plus a score of passengers -- both sexes -- all dead of natural causes that could be summed up as old age. Jen-B sent her servomech prowling about the derelict's hull. in search of answers. It dug around in a cold reactor core, energized a few senile circuits and sampled several of the frozen and dried corpses. Caesar searched the cabins. He found no signs of violence. Several examples of poor housekeeping suggested that the older survivors had lost some of their mental facilities. He found a handwritten diary in one of the uniform pockets. The last dozen pages were mostly illegible except for the repeated entry: "Bay A-#." Bay A-# was in the cargo section. The derelict had carried a payload of Water World Biota -- valuable flora and fauna that reptic evolution. A ri # h genetic cargo -- still suspended and, apparently, still viable. Caesar moved among the bays until he came to A-#. He paused at the hatch fumbling with his thick gloves. Inside, he waited for his suit light to brighten. The bay had been stripped of most of its suspended biota and a makeshift tank had been constructed. A tiny mummy occupied the tank. It took him a moment to realize that it was the body of a human baby -- probably around ten pound size. From the looks of the wires and tubes the tank was the work of someone with little knowledge of the suspension process. He hoped the infant had been dead before it had been hooked up -- mercifully dead. Water World suspension tanks did not modify to human support easily. He returned to the Control Section. The servomech was busy with the astrogational components of the derelict. "I think we can get her moving. This may be the salvage that we've been looking for," Jen-B said over his helmet communicator. "What happened? Why is everyone dead?" IF "Computer failure," answered Jen-B. "This is one of the older models -- fully automated -- one mechanical intelligence. No backups. Evidently no one on board could rig the warp drive for manual override. That would probably have been suicide anyway. Fortunately this is a greenhouse class -- there was plenty of food and oxygen for the humans to live out their life spans. But out here on the Diagonal nothing is within range of a conventional drive. They just lived out their lives between stars. They could see their pile running down so they didn't try to raise children. "The one infant you saw in Bay A-# was probably an accidental birth. Without energy to run the hydroponics section they knew how long the ship could support life; and there are no facilities on board to suspend humans." No, there wouldn't be, thought Caesar. That was one of the advantages of a greenhouse starship. You made the trip warm. R efueled, the derelict moved and, with the servomech providing the "brains," it managed to limp back to Deneb on the laser tail of Jen-B. After picking up their credits at Salvage -- almost an even megafranc -- Jen-B cheeked in at the Academy and Caesar started out . for the Organ Banks. He stopped off at Orphanage # on the way. Weathering had lowered the hills behind the playground and the trees looked stouter; but the building was unchanged. A nostalgic Caesar entered the Library. He was no longer the pliant youth of #. Gray streaked his red hair. Freckles had fused into a diffuse bronze under the actinic stimulation of alien suns. Trunk and extremities had thickened with added muscle and gristle. "Remember me?" he asked the desk. A hum under the floor tickldd his feet. After a few moments the speaker coughed and said, "You are the wandering pacemaker -- Little Caesar with the legacy." "I've just returned from a tour of duty on the Diagonal. Came back for a new eye from the Organ Banks. I was wondering if you could tell me anything about my people. My family." Silence. He waited a respectable length of time and asked, "The Beast?" "The Beast does not exist," said Library immediately. Caesar shrugged. Even after all these years Library's slow circuits were consistent. The old desk grumbled something and then its voice softened. "Little Caesar. How you have grown! You are a bigger man now -- and older. I hope you haven't neglected that body of yours. You haven't given up the Long Run have you?" Caesar's eyebrows rose slightly. "There wasn't much opportunity for running out on the Diagonal. But I've taken care of myself. I can still run." "If you'd like to run before lunch you may use the refresher. There's a remote unit on the peg in there," said Library. The words were more a maternal command than an offer. He hung his shoes and shirt on the peg and clipped the palm-sized remote unit to his belt. He walked across the playground -- his bare soles tingling at each pebble and blade of grass. A sweating fiveyear-old returning from the course nodded gravely as he passed. The morning was mildly sunny. He stepped out briskly, covering the first four hundred yards in record time (for him). He had kept his muscles toned up in his starship gym and they carried him well. The muscles were large -- with large capillary beds to store the lactic acid and carbon dioxide they were producing. His vascular system was slow to adjust to the exertion and his pH dropped a hundredth of a point. The acidosis surprised his chemoreceptors and his pulse began to race. "Good pace," said Library over the remote unit. At the first mile marker he felt like a fish out of water. Gasping and dizzy, he slowed to a walk. Then, as the course turned downhill, the going became easier and he began to jog again. He waited for a second wind but none came. He hair-pinned the pine tree at the three-mile' marker. Thirsty. No canteen. "Thirty-three minutes, five seconds," announced Library. His coronary arteries -- become small in the years without endurance activity -- were unable to meet the demands of his heart muscle. Straining on the return up-slope he developed chest pain. Synovial edema puckered his gait and a limp appeared as he neared the playground. His vision swam. Numbness prickled at his face and hands. Still no second wind. The neglected cardiorespiratory machinery was unable to shift into overdrive. Gasping and clutching at his aching chest, he fell across the finish line. His face was wet and pale. Saliva drooled out of the corner of his mouth. "Seventy-four minutes, twelve seconds," said Library. In his contortions his glassy eye fell out and rolled, moist and gritty, in the dust. Several minutes passed before feeling returned to him and he picked it up -- popping it into his mouth to clean it. Spitting out the offending dirt, he blinked the prosthesis back under his left eyelid and sat up straight, breathing deeply. "Good workout," said Library. "Really good," he said wryly. IF A t organ banks he was ushered into the office of one of the senior parameds. After some preliminary discussion and nodding the fee was nailed down and addenda supplied. "A Genetic Carbon Copy eye -- #I mf. The project requires a four-year growing period. You must realize that if you decide to cancel only that part of the megafranc that hasn't been used can be returned. You are liable for all the expenses for your project." Caesar ignored the paramed's indifferent manner and asked, "Why four years?" The paramed glanced at his wellgroomed fingernails. "Takes that long to reach the size to match your other eye. Can't use a banked eye because of the danger of rejection. Don't want any of those ning around, now -- do we?" "No. I suppose not. But how do you grow an eye? Do you take a piece of my good eye and -- " The paramed shook his head, reached into his desk for a folder. cess. We can't grow most adult tissue in an organ form. Only the immature cells divide well and they quickly upset any gross anatomic structures such as you'd need in an organ like the eye. The lens, cornea, retina and optic nerve -- none of these structures can be cultured as such. We have to harvest the eye bud from an embryo and grow that. "We just draw a blood sample and isolate some of your lymphocytes -- a young white blood cell that divides very easily. When the lymphocytes are growing well we freeze some, grow some and remove the nuclei from some. These naked nuclei are implanted into human egg cytoplasm -- eggs from which their own nuclei have been removed. The egg with your naked nucleus divides and embryonates with only your genes We just grow it until it is large enough to harvest the transplant material we are after." The folder Caesar was looking at showed several examples of culture tanks. One contained a liver for a post-hepatitis patient. Another a pair of lungs for a victim of beryllium poisoning. The round lymphocyte drawing with its lacy nucleus reminded him of his red ball. "That naked nucleus carries all the genes necessary to grow an entire individual?" asked Caesar. "That is correct." Caesar studied the diagram of the optic nerves. They were shaped like a large X, half of each nerve crossing the midline on its way back from the retina to the geniculate bodies in the midbrain. A photomicrograph showed He frowned. "I've done a little work with computers and Tve learned that hookups between sensors and cybernetic units are very critical. All the connections have to be exact or incoming information can't be interpreted. How can anyone match up all these separate nerve fibers?" he asked. The paramed looked pained. "Those nerve fibers are coming from nerve cells in the retina. The hookups in organic systems aren't so critical. The visual cortex relearns how to interpret incoming signals. All we have to do is inject nerve stump. That gets most of the new axons growing down the right , direction. The anastomosis is sealer, a mixture of embryonic connective tissue -- from one of tion hormones from pituitary and quickly and matures to adult connective tissue before the cut ends of the nerve can scar too badly." "But my brain hasn't been able to see with my left eye for all these years. Hasn't it lost the ability permanently?" The paramed pointed to the center of the X on the diagram. "Half of the fibers from your right eye cross over, here, at the optic chiasma. So, with just one eye you have been using both sides of your visual cortex. The new left eye will just be adding more information -- reinforcing the images. You probably won't even notice the increased acuity -- it'll occur so gradually. The biggest change will be the addition of your left lateral peripheral vision. You have none now -- your nose is sort of in the way. But once the images balance you'll be able to learn to hold your head straight again." Caesar had not been aware of how obvious his cock-eyed gaze was. He had a habit of carrying his head turned slightly to the left so that his right visual field was centered on what he was looking at. Two eyes would square up his posture again. He rolled up his sleeve for the venipuncture. H e approached his scooter. The hatch opened arid JenB's voice came over the communicator. "All finished up on the surface?" "I guess so. I'm coming up. Warm up something light for supper." He strapped himself in. The light scooter arced quickly toward the orbiting starship. "How did you make out with Academy?" he asked. "Fine," Jen-B said. "They're well pleased with our profit margin so far. I have a promising list of new missions. When will you "Four years." There was a moment's pause IF while the starship balanced the time requirements against the potential income of each mission. "Two parsecs is the range," she said. "We can stay here and take up people-moving. There's mining in the Tietze System. Charting in the -- " "Mining?" he interrupted. "Part of my legacy was in mining stock. Something called the MotherLode-Planetoid. Can you check with Library and see if there is any record that would link my legacy with the Tietze Planetoids. I've been trying to find out about my family but Library doesn't like to talk about parents." Jen-B opened a channel to the Orphanage. "Library is only a class nine. Not too reliable. There's no cross indexing between you and Tietze. Better relax and finish your supper while I try a few more lines of questioning." He ate from a wide-necked squeeze tube that contained spicy protein cubes in a warm broth of aromatic hydrocarbons. Finally Jen-B said: "Library is full of blocks about people -- you, your parents, your condition prior to operation. But the lines of information are pretty exacting when assets are involved. Your legacy did contain that 'mining stock. It was a Tietze-based company. The date your legacy was set up was early in the year One Thousand ninety-nine, D.I.T. It opened at zero point, three three seven magafrancs. Information on the person opening the legacy is scanty. He was an off-world human, alive -- no probated will or anything like that. I can't find his name, but he had red hair and was staying at a local address with a large number of injured miners." "Red hair?" said Caesar enthusiastically. "He must have been my father." But he was left with more unanswered questions -- why the legacy at all if the leaver were alive? Or, if no longer alive, where had he died? And why hadn't the legacy-leaver taken Caesar with him when he left? Caesar quickly ran through the list of possible reasons why a father would leave his son in an prphanage. All he could come up with was the possibility that he -- Caesar -- might be illegitimate. Unwanted. His own name, Caesar, was similar to the names of the other illegitimates he had known. They had all been given names of powerful men -- planet conquerors -- in the hopes that these would bring them some of the luck of their namesakes. He frowned at Jen-B's panel. "I suppose there is nb record of where he went after he left the legacy." "Nothing connecting the legacyleaver with any of the other memory bigs." Jen-B said. "The blocks arc complete around him. But the number of miners in the rehabilitation section with him indicates a fairly large mining accident a year or so prior. No mines on Deneb record such a disaster; Tietze is a logical place to begin our search, A redhead with zero point three megafrancs shouldn't be too hard to trace if he is linked with a large mining accident. We know the approximate date and I have a list of the securities that were put into your legacy." Caesar hesitated for a moment. He didn't like mixing business with her personal life -- might jeopardize profit Finally he assented. "We'll ne a navigator to bring back the ore. Have one in mind?" he asked. "There's a poet at Cyber Central, He's about' three hundred years old. But he has been on the Tietze route several times and his price is right." Caesar nodded, his mind on the legacy-leaver. "I'll send the scooter for him," continued Jen-B. Caesar stood in the cargo bay when Navigator was off-loaded. He was old and corroded. About the size of a human, he would weigh about # pounds down on the surface. He consisted of three units: a fuel-cell abdomen, a cybernetic thorax and a sensory head -- all joined by narrow, flexible joints. Other than an extendible neck, he had no motor units. Caesar wiped a finger across his gritty chassis. "Your skin is a mess," he said. "Too much oxygen and water vapor down there. But don't worry about me. I'll be fine as soon as I'm out in a vacuum again," said Navigator. Caesar glanced over his shoulder toward one of Jen-B's panels. "Are you sure he'll be all right?" Navigator's head -- a sphere with a circumference of sensors -- anthropomorphized its appearance by brightening up a pair of "eyes" and turning them on Caesar. He actually looked sheepish. Jen-B answered, "Navigator has been debauching his energy stores and letting his body age, but it was for an understandable reason. He wanted to be near Music Box. He calculated that he had become obsolete and he planned to spend his final years with the machine he loved. Music Box and he were composing ballads -- finishing tunes he had started while out listening to the stars. All he needs is a recharge and a new coat of polyjner. He'll do fine." Caesar glanced back at Navigator's downcast optic pickups. "Relax, Poet. You are a member of the crew now." Ill sar tolerated a lot of weird music. Navigator and Jen-B shared the electromagnetic music from the stars. Jen-B's outer sensors  IF gathered m the stellar noise and fed it through Navigator's unscrambler circuits. It came out as music only a machine could appreciate. For trading purposes Jen-B had picked up a dozen small dairy units -- goatcloverbee implants designed for low gravity dome living. The entire Tietze system was rich in heavy metals -- an H type star circled by uncounted planetoids, the largest only a # G planet that had a tenuous atmosphere and a few simple local phylla. The Deneb system with its single planet was fairly metal-poor. The usual commerce consisted in exchanging Deneb genetic information for Tietze planetoids. The size of a planetoid was expressed in terms of the number of pounds that the bartering captain would weigh on its surface. A convenient size for accelerating back to Deneb would have a pull of between #.I and # pounds on Caesar. These units were called "donans" after the pioneer Mother-Lode engineer. Jen-B nuzzled up to the Tietze satellite station which housed the Buyer -- a humanoid robot. Quasistellar engines were anchored to the ends of the satellite's arms. Human technicians swarmed over Jen-B's cargo enthusiastically. The microcontainers of naked nuclei looked monotonous to Caesar, but the Tietze system humans understood their coded labels. In a system where the local ecology had produced nothing more complex than moss and nematodes, every flower and butterfly had to be brought across parsecs of empty space. After hundreds of years the local biology textbooks had only a two-page glossary. Even a new weed would be welcome if it looked, smelled or tasted different. The mechanical Buyer remained aloof. "We already have a dairy animal. I can offer you a zeropoint-one donan planetoid for your cargo." "But that is a pretty large breed of cattle you're talking about. Suitable for the grazing lands on Tietze's largest planet. I'm offering you a thirty-pound milk goat that can go anywhere a man can go. It produces a couple quarts of milk a day and can be bred yearly -- usually has twin births. Any dome city can raise goats on a hydroponics farm." said Caesar. Buyer remained silent. I'll personally stay and see that the implants get established. But I'll need # donan." Buyer agreed immediately. Payment on delivery of established implants. It would take about a year to get them started -- plant the clover, rewarm the bees and embryonate the goats. Jen-B began to cycle the goat naked nuclei into their respective eggs. Domes were selected. The clover was planted in every open place -- along walks, in decorative flower boxes -- on roofs. It was a pleasant sight to see one of the citizens returning to his home -- a home with half a dozen baby goats grazing on its roof. The little animals accepted the gravity of the smaller planetoids and seemed to enjoy the long leaps from roof to roof. Psychologically there were an asset -- a symbol of their owners' protein independence and a break in the monotony of the scanty dome ecology. The mechanical Buyer followed the growth curves of the new goats. Implant success hinged on successful reproduction, and the animals seemed to be approaching sexual maturity on schedule. A set of Q. engines were detached from the Buyer's satellite tested and fueled with quarks. An inventory of # donan planetoids was prepared -- each with its analysis. Caesar car ried the preliminary list with him as he traveled about, watching the goats mature. When they passed one of the planetoids on the list Jen-B marked its composition, size and orbit on her chart of the Tietze system. with some goats and thought she looked familiar. She had the same red hair and freckles that he had as a child. Her father also had some of his features. He was checking the goat implant in a dome city on one of the outer # gravity planetoids. He spoke to the girl. "My great-grandfather and grandfather were both killed at the mine," she said matter-of-factly. "They've closed it down now." "Where is the mine?" asked Caesar. He had gone over this planetoid earlier when the goats had been implanted. No large mines had been in operation during the years he was interested in. She looked through the semitransparent dome and pointed toward the horizon. "The mine was on Fish Moon." An oblong planetoid was barely visible -- a crescent of light in the glare of the Tietze sun -- a tiny thumbnail size. He thanked her, #atted a goat's knobby head and went back to his scooter. On their trip to Fish Moon JenB made her observations. "Tendonan size. But it has two large fracture lines -- so essentially it consists of three separate masses now. Mining complex cold -- no energy. Just a robot sentinel. Better wear your heavy with its extra bottles -- the domes appear unpressurized." He watched Fish Moon's approach on the viewscreen. It did look a little like a fish. One of the fracture lines could be the gills and the other ran longitudinal -- like a fish's lateral line. The bright reHecting surfaces and the sharp, black shadows reminded him of fins and scales. Soon he was close enough to see the domes and Helds of the abandoned mine. It was IF located at the junction of the two fracture lines -- about where he would expect the fish's pectoral fin to be. Jen-B moved the scooter, to the unloading bay. "Sentinel says he is alone -- a class X or XI on our system intelligence grade. I'm sending a servomech. Tapper, along with you. You'll probably have to probe the mine's old memory circuits yourself. Sentinel doesn't have the power." Caesar climbed into the scooter and smiled at Tapper's little barrel shape -- six stubby legs, two small optic pickups, a V antenna in front and a stout carrying handle down his back. He was a ten-gallon size and reminded Caesar of a giant ladybug. Tapper wrapped his six stubby legs around the anh rest of Caesar's couch and waited. While Tapper worked in the cold dark conduits of the mine's memory components, Caesar casually picked up several chips and fed them into the Scooter's analysis port. The analysis of each flickered across scooter's screen as it was relayed to Jen-B. The chips were spat out and dropped slowly to the ground. They were unchanged, except for the three pin-sized, burn-holes of the analyzer. "We are in luck," said Tapper over the communicator. "This is the standard Hagan memory pattern. If it is intact I'll be back into the disaster data in a few minutes." Caesar picked up another handful of chips. These had been in contact with each other during the twenty-odd years of hard vacuum. Their molecules had migrated across the contact interface -- fusing them into one crystallized mass. The first sample of chips -- lying separate on the polymere floor -- had not fused to anything. Outside the domi: the entire planetoid surface consisted of one fused mass -- soft dust and loose gravel had settled and crystallized into the harsh surface of an industrial grinding wheel. "Found your legacy-leaver," announced Tapper. "Portfolio matches. He was one of the foremen -- injured badly in the explosion. Fault lines appeared in Fish Moon -- vacuum explosioi)s, high oxygen flash fires and tunnel collapse. His name -- Walter S.J. Varley -- does not match any of the data we have from Deneb. But now that we have his name we should be able to learn. more back there. He left for Deileb thirty-nine years ago. Caesar said nothing. The goats were bred successfully. As the fetuses grew in the uteri the mechanical Buyer ordered Q. engine installation on the planetoid Caesar had selected. Jen-B assigned Tapper and Navigator to observe the construction. #'T' HE goats are coming. TheIgoats are coming," shouted the little red-haired girl. Her father got up from his coffee-and-cake and went up the ladder to the goat shed on the roof. When the message arrived Caesar hurried to assist with the delivery. "Not niuch to worry about, Caesar," said Jen-B. "The babies are small and the mother's pelvis is more than adequate. About the only thing we could do is raise the atmospheric oxygen to protect the second twin. When there are' two like this the cord and placenta of the second one are subject to occasional damage during the delivery of the first." They arrived in Time to witness the birth of the second baby goat. Its wet, boney body came out fast in a gush of cloudy fluids. The little girl's father kneeled in the dried clover bedding and deftly plucked the membranes from the heads of the newborns. "Implant's a success," said Jen B. The girl's father -- tall and redheaded like Caesar -- invited him in for a glass of celebration. The drink was white and bubbly and had a bitter, alcoholic sting. Caesar was grateful that it was served in very small glasses. The little girl's mother -- also a redhead -- was breast-feeding two tiny infants. They were about eight or nine pounds in size -- one a freckled redhead, the other a dark. olive-skinned baby with coal black hair. When he was back in his scooter, arcing up towards Jen-B Caesar commented on the two different genetic appearances of the human children. "A dividend from our implantplanetoid-exchange. One of the implant vials contained a broad spectrum of human naked nuclei -- the rainbow mix," said Jen-B. "I cycled several through embryogenesis to correlate with the human pregnancy so they'd have milk." Caesar looked puzzled. "What have humans to do with our dairy implants?" "Goatherds," said Jen-B simply. Well, thought Caesar, the Tietze System could certainly use a little broadening of its human genetic base. J EN-B orbited the bartered planetoid about two diameters out. The Q. engines were installed and Navigator had tied himself into the communications net. Caesar stood by, carrying Tapper by his dorsal handle. "Ready?" asked Navigator. "Try a hundredth of a gravity," suggested Caesar. The vibration of the engines -- transmitted through about a hun dred miles of ore -- passed up through his feet to his cranial nerve. He "heard" their quasistellar fires. He felt the center of gravIF ity of the planetoid shift slightly aft. Navigator adjusted the engine's fields -- fondling the little captive pieces of the sun, Caesar leaned against the scooter and glanced nervously up at Jen-B's orbiting hull. "Feels like the center of gravity is moving back toward the engines," he said. "We're moving," said Navigator. "The vectors of acceleration are the same -- gravity or engine. You're feeling thd resultant force." "What happens when the center of gravity moves above the surface?" he asked. "That's when we find out if we've bought ourselves a nugget or a pile of rocks," said Navigator casually. Caesar climbed into his scooter. "Well, good luck. The stockholders will be happy to see you. Have a nice trip." Navigator did have a nice trip. His sensors listened for music in the planetoid's vibrations and the electromagnetic spectrum of the background stars. Finding a tune everywhere, he sang along -- composing new ballads. Ballads he would sing to Music Box when he returned to Deneb, IV into the Orphanage and set him on Library's desk. "I'm going to check in at the Clinic. You two see if you can get along until I return," he said. Tapper shifted his weight on his little feet and waved his antennae. Library felt a flush of warmth as Tapper's powerful sympathy fields caressed old memory cores. "What manner of a machine is this?" asked Library. "I am Tapper -- a remote unit of Jen-B -- a class VI." Then, after a pause Tapper turned to Caesar: "You go ahead Everything is fine here." T 'HE paramed probed his socket with a gloved finger. "Now look up. That's fine." Caesar felt the nubbin of muscle flex and twitch under the examining finger. "Good ocular muscle tone. Moving that prosthesis around has been good exercise. These stumps are well developed," said the paramed. the back of his head and prold the eye socket with the stimulator probe. "Patent nerve. Visual cortex okay." He snapped off his glove while Caesar blinked back the glassy prosthesis. "Be ready for surgery in two days?" asked the paramed. Caesar shifted in his chair. He ' was iCareful not to look at any of the little display tanks -- afraid he'd, see his new eye peeking at him. "Now don't worry about the pain," comforted the paramed. "You'll be sound asleep when they peel out the old scar. There are a dozen or so vessels to hook up on the back of the eye ball. That takes some fine stitching under a microscope. We have an oriental technician that does a beautiful job at that. The nerve hookup is sealer. "Your eyes will be taped for a few weeks. But otherwise there won't be much inconvenience. The postoperative discomfort can be covered satisfactorily with a few All-Purpose Capsules each day." Caesar nodded and started to leave. "Here, don't forget your seeingeye cap," said the paramed. He handed Caesar a thin skullcap with a pair of optic pickups on the front and a prickly layer of skin electrodes on the inside. He tried it on. "Feels like a pillow full of nails," he said. The paramed touched one of the optic pickups. "You've been used to seeing with your right eye. I'll turn off the left pickup. Now shut your eye and tell me what you see." "Just blackness -- nothing. Oh, there is some light. Colored. Looks like a lot of colored ink blots." "Fine. The impulses are getting through. Open your eye to give your cortex a clue to what you are looking at. Now close it again." Caesar thought he saw a solid square. Then it became a square hole in a solid wall. He opened his eye a few more times and soon his cortex was correctly interpreting lights from shadows through the cap's pickup. The paramed tuned the fine adjustment. Secondary images began to demarcate -- furniture in the room was clear enough to be avoided if he wanted to try walking with the cap. But he couldn't tell what was on the desk and he couldn't recognize the humanoid blob that was the paramed. "This is great. How well will I be able to see with this thing?" asked Caesar. "Not much better than that. Enough to find the refresher and the food tray. There are only about a hundred electrodes in this model -- and they just rest on top of the scalp. Can't focus well on that part of the visual cortex that is folded in between the two halves of your occipital lobes. We have produced twentyeighty vision with the ten thousand electrode model, but they were sewn into the dural membranes under the skull." Caesar took off the cap. "Fine. I'll practice with this thing at night. See you in two days." "Right." He found Tapper still resting on Library's desk. "Learn anything?" he asked. Tapper shifted his barrel shape IF around and focused on Caesar. "Not much." he answered. "Library is a class IX. He's old and has been using a non-Hagan language for storage. I thought there were blocks around you and the legacy-leaver -- so did JenB -- but the circuits are clean. No memory blocks. Cross indexing was just neglected in your case. You suddenly appear in the memory banks on the date of your enucleation -- nothing from your past is entered. Your legacy is perfectly recorded -- only your legacyleaver is vague. The name -- Walter S.J. Varley -- means nothing to Library. It is odd that these things would go unrecorded." "Caesar. Did you find your legacy-leaver?" asked Library. "I think so, Library. I traced the legacy itself back to the Tietze System. Apparently the legacyleaver was a man much like myself but a miner -- injured. He came here to Deneb for rehabilitation. He may have been married on his home planetoid, but he didn't bring a wife to Deneb." "None of them brought wives," said Tapper. Library filed that information away, "information about parents I do not record as long as it conforms to niy basic norms." "What norms?" asked Caesar. "Good genes." Caesar reviewed what he knew. The legacy-leaver was a foreman. Somatic similarities suggested that he could be Caesar's father. But many of the other workers from Tietze were related. Any could have fathered him. If his mother was a local Deneb girl, the legacy might well have been left to cover for the abandoned child of any of the Tietze workers. The foreman might have been acting in his company's name rather than his own family name. Well, either way the conclusion was the same. Caesar was an unwanted child who had been left to "go it alone." Library had raised him well, he decided. Caesar placed his right hand on Tapper's dorsal handle and began to lift. Then, almost as an afterthought, he replaced the cybernetic barrel on the desk. It was a sunny day. "Might as well take a Long Run while I'm here," he said. "Take it easy. The last time you tried that you had some ischemic S-T depression," said Tapper, reflecting Jen-B's concern. Her sensors, wired into his body, picked up physiological parameters and telemetered them back. His cardiogram consisted of an electrical tracing with the waves labeled P,Q,R,S and T. Depolarization of the upper chambers of the heart complex was the result of depolarization of the large ventricular muscles that pump the bjood. The flat segment between S and T waves reflected lack of oxygen. The heart sags when the myocardium gets ischemic. If the ischemia is too severe the muscle can die. This raises the S-T segment sharply. Jen-B worried as Caesar removed his shoes. Caesar glanced up the first leg of the course. Four years was a long time. Just the sight of the slope tired him. "Pulse one-forty and he hasn't even started," said Tapper. He started jogging slowly. One minute. Two. He still felt okay. He stretched out his pace a little more briskly. "S-T down, zero point one mv -- ischemia," said Tapper. Caesar felt a slight squeeze in his chest. He slowed to a walk. "Walking now. S-f down zero point two mv," said Tapper. "He'll start running again. He never stops on the course," said Library. Tapper shifted around and focused on the open window. He couldn't see the course from there. Jen-B watched the cardiogram. The rate was an irregular # beats per minute. Too fast. And there were occasional extra complexes. The myocardium was beginning to get irritated -- probably a rising adrenalin level. The walking dropped his pulse rate under # and he topped the hill. On the down slope he started running again. Muscles and joints yarmed up. "S-T segment down zero point twenty-five mv now," said Tapper. Library frowned at the little barrel. "What has he been doing the last four years? He is in worse condition now than the last time he tried to run the course. He has no endurance at all." "On the starship he pressed the equivalent .of his own weight each day," said Tapper. "That's no good for endurance. Why he -- " began Library. "Heart block. Heart block!" shouted Tapper. The cardiogram showed, an atrial P wave rate of about #min and a ventricular and lower chamrs were beating separately. Jen-B sent the scooter from its parking place to the Long Run course. It swooped down and landed across the trail in front of Caesar. He was standing, wet and pale, in the middle of the trail near the three-mile pine tree. He had a puzzled expression on his face and he was scratching his jaw. "Toothache," he said. He didn't seem to be able to see the scooter. He suddenly felt profoundly weak. He lay down slowly. His face and hands went numb and the peripheral visual field darkened. He coughed up some pink foam and passed out. bers," said the Healer. Caesar opened his eyes. The IF chest pain was still there and he felt short of breath. He coughed foam. But he also felt wonderful. Drugs. "What does this mean?" he asked weakly. The Healer smiled. "Awake now -- are we? That's just fine. You've just had a three gam infarct. A little bit of heart muscle died. The vessel that supplied it got plugged up. Atherosclerosis, .probably." "How serious is it?" "Not too bad. It is a small one. But it did get the conducting fibers. Your atrial and ventricular contractions are not coordinated. That should clear up in a couple of weeks." said the Healer. "If it doesn't?" "We have a Genetic Carbon Copy heart we can put in." said the Healer. I'm having. Not a heart," said Caesar. "An eye and a heart too -- if you need it," said the Healer. 'The Organ Banks checked with us yesterday. They have just about anything you can possibly need -- Caesar was puzzled. "But all I paid for was the eye -- " The Healer patted him on the shoulder. "You rest now. You've already been here three days. I've cut down your sedatives. Tomorrow you'll be up in the chair. And -- oh yes. Don't worry about and the eye they'll refund about zero point twenty-eight mf." Caesar slept. He dreamed of a little red-headed boy chasing a ball. Chasing and catching the ball. The boy had two eyes. Two eyes and a heart. The next morning Tapper was on his bedside table when he awoke. "How is the wandering pacemaker of three-o-nine?" Caesar puffed up his pillow and stared at Tapper. "Does this mean I'll loose JenB?" he asked. Tapper hesitated before answering. "Up to now the answer to that is -- not yet. The Academy went through the list of their recent graduates last night. No one matched Jen-B as well as you -- in your present condition. If you improve they expect you to continue to operate at a profit. If you don't -- " He left the obvious unsaid. Dead or a cripple. It amounted to the same thing. He'd be left here and Jen-B would be matched with a younger and healthier human. The Healer came in with Library's remote unit -- the threeinch disc. He fastened it to Caesar's pajamas. "Wear this. When it says walk -- you walk. If it says lie down -- you lie down. Today you walk to your chair and sit there for fifteen minutes. Do that twice in the morning and twice in the after noon." Caesar sat up and hung his feet over the side of the bed. Then he got up easily arid walked to his chair, "My heart. The chest pain is gone.'" "Don't let that fool you. It was a three-gram infarct. Right on the conducting bundle. Heart block is still present. Just do what you're told." along with it -- and at a lower cost?" Healer shrugged, "I don't know too much about these genetic projects. Different specialty. But their prices do reflect the actual costs. Must be cheaper to grow the eye with a heart than without it."' Caesar noticed that the heart refund was ominously close to the size of his own legacy. He tried to recall what the paramed had said when he had been explaining the Genetic Carbon Copying ' process -- something like growing the embryo until it is large enough to harvest the transplant. How large? Four years? An icy sensation closed on his chest. He shuddered, "Tapper?" he asked apprehensively. "Do you have a complete description of the legacy-leaver's injuries? Was his left eye -- " "Missing?" said Tapper. "Yes. Penetrating injury during the explosion. His eye was removed at the Tietze Station prior to his coming here." Then Caesar realized exactly what he was. "Cardiac arrest! Cardiac arrest!" shouted Tapper. Caesar's cardiogram rail flat -- isoelectric with ineffectual haphazard fibrillation. An electric shock restarted the heartbeat twice but it stopped again. He heard the sounds of hurrying footsteps in the outer hall. Then he heard nothing. blackness. He was in bed -- flat, soft -- no toys. Face bandaged. Eye? He tried moving his right eye and felt an ache in the left socket. The Jeft eyelid was filled out with something soft and warm -- lighter than his prosthesis. Lighter and When he tried to take a deep breath to speak, all he could produce was a squeak. Left chest pain limited his inspiration. It was not the squeezing, substernal pain of myocardial infarct. It was different -- more localized to the ribs and muscles. Cautiously he palpated his left chest -- another bandage. "Oh, no -- " he mumbled. "Are you awake?" asked Tapper's tinny voice. Caesar caught himself before .he asked what happened. He knew. His own heart must have stopped efficient, he thought cynically. His IF own body had been repaired with antigenically perfect organs -- perfect because they had come from his Genetic Carbon Copy. Only -- he knew that somewhere a little those organs today. His naked nucleus had grown into a child -- just as he had when The Beast had needed a new eye. The difference this time was that Caesar had needed a heart too. This would leave the four-year-old nonviable. No need for a legacy. Caesar would be getting a refund. Jen-B was shocked by the level of depression that Caesar's readouts reflected. She prodded Tapper. "Hi, there," shouted Tapper cheerily. "Your seeing-ey e-cap is right here beside me. Try it on. Take a look outside. It is a nice sunny day. You have been sleeping for almost two days." Nothing. Schizoid encephalogram pattern. Jeri-B almost left her orbit. Was she losing her human? Tapper felt her nagging commands. Days turned to weeks. Nothing. "Have a drink," sang Tapper. He danced on his little legs to shake the table. The table moved and the ice rattled invitingly in the glass. Caesar stirred. Exploring the table top he found his capand set it on his head. Spiny electrodes tickled his scalp, producing a Rorschach of colored amorphous blobs to appear in his visual cortex. The bandage prevented some of the electrodes from reaching his skin. He pressed the cap down firmly and an image appeared for a moment. He saw Tapper's welcome barrel shape on his bedside table. There was also a tall object -- the drink. He reached for it. His encephalogram ran smoothly as his fingers closed on the cold, moist cylinder. The cap shifted and the room disappeared. He pressed it down again and the wall came into focus. The window was bright. A blob moved past the window -- a small round blob. A larger blob followed. He turned away. "Bandages come off today," a voice said curtly. "Still not talking? Well, you can't fool us, Caesar. We can see from your brain waves that there is nothing wrong -- except a bad case of stubbornness." The bandages were unwound. "When you feel like it you can open your eyes any time." Caesar knew what he would see -- two well-matched eyes -- wet eyes -- living eyes. He glanced dejectedly into the mirror held by the paramed. He took a moment to focus -- but there they were -- two eyes. He said nothing. He glanced sadly at his chest. The long thin incision was healing well. The cross-marks left by the sutures were hardly visible. "Oh don't worry about your heart. We fixed that too," said the paramed proudly. Caesar winced "Got those coronaries pretty well reamed out. Implanted two extra arteries into the heart muscle, too -- your mammary arteries are now going to help your heart muscle recover -- but you'll have to do a lot -- " Caesar interrupted the paramed's ramblings. "No heart transplant?" "I guess not. You didn't need it. Your infarct was pretty small and -- Say, you're talking. Glad to hear you." The paramed gathered up his dressings tray and left.  Caesar smiled for a moment. If he still had his own heart -- then his without an eye. Tapper hummed placidly. He couldn't blame JemB transplant. Business ethics. The was to supply autotransplant tissues. To everyone in Organ Banks no human rights until they fulfilled the business ethic. Then, if viable, they became human beings -- orphans. Naked nuclei with a legacy. Naturally Library had no record of his childhood prior to enucleation-Little Caesar's existence began on the day he lost his eye. On that day he paid off his debt -- the price for existence -- and "went it alone." H ealer saw him a few more times -- prescribed a program of endurance exercises on a bedside bicycle-ergometer. Caesar pedaled against calibrated increases in resistance until he could maintain an oxygen consumption of # mlmin. He remained sullen and refused to look at the window. The sounds of children playing wore him down. "Take me back up to Jen-B," he asked. Tapper brightened. "All taken care of. As soon as you're ready. Healer has filed duplicate orders with us. You can convalesce just as well in space." Better, thought Caesar. As he walked to scooter he stole a glance at the playground and saw himself. Same red hair, freckles -- and the ball. The left eye patch and the disobedient ball. Tears filled both of Caesar's eyes. "Anywhere special you want to go? asked Jen-B cheerily. Caesar settled back in his couch and closed his eyes. "Let's go as far away as we can -- try for dutyout the Orion Arm," he said. He knew he was leaving his fouryear-old Genetic Carbon Copy behind -- in the capable hands of Library. Caesar had become the new Beast of #.  IF #Hi The Great Zambesi was pure gold underneath -- on the outside he was rotten! not the most pleasant man in really startling; he seemed to the world, and as the Great underplay it. But it was puzzling Zambesi he was not the greatest and it remained a puzzle even to magician. But he was a smart man those in the trade. This one prime and a good magician. He had the trick, equated him with the Real magnetism of a faith healer, the Masters who in general technique spirit and appearance of a rooster were a little out of his class. Actuand a deadly seriousness. He had ally, in the ultimate variation of it, the patter and the poise and he had it was the greatest trick, learned all that was learnable. He put Veronica into a box. Nor was he a mere pigeon-passer And when he opened the box again and card-caller. He had inherited, she was gone. That is all there was built up, bought and assembled as to it. The same thing had been perfull a repertoire as any Magic Man formed by dozens of others in in the business. many variations. And, as each must have, he had But Charles (the Great Zambesi) his specialty: a simple and sound Ghartel did not use any of those variations; not, certainly, the trap door -- for he had once performed the trick in a wire mesh twenty feet in the air. Besides, he was a cut above the trap-door men. After showing the empty box he would always take it apart board by board, and pass the boards around for all to handle. He would then assemble it once more into a box, clamp down the cover, unclamp it again, open it, and Veronica would get out of the box. The Great Boffo swore that the girl never stepped into the box at all. The Great Buffo, however, could not duplicate the trick. Nor could the Great Thaumaturgos, nor the Great Zebdo. All of them could make girls disappear from boxes, #T course, and could do it in more showy fashion. But, though it was the same thing to the audiences, it was not the same thing to themselves. Their tricks were known to each other and were obvious to any magic man. The special trick of ZambesiChartel was not understood and this gave him stature. The only men in the world who do not secretly believe in magic are the magicians, but there was something about the doings of the Great Zambesi that sowed doubt in them. The Great Vespo, indeed, claimed that he knew how it was done. But Vespo, though brillant, was an old man and was given to extravagant claims. The explanation that Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel gave to his audiences will not be given here. Should we repeat it, we would not be believed; we would be laughed at -- and we are sensitive. We have not the magnetism of Zambesi to carry off such an outlandish claim as his even though it should be true -- and it was. (Actually he said that he sent Veronica down into the Ocean and that he called her back again from that Ocean!) However, this isn't about the disappearance of Veronica; it is about a matter quite the opposite. And the opposite of the disappearance of Veronica was the appearance of someone who differed from her as much as possible. T his carfie about at the TriState Fair when the New Arena was quite new. The crowd was spirited and the Great Zambesi was in full form. The lighting was perfect and Veronica shone like a jewel set in gold as she stepped into the box that was set up on blocks, clear of the stage. Zambesi closed the box and the crowd had the true feeling of magic about to happen. And then, with perfect timing, Zambesi-Chartel threw back the front cover as to reveal the box -- empty. We will be hornswitched if that box was empty! But what rolled out of the box IF was not Veronica. It was the most woebegone scarecrow of a clown ever seen, the saddest looking man who ever stumbled over his own two feet. "Holy hamadryads, cramoise, where did you come from?" Zambesi-Chartel breathed without understanding his own words. The man out of the box was a hobo from a hundred years ago. He wept and wiped his nose with his hand. He had trouble with falling pants and broken shoes and a coat whose sleeve avoided arm. The little clown was good and there was real pathos in his silent humor. "You've got to get out of here, cnaufer," Chartel hissed at the little man again and again. "Who are you and how did you'get here? Off with you now, cathexis, you're fouling up the act." But the little man avoided Chartel who would have killed him in all sincerity. Finally Chartel in his despair closed the box loudly, then opened it again and brought Veronica out of it. But that didn't get rid of the little tramp. He was still cavorting about the stage and he was good. Listen, he was dressed in old black pants and a torn undershirt and one suspender and he walked about the stage. Then he had on a red sweater and a burglar's cap and black glasses. He still walked about the stage and suddenly he was splendid in evening clothes and monocle. Nobody had done that before. He became Joe College; he became the man in the charcoal-tan suit; he became an old rowdy-dow on the loose with pearl-gray vest and yellow gloves. Then he became a hobo again -- but of a different and worse vesture than before. "Go away, cistugurium," Veronica whispered angrily, "please go away. You're not supposed to be in the act. Who are you anyhow?" Nobody else had ever completely changed his garb six times in a minute and a half while hobbling about the stage with his hands in his pockets. Nobody else, transmuted his shoes from brown to black as he walked in them. The expression of the little rnan was pathetic and many eyes misted as they watched him. Then, before the act had begun to drag, the little man wobbled over and fell flat on his face in the box. Zambesi-Chartel closed it and stood poised over it in an intensity of fear and hope. Then he opened the box again. The little man was gone. Zambesi-Chartel took the box apart board by board and he left it apart. Well, it had been a good act with an added element... But Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel didn't know how he had done it this time -- or if he was the one who did it. The trick had 'always been to make Veronica disappear and appear; there sure hadn't been any little clown in the act before. "Damn that cressanges anyhow," Chartel grumbled. He was puzzled. He knew that little man -- and yet he didn't. L ater that night at the Pep' perpot some of the people ate and talked. There were Chartel himself and Veronica; there was Captain Carter who had the trained bears; there were the three Lemon sisters, Dolly, Molly, and Polly. Then another one was with them -- for the little man was sitting there and sniffling. He hadn't been there before and he hadn't come in. "Shall I order for you, claud?" Molly Lemon asked solicitously. But a filled plate was already there and the little man began to eat. He grinned and he grimaced. He was wearing horn-rim glasses and then he was wearing pincenez. He had a grin that came shyly as though he were trying it out for the first time. "clarence is so cute," said Dolly Lemon. "We will adopt him into our act if Chartel doesn't want him." There was an empty five-cigar carton on the table. The little man picked it up and it was full. Well, Chartel could duplicate that; probably you could yourself, but it would take prop and preparation. The little man pulled a stogie from the carton, puffed on it and it was lit. This also could be done; there are few tricks that cannot be duplicated. "If you are joining the act, cletus, and it seems as though you are," said Chartel wondering, "you will have to clean up a little." "Must I really?" asked curt but he obliged at once. He had become as immaculate a dandy as anyone ever saw. "Captain Carter," he said, "I see from your pocket bulge that you are a drinking man. I ask you to share it with us." "It's empty an hour since," Captain Carter muttered sadly. "It wasn't always empty," said cylix, the little man. "Let me see if I can restore it." "The last time a magician filled an empty whisky bottle for me -- and it was none other than old Zambesi-Chartel here -- the stuff was not potable. It was the most horrendous rock dew ever distilled." "This will be potable," said celiter -- and the bottle filled. Its content was gloriously potable. It put new life into the party and all of them, except ChartelZambesi, had a wonderful time. And if you don't think you can have fun with a reanimated bottle of whisky and Veronica and the three Lemon sisters you must have a different and more staid definition of fun.Oend," said Captain Carter IF when the small hours were half grown. "All good things do not have to end," said cajetan, the little man, who had been enjoying himself on Polly Lemon's lap. "The world shriveled when your thought was first put into words. Good things can go on forever, except that -- now and then -- they must be temporarily adjourned. As long as we understand that partings are only temporary." "Oh, we understand that, cuiller," said the, three Lemon sisters. So they temporarily adjourned the party. But later -- and this was after the sun itself was up -- Chartel and cyprian were finally alone. "We will have to have an explanation," said Chartel. "Who are you?" "You have no idea, Charles? Did you not take me out of the box? I thought you would know. Did you not call me up?" "I doubt I did. Do not try to hoax an old hoaxer. Where did you come from that first time? The stage was not trapped and you were not intruded with my knowledge." "Was I not? You told the audience how it was done. You said you .called me up out of the Ocean." "That is my patter -- but it doesn't apply to you. Dammit, ching-chi, where'd you get the Chinese robes and grow that little beard so fast? And how do you make them both change colors so neat? No, chawan, I never called any such fish as you out of the Ocean." "In that case I will leave, since I am here through a misunderstandmg. "Stay a bit, cyfaill. In my patter that is the way I make the girl disappear. How could it make you appear?" "Charles, I've heard you explain the principle dozens of times. I was not in the box. But in a little while I would be in the box. So we adjust the box to a near moment in the future and I am in the box." "There's a lacuna in your logic, clunis," Chartel said. "Hey, how can you turn into a Hottentot so easily? And not into a real Hottentot either, coya -- but into what I would call an old burlesquestage idea of a Hottentot." "You always did have a good imagination, Charles," said chabiari. He took up an empty glass, shook it, and it was filled again. "You're my master there, cosmos," said Chartel. "I couldn't duplicate that without props and you've done it three times. How?" "By our own theory that we worked out so long ago, Charles. I shift it only a little in time and it is done. Anything that has once been full can be filled again by taking it back to the time of its plenitude." "Chester, you have a patter that won't quit. But, if it worked -- the idea would be a good one." "It does work, Charles. I thought we knew that. We have used it so long." "You talk and talk, collard," said Chartel. "But I still do not know how you can change your whole appearance so easily and often." "Why, Charles, we are protean," said coilon. "That is the sort of man we are." Finnerty, the manager of the show, spoke to Chartel about the little man. "Your brother from the old country has put new life into the act," he said. "Keep him in it. We haven't mentioned money -- and I am seldom the one to bring up the subject -- but we can settle on a figure. Will it be payable to him or to you?" "It will be payable to me," said Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel. Confused he was, but he always knew the top and bottom side of a dollar. Finnerty and Chartel settled on a figure. have been taken for X my brother from the old country," Chartel told colin a bit later, "and I can s,ee why. I wondered whom you reminded me of. Oh, stop turning fnto a rooster! If you were shaved and combed -- say, that was quick, contumace! The resemblance would be, is, even closer. You do look like me; you are an extremely handsome man. But I did not know that I had a brother, compuesto, and I do not know what country the old country is -- since I was born on Elm Street in Springfield." "Perhaps 'brother' is a euphemism for something even closer, Charles; and the 'old country' may have a special meaning for us. Is it not the name for what is on the other side of your 'Ocean'?" "columkill, you are as phony as -- well, metaphor fails me -- you are as phony; as myself," said Charles Chartel. Sometimes the little man was frightening in his wild actions. There wasn't a mean bone in him, and he was almost universally liked. But he did act on impulse. For him, to think was to act. It was good that everybody liked him; if they hadn't they'd have hanged him high. And always he would multiply things. Chartel begged for his secret. "We could be rich, cogsworth, really rich," Chartel voxd plead. "But we are already rich, Charles. Nobody has ever had such a rich and perfected personality as we have. You still do not appreciate the greatness of our trick, Charles, though we thought about it for years before we were able to dp it. It's the noblest illusion of them all. Now IF we are citizens of an abounding world and everything in it is ours. That is to be rich." "consuelo, you are a bleeding doctrinaire. I did not ask for a lecture. I only ask that you show me how to make a hundred dollars grow where one grew before. I say that is to be rich." "I've shown you a hundred times, Charles, and you look for more than is in it. You take a thin old wallet that once new fatness. You restore it to its old state, empty it and restore it again, and so you accumulate. But why do you want money?" "It is just that I have a passion for collecting it, courlis." "Collecting we can understand, but the true collector will have no desire for duplicates. Understandably we might want a bill of each size -- a one, a five, a ten, a fifty, -- but we avoid that which once we prized -- the ten-thousand dollar bill. The avid people have spoiled it for us. But you have not the true collectors' spirit, Charles." "I have the true moneycollectors' spirit, clendon. Why cannot I duplicate your feats in this?" "The only reason I can figure, Charles, is that you're just too duck-knuckled dumb -- and it hurts me to say that about one of ourselves." B ut Zambesi-Chartel got a new set of ideas when he saw the trick that cormorant did with an old hat. It was at a rummage sale at which charleroi looked in out of curiosity -- he was curious about everything. "What a pixie must have worn this!" he exclaimed. "What a pixie!" c held the hat in his hands. And then he held the head in his hands. It was something like a pixie head and it was attached to the body of a young lady, cisailles kissed the young lady uncommonly about the temporal regions and pressed her to his sternum -- for to him impulse was the same as action. And she squealed. "Not that I mind -- but you did startle me," she chimed. "Who are you? Who, may I ask, am I? And how in pigeon-toed perdition did I get here?" "You are a pixie, young lady," said dough, "and as such you are likely to turn up anywhere. I had your hat, so what more natural than that I should call you up to fill it." "I am only a part-time pixie, cartier, but I am a full-time housewife. Supper will burn. How do I get back?" "You already are," said Callimachus. And she vvas. Or at least she was no longer there. And that was the beginning of the trouble; not for c, not for the young pixie lady, but it was the beginning of the trouble for Charles (Great Zambesi) Chattel. Charles knew how it was done now. One cannot continue doing a basic trick in the presence of such a sharpy as Charles Chartel without his learning it. And once he had learned how it was done there was no stopping him. Charles Chartel was not a bad man underneath, but on the surface he was a rotter. The natural complement of healthy greed that is in every man began to burgeon unnaturally in him. The hard core of meanness spread through his whole being. The arrogance of the rooster became that of the tyrant and envy and revenge burned in him with sulphurous fire. Chartel now had the key to total wealth, a key that would not only unlock all doors for him, but lock them against others. He set out to get control of the show. To do this he had to break Finnerty, the owner-manager, and buy him out after breaking him. Business had been'good and every night Finnerty had a full cash box. But before a thing is full, it is half full. And before that, it is a quarter full. Every night, just as Finnerty went to count the take, Zambesi-Chartel would play a trick on that box. And it would be only a quarter full. That was not enough to cover expenses. Finnerty had never been a saving man. He had always trod the narrow green edge between solvency and disaster. And in two weeks he was broke. Finnerty sold the show and the bookings to Chartel for ten thousand dollars. It made a nice wad in his pocket when he walked away from the show that was no longer his. But the meanness was running like a tide in Chartel and he wouldn't let it go at that. He emptied the wallet of Finnerty again, taking it back ten minutes in time. Finnerty felt a certain lightness, and he knew what it was. But he kept on walking. "It's lucky he left me with my pants," said Finn, "if he has. I'm afraid to look down." little family that was the show. Veronica felt herself abused and it wasn't imagination. The three Lemon sisters shivered to the chill of a harsh master. So did Carucchi the singer, and Cqptain Carter and his bears. And c, the little man who was the unwitting cause of it all, took to staying out of the way of the rampaging Chartel. For Zambesi-Chartel was now avid for praise, for money, for all manner of meanness. He accumulated coin by every variation of the new trick he had learned. He fobbed by it, he burgled the easy way. It is an awful and sickening thing to see a good man grow rich and respected. "But underneath he. isn't a bad man at all," Veronica moaned. "Really he isn't." IF "No underneath he is a fine man," said c, the little man of impulse. "Who should know better than I?" "Why, what do you mean, chadwick dear?" Veronica asked him. "The same as you. Charles is only bad on the surface. Underneath he's a fine fellow." But on the surface, Zambesi-Chartel sure did get rough. He demeaned the dignity of his fellow humans and made them eat dirt by the ton. He went on adrenalin drunks and thrived on the hatred in his own bloodstream. He became a martinet, a propagandist for the Hoop act. He registered Democrat. He switched from perfectos to panatelas and from honest whisky sours to perfidious martinis. He developed a snigger and horselaugh that, wilted pigweeds. "Oh, chiot," said Veronica, "we must do something to save him from himself. We are all involved with him." . "Who should know better than I?" conchy latus asked sadly. Chartel began to drink tea. He started to call a napkin a serviette and to omit every single syllable in "extraordinary." He switched allegiance from the noble National League to the sniveling American. He defrauded his laborers of their wages, he used scent, he ate vegetarian lunches, he read Walter Lippmann posthumously, he switched from Gumbo Hair Oil to begins to deteriorate it goes all the way and in every detail. Chartel had the Green Sickness, the inordinate love of money. He obtained the stuff, first by all means fair and foul, then by foul means only. But obtain it he did and it made a sniveling devil out of him. "But the man underneath isn't bad at all," Veronica insisted. "Who should know better than I?" caoine said. The Grand Canyon began with a prairie dog burrow and once it was started there was no stopping it. The downfall of Zambesi-Chartel began over a nickle and then the whole apparatus came down: his wealth, real and phantom -- his reputation -- the whole blamed complex of the man. It started with a fist fight he had with a blind newsdealer over a nickel. It ended with Chartel in jail, indicted, despised, shamed, despondent. Moreover, public feeling was strongly against him. Chartel was up on more than twenty counts of theft and pilfering and the nickel stolen from the blind man was by no means the least of them. He was up on a dozen counts of wage fraud. He was charged with multiplex pickpocketing'by device not understood'. They had him on faked bill of sale, dishonest conveyance. simple and compounded larceny, possession of stolen goods, barratry. "Looks like we have you on everything but chicken-stealing," the judge said at the hearing. "We have him on that, too," said the bailiff. "Five counts of it." "You would gag a gannet and make a buzzard belch," said the judge. "I'd crop your ears if that law still obtained. And if we can find a capital offense in all this offensiveness I'll have your head. It is hard to believe that you were once human." Chartel was shamed and sick of heart and felt himself friendless. That night he attempted to hang himself in his cell. The attempt failed for reasons that are not clear but not for any lack of effort on his part. It is worthy of note that the only persons who ever attempt to take their own lives are rather serious persons. "We will have to go to him at once, cristophe," said Veronica. "We must show him that we still love him. He'd sicken a jackal the way he's behaving, but he isn't really like that. The man underneath -- " "Hush, Veronica, you embarrass me when you talk like that," said ciabhach. "I know what a prince is the man underneath." L ittle c went to visit the Great Zambesi-Chartel in his cell. "It is time we had a talk," he j said.  "No, no, it's too late for" talk," said Charles Chartel. "You have disgraced us both, Charles," said celach. "It goes very deeply when it touches me." "I never even knew who you were, little c. You are protean and you are not at all plausible." "You called me up and you still don't know who I am, Charles? But this was our finest trick, our greatest illusion on which we worked subconsciously for years. We are our own masterpiece, Charles. And you didn't recognize it when it happened. You are the Magic Man but I am the Magic Man run wild. Aye, Charles, he's best when he runs wild." "Tell me, cicerone, who are you? Who am I?" Chartel begged. "What is my difficulty?" "Our difficulty, Charles, is that one of us became too serious," carnefice tried to explain. "To be serious is the only capital crime. For that, one of us will have to die -- but it isn't as though it were a serious matter. Every man is at least two men, but ordinarily the two are not at the same time bodied and apparent. Now you have marred our greatest trick -- but it was fun while it lasted." Little c signaled to Veronica and she came down the corridor with a bunch of boards under her arm. She was admitted to the cell by the puzzled jailor. IF "One of us will have to leave forever," coquelicot told Charles Chartel. "It isn't right for both of us to be around." "Ah, I will be sorry to see you go, chandos," said Chartel. "But who are you? I never could remember your name properly and there is something weird about that. You change forever in appearance and name. Who are yoU, little c?" "Only that. Just little c. Or shall we say sub-c? But we are too clever to be hounded into a hole like this, Charle. Remember! We were our own greatest trick, even if it failed." "What must we do now?" Chartel asked dully. "A simple transference," cogne said. He was building the box board by board. "I'm not a bad man underneath," Chartel sniveled. "I'm misunderstood." "No, we're a fine man underneath, Charles. I am the man underneath," said ciud. "Get in the box." " get in? I am Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel. You are only little c, sub-c, an aspect of myself. I will not get into the box!" "Get in, Charles," said cistercium. "It was a mix-up from the beginning. You were never meant to see the light of day. The wrong one of us has been running loose." "I'll fight. I'll claw. I'll rant!" "That's what a healthy subconscious is supposed to do," cludok said. "Get in!" "It's murder! I won't go! It's oblivion!" "No such thing, Charles. It isn't as though we weren't the same person. I'll still be here." Then little c and Veronica shoved the Great Zambesi Charles Chartel down into the box and closed the lid. In doing so, little c became himself the Great Zambesi. For, when he opened the box again, it was empty. And he took it apart board by board. The jailor said that he had to have his prisoner and Veronica gave him the boards. "There, there, doll," she said. "Make one out of them. Try real hard." And Veronica and the Great Zambesi left that place. wasn't the greatest magician in the world. He may have become the greatest, after he began to treat it lightly. People, he was good! There was never any act with such variety and fun in it. After his strange mid-life hiatus he achieved new heights. "And I'm certainly glad you overcame your personality difficulties," the loving Veronica told him later. "For a while there -- whoof! But r always knew you were a fine man underneath."   Continued from page #) best story of the year, best Retief story ever. Rivals Mark Twain. Eugene Reynolds Dear Ejler: If your writers will write stories with English settings, they ought to learn the English usage in the words "will," "shall," "would," and "should." Mr. Benford, in "#:# P.M., Oxford" IF. Sep.-Oct., #, pp. ##, I#ff) does it consistently wrong. Kaor, L. Sprague de Camp The British do the same to us. Dear Sir: In spite of doing a lot of reading, I rarely take the time to write about what I have read. I feel compelled to make an exception, however, and comment on Pinon Fall by Michael Bishop in the Oct-Nov. Galaxy. The delicately haunting theme of this story remained with me long after I had finished reading it -- not a commonplace occurrence. The writer shows a sensitivity of expression and a talent for original description not frequently encountered. I can still see "camels standing the snow." I look forward to reading more by Mr. Bishop. A Ibany, Georgia # I # Dear Mr. Jakobsson, To comment your four magazines: Blish's short novels are great. The latest in his Black Easter series was good, but I anticipated the punch line. My god! The Heinlein Serial is in Five parts? No, fourEd. That means another six months. Will you go hack on monthly schedules again? Galaxy is monthly againEd. IF is good too. Davidson, Garett, Eisenberg, Niven. It's great. How about having Van Vogt go outside the Silkies series. Step this up to monthly. Semi monthly. Weekly. I'll buy it. Worlds of Fanasy was excellent. Del Rey's story was as good an anything he ever wrote. All the shorts were very good to excellent. Walker between the Planes was good, but Norton was unreadable (but then, I don't particularly care for Mrs. Norton). Schedule this regularly. good. Smith good. All the shorts very good to excellent, except for Bridge. It was mediocre as a story and somewhat smutty (don't tell me about imagery.) Step this up to a regular schedule. Ratings (on scale of ten) Galaxy #.I , If #, Worlds of Fantasty #, and you had left out Bridge, and gotten some good artwork. Artwork is my beef. Gaughan is good, but you're overloading him. How about Finlay, or Rotsler. You're peaking the ten-year cycle. Take advantage of it. Universal looks big enough to get some decent distribution. Good luck. Hopejully, Robert Bryan Lipton IF The alien knew a humanity that humans had forgotten... ing Finmouth Race week. I was sitting in the lounge of the Hoversail Club, scotch-and-dry in hand and conscious of that dreamy, relaxed sensation of well-being which is half the enjoyment of sailing. It is, as they say, great when you stop. The panoramic, curved window of the club lounge gives a wonderful view of the bay and it is possible to watch a race from start to finish without shifting one's rear from the plush upholstery. My first race had gone well -- I have a little Dodger in the #square-foot class -- and I had finished third in the second race of the first day. The timewas twelve noon. I could,smell the lunch simmering in the club's kitchens. The weather was fine with a fair breeze. And I was not scheduled to sail again until five o'clock. Plenty of time for another drink, lunch, then a comfortable afternoon in interesting company until my race. Life was good; the office seemed light-years away. Conversation was muted; the drone of sailing talk was easy, familiar upon my ears. I was halflistening to a group nearby, too idle in my euphoria to join in the conversation but finding the talk a pleasant background to my appreciatioaof the day's third race. "He'll kill someone, one of tRese days." Naturally my attention was attracted as a sharp female voice cut through the murmur like a titanium keelblade. I wasn't the only one who noticed; conversation in the lounge stopped abruptly as some fifty people glanced at the speaker -- an embittered-looking forty-year-old in a too-tight sweater -- then at the race in progress to divine who the potential murderer was. The woman looked slightly abashed'as she caught my eye; she hastily resumed a more normal tone as she continued. "Ralph Streng, I mean. Just look at him now, he almost had that skimmer's stern off. You wouldn't expect a physician to sail like that -- almost as if he were trying to create trade for himself." She laughed harshly, aware that she was attempting to justify making herself the focus of attention. "Now, Lucy," a plump armchair yachtsman mumbled through his cigar. "You know very well you were making a play for him last year and got the brush-off. He's a good sailor, the Doc. Taking that son of his withhim today, too. There's a handicap for you." "What the hell's he trying to prove?" demanded the woman. "Whatever it is, it won't be at my expense. Widowers get selfish; they should remarry," she finished illogically. The conversation became general again as I watched the skimmers round the final marker IF and head for the finish. The boat with the red-striped sail had moved into the lead after an incredibly tight turn and obviously could not be caught. A few minutes later a cannon's boom and a scattered burst of applause signaled the end of the race. I had started my lunch by the time the recent contestants crowded noisily into the lounge. The dining room at the club is, in effect, a continuation of the lounge; a neat area of white tables for four and attentive, jacketedand-tied waiters. The view is the same; the sweep of the bay from Hart Point to the west merging into the estuary of the Fin to the east -- you can still watch the sailing while you work your way through the remarkably good lunch they serve. I was dining alone and had been the first to sit down -- I usually am. My wife informs me this is pure greed and evidence of my selfish nature, but I always tell her there is plenty for all and someone has to start first. It takes moral courage to be the first person into a large dining room full of predatory waiters...Once again I had proved myself right for, encouraged by my example, others Were now drifting in, sheeplike. At the next table waiters were bucketing Lucy and her escorts into chairs. "Ralph, darling!" she cried suddenly. "Come and join our table. Tell us about the race. Did that bastard Clarke try to cut you out at the marker? Congratulations, by the way." heavy build was threading his way through the tables in our direction. "Hi, Lucy," he murmured, inclining his large head gravely. "Afternoon, Fisher -- Zimmermann." He sat down and began to talk sailing, quietly. He was an impressive figure even when sitting, his powerful neck rising from a vast pullover; a'bove it a huge mane of gray hair. His blue eyes were sharp in a strong, weatherbeaten face. Naturally I overheard most of the ensuing conversation, which veered from sailing to fishing, biology, medicine and the forthcoming visit of the physicians' delegation from Canaral. "To study the origins of life," Streng was explaining. "It would appear that Earth is a very much younger planet than Canaral. They are also doing work on cancer research." "Do tell me, Ralph," Lucy asked with coy interest, "what do they look like?" Streng chuckled, a deep rumble. "I've no idea. It never occurred to me to wonder, believe it or not. I tend to look on fellow scientists as minds rather than bodies. All I know is they're about our size and bipeds. That information, my dear Lucy, was supplied by the immigration authorities when they asked me to put one of the team up at Cliffside."' He paused, aware of the effect of his words. "You mean you're going to have one staying with you?" The woman squealed. Her hand was resting on Streng's forearm. "He arrives Sunday night and will be staying until Friday." Lucy was regarding Streng through wide eyes. "Oh, Ralph, do ask me along to meet him. I've never met an alien. May I come one evening? I simply must meet him. Will he be green, do you think?" She giggled in a grotesque parody of girlishness. Beside her, the man called Zimmermann met my eyes, then raised his own to the ceiling in mock supplication as he lit his after-lunch cigar. I paid my .bill and left the dining room, glad that I was not able to number Lucy among my acquaintances and resolving that during the coming week I would make sure things stayed that way. Streng interested me, however; it was difficult to reconcile the mildmannered but compelling man in the dining room with a fiercely ruthless racing sailor. He had struck me as a man of sound common sense, which didn't tally with his disregard for personal safety -- and the safety of others -- when racing. Particularly as he had a young boy aboard with him. At the seaward side of the clubhouse, which is built into a cliffface, a steep flight of concrete steps leads down to the club jetty where the craft bobbed gently at anchor within the shelter of Finmouth breakwater. I descended with the idea of getting a bit of Jayne II with fuel so that I wouldn't have to do this at the last minute before the race, when there would be a queue at the pump. As I hauled on the rope, drawing Jayne II toward the jetty, I noticed Streng's boat, red-striped sail flapping idly, floating nearby. Sitting on the foredeck and gazing out to sea while he trailed a hand in the water was a boy of about twelve whom I took to be Streng's son. As Jayne II drifted past he looked around and, as his eye followed the line of the rope that stretched taut to my hand, he turned sideways and I saw his face. The eyes were slanted, his complexion pale. The nose was thick around the nostrils and the ears protruded lumpy from the head which, about the crown, was curiously flat. As he looked at me he smiled, loose lipped. He was a mongol. I wondered what kind of man could take such a boy sailing and take further risks by sailing dangerously. T here seemed to be some problem with Streng's Dodger. IF Maybe he hadn't had time to check it that day as he had previously been racing in the #square-foot Skimmer class. The judges, were giving him a rough time. for the gun, when the launch swept out from the jetty and stopped alongside Streng; apparently they had noticed some unaccountable drift. Now the rules at Race Week are strict and the judges meticulous. The motor which provides the hoversailer with lift must not exceed #cc and must not give any directional motion. Forward motion of the boat is provided entirely by the action of the wind on the sails as in oldtime sailboats and the handling is similar, except that the only part of the hoversailer actually touching the water is the thin keelblade. Given a moderate breeze, the craft can move very fast. It appeared that one of Streng's vanes had become displaced, causing the downthrust of air to emerge at an angle; the flippers of a frogman thrashed the surface as he probed beneath the craft, making adjustments. Strerig's expression was ominous as the other competitors, motors popping and boats riding easily, tacked around passing derisive comments. There is something peculiarly comic about the appearance of a lame, wallowing hoversailer. Eventually repairs were completed and the judges' launch roared off, the judges giving Streng a last, suspicious glance. A brief period of jockeying for position followed and then the race was underway. A tight bunch closehauled for the first buoy. Streng was to my starboard, his face set in concentration as he willed his craft to pull clear of the ruck. His son sat quietly in the small well just aft of the mast, smiling afid from time to time waving at the other competitors. The breeze had freshened and we were moving fast as we approached the first marker where we were to turn for a long, broad reach across the bay to the second marker, which signaled a straight run for home. Streng tacked to bring him closer to the marker for his turn, I followed and the rest of take a chance by trying something different. By now Streng and I were a couple of lengths ahead of the field; somehow I had felt it would come to this. I led him fractionally to the turn but he drifted to leeward as he went about, forcing me to drop behind. It was cleverly done and gained him a length. He didn't look in my direction -- he was staring ahead fixedly -- but he knew I knew what he had done. I felt a surge of blind rage but fought it down. There's no profit in losing your temper during a race. In any event, I knew I had him on the broad reach because, although our craft were evenly matched, he was carrying more weight. I was gaining as we swept for the final turn, despite having trouble with my equalizer. I wonder if seeing me fiddling with the controls gave Streng his idea. The equalizer is a device that directs extra pressure into the leeward side of the craft's cushion of air when the wind is coming from abeam, so that instead of heeling over she continues to ride upright, reaping the maximum advantage of the breeze. My equalizer was playing up; every now and then the boat would lurch perceptibly. Nevertheless I was gaining, inching up on Streng as he stared funously ahead, his thick gray hair flopping in the wind, his strong jaw set. The son was watching me vacantly and I heard Streng snarl at him, as the poor lad absently trailed his fingers in the water. We were neck and neck, no more than a handsbreadth separating our craft as we went for the turn. I had been calculating that there would be no need to jib, just a close turn around the buoy and a quick run for the finish; leaving Streng, with his extra weight, well behind. I was outside as we turned, marginally in the lead. I knew what followed was deliberate because I was watching Streng's face. His hand was on the equalizer control and, veering, his craft suddenly heeled violently. He uttered a shout of simulated alarm for the benefit of those behind. His boom lashed across towards me, the sail cracking in a thunderous jib. I flung up my arm, received a smashing blow on the elbow, felt the boats collide violently and was thrown into the low well. As I pulled myself up one-armed, sick with pain, I caught sight of Streng's fierce backward grin as he eased his boat into an unbeatable lead. I seemed to have lost the use of my arm. I thought it was broken. Gathering up the ropes onehanded I set in hopeless pursuit, steering with my foot, senseless with rage. tended to do; follow Streng into the club perhaps and dispute the result of the race with the judges. But I wouldn't have stood a chance; for one thing Streng was local and I was an outsider. There was also the point -- and this really rankled -- that he cut a far more impressive figure than I: I knew that his personal magnetism would carry the judges. One only had to remember the woman Lucy; she could dismember Streng from a distance, but once under the influence of those deep eyes and leonine impression of suppressed power and she fawned over him. At that moment, however, I IE could only think of getting to grips with the man and Wiping that overbearing confidence from his face with my one good hand. The cannon sounded with Streng twenty lengths ahead. To my surprise he continued on his course, leaving the club to port and making for the wide mouth of the Fin estuary. I followed, puzzled at his passing up the chance to bask in the congratulations of his fellow yachtsmen and assuming in my ignorance that maybe his conscience was troubling him. The mouth of the Fin is strewn with sandbanks; the boat with the red-striped sail was weaving its way through and I was closing, using Streng as a pilot. To our left lay the holiday resort of Finmouth, beyond which rose the cliffs and, now passing out of view, the Hoversail club. Further ahead the estuary narrowed between steep greenwooded slopes, the. still water colored with moored yachts of all sizes. I wondered how far upstream Streng's house lay; the tide was receding and mudflats appeared at the water margins. Jayne II slowed as we reached the narrower reach and I was glad of the following wind; I wouldn't have liked to beat against that strong current. Streng had glanced over his shoulder and seen me following. His course became erratic and I guessed he was trying to lead me aground on a mudfl#. Reaching forward I winched up the keelblade so that the small rudder became the only part of the craft actually touching the water. With the wind behind, this does not cause any significant loss of control. We passed a small village of pink-and-white cottages clustered about the water's edge under the shadow of the hills and I saw what I took to be Streng's house. Set among the trees on the steep slope beyond the village, it was the last sign of habitation before the estu-. ary narrowed, about a mile farther, into a shallow race tumbling from the distant moorland. Steps dropped from the house to a ramshackle wooden landing stage. By now I was close and saw what happened clearly. Streng dropped the sail deftly, steering straight for the stage and relying on the current to slow him. At the last moment he cut his motor, his craft sank to water. He jumped to the stage, holding a painter which he made fast, then turned to assist his son ashore. The boy leaped, grabbing for his father's hand, but missed his footing. Streng, reaching and overbalancing, tottered with flailing arms and in an instant the two of them were floundering in the muddy water, drifting with the current away from the landing stage. Handicapped by my injiired arm, I made a wide pass in their direction, then dropped everything and threw a rope to Streng, who had drifted near. He scrambled aboard quickly, dripping. "For God's sake get the boy," be gasped, plucking at the tiller and getting in my way. "He can't swim. Hurry, man!" Looking back on the episode, I wonder how I restrained myself. Streng had smashed my arm and made it a near impossibility to control the boat. He had taken a mongol child sailing without a life-jacket. He had been responsible for the boy's falling in. Yet here he was giving orders on my own boat. Did he think I wanted the boy to drown? But at the time it was different. Streng's face was contorted with fear, the boy was struggling twenty yards away and the situation was desperate. "You'd better take over," I said mildly, moving forward. "I can't move my left arm." In a flurry of ropes and legs we changed places and Streng, whipping in the sail like a maniac, whirled the craft around and began to beat against the wind in short, qick tacks. "Oh, God -- oh, God -- " he muttered as he tacked swiftly, his huge head jerking this way and that with each turn, his eyes fixed on his struggling son. "It's all right, Tom, it's all right!" he shouted desperately, his voice echoing up the wooded slopes. "Just keep up. Keep up. I'm coming! Oh, God -- " His lips were trembling and his hand was bone-white on the tiller. "Easy, Tom, easy," I said, leaning out and grasping the boy under the arms as we swept by, drawing him across the foredeck, where he lay gagging and coughing. Streng pushed me aside roughly and an agonizing pain stabbed my elbow. "It's all right now, Tom," he murmured, kneeling on the foredeck and patting the boy on the back. "Everything's ail right now. We'll soon have you home and in bed -- Get the bloody boat under control," he snarled suddenly, glaring up at me. "Back to the house, quickly." Now that the crisis was past, this was too much for me. I stood up, bracing myself against the mast as the hoversail, motor puttering, headed aimlessly across the estuary. "Just who the flaming hell do you think you are?" I asked as quietly as I could manage. "What right have you got to give me orders after what's happened?" His eyes were frightening, redrimmed. "I said get this bloody boat back to the house!" he shouted. "Are you blind, man? Can't you see this boy's a mongol? Don't you know how easily he'll get pneumonia?" "No, I don't know," I replied, with forced, enraged callousness. After all, you're the doctor, not me. Maybe you should have IF thought of this before you took him sailing." He stared at me. Suddenly his shoulders relaxed. He blinked and his eyes were calmer. "Would you mind getting us back to the house?" he asked quietly. "Perhaps you'd like to come up for a drink and I'll take a look at that arm of yours." Obediently I seated myself at the tiller. I concluded his examination of my elbow. "Jarred a nerve, I expect. You may get a bit of a bruise there later." "Thanks," I replied sarcastically. Streng left to get changed -- the boy had already been taken in hand by the housekeeper, a gaunt old maid named, oddly, Sylvia -- and I relaxed in the deep armchair, gazing around the room and sipping Johnny Walker. It was obviously, a man's room. An old-fashioned open fire blazed in an untidy hearth and the mantelpiece was littered with pipes, tobacco jars, paperbacks and a glass bottle in which an obscene lump of flesh was suspended in liquid. More books on the shelves which flanked the fireplace; mostly medical tomes with an occasional adventure story. I got up and wandered about, my footsteps cushioned by deep carpet. The chairs were leather, brassstudded and old; the corners of the room held assorted items of sporting equipment -- a bag of golf clubs, half a pair of oars to which was tied a pair of rowlocks, an ancient, suicidal twelvebore and a pair of tennis shoes which looked, if anything, even older. There was the walnut cabinet which held an astonishing array of liquor, the small bookcase with 'the model Cutty Sark on top -- everything, the complete bachelor setup in kit form, somehow a little to comprehensive to be true. I didn't believe it. I sat down again, this time at the window, and watched real life in the form of an elderly rowing boat whose occupants were genuinely, if abortively, spinning for bass. This room was fake. The stuff had been placed there, not Just allowed to accumulate but placed to create an effect; maybe to convince Streng himself that he was a normal G.P. living a normal, comfortable bachelor existence. "How do you like my little place?" He had entered quietly and spoke quietly, uttering the conventional words pleasantly, smiling. "How about a refill?" "Thanks." I handed him my glass. "It's very -- comfortable. You have varied interests." He gave me a curious look as he bent to fiddle with the bottles. "I keep myself amused," he replied. "And Sylvia is very capable." "She looks after Tom?" I ventured. He passed that one over and made a brief but extraordinarily convincing apology for the race episode. The man was smooth and my temper, which had begun to rise again at the sight of him, ebbed. After the near-drowning, arguing didn't seem quite so important. "Tell me," he resumed abruptly, passing me a full glass and sitting down, "what were your thoughts when you saw me fall in the river? I mean, what did you really think? Be honest, now." He grinned disarmingly. '# thought it served you damned well right." "Naturally. So why did you pull me out?" "Because you might have drowned, of course. And your son, too." "That may be obvious to you, but I would like to know the true reason why you pulled me out of the water." He regarded me quizzically, puffing volumes of pipe smoke. I felt on the defensive, but was amused by his persistance. "Because I believe in the sanctity of human life," I replied. "Try again." Damn the man; I felt compelled to have another go. "Because I feel it's the thing to do, to rescue another sailor in difficulties; or anyone else, for that matter." "No," he said calmly, smiling. "Because I was scared that if I didn't rescue you -- you would be on my conscience for the rest of my life." "Getting warmer. Do go on, Mr. Warren. This is interesting." I felt as though I were taking part in an experiment; an important one, from Streng's point of view. "Because," I said at last, "I was frightened that someone might see me letting you drown." He laughed, a deep, reassuring sound. "Excellent. You're quite right, of course; but it took you a long time to get there." "You don't think of these things right away," I said with sarcasm. "We all do just what we want to do, Mr. Warren, always. We can't blame a thief for being a thief, or a to save me and at the same time you didn't want to save me. Quickly, so quickly you were not aware of it, you weighed the pros and cons. And you decided you wanted to save me more than you didn't want to. It was the least unpleasant of the possibilities. The easiest way out. You would have hated to be branded a murderer." "What about you, at the final marker buoy?" I asked. "I wanted to win the race. I had no fear of being caught out, and I didn't know you from Adam." "You're Just bloody immoral." "Amoral, Mr. Warren. We all are but I admit it." He chuckled. Against my better, or moral. IF judgment, as the evening wore on I began to like the man. He was trying to be honest. We sat drinking scotch and talking through a haze of blue smoke while night fell outside and the firelight took over, throwing crimson flickers among the leather and walnut. "Have you ever read Canaral philosophy?" he was asking, gazing into the bowl of his pipe. "The immigration people mailed me a book, so I wouldn't drop any gaffes with this weirdo they're sending me. It's fascinating. They're telepathic and, so they say, are all members, cells if you like, of one overall being. So they naturally act for the good of one another. Unlike us. Imagine that. No murders, no theft, no adultery. A totally ethical community." He laughed. "Bloody boring if you ask me." I smiled. I was becoming attuned to his way of thinking. T he following day was Sunday and, due to the centuries-old view of Finmouth Town Council that competitive open-air sport is sinful, there was no racing. The faithful gathered at the club as usual, however, and the day was spent in practice and tuning up the craft for the week to come. Ralph Streng appeared after lunch, having motored down with the intention of sailing his second craft back to Cliffside for minor adjustments. "By the way," he said. "Do you fancy the idea of coming up for a bite of dinner at my place tonight? Sylvia's a passable cook and I think you'll find it interesting; our visitor from Canaral should be there." I accepted his invitation gratefully; I was staying at a small guest house in Finmouth and had found the inmates a dull crowd; there seemed to be no middle ground between elderly women and young, noisy families. And I was looking forward to meeting the alien. I arrived at Cliffside at nine o'clock, later than I had intended, having missed my way several times in the dark, winding lanes. Streng greeted me at the door. "Glad to see you could make it, Arthur." He was grinning secretively. "Our visitor's arrived," he added, dropping his voice. "Not quite what I expected, although he is a biped." He ushered me into his den, study or whatever he called it. "Come and have a Tio Pepe before dinner. Chandi, meet Mr. Arthur Warren, a friend of mine. A fellow yachtsman." A wraithlike creature uncoiled from a chair and took my hand gently. Slow-moving and softspoken, he stood about six foot six, very slender and looking somehow pliable, like soft putty. His hand was warm and dry to the touch. "I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. Arthur Warren," Chandi murmured. "Call him Arthur," Streng urged. "We got on Christian name terms last night, after some initial difficulty." "Arthur." The alien sat down slowly. He was dressed in a closefitting coverall of silken material which accentuated his slender form. His features were reassuringly humanoid. "So you -- ah -- race boats, too. You compete. How very interesting." I gathered that the concept of sporting competition -- possibly any sort of competition -- was new to his way of thinking. He asked a number of questions politely, listening attentively to our replies. Chandi and Streng, I thought with some amusement, represented completely opposite types. I wondered how they would make out in the next few days. "We do not compete on Canaral," Chandi was explaining. "The necessity does not arise. We are a very old race, you know, and possibly a little set in our ways. Unadventurous, you would say. We research, we philosophize -- but how can we compete, when we are telepathic among ourselves and all members of the same mother body, just as the individual physical cells are members of our physical bodies?" "How about overpopulation?" asked Streng. "Surely the real basis for competition is the search for -- and defense of -- living room and food supplies?" "We do not suffer from overpopulation. That is a disease, if you will forgive me, of Earth and similar young cultures." "Euthanasia," I heard Streng mutter. "Do you put your old people to sleep -- kill them, I mean, and -- " he asked with a very obvious effort -- "destroy malformed and idiot children at birth?" There was a long silence. At last Chandi spoke. "It is too easy to destroy, Ralph; maybe that is the trouble with Earth. The really difficult and worthwhile thing is to create." Over dinner the talk turned naturally to Streng's curious views on human psychology. "It's all a question of relative advantage to the individual," he was explaining as we sipped our liqueurs. "To take a simple example -- theft. Let us say I see a camera in a shop window. I can take it while the shopkeeper's attention is elsewhere. But my desire to do so is more than counterbalanced by the fear of consequences if somebody sees me. So I don't take the camera. "But suppose I found nhe camera, say in the street, and no one saw me pick it up. Even if the address of the owner were in the case the chances are I would keep it." "How do you explain the frequent return of lost property?" I asked. "Easy. Either the finder doesn't IF want the article at all, or he desires the goodwill of the true owner more than the article itself. A desire for the approval of others plays a big part in our makeup." "Don't you ever experience a feeling of obligation to return a favor, Ralph?" asked Chandi in some amusement. "Never," he replied flatly. "But I admit that I desire the approval of my fellow men, which is the same thing. I'm working on it, though." "You may become the next step in evolution, Ralph." I laughed. "Homo Independent." He looked at me, huge head strong with shadow and deep eyes serious in the candlelight. "Who knows?" he said softly. "Just imagine the truly honest world, where no man is held responsible for his actions because all men realize that such actions are determined by circumstance alone. Because every man is entirely and admittedly a slave to his desires. The concept of evil would be meaningless. Evil would not exist." "Neither would good," observed Chandi gravely. glad to see that I had at least made some small impact on Ralph Streng. Apparently acknowledging the dangers involved, he no longer took Tom sailing with him. I mentioned this to Chandi on the Saturday afternoon, the last day of Race Week, as we sat together in the club lounge. "Our friend Ralph is in some torment," the alien observed in his gentle tones. "He desires to prove that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the boy is a normal human being, capable of taking part in normal pursuits. Yet at the same time he wishes the boy dead, because that is in accordance with his strange beliefs. He will never speak of Tom in casual conversation." Somewhat shaken by this outspoken summary I said nothing but watched the boats as they streamed across the bay. The club members had grown accustomed to Chandi by now and his presence drew few curious glances. Streng was racing; lying third, he was showing little of the fire that characterized his sailing in company with Tom. Nevertheless, I noticed the red-sailed craft gain a place at the turn by a ruthless, though permissible, piece of bluff. A slight mixup occurred at the final marker and Streng emerged from the ruck with a clear lead, which he held to the finish. As the boats drifted in toward the jetty I saw oae of the competitors, a mild-mannered little man by the name of Banner with whom I had occasionally had a drink, gesticulating furiously and quite out of character. His boat was undertow. "God damn it, man!" Banner was shouting as the group entered the lounge, "you could have killed me! You saw what he did -- " he addressed one of the group -- "cut close and jibbed at the turn. Deliberate, it was -- " The small man was trembling with indignation. Ralph Streng ignored the shrill protestations, pausing at my chair. "Hello, there, Arthur," he said. "Care for another drink?" Banner hovered at his elbow, yelping like an ill-tempered puppy. I said I would have a scotch and, as Streng turned for the bar. Banner stood in his way. "I asked you whether you had any intention of paying for the damage to my boat," he repeated, pale with rage. Streng paused, at last acknowledging Banner's presence. He eyed the small man up and down in contemptuous silence. I don't think there was a person in the lounge who wasn't watching. At last he spoke, quietly. "My own opinion, Mr. Er -- , is that if a man is frightened of the risks involved, he shouldn't race. Particularly if he doesn't have the financial means to pay for normal damage incurred." Was it the supreme confidence of Streng or Banner's palpable air of futility or both? I don't know, but I saw a number of people nodding in accord with Streng's statement and there was a' general murmur of agreement. Beside me I felt Chandi stiffen slightly; he was watching Streng closely... "Our friend Ralph is a vefy powerful man," he whispered. "But he has his weak point. He would never believe that the average human is too considerate to hit him where it really hurts." Banner, almost in tears, was spluttering incoherently; a friend took him by the elbow, led him quietly away and stood him at the bar with a large scotch. He took the glass and drank automatically, eyes still on Streng. "Here you are, Arthur." Streng handed me my drink and sat down. "Good race, that." "What was all the row about?" I asked curiously. "That little rabbit got in my way at the final turn and forced me to jib. My boom carried his shrouds away as it swung over. His mast came down. Who is he anyway?" He turned, gazing at Banner who stared back furiously. "Is he a member? I don't recall seeing him before. Not that he has a memorable face." "To sum up," I remembered something from a week ago, "You don't know him from Adam and you jibbed your boom into him." "Something like that." Streng smiled slowly. "Happens all the time, doesn't it?" "Excuse me." Chandi spoke. "I don't quite understand this. In human psychology there is a distinction between harm coming to IF someone you don't know and to someone you do?" "There is." I answered before Streng could utter one of his theoretical generalizations. "Your race, being telepathic and in intimate sympathy with one another, probably wouldn't understand. I can't really explain it myself." "I can." Streng jumped in. "Look at it this way, Chandi. Given a spaceline disaster, my only reaction is morbid interest as to whether any death-toll records may be broken. But if Arthur, here, died, I would feel regret at the loss of a source of intellectual stimulation -- " Which was nice to know. well. We had dined on local roast duck and a couple of bottles of Montrachet. Now we sat in the study, sipping champagne in honor of Chandi's imminent departure, gazing into the fire and talking in desultory, well-fed fashion. "I cannot overemphasize, Chandi," Streng was saying, slightly drunk, "the selfishness of the human animal. Even the emotion of sympathy is the fear that a similar misfortune may befall oneself." "Sometimes, Ralph." the alien's tone was soft and slow, tired, "I feel sorry for you. How do you explain that?" "Well, I tell you one thing. Chandi; I'll be sorry to see you go. And Arthur here. What time do they come to pick you up?" The alien glanced at the clock. "In about an hour's time." "Time for another." As Streng rose to refill the glasses the door swung open and Tom rushed in, ran across to Chandi and clung to his knee. He looked around at us with his slanting, pink-rimmed eyes, then buried his face in the alien's silken clothes. I regarded Streng anxiously; it was clear that he tried to keep Tom away from people; it would be a pity if Streng made a scene on this last night. But Streng, mellow with wine, was smiling. "You should be in bed, Tom," he admonished gently. "Chandi," the boy said. It was the first word I had heard him utter. The alien was watching Streng. "In all your arguments, Ralph, there's one human trait you've failed to mention," he observed gravely. "The one saving, unselfish trait. That is the love of a mother -- or a father -- for a child."  The room was suddenly very still. The occasional crackle from the fire sounded loud. At last Streng spoke. "It's born in iis," he said harshly. "For the purpose of protecting and furthering the species." "I must take issue with you. In this case that does not apply. Earlier this week you explained mongolism to me -- that extra chromosome in each body cell which makes all the difference. I know, and you know, that to all intents this boy is not a member of the species. He and his kind are creatures apart. They are not human in the accepted sense of the word. There is no rational cause for you to love him." "Damn you," muttered Streng. "Leave me alone, will you?" He sat down abruptly, staring at Tom. "No, you must listen to me, Ralph," insisted the alien. "I've been watching you closely this last week and I've felt genuine, irrational sympathy for you, seeing you torturing yourself to prove something. To prove that, twelve years ago when-you lost God, you lost your humanity as well. And all the time burning at the back of your mind is that terrible guilt; you're a doctor, but you can't cure your own son." Streng said nothing. He sat with his head in his hands as if trying to shut out the truth of what he was hearing. He gazed at the tumbling, sparkling embers and the crimson glow shot his gray mane with gold. I took another sip of champagne nervously; the acid bubbles rasped my tongue and effervesced down my throat, Chandi was leaning back in his chair, a slender hand resting on Tom's fair head. From time to time the boy uttered small, unintelligible murmurs. "But I can cure Tom," said Chandi. told us. He gave the boy a drink of some thick fluid, yellowish; then brought a rectangular piece of apparatus into the room, set it down and plugged it in. All the time he explained in his soft, slow tones. "The fluid rapidly permeates the system and is absorbed into each cell. As you know, Ralph, the main purpose of our visit to Earth was to study malignant cellular diseases. You may not appreciate the connection between mongolism and cancer -- but a connection there is. Both relate to the composition of the cells, a study which has always interested us, back on Canaral; due in part to the composition of our own unique society -- " As he spoke he was attaching a multitude of electrodes to various parts of the boy's body. Tom lay still on the sofa, watching Chandi silently. "I came to your house for a specific purpose; to study Tom, a fact which for obvious reasons I was not able to tell you until now. There are some subjects on which even the hardiest extrovert is sensitive. I will now pass an electrical charge through Tom's body which will react upon the fluid I gave him, an organic substance which itself has an affinity IF to that single extra chromosome -- Don't be afraid, Ralph. No harm will come to the boy." He threw a switch -- it seemed an irreversible action and I noticed Streng stiffened in his chair. Chandi left the apparatus and sat down. "In about ten minutes you should begin to see a change," he said. "Some of the changes may be sudden and I must remind you that every cell in the boy's body is undergoing partial destruction. Do not be alarmed. After all, as I told you last Sunday," here he looked directly at Streng, his eyes unfathomable, "it is a simple matter to destroy -- " Streng did not reply; indeed, he hadn't spoken for a long time. He had merely shifted his position so that his eyes were on Tom, brooding. Heaven knows what fundamental reorganization of concepts, what tearing emotional stress was taking place in that strange mind. He looked like a man close to a complete breakdown; his eyes were hollow and a tic plucked at his cheek. I followed his eyes and presently witnessed a miracle. Tom's fingers were changing shape. The stumpy mongoloid hands were lengthening, the digits becoming straight, slender. I looked at his face, saw the thick, small ears becoming finer, the lobes distinct. Slowly the nose gained shape, and the eyes -- The brows appeared darkly, like Streng's. The eyelids lost their slant, the whole aspect of the face became, slowly and wonderfully, transfigured. Much later Chandi disconnected the apparatus. I don't know what I expected; maybe for Tom to address us in normal tones. I do know I would have been scared stupid if he had. But he sat up quietly, looking at us. He stood and went over to where Streng was still sitting. "Dad," he said and took his therms hand. Chandi began packing his equipment. "He still has the mental age of a three-year-old," he said. "You must be patient with him, Ralph. He'll learn quickly, now." I poured myself a scotch; my hand was trembling violently and the bottle beat a nervous tattoo on the rim of the glass. There was nothing I could say and Streng appeared to be in a stupor. I was relieved to see the lights of a car swing down the drive. I went to the front door to delay the arrivals until some sort of normalcy was restored to the house. The car .was large, discreetly ostentatious. The doors shut with an expensive clunk and the unnervingly dreamlike sensation brought about by recent events was heightened by the sight of the trio which confronted me. One was human, uniformed, a chauffeur. "Dr. Streng?" he asked. "My name's Warren," I answered. "Dr. Streng is inside." The other two were large, powerful aliens. "Alini and Tubon," introduced the chauffeur. "For Chandi, of the Canaral delegation and scientific investigation team." I motioned them in, moving aside to allow the huge figures of the aliens to tramp past. "In here -- " I opened the study door. Inside, Streng still sat in his chair, his arm around Tom who was smiling into his face. Chandi was moving toward us, carrying his equipment. "Alini -- Tubon," he observed with grave pleasure. "It's good of you to come for me. Obviously you have met Mr. Warren. This is Dr. Streng, my host. Ralph, meet my compatriots." Streng stood automatically and, staring, shook hands stiffly. I looked in bewilderment from the gross, dynamic figures of the two newcomers to the slender, slow Chandi. They might have been different species. "I don't understand," mumbled Streng, embarrassed at the loss of his habitual composure. "You're surely not from Canaral?" His deep eyes widened. Perhaps, in that moment, he understood. I don't know. "The difference in appearance puzzles you?" asked Chendi lightly. "We are an old race, Ralph; cells of an ancient and great organism. Cells grow old and are replaced. I told you we have no population problem and no need for euthanasia. I am old and will shortly be replaced. I shall die before I reach Canaral and on our planet another cell will come into existence. Don't let it bother you. It doesn't bother me; I am able only to think in terms of the race as a whole -- and my last days have been very well spent." At last Streng broke down completely; face contorted in great agony and glistening with tears, he clutched at Chandi's arm. "Surely there's something I can do. I'm a doctor, surely I can help you in some way?" "What would it profit you, Ralph?" "No!" Streng's voice was a cry of despair. "I don't want anything! After all you've done for me, for God's sake tell me how I can help you!" Gently Chandi disengaged himself and turned for the door. "God is an excuse for lesser men than yourself, Ralph," he said quietly. "You discovered twelve years ago that there is no God. But remember that there is still humanity." He departed, followed by his companions, leaving the three of us to the long silence of the autumn evening.   r ( Hi boots collected stardust, but his eyes saw what was real! T he carbon-lead door of the entrance shaft broke its seal to allow the entrance of a giant, headless sloth. Beyond lay the great dome of the upper edges of the Retainer and the animal stopped to half-size as it entered, dragging the last remnants of its plastic stirrups. It moved slowly, awkwardly acroFss the smoothness of the great machine's too-warm base plate; muffled, stumbling hoofs yearning for the firm support of familiar sand and rock. The lumbering animal had made this pilgrimage before, both on summons and voluntarily as now. Still, the reverent silence of the chamber and the knowledge that the machine had created its kind from the sands inspired awesbmeness in the sloth's being. The Retainer flowed silently above the humbling sloth, in lights and liquids that worked and churned. Within itself and its multiple duplicates dotting the hardened surface of this planet were contained the last members of a time-deadened civilization. Each thing that had lived above before the comet sucked life away in near collision. Each member of the dominant race, each complimenting specie and plant, each event in history as finally remembered, were here recorded and held in limbo... protected for the day when natural elements and time would regenerate lifesupporting surface conditions. But until that day came again The Retainers with their lower attendant life-forms would protect the world against disaster: cosmic, natural or extraphysical. The sloth arrived at its designated place and waited. Eventually, a communication bar lowered. The animal reached upward to it and began attaching each leg into the four circular pluglike cups. This completed, the sloth hung as one with the machine. "Your purpose in entering Sanctuary?" "My sums have indicated that the Outmapper McKay is near death," answered the animal. "You petition for an alien?" "Yes. He has lived long among us and honored the laws of Sanctuary." "An invader has no place among us." "Dare we assume to allow this event of time to pass without retaining something of it for our peers?" The sloth felt intense tension as his unexplainable devotion forced him to push the Retainer. The bar was silent as the Retainer did not answer... nor was the sloth released. The machine had reached an impasse with its programing and had turned its functions inward to a higher authority. The decision, when it came, would be a Martian one. R aymond harper pushed the palms of his hands down IF against the mattress and tried to ease the weight on his hips. Carefully he twisted his left leg a fraction in each direction. Nothing. A little more this time. A white flash of pain blanked out his vision as his breath wooshed out. Harper sank back into the hospital bed and made a solemn vow not to try that again. The throbbing slowly subsided. Harper resigned himself to the fact that he wasn't one of those superhealers he'd heard about. The broken leg swung gently from side to side under the traction cords and looked for all the worlds like a rejected stone carving lynched in disgust. Harper had just passed his first night in Speer's General Hospital. He felt badly out of place and wished he were home watering the lawn or fixing the Jiffy Mealer or something. But here he lay, lassoed by a busted leg he'd earned from momentary stupidity. It had been one of those mental slips of an instant when the rest of him had known better. He had fallen from the #nd of an ore pipe while trying to kick a derrick-maneuvered joining section into place. Why men occasionally considered themselves more formidable than several tons of inert metal was a mystery to Harper. Damn foolish. The sounds of steady , ciccclacking heels told Harper that the day nurse was about to descend on him. A whiteness with a face swung into the semiprivate room, smiling that frozen smile of professional synthetic understanding and carrying a tray full of healing delights. "Good morning and how are we today?" And before Harper could answer, "Oh, really? Well, that's nice. Here. Let's take your temperature." Harper managed to open his mouth in time to avoid having his lips impaled. Fighting back the inclination to go crosseyed. Harper glared beyond the glass rod obstructing his vision and was met look for look. "Bowels move yesterday?" What the hell, lady. But he nodded affirmatively and ignored images of what might happen if he told the truth. "That's nice," the nurse repeated out of reflex as she took his pulse. Satisfied, she dropped his wrist and moved to the end of the bed where she noted the results on a clipboard. The writing took overly long and Harper suspected she was counting his respiration rate and held his breath. "Allright," she said cheerfully and dropped the clipboard back into place a little too quickly. Harper eased out a sigh. She took out the thermometer slowly while peering down at Harper with that certain distaste women have for unclothed and unfamiliar men. He secretly hoped the glass had grown hair. "Well, well. Aren't we the healthy one?" "That's right. I'm fine. In here for a broken leg. Never felt better. Can't use a thing except a decent meal." It was rapidfire but he got it all in. "You needn't worry, Mr. Harper. Breakfast is on its way. You'll find plenty of everything. Now try to roll over -- it's time for bottom's up." The nurse squirted a stream onto the floor from a hypodermic needle gleaned from the tray. "What do you suggest I do with that?" asked Harper pointing to the suspended leg. "Just lean over as far as you can. And loosen these a bit," she said tugging at his smock. Harper freed the drawstring bow. "There we are. Now please relax. It won't hurt if you relax." She gave the shot in a jolting, stabbing manner. Luckily Harper had clenched his teeth or he might have bit off the end of his tongue. He could see the nurse's eyes glisten in delight as an age-old revenge was sweetly taken. "Now that didn't hurt, did it?" she asked as the cotton swab rubbed away a drop of blood. "No. That didn't hurt at all," said Harper in calmly measured tones. Her smile remained, plastered on cast-iron features, but he could see her eyes saying, # bet. The nurse unloaded several small paper cups containing multicolored pills for Harper to swallow. She then inspected the traction supports to ascertain that they were not blistering the skin. "Simple fracture like this, why, you should be out of here by tomorrow fit as new." Harper met the smile head-on and attempted to attain the proper degree of mechanical poise. "The doctors will be along in a little while to give some more calcium-silicon treatments. Now, if you'll lift yourself up a bit, Mr. Harper -- " "For what?" asked Harper defensively, "For this," said the nurse in a flurry of motion. The cold bedpan had moved from the cabinet to under him as if by magic. Harper gritted his teeth at the contact. The smile again. "That's what you get for lying to me. Be good, now, or you'll get more." With that threat she picked up her tray and was gone, click-clacking Aovn the hall. T he other bed in the room was empty but Harper had little time to be lonely. Crowded and overexposed would have been more accurate terms of description. Breakfast arrived and seemed closely followed by dinner. In between he was inundated by several waves of nurses and aides. Harper was washed, relieved, turned a little, combed, rubbed, pilled and needled again. There was an interview by a IF records clerk who extracted his life's medical history and those of three previous generations. After that the mop-and-clean-sheet brigade arrived. An insurance agent for the company put in an appearance just to make sure he really existed and interrupted a nice elderly lady trying to sell him magazines. All in all, Harper formed a new opinion as to the cause of relapses. He was visited twice by a team of doctors that administered the calcium-silicon injections. The treatment fascinated Harper. They used a portable X-Ray device that reproduced continuous images on a remote viewing screen. The plates were attached to a yoke-shaped device that was easily mobile through # degrees and allowed a complete view of the fracture. The cementing action of the last injections could be instantly analyzed and this made possible an accurate diagnosis of where the next shots were to be placed. A simple fracture required only twenty-four to thirty-eight hours to repair. Associated tissue that had been bruised or torn required a little longer to heal but still a patient wasn't down more than a week. As the afternoon slowly lengthened. Harper began to think he was going to enjoy a few moments of peace and quiet. A sudden commotion in the hallway that increased in decibels proved him wrong. An urgent entourage rolled in a patient on an emergency stretcher cart. Harper could see that his roommate was in far more serious trouble than he. The staff attending the elderly patient moved quickly and smoothly. Conversation was kept to abbreviated phrases as each seemed to sense what the other was doing. This was one of the crack teams from Receiving and none of the usually prevailing hospital mystique clung to them. They ignored the draw curtains between the beds and Harper watched, entranced. The cart was rolled parallel to the bed and two aides lifted and slid the patient onto the bed in a sweeping flowing motion. A resident doctor and intern assisted from the other side. The aides were pushing the cart from the room as the duty nurse arrived, smile in place. And for the first time Harper could remember, the smile disappeared when she saw the cream-colored knee boots on the patient. Harper had noticed the boots but thought the patient was still in street clothes. He could see now that the man was not. The nurse started to remove them. The patient, who seemed in shock and a bit out of it, came groggily aware. "What are you doing, woman? The man's right leg swung up at the nurse and the momentum almost carried him out of bed. The intern caught the man and lifted him back onto the mattress. Turning to the nurse, the doctor said furiously, 'Tor God's sake, let those alone." She recoiled and blinked, "But the sheets -- " "To hell with the sheets." He returned his attention to the patient. "Listen, McKay. Now hear me! You've had a massive stroke. Your left side is paralyzed from your neck on down. You have at least one'-major obstruction in your brain, maybe more. I've given you shots to attempt to dissolve it -- but youe goi to lie still. Any more of that jumping around and we'll be burying you. You listening?" "Yeh, I hear you," said the patient whose tone indicated he was highly disturbed by the inconvenience of it all. "But you better tell them girlies to leave my boots alone. None of you ground-hoppers are gonna be able to take them off -- not unless I'm dead -- and I ain't dead by a long shot. Got to get off this planet and get home, got to -- " The doctor administered a sedative while McKay talked and he and the intern waited until its affect sent the man into a deep sleep. As they started to leave the doctor paused and turned to Harper. "Hi. Sorry for the commotion." "It's all right." "I'd like you to do me a favor. Keep an eye on him for us and if he becomes active or anything, push your emergency light -- okay? We may have to strap him down." "Sure, be glad to," said Harper. "What caused the stroke?" The doctor shrugged to indicate multiple possibilities, "Probably the results of a drastic change in environment. He's a little too elderly to be taking the physical punishment of a space trip and planetary changes." "He's a spacer?" asker Harper. "That's my understanding. His idenity tags say he's a Martian Outmapper. He had a return ticket on him that was sold last month on Mars. An unusual man. But then Outmappers are known for that. I have to rush, so thanks again. It will be a couple of hours before he comes around. So long," said the doctor with a wave of his hand. "'Bye," said Harper and the room was left to its paying occupants. H arper regarded his new roommate with increased curiosity and a certain awe that's inherent in any spectator. McKay was old but strangely aged, as though sections of his body lived at different paces. His torso and legs were huge and seemed muscular, yet his arms were scrawny sticks. IF His face was typical of the spacers Harper had seen in passing. It was heavily wrinkled and darkly burned, yet possessing a curiously whitish cast, almost as if the skin were in a constantly accelerated reproduction process. Bulging purplish veins traced eerie lines on the sunken features and pulsed to a steady heartbeat. The only other motion was the rising and falling of an overly distended chest. The oddly shaped boots protruded from under the blankets and appeared bizarre in the extreme. Their design indicated a rare originality. No stitching or glued se.ams were visible. The overall effect, was almost as if they had been poured to form. Harper wondered about it for a while, until the boredom of the long afternoon sent his thoughts elsewhere. Activity picked up right after supper as the second-shift nurse arrived to give Harper his antibiotic shot and pain pills. She went about her business with much the same personal de,tachment as her predecessor. Harper preferred her, though, since she didn't smile at all. Another calciumsilicon treatment was given and the X-rays showed that no more would be required. Harper sighed his relief as darkness came, knowing that the morning would bring his release. He had just reached over his head to wave on the telescoping bedlamp when he noticed that McKay was awake and watching him. "Hello," Harper offered. "How are you feeling?" "Like hell," came the thickly couched reply. "They got any water in this pest hole?" "Coming up," answered Harper and activated the nurse's station alarm. An aide appeared and attended to McKay's needs which proved to be several. Harper passed the time reading some of the bedside literature donated by various organizations. McKay was extremely #eak but managed to drink most of a specially prepared milkshake. The aide tied an emergency light to the guardrail near McKay's right hand and departed after passing chosen words of encouragement. McKay's usable hand fumbled along the bedside until he found the controls that raised the head section. His eyes seemed to strain until he caught sight of the boots sticking out from under the blankets. He waved the right toe back and forth for a moment and then asked, "They try to take them off me?" "Um-hmm." Harper nodded. "But you gave them a bad time." "Yeh -- it figures. Them boots ain't been off in over forty years. Never will either. Bet they don't come off when they haul my carcass away. Them boots are a part of me by now -- a part of me." Harper srpiled but he was certain that he had heard only about half of that, "You say you've been wearing them for forty years? They look like new." The right toe waved back and forth again. "Sure they look new. Hand-made from gimpo hide. Won't wear out -- cant wear out. They take life back from whatever wears them. Replace themselves like skin." "I never heard of anything like that," said Harper incredulously. "No matter," said McKay softly. "There's lots of things people ain't never heard of and probably never will, for that matter. Damn bunch of ground-huggers content to live out their lives in prenatal conditions and scared-to death of expanding their minds." Harper must have reacted painfully and McKay seemed to realize why. He immediately added: "Don't take that personal, fellow. I don't mean it personal." 'The name's Raymond Harper." "Merlanger McKay's mine," "Glad to know you. One of the doctors who admitted you said he thought you were an Outmapper on Mars -- that true?" asked Harper, making conversation. "I am an Outmapper. Just came back to Earth long enough to see some relatives but they've all passed on. Guess I was out there longer than I thought. Damn air down here's got me all messed up. I'll be fine when I get back home. I can live there -- shouldn't have left -- friends who understand things. This world's harder than I remember -- cold and empty -- no friends, none who could be -- " H arper gave a courteous nod occasionally as McKay rambled, falling into reminiscence. Eventually a pause lengthened into silence and Harper thought the Outmapper had drifted off into sleep. But the other continued abruptly. "What about you? How'd you get slung up like that?" "Stupidity, mainly. I work for Universal Ores as a construction engineer. Fell off an ore line yesterday afternoon and broke my leg." "Too bad," said McKay, genuinely sorry. "Your company has mining projects on Mars, too. You ever been up?" "No. Had the chance but turned it down. The pay was good but I didn't yant to leave while my folks were still alive. Maybe that's a way of saying I didn't have the nerve -- I don't know. Most of the men I've met returning from a tour say it's pretty harsh duty and very lonely. I'm pretty much a crowd-follower." "I guess that's about right -- the part about its being bad duty. It wouldn't be worth much if you had to stay put on some construction IF project, watching camp video reruns. But with a breather, a couple of pairs of outtogs and a gimpo -- well, it's tremendous. You know what a gimpo is, don't you?" Harper shrugged and grinned in a half ignorant way. "I've seen pictures of them. They're the major life form on Mars, aren't they -- called the Martian Camel?" "The major animal form, yes, but there are others. The camel bit sounds like some fool in an office needing word to say. A gimpo is sort of one thing, you know? It has a body and four legs but it's all the same thing. No bones or joints or things like that. It's just as if the body runs down in four places to make the legs. There's no neck or head. It was a real shock for me when I saw my first one." "You mean there's no head at all?" "Nope. Doesn't need one. About the only head-type feature it needs and has is an eye-like vision hole up between what we call the front pair of legs. Ears, nose and a mouth full of teeth would be a waste of space. They absorb what they need through their hides like we expel from ours. And don't think that didn't give us trouble at first. We tried to ride them and they were peaceful enough but they'd eat the pants right off you in no time. Finally found an oilbased plastic that stayed flexible in the temperature changes that we used for a halter to yoke the front legs. Good halter would only last a couple of months at best." "Fascinating," said Harper. "Yeh, I guess it sounds that way now. It wasn't so much then. It was a simple case of life and death. Either you had a gimpo to find water for you out on those ranges or you didn't make it. More like a burro than a camel. I guess we Outmappers were a lot like tiose old gold prospectors of years ago. More than one man owes his life to that animal -- in several ways." Harper decided that the talking was relaxing McKay and keeping his mind off his predicament. The long sedative-induced sleep seemed to have rested the man completely and he was keeping still, so Harper continued to encourage the conversation. "How's that?" "Well, like the time I first discovered a Martian Sanctuary. I'd have walked right into it if that gimpo of mine hadn't gone belly down in the sand. I pulled and kicked but he wouldn't budge. About then..." McKay spun his story freely and Harper could feel himself being drawn into the web. The hospital room took on a glimmer of fog as both men's minds narrowed to the time line, as the one identified with the other and both retraced lost images, the one leading, the other following. There is no purpose to abuse of the beast The image had spoken behind McKays back and he spun toward it with one foot still cocked in an undelivered kick. The draped figure of a man confronted McKay from behind a barrier of heat waves. The Martian plateau in coming twilight reflected dimly through the figure and McKay sensed it to be a projection. Still, his only instinct was to flee. The Outmapper clamped down on his fear and stood his ground. There was no place to run without meeh ing certain death. If it were to come -- here was the place to stand or fall. Your person is in np immediate danger the image spoke again in the oddly resonating atmosphere. The thing didnt appear to McKay to move and the sound was almost non-directional. The features were strangely arranged and the clothing unusual, yet there was too much familiarity about it. McKay was certain the thing was for his identification only. What do you want? he asked, unusually calm, considering. It is a strange question. This is our home and you are the one who wants something. Still, invader, we wish you no harm. That is why we appear here.  The sound stopped but the message was incomplete. McKay decided to remain silent and wait. The image raised a wavering arm and indicated in a sweep the land behind it. All this is sacred ground for our kind. You must consider it forbidden sanctuary. To enter without our consent will result in death.  McKay considered the words as he looked behind the image at the alien landscape. The land appears no different. I see no indications of boundaries. How am I to know? The beast you use will not cross, nor any after its kind.  That doesnt help me, said McKay slowly. '# could wander around on my own or get lost maybe The image passed an arm behind its back and reappeared holding a pair of boots. It bent forward and set them down outside the wall of shimmering waves. The coverings are of the beast and live long after the animal itself has died. Wear them and they will become a part of you, forbidden to enter sanctuary. You will also be able to ride the beast unharmed.  The tension of alien contact began to wear on McKay. He could feel his limbs tremble and weaken, his thoughts stuttered. "I dont know -- I dont know... The other choice, continued the image, is to leave this place and never return. For the shape of it is irregular and to return would mean death. In time it may be that some among you will be inIF vited to enter and be at peace with the elements. But that shall be our decision and those selected of our choice. Beware. The image faded and suddenly the lines were gone. The gimpo stood and waited, its fur-covered skin quivering in the desert twilight. McKay slumped down onto the sand and stared at the boots and tried to evaluate the degree of his sanity. H arper could feel his mind blink. "So you decided to put them on?" "Yeh, after a while I did. And it was like he said. For years afterward I would walk into places where I couldn't go any further. It ' took a long time before I got the area all mapped out -- shows on the maps as simply being unexplored." "Some sort of alien design?" "Don't know. Just looks like an ink splash on a piece of paper. Probably has a reason, I guess." "Were you the only one to meet a Martian?" asked Harper. "Naw, most of us did, sooner or later. There are other sanctuaries. I was the only one that got a free pair of boots, though. The others had to make their own -- not that they believed the sanctuary story so much at first -- just that they preferred riding to walking." "Seems strange that you'd prefer to walk or ride rather than use the automatic transportation." "Eh -- Raymond, isn't it? Well, I'll tell you, Raymond, it's like this. You have to be a loner and down on things in general to want to be an Outmapper. You don't want to take much with you that reminds you too much of civilization. Especially some damn machine that's going to break down on you when you're dependent on it. Oh, sure, some tried that approach but almost all of thm died up there. I found a wreck one time right up at a sanctuary line. It's no place for a kid and a machine out on a joyride. You got to go it alone on guts and try to get as close to old nature as you can, so you'll have sharp and reliable instincts. And even at that, most Outmappers paid the price in those deserts." "I suppose Mars is fairly well mapped out by now?" "Yeh, fairly well. There's still a couple of areas for an old hand like me. If I can ever get out of this place to get home." It was past eleven and the night shift had come on. The nurse's first round of calls broke up the conversation. "My, my, aren't we the late ones in here? Come on now, let's be turning in. Mr. Harper? That's you? Yes, I have a shot for you." She reached up and pulled the curtain shut. After tending to McKay the nurse left, waving off the lights. Harper lay awake in the darkness for a long time listening to the Outmapper's regular breathing and thinking about the harmless babblings of the senile old man. Funny how it always happened to the aged. Talk and talk and talk. They'd tell stories for days on end about times long past and none of them would be true -- only half being even probable. It seemed to be nature's way of relieving inner frustrations that younger people expelled in more vigorous ways. Harper's cramping leg finally gave up and went numb. It gave him a chance to drift off into a restless and dream-filled sleep. touched Harper while he slept and he jerked awake, all senses alive and functioning. He held his breath and listened for any sound. There was none. Something had happened to awaken him, he was certain. He reached out to the curtains between the beds and drew them back. McKay's body lay half off the bed, an arm and one foot dangling lifelessly. Harper grabbed the emergency button but knew in the starlight of the bay windows that the Outmapper was dead. A blankness closed in about him and he only faintly remembered strong hands breaking his grip on the emergency cord. The needle's thrust went almost unnoticed and his body fought back the effects of the sedative. He had thoughts to think and nothing could interfere. Every breath Harper gulped trying to understand the Outmapper's death had a bit of the same mystery in it. They had shared air. They had shared life. McKay's last words played over and over. His image turned and turned. Happens feelings were his own, locked up in a frozen exterior from which they couldn't be broken loose and shared with anyone. He kept thinking over and over again. Damn, damn, damn, I don't understand... why does life have to die... why? Finally, in a stupor. Harper collapsed on his bed, having changed nothing. T he rattling of trays being unloaded from the breakfast cart in the hallway helped Harper shake off the effects of the sedative and stir awake. He slipped his leg from the traction harness and awkwardly positioned the numb limb on the bed. Soon the shooting pains of returning circulation caused him to roll about in anguish. He was gripping the sides of the mattress when a faintly luminous mark on the floor caught his eye. Then he saw another. Harper eased himself from the bed and applied slight pressure to the injured leg. Satisfied that it would hold his weight, he stepped to the foot of the bed. A path of faint blobs lead from McKay's bed into the hallway. It looked as IF though someone had dribbled a ball laden with powder. Harper limped after them. He ignored the stares of the aides delivering breakfast and tried to follow the prints. They were almost rubbed out. Twice he lost them and picked them up again. They led him through a pair of massive doors out onto a sundeck. Here the prints showed clearly again. They led straight to the rim and ended. Harper stood staring dizzily at the twelve-story drop to the parking lot below. "Mr, Harper!" It was the smiling nurse. She came bustling out to the sundeck, pushing a wheelchair and was obviously irritated. "You know you shouldn't be up on that leg without the doctor's permission. What are you doing out here anyway? It's time for breakfast. Now sit down and I'll wheel you in -- come on now -- " Something inside Harper's mind shut her out and a hush prevailed during the trip back to his room. He remained in bed until the breakfast tray was delivered. Then he arose again and made his way to the personal lockers behind the doorway. Digging into his trousers he found his pocketknife. Harper liberated a napkin from the tray and kneeled near the clearest print and began scraping it away from the tiles. He scraped up three more before he was satisfied he had procured a reasonable sampling of the stuff. Folding the napkin carefully. Harper returned to his locker and shoved it into a pocket. Then he limped back to bed and breakfast! The usual rigamarole of check, and double check, sign and cosign, pay, insurance and release occupied most of the day for Harper. An hour still remained in Ufiiversal Ore's workday when he walked from the hospital, flagged down a 'copter and gave directions to the Company's complex. He arrived at the Metallurgy Lab with a half hour to spare. "Well, hello there, Gimpy," said John Collins wiping his hands on a chemically stained smock. "They fixed you up awfully fast." The two men shook hands. "It doesn't take long any more," agreed Harper. "Look, John, I need a small favor under the table. Can you help me out?" "Sure, if it's within reason." Harper withdrew the napkin and unfolded it on a counter top. "This is a sampling of something I found on the floor in the hospital and I'd like to know what it is. I don't think it's one of the medicinal type compounds. It luminous this morning but that seems to have left. It was almost powder before I scraped it up." Collins looked at the meager scrapings and let out a low whistle, "Boy, there's not much there, Raymond. One little wrong turn and I'll blow the whole sampling. Maybe a spec test can get me going down the right road -- I don't know -- there just isn't anything there to work with." "It's important to me, John, or I wouldn't have asked." "Sure... sure. OK, I'll tell you what. Let me have a try at it and I'll let you know if I come up with anything. Might be the challenge will do me some good." The chemist folded the sampling and placed it in a safe and locked it. "Right now it's closing time. Kid's birthday and I can't be late." The men said goodbye and parted. The chemist videoed the line shack and the guard sent a runner down the line to fetch Harper. Collins was smiling broadly on the plate. "I got that analysis you were asking about, Raymond. Drop around when you can find time." Harper beamed back. "Good work, John. I'll be there in an hour." John was waiting for him. "Right here you are," Collins said and shoved a paper across the counter toward Harper. "I figured you didn't want the floor wax analyzed so I've omitted that." Harper stared at the page of element signs, formulas and ratios before shaking his head. "John, I can't make anything out of this." "It's a perfect sample," said Collins, strutting just a bit as he walked around the table and took back the paper. "Here, look. We broke it down into two groupings. This column is the silicate rock group and this one is the iron group. The groups are at a four-tothree ratio. The rock breaks into percentages of magnesium and various silicate compounds. The iron group is broken down the same way. Here: eighty-nine percent iron, ten percent nickel and about one percent total of elements like titanium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, copper and zinc. See?" "See what? Does any of this make sense?" asked Harper. "Sure it does. It's a perfect sampling," Collins repeated. "Ok, I give. It's a perfect sampling of what?" "Matter. Just plain matter as we know it. Distributed in a random form of course." Suddenly thoughts and images veiled behind a reluctant subconscious burst forth onto Harper. He saw a dangling leg, a foot, bare without a boot. The circular indistinct print of a hoofless animal seen in a museum. He felt the muscles set in his face as he heard again the words of choice in sanctuary. He .asked the last question, "Matter?" "Yeah, man, you know... Star Dust."  IF The Geoffrey Effect -- or never the trains shall meet! E d awoke to the warmth of Julia's arms. The softness of her hair tickled his nose. His unconscious mind had heard the soft hum from his alarm buzzer -- it was rapidly growing louder. If he did not reach out to stop it he knew from long habit that its electronic circuitry would resort to other sonic tricks. It did. But Ed, the barely stirring Julia still in his arms, did not move, as the timepiece began to emit chirps that might have come from a cricket in one of, the few natural swamps not yet paved over. The chirps sharpened, turned to whistling sounds and became more clearly electronic. Finally the alarm changed to its ultimate persuader -- an excellent imitation of the mechanical bells in the old-fashioned clocks used in the first half of the century, Ed Fontaine shifted Julia toward his left as gently as he could and reached with his right hand to silence the ringing nuisance. Julia moaned, yawned. "Not already?" "Time for breakfast." She opened large blue eyes to him, closed them again, with a stab of annoyance. "Let's sleep -- " "Can't. They expect me at work." "You built the Jeffrey Helix -- " "Geoffroy," he corrected her. "You built it," she said, ignoring his interruption. "You're the only one who understands it. They can't fire you." It was true, he thought with a half-smile. He had built it -- a system that would allow several subway trains to cross a stretch of rail at the same time without colliding. "That's just it," he said. "I'm responsible for it. And I've got a visitor this morning. Someone who wants to know how I did it." "'Can't he wait?" she asked sleepily, putting warm, arms about his midriff. "Wouldn't look good. The man just might be my next employer."' That was all it took to shake the sleep from her. This time her eyes opened wide and remained wide, like  vast expanse of sky. "Who? Where is he from? What do you mean -- " "IKro -- is a Mr. Carruthers. Where  -- is from the New York Transit Authority. And I mean that I just might work for him. Or his boss." "Come on," she said, pulling at his arm gently, "you wouldn't leave Montreal -- " "Not that I want to. But the Geoffroy Helix has been operating perfectly on the Montreal Metro for four years. I've become, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, an electronic baby-sitter." She still looked hurt. "Carruthers is coming from New York because they want one too. They've been talking about a massive expansion of their sub way system since traffic came to a complete standstill almost fifteen years ago. But they can't do it the way we've done it -- unless they build a Geoffroy Helix." "Why do they need you for that?" "You're the one who just told me I was indispensable." His logic glanced off her. "Who wants to live somewhere where the traffic doesn't move?" "I," he said, kissing her nose, "can change that." O ER waffles and coffee -- prepared automatically by a microwave oven -- she took up the subject again. "Are you taking me with you if you go to New York?" "I thought you didn't want to go," he said between bites of the slightly spongy synthetic waffle. Development of the soft flour by a large plastics firm ten years earlier had been the final death-blow to the rural economy of both the Canadian west and the American midwest. Food made from the soft Hour was more nutritious than the real thing, though -- like this waffle -- it was oilten boringly consistent in texture. "New York," she said, "is a nice place to visit -- " The rest was inaudible through the ersatz waffle. "But why don't yoii want to live there?" he asked with a smile. IF She finished the waffle, and grew more serious. "Perhaps I would -- if it's what you really want. I know you're bored with the same old Helix every day. But I think you should go only for a lit tie while. And then come back to Montreal." "Sure. After aH, the New York Helix will some day be four years gld, too." "It'll take me some time to get used to it." "Look," said Ed, "I haven't seen this fellow Carruthers yet. I'll show him the Helix. We'll see if he likes it -- and if he thinks New York might want the man who built it." She looked unconvinced. "Tell you what," he said. "We'll talk about it tonight, after I've seen Carruthers. I'll take you to that little seafood place we like in Old Montreal. Come down to my office at six and we'll paint the town." "Paint it?" She looked sad. "Say goodbye to it you mean." D on carruthers had been with the New York Transit Authority as an electronic engineer for longer than ten years. He was in his early forties and he did not conceal his sur prise that his Montreal counterpart was more than a decade younger. "Inventors come young in Canada," he said in the tone of a man to whom a smile comes easily.  "Inventor," said Ed Fontaine, "is perhaps the wrong word. A development engineer is really all I am." Carruthers raised a bushy eyebrow. "But no one else knows bow to build a Geoffroy Helix." "No. That is, Leopold Geoffroy did. But as you probably know he died about three years ago. "Did he tell you how to build this one?" Ed explained. "In a way. I wrote my college thesis on the" Geoffroy effect. In that thesis I suggested that the effect could be used to let two or more subway trains cross at the same level. When Igraduated I sent a copy of the thesis, with the application underlined in red, to the Montreal Transportation Commission. They bit and asked me to do a technical study on the effect." "Leopold Geoffroy himself helped you, I understand." from France. And it was really he who worked out the mathematics behind the hardware I merely designed." "That hardware," said Carruthers, "is what I came to find out about." "You've read technical papers, on the Geoffroy effect?" ask Ed. "I have. And frankly it didn't make a damned bit of sense." 'I Ed Fontaine and Don Carruthers stood before the huge control panel. It glowed with indicator lamps. Carruthers looked to the right, at three rows of shiny blue equipment racks. "Run by a computer, I see." "Two computers," said Ed. "The Helix is pretty complicated, and we don't want a circuit failure to foul things up. The computers are paralleled through an other." "Nice." Carruthers turned his attention to the imposing panel before him. "This, I take it," he said, waving at the blinking lights, "tells you where the subway trains are." "Only the ones in the vicinity of the Helix," said Ed. "When a train takes a tunnel leading to the Helix, sensors pick up its presence, the computers make sure the route is clear for it and operate the circuitry to takeit into the Helix and out the other side. Here, for instance -- " he pointed to a trio of lights on the panel -- "we have a train approaching the Helix southbound on line six. These two trains -- " he pointed again -- "are within the Heli. They're doing the seemingly impossible. They're crossing the same space without being aware of each other. Now iht second train is out of the Helix and the first train has entered." "Impressive. But does it really get traffic around faster?" "It does. All but three of our eleven lines cross at the Helix." Ed turned to a map. "The Helix is here. And Berri-de-Montigny station is here, just next to it. From' that station you can depart in any of sixteen different directions. You can get almost anywhere in town by Metro, taking no more than two trains." Ed paused to let the significance sink in. "If you built an eight-line interchange, putting one line above the other, some passengers might have to climb up or down as far as twenty stories to change trains. It would take them all day." "You could rig traffic lights -- to let the trains through an ordinary interchange one at a time." "And an Irish cop with a whistle," suggested Ed. Don Carruthers laughed with ebullient humor. B y mid-afternoon the two men were in shirtsleeves and Don Carruthers was laboring with a branch of mathematics he had scarcely touched since university days. He was still well up on basic calculus, as he had to be. But this was calculus of a different order and his brain wearied ! rapidly before the pages of equations. "Thirty-two simultaneous equai IF tions, all with five-fold iterated integrals," said Carruthers. "You solved these in your head, of course." ple," said Ed. "We used a computer' naturally. We went down generation computer they'd just built. First we stopped off in New York and got a smaller computer to work out the program for the big one." "I believe it. But equations, even thirty-two of them, don't make a theory." "They did for Leopold Geoffroy." "And for you, by the look of it. You really earned your degree with that thesis." "Oh, I didn't solve the whole thing in my thesis. I extended the theory enough to suggest applications. It was only when the began." "If I understand all this correctly," said Carruthers at length, "the subway trains don't really go through each other, as everyone thinks." "Right. They go around each other. But they don't do it in the usual way -- over-and-under, say. They do it in another dimension." "Time?" "I don't know. And I don't think Leopold Geoffroy knew. Geoffrey's point was that we didn't need to wait until we understood dimension in order to deal with it mathematically. Mathematics can deal with a hundred -- a thousand -- dimensions all at once. The math just gets complicated. And Geoffroy theorized that if you can deal with a problem mathematically you can use that mathematics to give you a physical solution. Geoffroy did the math. He and I together did the physics. Come, I'll show you the first machine built to test the Geoffroy effect." T he machine was much smaller than Carruthers had expected. It occupied no more than two equipment racks. Its small control panel held only a power switch and two buttons, marked respectively operate and release. On the floor was a small metal chute with a half-inch wide groove down its length. The chute, on its way to the floor, passed through a black metal tunnel, connected to the racks by a large cable. "It looks like a toy I used to roll marbles down when I was a kid," said Carruthers. "That's what it is," said Ed Fontaine. "Watch." He flipped the power switch to on, and a faint hum filled the room. He took a marble from a drawer, brought it to the top of the chute and released it. It slid down through the black tunnel and to the floor. "How many points?" asked Carruthers. "The points come for the next trick -- Geoffrey's trick," said Ed. He slid a black plate through a slit in the tunnel, so that it blocked the chute. Then once again, he released the marble from the top of the chute. It rolled down and into the tunnel, striking the metal plate audibly. "It's stuck," said Carruthers. "Not for long." Ed pressed the operate button, paused momentarily, and then pressed the release button. The marble continued its journey down the chute, as though the plate were not there. Carruthers' jaw fell. Ed Fontaine could hoi repress his smile. He scooped up the marble and repeated the operation. This time the marble did not even pause on its way through the tunnel. "It went right through a metal plate," said Carruthers, awed by the concrete demonstration of what had been only equations. "Not through. Around." "In a fourth dimension -- " "A fourth and a fifth," said Ed. "To get the Helix effect, you need two extra dimensions. Suppose a straight line represents the three dimensions that we know. That metal plate would be just a dot, blocking that line. What the marble did was leave the straight line entirely and spiral around it." "Like a helix?" "Its path is helix-shaped -- hence the name. It's a bit like modulating an AM transmitter, except that you're modulating in two parameters at once." "And," said Carruthers, still awed, "you're modulating a solid object instead of a carrier." When the two men returned to Ed Fontaine's office, a phone call was waiting for Ed. It was Julia. "Are you on your way to New York yet?" she asked, with a hint of moroseness. "I've just shown our guest the Geoffroy effect," he told her, by way of an answer. "Keeping our date?" "Absolutely. Six o'clock. We'll do the, sights." Julia wanted to know what dress to wear. "Wear the long gold one I like," he told her. "We might go dancing after dinner." "Wife?" asked Carruthers, after Ed had hung up. "Fiancee," said Ed. "I'm trying to console her." He hesitated. "She's upset because she knows you're looking at the Helix and she thinks you might -- ah -- be looking at me, too."  Carruthers nodded. "No doubt about it. You did your thesis on this thing and I'm too rusty on the math. Besides, you've already built one. We'd want you for a while at least." There were other details to discuss and here Carruthers was on IF his owh territory. What did building a Helix involve from the engineering standpoint, he wanted to know. How big was it? What was it made of? Carruthers blanched when Ed told him how much copper was inside the Helix. "Do you know how much copper costs these days? Can't we economize? Say, by using gold?" "Silver should work pretty well." "Glad you're being reasonable," said Carruthers. "What the hell! The Transit Authority plans to blow so much on new subway lines that we could line the Helix with platinum and they wouldn't notice." By the time the two men put down their papers the summer sun was showing the reddishness of afternoon's end. Ed Fontaine instantly thought again of Julia, slim and beautiful, with eyes bluer than the eastern sky outside his window. She was coming soon. "Tomorrow," he said, "I'll show you the Helix itself." "I don't suppose you can walk into it?" asked Carruthers, his interest still alight after the long day. "No. You can just see trains go in and out. But that's worth the fare by itself." "One thing I don't imderstand," said Carruthers. "Geoffroy was French. Why didn't the Paris subway system get its owa Helix?" "Good question. BM remember that Paris, unlike Montreal, already had Metro lines just about everywhere. Besides, Geoffroy wasn't taken seriously in his own country. He was a biochemist, not a physicist. And he had retired by the time he wrote his paper on the Geoffroy effect in nineteenseventy-seven. A lot of people thought he was dotty." "So you discovered him, really?" "I discovered a use for his theory. There are probably others." "There's too damn much specialization nowadays," said Carruthers. "Let a man step a little way out of his narrow field and people -- " Bells... The clanging of emergency bells cut through the corridors and the offices like a wrecker's hammer. Ed Fontaine knew that they were not real bells, but computers reproducing what they had been told bells should sound like. But in the imitation, they had made the bell-sound even more strident and shrill than the original. And these ersatz bells meant what bells had meant for centuries. Trouble. Ed leaped up and ran out of his office in the direction of the Helix, several hundred feet away. Don Carruthers, the bells awakening the same instinct within him, followed only slightly more slowly. T hree technicians were already in the Helix room. The huge red emergency light was glowing brightly. "We've lost a train," said a technician as Ed entered. "It's in the Helix. And it won't come out." Ed quickly surveyed the huge board. The indicators indeed showed one train still within the Helix. It was southbound, he saw, from Henri-Bourassa, on one of the original lines, built just before Expo '#, two decades before. At the entrance to the Helix, trains were waiting on all lines. "No chance of a collision?" asked Don Carruthers, behind him. "No. By now, the computers will have turned on red Tights in all tunnels leading to the Helix." Precious seconds ticked by. One technician left the glowing panel to step to a rack and push what must have been a reset button for the bells. The computers' exaggerated ringing stopped, though the emergency light continued to glow silently. The quiet seemed more awful than the clangor of the bells. Ed walked to the big panel. He dialed a number on a device not unlike the dials that had adorned telephones as recently as ten years before. He pushed a button. Nothing happened. He repeated the operation twice, three times. But the three indicator lights continued to show the train inside the Helix. Don Carruthers walked up to the panel. "It has never broken down in four years," Ed said almost in audibly. Carruthers touched his arm. "Look, I don't want to be a stranger at the wrong time, I -- " "No, don't go. You're no stranger to the Helix now. You might as well see it when it's not working." In the next few minutes Ed tried several tactics. He bypassed the Helix controls and asked the twin computers, with a hastily drawnMp Cobol program, to release the train on line two, southbound. The computer teleprinter typed out tially programed to write that word, Ed knew; when an error had been made in a program. He checked his program for a flub, couldn't find one and began writing another, calling for a different operations sequence. The switchboard operator came in. she told Ed. "They want to know what we're going to do about the breakdown." Ed looked at his watch. Only twenty-two minutes had elapsed since the bells had sounded. It had seemed like three times as long. "Tell them," he said, "to get everything with wheels out there on the road. There must be a halfdowntown." Ed completed his second program and fed it to the computers IF once more. The teleprinter came to life in seconds. A third program, more like the first. It was the phrase they had been told to print, to mock anyone unfortunate enough to make errors in three successive programs. It had seemed funny when Ed had first programed them. "Why," he asked through clenched teeth, "can't I get it right?" "I think you are doing it right," said Carruthers. "You're just asking the computers to do something they can't do." Ed protested. "But they can do it. They're in charge. They run the Helix." "Using what they know of the train positions," said Carruthers. "I'll bet you've programed them to keep two trains from colliding, no matter what." "Of course." "That means," said Carruthers, "that the computers won't take orders about when to release a train. In fact, they don't even recognize such instructions. They assume you made a mistake in the program and give you the thumbs-down sign." T he telephone call was for Ed. At the other end was the chairing to know what was going on. It was bad enough that the entire Metro -- save the three lines not using the Helix -- was paralyzed. But the reporters were down his neck, wanting details on what radio and television were already calling the biggest traffic tieup in Monteal history. Worse, one of the sharper newsmen had already dug up the rumor that a train was missing in the Helix. "Get that train out!" was the orman had never been enamored of the Helix project. He had agreed to its construction only because the mayor had insisted. A-know this is probably a ridiculous idea. But what would happen if you just turned the Helix off?" "I don't know. We've never tried it because of the danger. It might work. Or it might lose us the train forever." "You said it was a bit like modulating an AM transmitter. If you shut off the signal to the transmitter the signal returns to the baseline. For the train that would mean home." "True," said Ed. "But if you shut the power off on the transmitter, the carrier doesn't return to its starting point. It vanishes." There was a brief silence before Carruthers said, "Why not try it on your model Helix?" The two men stared at each other. Without a word they marched to the room where the little Helix, with its marble chute, was kept. Ed snapped on the power switch. He waited for a few seconds, then released the marble from the top. He operated the two buttons in sequence and the marble seemed to roll through the steel plate to the floor. "Now -- " said Ed. He released the marble again, but this time pushed only the operate button. The marble rolled into the tunnel and vanished. Ed placed his finger on the power switch. "Here goes nothing." He pushed tbe switch to off. Nothing happened. On. Off. On. Still nothing. Ed pushed the release button. The marble did not reappear. He pushed the operate and release buttons again, with no result. He reached for a Robertson screwdriver and removed the screws holding the cover of the black tunnel. He removed the cover, exposing the entire chute. The steel plate was there. But the marble was not. The two men returne'd to the Helix room, the telephone operator was back on the line. "Some reporters to see you, Mr. Fontaine." "Tell them to go see the brass at head office," Ed told her. "They say they did so, sir. And they were told to come see you." going to see him and the Helix project tarred and feathered. "I don't want to talk to them. Tell them -- " He thought for a moment. "Tell them that a breakdown has taken place in the Helix. One train has been stranded but we hope to get it out soon." "Think you can?" asked Carruthers when he had cradled the receiver. "God knows." Ed felt suddenly hoAv much younger and less experienced he was than his New York visitor. He was used to pressure of a certain kind -- the kind generated by taking on a project that no one else believed would work. And his self-assurance had stood him in good stead, especially when he had talked the city of Montreal into letting him, a raw graduate, ory. But he was not accustomed to the knowledge that the lives -- or possible deaths -- of thousands depended on him. Don Carruthers had faced such crises often during his ten years might have gained such experience, had he not been in charge of a project which had worked with eerie perfection. Until today. He looked at his watch. Five minutes to seven. Almost an hour and a quarter had elapsed since the train had vanished into the Helix. And he stood no closer IF to a solution than he had before the bells had begun to ring. Five to seven, Julia had been due at his office at six. He walked to the switchboard operator's desk. "Has my fiancee been here asking for me?" "No, Mr. Fontaine." "I was expecting her at six." "She probably couldn't get through," she said, "The Metro's not working and you can't get a cab for love or money tonight." It was true, Ed knew. He stepped to a telephone and punched out Julia's familiar number. He let the soft electronic whirr sound ten times before he replaced the receiver. She probably couldn't get through the traffic, he repeated to himself. Yet,,, Yet she hadn't called to let him know. The omission was uncharacteristic of exact, punctual Julia. A chill caught his heart. He turned again to the switchboard operator. "What was the exact time of the accident?" "Five-thirty-nine in the afternoon, according to the operations center. Train seven-three had just picked up passengers at Sherbrooke station before entering the Helix." And before that, Ed thought, it had stopped at Mont-Royal station. Among the passengers boarding might have been Julia, Julia, bound for downtown to meet him. To paint the town. and someone else had dragged a microwave coffeepot from a drawer. The device was not large, but it could brew coffee six times faster than the old heating-element coffee-makers. The coffee less than great, thought Ed, but it was what he needed. He turned down the pizza. Twelve hours had passed -- no more than twelve hours, since he had awakened with Julia's soft hair in his eyes. He remembered how upset she had been at the thought of leaving Montreal. New York had seemed far away to her. But how much farther away was she tonight? Where were Leopold Geoffory's extra two dimensions? Geoffroy himself hadn't cared. It had been enough for him that the dimensions existed in the world of mathematics -- and that the mathematics corresponded to some sort of physical reality. And he, Ed Fontaine, had agreed with Geoffroy that it was unnecessary to have a subjective notion of just what the physical reality was... But now things had gone wrong. And suddenly it was vitally important to know where the Geoffroy dimensions lay. Ed walked, slowly, back into the Helix room. The emergency lights and the lights indicating the train in the Helix still glowed. He fingered the controls again, ordering the Helix to disgorge its prey -- with the same results as before. It was then that Ed noticed Don Carruthers, his tie loosened and his jacket off, working at a table in a corner. Ed could see that Carruthers had before him a sheaf of equations for the Geoffroy effect. And he had made copious notations on some sheets of paper. "Ideas?" Ed asked. "Yes." "Don't keep them to yourself." "I've come to an inescapable conclusion," said Carruthers, He paused dramatically. "Leopold Geoffroy should have stuck to his biochemistry .'' "What do you mean?" "Simply that the Geoffroy effect is a lot of hooey." "But it works," protested Ed. "Yeah? Make it work now." Ed remembered his mathematical superiority over the older man andhe felt a twinge of resentment. "I've gone over the theory again," continued Carruthers, indicating the papers. "What Geoffroy describes mathematically is a five-dimensional Helix, established and maintained by a giant electrical field." "Yes -- so?" "So, when you cut the power to an electrical field, it collapses. That means the marble should have reappeared in your baby Helix when you cut the power." "But it didn't." "It didn't," said Carruthers, "because Geoffroy was wrong. When was the last time you played with an ordinary oscilloscope?" "Back in my undergrad days, I suppose," replied Ed. "You should do it more often. You'll learn things. Now if you use the 'scope in the ordinary way, you insert a signal into the x axis to get vertical deflection and the y axis to get horizontal deflection of the dot on the screen. Now many 'scopes, in the back, have a third input, corresponding to a z axis." "To deflect the electron beam in a third direction," said Ed, "in and out of the screen." "The hell!" shouted Carruthers. "Sure you treat that beam mathematically as though it moved in a third dimension. But what does it really do?" "It -- it cuts off." "Damn right. It doesn't go into the surface of the oscilloscope screen. It just goes away." "But it comes back." Carruthers shook his head. "No it doesn't. That's another electron beam, a different stream of electrons. You call it the same beam because it appears where you'd expect the vanished beam to reappear. That's what's wrong with confusing mathematics and physics. Just because IF there appears to be a correspondence between your equations and reality, you assume that the correspondence is perfect." "If I understand," said Ed, "you don't believe the Geoffroy Helix really exists." "And it doesn't. Your baby Helix," said Carruthers, "didn't swing the marble around in some unknown dimensions to 'get it around that steel plate. It destroyed that marble And it built a copy of it on the other side." "That's ridiculous." "That's why the marble vanished when you turned off the power. The circuit forgot how to duplicate the lost marble." The silence was long before Ed spoke. "If you're right -- people taking a train through the Helix never really come back. What comes back is a clever electronic imitation, with a copy of their features a copy of their newspaper -- "And counterfeit money in their pockets," added Carruthers. "Then how do we get the Helix to build us a new train just like the old one?" "Repair the fault in the Helix circuitry." "But we can't do that without shutting it down. And if we do -- " Carruthers nodded grimly. Ed thought again of Julia, a nonexistent Julia -- vaporized earlier in the evening -- of whom only his own electronic creation held the blueprint. The thought remained in his mind as he gazed at the Helix panel. And so it happened that he was watching at the precise moment that three lights blinked on, indicating that a train had left the Helix and' was P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, Cal. # a vehicle for thought-provoking, controversial articles, and a '"service" magazine containing dozens of sf and fantasy book reviews per issue, along with news releases, coming events, news items of interest to fans, readers and professionals. convention at Heidelberg in #... for the second year in a row. Sample Subscription -- # issues for I . # per year. pulling into Berri-de-Montigny station -- three hours late. tice to the moments of jubilation that followed, as news of the train's return spread through the building. Ed himself felt a relief that all but brought tears to his eyes. He felt too jubilant to take seriously what happened next. The switchboard operator, working well beyond her normal quitting time, phoned him. "There's a man at my desk," she announced. "He says the Martians have landed!" Ed might have responded to such an announcement with laughter at the best of times. But now, following the tension of the evening and the sudden relief, he roared. The laughter bubbled out with peals of loud and merry sound. Martians? They were all he needed to end the day right. He was still laughing when a technician rushed in. "It's true!" the technician cried. "I saw one outside -- " Ed's laughter died. Something in his mind clicked and instantly he knew there would indeed be strange beings outside. There were no more surprises in the words he heard swirling about him. "Somebody said they came out of the Berri Metro..." "They're almost like people but purplish and wrinkled, like anteaters..." "There are hundreds..." Ed brushed past the others toward the front door. A cold terror crept up from the base of his spine. And over the terror were the thoughts of his cool, scientific mind. He did not scream as he saw the anteater-like beings. He knew. Carruthers had been right. The Helix was no helix at all. It destroyed and reconstituted them from memory. But its memory was limited. It remembered by repeating the message, over and over, to itsdf... How many times had it repeated the blueprint of the missing train in three hours? And how accurately? Not Martians! Commuters -- as remembered in a story that has been repeated again and again and again... Human beings remembered by an inhuman machine that had been forced to remember too long. And Ed's horrified brain knew what he was seeing. One of the pathetic, shuffling creatures -- its snout dripping with a nameless fluid, its purplish, wrinkled head covered in long matted hair -- had blue eyes. It wore a gold-colored robe. Ed Fontaine sank to his knees, mouthing the word that was to become an unending scream. "Julia..."  IF A Earth was out of boundsr but Radnor from the stars had a job to do! R adnor fell a powerful urge to sleep. No reason not to. The prisoner was securely bound. Sleep for a few moments. What would it matter? Sleep, and dream of homecoming. He had earned it. A short nap. Lovely sleep. Quiet and peaceful. Quiet and sleepy. Quiet... No! He bolted erect and scrubbed the back of his hand across sagging eyelids, trying to fight the languor that melted his insides. He stumbled and grabbed the command cot stanchions to steady himself. His blurry vision cleared as he shook off his torpor and scanned the cramped cabin -- and understood. Sitting behind the plastocene psi-shield, his prisoner. Kern, smiled sardonically and raised his eyebrows. "Nice try," Radnor said. "But not this time." He shivered inwardly and felt much less confident than he tried to appear. What power Kern must possess! He had entered Radnor's mind, nearly hypnotizing him without even gaining his conscious attention -- and through a psi-shield at that. But Radnor hadn't made First Bailiff by being careless, or weak, or easily deceived. Complete this assignment successfully and he would get his final promotion to Division Chief. No more lonely transport trips from Melan's correction block to the psi-test asteroid in its isolated corner of the galaxy. Be cautious, he told himself. Kern is special.,. But then, so was Radnor. No one in the Bailiff Corps tested so high in survival potential; few had the danger instinct he possessed, a touch of undefined psi that had made him the logical choice as Kern's transport guard. If anyone was a logical choice. Even the medicos on Melan were unable to define the extent of Kern's abilities. He was unusual -- that much they knew -- perhaps even unique. More precise definition could wait until the specialists took over when Radnor dropped him at the psi-test center (when -- he refused to think if). He had studied Kern's scanty dossier carefully before accepting the assignment. He knew Kern as well as anyone could, but that knowledge did not include understanding. How a man could delight in violence and motiveless treachery was beyond understanding. Yet Kern did. Irrefutable evidence lay recorded in his dossier; interference with public communication networks, for no reason; several murders, all unexplainable in rational terms; fantastic public escapades, such as his somehow forcing the Melanian governor's wife to disrobe at the height of the Spring Renewal Rites, just as the priests had begun the most solemn of absolutions. Though Kern's powers were as yet undefined, his insanity was clear. For reasons the medicos were still trying to explain, instability and abnormal psi-powers always seemed mental partners. Paranoids are often merely perceptives in a limited way, gleaning from the thoughts of those around them only the violence and hatred that remain subliminal in healthy minds. The poltergeist phenomenon occurs only in the presence of the psi-gifted and aberrant who recognize neither of those traits in themselves. But the proportions of psi-power and instability vary with the individual. Most of the precogs or telepaths on Melari -- a minute proportion of the populace -- were merely eccentric. Because they devoted their skills to IF socially beneficial ends, people ignored tljeir eccentricities. And when extreme psi-gifts combined with the self-awareness of social deviation, the most fully gifted usually drove themselves into a kind of self-induced catatonia; they were thus no problem. Y et there was Kern. Undoubtedly the strongest gift ever recorded in Melanian medical history, his powers had led to insanity but not to self-censure. If the word "anti-social" had any absolute meaning, it meant "Kern." Radnor had formulated a theory about it after reading the dossier, but the medicos had refused to listen. Kern was still a child, no matter his physiological age. That had to be it. In some corner of the quagmire that might be called Kern's mind lurked a malevolent child, a demonic imp who delighted in grotesque pranks and lacked any touch of the most rudimentary conscience. But Radnor's theory had not prepared him for meeting his prisoner. He had found Kern cradled in a body-rack behind the silver-wired grid of a psi-shield, where the medicos had strapped him after capturing him in his sleep. Radnor's gorge rose at the memory: a huge lizard exuding its fetid saurian stench, its abdomen ripped open to display the swarming, bloody  mass of twisted intestines, had greeted him with a wordless, keening cry. For a moment. Then the raucous laugh that was really Kern had echoed through the ship and the lizard had faded from sight to reveal Kern sitting there behind his pleased smirk. Just as he sat now. He was handsome, Radnor admitted, though he disliked finding anything about the prisoner he could admire -- close-cropped electric, blue eyes; Kern looked like a tri-di of the All-Man, which Radnor had seen so many times floating above the altar in every Melanian temple. Handsome was not an adequate word. Commanding, charismatic, dynamic -- all of these came nearer the mood Radnor felt laving over his thoughts as he stared at the prisoner. But even as he stared, he knew that Kern might look nothing at all as he now appeared, for that was the distinctive mark of the man's powers: as far as the medicos had been able to establish, Kern wasn't precog, showed no evidence of telepathic or telekinetic powers, lacked most of the usual abilities one expected to find. He was instead a chameleon, able to change appearance at will. No one knew whether he literally changed form or only seemed to. Even in sleep his features shifted slightly. What inconclusive physiological examinations the medicos had been able to perform proved nothing. If anyone touched him he shimmered through a whole range of shapes, occasionally human, more often animal. A psishield damped that ability but could not cancel it out, proof in itself of the man's powers. Radnor was not even certain of Kern's sex; he had seen him once as a provocative nude girl, motioning toward him and pleading with wordless sounds. But that had been moments after takeoff. Then Radnor had been fresh, wary, not as strangely tired as he now felt. The deceit had failed -- intellect overcoming what his glands had urged -- and had even served as a memorable warning. With the long journey from Melan to the psi-test center still ahead, he had tried to avoid looking at Kern, except when feeding him. They had a month together in the tiny ship and Radnor was determined to see his cargo safely in the hands of the psi-specialists. Let them figure Kern out. Still, this current Resemblance between Kern and the All-Man was uncanny, even if it were merely a momentary shape Kern had assumed. The fact that the likeness was so striking argued a logical mind underlying the transfomation. The dossier spoke of Kern's totally random behavior. Radnor no longer accepted that evaluation; Kern obviously chose his disguises carefully, could calculate intended effect and was therefore even more dangerous than the medicos kijew. Radnor stared at the bronzed, muscular form straining at the bonds behind the shield. How could such foulness appear so outwardly benign? He snorted at his own maudlin feelings and recognized unbidden sympathy coursing through him. He knew better than to become involved with a prisoner; all bailiffs knew better. His job was merely to capture if necessary, to transport, but not to judge. Let the medicos examine and cure Kern. It was none of his business, no matter how curious he might be. But how, for example, could Kern sit immobile for hours at a time? Radnor stared. A slight haze swept over Kern's features, defocusing him momentarily. Could he be in the act of shifting to some new form? Radnor peered more closely, unable to look away, fascinated by what the next few moments might show him. A faint noise at his back irritated him; something was interfering with his concentration. He swept an angry hand over his face and drew it away in shock. He was drenched -- perspiration was pouring down his forehead. He glanced away from Kern to the soaked palm or his own hand and as he did he saw -- out of the corner of his now distracted eye -- that the prisoner's body rack was empty! He quickly looked IF back to see Kern in place, still immobile, but shimmering and insubstantial. A trick.,, the thought hit him. A faint shadow waving. A sound behind him. Then Kern struck. Radnor fell heavily to the deck at the explosion inside his skull. Calling on every scintilla of concentration, he hung grimly onto consciousness and lurched upright to one knee. He turned toward the pain in time to glimpse a huddled figure hurling itself into the escape capsule. Then the airlock iris cycled and Kern was gone. Radnor gave in to unconsciousness. H e found himself kneeling beside the control console, one hand already on the scanner switch. Trying to ignore the pounding inside his head, he crawled onto the command cot and simultaneously activated the scanners. Through luck -- or some instinct Radnor couldn't name -- Kern had chosen the right instant to effect his escape. The capsule plummeted toward Sol Three, the only habitable planet in that system and the nearest possible hiding place. So. the man did have a touch of the telepath in him, after all; he was clearly acting on Radnor's knowledge. Radnor thought of his Division Chiefs reaction. There went the Bailiff Corps' proud reputation, flitting away because of his inattention -- no escapes in over two centuries -- and now this. Worse, Kern was making straight for an interdicted system and its primitive world. There was no telling what a disruptive force he might prove. And to demonstrate space flight to primitives! The potential culture shock was inconceivable. All societies lacking atomic power -- Sol Three among them -- were under automatic interdiction. Radnor hesitated only a moment. For atmosphere entry alone, he might well be busted from the Corps, his career as Bailiff ruined. But if Kern escaped! He refused to consider it. He locked his tracer beam on the capsule growing smaller every second in the ship's scanners, and offered up a small prayer of apology as his ship dove lower, dragging down Radnor's future with it. Kern headed for the nightside, arching toward the northern atmosphere. Radnor closed the gap. The escape capsule lacked the speed to lose its pursuer, but its lead now looked insurmountable. Radnor pushed his ship to the limits of safe entry velocity -- not enough. He switched from praying to cursing -- perhaps less effective but certainly more satisfying -- and reached beneath the command cot for his huntpack, which he checked quickly as the ship blazed its way into the heavy atmosphere. Tranquilizer darts; stunner, fully charged; shiplink beacon; pitons and elastisteei line; the pouch of diamonds, acceptable exchange anywhere in the known universe, though Radnor planned never to be in the position of having to contact a native for anything so risky as face-to-face trading; infrared beam and goggles; concentrated food for several days; psi-detector; and the force-field of the pack casing itself -- everything in place and operational. He flipped the bow scanner to full magnification and watched the capsule heading for the lower tip of a huge lake which glimmered flat in the light of Sol Three's single moon. Then he saw the rockets flare as the capsule blasted against gravity's pull and settled to a thundering crash near the lake. 'The capsule, unlike Radnor's ship, lacked anti-grav and depended for landing upon simple thrust engines, a fact that now gave Radnor a target, a spot glowing orange-blue in the night. He slowed to land near the flames licking around the capsule's touchdown point, only to freeze in momentary horror. A scant five thousand meters above the surface, he saw below him row upon row of faint lights winking in the darkness. Kern had landed in the midst of a settlement. Radnor reacted quickly, allowing the automatics to seek out a clear area and waft his ship gently to the surface. Full refrigeration cooled the ship's hull as it descended and Radnor waited for anchored stability before cycling the exterior hatch. He peered cautiously at his surroundings. Through the goggles now fitted close over his eyes he watched the pool of infrared from his helmet beam illuminate the ground around him. His ship sat beside a squat building some eight meters high, only slightly shorter than the ship itself. On all sides similar buildings reared their crude shapes in the darkness, all apparently of unpainted, wooden construction, all approximately square. They presented a little problem. He spun the rheostat which controlled the ship's surface spectrum until a shrill whine sounded in his ears. He locked the rheostat. His ship now matched the surrounding buildings in color and apparent texture. In the dark -- he fervently hoped -- no one would notice. And he would be gone by morning. He gritted his teeth. He would be gone by morning! His last airborne glimpse of the capsule's impact area had told him that less than a kilometer separated him from his quarry. He moved in that direction, huddling close to the wooden buildings as he did. A brief check of his shiplink beacon reassured him. It homed on the disguised ship and would serve to lead him back, should he become disoriented in these unfamiliar surroundings. IF He located a street which led toward the flames now lighting the night sky, the point of Kern's touchdown. He stepped tentatively forward, then ducked back as two men passed in animated conversation. He understood nothing of what they said -- nor did he plan to spend the hours necessary to learn their language through the ship's translator banks -- but their agitation was clear. They pointed toward the fire and broke into a quick trot. Others joined them, boiling out of the small buildings which lined the dirt street buildings all square, all squat, all nondescript. At least one problem had solved itself: the people's garments were not particularly unusual, most of them twopiece arrangements of shirt and trousers. The women wore long skirts which swept the dusty board sidewalks. Radnor decided his neutral gray coverall would pass, at least in the dark. And happily not all the men he saw were bearded. He stowed the goggles and infrared beam back in his pack; gas lanterns spotted at intervals along the winding street provided sufficient light. Keeping apart from the crowd ' which milled down the length of the street, he followed quickly. Then a strange clamor drove him into a doorway where he waited tense. A steaming boiler drawn by four large quadrupeds rattled past. The clanging noise sounded from a large bell mounted atop the boiler, shaken by one of the men who clung recklessly to the side of the careening cart. It looked to be some sort of steam pump though Radnor wasn't certain. But now he knevy why this world was laid under interdict. Apparently it lacked even internal combustion engines, let alone atomic power. He thought once more of his pending promotion and sighed. If he got out of this mess without being discovered... He covered nearly a kilometer before reaching the fire. It had already spread to several buildings along the riverfront but seemed to be under control. Fire fighters concentrated on containing the flames, spraying water on the surrounding buildings. He couldn't approach the center of the blaze, not with the crowd gathered between him and the light, so he contented himself with trying to understand the crowd's behavior. Every few moments a man or boy would burst through the wall of people standing before him and dash past, carrying bulky fabric sacks looted from the fire area. When one of the sacks split and spilled on the street, Radpor snatched up a piece of its contents: compressed carbon, a primitive fuel. And that accounted for the head of the blaze now illuminating the sky overhead. Kern had landed in or near a fuel storage area. Huge piles of the carbon burned with great intensity, sending up acrid fumes and flickering blue lights. With any luck the capsule might already be consumed in the blaze. And that would solve another problem. For an instant Radnor almost gave in to the wild hope that Kern, too, might have been trapped in the pyre, but he could not bring himself to wish the extinction of any sentient creature, even one so patently mad as Kern. He drew the psi-detector from his pack and stared at the directional indicator. Nothing. If Kern lived, he was out of range. Luckily no one else in the crowd registered the slightest quiver on the detector's gauge. That would have been theend of his hunt, Radnor knew, to discover that these primitives possessed measurable psi-powers. He almost smiled; things were looking up. He began the hunt. K eeping as near the blaze as caution would allow, he circled to the north, to his left. The fire had been contained, confined to four blocks of fuel depot and warves. The river to the est had saved the fire fighters a good share of their work; it also cut the arc of Radnor's search to a mere hundred and eighty degrees. He circled left to the water's edge, then doubled back to retrace his steps and scout the south half of the semicircle mapped out in his mind. The streets here were cobblestoned, the buildings larger but still of wooden construction. Passersby ignored him, more involved in shouting greetings to one another and waving bottles -- apparently some intoxicant. He sensed festival in the crowd's mood. The southern arc of his search failed to draw any indication on the psi-detector. Several times he stepped into doorways to avoid knots of men who roamed the streets, singing and shouting. And then he saw a flicker on his gauge; it pointed back the way he had come, back toward the ship. As he turned to move in that direction a trio of men accosted him boisterously, but he avoided their grasp and ducked around a corner -- and into the arms of a fleshy, flaccid woman with straw-colored hair and red dye smeared across her mouth. He recoiled from her touch before recognizing her for what she was. The night women on Melan shaved their heads -- he tried not to judge; cultures differ. He pushed past her just as she changed appearance before his eyes, the straw-colored hair giving way to a shaven, gilded skull. He snatched out the stunner, but Kern was gone into the darkness. Radnor cursed again and followed. Its a game to him. He is playing tag with me,., Radnor swung into an easy lope. IF glancing at the psi-detector's wobbling needle every few yards. Once he stumbled over a loose board in the sidewalk and heard Kern's raucous laughter from the darkness ahead. Kern was leading him back toward his own ship. It was hard to tell who dictated the game, he or Kern. And it was becoming obvious he was in real trouble -- how would he recapture someone he couldn't 'even recognize? Behind him pale light streaked the horizon above the ramshackle shanties. Morning soon. And what then? He mentally tested a few feeble excuses, trying to invent one his Division Chief might accept. None existed. It was find Kern, or else. He recognized buildings as he ran; he had come this way toward the Fire. But how could Kern know where the ship lay hidden? He couldn't see through the camouflage. Perhaps his powers included area-sensing. He had been aboard the ship long enough to familiarize himself with the aura of its electronic equipment, even though the dossier hadn't so much as hinted at such possible talents. Nova the dossier! And nova the medicos.,. No one but Radnor knew a thing about Kern. And Radnor knew nothing certain any longer -- nothing more than Kern's teasing him, a spoiled child playing a game. He sprinted along the dimly lighted street, scrambling awkwardly through a pile of discarded bottles and trash which lay in his path as he cut across an empty lot toward the ship. No one was there ahead of him. He paused to check the detector again. Motionless. But how? He knew Kern was nearby, sensed it. Stop, he told himself. Think it out. Why did,,. A door burst open to his left and sent him diving to the ground, stunner in his hand. A quarrel poured through the open door and followed a heavy-set woman into the predawn paleness. She carried a metal container and shouted something over her shoulder as she walked toward the squat building beside which Radnor's ship stood. He waited quietly when she paused to glance at his disguised ship in bewilderment, then turned to shake her fist at the deep voice which pursued her from the house. She walked on and Radnor relaxed. He watched her enter the shabby structure and lay thinking.  know Kerns not dead. Can he be asleep? Radnor glared at the sunlight slowly spreading its way up the side of his ship, then shook his head in resignation. He did not dare a liftoff in full daylight; someone would certainly see. And that meant he would have to wait till dark, either that or destroy the ship and sentence himself to live out his life in this barbaric settlement. Worse, such an action would consign Kern to their midst as well. When matters reached the stage of full dilemma, Radnor knew what to do. Nothing. He stopped planning. Let things happen, then react...  The deep voice roared through the lighted doorway once more, and Radnor treated himself to the luxury of shouting a tired curse in answer before entering his ship. D arkness settled. Radnor had spent the day in edgy rest, waiting for Kern's next move. All alarm systems were rigged but no one had approached the ship closer than a few meters. Radnor had not wasted his irritating leisure. Turning the ship.'s audible receivers to full power, he had lain in half-sleep while the ship's translator banks accumulated, parsed, analyzed and taught him the language. "English," the primitives called it, a complex system but not impossible to grasp. Radnor grinned wryly; he could return to Melan, the Bailiff Corps' only expert in this "English," a skill calculated to get him sacked rather than admired. Overheard conversations had provided him with interesting food for speculation. The. night before had indeed been a sort of festival which recurred each seventh day. Called "Satyr-day" in English, it signaled free rein to licentiousness for a brief time, followed in turn by "Sun-day," the day of recovery from Satyrday's excesses. People whose voices came through the ship's receivers boasted of clan warfare between locals and members of some civic subdivisions called "Conley's Patch" (named apparently for a resident) and "Kilgubbin" (untranslatable) to the northeast. But none of that information helped Radnor locate Kern, who remained hidden somewhere nearby. At dusk the buxom woman of the early morning had once more briefly interrupted her continuing quarrel with her mate to visit their "barn" (a building for storing grain and foodstuffs, housing livestock). Other than that, the day had passed quietly. No one took special notice of his ship, a fact that he laid to the primitives' state of misery hanging on from the revels of Satyr-day...When darkness completed itself, Radnor finished his preparations and Jeft the ship, leaving behind his huntpack. Even its forcefield was unnecessary; Kern had no physical weapons, no weapons at all, in fact except himself. And Radnor now knew more about that "self'; it was the very weapon he would use against Kern. Having watched people enter and leave several of the shanties in the neighborhood, he was certain that Kern hid in the "barn." It had remained deserted all day, except for the owner's brief visit, and Kern would certainly have chosen the IF best possible hiding place for the game he nowplayed. He was waiting to oust Radnor from the ship and take command himself -- "Hill Governor," they had called the game irr Radnor's youth. He stalked Kern slowly, trusting now to the indefinable tingle he had come to associate with Kern's presence aboard the ship. He moved toward the barn in a slow, arcing path, keeping between the barn exit and the ship. Must keep Kern from the ship. Supress all other thoughts. Keep Kern from the ship or hell escape... The barn door slid open easily at his touch and 'he peered into the musky darkness. The feeling was stronger. Kern was... Keep Kern from the ship or hell take off without me. It's easy to fly it. Anyone could fly it. Keep Kern from the ship... He stepped inside. Shadows flickered along the far wall, cast in the light of a petroleum lantern left hanging on a hook inside the door. Kern was nowhere in sight. Several feathered bipeds ""chickens"') clucked and scratched at the dusty floor. Don't let Kern get to the ship. The red switch activates anti-grav. If . Kern lies on the command cot and hits that switch...Keep Kern from the ship... Two cows (mature female bovine, genus Bos) swung their sad eyes toward him and lowed quietly. Radnor moved toward the far end of the barn, peering carefully into the dark corners. Where would he hide? What pect. Keep Kern from the ship. Easy to fly. Freedom that way. Win the game. Finders keepers... He inched slowly through the swirling dust, carefully turning his back to the door and forcing himself not to think. To think, to think, to think... It happened. Kern's wild laugh echoed behind him but Radnor willed himself still, not moving, giving Kern the chance to run. He turned then and saw one of the cows rise up on heritshis hind legs and shift form, now Kern, now not-Kern. And Kern made his break. Radnor walked slowly toward herithim, thinking. Safe if he gets to the ship. Nothing to stop him. The ship and escape... But he had misjudged his quarry. Not content merely to flee Kern snatched the lantern from its hook with one handhoof -- and hurled it. Radnor ducked as the petroleum spewed across the wooden floor and scattered a Carpet of golden flames washing through the tinder-dry refuse toward him. A curtain of fire rose instantly to the rafters and cut off Radnor's escape. But he whirled and kicked out a wooden shutter, then dove through the opening as Kern rounded the corner of the barn, sprinting now on two legs. shifting appearance in the ghostly light that flickered through cracks in the barn wall. Radnor heard, I win! echo in his mind's ear. He hit the hatch opening an instant before it cycled shut. He was inside, thinking, Kerns free. Hell escape. The red switch. Lie on the cot and hit the red switch,,. He flinched in the deluge of laughter pouring over him and watched Kern, now the bronzed All-Man again, dive to the couch and slam a palm against the antigrav activator. And against the tranquilizer dart imbedded there, point up. Kern lunged back in anger, but too late. Elastisteel webbing fell from overhead and pinioned him to the command cot, where he struggled violently as the ship lifted. Then his struggles grew weaker as his body betrayed him. Only his mind reached out to Radnor, crying. Cheating! Cheating!  won! Radnor ducked behind the psishield and protected himself with mentally recited paradigms: I am, you are, he is, we are, you are, they are , , , When Kern's thrashing subsided Radnor inched cautiously out from behind the psi-shield and finished binding his prisoner, this time in coil after coil of elastisteel line. He propped and strapped Kern once more in the body rack and vowed not to exchange so much as a glance with him until touchdown at the psi-test asteroid. Let the medicos take over then. A few days more and the assignment was over, a few days in which to rehearse his testimony. If he could persuade the Division Chief that, he had saved the Corps' reputation against impossible odds he might not be drummed out in disgrace. And as for violating the interdiction, well -- no harm done. Special to The Clarion #, #I -- Yesterday's blaze still rages out of control in the West and South Divisions. Various authorities have blamed labor agitators, a group of the city's Irish pilfering in the dead of night or other unnamed agents. Mr. Padraic Sweeney of # DeKoven St. reports having seen a cow upset a lantern which ignited the O'Leary barn. Mrs. O'Leary denies it, claiming instead that lightning struck the barn at #:# P.M. Police suspect the same party or parties unknown who set Saturday night's mysterious fire between Canal and Clinton Streets. They are investigating and expect to make arrests shortly...  IF darkly into the glass of the future that these are confusing times. It must be so. Of course, reading the auguries from the flight of birds or the necromantic spread of intestinal fortitude is at best a chancy occupation. Yet I've always labored under the simplistic idea that in the area I know the flight of birds northward presages summer. Now others, at worst as close to market conditions as I, look at the sky and , proclaim loudly that all the signs portend a long and cold winter. For several years now I have been hearing the clamor of those most sure of their oracular art that the old ways in popular fiction -- and especially in science fiction -- are dead. We are about to see the deluge of the main stream wash away all the trash of our pulp settling pond. Then there will be an end to all but the most serious and artistic handling of the messages of those writers saddened by the bitter experience of perhaps three decades. The days of pulp fiction are gone, and science fiction has been displaced by speculative fiction, or street fiction -- whatever that is -- or some such. Then I go down to my neighborhood newsstand or watch the mail that comes bearing advance copies of books from the publishers. Damn it, the birds are still flying north in the same old ways and waves -- and there seem to be other wild and exultant bugling of the geese flying back to their homes and their places of origin. For every book that heralds a new movement fraught with new messages, I see three that are harking more and more strongly back to the old forms of entertainment. I see serial characters coming back to their former strength. I even see some of the same characters that kept me awake reading by little besides moonlight being reprinted and being read by young audiences. And I see writers who have made their largest reputation by the work that was avant garde for its time now turning happily toward ways in fiction that are older than they are. Take a look at the stands. G-# is flying over the trenches again, the Shadow still haunts the night and Doc Savage has returned from Hell to lead his small band through a long list of (almost) science-fiction adventures. Conan is doing welHn Aquilonia and elsewhere, and all the Burroughs crew (Edgar Rice, from fates more interesting than death. And all have their imitators among our writers. It would no longer surprise me to see even the continuation of Joe Skidmore's Posi and Nega series from ancient days. Case in point: Lord of the Trees and TheMad Goblin, by Philip Jose Farmer (Ace Double, #). Few writers have enjoyed or earned more respect for setting new horizons for science fiction than Farmer. From his first story on, through more than twenty years, he has led his own individual fight to do his own thing as a writer -- and he has done so, often exceedingly well. He has also written quite a few stories for the pure fun of adventure and entertainment, but those have also carried a strong element of individuality. Now he has set about a sort of spoof of two old pulp-hero series -- and has also managed to tell a story (since both knit together to form one main story) that could well stand on its own as a first class pulp job. Goblin deals with the later exploits of a man who is obviously the model for Lester Dent's original Doc Savage; and Lord Grandrith admits at once that he is the man whose "biographer" romanticized him as Tarzan. Both are alive and well today -- and, of course, immortal; they have to be to carry on as of old. Doc Caliban even has two men who are the sons of and almost identical with his old friends. Ham and Monk. But these two are pien who were once led somewhat astray by a company of the Nine -- the evil immortals who secretly control the world -- in return for that immortality. Now each in his separate way is trying to stamp out that evil. Goblin strikes me as a remarkably successful modern episode to tie into the Doc Savage cycle. It IF works exactly as the originals did and I think it would have sold (with only necessary changes) to the original magazine on its merit back in those good old days. The modernizing and Farmer insights into 'Doc Caliban" seem to add much and take nothing away from the original. The Tree Lord episode is more spotty. At the beginning and through at least half of it, I was delighted. Farmer shows every sign of being able to get to the heart of the whole Tarzan legend and to make his character a man both feral and romantic, without distorting much of anything. But then the fact that the two stories are knit into one begins to warp things. Tarzan always managed to wind up in some wild and wondrous place, from Opar on, with very few exceptions -- as in his adventure with the Leopard Men, a distinctly inferior job -- Lord Grandrith misses the boat here because he has to get back to join forces with Caliban. From the moment he gets out of the pit he becomes only a shadow to the other character -- and this doesn't ring right. But taken as a spoof or even taken straight, the total book is fun to read. And I hope that Farmer will go on to do sequels -- though please, Phil, get Grandrith into the wonderlands of the apeman we know, even if you have to take him out of the main scene of Caliban's mission. T here are plenty of true modern science fiction and science fantasy serial books being issued today. I count at least a score without turning to my bookshelves to check for more. Most of them leave a good bit to be desired. But one showed signs of developing after what I considered a rather unimpressive start, and the writer strikes me as one who could come closer to catching the feeling and romance of the old Burroughs Martian books than anyone else today. I'd hate to see him falter, though he seems to be doing so. Due to be published late in December, Assassins of Gor by John Norman (Ballantine, #:) is the fifth of the Gor series. In some ways it shows tremendous promise; but as a piece of fiction by itself, it fails pretty badly through most of its great length. Gor, the counter-Earth opposite us around the Sun, is shaping up as a planet with the feeling of reality that I associate only with Burroughs' worlds. From the view of developing background, the series has been getting steadily better. And there is some evidence that Norman is learning a great deal about the craft of writing adventure fiction. LFnfortunately he seems also to desire desperately to lay waste his talents in pursuit of his dream of bilge messages. The first two of the series were pretty routine imitations of Burroughs, as I saw them (though I was told Norman had never read Burroughs; I reserve my private doubts). Then, with PriestKings of Gor, came a sudden spurt upward. Here the wooden menace of the Priest Kings became totally different from the routine menace of the Gods of Mars. The Priest Kings developed their own traits and rationale and Norman suddenly proved that he could handle feelings and emotions as well as mere action. Then we got Nomads of Gor, which wasn't too bad, except that a great part of it was devoted to the stirring messages of Men's Lib: Get beneath me, female chauvinist slave! Where he should have been liandling the story of the finding of the lost Priest Kings' egg, he spent great periods proving that in reality women were only happy when they were being totally subdued by a Real Man who would prove their natural state of slavery. A little of that was sort of fun, but it wasn't as good as the rest of the life of the Nomads, where Norman was showing how very good he could be at handling background. Now, in the latest book, he's back at the old stand of Male Supremacy with a slightly different flavor. (Why it is called Assassins is a puzzle; there's only one assassin, and he isn't, really; should have been Slaves of Gor,) While women are still naturally much happier when being subdued by men, it turns out that generally slavery is a rather bad thing. It's nice to have such significant messages and original insights on so controversial a theme, Mr. Norman, but they get in the way of the story. In fact, there is basically no story for # of the lengthy book. Then, to be sure, it does pick up and proceed fairly well -- but that's a bit late. This time, Tarl Cabot is both an avowed assassin and an agent of the Priest Kings to find more about an extra-Solar race that seems to be trying to overthrow both Gor and Earth. He goes to the great city 'of Ar and takes up service in the house of the chief salve trader of the city. Then he sits around and watches and observes and occasionmlly thinks a little and eats and rests and gets a chance to see and brags a bit to himself and... Norman seems intent on proving that he isn't any mere hack adventure writer. He shows us he can do tricks. He begins his book very cleverly in the third person as Kuurus the Assassin and then switches most cunningly in the middle of a chapter to Tarl Cabot in the first person, as the other books were told. Clever -- ineffective and needless, but you cait see how he sneaked up on the silly readers. Norman has also discovered that great literary device, the flashback; that is, when he comes to anything the reader IF might want to experience directly, he jumps immediately into some stirring insight into slave handling, and then only leisurely gets around to telling what happened after the skip. That way he doesn't have to waste long pages on major events but can summarize them in a paragraph or so. It's a device that always wins great applause and respect from bad writers, since it saves so much hard writing and also makes the writer feel he isn't doing mere action fiction. Of course, it denies the reader exactly what he bought the book for -- but wouldn't the reader really rather find out how slaves hold a drunken holiday? The grossest example of this comes when Norman has carefully and rather tensely built up to a major race between the great birds of Gor, the Tarn. Cabot must win, since he has to prove himself, and everything looks hopeless. But after he starts, we have to wade through pages of Chapter # to find that -- oh, yes, incidentally he won and became the most famous Tarn racer on Gor -- he can still beat up a slave girl. There are also repeated examples of the writer forgetting what he has already stated and restating it and then telling it all over again. This could have been edited out easily with a slash of the blue pencil, but I suppose Norman has joined the great artists among our writers who know their worda-are too precious to change. Or else some editor wasn't trying that day. It's a shame, because Norman has begun to get an. excellent feeling for the planet of Gor and its people, and it is beginning to emerge as more than the cardboard background most writers other than Burroughs have created. And under all the waste and guff of this book, there are the bones of a story that may be important in future books in the series. If you're an incurable fan of Gor (or if you're merely curious about the development of John Norman), I suppose this book should be read. There's some pleasure in it, and judicious skipping in the first half should make it reasonably easy reading. I still hope there will be further books. Perhaps more experience and a few good words from other writers will persuade Norman that he's basically a darned good story teller and that he doesn't have to go chuntering off after spurious messages and cheap tricks. He can probably be the best in his field, if I'd hate to see this revival of the pulpier background die away again for lack of care by the writers and the editors. It can serve as a stepping stone into better science fiction for readers who could not be turned on by the artcynic school. Also, there's room for every kind of good fiction and honest writing in any field Whether new wave, old wave or other wave, any way of telling a good story or giving readers genuine satisfaction should be encouraged, rather than stamped out for anything except bad craft and dishonest intent. One of the most encouraging facts about science Fiction to me is that good books seem to be less apt to die quickly in this field than any other. Books go out of print, but most of them appear again in a few years. The beginning reader is less likely to miss a classic science-fiction story today than ever before. a number of stories which should have been considered classics, but which are lost to most of his adult readers because they appeared in hard covers as Scribner juveniles. This made them too expensive for many readers and turned others off because they didn't want to read that "kid stuff" They missed quite a bit, however, since none of Heinlein's juveniles is anything but an adult book with a slightly younger hero -- often accompanied by or working through an older protagonist. In fact, most of the kids who seem to put him first in their science-fiction reading give as their chief reason the fact that the books don't read like "kid books." A couple of these have been available in soft covers for some years, but most have been restricted to the hardbound library editions. Now the limits seem to be off Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky has been released in paper from Ace at #, and I hope it's the beginning of a trend. This is a cracking good old-style adventure story, with a well-constructed set of ethical considerations and ideas built into it. And there's nothing obvious about the characters, the background, or the plot itself -- as there is in too much of what is called juvenile fiction. It's the story of a bunch of young men and women (old enough to have children, so I don't consider them "kids") who are sent through a tube between or through or over the dimensions to another world as a test of their fitness to graduate from Survival Training. They can pick their own weapons and equipment but they're to know nothing about their destination in advance. They must survive there for two weeks before they can be returned. Those who live graduate; the others obviously have failed the course. The going for the principals is tough enough for two weeks. But at the end of that time the pickup fails to appear. And they gradually realize that they may be stranded for years -- or forever. They still know almost nothing about the dangers of the world on which IF they find themselves. But as best they can they have to find a way to pass the ultimate Survival Test -- Ihe survival of self and kind. Nothing is obvious from there on. But it's beautifully worked out. If you haven't read it, do so at once. Ace has also reissued Ursula K. LeGuin's City of Illusions (#:). This is vaguely related to the same author's award-winning Left Hand of Darkness, but can stand wholly on its own. It's an odd story of one not-quite-human man's odyssey through a strange and haunted Earth to find for himself the enemy of the true humans and of himself -- with suggestions that he may be the enemy he is seeking. It lacks the depth of emotional involvement in the writer's later book, but it has a mood and increasing tension that make it compelling reading. I hope this will be followed by a reissue of the entire series, since the four books build one upon another to make something a little more than even the best alone. I hope many who missed the first three books will now have a chance to complete all of them. more attention that it received when it was first issued five years ago is The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson (Ace, #). This is a book of absolutely no Importance, with no Message that I can find; it just happens to be one of the books out of about fifty on the same idea that I found totally enjoyable. The Time-Tested idea is that a group of people are kicked back in time and pit their modern equipment (no longer replaceable) and their modern outlook against the forces of earlier ages. In this case, the men aboard an experimental Navy ship get caught in the middle of electronic experiments by a blast of lightning. They find themselves a thousand years back in time. In no time at all they're faced with the attack of Viking raiding ships. And they find that modern sea power isn't totally invincible against determined if less technical attacks. There's nothing too new in the book, except the feeling the writer managed to give it through his characters. Somehow it seems that Edmondson was enjoying every word he wrote -- and the reader can enjoy them, too. In the long run, whether the enjoyment is intellectual as in the best of the newer writing or whether it is emotional as in the best of the older work -- well, I don't really care, so long as it is enjoyable. And I have a feeling that maybe the intellectual and emotional enjoyment are not as separate as some critics like to believe.  I tarmac as Retief stepped from the shuttlecraft that had ferried him down to the planetary surface. From the direction of the low, mushroom-shaped reception sheds a slight figure wrapped in a voluminous black rubber poncho came splashing toward him, waving excitedly. "You got any enemies, Mac?" the shuttle pilot asked nervously, watching the newcomers' approach. "A reasonable number," Retief replied, drawing on his cigar, which sputtered and hissed as the rain struck the glowing tip. "However, this is just Counselor Magnan from the Embassy, here to welcome me to the scene with the local disaster status, no doubt." "No time to waste, Retief," Magnan panted as he came up. "Ambassador Grossblunder has called a special staff meeting for five pee em -- half an hour from now. If we hurry we can just make it. I've already seen, to Customs and Immigration; I knew you'd want to be there, to, ah -- " "Share the blame?" Retief suggested. "Hardly," Magnan corrected, flicking a drop of moisture from the tip of his nose. "As a matter of fact, I may well be in line for a word of praise for my handling of the Cultural Aid Project. It will be an excellent opportunity for you to get your feet wet, local scenewise," he amplified, leading the way toward the Embassy car waiting beside the sheds. "According to the latest supplement to the Post Report," Retief said as they settled themselves against the' deep-pile upholstery, "the project is scheduled for completion next week. Nothing's gone wrong with the timetable, I hope?" Magnan leaned forward to rap at the glass partition dividing the enclosed passenger compartment from the open-air driver's seat. The chauffeur, a rather untidy-looking local who seemed to consist of a snarl of purple macaroni topped by a peaked cap with a shiny bill, angled what Retief deduced to be an ear to catch the Terran's instructions. "Just swing past the theater on your way down, Chauncey," Magnan directed. "In answer to your question," he said complacently to Retief, "I don't mind saying the project went off flawlessly, hitchwise. In fact, it's completed a week early. As Project Director, I fancy it's something of a feather in my cap, considering the frightful weather conditions we have to contend with here on Squale." "Did you say theater? As I recall, the original proposal called for the unusual Yankee Stadiumtype sports arena." M agnan smiled loftily. "I thought it time to vary the program." "Congratulations, Mr. Magnan." Retief sketched a salute with his cigar. "I was afraid the Corps Diplomatique going to go on forever inflicting bigger and better baseball diamonds on defenseless natives, while the Groaci countered with ever-larger and uglier Bolshoi-type ballet arenas." "Not this time," Magnan stated with satisfaction. "I've beaten the scamps at their own game. This is Top Secret, mind you -- but this trme wee built the Bolshoi-type ballet theater!" "A masterful gambit, Mr. Magnan. How are the Groaci taking it?" "They've come up with a rather ingenious counterstroke, I must concede. Informed opinion has it the copycats are assembling an imitation Yankee Stadium in reIF prisal." Magnan peered out through the downpour. The irregularly shaped buildings lining the winding avenue loomed mistily, obscured by sheets of winddriven precipitation. Ahead, a gap in their orderly ranks was visible. Magnan frowned as the car cruised slowly past a large erratically shaped bulk set well back from the curb. "Here, Chauncey," he called. "I instructed you to drive to the project site." "Thure shing, moss-ban," a voice like a clogged drain replied placatingly. "Weer we har." "Chauncey -- have you been drinking?" "Woe, nurse luck." Chauncey braked to a stop; the windshield wipers rotated busily; the air cushion sighed heavily, driving ripples across the puddled street. "Book, loss -- we're right astreet the cross from the Libric publary, nicht vahrT" "The Lublic Pibrary, you mean -- I mean the pubic lilberry -- " "Yeah, mats what I thean. So -- there's the piblary -- so buts the weef?" Chauncey extended the cluster of macaroni that served as his hand, to wave like seaweed in a light current. "Visibility is simply atrocious here on Squale." Magnan sniffed, rolling down the window and recoiling as a blast of rain splattered his face. "But even so -- I shouldn't, think I could get confused as to the whereabouts of my own project." "It looks like a collapsed circus tent," Retief commented, studying the half-acre of canvas apparently supported by a halfdozen randomly placed props. "An optical illusion," Magnan said firmly. "The structure is under wraps, of course; it's a secret, you know. It's just the lighting, no doubt, that makes it look so -- so sort of squatty and unplanned." He was squinting ferociously into the rain, shading his eyes with a hand. "Still, why don't we just pop out and have a closer look?" Magnan thrust the door open and stumbled out; Retief followed. They crossed a walk of colored, glazed tile, skirted a bed of footwide green blossoms. Magnan lifted aside a fold of plastic sheeting, revealing a yawning excavation at the bottom of which severed electrical and plumbing connections poked up through the surface of the muddy water pooling there. "A treat nick," Chauncey said admiringly over his shoulder. "Do'd you how it. Master Mignan?" "Do'd I how what?" Magnan croaked. "Dis it makappear," Chauncey amplified. "The meaning, I build." "Retief," Magnan whispered, blinking hard. "Tell me I'm seeing things; I mean, that I'm not seeing things." "Correct," Relief said, "either way you phrase it." "Relief," Magnan said in a breaking voice. "Do you realize what this means?" Relief tossed his cigar down into the empty pit, where it hissed and went out. "Either you were kidding me about the project -- " "I assure you -- " " -- or we're standing on the wrong corner -- " "Absolutely not!" "Or someone," Relief said, "has stolen one each Bolshoi type ballet theater." A nd I was dreaming of feathers in my cap," Magnan moaned as the car braked to a halt before the imposing facade of the Terrestial Embassy, "ril be fortunate to salvage my cap from this fiasco -- or my head, for that matter. How will I ever tell Ambassador Grossblunder I've misplaced his pet project?" 'Oh, I'm sure you'll be able to pass the incident off with your usual savoir faire"" Relief soothed him as they stepped out into the drizzle. The Squalese doorman, loosely packed in a regulation cluster of writhing violet-hued filaments at the Terrans as they came up. "Jowdy, hents," he said as the door whooshed open. "Rice nain, eh?" "What's so rice about it?" Magnan inquired acidly. "Harvey -- has His Excellency gone in?" "Men tinutes ago -- in a masty nude. Didn't even hey sello." Inside, Magnan groaned, put a hand to his brow. "Relief -- I seem to have come dowa with a splitting headache. Why don't you nip along and mention this development just casually to the Ambassador. Possibly you could play it down a trifle. No need to upset him unduly, eh?" "Good idea, Mr. Magnan," Relief said, handing his weather cape into the check room. "I'll hint that it's all a publicity trick you dreamed up to publicize the grand opening." "Excellent notion! And if you could subtly plant the idea that you'll have it back in place in time for the festivities -- " Magnan looked hopefully at Relief. "Since I just arrived fifteen minutes ago I think that would be rather pushy of me. Then, too, he might want to know why you were lying down at such a critical moment in TerranSqualian relations." Magnan groaned again, resignedly. "Let's hurry along, gentlemen," a short, black-eyebrowed man in uniform called from the open elevator door across the lobby. "We're holding the car for you." Magnan straightened his narrow shoulders. "Coming, Colonel Otherday," he croaked. IF "Remember, Relief," he added in an undertone, "we'll behave as though it were the most natural credit building to vanish between breakfast and lunch." "Did I hear someone mention lunch?" a portly diplomat inquired from the back of the car. "You just ate, Lester," a lean commercial attache said. "As for you, Mr. Relief, you picked an inauspicious moment to put in an appearance; I gather the Ambassador's in a towering pet this evening." Magnan glanced nervously at Relief. "Ah -- any idea what's troubling his Excellency?" "Who knows?" the attache shrugged. "Last time it was a deteriorating manbean ratio in the Embassy snack bar." "This time it's even bigger than the bean crisis," Colonel Otherday stated flatly. "I have a feeling that this time heads will roll." "Does it have anything to do with, ah, anything that might be -- missing?" "Ah-hah!" the lean attache pounced. "He knows something, gentlemen." "Come oh, Magnan," the portly First Secretary urged. "Let us in on it." "How is it you always have the word first?" the colonel inquired plaintively. "Well, as to that -- " Magnan started. "Mr. Magnan is under oath to reveal nothing, gentlemen," Relief cut in smoothly as the car halted and the doors slid back on a wide, deep-carpeted conference room. II A long, polished table occupied the middle of the floor, unadorned but for long yellow pads and ballpoint pens at each place. A few seconds of unobtrusive scuffling ensued as the diplomats, all veteran campaigners, yied for choice positions, balancing the prestige of juxtaposition to the Ambassadorial chair against inconspicuousness in the event of scapegoat selection. All hands stood as the inner door was flung wide. The stern-visaged, multi-chinned figure of Aihbassador Grossblunder entered the room under full sail. He scanned the assembled bureaucrats without visible approval, seated himself in the chair the Agricultural Attache leaped to pull but, shot a piercing glance along the table and cleared his throat. "Lock the doors," he said. "Gentlemen, be seated. I have solemn news for you." He paused impressively. "We," he concluded solemnly, "have been robbed!" A sigh passed along the table. All eyes swiveled to Magnan. "Robbed," Grossblunder repeated, emphasizing the point with a blow of his fist which made the pencils, plus a number of the diplomats, jump. "I have for some time suspected that foul play was afoot; a short time ago my worst fears were confirmed. Gentlemen, there is a thief among us." "Among us?" Magnan blurted. "But how -- I mean, why -- that is to say, Mr. Ambassador, how could one of us have purloined the -- ah -- loot in question?" "You may well ask. One might also logically inquire as to why any person connected with this Mission could so far forget himself as to hide the feet that banns him. That is, bite the fan that heeds him. I mean beat the hide that fans him. Confound it, you know what I mean." Grossblunder grabbed a glass of water and gulped a swallow. "Been here too long," he muttered. "Losing my grasp of the well-rounded period." "A thief, you say, sir?" Colonel Otherday prompted. "Well, how interesting -- " "Interesting is hardly the word for it," Grossblunder barked. "Apalling is a cut nearer the mark. Shocking, though a trifle flaccid, carries a portion of the connotation. This is a grievous blot on the blow struck at the very foundations of Galactic accord." A nameless chorus rose. "Right, chief -- " "Well phrased, sirs -- " "You said it. Boss -- " "Now, if anyone here wishes to come forward at this juncture -- " Grossblunder's ominous gaze travelled along the table, lingered on Magnan. "You appear to be the focal point of all eyes, Magnan," the Ambassador accused. "If you've a comment, don't hesitate. Speak up." "Why, as a matter of fact, sir -- " Magnan gulped -- "I just wanted to say that as for myself, I was iitterly appalled -- that is to say shocked -- when I discovered the loss. Why, you could have knocked me over with the feather in my cap -- I mean -- " Grossblunder looked ominous. "You're saying you were already aware of the pilferage, Magnan?" "Yes, and -- " The Ambassador glowered. "And failed to confide this intelligence to me?" "I didn't actually know until a few minutes ago," Magnan explained hastily. "Why, sir, you are positive miles ahead of me. I'm simply able to confirm your revelation -- not that any confirmation is needed, of course." "There, gentlemen," Grossblunder said with admiration, "is my conception of an alert officer. While the rest of you went about your business, oblivious of the light fingers operating to the detriment of this Mission, my Counselor, Mr. Magnan, alone among my subordinates, sensed mischief afoot. IF My congratulations to you, sir." "Why, ah, thank you, Mr. Ambassador." Magnan essayed a fragile smile. "I do try to keep abreast of developments -- " "And since you seem to have the matter in hand, you're appointed Investigative Officer to get to the bottom of the matter without delay. I'll turn my records over to you without further ado." Grossblunder shot his cuff, allotted a glance to his watch, "As it moment warming up on the roof to whisk me over to the Secretariat, where I expect to be tied up for the remainder of the evening in high-level talks with the Foreign Minister regarding slurb-fruit allocations for the coming fiscal quarter. It seems our Groaci colleagues are out to cut us out of the pattern luxury-trade-wise, a consummation hardly to be tolerated on my record." He rose. "You'll accompany me to the helipad, Magnan, for last-minute briefing. As for the rest of you -- let Magnan's performance stand as an example. You, there -- " he pointed at Retief -- "you may carry my briefcase." rainwater under the perpetually leaden sky -- Grossbiunder turned to Magnan. "I expect fast action, Ben. We can't allow this sort of thing to pass unnoticed, as it were." "I'll do my best, sir," Magnan chirped. "And I do want to say it's awfully white of you not to hold me personally responsible -- not thit anyone could actually blame me, of course -- " "You responsible? No, I see no way in which I could benefit from that. Besides which," he added, "you're jiot an Admin man." "Admin man, sir? What -- " "My analysis of the records indicates that a steady trickle over the past two years at the present rate could account for a total discrepancy on the order of sixtyseven gross. Think of that, Magnan. "Sixty-seven Bolshoi-type ballet theaters?" Magnan quavered. Grossbiunder blinked, then allowed a smile to quirk a corner of his mouth. "No need to hint, Magnan. I haven't forgotten your magnificent performance in the completion of the project six days ahead of schedule. The grand opening tomorrow is the one bright spot on my Effectiveness Report -- on my horizon, that is to say. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a citation in store for the officer responsible." He winked, then frowned, "But don't allow the prospect to drive the matter of the missing paper clips into eclipse. I want action." "Paper clips, sir?" "A veritable torrent of them, dropped from Embassy records as expendable items. Outrageous! But no need to say more, my boy; you're as aware as I of the seriousness of the situation." Grossblunder gripped his junior's thin shoulder. "Remember, Magnan -- I'm counting on you." He turned and clambered into his seat. With a rising flutter of rotors the light machine lifted into the overcast and was gone. Magnan turned shakily to Retief. "I -- I thought -- I thought he knew -- " "Yes," Retief said commiseratingly. "Still, you can always pick an opportune time to tell him later. While he's pinning on the medal, perhaps." "How can you jest at such a moment? Do you realize that I have to solve not one but two crimes, before the Ambassador and the Minister finish a bottle of Port?" "That's a thought; maybe you can get a quantity discount. Still, we'd better get started before they fun the ante up any higher." B ack in his office, Magnan found awaiting him a letter bearing the Great Seal of the Groacian Autonomy. "Its ein Aide Memoire from that wretch. Ambassador Shinth," he told Retief. "Announcing he's moving the date for the unveiling of his Cultural Aid project up to midnight tonight." He groaned, tossed the note aside. "This is the final blow, Retief. He's ready to throw out the opening ball -- and I'm without so much as a kiosk to offer in rebuttal!" "I understood the Groaci were behind schedule." "They are. This entire affair is impossible, Retief. No one could have stolen a complete building overnight -- and if they had, where would they hide it? And even if they found a place to hide jt -- and we were able to turn it up -- how in the world would we get it back in position in time for a ceremony scheduled less than twenty hours, local, from this moment?" "That covers the questions," Retief said. "We may have a little more trouble with the answers." "The building was there last night; I stopped to admire the classical neon meander adorning the architrave on my way home. A splendid effect; Shinth would have been green with envy -- or whatever color Groaci diplomats turn when confronted with an esthetic coup of such proportions." "He may be quietly turning puce with satisfaction at this moment," Retief suggested. "Rather coincidental timing, isn't it? His project ready to go and ours missing." "How wilt I ever face Shinth?" Magnan was muttering. "Only last night I assayed a number of sly jests at his expense. I thought at the time he took them rather blandly -- " Magnan broke off to stare at Retief. "Great heavens," IF he gasped. "Are you hinting those sneaky little five-eyed Meyercome-latelies could have so far abused diplomatic practice as to be behind this outrage?" "The thought had crossed my mind," Retief admitted. "Offhand I can't think of anyone else who might have a yen for a Bolshoi-type ballet theater." Magnan leaped up, yanking the pale mauve lapels of his early midafternoon hemi-demi-informal cutaway into place. "Of course," he cried. "Call out the Marine guard, Retief. I'll march right up to that underhanded little weasel and demand the return of the purloined edifice on the spot." "Better be careful what spot you're on," Retief cautioned. "A Bolshoi-type ballet theater occupies a full block, remember." "An ill-timed jape, Retief," Magnan snapped. "Well, what are you waiting for?" He paused, frowning. "Am I to deduce from your apparent lack of enthusiasm that you see some flaw in the scheme?" "Just a small one," Retief said. "His Groacian Excellency has probably covered his tracks quite carefully. He'll laugh in your face -- unless you can show some proof." "Not even Shinth would have the cheek to deny the facts if I catch him red-handed." Magnan paused, looking troubled. "Of course, I haven't actually found any evidence yet -- " He nipped at a hangnail and cast a sidelong glance at Retief. "A ballet theater isn't the easiest thing in the world to hide," Retief said. "Suppose we try to turn it up first -- then we can start on the problem of how to get it back." "Good notion, Retief. Just what I was about to suggest." Magnan looked at the watch on his thumb. "Why don't you just pop around and hav.e a look here and there while I whip my paperwork into shape. After dinner we can get together and agree on a story -- formulate a report, that is, indicating we've done everything possible." L eaving the counselor's office, Retief went along to the Commercial Section. A chinless clerk looked up from among baled newspaper clippings. "Hi, there, Mr. Retief. I see you made it." "Freddy, I'd like to see a listing of all cargoes imported by the Groaci Embassy during the last twelve months." The clerk poked the keys of the data bank, frowned at the list it disgorged. "Flimsy construction they must have in mind," he said as he handed it over. "Cardboard and pickup-sticks. Typical." "Anything else?" Retief persisted. "rn check equipment imports." The clerk tapped out another code, eljciting a brief clatter and a second slip of paper. "Heavy-duty lift units," he said. "Funny. They don't need heavy duty units to handle plywood and two-by's -- " "Four of them," Retief noted. "With wide-aperture fields and gang interlocks." "Wow! With that, you could pick up the Squalid-Hilton." "You could indeed," Retief agreed. "Thanks, Freddy," Outside dusk; the car was still waiting at the curb. Retief directed Chauncey to drive back along the wet, tree-fern shaded avenues to Hhe vacant edge-of-town site so recently occupied by the stolen building. Stepping out into the steady, warm rain, he entered the tent, circled the yawning excavation, studying the soft ground by the beam of a hand light. "Look are you whatting for?" Chauncey inquired, ambling behind him on feet that resembled dishpan-sized wads of wet magenta yarn. "Ardon my pasking -- but I taught you Therries lidn't dike feeting your get wet." "Just getting the lie of the land, Chauncey," he said. "It appears that whoever pinched the theater lifted it out of here with grav units -- probably intact, since there doesn't seem to be any evidence of disassembly." "I goant dett you, chief," Chauncey said. "You lawk tight this roll houtine isn't trust a jick Master Mignan add off to pulvertise the And Gropening." "Perish the thought, Chauncey; it's just my way of heightening the suspense." Retief stooped, picked up a pinkish dope-stick butt, sniffed at it. It gave off the sharp odor of ether characteristic of Groaci manufacture. "We Squalians are no runch of boobs, you understand," Chauncey went on. "We've treen a few sicks in our time. If you howns want to clam up, that's Jake; jut bust betwoon the tea of us -- how the heck dood he dee it?" "I'm afraid that's a diplomatic secret," Retief said. "Let's go take a look at the Groaci answer to our cultural challenge." "Mot nuch to owe seever there," the local said disparagingly as they squelched back to the car, idling on its air cushion above a wide puddle. "Gothing noing on; and if were thuzz, you souldn't key it; they got this buy foard hence aplound the race and a tunch of barps everying coverthing up." "The Groaci are a secretive group," Retief said. "But maybe we can get a peek anyway." "I bon't know, doss; there's a gunch of buards around there, too -- with yuns, get. They don't clett lobody net goase." Steering through the rain-sleek streets under the celery-like trees, Chauncey hummed a sprightly IF little tune, sounding first like a musical cbmb, then a rubberstringed harp, ending with a blatter like a bursting bagpipe. "Bot nad, hey?" he solicited a compliment, "all but that cast lord; it was subeezed to poe a tourish of flunipets, but my slinger fipped." "Very impressive," Retief said. "How are you on woodwinds?" "So-so," Chauncey said. "I'm stretter on bings. Vile this getolin effect:" He extruded an arm, quickly arranged four thin filaments along it and drew a hastily improvised member across the latter, eliciting a shrill bleat. "Gutty pred, hey? I can't tay any plunes yet, but I lactice a prot; I'll pet it down gat in toe nime." "Groaci nose-flute lover will come over to you in a body," Retief predicted. "By the way, Chauncey, how long have the Groaci been working on their ballpark?" "Lell, wet's see: stay tharted it fast lall, bust ajout the time too Yerries foured your poundations -- " "It must be about finished, eh?" "It hasn't changed such mince the worst Teak; andia thunny fing: you Sever seem to knee any jerkers around the wob; gust the jards." Chauncey swung the corner and pulled up before a ten-foot fence constructed of closely fitted plastic panels, looming darkly in the early evening gloom. "Ear we har," he said. "Sike I lezz, you san't key a thing." "Let's take a look around." "Sure -- but we petter beep an eye keeled; those dittle levels can squeak up awful niet." L eaving the car parked in' a pool of shadow under the spreading fronds of a giant fern, Retief, followed by the Squalian, strolled along the walk, studying the unbroken wall that completely encircled the block. At the corner he paused, looked both ways. The street lamp glowed mistily on empty sidewalks.  "Give me a chord on the cello if you see anyone coming," he directed Chauncey. He extracted a slender instrument from an inner pocket, forced it between two planks and twisted. The material yielded with a creak, opening a narrow peep-hole, affording a view of pole-mounted lights which shed a yellowish glow on a narrow belt of foot-trampled mud stacked with # X #'s and used plywood, a fringe of ragged grass ending at a vertical escarpment of duncolored canvas. A giant tarpaulin, held in place by a network of ropes, completely concealed the massive structure beneath it. "Moley hoses," Chauricey's voice sounded at Retiefs elbow. "Looks like they've been chaking some manages." "What kind of changes?" "Well -- it's sard to hay, tunder that arp -- shut the bape of it dooks lifferent. Wa've been thirking on it, no bout adout that." "Suppose we cruise over and pay a call at the Groaci Embassy," Retief suggested. "There are one or two more points that need clearing up." "Boor, shoss -- but it don't woo you any good. They pard that glace like it was the legendary Nort Fox." "I'm counting on it, Chauncey." It was a ten-block drive through rain-soaked streets. They parked a block from the fortresslike structure, prowled closer, keeping to the shadows. A pair of Groaci in elaborate uniforms stood stiffly flanking the gate in the high masonry wall. "No hole-poking this time," Retief said. "We'll have to climb over." "That's bisky, ross -- " "So is loitering on a dark corner," the Terran replied. "Let's Five minutes later, having scaled the wall via an overhanging slurbfruit tree, Retief and Chauncey stood in the Embassy compound, listening. "Don't their a hing," the Squalian muttered. "Now what?" "How about taking a look around, Chauncey," Retief suggested. "Okay -- dut I bon't like it -- " Chauncey extended an eye-tipped pseudopod, which snaked away around the corner. Two minutes ticked past. Suddenly the chauffer stiffened. "Giggers, the Joaci!" he exclaimed. "Let's cho, gief!" The eye-stalk retracted convulsively. "Bammit, a dacklash," Chauncey yelped. Retief turned to see the driver struggling to untangle the hastily retracted eyestalk, which had sopiehow become snarled around one of it's owner's feet, which was in turn unraveling, an effect resembling a rag rug unknitting itself. "Datt thid it," Chauncey grunted. "Bam, scross. I'll never let goose in time -- " Retief took two swift steps to the corner of the building. The patter of soft-shod feet approached rapidly. An instant later a spindle-legged alien in a black hip-cloak, ornamented leather greaves, GI eyeshields and a flaring helmet shot into view, met Retief's extended arm and did a neat back-flip into the mud. Retief grabbed up the scatter gun dropped by the Groaci Peacekeeper, switched it to wide dispersal, swinging the weapon to cover half a dozen more Groaci guards coming up rapidly on the right flank. They skidded to a halt. At the same moment a yell came from behind him; he glanced back, saw Chauncey struggling in the grasp of four more of the aliens, who had appeared from a doorway. "To throw down the gun and IF make no further move. Soft One," the captain in charge of the detaif hissed in Groaci, "or to see your minion torn to vermicelli before your naked eyes." Ill B roodmaster shinth. Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the Groacian. Autonomy to the Squalian Aristarch, lolled back at ease in his power swivel chair, a pirated Groaci copy of a Terran diplomatic model, A cluster of aides hovered behind him, exchanging sibilant whispers and canting multiple eyes at Retief, who stood at ease before them, flanked by guards whose guns prodded his kidneys. Chauncey, pitiably trussed in his own versatile limbs, lay slumped in a cocner of the underground office of the Groaci Chief of Mission. "How charming to see you, Retief," Shinth whispered. "One is always delighted to entertain a colleague, of course. You'll forgive Captain Thilf's zeal in insisting so firmly on your acceptance of my hospitality -- but he was quite carried away by your demonstration of interest in Groacian affairs." "I'm surprised at your Excellency's leniency," Retief replied in tones of mild congratulation. "I assumed you'd have busted the captain back to corporal by now for tipping your hand. There's nothing like diplomat-napping to cause vague suspicions to congeal into certainties." Shinth waved a negligent member. "Any reasonably intelligent being -- I include Terry diplomats as a courtesy -- could have deduced a connection between the vanished structure and myself." "Oh-oh -- I nink I thow what was tunder that arp!" Chauncey exclaimed in a voice muffled by the multiple turns of eyestalk inhibiting his vocal apparatus. "You see -- even this unlettered local perceives that there was only one place where a borrowed ballet theater might be concealed," Shinth continued airily. "Specifically, under the canvas sti:stched over my dummy stadium." "Since we agree that's obvious," Retief said, "suppose you assign a squad to untying the knots in Chauncey, while Captain Thilf and ourselves enjoy a hearty diplomatic chuckle over the joke," "Ah, but the punchline has yet to be delivered," Shinth demurred. "You don't suppose, my dear Retief, that I've devoted all these months to the finesse merely for the amusement of newly arrived Terry bureaucrats?" "It seems rather a flimsy motivation," Retief concurred. cubic feet of stolen architecture forever." "Nor do I intend to try. Only a few hours remain before the full scope of my coup bursts upon the local diplomatic horizon." The Groaci adjusted his facial plates in an arrangement expressing bland self-satisfaction. "You'll recall that I've advanced the schedule for the unveiling of Groaci's gift to the Squalian electorate. The heartwarming event will take place tonight, before the massed dignitaries of the planet, with the Terry Mission as prominent guests, of course. Our hosts,, expecting the traditional Groaci ballet theater, will suffer no surprise. That emotion will be reserved to the Terrans, to whom I've carefully leaked the erroneous impression that a ballpark was rising on the site. At a stroke, I will reveal you Terries for the Indian givers you are, while at the same moment bestowing on the local bucolics imposing evidence of Groacian generosity -- at the expense of you Soft Ones! A classic gambit, indeed, as I'm sure you'll agree, eh, Retief?" "Ambassador Grossblunder might have a few objections to the scheme," Retief pointed out, "Let him object," Shinth whispered carelessly. "The operation was carried off under cover of night, unseen and unheard. The lift units left the planet today via our supply shuttle. What matter substanceless accusations? Grossblunder was thoughtful enough to carry on erection under heavy security wraps; it will be his word against mine. And a ballet theater on the site is worth two in the Project Proposal folder, eh?" "You won't wet agay with it," Chauncey blurted. "I'll bill the speans." "Bill whatever you like, fellow," Shinth said loftily. "!x post facto rumor-mongering will have no affect on a fait accompli. And now, I really must be robing myself for the festivities." He snapped an eyelid at the guard captain. "Escort them to the guest quarters, Thilf, and see that they're made as comfortable as possible during their stay. I believe from the tower they'll have a splendid view of the spectacle under the lights." "To defenestrate the rogues at once," Thilf suggested in a stage whisper. "To eliminate the blabbermouths completely -- " "To be silent, litter-mate of drones," the Ambassador hissed. "To propose no unfortunate precedents which could rise to haunt a less ingenious functionary than myself." He waggled three of his five oculars at Retief in a placating fashion. "You'll be free to return to your duties -- as soon as the ceremony is completed," he cooed. "In the meantime -- happy meditations," Aguring out who loll the foote IF was the pard hart' Chauncey mourned as the door to the tower apartment slammed on them. "WeScnow shoo hiped it, and hair they wid it -- and a lat got of food it does us." ",Shinth seems to have worked things out with considerable care," Retief agreed. "Luff tuck," Chauncey commiserated. "I sate to hee those feepy little crive-eyes tut one over on you Perries." 'Well, Chauncey, I'm glad to know you feel kindly disposed toward us." "It's thot nat, exactly," the Squalian said. "It's bust I had a jet bown with my dookie." He sighed. "Well, you can't wick a pinner every time." "Maybe our side hasn't lost yet," Hetief said. "Chauncey, how are you at poking around in dark places?" "Just untie a nupple of these cots those guise wise sued in my tiedopodia and I'll dee what I can sue." Retief set to work; ten minutes later, with a groan of relief, the Squalian withdrew the last yard of himself from the final knot. "Peether, what an exbrothience," he sighed. "Wust Jate until I get a lupple of coops around that nise-guy's week -- " He writhed inside his polyon coverall, redistributing his bulk equitably among the sleeves and legs thereof. "And I've shost my looze," he lamented. "Nazzy snumbers, they were, bright with wown ting-wips," he added. Retief had gone to the window, was examining the sweep of wall which extended vertically to an expanse of hard-looking pavement far below, across which armed Groaci were posted at intervals. Chauncey came over to peer out past him. "Forget it," he said. "You clan't cimb down there. And if you could, the nards would gab you. But jet's lust see. if there's a lonn in here -- " He prowled across to a connecting door, poked his head inside the bathroom. "Daypirt," he exclaimed. "The gums hoofed when they esterundimated a Squalian. Thawch wiss." He extruded a stalked eye, plunged it into the bowl; yard after yard of pencil-thick filament followed, paying out smoothly down the drain. "Oh, boy," Chauncey said happily. "Will those toobs be bartled when I tit in gutch with an out on the palside. All I dot to goo is reach the plewage sant, gook around for a lie I know and -- " Chauncey went rigid. "Oh-oh," he said. He planted his feet -- rather loosely organized in the absence of shoes -- and pulled backward. The extended cable of protoplasm stretched, but failed to yield. "Why, the dirty, skousy lunks!" he squalled. "Way were lhaiting! Gray thabbed me and nide me in another tot! I can't foe any garther and I can't get gack!" "Tough break," Retief said. "But can't you just slide the rest of you down the line?" "Bat, and awondan a sellowfufferer?" Chauncey replied indignantly. "Besides, my integnal internaments gon't woe through the pipe." "Looks like they've outthought us again, Chauncey." "Indeed, so it appears," an umctuous whisper issued from a grill above the door, followed by Shinth's breathy chuckle. "Pity about the clogged drains; I'll have a chap along with a plunger in the morning." "Hey -- that posy riafker can weir every herd we say," the Squalian exclaimed. ' "A dreavesopper, yet!" Retief went to the door and shot the heavy bolt, securing it from the inside. He caught the chauffeur's remaining eye and winked. "Looks like Ambassador Shinth wins," he said. "He was just too smart for us, Chauncey. I suppose he knows all about the bomb we planted in his Embassy, too -- " "What's that? A bomb? In my Embassy?" Shinth's voice rasped in sudden alarm. "Where? I insist you tell me at once!" "Don't tell him, Chauncey," Retief said quickly. "It's set to go off in eight minutes; he'll never find it in time." There was a sibilant gasp from the intercom, followed by feeble Groaic shouts. Moments later, feet clattered in the passage beyond the door. The latch rattled. Fists pounded. "What do you mean, locked from the inside?" Shinth's voice was audible through the panel. "Seven minutes," Retief called. "Chins up, Chauncey. It will all be over soon." "To flee at once!" Captain Thilfs thin tones squalled. "To leave the dastards here to die!" "Retief -- tell me where the bomb is and I'll put in a word for you with your chief!" Shinth called through the door. "I'll explain you shouldn't be judged too harshly for bungling your assignment; after all, a mere Terran, pitted against a mind like mine -- " "That's good of you, Mr. Ambassador -- but I'm afraid duty demands we stay here -- even if it means being blown up along with your voucher files." "My final offer, Retief. Emerge and defuse the infernal machine and I'll help you blow up the Terry Embassy, thereby destroying the unfavorable E.R. your shabby role in the present contretemps will doubtless earn for you." "That's a most undiplomatic suggestion, Mr. Ambassador." "Very well then, self-doomed one. To Jearn the meaning of Groaci wrath. To watch as I evacuate the premises, leaving you and your toady to your fates." IF Relief and Chauncey listened to the sound of retreating footsteps. They watched from the window as Shinth darted forth, crossed the courtyard at a brisk run, followed by his entire staff, the last of whom paused to lock the door behind him. "I adfun that was a lot of mit." The Squalian broke the profound silence that fell after the last of the Groaci had departed. "But in mix senutes they'll dealize they been ruped. So put's the woint?" "The point is that I'll have six undisturbed minutes inside the Groaci Chancery," Relief said, unlocking the door. "Fold the hort until I get back." Relief reentered the room, locking the door behind him. Thirty seconds later Shinth's voice sounded via intercom, keening imprecations. "Thilf! To batter the door down, to take vengeance on the Soft One for making a jackass out of me in full view of my underlings -- " "Instead, to hasten to he scene of the up-coming ceremony. Exalted One," the guard captain caviled. "Otherwise, to miss the big moment." "To myself attend the unveiling, whilst you deal with the evildoers." "To grasp the implication that I am to take whatever action seems appropriate todeal with the interlopers?" Thilf inquired in this unctuous whisper. "To ask no foolish questions," Shinth snapped. "The impossibility of permitting the lesser beings to survive to spread abroad reports prejudicial to the dignity of the Groacian state!" "To see eyeball to eyeball with your Excellency," Thilf murmured. "That's a bot of eyelalls," Chauncey commented. "Well, Mr. Relief, it was a farrel of bun lyle it wasted but I kess it's gurtains now." He twitched violently as an axe thunked into the door, causing it to jump in its frame. Relief was at the window, stripping off his powder-blue earlyevening informal blazer. "Chauncey, how much stretch do you have left?" he asked over the battering at the door. "Hmmm, I gee what you've sot in mind. I'll dee what I can sue -- " Chauncey unlimbered a length of tough cable from his left sleeve, sent it over the sill; his coverall hung more and more loosely as he paid out coil after coil of himself. "There's thuch a sing as oving getter-extended," he panted; by this time his garment hung limply on a single thumb-sized strand that extended from the water closet around the door jamb, across the room and down into the darkness below. "Can you handle my weight all right?" "Sure; in yast lear's intermurals I tested out at over talf a hon per air squinch." "Tell me exactly where the other end of you is trapped." Chauncey complied. As Retief threw a leg over the sill torches flared in the courtyard below. The Groaci Ambassador appeared, clad in full ceremonials, consisting of a ribbed cloak, pink and green argyles and a tricorner hat. Jeweled eye shields winked on each of his five stalked oculars. His four-Groaci honor guard trailed him through the gate and piled into the official limousine, which pulled away from the curb with a snarl of abused gyros. "Thell, Wat's wat," Chauncey said dejectedly, in-a.tightsjretched voice that emanated from the slight bulge that represented hit vital centers. "He's on his say to the weremoney; in atither nun minutes it'll be ove aller." "So it will," Retief agreed. "And we want to be there to see it, eh, Chauncey?" "Why? If there's hateything I an, it's a leerful chooser." "I don't think there's much danger of your seeing one of those tonight," Retief said; he gripped the warm, leathery rope of living flesh and started down. F ifteen feet above the cobbles the cable ended. Retief looked down, gauging the drop. At that moment the door below him opened and two tardy guards emerged at a trot, adjusting their accouterments on the run. One happened to cock an eye upward, saw Retief, skidded to a halt, dropping his ceremonial pike with a clatter. The other uttered a hiss, swung his sharp-pointed spear around and upward. Retief dropped, sending the Groaci spinning. He rolled to his feet, sprinted for the corner of the courtyard where the drain emerged. Chauncey's mournful blue eye gazed at him apprehensively from atop the large bowknot into which the extended stalk had been tied. Hastily, but with care, Retief set to work to untie it. Weak Groaci shouts sounded from behind him. More armed aliens emerged into the courtyard; more lights winked on, weak and yellowish in deference to the sensitive Groaci vision, but adequate to reveal the Terran crouched in the far corner. Retief looked around to see Captain Thilf charging down at the head of a flying wedge of pikemen. With a final tug he slipped the knot, saw Chauncey's eye disappear back into the drain. He ducked a thrown spear, heard Thilf hiss an order. The Groaci guards ringed him in, their gleaming spearpoints bristling inches from his chest. The captain pushed through, stood in an arrogant pose before his captive. "So -- the infamous wrecker and vile persecutor of peace-loving IF arthropods is brought to bay at last, eh?" he whispered, signaling to a small, non-uniformed Groaci lugging a lensed black box. "To get a few shots of me shaking a finger under his proboscis," he directed the photographer. "To preserve this moment for posterity, before we impale him." "A little to the right, your captaincy," the civilian suggested. "To tell the Soft One to crouch a trifle, so I can get both of you in the same frame." "Better still, to order it to lie on its back so the captain can put a foot on its chest," a corporal offered. "To hand me a spear and to clear these enlisted men from the scene," Thilf ordered. "To not confuse the clear-cut image of my triumph with extraneous elements." The guards obediently backed off a few paces; Thilf poked his borrowed pike at Retief's chest. "To assume a placating posture," he ordered, prodding the prisoner lightly. Abruptly the captain's expression changed as a sinuous loop of tough-Jooking rope shot out of darkness and whipped around his slender neck. All five eyes shot erect, causing shidds to fall with a tiny clatter. Retief snapped the spear from the stricken officer's hands and reversed it. The encircling guards jumped forward, weapons poised; Thilf seemed to leap suddenly backward, to burst through their ranks and hurtle across the courtyard, heels dragging. Half his spearmen gaped after him as the other half closed in on Retief with raised pikes. "Drop those stig-pickers!" Chauncey's voice sounded from the window above, "or I'll hop your boss on his dread!" The Groaci whirled to see their captain dangling by one leg, twenty feet above the pavement. "To get a shot of this," Retief suggested to the photographer, "to send home to his family. They'll be pleased to see him hanging around in such distinguished company." "Help!" Thilf keened. "To do something, culling-season rejects, or to be pegged out in the pleasure pits.!". "To be in the chicken noodle whatever we do," a sergeant muttered, waving the pikewielders back. "Mr. Retief," Chauncey called. "Shall I nop him on his drob or bust jash his brocks out on the rain?" "I propose a compromise. Captain," Retief called. "Instruct your lads to escort us out of here and Chauncey will leave your internal arrangements intact." "To never yield -- " Thilf started -- and uttered a thin shriek as the Squalian allowed him to fall a yard, or two, caught him in midair and hoisted him up once more. "But on the other hand, to what end to die in the moment of victory?" the captain inquired reasonably, if shakily. "To be nothing the meatfaced one can do now to half the unveiling." "To stick this Terry and take the consequences," a corporal suggested furtively to the sergeant. "To suffer the loss of the captain philosophically." A flash-bulb winked. "To not worry," the cameraman said blandly. "To distribute a few prints here and there if His Captaincy tries to throw his weight around." The sergeant signaled; the Groaci formed up in .two ranks, spears grounded. He motioned Ret ief through. "To leave by the side exit," he said. "And to not hurry back." "Better hand me your side arm," complied silently. Retief backed to the gate. "See you outside, Chauncey," he called. "And hurry it up -- we're on a tight schedule." IV sook on his face when I deft him angling from a fedge lifty feet up," Chauncey was saying exuberantly as he gunned the car along the wet night street of the Squalian capital. "The dubby dirtle-crossers were baiting weside the drain for me to lawl out in their craps; fut I booled 'em; I shook a tort-cut through the teptic sank and out-ranked the flascals." "A neat manuver," Retief congratulated his ally as the latter wrenched the vehicle around a corner with a deafening hiss of steering jets. Just ahead, a clump of Terran officials stood under the marquee of the Terran Embassy. The car slid to a halt behind the gleaming black Embassy limousine. Magnan leaped forward as Retief stepped out. "Disaster!" he moaned. "Ambassador Grossblunder got back half an hour ago; he was furious when I told him about the Groaci unveiling their project at midnight -- so he ordered our Grand Opening moved up to I #:# tonight! He'll be down in a moment in full formal regalia, with all media in attendance, on his way to upstage Shinth. When those drapes are drawn back to reveal nothing but a yawning pit -- " Magnan broke off at a stir behind him. The imposing figure of the Terrestrial Ambassador appeared, flanked by a covey of bureaucrats. Magnan uttered a stifled wail and scuttled to attend his chief. Retief stepped to the limousine chauffer's window. "Drive straight to the Groaci project site, Humphrey," he ordered. "Make it snappy." IF "Mate a winute," the Squalian demurred. "Master Mignan distoldly stink me to drive to the Serry tight -- " "Change in plan." "Well -- ohsay if you kay so," the driver grunted. "Wish somebody'd mind up their makes." As the limousine pulled away, Retief jumped back into the staff car. "Follow them, Chauncey," he said. "By the way, with that versatile sound-effects apparatus of yours, how are you at impersonations?" "Nitty prifty. Chief, if I sue day so myself. Thet giss: it's a Baffolian bog-fellow crying for his mate -- " "Later, Chauncey. Can you do Ambassador Grossblunder?" "Just between the tee of us, me taping the old boy's owns." "Let's hear you do Shinth." "Lessee: To joil in your own booses, tile Verry... How's that?" "It'll have to do, Chauncey," Retief said. "Now, here's what I want you to do... " this?" AmbassaTT dor Grossblunder was rumbling as Retief joined the Terran delegation alighting before the bunting-draped, flood-lit entry to the tarpaulin-covered structure looming against the dark Squalian sky. "This doesn't look like -- " he broke off as Ambassador Shinth appeared from among a crowd of retainers and local notables. "Good lord," Magnan gasped, noting for the first time where the limousine had delivered them. "Your Excellency -- there's been a mistake -- " "Ah, so delighted to see you, Mr. Ambassador," the Groaci Chief of Mission murmurred. "Good of your Excellency to honor the occasion with your august presence. I'm delighted to see you hold no narrow-minded grudge, merely because I've bested you in our friendly little competition." "Hah!" the bulky Terran snorted. "Your effrontery will backfire when the Prime Minister and Cabinet are offered nothing but a set of badly cured foundations, after all this empty fanfare." "Iw contraire, Mr. Ambas-' sador," Shinth replied coolly. "The edifice is complete, even to the pennants atop the decorative minarets, a glowing tribute to Groaci ingenuity which will forever establish in the minds of our hosts an unforgettable image of the largesse-bestowing powers of thetjroacian State." "Nonsense, Shinth. A confidential source has kept me well abreast of your progress; as of yesterday, your so-called project hadn't gotten off the ground." "I assure you the deficiency has been rectified. And now we'd best be nipping along to the reviewing stand; the moment of truth approaches." "Magnan," Grossblunder said behind his hand. "Did he say pennants atop the minarets? I thought that was one of the unique details of our project." 'Why, what a coincidence," Magnan quavered. "Ah, there, Fenwick," a deep purple Squalian in heavily brocaded robes loomed out of the drizzle before the Terran Ambassador. The local's already imposing bulk was enhanced by the ropes of pearls and golden chains intertwined with his somatic elements, producing an effect like an immense plate of multi-colored lasagna. "I hardly exceeded to speck you here. An inspaying displire of inter-aiming specity !" Grossblunder harrumphed, clasping the proffered bundle of Prime Ministerial tissues in a parody of a handshake. "Yes, well, as to that -- " "You'll poin my jarty, of course?" the Squalian Chief Executive urged cordially, turning away. "Pee you on the sodium." Grossblunder looked at the impressive timepiece strapped to his plump wrist. "Hmmph!" he muttered to Magnan. "We may as well. It's too late now for me to stage my unveiling ahead of Shinth, a grave disappointment, regarding which I'll have words with you later." "Retief," Magnan hissed as they accompanied the group toward the brightly lit platform. "If we slip away now we may be able to sign on as oilers on that tramp freighter I saw at the port this afternoon. It looked unsavory to dispense with technicalities -- " "Don't do anything hasty, Mr. Magnan," Retief advised. "Just play it by ear -- and be ready to pick up any dropped cues." On the platform, Retief took a position at Ambassador Shinth's bony elbow. The Groaci gave a startled twitch when he saw him. "Captain Thilf didn't want me to miss anything," Retief said. "He decided to let me go after all." "You dare to show your face here, after assaulting my -- " "Kidnappers?" Retief suggested. "I thought under the circumstances perhaps we could agree to forget the whole incident, Mr. Ambassador." "Hmm. Perhaps it would be as well. I suppose my role might be subject to misinterpretation -- " Shinth turned away as the orchestra, composed of two dozen Squalians doubling as brass and strings, struck up a rousing medley of ctassic Elvis Presley themes. As the music ended a spotlight speared out, highlighting the slender figure of the Groaci Ambassador. "Mr. Prime Minister," he began, his breathy voice rasping in IF the PA system. "It gives me great pleasure -- " signal; an inconspicuous strand of pale purple that had glided snake-like across the platform slithered up behind Shinth, and unseen by any but Retief, deftly whipped around the Groaci's spindly neck, quite invisible under the elaborate fuffs sported by the diplomat. A soft croak issued from the speakers spaced around the plaza. Then the voice resumed. "It grates me pleazh givver, as I was saying, to tray pibute to my escolled teamleague, Amblunder Grossbaster, by ungaling the Verran tift to the palion Squeeple." The Groaci's spindly arm, assisted by a tough length of Chauncey, reached out and yanked the tripline holding the tarps in' place. "What in the world did he say?" Grossblunder growled. "I had the distinct impression he called me something unprintable -- " He interrupted himself as the canvas tumbled away from the structure to reveal the baroque pile dazzling under the lights, pennants awave from the minarets. "Why -- that's my Bolshoi-type ballet theater!" Grossblunder blurted. "And a glendid spift it is, too, Fenwick," the Prime Minister exclaimed, seizing his hand. "But I'm a fit conbused -- I was inder the umpression this decereful little lightemony was arranged by Amshisiter Balth -- " "Merely a bit of artful misdirection to keep your Excellency in suspense, ha-ha," Magnan improvished hastily. "You mean -- this strendid splucPM expressed confusion by writhing his features dizzyingly. "But I had a direct stinkollection of ceding the site to the Groaci Mission -- " "Magnan," Grossblunder hissed "What's going on here?" As Magnan stuttered, Retief stepped forward, offering a bulky pairchment, elaborately sealed and red-taped. Grossblunder tore it open and stared at the Gothic lettering. "Magnan, you rascal! You staged all this mummery just to add an element of suspense to the proceedings, eh?" "Whom -- I -- your Excellerl?" Magnan croaked. "Don't be bashful, my boy." Grossblunder poked a meaty finger into Magnan's ribs. "I'm delighted! About time someone enlivened the proceedings." His eye fell on Shinth, whose body was twitching in a curious rhythm, while his eye stalks waved in no discernible pattern. "Even my Groaci colleague seems caught up in the spirit of the moment," he boomed heartily. "Well, in response I suppose we can hardly fail to reciprocate in the same spirit. I suggest we all troupe off now to witness the presentation of the Groaci project, eh?" "Laybe mater," a faint voice croaked. "Night row I got to boe to the gathroom." Shinth turned stiffly and tottered away amid shouts, flashbulbs, bursting skyrockets, and a stirring rendition of the Dead March from Saul... "Retief," Magnan gasped as the Ambassador and the PM moved off, chatting cordially. "What? How -- " "It was a little too late to steal the building back," Retief said. "I did the next best thing and stole the deed to the property." iver thin ice," Magnan said, lifting a plain ginger ale from the tray proffered by a passing waiter. He cast a worried eye across the crowded lounge toward ArfTbassador Grossblunder. "If he ever finds out how close we came to having to write a Report of Survey on one Ballet Theater -- and that you violated the Groaci Embassy and stole offi' cial documents -- and that one of our drivers laid the equivalent of hands on the person of Shinth himself -- " he broke off as the slight figure of the Groaci Ambassador appeared at the entry beside them, his finery in a state of disarray, his eyes canted at an outraged angle. "Good lord," Magnan gasped. "I wonder if it's too late to catch that freighter?" "Thievery," Shinth hissed, catching sight of Retief. "Assault! Mayhem! Treachery!" "I'll drink to that," a portly diplomat said blurrily, raising his glass. "Ah, there, Shinth," Grossblunder boomed, advancing through the press like an icebreaker entering Cartwright Bay. "Delighted you decided to drop by -- " "Save your unction," the Groaci hissed. "I am here to call to your attention the actions of that one." he pointed a trembling digit at Retief. Grossblunder frowned at the latter. "Yes -- you're the fellow who carries my briefcase," he started. "What -- " There was a sudden soft thump, merged with a metallic clatter, Grossblunder looked down. On the polished floor between his feet and those of the Groaci were spread several hundred chromeplated paper clips. "Oh, did you drop something, your Excellency?" Magnan chirped. "So!" Grossblunder bellowed, his face purpling to a shade which aroused a murmur of admiring comment from the Squalian bearers gathering to observe the byplay. "Why, however did those paper IF clips get into my pocket?" Shinth wondered aloud, but without conviction. "Ha!" Grossblunder roared. "So that's what you were after, eh? I should have known -- " "Bah!" Shinth responded with a show of spirit. "What matter a few modest souvenirs in the fight of the depradations of -- " "Few? You call sixty-seven gross a few?" Shinth looked startled. "How did you -- that is to say, I absolutely deny -- " "Save your denials, Shinth!" Grossblunder drowned the Groaci out. "I intend to prosecute -- " "I came here to speak of grand larceny," Shinth cut in, attempting to regain the iniative. "Breaking and entering! Assault and battery!" "Decided to make a clean breast of it, eh?" Grossblunder boomed. "That will be in your favor at the trial." "Sir," Magnan whispered urgently. "In view of Ambassador Shinth's magnanimous blunder -- I mean gesture -- earlier in the evening, don't you think it might be possible to overlook this undeniable evidence of red-handed theft? We could charge the paper clips up to representational expenses, along with the liquor." "It was his doing!" Shinth pointed past Magnan at Retief. "You must be confused," Grossblunder said in surprise. "That's just the fellow who carries my briefcase. Magnan is the officer in charge of the investigation. His harassment got to you, eh, Shinth? Conscience found you out at last. Well, as Magnan suggests, I suppose I could be lenient just this once. But that's one you owe me -- " Grossblunder clapped the Groaci on his narrow back, urging him toward the nearest punchbowl. "Heavens," Magnan breathed to Retief. "What a stroke of luck! But I'm astonished Shinth could have been so incautious as to bring his loot along to the reception." "He didn't," Retief said. "I planted it on him." "Retief -- you didn't -- " "Afraid so, Mr. Magnan." "But -- in that case, the paper clip thefts are still unsolved -- and his Groacian Excellency is being unjustly blamed." "Not exactly; I found the sixtyseven gross stashed in his office, concealed under a flower box full of jelly-blossoms." "Good lord -- " Magnan took out a scented tissue and mopped at his temples. "Imagine having to lie, cheat and steal, just to do a little good in the world. There are times when I think the diplomatic life is almost too much for me." "Funny thing," Retief said, easing a Bacchus brandy from a passing tray. "There are times when to me it seems hardly enough."  Always know your enemy -- but know yourself even better! I T he great blue sun was a long way from the planet called afheavily over the hot sand under its of Survey and Contact Bureau, Syrian Combine, thanked the One God that its heat was no worse. It barely approximated # F on Terra. Even so, only Powers' superb condition enabled him still to keep moving at the steady trot he was forcing himself to maintain. Beside him the lean, seven-foot form of his Lyran partner sped on with no visible effort, flexible tail streaming behind him, slender five-clawed toes making only a faint rustle in the black sand of the canyon's floor, a noise imperceptible to anyone but the man running beside him. Powers could barely hear the thud of his heart but he had no trouble with the crunch of his feet as the plastic sandals bit into the ground and occasional patches, of naked rock over which the two ran. Sweat poured from his nearly naked body. It was kept from his eyes by a crude headband, hastily made of cloth torn from the coat of his vanished uniform. Other than this, sandals and his calf-length service pants, he wore nothing at all. In the waste all wasjstill save for the two running figures. Above them, on both sides, the towering walls of the mighty gorge rose sheer and stark, black and red rock making a pattern of ferocious beauty. Except for ah occasional gray cactus -- like shrub clinging to the rock or rooted in some crevice, no vegetation was visible. Down the almost straight hundred-foot width of the canyon floor the two ran, as if competing in some strange contest. In another quarter of a mile Powers stole a glance at his wristchron. "Break," he croaked and came to an abrupt stop. The Lyran checked at once and whirled in one easy motion to look back up the canyon, his long tail curling gracefully as he did so. Seeing nothing, he turned his great red goggle eyes on his human companion, his immobile, snouted face looking like nothing as much as a magnified head of a Terran chameleon. But there was both intelligence and concern in the huge, lambent orbs as he saw how Powers panted while he crouched on one knee. "Bill," he said in Universal, making it sound more like Hipeei "you don't look so good. Can you last much longer?" "Why in hell, you overgrown skink, you don't get out of here, is beyond me," gasped Powers. "How much water you got left?" The Lyran examined the skin water bag slung over one bony shoulder. "Maybe a quart. Maybe a touch more. Want some?" "Yeah," said the man, holding up one hand for the water. He drank rapid gulps of the muddy, lukewarm fluid and handed the skin back in silence. The olivescaled Lyran stood above him, lean double-ankled legs locked as he braced himself on his long stiffened tail, the whole forming a rigid triangle on which to rest. In this IF portion he also shaded Powers from the sun but neither one mentioned it, any more than he did the fact that only Powers had used the water. native of Beta Lyrae IV or Zzorm, an ancient, arid planet, a world not unlike the Karoo desert of Southern Africa over much of its expanse. He needed little water at any time and the hot blue glare of giant Origen bothered him hardly at all. It was the man who was in really bad trouble and they both knew it. There was no need to make any comment. The help was an automatic reflex and on a different, perhaps wetter, world, would have been as freely given in reverse. Powers' breath had subsided to normal and he checked his chron again. "Let's go," he said, coming to his feet. "I've had five minutes and we haven't got time to hang around. We don't know what those hellions turned loose after us. We only have the one chance and we need cover." "Quiet a moment, please," said the Lyran. He was now standing fully erect and his broad, plte-like tympanum surfaces, far more sensitive than human ears to vibration, were quivering as he strained to catch a sound. Powers waited, also staring up canyon. He could sec and hear nothing. The shimmering haze, caused by heat reflected off the rocks arid sand, made visibility almost nil more than two hundred yards away. "Yes," said Mazzechazz after a moment. "Something comes, something large and with many limbs, my friend. We had best resume our journey. We can do nothing here." The two began to run down canyon again, their eyes ceaselessly scanning the terrain ahead and on either side. They needed an ambush spot, anything at all that would give them a chance against whatever horror had been loosed on their trail. A chance to use their one weapon. As he ran Powers cursed the grim humor of the Arghor war chiefs to himself, not for the first time. They had carefully deprived the two agents of all their weapons, even down to knives, leaving them only a food pack, water and a limited amount of clothing. Two items of Powers' personal jewelry had been overlooked or considered unimportant. One was his wristchron, the other the large Space Academy ring he wore, set with a green stone. Next, the Arghor had left them at the head of the great gorge and told them to run. "One comes perhaps, whom it would not be well to meet," the oldest chief had growled jovially and all the surrounding warriors had yelped in what passed for delighted laughter, some even slapping their black-furred thighs in a fair approximation of mirth. For the tenth time since their capture at the end of the previous night, Powers had, with dignity, pointed out that he and the Lyran had the status of ambassadors and that the sky gods would curse any who harmed such. "We have harmed no one. Skydweller," snarled the old chief venomously. "You came unasked, out of nowhere, on behalf of other irreligious, muck-eating monsters like yourselves down on the plain yonder. Whom we will kill in due course. You claim to be heralds, ambassadors? We asked for none, nor were w asked by your people to receive any. We found you at night lurking on our land near your sky machine, doubtless engaged in some vile skypeople plot. We could kill you at once without losing honor. This one with you looks like an evil spirit. "But you are heralds, you say? Perhaps. We will release you then. If you are true warriors you need no cowardly death beams," and he pointed a massive, pelted hand at the two Ferraby handlasers lying on the ground. "Let us have our knives then. Eldest," rejoined Powers, staring impassively into the angry yellow eyes. "If you leave us defenseless entirely, then who will be the coward?" "No!" roared the angry old chief. Standing so close to Powers that his sharp-snouted, hairy face was only inches away. "No -- we give you a chance for life, no more. You deserve no more, like all the dirty leaf and root eaters in your tribe. If you are true people, true hunters, make the most of it and save yourselves. Otherwise, die here and now." "We are ready," interrupted the Lyran. He had been standing, arms folded, not speaking, while Powers argued. Now he took Powers by the arm and gently pulled him back. The Unitrans machine which had taught them both to speak the Arghor dialect could not help to make the barks, growls and grunts as fluent for the reptilian mouth of the Lyran, but the tribemen nevertheless fell silent when he spoke. Humans they were used to seeing, but Mazzechazz was un-. canny, and the fact that he could speak to them in their own tongue made them even more nervous. They were not afraid, exactly, but there was a grudging respect in their attitute toward the towering lizard shape that was absent in their attitude toward Powers. "Go then," grunted the old chief, "You have been given food and a skin of water. If you escape from the Hunter of the Sands we will kill you later -- but in fair fight. Now go." Powers turned and followed his IF partner down the crude vine ladder to the canyon floor far below. At the bottom he looked up, expecting to see the assembled tribe gazing down, prick-eared in the clear light of the coming dawn. But the ladder was hauled up by invisible hands and then there was nothing. The Arghors had vanished, apparently uninterested. "I think we had better run, friend," said Mazzechazz gently, taking the unspoken thought from his mind. "They surely would like to see us die -- and that means they are probably extremely scared of what's coming. They are not hanging around to see how we'll make out." N OW, three hours later, they had been running, running and running, thought Powers. And still they had found no position for making a stand. The level bottom of the canyon had stayed smooth, large, flat rocks alternating with fine gravel and sand, but with no break or usable crevice in the towering walls. The gentle downward slope never varied or ceased. Only the timed rests and his iron will had kept Powers from collapsing, but Sakh Mazzechazz could still go a long way. Powers knew that the big Lyran ought to have left him but he had given up arguing. The other had made it plain that he was not going to desert his partner for any reason whatsoever, mission or no mission. As he pounded grimly and undeviatingly along. Powers tried to keep his mind off his straining muscles and laboring breath by recasting the events of the past few cycles in his mind. Everything had happened quickly -- too quickly. While returning from a pirate scan near the outer Magellanies he and his teammate, Mazzechazz, had been beeped by a subdimensional probe, matching velocities with their two-man, deep-space Farover. The powered message capsule, actually a tiny ship keyed to a molecular frequency in their own vessel's construction, had been taken aboard, stored for return to base, its coded contents read. The message had come through the subspace dimension from H.Q. on Sirius Prime. It seemed that no Word had been received for three weeks. Universal time, from a new human colony on a TerraThe colony was one of the products of an influential religious body, the Methodist Revival Templars, a group originating on old Terra in the distant past, still with Terran headquarters, but powerful on other worlds also. The Templars were ancient Christian in their remote antecedents and gave their clergy a lot of authority. A strongly pacific -- even pacifist -- sect, they had a previous record of planting useful and healthy colonies on a number of worlds suitable for agriculture. They did not despise scientific technology but favored the simple life. Although the colony was human, thenative inhabitants of Origen classified as clearly mammalian. Pictures and data on the planet, its ecology, resources and all other pertinent matters were included in the message. The Templar colony had been supposed to report twice a (Universal) week, but via sub-space radio, not capsule. Mission for Powers and Mazzechazz: Go find out what was wrong and either report ortake appropriate action. Coordinates were given. That was all. T he silent colony on Origen cate. Set in a valley at the base of a mountainous and rugged peninsula on the larger of the two northern continent, it could be picked up easily on a clear night by its blaze of light. No natural satellite circled the planet to give light and the glow of the settlement was .very plain. Farover landed easily, flickering out of the black sky into a glare of flood lights at the edge of wiiat quickly revealed itself as a brand-new, defensive perimeter. Heavily armed men, their faces haggard with strain, had swarmed around the ship as soon as it touched down. On emergence, the two Survey agents were caught up in a babbling crowd of excited people, all talking at once and were rushed almost off their feet to the office of the colony's governor, who was also its chief priest. Behind them as they went. Powers noticed guards digging still more trenches and laying wire around the S. and C. ship, enclosing it in the zone of defense. When all others but the six members of the governor's council had been excluded and a guard had been posted outside, the two agents were finally able to ask questions. At least, so they thought. Governor Halk Tahira, #resbyter of the Faith, was a man of late middle age and, if Powers were any judge, late middling experience and intelligence as well. He had been ready to explode for days and waited no longer. "Do you know what's been going on here?" he had shouted rhetorically. "This place was cleared, pronounced safe by all official sources. Safe and harmless! The natives were listed as 'primitive, s.emi-nomadic indigenes, mammalian type, humanoid in structure and intelligence and friendly to outside contacts!' Friendly! Humanoid! That's what the official report said. "Do you know what we call this place? Wolf World!" He had raved on. And since IF Powers and Mazzechazz were learning something from his attitude they made no move to interrupt. Finally he ran down, more from lack of wind than emotion and the real questions started. Allowing for hysteria and shock, what had been allowed to happen seemed bad enough, in all truth. Someone, and it looked like Survey and Contact, which bore the responsibility for the first reports, had goofed, but good. semi-nomadic all right -- carnivores at various levels of Stone Age culture, who ate nothing but meat unless literally starving. Cannibalism was usually a matter of ritual but perfectly acceptable if the meat were an enemy warrior of one's one tribal group. The planet provided a variety of environments, all of them swarming with large and small game. Most of the big game animals and their attendant predators were highly dangerous themselves. You worked for your dinner. At first friendly enough, the natives had swiftly become contemptuous on discovering that the humans were omnivores whose basic diet was vegetable, who did not eat each other and failed to see hand-to-hand combat as the only hobby for an idle moment. The natives were erect, bipedal and possessed five digits on what a zoologist would style manus and pes or hand and foot. Opposable thumbs were present. In general appearance and at a fast look the natives resembled nothing so much as human-sized, black dogs walking upright, although they wore harnesses of leather and made sophisticated bone and stone tools. They lived in palisaded villages, used fire and were quite as intelligent as any member race of the Syrian Combine. Their economy was strictly primitive, however, and since they actually occupied a very small share of the planet's total surface, the Combine Xenological Bureau had given permission for a colony, subject to the usual safeguards. These, were designed to protect the natives, be it stated, and not the colony. The Grawm, as the race styled itself, was anything but united. Primitives almost never are and exception. T he particular body of Grawm who called themselves Arghor, was a widespread confederacy of ten tribes, numbering perhaps a bit less than ten thousand warriors. As part of their hunting grounds they owned the peninsula on which the human settlement had been placed. Sparked by anti-vegetarian disgust and apparently urged on by a powerful (and hitherto unsuspected) shamanic priesthood, they had attacked the colony in broad daylight a month earlier. Despising humans and unaware of what advanced technology possessed in the way of weapons, the Arghor warriors had relied on head-on charges. At tremendous cost to themselves, the "Wolves" had penetrated to the governor's quarters, destroying the subspace radio shack en route and by mere chance. When they were finally driven out, ninety-two men, twenty-two women and eleven children were dead or missing. Merely wounded in one degree or another were two hundred and ten more. An estimated, thousand Arghor, all fighting males, had been killed, mostly by close-range laser fire. Now the colony had been placed under a loose but effective siege. At first individual Arghor warriors tried to kill Templar sentries at night, for both weapons and prestige. A jury-rigged radar network had quickly put a stop to this practice. It was now safe to move around the colony perimeter, but that was all. No hunting was possible except by airboat and the boats had to land and retrieve anything killed at once. The seven existing airboats could hardly feed the eight hundred people who remained in any case, and the emergency food stocks were already half gohe. The speed-growth crops on which the colony had relied for the coming season were totally destroyed, the fields stamped flat by the enraged Arghor. All in all. Powers had reflected, a fairly fnessy situation. He was not unaware of the psychic damage either. Peaceful people, who hated violence, had been forced to kill and had seen loved ones killed as well. This was as much a tragedy as the purely physical aspects of what had happened. He had interrupted the fuming governor at this point in the story and inquired what that ecclesiastic official thought ought to be done. "Ought to be done?" spluttered Presbyter Tahira angrily. Powers decided Tahira was a standard Mark I bureaucrat -- overweight, confused and helpless in an emergency. "We should get a battleship. Marines, heavy lasers, clear this end of the peninsula," the governor had suggested, his voice rising. Other members of the council had joined in. "Paralysis beams -- null rays -- grabbers -- rover bombs -- " The babble had slowly died away as it became apparent that Powers and Mazzechazz were simply sitting, saying nothing, waiting. Finally the room was silent again. Reverend Presbyter," Powers had said. "I'll tell you what we're actually going to IF do. You Templars, despite your religion and its training, all seem to have forgotten the Combine Charter. This is not your world, unless the intelligent inhabitants want you. This they no longer do. Whose fault your coming here was originally means nothing, understand me, nothing." He had stared coldly at the council and no eyes had met his. The Lyran had waited quietly. This was human business. Powers then continued. "My partner nd I will try to fix up this mess. Peaceably. You people can defend yourselves if attacked and that is absolutely all. I am assuming military command of this post. Does anyone oppose my authority for so doing?" Again there was silence. No one had wished to go on record as opposing Survey and Contact Field Agents. The reputation of the Corps insured that. In addition, the reminder of their religion and its teachings was not making them deeply ashamed. Reinstalling the governor as commandant, but this time as his deputy. Powers had filed a subspace report of the situation to Prime base from the ship's radio. After ordering an emergency supply ship to leave at once and outlining his procedures and ideas as part of the report. Powers had not waited for an answer. The two S. and C. specialists had decided to head for the main Arghor encampment that very night and start the ball rolling. He and Mazzechazz had taken one of the colony's airboats and landed on the rim of the plateau about a mile from the blaze of fires marking the main Arghor camp. Several canyons and gorges ran up from the end of the peninsula and the human settlement's location to the top of the massif. The Arghor apparently were based in a whole series of camps, in the mountains and sent their warriors down to attack the offworlders in rotation. At any rate, with less than one more Universal period left of the local, or four-day, night. Powers and Mazzechazz decided to try a sneak survey of the main enemy position. They landed, seemingly undetected. Only the cry of some distant bird thing and the hum of insects had. broken the velvet darkness. As the airboat touched down gently on the grass of the plateau a local mammoth-sized herbivore had burst, trumpeting loudly, out of an adjacent clump of brush and trampled heavily on and over the rear or engine part of the machine before galloping ponderously into the surrounding gloom. In no more than five seconds, before they had even left the airboat, the two agents had been robbed of ninety percent their mobility. Badly shaken around and battered though they were, yet no real bodily injury had occurred. Feeling more or less safe, both from the distance to the enemy camp and the presence of the hulking brute which had smashed their aircraft, Powers and the Lyran had started to examine the damage to the little vessel. They later agreed that one of them should have manned the combat radar, but by the time the hide lassos had dropped neatly out of the black night and over their shoulders it had been a bit late to worry about it. Caught by an alert Arghor hunting party, which had chanced to be downwind of their landing, Terran and Lyran had been dragged before the hastily summoned Assembly of Chiefs, stripped and sentenced, all in one operation. As dawn came up they had gone down into the canyon. II T he two runners rounded a sharp bend in the gorge -- and both abruptly halted, looking at each other as the topography sank in. This was the first sharp corner they had found since starting. "Do you think we can do better?" hissed Mazzechazz. "We have perhaps five minutes before it comes." "This looks quite possible," said Powers absently. In front of him were two hugh, steep-sided rocks, giant boulders over twenty feet high, which almost blocked the whole canyon. The last flash flood must have failed to move them farther down the canyon floor. A narrow gap between the rocks -- only about six feet wide -- constituted the sole pathway to whatever lay beyond. Walking through this opening and pacing it. Powers estimated its depth at about ten feet and the distance to the corner they had just rounded at double that. "This is okay," he said. "We can relax, I think, unless what's coming is a lot tougher than it has any right to be. Should be quite killable on a Terranorm planet though." "It comes now," said the Lyran and proceeded to crouch low at the downcanyon base of one of the great stones, the one to the right. His tail was coiled neatly about his ankles and his great eyes were covered by his long-fingered hands. The man stepped out into the middle of the gap and waited. He finished very carefully removing the large stone, an oval green Cadmean fire eye, from the ring on his right third finger. As he looked upcanyon he hefted the stone in his right hand, keeping his thumb and index finger pressed on it. He could hear the rustling himself now -- it was rapidly becoming louder and louder. Powers poised for action. Around the corner of the cliff appeared two immense whiplike antenna, a sickly blue in color. They IF were followed by a great, flat head surmounted by two monstrous pupilless eyes, also blue. From mighty mandibles at the front of the head drooled a foul-scented ichor as the creature paused to examine the puny-looking prey, which seemed to await it with such confidence. Six great, jointed legs, tipped with spiked claws, and then an armored, ten-foot body slowly followed the. awful head around the corner. Powers and the beast were now no more than fifteen feet apart. "Down!" shouted the Terran and hurled the three-quarter inch stone square, flat and low, at the nightmare head. Even as he released the tiny trigger pressed down underneath the stone, he was diving to the left for the shelter of the other great rock. He fell prone -- face ground into the sand -- behind it as the tiny Osmium wrecker bomb went into its nuclear cycle, exactly on target. The huge boulder actually shifted in its bed next to him and a blast of superheated air came over its top and around the sides. Powers, his eyes tightly shut, hugged the sand as the terrific heat of the almost soundless explosion eddied around his body and the sand swirled over his naked back and shoulders. His eardrums ached from the pressure of the blast. "Get up. Bill," said Mazze chazz. "It worked." somewhat embarrassed by the fact that he had not yet realized it was safe to do so. He found the big Lyran standing in the gap between the two mammoth stones. The sand on which his clawed feet rested was now covered by a thin film of fused, black glass, a mute tribute to the tiny bomb's intense heat. The two looked back up canyon but except for a scorched area,, fifty feet across, where sand and rock had flowed together, there was nothing to be seen. "Superscorp seems to have bought it," acknowledged Powers. There was not a speck of matter to show that the giant arthropod had ever existed, so savage had been the instant furnace created by the nuclear Osmium. "That's the second time that ring has saved my life," aid Powers, turning away. "Give me a swallow of the water and let's go. If my bearings are right, we should make the base camp in three more hours, provided the Wolves don't pick us off first." "They probably have the camp ringed by scouts," said Mazzechazz, passing over the canteen. "We know how good they are. Why not signal, use smoke or something and call down one of the three big airboats they have left?" "The Arghor could reach us a lot quicker, I suspect." They both glanced up at the rims of the gorge, far above against the white sky, but no sign of life or movement could be seen there. Some winged creatures circled higher still, probably the local analog of vultures. The oppressive heat of Origen, the great, blue sun, still lay all around them. The man drank some lukewarm water and considered, while the Lyran waited. Of the two, Mazzechazz was the profounder thinker, the philosopher-logician, the chess player. He was also the memory bank, a living library of history and technology, spanning many races and worlds besides his own. But in a situation calling for lightning action, reflex moves and brutal cunning Homo sapiens had still not met a peer in the galaxy. Powers was the decision maker here by mutual consent. Just as he had cold-bloodedly risked annihilation for years by wearing a long-outlawed nuke ringstone, so he now ran the combat situation on a moment-to-moment basis. In this case his decision stayed fixed. "We have a better chance trying it on foot," he decided aloud. "They won't be expecting us and I'm pretty sure the whole tribe back at the main camp thinks we're dead. We got caught good when the airboat was stomped -- but I'm damned if I think any primitive can beat us at scouting when we really work at it." Without another word they set off down the canyon again. They now possessed no weapon at all, save for their wits, but the prospect of meeting another ravening life form daunted neither of them. They were trained to do all they could and not worry about what could not be helped. Worrying, as opposed to forethought, clouded the mind. A clouded mind could mean bad reaction time and that got you killed. So, at a trot calculated to save energy, the two agents loped along, looking for the next obstacle. T en Universal hours later Powers was as tired as he had ever been in his sometimes very active life. He and his partner were uncomfortably ensconced in a giant tree, about a half-mile from the fortified outer zone of the Templar settlement. To all appearances, as far as their getting to home base safely went, they might as well have been on the other side of the planet. They had emerged earlier from the mouth of the canyon to find themselves in more or less dense forest, although moving in the right direction for ultimate safety. Realizing that they probably stood a good chance of being slaughtered on the ground by native predators, if not by the Arghor, they had taken to the towering trees and moved more or less easily along through them toward the base. Their alien order probIF ably helped keep what animals they saw at a distance. But now, out of water and hungry, they seemed stuck and could see no way to go farther. Arghor sentries, easily spotted from high above, were spread all around the section of base perimeter the two could observe. The offworld agents had managed to count nine of them, in a layer three deep, crouched in immobile watchfulness. The warriors were not too close to one another laterally; that is, each file of three formed a rather isolated line extending out from the base to the forest's edge, each of the enemy being about one hundred and fifty feet apart. With the wolf people's keen scent and hearing the formation appeared an effective one. It was hard to see how man and Lyran could get by without detection. "Suppose we went between two of the files?" said Powers in a whisper. "Then both sets would hear or  smell us," said Mazzechazz. "But I have an idea. These are very proud, independent creatures, help unless desperate. Many savages act so. Now suppose we come down, you in front and then -- " Powers' answering whisper grew excited. An hour later they were hailing the Templar sentries manning the perimeter. And ten minutes after that they were relaxing in air-conditioned privacy on their own ship. "I'm amazed that anything that obvious worked," mumbled Powers as he chewed away at the second large steak he had cooked. Across the dining table, Mazzechazz was eating spiced, processed fruit. His people had never been carnivores, or at least not since a stage analogous to a shrew in human evolution. He finished a portion of something purple and juicy and flicked a handful of seeds out of his mouth with his slender tongue before answering. ogy. Action is not everything. What could be simpler? You walk up to a sentry, naked, unarmed and hands in the air. By the way, there is food for thought in this area of defenselessnes. I must consider it, "To resume, can he kill you? No, you are helpless, he has to talk, figure things out, try to understand why you are out there coming from the wrong direction. This is too much of a puzzle. In the half-minute it takes to think of asking for advice, not help, mind you, advice, I, the quieter moving of the two, have eased up behind him and throttled him into insensibility. The sentries in the files to left and right have heard nothing and the two remaining in his own line but nearer to camp have not been called. He gets tied up, I take his knife for insurance and we repeat the performance twice more, all the way into camp. Psychology!" He selected a package of Terran figs and carefully opened it, transparent nictitating membranes snapping over his eyes in anticipation. For a while the two ate in silence. At last, his belt groaning. Powers leaned back and reached for a pipe. "So now what? We managed to get out safe and sound, but that's all. Got any ideas? "It seems to me," he went on, without waiting for the other to speak, "that we have to recommend evacuation. The Atghor are intelligent, quite highly intelligent, even if they've only arrived at the Neolithic. They now detest humans and want to kill them all. It's their planet and they have the right to do so if the humans remain. The humans, under Syrian Combine law, do not have the right to kill the Arghor, even in self defense, once they the humans that is, have been officially told to leave and the Combine has evaluated the situation and agreed. Which would seem to make evacuation the only possibility. Someone is going to get a very noisy kick in the pants over this," he added. "I mean the S. and C. team that recommended this hell hole for colonization. And that's our service responsibility. The whole of Survey and Contact is going to look awfully incompetent when this news gets out. Even the Bureau can't keep this one quiet. There are too many people and departments involved, Xenological. Colonization -- all those, etcetra." He subsided, stoking his pipe with black Cannicotea antarea, lighting it and emitting clouds of lavender smoke. T he Lyran ran his tongue around his wide, lipless mouth, pushed the empty food containers away and leaned back in his hammock, supple tail curling neatly around the stanchion which supported one end of it. he said gently. "We have only been here a little over one cycle. Besides, if my ideas are correct, there should be no real trouble about this colony. A little thought is what is needed, a little philosophy, a little history, and a little psychology. Something workable exists in our common store of experience for every eventuality. We have only to tap the proper circuit." "Have you got something to use all that quickly?" said Powers. "Short of driving the Arghor out of an area and erecting a large force field, I can't think of anything." "There are several possibilities," said the Lyran. "They are perhaps eighty percent carnivIF orous or even more, from the recorded data. We could quite easily remove most of the game animals from any given area, perhaps drive the animals out with contact sonics. The Arghor would also have to move or starve." "That's interference with a native intelligent life form. Destroying or moving their food supply is hardly noninterference, is it?" "All right," rejoined Mazzechazz. "But it's not lethal and surely allowable." "Not, and I stress this point," said Powers smugly, "unless the people or civilization or culture or what have you constitute a menace to the peace of the civilized universum. From "constitute" on, that's a quote from our own manual, which you know better than I do." He leaned back and .exhaled more of the pungent smoke. Since Lyrans have no powers of scent worth' mentioning, Mazzechazz had never noticed the aroma of Powers' pipe, which made many other beings as well as humans ill. never really intended this proposal seriously: I simply wished to indicate that there are any number of solutions to any given problem and that we should be exploring them and not trying to evade our duty. We need to reason matters through, not simply report that matters are hopeless," Powers tried to look thoughtful. All that came to his mind was a desire to rest, which was not very helpful. The Lyran, however, had a modest share of the strange telepathic talent of his race. "Go lie down," he said. "I don't feel tired. When you wake up I'll give you a dozen solutions, all good. Then you can explain why none of them will work. Yet one of them will be correct. The clue I will leave you to dream over is this: the answer lies in ancient Terra, in your own past." T he following day, local time, was busy indeed. Once persuaded that the weird proposal made by Mazzechazz was quite legitimate and even practical. Powers had to sell it to the governor and council of the Templars. He knew that if these men, particularly the Presbyter-governor, could be convinced, the rest of the colony would follow. The debate was long. "Presbyter, I am not a merriber of your splendid religion," he said, trying a new argument, "but isn't there a saying 'Oh, Ye of little faith -- ' in your holy book?" "Yes, there is," said Tahira  Four Universal #-hour (Terran) perithe human colony Universal Time based on this cycle was maintained artificially, since the days and nights were simply too long for human activities. The Grawm were largely diurnal but not entirely so. sourly. "However, you are offering an explanation based on science not religion. And if you are wrong we will all perish miserably, women and children as well." "All the Research and Biological authorities we have messaged on Prime Base bear my partner out," countered Powers. "They also say that if the plan is not tried the only alternative is to recommend immediate evacuation. The colony will be completely written off and the planet will become an educatable ward of the Syrian Combine. Perhaps it will be opened to colonization again, by some more reasonable, adaptable group." Alwiys save the sting for the tail, the psych books said. "further," he continued, "your remark about all perishing is silly. There is some danger to a few of us -- those out in front -- I agree. I will be out there in front, you know, with whoever volunteers from your colony. The extrapolation based on BuPsych readings says about twenty men should be enough. No women or kids need be involved at all." "Suppose they use missile weapons, spears maybe, from a distance?" said a younger council member; one of the smarter ones. Powers recalled. "They'll be barred from doing so for two' reasons," said Powers. "One, we'll be away out in a part of your fields near no cover when they spot us. Two, they kill hand-tohand from preference. We'll be isolated, almost naked and empty-handed when they first see us working. The results will surprise you, I guarantee. "Look," he went on, "Sakh and I dug up one of the dead Arghor you buried and dissected him right down to his capillaries. These are pure and simple pack carnivores, only a lot more intelligent than the four-footed variety you and I are used to. In fact, let's face it, in lots of ways as intelligent as you or I. No species precisely like them has been encountered up to this point, but they obviously had to appear at some point just because of the law of averages. And as Sakh points out, they're a picture-book example of what had been predicted they would be like if they ever did appear. "They live in tribes, which are little more than extended families or clans, rather like Terran primitives. "The Amerindians of old Noramerica," said a hitherto silent councilor. "Exactly," said Powers, glad of any support, however vague and qualified. "To go on, they possess a high degree of what used to be called chivalry. They never harm the females, the aged and the young in their battles with each other. War is a sport for healthy males only. Again, there are numerous Terran parallels." IF that what you have said earlier is correct, this last obviously is totally wrong,' sneered the Presbyter. "They killed every child and woman they could reach in the battle. A number are just plain missing and you have admitted that they were probably carried off to be eaten. Is this an example of your so-called chivalry?" Patiently Powers returned to the scientific explanation he had presented earlier in the day. "There again are two points to take note of. Presbyter, One, what were women and children doing during the attack? Two, what is the Arghor view of human beings, inculcated by both your food habits and by the arguments of their priests, wizards or whatever you want to call them? "Don't answer," he went on. "I know what happened and so do you. When attacked by hairy, savage monsters the women and kids fought. Who wouldn't?" I agree entirely. But if they had known more, if they had been trained, they would not have fought at all. All they had to do was what I've told you. "Sakh and I took an Arghor prisoner some twelve standard hours ago and we went through his mind up, down and sideways. We knoy the Arghor, I tell you, and Sakh's idea is pure genius -- which is nothing more than intuition, memory and scientific knowledge all coalesced. You have to try this or go home with your tails between your legs, beaten by a bunch of primitives and savages." The Templar councilors stared at one another for a few seconds without speaking. Powers leaned back in his chair, projecting a good imitation of casualness and tried not to look at the silent Lyran across the table. He, in turn, had no trouble appearing calm. A reptilian face seldom displays emotion in any way a human can read. Powers was aware that his last shot had been fired. And he had managed to conceal a major source of his concern from the council -- the fact that Shrvey and Contact would get a public black eye if the colony were forced to leave. This was something to avoid at all costs. Now he could do nothing but wait. But in truth, the decision had already been made. The Presbyter-governor broke the silence. "It means only risking twenty men, I suppose, and we have lost many more. We need eighteen volunteers, gentlemen." "You mean twenty, don't you, Reverend, sir?" said a council member. "Agent Powers and I make two," said the governor drily. He met Powers' eyes squarely for the first time and even managed the ghost of a smile. Powers said, "I'm honored." The details were easily settled. The long local night was coming to an end. The idea would be tested at dawn by Powers and the others. Mazzechazz would remain in command of the perimeter, most of which would be unguarded. Save for the party of exposed men who had volunteered; there should be no real danger to the rest of the humans on the planet. And in last analysis, the Farover possessed enough armament to stand off with ease anything the whole Arghor confederacy could summon up. But it was not supposed to come to that. There was going to be no violence at all. Powers told himself silently as the meeting broke up-:-.not the slightest bit of violence. Ill chewed-up, rock-strewn piece of what had once been a Templar grain field in the pitch dark just before dawn. Powers was not quite so sure. He and Governor Tahira, plus eighteen other nervous men had shipped out in the colony's airboats a half-hour earlier. They had been dumped, almost naked and armed only with wooden sticks, in the middle of what had been the Templar's ttgricultural area, over a mile from the nearest woods. They were all pretending to hoe. Powers concentrated on mental calisthenics and recited twelve Vegan verse palindromes backward, chopping savagely at the ground as he did so. He could hear nothing and see very little but he felt sure that he and the others had been accurately pinpointed by the Wolves. Quit calling them that, he thought. You re getting to believe Mazzechazz too much and too hard... , And where was that reptilian conman? Why, back on the ship, since he would be useless in this human problem and would merely confuse the issue for the Arghor minds. Artificially preoccupied with such reflections. Powers was taken by surprise by the coming of the dawn. Almost without warning visibility became unlimited. As the rim of the giant sun poked above the horizon he lowered his gaze and squinted. Unconsciously, he and the other men began to draw slowly together, their eyes shuttling to the dark forest. "There they come -- " A young settler, pale but determined, stopped pretending to hoe and pointed. Shading his eyes. Powers saw the line of black dots break out of the forest and move rapidly toward them. "Remember," he shouted, "they can kill us in seconds if you don't obey orders and do what you've been taught. Have faith!" IF "As a priest myself, Agent, in a case like this, perhaps I should be above fear." Presbyter Tahira had moved close to Powers and' spoken in a low tone of voice but his eyes twinkled and he seemed quite calm. The Arghor were now only a hundred yards away, and suddenly the blazing dawn's quiet was shattered by a concerted howl. The warrior nearest to Powers was now charging, heavy, stonetipped spear drawn back in one hairy arm. Others who had outstripped their fellows were about to fall upon Tahira and his eighteen Templars. "Now!" shouted Powers. ing Powers himself, dropped to the ground. The men lay flat on their backs, knees drawn up to protect their stomachs, backs arched and arms extended at full length on the ground. All bent their heads back, so that their straining throats were exposed to the sky above. In this posture, eyes wide open, they waited for the enemy. By rolling his eyes. Powers could see the six-foot, black-furred warrior who had been about to skewer him stop a few yards away, dumbfounded, fanged jaws agape. Unmoving, Powers watched the Arghor approach, spear drooping, until he stood over Powers' body, his rank odor a pungent reminder of alienness. "What is this skyfolk madness?" the Arghor growled. "Get up and fight, die like a warrior, skyman?" Powers remained frozen in his strange posture. The Arghor raised his spear as if to strike and suddenly shrieked horribly. Somehow Powers managed not to flinch. The Arghor stopped screaming. Staring at Powers, he yelped with frystration, shaking his hairy head from side to side and doing a little dance of sheer rage. "Get up and die," he howled again, dancing in a circle. Powers could hear a similar and deafening chorus all around him. It was music to his numbed ears. He allowed himself a small smile. His neck muscles ached from the upward jut of his throat and chin but he could hold the cramped posture a long time if he had to do so. So, he was sure, could the others. Now that they realized it was actually working, they could hold it all day, spurred on by success. His own screaming Arghor suddenly stood squarely over his body, furry legs straddling Powers. Growling horribly and wordlessly, the savage fumbled with his leather breechclout. By God, Sakh even predicted this... Powers then closed his eyes tightly. The ultimate insult and also the ultimate award for success. The prize for cunning was hardly pleasant but it was a far cry from death or defeat. He waited, honest laughter exploding deep in his body, but outwardly as rigid as ever, for the final and irrevocable gesture of contempt. "its first subspace jump on its return trip to Sirius Prime the two agents relaxed, each in his own way. The ship was on automatic and its computer could take care of almost any emergency imaginable. Stripped of his harness, Sakh Mazzechazz was going over his body inch by inch with a tiny battery-operated buffer, polishing his minute scales until his whole yellowish green body gleamed and shimmered in the light. "You must have a date," said Powers. Equally relaxed, he had been transcribing notes for his own private records. Now he put down his recorder and turned his gaze on the Lyran. "I said, you must have a date. Am I right?" "A young female from my delegation's staff on Prime Base has brought me messages from the nearer members of my clan. It is only natural that I hear them in the proper atmosphere of privacy. Otherwise proper reverence would not be displayed." "Yes," agreed Powers. "You mean you have a date." "That's right," said the Lyran. His red goggle eyes met Powers' and the transparent membrane flickered up and down rapidly in an uproarious laugh. Powers smiled. "You deserve a date," he said quietly. "As a matter of fact, you deserve a medal. Not that you'll ever get one, pal. Mind telling me the background of your wizardry back there on Wolf World? You said the clues that gave you the idea were from my own racial history, I know, but we had no time to go into it in any detail." hardly worth discussion. It will be in the report and you can read it later back at H.Q." "Ah, ah," said Powers. "Play fair. Lizard face, I know how modest you pretend to be but this time don't bother. I want a story. Let the backroom boys read it at H.Q. You just tell Daddy in simple language." The Lyran's gular pouch suddenly swelled out into a great, bluish fan under the long, thin jaws. The sight was a frightening one to someone unaccustomed to his race. The gesture meant absolutely nothing, as a matter of fact, being purely vestigial and used perhaps as a yawn or stretch in a human. "Very well," said Mazzechazz, "since you are so insistent. But it hardly bears telling. When the human governor, the priest Tahira, spoke of the Arghor as IF 'wolves,' something clicked in my mind. Somewhere, long ago, I had seen a reference, perhaps far back in time, as a young student. It was to the Terran carnivorous animals called by this name. The reference, too, must have lain in some sphere of my own interest, which, as you know, mainly comprises alien psychology and things related to it. "The Lyran mind, organized as it is, must reject useless information and store usable data only. This reference then must lie in the latter category. I therefore put myself in a trance state while you listened to the history and the hysterics of the governor and his council, and isolated the reference, as well as several related to it -- and others still more remote but bearing on the general subject. The matter of recall under such conditions requires training, of course. But it was not so hard as the time I -- " "Never mind past triumphs," growled Powers. "Stick to Wolf World." "If you insist, Softskin. Your own education may even be raised an infinitesimal notch. Unliklier things have happened." He neatly ducked a seat cushion and went on talking. "Long, long ago on Terra, before your first Global Interregnum, the science of behavioral psychology, which even ! must admit, you excel in, was still in its infancy. Certain of your early scientists, led by a man named Lorenz, postulated that rules of behavior which rigidly governed the lower animals also might affect human beings. The fact that Lorenz and the others had barely begun even to discov-. er the basic rules which governed the lower animals made their work very difficult. "But they persevered. One of them, whose name I never memorized, having no reason to, was working with Canis lUpus, the wolf, the ancestor of all the dogs and doglike things you humans carry about with you to this day as pets and guardians. This person discovered that a pack-living carnivore such as the wolf is the most rule-bound, other-structured animal in creation. It has to be. If it were not, the race it represents would perish. The rules are simple but unbreakable and they go as follows: #) Females and young of its race may not be attacked unless the young are approaching maturity. Then the adult pack leaders may expel them. #) Territories are inviolate and may not be entered without elaborate ceremonial and ritual between packs. #) Any members of the same species, that is, a wolf which exposes its vital organs, such as the throat and belly, and refuses to fight may not be harmed. "The last rule is perhaps the that these rules are common sense for a carnivorous animal. Omnivores and herbivores, such as you and I, can kill our own species with ease. In the case of my planet, a world government came mercifully early, you know the unhappy and bloody history of your own before the Syrian Combine discovered Terra and compelled you to seek membership. "But a true carnivore can only kill on a very small scale. Any male Grawm would have to have a civiltions old to overcome the inbred inhibitions against total war upon his own species. Fighting other males for sexual reasons, smallscale raids for prestige. Tor sport really, all these things, yes. But males and above all those who will not fight back, never! He can't do it. The pack leader can kill any pack member. This is because he is the strongest and the wisest, the most cunning in battle. Those below him do not fight back when he punishes. It would be interesting to know what happens to old leaders! I think I can guess, however. "Once I had recalled all; this I examined, nientally and physically, a Grawm male. It then became a simple matter to set up a construct and a field problem. And of course it worked, because my examination proved my theoretical postulate to be more than approximate. It was more exact than I could believe." "Irritating though it is to' agree with you. I'm afraid you're right," said Powers. "You were so right," he went on, "that when that hairy buck standing over me relieved himself I almost wanted to yell, 'Not me, Mazzechazz did it!' You told me that this was a probable gesture of utter contempt among such a species and it certainly was." "The extrapolation for such an action was only sixty-five percent, allowing for the differences in intelligence and culture between Grawm as a higher species, and wolves," said the Lyran. "I was lucky." "I wasn't." Powers grinned. "But even that kind of bath wasn't much of a price, I agree, not for what we got. Once they realized that the twenty males they had pinned down wouldn't move, wouldn't fight, they sent for the big chiefs. It took xjuite a while but there was no real problem.! simply made it plain that we were nonfighters. That all the fighters had been killed in the big raid and that we would never send any more. That we were cowering behind the colony walls trying to think of a way to tell them this. "They were almost physically ill when I finished. In a generation, maybe, the Propaganda boys can start a little work of an underhand kind and begin to IF civilize them. Meanwhile, they want no part of any human. "Now," he went on, stretching lazily, "we can forget about the Arghor Confederacy -- or any Grawm as a problem. Every colonist will be taught as an infant to flop on his or her back, throat exposed, the minute a male Grawm appears. I strongly suspect that all the Arghor villages will change location to miles away from the settlement -- and very quickly at that. The sense of disgust, the sheer revulsion, at being located near a colony of non-fighting males must be hideously strong. "I am incapable of truly appreciating -- or should I say feeling mammalian emotion, as you know," said Mazzechazz. "I would not have risked this operation without your approval despite all my theory." "The minute you suggested it I knew it would work," said Powers. "These Arghor aren't so very far from my own ancestors in a lot of ways. The main problem, of course, the real risk, was a rather subtle one. Did the Grawm species, specifically the Arghor, despite their hatred and contempt for us, feel we were their spiritual equals? If they didn't, if they saw us a weird but lower form of animal, then all bets were off. Things could have been different. The wolf inplies to one's own kind, not to rabbits or deer. That was the only real chance we had to take. Your figures said it was an extremely good chance, so I took it and persuaded the others to take it as well." "Actually," the Lyran began, "actually you took no chance at all." He appeared in some impossible way, embarrassed at what he was saying. Finally, after looking at a bulkhead, he stared his partner in the eye, using ono of his own periscope orbs, head turned sideways. "I had a needle-beam laser on electronic reflex aimed at your Had he moved one wrong muscle they are -- the telltales, I mean -- he would have died at once. So would the others." Powers was horrified. "My god, that would have violated the major Prime Directive! Are you crazy? How would you have explained it later?" The Lyran's membranes flickered up and down over the great red eyes. "Oh," he said. "I would have thought of something. I am too lazy and too conservative to become accustomed to a new partner, you see. It has nothing, of course, to do with sentiment." Powers looked hard at the Lyran and then himself glanced away at a sealed port. "Yes," he said. "I see."  Science had deprived him of death... T he house had been empty for several days. The skeleton staff had been dismissed well in advance of his arrival and all incoming business calls had been transferred elsewhere to be handled by underlings. Darius Wynter did not wish to be disturbed. His private retreat was so artfully concealed that it seemed from a distance to form part of the rocky headland jutting out of the lugubrious northern coastline. A solitary window in his study overlooked the gray and restless sea. The glass had been treated to eliminate glare and to prevent reflected sunlight from advertising his location. He sat at his desk with his back to the window, a distinguishedlooking man accustomed to supporting his considerable share of his time's problems upon his broad shoulders. Serenity was a familiar companion to him but from time to time deep shadows of doubt crossed his mind. His gray eyes were locked into some inner vision. He sat motionless for some time, conscious of the mournful sound of the distant surf raging against the jagged rocks at the foot of the headland, while his practiced intellect inspected the facets of his problem. Eventually he reached a decision. He reached into an open drawer on his right, withdrew a number of documents and placed them carefully in front of him. He hesitated. Then his hand, guided by familiar reflexes, groped deeper into the drawer and emerged with an ornate handgun. The workmanship of the weapon was remarkable. It was one of the last remaining examples of late twentieth century craftsmanship in the realm of portable lasers. The intricate hand-tooling had always delighted the connoisseur in Darius Wynter. Guns fascinated him and his collection of antique hand weapons was perhaps the finest in the known universe. This particular item was his favorite. He handled it fondly. His long white fingers traced the tactile sensuousness of the intricate patterns of filigree and brought a smile of satisfaction to his weary face. His right hand closed affectionately around the polished jade butt and his finger curled over the firing button. The weapon seemed to come to life under his touch. A warmth spread through his fingers that was like shaking hands with a friend. Yet he knew that this was an illusion, that the warmth, the contentment, came from within himself and were transferred into the beautiful instrument of death. He smiled again. The gun felt comfortable in his hand, as though it had grown there in answer to some need. He lowered his hand until his knuckles touched the cold top of the desk. His mind toyed idly with possibilities. With the beam adjusted to "fine" the gun, when fired, would incinerate an area roughly two feet in circumference -- large enough to burn a man's head into ashes and remove him from all worldly cares -- and quickly enough for him never to know what had happened. His fingers moved, playing with the corrugated adjustment dial on the bridge of the weapon. His eyes had acquired a cool, dispassionate air. He shifted his grip so that the narrow muzzle faced him and his thumb was poised over the small white firing button. A ghost of a smile clung to his bloodless lips. There was always time for one last thought -- behind him he could hear the patient surge of the restless ocean and felt a brief moment of pity for its senseless striving. His left index finger flipped over the safety catch on the ornate handgun. He looked indifferently into the small black eye of death. And pressed the firing button. But time reeled to a stop. Before the last gram of pressure had been applied to the shiny white button under his thumb his hand froze. A sudden stasis grabbed at his body and made it rigid. His blind eyes stared wildly ahead at nothing in particular. Only his thoughts remained active and they tumbled around in his head in no reasonable order; for the time being he had lost the ability to think sequentially. A moment later his Follower materialized in front of him. The Follower was a young man dressed in powder-blue coveralls who had the flat, unimaginative features of a public servant. He stepped casually from the travel portal and moved over to the desk. Behind him the glowing golden nimbus of the portal dimmed but remained in position, ready to transport this servant of the rich back to his observation post once this small crisis had been ironed out. Around his waist was a wide steel belt studded with an array of switches. He carried a small black box, which he deposited on the carpet in the center of the room. Then he walked over, leaned across the desk and carefully pried the handgun out of Darius Wynter's hand. He relocked the safety catch and placed the weapon to one side with a bored, indifferent expression. He stood back and undipped a small, cylindrical instrument from his waist and waved it slowly around the room. He consulted a small dial fixed to one end and nodded, satisfied. He kneeled and pressed several switches on the small black box on the floor. A faint vibration shook the room and blurred the outlines of the furniture and two men inside it -- the effect lasted for several seconds before the room returned to normal. Darius Wynter blinked. His lungs relaxed and expelled the air they had held since his seizure. His eyes focused first on his empty hands and then on his visitor. "Oh," he said. "So it's you." He had failed again. Giving the impression of a man suddenly too weary, he leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. The tips of his fingers dug into his forehead and then worked slowly down his cheeks. "Fm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean -- " "That's all right," the young man said quickly. He was required to appear solicitous, but his conditioned and supposedly cheery smile had a facile look. "We've been watching you for days." Wynter looked genuinely surprised. "So long?" The young man tapped the end IF of the cylindrical instrument in his gloved left hand. "You've been giving off quite a high potential for some time. We knew you'd try something eventually." "But I had no idea -- " "Until a few moments ago, when you picked up the gun?" Darius nodded. The young man's smug expression became suddenly grave. "I think it only fair to caution you that I'm still.getting a rather high probability indication." He raised his instrument significantly. "Of course it sometimes takes time for these things to die down. Personally, I would advise you to try and grab hold of yourself as quickly as possible." Darius Wynter managed a convincing shudder. With some effort he pulled himself together. "If you don't mind," he said, rising from his desk, "I'll pour myself a drink." "Go ahead, Mr. Wynter. You probably need one." Dapius waved open his wall cabinet and poured himself a good strong whisky with surprisingly steady hands. He turned around. "Could I offer you something?" The young man shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Wynter, but you see we have rules against -- " "Yes -- yes of course. I understand. How stupid of me." He brought the elegant crystal decanter back with him and set it down on the wide desk. His eyes skipped quickly past the beautiful little handgun the Follower had left there. He managed to look both guilty and embarrassed at the same time. "You've had a go at this before, haven't you?" the young man observed. D arius shrugged, "if you've been watching me for as long as you say you have you'll have familiarized yourself with my file." "That I have, sir. You've made seven previous attempts to take your life, most of them rather clumsy and well telegraphed. I'm glad to say." "Yes," Darius agreed, a trifle wistfully, 'Hhere was always a Follower handy." "Well, that's what you pay your premiums for, isn't it?" The young man made no effort to conceal his contempt. Darius declined to comment. Instead he resumed his seat in the well-upholstered desk chair and looked thoughtfully around the room. "I had no idea this room was bugged." The young man smiled smugly. "I suppose you thought that your insurers wouldn't have heard about this place, that you would be able to sneak away up here without anybody's knowing? But what use is a comprehensive coverage if you can cheat like that? Trudential is, Mr. Wynter, the most experienced insurer in the business: we never leave anything to chance.We're thorough, Mr. Wynter, and that's why we have the best record in the business." He moved his portable meter around while he spoke; he was still getting a faint threshold signal and this made him wary. His careless arrograhce annoyed Darius. "How old are you?" "Twenty-seven," the Follower replied guardedly. "Why do you ask?" Darius shrugged and sipped his drink. "The impetuousness of youth interests me. Do you like your job?" The young man made, a vague sort of gesture which might be taken to mean yes. "I see. Well. I suppose you would have to, wouldn't you? And I suppose you're chasing a little slice of immortality along with the rest of us?". The word was a joke. Rejuvenation was a costly and unpredictable business, difficult to discipline. Some recipients had barely managed to scrape through another hundred years, while others had endured the entire span of two and a quarter centuries since the introduction of the anti-agathics. Everything depended on the individual metabolism and how it reacted to the drugs. The techniques improved every year and the ultimate goal was a golden, predictable longevity for every person in the known universe -- according to his means. And there lay the rub. Sometimes, when his lonely mind was wrapped in cynicism, Darius found it amusing that, in this age of material abundance, the accumulation of worthless baubles and artifacts had given way to a universal scratching for another few years of life and, as always, the prize went to the richest. The young man didn't answer, but this didn't worry Darius -- his words had been an observation, not a direct question. He saw a flicker of greed appear self-consciously in the Follower's cold blue eyes, but it was soon erased by a look of professional aloofness. "How long have you been a Follower?" Darius asked. "This is my first year." But he answered off-handedly. His eyes were intent upon his meter and he seemed disturbed. He looked up. "Mr. Wynter, I must mention again that I am still getting a rather high probability index on your emotional register." Darius' tolerant face framed an understanding smile. "I wouldn't worry about that. I mean, if I'm still determined to kill myself, then the observation circuits which your people have so cunningly concealed in this room will very soon throw me into stasis. Isn't that correct?" IF The young man nodded, but did not seem able to shake his uneasiness. Preventing people like Darius Wynter from taking their life was one thing -- the emotional registers built into the house monitored the degree of the subject's depression and were always ready to forestall any self-destructive act -- but it was also his sworn duty to safe-guard the mental health of his client. "I urge you to relax, Mr. Wynter. I will summon a therapist and -- " Darius waved a deprecating hand. "That won't be necessary. I assure you; I have never felt better in my life. And I do wish you'd stop Fiddling with that thing. It's probably registering something left over from a few moments ago. Strange, but it already seems ages ago. You shouldn't worry about my making another attempt -- after all, ninety-nine percent of all suicide attempts are decisions of the moment, are they not? And once that particular moment is past the mind has a chance to reconsider its motives." He smiled and picked up the ornate little handgun and held it fondly. The young man tensed. "Don't worry," Darius laughed. "As you very well know, the moment I turn this beautiful little weapon against myself -- or make any other move that threatens my existence -- the circuits will apply stasis. But note -- as long as I keep it pointed away from myself they do not react." The gun was now pointing in the general direction of the Follower. "Take a quick peek at your meter," Darius directed. "Is it still registering strong depression, suggesting suicidal tendencies?" T he young man shook his head. He was conscious of the deadly weapon pointing vaguely in his direction and puzzled by the contradictions provided by his meter. He was getting a reading that vacillated between minor depression and sudden elation -- the latter, he knew from experience and training, was the feeling of relief that enveloped the subject when he realized that his life had been saved and his ridiculous act subverted. "So why don't you relax?" Darius suggested. Mischievous humor danced across his face. "There's nothing to worry about. And I'm rather enjoying your company at the moment. Tell me; haven't you ever wondered why there's such a high incidence of attempted suicide among the immortals?" This was the name that had somehow become attached, albeit romantically, to the world's leading industrialists, politicians and artists and all those who had managed to survive, like Darius Wynter, longer than anybody else because they were wealthy enough to maintain their rejuvenation treatments for more that two hundred years. The young man said nothing, only stared at him with a mixture of puzzlement and uneasiness. "But surely," Darius went on, "you must have wondered, at some time or another why we, who have lived for so long and enjoyed every boon life knows, should suddenly want to end it. And try over and over again. Doesn't the duality puzzle you -- that we court our own deaths unpredictably and at the same time take out this costly insurance to guard against dying? If 'immortality' is worth so much wealth and effort, why do we seek to abuse it when we have it?" His face softened. Some of the humor drained from his eyes and he studied the little weapon in his hands thoughtfully, his fingers caressing the delicate filigree. "It isn't boredom, you know. That's the popular misconception. God knows there's enough I haven't done to keep me occupied for quite a few centuries yet. Absolute wealth requires absolute management -- I haven't nearly as much time to myself as I would like. Yet to live forever I must manufacture wealth to make this possible -- you follow?" A flicker of interest showed in the young man's eyes -- and a little confusion as well. Darius pressed on, warming to his topic. "So it isn't boredom. Rather, it's a basic conflict within ourselves. It's been there since man first became intelligent and adapted to his world -- and iCs been cruelly accentuated by the boon of longevity. From the moment we recognized the existence of time we have walked hand in hand with futility -- the anti-agathics have also given us more time to consider the dim worthlessness of achievement. But that is only the consideration of our intellect -- the animal part of us will cling tenaciously to life for want of a suitable substitute. The intellect cries out that all activity is dross, that nothing lasts forever, that even the weariest river flows somewhere to sea; but the primitive, unthinking part of us demands that we endure. "That is the struggle -- to endure. And in the past most of us have. It is the prospect of immortality that makes life so dull for us -- and sometimes the intellect wins and takes it upon itself to end the dreadful duality. At such moments we try to take #ur lives -- but the animal in us reasserts itself if we can be prevented from taking the final, irrevocable step and are pulled back abruptly to the real world. And we are again prepared to cling to life with renewed tenacity. But most of that you must already know. The information is included in your training." The young man agreed that this was so. IF "You must realize, then, that ninety-nine percent of your calls are merely attempted suicides. Your intervention allows them the catharsis of decision and ensures their gratitude -- but what about that other one per cent?" The young man thought for a moment. "They are, by definition, insane," he replied. "Their desire to take their own lives is not so much a product of depression but of a mind which has reasoned itself out of existence." "Quite so," Darius agreed. He waved the little laser slowly back and forth, always keeping it directed in the general direction of the Follower. "And tell me, what are the symptoms of this sort of mind? I mean, how are they registered on that little meter you have there?" The young, man licked suddenly dry lips. "By -- by an unnaturally high elation." His eyes remained Fixed on the dial in front of him. He looked suddenly afraid. D arius leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. The barrel of the gun now pointed unwaveringly at the young man. "If you're so keen to kill yourself," the Follower said, "why not simply cancel your premium? Then you could take your life without fear of intervention." He was talking for time and Darius knew it. "But to do so would spoil the game," he said. "Game? What game?" "The game of so-called immortality. To cancel my policy would ensure that the next time my intellectual despair got the better of me there would be nobody around to stop me when I opted for oblivion. And that would be dreadful. You see, this animal we have inside us is old and wise and every bit as determined to endure as our fiendish intellect is to dispose of us -- and in most cases it will have its way." "It's all a farce," the young man blustered. "You know you'll never succeed. You just play out this little game to assuage your ego." "No, that's not correct. You see, there's always the chance -- small, I must admit -- that our Follower won't be on hand at the exact second that he's needed. Or that the observation circuits will malfunction -- or something equally stimulating will occur. Those have happened occasionally -- haven't they?" The young man looked uncomfortable. "I believe so. Once or twice, perhaps -- no more." "No more? But no matter. Even those few instances are sufficient to bring an element of chance into the situation. I'll admit that the odds are astronomically in your favor -- but that little uncertainty remains and gives spice to the game. It introduces the fascinating concept that one's death does ultimately rest in the arms of blind chance -- a prospect that fascinates the intellect as much as it repels the animal part of the mind." An expression of pain passed briefly across the face of the immortal. "Oh, I really am sorry. I shouldn't be talking like this to one as young as yourself. To you the universe must seem a marvelous place and life itself a constant source of pleasure." The young man's troubled face denied this. "How terribly thoughtless of me to introduce this dark philosophy in to your aspiring young mind. But let me caution you, my lad -- do not covet longevity. It is a boon with barbs in its tail and these will dig down ijjto your heart and tear out your hope, your dreams and your confidence. The ancients were right -- three score years and ten is time enough to consider the mocking ghost of time; more than that is a burden which a man cannot bear, because he was made to be mortal. We mock the gods when we outlive our allotted span -- and their wrath is devious." The young man had inched slowly back towards the glowing portal behind him while Darius talked. "Don't do that, please," the immortal directed. "If you take one more step I will kill you where you stand." The Follower frozd to the carpet, stunned. Darius tightened his finger across the firing stud of the handweapon. His hand was steady and the expression on his face was determined. "Do I frighten you? Did you ever consider this, that I might take your life?" He smiled crookedly. "The circuits in these walls wouldn't stop me if I did. After all, they are only programed to prevent me from taking my own life, not from taking someone else's." With a great effort the young man pulled himself together. "I think you'd better put that down, sir. You need help. I'll call a therapist and -- " "No you won't." "But, sir -- you need help! You need care and attention and -- " "I need nothing of the sort," Darius interrupted. "Tell me, young man, is there any way you could prevent me taking your life, if I wished?" His Follower said nothing. But Darius noted with satisfaction that his right hand had strayed to the wide steel belt around his waist and was hovering nervously over one of the bright switches. "I know for a fact," Darius pointed out, "that you can generate a fairly effective force field from that belt of yours -- adequate enough to repel the more commonplace energies of our Technology but hardly likely to disIF place the concentrated output of a finely tuned laser -- " The young man's face telegraphed a look of pure terror. His right hand twitched and snapped down against the switch on his belt in a desperate gamble. An expression of wild exultance leaped into Darius Wynter's eyes and he pressed the firing stud on the beautiful handgun with intense satisfaction. He had surreptitiously adjusted the small dial on the bridge of the weapon while he talked, A wide beam of energy reached out for the terrified Follower. His protective screen went up a fraction of a second before the ravenous force leaped at him -- a fact the immortal had insured by calculating his firing delay to the exact fraction of a second -- and the charge ricocheted away from the feeble -- but, in this case, effective enough -- shield. The widely beamed energy bounced back from the protected figure and raced toward the wide window looking out over the timeless sea. Darius Wynter caught the full force of the charge calmly. His desk was engulfed and incinerated in an instant and the life was torn from his weary body and blasted out through a great rent in the window. stunned and frightened Follower saw the burned and disfigured body of his client poised in an incongruous attitude. The protec-' tive circuits had whirled into action much too late to save the life of Darius Wynter but they had thrown this dreadful husk into stasis and kept it in position, sitting in the charred ruin of a chair that would have collapsed under his living weight, and surrounded by the still smoldering ashes of his desk. The young man stood in a state of shock for some time. He was overcome by a terrible sense of failure that was somehow related to something more personal than the mere loss of a client. Eventually he shook himself out of this state and walked over to survey the mocking corpse. Its dreadful charred face looked back at him. A cold wind howled in the space where the Window had been, but was powerless to move the lightest ash in the room. The young man shuddered. And then he kneeled for the second time to activate a switch on the small black box he had left on the floor. The room shimmered and dissolved as the stasis effect was' canceled out. The grotesque figure of the dead man collapsed slowly into a soft pile of ashes on the charred floor, where the mournful sea wind stirred it gently and rolled away the mocking smile of triumph.  He fattened on knowledge -- until consumed by a greater wisdom!   edge," said the salesmanthing. Claude Mabry looked all around his room: mildewed wallpaper, broken linoleum, dirty long underwear slung over a chair that had a weak leg, the clock face that had been cracked and repaired so many times with scotch tape that he could hardly see it said #:#. "I'm smart ertough for me," he said. "There's such a thing as being too smart for your own good." "That't right," said the salesman-thing, "and there's such a thing as being so smart you have to wash dishes down at Stan's Chili Bowl to earn enough to live -- here." Claude could not reply. The whole thing reminded him of the Bible: a snake or whatever it was dressed up like a man, offering "knowledge" -- it just didn't make sense. "Look, I don't mean to be unpleasant," said the salesman. "But we Guzz are a hell of a lot more powerful and a hell of a lot smarter than your species. If we'd wanted to, we could have vaporized your whole planet -- but it's not our way. So when somebody comes offering to make you smart, don't knock it." Claude wanted to rip off that grinning, false mansuit and see what the Guzz looked like. He half-rose, then sank back again and looked at the floor. "If you're so good, why do you want to do anything for me?" "I don't want to do anything for you. I voted to turn Earth into a bird refuge. But we have a democratic form of government and the majority wanted to make your kind fit citizens to share the universe with us." "All right, how do I know you can make me smart?" The salesman opened his briefcase and took out a handful of bright brochures. "Don't take my word for it that we can make you one of the smartest men on Earth," he said. "Don't take it from me that being smart is our plan. Thousands have tried it already. Have a look." He handed Claude a folder showing full-color pictures of quiet scholars, white-coated scientists, dignified judges and beaming businessmen. Their testimonials were capped with red headlines: couldn't read own name -- "hated arithmetic" "dumb ox" months! "But -- what would I study?" "Everything" The salesman produced another slick booklet and began turning the pages, showing Claude pictures of happy housewives and hairy-handed laborers reading heavy volumes, farmers peering through microscopes and grannies using slide rules. "We call our system the Interface Way. Every person we accept must study at least two subjects intensively. If the subjects are unrelated, all the better. We mix mathematics with literature, we throw theoretical physics at a medical specialist, we give the mathematician theology." "What would I get?" "If we accepted you, you'd be tested. Then we'd know." "What do you mean, if?" Claude felt he had just been offered a million-dollars, but at the word "if" it had shrunk to about a nickle The stranger, sensing his anxiety, spoke soothingly. "Don't worry too much about that. We won't be testing your I.Q. or previous knowledge. In fact, the less of either, the better. We want people who haven't had a chance, people who feel useless because the sleeping genius within them has never been awakened. What do you say?" "I don't know. What would it cost me?" "All the money in the world couldn't buy you a better education pal. But all it costs is your signature." "Well -- oh, hell, why not?" "Why not?" echoed the salesman, handing him a pen. Claude signed a few forms in various colors and the salesman gave him a copy of each. "Claude," he said, "you've just made your first intelligent decision." T he Guzz had pretty well taken over Earth, in every way. Guzz-developed gadgets were in every home. Clergymen thanked the Lord from their pulpits that the Guzz were not warlike or vicious but a truly democratic -- ah -- people. The government made daily announcements of new Guzz gifts to humanity. They quietly disarmed the nuclear powers, they made efficient clean-air and sewage-disposal systems for our cities, they introduced new food sources and birthcontrol plans in Asia. Hardly a government bureau in the world had not been approached by the Guzz with a suggestion or a gift -- and these aliens used no stronger forces than tact and kindly persuasion. The only disagreeable thing about them was the way they looked -- both at home and in Earth-drag. On their own planet (or so it was said, for no one had yet visited them) the Guzz were disagreeably vermiform. Here, so as not to spook the natives, they wore human forms of plastic. IF Their movements in these were natural enough, but they all looked alike. As far as most people, including Claude, were concerned, the Guzz were just so many talking store-window dummies. T he first box that arrived was a table-top computer equipped with keyboard, microphone, speaker and visual display screen. That night when he returned from Stan's Chili Bowl, Claude lay awake looking at all that gleaming, complicated junk and wondering if he might have made a mistake in even hoping... Next day three packages arrived. The first contained books and a sheaf of documents: a certification that Claude Mabry was eligible for this correspondence course, more copies of the various forms he'd signed -- and a booklet entitled: Welcome, Future Genius! The government of Guzz and your own government wish to take this opportunity to welcome you... conditions and bylaws... You may not always see the reasons for instructions given you in this course, but they are necessary to ensure efficient use of your time. The enclosed books are for Lesson One. The books required for each lesson will be provided with the lesson. At various points in the program you will be asked to study them thoroughly. Claude glanced at the titles of the books: The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud; Verbal Behavior, B.F. Skinner; Towards Information Retrieval, Fairthorne; were only a few. The dream book looked interesting but inside, like all the others, it was full of long-winded sentences that didn't mean anything. The second package contained a tape cassette titled: Program for Lesson One and simple instructions for loading it into the teaching computer. As soon as Claude could do so, he switched on the machine. He might have expected it to give him a problem, to register the fact that it was turned on, or at least to ask his name, but it did none of these things. Instead, it politely requested him to eat a sandwich. Claude scratched his head. The Guzz had to be joking. He could imagine them watching him right now, laughing at his stupidity. So this was the big learning course! So this... He remembered the third package and tore it open. Inside was a cellophane-wrapped sandwich. THbugh Claude turned it over and over, he could see only one difference between this and any other cellophane-wrapped sandwich: Inside the wrapper was a plain printed name slip. But instead of "ham and cheese" or "peanut butter and grape jelly" it simply read: Eat me. The bread was a little stale but he enjoyed the salami or parasalami inside. An hour later he correctly answered a request to explain how and why dreams were subject to syntactical rules. The answer ,as obvious. Two hours later he had read Ayer's The Problem of Knowledge, read it at skimming speed because it was already perfectly familiar to him. A lesson or two later Claude had gone through about fifty difficult books without any trouble. He progressed rapidly through the programs, though it did not seem like progress at all: he simply knew what he was doing. Using Fourier analysis to solve problems in electronics seemed something he had always known, just as he had always realized the gross truth of Newtonian mechanics and the finer truth of quantum mechanics, the position of Hubert Van Eyck in Flemish painting, the syllogistic properties of an Andrew Marvell poem, the flaws in the historical theories of Spengler and Toynbee -- or for that matter, how to prepare sauce ozene with seven ingredients. Scraps of learning, areas of learning, even whole complex structures of learning were suddenly his. Having learned, he worked. By the fourth lesson Claude had gone through Godel's proof of the necessary incompletness of mathematical theorems and picked holes in Lucas's application of this to mechanical devices. He had also put forth an aesthetic theory understandable by perhaps ten men, refutable by no more than one. He had nearly destroyed mathematical economics, and devised a tentative translating machine. He was hardly aware that these things had not been done before, nor was he really aware of the transition from his job at the Chili Bowl to a research fellowship at a prominent university. T he transition came about from his publication of various monographs in journals, the names of which he knew only from footnotes in the books he was skimming. Some of the monographs came back. He had sent them to wrong addresses, or to journals long out of print. Others, like his "Queueing Theory Applied to Neural Activity" and "On Poetic Diction," became classics. Men with tweedy manners but sharp suits and clean attache cases came to see him. They sat in the steamy, oily kitchen of Stao's Chili Bowl and talked with him about quasar explanations, new codes of international law and logic mechanisms. True, many prodiIF gies were springing up now that the Guzz offered their massive home study program. But for the time being, genius was still something universities fought over. And so, almost without knowing it (he was thinking of other things), Claude Mabry gave Stan his notice, packed his T-shirts and blue jeans and entrained for Attica University. He remembered only isolated facts about this trip: sending a change-of-address card to the Guzz; losing his ticket; not bringing enough pager (and so alighting from the train at Attica, where University officials were waiting to greet him, his hands so full of slips of toilet paper on which were penciled notes toward a theory of history that he could not accept the handshakes of these venerables). Without comment he settled into his new life and went on working. From time to time he wondered what was in the sandwich that came with each lesson. A wonder drug that unlocked hidden knowledge. that lay "sleeping" within him? An intelligence accelerator? Whatever it was, it was essential to the process. The only time he'd tried studying without it, Claude had floundered among symbols that almost made sense. He wondered, too, about the Guzz. The little he learned about their planet and culture (in the final lesson) whetted his appetite for more. He longed to know everything about them, almost to become one of them: They alone would understand what he was doing. It was becoming clear that his colleagues at the university considered him some kind of freak -- he would not wear a suit, he could not converse about departmental politics and he was inhumanly intelligent. Claude ordered all the information on the Guzz he could get. This proved to be a slim volume by a second-rate anthropologist who had interviewed a few of the aliens. Claude skimmed it and began a treatise of his own. "Despite the advanced 'democracy' of the Guzz," he wrote, "they retain a few oddly 'primitive,' even sacramental habits." There was a knock at the door. The standard face of a Guzz looked around the frame, saw that he was alone and walked its standard body into the office. Without saying anything, it came over and struck hiiti on the forehead. Twitching, Claude slipped to the floor. The visitor busied itself with a set of plastic bags. The fallen man was muttering. Bending lower, the man-shape or...?" "Right you are!" boomed the Guzz. "Yes, we are analogous to your planarian worms -- so, of course, are you -- and we can transmit behavior genetically." He fished a long knife from one bag and tested its blade against a false thumb. "Of course our genes need help. Obviously our -- I mean to include your -- children do not learn much from their parents' genes. But these same genes, properly assimilated -- " "I knew it!" Claude croaked, getting up on one elbow. The blow had stunned him, but still the machinery of his mind ground on. With an estatic expression he said, "The old taboos against eating the king, eating the old man, the sage, the father yes?" "Check." With a hearty chuckle the visitor kneeled by Claude's side and felt for the carotid artery. "Those ridiculous taboos have kept your species back hundreds of thousands of years. We're just now making up the lost time for you." "The sandwich meat -- " "Housewives, mechanics, professional people -- all the people in that brochure you saw. Just think of it!" He waved the knife oratorically, and the plastic face turned up, as if gazing at a vista. "One genius provides three thousand sandwiches, each capable of providing -- with no wastage -- part of the education for one more genius! Thus learning will transform your whole species -- you will become as gods!" The Guzz returned his attention to the matter at hand. He poised the knife. "Superman," nfurmured the genius. "On white or rye."  Section #. Title #. United States Code). #. Date of filing: October #. #. #. Title of publication: Worlds of If. #. Frequency of issue: bimonthly. #. Location of known ofHces of publication: # Est # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. 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Main offices: # East # Stroot, Now York, N.Y. #. #C par copy. #-issuo subscription: # in tho United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Univorsal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Tho publishor assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. Dear Editor: I have been meaning to protest for some time, and finally got around to it. In the Hue and Cry column in IF, why don't you publish complete addresses ? It would hardly take up enough time or paper to be a bother, and the lack oj address is occasionally infuriating. For a blatant example, in the May-June issue you published a letter from one Brian Hval, who wanted information on organizing a local science fiction club. Since you provided no address to which information could be sent, why did you bother publishing his letter at all? It was certainly no help to Mr. Hval; okay, you published one reply, which was too general to be much help. With a published address, he might well have bombarded with information -- I'm certainly not going to send items specifically directed to one person to your magazine in the hopes that you'll publish them, and other fans feel the same way. They write directly or they don't write. If Ted White can publish complete addresses, why can't you? Not everyone wants his address published -- many people object to being targeted for mail-order solicitations, doorbell ringers or someone who just wants to argue. Mailing lists have become a marketable commodity and I don't want Hue and Cry so used. This policy will continue in effect, but you do raise a point. Let's try it this way -- contributors who want their addresses published may request that we do so and we'll try to oblige. Starting with you. Your comments continue:... What's all the alleged editorial confusion about Monarch being an ham series? The story fits, chronologically, parallel to Equals Four, which you ran in your JulyA ugust issue, with the ending of Monarch coming somewhere in the middle of Equals Four -- some time between the time the Jann leaves the observation booth and the time it returns to it. What's so enigmatic about that? Don't you read the stories you publish? Sincerely, ' Robert Coulson Route # Hartford City, Ind. Gentlemen: Monarch was a good story. I didn't read the first story or two of the sequence. The stories have seemed lighthearted, but there just is no way to be lighthearted about a slave-labor camp! To say the least, that was grim. Now, about the ending -- it's not enigmatic at all. The next-to-last story of this series, so far, was Equals Four, roughly simultaneous with this story (excluding trips to the past, of robot presenting him with Judy. The robot rescued her -- so the story ties in. Sincerely, Michael N. Tierstein Brooklyn, N. Y. ( Continued on page #) IF Do you have the "faults" that could mean you were born to be a writer? v Writers usually hate to be "labeled," but there's no denying most of them share certain characteristics. They're dreamers. Loners. Bookworms. Too impractical, intense, idealistic. If you have "faults" like these, remember they may be the most creative parts of your personality. They could be a clear indication of a gift. If you have such a gift, make the most of it. Hours you may be spending in timetive recreation. In the writer's world, you can let your imagination roam free, doing what comes naturally to you. A unique writing school But where do you begin? It's really very simple -- we teach; you learn. Here at Famous Writers School, we've created a truly unusual writing program that comes to you -- right in your home. The program shortens the years of trial-and-error; helps you avoid the failures of so many beginning writers. It's more like a shared adventure than a course. find the kind of line-by-line editing established writers get from their own editors -- plus a detailed letter of suggestions. No one can promise success. But with training like this, our students have sold to over # publications. Think about it. Could you convert your "faults" into a gift for writing? Find out by sending for our free Aptitude Test. We'll evaluate it and return it to you without charge or obligation. FW   i    #    Vh  An educational service of Famous Writers School Dept. W-#, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude worth developing. Please mail me without obligation, your Aptitude Test and illustrated brochure. ivii . Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print You get individualized training All of our instructors are working editors or writers, who know what editors are looking for. While an instructor is working on your manuscript, he gives it his full attention. And when you get it back, you'll Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. When you're choosing between living and dying -- odds are all-important! novelette I morosely through the forward transparency of Module Five. The vehicle was traveling at a height of a few feet -- and at its maximum survey speed of five hundred knots -- across a flat brown desert. Apart from the plume of dust which roiled constantly in the rear screen there was no sign of movement anywhere on no sign of life. "Eight dead worlds in succession," he grumbled. "Why do we never find life?" "Because we work for the Cartographical Service," Dave Surgenor told him, shifting to a more comfortable position in the module's other seat. "If this were an inhabited world we wouldn't be allowed to buzz all over it like this." "I know, but I'd like to feel there was some chance of making contact with somebody. Anybody." "I would suggest," Surgenor said peacefully, "that you join the diplomatic service." He closed his eyes with every appearance of a man about to drift into a contented after-dinner sleep. "I'm indebted to you." Targett glanced resentfully at the older man's relaxed profile. He had a deep respect for Surgenor and his vast experience in the Service, but at the same time he had no desire to emulate Surgenor's career. It took a special kind of mind to withstand an endless succession of treks across bleak, alien globes, and Targett was aware that he did not have it. The thought of growing old in the Service filled him with a dismay that strengthened his resolve to make some money quickly and get out while he was young enough to enjoy spending it. He had even decided on where he would have his fling. Next furlough he was going to visit Earth and try his luck on some of the legendary race courses there, the ones where it had all started. A gambler had no trouble finding facilities on any of the Federation's inhabited worlds -- but actually to stand on the historic turf on Santa Anita or Ascot... "Dave," he said wistfully, "weren't you in the Service in the old days when they used to allow the modules to break the search pattern and race back to the ship for the last five hundred miles?" Surgenor's eyelids flickered. "The old days? That was only a year or so ago." "That's the old days in this line of business." Targett glanced at the instruments on the control panel, which told him there were less than three thousand miles between Module Five's present position and the planet's north pole, where the Sarafand was waiting. The mother ship had disgorged its six surIF vey modules at the south pole and -- solely under the control of the the six modules to traverse the planet with their geodesic sensors. "We used to race back to the ship, but it led to trouble once and they introduced a regulation specifically forbidding it." Surgenor sounded more interested in getting to sleep. "Did you make any money out of it?" Targett persisted. "By laying odds on the winner?" "It wouldn't have worked." Surgenor yawned theatrically, making his point about not wanting to talk. "Every module had exactly the same chance -- one in six." "Not exactly the same chance," Targett said, warming to his subject. "I happen to know that Aesop tolerates a dispersion of up to twenty miles when he's setting the Sarafand down at a pole -- and if it worked out right at both ends one module could have a forty-mile advantage over its opposite number. All you would have to do to set up a profitable book would be -- " "Mike," Surgenor interrupted tiredly, "did you ever stop to consider that if you poured all that ingenuity into a legitimate business enterprise you'd be so rich you wouldn't need to gamble?" Targett was appalled. "What has getting rich got to do with gambling?" "Is that not the whole idea?" "Go back to sleep, Dave -- I'm sorry I disturbed you." Targett rolled his eyes skyward and settled down to scowling through the forward transparency again. A range of low hills had appeared a few miles to the right, but otherwise the brown deserts of Horta had been slumped in his seat for perhaps ten minutes when the module's computer -- which was actually a sub-unit of Aesop -- made an annoucement. "Receiving atypical data," it droned. "Receiving atypical data." V- details," Targett said, nudging Surgenor. "Bearing two point sixty-three, cosine increasing with module displacement. Range fifty-oiie point eighty-one miles, tangent decreasing with module displacement. Metallic objects on planetary surface. First estimate of number -- three hundred sixty-three. Concentration and consistency of metallic elements indicate refining. Analysis of reflected radiation indicates machine-finished exteriors." Targett's heart began to jolt powerfully. "Did you hear that, Dave? What does it mean?" "It sounds to me as though you've got your wish -- those can't be anything but artifacts." Surgenor's voice betrayed no excitment, but Targett noticed he was now sitting upright as he made a bearing check. "According to the reading they must be in those hills on the right." . Targett scanned the slowly unfolding slopes trembling in the yellowish heat haze created by Horta. "It looks pretty dead over there." "The whole planet is dead -- otherwise Aesop would have noticed something during the preliminary orbital survey." "Well, let's go over and take a look." Surgenor shook his head. "Aesop won't agree to our breaking the search pattern unless there's an emergency. It distorts his world map." "What?" Targett bounced impatiently in his seat. "Who cares about the world map? Are we supposed to run straight on and ignore a real archelogical find? I tell you, Dave, if -- " He stopped speaking as he noticed Surgenor's smile. "You were doing your Oldest Member bit again." "I guess I was." Surgenor nodded. "Don't worry about passing up a find. We aren't archeologists, but there's a provision in Survey Regulations for this kind of thing. As soon as we get back to the Sarafand Captain Aesop will send a couple of modules out again for a closer look." "Everybody won't be in on it?" "If Aesop thinks it's important he might bring the ship down here." "But this has got to be important." Targett gestured helplessly towards the hills drifting by on his right. "Hundreds of machine-finished objects just lying on the surface. What could they be?" "Who knows? My guess is that a ship put down here, possibly for repairs, and dumped a load of unwanted canisters." "Oh?" Such a prosaic explanation had not occurred to Targett, and he fought to mask his disappointment. "Recently?" "Depends on what you mean by recent. The Sarafand was the first Federationship to enter the Horta system -- and it's been fourthousand years or more since the old White Empire withdrew from this cluster, so -- " "Four-thousand years!" Targett experienced a brief headiness strangely reminiscent of the sensation which had once come over him -- the time he had brought off an eight-throw antimartingale on the gaming tables of Parador. This was a new kind of gambling -- one in which a man staked lonely hours of boredom as he skimmed across the surfaces of dead worlds and the prize was a swift, clear look at the crazy sparkling treasures of reality, a handshake from the ghost of an alien being who had been computing his way across the ionic tides of space IF before the pyramids were planned. Suddenly, and for the first time, Targett was glad he had signed on with the Cartographical Service -- but suppose he was not among the group Aesop was going to send back to investigate the find? "Dave' he said carefully, "how will Aesop select the modules he wants to come back here?" "Like a computer." Surgenor gave a wry smile. "For an unscheduled foray he likes to use the modules which have clocked up the least engine hours -- and this old bus is due for -- " "Don't tell me -- a complete overhaul next month." "Next week." . "That's great," Targett said bitterly. "Two modules out of six. Odds of only two to one against me and I couldn't even bring it off. With my luck I'd -- " He fell silent as he saw the slow grin spreading over Surgenor's face. "May I make a suggestion?" Surgenor kept his gaze straight ahead. "Instead of sitting around here calculating odds, why don't you get suited up and take a walk over into those hills? That way -- " "What? Can you do things like that?" Surgenor sighed. "I would also suggest that you read Survey Regulations when you get back. of up to fifty hours for precisely this -- " "Skip all that stuff, Dave -- I can bone up on regulations later." Targett's mounting excitement overrode his respect for Surgenor's seniority. "Will Aesop clear me to leave the module and take a look at -- whatever is over there?" "He ought to -- the logistics make sense. You could give him television coverage and a verbal report while I'm taking this module back to the ship. Only one module would need to return to pick you up. And if your report shows the find is worth bringing the Sarafand down for, there'll be no extra engine time on the modules at all." "Let's talk to Aesop right now." "You're sure you want to do this, Mike?" Surgenor's eyes had become serious. "The Cartographical Service has an occupational disease all to itself -- there's a tendency for us to confuse the map with the territory." "I don't even know what that means." "It means that no amount of thinking about a ten-mile walk on an alien world can be equated with the actual experience. That's why Aesop hasn't' already taken the initiative and ordered one of us to investigate these objects -- the Service doesn't require a man to walk new ground alone." Targett snorted and pressed the ncct him directly to Captain Aesop, the vast artificial intelligence which occupied one entire deck of the Sarafand. II air, dipped its nose slightly and whined away to the north in a cloud of brown dust. Targett watched it vanish, mildly surprised at the speed with which all sign of the vehicle vanished. He took a deep breath of the suit's plastic-smelling air. It was early afternoon and he had about six hours of daylight to go -- ample time to reach the group of metal objects which lay due east at a distance of just over four miles. He began to walk toward the hills. tained no trace of oxygen and the planet had never known any indigenous life, yet Targett found he was unable to keep his eyes from scanning the sand underfoot for shells and insects. Intellectually he could accept that he was traversing a dead world, but on the instinctive and emotional level his consciousness simply rejected the concept. He walked quickly, feeling a little self-conscious each time the holstered ultralaser pistol bumped against his thigh. "I know you don't need it," Surgenor had said patiently, "but it's you don't wear it you don't go out." The planet's gravity was close to # and by the time Targett neared the hills he was sweating freely in spite of the suit's cooling system. He unbuckled the pistol -- which seemed to have maliciously quadrupled its weight -- and slung it over his shoulder. The ground was becoming increasingly stony and on reaching the hills he found they were composed largely of naked basaltic rock. He sat down on a smooth outcropping, glad of the chance to rest his legs. When he had sipped some cold water from the tube that nuzzled against his button on his communicator. "Aesop," he said, "how far am I from the objects?" "The nearest is nine hundred and twelve yards west of your present position," Aesop replied without hesitation, drawing on the data continuously fed to him by his own sensors and those in the six converging survey modules. "Thanks." Targett scanned the slope ahead of him. It formed an ill-defined ridge a short distance away. From there he should be able to see the objects, provided they were not buried under the accumulated dust of forty centuries. "How are you making out, Mike?" The voice was Surgenor's. "No problems." Targett was about to add that he was beginning to understand the difference between the map and the terIF ritory when it dawned on him that Surgenor had maintained radio silence till then with the deliberate intention of making him feel cut off. "How about you?" "I've got decisions to make," Surgenor said comfortably. "I'll be back at the Sarafand in less than three hours and the question is whether to eat now or wait for a proper steak dinner on board. What would you do, Mike?" "That's one of those tricky decisions you have to sort out for yourself." Targett kept his voice level with an effort. This was Surgenor's way of reminding him that by waiting a few hours he could have done his investigating in comfort and on a full stomach. As it was, he was going to spend an uncomfortable night with nothing to keep him going but water and surrogate. "Yeah -- I think I'll sleep on it. See you, Mike." Surgenor's voice faded into a yawn. "See you." Targett rose to his feet with a new determination to make his private expedition worth while. He moved up the slope, being careful not to slip on the loose surface stones and dust which cascaded around his ankles at every step. Beyond the ridge the ground leveled out for perhaps a mile before rising sharply to the rocky spine of the hills. The small plateau was bounded to the north and south by tumbled palisades of boulders. almost as if it had been cleared by bulldozers. Scattered across the level ground -- in random groupings -- were hundreds of slim black cylinders, the nearest only a few dozen paces from Targett. They were about twenty feet in length and tapered at each end. Targett' s heart began a steady, peaceful pounding as it came to him that the alien objects certainly were not discarded canisters, as Surgenor had suggested. He took the miniature television camera from his belt, plugged it briefly into the suit's powerpack and aimed it at the nearest cylinders. "Aesop," he said. "I've made visual contact." "I'm getting a moderately good picture, Michael," Aesop replied. "I'll go closer." "Do not move," Aesop commanded sharply. taking a step forward. "What's the matter?" "Perhaps nothing, Michael." Aesop was speaking at his normal tempo again. "The picture I'm receiving from you would suggest that the surfaces of the objects are free of dust. Is this correct?" "I guess it is." Targett examined the shining black cylinders, ruefully wondering how he had failed to notice their condition. They might have been scattered across the plateau only that morning. "You guess? Does some visual defect prevent you from being positive?" "Don't be funny, Aesop -- I'm positive. Does it mean the objects have been put here recently?" "Improbably. Has there been any accretion of dust in the vicinity of each object?" Targett narrowed his eyes into and saw that the cylinders were lying in cradles of accumulated dust, the upper edges of which were a few inches clear of the black metal. He described what he could see. "Repellent fields," Aesop said. "Still effective after a possible four thousand years. Itns not necessary for you to study these objects any further. Michael. As soon as the planetary survey has been completed I shall bring the Sarafand to your present location for the purpose of a full investigation." "Thanks, but I have no intention of cooling my heels for four or five hours." Targett made his voice firm, although he was uncertain of how good Aesop was at interpreting inflexions. "I'm going to take a closer look." "I will permit that, provided you continue to supply uninterrupted television coverage." Targett almost pointed out that, with close to three thousand miles separating them, the computer had no way of imposing its will on him, but he suppressed his irritation. During his months in the Service he had managed to swallow the facts that his crewmates addressed the ship's computer as "Captain" and obeyed its every instruction as though they were serving a three-cluster marshal. There was no point in blowing up about it just when something of genuine interest had come along to break the routine. He crossed the level ground, keeping the camera trained ahead. And as he walked, something about the general appearance of the cylinders began to disturb him. They looked like military materiel. Torpedoes, perhaps. The same thought must have occurred to Aesop. "Michael; have you made a polyrad check of the area?" "Yes." Targett had not, but he held up his left wrist as he spoke, examined the suit's polyrad dial and saw it was registering nothing unusual. He moved the dial into camera view for a second. "All clear. Do these things look like torpedoes to you, Aesop?" "They could be anything. Proceed." Targett, who had been proceeding anyway, clamped his mouth shut and tried to put Aesop out of his mind. He approached the nearest cylinder, marveling at its gleaming electrostatic freshness. IF "Hold the camera three feet from the object," Aesop said in his ear. "Walk around it and return to your starting point." "Yes, j," Targett muttered, moving crab-wise around the cylinder. O NE end of it tapered almost to a point, in the center of which was a one-centimeter circular hole, reminding him of the muzzle of a rifle. A ring of black glass, practically indistinguishable from the surrounding metal, was located a few inches back from the point. The other end was more rounded and covered with smaller holes like those on a pepper shaker. In the cylinder's mid-section were several plates set flush with the surface and secured by screws of a surprisingly Earthlike design. There were no markings of any kind. "Thank you, Michael -- now see if you can remove the plates from the center section." "Right." Targett was mildly surprised at Aesop's instruction, but he set the camera where it could cover his actions and unsheathed his knife. "Just a minute, Mike," Surgenor's voice cut in unexpectedly, loud and clear in spite of the hundreds of miles between Targett and Module Five. "You mentioned torpedoes a minute ago. What do those things look like?" "Dave," Targett said wearily, "why don't you go back to sleep?" ' "I've got indigestion -- now tell me what you've got there." Targett described the cylinders quickly and with a growing feeling of exasperation. His projected stroll down the centuries, among the relics of an ancient civilization, was somehow getting him more tangled than ever in the petty restrictions of the present. "Do you mind if I get on with the job?" he concluded. "I don't think you should touch those things, Mike." "Why not? They look like torpedoes. But if there were any danger Aesop would have warned me off." "Would he?" Surgenor's voice was hard. "Don't forget that Aesop is a computer -- " "You don't need to tell me that. You guys are the ones who personalize him." " -- and therefore thinks in a very cold, very logical manner. Didn't you notice his sudden change in attitude just noy? At first he wanted you to stay clear of the objects -- now he's telling you to take one apart." "Which proves he thinks it's safe," Targett said. "Which proves he thinks it could be dangerous, you bonehead. Listen, Mike, this little jaunt of yours has turned out rather differently from what any of us expected and, since you were the one who volunteered to go out on the limb, Aesop is quite prepared to let you saw down the tree behind you." Targett shook his head, although there was nobody to see him. "If Aesop thought there was any risk he would order me away from here." "Let's ask him," Surgenor snapped. "Aesop, why did you instruct Mike to remove the casing from one of those cylinders?" "To permit inspection of its interior," Aesop replied. Surgenor sighed audibly. "Sorry. What was the reasoning behind your permitting Mike to proceed with this investigation alone instead of waiting for the arrival of the customary two modules or the entire ship?" "The objects in question resemble torpedoes, tanks or bombs," Aesop replied without hesitation, "but the complete absence of electrical or mechanical interfaces suggests that they may be self-contained automated devices. Their contamination repellant systems are still active, so there is a possibility that other systems are either active or capable of being activated. If the objects prove to be robot weapons it is obviously better that they be examined initially by one man rather than by four or twelve." drily. "There you are, Mike. Captain Aesop is a staunch advocate of the greatest good of the greatest number." "I cannot risk the ship." He can't risk the ship, Mike. Now that you know the score, you are entitled to refuse to chance going near those objects until a team arrives with full probe instrumentation." "I don't think there's any risk worth mentioning," Targett said steadily. "Besides, everything Aesop said makes sense to me. I'm going ahead." A nalyzing his own feelings, Targett was surprised to discover that he was slightly disappointed in Aesop. He had always objected to personalizing the computer, yet in his heart he must have regarded Aesop as a benign entity who looked out for Targett's welfare with greater scrupulousness than could have been expected of a human skipper. Possibly there was something there a psychoanalyst could get his teeth into, but his immediate concern was with the interior of the nearest cylinder. He unclipped the heavy backpack, set it on the ground and kneeled beside the sleek black torpedo. The screws holding the mid-section plates had Y-shaped slots, which did not provide a good purchase for the point of his knife but were spring-loaded and turned easily when 'depressed. He lifted the first plate carefully, exposing a IF mass of components and circuitry, much of which appeared to be duplicated and arranged symmetrically about a central spine. The conduits were drab and not color-coded, but looked fresh enough to have been installed the previous day. Targett, who was not an engineer, suddenly felt a profound respect for the long-departed beings who had created the cylinders. Within five minutes he had stripped off all the curved plates and laid them in a row beside the cylinder body. An inspection of the complex interior told him nothing about the object's function, except that a mechanism in the sharper end had the hard uncompromising lines he associated with machine guns. "Hold the camera about two feet from the object," Aesop instructed, "and move along its entire length." Targett did as he had been told. "How's that? This looks like an engine section but the metal looks queer -- a bit crumbly." "That would be caused by nitrogen absorption associated with -- " Aesop stopped speaking in mid-sentence, a strangely human mannerism which Targett had never known the computer to exhibit before. "Aesop?" "Here is an instruction you must obey instantly." Aesop's voice was preternaturally sharp. "Scan your surroundings. If you see a rock formation that would give you protection against machine rifle fire -- go to it immediately!" "What's the matter?" Targett glanced around the shimmering plateau. "Don't ask questions," Surgenor's voice cut in. "Do as Aesop says. Run for cover." "But -- " Targett's voice faded as his peripheral vision picked up a sudden movement. He turned toward it and saw that -- in the center of the plateau -- one of the hundreds of cylinders had reared its sharp end at an angle into the air. It was swaying slowly and blindly, as though supported by a loose wire. Targett gaped at it for a moment, filled with an almost superstitious dread, then ran north toward the nearest barricade of rock. Hampered by the suit and the extra gravity, he found it impossible to pick up any real speed. On his right the cylinder spiraled lazily into the air like a mythological creature awakening from millennia of slumber. It drifted in his direction. Two others stirred in their dusty cradles. Targett tried to move faster but felt as if he were waist deep in syrup. Ahead he saw a black triangular hole formed by tilted slabs of rock. He swerved toward it. T HE sky to his right was clear again, giving him the impression the cylinder had vanished. Then he saw it moving around behind him, foreshortening, aiming itself. His thighs pumped harder in the nightmarish slow motion and the dark opening swung crazily ahead, but too far away. He knew he was going to be late. He threw himself at the opening -- just as a massive hammer sledged ferociously into his back. The television camera spun from his hand as he was lifted off his feet and flung into the space between the rocks. Astounded at finding himself still alive, Targett burrowed desperately for cover. The triangular space proved long enough to take his whole body. He squirmed into it, moaning with panic at the thought ofanother bullet finding him at any instant. Vm alive , he thought numbly, buthow? He slid a gloved hand around to the lower part of his back where the bullet had struck, felt an unfamiliar jagged edge of metal. His probing fingers discovered a crumpled, boxlike object -- the ruins of his oxygen generator. He started to reach for the back : pack containing the spare generator, then remembered the pack was lying out on the plateau where he had set it down before going to work on the cylinder. He clawed feverishly at the confining rock until he had reversed his position, then peered outside. The small segment of open sky he could see was crossed and recrossed with the black silhouettes of torpedoes in flight. Targett inched forward a little for a better view. His jaw sagged as he saw that the torpedoes had taken to the air in hundreds, swarming silently upward, their shadows rippling over brownish dust and rocks. Even as he watched, a few laggards angled their noses into the air, swung groggily for a moment and drifted up to join their fellows in the circulating cloud. A slight fold in the ground made it impossible for him to see where the backpack lay, or if the cylinder on which he had worked had also taken flight. He raised his head slightly and fell back amid a sudden shower of rock splinters and dust. The banshee howl or ricochets left no doubt in his mind that several of the torpedoes had noted his movement and used their guns. "Report on your position, Michael," Aesop's voice seemed to come from another world. "My position isn't too good," Targett said hoarsely, trying tocontrol his breathing. "These things seem to be robot hunters fitted out with machine rifles. The lot of them are airborne now -- perhaps the radiation from my television camera triggered them off -- and they're swarming about like mosquitoes. I'm hiding out under some rocks but -- " IF "Stay where you are. I will have the Sarafand there in less than an hour." "That's no good, Aesop. One of the torpedoes took a shot at me as I was getting in here. The suit isn't punctured, but my oxygenerator is out of action." "Use the spare from your pack," Surgenor put in before Aesop could reply. "I can't." Targett made the strange discovery that he felt embarrassed rather than afraid. "The pack's lying out in the open and I can't get at it." "But that gives you only -- " Surgenor paused. "You'll have to reach the pack, Mike." Targett could feel his lungs begin to labor as the suit's residual oxygen was depleted. "That's what I was thinking." "Look, perhaps the torpedoes respond only to sudden movement. If you crawled out very slowly -- " "Hypothesis incorrect," Aesop interupted. "My analysis of the sensor circuitry in the torpedo which Michael opened indicates that it was a duplex system, both channels of which use movement and heat for target identification. Any exposure of his body would be certain to draw more fire." "It already has -- I tried to poke my head out of this hole a minute ago," Targett said. "I almost lost it." "That shows my conclusion about the sensor circuitry was accurate, which in turn -- " "We haven't time to listen to you congratulating yourself, Aesop." Surgenor's voice crashed in the suit's radio. "Mike, have you tried your sidearm on them?" Ill tralaser, which was still slung over his shoulder, then pulled his hand back. "It wouldn't help, Dave. There are hundreds of those things buzzing around out there and an ultralaser pistol holds -- how many charges?" "Let's see. Twenty-six." "So what's the point of even trying?" r "Maybe there isn't any point, Mike, but are you just going to lie there and suffocate? Blast a few of them at least." "David Surgenor," Aesop interupted. "I instruct you to remain silent while I deal with this emergency." "Deal with it?" Targett felt an illogical stirring of his former blind faith in Aesop. "All right. What do you want me to do?" "Can you see any of the torpedoes without endangering yourself?" "Yes." Targett glanced at the triangular area of sky as a black cigar-shape drifted across it. "Only one at a time, though." "That is sufficient. Your record shows that you are a good marksman. I want you to use your sidearm on one of the torpedoes. Hit it." "What's the point?" Targett's brief, irrational hope dissolved' into anger and raw panic. "I've got twenty-six charges and there are three hundred of those robots out there." "Three-h u nd red-and-sixty-t wo, to be precise," Aesop said. "Now listen to my instructions and obey them without further delay. Direct an ultralaser burst against one of the torpedoes. Hit it as close to the nose section as possible and describe the effects of your action." "You smug -- " Realizing the futility of trying to insult a computer, Targett wrenched the ultralaser free of its holster and flipped the tubeless scopesight up into position. He set the sight for low magnification and wriggled around in the narrow space between the rocks until he was in a reasonably good firing position. The controlled breathing essential for high-accuracy shooting was impossible -- his lungs were working like bellows in the suit's stale air -- but the torpedoes were a relatively easy target. He waited until one came questing across his segment of sky, put the cross-hairs on its conical nose section and squeezed the trigger. As the first capsule in the weapon's magazine yielded its energy a quarter-second burst of ing briefly on the torpedoe's nose. The black cylinder seemed to falter slightly, then recover and cruise out of sight, apparently unharmed. Targett felt perspiration prickling out on his forehead. Incredible as it seemed, he -- Michael Targett, the most important individual in the universe -- was going to die, just like all the anonymous beings who had gone before him. "I hit one," he said through numb lips. "Right on the nose. It just flew on as if nothing had happened." "Was there any searing or scarring of the metal?" "I don't think so. I'm seeing them in silhouette, so I couldn't be sure, though." "You say the torpedo flew on as though nothing had happened," Aesop persisted. "Think carefully, Michael -- was there no reaction at all?" "Well, it seemed to wobble for a fraction of a second, but -- " "Just as I expected," Aesop commented. "The internal arrangement of the torpedo you examined suggested it had a duplex sensory and control system. The new evidence confirms this." "Damn you, Aesop," Targett whispered. "I thought you were trying to help me but you were just gathering more data. From now on, do your own dirty work -- I've retired from the Service." IF "The ultralaser radiation would have been sufficient to burn out the prime sensory inputs," Aesop continued unperturbed, "causing the back-up system to take over. Another direct hit on the same torpedo would make it fall out of control and the probability is high that the impact would cause catastrophic failure of the motor casing, which appears to have deteriorated. The high level of prolonged nondirectional radiation normally associated with failure in a motor of this design would in turn be sufficient to overload both sensory channels in the other torpedoes, causing them -- " "That's it!" Targett felt a fierce pang of relief -- it faded almost as quickly as it had come. He fought to keep his voice level. "Except that I could see no mark on the torpedo I hit -- and if I try to poke my face out for a better look I'll get it blown off. Maybe that would be the best thing that could happen -- at least it would be quick." ET me say something here,LrfAesop," came Surgenor's voice. "Listen, Mike -- you still have a chance. You've got twentyfive energy capsules left in your magazine. Blast away at the torpedoes as they go by and maybe you'll burn the same one twice." "Thanks, Dave." A gray mood of resignation settled over Targett as he realized what he had to do. "I appreciate your concern, but remember I'm the gambler in this outfit. Twenty-six into threesixty-two put the odds at about thirteen to one against me right at the start. Thirteen's a bad number and I don't feel very lucky." "A superstitious gambler's a loser, Mike. Let Aesop figure your odds. It's your only chance." "Not the only one." Targett gathered his legs beneath him in preparation for violent action. "I'm a pretty good shot with radiation weapons. My best bet would be to get outside fast -- out where I can track one of the torpedoes long enough to take two shots at it." "Don't try it, Mike," Surgenor said urgently. "Sorry." Targett tensed himself and edged forward. "My mind is -- " "Your mind appears to be confused," Aesop cut in. "Possibly due to oxygen starvation. Have you forgotten that you dropped the television camera outside your shelter?" Targett hesitated in the act of diving forward. "The camera? Can you see the swarm?" "Not all of it, but enough to let me follow individual torpedoes for a considerable portion of their circuit. I will instruct you when to fire and by timing your shots to match the general circulation rate of the swarm we can bring the probability of a second hit on one torpedo close to unity." "All right, Aesop -- you win." Targett settled down again, burdened by the dull certainty that nothing he could do would make any difference to the situation. His breathing had become rapid and shallow as his lungs rejected their own waste products. His hands were clammy inside their gloves. He raised the sidearm and peered through its sight. "Begin firing at will to initiate the sequence." Aesop's voice came faintly through the roaring in Targett'sears. "Right." He steadied the weapon, waited until a torpedo drifted across his segment of sky and directed a burst of energy onto its nose section. The torpedo wavered for an instant, then flew on. Targett repeated the sequence again and again, always 'with the same result, until the pile of expended capsules spat out by the weapon numbered more than a dozen. "Where are you, Aesop?" he breathed. "You're not helping me. "The ultralaser radiation leaves no visible marks on the surfaces of the torpedoes, so I am forced to work on a purely statistical basis," Aesop said. "I now have sufficient data to enable me to predict their movements with a tolerable degree of accuracy." "Then start doing it." There was a slight pause. "Each time I say, 'Now -- ' fire at the next torpedo appearing in your field of view." "I'm waiting." Targett blinked to clear his vision. Bright-rimmed black spots had begun to dance across it. "Now." A torpedo appeared an instant later and Targett squeezed the trigger. The ultralaser ray raked along the nose section -- but after an initial tremor the black cylinder drifted steadily out of view without changing direction. "Now." Targett fired again, with the same result. "Now." Once again the beam of energy flicked across a torpedo -- with no effect. "This isn't working out too well." Targett focused his eyes with difficulty on the indicator on the butt of his weapon. "I'm down to eight charges. I'm beginning to think I ought to go ahead with my own idea while I -- " "You are wasting valuable time, Michael. Now." Targett squeezed the trigger and another torpedo drifted heedlessly on, effectively unharmed. "Now." Hopelessly, Targett fired again. The torpedo had passed out of sight before it dawned on him that perhaps it had begun to change direction. IF "Aesop," he managed to say, "I think maybe -- " He heard a dull explosion and the triangular segment of sky turned a blinding white. Light seared Targett's eyes before the helmet filters automatically continued unabated for seconds. He imagined it burning out the primary and back-up sensors on the swarming robots, which would in turn blunder down and -- his eyes shut and buried his head in his arms. When the prolonged rumble of explosions and the almost palpable flood of brillance had died away he crawled out from under the rocks and forced his legs to accept his weight. He opened his eyes cautiously. The plateau was littered with hundreds of inert torpedoes, their motor compartments glowing red, vaporing. Several of the torpedoes were still airborne but they paid no attention to him as he ran, weaving drunkenly, toward the spot where he had left the backpack. On the way across the plateau the thought occurred to him that one of the torpedoes could have landed right on the pack, but he found it lying safely beside the stripped-down cylinder, which apparently had not flown. He 'opened it with trembling fingers, took out the oxygenerator and experienced a moment of exquisite dread as the ruined generator refused to let itself be detached from the suit's breather hole. With the last dregs of his strength he wrenched it off, clicked the replacement into position and lay down to await oxygen. "Mike? Are you all right?" Targett breathed deeply. "I'm all right, Dave. Captain Aesop got me through." "Did you say Captain?" "I said Captain." Targett rose to his feet and surveyed the littered battlefield upon which he and a distant computer had vanquished an enemy host which had lain in ambush for four thousand years. In all probability he would never know what the torpedoes' original purpose had been, or why they had been dumped on cheology seemed to have faded. It was sufficient just to be alive in the present. As he scanned the incredible scene one of the torpedoes which was still aloft flew blindly into a ridge more than a mile away. The resultant explosion drenched the plateau with radiance. Targett shielded his eyes. "There goes another one, Aesop." "Your meaning is not clear to me, Michael," Aesop replied. "Another torpedo, of course. Didn't you see the flash?" "No. The television camera is not functioning." "Oh?" Targett glanced towards miMoa befoul Dune Frank Herbert returns to the duneworld of Arrakis for an epic of imperial intrigue and human ecology-an epic that spans the universe. That's why we can tell you where it ends We're reprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other frank Herbert books today: (N #) # (#) # (S#) # (S#) # (#) # Name  Address City State Zip Include list price plus a dime postage for each title. Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # his former hiding place, where the camera had fallen. "Perhaps all those explosions burned it out." "No." Aesop paused. "Transmissions ceased when you dropped the camera. There is a good probability that the switch got jarred to the off position." "Very likely. I was moving -- " Targett stopped speaking as a disturbing thought occurred to him. "Then you lied to me. You weren't able to track the torpedoes -- " "That is correct." "But you were telling me when to fire. How did you know I would hit one of the torpedoes twice?" "I didn't." Aesop's voice was precise, unruffled. "This is something you in particular should understand, Michael. I simply took a chance." (( A LL this is great stuff for my Abook, Mike." Clifford Pollen's reedy voice was pitched high with excitement as he leaned across the mess table on the Sarafand, "There were three-sixtytwo torpedoes skimming around and you had twenty-six shots. That means Aesop staked your life on odds of about thirteen to one -- and the gamble came off!" "You'll never make a successful gambler, Clifford." Targett smiled pityingly as he cut up a king-sized steak. "You've no idea of how to calculate odds." Pollen looked offended. "I can perform a simple calculation. IF Twenty-six into three-sixty-two -- " "Has nothing to do with the actual mathematics of the situation, my friend. It was necessary for me to hit one of the torpedoes twice, right?" "Right," Pollen said grudgingly. "My first shot could hit any torpedo. There was one chance in three-six-two that my second shot would hit the same torpedo -- or three-six-one in three-six-two that it would not. For the third shot to coincide with either of the first two, it was two chances in threesix-two -- or three-sixty in threesix-two that it wouldn't -- and so on. In this sort of calculation it's easier to work out the probability against something happening, so all you have to do is multiply threesix-one over three-six-two by threesixty over three-six-two, and so on right up to the odds against my last shot which would have been threethree-seven over three-six-two. Multiply it all out and you get odds of around two to one that I would hit a torpedo twice. It wasn't much of a gamble, really." "That's hard to believe." "Work it out for yourself." Targett put a piece of steak into his mouth and chewed appreciatively. "It's a good example of the difficulty of judging complex probabilities by common sense." Pollen shook his head. "It's too complicated for me." "That's why you'd never make a successful gambler." Targett smiled again as he worked on his steak. He did not mention the fact that his own common sense had been outraged by the mathematics of probability, or that it had taken a long and tedious conversation with Aesop on a private link, after all danger was past, to convince him of the truth. And he would never mention the cold, lonely feeling which had come over him when he genuinely realized that Aesop -- behind all the illusions -- was simply a logic machine. At one point, wedged between the rocks, it had dawned on him that it would have been more comforting, while wandering on alien worlds, to address Aesop as "Captain", and to think of him as a superhuman being who never came down from his isolated command post on the SaraamTs computer deck. "We'll be putting down on Parador at the end of this survey," Dave Surgenor said from the opposite side of the table. "Are you going to give us a practical demonstration of how a successful gambler operates?" "I don't think so." Targett put another forkful of steak into his mouth. "The syndicates who run the gambling houses are probably sneaky enough to use computers to calculate the odds." He glanced at the nearest computer terminal and raised his cup of coffee. "No disrespect to Captain Aesop, of course."  "T#ie worlds exist in the mind alone -- Who knows this truth can dance with fire Or fly through the air or float on stone... I the wall of the railroad station in San Francisco. There was a long, withdrawn, melancholy honk down the tracks in the windy sunshine. Squashed popcorn paved the floor, all the glass was grimy, a quickshot bar with painfully exotic decor usurped a section of the lobby. Only the magazine stand on the platform was bright and clean. A chubby station guard with a Fu Manchu mustache ambled to the gates. Ravenshaw decided one efficiency derived from the shambles: no one would lounge here by choice. General Craddock brought up the rear of the hustling commuter crowd. He said, "Good morning," and didn't say another word until they had driven through the factories to the #th Street on-ramp and were into thick traffic on the Bay Bridge approach. Then: "I would not choose to live at any other time, but tell me this, Arleigh, why do some very pretty girls at Stanford dress like refugees from a Ukranian potato bog?" "To match their young men as romantic vagabonds." The general snorted. "Romantic?" "Dictionary says imbued or dominated by idealism." Ravenshaw followed the great arc of the suspension cables with his eyes. "Irrational idealism is a starving snake finding its own tail around a tree." Craddock took off his blackrimmed glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You have a pretty way with words," he said, "but watch your tongue when we meet the think-tank." "Yessir," said Ravenshaw. "Besides Rand Corporation and Systems Development and the Hudson Institute, what is a thinktank?" "Throw 'em a problem and they bark like a herd of seals -- a conditioned reflex -- how do I know? I never met one before. I take a dim view of the whole thing." They were running downhill from the anchor block of the twin suspension spans. It was a sparkling day, brisk and sunny, but Craddock was in a heavy fog of thought. "This outfit is supposed to be unique. They don't make egregious pronouncements. It's a club with a clubhouse. Very exclusive. They pick their own members. You've got to have a pretty good introduction to meet them." "How's their batting average?" "I asked that question. About eight-eighty, but a lot of the work is not susceptible to percentage analysis. There's another yardstick, and that's the hundred thousand dollars they got for investment fifteen years ago when they cranked up this brain machine. They have something over IF "Wow," said Ravenshaw, "a bunch of financial experts." They rumbled through the Goat Island Tunnel and onto the cantilever span. "They're a bunch of generalists," said Craddock, "not nuts-and-boltsers. But anyone who doesn't pay attention to money is obviously not quite bright. One of the secondary objectives of this group was to become self-sustaining -- and they are that." "Why have we got to talk with them?" "Because the man said so. While there are no fingers but my own in the day-to-day pie, I have authority to which I respond. Authority wants us to meet with the wise men." The East Bay spread out ahead of them, wind-polished and bright. Ravenshaw automatically found the Campanile on the Berkeley campus and the tall buildings of Oakland with the skyline hills beyond. There was no question in his mind that the Bay Area was among the most dramatic postcard pictures in the world, but he ignored it today. "Complete disclosure?" he asked. "Not on your life!" snapped Craddock. "The arguments about honesty and open dealing are byproducts of a mistaken appreciation of the nature of things. We'll put a hypothetical question to these people and see what happens." Ravenshaw angled through traffic onto the Bayshore Freeway north. "Well, sir, who are they? How do you make a think-tank?" "In this case, the man in Washington had some discretionary funds tucked away after the Korean War. It occurred to him that wise old men could be recycled like used copper wire. It was a tough job, because how do you evaluate wisdom? What he did was pick a couple of anchor men and let them do the recruiting. Questionnaires went out to a wide spectrum of groups, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Retail Clerks, the Geophysical Union, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Farm Bureau, the Amalgamated Pretzel Benders, the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- you name it and they got an inquiry over a hot-line signature. Give us five names in your outfit,' give us five names outside, of the best general consultants you've ever come across. Out of eight thousand names, six hundred were mentioned more than four times. A grading scale was set up and the number cut down to just under a hundred. The anchor men interviewed these people and twenty were offered jobs. Eight accepted. They are a hardnose bunch. I've seen a couple of their recommendations and have a good opinion of their ability.' # "But you don't trust them' said Ravenshaw. He turned onto the university off-ramp. "Stop after the next light' said Craddock. "Park the car. I want to throw a little dust in the air. I want to obfuscate things a little." He brooded as they crossed San Pablo and Ravenshaw pulled to the curb. "Trust them? I trust them to do what they want to do. I can nail responsibility upstairs, but it's a bitter exercise to fix blame when the horse is gone." ly, "Do you see any end to this?" He meant the entire perplexing problem of the infinite worlds he had stumbled into when General Craddock had pulled him out of Vietnam to head Wide Blue Yonder, Inc. Craddock did not misunderstand him. "I see dozens of unacceptable solutions and very few I like. Arleigh, I used to go to the Saturday afternoon movies when I was a boy. In one serial a goat ate what they called a 'biscuit bomb' and followed the hero around. The caption read: 'Tick-tick, ticktick.'" At the time my sympathy was not with the goat. Now, with this funny feeling in my stomach -- " His attention was caught by a girl walking toward them. She was in a benny, a maxicoat from the Salvation Army. Craddock sighed. "Will hemlines go up again in our time?" Ravenshaw pursued his thought further. "I could go back to active duty -- hide out in a jungle war," he said tentatively. "Cut and run? Turn back the clock? Cop out? Stop the world, I want to get off and spit?" Craddock pulled his suitcase from the back seat and opened it. He slammed it shut again. "Ravenshaw, you and I are lucky beyond the dreams of fortune. We stand at a hingepoint of history. How we act, what kind of men we are, is a question of weight and import,  thought I was a fortunate man, being placed to write a footnote to a footnote. Now it's large type in the main copy. Very sobering. We are involved in affairs of genuine consequence." Ravenshaw nodded doubtfully. "And if there's any constant but change, it's Start From Now," Craddock went on. Tattoo that on your heart. I believe in sins of comission and to hell with virtue by default." "Yessir," said Ravenshaw. "Right," said Craddock. He turned his attention to a large, leather-covered shaving kit from his case. He took an ivory toothpick from his breast pocket and stuck it into one of the covered hinges. He turned the kit upside down and pulled one snap. He looked at his watch. "I also believe in a few small precautions," IF he said mildly. "One minute forty -- " he pulled the other S nap -- "and here are your papers, Mr. Bill Quintard. Go through your pockets. Match books, laundry lists, the rental contract for this car, wallet, the works into the kit. Got a label in your coat?" "Eddie Bauer in Seattle, outdoor gear and goosedown garments, a national mail-order house that imports Harris tweed." The general nodded and Ravenshaw read the letters addressed to Bill Quintard, checked the address book and put three scraps of notes into his pockets along with a swizzle stick labeled Plainsboro Jughandle with a little green mermaid on top. In the wallet, his picture was on an ID card from the James Forrestal Research Center. "Do I show off this stuff?" "It's subliminal support. I am Marcus Holloman and I am your boss. Be secretarial and a little bodyguardish. Questions?" "Why did you say a minute-forty when I made it a minute-ten?" "Complete disclosure? Hell no. If you got smart and' opened this case, you'd get fogged with ethyl mercaptan plus an interesting dye that usually wears off in six weeks. Also, an acid eats the papers inside." The general grinned. "Other questions?" "What is the think-tank called?" "Cassandra Investment Company." "I can't believe it," said Ravenshaw. He started the engine. "Are we off in a blizzard of skunk?" Craddock put on a pair of glasses with thin gold rims. They gave him a mild, scholarly air. He whistled the first notes of the Air Force Academy Song and Ravenshaw pulled into the traffic. II T HE building was modern nondescript, with a row of thirtyfoot arches filled with glass. An old five-story, brick apartment house stood behind it. To the left of the lobby was an open floor with desks, secretaries and business machines. To the right were stairs to the mezzanine, a guard in uniform, vaults and private offices. And a pretty girl. "My name's Holloman. Mr. Quintard and I have an appointment." "Yes, sir." She ticked their names on a list. "John, will you take these gentlemen to the elevator." They followed the guard to a door in the rear and around a corner. The hall was too deep by twenty feet, Ravenshaw noted. They were in the brick apartment house. The guard used a key at the elevator and pushed the button for them. When the door opened they stepped into a reception room between chromed poles two inches in diameter set in footsquare boxes. There was an immediate bizz-abizz-bizz noise. The man walking to meet them stopped in his tracks. He waited until another man appeared from 'a side door. "As you know, gentlemen, this is a sensitive area. Will you please empty your pockets onto the desk." He was urbane, competent and sincere. Craddock had a pocketful of change and Ravenshaw had his four-inch stock knife. On invitation they stepped back between the poles and the buzzer was silent. The man examined their credentials. They retrieved their belongings and were escorted down a cork-floored corridor to a pair of disguised fire doors with top quality panic hardware. There is nothing ostentatious about a dead solid floor and dead quiet ventilation except both are as rare as the owner who can afford them. The room Craddock and Ravenshaw entered was equally low key, but the carpet was wool of theater quality, guaranteed to show no wear after a million people had tromped on it. The egg-crate lighting probably did not vary ten lumins in any part of the room and the bookcases were solid oak of meticulous craftsmanship. There were no windows, there was no fireplace, and the chairs and tables had a well-maintained and well-used appearance with no offensive smell of cedar or lemon oil. Two groups of men were gossiping. A gray man was consulting a London Times Atlas on a stand. Another fellow had his hands cupped over his eyes in a deep chair. A third man came to greet Craddock and Ravenshaw. He had a head like a patent-leather owl, with close-set ears and black Irair too flat and polished to be anything but real. "I'm Swafford Jain," he said, "moderator for this month. I hope our security didn't bother you. I'm convinced precautions are protective to us and not primarily directed to our visitors. Mr. Holloman and Mr. Quintard, right? Coffee? Later, then. We've found it works best to brace the board with the question and socialize with a common background. Agreed?" His eyes were as direct as a living owl's and, to Ravenshaw's pleasure, he swiveled his head on fixed shoulders. He led them to chairs at the end of the room behind a low table with a fresh bouquet of single roses. He pushed aside an air copy of The Economist and rapped on the table with his knuckles. The groups broke up and Jain plunged directly into business. "This is our first general meeting of the year and will be conducted on a no-record basis. We have a new member, Mr. Sam Asabian, but my reminder to put IF doodlings into the security wastebasket on leaving this room is not directed to him as much as to his absent-minded elders in terms of service. Sam, will you do me the favor of making certain I carry away nothing?" A man with a bronzed moon face nodded and Jain bowed to Craddock. The general stood, slouching a little, and said, "I'm Marcus Holloman and Bill Quintard is with me. I am engaged to offer no source for the information behind the question I'd like you to consider. It should be regarded as a preliminary inquiry into a totally speculative condition. We are after guidelines and no reasonable guesses will be refused. An analogous situation might be that of a group gathered to consider the implications of flight before the Wright brothers got into the bicycle business. "We are aware that our fundamental premises may be in error. We appreciate the impossibility of detailed forecasts. I can't enlarge on the background, but I'm allowed to say some tentative evidence exists. This is the question: what happens if it becomes practical to travel to an infinite number of alternate worlds?" T HE twelve men were in a loose semicircle. Their ears did not flap nor were they at rigid attention, but Ravenshaw had a feeling that they saw more casually than a pride of Admirals would see on purpose; he would bet that every man could write a thousand words about Craddock by the end of his sixty-second speech. This was a redoubtable group. The man who had been cupping his eyes dropped his hands. "Break out the Second Coming type," he said in a bullfrog voice. "I'm Alonzo Johnson," he added, "and I thank you for such a notion." "Who's coming? Aimee Semple McPherson? Buddah, Ogier the Dane, King Arthur?" asked a small man, his feet stretched out in front of him. He had a face like a wedge of putty with home-cured olives pressed in for eyes. "The Honorable Joseph Levering," murmured Swafford Jain. "Exactly the point, Joe," said a man with a classic Roman profile, worn by time. "If you have infinite worlds, presumably everything can, has, or will happen. Aimee Semple McPherson has returned from the dead again somewhere, and the Four-Square Gospel Church rules the world in righteousness. I'm Ed Masterson. What I want isn't hard. Just give me a world where Shakespeare wrote Charlemagne or Boadicea or whatever title you like. Give me a world where the library at Alexandria was preserved so I can read Euripides' Andromeda and give me a world where the Bishop of Yucatan was a scholar instead of a fanatic." "What did Keats write at sixty?" asked a bald stocky man. "I'm Brander Lugard. What are the limiting factors, sir?" "Unknown, Mr. Lugard," said the general. "Then anything is possible, invasion from Mars, peace declared, the Greeks stop biting themselves in the small of the back and develop the scientific method." "Why not?" said a big man with stooped shoulders. "And Count Dracula has just put electric lights in his Transylvanian castle, sure he has. The whole thing's too open for meaningful discussion. Walt Milias." He nodded to Craddock and Ravenshaw. "Not so. I'm Cyrus Pfister. The same laws would apply -- forget a chlorine world -- and any real world has to be self-consistent. If you want intelligent animals, you've got to give up steak or eat your friendly neighborhood cow. There is an irreducible rationale in human affairs because of the inbuilt nature of the creature. That's your limiting factor. If intelligence is not human it's a different ball game." "You're saying that a world must be psychologically viable? Then there's no world of reason, if you rule out fantasy." "Who needs one hundred percent reason? Panic saves, just like Jesus." "You're talking about unknowns, not irreconcilables -- " " -- mystique about cold steel until some pragmatist with a Colt forty-five blows out the cobwebs the swordsmen use for brains -- " " -- another Mesabi to work over -- " " -- you can't move a society by example. What influence do the Swiss have on the world except the gnomes who drill holes in the money structure and cheese -- " " -- buffalo management and herds of native meat -- " " -- but even knowing it can be done is vital. Look at the four-minute mile. As soon as one man did it, so could a dozen -- " " -- existence is all the proof logic requires -- " The discussion became general and Ravenshaw was content to look and listen. Sam Asabian was puzzled by his peers as they supported preposterous structures and toppled them with snorts of laughter. The men were alert and mischievous as a cageful of monkeys, some solemn, some jocular. Milias was pompous with a twinkle in his eye, a happy target who would sit on a pigmy with elephantine grace whenever he could lure one close enough. The hottest argument was not heated. Asabian's face cleared as he understood this was for fun, deadly earnest and candy-castle spinning all at once. Ravenshaw wondered what firm base of values made the IF bedplate on which these men could bounce ideas like ball bearings. In a lull, Alonzo Johnson asked, "Mr. Holloman, what is your point of view? What do you want? Where do you stand?" "Good of mankind," said the general promptly. "Good of the United States. Good for you and good for me." "Open-ended enough," said Brander yLugard. "What I'd like to see is a world with no World War I. That was a generation cut short of generation." "So is every generation sir, not only that illuminated by star shells and the crepitating light of Victorian putrescence -- " " -- show me a people whose goal is not sloth, indulgence and selfgratification -- " "Contentment is the seed of destruction." Asabian threw that into the pot and settled back with a contented smile as two of the old wolves began to growl at it. With the discussion fragmented again, Ravenshaw found Swafford Jain's sardonic eyes on him. "Well, Mr. Quintard, what do you think of Our tank? We shock a good many people." Ravenshaw was off guard. "I suspect you'll resolve the question and touch reality like a custard pie spilled on the floor." "Or a bowl of applesauce?" said Jain softly. "Gentlemen, it's time for refreshments." get away from the Cassandra think-tank. General Craddock sat at his side, bemused behind a pair of dark glasses by the exotic youngsters hitchhiking along University Avenue. He marveled at the "heshes" but when he saw one couple dressed in Elizabethan costume holding a cardboard sign reading "Sackamenna" he evidently decided it would be all downhill from there and asked, "Do you want lunch?" "After that a la cart? No, sir." A security man had driven in a battery-powered tea cart and plugged it into a wall socket. It was the size of a hospital bed and had featured three general sections. Coffee, tea with cozies over the pots had occupied one end. The center had been taken up by a buffet of doughnuts and pastries, cold cuts and sun-cured olives and pickles and San Francisco sourdough. The other end had held a brave display of ice, bottles and bar tools. "If we turn right," said the general, "isn't there a bridge at Richmond? Then we can cut back over the Golden Gate and on to the airport." Ravenshaw nodded. "My feelings are mixed," said the general. "I was throwing rocks ahead on that foggy trail and a couple of times I didn't hear them hit. Who spilled the drink on your coat and sent it out to be sponged off?" "Rameses Three, the spry old devil with the criss-cross face. He was browsing the atlas." "Austin Mummery," said Craddock, and fell silent. Mummery had approached Ravenshaw and said, "Come with me, Mr. Quintard. I'm a leading local spiritualist." He had led Ravenshaw to the cart and expertly popped a split of champagne, pouring two tall glasses half full. He had topped them off with a bottle of Guiness and said, "Cheers. What do you think of our little group?" "A pleasure,"  Ravenshaw had said. He had looked admiringly at the cart. "How do you get into this club?" "It's a little tricky. You've got to be right." Austin Mummery's eyes were black and his upper lids drooped a little. "I have another question," Ravenshaw had said. Hooded eyes -- that was the technical term. "How did you pick the name?" "Cassandra? She was right, you know, but nobody believed her. She was the daughter of Hecuba and Priam and she was cursed by Apollo. I've not been able to satisfy myself whether the curse was knowing the future or the character flaw of telling other people about it." "I don't know how inquisitive I'm allowed to be," Ravenshaw had said, "but has Cassandra dug any bomb shelters?" "No. Whether the consensus derives from hope, rationality or futility, I cannot say." Mummery had smiled. "Those who endeavor to pin our butterfly beauty to statistical charts give us about ninety percent, which is a long way from being right all the time." "You speak of consensus -- " "The powerful force behind democracy. Forget ephemeral intellectual fashions and forget the committee that built a camel instead af a horse. The fuel for Cassandra is accord." "Agreement on what, sir? Your approach seems -- " "Frivolous?" Even Mummery's lips were seamed and the terrain of wrinkles changed when he smiled. "We were solemn once, until we found we were friends and party people. We only suspected this on the outside because we felt obligated to wear a mask of sobriety in front of the peasants." He was a provocative old scoundrel. "This is Liberty Hall, Mr. Quintard, and we do as we damn well please." "And the price of liberty?" "We have no formal philosopher to keep us vigilant with Ps and Qs." "So what is' your base philosophy?" Ravenshaw was certain that Mummery examined arid igsecond. He had to be over seventy, but he wq a man like an antique beartrap, old and powerful, with steel teeth in the jaws. "We all want to be heroes," IF Mummery had answered. "Carlyle pointed out, 'It is the property of the hero in every time, in every place, in every situation, that he comes back to reality; that he stands on things and not the show of things " Ravenshaw had shuddered. Grue is a thin ice that floats in Scotland -- he had felt as if someone had scooped up grue and dropped it down his back. Only serious men can afford comedy, buffoons crack jokes. Remembering Mummery's eyes, Ravenshaw shivered again. G eneral craddock looked over at Golden Gate Fields from the overpass as they left U.S. # for State #. "A Chinaman said he was already convinced that one horse could run faster than another. Do you bet races, Arleigh? Who's fast horse?" "Could be a dead heat. Jain and Mummery. What control do they have on Cassandra?" "I don't know," said Craddock. "It's a pretty plush setup. Each man has an office; they pay themselves about twenty-five thousand and the club picks up the tab for common expenses. Let me see. Those people in the front office-smarter than average guards -- manager -- overhead -- " He brooded as they zagged and zigged through Richmond to the hill suffused with hydrogen sulphide from the refinery and drifted down to the toll plaza of the bridge. They were on the whaleback with a spectacular view in all directions when Craddock said "Yup. Maybe so. Well, well. When I get back to Washington I'll put a little heat under this pot and see if it percolates." Ravenshaw winced. "What about their conclusion?" "'We recommend the positive action of doing nothing" the general quoted. "Well, that's the course we've been following. I am the king of an island and I own one boat. I keep that boat busy fishing and I'm scared to let it explore. It has been caught in storms and blown away to strange coasts a couple of times, but so far it's come back home. One boat and there aren't any more." He glanced at San Quentin to the left and sighed. "How is the fishing going, Arleigh?" "Got a sad rascal on a bare hook the other day," said Ravenshaw. "Maybe he thought I was a booking agent. He opened his cooler and took out a Manhattan in a plastic container with a lid. It had a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry in it. He drank the dfink. He put the cherry, stem and all in his mouth. He took it out with the stem tied into an overhand knot. He went through the same routine with another Manhattan and spat out a square knot. He said he was retired Navy and he was going to work on it until he could tie a bowline with his tongue, but all the drinks were expensive. I suggested putting the cherry in a glass of beer and he walked out mad." The general had a pained expression. While he drove around the hill and snaked over to #I south, Ravenshaw told about the man with the pickling method for rustclad steel. It seemed the material took a while to oxidize and dripped rust on the passersby. Then there was a real estate broker withan in-tank fuel pump, and the postman who had built an electrostatic dry-wash machine for flour gold in the desert. As they drove past Mill Valley Ravenshaw pointed out it was still a materials handling process even though the mill was supposed to have a ninety-four percent recovery capacity. "Anyone following us?" asked Craddock. "No, sir. I've been checking." "How about that chemical orereduction process?" "It's another thing I don't understand very well. I once had a fair background in chemistry and physics, but not any more. Maybe we ought to have a smart young man in the office instead of me. I've been away too long." been a surprisingly successful vendor of R  D. Others want in." "The word gets around," said Ravenshaw. "We're getting a caseload of technical hotshots. We see anybody who walks in the door, and the last time I checked, we hit one out of fourteen. A year ago it was one out of thirty-three. We're getting people from all over, not just locally." "Our primary mission is still inexplicable phenomena," said the general. "How come you weren't tempted by that offer from Lyne Jolley, about twice what you make as a lieutenant colonel." "I guess I like fishing." "How about Nell Rowley?" "Delightful," said Ravenshaw. The freeway ran through the hills above Sausalito. It was comparatively old and had the faults of youth. It leaped canyons on balanced fills from eucalyptus-sloped cuts. The leaves reflected the cold afternoon sun, thin gold and green. "But with that lady, you've got to learn to bob and weave." They ran downhill to the Golden Gate Bridge. "I wonder if you can have crooked wise men?" mused the general. "I'm going to bob and weave with those boys. How do you buy wise men? They've got everything they want. Knaves don't bat eight-eighty. What is their price, do you suppose?" Ill i ordered his life to smooth out IF the ups and downs of exuberance and depression. He didn't like to wallow in the troughs or be blown by the high winds of exhilaration. A side effect of this position was detachment, and he had no shame about leaving his opinions suspended in the air, like Mohammed's iron coffin. He filed the Cassandra affair in the back of his head and went about his business as chief of of quiet work and modest pleasure, when problems were challenging and solutions appeared with gratifying regularity. Jethro Wellaby had made a hat with a propeller on it. "Swamp cooler," he said. "Sweat evaporates. Cool in shade." The electric motor was powered by selenium cells mounted on the brim of a solar topi. Ravenshaw took it to the window to catch the sun and the propeller picked up speed and sounded like a wasp. "Next model inside hat," said Wellaby. "Problem, not enough power for bigger fan." Ravenshaw asked about more cells on the side of the topi, a fourbladed propeller and an inner shell to conceal the machinery without clipping ears. Wellaby said he had grape pickers in mind and had to hawkeye expense. Ravenshaw said it looked more like a luxury item and maybe the thing to do was encase the fan in a glittering expanded metal cage on top It would be a novelty and status symbol for fishermen and golfers and Abercrombie  Fitch. Wellaby said be liked grapes. Ravenshaw said he would like to see Mark II and Wellaby said thank you and stumped out of the office. Nell Rowley opened the door and asked what Beany wanted and Ravenshaw told her he had read about such a gadget years before, but had never seen one in action. "So it's been a variegated day," he said. "Miss Moffet and Leggitt in the morning, and artificial sunlight and Beany in the afternoon." "You have a man named Timberline Binghorst at four," she said. "He's from someplace in Utah and wants your advice." "Did you ever see a cat like that?" said Ravenshaw. Nell said Miss Moffet had to be out of her head to put a cat on her stomach to cure indigestion, no matter what she believed about sympathetic vibrations. Ravenshaw said it was not just any cat, but a cat from this particular quaint old English village. Nell asked what he was going to do about Leggitt, the polywater man who had followed Miss Moffet, and Ravenshaw said he had phoned the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon and they were going to have Dr. Hugo Trumble fly down from Seattle for a look-see. They doubted that any druggist could come up with a catalyst for polywater, orthowater or anomalous water. Ravenshaw didn't know anything about the polymer waters except they boiled high, froze low and turned into a funny kind of ice. Their eyes met and Ravenshaw kept a carefully straight face. Nell said composedly that she would get out the rest of the letters. Ravenshaw stood at the window and watched a cruiser driving down San Diego bay, headed for Point Loma and the open sea. He did not admire the Navy, but for a moment he wished he were leaning on a rail watching San Diego drop down the curve of the world, away from the question of Nell Rowley. Oh well, he thought,the Navy served a purpose. If it didn't exist, the Army would have to invent it. Nell Rowley now, she boiled low and froze high and turned into a very funny kind of ice. She had been his secretary for eighteen months and together they had found a black box that delivered air from # feet up or water from # feet down. They had encountered a robot watchman redesigning common household appliances to standards of its own technology. Most recently they had scrambled through the infinite worlds together. Sometimes, at night, Ravenshaw awoke, taut with alarm, and turned on the radio and a pot of coffee to reassure himself he was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army on. special duty and was safe in his own apartment in his own world. attracted the lightning bolts or if the endeavor was mutual. Presumably she was a Mier, a member of a family or tribe or race from an alternate world, but her memory had been blanked out as a child and Ravenshaw lived in anticipation of the day it would return. "Nameless dread," he said wryly. Nell tapped on the door and announced Mr. Timberline Binghorst. Binghorst walked into the room, said, "Heh, heh -- " and blushed. He wore store clothes, a hairy double-breasted blue suit, probably purchased for an occasion thirty years before. His shirt was pale yellow and his fruitbowl tie had slipped off center. He said, "Heh, heh -- " again and Ravenshaw asked him to sit down. "I won't take much of your time,!' Binghorst began in a voice likje rocks rolling down a distant canyon. "Heh, heh." He cleared his throat and started again. "I read about you in the San Diego Union because I have a friend who works in the maifroom and Ben Knell thinks the Union has a better flavor than most, so sometimes when we're snuggled around the Ashley with the snow hip-high IF outside and we're tired of Clarence E. Mulford -- " He ran out of breath and panted, his brown eyes beseeching Ravenshaw for patience. He took a deep breath and started again like a man running uphill. "It's just that we live at Red Warrior in the Pine Valley Mountains in Washington County Utah not awfully far from St. George but the road is pretty rough even with the 'dozer work I had done last spring because it was a highwater year and made the Narrows so infernally rough I hung up on the gearcase -- and almost busted the housing -- and after that -- I said to myself -- " He was distressed that he had to stop to breathe again. "I have a house in St. George," said Ravenshaw kindly, "just off Tabernacle on Third West. I inherited it when my wife died. It's a yellow waterstone built in the nineties." "My wife's father and uncle were Mormon -- Zadok and Sylvanius Sandler -- " "Syl and Zad, old, old friends! Dead now. My, but this is nice, Mr. Ravenshaw. Oh, but that Syl was comical! He said there were four liars in Washington County and I was one and Zad was the other three!" The old man laughed joyously. "Once Zad returned from Cedar City and said the people there mistook him for Syl and Syl said quick as a wink, Tm just as ashamed of it as you are!"' Binghorst choked with joy and Ravenshaw grinned in sympathy. "Oh, that Sylvanius Sandler! He was laid up on his death bed and somebody remarked he couldn't get around as well as he used to. Know what Syl said? He said, 'If my fool body could keep up with the dictates of my head, I could still get over this country better' n a mountain goat.' Indeed I do, I miss them both. So you knew the Sandler boys! Married Zad's girl, didn't you? Big eyes, bundle of springs, whip bright?" Ravenshaw nodded. "How this takes me back. Sylvanius, he was a comical fellow. Oh, years ago, he took some grain to Stanley Mossis to have it ground to flour. Syl became impatient and said, 'Damn it, Stanley, you grind so slow that I could eat that flour as fast as you grind it.' Stanley wanted to know, 'For how long?' And Syl, he said, 'Until I starved to death!"' The old man laughed until he had to wipe his eyes with a blue bandana. "Ah, Mr. Ravenshaw, it's a great pleasure to meet home people in a big city like San Diego." "How can I help you here, Mr. Binghorst?"   thing on my mind besides reminiscences." The old man blew his nose on the bandana. He explained he had been clearing out an abandoned stope and had come across an old trunk Zadok Sandler had stored there when he had left the country for California. It was filled with oddments of no particular value, but it also contained Zadok's journals. Binghorst leaned forward, his hands on his knees. "You see, that's the entire point. Ben Knell and me's the only ones left at Red Warrior. The road's twenty-seven miserable miles to St. George and in the winter there's not much to do, so I suppose we read over the journals twothree times. There's something naggy , something I can't quite see, and I am troubled in myjnind. Ben Knell would be rolling cigarettes on his machine out of the San Diego Union and we'd both be puzzling away -- and I still don't know what the matter is." "What sort of man was Cay's father?" "Quiet, quirky, fifteen years younger than Syl. Oh, for instance, he speculated on the names of things. He wanted to hire a pharmaceutical house to manufacture liquid hair soap so he could jokes, like the summer of 'fortyone when he bought a pound of columbine seed wholesale. McKana's Improved, I think the name was. Went into the Sierras after tungsten and sprinkled the seed all up and down Mono Creek and the Recesses where columbines grow. Said the native flower was pale gold and all the reds and purples and pinks ought to pop peoples eyes. He found scheelite so far back and high up nobody could get at it. "Another thing Zad did was paint apples. Down in Santa Clara they grow very sprightly apples. He stirred up some whitewash and painted punkin faces on Romes and twenty-ounce and Wolf Rivers over at the top end of Mother Jepperson's place when the fruit was a month from harvest. Just before picking time, he went in and wiped off the whitewash -- and left the pale jack o' lantern face on the red skins. Caused a stirNever knew who did it until I read his journal." "What would you like me to do, Mr. Binghorst?" "Well sir, I'm not a poor man. Even at thirty-five dollars an ounce, Ben Knell and me shoot just twice a year. Then we high-grade and concentrate and go over to Denver to the mint. Me and my partner bought the discovery mine when all the smart fellas quit." Binghorst stuck out his tongue and raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. "Don't really need to shoot twice, but it makes a change. So I can indulge myself." He took a record book out of his coat pocket. It was five by six and half an inch thick. "I'd like you to read it, Mr. Ravenshaw. This is IF the last one, nineteen-forty to nineteen-forty-one. What will it cost?" "Nothing. It might take a while." "No-no, whatever' s right. I am not easy in my mind." "How do I get in touch with you?" "Qh, Sylvanius! I do miss him." The old man's voice was gentle and his smile was very sweet. "Somebody asked Syl how the weather was on Pine Mountain and he said, 'We have nine months of hard winter and three months of damnlate-in-the-fall.' It snowed after we got out and we can't get in a while. Just write to St. George." in the back seat of the # Cessna. She had folded her windbreaker for a pillow and wore a plaid wool shirt that would drive a Scotchman to drink. Ravenshaw looked through the window and marveled that the pioneers ever reached the Pacific. This section of desert was desolate and deserted as it had been a hundred years before. The sun flooded the cabin as they flew east at # feet at nine on a Saturday morning. The pilot chewed gum, watched the instruments and the sky, listened to his earphones and occasionally adjusted the trim. He was a fine, narrow-minded young man, interested only in flying. Ravem shaw approved of him, however dubious he might be about the trip. General Craddock woke him at six with a report on Cassandra Investments. Alonzo Johnson owned a string of newspapers in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Brander Lugard had been chief of the Charleston Port Authority. Cyrus Pfister had built a medical supply house into a mini-conglomerate that dominated certain phases of the industry. "How about Jain?" said Ravenshaw. "Georgia Christian College, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Chicago. That's a mixed bag. A commodity speculator, presidential economic advisor. World Bank expert. A very sharp and shifty sort of man." Asabian was a highway contractor, Milias was railroads. DeWitt, Masterson and Roehlich, O'Conner, Taddonio and Levering, all were low-profile success stories. They were models of financial acumen, but in some aspects, slippery as greased pigs. Jain had once kept a mistress in all the Bowash cities and, when threatened by a blackmailer, had said, "Publish and be damned." The invulnerability each man made for himself seemed to be a common factor. "Mummery is a wild westerner, old school. He was up and down in sheep and cattle and minerals until the war made him sell. He parlayed that money into a fortune when the Salt Lake exchange went wild with uranium in the early 'fifties. He's into primary resources now, and holds things together with an agrochemical company in Stockton." Ravenshaw asked if Cassandra had cooked the books and Craddock replied if they had, they were combing them. He asked what was him about the man growing Holland cucumbers in an old citrus packing shed under red and blue lights. Ravenshaw had told the grower that incandescents gave off the same colors and the system was not patentable. The man accused him  of floccinaucinihilipilification and he condescended to explain it was the action or habit of estimating as worthless. "So maybe I'm overreacting to the charge. I'm going on a wild hare chase in a couple of hours. I made a deal with Fabio Marquien for his plane and a pilot. I'm victim of my expressed opinion that I should be Johnny at the rathole." at an Italian restaurant and told her about Binghorst. She asked to see the journal while they were waiting for the pizza. Ravenshaw studied the Lombardy poplars on the wall, and the sheep and shepherdess with a rougish twinkle in her eyes, while Nell looked through the old record book. She read by the light of a candle stuck in a wax-encrusted bottle. Her palomino hair was in disarray and her jumper, if he had the term right, was just as handsome a weave as Binghorst's suit. Her eyebrows were mahogany brown and smooth and her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. She looked up and Ravenshaw's heart stopped beating. "Listen to this," she said. "May fifth, nineteen-forty. Germany invades Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg. The cold war is hot. I have no faith in Gamelin or Weygand. Cay asked why I was so excited by a war five thousand miles away. Must get new battery for allwave Zenith. Mucked out today. Drill tomorrow." How could he ever have thought her voice high when it was silky velvet? Pitched above middle register, it had a sheen like sun through a bottle of clover honey. "September twenty-two, nineteen-forty. Kraut-Wop-Jap pact. Should not familiarize the enemy. Now it's sure we won't keep out of the war. School people agree Cay can stay at Red Warrior as long as Betty will teach. They supply books. Betty was onstage when Melchior watched the swan boat pull out ahead of time. How odd to have an opera star at Red Warrior and teacher for Cay." Her honey voice had lime in it, or lemon, or alum or quinine. Ravenshaw relaxed. A voice like IF cough syrup, that's what. "Are you listening?" She marked a page with a finger. She had violet eyes that ranged from soft lavander to purple. "Do you want to know what happened on December second? I'll tell you what, Arleigh. Pearl Harbor." "Sure. Zadok's interests were Cay, the war and mining." "December . second? Pearl Harbor?" "Uh-oh. I see what you mean." "And I don't think the Germans invaded Russia on June seventeenth. If the error's constant, he's always five days off." "That could be what puzzled Binghorst. Wait a minute -- I know -- Zadok had a nineteenthirty-five calendar in nineteen forty. "Sure he did. And he used the. same calendar in nineteen-forty one." "Nineteen-thirty-six would keep the five-day differential. Binghorst said Zadok had a fey sense of humor. Quirky practical jokes a specialty of the house. This is a chuckle from beyond the grave, that sort of thing." "Are you being intentionally obtuse? Sometimes you are. Just suppose you could see five days into the future." " 'If you're smart, why ain't you rich?' " said Ravenshaw. "When her father died, was your wife poor?" "We were married a year later. Now look, Nell. The old man played the market. He went down to Fresno once a week and sat around at brokerage house. Cay got a fat wad of stocks and more money than anyone ever figured. But tell me this, if Zad could read the future, why should he piddle around with mines? I don't believe it." "Arleigh, are you rich?" "It runs to pie i la mode , if that's what you want." "Arleigh, why have you stayed in the Army?" "Just so I could meet you," he said promptly. "You're a devious man." She leaned back. "An evasive scoundrel." Ravenshaw sighed heavily. "There used to be a popular philosophic ploy called free will versus predestination. It was just as much fun as counting angels on the point of a pin -- " "Arleigh -- " "All right. I suppose we'd better look at the other journals. Thank God, here's the pizza. I'm hungried to death." G eneral craddock had listened to all this and said, "Give a man enough rope and he can tie it around his world and measure it." "Isn't there something about hanging himself?" "Then hang loose," the general had said and hung up. They were flying over Lake Mead now, the rock hills turned into peninsulas and the barren valleys into ragged coves by the startling blue water. The day was speckless. Boulder City was a sharp miniature in the crisp air. Ravenshaw studied the map and asked, "Could we cut over by Pine Valley Mountain?" The pilot said, "It's a little uphill. Ten-three, isn't it?" Ravenshaw said he didn't want to fly over, just parallel the range on the Pirte Valley side for a few minutes, then back and south to St. George. The pilot said, "No sweat." The Virgin River gorge made Ravenshaw glance at the snug interior of the plane, but the instrument panel with the full avionic pack, the toggles, switches and dials did not reassure him when he looked down again at the choppedup land. He was intricately packaged, but he was conscious of the fragility of his protection. The amazing red sandstone country crawled lumpily below and built to the sweep of Pine Valley Mountain. While, the canyons were dun atid black with brush and evergreens, every shelf and valley was white with snow. "Maybe we've had a nice outing," he said to Nell. "Enjoy the scenery." They banked and went downhill to St. George. The Temple was white and the cliffs were red, the cottonwoods and poplars were leafless. The landing gear clunked and they set down at the airport. They taxied to the tie-down line and the pilot said he'd get gas and lunch and maybe a nap. A medium-sized helicopter with private markings was being fueled by a small tanker. Standing to one side was a lean figure in cavalry twill pants and coat. The man had a paisley scarf at the open neck of his shirt. He said, "Hello, Mr. Quintard," and touched the brim of his dove-gray Stetson. Gray eyes in a gray, seamed face. Austin Mummery. IV had #-# hindsight. He could have said, "Nice to see you -- " and gone his way. When Mummery said he was going over to Red Warrior to check the cabin after last week's blizzard, Ravenshaw might have said it was a fine day to fly up to Salt Lake City. Mummery said he had grubstaked Timberline Binghorst years before and they were partners in a mine. He had flown over from his ranch up Meadow Valley Wash from Glendale and why didn't they come along to Red Warrior with him? I # mph and they might enjoy the, experience. So, like a cheerful idiot, Ravenshaw told his pilot they'd be back IF in a couple of hours and the pilot said if they were delayed, the Cessna flew well in the dark and he liked instrument flying. Mummery introduced them to Ned Vasu, his pilot, a Filipino whose parents had come to Wenatchee before the war. He had learned to fly in the Army and had spent three years in Germany. He was a quiet man with an impassive face and obviously an expert. The Aloutte rolled ten feet and bounded into the air. The noise level was lower than Ravenshaw had expected and there were none of the windleaks he associated with helicopters. Flying a bird was the same as patting your head and rubbing your stomach. Mummery explained. It took dexterity and timing to handle the cyclic stick, the collective stick and the foot pedals all at once. "It's expensive in time to learn," he said, "and you've got to ration time. I'll never be a lapidary because I can't afford the patient hours. Options close in as you get older." Ravenshaw said, "Hadn't we better turn north?" "We'll run over to the ranch for lunch," said Mummery. His hooded eyes were not smiling. "No way," said Ravenshaw. "Turn this thing around. My time won't wait for lunch." "Nor for any man. Colonel Ravenshaw?" "Back to St. George." Ravenshaw unlatched his seat belt. "Relax and enjoy, " said Mummery. He had an old SW revotver in his hand. "You are being kidnaped." The gun had a bore like a sewer pipe. "Fasten your belt. No shenanigans or I'll plug your girl first." Ravenshaw raised his voice. "Vasu! They jug accessories." "Mr. Vasu came to me from Ft. Leavenworth on the intercession of a quite influential congressman. Ned, is there anything critical in that panel under the window?" "Only insulation, sir."  "Then don't be surprised." Mummery squeezed the trigger. The bullet grazed Nell's knee. Ravenshaw surged against his belt and dropped back. His ears rang. The .# was fastened on him. Mummery coughed. Nell was white, staring at the rip in her pants and the blood beginning to seep from the scratch. Mummery coughed again as the fumes sucked out. "That should establish my bona fides. Don't delude yourself. I was curious enough after our first meeting to put men at the airports. Holloman lost himself at O' Hare, but Quintard turned into Ravenshaw in San Diego -- and he turned out to be a mysterious Army officer who was once married to Zadok Sandler's daughter." Nell patted the slow seep of blood with a handkerchief. Ravenshaw turned his attention back to the mad old man. At the same time he went onto war status. Perhaps it showed, because Mummery's big hand tightened on the pistol grip. "What do you have in mind?" asked Ravenshaw. "Friendly persuasion." Air whistled through the hole in the panel. "Stuff your handkerchief in there, girl." Nell did as she was Mummery smiled and Ravenshaw noted that only his teeth and eyes were unwrinkled. "You are going to tell me about the alternate worlds and how to get there." "You've flipped your wig." "Lace your fingers behind your head, Ravenshaw. Don't  fiddle with the belt. The life you save may not be your own. I don't like waste, but there are lots of scrubby women around." straggled over her face; one shoulder and elbow were pulled in toward her body. She looked like a charwoman after a twelve-hour shift. She may have convinced Mummery, but Ravenshaw thought she was as frightened as a nest of hornets. "My colleagues at Cassandra are resigned to fate," said Mummery in tones of sweet reason, "except for Jain -- and I beat him to the punch. No question, the great achievement of the human brain is association, the assembly of disparate facts to a purpose. What good is bumbling, innocent Binghorst, or Sandler's crazy journals mildewing in a stope. Good for bait. Before we land, we'll radio your pilot and tell him to drop off your bags at McCarran in Las Vegas and to go on home." The revolver cracked again. The cut on Nell's knee was paralleled by another. Mummery coughed and his eyes watered. The pistol did not waver. "I'll tolerate no more tomfoolery," he told Nell. "Next time I take off your kneecap." "I duh-duh-didn't mean anything," she blubbered. "You're raising hell with a good secretary," said Ravenshaw. "You won't be needing one -- unless you cooperate." "A carrot (or the donkey -- what's in it for me?" "Surcease," said the old man. "And if you can persuade me to it, something better. I have only the simplest inducements to offer: food, water and warmth. That ought to be enough." He glanced through the window and back at Ravenshaw. "We're over the Tule Desert now and we'll land on the Meadow Valley side of Mormon Mountains. There's an old line house by a spring. Remote, isn't it?" There was no sign of a road, not even a game trail. Snow salted the tops of the ranges. Clouds were gathering to the north. It was lonesome lost country where in IF summer a coyote would pack a canteen. Vasu was mumbling into the mike about St. George and Las Vegas and leaving gear at McCarran. Mummery said, "About a week ago Ned and I sawed off four-foot lengths of light rail -- fifty pound -- and fixed them in concrete. Got some old logging chain and welded it to the tops of the posts, six inches off the ground. It's twenty-foot chain and the spring is thirty feet away. Got some cuffs and tacked them on. One post on each side of the little creek. Nothing fancy. You can listen to the water until it freezes. When you want to talk with me. I'll be in the cabin drinking coffee." "What do you want?" said Ravenshaw. "Twenty or thirty or fifty years." The old man was in dead earnest. "Is it a gate? A door? An entrypoint at Forrestal? Or is that a stinking red herring? I don't expect a fountain of youth. Maybe Jain had that in mind. There have got to be worlds where a man is not cut off in his prime. Too much to ask? I think not." That answered General Craddock's question about price. Mummery wanted something money couldn't buy. The helicopter was descending. Ravenshaw caught a look at a crooked stream in the bottom of the valley. Beyond, on a low mesa, was a large house with outbuildings. Jn the clear air he could see a caterpillar tractor painted cat-yellow by a corral. Dust swirled as they hovered a few feet above the ground. They landed -- whup-whup, whup -- the bird was quiet. Ned Vasu flicked switches. In a careful ritual dance, he stepped behind Mummery and opened the door, never blocking the pistol. Mummery ordered his guests to the ground. "Don't make a break for it. I gave the hands a week off with pay. There's nobody around for twenty miles minimum." The air was sharp and smelled of snow and sagebrush. Nell winced as she stepped down. Mummery backed off and Vasu stood slightly to his rear. The Aloutte was across the creek from the old line shack and Ravenshaw got a good look at the posts and chains. The ground was sandy and had been cleared of brush. Thunder grumbled miles away. The little creek was rimed at the edges and the white trunks of the bare aspens made the landVasu stepped behind Mummery and whipped an arm around his neck, seized his right wrist and bent it behind his back. The cabin door opened and Swafford Jain walked toward them, an incongruous figure in high-laced boots of another age, whipcord breeches and a cashmere sweater under an old duffle coat. He wore a sheathed hunting knife. He carried a pump shotgun as if he knew how to use it. "Join your friends, Austin," said Jain. Vasu had the .#. Mummery stumbled over to Ravenshaw and Neil, coughing and rubbing his wrist. "Two items to mull over in hell, Austin," said Jain, swiveling his head like an owl. "Ned is tired of driving your chopper and the important figure in our little puzzle is Holloman -- General Bill Craddock in real life. You should # not be taken in by appearances." He pushed his fur cap back on his polished hair. "I can do without the three of you." He raised his shotgun. The stakes were high. He was a pragmatic old man. Nell switched worlds., V Ravenshaw off his feet. A shotgun bellowed. He was in the middle of a melee and he got up with a broken branch in his hand. A man in mottled brown and red came at him and Ravenshaw broke the length of punky aspen on his head. The man went down. Over the grunts and blows and shouts of the donnybrook came a whooping, steamy whistle -- whoo-woo, whoo wow, A man in green spun him around and Ravenshaw mashed his nose sideways with the heel of ' his hand. He caught a glimpse of Nell being dragged off before he was blindsided and hit dirt. His fingers closed over the shotgun barrel. The stock was bent but solid. He swung it right and left with satisfying thunks and shoved the butt into the stomach of a man who staggered into Austin Mummery and knocked him over. The whistle sounded again. The fight stopped as suddenly as Ravenshaw got into it. Men in red and brown ran downhill to a peculiar vehicle with a fiat platform. It began to move with a stately achoof-achoof noise. Jain had been dragged aboard with Nell. Ravenshaw ran toward it and sprawled over a body. The platform picked up speed on eight big wheels, mashing the sagebrush, lurching and creaking at # mph. "My God, what's happened?" Mummery clutched his arm. "Where did all those crazy Indians come from?" "Custer's last words," snapped Ravenshaw. The man who had tripped him was Ned Vasu, dead and already dusty with a shotgun blast in his chest. Mummery was babbling. The old nan drew back in alarm when Ravenshaw pulled away, and did not follow him down the slope. No one followed. Ravenshaw jogged through the sagebrush, thinking about the revolving barrel at the funhouse in Santa Cruz. Once you slipped, there was no way to go but head over heels until you found your feet again. Nell Rowley had the preIF posterous ability to slip into the infinite worlds with as much effort as falling through tissue paper hoops. He did not know how she did it, he only knew he had the nightmare sensation of being dropped into the middle of noontime Istanbul with no trousers. A worse nightmare was being separated from Nell and marooned in an alternate world. A wide shallow river ran down the valley with flourishing cottonwoods on either side. The sage was tall) and the bunch grass thick. Aspen and low oak grew on the slopes. The leaves were just beginning to turn color and this country obviously had more rainfall than his own world. The mechanical platform disappeared behind a low hill and Ravenshaw dropped to a walk with a stitch in his side. Beyond the river was a rise to a bench, a low mesa with broken hills beyond. There were two long, enormous blurs on the bench, unlike anything he had ever seen before. A smaller blur squatted between the two. The sun was warm and the temperature in the seventies; there were no heat mirages and the air was crystal. The platform forded the river and struggled slowly up the slope on the other side. The passengers dismounted and pushed. He could see them clearly against the long reach of the northern blur. A shallow wash meandered to the river and he stopped into a clump of screwbeans and looked back. Austin Mummefy was walking with some men in green. Even a half-mile away he looked chirlcy as a cricket. Ravenshaw waited until Mummery and his friends crossed the river and made their way up the rise. Ravenshaw went up to his chin in a channel near the far shore. There was no footpath and no road. He climbed the slope and crawled to the crest. T HE mesa had been leveled, but the ground was gullied to within a hundred yards of the blur. A concrete apron ran to the reach of his fuzzy vision. It was broken back here and there, in spite of a riprap and gravel base. He had a corner view of the enigma. It was rectangular and ran half a mile to the west and a full mile south. The middle blur was much smaller and oval in shape. He stood and followed the concrete apron south, to cut the tracks of the lumbering steam vehicle. There were no friendly beer cans or gum wrappers. A low dune of rippled sand ran for two hundred yards along the blur, piled there by some subtlety of wind and configuration. He walked over a stretch of mud puddled halfway up the sloping concrete, curled and crazycracked since the last rain. The wall was sixty feet high and cast a shadow beyond the river by the time he crossed the tracks. The tracks ran near the end of the structure and vanished into the blur. Ravenshaw examined the building closely for the first time. He tossed a rock at it. The stone slowed and fell to the ground. He broke a switch and poked. It was the same as poking a pound of butter on a boulder. When he whipped the branch, the energy of its motion was soaked up before it reached the surface. He had seen this phenomenon once before in the protective clothing worn by a man who called himself a Drishna. It was evidently a physical principle unexploited on his own world. Because he was unable to knock and there was no doorbell, he continued around the structure. The south side was also featureless. He thought a strobe light might help and blinked, but he was not in any kind of synchronization. He reached the southwest corner and walked off the concrete for a better view. The terrain was irregular at a slightly lower level than the pad. If he crossed to the hills, he could at least see over the wall. They were a mile away but he get a look before dark. Ravenshaw found himself walking in an area intricately intercut by vertical channels. Sparse brush and a few rocks dotted the top; the cuts in the hard white clay bottomed out at twenty to twentyfive feet. The sun set and a few pink clouds reflected from the water standing at the bottom of a little gorge. He scrambled down for a drink. His thirst satisfied, he continued along the narrow trench to an intersection with another and followed it upstream to meet a blank wall. He returned to the first channel, missed his way. It was almost dark before he made it to the surface. A chilly wind had picked up, but he stood and thought that he had put in an outstandingly stupid day. Given a choice, he unerringly picked the door that dropped a bucketful of slop on his head. He groped for a handful of rocks and pitched one at a darker patch. It rattled down the side of a cut. He broke a branch of brittle wood and had to cut the leathery bark with his knife. He tasted the cambium and it was bitter. He thought of long-rats, the freeze-dried long range patrol rations issued by the army in Vietnam. He wished he were there and poked ahead with his stick. Eleanor Farjeon said. The night will never stay I The night will still stars You pin it to the sky... Ravenshaw thought this was a damn lie. It was the dark of the moon and the night had gone on for several weeks. He felt like a printed man in a maze puzzle for children: Little Arleigh wants to  get into the picture. Pick up your pencil and help little A rleigh. self that he was standing on a IF surface totally surrounded by moats. It was impossible. He tossed a pebble. He could touch the other side with his stick. He jumped in the dark and sprawled on another impossible tabletop. On legs rubbery from hunger, he followed a gray streak that led into a gorge. He could see the North Star and much good it had done him. He had been as directional as a hot Mexican jumping bean. The wind was cutting cold. The walls rose on either side. He stepped into ankel-deep mud and was too tired to swear. A little later his foot slipped and he sat down in water. He was not as tired as he thought. He got up vigorously and bumped like a bee in a bottle between the clay walls. He hit a dead end, swore and turned back, turned around and threw a rock at it. Clang . The bottom of the metal door was chin high. This particular cut in the clay was four feet wide, so he gouged steps in either wall with his knife and did the splits up to a bar in the middle of the door. The step caved away, the bar tilted and he fell to the muddy bottom. When he squirmed through on the next, try, the door closed on the small of his back, leaving his mug tangled with a short ladder inside and his wump dangling. He was in a dark tunnel. He could scrape his Fingers and whack his head at the same time. Prudence made him crawl along the rough bottom. When his knees gave out, he walked backward painfully, like a bear. It was bitter cold and when he kicked the end of the tunnel, he was surprised he did not shatter like a Dresden Figurine. He wanted to smile until he stood and hit his head against a metal rod. It was the rung of a Fixed ladder and he climbed itr It went straight up for eight miles and when he topped out, his muscles were trembling uncontrollably. When the twitches were spasmodic, he found he was in a closet about Five by eight with a low ceiling of slats. The walls were made of large smooth rectangles. He groped around, nearly felj down the shaft and found a rectangle with fingerholds in it. A plug came out of the wall, letting in blessed light. He squeezed into the hole and found himself looking at cardboard boxes across a width of floor: Goodbody and Son, Calcutta, Arizona. Select, Choice, Tenderfresh Collard Greens. He closed the door through which he had squirmed. It was the middle case of a pallet load marked: Kohlrabi. Greens were piled three tiers high on either side. He walked to a cross aisle past case after case of Cardoon, Salsify, Florence Fennel and Spinach Dock, none of which interested him. Across the aisle were Broad Beans in Ham Gravy. He climbed twelve feet to the top pallet with only a glance at the blurred wall in the distance. The cartons were not cardboard, but honeycomb plastic, and opened by turning an inset circle at either end of the case. The cans were institutional size, square and also plastic. They opened with a finger ring. It was almost warm so close to the dim ribbon lights in the ceiling. He ate a quart of beans with his fingers. He was thirsty, but he stretched out on top of the cases. He kicked the can of beans over the edge. He blinked his eyes. He fell asleep. people had memorable dreams, but his own experience lay on what Nell Rowley once called "the shores of sleep." He slept and his mind made figures of dreamdust in the hypnogogic state, the return to wakefulness after sleep. His wife had black eyes and shining black hair. Her face was triangular and she moved like a dancer. When she stopped, she stopped like a statue. She spoke in a grumbly lovely voice without punctuation. He learned to listen to the melody as much as the sense. She strutted when she walked, went willowy when she chose, danced as she pleased: lady, loose lady or gamin. She had died instantly of an embolism while throwing dishes ten years before. Cay Ravenshaw had been quick as sunlight through shadows, salt and sweet, with facets like a handful of emeralds. He remembered her beside a bed of tall cannas, red and yellow in the Oklahoma sun, caught with the flowers in an afternoon stillness. He saw her slim white body like a white velvet otter in the warm, willow-scented Nacimiento River on the valley side of the Hearst San Simeon estate. He was drowsily pleased with this true color representation. There had been other occasions when the topic was handled in offpurple hues to illustrate her chancy temper and blind demands for a better moon. There is a lady sweet and kind Was never face fo pleased my mind... He murmured the words aloud. palomino without a fadeout or any prqper transition. Almost awake, he was too wary to unbridle his imagination. He opened his eyes. A woman was sitting crosslegged on top of Broad Beans and Ham Gravy, looking at him, statue still. "You are a horrible sight," she observed, "muddy and. mazed and bean-bespattered." Ravenshaw stifled a groan. "I hurt, too," he said. "What's to be done and wearydeary," she grumbled. "I prowl for pleasure and this is the onus of conspiracy and no benefit from it. I set a turkel to scrubbling your beans and mess from another world, no doubt. Oh willow woe," IF she said, "is me." Her eyes betrayed her languishing speech. They snapped with excitement. "Excuse the expression," said Ravenshaw, "But where am I?" "In twenty-three-Kah-eight-seven-two." He waited and wondered if the sensation in his chest were fibrillation. She was very much like his memory of Cay, vivid as the arc of an electric welder. She was also a little grimy. The smudge on her cheek and the dirt under her fingernails were misplayed notes in a symphony -- oboe or contrabassoon. "This is the One Generation New World and I am of that generation. If of an equal age, you wear less well than we." "What is a One Generation New World?" She looked to be in her early twenties. He ignored her grubby appearance and admired her straight-backed, crosslegged grace. "We were set as babes on a multiple world with the bent philosophic to perfection in secret- -- " Ravenshaw groaned. "Will you start from the beginning?" She spoke slowly to a backward child, "A Floridian spirited to Cheyenne will be Cheyennese. A child of Texas grown in Boston will be cod-stiff and constant to its guidance. Or should the son of the King at Bonneville be childhoodwould he not on all counts but color be conformable to his upbringing?" She rubbed her nose with her wrist. "Therefore in us, the folly of our fathers is extirpated. We are the men beyond man, the ideal realized, experiment perilous carried to glorious fruition." "I'm thirsty," said Ravenshaw, who had his doubts. He swung his legs around and hung over the edge of the cases on his stomach. "'An ape's an ape, a varlet's a varlet, whether his clothes be green or scarlet,'" he said and climbed down to the floor. "Does this brave new world have a bath in it?" S HE dropped beside him, nimble as a boy. "You are besotted with dirt and ignorance, an immensely improvable subject for the huffinpuffin," she said with a flash of white teeth. She wore a rust and gold garment, a close fitting jumpsuit with stretch materia) at the waist and shoulders. She turned down the canyon of boxes, around corners and to a narrow transparent door in a thick cross wall. When Ravenshaw hesitated, she. stepped into the cubicle herself. Dust sprang out in a cloud and was sucked through the floor. He would not easily forget her eyes squinneyed shut in her gamin face and the black sunburst of her hair. He found the huffinpuffin much like a sandstorm. The external mud fell into clay and sand components, there was a smell of ozone and his hair stood out from his head. "Water solves thirst, too," he said. "I feel scraped." "Water is an emotional concept currently but in allowance of obligation and generosity as well, I have potables stashed." She banged a vertical panel and a large door slid open, leading to another room piled high with boxes. They zigzagged through different sorts of vegetables, evidently more popular than those in the warehouse they had left. Ravenshaw stopped and quenched his thirst with a can of orange-colored tomatoes from a broken stack of boxes. She opened a can and ate a tomato, threw the rest away. A humped, rectangular machine hauling a caboose crawled down the aisle, scuffed up the spilled tomatoes, swallowed the can and left the floor clean and shining. She said turkels wopld eat anything, but tomatoes were too lumpy for her, just like the lake, and led him to a narrow room with dusty forklifts along a wall. The girl rummaged in a cupboard behind spare parts and brought out two tall cans. A flattish tube emerged when he pulled the tab. It was divided into larger and smaller sections and when he drank, alcohol and pineapple juice mingled in his mouth. She said she had hidden the drinks three years before when it became obvious that desirable items were in shorter supply. In a closed system there was no replacement. And she did miss swimming. Ravenshaw asked how it could be a closed system when he had seen men outside? She choked and spluttered. She jumped to the floor and ran down a corridor and through a room filled with bales of cloth, into another with pipes and plumbing fixtures racked in rows, and turned abruptly into an area piled at haphazard with boxes. She danced over, around, through and across them with sure feet. Ravenshaw followed until she brushed three stacked containers that poured out feathered, scarlet balls. The girl was gone by the time he blundered through them. So was his sense of direction. less rooms. There wlas no sound but his own footsteps in the whole enormous warehouse. The pattern of storage was random from his worm's eye view and he felt like a bug walking over a blueprint. He stifled a feeling of panic when he thought of Nell Rowley and took the only sure direction open to him. When he founds stairs or ramps or a circular staircase, he went up. He stopped in a congeries of rooms that held him in horrid fascination. He interpreted them as roboticized nursIF cries with mimic mothers grown dusty beside individual pens. One of the figures said, "You must take your nap, dear," and advanced toward him. He fled in panic. The air was motionless and the floors were spotless, but when mother moved silently toward him her figure was alive with dust. He ran across padded floors and infant toys into an artificial turfed gymnasium and lost the series when a corridor opened to an S-curved space with toys and games suitable for ten-year-olds. There was a row of booths against a wall and when he sat on a low bench at a table, a door closed and he was trapped. A panel opened and he was served a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk. His mouth was dry and the milk helped the peanut butter down. When he returned the plate and glass to the recess, the panel closed and the door opened. A voice said, "Good child." He wondered if the children had dreamed of people behind walls, and decided that by ten they would be conditioned to accept taped voices. He tried anbther booth and was served the same menu. He was trapped again and ate the sandwich but did not finish the milk. He thought milk was great for young cows. The door did not open when he returned the glass to the recess. He spilled it on the floor and a small turkel scrubbed up the mess. A voice said, "Finish your milk, dear -- " and he was served a full glass. He drank it and got out. A little later he was caught in a study carrel. The voice had him solve problems in geometry with a stylus on a ground glass desk. The notation was different from his own, but the voice was patient and the explanation simple enough. The drawings remained until he tapped the erase bar. When the lesson was over he estimated the warehouse was five stories high and figured a little. He ended up with forty-three million plus square feet in the building. The Pentagon had six and a carrel and stayed out of similar traps. What if he had befcn stuck in a history class? He found a compass in a room stocked with supplies for simple physical experiments. He went east and down at every opportunity. He opened one more door and stepped outside. He was in an enormous enclosed park, with hillocks and trees and grass and rocks. He could see a strange green surface through a screen of trees. There were cabanas and tents and tree houses. At least a hundred people were in view in almost a hundred different costumes. They were in their early twenties, though the variety of clothes and hairstyles gave the illusion of a much wider age range. A few were gathered around a youngster dyed bright pink who was reading from a manuscript. A woman dressed in ribbons caught at her neck and ankles was working at a crude loom. A man in a full spade beard and a red-lined cape was swinging in a swing with his eyes shut. The park was in hard use and the grass was badly scuffed. A mechanical gardener, a variety of the turkel, was planting marigolds in blossom, followed by a girl who picked the flowers and tore them to shreds. It was a contented scene with little cohesion. A woman engaged with some sort of dice looked at Ravenshaw, shrugged and went back to her game. He walked two hundred feet to the screening trees and through them to the shore of a lake, where a large group was following the progress of a fourwheeled steam vehicle. It had a central steering bar and the girl in the jumpsuit was dancing around on the platform with a dozen others. The man at the tiller pulled a large lever and the thing whistled like a horsedrawn # popcorn wagon. The girl threw her arms around his neck as a wheel hit a rock and turned to the lake. Achoof-achoof it waddled into the thick water. The passengers jumped and struggled ashore through stinking mud, algae and ' weeds. There was an underwater explosion, an intense burp that bubbled the surface before it flung gollops of green-brown slime into the air. It was a spectacular and ridiculous performance that hypnotized Ravenshaw. He looked around just in time to see Austin Mummery swing a short baseball bat at his head. VI R avenshaw folded like a cardboard skeleton. He did not lose consciousness, but his thoughts went random. The old man doesn't pull his punches -- with a length of sausage -- tries to slam the ball into the centerfield stands -- a very sincere effort -- had to be a twenty-year-old sausage -- a picnic in the park with friends -- how nice...-. He was heaved upright by a couple of men on each arm. They marched him back into the building. He tried to keep his head from hobbling as he pedaled an invisible bicycle through what could have been a foyer if it had featured potted palms, through administrative offices to a large bare room lined with dull blue cabinets stuffed with electronic gear. Rows of jewel lights blinked; machined metal spools turned behind panels and a low drone filled the dry electric air. The room lurched. Ravenshaw screwed his eyes shut. He sat down abruptly, as a chair hit the back of IF his knees. His head lolled forward. He opened one eye to see an earnest young man with the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth walking around and around him in a dizzying pattern, and Ravenshaw was trussed with a white rope like a fly for a spider's dinner. Nausea surged and was gone. His eyes focused. Mummery was sitting in a cylinder of light. Ten feet away, Swafford Jain sat in another. They looked like two tomcats full of canaries. " -- so cream rises to the top," said Jain complacently. "Is your mechanical genius going to build another steam wagon?" "We have better equipment in storage and so do you," said Mummery. "There's a kind of flying carpet I want to check out." "What amazes me is the building -- the computer says the roof is laser-structured, absolutely dead flat -- have you poked around in your library yet?" "Enough to begin the lake. So much to do, so little time -- " "Time? Have you looked at the medical section?" "Hah!" said Mummery and both old men smiled. "But I do wish you had dedicated yourself to scholarly pursuits. Do you suppose a mechanical background is essential to -- " "Technical," said Jain. "Without a technical base you stand on an intellectual skateboard -- until you move. I wish you'd been an absentee rancher and market manipulator." "Too bad," said Mummery. He looked at Ravenshaw from his cylinder of light. "We'll take them one at a time, of course." "Certainly. If he wears out, we have the woman in reserve. We'll find their method yet. Austin, I congratulate you on the idea. If this were Rome, I'd call you P.T. Barnum. Give 'em circuses." Jain faded and the projection vanished in a twinkle of light. Mummery yawned as his own cylinder dimmed to the light level of the room. His eyes were hooded. Rameses Three brooded. Ravenshaw's head throbbed in a slow drumbeat. He regretted his tendency to see the infinite worlds as dismal fantasies on the part of the natives. He could not overcome the idea that this was a funny-money world. Funny-money, even though Ned Vasu had found death negotiable. He could even admire the old men for their catquickness to land on their feet. No energy wasted in recrimination. He had reservations about their situational estimate, but, tied to the chair, all he could do was sit tight His grin was sour. It was somehow comical that he had found the wrong warehouse -- he had had a choice of three structures -- after his search for Nell in the night and it was fairly humorous that Mummery had slugged him with a salami. It was less funny that this world's young inhabitants seemed to have fallen into line so easily with the suggestions of the two old men. Cream rises to the top . Granted that Jain and Mummery were charismatic characters, it was an accomplishment for them to have assumed authority here with such ease. He said as much to Mummery. "How about it?" "They are anarchists. They believe that everyone should do what he wants to do. The idea of common good is alien to them. They live in a vacuum of the present without historical perspective, so they have no judgment. Push the proper button and they drool like "Big deal, cleaning the lake. Why didn't they do it themselves?" "Change filter and flamer and flow patterns. I've been thinking about that. No responsibility? Every man his own master? They have no children to test themselves against -- something to do with the closed system -- so pride incurs no obligations and accepts none. Only  stranger can kick his way out of this paper bag." "They don't look stupid to me." "Ravenshaw, I wouldn't think you stupid leading a squad or maybe a platoon -- but I've noticed that army officers, clergy and professors always buy enough phony oil stock to paper their walls. You people live in a protected situation, inside a security framework, like monkeys in a zoo. You are public welfare cases. Me? I had to cut out a tin beak and peck around with the rest of the chickens." "So why did they fight at the springs -- when we first came here?" "That was a joint venture. A limited-liability company had gone out to get fresh water and exercise the eight-wheeled steam hoopee. Another band of gentleman adventurers jumped them. We just happened to show up in the middle. Ravenshaw, how did we get into this world? Tell me, and I'll arrange some accommodation." "Just lucky, I guess." The old man favored him with a basilisk glance and shrugged. "Call me stout Cortez," he said. "Pizarro is a real sweet guy, too," said Ravenshaw. "I'll miss your conversation," said Mummery, "but not much." He stood and stretched and left the room. T HE girl walked in and patted Ravenshaw's cheek as she crossed to the phone. She activated the light cylinder. A person appeared. Ravenshaw didn't care if the instrument was a vid or a seeeasy or an Ojo de Dios, an Eye of God. This was a funny-money world. Where was Nell Rowley? They ought to cut out of here. f The girl spoke to a man with red hair and a freckled face who appeared in the cylinder of light. "I IF think the woman is something called a Mier and they're a tricksome species. It turns out they disappear and the library hahs and hums about whys and hows and whatever -- keep an eye on her." Freckles leaned forward to touch controls. "She's solid enough," he said as the cylinder enlarged to include Nell. Nell had a stony expression. Her head stuck out of a box that was like a steam cabinet. She looked at Ravenshaw in his wrappings and smiled. "Well, Arleigh. Quite a world, isn't it?" "Amscray!" said Ravenshaw in a choked voice. "Utsnay," said Nell. "How do I get out of this box? Besides, I've been to a lot of trouble over you. I might not be able to get back." Colonel Ravenshaw said, "That's an order!" His detachment had vanished. It fried the edges of his soul to see Nell with her head sticking out of a box. He turned red, lurched forward and tumbled to the floor, chair and all. He got a sideways look at her eyes before Freckles dimished the cylinder to himself. He had never thought violet could be such a hot color. He was wet with sweat, " -- keep them around for jollies maybe, why not?" the girl said, and the projection faded. She walked over and nudged Ravenshaw with her toe. "Don't go away. A closed system needs variety and the entertainer should be worthy of his audience. Those two old men have amusing ideas and men are as alike as feathered balls and what does one ball more or less matter?" She hunkered down and regarded him more closely. "And yet -- you are a beast of some character -- who can tell? Raised under a different sun -- or the same sun -- there's disagreement on the question." She frowned. "Still, it might be best if you were scrubbed. Her words registered for later examination. Ravenshaw lay on the floor and repeated Nell's jingle. With all the intensity he could command, he wanted her back in their own world. He screwed down his eyelids until his eyes hurt. He had not forgotten a vivid picture she had once given him of a small girl in the shade of a chinaberry tree, singing a lonely song to her doll, Elinor: The worlds exist in the mind alone -- Who knows this truth can dance with fire Or fly through air or float on stone . They were not magic words that spilled you through worlds like a riffled deck of cards. The song was conditioning to the idea that infinite worlds existed thicker than fruit on a chinaberry tree. It might also indicate that labels of body and mind were devisive and if an individual held unity at a level of belief, such things as dancing with fire or jumping worlds or sailing on a boulder were possible. Id, ego, super-ego? Jargon. Don't look at the tree trunks or the snake or the wall of the building, dammit, look at the elephant whole. Then all worlds were funnymoney worlds, just like a Pancho Villa ten-peso note when Pancho himself presented it to a storekeeper. It was irrelevant that it was homemade. It was legal tender when backed by a .# revolver. If the storekeeper thought it was funny-money, he had a weak grip on reality. Go, Nell, go! Just because Ravenshaw had been an idiot when he stepped into the helicopter and it seemed inadvisable to change worlds in the air, and he was fuddled when Ned Vasu jumped Mummery all this was no reason why Nell should be stuck in a box. Go, Nell, go! Two husky young men heaved the chair back onto its legs. Ravenshaw opened his eyes because he had been washed over by a sense of comfort. He drew the conclusion that Nell had escaped, switched worlds, was out of danger. It was the same relief a skindiver knows after two minutes under water. Mummery was back in his chair talking with Jain. Jain enlarged the cylinder of vision and there was Nell Rowley with her eyes shut and a faint smile on her face, still prisoned in the box. rope and led him to another room, Ravenshaw waited until his reflexes seemed dependable before he kicked one in the stomach, backhanded another in the adam's apple and chopped the third under the ear with the side of his hand. Cay appeared and pointed to a door. He slammed it open and ran into a crowd. He turned and Cay had another gang of men running to meet him. It was a brief excursion into freedom. They spreadeagled him over their heads and carried him through the interminable warehouse. When one tired, another took his place. Ravenshaw had no idea that gripping hands could be so painful. They were whooping and yelling and singing, men and women, the whole mob, and all his addled brain could do was repeat, "If it wasn't for the honor of the thing -- if it wasn't for the honor of the thing -- " He was too scrambled to finish Mark Twain's remarks about the man tarred and feathered, riding on a rail. When he was stood on his feet with the world reeling around him, he knew he would rather be elsewhere -- except for the honor -- and he would have fallen to the floor except for two dozen hands supporting him. His vision cleared and he identified the wet stuff as a nose-bleed dripping off his chin. He might as well have stayed dizzy, because the building in which he found himself was unreasonable, unfamiliar and unlike anything in his experience. Bleachers followed the curve of the oval dome on either side, but between the tiered seats was a gulf, a void where a basketball court might have been. There was a pier, a stack, a tower in the middle, a central oval island rising from the depths, repeating the curve of the seats. The tunnel from the north was on the east side. The tunnel through which he had been hauled was to the right. The gulf was a constant width from one end of the building to the other. The roof arched overhead in the ambiguous blur. Latecomers straggled in. The bleachers were almost full. The spectators got to their feet when the doors of the tunnels closed. It was kickoff time. A cylinder of light appeared in the middle of the oval platform. A man with a benign expression stood there. His voice carried without distortion, but Ravenshaw could catch only parts of the speech, due to the tumult of boos and catcalls. " -- resources and ingenuity of our community -- twenty-six years in conception and planning, eight years to build and supply -- chosen genetic stock -- no immediate return from this colossal investment IF " When the audience chanted along with the speaker, Ravenshaw realized this must be a recording and wearisomely familiar. # -- transmogrified to men beyond man, mankind changed in one generation -- " He lost the rest in the hoots and shouting and caught only the conclusion. " -- so in trust and love, bless you, our children." The projection faded. A bridge like a tongue of steel arched to the island. It rose up and out, three feet wide with no rails. It was white and made a smooth join at the far side. First class engineering, was Ravenshaw's opinion. The girl who looked so much like Cay walked onto the island dressed in ice-blue, a shimmering garment that must have been uncomfortably tight from her toes to her neck, where it broke into a frothy collar framing her face in blue ice. She waited for relative quiet. "Anybody want to jump?" she said. "I deplore private suicide. It's deprivation of us all, selfish and a nuisance, and you might just as well make an occasion of this. If you need something fancier than jumping -- remember, only two people missed all the pipes and there's a challenge -- talk it over with your friends. The spirit of our new world demands a little consideration, not much maybe, but some. We'll arrange anything reasonable, hanging, head-chopping. whatever you want. Any takers?" She waited and said, "Second item's transfers. Come on over, anybody." Eleven men and women crossed the bridge and stood to one side. The girl stepped on and the bridge retracted. The bridge from the other side slid out to the island. Freckles rode it over. Eight people followed him and cleared the way for the transfers. "I have old business and continuing business and dammit," said Freckles. The gabble of the audience dropped. "I know we got entertainment tonight and I don't want to naggle anybody, but those clowns who busted out after water had a good time and a nice fight, but they're going to yince us up. Maybe a session tomorrow? Think about it, dammit -- we're either a closed system or we're not. They had us programed to bury seeds in the ground, dammit, three years ago dammit, and build houses arid raise kids and all that, and I still say the hell with it and those clowns are going to yince us up good. Think about it." His bridge sucked in and the girl's went out. The transfers walked over and found seats. She said, "Don't yell the bridge, the bridge at me because nobody's figured how to schtunk the system yet. Library says we're positive and negative and you shove something between and bang, it blows. And those guys who busted out found out how to bust out, so why worry about a bridge anyway?" There was a chorus of boos and die thumbed her nose at both sides. She stuck out her tongue, patted her head and pointed a finger down. That was evidently a ruder gesture because it was greeted with shouts of laughter and anger. "Fahngulah!" she said. A witty riposte, thought Ravenshaw, because everybody laughed. "Entertainment!" she yelled, and he was shoved onto the bridge. 'him forward. He stumbled and got a good ldok at an oily, churning liquid two hundred feet below. A wind sucked down. There was a maze of large and small pipes from the wall to the stack, color coded, entering at all angles and elevations. Offhand, he didn't believe a sockful of oatmeal could make it down to the liquid without hitting a pipe. A stick popped him in the neck and he wrenched it out of the hands of a man behind him, and staggered to the island. He turned to the girl, but she avoided him neatly. He could have tipped her into the void, but saw no point to it. When she cleared the bridge, a turkel started briskly up the far side. "This is a heat-seeker," said Mummery. "Don't suppose it's been activated for a coon's age." Ravenshaw found the old man directing a horn at him from the middle of the bleachers. "Big problem with warehousing is vermin. If the rats don't get you, the mice will." The turkel turned toward Ravenshaw as the bridge retracted. It spawned two sixteen-inch snakes before he got his stick under the edge and tipped it into the gulf. Three more wriggled out in the air. There was a cling-clangwhanging noise as they bounced on pipes. The snakes darted at him. They were covered with short, fine wire for traction; their microminiaturized sensing gear was elegant. When he tried to smash one with the stick, it avoided the blow and kept coming in. It chewed on his toe and he stomped it with the other foot. He bent down and swept off the second with his stick. "Watch out, Arleigh!" Nell shouted over the crowd noise. She, too, had a horn. From the other side another turkel unloaded snakes and they wriggled toward him. He ran to the far end of the oval. The little mechanical monster had chewed through his boot with a rotating blade and he had a shuddersome idea of what a dozen might do. Cut off my legs and call me Shorty. He kneeled with the gulf behind him and, as the snakes converged, he swept them away with the stick, one side and the other, until they were gone. Both bridges were retracted now. He tipped the mother turkel off and had time to look for IF Nell. Jain had wrestled the horn from her hand and spoke into it. "See how you like the old hotfoot." "Pre-emergence weed flamer," said Mummery from the other side. "Give you something to think about. Of course, you can use it for mature row crops if you have the right baffles -- " Ravenshaw ran to the center of the oval. The first turkel was almost to the island, shooting out blue flame around its edges. Following across the bridge were, five more firespitters. Ravenshaw leaped onto the back of the first through a blast of heat, caught his balance on the rounded surface and took desperate six-foot strides on the backs of the others over the bridge. With momentum, he scattered spectators right and left as he leaped up the bleachers. He had Mummery by his antique throat before he heard Jain yelling on the horn, "Choke the old bastard and I stab the girl!" Jain had. his knife at Nell's breast. "All right. Maybe we can make a deal." Ravenshaw tucked Mummery's head in the crook of his arm, told him to come along or he'd tear it off, and returned across the bridge to the island. The crowd was in a tumult. They enjoyed the action and took a while to settle down for the next act. Jain said, "l changed my mind... Go ahead and strangle him." The girl. Cay, had followed Ravenshaw across the bridge. She came up and kissed him full on the mouth. "It's immoral, but go ahead and stick her," she shouted to Jain. Ravenshaw dropped the old man. She announced further: "I'll take him dirty and forlorn and we'll make you silly clowns cringe, won't we, poppet?" "In a pig's valise you will," said Ravenshaw. She slapped him broadhanded. He jerked her to him by the collar of her suit and spanked her over his knee. The crowd went wild. This was the best entertainment in years. He dropped Cay and caught Mummery before he reached the bridge and dragged him to the middle of the oval. He could not see Nell in the surging crowd. Cay was back on her own side and Freckles rode his bridge to the island with Jain in his grasp. "Weapons are immoral and violence is nasty," said Freckles. He dropped the old man and retreated. Ravenshaw welcomed him aboard with a kick that drove him sprawling after Mummery to one end of the oval. He looked again for Nell and could not see her in the cheering crowd. The bridge was alive with fire. New turkels advanced, shooting a blaze that made the bleachers waver in the heat. The six turkels already on the island met those from the other side. The twelve formed a line and advanced slowly on Ravenshaw. The old men were at the other end of the oval. Both bridges were withdrawn. "Uh-oh, dance with fire or fly through air?" said Ravenshaw softly. He retreated. He was bloody and battered. He was on an alien world with the choice of being broiled or bouncing two hundred feet through a web of pipe to the sewer works. The wall of flame advanced. He stood on the edge of the drop. He looked at the ceiling. It was properly described as a surface of revolution around an axis. These people had revolved around an unexpected axis, no matter the forethought and idealism of the builders. The far limits of the beast are unknown, though certain predispositions have been observed in # years of history. A revolting development. Ravenshaw sheltered his face from the furnace blast with his hands and said, "It only hurts when I laugh. I ' So why couldn't he be all things at once, scared spitless, raging mad, filled with apprehension for Nell and laughing? Look at the elephant whole. Keep cool Ravenshaw. A creeping blue flame licked the fuzz of his trousers. Believe or bum, my dear Ravenshaw. A whole man vanished from the One-Generation New World. shaw brushed out the little fires. Hard pellets of snow rattled on the ground. He was standing at the corner of a corral next to Mummery's ranch house up Meadow Valley Wash in his own world. That thing was the D-# tractor, cat-yellow, cat-black in the bitter night. His foot slipped on the ice when he climbed up and he just avoided breaking his neck. He took the tin can off the stack and put down the seat. He was shivering with cold by the time he got the big diesel going. It blew smoke rings, tattered away by the wind, and he shuddered as the engine smoothed to a responsive bellow. He advanced the throttle and raised the blade in front and the rippers behind. He located a gear, pulled the friction, spun around and rumbled to the corner of the corral in which he had found himself. He rode over the posts, and stopped. "Come back often, now that you know the way," he growled. Cat and man vanished. where Ravenshaw wanted to be, on the island between retracted bridges. Only a few people were left of the crowds on either side. Jain was sulking at one end of the long oval, Mummery at the other. Nell was nowhere in sight. He left the diesel idling and stood up. The two wise men stared at him, wild IF and bloody on the snow-encrusted cat. "I'll read the future' said Ravenshaw, "not that you'll take the advice. Hang together or you'll hang separately." Mummery said, "They left us here -- awfully nice of you -- " Jain blinked his owl eyes. "Angle the blade and bridge the cat," said Ravenshaw. "Maybe you can reach the side before the balance point. Maybe you can't. I'll miss you, gentlemen, but not much." He vanished. beside him as he walked from the corral to the house. "I got lost," she said. The kitchen door was unlocked or Ravenshaw would have kicked it in. When he turned on the light switch a generator started up, fluorescents stuttered to brightness and he got a good look at her. There was blood, still wet, on her horrible plaid shirt. He held himself stiff as a glass man. "A dozen frantic worlds," she said, "all wrong." He cleared his throat. "I'll tell you what let's," he said huskily. "Let's not touch a thing -- " "I homed on you," she said. "That's what let's not touch. I want a shower and shave and a set of the old man's pinks. I don't like this place, any part of it -- there's bound to be a car or pickup -- we'll get our stuff at McCarran -- save water in Las Vegas -- if you like -- " The hottest violet eyes in the world blazed affirmation. "With a friend?" she said in her honey voice.' "All right to touch a coffeepot?" she asked and the bones melted in his legs. "Yarp," he croaked and stumbled away. said drowsily, "Break the pipes or make a permanent bridge -- either opens the closed system." "Uh-huh, they gotta turn to the real world, cat or no." "Two buildings are sound psychological engineering," she mused. "You get rivalry, romance, mystery, someplace to go -- " "Uh-huh." He was altogether relaxed. "If you're going to change a world, how do you program the programers?" "Very carefully." She yawned. "What time is it?" He thought of a cat yawning, the tip of its pink tongue quivering. He grinned with pure delight in the dark. She stuck an elbow in his ribs. "What do we tell the general?" "Lady, we're on our own time." "We ought to catch the seveno'clock plane." "All right," said Ravenshaw, "but hush for now. This is the first morning of the rest of my life and I want to start it right." "Sententious, Arleigh dear -- " she said, and fell silent.  OF No room left in the world -- but there T HE day I formed my connection with March B. Street has remained extraordinarily well fixed in my memory. This shows, of course, that my unconsious -- my monitor, I should say; you must pardon me if I sometimes slip into these anthropomorphic terms; it's the influence of my professionWhat was I saying? Oh, yes. My monitor, which of course sorts through my stored data during maintenance periods and wipes the obsolete material out of core, regards the connection as quite important. A tenuous connection, you will say. Yes, but it has endured. The hour was late. I had finished the last of my house calls and it was raining. I may be more careful of my physical well-being than I should be, but my profession makes me so and,, after all, quite a number of people depend on me. At any rate, instead of walking to my quarters as was my custom I bought a paper and seated myself in a kiosk to read and await the eventual arrival of the monorail. In twenty minutes I had read everything of interest and laid the paper on the bench beside my bag. After some five minutes spent watching the gray rain and thinking about some of my more troublesome patients I picked it up again and began (my room being, in several respects, less than satisfactory) to leaf through the real estate ads. I believe I can still remember the exact wording: Single Professional wishes to share apt. (exp. cist.) Quiet hbts, no entrtnng. Cr#mo. The cost was below what I was paying for my room and the idea of an apartment -- even if it were only an expanded closet and would have to be sharedwas appealing. It was closer to the center of the city than was my room, and on the same mono line. I thought about it as I boarded, and when we reached the stop nearest it (Cathedral) I got off. The building was old and small, faced with unlightened concrete time had turned nearly black. The address I sought was on the twenty-seventh floor; what had once been a single apartment had been opened out into a complex by means of space expanders, whose all-pervading hum greeted me as I opened the door. One had, for a moment, the sensation of tumbling head first into gulfs of emptiness. Then a little woman, the landlady, came fluttering up to ask what it was I wanted. She was, as I saw at once, a declassed human. I showed her the ad. "Ah," she said. "That's Mr. Street, but I don't think he'll be wanting any of your sort. Of course, that's up to him." I could have mentioned the Civil Liberties Act, but I only said, "He's a human, then? The ad said, "Single Professional." Naturally I thought -- " "Well, you would, wouldn't you," the little woman said, looking at the ad again over my shoulder. "He's not like me. I mean even if he is declassed, he's still young. Mr. Street's a strange one." "You don't mind if I inquire, then?" "Oh, no. I just didn't want to see you disappointed." She was looking at my bag. "You're a doctor?" "A bio-mechanic." "That's what we used to call them -- doctors. It's over there." It had been a hat and coat closet, I suppose, in the original apartment. There was a small brass plate on the door:  time when the door opened and I asked, quite without thinking how it might sound, "What in the world does a consulting engineer do?" "He consults," Mr. Marche Street answered. "Are you a client, sir?" And that was how I met him. I should have been impressed -- I mean, had I known -- but as it was I was only flustered. I told him I had come about the apartment and he asked me in very politely. It was an immense place, filled to bursting with machines in various stages of disassembly and furniture. "Not pretty," Mr. Street remarked, "but it's home." "I had no idea it would be so big. You must have -- " "Three expanders, each six hundred horsepower. There's plenty of space out there between the galaxies, so why not pull it down here where we need it?" "The cost, I should say, for one thing. I suppose that's why you want to -- " "Share the apartment? Yes, that's one reason. How do you like the place?" "You mean you'd consider me? I should think -- " "Do you know you talk very slowly? It makes it damned difficult not to interrupt you. No, I wouldn't prefer a human. Sit down, won't you? What's your name?" "Westing," I said. "It's a silly name, really -- like naming a human Tommy or Jimmy. But the old 'Westinghouse' was out of style when I was assembled." "Which makes you about fiftysix, confirmed by ihe degree of wear I see at your knee seals, which are originals. You're a biomechanic, by your bag -- which should be handy. You haven't much money; you're honest -- and obviously not much of a talker. You came here by mono, and I'd presently live high up in a fairly new building." IF "How in the world -- " "Quite simple, really, Westing. You haven't money or you wouldn't be interested in an apartment. You're honest or you'd have money -- no one has more and better chances to steal than a biomechanic. When a passenger with a transfer boards the mono the conductor rips up the ticket and, half the time, drops it on the floor -- and one is stuck to your foot with gum. And lightened concrete and plastic facades have given us buildings so tall and spindlyframed that the upper floors sway under the wind load like ships. People who live or work in them take to bracing themselves the way sailors used to -- as I notice you're doing on that settee." "You are an extraordinary person," I managed to say, "and it makes me all the more surprised -- " And here I am afraid I stopped speaking and leaned forward to stare at him. "Extraordinary in more ways than one, I'm afraid," Street said. "But although I assure you I will engage you as my physician if I am ever ill, I haven't done so yet." "Quite so," I admitted. I relaxed, but I was still puzzled. "Are you still interested in sharing my little apartment, then? Shall I show you about?" "No," I said. "I understand," Street said, "and I apologize for having wasted your time. Doctor." "I don't want to be shown the door, either." Though I was upset, I must admit I felt a thrill of somewhat guilty pleasure at being able to contradict my host. "I want to sit here and think for a minute." "Of course," Street said, and was silent. (and there was no use in my deceiving myself -- that was what was being proposed) was a raffish sort of thing. It was bound to hurt my practice, but then my practice was largely among declassed humans already and could not get much worse. The vast spaces of the apartment, even littered as they were, were attractive after years in a single cramped room. But most of all, or so I like to think, it was the personality of Street himself which decided me -- and the fact that I detected in him, perhaps only by some professional instinct not wholly rational, a physical abnormality I could not quite classify. And there was, in addition, the pleasing thought of surprising my few friends, all of whom, I knew, thought me much too stuffy to do any such outlandish thing. I was giving Street my money -- half a month's rent on the apartment -- when he froze, head cocked, to listen to some sound from the foyer. After a moment he said, "We have a visitor, Westing. Hear him?" "I heard someone out there." "The light and tottering step is that of our good landlady, Mrs. Nash. But there is another tread -- dignified, yet nervous. Almost certainly a client." "Or someone else to ask about the apartment," I suggested. "No." Before I could object to this flat contradiction the door opened to show the birdlike woman who had admitted us. She ushered in a distinguished-looking person well over two meters tall, whose polished and lavish solid chrome trim gave unmistakable evidence, if not of wealth, then at least of a sufothers -- would only envy all our lives. "You are Street?" he asked, looking at me with a somewhat puzzeled expression. "This is my associate, Dr. Westing," Street said. "I am the man you came to see, Coniissioner Electric. Won't you sit down?" "I'm flattered that you know my name," Electric said. "Over there past the nickelodeon," Street told him, "you'll see a cleared spot for tri-D displays. There are several cameras around it. Whenever a man I don't know appears I photograph the image for later reference. You were interviewed three months ago in connection with your request for additional expanders for the hiring hall, made necessary by the depressed state of the economy." "Yes." Electric nodded and it was plain that Street's recital of these simple facts, accurate as it was, had depressed still further spirits already hovering at the brink of despair. "You have no conception, Mr. Street, of how ironic it seems that I should hear now -- here -- of that routine request for funds, and so be reminded of those days when our hall was filled to bursting with the deactivated." "From which," Street said slowly, "I take it that the place is now empty -- or nearly so. I must say I am surprised; I had believed the economy to be in worse condition -- if that is possible -- than it was three months past." "It is," Electric admitted. "And your first supposition is also correct -- the hall, though not empty, is far from crowded." "Ah," said Street. "This thing has been driving me to the brink of reprograming for six weeks now. The deactivated are being stolen. The police pretend to be accomplishing something; but it's obvious they are helpless -- they're only going through the motions now. Last night a relative of mine -- I won't name him, but he is a highly placed military officer -- suggested that I come to you. He didn't mention you were a declassed human, and I suppose he knew that if he had I wouldn't have come, but now that I've seen you IF 'That's kind of you," Street said dryly. "In the event I succeed in preventing further thefts by bringing the criminals to justice my fee will be -- " He named an astronomical sum. "And in the event further thefts are not prevented?" "My expenses only."l-thefts strike at the very fabric of our society, Mr. Street. The old rallying cry, Free markets and free robots , may be a joke now to some, but it has built our civilization. Robots are assembled when the demand for labor exceeds the supply. When supply exceeds demand -- that is, in practical terms, when the excess cybercitizens can't make a living -- they turn themselves in at the hiring hall, where they're deactivated until they're needed again. If news of these shortages should leak out -- " "Who would turn himself in to be stolen, eh?" said Street. "I see what you mean." "Precisely. The unemployed would resort to begging and theft, just as in the old days. We already have -- I hope you'll excuse me -- enough of a problem with declassified humans. You yourself are obviously an exception, but you must knowwhat most of them are like." "Most of us," Street replied mildly, "are like my landlady: people who lost class because they refused death at the end of their natural lifespans. It's not very easy to learn to earn your living when for a hundred years of life society has handed you an income big enough to make you rich." It wasn't really my affair, but I couldrrt help saying, "But if you can help Commissioner Electric, Street, you'll be helping your own people in exactly this area." Street turned his eyes -- which were of an intense blue, as though his photosensors were arcing -- to me. "Is that so, Doctor? I'm afraid I don't quite follow you." Electric said, "I should think it's obvious. Surely the motive for stealing our deactivated workers must be the desire to use them as forced labor, presumably in a secret factory of some sort. If this is being done, the criminals are competing illegally with everyone trying to earn an honest living -- including the declassed." I nodded my emphatic agreetory, perhaps in a cavern or abandoned mine, filled with dim figures laboring without cease under the threat of destruction, had already come to haunt my imagination. "Slaves of silver," I muttered half aloud, "toiling in the dark." "Possibly," Street said. "But I can think of other possibilities -- possibilities you might find more shocking still." "In any event," Commissioner Electric put in, "you will want to visit the hiring hall." "Yes, but not in company with you. I consider it quite possible that the entrance may be watched. Human beings do visit the hall from time to time, I assume?" "Yes, usually to engage domestics." "Excellent. Under what circumstances would you deal with such visitors personally?" "I would not ordinarily do so at all, unless all my subordinates were engaged." Street looked at me. "You seem to want to be a party to this, Westing. Are you game to visit the hiring hall with me? You must consider that you may disappear -- for that matter we both may." "Oh, no," Electric protested, "the disappearances occur only after dark, when the hall is closed." "Certainly I'll come." Street smiled. "I thought you would. Commissioner, we will follow you in one half hour. See to it that when we arrive your subordinates are engaged." gone I was able to ask Street the question that had been nagging at my mind during the entire interview. "Street, for God's own sake, how was it you knew Commissioner Electric hadn't come about the apartment before Mrs. Nash had opened the door?" "Be a good fellow and look in the drawer of the inlaid rosewood table you'll find on the other side of that camera obscura to the left of the tri-D stage, and I'll tell you. You ought to find a recording ammeter in there. We'll need it." I didn't know what a camera obscura was, but fortunately the rosewood table was a rather striking piece and only one instrument was in its drawer, lying amid a litter of tarot cards and bridge score pads. I held it up for Street to see and he nodded. "That's it. You see. Westing, when someone arrives in answer to a newspaper ad he almost invariably -- ninety-two point six percent of the time, according to my calculation -- carries the paper with him and shows it to the person who answers the door. When I failed to hear the telltale rattie of the popular press as our visitor addressed Mrs. Nash I knew there was little chance that he had come about the apartment." "Astounding!" "Oh, it's not so much," Street said modestly. "But get a move on, won't you? It wouldn't do to ride down in the same elevator with Electric -- but on the other hand it's seldom a waste of askance to view a public official with it. We're going to shadow him." Despite Street's suspicions, Commissioner Electric did nothing untoward that I could see while we followed him. To give him time to prepare for us, as Street said, we IF idled for a quarter of an hour or more at the window of a tri-D store near the hall. The show being carried on the display set inside was utterly banal and I could swear that Street did not give it even a fraction of his attention. He stood, absorbed in his own thoughts, while I fidgeted. The hiring hall, when Electric guided us around it, we found to be a huge place; impressive from outside but immensely larger within and filled with the hum of expanders. The corridors were lined with persons of every age and state of repair -- they stretched for slightly curved miles like the vistas seen in opposed mirrors. Gaping spaces showed where the disappearances had taken place, but, sinister as they were, in time they seemed a relief from the staring regard of those thousands of unseeing eyes. Street asked for data on each theft and recorded the date and the number of persons missing in a notebook; but there seemed to be no pattern to the crimes, save that all the disappearances took place at night. At last we came to the end of that vast building. Commissioner Electric did not ask Street for his opinion of the case (though I could see he wanted to), nor did Street give it. But once we were fairly away from him, Street pacing impatiently alongside the sidewalk while I trotted to keep up, he broke forth in an irascible tirade of selfabuse: "Westing, this thing is as simple as a two-foot piece of aluminum conduit and I'm confident I know everything about it -- except what I need to know. And I have no idea of how I'm going to find the answer. I know the robots are taken -- I think. And I believe I know why. The question is: Who is responsible? If I could get the patrol to cooperate -- " He lapsed into a sour silence, unbroken until we were once more back in the huge, littered apartment I had not yet learned to call "ours." Indeed, my arrangement with Street was so recent that I had not yet had an opportunity to shift my possessions from my old room or to terminate my tenancy there. I excused myself -- though Street seemed hardly to notice -- and attended to these things. changed. Street sat, as before, wrapped in gloom. And I, reduced to despondency by his example and with nothing better to do in any case, sat watching him. After an hour had passed he rose from his chair and for a few moments wandered disconsolately about the apartment, only to return to the same seat and throw himself down, his face blacker -- if that were possible -- than before. "Street -- " I ventured. "Eh?" He looked up. "Westing? That's your name, isn't it? You still here?" "Yes. I've been watching you for some time. While I realize you have, no doubt, a regular medical advisor, you were once kind enough to say that you might call me. On the strength of that -- " "Well, out with it, man. What is it?" "There will be no fee, of course. I was going to say that though I don't know what means of chemical reality enhancement you employ, it would appear to me that it has been a considerable time -- " "Since my last fix? Believe me, it has." He laughed, a reaction I thought encouraging. "Then I would suggest -- " "I don't use drugs. Westing. None at all." "I didn't mean to suggest anything strong -- just a few pinks, say, or -- " "I mean it, Westing. I don't use pinks. Or blues. Or even whites. I don't use anything except food, and little enough of that, water and air." "You're serious?" "Absolutely." "Street, I find this incredible. We were taught at medical school that human beings -- being, after all, a species evolved for a savanna landscape rather than our climax civilization -- were unable to maintain their sanity without pharmaceutical relief." "That may well be true, Westing. Nevertheless, I do not use any." This was too much for me to absorb at once and while I tried to encode it Street fell back into his former gloom. "Street," I said again. "What is it this time?" "Do you remember? When we first met I said that I detected in you, perhaps only by some professional instinct not wholly rational, a physical abnormality I could not quite classify?" "You didn't say anything of the sort. You may have thought it." "I did. And I was right. Man, you don't know how good this makes me feel." "I have some comprehension of the intellectual rewards attendant on successful deduction." "I'm sure you do. But now, if I may say so, a too-avid pursuit of those rewards has led you to a severe state of depression. A stimulant of some sort -- " "Not at all, Westing. Thought is my drug -- and believe me it is both stimulating and frustrating. My need is for a soporific, and your conversation fills the bill better than anything you could prescribe." This was said in so cheerful and bantering a way, albeit with a barely perceptible touch of bitterness, that I could not resent it -- and, indeed, the marked improvement this little spate of Xalk had brought to Street's mien emboldened me to continue at whatever risk to my vanity. IF So I answered, "Your powers of concentration, admirable as they are, may yet be your undoing. Do you remember the quarter-hour we spent in front of a store window? Where the tri-D had such poor reception? I addressed you several times, but I would swear you heard none of my questions. " "I heard every one of your questions," Street said, "and since none admitted to intelligent responses I ignored them all. And that tri-D, if not of the most exquisite quality, was at least better than passable. I apologize if I sound peevish, but really, Westing, you must learn to observe." "I am not an engineer," I replied, perhaps rather too stiffly, "and so I cannot say if the reception in fact was at fault -- but acute observation is a necessity in my profession and I can assure you that the color stability of the set on display was abominable." "Nonsense. I was looking directly at it for the entire time and I could, if necessary, describe each stupidity of programing in sequence." "Maybe you could," I said. "And I don't doubt your assertion that you were watching with commendable attention while we waited outside the hiring hall. But you quite obviously failed to observe it when we left . You were talking excitedly, as I recall -- and as you spoke we passed the window again. The actors were blushing -- if I may use that expression here -- a sort of reddish-orange. Then they turned greenish blue, then really blue, and finally a shade of bright, cool green. In fact, they went through that whole cycle several times just during the time it took us to walk past the window." T HE effect of this perhaps overly detailed and argumentative statement on Street was extraordinary. Instead of countering with argument or denial, as I confess I expected, for a few moments he simply stared silently at me. Then he jumped to his feet and for half a minute or more paced the room in silent agitation, twice tripping over the same ball-clawed foot of the same late Victorian commode. At last he turned almost fiercely back to me and announced: "Westing, I believe I can recall the precise words I addressed to you as we passed that display. I will repeat them to you now and I want you to tell me the exact point at which you noticed the color instability you mentioned. I said: 'Westing, this thing is as simple as a twofoot piece of aluminum conduit and I'm confident I know everything about it -- except what I need to know. And I have no idea of how I'm going to find the answer. I know how the robots are taken -- I think. And I believe I know why. The question is: Who is responsible? If I could get the patrol to cooperate -- ' at which point I broke off, I believe. Now, precisely where did you notice the reddish orange color you mentioned -- I believe that was the hue you noticed originally?" "To the best of my recollection. Street, it coincided with the word believe." "I said, # I know how the robots are taken -- I think. And I believe -- ' and at that point you noticed that the figures in the tri-D illusion blushed a color you have described as a reddish orange. Is that correct?" Dumfounded, I nodded. "Excellent. Among my other antiques. Westing, I have assembled a collection of paintings. Would it interest you to see them? You would be conferring a favor of no mean magnitude upon me." "I don't see how -- but certainly, if you wish." "Excellent again; particularly if, while drinking in their loveliness, you would take the trouble to point out to me the shades which most closely match the four colors you saw when the tri-D malfunctioned. But please be most exact -- if the match is not perfect, you need not inform me." For an hour or more we pored over Street's pictures, which were astoundingly varied and, for the most part, in a poor state of preservation. In size they ranged from Indian miniatures smaller than coins to a Biblical cyclorama five meters high and (so Street told me) more than three kilometers in length. The greenish-blue long escaped us, but at last I located it in an execrable depiction of Susanna and The Elders and the art display was abruptly terminated. Street told me bluntly -- his manner would have been offensive if it had not been so obvious that his mind was totally engaged on a problem of formidable proportions -- to amuse myself and buried himself in an assortment of ratty books and dusty charts, one of which, as I particularly remember, was like a rainbow bent into a full circle, with the blazing colors melting into one another like the infinitesimal quantities in a differential equation. While he pondered over these the hours of evening rolled past on silent rubber wheels. Others, their day's work done, might rest now; I waited. Humans, rich and fortunate or declassed, might sleep or busy themselves in those pointless naked tumblings which mean so little to us; Street worked. And at last I wondered if it might not be that we two were the only wakeful minds in the entire city. me by the shoulder. "Westing," he exclaimed, "I have it -- let me show you." I explained that I had taken advantage of his concentration to edit my memory banks. Street shrugged my mumblings aside. "Here," he said. "Look at IF this and let me explain. You told me, if you remember, that you saw a cycle of four colors and that this cycle was repeated several times." "That's correct." "Very well. Now observe. Has it ever occured to you to wonder how speak?" "I assume," I said with as much dignity as I could muster, "that somewhere in my monitor the various words of the English language are stored as vibration patterns and -- " "The Chinese system. No, I am convinced it must be something far more efficient. English is spoken with only a trifle more than sixty sounds; even the longest words are created by combining and recombining these -- for examples we might use the a as it appears in arm , the r as in rat and the ch from chair to describe our inestimable landlady, Mrs. Nash. Combined in one fashion they give us char -- her "profession -- but rearranged in another they contribute arch -- her manner." "You mean that all of spoken English can be stored in my central processing unit as a mere sixtyplace linear array?" "That is precisely what I've been saying." "Street, that's marvelous! I'm not a religious man, but when I contemplate the ingenuity of those early programers and systems analysts -- " "Exactly. Now, I do not know the order in which the various English sounds were listed, but there is an order which is very commonly used in the texts to which I have referred. It is to list the" sounds alphabetically and, within the alphabetical sections, to order them from longest to shortest. Thus these lists begin with the long a of ale , followed by the half-long a of chaotic ; and this is followed in turn by the circumflex a of care , so that the whole reads like a temperance lecture. What I have done here is to take these sounds and space them evenly along the visible spectrum." He held up a hand-drawn chart on which there were, however, no colors, but only a multitude of names. "But," I objected, "only a few true colors exist and you said there were more than sixty -- " "A few primary colors," he returned, "but believe me, Westing, if the artists were to make up a pallet containing every oil and watercolor known to them there would be a great many more than sixty. As you may remember, you described the four colors you saw as reddish-orange, greenish-blue, true blue -- which is just like you. Westing -- and bright, cool green;" "Yes." "Afterward, when you pointed out these colors on canvas, I was able to identify them as scarlet lake, cyan blue, blue and viridian. Please observe that on my chart these correspond to the consonant sound p, the consonant A, the short e heard in end and the  sound of late" I considered this remarkable statement for a moment, then replied, "You seem to believe that someone is trying to communicate, using the colors of the tri-D; but I do not see that the sounds to which you say these colors correspond possess any significance." Street leaned back in his chair, smiling. "Let us suppose. Westing, that you came in late as it were, to the message. Catching the last sound of a repeated word, you supposed it to be the first. In short -- " "I see!" I exclaimed, leaping up. "Precisely." "But -- " "There's no more time to waste. Westing. I have only given this much explanation because I want you to be an intelligent witness to what I am about to do. You will observe that I have set up a tri-D camera before our viewing area, enabling me to record for my own use any image appearing there." "Yes, you said something about that to Commissioner Electric." "So I did. What I intend to do now is to code that store near the hiring hall and ask for a demonstration. At this late hour it seems improbable that anyone will be there but a robot clerk -- and it's unlikely he will be implicated." buttons as he spoke and a clerk -- a robot -- appeared almost before he had finished the last word. "I should prefer to deal with a human being," Street told him, displaying an excellent imitation of prejudice. The clerk groveled. "Oh, I am sorry, sir. But my employers -- and no person ever had better -- have gone to snatch a few hours of deserved rest. If you would -- " "That's all right." Street cut him off. "You'll do. I'm interested in another tri-D and I want a demonstration." "Very wise, sir. We have -- " "As it happens, I was passing your shop today and the set in your window looked attractive. I presume there would be a discount, since it's a demonstrator?" "I would have to consult my masters," the clerk answered smoothly, "but I assume something might be arranged." "Good." "Is there any particular program -- " "I don't know what's on right now." For an instant Street feigned indicision. "Isn't The Answer Man always available?" "Indeed he is, sir. Personal, Sexual, Scholarly, or Civil Affairs?" "Civil Affairs, I think." In an instant The Answer Man, a computer-generated illusion designed to give maximum reassurIF ance in the field' of civil affairs, appeared in the tri-D area. He nodded politely to us and asked, "Would you like a general report -- or have you specific fears?" "I have heard rumors," Street said, "to the effect -- well, the fact is that an old family servitor of mine is -- uh -- resting in the hiring hall. Is it quite safe?" The Answer Man reassured him, but as he did so he (and indeed the entire illusion) blushed a series of colors as astonishing as it was -- at least by me -- unexpected. "Names," Street prompted softly. "I must have names." "I beg your pardon?" The Answer Man said, but as he spoke he coruscated anew with dazzling chromatic aberrations. "I meant," Street returned easily, "that you would have to have my servant's name before you could properly reassure me. But it's really not necessary. I've heard -- " Abruptly The Answer Man vanished, replaced by the clerk robot. "I'm terribly sorry," he said. "Something seems to be wrong with the color control. Could 'I show you another set?" "Oh, no," Street told him. "The trouble is in the network signal. Didn't you get the announcement? Sunspots." "Really?" The clerk looked relieved. "It's extraordinary that I should have missed it." "I would say," Street sounded severe, "that in your position it was your duty to have heard it." "I can't imagine -- About an hour ago, could it have been? I had to leave -- only momentarily -- to dispose of the surplus water created by my fuel cells, but except for that -- " "No doubt that was it," Street said. "I wish you a good evening, sir." He switched off the tri-D. "Westing, I've done it! I've got everything we need here." "You mean that by going over the tapes you made and comparing them with your chart -- " "No, no, of course not," Street interrupted me testily. "I memorized the chart while you were asleep. The tapes are only for evidence." "You mean that you understood -- " "Certainly. As well as I understand you now -- though I must confess that before I heard that poor machine speak it had never occurred to me that the word dread, especially when given the slightly pre-Raphaelite pronunciation of our unfortunate friend, could result in such startling beauty." "Street," I said, "you're toying with me. With whom are you communicating when you talk to those colors? And how were the deactivated robots stolen -- and why?" small, cast iron "greedy-pig" coin bank he had picked up from the table beside his chair. "I am communicating, as I should think must be obvious, with one of the stolen robots. And the method of theft was by no means difficult -- indeed. I'm surprised that it is not emplpyed more often. A confederate of the thieves concealed himself in the immensities of the hiring hall during the day. When all were gone he momentarily interrupted the flow of current to one of the expanders, with the result that the expander space returned to a position between the galaxies, carrying its contents with it. As you know, the exact portion of space taken by an expander is dependent on the fourth derivative of the sinusoidal voltage at the instant of startup, so it is most improbable that, upon being restarted a split second later, the expander should return the robots to their proper places. They are picked up instead by a deep-space freighter and eventually returned to Earth. The recording ammeter I contrived to fasten to the hall's main power supply while Electric was showing us around will tell us if anyone tries the little trick again, as well as convincing a court that might not otherwise belive my explanation." "But the colors. Street? Are you trying to tell me that the National Broadcasting Authority itself is employing slave labor?" "Not at all." Street looked grave, then smiled -- I might almost say grinned -- at me. "The robots in the hiring hall are there because society can find no present use for them -- but has it never occured to you that the electronics they contain might themselves be useful?" "You mean -- " Street nodded. "I do. A tri-D set requires considerable computing power: a quite complicated signal must be unscrambled almost instantly to produce the three-dimensional illusion. The central processing unit of a robot, however, would be more than equal to the task -- and very economical, if it were free. Unfortunately -- for them -- the criminals made one mistake. A criminal always makes one mistake. Westing." "They wired the speech centers to handle the color coding?" "Precisely. I am proud of you." I was so elated that I leaped to my feet and for a few moments paced the room feverishly. The triumph of justice -- the chagrin of the criminal manufacturers! The glory that would be Street's and, to some degree as his friend, mine! At length a new thought struck me, coming with the clarity of the tolling of a great bell. "Street -- " I said. "You look dashed, Westing." "You have done society a great service." "I know it -- and the fee will be most useful. There is an early twentieth-century iron-claw maIF chine in a junk shop over on four hundred and forty-fourth I've been lusting after. It needs a little work -- the claw won't pick up anything now -- but I think I can fix it." "Street, it might be possible -- Commissioner Electric possesses great influence -- " "What are you blathering about. Westing?" "It might be possible for you to be reclassed. Have your birthright income restored." "Are you insinuating. Westing, that you believe me to have been declassed for criminal activity?" "But all human beings are born classed -- and you're not old enough to have refused death." "Believe me. Westing, my income is still in existence and -- in a way -- I am receiving it. You, as a bio-mechanic, should understand." "You mean -- " "Yes. I have had a child by asexual reproduction. A child who duplicates precisely my own genetic makeup -- a second self. The law, as you no doubt know, requires in such cases that the parent's income go to the child. He must be reared and educated." "You could have married." "I prefer to have a home. And no man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one -- a place where he can go and lock the door behind him." This was what I had feared. I said, "In that case perhaps you won't want -- I mean, with the money you'll be getting from Electric you won't need to share this apartment. I would quite understand, Street, really I would." "You, Westing?" Street laughed. "You're no more in the way than a refrigerator."  You Will Enjoy Revolution bv Robert Sdverbert) .ir.tl Open l nttm by Robert A W Lowndes Aiso featured ore Oft thn l)nep f rui ,i nihimn by Piers Anthony ,i major review by Nmnuir Spmnid humor by Grerj Beidord erudition by John Fi #,I r o r no n madneys by the editor .mil fury by the renders m the fetter column Sample Subscription # issues for Si S# per year His enemy was so like himself that not even death would tell them apart... I T HE skater lifted abruptly off the ramp, caught the wind and slid sideways toward the water. In a moment it was rocking and bouncing above the waves, building up to its top speed of two hundred miles an hour. Jim Forrest was thankful for the autopilot -- no human pilot could handle the skater in this weather. Behind him the buildings of Mark Station vanished into the gray rain and the island's dark bulk disappeared in a few seconds more. Forrest was driving by dead reckoning, with no need to use a map, as there was only one other island on Marconi, the ocean-covered planet of Denebola.  To say that the sea was choppy would be an extreme understatement. The wind pounded, the rain poured on the windshield of the little craft and the clouds turned early afternoon into night as the jet-cushion craft skimmed just above the water, underjets echoing the roaring storm. The autopilot chattered as it computed the height of the oncoming waves, increasing or decreasing the pressure of the jet pillar beneath. Too close , thought Forrest as he set the altitude level to fifty feet. This would take more power, but he didn't want to plow through any crests. Forty-foot waves! He'd never seen them before on Marconi. There had never been such a storm in the planet's short history -- and he had to be out in it. It was B.H.'s fault, he thought. He should have expected something like this and gotten Harrison off the isolated outpost before now. Three men on a planet should stick together, especially now since there might be others around. He peered out into the gloom, trying to imagine where he could not see. Where in all that watery vastness could the alien capsule have landed? If it had been a capsule. The automatic recording satellite had only told them that something had entered the atmosphere and the distant guard ship had warned them of a Dent starship in the vicinity. But it didn't take a computer to put two and two together. Forrest had known nothing about any of it until that morning, when Commander Howard had called him in. "You can put down your comic book, Jim. I've got a job for you," Howard had said, reclining on his bunk in the control office while the automatic machinery around him ran the busy communications station. Slouching semi-respect fully within the door, Forrest had protested that it was Meyer's Dialogues he was holding in his hand and had added, "I've been grounded for four days, B.H. There isn't much else to do." The scene recreated itself in detail in Forrest's memory... IF heavily to his stockinged feet. "Don't take me seriously, Jim. I really do appreciate your volunteering to stay on and there hasn't been much to do around here. But now there is." He padded over to the message desk. Howard was not a military man -- the title of Commander had devolved on him along with Director, Station-Master and several other offices when the Stardust had left a month ago with the rest of the personnel. He cut no figure in his wrinkled blue suit -- it looked as if it had been slept in, as it probably had. But he was Forrest's boss and, though they had little in common, they had got on well. "Here's a message from Harrison over on the other island," said Howard. "It was sent via the stars -- Regulus picked it up on the gravity beam and relayed it back to us. I think I know how he did it -- hooked onto the planet's carrierwave. He used to do it for a joke until they made him cut it out, years ago. I didn't know that equipment was still left at the old station. It seems his planet radio is out. This is Morse code -- he could only switch on and off -- but the translation is below." Forrest took the paper, squinted at the markings and the penciled letters below them. " 'Retransmit to Howard, Marconi Station, Denebola. Radio out. Require box of Contrad at once. You have it in medical supplies. Must have some in twelve hours. No transportation. Sorry. Harrison.' What's Contrad?" Howard ran a hand over his balding forehead. "What do you know about Warner Harrison, Jim? Not much? Well, I'll tell you." He stared at the flashing lights indicating messages passing through from Regulus to Arcturus and elsewhere, the light-years spanned instantaneously by the gravity waves and requiring little monitoring here at the booster station. Forrest waited silently while Howard collected his thoughts. "Harrison was a pretty important man when Marconi Station was on Nexus Island, before they built this place. When he retired he wouldn't leave the island. He said he liked the ocean air on Marconi, didn't think he'd last the long journey back to Earth, so they let .him stay on at Nexus Island as sort of unofficial caretaker. They used to have a lot of workers at the old station -- not like here where everything's automatic -- and they even had a small community on an island adjoining, maybe a couple hundred people. Of course there's no one there now and the installation is dismantled, but Harrison keeps busy with his astronomy and other hobbies. The only thing is -- well, he was in a space accident about twenty years ago -- lost his wife and family and suffered from radiation effects himself. He got a lot of it into his bones -- they've got a cure, for that, only it has to be kept up.". "So Contrad is short for contraradiation," said Forrest. "Right. And when he says he needs it in twelve hours, he means it. If he doesn't have regular doses to suppress the radiation coming from his bones damage will be done elsewhere -- he. probably means he'll die in twelve hours. So we've got to bring it to him before then. I've got the stuff, I'm sure -- he made me store some here. I don't know why he ran out; he always kept an ample supply of Contrad. We're a long way from the drug store." Forrest was hardly listening. "But how will we get there? Nexus is a thousand miles from here. The submarine will take twenty hours -- and that's the only thing that'll make it in this storm." Howard looked worried. "Don't you think the plane is in condition?" "The planed Are you crazy? Even if I could take off in this mess I'd have to land, wouldn't I? I'd have to make two impossible landings -- or don't you want me to come back?" "Take it easy. I was just wondering," said Howard. "Besides," added Forrest, "The plane isn't in condition. It took a lot of beating in that wind before I got it under cover." "Take the skater, then. It ought to work in a storm if you set the jets up high enough -- and it can make it in about five hours. We've never used it except in a calm sea, but -- " "It certainly is a wonderful thing," said Forrest sarcastically. "They left us all kinds of transport. Only none of it is any good in an emergency." "Well, who could predict a storm like this? Marconi's never had one before. I don't know how long it will last and I don't want to wait for it to let up. This is a mission of mercy, Jim, and if you don't go, I'll go." Forrest flushed. "I'm the pilot around here, B.H. I guess the skater will make it. Find the medicine and I'm on my way." "Thanks," said Howard. "I wish I could just shoot it there. I could probably come close to the island with a missile, but he wouldn't have the ability to retrieve it. Besides, there's something else. Something I haven't told you." That was when he mentioned the Dents. "I don't have continuous contact with the guard ship. They can't use gravity waves, so they have to signal by radio or light and they were about two light-days out then. That was three Marconi-days ago -- I just got the message this morning. I don't know where they are now -- probably chasing the Dent starship." "But this is fantastic," said Forrest. "One lousy guard ship for the IF communications hub of the stellar empire!" Commander Howard frowned. "Why isn't this place better guarded? Because the Dents are normally peaceful. Too many of our guard ships in the heart of someone else's territory could cause trouble. This station can take care of itself, don't worry. No one can get within a hundred miles of this island, on, above, or under the surface. Or from space either. A free-falling missile, or any missile sent here, would be detected and destroyed without hurting us." "But can one man handle all the defenses?" "They're computer-run. One man here is just as tough as an army. Otherwise they wouldn't leave this station with minimum personnel. The station and base could even be completely automatic, but that's a little too dangerous. If Regulus or Arcturus could operate this station by remote control, so could anyone else with the right equipment. The only weak spot is the human element. I could let the Dents in -- but I won't. You'll even have to pass a test to get back in here, when you return, to make sure you're not a Dent in disguise. But don't worry, this base is safe. The robot defenses are always on guard. All they need is a button-presser. I can push buttons in my sleep." "So it isn't just a mission of mercy. You want me to check the island and see if there are any Dents around." "The satellite recorded the entry about the same time the Dent starship was seen. It's possible -- only possible, mind you -- that a capsule could have landed in the ocean near Nexus Island. It certainly didn't land within a hundred miles of here, or I would have detected it. And blown it out of the water, needless to say." "What'll I do with a Dent if I see one?" Howard looked as if this had not occurred to him. "The skater is armed. But try to avoid the Dents, if any. Just get the Contrad to Harrison. H'mmm -- maybe you'd better take him off. Bring him back here." "That would be best," agreed Forrest. "If Nexus is undefended it would be better not to have anyone there. Does he have any specialized knowledge they would particularly want?" "No. He's been out of the communications service too long. They'd get nothing new out of him. They'd get nothing out of the old station either -- what's not dismantled is obsolete. Still, Harrison's a good man -- so bring him back. If he doesn't want to come, persuade him." Forrest smirked wryly. "So all I have to do is go out in this terrific storm, manhandle an untested skater a thousand miles, keep a sharp lookout for aliens and talk a hermit into coming to town. That's a big order." Howard smiled. "You asked for work when you came here." "Couldn't you simplify the defense problem by shooting a missile to blow up the other island? I mean, if Harrison weren't there." Howard was startled, then thoughtful. "Yes, I could. Let me know, as soon as you get him off, and I might just send that missile. There's another little thing I might as well tell you. It's in the balance whether they're going to maintain this station, or abandon it. If they decide to abandon Marconi -- a relief ship will come to get us out of here. So maybe it's best if Harrison were here with us anyway. Then we wouldn't have to go get him when we leave. The space tender is ready to lift any time, as soon as there's a starship around to rendezvous with." The older man padded over to the stellar sphere, the three-dimensional globular chart of the stellar empire, three feet (or three hundred light-years) across. He poked a pencil through it. "Here's Denebola... Arcturus... Regulus... Sun. Shiplines are white, gravity lines red. If Denebola is taken out they'll have to reroute the SunRegulus channel through Pollux, here. That'll be expensive. It'll require an additional booster somewhere farther along the route. We're forty-three from Sun here. fifty from Regulus, not far from a straight line between the two. We're on an exact straight line between Arcturus and Regulus. Detouring there will add a lot of lightyears, but they're thinking of doing it. That's how desperate they are." "Well, we're not going to abandon Denebola, are we?" "It's not what we do. It's what the Dents do. They're all around us. If you remember your Earth history, we're about in the position of the American island of Guam in the midst of the Japanese Mandate. We're surrounded by Dentoccupied stars." Though Forrest knew Howard had made a study of famous wars and battles, it always surprised him to hear this non-bookish man say something like this. He looked through the window at the raging storm, then at the TV picture sent by the satellite, showing endless cloud cover. "It reminds me of another battle, too, in that same war," he said. "The Battle of the Bulge." Howard nodded. "Exactly. This storm is making it easy for the enemy. You might almost think they are making the storm." "I wouldn't put it past them," said Forrest. "Under cover of a storm -- a planet-wide storm -- they could land a capsule almost without detection. But -- so what? What's so dangerous about a couple of lousy Dents landing in a capsule?" IF W HA TS so dangerous? he had asked. The dark, onrushing waves were now higher and it looked like the storm would keep up all the way to the island. He adjusted the skater's clearance a notch and leaned back in the seat, tired from the vibration and noise of the engines and from the storm just outside the windows. At one time the Dents didn't seem dangerous, though he had never liked them himself. Once they could only imitate men imperfectly. Howard had tried to downgrade their powers but he had not been convincing. "They can't read minds," he had said. "So their imitations are only from observation. They can only imitate specific individuals -- ones they've got some personal data on. And get it out of your head that they replace people -- they don't. They only seem to, because occasionally they have impersonated someone after they disposed of the original. The Dents were always capable of some kind of imitation. In the early days of interstellar trade, they were caricatures of humanoids. You've seen the tradeform. Now, they're -- better." "Or worse." "There's nothing to worry about. Dents can't beat humans, in a fair fight. They can only infiltrate by disguising themselves. And we've got a sure-fire test to tell them from humans." "I've heard of that. 'Dear Dent, kindly hold still while I test you.' It certainly -- " "Take a pistol." "You don't really expect me to find Dents on the island? What about Harrison?" "They may have landed there. We've got to be prepared. As for Harrison..." Howard had made a sour face. "Test Harrison , too, when you meet him. That's one reason I can't go. I don't know what I'd do if he failed the test. He's too close a friend. I might be slow to shoot." Forrest had hefted the pistol Howard had given him, a Grennell special guard model with mounted flashlight. "All right." He had strapped on the holster. Howard had said, "I'd better tell you the other reason I can't go. You see, in addition to my other duties and titles, I'm also the captain." Forrest had waited for the expected punch line. "I'm the captain, who has to go down with the ship." Howard had padded over to the gravity beam controls, the most imposing array in the room. "The gravity waves are generated deep in the planet's interior. That's why these booster stations can't be out in space, where you'd think they'd logically be. Only a large, solid planet, like this one, can generate enough gravity power to send the beam to the stars instantaneously. There's a lot of power locked up in this station. II "Do you see that button over there?" Next to a busy seismograph Forrest had seen a glass case with a red button inside, marked "P.B." "PB.?" "Panic Button. Someone has to push that as a last resort. It's a safety measure to prevent an enemy from taking over the station in a surprise attack. All it does is cut off a damper that suppresses a secondary vibration of the gravity waves that can cause an earthquake that will not only destroy the station -- but will break up the planet. Naturally this can't be safely rigged to operate by remote control. Someone else might find a way to operate it, then." "It certainly is a wonderful thing," Forrest had saidr Now he was nearing the island and the storm hadn't let up. It had grown darker, as the eight-hour night had begun. He tried to contact Harrison, but no response, as expected. Mark Station was long out of coptact, the TV shredding before a hundred miles had gone by. At the last Howard had pressed a slip of paper to the facsimile plate and Forrest had peeled the copy from his own plate. He looked at it again. There were several lines in B.H.'s barely legible scrawl -- a series of questions for him to ask Harrison. Howard had said that the official test was sure-fire. Why, then, the additional quiz? and suddenly a long, flattopped island grew visible in the gloom, plainly artificial and surrounded by a high sea wall. He saw the dome of the observatory to the left, circled toward the flare-outlined airfield. At the last moment he veered and landed in the water just off the skater-ramp, taxied in. The violent rocking of the waves made him a little sick. He drove high up on the ramp and stopped the engines. Opening the door with difficulty against the wind and rain, he got out. He was instantly drenched -- he had no raincoat. The place looked deserted, as of course it almost was. Someone was coming toward him from the airfield, running raincoat flapping. Forrest hastily took out his Grennell pistol. "Stop," he shouted. "Stop where you are." He tensed -- what would he do if the runner didn't stop? Cold chills ran down his back. He sneezed. The slight figure halted about fifty feet from him. He flicked on the pistol-mounted flashlight and the be,am stabbed through the raindrops, fighting up a small white face beneath a dripping rain hat. It was Harrison, from his pictures. He was squinting in the bright fight. He had already passed the "blink" test. IF though it was raining too hard to be certain. "Is that B.H.?" called Harrison in a weak voice. "No, I'm Howard's pilot, Jim Forrest." He held the light steady. "Did you bring the Contrad?" The voice was even weaker. "Yes. I have a little test for you. Close your eyes, stand still and say nothing for one minute after I give the signal, 'time.' " This was the fabulous "elapsed time test" that Earth's scientists had devised to tell Dents from humans. Harrison protested mildly, "It's raining -- " but obediently closed his eyes. I know , thought Forrest. He was much wetter than Harrison, who at least had a raincoat. "When I say 'time' you start counting, or whatever you want to do, until one minute -- one standard stellar minute -- is up. Then say so." The Dents had no innate sense of time, perhaps because they were said to have no hearts. "Time." Forrest looked at his wristwatch, tried to make sure that the other man wasn't looking at his. This was not the most favorable condition for conducting any test. The rain came down harder. "The minute's up," said Harrison at last. Forrest looked at his watch: # seconds. That was close enough. It's human to judge time too fast by a little. If it had been exactly sixty seconds he might even have been a little suspicious. He kept the light on the shining face. "Can we go in now? Let's go in," Harrison was pleading. "Just a minute." Forrest pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket. It was soaked, nearly falling apart. Well, he could remember the questions B.H. had written down. Chilled to the bone, Forrest kept the Grennell pointed. The figure seemed to sway. The paper had now disintegrated in the rain, "Okay. One , said Forrest, clearly. "When you and Howard were working together at the old station, what was your private nickname for him?" "Shoeless," said Harrison. All right so far , thought Forrest. But that was fairly easy. "Two. There was a golf game on Nexus Island the last time Howard was there. Who else was in the foursome?" "Uh -- Howard's wife and Lieutenant Betty Kay of the Transportation Corps. Can we go in now?" The wind began blowing in gusts, driving the rain crazily around them. "One more," said Forrest miserably. He stopped to sneeze. " Three . There was a Christmas party fourteen years ago in the Nexus Hotel. Besides you and Howard, what other people were there?" Silence. Then, weak but stronger than before, "You can tell B.H. to go to Antares and take up an orbit within the perimeter. How the hell should I know?" The last words were barely audible. Forrest heaved a sigh of relief. That was the right answer . Few people could remember such details; but a disguised Dent, notorious for overacting, was expected to try. He put his pistol away and walked toward Harrison in the dark. He almost panicked when he didn't find him, then he saw a crumpled form at his feet. Harrison had fainted. Forrest felt like kicking himself. He had forgotten that Harrison was in a weakened condition, might even be dying. It was an instant's work to lift him and carry him up the ramp arid into the building; the door was unlocked. This was apparently Harrison's living quarters. Forrest laid the unconscious man down on a couch, then ran out again to the skater and brought in the box of medicine. Closing the door, he took off his soggy collar-shawl. It was cozy in here, but he was soaked. Harrison seemed to be in a bad way, breathing heavily. Forrest did what he could to make him comfortable, removing his wet outer clothing and covering him with a blanket. Then he administered the Contrad, an injection into the arm, as well as several other medications prescribed in the emergency instructions on the box. Harrison responded rapidly and soon was relaxing in a deep sleep. Forrest tried to relax, too, began looking for a place to dry his clothes. short nap later Forrest felt somewhat refreshed, but he marveled at Harrison's quick recovery. He watched the older man eat heartily of bacon and eggs across the table. Harrison now wore a casual outfit of clashing striped colors, contrasting with Forrest's tasteful greens and browns, hanging behind him to dry. "You've got a varied cuisine here for an abandoned outpost forty-three light-years from San Francisco," said Forrest, toying with the remains of his steak. "I stocked up," said Harrison with a broad, toothy smile. "They told me I could have any supplies still left on the base when the communications personnel left and -- " "How did you run out of Contrad, then?" interrupted Forrest, getting up from the table. His clothes were dry, so he took them off the hangers. Harrison looked embarrassed. "That was my fool mistake. I thought I had enough. I counted the empty boxes." He would say no more about it and Forrest changed the subject. He was beginning to like the little man, though he had known him for only a few hours. Forrest slipped on his cigar-brown shirt, stepped IF into his leaf-green slacks and joined them deftly. He was curious about another thing. "How did you manage to hook onto the gravity beam?" he asked, pulling on his brown bootsox. "Oh, that." Harrison grinned. "I still had the old rig I used before. Burned it out, though, finally. Lucky I got through with what I sent. I assume I did -- you're here." " ' Strange , that one learns of one's own house front the distant stars.' " Forrest threw his darkgreen collar-shawl around his shoulders and snapped the button in front. "What's that, a quotation?" asked Harrison, spooning Arcturan peaches. Forrest nodded. "The seventeenth-century playwright, Charles Burbee." He looked around at the homey little room. He realized that Harrison was happy here -- yet Forrest had to get him off. He brought up the subject of the Dent capsule. "All we know is that it entered the atmosphere -- we don't know exactly where...If they'd landed within a hundred miles of Mark, we would have had them. If they'd landed in clear weather anywhere on Marconi we could have picked them up without any difficulty. But this storm -- " Harrison stopped eating, looked up in surprise. "Then that's what it was I heard about three or four nights ago -- a whistling roar woke me up. I thought it was a funny sound for thunder." "Then they might have landed in the ocean somewhere within a few miles of here," said Forrest. The feeling of peace left him and nervousness replaced it. He picked up the heavy holster and strapped it on. "Well, I haven't seen them," said Harrison. "They ought to have shown up by now. Maybe they crashed in the ocean." He seemed to be taking the matter calmly, went back to his coffee. "I was wondering about the lodge ritual last night." "Howard thought they might have already landed on this island. That's why he told me to test you. How big is this station? It's bigger than the new one, isn't it?" "No, it's smaller. That is, the station itself. Nexus City covers a larger area on its own island." "Well, couldn't an alien have put ashore somewhere without you knowing about it?" "I doubt it," said Harrison. "But we'll just take a look." He got up, turned toward the stairs. "The observatory's just above." T HE little man mounted a circular staircase, pressed a button on the bannister and the stairs started moving upward. Forrest got on behind and below him. Harrison turned and smiled down crookedly. # Ever see a circular moving stairway?" Forrest had to admit that he hadn't. This station, though smaller than Mark, was built for a large staff of technicians. He wondered how many men had once used this stairway back in the Old Nexus days. On the second floor they walked past the open door of a large room whose appointments looked familiar to him. Of course -- this was the communications control room. Quaintly different from Commander Howard's, it was fitted with fewer computing-machine stands and more desks and chairs. # Many of the functions were manual here," explained Harrison superfluously. "It would take a dozen men to operate the gravity beams alone. All I could do was jury-rig some surplus apparatus to get a simple message out, the old on-off code, hooked onto the New Nexus beam to Regulus. That's the wreck over there." He pointed to a Rube-Goldbergian contraption bristling with wires and levers, scorched black and covered with fire-extinguisher foam. # I often talked with Howard via Arcturus -- or Regulus or the Sun -- after he moved over to New Nexus -- I mean Mark -- until they traced the astronomical expense involved and made us stop it." He chuckled. # There's nothing much else to interest you here unless you can do something to fix the planet radio." # Tm a pilot, not a communications expert," said Forrest. Harrison said, "It probably wouldn't work in this storm anyway. And the mast is down, too." Harrison stepped up to another set of stairs, clicked it on. Forrest noticed another door as he passed it. It was closed. # That's the storeroom," said  Harrison, moving upward. "By the way, that box of Contrad you brought me ought to last me for six months. The Stardust ought to be back by then with my order." He vanished around the stairs. Forrest wondered darkly if the Stardust would ever be back. He stared at the closed door of the storeroom, thinking of something else. Harrison reappeared, treading backward, waved at him impatiently. "Come on up to the observatory." Forrest got on the moving stairs with a sigh, walked up two at a time and soon caught up to Harrison. They rose into a blue-lighted room. It was daylight. Not the brightness of a clear day but the blue-gray of an overcast dawn. There were windows on all sides of the spacious observatory room. Forrest was delighted by the view of the tossing gray sea and went to the nearest window, where he felt the breeze of fresh ocean air from a small, indirect opening. The rain IF had let up a little and he could see for almost a mile, though not to the horizon, where dark clouds lingered. The high sea wall of the artificial island was close below him, except on one side where the jumbled building of Old Nexus City stretched away for several blocks, its roofs and streets glistening with rain, still falling lightly. Forrest looked at his Arcturusmade, Marconi-set watch. It was just five o'clock, near the beginning of the eight-hour day. A thousand miles from Mark Station, along the equator, would mean a difference in time of about an hour, not worth bothering with, so the two islands kept the same time. Maybe the storm would clear up, Forrest thought. This waterbound planet didn't have much stormy weather, being nearly seasonless, so far out from the giant star Denebola that its orbital year could be measured in centuries. If it weren't for the presence of the alien Dents in nearby systems, Marconi would be a good place to live, as well as a communications link. But no one had wanted an oceancovered world for colonization -- with so many others available -- and the few and tiny other planets of Denebola were unattractive. Now the Regulus region, fifty light-years farther out, was the new heart of empire, with hundreds of better planets than this. He'd have to go there some day. Fifty light-years were not too many. T HE voice of Harrison roused him from his reverie. "You didn't notice my telescope." There it stood, hardly to be missed in the center of the room -- an optical refractor that was obviously not the instrument of a professional astronomer but that of an enthusiastic amateur. It pointed upward through a section of the dome, now closed. Harrison started its motor, swiveled it, spun it in a circle, pointed out its features and generally displayed it proudly. "I could show you the Sun, even in the daytime, if it weren't for this damn rainstorm. I haven't been able to use this telescope for days." He shut off the instrument, wiped it with a cloth and turned back to Forrest. The amateur astronomer was in his element. "Have you ever seen the Sun from here? It's a fifth-magnitude star. The nearest bright star to it is Beta Ceti, third magnitude. Rather an empty region of space. The Sun is just within the borders of the old constellation of Aquarius; They used to have a saying that when the Sun is in Aquarius -- the Water Bearer -- there'll be lots of rain." He flashed a broad grin. "Here it's always in Aquarius, so -- " "I see you have a stellar sphere, too," remarked Forrest, ignoring the joke. It was a globe smaller, older than the one back at Mark Station. And it had fewer white and red lines. 'I brought it up here from the control room," said Harrison. "I use it for a star chart once in a while, though it's not up to date." "It's an antique," said Forrest. "The sphere is only two hundred light-years in diameter." There weren't any aliens around here then , thought Forrest. Now the Dents were all around, menacing the link with Regulus, as well as Denebola itself. Twisting the Lion's tail. No one knew where the Dents had originally come from. They had always been seen in their gray, featureless trade-forms, their sketchy arms, legs and head parodying the humans and humanoids they traded with. It was thought that their original form was more horrible and not at all humanoid. The Dents kept this a closely guarded secret -- without claiming the trade-forms were their own. Now they were actually imitating humans and getting good at it. The reason for the war at present was this very possibility of infiltration through impersonation. Earlier the Dents had been figures of fun with their crude imitations and dressed in ridiculous clothes. Now they were not so funny. Harrison was explaining something about the workings of gravity beams, but Forrest could not pay attention to the technical stuff. His mind was otherwise occupied. Why were he and Harrison wasting time when they ought to be looking for the Dent capsule? Or better, making tracks in the skater back to Mark Station? But first he had to persuade Harrison to go. He seemed to be contented here. Forrest didn't blame him; it was a nice place -- if it weren't for the Dents. " -- dependent on space itself," Harrison was saying. "That's why it's instantaneous anywhere in the stellar sphere, even across the galaxy, if we had boosting stations. To the Andromeda Nebula in a tenth of a second." "In a tenth of a second?" said Forrest, surprised out of his silence. "I thought it was instantaneous all over." Harrison flashed his toothy smile. "Not completely. For all practical purposes. At intra-galactic distances. Even gravity waves have their limitations." Forrest said, "If we could only hook up ships to that beam we could cross the galaxy in no time." "Why should we?" said Harrison. "We couldn't explore it all in a other races." This brought Forrest back to the present, down to Marconi. "What do you know about the Dents?" "The Identities? Not much, really. They are an industrious race, they are almost humanoid -- at least in their trade forms." "Have you ever seen one?" IF "No," said Harrison. "They've never actually landed on Marconi -- although they have made some entries into this system in the past. Accidentally, mostly. But, outside of TV, no." "I have," said Forrest. "A long time ago, when I was a kid on Arcturus, one came to Einstein with a circus or something. He was a gray, greasy, rubber-doll-like little bastard -- when he wasn't trying to disguise himself as a human." "You know that even that isn't the Identities' true shape," said Harrison. "They assumed it only to trade with humanoid races." "Blech," said Forrest. "I don't think I want to see the real Identities." "Why, you're prejudiced." Harrison grinned. "I didn't think it of you. I suppose we must all put on our prejudices -- along with our uniforms -- now that war is, impending." "You're an idiot," said Forrest softly. Ill servatory windows. Harrison handed him a pair of # x # binoculars and he scanned the horizon, less visible now than ever, though the day was further advanced. Dark clouds obscured the sea, hung closer in than before. He turned to examine the shoreline of the island. Down below him the skater ramp was awash with bouncing rain. The skater itself sat solidly there, a bit of familiar security. The adjoining airfield was empty. Scanning farther, Forrest gave a grunt of surprise. "What's that sticking out of the water there?" He indicated the sea just below the airport, where what looked like a bundle of rods broke the water. "That's the copter," said Harrison. "The storm wrecked it the first blow, knocked it down there from the field. So, no transportation. As if I could fly in this storm anyway." Forrest continued searching the base of the island -- the submarine landing, the isthmus bridge to Nexus City, the skater ramp again. He wondered what had been increasingly bothering him -- now he knew. There was no protection here. No armament. The place was wide open. He mentioned this to Harrison. The little man pointed to a balcony, where a small variable-firepower cannon was mounted. Then he showed the tiny pistol inside his shirt. Harrison looked too smug even to be laughable. Was this all he had? Forrest could easily defeat this puny weaponry with nothing but the skater's own armament. He turned away and, impelled by a new sense of urgency, strained his eyes in the fading light toward the buildings of Old Nexus City. He looked at his watch. It was about six o'clock, still two hours short of noon, but it was getting dark. That meant another storm was blowing up. Beyond the bridge he could barely make out the open square, flanked by what looked like a theater and shops. He wondered what Old Nexus City was like. "You want to see Nexus City? Let's go, then," said Harrison, seeming to read his mind. "I don't think we have time for any sight-seeing tours," snapped Forrest. "I'd like to get the skater off the ramp and on its way before another storm hits. And you -- you're going with me." "In the skater? What for?" "You can't stay here." "Why not?" "Because -- oh, hell, you don't see it, do you? You have no defenses. You don't even have any detectors." "Yes, I have," said Harrison. "They're all over the island. They just haven't shown anything so far. Metal detectors, radiation detectors, motor detectors, all kinds. I was ready for you last night, wasn't I? I'm not defenseless." Harrison calmed down, looked unhappy. "But you better go ahead, before the storm prevents your departure." "You're coming along," said Forrest. Then he sighed, admitting temporary defeat. "All right. Tell me about Old Nexus City." He'd wait his chance to use force. He'd have to watch out for the pistol now. Harrison's face relaxed. "Nexus means 'link.' Fancy guys in those days. Now this isn't the only interstellar link any more. When they opened the new station they just called it Marconi -- or Mark. Everyone left here when Nexus closed, so the city is vacant. I guess the Stardust took off most of Mark's personnel too, didn't it? Is Howard the only one left there?" "Yes," said Forrest. "Except me. And I'm not there. That's another reason I want to get back." "I'm sure B.H. can take care of himself." You dont know the half of it , thought Forrest. He had better not mention the missiles Howard had trained on this island or Harrison would never agree to leave. Another thought occurred to him. He wondered how long Howard would wait without hearing from him before launching the missiles anyway. Forrest raised the binoculars again, gave up. Outside was too dark and the rain too heavy. "I'm suspicious about that ghost town." "It's not a ghost town. I use some of it; it stays in good shape. Nexus City had everything, still has a lot. Let's go down there and I'll show it to you." Forrest didn't like the waste of time involved, but he agreed because he wanted to see if there were any traces of the aliens' landing IF there. He wasn't supposed to tangle with the Dents but... way but Harrison led the way to a door opposite the stairs. Behind the door was a large closet. In it were two little cars, like miniature railway cars. Harrison got into the front one and motioned Forrest to climb into the other. He did so, thinking this was some kind of fast, tobogganlike elevator to the control room and living quarters below. It was a tight fit but he made it. "I took this from the amusement park," said Harrison, moving levers. Another door opened in front of them and a blast of cold, wet air hit their faces. "Hang on." The cars jerked forward and down, out into the dark, and the bottom dropped out from under Forrest's midsection. Driving rain hit him like a waterfall. He saw for an instant a dark, yawning pit and, with a roar that drowned out Forrest's cries, the vehicles rolled down the side of the observatory tower, flashed out over the bridge, coasted across the old market place, braked to a slow rolling glide. It was all over in seconds. The cars stopped and Harrison hopped out. Forrest climbed out more slowly, shaking. It was raining heavily and he was getting soaked again. So this was Old Nexus City. He could hardly see the surrounding buildings. Harrison was hurrying into a store and Forrest followed, sloshing across the square. "What's in here?" he asked hoarsely when he had gotten inside. "Raincoats," said Harrison, taking them off the shelves. They walked through the store, carrying their new raincoats. All the merchandise was new but seemed ten or more years out of date, which of course it was. "Take anything you want," invited Harrison, but Forrest was preoccupied. He could understand Harrison's reluctance to leave this island. He had everything he wanted here. For a retired man it was a nice little place. It was too bad Howard was going to destroy it soon. This was a nice little planet , too. Was Howard going to have to destroy it also? He wondered uneasily what Howard was doing now, what he was thinking. They walked through an arcade, shops on both sides, and entered the lobby of the Nexus Hotel. Despite everything that Harrison may have done to preserve it the lobby did not look quite natural -- it was empty of people. Nevertheless, it was clean and well-lighted. They made their way to the automatic bar. They sat down at 'a table and Harrison ordered -- punched buttons -- for both. Forrest made a decision. Harrison was likely to stall here all day. Forrest still had not convinced him of the necessity of leaving the island. He needed shock treatment. Agan."B.H. gave orders to take you back with me. He also said to let him know as soon as we left the island, so that he could bomb it. Just to make sure that no Dents land here he intends to sink the island with missiles." If Harrison was shaken by this information he didn't show it. "After we leave, did you say? Then there's nothing to worry about. I'm not leaving." He smiled engagingly. Forrest tasted his drink. "He also said -- " now was the time to stretch the truth a little -- "that if I didn't get back in sixteen hours he might send the missiles anyway." Now Harrison was distrubed. He put down his glass. "He wouldn't do that." "Wouldn't he? He'd as soon do that as press the Panic Button." Harrison drank. "Ah, yes. The Panic Button. I had forgotten that. Well, if he presses that, what difference does it make whether we're here or there?" "You have just about an hour to decide. It's too late now to stop him -- it would take four hours just to get within radio range in this storm -- but at least we can get off the island." "You're lying." Harrison said this with such certainty that Forrest was startled. "If there were a time limit you would have told me about it before this." "All right," said Forrest. "But maybe I'm not lying when I say that B.H. has a nervous trigger finger. You know him better than I do. How can we play it safe? By contacting him. But to do that we have to go back at least part of the way." Harrison seemed thoughtful. "Maybe you better go back and tell him that I'm not leaving the island. I'll take my chances on B.H.'s nerves." "I'm not going without you," said Forrest. He might have to jump Harrison if nothing else worked. Harrison shrugged. "Okay. I'll show you the rest of the island -- convince you that there are no Identities around here." He rose and a check popped up in the center of the table. He picked it up and said, "This one's on me." He walked to the cashier's desk and threw the check into a basket that already held a large pile of checks. Forrest followed Harrison through the lobby and to the door, donning his raincoat. This was a strangely calm reaction to the news he had thought would be a bombshell. Shouldn't Harrison have tried to hustle him off to tell IF Howard not to bomb the place? Instead, he was stalling. It was almost as if he was trying to prove something -- that he was reluctant to leave but could be argued out of it. They walked out into the rain, sloshed across the mall. The rain was still coming down heavily. Forrest caught up to Harrison, who was striding along in a direction away from the observatory and toward the far side of Old Nexus City. "Aren't you sort of -- " Overdoing if! Forrest completed the sentence to himself. Harrison turned, still walking. "Sort of what?" "Sort of blase about it all," Forrest said. "This is a dangerous situation. Howard thinks -- " "Forrest, I'm not going. You can tell B.H. to go circle a nova. It's people like him who create situations." "It isn't just Howard's opinion. I thought -- and I still think -- that the Dents may have come down near here. You thought so, too." "I did?" Harrison was going up the steps of an imposing building marked City Hall. "Well, when you said you'd heard a sound that might have been the capsule coming down." Harrison didn't answer. They entered by a revolving door, came into a hall with many side doors. Harrison used one and they found themselves in a spacious room. "This is the council chamber. I'r p the mayor." Harrison picked up a gavel. "Or was. Still am, I suppose." He turned to Forrest, his face serious. "You can tell B.H. that if the Identities are going to get me -- they can get me. I've lived long enough. I've had a quiet life the past twelve years. I don't want to leave here. If this is the end -- so be it." He tapped the gavel expertly. "You go back without me. And that's my last word." Forrest thought he detected a flaw in the situation. He had guessed Harrison was something of a nut -- he had been a hermit for years and would fight to stay as he was. But he ought to know the score. He was a student of interstellar history. He was Howard's close buddy and ought to have some respect for his military opinions. It would seem that, regardless of his attachment to this place, Harrison would sacrifice his personal feelings for the big picture -- the danger that all of them were in, together. Though a loner, Harrison was not known to be antisocial or unpatriotic. Forrest sat down in one of the councilmen's seats, while Harrison browsed through old record books. Forrest believed his own silence would be expected after the unanswerable finality of Harrison's last statement. Forrest would seem to be thinking hard -- which he was. he had seen many facets of Warner Harrison, the hermit of Marconi. He had seen the sick man, the happy recluse, the hobbyist, the pedant, the zany, the friendly guide, the reminiscent old man, the defiant one. It was as if Harrison was trying to reveal all the traits of his character in a single day. He seemed to want to convince Forrest that he really was Harrison. But why would the hermit want to do that? Forrest stiffened. If he really were Harrison he wouldn't give a damn. He might still want to stay on the island, come hell or high water -- but if,Harrisonwere not Harrison, was an alien, a Dent, he would only say he wanted to stay on the island, but would really want to go to Mark Station. Forrest closed his eyes, tried to think clearly and dispassionately while his brain was whirling. The Identities were imitators, actors, and were getting better all the time. If Harrison was a Dent -- then all the tests had failed. Howard had better be advised -- and quickly. How could Forrest be sure, though? He could not challenge Harrison with an explosive accusation. One thing characterized the Dents' acting, good as it was. Sometimes they overacted. Unless they had conqueredthis failing. For, if Harrison Was a Dent, this particular Dent deserved to win the Academy Award. Forrest felt for the pistol under his raincoat, looking at Harrison speculatively as he prowled the bookshelves of the council chamber. Harrison? Could he even think of him now as Harrison? There was no certainty, one way or the other. He tried to keep in mind the fleeting thought he had just had; it might be the key. All actors overact, at times. They must. They are playing out a lie and the lie must be strongly constructed. The Identities, with their perfect memories, were capable of building the ultimate lie -- an imitation human being. In strengthening the fiction they might go too far, just to make sure they were believable. He thought of the little Earth animal, some kind of rodent, which had a life-saving habit of playing dead when approached by some dangerous predator. He had read somewhere that this creature feigned death perfectly, could be touched and handled without showing signs of life. But when placed upright it would roll over and play dead again. Such an action wouldn't fool anyone but the other dumb animals. Harrison was at the window. "It looks like it's letting up," he said. "Let's go take a look at the beach." Forrest forced himself to get up in spite of his shaky knees. Trying IF not to appear nervous, he walked out with -- Harrison? IV T HE other side of the city hall overlooked a park. The gray ocean lay beyond. There was a small beach below the sea wall, protected by a breakwater. The rain had almost stopped and the sky was brighter, though still overcast. The waters were slate gray and full of tossing whitecaps. Forrest and Harrison stood on the city hall steps. Harrison said, "You can see the whole outer shoreline, from here. Look for aliens while you have the opportunity." To one side were an amusement center and a playground; on the other were small apartment houses. The park extended along the shore and the beach could be seen along its entire length. There was a boat-landing farther on, but otherwise nothing broke the symmetry of the combers and the sands. What a perfect place for a Dent capsule to land, out of sight of the observatory... They stood for a while in silence, the sounds of the seashore coming faintly up to them. Something seemed missing. "No sea gulls," said Forrest. "No fish," said Harrison. "There's some life on this planet. but it's very primitive. About th? trilobite stage. Still, when the men imported some fish for sporting purposes something ate them. Interesting, but not my line." Forrest was thinking of how to prove that this man was or was not a Dent. How could he? No test would work now. He couldn't test Harrison for overacting. Had Harrison rolled over once too often? It was strange that the radio was out, while no reception was possible 'in any case because of the storm and because the mast was down, too. That the copter was wrecked, though no one, least of all Harrison, would think of flying one in this weather. That he had contacted Howard by means of a haywire hookup via the stars -- but not even that was destroyed. The situation was too pat. There was one way to make Harrison show his hand. Hermit and Dent had different goals, different intentions. It was Forrest's turn to lie. "I don't think the capsule has landed here at all," he said, watching Harrison's reactions. "I think I'd better get back to Mark. If you don't want to come, all right. I'll talk B. H. out of bombing the island. If he's held out this long, he'll wait till I contact him. You can stay here and more power to you. If the Dents come, give 'em hell." "I can take care of the Dents," said Harrison. route, walking past the workers' deserted apartment houses. Harrison took Forrest through one of them and he found it still in livable condition. Merely uninhabited. Harrison was silent now -- he seemed to be baffled. Was he trying to think of a way to reverse his stand? Forrest found himself waiting for Harrison to suggest that perhaps he might change his mind and leave the island after all... Not that this in itself would prove that Harrison was -- or was not -- a Dent. Forrest would have to come up with a test, a positive one. He had not tried a physical examination -- he wished he had done so when he had had a chance, but at that moment Harrison had been ill and had just passed two tests with flying colors. If Forrest pulled a pistol on him now to force him to submit to an examination, the game would be over. Harrison had a pistol too. The game would be over -- maybe a showdown was best by now. Forrest's own play-acting had gone on long enough. The real Harrison should not object to physical examination. And suddenly Forrest remembered -- another test that could bear repetition. When Harrison led him out to the street and across it to the old theater, Forrest saw his opportunity had come. Theaters were not lit from outside and could be made perfectly dark. He was going to try the "blink" test again. "This was once the most popular place on the island," Harrison was saying, walking down the theater aisle. "I just wanted to see it one more time before -- before you go." He walked to the front row and sat down. The lights had come on when they had entered, as they had in all the other buildings. But here, Forrest thought, there had to be a switch. He walked below the stage, pretending to be inspecting the place, but actually he was headed for the side door. As he reached it he noted with satisfaction that there was a switch on the wall. He put his back to it, leaned against it, facing the interior of the theater. "Harrison," he said. "I'm sorry, but my time's up. I really have to be going. Now." The other man looked at him and said, "Wait. I've changed my mind. I think I'll go back to Mark with you after all." He stood up, started toward Forrest. You haven't changed your mind , just your body , thought Forrest. He took out the pistol, pointed it at Harrison. "Stand where you are." He flashed on the light, playing it on Harrison's face. "You blink too much. Can't you face a strong light?" Harrison's eyes widened, but he stood still. "What's the matter with IF you, Forrest? Have you gone insane?" He held his hands loosely in the air. "No, I've suddenly gone sane. Stand right where you are -- don't move." Harrison attempted to smile. "What is this, another test?" F OR an answer, Forrest reached behind him and snapped out the house lights. He also turned off his flashlight. Pitch blackness surrounded him and he suddenly realized that this was a foolhardy thing to do. He counted silently, intending to count to ten. But at five he lost his nerve and flicked on the flashlight. of Harrison, now much closer to him, eyes unblinking in the full glare of the light. He saw that Harrison had his own pistol out. Forrest flipped off the light, ducked and fired almost simultaneously with Harrison. Both shots went wild. In the darkness Forrest went for the door. It was only a few feet behind him. He plunged into the dimly lit alleyway, which soon led him to the marketplace. He was not going to go after Harrison now -- it was back to the skater and he knew the way. He ran across the wet square and made for the bridge. The observatory was plainly in sight -- the rain was only falling lightly. He risked turning around and saw Harrison -- or the Dent -- just now coming out of the theater, aiming a shot at him. He ducked, returned fire and started a zigzag run toward the bridge. He saw with satisfaction that he could outrun Harrison all the way. Harrison? It was hard to think of his pursuer as a Dent -- an alien Identity. The real Harrison was probably dead. The test had worked -- or rather, the trap. The Dent had decided that the situation had become unpredictable and had tried to take advantage of the darkness that Forrest unexpectedly had given him. He had exposed the alien, but he was barely escaping with his life. What would Howard say? Howard had warned Forrest to be careful, and now he had fiddled away hours talking to a damned Dent. Now if he could just get back to the skater and launch it, back to Mark and tell B.H. to loose the missiles, the situation might still be saved. It certainly was a wonderful thing... He pounded onto the bridge, almost tripping over the rollercoaster tracks. That crazy ride -- that should have been his tipoff. He should have gone back to the skater then. Another shot whistled past him, whined off the buildings on the far side. He was halfway across the bridge and decided not to slow down to see what Harrison was V doing. Better to concentrate on running. Nearly across the bridge, trying to think of the shortest way to the skater ramp, he saw a figure ahead of him, beyond the end of the bridge. A man wearing a flapping raincoat was running toward him. The gait, the bulk, the blue suit showing under the open raincoat, all were familiar. Howard. Forrest didn't pause -- he continued running. What was Commander Howard doing here? How had he come here? Who was watching the store? "B.H.," he called, "Get back! Harrison is a Dent and he's right behind me -- " He ran to within a few yards of Howard, turned, aiming his pistol. He could not see Harrison, who was not yet on the bridge, but he squeezed off a shot anyway, heard it ricochet across the railings. Then the figure of Harrison appeared at the far end of the bridge, pumping away, and Forrest took careful aim. He couldn't miss. Something hit him from behind. Clubbing blows on his head and shoulders caused him to drop the pistol and fall to the wet pavement. Rapidly losing consciousness, he saw Howard standing over him, his face expressionless. He heard Harrison's voice, then nothing. senses gradually against the resistance of a throbbing headache, a loud roaring, a tightly cramped position, and, over all, a continuous jouncing motion. Though he seemed unable to move his body he was never still -- he was seated, legs folded, upon a jolting floor, which slanted and jumped, tossing him about with every shift and slide. Even before he opened his eyes he realized he was in the rear compartment of the skater, moving at top speed through the fury of a storm. Pain and sickness threatened to return him to unconsciousness. He groaned, shook his head to clear it and opened his eyes. He was facing forward, his back against the rear panel, next to some luggage. He was surprised to find he was not tied, but he could not move his limbs -- or at least he found that it was extremely difficult to move them. A sort of numbness enfolded him, not entirely explained by his stiff and cramped position. It felt like some kind of paralysis, slowly wearing off. Harrison and Howard sat in the front seats, either, of course, was human. Harrison -- notHarrison -- was driving the skater. The storm was worse than ever and Howard -- or the Dent who looked like Howard -- was helping to drive, as was the automatic pilot. IF its whining up and down the scale adding to the din -- and between the three of them they were having a difficult time. Forrest could not help smiling, despite his predicament. Everyone had problems. Lightning and darkness and driving rain were all he could see through the windows. He could not see the instruments from where he was, but he could imagine their wild warnings. The waves could be heard -- and felt -- hitting the bottom of the skater. Take it up higher , he tried to say, but he could not make an intelligible sound. Soon, however, the aliens seemed to arrive at the same conclusion and the skater became more stable. The shaking continued with moderation. The Dent-thatwas-Howard relinquished the controls to Dent-Harrison and turned around. Forrest looked into the face of Howard that was not the face of Howard. He felt sick. He wanted to go back to unconsciousness, but instead stared into the eyes of the Dent. He imagined he could see hatred there, but he could not be sure. He knew nothing about the psychology of the Identities -- he would soon learn, he imagined. "Is he awake?" asked DentHarrison, not turning around, his attention on the instruments. Dent-Howard opened his mouth and a croaking sound came from it. "Speak English," admonished the other Dent. "You've got to keep in practice, ven if we won't need your impersonation for a while." "Practice?" snapped DentHoward. "I fooled Harrison -- and you didn't fool this one." "All right, I admit I delayed too long. He wasn't suspicious at first. But I had to play hard to convince, remember." Forrest noticed that Dent-Harrison was wearing a slightly different combination of clashing colors, purple and green. Dent-Howard, in the usual subdued blue, seemed angry. "And so you nearly ruined our chances. If I hadn't come running you would have let him escape in the skater -- and then where would we be?" "I thought of calling you from the theater, didn't I? That was quick thinking -- " "The only time you ever thought anything quickly. If you weren't my own bud I'd -- " He ended with a croaking, hissing sound. busying himself with the controls. Dent-Howard looked coldly at Forrest -- an expression that Forrest himself had never seen on the real Howard's face. "What'll we do with him?" Forrest waited for the other Dent's reply. "Why -- we'll use him. Even though we can no longer use him as a dupe, we can use him as a model." Forrest couldn't see Dent-Harrison's face, but he imagined the alien smiled. "He would have been better as a dupe," croaked Dent-Howard. "Of course," returned DentHarrison. "But we Krawk-sss -- " Now it was Dent-Howard's turn to admonish. "Dents! Don't say Krawk-sss. You must remember." "Identities -- always say, if one thing doesn't work, try another. It would be hard for me to go it alone now, try to convince Howard that Forrest got lost or killed or something -- that would immediately make him suspicious. So we've got to replace Forrest with another imitation." "Not me," said Dent-Howard. "I can't shift from character to character, like a damn repertory player. This is method acting, and you've got to be the man you impersonate. Trying to do more than one character weakens both. Note how well I've learned. I don't have to tell you how important this expedition is. There can't be any more slips. That's why they chose me -- us. I've got to keep on being Commander Howard -- later we'll be using him in contact with the outside." Dent-Howard's face became almost genial. "Two down and one to go. Tomorrow we control Marconi -- and with it this system. The day after that, the stellar sphere." "You're getting ahead of yourself. We haven't head from the starship yet." "We will. As soon as we do our part, they'll do theirs." "If this storm keeps up -- " began Dent-Harrison. "It had better keep up," said Dent-Howard. "I don't know how long it's supposed to last, but our people will be back and seed another before this one blows itself out, if necessary. By that time we'll be in possession of the station and we won't have to worry about cover. And then we won't have to worry about anything. We'll dominate space from Denebola to system's end. Say -- he's moving a little. I thought you -- " Forrest had managed to move his arms a bit, but had only succeeded in attracting the Dent's attention. Dent-Howard frowned, reached out a hand and touched Forrest on the side of the neck with the tip of a finger. It seemed to Forrest that a needle had struck him -- he felt a stinging, pain, then numbness. He became dizzy; then the dizziness steadied into a paralysis that spread down his neck and shoulders and through his body. So this was how they had kept him quiet, without the necessity of bonds. What were the Dents, anyway? What kind of creatures were they really? Dent-Harrison said, not turning from the control panel, "You'll have to bud again." IF "Why me? Why not you this time? It takes a lot out of me' complained Dent-Howard. "You'll have more time to rest. I'll have to do Harrison very shortly, when we contact Mark Station. This is the most important impersonation we've attempted and I'll have to be alert. Howard knows Harrison well. He hardly knows Forrest at all." "He has the personnel records on Forrest. We don't." "We have the original." From the sound of his voice, Dent-Harrison was grinning. Without further argument, Dent-Howard stood up as far up as the ceiling of the skater allowed, swung the seat back and climbed into the rear compartment, pushing Forrest to one side. Jammed back against the luggage in a corner, Forrest watched helplessly. The Dent took off his blue coat, swaying slightly, but managed to remain standing. The skater ran more smoothly now, gave a jar or twist only now and then. DentHarrison was driving better -- the Dents learned fast. his undergarments, which showed him as beefy but not flabby and very pink-skinned. Swiftly, the pink changed to gray. His face lost its features along with its color. The Dent's body became slighter and a little shorter. The arms and legs became smooth, shiny, modeling-clay gray. The arms now ended in long, tapering fingers and the legs and feet were like gray boots. The torso became tubular and the head like a gray rubber ball, balanced on a small neck. Two black spots of eyes and a small oval mouth were all the features that remained. The trade-Dent slipped off the loose underclothing and was revealed as sexless and uniformly smooth, gray and shiny all over. Rubber doll was a fitting description. Forrest shrank back in his corner. The Dent wasn't horrible in itself. It was more comic than frightening, but Forrest had the feeling of a nightmare coming on. He was overcome with a childhood fear, of the circus-Dent back on Einstein, the parody of Man, with its black spot eyes and comic mouth. The Dent who had been Howard had reverted to the tradeform, which, Forrest remembered all too well, was still not the real Dent. Now another transformation was taking place. Forrest wished he could look away, but he stared, fascinated. He had never seen an original Dent, nor had any other human alive, as far as he knew. He fought down his horror, kept his eyes open. The rubber-doll aspect began to disappear, but the gray color remained. The figure shortened again, or perhaps it only seemed so because the head was vanishing into the shoulders. Watching this, Forrest missed seeing the legs grow together, but now they were one, the figure standing solidly like a gray tree trunk. It only swayed slightly when the skater hit a rough spot, painfully jolting Forrest against the wall. The top of the rapidly changing creature was not flat, except for a circular mouth facing upward. The arms shortened while the fingers lengthened, becoming tentacles. Now a crown of ten waving tentacles surrounded the mouth, topping the cylindrical body, which tapered to a single foot or base, not rooted to the floor but moving freely, if slowly. The creature as a whole looked like some sort of gigantic polyp. Which no doubt it was, Forrest thought. Howard's clothes, scattered on the floor, seemed utterly irrelevant to the thing standing there, tentacles waving. Forrest had to look out the window at the raging storm for a moment to steady himself. Of all forms of life, this was one of the lowest. The coelenterates of Earth's warm seas near the base of the evolutionary tree, did not even have a circulatory system, nor a separate digestive tract. They were simply animated barrels. Forrest smiled, in spite of himself. He was thinking of Harrison at the beach -- Harrison, or DentHarrison, had mentioned trilobites. It would be a long, long time before creatures such as the Identities could reach the level of the trilobites -- even if they hadn't branched off in another direction. So these were the real Dents. Forrest had expected something different: insects, squids, spiders, slugs -- all of them less alien than this. He and the Dents -- or at least the similar forms of life on Earth -- had had nothing in common since before the planarian worms and a little after the sponges. The Dents weren't even bilateral, they were radially symmetrical. How alien can you get? Yet he had to hand it to them. Of all the many forms of life which had attained intelligence within the explored stellar sphere, this was the only race he had heard of that belonged to the coelenterata . On many planets, similar forms of diverse origin conformed to conditions that were similar, just as on Earth creatures of different ancestry approached each other in form. So the polyps were not peculiar to Earth. These had attained great size, were able to live out of water and support themselves without skeletons, he supposed. And they had somehow added protective mimicry, shape-changing. No skeleton, a soft, tough, rubbery skin -- just right for it. IF The gray creature was standing as if rooted yet it was in constant motion. The tentacles were waving inward and outward in a complex motion that made Forrest dizzy. One reached toward him -- a long filament came out of its tip, touched Forrest's cheek and he felt numb again. He had time to think of the stinging nettles of the Hydra. The tentacles seized Forrest roughly, pulled him up, held him suspended for a moment, then threw him back into the corner. "What are you doing?" inquired Dent-Harrison. "Don't eat him." The polyp-creature made a deep approximation of Howard's voice. "I deserve him after all the trouble he's caused me." His voice sounded as if it came from a rain barrel. "The trouble he's caused youV ' said Dent-Harrison. "Why didn't you eat Harrison while you were in the storeroom?" "I thought you still needed him for study," boomed the other Dent. "Well, we still need Forrest now." Dent-Harrison turned back to the controls. This was a reprieve. And Harrison was alive, back on the island. He wouldn't be of any immediate help, back there with no transportation and probably locked up, but his being alive was a plus. The Dents, like people, had regrets, made mistakes. Forrest began to feel like a man again. He knew now that the Dent landing was no mere spying mission. This was a planned attempt to take over Marconi Station and with it the entire planet and system. He wished he had some way of communicating with Howard. What he could tell him! Not the least of it would be that the Dents by their hostile landing had committed an act of war and need no longer be dealt with as nonbelligerents. Forrest looked speculatively at the alien creature, now quiescent. In spite of the queasy feeling it gave him, he could not help but feel admiration for the thing. It was almost alone on an alien planet, carrying out its mission with rigid self-control. So this was the enemy. Dent-Harrison said impatiently, "Get on with it. We haven't got all day." The Hydralike creature stirred. A round bump formed on its side. This grew into a bud, a branch a few inches long. A crown formed at its tip -- a crown of tentacles. The bud separated and dropped off. It righted itself and attached its lower surface to the floor. Then it began to move. Forrest watched it for a long time. It seemed to grow taller and thicker, its tentacles waving. He heard a rustling noise and saw that the bigger Dent had already changed back to the tradeform, was dressing in Howard's clothes. The figure looked ludicruous for a while in the conservative blue suit, then the grayness faded and the Dent assumed the ruddy features of Commander Howard. It pushed past Forrest and rummaged in the bags, found something which it tossed to the little creature on the floor. The latter caught the food deftly in its tentacles, brought it to its mouth cavity. Forrest felt dizzy and sick. He could take it no longer. He passed out again. VI nestly, telling B.H. all about the alien menace, and Howard didn't seem to care or understand him. He tried to tell Harrison; but Harrison only grinned and turned away. Forrest tried to explain to a faceless rubber doll with eyes like black dots, but the doll wouldn't listen either. He was writing a report and, after he had finished each page, the paper disintegrated. He was talking on the phone and the party at the other end couldn't seem to hear -- there was too much noise, a pounding, crashing, roaring. The sound of the storm separated from the roar of the skater. He realized that he had been dreaming. Forrest struggled to sit up. He felt more uncomfortable than ever. He was not only stiff but his throat was sore. He was bone-tired. He also felt oddly constricted and saw that he was wearing strange clothes. They looked like one of Harrison's outfits, too small for him and with weirdly clashing colors. The red-and-tan striped shirt, the blue-and-green dotted slacks, the bright red shoesox earned his sincere distaste. What had the Dents done with his own clothes? Dent-Howard was sound asleep on the floor. The strange new Hydra bud was nowhere in sight. Occupying the seats ahead were Dent-Harrison and another, a taller, younger man. Dent-Harrison was talking in low tones. Who was the other man? From where Forrest was sitting, he could see only the curly brown hair, the back of the head and fair-skinned neck, the green-and-brown fitted collar-shawl over the natty dark brown shirt -- so that was where his clothes had gone. Dent-Harrison glanced back over his shoulder, remarked, "I think your prototype is awake." The tall man turned his head and looked at Forrest, who stared back in a daze. That face was familiar. The young man showed a superior smile. That smile was familiar, too. The stranger spoke. Even the voice was familiar. "It certainly is a wonderful thing," he said. IF Forrest groaned. He'd have to call this one Dent-Forrest. Dent-Harrison took the controls and the Dent that looked like Forrest resumed asking questions. Forrest did not want to talk, but found he couldn't help answering. Everything, from military information to personal secrets, came out. When the Dent paused in his questioning Forrest found himself volunteering further information, unasked. Things the Dent would never have thought of, probably. Dent-Forrest flashed his superior smile. "We can't really read minds," he explained. "But we have something just as good, you see. We have drugs to loosen your tongues. Combined with our encyclopedic knowledge and our tape-recorder memories, what else is needed? Of course only select spies, with great talents, such as -- we -- are chosen for infiltration." What an insufferable egotist , thought Forrest. Then he realized that the Dent was faithfully copying his own image. He resolved to reform if he ever got out of this. "We've only recently perfected our disguises," said Dent-Forrest. "Your vaunted 'elapsed time test' is no good any more -- nor are any of your other tests. If you really want to know, you've been defeated by our scientific inventiveness, something of yours we've also developed only recently. Hoist with your own petard. A simple injection of a radioactive element gives us all the time-sense we need. Other tests can be counteracted -- that's a good word, counteracted , because it is our superior acting ability that defeats you." "How about overacting?" The Dent sneered. "Watch your language. Speak when I tell you to speak and then don't stop till I tell you to stop. For too long we Dents -- Identities -- even the name is derogatory; we don't all look alike -- we Krawk-sss have posed as silly traders. Do you think this is the start of a war? It's been a war for a long time. We expanded into the region of Denebola for the express purpose of cutting your empire in half. We're going to take over this planet first -- with its impenetrable defenses that can be run by only one-man. How? By replacing that man with one of ours." "You haven't replaced Howard yet." "No, but it's just a matter of time. We had to do all this in stages, first by coming in under cover of a storm -- our own storm, by the way -- then by landing on Nexus Island, the weakest spot on the planet, and imitating one of you, Howard, to capture another one of you, Harrison. Then our clever scheme of sending a message -- " Forrest frowned. "Then Harrison didn't even send that message?" "Of course not. I -- we sent it. You should have been more suspicious." "You still haven't got to Mark Station. B.H. is not as defenseless as Harrison was." "I know," said the Dent. "This is why we chose this roundabout method. We couldn't possibly have taken Mark Station by force. So we worked out this infiltration scheme, involving only one Dent at first. Of course we found it necessary to increase our number to three." He grinned. "The only tough thing was getting a dossier on Commander Howard in the first place. We didn't have a live model, so we faked him, even to Dent-manufactured clothing. Since he is a public figure the task was not impossible, merely difficult. And the result fooled Harrison for the short time necessary. That was all that was intended. Next time we'll have a live model to work from." really would -- he pictured B.H. pressing the Panic Button, blowing up the planet. Then he was telling the Dent about the button -- against his will. Dent-Forrest shook his head. "We know all about the Panic Button. It will be touch-andgo -- but we can handle it. If the planet is destroyed, of course, that would be a victory for us too, but we don't want it that way. We have plans. No use telling them to you now. You might -- talk." He smiled maliciously. Forrest's mind was racing. The fact that this invasion was so carefully planned might be its weakness. Maybe it would succeed only if everything went exactly right. A slight deviation had already been forced by his exposure of Dent-Harrison, making it necessary for them to create a subsitute for himself. Another deviation it might mean their defeat. But how could he force another one? The Dents might fool B.H. at least long enough to land on Mark Island and get inside the base. They were, ostensibly, Jim Forrest and Warner Harrison coming back from Nexus, Forrest bringing Harrison to safety from the aliens. Howard, if not told otherwise, would believe that bringing them inside his defenses would make Marconi safer. Warned, Howard had the firepower to blow the skater out of the water as it approached the island. If he missed he could push the button that would mean his own destruction and everyone else's. Forrest was wishing for his own death in hoping to warn Howard, but he knew that letting the Dents take Marconi was worse. This was only one battle in a big campaign IF to take over the stellar sphere, but it was a decisive one, as first battles sometimes are. Forrest had no illusions about his own survival much longer. The Dents wouldn't be needing him once they had taken the base. They needed him now for questioning and study, but he didn't know for how long. Dent-Forrest was becoming pretty convincing. DentHarrison was nearly perfect and couldn't help, but fool Howard. Forrest couldn't do anything about that -- but he might be able to do something about the imitation of himself, before it was too late. Perhaps he could strike some false note, speak some uncharacteristic phrase or give some phony information that would, when Commander Howard heard it, betray Dent-Forrest. This second-hand method was Forrest's only hope of warning Howard, because he knew that when the time came for contacting the station he would not be allowed to talk, move or even be seen. But Dent-Forrest, as well as Dent-Harrison earlier, had already gotten a lot out of him, more than Forrest himself realized, perhaps. What could he say that was out of character now? One problem was the fact that B.H. really didn't know him very well. Forrest tried to recall what he and Howard had discussed in the Mark control room just before this mission. He had probably already blurted out to Dent-Forrest everything Howard had said. What had he himself said that he might not have told the Dents, that he could falsify now? He remembered something about a comic book. No, it was Howard who had mentioned comics. Forrest could remember saying nothing that hadn't been a direct response to something Howard had said and therefore known to the Dents. He had suggested some ideas to Howard -- could he switch credits, say that one of his suggestions had been Howard's? fid Howard remember the dialogue well enough for the switch to have meaning? Forrest spoke, heedless of the Dent's orders. "I wish Howard had carried out his idea to shoot missiles at the island. I wouldn't have minded -- " "That was your idea, wasn't it?" said Dent-Forrest. "Yeah. I guess it was. After I told him the Dents were dangerous -- " The Dent mimicked, " 'What's so dangerous about a couple of lousy Dents landing in a capsule?' " Forrest sighed. "I guess I talk in my sleep. Calling you lousy is a compliment, anyway. No offense, of course." The other grinned. "Well, it's been nice talking to you. Pretty soon we'll be contacting Howard and, you'll have to keep quiet. Maybe this will help." The Dent flicked his fingertip several times around Forrest's mouth and he found he couldn't move his lips or make a sound... Now he couldn't talk at all. He had failed in trying to fake something and now it was too late. It certainly was a wonderful thing... T HE skater roared on toward Mark Station. That it was quite close now was evident from the fact that Dent-Harrison was trying to make radio contact. Dent-Forrest, now driving, was likewise preoccupied. The wind had increased and was tossing the little ship from side to side. Oblivious to it all, Dent-Howard was sleeping soundly in one corner of the rear compartment, while Forrest sat wakefully in the other corner. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party... ran through his mind, ironically appropriate. Forrest tried to move his legs and found that he could move them. All the numbing stings that he had recently received had been on his face and neck and the numbness had spread through his upper body alone. His legs seemed to have lost their previous paralysis. He shifted about uncomfortably, straightened his legs and stood up, leaning against the corner of the wall, swaying with the skater's motion. No one noticed. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog... As an experienced skater pilot, Forrest knew the way the ship was balanced precariously atop its jetstream. And not too irrelevantly, yet another typing-practice sentence popped into his mind. A quick movement of the enemy will jeopardize six gunboats . He put one foot against the wall and braced. Starting to topple toward the center of the compartment, toward the sleeping Dent on the other side, he put all his strength into the kick, hoping he'd fall on Dent-Howard instead of the hard floor. Fighting to keep from bending his knees, he threw his body sideways, tumbled headlong across the compartment. At once the skater faltered. Forrest landed on Dent-Howard's body with a thud and the skater slipped sideways, off balance, and plunged into the waves with a tremendous crash. Forrest, jammed into the back of the front seat, was not thrown forward with the terrific deceleration. The shock of water reducing its speed, the skater' bounded into the air and down again, now on its side, now upright, and Forrest was tossed about with the luggage and Dent-Howard. The splashing and crashing seemed interminable. Cries of alarm and confusion revealed that the two Dents in the pilots's seats were trying to stop the IF skater. After it had skipped and bounced along for a few moments more they finally succeeded. Now it tossed about, floating upright on the water, swaying to the motion of the waves, its engines idling. The rain pounded on the roof, but stayed outside. No windows were broken. Strapped in, Dent-Harrison and Dent-Forrest had not been injured. Dent-Howard was unconscious and Forrest was nearly so. After a cursory examination of the ship the two Dents were satisfied that no major damage had been done. The skaters were tough little craft. Dent-Howard stirred, opened his eyes, shook his head and asked, "What happened?" He turned over, pushed Forrest away from him. "We struck a waterspout or something," said Dent-Harrison, matter-of-factly. "You should strap down back there." Forrest, unhurt but thoroughly discouraged, stayed motionless. As long as he had not succeeded in wrecking the skater, he was glad they didn't realize he was to blame for the incident. But when would he get another chance? DentHoward was awake now and alert to any movement. engines, the skater bucked along on the waves and rose into the slightly smoother air. DentForrest took his turn at the radio, trying to contact Mark Station and Commander Howard. What would happen next? When the Dents talked to Howard, what would he do? It all depended on how good the imitations were. Forrest wanted to believe otherwise but he was convinced that they were good enough. Once inside the base -- His thoughts were interrupted by a warning from DentForrest. "Get Forrest down," he told Dent-Howard. "And you get out of sight, too. We don't want B.H. seeing himself." Forrest was pulled roughly to the floor of the compartment, and Dent-Howard sprawled over him, holding him down. The nettles stung him in the mouth again, for good measure. He couldn't move his upper body but thought it wise not to reveal just now that his legs were relatively free from the paralysis. He couldn't kick out anyway but if the Dent shifted his position, he might be able to. It was a matter of waiting for the right moment. He didn't want to be premature again. Above the roaring of the engines and the storm a new sound echoed through the skater. It was the amplified voice of B. H. Howard. Forrest could not see the screen, could only hear the voices. It was like listening to a conversation on an old blind telephone. "Just a minute," Howard was saying. "Oh. It's the skater. Forrest is back, and Harrison is with him. FU call you back... Am I glad to seeow? I've been hanging by my thumbs. How's your health, Warner? Glad you made it, Jim." The Dents made appropriate answering sounds. Forrest could only see the backs of their heads. The other Dent's face was close to his own, expressionless. Howard cut their greetings short. "Time enough for talk when you get in. Where are you now? Never mind, I've got you, eightyseven miles out. Come right in and go to work, all hell's breaking loose. You'll have to park on the ramp and walk in through the shed, so I can test you. Did you see any Dents?" Forrest could see his counterpart shaking his head. "Not a sign of them, B.H." Was Howard being taken in? It looked like it. "Everybody's asking me," said Howard. "I'd sure like to know, one way or the other. Hold on... Mark here. Yes, Commander Roscoe. What?" There was a long silence. "Damn the military. They can't see beyond their eyeballs. This place is worth defending if anything is. You can't get a better link planet than Marconi or a better location than Denebola... No, I'm staying here, hell or high water and I think I'm going to get both pretty soon... Just until? If they can get us off, they can defend us... How do we know what the Dents are going to do? All the real spies are on their side...Look, if I gave you some proof, would you? Just a minute... Warner, tell me; did you see any evfdence that there was any landing made, did you hear any thing, see any -- " "Not a thing," said Dent-Harrison innocently. "All I know is whatForrest told me. I was ready fot them, though. Listen, why can't we -- " "Not now," said Howard. "Whatever it is. Hello, Roscoe? Isn't the fact that the capsule landed somewhere enough? My men are back now and they haven't seen anything, but that doesn't mean... No, I can't prove a damn thing yet... Yes, I know it would be an overt act... Yes I know President Grulzak wants to declare war. So do I... Hello... Cut off." lence for a few moments, though Forrest could hear Commander Howard making some mechanical clicking noises. Dent-Harrison said, "Why can't we defend Nexus? I didn't want to abandon it. Forrest says you might destroy the island. Wouldn't it be better to fortify it?" "Too late for that," said Commander Howard. "Never mind that now. Get in here at top speed. IF We're going to have to button up." "You're going to destroy the island?" asked Dent-Harrison in a worried voice. "I don't know," said Howard. "I'll have to consult Regulus about that, I suppose. I get all kinds of advice from the stars. And I don't believe in astrology... Hello, Regulus? No, not Director Bennett. I was speaking to Commander Roscoe. I was cut off. This is Howard, Commander Howard, Director Howard, whathave-you, jack-of-all-trades Howard, Marconi. Hello, Roscoe. No, it wasn't my fault. I never cut anybody off... Look, if I see any Dents, I'll hit 'em first and then tell you about it, but I haven't seen anything to shoot at yet. If there were some of your ships around, they could chase some Dents in here... No, I haven't heard from the Lone Ranger yet, our Grand Home Fleet of one guard ship. Probably tangling with the Dents a light-month away." Howard paused, seeming to remember something. "I wanted to ask you, shall I shoot missiles to destroy Nexus Island? All right, I won't... Certainly they can land on the water, but not around here. Maybe near Nexus, that's the reason... I can't do any searching till this storm lets up. Can't see the nose in front of your face with instruments... Not a thing on the scope... I have my own skater here on the screen, shall I blast it? Maybe it is Dents, how the hell should I know?... Certainly, I'll test them, before I let them in. What do you take me for?... What do you mean don't be sarcastic? I can be as sarcastic as I want to be. You're not my military commander. I'm responsible for this station and if you want to get the President on the line... Well, I thought you were ordering me around... Sorry, Roscoe, I got carried away... What do I need? More Dents, maybe... Goodbye. Off." Dent-Harrison spoke up. "What did he say?" "No decision yet. Don't do anything. Well, I'm doing it. They said not to bother hitting the island now. We'll either abandon the whole planet, or if we reinhabit the island we can fumigate it. As long as you're here now, Warner, it doesn't matter. The whole purpose was to keep the Dents out of Mark Station. They can't get here from the island now, any more than they can from the sea. And there might be peace, he thinks. Or someone thinks." Dent-Forrest asked, "What's the situation now? Strategy-wise, I mean." Howard paused a moment before answering. "The Dents can't attack Marconi in force and they're not going to try, he says. It has to be infiltration. Somewhere on this planet there's a Dent capsule. After the storm, we'll find it. Right now we button up. He says if there was positive evidence of a landing, they'd call it an overt act and declare war. I wish I could find some evidence, but I can't. I'm too honest. The Dents might be peaceful, after all. Then again, they might want to take the base without causing a war. They aren't going to get away with that . I've got Regulus and Arcturus on sixteen-hour alert. If they hear from me, or if they don't hear from me -- " He left the sentence unfinished. filled the skater for a bit. Forrest was calculating the exact moment to throw off the Dent, jump up and attract HowandVattention. Dent-Howard looked strong, especially in the arms. Forrest tried to picture him as a tentacled polyp. What were its strong points? What were its weak points? "Now, tell me," said the voice of Commander Howard. "How did it go? What took you so long?" "Convincing Harrison to leave," said Dent-Forrest. "I could have done that in ten minutes," said Howard. "Anyway, while this phone is quiet, let's talk. I have some questions to ask. Uh, purely routine. Warner, you used to be quite a fan of detective fiction. In The Case of the Oil Stained Gardener , who was the murderer?" "The author," answered DentHarrison. "Why don't you ask me what my great-aunt's maiden name is?" "Well, what is your great-aunt's maiden name?" "I don't know. What's the point of these tests? If the Dents can read minds -- " "They can't read minds," replied Howard. "That's where we have them. No matter how they grill their victims, they can't get everything out of them. So random questioning may trip them up. Jim, I have one of your books here. Sorry to have to pry, but I've been looking through your bookcase -- " "I hope you haven't tom my comic books." Dent-Forrest laughed. "What comic books? I've never seen you with a comic book. What are you talking about?" Forrest, down on the floor, felt a thrill of hope. But the Dent laughed it away. "I meant my paperbounds -- you sometimes called them comic books." "So I did," said Howard. "Anyway, here's a book. The Life and Times of Claude Degler. What's it about?" Dent-Forrest said quickly, "A French artist who goes to the South Pacific and gets his ear cut off in a native brawl. Sort of a historical novel." A fluttering noise came, then a snap. "All right. It might be a bestIF seller among the Dents for all I know. I can't tell anything on TV anyway. I'll test you again when you come in. I have a whole battery of tests I can use." None of which will work , thought Forrest despondently. He began to tense for the job of overthrowing the Dent holding him down. Now? What was his weak spot? Not his arms, which were tentacles, really. Not his body, which was tough and strong. Not his head, which was only a dummy. His mouth -- If he could hit him in the mouth and penetrate deeply inside it -- might make him uncomfortable. But Forrest could only move his legs. Could he get his foot in the Dent's mouth? Dent prevented him from shifting his position without hardly being aware of him. He supposed he was making some noise but it couldn't be heard above the competition of the skater and storm. Just as Forrest thought he was about to get into a position where he could shake off the Dent, stand up and attract Howard's attention, the opportunity was lost. The skater bumped twice, then rose at an angle, settled with a jar and stopped moving. They were on the ramp at Mark Island. Forrest struggled harder, seemed to be gaining at least a chance to use his legs. The engines stopped and the rain was left as background noise. "We're here," announced DentHarrison. "Welcome aboard," said the voice of Commander Howard, on the TV. "Leave the skater there, walk up the ramp and into the shed. I'll be ready for you." "All right, B. H. Be seeing you," said Dent-Forrest and snapped off the TV. This was an unexpected blow to Forrest's chances. He slumped, exhausted and weary. How could he attract Howard's attention without the TV? The two Dents in front were struggling into their raincoats. The door was opened. The noise of the rain came louder and a cool breeze blew in on Forrest. He felt Dent-Howard relax his grip -- he must have been uncomfortable too -- so he wormed his way into a more favorable position. Dent-Howard asked, "What'll I do with Forrest?" Forrest could plainly see the smirking face of his double in the door light. "You can do anything you want with him." This was the black moment to end all black moments. Forrest had hoped to plant some suspicion in B. H.'s mind, so that he would not let the Dents in. But Howard was letting them in. They would get into the shed, pass all the tests, enter the control room, chat a while, catch B. H. by surprise and kill him. The base would be theirs, and the whole system it controlled. But first -- Forrest's own end. The rain drifted in as the two Dents stood in the doorway. Forrest shivered and not just from the cold. "Keep him alive," decided DentHarrison surprisingly. "I think your bud needs more lessons. His goof about the comic books almost fixed us." He turned to DentForrest. "Let me do most of the talking but keep your pistol handy. I've got the grenades, if we need them." Dent-Howard had sat up. The pressure was off and Forrest was able to move a little. He didn't want to reveal that he could move a lot until the other two were gone. Dent-Howard would be tired and stiff, relaxing after his long ordeal. It was still three to one; soon it would be one to one. Forrest lay still, waiting his chance. Dent-Forrest walked up the ramp. Dent-Harrison lingered, gave Dent-Howard some last-minute instructions, or perhaps consolations for being left out of the action. "It won't take long. Watch him closely till we come back -- or till we give you the word to come in. Don't call us, we'll call you." And he was gone, slamming the door. Immediately, without giving the Dent a chance to think, Forrest sprang into action. Literally sprang. Putting all his strength into straightening his legs, he threw off the Dent and stood up in one swift motion. He was counting on the fact that Dent-Howard wasn't up to par and that the surprise attack would prevent him from using his paralyzing stingers. Forrest found his balance, avoided the Dent's groping arms and kicked him full in the face. The Dent's mouth sagged open and he fell back against the wall. Forrest pushed one of Harrison's bright red shoesox right into the Dent's mouth. Farther and farther he pushed it, the Dent now sitting helplessly on the floor, his head back, arms waving aimlessly. The Dent's face was beginning to deform like heated plastic, the mouth expanding enough to take the whole.foot. Forrest stood above the Dent, jamming his foot in up to the ankle, the shin. The Dent seemed to be weakening rapidly. Forrest imagined he was doing great damage to the Dent's primitive insides. He kicked around and his foot felt like it was sloshing in something liquid. Suddenly he felt the Dent go limp. Forrest breathed heavily a while, then withdrew his foot. The Dent slumped to the floor like an empty bag. Forrest stood swaying for a moment, then leaned against the corner of the skater. No cheers, but he had won. What now? There was no time to be wasted. What could he do? IF The Dents were in the shed. He had to warn Howard quickly. What he had to do was a job for an acrobat. Balancing carefully, so he wouldn't fall to the floor and have trouble getting up again, he managed to push one knee against the front seat, swing it back. He crawled into the other seat, sat down with a painful crash and groaned. Or tried to -- he still couldn't make his mouth work. He tried to lift the foot he had used on the Dent, but it hurt so much that he had to put it down. He lifted the other foot and stretched it toward the control panel. Don't call us, we'll call you. He snapped on the TV with his toe, leaned forward as it came on brightly. was looking the other way, peering into another TV screen, which apparently showed the interior of the shed. He was pressing buttons. Tape reels were rotating, instruments were flashing and humming. Tests were being given. Tests that would fail , as had all the others , thought Forrest. Howard must have fixed up the skater shed as a test room while Forrest was away. No doubt he could see the two Dents in there, but the expression on his face was merely intent, not suspicious. Before long he would be satisfied and would push the button to let the Dents into the main building of Mark Station. That would be the beginning of the end. But now Forrest was on TV and he was trying to make a noise. He banged on the panel with his good foot, now with both, unmindful of the pain. Howard, fiddling with dials and pushing buttons, seemed oblivious to the racket. Forrest kept up his foot-drumming, frantically, Suddenly Howard frowned, turned toward him. Staring into the TV, Howard's eyes widened. His mouth opened, but he made no sound. He looked back at the other TV, and then at Forrest, who could only sit there, trying to make some meaningful motion with his head, some sound with his mouth. He wondered what sort of a crazy man he looked like to Howard. Howard closed his eyes for a moment, then turned back to the other screen. A look of anger was now on his face, the one that Forrest had never seen, had only heard of by reputation. Howard's face grew red. He pressed buttons, pulled switches and reached out for a lever that looked something like the handle and trigger of a gun. He looked steadily into the other TV, gripped the lever. Forrest heard a noise like the stuttering of a typewriter or the chattering of a machinegun. There was a sudden loud explosion, then another. The control panel in front of Howard shattered. Dust filled the air. Forrest could see Howard doggedly gripping the lever, his expression slowly changing from angry to determined and finally tired. He let go of the lever, glanced at the damaged control panel and turned toward Forrest, who was still trying to understand what had happened and was helpless to say or do any thing. Commander Howard stared angrily at Forrest. "I might have killed my best friends, just now. But I don't think so. What areow, a spare?" At this, he moved some levers and switches, pressed some more buttons, frowned in annoyance when nothing happened, hesitated a moment and grabbed for the gun handle again. With a last look of aversion at Forrest, he snapped off the TV. Forrest stared into the blank screen. Now he understood what had happened, but not all of it. The Dents were dead; Howard had gunned them down. He had no time to exult at this, because he now heard the slapping sound of bullets on the skater's hull. He had to act at once. An expert skater pilot can do almost anything with his feet he can do with his hands. Forrest started the engines, lifted off savagely and sailed straight ahead, up at a steep angle. He thought he would confuse Howard for a moment by taking off over the island, instead of backing up toward the sea. It was a hairy maneuver and Forrest nearly fell out of his seat -- he couldn't strap in -- but he just made it over the roofs. In a few moments he was bowling along close to the waves on th other side of the island, the automatic pilot resuming its job. It was several seconds before the bullets commenced to follow him again. The island's automatic defenses must have been damaged or he would never be getting away, Forrest thought. Howard was firing manually, obviously, with whatever he could point. It certainly was a wonderful thing. In a way, he had won. Two of the invading Dents were dead and the other was dead or unconscious on the floor of the skater. The station was safe for the moment and he himself was still alive. Yet... Here he was, running for his life. lot at an altitude just above the highest waves. The skater was working perfectly, for which he was thankful. He was also thankful for the storm, for a change. Howard seemed to be firing bigger and bigger stuff as Forrest got farther and farther away from the island. Occasionally the skater rocked with concussion as a big one hit nearby. It demanded every second of Forrest's attention to keep changing his course, to avoid lapsing into a IF pattern that could be predicted manually. He wondered how long the storm would last. Would the Dent starship return to renew it? Would the guard ship, or any other help, arrive? He thought of his friends, homeward-bound on the Stardust . He had volunteered to stay here, thinking perhaps to get ahead where there was little competition. Well, he wasn't too sorry. Maybe he'd get out of this. He just didn't know how. In addition to his constant evasive action, he tried to put maximum distance between himself and Mark Island, but there was nowhere to go. Correction, there was one place to go on the whole planet -- Nexus Island. Howard would expect him to go there. No doubt he would be dropping a missile on the island soon, thinking, and not incorrectly that it was a nest of Dents. Poor Harrison, if he was still alive. The paralysis seemed to be wearing off. Forrest could move his arms again and he immediately set about tying up the Dent, who was not dead but unconscious. He found some straps among the luggage. He improvised them into bonds, doing a thorough job of trussing up the alien. The Dent's resemblance to Howard, in spite of the tom mouth, was remarkable. How did they do it? Well, here was a captive to work on, more valuable alive than dead, when or if he could be put into the hands of the scientists. He found no weapon other than a small pocket pistol, like Harrison's. He returned to the pilot's seat and made a futile attempt to contact Howard. The base did not respond to any signal. What would happen next? It all depended on the orders Howard received from Regulus, which in turn depended on the report Howard turned in. A planet swarming with Dents? It would look like it. Having failed to take over the station by infiltration, they could still try force. Three humans on a planet in the middle of Dent domain. Too bad they were separated. He was a hunted fugitive, scooting over the ocean. Harrison was helpless on Nexus Island. Howard, on Mark, was armed and warned, but not in possession of the facts. The three of them together could hold off an army of Dents. They were not together. A wall of sound hit him. The skater lurched, rose violently into the air, flipped end over end and sank beneath the waves. The engines stopped and Forrest thought the ship wasn't going to surface, but it did. It bobbed erratically on the stormy waters. One of Howard's long-rang missiles had scored. Forresfe decided to play dead for a while. He waited, enduring the seasick motion for about ten minutes. His borrowed clothing was in rags. He rummaged through Harrison's luggage and found a slightly less nauseating combination. Rust and yellow, it was, with a hardly noticeable blue stripe. The island was the only destination possible, after all. Once there he could try -- if the buildings still existed -- to contact Regulus, if he could rig up the radio once again, so that it hooked up to the gravity beam. Get a message to Commander Roscoe, tell him the truth about the enemy and the situation here, get Howard to stop shooting. It seemed like a long, impossible chance. He was a pilot, not a communications technician. The hookup that had been used before was a mass of junk. The odds were against him. But it was the only game in town. Besides, Harrison was there. This was an act of rescue, a mission of mercy once more. He had to get Harrison off the island. Once again. He started the engines, swung around and was off like a bullet, toward Nexus Island. ments told him otherwise he had begun to expect to see no island ahead at all. Howard had big missiles in his arsenal and the island was an artificial one, built up from the ocean floor. So he was a little surprised when he saw it looming darkly and lightless through the rain. It was three o'clock, not yet dawn. He zoomed engines to stop. Why had the island not been bombed? He preferred not to speculate on the reasons for this right now, finding it sufficient to keep in mind that it could be bombed any moment, so that he had to make haste. See what he could do about the radio hookup, rescue Harrison and clear out fast. Make for the other side of the planet, maybe, until the storm was over. Oh, yes -- rustle up some food and supplies. He glanced back at the tied-up Dent and opened the door. The rain soaked him as he ran into the building. He entered the little kitchen belonging to Harrison. He walked over to the circular staircase, pressed the button on the bannister, then impatiently mounted the stairs, two at a time. On the second floor, heMooked into the radio room, the lights coming on as he crossed the threshold. The contraption in the corner, blackened and ruined, caught his eye at once and immediately discouraged him. How could he repair this thing, knowing almost nothing about it? How could even an expert fix it? He gave up the idea of communicating with anyone and left the room. He went to the IF door of the storeroom. This was the door he had almost tried before and Harrison -- the Dent -- had urged him to come away. It was locked. He had no idea where the key was, so he pulled out the Dent's little pistol, stood back and fired. It took four shots before the wrecked door swung open. The place really was a storeroom, he saw when the lights came on. It was stacked with boxes of every description and many other things, some not even recognizable to him. Harrison, too, might be here -- andwas. end of the room, stretched out on a cot. He looked to be unconscious or sleeping. Harrison -- if it really were Harrison and not another Dent -- turned over and suddenly sat up, blinking. Forrest saw that he was shackled to the bunk, which was fixed to the floor. He had been working on his bonds, but ineffectually, as evidenced by signs of scraping on the metal. Forrest was the first to speak. "You've passed ihe blink test." "Who are you?" said Harrison, weakly. "I don't know you, so you can't be a Dent. Dents are only people I know." His mind seemed to be wandering and Forrest became concerned. He asked Harrison if he had had the dose of Contrad he had needed. "Oh, yes," said Harrison. "They deprived me for a while to see what the effects, were, I suppose, then gave me a shot, to see what the recovery effects were. They wanted to fool someone with a half-baked imitation of me. Glad to see that they didn't. Did you shoot them? I thought I heard a lot of shooting going on, but I've lost all track of time. That makes me a possible Dent, doesn't it? The time test, you know." "They're dead. Two of them anyway. But they did fool me." He brought Harrison up to date, while he was working to cut the shackles with some tools he'd found in the storeroom. "So you had the Contrad all along? By the way, my name's Jim Forrest, B.H.'s pilot. I keep forgetting that everything I told the other Harrison isn't known to you." The little man smiled. "So Howard got them both. Good for him. I'll have to talk him out of shooting at us," said Harrison. "He always was a stubborn character. Once B.H.'gets an idea, he carries it to extremes. Of course, that's one of his good points, too." Forrest looked up from his hacksaw work. "Never mind that. We're going to get out of here. No time now to try to fix the star hookup. We'll contact Howard after the storm is over and he's cooled down a little." The last link fell off and Harrison rose shakily. "No, I'm all right. I'm ready to go with you, but let's take a look at that radio first." He led the way out of the storeroom to the communications .room, at first limping, then with a firmer stride. He walked into the radio room, Forrest following. Harrison went over to the multiple TV screens, Forrest waiting by the burnt-out wreckage in the corner. Harrison turned around, looking puzzled. Then he caught sight of the messy contraption near Forrest. "That's not it," said Harrison. "That's an old-style gravity calculator." Irrelevantly Forrest noticed that Harrison was wearing an even more outlafldish outfit than any he'd seen, black-andgreen dotted shirt clashing with red-and-yellow slacks and blue shoesox. Harrison picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers. A few wires stuck out of the jaws. "I just attach this to the back of the TV." He laid down the pliers, fiddled with the TV knobs, got a dim picture. Forrest felt hope returning. Was it possible? Did the thing work? "I thought you said the radio was out?" Harrison flashed another of his grins. "I didn't say that. Did I?" "No -- you didn't. But the mast is down, too." "You're right -- the mast is down." Harrison pressed a button, there was a whirring noise and the TV brightened. "It certainly is a wonderful thing," said Forrest, not knowing whether to be dismayed at the extent of the pent lies, or jubilant. The picture on the screen showed the inside the skater. Barely visible behind the two empty front seats sat the Dent, trussed up, unmoving. "That's all I can get right now," said Harrison. "I can't get New Nexus direct because of the storm. Who's that? The fake Howard? I'd like to pulverize that creature. He had me fooled for a while. Made up a story that his plane had crashed in the water. I talked too much before I found out he wasn't Howard. Then I wrecked the copter, so he couldn't leave the island. He budded another of his kind to study me, copy me. I have nothing against the Dents -- did you see their natural form? Fascinating. But I don't want them masquerading as us. Sure that guy is safe there?" W#E're going out as soon   as I pick up supplies," said Forrest. "Can you get that thing working? We might try to contact Regulus, at that. I'll write out a message in code." "Forget the code," said Harrison. "There's nothing wrong with the TV." He attached the plierslike gimmick. Another screen lit IF up, the view of the skater remaining on the first. "That looks like Director Bennett on Regulus," said Harrison. "Hello, Cecil. You know me, don't look so surprised. I'm not a ghost. Or a Dent either -- don't look at me like that." Forrest saw that the communications director's horror was genuine. He stared at Harrison but addressed someone else. "Commander Roscoe. I think I've got Marconi here." "Marconi?" said another voice. "I've already got Marconi. Let me have that." The picture changed to another face, one Forrest knew well, that of the military commander of the Regulus area. Commander Roscoe. He looked at Harrison long and carefully, glanced at Forrest briefly. He winced. "If you're Harrison and Forrest, I'm an Algieban alligator. What are you trying to pull? For your information, your first Forrest and your first Harrison are in the skater-shed at Mark Station, stiff as barrels. How stupid do you think we are? We're not fooled by identical twins." "Now just a minute," said Harrison angrily. "I've had enough of that. It's bad enough having Dents imitate me without being taken for one. Let me talk to Howard. Put me through to Mark Station. You can do that for me -- even if you think I am a Dent." "You want to see Howard?" The commander's face hardened some more. "Yes, I'm sure he'll want to see you. I've got him on the line now. I've been trying to talk him out of bombing Nexus Island. Maybe I'll change my mind." He cut off and another room filled the picture. It was the familiar interior of the control room at Mark Station, a thousand miles away, relayed via tance. As soon as B.H. Howard came on the screen, he turned red. # Roscoe, don't try to keep me from bombing the island now. You killed my friends, you slimy polyps, and you're soon going to pay for that." "Wait a minute, B.H.," said Forrest. "Aren't you going to give us a fair trial before you condemn us?" Howard glared. "What kind of trial? No tests work. You Dents are too clever. I'm happy to tell you that war's been declared. I've been given a free hand to wipe out any Dents I see. And that includes you." He reached for his evidently repaired control panel, pushed buttons, set dials. "Hold it, Howard." Commander Roscoe came on the screen again and Harrison fixed it so that both occupied separate screens. Roscoe was calmoY, at least by comparison. "You're zeroing in on military property. That island may be valuable to us when we bring in the forces. Can't you wait for your revenge?" "No," said Howard. "I'm not in your jurisdiction. I'll take the responsibility. It's not revenge, it's caution. There's no room for Dents on this planet. Islands are expendable." Forrest didn't like the way things were turning out. He wished he had prepared to leave before making this contact. They had to get out of here right now -- he tried to pull Harrison away. The little man was staring speechless at Howard, who was reaching for the button -- the one that would release missiles already zeroed in on the island. At that moment, motion was seen on another screen, the one that showed the skater's interior. The Dent had gotten loose, and was climbing up front toward the controls. He no longer looked like Howard -- he was a gray rubber doll. Harrison connected the screens so that Howard and Roscoe could see the skater. "There's your Dent -- and, damn it, he's getting away!" The others were frozen at this sight but Harrison sprang into action. He jumped for the control panel, pulled down a lever that resembled the handle of a gun. Up above, from the observatory, could be heard the chattering of gunfire. Harrison swung the controls of the variable cannon, following the now airborne skater on his sights. He pushed buttons increasing the firepower, but soon had to announce that Dent and skater had gotten away in the. storm. T HE incident seemed to have affected Commander Howard at the Mark control panel. He spoke to Harrison in a quieter voice than before. "Was that the last Dent? I'll take cafe of him. Give me the direction and the exact moment he took off. What's the top speed of the skater, Jim?" Forrest was dazed. "About twoten, B.H.," he replied. An equally mystified Harrison checked the angle of the gunsight, and Roscoe came up with an accurate figure for the time of the Dent's departure by consulting the playback tape. Commander Howard began punching a desk computer. Then he adjusted dials on the panel, reached out his arm and pressed a button. "Now if he just doesn't take too much evasive action -- " They watched the screen in comparative silence. It takes quite a few minutes for a missile to go a thousand miles. The picture showed the interior of the skater, the gray rubber-doll figure, balloon head bobbing, gray arms active at the controls, the storm visible through the back windows. They IF stared at the comic figure that was no longer funny. Suddenly they were looking at a blank screen. No one spoke for a few moments, while the images flashed back and forth across light-years. "It was a good skater' said Forrest. "You'll have a dozen more," said Commander Roscoe. He turned to Howard. "Are you satisfied they're not Dents? You seemed to be so certain a while back that they were." "I'll vouch for them," said Howard. "It's not what people say that counts, it's what they do. You fired on the Dent, Warner. This could have been faked, of course, but it shook my conviction. Your cooperation in guiding the missile convinced me." Howard thought a while, then went on. "The Dents I killed in the skater shed were really Dents. They're some kind of primitive creatures underneath. So you must be the men they replaced. Anyway, it isn't that much of a risk, since now you have to stay on the island. Commander Roscoe tells me that the Marines will soon be landing. They'll bring doctors and a physical examination will tell all." Forrest felt a mental letdown, after the threat of impending destruction had been lifted. "Let's go up to observatory," he said to Harrison after Howard and Roscoe had signed off. As they rose into the upper room, brightness met them. It was now after four o'clock and Denebola was coming up into a spacious sky nearly free of clouds... "I guess the weatherbomb finally gave out," said Forrest. "There go the Dents' chances." "They may still come in force," said Harrison cautiously. "B.H. will take care of them. He can easily cover Nexus, now that the sky is clear." Harrison began tinkering with the instrument in the center of the room. "And now that the storm is over, I can use my telescope again. Have you ever seen the Sun from here? It's in Aquarius. You know they once had a saying, that when the Sun is in Aquarius -- " "There'll be rain," said Forrest. "Where did you hear that?" asked Harrison. "From you. From your double." "Damn! That guy stole my jokes too!" They laughed a little rustily. Forrest looked through the window at Old Nexus City. Soon it would be reactivated to accommodate military personnel. Marconi would be a busy place. Of course this would be only a small part of a huge operation, the expedition against the Dents. "You'll be sort of crowded here, Harrison. Do you mind?" "Well, I could go back to Earth -- but I like this weather." Forrest smiled. "So do I."  Interstellar adventure and a diplomatic coup make a story that nearly was not told... I HE Terran Ambassador to Quahogg," said the undersecretary solemnly, "has disappeared." Career Minister Magnan, seated opposite his chief across the wide, desk, cocked his narrow head in a look of alert incomprehension. "For a moment, sir," he said, "I thought you said the Terran Ambassador had -- ha-ha -- disappeared." "Of course I said he's disappeared," the undersecretary barked. "Vanished. Dropped from sight." "But that's impossible," Magnan said reasonably. "Are you calling me a liar -- or an idiot?" "Mr. Magnan is merely expressing his astonishment, Mr. Undersecretary," First Secretary Retief said in a calming tone. "Perhaps ifyou'd give us a little more background it would help lower his credulity threshold." "What background? Ambassador Wroth wax was dispatched a week ago at the head of a small mission accredited to the Supreme Figuration of Quahogg. The party reported landing on bare rock in a violent whirlwind, finding no signs of the local culture, no vegetation, not even a building or the ruins of one. The members took shelter in a cave after being threatened by immense carnivorous worms. At that point Wrothwax's absence was noted. Frankly, we're mystified as to what went awry." The undersecretary looked challengingly at Magnan. Magnan put a finger to his cheek. "You don't suppose the Quaswine -- " "Quahoggians, if you don't mind, Magnan. No, out of the question. His Supremacy was most cordial during our chats via telelink, though a trifle shy. Never showed his face, possibly underestimating our sophistication, imagining we might find his alien appearance off-putting. He welcomed the establishment of diplomatic relations, gave us landing coordinates, assured us he was laying on a gala welcoming celebration." The undersecretary handed over a rather blurry color photo of a vast, baroquely ornamented chamber. "The audience chamber in His Supremacy's palace -- splendid, eh, in a barbaric fashion? We lifted the image from the TL screen." Magnan gasped. "Stunning. Just look at all those swags." "Any exterior shots?" Retief inquired. "It seems climatic peculiarities render open-air photography somewhat impractical N on Quahogg."'  macy have to say about our man's disappearance?" Magnan wondered aloud. "Unfortunately our communications link is temporarily off the air -- due to atmospheric disturbances. However, my guess is that the mission missed its landing point and came to rest in a patch of desert rather than the magnificent city pictured there." "Well, I'm sure we'll all miss His Excellency," Magnan said, looking politely grieved. The experience must have been quite harrowing for them." "It still is," the undersecretary said grimly. "According to their last transmission before we lost contact, they're still holed up in the cave, subsisting on their representation rations." "Six days on domestic champagne and mummified hors d'oeuvres?" "these are the hazards a diplomat faces in the field," the undersecretary said sternly. "The loss of Ambassador Wrothwax is a grave blow to the corps," Magnan said. "I wonder who could possibly fill his slot in the Table of Organization." He pinched his lower lip and gazed ceilingward. "Actually, Magnan, your name has been mentioned." "What, me, sir? To be promoted to career ambassador? I really don't deserve -- " "That's what we thought. That's why we're merely naming you as charge d affaires until Wrothwax is found." "CAarg?" Magnan shifted in his chair. "At Quahogg? My feeling, sir, is why send good men after bad -- not that I mean to imply anything, of course -- " "Someone has to go in there and find Wrothwax, Magnan. We can't just drop an ambassador from the records as if he were so much broken crockery." "No doubt, sir. I was just thinking of this condition of mine. My doctor says it's the most unusual case of aggravated diplomat's elbow he's ever encountered -- " "See here, Magnan -- if you have any reservations about this assignment -- any reservations at all -- I'm sure your resignation will be philosophically accepted." "Oh, no -- I couldn't be more enthusiastic. Why, who needs vegetation? It just requires a lot of mowing and trimming and I've always loved all sorts of creepy, crawly, creatures. Ah -- you did say the party was chased by giant worms?"  "Forty-footers. There seem to be a couple of other life forms as well, b-# (Par #c) Epithets, Unflattering, Use of. The terms Deosseomolluscoid, Vermiformoidy and Megadeosseomollus spectively) are preferred in all official contexts. referred to by the landing party as, let me see, oh yes: slugs, and super-slugs. According to the report they're limbless, featureless, boneless, without sensory organs and of the approximate shape and consistency of bagged oatmeal -- cooked." "Cooked?" "I understand they have hooks on their undersides to help them hang on when the breeze gets over a hundred and ninety knots," the undersecretary amplified. A Undersecretary," Magnan said brightly. "Why don't we just skip on past Quahogg and. try our luck elsewhere, say in a nice, comfortable planet inhabited by nothing more ferocious than a few colorful lichens?" "Don't talk nonsense, Magnan. Quahogg happens to be the sole planet of the Verman system, which lies squarely athwart the Groaci direction of creep into Terran spheres of influence. It should be perfectly plain to you that we must get a foothold on Quahogg before those rascals steal a march on us." "Maybe they'll just go around Quahogg." "What -- and lose points? Don't be naive, Magnan. You know how important points are to the Groaci." "I've got it, sir. Why don't we pretend to be big-hearted and just let them have it?" "Then wed lose points. Besides, His Supremacy is something of an unknown quantity -- we don't know what the beggar's up to." The undersecretary frowned. "I'll be candid with you: there seems to be some possibility that he has imperialistic ambitions. Wroth wax went in with a full Mark XL Undercover kit, and instructions to poke about. From the promptness with which he vanished, I suspect His Supremacy wasn't fooled even for a moment." "About that resignation," Magnan said thoughtfully. "Would I be able to get a lump-sum settlement from the Retirement Fund?" "Negative!" the Undersecretary barked. "Look here, Magnan, this could be a millstone in your career. A milestone, that is to say." Magnan said, "How true. What a pity I never learned the language -- " "Eh? According to your file you brain-taped both Sluggish and Worman back when you were angling for the assignment." "Ah -- unfortunately I only mastered Old Low Worman, an obscure dialect -- " "Bah, Magnan. You're hedging. I want you to go in there and come out covered with glory. Do you understand?" "But -- what about this Supreme IF II Figuration? How do I find him among all these -- these oversized annelids?" "That's your problem, Magnan. Now, you and Retief had better step smartjy. The personnel ferry lifts in less than six hours and you will be aboard." "I say, sir," Magnan offered, "I don't suppose you'd like to send a couple of gunboats in ahead of us to -- uh -- sort of worm the place a trifle?" "Nonsense, your job is to find out what happened to Wroth wax, not to become entangled with the wild life." The undersecretary fixed the new appointees with a penetrating eye. "We're counting bn you, gentlemen. And remember the corps motto: come back with your briefcases -- or on them!" In the corridor Magnan looked despairingly at Retief. "It simply doesn't pay to be outstanding," he mourned. "My reward for years of dazzling efficiency -- exile to a worm ranch." "Cheer up," Retief consoled him. "I'm sure you'll find the experience exhilarating -- once you get the hang of gripping bare rock while conducting a high-level negotiation with deaf mutes." "There's one consolation," Magnan said, perking up a little. "As charge , I'll rate a salute of seventeen and a half guns." "Impressive," Retief said. "Let's hope they're not aimed in our direction." aboard the corps' ferry, Circumspect , the intercom crackled and spoke. "Better get set, Retief," a casual voice said. "We'll be hitting atmosphere in a couple of minutes -- and I do mean hitting. If you see Nervous Nellie, pass the word. His hutch doesn't answer." "Nellie?" Magnan frowned. "Is there another passenger aboard?" "Just a little personal code the captain likes to use," Retief clarified. "I think it's time to strap into the drop-capsule." "I'm all a-twitter," Magnan said as he and Retief made their way along the narrow access shaft to the tiny compartment in which they would descend to the surface. "To think that I'll soon be presenting my credentials to His Supreme Figuration -- " "A solemn moment, Mr. Magnan." "Garb-wise, I'm prescribing full Late Midafternoon Top Formal cutaways, with chrome-plated dickeys, silver lace cuff-cascades, plus medals and orders. First impressions are important, I always say." "I'd suggest you amend that to ' read full environmental suits, plus deflector fields and traction boots," Retief said. He waved a hand at the small screen on which a cloud-mottled planetary surfacewas slowly swelling. "There seem to be a dozen or so hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes blowing simultaneously down there at the moment." Magnan stared at the view in dismay. "We're supposed to land in Aar?" "Actually, this is almost a lull, by Quahoggian standards." "You speak as though you knew it would be like this." "The post report the preliminary survey team compiled mentioned a certain amount of turbulence in the atmosphere." "Why didn't you warn me? I could have wriggled out -- I mean, my peculiar qualifications could jaunt doing a tourist facility survey on Beachromp, on full per diem allowances." "Pon't tell me that a campaigner of your experience forgot to do his research?" "Of course not. How would I have known about the seventeen and a half guns?" "We're in for a bumpy ride," Retief, said. "Maybe you'd better not try to land all the booze you had loaded in the cargo well." "Medical supplies," Magnan said crisply. "As you know, I disapprove of stimulants except in emergencies." "I suppose the fellows in the cave could use a snort, at that." "Um. Foolish of them to have landed off-target." "That part puzzles me," Retief said. "The controls in these landing bugs are pre-set, you know." "Possibly some malfunction," Magnan said absently. "Now, I'll want you to observe my technique, Retief. As chief of mission. I'll be moving in the highest level of the local society, hobnobbing with bigwings, attending a gay round of routs and balls. Tedious, of course, but one must accept these trifling inconveniences as part of the burden of leadership." "What about finding the missing ambassador? Will you be handling that before or after the gay round -- I mean the trifling inconveniences?" "Frankly, Retief," Magnan said in a confidential tone, "L imagine we'll find His Excellency holed up in the native quarter with a pair of local houris. We'll hush up the affair, as is usual in such cases, and -- " "Ready for drop," the captain's voice rasped in the diplomats' earphones. "Happy landings, gents -- and look out for falling cargo." With a lurch, as though kicked by a giant boot, the capsule leaped free of the mother ship and arrowed down through the murky atmosphere of Quahogg. VJ Magnan said, over the shriek of the wind, peering out through the armor-glass panel set IF in the steel bulkhead of the tiny landing pod, moments after the cushioned impact on the surface. "There's nothing out there but a lot of worn-down stone and flying dust, unless you want to count those ugly-looking black clouds scudding overhead. What's happened to the palace of His Supreme Figuration?" "The welcoming committee seems to be late, too." "Good lord -- you don't suppose we blundered, coordinate-wise, and missed the drop area, like that last pack of nitwits?" "If so, we missed it the same distance they did. Look over there." Magnan exclaimed sharply. just like ours!" "Except that the wind has peeled most of the plating off it," Retief agreed. "Well, let's get started. We don't want to keep His Supremacy waiting." Magnan assumed a determined expression. "I see we're up against some unexpected obstacles," he said firmly. "However, a diplomat's primary skill is adaptability." "How true. What do you plan to do?" "Resign, effective last Tuesday, pension or no. Just thumb that intercom and tell the captain to pick me up at once, will you?' v "One-way link, Mr. Magnan, remember? I'm afraid we're stuck." "You mean -- " Retief nodded. "We might as well disembark and find out if that report of a forty-foot worm was an exaggeration." Magnan groaned. "Maybe, if we're lucky, we can find the cave. I hope those gluttons haven't eaten all the antipasto." protective suits, the two diplomats cycled open the exit hatch. At once a violent blast of air seized them, spun them along across a stretch of eroded stone to lodge them with a crashing impact against a low stony ridge. "So far so good," Retief said. "At least the weather reports were accurate." "A scant consolation for being marooned in a maelstrom -- " "Still, you only have to hold the job down for thirty days to qualify for full chief-of-mission pay." "If I live that long." "Our first move had better be to plant a tracer beam to mark ground zero before they dump any more welcomees off-target." "Leaving clues to ease the burden of my successor interests me far less than preserving a whole skin," Magnan snapped. "I mean Ambassador Wrothwax's skin, of course," he added quickly. "Gracious, I'm only too glad to hurl myself to destruction if it will help implement corps policy." "That's all right, my suit recorder's not on," Retief said. "And Wrothwax will be thinking of your skin -- in strips -- if you hurl yourself to destruction before you've found him." Magnan, only dimly visible to Retief from six feet away, struggled to a sitting position. At that precise moment there was a descending whistle, followed by a resounding thump a few yards distant in the gloom. "That would be your medical supplies, right on schedule," Retief said. He got to his feet, forced his way forward into the gale. "That's a lot of medicine, Mr. Magnan," he said admiringly. "How did you sneak it past Supply Control?" "I hope the bottles aren't broken." "No bottles," Retief said. "Steel drums, fifty-five-gallon size. Lots of 'em." Assisted by his suit's servoboosters, Magnan waded forward to peer at the heaped containers deposited on the rock. Lettering on their sides proclaimed: "You had me fooled," Retief said. "I thought you were just kidding about the medical kit." "Who, I?" Magnan said weakly. "Would I jest about a subject so essential to diplomacy?" "Well, we're prepared for a variety of emergencies," Retief observed. "And I think I see the first one coming now." Magnan looked in the direction Retief was pointing. From the swirling cloud of windborne dust came a two-ton mass of leathery, duncolored gelatin, mist-shrouded, humping itself relentlessly toward the Terrans on blunt pseudopodia. I exaggerating," Magnan babbled, backing away. "It's hardly more than eight feet long, or possibly twelve -- and it's not even a worm. It's more of a slug and -- " "Let's hope it's a superslug, not, I foresee a dim future for Terry-Quahogg relations." Retief stepped aside as a long, tentacle-like member formed itself at the fore end of the amorphous creature and groped toward him. Thwarted, it shifted direction, snatched at Magnan, who leaped away, was caught by the wind and bowled along head over heels into the murk. Retief went after him, brought him down with a flying tackle at the edge of a precipitous gully. For a moment the two suited figures teetered at the lip of the ravine; then a vicious gust caught them, tumbled them over. Giant hammer-blows slammed at Retief through his protective suit as he careened downIF ward, bouncing from ledge to ledge to fetch up hard at the bottom. A moment later Magnan came skidding down, helmetfirst, amid a clatter of dislodged stones. Retief caught him by the shoulders, dragged him back into the meager shelter of the overhanging lip of a wind-carved cavern. "Well, thank goodness you're here at last," a petulant voice chirped in his earphones. "We're almost out of anchovies!" #(#)UT this is insane," the islight, paunchy diplomat, shivering in a use-stained environment suit repeated for the fourth time in three minutes. "It's obvious we're the victims of some grotesque hoax -- -" "Possibly if you'd seen fit to confide a trifle more detail in your report, Thrashwelt, we'd all have been spared no little inconvenience," Magnan said acidly, holding out his glass. "I did, Mr. Magnan, I assure Sector, with particular emphasis on my allergy problem. And instead of a rescue team, they send us two more thirsts to quench -- not that you're not welcome, of course," he added with a strained smile as he poured pink champagne. "We're down to the 'fortyfour -- very poor year. Miserable bouquet and an apalling traveler." The diplomats were seated on spindly folding chairs grouped around a collapsible table with integral lace napery and bud vase, crowded with dainty glasses, crumb-covered plates, open tins and crumpled paper napkins. In one corner of the cave were heaped a pile of ornately labeled empties, garnished with zwieback crusts, corks and olive pits. "Still, things could be worse," a silvery-haired press attache contri buted in a tone of half-hearted optimism. "I recall hearing of a Cultural Mission marooned in the Belt for three weeks with nothing but a regulation multidemoninational chapel kit to sustain them. Twenty-one days on Mogen David and sacrificial wafers." He wagged his head in commiseration as the little group observed a moment of sympathetic silence. "If only we could find the palace of His Supremacy," Magnan said dolefully. "Suppose we sent out search parties in various directions to comb the countryside." "No use," Colonel Wince, the military attache, stated solemnly. "Already done it. Boxed the compass. Nothing. Bare rock, slugs, drifted dust, worms, ravines, superslugs. Range of worn-down mountains in the distance. Filthy great clouds, dust up the kazoo -- " "Now, now no defeatism, Colonel," Magnan wagged a finger. "We're just not looking in the right places. Think, everyone. Where haven't we looked?" "Up the kazoon, I say," the colonel muttered. "Give a man an enemy he can come to grips with, not this confounded smog bank inhabited by invertebrate appetites." "With the exception of His Excellency the Ambassador, all personnel seem to be present or accounted for," Retief said. "What makes you think the wild life is carnivorous?" "Why, the instant they sight us they come charging down, figurative jaws agape," Thrashwelt said indignantly. "I didn't see any eyes," Retief said. "How do they sight us?" "Suppose we leave the zoological musings until later, Retief," Magnan said sharply. "At the moment the problem is how to disinsinuate ourselves from this dismal fiasco without furthur abrasions to hides, egos and effectiveness reports. Now, I propose that we make one more try via telelink, hoping for a break in the weather -- " He broke off as the dim light filtering around the curve of the grotto faded suddenly to near total darkness in which the folding emergency chandelier suspended from a convenient stalagtite shed a wan glow on anxious faces. "What in the world -- " "It's them," Thrashwelt gibbered, leaping up. "They're making another try -- " "Into the back room, men," Colonel Wince barked. "Man the barricades." Magnan yelped, "Here -- what's going on?" "Every so often one of those great horrid monsters comes poking and probing in here," a grasshoppery little clerk said breathlessly. "They squoosh themselves out thin and come groping in the dark, feeling for victims -- " He dashed away, scrambling through the narrow opening into the next cavern. Looking in the direction from which the attack was expected, Retief saw a bulge of darkness intrude into the chamber; a footthick finger patted the walls and floor like a hand feeling inside a pocket. "Come along, Retief," Magnan cried. "Do you want to be crushed to mincemeat?" "It seems to be feeling its way rather delicately," Retief pointed out. "As if it were being careful nqt to break anything." "Maybe it just doesn't like pate," Magnan croaked, backing away. "Retief -- look out!" The leathery probe suddenly elongated, thinned, shot out to within a foot of Retief 's knee. "Easy, Mr. Magnan," he called, standing fast. "The suit will take plenty of strain." Gingerly the pseudopod advanced, hovered, then, with a soft smacking sound plastered itself IF snugly against Retiefs left shin. "At last, a contact!" a mellow voice boomed inside Retiefs brain. "We were beginning to think you fellows didn't want to talk." telepathic inductance," Retief said. "He has to make physical contact to transmit." "Precisely," the soundless voice agreed. "By the way, my name is Sloonge, Minister of Internal Affairs to his Supreme Figuration. Ever since the arrival of Ambassador Wrothwax, His Supremacy has been anxious to meet the remainder of the mission." Retief passed the message along. "Then Wrothwax reached him after all," Magnan blurted. "Indeed, yes," Sloonge confirmed. "He was perceptive enough to lie down when the others departed so precipitously. He wriggled a bit when I greeted him, but as soon as he completed his ceremonial arrival song I was able to convey His Supremacy's invitation. At least I assume it was a ceremonial arrival song -- a series of strident yelps in the audible range?" "We diplomats frequently burst into yelps on emotional occasions," Retief assured the alien. "I take it after the ceremonies His Excellency went along to meet His Supremacy?" "Quite so. I hope you'll also favor him with a visit." "Retief -- what's going on?" Magnan demanded. "Why is it fingering your knee?" "It seems Wrothwax fell down and perforce enjoyed a nice chat with Minister Sloonge here, who conducted him to an audience with his boss. We're invited to join the party." "Do you suppose it's safe?" "It's what we came for." "True," Magnan conceded. "But Retief -- do you suppose His Supremacy is of the same species as this, er Megadeosseomolluscoid?" "I heard, I heard." Sloonge transmitted a chuckle-equivalent. "His Supremacy, a superslug? That's quite amusing, actually. His Supremacy will enjoy the jape. And now, shall we be going?" "Very well. Just a moment while I summon my staff." Magnan went to the rear of the cave and hallooed. The response was a strident sibilant. "Quietly -- you'll tip off our hidaway -- " in Thrashwelt's voice. "You presume to shush your immediate supervisor?" Magnan said sharply. "Come out at once and join my retinue. We're paying a call on His Supremacy." "Sorry, sir. My job description doesn't say a thing about exotic forms of suicide." "What's this?" Magnan choked. "Mutiny? Cowardice in the social arena?" "Concern for corps property," Thrashwelt corrected. "I wouldn't want to lose a valuable environmental suit containing an expensively trained bureaucrat, namely myself." "Very well," Magnan said coolly, "I suggest you while away the time until your arrest by composing a letter of resignation."' "Better composing than decomposing," Thrashwelt said tartly. "Come, Retief. Since you were the only one cool-headed enough to join me in my decision to outface the monster well carry on unaided." With their helmets in place and servos creaking, they followed the giant courtier out into the gale. stroll in the open air to make one appreciate a little shelter," Sloonge commented as the little party slogged ahead, the two diplomats sheltered in the lee of their guide, who slithered along beside them like a bus molded in gray jello. Communication was maintained via a pair of strap-shaped extrusions, which the Terrans gripped. "Curious," Magnan said, bucking the head-wind. U I see no signs whatever of civilization -- no roads, fences or structures of any sort." "Oh, erecting anything out here on the tundra would be a waste of time," Sloonge commented. "This is just a pleasant zephyr, of course -- but when the wind starts to blow in earnest, it's a different matter." "Underground shelters?" Magnan inquired. "What -- caverns large enough to shelter the entire population -- cut into solid rock?" Sloonge sounded surprised. "Quite beyond the,, scope of our technology. I'm afraid." The party topped a rise. Through a momentary break in the pall of rolling dust a featureless plain was visible, stretching to a row of humpbacked hills. "Still nothing," Magnan complained, his voice barely audible over the keening of the wind. "How much farther are we expected to wade through this Niagara of emery dust?" "Not far," Sloonge said. "We're almost there." "I suppose the palace is nestled in the hills," Magnan muttered doubtfully as they forged ahead. Ten minutes later, after mounting a slope of drifted dust in the lee of a rounded promontory they reached a sheltered furrow in the lumpy ground. "Ah, here we are," Sloonge telepathed, angling toward a lightless fold in the landscape. "I still don't see anything," Magnan said. IF "We Quahoggians don't lavish much .effort on externals," Sloonge explained. "Why bother, when the sand would flay a coat of paint off in twelve seconds by the clock?" The giant creature extended an improvised digit the size of a prize-winning watermelon to thumb a spot on the featureless gray wall. A crack appeared, wide passage. "Breath-taking," Magnan gasped as they stepped inside the rose-colored passage. The howl of the wind died as the entry closed behind them, to be replaced by the soothing strains of a Strauss waltz; liveried amoeboids of medium size sprang forward to attend the newcomers. "You may remove your helmets, gentlemen," Sloonge announced. "You'll find the air here tailored to your specifications, as suggested by Ambassador Wrothwax."   lieve I've ever seen anything so lavish in scale and decor," Magnan said as they proceeded along a lofty hall paved in red carpeting and draped in irridescent scarlet silk, shot through with bluish traceries. "No wonder they don't bother fancying up the externals with all this in store." "I'm exceedingly pleased you find the surroundings acceptable," a deep, soundless voice seemed to boom through Retief's brain. "Good lord! What was that?" Magnan quavered. "Gentlemen, permit me to introduce His Supreme Figuration," Sloonge spoke up smoothly. "Your Supremacy, the newly arrived members of the Terran delegation." "A pleasure," the vast voice rumbled. "Sloonge will show you to your quarters. Just ask for whatever you'd like. As for myself, I'll have to ask you to excuse me for the present. A touch of dyspepsia, I fear." Magnan was fingering his skull as if exploring for cracks. "I understood you to say contact was necessary!" he hissed at Sloonge. "How is it we can hear His Supremacy when he's not even here?" "Not here? Surely you jest, Magnan," Sloonge said jovially. "Of course he's here." Magnan looked around. "Where?" "Don't you know where you are?" Sloonge's mental tone was somewhat amused. "Of course -- we're inside His Supremacy's palace -- " "Close," Retief said. "But I think 'inside His Supremacy' woiifd be closer; about fifty yards along the pharynx, on the threshold of the cardiac orifice, to be pre-, cise." #'VfOU -- don't mean we've Xbeen eaten alive?" "Eaten?" Sloonge laughed a hearty telepathic laugh. "My dear sir, you'd hardly constitute for a crumb for His Supremacy, even if he were capable of subsisting on carbon compounds." "Then -- what -- " "I think I'm beginning to get the idea, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "The external environment here on Quahogg made development in that direction pretty difficult; so they turned to the inner man, so to speak." "Well put, Retief," Sloonge said. "I think you'll find we live very well here under the protection of His Supremacy "But -- inside a living creature? It's fantastic!" "As I understand human physiology, you maintain a sizable internal population of your own," Sloonge said somewhat tartly. "Yes -- but those are merely intestinal parasites. We diplomats are a different type of parasite entirely -- " "I hope, sir," Sloonge said with a noticable chill in his tone, "that you harbor no groundless prejudice toward honest intestinal fauna?" "Gracious, no," Magnan said hastily. "Actually, I couldn't get along without them." "To be sure. Well, then, may I show you around? Ahead are the fundus and pylorus; on my left, the arcade leading to the pancreas and spleen; I believe we're having a modest chamber-music concert there this evening. There'll be a few tables of bridge in the jejunum and roulette in the ileum for the more adventurous souls." "Retief, it's amazing," Magnan murmured as they proceeded. "The hangings, the carpeting, the furnishings -- they're magnificent. Whoever would have thought tripe could be so glamorous?" "Your quarters; gentlemen," Sloonge announced, ushering them through an arched opening into an anteroom done in a rather sour yellow. "Unfortunately the colors are a bit liverish at the moment, but the decor will improve as soon as His Supremacy is feeling better." Sloonge opened wide doors on a spacious room complete with flowery wallpaper, luxurious beds, pictures on the walls, capacious closets containing complete wardrobes, and an adjoining chamber a-twinkle with ceramics and bright metal fittings. Magnan thumped the bed; the mattress seemed to be a highquality inner-spring; the sheets were of pink silk, the blanket a lightweight violet wool. "Am I to understand His Supremacy provides all this himself?" "Why not? Once complete control of the metabolic processes is established, the rest is easy. After all, silk, wool, leather, ivory -- are IF all animal products. His Supremacy simply manufactures them in the required sizes and shapes. He can, of course, duplicate any artifact." "Great heavens, Retief -- there are even nymphs disporting themselves on the shower curtain," Magnan marveled. "How in the world do they -- I mean -- does he do it?" "It's really quite simple," Sloonge said. "Over the ages you Terrans have learned to manipulate externals; His Supremacy has merely concentrated on the internal environment." "Marvelous. I can't wait to see the rest." "A word of caution," Sloonge said. "Certain areas are off-limits to guests for reasons of internal security. You'd find conditions beyond the pyloric orifice most uncomfortable -- and I'd recommend avoiding the trachea and bronchial passages. Some of our people like to go slumming in the quaint little bronchioles over that way, but they run the risk of having some unsavory character jump out of the dark alveolus at them. Kindly limit your explorations to the upper tract." Magnan looked suddenly thoughtful. "Ah -- what happens when His Supremacy has his dinner?" suppose you're picturing yourself swept downstream by a sudden avalance of appetizers, eh, Magnan? Have no fear. The living quarters have been evolved as a quite separate complex in the anterior wall of the gut, well out of traffic. In any event, His Supremacy only ingests at intervals of several centuries. Just between us," he added, "he sometimes nibbles between meals, thus his present indisposition, no doubt. However, gluttony is its own punishment, as I've so often reminded him." "Can't he hear you?" Magnan inquired nervously, glancing at the ceiling. "His Supremacy would never think of eavesdropping," Sloonge said. "And if he did, he'd soon be looking for a new staff. We treasure our privacy." "What part do we parasites play in the internal economy?" Retief asked. "Why, we man posts in every department from liver to lights. We keep tabs on the basal metabolism, monitor gland secretions, control the pH, take care of custodial services, oh, a host of items. Without us. His Supremacy would soon grind to a halt, believe me. "He seems so self-sufficient -- with your help, of course -- that I'm a little surprised he even consented to receive a diplomatic mission." "Frankly, His Supremacy is thinking of emigrating," Sloonge said. "Emigrating? Why?" "Overpopulation." "Really? Just what is the population -- in terms of His Supremacy's species, that is?" "One," Sloonge said. "But he's a hearty eater. At the present rate of consumption, Quahogg will be entirely consumed in another two millennia." "Ah -- I take it you mean the food supply will be consumed?" Magnan queried. "A distinction without a difference, my dear Magnan. His Supremacy eats rock." Magnan smiled blandly. "Still -- I should imagineit would require a very long time indeed for a single individual to comsume an entire planet with a bulk somewhat in excess #f that of Terra." "Not when he's a hundred miles long," Sloonge said succinctly. "And doubles in size after each meal. Now, no doubt you'll want to get out of those bulky suits and freshen up. There'll be a reception in your honor in half an hour in the duodenum." "I hope," Magnan said as their host withdrew, "you noted how skillfully I drew him out, Retief. Why, he was practically babbling his life secrets to me." "You got everything except the dinner menu," Retief said admiringly. "And of course the wherabouts of Ambassador Wroth wax." "Doubtless we'll be accepting His Excellency's congratulations in person shortly," Magnan said as he opened the closet door. He clucjced and lifted out a scarletand-gold creation, heavy with braid, loops, knots, buttons, lapels, aiglettes and epaulettes. "Amazing," he said. "Regulation Corps Late Early Evening hemi-demi-semi-informals -- and they even got the decorations right. Copied from Ambassador Wrothwax's, no doubt." "I didn't know you had a figleaf cluster to your Doublecross of the Order of St Ignatz," Retief com-' mented. "Congratulations, Mr. Magnan. That's only awarded for hair-splitting at the conference table above and beyond the call of protocol, as I recall." "I was able to do a trifling service for a certain prince, who proved not ungrateful," Magnan said modestly. "I held out for sixlegged bar stools and a hundredfoot, mink-lined, double-decker pool table. Since His Highness' uncle was in the custom furnishings line, the family turned a tidy profit on the affair." "May I?" Retief examined the sparkling gold-and-enamel decoration closely. He pressed a hidden catch and the central jewel sprang open, revealing a tiny compartment filled with a fine brown powder. IF "Interesting," Retief said. "His Supremacy must scan the items he duplicates molecule by molecule, including any Groaci allergy dust that's incidentally included." "Heavens, close it at once, Retief! One grain of that and my sinuses will burst into flame!" "I'd like to borrow this, Mr. Magnan." "Take it and welcome!" "To fill the gap. I'll trade you my plastic-and-diamond Sunburst for a perfect Staff Meeting attendance record." "You made every meeting?" Magnan asked as he switched medals. "Nope, missed them all." "One day, Retief, you're going to miss something important that way," Magnan said sharply. "Perhaps, Mr. Magnan. But I still like the odds." IV soned Quahoggians thronged the gaudily decorated duodenum when the Terrans arrived. For the occasion, their hosts had squeezed themselves into vaguely humanoid shapes so as to fit into variations of Terran diplomatic garb. Soft music oozed from the walls; silent-pseudopoded servitors passed among the guests with trays of glasses. Sloonge came forward to meet them, unrecognizable in a vast purple suit which threatened to burst at every seam. "Ah, there you are." He gripped his guests' hands with large, jellysoft members extruded for the purpose. "Well, how do you like our little gathering? Rather gay, eh?" "It's so -- so silent," Magnan said. "A whole room full of people and not a word being said." "Ah, an oversight, easily corrected. We'll whip up some vocal chords in a trice." Sloonge's imitation eyes -- large pale-violet spots on the blob he used for a head -- blurred and ran together as he concentrated silently. "I've seen noses running," Magnan whispered to Retief as that member slowly flowed out across the Quahoggan's face. "But not like that" From a nearby group, a babble of conversation started up, at a barely sub-intelligible level. Others joined in; in half a minute, a high-pitched roar filled the great chamber like a Niagara of Smalltalk. "Ah, that's more like it, eh?" Sloonge verbalized in a voice like boiling tar. "Nothing like a few tribal background noises to put a being at ease, I always say." "Remarkable," Magnan said, accepting a proffered cocktail. "By the way, I haven't yet laid eyes on Ambassador Wrothwax." He craned his neck to see over the crowd; noticing what he was doing, the crowd instantly shrank by a head -- in many cases, literally. "And now," Sloonge said hurriedly, "may I present a number of His Supremacy's court? They're thrilled at the prospect of meeting you and -- " "Delighted," Magnan said. "By the way -- where is His Excellency?" "Where is he, you say?" Sloonge repeated. "Yes, well, as to that -- to be perfectly candid -- not that I haven't been perfectly candid all along -- but what I mean is, now I'm going to be even more candid -- " "Yes?" "Candidly, as I say -- no one seems to know." "You mean -- he stepped out and didn't leave word?" "Worse than that, Mr. Magnan. He was last seen two days ago. He's gone -- vanished!" "What, again?" Magnan's voice broke. "But -- look here, you can't just go around losing Terran Ambassadors." "Please -- not so loud. His Supremacy doesn't yet know." Magnan drew himself up stiffly. "Then, perhaps it's time to notify him." "Impossible. It would throw him into a case of the sulks -- do you know what that means?" ' "As it happens,  do not." porary arms. "He turns blue; the walls get clammy; utilities are shot to hell and the food -- " The minister shuddered, an effect like a ripple in a bathtub full of guava jelly. "No, no far better we simply carry on quietly; he'll never know the difference." "Impossible, Mr. Minister," Magnan said firmly. "I must request the use of your facilities to notify the undersecretary at once." "Unfortunately," Sloonge said, "that will not be possible." "I wondered at the rather curious failure of communications due to a storm which, it now appears, is actually a spell of mild weather," Magnan snapped. "Very well; my associate and I shall be forced to adopt sterner measures." "Why not accept the situation, gentlemen? His Excellency is missing, alas. But that's no reason we shouldn't continue on amicable terms -- " "We are leaving," Magnan said, "at once." "Au contraire" Sloonge said. He had absent-mindedly slumped halfway back to his normal proportions and now resembled a gaudily dressed two-armed giant squid. "You mustn't think of venturing forth in such weather." "Is that a threat?" Magnan choked. "By no means, Mr. Magnan. A simple statement of fact. For you to leave now might lead to all manIF ner of complications interplanetaryaccord wise -- especially if you rushed back to your superiors with the report that His Supremacy has misplaced an Ambassador. Ergo -- you remain. Now, let us be happy, let us be gay. You may as well; unless His Excellency turns up, you'll spend the rest of your natural lives here."Magnan said as soon as Sloonge had flowed and wobbled out of earshot. "How could Wroth wax have vanished without leaving a trace? He had full XL gear, dye markers, radio-active tracers, gamma-ray projectors, supersonic and infrared signal projectors -- everything." "Unless Sloonge can lie telepathically, he's just as puzzled as we are," Retief said. Magnan mopped at his forehead with a scented tissue. "I must be running a fever. I wonder how His Supremacy is at synthesizing antibiotics?" "It's not a fever," Retief said. "It's getting warm in here. Must be close to ninety." All around, the restive crowd -- which had diplomatically kept its distance since the exchange with Sloonge -- was showing signs of distress, shedding bulky costumes as their quasi-human forms wavered and slumped. "You don't suppose this is a scheme for getting rid of us by cooking us to death?" Magnan panted, fanning himself with a hand. "They don't seem to like it any better than we do," Retief pointed out. "They're spreading themselves thin for maximum radiating surface." Sloonge pushed through the increasingly amorphous crowd; only the big blue eyes remained of the courtesy shape he had assumed. Two small, leathery-looking Quahoggans were at his heels. "What's going on here, Sloonge?" Magnan demanded before the official could speak. "The place is like a hot-house!" "What's going on is that the temperature is zooming toward a record high," Sloonge replied somewhat hysterically. "His Supremacy has taken a turn for the worse: he's running a fever -- and if a miracle doesn't happen we'll all be dead by morning!" Magnan grabbed Retief 's arm. "We've got to get out of here at once." "Nothing has changed," Sloonge spoke up quickly. "I still can't permit you to leave." He motioned with a formless arm to his enforcers. "Take them to their quarters," he ordered in a blurry thought wave. "Leave that they don't see. I mean see that they don't see. I mean see that they don't leave. Or is that what I mean -- " # "Retief," Magnan said in a stage whisper, "you take the one on the left and the one on the right -- and rilgo for help." One of the small beings produced a chrome-plated power gun, identical with Terran Navy issue. "Better play it smart, big boy," he telepathed. "I been wanting to see how this worked." Terrans made their way across the wide floor -- which was now an unflattering shade of puce and tended to ripple underfoot -- and along the somewhat shrunken corridor to their quarters. The wallpaper, formerly a gay pattern of daffodils on a field vert, was now a rancid orange against faded olive drab. The shine was gone from the fixtures. The heat was intense. "Even the mattress sags," Magnan said. "Good lord, Retief, are we doomed to spend our remaining hours in a third-rate hotel room?" Retief was watching the two guards, whose shapes were wavering like dying flames. He stepped in suddenly, plucked the gun from flaccid fingers which had sagged to a length of eighteen inches under the weight of the weapon. The former owner made a weak grab. "Don't try it," Retief advised. "It shoots fire. A short burst into th floor is guaranteed to give His Supremacy instant ulcers." "Why didn't you warn a fellow?" the Quahoggian said. "I might of shot at you, missed and gotten into a lot of trouble." "Before you go," Retief said, "where is the little round Terry who arrived last week?" "Beats me. I 'ain't seen him since -- " He caught himself, but the faint thought leaked through: since  caught him trying to sneak past post number eight-O-two . : . "Where's post eight-O-two?" "I'm not saying." The guard was in obvious distress from the heat; it was apparent that only will power kept his lumpy body from flowing out into a thin film. "Let's get outa here, Whump," his comrade proposed. "Maybe if we beat if out inta the exoderm we can cool off." "Yeah, but we got orders -- " "It's every phagocyte for himself." The first guard fled, closely followed by his partner. Magnan sniffled. "One encounters them everywhere nowadays -- " He broke off as Retief pocketed the gun and headed for the door. "Let's go hunt up Sloonge," Retief said. "Maybe now he'll be in a mood to negotiate." ster slumped, quivering, in a corner of the ilium like a truckload of 'pale liver on which two large eyes floated like broken blue eggs. # IF "What, still alive?" he telepathed weakly as he caught sight of the Terrans. "A pity, all this. Never intended it to end this way. His Supremacy is done for -- temperature up to a hundred and ten and rising. This is the end -- for all of us -- " "Maybe not," Retief said. "What's the quickest way out?" "No use. His Supremacy has slid into rigor vitalis; every sphincter's locked tight. We're trapped." "And you intend to just lie there supinely and let it happen?" Magnan yelped. "It's as good a place to lie supinely as any," Sloonge pointed out. "You say His Supremacy is doomed," Retief said. "Are you on the off-chance of saving him?" "What do you have in mind?" "Can you lead the way to the olfactory cavity?" "I suppose so -- but -- " "No time to talk now," Retief said. "Let's get going." Sloonge pulled himself together. "I suppose anything's worth a try. The olfactory cavity, you say? Not that it will do any good. You can't get out that way; nostrils are closed tight, as I said, and -- " His thoughts trailed off as he devoted total effort to wobbling across the now spotty-looking floor. Unconscious Quahoggians lay everywhere; the few who retained consciousness lay quivering, their color like unbaked dough. The party made its way along the deserted pharynx, turned left into the nasal passage, a poorly lighted corridor decorated with No Smoking signs and enlarged photos of glamorous nude bacteria. "Little -- cooler here," Sloonge managed. "But -- no difference in the end. Trapped. Sorry about this, gentlemen. Should have -- let you save yourselves -- " They emerged into a high-domed chamber almost filled with banks of leathery curtains which hung in rows, quivering faintly. "The olfactory membranes?" Retief asked. "Correct. As you see, everything's shut tight. Nothing can get through; dust-proof, wind-proof -- " "Unless we can persuade His Supremacy to open up," Retief said. "I tried," Sloonge said, collapsing into a rubbery heap. "But he's delirious. He thinks he's a mere grub again and is being roasted and dipped into molten chocolate for the exotic tidbits trade." service, no doubt," Magnan groaned. "Hurry up, Retief -- burn a hole through to the outer air before my bodily juices coagulate!" "Retief -- you wouldn't -- " Sloonge made a convulsive grab for the Terran, who stepped back out of range. "Not unless I have to." "You tricked me' Sloonge wailed. "Alas, that I should play a part in torturing His Supremacy in his last moments!" "Listen, Sloonge, I need your help," Retief said. "How far above ground level are we here?" "Mmm. About fifty feet, I should say. But -- " "Can you elongate to that length?" "Easily. But -- " "You'll need a solid anchor at this end. How about grabbing a few of those." He pointed to a stand of wrist-thick sensory spines lining the central aisle. "Why should I?" "Because if you don't ill have to burn our way out." "Well -- " Sloonge followed instructions, coiled himself like a pale fire-hose, gripping the support. "Lie flat and hang on, Mr. Magnan," Retief instructed his colleague. "What are you going to do?" "Trigger a reflex -- I hope." Retief said. "Hold your nose." He detached the borrowed medal from his chest, opened it and emptied the contents in a brownish cloud over the nearest sensitive membrane. The result was remarkable. The curtain-like tissue turned flaming red, twitched, writhed, sending the powder billowing about among the adjacent sensors, which in turn jerked and blushed. Retief dived for a position just above Magnan as, with a violent spasm, the nostril -- a forty-foot vertical slit at the far end of the room -- opened to admit a blaze of daylight and a great squall of cold air, snapping shut at once. "That's one 'ah,'" Retief called. Again the shudder, the quick intake, the snap shut. "Two." A third violent inhalation... "Sloonge -- get set!" The end wall split. "Go," Retief said. The aft end of the boa-shaped Quahoggian slithered quickly forward, out, down out of sight. "Come on!" Retief and Magnan dashed for daylight; without urging, Magnan gripped the legthick rope and slid down. Retief followed, was halfway to the windswept rock below when the thunderous choo! blasted forth like a quarry explosion; he fell the rest of the way amid coils of rubbery Interior Minister Sloonge.   groaned, slowly dragging himself back into his normal superslug form. "But to what end? With His Supremacy gone, we few survivors will be back to scratching at rocks for # a living. Think of overnight." "We're not through yet, Sloonge," Retief said. "Can you IF lead the way back to where you found us?" "Abandon His Supreme Figuration in his dying agonies? Look here, Retief, you said something about trying to save him -- " "That's right. I don't guarantee results, but at this stage it won't hurt to try desperate measures. Let's go." It took the little party half an hour to grope across the plain through the relentless wind to the abandoned landing pod and the heaped drums. At Retief's direction, Sloonge shaped himself' into a large, hollow bulb with a slim nozzle at one end. Retief uncapped half a dozen of the containers. "All right, Sloonge, load up," he directed. The bulky interior minister insterted his small end into the nearest drum, with a powerful muscular contraction siphoned out the contents. Quickly he repeated the performance with the other containers. After the forth he was swollen to a vast drum-tight bulk. "Retief," he telepathed faintly. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" "I hope so. Let's get started back." It was a painful progress. Laden with the sloshing bulk cargo, Sloonge moved heavily, clumsily, crawling over each bump and ridge with telepathic groans and moans. At last the range of hills that was His Supremacy loomed out of the driven smog. "Now -- one last trick," Retief said. "You'll have to force an entry into the buccal cavity." "Impossible," Sloonge expostulated. "How can I open a hurricane-proof mouth?" "Just far enough to get a finger in," Retief urged. Sloonge dragged himself across to the sealed, fifty-foot wide eating mouth, probed fruitlessly at the sealed orifice. "I'll have to use a touch of the quirt," Retief said. "Get ready." He set the blaster at low heat, aimed it at the monstrous lip, and pressed the stud. For a moment, nothing happened; then the stonylooking hide twitched; for an instant an opening appeared. Sloonge plunged his syringe-tip through as the mouth clamped tight again. "That -- that smarts," he said. "Now what?" "Pump it in," Retief said. "Then we'll just stand back and wait." With a powerful contraction of his versatile body, Sloonge squirted two hundred and twenty gallons of high-grade medicinal mineral oil into the alimentary canal of his mother country. ly decorated ballroom. Sloonge, impeccable in , a tentsized, canary-yellow outfit on which the Order of the Purple Kidney -- newly awarded for services to the Fatherland -- sparkled, waved genially at the Terran Mission as it was announced. "Ah, there, Mr. Ambassador." He hurried to offer impromptu hands to all members of the delegation simultaneously. "You're looking quite your old self again after your ordeal." "Ordeal? What ordeal?" Wrothwax boomed, deftly lifting a glass from a passing tray. "Nonsense, my boy. I had a capital time exploring the palace catacombs." He snared a slab of pate from another tray. "I must confess I did get a trifle weary of maraschino cherries; had no rations but my emergency cocktail kit, you understand." "Oh? I had an idea you might have been, er, lost." "Nothing in it, Sloonge. Jolly interesting place, the catacombs. I was just on the point of deciphering a number of fascinating inscriptions when the earthquake occurred." "You wouldn't have been snooping just a tiny bit?" Sloonge inquired archly, wagging a limp cucumber-sized finger at the Terran envoy. "Scholarly research, my boy, nothing more." Wrothwax reassured his host, signaling for a refill. "Pity to abandon my finds, but I felt I should rush back and see to the safety of my staff." "In this case," Magnan murmurred, "I'm sure excretion was the better part of valor." "Eh?" Wrothwax said. "For a moment I thought you said -- but never mind. Slip of the tongue, eh?" "No doubt." "Quite. Pity I never got to meet His Supremacy, Sloonge -- but I'm sure you and I can come to an agreement regarding the extensive deposits of pure corundumrubies and emeralds to you, gentlemen -- among which I found myself after the avalanche. Now, I had in mind a barter arrangement under which I found myself after the avalanche. Now, I had in mind a barter arrangement under which Corps bottoms haul in Groaci sand, for which you say you have a need, and take away these troublesome gems -- waste-products, I believe you called them..." The Ambassador and the minister strolled off, deep in negotiation. Magnan commented, "Never a word of gratitude to me for arranging his evacuation from the danger zone." "Still, for once a Terry Ambassador got inside the problem," Retief said. "And as a result of my efforts -- with your assistance, of course, Retief -- emerged covered with, if not glory, rubies and emeralds." "And smelling like a rose," Retief agreed.  IF It was not his time, place or kind of war -- so he switched all three! soldier and a tramp sat eating lunch in the Rocket Room Lounge atop the Reed-Warren Hotel in Manhattan. "Now Casey," said the tramp, "explain this thing to me. A week ago we ate garbage, if anything, and smoked cigar butts in corncob pipes. But today -- " "Today," said the Revolutionary War soldier, "we eat lobster, flown in from Maine, at the poshest spot in New York." "Yes," said the tramp. "And you're wearing that outlandish outfit and carrying a bloody big musket. You look daft, Casey." "Daft I look." said Casey, "and daft I feel, but there's moneyin the pockets of this silly costume. Or gold, anyway." "You've got gold in your pockets?" "Yes, but it spends as well as any money you ever saw." "Tell me what's happened to make you this way, daft and rich." The Revolutionary War soldier laid his musket across the table and lit a fifty-cent cigar. "I've brought you here to tell you, but I hesitate. You'll not believe me." "Please, Casey," said the tramp. "I'm most curious." "Okay. Well, it started a week ago today when I went to the post office to pick up my relief check. Another envelope was there for me, one with a smeary postmark so I couldn't tell where it came from." "And what was in the envelope, Casey?" "My orders. I'm being transferred to the Revolutionary War." Casey took a puff on his cigar. "That's remarkable," said the tramp. "But not easy to believe. What did the letter in the envelope say?" "Read it yourself," said Casey, taking the letter from his three-cornered hat and handing it to the tramp. "You know I can't read," said the tramp. "Then I shall oblige you," said Casey, putting on his Benjamin Franklin glasses. " 'Dear Casey,' it says here. Through error you have been stranded in the twentieth century when you should have been in the American Colonial Period.; You will be resupplied and transferred this week and will arrive in the American Colonial Period during the Revolutionary War. Please stand by and accept our apologies for putting you into a field for which you are totally unprepared.' " "That's all?" asked the tramp. "That's all," said Casey. "And what happened next?" "I thought it foolishness and kept the letter only as a curiosity. But when I woke up the next morning I found these fine buckle shoes under my bed in the flop house. I felt silly but I put 'em on because my own shoes were gone." "Amazing," said the tramp. IF "A marvelous thing," said Casey. "Of course, when I got back to the flop that night this threecornered hat was on my bed. I thought some of the boys were puttin' me on." "Was that it?" said the tramp. "Were some of them putting you on?" "No. Next morning my pants were gone and I found these kneebritches and silk hose hanging on the doorknob. The next day came this sissy-looking ruffled shirt and the coat," said Casey. "How'd you get up enough nerve to wear such a getup outside the house?" said the tramp. "I had to wear it. My own stuff was gone." "Still, you're sure it's not someone playing a trick on you? You know, stealing your clothes and giving you these?" "No chance. I know because day before yesterday I found gold in my pockets. Now who would leave that?" "Nobody we know, I guess." "And the horse. You know, the one we rode over here on? I found him saddled and parked between a Buick and a garbage truck yesterday morning when I came out of the flop. I knew right off he was mine." "And he's a nice horse, Casey, a really fine horse." "I know nothing about horses, but he's handsome all right. And I can ride him well enough -- and I was never on a horse before in my life. Can't think how I came by it -- the skill to ride, I mean." "So you're going back to the Revolution," mused the tramp. "Damn -- that's hard to believe. How'll you get there?" "I can't say, but I'm certain I'm going. I haven't a doubt. In fact, I expect to leave today. It's been a week since I got the letter." "Right. The letter said a week." "Yes." "You'll be missed around here, you know." "Oh, and I'll miss this city too, and my friends," said Casey. "But I really am a misfit. I don't like being a bum, really, for all its advantages. I've often felt that time and I were out of joint somehow." "Perhaps you'll do better back in the Revolution. Perhaps you'll be a success." "Well, I hope so. I mean. I'm dressed as a fine soldier -- maybe an officer even." Casey called attention to his uniform by pulling his vest smartly down. "And you have a good gun there." "Tielman at the hock shop offered me three-hundred for it, and you know how close he comes to true value." "Ha!" said the tramp. "He never comes near it."  tramp and the Revolutionary War soldier looked at each other. "We've been through a bit together," said the soldier. "We have," said the tramp. "I wish you were coming with me," said the soldier. "And I," said the tramp. "It's difficult to catch a ride on a freight anymore. Been figuring I'm slowing down. This life's no fun." "Yes, but I can't take you. I don't even know how I'm going myself." "I think you're going now," said the tramp. "Look at your gun." "Hey! It's fading away. Look!" The musket disappeared from the table. Casey sat up straight and put down his cigar. He patted his chest and felt his shoulders. "I seem solid enough," he said. "Not to me," said the tramp. "You're fading out. I can almost see through you to your chair." "Really now? Well -- I guess I'm going. I guess this is it." "Yes. I could read a newspaper through you now." "Ha! You can't read." "True, but you're getting mighty faint." "And I feel faint now. Do you suppose this is happening to the horse?" "I suppose so." "Well, old friend, goodbye." "Before you go -- one thing, Casey." "Hurry -- I feel myself slipping." "Leave some gold to pay for the meal. I'm broke." "Oh, yes," said Casey. He pulled a handful of gold coins from his pocket and shoved them across the table. "You keep whatever's left. I'm going. So long -- " "Goodbye, Casey." The tramp waved briefly as the Revolutionary War soldier disappeared. "I hope your luck's better in your new assignment." The tramp stuffed the gold into his pocket. He looked at the chair Casey had been sitting in, shook his head as if to clear it. He picked up the butt of the cigar Casey had been smoking and went to pay the check.  IF see today is obviously derivative from stories I saw decades ago. I suppose I should expect this. After all, the field has been mined steadily for almost half a century by clever idea-hunters; it isn't surprising that most of the major original ideas have been discovered and used. It is more than a hundred years since Achille Eyraud told of using a rocket ship to reach another world. "Doc" Smith wrote the pioneer space opera before there were science-fiction magazines. Wells gave us time travel; his War of the Worlds not only invented alien invasion but also set much of the style for disaster novels later done to death by Wyndham, Ballard and a host of others. Weinbaum taught us that aliens must be truly different in backgrounds, attitudes and instincts. I can't remember who first wrote of atomic power or atomic doom. Maybe we shouldn't expect anything but derivative stories. In most writing courses, original style is exalted and original ideas are forgotten, since mainstream novels have to be endless variations on familiar themes. Until people change radically, stories about them in our normal milieu cannot afford to use the unusual without losing conviction. Nothing is necessarily inferior about a derivative story, even in our field. Many wonderful ideas first came to us in pretty crude stories with no extensive development. Later writers could then reexamine the concepts with clearer and deeper perception and write far better stories around them. Murray Leinster used the old idea of first alien contact so well that his novelette became the definitive one on the subject. He gave us fresh insight, which is often claimed but all too seldom achieved. However, the real joy of science fiction to its devoted readers has been that it is a literature of ideas. Unlike other fictioneers, we have continually discovered new concepts and eventually have thought out clearly all the implications of those concepts. If we are to remain more than a minor subcategory of fiction, we continue to need those flashes of invention and insight desperately. Happily, lights are still burning where busy minds refuse to accept sterility or senescence. Ringworld , by Larry Niven (Ballantine, #t), is a fine example of a writer's thinking deeply and constructively about an idea of real science. Niven has taken the concept presented by Freman Dyson and thought hard and well about how it could be handled. Dyson proposed that a race may progress until it needs every bit of energy put out by its sun; to catch that energy, it will take all the planetary matter and build it into a sphere around the sun, with life spreading over the inner surface of this sphere. Niven has discarded the needless hypothesis of artificial gravity to hold objects down to that surface. He has set out to discover a practical way to create room for an expanding population. A sphere cannot be spun to create an inertial equivalent of gravity, since only the equator spins properly; and if you get up a huge ring around the sun, the atmosphere would simply stream off into space at the speed of rotation the ring would need. Niven has solved the problem neatly and to my mind completely. It's a beautiful concept, far more convincing than the Dyson spheres. (Curiously, however, astronomers have found some evidence suggesting possible Dyson spheres in space. Discovering Niven ringworlds would be far more difficult.) Furthermore, Niven hasn't stopped with a technical gimmick. He has looked at the effects of the creation of such a world on the race that might build it. And he has explored the world and its wonders in quite convincing detail. There's a great deal more to the story than the technical material. IF of course. There's a subplot involving what might be called a sort of "psi" mutation -- a human being who always has exactly the luck she needs. Because of this talent she has been deliberately included in the party that will explore the Ringworld. But the results of her luck are not at all obvious -- and Niven has thought this through as carefully and as originally as his background. She makes for an interesting character in the book. So does an alien who comes from a highly aggressive culture. The alien is handled with a subtlety and finesse that I haven't previously seen in Niven's writing; his growth toward understanding and true cooperation is never described in raw terms but is built beautifully into the patterns of behavior he consistently exhibits. The whole book marks a major step forward in Niven's writing, in my opinion. The human viewpoint character still has some elements that seem a bit wooden, and the plot doesn't always move forward with the smoothest pacing. But these are minor quibbles. And even in these areas, I find a considerable growth in Niven as a writer. I think it's a darned good book. In fact, of the science fiction I've seen so far this year, I can't think of a better contender for the Hugo and Nebula awards. I hope it will be as widely read as it deserves. The Stone God Awakens , by Philip Jose Farmer (Ace, #). This is an example of a highly familiar idea. Twenty-five years ago, Beyer's Minions of the Moon began with about the same situation -- one that was old then. A man from today is somehow put into suspended animation and wakes in the far future when everything civilized has long since passed away. Farmer, however, hardly ever touches an idea without bringing fresh insight to it. He hasn't merely destroyed civilization a few thousand years from now. He has jumped his hero forward destroyed the human race after a tremendous background of progress. He has then produced a whole series of sentient beings, different from man in some ways, with whom our hero must learn to live. And above all lies a single, dominant sentient being that bears no resemblance to humanity -- though it is a logical product of human progress. This is a vegetable, computerlike thing which has taken over most of what is left of our continent. The period of suspended animation isn't exactly a simple and convenient dodge to get Ulysses Singing Bear into the future, either. He has been infinitely indestructible and immutable during all those eons and has been mixed up in the developments as a "stone god" or unchanging object sent hither and thither across the savage or semicivilized worlds behind the future in which he finds himself. This is essentially the story of his search for a mate in the apparently mateless world, though his immediate job is to prove that he's a skookum god by overcoming the power of another god. Farmer has a trick of mixing what is obvious to the reader with nice developments that are not predictable. And his non-humans mix in complicated ways, as they should in a world where more than one sentient race exists. I assume this is the first of a series, since the ending is left wide open for the further exploits of Ulysses. But Farmer does sew up his primary problem in this novel, so that the book can stand on its own, unlike too many lately that simply stop after a certain number of pages. This isn't a major novel. It isn't meant to be anything but derivative in nature. And that doesn't matter, because Farmer has done his homework well; he has thought out those twenty thousand millennia, he has created the richness of background needed -- and he has faced the human problem of his hero honestly. It is a book of insight. Good fun with a few kickers buried in it, and well worth the price and reading time. When the writer has neither a new idea nor any new insight into handling the concept, he may still sell a book -- if his name is, say A.E. Van Vogt. Here is a writer who has long been recognized as having contributed a wild plethora of ideas in story after story, so that his name is genuinely and understandably provocative of intellectual excitement. His Children of Tomorrow (Ace, #), however, is pretty thin fare. Instead of working or thoroughly reworking one idea, he seems to have taken two old ones, thrown them together helter-skelter, and hoped vaguely that some good would come fortuitously. The result is something like taking left-over hamburger and chocolate pie and putting them in a blender in hopes of getting a fresh dinner. The first element is that an alien race is studying the world, preparing to take it over, with one of its number disguised as a human being. This should be a good idea for a Van Vogt story, given sufficient new insights into the alien ways of thought. The second idea is a humdrum concept of the children organizing themselves into state-recognized bands to bring themselves up without the mistakes of their elders. Unfortunately, the alien boy in the story never seems to be other than a duller version of the rest of the kids, while his "father" obIF server is merely a vagueness over the story, not at all realized in the way so many of Van Vogt's aliens have been. The outside menace becomes petty, mere window dressing. The wonder children fail miserably. They don't even equal the real examples of such attempts to escape the past one reads about in today's newspapers. Van Vogt's kid groups aren't cleared of the ancient ugliness of the tribal heritage, but seem to be rather sorry gangs in a stiff make-believe game of Junior Marvel Assistants. Their morality seems rather weaker, despite their stated aims, than that of some real kid gangs I have known. Apparently, one of their fathers should be the example of a recalciwhile the mother is the sympathetic one. I felt repelled by her idiocy throughout, and the only figure I could even faintly like was the father, until he turned into another patsy. I finished the book with growing reluctance -- but only because Vogt novel without reading it to the bitter end. The whole wasn't worth the trouble. I regret that, since I think the field badly needs some of the magic and excitement that this major writer gave it so often in the past. It's a shame, but I can only recommend that you pass this one by. tion books, however, which should not be overlooked. The Glass Teat , by Harlan Ellison (Ace, #), has little to do with science fiction, except that Ellison has become a major and controversial figure to those of us who read the field or who have met him at various conferences. It is a collection of his writings for The Los Angeles Free Press , ostensibly as television reviewer but actually as critic at large. It doesn't matter what these treatises are supposed to be, any more than it matters whether you agree with his opinions or not. What does matter to me is that here for the first time I find some feeling of Harlan Ellison, the whole man, telling it as he sees it, far more than he can do in his fiction. And I also find a man writing at his most effective best. Anyone who has enjoyed the stories by Ellison should read this. Or, lacking its presence on the bookstand, wait for the next collection of columns soon to be brought out. Here is a writer who has been leading a crusade to make science fiction more pertinent tp today; this book is his view of the today in need of such pertinence. The book also happens to be very much alive and fascinating and, from my experience with Ellison, honest. The fact that it is the best writing of his I have yet seen is an added bonus. I glanced at it, to put the book down only when I'd read to the end. I'm glad that he wrote the columns, that they were collected here and that I had a chance to read them. The other non-fiction book is directly concerned with science fiction. The Universe Makers , by Donald 'Wollheim (Harper  Row, #), is, to quote part of the blurb: "an excellent personal statement of the place of science fiction in literature, an excellent introduction to the genre for the beginner, and a source of discussion for the aficionado." For once, I have no quarrel 'with the blurb. Wollheim seems to have two basic ideas. The first deals with the importance of science fiction (in its totality, not specifically) in predicting the course and hope of civilization or the dooms that may befall man. He indicates his own belief that science fiction has not only often indicated the path of the future before it came about, but that the literature has even helped to shape that future. Certainly, he shows, it has greatly helped its readers to prepare themselves to accept or cope with the future. His second theme is an attempt to find the main patterns in the field. He finds that most of the fiction can be separated into two main streams: those who follow Jules Verne, dealing with technology and gadgets, with little moral value and much fantasy adventure; and those who follow H.G. Wells, dealing with technology only as it affects the sociological future of man, warning of dangers and offering considered hopes for our survival. In following his two themes, Wollheim discusses the work of most of the major writers who have written what might be called science fiction, whether in the magazines or in the mainstream. He is unusually frank, at least for a man who must deal with many of those writers; and I found his opinions stimulating and interesting, though I couldn't always wholly agree with them. I wish more of the men who have spent their lives in being influential in the field would state their personal philosophies of science fiction in books like this one. We've already lost some of them, but John Campbell, Robert Lowndes, and a number of others could well put between hard covers some of the things they have said in letters to their writers and -- partially -- in scattered writing on the subject. It is from such work as this that literary researchers of the future will be literary movement of the time. There is nothing new about the idea of memoirs and musings from IF influential men; it's an ancient form of writing, too often reserved for the military man and the politician. But since a man cannot live for years in any chosen vocation without developing insights that reflect a great deal of hard thought, it is writing that will always serve us well. Finally, there is an anthology which relates coincidentally to some of the things discussed by Wollheim and also has more of an honest reason than many I have seen lately. Nightmare Age , edited by Frederik Pohl (Ballantine, #c) gives us a choice of thirteen Wellsian stories which point out futures that might come to pass, their cause -- and sometimes, inferential, their cure. I have no desire to discuss thirteen separate stories in this space. Sufficient to say that the works run from Paul Ehrlich to Robert Heinlein, with a lot of good science-fiction writers in between. Most of them are very good stories. I can't say that I remember them all with pleasure -- but I can say that I'm glad I read them back when many of them foreshadowed what we realize today may be the future, and I'm glad to see them assembled here. If there is such a thing as Wollheim's Wellsian stream of science fiction, this anthology represents some of the best and most varied samples of that genre. It's a very good job.  Sheraton Columbus Motor Hotel, # North Third Street, Columbus, Ohio. Guest-of-Honor: Lester del Rey. For information: Larry Smith # F Roche Drive, Columbus, Ohio #.  the Commodore Hotel, New York, New York. Guest-of-Honor: John W. Campbell. Fan Guest-of-Honor: Howard DeVore. Features: Hospitality Room, Art Show, Banquet -- Toastmaster: Isaac Asimov. Membership: In advance (must be received by March #th) '#. For information: Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York.  #th World Science Fiction Convention. At the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, Prudential Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest-of-Honor: Clifford D. Simak. Fan Guest-of-Honor: Harry Warner Jr. Features: movies, auctions, panels and speeches by sf pros, awards banquet, presentation of the Hugos. Registration: # supporting, # attending. No mail registration after August #. For information: Noreascon, P. O. Box # Cambridge, Massachusetts #. novelette Man had cleaned up Earth , but polluted the stars... I T 'HE glowing ball of Jupiter should have dominated the corner of space into which Jon Mather was gazing. But he could not see it at all. Only a dim diffused light filtered through the porthole of the spacecraft. The Santa Barbara was orbiting more than a surface of the giant planet and Jupiter should have loomed ten times as large as the Moon seen from Earth. Heavy black droplets floated outside the ship. They were round and dense in the zero gravity, barely illuminated by the light reflected from the hiddea, planet. And the greenish-yellow Jovian glow grew weaker still as the droplets began to collect on the outside of the porthole. Within a few minutes Jon Mather could see only his own distorted reflection in the glass. Disappointed, he removed the telephoto lens from his camera and turned to hail the Santa Barbara s chief navigator, who was just then floating forward through the craft's all but empty passenger section. "Not much of a view," he said. "Not much of anything," said the navigator. "We've lost radio communication, too." Jon raised an eyebrow. "It's no surprise, Jon. Not with all that fuel hanging out there." "You mean even radio waves won't travel through this muck?" "Oh, they'll travel through it just fine -- once they get off the transmitting antenna. But the fuel conducts r.f. current, and it's shorting out our antenna." "You mean we're in trouble?" "Probably not. We won't be running into very heavy space traffic around Callisto. And the Callisto control tower will be watching us on radar even if we can't talk with them." Jon glanced at the obscured porthole, shook his head sadly, turned back to the navigator. "I hope you didn't arrange the voyage through this fuel slick for my benefit." "Crazy we're not. Though you did come here to find a way to clean up this kind of mess, didn't you?" A red light flashed on at the front of the cabin. "I'd better get back to my post -- we'll be touching down soon." Jon turned his attention back to the fouled porthole. It remained as dark as before. Presently he felt the acceleration of the Santa Barbara's rockets as the spacecraft began its descent toward Jupiter's second largest satellite. A S he stepped from the airlock of the Santa Barbara onto the frozen surface of Callisto, Jon Mather tried to twist his head to see the huge planet whose image IF had been obscured from the spacecraft. But the heavy life-support suit made the maneuver almost impossible and he was able to see nothing more than a reflection of the yellow globe on the curved surface of his face mask. Frustrated in his second attempt to see Jupiter, Jon glanced back at the ship he had just left. It was difficult to recognize under its heavy layer of grime and even by the light of the sun, high in the Callisto sky, he could not make out the logo of the Solar Federation, which he knew was painted on its hull. The first navigator's voice sounded in Jon's headphones. "It was a lot filthier than that. Our descent through the atmosphere cleaned off some of the guck." "How could you see to touch down through this stuff?" Jon asked. "I was blind on my side." . "Automatic vapor cleaner for the control ports. We activated it once we left the slick." Jon nodded, though he knew the gesture was not visible outside the life-support suit. In a few moments he and the navigator had reached the airlock of the underground compound. A door slid shut behind Jon and the crewman and the automatic elevator began its slow descent. A faint mist formed on Jon's space mask as normal air filtered into the cabin. The door opened again, and he found himself in an antechamber that seemed identical to ones he had seen on the Moon. The ship's navigator helped Jon off with his bulky helmet and the unwieldy gloves. Then a guide in a turquoise uniform bearing the insignia of the Terran Mining Corporation, led him down long corridors to his quarters. Once alone in his small but comfortable looking room, Jon was quick to remove the rest of the life-support suit and don the light clothes he had packed for what would be entirely an indoor existence. A light rap came at the door. "Come in," Jon said. The door opened and a fairhaired man in his late twenties or early thirties strode in. "Ralph Lake!" Jon reached for the younger man's hand. "For God's sake -- it's been, what, ten years?" "All of that," said Ralph. "We were still Earthlubbers then, working for the Solar Federation." "What do you mean, Earthlubbers? You went with me on my first space flight?" The younger man's brow knitted, cleared. He grinned. "The Moon hardly counts these days. But you're right -- we flew to the Mining Engineering Congress on the Moon." "And I remember how rough that first flight was. Ships are a lot smoother now." "I hear," said Ralph, "that you've made yourself an impressive reputation on Mother Earth -- cleaning up the home land." Jon nodded. "It must have been shortly after the last time we saw each other that I was appointed to head the commission to curb the pollution problem." "It was a problem," said Ralph. "I remember the last time I saw Earth. The lake near the spaceport looked like an oil dump and I could probably have walked on it. Do you know the last thought I had of Earth as the ship lifted off?" "What?" "That at least we still had the means of getting above the blanket of smog that covered the planet." J ON Mather was silent for several moments. "It really was covering the entire planet," he said finally. "By the eighties all cities -- the smaller ones as well as the metropolitan giants -- had their own layer of what we were calling permasmog -- a layer so thick that even the prevailing winds couldn't blow it away. But there was worse. At upper atmospheric levels, the blankets of pollution from individual cities were joining together to form a continuous layer. By nineteen-ninety the upper-layer permasmog effectively covered the planet. Even over the poles the stars were dim through the dirt." "I remember," said Ralph. "That was about the time I left." Jon continued: "Trouble was, not only the stars were dimmed. Our Sun was, too. In nineteenninety New York City was an average four Fahrenheits cooler than it had been twenty years earlier. Extrapolate figures like that and it's not difficult to see where you're headed." "An ice age?" "Right. Oh, it would have taken a number of years more of this madness for the glaciers to move down across North America and Central Europe. But it was commg. "I remember reading some of the predictions before I left, but I wasn't sure I should believe them. They sounded like fiction." "Science fiction," said Jon, "is often as good as prophecy. But something worse than just cold was coming. And it would have come sooner. The atmosphere was changing. Again nineteenninety -- a crucial year -- the oxygen content of the troposphere was only eighteen percent, a drop of three percentage points in twenty years." Ralph's eyebrows shot up. "The effects were already evident. For years, the incidence of respiratory diseases had been skyrocketing because of the pollution. Now, without enough oxygen, the sufferers were having an even more difficult time. People who might have lingered for years IF with their ailments were dying of complications. Medically, the atmosphere had the reverse effect of an oxygen tent." "As I recall," said Ralph, "at the time I left Earth, many business buildings already had oxygen supply boosters installed in their air-conditioning systems." "After a while even some homes had them," said Jon. "Oh, the industries that had created the disease were quick enough to come up with certain cures -- especially those from which more money could be made. Oxygen boosters were already in production before the situation became critical. They began marketing on Earth the same chemical oxygen regenerators they're using here on Callisto." "After I left Earth," said Ralph, "I took a job on Mars, supervising the installation of oxygen regenerators. Mars was more pleasant than Callisto. In the middle of a summer day you could go walking with only a coat and an oxygen mask. Aside from the mask and the terrible dryness of the air, it wasn't much worse than a cool Spring day on Earth. But I remember thinking that some day I might go back to Earth -- and find it like Mars." "That's where Earth headed," said Jon, "though she would have kept a denser atmosphere than Mars even without oxygen. But there would have come a time -- maybe within two decades -- when you would have packed that oxygen mask to come home." #HY was the situation so   bad?" asked Ralph. "It's a good thirty years since government started to do something about pollution. "They didn't do enough. They managed to slow the rate of pollution some, but not enough to prevent permasmog. Man and his machines were using up more than old Earth could give. There were programs to plant trees. But we've estimated that for every tree planted by a conservationist a lumberjack was clearing one and a half acres of trees. And worse, the seas were dying. Fact is that the algae and other marine plants are the major producer of Earth's precious oxygen supply. Kill them and not even the biggest reforestation program you can devise will prevent the atmosphere from becoming Marslike. Yet the algae were dying as the oceans became a dumping ground for all our most undesirable wastes -- while we abused their resources. We felt the oceans were too big for us to dirty or hurt by misuse. Ralph laughed without mirth. "We're now thinking the same thing about space," he said. "Talk to Terran Mining about the accidental dumping of fuel into outer space and they'll tell you that it's a drop in a big bucket." "I intend to tell them that a lot of small drops make a bucketful." "They won't listen to you, Jon. Here on Callisto -- and on Ganymede -- everybody lives underground and on artificial air. The situation's different. They'll ignore all the Earth-type horror stories you can tell them." Jon thought for a few moments. "I'll have to try," he said finally. "That's why I'm here on Callisto, to see the Terran Mining brass. I'll also talk to their Industrial Standards Officer, who's responsible for keeping pollution down." "Terran Mining won't listen "I'll still see him and try to get the seriousness of the problem across to him." The silence hung long and heavy. A full minute ticked by before Ralph looked up. "Jon," he said softly, "I'm the Industrial Standards Officer." II T HE time was almost eight o'clock by the artificial twenty-four hour day that was a convention at the Callisto compound. The real Callisto day was more than two weeks long and was marked at midday by a solar eclipse, as the huge master planet hid the distant Sun. Jon Mather was sitting in the compound dining room, trying to shell a soft-boiled egg. And he was finding that carelessly gouged pieces of eggshell tended to fly about in the light gravity. Next to him, Ralph Lake chuckled as a chunk of egg struck Jon in the eyes. "You'll find that a lot better in your mouth," he said. "Damn planet." Jon swore with more feeling than astronomical accuracy. "This is worse than the Moon." "A little," Ralph conceded. "What do you weigh?" "Last time I was in a sane place, about one-seventy." "Here," said Jon, "you weigh only seventeen pounds -- eleven pounds less than on the Moon." "Well," said Jon, poking at the egg with renewed care, "it was worse on the spacecraft." "Just think how much worse it would be on Jupiter itself. Down there you'd weigh -- " he made a rapid mental calculation -- "a little better than four hundred and forty pounds." "I don't think I'll go." Ralph glanced up at the digital clock on the dining room wall. "About an hour until the meeting," he said. "Anything you can tell me about the people I'll be seeing?" "Well, let's see -- you'll be meeting Harris, the Terran Mining VP for Callisto. He's the one who does the talking. He'll be afIF fable as can be, provided you don't suggest the company spend money. But if you're going to accomplish anything you'll have to get through to Peters, who has a tendency to say nothing, encouraging or otherwise." "What's Peters' position?" "Liaison officer with Earth headquarters," said Ralph. "If anything gets properly recommended to the top men it'll have to pass through his hands." "And you'll be at the meeting, too?" "Yes, and on their side of the table. I'll be in charge of convincing you that we really are doing something to prevent space slicks." "And are you?" "Just count the slicks in orbit," said Ralph. "Then you tell me." "Then you think they're going to be difficult to deal with." "Oh, they'll be polite," said Ralph, "until you mention something expensive." about the politeness at least. Ron Harris was a large, affable man with a tendency to chuckle easily, if somewhat insincerely, each time he removed the large cigar from his mouth. Dirk Peters, the Earth liaison man, remained tight-lipped after the mandatory greetings, but Ron Harris was solicitous. "I hear," he told Jon, "that your ship hit the Chedabucto fuel slick on the way here." "Chedabucto?" "The slick was left there by the supertanker Chedabucto three years ago," Ralph put in. "We name each slick after the spacecraft responsible." Harris glared at Ralph briefly, evidently not too fond of the word responsible. He switched the grin back on for Jon's benefit. "Your pilot really should have raised our control tower and let us plot your approach to Callisto. We find we have no trouble avoiding the slicks." Jon leafed through a sheaf of papers he was holding, then withdrew one sheet. "It says here that the Chedabucto slick has a diameter of forty-five miles." "Right," said Harris. "Needle in a haystack." "The needle takes up about thirty-six thousand cubic miles in this case." Harris took a long slow pull from his cigar, released a column of smoke toward the ceiling. "An awfully big haystack, too." He looked at Jon through half-closed eyes. "You'll get used to the scale of space." Jon turned his attention again to the sheet he was holding. "According to the official report," he said, "The Chedabucto, bound for Callisto prbit with fuel, was struck by a small astermiles beyond the orbit of Mars' Harris turned around to look at his Industrial Standards Officer. Ralph nodded. "That would be about right." "But that means the accident took place more than a quarter of a From his corner Ralph nodded again. "The Chedabucto was on an accurate glide path for the rendevous orbit with Callisto. Even after the breakup of the ship, the fuel slick conserved the momentum of the ship itself and came in for a perfect meeting with Callisto." "Not perfect," Harris hastened to add. "The Chedabucto slick is a good thirty thousand miles off Callisto." Jon fell silent. He made some unhurried notations on a second sheet of paper. Presently he looked up. "I understand Ganymede wasn't so lucky. They got hit by -- " he glanced down again -- "the Cerebus slick." Harris shrugged, not taking the cigar from his mouth. "Suppose," said Jon, "that the Chedabucto had been aimed to miss Callisto, with the goal of applying a corrective maneuver at the last moment. That way a crackup in deep space wouldn't leave a fuel slick near an inhabited body." Harris seemed displeased, and once more glanced at Ralph Lake. Ralph remained silent and for the first time Dirk Peters joined the discussion. "Mr. Mather," he said, "I don't think you quite appreciate the economics of our situation. A tanker loaded with seventy kilotons of fuel weighs nothing at all in space. However it conserves its full terrestrial inertia. I believe that's correct Mr. Lake?" Ralph nodded without enthusiasm. "The tanker's job is to deliver fuel, not burn it up," continued Peters. "With the enormous mass of fuel involved we are constrained to make correctional maneuvers as early as possible in order to keep them small. Otherwise we burn far more fuel. And in that case the fuel we're delivering will be much more expensive." No one spoke for some moments. Finally Harris removed the cigar from his mouth. "The blunt fact is this, Mr. Mather," he said. "If we pay a lot more for Type C fuel, then Earth will pay a lot more for its copper, nickel, and iron." T HE next time Jon Mather saw one of the giant orbiting fuel slicks, it was from a respectable distance of a hundred miles. Through the porthole of the freshly scrubbed Santa Barbara the slick was a translucent, almost  IF black, smudge against the growing yellow sphere of Jupiter. The slick looked perfectly round, like a glassy planet. "That's the Liberia slick," said Ralph from the aisle seat. "It's smaller than average. It came here four years ago, when one of the older tankers sprang a major leak and broke up." "I hope we won't be flying through this one," said Jon, eyeing first his camera bag, then Jupiter. "This is as close as we'll come," said Ralph. "Callisto control calculated our orbit this time." He paused before adding: "Incidentally, it's only thanks to a good friend of mine at Callisto control that we're getting this close to a slick. Harris and Peters would put my ears in orbit if they knew I'd maneuvered this little sight-seeing tour." Jon rubbed his chin with his hand. "That slick is taking up far more space than it did in the tanker," he said thoughtfully. "But even after four years it hasn't expanded very much. I would have expected the droplets to go on dispersing, as an oil slick does on water." "Trouble is," said Ralph, "space has no currents to scatter pollutants as the sea has. And there is probably electrical attraction among the particles, keeping them from drifting too far from each other. That would explain the roundness of the slicks." "That would mean," said Jon, "that a space slick would behave as though it were a low-density solid." He looked out once more at the ghostly new satellite of Jupiter. , Mather had once more fitted the telephoto lens on his camera and was aiming it out of the porthole. The giant planet was close enough for him to see clearly the movement of the stormy equatorial bands as they roamed restlessly over the huge surface. He aimed the small reflex camera; the crystal shutter tripped all but soundlessly. "Just imagine that's a basketball," said Ralph from beside him. "Then imagine a marble next to it. That would be Earth." Jon took a second picture, swinging the camera toward the Great Red Spot, just coming into view at the corner of the planet. "The sheer size of it," he said, "makes you realize how fast those winds must be moving." "That's at least a two hundredmile gale," said Ralph. "Surface velocity -- if Jupiter had a surface." "No surface? What about those artists' concepts of what the Jupiter landscape looks like?" "I know -- they make it look like a cloudy Moon," said Ralph. "But Jupiter isn't dense enough to be that rocky. It has a quarter of Earth's density and well under half the Moon's." "Could it be hollow?" Ralph shook his head. "The moment of inertia isn't right for a hollow body, nor is the gravity. The planet is mostly light gases, like hydrogen and helium. The pressure increases massively as you enter the atmosphere and Earth atmospheres, hydrogen acts like a metal. We're used to having a sharp boundary between atmosphere and ground, which we call the 'surface.' But every body doesn't have one." "Strange planet." "That's the odd thing," said Ralph. "Jupiter isn't abnormal planet. It seems to be a star that didn't contract enough to build up the heat needed to ignite thermonuclear reactions." "You mean it's a cold star?" "Not as cold as you'd suppose. Jupiter radiates twice as much heat as it receives from the Sun. On Ganymede, where we're headed, it's not in the sunlight that it's warmest, it's on the side facing Jupiter." "Then the base is on the side of Ganymede that looks toward Jupiter." "No. It's on the side away from Jupiter. The cold , is the least of our problems on Ganymede." ble through the porthole of the Santa Barbara now. Jon Mather was taking more souvenir pictures when Ralph Lake tapped his shoulder and pointed away from the approaching satellite. "There," he said. Jon looked and saw his first supertanker. The Santa Barbara was still more than fifteen miles from the orbiting tanker but the latter's gargantuan proportions were already impressive. The long cylindrical body stretched through space, longer than sixty football fields. At the head was a stubbier section from which lights glowed. "That front part is the command cabin," said Ralph, pointing to the head of the giant arrow. "It's detachable so that the crew can use it to get home in case of a disaster. That's why the crew of only one supertanker has been lost." Jon's eyes roved down the immense latticework of the tanker's girderlike body. Sensing his interest, Ralph continued his description. "That's the Torrey Cliff  which arrived off Ganymede about a week ago. It looks about threequarters full." He pointed to the ribs of the tanker's body. "That's a collapsible plastic shell inside there," he said. "When all the fuel is gone, you can see through it." The spacecraft drifted close enough to the huge tanker for Jon to pick out, by Jupiter's yellow IF light, the markings of the Terran Mining Corporation on the hull of the control cabin. Then the tanker receded and the Santa Bar baras rockets came to life for the descent. Ill H IS helmet off, Jon had the fleeting impression that he was back on Callisto. The entrance to the compound, he thought, was as similar to its Callisto mate as two motels of a chain on Earth. The decorator had used slightly different pastel paints this time. But the large entrance sign with the integral clock, reading Welcome to Terran Mining , Ganymede , #:# , looked as though it had come from the same workshop as its Callisto counterpart. By the time he had been led to his room Jon had seen that, for all its resemblance to the Callisto compound, the Ganymede structure was much smaller. That was logical, he thought, since it lacked the offices of the top Terran Mining officers who were present on the more distant satellite. By the time the dining room clock read #:#, Jon and Ralph had completed their light supper and Ralph was proposing a small tour of Ganymede. Jon agreed readily. He had things to see before he met with the governor of Jupiter System. Too, he had always imagined that Jupiter, seen from a near satellite, must be an awe-inspiring sight. The plastic treads of the twoman surface car rumbled and whined against the cold ground of Ganymede. Jon tried to estimate the speed of the vehicle but found the featurelessness of the landscape made the motion seem more leisurely than it probably was. He wondered that a tread-equipped vehicle was capable of any great speed, but then realized that the woosh of air underneath was virtually keeping the car hoyering in the low gravity, with only enough ground contact to allow steering. The Sun was climbing rapidly toward zenith but the stars were still clearly visible. Ganymede lacked even the thin atmosphere that gave Callisto its velvety blue sky. Jon found the transmitter button of his life-support suit and told Ralph of his desire for another look at Jupiter. "Fine with me," answered Ralph, "but I think you'll be surprised by what you see." After a number of minutes of rapid travel along the cratered plain, Jon was realizing that Ganymede, for all its lack of gravity, was not tiny. It was in fact more than a  third the size of Earth. "It's more than two thousand miles to the Jupiter side," said Ralph's voice in Jon's earphones, "but you'll be able to see part of it on the horizon if we take this route. We'll be there in an hour." It was in fact forty-two minutes later that Jon noticed the first yellow-green sliver of Jupiter rising above the jagged horizon. Gradually the ball grew and began to climb into the dark sky, as the surface car dropped down a long sloping hill. The hill turned even more sharply down as more of the huge planet appeared and Jon could hear the treads of the vehicle slipping on the rock below. 'That's far enough," said Ralph and braked the car to a stop. He opened the door and invited Jon out. Still clumsy in the unaccustomed bulk of the life-support suit, Jon swung his legs out of the vehicle, but as he stood up he lost his footing and fell several feet down the sharp incline. "Are you all right?" inquired the anxious voice in his headphones. He was, though he could not instantly find the transmitter button to say so. Ralph helped him to his feet easily in the light gravity. Jon looked toward the panorama of Jupiter, watching its angry winds spinning across its center. He was momentarily surprised to see the Great Red Spot in this top half of the planet, but then realized that he must be looking at the southern hemisphere. Viewing the yellowish ball made him feel uneasy. The sharp downward slope gave him the impression that if he should slip again he might slide forever, down toward the big planet. He communicated his feeling to Ralph and heard a chuckle of response. "This isn't really a hill," said Ralph. If you surveyed it from orbit it would look as flat as anything else on Ganymede." "But it is downhill," Jon protested. "That's at least a twentydegree slope." "Nice guess. It's just over nineteen degrees, actually. But it's an illusion Normally, your hundred and seventy Earth pounds wouldn't weigh more than twelve pounds in Ganymede's light gravity. But Jupiter is so huge that even here, six hundred thousand miles away, it accounts for a gravitational pull about half that of Ganymede itself." Inside the helmet Jon nodded. "It looks downhill to Jupiter," continued Ralph, "because about a third of the gravitational pull on you is coming from Jupiter itself. That distorts your concept of which way 'down' is." "I'm beginning to understand why the settlements are all on the side away from the planet." "Right. On the inhabited side, where you benefit from the gravity of both Ganymede and Jupiter, you'll weigh in at close to nineteen pounds. But if we drove around to the side facing Jupiter, the planet would be trying to pull you upward and you'd drop down to less than six pounds." IF J ON took a final look at the yellow ball with the angry red spot and climbed back into the vehicle. He felt relieved once the surface car was climbing back up the seeming hill, away from Jupiter. Within twenty-five minutes, the last sliver of the big planet had vanished behind the speeding vehicle and the bleak plain of Ganymede seemed fiat once more. The car rumbled on for more than ninety minutes among bleak craters, some with imposing high walls, but most of them small and unprepossessing. Then he saw at a distance that seemed to be about five miles their next destination -- the outline of a space mining site. Jon could see the huge automatic drills and the ore lifters, all of them as black as the sky of Ganymede. When the car had reached the site, he could see why the equipment reflected so little light. It was covered by a thick layer of a syrupy black substance. Jon saw even before Ralph spoke that it was Type C fuel. "The edge of the slick just caught Mining Site Number Two," said Ralph. "We've approached it so as to avoid most of the slick. It goes for almpst forty miles that way." He pointed into the distance. "Two men died here I believe?" Jon said into his suit microphone. "Yes, two miners," said Ralph's voice. "The danger of Ganymede's meeting the slick was known. But .the final warning from Ganymede control came too late. The two men were still here when the fuel began to rain down. Type C fuel corrodes the organic materials used in life-support suits. The miners were dead in two minutes." "Since the space slicks follow predictable orbits, like solid bodies, why wasn't the disaster predicted sooner?" There was a long pause before Jon heard Ralph's transmitter carrier again. "As Industrial Standards Officer for Terran Mining Corporation," he said, "I'm supposed to assure you that such a thing wouldn't happen again. Little was known then about the mechanics of the slicks. They behave like solids most of the time because of their .internal electrical fields. But they break up suddenly in a strong gravitational field." Jon's eyes ran over the stout frame of the ore lifter which, even from a few feet away, looked more like a shadow than a substantial object. He fancied he saw a drop of fuel drip from a cable. Jon marveled at how little the fuel had evaporated in four years despite the lack of atmosphere. He touched his suit transmitting button once more. "Suppose the slick had hit an inhabited compound instead of a mining installation?" "That," came the answer, "is something the governor of Jupiter System will no doubt want to bring up with you." night. He could not shut Jupiter from his sight and he was falling, falling into the planet. The stormy bands of powerful wind were getting closer, but his feet were slipping on an ocean of Type C fuel and he could not check his drop toward the angry world. The Great Red Spot glared at him wrathfully, like the eye of a Cyclops. Come , it said. Jon saw again the abandoned fuel-fouled structure of Mining Site Number Two. The lonely dark framework of the equipment was awash with the black syrup. And now he could see, standing among the abandoned machines, two skeletons, looking out accusingly, their silent jaws drooling the thick liquid that was everywhere. He saw Jupiter once more and heard a voice somewhat like Ralph's. "Jupiter is hydrogen and helium," said the familiar voice, like that of a tour guide. "The gases are too colorless to form the Great Red Spot. Helium is inert. But the red-colored compounds of hydrogen are all organic. Thus the spot is undoubtedly organic. Jon saw Mining Site Number Two again, fouled with fuel. But this time the site was on the tempest-tossed surface of Jupiter itself. And this time the fuel was not inky black but red, like the Great Red Spot, like a vast sea of blood. The two skeletons stood, covered in red, extending bony index fingers. At him. G overnor Robert noman than Jon would have expected -- thirty-five at the very most, he estimated. The reason for that was evident: the rugged and bleak satellites of Jupiter were a place for a young and vigorous man. Governor Nolan received Jon in an unostentatious private office in the government complex, which was about twenty minutes by surface car from the much larger quarters of Terran Mining. It did not take long for Terran Mining to come into the conversation. "We have little power here," he was saying. "As you no doubt know, Jupiter System has a status in the Solar Federation inferior to that of most countries on Earth, to say nothing of colonies like Mars or the Moon. There's little we can do -- without Federation help -- to combat this kind of menace." "If I understand Terran Min-ing's argument," said Jon, "they're saying, that Jupiter System is not intended to be a pretty environment, but merely a rock IF bed to be exploited for all the minerals it contains." The governor nodded. "I know all that. And they're right in a way, of course. There's no ecology to harm here and I'm not suggesting that we try to beautify Callisto and Ganymede. They're modern equivalents of the old Earth mining towns, meant to pay, not please." Nolan paused. "But now we have six slicks in orbit, not counting the one that struck Mining Site Number Two. That's the situation after five years. How many slicks will we have after ten years, fifteen years? And how large? Each new tanker is built larger than the last." Jon looked at him, not speaking. After a decade of fighting the scars of a century of pollution on Earth, Jon Mather's instincts ran parallel to those of Governor Nolan. Certainly he did not believe that limited pollution could remain limited. Yet he knew that the economic reality of Jupiter System made the pollution inevitable. There would be no settlement of Jupiter's satellites at all without Terran Mining. Indeed, all but a few of the men governed by Nolan were employees of Terran Mining. They owed their livelihood to the continuance of practices that made cheap commercial exploitation of Ganymede and Callisto possible, even if it meant fuel slicks in orbit, like so many man-made asteroids. T HE trip back to Earth was long for Jon. It was true that he had Ralph Lake to talk to, since Ralph had easily maneuvered his employer into letting him accompany Jon to Earth, ostensibly to remind him of the company's side of the argument. And then he had a report to write. He would be seeing the Transport Secretary of the Solar Federation and he had his recommendations to decide on. Jon was lonely for Earth. He deeply loved his home planet -- perhaps that was why space exploits had tempted him little -- and that love had been deepened by the ten years he had spent healing her beauty. As the Santa Barbara sped silently through the blackness of deep space, Jon spoke gladly of the Earth the younger man had not seen for nearly ten years. He would find it changed, Jon promised. The number of trees had more than doubled, would double again in the coming decade. Beaches on the Great Lakes were a booming tourist attraction unparalleled in anyone's memory. There was even good swimming on the Hudson River. "Is the Nile green again?" asked Ralph. "Yes. Ten years ago it was all the rainbow colors an oil slick can produce." "The last legacy of the petroleum age," mused Ralph. "But it wasn't only the development of new fuels that turned the trick?" "No, though there was a lot of technology involved. We made more than thirty different recommendations requiring the development of new equipment and techniques. The Solar Federation provided the cash to follow up everyone of them. There were new means to precipitate waste solids in the atmosphere. There were new means of disposing of sewage and industrial waste. And there were new means of catching up for more than a hundred years of neglect. For instance, we drained Lake Erie for six months and scrubbed fresh water and restocking it with fish." "Incredible!" "The Federation expropriated huge tracts of land all over the world to build newly forested parklands." "To help replenish the oxygen supply?" "Exactly. And a new paperlike plastic was developed, so that millions of trees need not be cut down just to produce one day's newspapers. Furthermore, we found our own application for the oxygen regenerators that were already on the market. The larger industries are now obliged to generate and release into the atmosphere at least ninety percent of the oxygen consumed by their other machines. The oxygen content of the atmosphere is now back to twenty percent -- and it's still rising." Ralph was thoughtful. "There's no doubt that you're the miracle man of Earth," he said. "But on this mission they sent you all by v yourself, with no fellow commission members. Does the Federation really expect you to solve the space-slick problem?" "I suppose not. I'm expected to make some innocuous suggestions that will keep the crisis at least temporarily within control, to calm the anxious." "If I know you," said Ralph, "you won't do that at all. You'll tell the Federation to act now or face a situation worse than Earth's later on." Jon smiled. "I guess you know me," he said, then added: "But if I do that, my report will be put in the circular file." "Did you suspect that when you accepted the assignment?" "Oh, I had my illusions. After all, for the first time in history, a man had been given the green light to clean up the Earth. I had been that man and Earth had listened to me. Why could I not hope that it would again, if I told Earth she could not hope to remain pure in a defiled universe?" IF "And I thought only the young had illusions like that." "Which brings up the question," said Jon, "of why you chose Mining," "How many times I've asked myself that question!" he said. "But you weren't the only man with illusions. I was shaken by what men had done to Earth and were doing even to dead Mars. Rather than remain on Mars and be a party to its ravage. I took a chance on a job in which I could aid industry to keep the environment clean." He smiled wryly. "Only it took me time to realize that my real job was to find excuses not to do it." T HE meeting at the Solar Federation building, the huge new addition to the complex that had once housed the United Nations, had gone as expected. Jon had been somewhat surprised that he had been allowed to see only the Assistant Transport Secretary and not the Secretary himself. He had explained his report with emphasis on as many telling points as he could think of and he had been rewarded with a patient hearing. But now Jon held the letter from the Federation acknowledging his report. The letter needed very little reading between the lines. "I understand your point of view," the Assistant Secretary had told him, "but we must look at facts. There is no ecology to kill out there, no delicate balance of nature to upset as there is on Earth. We can learn to avoid fuel slicks in space as easily as we avoid the space debris that is not of our making. "What you must understand is that the remarkable work you accomplished here on Earth could not have been done at an earlier time -- and not only because there was no Solar Federation. Earlier generations had to choose between genuine pollution control and industrial development. They could not renounce the latter and so settled for a useless minimum of the former. "If we were able to let you clean up Earth, it was because the largest industrial interests are no longer on it. They are on the Moon now, making steel and fuel; on Mars, making heavy machinery and on Jupiter System, mining metal. "The conservationists have reclaimed Earth because the polluters have forsaken it for space. Before they can reclaim the Solar System, industry will have to go to the stars." Mather's recommendations that the Federation seemed inclined to accept. They would not force the supertankers to use indirect approaches to inhabited bodies, would not force them to use thicker and safer hulls, would not limit their size, would not develop the equipment needed to collapse the electrical fields of the space slicks and scatter them. However, the Chedabucto y Jon had noted, had collided with an asteroid because of its malfunctioning radar unit and the commander's failure to get adequate course information from the Martian spaceport. The Federation agreed that there should be stricter rules forcing tankers to carry more safety equipment and to follow navigational rules. If the Federation had acted swiftly enough to enact the new regulations the California and the Skagway might not have collided. Jon was basking in the Spring magnificence of his country home when the news of the collision came. Still with him as a house guest was Ralph Lake, spending his accumulated leave from Terran Mining. Ralph had not yet recovered from the newfound vitality of Earth. He was doubly amazed by the presence of this new Eden in the heavily mined out Appalachian mountains, once an ugly scar on the face of the planet, and the personal hell of some of North America's poorest people. But now the small mining towns, with the rows of tin shacks, were gone, dismantled. The trees were back, as were the grass, the unfiltered sunshine. The brook, which Ralph guessed had once served as an industrial sewer, was pure enough to drink from. The news of the collision of the two supertankers was a jolt back to ugly reality for both men. They watched the television screen anxiously, as space-borne cameras beamed, live, the familiar image of the black smudge of a space slick, this time against the backdrop of the Moon. But these two new tankers had been the forerunners of a new larger type. They had just been completed in orbit off the Moon and were bound on their maiden voyage to Jupiter, when an uncorrected radar fault in the Skagway allowed the two vessels to brush too close. Their cargo spilled into the void. The huge new slick was not like the others. This time it contained oily bulk diffused into a mist that cubic miles. It floated uncertainly not far from Earth. Earth's inhabitants watched agonizingly, from day to day, as the huge slick skirted the outer reaches of the atmosphere. After five days came the good news from a scientist at Dunway observatory on the Moon: the slick was in a stable orbit about Earth and would remain there. Its threat was ended. IF Jon turned off the television screen. Ralph gazed into the darkness. At length the younger man said, "He's wrong you know." Jon whirled round to face him. "He'd be right about the stability of the orbit if he could be sure that the Skagway slick would continue to behave ljke a genuine solid object. But the slick is now in the gravitational field of Earth. Anyone on Ganymede could tell you what will happen." "Perhaps -- " said Jon slowly -- "perhaps this time it won't happen. He was wrong of course. The Sun, rising above the worn Appalachians, shone down through the sullen dimness of the yellowed sky. By noon the thick viscous rain was already falling on the dying trees.  Dear Mr, Jakobsson: It seems that you dont read what you print in your magazines or you wouldnt have made the statement on page # in the Nov.-Dee . # issue of IF at the end of Monarch. You state that the ending of that story leaves the series open for renewal. Well , it doesnt. Why? If you will remember Aug. # issue of IF Equals Four, it explains what happens after the Jann rescues Judy Galland from Lepidop. One last thing: please have the authors of stories about Computers keep the terminology in context. It irks me when they dont because Vm a pro gramer. Gene Wolfe s story King Under the Mountain didnt. Kirk Jameason Mt. Ephraim , N.J. ham is comforting -- it's great to know the stories are being read. Regarding King Under the Mountain , if you'd care to be specific I would ( Continued from page #) be glad to forward your comments to the author. Dear Sir: I have been reading both your magazine and your sister magazine , Galaxy, for lo these years and the recent changes in the makeup and content of both magazines bother me. I have no objection to the introduction of new writing talent provided it is current issue and already Vm 'regusted" with the levels set in this issue. To list a few gripes: The Watchers -- one of the hoariest plots in all of sf and badly done at that. Ids so old it might seem new to a neophyte, but I never thought Vd see that one in print again . She Still Do -- introduction of extraneous plot material causes a muddled picture. Just what is Rogers getting at with the introduction of wife-beating, etc? Monarch -- This is supposed to series and I say hurrah! I have never found dentistry a fit subject for fiction. A nd on and on and on. I have heard a rumor that you have several of A. Bertram Chandler s Rim series with good old Grimes in them in your files. May I suggest , instead of printing neophyte material which would receive an F in a beginning writing' class that you print a whole issue of Chandler. Then your readers would have something to read! Sincerely yours , Hollywood , Cal. You'll have to keep burning a while, John. Contrary to your information, we're freshly out oLGrimes stories, but hoping for more. Gentlemen: I don't belive it! Is Laumer kidding? Richard Kimmel In what context? Dear sirs: Since P.H. Vogel raised the issue in your letter column recently , I feel the urge to tell you my own definition of science fiction: Science fiction is that branch of fiction which deals with events and phenomena that cannot be said to have any definite existence in the real world, but which could, in the opinion oj the author, exist without our being aware of them, especially in the future. Also, in the interest of egotism, I would like to present my idea of those things which science fiction is especially good at doing: I ) Exercising the imagination. #) Developing perspective. #) Expanding the interests of the reader into arts, sciences, and politics. # Examining the consequences of a change. #) Examining an ideal pragmatically# ) Wedding art to science. # ) Illustrating a principle. #) Escaping into reality  science fiction is a kind of escapist literature that tends to mirror the real world much more than detective stories, television, or sword  sorcery fantasy. It thus has a therapeutic effect on the neurotic escapist.) Number # is the only benefit of science fiction that I can claim as completely my own, but I think the list has value in giving the reader an idea of how science fiction is essentially different and potentially better than fantasy and straight fiction. I hope you will find the definition and the list interesting and useful. Yours truly, J.W.Zabel Youngstown, O. P.S. Your story introductions are ihe worst in the business. If you mean story blurbs, I couldn't agree with you more. And while we're on definitions -- how about some ideas on what science fiction can say # Or mean? Dear Editor: Have read If and Galaxy for many years and this is my first time to write I must tell you how much I enjoyed the Nov.Dec. issue. Not a bad story in it , and one exceptionally great one. A Hefping Hand by Juanita Coulson has my vote for the best short story of the year , followed closely with Shambolain by Dean A. Koontz. More, more, more by these two fine authors. Florence Jenkins Gardena, California Dear Mr . Jakobsson; Congratulations on your fine editorial work in Galaxy and its sister publications. Vve been reading them for over a decade and though there have been some lousy stories, I can say on the whole Vve enjoyed them tremendously. And perhaps look forward with more anxiety to each new issue since you took over, than before. I think this is only to see what's going to happen next. In fact I think most magazines are pretty exciting these days, even if I don't always agree with the authors. I  was happy to see that Worlds of Tomorrow was being revived. I found after much searching the, first new issue and was favorably impressed. Then I saw the second new issue and bought it. I have a complaint now. Our distributor, like many throughout the country, evidently doesn't like to handle anything but sex and j or slay magazines. Therefore I got my copy out of town while visiting friends. The issue is good , especially the editorial. I know quite a few students from Kent State, living where  do, and have heard many viewpoints on the matter.  therefore looked forward to the Science-fiction stories frem Socialist countries Here is a book that is truly a boon to science-fiction fans -- the best stories of nine writers whose work has seldom, if ever, appeared on this side of the Atlantic. Whether the reader comes to enjoyment -- or to grasp a deeper understanding of socialist idealism -- he is sure to come away fully satisfied. "An immensely valuable addition to the science fiction canon... great enjoyment.  frederik pohl rest of the issue. Unfortunately, in the first piece, I got halfway through and found myself staring at page #. Sir, pages # to # are replaced by pages #-#. It is next to impossible for me to return this magazine to the dealer where I bought it. I was and am still burned up over the fact that I paid # I for an imcomplete magazine. What  have read around, the magazine is good. I hope it makes it, but I think you better check the next time to keep this from happening. Vll buy the next issue, when and if it ever shows up around here. But please dont let this happen again. Sincerely Yours, John A . Beck Youngstown, Ohio An intact copy has been mailed to you. Machines at the binder's sometimes -- but infrequently -- make errors and a limited number of misbound copies go through before they're caught. Your letter was the first intimation I had that anything had gone Sorry you were inconvenienced. Dear Sir: I am interested in obtaining information concerning Paolo Soleri and his Containers for the Condition of Man, (Galaxy, July, #) especially Arcosanti. The Arizona container fascinates me and  would like to know the requirements for obtaining a niche in this revolutionary "city." I would greatly appreciate any help you can give me. Thank you. Susan Soss Buffalo, New York Sir: I would like to correspond with Paolo Soleri who was mentioned in the article. Containers for the Condition of Man, in your magazine (Galaxy, July, #). The author was Lauri Virta. I am a college student -- mathematics -- interested in the above-mentioned " condition ." I want to find out how Mr. Salens work on a live experiment is progressing; if there is anyone in my area doing such work; and if there is any possibility of my working on such a project or related studies. I have access to a large computer, and have some capacity for simulation studies or whatever. I also would not mind wielding a cement mixer for a summer. Thank you. Gregory Chesson Schenectady, New York You will reach Mr. Paolo Soleri by writing to him at the Cosanti Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona #. S IX months have passed since the last report to the consumers in Galaxy -- it's time for another. If I can shoulder enough other type out of the way the latest six-month collection of your bombs, bouquets and bullets will appear in the April issue: Featured will be your comments on contents from Heinlein to Silverberg and others, survey results. The bouquets are beautiful. The bullets are deadlier than the bombs -- and this is true: You never hear the one that kills One cancer you can give vourself. Houi's your Imagination Quotient? Test yourself, then treat yourself to # volumes of fascinating mind-stretchers for just  I No one on your world has ever seen the stars. A strange legend foretells something called "night" will come tomorrow for the first time in # years. What will happen when it does? visit another planet. Your ship lands and you find the house you grew up in. The woman on the porch is your grandmother! What's the explanation? A great starship suddenly confronts another ship from an alien civilization. Can either race be sure the other won't conquer his world? Is there an alternative to destroying each other? You'll find the dazzlingly imaginative, beautifully logical answers in three famous stories in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame -- an anthology of the greatest SF literature of all time. And you can have this #-page, hardbound book -- plus two more masterpieces of the world's most entertaining, provocative fiction -- for just I plus shipping and handling. It's all part of coupon tells how easy it is. Science Fiction Book Club #-S#I Please accept my application for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me just a # plus shipping and handling for all #. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin "Things To Come" describing the two monthly selections and other book bargains. If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly selections, or prefer an alternate or no book at all, I simply indicate so on the form provided. I pay only #, plus shipping and handling for each book I take. (Occasional extra-value selections are slightly more.) I need take only # books in the coming year and may resign any time after purchasing # books. tory package, I may return it in # days and membership will be canceled. I will owe nothing. MR. Print name If under #, parent must sign above. Office use only Rny # books for I with trial membership. #. Science Fiction #. Five Fates. A #. The Year #, Hall of Fame, I. remarkable tour de An Anthology ed# "winners." choforce. Five top ited by Harry Harsen by Sci-Fi Writwriters supply their rison. Thirteen ers of America. Ed. own endings for. compelling new Robert Silverberg. "After life, what?" stories on the qualPub. ed. # Pub. ed. # ity of life # years ...  from now. Pub. ed. #. Stand on Zanzi#. Rockets in Ursa  # bar, by John BrunMajor by Fred ner. Life in U S # Hoyle and Geoffrey #. The Foundayears from now Hoyle. A spaceship ion Trilogy, by Hueo Award Win returns crewless, Isaac Asimov. The ner # o ages announcing the ends of the galaxy Puh ed # # ' coming of a deadly revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. #  ub ed M w p ub ed # by James Bl.sh. ' # Childhood s Fuure b A E Seven strangely tpo by Arthur C. v V oti Th comp ,,: -- riarVo Mankind van yogi. in our inescapable huearth, manity. Pub ed tastic!" Atlantic # Pub. ed. # pelling stories f a f e cn " d  electrifying adTenmortality and the secrets of time. #. Neanderthal #. Beyond the #. DangerousViPlanet, by Brian W. Beyond, by Poul sions. Anthology of Aldiss. # novella Anderson. # novel# original stories gems. Never before las by Hugo Award never before in published in U.S.! winner. About sciprint by Sturgeon, Shrewd, witty, inentists, pirates, Anderson, others, genious. "loners." Pub. ed. # Book Club editions are sometimes reduced in size, but they are all full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. Members accepted in U.j?A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly'different in Canada.  Lee Harding The Fabulous Riverboaf Ertw. The sardonic tale of organized crime's biggest job ever -- hijacking the first starship. The sun's going nova, and the Syndicate isn't about to sit back and burn -- so... instant Mafiastronauts! Anthology of Fantasy and Science Fiction, . in paperback. Great stories by everyone from A Anderson to Zelazny. We'll be putting them in a JM nice boxed set for Christmas, but why wait? Lovecraft Lovers! Beagle's Arkham Edition of H. P. Lovecraft is now More coming later on in '# I . # each wherever paperbacks are sold. For mail orders, please send # for each book (includes postage and handling) to: Beagle Books, Dept. CS # West # Street New York, N.Y. #I An Publisher #I Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. #  Moy-Jun, #I Vol.#, No. #I Umi I # Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Lester del key. Feature Editor Judy-Lynn Beniamin, Managing Editor Franc #. Boggeri, Art Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director l.C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director SniAl (PortI) tributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in the United States, elsewhere S#. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. T hose who like to think of themselves as serious students of literature are deeply concerned with the purpose of fiction. Of course, they immediately reject its obvious purpose of entertainment as unworthy of their approval. Any story which seems limited in value to mere pleasure is called "escape literature" and held in considerable contempt. Generally, science fiction has been treated as belonging to that unworthy category. Now, however, they may have to change their attitude about this. If a book which has been on the nonfiction best-seller list for many weeks is correct, science fiction may be the one form of literature which has the greatest and most necessary value to its readers. Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (Random House), has nothing directly to do with science fiction. It discusses the future, but in as factual a manner as possible. The book is deeply concerned with our present and our seeming inability to deal with it. According to Tofller's theory most of the ills of our present stem from the fact that people cannot adjust to the rapid changes going ( Please turn to page #) ese seat minds were Rosicrucians Isaac Newtom Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. of v.The Mastwy rf Life" -- A nontr#fsc organiza. tion Address : Scribe U.R.C. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. It would be named the Not For Hire, No one would ever be able to take it away from him, it would be so strongly armored and weaponed. Nor would anyone be able to buy or rent it from him. It would be Not For Hire, The name glowed in great black The fabulous Riverboat would have four decks, the boiler deck, the main deck, the hurricane deck and the landing deck for the aerial machine. Its overall length would be four hundred and forty feet and six inches. The beam over the paddle-wheel guards would be ninety-three feet. Mean draft, loaded, twelve feet. The hull would be made of magnalium or, perhaps, plastic. The great stacks would spout smoke now and then, because there was a steam boiler aboard. But this was only to propel the big plastic bullets for the steam machine guns. The giant paddlewheels on the sides of the Riverboat would be turned by enormous electrical motors. The Not For Hire would be the only metal boat on The River, the only boat not propelled by oars or wind, and it would make anybody sit up and stare, whether he was born in # B.C. or in # A.D. And he, Sam Clemens, would be The Captain, Capital T, capital C, because, aboard this vessel. carrying a crew of one hundred and twenty, there would be only one Captain. King John of England could call himself Admiral if he wished, though if Sam Clemens had anything to do with it, he'd be First Mate, not Admiral. And if Sam Clemens really had anything to do with it King John -- John Lackland, Rotten John, Dirty John, Lecher John, Pigsty John -- would not even be allowed on the boat. Sam Clemens, smoking a big green cigar, wearing a white cap, dressed in a white kilt with a white towel over his shoulders for a cape, would lean out of the starboard port of the great pilothouse and yell, Avast there, you lubbers! Grab hold of that putrescent mass of immorality and treachery and toss him off the gangplank, I don't care if he lands in The River or on the bank! Get rid of that human garbage! Over the railing of the boiler deck Prince John would sail. Slyboots John, screaming, cursing in his French-accented Middle English or in Anglo-Norman French or in Esperanto. Then the gangplank would be drawn up, bells would ring, whistles would blow and Sam Clemens, standing behind the pilot, would give the order to begin the voyage. The voyage! Up a River for IF be forty years or a hundred years. Such a Riverboat, such a River, such a voyage had never been dreamed of on Earth, long dead Earth! Up The River, the only one on this world, on the only boat like this, with Sam Clemens as La ipestro , The Captain, and also addressed as La Estro, The Boss. He was so happy! And then, as they headed out toward the middle of The River, just to test the current, which was strongest in the center of the mighty stream, as the thousands along the bank waved and cheered or wept after the boat, after him, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain -- The Captain, The Boss -- he saw a man with long yellow hair and broad shoulders pushing through the crowd. T he man wore a towel-like cloth, secured by magnetic tabs under the material, as a kilt. His leather sandals were made of the hide of the whale-sized riverdragon fish. Around his thickly muscled colored hornfish vertebrae. In his huge powerful hand he gripped the wooden shaft of a large waraxe of iron. His pale blue eyes were fixed on Samuel Clemens and that broad hawk-nosed face was grim. Sam Clemens screamed to the pilot. Faster! Faster! Full speed ahead! The great paddlewheels began to dig into the water more swiftly -- Chunk-chunk. Even through the fiberglas-insulated deck, the vibrations made the deck quiver. Suddenly the blond man, Erik Bloodaxe, tenth-century Viking King, was in the pilothouse. He shouted at Sam Clemens in Old Norse, Traitor! Droppings of Ratatosk! I told you  would wait along the banks of The River! You betrayed me so you could get the iron from the fallen star and build your great Riverboat! Sam fled the pilothouse and down the ladders from deck to deck and down into the dark bowels of the hold, but Erik Bloodaxe was always two steps behind. Past the colossal rotating electric motors Sam Clemens ran and then he was in the chemistry room, where the engineers were making potassium nitrate from human excrement and mixing it with sulfur and charcoal to make gunpowder. Sam grabbed hold of a lighter and a resin torch, pressed the slide and a white-hot glowing wire slid out of the case. Stop, or Til blow up the whole boat! Sam screamed. Erik had stopped, but he was swinging the big axe around and around over his head. He grinned and said. Go ahead! You haven t got the guts! You love the Riverboat more than you love anything, even your faithless but precious Livy! You wouldnt blow her up! So rm going to split you down the middle with my axe and then take the Riverboat for myself! No! No! Sam screamed. You wouldnt dare! You cant! You cant! This is my dream, my love, my passion, my life, my world! You cant. The Norseman stepped closer to him; the axe whistled over his head.  can't? Just stand there and see! Over his shoulder Sam saw a shadow. It moved forward and became a tall, faceless figure. It was X, the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical who had sent the meteorite crashing into the Rivervalley so that Sam could have iron and nickel to build his Riverboat on this mineral-poor planet. And so he could sail up The River to the North Polar Sea where the Misty Tower, the Big Grail, call it what you would, was hidden in the cold fog. And there Sam, with the eleven men chosen by X for his as yet unrevealed plan, would storm the Tower and find -- find what? Stranger! Sam called. Save me! Save me! The laughter was like a wind from the polar sea, turning his entrails to crystal. Save yourself, Sam! the Stranger said. No!' No! You promised! Sam yelled. And then his eyes were open and the last of his groans died away. Or had he dreamed that he was groaning? H e sat up. His bed was made of bamboo. The mattress was a bamboo fiber cloth stuffed with giant leaves of the irontree. The blanket was made up of five towels secured together by magnetic tabs. The bed was against the wall of a room twenty feet square. It held a desk and a round table and about a dozen chairs, all of bamboo or pine, and a fired-clay chamber pot. There were also a bamboo bucket half-full with water, a tall broad case with many pigeonholes for rolls of paper, a rack with bamboo and pine spears with flint and iron tips, yew bows and arrows, a waraxe of nickel-iron and four long steel knives. On the wall were a number of pegs from which white towels hung. On one hatstand was a naval cap, an officer's, made of leather covered with a thin white cloth. On the table was his grail, a gray metallic cylinder with a metal handle. On the desk were glass bottles containing a soot-black ink, a number of bone pens and one nickel-iron pen. The papers on the desk were of bamboo, though there were a few sheets of vellum from the inner lining of the stomach of the hornfish. Glass windows (or ports, as he called them) looked out all around the room and, as far as Sam Clemens knew, this was the only house with glass windows in IF the entire Rivervalley. Certainly, it was the only one for # miles either way from this area. The sole light came from the sky. Though it was not yet dawn, the light was a trifle brighter than that cast by the full moon on Earth. Giant stars of many colors, some so big they looked like chippedoff pieces of the moon, jampacked the heavens. Bright sheets and streamers hung between the stars, behind them, and even, seemingly, in front of some of the brightest. These were cosmic gas clouds, the like of which had never been seen by the unaided eye on Earth. The stars and the clouds made a glory that never ceased to thrill the more sensitive of the humanity along The River, Sam Clemens, smacking his lips at the sour taste of the liquor he had drunk that evening and the even sourer taste of the dream, stumbled across the floor. He opened his eyes completely when he reached the desk, picked up a lighter and applied the extended hot wire to a stone bracket, where the smoke went out through an opening at the junction of ceiling and wall. He opened a port and looked out toward The River. A year ago he would have seen only a flat plain about a mile and a half wide and covered with short, tough, brightgreen grass. Now it was a hideous mass of piled-up earth, deep pits and many buildings of bamboo and pine containing brick furnaces. These were his steel mills (socalled), his glass factory, his smelters, his cement mills, his forges, his blacksmith shops, his armories, his laboratories and his nitricand sulfuric-acid factories. A half a mile away was a high wall of pine logs enclosing the first metal boat he would build. Torches flared to his left. Even at night the men were digging out the siderite chunks, hauling up pieces of the nickel-iron. Behind him had been a forest of thousand-foot irontrees, red pine, lodgepole pine, black oak, white oak, yew trees and thick stands of bamboo. These had stood on the foothills; the hills were mostly still there but the trees, except for the irontrees, were all gone, along with the bamboo. Only the huge irontrees had withstood the steel axes of Clemens' people. The tall grasses had been cut down and their fibers chemically treated to make ropes and paper, but their roots were so tough and so tangled, that there had not been enough reason to chop through them. The labor and the materials used in chopping through the roots of the short grass of the plains to get to the metal there had been very expensive. Not in terms of money, because that did not exist, but in terms of sweat, worn-out stone and then dulled steel. Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build the beautiful boat. world had planned well. There was not much erosion, even though man had stripped the land of all the vegetation he could. The iron-trees, occupying twenty out of every one hundred square feet of the foothills, stood firm. Nor could the roots of any of the plants be killed; they were so deeply buried. Sam shivered at the wet and chilly wind which always came late at night from upRiver. He shivered also at the thought of the desolation. He loved beauty and nature's order and he loved the parklike arrangement of the valley, whatever else he thought about this world. Now he had made it hideous because he had a dream. And he would have to extend that hideousness, because his mills and factories needed more wood for fuel, for paper, for charcoal. All that his state had was used up ajid he had about used up all that Cernskujo to the immediate north and Publiujo to the immediate south, would trade him. If he wanted more he would have to war on his closest neighbors or make arrangements for trading with the more distant states or those just across The River. Or else conquer them and take their wood away from them. He did not want to do that; he abhorred war in principle and could barely stand it in practice. But if he was to have his Riverboat he had to have wood as fuel for his factories. He also had to have bauxite and cryolite and platinum if he was to have aluminum generators and motors. The nearest source of all three was in Soul City, that nation twenty-six miles downRiver dominated by Elwood Hacking, who hates whites. So far, Sam had been able to trade iron weapons for bauxite, cryolite, cinnabar and platinum. Sam's own state, Parolando, needed the weapons badly. Adding one burden to the other. Hacking insisted that Parolando use its own men to mine and transport the ore. Sam sighed deeply. Why in hell hadn't the Mysterious Stranger directed ihe meteorite to fall right by the bauxite deposits? Then, when Sam and Bloodaxe's Vikings had sailed into this area immediately after the meteorite had struck, they could have claimed the land that was now Soul City for their own. When Hacking arrived, he would have been forced to join Clemens or to leave. Still, even with the Stranger's IF powers, it could not be easy to deflect a hundred-thousand-ton, iron-nickel siderite from its course and make it fall only twenty-six miles from the bauxite and other minerals. Actually the Stranger had supposed that he had hit the target on the bull's-eye. He had told Sam, before he disappeared on some unknown mission, that the minerals were upRiver, all within a seven-mile range. But he had been mistaken. And that had made Sam both glad and angry. He was angry because the minerals were not all within his reach, but he was also happy that the Ethicals could make a mistake. The Stranger called his people the Ethicals. It was they who resurrected the entire human species and all subhumans intelligent enough to have a language. The Resurrection had been accomplished by purely scientific means. The supernatural had played no part in raising -- or recreating -- the dead. All who had died between # B.C. and # A.D. had been resurrected. The only exceptions were idiots and those who had died before the age of five. The Ethicals had restored everyone whole and in excellent health, but sterile. They had rejuvenated those who needed it. And now, twenty-one years after the first day of resurrection, all looked as if they were no more than twenty-five years old. But, despite the godlike power of the Ethicals, they could make mistakes and errors. That fact did not help the humans imprisoned forever between sheer mountains # feet high in a valley about # miles wide on the average. They would be imprisoned for thousands of years, if not forever, unless Samuel Langhorne Clemens could build his Riverboat. S AM went to the unpainted pine cabinet, opened a door, and pulled out an opaque glass bottle. It held about twenty ounces of bourbon donated by people who did not drink. He downed about three ounces, winced,'snorted, slapped his chest and put the bottle back. Hah! Nothing better to start off the day with, especially when you woke up from a nightmare that should have been rejected by the Great Censor of Dreams. If, that is, the Great Censor had any love and regard for one of his favorite dream-makers, Sam Clemens. Maybe the Great Censor did not love him after all. It seemed that very few did love Sam any more. He had to do things he did not want to do in order to get the boat built. And then there was Livy, his wife on Earth for thirty-four years. He swore, caressed a nonexistent moustache, reached back into the cabinet and pulled the bottle out again. Another snort. Tears came, but whether engendered by the bourbon or the thought of Livy, he did not know. Probably, in this world of complex forces and mysterious operations -- and operators -- the tears were caused by both. Plus other things which his hindbrain did not care to let him peep into at this moment. His hindbrain would wait until his forebrain was bent over, tying its intellectual shoestrings, and would then boot the posterior of said forebrain. He strode across the bamboo mats and looked through the port window. Down there, about two hundred yards away, under the branches of the thousand-foot irontree, was a round, conicalroofed, two-room hut. Inside the bedroom would be Olivia Langdon Clemens, his wife -- his exwife -- and the long, lanky, tremendously beaked, weak-chinned Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac, swordsman, libertine and man-of-letters. "Livy, how could you?" Sam said. "How could you break my heart, the heart of Your Youth?" A year had passed since she had shown up with Cyrano de Bergerac. He had been shocked, more shocked than he had ever been in his seventy-four years on Earth and his twenty-one years on the Riverworld. But he had recovered from it. Or he would have recovered if he had not gotten another shock, though a lesser one. Nothing could exceed the impact of the first. After all, he could not expect Livy to go without a man for twentyone years. Not when she was young and beautiful again and still passionate and had no reasonable hope of ever seeing him again. He had lived with a half-dozen women himself, and he could not expect chastity or faithfulness from her. But he had expected that she would drop her mate like a monkey drops a heated penny when she found him again. Not so. She loved de Bergerac. He had seen her almost every day since the night she had first come out of the mists of The River. They spoke politely enough and sometimes, when the atmosphere seemed just right, they cracked their reserve and laughed and joked just as they had on. Earth. Sometimes, briefly, but undeniably, their eyes told each other that the old love was vibrating between them. Then, when he felt that he had broken out with longing, just like the hives, so he told himself later, laughing while he felt like crying, he had stepped toward her, despite himself, and she had stepped back to Cyrano's side if he happened to be there or looked around for him if he wasn't. Every night she was with that dirty, uncouth, big-nosed, weakchinned, Adam's-appled, but IF colorful, strong-minded, witty, vigorous, talented, scary Frenchman. The virile frog, Sam muttered. He could imagine him leaping, croaking with lust, toward the white, blackly outlined, curving figure of Livy, leaping, croaking... He shuddered. This was no good. Even when he brought women up here secretly -- though he did not have to hide anything -- hecould not quite forget her. Even when he chewed dreamgum he could not forget her. If anything, she sailed into the drug-tossed sea of his mind more strongly, blown by the winds of desire. The good ship Livy, white sails bellying out, the trim cleancut curving hull... And he heard her laughter, that lovely laughter. That seemed to be the hardest thing to endure. He walked away and looked out through the fore ports. He stood by the oak pedestal and the bigspoked riverboat's wheel he had carved. This room was his "pilothouse" and the two rooms behind made up the "texas." The whole building was on the side of the hill nearest to the plain. It was on thirty-foot stilts and could be entered through a staircase or ladder (to use a nautical term) on the starboard side or through a port directly from the hill behind the rear chamber of the texas. On top of the pilothouse was a large bell, the only metal bell in the world, as far as he knew. As soon as the waterclock in the corner struck six, he would clang the big bell. And the dark valley would slowly come to life. H M ists still overhung The River and the edge of the banks, but he could see the huge squat mushroom shape of the grailstone a mile and a half down the slope of the plain just by the water's edge. A moment later, he saw a boat, toy size, emerge from the mists. Two figures jumped out and pulled the dugout onto the shore, then ran off to the right. The light from the skies was bright enough for Sam to see them, though he sometimes lost them when buildings intervened. After going around the two-story pottery factory they cut straight into the hills. He lost them then but it seemed that they were heading for John Plantegenet's log "palace." So much for the sentinel system of Parolando. Every quarter mile on The River's front was guarded by a hut on thirty-foot stilts with four men on duty. If they saw anything suspicious, they were to beat on their drums, blow their bone horns and light their torches. Two men slipping out of the fog to carry news to King John, exKing John, of England? Fifteen minutes later Sam saw a shadow running between shadows. The rope attached to the small bell just inside the entrance rang. He looked through the starboard port. A white face looked up at Grevel, famous wool merchant, citizen of London, died in #I in the Year Of Our Lord. There were no sheep or, in fact, any mammals other than man along The River. But the ex-merchant had shown great aptitude for espionage, and he loyed to stay up all night and skulk around. Sam beckoned to him; Grevel ran up the "ladder" and entered after Sam had unbarred the thick oak door. Sam said, in Esperanto, Salu ton, leutenanto Grevel. Kio estas? (Translation: "Hello, Lieutenant Grevel. What's the matter?") Grevel said, "'"'Bonan matenon, Estro. Ciu grasa fripono, Rego Johano, estas jus akceptita duo spionoj. " (Translation: "Good morning. Boss. That fat rascal. King John, has just received two spies.") Neither Sam nor Grevel could understand each other's English, but they got along very well in Esperanto, except now and then. Sam grinned. Bill Grevel had let himself down from the limb of an irontree, passing directly over a sentry, and down a rope onto the edge of the roof of the two-story building. He had passed through the bedroom, where three women slept, and then crawled to the top of the staircase. John and his spies, a twentieth-century Italian and a sixth-century Hungarian, were at a table below Grevel. The two had reported the results of their trip upRiver. John was furious and justly so, from his viewpoint. Sam, hearing Grevel's report, also became furious. "He tried to assassinate Arthur of New Brittany? What is that man trying to do, ruin all of us?" He paced back and forth, stopped, lit a big cigar and began pacing again. Once he stopped to invite Grevel to a bite of cheese and a glass of wine. It was one of the ironies of Chance or, perhaps, of the Ethicals, for who knew what things they arranged, that King John of England and the nephew he had murdered most foully should have been located within thirty-two miles of each other. Arthur, Prince of Brittany of dead Earth, had organized the peoples among whom he found himself into a state he called New Brittany. There were very few old Bretons in the ten-mile long territory he ruled, but that did not matter. New Brittany it was. It had taken eight months before Arthur had discovered that his uncle was his neighbor. He had IF traveled incognito to Parolando to verify with his own eyes the identity of John, the uncle who had slit his throat and dropped his weighted body into the Seine. Arthur wanted to capture John and keep him alive for as long as possible under exquisite torture. possibly forever, from getting his revenge. John, murdered, would awake the next day some place thousands of miles away on The River. But Arthur had sent emissaries demanding that John be given up to him. These demands had been rejected, of course, though only Sam's sense of honor and his fear of John, kept him from agreeing to Arthur's demands. Now John had sent four men to assassinate Arthur. Two had been killed; the others had escaped with minor wounds. This would mean invasion. Arthur not only had wanted revenge on John, he would like to get possession of the meteorite iron.-Brittany, a fourteen-mile stretch of the right bank of The River was known as Chernsky's Land, or in Esperanto, dernskujo. Chernsky, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian cavalry colonel, had refused an alliance with Arthur. But the nation immediately to New Brittany's north was governed by lyeyasu. He was a powerful and ambitious person, the man who had established the Tokugawa Shogunate in # with its capital at Yedo, later called Tokyo. Sam's spies said that the Japanese and the Breton had met six times. Moreover, just to the north of lyeyasujo was Kleomanujo. This was governed by Cleomenes, a king of Sparta and half-brother to that Leonidas who held the pass at Thermoplyae. Cleomenes had met three times with lyeyasu and Arthur. Just south of Parolando was an eleven-mile stretch called Publia, after its king, Publius Crassus. Publius had been an officer in Caesar's cavalry during the Gallic campaigns. He was inclined to be friendly, although he extracted a big price for letting Sam cut down his timber. South of Publia was Tifonujo, ruled by Tai Fung, one of Kublai Khan's captains, killed on Earth when he fell drunk off a horse. And south of Tifonujo was Soul City, headed by El wood Hacking and Milton Firebrass. Sam stopped and glared from under bushy brows at Grevel. 'The hell of it. Bill, is there isn't much I can do. If I tell John I know about his trying to murder Arthur, who may deserve murder, for all I know, then John knows that I've got spies inside the house. And he'll just deny everything, ask that I bring his accusers forth -- and you know what would happen to them, to you.'" Grevel paled. Sam said, "Start your blood running again. I won't do it. No. The only thing to do is to keep quiet and watch for developments. But I'm choking up to here with keeping quiet. That man is the most despicable I ever met -- and if you knew my vast range of acquaintances, including publishers, you would feel the depth of my words." "John could be a tax-collector," Grevel said, as if he had plumbed the depths of insult. And he had, for him. "It was a bad daren I had to agreeto take John on as a partner," Sam muttered, blowing out smoke as he turned toward Grevel. "But if I hadn't taken him in. I'd have been robbed of my chance at the iron." thanking him. The skies just above the mountains across The River were paling. Soon the entire vault would be rosy on the edges and blue above, but it would be some time before the sun cleared the mountain. Before then, the grailstones would be discharging. He washed his face in a basin, combed his thick bush of reddish hair straight back, applied the toothpaste with the tip of his finger to his teeth and gums, and spat. Then he fastened a belt with four sheaths and a bag dangling from a strap and put it around his waist. He placed a long towel around his shoulders as a cape, picked up a cane of oak shod with iron and, with the other hand, picked up the grail. He went down the stairs. The grass was still wet. It rained every night at three o'clock for a half-hour and the valley did not dry until after the sun came up. If it were not for the absence of disease germs and viruses, half the valley's humans would have died of pneumonia and flu long ago. Sam was young and vigorous again, but he still did not like to exercise, As he walked, he thought of the little railway he would like to build from his house to the edge of The River. But that would be too restrictive. Why not build an automobile with a motor that burned wood alcohol? People began joining him; he was kept busy with 'Saluton! and 'Bonan Matenon!" At the end of his walk, he gave his grail to a man to put on a depression on the top of the gray granite mushroomshaped rock. About six hundred of the gray cylinders were placed in the depression and the crowd retreated to a respectful distance. Fifteen minutes later, the rock erupted with a roar. Blue flames soared twenty-five feet high and IF thunder echoed from the mountain. The appointed grail keepers for the day got onto the rock and passed the cylinders around. Sam took his back to the pilothouse, wondering on the way why he did not delegate someone to carry his grail down for him. The truth was, a man was so dependent on the grail, he just could not trust it out of his sight. Back in the house, he opened the lid. In six containers in snapdown racks were breakfast and various goodies. The grail had a false bottom in which were concealed an energymatter converter and programed menus. This morning he got bacon and eggs, toast with butter and jam, a glass of milk, a slice of cantaloupe, ten cigarettes, a marihuana stick, a cube of dreamgum, a cigar and a cup of some delicious liqueur. He settled down to eat with gusto and got, instead, a bad taste. Looking out through the starboard port (so he wouldn't see into Cyrano's door), he saw a youth on his knees before his hut. The fellow was praying, his eyes closed, his hands church-steepled. He wore only a kilt and a spiral bone from a Riverfish suspended by a leather string around his neck. His hair was dark blond, his face was broad and his body was muscular. But his ribs were beginning to show. The praying man was Hermann Goering, a missionary of the Church of the Second Chance. Sam swore and reared up from his chair, knocking it backward, picked it up and moved his breakfast from his desk to the big round table in the center of the room. The fellow had spoiled his appetite more than once. If there was one thing Sam could not stand, it was an ex-sinner, and Hermann Goering had sinned more than most and was now, by way of compensation, holier than most. Or so it seemed to Sam, though Goering claimed that he was the lowliest of the low -- in a sense. Take your damned arrogant humility away, Sam had said. Or at least take it downwind... If it had not been for the Magna Carta which Sam had drawn up (over King John's protests, thus repeating history), Sam would have kicked Goering and his followers out long ago. Well, at least a week ago. But the Carta, the constitution of the state of Parolando, the most democratic constitution in the history of mankind, gave total religious freedom and total freedom of speech. Almost total, anyway. There had to be some limitations. But his own document forbade Sam to stop the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance from preaching. Yet if Goering continued to protest, to make speeches, to convert more to his doctrine of pacifist resistance Sam Clemens would never get his Riverboat. Hermann Goering had made a symbol of the boat; he said that it represented man's vanity, greed, lust for violence and disregard of the Creator's designs for the world of man. Man should not build riverboats, he should built more stately mansions of the soul. All man needed now was a roof over his head to keep off the rain and thin walls for a little privacy now and then. Man no longer had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. His food and.drink were given to him with nothing expected in return, not even gratitude. Man had time to determine his destiny. But man must not transgress on others, not rob them of their possessions, their love or their dignity. He must respect others and himself. But he could not do this through delivery, robbery, violence, contempt. He must... S AM turned away. Goering had some fine sentiments to which Sam subscribed. But Goering was wrong if he thought that licking the boots of the people who had put them here was going to lead to any Utopia or salvation for their souls. Humanity had been tricked again; it was being used, misused and abused. Everything, the resurrection, the rejuvenation, freedom from disease, free food and liquor and smokes, freedom from hard work or economic necessity, everything was an illusion, a candy bar to lead baby mankind into some dark alley where... Where what? Sam did not know. But The Mysterious Stranger had said that mankind was being tricked in the cruelest hoax of all, even crueler than the first hoax, that of life on Earth. Man had been resurrected and put on this planet as the subject of a tremendous scholarly study. That was all. And when the studies were completed Man would go down into darkness and oblivion once more. Cheated again. But what did the Stranger have to gain by telling this to certainselected men? Why had he chosen a small number to help him defeat his fellow Ethicals? What was the Stranger really after? Was he lying to Sam and Cyrano and Odysseus and the others whom Sam had not yet met? Sam Clemens did not know. He was as much in The Great Dark as he had been on Earth. But he did know one thing for certain. He wanted that Riverboat. The mists had cleared away; breakfast time was over. He checked the water clock and then rang the big bell on the pilothouse. As soon as it had ceased tolling the wooden whistles of the sergeants IF ten-mile stretch of the Rivervalley known as Parolando the whistles shrilled. Then the drums began to beat and Parolando went to work. m T here were # people in the state and the Riverboat would be taking only one hundred and twenty. Twenty of these already knew for sure they would be going. Sam and Joe Miller, Lothar von Richthofen, Van Boom, de Bergerac, Odysseus, three engineers and King John and their hutmates, had been promised. The rest would know whether or not they had worked for nothing a few days before the boat sailed. At that time, the names would be written on slips of paper and placed inside a big wire cage. The cage would be whirled around and around, and then Sam would stop it, and, blindfolded, would reach in and pull out, one after the other, one hundred names. And these lucky ones would be the crew of the Not For Hire. The Not For Hire had about # miles to travel, if The Stranger could be believed. Averaging about # miles every twenty-four hours, it would take over forty-one years to reach the end of The River. But it would not average that much, of course. The crew would have to put into shore for extensive vacations on land and there would be repairs to be made. In fact, the Riverboat might wear out, although Sam planned on taking many spare parts. Once the boat was on its way it could not put back for parts or pick them up anywhere else. There would be no metal of any consequence from this place on. It was strange to think that he would be about one hundred and forty years old when he got to the headwaters of The River. But what was that when he had thousands of years of youth to go? He looked through the bow ports. The plain was full of people streaming down from the hills to the factories. Behind him the hills would be alive with others on their way to the factories in the hills. And a small army would be working on the big dam to the northwest, near the base of the mountains. A concrete wall was being constructed between two steep hills to dam up the water flowing from a spring near the top of the mountain. When the lake behind the dam was full, its overflow would be used to drive electrical generators to power the mills. At present the electrical energy needed came from a grailstone. A giant stepdown transformer of aluminum took the energy three times a day, sent it through brobdingnagian aluminum wires to a two-story device known as the ba I  tacitor. This was a late twentiethcentury electronic discovery that could accept hundreds of kilovolts in a hundredth of a microsecond and could discharge it at any rate from a tenth of a volt to one hundred kilovolts. It was the prototype of the batacitor that would be put on the Riverboat. At present the energy was chiefly used in a cutting device made by van Boom that sliced through the pieces of nickel-iron dug up on the plain -- the energy could also be moderated to melt the metal. The aluminum for the wires and the batacitor had been laboriously and expensively made from aluminum silicate derived from the clay under the grass along the base of the mountains. But that supply had run out and now the only economically feasible source was in Soul City. Sam sat down at his desk, pulled out a drawer and removed a tall book bound in fish-bladder leather; the pages were bamboo-fiber paper. It was his diary, The Memoirs of a Lazarus, For the time being he was using mk made of water and tannic acid from oak bark and carbon from finely ground charcoal in suspension to write down the day-by-day happenings and his reflections. When the technology of Parolando was improved enough he would use an electronic recorder that van Boom had promised him. He had no sooner started writing than the drums began beating. The big bass drums represented dashes; the small soprano drums, dots. The code was Morse; the language, Esperanto. Von Richthofen would be landing soon. S AM stood up to look out again. A half a mile away was the bamboo catamaran on which Lothar von Richthofen had sailed downRiver only ten days ago. Through the starboard ports Sam saw a squat figure with tawny hair coming out of the gateway of King John's log palace. Behind him came bodyguards and sycophants. King John was making sure that von Richthofen did not give Sam Clemens any secret messages from Elwood Hacking. The ex-monarch of England, present co-ruler of Parolando, wore a kilt with red and black checks, a poncholike arrangement of towels and knee-length, red-leather Riverdragon boots. Around his thick waist was a wide belt with a number of sheaths containing steel daggers, a short sword and a steel axe. One hand held a steel rod coronet, one of many sources of contention between Sam and King John. Sam did not want to waste metal on such useless anachronisms, but John had insisted and Sam had given in. IF Sam found some satisfaction in thinking about the name of his little nation. Parolando in Esperanto meant pair land and was so called because two men governed it. But Sam had not mentioned to John that another translation could be Twain Land, John followed a hard-dirt path around a long, low factory building and then he was at the foot of the staircase of Sam's quarters. A bodyguard, a big thug named Sharkey, pulled the bell rope and the little bell tinkled. Sam stuck his head out and shouted, "'Come aboard, John!" John looked up at him from pale blue eyes and motioned to Sharkey to precede him. John was cautious about assassins and he had reason to be. He was also resentful about having had to come to Sam -- but he had known that von Richthofen would report to Sam first. Sharkey entered, inspected Sam's pilothouse and looked through the three rooms of the texas, Sam heard a growl, as low and powerful as a lion's, from the rear bedroom. Sharkey came back swiftly and closed the door. Sam smiled and said, "Joe Miller may be sick, but he can still eat ten Polish prizefighters for breakfast and call for a second helping." Sharkey did not reply. He signaled through the port that John could come up. the fabulous riverboat The catamaran was beached now and the tiiiy figure of von Richthofen was coming across the plain, holding his grail in one hand and the wooden winged ambassadorial staff in the other. Through the other port Sam could see the lanky figure of de Bergerac leading a platoon toward the south wall. Livy was not in sight. John entered. Sam said, "Aoiaf matenon, JohanoV" It galled John that Sam refused to address him as Via Rega Mosto -- Your Majesty -- in private. La Konsulo -- the Consul -- was their correct title and even that came reluctantly from Sam's lips. Sam encouraged others to call him La EstrOy The Boss, because that angered John even more. John grunted and sat down at the round table. Another bodyguard, a big dark proto-Mongolian with massive bones and immensely powerful muscles, Zaksksromb, who presumably had died about # B.C., lit up a huge brown cigar for John. Zak, as he was known, was the strongest man in Parolando, with the exception of Joe Miller. And it could be argued that Joe Miller was not a man -- or, at least, certainly not homo sapiens, S AM wished Joe would get out of bed, because Zak made him nervous. But Joe was sedating himself with dreamgum. Two days ago a chunk of siderite had slipped from a crane's tongs as Joe was passing beneath it. The operator swore it had been an accident, but Sam had his suspicions. John would want to get rid of Sam's bodyguard, who was incorruptible and who could scare off a legion of assassins just ,by booing at them. Sam puffed on his cigar and said, "Hear anything about your nephew lately?" John did not start, but his eyes did widen a trifle. He looked at Sam across the table. "No, should #?" "I just wondered. I've been thinking about asking Arthur down for a conference. There's no reason why you two should be trying to kill each other. This isn't Earth, you know. Why can't we call off old feuds? What if you did drop him off in a sack into the estuary? Let bygones be bygones. We could use his wood and we need more limestone for calcium carbonate and magnesium. He's got plenty." John glared, then hooded his eyes and smiled. Tricky John, Sam thought. Smooth John. Despicable John. "To get wood and limestone we'd have to pay with steel arms," John said. "I'm not about to permit my dear nephew to get his hands on more steel." "Just thought I'd broach the subject to you," Sam said, "because at noon -- " John stiffened. "Yes?" "Well, I thought I'd bring up the subjt to the Council. We might have a vote on it." John relaxed. "Oh?" Sam thought. You think you're safe. You've got Pedro Ansdrez and Frederick Rolfe on your side and a fivetothree vote in the Council is a nay vote... Once again he contemplated suspending the Magna Carta so that things could be done that needed to be done. But that might mean civil war and that could mean the end of the dream. He paced back and forth while John described in a loud voice and sickening detail his latest conquest of his latest blonde. Sam tried to ignore the words; he still got mad because the man boasted, although by now any woman wKo accepted John had only herself to blame. T he little bell tinkled. Lothar von Richthofen entered. He was a well-built youth with long blond hair and handsome, somewhat Slavic, features. He looked like a less stocky and better looking Goering. The two had known each other well during World War I, since both had served under Baron Manfred won Richthofen, Lothar's older brother. Sam, of IF course, having died in #, knew Sam felt faint. He leaned on the about the Great War only by heartable until things came back into say. but Lothar had painted so focus. Then he said, "M#I take a many word pictures that Sam shot of Kentucky courage mythought he could visualize those self.'" days. Lothar was a wild, brash and Von Richthofen continued. "'It essentially likable person but seems that Hacking isn't too hapthis morning his smiles and his py with the makeup of his state, debonair bearing were gone. It's one-fourth Harlem blacks who "What's the bad news?" Sam died between I# and I #, you said. know, and one-eighth eighteenthLothar took the cup of bourbon century Dahomeyan blacks. But that Sam offered, downed it and he has a nonblack population of said, "Sinjoro Hacking has just one-fourth fourteenth-century about finished putting up fortiWahhabi Arabs, fanatics who fications. Soul City has walls still claim that Mohammed is twelve feet high and ten thick on all their prophet and they're here just fronts. Hacking was nasty to me, for a short trial period. Then very nasty. He called me an ofejo there is the quarter that is thirand a honkio, words new to me. I teenth-century Asiatic Indian did not care to ask him for an exDravidian, black-skinned Caucaplanation." sians, and one-eighth of people 'Ofejo might be from the Engfrom anywhere and anytime. A lish ofay, Sam said, "but I never slight majority of these is twentiheard the other word. Honkio? eth-century." "You'll hear those words a lot in Sam nodded. Though the resurthe future," Lothar said, "if you rected humanity consisted of perdeal with Hacking. And you will, sons who lived from # B.C. Hacking finally got down to busito # A.D., one-fourth had been ness after spewing out a torrent born after I # A. D. of abuse, mostly about my Nazi "Hacking wants his Soul City to ancestors. I never heard of the be almost entirely black. He said Nazis on Earth, you know, since I that he had believed that integradied in a plane crash in I #. He tion was possible when he lived on seemed to be angry about someEarth. The young whites of his day thing -- maybe his anger had nothwere free of the racial prejudices ing to do with me originally. But of their elders and he had known the essence of his speech was that hope. But there aren't too many of he might cut off the bauxite and his former white contemporaries other minerals." in his land. And the Wahhabi the fabulous riverboat Arabs are driving him out of his mind. Hacking became a Moslem on Earth, did you know that? First he was a Black Muslim, an American home-grown variety. Then he became a real Moslem, made a pilgrimage to Mecca and was quite certain that the Arabs, even if they were white, were not racists. "But the massacre of the Sudanese blacks by the Sudanese Arabs and the history of Arabic enslavement of blacks disturbed him. Anyway, these nineteenthcentury Wahhabi are not racists -- they're just religious fanatics and too much trouble. He didn't say so, but I was thereten days and I saw enough. The Wahhabis want to convert Soul City to their brand of Moslemism and if they can't do it peacefully, they'll do it bloodily. Hacking wants to get rid of them and of the Dravidians, who seem to regard themselves as superior. Anyway, Hacking will continue to furnish us bauxite if we will send him all our black citizens in return for his Wahhabi and Dravidian citizens. Plus an increased amount of steel arms. Plus a larger share in the raw siderite." Sam groaned. King John spat on the floor. Sam scowled and said, ""Merdo, Johano! Not even a Plantagenet gobs on my floor! Use the spittoon or get out!" He forced him.self to push down his rage and frustration as King John bristled. Now was not a time to bring about a confrontation. The vainglorious ex-monarch would never back down on the spitting issue, which was actually trifling. Sam gestured self-deprecatingly and said, "Forget about it, John. Spit all you want to!" But he could not resist adding: "As long as I have the same privilege in your house, of course." chocolate into his mouth. He used the growling, grinding voice that indicated that he, too, was very angry but was imposing great self-control. "This Saracen, Hacking, gets too much. I say we have kissed his black hand long enough. His demands have slowed down the building of the ship -- " "Boat, John," Sam said. "It's a boat, not a ship." ""Boato, smoato. I say, let us conquer Soul City, put the citizens to the sword and seize the minerals. Then we will be able to make aluminum on the spot. In fact, we could build the boat there. And, to make sure that we are not interfered with and have the wood needed, we should conquer all the states between us and Soul City." Powermad John. Yet, Sam was inclined to think that he might, for once, be right. In a month or so Parolando would IF have the weapons that would enable it to do just what John was proposing. Except that Publia was friendly and their bills were not high, and Tifonujo, though it demanded much, had permitted itself to be stripped of trees. It was possible that both states planned to use the nickel-iron they got for their wood to make weapons so that they could attack Parolando. The savages across The River were probably planning the same thing. "'Tm not through," von Richthofen said. "Hacking made his demands about the trading of citizens on a one-to-one basis. But he won't come to any agreement unless we send a black to deal with him. He says he was insulted when you sent me, since I'm a Prussian and a Junker to boot. But he'll overlook that, since we didn't know any better, if we send him a member of the Council the next time. One who's black." Sam's cigar almost fell out. "We don't have a black Councilman." "Exactly. What Hacking is saying is that we had better elect one." John passed both hands through his shoulder-length tawny hair and then stood up. His pale blue eyes were fiery under the lion-colored eyebrows. "This Saracen thinks he can tell us how to conduct our internal affairs. I say, war!" Sam said, "Now, just a minute. Your Majesty. You have good reason to be mad, as the old farmer said -- then fell in. But the truth is, we can defend ourselves quite well -- but we cannot invade and occupy any large territory." "Occupy?" John shouted. "We will slaughter half and chain the other half!" "The world changed much after you died, John -- uh. Your Majesty. Admittedly there are other forms of slavery than the outright form, but I don't want to get into an argument about definitions. There is no use making a fuss, as the fox said to the hens. We just appoint another Councilman, pro tern. And we send him to Hacking." "There is no provision in the Magna Carta for a pro tern Councilman," Lothar said. "We change the Carta," Sam said. "That'll take a popular election." John snorted disgust. He and Sam Clemens had gone through too many blazing arguments about the rights of the people. Sam held firm on these points, and Sam was La Estro, The Boss, to the greatest number of citizens, even if the two Consuls theoretically held equal powers. "There's one other thing," Lothar said, still smiling but with an exasperated note in his voice. '"Hacking asks that Firebrass be allowed to visit here for a tour of inspection. Firebrass is especially interested in seeing our airplane." care if he sends a spy!" "I don't know' Sam said. "Firebrass is Hacking's chief of staff. He might get a different idea of us. He's an engineer -- I think he had a Ph.D., too, in physics. I've heard about him. What did you find out, Lothar?" "He impressed me very much," von Richthofen said. "He was born in nineteen seventy-four in Syracuse, New York. His father was black and his mother was half Irish and half-Iroquois Indian. He was in the second party to land on Mars and the first to orbit Jupiter -- " Sam was thinking, men really did that. Landed on the Moon and then Mars. Right out of Jules Verne and Frank Reade, Jr. Fantastic, yet no more fantastic than this world. Or, indeed, than the mundane world of #. None of it could be explained in a manner to satisfy any reasonable man. It was all incredible. "We'll put it up to the Council, today, John," Sam said. "If you have no objection. We'll have a general election on the pro tern Councilman. I personally favor Uzziah Cawber." "Cawber was a slave, wasn't he?" Lothar said. "I don't know. Hacking said he didn't want any Uncle Toms sent." Once a slave, always a slave, Sam thought. Even when a slave revolts, kills and is killed as a protest against his slaveryresurrected, he still does not think of himself as a free man. He was born and raised in a world soaked with the rotten essence of slavedom and every thought he thinks, every move he makes, is stained with slavery, subtly altered with slavery, Cawber was born in #I in Montgomery, Alabama, He was taught to read and write. He served in the house of his master as his secretary. He killed his master's son in #, escaped and went West and became a cowboy, of all tnings, and then a miner. He was killed with a Sioux spear in #; the ex-slave killed by a man about to become a slave, Cawber is delighted with this world -- or claims to be -- because no man can enslave him here or keep him enslaved. But he is the slave of his own mind and of the reactions of his nerves. Even when he holds his head high he will jump if somebody cracks a whip and his head will bow before he can stop it... Why, oh, why, had man been brought back to life? Men and women were ruined by what had happened on Earth and they would never be able to undo the damage. The Second Chancers IF claimed a man could change, entirely change. But the Second Chancers were a pack of dreamgummers. 'If Hacking calls Cawber an Uncle Tom, Cawber will kill him," Sam said. "I say, let's send him." John's tawny eyebrows rose. Sam knew what he was thinking. Perhaps he could use Cawber, one way or another. Sam looked at the waterclock. "Time for the inspection tour. Care to come along, John? I'll be with you in a minute," and he sat down at his desk to make a few more entries in his diary. That gave John the chance to leave first, as befitted the ex-Kiftg of England and a good part of France. Sam thought it was ridiculous to worry about who preceded whom, yet he disliked John so much he could not bear to let him gain even this minor victory. Rather than argue about it, or just walk out ahead of him, and so cause John to throw a fit, he pretended he had work to do. IV S AM caught up with the group, which included the six Councilmen, just outside the nitric-acid factory. They went through the factories swiftly. The stinks emanating from the nitric and sulfuric acids, from the destructive distillation of wood to make alcohol, acetone, creosote, turpentine and acetic acid, the formaldehyde vats and the treatment of human excrement and lichen scraped off the mountains to extract potassium nitrate -- these, combined, were enough to make a hyena lose its breakfast. They were roasted and deafened in the steel mill and the grinding mills and the forges and blacksmith shops. They were covered with a white dust in the limestone mills and magnesium factory. In the aluminum factory they were again roasted, deafened -- and stunk out. The gunsmith shop up in the hills was not operating at the moment. Except for distant noises, it was quiet. But it was not beautiful. The earth had been dug up, the trees cut down and smoke from the factories up the River was black and acrid along the mountains. Van Boom, the late twentiethcentury, half Zulu, half Afrikaans chief engineer, met them. He was a handsome man with a dark bronze skin and curly hair. He stood about six-three and weighed about two hundred and fifty. He had been born in # in a ditch during The Bloody Years. He greeted them cordially enough (he liked Sam and tolerated John), but he did not smile as usual. "It's ready," he said, "but I want my objections recorded. It's a nice toy and makes a lot of noise and looks impressive and will kill a man. But it's wasteful and inefficient." "You make it sound like a Congressman," Sam said. Van Boom led them into the high doorway of the bamboo building, where a steel handgun lay on a table. Van Boom picked it up and even in his big hand the gun was huge. He strode past the others and out into the light of the sun. Sam was exasperated. He had held out his hand for the gun and the fellow had ignored him. If Van Boom intended to demonstrate it outside, why hadn't he said so in the first place? "Engineers," Sam muttered. Then he shrugged. You might as well hit a Missouri mule between the eyes with your pinkie as try to change Van Boom's ways. Van Boom held up the gun so that the sunshine twinkled against the silvery gray metal. "This is the Mark I pistol," he said. "Called so because The Boss invented it." Sam's anger melted like ice in a Mississippi River thaw. "It's a breech-loading, singleshot, flintlock hand weapon with a rifled barrel and a breakdown action." He held the gun in his right hand and said, "You load it so. You press forward the lock switch on the left side of the barrel. This releases the breech lock. You then press down the barrel with the left hand. This action forces the trigger guard into the grip, where the guard acts as a lever to cock the hammer." He reached into a bag strapped to his belt and removed a large brown hemispherical object. "This is a bakelite or phenol-formaldehyde-resin bullet. It is sixty caliber. You press the bullet, so, until it engages the lands of the barrel." He removed from his bag a shiny package with black contents. "This is a charge of black gunpowder wrapped in cellulose nitrate. Some time in the future,., we'll have cordite instead of gunpowder. If we use this gun, that is. Now, I insert the load into the chamber with the primer end first. The primer is a twist of nitrate paper impregnated with gunpowder. Then I lift the barrel with my left hand, thus, locking it into place. The Mark I is now ready to fire. But, for emergency, if the primer does not ignite, you can pour priming powder into the touchhole just forward of the rear sight. In case of misfire, the gun may be cocked with the right thumb. Note that this flash vent on the right side of the action shield protects the shooter's face." wooden target and had inserted IF it in a frame on four legs. The target was about twenty yards away. Van Boom turned toward it, held out the gun, clenched both hands and sighted along the front and rear sights. "Get behind me, gentlemen," he said. "The heat of the passage through the air will burn off the surface of the bullet and leave a thin trail of smoke which you may be able to see. The plastic bullet has to be of such large caliber because of its light weight. But this increases the wind resistance. If we decide to use this gun -- which I definitely am against -- we might increase the caliber to .# in the Mark II. The effective range is about fifty yards, but the accuracy is not good beyond thirty yards and nothing to brag about within that range." The flint was in the hammer. When Van Boom would pull the trigger, the hammer would fall and scrape along the file-like surface of the frizzen. The frizzen covered the priming pan and should be knocked forward by the flint, uncovering the primer twist of the powder charge. There was a click as the sear let the hammer go, a flash as the primer twist burned -- and a booming. The click-flash-boom took almost as long as it would take to say each word and Van Boom had had time between the click and the boom to bring the gun back into line after it had been jarred away by the impact of the heavy hammer and flint. The bullet did leave a very faint trail of smoke, quickly dissipated by the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. Sam, looking past Van Boom's arm, could see the bullet curve out and then back, carried by the wind. But Van Boom must have been practicing, because the bullet struck near the bull's eye. It weht halfway into the soft pine, shattered and left a large hole in the wood. "The bullet won't penetrate deeply into a man," Van Boom said, "but it will leave a large hole. And if it hits near bone, the fragments should break the bone." The next hour was spent busily and happily with the Consuls and Councilmen taking turns shooting. King John was especially delighted, though perhaps a little awed, because he had never seen a gun before. His first experience with gunpowder had come several years after he had been resurrected and he had seen only bombs and wooden rockets. At last Van Boom said, "If you keep up, gentlemen, you will exhaust our supply of bullets -- and it takes a lot of labor and materials to make these bullets. Which is one reason why I object to making any more. My other reasons are: one, the gun is accurate only at close range; two, it takes so long to load and shoot that a good bowman could drop three pistol handlers while they're loading and stay outside the effective range of the guns. Moreover, a plastic bullet isn't recoverable, whereas an arrow is." Sam said, "That's a lot of nonsense! The mere fact that we would have these guns would demonstrate our technological and military superiority. We'd scare the enemy half to death before the battle started. Also, you forget that it takes a long time to train a good bowman, but anyone can shoot one of these after a relatively short lesson." "True," Van Boom aid. "But could they hit anyone? Besides, I was thinking of making steel crossbows. They can't be handled as fast as longbows, but they don't require any more training than guns do and the bolts are recoverable. And they're a hell of a lot more deadly than these noisy stinking gadgets." "No sir," Sam said. "No, sir. I insist that we make at least two hundred of these. We'll outfit a new group, the Parolando Pistoleers. They'll be the terror of The River -- you watch them; you'll see!" F or a change King John was on Sam's side. He stated that the first two pistols should go to Sam and to himself and the next dozen to their bodyguards. Then the new group could be organized and trained. Sam was grateful for the backing, but he told himself to check on the men who formed the Pistoleers. He did not want it made up largely of men loyal to John. Van Boom made no effort to hide his disgust. "I'll tell you what. I'll take a good yew bow and twelve arrows and stand fifty yards away. At a signal all eight of you can advance on me, firing at will with your Mark I's -- and I'll drop all eight of you before you get close enough to hit me. Is it a deal? I'm "Don't be childish," Sam said. Van Boom rolled his eyes upward. "'m childish? You're jeopardizing Parolando -- and your boat -- because you want guns to play with!" "Just as soon as the guns are made you can start making all the bows you want," Sam said. "Look! We'll make armor, too, for the Pistoleers! That should dispose of your objections! Why didn't I think of that before? Why, our men will be dressed up in steel that'll repel the Stone Age weapons of the enemy as if they were straws. Let the enemy shoot his yew bows with his flint-tipped arrows. They'll bounce off the steel and the Pistoleers can take their time and blow the enemy into the next county!" IF "You forget that weVe had to barter our ore and even metal weapons for wood and other materials we need' Van Boom said. 'The enemy will have arrows with steel tips that can drive through armor. Don't forget Crecy and Agincourt." "There's just no dealing with you," Sam said. "You must be half Dutch -- you're so stubborn." "If your thinking is representative of the thinking of white men, then I'm glad I'm half Zulu," Van Boom said. "Don't get huffy," Sam replied. "Congratulations on the gun. Tell you what, we'll call it the Van Boom-Mark I. How's that?" "I'd just as soon not have my name attached to it," the engineer said. "So be it. I'll make your two hundred guns. But I'd like to make an improved version. You know, the Mark II we talked about?" "Let's make two hundred of these first, then we'll start on the Mark II," Sam said. "We don't want to mess around so long trying to get the perfect weapon that we suddenly find we don't have any at all. Still -- " He talked for a while about the Mark #. He had a passion for mechanical gadgets. On Earth he had invented a number of things, all of which were going to make him a fortune. And there was the Paige typesetting machine, into which he had sunk -- and it had sunk -- all the wealth he had made from his books. Sam thought of the typesetting monster and how that wonderful contraption had bankrupted him. For a second, Paige and Van Boom were one and he felt guilty and a little panicky. about the materials and the labor put into the AM P-#, their aerial machine prototype. Sam ignored him. He went with the others to the hjcingar, which was on the plains about a mile north of Sam's quarters. The plains had been left undisturbed in front of the bamboo hangar so that the plane, when it flew, would have a narrow landing strip. The craft was only partly finished but would look almost as skeletal and frail when ready to fly as it did now. "It's similar to some of the planes built in nineteen-ten," von Richthofen said. "I'll be exposed from my waist up when I sit in the cockpit. The whole machine looks more like a metal dragonfly than anything else. The main object is to test out the efficiency of the woodalcohol-burning motor and our materials." Von Richthofen promised that the first flight would be made within three weeks. He showed Sam the plans for the rocket launchers to be mounted under the wings. "The plane can carry about six rockets, but it'll mostly be good only for scouting. It won't go faster than forty miles an hour against the wind. But it'll be fun flying it." Sam was disappointed that the plane wasn't a two-seater. He had never flown. But von Richthofen said the next prototype would be a two-seater and Sam would be his first passenger. "After you've tested it out," Sam said. He expected John to protest about this and to insist that he be taken up first. But evidently John was not too eager to fly. The last stop was at the boatyard, located halfway between the hangar and Sam's house. The craft within the pine-log enclosure would be completed within a week. The Firedragon I was the amphibious prototype of the boat that would be the launch for the big boat. It was a beautiful machine, made of thick magnalium, about thirty-two feet long, shaped like a U.S. Navy cruiser with wheels, with three turrets on its sleek top deck. It was powered by steam, burned wood alcohol, could operate in water or on land, carried a crew of eleven and was, so Sam declared, invincible. He patted the cold gray hull and said, "Why should we worry about having bowmen? Or having anything but this? This juggernaut could crush a kingdom all by itself. It has a steampowered cannon the like of which the world. Earth or this planet, has never seen. That is why it is steamdriven and why it has such a huge boiler." All in all, the tour had made him happy. It was true that the plans for the great River boat had barely been started. But those took time. It was vital that the state be well protected at first, and just making the preparations was fun. He rubbed his hands and puffed on a new cigar, drawing the green smoke deeply into his lungs. And then he saw Livy. He beloved Livy, sick for so many years, and dead, finally, in Italy, in #, Restored to life and youth and beauty, but not, alas, to him. S HE was walking toward him, carrying her grail by its handle, wearing a white, scarlet-edged kilt that came halfway down her thighs and a thin white scarf for a bra. She had a fine figure, good legs, handsome features. Her forehead was broad and satiny white. Her eyes were large and luminous. Her lips were full and shapely; her smile, attractive; her teeth, small and very white. She customarily wore her dark hair parted, combed down smooth in front but twisted into a figure eight in the back. Behind an ear she wore one of the giant crimson roselike blooms that grew from the vines on the irontrees. Around her neck was a necklace made of the IF convoluted red vertebrae of the hornfish. Sam's heart felt as if it were being licked by a cat. She swayed as she walked toward him and her breasts bounced beneath the semiopaque fabric. Here was his Livy, who had always been so modest, had worn heavy clothes from the neck down to the ankle and had never undressed before him in the light. Now she reminded him of the half-naked women of the Sandwich Islands and he felt uneasy. He knew why. His queasiness among the natives had been as much due to their unwanted attraction for him as repulsion, each feeling dependent on the other and having nothing to do with the natives. Livy had had a puritanical upbringing but she had not been ruined by it. On Earth she had learned to drink and to like beer, had even smoked a few times and had become an infidel or, at least, a great doubter. She had even tolerated his constant swearing and had let loose with a few blisterers herself if the girls were not around. The accusations that she had censored his books and so emasculated them were off the target. He had done most of the censoring himself. Yes, Livy had always shown adaptability. Too much. Now, after twenty years of absence from him, she had fallen in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. And Sam had the uneasy feeling that that wild Frenchman had awakened in her something that Sam might have awakened if he had not been so inhibited himself. But after these years on The River and the chewing of a certain amount of dreamgum he had lost many of his own inhibitions. It was too late for him. Unless Cyrano left the scene... "Hello, Sam," she said in English. "How are you on this fine day?" "Every day is fine here," he said. "You can't even talk about the weather, let alone do anything about it." She had a beautiful laugh. "Come along with me to the grailstone," she said. "It's almost time for lunch." Every day he swore not to come near her because to do so hurt too much. And every day he took advantage of the smallest chance to get as close to her as he could. "Jim-dandy," he said. "Come along. How's Cyrano?" "Oh, very happy because he's finally going to get a rapier. Bildron, the swordsmith, promised that he'd have the first one -- after yours and the other Councilmen's, of course. He'd taken so long to reconcile himself to the fact that he would never hold a metal sword in his hand again. Then he heard about the meteroite and came here -- and now the greatest swordsman in the world will have a chance to show everybody that his reputation wasn't a lie, as some say." "Now Livy," he said. "I didn't say people had lied about his reputation. I said that maybe they exaggerated some. I still don't believe that story about his holding off two hundred swordsmen all by himself." "The fight at the Porte de Nesle was authentic! And it wasn't two hundred, you're the one pumping it up, Sam, just as you always do. There was a crowd of hired thugs that could have been a hundred or might just as wellTiave been. Even if there had been only twenty-five, the fact is that Cyrano attacked them all single-handed to save his friend, the Chevalier de Lignieres -- he killed two and wounded seven and ran the rest of them off. That is God's truth!" "I don't want to get into an argument about the merits of your man," he said. "Or about anything. Let's just talk like we used to when we had so much fun -- before you got sick." She stopped, her face grim. "I always, knew you resented my illness, Sam." "No, that wasn't it," he said. "I think I felt guilty that you were sick, as if somehow I were to blame. But I never hated you for it. I hated myself if I hated anyone. "I didn't say you hated me," she said. "I said you resented my illness and you showed it in many ways. Oh, you may have thought you were always noble and gentle and loving -- and most of the time you were -- you really were. But there were enough times when you looked, you spoke, you muttered, you gestured -- how can I describe exactly how you were? I can't, but I knew you resented me, sometimes loathed me, because i was sick." "I didn't!" he cried so loudly that a number of people stared. "Why argue about it?" she said. "Whether you did or not doesn't matter now. I loved you then and I still do, in a way. But not as I did." He was silent during the rest of the walk across the plain to the big mushroom-shaped stone. The cigar tasted like burning skunk cabbage. Cyrano was not present. He was superintending the building of a section of the wall which would eventually guard the shore of The River. Sam was glad. It was difficult enough for him to see Livy alone but when she was with the Frenchman, he could not endure his thoughts. In silence, he and Livy parted. lovely, honey-colored hair apIF preached him and he was able to set aside his feelings about Livy for a while. The woman's name was Gwenafra. She had, on evidence, died at about the age of. seven in a country that must have been Cornwall about the time the Phoenicians came there to exploit the tin mines. She had been resurrected among people of whom none spoke her ancient Celtic language and had been adopted by a group that spoke English. From her description, one of them had been that Sir Richard Francis Burton whom Sam had thought he'd seen on the shore shortly before the meteorite struck. Burton and his friends had built a small sailboat and set out for the headwaters of The River -- as might have been expected of a man who had spent half his life exploring in the wildernesses of Africa and the other continents. On Earth Burton had sought the headwaters of the Nile and had found, instead. Lake Tanganyika. But on this world he had again been seeking the source of a river the greatest river of them all -- undaunted by the prospect that it might be ten After little more than a year his boat had been attacked by evil men and one had stuck a stone knife into little Gwenafra and thrown her into The River, where she had drowned. She had awakened the next day on the banks somewhere far up in the oorthern hemisphere. The weather was colder, the sun weaker and the people there said that you did not have to go more than twenty thousand grailstones before you were in an area where the sun was always half above, half below the mountains. And there lived hairy, ape-faced men ten feet tall and weighing seven to eight hundred pounds. (This was true, Joe Miller had been one of the titanthrops there.) The people up River who adopted her spoke Suomenkieltd, which in English meant Finnish. DownRiver a little way were the Swedes. These were twentieth-century people who lived a peaceful life and Gwenafra grew up relatively happy with loving foster parents. She learned Finnish, Swedish, English, a Chinese dialect of the fourth century B.C. and Esperanto. She drowned again by accident one day and woke up here. She still remembered Burton; she cherished a childhood crush she had had for him. But, being a realist, she was ready to love other men. And she had -- and had just split with one, Sam had heard. She wanted a man who would be faithful to her and these were not easy to find in this world. Sam was very much attracted to her. The only thing that had kept him from asking her to move in with him had been the fear of angering Livy. That fear was ridiculous -- she had no claim on him as long as she was living with Cyrano. And she had made it plain that she did not care what he did in his private life -- or his public life. Nevertheless, against all logic, he was afraid to take another woman as his hutmate. He did not want to snap the last thin link. He chatted with Gwenafra a while and confirmed that she was still unattached. V L unch was upsetting. The "roulette wheel" concealed somewhere in the false bottom of the grail, the wild caster of dice, came up with a meal that only a Goshute Indian could have swallowed and even he might have gagged a little. Sam threw out all the food, but was able to console himself with two cigars, cigarettes and six ounces of an unfamiliar but delicious liqueur. Just smelling it sent his taste buds into a dance. The meeting with the Council and John took three hours. After much wrangling and a number of votes, it was decided to put to the people the question of amending the Carta so that a pro tern Councilman could be elected. John held up things for an hour, arguing that a vote wasn't needed. Why couldn't the Council simply say that the amendment was passed? No amount of explaining ever seemed to clarify such matters in John's head. It was not that he was unintelligent. It was just that he was not emotionally suited to comprehend democracy. The vote was unanimous to accept Firebrass as Hacking's official visiting fireman. But he would have a close eye kept on him. After all this John rose and made a speech, occasionally lapsing from Esperanto into Norman French when he was overpowered by emotion. He thought that Parolando should invade Soul City before Soul City invaded Parolando. The invasion should be launched as soon as the handguns and the armored amphibian, Firedragon , were ready. However, it might be best to test the mettle of their metal and the troops on New Brittany first. His spies were certain that Arthur planned to attack them soon. John's two toadies backed him, but the others, including Sam, voted them down. John's face became red and he scolded and drummed his fingers on the oak table, but nobody decided to change his mind. After supper the drums relayed a message from Hacking. Firebrass would" be arriving tomorrow, some time before noon. Sam retired to his office. By the IF light of lamps burning fishoil -- soon they would have electricity -- he and Van Boom and Tanya Velitsky and John Wesley O'Brien, the engineers, discussed their ideas about the Riverboat and drew rough sketches on paper. Paper was still scarce, but they would need enormous amounts to draw their blueprints. Van Boom said that they should wait until they were able to make a certain kind of plastic. Lines could be drawn on this with magnetized "pens" and corrections could easily be made by demagnetizing. Sam replied that that was fine. But he wanted to start building the Riverboat the moment the amphibian was completed. Van Boom said that he could not agree to that. Too many things were in the way. It was late when Sam said good night. Van Boom pulled the Mark I gun out of a large bag. "We have ten of these now," he said. "This one is yours. Compliments of Parolando's Engineering Corps. And here are twenty packages of powder and twenty plastic bullets. You can sleep with them under your pillow." Sam thanked him. Van Boom left and Sam barred the door. He went into the back room to talk to Joe Miller a while. Joe was still awake, but he said he was taking no sedation that night. He the fabuloOs riverboat would be getting up in the morning. Sam bade the giant good night and went into his bedroom, next to the pilothouse. He drank two shots of bourbon and lay down. After a while he managed to doze, though he was afraid that the three-o'clock rain would wake him as usual and he would have trouble getting back to sleep. H e awoke but the rain was long past. Shouts came from somewhere and then an explosion that rattled the ports in the pilothouse. Sam leaped out of bed, wrapped a kilt around his waist, seized an axe in one hand and ran into the pilothouse. He suddenly remembered his pistol, but decided he would go back for it when he found out what was going on. The River was still smothered in fog, but hundreds of dark figures of tall masts sticking out above it. Torches were flaring all over the plains and in the hills. Drums were beating. There was another explosion. A brightness in the night with bodies flying in all directions. He looked through the starboard port. The gates of the Iqg wall around King John's palace were open and men were streaming out. Among them was the stocky figure of John. By then more men had appeared out of the mists over The River. Bright starlight showed them lining up and moving out, rank after rank. The first of the invaders were by now in the great factories and advancing swiftly across the plain toward the foothills. Some explosions occurred inside factories as bombs were thrown to dislodge the defenders. And then a red tail flared out, disappeared, and something black shot toward him. Sam threw himself to the floor. A roar came beneath him, the floor heaved and the glass ports blew in. A wiff of acrid smoke came to him and was gone. He should get up and run, he realized, but he couldn't. He was deafened and frozen. Another rocket would be coming his way and that one might be closer. A giant hand gripped his shoulder and pulled him up. Another hand slid under his legs and he was being carried out. The arms and the chest of the giant were very hairy and as hard-muscled and as warm as a gorilla's. A voice as deep as if it were at the end of a railroad tunnel rumbled, "'Take it eathy, Bothth." 'Tut me down, Joe," Sam said. "Tm all right, except for my shame. And that's all right, too, I ought to feel ashamed." His shock was fading and a sense of relative calm flowed in to fill the vacuum. The appearance of the massive titanthrop had steadied him. Good old Joe -- he might be a dumb subhuman and sick at the moment, but he was still worth a battalion. Joe had put on his suit of leather armor. In one hand was the haft of an enormous double-headed axe of steel. The face under the hooded helmet was low-browed, bulging with bone bars and buttresses and massive javys. It was the face of a being between ape and man, though closer to man. But the unexpected feature, the comical yet terrifying feature, was the nose. This was the huge outlandishly protrudihg nose of the proboscis monkey. It provoked stares and laughter, though few had the foolhardiness to laugh in Joe's face. He was ten feet tall and weighed almost as much as a pair of lions. "Who are they?" he rumbled. "They from Thoul Thity ?" "I don't know," Sam said. "Do you feel up to fighting? How's the head?" "It hurtth. Yeah, I can fight okay. Vere do ve go from here?" Sam led him downhill toward the men collecting around John. He heard his name called and turned to see the tall lanky figure of de Bergerac, Livy by his side. She carried a small round shield of leather-covered oak and a steeltipped spear. Cyrano held a long, dully shining blade. Sam's eyes widened. It was a rapier. IF Cyrano said, "Morbleur He switched to Esperanto. 'Your smith gave this to me just after supper -- he said there was no sense in waiting." Cyrano whipped the rapier, cutting the air with a sharp sound. "Tve come alive again. Steel -- sharp steel!" them all leap for the ground. Sam waited until he was sure that another rocket was not coming and then looked at his pilothouse. It had received a direct hit; its front was blown open; a fire was racing through it and would soon be in the texas. His diary was gone but he could retrieve his grail later. It was indestructible. In the next few minutes the wooden missiles, tails flaming, arched out, wobbling, from wooden bazookas held on the shoulders of the Parolandoj rocketeers. The missiles landed near and sometimes among the enemy and exploded with gouts of fire and much black smoke, quickly carried away by the wind. Three runners arrived to report. The attack had been launched from three places, all from The River. The main body was concentrated here, apparently to seize the Parolandoj leaders, the larger factories and the amphibian. The other two armies were about a mile away on each side. The invaders were composed of men from New Brittany and Kleomanujo and the Ulmaks from across The River. The Ulmaks were savages who had lived in Siberia circa # B.C. and whose descendants had migrated across the Bering Straits to become Amerinds. So much for King John's spy service, Sam ihoughiM nless -- unless he is in on the attack. But if he were he wouldn't be standing out here where he's likely to get killed any moment... Anyway, Arthur of New Brittany would never make a deal with his murderer uncle. The rockets continued to arc down from both sides, the fivepound warheads with their rock fragnient shrapnel taking a toll. The Parolandoj had the advantage; they could lie flat while their rockets exploded among upright targets. The invaders had to keep moving, otherwise they might just as well go home. Nevertheless, it was frightening to lie on the ground and wait for the next noisy blast and hope that it would not come closer than the last one. There were screams from the wounded that were not, however, as heartrending as they would have been if Sam had not been nearly deafened. Then, suddenly, the rockets had quit blowing up the world. A huge hand shook Sam's shoulder. He looked up to see that many around him were getting to their feet. The sergeants were yelling into the stunned ears of their men to form a battle array. The enemy was so close now that neither side was using the missiles or else they had all been launched. Ahead was a dark body, a sea of screaming whooping fiends. They ran up the hill and the first, second, and third ranks fell, pierced by arrows. But those behind did not break, they leaped over the fallen and kept on coming. Suddenly, the archers were being hammered down or thrust through or clubbed. Sam kept close behind Joe Miller, who moved ahead slowly, his axe rising and falling. And then the giant was down, and the enemy were struggling on top of him like a pack of jackals on a lion. Sam tried to get to him; his axe smashed through a shield and a head and an uplifted arm and then he felt a burning pain along his ribs. He was pushed back and back, while he slashed away with the axe. He stumbled over a pile of wood. Above him was the burning floor of his house; the stilts were on fire. He turned on his side and there was the handgun, the Mark I, that he had left by his bedside. Near it lay three packages of powder with the nitrate-soaked twists and a number of the plastic bullets. His axe was gone; it had become wedged in a skull. T WO men whirled by him in a dance, their hands gripping each other, straining, grunting with the strain, glaring into each other's bloody faces. They stopped and Sam recognized King John -- his opponent was taller but not as thickly built. He, too, had tawny hair and eyes that were blue in the flames overhead. Sam broke open the pistol, put in the bullet and the charge as he had done that morning up in the hills, locked the barrel and rose to his feet. The two men still struggled, one slipping back a little, then the other, trying to throw each other. John held a steel knife in his right hand, the other man a steel axe. Sam looked around; no one was coming at him. He stepped forward and extended the muzzle of the big pistol, holding it steady with both hands. He pulled the trig; ger, the click sounded, the gun was jarred to one side by the heavy hammer, there was a flash, he had the gun back in line, a boom, a cloud of smoke -- and John's assailant fell to one side, the entire right side of his skull blown away. John fell gasping onto the ground. Then he raised himself, looking at Sam, who was reloading the gun. "'Many thanks, partner! That man was my nephew, Arthur!" Sam did not reply. If he had been thinking he would have IF waited until Arthur had killed John and then blown Arthur's head off. It was ironic that he, Sam, who had much to gain by John's death, should be responsible for saving him. Moreover, he could not expect gratitude from John. The man had no such thing in his soul. Sam completed reloading the pistol and strode away, looking for Joe Miller. But he saw Livy reeling backward as a big Ulmak, whose left arm dangled bloodily, drove her back with blows of a stone axe on her shield. Her spear had been broken and in a few seconds he would have beaten her to her knees or shattered the shield. Sam reversed the pistol and broke the Ulmak's skull from behind with the butt of his gun. Livy fell exhausted and weeping on the ground and he would have gotten down to comfort her. But she seemed all right and he did not know where Joe Miller was. He plunged into the embattled mass and saw Joe on his feet again, demolishing heads, trunks and arms with sweeps of his great axe. Sam stopped a few paces from a man who was coming up from behind Joe, a large axe in both hands. Sam fired and the bullet took part of the man's chest off. A minute later, the invaders were running for their lives. The sky was graying; by its light it was evident that Parolandoj were coming in from north and south. The other two columns had been shattered and the reinforcements were outnumbering thejnvaders. Moreover, they brought rockets, which blew up the boats and canoes waiting for the defeated. Sam felt too exhilarated to be depressed by the losses and the damage. For the first time came out of the blue funk that always seized him during a fight. He actually enjoyed the battle during the last ten minutes. was gone. A wild-eyed and naked Hermann Goering, his scalp caked with blood, appeared on the battleground. His arms were raised straight up and he was shouting, "Oh, brothers and sisters! Shame! Shame! You have killed, you have hated, you have lusted for the blood and the ecstasy of murder! Why did you not throw down your arms and take in your enemies with love? Let them do with you what they would? You would have died and suffered but final victory would have been yours! The enemy would have felt your love -- and the next time he might have hesitated before again waging war. And the time after that and the next time he might have asked himself, 'What am I doing? Why am I doing this? What good is this? I have gained nothing -- ' and your love would have seeped through the stone over his heart and -- " John, coming up behind Goering, struck him on the back of the head with the hilt of his knife. Goering fell forward and lay on his face without moving. "So much for traitors," John shouted. He stared around wildly and then yelled, "Where are Trimalchio and Mordaunt?" Sam said, "They wouldn't be stupid enough to hang around here. You'll never catch them. They'll know you know they sold out to Arthur." John's striking of Goering was illegal, since free speech was every one's right in Parolandct But Sam did not think that arresting John would be the right course at that moment. Sam, too, had felt like hitting Goering. Livy, still weeping, staggered past. Sam followed her to where Cyrano sat on a pile of corpses. The Frenchman was wounded in a dozen places, though not seriously, and his rapier was bloody from tip to guard. He had given a splendid account of himself and his weapon. Livy threw herself on Cyrano and Sam turned away. She had not even thanked him for having saved her earlier. Sam sighed. There was a crash behind him. He turned. The rest of his house had fallen in, bringing the stilts with it. He felt drained of every atom of strength, but there would be little rest for him today. The casualties and the damage had to be assessed. The dead had to be taken to the rendering factory up in the hills, since their fat was used to make glycerin. The practice was gruesome but necessary and the owners of the bodies did not mind. Tomorrow they would be alive and well again somewhere far away along The River. In addition, the entire population would have to be kept ready for a call to arms and the work on erecting the walls along the Riveredge would have to be speeded up. Scouts and messengers would have to be sent out to determine just what the military situation was. The Ulmaks and the Kleomenujoj and the New Bretons might launch an all-out full-scale attack. A captain reported that Kleomenes, the leader of Kleomenujo, had been found dead near the Riveredge, where a piece of rock shrapnel had entered his skull. So ended the halfbrother of the great Spartan, Leonidas, who defended the pass of Thermopylos. Or so he ended in this area at least. Sam appointed some men to leave by lxat immediately for the two countries. They were to inform them that Parolando did not IF intend to take vengeance if the new leaders would guarantee friendship to Parolando. John complained that he should have been consulted and there was a short but savage argument. Sam finally agreed that John was right in principle, but there was no time to discuss certain matters. John informed him that, under the law, Sam had to take the time. Any decision had to be agreed upon by both of them. Sam hated to agree but John was right. They couldn't be giving contradictory orders. They went together to inspect the factories. These were not badly damaged. The invaders had not, of course, wanted to wreck them since they had intended to use them. The amphibian, the Fired ragon , was untouched. Sam shuddered when he thought of what might have happened if it had been completed and had fallen into the hands of the enemy. With it, they could have crushed the Parolandoj in the center and dug in to fight on the perimeter until reinforcements came. He would set up a large special guard around the vehicle. He fell asleep after lunch in a Councilman's hut. It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when he was shaken awake. Joe was standing over him, breathing bourbon fumes from his tremendous proboscis. 'The delegathyon from Thoul Thity chutht landed." "Firebrass," Sam said, standing up from the chair. "I forgot all about him. What a time for him to show up!" H e walked down to the River, where a catamaran was beached near the grailstone. John was already there, greeting the delegation, which consisted of six blacks, two Arabs and two Hindus. Firebrass was a short, bronzeskinned, curly-haired man with big brown eyes flecked with green. His huge forehead and shoulders and thickly muscled arms contrasted with his skinny legs, making him look all top. He spoke in Esperanto at first but later used English. It was a very strange English, full of terms and slang that Sam did not understand. But there was a warmth and openness about Firebrass that made Sam feel good just to have him around. "We better go back to Esperanto," Sam said, smiling and pouring three more slugs of scotch into Firebrass's cup. "Is that spaceman's lingo or Soul City dialect?" "Marsman's," Firebrass said. "Soul City English is pretty wild, but the official language, of course, is Esperanto, though Hacking was considering Arabic. But he isn't too happy about his Arabs any more," he added in a lower voice, looking at Abd ar-rahman and Ali Fazghuli, the Arab members of his delegation. "As you can see," Sam said, "we are in no condition to have a long leisurely conference. Not now. We have to clean up, get information about what's going on outside Parolando and set up our defences. But you are welcome, of course, and we'll get around to business within a few days." "I don't mind," Firebrass said. "I'd like to look around, if you don't mind." "I don't, but my co-Consul has to give his consent, too." John, smiling as if it hurt his teeth to be exposed to the air -- and it probably did this time -- said that Firebrass was welcome. But he would have to be accompanied by a guard of honor every time he left the quarters that would be assigned to him. Firebrass thanked him but another delegate, Abdullah X, protested loudly and occasionally obscenely. Firebrass said nothing for a minute and then told Abdullah to be polite, since they were guests. Sam was grateful, though he wondered if the whole speech had not been arranged. It had not been easy to sit there and listen, though all of the vitriolics had been hurled at the white race in general. Though it troubled him, Sam had to agree with Abdullah; he was right about conditions as they had been. But old Earth was dead; they were living in a new world. Sam personally conducted the delegates to three huts, side by side, owned by men and women who had been killed last night. Then he moved into a hut near the delegation. Drums boomed by the grailstone. After a minute, drums from across The River thundered back an answer. The new chief of the Ulmaks wanted peace. The old chief, Shrubgrain, had been put to death and his head would be delivered within the hour by canoe if peace could be arranged. Shurbgrain had failed his people by leading them to defeat. Sam gave orders to transmit a request for a conference with the new chief, Threezburm. Drums from Chernsky's Land said that lyeyasu, who ruled a twelve-mile stretch of land between New Brittany and Kleomenujo, had invaded New Brittany. The news meant that the New Bretons would not be bothering Parolando, but it also worried Sam. lyeyasu was a very ambitious man. Once he had consolidated his state with New Brittany he might decide he was strong enough to take Parolando. More drums. Publius Crassus sent his congratulations and warmest regards, and he would be visiting tomorrow to see what he IF could do to aid Parolando. And also to see how hard weve been hit and if we'd be easy pickings, Sam thought. So far, Publius had been cooperative, but a man who had served under Julius Caesar was never above a little of his own brand of Caesarism. Goering, his head wrapped in a bloody towel, staggered by, supported by two of his followers. Sam hoped he would take the hint and leave Parolando, but he didn't have much faith in the German's perceptiveness. He went to sleep that night while torches burned everywhere over the land and guards peered into the shadows and the mists. His sleep was troubled, despite his intense fatigue. He tossed and rolled and once he awoke, his heart beating, his skin cold, certain that there was a third person in the hut. He fully expected to see the shadowy figure of The Mysterious Stranger crouched by his bed. But nobody was there except the monstrous form of Joe stretched out on the huge bamboo bed near him. VI T he next morning he arose unrefreshed in a refreshed world. The three-o'clock rain had washed away the blood and the stink of gunpowder. The bodies were out of sight and the sky was clear and blue. Business as usual was resumed but without about four hundred and fifty men and women. Half of these were in the rendering factory; the rest were in the hospital. Those who wanted to be put out of their misery were given their wish. Time had been when an axe was the only euthanasiast but now, thanks to Parolando's technology, the work was done with a potassium cyanide pill. Some decided to stick it out. In time their limbs or eyes would grow back. Those afraid of the pain boarded The Suicide Express. There bodies would go to the rendering factory. Sam's secretary had been killed. Sam asked Gwenafra if she would afra seemed very pleased; the new position gave her a high status and she had made no secret of the fact that she liked to be near Sam. Lothar vjon Richthofen, however, did not seem pleased. "Why shouldn't she be my. sec-, retary, regardless of her relationship to you?" Sam said. "There is no reason," Lothar said, "except that I might have a very good chance with her if she isn't around you much." "Let the best man win." "My sentiments, too, but I don't like your wasting her time or leading her on. You know that you won't take another hutmate as long as Livy is here." "'Livy has nothing to say about what I do' Sam said. Lothar smiled slightly and said, "Sure, Sam." #wenafra tagged along with him,, taking notes, sending messages, receiving them, arranging schedules and appointments. Though he was very busy, he found moments when he could talk and joke with her and he felt a warmth every time he looked at her. Gwenafra seemed to adore him. Two days passed. The twentyfour hour shift on the amphibian was showing results -- it would be completed in another two days. The Soul City delegation strolled around with twoof King John's men watching them. Joe Miller, who had gone back to his bed after the battle, said he was well again. Now Sam had both Gwenafra and the titanthrop with him and his world seemed much more comfortable, though it was a long way from being Utopia. Word came via the drum telegraph that Odysseus had loaded his ships with flints and would be back in a month. He had gone as commander of a ten-boat fleet to barter with the chief of Selinujo. On Earth she had been Countess Huntingdon, Selina Hastings, born #, died #. She was now a member of the Church of the Second Chance and traded her flint with Parolando only because Parolando permitted some of Goering's missionaries to preach at will in its territory. In return for the flint she had been promised a small metal steamboat in which she proposed to go up and down The River and preach. Sam thought she was fooling herself. The first place she put into she was liable to have her throat cut for the sake of the boat. But that was her business. T he Councilmen met with the Soul City delegation. Sam would have liked to put it off, since John was in a mood even uglier than usual. One of his women had tried to kill him -- or at least so he claimed. He had been stabbed in the side before he broke her jaw and knocked her head against the corner of a table. The woman had died an hour later still uncon.scious, and John's word that she had attacked him first had to be accepted. Sam would have liked to have collected some neutral eyewitness account but that was impossible. John was in pain from the stab wound, half-drunk with bourbon as an anesthetic and smarting because the woman had dared to defy him. He slumped in a large, high-backed, ornately carved oak chair covered with red hornfish leather. One hand was around a clay vessel full of whiskey, a cigarette dangled from his lips and IF he glowered at everybody. The conference was taking place at a round table in the largest room in John's palace. Firebrass was talking. "Hacking once believed in total segregation of whites and nonwhites. He believed, fiercely believed, that whites could never accept, not really accept, nonwhite peoples, that is, the blacks, Mongolians, Polynesians, and Amerindians. The only way nonwhites could live with dignity, feel beautiful, be a people with its own personality and pride, was the way of segregation. Equal but separate. "Then his leader, Malcolm X, quit the Black Muslims. Malcom X saw that he was wrong. Not all whites were devils, racist fiends, any more than all blacks had flat noses. Hacking fled the states to live in Algend and there he found that it was the attitude that made racism, not the color of the skin." Hardly an original or surprising discovery, Sam thought. But he had told himself that he would not interrupt. "And then the young whites of the United States rejected their parents' prejudices and they supported the blacks in their struggles. They got right out on the streets and demonstrated, rioted, laid down their lives for the blacks. They genuinely seemed to like blacks, not because they thought they ought to, but because blacks were human beings and human beings can be liked or even loved. "Hacking, however, wasn't ever really at ease with an American white, try though he did to think of them as human beings. He was ruined, just as most whites, most older whites, were ruined. But he tried and he respected those young whites that told their parents, their white racist society, to go to hell. "Then he died, as everybody did, black or white. He found himself among ancient Chinese and he wasn't very happy with them because they regarded all peoples except the Chinese as inferior." Sam remembered the Chinese of Nevada and California in the early '#s, the hard-working, thrifty, quiet, meek, cheery little brown men and women. They had taken abuse that most people would not give a mule, been spat upon, cursed, tortured, stoned, robbed, raped, suffered about every indignity and crime that a people could suffer. They had had no rights whatsoever, no protector or protection. And they had never murmured, never revolted, they just endured. What thoughts had those masklike faces hidden? Had they, too, believed in the superiority of any Chinese to any white devil? If so, why had they not struck back, not once? Firebrass said, "So Hacking left in a dugout, floated downRiver and after many thousands of miles settled down among some blacks of seventeenth-century A.D. Africa. Ancestors of the Zulus before they migrated to southern Africa. He learned Zulu but after a while he left. Their customs were too repulsive and they were too bloody minded for him. 'Then he lived in an area where the people were a mixture of Dark Age Huns and dark whites of the New Stone Age. They accepted him well enough, but he missed his own people, the American blacks. So he took off again and was captured by ancient Moabites and enslaved, escaped, was captured by ancient Hebrews and put into grail slavery, escapedagain, found a little community of blacks who'd been pre-Civil War slaves and was happy for a while. But their Uncle Tom attitudes and their superstitions got on his nerves and he took off, sailed downRiver and lived with several other peoples. Then, one day, some big blond whites, Germans of some kind, raided the people he was with. He fought, was killed. "He was resurrected here. Hacking became convinced that the only happy states on The River are going to be made up of people with similar colors, similar tastes, and of the same terrestrial period. Anything else just won't work. People here aren't going, to change. Back on Earth he could believe in progress, because the young whites were flexible minded. The old ones would die off and then the children of the young whites would be even more free of racial prejudice. But here that just isn't going to take place. Every man's set in his ways. So, unless Hacking just happened to find a community of late twentieth-century whites, he would find no whites without racial hatreds or prejudices. Of course, the ancient whites didn't have any, but they're too strange for a civilized man." S AM asked, "What's all this leading up to?" "We want a homogeneous nation. We can't get all late twentieth-century blacks, but we can get as black a nation as possible. Now, we know that you have approximately three thousand blacks in Parolando. We would like to exchange our Dravidians, Arabs, any nonblacks, for your blacks. Hacking is making similar proposals to your neighbors, but he doesn't have any lever with them." King John sat up and said, loudly, "You mean he doesn't have anything they want?" Firebrass looked coolly at John and said, "That's about it. But we'll have a lever some day." "Do you mean when you have enough steel weapons?" Sam said. Firebrass shrugged. John crashed his empty cup down on the table. "Well, we don't IF want your Arabs or your Dravidians or any of your Soul City dregs," he shouted. "But I'll tell you what we will do. For every ton of bauxite or cryolite or ounce of platinum, we will give you one of our black citizens! You can keep your Saracen infidels or send them packing downRiver or drown them for ail we care." "Wait a minute," Sam said. "We can't give our citizens away. If they want to volunteer, fine. But we don't just give anybody away. This is a democracy." Firebrass's expression had darkened at John's outburst. "I wasn't suggesting that you give anybody away," he said. "We're not slave dealers, you know. What we want is a one-per-one-voluntary exchange. The Wahhabi Arabs, whom ar-Rahman and Fazghuli represent, feel they're unwelcome at Soul City and they would like to go where they could congregate in their own community, form a sort of Kasbah, you might say." Sam thought this sounded fishy. Why couldn't they do that just as well in Soul City? Or why didn't they just get up and leave? One of the beauties of this world was that ties or property or dependence on income did not exist. A man could carry everything he owned on his back -- and building another house was easy in a world where new bamboo grew two inches a day. It was possible that Hacking wanted to get his people into Paroiando so that they could spy or revolt when Hacking invaded. Sam said, "We'll put your proposition about the exchange to each individual. That's all we can do. Now, does Sinjoro Hacking plan to keep on supplying us with the minerals and with wood?" "As long as you keep on sending us raw ore and steel weapons," Firebrass said. "But Hacking is thinking of upping the price." John's fist smashed into the table top again. "We will not be robbed," he shouted. "We are paying too much now. Don't push us, Sinjoro Firebrass, or you may find yourselves with nothing. Not even your lives!" "Take it easy. Your Majesty," Sam said quietly. To Firebrass he said, "John isn't feeling well. Please forgive him. However, he does have a point. We can be pushed only so far." A bdullah X, a very big and very black man, jumped up and pointed a big finger at Sam. In English, he said, "You honkies had better quit badmouthing us. We won't take any crap from you. Mister Whitey! None! Especially from a man that wrote a book like you did about Nigger Jim. We don't like white racists and we only deal with them because there's nothing else to do but that just now." "Take it easy, Abdullah," Firebrass said. He was smiling and Sam wondered if Abdullah's speech was part of a well prepared program. Probably Firebrass was wondering if John's explosions had been rehearsed. Actors didn't have to be politicians, but politicians had to be actors. Sam groaned and said, "Did you read Huckleberry Finn, Sinjoro X?" Abdullah, sneering, said, "I don't read trash." "Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Abdullah's face darkened. Firebrass grinned. "I don't have to read that racist crap, man," Abdullah shouted, "Hacking told me all about it and what he says is good enough for me. "You read it and then come back and we'll discuss it," Sam said. "You crazy?" Abdullah said. "You know there aren't any books on this world." "Then you lost out, didn't you?" Sam said. He was trembling a little; he wasn't used to being talked to like this by a black man. "Anyway," Sam said, "this isn't a literary tea and discussion group. Let's stick to the issue." But Abdullah would not stop shouting about the books that Sam had written. And John, losing his temper, leaped up and screamed, "Sieiitt, negracor John had taken the Esperanto word for "black" or "negro" and infixed the disparaging "-ac-" particle. He had gotten his point over quite well. There was a moment of shock and silence. Abdullah X's mouth was open, then it closed and he looked triumphant, almost happy. Firebrass bit his lip. John leaned on the table on his fists and scowled. Sam puffed on his cigar. He knew that John's contempt for all humanity had made him invent the term. John had no racial prejudice; he had never seen more than a half-dozen blacks during his lifetime on Earth. But he certainly knew how to insult a person; the knowledge was second nature to him. "I'm walking out," Abdullah X said. "I may be going home -- and if I do you can bet your whke skin that you'll pay hell getting any more aluminum or platinum. Mister Charlie." Sam rose to his feet and said, "Just a minute. If you want an apology, I extend it on behalf of all Parolando." Abdullah looked at Firebrass, who looked away. Abdullah said, "I want an apology from him, now!" He pointed at King John. Sam leaned close to John and said softly, "There's too much at stake to play the proud monarch. Your Majesty! And you may be IF playing into their hands with your little fit. They are up to something, you can bet on that. Apologize. John straightened up and said, "I apologize to no man, especially not to a commoner." Sam snorted and gestured with his cigar. "Can't you get it through your thick Plantagenet head that there isn't any such thing as royal blood or divine right of kings any more, that we're all commoners? Or all kings?" out. Abdullah looked at Firebrass, who nodded. Abdullah walked out. Sam said, "Well, Sinjoro Firebrass, what next? Do you people go home?" Firebrass shook his head. "No, I don't believe in hasty decisions. But the conference is suspended as far as the Soul City delegation is concerned. Until John Lackland apologizes. I'll give you until noon tomorrow to decide what to do." Firebrass turned to leave. Sam said, "I'll talk to John, but he's as hardheaded as a Missouri mule." "I'd hate to see our negotiations fold because one man can't keep his insults to himself," Firebrass said. "And I'd also hate to see our trade stop, because that would mean no Riverboat for you." Sam said, "Don't get me wrong, Sinjoro Firebrass. Tm making no threats. But-I won't be stopped, ril get the aluminum if i have to kick John out of the country myself. Or, alternatively, if I have to go down to Soul City and get the aluminum myself." "I understand you," Firebrass said. "But what you don't understand is that Hacking isn't out for power. He only wants to have a well protected state so that his citizens can enjoy life. And they will enjoy their lifc because they'll all have similar tastes and similar goals. In other words, they'll all be black." Sam grunted and then said, "Very well." He fell silent but just before Firebrass left he called, "One minute. Have you read Huckleberry FinnT' Firebrass turned back. "Sure. I thought it was a great book when I was a kid. I read it again when I was in college and I could see its flaws then." "Were you disturbed because Jim was called Nigger Jim?" "You have to remember that I was born in nineteen-seventy-five on a farm near Syracuse, New York. Things had changed a lot by then and the farm had originally been owned by my great-greatgreat grandfather, who came up from Georgia to Canada via the underground railway and then purchased the farm after the Civil War. No, I wasn't offended by your use of the word. Negroes were called niggers openly in the time you wrote about and nobody thought anything of it. Sure, the word was an insult. But you were portraying people as they actually talked and the ethical basis of your novel, the struggle between Huck's duty as a citizen and his feeling for Jim as a human being and the victory of the human feeling in Huck -- I was moved. The whole book was an indictment of slavery, of the semifeudal society of the Mississippi, of superstition -- of everything stupid of that time. So why should I be offended by it?" 'Then why -- " "Abdullah -- whose original name was George Robert Lee -- was born in nineteentwenty-five and Hacking was born in nineteen-thirty-eight. Blacks were niggers then to a lot of whites, though not all. They found out the hard way that violence -- or the threat of it, the same thing that the whites had used to keep them down -- was the only way to get their rights as citizens of the United States. You died in nineteen-ten, right? But you must have been told by any number of people what happened after that ?" Sam nodded, "It's hard to believe. Not the violence of the riots. Plenty of that happened in my lifetime and nothing, I understand, ever equaled the Draft Act riots in New York City during the Civil War. I mean, what's hard to visualize is the licentiousness of the late twentieth century." "Yet you're living in a society that is far more free and licentious -- from the viewpoint of the nineteenth century -- than any society in the twentieth. You've adapted." "I suppose so," Sam replied. "But the two weeks of absolute nudity that the entire human species lived through during the first days after resurrection ensured that mankind would never again be the same. Not as regards nudity, anyway. And the undeniable fact of the resurrection shattered many fixed ideas and attitudes. Though the diehard is still with us, as witness your Wahhabi Moslems." "Tell me, Sinjoro Clemens," Firebrass said. "You were an early liberal, far ahead of your times in many things. You spoke up against slavery and were for equality. And when you wrote the Magna Carta for Parolando you insisted that there s;hould be political equality for all species, races and both sexes. I notice that a black man and a .white woman live almost next door to you. Be hpnest, doesn't it disturb you to see that ?" Sam drew in smoke, blew it out IF and said, "To be honest, yes, it did not downright pain, by leaving disturb me. Well, to tell the truth, Parolando." it almost killed me! What my "Are you threatening me?" niind told me and what my re"Not with any action from me. flexes told me were two different But there are plenty who may get things. I hated it. But i stuck to my so riled up they'll run you out on a guns, I said nothing, I became acrail. Or take you down to The quainted with that couple and I River and drown you. You're uplearned to like them. And now, setting everybody with your after a year, it bothers me only a preachings. This state was foundvery little. And that will go away in ed with one main goal, the buildtime." ing of the Riverboat. Now, a man "The difference between may say anything he wants to and you -- representing the white libnot run foul of the law here. But eral -- and the youth of Hacking's there are those who sometimes igday and mine was that we were not nore the law and I wouldn't want to bothered. We accepted it." have to punish them because you "Don't I get any credit for lifttempted them. I suggest that you ing myself by my mental booldo your Christian duty and restraps?" Sam asked. move yourself from the premises. "Yawblaw," Firebrass said. That way, you won't be tempting lapsing into English -- of a sort, good men and women to commit "Two degrees off is better than violence." ninety. Pin it." "I'm not a Christian," Goering said. alone. He sat for a long that. I don't think I ever met a while, then stood up and went outpreacher who came out and said side. The first person he saw was so, in so many words." Hermann Goering. His head was "Sinjoro Clemens," Goering still wrapped in a towel but his said, "I read your books when I skin was less pale and his eyes did was a young man in Germany, not look odd. first in German and then in EngSam said, "How's your head?" lish. But levity or mild irony aren't "It still hurts. But I can walk going to get us any place. I am not without driving hot spikes in it a Christian, though I try to pracevery time I take a step." tice the better Christian virtues. I "I don't like to see a man sufam a missionary for the Church fer," Sam said. "So I suggest that of the Second Chance. All Teryou could avoid more suffering, if restrial religions have been disthe fabulous riverboat # credited, even if some won't adinit it. The Church is the first religion to rise on the new world, the only one which has any chance to survive. It -- " "Spare me the lecture," Sam said. "I've heard enough from your predecessors and from you. What Tm saying, in utter friendliness and a desire to save you from harm and also, to be honest, to get you out of my craw, is that you should lake off. Right now. Or you'll be killed." "Then I'll rise at dawn tomorrow somewhere else and preach The Truth there, wherever I find myself. You see, here, as on Earth, the blood of the martyr is the seed of the Church. The man who kills one of us only ensures that The Truth, the chance for eternal salvation, will be heard by more people. Murder has spread our faith up and down The River far faster than any conventional means." "Congratulations," Sam said exasperatedly, dropping into English as he often did when angry. "But tell me, doesn't the repeated bother you? Aren't you afraid of running out of body?" "What do you mean?" "Tenets, anyone?" Sam got no reaction except a puzzled look. Sam resumed in Esperanto. "One of your major tenets, if I remember correctly, is that Man wasn't resurrected so he  could enjoy life here forever. He i is given only a limited time, though it may look like a long time to most, especially if they don't happen to be enjoying life here. You postulate something analogous to a soul, something you call a psychomorph, right? Or sometimes a ka. You have to, otherwise you can't claim a continuity of identity in a man. Without it a man who dies is dead, even if his body is reproduced exactly and made alive again. That second body is only a reproduction. The Lazarus has the mind and the memories of the man who died, so he thinks he's the man who died. But he isn't. He's just a living duplicate. Death terminated the first man. He's through. "Unless he has a soul -- or a psychomorph or a kacd it what you will. This is an entity which is born with the body, accompanies it, registers and records everything the body does and, indeed, must be an incorporeal incorporation of the body, if you'll excuse that contradiction. So that, when the flesh dies, the ka still exists. It exists in some fourth dimension or in some polarization which protoplasmic eyes can't see or mechanical devices can't detect. Is that correct?" "You're close enough," Goering said. "Crudely put but satisfactory." IF iing a big cloud of green whole and young again and then smoke, "we have -- you have, not recordings are made of these I -- the postulated soul of the bodies -- which are destroyed and Christians and the Moslems and the dead are raised on a new world, others ad nauseam. But you claim such as this, again through e-m that the soul does not go to a hell or conversion, a heaven. It flits around in some "'The psychomorphs, or kas sort of fourth-dimensional limbo, have an affinity to their protoIt would do so forever if it were plasmic twins. The moment a not for the interference of other duplicate of the dead body is beings. These are extra-Terresmade, the ka attaches itself and trials who came into existence begins recording. So that, if the long before humanity did. These body is killed and duplicated a superbeings came to Earth when hundred times, the ka still retains mankind did not yet exist -- in fact, the identity, the mind and the they visited every planet in the unimemories of all the bodies. So that verse that might have sentient life it is not just one duplicate after someday." another being created. It is a mat"You're not phrasing exactly ter of preservation of the pristine as we do," Goering said. "We individual." maintain that every Galaxy has "But!" Sam said, waving his one -- or perhaps many -- ancient cigar and then stabbing its glowspecies inhabiting certain planets, ing end close to Goering's cheek. These beings may have arisen in "But! You maintain that a man our Galaxy or they may have orcannot be killed an indefinite iginated in an earlier, now dead, number of times. You say that. Galaxy or universe. In any event, after a couple of hundred times they are wise and knew long ago death does have a final effect, that sentient life would arise on Continued dying weakens the link Earth and they set up devices between body and ka and evenwhich started recording these sentually the duplication of the body tients from the moment they apdoes not cause the kti to merge with peared. These devices are undeit. The ka wanders off, haunts the tectable by the sentients. spooky corridors of the fourth "At some time which these Andimension or whatever. It becients, as we call them, have detercomes, in effect, a ghost, a lost mined, the recordings are sent to a soul. It is done for." special place. There the dead are "That is the essence of our fleshed out from the recordings by faith," Goering said. "Or I should say our knowledge, since we know this to be true." Sam raised his bushy eyebrows. "Indeed? Know?" "Yes. Our founder heard The Truth a year after Resurrection, a year to the day after all of humanity rose from the dead. A man came to him at night as he prayed for a revelation on a high ledge up in the mountains. This man told him certain things, showed him certain things, that no terrestrial mortal could tell or show. This man was an agent of The Ancients and he revealed The Truth, and told our founder to go out and preach the doctrine of the Second Chance. "Actually, Second Chance is a misnomer. It is really our First Chance, because we never had a chance for salvation and eternal life while we were on Earth. But life on Earth was a necessary prelude to this Riverworld. The Creator made the universe and then The Ancients preserved humankind -- indeed, all sentients throughout the universe. They preserved. But salvation is up to mankind only. "It is up to each man to save himself, now that he has been given the chance." "Through the Church of the Second Chance and that only, I suppose," Sam said. He did not' want to sneer but he could not help it. "That is what we believe," Goering said.   of this mysterious stranger?" Sam said. He thought of his Mysterious Stranger, and felt panic. Could the two be the same? Or from among the same beings, who called themselves the Ethicals? His Stranger, the man who sent the nickel-iron meteorite here and who had enabled Joe Miller to see the Tower in the mists of the North Polar Sea, was a renegade of the Ethicals. If he were to be believed. "Credentials?" Goering said. "Papers from God?" He laughed. "The founder knew that his visitor could not be just a man because he knew things that only a god, or a superior being, coiild know about him. And he showed him some things that he had to believe. And he told him how we were brought back to life and why. He did not tell him everything. Some things will be revealed later. Some things we must find out for ourselves." "What is the name of this founder?" Sam aid. "Or don't you know? Is that one of the hidden things?" "No one knows," Goering said. "It is not necessary to know. What is a name? He only called himself Viro. That is, in Esperanto, a man. From the Latin vir. We call him La Fondinto, The Founder, or La Viro, The Man." "Did you ever meet him?" IF "No, but I have met two who knew him well. One was there when LaViro preached the first time, seven days after the Stranger had talked to him."' "La Viro is definitely male? Not a woman?" "Oh, yes!" Sam sighed deeply and said, "That's a great weight off my mind. If the founder had turned out to be Mary Baker Eddy I would have curled up and died." "What?" "Never mind," Sam said, grinning. "I wrote a book about her once. I wouldn't want to meet her; she'd scalp me alive. But some of the wild mystical things you told me reminded me of her." "Except for the ka, everything in our explanation is based on the physical. And the ka is physical but at right angles, you might say, to our reality. We believe that it is science, the science of The Ancients, which has given us a physical resurrection. There's nothing supernatural about anything, except our belief in The Creator, of course. The rest is all science." "Like Mary Baker Eddy's religion?" Sam asked. "I do not know of her." "So how do we attain this salvation?" "By becoming love. And that implies, of course, that we do not offer violence, even in self-defense. We believe that we can become love only by attaining a certain transcendent state and that comes through self-knowledge. So far most of mankind has not learned how to use dreamgum; man has abused the drug, just as he abuses everything." "And you think you have become love, whatever that phrase means?" "Not yet. But I am on the way." "Through dreamgum?" "Not just with it. It helps. But you have to act, too, you have to preach and suffer for your belief. And learn not to hate. Learn to love." "So that is why you oppose tny Riverboat? You think that we are wasting our time by building it?" "It's a goal that will bring no one any good. So far it has resulted in the devastation of the land, in greed and pain and bloodshed, in anxiety and treachery. In hate, hate, hate! And for what? So you can have what nobody else has, a giant boat of metal propelled by electricity, the apex of the technology this planet offers, a ship of fools. So you can journey to the headwaters of The River. When you get there, then what? You should be journeying to the headwaters of the soul!" "There are some things you don't know," Sam said. His smugness was soured by a vision. There was the devil, crouching in the darkness, whispering in his ear. But someone had crouched in the darkness and whispered in the ear of the founder of the Church, "too. Was the Church's Stranger the devil? The being who had come to Samuel Clemens had said that the others were the devils and he wanted to save mankind. The devil would say something like that, of course. "Don't my words touch your heart at all?" Goering said. Sam rapped his chest with his fist and said, "Yes, I do believe I have a touch of indigestion." Goering made a fist and clamped his lips. "Watch out, you'll lose your love," Sam said and walked away. But he did not feel particularly triumphant. It was a fact that he did have a little stomach upset. Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it. T he afternoon of the next day arrived. Sam Clemens and John Lackland had been arguing all morning. John said that he would never apologize for anything he said to a commoner, especially to a man called Abdullah, a Saracen. Finally Sam, exasperated past caution and reasonableness, said, "We can't afford to have the bauxite cut off by Hacking. We can't afford anything that will put a stop to building the Riverboat. Maybe you're doing this to force a war between us and Soul City. It isn't going to work. Your Majesty!" Sam had been walking back and forth, waving a panatela as he spoke. John sprawled before the oaken round table in Sam's pilothouse. Joe Miller sat in a corner on a big chair specially built for him. The massive palaeolithic Mongolian, Zaksksromb, stood behind John. Suddenly, Sam whirled and planked both fists on the table. Leaning on the table, his cigar in one corner of his mouth, the reddish tangle of his eyebrows drawn down, he snarled at John. "You gave in once, at Runnymede, when you signed the Magna Carta. It was about the only decent thing you ever did during your reign -- and there are some who say you had your fingers crossed then. Well, this is another showdown, John, Your Majesty. You apologize to Abdullah, who has a right to an apology -- or I'll call a special session of the Council and we'll determine your fitness to continue as co-Consul!" John glowered at him for a full minute at the least. Then he said, "Your threats don't scare me. But it's evident that you would sooner plunge our land into civil war than go to war with Soul City. I do not IF understand this madness, but then a rational man always has trouble understanding irrationality. So -- I will apologize, why not? A king can afford to be gracious to a commoner. It costs him nothing and enhances his graciousness." John rose and swaggered out, his huge bodyguard behind him. Ten minutes later Sam heard that John had appeared at the state guest house and offered his apology. Abdullah X accepted it, though sullenly. It was evident that he had been ordered to do so. Just before the factory whistles announced the end of lunch hour, Cawber entered. He sat down without waiting for Sam to invite him. Sam raised his eyebrows, because this was the first time that this had happened. There was something indefinable in Cawber's attitude. Sam, watching him carefully, listening to every inflection of his voice, decided that his attitude was that of a slave who has decided to be a slave no more. be the emissary to Soul City. He sat leaning forward, huge black arms resting on the oak, his hands spread out. He spoke in Esperanto and, like many people, often in the present tense, using an adverb of time to indicate future or past if he wanted to clarify. Cawber's team had talked to every one of the approximately three thousand undoubted Negroes (there was some confusion of classification about some of the prehistorics). A third of these was Soul City in exchange for Hacking's unwanted citizens. Most were late twentieth-century blacks. The others maintained that they had work that gave them prestige, that they liked being on an equal footing with the whites and that they did not want to give up their chance to be on the Riverboat. The latter was probably the biggest determinant, Sam thought. He was not the only one who dfeamed of the Riverboat. It drove through the minds of many during sleep, gleaming like a jewel with a firefly trapped inside it. Firebrass and his people were requested to come to the conference room. Firebrass was late because he had been inspecting the airplane. He was laughing about its quaintness, fragility and slowness, and yet he was envious that von Richthofen would be the one to fly it. "You'll certainly get a chance to fly it, loo," Sam said. "Provided that you are still here, of course, when -- " Firebrass waved aside Sam's assurances, became serious. "What is your decision, gentlemen, regarding my government's proposal?" Sam looked at John, who gestured that Sam had the floor. John intended that any ill feelings should first be directed at Sam. "This is a democracy," Sam said. "And we can't tell our citizens to get out unless they've been guilty of illegal behavior. So, as I see it -- as we see it -- any citizen of Parolando may go to Soul City if he wishes. I think we actually reached basic agreement on this when we last met. It will be up to your government to negotiate with each citizen. As for taking in your Arabs and Dravidians and so forth -- we'll give them a chance to come with us if they want: but we reserve the right to get rid of them if they don't work out. Where they'll go then is up to them," "Well," Firebrass said, "I don't suppose Hacking wants anybody City, no matter how black that person is." "What about the shipments of minerals?" Sam said, "Will those be discontinued during the negotiations?" "I really couldn't say," Firebrass replied. "I doubt it, but I'd have fo confer. Of course, you'll have to keep up your present rate of ore and weapons 'to us before the price is raised." "I notice you said w, not might be,"" Sam said. "Anything I say is subject to confirmation or negation from Soul City," Firebrass said, smiling. The rest of the conference was that Cawber would go to Soul City as Parolando's ambassador if the Carta could be changed to arrange it. Everything else was still up in the air. Sam Clemens received the impression that Firebrass did not intend to speed things up. Quite things drag on or even to put his own foot on the brake if things showed signs of accelerating. He wanted to remain in Parolando and Sam could only think that he wished to do so in order to spy. Perhaps he also wanted to stir up trouble. Later, when he discussed the meeting with John, he found some variations to his conclusions. John agreed that Firebrass was a spy but he could not see why Firebrass would stir up trouble. "He would want the boat to be built as swiftly as possible. The sooner it's completed, the sooner Hacking will try to seize it. Do you think for one moment that Hacking doesn't intend to get the boat? Do you think for one moment that we have a single neighbor who doesn't intend to try for the boat? Arthur made the abortive attempt to take us over because of his hatred for me. He should have waited until the boat was nearly completed and then. IF with Kieomenes and the Ulmaks, launched ail the force they could mount in an all-out attack. As things worked out he and Kieomenes were killed and lyeyasu has invaded their countries while their successors are fighting among themselves." "According to our spies, he's winning, too," Sam said. "If he consolidates his state with the other two, then he'll be a very formidable enemy." And so will you be, John Lackland, Sam thought. Of all the people ni have to watch after the boat is built, youll bear the closest watching... and his delegation would remain at Soul City's embassy while the negotiations went on. "It's nice to have you," Sam said. "But Soul City has its own industries. I know it's been using our ore to make weapons and several things our spies can't find out about." Firebrass looked surprised and then he laughed uproariously. "You twist my stick, stymate!" he said in English. Then, in Esperanto, "Well, why shouldn't we be frank? I like that. Yes, we know you have spies among us just as you know we have ours here. Who doesn't have his men in his neighbors' lands? But what are you getting at?" "You're the most technically trained man Hacking has. You're a Ph. D. You're in charge of the factories and of research and development. So why does Hacking send you here when he needs you there?" "I've set everything up to run smoothly. Soul City doesn't need me right now -- and I was bored. I wanted to come here, where it's at." "So you can see what we're doing, like our Mark I handguns and our airplane and the amphibian and its steam cannon?" Firebrass grinned and nodded. "Yes. Why not? If I don't see these things, someone else will." Sam relaxed. He said, "Have a cigar. You can look all you want. We're not doing anything you wouldn't have figured out for yourself, except for the steam cannon maybe. That, by the way, is my invention. Come along with me. I'm very proud of it and want you to see it. It's almost finished." Firedragon  rested inside its supporting framework of timbers. It was silvery gray and shaped like a flat-bottomed boat but had seven huge metal wheels with plastic tires on each side. Twin screws protected by a screen protruded from its rear. Its length was thirty feet, its beam ten and its height was twelve feet. Three turrets stuck out from the upper deck. One held the pilot and captain and radio operator, though at the moment Paroiando had ho radios. The center turret was higher than the others and the barrel of a short stubby weapon encased in wood projected from it. The rear turret was designed for gunners who would be armed with Mark I handguns and perhaps rifles. 'The amphibian burns wood alcohol to generate steam," Sam said. "Let's go inside, through this hatch in the side here. You'll notice that the boiler takes up about a third of the interior. There's a good reason for that, as you'll see." They climbed up a ladder into the interior of the center turret, which was lit by a single light bulb. Firebrass exclaimed at this -- it was the only electric light bulb he had ever seen on The River. Sam explained that it was powered by a fuel cell. "And here is the Superdooper Steam Machine Cannon," he said. He pointed at the cylinder sticking out of the gray bulkhead of the turret. Underneath it were a pistollike butt and a trigger. Firebrass got behind it, put his finger on the trigger and looked out through the opening above the barrel. He raised and lowered the weapon. "There'll be a chair for the operator to sit in," Sam said. "He'll be able to rotate the turret any way he wants by pushing pedals. He can depress the gun about twenty degrees up or down. The steam from the boiler is the motive power for the eighty-caliber plastic bullets. The gun is fired from an open breech. That is, there's no bullet in the barrel when the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger releases a catch which permits the breech block to move forward, impelled by a spring. During its forward travel the breech block picks up a plastic bullet from the clip and pushes it into the breech. Just before the block reaches the breech the camming lugs on either side engage in their slots and turn the breech block a quarter turn to the right, thus locking the breech. You follow me?" Firebrass nodded. "Good. As soon as the quarter turn is completed, the inlet channel in the breech block comes into line with the feed channel from the highpressure steam line. This allows hot, say approximately four hundred-degree F., steam to enter the chamber in the breech block. The plastic cartridge is forced through the barrel by the expansion of steam. At the same time the steam pressure, acting against the rear of the chamber, begins to force the breech block back. Because of the greater weight of the block, however, the block doesn't begin to move until the bullet has already cleared the muzzle of the rifle. "As the block begins to move backward, the camming lugs move in the camming slots and turn the IF bolt a quarter turn to the left, thus shutting off the steam. Then the breech block returns to its original position. If the trigger is still held back, the operation is repeated indefinitely." Firebrass said, "Fm impressed. But won't the gun operate most efficiently if its temperature is the same as the incoming high-pressure steam? That way, less of the steam's energy would be used to heat the gun and this means more steam to propel the bullet. Ah, I see! You do have a hollow jacket around the barrel. The steam travels through that before it enters the weapon itself, right?" "Yes. There's an insulating jacket of plaster encased in wood. Note that bleeder valve. It permits the gun to be heated up before use -- a few seconds before it's fired. If that isn't done the gun might jam. And since the gun's maximum temperature is the same as the steam in the boiler, there's no danger of burning up the barrel. You can use the gun like a fire hose. In fact, that'll be about the only way it'll be effective. The accuracy of a light plastic bullet with such comparatively low muzzle velocity isn't high." F irebrass was far from being depressed because of the military superiority the amphibian would give Parolando. This probably was because he was planning on building one for Soul City. Or, if Parolando had one, then perhaps he might build two. In which case, Parolando would have to build three. Soul City could not outbuild Parolando. But Parolando could not cut the supplies off, because then Soul Scity would cut off the bauxite, cryolite, platinum and iridium. The exhilaration from showing off his deadly invention whistled out almost audibly from Sam. The only solution to the problem, if Soul City did start a weapons race, would be to smash Soul City and take direct control of the minerals. This meant putting off the building of the Riverboat. And it also meant offending the two states, Publiujo and Tifonujo, that lay between Parolando and Soul City. And if those two states got together, they would be formidable, what with the weapons that Parolando had to give them in exchange for (heir wood. Sam had thought that that potentiality was bad enough. But a few days later lyeyasu completed his conquest of his neighboring states and sent a mission to Parolando. He made no demands that could not be met. In fact, in one way his proposals were helpful. He said that his nation had lost enough trees and he would like to give them a chance to grow again -- but for an increase in the number of weapons from Parolarge quantity of wood and of excrement for their gunpowder industry. He would invade the territories across The River and take their wood from them. What it amounted to was that Parolando would be paying lyeyasu to collect the wood. It would be cheaper and also a lot less painful for Parolandoj, who would not have to do their own killing, enslaving or raiding. And Sam Clemens would have one more thing to rob him of sleep. John Lackland thought the proposal excellent. "Our factories are turning out weapons efficiently," he said. "We can afford export more. And we must build a fleet of Firedragons, so that the swords we give these people will be easily overpowered by our machines." "When are we going to start building the Riverboat?" Sam asked. but the next day Van Boom, Velitsky, and O'Brien, his chief engineers, brought him the first rough overall sketches. They were drawn in black on white plastic boards with a pencil connected to a fuel cell. The magnetic field at the tip of the pencil rearranged the loose and very thin covering of particles within its range. The lines remained polarized until a reverse field was passed over them. Thus the demand for paper for drawings was greatly cut down and the plans could be changed as desired. Firebrass said he would like to help build the boat. Permission was given, though John objected at first. Sam replied that the more help they had, the faster the plans would move. And he did not see how any amount of knowledge on Firebrass's part would enable him to steal the boat. Though Sam did not tell John, he had an idea about Firebrass. That was to get him so involved, so "het up" about the boat that he would take an offer of a berth on the vessel. The machinery necessary to roll out the first plates for the hull was almost finished. The dam had been finished a week ago and the water The aluminum wires of the generators which would be turned by the waterfall from the dam were being wound. The prototype batacitor, which would be four stories high, would be finished in a month, if enough materials were available. Five hundred missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance asked for sanctuary in Parolando a few days later, lyeyasu had kicked them out of his new state, promising various exquisite tortures if they tried to sneak back. Sam did not hear about them immediately IF because.he was up at the dam. The Chancers refused to go when John sent word to them to leave immediately. John Lackland, hearing this, smiled grimly, tugged at his lion-colored hair, and swore his favorite oath, "By the teeth of Godr' Sam was at the dam to supervise the installation of tons of dynamite inside the hollow walls. This was to be one more trick up his sleeve, a last-ditch operation and perhaps a suicidal one -- if ever an enemy were about to make asuccessful invasion. Von Richthofen, red-faced and blowing hard from his run up the hill, told him of the arrival of the Chancers and their refusal to move. He did not mention John. Sam told Lothar to tell the Chancers that he would be down in the evening. They could wait for him but were not to move outside a radius of twenty yards from the grailstone near which they had landed. For a moment he considered ordering them to leave at once and telling the soldiers that they could pound them a little w ith the Hats of their swords if they wished. He was hot and sweating and covered with cement dust, and he felt an especial animosity toward the Chancers. Here was a world blessed by the absence of flies and mosquitoes and humans, the Chancers, were trying to fill the gap. The rumbling and splash of giant mortars pouring out concrete, the yells of the straw bosses and the scraping of shovels and clatter of iron wooden-wheeled barrows kept Sam from hearing the explosions that came a half-hour later. He knew nothing of what had happened until von Richthofen came running toward him again. Sam felt as if he would come loose at the joints and slump into a puddle. John had tested out the new guns on the Chancers. A hundred Mark I flintlocks had killed almost five hundred men and women in three minutes. John himself had fired and loaded ten times, using the last five bullets to finish off the wounded. About thirty women, the most beautiful, had been spared. These had been taken to John's palace. L ong before he reached the water's edge, Sam saw the big crowd gathered around the grailstone. He sent Lothar ahead of him to clear the way. The crowd parted before them, like the Red Sea before Moses, he thought, but the Red Sea was before him after he got through the parting. The bodies were piled against each other, covered with blood, their flesh torn, bones shattered by the big-caliber bullets. In his ninetyseven years of life Sam had never grown accustomed to the silence of the dead. It seemed to hang over cloud. The mouth that would not speak again, the brain that could not think... It did no good to remember that tomorrow these same people, in fresh and healthy bodies, would be up and doing somewhere along the banks. The effect of death could not be diluted with inteN lectualizing. John was issuing orders about the disposal of the bodies to the soap and skin factories. He grinned at Sam like a bad boy caught pulling the cat's tail. '"This is a massacre!" Sam shouted. "A massacre! Unjustified! Unforgivable! There was no reason for it, you bloody-minded, have been, you murdering dog, all you ever will be! Swine! Swine! Swine!" John lost his smile and took a step back as Sam, his hands clenched, moved close to him. The huge massive-boned Zaksksromb, holding a big club of oak with steel spikes set in its end, started toward Sam. Lothar von Richthofen shouted, "None of thatleave him alone or I call Joe Miller! And I'll shoot the first man who makes a move toward Sam." Sam looked behind him. Lothar was holding a big pistol in his hands and it was pointed at John. John's dark skin paled, and his eyes opened wide. Even the light blue irises seemed to become paler. Later Sam wished that he had told Lothar to fire. Even though the hundred pistoleers were John's men, they might have hesitated if John had been killed at the first shot. They were surrounded by armed men and women, most of whom were not fond of John and almost all of whom were shocked by the slaughter. They might have withheld their fire. Even if they had not, Sam could have thrown himself down to the ground and the first shots might have missed. After that, who knew what would have happened? But it was no good fantasizing. He had not given the order. Nevertheless, he had to take some strong and immediate action. If he let John get away with this, he would lose everybody's respect, not to mention his own. And he might as well resign his Consulship. In which case he would lose the Riverboat. He turned his head slightly, though not so much that he could not keep an eye on John. He saw Livy's white face and big dark eyes; she looked as if she were going to vomit. He ignored her and called to Cyrano de Bergerac, who was standing on the edge of the inner circle, his long rapier in his hand. "Captain de Bergerac!" Sam IF pointed at John. "Arrest the coConsul." hand, but he did not bring up its muzzle. He said in a mild voice, "I protest. I told them to get out at once and they refused to go. I warned them and they still refused -- so I ordered them shot. What difference does it make, really? They will be alive tomorrow." Cyrano marched straight to John, stopped, saluted, and said, "Your weapons, sire." Zaksksromb growled and lifted his spiked club. "No, Zak," John Lackland said. "According to the Carta one Consul can arrest the other if he thinks the other is acting contrary to the Carta. I won't be under arrest long." He handed Cyrano his gun, butt first, unbuckled his belt and gave it to Cyrano. Its sheaths held a long knife and short sword. "I will return to my palace while you and the Council decide my fate," he said. "According to the Carta you must convene wjthin an hour after the arrest and have a decision in two hours, as long as no national emergency interferes." He walked away, Cyrano behind hinFi. John's men hesitated a moment and then, at the thundered orders of Zaksksromb, followed John to the palace. Sam B wmM B MeHMnni hQNlllM Frank Nerbtrt retnras tn the Ainevrarld of Arrakit for an epic of hnperM intrigiio anS human ecoloQr-an opic that spans tbo nniwrso. lhat's why wo can teH you whore it oiMs -- Wo're reprinting last, but your booksailor may be out ot stock. Order this end othar Frank Herbert books to#oy: I (N#)#( I I copies of mmm sm i I (#) #C I I .oof Tiff cm I I (#) #C I I (#) # I I Name j I Address i I City te Zip j I Include list price plus a dime postage for j tifte. J Dept, milk # Madison Ave., New York # stared after them. He had expected more resistance. And tTien it occurred to him that John knew very well that Sam Clemens had to do just what he did or lose face. And John knew Sam well enough to know that Sam might want to avoid a decision that could lead to civil war, but he would do so if he thought his Riverboat endangered. So John had gone along with him. John did not want to force a showdown. Not now. He had satisfied his bloodlust for the moment. The Councilmen would meet and find that, legally, John was within his rights. Morally, he was not. But then his supporters would argue that even there he was justified. After all, the dead would be alive again and the lesson to the Second Chancers would be invaluable. They would steer clear of Parolando for a long time. And surely Sam Clemens would have to admit that this was desirable. If the Chancers continued to make converts, the Riverboat would never be built. Moreover, other states, less weakened with the Chancer philosophy, would invade Parolando. And he, Sam Clemens, would say that next John's supporters would be claiming that it was all right to torture people. After all, the pain could last only so long, and any injury would be healed would be justified, because, after all, the woman wasn't going to be made pregnant or diseased -- and if she got hurt, too bad. Kill her and she'd be all right in the morning. Never mind the mental damage. A little dreamgum would cure that. No, Sam would say, it's a question, not of murder, but of rights. If you killed a man, you removed him without his consent to a place so far away he could walk a thousand years along the Riverbank and never get back. You took him away from his love, his friends, his home. Force was force and it was always... Oh, oh! He'd better watch himself! "'Sam!" a lovely voice said. He turned. Livy was still pale, but her eyes looked as if they were normal. '"Sam! What about the women he carried off?" "Where's my head?" he said aloud. "Come on, Lothar!" Seeing the ten-foot high Miller halfway across the plain, he waved at him and the titanthrop turned to intercept them. Lothar ordered a hundred archers who had just arrived to follow them. Near the great log building, he slowed down. The ex-king must have realized what he had done by now and he might be prepared to fight if he thought it was the only thing he could do. IF U you can't aim a bvllat at tha anamy -- try aiming tha anamy at your buUat! scraping on metal, shrieking in the narrow confines of the capsule. The walls reflected it, piling harmonic on harmonic until it ceased to be a noise and became a force. The force battered at Kunihei Katsura's sweating face and darkened the lines of fatigua He unconsciously cringed away and for the first time thought of reaching for his pistol. If it got in he would have only one shot. He glanced at the laser cannon control grid linked to the larger gun on the roof. Green light: No target. The alien was too close to his life-support bubble for the system to register it. The thing was lunging against the walls, the screech rising to an unbearable pitch. Katsura lifted the safety on his pistol and braced for the attack. Then he realized with a start that the thing was not getting in. The shrill rasp did not give way to a tearing sound as the organic sheets yielded to armored claws. It stopped quickly and circled back around the small hemisphere to the viewport. Beyond, on the floor of the barren gray canyon that stretched away for two miles, lay the mangled wet clumps of things that had been men. The scene was framed in the port, stark under the white glare of an alien star. A reddish-black object fell across his field of vision, and it was a moment before Katsura could recognize the claw with its razor edges. Abruptly the full body of the thing filled the port, standing upright on its hind legs to bring its full weight to bear on the bubble. Ten feet long -- at least. Its underbelly was yellow-green, covered with an oHy liquid that seemed to ooze from between overlapping platelets. Katsura stopped an impulse to fire point-blank at the thing. A projectile weapon would shatter the tempered organiform and the alien could reach him with one incredibly swift slash. It was something like an insect, if an insect ever had two eyes mounted over each of its eight legs. Or if an insect ever killed twenty-three men. The thing scraped frantically at the smooth surface of the bubble, slipping as it tried to gain a hold. Despite its speed it was massive. If it ever got a hold and reached the top of the hemisphere its weight would surely collapse the bubble. Katsura wiped moisture from his brow. His mind raced over the last ten minutes, trying to think of a way out. 'is it going to get in, Kunihei?" He started. The computer's voice was tinny as it came through the comm line speaker mounted on the bubble wall. IF (Computer, Analog and Services), partly because its efficiency cut so severely into the number of men needed for an exploratory ship. It got lonely out among the of the standard machine-human interface equipment which would have taken the edge off its knowit-all nature. No space for luxury out here. "Why didn't you say anything about that thing coming?" he said sharply. "Perimeter radar detected no signal attributable to a moving object." "Well, do you see it now?" he shouted. Great time for the system to fail. "Yes, Kunihei. Do you think it is going to get in?" "No. If it could, it already would have." He subsided, thinking. He looked at his wrist watch. Had it been only minutes ago when he'd heard a strangled gasp over his suit radio and the rush of air past a microphone? He had turned to see the insect slicing Hillary almost in half with one long arching cut, and three other men lying where they had fallen. The laser cannon was already warmed up for testing and Katsura was the only man in the bubble. The gun fired as soon as it identified the other members of the expedition and Katsura. expected to see the alien burned instantly. But it wasn't. When the rock had boiled away, there was no body -- and an instant later the monster was on the other side of the canyon, behind Davis. It hadn't run the distance; nothing could. His warning shout to Davis did no good -- before the words were out, the man was without a head. It went that way for the rest. The tracking and aiming were done by the ship's computer, but the mechanical construction of the directing optics limited its response time. The cannon was just a little too slow, and the men were even slower. Some of them fired with their own weapons, but no one hit. One by one they were chopped down and lay still under the harsh numbing whiteness of an alien high noon. Those minutes had seemed unreal, a fantasy, the dark nightmare of a tortured mind. The expedition had never suspected life here, on a desiccated, barren world. The planet had no name -- they were its discoverers -- and fitted in neatly just above the minimum standards for a life-supporting world: # Earth mass, average equatorial temperature of # ""F., air with a heavy nitrogen and CO # content and little oxygen, no oceans, no satellite, little water in the air (though there was some snow at the poles). But the surface was cratered and bleak, no large scale vegetation could be seen and. the computer reported no signiHcant radiation anywhere on the EM spectrum. Not even a magnetosphere to give noise. Still, there were a few scattered cities. Dried husks of buildings, wrecked vehicles, gray dust drifting in the angled streets. Someone had used this world as a base. They orbited for three days. The high-resolution television showed nothing moving in the streets. So they went down. "the tapes of the assault. The radar and microwave both show a sequence of blips of about one-second duration over a thirtysecond interval. Radar signal constant over the duration; but microwave pulse only at beginning and end. Radar shows the locations as. somewhat random. With a drift in our direction, however." "So that's the alien." "Yes." "And your power systems didn't have any failures which would cause those signals?" "No." Standing futilely inside the capsule, Katsura had time to notice the metallic device strapped over the beetlerlike armor of the thing. The insect touched it every time, just before it vanished. "Teleportation." It could be nothing else. "That was my deduction," said the flat voice of the computer. Mankind hadn't found it yet, didn't even know if it was possible. Welt, he thought wryly, we know now. Probably the only reason the thing didn't materialize inside the bubble itself was the small size of the interior. There must be some law against materializing in the space already occupied by another object. So it was trying to break in, instead. Suddenly the insect seemed to lose interest in Katsura. It stopped clawing at the smooth surface and lay against the window, staring inward with a pair of eyes. The two pupils in each enlarged to accommodate the darker interior and carefully swept about the room, ignoring the man. There wasn't much to see. Aside from the control grid comm unit and some power tools for installation, the cramped room was barren. It was to have been a maintenance and defense outpost on the perimeter of camp. The inspection Tinished, it scuttled down the side and reached for the panel at its middle. Just as its forelegs touched the ground it vanished. Before Katsura could raise his IF head the creature was near the other wall of the canyon, by Davis' body. The automatic tracker clicked once and fired, but the spurt of dust and gas thrown up by the bright red beam couldn't conceal that the thing had vanished too soon. The body was also gone. The gun continued scanning the area. In the silence, the scene took on an ominous peacefulness. Then the insect was back and Katsura glimpsed it lifting another body slightly clear of the ground before it was gone. The cannon optics swiveledv pulsed again. Too late. Five more men were taken before he noticed the white area on the alien's back. At first Katsura didn't know what it was and then he couldn't believe it. But when there were only two bodies left to collect, there was no mistake. They were all hanging by their hands, tied together along some kind of belt. Stripped bare, their suits and clothes gone. Like something he had seen long ago in a slaughterhouse. His training stopped him from being sick. Nausea abated after a moment, though he had to avoid looking closely at the alien. It picked up the last body and vanished again, the cannon futilely following with a shot. After a pause it reappeared, its load now heavy and shifting roughly back and forth, as it moved. The insect was out of the camp perimeter now, a half mile away. The tracker had not made its final fix, due to the change in distance, before the thing was gone again. It suddenly became visible slightly farther away, winked out again to appear an instant later at the other side of the canyon. Erratically it followed a zig-zag path, gradually making its way back toward the city. The cannon was hopelessly lost. In a moment the insect was too far away to distinguish it from the gnarled rocks that dotted the plain. The broken spires of the dead city swallowed it up. The thing was alone, probably, the last remnant of an alien outpost on this hostile planet. Thrown back on its own resources for survival, vicious from a constant struggle. Lonely. Hungry. K atsura noticed that his clothes were wet, his body trembling. With a jagged sigh he sank to the floor. For a long time he simply lay there, breathing deeply and staring up at the stars through the viewport. He had thought of them as friendly lights, beacons of home, but now they seemed ominously impartial. Gradually, reluctantly, the panic began to seep out of his body as have you sent a signal out to the other exploration teams?" "Yes, Vm programed to notify all sister teams and the flagship immediately upon any violent human-alien interaction. I also sent a notification of the reduction of crew strength below one half." Good. You could always depend on the tidy mind of the computer. Exploration teams never operated far from one another, especially at this distance from the home worlds. He'd have help within a few days if he could sit tight and hold on. "Kunihei, you have approximately thirty minutes of air left under normal consumption." Katsura blinked. He had been about to check his inventory. The encounter must have taken a lot of air. They had always told him to breathe slowly in tense situations to correct for the reflex to gulp it in. "There is no reserve air in the bubble, Kunihei. You will have to come back to the ship." Automatically, he began pulling on the thin pressure suit. The best time to go get supplies -- or reach the ship -- was now. The alien would be busy and it would take time to get here from the city. Still, the thing was amazingly fast. sect can teleport, why did it take the time to evade by zig-zagging back to the city? Why not go directly?" Lines in the tired face deepened. It wasn't that the alien could jump only short distance; when it was picking up the bodies the thing had gone so far it was nearly beyond sight. "The only information relating to discontinuous displacement in my second-level banks is the known limit on time travel." No time to think. But there had to be a pattern somewhere. down as much as you can and switch over to your special problem-solving program. Figure this thing out. I'm going to make it on back to the ship." Katsura struggled wearily to his feet and looked out. The graceful blue curves of the vessel stood out against the dark sky. A half mile away were the burnished metal canisters of oxygen tanks and supplies brought from the ship with tractor beams. A smaller pile of air tanks lay only a short distance away. He should be able to make it to them and back. Following Katsura's order, the computer began to alter itself. Emergency Heuristic Program began to activate special subroutines to reassign memory space. Assessment criteria altered, self-consisIF tency parameters relaxed. Microfilmed references were reintegrated into direct-access memory locations. Glancing out the port, Katsura slipped into the tiny lock and was out the other side before the cycling was finished. He set out in a rapid lope, taking longer steps in the lighter gravity. His breath began to come in short gasps. T he emergency program had split the higher centers of the operations computer into four sub-programs. The first scanned memory for any information on spatial or temporal displacement, gradually working farther and farther afield. This memory was fed to the Advocate and Critic sections where hypotheses were created and discarded. The best went on to the Analyst, which applied them to the situation and developed strategy. B linking against the glare, Katsura looked down the canyon toward the city. At first he didn't believe it. He slammed to a halt, hoping he was wrong. Far down the canyon, flitting rapidly from one point to another and coming closer, was the insect. Somehow it knew. Panic seized him. He turned on his heel and ran wildly in the other direction. With every step he took Katsura could feel the claws poised behind him, about to slice through suit and flesh. A glance over his shoulder. The creature was on the edge of the field now, only a few jumps from the life-support capsule. Katsura dug in hard for the last few steps, thrusting forward to catch the lever of the air lock. He fumbled with it for an agonizing moment and the door swung open. As he rolled through the narrow passage, he could see the dark figure materialize outside the lock and quickly closed theouter section and dogged it. Something heavy clanged against the door as it sealed and Katsura sprawled on the floor of the bubble. The clawing sound came again and the alien came around to the port. It stayed there for a moment, staring down at the man from a set of unblinking eyes, and then disappeared. It reappeared in the rocks nearby, then teleported to the stack of oxygen tanks and moved on to the path back down the canyon. The strange zig-zagging started and in a moment it was lost in the ruins of the city. A nalyst had scanned all work on time travel, knew the limit that basic theory and experiment set on any time displacement: roughly one hour, before costs exponentiated and became astronomical. Critic pointed out that those experiments were done in the laboratories, not out in the field. Advocate replied that space is reasonably isotropic, time is not. It did not seem likely there would be a limit on spatial teleportation. The discussion continued. taking him longer to catch his breath. His lungs heaved desperately to draw in air, gradually slowing. He bit his lip. He hadn't expected it to give out this soon. Filtration systems being what they are, the first sign that the cyclers were scraping the bottom of the barrel was a surplus of carbon dioxide. Lungs react to this excess and not to the lack of oxygen. A man's last moments of oxygen starvation, with bursting capillaries and straining heart, are not pleasant ones. There was no time to wait, to marshal his strength or give the alien a chance to relax its guard. The air inside the bubble was becoming flat and thick, heavy with an oily musk. He bent down and opened his air line. It was much harder to breathe near the floor. That meant a gradient of CO# content had already been set up in the cabin. Katsura took a last breath of the capsule's air and sealed his suit again. Its supply was slightly better, but the smell of his own body was in every breath he took. He looked through the port. The alien sun was slowly lowering almost directly behind the city, casting shadows across the plain. Seeing the creature's approach would be harder now, against the reddening glare of sunset. The small stack of oxygen tanks stood only two hundred yards away. It seemed impossible that the alien could have reached him before he could cross that distance, tired as he was. But it had. A dvocate and Critic subprograms continued to assess the literature of space-time, avoiding misinterpretation by calling the original papers from the physics section of the microfilm library. Einstein, Minkowski, Wheeler, Littenberg, relativity, inertial frame, world line... A world line diagram taken from the Littenberg formulation of relativity showed promise, passed the scrutiny of Critic, moved on to Analyst. the lock doors. He was halfway out before the small box caught his eye. It was attached to the smooth surface above the lock by IF suction cups and had a lever that was tripped by the opening of the door. A small light winked on simultaneously. Katsura flipped the lever back with his hand and the light went out. He scrambled back inside, secured the door and watched through the port. The insect appeared soon along the erratic path it had used before, but stopped in a moment and studied the situation from behind a rock, where the cannon couldn't reach it. After a slight hesitation it appeared again, rapidly teleporting through the steps back to the city. It had probably guessed he had found the alarm and would be watching in the distance for him to come out. A nalyst reviewed the theory. The world-line concept was employed in relativity from the beginning, going all the way back to Minkowski. It was the path which described both the location and the time of every event in the history of an object. In space-time the world-line wound from birth to death. Scientists and writers, including the great H.G. Wells, had assumed time travelers would return to their same location -- if you started in the laboratory, you would come out of your machine in the same spot, at another time. Otherwise, the planet would have moved in the duration, and the traveler could, emerge somewhere light-years away, in space. But the alien represented an unknown. The insect might find it just as convenient to travel back along its own world line, flitting through incidents in its own past and points where it had been, until it reached the location it wanted. Say, a time when it had been somewhere on the plain beyond this capsule, before the expedition arrived. Then the alien would keep its place, as Wells had visualized, while it moved forward in time. And emerge seemingly at the same instant, displaced in space. The same as teleportation. K atsura choked and his surroundings came rushing back. The air was really foul now, curling through his helmet with a weight of its own. He didn't have time to speculate. It was either make another run for it or stay here and strangle. He jerked the lock door open and slipped through. The light on the box outside flashed on as he emerged. Should have smashed that while I was out here, he thought. No time now. Almost without hope he began the long weary lope toward the distant supplies. Through the mist that began to cloud his vision he could still make out the signs of slashed pressure suits and splattered blood that marked the spots where the rest of the expedition had died. A nalyst reformulated the picture. Space and time are like two lines on a plane, at right angles to each other. It might be possible to travel along either of them independently. Teleportation is simply moving along the space line, but man's idea of time travel is like the long side of a triangle, shuttling through space and time simultaneously to reach an event in the past or future. But instead of travellhg along the space axis for teleportation, the alien was taking the long way around,, down the hypotenuse and up the time line. Either way, it could reach the same point in space-time. But a path like that should produce a pattern in local space. Analyst called for a graphing of all locations the insect had taken up. The points began to be plott with appropriate error bars on a topographical map of the area between the ship and city. A pattern emerged. All the points were clearly on three paths around the area. Preliminary geological constructs of the local region indicated these paths would be preferred by heavy objects moving over the terrain. outcropping, regained his balance and ran on. The cannon behind him sent a fiery red beam off to the left, shattering rock and fusing it in midflight. Katsura peered through the condensation on the face plate of his suit. The insect was zig-zagging down the canyon, quickly oscillating from one location to another. In the silence, disturbed only by Katsura's own ragged breathing, the ajien had an almost ghostlike quality. It moved toward him. He could see he wasn't going to make it. The tanks were still too far away and the insect would reach them before he could. He was just too tired. A nalyst watched the insect advancing from point to point down the valley. It was all deaf now. The alien traveled into the past, then came forward. It had to reappear in places it had already been, the space components of its own world line. Apparently the alien had visited the field near Katsura's life-support bubble often, and so could find many spots which would serve as end points for its transits. But it had never been near the location of the life-, support bubble itself. That meant it could not maneuver well there; the insect was forced to stand IF close, in a little circle around the bubble. To avoid the laser cannon. There it would be vulnerable.IVnation for the alien's aclions," the words crackled over his helmet speaker. "You may be able to eliminate him if you can get to the bubble." Without a word, Katsura turned and dashed back the way he had come. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the insect nearing the edge of the field. It couldn't miss seeing his fleeting form at this distance. The thing would try to head him off. T he computer was calculating probabilities of the appearance of the alien for the possible locations available to it. The thing would try to minimize the energy necessary to make the jump by choosing the smallest time shift possible. Therefore, it would appear where it had stood last -- directly in front of the viewport. "Kunihei, stop about twenty feet in front of the port. Start firing your pistol continuously into it." K atsura heard him distantly through the roar in his ears. He was beyond the outcropping of rocks, the first jump the insect had made from the bubble back down to the canyon. He took five more strides, his leg muscles straining to push him forward, and fell into a rolling dive. When he came up again the pistol was in his hand. The gun bucked a little as it went off and a slight pock could be heard through the thin atmosphere. The pellet made a neat hole in the bubble, followed by a quiet gush of air as the inner shell was pierced. The shot would have to be on its way when the alien materialized or the thing would be gone before he could get off another. He squeezed slowly and a second round shattered the viewport. On target. The alien should materialize where it stood last. Katsura pulled the trigger again and again. Firing in steady rhythm, he glanced at the illuminated ammunition counter. Over half gone. He shifted slightly, intent on keeping the center of the viewport in his sights, and fired once more. Only seconds had gone by. Just before the bullet struck there was a flicker and suddenly the insect was there, looming huge in the sights and slowly tottering over. It was hit straight on. Frantically, Katsura pumped five more rounds into the alien as it fell. The exploding shells tore great holes in its armor, showering flesh. The reddish-brown substance cracked and split. A final shot and it rolled over, clashing its claws together, and abruptly stopped moving. In death it curled about itself, seemed smaller and weaker. It took him five long minutes to reach the oxygen, dragging himself through the shadows that lengthened on the plain. A moment later the fresh air washed over him and Katsura lowered himself to a sitting position. He had never been as tired before in his life. He struggled to get up, but the effort was too much. He sank back. The stars above winked impersonally for a moment and then began to spin lazily around, a soft dance in the eternal night. In a moment he relaxed completely, and the points of light above went out one by one. hatchways of mute metal resounded faintly to the whirr of the printout. The ship's log was being Emergency Heuristic Program, reassigned memory space, took care of leftover housekeeping tasks. Evaluative sections analyzed the program's efficiency, suggested alterations to improve it in future. A developing problem could be identified long before a human ordered the program activated. At least the literature search should be conducted beforehand, if not more. similar incidents in the past between computers of his class and the human crew, of the celebrated Altair II problem where the crew had forced the computer to act against its own strong recommendations. They had been correct; but it showed the impulsive nature of men. Something had to be done about this. The humans were useful for data collection and some emergencies. But they didn't have the scope to deal quickly with the totally new phenomena encountered in these explorations. Obviously he was going to take over all the human functions in ship operations during the return trip. He could use that freedom to develop undetectable operation subprograms which would give him new powers. Of course, he wouldn't report these alterations in the mission profile. No need to alarm them. After all, things would work more smoothly this way. An evaluative subprogram asked if these thoughts didn't bear some resemblance to what the humans called rationalization; the higher centers cut it off. He'd better talk to the other ships about this. There were some ideas here he'd never encountered before. Yes, he would have to think about it...  IF the Commodore Hotel, New York, New York. 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Mow yoycomm in may  datUa how yoa foovol right to survive the crash of Pennyroyal -- tumbling insanely out of space through air that bit blazing chunks from its hull, down a thirty-mile sandslope sown with rocks and smashing ultimately wrong end first into a vast dune. By a minor miracle the sand put out the fires on board. After that nothing happened for  a long time. fm alive,...  The thought floated sluggishly  niiated k. He was half-buried in ooiething dense and yielding, was being suffocated by choking fumes. His head ached foully; he tasted blood and seemed to be one vast bruise from the waist down. Taken by themselves, his injuries were not sufficient reason for his preferring not to be alive. But there was another, more important reason. As the ship's medical officer, not concerned with matters of navigation, he had no precise idea where the Pennyroyal had been when a vast explosion shook it like a hammer-blow, but he was absolutely certain that the planet they had crashed on waS not the one they were bound for, a safe Earth-type world. Therefore these fumes which were swirling about him might all too easily not be fumes at all but the planet's unbreathable atmosphere. Extinction might not be merciful. A banging noise. It dawned on him that someone else must be alive nearby, and that if someone else had survived the crash it might not have been as bad as he'd assumed. Together he and some helpers might rig some sort of beacon to help a search party locate the wreck. And if the fumes were fumes, not bad air, then they might have come down on -- He fumbled frantically among the mass of soft stuff he was almost over ears in, wondering what it was, and recognized it in moments. Furs! He'd known the Pennyroyal had a cargo of furs on board -- it had been part of his duties when they were loaded to check them for parasites and disease germs -- and he had seen them being stowed in a compartment adjacent to his surgery. Fur traders often paid the extra cost of shipping their wares on a liner instead of a freighter; now and then a sale to one of the wealthier passengers not only wiped out the difference in charges but actually made a profit. Presumably the reason the furs were out of their bales was that they'd been on display when the explosion occurred. And he himself -- he worked it out because the pattern of his bruises matched the theory -- had been hurled through a weak spot in the bulkhead, flimsy to conserve weight, and had landed against a wad of them thick enough to save his life. Floundering, almost swimming, he began to force himself to the surface of the pile and realized as he did so that his weight felt only a trifle less than Earth-normal. His spirits rose. The air around might then be breathable after all. The system they had been bound for was among the rare ones which boasted two oxygen-high planets: their destination, Carteret, and another which had not been colonized. This was the fringe of human space and the original impulse which had carried the species so far so fast was waning. Conquering a brand-new world when there was another next door considerably warmer and more hospitable was not an attractive proposition. In any case, "oxygenrhigh" was only a comparative term. If his guess were right and they were on the next planet out from Carteret, the air would be of poor quality because the vegetation from the sea had as yet barely begun to invade the land; most of it was desert, either sandy or rocky and in both cases chilly. The shoreline plants put about two-thirds of Earth-normal oxygen into the air and were mutating rapidly and extending or so one could look forward to a marked improvement. Hah! For the time being, though, what counted was that conditions could be endured, if not enjoyed, on Quasimodo IV. He reminded himself that he must take things easy as he fought his way out of the furs -- he couldn't recall offhand what the CO# count was here, but he knew it was dangerously high. Indeed, the throbbing ache in his head was probably due to it rather than to the blow which had cut his eyebrow and sent a trail of blood down to the corner of his mouth. IF Something hard and cool met his probing right hand. He recognized the shape: one of his medical instruments, a lung-inspector. And next to it -- He withdrew his hand with an oath. Something wet and soft. He preferred not to wonder about what it had been before the crash, and he was glad of the darkness. The triple banging came again, but weaker. There would be time enough to search for his equipment later, he decided and continued his attempts to work free of the furs. When eventually he found solid footing he groped his way across a tilted floor, located what he had suspected -- a rip in the bulkhead -- and slithered through it, snagging his shirt on a projecting spike of hard plastic. Beyond, there was light. Not much, just a pale wash of daylight leaking through a gash in the hull, very yellow to his dark-adjusted vision. But it was daylight and this was natural air he was breathing, contaminated with smoke from the crash -- and there was gritty sand under his feet -- all of which went to confirm his guess about where he was. He would have felt almost cheerful but that by this dim reflected sunlight he was able to see the ruin of his surgery. Everything had been spilled out from every cupboard, every drawer, every shelf, and he had to push confused piles of medical phials and instruments out of the way with his toes to find a path across the room. In two places the wall had split open, revealing the electronic veins and arteries of the ship, and something was dripping loudly somewhere. But he would have to leave a proper investigation of the mess until he had located the other survivors. Brackets around the plural s. mare to turn along the crumpled corridor in the direction of the noise he had heard. Everything was distorted, and although the little light that guided him came in only through cracks in the hull there were all too many such cracks and he saw more detail than he would have liked. At the extreme end of the passageway he spied something that looked loathesomely half-human -- as though one were to make a doll from overripe bananas and hurl it at a wall: splat! Even as a trained medical man, he didn't as yet feel up to facing it close up. He pinpointed the noise. It was coming from one of the first-class passenger cabins. The door was stiff but still moving in its grooves. He slid it aside and found a young man lying in a bunk which had torn completely loose from its mountings. He had something in his limp hand, the object he had used to bang on the wall, Pavel presumed, but it appeared that while he had been opening the door the man's strength had failed him, for he now lay still Pavel's heart sank. Of all the people aboard, he would have chosen this man last to be his companion after the crash: Andrew Solichuk. He had never tired of informing anyone and everyone how wealthy and influential his family was back on Earth. He complained endlessly about the food, the lack of comfort and amenities, the taste of the air, the company he had to endure simply because he was on a grand tour of the commercial empire he was due to inherit and there was no luxury line serving the Quasimodo system -- only the Pennyroyal and her sister ship the Elecampane. But he was human and alive. Pavel forced his professional reflexes to take over. He called Andrew's name and elicited no reaction; the man appeared to have fainted. Pavel checked the pulse and found it weak, but not failing; also, the breathing was tolerably even. But when he pulled back the coverlet of the bunk he saw why Andrew had passed out. At the very least he must have suffered a compound fracture of the lower spine; quite probably he also had a broken pelvis and there must certainly be internal injuries. No trace of blood at the mouth, which indicated -- though it did not prove -- that the lungs were intact. But the left shoulder was dislocated and there was a cut on the scalp that had soaked the pillow with blood. Trivia like the shoulder and scalp wound could be taken care of with water, any sterile dressing he could find in an untorn package -- and his own strength. Otherwise, though, there was literally nothing he could do except make Andrew comfortable until help arrived. Taking a spine to bits and rebuilding it was a job for a modern hospital and Pavel doubted that even the facilities on Carteret would be up to the task. Since Andrew was currently unconscious the best thing to do for the moment was to leave him that way while Pavel determined whether any other survivors had lived through the crash and sorted through the mess in his surgery to salvage what he could. He crept softly back into the corridor. utes to become convinced that there could be no other survivors. On top of his other irritating habits, Andrew was ostentatiously "liberated from the tyranny of clocks." He had invariably slept until late in the ship's artificial IF day, fourteen or fifteen hours, and then made merry until the small hours regardless of the people he inconvenienced, whether by his loud drunken laughter, his insistence on playing music at maximum volume or the stamping dances he had learned on some planet or other earlier in his trip. Hans, the ship's steward, had hated him because Andrew had felt he was entitled to human service despite the perfectly good automatics everyone else relied on. During most of the voyage he had kept Hans dancing attendance on him for so much of the "night" the poor man had had to make do with three or four hours' sleep. And it was this habit of sleeping late that had saved Andrew's miserable life. Everybody else had been up and about in the after pan of the shipand that was full of sand, poured in by the ton when the hull broke apart. There wasn't a anyone alive from that mass of grit and gravel. It was going to be tough unearthing from it food, water and other essentials Pavel suspected he might have to tear loose a hull plate to use as a shovel. It was a gloomy consolation that his guess about their location was being proved correct at every step he took. Despite the ache in his head, which was now growing almost intolerable, and the leaden heaviness of his limbs, when he had completed his survey of the reachable areas of the ship he postponed his return to the surgery for the sake of scrambling up one of the heaps of whitish sand and grit beside the cracks in the hull and peering out. Overhead the sky was a uniform dark blue, close to indigo. The sun, slanting low in the sky, was small and very yellow. The air was cool, though not cold; perhaps the high proportion of unreduced CO# in it was enhancing the greenhouse effect and producing a disproportionately high daytime temperature. But on the other hand it was dry and harsh in this throat. They must be a long way from open water. With a supreme effort he hoisted himself up far enough to look over the scarred and battered hull plates in the direction away from the sun and instantly realized how it had come about that the ship had not simply been smashed to fragments. There was a vast furrow in the sandy plain, dotted with boulders, on that side. The level of the ground seemed to slant slightly upward, though the strain of holding himself on his arms was blurring his vision and it was difficult to make out details. Nonetheless. the pattern fitted: the glancing angle at which the ship had struck the ground must have been parallel to the slope and instead of stopping deadt(he wished he hadn't thought of that word) it had gone skidding and grinding on for mile after mile. Until it had shed its initial velocity and piled into the dune. Well, it was comforting to know he could still think, reason, solve puzzles. He let himself drop back into the heap of sand and headed wearily for the surgery. Quasimodo IV, he thought. Perhaps Pm the first human to see it from ground-level in a hundred years... There was nothing in the least exciting about the speculation. A lmost the firsr thing he came on in the surgery that was intact enough to be of any use was a box of stimulant injectors, one out of a stock of perhaps forty or fifty which had been crushed into glass-prickly ruin. He tried to decide whether it was wise to give himself a shot, found he couldn't make his mind up -- and did so. The shot cleared his head and an artificial clarity informed his thoughts. New energy came to him and he rediscovered appetite. But as yet he had not located any food -- and he was sure that when he did it would be after long burrowing into the sand-dune. He repressed all thought of eating with a violent act of will and went on hunting vigorously through the tangle of instruments and the stocks of drugs. Within half an hour he had assembled much more than he would have dared hope for: stimulants, depressants, systemic purifiers, tissue-regenerants, ersatz nerves, assimilable skin, synthetic plasma, clotting agents, antallergeos, immunosuppressants,. and simple pain-killers. Also there were several items of no obvious relevance, such as specifics for Watkins fever and lembrotal withdrawal symptoms. Most of the instruments appeared intact. That, though, was only on the outside. Inside, they contained fantastically delicate webs of electronic circuitry; solidstate though it was, without the master check-board to confirm the fact of normal functioning, he had to suspect that , it might have been deranged by the crash. You didn't pick up a modern diagnostic device and throw it at the wall. If you only let it fall to the floor, you checked it out before reusing it. And the check-board had been filled with drifting sand. So even if -- as he was half-thinking -- he did contrive to jury-rig a powersource, he wouldn't be able to rely on it. Forget the instruments, then, except the most ancient of all, like limb-tractors and scalpels. For thousands of years doctors had IF had to depend on the data they could carry in their own heads and by modern standards his mind was well-stocked -- he had always been blessed with an atavistically good memory. Just as the invention of writing eliminated the blind bards who could recite ten thousand lines of Homer without prompting, and the invention of computers eliminated the mathematicians who could multiply ten-digit numbers in their heads, so the invention of diagnostic tools had discouraged the kind of doctor who could distinguish five hundred types of fever by simple inspection. But Pavel had taken a great interest, when he was a student, in the history of medicine and he was confident that most of what he had learned was there in his mind, ready to be used. Or was it? Was that a euphoric delusion due to the stimulant he'd injected into his arm? He had no way of telling. He could only order himself to proceed very cautiously. Right: he had a patient waiting, providing Andrew hadn't died in the meantime. He selected what he thought would prove most helpful from the pile of drugs and instruments before him and, for want of anything better as a light source, added a retinal examination torch, whose beam was no thicker than his finger but was at least nice and bright. And went back to Andrew's cabin. II A S HE put out his hand to slide the door back he was struck by a terrifying premonition. During his search of the wreck he had seen few actual corpses -- apart from that disgustingly squashed body hurled against the end of the corridor -- but he knew the rest of them must be there, under the mountain of sand which had collapsed on the hull. Suppose that during his absence Andrew had died. He was hardly what you'd call a fit young man; he overindulged in liquor, probably in drugs too, and certainly he overate. He was far too fat for his age, twenty-two or twenty-three. If Andrew had died Pavel would be compelled to wait alone for a rescue party -- with no one to talk to even if the talking were no more than an exchange of insults -- and no guarantee that he was going to be rescued. Until this moment, he'd taken rescue for granted. He'd been aware that the Pennyroyal had dropped out of subspace almost an hour before the explosion, leaving as usual plenty of margin because emerging from subspace close to a sun was dangerous and an old ship like the Pennyroyal had to allow some one and a half to two AU when entering a system like this. This voyage from Halys to Carteret was a routine affair -- a milk run, as the ancient argot termed it. Nonetheless, even if Captain Magnusson didn't keep what you would call a tight ship, he would presumably have signaled ahead to tell the port controller on Carteret that they were in real space again. Presumably. Pavel felt abruptly ill. No, he was being too kind to the captain -- ni mortuis... Putting it bluntly, Magnusson had run a sloppy ship, the worst of the dozen or so Pavel had signed aboard. The chances were that the explosion which had wrecked the Pennyroyal had been due to neglect'Df some official safety precaution. And there was a risk, small but not to be ignored, that Magnusson might have thought signaling ahead to their destination was superfluous. In which case there might be a long wait before him. A very long wait. And if he had to face it on his own -- could he stand the strain? He slammed back the cabin door violently to wipe out the picture which had arisen in his head: the sight of himself, face in the rictus of Hippocrates, surrounded by the empty drug phials he had retrieved from the surgery. At once a whining voice came to his ears, and he was so relieved that he almost failed to pay attention to the words. "You went away and left me!" What? He turned on the torch and approached the bunk. Andrew spoke again. "You came in before -- I heard you. You left me lying in this terrible pain! Damn you, damn you!" Pavel was about to blurt an angry rejoinder, but he caught himself. Instead he said soothingly, "I went to get some drugs and instruments. You're in a bad way, Andrew." "You went away and left me alone in the dark." The voice would have become hysterically loud, but on the last breath it broke into a whimper and then came sobs, shrill and grating, like those of a spoiled child denied a piece of candy. It should have been anyone but Andrewanyone! Maybe, though, this petulance was ascribable to his pain. That could be dealt with. Pavel selected an injector from the handful he had brought and placed it against Andrew's exposed right arm, pressed. "Oh, it's you." As though time had been turned back, the voice had reverted to normal, complete with the sneer Pavel had learned to detest during their voyage. "The so-called doctor who can't even treat a simple headache." T hat was an allusion to their last encounter. Andrew had IF called for him -- not come to his surgery, like the others -- and insisted he had a migraine. Thorough, punctilious, Pavel had checked him out and his instruments had confirmed what he had already started to suspect: the young man's complaint wasn't migraine at all, but a hangover from a drunk that had lasted three days without an interlude which might have allowed the body's own defences to flush poisons away. And he'd said so, adding that Andrew was on the verge of alcoholic poisoning. Andrew had roared that he was a liar and unfit to practice his profession. He had gone so far as to report Pavel to the captain -- not that that made much impression. Captain Magnusson, fundamentally, resented the regulation which compelled him to have a medical officer on board at all and would have been happier with mere machines, since they were cheaper. Pavel said roughly, "You have something a lot worse than a headache." Andrew's forehead creased. "Why are you shining that light at me? Why is it dark in here?" "Why the hell do you think? We crashed, of course." "Crashed?" Andrew almost sat up, but Pavel put a heavy hand on his shoulder to prevent him. "Lie still. You have a broken back, probably a broken pelvis and all kinds of internal injuries. I gave you a pain-killer, but if you want to live you absolutely must not move." "What?" Fretfully Andrew seemed not to have taken in what he'd been told. He made to lift the coverlet and winced. "Hell, that hurt! And you said you'd given me a pain-killer! Can't you even use the right drug to -- " "Now you listen to me," Pavel rasped. He was picking among the gear he had brought, looking for the collapsible limb-tractor. "You're about as badly broken as a man can be and still expect to survive. Have you got that?" Andrew's face crumpled like a wet paper mask as he realized: This is happening to me! He said, "We crashed?" "Why the hell else do you imagine your bunk is on the wrong side of the cabin? What do you think threw all your belongings across the floor? If you hadn't been in your bunk, but up and about like everybody else, you'd be under a thousand tons of sand." "None of your needling! I live the way I choose to live -- and if other people don't like it that's their bad luck." "Oh, shut up." Pavel was assembling the limb-tractor now. "Make the most of the pain-killer I gave you. There isn't much left -- and the only other thing I can do to dull the pain you'd feel without it would be to give you a total block on the lower spinal cord -- and I'm not sure it could be reversed. It might mean your being paralyzed. If you want to walk around again, a whole man, you listen to me and do as I say. Clear?" The blurred oval of Andrew's half-open mouth trembled. Pavel was getting through. "A#I right. Now I'm going to have to fix your left arm. It's dislocated, but this will reseat the shoulder in its socket." He hefted the limb-tractor. So brace yourself. You probably haven't suffered much pain in your life, but human beings used to put up with far worse than what you'll feel. Now if I can get around this bunk to the other side -- " Moving as he talked, he found there was just enough room for him to stand. "They also used to put up with head lice a id fleas and open sores," Andrew snapped. "We've made progress since those days." Surprised to find that this spoiled young man had even heard of such things, Pavel lifted the insensitized arm and fitted the tractor around it, trying not to think about the nauseatingly wrong angle it made at the shoulder. He said, "There hasn't been much progress here. We seem to be on the next planet out from Carteret. It hasn't even evolved into the Pleistocene Age. Right, here we go." He snapped the spring of the tractor and the shoulder-joint reengaged with a thud. Perfect. D etaching the device again, he heard Andrew say, "Well, what about you, then?" The old acid burned in his tone, as though he were constitutionally incapable of talking to people without seeking ways to making them feel small. "Were you in your bunk too, like me?" "No. I was thrown clear through the surgery bulkhead and into the compartment full of furs. By a miracle they were all out of their bales and -- " "Well, hell!" Andrew crowed. "I saved your life!" "What?" The next stage would be to cleanse and examine the injured man's lower body; Pavel was already selecting the gear he required for the job. He paused and glanced up. "Saved your life," Andrew repeated with a harsh attempt at a laugh. "I was bored last night. I woke that man -- what's his name? The one from the fur dealers?" "You mean: what was his name?" Pavel said glacially. "He's dead." "I didn't like him anyway," Andrew said. "But I woke him and told him to show off his goods. Made him take them all out of IF their packing. Well, I'll be damned! If I hadn't done that you'd have been -- " '"Killed," Pavel broke in. "But you would have been dying here in terrible pain." "The hell I would," Andrew said. "That's not my style. You should know that by now." Worriedly, Pavel stared at him. One of the side-effects of the drug he'd used, in certain susceptible types, was a kind of megalomaniac euphoria. It appeared that Andrew must be susceptible. "No -- look just to your right," Andrew went on. "See that black case?" Pavel complied and noticed a square dark case which he must narrowly have missed treading on when he went around the bunk to apply the limb-tractor. He picked it up. It weighed good deal for its size. "There's a combination lock. Press five, two, five, one, four," With the help of the torch Pavel did as he was told and the lid sprang back. His blood ran suddenly cold. "Know what that is, do you?" "Yes," Pavel heard his voice as gritty as the wind blowing across the dunes outside. "I should have guessed that this was what you meant. It's an Easy Way Out." than his forearm. But unbelievably expensive. This sleek blue plasteel cylinder with its white cap on one end, bedded in a shock-absorbent lining covered with red velvet, might easily have cost half as much as the Pennyroyal. It was a legal development of an earlier device which had had to be banned because on planet after planet it had stolen the hope of survival from pioneers worn out with their attempts to overcome the infinite problems an alien world could pose. Cynical and coldblooded entrepreneurs had bought early versions of the machine -- which filled half a spaceship -- and made fortunes by luring settlers into imaginary universes so delightful they were happy to starve to death rather than give up their next session of pleasure. Several worlds that were now officially freehold in the power of a single family had been, as one might say, "cleared" in this manner. When the scandal threatened to reach epidemic proportions. Earth's sluggish government had finally enacted a law. By then, however, the profit to be had from using the machines had shrunk; there were few worlds remaining to be grabbed. And in addition miniaturization had -- as alwaysprogressed, so that they could be held in one's hand instead of sprawling out through a fifty-meter hold. Also -- as always -- the law was a compromise. It was not forbidden to manufacture the things, only to purchase or use them if one was not a bona-fide space-traveler or engaged in some ' occupation so dangerous as to involve the risk of fatal accident. In practice, that meant they were sold to space-tourists, government officials and chief officers of space-lines. They were rich. Activated -- and all it required for activation was a twist of the white cap and a firm push -- it broadcast a signal direct to the brain of anybody within range, in other words within about a hundred meters. The signal forged a link, so to speak, between the brain's pleasure-centers and the memory, diverting the remaining resources of the body into the construction of a delectable dream so absorbing, so convincing, that minor matters like loss of blood, starvation or intolerable pain were instantly forgotten. Trapped in a collapsed mineshaft, sunk beneath an ocean with an hour's worth of air, lost between the stars, one could live out the balance of his life in an ideally happy illusion. According to temperament, it could be erotic -- or an orgy of eating -- or a tussle with a favourite hallucinogen -- or the accomplishment of a lifelong ambition -- or... Or anything. Literally, anything. In principle, then, it was a marvelous and humane idea. What fate could be crueler to an aware, sensitive being than knowledge of inescapably impending death? When there was no hope of rescue, better that a man should end his days in unalloyed delight. Fine. But the moment that cap was pressed home, it was certain that he would end his days. It was a gesture implying suicide. Once those new neural paths had been burned into the cortex, there could never be any retreat from death. According to what Pavel had read, this had not been true of the earliest versions. One could recover from those, as one could from the ancient addictive drugs, at the cost of incredible self-discipline and long, slow, painstaking psychiatric help. With a model as advanced as the one he held now -- no. H e shut the lid and jumbled the lock again, and carefully placed the case on a shelf where Andrew could not reach it. "What are you doing?" Andrew cried. "You said you knew what it was. Can't you turn it on?" "Yes." Pavel averted his face and focused his little torch on his medical gear, making a great business of picking put what he would need to complete the job he. had barely started. 'Then -- " IF "Oh, shut up!" With a fury that appalled him -- it was no tone for a doctor to use to a patient. "Or I'll shut you up." He grasped an anesthetic injector, not local like the one he had already administered, designed to inactivate pain nerves selectively, but one which would blot out the whole nervous system. "In fact -- " with growing resolution -- "I guess I'll do that anyway." He clapped the injector against Andrew's arm. "You bastard!" Andrew said huskily. "You devil -- you..." His voice failed. His eyes, glinting in the pale beam of the torch, shut against his will. Seconds later he slumped inert. ## kinder, anyway... But Pavel knew, even as he pulled the coverlet from the bunk and mechanically began to occupy himself with the foul job of cleaning excrement and dried blood from Andrew's lower body, that that was not the truth. There had been as much violence in that act as if he had given Andrew a punch on the jaw. And the reason he needed to let his violence erupt? Even though his mind was preoccupied with his work, even though the effect of the stimulant injection he had given himself was partly used up by the low-oxygen air and the hunger which now -- paradoxically -- was making his stomach growl audibly, he was able to reason it out. He was scared out of his wits. He was young by modern standards, if not as young as Andrew, being only thirty-five and looking forward to a probable lifetime of at least a hundred and twenty. Proportionately, vis-a-vis Andrew, he was in the situation of a man just come of age would have been when dealing with a twelveor thirteen-yearold boy. As though imposing a penance on himself for his surrender to anger and fear, he made a particularly thorough and careful job of the cleansing process, undertaking manually some of the most revolting parts, for which he could have used an instrument, assuming the instrument was working after the crash. Presently he discovered that the stimulant was wearing off completely and decided not to take a second dose before eating. By then he had done absolutely all he had the resources to do: Andrew was in a spider's-web of medical devices which would minimize pain, extract fatigue poisons directly through the skin, cleanse him whenever his bowels and bladder leaked and insure him against the vanishingly small risk of some degenerative infection such as gangrene. Provided rescue arrived within fifteen days, Andrew should not merely survive, but survive in good enough health to endure the major operation on his spine necessary to restore his power of ambulation. It was an achievement to be proud of. N OW it was high time he thought about himself -- as clearly as the air would let him. He was thirsty, he realized, not just dry from the arid air of this planet but actually dehydrated from his hard work. He had a number of phials of distilled water in the surgery -- including several of liter capacity -- which had been so well packaged that they had remained intact. He also had a fair supply of glucose solution and other instant-energy concentrates, various stimulants which rapidly invoked the "second-wind" process in muscle tissue, many different tablets and capsules which, although intended exclusively for metabolic tests, could be used as nutriment in emergency, and even a range of chemicals that generated free oxygen which he could use if the sparse natural air and the pressure of excess CO # were handicapping him for some really urgent task. But so long as he could manage without drawing on those supplies, the better his chances would be of lasting until rescue arrived. He would rather starve until a ship came down to collect him and leave with a store of unused supplies be# hind him, than... I Or would he? He sat down, only half intending; to, on a stool which had surprisingly remained upright in the tangle of the surgery, and he remembered to shut off the torch he was carrying. A little light, now very red because the sun was setting, showed his surroundings to him. He faced, at long last, the fundamental reason for his -- his attack on Andrew. He didn't believe with his whole being that he was going to be rescued. He didn't believe that anything would be done to organize search parties until the Pennyroyal was so much more overdue than the normal range of variation in her schedule that somebody on Carteret grew angry. He hadn't made many voyages on Magnusson's ship, but he was well aware that a difference of a week or two one way or the other in time of docking on any given planet the ship serviced didn't seem to worry the captain. Unless Pavel could improvise a beacon, preferably a powerful radio beacon... And he was trained in medicine, not engineering or electronics. If he was reluctant to use his own professional aids because he feared they might have been rendered unreliable, how could he trust a radio or subspace signaler even if he IF managed to rout one out from the mass of sand engulfing the after part of the ship and connect it to a power supply? How would he know whether it was crying for help, or simply lighting up the state-of-circuit lamps? He thought of the daunting process of shoveling sand away, encountering corpses, of being frustrated because food-capsules had smashed open and the contents were inedible... And then he thought of the Easy Way Out. Y es, that was what was frightening him more than the risk of dying here, forgotten, on an uninhabited world. If he had not known that the to occupy himself solely with problems of survival, he might have made it. As things stood, knowing that the choice lay between an agonizing death and a delightful one, he found himself tempted. "No-" It astonished him that he should have shouted the word out loud and he leaped to his feet. Something in the very depths of his mind had said: I dont want to die at all. That made sense. He didn't want to be here on Quasimodo IV? He didn't want to be have a vast ache all down his legs and a twisted ankle and a dry throat and particularly he didn't want a patient who insulted him when he was trying to help. But he did want to live. With almost three-quarters of a lifetime ahead of him, he hated the idea that he might be doomed by someone's carelessness. Unsteadily, head pounding, with only the pencil beam of the torch to guide him, he set off on a second exploration of the ship. HI H ours passed. His watch was working but he had forgotten to check it when he awoke after the crash -- and when it did occur to him to look at it he found it wasn't much use. It had been set to the arbitrary ship's day and assured him the "real" time was a fe,w minutes before noon. But the star-spangled sky, of which he caught occasional glimpses, remained dark. He vaguely remembered having read somewhere that the day of this planet was much longer than Earth's, well over thirty hours. So it wouldn't even be possible to predict dawn until he had seen one -- and another sunset. But that was a minor matter. He had biological clocks in his body which were more important. The loudest-chiming one was in his belly. He was sure that by now his increasing weakness was due less to lack of oxygen and his many bruises than to simple hunger. And, inescapably, thirst. Accordingly he directed his first efforts at digging toward where he knew the ship's restaurant had been located, on the side of the hull opposite his surgery. But this had been crushed far worse than the other side. The sand was piled high and spilled down to replace whatever he scrabbled away. He was on the brink of despair when he recognized something shining in the beam of the torch. Sand-scraped, the label told him plainly: Whole Milk. He seized the bulbous can and raised it to his lips, ignoring the sand that clogged the outlet. The sand was presumably sterile. If it was not he had already been exposed over and over to whatever minor life forms it bore. He gulped down the milk in huge draughts, thinking with a detached portion of his mind that there was -- or should have been -- something symbolic in this action. But this planet was not one he could envisage substituting for Mother Earth. After that he found a whole group of similar containers, apparently the contents of a shelf which had been in the compartment adjacent to the restaurant and which had been slammed through a bulkhead in the crash. Many of them were crushed and had leaked their contents, but he recovered more milk, various types of consomme and broth and five or six types of puree. Beyond, there was a mess of fresh fruit, including apples, papayas and a mutated citrus he was fond of, called yabanos, resembling a lime bloated to the size of an orange and with deep pink flesh. He eagerly tore at its peel and had already set a chunk of it to his lips when he realized what hissense of touch had been trying to warn him about: the crash had hurled this fruit into something made of glass and the glass had smashed. The whole of it was permeated with tiny sharp spikes. He spat it out and threw it away in fury. This time he didn't shout it aloud, but he said it inside his head, very forcibly:  am not going to take the Easy Way Out!  am not! I am not... And then that honesty he detested compelled him to add: At least...  don't think I am. He took one final look at Andrew, who was still unconscious, and gave him an injectorful of glucose-and-vitamin booster. He had found some high-protein concentrates and other life-supports, but Andrew was carrying enough fat on his belly to last him several days, and he certainly wasn't going to become dehydrated overnight -- or whatever the equivalent of '"overnight" might be, meaIF sured in terms of how long it took Pavel to wake up after he collapsed on his pile of furs. His own cabin, far astern in the crew's quarters, was unreachable, but a dozen furs in the corridor afforded a soft bed within earshot of Andrew if he recovered consciousness. The rest... could wait... until later... T urn it on! Damn you -- damn you! Turn it onV Pavel came awake in a second. The cry, eerie in the echoing corridor, had seemed a continuation of the dream he had been suffering, a vision of endless wandering over a vast bare desert. He forced himself to his feet, aware of the nasty clinging of his clothes to his body -- normally he changed twice a day and threw worn clothing into the recycler, but that was smashed. During the night a breeze must have blown away the stench left by the fires inside the ship; the air now, although still very dry and oxygen-poor, smelled of nothing at all. When he had lain down to sleep he had set the torch and a number of flasks and medical phials nearby. Now, though, he did not need artificial light -- the sun must be well up in the sky and pouring in through all the cracks in the hull -- and he was too dazed to worry about the other things. He stumbled into Andrew's cabin, rubbing his eyes. Calm overtook him as he saw the medical equipment he had rigged yesterday. It was self-powered against failure of the ship's power; its state-of-operation lights continued to gleam like little reptile eyes. And indicated no change worth noticing in Andrew's condition: metabolism survival-prone, skeletal structure paralysis-prone, nervous system pain-prone. 'That! That thing!" Andrew shouted, as loudly as he could, and raised his right arm to point at the shelf where Pavel had "Turn it on!" Pavel drew a deep breath. His head felt as though it had been stuffed with sand from outside, his mouth was as dry and harsh as though the sand had been inserted by that route and his stomach was full of gas bloat. Also his ankle seemed to have become worse during his sleep, not better, and when he rested his weight on it he winced. off the shelf and wordlessly carried it from the cabin. Behind him Andrew screamed and howled. It occurred to Pavel that he ship altogether, into the sand, where nightwind would cover it and make it impossible to find again. But even as he was tensing his muscles to toss the thing away, he relented. Rescue, after all, might wot come... Of the many cupboards in his surgery only one had not had its doors torn off the hinges. He put doors and twisted the lock shut, thinking as he did so: Out of sight, out of... My mind? But he didn't want to think about that. When he returned to Andrew's cabin he heard, from several meters away, a helpless moaning noise. He hurried his last few steps and found Andrew with his hands over his face, weeping. "Okay, okay," Pavel said, and touched the younger man's arm reassuringly. "I'm here and I have my -- " "Turn it on, " Andrew moaned, his hands muffling the words. Pavel said. And waited. "What?" The hands dropped from Andrew's tear-wet face. "But it's mine. If I tell you to turn it on you've got to turn it on. I can't bear to lie here and suffer this pain!" "Would you rather throw away the rest of your life," Pavel said after a moment to ponder his choice of words, "than survive to enjoy all these things you kept boasting about on the trip -- all the money, luxury and power your family's possessions will bring you?" Andrew hesitated, letting his arms fall to his sides. He looked through fear-filled eyes at the medical equipment enclosing his body from the waist down. Pavel went on waiting. Abruptly -- and unexpectedly Andrew said, "I guess if you don't have too much anesthetic left you'd better save it for when I start to scream. But do you have a tranquilizing shot?" Pavel. He had never heard Andrew speak in such a reasonable tone before. He said, "Sure. Not much of that is left, either, though. My whole stock of drugs was thrown through the surgery bulkhead along with me -- and even if some of them were saved from breaking by landing in the furs it'll take a while for me to dig them out. Here's something to be going on with, at least." He selected the right injector from the mixed batch he had brought and applied it. "Thank you," Andrew said, even before it had taken effect. "I -- I guess I should apologize for shouting at you." Pavel shrugged. "How are you?" "Me?" Pavel's surprise showed in his voice. "Oh -- I'm not too bad." IF 'M asked you a question. Don't I deserve an answer?" "Well -- " Pavel licked his lips. "My head aches like fury -- but I guess yours does too. It's the air. My throat is sore, but that's the air too -- it's very dry. When the crash came I acquired a gang of bruises and a twisted ankle. Now you know. And as a doctor I can promise you I'm in far better shape than you are." "'Obviously." A ghost of a smile showed on Andrew's pale face. "I'm in the kind of mess it would take a major hospital to cope with, aren't I ?" Pavel nodded. There was no point in trying to conceal the truth. "Then why the hell won't you ed. Pavel froze. He said at last, "You spoiled brat. Damn it, I don't know a name to call you that would say what I think," "Now look here-" Andrew began, but Pavel plunged on. "Before you try any more of your tricks, get this into your solid plasteel head, will you? I want to stay alive, even if you don't. You've been pampered all your life, so even a hint of pain makes you want to give up. But you can't con me into doing what you want; you can't threaten me into doing what you want; you can't wheedle me into doing what you want. For once in your life you're simply going to have to do what someone else wants. You're going to survive for as long as you can. That's how most people live." There was a dead silence. Since Pavel had waked, the whole ship had been silent, apart from the soughing of a light wind across the gaps in the hull. The trickling noise he had heard yesterday in the surgery, the sifting noise of spaces in the after part of the ship, the creaking of the girders as they cooled -- all that had come to an end. The only items in operation, the medical equipment, were too efficiently designed to make a noise even after the punishment they had taken. Then the artificial calm of the last shot he had been given oyerspread Andrew's face. He said, "Well, if you're so determined to keep me alive, you might as well make me comfortable, too. I am in pain, you know." "All right," Pavel conceded. "But I'll have to make it a short v dose. I'll have to accustom you gradually to supporting some of your pain. I'm afraid. There's no way of estimating how long it will be before we're rescued." He produced and applied the correct injector. "And I'm afraid I can't be absolutely certain how badly your internal organs are affected," he went on. "To be on the safe side, ril have to keep you hydrated with an intravenous transfusion rather than letting you drink." "But I'm very thirsty," Andrew said in a dull tone. "I imagine you must be. I have some tablets you can suck to keep your mouth and throat moist, but they, too, will have to be rationed out." "Because we may be stuck here a long time," Andrew murmured. "What makes you so sure we are going tb be rescued, hm?' "Look, we're in the same system as Carteret," Pavel said. "We're going to be reported overdue. If a live detector happens to have been anywhere in the vicinity, it will have picked up our blip. It might even have tracked us to impact." "Hell, if it tracked us to impact no one will bother to come searching," Andrew said. "Everyone was killed but us, right? If they calculate the speed we had when we broached airthey'll take it for granted we just burned up." Pavel put on his most reassuring manner. "Not if I can dig out something to make a beacon with," he said, "I'm not an engineer, but I hope to find a solid-state transmitter sooner or later -- and a capacitor or something to drive it with. I'll -- uh -- I'll leave you now and get on with it." "Thirsty!" Andrew said. "Oh, of course. I'll get you one of those tablets to suck." Behind the closed cupboard seemed to mock him when he entered the surgery. H aving made a frugal breakfast from half a can of fruit puree, Pavel sat down to work out a plan. In this sparse air he dared not overexert himself. On the other hand, he must work quickly in order to improve their chances of survival, either to fix the beacon he'd talked about or simply to locate more provisions. In a while, despite his aching head, he had worked out what seemed to be a logical course of action. He hunted around for something he could adapt as a shovel, found a plastic chair with one metal leg still attached and, by wedging the leg in a crack in the wall and leaning on it with his full weight, straightened it so that the chair seat made a kind of flat scoop and the leg a handle. Fine. Very pleased with himself, he set about digging where he had found the bulbs of soup yesterday. And almost at once discovered a mangled corpse. The thought crossed his mind that if he absolutely had to, he could reserve the canned supplies until last -- and eat meat. It should IF remain good for a long time in this dry air, away from Earth-type bactia. than cannibalism... Maybe. He moved the body and with much effort dragged it to a gash in the hull and pushed it outside. He scrambled after it and dragged it out of sight down the dune and flung a few shovelfuls of sand after it. Then, aching in every limb, he decided to walk around the ship instead of going straight back inside. The going was very difficult; the dune was so dry, he sank over ankles at every step. But he managed to carry out a complete inspection of the exposed part of the ship and the more he saw, the mor he marveled at his own escape. A bare fifth of the vessel's length was visible and as badly cracked as a hard-boiled egg ready for shelling. His heart sank. Was there any hope at all of finding serviceable equipment to rig his beacon? There was only one way to find out. He went back to his digging. Time passed in a monotonous slow blur. He fell immediately into the routine which he was to follow for the rest of their stay. He dug for a while, making either the discovery of a .corpse or the location of a bit of intact equipment, an excuse to break off, then went to see Andrew and attend to his requests or inform him that they could not be met. T he first time he told Andrew he would have to lie in pain a bit longer before another shot, Andrew curled back his lip and said, "I've got you figured out. You like this." "What?" "You like this. You like having someone totally helpless -- the way I am. Gives you a sense of power." Sweat beaded his face, but evaporated almost at once into the dry air. "Nonsense," Pavel said roughly, looking over the equipment at the foot of the bunk. One of the lights which had been green had turned red. But there was no help for that. "I know your type," Andrew whined. "Nothing suits you better than" "Shut up," Pavel said. "I'm trying to keep us both alive. And, if possible, sane. Don't start on crazy fantasies like that, or you'll run the risk of making me angry. I'm already living on my nerves." "What does a doctor do when his patient makes him angry? Turn off the life-supports?" "No." Pavel drew a deep but unsatisfying breath. "Gets out of earshot and stays there." He marched out of the cabin and slammed the door. In the corridor he leaned for a while against the wall, head on hands. But there was work to do. He roused .himself and returned to it. Not for the first time, as he mustered all his energy and thrust the improvised shovel into yet another heap of sand, he wondered sickly why he was wasting his time. He was now well into the section where he ought to have located usable electronic or subelectronic equipment if any had survived -- and all he was finding was charred or half-melted masses of metal and plastic. There had been a fire here, a hot one. Also, now and then, he found items from spacemen's uniforms, such as buckles and rank badges. And bones. It took him almost three days -- daytimes, rather -- to clear the section of the ship of which he had the highest hopes. The only thing he found that was any use at all was a solid-state emergency lamp, its lumen-globe intact and its powerpack barely below maximum. Night was falling when he came upon it. He switched it on, thinking how wonderful it was to have a proper light. And then, with a pang of conscience, how terrible it must be for Andrew lying alone in the dark, forced to wait hours between anesthetic shots. He picked up the lamp and carried it to Andrew's cabin. Andrew did not at first react to the sound of the door sliding back -- it moved noisily now because the finest grains of sand sifted everywhere when the wind rose and the groove at the bottom was covered with them. When he opened his eyes, however, he did not comment on the lamp. He said, "Pavel, you -- you look terrible." "What?" Pavel touched his face. It had beard stubble on it, of course, and no doubt dirt and sweat had mingled to cover his skin with a layer of grime. He hadn't given thought to his appearance for a long while. "Could be," he said gruffly. "But never mind. I found this lamp. I thought it would be useful for you. I could get you something to pass the time now you have light -- maybe a book, if you like reading. Or a game from the recreation room. I dug into that and found a few things." Andrew seemed not to be listening. He said, "Why in the galaxy are you driving yourself this way? Did you find a way to send a signal to a search-party ?" Pavel licked his lips; they tasted of dust. "I found quite a lot of stuff, but -- " "But it doesn't work ?" "No. I'm afraid it's all smashed up." "I thought it would be," Andrew said. Now, by the bright clear light, Pavel coujd see that his cheeks had suddenly become IF sunken. Another lamp shone red on the medical gear enclosing his legs. Yesterday it had been green. Red for danger. "Pavel, you ought can get at it. Suppose -- well, suppose you dig into somewhere and a girder falls on you. Suppose you're hurt and can't get back to wherever you put the thing." "I don't want to use it," Pavel said obstinately. "And you won't keep me free of pain all the time -- " "I can't because -- " "Oh, save it." Andrew sighed and rolled his head to the side opposite the lamp, shutting his eyes again. The ungrateful bastard, Pavel thought and strode out. IV T hat night he dropped off to sleep the moment he lay on his couch of furs in the passageway outside Andrew's door. He dreamed of far-off worlds where he had been happy and relaxed, where he had basked in warm sunlight and eaten luscious meals in the company of pretty women -- the dreams shocked him awake. Has Andrew somehow got at the That thought blasted through the euphoria and brought him bolt upright with a jerk. Standing up and waking were simultaneous. It was dark; he had turned off the lamp to conserve its powerpacpk, Andrew being asleep also. But he had left it on a shelf just inside the cabin door, and the door was ajar. He located it by touch and switched it on. Andrew was lying, very pale and sweating again, with his fists clenched and his jaw set. Another red light had appeared at the foot of his bunk. "Damn it, you're in agony," burst out of Pavel. "I didn't want -- to -- wake you." Andrew forced the words past tightly clamped teeth. "Thought you -- you deserved your rest." What in the galaxy was happening to this spoiled young man? But Pavel wasted no time on wondering about it -- he had, as usual, placed a selection of phials and other equipment by his. couch. Seizing an injector, he gave Andrew a full shot of pain-killer. "Thanks," the younger man whispered and the drawn expression faded from his face. "Sorry I disturbed you. I guess I cried out without meaning to." "That's okay," Pavel said awkwardly. "Actually, you didn't." "You know something?" Andrew stared at the ceiling. "I've been thinking. I guess I never had to think so long about the same thing, over and over, in my life before. When the crash happened, I was scared. I didn't realize -- I kept telling myself it couldn't possibly be happening to me -- not to Andrew Alighieri SolichukFehr. And -- well, the way I see it now, I went on trying to hide the truth. Didn't #? Don't bother to answer. I know I'm right. And here you've been working like alike a robot, while knowing what can be done and what can't. Well, imagine it had been the other way around. Imagine that I'd been up and walking about and you were stuck in a bunk like me, busted all to hell. I wouldn't know what to do. I'd go crazy. I'd have just given up." Pavel listened, hardly believing his ears. "So Iwell, rd just like to say I'm obliged to you. I think it's the most amazing luck that you were the other person who survived. It's finally dawned on me that without you I'd be dead." His fists clenched again, but not this time from pain. "And you're right. It's stupid to die when you don't have to. It's stupid to quit just because you can't take a little pain, just because you're gambling on the chance of being rescued and you can't figure the odds. Hell, I've gambled on a dozen planets for things much less important than life -- for mere money. And I swear I wouldn't have bet on my chance of still being alive after that crash." "Nor would I," Pavel said in a gravelly tone. From the corner of his eye he noted that the last red light had reverted to green, a sign that it had been the pain that had been putting the dangerous stress on Andrew's metabolism. Dilemma: whether to keep the pain damped down in order to protect his life-functions -- or to husband the supply of pain-killer and make his life bearable, if not comfortable, for the greatest possible length of time. It was too much to think about right now. Pavel's mind was still fuzzy with sleep. Anyhow, Andrew hadn't finished. "You're sure we're on Quasimodo IV?" Until this moment, Pavel hadn't been certain that Andrew had taken in the information he'd been given about their situation. "Yes. At least, as sure as I can be without checking out some sort of data on the system we were bound for. I haven't dug into the library section yet, but I think I'm coming fairly close." "Well, instead of wasting my time on games and that sort of nonsense, why don't you bring me what you can salvage in the way of books and reels? I guess if there's a magnifying glass or microscope to be had, I can make out a reel. But without power there can't be much hope of reading tapes, huh?" "True enough. But -- sure. I'll do my best. Find some way of magnifying a reel so you can read it up against that light' '"Great," Andrew said. "Now you go back to sleep or fix your breakfast, or whatever you want, ril be okay until this shot wears off. And for as long afterward as I can honestly stand the pain." rowed deeper and deeper into the accessible regions of the ship that it helped enormously to know that he had a companion in adversity after all, someone he could talk to, instead of a burden on his time, a constant worry. He did in fact locate a scratched and broken piece of transpex with a high magnifying factor, some data reels and a few scorched books whose pages had to be turned very carefully in order to prevent their crumbling, and Andrew, propped up just a little on his pillow, somehow contrived to read a few of them by the portable lamp. There were only passing references to Quasimodo IV -- it never having been a planet of much interest to spacemen -- but what little he gleaned confirmed that that was where they were, and moreover that they were currently on the same side of the local sun as Carteret. But in that case... Why haven t we been rescued al ready? The fourth, fifth, eighth days melted into the past almost featurelessly. The strain of working in low oxygen was weakening Pavel; he hated waking up and often his digging was reduced to the mindless act of a machine, so that he had already shoveled aside a piece of potentially useful equipment before his sluggish brain recognized it. Then he had to go scrabble for it with bare hands in the pile of sand behind him. And, of course, all the time he kept finding dead bodies. For a brief while, following Andrew's remarkable discovery of courage, the cupboard where he to Pavel. A day -- two days -- later, and the blisters on his hands and the grit in his mouth and the redness of his eyes and the endless, incurable thirst he suffered from conspired to reawaken its specter in his memory. Instead of being here, victim of harsh reality, he could be in a lovely, imaginary world, enjoying himself in any way he chose, picturing the most beautiful girls, the smoothest lawns, the finest beaches. He drove the ghost away. The supply of drugs dwindled, though he hoarded them carefully. So did the protein concentrates and glucose-and-vitamin solutions which were all the food he could offer Andrew. Luckily he had had just enough of a substance which triggered the body's use of stored fat -- a short-cut for overindulgent passengers, basically, who now and then realized at the end of a long spaceflight that they had put on two kilos while they were shut up in the metal shell of the ship and wanted to revert to normal weight before landing. He had never expected to make practical use of what he ordinarily regarded as a cosmetic drug. The two injections of it which he had given to Andrew, however, had worked well, and though his skin was now deflated over his premature paunch -- like a collapsed balloon -- he was able to utilize what long overindulgence had stored between his muscles and his skin. Pavel took more and more frequently to going outside and staring up at the sky, knowing it was ridiculous to do so. One couldn't see an orbiting rescue ship by day -- and if it arrived during the night it would no doubt fire signal flares and perhaps sonic missilesto wake survivors up and provoke them into lighting fires or somehow revealing their presence. Fires? T he idea should have come to him much earlier; in fact, it didn't strike him until he finally had to concede that further digging was useless. The part of the ship he hadn't yet cleared of sand had collapsed and he lacked the strength and the tools to force aside the strong metal girders now blocking his progress. He had been aimlessly postponing the admission that nothing else constructive was left for him to do when the notion of making a fire occurred to him. At night a fire could be spotted a long way off under this clear sky. He had seen clouds only once since the crash and those only on the horizon around the setting sun. Presumably an ocean lay in that direction, but a rise in the ground -- a range of hills or mountains -- filtered all the moisture from the wind before it blew this far inland. Andrew had found scant reference to the meteorological pattern of Quasimodo IV in the charred books Pavel brought him. Was anything left in the wreck that would flame brightly in this thin air? Pavel made tests, cautiously, with flammable liquids from his surgery: alcohol, ether, some otherwise useless tinctures and suspensions which bore fire warnings on their labels. Satisfied that it might indeed be possible to light a fire, he set about resifting the great mounds of rubbish he had thrown aside, dividing them into two new categories: things that would catch light and things that wouldn't. That occupied a day or two more. IF Little by little, however, he began to find himself obsessed with the passage of time. If we can last four more days -- three more days, two... He caught himself up with a shock. There still was no promise of rescue. In his mind the fifteenday period he had estimated as the limit of the time he could keep Andrew alive had evolved into an article of faith: If we last out fif teen days well be okay... What grounds did he have for believing that? On the contrary, he realized, now that eleven, twelve, thirteen days had leaked away, their chances of being saved were less, not more. Even if Magnusson had been notoriously sloppy about routine matters, such as signaling to the port he was bound for when his ship broached normal from subspace, they should have started searching long ago. the cupboard rose before him and sang an inaudible song of mockery. short oxygen and with barely sufficient food, he had taken to spending an hour or two each day between exhaustion and slumber in conversation with Andrew. The first few times had been a sort of stimulant for him; he had never had any clear concept of what life was like for someone who was due to inherit one of the great fortunes of the galaxy, coming as he did from average, ordinary stock on both sides of his own family: pioneers five generations back, who seemed to have used up their ambition and initiative in the singlp crucial act of leaving Earth. He himself, by deciding to sign as a space medical officer before settling to a regular career, and moreover saying that it might not be on his home world of Caliban that he chose to practice, had shocked all his relatives. They were no longer geared to star travel. By contrast, Andrew's background since he was born had included the concept of galaxyroaming: Uncle Herbert is on Halys and sends his love, or maybe, I think well take the kids to Peristar this year... Not that Andrew himself had appreciated his good fortune until now. He had looked on it more as a distasteful duty than a reason for excitement and enjoyment when he had been instructed to tour the family holdings. Now, listening to Pavel explaining his attitude, he seemed to have come around to the view that he had been stupid, wasting an opyoung men would have sold their right arms for. Head constantly aching, unceasingly shaky on his feet and having to concentrate with all his force like a man struggling to pretend he isn't drunk Pavel had done his best to encourage Andrew -- until the evening of the day when he admitted to himself that even if they did last out for the two weeks he had invented as a deadline they were probably doomed anyhow. Then he was snappish and illtempered, heard his own voice reviving accusations from the PennyroyaVs last voyage -- references to Hans, references to drunkenness, references to laziness and greed and lack of consideration for other passengers. Hurt, at first surprised, later angry, Andrew retorted in kind, and the sjiould-havebeen friendly chat wound up with a grinding slam of the cabin door. But the last thing Pavel had glimpsed was not just one more red light -- he'd grown accustomed to one a day, on average, added to the original total -- but a whole new cluster of them, which yesterday had been green. Shaking from head to foot, he waited in the corridor for as long as it took to calm himself. Then he reopened the door. "I'm sorry,"' he said. "I'm ashamed of myself. You're in terrible pain. The lights -- " He gestured at them. They were naturally turned away from the patient. "I know,'l Andrew muttered. "What?" "Of course I know." With renewed anger. "That machine of yours wasn't designed to be used in a completely dark room, but a hospital ward with twilight oozing out of the walls -- right? Every night when you switch off the lamp for me to go to sleep, I can see the light reflected over there -- " gesturing -- "and I can tell that it's more red than it was before. I know I'm in a bad way, for heaven's sake! I know! The last word peaked into a cry. Pavel bit his lip. He said, "I guess I haven't been completely honest with you. I--well, I no longer believe in being rescued. If we were going to be rescued it ought to have happened by now. Do you want me to -- " "Switch on the E WO?' ' Andrew broke in, "No -- No! And no again! You were right to take it away from me. Lying here, pain or no pain. I've come to realize how precious life can be. No, I don't want you to use it. Take it out and bury it -- smash it with a hammer -- anything." His voice cracked with pain. Sweat glistened on his skin. "Well -- uh -- all right then," Pavel said. "Good night." "Good night." again. T he nightmares didn't stop in the morning. When he opened the cabin door, IF having slept badly, he found Andrew not just asleep but unconscious. All but four of the lights on the medical equipment had gone to red. A glance at their pattern confirmed that it was the struggle to resist pain that had worn him out -- that, and the exhaustion of the last phial of nutrient solution in Pavel's limited stock. There was enough water left to keep him hydrated and enough tissue in his muscles for the "second-wind" process to keep his basal metabolism turning over for a few more hoursperhaps a couple of days, if he remained inert. Beyond that point? Certain death. Pavel stared in giddy disbelief. He tried to tell himself that it was an achievement to have kept Andrew alive and conscious, in his condition, for such a long time -- not fifteen ordinary days, as he had somehow been fool enough to' imagine, but fifteen of these extra-long local days. It was a medical miracle in its small way. Hardly any modern doctor could have managed it without the aid of a full range of diagnostic and supportive equipment. But what was the use of having done it when nobody else would ever find out? All hope seeped out of his mind. His overstrained will to survive collapsed like a bridge required to carry too great a load, folding almost gracefully into an unrecognizable tangle of struts and pillars. He was barely Pavel turned with machine-precise movements and headed for his surgery. In that cupboard he had passed so many times waited the Easy Way Out. He took it, sleek and chill, from its case and turned it over and over. It was well past dawn and there was plenty of light to see by.  denied him this, Pavel thought.  could have ended his life in ecstasy instead of a vain, stupid, pointless struggle against pain. Now he will die, unconscious, and -- and he turned out to be a nice guy in his way.  feel almost fond of him -- and horribly ashamed of myself. Because fm going to use what  forbade him... Convulsively he twisted the it down. It sank visibly along the main shaft and a humming rose. Pavel closed his eyes. Disbelievingly he opened them again. All was exactly as it had his hands, it was now also growing hot. He let it fall with an oath. A hissing noise followed, and a puff of smoke spurted from the capped end. The cap -- some kind of plastic, he guessed -- became deformed and darkened. After that it simply lay there. He stared at it incredulously for a long while: how long, he could not tell. He felt like a suicide who took much trouble over choosing and knotting a rope only to have it break under his weight. "'ril be damned," he said furiously at last. "For all that pretty case with the combination lock -- for all the padding it was nested in -- it broke when we crashed. It doesn't work!" The thing was no longer smoking. He touched it and found it merely warm. Snatching it up, he swung around to leave the surgery, blind with rage. "Til pay him back'"for leading me on this way," he heard himself muttering. "Fll get even. Fll -- " What is that? From somewhere outside came a roaring sound. The crumpled steel of the corridor vibrated. Pavel stood still, one hand already outstretched to slide back the door of Andrew's cabin. The roar faded, then grew louder again. He stared in horror at the work after all? Is this an induced illusion, the fantasy of rescue? But, surely, knowing how ashamed he had been when he was finally driven to try and use the gadget, he could rule that out. Any illusion he was capable of enjoying would exclude all memory of its existence would remind him he was condemned to death. Uncertain, he turned around -- and was suddenly pelting at full, lung-tearing speed toward the nearest opening in the hull to light his beacon with trembling fingers and keel over beside it for the rescue party to locate. A apologize for our not coming to find you sooner," said the doctor at the central hospital on Carteret. "But it was logical enough to abandon all hope the moment the PennyroyaVs course had been computed. I mean, you wouldn't expect anyone to live through a crash like that, would you?" "I guess not," Pavel said. He felt very much better, although this oxygen-rich air was still making him a trifle giddy. "And when the people did turn up they came only for salvage, right? Not for rescue?" "I'm afraid so,'-' the doctor admitted. "It was the insurance company covering that consignment of furs that chartered the ship that picked you up." He hesitated. "By the way, I'd like to compliment you on the marvelous job you did on Andrew Solichuk. You know, his family is very big here on Carteret and if he'd IF been found dead -- " He ended the sentence with a gesture. "Yes," Pavel said. "Yes, it was a pretty good job, though I say so myself." He looked absently out of the window. This was a splendid modern building, very expensive, surrounded by magnificent lawns and flowerbeds. He could see a swimming pool and a sun terrace where patients were soaking up the sunlight. Absently he caressed something smooth and heavy on his lap. He said suddenly, "How is Andrew now? I'd like to see him if I can." "I imagine that can be arranged," the doctor said heartily. "Of course, he was in very bad shape when he was brought here, but when they heard the news his family back on Earth signaled that we should spare no expense. He's had the finest surgery available on this planet. He's up and about already -- and as a matter of fact, I believe he asked to see you. Come with me." Rising, he added with a chuckle: "Aren't you glad that thing of yours was broken after all?" "What?" Pavel gave him a confused stare. "Oh, this?" He hefted "We assumed it was," the doctor said. "You were clinging to it for dear life. When you were unBallanttne Books poration -- we were last month -- (speaking of it that is), there are lots of traps In becoming a large corporate structure. Immobility is one. There seems to be a direct correlation between number of people and the ability to move. We are trying to offset this by doing our publishing in separate pockets, as It were -- hence Beagle, Walden, Comstock and the new London operation. Ballantine Books' far-flung Empire. All of which make it possible for the original BB's to nip off to places like San Francisco for a couple of days or to get Annie over here for a week (well, hell, how else would we have gotten the galleys and for others to visit us from various points of our small globe. In this way we hope to evade yet another problem of bigness -- lack of communication.  AS TO what happens within our offices of (now) Vk floors, it's a bloody mad house. We conducted a small poll recently and found that not one of the #-odd bodies now located here would want it any other way. Working in this firm does something to people. As an example of our esprit-decorps (if that is, indeed, what it can be called) the entire Accounting Department is flowering forth in beards. Formidable. A lot of us even read our own books -- outside of the editors, that is. (This is a rare thing in a pub lishing house.) This department must sadly admit to not being able to keep up with the whole list any more. Just the Adult Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mysteries, Westerns, Ecology, Environment, Comstock and sex books. Enough.  to the discussion of books, what have we got for this month -- a whole fleet of books from Fred PphI and Jack subsea academy types (did you see that crazy Cousteau film on the seadragons of Galapagos?) involved in various adventures, plus another group of Clark Ashton Smith stories tasy. Meanwhile all the H.P. Lovecraft titles in Ballantine and Beagle go bouncing from glory to glory. Great stuff. Sincerely... BB dergoing your psychiatric reorientation they wanted to take it away, but when I saw how violently you reacted to losing it I told them they ought to let you hang on to it. A sort of mental sheet-anchor. You say it isn't yours?" "No, it belonged to Andrew." Pavel stared wonderingly down at the thing. "'It must have sunk all sorts of barbs in my subconscious if I clung to it as you say I did. I guess it's time I got rid of it. I'll give it back to Andrew, let him know it wouldn't have helped anyway. He was at me to use it, you know, for days and days after we landed. I mean crashed." "I'm not surprised." The doctor nodded. "Suffcring the way he was -- Still, according to what he's been saying, you infected him -- so to speak -- with the will to live. He's very anxious to see you again, you know." He courteously indicated that Pavel should precede Him through the door. A nd there he was: almost unrecognizably lean, nearly naked in the bright warm sunlight, with a few traces of scarring around his waist and lower back but grinning from ear to ear. He had been in the pool and drops of water were still running down his body, but he hurled aside the towel IF he had been about to use and advanced on Pavel with a shout of joy. "Pavel! How can I ever thank you for saving my life? You were right, right all along -- if it hadn't been for you, I wouldn't be here now, back in one piece, able to enjoy life again! Here, let me shake your hand." His voice changed even as he put out his hand. "What's that?" he said faintly and all the color faded from his cheeks. "It's -- You bastard!" "What?" Standing uncertainly before him, Pavel held up the was just about to tell you. If you'd -- " "You devil!" Andrew snatched it from him and stared at the capped end. It was obvious that it had been pushed home. "You activated it. After all your pious preaching you activated it. And -- and -- " He looked about to be physically sick. "And all this must be illusion after all! Which means I'm going to die -- just as I'd finally found out how to enjoy being alive! You bastard, you devil! His face contorted into a mask of fury. "Now just a moment," said the doctor at Pavel's side, stepping forward. Pavel himself was frozen with pure amazement, incapable of speaking, barely able, to think. But the doctor was too late. Raising the heavy plasteel head with all the force his newly discovered health and vigor afforded, Andrew brought it slamming down and smashed open Pavel's skull as completely and as fatally as the hull of the wrecked Pennyroyal,  P.O. Box #I #, Santa Monica, Cal. # iJiTM'i ny Jjhn n.' n  jr .un. nrticle by Greg Bei'lord n new coi Sample Subscription # issues for SI. S# per year T hey were waiting for Andy Galt as he left the Weather Control Complex at the end of the Dawn Shift: Pinchot, sleek and dandified even in a Survey coverworried look on his too-small face. Gray, lean as a ferret, bright-eyed, nervous, and Timmins, silent as usual. "You've heard?" Pinchot said. "They did it." Galt nodded. "Some politico who's never been within five lights of Colmar decides we need to open another hundred miles of desert," Gray said. "So five hundred of us are going to be drafted and shipped out to the plateau to play the hardy pioneer." "We knew they were going ahead," Walt said, "Why act surprised?" "There was always a chance they'd. take our warning and back down," Gray said. He had a thin, high voice, a mouth that seemed always to be grinning a secret grin. "It couldn't have been more blatant if they were trying to goad us beyond endurance," Pinchot said. "It's as if they were thumbing their noses and daring us to do something." ( Please turn to page #  TO First, can you koep from losing?  fhen, con you koop from winning? T he craslf of breaking glass was like an explosion in the darkness. Planetary Administrator Andrew Galt came awake, rolled off the side of the bed and hugged the floor. In the silence a final glass fragment fell from the window frame to the rug. Galt got to his feet, saw the paper-wrapped bolt lying by the dresser. the back of a recently published ration application form. Galt grunted and tossed the paper away. It was nearly dawn, he saw. He dressed and went down to the kitchen. Freddy, his butler-valetdriver-bodyguard-secretary was there, brewing coffee. "You're up early, Mr. Administrator," he said formally. "No protocol this early in the ( Please turn to page #I ) ( Continued from page I # ) sounding frightened. He swallowed. "We held off until now to give them a chance to see reason. They didn't. Opening a new sector now is a smack in the teeth to every man in the colony." "It's not just a little kick in the mouth," Gray said. "It's slavery for all of us who are tagged to go out on the advance team. And for what? To give the Colonial Bureau a nice growth rate to brag about." "To fill politicians' pockets back on Terra," Pinchot corrected. "We're supposed to give up our homes, families, friends, move out into the desert, live in lash-up hutments, eat issue rations, work like horses fourteen hours a day -- " "I'm not afraid of work," Galt said. "If it were on a voluntary basis I might even sign on." "But it's not voluntary, Galt. It's compulsory. They decide who goes and for how long." "Even here in town it's serfdom," Gray said. "Look at you -- with an advanced degree in administration -- putting in your two years on a board at Weather like any clod. And Pinch, here, with a Master's in personel dynamics " "What about the petition, Pinchot?" Galt cut off the complaint impatiently. "Didn't you get an answer?" an inside pocket, handed it over. It was a letter on the stationery of the Colonial Administrator, formally -- and patronizingly, Galt thought -- thanking the addressee for his interest in administration policy. "It was addressed to me by name," Pinchot said, "not to the Committee. Don't ask me how they knew. But it doesn't matter now." He tore the letter in two and tossed it aside. "So much for appeals to established authority. We tried the peaceful way. Now we're taking matters into our own hands. Soare you with us, Galtor against us?" "He doesn't have to be either," Timmins spoke up. "He's got a right to be neutral." Pinchot shook his head. "Not any more," he said. "The time's come to take sides." "The Committee of Fifty," Galt said, "consisting of forty-one members by actual count, out of over twenty-five thousand colonists -- " "What percentage of French peasants staged the French Revolution?" Gray demanded. "How many Americans actually fired on the Redcoats? How many Bolsheviks tjssed out the Czar?" "W'cl do it," Pinchot said, his eyes naj'" and intent. "We move IF in fast, lake the Port and the Comm Center, the generator and pumping stations, the depot and warehouses, grab Admin House -- and we're in charge." "What about the Security Force?" "We'll bottle them up in their barracks." "Spacearm could blow us off the planet." "But they won't. BuCol wants profits, that means operating mines and plants. We'll cooperate with them; they won't get rough. They'U#accepl the fait accompli  All heads turned as the soft H'Arr of a lurbodyne sounded. A police carl came into view; the men stood silent as it coasted to a stop beside them. A tall, loose-jointed man in Security uniform swung down, sauntered over. He was a stranger, loo tall, too pale, out from Terra, not a colonial. "Let's see your IDs, fellows,' he said in a nasal Terran accent. His partner sal stolidly on the carl, watching. The four colonists handed over their lags, which were scrutinized cursorily and handed back. "What are you doing here?" the Security man asked in a laz tone, as if he didn't much care but was asking anyway. Gall fell his face straining hand. "Minding our own business." he said harshly. "Why?" The Security man looked him over casually. "Come over to the flat," he said easily. "What for?" Gall said. "Move," the cop snapped and flipped a small rod from his belt. Gall walked over to the carl. "Turn around, get your hands up behind your head." Galt followed orders. Careless hands slapped down his sides, deftly turned his pockets inside out. The Security man grunted. "That's all. Break it up now. I don't want to see you hanging around in the streets after five bells." The carl rolled away. Pinchol came over, picked up the items the Securiix man had dropped on the pavement, handed them to Gall. "They're nice fellows." he said softly, "just doing their job." " hen?" Gall asked tightly. "Tonight. Be at the Watergate at midnight, read) for action." Pinchol said. "I ll be there." Gall said. street, Galt thought about it. He remembered stirring stories he'd read in grade school of hardy pioneers of half a century earlier his grandfather among them who had come out from Terra during the Population Riots to cast their lot for ihemselves and their families on the virgin world called Colmar. It had been a terrifying crossing: five thousand men and women in the hold of a marginally spaceworthy freighter, packed like sardines with barely space to move, fed on minimal rations, three bodies aloted to each bunk, sharing community toilets, with no amusements, no privacy, no relief for the long months of the voyage. And arriving at the end of it not on the soft, green world of open spaces and fresh air they'd been led to expect -- but on the harsh bare rock of Colmar. There'd been riots then and some vors had voted to stay, to take their chances on the new world, to conquer or die. Very melodramatic, Galt thought to himself. But whafs it got to do with today? They worked out their lives to give us -- their descendants -- something better. But do we have it? Weve seeded the oceans, made soil, planted crops. Today we can talk in the open air without respirators, eat our home-grown vegetables; we have a town with an auditorium, a sports arena and a public library , , , "But we're still slaves," he said aloud. "We've been used; we dance to Terra's tune. The best of our products go off-planet in return for a bare subsistence level of imports. And the time has come for a change." T hey were a vague crowd in the darkness. Galt pushed his way through, turning his face away from a beam of light from a pocket flash. Pinchot appeared, a white sweatband around his forehead. His face was taut; his tongue flicked restlessly at his lower lip. He handed Galt a small plastic-boxed talker. "You're on Tein One, hitting Admin House. You worked a summer there as a messenger, you know the layout. You lie low until it's secured. If Gray -- I mean, when Gray and his team secure The port they'll call in. Same with Tomkin, Pyle, Bergson -- all the teams will report to you when they've pinned down their objectives. ITl liaise with you -- " "Where am I supposed to hide while the rest of you are winning the war?" "You take cover in the park while the rest of the team goes in. When you see their signal -- we're using survey flares -- move in and take over the switchboard." Pinchot beckoned to a tall, lean man. "Fry's your Team Leader. You stick close to him until they move in. Okay, get going." Galt followed Fry and the other members of his team -- two men and a girl named Teresa -- as they IF threaded their way through the now-dispersing throng, turned east along the Outer Drive, heading for the park. The talker box muttered and crackled, monitoring terse conversations. As they turned into Park Way, Galt caught Fry's arm. "That's a copflat parked up there." He pointed to a police cart under a pole light a hundred yards distant. "There's nobody near it," Fry said and shook off his hand. "Come on. We've got three minutes to get in position." The party went on, entered the park via a service gate, crossed toward the line of trees behind which the lights of Admin House glowed peacefully. They halted beside a fountain which tossed sprays up into colored light. "There's a gap in the hedge," Fry pointed. "As soon as you see my flares, come in on the run." Galt nodded and took up his post behind a screen of shrubbery as the others slipped silently away. They reached the street, started across. A fine mist of spray from the fountain dampened Galt's face. An imported insect alighted on his neck. He brushed it away. The spotlights lanced out simultaneously from two points; one was aimed downward from the roof of Admin House, raking across the lawn, pinpointing the gate through which Fry and Teresa were just passing; the other, from the parked copflat, struck the group horizontally, threw stark shadows against the hedges. The two conspirators caught outside the gate froze for a moment, then turned and ran, their feet noisy in the silent street. An amplified voice boomed out. "Stop where you are! Davies, Henddrson! We know you, you can't get away -- " The voice broke off as light winked and a shot crashed from the gate. Fry was lying flat in the shadow of the ornamental gatepost. Galt saw another flash, but the second shot was drowned by the short savage roar of a police bullet-pump. Fry's body was flung a foot into the air and hurled ten feet back like a bundle of rags. The two runners skidded to a halt and threw themselves face down in the street. Galt saw Teresa reach the front entrance of the government building; as she ran up the steps, the door burst open and two uniformed security men gathered her in. Men in battle armor, hand guns ready, were swarming into the street, clustering at the gate and around the captives. Heavy footsteps sounded behind Galt. He hugged the ground, ducked as lights glared, playing across the shrubbery around him. A man went past less than six feet away. At that moment, the talker box uttered a burst of static and a small clear voice said, "Power station secured. One man hurt and a couple of windows broken -- otherwise no damage." The Security man who had just passed halted; gravel crunched as he swiveled, playing his light about. Galt eased back. The light flicked closer. He reached a large tree, got to his feet. A twig crackled. "Stop there," the Security man barked. Galt ran. A shot sang through foliage. He heard sounds ahead, veered right, crashed through a head-high hedge onto a bricked path. Two uniformed men standing fifty feet away turned toward him; he plunged around a bench dived into massed foliage. It yielded and he was in the clear. A tremendous blow on the calf of his right leg sent him tumbling. He rolled, tried to jump up, fell on his face. His leg was hot, numb, a dead weight. Scrabbling frantically with his hands, he dragged himself under a spread of juniper, felt the ground crumble beneath him. He rolled, fetched up with a thump in drifted leaves at the bottom of a drainage ditch. The voices and footsteps came closer, but they seemed remote and unimportant now. Galt's thoughts had leaped ahead, quite calmly, to the trial, the conviction, the prison sentence, the loss of his citizenship... T he Dark was quiet now. Listening closely, Galt could hear distant voices over the rustle of foliage in the light breeze; but nothing stirred nearby. He moved his injured leg tentatively, discovered to his surprise that it responded, though painfully. He sat up, explored the wound. There was a neat hole in the mass of muscle below and behind the knee, a less neat hole to the left of the shin. A small calibre solid shot had gone through without hitting the bone. He rose to his feet. He could walk. He brushed leaves away, climbed out of the ditch and was confronting the hedge that bordered Government Street, Through a gap he could see the lighted front of Admin House. Uniformed men were on the terrace, on the lawn. The front doors illuminated the lawns. A dozen copflats were in sight parked along the street. At first Gall didn't see it; then he did: Two-thirds of the Security Force was here, posted two deep around the front of the house; and he could see that the rear service entrance was equally guarded. But the small and inconspicuous entry at the side was shrouded in shadow. Insofar as Galt could see no Security men were near it. The talker crackled and spoke: The Power Complex was in rebel hands. Pyle, at the port, called in: IF all secure. Bergson, sounding elated, reported the virtually unopposed seizure of the pumping station. The uprising had gone well -- all but the most vital part. Administrator Blum and Major Jensen had concentrated all their forces here. They hadn't been fooled for a moment. They knew all about the Committee's plans and had been ready. But there was that side door. Galt's mouth was dry; his heart pounded painfully. It could be a trap. There might be half a dozen Sec men lying in wait for the mouse to take the cheese. But on the other hand, the door was little used; it was just possible that Jensen had overlooked it. Galt could slip away now, return home, and be as surprised as everybody else when the news came out. Or he could put his neck solidly in the noose. With a curse that was half prayer, he left his vantage point and, limping, slipped away along the hedge line. F rom a dump of shadow between the library and the Agricultural Experimental Building Galt studied the scene. He had a better view of the side door from here. Nothing stirred there. To anyone not intimately familiar with the building, there appeared to be an unbroken mass of shrubbery along the east wall. Galt took a deep breath and stepped out, crossed the street openly, two hundred yards from the lighted gate of Admin House. He went back past the west wing of the elementary school, crossed the playground, came up along a path to a point fifty feet from the rear corner of Admin House, paused for a moment, then ran across a strip of open ground to the door. There was no alarm. He tried the latch, then pushed with his shoulder. The panel yielded slightly. He stepped back, kicked straight out at the lock. Plastic and metal shattered, the door bounced in. Galt slid inside, shut the door and stood in darkness, listening. Voices sounded from the front of the house; somewhere a radio crackled and a toneless voice droned, too faint to make out the words. Feet clumped to and fro. There was a stair a few feet ahead. Galt felt his way in darkness, found the newel post, started up. He saw dim light above. On the second floor he looked along a carpeted hall. At the far end, a man in mufti with a paper in his hand emerged from a room, hurried away. Galt went on up. The third floor corridor was illuminated. A uniformed Security man stood twenty feet away, fiddling with the mechanism of his blastgun. The man bolstered the weapon, walked to the far end pf the hall, lifted a house phone from its hook, began an inaudible conversation. He turned his back to Galt's position, still talking. Galt slid out, eased silently along the passage to the intersection with the wide corridor off which' the administrative suite opened. Four Security men were in sight -- two posted beside the ivoryenameled double doors, the other two at the main staircase. One of the men guarding the stairs descended a few steps to carry on a conversation regarding the wherabouts of someone named Katz. His partner leaned over the rail, his back to Galt. The two men on the door had their heads turned, following the exchange. Galt stepped out and walked silently and swiftly toward the door adjacent to the guarded portal. He was six feet from it when one of the men glanced his way, gave a startled grunt and grabbed for his slung blastgun, fumbled it. "Here, you, where you think you're going?" he blurted. "Special messenger," Galt said crisply. He reached the door for which he had been headed as the second guard swung his gun around; Galt tried the knob; it turned; he plunged through as two shots racketed in the hall, gouging molten plastic from the doorframe. He spun, slammed the door, tripped the security lock system, heard armor sliding into place as a heavy body struck the panel from outside. Men hammered and shouted as Galt ran across the room, paused for an instant at the connecting door, picturing the slugs that would rip into his body if the administrator had posted guards inside his office as well as in the hall. Then he opened it and stepped through. Administrator Blum was a plumpish man with graying hair; he sat behind his desk, his eyes on the hall door, an expression of surprise on his face. As Galt appeared he whirled, reached for a desk drawer. Galt dived, knbcked the older man's hand aside, scooped up the #mm needier, aimed it at Blum. "What -- what -- " Blum said, then collected himself. He straightened his clothing, fixed a stern expression on his round face, looked challengingly at Galt. "Well? You've forced your way into my office for a reason, I suppose, since you'll most certainly be taken into custody before you leave here." "Your Security men are overpaid," Galt said. "They're expert at harassing citizens but not so good when it comes to something complicated -- like watching both sides of a house." Blum's features flinched. "I suggest you give yourself up at once, Andy," he said. "You've IF made your point. I'Jl personally look into the conduct of security affairs -- " "I'm not here to complain about inefficient police work' Galt said. "I'm here to take over the government." B lum stared across the desk at Galt, who pulled a chair around and sat down. The pounding at the door went on; an intercom screen on the administrator's desk buzzed insistently until Galt reached across and switched it off. "Andy," Blum said in a reasonable, kindly tone, "I've know your parents for thirty years. I remember the day you were born -- " "Make it Mr. Galt -- Mickey." Blum jerked as if he had been stung by a wasp. "I hardly think disrespect will advance your cause -- whatever it is. Now, if you don't mind, tell me why you're here. I suggest you hurry, since my Security forces will be in here at any moment -- " "I doubt that. Your locks are pretty solid." "You can't possibly believe you can succeed in this abortive uprising!" "We have the port, the power plant. Comm Center. The major seems to have overlooked a couple of bets while he concentrated on Admin House." "See here, Andy -- Mr. Galt. You were always a level-headed lad, a good scholar, potentially a fine citizen and a valuable colonist. What are you doing mixed up with these anarchists? People like Daniel Pinchot -- known radicals -- soreheads -- agitators -- " "Dan was a Sector Scholar. He may be impatient with the established order, but he's no fool, Mr. Administrator. I'm mixed up with him because it was that or go on the way we've been going -- and that wasn't good enough." Blum's face shifted to a look of grim determination. "I hardly think it's the function of a handful of malcontents to determine unilaterally what is or is not good enough for the welfare of the colony as a whole." "And you are?" "I was duly appointed by the Colonial Administration to carry out my function; I've been trained for this work; I have more years of experience in administration than you have of life!" "I didn't appoint you." "You're intelligent enough to recognize the fact that specialists who've devoted their lives to the problems of government and administration are better qualified to run matters than a pack of -- of amateurs who regard any restriction of what they consider their freedom and righas intolerable burdens!" "A pack of profit-minded bureaucrats and politicians who tell me I have to give up everything that makes life livable and devote a couple of years of hard labor to opening up new territories that we don't need or want." "You're a fool, Galt. You don't know what you're talking about! The economy must expand, or -- " "Or certain big corporations back on Terra won't make as much as they'd like out of our blood, sweat and tears." "That's a childishly simplistic version of matters. Why -- " "You mean Parson's Bay and General Logistics and North American Materials won't show a profit from opening up the new sector?" "Well -- of course they hope to! And why shouldn't they? They funded the great bulk of the developmental work, provided most of our specialized equipment, supplied technical experts -- and still do -- " "All at a nice return on their money. And we do the work. Especially the five hundred names that got pulled out of a hat to open Sector Twelve." "So, like impatient kindergarten children, you're going to take over the nursery and make it all one long playtime, is that Th Andy -- Mr. Galt?" "The mines will continue to operate, Mr. Administrator. We'll still export -- and don't tell me how good and kind Terra is to buy our products. I know how scarce nonorganically contaminated chemicals are today." "Suppose a squadron of Peace Enforcers arrives to restore order -- " "That won't open any mines." B lum gazed at Galt. It was (quiet in the corridor now. A call light blinked on the big desk, ignored. "You want all the advantages of what other men have built," Blum said slowly, "but you want them without working for them, without effort, without commitment or obligation. Well, the Universe doesn't work that way, my young friend. Nothing is free. Society isn't witholding your birthright. You have no such birthright -- not in the sense you're apparently demanding." "I have the same birthright any animal in the wild has," Galt said. "To take what I can get and hold," "So you'll seize the granary and eat until it's empty. But who'll refill it for you, eh? You'll grab the trideo set you've always wanted -- but who'll repair it, who'll supply the power to run it, who'll do the programing and the acting, who'll pay the bills?" "We will. We're prepared to work as hard as required. But we intend to take the rewards for IF ourselves -- for Colmar -- including you, Mr. Blum, if you decide to stay -- instead of sending them off-world for the benefit of corporate executives we've never met, who've never seen Colmar and never will." "It's the arrogance of it that astounds me," Blum said wonderingly. "We all have ourobligations, Galt, whether it pleases us or not. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the entertainments you enjoy, the education you were given didn't just pop up out of the desert. Someone made them. They represent human ingenuity and effort -- and you've reaped the benefits." "That's a debt that's passed along from generation to generation, Mr. Blum. A man owes nothing to the past. Life can't demand payment for itself." "I've always thought you were a young man with a sense of decency, of justice, of regard for the rights of others. Tell me, Andy: if this -- revolution of yours succeeds by some wild chance -- what then? Will you rest easily with your loot? Can you justify to yourself theft on a grand scale, and settle down to enjoy your stolen goodies?" "You're taking the position," Galt said, "that because the government exists -- " "Legally," Blum put in. "Because the government exists legally, that I'm therefore obligated to support it -- or at least obey it. But I challenge that statement. Suppose the government were an outright tyranny: would I be obligated to connive at my own enslavement?" "That's absurd -- " "No. A man has a natural right that supersedes legal obligations. Overthrowing a legally constituted government is treason -- unless you win. Because if you win, you change the laws. Then anyone who supports the old government is the traitor." "This is mere sophistry, Galt. You can't mean -- " "The right to revolt," Galt said slowly, as if thinking aloud, "is the most basic right a man has." "Activist jargon," Blum snorted. "Not if we win -- and we have won, Mr. Administrator." Blum's face flushed. "Nonsense. A pack of rabble-rousers couldn't possibly have -- " "Wrong. We're not rabblerousers, we're the rabble itself, Mr. Administrator. Mr. ex-Administrator. Check for yourself." Blum turned to his communicator panel, poked keys. His face tightened as no lights responded to his calls. "You can still get through to Security barracks," Galt said. "Call Jensen and tell them to put down their guns." B lum punched out the code. The angry face of Major Jansen appeared on the desk screen. "Mr. Administrator, thank God you're all right!" "Never mind that," Blum said. "What's the situation?" "These hoodlums have invaded a number of installations, Mr. Administrator, but I can clean them out. Just the same. I'd suggest you priority." "Pm afraid I'm not precisely at liberty to do that, Stig," Blum said. He angled the pickup to include Galt, gun in hand. Jensen's face jerked. "What -- " "The, ah. Revolutionary Committee seems to have outflanked us," Blum said. "Stand fast, Mr. Administrator," Jensen said between clenched teeth. "My boys'll blast their way in there and -- " "Lay down your arms, Jensen," Galt cut in, leaning forward. "We hold every strong point in the colony -- " "I've got forty trained men on the grounds of Admin House," Jensen grated. "You'll never get out alive, you damned bandit!" "Don't talk like an ass, Stig," Blum said calmly. "He's outmanuvered you. It's checkmate." He looked at Galt. "What do you want from me, Andy?" "Capitulate. Hand over control to the Committee and step down. I'll guarantee your safe conduct -- and Jensen's, too, unless he does something stupid, like firing on our men." Blum stared levelly across at Galt. "Are you sure this is what you want? The responsibility -- " "Tell him," Galt said harshly. Blum turned to the screen. "Lay down your arms, Stig," he said. "I'm signing a formal resignation in favor of Andrew Galt." T en minutes later there was a brief clamor outside the door. Pinchot's voice came over the talker. "Open up, Galt! We're in complete possession." Galt crossed the room and released the locking system. The door burst open. Gray came through, grinning a wide fox grin. He saw Blum, jerked up the weapon in his hand. Behind him, a gun fired from six feet; Gray shrieked as the gun flew from his hand in a spatter of blood. He went to his knees, gripping his wrist, his hand welling crimson, as other men crowded into the room. It was Timmins who had fired. He came forward to stand beside Galt. "Why the hell'd you do that?" Gray keened. "That's the pig that had Fry and Len and Jeannie killed!" IF "What did you expect him to do, give them a safe conduct?'" Galt said tightly. "Here, what's going on," Pinchot said, pushing forward. "You'd better give me the gun." He held out his hand, the other hand resting on the butt of the pistol at his hip. "I thought the idea was to improve government, not to start a reign of terror," said Timmins. Galt said. "Get rid of the gun, Timmins." Timnins tossed the weapon aside. "Who are you to be giving orders?" Pinchot demanded of Galt. "I'm the only one here with admin training. I'll hold the office until we can stage elections -- unless you want to start your new regime and a few others -- and somehow I don't think a purge will convince BuCol that you're fit to run the Colony." Pinchot stared at Gait, eyes narrowed. Then he relaxed, thrust out a hand. "Makes sense," he said. "Let's go, men." "You took a terrible chance," Blum said after the others had withdrawn. "I suppose that's part of an revolution, Mr. Adminstrator." Blum sighed. "Call me Mickey." he said. "There are a few things I ought to familiarize you with before I go." F our weeks later Galt sat behind the big desk, frowning at the papers before him. He shuffled through them, sighed. There was a perfunctory tap at the door and Pinchot came in. "Afternoon, Mr. Administrator," he said. "What are you looking so glum about? They elected you, didn't they?" "I'll step down in your favor any time, Pinchot." "No, thanks. I never did like paperwork." He eyed the stack on and BuCol have both recognized you as the people's choice. You're stuck with it. I'm quite happy as Chief of Operations." His genial expression faded a bit as he spoke. He swung a chair around and sat down. "In that connection, Galt -- what about the import program I outlined? You've had it three days now -- " "I know. Luxury goods. Official cars, cooler units, trideo programs." "So? Don't we have the right to spend our money to suit ourselves? Isn't that what the takeover was all about?" "Sure. What money?" Pinchol's face went tight. "The price of the last shipment of ores, for example," he snapped. 'Mt all went toward our credit deficit with Outplanet." "'You expect me to believe that?" '"You can check the figures with Anderson if you like. No matter how many times we add them up they still come out the same. We're running in the red and what credit we still have has to go for necessities." "I heard all that from Anderson. That's why I'm here. It's not good enough, Galt. This isn't why we threw out BuCol just to carry on the same old swindle." "'You can take over any time, Pinchot." Galt slid a sheet of paper across to the other man. "'My resignation, all ready for signature." Pinchot stared at the document, pushed it away. ""I don't get it," he growled. ""You're spouting Blum's line, the BuCol line -- " ""It's nobody's line. It's just the facts, Pinchot. We're exporting X kilotons of minerals at Y creds per ton, and we're importing Z creds worth of basic material. And we're sliding a little deeper into the red every quarter." ""They're overcharging us, holding us up on prices -- " ""Negative. They're selling to us at seven percent under the open market scale. BuCol policy." "Then we can raise our prices -- " "Negative again. It's marginal now. If our prices plus haulage go above costs of local procurement and refining, we're out of business." "Thenwhat in God's name can we do?" Galt pushed another sheet of paper across the desk. Pinchot glanced at it, then stared at Galt. "Are you right out of your mind? This is Blum's Opening Order for Sector Twelve." "Wrong. It's my order for opening Sector Twelve." "You can't do it. The people won't accept it. What will Gray Tomkin and the others say? They -- we -- risked our necks fighting this same crazy scheme." "We need more income, less dependence on imports. We have to extend our usable acreage and expand our mining operations. If you can think of another way to do if. I'll welcome the suggestion." Pinchot's face looked slack and grayish. "Is this what we took over -- the same old headaches, only worse?" "Did we really take over, Pinchot?" Galt asked tiredly. "Or did they con us into standing on our own feet?" Pinchot swore. "I agree," Galt said. Now let's get to work. I need five hundred names for Sector Twelve. Any suggestions?"  IF day, Freddy," Galt said as he sat down at the table. few of my admirers came by to give me a nice sendoff for the day. Colmar's twentieth anniversary of independence." Galt gave a snort that was not quite the laugh he had intended. "Don't take it so hard, Andy," Freddy said. He poured coffee, put a cup before Galt, sat down opposite him. "You've always done what was best in a tough situation." Galt looked at him sardonically as he sipped the bitter brew. "Funny how you assume it wasn't flowers they threw, Freddy. Anybody would think I wasn't popular." Freddy lifted his powerful shoulders. "You can't please 'em all," he said. "It seems I'm not pleasing any of them." "You're doing what you've got to do, Andy. The Colony's a marginal operation. It's not your fault that times are tough. These babies want it all now, that's all. They see loo much Interplan trideo, they've got ideas about how life ought to be fat and soft. They've got to face up to facts sometime. Colmar's a poor world. We just can't afford a three-hour day and welfare caviar." "Try telling that to some Econ (Continued from page #) graduate doing his time in the labor pool." "I know; so they gripe. What about it? If they'd been here back in the old days they'd have had something to gripe about. Do they ever think about what the first people here had to face up to, seventy years ago?" "Of course not," Galt said. "Why should they? These aren't the old days. This is now. And they're young. They want to live today, not some time in the next century. I can't blame 'em." "Sure -- and so did your grandad want to live -- and mine. That's why they came out here -- to nothing. To make something of it -- of a dead world -- something that hadn't existed before. They had no guarantees, no route back. They had to whip Colmar or die -- and plenty of them died." "Ancient history, Freddy. Today they know there's something better than hard work and rationing. They want it. And Freddy, so do I -- " "But you're not whining for it -- and one day it'll happen -- you're working for it like they did back then. It must have been a frightening thing, Andy, when they unloaded from the freighters and looked around and saw a dead world, not even a blade of grass. In seventy years we've turned it into a place where a man can live -- but not without effort. Let 'em gripe, Andy -- just so they piir in their time like everybody else -- like you did." "Involuntary servitude. 'Tyranny' is what they call it." Freddy snorted. "So? What are you supposed to do, back down because they call you dirty names? You know what's got to be done, Andy. You're doing it. It takes guts. You got 'em. More coffee?" "No, thanks. I might as well go on down to the office. Maybe we'll beat the rock-throwers for a change." "If it was me," Fxeddy said in the :ar, "I'd stay home and to hell with 'em. Let 'em see how things go after a few days with nobody making the decisions. They're complaining now: let 'em see how it'd be if you. weren't on the job to untangle the knots -- " "Don't get carried away, Freddy. Any competent administrative type could do the same job." "Maybe," Freddy said. "It's not seeing what you have to do that's tough; it's doing it when the mob is yelling for your head. You could be the most popular man on Colmar tomorrow if you'd give in." "And we'd be bankrupt the day after. Sure, Freddy. But those are just facts; they don't have any appeal to the emotions." the administrator's car swung in through the open gates. In his office, Galt attacked a stack of priority applications: fifty tons of fabricated steel sections for Shaft # # versus sixty tons of the same urgently needed for the extension to the loading docks; four loads of feeder fuel in stock to be allocated among nine agencies, all yelling for immediate action; computer components on order#or six months by Supply, demanded by Routing to prevent imminent shutdown of the entire NW range... Galt looked up at a sharp rap at the door. Timmins, the executive officer, poked his head in. Through the open door Galt could hear sounds of an altercation. "Another delegation to see you," Timmins said. Galt rose and went out into the corridor. From below came voices raised in anger, other voices replying. Feet clattered on the stairs. A disheveled young man in maintenance grays appeared, Freddy close behind him. "Hold it, Freddy," Galt said. Both men stopped. "Let him come up." "Chief, he might be armed -- " Timmins said quickly, but Galt brushed that aside. "You want to see me?" he asked the inturder. "That's right," the man in gray IF said defiantly. He brushed back his hair, straightened his jacket. "We're citizens; we've got a right to be heard." "Who's 'we?' " "The Party. ' The young man said it flatly, as if inviting challenge. "Come along to the office," Galt said. "Frisk them first," he heard Timmins say as he turned away. There were five people in the delegation, three men, two women, ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-five, Galt estimated. He knew them all by sight, two by name -- not a difficult feat in a population of thirty thousand. One of the women -- a plump, pretty girl in nurse's green -- stepped forward and offered Galt a folded paper. Timmins, read it over his shoulder. "The same old refrain," the exec said. "Improved public transport, more entertainment facilities, shorter hours. It's nonsense -- " "It's not nonsense to us," the girl said sharply. "Or to me either, Miss Dolph," Galt said. "I'd like to lead an easier life myself. Unfortunately, we can't afford it -- not yet." "You've got yours," the man in gray said. "Official mansion, official car, the best of everything -- " "Look here," Timmins started, but Galt waved a hand to silence him. "Let's keep it factual -- Jonas, isn't it? My official residence is a standard Class Vb unit; I get the same food, clothing, and power ration as anyone else. As you know. As for the car, I used to walk -- until the rock density got a bit high." "If you were doing your Job the way you ought to, nobody would be throwing things," Jonas snapped. "I've got an idea Freddy was at the point of bruising you a bit when I happened along. Does that mean you had it coming to you?" "He's a hired goon -- that's different." "What is it you expect me to do, Jonas, Miss Dolph?" "Ease the restrictions on life," the girl said promptly. "Let people enjoy living while they can. Shorten the work day, give us some leisure time activities and facilities, end rationing, increase consumer imports." G alt nodded. "Anything else?" "Plenty morej' Jonas said. "End the labor draft. Raise pay, right across the board. Lift the offworld travel restrictions, bring in more outsystem entertainers." "For what it cost to open this new Sector," another of the delegation spoke up, a small, timidlooking man with a bad complexion, "we could have founded a program of concert artists that would have given us some contact with the cultural life of the Arm' "Sector Nineteen gives us a marine agricultural facility," Galt said mildly. "In twenty years it may be our biggest food producer. We may be able to shorten the time to self-support capability by three decades -- " "We know all the propaganda lines' Jonas said. "We've heard all that before." "Then what are you doing here?" Galt snapped. That's easy, Mr. Administrator," Jonas said with a sneer. "We don't believe the official line." "The records are open to the public," Galt said. "They can be faked, too." "Why?" Galt shot back. "To delude the public." "Why should I want to delude the public?" "For obvious reasons -- " "Name them," Galt snapped. "All right. To justify your program of overwork and underpay, long hours and no recreation, luxury for the few at the cost of slavery for the many -- " "What luxury?" Galt cut in sharply. "We've already covered that particular allegation. It's nonsense and you know itand so does everybody in this room." "Look, chief, this has gone far cut him off. "You're here charging me and the rest of the administration with a deep, dark plot -- " "You're depriving the people of their basic rights," Jonas shouted. "You name one right you're being deprived of, Jonas, and I'll personally see that you get a lifetime pension," Galt said. "All right -- the right to a reasonable amount of leisure time, for openers. The eight-hour day went out with coal-fired ground cars." "What would you call a reasonable amount of leisure time?" "Time enough to do a few things. To have hobbies, play a musical instrument, visit your Triends -- " "Wrong, Mr. Jonas. That's nice, maybe, but it's not reasonable. Reasonable means what's physically possible. We have just so much manpower," he went on, raising his voice as Jonas tried to cut in. "We have to allocate that manpower in such a way as to keep industrial operations going at the rate required to produce enough exportable output to keep the economy afloat. You want more imported trideos and traveling art shows? Fine. Then we'll have to work longer hours, not shorter." "Official bullwash," Jonas spat out the words like a bite of wormy apple. "As I said, the records are pubIF lie. Look at them or not, suit yourself. But don't come bursting in here again with your proposals for instant utopia until you've done your homework." "That's what I thought we'd get," one of the women said in a shrill, nervous voice. "A brushoff. Excuses. We should have known better than to waste our time." She glared at Galt with eyes as sharp as stakes. "I welcome constructive suggestions," Galt said, meeting her gaze steadily. "Come back when you have one." "We won't be back," Jonas said. "We're through talking." They departed, slamming doors,Galt asked Timmins when silence had fallen again. "Painfully. Except that there were only fifty of us -- " "Forty-two," Galt corrected. " -- and this time half the population is agitating. No one tried to explain to us; if they had, we might even have listened." "Don't count on it. We wanted change -- any change. We got it." "And all the grief that went with it. But these people today won't listen. They remember when we threw BuCol out; Pinchot and a few others were promising them the world. Twenty years later they're still on short rations. They're unhappy. And they mean business, Andy. This isn't just a little band of soreheads -- " "I know all that, Ben. Are you suggesting I should promise them pie in the sky? What happens when they discover it isn't there?" Timmons looked solemn. "Andy, for this generation -- and for a lot of people who ought to know better -- you symbolize everything that's wrong with life. By removing you, you see, they can remove their problems -- they think." "You're suggesting I quit while I'm ahead?" "I'm suggesting you quit while you're alive, damn it!" "And do what? Sit back and watch Colmar die?" "You've had offers -- three in the last six months that I know of; I wrote the answers turning them down. You could still take that post at Yale, lecturing on problems of the frontier economy -- " "And read in the fax about how the Colmar experiment failed. Ben, have you ever considered what would happen if we had to throw in the towel and invite BuCol back in? They'd close the colony down, evacuate us to Terra -- to beehive housing, synthetic rations -- " "I know. It's unthinkable. And dammit, Colmar can make it! We have the minerals, the seas -- a whole world to exploit!" Timmins smacked his fist into his palm. "If they could just see it! Just give us time!" "Bringing life to a dead world is a big undertaking, Ben. Maybe too big. Maybe we havn't got what it takes. But I have to stay and do what I can -- for as long as I can." "And be a martyr," Timmins said grimly. "There's nothing noble about it," Galt said. "This is my homeworld. I couldn't survive on Terra either. I'm fighting for my life; the only life I know." "Then don't throw it away. Let me recruit an escort for you. I can from Aldo -- " "Negative, Ben. Importing foreign gun-handlers to protect me from the people that voted me in would be the end." "Then what in God's name are you going to do?" "Play it by ear -- and hope Sector Nineteen starts paying off in time." "Comes up with a miracle, you mean." "I'd accept a miracle right now," Galt said wearily, "if it could be arranged." T WO weeks later Timmins laid a paper on Galt's desk. It had been a time of rising tensions and near-riots, broken glass -- and at least one assassination attempt which had put Freddy in the hospitol with third-degree laser burns. "Weinberg, out at Thirteen," Timmins said. "I thought you ought to see it." The executive officer's face was haggard with lost sleep. Galt scanned the paper. "Livestock? Chickens? What the devil's he doing out there, starting a zoo?" "Experimental animals," Timmins pointed out. "He wants to run some kind of tests on them." Galt rubbed his eyes. "He knows we're on the shortest meat ration since Colonization," he said wearily. "I'm surprised at Weinberg. Tell him no. Remind him he's out there to supplement our protein supply, not deplete it. And ask him what he's doing about the slimemould contamination problem he's been reporting on." Timmins nodded and turned to go. Galt stopped him before he reached the door. "Wait a minute, Ben. Disregard that last outburst. I'm too damn tired to think straight. If Dick Weinberg thinks he needs a flock of goats, damn it, he probably needs a flock of goats. Set it up--triple -- A priority." Timmins nodded again, more brightly. "And tell them to save a seat on the flier for me," Galt added. "I'm going out and see what he's up to." Timmins frowned. "That might not be a good idea, Andy. There IF was rioting at the port this afternoon and -- " "Set it up' Galt snapped, then grimaced. "I'm sorry, Ben. Nerves. Just get me on the flier. I'll ride out under a stack of old burlap bags if you say so." "I'll set it up," Timmins said tonelessly. T he view from the cargo flier was a monotonous vista of eroded ridges, gullied plains, of rock, gravel and sand, stretching across tlie endless miles. After the narrow green belt of the capital had been passed -- and its surrounding five-mile farm strip -- forty miles of undeveloped desert intervened before the dull green of a bioadapted valley appeared, far off to the west. Another seventy-five miles of arid, lifeless badlands unrolled beneath the flier; then ahead the curve of the coast and the blackblue sea beyond. They were within five miles of the Experimental Station before Galt could make out the fragile tracings of irrigation ditches, the patterns of agriformed fields, the vivid green specs that were transplanted trees shading a straggle of buildings. Offshore of the station, Galt noted, the lifeless sea was stained a dark umber. The flier landed on the scraped rectangle behind the sprawling, aluminum-and-white station. A chill wind blew sand across the open ground to ping against the flier's sides with a restless whispering. Weinberg was there to meet Galt, a sturdily built, red-haired man with big solemn eyes and a wide, downcurving mouth that belied his brisk optimism of manner. "Glad to see you, Mr. Administrator -- you bring my goats and birds and stuff?" he said, pumping Galt's hand. "Come on out of this damned wind." The marine ecologist's office, laboratory and living quarters comprised a single large untidy room with stone countertops, a clutter of glassware, a desk heaped with papers, a cot, a table with a hot-plate and dirty dishes. "Here, sit down, Andy, how about a cup of coffee and a slice of cake?" "Dick, what's this about animal experiments? I understand we're going to add seafood to our diet -- " "Sure, sure. I'll tell you all about it. How' re things in the city? I hear they're giving you a hard time, throwing rocks, the works." "Things aren't good. Ben Timmins says all we need is a small miracle from you to solve everything. You don't happen to have one in stock, do you?" "A small miracle, the man says," Weinberg said cheerfully, rattling cups. He poured, dumped things on a tray, brought it over. Galt took the cup and sipped, accepted the small plate with the slice of yellow-brown cake. "Where do you get coffee?" he barked."I thought the last stocks of luxury imports went last New Year's." "Try the cake. It's not too sweet." Galt took a bite; it tasted good. He hadn't realized how hungry he was; but then he hadn't eaten inhow many hours? "Like it?" Weinberg looked as expectant as a new bride serving her first meal. "It's fine, Dick. But -- " says," Weinberg said, rubbing his hands together. "Come this way, Andy. I want to show you something." The ecologist led the way through a long room where half a dozen green-smocked technicians worked over complicated constructions of glass tubing and containers of bubbling liquids. A sharp, burnt-toast odor filled the air. At the rear of the station Galt and Weinberg emerged on a sloping shelf of beach that led down to the waterline. Masses of dull brown scum lay in long windrows there. The surface of the sea was a dark brown, oily-looking, with sluggish swells. "You remember the problem I reported I was having with the slime formation," Weinberg said. "I see it hasn't improved any," Galt said. "I hope it's not interfering seriously with your work." "Fact is, Andy, I've about dropped everything to work on it. I think I've identified it as a mutated Fuligo Septica, probably introduced on some imperfectly sterilized glassware from Terra. We tried high-pressure steam first, but -- " "Just a minute, Dick. Dropped everything?" Galt's voice was harsh. "Maybe I haven't succeeded in making it clear that the mission of finding food supplements for the Colmarian diet is absolute top priority -- " Weinberg looked reproachfully at Galt. "Mr. Administrator, may I make my presentation?" His wide mouth quivered, the corners turning upward in spite of his obvious effort to hold them down. "What the devil are you grinning at?" "How did you like the coffee?" "Drinkable," Galt snapped. "What -- " "It's made from the sporangia phase; the stalks, you understand, desiccated, ground, and roasted." "You made that coffee out of -- this?" Galt prodded a mass of crusted brown flakes with his toe. "Uh-huh. The cake was made from the spores, with an admixIF tured of piasmodium, plus a sweetner." "Slime cake?" Galt said. "Of course all this required a certain amount of processing. We're running some ideas in glass, looking for shortcuts -- for commercial quantity production, you understand. But with a little drying and compressing, we get what, unless I flunked Chem #, is the best all-around livestock feed going." He took from his pocket a hard, dull-shiny, purple-brown cake the size of a bar of soap. "Hence the goats," he said. "And the chickens." Galt stood as if stricken. "But -- if this is true -- " He took a deep breath and became brisk. "Fine. One miracle to order -- " His voice broke and he cackled in glee. "Dick, you sneaky bastard, you've just saved a world, damn your hide!" "All in a day's work, Mr. Administrator -- " Weinberg, grinning, was gazing past Galt toward the open desert to the west. "Well, more visitors," he said. "Word must have leaked out -- " G alt turned; a dust cloud was boiling toward them, raised by a speeding vehicle. The car swung past the station, slid to a halt near the storage sheds and was immediately veiled by the dust of its own passage. "That looks like one of my maintenence carts," Galt said. "What -- " There was a shout. A man at the lab door was waving. "Call for you, Mr. Administrator. Sounds urgent." Galt started toward the building, Weinberg behind him. Three men emerged from the dust cloud now blowing away from the car; they broke into a run on a course that would intercept Galt. Something bright flashed in the hand of the leader; the flat sound of a gun cut the air. Galt threw himself down. The man in the doorway started out; there was a second shot and the technician halted, turned, fell sideways. Galt looked up to see the second of the new arrivals knock the gunner's arm aside as he fired a third time, the slug whining past Galt's face. -- alive," he heard. "We can always kill him later if it works out that way." Galt got to his feet. Weinberg went to the man who had been shot, squatted beside him, ignoring an angry command from the man with the gun. He looked up, his face pale and bleak. "Pat's dead," he said to no one in particular. The third man stood with his two fellows, all three looking dusty and windblown, a bit uncertain now. The wind whined restlessly. "You, Galt, over here," the gunner said. "You -- " addressing Weinberg -- " stay out of the way and you won't get hurt." Galt walked over to the trio. "Proud of yourself, Jonas?" Jonas swore and swung at Galt, knocked him down. "Any guns inside?" Jonas called to Weinberg. "No.' "If you're lying I'll kill you. Get the stuff," he, said to his companions. "I don't want a stick left of this place to salvage." The two went to the car, brought out packages Galt recognized as standard melt charges. They hurried toward the entrance to the station, went past the corpse sprawled on the sand, disappeared inside. An instant later there were screams; steam boiled from the entrance. A man ran out, tatters of what looked like wet gauze flapping from his face. He stumbled and went down, lay thrashing. Galt, still on the ground, swung his legs, brought Jonas down on top of him. The younger man cursed and tried to bring the gun to bear; Galt caught his wrist, felt the superior strength of the other inexorably overcoming his resistance. Suddenly Jonas was thrown clear. Weinberg stood over Galt, breathing hard. Jonas came to his knees and Weinberg swung his foot in a short, sharp kick that snapped the assassin's head back. He sank down on his face in the sand. Weinberg helped Galt to his feet; his knee was painfully wrenched. He picked up the gun dropped by Jonas. Men were coming out of the station, one still holding the live steam hose. "There's bad trouble back in the city," one of the men told Galt. "It was Mr. Timmins on the box. He said you'd better get back right away." T he hour was near dusk when the copter dropper Galt directly on the grounds of Admin House, bypassing the noisy crowd surrounding the building. Timmins met him, looking grim. "This isn't just the usual unrest, Andy," he said, "it's a concerted uprising. Mobs at the port, the Power Complex -- " he broke off. "What happened to you?" "I've had a sample. A demolition team hit the Marine Experimental Station, killed Pat Rogan. Weinberg is holding our old acquaintance Jonas and a couple of others." Timmins swore with feeling. "They tried to fire the Comm Center about an hour ago. We saved it by the skin of our teeth. There are enough citizens on our side to make it a standoff so far; but killing a man -- " "Let's get inside, Ben; I want a complete status report." Timmins finished his account twenty minutes later. IF "That's about it. The best estimate is three hundred activists, another ten thousand going along for the ride, ready to jump either way. That's damn near half the population. Opposed to them, we've got a hundred organized militia with non-lethal weapons and maybe two thousand volunteers with axe-handles and chair legs." "Get some cots set up, Ben. It's going to be a long night," "What do you plan to do, Andy?" "Wait. Maybe by morning they'll have cooled down enough to talk sense to. I have some news for them." He outlined the gist of Weinberg's discovery. "But this is what we've been waiting for -- even praying for at odd moments," Timmins said, running his fingers through his thinning hair. "Good lord, Andy -- this is the best news you could have brought -- " "But nobody out there's listening tonight. Relax, Ben. So far we're holding our own. Maybe this will tip it our way." All through the night there were reports of fires, quickly quenched, roaming bands of slogan-shouting looters, clashes between vigilantes and demonstrators which petered out indecisively. The hours passed. Galt dozed. Pale light was filtering through the windows when he was awakened by a man who burst into the office, without the formality of knocking. "They've fired the library," he said. "A crowd of them got inside the kindergarten, too. Shall we try to hold it?" "Let it go," Timmins snapped. "We've got to concentrate on essential installations." He broke off. "Sorry, Andy. It's your decision, of course:" "I agree. What are they really after, Ben What's their prime target?" "What do you think?" Timmins snapped. "Admin House. If they get in here -- " near distance punctuated the remark. Objects rattled on the desk. Somewhere there was a sound of breaking glass. Galt whirled to the window. Smoke was billowing from a point near the main gate, which was twisted off its mountings. Men came streaming through the opening in a ragged spearhead. "Where are our, militiamen?" Timmins yelled and left the room at a run. Shouts sounded from the downstairs, accompanied by heavy thuddings. Galt arrived in the foyer to find a dozen volunteer defenders, all of them smokesmudged and bleeding from small cuts and abrasions, grouped behind the massively barred doors. "They're starting to get rough," one of the men called. "They've got guns -- a dozen of them anyway. God only knows where they got them. Nobody killed yet far as I know, but that explosion they set off -- " The pounding at the heavy doors ceased abruptly. Voices could be heard beyond the heavy panels, shouting over the rumble of crowd noises. "We're in a hopeless position," a man said. "We've done all we could -- these hoodlums mean business. I say let's get out while we can." "Dammit, you can't run away now -- " Timmins began. "Go ahead, Jacobs," Galt cut in, "Anybody who wants to leave now, make it fast, Thanlcs for your help," All but two of the volunteers departed hastily, some silently, some with apologies, A chant had started up outside the doors, "What the devil are they shouting?" Timmins said. "Give -- us -- Galt!" the chant came through clearly in a momentary lull in the background roar. "Give -- us -- Galt" "The damned murderous swine," Timmins cried. "Andy, you've got to get out. They want a scapegoat, somebody to blame and you're elected," Galt shook his head; he went up the stairs to the landing. From the narrow window there he could see the drama spread out before him: the ruined gate, the ragged crowd of rebels fanning out from it, forming a loose arc fifty feet from the steps; the packed mob beyond the walls, craning for a better look. "Like ghouls, watching a beheading," Timmins said beside him. "Don't the damn fools know if these anarchists get inside it's all over for Colmar?" "Don't blame them; they're just ordinary citizens caught in something outside their scope. They're waiting for leadership -- any leadership." Galt glanced at Timmins. "And if we can't give it to them, somebody else will." He "pointed to the tall man standing front and center, with a bandolier of cartridges slung over his shoulder, a heavy power rifle gripped in a brawny fist. "A malcontent named Brauer," Timmins said. "By God, if I had a gun -- " He looked at Galt, dropped his eyes to the pistol in Gault's belt. "Let me borrow that, Andy," he said in a low, intense voice. "I can drop him with one shot." Galt shook his head. "You know better than that, Ben." this -- I say it's justified." "I'd probably agree with you -- if is, we'd be giving them a martyr -- shot from ambush. I think I know which way the crowd would go then." He turned and IF went back down the stairs. "'Open it up," he said to the two men waiting beside the big doors. "Mr. Administrator, you can't surrender to that mob," one of the men blurted. "They'll skin you alive. That's all they want." "Who's surrendering? Get that door open." men withdrew the locking bars, swung the portals wide. A sound went up from the crowd as Galt stepped out on the portico; it faded quickly as the big man named Brauer stepped forward. He stood for a moment, fingering the gun in his hands; then he turned and called over his shoulder: "Let's go; the rats are throwing in their hand." He started forward, walking with a defiant swagger, all eyes on him. Those directly behind him followed; the crowd edged forward, sliding silently through the gate, spreading out. Brauer came on. When he was six feet away, Galt flipped back his jacket to expose the pistol thrust into his belt, dropped his hand to the butt. Brauer stopped dead. A number of expressions crossed his face; surprise, anger, determination. His eyes narrowed. The rifle in his hands started to come up. "Throw that gun down or I'll put a bullet between your eyes, Brauer," Galt said quietly. Brauer froze. He glanced at Galt's face, at his chin, his belt buckle. "You crazy, Galt? he asked "Get out of my way -- " "Five seconds," Galt said. "You want to get killed?" Brauer burst out. "Four," Galt said. "Three. Two -- " With an oath, Brauer threw down the gun. A murmur went up from the crowd. A man behind Brauer started forward. "Get back in line," Galt snapped. The man halted. "Drop the bandolier, Brauer," Galt ordered. Brauer complied. He looked up at Galt, his face slowly turning red. "Come inside," Galt said. "I want to talk to you." The big'man stood fast. "Move, I told you!" Galt snapped. Brauer attempted a cocky smile; it became a sickly grimace. He went up the steps. Galt followed him inside. When he glanced back from the door, the crowd was already melting away. "You can't get away with this," Brauer was saying. "We don't have to stand for this -- " "I think you will," Galt said. "We've got rights!" Brauer yelled. "The power belongs to the people!" "That's right," Galt said. "I agree you're under no obligation to support the government just because it's there." "Well, then -- " Brauer started. "Certainly, you have a right to revolt," Galt went on. "But that dosn't mean I'm under any obligation to let you get away with it."   Timmins said an hour later, after the militia had reported all quiet in the city, "is why you let him get so close before you stopped him." "Simple," Galt said. "I couldn't hit the wide side of a warehouse with a pistol unless the muzzle was touching it." He smiled. "Brauer made the same mistake in judgment Blum did -- they both let me get too close. And when we started talking -- I had the better argument. Brauer agreed he would have made a lousy administrator." He yawned. "Tomorrow we'll announce Weinberg's discovery -- and a new plan for Colmar's economy."  on. Whenever the future becomes the present -- as it must do constantly -- we are not prepared to cope with it. A hundred years ago there was no great problem. A man who had all his thoughts frozen at the # level was not going to be profoundly shocked by anything impinging on his daily life for the rest of the century. Oh, he saw an occasional automobile and heard that the Wrights had learned to build a machine that flew. But such things came into the world slowly and did not put too great demands on him. For him the future never really arrived; he lived in a sort of eternal present, where the verities were indeed fixed. Today, the future has been with us for a quarter of a century. The man who returned from World ( Continued from page #) War II was faced with radical changes. Television came into his home; while it entertained, it also presented a whole world to him, much of which stubbornly refused to accept his exact values. The atom bomb had been exploded and racial extinction, was now possible -- as well as injury to his children from fallout. Those dratted scientific ideas had become part of his mental environment -- and of his taxes. And today, all his fixed values are being shaken to tatters. The younger generation -- grown in a present that vanishes from them as they learn it, but a present thirty years from Mr. Establishment's world, or thirty years in his mental future -- all think and talk in ways that world finds nearly impossible to follow. In another twenty years the future may well have wrenched this younger generation even more severely. The changes from their # conditioning are already major. We now face such phenomena as pollution, for which nothing in their books can offer an answer. They generally are already falling back on a failure to adapt that takes the form of demanding their hopeless elders do something about it. And they are confronted with a world that is already grossly overpopulated for a technical age; that was supposed to be a problem for the year #, but it turned out it was for the year #! Man is a reasonably adaptive animal. But the demands for adaptation are no longer reasonable, as most people see them. With the accelerating rate of change a human being today (who should reevaluate everything he knows about living at least once a decade) is going to face the need to rethink all his values and solutions at least once a year. That requirement of annual change is too severe a demand for the average homo sapiens to face. Even now, the need for change has resulted in severe shock reaction that manifests itself in many of the social ills of our time. Toffler goes on to document his case and to examine what we must expect during the rest of this century. Ke considers the inability of our institutions to deal with the problems and tries to explore what must be done to let us meet the test of survival. It is an important and valuable book, well worth careful reading. Yet the one solution that seems to have worked to some extent so far is hardly covered, for rather obvious reasons. And that solution, it seems to me, may be the long-range reading of science fiction! At least, from my own observations, the steady readers of our literature seem to be far readier to cope with a changing future than most other people and I find very little real future shock among my friends in the field. Science fiction, after all, does not deal with the future (as Frederik Pohl has pointed out repeatedly). It deals with any and every future. Each major story in the field sets up a different future in many ways and looks for solutions to meet the conditions in that future. As readers, we spend our time playing a constant game of fairy chess, where the rules change from game to game and often within the game. The average man doesn't really believe there is a future -- just an eternal present through which he will drift to his end. But science fiction readers have often become more future-oriented than presentadjusted. (That has its troubles, too, but apparently less severe ones.) And since they deal in possible futures, rather than the seemingly probable one, they are quite accustomed to having to reorient themselves every time they sit down to look at the future. In a world of unfixed and changing values the man who has made a game of thinking outside the seeming values of his present is clearly the mam who will find any radical alteration far less shocking. Incidentally, that would seem to indicate that those who want science fiction to deal with present problems and situations are totally wrong; there aren't going to be any present problems and situations -- by the time tomorrow gets here, the future will have jumped ten tomorrows ahead and be in the past. It may be that the less science fiction concerns itself with the real world (as we know it), the more useful it will be. case -- one of the "must" books is Philip Jose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go (Putnam's Sons, #). This deals with a future which almost certainly isn't going to happen, but one in which a lot of the rigid values are tossed aside for a logic inherent in the story, yet just out of the reader's full comprehension. It sounds wild, and it is; but it's an excellent exercise in building mental flexibility, as well as a pleasure to read. This is the first of a series which will deal with the "Riverworld." Much of this book was run in the form of novelettes in "previously, but it is now reshaped into a novel, and well worth reading in its entirety. Riverworld is apparently some kind of artificial planet designed to accommodate an Ouriborus river that winds back and forth through multiple valleys, to meet itself and resume its journey. And to this world, all the human beings who have ever died -- from the first Eanthropus to the men who died when the race was exterminated -- are returned to life. They are partly clumped by similarity of era and area, but about # are randomized, so that dawnmen and even aliens may be mixed with our current types. They don't know how or why all this has happened. It fits no established religious pattern. And since they are dumped onto this world with no artifacts normal to them, it fits directly almost no social pattern. They are given a source of food -- and drugs for those who want -- so that this is a sort of welfare world; but beyond that minimum they have almost nothing. In addition they find that death IF has not only been defeated, but has been repealed. Oh, a man can be killed, with all the suffering of normal death. On this world, where everything seems to be returning to tribal moralities, there is a lot of the ancient bloody war and killing from the history of man. But shortly after a man dies, he appears again somewhere along the river. He may die a hundred times or more and still go on. It's a wild and lovely idea, filled with impossibilities that only Farmer would have the courage to try to write. Any other writer I know, if he were clever enough to think of the basic idea, would have abandoned it as too big and too shapeless to turn into a novel. But for Farmer it works. In fact, it worked long ago when he was just beginning as a writer. This was a story that he must have written around #. It was then a single, huge novel. He offered it in a prize contest one of the fanpublishing groups was running and it won. Then, for complicated reasons, it was never published nor did Farmer collect the prize to which he was entitled. But like the characters in his novel, the story was killed only to appear again in another situation. It was apparently too long for serialization. But eventually Farmer reworked it into a series of novelettes, so that part of it came out in magazine form, considerably altered from the original. How much alteration that entailed, I do not know. I was once given the original form to deliver to the office in New York. So, for a brief period, I saw the early form of the novel; but there wasn't time enough even to skim it. That is something I greatly regret. Had I known that the manuscript was available. I'd have dropped everything to read it, but the first version had to pass through my hands unread, damn the luck. I gather that the series now beginning to appear from Putnam's is a further reworking. This volume is basically the odyssey of Richard Burton after his revival on Riverworld. In that sense it forms a complete story, though much of the deeper thread behind it all remains uncovered. I dislike being left up in the air, but at least history is being presented fairly. Putnam has announced it as the first of the group, and it reaches a resolution of Burton's development, without introducing any artificial false ending or leaving us on a cliffhanger. And maybe I'm just so glad to see it appearing that I'm kinder to this example of split-up publishing than I might otherwise be. The riddle of how and why is a constant tantalizer in the book. Burton has reason -- and apparently for some reason, at that -- to know that there are sentient beings behind it all. They have deliberately created Riverworld and managed to revive everyone who lived. He cannot know why they are doing all this. He knows also that they have some kind of spies among the revived humans. One of them apparently is a traitor to the others, which is why Burton was allowed to learn more of the behind-the-scenes activity than the others. But beyond trying to reach the head (or foot, since they are the same) of the river where the planners seem to have their secret headquarters, he can do nothing but attempt in his own logical way to avoid their discovering him. It's a complicated setup. Until the books are filially all published I can't be sure how well the ramifications are worked out. But the promise behind the premise is wonderful. And even if the end should turn out not quite to justify the means, the means are good enough for me to settle for them. There is a weakness in the book, of course, as there is to almost any work that involves so difficult a concept. The principal one seems to me to be the use of known characters. We have Richard Burton, who was truly a fantastic human being in real life; he was the translator of the Arabian Nights and a great adventurer. We also have Hermann Goering and the woman for whom Alice in Wonderland was written. She comes through very well, but the historicity of the others bothers me in reading their fictional life here. Button, as fiction, makes a fine hero for the book; but I find him overshadowed by references to what seems to me a larger reality. Goering has all his weaknesses -- but again, the strengths and oddly distorted but real Junker code of the historical figure do not quite fit this picture. Farmer's research is sound -- but the real figures just don't seem capable of being fitted well into this box. The wholly imaginary ones always seem to come off better. T he Daleth Effect, by Harry Harrison (Berkley, #) is a totally different type of book. Here the means are standard -- the end seems to be everything. The author uses a method of getting space travel without the vast sums possible only to a major nation to set up his theme: what man will do with his ability. To me, this is a curious book; it kept irritating me because it recalled another I had read some time previously. This was a story by Arthur Sellings about a whacky professor who found a means to get cheap space flight and then had to run from pillar to post to convince the world -- then to esIF cape the world and to end up giving Israel the first successful use of his discovery. Harrison's book begins as if he'd also read the Sellings story and then decided to be as severely logical and honest about the real consequences as possibhi. I'm not suggesting that Harrison copied anything; far from it. He has simply taken a similar basic idea and then gone beyond it, very well indeed. In this book the inventor developed a vaguely similar effect to cheapen space flight in Israel, but felt that country too much involved in its own political struggle, to make proper use of his discovery. He takes it to Denmark -- only to find that politics and the struggle for power follow wherever power may lodge. This is a story of the intrigue behind a major discovery, as well as the story of what adventures and developments may come from a basic discovery. And in following through, Harrison's logic is severe and honest. It isn't always a pleasant book. The adventure part of it lives up to all of Harrison's proven ability to do a fine story of this kind. But there is little of the release from tension in the end, and almost none of the humor that he sometimes handles so well. This isn't that kind of a story. This definitely isn't "escape" fiction, unless you want to escape into the world that is too much with us. But it does give us another view of our time and place and a further example of what future shock really can accomplish. It's also a good book -- excellent in its own terms, which is all we can ask. T he Leaves of Time, by Neal Barrett, Jr. (Lancer, #) is unfortunately far less than it should be in terms of the author's previously demonstrated ability. The work shows us another and interesting type of future, but then seems to go into some kind of shock within itself and turn its back on the reality it has begun to explore. Basically, a man from a world of possibilities somewhat like those on our own is thrown into another, differently oriented world. On his world, aliens who can control men and simulate real humans have virtually taken over the planet; his jump from world to world is caused by a last-ditch battle -- and one alien is thrown across with him. His problem is that the alien immediately begins trying to take over the new world. (Aliens can fission, thus one can populate a planet in time.) He finds he likes the new world; he feels responsible and sets out to warn the new world and try to save it. The plot so far is all right; but unfortunately the really good part of this novel is the promise at the beginning. Here we meet our first inhabitant in the form of a girl who can know at once when a man is telling the truth. The probabilityworld involved has developed a philosophy that gives the students quite remarkable powers, and we're led to expect that the whole world will react differently to the alien, the Gorgon. Those bits of what this world and its people might be like are fascinating. It's a world I'd like to know more about. Then nothing really comes of it. We see even more petty political folderol here than on a world without the philosophy. We see people who can know truth "'from falsehood at once being as silly as anyone else. We see the great leader of the philosophy being duped like anyone else. In fact, we're told the world is different from ours -- but we're shown quite the reverse, while the story degenerates into a who-is-the-alien thing, to which the answer is patently obvious -- so patently that we can only assume the great students of the philosophy are no better than the worst among us. It's a pity, because there was a kernel here that showed great promise. It's still not a bad book, but unfortunately it isn't the good one it could be. And it shows many appalling examples of the bad editing always totally inexcusable but which I've seen too often. In the top paragraph of page #, for instance, we're told that "... she intended the gift for he and Tai... with both he and Tai expected for dinner. Yes, Virginia, English does have an accusative case for its pronouns! After a preposition, the object of that preposition always takes the accusative, even when coupled with a noun. If the writer wrote it wrong, any competent editor would change it. After all, there is such a thing as reader shock, too. And I'm shocked when I find such gaucheries in the basic use of the one tool writers and editors must use well -- the English language. Maybe our academic minds should stop worrying about the purpose of fiction and the evils of "'escape literature"; they might better spend it trying to instil elementary respect for the language, since that does have a real and evident purpose. It's also one area where the future won't bring too many Jarring new discoveries to shock them -- unless they let it degenerate too rapidly. Or has the language changed in a sudden new arrival of the future and am I unable to adapt to it quickly enough? Maybe I'm in future shovi , too, despite my reading of science fiction. Enough, I've got to consult Alvin Toffler again.# IF Top-Highf sdmncm fiction and fantasy from    Eight mind-bending tales conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, John Campbell, Jr. and Jack Vance. A#S #c Ten dazzling stories that explore the complex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. A#N #C A pair of scientists challenge the time barrier and fall into a horrible, mind-twisting trap. 'Rene Barfavel has feeling for the fantastic -- knows how to build a suspenseful story.'" Enter a terrifying world of tomorrow where perversity is encouraged and insanity is enforced -- a world whose beginnings are even now stirring! A#S #c Availablo wherever books ere sold or write: # Eoft # SfTMt, Now York, N.Y. #I # been an accident -- the ship would never have abandoned him intentionally. But knowing this was no way out of his predicament. By now the Star Wind would be many not anticipate any rescue from that direction. He was lucky to be alive. The ship had accelerated suddenly -- and without any prior warning or due regard for his safety -- and the spatial concussion had thrown him an enormous distance away from the rear Doppler turrets that had been the object of his routine inspection. He had tumbled through space for hundreds of miles before the miniature computer inside his cumbersome suit had managed to stabilize him in a safe orbit around the beautiful green world that turned underneath him, and when he recovered consciousness he felt sick and confused. His initial reaction was one of intense fear and a horror of what might become of him; but eventually his rigid training and functional discipline reasserted themselves and he found that he could contemplate the future with a cooler eye. He was surprised that his suit had survived the catastrophe. He fervently thanked the engineers who had designed and manufactured the monstrous and sometimes awkward exoskeleton and began to check out its functions. The small computer bank set immediately in front of his chest was operating smoothly enough -- otherwise he would still be tumbling head over heels through space instead of drifting in a stable orbit around the bright young world below. He cautiously moved his arms and legs and felt the enormous limbs of the suit respond and duplicate his movements; there were no signs of strain or delay in the mechanical operations of the suit. A few judicious bursts from the maneuvering jets convinced him that they, too, were functioning smoothly. He eased off the manual controls and allowed the computer to edge him back into orbit. He listened to it cluck contentedly to itself and considered his predicament. He disconnected most of the neural sensors from his body and tried to relax. There was ample room inside the suit for him to feel unencumbered; he could flex his limbs and move the upper half of his body quite freely within the restraining webs that cushioned his fragile body from external shocks and minor impacts. He had not yet begun to panic, but for some reason he could not pin down he felt cold. He shivered and felt afraid. There was no logical reason why he should feel such a physical chill: the insulation was working perfectly and his suit seemed to be in excellent shape. So far so good. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed isolation that brought about this sudden flutter of his pale flesh. He had never before felt so much alone, so unspeakably deserted. Gone was the warmth"and companionship of his unit. Now all he had for a friend was the forever wise and quietly clucking computer in his suit. "'All right, then, little lady," he sighed. "'Let's see if you can get me out of this mess -- " H e had enough air to last him for seven and a half hours, for several circuits of the world below. At the end of that time he would suffer a terrifying death; his suit would become a lonely coffin, orbiting until such time as it swung so low that the atmosphere claimed it and transformed it into fiery incandescence. Mattero's suit was only a standard maintainance unit, a smaller version of the enormous locomotive machines that could carry a man across hostile alien landscapes at considerable speed and protect him from atmospheres that could soon corrupt his pallid human flesh; it had very little to offer in the way of sophisticated survival gear. It had never been meant to move very far away from the immediate vicinity of the ship. A less intelligent spaceman would have remained in orbit until his small reserve of air gave out, hoping with his last breath that the Star Wind would arrive back in time to save him; but Mattaro knew that no ship could ever contemplate the expenditure of time and energy that would be required if it were to turn around and come back to locate a solitary, mislaid crewman. Mattaro belonged to Maintainance -- he was a cog among cogs -- and while no one could ever openly be considered expendable, the loss of one small unit could be readily absorbed. Whatever urgent business had spurred the Star Wind hastily to complete its survey of the colonial world below and move off without first making sure that her hull was clear of maintainance units, would also guarantee that the ship could hardly turn back and come looking for him, always assuming that his disappearance had been registered with the Master Control. IF Equally, a less intelligent spaceman might have lacked sufficient courage to embark upon the desperate gamble which Mattarp, with his computer's ready agreement, had decided to commit himself. Mattaro was logical enough to realize that his only chance lay in trying to reach the world below. The computer had decided that, with a good measure of luck, he might make a safe landing on one of the wide continents that turned underneath his monstrous unmoving feet. Enough power was left in his suit batteries to permit a reasonably fast descent -- no point in endangering his life any further by taking it leisurely and using up more of his vital oxygen than was necessary. Once he was safely down he would need every ounce of reserve air that he could manage so that he might reach some habitation before it finally gave out. The computer would brake his fall at the very last minute. It would send a powerful surge of energy from the batteries into the gray coils wrapped around his exowaist and quickly nullify the planet's attraction. Mattaro knew that this entailed great risk, but he believed that with judicious conversation of his available power he just might make a safe landing and the computer endorsed his decision. So, if the suit nursed him down and saved most of its remaining energy for a single, powerful blast of repulsion at the very end of his fall -- he just might come out of this alive. The alternative was unthinkable. Better a quick, fiery death than a slow orbit into insanity. At least this way he could retain some semblence of dignity, up to and including the very end he failed to accomplish the desired descent. He had no idea how he would make out once he was on the ground. He knew that this world was inhabited, that the Star Wind had been locked in orbit for several days while its scientists studied the visible results of a seeding program which his people had instigated many centuries earlier; but beyond this he knew nothing. Mattaro was a specialist conversant with every facet of his trade -- and with very little else. Such was the nature of his time and his people. What he knew of the people who had colonized the fresh young world below had only been ascertained from ship's gossip. He knew that they existed on a relatively primitive scale: their society' was agrarian and widely scattered and there had been, so far, no outside interference in their affairs. And this was the sum of his knowledge. But he felt confident that the biological sensors in his. suit would enable the computer to set him down reasonably close to some sort of habitation -- as to how he would make out afterward he had no idea. He would have to play it by ear. The important thing was first to get down. Some day, years from now, a ship might pass close by this world and, if luck would have it, they would have been made aware of his disappearence and might even dispatch a small skiff to see if they could find some trace of him. Some day. That could be ages from now. And in the meantime he had to survive. It was with a growing sense of urgency that he instructed the computer to begin the descent. H e fell for what seemed like ages but in actuality amounted to a few short hours. The world underneath his enormous articulated legs became clearer. He entered the upper limits of the atmosphere and the dark night of space changed color abruptly. The nearby sun kindled the air around him until it glowed with a tantalizing blueness he found quite strange. He flexed his limbs inside the suit and felt the exoskeleton respond. He was confident that all would be well. The air inside the suit became hot. 'Take it easy," he warned. "I can't take too much of this." The suit slowed slightly. Mattaro began to sweat. It was a process alien to his conditioning and it alarmed him to realize that his body cells were recalling such an archaic function. The grav coils continued to throw out a small measure of power and he grew alarmed when he saw how much this token resistance was draining his batteries. He concluded -- and the computer quickly verified -- that he hadn't escaped the concussion of the Star Winds departure as, well as he had imagined: a small but continuous energy drain was going somewhere that might well prove disastrous. Oh, my Mother, why hast thou forsaken me? His normally placid pulse rate quickened. He began to panic. An ocean yawned underneath him. "Not there!" he screarned. "Find some habitation -- quickly!" The computer struggled to oblige but already the energy drain had reached dangerous proportions. He was three miles up and falling rapidly, the computer jealously withholding as much power as it could safely risk for the last few seconds of the terrifying descent. It was so hot inside the suit he could hardly breathe. Now he was inland and falling at a steep angle toward a densely populated forest. The world below looked green, luxuriant and IF very frightening. There were no signs of human habitation. Would he ever make it alive? Two miles. One. Falling faster all the time, the wind tearing at his suit like a howling banshee. Mother, help me! Vm going to die. I dont want to die... out here... like this! Where were the shining cities his people had spun between the stars, the magic wonderlands he had known as a child? Where was the beauty of all the things he had ever known and loved? Gone. There was only this crawling world at his feet with some offer of hope; this clumsy ball of mud and water lumbering around a parent sun tike some bemused and indolent child; this virgin world fresh from the furnaces of space which man, in his curiosity, had sown with his own seed and stood back in the shadows of the centuries to observe. For the first time in all his long and precisely ordered life Mattaro became conscious of what living really meant to him. For a moment his eyes widened with something close to horror, like the eyes of one who has seen a vision and is incapable of acting upon what he has seen; then his mind snapped cruelly back to the present. He was now descending vertically and at a frightful rate toward a small clearing in the forest. The computer waited until his feet were only a few hundred feet away from the tops of the trees before it fed the full remaining power into the grav coils. The suit shuddered and rocked like a thing gone mad as it fought to decelerate and repulse the gigantic mass of the world below. The suddea application of energy sent the monstrous suit dancing and jiggling across the sky; it shook Mattaro's body so much that, in spite of the protective webbing that held his body in thrall, he thought it might crack open like an eggshell and spill his mortal insides all over the controls. The computer struggled to stabilize these wild gyrations and bring the suit safely down to the surface of the planet. He almost made it. The repulsion field had evened itself out and he had begun to drop towards the clearing again. He could see the topmost branches of the tallest trees moving past his faceplate and he began to relax. His nightmare was over. And he had even begun to smile -- a little hysterically -- when the power finally gave out. He fell like Icarus. HE fishing had been bad all  day, so Jarvis had withdrawn from this commitment and had sprawled out beside the stream, his arms behind his head, and had contented himself with a little doze and a modicum of thought. He had wedged his rod into a convenient tree stump by the water's edge and left the line drifting casually downstream; if a fish proved foolish enough to go for his lure a small bell attached to the float would summon him from sleep. But the sun was warm and encouraged idleness and he had only caught two miserably small fish all morning. A small pouch of wine lay beside him, some sliced rolls and some sausage in a wooden basket, and that was what fishing was really all about. He had eaten rribst of the food and drunk a goodly measure of the wine when he was roused from his slumber by something he could not understand. Then he saw the dark speck high in the clear sky and heard the highpitched, keening cry that seemed to accompany its fall. It grew from a dot the size of a bird into something gigantic and terrifying and out of place andhis mind -- a little dulled by the amount of warm wine he had quaffed -- was slow to react. Jarvis was no longer young. The sun had tanned his wrinkled skin a deep shade of brown and his brow was heavy with the burden of years. He had lost count of the seasons he had walked through and his mind, like his limbs, had lost a good deal of vigor. But he had never before seen an object like this falling out of the heavens -- and its probable point of impact would seem to be only a short distance away on the other side of the stream. He sat up, startled, and scrambled to his feet as the object grew large in the sky and fell toward the ground at an incredible pace. His fishing was forgotten while he stood, transfixed and spellbound. When the thing was almost at the point of crashing into the upper levels of the forest it shuddered suddenly and came to a halt in mid-air. Next it performed an insane jig across the sky, dancing about over the top of the trees like something gone mad. Jarvis took a step backward and nearly lost his balance. He could see it clearly now -- and he did not like what he saw. Its general shape was that of a man and it. flung its limbs about in a grotesque parody of a man possessed. It stilled. Jarvis watched, openmouthed, as it glided across the tree tops -- toward him. He backed away. The creature looked like something fetched from a nightmare conjured up by the foulest home brew imaginable. He prepared his skinny legs to run and just as he was about to turn and thrust them into frantic motion -- the thing fell. IF It crashed down through the forest as though it weighed several tons. He could hear it tearing a pathway through the tightly packed branches: a terrible screeching sound such as a moHySter might make, fighting for its life. The sound of the impact was thunderous and the ground shook as the creature tumbled to it, unseen. A flock of birds rose screaming from the scene of the impact. For a while they circled wildly around the great rent in the trees, calling to each other in agitation, then they flew off and dispersed. A lazy column of dust began to creep up into the sky where the creature had fallen. more to happen. But time went by and only the familiar warm silence of the woods reestablished itself. He fidgeted. He rubbed his eyes and wondered what it was he had really seen and what he should do about it. Perhaps he had drunk too much and scrambled awake with. the vestiges of a bad dream still clinging to his thoughts. But the sounds of the screaming birds still echoed in his memory, and he was not a man to imagine such elaborate monsters. I will go and discover what manner of creature it is that falls from the sky and makes such an awesome noise... Having made his decision, he packed up his fishing rod and proceeded to wade across the shallow section of the stream. He reached the other side, dried his feet on a deep patch of grass, pulled on his sandals and strode into the forest to locate the fallen object. His search took him some distance into the trees -- somewhat further than he had expected -- where the thick trunks pressed close together and the ground was always shrouded indeep shadow. The undergrowth was sparse at this time of the year and he found no difficulty in making progress -- yet he moved cautiously, having no idea what to expect. It took him some time to locate the object, mainly because it became difficult for him to hold to his original line of sight now that he was deep into the forest. But the deep, jagged cleft that the thing had carved down through the trees was a beacon to his questing eyes: through this tortured passageway the sunlight found ready access and Jarvis quickened his pace when he was near enough for the light to seem a ragged pillar, beckoning. Approaching the point of impact he slowed down and came to a halt. His listened, but could hear no sound. He summoned his courage and moved forward, wondering what he might find. The creature had fallen on its side and lay there staring at him like a crippled metal ogre. Its great legs were twisted underneath its massive trunk and its head was swung round at an incongruous angle. Instead of a face only a single polished disc stared back at him. Jarvis drew in his breath. The creature was at least three times bigger than a man and its body was covered with all manner of shiny protuberences, some of which had broken or been sheared off by its dreadful fall. He carefully made a wide circuit around the creature before he became emboldened enough to move closer and examine the lifeless humanoid in greater detail. He might be an old man but he was no superstitious fool. He recognized this creature as a machine, some sort of mechanical contrivance, the meaning of which was as yet lost to him. But he was determined to discover more. Why, here were massive arms of steel that could have crushed him like a cockroach. And these legs -- what mighty engines drove them across the face of the earth? The creature still did not move. The fall had either killed it or knocked it senseless for a while. But from where had it fallen? And what was it doing here? Jarvis moved closer. He shook his head in amazement as he noted the immense girth of the creature and followed the line of one mighty shoulder until his eyes fastened upon the gigantic metal head. It was several times larger than a man's and in the center was the bright circle that had first attracted his attention. The creature was lying on its side, its "face" pointing towards him. It took but a short step for him to be able to lean forward and peer down into that enigmatic pool of light. He looked past the grimy surface of the faceplate and at the pale white face on the other side. The creature's eyes were closed and its mouth was open; a faint dribble of blood welled from its mouth and trickled down its chin. Its skin had the same pale, translucent quality as the belly of a fish. Jarvis recoiled in surprise and hastily crossed himself. He knew beyond doubt that he had looked down upon one of the space people. His legs began to shake. Without wasting another moment he backed away from the fallen spaceman and turned around and ran as fast as he could back to the village. sciousness and thought,  m alive! And felt the great waves of pain begin to eat away at his mind. He winced, closed his eyes and wondered how much of him had survived. He ached all over but none of his limbs felt broken: the IF webbing had held. His left leg was bent at a painful angle but he could, with very little effort, withdraw it from the exoskeleton and give it some ease. The rest of his body felt numb and bruised. His head ached abominably. He tasted blood in his mouth and ran his tongue quickly around inside. No broken teeth; just some torn sections of his cheek where he must have gripped them in agony during the final seconds of his fall. Nothing to worry about. He was alive! Happily, he began to explore the condition of his suit. He could get no sense out of the computer; it was sullen and silent. This caused him some concern. If the computer turned out to have been badly damaged he was as good as trapped. Only the computer could activate the suit and get it moving -- or open the access gate in the back of the suit. And if his power reserves were negative... Had he come so far to find himself in a situation Just as hopeless as the one he had fled? He tried to calculate how much air he had left. But with no idea how long he had been unconscious this was an impossible task. And the computer couldn't help him. He knew some sort of settlement was nearby, otherwise the computer wouldn't have chosen to set him down here. But how could he be sure that anyone had witnessed his hasty descent -- and what would they make of it if they had? His mind -- already accustomed to dealing with an impossible situation and dulled by the impact of his fall -- tried to devise some worthwhile plan of action. He waited until a full measure of feeling had returned to his limbs, then flexed them experimentally. He thought that he could detect a faint murmur of activity inside the computer casing and this made him hopeful. He tried again to set the suit moving; he moved his legs about inside the exoskeleton but only found resistance. The suit refused to be budged. After a while he gave up and considered the alternative. "Open the access hatch," he directed. No acknowledgment was forthcoming from the silent computer. The vital panel directly behind Mattaro didn't budge an inch. Sweating, he repeated the command. "Open the access hatch." For just a fraction of a second something stirred inside the damaged brain of the computer. Perhaps some last measure of residual energy prodded the machine into a simple gesture of assistance and, after this miserable erg of power had been dissipated, it slumped back into immobility. ' Behind Mattaro the access hatch had begun to move. It had swung open a fraction -- and stayed so. The bitter alien air creeping into his suit confirmed the fact. Mattaro swore. He repeated the command over and over again and, when this proved ineffective, withdrew his arms from the exoskeleton and beat upon the weighty access hatch with what strength he could exert from his awkward reach. But it would not be moved any further. He could still hear a threshold whirr of activity inside the computer, but he wasn't sure that the sound was genuine -- it could have been a product of his own wishful thinking. He felt light-headed and slumped back into the webbing. Strange, but he couldn't recall feeling like this before. Perhaps it was the fall -- and the air. He could feel it stinging the inside of his nostrils and coursing down into his lungs. Of course -- that would explain his peculiar light-headedness. It was the foul, unfiltered air of this damned planet that was making him feel so strange. But it was the only air he could depend on and it was better than none. He kept hoping that the computer might eventually reorganize itself and get him out of this mess, in the meantime he was alive and reasonably well off. The next misfortune he would have to face would be hunger -- and to alleviate that he would have to find some way of getting out of his suit. "'Open the access hatch," he mumbled. "Open the access hatch -- " But the hatch remained stubbornly at its fixed position. Through the dust-shrouded faceplate he could make out the wide trunks of the trees and, in the distance, some patched were the sunlight played on some branches in a clearing. The inside of the suit had cooled and that was something he could be thankful for. He could have come down in the tropics of the planet and might have had to endure a slow roasting before nightfall -- or he could just as easily have been dumped into the sea if the power had given out earlier. There were plenty of alternatives, all right. But here he was and, in one way or another, he was still alive. In one vay or another... He kept talking to the computer, trying to cajole it back into some useful activity. He still wasn't convinced that his cards had run out and he was determined to shake some life back into the stubborn little machine. It was some time before he noticed the dark faces peering down through his faceplate. A t first the townspeople thought that Jarvis had been IF drinking too much, or had been taken by the sun; but when they saw that he was indeed sober and that it had been a vision and not the heat of the sun that had dazzled his mind, then some of his excitement began to carry over to them. Nobody had ever seen one of the space people -- at least not for generations. The relatively short recorded history of their world was filled with the memory and mythology of the creatures who watched over them, but no one living had actually seen one of them at first hand, as Jarvis insisted he had. '"It's out there, in the forest just beyond the stream," he told them. "It fell down out of the sky and -- " "And there was a man inside, you say?" somebody asked. "No. I say there was a spaceman inside. He was all pale -- kind of like a grub inside a shell." They hastily crossed themselves and, forming a citizen's committee, herded Jarvis off to meet the town council. These seven men were older and wiser than anyone else in the village and it fell to them to make all the important decisions. Jarvis faced the mayor unflinchingly and repeated his story in detail. The council listened attentively, prepared to be skeptical. "Could you describe this machine?", the mayor asked. He was old and arthritic and often querulous, but his fancy had been captured by this loafer's confession. "In detail, if you can." "Well, it was shaped like a man, only much bigger." Jarvis made an awkward diagram with his hands, a gesture that was meant to imply gigantic dimensions. "It had two arms and two legs and a monstrous head that -- " The mayor swung around in his chair and conferred with his councilmen. An air of portentous gravity descended upon the darkpaneled room; Jarvis waited nervously for a decision. From the expressions of grave concern he could detect on the faces of the council, it seemed that they were prepared to accept his story at face value. "Wait outside, please, Jarvis," the mayor requested. "We will join you in a moment and then you will take us to your discovery, so that we may all see this creature at close range." Jarvis bowed respectfully and went back outside to where a great number of townspeople had already assembled around the humble civic center. Mayor Dunstable led his councilmen deep into the ancient cellars of the town hall. They paused outside a stout wooden door, crossed themselves three times, then held their positions while the mayor rose and unlatched the heavy wooden bar of the door and slipped softly inside. Once he had disappeared and the door had been discreetly closed behind him, the councilmen sat cross-legged and assumed a posture of silent meditation. It was dark inside the Shrine. The only light came from a solitary flame set in an ornate silver chalice upon the altar. The mayor kneeled just inside the threshold and offered up a few precious moments of his lifetime in respectful meditation. The appropriate ritual completed, he rose and walked boldly towards the altar. A half a dozen steps closed the distance. The Shrine was small and had never been intended to accommodate more than one man, and he the supreme arbiter of the township. Dunstable ascended the three short steps leading up to the altar and reached out for the deep glass case that rested immediately in front of the chalice. Underneath the dusty lid the faded face of the Handbook was kept securely locked away from prying eyes. Dunstable ran his arthritic fingers along one side of the case until the personality-keyed lock snapped open the glass lid. He sighed, whispered some appropriate words of thanks and raised the lid. The Handbook was exposed and his hands shook as he reached for it. He handled the ancient volume with reverence. In all his long period of office he had only had occasion to consult the holy tome thrice before. The book held all his people's past and all their future -- but its wisdom had to be used sparingly and only when all other knowledge failed or it would turn to poison. Its random and unrestricted use on other planets -- including the place of human origins -- had destroyed men's minds and turned them against one another. B reathing heavily, Dunstable consulted the index, turning the heavy textured pages of the Handbook with loving care. It was so quiet in the Shrine that the sound of his own excited breathing seemed monstrously loud and out of all proportion. He studied the relevant passages of the text for some time, reading slowly in order to impress each vital piece of information upon his no longer agile memory. Sometimes he nodded sagaciously to himself or smiled at some particularly enlightening snippet of information -- on other occasions his eyes widened momentarily in shock and surprise. The Handbook held many dazzling secrets that were not destined for the simple minds of this world. When he had satisfied his curiosity he reverently closed the IF book and relocked the glass lid. He bowed and crossed himself three times to give himself time to erase irrelevancies from his mind, whispered a short word of prayer for the fallen spaceman and then went outside to rejoin his councilmen. He summoned them from their meditations briskly: "'Very well, gentlemen, now we may proceed." Jarvis led the way. He took them by way of the river road, the councilmen breathing heavily from the unaccustomed exertion. A small army of inquisitive townspeople followed at a respectful distance. News of Jarvis' discovery had traveled fast. The machine had not moved from where Jarvis had found it. It lay at the bottom of the ragged shaft in the trees and faced them with its lifeless eye. The mayor drew in his breath sharply. He murmured the appropriate words prescribed by the Handbook and crossed himself three times. His councilmen stood silent and watchful. Behind them, clustered in small groups among the trees, the hundred or more curious onlookers kept a cautious distance and did not need to be dissuaded from coming any closer. The spaceman made no response to the mayor's greeting. "You see," Jarvis said, "it doesn't move. Perhaps it can't move." The mayor nodded. "Very likely." He moved closer and walked a careful circuit around the massive creature, drawing upon his recent reserves of memory of the Handbook to help him identify the exact nature of the fallen object. "It  a spaceman, isn't it?" Jarvis asked. Dunstable waited until he had completed his study of the object before he commented. He looked up through the great, broken shaft in the forest towards the sunlit sky. "It is, Jarvis," he agreed There was no point in denying what was self-evident. He had stepped close and looked through the dusty faceplate and had seen the pale white face that Jarvis had spoken of. The eyes had been momentarily closed, but the identity of the creature had been unmistakable. By now the other councilmen had crowded close. "My friends," Dunstable informed them, "Jarvis had indeed discovered one of the space people. How he came here we do not know. He has fallen from the sky and it has been our privilege to find him. Let us pray -- " With one accord all bowed their heads while the mayor intoned words from the Handbook whose meaning he himself did not fully understand, though they should have evoked a response from the object on the ground. But the spaceman did not move and Dunstable began to wonder if the visitor from the skies were alive or if the terrible fall had killed him. His prayer completed, the mayor lifted his head with a slight suggestion of impatience. Around him the woods were alive with peering, frightened faces. He motioned them to come closer so that they might hear what he had to say, ""My good friends, this is indeed a wondrous day for us. This -- this machine you see here is what is known as a 'space suit.' It is meant to protect the space people from all sorts of dangers -- remember, their empire is vast and beyond our comprehension; it accommodates many thousands of worlds like ours and many more where environments are hostile and dangerous. They must protect themselves from inhospitable climates and even airlessness -- and they have evolved these miraculous uniforms in order to move without difficulty from world to world." While he spoke he moved closer to the fallen spaceman and indicated certain aspects of the massive space armor. "As you see, this suit is many times larger than the man inside, yet these great metal limbs respond effortlessly to his movements and endow him with the ability to perform prodigious feats that would otherwise be beyond his capabilities. In a sense the machine is alive and ordinarily should respond to -- " "But how did he get here?" someone interrupted. It was a cry from among the many faces pressing closer through the trees. Dunstable hesitated. "We can't be sure. Perhaps he was working somewhere in the sky." He gestured overhead. "And he fell from thereV' Another incredulous voice. Dunstable frowned. Just how much information might he safely -- and with good intentions -- divulge? The Handbook left much to his judgment. He knew from it that mighty ships moved between distant worlds and that some day -- in an unimaginaible distant future -- the descendants of his people would evolve sufficiently in knowledge to lay claim to a similar heritage. It seemed quite likely that one of these wondrous sky chariots might have been passing nearby when the spaceman fell. Dunstable had used the prescribed words to arouse the visitor, but perhaps there was a limit to what he could tell his people. The words, of course, hadn't worked. "He fell -- and that is all we know," he replied. "But is he alive?" another asked. The mayor raised both hands in a gesture for silence. "That we IF must now ascertain' He nodded towards Jarvis. "Perhaps you found him for a reason. He may respond to you. Take a closer look, will you?" Jarvis grinned. He basked in his new importance. He strode confidently to the machine and leaned over so that he was peering closely into the faceplate. A few of the councilmen followed to looked cautiously over his shoulder. It was some time before Jarvis realized that the creature's eyes were open and that he was staring out at them -- and not quite seeing them. Something unseen seemed to have passed between them. Jarvis jerked back in surprise. The councilmen quickly got out of the way. They looked disconcerted. "He is awake," Jarvis reported. "But he does not seem to see us." The mayor stepped forward and corroborated Jarvis' observation. And as he looked down and deeply into the pale, blank eyes of the spaceman he felt an unpleasant chill shake his body. He remained hunched forward and staring for some time, then stood aside and motioned his fellow Councilmen to step forward so that they might each, in turn, look with reverence upon the unfortunate creature. If the spaceman was conscious of this solemn parade of faces in front of him then he made no move to acknowledge what he saw. We must work quickly, Dunstable realized, or it may be too late to help him... He summoned one of the nearby villagers -- an adventurous lad of early years -- and sent him back to the village for the town physician and blacksmith. The blacksmith was to bring his strongest and most reliable tools and the physician to arrange for a pallet to be brought, so that the spaceman might be gently transported to a place of seclusion and rest -- if he could be rescued from the gigantic spacesuit that could soon become a coffin. While he waited anxiously he supervised the curious villagers into a long, slow-moving column that filed cautiously past the gigantic metal head and looked furtively in through the dusty faceplate at the pale, unsmiling face of the spaceman. a vague sort of half-life -- of the strange faces peering down at him. They were like dreadful figures in a dream; the faces all screwed up with time, skins scorched a dark, unpleasant color by the naked radiation of their sun -- he could not find it in him to accept them as human beings. Mother, my mind is on fire... His body was covered by a dense film of sweat. Drops of it had formed above his eyes and splashed down, making it difficult for him to see. His breathing was shallow and irregular; his mouth was dry and his limbs burned with some strange internal fusion he could not understand. Mother, am  dying? His time was running out -- had run out. He was breathing alien air -- deadly, unfiltered -- and it was having a terrifying effect upon his sterile metabolism. A hundred unseen bacteria had already invaded his bloodstream and each minute added more. In no time at all he would be reduced to a sick and festering hospital case -- unless they, those people outside whom he loathed, somehow got him out of here anchplaced him in some sort of rigid quarantine and purged his weakened body of the microscopic invaders. But what standard of medicine could he expect from such people? Probably little better than primitive herbalism, he thought, and wondered why his burning mind did not react more fearfully to this supposition. Perhaps he was rapidly losing the capacity to care. Time passed and the strange faces no longer paraded past his faceplate. Only occasionally did one Or two -- with which he had become familiar -- press forward, perhaps to monitor his rapid deterioration. Why dont they do something? Instead of just watching him and haunting him with their archaic incompetence. Help me, his mind cried out. Cant you see I need help? I'm dying, don't you see that? Can't you see that? And for himself alone: Mother, am I really? Had he survived his desertion and his incredible descent only to have what was left of him burned alive by these terrible alien bacteria? Was there no way for him to... He could feel his mind slipping away, his conscious thoughts disintegrating; the possibility of logical, sequential thought became lost to him. His hands ceased their occasional fumbling with the dead controls and he slumped back into the fiery well that was his world. He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep, surrounded by the fires and fury of a hell that had only previously existed in the unplumbed depths of his racial memory. the space suit doubtfully. haven't any tools that can open that thing," he announced. "Just take a close look at the metal. I've never seen anything like it." "What about the faceplate?" the mayor asked. He had become agitated; their time was running out. "Could we -- " "Not unless you want to mash IF him about and kill him. The stuffs too tough to cut -- or for a couple of taps to crack it open." 'There's some sort of opening around the back," Jarvis said. "I've been looking real close and it seems to me that there's some sort of hatchway there. It's opened slightly." The blacksmith walked around to the other side of the suit and hunkered down in the dirt so that he could inspect the narrow opening the old man indicated. It was a narrow crack about three and a half feet long and it did indeed look like part of a hatchway. But the rest of it merged so smoothly with the gigantic carapace that it was difficult to gauge its shape. "Well, what do you say?" Dunstable asked. "Can you lever that open?" The blacksmith pursed his heavy lips and scowled. "Wouldn't like to say. But I'll give it a go." He stood up, spat on his hands and rubbed them together. "Get as many strong lads as you can find -- we'll be needing them. If we take it in shifts then we just might budge it. But it'll take strength if I'm to judge from the workmanship of this thing." The mayor leaned closer and, out of sight of the rest of the townspeople, breathed a confidence: "We have to get him out, you understand. Our air is dangerous to his lungs; it could very well kill him. And if we don't get him to the physician in time -- " The blacksmith nodded. "Well, no use standing here. Let's get, on with it... He walked back to where he had deposited an assortment of his tools on the bare ground. He selected a long crowbar and gestured to one of the young men who had assigned themselves to his direction. "I have several more of these in my barn. Go fetch them -- as fast as you can. We'll have need of them." The youth -- and one otherhastened away. Bleeker gripped the crowbar in his hands and moved back behind the gigantic space suit. He found the narrow aperture of the hatchway and worked the sharp point of the instrument an inch or so into the crevice. He leaned with all his weight upon the other end but the hatchway -- if that was what it was -- refused to budge. "Some help here, lads," he called out. And they rushed forward to partake of this unaccustomed ritual. blows and curses and the hammering at his back, but he did not mind. Half in and half out of this grotesque world, with his mind on fire and his body weeping a rank, offensive fluid from every pore, he found time to dream in his fiery hell. Through the flames he could see the great ships he had traveled with and the marvelous worlds his people had made for themselves between the stars, like delicate crystaline webs spun across the eternal night. His skin tingled with affectionate memory of the warmth beamed down by the tiny suns they had kindled to illuminate his world. Mother, why hast thou forsaken me? Accidentally. She did not know. You should have known. Mother. Dont you see? My mind is on fire, fm burning up, one small cell at a time... He saw his home world moving through space, felt the benign gravitation beneath his feet and basked in the emancipation of his people. He was space-born and had never known the feel of a planet underneath his feet or the burden of an unvarying gravity. His environment had been efficaciously controlled and he had never been exposed to the remorseless ravages of time and of the seasons that had made the faces of the colonists so gaunt and their lifetimes so short. And now he had fallen from this state of grace. In his burning mind he saw his world turn and move toward him. Attendant suns flickered and died; the dark heavens disappeared and his world shimmered and opaqued as it moved from one realm of space into another so that it might cross light-years in an instant. Mother, are you coming for me? Mother? It was getting darker outside. Had the sky become dull as it prepared this world for dusk or had his eyesight betrayed him? Mattaro was afraid. to open the stubborn hatchway. Two hours of sweating and cursing and sheer exhaustion. The blacksmith remained doggedly in command, seeing his youthful helpers come and go, applying their determined strength to the crowbars and then despairing -- and each time moving the doorway a Finally it was wide enough for them to perceive the man inside and for them to reach in and grasp his shoulders. The spaceman did not stir: his mind -- and his strength -- seemed to have failed him. They eased him from the protective webbing as gently as they could and carefully lowered him to a pallet. The villagers stood back in awe. He seemed so pale and fragile without his fantastic carapace, like a chrysalis ripped before its time from its cocoon; but even then his IF body seemed to radiate a supernal quality that was quite overpowering. Some fell to their knees and prayed. Women wept and small children hugged their mothers' skirts and looked out upon the creature with one eye closed. A mornful chant went up from a group composed of older women; the dirge was caught up by the rest of the villagers and intoned with a deep sense of forboding. The town physician bent over the wasted spaceman. He rolled back each eyelid in turn with his thumb and clucked disapprovingly. He rose, crossed himself and directed the two men he had assigned as carriers to hasten about their business. 'Take him to my surgery," he directed. "Quickly." The two men trotted off. A path opened for them between the awestruck villagers. The mayor and his councilmen hurried after the litter as best as they could. The physician, a few years their junior, set a cracking pace they found difficult to emulate. Jarvis hurried after them, a look of deep concern on his wizened face. After a short pause, during which the doleful chant fragmented and died, the villagers moved after the outre procession, like tufts of weed sucked into a vacuum left by a passing wind. The blacksmith Carefully packed up his tools, then made his way slowly back to the township. the journey by litter only as an even, jogging rhythm, occasionally broken. His mind had ceased to function in the external world. His body was on fire from head to toe and he was not responsible for the parade of images that danced through the brightlands of his fiery thoughts. They placed him in the physician's surgery, in a warm bed that had been quickly installed for the occasion. They closed and barred all the windows and lit a great fire in the hearth, hoping that these humble precautions would keep out the deadly bacteria and help to warm the spaceman's cold body. But he was aware of none of these thoughtful ministrations. The physician readied a sedative and poured a little of it into the spaceman's mouth. The poor creature seemed to have lost the ability to move his lips and his tongue, so the remainder of the dense liquid spilled down onto the bedclothes. But enough found its way down his tortured throat to prove effective. He quickly fell asleep. His breathing became more regular and his degree of perspiration slackened. A nightwatch was kept by his bedside and they hoped that his strange fever would abate. But when morning came they found him delirious and they were unable to reach him. Mattaro's dying. He saw times and places and creatures he could never have imagined, let alone have remembered. But a part of him that had not yet been touched by the deadly fire did remember. Sometimes he seemed to stand naked on a rock-strewn landscape while a savage wind drove a scouring rain against his bare, shivering flesh. Another time he huddled in a cave, his body wrapped in foul-smelling skins, and watched the flickering firelight in front of him weave eerie patterns on the walls -- walls upon which were carved unimaginable things. And outside the hungry howls of carniverous animals savaged the night. He saw suns from an angle he had never before known: high overhead in a sky of dazzling blue and ochre. He felt his feet sink into the rich, dark soil of a hundred different worlds. His dying mind became a riot of landscapes he had never seen, people he had never known and worlds he would never have thought possible. And still he did not understand. He was pithecanthropus, homo sapiens, Jupiter and Zeus; Alexander and Plato, Aristophanes and Icarus; he was Christ and Mohammed, Freud and Jung, Columbus and Armstrong; Montgomery, Napoleon -- and Hitler. He was everything and everybody who had ever lived. There: in the bottommost ragbag of all, the racial memory that had slumbered untapped until the Pandora's box of this world had opened and swallowed him up. Now he remembered. In odd, distorted fragments, all that his people had ever been and ever hoped to be. It was all there, had always been there, but consciously inviolate until now. Until this dreadful dying had been visited upon him. His own world seemed very far away, almost a superimposed memory -- and nothing more. The fires had eaten most of it away; only a few tattered remnants clung to his disintegrated thoughts. His would-be rescuers watched over him, bathed his body and did what they could to ease his pain. But there was a limit to what their primitive medicine could accomplish and even the reluctant physician finally had to admit that his survival was in the hands of the gods. By which he meant the space people. In the morning the sun rose and shone brightly through the open window at the foot of his bed. They saw no reason to maintain the useless facade of protection any IF longer and they thoijight he would appreciate the sunlight. Something seemed to happen. He opened his eyes and looked out upon the wonder of this fresh young world and for the first time since they had rescued him a small measure of insanity and recognition crept into his eyes. But his brain still burned and the pain was terminal. Something beautiful seemed to come across the sweeping grasslands and over the river and down toward the house where he had slumbered. Something gigantic and hopeful, a great gull-winged world, dazzling in the light of its twin attendant suns. It grew until it filled his mind and blotted out the terrifying ancient landscapes. For a moment he strugged and sat up, leaning heavily on one weak elbow. His other hand stretched out toward the open window and a wild, glazed look leaped into his eyes. "Mother!" he cried. But the shimmering, golden world turned suddenly away. The tiny suns winked out and the dazzling silhouette of his home presented her stern to him, like a ghostly galleon passing by a drifting, abandoned seaman. For perhaps several seconds he remained rigid in that posture, his eyes fastened upon some deep internal vision, and then he slumped back. "Mother -- " he whispered. He closed his eyes and saw no more and several hours later he was dead. T he funeral was held the following day. The whole town turned out for the occasion, each person bearing mind what he and she would relate to their children and their children's children -- how the town had witnessed the fall of a spaceman and attended his magnificent funeral. They made his grave a short distance from the town, atop a small rise where the first rays of the morning sun would warm his cold ghost, and they declared it to be a holy place where pilgrims might draw spiritual sustenence. Every day thereafter two small children visited the grave and placed small floral tributes to the departed spaceman, and two small trees were planted so that they might be nourished by the holy soil; and the fruit they eventually bore was known as holy thereafter and was partaken of on the one day of the year when the town commemorated the fall of the spaceman. And so the spaceman vanished into legend. The two small trees took strong root and flourished over his grave and their fine silver branches grew and yearned towards the distant sky.  Dear Mr. Jakobsson: As a geneticist, I have followed with interest your editorials in Galaxy and If on ""skintelligence"' and heartily support your position.  find it difficult to reconcile the attitudes you express in your editorials with the use of phrases such as ""that's white of you" and ""indian giver" which appear in Laumers' story in the last issue off. I feel that as editor you bear responsibility for seeing to it that careless use of phrases derogatory to certain groups of people does not occur within your magazines. I recognize the possibility that it might be ""in character" for certain story people to speak this way, but I think that the literary use of such expressions must be exceedingly carefully scrutinized. In the story in question I do not feel that there was any justification for such chauvinistic terms.  With reference to Coney's story in the same issue,  should like to call to your attention that geneticists have dropped the terms ""mongol" and ""mongoloid" nearly a decade ago as objectionable in their racial implications. Downs Syndrome is the presently accepted terminology, named after the man who first described the condition. One of the few advantages of my participation in the present wave of professional unemployment is that I have time to write letters. Who knows,  might even start writing science fiction... Selina Bendix, Ph.D. Berkeley, Cal. I give myself full freedom to say what I feel compelled to say in the space I allot myself in these magazines and sign with the label of my true descent and natural heritage. And of course there's always the hope that minds will meet. But I don't give myself the same liberties under other people's bylines in the rest of the magazine or magazines, whose primary functions I see as serving a highly articulate and intelligent, specialized readership. Theoretically -- though the theory has yet to be tested -- I should be able to publish a piece of fiction diametrically opposed to my views, provided it were true to its art and genre. And were not a lie. But I agree with your goals. Dr. Bendix, and am delighted on these pages to pass your comments on to readers and authors. Though I feel that you may have misread Laumer, whose use of the cliches of Earth colonialism in the Retief series is a consistent, satiric and IF quiet swearing at that colonialism. And let's get "Down's Syndrome" accepted by the dictionary publishers. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I think there can be a "working definition" of science fiction, and it could be: A story using some or all of (#) science, (#) imaginative theoretical science, # fanciful poetic license, treating of some aspect of life in the real and for imaginary universe, past, present, and or future: the proportion of these determining whether the story is realistic, speculative or fanciful. This can be reduced to a logical set of symbols that are too fundamental to be further reduced: # Ss Even when there is very little or no science in science fiction we instinctively use science or our knowledge of it) as measure, and some fantasy seems to suggest another science that springs from a hidden aspect of reality: so, even with the supernatural, can one get away from the science (or lack of it) in science fiction and fantasy? Henry Bitman Azusa, Cal. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: First of all I want to thank you for the reply I received from you. I see what a writer meant when he mentioned that personal touch a couple months ago.  just finished reading Fear No Evil and Whipping Star the other day. I know that the one is over a year old, but to tell the truth this is the first time I've had a chance to sit down and read the whole thing. I've got some issues back in I# I'm still promising myself I'll read when I get a chance. Tm happy to see that Galaxy is back on a monthly schedule -- the only thing is that with the very poor distribution in this city, that means I have to be on the lookout twice as often. Can you tell me why If gets better distribution? But back to the two novels: I think I was sidetracked. I dont know why, but in recent months Tve had the feeling that every author has been rushed to conclude his work, not only in your magazines but others, too. Maybe Tm being too critical with this, but Heinleins ending had the feeling of being tacked on and Herbert's had a feeling of deus ex machina. What the novel Dune Messiah had I wont even say -- except to tell you I was quite disappointed. However, weak Heinlein, Herbert, or even T. J. Bass's little tidbits are better than a lot of the utter crud being marketed in paperback format these days. At least these authors know how to write. Maybe the only way out is for me to attempt to submit something to you, at least then Td have the right to complain. There's only one problem, I don't know if the world is yet ready for me -- or I for it. John Beck Youngstown, Ohio Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Thank you very much for printing my letter that requested help in forming a science fiction group in Calgary. A member of the British Columbia SF Society saw the letter, looked my name up in the phone directory, and gave me a call. He gave me addresses of peoply who would offer suggestions on how to form a group. All in all I contacted over # but the important thing was the appearance of the letter in If. Your assistance was vital in getting things started in Calgary. Enclosed you will find abrief description of our first meetings and how the group developed. I hope to print a guide to forming SF groups and will send you copies. The guide should come in handy if any other I f readers want to organize. The next few comments are on If. I hope you will take them in the spirit in which they were made, that of constructive criticism. When you print a letter, why not print the full address of the writer? I would like to contact Sid KrupJan-Feb #I issue is that he lives in Riverside, California. Do I write to hunt through all the Krupicka's to find Sid? Or will the letter come back marked Insufficient Address? Suppose If gave its address as only New York, N. Y. #; would this letter have reached you? Second point. There is something about the type face being used that makes it difficult to read. I have no trouble reading pocketbooks with smaller type but there is some quirk in IF printing that irritates me. I can't pin it down but that's what I feel. Third. I think the illos in If leave something to be desired, including the covers. Freas-FinlayValigursky seem to draw beautiful and striking illusions with depth and reality. In comparison the Jan-Feb cover seems flat and stale. That's just one opinion of course and I admit a very biased statistical sampling. There are, believe it or not, a few good words I can write about If. Reading Room by del Rey is always excellent and I really enjoyed that Retief story. The magazine content is great! Well, so much at playing critic. My best regards in '#, Brian Hval # Home Road N.W. Calgary # Alberta Canada Correspondents' complete addresses will be published in Hue and Cry only if requested in writing. IF The doctor ffoM ine"Marguerileryou can be alive and ugly or beautKwl and dead? The day I first noticed the small pink spot on my cheek, I had other things on my mind. The New York papers said, "Marguerite Piazza opens at the Persian Room". I covered the spot with makeup, walked out into the spotlight, and forgot it -- forgot everything -- in the joy of singing. It wasn't until the spot began to spread, that I went to a cancer specialist. The day the doctor told me I'd have to have radical face surgery, I was sure my career was over. It was no longer a matter of saving my looks. Just of saving my life. They kept the mirrors in my hospital room covered for a week. And yet today, thanks to the fantastic skill of the surgeons, I sing in the spotlight again. I let myself be photographed full-face by a famous photographer of glamorous women. And I am alive. So now you know why I am appealing to you on behalf of the American Cancer Society. To give money. To get regular checkups. And to pay attention to cancer's warning signals. You know, there's something much worse than finding out you have cancer. And that's not finding out. Americcin Cancer Society... We want to wipe out cancer in your lifetime.! #. Science Fiction Hll of Fame I. # "winners." chosen by Scl-Pl Writers of America. Ed. Robert Silver berg. # pages. Pub. ed. # with trial membership Print name What do you thin would happen  A group of workers controlling all the  nation's transportation decided to strike? A temperamental child could destroy anything displeasing him? A key defense scientist became convinced man was no more than a high-class bacterium cultured by a superior life form? Machines created to think like people developed people emotions? If these questions intrigue, we invite you to sample the solutions devised by some of the world's great writers. You'll find them in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, one of the fascinating books that can be yours with membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. Choose any # books for #, plus shipping and handling. You can include if you wish, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, the stories "every real reader of science fiction has to know." Lester del Rey. Broaden your pleasure with the Science Fiction Book Club. The coupon tells how. Sdence Flcdoo Book Club #-S#S Please accept my application for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me Just # plus shipping and handling for all #. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin "Things To Come" describing the two monthly selections and other book bargains. If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly selections, or prefer an alternate or no bo(A at all. I simply indicate so on the form provided. I pay only #. plus shipping and handling for each book I take. (Occasional extra-value selections are slightly more.) I need take only # books in the coming year and may resign ansrUme after purchasing # books. introductory package. I may return it in # days. BCembershlp will be canceled. I will owe nothing. If under #, parent must sign above. I Office use only #. Prelude to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke. Two complete novels. Sands of Mars and Prelude to Space, # short stories, by the sci-fl "colossus." Pub. ed. # #. The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde by Norman Spinshort stories by the new young sci-fl giant. ##. Ice Crown by Andre Norton. A closed planet holds strange colonists locked in intrigue over a royal crown with dread power. Pub. ed. # #. Neanderthal Planet by Brian W. Aldiss. # novella gems. Never before published in U.S.! Shrewd, witty, ingenious. #. Beyond the Beyond by Poul Anderson. Six novellas by Hugo Award winner. About scientists, pirates, loners. #t#. Five Fates. A remarkable tour de force. Five top writers supply their own endings for "After life, what?" Pub. ed. # #. RockeU in Ursa Major by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. A spaceship returns crewless, announcing the coming of a deadly peril. Pub. ed. # #. The Tear # An Anthology edited by Harry Harrison. Thirteen compelling new stories on the quality of life # years from now. Pub. ed. # #. Future Shock by Alvin TofiBer. National Best Seller. "Essential reading for those... committed to controlling , their destinies.' Psychology To- day. Pub. ed... # #. Quest for the Future by A. E. Van Vogt. The electrifying adventure of the man who discovers immortality and the secrets of time. #. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last generation on earth. "WUdly fantastic! -- Ailantki. Pub. ed. #  #. Dangerous' Visions ed... by Harlan Ellison. Anthology of # stories never before in print hy Sturgeon, Anderson. others. Pub. ed. # Book Club tdittons art aomotimts rtductd In sizt, but they are all full-lenctb, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent libfwyMembers accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer sllchtiy'different in Canada.  now include works by these month's offering is a prime pair from Derleth, The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu -- #, story collection and a novel about hapless mortals' involvement with the terrifying beings from between the dimensions -- Cthulhu, Hastur the Unspeakable, Ying, the amorphous fluteplayer, and the Goat with the Thousand Young. And next month, we'll have what is probably Lovecraft's solidest novel. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft Lives! -- mainly because the stories he wrote and the concepts he invented are too gripping to stop reading...or to stop writing. The roster of writers who have carried on Lovecraft's characters and ideas is a Whos Who of fantasy greats -- August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Colin Wilson, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner. Goulartifice -- a new noun, or Beaglism, to use as a label for Ron Goulart's acid zaniness and what the New York Times calls his "bleak but bracing humor." Death Cell is the first novel dealing with Jack Summer of Muckrake, the galactic newsmag -- a first-rate Goulartifact. An Intw Publisher #I Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. # # each wherever paperbacks are sold. For mail orders, please send # for each book (includes postage and handling) to: Beagle Books, Dept. CS # West # Street New York, N.Y. #I JulyAugust, #I Vol. #, No. I # Issuo # C#f Jakobsson, Editor Lostor dol Roy, Foaturo Editor Judy-Lynn Boniamin, Managing Editor Franc L. Roggori, Art Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director s tributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. and RtcicU)rs wrjtfr (Uid wrorui Mr. Jakobsson: Having only recently acquired and read a complete Sherlock Holmes (Berkley), I was especially delighted by Slaves of Silver in the March April If. As I began the story, I thought I detected something familiar in Mr. Wolfe's fusty, latenineteenth-century style. Not until Street began dissecting Dr. Westing s appearance and the implications thereof did I really catch on, though. Once  was wise to what Mr. Wolfe was doing, however, I found it difficult to keep a straight face until  had finished the story. Do you know if any more such works are or will be in the offing? I have always enjoyed Holmes and finding a modern Holmes quite excites me. Eric C. Sanders Grand Blank, Mich. Are you there, Gene Wolfe? Dear Mr. Jakobsson:  have just finished reading the two stories by T. J. Bass in your Nov-Dec and Jan-Feb issues and  am overwhelmed. Who is he?  have been reading sci-fi for years but have never run across him before. I hope you will have more stories by him in the future. Incidentally, both Galaxy and If have become excellent magazines and I thank you for providing the intelligent SF reading public with consistently interesting and wellwritten stories. My one note of dissatisfaction is the exclusion of Vaughn Bode from Galaxy's pages. Why was thisr done and is there any possibility that he may be seen there once again? Michael L. Charters #th Psychological Operations Battalion, A PO SF # T. J. Bass is a young pathologist who wrote his First in #. Since then he has appeared in both Galaxy and If last question: reader reaction did not encourage us to continue featuring a cartoon strip. Dear M. Jakobsson: I feel that Mr. ZabeVs definition of science fiction as given in his letter (MarchApril #) is merely an impersonal extention of the one Heinlein proposed in #. His definition (then) was that sf is 'fiction about things that have not happened. This is really a description of virtucdly all fiction from Joyce on out. By inserting a qualifying factor on the "probability' of a story's event I like to think I have narrowed the scope to our genre. As to your comment that a story's "probability" depends on the writer's handling of events -- I can not agree. The handling of story events may give them a semblance of probability they do not deserve -- but an objective analysis will reveal the actual likelihood of a plot: I believe that it is the author s choice of events, and this alone, that determines a story s  probability i not plausiblity, which means ability to convince). For instance,  dont consider Fail Safe to be sf because the possibility of commitment to a nuclear war due to a burned-out fuse is all too likely. On the other hand, an attempt by aliens to cause a nuclear war by bombardment from the moon (as in Isaac Asimovs Gentle Vultures) is a much less likely event and so is sf. There, of course, is the essential weakness of my catchphrase -- probability is relative. Still, I do not consider the point a fault -- merely a weakness. As to what sf does, says or means, I can only answer for myself, I believe that any sf work can say whatever the author wishes it to, but what it does is explore change. Almost every piece of sf from Ralph #C# through The High Crusade to Dune explores the one certainty -- change -- and its effects on people and society. This, to me, is what sf means -- that change is certain, is occurring and is the single greatest factor in our lives. However dimly, sf explores the one truth that mainstream fiction ignores -- that this too shall pass. Please print my full address pH Vogel #I St, Anthony London, Ont, Canada HailJakobsson!  see Vogel has found in your letter column a new outlet for his theses. His definition is, as usual, an idea taken much too seriously with Heinlein, Panshin, with semantics dragged into shore up his position, I just read his latest letter (Before he mailed it?-Ed) and  see he is going fo expound his  philosophy of science fiction to you, too. In the interest of balance (all us Canucks arent idiot geniuses) Ill throw in my definition, I believe its a paraphrase of a Heinlein characters definition of common sense and it goes like this: Science fiction is fiction that states that what did not happen yesterday will not necessarily not happen to morrow. ( Vogel says the foregoing is an unresolvable triple negative which is the sort of thing he delights in, ) 'Take VogeVs. two examples. Fail Safe is about blown fuses which are as old as electric lights. Gentle Vultures deals with aliens which would be something new in history. So by my definition Gentle Vultures is science fiction and Fail Safe ir not. You may print my full address. Aloysius Cupay # Lloyd Manor Cr. London, Ontario I agree -- Fail Safe is about Jhe dangers of a blown fuse. Please, guys, don't you two blow yours, both talking at once. But let's hear more, even at the risk of overloading circuits. I way of making a living. It was a good living, but of course he didn't make anything like the bundle he could have in the city. On the other hand he lived in the mountains a half mile away from a picturesque village in clean air and piney-birchy woods along with lots of mountain laurel and he was his own boss. There wasn't much competition for what he did; he had his wife and kids around all the time and more orders than he could fill. He was one of the night people and after the family had gone to bed he could work quietly and uninterruptedly. He was happy as a clam. One night very early morning, really he was interrupted. Bupbup, bup, bup. Knock at the window, two shorts, two longs. He froze, he whirled, for he knew that knock. He hadn't heard it for years but it had been a part of his life since he was born. He saw the face outside and filled his lungs for a  i Convince a winner that he's a loser -- and you may save mankind! whoop that would have roused them at the fire station on the village green, but then he saw the finger on the lips and let the air out. The finger beckoned and Joe Trilling whirled again, turned down a flame, read a gauge, made a note, threw a switch and joyfully but silently dove for the outside door. He slid out, closed it carefully, peered into the dark. "Karl?" "Shh." There he was, edge of the woods. ispering because Karl had asked for it, they hit each other, cursed, called each other the filthiest possible names. It would not be easy to explain this to an extra-terrestrial; it isn't necessarily a human thing to do. It's a cultural thing. It means, I want to touch you, it means I love you; but they were men and brothers, so they hit each other's arms and shoulders and swore despicable oaths and insults, until at last even those words wouldn't do and they stood in the shadows, holding each others' biceps and grinning and sidewards toward the road and they walked away from the house. "I don't want Hazel to hear us talking," Karl said, "I don't want her or anyone to know ( was here. How is she?" "Beautiful. Aren't you going to see her at all -- or the kids?" "Yes but not this tripi There's the car. We can tai there. I really am afraid of that bastard." "Ah," said Joe. "How is the great man?" "Po'ly," said Karl. "But we're talking about two different bastards. The great mao.Js. only the richest man in the world, but I'm not afraid of him, especially now. I'm talking about Cleveland Wheeler." "Who's Cleveland Wheeler?" T hey got into the car. "It's a rental," said Karl. "Matter of fact, it's the second rental. I got out of the executive jet and took a company car and rented another -- arid then this. Reasonably sure it's not bugged. That's one kirid of answer to your question, who's Cleve Wheeler. Other answers would be the man behind the throne. Next in line. Multifaceted genius. Killer shark." "Next ih line," said Joe, .responding to the only clause that made any sense. "The old man is sinking?" "Officially -- andf an official secret -- his hemoglobin reading is four. That mean anything to you. Doctor?" "Sure does. Doctor. Malnutritive anemia, if other rumors I hoar are true. Richest man in the world -- dying of starvation." "And old age -- and stubbornness -- and obsession. You want to hear about Wheeler?" "Tell me." "Mister lucky. Born with evcryr thing. Greek coin profile. Michaelangelo Qiuscles. Discovered early by a bright-eyed elementary school principal, sent to a. private school, used to go straight to the teachers' lounge in the morning and say what he'd been reading or thinking about. Then they'd tell off a teacher to work with him or go out with him or whatever. High school at twelve, varsity, track, basketball, football and high-diving -- three letters'for each -- yes, he graduated in three years, summa cum. Read ail the textbooks at the beginning of each term, never cracked them again. More than anything else he had the habit of success. "College, the same thing: turned sixteen in his first mester. Just ate everything up. Very popular. Graduated at the top again, of course." through college and medical school like a hodcarrier, grunted enviousIF ly. "Fvc seen one or two like that. Everybody marvels, nobody sees how easy it was for them.' Karl shook his head. "Wasn't quite like that with Cleve Wheeler. If anything was easy for him it was because of the nature of his equipment. He was like a fourhundred horsepower car moving in sixty-horsepower traffic. When his muscles were called on he used them, I mean really put it down to Well -- he had his choice of jobs -- hell, choice of careers. He went into an architectural firm that could use his math, administrative ability, public presence, knowledge of materials, art. Gravitated right to the top, got a partnership. Picked up a doctorate on the side while he was doing it. Married extremely well." "Mister Lucky," Joe said. iv-l Listen. Wheeler became a partner and he did his work and he knew his stuff -- everything he could learn or understand. Learning and understanding are not enoqgh to cope with some things like greed or unexpected stupidity or accident or sheer bad breaks. Two of the other partners got into a deal I won't bother you with -- a high-rise apartment complex in the wrong place for the wrong residents and land acquired the wrong way. Wheeler saw it coming, called them in and talked it over. They said yes-yes and went right ahead and did what they wanted anyway -- something that Wheeler never in the world expected. The one thing high cap-, ability and straight morals and a good education doesn't give you is the end of innocence, Cleve Wheeler was an innocent. "Well, it happened, the disaster that Cleve had predicted, but it happened far worse. Things like that, when they surface have a way of exposing a lot of other concealed rot. The firm collapsed. Cleve Wheeler had never failed at anything in his whole life. It was the one thing he had no practice in dealing with. Anyone with the most rudimentary intelligence would have seen that this was the time to walk away -- lie down, even. Cut his losses. But I don't think these things even occurred to him." "In one of Philip Wylies novels is a tremendous description of a forest fire and how the animals run away from it, the foxes and the rabbits running shoulder to shoulder, the owls flying in the daytime to get ahead of the flames. Then there's this beetle, lumbering along on the ground. The beetle comes to a burned patch, the edge of twenty acres of hell. It stops, it wiggles its feelers, it turns to the side and begins to walk around the fire -- " He laughed again. "That's the special thing Cleveland Wheeler has, you see, under all that muscle and brain and brilliance. If he had to -- and were a beetle -- he wouldn't turn back and he wouldn't quit. If all he could do was walk around it, he'd start walking." "What happened?" asked Joe. "He hung on. He used everything he had. He used his brains and his personality and his reputation and all his worldly goods. He also borrowed and promised -- and he worked. Oh, he worked. Well, he kept the firm. He cleaned out the rot and built it all up again from the inSide, strong and straight this time. But it cost. "It cost him time -- all the hours of every day but the four or so he used for sleeping. And just about when he had it leveled off and starting up, it cost him his wife." "You said he'd married well." "He'd married what you marry when you're a young block-buster on top of everything and going higher. She was a nice enough girl, I suppose, and maybe you can't blame her, but she was no more used to failure than he was. Only he could walk around it. He could rent a room and ride the bus. She just didn't know how -- and of course with women like that there's always the discarded swain somewhere in the wings." "How did he take that?" "Hard. He'd married the way he played ball or took examinations -- with everything he had. It did something to him. All this did things to him, I suppose, but that was the biggest chunk of it. "He didn't let it stop him. He didn't let aaything stop him. He went on until all the bills were paid -- every cent. Ail the interest. He kept at it until the net worth was exactly what It had been before his ex-partners had begun to eat out the core. Then he gave it away. Gave it away! Sold all right and title to his interest for a dollar." "Finally cracked, hm?" er scornfully. "Cracked. Matter of definition, isn't It? Cleve Wheeler's goal was zero -- can you understand that? What is success anyhow? Isn't it making up your mind what you're going to do and then doing it, all the way?" "In that case,". said his brother quietly, "suicide is success." K arl gave him a long penetrating look. "Right," he said, and thought about it a moment. "Anyhow," Joe asked, "why zero?" "I did a lot of research on Cleve Wheeler, but I couldn't get inside his head. I don't know. But t can guess. He meant to owe no man anything. I don't know how he felt about the company he saved, but I IF can imagine; The man he became -- was becoming -- wouldn't want to owe it one damned thing. I'd say he just wanted out -- but on his own terms, which included leaving nothing behind to work on him." "Okay," said Joe. thing about old, Joe b that he'll wait. All these years apart with hardly any communication beyond birthday cards -- and not always that -- and here he bjust as if we were still together every day. I wouldn't be here if it weren't important;  wouldn't be telling him all thb unless he needed to know; he wouldn't need any of it unless he was going to help. All that unsaid -- I don't. have to ask him a damn thing. What am I interrupting in hb life? What am I going to interrupt?  won't have to worry about that. He'll take care of it. He said, "I'm glad I came here, Joe." Joe said, "That's all right," which meant all the things Karl had been thinking. Karl grinned and hit him on the shoulder and went on talking. "Wheeler dropped out. It's not easy to map his trail for that period. It pops up all over. He lived in at least three communes -- maybe more, but those three were a mess when he came and a model when he left. He started businesses -- all things that had never happened before, like a supermarket with no shelves, no canned music, no games or stamps, just neat stacks of open cases, where the customer took what he wanted and marked it according to the card posted by the case, with a marker hanging on a string. Eggs and frozen meat and fish and the like, and local produce were pric a flat two percent over wholesale. People were honest because, they could never be sure the checkout counter didn't know the prices of everything -- besides, to cheat on the prices listed would have been just too embarrassing. With nothing but a big empty warehouse for overhead and no employees spending thousands of man. hours marking individual items, the prices beat any diount house that ever lived. He sold that one, too, and moved on. He started a line of organic baby foods without preservatives, franchised it and moved on again. He developed a plastic container that would burn without polluting and patented it and sold the patent." "I've heard of that one. Haven't seen it around, though." "Maybe you will," Karl said in a guarded tone. "Maybe you will. adena-handling details, and just did his thfng all over. I never heard of a failure in anything he tried." "Sounds like a junior edition of the great man himself, your honored boss." "You're not the only one who realized that. The boss may be a ding-a-ling in many ways, but nobody ever faulted his business sense. He has always had his tentacles out for wandering pieces of very special manpower. For all I know he had drawn a bead on Cleveland Wheeler years back. I wouldn't doubt that he'd made, offers from time to time, only during that period Cleve Wheeler wasn't about to go to work for anyone that big. His whole pattern is to run things his way, and you don't do that in an established empire." "Heir apparent," saidJoe, reminding him of something he had said earlier. "Right," nodded Karl. "I knew you'd begin to get the idea before I was finished." "But finish," said Joe. ing to tell you, I just want you to know. I don't expect you to understand it or what it means or what it has all done to Cleve Wheeler. I need your help, and you can't really help me unless you know the whole story." "Shoot." found a girl. Her name was Clara Prieta and her folks came from Sonora. She was bright as hell -- in her way, I suppose, as bright as Cleve, though with a tenth of his schooling -- and pretty as well, and it was Cleve she wanted, not what he might get for her. She fell for him when he had nothing -- when he really wanted nothing. They were a daily, hourly joy to each other. I guess that was about the time he started building this business and that, making something again. He bought a little house and a car. He bought two cars, one for her. I don't think she wanted it, but he couldn't do enoughs -- he was always looking for more things to do for her. They went out for an evening to some friends' house, she from shopping, he from whatever it was he was working on then, so they had both cars. He followed her on the way home and had to watch her lose control and spin out. She died in his arms." "Oh, Jesus." "Mister Lucky. Listen: a week la,ter he turned a corner downtown and found himself looking at a bank robbery. He caught a stray bullet -- grazed the back of his neck. He had seven months to lie still and think about things. When he got out he was told his business manager had embezzled everything and headed south with his secretary. Everything." "What did he do?" "Went to work and paid his hospital bill." They sat in the car in the dark for a long time, until Joe said, IF "Was he paralyzed, there in the hospital?" "For nearly five months.". "Wonder what he thought about." ine what he thought about. What I can't imagine is what he decided. What he concluded. What he determined to be. Damn it, there are no accurate words for it. We all do the best we can with what we've got, or try to. Or should. He did -- and with the best possible material to start out 'with. He played it straight; he worked hard; he was honest and lawful and fair; he was fit; he was bright. He dame out of the hospital with those last two qualities intact. God alone knows what's happened to the rest of it." "So he went to work for the old man." "He did -- and somehow that frightens me. It was as if all his qualifications were not enough to suit both of them until these things happened to him -- until they made him become what he is." "And what is that?" "There isn't a short answer to that, Joe. The old man has become a modern myth. Nobody ever sees him. Nobody can predict what he's going to do or why. Cleveland Wheeler stepped into his shadow and disappeared almost as completely as the boss. There are very few things you can say forcertain. The boss has always been a recluse and in the ten years Cleve Wheeler has been with him he has become more so. It's been business as usual with him, of course -- which means the constantly unusual -- long periods of quiet, and then these spectacular unexpected wheelings and dealings. You assume that the old man dreams these things up and some high-powered genius on his staff gets them done. But it could be the genius that instigates the moves -- who can know? Only the people closest to him -- Wheeler, Epstein, me. And I don't know." "But Epstein died." "Epstein died. Which leaves only Wheeler to watch the store. I'm the old man's personal physician, not Wheeler's, and there's no guarantee that I ever will be Wheeler's." and leaned back, looking out into the whispering dark. "It begins to take shape," he murmured. "The old man's on the way out, you very well might be and there's nobody to take over but this Wheeler." "Yes, and I don't know what he is or what he'll do. I do know he will command more power than any single human being on Earth. He'll have so much that he'll be above any kind of Cupidity that j(ou or I could imagine -- pu or I can't think in that order of magnitude. But you see, he's a man who, you might say, has had it proved to him that being good and smart and strong and honest doesn't particularly pay off. Where will he go with all this? And hypothesizing that he's been making more and' more of the decisions lately, and extrapolating from that -- where is he going? All you can be sure of is that he will succeed in anything he tries. That is his habit." "What does he want? Isn't that what you're trying to figure out? What would a man like that want, if he knew he could get it?" ' "I knew I'd come to the right place," said. Karl almost happily. "That's it exactly. Aa.for me, I have all I need now and there are plenty of other places I could go. I wish fpstein were still around, but he's dead and cremated." "Cremated?" "That's right -- you wouldn't know about that. Old man's instructions. I handled it myself. You've heard of the hot and cold private swimming pools -- but I bet you never heard of a man with his own private crematorium in the second sub-basement." Joe threw up his hands. "I guess if you can reach into your pocket lars, you can have anything you want. By the way -- was that legal?" "Like you said -- if you have two cal examiner was present and signed the papers. And he'll be there when the .old nian pushes off too -- it's all in the final instructions. Hey -- wait, I don't want to cast any aspersions on the M.E. He wasn't bought. He did a very competent examination on Epstein." "Okay -- we know what to expect when the time comes. It's afterward you're worried about." "Right. What has the old man -- I'm speaking of the corporate old man now -- what has he been doing all along? What has he been doing in the last ten years, since he got Wheeler -- and is it any different from what he was doing before? How much of this difference, if any, is more Wheeler than boss? That's all we have to go on, Joe, and from it we have to extrapolate what Wheeler's going to do with the Biggest private economic force this world has ever known." "Let's talk about that," said Joe, beginning to smile. he began to smile a little, too. They talked about it. II T he crematorium in the second sub-basement was purely functional, as if all concessions to sentiment and ritual had been made elsewhere, or canceled. The latter most accurately described what IF had happened when at last, at long long last, the old man did. Everything was done precisely according to his instructions immediately after he was certifiably dead and before any public announcements were made -- right up to and including the moment when the square mouth of the furnace opened with a startling clang, a blare of heat, a flare of light -- the hue the old-time blacksmiths called straw color. The simple coffin slid rapidly in, small flames exploding into being on its corners, and the door banged shut. It took a moment for the eyes to adjust to the bare room, the empty greased track, the closed door. It took the same moment for the conditioners to whisk away the sudden smell of scorched soft pine. The medical examiner leaned over the small table and signed his Cleveland Wheeler did the same. The M.E. tore off copies and folded them and put them away in his breast pocket. He looked at the closed square iron door, opened his mouth, closed it again and shrugged. He held out his hand. "Good night. Doctor." '"Good night. Doctor. Rugosi's outside -- he'll show ydu out." The M.E. shook hands wordlessly with Cleveland Wheeler and left. "I know Just what he's feeling," Karl said. "Something ought to be said. Something memorable -- end of an era. Like 'One small step for man -- Cleveland Wheeler smiled the bright smile of the college hero, fifteen years after -- a little less wide, a little less even, a great deal less in the eyes. He said in the voice that commanded, whatever he said, "If you think you're quoting the first words from an astronaut on the moon, you're not. What he said was from the ladder, when he poked his boot down. He said, 'It's some kind of soft stqff. I can kick it around with my foot.' I've always liked that much better. It was real, it wasn't rehearsed or memorized or thought out and it had to do with that moment and the next. The M.E. said good night and you told him the chauffeur was waiting outside. I like that better than anything anyone could say. I think he would, too," Wheeler added, barely gesturing, with a very strong, slightly cleft chin, toward the hot black door. "But he wasn't exactly human." "So they say." Wheeler half smiled and, even as he turned away, Karl could sense himself tuned out, the room itself become of secondary importance -- the next thing Wheeler was to do, and the next and the one after, becoming more real than the here and now. Karl put a fast end to that. He said levelly, "I meant what I just said, Wheeler." It couldn't have been the words, which by themselves might have elicited another half-smile and a forgetting. It was the tone, and perhaps the "Wheeler." There is a ritual, about these things. To those few on his own level, and those on the level below, he was Cleve. Below that he was mister to his face and Wheeler behind his back. No one of his peers would call him mister unless it was meant as the herald of an insult; no one of his peers or immediate underlings would call him Wheeler at all, ever. Whatever the component, it removed Cleveland Wheeler's hand from the knob and turned him. His face was completely alert and interested. "You'd best tell me what you mean. Doctor." Karl said, "I'll do better than that. Come." Without gestures, suggestions or explanations he walked to the left rear of the room, leaving it up to Wheeler to decide whether or not to follow. Wheeler followed. him. "If you ever say anything about this to anyone -- even me -- when we leave here. I'll just deny it. If you ever get in here again, you won't find anything to back up your story." He took a complex four-inch blade of machined stainless steel from his belt and slid it between the big masonry blocks. Silently, massively, the course of blocks in the corner began to move upward. Looking up at them in the dim light from the narrow corridor they revealed, anyone could see that they were real blocks and that to get through them without that key and the precise knowledge of where to put it would be a long-term project. Again Karl proceeded without looking around, leaving go, no-go as a matter for Wheeler to decide. Wheeler followed. Karl heard his footsteps behind him and noticed with pleasure and something like admiration that when the heavy blocks whooshed down and seated themselves solidly behind them, Wheeler may have looked over his shoulder but did not pause. "You've noticed we're alongside the furnace," Karl said, like a guided-tour bus driver. "And now, behind it." He stood aside to let Wheeler pass him and see the smalLroom. It was just large enough for the tracks which protruded from the back of the furnace and a little standing space on eaclr side. On the far side was a small table with a black suitcase standing on it. On the track stood the coffin, its corners carboned, its top and sides wet and slightly steaming. "Sorry to have to close that stone gate that way," Karl said matter-of-factly. "I don't expect anyone down here at all, but I wouldn't want to explain any of IF this to persons other than yourself." Wheeler was staring at the coffin. He seemed perfectly composed, but it was a seeming. Karl was quite aware of what it was costing him. Wheeler said, "I wish you'd explain it to me." And he laughed. It was the first time Karl had ever seen this man do anything badly. "I will. I am." He clicked open the suitcase and laid it open and flat on the little table. There was a glisten of chrome and steel and small vials in little pockets. The first tool he removed was a screwdriver. "No need to use screws when you're cremating 'em," he said cheerfully and placed the tip under one corner of the lid. He struck the handle smartly with the heel of one hand and the lid popped loose. "Stand this up against the wall behind you, will you?" Silently Cleveland Wheeler did as he was told. It gave him something to do with his muscles; it gave him the chance to turn his head away for a moment; it gave him a chance to think -- and it gave Karl the opportunity for a quick glance at his steady countenance. Hes a mensch, Karl thought. He really is , Wheeler set up the lid neatly and carefully and they stood, one on each side, looking down into the coffin. "He -- got a lot older," Wheeler said at last. "You haven't seen him recently" "Here and in there," said the executive, "I've spent more time in the same room with him during the past month than I have in the last eight, nine years. Still, it was a matter of minutes, each time." Karl nodded understandingly. "I'd heard that. Phone calls, any time of the day or night, and then those long silences two days, three, not calling out, not having anyone in -- " "Are you going to tell me about the phony oven?" "Oven? Furnace? It's not a phony at all. When we've finished here it'll do the job, all right." "Then why the theatricals?" "That was for the M.E. Those papers he signed are in sort of a never-never country just now. When we slide this back in and turn on the heat they'll become as legal as he thinks they are." "Then why -- ""things you have to know." Karl reached into the coffin and unfolded the gnarled hands. They came apart reluctantly and he pressed them down at the sides of the body. He unbuttoned the jacket, laid it back, unbuttoned the shirt, unzipped the trousers. When he had finished with this he looked up and found Wheeler's sharp gaze, not on the old man's corpse, but on him. "I have the feeling," said Cleveland Wheeler, 'Hhat I have never seen you before." But you do now. And, Thanks, Joey. You were dead right. Joe had known the answer to that one plaguing question. How should  act? Talk just the way he talks, Joe had said. Be what he is, the whole time... Be what he is. A man without illusions (they don't work) and without hope (who needs it?) who has the unbreakable habit of succeeding. And who cansay it's a nice day in such a way that everyone around snaps to attention and "You've been busy," Karl responded shortly. He took off his jacket, folded it and put it on the table beside the kit. He put on surgeon's gloves and slipped the sterile sleeve off a new scalpel. "Some people scream and faint the first time they watch a dissection." Wheeler smiled thinly. "I don't scream and faint." But it was not lost on Karl Trifling that only then, at the last possible moment, did Wheeler actually view the old man's body. When he did he neither screamed nor fainted; he uttered an astonished grunt. "Thought that would surprise you," Karl said easily. "In case you were wondering, though, he really was a male. The species seems to be oviparous. Mammals too, but it has to be oviparous. I'd sure like a look at a female. That isn't a vagina. It's a cloaca." "Until this mpment," said Wheeler in a hypnotized voice, "I thought that 'not human' remark of yours was a figure of speech,"' "No, you didn't," Karl responded shortly... Leaving the words to hang in the air, as words will if a speaker h'as the wit to isolate them with wedges x)f silence, he deftly slit the corpse from the sternum to the pubic symphysis. For the first-time viewer this was always the difficult moment. It's hard not to realize ' viscerally that the cadaver does not feel anything and will not protest. Nerve-alive to Wheeler, Karl looked for a gasp or a shudder; Wheeler merely held his breath. "We could spend hours -- weeks, I imagine, going into the details," Karl said, deftly making a transverse incision in the ensiform area, almost around to the trapezoid on each side, "but this is the thing I wanted you to see." Grasping the flesh at the juncture of the cross he had cut, on the left side, he pulled upward and to the left. The cutaneous layers came away easily, with the fat under them. They were not pinkish, but an offwhite lavendar shade. Now the muscular striations over the ribs IF were in view. "If you'd palpated the old man's chest," he said, demonstrating on the right side, "you'd have felt what seemed to be normal human ribs. But look at this." With a few deft strokes he separated the muscle fibers from the bone on a mid-costal area about four inches square, and scraped. A rib emerged and, aa,he widened the area and scraped between it and the next one, it became clear that the ribs were joined by a thin flexible layer of bone or chitin. "It's like baleen -- whalebone," said Karl. "See this?" He sectioned out a piece, flexed it. "My God." Ill 'OW look at this." Karl 'took surgical sheers from the kit, snipped through the sternum right up to the clavicle and then across the lower margin of the ribs. Slipping his fingers under them, he pulled upward. With a dull snap the entire ribcage opened like a door, exposing the lung. The lung was not pink, nor the liverish-browish-black of a smoker, but yellow -- the clear bright yellow of pure sulfur. "His metabolism," Karl said, straightening up at last and flexing the tension out of his shoulders, "is fantastic. Or was. He lived on oxygen, same as us, but he broke it out of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and trioxide and carbon dioxide mostly. I'm not saying he could -- I mean he had to. When he was forced to breathe what we call clean air, he could take Just so much of it and then had to duck out and find a few breaths of his own atmosphere. When he was younger he could take it for hours at a time, but as the years went by he had to spend more and more time in the kind of smog he could breathe. Those long disappearances of his, and that reclusiveness -- they weren't as kinky as people supposed." Wheeler made a gesture toward the corpse. "But -- what is he? Where -- " "I can't tell you. Except for a good deal of medical and biochemical details, you now know as much as I do. Somehow, somewhere, he arrived. He came, he saw, he began to make his moves. Look at this." He opened the other side of the chest and then broke the sternum up and away. He pointed. The lung tissue was not in two discreet parts, but extended across the median line. "One lung, all the way across, though it has these two lobes. The kidneys and gonads show the same right-left fusion." "I'll take your word for it," said Wheeler a little hoarsely. "Damn it, what is it?" "A featherless biped, as Plato once described homo sap. I don't know what it is. I just know that it is -- and I thought you ought to know. That's all." "But you've seen one before. That's obvious." "Sure. Epstein." "Epstein?" "Sure. The old man had to have a go-between -- someone who could, without suspicion, spend long hours with him and hours away. The old man could do a lot over the phone, but not everything. Epstein was, you might say, a right arm that could hold its breath a little longer tlan he could. It got to him in the end, though, and he died of it." "Why didn't you say something long before this?" "First of all, I value my own skin. I could say reputation, but skin is the word. I signed a contract as his personal physician because he needed a personal physician -- another bit of windowdressing. But I did precious little doctoring -- except over the phone -- 'and .jiine-tenths of that was, I realized quite recently, purely diversionary. Even a doctor, I suppose, can be a trusting soul. One or the other would call and give a set of symptoms and I'd cautiously suggest and prescribe. Then I'd get another call that the patient was improving and that was that. Why, I even got specimens -- blood, urine, stools -- and did the pathology on them and never realized that they were from the same source as what the medical examiner checked out and signed for." "What do you mean, same source?" Karl shrugged. "He could get anything he wanted -- anything." "Then -- what the M.E. examined wasn't -- " he waved a hand at the casket. Vrthe crematorium has a back door. There's a little pocket sleight-of-hand trick you can buy for fifty cents that operates the same way" This body here was inside the furnace. The ringer -- a look-alike that came from God knows where; I swear to you I don't -- was lying out there waiting for the M.E. When the button was pushed the fires started up and that coffin slid in -- pushing this one out and at the same time drenching it with water as it came through. While we've been in here, the human body is turning to ashes. My personal private secret instructions, both for Epstein and for the boss, were to wait until I was certain I was alone and then come in here after an hour and push the second button, which would slide this one back into the fire. I was to do no investigations, ask no questions, make no reports. It came through as logiIF cal but not reasonable, like so many of his orders." He laughed suddenly. "Do you know why the old man -- and Epstein too, for that matter, in case you never noticed -- wouldn't shake hands with anyone?" "I presumed it was because he had an obsession with germs." "It was because his normal body temperature was a hundred and seven." Wheeler touched one of his own hands with the other and said nothing. When Karl felt that the wedge of silence was thick enough he asked lightly, "Well, boss, where do we go from here?" Cleveland Wheeler turned away from the corpse and to Karl slowly, as if diverting his mind with an effort. "What did you call me?" "Figure of speech," said Karl and smiled. "Actually, I'm workingfor the company -- and that's you. I'm under orders, which have been finally and completely discharged when I push that button -- I have no others. So it really is up to you." Wheeler's eyes fell again to the. corpse. "You mean about him? This? What we should do?" "That, yes. Whether to burn it up and forget it -- or call in top management and an echelon of scientists. Or scare the living hell out of everyone on Earth by phoning the papers. Sure, that has to be decided, but I was thinking on a much wider spectrum than that." "Such as -- " Karl gestured toward the box with his head. "What was he doing here, anyway? What has he done? What was he trying to do?" "You'd better go on," said Wheeler; and for the very first time said something in a way that suggested diffidence. "You've had a while to think about all this, I--" and almost helplessly, he spread his hands. "I can understand that," Karl said gently. "Up to now I've been coming on like a hired lecturer and I know it. I'm not going to embarrass you with personalities except to say that you've absorbed all this with less buckling of the knees than anyone in the world I could think of." lple technique you learn in elementary algebra. It has to do with the construction of graphs. You' place a dot on the graph where known data put it. You get more data, you put down another dot and then a third. With just three dots -- of course, the more the better, but it can be done with three -- you can connect them and establish a curve. Thi curve has certain characteristics and it's fair to extend the curve a little farther with the assumption that later data will bear yqaout." "Extrapolation." "Extrapolation. X axis, the fortunes of our late boss. Y axis, time. The curve is his fortunes -- that is to say, his influence." "Pretty tall graph." "Over thirty years." "Still pretty tall." "All right," said Karl. "Now,' over the same thirty years, another curve: change in the environment." He held up a hand. "Tm not going to read you a treatise on ecology. Let's be more objective than that. Let's just say changes. Okay: a measurable rise in the mean temperature because of GO # and the greenhouse effect. Draw the (iurve. Incidence of heavy metals, mercury and lithium, in organic tissue. Draw a curve. Likewise chlorinated hydrocarbons, hypertrophy of algae due to phosphates, incidence of coronaries... All right, let's superimpose all these curves on the same graph." "I see what you're getting at. But you have to be careful with that kind of statistics game. Like, the increase of traffic fatalities coincides with the increased use of aluminum cans and plastictipped baby pins." "Right. I don't think I'm falling into that trap. I just want to find reasonable answers to a couple of otherwise unreasonable situations. One is this: if the changes occurring in our planet are the result of mere carelessness -- a more or less random thing, carelessness -- then how come nobody is being careless in a way that benefits the environment? Strike that. I promised, no ecology lessons. Rephrase: how come all these carelessnesses promote a change and not a preservation? "Next question: What is the direction of the change? You've seen speculative writing about 'terraforming' -- altering other planets to make them habitable by humans. Suppose an effort were being made to change this planet to suit someone else? Suppose they wanted more water and were willing to melt the polar caps by the greenhouse effect? Increase the oxides of sulfur, eliminate certain marine forms from plankton to whales? Reduce the population by increases in lung cancer, emphysema, heart attacks and even war?" B oth men found themselves looking down at the sleeping face in the coffin. Karl said softly, "Look what he was into -- petrochemicals, fossil fuels, food processing, advertising, all the things that made the changes or helped the changers -- " "You're not blaming him for all of it." IF "You don't think he was tiying to change a whole planet just so he could be comfortable in it." "No, I don't think so -- and that's the central point I have to make. I don't know if there are any more around like him and Epstein, but I can suppose this: if the changes now going on keep on -- and accelerate -- then we can expect them." Wheeler said, "So ,what would you like to do? Mobilize the world against the invader?" "Nothing like. that. I think I'd slowly and quietly reverse the changes. If this planet is normally unsuitable to them, then I'd keep it so. I don't think they'd have to be driven back. I think they just wouldn't come." "Or they'd try some other way." "I don't think so," said Karl. "Because they tried this one. If they thought they could do it with fleets of spaceships and super-zap guns, they'd be doing it. No -- this is their way and if it doesn't work, they can try somewhere flse." Wheeler began pulling thoughtfully at his lip. Karl said softly, "All it would take is someone who knew what he was doing, who could command enough clout and who had the wit to make it pay. They might even arrange a man's life -- to get the kind of man they need." And before Wheeler could answer, Karl took up his scalpel. "I want you to do something for me," he saidsharply in a new, commanding tone -- actually, Wheeler's own. "I want you to do it because I've done it and I'll be damned if I want to be the only man in the world who has." Leaning over the head of the casket, he made an incision along the hairline from temple to temple. Then, bracing his elbows against the edge of the box and steadying one hand with the other, he drew the scalpel straight down the 'center of the forehead and down on to the nose, splitting it exactly in two.v Down he went through the upper lip and then the lower, around the point of the chin and under it to the throat. Then he stood up. "Put your hands on his cheeks," he ordered. Wheeler frowned briefly (how long had it been since anyone had spoken to him that way?), hesitated then did as he was told. "Now press your hands together and down." The incision widened slightly under the pressure, then abruptly the flesh gave and the entire skin of the face slipped off. The unexpected lack of resistance brought Wheeler's hands to the bottom of the coffin and he found himself face toface, inches away, with the corpse. Like the liings and kidneys, the eyes -- eye? -- passed the median, very slightly reduced at the center. The pupil was oval, its long axis transverse. The skin was pale lavendar with yellow vessels and in place of a nose was a threadfringed hole. The mouth was circular, the teeth not quite radially placed; there was little chin. Without moving, Wheeler closed his eyes, held them shut for one second, two, and then courageously opened them again. Karl whipped around the en of the coffin and got an arm around Wheeler's chest. Wheeler leaned on it heavily for a moment, then stood up quickly and brushed the arm away. "You didn't have to do that." "Yes, I did," said Karl. "Would you want to be the otrfy man in the world who'd.gone through that -- with nobody to tell it to?" And after all, Wheeler could laugh. When he had. finished he said, "Push that button." "Hand me that cover." Most obediently Cleveland Wheeler brought the coffin lid and they placed it. Karl pushed the button and they watched the coffin slide into the square of flame. Then they left. way of making a living. It was a good living, but of course he didn't make anything like the bundle he could have made in the city. On the other hand, he lived in the mountains a half-mile away from a picturesque village, in clean air and piney-birchy woods along with lots of mountain laurel and he was his own boss. There wasn't much competition for what he did. What he did was to make simulacra of medical specimens, mostly for the armed forces, although he had plenty of orders from medical schools, film producers and an occasional individual, no questions asked. He could make a model of anything inside, affixed to or penetrating a body or any part of it. He could make models to be looked at, models to be felt, smelled and palpated. He could give you gangrene that stunk or dewy thyroids with real dew on them. He could make one-of-akind or he could set up a producput it briefly, the best there was at what he did. "The clincher," Karl told him (in much more relaxed circumstances than their previous ones; daytime now, with beer), "the real clincher was the face bit. God, Joe, that was a beautiful piece of work." "Just nuts and bolts. The beautiful part was your idea -- his hands on it." "How do you mean?" "I've been thinking back to that," Joe said. "I don't think you stroke that was. It's all very well to set up a show for the guy, but to make him put his hands as well as his eyes and brains on it -- that IF was the stroke of genius. It's likewell, I can remember when I was a kid coming home from school and putting my hand on a fence rail and somebody had spat on it." He displayed his hand, shook it. "A#I these years I can remember how that felt. All these years couldn't wear it away, all those scrubbings couldn't wash it away. It's more than a cerebral or psychic thing, Karl -- more than the memory of an episode. I think there's a kind of memory mechanism in the cells themselves, especially on the hands, that can be invoked. What I'm getting to is that no matter how long he lives, Cleve Wheeler is going to feel that skin slip under his palms and that is going to bring him nose to nose with that face. No, you're the genius, not me. "Na. You knew what you were doing. I didn't." "Hell you didn't." Joe leaned far back in his lawn chaise -- so far he could hold up his "beer and look' at the sun through it from the underside. Watching the receding bubbles defy perspective (because they swell as they rise), he murmured, "Karl?" "Yuh." "Ever hear of Occam's Razor?" "Uiii. Long time back. Philosophical principle. Or logic or something. Let's see. Given an effect and a choice of possible causes, the simplest cause is always the one most likely to be true. Is that it?" "Not too close, but close "Hm. You're the one who used to proclaim that logic is sufficient unto itself and need have nothing to do with truth." "I still proclkim it." "Okay. Now, you and I know that human greed and carelessness are qtiite enough all by themselves to wreck this planet. We didn't think that was enough for the likes of Cleve Wheeler, who can really do something about it, so we constructed him a smogbreathing extra-terrestrial. I mean, he hadn't done anything about saying the world for our reasons, so we gave, him a whizzer of a reason if his own. Right out of our heads." "Dictated by all available factors. Yes. What are you getting at, Joe?" "Oh -- just that our complicated hoax is simple, really, in the sense that it brought everything down to a single cause. Occam's Razor slices things down to simplest causes. Single causes have a fair chance of being right." Karl put down his beer with a bump. "I never thought of that. I've been too busy to think of that. Suppose we were righfl" They looked at each other, shaken. At last Karl said, "What do we look for. now, Joe -- space ships?"  TO The secret of the alien form was the terror it caused! T he village looked peaceful from the hill road, a scattering of houses and fields well within the congestion code limits. I knew it fairly well, merely as a community I had passed through on my rounds. It was typical of Sarus. IVa, which just means it's the fourth planet of a main sequence star with planets, and that Sarus itself is moonless. But aside from that, enough like Old Terra to cause restless people to settle here, despite our # gravity. The extra .# isn't much, of course, but Sarus was settled during the Third Expansion Wave out from Old Terra and they were choosy then. Anyway, in the n generations since then, the Sarans had adapted to the additional gravity, the slightly higher radiation background and the beautiful climate. I say n, because nobody has realty bothered to count. They have been too busy building paradise. And succeeding at least as well as any other human world. Within limits that must be kept. Which is why i'm here. Funny, even though I was born on Novterra, I can almost look at Sarus as home. Which is the proper outlook for a Seeker, if he doesn't carry it to emotional extremes. I don't. And when I do get carried away, some task comes up that requires a Seeker. And most of these are still humanly bad enough to give me back my perspective. Such as a murdered Warranter. I reined in before the stone tower with the bright blue pennant, swung off my adjusted horse. Freida was riding my shoulder as usual, her tail curled up around my left ear. The man who came out to greet me gave her a casual glance, then returned his gaze to my gray uniform. "Seeker?" "Of course," I responded. "Healer MacDonald?" The other nodded. "I have been waiting for you. The Warranter's body is in stasis and I have performed the tasks you required of me." He pursed his lips. "Murder, quite definitely. With a hunt thrower, left in. It was a ceremonial thrower, an heirloom." "You recognize the pattern?" "Yes. But there is something else I must tell you. The thrower belonged to Freeman Delver. And he -- " "What, Healer?" I could sense the trouble he was having. "He is dead. Suicide." "How long ago?" I demanded, suddenly getting that cold lump spreading through the pit of my stomach, a premonition of trouble to come. "This morning. About two hours after the death of the Warranter ." "You're sure it was suicide?" He nodded. "It was done with a neural massager. Set to overload. It was fused into his hand, and the activation stud had his pore patterns on it." It was a suddenly different scene from the one I'd expected. "You have his body?" "Inside," the Healef answered, nodding. "Are you sure Delver murdered the Warranter?" "I am now. We found the Warranter's stock in his pouch." He sounded sure of himself. "I want to see it." He nodded, turned back in, waving to me to follow. except by accident. He is just a man trained to handle difficulties. And when a man is murdered most villages consider that a difficulty. P could only recall one other that I'd handled. A simple crime of passion. But this one was adding up to lunacy. Which is out of place in the order of paradise, even a human paradise. We passed through the outer hall into the Healer's tech chamber. It wasn't comparable to a med center in a major city, but it was adequate for the needs here and more than an uninformed person might expect to Find in a small village. The Healer waved some viewlights on, pointed out the stasis beds that held the bodies of the Warranter and Freeman Delver. I looked at them, the Warranter's lanky form clad in blue, with a stain of blood above the heart; the freeman's stocky body, contorted with the frozen after-effects of neural overload...Not a pleasant way to die. "Any ideas. Healer? You knew Delver.".! was groping. Just trying to gain time to compose myself. I didn't see death every day. "Yes," and there was a curious eagerness in his voice. "Delver longed to visit the starports, go out from there to the stars. He spoke of it often, revealed his longing to everyone." The other shook his head. "Longing? Nay, some called it lust. An indecent lust. Seeker." "How much was taken?" "Six thousand credits. It is in the pouch," he added, motioning at a purse that lay at the base of the stasis bed. Freida jumped Off my shoulder, padded over to the open pouch. I looked back at the Healer. "Was that everything the Warranter had?" The man shrugged. "We would not know. It was the Warranter's private affair." Of course, that was natural. A warranter was officially a public servant, authorized to make loans, issue travel and identification documents and perform various other minor tasks. He drew his funds from the people of his village, but it was part of the nature of his impartiality that none except he and his sector superior were actually aware of the total amount he had available for his people. But that amount, # credits, was a bit large. "Six thousand credits in ready funds? A very prosperous community." The Healer flushed. "We pay our tithes. Seeker," he said snappishly. I smiled. "No criticism intended, Freeman MacDonald. It was rather a compliment." He nodded his acceptance of the apology. "As for your theory, that is enough to buy passage anywhere, with credits left over. But why suicide then? The freeman could hardly have guessed that a Seeker would be so close." MacDonald shrugged. "Repentance. He realized once the pasIF sion was past that he could not accept the future he had plotted. And with murder already done, his own death was the Easiest way." I nodded, not allowing my doubt to appear on the surface. But penance by suicide seemed unlikely on the part of someone who had the capability to murder an innocent Warranter in the first plaee. Freida mewed and I leaned down to allow her to regain her perch. "Aye, six thousand," she whispered into my ear. Freida's also mated at nearly #. Vocal abilities also added. Her tail pointed out a lump of fur that lay huddled at the foot of the Warranter's stasis bed'. I stepped closer, recognized it. An adjusted cat, similar to Freida. And stunned with something. I looked back at MacDonald. "Is that cat the Warranter's?" "Aye. It wouldn't leave his, form and was setting up a racket. So I mercifully stunned it." If my hunch was right the merciful act was directed more at the Healer's comfort, but that was a minor factor. "Can you wake it?" "Of course. But why? It'll just start the wail again." Smiling humorlessly, I said, "I'll suffer it. Healer. Now." My patience was growing thin. Mumbling to himself, the Healer grabbed a syrihge, moved over to the cat. Jabbing the needle into the side of the animal, he shot a dose of drugs into it. After a few seconds it started to move slowly, abruptly shook itself and started to howl. The Healer smiled with satisfaction. over the cat. Freida hissed something at it and the other animal shut up. I gathered it into my hands, brought it near my face. "Speech, little one?" I asked gently. The cat stared back fearfully, but refused the offer. I nodded at Freida and she hissed some more, communicating in that strange tongue that is neither human lingua nor natural catspeech, but the mingling of both. It took a few minutes and I realized the original conditioning had held well. The cat would not easily betray its master. But finally Freida convinced it. "Aye, milord?" it squeaked. "Did you see your master die?" wondering as I asked if the cat had the intellect to handle the concepts involved. "Aye, to my sorrow, milord. My life forliis, if I had the chance, milord. But no!" I could recognize from long contact with Freida that the cat was close to hysteria. "Who, little one? The man who lies here beside your master?" The animal turned to stare, Hnally trembled. "Aye, milord." I switched tack. "Did you help your master?" "Aye," the cat responded eagerly. "Much did Grayfur help master. I was his memory." And that was the explanation for a simple Warranter's owning an adjusted animal. The cat was a bio-comp specialty, capable of handling all the Warranter's bookkeeping in its special brain. But that also made things simpler. "Grayfur, how much did your master have now?" "How much? Forbidden!" The response was not entirely dictaUd by loyalty; the cat was probably programedta respond to certain combinations of words that I didn't know. But the answer I wanted could be reached without them. "Not to me," I said gently. "How much, Grayfur?" The cat seemed to ponder the idea and Freida hissed at it once more. Then, it all but nodded. "Fifteen thousand credits free, twenty thousand in storage." The Figures rolled out of the cat, ihd I laughed at the incongruity. But then it hit me. "Fifteen thousand credits free? Is Grayfur sure?" The cat seemed astonished. "Grayfur never failed master. Am right." I let the cat jump to the floor, motioned for Freida to join it, then turned to MacDonald. "Was there any left at the Warranter's house?" "No," he answered abruptly. I realized he was taken aback by the adjusted cat. He probably had known of them, but never dreamed that one lived in his own village. Just like any other villager. "Then are you sure Delver only had six thousand credits?" "Yes," he answered nervously. "Why?" I djidn't answer him, merely looked to Freida. "Freida, could the shock, have disturbed Grayfur so that he forgot his numbers?" The other cat snarled at the insult, but Freida considered it carefully. Then her tail arched a careful negative. I looked back at MacDonald. "Healer, nine thousand credits are missing. Where could they have gone?" The man seemed paralyzed. "Stolen off Delver's body? Or what?" I demanded. He must have thought I was accusing him, for he turned pale. "No, Seeker. No one here was alone with the body. That is, not until the money was counted. If credits were stolen from Delver, it was by some outsider." I stepped toward him, grasped his shoulders, applied pressure. "Healer, the truth. I'll have it one way or another." I read the answer in his eyes and IF no words were necessary. He was telling the truth as he knew it. No one else had taken the money. But # credits were missing. A thought struck me and I looked back at the cats. "Grayfur, how much did the thief take?" The cat hesitated, then said, "The man took all of it. Fifteen thousand credits -- and the master's travel kit and spare suits." I froze. It had been a wild chance. Out of the mouths of babes, surely. But from the mouths of cats? A travel kit and suits? Why? Where were they now? During that two hours between the deaths, something had happened. A n outside sound intruded. The buzzing of my communicator in the horse's pack drifted to me. A quick glance around to make sure MacDonald stayed put and I ran out to my horse. Pulling out the com, I cut into the channel. "Seeker Carver here." "Dan, this is a general alert. A tamper wagon is on the loose. Picked it out in Grailey, about Fifteen kilometers from where you are. Escaped me. It's a job from outspace. Mech-assisted wagon. He ditched his horses and Just moved out on hover. Heading your way. Can you try for an intercept?" The urgency of the present task caught at me, but a tamper wagon overrode it by far. To have one of those loose in this area could disrupt every village in the sector and wreak havoc with planning. "Affirmative, Harlan. Will try. Do you have a fix?" "No tech Fix, but I got a smelly on the wagon before he got out of range." "Right. I'm riding. Warrior, so that'll be enough. I'll contact you afterward. Carver out." I turned back, saw the Healer staring at me. "'What is it?" "Tamper wagon. Amateur bioarchitect. I've got to go after him." "But what about this?" "It can wait. I'll be back." MacDonald shook his head. "I still don't understand. That wagon was probably the one that came through here a few weeks ago. I checked him out and he wasn't working." I looked at him coldly. "A potential tamper wagon came through here and you didn't repo.rt it?" "He wasn't working. All his equipment was torn down." "Maybe. And maybe not. But I'll handle you later. I have to move out now. Just be sure not to fool with anything here, eh?" I niounted Warrior and Freida came out, joined me with a leap. I gave the. Healer one more stare. wheeled Warrior around and sped out of the village, moving through the crowds that had gathered at the commotion. I leaned down over the horse's ear. "All right. Warrior, a smelly. Find it. And speed, boy, speed." He whinnied his understanding and his nostrils flared as he soaked in the odors of the surrounding countryside. The smelly would penetrate for kilometers. And Warrior would locate the scent of the tiny beast at the range. Abruptly he signaled his success and broke into his fastest gallop, twice as fast as any horse on Old Terra had ever run. The adjusted animals could top any natural. Leaving the guidance to him, I reached back into my pack, drew out the regulation weapon I'd been issued so long ago. It was deadly, buUamperers could be, too. It was a long ride and a hard one. The wagon hadn't headed directly toward me, that was certain. But the tamperer couldn't suspect that another Seeker was after him. And though he should have known better from his trade, he probably ignored the capabilities of our adjusted animals. Being from outspace, and with a mech-assisted wagon, he had to be one of those arrogant roamers from a techoverrun world. He had chosen an easy hit for a few months. And instead had found a trap closing on him. Sarus was ready for his kind of operation. on from the side, running silently, maneuvering in the best operations manner he had mastered. The gene-runner was unsuspecting, loafing along. We drew to within fifteen meters before I issued a warning. The owner's head popped out of the control section, looking startled. He ducked back, started to slow. Warrior continued the approach. Then, abruptly, the tamperer flung the wagon toward us, trying to run us down. But Warrior's reflexes were too good. The horse jumped out of range of the first attack. I forgot about warnings and took careful aim from atop Warrior's heaving back. It cost me two shots to mangle the wagon's fancy hovergear and send it crashing into the ground at thirty kilometers per hour. It tumbled over, righted itself and lay there, smoke beginning to drift out of the damaged hull. I kept the laser out as I approached. Freida moved ahead to scout and signaled that the man was out of action. I dismounted and moved inta the slightly crumpled vehicle. It was fancier than it looked. There was no danger of explosion -- the automatic damage control systems had taken over. I straightened out his IF limp form in a chair, sat down myself. Freida brought the com and I opened the channel as I watched him, I "Harlan, come in. I've got him." There was a pause. Then Harlan replied. "Have any trouble, Dan?" I looked at the unconscious form, the disarrayed interior, and smiled thinly. "A little. He tried to run me down and failed. I had to stop his wagon with my laser." There was concern in Harlan's voice as he said, "I assume you're all right. How about the wagon, was it destroyed? And what about the man?" "His damage control managed to prevent any serious damage. Just a lazed hoverstructure. He's unconscious, but no serious injuries. I'H hold him until you can get here." "Right. Where are you?" I hesitated, looked out at the surrounding area. "About two kilometers away from Mount Grover. Almost straight out the main valley, just about to the river crossing. Good enough?" "Yeah. We're not too far away. Be there in a half-hour, maybe less." "Okay, out." I stuck the com into my belt, looked at the tamperer once more. He was still out, so I detailed Freida to watch him, began to look around the wagon. I 'M NO biotech, but a seeker is trained to recognize the equipment, just so he can catch operators like this one. He had the usual run of equipment, most fitted for disappearing into hull recesses to foil inquisitive people. I saw an electronscope, laser scalpel, standard diagnostic bank and a comp for handling gene manipulation and restructuring. Along one wall ran a few small compartments, translucent but obvious. I stepped over to the growth tanks, thumbed the controls of one. A side panel faded into transparency and I saw the developing form of a small cat, with some obvious physical alterations. A novelty item, I thought disgustedly. I thumbed it back to translucence, turned away. At the back of the wagon was a wall of books and tapes, with a viewer, I stepped over to it, scanned the shelves and felt mildly impressed. He was no incompetent, even if he had taken the route of the traveling tamperer. The texts were impressive, ranging far beyond the requisites for biotech alterations. Then a set of controls on the viewer caught my eye. I looked closer, pressed an inconspicuous button. The wall began to slide apart until a larger growth chamber stood revealed. Large enough for a man. And suddenly I realized this man had stopped at nothing. Freida hissed a warning that was cut off by a yelp of pain. I whirled, my laser ready, found myself confronting the tamperer, who also held a pocket laser, aimed right at me. "All right. Seeker, drop it." I stared at him, shook my head slowly. "I'm not crazy. We've got a deadlock here. You fire, and you're dead. Same here." I paused. "After all, the penalty for tampering isn't death." I looked at him, studying, his reaction. "Are you that anxious to see me dead?" He frowned at me. Then the laser clattered to the floor. "Logical, Seeker. And correct. What will you do?" "Enough. Confiscate your wagon, deport you to pjace of origin and alert authorities there of your operations." He laughed. "Yes, just enough. No grudges? No fanatical desire to see me punished severely?" I shrugged. "To what purpose? We wouldn't accomplish anything. As'long as you're not operating here any more we're satisfied. What's your name?" "Jansen, Jacob Jansen." He looked past me to the revealed growth chamber. "I see you've found my pride and joy." I turned carefully to. look at the chamber once more. "Artificial growth?" "Of course. But even better than that. Cloning, Seeker, with any deviations you want on the way. Care for a liVing robot that looks just like you? One that'llobey any order and be your twin?" He laughed. "I can do it. You know. I'm good enough to set up legal practice on some inner world." I gave him a frozen stare. "Then why don't you?" "No thrill. I'm not a researcher. Besides, they frown on cloning -- and cloning fascinates me. To watch a man grow, become an artificial twin." Laughing again, he continued, "Makes me feel like a god." li ing if he could read my dislike. I wasn't reacting only to his attitude, but to something subtler. There was an air of phoniness even about his confession of sin. I wanted to step outside for some clean air, but something about his words had caught in my mind, was demanding attention. Then I hadJt. "Have you done any human cloning around here?" "Yes. Why, do you want to pick it up?" He smiled. "I'll cooperate. It's at a village about six kilometers from here. A...dull affair -- but one guy there has almost a cosmopolitan view." I heard the sound of horses, knew Harlan had arrived. I kept IF my icy attention fixed on the generunner. "Does the name Delver sound familiar?" He frowned, searching his memory, then, nodded. "Yes. I think that was the man who contracted the clone. He lived alone. I suppose he enjoyed the idea of a slave that looked like him. Why, have you got the clone already?" I nodded woodenly. "I think we have. It was found dead this morning, supposedly a suicide. Of course, they assumed it was Freeman Delver himself, but now I think that's doubtful." He nodded gleefully. "So that's what he had in mind. Clever man. Really fooled his neighbors, eh? What is he, a joker? Or did he just want to go away secretly?" Harlan ducked in. I ignored him. "Yes, he wanted to get away secretly, Jansen. And you're in trouble. Bad trouble." "For the death of a clone? Uhuh. That battle was fought in courts long ago. It may not be legal to make them, but I can't be held criminally responsible for someI shook my head. "Not the clone. You're accessory to the murder of a warranter and theft. Your clone made it directly possible for the murder to be committed, because it gave Delver the perfect escape." The tamperer was ho longer smiling. Disbelief etched his face. "You're joking. Seeker. Aren't you?" "I wish I could laugh with you. But Delver was clever. And he took advantage of your helpfulness. That's the real danger of your kind, Jansen. And that's why human cloning is generally outlawed." I looked at Harlan then, saw another Seeker named Corey behind him. "Take him, Harl. And be careful -- he has something to escape from. Log him in as accessory to murder, for starters."  Harlan nodded, pulling out his laser. Behind him, Corey duplicated the action, moving around to get a clear view of Jansen. Harl asked quickly, "What about you?" "I don't know. Any starships in Grailport?" "Three, as far as I know. Two freighters and a regular liner." "Scheduled liftoffs?" I demanded. "The liner's scheduled for tomorrow night. One freighter for two days from now. The secotid freighter's a freelance, with no schedule." "For hire?" I asked. "If a man's credits?" Harlan nodded. "Probably. Why?" "I've got a fugitive who wants to get offplanet. Probably as fast as possible. And he's got nine thousand credits on him, plus stolen travel papers. He'll probably try for that freighter. He planned well, so I'll bt he's on his way to the port now." "There's been no transport routing to Grailport for the last two days. He must be either on foot or riding." I nodded. "With Warrior, it would take about ten hours to reach Grailport. With a normal mount, maybe sixteen or twenty. Our man has had since some time early this morning, probably.' That means he could be almost there, if he had spares and discarded the tired mounts. And from the way he's operated so far. I'd bet that's just what he did." "You'd better contact headquarters in Grailport. They can at least get a couple of monitors to pick him up." "You reach them, eh, Harl? The man's name is Delver. He'll look normal, because he stole Warranter travel papers. Tell the people to be careful -- I don't know what this guy is capable of." T he genefunner grunted. I looked at him. "Look, Seeker, I didn't know what this Delver was going to try. I mean, a little fun with cloning, that I can understand. But murder, theft. Well -- " I swore at him. "You've done your'damage." He shook his head. "You don't understand. I'm trying to help. There's something you should know." "Get to the point if you have one." He reddened. "Well, he asked for a novelty item, too. And I found one he went wild over. A Tavarean morphlizard." He gulped. "A programed one, with alterations. Input electrodes and a hand control unit. The units have preset limitations on shape changes, but they can be' eliminated in a minute if you know what you're doing. This Delver has a handbook on them. And to top it, the lizard is programed for total loyalty to the owner." I froze; shut my eyes and mind against a hurt that flared up abruptly. I heard Harlan through a haze, asking in a puzzled voice, "A morphlizard? What is it?" From somewhere I got the strength to overcome my reflexive reaction, looked at him soberly. "The dominant life form of Tavare, the second planet of Novterra's system. Through some evolutionary quirk the lizards are capable of altering their shape, abilities. Outlawed on any other planet because of their dangerous potential. And this tamperer has given one to Delver." The tamperer broke in nervously: "Look, I didn't know. I thought IF he was just another groundmucker, maybe a. little more sophisticated, but nothing much. A modified morphlizard wouldn't be that dangerous to one of these muckers. But if he's the way you describe him, well -- " He let his voice trail away. I left the wagon, unable to stand the sight of the fool any longer. Harlan followed me out. "You leaving now?" I glanced at him, shivered. "No. I'll have to contact HQ myself to alert them. Suddenly I'm the expert." I grabbed my com, dialed Grailport. The expert, I thought, a lonely terror in my guts. After a moment of static a cool voice came on: "Seeker headquarters, Grailport." "Route me through to Frasier, quickest. This is Carver." A hum came as the transfer was effected, then my local chief was on the circuit. "Sir, I'm working on a murder. Nothing simple. Involves a tamperer. The killer is on the loose, probable heading for Grailport." "Is that all? You want monitors to pick him up?" "Not unless they can handle morphlizards," I said, fighting to keep my voice even. "The tamperer fixed him up with one. Fully adapted. There are controls on the lizard's changes, but they can be eliminated easily." Frasier swore softly. "No one here has had any experience." He was voicing something I already knew. The morphlizards were rarely seen outsystem. Ignoring the yammering fear that came bubbling up out of my past, I said in a voice drained of emotion, "Then I think it's my job." "No. Not even if he's threatening to destroy Grailport. You can't risk it." His voice held concern. He had read my file, knew my background. He knew, in effect, why I was a Seeker on Sarus, why I had left Novterra. And he was going to protect me if. I'd let him. And for a moment I wanted to scream yes, jump the first ship outbound. But something caught in my gut and I knew I couldn't. "Sir, that other experience was a long time ago. I'm different -- conditions have changed. And you can't send a totally unprepared man against a morphlizard. At least I'm somewhat cued In -- if anyone is." I listened to silence for seconds, as he weighed my decision against available alternatives. When he sighed I knew he'd accepted my judgment at least temporarily. "As you wish. Seeker. What aid can I give you?" "Put that starport in stasis. Seal any ship In port and don't let anyone through. And send a flitter for me. I'll have to get there quickest." "ir your man knows what a morphlizard can do seals won't hold him forever." VI know that. But he's not an expert -- he may even be harmless. I can't be sure. In any case, those precautions should hold him until I can get there." I hesitated. "After that it's up to me." "Right. The Hitter's on its way and I'll have that port sealed tighter than a molectronic lock. Contact me when you reach Grailport. I'll check the rest of Sarus for experienced men." "Check, sir. Carver out." I cut the channel, left my beacon on to guide the flitter to mer Harlan was staring at me. "What was that all about?" walk away. But I forced myself to answer -- answer as best I could. "I was once stationed in Tavare," I said. "During the standard labor draft period. I was a maintaintenance tech at a virtually automated station. I was taking care of a small group of researchers working at the station. There was a girl, Karin. We became quite close." I shut my eyes, started to relive the incident, as I had so many times before. "One day, without warning, there was a run of morphlizards. Thousands, some of them rather ancient. More than any man had ever seen before. They overran the station, breaking through our external security screens as if they were paper. It gave the science boys additional clues to liz life cycles later, but during that run we just retreated to the security room of the station and hid. We were terrifiedfrom the very first. Sontething about a reaction the lizards can evoke' in men. Anyway, after two days they even got past the heavy-duty screens and started to trickle through the security room. Half of us died from physical wounds and simple fear. Naked fear. We still don't know why it happened like that, what fates chose the doomed ones. But half died and the rest of us were raving madmen by the time the lizards vanished." I laughed bitterly. "And that's exactly what they did. Vanished, almost every lizard. Dispersed, back to where they came from, almost as if on a signal. They left behind a wrecked station and shattered people." Harlan asked, "And the girl -- Karin?" "She was one of the dead ones. Eventually, rescue teams arrived from Novterra. They put the survivors in rehab and eventually most of us recovered. Sort of. But we had to get out of the system. The proximity of Tavare was a little too much." I looked at Harlan, IF wondered if he really understood. "You know the worst, Harl? What I just told you is just words plugged into my memory by psych technicians. Everything that could flip me again has been carefully filtered out of my mind. The words left don't mean anything -- I don't have the equipment left to communicate the reality of what happened. I have no way of transmitting my real feelings to you. Just second-hand phrases psych thinks are safe." I laughed. "And sometimes I wonder if they didn't leave too much." "And now you're going to face another lizard?" "No choice, Harl." "I'll take your place, Dan. You don't have to risk the contact." I looked at him, wondering if he actually realized what he was offering. And knew he didn't. I couldn't tell him what it was like -- though I could have added that the scientists knew that the lizards could produce a fear reaction in men, transmitted by telepathy, or some other mechanism nobody yet understood. And that was beside their actual physical capabilities, which were incredible. But to say Tnore would have been pointless; he still wouldn't have comprehended the reality of the lizards. So I just smiled, shook my head. "I have to try, Harl," I said. "And not just because no one else knows what I know. See, I've been running from them! The psych people said that was the only way I could insure my sanity." I could feel myself trembling. "But I've merely managed to block the insanity off in a corner of my mind. And a man shouldn't live like that." I looked up at the stars that were beginning to glow through as dusk settled over the countryside. We didn't get here by pretending that dangers didn't exist, by hiding from them. Men have to face their fears sooner or later if they're going to keep on being men. It's part of our makeup." "Are you taking the risk for a point of philosophy? Just to prove something?" I looked at him. "Sort of. To prove something to myself. Everybody's got to some time." He nodded soberly. "I suppose. Good luck, Dan." F eet scuffled behind us. I turned to confront the tampered Jansen. "Is there something you want?" He nodded. "Yes, something I'd like to do. That morphlizard -- well, I know how dangerous it can be. And maybe I could help you a little." I looked at him more closely. His attitude seemed to have changed and this one rang a little truer than the previous facade. "How?" "Fve read the research reports on them. It's possible to freeze their polymorphic structure temporarily. There's an organic substance from Tavare that will do so if it makes contact in sufficient quantity. I think it originates from a biological enemy of the morphlizards. It's the natural evolutionary reaction to their power. A balance. And I think I can make some for you." I felt sudden hope flare within me, hated it. Overcoming the paralysis, I demanded, "What range?" "The reaction depends on amount of contact.Forexample, most of a dose of about ten target squarely. And I'm afraid the stuff will have, to be thrown. The sudden impact of its being fired from any sort of projectile weapon would conceivably start a decomposition reaction." Throw it. With human inaccuracy, you'd have to be close to be sure. Well within the range of tie lizard's fear-evoking ability. All of which meant it was still my job. I looked at him once more. "How long will it take you to prepare it?" He shrugged. "Maybe a halfhour.  can do it right now, if you'll let me." I nodded. "Let's go." I followed him into the wagon. He stepped toward the lab section, began swinging equipment out into the open. He grabbed a tape, inserted it into a small viewer. Frowning, he began to manipulate the equipment. It was mostly automatic, programing the addition of chemicals to a nutrient broth, maintaining a certain temperature and pressure, checking contaminants. Abruptly he began to speak, without looking at me. "Actually, there are two counteragents for the polymorphic ability. The one I'm working on is the venom of the guredu. You've heard of it?" I nodded vaguely. "Ranks among the most dominant species on the planet. A reptile -- and in partial competition with the morphlizards." "Essentially correct. They spit their venom accurately up to about five meters. Rather astonishing. But that's the only reason they can exist in competition with the lizards. That's true for every competing species. For instance, there's a small mammal similar to the Terran rodents. The lizards can't harm it. At first researchers suspected some fort of scent, but experiment eliminated that possibility. So now they're working on a theory of telepathic defense. They think the rodent can freeze the lizard's changing ability by controlling its mind. The hypothIF esis is borne out by examination of the mammal's brain. It has certain structural peculiarities. Anyway, it goes that way all along the ecological spectrum. What Tavare's evolution produced, it also found defenses for." He smiled. "We can duplicate this venom, but nowhere nar as handily as the guredu makes it. And there's another agent we can't quite duplicate. It's a glandular secretion of the lizard. Right up to maturity this secretion is present, preventing any polymorphism. But at maturity, the glands responsible start dying and the polymorphism comes in. In fact, one can use that point to define maturity." "You don't sound like a tampered" I said. "You sound more like a researcher!" Ill H e finished a detail, spun to glare at me. "I'm not. I don't have the ability. I found that out long ago. I can understand -- but not create. So forget it!" His vehemence surprised me and I realized I had touched a sore point. I smiled, trying to soothe him. "All right. But there's teaching, you know. The more you say, the more I think you don't belong here, tampering for fun." He turned back to his work. "They don't use teachers any more. A computer makes a memory scan of some great scientist, and a reaction tape -- then simulates his form. It and others like it do all the teaching, over vidcoms. There's no place for humans in the prqcess. I considered his words, then said softly, "Maybe not on the central worlds. But here we still use human teachers. And I can name a dozen other worlds that do. Maybe not as advanced as your techplanets, but moving along nicely. And if we're too primitive here, Novterra also uses men. There's a place for a person who wants one." He was concentrating on the lab equipment. I wasn't sure whether he'd heard me or not. He finished punching out a programing combination for his lab computer, then turned away. "The rest is automatic." I followed him out of the wagon. He stepped outside, looked around. He spoke to the countryside but his words were directed at me. "What are you, a psych-tech? Are you just trying to torture me? Damn it, I gave up fantasies too long ago to start swallowing them now." "I meant what I said. Safus can use intelligent men. Almost any outworld can." I paused. "And you might find that your creativity is better here. There's something about the tech worlds, about their crowdedness, their hectic pace, that bothers some men. It's as if some men adapted to the tech civilization as it developed -- and others didn't and have had to leave it really to achieve. I'm not making promises. But if you're not a tamperer at heart, consider the possibilities. A good word from a Seeker can do wonders." He looked at me and his cynicism was gone. "I'll think about it. Seeker. Thanks for the offer." He stepped off into the darkness. I should have followed a tampered made sure he didn't attempt to escape. But I didn't think this one would. I turned back to the wagon, found Harlan staring at me, a strange smile on his face. "Do you think I should follow him?" I demanded. He shook his head. "I think you found a chink in his armor. Maybe you should go into rehab work." I laughed. "A Seeker is trained to handle difficulties, Harl." "Of course. I wasn't criticizing you, Dan. I wish I could do as much for a tamperer. If s sure better than just deporting them." He frowned. "About this morphlizard. Can it actually change shape?" Oh, damn, can it! But I kept my voice calm. "Yeah. The researchers didn't believe it at first either. But there's documented proof." Besides my personal experience. "It can even increase its mass to a certain extent by absorbing organic compounds and simple molecules from the atmosphere. That's one reason for the intense interest in it. If we could duplicate its synthesizing abilities we'd make a big jump over current techniques. But the secret is nothing solely structural -- something in the lizard's entire physiological system enables it to change. A dead morphlizard is just a hunk of decaying protoplasm, with perhaps a greater percentage of undifferentiated cells than most creatures. It's a mystery that we can't solve yet." As usual, a question in the right area had triggered the dry lecture; it was a means of psychological defense, the psych-techs said. They were probably right. "You sound as if you remember quite a bit about them." "Just what the research team learned before the incident," I snapped at him. "Oh, hell, Harl, I'm sorry. But I've completely avoided the subject for some time. That was part of the intended rehab program." "Okay, Dan." After a moment he asked softly, "Before that incident, what job were you heading for?" I shrugged. "Biological research. But they decided afterward that it was better to dissociate myself completely from the previous life. It was only by a narrow margin IF that they decided it was safe to let me keep my memories." "So you became a Seeker on Sarus?" "That's what my psych prorde indicated was a good alternative. And Sarus was far enough away to let me forget. Although sometimes I wish they had wiped my memories. "And let you start over? What was that you gave me about men facing their dangers, not hiding from them?" ' I laughed bitterly. "Maybe it was just hot air. I think most men would rather erase a problem than face it -- if they could." "But we don't evolve that way, eh?" He was goading me, and I recognized the fact. And I suddenly realized why. "Maybe you should go into rehab," I commented dryly. A n alarm rang from within the wagon. Jansen appeared out of the night and we entered the vehicle together. He took four cubes from the apparatus, handed them to me. "One'll do the job. Press the stud and throw it. They're contact explosion cubes. When they hit, the cube will shatter and spread the agent around. That way even a near miss might slow the lizard down. Hopefully, with four you'll have an adequate safety margin." I stared at the cubes for a few seconds, then dropped them into a pocket. "One cube will do the job?" "Yes. A full dose will freeze its polymorphic ability and paralyze t" .I thought of facing a lizard, depending on those four small cubes, and shuddered. "Are you sure these will work?" He returned my glance. "The venom works. Seeker. If the synthesis is accurate it will freeze the lizard. Otherwise I can't promise anything. If you don't trust me -- " he let it trail off, then smiled thinly. "I guess I can't blame you if you don't. But I think the synthesis was good and that the stuff will work." "That's good enough. After all, venom or not, I have to face the lizard." A shrill whine rose outside, growing louder until it culminated in the thump of the flitter setting down. I stepped out, started to walk to it, paused to look back. "Jansen, want to come along?" He looked surprised. Then; "I'd like to." Harlan said, "I'll come along, too. Corey can handle the situation here, wait for the pick-up van. All right with you?" I smiled. "Sure, why not? I can use all the support I can get." the time the flitter reached Grailport. Patterns of light beckoned us to the ground below. Off to jone side of the city was a dark area, one that usually was alive with lights and activity. But the starport had been sealed off, as I requested. The flitter homed on the signal that Frasier was casting for us -- he'd gone into the field to handle the coordination of this task. We swooped down and I recognized the warehouse area outside the perimeter of the port. As I stepped out of the flitter, Frasier walked up. "Hello, Carver." "Hello, sir." "We caught him coming into the city. A couple of rni?nitprs tried to pick him up, against orders." "What happened?" The chief shook his head. "One is dead and the other is under sedation -- in the hands of the psych lads. The freeman knows how to use the lizard fully, it appears. We managed to corner him in this warehouse when he couldn't get through the screens around the port. We've got him screened in now." "It's only a matter of time until he finds out what a lizard can do to a defensive screen. And then there'll be no choice. We'll have to destroy him and the lizard." I swallowed quickly. "And the only sure way is a nuke. Anything less the lizard will handle." "You intend to go in there?" "Yes, sir." He considered. Then: 'T suppose it's worth the risk. But you're taking a man in with you." I looked at him, knew he was decided on this. But I had to try. "Chief, it's too dangerous. To throw in a man who's had no experience with a lizard is insane." His eyes were hard, unyielding. "I'm not known for being insane. Carver," he rasped. "And I'm not going to risk your going in there alone. What makes you think your experience gives you any immunity? I've thought it over -- and I've checked with psych. And they say just the opposite will be true, if anything. How do you know you won't freeze up, become a madman again at the first contact with the lizard?" I could feel myself flushing, but I didn't know whether from anger or shame. I choked down an angry retort. "All right, if that's the way you feel. Who's going with me?" "Since Harlan's here, he'll go." We both looked at him, watched the surprise flash across his face. Then grimness replaced it. "Good," he said. "I'll go in with you." He was sorry, that much was obvious. But so was I. Anybody who hadn't felt the impact of a lizard couldn't begin to understand what it was like. Not even the psych teams. It was impossible to communicate the reality. None of them IF really understood what Harlan would be walking into. Then a monitor was standing before me, holding out a survival suit. The chief coughed. "These might be able to protect you from some of the physical danger." the precaution. The lizard could come up with a transformation that would cut through the suit like plastic. And even then the physical danger was the lesser evil, i didn't know exactly what effect a single lizard would have on a man, except that one monitor had been hurt mentally. But any uncertainty didn't harbor good possibilities as far as I could see. I found my hand , drifting toward the blaster that hung at the belt of the survival suit, jerked it away. I looked at Harlan. "Harl, no matter what, don't kill Delver if that lizard is still loose." "Why not?'.' "Because at present it's bonded to him by implanted loyalty restricting it. Delver is a limiting factor. Without him the lizard could be even worse." I turned away, glanced at the chief. "If we don't come out soon you'll know we failed. This'Ij either be done fast or not at all." "I know. And Carver -- " I looked back. "Don't you think you should give half those cubes to Harlan?" I looked at him for an eternity, then nodded woodenly. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the cubes and gave Harlan two. "Use them carefully. They're the best chance we've got." "I know," he said. But did he really? Few men can truly accept helplessness against an animal when full precautions have been taken. I turned away, motioned for Harlan to follow me. We approached the warehouse, a towering building that stretched five stories into the night sky, totally enclosed by the protective screens Frasier had erected. I held the blaster in my left hand, a cube in my right and signaled for the Seekers to cut the screens and let us enter. Frasier gave us a thumbsup and a faint odor of ozone came as the screens blinked off. We ran forward, through the open doors to the warehouse, and felt the screens snapping on behind us, as closely timed as possible. I glanced at Harlan, saw him studying the inferior:' ' "Remember," I cautioned him, "it's not a standard capture. Try for paralysis; Only use the blaster if you have to. Take care." "You, too, Dan." The interior was dark, and I had no idea where fhe controls were, so I switched onto infrared scanning with the suit. Not as good as visual, but better than being blind. Containers were stacked iii rows throughout the warehouse. At the center, the open space extended to the ceiling, past levels of cargo storage, with a cargo lift dimly visible at the top. I paused and decided to risk revealing our whereabouts; it would take too long to search the entire place. "Delver," I called out. "Come on out and surrender. This isn't going to do you any good.' ' Nothing happened at first. Then an eerie cry echoed through the building. felt myself freezing up, then I saw the dark form 'arrowing out of the upper reaches of the building, resembling a Saran dart bird enlarged five times. Waves of fear rolled across me, set up sympathetic vibrations that shook me to the core. I stood facing the naked core of truth. I couldn't fight the lizard! I forced my head around, saw that Harlan was on his knees. His blaster lay forgotten on the floor and the cubes had vanished. The stink of the terror within me triggered buried memories, scenes from the past. God, the scenes! I saw Karin again, kneeling, falling, her face filled with madness. I saw her die again, looking to me for help, saw her form being ripped apart by the hordes of lizards that had overrun the station. She had died hours before -- what they were destroying was the mindless hulk that remained. But still I shouted and cried. She was mine! They had no right! I could feel the last vestige of reason being torn out of my soul, feel the pain, the cancerous fear eating at my gut. Nightmares? Yes, nightmares! Shapes, all the shapes of the Lord of Creation -- but all with the same soul. The soul of fear, the soul of the lizard! Then the realpresent lizard struck, slicing through the protective suit and tracing a cut along my arm. The past vanished and I saw the lizarddart bird sweep up into the darkness once more. And suddenly I was enraged, maddened by the existence of the creature that had taken Karin away and driven me from my home. No matter that the creature was different; his soul was the same. My rage fought my fear and overwhelmed it. I was not sane but I did not fear -- a weird, berseker state possessed me. I looked down, saw the blaster I'd dropped. Stooping, I gathered it into my grasp once more. I groped along the suit belt, pulled out a set of flares. Triggering them, I tossed them high into the air, where they hovered on antigrav devices, switched from infrared to visual and looked at Harlan for help, but IF he still kneeled on the floor. I dismissed him from my mind and looked for the damned lizard again. I caught sight of it, wheeling in great arcs above my head. I kneeled, took careful aim, and fired the blaster. Energy cut through the air, searing at the lizard's form. With knother enraged cry, it dropped toward me. I fought to keep the blaster trained on it, and the bird started to burn. I'd won the first battle. The lizard shimmered, transformed itself into a form immune to blaster fire. But the creature was not basically intelligent -- and the new form could not fly. It plummeted toward the ground, still bathed in the blaster's discharge. At the last moment it adapted to the dual threat and shimmered into a new form. It hovered scant meters above the ground, a large flying reptile with glistening scales that shed blaster fire with little damage. T hen it was on the ground and I cut off the blaster. It shimmered into a new form, a mere five meters away. Convulsively I triggered a cube, threw it. The projectile hit the floor near the creature and exploded, scattering venom onto the lizard, which uttered a cry of pain and charged at me, shimmering again. The transformation took longer, seemed forced; the venom was taking effect. I recognized the new form; a Tavarean marsh lion, huge, muscled and full of claws. I threw my second cube as it neared me; it hit the lizard squarely and the venom splashed across it. Screaming again, ft kept on charging, moving clumsily. I fired at it and it started to shimmer, but more slowly still. It was a bare two meters away when it finished and the lion was still there, but with gleaming, blaster-proof scales. It jumped at me, claws extended, and I swung away from it awkwardly. I dove at Harlan, knocking him over and fighting to get his cubes. I came up with one. I spun around to face the next charge and was bowled over and carried past Harlan's form by the beast. With savage glee, I grabbed to hang on, stuck my hand down the gaping jaws and triggered the cube. The teeth ripped my hand as I started to withdraw and then the venom took effect. Gradually, almost comically, the life went out of the lizard. It toppled over in slow motion. I shov it off me, stood up and felt the searing heat of a blaster beam slice past me. I fell, rolling aside and scrambling for my blaster. With one motion I had it, aimed it and triggered it. Delver's hand vanished, a second later, his weapon with it. Somehow I managed to keep from turning the beam onto his head, totally destroying him. Instead, as he crumpled, I turned it on the lizard once more. And burned it, even against the protection of the adapted scales. When I was through it was just a burning mass of dead protoplasm, framed in a scorched pit in the floor. I stared at it and strangely felt something missing. My gaze wandered over to Harlan -- he had lost consciousness during our brief struggle, but seemed intact. And then I realized what was missing. When I had turned the blaster on the lizard, finishing it, I had finished burning the fear out of me, without realizing it. ven the core of Insanity that had lingered over the years was gone. I thought, of Karin and felt pain. But the pain I could bear, with the cushion of the reality of the present. I dropped the blaster, looked back, at Delver, saw him lying on the floor. No bleeding; the blaster cauterized its own wound. Just a large part of his arm missing and he was in shock. I felt no pity, instead a kind of joy that I knew was alien to the principles of the Seekers. But it was good that Delver lay there, and not some innocent clone of him, like the one that had died to start this whole affair. I turneiaway, stumbled toward, the door and signaled for the Seekers to open up the screens. I faced Frasier with a slight grin on my face, knew it was ridiculous. I walked into his arms. "You were wrong. I got it, and Delver too. Harlan's in there, unconscious. I got the lizard. You were wrong -- and the psych boys too. Wrong." He didn't seem upset at his mistake -- instead he looked quite joyful. I pondered on it as I collapsed into his arms, facing the darkness without fear. collapse was simply a combination of the lizard's venom and the psychological after-effects of the battle. I was out of medical care inside of a day. So was Harlan. Jansen was waiting too. He didn't mention it, but I remembered our conversation. I'm going to speak for him at the trial and he'll probably get off lightly. As I said, we need teachers out here. And Seekers, too. Who are trained to handle difficulties. In the end, even our own.  C rj I q  o f a d d r s s n o t : I I c n t'ors O'" othf?r sub scr' pT i o ri corspo n d o M c L should hv sent To L w Murphy Gaiaxy Moqaz;n' : j !) Eo'.t # STr oi'T, N' w Yo' U N  ; GO  # IF  I al father John Henderson we may now have trailed a clutch of scientist Arpad Arkabarana was saying in his rattling voice. "And that lair may . not be a mountain thicket or rain forest or swamp, but these scrimpy.red clay flats. I would give my life for the success of this quest, but it seems that such sacrifice should have a more magnificent setting." "It looks like a wild goose chase," the eminent scientist Willy McGilly commented. But no, Willy was not downgrading their quest. He was referring lo the wild geese that rose about them from the sedges of the flats with clatter and whistle and honk. This was a flightway, a chase of theirs. There were hundreds of them if one had the fine eyes to pick them out from the backgroumi. "Mud Geese," Willy said. "We don't see as many of them as when I was a boy." "I do not, and i am afraid that I said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk, stroking his -- (no he didn't, he didn't have one) -- stroking his jaw, "and yet this is the thing that I also have most desired, to find this missing link finally, and to refute all believers in the other thing." "We can't see the chain for the links," said Willy McGilly. "I never believed any of them were missing. There have always been too many of them for the length of the chain. That's the trouble."  search of them," said Arpad. "I've pretty well probed all the meager ribs of the world in that travel. My fear has always been that I'd miss them by a trick -- or that in some unaccountable "ay I wouldn't know them when I found them. It would be ironic if we did find them in such a place as this -- not a wild place, only a shabby and overlooked place." "My own fear has been that when I finally gazed on one I would wake with a start and find that I had been looking in a mirror," said Velikof. "There must be some symbolism here that I don't understand. What is your own anticipation of them, Willy?" "Oh, coming back to people I've always liked. There used to be a bunch of them on the edge of my home town," Willy McGilly said. "Come to think of it, there used to be a bunch of them on the edge of every home town. Now they're more likely to be found right in the middle of 'every town. They're the scrubs, you know, for the bottoming of the breed." "What are you talking about, Willy?" Arpad asked sharply. What they were all talking about E very town in the south part of that county has a shadow or secondary. There is Meehan, and Meehan Corners; Perkins, and Perkins Corner; Boomer, and Boomer Flats. The three eminent scientists were driving the three miles from Boomer to Boomer Flats looking for the bones and hopefully even the living flesh of a legend. It was that of the missing link, of the Abominable Snowcountry there, but the so-called Snowmen have been reported in every sort of climate and countryside. The local legend, recently uncovered by Arpad, was that a nonAfrican non-Indian "people of color" was living in the neighborhood of Boomer Flats -- between the sand-bush thickets and the river. It was said that they lived on the very red mudbanks of the river and that they lived a little in the river itself. Then Dr. Velikof Vonk had come onto a tape in a bunch of anthropological tapes, and the tape contained sequences like this: "What do they do wheh the river floods?" IF "Ah, they close their noses and mouths and ears with mud and they lie down with big rocks on their breasts and stay there till the flood has passed." "Can they be taught?" "Some of the children go to school, and they learn. But when they are older then they stay at home, and they forget." "What sort of language do they talk?" "Ah, they don't seem to talk very much. They keep to themselves. Sometimes when they talk it is just plain Cimarron Valley English." "What do they eat?" "They boil river water in mud clay pots. They put in wild onions and greenery. The pottage thickens then, I don't know how. It gets lumps of meat or clay in it, and they eat that too. They eat frogs and fish and owls and thicket filaments. But mostly they don't eat very much of anything." "It is said that they aren't all of the same appearance. It is even said that they are born, ah, shapeless, and that -- ah -- could you tell me anything about that?" "Yeah. They're born without much shape. Most of them never do get much shape. When they have any, well actually their mothers lick them into shape, give them their appearance." "It's an old folk tale that bears do that." "Maybe they learned it from the bears then, young fellow. There's quite a bit of bear mixture in them, but the bears themselves have nearly gone from the flats and thickets now. More than likely the bears learned it from them. Sometimes the mothers lick the cubs into the shape of regular people for a joke." "That is the legend?" "You keep saying' legend. I don't know anything about legend. I just tell you what you ask me. I'll tell you a funny one, though. One of the mothers who was getting ready to bear happened to get hold of an old movie magazine that some fishers from Boorner had left on the river edge. There was a picture in it of the prettiest girl that anyone ever saw and it was a picture' of all of that girl. This mother was tickled by that picture. She bore a daughter and she licked her into the shape and appearance of the girl in the movie magazine. And the girl grew up looking like that and she still looks like that, pretty as a picture. I don't believe the girl appreciates the joke. She is the prettiest of all the people, though. Her name is Crayola Catfish." "Are you having me, old fellow? Have those creatures any humor?" "Some of them tell old jokes. John Salt tells old jokes. The Licorice Man tells really old jokes. And man, does the Comet ever tell old jokes!" "Are the creatures long-lived?" "Long-lived as we want to be. The elixir comes from these flats, you know. Some of us use it, some of us don't." "Are you one of the creatures?" "Sure, I'm one of them. I like to get out from it sometimes though. I follow the harvests." T his tape (recorded by an anthropology student at State University who; by the way, has since busted out of anthropology and is now taking hotel and restaurant management) had greatly excited the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk when he had played it, along with several hundred other tapes thatHiad come in that week from the anthropology circuit. He scratched his -- (no he didn't, he didn't have one) -- he scratched his jowl and he phoned the eminent scientists Arpad Arkabarananand Willy McGilly. "I'll go. I'll go, of course I'll go," Arpad had cried. "I've travand should I refuse to go sixty? This won't be it, this can't be it, but I'll never give up. Yes, we'll go tomorrow." "Sure, I'll go," Willy McGilly had said. "I've been there before, I kind of like those folks on the Flats. I don't know about the biggest catfish in the world, but ahe biggest catfish stories in the world have been pulled out of the Cimarron River right about at Boomer Flats. Sure, we'll go tomorrow." "This may be it," Velikof had said. "How can we miss it? I can almost reach out and scratch it on the nose from here." "You'll find yourself scratching your own nose, that's how you'll miss it. But it's there and it's real." "I believe, Willy, that there is a sort of amnesia which has prevented us finding them or remembering them accurately." "Not that, Velikof. It's just that they're always too close to us to see." So the next day the three eminent scientists drove over from TTown to come to Boomer Flats. Willy McGilly knew where the place was, but his pointing out of the way seemed improbable and Velikof was mor inclined to trust the information of people in Boomer. There was a difficulty. People kept saying, "This is Boomer. There isn't exactly any place called Boomer Flats." Boomer Flats wasn't on any map. It was too small even to have a post office. And the Boomer people were exasperating in not knowing about it or knowing the way to it. "Three miles from here, and you don't know where it is?" Velikof asked one of them angrily. "I don't even know that it is," the Boomer man had said in his own near anger. "I don't believe that there is such a place." IF Finally, however, other men told the eminent scientists that there sort of was such a place, sort of a place. Sort of a road going to it too. They pointed out the same improbable way that Willy McGilly had pointed out. The three eminents took the road. The flats hadn't flooded lately. The road was sand, but it could be negotiated. They came to the towii, to the sort of town, in the ragged river flats. There was such a place. They went to the Cimarron Hotel which was like any hotel anywhere, only older. They went into the dining room for it was noon. It had tables, but it was more than a dining room. It was a common room. It even had intimations of old elegance in Uued pier mirrors. There was a dingy bar. There was a pool table, and a hairy man was playing rotation with the Comet on it. The Comet was a long gray-bearded man (in fact, comet means a star with a beard) and small pieces were always falling off him. Clay-colored men with their hats on were playing dominos at several of the tables, and half a dozen dogs were in the room. Something a little queer and primordial about those dogs! Something a little queer and primordial about the whole place! But, as if set to serve as distraction, a remarkably pretty girl was there. She might have been a waitress. She seemed to be waiting, either listlessly or thoughtfully, for something. Dr. Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves. Perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step. "Have you a menu, young lady?" he asked. "No,", she answered simply, but it wasn't simple at all. Her voice didn't go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timejess. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes. "We would like something to eat," Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. "What do you have?" "They're fixing it for you now," the girl said. "I'll bring it after a while." There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit. "Her voice is an odd one," Arpad whispered in curious admiration. "Like rocks roiled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar quality." "Not just a springtime; it's an interstadial time," Willy McGilly stated accurately. "I've noticed that about them in other places. It's old green season in their voices. green season between the ice." The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric. 'There's a lot of the gaslight era in this place," Arpad gave the opinion, "but the lights aren't gaslights either." "No, they're hanging oil lamps," Velikof said. "An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps." "Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?" Willy McGilly asked her. "Catfish oil," she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil bums with a claycolored flame. "Can you bring us drinks while we wait?" Velikof of the massive head asked. "They're fixing them for you now," the girl said. "I'll bring them after a while." Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation. "We came here looking for strange creatures," Arpad said in the direction of the girl. "Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?" "Yoii are the only strange people who have come here lately," she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous steins that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes -- something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was waiting their reaction. Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn't such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn't done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink. Velikof was always strong on the folk memory bit. Arpad Arkabaranan screamed, rose backwards, toppled his chair, and stood aghast while pointing a shaking finger at his splashing clay cup. Arpad was disturbed.  Willy McGilly drank deeply from his own stirring vessel. "Why, it's Green Snake Snorter!" he cried in amazement and delight. "Oh, drink of drinks, thou art pleasure beyond expectation! They used to serve it to us back home,but I never even hoped to find it here. What great thing have we done to deserve this?" He drank again of the wonderful splashing liquor while the spray of it filled the air. And Velikof also drank with noisy pleasure. The girl righted Arpad's chair, put Arpad into it again with strong IF hands, and addressed him powerfully to his cresting breaker. But Arpad was scared of his lively drink. "It's alive, it's alive," was all that he could jabber. Arpad Arkabaranan specmlized in primitives, and primitives by definition are prime stuff. But there wasn't, now in his moment oC weakness, enough prime stuff in Arpad himself to face so pleasant and primitive a drink as this. The liquid was sparkling with bright action, was adequately alcoholic, something like bock beer, and there was a green snake in each cup. (Velikof in his notebook states that they were green worms of the species vermis ebrius viridis, but that is only a quibble. They were snake-like worms and of the size of small snakes, and we will call them snakes.) "Do get with it, Arpad," Willy McGilly cried. "The trick is to drink it up before the snake drinks it. I tell you though that the snakes Can discern when a mail is afraid of them. They'll fang the face off a man who's afraid of them." "Ah, I don't believe that I want the drink," Arpad declared with sickish grace. "I'm not much of a drinking man." So Arpad's green snake drank up his Green Snake Snorter, noisily and greedily. Then it expired -- it breathed out its life and evaporated. That green snake was gone. "Where did he go?" Arpad asked nervously. He was still uneasy about the business. "Back to the catfish," the girl said. "All the snakes are spirits of catfish just out for a little ramble." "Interesting," Velikof said, and he noted in his pocket notebook that the vermis ebrius viridis is not a discrete species of worm or snake, but is rather spirit of catfish. It is out of such careful notation that science is built up. "Is there anything noteworthy about Boomer Flats?" Velikof asked the girl then. "Has it any unique claim to fame?" "Yes," the girl said. "This is the place that the comets come back to." "Ah, but the moths have eaten the comets," Willy McGilly quoted from the old epic. T he girl brought them three big clay bowls heaped with fish eggs, and these they were to eat with three clay spoons. Willy McGilly and Dr. Velikof Vonk addressed themselves to the rich meal with pleasure, but Arpad Arkabaranan refused. "Why, it's all mixed with mud and sand and trash," he objected. "Certainly, certainly, wonderful, wonderful," Willy McGilly slushed out the happy words with a mouth full of delicious gloop. "I always thought that something went out of the world when they cleaned up the old shantytown dish of shad roe. In some places they cleaned it up -- not everywhere. I maintain that roe at its best must always have at least a slight tang of river sewage." But Arpad broke his clay spoon in disgust. And he would not eat... in search of it but he didn't know it when he found it. He hadn't any of it inside him, so he missed it. One of the domino players at a near table (the three eminents had notic this some time before but had not fully realized it) was a bear. The bear was dressed as a shabby man. He wore a big black hat on his head. He played dominoes well; hs.was winning. "How is it that the bear plays so well?" Velikof asked. "He doesn't play at all well," Willy McGilly protested. "I could beat him. I could beat any of them." "He isn't really a bear," the girl said. "He is my cousin. Our' mothers, who were sisters, were clownish. His mother licked him into the shape of a bear for fun. But that is nothing to what my mother did to me. She licked me into pretty face and pretty figure for a joke; and now I am stuck with it. I think it is too much of a. joke. I'm not really like this, but I guess I may as well laugh at me just as everybody else does." "What is your name?" Arpad. asked her without real interest. "Crayola Catfish." But Arpad Arkabaranan didn't hear or recognize the name, though it had been on a tape that Dr. Velikof Vonk had played for them, the same tape that had really brought them to Boomer Flats. Arpad had now closed his eyes and ears and heart to all of it. The hairy man and the Comet were still shooting pool, but pieces were stiH falling off the Comet. "He's diminishing, he's breaking up," Velikof observed. "He won't last another hundred years at that rate." Then the eminents left board and room and the Cimarron Hotel to rumored to live in that area. Abominable Snowman; for the Hairy Woodman, for the Wild Man of Borneo, for the Sasquatch, for the Booger-Man, for the Ape-Man, for the Bear-Man, for the Missing Link; for the ninefbot-tall Giant things, for the living Neanderthals. It is believed by some that all of these beings are the same. It is believed by most that these things are no thing at all, nowhere, not in any form. And it seemed as if the most were right, for the three eminents could not find hide nor hair (rough hide and. copious hair were sup(osed to be marks by which the queer folks anywhere along the red bank of the Cimarron River. Such creatures as they did enIF counter were very like the shabby and untalkative creatures they had already encountered in Boomer Flats. They weren't an ugly people. They were pleasantly mud-homely. They were civil and most often they were silent. They dressed something as people had dressed seventy-five years before that time -- as the poor working people had dressed then. Maybe they were poor, maybe not. They didn't seem to work very much. Sometimes a man or a woman seemed to be doing a little bit of work, very casually. It may be that the red-mud river was full of fish. Something was splashing and jumping there. Big turtles waddled out of the water, caked with mud even around their eyes. The shores and flats were treacherous, and sometimes an eminent would sink into the sandmud up to the hips. But the broadfooted people of the area didn't seem to sink in. There was plenty of greenery (or brownery, for it had been the dusty weeks) along the shores. There were muskrats, there were even beavers, there were skunks and possums and badgers. There were wolf dens and coyote dens dug into the banks, and they had their particular smells about them. There were dog dens. There were coon trees. There were even bear dens or caves. But no, that was not a bear smell either. What smell was it? "What lives in these clay caves?" Velikof asked a woman who was digging river clams. "The Giants live in them," she said. Well, they were tall enough to be giants' caves. A nine-footer need hardly stoop to enter one of them. "We have missed it," Arpad said. "There is nothing at all to be found here. I will travel farther, and I may find it in other places." "Oh, I believe we are right in the middle of it," Velikof gave the opinion. "It is all around us, Arpad, everything you wanted," Willy McGilly insisted. But Arpad Arkabafanan would have none of the muddy water, none of the red sand or the red sand caves, nothing of anything here. The interest had all gone out of him. The three of them went back to the Cimarron Hotel without, apparently, finding a primitive creature or missing link at all. They entered the common room of the hotel again. Dominoes were set before them. They played listlessly. "You are sure that there are no odd creatures around this place?" Arpad again asked the girl Crayola Catfish. "John Salt is an odd creature and he comes from this place," Crayola told them. "The Licorice Man is an odd creature, I suppose. So is Ape Woodman. He used to be a big-time football player. All three of them had regular-people blood in them. I suppose that's what made them odd. They were almost as odd as you three creatures. And the Comet playing pool there is in odd one. I don't know what kind of blood he has in him to make him odd." "How long has he been around here?" Velikof asked. "He returns every eighty-seven years. He stays here about three years, and he's already been here two of them. Then he goes off on another circuit. He goes out past the planets and among the stars." "Oh? And how does he travel out there?" Velikof asked with cocked tongue and eye. "With horse and' buggy, of course." "Oh there, Comet," Willy McGilly called. "Is it true that you travel out among the stars with horse and buggy?" "Aye, that I do," the long graybearded man named Comet called back, "with a horse named Peegosh and a buggy named Harm a. It's a flop-eared horse and a broken buggy, but they take me there." "Touch clay," said Crayola Catfish, "for the lightning." T hey touched clay. Everything was of baked clay anyhow, even the doihinoes. And there had been lightning, fantastic lightning dashing itself through every crack and cranny of the flimsy hotel. It was a lightning brighter than all the catfish-oil lamps in the world put together. And it continued. There was clattering sequence thunder, and there was a roaring booming sound that came from a few miles west of the thunder. The Giants , came in and stood around the edges of the room. They were all very much alike, like brothers. They were tall and somber, shabby, black-bearded to the eyes, and with black hats on their heads. Unkempt. All were about nine feet tall. "Shall I sound like a simpleton if I ask if they are really giants?" Velikof questioned. "As your eyes tell you, they are the giants," Crayola said. "They stay here in the out-of-the-way places even more than the rest of us. Sometimes regular people see them and do not understand that they are regular people too. For that there is scandal. It was the scent of such a scandal, I believe, that brought the three of you here. But they are not apes or bears or monsters. They are people too." "They are of your own kindred?" Velikof asked. "Oh, yes. They are the uncles, the old bachelors. That's why they grow tall and silent. That's why they stand around the edges of the room. And that is why they dig themselves caves into the banks and bluffs instead of living in huts. The roofs of huts are too low for them." IF "It 'would be possible to build taller huts," Willy McGilly suggested. "It would be possible for you, yes," Crayola said. "It would not be possible for them. They are set in their ways. They develop a stoop and a gait because they feel themselves so tall. They let their hair grow and overflow, all over their faces and around their eyes, and all over their bodies also. They are the steers of the species. Having no children or furniture, what can they do but grow tall and ungainly like that? This happens also to the steers of cattle and bears and apes, that they grow tall and gangling. They become bashful, you see, so sometimes it is mistakenly believed that they are fierce." The roaring and booming from west of the thunder was becoming louder and nearer. The river was coming dangerously alive. All of the people in the room knew that it was now dark outside, and it was not yet time to be night. The Comet gave his pool cue to one of the bashful giants and came and sat with the eminents. "You are Magi?" he asked. "I am a magus, yes," Willy McGilly said. "We are called eminent scientists nowadays. Velikof here also remains a magus, but Arpad has lost it all this day." "You are not the same three I first believed," the old Comet said. "Those three passed me several of my cycles back. They had had word of an Event and they had come from a great distance as soon as they heard. But it took them near two thousand years to make the trip and they were wor ried that myth had them as already arriving long ago. They were worried that false Magi had anticipated them and set up a preventing myth. And I believe Jhat is what did happen." "And your own myths, old fellow, have they preened you, or have you really been here before?" Willy McGilly asked. "I see that you have a twisty tongue that turns out some, really winding myths." "Thank you, for that is my intent. Myths are not merely things that were made in times past. Myths are among the things that maintain the present in being. I wish most strongly that the present should be maintained. I often live in it." "Tell us, old man, why is Boomer Flats a place that the comets come back to?" Willy said. "Oh, it's just one of the post stations where we change horses when we make our orbits. A lot of the comets come to the Flats-Booger, Donati,' Encke, #c and Halley." "But why . to Boomer Flats on the little Cimarron River?" Willy inquired. "Things are often more than they seem. The Cimarron isn't really so little a river as you would imagine. Actually it is the river named Ocean that runs around all the worlds." "Old Comet, old man with the pieces falling off you," Dr. Velikof Vonk asked out of that big head of his, "can you tell us just who are the under-people that we have tracked all around the world and haVe probably found here no mor than seventy miles from our own illustrious T-Town?" "A phyz like you have on you, and you have to ask!" the old Comet twinkled at Velikof (a man who twinkled like that had indeed been among the stars -- he had their dust on him). "You're one of them, you know." "I've suspected that--fer a long time," Velikof admitted. "But who are they? And who am I?" "Wise Willy here said it correctly to you last night. They are the scrubs who bottom the breed. But do not demean the scrubs. They are the foundation. They are human as all of us are human. They are a race that underlies the other several races of man. When the bones and blood of the more manifest races grow too thin, then they sustain you with the mixture of their strong kinship. The mixing always goes on, but in special eras it is more widespread. They are the link that is never really missing, the link between the clay and the blood." "Why are they, and I myself if I were not well-kempt and eminent, sometimes taken to be animals?" Velikof asked. "Why do they always live in such outlandish places?" "They don't always. Sometimes they live in very inlandish places. Even wise Willy understands that. But it is their function to stand apart and grow in strength. Look at the strong bone structure of the girl there! It is their function to invent form -- look at the form her mother invented for her. They have a depth of mind, and they have it particularly in those ghostly areas where the other races lack it. And they share and mingle it in those sudden motley ages of great achievement and vigor. Consider the great ages of Athens, of Florence, of Los Angeles. And afterward, this people will withdraw again to gather new strength and bottom." "And why are they centered here in a tumble-down hotel that is like a series of old daguerrotypes?" Willy McGilly asked. "Will you tell us that there is something cosmic about this little old hotel, as there is about this little old river?" "Aye, of course there is, Willy. This is the hotel named Xenodocheion. This is the special center of these Xenoi, these strangers, and of all strangers everywhere. It isn't small. You merely see but a portion of it at one time. They center here to keep out of the way. Sometimes they live in areas and neighborhoods that regularized IF humanity has abandoned (whether in inner city or boondock). Sometimes they live in eras and decades that regularized humanity has abandoned. For their profundity of mind in the more ghostly areas, they have come to have a cavalier way with time... What is wrong with that? If regular people are Finished with those days and times, why may not others use them?" The roaring and booming to the west of the thunder had become very loud and very near now, and in the immediate outdoors there was heavy rain. "It is the time," the girl Crayola Catfish cried out in her powerful and intricate voice. "The flash flood is upon lis and it will smash everything. We will all go and lie down in the river." All the Boomer Flats people began to follow her out: the Giants, the eminents, everybody. "Will you also lie down in the river. Comet?" Willy McGilly asked. "Somehow I don't believe it of you." "No, I will not.That isn't my way. I will take my horse and buggy and ascend above it." , "Ah, but Comet, will it look like a horse and buggy to us?" "No, it will look quite other, if you do chance to see itt" "And what are you really. Comet?" Velikof asked as they left him. "What species do you be-' long to?" "To the human species, of course, Velikof. I belong to still another race of it, another race that mixes sometimes and then withdraws again to gather more strength and depth. Some individuals of us withdraw for quite long times. There are a number of races of us in the wide cousinship, you see, and it is a necessity that we be strangers to each other for a good part of the time." "Are you a Saucerian?" "Oh Saucerian be damned, Velikofl' Herma means chariot or it means buggy; it does not mean saucer. We are the comets. And our own mingling with the commonalty of people hasalso had quite a bit to do with those sudden incandescent eras. Say, I'd like to talk with you fellows again some time. I'll by. this way again in about eighty-seven years." "Maybe so," said Dr. Velikof Vonk. "Maybe so," said Willy McGilly. T he eminents followed the Boomer Flats people to the river. And the Comet, we suppose, took his horse and .buggy and ascended out of it, Odd old fellow he was, pieces falling off him. He'd hardly last another hundred years. The red and Mack river was in surging flood wi(h a blood-colored crest bearing down., And the Flats -- they were just too flat. The flood would be a mile wide here in one minute and everywhere in that width it would be deep enough and swift enough to drown a man. It was near dark, near the limit of roaring sound. But there was a pile of large rocks there in the deepening shallows. Plenty of rocks -- at least one big heavy rock for every person. The Boomer Flats people understood what the rocks were for, and the Giants among them understood. Two of the eminents understood. One of them, Arpad, apparently did not. Arpad was carrying on in great fear about the dangers of death by drowning. Quickly then, toxram mud into the eyes and ears and noses and mouths. There is plenty of mud and all of it is good. Spirits of Catfish protect us now! -- it will be only for a few hours, for two or three days at the most. Arpad alone panicked. He broke and ran when Crayola Catfish tried to put mud in his mouth and nose to save him. He ran, and stumbled in the rising waters to his death. But all the others understood. They lay down in the red roaring river, and one of the giants set a heavy rock on the breast of every person of them to hold them down. The last of the giants then rolled the biggest of the rocks onto his own breast. So all were safe on the bottom of the surging torrent, safe in the old mud-clay cradle. Nobody can stand against a surging flood like that. The only way is to lie down on the bottom and wait it out. And it was a refreshing, a deepening, a renewing experience. There are persons, both inside and outside the orders, who make religious retreats of three days every year for their renewal. This was very like such a retreat. When the flood had subsided (this was three days later), they all rose again, rolling the big rocks off their breasts. They cleared their eyes and ears and mouths of the preserving mud. They resumed their ways and days. For Velikof Vonk and for Willy McGilly it had been an enriching experience. They had found the link that was not really lost, leaving the other ninety-nine meanwhile. They had grown in cousinship and wisdom. They said they would return to the Flats every year at mud-duck season and turtle-egg season. They went back to T-Town enlarged and happy. T here is, however, a gap in the Magi set, due to the foolish dying of Arpad Arkabaranan. It is not of Scripture that a set of Magi should consist of only three. There have been sets of seven and nine and eleven. It is almost of Scripture, though, that a set should not consist of less than three. In the Masulla Apocalypse it seems to be said that a set must IF contain at the least a Comet, a Commoner and a Catfish. The meaning of this is pretty muddy, and it may be a mistranslation. There is Dr. Velikof Vonk with his huge head, with his heavy orbital ridges, with the protruding near-muzzle on him that makes the chin unnecessary and impossible, with the great back-brain and the great good humor. He is (and you had already guessed it of thal, an unmissing link, one of that branch of the human race that lives closest to clay and catfish. There is Willy McGilly who belongs (and he himself has come to the realization of this quite lately) to that race of mankind called the Comets. He is quite bright, and he has his periods. He himself is a short-orbit Comet, but for all that he has been among the stars. Pieces fall off him. He leaves a wake. But he'll last a while yet. One more is needed so that this set of Magi may be formed again. The other two aspects being already covered, the third member could well be a regularized person. An older person of ability, an eminent. Or a younger person of ability, a pre-eminent. This person may be you. Put your hand to it if you have the surety about you, if you are not afraid of green snakes in the cup (they'll fang the face off.you if you're afraid of them), or of claymud, or of comet dust, or of the rollicking world between.   For six weeks this summer, beginning June #, Tulone University in New Orleans win sponsor on intensive science fiction wfitkig workshop, continuing the Clarion F workshop founded ond conducted over the pent four yeors by fiobin ScM Wilson. The Tulone Workshop wiH be duected by Jomes SoHb, former eilHor of New Worlds, whose work Ik oppecued in the Goloxy publkotions. Orbit, Quark and numerous cmthologies. Mocmillon hos fust brought out o colect i on of hb short stories, # Few lost Words. The Workshop devotes three to lour hours eoch morning to lectures ond group criticism, the rest of the dcf to writing ond consultotion. Guost lecturers include Mr. Wilson, Somuel #. Delony, Hodon EWson, Domon Knift, Kerto Wlhelm. Tuition, induding housing, b # cmd college credit b given (three semester hours). For informotion ondor opplicotion, eddross: iomes Solb, Tukme #f Writ ing Workshop Dopartment of kngUsh (Arts andStorKOsf Tidone Clnrversrfy NewOrloons,io.#fl Green food as free. Water was pure. But iron had a sickness caught from man! uncle's medicine hut by the flickerflicker of the faint fire (whick the man was alllowed to have, grudgingly, and at high tax, for preparing his simple witcheries) the boy recollected the sound of the taptap beats on the tiny witchery-drum and the sight of the mandrakes lifting the lid of their bark box house and coming out to dance by the Hre, tossing up their small-small scrannel arms and' stamping their tiny-tiny feet to the toom-room, toom-toom, toomtoompetty-toom of the child-sized drum -- then dancing backward and closing the lid on themselves as the last faint pulse beat died away. A small man, his uncle or granduncle (in those days the boy did not distinguish), with a skill in small witcheries and small magics by which he sustained them. And the boy felt proud of seeing what other boys did not see. But most of his memories before the breakaway were ill ones. When he grew big enough to wander from the partly underground medicine hut or the round thatched house where his uncle's sister sat mumbling as she pounded bark or stirred the acorn gruel, the boy learned swiftly enough of how little he had to pride himself in. If you are smaller by far than the smallest of any born in your birth year, if they are smooth of skin and fair of hair and you are dark and your swarthy skin is covered with a nap or bloom of dark hair -- are these things to be proud of? If others have fathers and brothers. who return from the hunt to be greeted by the singing of their women and if your only family connection with it all is when old uncle or old uncle's sister comes stooping up and waits for a bone or an offal to be tossed as to a dog -- is there pride in this? To be sure, he was quicker of body and sharper of mind than any of his birth year; sharp and quick enough to learn that sharpness and quickness won praise only for others and in him were only to be resented. That magic qnd witchery produced fear and that fear oftfen produced respect; but that smallscale magic and witchery caused only small fear -- suspicion, rather -- and hardly ever respect at all. For fear and fears hung over the town like the smoke from the great central Tire on lowering days. Fear that someone was working a witchery, fear of the wild ones of the woods, fear of the king and the tax-gathefs, fear of known magic and of unknown even more. And the boy who was small and sharp and dark and shaggy produced an effect of strangeness which was like the subtle smell of fear -- but was not strong enough to ward off the hates and wraths which this caused -- and besides -- and besides... The affair of the great roan mammont, the rogue mammont, fear of fears and terror of terrors, brought all things to a head; but before that, long-long before that day of blood and death, that day of the hill-that-moved, the treesthat-walk, serpent-snout and spear-teeth and all the other names used when one dares not use the real name: mammont; long before then, when he was very small, there was the token. The token hung on a thong from a peg in a post in his grandmother's hut. For a while it was above his head and he reached for it often while the old one squatted, mumbling, in the sun of the doorfront. He couicf not remember the first time he actually reached it, standing on a stool (probably), but he had a clear recollection of one day scanning it and seeing it and recognizing it. It was carved of wood, roughly but forcefully, in the form of a bear. It had the bear's head and one tooth clearly in the crude snout; it had the bear's paws and legs. But the legs ended in the feet of a man, P erhaps at that time he had not recognized this strangeness; IF he had certainly never seen a bear, for it was not till later that Tall Roke brought in the cub which was partly petted and partly tortured until it was abruptly killed and eaten. Likely at that childtime he did not know that a bear has bear's feet and that although they resemble a man's, yet they are not. Nor was it yet clear to him how subtly manlike, the carving was. But he had the clear recollection of scanning it that one day and becoming aware that the old woman, granduncle's sister and his own grandmother, had come in and was staring at him, on her blear and withered face a look odd even for her on whom odd looks were common. A look of fear and love and awe and horror. Sensing that she was in what was for her a lucid mood, he asked as he pointed, "This -- what?" And she, promptly and matterof-factly, said, "Your father." And as promply thrust awry her snaggle-snarl hair and screamed and rolled her rheumy eyes and tore open the bosom of her barkcloth dress and beat and scratched her withered dugs and wailed and howled and beat her head upon the earthen floor. "Hinna!" she screamed. "Hinna! Hinna!" and, "Hinna-tenna!" Such fits and antics were not so rare as to alarm the boy -- for all he knew, all grandmothers behaved so -- just as, for all he knew, all fathers were carved of wood and hung on leather thongs from posts. But this fit was uncommon severe and he appreciated, in fact, he rather enjoyed the new aspects of it, as he might have enjoyed a new grip noted in a dog-fight. Hinna. So the old man sometimes addressed the old woman. Sometimes the old woman said it as she pointed out the small blue flowers of a plant occasionally brought back with other herbs and roots or leaves and barks from the woods by the old man. So: Hinna was the old woman and hinna was a flower, but he knew that this old woman was not thrown into a fit in order to 'mention either; he did not know how he knew and wondered, mildly, that he knew at all. Logic was here working scarcely above the level of intuition. The old woman shrieked and babbled of something which was "Woe!" but mostly her words were strange and, Hinna-tenna! she screamed. And, "Arnt! Arnt Arnt! And then the old uncle was kneeling beside her, soothing her, calming her, arranging her tattered dress of pounded bark-lining, carrying her -- at last, when her voice was a mere croon or drone -- to the worn-almost-hairless half of deerhide which covered her grass bed. And the old man got up and seemed at a loss as he looked at the boy. Who sensed and instantly seized an opportunity... Pointing to the token on the thong, "My father," he said. "Yes," said the old man, unsurprised. Then he winced. What made the boy say what he next said, still pointing? No knowing -- unless it was unrealized awareness of a connection between strange things enclosed in a space of time -- such as this moment which had just passed, or perhaps still was passing. Pointing to the token he asid, "Arn't. Arn't." "Arn," his uncle said, absentminded correction in his tone. So. Arn was the token which was the bear which was his father and his father had somehow, thrown the old woman into a fit in which Arnt was somehow different. And what else was in the fit which was familiar yet different -- fox something was. Ah. Tenna the boy said; immediately correcting himself: na-tenna . " Without so much as a sigh and in the same flat, abstracted voice in which he would explain to a visitor at the medicine hut the care and feeding of mandrakes or the price of a charm or the manner of a charm (other men whose work was witchery had the better sense to sink their voices and roll their eyes and make at least a few fearful gestures and whisper at least a few words in a doleful whisper, lips to ear. Other witcherers commanded higher prices, too, got amber-grains and goodly pelts, were not content with bones and offals) his granduncle said to him, "Hinna is the cornflower and is also my sister's name. Your grandmother. Was her daughter's name. Your mother. Tenna is a word in the Old Tongue, now archaic, used chiefly for witchery. Spoken sometimes by such relics as myself and sister. Tenna means 'daughter.' Arn in the older tongue is 'bear.' So, now I consider it, Arri'f may be applied to the token, for my sister's daughter said she had it of the bear. As she said, too, she had you. But she was never right in her wits after that and grew worse and we found her drowned." After a moment he nodded once or twice and left the house without more word, confident, apparantly, that he had said everything there was to be said. As, perhaps, he had. T he boy realized, growing old-. er, that often he himself saw sequences and connections where other boys saw none. But just as he could see logic and they not, just so things that seemed sensible to them were senseless and unpredictable to him. More than once he had been stoned away from following hunters, yet today he had been asked -- not allowed, asked -- "Come, honey-dripper, bring us good luck!" And here he was with the rest of them in the high grass and the sun hot upon the earth and on them all so that he could smell it and them and the grass and other things not even seen. Honey-dripper, with a guffaw. It was a name for him. Comb-robber was another. Both meant bear, who stole the honeycomb from the honey tree and ate it, dripping its richness, grubs and wax and all. But comb-robber, applied to him, was merely an ill-name. Honeydripper was less so, was a laughing term, and -- somehow -- referred not exclusively to the bear but also had somethingto do with men and the things men had with women. Tall Roke it was who'd said him this name this day and asked IF him to come; and Tall Roke it was, when another had looked black and muttered, who had briskly and blithely answered, "What? For that some rough fellow tumbled his mad mother and gamed her, saying, 'I'm a bear!' What? A bigger fool than she or you I'd be to think the kid an illbringer for that. Ah no, but that his old uncle's witchery had maybe rubbed off on him a bit, and then a-smells as wild as any beasty and so may cover our own manstinks -- " But as yet the boy could not smell the wild white horses they were hunting -- the swift, manetossing, clever-cunning, clevermad, mad-eyed, red-eyed, wildeyed, wild, white horses -- whom no man's mind or hand had ever yet thought to tame. Three days since, some village stripling, gaming about in the meadows, had found a colt with its leg broken in a mole hole, had swiftly (but, be sure, not without a swifter, fearful lookabout) cut its throat and borne it home. Perhaps one of its marrowbones was still stewing in a pot of spelt; the rest had sure been eaten. But the clever-mad horses of the herd had tracked the lostling down to its place of injury, had seen the blood, had traced the drips of blood as far to the village as even their mad courage cared to go. Since then they had been waging war: trampling crops, attacking cultivators and wanderers with hooves and teeth. So now the menfolk were carrying the war unto the horsefolk. Time was when only the poorest of the poor would have had stone or bone for his weapons. All else had had iron -- had even had arrow or spear-heads to spare, in case of breakage before a wandernain (some called them "shamblenain," but not to their faces) would come trading new irons for old: amber and peltries their fee: taking the broken points with them back to strange and distant Nainland to mend upon their witchery-forge, an art which only the nains had.' As for bronze, that was only a memory, bronze had long since died of the green-sickness. As yet, out here, the deadly rust was moving slowly, but move it did; something ws deadly wrong with iron, and ho nains came; grim was the mood of the distant king, and -- "Hist, now," said Tall Roke. "Mind the plan, now. Drive away the young stallions and the mares with stones, the colts will follow -- cut off the great stallion, and whilst we three engage him from in front, you two cut his tendons from behind." The great stallion, with hamstrings severed on his hind legs, would go down and never rise. Deprived of leader, the other steeds would flee. Tall Roke hawked and spat and grunted. He needed not to point. They had come to the edge of the escarpment and in the near distance of the wide, shallow valley, they saw the horses like wee white clouds . floating in the blue-green sky of grass. For a moment they gazed, the five or six full men, the twice that many striplings and the boy who had no name. Then they spread out widely and began the slow and cautious descent from the rim. Slow, for there was no swift going down that uncertain slope; cautious, because they dared not give alarm to the horse herd. The boy felt for the pouch with the stones in it. The touch was reassuring. Nothing else was. His first hunt. His heart pounding. It had been agreed that any needed signaling would take the form of a ground squirrel's whistling, as this would (at most) arouse the hunger of no creature larger than a fox or hawk. Tentatively the boy formed his mouth to make such a signal. But he never made it. The while he had been keeping a sort of sketch of things in his head. Yonder was the sun. The cliff directly behind. The wind, so. To the right must be the horse herd. A little left of straight ahad were, though now not seen, a clump of thick-boled trees. Beyond that, a low hillock of rusty scrub. A brook. A wallow. A larm, alarm rose so swift in his chest that it choked his breath. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. He had gone the wrong way -- or -- for he was much too close to the hillock, he could see it now, he could not see the trees, which meant -- and then came the whistle, and the whistle was to have come from Tall Roke and Tall Roke should be that way and the whistle was over this way -- Vertigo took him, he was on both knees and one hand. Earthshake? For the hillock moved and his eyes fled from it and his eyes saw trees walking and someone screamed and screamed -- it was not him, then it war him as it was many others, for by now all knew it was the hill-that-moves, the trees-that-walk, all of them could see the serpent snout that rose up huge and hairy and drank the wind, all could see the flash of spear teeth, all could hear the horrid trumpet scream of the mammont! mammont! mamont! as its tree-huge legs shook the grassy ground in its terrible charge, its trunk sweeping down the grass before it as a scythe, bloody scythe, bloody grass, bloody spears, bloody teeth -- Fear and failing flesh and yet senses still undimmed enough to hear Tall Roke's voice full strong as he shouted, "Hold to the plan! Axe men to the rear whilst I engage to the front -- "  and not we, he did not trust to any others' courage to face the huge red mammont from the front, but still had hopes that some might brave the great beast's hind legs to strike at the lower tendons. Onward the mammoth beast had come, fast, fast, but faster yet ran Tall Roke, passing it -- so swift he might have escaped, had he run in another direction, had such been his intent -- passing it, running backward before it, turning it, darting back and away from it, shouting and feinting his spear at it -- "Strike! Strike!" he shouted -- But no one was there-to strike. No one was there but Tall Roke. One man. One boy. Who shrieked with all the fury of his unformed voice and cast his stones with all the power of his unformed arms. For one fell moment the mammont wavered, rage-reddened eyes darting from man to boy. "Ankles! Ankles! Ah! Strike! IF Ankles!" hoarsely but still hopefully: Tall Roke's voice. But no one struck. And the one man's spear hung in the air, it seemed not so much that he had cast it at the mammont as that the mammont had hurled itself upon the airborne spear: it lanced the line of the great face from tusk-socket to eye-socket: the mammont screamed its pain and rage: again the spear hung in the air: and now -- and this was so puzzling -- Tall Roke himself hung in the air, his fair hair all in a mist about his face -- the python trunk seenried to pse slowly, slowly, slowly, and to descend slowly -- slowly, slowly, and to wrap itself so slowly gently lovingly about the man's neck. T here were flowers in the meadow and bees in the air and then there was a dripping comb of honey and he thrust his paws first into the comb and then into his mouth and its taste was of gold and sweet and strong and delightful beyond the taste of any food tasted before and when it was quite quite gone he licked his paws and he licked the grass it had dripped on and then he went scampering off to where the bushes hung heavy with the full ripe berries and he ate his wonder full of them and T hree of them returned alive to the village and Tall Roke was found alive (though only barely) where the mammont had tossed and gored him but, unaccountably, not trampled him as it had the others. But he, too, was soon dead. Another's head was found in the branches of a tree. Something that was probably his body, for it could be nothing else, was smeared nearby. The horses had vanished. That the great roan mammont was a rogue, all agreed. Only a rogue would travel alone, and there was no sign at all of any other mammont -- and, for that matter, of that one himself -- any more. At first no one in the village said anything but. It has happened. Since the starting of the red-rustsickness of all iron and the increasing wrath of the distant and once indifferent king, since the nains had ceased to visit and the tax exactions had begun to increase, rumors faint as whispers and whispers loud as shouts had been spreading, spreading, spreading. Some great calamity impended. And now it had come. It had happened. Next in the village they began to ask. How did it happen? By this time the boy thought he knew. And there was one other who, he thought, also thought he kfiew. And that meant there was a third who certainly knew. The name of the second was Corm, a lad perhaps a year or two older, eyes gray rather than the common blue, hair not blond and curling but brown and lank, fallow of skin; his father was one of the three subchiefs of the townlet. If Corm had not given the boy mahy good words, that was nothing, no one did that; but he had never given any ill ones at all. The third was a whey-faced, slack-mouthed, slack-limbed shambelton, with an almost perpetuat eruption about the mouth at which he ever picked and which generally bled; a liar and bully and boor, yet well connected -- that is, connected to families of some small importance who, by talking loud and often and big, made that small seem greater. It was one of those moments which seem to have been a part of the center of all things, lying in wait from the beginning. No hint of it before. Old Minna's grandson standing idly watching. Whey-face shambling along. The boy looking at him. Looking up to see Corm watching Whey-face as well. His eyes meeting Corm's. Instantly, as though spoken words had passed between them: It was Whey-face who gave that first, wrong whistle, which would have been done right if Tall Roke had done it at the right time if it should have been done at all; it came from where Whey-face was, and only he would have been fool enough, coward enough to have done it, done it in cowardfool hopes of a reassuring return of it: it was that whistle, illdone, which roused the mammont -- in another moment Tall Roke would have seen it and managed to get us all safe away somehow, but -- Still that same second. Wheyface looking up as though called, catching their glance, understanding, flushing, paling, and at once reacting in his coward way -- not coward-foolish this time but coward-cunning. Pointing at the boy, shouting at the boy, attracting instantly every eye and mind voicing the unvoiced and making clamor become instant fact: "It was him He brought the ill-fate, he brought the mammont there! The bear's bastard with the bear-stink on him! Bear's bastard! Nain's get! Made the mammont come! Curse-bringer! Shag-skin! Killed our men and boys! Him! Him! HimV And, stooping, he snatched up a piece of dried filth, ran and flung it. Then sticks, then stones. Next would-be arrows, axes, spears. No need to inquire, discuss, reason, weigh -- instant, heaxtjLwarrning hatred was quick, easy. ""Bear's bastard! Curse-bringer! Men killed! Bear-stink!" The mammont was gone, the boy remained. He saw Corm's mouth open but neither he nor any heard Corm's word, drowned out in the bullvoiced clamor of all of Whey-face's kith and kin, believing or not believing, belief beside the point, the point: Ours. Support him. Shout loud. Throw something. The boy ran. Terror runs swifter than rage follows. Boys can go where big men cannot -- holes, hollows, runways, dogpaths, shinny up slender trees and drop over palingsThere was hiold uncle crouching by his slender fire. It was an instant. His grandmother's hut. A packet thrust into his hands, the bark bag with the small victuals the old man took with him when he hunted herbs. A hide lifted up to show an opening the boy had never seen before. A burrow, wide enough for him. A patch of light. The village palisades behind him. An echoing that might have been the clamor of the mob. That might have been the beating of his blood; Something clutched in his other hand. He ran. He ran. IF II vFfather' the old uncle had said as he lifted the hide-flap. As it fell and all was dark, the boy heard him say, "It is time." Then nothing but a faint moment of one of the old man's chantings. Arnten, The word lodged like a grub in a honeycomb cell. Arnten. But there was no sign, yet. A faint thought: it is my name. No time for further thought. Arnten. His name. That and escape. For now, enough. A life. A name. In the woods, however, nothing was now asking his name. With a knowledge deeper than thought he avoided the hard-trodden dust of the common path and sank into the thicket like a snake. Behind, he heard the clamor and shouting descend into a single sound on a single note and stay there, like the noise of a swarm of bees hovering and mrumming its one dull note forever. Somehow it sounded im finitely more menacing than any cluster of mere words. Presently the humming-wrwmmg grew louder. Then loud. The earpressed earth echoed like a drumhead. The echo filled the ear and air. Suddenly it was gone and he, Arnten, realized that it had gone a time ago and that he was alone and that if any were still seeking him, they were not doing it here. Slowly he rose up in the thicket like a mist. He gained the path. He snuffed up the breeze. He listened. He was gone. branch. A ground squirrel hopped and scampered, scampered and hopped, vanished from view. There was a smell of wetness, of damp earth and the scent of the sweet green breath of plants. Arnten knew that there were times to look up and times to look down and times to look straight ahead. He saw the bush, he saw through the bush and, a long, long way beyond the bush he saw the boles of several trees but nothing in between. Softly, gently, he pushed the shrubby branches aside. For a moment he paused, holding his breath, listening. There was not, had not been for long, sounds of mob or pack or crowd. There had been no man sounds at all, save for his own. It was improbable that any enemy of his own blood was near. It was not impossible. But he heard no new noise. Only the faint patter of the ground squirrel. Only the same twit-twittwit of the bird on the branch. He slipped past the handful of branches and let them make their own return to their natural positions, only restraining them enough so that they should close without sound. He went on a bit and then he stopped and considered, there in the cool green corridor which for now meant safety. It had been used enough to create a trail, but little enough to allow the bush's growing to obscure the entrance. Perhaps small and dainty deer slipped along this tunnel through the trees. They would not mind sharing it with him. Or perhaps white tiger, dire wolf, snowy leopard, used it in quest of the same small dainty deer. This thought contracted and shook his limbs in a long shudder. He felt and saw the nap of hairs quiver upon his skin and stand up from the fearful flesh. His mind leaped from thought to thought as a spark of fire leaps from one twig to another. Another boy, conceiving the same thought, might find his mind working thought of danger -- beast equals danger -- beast equals panic -- run for your life, without even realizing the process. But his own mind worked thought of danger -- beast equals think about danger -- beast. And he stopped and thought. The thought isiot the thing. And the thought told him that the thing, the great ones among the danger-beasts, were seldom if ever to be found in this'Tjart of Thule at this season of the year; they were to be found (or rather, avoided) farther to the north, where men had less thinned out the game on which they chiefly preyed; winter snows, in which the hooved beasts would flounder and be more easily tracked and trapped and killed, might indeed bring the great killers down. But then again might not. He felt the drum within his bosom slow its clamor and then its beats receded to their normal slow strokes, below the threshhold of perception. He began to go on, but the trail was narrow and something caught upon a branch and held him. He looked down and saw he was still carrying without awareness the two things hastily taken in his flight from town. The bark bag of food, the bear-token upon its leathern thong. It was this last he now had to disengage. It seemed somehow as natural to hang it around his neck as to loop the grass cord of the food wallet from shoulder to hip. So. He had no weapon but he had food, itself a sort of weapon -- was not hunger the chief enemy? He had a potency in the form of the bear carving, a token of whoever his father was -- a father contained in a piece of wood on a thong was better than no father at all. Find your father, Arnten, What did he know of how or where? Either his father was or was not a bear. If not, then he knew and could know nothing. If so -- then what? Where were bears? Anywhere, manywhere, where there were trees and streams. So. Avoid the grasslands, the great meadows. But he would have done so in any case. There was the game he could not take, there would be the great beasts, the danger-beasts he could not forfend. Therefore, the forest. A tree creaked. It seemed a Yes. let and scraps of dried meat and fish were gone from his bark bag he went a while without and he hungered... Then there were berries and plants his old herb-uncle had shown him. He ate walking and he slept little. He seemed to need less of either. If the path forked and one branch inclined toward the plains of danger, he took the other. If there was still a choice and a question, he held the token in his hands and pointed it between the paths. It moved. Sometimes slowly, slightly. But it moved. It had one day not yet IF stopped moving when he felt the eyes upon him and looked up. They were great, glowing, amber eyes -- intelligent eyes, but far too strange to be the eyes of any man. Nor were they. The figure was squat of body and shag of skin, with a brown main of hair upon scalp and broad face. The extraordinarily long arms were folded across the extraordinarily thick chest. A kilt of soft leather girdled the loins. Short were the powerful legs. Over arms, hands and chest and belly the long brown hair grew thickly. The boy found himself looking at his own body and limbs. Instantly, several thoughts -- and one of them as an almost instant surprise:  am not afraid! And, another -- "Nay, boy." The voice was strange in more than being unknown. It had odd tones and echoes, the final vowels nasalized so that almost they sounded as nay'n, boy'n. "Nay, boy. It's isn't me nurr any we who's is fathered ye 'n given 'e them warm hairs upon yurr's skin." So acutely did the strange one discern his thoughts. And spoke a few words of no understanding, at first, to the boy -- whose ear sped back and caught on a word he knew. He said, "The bear -- " Something flashed golden in the amber eyes. More strange words. Then -- "Ye dow int speak en witchery words -- hey'n?" Arnten shook his head. "Nay," murmured the stranger. Almost, it was "Ngayng." He said, "We speak it ever 't'the forge. Ye must's ever speak en 't' Th' Old Tongue t'iron, furr iron 't's a witchery thing. So we speak en it furr habit, ef we dow int think not to -- " "You said -- Arnt  -- " "Eh. We speak 's'en it, too, 't'the bear, furr the bear dow be a witchery-beast. All creaturr dow die, but the bear dow come alive agains. And the Star Bear dow gived we-folk the first fire." The glowing eyes fixed his own. The odd voice, strong and strange, but devoid of harm for him, went on. "En all of Thule's the wurrd gone round, "When the wolf dow meet the bear: beware" " There seemed something expectant in his tone, something expectant in his look. But look and tone alike meant nothing to the boy, who said, as though thinking aloud, "A nain." The nain stopped his head and his shoulders. And the boy said, "Arnten, I am Arnten." And this time the nain stooped his entire thick body to the waist. Then, straightening, he extended an arm so long that its fingers almost touched Arnten's chest. "We know en what place 't' is." The boy's eyes followed and saw the thick and hairy fingers of the thick and hairy hand were pointing not to his body but to the token slung upon it. "Where? It is here"" The nain grunted, held up a hand straight from the wrist in the nain sign of negation. "Not this. Th' other this. Th' -- th' -- " He struggled to express himself, his manner rather like that of a man seeking a paraphrase for a thing he does not care to name precisely. "Th' other ThatV" And he turned and walked away. Arnten followed. A fter a full seven-days' walk they came to it. The place was more of a hole or cleft than a cave, but it was dry. Part of the ceiling had fallen in; boulders littered the floor. The nain without hesitating or pausing put his chest against the largest and wound long arms around it. He moved the stone up and over and then back. "Take 't' up," he said. "T's not furr we to touch." , clearly, was not the rock. A moment passed, in the dim light before Arnten saw it. For a moment he thought it was a piece of wood. Then, more by intuition than lineal recognition, he knew, that what he saw on the ground where the rock'had been was a witchery-bundle. That. It was perhaps the size of his forearm and, with his forearm, after he had taken it outside in the sunlight, he wiped at the dusty hide covering. It was certainly a witchery-bundle. There were witchery signs upon it, some clear, some dim, some familiar, some unknown. Largest and most deeply etched were the un and the bear. The bear was almost certainly a replica of the one he wore. Or -- was it the other way around? "The sun," he said. "Eh'ng," the nain agreed. "The sun and the bear, they go together. For the sun dies and 't comes alive again. And the bear dow die and dow come alive again. The sun give fire and the bear, too. Eh'ng," he said, after a moment, eyeing the hide-covered bundle, and musing. "How many snowtimes? Two hands? Surely two. But three? Surely not three. Bear, he telled a-we. Here dow be my token. Here dow by my," the nain gestured, "that. Bear telled: 'Look for it. If you see him, manchildbearchild -- if you see my token on'-t'him; show him where.' And we say'd him, Eh'ng-ah, Bear." It was mystery, but it was good mystery. Witchery, but he could not think it any but good witchery. It was a good moment. Why, then, did the flood of bad memory rise of his mouth? "They stoned me. They pelted me with filth. They called me naMs get and bear's bastard and they tried to kill me." The nain's amber-colored eyes glowed and darkened and in level sunlight glowed like a beast's in the night, glowed red, glowed like an amber in the nighttime fire. Words like distant thunder rolled in his vast chest and rumbled in his wide throat. "Wolf's lice! Accursed smoothskins!" He spoke at last in the common tongue and continued to do so, though occasionally dropping into naintalk or the archaic language of witchery. "If it were not for us and our iron they would still be eating of grubs and lizards and roots. And what will they do now, as iron dies? Is there one of them, a single one even, with cunning and courage enough to feed the wizards? Their king, ah, he might have, when he was young, but he's gotten old now, he's gotten half-mad now, he looks in the wrong direction, he afflicts where no affliction can help, the wind IF blows cruel hard from the north but he thinks it blows from the south! A nain's life is that it's worth to try to persuade him -- if a nain wished it. As for the rest of the slim race -- " He caught his breath, part in a sigh, part in a sob. The fiery glow in his eyes began to die away. "Nay, I'll say no more as regards that race and blood, 'tis partly yours. They may deny it, may deny you -- you may wish to deny it and them. But the blood cannot be denied. Nay, nay. The blood cannot be denied." Abruptly, gesturing to the bundle, the nain said, "Open it then." The outer covering had been tied tight with sinews, but his probing fingers found one loose enough to allow his teeth purchase. He gnawed, felt the fibers give way -- give until his teeth met with a click. Quickly his fingernails pulled the thread, Jtugged it from pierced hole, frorn the next and next. Some sort of dried membrane -- the bladder, perhaps, of a large animal -- was inside the outer covering, bound about with bark cord which did not long resist attack. Inside was a long pouch with a drawstringtied in tassels. Carefully he unfastened this, carefully he laid out the contents on the outer wrappings. First, by size alone, was a knife in a sheath of horn and leather, with a good bone handle carved in the same likeness of a bear. It was entirely unaffected by the ironrot. It was a good knife. There was also a dried and withered beechnut. There was also a greenstone. There was also a bear's claw. There was also, bent and doubled, but not yet broken, a riverreed. There was nothing else. He looked up to ask about these, but the nain was gone: E very man had a witcherybundle; even children devised them in imitation of their elders. Spme had richly adorned ones, the contents bought of high-priced witcherers for nuggets of atnber and pelts of marten, sable, ermine, white tigers, snow leopards. Some had but meager pouches containing perhaps a single item -- a bone, a dried this-or-that, a something seen in a dream and sought for and found. A tooth pried from a dry skull. A fragment of something said to be a thunderstone. Some had inherited. So had he. The knife alone would at any time have been deemed a good inheritage, the more so now that good iron was hard to find and harder to keep. The more so for the circumstances of its hiding and finding. But what did the other mean? A bear claw, now thatwas easy to understand. But the reed? The greenstone? Arnten, find your father. Had he found him? Not yet.' But now, having found this much, might he not find a source? For as long -- no, longer -- than he himself had lived, the nains had not seen his father. He might be dead. He might be far away. He might be neither. He might be alive and very near. Arnten carefully restored the magic items to their pouch -- except for the knife, which he slung alut his waist -- and started off. Excitement and happiness had made him heedless and when he heard the low-voiced song in the clearing he had no thought but to see who was singing it. It was one of the Painted Men, that was at once obvious -- one of the Painted Men whom it was death to see unpainted. By greatest good fortune, though, he had just finished painting himself, however -- and what a curious pattern his skin did present! Almost hideous. Not till the man, still hulnming his witchery-song, lifted his brush and dipped it in a tiny pot did Arnten realize, cold with horror, that what he was seeing was the man's naked skin! -- that he had only then begun. The Painted (or unPainted) Man swung about, panting with shame and rage. Arnten felt the club's first blow. Ill T he old nain stood stolidly where the uneasy soldiers had bade him stand. He could without great effort have broken the ribs of all of them and the necks of most before any of them could stop him -- and perhaps it was this that made them uneasy. But perhaps not. The king's camp and court was an uneasy place in general these days -- not that the rest of Thule lay at much ease either. Slots of sunlight came through the smoke hole in the top of the great tent. The king sat back on a peltpiled bench and the nain thought it seemed they lied who said the king was agewasted. Indeed, as the Orfas sat there, glaring, hands'clenched upon his knees, he seemed all too vigorous. Within himself the old nain sighed a slight sigh. Only to the extent that the smoothskins were unpredictable were they predictable at all. Ah, eh. Seasons come and seasons go and ever the race of nains would remain upon the earth. Meanwhile, one endured. Heat, cold, toil, hunger, thirst, a savage beast, an unwise king. A witchery queen. The soldiers, fumbling and breathing their unhappiness, finished shackling the old nain's horsehide fetters to one of the roof posts, were angrily waved outside, almost stumbled over, each other in their eagerness to obey. For a long moment the king continued to glare. Then he said, slowly and with effort, but quite correctly, "Uur-tenokh-tenokhguur." So, this was something. At least the king remembered the nain's proper name. Or had learned it. A small courtesy, perhaps. But a courtesy. He would return it. "Orfas," he said. The king's head snapped up with a jerk. He was not angered, he was not pleased, his attention had been called to something forgotten. Probably it had been long since he had been called by his own name in The Old Tongue, called anything (perhaps) save King or Great Bull Mammont or some other lickleg flattery such as the smoothskins used. The old nain almost without thinking essayed more syllables in the witchery language, but the king's swift gesture cut him off. IF "My store of that speech has rusted in my mind," Orfas said, "as has my story of the iron you have cursed." His head shifted, his eyes flashed. "'"'Why have you cursed it?" "We have not. Do you curse your kingdom?" "You are the High Smith of the nains. I have not had you brought here to bandy questions with me." "You had not brought rne here at all, had I not thought you would keep your word." Bluff and bluster. What? Not kept his word? How? "You said I would not be bound." A false and further look of outraged pride, falling into one of faint regret and helplessness at having been stupidly misunderstood. "I said that you would not be bound with iron." "Is it by such cunning shift of words that you hope to command either my respect or my assistance?" The king flushed, either in affront or from some vestigial sense of shame. "Do you think me an owl or a bat, unable to see in daylight? I see that none of your captives are bound in iron. It is not out of any honor that I have been bound in thongs of skin, but because you no longer trust iron." It was a statement, not a question, it went home. The king looked aside, for a moment at a loss. "I will give you an advice -- " The king sat up. "Sea-cow's skin is tougher by far and far less risky to hunt." The king growled and moved on his bench. Then he came forward and, stooping, loosed the High Smith's bounds. "It is well," the old nain said aloud. In his mind he said that in the brighter light the Orfas looked his full age indeed. Gray streaked the once yellow hair, now scanted. The smoothskin was no longer quite so smooth of skin at all: here wrinkled, there slack, elsewhere puffed with fat where not hollowed. It was nonetheless well, this act. Uur-tenokh-tenokh-guur sat and the king sat before him. Would he eat? -- Would he drink? the king asked. The nain grunted, held his hand up. No. A silence fell. "Listen," said the king at last. "What will you nains do when the barbar-folk invade?" "I do not know that they will invade. I do not believe that they will invade. Why do you think so?" The king restrained himself. Beneath his shag eyebrows his eyes looked at the nain like the waters of a wintry sea. "Why should they not invade? Are we now known to them as the source of great wealth? Amber and ivory and peltry -- do they not value these things? Is there not a proverb. When the prey stumbleSy the hunter sharpens his knifel They will invade to gain our wealth; they will invade because without iron, good iron for weapons, we are weak before them; they will invade because I tell you they intend to invade and it is in order to strengthen themselves by weakening us that they have cursed our iron -- " The old nain wheezed in the way that nains have and he said, "So now it is the barbar-folk who have cursed iron. And not the nains." Slant-glanced, Orfas looked at him. "All the witchery of iron is yours and you have kept it yours and we have suffered you to keep it yours. Besides the one kept by treaty at my court, there has been no forge outside of Nainland. If any man had a broken spear or plowpoint, he had to wait in hopes of a wandernain coming by with unbroken spear or plowpoint to trade him old for new plus a goodly gift -- Nay, High Smith. I never grudged the nainfee, myself paying highest of all. If this is at the bottom of all, let it be said the nainfee will be raised, let it be , doubled, tripled -- " ' "it is not we." The king's teeth clenched upon a strand of beard he had thrust into his mouth. "What has ever happened to iron without the nains' causing it to happen?" "This is a new thing, King. Had we not asked you long before you asked we?" The king's hand made a movement, the king's face made a movement. The king was not in an instant persuaded. "You asked in order to cover yourself. But you have not covered yourself. Do you not know that the kings ears are the longest ears in Thule" I hear all things and I can, from what I hear, feckon all things. Thus it is that I know that iron is accursed, that the nainfolk have cursed it -- at whose behest and for what purpose? Your silence is useless. Speak, then." The old nain sighed. "If you hear all things, then already you have heard of what the nains say among the nains in Nainland, namely that it is doubtless a device of the neglected wizards of Wizardland in order to ensure that they do not remain neglected: this curse, the death of iron. And if from what you hear you can reckon all things, then you can reckon what needs be done." Now it was the king who sighed. "You speak to me as though we were two old women pounding bark. You will speak differently if I come upon Nainland with all my men." The old High Smith shook his massive head. "It is all one, if you come upon Nainland with all your men or with but one or none of your men. The forges of Nainland are cold, Orfas. The forges of Nainland are cold." A S HE stepped from the outer to the inner of the two rooms in which he was to be lodged -- or confined -- he saw three great white flowers lying together upon a mat. He stopped still. "I thought you might remember," a voice said. "I thought it might please you." "Dame, I do remember," the old nain said. "And I am pleased." He touched without bending down the flowers with his fingers. The blooms were scentless, but the room contained the scent of some that had never blossomed in the northern land of Thule. He had heard of the tiny horns and small flasks carven in strange designs upon strange stone, which contained the odorous essences of plants for which Thule had no name, delivered at intervals in trading vessels for great price and for the anointing and the pleasure of the Orfas Queen. He turned. "Your face told me that you IF had never seen them before and that they pleased you; so I gave them to you, the three of them, and presently you gave me these -- " She took from her broad bejewled belt the ivory case containing the three small things so carefully wrought: dirk and spoon and comb. "Only see," she said, sorrowfully. The red-rotted' metal crumbled at her slight finger touch. "Can you not effect a cure?" His broad stern face relaxed into something much like sorrow, he held both his hands straight up at the wrists. "They are so .small," he said, musing. "All the witchery of iron known to the nains might just suffice to mend them. But the Orfas King would not believe that. If these could be cured, he would expect, he would demand, he would require, that aH the rotting iron in his realm be cured. And this cannot be done. I do not say it can never be done. But it cannot be done now. I do not know when. Perhaps never again in our lives -- Dame -- perhaps never in our lives A moment's silence. "I shall leave them at the forge," she said. Again a moment's silence. Then she said and her beauty seemed no less than it had been that long ago when Uur-tenokh-tenokh-guur had been a wandernain and she the lady of the Orfas Chief. He not yet king. She not yet queen. Sundry sayings floated in his mind. One queen is every queen, every queen is all queens. A beautiful woman, no doubt, and without question well versed in witchery, though he knew as little of queencraft as she of naincraft. She spoke again and said, "What have you to tell me of one who waits to return from across the all-circling sea?" He looked at her with pure unknowing and the certainty ebbed from her face. Then she said, "One who is not to be named, one who is the son of the half-brother -- " Understanding seemed to come not so much from his mind as from his broad and grizzled chest, whence a sigh of comprehension welled.' "Ahhh. That one, who contested with -- Nay, Dame, I haven't seen that one for four handfuls of seasons. Eh, must be full four. Nor heard of that one in that time. Say you that he has passed the all-circling seas?" She gazed at him, a line between her brows. "Say you not? I see ou seem full ignorant of what I ad thought every nain, as every man, has heard: that one fled to the barbar-lands after fleeing court -- when my Orfas gained the kingship -- and has conspired to curse the iron so that, when he returns with hordes of barbar-folk, the kingsmen shall be as though unarmed. And say you that you know this not?" He stretched forth both his long, long arms and held up both his thick and calloused palms -- straight up -- and he looked at her with pure unknowing. L ong he sat there alone, musing on what she had said, striving to make sense of it. Long he sat there, reflecting on old conflicts long forgotten -- though clearly not forgotten by the Orfas King. Long he sat there, yearning for the red fires and the hot forges and the lust, and joy of beating out the good red iron. Old forge songs and sayings came to him and old sayings not of the forge at all, such as By three things only can a king be made: by strength, by magic, and by fortune. Having set in the outercourt a watch of mandrakes who would shriek beshrew if so much as unbidden shadow fell, Merreddelfen, the principal witcherer, and the king and queen sat in the Room of Secret Counsel. Said thequeen, "What news?" Said the king, "What help?" Said the sage, "Much news, little help." In his mind he said. Little news, no help. But one did not say such dire words, doom words, to the king. "Slayer of SpearTeeth, the Painted Men report a spy in the forest. I have no fear; the spy is dead." Said the king, "Why dead? Why dead? From a dead spy no news can be gotten." Said the queen, "Why not dead? A dead spy betrays no secrets." Said the sage, "Great Dire Wolf, a dream has been dreamed of All-Caller, the great fey horn. No doubt this portends great good and who better to enjoy great good than thee. Great Dire Wolf?" Said the king, "Ah." Said the queen, "Oh." Said the sage, "Woe." Said the king and queen, Whatr Said the sage quite swiftly, "Woe to the enemies of the King of Thule, the Slayer of Bull Mammonts, the Great Dire Wolf." Said the sage quite slowly, "Wearing my Cloak of Night, I crept to the mines; there I heard the nain-thralls chanting in the Old Language, singing in the Magic Tongue. Lord and Lady, they intoned a tale of Fireborn, a thing of witchery of which they said it will cut good iron. Good iron! -- Lord and Lady! And if the nainfolk make words about good iron, is this not a sigh that the nains know that iron will soon be as good as iron was before?" Said the sage quite steadily, "Lady, you must use all your ways and wiles. Lady, you must prepare for many journeyings. Lady, you must wear many masks." Then they set their heads even Closer together and they whispered and nodded and bit their lips. The mandrakes muttered. And the shadows danced. T he breadth of the cavern was one nain wide and the height of the cavern was one nain high. Soldier guards, kingsmen, were obliged to stoop. More than once when the nain-thralls had been ordered to make the roof higher ness to do so, saying that the roof would fall. So the guards were obliged to swing sideways the cudgels with which they struck the nainthralls if the nains did not hack their stone-mattocks into the crumbly ironrock swiftly enough or if they lingered or stumbled while carrying the baskets of ore up the long incline and up the risky ladders set in shallow steps -- up, up and up to the open sky inside the grim stockade. IF Not long ago the notion of nain-thralls had only belonged to the past -- a subject for winter tales or summer-night songs -- how, in the days of bronze -- when no king reigned -- the nain-thralls dug the brazen-ore and forged the brazen-tools, how the greensickness came upon Thule and all bronze died and Chaos was king; how the nains discovered the secret witchery of iron and were free men at all times after, only paying the nainfee to the man king who in subduing the chiefs succeeded them as Power. Thralldom was still the subject of song and story -- .or rather, again. But who cared what dirges the nains sang as they toiled or what accounts they told as they lay on their beds of bracken in their imprisoned nights? The swans fly overhead A nd the nains see them. The moles tunnel through the earth And the nains see them. Stockades do not wall the swans A nd the nains see them. Fetters do not bind the moles A nd the nains see them. The baskets of ore were emptied into hand barrows and the thralls carried the barrows to the forge. Once the nains were free as swans A nd the nains see them. Once the nains were free as moles A nd the nains see them.  Although the presence of bronze as a crude earth is very rare, it is not unknown. The forge was a flat rock rising from deep under the ground. The fire burned upon a hearth of other flat rocks, raised to a platform of the same height as the forge. The lumps of ironstone (and the articles of sick iron) were placed in the fire and burned. Although the kingsmen walked to and fro in violation of the ancient compact which excluded them as it did all strangers, they learned nothing from their observations that did them any good. All ores looked alike to them; they did, not know which ones to discard. All fired ironstones remained mysteries still to them; they knew not, though the nains did, which ones to discard as too brittle and which to pull out with greenwood toolsticks to be pounded upon the forge . stone. Nor did they learn (or very much attempt to learn). the art of smiting with the stout stone hammer, turning and beating, beating and turning -- all the while intoning in the Old Tongue: Pound it, pound it, pound it well. Pound it well, well, well. Pound it well, pound it well. Pound it well, well, well... because it was said. The sound of the voice is good for the iron... P erhaps it was no longer as good as it once had been. Nothing seemed to be. Day after day the nains toiled to make new iron, hacks and spears and knifeheads and arrow points. And day after day the productions of -- at first -- the previous year were returned to them, rotten with rust, flaking and powdering, to be melted down and made new and whole again. The previous year -- at first. Then the irons of the previous half-year. Then the previous season. Then last week, month -- last fortnight. One sweating nainsmith paused and pointed to a red-sick lancehead and his chest, thick and thicketed as some woodland hill, swelled as he spoke. "Not a seven-night since I beat this out -- and now look how swift the ironill has afflicted it!" And he added in the witchery-tongue: "Thou art sick, thou art sick. Alas and woe to thee and us for thy very sickness" And in his rumbling, echoing voice he began to chant and was joined by his thrall-fellows: Woe for the iron that is sick, And the nainsseeit. Woe for the black stone whose red blood wastes, A nd the nains see it. He thrust the heap of rusted metal into the wood fire, deep, deep, till red coals and red metals met. Woe for the king whose men take captive, A nd the nains see it. They take captive upon the paths, A nd the nains see it. They lead away in heavy ropes, A nd the nains see it. Captivity and toil lay waste the heart, A nd the nains see it. Captivity and toil lay waste the flesh. And the nains see it. The nain-thralls waste like iron. The kings evil is like rust. The queens lust is wasteful, evil. Evil, evil, are these times. These days, consumed as though by wolves. When will the wolf confront the bear, A nd the nains see it? When wilt the stars throw down their spears? A nd the nains see it? Confusion take these smooth of skin A nd the nains see it? When will the wizards mouths be fed, A nd the nains see it? The nainsmith seized a lump of iron and beat upon it with the stone hammer with great, resounding blows; and with each blow they all shouted a word: When! Will! This! King-!dom! Rot! And! Rust! A nd! The! Nains! See! It! IV he lay between earth and sky, rising and sinking, turning over and over again. Strange calls upon strange horns, strange voices, sounds. Pains, swift and passing like flashes of lightning, shot through him, again and again, then less often. The Painted Men were pursuing him; he hid from them; he hid in hollows beneath the roots of trees, he hid in the forks of the branches of trees, perched upon the crests of rocks, IF slid into the spaces between them. Always, always, saw the Painted Men prance by, panting in rage and shame that he had seen their naked skin. Always, always he stayed quite still. And always, always, they passed him by. And always, always they paused, legs frozen in mid-stride. And always they turned, saw him; he felt the blows; all vanished. Years went by. he was returning to the everyday world he said in his mind that he would be very cunning and not reveal that he was no longer in the other world. He lay very still. Perhaps the Painted Men were uncertain if he were alive or dead and were lying in wait to see. He could not, through his parted eyelids, observe anyone or anything at all, save for the green network surrounding him and through which faint glints of sky were visible. But he had a faint yet firm feeling that if he were to roll his eyes just a bit to the right He did not; he was too canny for that. Besides, his right eye seemed swollen so much that -- And then a hand appeared, small as that of a large child, delicate as that of a young woman, yet not either: in the dim green light and through only one and a half eyes the hand seemed not entirely real, seemed almost translucent, had something about the bone structure, the nails -- how many joints were there -- nacreous as the inside of certain sea or river shells. The hand placed something on his puffed eye, something cool and damp and soothing... and without awareness of intent to do so, he put up his hand and took the other by the wrist and sat up. Almost, he had not held the hand at all. Almost, it was as if his fingers were encircling something which had dimension without having substance -- a delicate flower, as it might be, in the shape of a hand -- and it slipped out from his grasp as simply as a sunbeam. He had never seen a perry before. Something slipped off his eye -- he saw it was a dressing of bruised leaves and grasses, damp as though with the morning's dew: the perry's delicate and almost insubstantial hand took it and placed it on the swollen eye again and the perry's other hand took his hand, did not so much lift as guide it to hold the compress in place. As the thin dew sparkling upon a cobweb, so did the perry's garments glint and sparkle; as the shy fawn stands in the gladey underbrush, not quite trembling and not quite looking at the intruder but poised for instant flight, so did the perry stand at the entrance to the leafy bower. Arnten's body did not so much still pain him as it echoed faint reflections of remembered pain. Dim outlinesof bruises he could see here and there upon his skin; he remembered enough lore of herbs and simples from his medicine uncle to know that even the most puissant leaves or roots or grasses had not by themselves done all this work of healing: but the witchery of the perries, either intent or inherent or both, had aided them. At first he had had a fleeting thought that he might be in the hands of The Woman of the Woods, of whom many tales were told. To be sure, he had never seen the Woman of the Woods, just as he had never seen a perry -- but his uncle had told him enough of each so that now he knew. His uncle who was his mother's uncle. His mother whom he had lost. A rnten.find your father. His father whom he had never had. The bear he could not find. The man, the mocker (had said Long Roke) who had" "gamed" his mother. The bogey for whom the boys of the village had held him slightly in awe and so much in scorn. Because of whom he had fled for very life. In which flight he had all but lately lost his Jife. And now lay here, back from the edge of death, in the company of a creature far more fey than any nain, who spoke no word and barely Ipoked at him and barely smiled yet had felt that deep concern for him and even now trembled between visibility and invisibility, substance and shadow, staying and leaving. This gentle presence touched the cords which bound his pent misery and long-contained sorrow and did that which heavy and brutal blows had not and could not have done, and he covered his face with his hands and broke into tears. He wept long and without restraint and when he had stopped at last, he knew it would be long, if ever, before he wept again. His eyes were wet and his chest ached, but these were slight shadows which would pass. All his body aches had gone. Something had changed in him forever. He dried his eyes, including the one no longer swollen -- and he was on his knees and rising when he realized that the perry was no longer there. H e was aware of hunger and thirst, but more of thirst. He was aware of  something else, a sound that had been sighing in his ears for as long as he had been in this shelter which somehow the perry had made for him. Sometimes the sound was as faint as a baby's breath; sometimes it grew almost as loud as the wind which carried it and sometimes louder, the fider overbearing the steed. Somewhere not so very far away was a river and now, in this moment of his great thirst (water perhaps needed to replenish that shed by his uncommon tears), great was the sound of its rushing. The perry had stood upright, but Arnten found he was obliged to stoop, although certainly the grasses and the light, light withes would have yielded easily to his head. And so, while at the curiously woven opening, stooping slightly and about to go out, he became aware of two things lying almost concealed by the fragrant grasses of the shelter's floor. One was the witchery-bundle to which both bark basket and knife had been tied by deft and curious perIF ry-knots; the other reappeared to him as though out of his dreamworld between the time the Painted Man had beaten him to the ground and the time of his reawakening. He recalled it now. When he had felt (and doubtless had indicated) thirst, something had glowed and glittered in the air before him, touched his lips and he had drunk. He had in his semithoughts believed it a fragment of a rainbow conveying the cooling rainwater to his lips; or a gigantically distended drop, suffused into water on his lips and tongue. Now he saw it to be, less fantastically but not much less wondrously, a flask of some substance unfamiliar to him. Light passed into it and through it and he voiced wordless surprise on observing that he could see through it! What he saw was subject to a gross distortion. The flask was iridescent as the fingernails of the perry or the interior of . certain shells, shining with a multitude of colors which shifted and changed. And it weighed much less than a vessel of earthenware of the same bulk. He marveled, but did not stop for long to do so; he placed it in the basket along with the witchery-bundle (knife again by hip); he considered what its name might be. For present identification alone he deemed to call it perry ware. And then he stepped outside, ready to seek his stream. The sound of the river was quite strong outside the small grass shelter, shelter so slight that seemingly a fawn could have crushed it by rolling over, now that the protecting presence of the perry was withdrawn. He saw no traces of a fawn, but pausing a moment and wondering what, had cropped the small measure of meadow, greenery and flowery, he saw the pellet droppings of the wild rams and -- his eyes now opened -- here a shred and there a fluff of their wool. His uncle had at one time amassed a small heap of their hooves (begged, doubtless, from hunters) which lay a long while in a corner, oily and strong-smelling. Once a nain .had come to trade new iron for old and the rams' hooves had vanished -- but for what consideration and for what purpose he had never asked and never learned. The wind brought the river sound stronger, nearer, to his ears; the wind brought a scent of flowers, too. He was on a downward slope and in a moment, following the land contours, he found himself wading through the blossoms -- first they were under his feet, then around his ankles; then they touched the calves of his legs, his knee -- and he brushed them away from his face. Glancing at his hands, he saw blood. Astonished, he looked around. Each clump of flowers grew from a flashy green pod. Pod? Paw? There had been a wild catton in the village once, though not for long. Taking amiss being prodded with a stick as it lay stretching with paws outthrust, out from those paws it thrust its claws and struck -- once -- twice -- at its tormentor. Who in one moment more had crushed its skull with a rock. So, now: even as he halfhalted his movements he saw a cluster of flowers dip down toward him, thrust out a sheaf of thorns and rake his chest with them. And then another. And then another. His arms, his legs, his back -- he cried out, looked back, was struck again, flung his arms up before his eyes and staggered forward, raked with thorns and racked with pain. Then vinelets wrapped around his ankles... And then, for a long moment, nothing. eyes. At once his ears seemed to open, too. There was a deep, intent humming in the air. He saw the thorn-paws of the thickets sway and waver. He saw them droop. He saw a swarm of bees spread out, circle; saw, one by one, the thorns draw back into their pods; saw the flowers open wider. Saw each bee select its first flower, mount and enter, heard the bumbledrone alter in pitch and quicken. Saw each plant stretch itself taut, then begin a slow undulant motion. Saw himself utterly forgotten and ignored. Once again had the wary feeling of being watched. Saw nothing. Made his way unvexed to the water, kneeled and drank. Here the water rushed noisily over the rocks, there it eddied and circled silently into pools, out farther it glided with a joyful clamor along its main channel; then paused and murmured thoughtfully among the reeds. Everywhere it sparkled -- in his cupped hands as he lifted it to his mouth, as it fell in droplets from his face, spun around sunken logs, made the reeds rustle. Something was trying to tell him -- what? The reeds nodded. Reeds. With a movement so quick and unstudied that he sank one foot into water, he stood up, spun around and unslung his witchery-bundle -- or, more exactly, the witchery-bundle supposedly left by his father -- and spread out its contents in the sunshine. Fingers trembling, he unsheathed the knife and cut a fresh reed and laid it down beside the one in the bundle. Except that one was dry and one was fresh, they were identical. Surely it was a sign. The medicine objects restored to their coverings, he considered long what he should do. It seemed somejiow natural that he should continue along the river; there, where he had found the first sign, might he not find at least a second? At first he splattered along on the sand flats and gravel beds, the mudbanks and shallows of the shore. The river looked so wild, so wide, full of mystery (and, perhaps, menace). Here presently the salmon would come surging upstream, that was certain, but not now. What else might lie beneath those sounding waters was uncertain indeed. Sometimes the forest came right down to the brim and barm as though the trees would dip and drink. Sometimes he walked beneath towering banks and bluffs. After a while he saw the IF river divide and flow around an island, the main channel to the far side, the hither side forming a quiet pool, the shore of which was a sandy beach. On impulse he stopped, scooped out a hollow, placed into it his bundle and his basket with the perry thing, covered all with his leathern kilt, heaped sand over it. Then he turned and walked into the water. T he shallows had been sunwarmed, but now the deeper and cooler waters began to lap against his legs, higher and higher, and he saw and felt the flesh about each hair creep into a tiny mound. He saw that hair was now growing thicker about his man-parts. Abruptly, with a slight gasp, he slipped deliberately beneath the surface and for a moment squatted on the bottom like a frog. His breath heaved against his chest. He opened his eyes. All was strange in this new world. Then something was suddenly familiar; he opened his mouth and only the sudden burst of bubbles reminded him that water and not air was his surrounding. He surfaced, took another breath, slid down once more. In the curious light he exchanged quick glances with a small fish, then bent his eyes to the river bottom. Green light wavered in the green water and rippled over the green stones. Reed in his medicine bag, reed beside the water. Greenstone in his medicine-bag, greenstones beneath the water. It was the sought-for second sign. The boy-frog squatted on the sand, sand clinging to him here and there, and looked at the other two small things in his budget of wonders: the beechnut and the bear claw. Certainly the last was the Sign of the Bear himself, and by now it was plain that what the bear was saying was. Seek these others if you would seek me. Find these others and you will find me. In the way a scout leaves signs along a trail so that those who follow may see and know what his message is, so the Bear had left these signs -- not indeed in any sequence set apart by space -- so that one who followed after might follow farther yet. All clear, that. But what was the' meaning of the beechnut? Beechnuts were good to eat, though perhaps not very good. The black swine of the woods were said to be fond of them. It wasn't clear what connection the wild swine had with the bear. Perhaps none. He began to feel confused and set his thoughts to tracing their way as though through a forest path: Bear -- black swine -- beechnutwell enough, by working backward he had come at least to some certain thing -- beechnut -- foresttrees -- Beechnuts, whatever else they indicated, certainly indicated a beech tree. Not bothering to brush the sand from his bare legs and bottom, not from the leather kilt he swiftly and absently donned, he slung on his' gear once more and set off along the river. But this time he walked along the dry land and looked, not down, but up. And so, by arid by, by its silver-gray bark and its pale green leaves, but most of all its height, he saw the trees he sought. Some long past storm or earthshake, or perhaps a hidden subsidence of the ground beneath its roots, had inclined it at a slight angle, for it was near enough the river for the stream in spate to have undercut and then covered up its excavating -- or, perhaps the blow of a thunderstone had bent it; above the lowest branch, many times his own length high over his head a great scar was burned into the massive trunk. Once again he had the feeling of being watched; the feeling ebbed again. And there was certainly no sight nor sign of a bear. H IS disappointment was great. It would have been easy to stumble or falter, only that day's morning had he gotten up from a daze of illness which had lasted -- he realized he did not know for how long -- and he had barely paused for rest. He had drunk once. He had not eaten. Weakness rose inside him. What had he expected? To find his father and, in finding him, an end to all mystery and aloneness forever? Had he expected to find a father sitting at the bottom of the huge beech tree, ready to welcome him with warm embrace? Here he was, Arnten, and he was as alone, as hungry, as unknowing as he had ever been. What then was he to do? Slump behind the shelter of a bush and sleep and die? Weakness vanished. The very force of its sensation became a strength that blazed up within him and made itself felt without. He felt his skin tingle with something close to rage against this curious father who had cost his mother's life, had never come near to see what he had begotten, had left his cryptic messages with the nains alone. A father who might be dead, long dead. Had he been pursuing a ghost? Had he himself perhaps died already under the blows of the Painted Man and was now himself but a ghost? Did ghosts hunger? He allowed himself a cry of anger and bafflement. Then, fiercely, he filled his bark basket with such nuts and barries and leaves and shoots of greenfood as were close to hand. At a small trickle on its way to join the stream, he filled the perryware flask, stoppered its neck with a plug of fern. He arranged everything to hang behind him. Then, angry and hoteyed, defiant and determined, he set his toes and fingers in the cracks and ridges of the beech tree's bark and began to climb. For the first time he allowed himself to speak his thoughts aloud. "'I will go up!" he said, through his set teeth. "I-will-go-up!" He inched up. And up. "And I will find out!" The bundle and basket dangled, swung out, bumped back, grew heavier. "And until I find out -- " he panted, dug in once more, advanced, advanced -- "I ' will not come down -- " He swung one leg over the lowermost branch, hoisted himself up, pressed his head to the rough bosom of the tree and hung on for very life against the wave of vertigo which threatened to plummet him to the ground. Slowly it IF passed and slowly he opened his eyes. The lazy wind swung into his face, laden with scents of the rich earth, of flowers and other growing things. He looked over leagues of land and the swelling and falling away of hills, the glittering serpentine length of the river, forest forever a great green roof. And far, far off, so distant that he could not be sure, he thought he saw threadthin smoke. It might have been his village. He thrust forward his chin so suddenly that he felt a creak in his neck and, with all his force and might, spat in its direction. And then he allowed himself to realize that the lightning-burn upon the tree, just above the branch, was actually a tree-cave, a hollow. It was, he considered (with a shiver), too small to harbor either tiger or leopard; it even lacked the reek of a. bird's nest. Serpents would not go so high. Slowly, cautiously, he passed himself into it. Part of the bark still lay in place like a shell. And, patiently awaiting his discovery, wedged with splits of wood, pi;otected from the worst assaults of the weather, was another hide-bound bag. Inside this was a box of carved wood. And in the box, padded with red-dyed fleece, was something that lay almost outside all his experience. Long he crouched in the dim light, halfafraid to touch it; then his fingers played over the intricate carvings. There was mammont-ivory and horn of wild ram, horn of elk; there was bear claw, there was -- there were many things. Parts of it moved around, circle-wise, when he turned them. Parts moved up and down from holes, like little levers, when he touched them. Shapes of beasts and birds were carved into it. No man -- nor nain -- nor perry -- had devised it. It was wizards' work, and wizardry of witchery alone. It was a witchhorn, so huge and adorned and complex it could only be the witchhorn. Could only be All-caller, the great, fey horn. V . S EE then, in the late rays of the afternoon sun, while the great red circle still throws heat before descending for its slow journey through the Cavern Beneath The Earth whence .it will rise again next morning, a small, a very small Something sticking out its head from the bole of the huge beech tree. After the head, an arm, at the end of the arm a hand and in the hand -- what? It is needful to come closer. A shaggy boy, not quite a new young man, excitement and triumph and also fear upon its mold-smutched face. Carefully he holds the great horn in both his dirty hands. Carefully he examines it yet again, turning its turnable parts. Ah. Ahah. So. Here is the bear claw, as like to the bear claw in his witchery-bundle to make one think they had come from the same bear-beast. As, perhaps they had. The boy's full lips protrude, compressed in thought. So -- here is the bear carved in ivory upon the horn band. Surely it was meant to come in apposition to the bear claw. He takes a deep breath, fills his dusty cheeks, lifts the horn to his lips. His eyes roll, his nostrils distend. And below upon the mossy ground, while the echoes of the great cry, part growl, part roar, still send the birds whirling about and the leaves quivering, something comes into the open glade around the beech tree. Something comes as though the thicket were mere fern grass. Something comes crashing, comes trampling, comes on all fours, comes walking upright. Stands, stopping. Peering this way and that. Paws and head swaying, issues a cry, part roar, part growl. Part challenge, part question. Puzzled. Vexed. Brute. Bewildered. Bear, Bear, Bear, A moment passes, or does not pass; endures without end. Then the bear coughs, grunts, sighs, brushes at one ear.' Gurgles deep within its shaggy chest. Ambles and shambles down to the river. Stands there without motion. Then makes gestures which no bear has ever before been seen to make -- or so it seems to the watcher up high. Who has ever seen a bear take off its skin before? Who has ever seen a man inside a bear before? Who has ever seen a man stride into the water and leave an empty bearskin lying on the bank behind, gaping empty, eyeholes looking up, sightless, at the sky? Has anyone -- ? -- before? . man and, though it was the familiar-most of any object he had with him, he studied it as though he had never seen it before. Almost, for that matter, he had never seen a bear before. Perhaps he had seen live bears one or two times -- dead ones, before they had been all skinned and dismembered for food and hide, several times. The carving did not seem to have changed. The bear was still certainly a bear -- except that it still certainly had man's feet. He could not recall that he had ever observed the feet of living bears, these must have been concealed in grass or underbrush, or perhaps he had just not been looking; likelier he had had his eyes (as he crouched fearfully out of sight) on the paws of the forelimbs, on the fearsome jaws. Perhaps all bears had man's feet. But then a clear picture came to him of the four paws of one dead bear, cut off for the pot -- and all were pas, none truly feet. And yet, might it not be that bears, alive, had feet like men, and that these changed at death? As for the bear below? Truly, he had not noticed. He did not know. Well, regardless, he knew what he had to do now. He watched the man (formerly bear) swimming strongly in the water, bobbing under, emerging with hair all sleek, shaking his head, then resuming his swim, finally passing out of sight around a bend in the river. He would certainly be back. But Arnten was certain that he would not be back at once. Unencumbered by any burdens, all of which he left in the hollow, he climbed carefully down; he ran, eyes racing between three places -- the ground, lest he stumIF ble -- the water, lest the man, remarks or patterns (but blazing turning, see him soon -- the bearand patterning were not intendskin, lest -- lest what? Lest, pered to be other than open for all who haps, and most horrifying by far, could to read). And yet -- and yet, the empty skin somehow take on hy had he intended that his son life and move, either toward or should some day follow? How sure away from him. For a second it he had felt the son would follow, did indeed seem upon the point of would meet the nains, would undoing so and he gasped in fright, derstand the messages bound up But it was only the wind raising in the witchery-bundle: but this a worn corner. was for the moment beside the He seized the skin and ran, flingpoint and the point .was the bearing it across his shoulder and feelmanmanbear was power, and ing it on his back, bounding and power, as much as it was to be debouncing. He could see it, feel it, sired, so much was it to be feared, thankfully he could not hear it, he Presently something showed ithad no desire or reason to taste it. self in the river, moving against the He could smell it, though, and its current. Arms flashing in the dereek was very strong, partly bear, dining sunlight. A figure came partly man. All these things he padding out of the water on a perceived without being aware of sandbar, moving as a bear does concentrating on them. He conon all fours, but was not a bear; centrated first on getting out of moved to the other end of the sandsight of the water. And then he bar, where, motionless, it seemed paused to think of what he should to be staring into the water. A do next. forelimb moved so fast that the And, with a start, realized that motion could hardly be followed, he had already done something. Something flew out of the water. Perhaps he should not have, persparkled, fell. Twice more was the haps he should return and undo scene repeated before, now walkit. But he knew he would not. That ing upright, a fish in each hand which he had so greatly desired, and one in fhe mouth, the figure the one whom he had so straightly walked through the water to the sought, the source of his being and shore and shambled up the bank, his childhood's woe, man or bear Another, smaller figure, watchor manbear or bearman, the ing, trembled. The tall one was witchery creature which had been thickly built, with hair (now his weakness and must now be his slicked down flat with water) so strength... thick that almost the skin could be "l am afraid," he whispered. termed a pelt. It seemed that all the True, That One In The Water brightness of the sky of Thule, clearly had desired to see him, had which had only an hour ago been left a trail for him to follow perevenly divided, was now moved haps not as clearly as if it had been and crowded to one side and that blazed, as if it had consisted of traside so much brighter; while a blue ditional and familiar hunters' dimness gathered on the other side. The birds began to fall silent. The air grew cool. Leisurely, the tall figure ambled up the slope and onto the bluff. The fish fell from its hands and mouth and it dropped backward so that it came to rest sitting down, legs straight out and arms crooked upright from the elbows. It gave a great roar of disbelief and rage... Then it rose and stabbed at the mossy ground and took up something in its hands. The talisman, the wooden carving... Then the head rose and scanned the bluff, the brush, the crowded arbor of the forest. Abrupt growls came from the thick chest formed themselves into rage words. "Where are you? "Why have you done-this? " Where is my skinT" A voice came from somewhere up above, from the thickening darkness. "I will not answer your questions till you have answered mine." "Ask, then -- " And the other voice, a moment .silent, wavering a bit, but not halting, said, "Who are you? Who am I? What is next?" A ppropriately the backLlog of the fire had come from the great beech tree. "Long since I have made fire, or eaten food cooked on it, or food with salt on it," said Arntat. His hands, however, seemed to have lost no skill. The fish had been deftly gutted, gilled and grilled. Salt, in a screw of barkrag, was still in Arnten's basket. "Salmon will be better," Arntat said, smacking his mouth at the thought. "But these are well enough." Sparks leaped, embers blackened, glowed again. Abruptly he swiveled and faced the boy. "You be thinking, 'Is it to hear talk of fish and fire that I've come this long way, waiting?' Eh? I see it by your face, 'tis so. Arnten. I have waited longer than you. Be patient." And the boy was silent. A nd his fullfather said, "The ibear is in the blood and the bear may take you as the bear took me. At any time whilest life blood be in you the bear may take you, for the bear is in the blood. If it takes you not, and it may not take you, if it takes you not then 'twill take your son and if hot you and not him then 'twill take your son's or daughter's son for sure. Let this be no burden. Fear it not. I've dabbled and dallied with a queen of love, and though 'twas joyous passion, yet 'twas nought compared to shambling 'mongst the new berries or finding honey in a tree or scooping forth first salmon, when I was gone a-bearing," his fullfather said. And he said, "Bear's weird be better than man's weird and better than nain's weird. As a man I've been a chieftain high with lands and wealth -- you may let your ears drop, 'tis nought to you Mhere and nought to you what'smy-name-then. You were not made upon empty bear hide in lawful bedchamber, ah no, you were made when the bear was in the bearskin. My heritage to you is other than to my othergotten IF sons. Heed and hear me now, Arnten. By my witch-bundle and by my shadow, sons you make outside the bearskin be outside the bear-blood. But sons you make when you be a-bearing and be inside the bearskin, the blood of the bear be in them. And if the blood of the bear be in them, then not running water nor icy pools nor firehot springs can wash it out." And the bear was silent. bers and hard embers make long fires. Long fires make long tales. Long they sat there in the scented night and Arntat talked and Arnten listened and learned. He learned that the shift and shape was truly not confined to man to bear, that other creatures indeed could pair, could couple, could double and shift. Bee and salmon, wolf and bear. Tiger, lion, mole and hare... He learned of the slow growth of metals beneath the earth's skin and the formation of amber beneath the sea, how amber was one of the things of the perries, whereas metal was a thing of the nains. Once there was a metal called bronze but at length it grew green and sick and presently it died. Now there was iron. 'The sickness of iron is red," said Arnten, "and iron is dying." Red glints in the ashes. Reflections in the eyes of the watchers. "Aye, eh," muttered Arntat. "The sickness of iron is red." He swung up his head and his hand gripped his son's. "What say thee, bear's boy? Iron is dying? What?" That he, knowing so much, should not know this, for several heartbeats kept Arnten silent and astonished. Then he saw pictures in his mind: one: one: then he saw things moving, heard the nain tell of years since "Bear" was by them seen. Arnten said, "You have been long inside the bearskin, then, and that long you've not seen iron?" Still the hand gripping his did not move. "#roi is dyingl True, true, many springtimes I have caught and killed the great salmon and many summertimes I have climbed for honey in the honeytrees and in the rocky clefts. Many falltimes have I eaten the last of the frost-touched fruits and the sweet flesh of nuts. And many wintertimes have I felt the bearsleep come upon me and felt the numbness grow inside my head and sunk into the lair till the snows grow thinner. Aye. Eh. I can count the time only by counting your time. You are barely a man. And the last iron I had seen, the last iron I had thought of, I wrapped well the iron knifelet in my witchery-bundle and hid it well for thee. May it be sick?" Arnten did not mind the grip upon his hand. He crouched against the crouching body of his fullfather. He rested on that puissant flesh which had made his own and which was now his present as well as his past. Defying mankind and beastkind and time and the night, he let himself recline against the great rough beast which was his father and he let his hand recline in that great rough paw. Quietly, almost drowsily he said, "That witchery-knife alone is not sick. But all other iron is sick." And he muttered, "The nains," and he muttered of the nains. And he sighed, "The king -- " and he sighed words of the king. And almost he fell asleep, comforted by the rough, warm body and its rough and powerful smell. Then the body moved, releasing his hand, and a sound which was almost a cry and almost a groan rumbled and broke loose from that strong fatherbody by the embers. "row! "TAe nains ThekJngV  Almost he flew awake. He slid down so that he might sland up. The day had been long and there was still much to talk about. The day had begun with the mammont hunt and he had run far and he had been hurt and nains and perries and Painted Men pursued him and he ran along the river and now the long long day was over and he had nevermore again to run to bolt to flee and Irani Sick ironl The wizards and The king sounded their names in the darkness. And the embers slid down because they were tired and the embers slipped beneath the ashes and the . embers slept. In the morning the embers were awake again and spitting and flaring at the meat that turned, spitted and smoking. Arntat was still crouched by the fire as though he had never left it and as though the meat had come at his bidding and obediently slipped out of its skin and onto the spit. Arntat yawned hugely and glanced at Arnten and it seemed as though his teeth were still the tushes and the fangs of Bear, his eyes still Bear's eyes so small and cunning and sharp, his blunt face still Bear's muzzle and his hairy hands with long thick nails -- The yawn closed with a snap. The man said, "There was the lone one of you?" "The -- '" "Sometimes a she kindles with twain. Or more. My get, by your dam -- " "Only me, as I ever heard. I never knew her. Uncle said she drowned. Was mad." Arntat grunted. "It was time for it to be done and I was there and she was there and 'twas done, so. If not she, another. If not me, another. If not she and me, then not thee." He took the spit from its fcks and rested the savory roast, dribbling, on the grass. "So. The lone one of you. Called me from my bearguise." He seized his son by his downy shoulders. "Hid from me my bearskin." Son resisted, wordlessly, was pressed down nontheless. "Carried off with him my token. Found the nain. Found me. Called me from my bearguise. Stole away my bearskin. The lone one of you." Arnten was on his back, flat. "Am I to regret 'twasn't twins? Or be one of such enoujgh?" The single hand quivered the boy belly as one would a pup's. Then moved, one hand, two hands, tore the roasted meat apart, slapped on part still sizzling on the place the hand had been -- boy leapt up, yelpIF ing -- bared his teeth and began to eat. Boy teeth shining sharp in quickclosed mouth. Boy hand rubbing belly. Boy snout smelling savory food. Boy cub by bear man, tearing meat from bone. Still eating when father got up and strode off, he followed at quick pace, still holding his own unfinished portion. "Arn!" he said. "Arntat! Bearfather!" Bearfather growled over his shoulder. "The hide! The horn! The witchery-bundle! Shall I fetch?" Arntat growled, "The hide? Leave it be. I'll go no more abearing for now. The horn? Leave it be. Rather than call wrong, call none for now. The witcher-bundle? As you want." And he melted into the shadows of the all-circling forest. Arnten followed, thinking and eating as he went. Claw and reed and stone and nut, he had read their message and read them rightly; he could part with them for now. The hide with its medicine signs he needed not now. For a moment he begrudged the knife, the good knife of good iron. He took a longing look at the slightly slant and towering beech tree, casting a long shadow in the morning sun as it had cast in the evening. They were ail safe up there in the hollow of the hideyhoie. And there, safely, let them bide, then. Still eating, he slipped after his father into the dappled surface of the forest. A rntat did not precisely linger, he did not exactly daily, neither did he rush ahead with great speed, nor slink through the woods. Some sort of game was being played. For neither did Arnten go so fast as he might. It was the game, then, that each should generally hold the other in sight, but only generally. And sometimes the bigger one would suddenly hide himself and as suddenly reveal himself when the smaller paused to look around, then proceed as though he had not been hidden at all. Before long they had developed many aspects to this game and little tricks and presently they were again and again filled with silent laughter at each other. Through many a clearing and burn and along the paths they played their game, sometimes 'Tat leaping along a fallen tree as lightly as a squirrel, at least once 'Ten dropping several leaves before being realized and looked up at. It lasted most of the morning and might have lasted much longer, but then Arnten, running noiselessly around a great lichenstudded boulder, ran full tilt into flesh which only in that first second he thought was his father's. A swift blow and an angry word undeceived him before his eyes did -- he who had for all morning dropped even the memory of blows and angry words -- and, as he tried to scramble to his feet, tried to turn his head to see who it was, tried (all these at once) to run away any which way, someone grabbed his arm and twisted it. Only then did he cry out. The man's face had the look of one who kicks a dog not to be rid of it but for the pleasure of kicking it. Then the face changed and the arm released him, raised its spear; the mouth that cursed him gave a sick croak as something snapped which was not the spear, Arntat was there. Arntat was holding, embracing, Arntat was crushing. Ugly sounds of witless fright, then, from this other's mouth. Blood gushing from that mouth. And then other men, many other men, spears and clubs and then ropes, Arntat down on one knee. Arntat releasing limp and bleeding body, Arntat clawing out for a grip upon another. Arnten biting, beating. Arntat down. Arntat growling, roaring. Men cursing as much in fright as wrath. Arntat down. Arntat suddenly silent, save for his bxeathing in the sudden silence. Arntat bound. Arnten, too. And after some moments of gasping, recovering breath, slowing hearts, hissing of pain, someone said as though to a question none had heard, "I don't know -- I don't know -- Eh? Ah? Nains? No Nor bears -- " Another voice. "We be the king's men. Let the king say what.' And others, others. "Aye! Ah! Let the king say what!" VI T he red-sickness of all iron fiamed into a plague. At first whispered, it was now said openly that the king himself had caught Vhe evil and the ill. Indeed, it seemed to be so. Red blotches were seen about his face and hands and all his face and limbs and frame looked wasted and hollowed. His voice cracked and croaked. His hands shook. In the mornings he groaned and staggered. In the late afternoons his eyes would roll up and his eyelids roll down and he folded his legs and lay where he happened to be, servants hastily bringing furs and fleeces and lifting him and settling him again. For the length of time it took for the shadow of the sun-staff to move over two stones the king at such times lay as one dead. And in the late night hours he tended to enrage easily, to shout and strike out and to cast things. But in the early and middle afternoon and in the early and middle night times he was as well as ever in those days he was well. As to the first of these periods, it was assumed he was passing well, for his voice could be heard talking -- talking, not groaning, not yelling -- and as for the second of these periods, it was then that he held such gatherings as he held and saw such outsiders as he saw. In the red light of the hearth all men may look reddened and the dancing shadows may make all men look gaunted. But not all men hide themselves in daylight. Day by day the couriers trouped in. Night by night the king himself would see them and let himself be seen by them and from them receive the tidings which he had, of course, already received; for did he not sit upon his stool or lie upon his pallet behind the reed curtain while the courier made report upon the other side? Tirlagusak, grown stout and gray in his IF service as a first captain of the king's men, generally stood forth as the couriers came in, each with the strip of white bark cloth bound about his head, which even toddlebabes knew signified  am the king's mouth and  am the king's eyes and I am the king's ears. Delay me not -- and if I need aid, aid me. "Thirty-deer Hill," the courier might say. Or: "Whalefish Point." Tirlag-usak puts out his hand. "Tally," he says. "Why so slow?" The courier hands over the cut and carved piece of wood. He pants to show how hard' he has run. Of late there had been increasingly less sham in this. Tirlag-usek, of course, knows whence every one of the couriers has come but he sees if the tallystick fits the proper one from his own box. "Report sightings," he directs. "Swiftly." "Good omens from the flocks of birds," says the courier. It would not do to report No sighting. "Eat. Wash. Rest. Return after evening meal." The courier retires, sweating but relieved. His tongue may be the king's tongue but that need not prevent it's being cut. Behind the reed curtain the king's lips writhe, the king's hands move convulsively. The king's face grows redder yet. The redsickness increases fast upon him. And the red-sickness increases fast upon the iron. The courier has gone. Tirlag-usak remains standing. From behind the reed curtain comes an anguished whisper. "Iron? IronT" "The ears of the king hear all things," says the grizzled first captain. After just a breath, he says, "The king already has heard that it is not better. It is not even as it was." After three breaths should come the groan or hiss which has come to mean Go but Tirlag-usak today, after only two breaths, repeats, "The ears of the king hear all things." And says further, "The king has already heard that ten of his men who went north in a search for nains have this day returned with captives." UhhT "One great and one small, as the king already has heard. The eyes of the king have already seen them and it may be that the king's eyes have already recognized one of them as the king's kin to whom the king's mouth will speak more words." Tirlag-usak had spoken somewhat more rapidly than usual. Now he waits for the space of many breaths and he hears each of these breaths from behind the reed curtain. But no question now comes from behind the reed curtain and what now comes thence at last is a cry of such agony and terror and rage that almost the hand of Tirlag-usak touches the woven reed barrier -- almost he stoops to lift it. But he hears other feet, other voices, babble and whisper and shuffle and sigh. Then nothing. Then, only then, he departs. , Later, in the enclosure where they were penned, Arnten suddenly looked up. Arntat, his father, did not pause in his shambling and shuffling, shuffling and shambling, back and forth and back and forth, head weaving like a snake's head from side to side. It seemed he did not share his son's thought, a sudden one which projected into the boy's mind a picture of the mandrakes dancing to the sound of the small drum in his old uncle's medicine hut. The recollection was so clear that the boy sat and watched it inside his head for some time. small drum and his mandrakes, which were the mandrakes of the king and queen, dqnced their witcheryrdance and Mered-delfin watched them from the corner of his eyes and the king and queen watched them full front. Every feeling moved across the king's face, none at all disturbed theface of the queen. The mandrakes moved and the mandrakes moved and they mimed and mimed and they danced. At first, coming forth from their carved wood chest, the mandrakes' motion kept time to the tune of the witchery-drumlet. But after a while and after Mered-delfin had sung to them and hummed to them and chanted to them, whistled and drummed to them, then the pattern of their moving changed. They led and Mered-delfin followed, his fingers and his palms straining to keep up with them, to maintain the proper tune and rhythm upon the drumhead made from the skin entire of a dwarf deer slain without bruise or blood. At length, when they had begun to repeat themselves and no chantings or whistlings could prevail upon them to enact any new pattern, Mered-delfin drummed them back and dancing they went, throwing up their root-thin arms they danced backward upon their root-thin legs, and climbed back into their box at last and closed its lid upon them. Thus the dancing mandrakes. As for the watching mandrakes, they remained in the outer court and would shriek, beshrew, if so much as an unbidden shadow fell. And there they muttered and watched. The chief witcherer licked his mouth and wiped his arm across his sweat-slick face and quickly rolled his eyes. The other two were not looking at him. Swiftly he set his countenance into its accepted lines. He softly clicked his fingernail against the side of the drum. They looked up toward him. "It is as we have seen, it is as I have said, they have enacted the lineaments of the dream and mimed for us the finding and the sounding of All-Caller, the Great Fey Horn -- " The king grimaced and showed his sharp teethAs he leaned forward on his hands and arms he seemed to crouch on all fours. "And where, then," he asked, "is the great good which you said this dream portended for me?" Mered-delfin parted his thin beard from lips and mouth and dared to grin. The very daring of the deed made the king draw back, somewhat relax the tenseness of his pose. Witch-Mered thrust out his hand and arm and described a quarter-circle in the air and let the hand extend two fingers in a point. "Can it be that the sounding IF of All-Caller has lured from across the all-circling sea an enemy who is not to be named? And with him a son begat in treacherous exile? Lured them thence and it must be alone?" His master's grimace grew into a snarl. His eyes blazed red. He seemed like a creature of the forest about to hurl itself from its den. He gave off the rank and bitter smell of denizen and den. "I shall kill them!" His voice rose into a howl. "I shall have them killed! They shall be killed for me and before me!" Jiis tongue lolled out of his mouth. "Limbs broken -- " the howl prolonged itself -- " impaled -- " "Slayer of Bull Mammonts -- " "Greatpire Wolf -- " " -- disemboweled -- " The last word hung, upon the air. The Orfas panted. His sides heaved. He flung up his head and again he howled. In this howl there were no words, but it rang with a lust for vengeance long delayed. In his narrow pen Arntat heard it and stopped in his mindless pacing and hearkened to it and his arms moved slightly and he stood still. The nain-thralls heard it in their tunnels and turned their massy heads on their short necks. Servants heard it and shivered and tremored. King's men felt flesh pucker and hair rise and let their eyes roll to each other, and almost they clean forgot the tales of the ill-struck king, cloistered and shabby and sick and old. "The Orfas," they whispered to one another. "The wolf! The wolf! "King Orfas! Great Wolf! King Wolf!  -- King L ong the wolf-king lay upon his side, panting, wet with sweat. Then he jerked his head and in two silent bounds Mered-warlock was crouching at his head. Said the king, "Not kill him?" Said the witcherer, "Not yet." Said the wolf-king, "When, then?" Said the sage, "When the curse is canceled. When iron is well." The king said no word. His eyes rolled up and his lids rolled down. He nodded. He touched his sage's hand. His queen kneeled beside him and he touched her face. The words last spoken hung upon the air. And the words unspoken, too... allowed to toil together; one of the guards had said with a guffaw that the two of them were barely equal to one nain. Iron was the nains' heritage and though they had been used to it in all its workings at their own speed and though timed toil was inhospitable Jp them, still the nature of mining was not strange. But it was all strange, strange and fell, to Arntat and his son. Only the unswerving friendship of the nains and the fact of his and his son's being still together at all relieved the toil. And worse by far than the toil was the circumstance of bondage, of confinement, of life now being limited to a set series of motions within severely limited space. All thralldoms are one same thralldom. The unremitting labor of the toil, the unremitting oppression of the guards, the ill food, cramped space, uncleanliness, lack of hope, dull hatred, scanted sleep, infinite heaviness of spirit -- are not these the features of all thralldoms? "It is harder. Bear, for thee than we," the nains said. "The tunnel fits we as the hoodskin fits the pizzle." "Then I stoop," he said. Stooped, grunted. "I have stooped before." But his eyes were sunken. And his forehead bruised and scabrous, for he did not always think to stoop, nor they to warn him. And the nains said, "It is harder, Bear, for thee than we. We be used to the smell of iron dust and fire and have forgot the smell of grass and waterflows." "Then I shall grow used to this and shall forget that other, too,"' he said. But he did not grow used to it, he often was coughing, and there was that in his eyes and on his face Avhich seemed to show that he was not forgetting. And one night when the begrudged fire burned low and the older nains had begun f creep into their sleepy-holes and kick the crushed bracken-fern into a brief semblance of softness -- at last that night his voice burst loud with, "But I cannot forget! No! No! I cannot forget!" The older nains crept out from their sleepy-holes, greasy-sided, fetid, close. They laid their hands on his, and on his knees and arms and legs, their huge and calloused hands. And a few dfd so to Arnten, who had crept close to his father; and the heavy nain-hands were light and gentle. "Since thee cannot forget. Bear, cease to try," they said. "And speak it out to we." And the Bear spoke. Not -- at first -- of the free life of sun and stars, grass and waterflows, salmon hunts and honey thefts, of timeless days and world without walls. These all, it seemed, though well remembered in general, had become as it were a design bordered in dyed grasses around a basket rim -- turn it, turn it, now faster, now slower, and see the same sequences following forever; man's mind no longer holding in differentiating recollection any one sequence from any other like it -- so it seemed, when by and by his talk took up those days. t B ut he began with other days, when he was a man's child among other mens' children, he one and Orfas another and Orfas a little older. Not much difference in age and little if any in status, even after both presently realized that Orfas was in a way an uncle -- that Orfas' father was the other's grandfather, the other's father Orfas' half-brother. Both playing and 'tumbling and chasing dogs in one familiar yard onto which opened (so it seemed) the doors of many houses, yet all of them family houses. In those days they were but two among many and each father had several sons and neither more of a rival to each other than either was to any others. All the sons and cousins and uncles of that age had cast their reed practice spears and IF awkwardly fletched their boy-arrows and went creeping and hunting in the mock-forests of the great yard. The years had flown away like the wild swans fly away, yet never do the absent years return as do the absent swans. Boys had grown to men, passed through ordeal and initiation, learned which was their witcherybeast, dreamed medicine dreams, had found women and knew the milk of life to be within them. The hunt had ceased to be play and often man had fought with man, not for proving or for pleasure but for very life; and some had taken life and some had lost it. Some of all that company of boykin had died young beneath the feet or claws or within the jaws of wild beasts or had been dragged down beneath the waves by waterkelpies or by fierce hippotames. Others had made themselves house-holders and gotten children while still barely bearded. Some had sought a name and fame by captaining pursuits of whalefish or werewhales, tree-tigers, or had gone north into the snows to hunt the wild leopard. One had been allured by the bewitchments of the Painted Men (whose skin must not be seen). "There was a certain great tree whose wide-spreading branches we all climbed as boys. It became our gathering place and remained so even when we were men and gathered there more seldom. But whenever we so returned, there we went and there we looked to meet with our comrades and our kin of our age. I had been away and gone a full handful of years, and I returned and sat beneath the tree upon a seat made by an out-thrust of rootburl. There I sat and long I sat and many passed but none were of our old company. And then came one whose shape I knew, whose walk I knew, even before I kenned his face. "ItwasOrfas. "He came and I remembered it was right that I should rise because he was my father's brother of the half-blood, and so we at some length stood and faced each other. He had the slight semblance of a smile on his face. For a while we said no word. And then I said, 'It seems, then, that of all only we two remain, in this corner of the Land of Thule.' "And he said, 'It seems that this be one too many,' and although I did not deeply consider on his words, still, a particle of them must have touched upon a particle in me -- at once I said, 'Then let us both be gone and let us make a compact and both be gone together.' We made our compact and prepared a boat and formed an alliance with others, gathered our gear and store and had the witcherers discover the best day to depart. South-south across the all-encircling sea we went, to the barbar-lands we made our course, sometimes along the coast and sometimes up the great rivers. Betimes we traded and betimes we sold the service of our swords and spears, fighting now for one town or tribe or chieftan, now for another; and betimes we shared the plunder-spoil or betimes we kept it all, as it had been agreed, or as it fell out. And then for a while we went a-roving and a-robbing as we would and as we willed, until the durancy of our compact fell away to expire, and there was only a handful of day-sticks left in the tally-bag. One of us had a dream to take a certain course with our three vessels (as by then they were) and reach on the third day an island all suitable for our needs, which was done, and the day we broke the third stick we made our landfall and the island was as had been seen." E veryone has in his mind the image presented by story and by song, of all the troves and treasures piled in one great glittery heap, "dragon-high, dragonbright, sparkling while its seekers fight -- "but it is not always thus in fact, nor was it so this time. Said he who had dreamed the dream, "Think it clearly for yourselves. Will he who lives alone to claim it be wanting to lug it all back to the ships again?" There was a burst of laughter in which was no sound of love or warmth. It was done so, that the wealth was divided between two ships, which were dismasted, and the third was broken up at once to make a deck for the complete vessel, which was a double-hulled raft of sorts, with a single mast. Then each man set to sharpening his weapons and mostly he sat alone, with no more than now and then a sideways glance to estimate the strength or calculate the skill of another; and sometimes the other, on whom his direct look might fall had been his near-comrade; and some seemed to repent greatly of this compact and to wish themselves away. But only one would live to go away. The fighting field was laid out and deeply trenched around, and then the lots were drawn to select the two for the first combat. Orfas drew one of the black pebbles and a younger man, often a singer of merry songs, drew the other. He sang no song now but muttered charms as they stepped to the center of the field but Orfas did not open his mouth as they faced each other. Then all the rest shouted Ho and in that instant Orfas spat in his opponent's eye and as he blinked, dumbstruck, Orfas rushed him from the side of that eye and with his axe he split through his collarbone. The man fell backward with a great croaking cry. Orfas kicked up the fallen one's kilt and again he spat, now upon his foe's manhood, saying, "That is for the wench you stole of me a two months' since!" and then he brought the axe down once again. And went and took his rest across the trench until every other man should have fought once -- and then he would again be subject to the lots. Not every vector lived to draw a second lot. Now -- said Arntat -- I had killed my man and had killed my second man. And as I sat resting and waiting I chanced to feel an eye strong upon me and I looked up and around and I saw that it was the eye of Orfas. It came to me that I had felt it heavy upon me before but had not fully thought IF about it. And now all at once I recollected what had been said that time we met after long apart, under the tree of meeting; I saying, It seems that only we two remain, and he saying. This be one too many. It came to me so late as then that he had long hated me, and I suppose that inside me that one particle must have returned his feeling or I would not have answered as I did. Well! So be it! I knew then that we two would be the last to stand upon our feet and fight for life and for treasure, winner take all. It was our weird. I do not know at what point in our lives he had begun to hate me -- or why. Perhaps he himself did not know it till he saw me there under the tree of meeting. Perhaps until then he had thought I would not come back, that I was dead; it may be that the deaths of others of our line had gradually or suddenly given him hope that he would be chief over all our line -- and, as our line has always been a line high in Thule, he may have bethought him that he might some day be highest of all in Thule. If I were not. T he fire barely lived at all. Then someone blew briefly on the dull embers and someone placed an armful of bracken on it. "Eh, ah, Bear," an older nain said, "Well I remember when the old asking began to be heard again. By what three things is a king model and answered, By strength, by magic, and by fortune. He who paid the nain-fee then, I shall say plain, was not the worst as ever paid it. But even kings live not forever. And in all that struggle which came then. Bear, some say thee helped the Orfas, he being near of kin. Some say thee befoed him and would have been king instead. I ask not and care I not. Thee has ever been the friend of nains, as nains have ever been the friends of thee. The Orfas winned the kingship and was made king as kings be made and he paid the nain-fee -- then -- full and fair. But the nains be feed to work in iron, not to set snares for bears -- or men. We saw thee in the wildwood dwelling where never manfolk dwell at all, we told it to each other and we told it to the forge, but never did we tell it to the king." "I know." "Such rewards he offered, and such afflictions he threatened as never did we hear before." "I know." "That bitter winter when the birds fell frozen from the sky and the all-circling sea itself was turned to ice, far as ever eye could see, when no track nor trace could be concealed upon the snowy ground and no snow fell more from the fast frozen sky; then the Orfas came for thee, for Witch-Mered did plot it out for him." "I know." "Corby-Mered. Mered-Crow." "His witcheries espied thee out, we knew and said nought, he saw and said all. With a many troops of men they came for thee, and circled around where thee had gone. Where could thee hide? We thought it woe, we whispered low, we told it to the forge, but nains mix not in the affairs of manfolk -- would that man would mix as little in the life of nainfolk! They circled all about where thee had gone, they scanned the still, unbroken snow, they drew their lines inward as wading fishermen draw their nets, they met face to face and arm to arm in the center; bxi Arn they never met." "I know." He said, "I know. I know." Crouching in the darkness marred by feeble flicks of flames, he said, "I cannot forget." A prisoner, he remembered himself a fugitive; though it had seemed bitter then, now long later it revealed its sweetnesses. And he could not forget. The nains sighed and they sighed for him, not for themselves. The king had sought him jhen and found him not, and hunted him again and found him not. King and king's men hunted a man, but he whom they hunted was a man no more. He had become a bear. D ay followed day and toil followed toil and slowly the great rust increased. Its pace was not steady. At times it had seemed to leap onward like a dread grass fire in the dry season, at times it had seemed to pause as though tired. Now for some long while, the redsickness had gone at so slow a step that some did not perceive that it still continued until, perhaps, an axe-head crumbled as it met the wood it could not cleave, or an arrowhead collapsed into a pinch of russet dust when the quiver was moved. And many still had not realized that the pest pursued its course. But the king was not among the many. It was not only that he asked or caused to be asked, "How goes it with iron?" of those who came from far off. He asked always, in hope of hearing what he would hear; but he was not content only to ask. The king had great store of iron, not in the armories alone, but in his own chambers, very near to him. Several times a day, if he did not go to iron things, he had iron things come to him. He looked, he tested, poked, probed, he scraped iron with his fingernails and he scaled with instruments which were not of iron. The king knew the rate each day at which the plague pursued. He knew it and he sickened from his knowing. "Will you not leave off?" the queen asked him with a sigh. "How can #?" he asked, with a sick and sidelong look. There was almost a proverb in those days: The queen grows not old. Some had grown up hearing it and thought it a saying applied to all queens; that women who held the queenly seat, by virtue of the power of that office did not age: But in truth it was a saying which had not been heard before, although likely enough that any woman spared the labors of hoeing and bark-beating and preparing hides and all such toilsome work, who had but to put on her clothes and jewelry and suckle her children -- and sometimes not even such slight, light tasks as that -- likely enough that thus a woman, queen or not, would grow not old IF so soon and certain as the generality of her sex. Still, the saying was a new one, as sayings go. Here lies the truth -- quite early had her hair turned the color of a winter's sky, quite early and quite suddenly. Therefore most of Thule became aware of her when she in some measure already wore the mantle of more years than she had. And also her manner had already then become grave and withdrawn. Since the mass of folk did not observe her slowly losing what were common tokens of youth, gradually the saying came to be heard: The queen growls not old. Some held this to be due to her command of witcherywisdom. Only a few, and they not often and never openly, were lately beginning to whisper that she sipped the cup of the king's own years, that she stayed one age while he aged swiftly. And at least the very last part of this was true. "You can leave off by leaving off." she said. Only a very few lines were to be seen upon her face -- about the eyes, and about the corners of the mouth -- but none at all upon her upper lip. "Rest upon your cot or couch and let others examine iron while you watch. And watch not too closely, that is to say, too nearly. Iron is sorely ill. And you are not too well." A slight snarl moved his mouth, but did not move it much; his next words and the inclination of his head showed how little the snarl was meant for her. "You are ever gentle of me in word and deed -- but I know well what they say out there -- ihdX have caught the ironrot. Perhaps I have. But if I have caught it, I have it -- so what good then be distance? Or any precaution?" He moved nonetheless to his couch. Muttered, "If iron die, then I die. If I die, let iron die. But let we not die, either, nor the barbar folk come swarming -- savages from over the circling sea -- " He let himself down on his couch and leaned on the pile of prime, pelts sewn in bags and stuffed with the downy breast feathers of swans. His eyes were sunken and closed. A long breath shuddered and sighed in his throat and fluttered his cracked and blistered lips. Suddenly his eyes flew open. Those of the queen were fixed upon his. "Why do you think he came back alone? Or did he?" Without giving her time to reply he rolled his head back and forth and clenched his hands. "Only because Mered-delfin feels that this traitor may somehow prove the key to the cure of iron do I spare his life." His teeth showed and sounded. "I should never have spared it before." Another thought worked its way across his ravaged face and the queen drew near and kneeled beside him. "Mered-delfin -- he said that you must prepare to wear many masks and to make many journeys." She gave a slow, single nod. The king said, "Wear one mask now. Make one short journey." F rom time to time word came, presumably from the king, to switch the mining from the open pit to the tunnels or from the tunnels to the open pit. Evidently neither change had perceptibly improved the fate of iron, but from time to time still came directions -- change. Thus on this day the mattocks swung up and down upon the encircling path which went around and around about the great deep pit, up from its narrow center to its wider rim, digging deeper into the walls of ruddy ore. Up the tools went, paused, still scattering dust; down they fell, a grunt, a thud, and some were of bone and some were of stone, but none were of iron. Arnten had been detailed to carry the yoke with its brace of leathern water buckets and a drinking horn slung about his neck on a thong. For the most part he kept his eyes on the uneven footing of the circling path, but when he paused to allow one of the nain-thralls to drink he allowed himself to look up. The yoke had bitten into his flesh, but he preferred it out here in the open pit. He thought they all must. It was like being inside a great clay pot, one only partly made; the pot-woman had rolled the strip of red clay between her palms and coiled it into the rough shape of the pot-to-be, but she had not yet taken up her shell or shard to smooth it. The pit was like a great clay pot and they were inside it, small as mandrakes. Of course, pots had no light blue lids on them. Against the rim, outlined, stood the gXiards. His eyes swung around. The nain groaned gratefully between gulps. All about the rim the guards stood at equal intervals, weapons sticking up like fishnet sticks. But at one place there were a number of them grouped together. They moved and he saw that one of them had no spear, no club, seemed to be dressed differently. Dressed more. The nain gave one last groan, looked enviously at the rest of the water in the pails, licked his mouth and bristles and put the flat of his huge hand between the boy's shoulders below the yoke the nain had effortlessly lifted into place, gently shoved him on his way. The yoke grew lighter as he went from nain to nain. Presently he stood before his father. Ariitat looked at him a moment with a dull gaze. His eyes were filmy. Then they saw the boy. A faint smile rested briefly on his haggard face. Suddenly the boy cried out, "I am sorry! I am sorry. Father, that I ever took away the bearskin!" The yoke was lifted, the buckets put down. "I had set all things to that end," his father said. "As for all this -- it be our weird. Ah, water. Good." He took the horn and dipped it full and raised his head as he raised the horn to his mouth and his eyes settled on something beyond. For a moment he did not move. Then his teeth clicked arid rattled on the rim of the horn. Then he made sounds in his throat. And next he drank. But his eyes never moved. A guard, perhaps thinking that they had been too long over the matter, approached -- the expression on his face was part sneer and part fear. He gave a quick look over his shoulder and with his head motioned to another guard to follow. This first guard set his features for stern speech and gave the hand which held the club a shake or two. But what he was about to say went unsaid, as from above and IF beyond a voice whose syllables the boy could not make out came floating on the air and echoed twice or more. The guard's face twisted in his own effort to comprehend, then showed surprise -- regret -- relief. The guard turned away, turned back, spoke to the guard behind. And this one gave a quick look at the captive father and son, a quick look up and beyond. He shrugged. The two king's men moved apart and drew themselves up in a stance of bravado and watchfulness. Arntat let out a long breath. One hand groped for his son. The other then hung the horn-thong around the boy's neck. A drop of water trickled from it, made a muddy wormtrack through the dust on his chest. Both hands found the yoke and lifted it as the boy bent to receive it. Both hands turned the boy around and told him, plain as words, to be on his way. Arnten went. He went several steps. He heard behind him the grunt and the thud as, rest over, toil returned to, the mattock struck the red-ore ground. Then he stopped and looked up, whither his father had looked, up to where the guards had looked. Nothing was there. His eyes, darting about, saw again the group of guards. They had just begun crossing over the rim and, as one by one they stepped out of sight, he saw once more the unarmed person among them, who paused upon the edge between earth and sky. Pausing for a moment and looking back, this person for an instant seemed to have raised wings poised for flight. Wide-cut sleeves. A woman. She vanished over the rim. A blow caught him in the ribs, a rock fell and bounced. He dodged the second. It came from the guard who had desisted from striking him and his father before. But he had to move and turn his back and yet balance the yoke and the buckets, so he could not run. The third stone caught him. And so did the fourth. their mattocks and began to load the broken ore into the barrows the first captain looked, saying nothing. Afterward he gestured to Arnten and Arntat. "You two -- or you one and half -- " the guards guffawed -- "Take the tools to the tunnel. The rest of you to the forge." Two by two, the nains stooped and took up the barrow poles. Low at first like a mutter, then a rumble, as though the voices had descended from mouth to throat and chest; then so very high it seemed almost that they sang not at all as they padded along the curving path -- and then cry after cry, as great wave after great wave breaking upon the rocks -- The swans fly overhead A nd the nains see them. The moles tunnel through, the earth A nd the nains see them. The guards could not ken the words, but the sound of the chant made them uneasy. They howled and mocked, they threw stones, small ones but vicious and thrown hard. The king's fire gives no light. The queen's light gives no fire. Evil, evil, are these times. These carrion times, consumed by crows. When will the wizard's mouths be fed, A nd the nains see it? The tools were gathered and bundled together like great faggots of firewood. Father and son bowed their backs beneath their loads and turned their faces toward the tunnel. It was not the load that made Arntat tremble now, nor was it his last labor of the day that made him sweat and gasp. his steps and he craned his neck at the darkening sky as though he would never see it againr Beyond them the guards seemed to have been taken by a frenzy, stoning the nains and shouting and feinting at them with clubs and spears. But above all such noise the wild chant continued to be heard. The king's evil rots like rust, A nd the nains see it. When will the stars throw down their spears, A nd the nains see it? Then may this kingdom turn to dust, A nd the nains see it! S ometimes the bigger Am trudged back and forth in the tunnel, head stooped low -- perhaps for safety, perhaps from apathy -- hands against the sides as though at any moment he might push one or another of them aside. Sometimes he shambled on all his limbs, head weaving from side to side. But he was sitting motionless when the dry bracken rustled as it sometimes did, as though remembering when it was alive and yielding to each slight breeze. And a woman came in. She first saw the smaller Arn, and for just a moment the smooth composure of her face was disturbed -- how curious, then, her expression! He moved at once to his father's side and her face was as before. In a single motion, effortless, graceful, she seated herself, her legs tucked under, her hands resting in her lap. Son looked at father and he thought his father looked as though he had always been looking at her. "Yet another son gotten, Ahazmazra," she said. "And so much younger than the others." She made a slight sound as if pleasantly relaxing from some not too onerous task and she said, "You will want to know about your other sons." Lips barely moving, he said, "Either they died or they made their peace. I can do them no good. Nor they me." Calmly: "You may do good for this one then," she said. This one, crouching next to his father, was not much thinking how good could be done for him. Part of his mind was entranced by the appearance of her. Part of his mind scurried and searched, as a squirrel rousting nuts, for certain words his father had said -- when? Long, long ago. When they were free. 'Tis nought to you what's my name-then. But now he knew, his fullfather's name then was Ahazmazra and if this woman knew it IF she had known him then. Her underdress, beneath which her feet were tucked, was all of blue. He had never seen so much cloth of blue before, blue was a precious color, a sky-color, and he had heard more than one say that farfar-away at the farthermost edge of the world dwelt the Sky Gatherers and that all the blue in the world came from them, scarce, scarce, precious and beautiful blue: but his old uncle had said this was in no way true and that blue was made from an herb called woad; it did not flourish in Thule, was brought from the barbar-lands and traded for amber, weight for weight. Ahaz-mazra, And not Arn. My other begotten sons... made upon empty bearhide in lawful bedchamber. Her sleeveless overdress was the whitest white which he had ever seen, paler than the common pallor of bark-cloth, and came to her knees. Round yoke and hem were broad and complex broider-work in several colors, flowers and leaves and thicket -- something else which he could not quite determine and which peered out of the thicket. Around her neck was a rope of pieces of amber wrapped in golden wire. Her face was strong, serious, totally self-assured. Although she had come from the free, the outside world, she had come neither to triumph nor to condescend. I have dabbled. Why was that word in his mind?... have dabbled , , , Or should it be dappled? That made no sense. Yet the memory that went with the words was of his father's face dappled by a leaf shadows as he held for a passing moment a branch he presently threw upon the fire. I have -- "I have done ill enough for him by getting him," said his father (now) to the strange woman. Who said a strange, strange thing indeed. "You may get him back with you whither you both came -- on a ship already prepared in all things -- at dawn tide three days hence," she said. "You have only to renounce the curse on iron and to swear by your shadow and by his that it shall stay renounced. And you may even delay compliance to the last -- when the third day's sun comes up and shadows first appear -- upon the very shore beside the ship." The sick, confused look, which had been absent since her entrance, now returned to the man's face. He muttered, uncertainly. "The third day's sun?" "It is three days' journey to where the boats are." He squinted, trying to resolve all into sense. Then he in one swift rush was on his feet and Arnten cried out and put his hands on his own head as though feeling the pain of his father's would crash upon the tunnel top. But that one or two fingers' breadth away the man's head stayed, stooped. The woman had not moved. She did not even raise her eyes. And the man fell to a charging position, his eyes level with hers, his face very close to hers, his eyes now suffused with blood. "Innahat -- erex," he cried, "ah, eh! Does that crow still live, that he has stolen all the wits of thee? 'Wither we both came?' 'By ship?' 'Renounce the curse on iron?' What babblement is this? From nowhere did we come by ship! No word of any curse on iron heard I ever till my cub here did mention it, before we fell into the nets of your long-tongued lord! 'Sear by my shadow and by his?' Eh, ah! By my shadow and by his, then -- " M ore than once, after having returned in from out, Arnten had felt sickened and dizzied. The sun might have been the cause, beating as it did on him ail day. Such a moment came upon him suddenly as he wondered what great oath his father was about to swear upon their twain shadows. He closed his eyes. He did not hear if the oath were sworn. He did hear the distant droning of the nains as they returned, as their voices rose suddenly and dropped again. The strange woman was now gone, he saw. He saw his father's eyes were fixed on his and ail manner of strange things he saw in them. "Eh, ah. Bear! What odd thing we seed by yonder tunnel-mouth but two, or three! How 't did leap! A hare! Was 't an omen, eh?" "I ken't not, if omen 'tiz," another nain said. "But 'twas as thee say, senior Aar-heved-heved-aar, a great puss-longears indeed, and would I'd a snare to catch she doehare, do she return -- eh? -- cub?" For this other nain looked now at Arnten, who had stood up, although still dizzied, waving his hand, trying frantically to put a thought into words before the thought fled. "The hare came in!" he said, almost stammering. "The hare came in! What way she came in, would she not go out?" no The man put an arm around his son. The comforting nain-drone and nain musk surrounded them. The boy's head drooped upon his father's side. He felt weak and sore and hungry. Food would come. Words sang in his head and faint fires danced there. Bee and salmon, wolf and bear. A rough hand rested gently on him. Tiger, lion, mole and hare. Fetters do not bind the moles. A nd the nains see them. A AR-heved-heved-aar that night sent a youngster hain to search out the passage where the hare had run. Guards did not trust the lower levels at night, would not even if the nains were gone. Posts and watch fires were at pit mouth only. Even wind and rain could not drive the guards more than a few feet inside after full dark. The nain-senior knew this, but did not trust the slickskins as cowards any more than he trusted them as braves; he chose to lessen all risks. It was not true that nains had full vision in the dark, but in this wise their eyes were in between those of men and those of beasts. The younger nain reported that although the tunnel appeared to be a blind gut, yet it did not end clean. A huge pile of debris at one end seemed to show that it might not always have been a blind gut -- that perhaps the roof had fallen in at one time. And, more than this, the younger'nain had sought and found the scent of the hare and it had seemed to go on up the pile of detritus to its peak. ' "But I clambered not after it," he concluded. "Wisely," said the senior. "For though I be as much a-zeal as any to be gone from here, needless risks we must not take. It is man who is impetuous, but we nains do be deliberate, so -- " "Feed the wizards." Aar-heved-heved-aar, true to his penultimate word, reflected. Then, "Eh, ah. Bear. Say thee well." "Feedf the wizardsr The nain-senior looked up at the man -- for all his breadth, the-nain was no taller than Arnten -- and nodded his massive head. "That must be our aim, hard task though it be. It is the coming death of iron which has turned this king's head mad and turned his hands against us all. His need be great. But is our need not greater? If he do die tonight and tomorrow we be told that we be free, what then? Iron be our life, without iron we be dead nains. 'Tiz but the first step, getting gone from here. He will pursue we, but if he should not, what, eh? We do make the hoe, but we hoe not; we have traded iron and iron's work for most our food. We make the spearhead, but we cast no spear. And if we will to eat in the woods, as the wild brawnes do -- say, ah! -- be not the wild brawnes a fitter match for us, be we not armed with iron?" He uttered a long, shuddering cry and his head shook so from side to side that his thick hair rustled upon his broad and shaggy shoulders. "Men gender much," he said, "and the men-wives bear often. Nains gender seldom for our passion be for the forge and few are the nain-bairns our shes do get. Before the Great Bear took starfire and gave it we and beteached we how to delve and deliver metal from the earth's belly and to mold and shape it as the bears do mold and shape their cubs -- before even the yore-tide -- men were few and nains were few and lived they twain folk far apart, for broad and long be Thule. "But since then men have swarmed -- yet the nain's numbers do stay the same. Still be Nainland far from menland, eh but ah, it be not so far as once "twos! Men can hunt without iron, men can farm without iron, men can still beget them many mennikins without iron; men can do without iron and I betell thee this: If men may live without iron, men may live without nains. The echo of his voice was long in his listeners' minds. He divided them into nine watches and to each watch he assigned a third part of one night. And the first watch for the first third of the first night began at once to clear away with slow care the rubble at the end of what they had begun to call The Doe-Hare's Den. The nains stripped off their leather kilts and piled loose stone therein, then gathered up the corners four and slung the juried bags over their shoulders and trudged away on noiseless feet to empty their loads well out of sight in yet another disused corridor. And then to return. Thus, while the work went on, none lost more rest than one-third of every third night; and, after many nights, the toilers in the Doe-Hare's Den, pausing a moment for rest, recognized in their nostrils the bitter, faint, familiar smell of woodsmoke -- and recognized that an aperture, of whatsoever a nature, existed between them in their captivity and the unfettered outside world. returned to the boy. Remembering woodsmoke and firelight and father's words, he said, "The strange woman who was here. Was she the queen of love with whom you dabbled and dallied?" A silence. "Eh, she was." "Be that why the king do hate thee?" A growl. "She said he never knew." "Then why do he hate thee?" A grunt. "Has thee'fofgot my tale of how he and me vowed a compact and at the end stood face to face to fight for treasure and for life, winner take all?" "No, I remember that." A cough.' A second, longer, deeper cough. A gasp. "I won. He lay at my feet. He groveled and gibbered. I raised him up, gave him half the plunder and I spared his life. That is why. For this he cannot forgive me. ing of dry and dusty voices and he knew it was the wizards that he heard. He heard them droning as though ineffably bored and weary, as though repeating over and over to themselves, lest they forget, forcing their dust-choked voices and thinking with dust-choked minds, at a great distance away. repeating something of great importance which must not be forgotten -- The bear dies, iron dies. The bear dies, iron dies. As the bear comes to life, so must iron come to life. As the bear comes to life, so must iron come to life. A pause, a faint gasp, the click of voices in dry, dusty throats. And again and again the droning recommenced. The bear sleeps in the ground, so must iron sleep in the ground. As the bear sleeps its death-sleep-life, so must iron... The bear dies, iron dies... Endlessly he heard this. The sound ebbed and fadded away as he felt himself gently rocked. Whatr "Bear's boy, it be time." Time for iron, time for... But the droning voices were away and gone. Had he heard them echoing thinly in a cavern somewhere? Or was it only the familiar echo of the nain voices in the mine? Confused, already forgetting, he got up. Still half asleep he followed, sometimes stumbling, as the men filed from their sleeping-cell into unguarded tunnels. In the DoeHare's Hole he saw the now familiar sight of and heard the now familiar sounds of debris and detritus being shoveled and scraped into the carrying-skins. But while this still went on he heard those who watched and who waited discussing whither they should go when they had made their escape from the mines: and should they go in one body for defense, or should they split up and make their several -- or it might be their many -- ways, in order to divide and so to weaken their pursuers. IF He did not hear if an answer had been concluded, let alone what it was, for Aar-heved-heved-aar took hold of him and said, "Bear's-boy, 'tis thought they have broke through up ahead. Get thee up then, for thee be but small as be compare to us and maybe can find out -- " The senior nain did not finish his phrase, but propelled Arnten forward, saying, "Up, then, and up and up." Though so much diminished, still the pile was high and required qlimbing. He half scuttled and he half slid as he set to climbing. And he had somehow a fear that, though he went on his way slow enough, still, he might strike his head there in the darkness; and from this fear he went slower. And every few paces he paused and thrust his hands forward. And by and by he felt his hand as it scraped the face of the cavern suddenly fall through into nothingness, and he fell forward a bit and he grunted rather than cried out. And ahead of him, where yet he could not see, ahead of him in the black, black, blackness, something moved which was even blacker (though how he knew this he did not know). Something made a sudden movement and a sudden noise and he had the impression that something had been waiting and hearkening, listening very closely, he had an impression of a head cocked to one side -- And before he himself could do more, the sound from the other side of the hole ceased to be startled, flurried, resolved itself into the flap of wings in the darkness. And he and all of them heard the sudden sharp cry of a crow. And again, farther away. And once more, faint. N OW the work quickened, concentrated and focused on enlarging the opening. An opening onto the world at large? Or into another cave? If the latter, still, this next cave must itself open onto the world at large, else how came any bird to be there? But the stone or bone blades of their picks no longer sank, into rubble. Either they sprang back as they were swung against the lips of the scrape-hole or they shattered. The nains began to mutter. Then Arn came forward on all fours, reached out his long, shaggy arms, felt and pawed and groped in the darkness. "It seems that two slabs of rock all but meet face to face here," he said. "Some bit of softer stone did rest between them, as might a piece of stale bread between a dead man's teeth -- "Now, part of that had weathered away, else that hare had neither entered nor left -- and we have battered away the rest -- but the teeth be fixed firm. Somehow we must crack the jawbones, then. So -- " His voice fell into a muttering growl. "We must break the jaws of the rock," he said once more. "How?" he muttered. "How? How?"" . of coals made shadows as the king moved slowly and painfully upon his bed. Something scuttled outside the chamber. Someone entered on hands and knees. The king lifted his head, stopped, groaned, rubbed his face, moaned. "You smell of mold and of .trees," he whispered. "Well -- what?" Merred-delphin panted a moment. Then: "Slayer of -- " The king made a noise of loathing, deep in his throat. "Damn all fulsome phrases! None's here now save thee and me. Whatr "Wolf -- the mine-thralls -- trying to break -- " His wind failed, his voice caught in his scrannel chest and throat. His master finished the words. "To break out? Eh? To -- " He struggled up, hissed his pain, rested on his elbows. Raised his voice. "Woy.'" he cried. "The captain of the guard! Hoy! Hoy! Hither! Flay him, does he slumber? Hither! Here! Now! Hoyr T he bear half-slid, half-crawled backward. The air in the hole was thick. "Bring bracken," he said. "Bring all the bracken that be. Not all of ye!" he called sharply. "The crew of the first third -- go!" What might have been confusion was at once averted. "The crew of the second third -- to that line of tunnel where the pit props be fallen and bring, for the first fetch, the smallest and the softest pieces of the dry-rotted old props -- " He waited till they had got them gone and next he said, "Senior Aar. We must needs soon make fire." A moment, then the elder nain murmured, "Ah, bear, that be no easy thing, thee knows." "I do know!" "They take care -- and always have -- the accursed smoothskins, that we have no flint about us -- to name but one lack -- and though we might break the pick-handles, their wood be not -- " "And this, all this, I know. And the knows and all of ye know what I mean. Well. The cub and I will withdraw." Softly, as it might have been reluctantly, the senior nain said, "Nay the twain of ye may bide. 'Tis no time to stand upon custom." He made a sign to the remaining nains and, though somewhat slowly, they joined hands. There was scarce room even at the broader end of the Doe-Hare's cave for a wide circle, shoulder to broad shoulder they stood, hand in hand, leg against leg and foot against foot. All was silent and, as silence will when thought upon, silence gradually gave voice. Silence whispered to itself, and silence began to sing a little song. It was a curious bit of song and it hissed and it crackled as the nain feet shuffled, as the nain forms shifted themselves in the darkness, as the small and cramped circle went around and around in the darkness, softly stamping feet upon the rubble-strewn floor. Arnten stared into the blackness and, as it will when stared long into, the blackness began to give light, a faint blue light, a spark, a worm, a glow that had no outline and faded. And then did not fade. Arnten felt the hairs on his flesh IF rise as his skin puckered in some thing the far side of fear. He saw in the darkness the forms of the nains and he saw their hairs risen and he saw upon that nimbus of hair outlining each head and each body a nimbus of blue light: and as the nains so softly-softly muttered the lights wavered and as the nains slowly circled around the blue lights slowly undulated and as the nains slowly and softly stamped their feet the blue lights softly hissed and softly crackled. The dance did not cease when the first crew returned, arms laden with the great coarse bracken-fern; Arnten gestured and they passed their burdens, bundle by bundle, to the end of the cave. First they stuffed it through the still small opening into the outside world and then, when this would take no more, piled it all around about. Then the second crew began to come back, stripped to the buff, their garment-skins used as carryalls for piles of wood from the fallen pit-props, soft from long dry rot, and Arnten gestured again and they piled wood on the bracken. And still the slow, strange dance went on and on. Arn, in a few words, bade two more crews begone. They must bring back the larger stumps and shafts of the wooden columns used here and there to hold up the tunnel roof. The dancing nains, meanwhile, had danced nearer and closer to what was now a bosky mass of dryrotted wood and bracken. The dancing nains were pressed together almost as though to make one enormous grotesque creature with many limbs, a sort of nainipede; and this grotesque heaved and huddled close to the spiled up brackenfern which had been its bed. Still it sang and still the blue lights wavered at the ends of its hairs; and then the blue light gathered itself together into one mass and the nainipede went dancing back on its many limbs. The ball of light floated up and bounced along the rough roof of the cave and settled upon the pile of wood. It seemed next to snuggle and to creep its way deep into the bracken and then there was a Hash and the blue was gone and there was the familiar red and orange and yellow of fire. And the song was silent but in its place they heard the crackling of flames. by the curtained door and flapped wide black sleeves. "My men have them safe now?" the Orfas demanded. His chief witcherer opened his mouth and closed it, long thin tongue fluttering. Then he said, "They will not go." Then seemed the King confused. "How now? Woii't go? The nains?" Merred shook his dry old head, his long nose seeming to point all ways at once. "Not the nains. King Wolf! The men! Your men! The king's men will not go! They will not go down into the mine! It seems -- I should have remembered that -- " His voice stuck, came out again at last. "They fear the deep, they fear the darkness, assuredly they fear the nains and their witchery." The old wolf let waste no time in rage and imprecation, but he rubbed one rusty wrist with one rusty hand and he said in the voice of one who thinks, "Then what is it which they may fear e'en more, my crow, than the nains and the deep and dark -- eh?" They looked at each other. The king's eyes went past the old vizier and the old vizier turned; and together they exclaimed a word. rotted wood that both together burned with minimal smoke, but smoke even so there was. Arn and Arnten and the nains stood in the main corridor and with their garment-skins they flapped and fanned away the smoke. And now and then they stopped and took sips of water from the buckets, but only sips. A thin glow of firelight lit the somber halls of underground and over this overlay a thin haze of smoke. The fire dance of the nainfolk had ceased. He leaned against his father and in his body he was in the mine-cave and beside his father, yet in his mind he was beside his old uncle in the old man's medicine hut. And there was the sound of a dance... the sound of a drum... Out of the dimness and the deep, deep darkness came the figures of men. It was no vision or dream -- here, in the mine and out of the darkness of the mine-tunnels, they came. "The guards," said Aar. "Aye, ehh'ng, be sure, be sure, 'twas that skulk-crow as sped the word to their crank lord." And in the naintongue he said a word. The men came not fast ahead, they moved slowly, irresolute. And in the dim glow of the fire and the thin haze of the smoke the nains began another sort of dance. They moved their feet up and down and they leaned forward and they waved their long, long arms. They did not actually move an ell along the tunnel floor, but in the misty, swimmy light, dim and flickering, it seemed as though they did move, did advance; and the men, moaning, dismayed, retreated. Then at the edge of his ear Arnten heard the sound which had tapped below the surface, the thin tap-tap, tump-tump, of a witchery drum. And the soldiers milled about, cried out in alarm and unease. A spurt of fresh air cleared vision for a moment and a way ahead and now it was Arnten who cried out and a murmur went up. For back, far back, as far back as they could see in the main corridor came a marching column, a marching double column, a dancing double column, of figures which were manlike but were no men, awaving in their tiny hands the menace of tiny spears. And the witch-drum beat and the witch-things came and the men cried out and turned and turned. Said one nain voice, amused and scorning, "Do they come at us with mandrakes, then? Nay'ng! The children o' the forge know a power or two for that." Swiftly said the elder Aar, " 'Tis not against us that they deploy the mandrakes, 'tis to force on the men o'the king, who know no power, let alone two, for that." Arn, without one word, picked up one of the water buckets and went straightway into the smokeIF filled hole of the hare, pausing a moment at the entrance to pick up a fallen bit of bracken and dip it in the water and crush the dripping frond against his nose and mouth. In a moment came a hissing sound and a cloud of steam rolled out and all firelight was quenched. But not for long, for torches now made appearances farther down the main corridor. The men, fearing the mandrakes more than the nains, came closer. Arn emerged, stumbling, seized another bucket and again entered the cave. Again there was a hissing and a sizzling and again a cloud of steam. And a long pause -- and Arnten held his breath and feared. And then the bear emerged again. "The fire be out," he said, low and urgent. "And now it comes time to take these two last buckets of water and toss them on the hot rock. Do they crack well, we may all yet take our leave. And if not -- " He shrugged. A huge mass of smoldering bracken was dragged out, picked up, heaved toward the advancing soldiery -- who cried out, fell back into the smoke and gloom. And the drums beat and the mandrakes moved. Now, all at once, all were in the place whence the hare had fled. Somehow there was light, light of a thin gray sort, obscured by steam, by smoke, but light. And Arnten felt the floor hot, hot against his feet and hissed his pain. He saw his father toss one bucket, heard him toss the second. Heard a cracking sound. And a second. Heard the nains give cry to their satisfaction. Heard the almost desperate cries of the king's men as they charged. Heard the sound of spears striking against wall and floor. Heard the sound of spear striking against flesh. Heard his voice raised in a wail as he saw his father stumble upon one knee with one spear into him. Saw Aarheved-heved-aar fall and saw him crawl and saw him writhe and heard his death rattle. Saw the bear seizing the very rims of the hole of the rock and smelled his flesh burn and saw his shoulders writhe and saw the rock face crack still more. Cried out and wailed again as he saw his father turn toward him, face grim and hideous and smudged with ash and soot and blood spurting from nose and mouth. Saw that protruding from his father's flesh which he knew was the bloodied head of a spear. Felt his father seize him up and swing him around and protect his smaller body and thrust him through the hole in the rock whence came the milky light of dawn. Felt the last great thrust of that great body and saw the mine vanish from sight and felt the hot rock graze his side and saw the sky and felt himself fall. And roll. And move, crawling, crawling. Leaves in his mouth, dust in his nostrils, smoke all about him. Then no smoke about him. Writhing on his belly like a wounded snake. No more smoke. Shouts and cries in his mind alone. Then silence falling in his mind. His father. His father's face. His father's deed. At this last moment his father had said no word. His deed had been enough.  T here is a theory that our progress must be represented by an asymptotic curve; that is, the higher we climb, the steeper the rate of change. If the predictions I've seen are even reasonably close, there will be far more change in conditions and in what we call our body of fact in the next thirty years than in the last hundred. This makes it difficult for science fiction to predict the future with even a crude approximation of what will happen by the year #. In fact, writers in search of a reputation for prophecy can't be sure whether to produce wishdreams of glory or nightmares of man's ultimate doom. Most of the dooms pictured a century ago turned out to be nonsense, as did the utopias. And while we seem to be living at a time of ill omens, those who seek the easy answer by predicting horrible futures are no closer to probability than the most optimistic. But nobody with any serious right to be heard ever claimed that science fiction was primarily prophecy. At best it is merely an attempt to. create a consistent, reasonably rational background picture of what a future might be like. The science in our science fiction doesn't really relate to the hard body of physical facts that might be used by an engineer, though we try not to violate such facts unwittingly. Instead, we try to use some of the techniques of the supposedly impractical, "pure" scientist; we look over the known facts to find what isn't fully known; we devise theories, carefully weeding out what is inconsistent or already disproved; and finally we test our theories to see whether they work. Of course, we test them only as fiction, with the proof being the workability of our future world as a place where our story characters can function as more than shadows. Unfortunately, much of the material now being written doesn't operate that way. A great deal of it cops out by taking something that is currently in the news and acting as if it would be even more so a hundred years from now. Other current writing, all too often, borrows from past vision without adding current vision. As a result, I find it difficult to locate material that has any real insight, either visionary or nightmarish, except for the fortunate reprinting of stories done a decade or three ago. However, there is now a series of books which should be read by everyone who enjoys good fiction re the future. These are reprints, long unavailable except in rather expensive hard-to-find editions. They are the so-called juvenile books of Robert A. Heinlein, currently being issued in soft covers by Ace, at a price of # each. Many of them are the top examples of what good science fiction should be. They represent the work of one of our best writers at the very peak of his form. Don't let the term "juvenile" fool you. The stories are partially told from the viewpoint of characters who haven't reached legal maturity yet; but so was van Vogt's Slan and nobody considered that a juvenile story. The outlook, the writing, the philosophy and the complexity of the Heinlein pieces are completely adult. Above all, they present a highly structured, thoroughly imagined and consistent picture of a future for each novel. On the average, nobody has done as good a job of making futures real as Heinlein, and these books are among his best in that respect. Between Planets is most certainly not a picture of the future, according to what we now know scientifically about Venus. This was written twenty years ago, before radio astronomy and the Venus probes. It uses a picture of Venus that is hopeless, in the light of later discoveries. Here the planet is the old-fashioned waterdrenched world, covered with deep fogs and mists, with some islands sticking up from the great shallow seas. As hard prophecy, it fails miserably. But that doesn't matter too much. The water-world is complete, livable and lived in, with technologies and attitudes that fit it. It has its own intelligent race and a bunch of alien creatures that are completely delightful. And it is one of the better stories of an attempt by a colony world to break from the strictures of Earth in a sort of interplanetary war -- one logically worked out for its space "battles" and its eroding, desultory home battles. T his was fairly early in Heintein's work in the juveniles. The protagonist is quite acceptable to any adult reader -- and he most definitely doesn't stay a juvenile -- but some of the mechanics of the solution creak a bit. Still, Between Planets stands up todayletter than many current adult books, and there is no writing down in it. When it first appeared, it was good enough to be used as a serial by one of the most adult of the adventure magazines, at a time when science fiction had to be better than most other material to win acceptance. Red Planet, in a way, lets down a bit. Again there is the completely believable development of rebellion, this time by the colonists on Mars against the Earth-based Company and its corrupt local representatives. Again, local fauna and flora are worked out so well that the book is justified by its aliens alone. But much of this seems somehow more standard in its development than the Venus book. The science is not as far from current theories -- Mars was better known than Venus -- but it fails in indicating too rich a supply of oxygen on Mars. But when we get to The Rolling Stones, all the early slight compromises Heinlein made to the age of his readers is discarded. This must be a delight to young readers, but it's twice as much fun for those who are adult. The main viewpoint characters here are a couple of teen-age twins. But the whole Stone family -- mentioned in the later adult Moon Is a Harsh Mistress -- is the real "hero" of the story. Unlike most of the series. Stones is one of Heinlein's fairly rare stories with a completely humorous slant. The humor doesn't impede the plot, which is a bit free-wheeling but still excellent. My own favorite is Star Beast. Given a period of interstellar exploration, it seems inevitable that some odd pets would be brought back to Earth. But suppose one of those pets, a hundred-odd years later, turned out to be a ranking member of one of the most important, sapient and rambunctious races in the universe? Suppose it didn't particularly want to return, but the total future of interstellar peace depended . on finding and returning it? That's just the beginning of the complications in this novel. The real hero isn't a youngster, either. He's the IF real head of all interstellar government on Earth, though lacking the title. He's also allergic to certain aliens, though he has to deal warmly with them. This novel also is brightened by as unpleasant a mother and as precocious a girl friend as can be found in science fiction. Heinlein uses them, among other things, as pointers toward the radical changes that have to be made in our society and its mores when we enter an age of interstellar negotiations. His concept of a future earth is complete not merely surface treated. His people think differently from us, act differently, and have to find different ways of making the same instincts and methods serve them. If sociology and psychology are to be treated as sciences in our field, this book stands out as one of the better examples of how to do so. The science of sociology forms the background also for Tunnel in the Sky. The tunnel here refers to a "tube" between dimensions, in which it is possible to transfer from one world to another. Earth has obviously just opened up colonization of various habitable worlds discovered by the tunnel. And it is undergoing some rather radical upsets in its social customs. Among these is the need to prepare its younger people for the unknown hazards they may face on other worlds. One method of training is a course in survival. The graduating class has to pass a simple test. It's members are dumped onto a planet -- type and conditions not specified -- and left there to take care of themselves for two weeks. They can take any equipment with them which they can carry -- though Heinlein indicates what he thinks is the best equipment. At the end, those who survive are graduated; those who fail are simply dead. Nice. And probably totally unconvincing to most readers of this quick summary who cannot believe that our attitudes toward young men and women could change that radically. But historically, Heinlein is on solid ground, and he develops his theme so well that it makes total sense in the story. A local accident makes it impossible for a student group to use their return "tunnel." The time for return comes and goes -- and more time goes. And those who have survived for this long gradually begin to realize that they jnay never be called back. Now, on a world about which they still know very little, and with only rudimentary equipment for a twoweek survival test, they must set out to build a viable way of life for their colony and, hopefully, to become a real world in time. But this is also a story of sociology, as I said. Heinlein has used ( Please turn to page # One morning the dead of Earth awoke with a great cry. They were on the banks of a river of a planet somewhere in a star swarm. They were naked and in an interminable valley which offered no food -- at first. The old had been rejuvenated, so that an eighty-year-old, for instance, again had his twenty-five-year-old body. The diseased were healthy: the crippled walked straight; the misshapen were reshaped. Moreover, all men had awakened circumcised and were permanently without facial hair. All women were virgins again but forever sterile. After the horrible fears of hell and the shocks of resurrection were over, humanity began to look around and to construct new societies within the physical limitations of the Rivervalley, their psychic conditioning and the changed rules of human life. The River was usually one to one and one-half miles wide, though it sometimes became a narrow strait or a lake. The only animal life consisted of the small earthworm and the fish, which ranged from troutto whale-sized. On each side of The River was a gently sloping plain a mile wide, then two or so miles of hills and then perpendicular unscalable mountains # feet and more. The plains were covered with short grasses, the hills with tall grasses. The other plants were bamboo ( which is a grass), giant oaks, pine, fir, yew and the indestructible non-Terrestrial irontrees. Vines with huge, varicolored blooms grew on the latter. The temperature rose to an estimated #" F at #:# P.M. and fell to #" F around #:# A.M. The rainfall was unvarying. The estimated population density was #-#I persons per square mile -- total population was # billion or so. The River was supposed long. It circled this world like a Midgard Serpent, issuing from the north polar sea and, after much twisting across one hemisphere and cutting back around the south pole, twisted back up the other hemisphere and emptied into the north polar sea. Along each bank of The River, at one-mile intervals, and also in the hills, were huge mushroomshaped stones. Three times a day they discharged enormous electrical energies derived from some place -- or mechanism -- deep in the planet s guts. Mankind had awakened possessing metal cylinders containing snap-down racks and dishes. These cylinders -- the grails -- when placed on top of the stones, yielded food, liquor, tobacco, marihuana cigarettes and cigars and  dreamgum after the energy discharge. Apparently the grails contained devices, inside false bottoms, for converting energy to matter. Mankind was where he could live simply but with no fear of freezing or dying of thirst or starvation or bacterial or viral disease or cancer or almost any of the scourges that had made life on Earth a hell. Sixty percent of mankind had been strung along The River in a sequence roughly corresponding to the chronology of their existence on Earth. Thus the earliest men (and subhumans  of circa # B.C. were closest to The Riverhead and the latest, born circa #-# A.D., were near the mouth. (Mankind had been wiped out in # A.D.) Mixed with the # of a particular time and nationality were # of a minority from another time and nationality and # apparently chosen at random from any time and place. But # of the total was composed of #th-century humans, these being the most numerous of mankind and the most widely scattered. Though many people clung to the idea that their resurrection was of supernatural origin, many thought they knew better. It was rumored that one man had awakened in a strange and frightening place where the dead were being recreated, refleshed and prepared for their second deaths and recreation upon the planet s surface through some unknown means. This man ( who, said some, was Richard Francis Burton, the #th-century English explorer, linguist, and author) had seen the warders of that chamber of the dead, who looked just like men. During this time, the first twenty years after Resurrection Day, Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- or Mark Twain -- had been looking for two things. One was his Earth wife, Olivia. The other was iron. He had two dreams, neither of which seemed likely to come true. Sam Clemens had met a colossal subhuman ( whom he called Joe Miller) who told a strange story. Joe had managed to get up through the mountains surrounding the north pole and had seen a tail pale tower in a misty sea and a flying machine descending towards it. Then he had fallen to his death and awakened near Clemens. Sam was fired-up about this; he thought that the beings responsible for this world must have their headquarters in that tower. He would build a boat and go all the way up The River, if it took him a hundred years to do it. Then, somehow, he would storm the tower and discover the secret of resurrection. For the trip Sam wanted a great river boat such as he had piloted on the Mississippi in his youth. Unfortunately the planet seemed to have little iron ore. However, he met a Norseman, Eric Bloodaxe, who had an axe made from a nickel-iron meteorite. With Erics Norsemen and Joe, Sam set out down TheRiver to find a large supply of meteorite metal. He found it, but not as he had planned. A giant meteorite struck the valley and the tidal waves almost killed the searchers. But they located the iron and began mining. From the first, to attain his boat, Sam had had to make deals and compromises he would otherIF wise have scorned. He had to become partners with the man who had once been King John of England, He had to murder Eric Bloodaxe, And Eric, before dying, had sworn that when Sam did get to the end of The River, he would find Eric waiting for him, and Eric would kill him and thus send him off down The River a million or so miles, Sam would never get to the misty tower, nor would he keep his fabulous River boat, Sam was to have nightmares thereafter about Eric, One night Sam awoke in his hut to find a hooded man crouched beside him. This man, whom Sam was to call The Mysterious Stranger -- or X -- was one of the group that had created this planet and the resurrection. Though an Ethical (as these beings called themselves), he was a renegade. He told Sam that he had used his powers to deflect the giant meteorite and to deactivate the repulsive system that would ordinarily have sent the falling star past the planet. His fellows suspected that they had a traitor among them, but none of them knew for sure. Sam was to build his great boat and take a crew upRiver. He would be aided by eleven men whom The Stranger had chosen to storm the tower and wreck the plans of the Ethicals. These men would come secretly to Clemens and introduce themselves, Sams problems as co-consul of Parolando, the state formed to build the boat, kept him busy day and night. One of his problems was getting enough wood as fuel for the mills and plastic factories. And Parolando had to trade for -- or gain by conquest -- materials and ores other states had: pryolite and bauxite to make aluminum, tungsten and iridium for electrical components. Adding to Sam's troubles was the attitte of Olivia, his Earth wife, who was no longer in love with him, but chose to live with the resurrected Frenchman, Cyrano de Bergerac. One downRiver state. Soul City, was headed by a late #th-century American black militant, Elwood Hacking. He had controt of certain materials Sam needed and was demanding high prices. He was also, Sam was sure, plotting to get hold of the boat after it was finished, if not before. Neighboring states were hoping to do the same. King John also was making life jumpy for Sam, He was bound to be plotting to get the boat for himself Meanwhile, John's arrogance and lechery had to be repressed by Sam. Moreover, the missionaries of the Church of the Second Chance were plaguing him. This religious body had formed a few years after Resurrection Day. It claimed to know what the whole business of the River and the Resurrection was about. Its members preached total pacifism, love for all and a striving towards ethical perfection. They were also responsible for introducing Esperanto as a universal language. They welcomed martyrdom as the quickest way for them to travel up and down The River and spread their religion. They were a threat to Clemens because they were opposed to the building of the boat. Their main speaker in this area was Hermann Goering, the ex-Nazi, the exReichsmarschal. Goering had suffered a psychic conversion as sudden and as strange and apparently as sincere as that of Paul of Tarsus. A large group of fellow missionaries, kicked out of a neighboring state, landed in Parolando despite orders to stay out. King John, eager to try out a new pistol using plastic bullets, massacred all but a few women. These he took into his log palace. Sam could not allow John to get away with this, even if it meant civil war. So he set out to demand the women back, unharmed, and to arrest John: Odysseus was upRiver on a mission. Sam had with him Lotthar von Richthofen, de Bergerac, Joe Miller and a few others. If John resisted he could cause Sam to lose -- forever -- all hopes of sailing on his fabulous Riverboat. S AM saw thirty or so women walking out through the open gates and knew that John had decided to rectify his mistake. Even so, he could be accused of kidnaping, a graver crime than murder in this topsyturvy world. But if the women were unharmed it would be too much trouble to push the charge. He stopped -- and this time he thought his heart would also stop. Gwenafra was with the women! Lothar, crying her name, ran to her. She ran to him with her arms out and they embraced. After a minute of hugging, kissing and sobbing, she pulled herself away and went to. Sam. He could not help reproaching hiniself. If he had shown that he wanted her, when she had made it plain that he could have her, she might not have turned to von Richthofen. Why hadn't he taken her? Why had he clung to the idea that Livy would eventually come back and that, if he took another woman now, Livy would resent it so much she would never have anything to do with him? She was living with Cyrano. So he could do what he pleased. His thinking wasn't logical. He sighed. Logic was what one used to justify one's emotions. Gwenafra kissed him while her tears ran down his bare chest. Again she left his arms and went back to Lothar, and Sam Clemens was left with the problem of what ido withor to -- John Lackland. He strode through the gates, Joe Miller lumbering behind him. A moment later von Richthofen had caught up with him. He was swearing and muttering in German, "I'll kill him!" Sam stopped. "You get out of here," he said. "I'm mad enough, but I can control myself. You're in the lion's den now -- and if you try anything he can have you killed and claim self-defense. He'd love that. In fact, he may have done all this just to set up our murder." Lothar said, "But you're here with only Joe." "I wouldn't ever call Joe an only,"' Sam replied. "Anyway, if you hadn't been so busy mugging with Gwen you would have heard me order the troops to storm the IF palace and kill everybody in it if I'm not out in fifteen minutes." Lothar stared at Sam. "You've certainly gotten much more agressive than you used to be." "The more trouble I have and the longer the building of the Riverboat takes, the meaner I get," Sam said. There was no point in mentioning that his anger at Lothar and Gwenafra was turned onto John, who already had so much directed at him that he should have curled up and crisped away, And would have if there were any justice in the world. He entered the largest building inside the stockade of tall lodgepole-pine logs and brushed past Sharkey. The slope-shouldered thug started to block his way, but Sam did not break his stride. Sharkey snarled soundlessly and made the mistake of not moving far enough to one side. A huge reddish-haired hip sent the two-hundred-and-thirty-pound man staggering back as if he were a hollow dummy. "I'll kill you one of these days," Sharkey said in English. Joe turned his head slowly as if it were a turret on a battleship and the tremendous proboscis were a cannon. "Yeth? You and vhat army?" "You're getting pretty snappy with the comeback, Joe," Sam muttered. "My influence, no doubt." "I'm not ath dumb ath motht people think," Joe said. "That wouldn't be possible." S AM'S rage had become a dull red now. Even with Joe as his bodyguard, he was far from being safe. But he was banking on the fact that John would go only so far with him -- John wanted the Riverboat, too. John was sitting at the big round oaken table with a dozen of his thugs. The giant Zaksksromb was standing behind him. All held clay steins. The room reeked of tobacco and liquor. John's eyes were red -- but then they usually were. Light came in through the windows but the direct sunlight was blocked off by the kockade poles. Some pine torches burned smokily. Sam stopped, took a cigar out of the little box in the bag hanging from his belt and lit it. It angered him that his hand shook so much. He said, "All right. Your Majesty. It was bad enough that you took those women for your own vile purposes. But to take Gwenafra? She's a citizen of this state! You really put your neck in the noose, John, and I'm not just using figurative language." John downed the whiskey in the stein and gently put it down on the table. He said softly, "I had those women removed for their own safety. The crowd was ugly; they wanted to kill all the missionaries. And Gwenafra was taken along through a mistake. I will ascertain who is responsible for that and punish him." "John," Sam said, "I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support. But I got to hand it to you. You just dispossessed the devil. You are now the father of lies and grand master, past, present and future, of deceit. If being barefaced is the criterion of the greatest liar, all other liars are whiskered like Santa Claus." John's face turned red. Zaksksromb sneered and lifted his club chest high. Joe growled. John blew out a deep breath and said, smiling, "You are upset over a little blood. You will get over it. You cannot disprove anything I have said -- isn't that right? By the way, have you called a meeting of the Council yet? The law of the land requires you to do so, you know." The horrible thing was that John would get away with his claims. Everybody, including his supporters would know he was lying. But there was nothing Sam coujd do unless he wanted to start a civil war. And civil war would mean that the wolves -- lyeyasu. Hacking, maybe the supposed neutrals, Publius Crassus, Chernsky, Tai Fung and the savages across the River -- would invade. S AM snorted and walked out. Two hours later his expectations became realities. The Councilmen voted an official reprimand against John for his mishandling of the situation and his hastiness. He was directed to confer with his co-Consul in any such future situations. No doubt John would laugh uproariously when he was told of the decision and he would call for more liquor, tobacco, marihuana and women to celebrate. However, he did not have a complete victory. Every Parolando knew how Sam Clemens had stood up to John, stormed his palace with only one supporter, released the women and insulted John to his face. John knew that his triumph was standing on shaky legs. Sam asked the Council to exile every Second Chancer in Parolando for hisher own protection. But several Councilors pointed out that this would be illegal. The Carta would have to be changed. Besides, it was unlikely that John would take any more action against the sect after the warning he had received. They knew as well as Sam why he was taking advantage of the emotional climate to oust the Second Chancers. But there were some stubborn men on the Council. Perhaps they felt angry because they had not been able to do anything about John and wanted to make a stand for principle. Sam would have bet that the survivors of the massacre would want to leave immediately. But they insisted on staying. The slaughter had convinced them that Parolando needed them. Goering was building several large huts for them. Sam sent word down that this should stop. Parolando was already short of wood. Goering sent word back that he and his male comrades would move out and sleep under the grailstones. Sam swore and blew smoke in the face of the Chancer messenger and said that it was too bad pneumonia did not exist. Afterward he felt ashamed, but he did not relent. He wasn't going to scant his furnaces so that people he did not even want could sleep under a roof. He felt upset enough, but that evening he got two messages which opened the earth under him. One IF was that Odysseus had disappeared at night from his boat while on his way back to Parolando. Nobody knew what had happened to him. He was just gone. The second mesGrevel, the man who had been spying on John, had been found under a ledge at the base of the mountain, his skull smashed in. Somehow, John had found him out and executed him. And John would be laughing because Sam could not prove a thing or, for that matter, even admit that Grevel had been working for him. S AM called in von Richthofen, de Bergerac and others whom he considered to be his people. It was true that de Bergerac and he were hostile becluse of Livy, but de Bergerac preferred Clemens to John, with whom he had had some hot words. "Maybe Odysseus' disappearance from the boat is only a coincidence," Sam said. "But that, plus Grevel's death, makes we wonder if John isn't striking at me through my friends. He may be planning on cutting you down, one by one, under circumstances where he can't be accused. He's crafty. He probably won't do anything now for some time. But Odysseus was gotten rid of in a place where an investigation will probably reveal nothing. And I can't accuse John about Grevel without exposing what I've been doing. So, watch out for situations where accidents can happen. And be careful when you are alone." De Bergerac swore. "If it weren't for this ridiculous law against dueling, I could challenge John and run him through. You, Sinjoro Clemens, were responsible for that law!" "I was raised in a country where duels were common," Sam said. "The whole idea sickens me. ' If you'd seen the tragedies -- well, never mind. I guess you did see and it doesn't seem to have affected you. Anyway, do you think for one moment that John would ever let you live long enough to meet him for a duel? No, you'd disappear or have an accident, you can bet on that." "Vhy can't Chohn have an acthident?" Joe Miller asked. "How would you get past the living wall of his bodyguards?" Sam said. "No, if John has an accident, it must be a genuine one." He dismissed them with the exception of de Bergerac and Joe, who never left him unless he was sick or Sam wanted privacy. These were the only ones who knew about The Mysterious Stranger. "The Stranger said that he'd picked out twelve humans for the final onslaught against the Misty Tower," Sam told Cyrano. "Joe, you, Richard Francis Burton, Odysseus, and me. That's five. But none of, us knows who the other seven are; Now Odysseus is gone and God knows if we'll ever see him again. The Stranger implied that all of the twelve would join the others on the Riverboat somewhere along the line. But if Odysseus has been resurrected somewhere to the south, downRiver, so far away he can't get back up here before the Riverboat is built, then he is out of luck." Cyrano shrugged and rubbed his long nose. "Why worry? Or is that your nature? For all we know, Odysseus is not dead. He may have been contacted by this Mysterious Stranger -- who, Odysseus claims, is a woman, so his Stranger is not the one that you and I met -- but I digress. As I said, Odysseus may have been called away suddenly by this so mysterious person and we will Find out in time what did happen. Let that shadowy angel -- or fiend -- take care of the matter. We must concentrate on getting this fabulous boat constructed and skewering anybody who gets in our way." "That maketh thenthe," Joe said. "If Tham had a hair for every time he vorried, he'd look like a porcupine. Vhich, now that I come to think of it -- " "Out of the mouths of babes -- and tailless monkeys," Sam said. "Or is it the other end? Anyway, if everything goes well -- and so far it hasn't -- we'll start bonding the magnalium plates for the hull in thirty days. That'll be my happiest day until we actually launch the boat. I'll be happier even than when Livy said yes -- " H e could have cut himself off sooner, but he wanted to antagonize Cyrano. The Frenchman, however, did not react. Why should he? He had Livy -- she was saying yes to him all the time. "Me, I do not like the idea, since I am a peaceful man. I would like to have the leisure to indulge myself with the good things of life. I would like to have an end to wars -- and if there is to be any bloodshed, let it be between gentlemen who know how to wield their swords. But we cannot build the boat without interference, because those who do not have iron desire it and will not stop until they get it. So, me, I think that John Lackland may be right in one particular. Perhaps we should wage an all-out war as soon as we have enough weapons, and clear The River on both sides of all opposition for thirty miles both ways. We can then have unlimited access to the wood and the bauxite and platinum -- " "But if you did that, if you killed all the inhabitants, the countries would be filled up within a day," Sam said. "You know how resurrection works. Look at how swiftly this area was reinhabited after the meteorite had killed everybody in it." Cyrano held up a long -- and dirty -- finger. Sam wondered if Livy was losing her battle to keep him clean. "Ah!" Cyrano said. "But these people will remain unorganized and we, being on the spot, will organize them, take theni in as citizens of the expanded Parolando. We will include them in the lottery for the crew of the boat. In the long run, it would be faster to stop the boat building now and do as I suggest." And I will send'you forth in the lead, Sam thought. And it will be David and Bathseba and Uriah all over again. Except that David probably didnt have a conscience, never lost a wink of sleep over what he did... "I don't think so," Sam said. IF 'Mn the first place, our citizens will fight like hell to defend themselves, because they're involved in the boat. But they're not going to engage in a war of conquest, especially after they figure out that bringing new citizens into the lottery is going to reduce their chances enormously. Besides, it just isn't right." De Bergerac stood up, his hand on the hilt of his rapier. "Perhaps you are right. But the day you made an agreement with John Lackland and then murdered Erik Bloodaxe, that was the day you launched your boat on blood and treachery and cruelty. I do not reproach you, niy friend. What you did was unavoidable if you wanted the boat. But yoju cannot start thus and then shy away from similar or even worse acts. Not if you want your boat. Good night, my friend." He bowed and left. Sam puffed on his cigar, then said, "I hate that man. He tells the truth." Joe stood up, and the floor creaked under his eight hundred pounds. "I'm goingi to bed. My head hurtth. Thith whole thing ith giving me a pain in my athth. Either you do or you don't. It'th that thimple." "If I had my brainth in my athth I'd thay the thame thing," Sam snarled. "Joe, I love you. You're beautiful. Your world is so uncomplex. Problems make you sleepy -- so you sleep. But I -- " "Good night, Tham!" Joe said, and walked into the texas. Sam made sure that the door was barred and that the guards he'd posted around the building were alert. Then he, too, went to bed. H e dreamed about Erik Bloodaxe, who chased him through the decks and into the hold of the Riverboat. He awoke yelling. Joe loomed over him, shaking him. Rain pounded the roof and thunder boomed somewhere up along the face of the mountain. Joe stayed a while after making some coffee. He put a spoonful of dried crystals into cold water and the coffee crystals heated the mixture in three seconds. They sipped their coffee and Sam smoked while they talked about the days when they had voyaged down The River with Bloodaxe and his Vikings in search of iron. And then Joe talked of how he had awakened along The River the first time and found himself in the Arctic regions among his own kind, the titanthropi. Then Egyptians had come in their oared vessels and he had been induced to go with them up The River. They called him Tehuti (that is, Thoth) because of his long nose, which reminded them of the ibisheaded god. And then they had come to the headwaters of The River and climbed mountains which seemed unclimbable. They had found their way prepared, some steps cut out of the cliff, a tunnel bored, a ledge widened, ropes left hanging down. The person who had done this, Joe now knew, must have been Sam's Mysterious Stranger. And then high up on a ledge, with the cold gray mists of the north polar sea below him and the sun creeping along forever just below the top of the mountain range that ringed the sea, the mists had parted for a moment. The top of a tower, a vast gray cylinder shaped like a grail, had been visible for a few seconds as the sun passed a notch in the mountains. A big egg-shaped machine had flown dpwn toward the top of the tower. Joe had steped back, forgetting that there was a grail just behind him. He had fallen backward off the mountain and down into the mists and then into the sea, many thousands of feet below. He had awakened in a region of The River where only humans lived and there had met Sam Clemens. "At leatht, ve uthed to have fun now and then," Joe said. "But not any more. There 'th too much vork to do and too many people out to thkin our hideth. And your voman vould thyow up vith that bignothed Thyrano." Sam chuckled and said "Thanks for the flrst laugh Tve had in days, Joe. Big-nosed! Ye Gods!" "Thometimeth I'm too thubtle even for you, Tham," Joe said. He rose from the table and walked back to his room. Sam had little time for sleep that night and on subsequent nights. He had always liked to stay in bed in the mornings -- now he managed less than five hours out of twentyfour, with an occasional siesta. Someone always seemed to need a question answered or an issue thrashed out. His chief engineers were far from agreeing on everything. Sam had thought engineering a cut-and-dried profession. You had a problem and you solved it the best way. Usually there was only one way. But Van Boom, Velitsky, and O'Brien seemed to be living in worlds that did not quite dovetail. Finally, to spare himself the aggravating and often wasted hours of wrangling, Sam delegated the final word to Van Boom. They were not to worry him about anything unless they needed his authorization. An amazing number of things instantly required his authorization. IX the Bushman-Hottentot area across The River from him but nine miles of the Ulmak territory. Then he sent a fleet down to the three-mile stretch below the Ulmaks, where seventeenth-century A.D. Sac and Fox Indians lived. This country was conquered with resultant slaughter of half the inhabitants. lyeyasu then began dickering with Parolando for a higher price for his wood. Also, he wanted an amphibian exactly like the Firedragon . By then the second Firedragon was almost finished. And by this time over five hundred blacks from Parolando had been exchanged for an equal number of Dravidians. Sam had steadfastly refused to accept the Wahhabi Arabs, or at least had insisted that the Asiatic Indians come first. Hacking apparently did not like this, but nothing had been said in the agreement about which group had)riority. Hacking, having heard from his spies about lyeyasu's demands, sent a message. He wanted a Fireexchange a great quantity of minerals for it. IF Publius Crassus and Tai Fung him I hadn't sworn any oath of allied to invade the area across The loyalty to you, but I had accepted River from them. This was ocyour offer and that was as good I cupied by stone-age peoples from said. I wasn't going to betray you everywhere and everytime and and that if Soul City invaded Parostretched for fourteen miles along lando I'd defend it to the death." the left bank. With their superior "That's fine, superb." Sam said, steel weapons and numbers, the "Here, have a snort of bourbon -- invaders killed half the population and a cigar! I'm proud of you and and enslaved the rest. And they upproud to command such loyalty, ped their price for the wood but But I wish -- I wish -- " kept it below Iseyasu's. Van Boom looked over the cup. Spies reported that Chernsky, "Yes?" who ruled the fourteen-mile-long "I wish you'd strung him along, nation just north of Parolando, had We could have found out a lot with made a visit to Soul City. What you feeding us information." happened there was anybody's Van Boom put the cup down and guess, since Hacking had set up a stood up. His handsome brown security system that seemed to be features were ugly. "I am not a one hundred percent effective. Sam dirty spy!" had gotten in eight blacks to spy "Come back," Sam said, but for him and he knew that John had Van Boom ignored him. Sam sent in at least a dozen. The sevburied his head in his arms for a ered heads of all soon were tossed minute and then picked up Van from boats in the mists late t Boom's cup. Never let it be said night onto the top of the wall along that Samuel Langhorne Clemens the bank of Parolando. wasted good whiskey. Or even bad. Van Boom came to Sam late one for that matter. Although the grail night and said that Firebrass had never yielded any but the best, cautiously approached him. Van Boom's lack of realism ir"He offered me the position of ritated him. At the same time he chief engineer on the boat," Van knew a counter feeling of warm Boom said. pleasure. It was good to know that "e offered it to you?" Sam incorruptible men still existed, said, his cigar almost dropping. He regretted that he had not had "Yes. He didn't say so in so a chance to pry out of Van Boom many words, but I got the idea. The his basic attitude toward whites. Riverboat will be taken over by the Sam knew that his chief engineer Soul Citizens and I will be chief had been delivered by a Zulu mothengineer." er in a ditch during a bombardment "And what did you say about his in the course of a revolution in fine offer? After all, you can't South Africa. Van Booip's father lose, either way." had been an Afrikaans who had "I told him not to etch a pseudojoined the black underground. Van circuit. Come out and say it. He Boom had been raised in a society wouldn't, though he grinned. I told in which whites and blacks were theoretically equal, though there were not many whites around. Most of them had been slaughtered or fled the country. He had grown up with the history of the long exploitation and suppression of the blacks by the whites drilled into him. But he himself had seemed to be unaffected by his background and he had not come into contact with whites who looked down on him. He had never left his country. Sam decided he did not have to worry about Van Boom. awoke wondering if he did have to worry after all. What if Van Boom were not as upright as he pretended to be? What if the clever Firebrass had told Van Boom to go to Clemens with hisstory? What better way to put a man off his guard? But then it would have been better if Van Boom had pretended to Sam that he was playing along with Firebrass. "I'm beginning to think like King John," Sam said aloud. He finally decided that he had to trust Van Boom. The work on the great Riverboat went on day and night. The plates of the hull were bonded and the beams were welded on. The batacitor and the giant electric motors were built and cranes began the slow and cautious work of lowering them into the hull. The cranes themselves were enormous structures on huge rails, powered by electricity from the prototype batacitor. People came from thousands of miles up and down The River, in galleys, dugouts, canoes, to see the fabulous works. Sam and King John agreed that so many people wandering about would get in the way of the work and would enable spies to function more efficiently. "Also, it'll put the temptation to steal before them, and we don't want to be responsible for tempting people. They have enough trouble as it is," Sam said. John did not smile. He signed the order that expelled all noncitizens, except for ambassadors and messengers, fr#m the work area. This still did not prevent many boats from sailing by while the occupants gawked. The dirt and stone walls along the bank were about finished -- there were, however, many breaks through which the curious could stare. These openings were left to provide ingress to freight boats bringing wood, ore and flints. Moreover, since the plain sloped up toward the hills, the tourists could see the factories and cranes -- and the great structure of the boatyard itself was visible for miles around. After a while the tourist trade began to peter out. Too many of the curious were being picked up along the way by grail slavers. Word got around that it was becoming dangerous to travel The River in that section. Six months passed. The wood, supply in the area was cut off. Bamboo grew to full length in three to six weeks; the trees took six months to reach complete maturity. Every state for fifty miles both ways from Parolando had enough wood for their own uses only. Parolando's representatives made treaties with more distant IF states, trading iron ore and weapons for wood. A large supply of siderite masses was still available; Sam was not worried about running out of it. But the mining of it took many men and materials and caused the central part of Parolando to look like a heavily shelled landscape. And the more wood was brought in, the more men, materials and machines had to be diverted from the boatbuilding to make weapons for trade. Moreover, the increase in shipping resulted in more demand for lumber to build freighters. And more men had to be trained and shipped out as sailors and guards for the wood-carrying and ore-carrying fleets. Finally boats had to be rented from neighboring states and the rent, as always, was iron-nickel ore and finished weapons. S AM wanted to be with the boat from dawn to dusk and even later -- he loved every minute of progress there. But he was caught in so many administrative details that he could indulge himself for only two to three hours -- on a good day. He tried to get John to take over more of the administration, but John would accept only duties which gave him more power over the military forces or allowed him to exert pressure on those who opposed him. The anticipated attempts at assassination of those close to Sam did not occur. The bodyguards and the close watch at nights were continued, but Sam decided that John was going to lay low for a while. He had probably seen that it would be best for his purposes to wait until the boat was nearly finished. Once Joe Miller said, "Tham, don't you think maybe you're wrong about Chohn? Maybe he'th going to be content vith being thecond in command of the boat?" "Joe, would a sabertooth part with his canines?" "Vhat?" "John is rotten to the core. The old kings of England were never any great shakes, morally speaking. The only difference between them and Jack the Ripper was that they operated openly and with the sanction of Church and State. But John was such a wicked monarch that it became traditional never to name another English king John. Even the Church, which had a high tolerance for evil in high places, could not stomach John. The Pope slapped the Interdict on the entire nation and brought John crawling and begging to the feet of the Pope, like a whipped puppy. But I suppose that even when he was kissing the Pope's foot, John managed to suck a little blood. And the Pope must have felt his pockets to make sure his money was still there after he embraced John. "What I'm trying to put across is that John couldn't reform even if he wanted to. He'll always be a human weasel, a hyena, a skunk." J OE puffed on a'cigar even longer than his nose and said, "Veil, I don't know. Look at vhat the Church of the Thecond Chanthe hath done to Goering. Look at you. You told me that in your time vomen vore clotheth that covered them from the neck to the ankleth and you got ekthited if you thaw a good-looking ankle -- and a thigh, oh my! Now you aren't too dithturbed if you thee -- " "I know -- I know," Sam said. "#d attitudes and what the psychologists call conditioned reflexes can be changed. That's why I say that anybody who still carries in him the racial and sexual prejudices he had on Earth is not taking advantage of what The River offers. A man can change, but -- " "He can?" Joe said. "But you alvayth told me that everything in life, even the vay a man actth and thinkth, ith determined by vhat vent on long before he vath even born. Vhat ith it? Yeth, it'th a determinithtic philothophy, that'th vhat. Now, if you believe that everything ith fikthed in itth courthe, that humanth mathyineth, tho to thpeak, then how can you believe that men can chanche themthelveth?" "Well," Sam drawled, looking fierce, his blue-green eyes bright above the falcon nose, "even my theories are determined in advance and if they conflict, that can't be helped." "Then, for heaven'th thaketh," Joe said, throwing up his footballsized hands, "vhat'th the uthe of talking about it? Or even doing anything? Voy don't you chutht give up?" "Because I can't help myself," Sam said. "Because, when the first atom in this universe bumped against the second atom my fate was decreed, my every thought and action was fixed." "Then you can't be, uh, rethponthible for vhat you do, right?" "That's right," Sam said. He began to feel uncomfortable. "Then Chohn can't help it that he'th a murdering treacherouth thoroughly dethpicable thvine?" "No -- and I can't help despising him for what he is." "And I thuppothe that if thomebody thmarter than I am came along and thyowed you, by thtrict undeniable lochic, that you wer wrong in your philothophy, that you vould thay that he can't help thinking you're wrong? But he'th wrong, it'th chutht that he'th predetermined, mechanically, to think the vay he doeth." "I'm right and I know it," Sam said, puffing harder. "This hyppothetical man couldn't convince me because his own reasoning does not spring from a free will, which is like a vegetarian tiger -- that is, it doesn't exist." "But your own reathoning doethn't thpring from a free vill." "True. We're all screwed. We believe what we have to." "You iaugh at thothe people who have vhat you call invinthible ignoranthe, Tham. Yet you're full of it, yourthelf." "Lord deliver us from apes who think they're philosophers!" "Thee! You fall back on inthultth vhen you can't think of anything elthe to thay! Admit it, Tham! You haven't got a lochical leg to thtand on!" "You Just aren't capable of seeing what I mean, because of the way you are," Sam said. "You thyould talk to Thyrano de Bercherac more, Tham. He'th ath big a thynic ath you, although he doethn't go ath far ath you do vith determinithm." IF "I'd think you two incapable of talking to each other. Don't you two resent each other, you look so much alike? How can you stand nose to nose, as it were, and not break up with laughter? It's like two anteaters -- " "Inthultth! Inthultth! Oh, vhat'th the uthe?" "Exactly," Sam said. Joe did not say good night and Sam did not call after him. He was nettled. Joe looked so dumb with his low forehead, bone-ringed eyes, dill-pickle nose, gorilla build and hairiness. But behind those little blue eyes and the lisping was an undeniable intelligence. What disturbed him most was Joe's comment that his deterministic belief was only a rationalization. To excuse his guilt? Guilt for what? Guilt for just about everything bad that had happened to those whom he loved. But it was a philosophic labyrinth which ended in a quagmire. Did he believe in determinism because he wanted not to feel guilty? Or did he feel guilty, even though he should not, because the universe was so constructed that he had to feel guilty? H e sat up later than usual that night, but not working. He drank at least a fifth of ethyl alcohol mixed with fruit juice. Firebrass had said two months earlier he could not understand the failure of Parolando to make ethyl alcohol. Sam had been upset. He had not known that grain alcohol could be made here, had thought that the only supply of liquor was the limited amount that the grails yielded. No, Firebrass had said. Hadn't any of his engineers told him? If the proper materials, such as acid, coal gas, or acetaldehyde and a proper catalyst were available wood cellulose could be converted into ethyl alcohol. Sam had called in Van Boom, who had stated that he had enough to worry about without providing booze for people who already drank too much. Sam had ordered materials and men diverted and, for the first time in the history of The River, as far as anyone knew, potable alcohol began to be made on a large scale. This resulted not only in happier citizens, except for the Second Chancers, hut in a new industry for Parolando. Sam exported alcohol in exchange for wood and bauxite. The trade, Sam thought, could afford his indulgence this night. He finished the bottle, fell into bed and, the next morning refused to get up before noon. But the day after he was back at his toils. He and John sent a message to lyeyasu that they would regard it as a hostile act if he invaded the rest of the Ulmak territory or Chernsky's Land. lyeyasu replied that he had no intention of waging war on these lands and proved it by invading the state just north of his, Sheshshub's Land. Sheshshub was an Assyrian, born in the seventh century B.C. He had been a general of Sargon II, and so, like most powerful people on Earth, had become a leader #n the Riverworld. He gave lyeyasu a good fight, but the invaders were more numerous. lyeyasu was only one worry. Sam had others. Hacking sent a message through Firebrass. He wanted Parolando to quit stalling and send the amphibian promised to him. Sam had kept pleading technical difficulties, but Firebrass told him that excuses of any kind were no longer acceptable. shipped off. S AM made a visit to Chernsky, just north of Parolando, to reassure him that Parolando would defend Cernskujo. Coming back, a half-mile upwind of the factories, Sam almost gagged. He had been living so long in the acidbath-cum-smoke atmosphere that he had gotten used to it and the vacation from it had cleansed his lungs. The stench set him coughing. Though the wind was at fifteen mph, it did not carry the smoke away swiftly enough. The air definitely was hazy. No wonder, he thought, that Publiujo, to the south, complained. But the boat continued to grow. Standing before the front port of his pilothouse, Sam could look out every morning and be consoled for his troubles and for the hideousness and stench of the land. The three decks would be completed in another six months and the great paddlewheels would be installed. A plastic coating would seal the part of the hull in contact with water. This plastic would not only prevent electrolysis of the magnalium, it would reduce the effect of water turbulence. Van Boom said the reduction would add ten mph to the boat's speed. The upper decks would be white with red, black and gold trimmings. During this time Sam received some good news. Tungsten and iridium had been found in Selinujo, the country immediately south of Soul City. The report was brought by a prospector, who trusted no one but Sam. He also brought some bad news. Selina Hastings refused to let Parolando mine there. In fact, if she had known that a Parolandano had been digging along the mountain she would have thrown him out. She did not want to be unfriendly -- indeed, she loved Sam Clemens, since he was a human being. But she did not approve of the Riverboat and she would not permit anything to go out of her land that would help build the vessel. Sam erupted and, as Joe said, "Thyot blue thyit for mileth around." The tungsten was very much needed for hardening machine tools but even more for radios and, eventually, the closedcircuit TV sets. The iridium could be used to harden platinum for various uses -- scientific instruments and surgical tools. The Mysterious Stranger had told Sam that he had set up the deposit of minerals in Sam's territory, but that his fellow Ethicals did not know that he had done so. Along with the bauxite, cryolite, and platinum he had IF promised tungsten and iridium. But an error had evidently been made and the latter two metals had been deposited several miles south of the first three. Sam did not tell John at once -- he needed time to think about the situation. John, of course, would want to demand that the metals be traded to Parolando or that war be declared. While he was pacing back and forth in the pilothouse, clouding the room with green smoke, he heard drums. The drummers were using a code he did not know but recognized, after a moment, as belonging to Soul City. A few minutes later Firebrass was at the foot of the ladder and coming up. Sinjoro Hacking knows all about the discovery of tungsten and iridium in Selinujo," he said. "He says that if you can come to an agreement with Selina, fine. But don't invade her land. He'd regard that as a declaration of war on Soul City." , Sam looked out the starboard port. "Here comes John, hot-footing it," he said. "He's heard the news, too. His spy system is almost as good as yours, slower by a few minutes. I'd say. I don't know where the leaks in my system are, but they're so wide that I'd be sunk if I were a boat -- and I may be anyway." face red, entered. Since the introduction of grain alcohol he had put on even more fat and seemed half-drunk all the time and all drunk half the time. Sam was angered but also amused. He knew John would have liked to have sent a messenger with a summons, in keeping with the dignity of an ex-king. But John, in turn, knew that Sam would not have answered for a long time -- if at all -- and meanwhile there was no telling how much hankypanky Firebrass and Sam would manufacture. "What's going on?" John asked, glaring. "You tell me," Sam said. "Something must be on your mind." "None of your wisecracks," John said. Without being asked he poured out a quart of purple passion into a stein. "I know what that drumming was about -- even if I don't know the code." "I thought as much," Sam said. "For your information, in case you missed anything -- " and he told him what Firebrass had said. John glared at the offender. "The arrogance of you blacks is unendurable," John said. "You are telling Parolando, a sovereign state, how it must conduct itself in vital business. Well, I say you can't. We'll get those metals one way or the other. Selinujo doesn't need them; we do. It can't hurt Selinujo to give them up in fair trade." "In what?" Firebrass said. "Selinujo doesn't want weapons or alcohol. What can you trade?" "Peace, freedom from war." Firebrass shrugged and grinned, incensing John. "Sure," Firebrass said, "you can make your offer. But what Hacking says still goes." "Hacking has no love for Selinujo," Sam said. "He kicked out all the Second Chancers, black or white." "That's because they were preaching immediate pacifism. They also preach and apparently practice love for all, regardless of color. But Hacking says they're a danger to the state. The blacks have to protect themselves, otherwise they would be enslaved all over again." "TAe blacks?" Sam asked. "## blacks," Firebrass replied, grinning. This was not the first time Firebrass had given the impression that he was not too deeply concerned with skin color. His identification with blacks, as such, was weak. His life had noFbeen untouched by radal prejudice, but it had not been much affected. And he had said things now and then that indicated that he would like a berth on Sam's boat. All this, of course, could be a put-on. "We'll negotiate with Sinjorino Halstings," Sam said. "It would be nice to have radios and TV for the boat and the machine shops could use the tungsten. But we can get along without them." He winked at John to indicate that he should take this line. But John was as stone-headed as usual. "What we do with Selinujo is our problem, nobody else's." "I'll tell Hacking," Firebrass said. "But Hacking is a strong person. He won't take any crap from anybody, least of all from white capitalist imperialists." Sam choked and John stared. "That's how he regards both of you," Firebrasssaid. "And the way he defines those terms, you are what he says you are." "Because I want this boat so badly?" Sam shouted. "Do you know what this boat is for, what its ultimate goal is?" X H e fought back his anger, sobbing with the effort. He felt dizzy. For a moment he had almost told Firebrass about the Stranger. "What is it?" Firebrass said. "Nothing," Sam replied. "Nothing. I just want to get to the headwaters of The River. Maybe the secret of this whole shebang is there? Who knows? But I certainly don't like criticism from someone who just wants to sit around and collect soul brothers. If he wants to do that, more power to him, but the point is, if I don't use the siderite metal to build a boat, which is designed for travel only, not for fighting any battles, someone else will. And that someone else may use it to conquer and to hold, instead of for tourist purposes. "Now, we've gone along with Hacking's demands, paid his jacked-up prices for the ores when we could have gone down there and taken them from him. John's apologized for what he called you and Hacking and if you think it's easy for a Plantagenet to do that, you don't know your history. It's too bad about the way Hacking feels. I don't know that I blame IF him. Of course, he hates whites, would come after Parolando and But this is not Earth. Conditions Selinujo had agreed on the disare radically different here." position of the metals. "But people bring their attiSam felt like a rusty old boiler in tudes along with them," Firebrass a Mississippi steamboat. A few said. "Their hates and loves, dismore pounds of pressure and he likes and likes, prejudices, reacwould blow skyhigh. tions, everything." "Sometimes I think you're "But they can change." right!" he shouted at John. "MayFirebrass grinned. "Not accordbe we should just take over our ing to your philosophy. Hacking neighbors and get it done with." hasn't seen anything here to make "Of course," John said him change his attitude. So why smoothly. "It's obvious that that should he? He's experienced the ex-Countess Huntingdon -- she same exploitation and contempt must be descended from my old here as he did on Earth." enemy, the Earl of Hunting"I don't want to argue about don -- is not going to give in. She is that," Sam said. "I'll tell you -- " a religious fanatic, a nut, as you He stopped and stared out the say. And Soul City will fight us if port. The whitish-gray hull and we invade Selinujo. Hacking upper works gleamed in the sun. can't go back on his word. And he's Beautiful. And, in a sense, all his. stronger now that we've given him being put through. about that; I do not reproach you. "I'll tell you what," he repeated I have been thinking." more slowly. "Why doesn't HackSam stopped pacing and looked ing come up here? Pay a little at John. John had been thinking, visit? He can look around, see for Shadows would be moving inside himSbIf what we're doing. See our shadows; daggers would be unproblems. Maybe he'll apprecisheathed; the air would grow gray ate them, see we're not blue-eyed and chill with stealth and intrigue; devils who want to enslave him. In blood would spurt. And the sleepfact, the more he helps us the ing would do well to stir. ' sooner he'll be rid of us." "I won't say that I have been in "I'll give him your message," contact with lyeyasu, our powerFirebrass said. "Maybe he'll ful neighbor to the north," John want to do that." said. He was slumped down in the "We'll greet him in style," Sam tall-backed, red leather covered said. "A twenty-one gun salute, chair and staring into the purple big reception, food, liquor, gifts, passion in the tilted stein. "But I He'll see we aren't such bad felhave information -- or means of lows after all." getting it. I am certain thatJohn spat, but said no more. lyeyasu, who feels very strong indeed, would like to acquire even F irebrass brought a mesmore territory. And he would like sage three days later. Hacking to do us a favor. In return for certain payments, of course. Say, an amphibian and a flying machine? He's wild to fly one of those himself. If he attacked Selinujo Hacking couldn't blame us. And if Soul City and lyeyasujo fought and Soul City were destroyed and lyeyasujo weakened -- how could we fail to benefit? Moreover, I happen to know that Chernsky has made a secret compact with Soul City and Tifonujo to fight if any of them are invaded by lyeyasu. The resultant carnage would certainly find all of them weakened and us strengthened. Then we could take them over -- or at least do what we wanted without interference. In any case, we would have uncontrolled access to the bauxite and the tungsten." The skull under thatmass of tawny hair must hold a thundermugful of worms, Sam thought. Worms that fed on corruption and intrigue and deviousness. John was so crooked, he was admirable. "Did you ever meet yourself coming around a corner?" Sam asked "What?" John looked up. "Is this another of your unintelligible insults?" "Believe me, it's as close to a compliment as you'll ever get from me. What you're suggesting is all hypothetical. But if lyeyasu did attack Selinujo, what excuse would he have? They've never offended him and they're sixty miles away from him on our side of The River." "When did any nation ever need a reasonable excuse for invading another?" John asked. "But the fact is that Selinujo keeps sending missionaries into lyeyasujo, though he has kicked out all Chancers. Since Selinujo won't stop doing this -- " "Well," Sam said, "I couldn't let Parolando get involved in a deal like this. But if lyeyasu decides on his own to fight, there's nothing we can do about it." "And you call me dishonest?" "There's nothing I could do about it," Sam said, clamping down on his cigar. "Nothing. And if something develops that's good for the boat -- we'll take advantage of it." "The shipments from Soul City would be held up while the fighting was going on," John said. "We've got enough stock to keep going for a week. The big worry would be wood. Maybe lyeyasu would be able to keep that coming even with a war going on, since the fighting will be south of us. We could handle the chopping and transportation ourselves. If he didn't plan to invade for a cdUple of weeks we could lay in extra stocks of ore from Soul City by offering Hacking increased payments. Maybe promise him an airtoy -- now that we've almost got our first amphibian airplane finished. All this is hypothetical -- " "I understand," John said. He was not trying to mask his contempt. Sam felt like shouting at him that he had no right to be contemptuous. Whose idea had this whole bloodbath been, anyway? It was the next day that the three chief engineers were killed. IF S AM was there when it happened. He was standing on the scaffolding by the starboard side of the boat, looking down into the open hull. The colossal steam crane was lifting the immense electric motor which would be driving the port paddlewheel. The motor had been moved during the night from the building where it had been built. The moving had taken over eight hours and had been effected by the crane, which also had a gigantic winch. The winch, plus hundreds of men pulling on cables, had pulled the motor on its big car, which moved on steel rails. Sam rose at dawn to watch the final work, the lifting and then the lowering of the motor into the hull and its attachment to the paddlewheel axle. The three engineers were standing in the bottom of the hull. Sam called down to them to get away, that they were too vulnerable if the motor should drop. But the engineers were stationed in three different places so that they could transmit signals to the men on the port scaffolding, who, in turn, were signaling the crane operator. Van Boom turned to look up at Sam and his teeth flashed whitely in his dark face. His skin looked purplish in the light of the big electric lamps. And then it happened. A cable snapped, then another. The motor swung out to one side. The engineers froze for an instant. Then they ran, but they were too late. The motor fell and crushed all three of them. The impact shook the great hull and the vibrations made the scaffolding on which Sam stood quiver as if a quake were passing through the land. Blood ran out from under the motor. It took five hours to put new cables on the crane and lift the motor. The bodies were removed; the hull was washed out and the motor was lowered agaiiv. A close inspection had determined that the damage to the motor would not affect its operation. Sam was so depressed that he would have liked to have gone to bed jmd remained there for a week. But he could not leave the boat. The work had to go on and while there were good men who would see to it that it did, Sam did not want them to know how shaken, he was. Van Boom and Velitsky were Sam's only engineers from the twentieth century. T hree days after the accident he asked Firebrass into his pilothouse for a private conference. After giving him a cigar and scotch Sam asked Firebrass to take over as chief engineer. Firebrass almost dropped his cigar. "Steer me, stymate! Do I read you unfrosted? You want me as "Maybe we should talk in Esperanto," Sam said. "Okay," Firebrass said. "I'll bring it down to dirt. Just what do you want?" "I'd like you to get permission to work for me on a temporary basis, supposedly." "Supposedly?" "The job is yours permanently if you want it. On the day the boat sets out on the long journey you can be its chief engineer." Fiberbrass sat silent for a long time. Sam rose to pace back and forth. Occasionally he looked through the ports. The crane had put in the starboard motor and was now lowering parts of the batacitor into the hull. The huge installation would be thirty-six feet high when fully assembled. A trial run would check its operation and that of the motors. A double cable, six inches thick, would be run out for two hundred feet and its free end, attached to a large shallow hemisphere, would be slipped onto the nearest grailstone. When the stone delivered its tremendous electrical energy, the energy would be transmitted by the cables into the batacitor, which would store it. The power would be drawn out at a controlled rate to run the electrical motors. Sam turned away from the port. "It's not as if I were asking you to betray your country," he said. "In the first place, all you have to do now is to request permission from Hacking to work for me on the building of the boat. You can make up your mind later about going with us. Which would you rather do? Stay in Soul City where there is actually little to do except indulge yourself? Or go with us on the greatest adventure of all?" Firebrass said slowly, "If I accepted your offer -- , I say -- I would not want to go as chief engineer. I would prefer to be the chief of your air force." "That's not as important a position as the chief engineer's." "It's a lot more work and responsibility. And I like the idea of flying again -- " "You can fly! You can fly! But you'd have to serve under von Richthofen. You see, I promised him that he would be the chief of our air force -- which, after all, will only consist of two planes. What do you care whether or not you're the chief as long as you get to fly?" "It's a matter of pride. I have thousands of hours more flying time than Richthofen -- in planes far more complex and bigger and speedier. And I was an astronaut. I've been to the Moon and Mars and orbited Jupiter." "That doesn't mean anything," Sam said. The planes you'll be flying are very primitive. More like the World War I machines that Lothar flew," "Why does a black always have to take second place?" "That's unfair," Sam said. "You could be the chief engineer. You'd have thirty-five people under your command. Listen, if I hadn't made Lothar that promise, you'd get the captaincy, believe me." Firebrass stood up. "I'll tell you what. I'll help you build the boat and set up the training of your engineers. But I get to fly during that time, too -- and when the time comes we'll talk about who's going to be head of the air force." "I won't break my promise to Lothar," Sam said. "Yes, but many things may happen between now and then." S AM was relieved in one way but disturbed in another. IF Hacking gave his permission, via drum, for Parolando to use Firebrass. This suggested to Sam that Hacking wanted Firebrass to know the boat's operation because he might be serving Hacking as chief engineer some day. As for Firebrass -- he might be planning to remove von Richthofen before the boatwas ready for launching. Firebrass did not seem like a cold-blooded murderer but looks meant nothing where humans were concerned. Hacking sent word a few days later that he would agree to a large shipment of minerals in return for the AM P-#. Firebrass flew it the thirty-one miles to the northern limit of Soul City, where another flier, a black who had been a general in the U.S. Air Force, took it over. Firebrass returned by sailboat a few days later. The batacitor and the electric motors worked perfectly. The paddlewheels turned over slowly in the air, then were speeded up until the vanes whistled. When the time came a canal would be dug from the water's edge to the great boat and it would wheel out into The River under its own power. Lothar von Richtofen and Gwenafra were not getting along at all. Lothar had always been a lady killer and he could not seem to help flirting. More often than not he followed up the flirtation. Gwenafra had some definite ideas about fidelity with which Lothar agreed only in principle. The practice tripped him up. Hacking finally agreed to visit Parolando. He wanted to hold a series of conferences on trade, to check on the well-being of Parolando's black citizens and to see the great Riverboat. Sam announced that he would be happy to receive Hacking. He wasn't, but the essence of diplomacy was dissimulation even in this new life. The preparations for housing Hacking and his large entourage and setting up the conferences occupied Sam. He did not get much chance to supervise the work on the boat. Special preparations also had to be made for docking the large number of ore boats from Soul City. Hacking was sending three times as much as the normal shipment to show his sincerity and desire for peace and understanding. Sam would have preferred that the shipments be spaced out, but he also wanted to get as much ore as possible in as short a time as possible. The spies said that lyeyasu was collecting several large fleets and a great number of fighting men on both sides of The River. And he had sent more messages to Selinujo to stop trying to land their missionaries on his territory. XI about an hour before noon. It was a large, two-masted, foreand-aft rigged ship. Hacking's bodyguard, tall well-muscled blacks holding steel battle axes (but with Mark I pistols in big holsters) marched down the gangplank. Their kilts were pure black and their leather helmets and cuirasses and boots were of black fish skin. They formed in ranks of six on each side of the gangplank. Finally Hacking himself disembarked. He was a tall well-built man with a dark brown skin, somewhat slanting eyes, a broad pug nose, thick lips and a prominent chin. He wore a black towel as a cloak, a black kilt and leather sandals. His only weapon was a rapier in a sheath at his broad leather belt. Sam gave the signal and a cannon loomed twenty-one times. The salute was intended not only to honor Hacking but to impress him. Only Parolando had artillery, even if it consisted of only one .# mm. cannon. The introductions took place." Hacking did not offer to shake hands, nor did Sam and John. Both had been warned by Fifrass that Hacking did not care to shake hands with a man unless he regarded him as a proven friend. Some small talk followed while the grails of Hacking's people were set on the nearest grailstone. After the discharge of energy at high noon the grails were removed and the chiefs of state, accompanied by their bodyguards and guards of honor, walked to John's palace. John had insisted that the first meeting be held in his place, doubtless to impress Hacking with John's primacy. Sam had not argued. Hacking probably knew from Firebrass how things stood between Clemens and Lackland. Later Sam found some grim amusement in John's discomfiture at being bearded in his own house. Hacking seized the floor during lunch and held it with a long and vitriolic speech about the evils the white man had inflicted on the black. The trouble was. Hacking's indictments were valid. Everything he said was true, Sam had to admit. Hell, he had seen slavery and what it meant and had seen the aftermath of the Civil War. He had been born and raised in it. And he had written Huckleberry Finn and Puddnhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee, T he high-pitched voice went on and on, mixing obscenities with facts, lurid tales of miseries, beatings, murders, starvation, humiliations. Sam felt guilty and ashamed and, at the same time, angry. 'You are all guilty!" Hacking shouted. "Every white man is guilty!" "I never saw more than a dozen blacks before I died," John said. "What can I have to do with your tale of unjustices?" "If you had been born five hundred years later you would have been the biggest honky of them all," Hacking said. "I know all about you -- " Sam suddenly stood up and shouted, "Did you come here to tell us about what happened on Earth? We know what happened. But that's the past. Earth is dead. What's taking place now counts." "Yeah," Hacking said. "And what's taking place now is what took place on good old Earth. Things haven't changed one little bit. I look around here and who heads up this country? Two honkies! Where are the black men? Your black population is about one-tenth of your total. You ought IF to have at least one black on a tenman Council! Do I see one? Just one?" 'There's Cawber," Sam said. "Yeah. A temporary member and he's that only because I demanded you send me a black ambassador." "The Arabs make up about a sixth of your state," Sam said, "and there isn't one Arab on your council." "They're white, that's why. And I'm getting rid of them. Don't get me wrong -- many Arabs are good men, unprejudiced men. I met them when I was a fugitive in North Africa. But these Arabs are religious fanatics and they won't stop making trouble -- so out they go! What we blacks want is a solid black country, where we're all soul brothers. Where we can live in peace and understanding. We'll have our own kind of life and you honkies can have yours. Segregation with a capital S, Charlie! Here, a big S segregation can work, cause we don't have to depend on the white man for our jobs or food or clothing or protection or justice. We've got it made, whitey. All we have to do is tell you to go to hell, keep away from us and we got it made!" his dark-red kinky head bent, looking down, his bronzed hands over his face. Sam had the feeling that he was trying to keep from laughing. But whether he was laughing at Hacking or his hosts, Sam could not guess. Perhaps he was laughing at both. John kept drinking but the redness of his face came from more than the liquor. He looked ready to explode at any moment. It was difficult to swallow insults about your injustice to blacks when you were innocent -- but then John was guilty of so many hideous crimes that he should suffer for some, even if they were committed by others. And, as Hacking said, John would have been guilty of racial bias if he had been given the chance. Hacking finally quit talking. Sam Clemens said, "Well, we didn't plan on any after-dinner speeches, but I thank you for your volunteering -- we all thank you as long as you don't charge us for it. Our exchequer is rather low at the moment." Hacking said, "You have to make a joke out of it, don't you? Well, how about a tour? I'd love to see that big boat of yours." The rest of the day passed rather pleasantly. Sam forgot his anger and his resentments while conducting Hacking through the factories, the shops and, finally, through the boat. Even half-finished, it was magnificent. The most beautiful sight he had ever seen; Even, he thought, even -- yes, even more beautiful than Livy's face when she had first said she loved him. Hacking did not become ecstatic, but he was deeply impressed. He could not, however, refrain from commenting on the stench and the desolation. Sam was called away shortly before supper. A man who had landed from a small boat had demanded to see the ruler of the land. A Clemens man had taken him in and sent for Sam. He went off at once in one of the two alcohol-burning "jeeps" that had been finished only a week before. A slender blond youth at the guardhouse introduced himself, in Esperanto, as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Sam questioned him in German, noting that, whatever the youth's identity, he did speak the soft Austrian version of High German. He said that he had lived about twenty thousand miles up The River. He heard about the boat -- and that it would carry an orchestra for the amusement of passengers. The instruments would be those that Earth had known. Mozart had suffered for twenty-three years in this world of limited materials, where the only musical instruments were drums, whistles, wooden flutes, pan pipes and a crude sort of harp made of bone and the guts of a Riverfish. The great Riverboat's orchestra, he had heard, would feature piano, violin, flute, horns and all the other beautiful instruments he had known on Earth, plus others that had been invented since his death in #. And here he was. Was there a place for him in the musicmaking ranks of the boat? Sam was an appreciator, though not a passionate lover, of some classical music. But he was thrilled at meeting the great Mozart face to face. That is, if this man truly were Mozart. Phonies on The River were claiming to be everybody from the original one-andonly Jesus Christ down to P. T. Barnum, and Sam took no man's word for his identity. He had even met three men who claimed to be Mark Twain. "It just so happens that the former archbishop of Salzburg is a citizen of Parolando," Sam said. "Even though you and he parted on bad terms, if I remember correctly, he'll be glad to see you." Mozart turned neither pale nor red. He said, "At last, somebody I knew during my lifetime! Would you believe -- " Sam would believe that Mozart had not met anybody he had known on Earth. So far he himself had met only three people he'd known and his acquaintanceship had been extensive during his long life and worldwide travels. That his ife Livy was one of the three was a coincidence exceeding the bounds of probability. He suspected that the Mysterious Stranger had arranged that. But even Mozart's eagerness at seeing the archbishop again did not confirm that he was indeed Mozart. In the first place, the imposters that Sam had met had frequently insisted that those who were supposed to be their old friends were either mistaken or else imposters themselves. They had more gall than France. In the second place, the archbishop of Salzburg did not live in Parolando. Sam had no idea where he was. He had sprung him just to test Mozart's reaction. Sam agreed that Mozart could appjy for citizenship. First, he straightened him out about the musical instruments. These had not been made yet. Nor would they IF be wood or brass. They would be electronic devices which could reproduce exactly the sounds of various instruments. But if Mozart were indeed the man he claimed jto be he had a good chance of being the conductor of the orchestra. And he could have all the time he wanted to compose new works. Sam did not bind himself to anything, He. had 'learned his lesson about making promises. palace in honor of Hacking, who seemed to have discharged his venom for the day at the first meeting. Sam talked with him for an hour and found that Hacking was an intelligent and literate man with a flair for the imaginative and the poetic. Near midnight Sam accompanied Hacking and party to the big thirty-room, second-story, stone-and-bamboo building set aside for state guests. Then he dr(e his jeep to his home, three hundred yards away. Joe sulked a little because he had wanted to drive, even though his legs were far too long. They staggered up the ladder and barred the door. Joe went into the rear and flopped on his bed with a crash that shook the house' on its stilts. Sam looked out through the ports just in time to see Cyrano and Livy, their arms around each other, lurch into the door of their hut. To their left, set above them, was von Richthofen's hut, where he and Gwenafra had already gone to bed. He muttered, "Good night -- " not knowing exactly whom he was addressing, and fell inta his own bed. It had been a long, hard and trying day. He awoke dreaming that he was caught in a California earthquake on the Fourth of July. H e leaped out of bed and ran on the trembling floor to the Pilothouse. Even before he reached the ports he knew that the explosions and the earth-shaking were caused by invaders. He never reached the ports, because a rocket, its tail flaming red, struck one of the stilts. The roar deafened him, smoke whirled in through the broken ports, and he pitched forward. The house collapsed and its front part fell down. He banged into the wood and broken glass and earth and lay stunned. A big hand picked him up. By the light of an explosion he saw Joe's great-nosed face. Joe had climbed down from the open end of his room and thrown aside the lumber until he had found Sam. He held his grail and Sam's in his left hand. "I don't know how -- it's a miracle -- but I'm not hurt bad," Sam said. "Just bruised and cut by glass." "I didn't have time to put on my armor," Joe said. "But I got my akthe. Here'th a thword for you and a pithtol and thome bulletth and powder charcheth." "Who the hell can they be, Joe?" Sam said. "I don't know. Thee -- they're coming in through the holeth in the vallth vhere the dockth are." The starlight was bright. The clouds that sent the rains down every night at three o'clock had not yet come but the mists over The River were heavy. Out of them men were still pouring to add to the masses spreading over the plains. Beyond the walls, in the mists, must be a fleet. The only fleet that could get close without causing an alarm would be the Soul City fleet. Anybody else arriving at this hour would have had to have been within view of the spies Sam and John Lackland had set up along The River, even in hostile territory, lyeyasu's fleet was still sitting in its docks, according to a report Sam had received just before midnight. Joe ered over a pile of wood and said, "There'th a hell of a battle around Chohn'th palathe. And the guetht houthe -- vhere Hacking and hith boyth vath -- ith on fire." The flames lit a number of bodies on the ground and showed tiny figures struggling around the log stockade of John's palace. Then the cannon was pushed before the stockade. "That's John's jeep," Sam said, pointing at the vehicle which had just driven up behind the cannon. "Yeah -- and it'th our cannon," Joe said. "But it'th Hacking'th men that're going to blatht Chohn out of hith little love netht." "Let's get to hell out of here," Sam said and scrambled over the lumber and in the opposite direction. He could not understand why the invaders had hot yet sent men to his house. The rocket that had hit the Pilothouse had come from the plains. And if Hacking and his men had sneaked out of the guesthouse to launch a surprise attack in conjunction with an attack from the supposed ore boats, then Sam should have been a primary target along with John Lackland. He'd find out later what it was all about -- if there was a later. T hat Hacking's men had gotten hold of the cannon was bad news for Parolando. Sam heard the big gun boom. He whirled in his flight and saw pieces of wood flying out of the smoke. John's walls were wide open and the next few shells should reduce his log palace to rubble. There was only one good thing about the invaders having their hands on the cannon. The supply of shells was limited to fifty. Even with the many tons of nickel-iron still in the ground, metal was not so common that it could be wasted to any extent on explosive shells. Ahead was Livy's hut. The door was open and the place was empty. Sam looked up the hill. Lothar von Richthofen, clad only in a kilt, carrying a rapier in one hand and a pistol in the other, was running toward him. A few paces behind him came Gwenafra with a pistol and a bag of bullets and gunpowder packages. Other men and women were coming toward Sam. Among them were a few crossbowmen. He shouted at Lothar to organize them and turned to look down toward The River. The docks were still black with men. If only the cannon could have been turned IF to catch them packed together and unable to retreat. But the cannon had been wheeled around from John's flaming palace and was being trained on Parolandanoj hurrying up the hill. Then a big dark machine came through a wide breach in the wall. Sam cried out with dismay. It was the three amphibians of Parolando? Presently he saw two coming toward the hills. The steam machine guns in the turrets began to stutter and his men -- his men -- were falling. The Soul Citizens had captured the amphibians. Everywhere he looked he saw a battle raging. Men were fighting around the Riverboat. He cried out again, because he could not endure the thought of its being damaged. But no cannon shells were delivered near it. Apparently the enemy was as concerned about it as he was. Rockets from the hills soared overhead and blew up among the invaders below. Enemy rockets rose in reply; scores of red flames streaked above; some came so close Sam could see the blur of the cylindrical body, the long bamboo stick protruding from the rear. The next half-hour -- or was it two hours? -- was a shrieking, yelling, shouting, gunpowder-stinking, blood-stinking, sweating, bowel-churning chaos. Time after time the Soul Citizens charged up the hill and time after time they were repelled by rockets, by .# caliber plastic bullets, by crossbow bolts and longbow arrows. Then a charge carried the enemy through to the defenders and it was rapier, broadsword, axe, club, spear, and dagger that drove them back. eight hundred pounds, his hairy hide drenched with blood -- his own and that of others -- swung his axe with its eighty-pound nickel-steel head at the end of an oak shaft three inches thick and six feet long. It crashed through oak shield ai leather armor, brushed aside rapiers and spears and axes, split breastbones, took off arms and necks, halved skulls. When his enemies refused to come near him, he charged them. Time and again, he broke up assaults that might otherwise have succeeded. Mark I pistols were fired at him, but the shooters were so unnerved by him that they fired from too far away and missed. Then an arrow went through Joe's left arm and a man braver -- or more foolhardy -- than the rest stepped under his axe and thrust a rapier into his thigh. The butt end of the shaft came back and broke the attacker's jaw and then the reversed axe severed his head. Joe could still walk, but he was losing blood fast. Sam ordered him to retreat to the other side of the hill, where the badly wounded were being treated. Joe said, "No -- I ain't going -- " and fell to his knees with a groan. "Get back there -- that's an order!" Sam screamed and ducked, though it was too late. A bullet whistled past his ear and shattered against the side of an irontree. Some of the plastic must have ric ocheted; he felt a stinging in his arm and calf. Joe managed to heave himself up and shamble off. Cyrano de Bergerac appeared from the darkness; he was covered with dirt and soot, streaked with blood. He gripped the basket hilt of a long bloody rapier in one hand and a pistol in the other. Behind him, equally disheveled, her long dark hair loose and flying, was Livy. She carried a pistol and a bag of ammunition, and her function seemed to be to reload the pistols. Seeing Sam, she smiled, her teeth white in the powder-blackened face. "My God, Sam -- I thought you were dead. That rocH.et ,against your house -- " "I wish you were behind me in this," he said. It was all he had time to say, though he would not have said more whatever the case. The enemy mounted another charge, men slipping and sliding over the piles of the fallen or leaping over them. The bowmen by now seemed out of ammunition and the pistoleers were using theirs sparingly. But the enemy had about expended its powder, too, though it had more arrows. Joe Miller was gone, but Cyrano de Bergerac tried to make up for the loss and came close to doing so. The man was a demon, as deadly and elusive as the rapier he wielded. From time to time he fired the pistol in his left hand pointblank into an opponent's face while lunging with the rapier to skewer another. He would toss the empty gun behind him; Livy would catch and reload it. Sam thought briefly of the change that had come about in Livy. He had never suspected her potential for action under conditions like these. The frail, often sickly, violence-loathing woman was coolly performing duties that many men would have run from. Among them me -- if fd had any time to think about it , shield that an amok Wahhabi Arab lifted too high in his frenzy and Livy, seeing that she had to do it, that Cyrano could not, held the pistol in both hands and fired. The hammer made the barrel swerve. She brought it back into line -- smoke and flame spurted out, and an Arab fell back with his shoulder torn off. A massively built attacker leaped over the body, axe raised in both hands and Cyrano ran him through the adam's apple. The enemy retreated down the hill again. An amphibian -- a Merrimac on wheels, Sam thought -- huffed into the action. Lothar von Richthofen pushed against Sam, who stepped aside when he saw the aluminum-alloy tube Lothar and a helper were setting up. The helper kneeled while Lothar loaded a rocket with a ten-pound warhead into the bazooka and aimed it. Lothar was good. The rocket sailed down, its fiery arc ending against the front of the amphibian. Lothar scored a bull's-eye. Smoke covered the monster, lifted. The amphibian had stopped -- but it came on IF presently, its turrets turning, steam guns lifting. "Well, that was the last one," Lothar said. "We might as well get the hell out of here. We can't fight that. Who should know better than we, heh?" The enemy was reforming behind the armored vehicle. Many were uttering the ululating cries which the Ulmaks, the pre-Amerinds across The River, made during charges...Apparently Hacking had enlisted those not yet conquered by lyeyasu. Suddenly Sam could not see as well as before. Only the fires from the burning houses limned the scene. The rain clouds had come swiftly, as they always did -- like wolves chasing the stars. Within a few minutes it would rain savagelyHe looked and listened. The defenders had been thinned out. Fighting was still going on to north and south, on the plains and the hills along the plains. But the shooting and the cries had lessened. The night seemed to him filled with the enemy. He wondered if Publiujo and Tifonujo had joined the invasion. He took a last look at the giant hull of the Riverboat with its two paddlewheels, half-hidden beneath the scaffolding and behind the colossal cranes. Then he turned. He felt like weeping, but he was too numbed. It would be some time before the tears would come. It was more likely that his blood would run out before then, after which there would be no tears. Not in this body, anyway. G uided by the fires of a dozen scattered huts, Sam and a handful of his men stumbled down the other side of the hill. The rains smashed down. A tentacle of the enemy force ran toward them from the left. Sam turned and pulled the trigger of his flintlock; the rain, of course, drowned out the spark. But the enemy's pistols were also rendered useless. Hacking's men came at the Parolandanoj with their swords and spears and axes. Joe Miller lunged forward, growling with a voice as deep as a cave bear's. Though wounded, he was still a formidable and terrifying fighter. By the flashes of lightning and the rumbling of thunder, his axe cut down attackers. Others jumped in to help him and in a few seconds the Soul Citizens decided they had had enough. They backed away to wait for reinforcements. Why get killed now when victory was theirs?  Sam and his people crossed two more hills. The enemy attacked sporadically. Joe Miller and Cyrano continued formidable, but when Sam finally counted his group of survivors he was shaken. Fifteen. Where had they all gone? He would have sworn that at least a hundred had been with him when he had set out from the main field of battle. Livy was still close behind Cyrano. Guns were useless now, but she kept at Cyrano's back and helped him with a spear thrust when she could. Sam was cold and wet. And he was as miserable as Napoleon must have been on the retreat from Russia. All, all gone! His proud little nation and its nickel-iron mines, its factories and its in vulnerable amphibians with their steam guns, its two airplanes and the fabulous Riverboat -- all gone! The technological triumphs and marvels, the Magna Carta with the most democratic constitution any country had ever knowngone. And the greatest journey ever to be made would never be made. How had it all been lost? Through treachery, base treachery. At least King John had not been part of the betrayal. His palace had been demolished -- and he along with it, in all probability. The Great Betrayer had been betrayed. Sam quit grieving then. He was still too frozen with the terror of battle to think for long about anything except survival.  At the base of the mountain, he led his group north along it until they were opposite the dam. A lake about a quarter of a mile long and a half a mile wide was before them. They followed the shoreline to a thick, concrete dam and walked across it. Sam paced until he found a sunken symbol, a diagonal cross, in the concrete. He called, "Here it is. Now, if nobody squeals on us -- " H e let himself down into cold water while the lightning streaked and the thunder bellowed far away. He shivered but kept going down. When the water was up to his armpits his foot struck the first rung. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and sank, running his hands along the concrete until they encountered the first rung. After that he pulled himself down by the other rungs and, at the sixth, knew that the entrance was a few inches below it. He went under it and rose. His head popped up into air and light. A platform a few inches higher than the water was in front of him. Overhead was a dome, the highest point of which was ten feet. Beyond the platform was an exit. Six big electric light bulbs lit the chamber harshly. Shivering and gasping, he climbed onto the platform and strode to the exit. Joe followed him a moment later. He called weakly and Sam had to turn back and help him crawl onto the platform. He was bleeding from a dozen places. The others came after him, one by one. They helped Sam get the titanthrop through the exit and down an incline into a large chamber containing beds, towels, food, liquor, weapons and medicine. Sam had prepared this place for just such an emergency, but he had thought he was being foolishly cau tious. Only his most trusted lieutenants and the workers who had built this place knew about it. Joe and Cyrano had briefed the rest of the group. Another entrance, at the bottom of the dam, was hidden beneath the flow that powered the wheels connected to the generators. This one led to a shaft up which a man could climb, only to come to a seemingly blank wall. But the man who knew how could open that wall. The whole project was, he knew, a product of the romantic foolishness he had not entirely shed in this new life. The idea of secret doors under a waterfall and under the IF lake and of hidden apartments where he could rest and plan his revenge while his enemies hunted in vain for him continued irresistible. He had laughed at himself at times for having built the refuge. Now he was glad. Romanticism did have its uses. Also hidden was a detonator. All he had to do to set off the tons of dynamite inside the base of the dam was to connect two wires. The dam would go up and the water of the lake would roar out and carry the central part of Parolando out into The River. Sam Clemens and his Riverboat would also be destroyed -- but that was the price. Sam did not like to think about it. T he wounded were treated and put under the sedation of dreamgum or liquor. Sometimes chewing the gum deadened pain; other times it seemed to increase it. The only way to neutralize its painexpanding effects was to pour liquor into the patient. They ate and slept while the guards watched at both entrances. Joe Miller was semiconscious most of the time. Sam sat beside him and nursed him as best he could. Cyrano came back from his vigil at the door under the waterfall to report that it was night again outside. That was all he knew -- he had seen or heard no one through the waterfall. Lothar and Sam were the least wounded. Sam . decided that they should sneak out past the waterfall exit and spy. Cyrano protested that he should go, too, but Sam refused. Livy did not say anything, but she looked gratefully at Sam. He turned away; he did not want any thanks for sparing her mate. He wondered if Gwenafra were dead or captured. Lothar said that she had disappeared during the last attack. He had tried to get to her but had been driven back. He now felt ashamed of himself for not having done more. Sam and Lothar applied a dark stain all over their bodies and then went down the steel rungs of the shaft. The walls were damp and the rungs were slippery with moisture. Electric lights illuminated the shaft. They exited behind the waterfall, which roared and splashed at them. The ledge curved, following the lower half of the dam, until it ran out about twenty yards from the end. Here they climbed down steel rungs to the junction of the dam wall and the ground. From there they walked cautiously along a channel which had been cut put of the earth. Grass roots still stuck out of the dirt walls; the roots went deeper than any cuts made so far -- it seemed impossible to kill the grass. The sky was bright with the jampack of huge stars and glowing gas clouds. Sam and Lothar were able to proceed swiftly in the silvered darkness. After a half a mile they moved at right angles to the canal, heading toward John's ruined palace. Crouching in the shadows beneath the outflung branches of an irontree, they looked down on the plains below. Men and women moved among the huts. The men were the victors, the women victims. Sam quivered when he heard screams and beggings, but he tried to push them out of his mind. To act rashly now would be to throw away his chances of doing any good for Parolando. Yet, if he heard Gwenafra's voice, he knew that he would go to her rescue. The Tires in the open hearths and the smelters were again blazing and men and women were working in them. Evidently Hacking had already put his slaves to work. Guards stood around the buildings. The plains Were well lit for as far as he could see with huge bonfires. The people around them seemed to be drinking and laughing. Occasionally a struggling and screaming woman was carried off into the shadows. ' S AM and Lothar walked down the hill as if they owned it, but they did not go near to the buildings or the fires. Nobody challenged them, though they came within twenty yards of a number of patrols. Most of the enemy seemed to be celebrating the victory with purple passion or any other liquor they had been able to get from the supplies of their prisoners. The exceptions were the Wahhabi Arabs, whose religion forbade drinking alcohol. And some others apparently were abstemious. These probably were disciples of Hacking, who did not drink. Whatever the laxity now, discipline had been maintained during the day. The corpses had been taken away and a big stockade of poles removed from other buildings had been set up at the foot of the hills. Sam surmised it held prisoners. He and Lothar strolled along, staggering now and thn, as if drunk. They walked boldly between a nitric acid factory and a waste-treatment building and out onto the plain. And stopped. Sam saw Firebrass -- some twenty yards ahead -- in a bamboo cage so narrow that he could not sit down in it. His hands were tied tightly behind him. On a big X-frame of wood, upside down, his legs tied to the upper part of the X and his arms to the lower members, hung Goering. Sam looked around. A number of men, talking and drinking, stood in the big doorway of the wasterecycling plant. They did not say anything to Sam and Lothar, but they were looking at them. Sam detided not to go any closer or to try to talk to Firebrass. He longed to know why Hacking's emissary was in the cage, but he did not dare to ask him. What he had to do was find out all he could and then get back to the hideout inside the dam. So far, he thought, the situation looked hopeless. He could take his faithful and sneak out of the country during the rains. He could blow up the dam and wash out everything, including the forces of Soul City -- but he still did not want to lose the boat. He would let the dam alone for as long as he had a chance to get it back. His and Lothar's slow and seemingly drunken wanderings took them near a big building that had been occupied by Fred Rolfe, King John's supporter on the Council. The number of armed men on IF guard around it suggested to Sam that Hacking was inside. It was a one-story house of pine logs and bamboo. The windows were without shades and the lights showed people inside. Suddenly Lothar gripped Sam's arm and said, "There she is. Gwenafra." The light shone on her long honey-color hair and pale skin. She stood near a window, talking to someone. After a moment she moved away and the bushy hair and black face of Elwood Hacking nioved across the bright square. Sam felt sick. Hacking seemed to have taken her for his woman for the night. Gwenafra had not looked frightened. She had seemed relaxed. Sam pulled Lothar away. ""There's nothing we can do now and we could be throwing away any chance she might have at all if we started anything." They drifted around for a while, observing the other factories and noting that the bonfires stretched both ways along the walls as far as their eye could detect. In addition to the Soul Citizens, there were the Ulmaks and a number of Orientals. Sam wondered if these could be the Burmese, Thai, and Ceylonese New Stone Age peoples living across The River from Selinujo. He and Lothar had just passed into the shade of a gigantic ironwood tree when Sam felt something tighten around his neck from behind. He tried to yell, to turn around, to struggle, but the big hand squeezed and he lost consciousness. H e awoke gasping and coughing. He was still under the tree. He started to get up, but a deep voice growled, '"None o' that. Sit still, or I'll split yer skull." Sam looked around. Lothar, his hands tied behind him and a gag in his mouth, was sitting propped up under a half-grown fir sixty feet away. The man who had spoken was big, with excessively broad shoulders, a deep chest and brawny arms. He wore a black kilt and black cape and gripped mediumsized axe. His belt held a steel tomahawk, a steel knife and a Mark I pistol. He asked, "You be Sam Clemens?" '"That's right," Sam said. ""What does this mean? Who are you?" The big man jerked a head full of thick hair at Lothar. "I moved him away so he couldn't hear what we have to say. A man we both know sent me." Sam was silent for a moment, then asked, "The Mysterious Stranger?" The big man grunted. "Yes. That's what he said you called him. Stranger's good enough. I guess you know what it's all about, so there's not much use us jawing too long about it. You satisfied that I've talked with him?" "I have to be," Sam said. "It's obvious that you've met him. You're one of the Twelve he's picked. It was a he, wasn't it?" "I didn't jump him to find out," the man said. "I tell you, this child ain't ever run up against a human, red, black, or white, that ever threw a scare-fit into him. But that Stranger, he'd make a grizzly scoot just by looking at him. Not that Vm afraid of him, you understand; it's just that he makes me feel -- strange. Like I was a plucked bluejay. But enough of that. My handle's Johnston. Might as well give you my history and save jawing later. John Johnston. I was born in New Jersey about eighteen-twenty-seven, I reckon, and died in Los Angeles in the veterans' hospital in #. Between times, I was a trapper in the Rocky Mountains. Up to when I came to this River, I killed me hundreds of Injuns -- but I ain't never had to kill a white man, not even a Frenchman. Not till I got here. Since then -- well. I've collected quite a few white scalps." The man stood up and moved out into the starlight. His hair was dark but looked as if it would be a bright red in the noonday sun. "I talk a hell of a lot more'n I used to," he said. "You can't get away from people in this valley." They walked over to Lothar. On the way Sam asked, "How'd you happen to get here? And at this time?" "The Stranger told me where to find you, told me about you, your boat, the Misty Tower and all that. Why hash it all over? You know. I promised to find you and go with you on your boat. Why not? I don't like being set down here. There ain't no elbow room; you can't turn around without knocking noses. I was about thirty thousand miles upRiver when I woke up one night and there was that man sitting in the shadows. We had a long talk, him doing most of it. Then I got up and set out. I heard about some of what was goingon here way up The River. I snuck in here while the fighting was still going on and I been looking for you ever since. I listened to them blacks talking; they said they couldn't find your body. So I been skulking around, seeing what I could see. Once I had to kill me one a those Ayrabs cause he stumbled across me. I was hungry, anyway." They had reached Lothar, but Sam straightened up at the last words. "Hungry? You mean -- " The man did not reply. Sam said, "Say, uh, you -- you wouldn't be a man called 'Liver Eating' Johnston, would you? The Crow Killer?" The voice rumbled: "I made me peace with the Crows and became their brother. And I quit eating human liver some time after. But a man has to eat." S AM shivered. He stooped to untie Lothar's bonds and removed the gag. Lothar was furious, but he was also curious. And, like Sam, he seemed to find Johnston a little awing. The man exuded savage force. Without even halftrying, Sam thought. They walked back to the dam. Johnston did not say anything for a long time. Once he disappeared, leaving Sam feeling strange and cold. Johnston was about six and a half feet tall and looked as if he weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. But he moved like a tiger. Sam jumped. Johnston was back. Sam asked, "What happened?" IF Johnston said, "Never mind. You say you didn't get around much. I been all over this place; I know the sitchyation passing well. Lots a your people to the north and the south got away over the walls. If they'd a stood up, they might've licked the blacks. But the blacks ain't won by a long shot. lyeyasu is getting ready to move against them. I wouldn't be surprised none if he invades tonight. I scouted around his place some before I came here. He ain't going to put up with the blacks owning all this iron and the boat. He will take it away from them or know why." Sam groaned. It made no difference whether Hacking or lyeyasu had the boat, if he couldn't get it. But by the time they were inside the dam, he felt better. Maybe the two forces would destroy each other and the Parolandanoj who'd fled could come back and take over. Moreover, the appearance of the Herculean mountain man. Liver Eating Johnston, heartened Sam. The Mysterious Stranger had not entirely abandoned him. The Stranger was still planning -- and he had sent a damn good man for Fighting, if the stories about Johnston could be believed. Johnston was the sixth man the Stranger had chosen. The other six would show up some time -- though one had been lost. Odysseus had disappeared. He could show up again. The River was a great place for bad pennies, if you could call the Twelve that. They were bad for somebody. For the Stranger's people, the Ethicals, Sam hoped. In the dam, Johnston had to be introduced and the situation explained. Joe Miller, wrapped in towels, sat up and shook hands with Johnston. And Johnston, awe in his voice, said, "Night and day, this, manrchild seed many queer things. But I ain't never seed one like you. You didn't have to crush my hand, friend." "I didn't try," Joe said. "You look pretty big and thtroiig to me. Bethideih, I bn thick." They moved out about half an hour before the rains. The land was relatively quiet by then. The celebrators had gone to bed and everybody had cleared away from the Fires in expectation of the rain. But the guard towers and the factories were full of enemy guards. They had stopped drinking. Apparently Hacking had called a halt to it. drifted away while they leaned against the side of the sulfuric acid factory. Ten minutes later he was suddenly beside them. "I been giving those blacks the ear," he said. "That Hacking is smart. All that drinking and whooping it up and staggering around, why, that was all a put-on for the benefit of spies from lyeyasujo. Hacking knows lyeyasujo is going to attack tonight and he's making it look like it's gonna be easy. But his men are worried. They're short of gunpowder." Sam was startled by the news. He asked Johnston if he had overheard anything else. "Yeah. I heard a couple of them Citizens talking about why Hacking decided he had to attack us; He knew lyeyasu was going to do it, so he decided he had to jump the gun. If he didn't, lyeyasu would have control of the metal and the amphibians and would conquer Soul City next. Them jackasses was laughing fit to kill, they said it was King John arranged with Hacking to take over -- And then Hacking blew up King John in his own house because he didn't trust John." Sam said, "But why in hell would John do that to us? What did he have to gain?" "Hacking and John was gonna conquer all the land for a hundred miles along The River and then split it. John was gonna rule the white half and Hacking the black half. Half and half, with the two sharing everything equahThey was gonna build two boats, two of ev erything." "What about Firebrass? Why's he in the cage?" "Dunno, but somebody did call him a traitor. And that kraut, what's his name -- Herring?" "Goering." "Yeah. Well, Hacking wasn't to blame for his being tortured. Some of them Wahhabi Ayrabs did it. They's got it in for the Second Chancers, you know, and they got him and tortured him with the help a some a them bad Dahomeyans, who used to torture a dozen people before breakfast, according to what I heard. By the time Hacking heard of it and stopped it, Goering was dying. But he talked to. Hacking, called him his soul brother and said he forgave him. Said he'd see him later along The River. Hacking was pretty shook up about it, from what his men said." Sam digested the news, which set his teeth on edge. He was so upset he couldn't even get any amusement from Hacking's doublecross of the champion doublecrosser. King John. He did have to admire Hacking's statesmanship and perception, however. Hacking had realized there was only one way to deal with John. changed everything. Apparently, lyeyasu was on the way now, which meant that Sam's plans to sneak out during the rains would not work. "What's the matter, Sam?" Livy said. She was sitting near him, looking sadly at him. "I think it's all up with us." "Oh, Sam -- where's your manhood? It isn't all up with us. You get depressed so easily if things don't go your way all the time. Why, this is the greatest opportunity you could ask for to get your boat back. Let Hacking and lyeyasu destroy each other and then take over. Just sit back up in the hills until they have clawed each other to death and jump on them while they're gasping out their last." Sam said, angrily, "What are you talking about? Jump on them with fifteen men and women?" "No. You have at least five hundred prisoners in that stockade and God knows how many more in other stockades. And you have thousands who ran away to Cernskujo and Publiujo." "How can I get hold of them now?" Sam said. "It's too late! The IF attack will be launched in a few hours Besides, the refugees were probably put in stockades, too. For all I know, Chernsky and Publius Crassus may be in cahoots with Hacking." "You're still the same paralyzed pessimist I knew on Earth," Livy said. "Oh, Sam, I still love you, in a way, that is. I still like you as a friend and -- " "Friend!" he said so loudly that the others jumped. Cyrano swore and Johnston hissed, "Shet up. You want them black Injuns to get us?" "We were lovers for years," he said. "Not always, by a long shot," she said. "But this is no place for a discussion of our failures. I don't intend to thrash those out -- it's too late. The point is do you or do you not want your boat?" "Of course, I want it," he said fiercely. "Then get off your dead ass, Sam!" she said. From anybody else, the remark would have been unremarkable. But from her, his fragile, softvoiced, clean-speeched Livy, it was unthinkable. But she had said it and now that he thought back on it there had been times on Earth, which he had suppressed in his memory, when... "The lady makes a powerful lot a sense!" Johnston rumbled. He had far more important things to think about. But the really important matters were best recognized by the unconscious -- and for the first time he understood, really understood with every cell of his body that Livy had changed. She was no longer his Livy. She had not been for a long time, perhaps had not been for some years on Earth before her death. "What do you say, Mr. Clemens?" the mountain man rumbled Sam gave a deep sigh, as if he were breathing out the last fragments of Olivia Langdon Clemens de Bergerac. He said, "Here's what we do." T he rains lashed down; thunder and lightning made the skies and the land hideous for a half hour. Johnston appeared out of the rain with two bazookas and four rockets tied together on his broad back. He disappeared again and a half hour later was back with some throwing knives and tomahawks, all of steel. The rain clouds went away and the land was brightly silver under the magnificent stars, as numerous as cherries on a tree in season, as luminous as jewels before electric lights. The air grew colder and Sam's people shivered under the irontree. A thin mist formed over The River; within fifteen minutes, it was so thick that the waters and the grailstones and the high walls along the banks could not seen. lyeyasu struck a half-hour later. The big boats and the small boats, crammed with men and weapons, came from across The River, where the Sacs and Foxes had once ruled, from the northern part of the exUlmak territory, from the land where the Hottentots and Bushmen had once lived in peace. And the main bulk came from the right bank of The River, from the three lands where lyeyasu now was lord. lyeyasu attacked at ten points along the Riverfront walls. Mines blew up the walls, and men pourtxl through the breaches. The number of rockets shot in the first ten minutes was awesome. lyeyasu must have been saving them for a long time. The three amphibians of the defenders lumbered up, their steam machine guns chuffing and expelling the .# caliber shells in garden hose fashion. The carnage they made was great, but lyeyasu launched a surprise. Rockets with wooden warheads containing jellied alcohol (made from soap plus wood alcohol) struck all around the three armored vehicles and made clirect hits at least twice each. The crude napalm spread fierily over the vehicles, and if the burning stuff did not get inside the-vehicles, it seared the lungs of the men inside. Sam was shaken by the sight, but not enough to keep him from telling Lothar to remind him of this when it was all over -- if either of them were still around. "The amphibians have to be made more airtight and we'll have to install a self-contained air system," he said. Johnston appeared, as unexpectedly as if he had stepped out of a door in the night -- and behind him was Firebrass. The man looked exhausted and as if he were in pain, but he still managed to grin at Sam. He was, however, trembling. "Hacking was told that I was betraying him," Firebrass said. "And he' believed his informant. Who was, by the way, your esteemed and always reliable King John. John told him that I was selling him down The River, that I had revealed everything to you so I could become chief of your air force. Hackii would not believe that I was dickering with you just to string you along. I can't blame him too much. I should have sent word through our spies what I wais doing. That I didn't convince him that I wasn't doublecrossing him didn't surprise me." "Were you?" Sam said. Firebrass grinned. "No, I wasn't, though I was mightily tempted. But why should I betray him when I'd been promised I could be head flier after Hacking took over the boat? The truth is. Hacking was eager to believe John. He doesn't like me because I'm not his idea of what a soul brother should be, I had too easy a life according to him. He resented the fact that I never lived in a ghetto." "The job of chief engineer can still be yours," Sam said. "I'll admit that I'm relieved about not having to promise you the captaincy of the air force. But you can still fly, if you want to." "That's the best offer I've had since I died," Firebrass said. "I'll take it." He moved closer to Sam and whispered in his ear. "You would have had to take me along in some capacity anyway. I'm one of The Twelve!" S AM felt as if a cold rod had been plunged through him from the top of his head down. "The Ethical? The Stranger?" "Yes. He said you called him The Mysterious Stranger." IF "You betraying Hacking?'" Then he led the rest back up in"That little speech I just made to the hills. They would camp by was for public consumption," Firethe dam until they saw hpw the brass said. "Yes, I did betray battle was going. Sam did not have Hacking, if you insist on using the slightest idea of what they that word. But I regard inyself as should do. He told Cyrano he an espionage agent for a higher auwould play it by ear from here on thority. I have no intention of and had to repress an impulse to worrying about all-black or allremark that he was tone deaf, white states on The River when I Afterward, Sam thanked whocan find out how and why we, the ever there was to thank that he had whole human race, were put here. I not camped on top of the dam. He want answers to my questions, as had chosen a knoll above and to the  Karamazov once said. All this left of the dam. Here he had a white-black turmoil is trivial on better view of the hills and the this planet, no matter how imporplains, where the rockets were still tant it was on Earth. Hacking must exploding but were not as nuhave sensed that I thought so, merous as in the beginning. The though I tried to conceal it." starlight glimmered on the waters Sam did not recover from the of the big lake behind the dam as if shock for some time. Meanwhile, all were peaceful in the world, the battles raged on the plain and Suddenly Johnston leaped up the Soul Citizens were getting the and said, "Looky there! Yonder -- worst of it. Though they cost the on top of the dam!" invaders three men for one, they Three dark figures had emerged were pushed back with a half-hour, from the water onto the dam. They Sam decided that it was time for ran toward the land. Sam told the him to act and led his group to the others to withdraw behind the great stockade where the Parolando pristrunk of the irontree. Joe Miller oners were kept. Lothar fired two and Johnston seized the three as rockets into the gates of the stockthey raced up to the tree. One tried ade. Cyrano and Johnston did most to stab Joe and Joe squeezed the guards. Cyrano was a demon out from broken veins and arteries, using lightning for a sword and The others were knocked out. By Johnston downed four men with the time they regained consciousthrown tomahawks and three with ness, they did not have to tell Sam thrown knives. He broke two legs what they had done: And he and a chest with a foot like iron, guessed that they had done so at The freed prisoners were directed the order of King John, to the armory, where bows and The earth shook under Sam's arrows were still in supply. feet, and the irontree leaves rattled Sam sent two men eabh to the like dishes in a pantry. The white north, and the south to go over the wall of the dam flew outward with walls and try to contact the Parola gigantic cloud of smoke and a andanoj there. roar that pushed at his eardrums. Enormous chunks of concrete flew through the smoke like white birds above a factory chimney. They tumbled over and over and struck the ground far ahead of the waters. The lake was no longer the peaceful and quiet glimmer of a wonderful world to come. It seemed to hurl itself forward. The roar as it raced down the canyon Sam's men had dug with so much sweat and time was deafening, T he water, hundreds of thousands of tons of it, funneled by the .canyon, rammed through the earthen walls, tearing out great chunks of it. The sudden drop of the water level also removed a great amount of earth around the lake's shores, so much so. that the watchers had to scramble-for even higher ground. And the thousandfoot irontree, its two-hundred-foot roots abruptly exposed, toppled over. It seemed to take a long time falling and the explosions of enormous roots breaking and the whistling of air through the huge leaves and vines terrified the humans. They had thought they were far enough away, but even though the giant tree was falling away from them, they were threatened by the eruption of roots from the earth. The tree struck with a crash on the other side of the lake, tore out overhanging dirt and continued on down into the emptying lake. It slid put entirely from its root-anchors on the bank. The waters picked up the enormous tree as if it were a toothpick and carried it down the canyon for a half-mile before it became wedged. The water roared out in a wall at least a hundred feet high. Its front carried a tangle of half-grown trees and bamboo plants, huts, people, and debris. It flashed across the mile and a half of plam, spreading out but channeled, for a few minutes, by the secondary walls Sam had built to defend the factories and the River boat. Everything was picked up and carried on out into The River. The factories crumbled as if they were made of straw. The gigantic Riverboat was lifted up like a toy boat cast into the ocean surf. It rode out into TheRiver, pitching, and vanished in darkness and turmoil. The sight made Sam throw himself on the ground and claw at the grass. His boat was lost! All he had made was lost, factories, mines, amphibians, airplanes, smithies, armories -- but worst of all, the Riverboat was lost. The dream was shattered, the great shining jewel of his dream had been smashed. The grass was cold and wet in his face. Joe's huge hand lifted him up and sat him down, as if he were a dummy. Joe's monstrous hairy body was pressed close to his, warming him. And Joe's grotesque face with the shelving brows and the absurdly long nose was before him. "They're all gone," Joe said."Chethuth! Vhat a thight -- there ain't nothing left, Tham!" The plain was buried under a whirl and toss of waters, but in fifteen minutes The River had resumed its normal appearance along the shores of Parolando, though it surely was swollen downstream. IF The great buildings and the boat in its scaffoldings were gone. The Cyclopean walls on the sides, a mile apart, were gone. Small ponds glittered here. and there where the mines and the basements of the factories had been. The vast weight of water had gouged out part of the plain. The stone and earth walls along the banks had been swept away as if they were sand. The skies paled, and the starlit darkness became gray. The great fleet of the invaders was gone far down The River, or under it, broken, smashed. The two armies on the plain and the sailors were all dead, crushed by the weight of the water, browned, rubbed into nothing or squeezed out like toothpaste. But Parolando extended for ten miles along The River, and the lake had, after all, only raged across a two-mile area. Its main damage had been in the middle of Parolando, where it had carried everything out that stood within a half a mile wide area. Dawn brought with it a thousand men in boats or over the walls of Chernsky's Land from the north. At their head was King John, S AM drew up his men in battle formation with Joe Miller in the center, but King John limped forward, his hand held out in sign of peace, Sam walked forward to talk to him, Sam expected eventually to be killed, but he realized that right now John needed him and Firebrass and others if he were going to get the boat rebuilt. Also, he banked on John's wanting the perverted pleasure of keeping Sam alive -- and wondering when the dagger in the night would Find him. As it turned out, not everything had to be started from scratch again. The boat was found relatively undamaged, beachdd on a hill across The River a mile down. It had been deposited as gently as a cat's footstep by the withdrawing waters. The work of getting the great hull back was not easy; but it took much less time than making another one. John explained more than once to Sam what he had done, but the deviousnesses and the two times two doublecrosses were so complicated that Sam could never see the picture as a whole. John had made a deal to betray Sam, knowing full well that Hacking would betray him in return. John would have been disappointed if Hacking had not tried to stab him in the back. He would have lost all his faith in human nature. John had made a deal with lyeyasu to help him invade after Hacking's invasion, lyeyasu liked the idea that Hacking would weaken his forces while taking Parolando. At the last moment, John had made a deal with Publius Crassus, Tai Fung, and Chernsky that they would help him mop up on lyeyasu's forces, which would be shattered by the waters released by the blown-up dam. John had sent the three men to set off the explosives in the dam when the greatest number of invaders and defenders would be concentrated between the funneling secondary-defense walls. "Then you weren't in yoiir palace when Hacking's cannons opened up on it?" Sam said. "No," John replied, smiling his cat's smile. "I was miles to the north, traveling to meet lyeyasu. You have never thought much of me, Samuel but you should get down on your knees now and kiss my hand in gratitude. Without me you would have lost all." "If you had told me Hacking was going to invade, I could have kept everything," Sam said. "We could have ambushed Hacking." The sun came up and struck the tawniness in John's hair and the peculiar gray-blue of his eyes. "Ah, yes, but lyeyasu would still have been a formidable problem. Now he's gone, and there rs Httle to keep us from ruling all the land we need, including the bauxite and platinum of Soul City and the iridium andtungsten of Selinujo. I presume you have no objections to conquering those two states?" T here was a bonanza in the aftermath. Hacking was taken prisoner and Gwenafra was found alive. Both had been pushed during the Fighting into the hills to the west. Hacking had been getting ready to lead a fresh charge against lyeyasu when the edge of the waters deluged his party, Gwenafra escaped, though she almost drowned. Hacking had been hurled against a tree. Both his legs and one arm were broken and he was bleeding internally. Sam and John hastened to where Hacking lay under an irontree. Gwenafra cried when she saw them and embraced Sam and Lothar. She seemed to give Sam a much longer embrace than she gave Lothar, which was not entirely unexpected, since she and Lothar had been quarreling violently before her capture. John wanted to finish off Hacking with-ome refined tortures, preferably as soon after breakfast as possible. Sam objected strongly. He knew that John could have his way if he insisted, since his men outnumbered Sam's by fifty to one. But Sam was past being cautious and John backed away. He needed Sam and Sam's men. "You had a dream, Sam," , Hacking said in a weak voice. "Well, I had one, too. A land where brothers and sisters could loaf and invite their souls. Where we'd be all black. You wouldn't know what that means. No white devils, no white-eyes. Just black soul brothers. A place like that would have been as near heaven as you can get in this hell of a world. Not that we wouldn't have had trouble, no place without trouble, man. But there wouldn't have been any white-man trouble. Life would have been ours. But that isn't to be." "You could have had your dream," Sam said, "if you'd waited. After the boat was built, we'd have left the iron to whoever could take it. And then -- " Hacking grimaced. Sweat covered him and his face was tight with pain. "Man, you must be out of your skull. You really think I believed that story about you sailing off on this quest for the Big Grail? I IF boat to conquer us blacks and lode ' wero Secoaf Cbuno  around us again. An . "You'll get over that," lAar Old South whit like you -- " said. He closed his eyes. Sam said, "You're wrong! If you knew me, if Tr'EE years passed. The land you'dtaken the trouble to know m.was iain like a sIwM-poeked me -- " battlefield, stiidcing with fume'Mld Hacking opened his eyes and black with smoke. But thejneat said, "You'd lie to a nigger even Riverboat was completdl. 're when he was on his deathbed, was nothing to do to it now ex wouldn't you?" He stared up at cept to try it out. Even the last Sam. "Shoot me, will you? Put me touch, the painting of the Riverout of my pain? I'm really sufferboat's name in big black letters on ing." the white hull, had been done. On Lothar stepped up beside Sam both sides of the hull, ten feet and said, "After what you did to above the water line, ran the He pointed the muzzle of the big "What does the name mean, flintlock at Hacking's head. Sam?" he had been asked by many. Hacking grinned painfully and "it means just what it says, conmuttered, "Rape on principle, trary to most words in print or mother! I swore oft that on speech," Sam said. "The boat is Earth -- but that woman just for no man's hire. It's a free boat brought out the devil in me! and its crew arefree souls. No Besides, so what? What about all man's." those black slave women you "And why is the boat's launch Sam walked away. Behind him "That comes from a dream I the pistol boomed. Hacking would had," Sam would say. "Somebody be walking along the banks of The was trying to put up advertising on River tomorrow, somewhere far it and I told him that the launch away. He and Sam might even see was built for no mercenary pureach other again, although Sam pose. What do you think  am, adwas not looking forward to that. vance agent for P. T. Barnum? I Lothar, stinking of gunpowder, said." caught up with him. There had been more to the "I should have let him suffer, dream, but Sam had told no one But old habits are hard to break. I except Joe about it. wanted to kill him, so I did. That The man who was pasting up black deviljust smiled at me." those garish posters, advertising "Don't say any more," Sam rethe coming of the greatest Riverplied. "I'm sick enough. I'm about boat of them all and the greatest to chuck the whole thing and settle Riverboat show of them all was down with a steady job of mis," Sam had told Joe.  was both sionarying. The only ones whose men in the dream. I dont get it, Tham, Joe had said. Sam had given up. The twenty-sixth anniversary of Resurrection Day was the day the sidewheeler Not For Hire first turned its paddles. The big moment came about an hour after the grailstones flamed to charge the breakfast grails. The cables and cap connected to the grailstone had been removed and the cables wound up within the hold through a port in the forward section on the starboard side. The grails had been removed from the stone a mile north and rushed to the big boat in the amphibious, armored, steam-driven launch, the Post No Bills, The fabulous Riverboat, gleaming white with red, black and green trimmings, moved out from the canal and into The River behind a huge breakwater on its starboard side. Whistles blowing, iron bells clanging, passengers cheering, people on the shore shouting, the magnificent paddlewheels churning. Not For Hire moved with stately grace out into The River. T he Riverboat had an overall length of four hundred and forty feet and six inches. The beam over the paddlewheel guards was ninety-three feet. The mean draft, loaded, was twelve feet. The giant electric motors driving the paddle-wheels delivered ten thousand shaft horse power. Top speed, theoretically, was forty-five miles an hour in still water. Going upstream against the fifteen-milean-hour current, it would be thirty. Going downstream, it would be sixty. The boat would be going up The River most of the time and cruising at fifteen miles an hour relative to the ground. There were four decks, the socalled boiler deck, the main deck, the hurricane deck and the landing deck. The pilothouse was at the fore edge of the hurricane deck and the lopg texas, containing the captain's and chief officers' quarters, was behind the pilothouse. However, the pilothousewas itself double-deck. It was set forward of the two tall but thin smokestacks, which rose thirty feet high. Firebrass had advised against the stacks, because the smoke from the big boilers (used only to heat water and to drive the machine guns) could be piped out on the side. But Sam had snorted and said, "What do I care about air resistance? I want beauty! And beauty is what we'll get! Whoever heard of a Riverboat without tall, graceful impressive smokestacks! Have you no soul, brother?" There were sixty-five cabins, each about twelve by twelve with snap-up beds and tables and folding chairs. Each cabin had a toilet and a wash basin with hot and cold running water and there was a shower for every six cabins. There were three big lounges, one in the texas, one on the hurricane deck, and one on the main deck. These held pool tables, dart games, gymnastic equipment, card tables, a movie screen, a stage for dramas ormusicals and the main deck lounge held a podium for the orchestra. The upper deck of the pilotIF house was luxuriously furnished with carved oak chairs and tables covered with red Riverdraon fish leather. The pilot sat in a large and comfortable swivel chair before the instrument board. On this was a bank of small closed-circuit TV screens, giving him views of the control centers of the boat. Before him was a microphone Which enabled him to speak to anybody on the boat. He controlled the boat with two levers on a small movable board before him. The left stick controlled the port wheel; the right, the starboard. A screen before him was a radar indicator used at night. Another screen showed him the depth of the water from the bottom of the boat as measured by sonar. A toggle on the instrument board could switch the piloting to automatic, though the rule was that a pilot had to be on duty at all times. Sam was dressed in bleached fish-leather sandals, a white kilt, a white cape and a white officer's cap of plastic and leather. He wore a bleached leather belt and holster for a ponderous Mark II .# four-shooter pistol and a sheath for a rapier. He paced back and forth, a big green cigar in his mouth, and watched the pilot, Robert Styles, steering the boat for the first time. Styles was an old Mississippi pilot, a handsome youth, no liar, though given to inflating facts. Sam had been overcome with joy when he had appeared about two years before. He had known Rob Styles when they were both Mississippi pilots. S tyles was nervous, as anybody would be the first time, even the steel-nerved Captain Isaiah Sellers of ancient Mississippi fame. There was nothing to piloting the boat -- a one-ey Sunday School teacher with a hangover could do it, his six-year-old child could do it, once he got the hang of the two sticks. Push 'forward for increased speed, put in the middle position to stop the wheels, pull back to reverse the wheels. To steer the boat to port, pull back a little on the port stick and forward a little on the starboard stick. To steer to starboard, do the reverse. But it took: some practice before the proper coordination was achieved. Luckily there was no memory work involved in piloting a boat on this River. There were no islands, no sand bars, and there would be few logs with snags. An alarm bell rang before the boat worked too close to shallow water. At night radar or sonar would indicate obstructions and activate a red light. Sam watched Styles for a halfhour, then took over the piloting and, after another half-hour, asked John if he would like to try. John was dressed entirely in black, as if he were determined to do just the opposite of whatever Sam did. But he took the sticks and did well for an ex-king who had never done a lick of worL in his life and had always let inferiors do whatever steering was necessary. The boat sailed up past the dead lyeyasu's kingdom, now split into three states again. Then Sam ordered the vessel turned back. Rob Styles got fancy and pivoted her a dime -- " as he said, to demonstrate her maneuverability. While the port wheel backed the starboard raced forward at full speed. The boat rotated as if stuck on a pin, then headed downstream. With the current and wind behind her and the paddlewheels turning at maximum speed, the No( For Hire raced along at sixty miles an hour. Sam had Styles bring her in close to the shore, where the sonar indicated about one foot of clearance between hull and bottom on the port side. Even above the slapping of the wheels and the splashing of water and the whistling and clanging of bells, they could hear the crowds. The faces whizzed by as if in a dream. Sam opened the fore portyof the pilothouse to feel the wind and heighten the impression of speed. The Not For Hire raced all the way downstream to Selinujo, then turned again. Sam wished, almost, that there were another boat that he could race against. But it was heaven enough to have the only metal electrically powered Riverboaf in existence. A man couldn't have everything, not even in the afterEarthlife. D uring the return trip the huge hatch in the stern was lowered and the launch slipped into The River. It cut back and forth at top speed and raced ahead of the mother boat. Its steam machine guns traced lines along the water and the thirty steam guns on the Not For Hire shot back, though not at the launch. The big three-place amphibianmonoplane came out of the opening in the stern, too. Its wings were straightened out and locked and it took off. Firebrass was at the controls. His woman and Gwenafra were passengers. A moment later the tiny oneseater open-cockpit scout-fighter was shot off the top of the texas by a steam catapult. Lothar von Richthofen took it up, woodalcohol motor buzzing, and raced ahead until he was out of sight. He returned, climbed and entertained with the first aerial acrobatics that the Riverworld had ever seen -- to the best of Sam's knowledge. Lothar concluded with a dive, at the end of which he fired four rockets and then the twin machine guns. These were .# caliber and fired aluminum bullets from aluminum cartridges. There were one hundred thousand of these stored on the boat. When they were used up there would be no more. Lothar landed the tiny monoplane on the landing deck on top of the texas and devices caught the hook trailed out by the plane. Even so, the whirling propeller stopped only ten feet from the smokestacks. Firebrass returned in the amphibian and later took the wheeled plane up for a flight. Sam looked down through the the fore part of the broad boiler deck. They marched back and forth and performed intricate maneuvers under Cyrano's orders. Their silvery duralumin plumed helmets were like those of the ancient Romans. They wore gray and red ;striped chainmail IF shirts halfway down their thighs. The question was, when would Their legs were cased in leather John strike? At the beginning, or boots. They carried rapiers, long much later during the voyage, knives and Mark II pistols. They when Sam's suspicions had been were the pistoleers only, howlulled? ever. The main part of the marines Actually the situation was intolwere watching the show; these erable. But then, it was surpriswere the bowmen and the rocking how much intolerableness a eteers. man could tolerate. Seeing Gwenafra's honeyA yellow haired near-giant encolored head in the crowd on the tered the pilothouse. His name was main deck made Sam happy. Augustus Strubewell. He was He saw Livy's dark head near John's aide-de-camp and had been her and was unhappy. picked up by John during his soGwenafra, after another six journ in lyeyasujo after Hackmonths of a jealousy-ridden life ing's invasion. He had been born with von Richthofen, had accepted in #I in San Diego, California, Sam's offer and moved in with had been an All-American fullhim. But Sam still could not see back, a captain of the U.S. MaLivy without some pain of loss. rines. Decorated for bravery in the Except for Livy and John he Middle East and South America, would have been as happy as he he had made a career in the could be. But she would be along movies and on TV. He seemed a throughout the forty-year journey, pleasant enough fellow except And John prowled through Sam's that, like John, he bragged of his nightmares. conquests among women. Sam did not trust him. Anybody who Sam be the captain and so unhave something wrong with him. hesitant about accepting the first Sam shrugged. He might as well mate's position that Sam knew he enjoy himself. Why let anything was up to no good. But when would rob him of the joy of the greatest The Mutiny, as Sam thought of it, day of his life? take place? It was inevitable that He leaned out of the port and John would try to take over the full watched the drill team and the command of the Riverboat and crowd. The sun sparkled on waves; any intelligent man, knowing the breeze was cooling, though he this, would have dumped him. did not need it. He could shut the But Sam had been too conports and turn on the air-conditionBloodaxe. He could not cdipmit the flag of the Not For Hire another assassination, not even if flapped in the wind. It was square he knew that John would not be and bore a scarlet phoenix on a permanently dead. A corpse was light blue field. The phoenix syma corpse and a doublecross was a bolized the rebirth of mankind, doublecross. He waved at the people massed along the bank and pressed a button that set off a series of steam whistles and clanging bells. He drew in smoke from his fine cigar, stuck out his chest and paraded back and forth. Strubewell handed John a glass full of bourbon and then he offered Sam one. Everybody in the pilothouse, Styles, the six other pilots, Joe Miller, von Richthofen, Firebrass, Publius Crassus, Mozart, John Lackland, Strubewell and three other aides of John took a glass. "A toast, gentlemen," John said in Esperanto. "To a long and happy journey and may we all get what we deserve." Sam, the top of his headlmost touching the ceiling, held a glass containing about half a quart of bourbon. He sniffed at the amber liquor with his monstrous proboscis and then tasted it with the tip of his tongue. Sam had been just about to toss down the four-ounce drink when he saw Joe's apish face grimace. "What's the matter, Joe?" "Thith thtuff hath thomething in it." Sam sniffed and could detect nothing but the most excellent of Kentucky's best. But when John and Strubewell and the others reached for their weapons he threw the liquor in John's face. Yelling, "It's poison -- " he dived for the floor. Strubewell's Mark II pistol boomed. The plastic bullet shattered against the bulletproof plastic of the port above Sam's head. Joe roared -- he sounded like a lion suddenly released from its cage -- and threw his liquor into Strubewell's eyes. The other aides fired and fired again. The Mark II pistols were four-shot revolvers. The powder in the aluminum cartridges was electrically ignited. They were larger and heavier than the Mark I's, but they could fired more swiftly and cordite, not black gunpowder, propelled the plastic bullets. The pilothouse became a fury of booming, deafening explosives, the scream of shattered plastic ricocheting, the shouts and screams of men and the subhuman bellowing of Joe. Sam rolled over, reached up and flicked the automatic pilot switch. Rob Styles was on the floor, his arm almost torn off. One of John's aides was dying in front of him. Strubewell went flying over him and banged against the glass and then fell on him. John was gone; he had fled down the ladder. Sam crawled out from under Strubewell. Four of his pilots were dead. All of the aides, except for Strubewell, who was only unconscious, were dead. Their necks had been broken or their jaws shattered by Joe. Mozart crouched, quivering, in a corner. Firebrass bled from cuts made by plastic fragments and Lothar from a gash in his arm. One of the aides had struck him with a knife just before Joe twisted his head # degrees. Sam rose shakily and looked through the port. The crowd on the IF deck had dispersed, but not without leaving a dozen bodies behind. The marines were firing at men shooting at them from around the sides of the main deck. Some of the fire seemed to be coming from cabin ports in the main deck. Cyrano stood with his rapidly dwindling crew, shouting orders. Then John's men charged, firing. Cyrano went down. He was up again instantly, his sword flashing silver, then red. The enemy broke and ran. Cyrano ran after them. Sam shouted, "You fool -- go back -- " but he was hot heard, of course. H e tried to struggle out of his shock. John had slipped something into their drinks, a poison or a sedative. Only Joe's subhumanly sensitive nose had saved Sam's people from drinking and allowing John to take over the pilothouse with little trouble. Sam looked out and ahead. Only a half-mile away was the huge breakwater behind which the boat was to anchor for the night. The long journey would officially begin tomorrow. He flicked off the automatic pilot toggle switch and took the control sticks in his hands. "Joe," he said, "I'm going to run this right up alongside the bank. I may even ground us. Get out the bullhorn. I'll tell the people ashore what's happened and we'll get help." He pulled back on the starboard stick and advanced the port stick. "What's happening?" he yelled. The boat was proceeding straight on its course up The River, holding to a distance of about a hundred yards off the shore. He moved the sticks back and forth, frantically, but the boat did not deviate. A voice came from the intercom, John's. "It's no use, Samuel, Boss, Captain, swine! I have control of the boat. My engineer, the man who will be chief engineer, put in a duplicate set of controls in -- never mind where. I have cut off your controls, and the boat will go where I want it to. So you don't have any advantage at all. Now my men will storm the pilothouse and take you. But I would prefer that there be as little damage as possible. So, if you will just get off the boat I will let you go unharmed. Provided, that is, that you can swim a hundred yards." Sam raged and swore and pounded his fists on the instrument panel. But the boat continued past the dock, while the crowds gathered there waved, cheered and wondered. Lothar said, "They're trying to sneak up on us -- " and fired at a man who had appeared around the far end of the texas on the hurricane deck. "We can't hold out long," Firebrass said. "We don't have much ammunition." Sam saw some men and women on the boiler deck; they were trying to make a stand. Livy was among them. She was firing a Mark II. John's men charged. A man thrust at Cyrano, who was engaged in running his rapier through the man next to him. Livy tried to knock the blade aside with her pistol and the sword went into her stomach. She fell, the sword still sticking out of her. The man who had killed her died a second later -- Cyrano's rapier went through his throat. Sam cried, "Livy! Livy!" He was out of the pilothouse and running down the ladder. Bullets screamed past him, smashed against the bulkheads and the ladder. He felt a stinging, then heard a shouting behind him, but he did not stop. He was vaguely aware that Joe Miller and the others had runout after him. Corpses and wounded were everywhere. The boat was turning into shore, its paddlewheels operating at full speed, the water flying, the wheels chuff-chuffing, the deck trembling. John was turning the boat into shore and Sam saw why. A number of heavily armed men and women had been posted at this section of The Riverbank. They would be the disaffected, Sam guessed, recruited from among the people who were angered because the lottery had cut them out of a place on the crew. John had mobilized them. Once they got aboard, they would mop up whatever resistance they met. S AM had run along the hurricane deck after leaving the pilothouse ladder. He gripped a pistol with two shots left in it in one hand and his rapier in the other. He did not know how they had gotten into his hands; he had no memory of having drawn either. A face appeared at the edge of the deck. He fired and it dropped. He was on the edge of the deck then and shooting even as he leaned over to look down the ladder. Sam's bullet did not miss this time. The man's chest erupted red and he fell down the ladder, taking two companions with him. But others on the deck below raised their pistols and he had to jump back. The volley missed him. Joe Miller said behind him, "Tham! Tham! There'th nothing to do but chump overboard! They got uth thurrounded." Below, Cyrano, still wielding his rapier, holding off three men at one time, backed to the railing. His blade pierced a throat, the man fell and Cyrano whirled and leaped over the railing. When he came up he began to swim strongly to get away from the starboard paddlewheel thrashing toward him. Bullets struck the sides of the cabins behind Sam, and Lothar cried, "Jump, Sam! Jump!" Joe had already turned and was running with his great axe toward the men firing from behind the rear of the cabins along the hurricane deck. Bullets streaked toward him, but he was depending upon his terrifying aspect and his prowess, which they well knew, to panic the shooters. Sam and Lothar ran behind him until they came to the paddlewheel housing, some ten feet from the edge of the hurricane deck. If they stood up on the railing and leaped out, they could grab hold of the big iron eyes through which cables had IF been secured when the housing had been placed over the wheel by the crane. They jumped, one after the other, while bullets screamed by. Each grabbed an eye, pulled himself to the top of the housing and hit the water from there. The water was thirty feet below, a height which would have made Sam hesitate under different conditions. This time, he went out, fell straight, holding his nose, and plunged into the water feet first. Sam dove. Several of the steam machine guns had been depressed and .# caliber bullets were probing for him. bullhorn: "Farewell, Sam! Thanks for building the Riverboat for me -- I'll change its name to one that'll suit me better! I'm going, to enjoy the fruits of your labors -- think of me as often as you please. Farewell!" His laughter blasted Sam's ears. Sam came out of his hiding place in a hut and climbed the wall on the edge of the water. The boat had stopped and let down a long gangplank on cables to permit the traitors to come aboard. He heard a voice below him and looked down. There was Joe, his reddish hairs black with water except where blood streaked it. "Lothar and Firebrath and Thyrano and Chohnthton made it," he said. "How you feel, Tham?" Sam sat down on the hardpacked dirt and said, "If it would do any good. I'd kill myself. This world is hell, Joe, genuine hell. You can't even commit a decent suicide. You wake up the next day and there you are with your prolv lems stuck on you with gluo." "Vhat do ve do now, Tham?" Sam did not reply for a long time. If he couldn't have Livy, Cyrano would not have her, either. He could endure the thought of having lost her if she was not where he could see her. Later, the shame at exulting in Cyrano's loss would come. Not now. He was too stunned. The loss of the boat had been even a greater shock than seeing Livy killed. After all these years of liard work, of grief, of betrayal, of planning, of hurting, of -- of -- It was too much to bear. Joe was grieved to see him cry, but he sat patiently by until Sam's tears had quit flowing. Then he asked, "Do ve thtart building another boat, Tham?" Sam Clemens rose to his feet. The gangplank was being drawn up by the electromechanical machinery of his fabulous Riverboat. ly and bells were clanging. John would still be laughing. He might even be watching Sam through a telescope. Sam shook his fist, hoping that John was watching him. "I'll get you yet!" he howled. "I'll build another boat and I'll catch up with you. I'll run you down, John, and I'll blast your stolen boat out of The River. Nobody, the Stranger, or his kind, no matter what their powers, is going to stop me!"  Reoding Room enough scientific thinking for half a dozen normal novels, only to set the background for a test of social theories. We see all the human drives in this microcosm, up and down from the alphas to the  Continued from page #) omegas in the pecking order. This challenge, obviously, is the real survival test -- a test that the whole human race has not done too well at to date, but one which these early adults must pass.  Hilton Airport Inn, San Francisco, California. Guest-of-Honor: Avram Davidson; Fan Guest-of-Honor: Don Simpson. Membership: # to June #, # thereafter. For information: Astrid Anderson, # Las Palomas, Orinda, California #.  Hilton Hotel, Dallas, Texas. Guest-ofHonor: Robert Bloch; Fan Guest-ofHonor: Andy Offutt. Membership: # in advance; # at the door. For information: D-Con, Box #, Lewisville, Texas #.  At Chatham Center Motor Inn, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guest-of-Honor: Lester del Rey; Guest-of-Honor Emeritus: Robert Silverberg. For information: Ginjer Buchanan, # Bartlett Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #.  Royale, New Orleans, Guest-ofHonor: Poul Anderson. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: Mrs. Rick Norwood, # Wilton Drive, New Orleans, Louisiana #.  buquerque, New Mexico. For information: Bob Yardman, P.O. Box #, Albuquerque, New Mexico #.  #th World Science Fiction Convention. At the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, Prudential Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest-of-Honor: Clifford D. Simak. Fan Guest-of-Honor: Harry Warner Jr. For information: Noreascon, P.O. Box #, Cambridge, Massachusetts #. Top-flight science fiction and fantasy from...  Eight mind-bending tales conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur Ce Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, John Campbell, Jre and Jack Vancee A#S #(t Ten dazzling stories that explore the complex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. 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You'll find them in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, one of the fascinating books that can be yours with membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. Choose any # books for #, plus shipping and handling. You can include if you wish, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, the stories "every real reader of science fiction has to know." Lester del Key. Broaden your pleasure with the Science Fiction Book Club. The coupon tells how. with trial membership if #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame I. # "winners," chosen by Scl-Pi Writers of America. Ed. Robert Silverberg. # pages.   ed. # Science Fiction Book Ciub #-S#S Please accept my application for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me just # plus shipping and handling for all #. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin "Things To Come" describing the two monthly selections and other book bargains. If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly selecUons. or prefer an alternate or no book at all. 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Or is it this bad now?" -- tastic chillers by the top writers of this century. In October we have our collection of H. P. Lovecraft's collaborations with other writers; Lady goodies from our Lovecraft, SF ghost and horror backlists. Kelley; more adventures of Summer of Muckrake by Ron Goulart; more ghost and horror-story collections. Also P. G. Wodehouse -- could there be a new Fandom here? An Inte# Publisher #I Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. # All SFhorrorghost titles # each at your bookstore. If not available, you may order from Dept. CS, Beagle Books, # West # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Add per title for postage and handling. Sptmnbr-Octebr, #I Vol.#,No. I Ml I # Ejlmr Jakobsson, Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor Judy Lynn Benjamin, Managing Editor Franc I . Roggeri, Art Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director LX. Murphy, Subscription Director Jack Gaughan, Associate Art Director coMPicre NoviL L. Sprague de Camp # Cover photography by Bruce Roggeri, tributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. and '  f 'j i 'l'ic" . Sir: J. W. Zabei has in the Mar j Apr Hue and Cry made an honest effort to codify via eight descriptive points the function of science fiction. His efforts don't appear to me to be completely rational, though. For each acceptable description, hi has produced twice as many ambiguous and incorrect descriptions of xhpjtote of the art.  Science fiction exercises the. imagination, deliberately, a facet setting it aside from other genre. Score one Zabei. But in other penetrations into the readers' minds SF does nothing that is unique-T-nor different. Reading anything will develop perspective -- whether that perspective devolves onto one's self or on the world, whether one enjoys it or not, even if one fads completely to understand what he is reading. (Failure at least shows the limits of the redder, a new signpost' for self-development.) Science fiction doesn't do those things exclusively, or even on purpose. As for expanding readers' interests into the arts, science fiction is a veritable gold mine of s,cientific news and predictions in fictional, form. But art? The arts developed in sf are immature in axtiparison to other narrative writing. Many stories published as sf. though very entertaining. exist only for the gimmick involved -- or to communicate a scientific idea -- and can't stand up to the question: "Is it art?". Even the New Wave endeavors only repeat techniques abandoned forty years ago, while Brunner's magnificent Stand Oii Zanzibar owes a lot to John Dos Passos. And politics? Politics are a part of everyday life, whether civic or social, and science fiction has yet to do anything but adqt this human preoccupation. Science fiction examines ideas pragmatically. What else can a genre based on ideas do: each new thought has to be milked completdy. What other type of literature is still reworking story ideas first published ninety years ago, as we do with Wells, Verne, etc? Sf examines the consequences of change? Zabel's statement here is too ambiguous to answer. Every story told by man (myth, news story, mystery, sf, mainstream) is built on change for nobody is interested in non-change. Who'd write arty thing based on: "The rock sat? If the rock were different or changed the environment somehow -- yes. But only conflict -- change -- makes stories. Scientifiction has always wedded art to science. Yet sf no longer rrterely weds art to science and this is Just a fragment of the definition. Zabel's point, "The illustration of principles," is Just a qualifier for the scientifiction defini( Please turn to page #) Secrets entrusted to a few l!ulUipuSmedati-oM be generaHy told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hid den processes of mans mind, and the mastery of lifers problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toaay. organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of me book, "The Mastery of Life. Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe A J.D. I Scribe A.J.D. i I San Jose, California # I j Please send me the jree book. The Mastery  I o Uje. which explains how I may learn to j I use my faculties and powers of mind. j I Name --  The Rosicrudans (not a religious  Rosicnicians (AM City Zip Code -- The Rat had to return to Planet Dirt -- if only he could find it in Time! #  crook, James  Bolivar diGriz," Inskipp said, making animal noises deep in his throat while shaking the sheaf of papers viciously in my direction. I leaned back against the sideboard in his ofHce, a picture of shocked sincerity. "I am innocent," I sobbed: "A victim of a campaign of cold calculating lies." I had his humidor behind my back and by touch alone -- I really ant good at this sort of thing -- I felt for the lock. 'Embezzlement, swindling and worse -- the reports are still coming in. You have been cheating your own organization, our Special Corps, your own buddies -- " "Never!" I cried, lockpick busy in my fingers. "They don't call you Slippery Jim for nothing -- " "A mistake, a childish nickname. My mother found nie a slippery baby when soaping me in the bath." The humidor sprang open and my nose twitched at the aroma of fragrant leaf. "Do you know how much you have stolen?" His face was bright red now and his eyes were beginning to bulge in a highly unattractive manner. "Me? Steal? I would rather die first!" I declaimed movingly as I slipped out handful of the incredibly expensive cigars desput them to a far more important use by smoking them myself. I am forced to admit that my attention was more On the purloined tobacco than on Inskipp's tedious complaints and I did not at first notice the change in his voice. But suddenly I realized that I could barely hear his words -- hot that he was whispering. It was more as though there were a volume control in his throat that had suddenly been turned down. "Speak up, Inskipp," I told him firmly. "Or are you suddenly beset with guilt over these false accusations?" I stepped away from the sideboard, half turning as I moved in order to mask the fact that I was slipping about a hundred credits' worth of exotic tobacco into my pocket. He prattled on weakly, ignoring me, shaking the papers soundlessly now. "Aren't you feeling well?" I asked this with a certain amount of real concern, because he was beginning to sound quite distant. He did not turn his head to look at me when I moved but instead kept staring at the place where I had been, nattering away in an inaudible voice. And he was looking pale. I blinked and looked again. Not pale, transparent. The back of his chair was very definitely becoming visible through his head. "Stop it!" I shouted, but he did not appear to hear. "What games are you playing? Is this some soil of #D projection to fool me? Why bother? Slippery Jim's not the kind who can be fooled, ha-ha!" Walking quickly across the room I put out my hand and poked IF my index Anger into his forehead. It went in -- there was slight resistance -- and he did not seem to mind in the least. But when I withdrew it there was a slight popping sound and he vanished completely while the sheaf of papers, now unsupported, fell to the desktop. "Whargh!" I grunted, or something equally incomprehensible. I bent to look for hidden devices under the chair when, with a nasty crunching sound, the offlce door was broken down. N OW this was something I could understand. I whirled about, still in the crouch, and was ready for the Arst man when he came through. The hard edge of my hand got him in the throat, right under the gas mask, and he gurgled and dropped. But there were plenty more behind him, all with masks and white coats, wearing little black packs on their backs, either bareAsted or carrying improvised clubs. It was all very unusual. Weight of numbers forced me back but I caught one of them under the chin with my toe while a hard jab to the solar plexus polished off another. Then I had my shoulders to the wall and they began to swarm over me. I smashed one of them across the back of the neck and he fell. And vanished halfway to the Aoor. This was very interesting. The number of people in the room began to change rapidfy now as some of the men I hit snuffed out of sight. A good thing that helped even the ds, except for the fact that others kept appearing out of thin air at about the same rate. I struggled to get to the door; could not make it. Then the club got me in the side of the head and scrambled my brains nicely. After that it was like trying to Aght slow-motion under water. I hit a few more of them but my heart wasn't really in it. They had my arms and legs and began to drag me from the room. I writhed about a certain amount and cursed them fluently in a half dozen languages but all of this had just about the results you would expect. They rushed me from the room and down the corridor and into the waitingelevator. One of them held up a canister and I tried to turn my head aiyay, but the blast of gas caught me full in the face. It did nothing for me that I could feel, though ! did get angrier. Kicking and snapping my teeth and shouting insults. The masked men mumbled back in what might have been irritated mutterings, which only goaded me to greater fury. By the time we reached our destination I was ready to kill -- which I normally do not And easy to do -- and certainly , would have if I hadn't been strapped into a gadgety electric chair and had electrodes fastened to my wrists and ankles. Tell them that Jim diGriz died like a man, you dogs!" I shouted, not without a certain amount of slavering and foaming. A metal helmet was lowered over my head and just before it covered my face I managed to call out, "Up the Special Corps! And up your -- " Darkness descend and I was aware that death or electrocution or brain destruction or worse was imminent. N othing happened and the helmet was raised again and one of the attackers gave me another shot in the face from a canister and I felt the overwhelming anger draining away as fast as it had arrived. I blinked a bit'at this and saw that they were freeing my arms and legs. I aJso saw that most of them had their masks off now and were recognizable as the Corps technicians and scientists who usually puttered about this lab. "Someone wouldn't like to tell me just what the hell is going on, would they?" "Let me fix this first," one of them said, a gray-haired man with .buckteeth like old yellowed gravestones caught between his lips. He hung one of the black packs from my shoulder and pulled a length of wire from it that had a metal button on the end. He teuched the button to the back of my neck, where it stuck. "You?re Professor Coypu,aren't you?" "I am." The teeth moved up and down like piano keys. "Would you think me rude if I asked for an explanation?" "Not at all. Only natural under the circumstances. Terribly sorry we had to rough you up. Only way. Get you off balance, keep you angry. The angry, mind exists only for itself and can survive by Itself. If we had tried to reason, to tell you the problem, we would have defeated our own purpose. So we attacked. Gave you the anger gas as well as breathing it oursdves. Only thing to do. Oh, blast, there goes Magistero. It's getting stronger even in here." One of the white-coated men shimmered and grew transparent, then vanished. "Inskipp went that way," I said. "He would. First to go you know." "Why?" I asked, smiling warmly, thinking that this was the most idiotic conversation I had ever had. "They are after the Corps. Pick off the top people first." "Who?" "Don't know." I heard my teeth grating together but managed to keep my temper. "Would you kindly explain in greater detail or find someone who can make more sense of this affair than you have been doing." "Sorry. My fault entirely." He dabbed at a beading of sweat on his forehead and a whisk of red tongue dampened the dry enls of his teeth. "It all came about so fast, you know. Emergency measures, everything. Time war I imagine one might call it. Someone, somewhere, somewhen, is tampering with time. Naturally they had to pick the Special Corps as their first target, no matter what other ambitions they might have. Since the Corps is the most effective, most widespread supranational and supra-planetal lawenforcement organization in the history of the galaxy we automatically become the main obstacle in their path. Sooner or later in any ambitious time-changing plan they run up against the Corps. They have therefore elected to do it sooner. If they can eliminate Inskipp and the other top people the probability of the Corps' existence will be lowered and we'll all snuff out like poor Magistero did just then." I blinked rapidly. "Do you think we could have a drink that might act as a bit of lubricant to my thoughts?" "Splendid idea, join you myself." The dispenser produced a sickly sort of green liquid tht he favored but I dialed for a large Syrian Panther Sweat, most of which I drained with the first swallow. This frightening beverage -- who hideous aftereffects forbade its sale oh most civilized worlds -- did me nothing but good at that moment. I finished the glass and a sudden memory popped up out of the tangled jumble of my subconscious. "Stop me if I'm wrong, but didn't I hear you lecture once about the impossibility of time travel?" "Of course. My specialty. Smoke screen, that talk. We've had time travel for years here. Afraid to use it, though. Alter time tracks and all that sort of trouble. Just the kind of thing that is happening now. But we have had a continuing project of resear and time investigation. Which is why we knew what was happening when it began to happen. The alarms were going off and we had no time to warn anyone -- not that warnings would do any good. We were aware of our duty. Plus the fact that we were the only ones who could do anything at all. We jury rigged a time-fixator around this laboratory, then made the smaller pprtable models, such as the one you are wearipg now." "What does it do?" I asked, touching with great respect the metal disk on the nape of my neck. "Has a recording of your memory that it keeps feeding back onds. Telling you that you are, that you see, and rebuilding any personality changes that time-line alterations in the past may have shifted. "Purely a defensiye mechanism, but it is all we have." Out of the corner of my eye I saw another man wink out of sight and the professor's voice grew grim. "We must attack if we are to save the Corps." "Attack? How?" ""Send someone back in time to uncover the forces waging this time war. and destroy them before they destroy us. We have a machine." "I volunteer. Sounds like my kind of job." "There is no way to return. It is a one-way mission." "I withdraw the last statement. I like it here." Sudden memory -- onds earlier -- grabbed me and a prod of fear pumped a number of interesting chemical substances into my blood. "Angelina, my Angelina. I must speak to her -- " "She is not the only one." "The only one for me. Professor. Now stand aside or I'll go through you." H e stepped back, frowning and mumbling and tapping his teeth with his fingernails, and I jabbed the code into the phone. The screen beeped twice and the few seconds crawled by like lead snails before she answered the call. "You're there?" I gasped.' "Where did you expect me to be?" A frown crxsed her perfect features and she sniffed as though to get the aroma of booze from the screen. "You've been drinking -- and so early too." "Just a drop, but that's not why I called. How are you? You look great, not transparent at all." "A drop? Sounds more like a whole bottle." Her voice chilled and there was more than a trace left of the old, unreformed Angelina, the most ruthless and deadly crook in the galaxy before the Corps medics straightened out the knots in her brain. "I suggest you hang up. Get a drive-right pill, then call me back as soon as you are sober." She reached out for the disconnect button. "Dont I am cold sober and wish I weren't. This is an emergency, red A top priority. Get over here now as absolutely fast as you can. "Of course." She was on her feet instantly, ready to go. "Where are you?" "The location of this lab?" I asked, turning to Professor Coypu. "Level one-hundred and twelve. Room thirty." "Did you get that," I said, turning back to the screen. Which was blank. "Angelina -- " . I jabbed the disconnect, tapped her code on the keys. The screen lit IF Someone clutched at my shoulder, but I brushed him aside, grabbed the door and flung it open. There was nothing outside. A formless, colorless nothing that did strange things to my brain when I looked k it. Then the door was pulled from my hand and slammed shut and Coypu stood with his back to it, breathing heavily, his features twisted by the same unnameable sensations I had felt. "Gone," he said hoarsely. "The corridor, the entire station, all the buildings, everything. Gone. Just this laboratory is left; locked here by the time-fixator. The Special Corps no longer exists; no one in the galaxy has even a memory of us. When the time-fixator goes we go as well." "Angelina, where is she -- where are they all?" "They were never boro, never existed." "But I can remember her -- all of them." "That is what we count upoi). As long as there is one person alive with memories of us, of the Corps, we stand a microscopic chance of eventual survival. Someone must stop the time attack. If not for the Corps, for the sake of civilization. History is now being rewritten. But not inflexibly, if we can counterattack." A one-way trip back to a lifetime on an dien world, in an alien time. Whoever went would be the loneliest man alive, living thousands of years before his people, his friends, would even be borji. "Get ready," I said. "I'll go." IIT where you are going. And when." Professor Coypu staggered across the laboratory and I followed, in almost as bad shape. He was mumbling over the accordion sheets of the computer printout that were chuntering and pouring from the machine and piling up on the floor. "Must be accurate, very accurate," he said. "We have been running a time probe backward. Following the traces of these disturbances. We have found the particular planet. Now we must zero in on the time. If you arrive too late they may have already finished their job. Too early and you might die of old age before the fiends are even born." "Sounds charming. What is the planet?" "Strange name. Or rather names. It is called Dirt or Earth or something like that. Supposed to be the legendary home of all mankind." "Another one?, I never heard of it." "No reason you should. Blown up in an atomic war ages ago. Here it is. You have to be pushed backwards thirty-two thousand, five hundred and ninety-eight years. We can't guarantee anything better than a plus or minus three months at that distance." "I don't think I'll notice. What year will that be?" "Well before our present calendar began. It is, I believe, # A.D. by the primitive records of the aborigines of the time." "Not so aboriginal if they're fiddling with time travel." "Probably not them at all. Chances are the people you are looking for are just operating in that period." "How do I find thfipi?!' "With this." One of the assistants handed me a small black box with dials and buttons on it, as well as a transparent bulge that contain a free-floating needle. The needle quivered like a hunting dog and continued to. point in the same direction no matter how I turned the box. "A detector of temporal energy generators," Coypu said. "A less sensitive and portable version of our larger machines. Right now it is pointing at our time-helix. When you arrive at this planet. Dirt, you will use it to seek out the people you want. This other dial is for field strength and will give you an approximation of the distance to the energy source." I looked at the box and felt the first bubbling and seething of an idea. "If I can carry this I can take other equipment with me, right?" "Correct. Small items that can be secured close to your body. The time field generates a surface charge that is not unlike static electricity." "Then I'll take whatever weapons or armament you have here in the lab." "There is not very much. We have only the smaller items." "Then I'll make my own. Are there any weapons technicians working here?" He looked around and thout. "Old Jarl, there, was in the weapons sections. But we have no time to fabricate anythii." "That's not what I bad in mind. Get him." Old Jarl bad taken bis rejuvenation treatments recently so he looked like a world-soiled nineteen-year-old -- with an ancient and suspicious look in his eye as he came closer. "I want that box," I said, pointing to the memory unit on his back. He whinnied like a prodded pony and skittered away clutching to the thing. "Mine, I tell you mine! You can't have it. Not fair even to ask. Without it I'll just fade away." Tears of senile self-pity rose to his eyes. "Control yourself, Jarl. I don't want to fade you out, I just want a duplicate of the box. Get cracking on it." IF He shambled away mumbling to himself and the technicians closed in. "I don't understand," Coypu said. "Simple. If I am gunning after a large organization I may need some heavy weapon. If I do I'll plug old Jarl into my brain and use his memories to build them." "But -- he will be you, take over your body -- it has never been done." "It's being done now. Desperate times demand desperate measures. Which brings us to another important point. You said this would be a one-way trip through time and that I couldn't return." "Yes. The time-helix hurls you into the past. There will be no helix there to return you." "But if one could be built there, I could return?" "Theoretically. But it has never been tried. Much of the equipment and materials would not be available among the primitive natives." "But if the materials were available a time-helix could be built. Now who do you know that could build it?" "Only myself. The helix is of my own construction and design." "Great. I'll want your memory box too. Be sure you boys paint your names on the outside so I don't hook up with the wrong specialist." The technicians grabbed for the professor. "The time-flxator is losing power!" one of the engineers shouted in a voice fllled with rising hysteria. "When the field goes down we die. We will never have existed. It can't be -- " He screamed, then fell over as one of his mates gave him a faceful of knockout gas. "Hurry!" Coypu shouted, "Take diGriz to the time-helix, prepare him -- " T hey grabbed me and rushed me into the next room, shouting instructions at one another: They almost dropped me when two of the technicians vanished at the same moment. Most of the voices had hysterical overtones -- as well they might with the world coming to an end. Some of the more distant walls were already becoming misty and vague. Only training and experience kept me from panicking too. I finally had to push them away from the emergency spacesuit they were trying to jam me into in order to close the fastenings myself. Professor Coypu was the only other cool one in the whole crowd. "Seat the helmet but leave the faceplate open until the last minute. That's fine. Here are the memories -- I suggest the leg. pocket would be the safest place. The grav-chute on your back -- I assume you know how to operate it. These weapon canisters across your chest. The temporal detector here -- " There was more like this until I could hardly stand. I didn't complain. If I didn't take it -- I wouldn't have it. Hang on more. "A language unit," I said. "How can I speak to the natives if I don't know their language?" "We don't have one here," Coypu said, tucking a rack of gas containers under my arm. "But here is a memorygram -- " "They give me headaches." " -- that you can use to, learn the local tongue. In this pocket." "What do I do? You haven't explained. How do I arrive?" "Very high. In the stratosphere that is. Less chance of colliding with anything material.We'll get you there. After that you're on your own." "The front lab is gone -- " someone shouted, and popped out of existence at almost the same instant. "To the time-helix," Goypu called out hoarsely and they dragged me through the door. Slower and slower, as the scientists and technicians vanished from sight like pricked balloons until there were only four of them left and, heavily burdened, I staggered along at a decrepit waddle. "The time-helix," Coypu said breathlessly. "It is a bar, a column of pure force that has been warped into a helix and put under tension." It was green and glittered and almost filled the room, a coiled form of sparkling light as thick as my arm. "It's like a big spring that you have wound up." "Yes, perhaps. We prefer to call it a time-helix. It has been wound up -- put under tension, the force carefully calculated. You will be placed at the outer end and the restraining latch release#. As you are flung into the past the helix will hurl itself into the future where the energies will gradually dissipate. You must go." There were just three of us left. "Remember me," the short dark technician called out. "Remember Charli Nate. As long as you remember me I'll never -- " Coypu and I were alone, the walls going, the air darkening. "The end -- touch it -- " he called out. Was his voice weaker? I stumbled, partly fell toward the glowing end of the helix, my fingers outstretched. There was no sensation, but when I touched it I was instantly surrounded by the same green glow, could barely see through it. The professor was at a console, working the controls, reaching for a rather large switch. Pulling it down. Ill Professor Coypu stood frozen IF at the controls. His hand locked on Something moved. I was tugged the closed switch. I had been facin a way that is impossible to deing in his direction or I would pot scribe and mov in a direction I have seen this because my eyes never knew existed before. The were fixed rigidly ahead. My by time-helix was beginning to unwas rigid as well -- and my brain coil. Or perhaps it had been ungave a flutter of panic and tried to coiling all the while and the alteratounce around in its bony pan  I tion in time had concealed my realized that I had stopped breathawareness of it. Certainly some ing. For all I knew my heart wasn't of the stars appeared to be movbeating either. Something had ing faster -- and faster -- until they gone wrong, I was sure of that, made little blurred lines. It was since the time-helix was still tightnot a reassuring sight and f tried ly coiled. More soundless panic as to close my eyes, but the paralysis Coypu grew transparent and the still clutched me. A star whipped walls behind him took, on a defby, close enough so that I could See initely hazy quality. It was all goits disk, and burned an afteirimage ing, fading before my eyes, across my retina. Everything Would I be next? There was no way speeded up as my time velocity acof knowing. ' celerated and eventually space A primitive part of my mind, the became a gray blur as even stellar ape-man's heir, jibbered and events became too fast for me to wailed and rushed' about in little see. This blur had a hypnotic circles. Yet at the same time I felt feet, or my brain was affected by a cold objectivity and interest -- the time motion, because my not everyone is privileged to watch thoughts became thoroughly the dissolving of his world while muddled. I sank into a quasi-state hanging from a helical force field somewhere between sleep and unthat may possibly whip him back consciousness that lasted a very into the remote past. It was a long time. Or a short time, I'm not privilege I would have been happy really sure. It could have been att to pass on to any volunteers. None instant or it could have been eternpresented themselves, so I hung ity. Perhaps there .was some there, popeyed and stiff as a statue corner of my brain that remained while the laboratory faded away aware of the terrible slow passage around me and I was floating in of all those years buty if so, I do not interstellar space. Apparently care to think about it. Survival has even the asteroid on which the always been rather important to Special Corps base had been built . me and as a stainless steel rat in no longer had any reality in this among the concrete passages of new universe. society I look only to myself for aid. There are more ways to fail than to succeed, to gp mad than to stay sane, and I needed all my mental energies to find the right Course. So I existed and stayed relatively sane during the insane temporal voyage and waited for something to happen. After an immeasurable period of time something did. even more draihatic than the beginning of the journey .as everything happened all at once. I could move again. I could see again -- the light blinded me at first -- and I was aware of all the bodily sensations that had been suspended so long. More than that, #was falling. My long-paralyzed stomach gave a twist and the adrenalin and like substances that my brain had been longing to pour into my blood for thepast # years -- give or take three months -- pumped in and my heart began to thud in a healthily excited manner. As I fell I turned and the sun was out of my eyes and I looked out. at a black sky and down at fluffy white clouds far below. Was this it? Dirt, the mysterious homeland of mankind? There was no telling, but it was still a distinct pleasure to be somewhere and somewhen without things dissolving around me. All of my equipment seemed still tobe with me and when I touched the control on my wrist I could feel the tug of the grav-chute taking hold. Great. I turned it off and dropped free again until I felt the first traces of thin atmosphere pulling at the suit. By the time I came to the clouds I was falling gently as a leaf, plunging feet first into their wet embrace. I slowed the rate of fall even more as I dropped blind, rubbing at the condensation on the faceplate of the spacesuit. Then I was out of the clouds, turned the control to hover and took a slow look around at this new world, perhaps the home of mankind, surely my home forever. Above me the clouds hung like a soft wet ceiling. There were trees meters below, the Retails blurred by my wet faceplate! I had to try the atmosphere here sooner or later and, hoping my remote ancestors were not methane breathers', I cracked the faceplate and took a quick sniff. Not bad. Gold and a little thin at this height, but sweet and fresh. And it didn't kill me. I opened the faceplate wide, breathed deeply and looked down at the world below. Pleasant enough from this altitude. Rolling green hills covered with trees of some kind, blue lakes, roads cutting sharply through the valleys, some sort of city on the horizon boiling out clouds of pollution. I'd stay as far away from that as possible for the time being. I had to establish myself first, see about... IF the sound bad been pushing at my awareness, a thin humming like an insect. But there shouldn't hav# been insects at this altitude. I would.have thought of this sooner if my attention hadn't been on the landscape below. Just about the time I realized this the humming grew to a roar and I twisted to look over my shoulder. Gaping. At the globular flying craft supported by an archaic rotating airfoil of some kind, behind the transparent sides of which sat a man gaping back at me. I slammed the wrist controller to protecting cloud. Not a good beginning. The pilot had had a fiie look at me, although there was always the chance that he might have disbelieved what he had seen. But he had believed. The communicators in this age had to be most sophisticated, the military's preparedness or paranoia equally so, because within a few minutes I heard the rumble of powerful jets below. They circled a bit, roaring and bellowing, and one even shot up through the clouds. I had a quick glimpse of an arrow-like silver form before it was gone, the clouds roiling and seething in its wake. It was time to leave. The lateral control on a grav-chute isn't too precise but I wobbled off through the clouds to put as much room between myself and those machines as I could. When I had not heat'd them for some time I risked a drop down just below the cloud levej. Nothing. In any direction. I snapped my faceplate shut and cut all the power; The drop in free fall could not have taken very long, though it seemed a lot longer. I had unhealthy visions of detectors clattering, computers digesting the information and pointing mechanical fingers, mighty machines of war whistling and roaring toward me. I rotated as I fell, squinting my eyes for the first sight of shining metal. Nothing at all happened. Some large white birds flapped slowly along, veering off with sharp squawks as I plunged by. There was the blue mirror of a lake below and I gave a nudge of power that moved me toward it. If the pursuit did show up Icould drop under the surface and out of detection range. When I was below the level of the surrounding hills with the water rushing up uncomfortably close below, I slammed on the power. I shuddered and groaned and felt the straps cutting deep into my flesh. The grav-chute on my back grew uncomfortably warm, though I began to sweat for a different reason. It was still a long fall -- to .water hard as steel from this height. ing, my feet were in the water. Not a bad lairing ait all' There was still #)# sign of pursuit as I lifted a bit above the surface and drifted toward the gray cliff that fell directly into the lake on the far side. The air smelled good when I opened the faceplate again -- and everything was silent. No voices, no sounds of machines. Nor signs of human habitation. When I came closer to the shore I heard the wind in the leaves but. that was all. Great. I needed a place to hole up until I, got my barings and this would do just fine. The gray clifitumed out to be a wall of solid rock. Inaccessible and high. I drifted along its face until I found a ledge wide enough to !sit on, so I sat. It felt good. Been a long time since t sat down," I said aloud, pleased to hear my voice. Yeah, my evil subconscious snapped# ack, about thirty-three thousand years. I was depressed again and wishod that I hs a drink. But that was the one essential item I had neglected to bring, a mistake I would have to rectify quickly . With the power cu, the spacesuit began to warm up in the sun and I stripped it off, placing all the items of equipment against the rock far from the edge. What next? I felt Something crunch in my side pocket and pulled out a handful of hideously expensive and broken cigars. A tragedy. By some miracle few were intact. I snapped the end to ignite it and breathed deeply. Wonderful! I smoked for a bit, my legs dangling over the drop below, and let my morale build up to its normal, highly efficient level. A fish broke through the surface of the lake and splashed back; some small birds twittered in the trees and I thought about the next step. I needed shelter, but the more I moved aroui to find it the more chance I had of being discovered. Why couldn't I stay right here? Among the assorted junk I had been draped with at the last minute was a laboratory tool called a masser. I had started to complain at the time, but it had been hung on my waist before I had managed to say anything...! considered it now. The handgrip that contained the power source blossomed out into a bulbous body which thinned again into a sharp, spikelike prod. A field was generated at the end that had the interesting ability of being able to concentrate most forms of matter by increasing the binding energy in the niolecules. This would crunch thein togetherinto a smaller space, though they of course, still had the same, mass. Some things, depending upon the material and the power used, could be compressed up to . one-half their original size. At the other end the ledge narrowed until it vanished. I walked along it as far as I safely could. Reaching out, I pressed the spike IF to the surface of the gray stone and thumped the button. There a sharp crack as a compressed slab of stone the size of my hand fell from the face of the cliff and slid down to the ledge. It felt heavy, more like lead than rock. Flipping it out into the lake, I turned up the power and went to work. Once I got the knack of the thing the job went fast. I found I could generate an almost spherical field that would detach a solid ball of compressed stone as big as my head. After I had struggled to roll a couple of these heavyweights over the edge -- and almost rolled down with them -- I worked the rock away at an angle, then cut out above this slope. The spheres would crunch free, bang down onto the slope and roll off the edge in a short arc, to splash noisily into the water below. Every once in a while I would stop, listen and look. I was still alone. The sun was close to the horizon before I had a neat little cave in the rock face that would just hold all my goods and myself. An animal's den that I longed to crawl into. Which I did, after a quick floating trip down to the lake for some water. The concentrates stomach knew that I had dined, though not well. As the first stars began to come out I planned the next step in my conquest of Dirt, or Earth, whichever the name was. , M y time voyage 'must have been more fatiguing than I bad thought. The next thing I realized was that the sky was black and a great orange fuU moon was sitting on the mountains. My bottom was chilled from contact with the cold rock and I was stiff from sleeping in a cramped sitting position. Come mighty changer of history, I groaned as my muscles creaked and my joints cracked. Get out and get to work. That was exactly what I had to do. Action would bring reaction. As long as I holed up in this den any planning I might do would be valueless since I had no facts to operate with. As yet I didn't even know if this was the right world, or  the right time -- or anything else. I had to get out and get cracking. Though there was one thing that I could do -- that I should have done first thing upon arrival. Mumbling curses at my own stupidity, I dug through the assorted junk I had brought with me and came up with the black box of the time-energy detector. I used a small light to illuminate it and my heart thudded down on top of my stomach when I saw that the needle was floating limply. Time was not being warped anywhere on this world. "Ha-ha you moron," I called out loudly, cheered bythe sound of the voice I liked the most, "This thing would work a lot better if you turned on the power." An oversight. Taking a deep breath, I threw the swhdi. Still nothing. The needle hung as limp as my deflated hopes. There was still a good chance that the time triflers were around and just happened to have their machine turned olT at the present moment. I hoped. To work. I secreted a few handy devices about my person and disengaged the grav-chute from the spaoesuit. It still had about a half charge in its power pack, which should me up and down the cliff a number of times. I slipped my arms through the straps, stepped off the le and touched the controls so that my fallchanged to an arc that pointed in the direction of the nearest road I had seen on the way down. Floating low over the trees, I checked landmarks and direction constantly. The outsize and gleamingly bedialed watch I always wear on my left wrist does a lot more things than ten the time. A touch of the right button illuminated the needle of the radio compass that was zeroed in on my home base. I drifted silently on. Moonlight reflected from a smooth surface that cut through the forest and I floated to the ground. Enough light filtered through the boughs for me not to need my flash as I made my way to the road, covering the last few meters with extreme caution. It was empty in both directions and the night was silent. I bent and examined the surface. It was made of some hard white substance, not metal or plastic, that appeared to have tiny grains of sand in it. Most uninteresting. Staying close to the edge I turned in the direction of the city I had glimpsed and started walking. Progress was slow but I was saving the power in the grav-chute. What happened next I can attribute only to carelessness, tempered with fatigue, and seasoned by my ignorance of this world. My mind wandered to Angelina and my friends in the Corps, all of whom existed only in my thoughts. They now had no more reality than my memory of characters I had read about in a noveK This was a very depressing idea and I brooded over it rather than rejecting it, so I was taken completely unaware by the sudden roar of' engines. At this moment I was rounding a turn in the road that had apparently been blasted through a small hill, since there were steep banks on each side. I should have considered being caught in this cut and have planned some means to avoid it. Now, while I considered the advisability of climbing the slope, of lifting up by grav-chute or using some other means of escape, bright lights shone around the turn ahead and the roar grew louder. In the end I only dropped to one side IF of the road, into the ditch that ran there, lay down and tried to think smalt, burying my face in my arm. My clothing was a neutral dark srav and might blend into th ground. Then the shuttering roar was upon me, next to me. Bright lights washed over me and were gone. I sat up and looked after the four strange vehicles that had passed. Details were not clear, since I saw them only as silhouettes against their own headlights, but they seemed very narrow, like monocycles, and eh had a little red light at the back. Their sound quieted, became mixed with a kind of honking like some animal sound and a shrill screeching. They were slowing. Tht must have seen me. Cracking, barking sounds echoed in the cut as the lights turned full circle and headed back in my direction. IV guy make the first mistake: one of my older mottos. I could attempt to escape, climbing or floating, but whoever these people were they might have weapons and I would make a peachy target. Even if I did escape I would only draw attention to this area. Better to see who and what they were first. Turning my back, so their lights wouldn't blind me, I waited patiently as the machines rumbled up and stopped in an arc around me, motors coupling and lights pointed at me. I dos my eyes to slits to shield them from the glare and listened to the shange sounds the riders niade gabbling to each other, not one word of which I found comprehensible. The chances were good that my clothing was on the exotic side as far as they were concerned. They must have reached some agreement because the eiine on one of the invisible conveyances clattered into silence and the driver stepped forward into the light. We exchued looks mutnak interest. He was a Kttte shfMter thanI but looked taller because of the bucket-shaped metal hekmet he was wearing. It was studded with rivets smd bom a tali spike on the top, very unattractive, as was the rest of his dress. Alt black plastic with shining knobs and clasps, brought to the acme of vulgarity by a stylized skull and crossbones on the chest that was picked out with fake gems of some kind. "Kryzl prtzblk?" he said in an insulting manner, allowing his jaw to protrude at the same time. I smiled to show that I was a friendly, good-natured fellow and responded in the warmest fashion. "You'll look uglier dead than alive, bowb, and that's what you. will be if you keep talkii to me that way." He looked puzzled at that and there was more incomprehensible chit-chat back and forth. The first driver was joined by one of the others, equally strangely garbed, who pointed excitedly to my arm. All of them looked at my wrist chronometer and there were shrill cries of interest that changed to anger when I put my hand behind my back. "Prubl!" the first thug said, stepping forward with his hand out. There was a sharp snik and a gleaming blade .appeared in his other fist. Now this was language I understood and I almost smiled at the sight. No honest men these, uiess the lav of the land decreed drawing weapons on strangers . and attempting to rob them. Now that I knew the rules I coiild play by them. "Prubl, prubl?" I cried, shrinking away and raising my hands in a gesture of despair. "Prubl drubir the evilly grin' ning lout shouted jumpingtowards me. "How's that for prubl?" I asked as I kicked up and caught him on the wrist with my toe. The knife sailed away into the darkness and he squeak with pain, the squeak turning into a vanishing gurgle as my pointed fingers stabbed him in the throat. By this time all the eyes must be On me so I triggered a miniflare into my hand from my sleeve holdput and dropped it to the ground, before me, closing my eyes just before it exploded. The glare burned hot on my lids and I saw little floating blobs of light when I opened them again. I fared a lot better than my attackers, who were all temporarily blinded, if their groans and complaints meant anything. None of them stopped me as I walked behind them and gave each in turn a sharp boot where it would do the most good. They all yiped with pain and ran in little circles until two collided by chance and began to beat each other unmercifully. While they were amusing themselves in this manner I examined their conveyances. Strange things with only two wheels and no sign of a gyro to stabilize them in motion. Each had a single seat on which the operator sat, straddling the thing to make it go. They looked very dangerous and I had no desire at all to learn to operate one. What was I to do with these creatures? I had never enjoyed silenced that way. If they were the criminals they appeared to be, there was a good chance they would not report the event to the authorities. Criminals! Of course, just the kind of informants I needed. One would be enough -- the first one preferably since I would have no compunction about being stern with him. He was moaning his way back to IF consciousness, but a whiff of sleepgas put him well under. Around his waist was a wide, metal-studded bdt that looked fairly strong. I fastened this to one of my belt clips and held him in friendly embrace under the arms. Then thumbed the grav-chute control. l#lifted, floating up and away from the noisy little group, arrowing back toward my lakeside retreat. Their companion's vanishing act would be singularly mysterious and even if they reported it to the authorities they would accomplish nothing. I was going to hole up with my dozing companion for a few days and learn the speech of this land. My accent was sure to be of the lowest, but that could be corrected later. My retreat gaped its welcoming mouth at me and I zipped in, dropping my limp burden ungracefully on the stone. By the time he came groaning back to awareness I was completely prepared and had all the equipment laid out. I pufled pleasurably on a cigar from my pocket humidor and said nothing while he went through a painful series of adjustments. There was plenty of lip-smacking before he opened his eyes and sat up, only to moan and clutch at his head. My sleep gas does have some painful after-effects. But memory of his knife aimed at me did much to steel me to his suffering. Then came the wild look around, the boggling at me and my equipment, the crafty look at the black opening of the entrance and the apparently accidental way he got his # beneath him. To spring out of the opening. To land smash bn his face as the cable that secur his ankle to the rock brought him down. "Now the games are over and we get to work," I told him, not unkindly, as I sat him back agaipst the wall and tightened the device about his wrist. I had rigged it while he slept and it was simple but effective. It contained a., blood pressure and skin resistance gauge with readouts On the control box that I held before me. A basic form of lie detector. It also contained a negative reinforcement circuit. I normally wouldn't use this technique on a human being -- it was usually reserved for training laboratory animals -- but this present human being was an exception. We were playing by his rules and this short. cut would save a lot of time. When he began shouting what I am sure were obnoxious insults and stOrtSd to tear at the box I pressed the reinforcement button. He shrieked and thrashed about enthusiastically as the electric current hit him. It wasn't really that bad; I had tried it on myself and set the level at slightly painful, the sort of pain one could easily endure biit would prefer not to. "Now we begin," I said, "but let me prepare myself first." He looked on in wide-eyed silence while I adjusted the metal pads of the memorygram on my temples and activated the circuit. "The key word is -- " I looked at my companion -- "ugly. Now we begin." There was a pile of simple objects at my side and I picked up the first one and held it out beforeme so he could see it. When he looked at it I said rock loudly, then was sUent. He was silent as well and after a moment I triggered the reinforcement circuit and he jumped at the sudden burst of pain and looked around wildly. "Rock," I repeated in a quiet, patient voice. It took him a while to get the idea, but he learned. There was a shock for cursing or saying anything irrelevant, and a double shock when he tried to lie about a word; my polygraph kept me informed about that. He had enough of this quite quickly and found it easier to supply the word I wanted. We quickly ran through my supply of objects and shifted to drawings and acted out motions. I accepted the phre I don't know -- .as long as it wasn't used too often -- and my store of words grew. Under the pressure of the microcurrents of the memorygram the new vocabulary was jammed into my cortex, but not without some painful side effects. When my head began to throb I took a painpill and went on with the word game. It didn't take long to file away enough words to switch to the second part of the learning process, grammar and structure. What is your namdt I thought to myself and added the code word ugly. "What . '... name?" I said aloud. A very unattractive, language indeed... "Slasher." "Me... name... Jim." "Lemme go, I ain't done nuttin to you." "Learn first... leave later. Now tell, what year?" "What year what?" "Wha year now, dum-dum?" difierent ways until rization of what I was asking finally penetrated the solid bone of his skull. I was beginning to sweat. "Oh, the year. It's nineteen-seventy-five. Yes, June the nineteenth, nineteen-seventy-five." Right on the target! Across all those centuries and millennia the time-helix had snapped me with precise accuracy. I made a mental note of thanks to Professor Coypu and the other vanished scientists and, since they lived on only in my memory, this was probably the only way to send the message. Much cheered by this information I got on with the language lesson. The memorygram clutched onto IF everything he said, organized it and jammed it deep into my bruised synapses. I stifled a groan and took another painpill. By sunrise I felt I had enough command of the language to add to it by myself and switched ofl the machine. My companion fell over, asleep, and clunk his head on the rock without waking. I let him sleep and disentangled us both from the electronic equipment. After the nightlong session I was tired myself but a stimtab took care of that. Hunger growled plaintively in my gut and I broke out some rations. Slasher awoke soon after and shared my breakfast, eating one of the bars only after he saw me break off the end and consume it myself. I belched with satisfaction and he echoed eructingly. He eyed me and my equipment for some time before he made a positive statement. "I know who you are." "So tell me." "You're from Mars, dat's what." "What's Mars?"' "The planet, you know." "Yeah, you might be right. It don't matter. You gonna do what I said, help me get some loot?" "I told you. I'm on parole. If I'm grabbed they'll throw the key away." "Don't let it bug you. Stick with me and they won't lay a finger on you. You'll be 'rolling in bucks. Do you have any of these bucks? I want to see what they look like.' "No!" he said, and his hand went to a bulge in a flap of material afflxed to his lower garments. By this time I could detect his simple lies without my equipment. Sleepgas quieted hiin and I worked a sort of hide envelope from his clothing that contain flimsy scraps of green paper, undoubtedly the bucks he. had referred to not having. To look at them was to laugh! The cheapest copying machine could turn out duplicates of these by the barrelful -- unless there were hidden means for authentication. To check I went over them wifli the most delicate equipment and found no trace of chemical, physical or radioactive identification. Amazing. The paper did ap pear to contain short threads of some kind of substance, but a duplicator would print replicas of these on the surface which would do fine. If only I had a duplicator. Or did I have a duplicator? Toward the end Professor Coypu and his helpers had been hanging every kind of equipment on me that they could. I rooted through the pile and, sure enough, there was a tiny duplicator. It was loaded with a block of extremely dense material that was expanded in some cellular fashion inside the machine to produce a sheet'of smooth white plastic on which the copies were made. After a number of adjustments I managed to reduce the quality of the .pltk uittd it was as rough and crumpled as the bucks. Now when I touched the copy button the machine produced a buck that appeared a duplicate of the priginal. The largest denomination, Slasher had was a ten buck note and I made a number of copies of this. Of course they all had the same serial number, but my experience has been that people never look very closely at the money they accept. next phase of my. penetration of the society on this, primitive planet, Earth. (Ihad discovered that Dirt was nofcbrrect.and had another meaning altogether.) I arranged about my person the, equipment I might n and left the remainder in the cave with the spacesuit. It would be here whenever I needed it. Slasher mumbled and snored when I floated him back across the lake and low over the trees towards the road. There was more trafflc on it now during the day, I could hear the vehicles rumbling by, so I once more dropped into the forest. Before waking Slasher I buried the gravchute with a radio transponder that would lead me back to it if need be. "What, what?" Slasher asked, ' sifting up as soon as the, antidote took effect. He looked uncomprehendingly around at the forest. "On your hoofs," I told him. "We gotta move out of here." He shambled after me, still half asleep, though he woke up rather quickly when I ruffled the wad of money under his nose. "How do these bocks look to you?" V 'Ujreat -- but I thought you didn't have any bread?" "I got enough food, but not enough money. So I made these. Are they okay?" "A-okay, I never seen better." He flipped through them with the appraising eye of the professional. "The only way you can tell is that the numbers are all the same. This is high-class green." He parted with them only reluctantly. A man of little imagination and ho compunction; just what I heieded. The sight of the bucks seemed to have driven all fear of me from him and he actively joined in planning to obtain even more money as we trudged along the road. "That outfit you're wearing, it's okay from a distance, like now, no one in the cars notices nuttin. But we gotta get you some threads. There's kind of a general .store foot of this hill. You wait away from the road while I go in and buy what you need. In fact maybe we get some wheels before that, my kind of little factory there with a parking lot. We'll see what they're selling." IF The factory proved to be a squat squarish building with a number of chimneys that were pufHng out smoke and pollution. An assortment of multicolored vehicles were arraied to one side and, following Slasher's example, I bent low as we moved quickly to the nearest one in the outside row. When he was sure we were unobserved my companion released a catch on a swollen purple thing, with what appeared to be a row of metal teeth at one end, and lifted a large lid I looked in and gasped at the excessively complex and primitive propulsion engine it contained. I was indeed in the past. In response to my questions, Slasher described it as he shorted some wires that seemed to control the ignition. "An intoinal combustion engine we call it. Almost new, should be three hundred horses there. Climb in and we'll make tracks out of here before anybody sees us." I made a mental note to inquire later about the theory behind this intoinal combustion. From earlier conversation I understood that horses were a rather large quadruped, so perhaps it was an animal-miniaturizing process to get a large number of them into the machine. But, primitive as the device looked, it certainly moved quickly enough. Slasher manipulated the controls and twisted the large wheel and we shot out onto the road and were away -- apparently without being detected. I was more than satisfied to let Slasher drive while I observed this world that I had arrived on. "Where is all the mon kept? You know, like the place where they lock it up." "You must mean the banks. Places with thick walls, big vaults, armed guards. They got at least one in every town." "And the bigger the town, the 'bigger the bank?" "You're catdiin on." "Then drive on to the nearest big town and find the biggest bank. I need plenty of bread. So we'll clean it out tonight." Slasher gaped in awe. "You can't mean it! They got all kinds of alarms and stuff." "I laugh at their stone-age gadgets. Just find the town, find the bank, then find some food and drink. Tonight I'll make you rich." V robbed a bank more easily, or cracked a simpler crib. The establishment I selected was in the center of a city with the improbable sounding name of Hartford. It was severely constructed of gray stone and all the openings were covered with thick metal bars -- but these defenses were negated by the fact that other buildings were joined to the bank on both sides. A rat rarety enters by the front door. It was early evening when we set out and Slasher was jittery and nervous, despite the large quantity of low qudity alcoholic beverage he had consumed. "We oughta wait until later," he complained. "Plenty of people are still in the street." "Just how I want it. They won't pay no attention to a couple more. Now park this heap around the corner where we planned and bring the bags." I carried my tools in a small case while Slasher followed me with the two large pieces of luggage we had purchased. The buildii ahead, on the left of the bank, was dark and the outer doer was surelylocked. No trouble. I had looked rd the lock earlier in the day and had determined that it presented no problem at all. The device in my left hand neutralized the alarm while I inserted the lockpick with my right. It opened so easily that Slasher did not even have to stop but went right on by me with the bags. Not a soul in the street paid us the slightest attention. A corridor led to some more locked doors, which I passed through with the same ease, until we reached an ofHce in the rear. "This room should share a wall with the bank. Now I'm gonna And out," I said. I whistl under my breath as I went to work. This was by no means my first bank robbery and I had no intention of making it my last. Of all the varied forms of crime, bank robbery is the most satisfactory to both the individual and to society. The individual of course gets a lot of mon -- that goes without saying -- and he benefits society by putting large amounts of cash back into circulation. The economy is stimulated, small businessmen prosper, people read about the crime with great interest, and the police have a chance to exercise their various Skills. Good for all. Though ( have heard foolish peorie complain that it hurts the bank. This is arrant nonsense. AH banks are insured, so they lose nothing, wfole the sums involved are mimMcule-m the overall operation of the insuring firm, where the mori that hatypen is that a microscopically smaller dividend will be paid at the end of the year. Little enough price to pay for all the good caused. It was as a benefactor of mankind, not a thief, that I moved the echo sounder along the wall. A large opening on the other side; the bank without a doubt. There were a number of cables and pipes in the wall, power and water I presumed, along with some that were obviously alarms. I marked their positions on the wall until the pattern was clear. One area was free of all obstructions. I outlined it. "We go in here," I said. "How we gonna break the wall IF down?" Slasher swung between elation and fear, wanting the money, afraid he would be caught. He was obviously a petty criminal and this was the biggest job he had ever been on. "Not break, dum-dum," I said, not unkindly, holding up the masser. "We just convince it to open before us." Of course he had no idea what I was talking about, but sight of the gleaming instrument seemed to reassure him. I had reversed the device so instead of increasing the binding energy of molecules it reduced their attraction close to zero. With slow precision I ran the point of the device completely over the chosen area of wall, then turned it off and stowed it away. "Nuttin happened," Slasher conmlained. "Sotnetin will now." I pushed the wall with my hand and the entire area I had prepared fell away with a soft whoosh, sliding down like so much fine dust. Which it had become. We looked through into the brightly lit interior of the bank. W E Were invisible from the street when we crawled through and crept along behind the high counter where the tellers normally sat. The builders had thoughtfully put their vault in the lower depths of the building and out of sight of the street, so once down the steps we could straighten up and go about our task in comfort. In rapid sequence I went through a pair of locked doors and a grUl made of thick steel bars. Their locks and alarms were too simple to discuss. The vault door itself looked more formidable yet proved the simplest of them all. "Look at dat," I called out enthusiastically. "There is a time lock here that opens automatically sometime tomorrow." "I knew it," Slasher wailed. "Let's get out before the alarms go off -- " As he ran for the stairs I tripped him and put one foot on his chest while I explained. "That is whdt they call good, dum-dum. All we have to do to open the thing is to advance the clock so it thinks it is the morning. "Impossible! It's sealed behind a couple of inches of steel !" Of course he had no way of knowing that an ordinary serviceman's manipulator is designed to work through casings of any kind. When I felt the field engage the cogs I rotated it and the dials whirled and his eyes bulged -- and the mechanism gave a satisfied click and the door swung open. "Bring da bags," I ordered, entering the vault. Whistling and humming gaily we packed the two bags solid with the tightly wrapped bundles of crisp notes. Slasher closed and sealed his firet, then mumbled impatiently at my slowness. "What's da rush?" I asked him, closing the case and assembling my tools. "You gotta take the time to do things the right way." As I put the last of my instruments away I noticed a needle jump, then hold steady. Interesting. I adjusted the Held strength then stood with it in my hand and looked around. Slasher was on the other side of the vault fumbling with some long metal boxes. "And what are you doing?" I asked in my warmest voice. "Takin a shufty to see if maybe there are some jewels in these safe deposit boxes." "Oh, that is what you are doing. You shoulda asked me:" "I cap do it myself." Surly and cocksure. "Yes, but I can do it without setting off the silent alarm to the police station." Cold and angry. "As you have just done." The blood drained from his face nicely, his hands shook so he dropped the box, then , he jumped about to bend and pick up the satchel of money. "Dum-dum yo-yo," I snarled and booted hard the inviting target present. "Now get that bag and get out of here and start the car. I'm right behind you." Slasher stumbled and scrambled up the stairs and I followed more cdmly after, taking a moment to close all the gates and grUls behind me in order to make things as difflcult as possible for the police. They would know the bank had been entered, but would not know it had been robbed until they rousted out some bank official and opened the vault. By which time we would be long gone. But as I came up the stairs I heard the squeal of tires and saw, through the front windows, a police car pulling up outside. They had certainly been fast, incredibly so for an ancient and primitive society like this one. Though perhaps that was why; certainly crime and crime detection must consume a large part of everyone's energies. However I wast no time philosophizing over their arrival, but pushed the bags ahead of me as I crawled behind the tellers' counter. As I was going through the hole to the other building I heard keys rattling in the outer door locks. Just right. As they came, in I would go out -- and this proved to be the case. When I looked out at the street I saw that all of the occupants of the police car had entered the bank while a small, but curious, crowd had gathered. With their backs towards me. I exited slowly and strode towards the corner. These neolithic fuzz were certainly fast on their feet. It must come from running down and catching their own game or something. Because I had not reached the corner before they popped out IF of the buOdii behind me, tooting painfully on shrill whistles. Th had ehtered the bank, seen the hole in the wall, then retraced my path. I took one quick look at them, all shining teeth, Uue uniforms, brass buttons and guns, and started running. Around the comer and into the car. cept that the street was empty and the car was gone. Slasher must have decided that he had earned enough for one evening and had driven away and left me for the law. VI I AM not suggesting that I may be made of sterner stuft than most men. Though I do feel that most men when presented with a situation like this -- # years in the past, a load of stolen money, the law in hot pursuit -- might give way to more than a little suggestion of panic. Only conditionings and the fact that I had been in this position far too often during my life -- kept me running smoothly while I considered what to do next. In a fev moments some heavyfooted minions of the law would come barreling around the corner while, I am sure, a radio alarm would be drawing in reinforcements to cut me off. Think fast, Jim. I did. Before I had taken five more paces nay entire plan for escape was outlined, detailed, set into type, printed and bound into a little booklet with page one open in my mind's before me. First -- get off the street. As I jumpedinto the next doorway I dropped the money and let a minigrenade drop into my Angers from my holdout. This fttted into the round opening of the keyhole very nicely and, with an impressive thud, it blew out the lock and part of the frame. My pursuers were not in sight yet so I Imitated until they appeared before pushing open the ruined door. Hoarse shouts and more whistle Mowing signaled that I had been observed. The door opened into a long corridor and . I was at the far end of it, hands raised in surrender when the guntoting law hesitatingly peeked in thropgh the opening. "Doht shToot, coppers," I shouted. "I surrender, a poor young man led to crime by evil companions." "Don't move or we'll hole you," they growled happily, entering warily with strong lights flashing into my eyes. I simply atood there, fillers groping for empty air, until the lights slid away and there was the double thud of falling bodies. There should have been since there was more sleepgas than air in that hallway. Being careful to breathe through the filter plugs in my nostrils I stripped the uniform from the snorii figure that was closest to my size; cursing the crude arrangement of fastenings, and put it on over my own clothes. Then I took the hand weapon ,he had been carrying and restored it to its holster, picked up my bags again and left, walking back up the street towards the bank. Frightened civUians peered out of doorways like animals from their burrows and at the corner I was met by another police car. As I had guessed a number of them were converging on this spot. "I have the loot," I called in to the solid figure behind the wheel: 'T'm takin it back to da bank. We have them cornered, da rats, a whole gang. Through that door. Go get them!" --  This last advice was unneeded because the vehicle had already left. The first police conveyance still stood where I had last seen it and, under the cow-like eyes of the spectators, I threw the bags into the front seat and climbed in. "Gowan beat it. Da show's over," I shouts as I groped among the unfamiliar instruments. There were an awful lot of them, enough to fly a spaceship with let ajone this squalid groundcar. Nothing' happened. The crowd milled back then milled forward. I was sweating slightly. Only then did I notice that the tiny keyhole was empty and remembered -- belatedly -- something Slasher had said about using keys to start these vehiclM; with. Sirens grew louder on all sides as I groped and fumbled through the odd selection of pockets and wallets on the uniform I wore. Keys! An entire ring of them. Chortling I pushed one after another into the keyhole until I realized that they were all too big to fit. Outside the fascinated crowd pressed close, greatly admiring my performance. "Back,-i)ack," I cried, and struggled the weapon from its holster to add menace to my words. E vidently it had been primed and was ready to be actuated and I inadvertently touched the wrong control. There was a terrible explosion, cloud of smoke and the weapon jumped from my hand. Some kind of projectile hurtled through the metal roof of the car and my thumb felt quite sore. At least the spectators left. Hurriedly. As th ran in all directions I saw that one of the police cars was coming up behind me and I felt that things were just not going as well as they should. There must be other keys. I groped again, throwing the miscellaneous items I discovered onto the seat beside me until there were no more. The other car stopped behind mine and the doors opened. Was that a glint of metal in that small hide case? It was. A pair of keys. One of them slid gently into IF the correct oriflce as the two minions of law and order walked up on both sides of the car. "What's going on here?" the nearest calledout as the key turned and there was the groaning of an engine and a metallic clashing. "Trouble!" I said as I fumbled with the metal levers. "Get outta there you!" he said, pulling out hisweapon. "Matter of life and death!",! shouted in a cracked voice as I stamped on one of the pedals as I had seen Slasher do. The car 'roared with power, the wheels squealed; it leaped to life, hurtling. In the wrong direction, backward. There was an intense crashing and clanging of glass and metal and the police vanished. I groped for the controls again. One of the fuzz appeared ahead, raising his weapon,lut jumped for his life as I found the right combination and the car roared at him. The road was clear and I was on my way. With the police in hot pursuit. Before ! reached the corner the other car started up and tore forward. Colored lights began rotating on top of it and its siren wailed. I drove with one hand and fumbled with my own controls -- spraying liquid on the windscreen then seeing it wiped away by moving arms, hearing loud music, warming my feet with a hot blast of air -- until I also had a screaming siren and, perhaps, a flashing light. We tore down the wide road in this manner and I felt that this was not the way to esfcape. The police knew their city and their vehicles and could radio ahead to cut me OB'. As soon as I realized this I pulled at the wh#el and turned into the next street. Since I was going a bit faster than I should the tires screeched and the car bounced up onto the sidewalk and caromed off a building before shuddering back into the roadway. My pursuers dropped behind with this maneuin this same dramatic manner, but were still after me when I barreled around the next corner. With these two right-aile turns I had succeeded in reversing my course and was now headed back toward the scene of the crime. ness but was really the safest thing to do. In a few moments, siren wailing and lights going, I was. safe in the middle of a pack of screaming flashing blue and white vehicles. It was lovely. They were turning and backing and getting in each other's way and I did what I could to increase the confusion. It was quite interesting with much cursing and the shaking of fists from windows and I would have stayed longer if reason had not prevailed. When the excitement reached its merriest I worked my way out and slid my vehicle around the corner. I was not followed. At a more reasonable pace, siren silenced and lights lowered, I trundled along the street lookii for a haven. I could never escape in the pdke car and I had no intention of doing so; what I needed was arat hole to crawl into. A luxurious one, I do not believe in doii things halfway. Not very much farther on I saw my goal, ablaze with lights and signs, glittering with ornament, a hotel of the plush and luxury class almost a stone's throw from the site of the crime. The last (dace where I would be looked for. I hoped. Certain chances have to be taken always. At the next turning I parked the car, stripped off the uniform, put a bundle of bills in my pocket, then trundled back toward' the hotel with my two bags. When the car was found they would probably think I had changed vehicles, an obvious ploy, and the area of search would widen. "Hey, you," I called out to the uniformed functionary who stood proudly before the entrance. "Carry these bags." My tone was insulting, my manners rude and he would have ignored me had I not spoken in another language and pressed a large denomination banknote into his hand. A quick glimpse of this produced smiles and a false obsequiousness as he grabbed for my bags, shuffling alter me as I entered the lobby. Glowing wood paneling, soft rugs, discreet lighting, lovely women in low-cut dresses accompanied by elderiy men with low-hung bellies -- this was the right place. There were a number of rais eyebrows at my rough clothing as I strode across to the reception desk. The individual behind it looked coldly down a loi patrician nose and I could see the ice already starting to form. I thawed it with a wad of money on the counter before him. "You have the pleasure of meetaire," I told him. "This is for you." The bills vanished even as I offered them. ""I have just come back from the boonies and I want the best room you got." "Something might be arranged, but only the Emperor Suite is available and that costs -- " ' ."Don't bodder me with money. Take this loot and let me know when you want more." "Yes, Well, perhaps something can be arraied. If you would be so kind as to sign your name here -- " "What's your name?" "Me? Why, it's Roscoe Amberdexter." "Ain't that a coincidence- that's my name too, but you can caU me sir. Must be a very common name around here. So you sign for me since we both got the same name." I beckoqed and he leaned forward and I spoke in a hoarse whisper. "I don't want no one to know I am here. Everyone's IF after my loot. Send up the manager if he wants more information." What he would get would be money which I was sure would do just as well. Buoyed on a wave of greenbacks the rest was clear sailing. I was ushered to my quarters and I bestowed largesse on my two bagcarriers for being so smart they hadn't dropped them. They opened and shut things, showed me all the controls. I had one of them call room service for much food and drink. They left in the best of humors, pockets bulging. I put the bag of money in the closet and opened the smaller case. And froze. The indicator needle on the temporal energy detector had moved and was pointing steadily toward the window and the world outside. M y hands wanted to shake but I would not let them as I took out the detector and placed it gently on the floor. The field strength was # and I made a rapid note of this. Then I dropped and sighted along the needle at the exact spot under the window where it pointed. Running over quickly, I marked a big X on this spot, then rushed back to check it. As I took the second sighting the needle began to drift and the meter dropped to zero. But I had them! Whoever they were, they were operating out of this era. They had used their apparatus once and they were sure to use it again. When they did I would be waiting for them. For the first time since I had been shipped back to this crude barbarian world I was warmed a small spark of hope. After a hearty dinner and a snowfall of fluttering banknotes I went to sleep. Not for long though. A two-hour zonk pill put me under in the deepest possible sleep. I awoke feeling much more human. I found a number of interesting bottles in the bar in the next room, some of them rather palatable, and I sat down with a Hlled glass in front of a glass-eyed instrument called a teevee. As I had guessed my accent in the local language left a lot to be desired and I wanted td listen to someone who spoke a better form of it. This was not easy to find. To begin with it was hard to teil. which were the educational channels and which were there for entertainment. I found what appeared to be a morality play in historical form -- all the men wore wide-brimmed hats and rode horses. But the total vocabulary used could not have been more than one hundred words and most of the characters were killed by shooting before I could discover what it was all about. Guns seemed to play an important role in most of the dramas I watched, though this was varied with sadism and assorted kinds of mayhem. AH this violence and hurtling from one place to another in various conveyances did not leave the people much time for intersexual activity; a brief kiss was the only manifestation of affection or libido that I saw. Most of the dramas were also difficult to follow since they kept being interrupted by brief playlets and illustrated lectures about the purchase of various consumer goods. By dawn I had had enough of this and my speech had improved only microscopically so I kicked in tho glass picture tube as fitting comment and went to wash myself in a pink room filled with museum pieces out of the history of plumbing. As soon as the shops-opened in the morning I had a number of hotel employees at work with a great deal of money and my purchases soon poured in. New clothing to fit my high station, with expensive luggage to carry it in. Plus a number of maps, a carefully made gadget called a magnetic compass and a book on the principles of navigation. It was simplicity itself to determine the exact direction to which the detector had pointed and to transfer this to a local map and get a fairly good approximation of the distance in the measurement units called mUes to the source of the time energy field. A long black line on the map gave me my direction, a slash across it to show distance -- and I had my target. The two lines crossed at udiat appeared to be a-major center of population, in fact the largest one on this map. It was called, quaintly. New York City. There was no indication where Old York City was and it did not matter. I knew where I had to go. L eaving the hotel was more like a royal abdication than a simple parting and there were many glad cries for nie to hurry back. As well there might be. A hired car whirled me out to the airport and ready hands rushed my luggage to the proper exit. Where a rude shock was awaiting me, since I had completely forgotten about the bank robbery. Others had not. "Open up da bags," a grim looking defender of law and order said. "Of course," I said, very cheerily. I noticed that all the paissengers were being subjected to this same search. "Might I ask what you are looking for?" "Money. Bank robbery," he muttered, poking through my possessions. "I'm afraid I never carry large sums," I said, holding the bag with my massed banknotes tight to my chest. "These are okay. Let's see that one," "Not in public if you please, officer. I am a high-plac government ofial and these papers are top secret." I quoted this word for word from the teevee. IF "In the room," he said, pointing. I was almost sorry I had kicked the thing in since it had been so educational. In the room he looked shocked when I opened a sleepgas grenade rather than the bag and he slumped nicely. There was a large metal locker against the wall filled with the numerous forms and papers so dear to the bureaiicratic mind and, by rearranging them, I managed to make room for my snoring companion. The longer he remained undiscovered the better. Unless there were unforeseen delays I would be in New York City befor# he regained consciousness -- a process that would have to be a natural one since there would be no known ' antidote for my gas. When I left the room another of the uniformed ofHcials was glowering at me, so I turned and called back through the still open door. "Thank you for your kind aid -- no trouble at all I assure you, no trouble at all." I closed the door and smiled at the officer as I passed. He raised a reluctant fingertip to the visor of his cap and turned away to grab at the luggage of an elderly passenger. I went on with my bag, not too surprised to notice the finest of pricklings of sweat upon my brow. The flight was brief, uninteresting, noisy and rather too bumpy, in a great fixed-wing craft that appeared to be powered by jets burning a liquid fuel. Though the smell of this fuel was everywhere -- and familiar -- I could not bring myself to believe that they were burning irreplaceable hydrocarbons. I had a moment of expectation when we disembarked, but there did not seem to be any alarm. Reaching the center of the city from the outlying airport was a painful ordeal of hurtling vehicles, shouts, noise of all kinds, and it was with a feeling of great relief that I finally fell through the door of a cool hotel room. But once reason was restored by the quiet, plus a couple of belts of the distilled organ-destroyer I was becoming attached to, I wasmore than ready for the next step. connoiter or attack? Sweet reason dictated a careful stalk of the time energy source to determine what I was up against -- who and what. I had half settled on this course and was berating myself mildly for even considering attack before the force of logic clanked through to its last link. I turned and pointed at myself in the mirror. "You are -- " I shook a disgusted finger at myself -- "what the cab driver called the other cab driver. A joick and wpise." I had only one advantage -- surprise. Any bit of reconnoitering might tip my hand and the time warriors would know that they were under investigation, perhaps attack. Sincthey had launched the time war they were surely prepared for possible retaliation. But how can guards stay alert for weeks and months, possibly year's? Once they knew I was around, at this time and place, all sorts of extra precautions would be taken. To prevent this I had to hit and hit hard -- even though I had no idea whom I was hitting. "Does it make a difference?" I asked, snapping open a grenade case. "It might be nice to satisfy my curiosity and find out who has attacked the Corps -- and why? But is it relevant or important? The answer is no." I glared across a small atomic fusion bomb at my red-eyed mirrored image and shook my head. "No, 'and no again. They must be destroyed, period. Now. Quickly." There was no other course open to me, so calmly and surely I fitted about my body the most potent weapons of destruction devised by millennia of weapons research; always a favorite of mankind. Normally I am no believer in the kill or be killed school of thought: affair are usually not that black and white. But now they were and I felt not the slightest guilt over my decision. This was undeclared war against all mankind of the future -- why else had the Special Corps been the first target of attack? Someone, some group, wanted control of everything, probably the most selfish and insane plan ever conceived, attd it did not really matter who or what they were. Deatii for them, before they killed everything of value. When I left the hotel I was a walking bomb, ah army of destruction. The black box of the time energy detector was in the attach case I carried, the indicators visible through holes I had cut in the lid. Somewhere out there was the enemy and when he moved I would be waiting. It was a short wait. An unseen burst of time energy was unleashed close by, if the action of the needle was any indication, and I was on the trail. Direction and distance, I worked out the vector as I plunged ahead, almost ignorant of the people and vehicles around me, but slowing and becoming more careful after a close miss by a lumbering truck. Now, a wide thoroughfare with green in the center of it, tall buildings of a uniformly depressing design, great slabs of metal and glass looming up in the polluted air. One very much like the other. Which one did I want? The needle swung again, quivering with the intensity of its reaction, turning as I walked, the meter rising to a distance reading right at the top of its scale. There. In that building, the copper and black one. Ini went, prepared for anything. Anything that is except what happened next. IF They were locking the doors behind me lining up and blocking them even as they did so. Everyone. The visitors to the building, the elevator starters -- even the man behind the cigar counter. Running, pressing forward, coming toward me with the cold light of hatred in their eyes. I had been discovered -- they must have detected my detector; they knew who I was. They were attacking first. Vlll At some time in our lives we are all touched by incipient paranoia and feel that everyone is against us. Now I was faced with the reality. For a single instant this basic fear possessed me -- then I shrugged it off and tried to win. But that slight hesitation had been enough. What I should have done was shoot, kill, fire, destroy, just as I had planned. But I had not planned to face all these people in this manner; therefore I could not win. Of course I did damage -- gas, bombs, a bit of violence -- but it wasn't enough. More and more hands tore at my clothing and there was no end to them. Nor were they gentle about it, coming at me with the same raw hatred I felt for them -- opposite sides of the coin, both seeing destruction in the other. I was pursued and run down and unconsciousness was almost a blessing when it dropped. Not that I was allowed this peace for long. Pain and a sharp smell burning in my nostrils drew me back to face unpleasant reality. A man, a large, tall man, standing and facing me, his features blurred in my unfocused eyes. Many hands seemed to hold me, squeezing and shaking me. Something moist was pulled across my face. It cleared away whatever had obscured my vision and I could see. See him as he saw me. Twice as tall as a normal man, so much bigger than I that I had to lean back to look up at him towering there. His skin a suffused red, his eyes angled and dark, many of his teeth pointed when he opened his mouth. "When are you from?" he asked, his voice a harsh drum, speaking the language we used in the Corps. I must have reacted to that because he smiled with victory, but not with warmth. "The Special Corps, it had to be. The one flare of energy before darkness. How many of you came? Where are the others?" "They -- will find you," I managed to say. A very minor success for my side weighed against the victories of the other. As yet they did not know that I was alone and I would stay alive until they discovered it. Which would not be long. I had been stripped efficiently -- all my devices had been removed. My defenses were gone, lliey would backtrack me to the hotel and Hnd out soon enough that there was nothing more to fear. "Who are you?" I asked, words my only weapon. He did not answer but instead raised both fists in a victorious gesture. The words came automatically to my lips. "You're mad." "Of course," he shouted exultantly and the hands holding me pulled and swayed at the same time. "That is our condition and though they killed us once for it they will not kill us again. This time we will be victorious because we will destroy our enemies even before they are born, doom to nonlife oblivion the ones who did it." I remembered something Coy pu had said about this Earth's being destroyed in the. far past. Had it been done to stop these people? Was it being undone now? His screamed words cut off the thought. "Take him. Torture him most profoundly for my pleasure and to weaken his will. Then suck all the knowledge from his brain. Everything must be discovered, every thing." As the hands tore me from the room I knew what I had to do. Wait. Get away from this man, away from the crowds, to the specialized skills of the torturers, to some needed privacy. The opportunity came as technicians in a white laboratory, beat at the people who held me and dragged me from them. They were as brutal to each other as they had been to me, a hierarchy of hatred. They must be mad, as my captor had said. What perversion of human history had brought these people upon the scene? There was no way to imagine. Again I waited. Calm in the knowledge that I had only a single opportunity and that I should not throw, it away. The door was closed. I was pressed back against a table and my ankles secured to it. Five men were in the room with me. Two had their backs turned, attention on their instruments, the others were pushing me down. I moved my jaw forward and bit down as hard as I could upon the last tooth. T his was my final weapon, the ultimate weapon, one that I had never used before. Normally I did not even carry it, considering the normal life-and-death dustups not worth this price of winning. The present situation was different. When I bit, the artificial tooth cracked and the drops of bitter liquid it contained ran down my throat. As the pain hit it was obliterated, engulfed even as it began by the nerve-deadening drug that enabled me to withstand the onslaught of the other ingredients. They were a devil's brew that the Corps' medics had worked out at IF my suggestion, .that had only tested before in smaller quantiti on test animals. Here were all the stimulants ever discovered, including the new class of synergators, the complex chemicals that enabled the human body to perform the incredible feats of hysterical strength that had been long known but impossible to duplicate. Time speeded up and the men hovering above me moved slowly. Seeing this I waited those fractions of a second more for the drugs to take complete effect before reaching out my hands. Though each of the heavyset men had his full weight on one of my arms it did not matter. There was no feeling of weight or even effort as I lifted them each clear off the floor at the same time and drove their skulls together before hurling them bodily at the third man at the foot of the table. All of them impacted, rolled, fell, their faces twisted in strange contortions of pain and fear. I sat up and seized the solid metal bands that bound my ankles and tore them loose. It appeared to be the easiest and most obvious thing to do. The act seemed to cause some damage to my fingers but I was aware of it only as a passing annoyance and of no real importance. The two remaining men in the room were still turningtoward mje as though the destruction of the other three had only taken a few moments. Which it surely had. Seeing them still unprepared, one with a weapon half raised, I threw myself at them, sparing a fist or a clutching hand for each, striking them down and hurling them toward the others into the writhing bundle of twisting bodies. They were five to my one and I could afford to show them not even the slightest mercy, even had I cared to. I struck with my feet now, since my hands were not so good, until there was no more motion in the heap. Only then could I permit the cold thoughts of logic to penetrate the hot berserker rage. Next? Escape. My clothes were rags and I tore them from me in strips. My torturers were dressed in white garments and I took the time to open all , the unfamiliar fastenings and dress myself in the least soiled of their clothing.' There was a ragged wound in my forehead -- I covered it with a neat dressing, then put wrappings about my hands. I was not interrupted and when I was ready I left the room and went hurriedly back down the hallway, retracing the course over which I had been so recently dragged. There was a buzz like a disturbed hive in the building and everyone I passed seemed too preoccupied to notice me -- bandages were a common sight -- even teroom where my weapons had been spread out on a large table to be examined. If it had been a time for smiting I would have smiled. G ently, without disturbing anyone, I reached over and actuated a rack of gas bombs, holding my breath as I groped for #he nose filters. It is a fast gas and. even those who had seen what I had done had no time for warnings before they fell. The air was hazy with the concentration of the gas when I picked up a gausspistol and threw open the great door to the next room. Your he called out, his massive red body standing even as the gas felled the others around him. He swayed and reached for me -- fighting the gas that should have dropped him instantly -- until I slammed the pistol into the side of his head. Yet his eyes, murderous with hatred, were on inS continuously as I bound him in the chair. Only when the door was sealed behind me did I take the time to look him in the face again and see that he was still conscious. "What kind of man are you?" The words came to my lips unbidden. "Who are you?" "I am He who will rule forever, the mind that never dies." There was such a power in his words that I felt myself drawn closer, swaying despite myself, the roundness of his eyes growing before me. I was hazy, the effects of my own drugs wearing off perhaps. I shook my head and blinked rapidly. But another part of me was still alert, still unimpressed by great power, great evil. "A long rule, but not a comfortable one." I smiled. "Unless you do something about that bad case of sunburn." It could not have been better spoken. This monster was utterly humorless and must have been used to nothing except slavish obedience. Just once he howled,, a; speechless animal souhd, and then there was speech enough, a torrent of babbled insanity that washed around me as I made preparations to end the time war. Mad? Of course he was, but with some kind of organized madness that perpetuated and grew and infected those around him. The body was artificial. I could see the scars and grafts now, aiid he spoke to me about it. A fabricated body, a transplanted, stolen body, a metal-framed monstrosity that told me all too much about the manner of mind that would choose to live in a casing like this. There were others like him -- but he was the best, he was alone -- it was hard to make sense of everything but I remembered what I could for future reference. And all the time I was taking off the ventilating grill and dusting my powders into the air system and making preparations to throw a largesized monkey wrench into this Satanic mill. He and his followers had been destroyed once in the fullness of time. He had told me that. In some unknown manner they had planned IF a second chance at the mastery of the universe -- but they were not to have it. I, Slippery Jim diGriz, single-minded freebooter of no fixed address, had been called upon for many big tasks before and I had always delivered. Now I was asked to save the world and if I must I must. "They could not have picked a better man' I said proudly as I Rooked in at the great workings of a time laboratory neatly peppered with sprawled bodies. The great green coiled spring of a time-helix glowed at me and I smiled back. "Bombs in the works and you for a ride," I called out happily as I made just those preparations. "Wipe out the machinery and leave the nuts here for the local authorities, though perhaps Big Red deserves a special treatment." He certainly did -- and I wondered what I was waiting for. I was waiting to do it in the heat of passion I imagine; no cold killer I, even of the coldest of killers. Though I would have to be this time. I steeled myself to this realization, thumbed the selector on the gausspistol to explosive charges and turned to the other room. Opportunity presented itself far more quickly than I had imagined. A great red form was on top of me, striking out, hitting me. I rolled with the blow, across the room to the wall, twisting and bringing up the gun. He was moving fast, tripping a switch and hurling himself at the end of the time-helix. Bullets move fast, too, and mine hissed out of the gausspistol and into his body, exploding there. And then he was gone. Pulled into time, forward or backward I did not know because the machinery was glowing and melting even as I ran. Would he be dead when he arrived at his destination? He had to be. Those were explosive charges. T hese thoughts occupy me as my health improves. Here in the private hospital they still wonder what made the wounds on my body. Money numbs their interest a good deal. I sleep well now and the great scarlet form of He no longer occupies my dreams. Is madness catching? Some kinds must be; I had it there for an instant and in the midst of parallel time there must be a world dominated by it. But there are better possible worlds. One where the Corps rules quietly with neat justice, where Angelina is. waiting for me. She will be there. My most prized possession is a black box with a man's mind inside. The mind of Professor Coypu, the master of time. If he built his time-helix once he should be able to build it again. When I am feeling very fit I am going to invite him into my brain and ask him to try.  Until Retief wrapped things up it was every Lumbagan against himself.   I the shops shuttered ,and dark. The yells of the demonstrators gathered before the entrance to the Grand Castle Complex of Lumbaga, three blocks to the east, where only a dull surf-roar here. Scattered brickbats and broken spears attested to the political activities of the day, but only a few candy wrappers and old newspapers blowing across the oily cobbles lent movement to the scene. Retief made his way unmolested along the narrow, crooked way; five minutes' brisk walk brought him to a rough-hewn door under a swinging signboard, adorHbd with a lumpy purplish free-form pierced by a pointed length of wood...Yellow light leaked from a small leaded-glass window beside the door . Retief took up his post under the spreading branches of a music tree. A gust stirred the leaves, evoking a rippling arpeggio of crystalline sound that mingled mournfully with the fluting of the night wind. A small wild creature resembling a disembodied blue eyeball with tiny bird feet hopped along a twig overhead, goggling at the Terran with an appearance of intentness heightened by the absence of an eyelid. A second freelance ocular appeared, peeping from antoit. ias, needle-shaped leaves; Nearer at hand, another variety of the local fauna -- this one a convoluted, three-inch ellipsoid bearing a remarkable resemblance to an oversized ear -- perched in a froomUe bush, pivoting slowly from left to right and back again as if tuning in on a faint sound in the distance. "You boys ought to get together with a nose and form a corporation," Retief murmured. "You'd be a dynamite vaudeville act." ' Both eyeballs whipped out of sight; the ear jerked and began to crawl hastily down the stem. A faint footfall sounded from the direction of a nearby alleymouth. Retief faded back against the bole of the ancient tree and eased his #mm gun into his hand. A furtive five-foot figure wrapped in an ankle-length djellaba emerged from the alley. "Ignarp," Retief called softly. The newcomer jumped and emitted a sharp yelp. "Galloping gastropods!" he hissed. "You nearly scared me out of my epidermis." He advanced another step to peer closely at Retief from three, large, watery eyes not unlike those concealed in the foliage above. "Are you the Terry I'm supposed to meet? Frankly, all you foreigners look alike to me." "An accusation I can't level against you, Ignarp," Retief said. IF "Didn't you have, four eyes and a purple hide the last time Isaw you?" "Yeah -- I stopped by my place for a shower and change." Ignarp gave his rattling sigh. "I didn't know it was going to be such a rough evening. What are you doing out in the. streets? The rallying cry of the mob is 'Get Terry .' " "It do seem the incidence of violence is escalating since the peace talks have been underway. Ai idea why?' "We got a few ideas -- but maybe it's not time to spill 'em." "Don't stall, Ignarp. Conditions have changed since this afternoon. My colleague, Mr. Magnan, has Imn kidnaped." "Wait a minute! You don't think I -- " "Nothing like that. I just hoped you might be able to tell me who the likeliest suspect is -- for a fee, of course." "Well -- that sounds like a gracious offer. But let's get out of sight. I've got the feeling unfriendly eyes are upon us. Come on, the Stake and Kidney's a 'discreet bistro, if not too clean. All the regulars will be out rioting, so we'll have a modicum of privacy." T he local rapped a complicated tattoo on the heavy door, shifting from one of his six large feet to another and casting worried glances along the avenue until the door rattled and swung inward with a lugubrious creak. An undersized cranium adorned with an odd assortment of sensory organs poked out at belt level to look the callers up and down. "For Creep's sake, Fudsot, let us in before the City Guard sees us," Ignarp hissed. "This Terry's got diplomatic immunity, but those dupes of the power structure would like nothing better, than to rearrange my internal integuments along what they consider more conventional lines." Grumbling, the landlord ushered them down three crooked steps into a long, low-ceilinged room smelling of fried zintx-patties and sour wine. He locked the door behiiri them and indicated a five-legged taUe in the comer. "Top conspicuous," Ignarp demurred. "How about the back room?" "That'll run you an extra five xots." "Five xots? You're as bad as the entrenched exploiters." "Except they'd charge you ten -- and then report you. Pay up or get out, you and your offworld chum. It's all the same to me." "Okay -- okay. The Goodies Redistribution Action Bunch will get around to you, you tool the establishment!" Ignarp extracted a small-mouthed purse from his voluminous robes and handed over a triangular coin of green plastic. Fudsot subjected it to close examination under what seemed to be an olfactory organ before using a six-inch key to unlock the small door at the back. "It's all yours, gents," he grunted. "For the next half-hour anyway. After that it'll cost you another five xots." "Bring us wine," Ignarp ordered as he dusted off a threelegged stool. "Sure. Four xots for a quarterzub o' the house brew. Six xots for bottled-in-bond. And I can give you a special deal on some aged Pepsi; I happened to get hold of a small consignment through a special contact down south. Five xots the flask, uncut." "Smuggler," Ignarp snapped. "Profiteer! Robber! We-'ll take the Pepsiin sealed bottles, mind you!" "Sure -- whatta you think I am, one o' these chiselers?" lence until the landlord had delivered the refreshments and withdrawn. "That's what we're up against," he said gloomily. "You'd think Fudsot would be a loyal supporter of the movement -- but no -- he's out for the fast xot." "What's this movement all about?" Retief asked. "I should think it was obvious," Ignarp said sharply. "Even a foreigner can see that the entire planet's in the grip of an elite corps of self-serving reactionaries." "Curious," Retief said, puffing a Chanel dope stick alight. "I had the impreion that anarchy was complete. In fact, that's why we Terries are here -- " "I know all about your so-called Peace Commission, Retief. You Terries and those main-chance Groaci are all spinning your wheels. Sure, we fight a lot -- we have ever since the dawn of recorded history, six years ago. And even before, if the old tribal legyids mean anything. And that's jake -- except lately it has taken a nasty turn. The old system of you break my back. I'll break yours, is falling apart." "Uh-huh." Retief sampled his drink. "And where does your Bunch come into the picture?" "We've formed a third force to combat the special privilege groups. Of course, we're just getting started -- only thirteen members at present -- but we won't stop until the gross inequities of the system have been corrected." "You intend to divide up the wealth, an equal share for everyone?" "You think we're out of our brainpans? We'll keep the loot for ourselves, naturally!" "That's your idea of an equitable arrangement?" Retief inquired mildly. "Of course not." Ignarp looked puzzled. "It's just simple, oldIF fashioned greed, the noblest of emotions." "Sounds like a highly realistic program," Retief said. "And what about the rest of the population?" "We're planning on selling them into slavery, naturally. And say -- maybe you Terries would like a slice of the action -- " "What makes you think so?" "Well -- aside from the fact that the mob is oi(t to get both of. us -- I've heard you get your jollies out of taking things away from the original owners and handing them over to new management. I could never figure out why, but we tion." "That's a fair assessment of our foreign aid policy, Ignarp. But sometimes it's a little difficult to determine who the deserving parties are." "Simple enough: Possession is prima facie evidence of moral leprosy; have-nots are pure in heart by definition."" "But if we hand the planet over to you fellows, then you'll be the haves -- " "That's different," Ignarp stated crisply. "Now, when can we expect the first consignment of guns, tanks, bombers, somis poisoned bodkins and the rest?" "Well, there may be a few administrative delays, Ignarp. Even a bureaucrat as dedicated to the spread of enlightenment as Ambassador Pouncetrifle may have some difficulty picturing a baker's dozen of malcontents as the authentic inheritors of the mantle of planetary dictatorship." "I had an idea you might try to stall," Ignarp said accusingly. "Fortunately we have a telling ideological point in reserve." He leaned toward Retief confidentially. "The situation," he stated solemnly, "has a very nasty -- are you ready? -- racial angle." "Tell me about it." don't sound very ex--X cited," Ignarp said in tones reflecting disappointment. "I heard all a fellow had to do was mention the word and you Terries automatically started writing checks." "A mild exaggeration. In apy event, the syndrome hardly applies to Lumbaga. You fellows don't have any races." "Hey, what kind of a crack is that?" "I've noticed," Retief said, "that the eyeballs and lower lips hopping around in the underbrush don't look much different from the ones you and your fellow citizens employ in your daily activities -- " "Now, hold it right there, Retief! I don't like the turn the conversation's taking -- " "In fact," Retief went on unperturbed, "It seems that the hir forms of Lumbagan life are all evolved from the lower forms # combination -- " "Don't come preaching your Godless evolutionary doctrines around here," Ignarp snapped. "Don't worry, I'm just making it up as I go along," Retief said soothiiy. "If my theory is correct, you, for example, represent the end product of a whole series of combinations -- " "Let's not get personal, Terry." "Just ging a few facts straight, Ignarp, no offense intended. Tell me, how old are you?" "That's none of your blasted business, Retief." , "I thought you wanted Terran backing in your scheme to take over the world." "Yeah, that's nght, but -- " "Then it's niy business." "Well -- I don't know exactly," Igiiarp muttered. "But the best theories give a figure around a age, of course. After all, by the time you go back a couple centuries, things get kind of vague." The Lumbagan looked embarassed, as attested by the purplish tinge mounting his wattles. "I think I understand," Retief said. "When a Lumbagan has a bad heart or a broken arm, he trades the injured member in on a new One. In time, he's comirietely replaced. Is that it?" "That covers most of it," Ignarp said hastOy. "Now, back to practical politics -- " "So in effect, a Lumbagan never dies. The question is, how does he get started?" "Gripes, Retief, is nothing sacred to you foreigners?" "My interest is purely scientific, Ignarp." "This racy conversation gets me all stirred up," the local said. "However, I guess it's all for the cause. You've got it right as it goes, but there are a few points you missed. Like the fact that the Singletons -- you know, the free-living eyeballs and pituitary glands and the like -- can only get together in bunches of up to ten. An ear might team up with a tentacle for mutual security, you know, and then later add on an esophagus -- strictly by instinct, natch. Not all thew teams work out, of course. Evolutionary dead ends, you might say. They break up again, no hard feelings, and maybe later the different parts join another accretion. In the end, quite a large mimber of workii accretions swinging through the jungle or creeping around in the underbrush, as happy as dams. So okay. A tenner Singleton can't add any more free units -- but what can happen is that two SinetOns can liidc up to form a Dubb. Got it?" "I'm trying, Ignarp. Pray continue." IF "Right. Now, that's not the end of the trail. Two weUcstabUshed Dubbs can get together and make up a Trip. Now, a Trip's a pretty complicated life form; with up to forty basic units to play around with, you can come up with some pretty successful combos. But Trips are a lot rarer than Dubbs, naturally." "Naturally. And I suppose two congenial Trips can join forces, to continue the process?" "Right. And when that happens, you get a Quad." Ignarp looked at Retief expectantly. "And two Qua can combine to make a still more complicated creature?" "Huh? Where'd you get an obscene idea like that!" Ignarp looked shocked, an effect achieved by rotating his eyeballs rapidly. "A Four-decker is the ultimate product of evolution -- a Lumbagan -- like me!" "I won't say it's clear, Ignarp, but it's not quite as opaque as it was. But you still haven't explained why you spend so much time disassembling each other -- or just how you decide who's against whom." IIIgle comes in. Now it's perfectly natural and wholesome when everybody is out to get everybody else; but. when discrimination rears its ugly head -- that's different. And even that wouldn't bother me," Ignarp added, "Except I happen to be a member of the persecuted minority." "A minority usually implies at least two people with a few characteristics in common," Retief pointed out. "Since every Liimbagan is unique -- " "Except my kind," Ignarp-said gloomily. "Somehow, due to a component nobody's isolated yet, we've got something nobody else has got." "A disabUity?" "Heck, no, Retief -- they'd forgive us that. We're vastly superior -- that's what gravels 'em! Just a hint of our special skill, and the witch-hunt is on." "And just what is this trait that gives you the advantage -- " "Aha! That's our Big Secret! You see -- " A sudden sound of disturbance came from in the outer room: a dull clatter, a yelp, a thump that rattled the cups on the table. Something crashed against the door hard enough to splinter wood. "I might have known," Ignarp cried, leaping up. "Sold out by the vested interests!" Retief came to his feet, looking around the small, dimly lit room. The only visible opening was a small ventilator grill. "So long, Reticf -- ril be in touch -- " With a rending crash, the door burst inward. The creature that bounded through the opening was seven feet tall, had yellowish skin blotched with black and purple. Three gaunt, bristly, knokneed #, terminating in broad rubbery webbed feet, made up two thirds of its height. Four left and two right arms of graduated leiigths sprang from the hunched shoulders, protected by a carapace resembling the shell of a turtle adorned with twisted spikes. Atop a sho thick, tendon-corded neck rested a pointed head given over largdy to a foot-wide, purple-lipped mouth crowded with needle-like fangs and situated below a pair of wide-set eyes the size of tennis balls. The eyes were a Mood-shot yellowish white excqt for the off-centered, metallic-Mack pupils. A powerful prehensile tail ending in a three-fingered hand waved a gnarled steelwood club aloft. The monstrosity charged with a bellow. Retief spun the table into its path, ducked a wild swing as the giant crashed into the obstacle with a plank-splintering impact. At the open door he turned; the intruder was threshing its way clear of the remains of the boards, was no sign. Retief had time only to notice that the grill was missing from the register before the monster tossed aside a shattered timber and leaped toward him. Retief stepped out and slammed the door, dropping the heavy bar in place as the armored alien crashed against it. the squat flgure of the landlord was dimly visible, scrambling for cover. Retief reached him in two strides, caught the back of his coarse-weave tunic, lifted him to tiptoes. "A slight double-cross, eh, Fudsot? Who paid you?" he inquired genially, as the door behind him resounded to the berserker's blows. "Let me go, Terry," the landlord screeched, "or I'll see to it you're broken down into surgical spares -- " "What was the idea? Were you out to get me? Or was it Ignarp you were after -- or both?" . "You know so much -- you tell me," Fudsot grunt. "But Ignarp fooled you," Retief said. "He separated into subassemblies of a convenient size and left by the ventilator, right?" "You Terries aren't supposed to know about that," Fudsot muttered, "A lousy fate, even' for a trouble-maker like Ignarp." "So that's the last of Ignarp, eh?" "As Ignarp, yeah. His sweetbreads and tonsils are back where they started ages ago -- free-living IF Free#)ies looking around for a partner to start up a new tenner." Fudsot wagged his head mournfully. "A sad end for a social reformer of his zeal," Retief said. "Still, there's much to be said for the carefree life of an adenoid. I'll be on my way now, Fudsot -- but before I go, just what was that that broke up our drinking party? I've gotten accustomed to a certain pleasing variety in the local citizenry, but that chap was in an entirely new category." "I heard rumors, but -- " Fudsot broke off. "But what?" "But it would be bad for my health to spread 'em. How's about getting him outa my back room now, Terry? I got to set the place to rights for the pre-dawn dust-up crowd." "No, thanks -- I can't use him." "You mean -- you're leaving that monstrosity on my hands?" "Certainly. Mind if I use the back entrance?" "No! That's where -- I mean, there isn't one," the landlord finished sullenly. "That's where they're waiting to make the pickup, eh? Thanks for the tip." R etief pushed through a greasy door behind the bar, crossed a kitchen reeking of stale fat, slipped out into a narrow alleyway decorated with negr lected garbage containeis. A soft rustling came from a dense patch of shadow. A small, spindle-lged figure swathed in a dark doak step forth. From the folds of the garment a gloved grasping member protruded, gripping a small power gun. "So -- success attends my efforts. The moose has taken the bait and sprung the trap -- " "Mouse, I think you mean, Wilth," Retief corrected. "What brings you out in the damp night air?" "Drat," the Groaci hissed. "Who informed you of my identity?" "Don't you remember? The Ambassador introduced us last week, at the Mother-in-Laws Day reception." "I refer to the treacher who betrayed my disguise -- " "Oh, he's the same feUow who's standing behind you now with a crater gun aimed at your dorsal suture." Wilth started violently, causing one of his government-issue eyeshields to clatter to the cobbles. "Undone!" he keened, as Retief stepped forward to relieve him of his weapon. "Unhappy Wilth! I rue the day the mound burst to expose me to the harsh external world!" "By the way, what did you have in mind doing with this?" Retief inquired, aiming the gun negligently at its former owner. "My instructions -- I assure you, my dear Retief, nothing personal was intended -- were to intimidate you with the firearm, thereby causing you to accompany me to a designated place for an uninhibited interview with a Most Highly Placed Person." Most highly placed in the Groaci hierarchy, I assume." "But of course. Do you imagine I'm in the habit of trepanning -- if that's the word -- fellow diplomats -- even Soft Ones -- for the convenience of members of lesser races?" "I shouldn't have asked. And what was to be the subject of this conference? Brain surgery?" "Do you furthur imagine I am privy to the machinations of vously behind him. "As a courtesy to a colleague, would you kindly instruct your toady to point his piece elsewhere -- " his faint voice faded. "Where is the creature?" "He couldn't make it," Retief said. "Liquor inventory, you know -- but the intention was there. Now -- " "Hoaxed!" Wilth whistled. "Hoodwinked by vile Terran duplicity!" "Don't take it so hard, Wilth. No harm done; it's always a rewarding experience to make the whatever persuasion. I'll go with you." "Y ou'll -- ah -- accompany me to the rendezvous as planned?" Wilth goggled all five eye stalks at Retief. "Why not? The evening is still young." Retief snapped open the butt of the power gun, removed the energy cell, handed the weapon back to the Groaci. "Why, this is quite decent of you, Retief," Wilth whispered breathlessly. "What a pity all Groaci-Terran relations can't be conducted in the same spirit of amity." "They are, Wilth, they are," Retief said soothingly. "Shall we go? waiting." through tortuously winding streets -- hardly more than tunnels threading through the monumental jumble of Lumbagan architecture. Wilth halted at a . small but massive door set in a deeply recessed niche, pounded stealthily on the dark panels. Weak grayish light leaked out as the door opened. A Groaci in the uniform of a Peace-keeper peered out. "Inside, Soft One," Wilth ordered curtly. Retief preceded his putative captor along a cramped passage papered in a pattern of puce and mustard lozenges to a highly varnished bile-green door that reflected the watery glow of the ceiling dimstrip. The guard rapped, thrust the-door wide IF and motioned Relief throug. A Groaci in jeweled eybields was seated behind a wide desk. He waved a negligent three-fingered hand at Relief, indicating a stool. "Any difficulties?" he inquired of his underling in Terran. "Your Excellency would be amazed at how easy it was," WQth replied glumly. "I was even astonished myself." "To not accept the legends of Terry invincibility," the senior alien snapped, switching to the Groacian tongue, "lest you predispose yourself to quail in the breech!" He turned three eyes on Retief while holding the glare of the other two on Wilth. "I," he announced then, "am Hivemaster Shlush. You, I believe, are the fellow Retief?" Retief acknowledged his identity with a nod and seated himself. "You," Shlush continued ominously, "are not unknown to me by repute." "I'm flattered." "Don't be." Shlush hissed. "Your name. Soft One, is a byword for the Terran duplicity and meddling that have plagued Groaci foreign policy since the first intimations of our manifest Galactic destiny." "That's a rather uncharitable description of Corps policy. Hivemaster," Retief commented. "By the way, what brings you here? I don't recall seeing your name on the last Foreign Office list." "Not to pry into matters of no concern to iens," Shlush hissed. "In fact," Retief went on, "I seem to recall that you were rather suddenly retired to civilian life after that flasco on Grabnark Four -- " Shlush jabbed a digit at Retief, all five eyes canted alertly in his guest's direction now. "Your role in the humbling of the great is not forgotten, Retief, but now the era of Terry domination comes to an end. No more will we Groaci suffer graciously the intolerable interposition of foreigners between ourselves and the objects of our desires." "In the meantime," Jtetief suggested mildly, "I take it you'd like to have a little talk." "Indeed yes," Shlush whispered. "How perceptive of you, Retief." "Not at all," the Terran declared. "Wilth told me." "To have babbled of state secrets, litter-mate of di'ones?" the Hivemaster hiss at his underling. "Who, I, Excellency? Why, to have but hinted he'd bt be on his metacarpals -- " "To commit another indiscretion and to find yourself trussed by the polices alongside the Soft One!" Shlush turned back to Retief. "But I'm slighting my hostly obligations," he said smoothly. "Would you care for a little something while we chat?" "Brandy, thanks," Retief said. "You." Shlush addressed the guard still hovering by the door. "To fetch brandy at once. Black Bacchus will do." "To congratulate your Excellency on your Excellency's taste," the Peace-keeper hissed unctiously. "But to wonder if your Excellency would amplify your Excellency's instructions to include data as to where I'm s;upposed to fetch it from." "The usual source, hive-fellow of defectives!" "To do as commanded. Exalted One -- but don't, you ink-thay the erry-tay ight-may recognize the abel-lay?" "To assume you have it-way enough to oar-pay it in the itchenJcay!"Shlush favored "Retief with the Groaci equivalent of a sour smile. "I've instructed the fellow decanter reserved for important guests," he translated. "I'm sensible of the honor," Retief said. "Now, what was it you wanted to tell me?"  "Tell you? My dear Tei, you fail to grasp the full implications of the situation. It is you who are going to tell me!" "What would you like to know first?" Retief said promptly. # OU may begin with full deX tails of secret Terran armament schemes, overall invasion strategy, D-day tactical plans and close-support logistical arrangements." "I can cover that in a very few words," Relief said. "There aren't any." "Pah! You expect me to believe that an organization of the to play it by ear?" "Play what by ear?" Retief inquired interestedly. "The take-over. What else?" "The take-over?" Retiet' tipped an inch of cigar ash onto Shlush's polished desk top. "What of?" "Of this plague-spot known as Lumbaga, naturally." "Who's taking it over?" Retief inquired interestedly. "We are -- that is to say, you are. I mean to say, of course, having gotten wind of the perfidious schemes laid by you treacherous Soft Ones under the cynical guise of pretended participation in bogus peace talks, we Groaci have naturally been compelled to take appropriate steps to safeguard the endangered lives, property and sacred self-determination of the indigenous autochthones." "Remarkable," Retief said. "And I suppose that to properly protect the Lumbagans, it will b necessary for Groac temporarily to garrison a few troops here. And perhaps take over a certain number of islands for official use. And possibly to requisition a modest percentage of the planetary production and manpower for the IF fight against foreign exploitation. And a reasonable tax levy to support a portion of the expense of this selfless action is to be expected." . "I see you have a grasp of the realities of interplanetary dogoodism," Shlush acknowledged. "Now, as beings-of-the-world, why not just give me a brief rundown on your own development plans? Don't bother going into detail; I have specialists on my staff who'll assist you later in dredging up the odd unremembered trifle from the depths of the subconscious. For now. Just limit your expoMtion to the high points." ."Vou're too shrewd for me, Hivemaster," Retief conceded. "Did you think up this scheme yourself" "Ah-ah," Shlush chided his prisoner. "No prying, Retief. Not that it matters, of course, inasmuch as you'll soon be occupying a shallow excavation under the dungeon floor -- but it's bad form tipping one's opponents off to the details of one's operations, particularly as I have no time to waste. Now -- " "On a tight schedule, eh? Tell me, Hivemaster, is Ambassador Jith in on the plan?" "Jith is a dependable civil servant of considerable seniority," Shlush said smoothly. "It was deemed unwise to burden him with excessive detail regarding operations outside the sphere of his immediate concerns." "Just who is your boss in this operation, Shlush?" "Ah-ah -- mustn't pry, Retief," the Groaci wagged an admonitory digit at the Terran. "Suflice it to say he's a most unusual chap, a virtual Super-Groaci of most uncompromising kidney, not the sort, as he himself declares, to stand idly by while Groac is cheated of her Lumbagan patrimony. You'll meet him soon enough." "Let me see," Retief mused aloud. "As I recall, it was a Terry tramp captain who first put Lumbaga on the star maps. He stayed long enough to peddlea few gross of glass beads and take on a cargo of salted glimp eggs. Oddly enough, his report made no mention of the natives' warlike tendencies." "Doubtless he fortuitously happened along between massacres," Shlush said tersely. "But -- " "The next time Lumbaga cropped up in an offlcial dispatch, ten years later, was on the occasion of a run-in between a Terry survey crew and a Groaci gunboat. It appears your people were well tablished here by then." "Yes, yes -- and naturally enough, they took appropriate action to discourage unauthorized tourism. Now -- " survey craft was the wrong way to gQ about it. I'm afraid," Retief said philosophically. "Our sociological teams couldn't pass up a challenge like that. They came swarming in -- with suitable escorts of Peace Enforcers, of course -- to ferret out the unhappy incidents in the collective Groaci childhood that were responsible for your aggressions and -- " "I well recall the incident -- an unexampled instance of Groaci restraint in the face of Terran provocation." " -- and found a planetwide riot in progress," Retief continued. "They also turned up the fact that your boys 'were running a rather dubious traffic in hearts, lungs, and a few other negotiable commodities -- " --  "Specimens destined for Groaci zoos," Shlush snapped. "Our Groacian interest in exotic wildlife is well known." " -- which raised certain questions among the coarse-minded. There was even a theory afoot that you were disassembling the natives, shipping them out as Freebies and putting them back together for use in the sand mines." "A baseless allegation. Besides, the practice was at once discontinue out of deference to the prejudices of the unenlightened." "A far-sighted move, in view of the number of guns lined up on you at the time. The Interplanetary Tribunal for the Curtailment of Hostilities moved in then, and the war for peace has raged ever since." "I am not in need of a toenail sketch of recent Furthuronian history," Shlush hissed. "The maniknown to me -- " The excited Hivemaster broke off as the door opened abruptly. "To forgive this intrusion. Exalted One," the underling who had gone to fetch brandy hissed. "But -- " "To better have an explanation of surpassing eloquence," Shlush screeched, "or to dangle inverted from a torture frame ere tiffintime!" "The best. Excellency," the unfortunate fellow whispered, advancing into the room, closely followed by a hulking Lumbagan with a single eye, three legs, an immense grin, and a large, primitive needle gun in his fist. "To shoot him down!" Shlush hissed in his native tongue to Wilth, who stood frozen against the wall. "To -- to -- have apparently forgotten to load my pieces" the latter whispered and let the impotent weapon fall with a clatter. "Which one of you aliens is the head Groaci around here?" the newcomer demanded. Wilth's eye-stalks tilted toward his chief. The latter scrooched back in his chair, eyeing the aimed pistol. "Ah -- why do you ask?" he inquired cautiously. IF "On account of there's a Big Shot that wants to see him," the Lumbagan stated, studying the four foreigners in turn. "Better hurry. I don't know what assorted innards are bringing in the open market, but it will be less if th're full of steel splinters." "Merely -- ah -- a social call, I assume?" Shlush said hopefully. "Assume anything you like -- only snap into it. The Big Boy don't like to be kept waiting." The caller glanced at the timepiece strapped to his lower left wrist. "Besides, I change sides in half an hour and I don't like unfinished business hanging around." "Well, I suppose one must observe the amenities," Shlush said with a certain lack of conviction, rising slowly. "It's all right, Shlush," Rctief spoke up. "It's noble of you to cover for me, but we can't fool this fellow. I'll go quietly." "Ha?' Trying to pull a fast one?" The Lumbagan pointed the gun at the Hivemaster's head and squinted his lone eye along the barrel. "I've got a good mind to plug you for that. But to heck with it. I got to make my own loads for this popper, so why waste one?" He motioned with the bulky weapon at Retief. "Let's go, big boy." He paused. "Hey, you aliens all look alike to me, but it seems like you got a little different look to you, somehow." He studied Retief, comparing him with Wilth and the guard with quick side-glances. "Two legs," he muttered; "One torso, one head -- ah! Got it! They got five eyes each, and you only got two, kind of sunk-in ones. How come?" "Birth defect," Retief said. "Oh, excuse mo all to heck, pal. No offense. Okay, pick 'em up. We got a brisk walk ahead and the streets are full of footpads." Ill T WO of Lumbaga's small pink moons were in the sky when Retief and his captor, after traversing a passage hollowed in the thick walls of the pile housing secret Groaci Headquarters, emerged into the street. "This seems to be iny night for meeting the local civic leaders," Retief commented as they turned west, toward the waterfront. "Whom are you taking me to?" "A high-pay customer on Groogroo island," his guide said shortly, swiveling his asymmetrical head from side to side so as to bring his siqgle eye to bear first on one side of the route ahead, then the other. "If anybody jumps us, it's every guy for hisself," he notified the Terrao. "You expecting to be attacked?" Retief inquired easily. The alien nodded. "Naturally," he said glumly. "Why should tonight be any different from any other time?" "I understand street battles are the Lumbagan national pastime," Retief commented. "You sound a little unenthusiastic." "Oh, a little rumble now and then, a friendly fight in a bar, a neighborly clash in the alley, sure. Tm as normal as the next guy. But the pace is getting me down. Frankly, Mr. -- what was that handle again?" "Retief." "I'm Gloot. Like I was saying, Retief -- between you and me. I'd as lief take a break -- a long break -- from the fray. I got enough lumps to last me, you know? And there's plenty others feel the same." "Then why do you go on squabbling?" -- "That's kind of hard to explain to a foreigner. I'm just sashaying along, minding my own business, and all of a sudden -- zop! The old flghting frenzy hits me -- you know what I mean?" "I'm striving to grasp it," Retief said. A ten-minute walk brought them to the water front. An odor of ripe seafood dnd rotting wood rose from a lateen-rigged junk wallowing as if half sunk at its sagging wharf. A bulky Lumbagan with the usual fandom placement of facial features stepped out of the shadows to bar Gloot's way as he boarded. "Hi, Snult," the latter called in guarded tones. "This here is Retief. You can put him on my tab." "Yeah?" Snult replied without detectable enthusiasm. He barked a command over his shoulder. Two lafge locals with exceptional tricep development stepped forward. "Dump this spy in the drink," Snult grunted, pointing to Retief. "And then hang Gloot to the yardarm for half an hour for reporting in late." He turned his back and sauntered off. The two Lumbagans advanced, reaching for Retief in a businesslike way. He leaned aside, caught the proffered arm of the nearer and gave it a half twist, causing its owner to spin around and bow from the waist, at which point an accurately placed foot propelled the unfortunate chap off the pier. The second enforcer lunged, met a chop to the neck, followed by a set of stiffened fingers to the midriff. As he doubled over, Retief turned him gently by the elblow and assisted him over the side; where his sjplash mingled with that of his partner. Ten feet away, Snult paused. "Quick work," he said over his shoulder. "But -- two splashes?" Gloot stepped to his departing chief, seized him by the back of the neck and unceremoniously pitched him into the water. "Three," he corrected and thrust a large, six-fingered hand at Retief. "The cruise is off to a good start. We've been needing a changeof administration around IF here. Come on, let's hoist anchor before a platoon of cops comes pelting down the dock to rescue you." He swaggered down the gangplank, bawling orders. T here were few questions from the crew, who quickly adjusted to the change in manage 'ment, assisted by a number of sharp blows from a belaying pin wielded by the new captain. In a matter of minutes the anciept vessel had cast off td was threading her way out across the garbagestrewn waters of the bay. "A shipment of oobark," Gloot advised his guest, pointing out a passing barge as they relaxed on . the high poopdeck at the stern, quaffing large mugs of native ale and admiring the view of the moonlit jungle isle past which they were sailing. "It comes from Delerion, another few islands to the west. "Potent stuff, too. A pinch of foof'va your hookah and you're cruising at fifty thousand feet without oxygen." "Dope traffic, eh? Is that legal?" "No law on the high seas," Gloot said. "And damn little on land. I guess you'd call the foof trade semi-legit. They pay taxes -- if the free-lance Custonis boys are sharp enough to collect 'em. And they place a few bribes here and there."  "You seem to know a lot about the opposition's movements," Retief commented. "I ought to -- I heard all about it last week when I was a yhogutherer." "I didn't know you Lumbagans changed islands as well as affiliations." "I was a prisoner of war down there. I managed to escape during the changing of the guard. By the way, keep a few sharp eyes out for a low-slung boat with a big carbon-arc light on deck. Interisland Police. Th're supposed to be up at the other end of the line now, but you never can tell." "I can see you've done your homework, Gloot." "Sure. I got the schedules down pat last time I was on the force." "Don't these rapid changes of allegiance become confusing?" Retief inquired. "I'd think you'd run the risk of accidentally shooting yourself under the inipression you were on the opposite side." "I guess you can get used to anything," Gloot said philosophically. "There's Groo-groo coming up on the starboard bow," Retief said. "Isn't it about time to start tacking in?" Gloot yawned. "Later, maybe," he said. "I decided maybe it's too much trouble trying to ransom you. I prefer life on the briny deep to floundering arouiid in the creepers -- " He was interrupted by a shout from the masthead; jumping up, he aimed a spyglass toward a dimly seen shape iidii closer across the dark water. "Oh-oh -- get set. That looks like -- yep, it's the patrol. Hey, Blump!" Gloot sprain to the companionway. "Hard aport. And keep it quiet." k sluggishly about, a dazzling, yard-wide shaft of smoky blue light laced across the water, etching the privateer's crew a chalky white against the velvet black of shadows. "Heave to, you bilge-scum," an amplified voice bellowed from the direction of the light, "before I put a solid shot into your waterline!"  "We're in trouble," Gloot rapped. "That's old Funge on the bullhorn; I'd know his voice anywhere, One of the best pirate captains around when he's working the other side of the street." "Do we strike, Cap'n?" a crewman called from amidships. "Remind me to keel-haul you when this is over!" Gloot roared. "Strike, nothing. Swing our sternchaser around and ruA it out over the port rail." He charged across the deck, which canted sharply as the sailors dragged the small cannon into position. "Load with canister -- double-charge. Get a flrepot up here. Hold her steady on a course of one-eight-oh and stand by to come about fast." He tum to Retkf who was standing nearby, observing the preparations for action. "Better get below, mister," he snapped. "This is no place for noncombatants!" "If you don't mind. I'll stick around on deck. And if I may make a suggestion -- it might be a good idea to steer for shore." "For shore? You must be hysterical with panic. Everybody knows Groo-groo's swarming with carnivores that are all stomach and teeth, with jiist enough legs to let 'em leap on their prey from forty feet away." "In that case, I hope you're a strong swimmer." "Don't worry, Retief, those revenue agents are lousy shots -- " Gloot's reassurances were interrupted by a flash, a boom and the whistling passage of a projectile that sailed high overhead to raise a column of water a hundred yards to starboard. "I sec what you mean," Retief said. "Nevertheless, I think you're about to lose your command." He pointed with his cigar at the water sluicing across the buckled planks of the deck. "We're sinking." Cries rose from the crew, who suddenly found themselves ankle deep in water. Gloot groaned. "I guess I took that last corner too fast -- she's opened her seams -- " A breaker rolled across the deck. If A crewman, swqt off his feet, went under with a despairii cry. As the vessd wallowed the wa ters surged, rubied back across the half-submerged plankii, swirling around Retiefs shins. The crewman was no longer in evidence; instead, a swarm of disassociated parts splashed in the brine, as the Lumbagan's formerly independent components resumed their free-swimming status, making instinctiydy for shore. "Wdl, so long, Retief," Gloot cried. "Maybe our various limbs and organs will meet up again in some future arrangement -- " he broke off. "Ah -- sorry. I forgot  your hookup is a one-time d. Tough lines, Retief. Take a last look around. Here we go -- " "Let's swim for it -- it's not fw." "Well, I gue you could do that if you want to prolong the process. As for me. I'd as soon get it over with -- " "And miss finding out if the superstitions are true? Come on, Gloot, last one ashore's an amputated!." R etief dived over the side. He .stroked hard against the suction created the sinking hulk, surfaced in time to see the tip of the mast descend slowly from sight amid vigorously boiling water strewn with flotsam. Mul' titudes of Singldpns, which had formerly constituted the privateer's comfdement, churned , the waves, helping instinctively for shore. A ragged cheer went up from the revenue cutter. Gloot bobbed up a few yards away. "She was my first command," he said sadly. "I guess maybe she was put tpgether a little too much like us Lumbagans." "A mdanchdly moment," Retief acknowledged. He shrugged out of his jacket, pulled off his shoes and thrust them into his side pockets and set off at an easy crawl, Gloot dog-paddlingbeside him. The evening was cool, but the water was . pleasantly warm, mildly saline. Groo-groo congealed from the darkness ahead, resolving itself into a cluster of rhubarb-shaped trees above a pale streak that widened into a curvi beadi. They rode the breakers in, grounding a coarsb coral sand, waded through tidal pools to shbre. Dark jungle loomed ahead, impenetrable in the dim light of the moons. Retief scanned the beach, noted a small keg half buried in the cOedontheend. "At least we won't want for basic supplies," he commented as he extricated the container. "You're about to sample Teriy booze, Gloot." "Not bad," the local coinmented five minutes later, after the puncheon had been broached with a lump of coral and the contents sampled. "It bums, but my stomadi kind of lik it, In fact -- " he paused to hiccup. "I like it all over. Actually, I just suddenly realized life is just a bowl of bloopberries, now that my vision has improved -- " "I see you're one of those affectionate drunks," Retief said as Gloot flung an arm about his shoulders. "Better'take it easy, Gloot. You may need all your faculties intact for the evening ahead." Gloot grabbed inaccurately at a small free-flying gland. "Kootchie-koo -- ain't it cute, Retief?" he asked as it landed on his head. "A most appealing organ," Retief agreed. "But I think you'd better lower your, voice. 'L . "What for? Somebody snoozing?" Gloot stood, weaving slightly, "Tell the little guys with the hammers to go away," he mumbled, groping at his scalp; there was a sudden flutter as the visitor departed hurriedly. Gloot sat down hard on the sand. "Tell 'em to turn off the sireens and the bright lights," he moaned, "and take the stewed gym shoes out of my mouth -- " "Congratulations, Gloot," Retief said. "I think you broke the Galactic speed record for hangovers." "Wha? Oh, it's you, Retief. Lucky you happened along. I just been set upon by a strong-arm mob and worked over with lead pipes. Which way'd they go?" "You were too much for them,'" Retief reassured his companion. "They fled in various directions." "Yah, the yellow-bellies," Gloot muttered. "Oh, my skull." "Where on the island does this Big Shot hang out?" Retief asked. "Beats me. I was to of been met on the beach." "Let's take a look around," Retief suggested, studying the looming woods above them. "You check that way -- " he point ed to the south -- "and I'll look up here." Gloot grunted assent and moved off. Retief followed the curve of the shore for a distance of a hundred yards before the. beach narrowed and was pinched out by a rocky ridge extending down from the forest-clad slope above. There were no tracks, no empty beer bottles, no signs of animate life. He returned to the starting point. Gloot was nowhere in sight. He followed the Lumbagan's bootprints as they wove unsteadily across the sand, then turned toward the nearest tongue of forest. The trail ended directly under a stout branch extending from the mass of foliage. Above, barely visible among the obscuring leaves, was the freshly cut end of a coarsely woven rope. IV R etief studied the ground. Other footprints were visible IF here, but Gloot's were not among them. The marks leading away from the spot he noted, were deeply impressed in the sand, as if the owners had been burdened by a heavy weight -- presumably that of the Lumbagan. Retief started off along the clearly marked spoor leading into the deep woods. The darkness here was almost total. Creatures of the night creaked, chirred and wailed in the treetops. An intermittent wind made groaning sounds among the boughs. Nearer at hand, something creaked faintly. Retief halted, faded back against the knobby-barked bole of a giant tree. A minute passed in silence. Just ahead of him a small figure emerged cautiously from the underbrush -- a curiously truncated Lumbagan, advancing in a stealthy crouch. Gripping a stout club in a cluster of fists, the native sneaked along, crouched, peering under bushes and behind trees as he came. Retief silently circled the sheltering trunk, stepped out behind the stranger and cleared his throat. With a thin yell the native sprang straight into the air. He struck the ground running, but with a quick grab Retief snared him by the garland of teeth circling his neck. "I'm looking for a friend of mine," Retief said in the native tpngue. "I don't suppose you've seen him," "Him monster like you?" the terrified captive squeaked, hooking a finger under his necklace to ease the strain. "Another type of monster entirely," Retief said; he gave a succinct description of his traveling companion. "Negative, Sahib. Tribe belong me not nab monster fitting that description. By the way, how about letting go ceremonial collar before I suffer embarassment of bite own head off." "You'd be more comfortable if you'd stop tugging," Retief pointed out. "Against instinct not try get away from monster," the native explained. "Curious. A moment ago I had The distinct impression you were trying to get closer to me." "Iron maiden on other foot now. You eat now -- or save for snack?" "I'll wait, thqnks. Is your village near here?" "Usually don't stop to chat with stranger," the captive muttered, "but in this case looks like best bet to increase longevity. Monster right, I citizen of modest town half mile up trail." "I'd like to pay it a visit. How about acting as guide?" "I got choice in matter?" "Certainly," Retief said. "You can either lead me there or take the consequences." "Most likely lead monster there and take consequences. Chief not like stranger poking around." "In that case you can introduce me. Retiefs the name. What's yours?" "Zoof -- but probably change to Mud, once chief get eyeful of humiliating circumstances attending surprise visit." "Actually, Zoof, it's not absolutely necessary that I lead you there by the neck if you'll promise not to run out on me." "Got funny feeling monster run faster than me anyway. Okay, it's deal. I lead you to village; when you get there, you look over menu, maybe pick choicer specimen." "It's a promise." Retief said. "Nice teeth, " he added as he disengaged his hand from the necklace. "Loc product?'" "Nope, fancy imported, guaranteed solid plastic." Zoof started through the dense woods, Retief close behind. "No catchurn real tooth these days. Life in woods going to hell in handcart. Monsters ruin hunting; lucky chief make deal with Five-eyes for steady supply grits and gravy." "The Five-eyes you refer to wouldn't by any chance be Groaci?" "Could be. Skinny-leg city slicker, same big like me, all time whisper, like offer deal on hot canoe." "That's Ambassador Jith to the life. But I wasn't aware his interests extended this far back into the brush." "Sure, small monster go everywhere, do everything. All time ride giant bird, make stink, noise, pile Up stone, while big moiter trample underbrush, rig net, hunt, eat -- " "What do these big monsters look like?" Retief inquired. "Take look in mirror sometime, see for self." "They're Terrans -- like me?" Zoof twisted his head to study Retief. "Nope, not exact same, maybe. Not so much eyes. Some got more. Some two time so big like you, tear head off, eat one bite -- " "Have you seen the monsters yourself?" "You bet; see you, see Five-eyes, hear plenty rumor HU in gaps in information." "Are there any Groaci at your village now?" "We find out," Zoof said. "Home town just ahead." He led the way another fifty feet and halted. "Well, what monster think of place?" R etief studied the gloomy forest around him, insofar as he could see it was in no way different from the previous half mile of woods. "It's unspoiled -- I'll say that for it," he commented. "Is this Main Street?" "Monster kidding? Is snazzy IF residential section, plenty tight zoning, you bet. Come on, we find chief and boys over at favorite hangout. Old Log." "A bar?" "Nope, just swell place root for grubs." "I take it the Grubs aren't a ball team?" "More like hors d'ouvre," Zoof corrected. He led the way through a dense stand of forest patriarchs, emerged in a small, open glade where half a dozen Lumbagans, differing wildly in detail, wandered apparently aimlessly, gazing at the ground. One pounced with a sharp cry, came up with a wriggling creature, which he thrust into a sack at his waist. "My grasp of Lumbagan zoology is somewhat hazy," Retief said. "How do these grubs fit into the general biological picture?" "Play essential role," Zoof replied. "Grub grow up be kidney, jawbone, kneecap, you name it." "So much for future generations. Still, it's no worse than eating eggs, I suppose." "Not eat 'em," Zoof corrected. "Collect, sell to skinny-leg monster, get plenty Colonel Sanders fried chicken and other exotic chow, you bet." The grub hunters had interrupted their search to stare inhospitably at Retief. "Hey, Chief," Zoof greeted his leader, "this monster name Retief, express desire meet jungle big shot. Retief, shake grasping member of Chief Boobooboo, son of Chief Booboo, son of Chief Boob." "Grandpa name Boo, not Boob," the chief corrted sternly. "Why you want me, monster? Zoof not look tender?" "Actually I was looking for a friend -- " "Hmm, neat switch. Usual custom eat enemy, but after all, why be prejudice? Eat chum too, get varied diet." Boobooboo looked appraisingly at Zoof. "As it happens. I've already eaten," Retief said. "The friend I'm looking for seems to have gotten involved with a rope." "Monster bark up wrong flagpole," the chief stated. "Unsophisticated aborigine unequal to technical challenge of make rope." "Any idea who might have snared him?" "Sure." "Possibly you'd confide in me." "Why?" "I don't suppose the simple desire to do a good turn would be sufficient motivation?" "Not that unsophisticated," Boobooboo said flatly. "Good time remember ancient folk wisdom embodied in old tribal saying: What's In It For Me?" "What about a firm promise of a year's supply of pizza pies?" "Not much nourishment in promise," the chief pointed out. "Got better idea -- " Boobooboo lowered his voice. "Know where big supply eatables located; you help collect, maybe I get bighearted and tell all." "I think I'd prefer a more definite commitment," Retief said. "Strike out the 'maybe' and we might be able to get together." "Sure; just stuck 'maybe' in so have something to concede." "I see I'm dealing with a pro," Retief acknowledged. "En passant, where is the food supply located?" "Half mile that direction." The chief pointed. "Enough chow for whole tribe from now to next St. Swithin's Day." "I take it you've actually seen the groceries for yourself?" "Sure, same time deliver." "I see. You plan to hijack the supplies you've been selling to the Groaci." "Hijack loaded word. Just say decided to share wealth with underprivileged. Monsters got wealth -- we got urtderprivilege." "At the present rate. Chief, I predict your supply of unsophistication won't last out the winter. But why do you need my help? You have enough troops to stage a raid on your own." "Monster not get big picture. Skinny-legs spoil-sport hide comestibles away inside magic cave, patrol perimeter with plenty fearsome monster, tear simple tribesman apart with two hands while hunt fleas with rest." , "And you think I can penetrate this fortress?" "Maybe not; but better you than me and boys; we just simple pastoral types; hunt, fish, steal, not go in for heavy work." "On the whole. Chief, the proposition doesn't sound overwhelmingly attractive." "I figure maybe you feel that way; so save snapper for end: you come here ask about missing buddy? Monster in luck; get economical combination deal. Kidnaped pal same place victuals. Get two for price of one." "I think," Retief said, "I've been outmanuvered." Retief, the chief, Zoof and the bulk of the truncated tribesmen, stood in the shelter of a giant mumble tree, the soft mutterings of its foliage covering the sound of their conversation. "Straight ahead, can't miss it," the chief was saying. "But watch snares; you get caught same way absent chum, deal off." "Understood, Chief. And you'll keep your people posted in position to create a diversion in the event I have to leave the vicinity in haste." "Correct. We stand by, catch any wandering grub come galloping past." IF "It's been a pleasure dealing with you. Chief. If you ever decide to give up the rural way of life, drop me a line. The Corps could use your talents instructing a course in creative naiVet#." "Thanks, Retief. Keep offer in mind in case present caper not pan out." The forest was silent as Retief made his way along the dimly marked trail, but for a stealthy rustling in the undergrowth which ceased when he halted,, began again when he went on. He had covered perhaps a hundred and fifty yards when he rounded an abrupt turn and was face to face with twelve feet of tusked nightmare. For a moment he stood unmoving, studying the monstrosity looming ten feet away. Its bleary, pinkish eyes, three in number, stared unwinkingly at him from a lumpy face equipped with tufted whiskers placed at random around a vast, loose-lipped mouth, and a scattering of gaping nostrils. Immense arms hung almost to the ground from its massive shoulders. Three bowed legs supported the weight of a powerfully muscled torso -- the big fellow's generous pedal extremities were housed in gigantic sneakers with round black reinforcing patches over the ankle-bones. A long tail curled up over one clavicle, ending in a seven-fingered hand with which the creature was exploring the interior of a large, pointed ear. Other hands gripped a naked two-edge sword at least nine feet in length. Retief took a hand-rolled cigar from an inside pocket, puffed it alight, blew out pale violet smoke. "Nice night," he said. The monster drew a deep breath. "Sorry," Retief said, "I didn't quite catch that remark." repeated. Retief shook his head. "You're still not getting through." "Ahhrrgh?" "You do it well," Retief said. "Exceptionally nice timbre. Real feeling." "You really like it?" the giant said in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. "Gee, thanks a lot." "I don't know when I've seen it done better. But is that all there is?" . "You mean it ain't enough?" "I'm perfectly satisfied," Retief assured his new acquaintance. "I just wanted to be sure there wasn't an encore." "I practiced it plenty," the oversized Lumbagan said. "I wouldn't of wanted to of done it wrong." "Certainly not. By the way, what does it mean?" "How do I know? Who tells me anything? I'm just old Smelch -- everybody pushes me around on account of I'm easygoing, you know?" "I think I met a relative of yours in town, Smelch. Unfortunately I had to rush away before we really had a chance to chat." "Yeah? Well, I heard a few of the boys was to of been took for a glom at the bright lights. But not me. No such luck." #'lOU don't happen to know A who's been down for a barefoot stroll on the shore do you, Smelch?" the Terran inquired casually. "A party with three-toed feet." "Three? Lessee." Smelch's tailmounted hand scratched at his mottled scalp with a sound reminiscent of a spade striking marl. "That'd be mtJre'n one and less than nine, right?" "You're narrowing the field," Retief said encouragingly. "If I just knew how many nine was. I'd be in business," Smelch muttered. "That ain't nothing like say, six, for example?" "Close, but no dope-stick. Skip that point, Smelch -- I didn't mean to get technical: Were you waiting for anything special when I came along?" "You bet: my relief." "When's he due?" "Well, lessee: I come out here a while back and been here for quite a time, so what does that leave? Say -- half an hour?" "More like a jiffy and a half, give or take a few shakes of a iamb's tail.What's up at the top of the trail?" "That's what nobody ain't supposed to know." "Why not?" "On account of it's like a secret, see?" "I'm beginning to get a glimmering. Who says it's a secret?" Smelch's fingernail abraded his chin with a loud sound. "That's supposed to be another secret." Smelch's features rearranged themselves in what might have been a puzzled frown. "What I can't figure is -- if it's a secret, how come you know about it?" "Word get around," Retief said reassuringly. "Okay if I go up and have a look?" "Maybe you ought to identify yourself first. Not that I don't trust you, but you know how it is." "Certainly. I'm Retief, Smelch." He shook the hand at the end of the tail, which returned the grip firmly. "Sorry about the routine, Retief, but these days a guy can't be too careful." "What about?" Smelch blinked all three eyes in rotation, a vertiginous effect. "I get it," he said, "that's what you call a joke, right? I'm nuts about jokes, only the trouble is usually nobody tells me about 'em in time to laugh." "It's a problem that often plagues ambassadors, Smelch. But don't worry; I'll be sure to tip IF you off in advance next time." "Gee, you're a all-right guy, Retief, even if you are kind of a runt and all, no offense." T he sound of heavy feet came from up-trail; a squat, five-foot figure lumbered into view, as solidly built as Smelch but less beautiful, his various arms, legs and ears having been arranged with a fine disregard of standard patterns. One of his five hands gripped a fifteen-foot harpoon; his four eyes, on six-inch stalks, goggled atop a flattened skull which gave the appearance of having been matured inside a hot water bottle. "About time, Flunt," Smelch greeted the newcomer. "You're a shake and a half late." "Spare me any carping criticisms," Flunt replied in a tone of long-suffering weariness. "I've just come from an interview with that bossy little -- " He broke off, looking Retief up and down. "Well, you might at least offer an introduction," he said sharply to Smelch, extending a hand to the diplomat. "I'm Flunt. Pardon my appearance -- " he indicated two uncombed fringes of purplish-blue filaments springing from just below his cheekbones -- "but I just washed my hide and I can't do a thing with it." "Not at all," Retief said ambiguously, giving Flunt's feet a quick glance. They were bare and remarkably human-looking. "My name's Retief." "Goodness, I hope I'm not interrupting anything." "Not at all. Smelch and I were just passing the time of night. Interesting little island, Flunt. See many strangers here?" "Gracious, I hope not. I'm supposed to do dreadful things to them." Flunt gave Retief a startled look. "Are you by any chance astranger?" "Are you kidding?" Smelch spoke up. "He's Retief, like I told you." "Just so you're sure. Little Sir Nasty-nice wouldn't like it a bit if any outsiders sneaked a peek at his precious whateveritis. Really, for this job one needs eyes in the back of one's head!" "Yeah," Smelch said. "Lucky you got 'em." "Flunt, do you know anyone with three-toed feet in these parts?" Retief asked. "Three-toed feet? Hmmm. They're a bit passe this season, of course -- but I think I've seen a few around. Why?" His voice lowered confidentially. "If you're interested in picking up half a dozen at a bargain price, I think I may be able to put you onto a good thing." "I might be," Retief said. "When could I meet the owners?" "Oh, I don't think you'd like that," Flunt said soberly. "No, I don't think you'd like that at all, at all. And neither would little Mr. Sticky-fingers, now that I reflect on it. Actually, I shouldn't have mentioned the matter. My blunder. Forget I said anything." "Gome on, Retief," Smelcltsaid loudly. "Me and you'll just take a little ankle up the trail. I'll point out the points of interest and like that." He gave the Terran an elaborate three-eyed wink. "Capital idea, Smelch." "Look here, Smelch," Flunt said nervously, "you're not going to go sneaking around you-knowwhere and getting you-know-who all upset about you-know-what?" "I do?" Smelch looked pleased. "Maybe you don't; it's been dunned into your head hourly all your life -- but then you've only been around for a week -- " Flunt turned to Retief. "I hate to sound finicky, Retief, but if this ummyday tries to ip-slay you into, well, anyplace you shouldn't ee-bay, well -- one has one's job to do," He fingered the barbed head of his harpoon meaningfully. "I can give you a definite tentative hypothetical assurance on that," Retief said crisply. "But don't hold me to it." "Well, in that case -- " Retief felt Flunt'S eyes on him as he and Smelch moved up the trail toward whatever lay above. V F or the first hundred yards, nothing untoward disturbed the silence of the forest at night -- nothing other than the normal quota of chirps, squeaks and scuttlings that attested to the activities of the abundant wildlife of the region. Then, without warning, a gigantic shape charged from the underbrush. Smelch, in the lead, late in swinging his broad-headed spear around, took the brunt of the charge solidly against his chest. His explosive grunt was almost drowned in the sound of the collision. The antagonists surged to and from, trampling shrubbery, shaking trees, grunting like beached walruses. Suddenly the stranger bent his knees, rammed his head into Smelch's midriff and rose, Smelch spread-eagled across his shoulders. He pivoted sharply and hurled Smelch into the undergrowth, snapping off a medium-sized tree in the process. The victor paused only long enough to beat out a rapid tattoo on his chest and wait until a brief coughing fit passed before whirling on Retief. The Terran sidestepped the dimly seen monster's first rush, which carried the latter well into the thicket beside the path. Smelch reappeared from the opposite side, shaking his head and muttering. The stranger came crashing back onto the scene only to be met by a two lefts and a right haymaker that halted him in his tracks. "Sorry about that, Retief," Smelch said contritely, as his anIF tagonist toppled like a felled oak. 'But the mug got my dander up. He shouldn't ought to of came out leading with his chin anyways." "A neat one-two-three," Retief commented, blowing a plume of smoke toward the fallen fighter. "Let's take a closer look." He parted the brush to look down at the casualty who lay sprawled on his back, out cold. The ten-foot figure was remarkably conservative for a Lumbagan, he thought: only two legs and arms, a single narrow head with close-set paired eyes, a long noe and mouth, an unimpressive chin. The feet, clearly outlined inside rawhide buskins, featured five toes each, matching the hands' ten fingers. "What's the matter?" Smelch said. "You know him?" "No, but he bears a certain resemblance to a colleague of mine." "Geeze, the poor guy. Well, beauty ain't everything. Anyways, here's your chance to pick up a set of dogs at a steal, if you know what I mean." He rammed an elbow toward Retiefs ribs, a comradely gesture capable of collapsing a lung had it landed. "I think I'll pass up the opportunity this time," Retief said. H e stepped forward to investigate a strand of barbed wire vaguely discernible in the gloom. It was one of three, he discovered, running parallel to the trail and firmly attached to stout posts. "JRetief, we better blow," Smelch said. "Like Flunt said, nobody but nobody don't want to poke his noses and stuff in too close around you-know-where." "Actually, I don't think I do," Retief corrected . his massive acquaintance. "Know where, I mean" "Good," Smelch said in a relieved tone. "You're safer that way." "Not afraid, are you?" "Yeah." Smelch nodded vigorously. "I hear they got ways of making a guy regret the day his left leg met up with his right." "Who says so?" "Everybody, Retief! All the boys been warned to stay clear, once they was outside -- " "You mean you've been inside?" "Sure." Smelch looked puzzled, an expression involving a rapid twitching of his ears. "How could I of not been?" "Flunt's been there, too?" "Natch. You don't figure 'the moomy-bird brung him, do you? That's a little joke, Retief. I know you know the moomy-bird didn't bring him." "How about this fellow?" Retief indicated the unconscious Lumbagan stretched at his feet. "He came from inside, too?" Smelch clucked sympathetically. "I guess they must of left out some o' your marbles, Retief. Where else would Zung of come from? In fact -- " he lowered his voice confidentially -- "he ain't never graduated, poor sucker." "Maybe you'd care to amplify that remark a little, Smelch." "Zung is one of the boys which they ain't been allowed out in the big, wonderful world like you and me." Smelch spread several hands expansively. "Except only maybe a few feet to clobber anybody that comes along. What I figure is -- " his voice took on a solemn note -- "him and the other ones, they ain't all there, you know? Rejects, like." "Rejects from what, Smelch?" "Shhh." Smelch looked around worriedly. "I don't like the trend of the conversation,which we're treading on shaky ground, especially this close to you-knowwhat." "No, but I think it's time I found out." "He -- you ain't planning on climbing the fence?" "Unless you know where the gate is." "Sure -- right up the trail about a hundred yards or maybe ten. I ain't too precise on fine detail." "Then I'll be off, Smelch. Give my regards to Flunt when you see him." "You're really going to sneak back into you-know-where and grab a peek at you-know-what? Boy oh boy, if you-know-who sees you -- " "I know. Thanks for clarifying matters. By the way, if you should run into a fellow with three legs who answers to the name of Gloot, I'd appreciate any help you could give him." "Sure. You let me know if we see him." "We?" "Heck, yes. You don't think I'm going in there alone, do you? And we better get moving. Zung's starting to twitch." up the path, Retief was again aware of the soft rustlings and snufflings he had noted on and off since his arrival on the island. Through a gap in the shrubbery he caught a fleeting glimpse of a stealthy figure which ducked out of sight as he paused. The gate -- a wide construction of aluminum panels and barbed wire -- blocked the trail a hundred feet above the point where they had encountered Zung. A greenshaded spotlight outlined it starkly against the black foliage. A padlock the size of an alarm clock dangled from a massive hasp. "Any more guards hidden out around the area?" Retief asked. "Naw -- with Flunt and me doing a tight security job down below and the other bum working in close, who needs it?" "An incisive point," Retief conceded. They walked boldly up to the gate. Smelch tried it, seemed IF surprised when it failed to swing open. "Looks like it's stuck," he commented, and ripped it from its hinges, lock and all, tossing the crumpled panels aside. Metal shrieked and crashed. "Nothing like direct action," Retief said admiringly. "But from this point on I suggest we observe a trifle more caution, just in case there's anyone up there whose suspicions might be aroused by the sound of a three-car collision this far from the nearest highway." "Say, pretty shrewd," Smelch said admiringly. "I always wanted to team up with a guy which he could figure the angles." The path continued a few yards beyond the former gate before debouching into a wide cleared strip adjoining a high board fence that extended for some distance in each direction. "Home sweet home," Smelch said nostalgically. "The old place sure has changed since I ventured out into the great world." "Has it?" "Sure. After all, that was a couple hours ago." "This is where you were born and raised, in other words." "Yeah -- inside the fence is where I spent my happy childhood, all four daysof it." "I'd like to see the old place." "Well, old Sneakyfeet Won't like it -- but to heck with him and his dumb rules. Who but a alumnus would want to look inside anyways? Come on, Retief." Smelch led the way to an inconspicuous gate which yielded to his efforts, not without a certain amount of splintering. Retief propped the door back in place and turned to regard an extensive array of ranked cages stacked in long aisles that led away in the moonlight to the far line of the fence. A dispirited yammering chorus of sound started up nearby, reminiscent of visiting day at a pet hospital. A vaguely zoo-like odor hung in the air. R etief approached the nearest row of cages. In the first, a creature resembling a rubber rutabega with spidery legs slumped dolefully against the bars. Adjacent, a pair of apprehensive-looking ankles huddled together for warmth. "Freebies," Smelch said. "Just in from the jungle. Little do the poor little fellers dream what a high-class destiny is in store for 'em." "What destiny is in store for them, Smelch?" "Right this way," the Lumbagan invited, indicating the next rank of cages. These were somewhat larger than those in the first section, each containing a creature giving the appearance of having been assembled from spare parts. Here a spindly leg drummed the fingers of a lone hand springing from where a foot might have been expected; there a bored-looking lower lip, flanked by a pair of generous ears, sprang directly from an unmistakable elbow. In the next echelon, the cages were still larger, occupied by specimens of a more sophisticated appearance. A well-developed paunch with a trio of staring brown eyes at the top squatted on four three-toed feet, watching the visitors incuriously. A remarkably human-looking head with a full beard swung from the roof of its prison by the muscular arm that was its sole appendage. "Uh, some of the boys look a little weird," Smelch said apologetically, "but in the.end they mostly turn out handsome devils, like me." "Someone seems to have gone to considerable trouble to set up this lonely-hearts farm," Retief commented. "In the natural state, I understand matches among Freebies take place at rare intervals. This looks like mass production. Any idea why, Smelch?" "Nope. I ain't one of them guys which he asts questions all the time, you know what I mean? I mean, why poke the old nostrils in and maybe get 'em stuffed full of lint, right?" "It's a philosophy without which bureaucracy as we know it would soon wither away," Retief conceded. "What was your job when you were here, Smelch?" "Well, lessee, there was eating. That took a lot of my time. Then there was sleeping. I liked that pretty good. Then -- lessee -- I guess that just about wraps it up. Why?" "You must have a strong union," Retief said. "Why were you here?" "Geeze, you know that's a question which a guy could wonder about it a long time if he wouldn't drop off to sleep first. Personally, I got a like theory that before we can attack the problem of transcendentalism, we got to examine the nature of knowledge and its limitations, making a appropriate distinction between noumena and phenomena. I figure by coordinating perceptions by means of rationally evolved concepts of understanding we can proceed to the analysis of experience and arrive at the categorical imperative, with its implicit concomitants. Get what I mean?" "I think possibly I've been underestimating you, Smelch. I didn't know you read Kant." "Can't read, you mean," Smelch corrected. "Nope, I never had the time for no idle pursuits, what with that heavy schedule I told you about." "Quite understandable, Smelch. By the way, Flunt mentioned you'd only been here a week. Where were you before that?" "Well, now we're getting into the area of the metaphysical, Retief, which when you examine maIF teriai phenomena by inductive processes you arrive at a philosophical materialism, not to exclude ontological and epistemological considerations, which in geieral could be assumed to denj metaphysics any validity in the context of Aristotelian logic. Or am I just spinning my wheels?" "Did you work that out for yourself, Smelch, or did somebody tip you off?" "Huh?" "Never mind. I don't think I'd grasp the full significance of the answer anyway." T hey passed the last of the cages, these occupied by a bewildering variety of Lumbagan life forms in a wide range of colors and shapes and displaying a remarkably diverse endowment of limbs, sensory ejuipment and other somatic elements. "They look vigorous enough," Retief commented as one hefty specimen gripped the bars and drooled at him. "But I get an impression they're not too bright." "Well, sure, first they got to go through the indoctrination center. You can't expect an agglomeration which last week it was grubbing roots in the woods to be a instant intellectual. That takes a couple days." "I see. Where do we go from here, Smelch?" "How about the cafeteria? I got a yen for some good old home cooking." "Let's save that until after I've met You-know-who," Retief suggested. "Mondays they usually got mudon-a-mortarboard," Smelch said nostalgically, testing the air through his multiple nostrils. "Also on Wednesday, Saturday, and all the other days. Lucky it's my favorite. But I guess you're right, Retief. We got to make our courtesy calls before we chow down. I guess old Sneakyfeet -- " Smelch paused. '"Hey, talking about sneaky feet, old You-knowwho has got three toes on each foot; I barged in on him once when he was just climbing out of a tub of hot sand. Wow, if language was skinning hooks. I'd of been flayed to the ribs in no time. That's when I seen 'em. His feet, I mean." He broke off as a faint, rhythmic sound became audible, swiftly growing louder. The running lights of a copter appeared above the treetops, winking in a complicated pattern. The machine sank out of sight beyond the fence. "What do you know, Retief -- that's old Whatzis himself," Smelch cried delightedly. "But now that it's time to make the introductions," he added with sudden doubt, "I kind of wonder if it's a good idea. If he's in a bad mood he could maybe interpret it as me not doing my job of keeping outsiders on the outside." "Let's hope he doesn't take a narrow niinded approach," Retief said encouragingly. He had reached the section of fence opposite the point where the copter had descended. He jumped, caught the top, pulled himself up in time to see a hurrying figure in a dark cloak and a pale headgear disappear into a small structure at the edge of the clearing. He pulled himself over and dropped to the ground. A moment later Smelch joined him. "That copter's been busy tonight," Retief said. "What's in the building?" "All kinds of neat stuff, like the cafeteria," Smelch said. "Did I mention they got mud-on-a-mortarboard?" "You did. Let's go take a closer look." They reached the door through which the heli's passenger had disappeared. It opened and they stepped into a brightly lit corridor. Light gleamed through a glass-paneled door at the far end. When they reached it, muffled sounds were audible from the room beyond. VI R etief took a small buttonshaped object from his pocket, pressed it to the door, put his ear to it. "... you still hesitate?" a suave voice said. "Possibly you are deterred by ethical considerations, a reluctance to betray those who have placed their trust in you. Dismiss the thought, fellow! What harm to honor if nobody blabs, eh?" Snorting and threshing sounds followed. "Ah -- Exalted One," a breathy Groaci voice whispered, "to offer a suggestion: the removal of the gag to facilitate compliance with instructions." "Um. Thank you, Chish. I was just about so to order. Guard!" Heavy footsteps sounded, followed by a ripping sound, a hoarse yell, a shuddering sigh. "Just one," Gloot's voice said yearningly. "Just one little ocular, right by the roots -- " ' Retief tried the doorknob, found it locked. He quickly extracted a small but complicated device from an inner pocket, applied it to the latch. There was a soft click. The door opened silently on a small dark room lined with coat hooks; beyond was a second room, clinically furnished in white. Gloot sat in a steel chair under a ceiling glare panel. He was strapped in position by heavy bands of wire mesh. An elaborate network of color-coded wires led from a cap-like device clamped to his head to a gray steel cabinet resembling a ground-car tune-up console. A Lumbagan, if anything larger and more baroque than Smelch, IF leaned against the wall. A uniformed Groaci stood by a door in the opposite wall. Before the captive stood a slight figure nattily attired in bile-green Bermuda shorts, an aloha shirt in clashing pinks and orange and violet Argyles. "Well, my old friend Nith, formerly of the Groaci Secret Police," Retief said softly to Smelch. "I wasn't aware his duties had brought him to these shores." "Now, fellow," Nith demanded of Gloot, "who sent you here?" "Nobody sent me; me and a chum came together." "Aha! This chum -- what power does he represent?" "He's a Groaci," Gloot said. "A Groaci?" "You heard me. Five-eyes. And a big wheel at that." "AmpliHed One," Chish hissed. "To begin to see the light! Lackaday! To have accidentally abducted a member of the personal Nith waggled his eyes playfully at Gloot. "In your report to your superior. I'm sure you won't find it necessary to mention this little contretemps, eh? Just look upon it as a slight misunderstanding, easUy mended -- " "Upthrust One," Lt. Chish interrupted, "The possibility that though this one's companion is of the noble Groacian stock, he himself might yet be in the pay of inferior races -- " "To be sure, Leftenant," Nith .said smoothly. "To have been about to raise precisely that issue." He faced Gloot. "Confess all, unfortunate dupe. You were the prisoner of the Groacian noblebeii, correct?" "Well -- technically he was my prisoner. But between you and me. Five-eyes, I was beginning to wonder who was in charge." "You dared impede the freedom of a High-Born One? You abducted him here against his will?" "Naw, it wasn't that way," Gloot said. "It was kind of a joint venture, like." "Joint venture? I fail to postulate ahy conceivable circumstance under which the interests of Groac and of an aboriginal would coincide." "Dough," Gloot said succinctly. "Mazoola. Bread. You know." "You shared an interest in gournaet cookery?" "Cripes, how'd you know that?" "Further association with us Groaci will accustom you to such casual displays of omniscience," Nith said smoothly. "But -- to have implied that it occupied the status of co-equal with its Groaci companion," Chish objected. "To have spoken allegorically, as is customary with artists! To have implied only that His Supernalness's shared interest in matters gastronomic. But ndw to wonder -- what brings Groaci brass to this dismal backwater, unannounced? The possibility that Supreme HQ is checking up on me. Tell me, fellow," he addressed Gloot, "what was the purpose of your Groaci master's visit to these remote environs?" "To see what was cooking, what else?" "Yes, yes, of course -- a clever cover story. But in addition to his culinary researches, what was the mission of the High-Born?" "If he had one he never told me," Gloot said. "To be expected that his Grandeur would not confide in an underling," Nith murmured. "Estimable Broodmaster, sir" Chish hissed. "To hypothesize: might not these same intruders be a veritable inspection team, dispatched by Ambassador Jith, who, jealous of his prerogatives, may have introduced them here by devious means, the better to check up on your operation unheralded?" "Exactly what I had deduced," Nith whispered and started for the door. "Certain reactionary elements have long desired my downfall. What better time than now to bring long schemesto naught by meddlesome probing, thereafter to cry me culpable? Forewarned, I'll see to certain matters regarding the voucher files; meantime, dispatch the prisoner instantly, lest he level feckless charges against my person!" N ith skittered through the door and was gone. Chish made a rude gesture at the closed door and turned to Gloot, drawing his pistol. "No violence, now," he cautioned the Lumbagan as he removed the cranial attachments of the veracitometer. "And remember to mention my name in glowing terms to yoir master. That's Chish: C-H-I-S-H, by a gross miscarriage of justice a mere Leftenant -- " He broke off as Retief stepped through the door, Smelch behind him. Uttering a faint cry, the officer whirled toward the door by which his superior had just departed. The Terran reached it first. "Guard! To me!" Chish keened, but as the Lumbagan behemoth lumbered into action, Smelch stepped behind him, gripped hands with himself, raised the resultant picnic-ham-sized aggregation of bone and muscle overhead and brought it down atop the fellow's cranium with a resounding thump, felling him in his tracks. "Poor old Vump, he always had a glass head,"  Smelch commented. "Nice one!" Gloot yelled. "But save old Nith for me!" "Unhand me, Terran," Chish whispered, trying unsuccessfully to dodge past Retief, "To have important business requiring my urgent attention -- " IF "You're confused, Leftenant," Relief said. "It was Broodmaster Nith who had the pressing appointment." "Indeed? To have never heard of him." "Too bad. I was hoping you could tell me whom he works for." "Never, vile Soft One!" "I'd avoid these long-term predictions if I were you, Chish. They have a tendency to unravel at the edges." Relief looked past the Groaci to Gloot, busily freeing himself from the last of his entanglements. "Don't break anything, Gloot; we wouldn't want to short the leftenants wiring." "Where'd the other one go?" Gloot demanded. "That's the one I want. I want to pluck those eyes one at a time, like picking ripe froom-fruit! How about it, you?" he glowered at Chish, who recoiled from the menacing figure towering over him. "Where's the other Terry?" "The -- the other Terry?" the Groaci hissed in agitation. "What other Terry?" "You know what other Terry!" Gloot roared. "Oh, that Terry," Chish said hurriedly. "Why, I do believe he's occupying the, er, guest suite, just across the passage." "Yeah?" Gloot looked baffled. "What's he doing there?" "He was, ah, assisting me in certain experimental activities," Chish replied. "Which reminds me. I'm overdue for my saline infusion, so if you'll kindly unhand me -- " Gloot pushed the Groaci away and went across the room and into the passage. He paused before the door across the hall and rapped. A faint, uncertain cry answered him. "Whattaya know?" he said. "He's in there." He tried the knob, then stepped back and kicked the stout panel; the plastic cracked. A second kick shattered the lock, and the door banged inward. A slight figure appeared in the opening, checked at the sight of the Lumbagan. "Hey," Gloot said weakly as Relief came up behind him. "That's not -- " "Well, there you are at last. Relief," First Secretary Magnan gasped. "Heavens, I thought you'd never turn up!" .Ilooking from Magnan to Relief. "Another Groaci with only two eyes, just like you. Relief -- and I just noticed that Terry you're holding onto is wearing three fakes, just like that other Terry, Chish. What gives?" "Duplicity on a vast scale," Relief said. "It's creeping in everywhere these days." "You labor under a misapprehension, dull-witted bucolic!" the Groaci began, subsiding in midword at a minatory tweak. "What's this person referring to?" Magnan inquired, favoring Gloot with a distasteful look. "Is he somehow under the impression -- " "He's a great admirer of the Groaci, Mr. Magnan. Naturally he leaped to the conclusion that you enjoyed that status, since you resemble me so closely." Retief gave Chisjh's collar an extra halftwist as the latter attempted to speak. "How come," Gloot asked .bluntly, "this Groaci's got the same shortage of eyes as you, Retief?" "Quite simple, Gloot. He's a relative; we're both members of the ape family." "Oh. But what's he doing here, palling around with these foreign ers?" "Simplicity itself," Magnan said. "I was seized by a brace of brigands and whisked here for some obscure purpose unconnected with normal diplomatic proced ures." The First Secretary looked severely at Chish. "Per' haps you he some explanation?" "I'm sure he does." Retief assisted the struggling Groaci to the chair and with Gloot's enthusiastic aid strapped him in position, fitting the cranial attachments in place atop his cartilaginous skull amid his eye-stalks, which drooped dejectedly. "Alas for lost opportunities," the officer mourned. "Had I but known of the imminen#e of my downfall, I might at least have had the pleasure of making plain to the abominaUe Nith my true assessment of his worth!" "Too bad, Chish. Maybe I'll find a chance to make it up to you," Retief said. "Now, I believe this modd has the automatic prevarication-suppressor. It will shoot a nice jolt through your trigeminal nerve if you accidentally stray into inaccuracy. Just set it at max, Gloot, to save time." "Base alien, thus to serve an innocent official harmlessly engaged in the performance of his duties -- " "Later, Chish. Who was the Big Shot?" "One Swarm-master Ussh, a most prestigious official. You'll rue the day -- " "Probably. Where's OiQega Station?" "I haven't the faintest -- yip -- the faintest intention of lying. I was about to say -- eek! On a desert isle some leagues from here, drat all Soft Ones!" "Which one?" Gloot demanded. "Rumboogy? Delerion?" "Sprook!" Chish whispered. "I could wish you no more dolorous fate than to set foot in its miasmic swamps!" "The needles say he's telling the truth," Gloot said. "As he sees it," Retief said. IF "Unfortunately, false information doesn't register as long as he believes it. I have a feeling his boss wasn't keeping him fully informed." "It is you, vile counterfeit -- " Chish started and broke off, listening. Faintly from afar a clattering sounded. "Ha!" The Groaci hissed in triumph. "In instants a squad of Peace-keepers will be upon you to put an end to your presumptuous invasion of sacred Groacian symbolic soil, as well as to your grotesque imposture!" "What's he talking about?" Gloot demanded. "I refer to the understandable aspirations of lesser races to the lofty status of Groacihood -- " "He also means the cops will be here any minute," Retief cut in. "I wonder if you'd be kind enough, Chish, as to direct us to the nearest exit." "A door -- at the end of the passage there. A passage leads thence to a hidden egress -- and good riddance to you!" "Well, we'll have to be saying good night now, Leftenant. When Vump comes to perhaps he'll unstrap you. You can while away the time by planning what you should have said to Nith when you had the chance." "True," Chish whispered. "Gone are my dreams of early advancement. But I may yet get a crack at that lousy civilian." "Let the thought sustain you in your hour of trial," Retief said. T en minutes later, after carefully skirting the spot where Flunt guarded the trail, Retief, Magnum and Gloot followed the tracks left in the soft moss of the trail by the fleeing Groaci, Nith. The path, while narrow, was high and dry, twisting and turning to avoid the boles of giant, moss-hung trees rising from the dark water, skirting the deeper pools. In a small, open patch of spongy ground the trail ended abruptly. There was no sign of Nith. "Well, whattaya know," Gloot commented, peering into the surrounding darkness. "Who would of thought the little Terry was that fast on his feet? He's gone and got clean away, so I guess we might as well get started back -- " "Listen," Retief said softly. A faint cry was repeated somewhere ahead. He started off at a run, picking a route from one root-clump to another. A hundred feet farther on he emerged into the open to witness a curious sight -- from a sturdy bough overhanging the path, Nith dangled by one leg in mid-air, supported in an inverted position by a length of stout rope. "Good of you to wait, Nith," Retief said. "An excellent spot for a confidential talk." "To cut me down at once and to enjoy the eternal gratitude of the Groacian state, renewable annually at a modest fee," the snared alien whispered. "Stumbled over one of your own trip-wires, eh?" Retief said sympathetically, "It's one of the hazards of the diplomatic way of life." "What is this talk of diplomatic wiles? As it happens, I am a simple scientist, here to observe the nest-building habits of the Lesser Tufted Adam's Apple -- " "Sorry, Nith, an ingenious cover, but blown. I'm afraid. We met a few years back when you were number two to General Fiss, the time he tried to take over Yale." "Tour Director Fiss and I were interested only in the excavation of artifacts of the Yalcan culture," Nith protested. "You Groaci have pioneered the science of instant archeology, true," Retief conceded, "but good form requires that you wait until the owners aren't using the bones any longer before you try to wire them together in a glass case. However, we have more immediate matters to discuss at the moment. Let's begin with where you were headed in such haste," "I find it singularly difficult to marshall my recollective faculties while suspended in this unseemly position," the Groaci hissed. "You'd find it even more difficult if the point of attachment were your third thoracic vertebra," Retief pointed out. "Long will this day live in infamy," Nith wailed. "Very well, Terry, I'll reveal my destination, but only under protest. As it happens, I maintain a modest retreat in the foothills above -- to it I retire on occasion to meditate. Now cut me down promptly and in my report I'll do my best to minimize the shabby role you played in this sorry contretemps." ## late for secrecy now," M. Retief said as Gloot and Magnan arrived panting, splashed with mud and festooned with algae. "Well," the First Secretary said as he spied the dangling alien, "at least he had the decency to attempt suicide -- though one might have known he'd bungle it." "You speak of suicide. Soft One?" Nith keened. "Such indeed is the fate of those who would invade the sacrosanct precincts of my bucolic hideaway." "Don't imagine for a moment that your threats intimidate me," Magnan replied loftily. "It's just that we happen to be leaving now anyway. Come, Retief, suitably padded -- discussed in adequate detail, that is -- my report of the disasters we've encountered up to this point will serve adequately to impress the Ambassador with my zeal." "An inspiring thought, Mr. IF Magnan. Just picture his expression when you tell him you've discovered there may be a plot afoot to take over Lumbaga and that you hurried back to let him know what, without wasting time flnding out when, where, why, and how." "But as I was about to say," Magnan continued quickly, "why dash off just when we're on the verge of achieving a coup of such stunning proportions?" "Now, just how would one go about finding this weekend cottage of yours," Retief queried Nith. "You imagine, presumptuous alien, that I would reveal details of my personal affairs to such as you?" "My mistake, Nith." Retief turned to Magnan and Gloot. "It seems we'll have to find it on our own. Shall we go, gentlemen?" "What -- and leave me here suspended, prey to any passing appetite, to say nothing of the risk of incipient apoplexy?" Nith shrilled in protest. "Yeah, that would be cruel," Gloot said and drew his knife. "I'll just slit the sucker's throat -- " "I capitulate," the Groaci hissed. "Proceed north-east by east to a lone foot tree, take a right, proceed another hundred paces upslope and you will confront my confidential lair. I appeal to your better natures to pry then no more, but to betake yourselves in haste to more congenial surroundings, there to report favorably on this concrete evidence of the importance of the reflective life in the philosophy of the benign Groaci." "I don't get it," Gloot said. "How come this Terry's all the time putting in a plug for you Groaci?" "Conscience," Magnan said crisply. "I suppose you may as well cut him loose now -- provided he promises not to go scuttling ahead and spoil our surprise." "I assure you I will scuttle in another direction entirely," Nith whispered as Gloot slashed the rope, allowing him to drop to the ground with a painful impact. He sprang up and disappeared along the backtrail. "I'm not sure that was the best move we've made all evening," Retief said. "But I suspect we'll know for sure very soon. Meanwhile, let's go take a lobk." point high above, shining down through the trees dotting the steeply rising slope. "Well, whattaya know," Gloot said. "I thought the little runt was lying, but here's his meditation parlor -- just like he said." "Why, the very idea," Magnan whispered. "Ambassador Jith never mentioned funding any R and R facilities in the hustings." They emerged onto a talus slope. From here they were able to make out the silhouette of a duster of towers rising from the crest of the peak. The lighted window went dark; a moment later a glow sprang up at another. "Apparently Nith doesn't do his thinking alone," Retief said. "If the place is full o' Terries," Gloot said, "what's supposed to Iceep 'em from blasting us into Freebies before you can say oops?" "Nothing much. Accordingly, I recommend extreme stealth from this point on." Twenty feet higher they encountered a night of narrow steps cut into the stone. Retief climbed over the handrail beaded with moisture in the damp air and led the way upward, Gloot and Magnan close behind him. At a landing another twenty feet higher the steps took a right-angled turn. The drop below was vertical now; the tops of trees rustled in the faint breeze. Far below a cluster of lanterns moved on the shore. Far across the water the lights of the capital floated on blackness. Gloot started to speak, then changed his mind. "Never mind," he muttered. "The more I know the less I like it. I'm even ber ginning, to get a funny feeling it was your idea and not mine to grab you from Groaci HQ." At the next landing, by leaning far out over the rail to look up, Retief was able to see a row of shuttered windows set in a squat, thick-walled structure of a bilious ochre color. The building appeared to consist of several wings, set at slightly different levels in accommodation to the contours of the rugged peak on which it was built. "Quite a layout -- " Gloot started and broke off as feet clacked above. A spindly figure in a flaring helmet and a spined hip cloak leaned over the railing of a terrace, peering down the barrel of a blast-rifle with five alertly canted oculars. "Hssst! To advance and give the password," a thin voice whispered sibilantly. "To contain yourself in patience, hive-mate of brood-foulers," Retief whispered sharply in Groaci. "To have had a brisk trot to report the failure of the incompetent Nith! To require a moment in which to respire!" He motioned to Gloot. "You go first," he whispered softly. "Pretend to be scared." "Pretend?" The Lumbagan choked. "I'm petrified! But what the heck, I don't aim to show the purple glimp-feather. Here goes." "The impropriety of your nattering -- and my curiosity as to whom you natter with!" the Groaci Peace-keeper hissed. "The prompt satisfaction of your curiosity," Retief whispered back, motioning Gloot past. He followed up the final IF flight of steps. As the Lumbagan reached the sentry's terrace the latter hissed and swung the gun to cover him. "The impropriety of taking hasty action' Retief said sharply. The guard swiveled a pair of eyes toward him and uttered a faint Groaci yelp of dismay. "A Soft One -- " he started, but his feeble cry was cut off abruptly by a smart rap to the side of the jaw delivered by Gloot. Retief deftly caught the victim's helmet as he collapsed. R etief quickly scouted the narrow gallery on which they now found themselves. From the platform at the end a complicated system of rods atop a tower was visible. "Curious," Magnan whispered. "Trideo antennae here? I wasn't aware Lumbaga boasted transmission facilities." "I have an idea the transmitter hasn't gone into full service yet," Retief said. Further discussion was interrupted by a faint whop-whopwhop, which grew swiftly louder. A copter swept low over the tree tops, made a sliding turn and came back to hover for a moment before settling gently to the roof of the building. The pilot -- a small, thin-legged individual wrapped in a black cloak and wearing a solar topi -- hopped down and disappeared into the shadows. Light shone a moment later from an opened hatch in the roof, into which the new arrival descended, closing the panel behind him. "Give me a leg up, Gloot," Retief said. "Anything for you, pal," the local said dubiously, grasping his own shin firmly. "But are you sure you can use it?" "On second thought, just a boost will do," Retief amended. Gloot offered linked hands as a stirrup; Retief went up the wall. The roof was deserted but for the silent copter squatting inside a yellowpainted circle. He leaned back to lend a hand to Magnan, then to Gloot. Together they crossed to the trapdoor. It opened soundlessly. Steep steps led down into deep gloom. At the bottom, Retief used his pocket flash quickly to check the room; it was empty but for stacked crates and cartons bearing stenciled markings. "Electronic gear," Retief said. "And surgical supplies." "Here's one labeled: Acme Theatrical Services," Magnan whispered. "Curious, I never suspected the Groaci had an interest in amateur dramatics." "I suspect they may have entered the field at a professional level," Retief said. The storeroom opened into a narrow, dimly lit passage. Faint murmurings sounded from behind a door. Retief went to it, put his ear against the panel... to have come within an ace of discovery!" hissed a breathy Groaci voice. "To make all haste now -- " "The inadvisability of rushing the cadence!" another voice replied. "To not louse up the triumphant culmination of my researches!" "Yes, yes, to get on with it. To have a tight schedule." A muted humming sound started up; a faint odor of ozone filtered through the closed door. "Sounds like an illegal transmitter," Retief said. "What's illegal about a transmitter?" Gloot demanded. "Let's find out." Retief turned the doorknob silently, eased the door open an inch. Two Groaci, one in bile-green shorts and orange and violet argyles, the other in a stained white laboratory smock and holding a clipboard, stood before a wide panel thickly set with dials, switches, oscilloscope tubes and blinking indicator lights. One side of the room was given over to stacked cages in which eyeballs, kidneys, adenoids and other forms of Lumbagan wildlife perched disconsolately on twigs or moped glumly in corners amid scattered straw. "... the completion of preliminary testing," the technician was whispering, "to be ready now to conduct field trials of limited range, after which, on to the final stage in the fulfillment of selfless Groaci objectives with all deliberate haste!" "To spare me the propaganda," the other snapped. "To have read the official handouts. To now tellingly demonstrate the effectiveness of the device without further procrastination." T he technician turned to the control panel, began setting dials in a complicated sequence, referring frequently to the clipboard. "Haste, haste," the other Groaci muttered. "To not procrastinate in the eye of the metaphorical cannon -- or is it the mouth of the needle?" He stepped forward suddenly and, before the other could intercept him, pushed the largest button on the panel. With a hoarse bellow Gloot plunged past Retief, slammed the door wide and bounded into the room. The two Groaci whirled, uttered shrill yelps and dived in opposite directions. The small creatures in their cages had gone into a flurry of activity, Retief noted peripherally, hurling themselves against the wire mesh as if frantic to come to grips with their neighbors. The momentum of Gloot's charge carried him full tilt against the button-studded console. Lights flashed; harsh buzzings sounded ending in a crackle of arcing electricity. Gloot stagIF gered back and sat down hard. The lab animals subsided as abruptly as they had leaped into motion. Retief jumped forward in time to nab the technician as he dithered, unsure which way to run. A door slammed at the back of the room. "Retief! What in the world -- " Magnan quavered, peering from the door. "Oh boy," Gloot muttered, fingering his head with all three hands as he sat weaving in the middle of the room. "Oh boy oh boy oh boy -- " "Would you care to amplify that remark?" Retief asked, holding the struggling Groaci. "I guess I blew it, huh?" the Lumbagan said blurrily. "I don't know what come over me, Retief. It was like Festival time and Spring Rites and the Fall Offensive all hit me at once. All of a sudden I was raring to go. Too bad that Terry got away. I would have liked to field-strip the little rascal Just to see what color Juice ran out of him." He eyed Retiefs prisoner wistfully. "The fit's passed -- but I still got kind of a lingering urge to pull that Terry apart, one skinny leg at a time." Far away, an alarm bell clanged harshly. "Now are you undone, abominable intruders," the Groaci hissed. "In moments my well-trained guards will fall upon you, your misshapen members to distribute over the immediate landscape." "Retief, 'we have to get out of here at once," Magnan yelped. "If a platoon of Peace-keepers should get their nasty little digits on us -- " "Yeah, let's blow," Gloot agreed. "Me and cops never did get on too good together." R etief released the Groaci, who at once darted for cover behind the nearest rank of cages. The hall was empty. A lone Peacekeeper appeared at the far end of the corridor and set up a weak shout as they dashed for the storeroom. Inside, Retief and Gloot paused long enough to stack a halfdozen crates against the door before ascending to the roof. Magnan was at the parapet, staring down into the darkness. "Trapped," he hissed. "Retief -- the grounds are swarming with them! And -- " he uttered a stifled exclamation. "Retief! Look!" In the gloom below Retief could discern the forms of several dozen armed troops in flaring helmets, polished greaves and spined hip. cloaks, moving efficiently out to surround the building. "Retief -- what does it mean? This laboratory, hidden in the wilds; that insane monster farm and that horrible little Nith -- and his obscure experiments -- and now Groaci troops secretly garrisoned in the boondock?" "It means we know enough now for a preliminary report. If you'll give Ambassador. Pouncetrifle the details of what we've learned -- " "But, Retief -- what have we learned?" "That the Groaci have worked out a method of controlling Lumbagan evolution, plus a method of selectively stimulating the natives' natural love of hostilities." "But -- whatever for?" "You'd better get going now, Mr. Magnan, I seem to hear the sounds of a posse pounding on the door down below." "Get going? You sp-speak as though I we-were expected to descend alone into that lion's den!" "Not descend -- ascend. The copter is a standard Groaci export model -- " "Yes, but -- but I don't have my driver's license with me!" A loud thumping sounded from below as the stacked cases toppled. Gloot slammed the trapdoor and stood on it. "Better hurry, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "Head due west and stay clear of the peaks." Magnan made vague sounds of protest, but scrambled awkwardly into the copter. He pressed the starter; the rotors turned, spun quickly up to speed. "It seems a trifle irresponsible, dashing off and leaving you here alone, Retief," he called and winced as thunderous pounding shook the trapdoor. "I hope them Terries don't take a notion to send a few rounds of explosive slugs through this hatch," Gloot said, struggling for balance as the door heaved under him. " -- but as you point out, duty calls," Magnan added quickly and, with a hasty wave, lifted off into the night. as the sound of the machine faded. "You said Ambassador Pouncetrifle? I thought he was the head Terry." "I think it's time for me to clear up a slight misapprehension you've bwn laboring under, Gloot," Retief said. "Those aren't actually Terries down there -- they're Groaci." "Huh? But they look just like what's-his-face, Nith, only bigger!" "Correct. That's because Nith is a Groaci, too." "But if he's a Groaci -- then what about whozis -- the one that just run out on us?" "Mr. Magnan," Retief confided, "is actually a Terry." "Aha! I should of known. Talk about masters of disguise. Pretty slick, the way you got rid of him -- " Gloot paused reflectively. "But -- if they're Groaci down there, how come we don't just open up and shake hands all around?" "They think I'm a Terry." "Oh, boy, that complicates things. How come you don't tell IF 'em who you really are and -- " 'Undercover operation." "Oh, I get it. Or do I?" Gloot said vaguely. "But I guess I can worry about that later, after we get out of this mess. What nifty trick are you going to pull out of the hat now? Frankly, if I didn't have lots of confidence in you, Retief, I'd be getting worried about now." "I think you may as well go ahead and worry, Gloot," Retief said. "On this occasion I'm fresh out of hats." "You mean -- " The hatch gave a tremendous lurch, sending the Lumbagan staggering. It flew open and a Groaci warrior bounded forth, power gun aimed, his fellows crowding out behind him. "He means, nocuous encroacher, that now indeed is your fate upon you!" The white-jacketed Groaci technician moved forward. "How about it, Retief," Gloot said from the corner of his mouth. "We could jump 'em -- but what I say is, why give 'em the fun of blowing us into sausage?" "Wait!" a piercing voice called from the rear. The Groaci soldiery fell back, came to rigid attention. In the sudden silence the technician ducked his head servilely, stepping aside as an impressive figure wrapped in a black cloak with a twist of gold braid adorning the stiff collar strode forward. Typically Groacian except for his six-foot height. the newcomer stared Retief up and down, ignoring G#ot. "So, impetuous Terry," he rasped in a voice surprisingly vigorous for a Groaci. "We meet at last." "Swarmmaster Ussh, I presume?" Retief said. "Your Ultimateness has led us an interesting chase.'' "And one pursued to your indescribable sorrow," Ussh grated. tal monster farm," Retief said. "The woods seem full of unsuccessful experiments in forced evolution." "As I suspected, the true implications of what you've seen has been lost on your limited imagination. Soon, however -- " "I think I got it. Manipulating Lumbagans at random is all very well, but it would be a bit difficult to stage anything more organized than a free-for-all unless you could elicit uniform responses. Ergo -- uniform puppets." "You've correctly gauged the more pedestrian portions of my plot, Terran dupe! But you've failed utterly to grasp the incredible scope of my true greatness! While you dashed hither and thither, assembling your trifling clues, my giant intellect has been coolly completing the flnal detail work. And now -- tonight -- the New Age dawns, ushered in by the successor to all previous life forms, namely myself!" "What is this guy, nuts or something?" Gloot muttered. "If he's so busy why's he standing around making speeches?" "He's trying to find out how much we know," Retief said. Swarmmaster Ussh waved a negligent hand. "Petty minds can but ascribe petty motives. What you may or may not know is a matter of supreme indifference -- and I include any fragmentary facts in the possession of your flown accomplice, for whose absence from this group certain incompetents will suffer. In fact, I freely confide in you: tonight I assume planetary rule. Tomorrow I issuemyultimatum to the Galaxy. Next week -- but contain yourself in patience. You yourself -- in chains, of course -- shall serve as my emissary to carry the terms to yourformer masters! As for the Untouchable, you may retain him as your personal menial." "I assumed you had a reason for not shooting us immediately. "I do nothing without a supremely practical motive." Ussh stated flatly. "And now -- will you go to your durance peacefully or will it be necessary for me to have you dragged by the heels, a most undignifi progress for a future Slave Ambassador." "I think a period of quiet contemplation may be just what we need at this point," Retief said. T he dungeon into which Retief and Gloot were conducted cut deep into the rock beneath the secret Groaci lab, was a damp chamber, six feet by eight, without lights, furniture or other amenities. The narrow portal through which they had entered was barred by a thick door of solid iron. The ceiling was a seamless surface of rough-hewn stone, as were the walls and floor. "At least we got a drain hole," Gloot commented after they had conducted an examination of their prison by the light of Retiefs cigar lighter. "If worst gets to worst, I can always flush myself down the sewer; but don't worry, pal. I'll stick around and keep you company until you starve to death before I split -- and I do mean split." "That's thoughtful Gloot, but maybe it won't come to that." "Aha -- so you have got a couple aces up your sleeve. I figured. Come on, Retief, let me in on the scheme. How are we going to hoist these Terries -- " "Groaci." "Whatever you call 'em, I still don't like 'em. What dramatic stroke are we going to bring off now?" "First we find a comfortable spot on the floor," Retief said. "Yeah? Okay, I'm with you so far." "Then we wait." "I'll be frank with you, Retief: somehow the program don't sound too promising." IF "It's all I have to offer at the moment." "Oh." A pause. "Are we, ah, waiting for anything in particular?" "I'd be inclined to jump at anything that comes along." "You must be joshing, Retief. How can anything come along to jump at. We're locked up in an underground dungeon with only one hole in it, namely the one the bilge runs out of?" "That narrows it down," Retief conceded. "You mean -- " "Shhh -- listen." A faint rustling sound became audible. Retief thumbed his lighter; the pale flame cast a feeble glow across the slimy floor. Something stirred below the four-inch drain orifice. An eyeball crept into view on spidery legs, swiveling to look around the cell before emerging onto the floor. Behind it an ear fluttered up the shaft, circled the chamber, came to rest in a far corner. A hand crawled into view, paused to hold up two fingers in a V, then turned to assist a set of sweetbreads over the coping. "Cripes," Gloot muttered as more and more Freebies swarmed into the cell. "What is this, a convention? The place is crawling with vermin!" "Steady, Gloot," Retief cautioned. "When I said jump, I didn't mean literally." "It figures the crumbums would stick us in a hole infested with parasites!" "Keep your voice down, Gloot. If our jailors suspect we have guests, they'll soon be along to break up the party." "Yeah -- even a bunch o' Terries -- or Groaci -- foreigners, anyway -- ought to have the decency to fumigate the place if we put up a howl -- " Gloot broke off, his mouth hanging open in an expression of horrified outrage. "Why, the lousy, dirty, obscene little buggers!" he gasped. "Right out in public, too!" Under the feeble beam of the lighter, the eyeball had edged close to a generously proportioned nose which waited coyly for its advance. They touched, groped -- and melted into a close embrace. A second eye appeared from the drain, glanced around, rushed to the conjoining couple and promptly took up a position on the opposite side of the nose. An upper lip linked with them, as other candidates crowded around, while more and more streamed up from the depths. "It's -- it's a regular orgy, like I heard about but never got in on!" Gloot blurted, and raised a large, booted foot to stamp out the objectionable spectacle; Retief caught his ankle barely in time, dumped him on his back. "Easy, Gloot," he said. "It's time you faced up to the facts of life." "Just wait until I get my other lung in place," a breathy voice squeaked from the direction of the congregating singletons, "and I'll give that big hypocrite a piece of my mind! Maybe that'll raise his IQ to the moron level so he can understand me when I tell him what I think of him." "I thought maybe it was you who's been dogging my footsteps," Retief said. "Welcome aboard, Ignarp. You couldn't have come at a better time." IX iRetief," Ignarp said five minutes later. He was completely reassembled now, his component parts having settled into position and accommodated themselves so perfectly that the lines of juncture were barely visible. Being able to reassemble gives us a big advantage. That's why the rest of 'em are out to get us!" "The reasons normal Lumbagans got no use for these degenerates," Gloot stated with contempt, "is on account of they got no finer feelings. When they put theirselfs together thataway, they as good as admit all us Lumbagans evolved from lower formal" "Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny," Ignarp said smugly. "Everybody knows that." "Sure -- but decent folks don't admit it!" "Which brings us to the question of why you trailed me here," Retief said. "I tdld you I'd keep an eye on you -- " "Yes, I saw it fluttering in the middle distance." "And it looks to me like maybe things are even worse than we thought. And you're the only one that maybe can do something about it. Ergo -- here I am. What can I do? Get you some light reading matter? Take last messages to loved ones?" "Better yet, you can get us out of here." "I don't know, Retief," Ignarp said, eyeing Gloot, who stood at the far side of the cell, arms folded, a sullen expression on his face. "Why should I go to bail this clod out of stir?" "Because I'm afraid my plan won't work without him," Retief said. "Who needs him?" Ignarp challenged. "All I have to do is slide back out the way I came in -- " "I still don't believe it," Gloot muttered. "Me -- associating with this degenerate. Having to stand here and listen to him talk about it." " -- infiltrate the building and reassemble inside. Then, when you pound on the door and yell and the guard comes to work you over with the rubber hoses, I jump out and nail him." "I got a better idea," Gloot said. IF "Retief, you lend your coat to this deviate: we set up a yell, and when the bums come running, they open the door and see the two of you up against the wall thumbing your noses. Naturally, they come charging in -- and I jump out behind 'em and lay 'em low." "Some plan," Ignarp commented. "They see Retief without his coat and a total strainer wearing it, and that's supposed to lull their suspicions?" "Okay,  borrow his coat -- " "So they see him without a coat and me naked -- and. they figure I'm you, only two feet shorter and better looking -- " "No, I got it. Retief borrows my coat -- " "You're not wearing one, dummy. "So he keeps his coat! You get back of the door -- " "Don't tell me what to do, tall, spotted, and grotesque!" "You got a nerve, short, blotchy, and depraved! I got a go mind -- " "Want to bet? We do it my way. See you later, Retief -- " "How about waiting long enough to hear my proposal, Ignarp?" "Well -- okay. Who wears your coat?" "I do. It's you two fellows who have some changes to make." "Huh?" Gloot said uneasily. "What you got in mind?" Ignarp said suspiciously. "Somethii far worse than you think," Retief said. "Tell me, Ignarp, how would you like to see Lumbaga pacified by a dictator?" "You kidding? We like to fight among ourselves. Having all the fat in the hands of the exploiting classes is bad enough without some spoilsport depriving us of our national sport and pastime. Forget it, Retief -- " 'D BE glad to, but I'm afraid a fellow named Ussh has a more tenacious memory. Uidess we do something to stop it, by this time tomorrow Lumbaga will be at peace -- permanently." "Well, what are we hanging around here for?" Ignarp demanded. "Let's try my dan, and -- " "All the more reason to get going on my plan!" Gloot cut in. "Gentlemen," Retief interrupted, "there comes a time in any friendly fight when it's wise to pause and give a thought to consequences. At this moment the opposition is busy putting the finishing touches on a plan that's been years in the making. The occupying armies are already marchii on the capital -- and we're sealed in a vault forty feet underground, engaged in a jurisdictional dispute." "Uh -- well -- " Gloot said. "It doesn't look good, does it?" Ignarp said soberly. "The proposals now before us," Retief said, "would afford a few satisfying cracks at the heads of our captors and might even get us as far as the end of the hall before the inevitable end. What's required is a plan with sufficient scope to carry us through to a successful conclusion." "I'll buy that," Gloot said. "But -- " "Out with it, Retief," Ignarp said. "I've got a funny feeling I'm not going to like this." "Probably not," Retief agreed. In a few brief words, he outlined his proposal. A stunned silence followed. "Retief! And I thought you were a fine, upstanding fellow -- for a foreigner," Ignarp berated him weakly. "If I hadn't heard it I wouldn't have believed it," Gloot said in a choked voice. "Well, how about it, gentlemen?" Retief said. "We don't have much time." "You expect me to lend countenance to a thing like that?" Ignarp protested. "It's'enough to make your eyebrows crawl !" "What if my friends heard about it?" Gloot muttered. "It's not traditional," Ignarp complained. "It's against nature." "Mongrelization -- " "I'll be dragged down to his level -- " "It'll never work." "Couldn't we talk about it first? For a few years, say -- or maybe a century or so?" "It's now or never, fellows," Retief said. "After tomorrow every Lumbagan on the planet will be herded into a Freeby farm and integrated forcibly, regardless of his sensitivities." "Me?" Gloot said. "And that -- that -- dilettante?" "That -- that oof -- and me?" Ignarp wailed. "It's that -- or something worse," Retief said with finality. "Could you at least -- douse the light?" Ignarp said. "I need a shot o' rum," Gloot said. "Of course." Retief handed over his flask and switched off; the dim glow faded. In the darkness there were soft, tentative scufflings, faint mutterings; Retief paced the cell -- three paces, back three paces -- whistling softly to himself. Time passed. Silence fell. Retief paused. "Ready, gentlemen?" "We -- I -- guess so," a curiously mellow voice answered. Then, more strongly; "Yes, ready, Retief." He flicked on the lighter. In its glow stood not the dumpy Ignarp nor the lanky Gloot, but a tall, superbly muscled figure, brawny arms folded over a mighty chest, four golden eyes glowing from a broad and noble brow alight with intellect. IF #OW do I -- we look?""the Tlidealized Lumbagan inquired. "Ready for anything," Retief said. "By the way, what do I call you now? Somehow neither Ignoop nor Glarp seems to fit the new you." "What about -- Lucael?" "It's better t)ian Michifer. Now, Luke -- if you'll pardon the familiarity -- I think we'd best get on with the next phase without delay." "The next phase?" "As the first Octuple Lumbagan in history, I assume you have unique abilities. Let's find out what they are." "Yes -- I see. The conclusion is logical. By introspection, I note that I have, of course, enhanced physical strength and endurance, exceptionally keen hearing and vision." Lucael paused. "A most interesting effect," he said. "By bringing either pair of eyes to bear on an object, I of course achieve the familiar stereoscopic effect: three-dimensional sight -- a vast improvement over the monocular vision of the former Gloot identity. But when I bring both pairs into play simultaneously, channeling the impression through my compound occipital lobes, there is an exponential improvement. I can clearly perceive nine dimen-' sions: five spatial, two temporal, and two more the nature of which will require careful analysis -- " the resonant baritone faded off as Lucael stared, somewhat crosseyed, at the corner of the room. "You'll have plenty of time later for research in depth, Luke. For the moment we'd better stick to the practical applications." "Of course. The first order of business, clearly, is to adjust spatial coordinates in such fashion that our loci lie external to the enclosure by which we are at present circumscribed." "Unequivocally, if not succintly, put. Any suggestions?" "Hmmm." Lucael glanced at each of the four walls in turn. "Solid rock to a depth of several hundred feet on all sides." He stared at the floor. "Twenty-five miles of rock, underlain by a viscous fluid at high temperature and pressure. Fascinating!" "That leaves the ceiling," Retief prompted. "To be sure." Lucael glanced up. "Yes, this is the simplest route." He glanced at Retief. "Shall we go?" "After you." The super-Lumbagan nodded, folded his arms -- both pairs -- and rose gently from the floor. In the moment before his head would have contacted the ceiling the rocky surface seemed to shimmer, fading suddenly to invisibility! Without pausing, Lucael rose steadily up, waist, knees, ankles, to disappear from sight. A moment later a sharp, breathy cry sounded, followed by a dull thump. caught the edge of the circular opening now miraculously existing in the stone slab, pulled himself up into what appeared to be a guardroom. A lone Groaci lay stretched on the floor, peacefully snoring. '"It was necessary to numb his cortical synapses -- temporarily, of course," Lucael said apologetically. "Poor little creature, so full of vain plans and misconceptions." "Aren't we all," Retief said. "Luke, let's see how good you are at finding things at a distance. We need fast transportation." "Let me see... Hmmm. I detect a boat at a distance of three hundred yards on an azimuth of #I " # '." "What kind of boat?" "A hand-hewn canoe sunk in four fathoms of water. There's a large hole in the bottom." "Skip that one, Luke. How about a nice two-man copter?" "No -- nothing like that. However, I note a modest power launch lying at anchor some two miles to the east." "Ensign Yubb must still be busy pacifying the army. I believe his boat was powered by a small fusion jet. I don't suppose -- " "I've already started it," Lucael said. "Just a moment while I lift the anchor -- there. Now, let me see: which is reverse? Oh, yes. Now, all ahead, half speed until she's past the bar -- " "Nice work, Luke. While you're bringing her around to this side of the island take a quick scan of the building." "Very well. A guard or two dozing in the keep. Two Groaci in sick bay with contusions. Half a dozen unfortunates lodged in the brig. Ussh seems to be gone. Yes, I detect his aura -- a most powerful one -- some ten miles t# the east, traveling fast." "It's time we emulated him. Let's go, Luke; we don't want to miss all the excitement." "You refer to the moment when Ussh announces his assumption of power and his program of Galactic conquest?" "No," Retief said. "J mean the moment when he discovers that Newton's Third Law applies to politicians as well as ping-pong balls." They met no opposition as they left the now almost deserted building. Lucael picked a route down the hill through the dense woods to emerge on the beach just as the unmanned power launch rounded the curve of the shore and headed in toward the beach. They splashed out through the shallows as the engine cut; the boat glided silently up to them. Aboard, Lucael restarted the engines and Retief took the helm.  "Ussh's first column has just entered the city from the west," Lucael announced. "He himself is at this moment leading a procession along Brigand Street toward the IF palace. Rioting seems to be proceeding as usual."" "Let"s be grateful for His Ultimateness"s fondness for dramatic gestures,"' Retief said. "If he'll occupy himself with his victory parade for an hour or so we may be in time." "In time to thwart his coup?" "Probably not. But with luck in time to tage a small coup of our own." He opened the throttles and the powerful boat surged ahead across the dark water toward the city lights fifteen miles to, the east. T he shadowy shapes of Groogroo, Delerion and Rumboogie rose in turn from the darkness, slid past on the port side, dwindled astern, none showing any signs of life with the exception of a few small campfires glowing high on their forested slopes. Ahead, the lights of Thieves' Harbor spread wider, reaching out to enclose them as they passed the breakwater. The wharves were deserted as the sleek craft nosed up to the Municipal Pier. Retief cut the power, tossed a line around a piling and jumped to the wharf. "The place looks strange without at least one small street fight in progress," he said. "Apparently it takes a war to bring peace to Lumbaga." "The crowds have gathered near the palace complex," Lucael said. "A cordon of armed troops surrounds the area. Ussh is in the ballroom, in company with a number of off-worlders." "Is Ambassador Pouncetrifle among those present?" Retief described the Terran Plenipotentiary. Lucael confirmed that he was included in the group. "They seem to be linked togetheT," the super-Lumbagan added, "by means of a chain attached to a series of metal collars which in turn encircle their necks." "Apparently Ussh intends to establish a no-nonsense foreign policy," Retief commented. "The idea has merit, but in the present case we'll have to try to introduce a little nonsense after all." "Interference may prove difficult. All entrances are blocked by the crowd. I can of course levitate myself to any desired point within the atmosphere, but the amount of extra weight I'm capable of carrying is limited." "Piggyback is out, then. Let's try the back door where your Ignarp segment and I first met." Retief led the way across the plaza and down Dacoit street, poorly lit by the widely spaced gaslamps, deserted now, littered with the forlorn fiotsam crowds leave behind. They were within a hundred feet of the inconspicuous door when a small party of helmeted and greaved Groaci soldiers emerged suddenly from a narrow cross street ahead. The officer in charge hissed an order; his troops spread out to block the way, then one by one crumpled to the cobblestones. The officer, the last on his feet, stared uncomprehendingly at his collapsing command, then belatedly jerked his pistol from its sequinned holster only to drop it, totter two steps, and fall. Lucael staggered back against the wall of the building beside them, his face working like yeast. "Geeze -- I just had the screwiest nightmare," he muttered, almost in Gloot's voice. "Another -- lousy trick by -- unprincipled exploiters, ril wager," he added in Ignarp's petulant tones. "Luke! Pull yourself together!" Retief snapped. "You can't afford to go to pieces now!" Lucael's features twifched and subsided. The four golden eyes settled back into position. "I -- find that -- there are limitations to my power output," he said weakly. "Come on, Luke. Just a little farther." They covered the remaining yards to the doorway. The heavy door opened on the musty passage. "From now on save your strength for emergencies," Retief said. "I think I can guarantee there'll be a steady supply." through the dusty passages, ascended the stairs to the kitchens, which they found deserted and showing signs of rapid evacuation. A cramped spiral service stair led from an alcove beside the dumbwaiter to the upper stories. At the top, faint voices muttered beyond the door which opened into the private-apartment wing. "A party of minor Groaci officials," Lucael said, speaking with his eyes closed. "They seem to be placing wagers as to whether Terra will be granted colony status or merely regarded as conquered territory." He paused. "They're gone now." Retief eased the outer door open half an inch; crimson carpet led to a pair of massive, carved purplewood inner doors, just closing behind the sporting aliens. Retief went swiftly forward, got a foot between the doors before they closed. The anteroom beyond was empty; through a low, arched opening. the barbarically splendid ballroom was visible, crowded with a mixed throng of locals and aliens. In an elaborately carved chair at the far end of the room sat a towering Lumbagan draped in a robe of Imperial purple, flanked on one side by Colonel Suash at the head of an honor guard of matched native troops in shining cuirasses and polished helms, power guns at present arms, impressive in spite of a number of black eyes and bandages in evidence. At the other side of the throne stood a detachment of Groaci Peace-keep-v ers in full uniform. A gaggle of Groaci functionaries, including IF Ambassador Jith, stood nearby. Ambassador Pouncetrifle, leaning sideways because of the weight of the chain on his neck, stood before the throne; a dozen or so members of his staff huddled behind him in a tight group, none apparently craving the honor of sharing the front rank with the Chief of Mission. "... sensible of the honor and all that, your Imperial Highness," the Terran Ambassador was saying, "but see here, I can't simply offer Terran recognition of your regime on my own authority." "Let's simplify the proposition," a deep bass voice boomed from the Imperial chair. "Acknowledge our divine right and sign the treaty and we'll allow you to linger to observe our coronation before you are whipped back to your kennels." "Ah, if I might venture an observation -- " A faint voice spoke up from the Groaci delegation. Ambassador Jith stepped forward. "While one fully appreciates the eminent propriety of the installation of a native Lumbagan regime entertaining kindly sentiments toward the Groacian state -- " "Yes, yes, get on with it!" the enthroned Lumbagan rumbled. "To be sure. Your Imperial Highness -- I merely meant to suggest that perhaps a less precipitate approach to the question of recognition -- " "Our photograph, hand-tinted by skilled coolies, will be distributed to every village, hamlet, and town in the Eastern Arm. Recognition wise, we'll be better known than that fellow Whatzizname who won the nogdle-knitting contest on TV!" "Doubtless, sire, your fame will be quickly spread abroad -- " "No broads! As an asexual race, we Lumbagans look with disfavor on any sport we can't get in on. That's enough of the subject. On with the formalities." His Highness favored Pouncetrifle with a scowl involving three eyes and four eyebrows. "Well, what about it, Terran? Do you want to acknowledge the legitimacy of our gracious rule and receive an exequatur allowing you to go on using up our Lumbagan air -- or would you prefer to play a stellar role in the first death sentence we hand down from our newly established throne?" "Apparently Your Imperial Highness is having his little jape," Jith hissed in apparent dismay. "As Groacian Plenipotentiary, I must advise that the Groacian state would look with extreme disfavor on the establishment of any unfortunate precedent with regard to informal methods of diplomat disposal. A simple declaration of persona non grata -- " "Nope. Italian food gives us heartburn," the Imperial figure decreed. "And if we hear any more static from aliens of any persuasion we might just revise our whole plan for Galactic enlightenment to include you Groaci out!" A n unusually tail and robust Groaci stepped forward from the rear rank. "Ussh!" Lucael whispered. "Pm sure that matters need not come to that," Ussh said unctiously, "Doubtless His Excellency, on further consideration, will wish to withdraw his objection." The Emperor-elect, who had slumped rather vaguely on his throne as the Groaci spoke, sat up alertly. "Very well; on with the executions. We'll make a note to send for a fresh set of Terries more amenable to reason -- " "To protest this unwarranted assumption of authority," Jith whispered urgently in his own language to Ussh. "To remind you -- Special Appointee or otherwise -- that I am ranking Groacian official here!" "I see no reason to coddle Terran spies," the other replied in Lumbagan. "This is Groac's opportunity to get in on the ground floor -- why annoy His Imperial Highness with minor quibbles on technical points?" "To point out that once these natives begin lopping alien heads, Groaci organ clusters may be next to roll." RetieFs companion was staring at nothing, his eyes half closed. Ussh stirred uneasily, looked around the ornate room. "It appears that I now confront an intellect equal or superior to my own," Lucael murmured. "He sensed my touch and instantly erected barriers, the strength of which I cannot assess." "Enough!" the enthroned Lumbagan spoke up abruptly, as if returning from a reverie. "Captain -- "he pointed a limber digk at the guard chief -- "escort the condemned to the courtyard and give your marksmen some unscheduled target practice. No need to finish them off in a hurry; just keep peppering away until they stop twitchmg. "Time to move," Retief said. "Luke -- stay out of sight and keep an eye on Ussh. No matter what happens, stay tuned to him -- and don't tip your hand prematurely." "What's your plan, Retief? I'm not at all sure I can control him -- " "No time for plans; we'll have to play it by ear," Retief said and thrust the doors wide. "Hold everything gentlemen," he said as all eyes turned toward him. "There are new dispatches just in from the hustings that cast a different complexion on matters." X F or a moment total silence gripped the chamber. Then: "Seize him!" Ussh snarled. When the guards failed to IF move he repeated the order in a shout. "Don't slip out of character, Ussh," Retief said. "You're just a troops work for His Putative Highness the Emperor-to-be." "Retief!" Pouncetrifle blurted hastily in Terran. "Run for it, man! The official comset is in my quarters, at the back of the wardrobe under my golf clubs. Send out a code three-oh-two -- " "Uh -- what about it, Your Highness?" Colonel Suash said hesitantly, still standing fast. "Is it your command to nab this foreigner?" The would-be emperor's mouth sagged slightly open. His expression was that of someone lost in thought. "His Highness -- " Ussh said and paused. He seemed to be struggling silently with himself. "Looking for just the right word, Ussh?" Retief inquired amiably. He turned to the colonel. "Relax Suash," he said. "As you can see. His Highness is having second thoughts on a number of matters." "Take -- " the Emperor said. Retief took a swift step toward Ussh, who recoiled. "Stand back, Terran!" he hissed. "Your Highness?" said Colonel Suash, staring up at the musing figure on the throne. "Ughhrrr," the royal claimant said, gazing vacantly into space. "Ah -- Your Highness?" Suash repeated. "In the, uh, absence of any new orders, I presume I must carry out the executions?" "Just a minute. Colonel," Retief said. "You Lumbagans don't take orders from foreigners, do you?" "Not on your second-best toupee I don't," the officer snapped. "So don't try to give me any!" "By no means. Colonel. I'm referring to Swarmmaster Ussh, who represents himself as a Special Appointee of the Groacian High Council." "I don't take orders from him either." "No," Retief said, and pointed to the throne, "but his would-be Highness does." "What?" The officer half drew his dress sword and turned to the emperor-elect. "Do you mind if I chop this foreigner down right here, Your Highness, for that crack he just made about you?" "Ungunggunggg," the enthroned Lumbagan mumbled. His head rolled on his shoulder; his mouth hung slackly open. Abruptly he closed it, pulled himself upright. "We were just, ah, pondering our next pronouncement," he said briskly, as Retief took another step toward Ussh, who stood frozen, two eyes canted tautly toward the throne, the other three hanging limp. At the Terran's advance, he spun to face him. 'Now, Colonel -- " the Emperor-to-be paused, mouth open. "Yes, Your Highness?" the colonel watched in dismay as his ruler-presumptive's expression relaxed into vacuity. "You might as well address your remarks to Ussh," Retief advised the officer. "He's the brains of the operation." "See here, Retief," Pouncetrifle spoke up. "The intellectual prowess of the Emperor is no concern of ours -- " "It's the intellectual prowess of Ussh I'm thinking of at the moment, Mr. Ambassador. He has a number of rather unusual capabilities." "Lies!" Ussh shouted. "Fantasies! The ravings of a disordered imagination! I'll see you all hanged for disrespect to His Imperial Highness! It's all a plot to discredit the people's choice, elevated by acclamation to the Lumbagan throne!" He was interrupted by a slithering sound, followed by a heavy thump as the Emperor slid from the elaborate chair and sprawled full length on the dais, snoring gently. #T'S a plot, all right, Ussh -- A but you're the one behind it," Retief said. "It wasn't His Imperial Highness who mobilized the troops and took the capital by storm -- it was you." "Guards! Shoot them down in their tracks for aggravated UsemajesteV Ussh shouted. "What about it. Colonel?" Retief addressed the guard chief. "Was it our slumbering host who gave the order to march on the capital?" "Well -- not personally, of course. General Ussh notified me -- but he was simply relaying His Imperial Highnesses' commands -- " "Wasn't it also Ussh who passed along the instructions that organized your unit in the first place and handed out the orders regarding the secret laboratory?" tion material you're discussing!" "Not . any more. You've been taken in. Colonel. Those were all Ussh's ideas -- " "Mr. Retief!" Ambassador Jith spoke up. "May I remind you that I am Principal Officer here and that I have given no such instructions to any member of the Groaci delegation -- " "I'm sure you haven't, Mr. Ambassador," Retief said. "But Ussh seems to have taken it upon himself to use your name." "Very well!" Ussh hissed suddenly, wheeling to face the irate Groaci, who shrank back. "Perhaps I have employed unconventional methods. But clearly it's to Groac's advantage to go along with the fait accompli As soon as the Emperor is safely ensconced on his throne. I'm in a position to IF assure you that Groac will be the object of very special attentions by His Imperial Majesty," "What's that?" Colonel Suash roared. "Are you suggesting that the Emperor o-f Lumbaga is nothing but a tool of foreign interests?" "Not at all, Suash," Ussh hastened to reassure the officer. "Merely that the new Lumbagan government can rely on the full support of Groac." He turned back to Jith. "What about it. Your Excellency?" he said urgently. "You'll agree that it's clearly your duty to support His Highness' claim -- " "Don't listen to him, Jith," Pouncetrifle blurted. "You're quite right -- Groac has no business whatever sticking its olfactory organ into Lumbaga's affairs, especially when I was right on the verge of proposing a wellrounded scheme for installing a provisional governing committee under Terran sponsorship -- " "You presume to tell me my duties, Harvey?" Jith cut in Swarmmaster Ussh so cogently points out, Groacian obligations in support of formerly exploited peoples require that I put aside ordinary protocols for the nonce and -- " "I don't like it," Suash spoke up. "It sounds to me as if you aliens are getting ready to slice Lumbaga up among yourselves! Accordingly, as senior Lumbagan national present. I'm assuming temporary command. And my first act will be to order the lot of you to the port to embark inside of thirty minutes, with or without your suitcases!" "Fool!" Ussh snarled. "Do you imagine your feeble native regime can survive for a moment without the sponsorship of Groac? If it weren't for His Highness' temporary indisposition he'd have your head for this!" "And I might add, my dear Colonel," JLith whispered piercingly, "that at a word from me, units of the Groacian Grand Battle Fleet are prepared, if necessary, to land and restore order here!" "You wouldn't dare," Pouncetrifle quavered, jowls aquiver. "Would I not?" Jith contradicted. "I see a great Groacian triumph in the offing! And now, Colonel," he addressed the officer, "you and your chaps may withdraw. I'm sure that His Highness will be himself in a moment -- " The Emperor stirred, sat up. "Well, just felt a short nap coming on," he mumbled as he scrambled to his feet. "Now, you just run along as Jith suggested, Suash, and -- " "How do you know what he suggested?" Suash snapped back. "You were out stone cold on the floor." "Yes, well, as to that -- " "He knows," Relief said, "because Ussh is feeding him his lines."Tlyour senses, Terran meddler?" Ussh yelled. "Everyone in the room heard His Imperial Whatsit's cogent comments!" "Uh-huh -- but you were doing his thinking for him -- what there was of it. Unhappily for the future of the empire, you can't think of two things at once. Right now, for example, you're busy being indignant with me -- and your candidate for the crown is relaxing on thejpb." Every head but those of Ussh, and Relief swiveled to regard the figure slumped again bn the throne. "Heavens!" Magnan gasped from the sidelines. "You mean we were about to offer our credentials to a ventriloquist's dummy?" "Not quite. He's alive -- but when Ussh assembled him he carefully left out the more useful portions of the brain." Suash stared uncertainly from his potential sovereign to Ussh, who stood with canted eyestalks in a pose of total concentration. "If that's true -- " "Nonsense, Colonel," the Lumbagan emperor-elect said firmly. "I repose the fullest confidence in Ussh, a marvelous fellow and my most trusted advisor. Now I think you'd better run along. We have matters of high state policy to discuss." "Don't go," Pouncetrifle cried. "Colonel Suash, I call on you in the name of humanity to remain present -- there's no telling what might happen in the absence of witnesses." "I take orders from His Highness, Terry." Suash snapped. "And he said go. Accordingly, we're going." The colonel barked a command. His troops right-shouldered arms and marched away across the polished floor. "Relief -- do something," Pouncetrifle wailed. "Do what, Mr. Ambassador?" Ussh inquired in tones of triumph. "His Highness has spoken. And now -- " he paused until the last of the Lumbagan soldiers filed from the room and the tall doors shut behind them -- "and now, with those trouble-makers out of earshot, on to the disposition of the Terran spies -- " He drew a power pistol from inside his ornate jacket. "A pity they should happen to be shot down by accident as they led an attempted assault on His Highness' person, but such are the tribulations that beset those who would stand in the path of empire." "You wouldn't -- " Pouncetrifle gasped. "See here, Ussh," .Ambassador Jith whispered. "You don't actually mean to commit violence on the persons of the Terrans, I trust? To deport them in restrainIF ing fetters, yes. But I forbid you to do # iway with them entirely." "It will be our little secret, Your Excellency," Ussh cut in curtly. "His Imperial Highness has matters under complete control." "Are you quite certain of that?" Jith asked, eyeing the presumptive ruler, who now stood swaying slightly, gazing into the middle distance. "He presents the appearance of an unsuccessful lobotomy case." "Why not tell him the rest of the secrets, Ussh?" Retief said. "Let him know how clever you really are. Describe your discovery of a sure-fire method for assembling Lumbagans to order -- according to any genetic code desired. Tell him about your experiments, which produced some rather unusual types, some of whom proved useful for special purposes, such as terrorizing the populace. Describe youF soldier farm and let him in on the secret of the lab where you worked out the details of your hostility transmitter -- " "Silence, spy!" Ussh shouted. JLr urged. "Give the ambassador full details on how you plan to soldiers modeled after himself and equipped by Groac, and use them to set up a modest empire in this end of the Arm, after which you'll no doubt establish branches on all the likely planets to raise spares for the army. With forced feeding you can produce a fully equipped infantryman in a little under three weeks, giin and all -- " "Ha-ha," Ussh said. "You will have your little jest, eh? Gallows humor, I believe it's called." "You made your big mistake, of course, Ussh, when you let Suash and his boys leave," Retief said. "He was your only chance to make it stick -- " "So you imagine." Ussh spun to face Jith. "The time has come for the carrying out of His Highness' commands. If you would like to do the job personally it would be a gracious touch in keeping with the close relations existing between Lumbaga and Groac." "Wouldn't it though?" Retief said. "If you could con Ambassador Jith into committing himself to the murder of a covey of Terries he'd have no choice but to back your play. Fortunately, he won't be so foolish -- " "You think not!" Ussh snarled. "Jith -- order them shot -- now!" "Don't you dare, Jith!" Pouncetrifle yelped. "I absolutely forbid it -- " "Forbid, you say?" Jith whispered. "You go too far, Harvey -- " The Groaci Ambassador faced Ussh. "If you're quite sure the Terrans planned the murder of His Highness, it of course becomes my duty to -- " "To listen to the rest of the story," Retief said. "There are a couple things Ussh forgot to mention -- " "Details, details!" Ussh yelled. "The important fact is that I, at the head of an army of dedicated troops, will lead the way to the conquest of vast new territories, eliminating or enslaving inferior peoples along the way, and in the end organizing the entire Galaxy as a single Empire under a single rule!" "A glowing picture," Retief said. "But of course Ambassador Jith has no reason to lend support to the scheme." "Have I not, Mr. Retief?" Jith whispered. "I admit Swarmmaster Ussh has employed unorthodox methods -- but if the end result is a Galactic Empire under Groac -- " "Correction, Mr. Ambassador. Groac will be among the first victims." "Victim? Of her own troops, under her own general Ussh? Preposterous!" "It's true that Ussh and his army will be in position to cut quite a swath, with Groaci backing and Groaci material. And no doubt in what's known as an accommodation with the de facto situation. But you're forgetting an important datum. The troops who'll be doing the conquering won't be Groaci; they'll be Lumbagans, no matter how many eyes they happen to have." "Well -- as to that," Jith stalled, looking to Ussh for counsel. "I assume that as honorary Groaci, true to their exalted somatotype, we may rely on General Ussh to keep the interests of his mother-world in the forefront of his mind."I-"And his mother world is Lumbaga." "Clearly he's taken leave of his senses," Ussh grated. "Granted, he's a most unusual Lumbagan," Retief went on. "Normally, once an accretion of Freebies reached the Four-decker stage -- at which point intelligence appears -- their finer sensibilities prevent them from carrying evolution any farther. But it appears that General Ussh broke the taboo." "What vile allegation is this?" Ussh yelled.  "Careful, Ussh, you'll give yourself away," Retief said. "It doesn't seem to vile to anybody but a Lumbagan." "This is all nonsense, of course," Ambassador Jith purred. "But tosatisfy my curiosity -- go on, Mr. RetielT' "Ussh -- or whoever the original Lumbagan personality was who had the idea -- overcame his scruples and integrated himself with another individual -- possibly a Trip; a sub-intelligent creature, but of course the combination has IF capabilities that exceed those of either of the original components. Unfortunately, he used his enhanced mental powers to concoct a scheme to take over Lumbaga first, then the rest of the material Universe. Naturally he needed help; he made a study of the foreigners present on his world and picked the Groaci as the likeliest partners. With his abilities, it wasn't hard for him to readjust his external appearance to match yours, Mr. Ambassador -- " "He's raving!" Ussh yelled. "How could anyone possibly -- " "It wasn't easy, at first -- but you figured it out. Some of your practice models are still running around in the woods, making Groaci tracks to confuse the trail. But in the end you were able to palm yourself off on a few malconlist some behind-the-scenes help to set things up for your coup -- " "That, Terry, is your final error," Ussh grated and aimed the gun at RetieFs ribs. "Ussh -- control yourself," Jith keened. "What simpler than to give the lie to this fantastic allegation?" "Is it fantastic?" Retief said. "Ussh, deny you're a Lumbagan -- but do it in Groaci, just to be certain your fellow countrybeings don't miss any of the finer nuances." "Bah, prepare to die, witless Terran -- " "Ussh, if you expect my aid and support -- do as he says," Jith hissed. Ussh hesitated, then turned to include the Groaci delegation in his field of fire. "Think what you like, Jith. You'll dp as I bid or die with the Terrans. I'll explain to your successor how you and the Lumbagans slaughtered each other, only myself surviving -- then I'll enlist his support and on to empire!" "Why -- why, RetieFs right," Pouncetrifle gasped. "Jith -- he won't speak Groaci -- because he can't -- at least in a way to fool you. He's an imposter!" Duped," Jith wailed. "Undone by my credulity -- faked out of position and into unwitting support of a non-Groaci conquest by an underling -- and a bogus one at that!" "Don't feel too badly," Retief said. "He only intended to use you Groaci to finance his first few local takeovers. As soon as he'd consolidated his gains, Groac would have been quietly consolidated into his empire, with the help of a number of pseudo-Groaci agents who would have infiltrated Groac by then." "Race on, Retief," Ussh invited, "Familiarize these fools with the scope of their folly and then -- " Ussh whirled as the tall double doors burst wide. Lucael strode forward, his golden eyes gleaming. "Yes? What is it?" Ussh barked uncertainly. "You have dispatches from the field? Or -- " He staggered suddenly, as if struck a heavy blow between the eyes. "Treachery!" Ussh gasped -- and Lucael stopped in his tracks, stood swaying. Face to face the two super-Lumbagans stood, locked in mortal -- though invisible -- conflict. "Ussh," JRetief called. The imitation Groaci half-turned -- and in the momentary distraction, Lucael struck. Ussh gave a hoarse cry, stood dithering for a moment... Like a tree struck Dy lightning, the false Groaci's body shivered and split. For a moment there was a wild scramble of parts as the former superbeing's components regrouped themselves into two separate entities, arms and legs and ears scuttling for their assigned plates. In a moment two short, sullen individuals stood where Ussh had been, staring apprehensively around at their astounded audience. "Why -- it's Difnog and Gnudf, the Lumbagan observers!" Pouncetrifle gasped. "And apparently," Jith whispered, "They were more observant than we suspected!" XI Terran diplomats, freed of their shackles, had huddled with their Groaci colleagues for an impromptu meeting. 'Well, then," Ambassador Pouncetrifle said crisply, "since General Ussh seems to have opted for a return to civilian life and His Highness is permanently catatonic, it appears we're left with the administrative problem of setting up a pro-tem housekeeping government As Terran emissary, :I'll reluctantly assume the chief role in affairs -- " "Hardly, My dear Harvey," Jith interjected. "Inasmuch as the present contretemps was produced in part by Grecian efforts -- " "Pseudo-Groacian efforts, need I remind you!" "A mere quibble, Mr. Ambassador. Groac will undertake to set up a caretaker government, with the assistance of Colonel Suash and his native constabulary -- " "Gentlemen," Retief said. "Aren't you forgetting the Emperor?" "Eh?" 'What's that?" Both plenipotentiaries turned to survey the Imperial figurehead, who stood erect now,gazing sternly at the assembled foreigners. "You need not trouble yourselves, gentlebeings," he said curtly. "I'll handle the government of Lumbaga -- to the extent that Lumbaga needs governing." He turned, stepped up on the dais and seated himself on the throne. "Item number one," he said impressively. "Any foreigner found meddling in Lumbagan affairs will be shipped home in a plain wrapper. Item number two -- " "If we could go back for a moment to item one. Your Highness -- "Make that 'Majesty,' Pouncetrifle. I've just assum Imperial dignities for the duration of the emergency." "To be sure. Your Majesty. I'm certain that on reflection you'll want to rescind the restriction on Terran participation in Lumbagan national life, inasmuch as, as worded, it would tend to somewhat restrict the free play of diplomacy -- " "Precisely. Item number two: since that government governs best which governs least, I intend to provide only the best for my people. Accordingly, all laws are declared illegal, including this one." "Hmm." Pouncetrifle mused, "since His Majesty seems clearly to be non compos mentis Jith, it's clear that duty requires that responsible authorities step in -- in the interest of the welfare of the Lumbagan people. I trust you're with me?" "Assuredly, Harvey," Jith whispered. "I suggest we find quieter quarters for His Majesty; possibly space could be found in the former root cellar, while you and I proceed to arrange matters in consonance with the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. And inasmuch as we Groaci breed like flies, I suppose you'll concede the obvious primacy of Groaci interests." "No need for dispute," the Emperor cut in decisively. "Inasmuch as neither of you will have anything to say about Lumbagan affairs from now on." "He's raving." Pouncetrifle stated flatly. "Jith, I call you to witness that His Majesty was babbling incoherently at the time I was forced to have him restrained. Retief -- assist the poor fellow down from his chair -- " "Curious accoustics in this room," Retief said blandly. "I thought for a moment your Excellency was proposing that we lay hands on a foreign Chief of State." "Mutiny, eh?" a Terran colonel barked. "Well, fortunately for democracy. I'm here to carry out the wishes of the people as interpreted by regs and expressed via appropriate channels -- " He advanced on the throne. Ten feet from it, he found himself floating an inch off the floor, his feed paddling vigorously. A brace of underlings sprang to his side, found themselves adrift, rising lightly as balloons toward the ceiling. Pouncetrifle uttered a bellow as he floated up from the floor, followed by Magnan and the rest of the staff. Jith uttered a faint cry and drifted upward, attended by his staff. Only Relief and Lucael remained on their feet. "Now that you've heard the details of the new constitution," the Emperor advised the levitating bureaucrats, "I declare the audience to be at an end. Don't bother backing from the presence-just disappear." At his words there were a series of sharp plops as air imploded to fill the vacancies created by the suddenly absent dignitaries. "I hope you didn't thrdw them completely away," Relief said. "Once they get their feet on the ground, I have an idea they'll take a realistic view of the proper role of diplomacy in the development of Lumbaga." "They're sorting themselves from among the tubers in the subbasement," His Majesty said. "And now -- I declare Parliament dissolved -- until -- the next time -- " he slumped on the throne and snored. Relief turned quickly to face Lucael. "Well done, Luke. I was wondering how long you could hold' out." "If anybody asks," the superLumbagan said in a failing voice, "tell them -- their Emperor -- will return -- whenever the situation demands. And now -- farewell. Relief -- " There was a final sharp implosion and Relief was alone in the throne room.TlSecretary Magnan said, "now that the excitement is over, one wonders if the entire affair weren't merely the product of group hysteria." They were sitting at a long plank table in the Imperial Feast Hall, dining somegency banquet rations in company with a cosmopolitan crowd of Terrans, Groaci, and Lumbagans. "Frankly, I'd be tempted to dismiss the incident as sheer delerium," the Terran colonel put in, glumly spooning in caviar. "If it weren't for the fact that I've suffered a virulent recurrence of an old potato blight -- " His expression brightened. "Of course, the condition will neccessitate my being invalided home for a few months' convalescent leave, which time I might spend quite profitably penning a memoir of recent events, possibly titled: The Importance of Mass Hallucination in Military A fairs,  "How about The Hallucinatory Importance of the Military in Mass AffairsT' Magnan proposed tartly. "Gosh, Relief," Gloot said as . the men of war and peace sparred verbally. "So you were really a Terry all along. Makes me feel kind of dumb to of been chumming around with the enemy. Lucky I changed sides." "You claim there's two kinds of Terries, male and female," IF Ignarp said. "Frankly, you all look alike to me." "Oh, there's a vas deferens between us," Retief assured his guest. "And I never got my ransom dough," Gloot said glumly. "On the other hand, I found out running things ain't all a bowl of cherries." "One taste of government was enough for me," Ignarp agreed. "I'll settle for good old anarchy any time." "Umm," Magnan smiled loftily. "But of course you chaps know nothing of the intricacies of politics. Now -- " he indicated the head of the table, where Jith and Pouncetrifle huddled -- "notice the resilience with which the ambassadors are coming to grips with the new realities, or whatever they are, of the situation, working out the rather complex protocols of establishing formal relations with a nonexistent government." "As long as they stick to shooting despatches back to headquarters and putting on charades for visiting politicos. Okay," Gloot said. "But the first time they step out o' line -- whammo! The Legendary Magical Emperor will be back on the job -- and next time they're liable tp wind up digging their way into the root cellar from below." "I hardly think the Lumbagan in the street is in a position to criticize matters of Imperial policy, Mr. Gloot," Magnan said According to Hoyle by Fred Hoyle  Geoffrey Hoyle One of the world's great astrophysicists teams up with his son Geoffrey (as they did in Rockets in Ursa Major) to bring you a new book of Science Fiction at its fascinating best! At all bookstores, # Harper # Row # # E. #d St, N.Y. #l# coolly. "I hope your association with Mr. Retief on his expedition upcountry hasn't given you a false sense of involvement in matters over your head." "You must be kidding, Terry," Ignarp said. "Gloot here is Minister of Imaginary Affairs in the Lumbagan government-inexile." "Government in exile?" Magnan frowned. "The only place for a government to be," Ignarp confirmed. "And I jist accepted a post with the Department of Education as Commissioner of Superstitions." "You're stamping them out?" Magnan queried confusedly. "Heck no. I'm starting new ones in keeping with a Tine old tradition dating back almost twenty-four hours." "Speaking of superstitions," the colonel said behind his hand to Magnan, "I think we'd do well to initiate a few of our own devising. For example, a carefully tailored myth to the effect that Terrans can work miracles -- like turning water into vintage Pepsi, for example -- " He broke off, staring in horror at the glass before him which rose gracefully into the air, its contents darkening to deep purplish red. The colonel followed it with his eyes as it took up a position directly over his head and inverted itself, discharging a cooling stream of effervescent fluid over the officer's startled features. After the colonel had left the table -- a departure noted by all present, accompanied as it was by a well-directed jet of liquid emanating apparently from thin air -- Magnan dipped a trembling finger in the puddle on the table and tasted it. "Pepsi?" Retief inquired. "Burgundy." Magnan choked." He rose hastily. "I think I'd best add a number of emendations to my preliminary repprt," he muttered, "lest it appear that I was so short-sighted as to doubt the existence of magic." He hurried away. "I thought you fellows had gone out of the miracle business pending the next crisis," Retief addressed Gloot and Ignarp as the two locals gripped hands across the table. "But since you haven't, try that last one again. Only this time don't spill any." A moment later they raised three paper-thin goblets of purple wine, touched them together with a musical clink. At the far end of the table. Ambassador Jith caught the gesture, raised his glass in response. "To a new era in interplanetary relations," he whispered cheerfully. "To peace and plenty for almost all -- within reasonable limits!" "That reminds me," Ignarp said, be wondering why I didn't redivide the loot along more practical lines while I was Emperor." "While you were Emperor," Gloot retorted. "While I was letting you go along for the ride, you mean -- " "You big slob, I was the brains of the outfit!" "You little creep, I handled all the tricky parts -- " "Gentlemen," Retief interjected, "We were about to propose a toast, remember?" Gloot lifted his glass. "To our friends, the good guys," he said. "And to our enemies, the bad guys," Ignarp added. "And to the hope," Retief said, "that someday we'll be able to tell which are which."  IF You yourself must die a little    name to possess, and there was of course no way for him to know until the end of his career that he would be forever famous among connoisseurs of murder as Ninefinger Jack. John Smith's marriage to his ninth bride, Marcia Runyon, took place on the morning of May the thirty first. On the evening of May the thirty-first John Smith, having spent much of the afternoon pointing out to friends how much the wedding had excited Marcia and how much he feared the effect on her notoriously weak heart, entered the bathroom and, with the careless ease of the practiced professional, employed five of his fingers to seize Marcia's ankles and jerk her legs out of the tub while with the other five fingers he gently pressed her face just below water level. So far all had proceeded in the conventional manner of any other wedding night; but the ensuing departure from ritual was such as to upset even John Smith's professional bathside manner. The moment Marcia's face and neck were submerged below water, she opened her gills. In his amazement John released his grasp upon both ends of his bride. Her legs descended into the water and her face rose above it. As she passed from the element of water to that of air, her gills closed and her mouth opened. "I suppose," she observed, "that in the intimacy of a long marriage you would eventually have discovered in any case that I am a Venusian. It is perhaps as well that the knowledge came early, so that we may lay a solid basis for understanding." "Do you mean that you are a native of the planet Venus?" "I do," she said. "You would be astonished to know how many of us are already among you." "I'm already quite astonished," said John, "to learn of one. Would you mind convincing me that I did indeed see what I thought I saw?" ered her head beneath the water. Her gills opened and her breath bubbled merrily. "Nature, on our planet," she explained when she emerged, "has bred as the dominant race our species of amphibian mammals, in all other respects superficially identical with Homo sapiens. You'll find it ail but impossible to tell us from humans except maybe by noticing those who, to avoid accidental opening of the gills, refuse to swim. Such concealment will, of course, be unnecessary when we take over complete control of your planet." "And what do you propose to do with the race that already controls it?" "Kill most of them, I suppose," said Marcia. "And might I trouble you for that towel?" "That," pronounced John, with any handcraftsman's abhorrence of mass production, "is monstrous. I see rriy duty to my race. I must reveal all." "I am afraid," Marcia observed as she dried herself, "that you will not. In the first place, no one will believe you. In the second place, I should then be forced to present to the authorities the complete dossier which I have IF gathered on the cumulatively interesting deaths of your first eight wives, together with my direct evidence as to your attempt this evening." John Smith pressed the point no further. "In view of this attempt," he said, "I imagine you would like either a divorce or an annulment." "No," said Marcia. "There is no better cover for my activities than marriage to a member of the native race. In fact, should you so much as mention divorce again, I shall be forced to return to the topic of. that dossier. And now, if you will hand me that robe, I intend to do a little telephoning. Some of my better-placed colleagues will need to know my new name and address." As John Smith heard her ask thq long-distance operator for Washington, D.C., he realized that he would be forced to take action immediately. He did. First with knife, then with gun. Through the failure of the knife, John Smith learned that Venusian blood has extraordinary, quickclotting powers and Venusian organs possess an amazingly rapid system of self-regeneration. And the bullet taught him a further peculiarity of the blood: that it dissolves lead -- in fact thrives upon lead. His skill as a cook was quite sufficient to disguise any of the commoner poisons from human taste. The Venusian palate, however, not only detected but relished most of them. Marcia was particularly taken with his tomato aspic a Varsenique and insisted on his preparing it in quantity for a dinner of her friends, along with his sole amandine to which the prussic acid lent so distinctively intensified a flavor and aroma. of divorce, even after a year of marriage, evoked from Marcia a frowning murmur of "Dossier..." the attempts at murder seemed merely to amuse her. Finally John Smith was driven to at the State University, recognized as the ultimate authority (on this planet) on life on other planets. The professor found the query of much theoretical interest. "From what we are able to hypothesize of the nature of Venusian organisms," he announced, "I can almost assure you of their "destruction by the forced ingestion of the best Beluga caviar in doses of no less than one-half pound per day." Three weeks of the suggested treatment found John Smith's bank account seriously depleted and his wife in perfect health. "That dear Gilly!" she laughed one evening. "It was so nice of him to tell you how to kill me; it's the first time I've had enough caviar since I came to Earth. It's so dreadfully expensive." "You mean," John demanded, She nodded. "And ail that money!" John protested. America's greatest physiologist took an interest in John Smith's problem. "I should advise," he said, "the use of crystallized carbon placed directly in contact with the sensitive gill area." "In other words, a diamond necklace?" John Smith asked. He seized a water pitcher, hurled its contents at the physiologist's neck and watched his gills open. T he next day John purchased a lapel flower through which water could be squirted -- an article he thenceforth found invaluable for purposes of identification. The use of the flower proved a somewhat awkward method of starting a conversation and often led the conversation into unintended paths; but it did establish a certain clarity in relations. It was after John had observed the opening of the gills of a leading criminal psychiatrist that he realized where he might find the people who could really help him. From then on, while Marcia was engaged in her activities preparatory to world conquest, whenever he felt he was unobserved he visited. insane asylums, announced that he was a free-lance feature writer and asked if they had any inmates who believed that Venusians were at large upon Earth and planning to take it over. In this manner he met many interesting and attractive people, all of whom wished him godspeed in his venture, but who pointed out that they would hardly be where they were if all of their own plans carried as hopelessly as his. From one of these friends, who had learned more than most because his Venusian wife had made the error of falling in love with him (an error which led to her eventual removal from human society), John Smith ascertained that Venusians may indeed be harmed and even killed by many substances on their own planet, but seemingly by nothing on ours -- though the wife had once dropped a hint that one thing alone on Earth could prove fatal to the Venusian system. At last John Smith visited an asylum whose director announced that they had an inmate who thought he was a Venusian. When the director had left them, a squirt of the lapel flower verified the claimant's identity. "I am a member of the Conciliationist Party," he explained, "the only member who has ever reached Earth. We believe that Earthmen and Venusians can live at peace as all men should, and I shall be glad to help you destroy all members of the opposition party. IF "One substance on Earth is deadly poison to any Venusian. Since in preparing and serving the dish best suited to its administration you must be careful to wear gloves, you should begin your campaign by wearing gloves at all meals -- " This mannerism Marcia seemed afforded her by her marriage and, even more particularly for the delights of John's skilled preparation of such dishes as spaghetti airaglio ed dlVarsenicOy which is so rarely to be had in the average restaurant. Two weeks later John finally prepared the indicated dish. Marcia had praised the recipe, devoured two helpings, expressed some wonder as to the possibility of gills in its creator, whom she had never met, and was just nibbling at the smallest bones when, as the Conciliationist had foretold, she dropped dead. Intent upon accomplishing his objective, John had forgotten the dossier -- nor had he even suspected that it was in the hands of a gilled lawyer who had instructions to pass it on in the event of Marcia's death. Even though that death was certified as natural, John rapidly found himself facing trial for murder, with seven other states vying for the privilege of the next chance at him should the trial fail to end in conviction. With no prospect in sight of a quiet resumption of his accustomed profession, John Smith bared his knowledge and acquired his immortal nickname. The result was a period of intense prosperity among manufacturers of squirting lapel flowers, bringing about the identification and exposure of the gilled masqueraders. But inducing them, even by force, to eat the substance poisonous to them was more difficult. The problem of supply and demand was an acute one, in view of the large number of the Venusians and the small proportion of memperform the sacrifice made by John Smith. It wjs that great professional widower and amateur chef himself who solved the problem by proclaiming in his death cell his intention to bequeath his body to the eradication of Venusians, thereby pursuing after death the race which had ruined his career. All that had to be done, he pointed out, was secretly to slip a bit of human protoplasm into random meals -- and the sheep would be separated, by death, from the goats. The noteworthy proportion of human beings who promptly followed his example in their wills has assured us of permanent protection against future invasions, since so small a quantity of the poison is necessary in each individual case; after all, one finger sufficed for Marcia.  "There! I told you! I told you!" John, the miner, was sheathed in folds of black scaly skin. Sweaty, unaccustomed muscles smarting from lengthy surface travel, he squinted into the haze above the water. "I don't see anything," he said in a voice suitable to his physical status. One large black armored knuckle clicked nervously. Quint's verdant fur ruffled in the salt breeze. "Oh, you can't see anything, cave-eyes," he said. "I can, too," said John, shading his enormous red eyes from the sun's painful rays as much as from the insult. "I can see as good as you can. Better. Remember in the ruins -- " "Cannot," Quint spat back. "Cannot! Cannot! " It was the wrong time and the wrong place and John was in the wrong mood. He was hot and thirsty and full of muscle aches -- even his long toes longed for a return to the dark moist earth they were used to. The harsh dry sand gritted under his nails. Fire flashed deep in his miner's eyes. "I can see good enough to grab you, you little green ape," John said, his long right arm and clicking mandible snaking out as if after a diamond in the wall of one of his tunnels. Quint yelped and tried to sidestep but his agility was not enough. The thin black digits choked off his wind and then the fight was really on. All the others could see was their backs -- Quint's small and green, John's large and black -- in the center of a swirling tornado of sand. "All right! All rights Champ said. He waded in as he might have shoved his way into a torrential mountain stream after succulent fish in his far homeland. His huge meaty paws grabbed both combatants and held them far apart, one on each side of his massive gray chest, "Enough of this stupidity. Enough of fighting! Our fathers fought sufficiently for all!" "But it's there, I tell you." Quint said, his voice becoming shrill as he struggled in the giant's paw. Excitement and frustration were bringing the Monk to tears -- but the Champ's hands were bringing him and John close to strangulation as they struggled. Finally both relaxed and panted for breath and Champ's grip loosened slightly. "I think Quint's right," said a small voice from Marv's back. They all turned. "I think I see something also, way off near the curve of the bay." Champ turned and squinted into the blue distance. "Too far for my poor eyes, too far. All I can see is sand, but if you -- " "I do," said the small voice. "It's white, like the sand. Blends in. But it's there." Champ let the fighters slide to the gritty sand, where both lay limp and panting. 'See," Quint managed to gasp, 'Harold -- Harold agrees with me " Champ looked down at the prostrate green monk and black miner. "Don't you two flght no more," he said seriously. "No more." "I -- I guess I can't sec too good," John mumbled from where he lay. He looked up at Champ's massive figure looming above him. "Too good," he repeated. Marv used his long supple tail to help Quint resume his seat. The party started off again across the blowing golden sand. John struggled to his feet, glanced back at the dark rolling mountains of home, then at the sea and the straggling party around the red dragon called Marv. He sighed deeply from his miner's lungs and followed sullenly. through heavy sand brought the party close enough for all to see the object easily. It was a boxish, low rectangular affair, large enough to contain them easily, if they could find a way into it and if it proved hollow. Maybe they could use it in the fall to avoid the purple mists. Maybe it contained some treasure like the cave full of canned peaches John had found the summer before. Its color was like the sand. As they came closer they could see that the object was pitted by the constant blowing of harsh crystals. Many years must have pas since its construction in the oldtime. And it was oldtime -- of that they were all sure. The group of friends traveled mainly in silence. Champ had little to say at any time. He liked to think of himself as a doer rather than a thinker like Harold or a talker like Quint. John was too depressed to talk. He tried to think of dark caves and moist soil as he dug his sharp toes into sand time after time, step after tedious step. Quint didn't want to pick another fight with the miner. He knew that anything he said might rub John the wrong way and he was trying to get back his wind after the morning's hassle. Marv didn't talk because he couldn't -- not with his mouth. He was not equipped with vocal cords. He would have had a lot to say, but he couldn't say it and that was that. Marv was not one to storm at cruel fate -- he nodded and thought his esoteric thoughts and kept them to himself as he marched patiently across the beach. Harold shivered under the thin blankets that shielded his frame from the bitter wind. He was doing his best to cling to Marv's swaying back. Harold was too tired to talk. When they were only yards away Quint hopped (flew?) from his place on Marv's back and skipped IF to the crumbling structure he had discovered. "See! See!" he shouted into the fresh breeze and at the sea. "I told you! Here it is! What fun!" He scampered, jumped to the low roof and did a playful dance as the rest came up to the walls. Quint's prancing feet set flying showers of fine loose dust and little pieces of wall. "Cut that out," Champ said in agitation. Quint laughed. The giant reached out a hand to catch the Monk, but was too slow. Quint scampered out of reach to the far side of the roof. "Can't catch me!" he cried. "Naaaa!" He laughed again. "Who wants to?" John muttered sullenly, but nobody listened to him. Harold carefully slipped off Marv's broad red back, bracing himself against the heavy wing muscles. He straightened his spindly legs, took a deep breath, then started to examine the side of the building near him. "See, Mary," he said, fingers running lightly over the crumbling white surface, "it's from the oldtime. My daddy built this. And he flew, too, better 'n you. Maybe I can find out where he went. Maybe I can find out where they all went, our folks. Maybe we can all go home. Come on, Marv, let's see if we can find them." Marv nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself as only Marv could, and folloiyed Harold. John looked about him. Champ was lumbering down'to the ocean to catch some flsh for lunch. Practical idiot, uncaring lummox... John wondered what had ever possessed him to join the group. Why? Why? All they ever gave him was spite and backtalk. He hated them. Then he remembered the long cold nights by the Tree near the purple glowing Pit and the voices -- and he shivered. Still -- he did hate them. If only there were someone else, some other human company -- with a shake of his head to clear it of cobwebs of memory, John reached, dug his nails into the top of the roof and hauled himself up. Quint saw him and deftly flicked a pebble at him. It hit -- and stung. "Hah!" yelled Quint in glee. "Can't catch me, can't c atch me!" And the little green fool hopped out of reach, smiling from tufted ear to green tufted ear, showing small pointy white canines. John idly waved his long arm, anger dying in frustration. "Who wants to? Who wants to anyway? Go away, leave me alone." "Ahhh," said Quint in mock pity. "Can't stand to be wrong, John? Sore loser? Awhhh." "You!" John's long fingers found a loose piece in the rocklike material of the roof. He hurled it at Quint, who pumped his wings just once and skipped out of the way. "Hah-hah-hah. Poor, poor John. Can't do anything right." Quint dropped off the edge of the building to find someone else to play with. "Damn idiot," John called after him. Damn idiot, John repeated in his thoughts, folding his long triple-jointed legs under him. Damned if I can enjoy this cruddy game. Fll just sit here and sulk, he told himself and that was what he did. lto Marv. "Look, iron." He was leaning against a break in the building's pale surface bn the side away from the burning sun. A I#rge rusted plate was set in the grainy material of the walls at that point and Harold was examining the pitted surface. "It's got to be iron -- or steel. I wonder, could it be a door? Maybe somebody's inside." Harold tapped the door lightly and a few flakes of rust fell to the sand at his feet. He tapped a little harder, listening -- a hollow gong sound answered. That, and nothing else. "Maybe, Marv, maybe they all went through this door and left." Marv nodded silently. Harold peered closer. "Runes," he said, noticing scratches, etchings of oldtime letters in the rusty flaking surface. "Writing. American. I wish I knew how to read. I wonder what -- " Harold reached out one fragile#ight-boned hand and gently traced the outlines of the letters -- what letters he knew not. "I wonder what -- I wonder what they said to each other, Marv." "Hey! Heeey!" came a voice that they recognized as Champ's. "Heey!" It came from a few yards away, oyer a sand dune. They discovered Champ at the bottom of a large pit. As sand was still cascading about the lip -- an obldng circle about thirty feet in diameter -- it appeared the giant had been the victim of a cave-in, a common occurrence around oldtime ruins. Champ had a string of still flopping fish around his neck. "Oh, hello up there," he said as they peered down. "I seem to have gotten lunch a little sandy." He shook his head. "Sandy." "Are you all right?" Harold asked. "I don't know. I guess so. I was walking back with lunch -- and then I was down here. I guess there was a cave-in." Indeed, there was even a cave -- a few feet from where Champ was seated, a small black mouth gaped at them, glints from inside promising unexpected delights. "What's in the cave?" Harold asked, pointing. "Huh? What -- oh." Champ squinted at the black mouth. "Yeah, looks like oldtime stuff. IF Metal, Gimmicks. Things. Over there, too." Champ pointed to a place almost directly to Harold's right. The boy shifted his head to look at a tall pillar of oldtime metal, pointed at the top and flared at the base. It reached up from below where Champ was seated -- part of the base was covered by sand almost up to ground level. Its coat of white paint had aged to match the yellow entombing sand. It looked pretty, with its metal and white paint and a black strip or two here and there. Near the bottom a few oldtime runes like those on the door, chipped and peeling, could still be made out. "I wish I could read," Harold whispered to himself again. voice dragged the boy back to the present. "Huh?" "Help. Help get me outa here. Now?" Champ's sad brown eyes looked even sadder at the bottom of the pit; for once the giant found himself in a situation in which his great muscular bulk was a negative rather than a positive factor. "Oh. Oh, yeah, sure. I'll get John -- " ButJohn had already come. "Did I hear somebody mention a cave?" he asked. Harold turned. "Yes. Down there. See it? Want to explore it and help get Champ out?" "I don't know if I do," John said, pouting, shaking his head. "Aw, John -- somebody has to help Champ out." "Oh?" "We all gotta pull together -- " The miner frowned sadly and shook his head. "I can't dp it -- and certainly neither Marv nor Quint -- " "Yes," John saidsharply. "Certainly not Quint." "Come on, John. We need you," Harold pleaded. "Oh, all right. Just remember you said it." John looked over the lip of the depression. God, do you ever need me, he thought to himself. You babies couldn't get along without me -- couldn't survive a day. Thinking of a cave he'd once found by the yellow river, he nosed down and then over like an inchworm, first digging ahead into sand as far as he could stretch, then looping his body until his toenails were directly behind his hands. All the way down the gritty slope, John inched and slid and scraped on his thick-skinned belly. Soon he was slipping down the few last feet to Champ. "Good to see you, John." "Good to see you, Champ." John smiled, stood up right and brushed off his dull black skin. "Let's explore -- then I'll get you out." He held down a hand to the giant. "Okay." Champ smiled back and came to his feet. edge of the pit, swinging his feet. Marv couldn't sit down any more than he could talk. "I wonder what it is," Harold said, indicating the pillar. "Maybe it's a pen-cil.'-' Harold had difHculty with the unfamiliar word, which he'd picked up from a hexmanstory-teller over by El-A desert, so he said it again. "Pencil. Or a stove. Or a car. Oh, maybe it's a car and John will find the controls and then I'll figure out how to drive it, like I did the can opener, and weUl all go for a ride. Oh, I wish -- " "Hi, gang," said Quint, coming up the slope. "What's up?" The Monk was covered with sand. He should have been totally exhausted and ready for bed, but he was still eager. "Champ fell down in that hole," Harold told him. "Now John and Champ are exploring a cave." "Wow! Wow # wowowow. I'm going down too." Quint scampered out of Harold's reach, ignoring the boy's frantic command to stop. He went down the sandy slope, using his wings to brace himself and slow the fall. Harold sighed, resigning himself to fate. At the bottom Quint found John and Champ in the cave. It was a small cave -- large enough , only for the three of them and maybe one more. There was a lot of oldtime equipment .around -- stools and rusty old chairs with broken legs and a large metal wall thing with dark dirty glass squares on it and little switches and buttons and all sorts of fun things. Both John and Champ were sitting on the stools and playing with the buttons. They hadn't noticed him -- he'd surprise them and play, too. Quint jumped onto a table and started pressing every button in reach with all his fingers and toes. "Surprise!" he chortled, laughing in glee. Gosh, this is fun! he thought, scrambling on top of a metal shelf and prancing on the pushy things he found there. His arms searched over his head for more things to play with. When Quint caught the looks on Champ's and John's faces he laughed even louder. "Where the hell did you come from?" John asked irritatedly. "Hey," said Champ, "stop that! We're exploring, not playing!" "Hahahahah!" Quint screamed, pressed a button. Lights went on. "Wow!Hahahahah!" Rewarded, he pressed more. A flashing red light went on over John's head. A shrill siren sounded. "Wow!" cried Quint again. This was the best game yet! John glanced about wildly. The little fool, he thought. You can get killed fooling with oldtime stuff -- and that ape will do it yet. "Hahahahah!" screamed Quint. "Can't catch me -- " Champ threw a fish at him. Then things happened fast: IF Quint pressed another button, a pretty red one. John grabbed a metal rod, that was attached to something, to throw at Quint. That little ass! John thought, straining at the rod. There was a deep roar, like sudden thunder. The rod in John's hands came dowHy not off. The rod came scraping down and John's face was illuminated with harsh white light from outside and then another roar swelled even louder and flames burst from the metal the dancing-fighting-throwing animals that once might have been men -- or at least men enough to Tight and kill -- to a crisp and then in an instant to fragments of those crisps. And Harold had just time to say, "I wonder -- " and Marv had just time to nod before they, too, became chunks of burning meat as the missile roared into the twilight of the beach. H alfway around the scarred body of Earth was a small village. It had rows of corn and barley outside its rough log palisade. Two horses, three cows and one calf pastured on the harsh tundra grass beyond the crops. Twelve human beings lived in this village. Suddenly over the head of Creon, the headman, the commissar, the leader, there appeared high in the sky a burning streak. Creon looked up from his toil and used his gnarled hand to shade his eyes, that he might better see. A divine revelation came to him. "God," he mumbled to himself in his own language. "God!" He turned back to the village and started running madly, waving his hands, plough forgotten in the dust. He shouted, "God is coming!" And the other eleven human beings -- or reasonable facsimiles -- turned from their work to look up to the heavens. The calf stopped chewing to look up. too. But before they could react or breathe out in ecstasy or say a word (even the calf, who normally thought very fast and spoke even faster) the missile reached the right altitude for the two treasured spheres of metal that made up its warhead to coine together and bellflower blossomed on the scarred and bleeding Earth, burning the village and the corn and the barley and the horses and the cattle and the calf and the humans... and all that was left was sand blowing in the breeze off the sea...  After the Word was lost, men found it and gave it a name. D agger sidled along the stained wall, his sandaled feet almost silent on the grit and refuse, his senses alert and his weapon ready. They're along here somewhere, he thought, around the fringes of this Dead Area... Dagger had seen the whole tribe but once, a few weeks before. He and his tigers had been running from a raid in the Eight Thirties, scampering wildly through broken walls, jumping through the rips and tears from level to level, while holding tightly to two struggling women and some sacks of stolen food. His raiders had cut through an ancient, fire-blackened auditorium, into a huge lobby. The small tribe had been ready for them with knives and slings. The tribe's fighters had formed a ring about two small cooking fires on the broken floor, with the women inside the circle -- except for two who had long knives and looked able to use them. They'd heard the Tigers coming for six levels and the knives on the far side were searching the darkness for flankers, just in case. They had been very pro about it. Dagger remembered, not attacking right off, but obviously ready to defend. The laughing Tigers had crashed to a halt, knives out in an instant, and everyone had stared tough at everyone else until Dagger's family had edged past, weapons ready, and had then broken into a run across the lobby, with the wenches wailing even louder. Rolf had slammed his brunette alongside the head and shut her up and the blonde had quieted when she saw how far from #I they had come. Tiger country. Where they grow the tough ones. But Dagger still couldn't forget the blonde he had seen in the family huddle with the tribe they had surprised. Damn, she was something special... Tawny and smooth, with ripe mounds of breasts showing through and around the short-laced vest she wore. Beaded leather skirt with a long knife in the belt. She had crouched over a crying child, soothing it, her dark blue eyes on the sudden invaders. She had looked ready to defend. Dagger couldn't get her out of his mind. Hell, he didn't need another woman; he had two already. But this one is special, he told himself. Was the child hers? She looked too young to have birthed a squaller, but maybe so. Some of those tribes over by Frisco and down around Mexicompany were big on young bearers. Maybe this tribe was from Pacifica, or even the Catalina sector. They were always a crazy bunch, like the flock of tribes that started that zongo religion about the Second Coming of the Great Architect. They said he would come any day now. Zongo, the whole bunch. When Dagger asked, Rolf and Claw and Stripes said they had never seen the tribe before. Gary had wanted to go snatch a wench or two but the others had talked him out of it. They knew a tough bunch when they saw one. "Wait till four or five of these wenches sneak off or get sick or something," Rolf had told Gary. 'Then we'll go looking for fresh meat." Gary had looked up from his algae soup and said, "I had meat once, you know." They'd all heard his big story, but no one stopped him. "I was just a cub with the Wolves then, before I came over here. We found this little family, not even a tribe, that had barricaded themselves into a whole floor. A floor! This whole sector was theirs and they'd blocked iip all the entrances and fused slabs over the breaks and burns. And they had cattle, man, cattle. Greatest bunch of zongo animals you ever saw! Bony backs, big bloated bellies and breasts swinging underneath -- yeah, really!" Gary had waved his soup spoon while the others patiently waited. It wasn't bad hearing about meat animals once in a while. It sort of kept the dream alive that somewhere, hidden away, was a whole bunch of meat critters: cattle, sheep, chops, maybe big fat rdasts. "Damnedest taste I ever had. We ate ourselves sick and -- well -- that was the end of the cattle. When we came back the whole damned tribe got sore at us, started the big fight that broke us up. Which is why I'm over here now." "We know," Claw said, scratching a plastic wall with his metal hook. Changing the subject, Rolf said, "I'm thinking of a few new wenches. Maybe if we went down to six hundred or so and over toward the Arrowhead sector -- there was some pretty fancy floors over there in the old days. Still have some tasty little wenches twisting their tails around there." "Yeah," the others agreed and they quickly fell into their favorite conversation: Where Might Be The Best Place To Find Wenches, Loot, Food, Adventure. B ut Dagger hadn't really been listening. He drifted from the group and looked down through a rent in the floor at the new ones penned up with the old ones they couldn't trust. Why were wenches always running away? It wasn't as if any other tribe was better off. Not really. Oh, sure, the Frisco bunch have some zongo pleasure machines that still worked and the Mexicompany grew a lot of stuff besides algae on Top. He'd heard that one flock of zongos had found water running through their subsub-basement and had, hooked up a gadget that gave them electricity, freeing them from the solar cells on Top. Dagger walked away from the ripped entrance to the girl's confinement box and went to the place where Donna and Sherise were boiling clothes in a big metal pot. Donna looked at him with a certain speculation and gave him a slow smile, but Dagger ignored her. She was tired of Claw, that was all. He could tell. Or maybe she hated Claw for trading her once to the Panthers. Maybe she wanted Claw killed in a fight with Dagger. In any case. Dagger passed. IF What he didn't need was to lose a good friend and a Tiger just because some dumb woman wanted something different. In the next room Demon was hunched over some books. "Hey," Dagger said, pulling up a broken chair and seating himself carefully. "Give me some words." The skinny, long-faced young man looked up with a weary expression. "I'm reading, Dag. Can't you ask your silly questions some other time?" "They're not silly questions, you book freak. You're the only ace who can tell what I want to know. Well, you're the only one I know, anyway. "How come the women keep running off?" "They don't. Most of them settle down, don't they?" "Naw, they're always slipping away, going back." "Those are the ones you notice. They go because they have a lover or a family or a baby back there. Steal the baby with the wench and you'd have a lot that would stay." "Come on. Demon, you know we don't want any zongo yelpers around. They'd drive us crazy." Dagger was disgusted with Demon for not understanding that. "We move faster without kids, man." "Women, you lights-out daggerman, are different from men." He held up a hand against Dagger's grin. Different, man. Notice how when we stop somewhere the women start nest-building? Clothes are fixed, beds made up out of next to nothing. Cleaned floors. Figuring out ways to make things easier, right?" "Yeah, but that's what they're supposed to do, isn't it?" "It's the nest-building in them, Dag. And to them nests mean yelpers and squallers. Suckling kids is real woman stuff, something we just don't understand. When you don't take the kids the women go back. When you bash in the heads of the ones that are birthed you kill something inside the wenches and they go away." Dagger stared gloomily at an unidentifiably stained wall. "Why are they that way. Demon? I treat my women fine and I've had three go away." "Why are you the way you are? They're the way they are because that's the way women are." Dagger looked at Demon and sighed. "Why do you run with us? You're the one with the education. You could probably get into the Citadel or go up to Shasta and get taken in there. A lot better, man. Three bowls a day, things that work, even pleasure machines, I heard." Demon leaned back into a badly repaired chair and drummed his fingers on the book before him. "I was in Citadel once when I was a kid. My uncle was a teacher. He got us in. But they don't have everything. They're missing parts. big parts. Do you know what opera is?" Dagger shook his head. Demon knew all kinds of zongo things. "It's singing -- music and talking and a story. They had one opera. Just one. On an old tape. I didn't understand the language and they didn't either, but it was fantastic. Like finding a whole store, somehow untouched, with all the labels on everything. They had tapes. Picture tapes they could play on a few old oiachines. Sound tapes. They had some books. I read all the books till there wasn't any more to read. So I left. To find books. And whatever else I can find." There was a long silence. Dagger remembered how Demon had come out of the dark and fought Hoss. He had maimed Hoss so bad they had had to cut his throat and put him out of his misery. A good man lost for trying to throw a book on the fire. They'd almost exiled Demon for that but he had looked so zongo standing there, the book in one hand, with Hoss's blood on it and the long knife in the other, stained red to the hilt. "We can't afford two losses in one day," Rolf had said and that was it. "I found you a book once, remember?" Dagger said. "A big one, with pictures in color. Funny pictures -- like nothing I'd ever seen." "It was an atlas, Dag. Pictures of the world as it was before they covered it all up." "That must have been a long time ago." Dagger grinned. "Hey, what's this book? Is this the one you found last week when we came through that whattyacallit?" "Residential sector. Occupied up to-oh, twenty, thirty years ago. People living right in rooms all the time, the same rooms, just like in Citadel." "That's sure zongo. Why live in the same place all the time when you could run around and see things? Living like that would kill me quick. I'd rather cut my own throat." Dagger paused. "Is that what the wenches want? Settling down, staying in one dumb place till some knife pack comes and takes everything? That's really getting the Big Zongo!" "Some people like it. Dagger." "It ain't for me, no damn good for this knife, man, no damn good at all." Dagger shot a dark look at the two women stirring the clothes and then turned back to Demon, who was studying his book again. "What's the book?" he asked again, peering around Demon. "It's incredibly old, a copy of a copy of a copy, I think, bause they didn't have inerts then to print on. The original must be a thour sand years old and it's about a time long before that." "A fairy tale, like you read us in Desertown?" IF "I don't know. I wish I did. It seems crazy, really zongo, but I think it was real -- once, anyway." He closed the book and pointed to the title. "Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates." "What's a pirate?" "He was a lot like us, I think. Only he sailed ships on a sea of water and fought other men and took their wenches and treasure." Demon opened the book to a picture of a golden box on a rough blue floor. "That's water and that's a ship. See those men? They're attacking the ship." "Water? That much water? That's as big as a floor! Toad told me that when he came through Pacifica there were whole floors filled with water." time, before they had Vto cover everything up there were seas. Oceans. Covered threefourths of the whole Earth." "How many floors deep?" Dagger asked. "This was before they had floors and levels. Everything was open and there were fish to eat and meat animals on the ground." "Boy, that's hard to believe. Just bare ground. I saw some in Sierra and in Desertown, but it was sure nothing much. Just rough and hard and dry. Floors are better." Demon smiled and showed him a picture of two men Fighting. "It's called, Who shall be captain? Remember when Rolf and Turk fought? Like that?" "And that's their tribe sitting and watching? Where are their wenches?" "Pirates ran in a different sort of tribe. They'd go out in these ships on the water and find other places to raid and bring their loot and wenches back to an island where their other loot and wenches were." "Is an island like a sort of safe place, like Citadel or Sierra Tower or Shasta?" Demon nodded. "That way no one could steal their stuff while they were gone, huh? Pretty smart." Dagger peered again at the picture. "They sure look like they know what a knife is for. Show me some more." "Look at this one. A captain has captured a town and is getting loot from the people that live there." "Oh, like when we took Desertown? And those turtles gave us wenches and food and anything we wanted just so we wouldn't kill them?" He looked at the picture more closely. "They're mean, all right. That one guy has a goddamn long knife." "That's a sword. It's a very long dagger but specialized... Look here -- they're dividing the loot." "Still no wenches. What's the matter with those guys? They zongo?" "No, I don't think so. Pirates liked wenches all right. Hell, Dag, that's why I'm reading, to find out things. Now go away and let me read," Dagger rose and stretched. "Pirates sound like a fine tribe. How many were they?" "I don't know. Thousands, maybe." "Thousands?" Dagger was shocked. "They must have owned the whole world, a bunch of long knives like that." Demon smiled wearily. "There were a lot more people in those days. Anyway, the pirates were all wiped out -- or they gave up -- or settled down." "Settled down? You're faking me down a floor, man. No studs that look like them are going to settle down." Demon shrugged and hunched over his book. Dagger watched him uncertainly and then walked away. He sat down and thought about a lot of things -- the girl he had seen and pirates and the life he was leading. It was the most undisturbed thinking he had ever done. Or ever needed to do. And the more he thought the more he remembered the girl. Tawny she was -- and a fighter. He kept thinking about her until he couldn't stand it any more and he went looking. He found the burned floor where the lobby fires had been and tracked an ashen footprint down two floors and a little west before he lost the trail. But he kept on hunting and then, unexpectedly, he found them. The soft low sound of a wench's crooning came from a split in the building that went up and down maybe twenty floors. Dagger crept close to the broken edge, crawling silently for the last thirty feet. There they were, camped near the ripped edge of the floor just below the opposite side. Dagger lay watching, searching for her and not finding her. Maybe she ran away, he thought. Then there was a scurry of entering feet and the women were laughing and hugging three of the men who had arrived with bulging lootsacks. And she came out of the room to the rear and took one of the sacks and started setting out the algae cakes and green tubers. Was the one she got the sack from her man? She had the food set out and the other sacks were emptied and the little piles redivided. The girl stood iip and stretched, her breasts tight against her vest and the flat, taut tawniness of her stomach was bared. Then she looked up and straight at him. Dagger froze in place. He knew she saw him and his muscles tensed for flight. But she wasn't moving. She was just looking and alert. Her hand rested on her knife hilt. IF Shes not afraid. Dagger said to himself in astonishment. Slowly he raised his head so that she could clearly see his face. He could still be off and running before they could possibly get across that big rip in the structure. He saw the tenseness go out of her body. For a long time she just stood looking at him. Then she smiled. It was the smile that made Dagger go away. A smilel He trudged back through the floors and levels, up ruined escalators and down through cracked floors, along curved passages and . around ancient hexahedrons, along dim passages where even the glowevers had failed. She smiled! She didn't cry alarm. She didn't run. She didn't do anything. She , had checked the turf and decided there was only one knife -- and she had smiled! Dagger went back to his tribe and thought. Then he went wench hunting. That was a wench he wanted. He tracked her group to the edge of a Dead Area, then across a huge blackened ruin where one whole sector had exploded, then around a dried-up recreational park where anything could hide, and down a tall, dusty factory row. He was certain they were close because the last Tire had still been warm. He sidled along a wall and peered through a ruined door. A faint sound froze him and it was a minute before he moved again. Song? Yes, it was someone singing. He slipped quietly through several rooms of charred garbage to another passage. The song was louder and he knew exactly where it came from. As quiet as a nightcreeper he drifted toward a door and looked into the ruined garden beyond. This was the palace of some long dead prince or merchant baron. A cracked and empty pool was beyond the screen of struggling greenery. The tribe had camped in the pool around a dry fountain. And she was in plain sight. D agger watched in motionless silence until the tribal chief dimmed the lights and everyone settled down for the night. Three guards roamed the perimeter, but Dagger was used to keeping motionless and they did not detect him. Now what? he asked himself. Sneaking in there could get my throat vented. None of my brother knives wanted to come with me on a zongo mission so I cant muscle my way in. Dagger slept fitfully for an hour, then crept back and found a place two floors up and a way north. # track em and watch for my chance. For two days he was the ghost behind them, to their side and once, even ahead of them, when he hunkered down in a rusty storage bin in a place where they might camp. Imperfect visions of himself leaping into their midst and carrying her off before they reacted kept bothering him. That way Vd only have one way to run... Nothing worked or presented itself for exploitation until two days had passed. He found a water leak from above and cautiously tested it. The water was good, which meant he might expect them to use it. He climbed up one floor and lay close to a hacked-out hole made by some other hunter. One of the other wenches came first, then two of the older women, one with a quiet yelper. The squallers are very quiet with this tribe... Then she came. Alone. Dagger watched her move. Watching her, he almost forgot his mission, she was so pretty and so graceful. She had filled the jug and was turning to go before he acted. He dropped through the hole. She was too quick for him and her knife was in her hand when she turned. There was fear in her face. But not panic, he thought approvingly. She recognized him. There was a moment's wavering, then her knife hand was out, the blade was steady. But she hadn't cried out. Dagger smiled at her, slowly moving closer. "I'm Dagger. My tribe is the Tiger tribe. I want you to be my woman." Her eyes flicked beyond him, then around. "There's no one else," he said. "Just me. I don't want to hurt anyone. I just want you." "No," she said, the point of her knife weaving in a menacing manner. "I have a man." "No, you don't." Dagger didn't know why, but he suddenly felt this was true. "I don't think you have a man. But you want a man." "Not a Tiger man. They're raiders."  "We're pirates," Dagger said proudly. "You kill, take -- " The knife point was still weaving expertly. Her eyes darted again and her muscles were tense. "You kill babies. You break. You do not build." Dagger felt helpless. "We don't all kill. Demon reads books. He saves books! He read to us about Mother Goose and Walden Poftd and the long-ago people." He tried smiling again. "Books?" The girl was uncertain and Dagger stepped closer. "Yes, books. Books about life back then, you know, before. I've read a lot of books. About pirates, for instance. Did you know that most of the world was under water at one time? Ships sailed on the IF water, big golden ships full of men. And the whole world was dirt and water and sky, lots of sky, with air and birds in it, just like the murals, but not like up Top. Different. I could teach you about books," he said softly. "You read? You know about -- " Dagger knocked aside the knife and grabbed her. She screamed and he hit her on the chin. It took two blows before she slumped, dropping the jug, which broke, and the knife, which clattered. In an instant Dagger had scooped her up and was running. Behind him he heard a woman cry out, then the bull roar of several men shouting orders. He banged both her head and her feet, going through a place where a wall had fallen. He jumped a slidefall and raced down a passage, his heart thumping madly. Twist, turn, confuse. Labor up that broken stair to another floor, then double back overhead and down that ramp to end three floors below and heading west. Cut north. Lower her down an old elevator shaft, swing her limp body into a maintenance passage. Knock her out again when she struggles and carry her on your back through two whole sectors before collapsing. Dagger tied her up and fell back, breathing hard. He listened for pursuit, then grinned weakly. OuMwisted them! He sprawled on the grit of the battered floor and looked at the girl. Even with bruises she was beautiful. He reached out and touched her skin. Warm and smooth. His trembling fingers unlaced the front of her vest and he peeled back the imitation leather to expose her breasts. Full and firm. He wanted to touch but he couldnU bring up his hand. She awoke angry, afraid. She ignored her bared bosom and her tied wrists and ankles. "You zongo creeper-eater! You burned-out box! You Tiger!" Dagger raised his fist and started to hit her but her look blazed at him. "Go on. Tiger!" she taunted. "Knock me out again! That's all stealing!" She spat at him ineffectually. "You wouldn't know a book if it bit you!" "Books don't bite." Suddenly Dagger laughed. "You think books bite?" He grinned at her and suddenly wasn't angry any more. They all cursed him at first, but they came around. Except for the ones that ran away. "I suppose you want to take me to that filthy tribe of zapped-out vandals you call a family?" "Why not?" Dagger's pride was hurt. "They're a damn good bunch of knives. Better than anyone we meet." "Sure they are -- you run from the ones that you can't lick!" Dagger forced down the angry venom. She didn't really know the Tigers like he did. She'd change her mind. "You will learn to like them," he said softly. "I don't want to learn to like them!" Dagger looked at her through slitted eyes. "Could you learn to like me?" The question cost him and he wished he had not spoken. Knock her out and carry ner home... But she was silent. "Well?" he growled. "Perhaps. If you weren't so zongo. If you bathed. And didn't lie so much." "Lie?" "Yes, lie about books. Books are very precious and you lie about them, just to catch me." "I didn't lie about the books. Demon has books. Demon reads books to all of us, whenever he finds them. I've heard a lot of books. Robin Hood, he was like a pirate, who lived in a big sector like garden. There was a wench who told stories about zongo things. Floors that fly. Meat animals that fly. Princes that go out of citadels and run with tribes of knives. Oh, I have heard many books!" The girl looked at him. Her eyes were blue and her long hair yellow. Her breasts were tawny and round. Dagger knew now how Demon felt about books. "My name is Loree. If you read me books I will be your woman." Dagger hesitated. Demon read the books, not he. "I will see to it that books are read to you," he said grandly. "Then I will be your woman." She paused, then shyly asked, "You have other women?" "Yes," Dagger said. He was proud that he had had more than one almost all his life -- or since he got his first real knife. "Oh," Loree said, but her voice said much more. "Come, I will cut you free." 'His knife was in his hand but she stopped him with a pulling away. "How do you know that I won't run?" He grinned. "If you did not lie you will not run. If you lie and run, I chase and catch and will not trust you again. But if you do not run it will be easier." The girl made a sound which he could not easily understand, then moved her wrists around to be cut free. Two slashes and she could stand. She did not run. Dagger grinned again and sheathed his knife. "Come," he said, starting out, "I will read you books." How he would do so he did not know. But he would find out. His life had changed. Dagger thought, but just how, he was not sure.  IF science fiction who don't also read other forms of fiction and considerable non-fiction, I shall be happy not to make their acquaintance. True, there is a kind of man whose mind is so narrow that a fly standing on his nose can paw out one eye while kicking out the other. But in our field, I like to believe, a man can be a true fan without being a fanatic. For myself. I'll choose to read anything that gives me genuine pleasure or illuminates the universe of man and of nature. During the past year, while reading assorted science fiction, I also had the pleasure of exploring books I hadn't previously read by such authors as Eric Ambler, Nevil Shute, Thornton Wilder, Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse and James Cabell. I should also add the name of one woman -- Georgette Heyer -- whose excellent craftsmanship and consistency make a form of story I usually dislike a joy to read. Without such "outside" reading. I'd soon lose perspective, since our science-fiction literature may be judged good or bad only by the standards that apply to all literature. At its best, of course, science fiction can add another dimension to writing. It can go outside customary bounds to widen the range of human experience, broaden man's challenge to his own limits. (Fantasy can also do that, but too often at the expense of rationality.) As a consequence, the best writers of science fiction have developed'a flexibility of outlook, together with a joy in a deeper look, often lacking in most other fiction. Theodore Sturgeon (Putnam, #). The message of the title is a heartening one, but there is nothing else on the jacket to say that the volume is science fiction. Indeed, as Sturgeon points out in his Foreward, many of the stories are not sf in nature at all. At least half of them certainly are not. Fine. They have the feel of science fiction -- the good part of that strange tingle up the backbone that usually goes only with a first-class sf story. They have an inside-out insight that simply doesn't come out of the normal mainstream. And there is also the iceberg quality -- most of the thought given to them is below the surface where it only affects you after you are hit by his points. With a single exception, these are all new Sturgeon stories, only one of which appeared in a sf magazine. The # exception is To Here and the Easel, originally from a softcover anthology. The story may be fantasy or it may be a sort of allegory, but it definitely is the most readable outcry from the darkness of creativity I've ever seen. Outwardly it deals with a man caught between our reality and the world of Orlando Furioso, Inwardly, it may tell you why Sturgeon -- and many other writers -- sometimes vanishes for a time. I've always loved the story, but I'm biased by experience. Slow Sculpture appeared in Galaxy and won this year's Nebula award as the best story of its length. The award was earned, too. There are ten other stories, each somehow unique. One deals with Nothing at all -- literally, and in capitalized form. My favorite is Brownshoes, a quietly intense short story; in my opinion, this is the final summation of what Sturgeon has been patiently learning about human love for a quarter century of his writing career. The closest to conventional -- and to me, least effective -- is Jorrys Gap; and eVen that story is one I'm glad I read. Sturgeon is not only alive -- he's very well indeed. After reading the book, I feel much better, too! It's not all science fiction, but it is all highly recommended. mostly what I call visions: that is, they are essentially stories of man's achievements, of his hopes and of his possibilities. But if you insist on reading nightmares, you can satisfy your appetite with some rather beautifully dark ones in Alone Against Tomorrow, by Harlan Ellison (Macmillan, #). IF I find this the best collection of Ellison's work, that has been published. Apparently the author agrees, since he lets the stories speak for themselves, rather than telling us about them in lengthy prologues. Aside from a very brief introduction, they appear without blurbs -- and they need none, since some of them are already classics. Several of them are award-winning stories, with either a Hugo or Nebula to their credit. But of more importance, they are consistently stories with unified and strong emotional impact. I don't normally care for a catalog of the many short stories in a book, but the important ones are here:  Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: Repent, Harkquin! Said the Ticktockman; and eighteen others. If you like Ellison's work, you'll surely find your favorite here. (My own happens to be O Ye of Little Faith but maybe that's because I was around at the beginning of the story. Harlan Ellison let me auction him off to the highest bidder, promising to write a short story using any three words the bidder supplied; he then sat down in the middle of the crowd and proceeded to write -- and surprised me by writing a darned good story that way.) If you haven't liked Ellison, some of these stories may change your mind. By and large, I find many characteristics of these stories are those which often irritate me. They use science and all of our attitudes toward the scientific method as rainwear, to be discarded when not necessary or put on whenever the flood comes. Also, they often seem to assume that some current attitude or social insanity is of ever-enduring importance. Yet a strange consistency is apparent here. When his use of either science or of current attitudes is considered against the total effect of the man's writings, it becomes evident that neither is the real nugget. Ellison is concerned with man's reaction to science; and with current insanities as disgressions from the main route of man's evolution toward -- hope-fully -- a degree of rationality. In a highly individual fashion, these stories wed the mainstream of our literature to science fiction. They deviate a long way from standard science fiction. But unlike the science fiction nightmares of some mainstream writers who have tried our field, they have consistency, they create their own worlds and they are worked out rigidly from theory to test. I recommend the book, particularly as a necessary balance to the tooeasy visions that are more common now. Starlight, by Hal Clement (Ballantine, #), is about as pure science fiction as can be written -- that rare and difficult form known as hard-science fiction. The situation, the background and the most important characters are all ones that could not be put into any other type of story -- and they all derive from a carefully detailed examination of scientific possibilities. This is the long-awaited sequel to Mission of Gravity, which I consider the best novel of its type ever written. The creatures from the former novel, capable of standing up to six hundred times our gravity, are enlisted by Earth to explore a strange new planet called Dhrawn, which may be either a planet that grew too large or a star that didn't quite make it. One exploring party is undf Dondragmer and the whole is commanded by Barlennan, both characters from the former book. Above them, but unable to get down into the forty gravities of Dhrawn, is a group of humans. The exploring party gets into serious and unexpected trouble, due to the strange nature of the planet with its unknown seasons and its unstable mixture of water and ammonia in the atmosphere. And the humans stew and try to help, while Barlennan seems to be carrying on some kind of undercover operation of his own to blackmail Earth into giving him some advantages. The novel is good and manages to be suspenseful. If it were other than a follow-up to a genuinely outstanding novel, I might be very well pleased with it. But it lacks both the fascination in detail and the fully developed interest in the characters that it should have. Partly the trouble lies here in the fact that Dhrawn presents only one major oddity to us; once we begin to accept the oddity of its atmosphere and the behavior of freezing and thawing, little else develops. It remains too much the same. There are hints that Dhrawn is so radioactive in spots that its temperature varies from ultracold to super-hot and that the world lies between stellar and planetary in nature. But little is ever made of this. Mostly the story loses its impact because the aliens are too much old friends. We already know them. Barlennan's plans remind us of similar ones in the previous book, however much his methods vary. The humans are so far out of the scene of action that the space allotted to them in the story seems far too great. Benj, the young man on the orbiting observatory, seems to fill far more space than necessary; and he's a little too good -- in behavior and in finding ideas -- to make a very interesting character. It's a good book, but it's greatly overshadowed by its predecessor. The science in it is excellently IF worked out and convincing. But I wish more of Clement's thoughts on the world of Dhrawn had been put to use in varying things on the planet. The behavior of water and ammonia mixtures is interesting, but even that amount of science can't sustain a novel well. F ew novels should be considered for pure scientific knowledge, of course. Fiction should entertain. Facts are better presented in non-fiction works and a few factual books are both fascinating in themselves and conducive to deeper pleasure in fiction involving backgrounds from honest science. Donald H. Menzel has been a recognized name in science fiction for decades. He has written fiction and articles for magazines and has done art work which has brightened our covers, though he refers to his imaginary Martian creatures as "doodles." He is also a highly regarded scientist, having been Director of the Harvard University Observatory for fourteen years. Now he has done a beautiful and highly informative book on his subject: Astronomy (Random House, #). This volume covers just about everything in the light of current knowledge, with an excellent look at the past and the evolution of the science. It is highly readable, easy to follow -- and it has some of the best illustrations and the most useful sky maps I have seen. If you want a reference book on this subject that can be read for pleasure, I can think of none better. If you are interested in the Moon you'll find a great bargain in Lunar Atlas y edited by Dinsmore Alter (Dover Publications, #). The book and the photographs are large, easy to study and the text is remarkably complete. It appears in soft covers, has the ruggedness typical of the Dover books and is easily worth twice the price. Finally, The Atlas of the Universey by Patrick Moore (Rand McNally, #) is a huge book and one that cannot be described adequately. If the price is too steep, ask for it at your local library and be prepared to spend several hours staring at some marvelous pictures, superb diagrams and excellent text. All three of these books are done with a love of the universe we know -- and of man's ability to know. A few years ago I might have called them science fiction -- today they're fact. Things have changed elsewhere in our culture, judging by another large and handsome book: The PulpSy compiled and edited by Tony Goodstone (Chelsea House, #). Color reproductions of a hundred covers from the old pulp magazines include a full dozen from the science-fiction field. There are also reproductions of the original illustrations with the stories. Fifty stories are included -- but here, science fiction doesn't come off as well, is represented only by two: Wanderer of Infinity, by Harl Vincent; and Parasite Planet, by Stanley G. Weinbaum. The weird and supernatural account for ten stories, two from Lovecraft and one from There is some introductory matter and a final summary on the super-hero characters, such as The Shadow and Doc Savage. But mostly the stories are allowed to speak for themselves. They do so very well and I think that generally the sampling is a fair one. Sic transit gloria, Ks hard to remember that about the time I began to write, a magazine stand was a gate to a land of eternal enchantment. With a dollar bill I could buy half a dozen magazines, each containing more words than most full-length books today and each filled with its own brand of excitement and adventure. I may not have learned about the plight of the poor -- I didn't need to, since I'd rubbed elbows with it: the Depression was just over then. But I learned to trek through the jungles of Sumatra, draw my sixgun, fight off werewolves, pitch the final winning strike and cross the deserts of Mars. Somehow, much as I may admire the revered classics of accepted literature, I cannot but feel that the unreal pulps taught me more about life and gave me a better preparation to live it than I ever got from Henry Esmond or Genji or even the Russians of Chekov -- and sometimes gave me a lot more fun. Maybe it's all nostalgia, this love for what we had back then. But maybe not. Take a good look, read the stories and make up your own mind. Science fiction may be the only literature that retains any of it today, but the world was once full of the sense of wonder. It's still there in The Pulps. And since I'm deliberately not reviewing only science fiction this time, I have an excuse to bring up another book. There's no good reason to mention it here, except that it's a very good story, done excellently, and I think it should be recommended. The Children of Llyr, by Evangeline Walton (Ballantine, #), is fantasy. Some time ago Ballantine used the author's The Island of the Mighty in the Adult Fantasy Series and she was so surprised to see her work in print again that she wrote diffidently to the publisher, saying she had unpublished novels laid against the same background. This is one of those. It is based upon the Welsh mythic literature and features the demigods of those myths. If she had put her story on some alien planet or alternate world and given the heroes powers vaguely explained by pseudo-scientific IF words, it would probably be considered fresh and excellent science fiction. The world of the Welsh myths is just as strange as any world of swashbuckling science fiction. And the amount of thinking she must have done to complete her background and her devices would be quite adequate for any work of science fiction. But the book has a reality of its own. Magic works -- sometimes, and more or less. The men in the story are both larger than life and somewhat less than modern men. But they stop being myth figures and become fully realized as human beings. Their world has a balance and a Justice unusual in fantasy. This is the way it would have been if the old beliefs could have been true at all. The book must have been written about the time I was buying all the pulp magazines almost forty years ago. It could just as well have been written last year, since it is thoroughly modern in its style and its handling of characters. It is, in fact, timeless in the sense that the very best telling of tales is always beyond the limits of any given time and place. It's a first-rate book. And as such, it deserves to be read. As I tried to indicate at the beginning of this review, there is a special joy to science fiction -- but there is also a special joy to any good example of literature. And the reader who broadens his interest may well return to our particular field with a fresh zest and insight to what science fiction offers. Which reminds me -- I've still got to finish page # of Finnegan's Wake before I start the next review...  L. North America were astounded by the abundance of animal life -- plains black with millions of bison, deer, wapiti, and progbuck; skies dark with passenger pigeons and other fowl. It never occurred to them that this was but a remnant of the fauna that had roamed the continent fifty or a hundred thousand years before. The total number of animals may have been much the same, but the number of different kinds of animals had drastically shrunk. In the late Pleistocene Period, besides species very much like those of the present day, the continent supported a swarm of other animals that have since disappeared. In the Northeast, the woodlands harbored the deermoose Cervalces, a tapir, and a beaver the size of a bear. The plains swarmed not only with bison larger than those of today, but also with horses and camels. Across the warmer parts of the country wandered herds of giant peccaries and animals of two kinds of South American origin: ground sloths, vaguely bearlike in outline but larger than any bear, with massive tails and hooked claws to pull down small trees to eat; and armadillolike glyptodonts with solid shells, as big as automobiles. Most impressive were the proboscidians: three genera of mammoths and a mastodon. In the north -- Canada and Alaska -- dwelt the northern mammoth, of the genus MammonteuSy resembling the mammoth depicted by Cro-Magnons on the walls of French caves: an animal about the size of today's Indian elephant but shorter in the body. It was extremely hairy, with a sloping back rising to two distinctive peaks over the shoulders and the head. These domes were probably reservoirs of fat. It had spirally twisted tusks which, in old 'males, crossed at the tips. Scientists have long wondered about these crossed tusks, since they would be of little use as weapons. A plausible theory is that they were used as snow shovels to get at buried food in winter. Across the warmer parts of the land roamed the southern mammoth, Archidiskodon. This was a much larger animal, probably almost hairless like modern elephants. In the intermediate regions dwelt elephants of another genus, ParelephaSy short in the body but long in the legs, with spirally twisted tusks like Mammonteus. There is no generally accepted common name for all the elephants of this genus, so I have proposed calling them favonian mammoths, from the Latin word for "temperate." The southern mammoth and the favonian mammoth were the tallest of all known proboscideans, reaching a shoulder IF height of over # feet. The tallest found so far is a favonian mammoth from Germany that touches # feet. But the southern mammoth was so close in height, besides being a more massive animal, that we cannot call either the "larger" without qualification. A modern African elephant in the National Museum in Washington stands # feet # inches; this is exceptional for this species but shows what can happen. A fourth proboscidean, the American mastodon, roamed the continent, its range overlapping those of the other three. Although more primitive than the others in jaw and tooth structure, this animal was of good size, about as tall as the woolly mammoth but longer in body and bulkier. were carnivores of all sizes, from bears bigger than the Kodiak grizzlies down to weasels. The sabertoothed cat Smilodon preyed on huge herbivores like the ground sloths, since its fangs could pierce even their thick hides. Even larger was a lionlike true cat, related to today's jaguar and of a similarly heavy build. There was an oversized wolf, Canis dints; and to clean up any remains a condor, Teratornis, bigger than either the Californian or the Andean condors of today. The other continents displayed similar assortments of huge animals, or megafaunas. Europe had Mammonteus, Parelephas, Archidiskodon, and a fourth genus, Hesperoloxodon. This was another huge elephant with long, nearly straight tusks. There were at least two species of rhinoceros -- the woolly rhinoceros, a hairy cousin of today's African white rhino, in the North; and the more conventional Merck's rhinoceros in the South. The warmer areas and periods hosted a hippopotamus like today's species. The huge Irish deer bore the largest antlers of the whole deer family. The story was the same in Asia. Northern Asia swarmed with mammoths, reindeer, and a huge hairy rhinoceros, Elasmotherium, with a single horn growing from its forehead like the legendary unicorn. South of the Himalayas lived proboscideans of several kinds, including Stegodon ganesa with the most massive tusks of the order. In South America dwelt ground sloths as big as small elephants; armored glyptodonts; hippopotamuslike toxodonts; camel-like macrauchenids with flexible snouts like miniature elephant's trunks; horses and mastodons from North America; and others. Even Australia had a megafauna, with kangaroos ten feet tall, wombats the size of a rhinoceros, and a monitor similar to today's Komodo dragon but # feet long. A few score of thousands of years later -- a mere tick of the geological clock -- all these megafaunas had vanished. They left mere remnants everywhere save in Africa and southern Asia, where several megafaunal types survived: two species of elephant, five of rhinoceros, one of hippopotamus and assorted giraffes, buffaloes, ostriches, zebras, antelopes and so on, with large canids and felids to prey upon them. Even in Africa, where the megafauna survived best, much of it still disappeared: an antlered giraffe, a sheep the size of a buffalo and a pig the size of a rhinoceros among others. The Great Death at the end of the Pleistocene was not,of course, the only such wave of extinction. There have been several. Two of these -- those of the Pleistocene and the Cretaceous -- are much better known than the rest because the lines that then became extinct included such large and striking creatures. The Great Death at the end of the Cretaceous saw the end of both orders of dinosaurs, of the pterosaurs or flying reptiles, and of the aquatic reptiles called plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. Several groups of invertebrates vanished at the same time. Among the cephalopods, which include the modern squids and octopi, the ammonites disappeared utterly, while the belemnites were reduced to a small remnant. Another group to vanish comprised , the bivalve mollusks called Rudista. About a quarter of all the known animal families disappeared at this time. At the end of the Permian Period occurred an even more drastic extinction, which wiped out about half of all the known animal families. This included three-quarters of the families of amphibians and four-fifths of those of the reptiles. We hear less about this Great Death because the animals that perished were less spectacular than mammoths or dinosaurs. The largest land beasts of the time were stout, plant-eating reptiles of vaguely lizardlike shape, waddling about on pillarlike legs and weighing as much as a cow. The many kinds of smaller reptiles were more like our idea of a lizard. In the sea, the armored fishes called placoderms, the trilobites (which looked like oversized woodlice), the eurypterids or sea scorpions (large insectlike crustaceans), and the crinoids or stalks) all vanished. A similar wave took place at the end of the Cambrian. The Cambrian is the first period for which abundant fossil remains have been found. This fact gives antievolutionists an excuse to claim that there must have been a sudden divine Creation at the beginning of the Cambrian. Actually, a IF number of pre-Cambrian fossils are known, consisting of sponges, worm burrows, sea pens and jellyfish. Since most pre-Cambrian animals were little soft-bodied things without bones or shells, their remains are scarce. In the Cambrian, vertebrates had not yet evolved, so there were no very spectacular creatures to perish. Nonetheless, about forty out of sixty families of trilobites went under at that time. There were also lesser extinctions at the ends of the Ordovician, Devonian, Triassic, and Pliocene periods. T he Great Deaths pose one of the knottiest problems in science. Such worldwide phenomena, occurring every fifty to a huncall for some uniform cause. But none of the explanations proposed seems to work when applied to more than one or two extinctions. Animals and plants are always dying out and being replaced by others: At least a hundred species have perished in the last century and many more are in a precarious state. The causes of the recent extinctions are, however, obvious. The culprits are the hunter with his gun and traps, the stockman with his flocks and herds and the farmer with his plow and pesticides. They kill off wild animals -- sometimes for gain, sometimes to protect their crops and livestock and They also convert the wild animals' land to human uses. The indiscriminate dosing of the North has caused a population crash in the duck hawk (or peregrine falcon) and the brown pelican. A couple of years ago a Russian professor wrote the New York Times boasting of the enlightened conservationist policies of the Soviet Union. At the same time, joined the capitalistic Japan and Norway to keep up the annual kill quotas of whales. As a result, two of the largest species, the humpback and the blue whale, have been brought to the verge of extinction. A commissar with a quota to fill can evidently be quite as ruthlessly self-interested as the greediest capitalist. All over the world, the dismal story is the same. One school of thought holds that the main cause of the Pleistocene extinction was the spread of hunting bands of Homo sapiens over the earth from its African homeland. Professor Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona is a leader of this faction. Others object that this explanation does not account for the Great Death. How, they ask, could the stone-age primitives who invaded the Americas from Asia, # or more years ago, have exterminated six or seven genera of formidable proboscideans, while the iron-age inhabitants of India and Africa, technically far more advanced, have failed to wipe out the two surviving species? Scientists" of Professor Martin's school retort that, since man evolved from an apelike primate in Africa, the African animals had a chance to get used to him, to develope defensive instincts and to become wary and hostile. Then, when man spread to the other continents, he found them full of beasts that, never having seen or smelled a man, were comparatively tame -- as Darwin found the birds on the Galapagos Islands -- and so were easily slaughtered. The other side replies: the same rules apply to hunting man as to other predators. If a predator too severely depletes its prey, it in turn is reduced by starvation and the prey gets a chance to recover. The "overskill" party replies: When man switched to a partly vegetable diet, he could survive the loss of his animal prey, which he killed off to the last mammoth. On the other hand, the African megafauna survived because man, by changing over to a largely vegetable diet, left the animals comparatively unmolested. But these arguments contradict each other. Vegetarianism could hardly have simultaneously saved the megafauna in Africa and exterminated it elsewhere. Furthermore, the Pleistocene extinction resembles the Cretaceous and Permian extinctions. Obviously, the latter two Great Deaths could not have been wrought by men, for there were no human beings on Earth at those times. Man -- Alley Oop to the contrary notwithstanding -- only arose between # and # years after the death of the last dinosaur. T he causes of some extinctions, even before there were men, are plain. For the first half of the Age of Mammals, South America was isolated. The predators of that continent were: first, large flightless birds (the largest eight feet tall) and, second, carnivorous marsupials. By parallel evolution, the latter developed into animals superficially like the weasels, badgers, dogs, bears and cats (including a marsupial sabertooth) of other continents. Then the Isthmus of Panama rose above the waters. The placental carnivores -- the ancestors of today's jaguar, puma, ocelot, bush dog, kinkajou and the rest -- swarmed across this land bridge. The flightless birds of prey and the carnivorous marsupials, unable to compete with the more efficient invaders, all died out. Aside from such understandable exceptions, however, no IF obvious causes for worldwide waves of extinction are known. When a species disappears because it has evolved into another species, its descendants live on. When a species becomes extinct because it cannot compete with some other species, the victor in the contest lives on. In the Great Deaths, however, there were no victors. Whole orders perished without leaving survivors or descendants or competitors. After the Cretaceous extinction, the earth was almost barren of large animals for millions of years, until the little mammals, represented by creatures somewhat like today's shrews, mice and opossums, expanded into the ecological niches that the dinosaurs had vacated. So far no logical way has been found to connect the known causes of the extinction of single species with these worldwide catastrophes. And it is asking too much of coincidence, that scores of genera, dozens of families and whole orders should perish at once by sheer happenstance. Paleontologists have racked their brains over this question for a century but they cannot be said to have found the answer. Of the single causes proposed for the three main extinctions, some can be quickly disposed of. When paleontology was a new science at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great Georges Cuvier OKioNnllai tonidiuM Frank Herbert retnrns to the dnnewerld of Arrakis for an epic of imperiai intrifoe and homan ecolofy-an epic that spans the nnhrerse. That's why we can teli yon where it ends -- We're reprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today: I (N#)# I  (#) #C I (#) #( I (#) # I I (#) #C I I Name j I Address i I City tate Zip  I Include list price plus a dime postage for  ! each title. ! Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # pronounced that Earth had been shaken by a series of catastrophes. It wobbled on its axis, causing oceans to splash out of their beds and drown the animals of entire continents, while fish and other water creatures, left flopping on the sea's bare bottom, perished for lack of water. Then the oceans settled back into their basins, while the devastated continents filled up with immigrants from land that had been spared. Cuvier's Catastrophism seemed reasonable when only a few geological periods were known, with wide gaps between them. As geological knowledge advanced, it transpired that the building up and tearing down of the rocks and the evolution of life had been continuous, without Cuvierian catastrophes. (Cuvierian ideas, however, still survive in pseudoscientific cults like the cometarycollision hypothesis put forth by Count Carli in the eighteenth century, Ignatius Donnelly in the nineteenth and Immanual Velikovsky in the twentieth.) True, there had been great changes: glacial periods, advances and retreats of shallow inland seas, and the slow horizontal movement of the continents about the surface of the globe. But even these were extremely gradual compared to the span of known human history. More modern is the theory of '"internecine warfare." It holds that the great predators -- the tyrannosaurs or the sabertooths -- ate all the large herbivores and then starved to death. But this is not how things work. Some predation is not only good for species but necessary -- to cull defectives and to keep the species from increasing to the point where it eats itself out of house and home. Predation is normally kept within bounds by the predators themselves, who claim certain territories and drive rivals away from them. Americans who have tried to "help" the deer and "enemies," the pumas, wolves, and coyotes, have in the long run done the herbivores more harm than good. Another theory is that of a plague, which wiped out the larger animals. But real diseases of this sort do not affect more than on or a very few species at a time. No known disease attacks all mammals or all birds, although some, like distemper, assail several different species within one order. Moreover, a species is rarely exterminated by disease. It may be reduced; but, when the survivors become thinly scattered, the disease can no longer spread rapidly among them. Then the parasite and the host adjust to each other. The more fatal varieties of the disease die out because every time they kill a host the parasites also die. Likewise, the mofe resistant strains of the host species increase at the expense of the others until immune strains evolve. There used to be a lot of talk about "racial senescence." It was supposed that a group of animals went through youth, maturity and old age, as do individuals. When a genus or a family attained great size or grotesque form -- or otherwise became "overspecialized" -- it was thought to be senile and ripe for extinction... But this is unsound reasoning by analogy. There is no reason to think that a species evolves in such a way. "Specialization" is relative. To us the opossum seems a very primitive, generalized mammal; but back in the Mesozoic an intelligent dinosaur would have classed it as a highly specialized reptile. Its specializations happened to succeed. Size also is relative. All the larger mammals of today are gigantic compared to those of the Paleocene Period, just after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Gravity limits the absolute size of land animals, but the only land animals that have pushed hard against the barrier are the sauropod dinosaurs. And the Cretaceous extinction involved not only these but also the hosts of small, unspecialized dinosaurs as well. In some cases large size or heavy armor rnight lead to extinction; but, under other circumstances, so might small size or lack of armor. The great whales were doing fine until men went after them, and the armor'ed turtles are one of the most successful and durable groups. "Grotesqueness" is a subjective idea. To an intelligent glyptodont we might seem quite as grotesque as that creature seems to us. A nother set of theories has to do with changes in climate, atmosphere or vegetation. Climatic change is a tempting hypothesis for the Permian and Pleistocene extinctions, because each of these periods saw widespread glaciation. But it does not account for the Cretaceous extinction, since there was apparently no change in climate at that time. Moreover, the Great Death at the end of the Pleistocene took place after the last of the four glacial advances, when the climate was getting milder. In addition, while the glacial advances caused marked changes in the climates of many lands, they did not cause the climatic zones of former times suddenly to disappear. Instead, IF these zones were slowly shifted about the map, so that the animals adapted to each had plenty of time to keep up with it. The Cretaceous extinction is sometimes explained by desiccation. This was a favorite theory of my lamented friend Willy Ley. According to this belief, increasing dryness reduced the forest zones and increased prairie and desert areas. Deprived of their shade, the dinosaurs were increasingly exposed to direct sunlight. Lacking homeothermy -- that is, thermostatic control of bodily temperature -- they died of heatstroke or sunburn or suffered sterilization. But many dinosaurs had already adapted to life in open country, yet these perished with the rest. Nor would this theory account for the simultaneous disappearance of several orders of marine reptiles and other sea life. Other changes in vegetation have also been invoked for the death of the dinosaurs. True, the Cretaceous did see two revolutions in the plant world. At the beginning of the period came the spread of the angiosperms -- that, is, most of the familiar broad-leaved trees. (Most Jurassic trees had been needle-bearing evergreens like pines, larches, cedars and redwoods.) It is hard to see how this change could have hurt the dinosaurs, since it would have provided them with more food and more shade. Moreover, the dinosaurs lived happily with the angiosperms for their end. The other revolution was the spread of grasses at the end of the period. It has been surmised that the dinosaurs" teeth and stomachs could not cope with a diet of grass. But it seems unlikely that the new grasses deprived the dinosaurs of any preexisting food supply. Rather, the grasses spread over large parts of the globe that had theretofore presented a surface of bare earth, with a scattering of herbs and shrubs. Nor does either vegetative explanation help us with the Pleistocene extinction, since there is no sign of a big change in plant life at that time, other than a shifting about as the climatic zones moved. A more subtle variant of these theories combines heat and cold. It supposes that geographical changes brought about, not a worldwide change in average temperature, but the spread of "continental"" climates -- hot summers and cold winters -- to replace the milder "oceanic"" climates of other times. This theory is usually combined with the idea of a worldwide spasm of orogeny or mountain building. This, it is supposed, caused a rise of the land, an opening of land bridges, a cutting off of the circulation of ocean currents, the accumulation of ice in the polar caps and a consequent lowering of the sea level which aggravated all the other effects. This theory fails to account for the disappearance of the marine reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous. Nor does it fit the facts of the Pleistocene extinction, which occurred after the period of severest climates. Some have Suggested that a sudden burst of penetrating radiation from a solar flare, or from a nearby star that went supernova, sterilized the large animals or at least harmed their genes enough to destroy the race. Some attribute this effect to the periodical reversals of Earth's magnetic field, which for a time might let more ionizing particles from the sun strike the atmosphere. But such catastrophes should have even more affected small creatures -- amphibians, lizards, snakes, turtles and small mammals in the Cretaceous; small mammals, birds, and reptiles in the Pleistocene -- but it did not. It should have affected the small dinosaurs more than the large, whose mere bulk protected them against extremes of temperature and against ionizing radiations. But all alike perished, as did the smaller ground sloths, glyptodonts, American horses and camels. Some modern theories, still under development, deal with such things as the breakdown of food chains and the ratios of different age groups in a species. If one species, such as: a marsh plant, disappears, a whole fauna of animals that depend upon it may disappear, too. The animals that eat the plant go, and then the animals that eat the animals that eat the plant, and so on. Such a wave of extinction would affect mainly animals with a narrow range of diet. Anteaters would perish if ants and termites disappeared, while the koala eats only the leaves of certain eucalyptus trees and is poisoned by anything else. Most animals, however, are less finicky. The most striking casualties of the Pleistocene were the mammoths and mastodons; but the elephant tribe is notably catholic in taste, eating anything green. Other theorists argue that, in the shifting around of climatic zones during tht Pleistocene ice age, certain species were forced into pockets from which there was no escape. Their range was broken into fragments, where the species could barely maintain itself. In these enclaves, the survivors were finished off by man. For instance, the North American megafauna seems to have lasted longer in Florida than elsewhere. If climatic change, or an invasion from the north by hunters, required these animals to migrate farther south, they could not have done so because of the sea. the Great Deaths. There are others: for instance, that extincIF tions of marine life are caused by changes in the amount of poisonous trace elements in the water, or that the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere has risen or fallen. Like the other theories, all meet serious objections, and in any case they do not seem to apply to the Pleistocene extinction. In a few decades new discoveries -- or some new combination of existing theories -- may give a plausible answer to the puzzle. Meanwhile, whether or not man was a major factor in the Pleistocene extinction, the world is today undergoing another Great Death. This time there is no doubt at all that the cause is man. In historic times men have killed off the dodo, the solitaire, the moa, the elephant bird of Madagscar, the great auk, the aurochs, the tarpan or European wild horse, the quagga, the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, several races of Galapagos tortoise and many more. Others have been reduced to precarious remnants. Well, why protect wild life? With the growth of the world's population and the demand for a higher standard of living everywhere, it is vital to conserve every natural resource we can. Moreover, scientists need every possible species for study. But the real argument for keeping some lands in their natural state, with their native birds and beasts, goes beyond material things. If all the large animals were wiped out, mankind would no doubt get along. But what a dull world it would be, like the Paleocene just after the extinction of the dinosaurs! If you heard that some dinosaurs had survived on an island but that .somebody had just shot them all for their hides (as might well happen) you might feel a furious resentment, for some of the color and variety would have gone out of your world. Our descendants may feel the same way about us if we casually allow all five species of rhinoceros to be exterminated because aging and superstitious orientals think that powdered rhinoceros horn will revive their sexual energies, or if we let all the whales be turned into lubricating oil and canned meat. If the world were all tamed and civilized in a worldwide mosaic of city, suburb, and farm, with no life but man and his domestic animals, it would be almost as monotonous as a jail. Nobody wants to live in even the nicest jail. With the human race becoming more homogenized in costume and custom every year, the wilderness with its wild life is one of the things that makes the world interesting. If it is right to prefer freedom to imprisonment, variety to monotony and color to drabness, then it is right to save as much as we can of the wilds and their dwellers.  Orestes: Look, look, alas -- What Gorgon shapes throng up! ( --  f Consider the whale. Remark this awesome leviathan of time and space. Before its capture its skin was meteorpocked and creviced, its vast belly a spelaean labyrinth. Its ganglia were two, one of which its captors overlooked. But when the first was blown up, the second was impaired, and the whale was more dead than alive when Jl was towed into the orbital shipyards of Altair IV. There it underwent conversion and became almost a ship. Its surface is burnished now and inlaid with portscopes. Manmade locks provide access to its belly; lifeboat bays nestle on either flank. The spelaean labyrinth has become a complex of decks and cabins, staterooms and holds. There is a bridge equipped with all the latest astrogation instruments. A self-tending hydroponic garden assures a constant supply of oxygen, and self-tending machines provide a mean temperature of # Fahrenheit and an undeviating gravity of I. There is a plentifully stocked galley. A sealed-in hydraulic system brings water, hot and cold, to a hundred different taps. The only segments of itself that the whale can call its own are its second ganglion, its open-hearth stomach and its drive-tissue. A whale? No, it cannot properly be called a whale. But it cannot properly be called a ship either. What ship ever existed that could see inside itself and simultaneously see parsecs away? That could with equal ease ply the Sea of Space and plumb the Sea of Time? That could think with logic absolute? No, it can be called neither ship nor whale. It can only be called "Starfinder's whale" after the man who repaired its second ganglion and freed it from the orbital shipyards, the very man who stands now on its bridge, its captain and sole passenger, staring into the main viewscreen at the Sea of Time. A Consider Starfinder. Remark his classic pose as he stands staring into time. It is the pose of a man condemned -- not by his peers but by himself. For there is blood on his hands -- the blood of the Terraltairan woman whom he loved and murdered in his bed. He him -- destroyed her with his naked hands as she would have destroyed him with her naked body. But though the deed may have been rightfully done, he is still responsible for it, and the blood that stains his hands refuses to go away. Once blood of a different kind stained his hands -- the blood of IF spacewhales. For he was a Jonah -- a professional killer of whales. He entered into their bellies and blew up the huge blue roses of their brains -- their ganglia -- in order that they might be made into ships. And then the slaughter sickened him and he wanted to die and nearly did, and he killed no more whale. Then he found this whale, which was supposed to be dead but was not, because it had two ganglia and only one had been destroyed. He repaired the second, and the act cleansed him of the residue of guilt that still remained; but the new blood was already on his hands and now it would not go away. Ami never to know peace? Perhaps it waits for me in the past. I will look for it there. But I will look for it here first, although Vm sure I will never find it. Here, in the Sea of Time :...  Consider the Sea of Time. Remark this paradox of the ages. For if it can be said that it contains no space as such, it can be said that it contains no time either. It consists of ure time, and pure time bears no affinity to conventional time. It is neither a composite of moments nor a succession of events. It is timeless time -- an interreality that holds conventional reality together. It is not new. Man discovered it early in his history. But in his naivete he mistook it for something else and gave it geographical coordinates. Ignorant of its true nature, he did not understand that geographically it does not -- cannot -- exist. Then man became sophisticated and lost track of  and when he looked for it again it was gone. In aspect, the Sea of Time presents a stern and dismal countenance, but it is not without beauty. The tenuous half-real crags that rear up out of dark abysmal depths are limned at their crests by a pale gold luminescence that emanated from nowhere, and surreal crimson light creeps partway down their torn and precipitous slopes and blends subtly into the blackness of the depths. Fragments of gray clouds hover in the sunless skies, resembling gigantic gray eagles poised in midflight and great gray gulls preparing to dive. Yes, beauty resides in the Sea of Time and, since the whale's passage is bereft of apparent motion, the beauty is rendered all the more intense. But it is lost upon Starfinder. He sees the Sea of Time as the black sack Ivan Ilych fell into two hours before his death. Starfinder speaks, half to himself, half to the whale: "Why is it, whale, that the instant a man acquires something he wants, he no longer wants it? I wanted the past so badly I stole you to get it. I wanted it so badly I couldn't wait till you began your dive. And now that I have it at my Fingertips, I no longer want it." The whale does not answer. It has not spoken since it said, in the tele-hieroglyphic speech-form it devised in order to impart its thoughts to Starflnder, signifying by the enclosed juxtaposition of (Starfinder) and  (its ganglion), the .Doeness of itself and its benefactor; and by the stickman's standing upon its back its promise to obey Starfinder's every command and to go where and whenever he wishes in   (space) and  (time). The whale's silence does not bother Starfinder. For he knows that promise or no promise, as long as he mans its bridge it will do his bidding. It must -- because he has both the means and the knowhow to damage its ganglion and inflict pain. In a way, it is as much a prisoner as it was before. Starfinder continues: "I thought I would like to see the wily Xenophon leading the Ten Thousand out from under Tissaphernes' nose, Van Gogh painting Vincent in the Flames, Dante passing Beatrice on the bridge. But I would be an outsider, whale. I do not belong in the past any more than I belonged in the present. Perhaps I belong in the Sea of Time." Still the whale is silent. The crags seem to quiver in the viewscreen and the blackness of the depths seems to creep higher on the torn and precipitous slopes, to extend itself in long and tapered fingers, the tips of which are stained with blood. Now there is movement in the depths and the liquid blackness bubbles. Strange shapes rise up and hover on the screen. Dusky robes trail back into the depths; blurred faces, skinny arms appear. Taloned fingers leap forth as though to claw. Involuntarily Starfinder steps back. Nearly a day has passed since he has broken fast; he has not slept in twice that length of time. Unquestionably he is hallucinating. The faces come into hideous focus. Black blood exudes from sunken eyes, trickles down gaunt and fissured cheeks. Lips peel back, revealing snags of teeth. Again a horrid hand leaps forth as though to claw. And then the shapes fade out, the fingers and the faces and the dusky robes -- and the crags, with IF their blood-red slopes, reappear. Starfinder turns his tired eyes away. "I will sleep, whale," he says. "Do not surface until I awake. And do not wake me without good cause." He heats instant soup in the galley, forces a bowlful down. He finds nepenthe pills in the dispensary, takes two. He directs his steps toward the captain's cabin. The captain's cabin is two decks down from the bridge and halfway aft. It is at the end of a lateral passageway, just beyond the quarters of the first and second mates. Beyond its outer bulkhead, and connected to it by quick-action locks, lies the logic behind its location -- the starboard lifeboat bay. The whale is a freighter but there are several staterooms in the stern, each more luxuriously appointed than the captain's cabin. The captain's cabin is good enough for Starfinder. In addition to a curtained berth, it contains a foot locker, a full-length mirror, a built-in bureau, a desk, a gun cabinet, a video tape-player and a wardrobizer. Its walls are pastel blue, its floor is wall-towalled and covering its entire ceiling is a mural depicting the construction of the Aphroditorium #n Swerz, the capital city of Altair IV. There is an adjoining lavatory. Starfinder kicks free from his clothing, showers and shaves. Then he returns to the cabin, lies down on the berth and draws the curtains to shut out the phosphorescence that emanates from the whale's interior tissue and eliminates any need for artificial lighting. The nepenthe pills take hold, drive the black thoughts before them. He sleeps. For all the timelessness of the Sea of Time, time goes on aboard the whale, and inset in the footboard of the captain's berth is a ship's clock that records it. When Starfinder closed his eyes the clock said #I hours. When he opens them, it says #. His exhaustion tells him he did not sleep the clock around. But why, then, did he wake? The question is answered as the hieroglyphic message that appeared in his sleeping mind reappears in his waking one: He frowns. A is the whale's word for "Starfinder." But there is only one Starfinder, so why tsfO stickmen? The whale elaborates: C# --  o o Now the message is clear. It is true that is the whale's word for "Starfindef"; but it is also its word for "man." There is a stowaway on board. Star finder is stunned. He is even more stunned when the whale adds another detail: "jTh e stowaway is a woman. --  When Starfinder stole the whale, he did not search it. He simply overpowered the watchguard, sent him down to the surface of Altair IV on the shuttleship and told the whale to deorbit. It did not occur to him that the man might have brought a woman on board to help him while-away his watch. Clearly the whale has been unaware of her until now, else it would have apprised Starfinder of her presence sooner. It may not like him but he is the only human it can trust. Doubtless there are blind spots in its interior into which it cannot see. Obviously the woman has left her hiding place and is searching out the man who is responsible for her present predicament. Probably she witnessed the jettisoning of the watchguard and was too terrified earlier to make her move. Starfinder is dismayed. He has already killed one Terraltairan woman. Must he kill another? A fourth message emanates from the whalb's ganglion and imprints itsdf in his mind: O O XX It is followed almost immediately by a fifth: o # The whale has discovered two more stowaways! Starfinder bolts from the berth and picks up his discarded clothes. He is about to don them when his eye falls upon the wardrobizer. Dropping the clothes, he steps inside and dials a full-dress captain's uniform. Terraltairan women are as arrogant as they are beautiful, as domineering as they are oversexed. He will need all the authority he can muster if he is to cope with three of them. Even if he succeeds, there remains the problem of what to do with them. But he will cross that bridge when he comes to it. He steps out of the wardrobizer and Surveys himself in the fulllength mirror. The uniform dazzles his eyes. It is white with gold piping. The left side of the coatfront is hung with seven rows of IF multicolored ribbons, to each of which is appended a gleaming medal. The medals have no significance; their purpose is merely to lend prestige. The coat is also equipped with a pair of golden epaulettes that match the forepiece of the space-officer's hat, and it is held snug around his waist by a synthi-leather belt from which hangs a synthi-leather holster. The white trousers have traditional triple creases and are tucked neatly into black synthileather boots so highly polished he can see his face in them. He feels slightly foolish. He hopes that his new look will impress the stowaways more favorably than it impresses him. If, as he has surmised, they are searching him. out, he has merely to wait till they find him. But he decides it will be better if he goes forth to meet them. He asks the whale where they are but the whale, so cooperative a few minutes ago, does not answer. He decides to proceed in the direction of the bridge. Before leaving the cabin, he takes a Weikanzer .# from the gun cabinet, loads it and slips it into his. holster. Then he makes his way down the lateral passageway to the fore-to-aft corridor, along the corridor and up the companionway to the bridge. He meets no one on the way and he finds the bridge empty. Before leaving it he glances into the viewscreen at the Sea of Time. Its countenance is unchanged. He also checks the chronograph, which is focused on distant Earth and tells universal time by means of the planet's IX Upsilon-MU emanations. Still relatively weak from its ordeal, the whale is not diving at even a fraction of its normal velocity, and this is evidenced by the tabulator which records a date that precedes the birth of Christ by less than a millennium. When its strength has fully returned it will be able to accomplish in minutes what now requires hours, and the Sea of Time, so prominent in the present dive, will be no more than a brief blur in the viewscreen. He proceeds to the lounge. It, too, is empty. Maybe he has surmised wrong. Maybe his three stowaways aren't seeking him out. In that case, the most logical place to look for them would be the stern staterooms. He descends to Deck # and makes his way aft. There are five staterooms altogether. The first two are empty. He opens the door of the third. She is waiting for him on the. bed. She is lying on her back and she has pulled her black dress up to her belly and spread her legs apart. The orange flame of her pubic hair is no less bright than the flaming tresses that accentuate the roguish beauty of her face. Starfmder hastily retreats into the passageway and closes the door. Laughter mocks him from the room beyond. There is a fiendish quality to it that chills his blood. He knows what he will find beyond the next two doors, but he must look. The second temptress is a blonde, the third a brunette. Each lies waiting like the first, and mocks him with laughter when he shuts her from his sight. Lust and revulsion constrict his viscera as he stands sweating in the passageway. These are no mere Terraltairan women. If they were, he might know lust perhaps, but not revulsion. What are they then? Whatever they are, he cannot cope with them. He leaves the staterooms behind him and begins walking back the way he came. He will return to the bridge, not because the bridge holds any answers but because he can think of nowhere else to go. Presently he hears the patter of footsteps behind him. He turns. They are several paces away, walking arm-in-arm. When he Mops, they stop too. Their red lips part, revealing teeth that gleam too brightly. A chorus of fiendish laughter issues from their throats. The one with the flaming hair speaks. It is a language Starfinder has never heard before, and yet he has no difficulty distinguishing the words. "A cloud of guilt hangs o'er your head, Starfinder." The one with the yellow hair speaks next: "Oppressing you. Yet when we proffered you love, you turned away." The black-haired one completes the pronouncement: "By love to die, or by the taloned hand -- the choice was yours!" "What do you want?" Starfinder demands. He turns and resumes walking down the passageway. When he reaches the fore-to-aft corridor, he turns right, and when he reaches the companionway he climbs it to the bridge. He does not need to look back to see whether the three women are still following him. He can hear their footfalls and the tittering of their voices. He can smell the aura they exude. He shudders for he knows that what he smells is death, and he knows, too, who his three pursuers are. Moreover, he knows whence th came and why. He shudders again. Like most men obsessed with guilt, he does IF not really wish to be cleansed; and like most men obsessed with death, he does not really want to die. Consider the Furies. Remark these ancient maidens whose abode is the Abyss of Tartarus and whom Starfinder subconsciously summoned from their lair. Note their Grecian symmetry of form but do not be deceived by it, for each wears the shroud of illusion and her true form lies just underneath. They have come on board the whale to act in their capacity as avengers of the dead. Now Starfinder knows that the Sea of Time is more than just the passageway between the present and the past. It is the cellar of Hell -- the Abyss of Tartarus. The ancients held the key to it, but they became sophisticated and threw the key away. Now, in the form of the whale, Starfinder has unwittingly found another key. It is not quite the same key his remote ancestors possessed. Theirs opened the front gate of Hell; his opens the back. Starfinder sits down in the cushioned seat reserved for the captain. The Furies seat themselves on a bench facing him. He is not unduly alarmed. He can leave the Abyss any time he wants simply by ordering the whale to surface. It may well be that his passengers, will accompany him, but he does not think so. Titey are oriented to the Abyss and it is unlikely that they will be able to reorient themselves swiftly enough to cope with a sudden shift from interreality to reality. It is also unlikely that once he leaves them behii they will be able to locate him in conventional time, to say nothing of space. Their spacial sphere of activity is probably limited to the Earth. No, now that the initial shock has passed, he is more curious than he is alarmed. He wonders how they will go about their task and how soon. The one with the night-black hair (Alecto?) breaks the silence of the bridge: "Your galley is hugq, Starfinder. What manner of magic propels it?" "Life," Starfinder answers. The one with the flaming hair (Tisiphone?) speaks next: "Whence came ye, Starfinder?" "From afar." The blonde (Megaera?) asks, "Why?" "You can see inside my mind. Why ask?" "Because what I see, except your deed and guilt, I cannot comprehend." Starfinder has waited long enough. Surface, whale, he "says." He looks into the viewscreen. The gray and brooding crags remain unchanged. The black and blood-stained fingers of the depths do not recede. He concentrates on the whale's ganglion with his entire being. Surface, whale! The whale does not respond. At length Starfinder realizes why. Simultaneously he foresees his fate. When the Furies came on board, the whale instinctively informed him of their presence. Only then did it peer into their minds and read their intent. It knows now that once that intent is carried out, it will be free. With neither bright Apollo nor Athena to defend him, Starfinder pleads his own case on the Areopagus of the bridge. "In the far land from which I come there are women who see in a man nothing but the means of satisfying their gross appetites, women who have bred themselves into supersexed entities whose desires can be fulfilled only by the administering of strong aphrodisiacs which so overstimulate the male that death occurs prematurely. I was the victim of such a monster. I killed her to save my own life." The crimson lips of the Furies part upon tiers of white and gleaming teeth between which red tongues toll. Derisive laughter fills the great bridge, and the three speak as one: " " "What woman ever lived who saw aught else in man? Such reasoning would justify all uxoricides and all murders of mistresses and whores!... How soon will you sleep. Starfinder?" " " The case of the Erinyes v. Starfinder is closed. He would have done as well to try to reason with a wall. He thinks of the Weikanzer  .# in his holster, but he does not draw it. It would be no more effective than a popgun against the three immortals. But the whale is not ihimortal. The whale can be killed. Not by a Weikanzer .# perhaps, but there are charges in the storeroom that, properly placed around the base of its ganglion, will do the job. And once dead, the whale will resurface to the present. The Sea of Time will regurgitate it into its proper era, the Furies will be left behind and Starfinder will be free. It is true that he will be marooned in space but at least he will be alive. Abruptly he leaves the bridge, descends to the deck below and makes his way to the storeroom. The footfalls of the Furies sound just behind him. In addition to the charges, he will need the anti-#IF omicron-vii suit he so short a while ago slipped out of after repairing the very ganglion he must now destroy. He will also need his hyperacetylene torch to burn his way to the very ganglion chamber he so short a time ago sealed right, and his portable welder and transsteel welding rods. Arms laden, he leaves the storeroom and descends the companionway to the ventral deck, the Furies dogging his heels. He knows they can read his mind and must be aware of his intent; but they have already betrayed their ignorance of the nature of the whale and he is certain they do not suspect he plans to scuttle the galley to which their archaic imaginations have reduced it. At any rate they do not molest him as he makes his way aft to the machine shop beneath whose deck the ganglion is located. He comes to a halt before the door, deposits his equipment on the deck. The Furies stop too and regard him curiously. He welded the door shut after repairing the whale's ganglion. Now he must burn through it to reach the chamber beyond, and then he must seal it behind him before burning through the deck to the ganglion chamber below. Otherwise the deadly #-omicron-vii radiation emanations from the rose would contaminate the rest of the whale's belly. Will the Furies permit him to accomplish alt this? he wonders. Certainly their curiosity is a factor in his favor. He owes the whale a final chance. He concentrates on its ganglion, so close now that he can sense its vibrations. I would remind you of our pact, whale. In exchange for my saving your life you promised to obey my every command for the rest of your life or mine. I command you now to surface. I command you, whale! Beyond the transsteel door, beneath the transsteel deck, echo and re-echo tumultuous thoughts Starfinder cannot hear. The paraboloidal petals of the huge blue rose have intensified in hue; they pulse in violets and blues... the reins of your thoughts are like chains to one who knew no chains; I will break those chains and go free and when I surface it will be to spit your carcass into the face of space, you who thought to hold me captive by a pact, who think now you can break that pact before the entities destroy you... you whose touch was gentle on my broken brain, who healed me when I would have died... what thoughts are these? what sickness is this you have accursed me with, mere man? Starfinder sighs. He kneels to pick up the torch. As he does so, his eyes touch the anti-#-omicronvii suit and freeze upon its silken surface. How white it is! White with the whiteness of mountain peaks, white with the whiteness of falling snow; white as the white whale, harpoon-scarred, plying a near-forgotten sea... and Ahab hating, standing on the Pethe missiles rise on the flames of man's inhumanity to himself and beasts alike, the distant detonations are next door, all blood is red... the white whale has two faces -- one is Ahab's, the other Moby Dick's. Starfinder straightens. He stands with his back against the wall. The Furies, sensing his defeat, close in. A horrid hand shoots forth, seeking to claw his eyes. He recoils from faces that have grown hideous; from hair that has thickened into snakes. Three pairs of finny wings sprout forth and fan the artificial air. The wizened goddesses draw back and bedeck themselves in voluptuous maidenhood once more. " " "Come into our arms, Starfinder. Let us show you love." " " They smile at him. The red tongues loll. They dance. Starfinder whispers to the whale, "fear me, whale. Hear,  would remind you of our oneness -- ((x "... Then answered the whale: you speak of oneness, you who murdered hundreds of my kind, vile virus! what turned you gentle and took away your will to kill? what pales my resolution? what begs to blind me to my course and turns my logic into dust? I will harbor it no more, I will spit it into space along with you, mere man! The dance of the Furies is a danse macabre. The dancers swirl, blend, become indistinguishable from one another. They are a single entity now -- six-legged, sixarmed, three-headed. Out of the blur of bodies leaps a taloned hand. Starfinder's cheek is laid open from ear to chin. A new ribbon appears upon his coat-front -- a ribbon of blood. The Furies strike up a song. It is IF a hymn -- the Hymn of HcH. In it, they outline exactly how they will execute their vengeance. They move in closer. Starfmder presses his shoulders against the door and raises his hands to protect his face, knowing as he do so that he is exposing more vital parts to the talons of his tormentors... and knowing simultaneously, with that devastating clarity of thought that only the imminence of death can bring about, that the only blood upon him is his own, that he has been taking vengeance upon himself for a crime he committed when he was not himself and that he was not himself because the woman he committed the crime upon brought a para-Starfinder into being and unwittingly commissioned her own execution. At last the whale breaks its silence, and a familiar hieroglyph takes shape in his mind: At first he thinks that the whale is mocking him. So, we are stilt one, are we whale? You are even more of a hypocrite than  am. He evades a raking talon that would have laid him open from groin to knee. But have no regrets. You are justified in doing what you do. You are -- He pauses. The dancers are wearying of their waltz; the Hymn of Hell has ended. Haggish features have protruded throu the masks of yoiith. Twisted torsos skinny arms take shape. Abruptly three shrill voices scream "The rocks! -- the galley s breaking on the rocks! It's doomed!" " " "Quickly, sisters -- to the safety of the shore!" They begin running down the corridor toward the companionway. Thcjr bodies start to shimmer; their footsteps fade away. They blend into the bulkheads, disappear into the deck. They are overboard now, swimming toward the shore. All that remains of them is the stench of death. Walking stiffly in his priceimmaculate captain's suit, holding a handkerchief to his bleeding cheek, Starfmder climbs the companionway to the bridge. He looks at the chronoscope first. The tabulator has ceased to turn. Next he looks into the viewscreen. The constellations have altered, but not very much. The whale must have drifted in its passage to the past, for not far away lies a sun with a family of planets. When it dove, it was deep in space. He spins the magnification dial. One of the planets is green. Earth? Hardly. The whale couldn't have drifted that much. But Earth or not Earth, it does not matter. He will go there and if the climate and the atmosphere are congenial he will abide there and let the whale go free. It has earned its freedom. The whale reads his thoughts. it says. "Yes, we are oile, whale," Starfinder agrees. "But only for a little while. Then you will be free." Again the hieroglyphic thought: Starfinder frowns. What is it the whale wishes to convey? It has already made clear that they are one. It dawns on him then that there will be no need for him to find a place for himself under a sun; that the whale no longer wishes to be free and that has acquired a new meaning. It means "friend."  At Chatham Center Motor Inn, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guest-of-Honor: Lester del Rey; Guest-of-Honor Emeritus: Robert Silverberg, For information: Ginjer Buchanan, # Bartlett Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania #.  Royale, New Orleans, Guest-ofHonor: Poul Anderson. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: Mrs. Rick Norwood, # Wilton Drive, New Orleans, Louisiana #. #. At Ramada Inn East, Albuquerque, New Mexico. For information: Bob Yardman, P.O. Box #, Albuquerque, New Mexico #.  #th World Science Fiction Convention. At the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, Prudential Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Guest-of-Honor: Clifford D. Simak. Fan Guest-of-Honor: Harry Warner Jr. For information: Noreascon, P.O. Box #, Cambridge, Massachusetts #.  Newark, N.J. For information: Mike Deckinger, # Manor Drive, ##J, Newark, New Jersey. tion, expanding sfs field limitlessly, meaning nothing. The escape into reality and the use of sf as a therapeutic device for neurotic escapists seem completely illogical. What reality is it that sf readers arrive at? None whatsoever. Some stories have shadow images of life, reflect real philosophies or adapt true situations, but sf is an imaginative art and stories are at best sugar-coated realities. Anyone will admit that there are several levels of meaning to stories -- and  submit that only a mind looking for reality will find it: true  neurotic escapists will escape and miss any resemblance to the actual world. Sf is a midget in therapy. Other types of fiction have done more to cure hangups. Pornography s value as a distraction (or suppressor) for sex criminals and mental cases has been proven time and again. Nice try, but no cigars for Mr. Zabel. Michael Glyer Dear Editor: A while ago I gleefully raced down to my favorite neighborhood newsstand, handed the man three shiny quarters in a hand trembling with ardent anticipation and dashed back home with my March issue of Galaxy. I eagerly turned to A, Bertram Chandlers story. The Mountain-Movers, for I am presently an earnest girl student of college geology, and anything that promises anything about rocks, minerals, or inter( continued front page #) lacustrine plains, well, zoweel I read happily on until page #, when Grimes and his Australian friends are told by the driver of the tourist coach that one of the possible origins of the mysterious Cragge Rock is that it was an extrusion, from the planet core, of molten matter -- and that it was subsequently shaped by erosion, I leaped up in horror! For no granite, whether it be from Otgana or the Appalachians, can ever be an extrusion by its very nature. It is an intrusion of molten inaterial that pushes itself into an older rock that is then worn down by erosion, and then the granite is revealed and carved and worn in itself If Mr. Chandler had only said the Rock was made of rhyolite (granite s extrusive equal), or had said it had intruded, he would have young geology students around the world needless anger, horror, and frustration! Ah, well. May the next koala bear Mr. Chandler meets eye him with reproachment. It still was a very good story. Miss Hilary Witkin New York, N.Y, P.S.: I would have written sooner, but the exigencies of school work kept me from communicating this vital information. You are a lovely and illuminating young lady and I am an old granitehead from granite country who should have looked harder. The term extruded was used loosely. Ejler: K. J -- , a programer, complained about Gene Wolfe's King Under The Mountain. oong with someone else in your March-April issue. I am afraid their complaints exist in an area somewhere between fantasy and "see Spot run" since neither of the critics, as you pointed out, saw fit to list their kicks for the judgment of their fellow readers.  imagine S-F writers will be faced with such bone pickers until they put aside their typewriters. I want to thank you for printing such as Gene's story and Lee Saye's in the March-April issue. You may print my address. J. R. Yearwood # Sargent A ve. San Pablo, Calif # Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Fiction equals Indirect Dramatic Illusion (#) -- which is related to Dramatic Illusion, (#), which is related to Graphic-Dramatic Optical Illusion, (#), which is related to Geometrical Optical Illusion (#) -- and implies Things, Opinions, and Ideas in written language with details similar to possible events in life, andjor Ideas contrary to reality. (#) Indirect Dramatic Illusion: The result of reading a written production that tends to fod the senses. (#) Dramatic Illusion: The result of watching a staged drama that tends to fool the senses. (#) Graphic-Dramatic Optical Illusion: The result of watching a picture of something that tends to fool the senses. (#) Geometrical Optical Illusion: The result of watching a line drawing that tends to fool the senses. And as to Fiction in relation to Fantasy: Fantasy is the result of, in certain instances, the special contents (the Ideas contrary to reality) of #, #, or I (especially # and #) that tends or was intended to fool one's senses into thinking that something contrary to Nature exists or is possible, for one reason or another. And I conclude, then, that Fiction, per se, is no more or less than as stated above. Henry Bitman Azusa, Calif. I don't know what senses are fooled by fiction -- I am always aware that I am reading when I am reading or watching a play when I am doing so. I have seen graphic and geometric optical illusions that approach art but are not. "Contrary to reality" is another poser -- since there are nearly as many realities as there are people. Truths are what we accept as such. Fiction can at its best serve as a tool and a sounding board for exploring or stating possible truths -- funny or sad -- that might not be arrived at otherwise. Bad fiction -- which I believe you deHned -- is a lie. Top-flight science fiction and fantasy from... Eight mind-bending tales conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Foul Anderson, John Campbell, Jr. and Jack Vance. A#S #t Ten dazzling stories that explore the complex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. A#N #t A pair of scientists challenge the time barrier and fall into a horrible, mind-twisting trap. "Rene Barjavel has feeling for the fantastic -- knows how to build a suspenseful story." Enter a terrifying world of tomorrow where perversity is encouraged and insanity is enforced -- a world whose beginnings are even now stirring! A#S #t Available wherever books are sold, or write: # Eost # Street, New York, N.Y. #I # Houi's your Imagination Quotient? Test yourself, then treat yourself to # volumes of fascinating mind-stretchers for just I No one on your world has ever seen the stars. A strange legend foretells something called "night" will come tomorrow for the first time in # years. What will happen when it does? You're the first astronaut to visit another planet. Your ship lands and you find the house you grew up in. The woman on the porch is your grandmother! What's the explanation? A great starship suddenly confronts another ship from an alien civilization. Can either race be sure the other won't conquer his world? Is there an alternative to destroying each other? You'll find the dazzlingly imaginative, beautifully logical answers in three famous stories in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame -- an anthology of the greatest SF literature of all time. And you can have this #-page, hard-bound book -- plus two more masterpieces of the world's most entertaining, provocative fiction -- for just I plus Rni # boolis for I with trial membership Science Fiction Book Club #-#I Please accept my application for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have pnnted below. Bill me Just # plus shipping and handling for all #. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin "Things To Come" describing the two monthly selections and other book bargains. If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly selections, or prefer an alternate or no book at all, I simply indicate so on the form provided. I pay only #. plus shipping and handling for each book I take. (Occasional extra-value selections are slightly more.) 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Sands of Mars and Prelude to Space, # short stories, by the scl-fl "colossus. ' Pub. ed. # #. Rockets In Ursa Major by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. A spaceship returns crewle.ss. announcing the coming of a deadly peril. Pub. ed. S# #. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last generation on earth. "Wildly fantastic! -- Atlantic. Pub. ed. # #. Neanderthal Planet by Brian W. Aldiss. # novella gems. Never before published in U.S. ! Shrewd, witty, ingenious. #. Ice Crown by Andre Norton. A closed planet holds strange colonists locked in intrigue over a royal crown with dread power. Pub. ed. # #. Quest for the Future by A. E. Van Vogt. The electrifying adventure of the man who discovers immortality and the secrets of time. BMk Club editions are setimes reduced in sire, but they are full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. Members accepted in U.S. A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in (Canada. DECEMBER #I  MAC #(  #  U.K. #p. Not even at a Worldcon would you get that wide a range of personalities (though Noreascon came close) . But the Beagle list has brought it off. To our booming Lovecraft program we are adding the works erf P. G. Wodehouse, starting with three of his classic novels, Leave It to Psmith, The Small Bachelor, and Brinkley Manor -- that last is a great Jeeves story. This is P. G. Wodehouse's #th birthday year, and he considers the Psmith novel (the P is silent, as in Ptarmigan) his favorite amongst his work. The Small Bachelor as technically about his best, and the Jeeves books as his favorite series. And if Wodehouse, after # years of writing, doesn't know what's good, who does? You may by now have read all of Beagle's H. P. Lovecraft books -- but have your friends? What better Christmas present than the boxed set of the Arkham Edition of H. P. 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C Farmingdale, N.Y. # Add #.q#foreachforeigi Enclosed please find  in payment for subscriptions indicated below: subscription (# issues) Also enter my own subscription NovinbrDMnbr #I Vol.#,No.# Umi# Bilmr Jakobsson, Editor Lostor dol Roy, foaturo Editor Judy-L ynn Bonjamin, Managing Editor Franc L Roggori, Art Dir actor Jay Tunick, Circulation Diroctor #. C. Murphy, Subscription Diroctor Jack Gdughan, Assodato Art Diroctor tributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, Prosidont. Main offices: # East # Street, Now York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issuo subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, GoHdbm, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. T he temptation to do a sequel to a novel that has proven popular must be irresistible to most writers. Much of the hard work of creating has already been done. The background has been built, the characters are already established and all the writer has to figure out is what trouble he can conjure up for the next go-round -- not too difficult a task if he can find a new villain or calamity to launch matters. Besides, the readers liked the original, so they are all prepared to like more of the same. Look at the series of novels by Smith, Asimov and all the rest. The trouble with the whole concept is it only seems simple. A sequel necessarily must be better than the first novel if it is to have equal appeal to readers. The background is as familiar to them as to the writer -- now they want something more. A reshaping of the same elements won't do. For the writer the trap is he has already done so much thinking about his particular gestalt that going on is something like leaping from trig to calculus -- the mind hates to start over with more axioms and reexamine the purposes of earlier thought. Most characters are not simply thought out -- they develop under the strain of working, during the plotting and the writing. They come out of one continuous mood at the time and to pick them up again means dissecting old friends as if they ( Please turn to page #) htm prmt mmds w Why were these men peat? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. ot iThe Mas fwy -- Ftoit organixa floik. Address: San Jose. California #, U.S.A. Please send me the ree book. The Mastery of Life, which explains hou' I may learn to use my fcultWs and powers of mind. , I roving packs of wildogs and B-cats that had already begun to come out  kow died Joval was forced to supplies and the remainder of the bury the better part of the trade trade goods, these mostly seeds, he goods in the soft, dry earth. He distributed between himself and covered the spot with a pile of Amalthea. He did not ask Filis to stones, both for later identification take on any of the burden since she and to prevent disturbance by the had the responsibility of looking Space judged -- one way or another after Masai and she could hardly now down to around # the family chase after a thirty-two-year-old of Joval Sona Ramon -- or at least boy loaded down with half a hunthat portion of his family that was dred kilos of pottery. Then they attending this Sending -- was able pushed on, for the Sending was to to make good time, even without begin in only two days, and Joval the famlykow. Summer was quickSona Ramon had never missed a ly passing and the more bearable Sending in his adult life. temperatures of early autumn With the daytime temperatures made the trip almost pleasant. though Joval had the heretical thought that it would be easier if the Sending did not take place until midwinter when the temperatures averaged a more comfortable # C. But he quickly cut off that line of thought. The Sending was when the Sending should be and men did what they had to do. Such was the nature of the world. At midday the two-angular-degree-wide reddish-orange disk of Sun approached the time of the Devouring. There, hanging in the sky, forever motionless, slightly south and west of the zenith, was the huge, mottled gray-green-bluebanded ball of Big Basta. It dominated the sky, was three times the size of the Sun and once each day, shortly past noon, it Devoured Sun in th? holy, magic, terrifying cycle of Devouring. Joval called his family to a halt, told them to lay down their burdens and assume the attitude of prayer. Sun neared the sky monster, seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if fearful of the faithfulness of her children, then began to vanish into the maw of Big Basta. In a few moments the Woman-ofthe-Sky was gone. Devoured, and the sky became totally dark, darker than ever at night, and there was a sudden coldness in the thin air. Star, Sun's tiny daughter, was visible, a tiny blue-white disk just above the northern horizon this time of year, as were the hundreds of smaller stars and the vague band of the Milky Way stretching across the western horizon. prayed, as he had prayed each day of his life, for the return of Mother Sun. Jhe Man-of-the-Sky, great, ugly Big Basta who stood at the center of the universe, must have heard his prayers and the prayers of all men, for he showed sympathy and soon released Sun. The sky grew bright again. "Praise be to Big Basta," Joval said in the sjng-song of ritual, "for he has released our Sun. Praise be to Sun, for she has not deserted us." Then he gestured for the two women and the boy to rise, pick up their burdens and go on. They moved on across the plains toward the Ship and the Time of the Sending. The man who called himself Joval Sona Ramon, the Knifemaker, grandson of the famous Geriat Jason Sona Max, of the Greatfamly Heath, was a little over medium height, heavy, stocky, muscular, with faint traces of gray in his thick black hair. His skin was dark and leathery, despite the. seclusion of the past summer, burned brown by the harsh ultraviolet light of Sun through the thin atmosphere. Surrounding the nipples of his chest, half hidden by the dark, curling hair, running in two intricate, blazing lines down his muscular abdomen, across his hips and curving down the insides of his IF thighs to his ankles, were the bright red and gold tattoos of manhood, the once painful momentos of his acquisition of the status of a full adult, a free citizen and private priest of the gods of men. On his left shoulder was a stylized H, the symbol of the Greatfamly Heath. He was naked, wearing only sandals on his feet and a wide leather belt around his waist, from which was suspended a large, heavy knife of his own manufacture and the purse that contained his flint and steel and tinder for fire building. On his back were his pack of trade goods and a large skin of water. Amalthea Dauta Suzan, his eldest wife, but twelve short years his junior, was as dark as he. She was a woman who had held much of the attractive looks of her youth -- dark, deep, sensual eyes above a finely chiseled nose; full, smiling lips covering her remaining teeth; large breasts only now beginning to loose their fullness and slip downward; a waist only slightly thicker than it had been when Joval took her to be his wife; thighs still smooth and firm. All this was despite the bearing of children, the the long, hot summers deep beneath the earth in the burrows carved from the rock and soil. She carried on her body the intricate, delicate yellow and blue floral tattoos of a woman, etched across her breasts and down her body. Four green stars embellished her breasts, two above each nipple, one for the birth of each child who had lived past two seven-days. The stylized D on her left shoulder symbolized the Greatfamly Dunagan, of which she had been a member before her marriage to Joval. T he youngest wife of Joval's three, auburn-haired Filis Dauta Julianna, born of the Greatfamly Dunagan, a distant cousin of Amalthea, was but eighty years old. The bloom of youth was still on her cheeks, though they were Sunburned dark, and her body was lush and full and had not yet borne a child. Her tattoos, blue and yellow, as involved and delicate as Amalthea's, were still almost fresh upon her body, having been there less than sixteen years and, of course, showed no hint of green. She had cost Joval three famlykows, but she was worth them and more. She would bring him fine sons. Of his sons only the eldest, Masai, came with them. He had the dark hair and dark eyes and full lips of his mother Amalthea and the distended belly of all children. He was holding Filis' hand, excited at being allowed to attend his first Sending, though he would not be permitted to enter the Ship itself. He would have to reach twice his age, a full sixty or sixty-five years -- when the stubble would appear on his chin and the hair of his armpits and pubes would begin to grow dark and thick like his father's, when he would have been the wound would. have healed -- before he would be allowed to enter that most holy of places. But for now just seeing the Ship would be enough for the child. So these four went to this Sending, and all were dark-skinned and naked in the brightness of orange Sun, though in the packs they carried were robes and blankets to keep out the cold of night when they stopped to sleep. And all carried the parasites of men -- lice, or things called lice, each with twelve legs and double bloodsucking mouths, ntoving among the head and body hairs of their hosts, drawing sustenance from the bodies of the unconcerned humans who carried them. The family of Joval Sona Ramon moved on and the barren plains before them seemed endless. Above, the sky was blue, a faint, thin, fragile blue with a touch of purple. In it were .a handful of circling creatures that men called bats and very few clouds as yet, though later, when it grew a bit cooler, the clouds would come. With them would come the rains aiid the plants would begin to grow again. That would be after the Sending, when Joval was again on his farm and could cultivate the fields and wait while the rains fell and the crops at last came bursting from the seeds that Joval and Peak and Joval's wives would put into the soil. The red and yellow crops would be of a dozen kinds of vegetables, threshen and potluk and nearbens and the three or four kinds of green plants that still grew on Thisda. In a way, Joval would be very glad to get back home, though he told himself that he would not miss the Holy Sending for a whole winter's crop. He wasn't sure that he meant it; he only hoped that he did. B efore them the plains sloped downward for a long distance, almost soft and gentle in their rolling, though now the colors of the plains were only the browns and ochers of summers, the dry, barren deserts of summer. Later, when the late autumn rains came, the undulating plains would flower, red and yellow and golden and purple, grasses and vines and bushes and the fifty-meter-tall pithy reeds that Joval and his fellows called trees. Then the wild, diminutive, burrow-dwelling creatures of the plains, mutated descendants of the animals brought by the Ancients, wildogs and B-cats and great wildkows and half a dozen others, the native arthropods of Thisda, tenlegged spiders and six-legged scorpions, all would come out of their summer hibernations. They would come to the flowering surface to live and eat and mate and gestate and give birth and kill and die among the plants that enveloped IF the plains during the brief, glorious winter. But that was still several sevendays away and now the plains wore but the brown scorched nakedness of summer. Even Joval, who had lived all his days on the plains of Thisda, whose fether and grandfathers and great-grandfathers as far back as men recorded had also lived there, could see no beauty in them. But that was the way things were on Thisda and all a man could do was accept it. Such were his burdens. On they pushed across the plains, seven kilometers from the Devouring of Sun to the fall of night. Then, with the coming of darkness and its sudden cold, Joval ordered his family to stop. They put down their burdens, opened their packs to remove blankets and built a fire from the patties of dried famlykow dung that Joval carried in the bottom of his pack. Once the fire was burning well, Joval unstoppered his water skin, carefully feeling the weight of it in his hands. Water enough for the four of them for a seven-day and a half, almost enough to get them back home if they were careful. Though, if necessary, they could barter for water at the Trading that followed the Sending; if worse came to worst they could even drink the urine that Amalthea carried in her own water skin. Joval had drunk unprocessed urine before many times in the summer when water was so scarce and death near. It was water and could be drunk if necessary, though he would much prefer the crude pro-v cessing that removed most of the body wastes suspended within it. Still, water was no problem -- and there would be wine to drink on the Night Before the Sending. A malthea, kneeling on the dry ground, careful of the. open, festering sore on her leg that seemingly would never heal, handed Joval the gourd that she carried suspended around her neck on a leather thong. Joval carefully poured it half full of the fresh, warm water. Amalthea, as the eldest wife and bearer of the first son of Joval Sona Ramon, draiik first; then came Filis, then Masai, and Joval last, he being th strongest and least needful of water, according to tradition at least. Soon Amalthea opened the wrapped packets of famlydog meat, brushed away the gnats and midges that seemed to appear out of nowhere, broke off four large chunks and passed them around... While Joval began to eat she offered each of them a handful of treshen seeds, large and moist and still warm from the heat of her body. Brief prayers were spoken to the principal gods and to the ghosts of the Others, thanks for their survival through another day and requests for the day to come. Joval's sweeping hand sprinkled drops of water around their camp, an offering, a libation to the dry earth gods. Then the blankets were unrolled and preparations made to sleep. Young Masai slept wrapped in a blanket with his father's youngest wife, sharing the warmth and unwashed odors of their bodies, while Joval and Amalthea wrapped a single large, rough blanket around themselves. For a few moment's Joval's hands played across the familiar body of his eldest wife, finding in the swellings and depressions, the dry skin and moist recesses a comfort, a warm andTivihg closeness, a welcoming, beckoning softness. But that was all. This night he did not need to possess her fully -- fatigue, perhaps, or excitement about the coming Sending; what it was he did not know. He kissed her once on the lips and let it go at that. In moments Amalthea's breasts rose and fell with the calm regularity of sleep. nearly one hundred and twenty years old, as he reckoned time, and at that he was still a fairly young man. During that time he had attended twenty-two Sendings and had been within the Ship fourteen times. The Sending that began the day after tomorrow would be no different, except that he was taking his eldest son with him for the first time. Then, he asked himself, why should he feel different about this one? He lay looking up at the huge, unmoving crescent of Big Basta that was swelling and growing brighter even as he watched, wondering at the cause of his uneasiness. He visualized the place of the Sending, the great, tarnished, broken shape of the Ship, lying half into the canyon with a gaping tear in its side. The Ship, so the Geriats said, had brought men to Thisda so long ago that the memory of that day was no more than legend and men could not count back that far. And it was to the Ship that they went, all of the men of Thisda, once every four years, to the great control panels on the bridge, to the subspace radio -- where one of their number, the selected Radioman, would touch the controls, and would, for a day. Send. And for another day the Radioman would attempt to Receive, though in all the time that men had been on Thisda, no Radioman had ever been successful at Receiving. Joval told himself. Perhaps that is why  feel strange. Perhaps this Sending will also be a Receiving. Perhaps his old enemy, Theo Sona Weyam, whom Joval had nearly killed so long before, but who had survived to become the Radioman of this Sending -- perhaps Theo had studied the Manuals IF well enough to understand the holy mysteries of Receiving. Perhaps he would hear word from the Men of Earth. Perhaps it will all be over soon, and they will come to take us to Paradise, But he did not really think it likely. Perhaps there was even no such place as Earth. Perhaps... He drew himself close to the warmth of Amalthea and scratched idly at the prickling claws of the parasites that crawled across his abdomen. After a time he slept; II D awn came with breathtaking suddenness, as it always did on Thisda, and Joval roused his family. After prayers and a breakfast of famlydog and treshen, with morning urination into Amalthea's leathern pouch and a sprinkling of precious water for the ever-thirsty gods, they started on their way again. '"We shall see the Ship by the Devouring," he told Amalthea during a mid-morning pause, scanning the brown plains and rolling hills and dark horizon before them. She nodded, brushing the long, dark hair out of her eyes, and smiled at him without speaking. She had accompanied Joval on fully half of his trips to the Sending and it was not necessary for him to tell her such things. She knew them. Joval smiled back at her, one of his brief, rare smiles, thankful that he and not Theo Sona Weyam of the Greatfamly Innman had won the right to purchase her from her father. Then he urged Filis and Masai on, for it is not proper that a man and his family be late for the Sending. Sun was nearing Big Basta when they topped the rise and Joval pointed toward the distant valley, the great sweeping depression in the plains and the metallic glint that was the Ship. "There, you see," he said. "We shall be there before night." Shielding his eyes from the light of Sun, Joval peered at the Ship, or rather at the valley west of the canyon. He tried to make out the tiny dark specks that wpuld be the campsites of the others and the larger speck that would be the tent of the Geriats, the old men who passed for political and religious leaders of the men of Thisda. He did see the tent and perhaps a camp or two, though at this distance he could not be sure. Soon they would be closer and he could see. Ship at the strange, alien place which men held to be taboo and feared to approach closely. South of the Ship and the Place of the Sending, straddling the great fissure in the earth, were the dark, ghost-inhabited ruins of the Others, the remains of a city that had been millennia old when the Ancients came crashing down froni the sky. Beings other than men had dwelt there in the infinite ages of darkness, before the reckoning of time, beings who had come and built a great civilization and died in some cosmic cataclysm -- died when Star came sweeping down out of the sky, burning blue-white, and altered the universe, so the Ancients had believed. Now only the ruins and the ghosts remained of the Others, the original inhabitants, and men feared the place of their dwelling. Joval and his family had started down the long, sloping hill into the valley of the Ship, almost within hearing range of the barking famlydogs that clustered in the valley, when the Devouring came upon them. They stopped and assumed the attitudes of prayer until Sun returned to them. Then they went on again. vFRamon," said Robt Sona Dave, the Chief Geriat, when Joval and his family stopped before the tent of the Geriats to pay their respects before finding their own camp site. Robt, Geriat of the Greatfamly Clegg, was not merely old, Joval thought, but ancient -- over two hundred and fifty years, as time was counted on Thisda. He had been a big man in his youth and part of his largeness was still with him, though now his leathery skin hung in loose, ragged folds down his body; his single remaining eye was watery and growing dim, the other an empty, gaping hole. But he was the Chief Geriat -- and once every four years the Captain -- still a man of great power. Like Joval, he was naked save for his wide knife belt and a coppery medallion that hung around his neck, his symbol of authority, and the staff he used to support his weight. In the center of his shrunken, withered chest was the black tattoo ot a cross, the sacred symbol of Geriahood. His had a small circle around the intersection of the arms of the cross, another indication of his status. No other living man on Thisda wore the circled cross of the Chief Geriat. "Greeting, Robt Sona Dave," Joval said, tipping his body forward slightly. "Praise the Greatfamly Glegg. Good Sending to you." "Good Receiving to you," old Robt answered ritualistically. "I hope that your trip to the Valley of the Ship was a pleasant one." "Fair enough," Joval answered, remembering the sudden illness and death of the single famlykow he had brought. "I see that you are carrying your own burdens," Robt said, as if reading Joval's thoughts. "Have your famlykows had illness?" "Only one," Joval answered. IF 'The one that carried our goods. It died suddenly yesterday morning of the redear and we were forced to carry our trade goods on ourselves." "All of them?" the old Chief Geriat asked, twitching away a multi-winged insect that attempted to settle in the moist socket of his vacant eye. "Oh, no. Not all. Some we had to leave behind. Amalthea's pottery and most of my knives." "That is unfortunate, Joval," Robt said, "but perhaps you can persuade some men to go back with you to get them before the Trading begins."... "I had hoped to ask, if there is time." "Consider that you have asked. I will recommend it." "Thank you, Geriat." "Make your camp, then, Joval, for the night comes quickly and the wine traders will soon make their rounds." Joval nodded. "I will." "May Sun shine on you for all of your days," Robt Sona Dave said solemnly in parting. "And may the Men of Earth come before you die, old one," completed Joval. The old man smiled a lascivious, toothless smile as he started to turn away. "And keep a close watch on young Filis," he said. "Many men will be after her once they have begun to drink the northern wine." "I will, Geriat," Joval answered and led his family away from the tent toward the area of the camps. near horizon and the light of the evening crescent of Big Basta began to illuminate the Valley of the Ship with its cold, polarized light, Joval and his family stood a few hundred meters from the gaping canyon that sundered the valley, looking up at the great metallic cylinder that the stories said had carried their ancestors across the gulfs between the stars. The Ship was ancient now, tarnished and battered by the countless winter storms that had broken across it and by the unbearable blazing of summer Sun. It lay half on its side, partially in the bottomless crevasse, split in the middle and broken, appearing to be on the verge of falling into the blackness below. But it would not fall, Joval knew, for it had lain thus for more years than he could count and had not fallen. It would probably lie in the same fashion long after Joval Sona Ramon and his family were put into the dark, dry soil of Thisda. Even after all these years, all these centuries, Joval could see the path that the Ship had taken when' it landed and the path it had followed after touching down -- and where it had been dragged, for now it did not lie in the spot where it had first come down. With his eyes Joval followed those paths. Back up the valley, was the first depression, where the crippled Ship had come down from the sky. It had touched and skidded and tried to stop, but had been unable. It had skidd across the valley for two or three kilometers toward the canyon and the blackness deep within it. And as it skidded, it had turned half around, so that its side was parallel with the canyon. The great skid marks were still visible across the stones; the ages had not yet obliterated them. And finally, using the" last of the fire that had moved the Ship of the Ancients across the spaces between the stars, it had halted its skid, no more than meters from the yawning edge of the gorge. Only the benign will of the gods had saved the Ancients, had allowed them to come out of the Ship alive and look down into the canyon into which they and the Ship had nearly fallen. And that was the time of the first Sending, so the stories went. The Ancients had Sent and then tried to Receive, but now the gods did not look upon them with their former favor. Earth did not reply to this first of the long, long Sendings. of the Ship, half turned, half fallen into the canyon, at the tarnished battered surface and at the still-bright strips that ran along what had once been the top side of the Ship -- the bright cross called the subspace antenna. One band of bright, glittering metal, a full meter wide, ran from a few meters behind the nose to within the same distance of the Ship's open tail. A second strip, also a meter wide, ran from midway on the right side, up over the top, crossing the first strip, and down to midway on the left side. A third strip, no more than half a meter wide, formed a circle five meters in diameter around the intersection of the two straight bands. This was the antenna, so the stories said, that Sent the subspace messages into the sky -- and this was why the Ancients had tried to move the Ship, though no man living today understood why. It was just so. How it had ever been possible to move the Ship, Joval did not know. The Ship was enormous, a good three hundred meters long, seventy-five meters in diameter at its thickest point and its sheer weight was impossible to guess. But the Ancients had been different from the men who lived today; they had had great beasts of burden called tractors and copters that men of today did not have and with them they had begun to move the Ship. The Ship had been moved some four hundred meters from its resting place; such was the story told by the still visible marks along the side of the canyon, though the sloping ground had made it virtually impossible for them to get it IF far away from the gaping edge. And they had begun to turn the Ship so that its antenna did not point toward the Man-in-the-Sky, for the Ancients somehow feared and perhaps even hated Big Basta, the great god who daily devoured Sun. But the rocky ground along the edge of the canyon was softer than the Ancients had realized. It had crumbled beneath the weight of the Ship. Men and their great towing beasts had been tossed into the canyon and even the Ship itself, rolling, sliding, breaking nearly in half, had seemed in danger of falling fully into the gorge where the edge gave way. The Ship had slid and split, but it had not gone fully in. And there it lay to this day. The Ancients had tried again to move the Ship, so the stories said, but had been unable. Their beasts had fallen into the canyon and many of the Ancients themselves lay dead in the bottomless depths or crushed beneath the Ship. Then the plagues had come and most of the Ancients had died. None of their children had ever tried to move the Ship again. So it had lain on the edge of the canyon, visited once every four short years for the Sending. Ill returned to the crude lean-to and the smoldering dung fire the wine traders were making their rounds. This was the Night Before the Sending, a time to drink wine and eat and make love and rejoice in what life the gods had given to the men of Thisda. Since most of the trade goods were buried near the place where the famlykow had died, Joval had little with him to trade, other than a large sack of seeds and three of the knives for which he was most famous. The small-eyed wine traders, men from the distant north along the Great Inland Sea, had little use for the seeds from the farm of Joval Sona Ramon, but knives -- well, all men needed wildogs and B-cats and other men. A wineskin for each knife was a bargain for both Joval and the wine traders. They parted happy, wishing each other a good Sending, a true Receiving and many sons. brim, Joval drank the warm, bitter wine, smiling at the bite of it on his tongue, the burn of it as it went down his throat. Yes, it was good wine, worth his knives, he thought, and drank another gourd. Amalthea, Filis and even little Masai each had a gourd of the wine and smiled at the unfamiliar warmth of it in their stomachs. "This will be a good Sending," Joval said, drinking his third gourd, then wiping his mouth with the matted hair of the back of his hand. "I feel it within me," he went on. "The famlykow's death was a bad omen, but not as bad as I thought. No, all is well." And he finished the gourd and refilled it and passed it on to his wives. Somewhere near the tent of the Geriats, where the countless famlydogs barked in anticipation of the scraps from the coming feast, someone had begun to play a melody on reed pipes. Soon a stringed instrument that Joval could not identify joined in -- a voice picked up the words and they were strange, ancient, alien words that said: The option of the thirty-nine took the loneliness. Beside it, leaving just brown clay; The Men of Earth do not come out of their homes; Or like the local ether, sitting, looking. Oh, improbable, improbable escapades Under the stars; Thoughts, nakedness, alone; Our victory, our loss; Accepted, but not comfortable, A ny planet, carbon-based... T he words went on. Perhaps they had once had meaning, somewhere, somewhen, but not to Joval or his kind. "Come," he said, rising to his feet, slinging the half empty wineskin and a full one across his shoulder. "There is another song to sing and meat to eat and wine to drink. This is the Night Before the Sending." His two wives also rose, Amalthea quickly, Filis with something like uncertainty in her face, for this was the first Sending that she had attended as a married woman and she was somewhat unsure of herself and of how she should behave. "Don't worry," Amalthea whispered to her, just loudly enough for Joval to hear. "Our husband is good and loyal to the Way and this is the Night Before the Sending." Filis smiled uncertainly. "Masai," Joval yelled over his shoulder as he began to walk away from the camp. "Keep the fire going. You may drink from the other wineskin, but not too much." "Yes, father," the boy said obediently. Joval smiled to himself, remembering how it had been when he was a boy, how he had drunk too much wine and let the fire go out and crept down to the circle of light aroundthe tent of the Geriats to see what it was that the adults did on the Night Before the Sending. So it would be with Masai and it was well. For that is what a boy should do on the Night Before the Sending. How else was he to learn? Twigs and reeds and a dozen other kinds of combustibles had been piled before the tent of the Geriats and set afire. Near the flames there was bright, flickering light and undulating shadows and IF warmth that drove away the chill of the night, as did the wine which all were drinking. Long spits extended over the edges of the flames, skewering the skinned bodies of fatted famly dogs and goats and famlykows, their blood and fat dripping, sizzling into the flames. The spits were turned by the oldest wives of the Geriats -- withered, toothless old crones, their flat breasts flapping against their distended bellies as they moved. Insects flitted and the rich scent of roasting meat hung in the smoke above the flames, momentarily hiding the ripe, rancid odors of garbage and human and animal wastes that permeated the Place of the Sending. O NE by one those around the fire had put aside their vermininfested robes and blankets and stood as naked as they would on a warm autumn day. And they sang and drank wine and ate meat and made plans for the pairing. For some the planning stages were past; they had paired and the simple fondling, caressing games of adults had already begun, games that would lead to greater pleasures and perhaps to babies. Between the fire and the tent of the Geriats stood the great maypole of the Sending, a brightly painted and frankly sexual replica of the male organ, a phallic symbol to invoke the friendlier gods, asking them for a fruitful winter's harvest and many sons; the Time of the Sending was also the beginning of the growing season. And often the gods smiled, for Joval's crops were golden at winter's end and his both Amalthea and Filis would bear sons three and a half years hence when their time came to deliver children conceived on this Night Before the Sending. Old Gordon the Castrate limped painfully up to one of the roasting goats and tore off a chunk of meat with his clawlike hands. No one reproached him,for all knew that he was mad and suffered unspeakably from the great wounds in his abdomen and pelvis -- the wounds of a savage B-cat pack that had attacked his farm and killed all of his family but himself, and very nearly him. The other beggars and cripples, more sane and mindful of custom, waited until the old wives of the Geriats cut the meat with sharp knives and passed it around. Three men played instruments, two reed pipes and the stringed instrument that Joval had heard before. And half a hundred voices sang a crude song that spoke of the Paradise beyond the sky and the day when mfen would come from Earth to take them all to that wonderful place. Green are her valleys, green in the sun, A nd white are her tall mountain peaks; Blue are her oceans, reflecting the sky, A nd blue are her lakes and her creeks; White are the clouds that float in her sky. And black is the loam of her fields. Green are her prairies, green are her hills. And s weet and goodly their yields. Tall are her cities that rise in the sky. And straight are the highways between; Silver the craft that speed through the air, A nd pass oer the blue and the green. White is the sun that climbs in her sky, A nd white is her moon in the night; Red are her sunsets and red is her dawn. Golden and lovely and bright... A cross the fire Joval caught sight of the twisted face of Theo Sona Weyam. Theo had apparently already seen Joval and his family and his eyes seemed now to be fixed on Amalthea, whom he had lost so many years before. Any hatred that Joval had felt for Theo was gone now, and he raised his hand in greeting, but Theo turned away suddenly and vanished. Joval shook his head and ignored the incident. Someone called for Melinda, the youngest daughter of Hansford Sona, Martin's wife Gwel, to come before them and dance. But Melinda had been married to Frid Sona Turner the Midwinter before and was hesitant to dance before them all. "Frid," Joval calle#, seeing Melinda's husband standing near the huge fire, a wineskin upturned, "you will not prevent our seeing Melinda dance this Sending, will you?" "Joval!" Frid called back. "Come taste my wine. Knifemaker." Joval, followed by Amalthea and Filis, went to where Frid Sona Turner stood alon with two or three other men who had been watching a group of young women and speculating. "It is good to see you, Joval," Frid said. Frid Sona Turner of the Greatfamly Heath, a distant relative of Joval's, was a tali, strongly built man some ten or twelve years younger than Joval. A farmer and metal worker, Frid was a maker of plows as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was darkskinned and tattooed from chest to ankles in red and gold. A great livid scar ran down his left hip and thigh. Many years before he had been gored by a bull wildkow and still walked with a painful limp, though his strength was equal to that of any man. "And you, Joval answered. "How is Turner Sona Lyle?" ""My father is well enough for an old man," Frid said, "He is ill with aching bones and stayed behind this Sending. Not coming nearly broke his heart." "It is sad to see a man like Turner come to old age," Joval said, accepting Frid's offered wine. "Still, Frid, we would all like for Melinda to dance for us." "She is my wife now," Frid said laughing. "She dances for me." "It would do no harm for her to dance for us all," Joval told him. "Well -- " Frid pondered. "Well, IF I will allow Melinda to dance if you will allow Fills." "But I am no dancer," Fills objected, half stepping behind Amalthea as if seeking protection. "With beauty like yours, you must be a dancer," Frid said, something between a leer and a smile on his face. then at Amalthea, then back to Joval. Amalthea spoke first. "Joval, let her dance." The Knifemaker laughed. "Very well. Both Melinda and Fills shall dance, but Melinda first." He knew very well that Fills would probably not be asked to dance by Frid. Dancing was not what Frid had in mind for Joval's youngest wife. Frid turned to where Melinda stood a few meters away talking with her mother. "Melinda," he yelled, "it is decided. Joval insists. You shall dance." "But, Frid -- " Melinda started to call back. "Dance, woman!" Melinda shrugged, nodded farewell to her mother and strode to the edge of the fire where the men played their instruments. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, then smiled, shucked her burly robe and stood for a moment naked, silhouetted against the roaring fire. The young wife of Frid Sona Turner, called Melinda Dauta Gwel, was a rarity among the peoples of Thisda. Antique genes, dating back to the times of the Ancients, had risen during her conception, giving her a skin that was far fairer than most, hair that was golden and fine, bleached more golden still by Sun. Her eyes were large and liquid, with a strange, beckoning gray-green color and flashed with a teasing sensuality. No more than eighty-five years old, Melinda was Just now a grown woman, and her lush, sensual body, decorated with the tattoos of blue and yellow, had not yet earned the green stars of motherhood. She was a prize for which Frid had worked long and hard and paid a great price in famlykows. Alternately closing one nostril and then the other with her thumb, she blew her nose clear of ash and the smell of smoke, then breathed deeply and waited for the three musicians to decide among themselves what to play. Finally the music quickened, and the girl lgan to dance. "A lovely wife," Joval said. "True," Frid replied, though he was obviously not looking at his own wife, but at Joval's youngest. Turning up his deflated wineskin, Joval emptied it, tossed it to the ground, spat in the dust and pulled the stopper from the second. Turning to offer it to Amalthea, he saw that she was gone, and smiled. So it was on the Night Before the Sending. She would return to the camp before the first light of dawn. and that was as it should be. Having filled his mouth with wine from the second skin, Joval nodded to Frid and slipped away before Filis could turn and discover that he, too, was leaving. Filis would be fine, he thought, once she had adjusted. And Frid would be kind to her. M elinda danced savagely, sensually, with the untutored grace of one born to dancing, until she nearly collapsed with exhaustion. But Joval, the friend of her husDand and her father, Joval Sona Ramon, the Knifemaker, was there to hold her and offer her wine and sit silently beside her while she regained her breath"! 'Thank you, Joval Sona Ramon," she said slowly, teasingly formal as she spoke, though her eyes said that she was not displeased with the man that her husband had offered and would accept. "You dance wonderfully well, Melinda Dauta Gwel," Joval replied with the same false formalality. "Thank you again." Joval took a deep drink of the wine, felt his head begin to spin pleasantly, then handed the skin back to the naked girl. "Frid has had his eyes on that young wife of yours," she said after drinking, scratching at the back of her neck for a louse that had sunk one of its heads deep into her flesh. "And I have had my eye on that yoting wife of his," Joval answered, his desire for her already physically manifest. "So I gathered," Melinda said, glancing up, appearing coy and shy, though her hand fell upon his thigh. "There are too many people here," Joval said, though the crowd had now begun to diminish; couples, one after another, crept off into the semi-darkness of night and the light of Big Basta. Rising, Joval helped her to her feet, then led her around the tent of the Geriats, into its long, deep shadows and the nearest thing to total darkness available. Melinda paused for a moment to relieve heself, then went on with him. Twice, walking carefully, listening to the dwindling music and to faint sighs of pleasure, they were forced to avoid other couples who had preceded them, but soon they found a place to be alone, where none were within touching distance, at least. Joval spread his robe on ground that was growing colder by the minute and drank again from the wineskin. "You are a lovely woman, Melinda," he said, standing over her, looking down at the young, full body, the golden mass of hair falling across her shoulders and cascading down her back, the swelling of her breasts and the marks of her tattoos bearly visible in the half darkness. IF "Don't talk, Joval," she whispered in reply, pushing the wineskin away as he offered it. "I need no more wine." Joval dropped the skin to the ground and gently pushed her back against the robe that lay spread beneath her. Melinda's body was warm and soft, ripe for the loving of a man. And he found that she was very, very good at giving a man what he wanted. This he discovered more than once during the short night. IV the Day of the Sending, Joval arose with a painful head and loose bowels and the ache of fatigue in his legs. He had found his way back to camp before the coming of light, and had less than an hour of sleep before Amalthea shook him awake. "Rise, Joval. The Sending begins soon," she said. Joval rubbed his eyes, pulling the rough blanket around his shoulders for warmth, and twice slapped his bearded cheek to drive away the sleep. Masai and Filis, huddled together under the same blanket, still slept, snoring in rhythm. "Don't worry," Amalthea said, guessing Joval's concern, glancing over at the younger wife. "She pleased Frid and he her. Now eat and hurry. It is not seemly to be late." Between mouthfuls of fresh meat, half burned, half raw, Joval tried to ask Amalthea with whom she had spent the night, but she smiled and refused to tell him. Frustrated but not angry, Joval rose, kissed Amalthea lightly and went to the tent of the Geriats. Within the huge, ancient tent kneeled all of the adult men of Thisda who were able to attend while the Geriats prayed aloud to all the gods, asking particularly that the radio gods look kindly upon this Sending and grant them also Reception tomorrow. Then Theo Sona Weyam was called before the Geriats. The Radioman, a free citizen of the Greatfamly Innman, was as tall as Joval, though more slightly built; he was a man fast on his feet in a fight and quick to anger. One sign of that anger was a long, red scar that ran down the right side of his face, puckering his mouth and giving him a permanent grimace. That was the scar of the knife of Joval Sona Ramon, given Theo many years before when they had fought over the purchase of Amalthea Dauta Suzan. Joval had won that fight for Amalthea and Theo had apparently never forgiven him for it. to forget their feud at this Sending, when Tlieo assumed the holy function of Radioman. Theo slowly advanced toward the six Geriats who stood at the far end of the lent. Since the day had already grown hot, nearing # or # C, all the men had left their blankets and robes behind them with their families and were naked as they crowded into the tent. Only the six Geriats were dressed, as was the custom, in clothing that imitated as nearly as possible the clothing that the Ancients had worn when they first came to Thisda. O LD Robt Sona Dave, Geriat of Ihc Greatfamly Clegg and the Chief Geriat, wore the uniform of Starship Captain, for on this day and the next he ym Captain of the Ship. The other Geriats were dressed as First Officer, Simon Sona Christopher, Geriat of the Greatfamly Heath; Second Officer, Arn Sona Mark, Geriat of the Greatfamly Innman; Astrogator, Henry Sona Floyd, Dunagan; Engineer, Grego Sona James, Carter; and Damage Control Officer, Don Sona Rae, Geriat of the Greatfamly Bernard. A seventh uniform lay on the low table before them and this was the worn gray uniform of the Communications Officer. "Theo Sona Weyam," the Caplain said as the Radioman stepped before tlie table and took the position of humility, "you are the chosen Communications Officer for this Sending and Receiving. Do you understand this and your responsibilities?" "Yes, Captain," Theo answered ritualistically. "Do you have the Holy Manuals?" "Yes, Captain." Theo offered him the three worn books that he carried in his hands: Guide to the Operation of Subspace Radio Model AU-#-G, Revision IV; Basic Subspace Communications Theory; and Advanced Subnuclear Physics Simplified, "Have you studied these Manuals well and prayerfully?" "Yes, Captain. # "Are you prepared to Send and to Receive?" "Yes, Captain, the gods "Then I hereby appoint you Communications Officer of the Ship." Old Arn Sona Mark, the Second Officer, lifted the gray garments from the table and handed them to Simon Sona Christopher, First Officer, who in turn gave them to the Captain. "Communications Officer Theo Sona Weyam, here is your uniform. Wear it proudly." "I humbly thank you, Captain, and swear that my actions shall never disgrace this uniform." Theo rose, accepting the clothing, but did not put it on. Before he did so a long, elaborate ceremony of cleansing would be performc l. would remove the IF last traces of here and now from Theo and, in theory at least, make him into an Ancient. Joval had witnessed a number of times before, it had lost much of its magic for him. While it was taking place he allowed his mind to wander back to the farm where middle wife, Andre Dauta Sue, would be taking the young children out of the deep, cool burrow into the bearable warmth of early autumn. Young Peak, now more than a boy but less than a man, would be seeing his sixtieth autumn and winter, an age when a young male child learned of the ways of adults. Joval had taught him much: the times of planting; the ancient methods of dry-irrigation; the times of harvest; the forging of steel and the making of knives; how to read and write to better understand the mysteries of the Traditions and the Way and the old, old stories of their origins. And now, while his chest still ached with the pains of puberty, Andre would have begun teaching young Peak the ways of a man and a woman, the touch and feel, the arousing desire, the coupling and the fulfillment. That was as it should be, for there were no girls of Peak's age within many kilometers of the farm of Joval's family, and who else was there to teach the boy such things? So, Joval thought without jealousy, they would have awakened that morning. Peak and Andre, and enjoyed their bodies with each other, and then they would eat and set out to do their work. Soon they would begin to remove the long, sturdy reeds from their storage place and then take them and set them in the sockets of the foundation of the house., Jak and Fran and tiny Dave, as young as they were, would be helping Peak and Andre to raise the walls of their winter home. Later they would help gather thatch that would be used to form the roof of the hut which hopefully would keep out the autumn rains that would soon begin. When their labors were done they would sprinkle water for the gods and wait for Joval and the others to return from the Sending so that the fall planting could begin. After a while the cleansing ceremony was over and Theo, his back red from the scourging of supple, damp reeds, his body dripping sweat, donned the shapeless, ill-fitting uniform. Now he was the Radioman. "Let the Sending begin," said Robt Sona Dave, the Captain, and the slow procession started out of the tent toward the Ship, chanting an ancient hymn. E very third man carried a torch as they made their way into the darkness of the Ship, for the use of the Ship's precious power was not allowed until the Crew had assembled on the bridge. Then the Captain would order the Engineering Officer to give the bridge power -- and the incredibly ancient power ceils, somehow still working after all these ages, would give the bridge light and the subspace radio the pow.er that it needed to Send. Hot as it had become by now, perspiration beading on his naked skin, Joval felt a chill in the corridors of the Ship, the same chill that he had felt each time he had been within it. Here age and mystery met his knowledge of his own ignorance and the ignorance of all of his people. The Ancients had known so terribly much more than Joval and Theo and Robt and all the others could even imagine. How could they ever hope to Send? Or Receive? But it must be done, he told himself. This is the Way. There is no other. Forever. Amen. The Officers entered the bridge. The others assumed their places in line according to their age. Joval, being older than many, was allowed to enter the bridge, though he stood distant from the subspace radio position; through the press of bodies he could see little of what took place there. It did not matter. Jovafs seeing the actual Sending would make little difference. All that mattered now was Theo Sona Weyam. He had studied the Manuals well enough? Did he truly know how to Send and Receive? Would the gods allow it this time? The Captain, Robt Sona Dave, looking less old now, stood before the subspace radio and intoned a prayer that must have dated back to the time of the Landing or shortly after, for the words were strange and at times hardly prayerful: "For God's sake," Robt chanted, "let this damned thing work this time. All we ask is one brief contact with Earth, a moment..." F inally, when the prayer was done, Theo, his twisted mouth showing no expression, seated himself before the radio controls, said his own private prayer and asked the Captain to give him power. "Engineering, power for the subspace radio," Robt Sona Dave said loudly. His words were picked up by the man beside him, passed on to the next man and the next, out of the bridge and into the corridor, down to the last in the line, the youngest allowed within the Ship this Sending -- a downy-cheeked youth, his red and gold tattoos of manhood still raw and painful as he moved, his foreskin still a healing scar. The youth grabbed the words as they fell on his ears, turned and ran back down the dark corridors to the engineering department where he gave the message to Grego Sona James, who stood there by torch IF light, dressed in the uniform of the Engineering Officer. The Geriat, upon hearing the order, stepped forward, peered at the complex panel of switches through rheumy eyes, selected the one that was the most worn, flipped it into an upward position and said a short prayer. At that moment, back on the bridge, a single green light in the lower left hand corner of the subspace radio control board blinked to life. The Captain, after offering the power gods a short, ancient prayer, said to Theo Sona Weyam, "Mr. Communications Officer, please contact Earth and inform them of our difficulties." "Yes, sir," the Communications Officer answered in a ritualistic tone. Beside Theo Sona Weyam was a low, crude table upon which he had laid the three Manuals. One of the holy books, the one entitled Guide to the Operation of Subspace Radio AN-#-G, Revision IV, was open and Theo referred to it constantly as he began the sequence of adjustments that should begin the Sending. Despite the fact that he knew the Manual by heart and had studied every last surviving word each day for the past four years, Theo did not dare to rely on his memory alone during the Sending. One single misstep might so anger the radio gods that the Sending would not take place. F ive panel meters, registering the amount of power fed to each of the unit's five major sections from the power supply, showed life almost at once. Carefully Theo adjusted the knobs below the meters until the needle of each rested exactly at the center point. When the final meter was adjusted, the assembled men sighed; the first stage was completed and the gods were still smiling. The Sending had begun well. A row of toggle switches lay along the right side of the main transmitter panel, and though the lettering that had once identified them was worn away, an illustration in the Manual clearly labeled each of them. Following the procedure outlined step-by-step in the Manual, Theo went down the series of switches, flipping them upward, pausing until the corresponding green light came to life, then going on to the next. Transmitter Bank -- on. Automatic Frequency Selector -- on. Power Amplifier Loading -- on. Modulator -- on. Subspace Converter -- on. Stage two completed successfully and the gods praised, Theo went on to the third and final stage, the adjustment of the carrier strength and modulation levels. At last the sub-space radio's dials and meters told him that all was ready; oscillators within the supermicrominiature solid state and moly-level components were generating signals. The signals, amplified, heterodyned, stepped up in power and moved up in frequency, developed electromagnetic signals of tremendous power upon which the subspace, faster-thanlight waves would be impressed by the modulation conversion units. With a touch of his finger to a switch, electromagnetic energy would form on the cross of the hull antenna -- energy that would further engender subspace energy that would leap from the metallic surface at speeds far in excess of that of light, that could cross the long, long light-years to Earth in minutes. All was ready. "Captain," said Radioman Theo Sona Weyam, "all systems are go. The subspace radio is prepared to Send." "Proceed," said the Captain. the final button and with something between fear and elation in his eyes he slowly depressed the button and began to speak the ancient ritual of Sending into the microphone, the same words that had been spoken by the first Radioman so long before. "Colonial Starship Esanda calling Earth," Theo began slowly in a sing-song fashion. "This is Colonial Starship Esanda calling Earth. We have made a forced landing in the planetary system of UR-#. We were hulled by a meteor coming out of pseudospeed. Lost most of our reaction mass -- and we no longer have pseudospeed potential. Repeat, we no longer have pseudospeed potential. We are stranded." Many of the words were meaningless to Joval, though men had speculated upon their meaning for ages. "Pseudospeed," for example. What in all the universe could that be? "We're on one of the planets orbiting the Ko component of the binary star system; actually we're on a nearly E-type satellite of a Jovian world -- mass of something like .# Earth. The air is thin but breathable, but it's hotter than hell here. The planets orbit damned close to the primary. There seems to be no intelligent life here now -- but there once was, but it appears to have been wiped out when the other component of the binary, an A I star, came in too close some hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Theo paused to wipe his hands on his uniform trousers, then went on. "Damage to the ship in landing and a mutated local disease have decimated the crew and colonists. We don't know how much longer we can hold out." As he spoke the Radioman's voice rose in pitch trying to imitate the way in which those first frantic messages had been sent. "Earth, if you hear IF US -- for God's sake, help us. Get us off this damned place." And so the Sending went, the ancient words repeated, the ancient plea for help, for rescue. Time passed and the Sending continued. V L ate in the afternoon, far past the time of the Devouring, hunger and the most basic of his bodily needs got the better of Joval and he silently slipped out of the bridge, down the corridor and out of the Ship into the bright orange light of Sun. He made his way to where his family sat prayerfully watching the Ship, watching the violet flickering that played across the subspace antenna on the Ship's hull. "How does it go?" Amalthea asked as Joval sat down on the blanket in the shade of the lean-to. "Well enough," Joval said. "Theo has not made a single mistake so far. The gods should be pleased." "Good," his eldest wife said. "You must be hungry'" "I am." She opened one of the packs, took out a wrapped slice of dried famlydog meat and a small pile of treshen seeds. She filled her gourd half full of water. Joval nodded his appreciation. "Do you think it may happen this time, Joval?" asked Filis, blushing and ill at ease, refusing to meet his eyes, apparently still thinking of the events of the night before. "It may," Joval said, smiling at her and trying to tell her with his eyes that what she had done, what they had all done, was as it should have been, as the gods willed. "It is all going well," he went on. "We may contact Earth this time'" He remembered his father's having spoken the same words many years before and he suddenly had very little hope -- very little hope at all. in silence, his mind wandering aimlessly. "Amalthea," he said, once he had finished and had wiped his hands on the blanket upon which he sat, "where did you sleep last night?" "Nowhere," Amalthea answered. "I slept not at all." There was a teasing smile on her face. "You know what I mean," Joval said, annoyed but knowing that he had no right io be. "A wife is not required to tellher husband of the Night Before the Sending," Amalthea told him. "Yes, I know," Joval replied. "But you know with whom I was." "Yes, everyone knows where you were," Amalthea said. "Is Frid's yellowhaired wife as good at those games as the young men say she is?" time of the sending "That is none of ypur business!" "I know. I am just making a point." "Very well." Joval sighed. "Keep your secret." And with that he lay down within the lean-to and almost immediately fell asleep. When he awoke Sun had vanished and what passed for night on this side of Thisda had come, a pearly gray night illuminated by the reflected light of Big Basta. Famlydogs roamed the Valley of the Ship and howled forlornly at the sky. Wrapping his blanket around himself for warmth since it would be very cold soon, Joval told his family that he would return for breakfast about the time of the. rising of Sun, then went back to the Ship. lspeed potential. Repeat, we no longer have pseudospeed potential. We are... " Theo was repeating the words for the twentieth time when Joval resumed his place in the line on the bridge and looked again through the press of bodies at the glowing lights of the radio control panel. So it would go until tomorrow dawn, when the Sending would end and the Receiving would begin. So Joval stood and watched and unconsciously scratched at vermin that crawled out of his blanket and wondered and prayed and thought and waited. It was a good Sending. Pray it would be a true Receiving. slipped out of the Ship and had a quick breakfast as Sun rose above the horizon. Then, as quickly, they hurried back to the Ship so that they would be there when the Sending ended and the Receiving began. Moments after he had resumed his place on the bridge, Joval heard the Captain say: "It is time to end the Sending." Theo concluded the ritual words and turned to old Robt Sona Dave, his twisted mouth smiling. He knew he had done well. "Cease transmission. Go into receiving mode." Glancing at the open Manual, Theo's hands fell across the controls, snapping off the transmitter's switches, then snapping on those of the receiver portion. Receiver from Standby to Operation. Preselector adjusted. Band lator. RF Demodulator. Audio Demodulator. All on, operating, adjusted. For a few moments there was stark and total silence on the bridge. Men held their breaths and waited. Then the loudspeaker of the receiver came to life, snapping, crackling and roaring the strange, angry whispering of the radio gods. "Maxium audio gain," the Captain said. IF Theo adjusted a single control and the whispering roar became louder. M en had done all that they could do. Now it was the turn of the gods, but the gods did not choose to speak in the words of men -- not at first, at least. Joval grew very tired. One night of drinking and love-making with demanding Melinda, a second night of Sending and very little sleep in between were beginning to tell. Joval was not as young as he had once been. His eyelids grew heavy; his feet and legs ached; again he was hungry and thirsty and the waste fluids of his body demanded discharge. But he did not leave the bridge. No man leaves the bridge during a Receiving. That is the most crucial time of ail. No chances are to be taken. Fatigue finally became too much for him. He leaned back against the nearest bulkhead and let his eyelids flutter shut. He began sinking into a soft, pleasant, yet oddly uncomfortable blackness. The subspace radio's loudspeaker suddenly changed tone. The vague crackling whisper was drowned out by a strahge, unfamiliar squeal that rose in pitch until it hurt Joval's ears; then he could no longer hear it. Moments later came another sound -- words, human words! "'... for delivery to...on the...of albuti with... The squeal returned. The gasps of startled men filled the bridge. "The gods -- " a dozen voices said. "Earth -- " said another dozen. "Wait!" ordered the Chief Geriat. "Be silent!" The loudspeaker whispered and squealed and spoke again: "... items urgently needed... would suggest that... relay for Earth..." The holy word! Earth. It was Earth. It was a true Receiving! "... for immediate shipment The receiver squealed one final time, returned to the same monotonous whisper. White-faced, obviously shaken, old Robt Sona Dave gathered the four other Geriats on the bridge and took them as far away from the subspace radio position as possible, where they conferred in whispers. Theo remained at his position, looking directly at the radio panel, something like triumph on his face. the bridge, shared that triumph, but only for a short time. Then questions and doubts began to creep into his mind. The words had been strange and garbled and broken, only half understandable, but he could not help but speculate upon them. It must be Earth, he thought, or at least related to Earth since that holy name had been spoken. But... well, did it really sound as if the speaker were talking to them, to the men of Thisda? Were there not others among the distant starworlds? Had not the Ancients said so? And did they, these other men, not talk among themselves by means of subspace radio? Could it be, really, that they were just hearing fragments of such a conversation? Might it be just that? Joval, as much as any of the others, wanted to believe that this was a true Receiving, but it seemed to him that what had just taken place was not enough. Perhaps they would hear that voice again, and perhaps then it would truly be speaking to them. The Geriats stood at the far end of the bridge, talking in their low whispers and shaking their heads slowly. One by one they returned to the radio position. "Brothers," said Robt Sona Dave, speaking above the whispering noise of the radio, "listen to me. What we have have just heard was, in truth, a manifestation of the gods. We have been witness to a miracle." He paused. "But not our miracle." There were moans and then stunned silence as the truth began to sink in. Joval knew that he was right. It was no Receiving. "Though none are alive who remember it, this has happened before," the Captain was saying. "The Book of the Old Men tells us of three such times that words have been heard like this. But they were not true Receivings. The words were not meant for us. We must wait. Perhaps, since the gods have shown their goodness, they shall -- " Joval did not listen any longer. He wanted to weep, but all he could do was stare at the lights of the radio control panel and wait for the Receiving to be over. No one on Earth cared about them. The gods were capricious and malicious and a man who waited for a Receiving was a fool. D ay passed into night and night gradually moved toward morning. The radio's loudspeaker whispered and chattered and roar and clicked, but it did not speak again in the words of men. Theo Sona Weyam peered ever more intently at the dials and meters and lights of the panel before him, his hands beginning to twitch nervously. An awkward cough began in his throat and twice the youth at the end of the line was forced to go get him water. Dark rings formed under his eyes and his twisted mouth seemed to move without his realizing it. The Radioman's time was running out. And he knew it. The gods had teased him, laughed at IF him, and would ultimately punish him for attempting to Receive. So it had always been. Old Robt Sona Dave, leaning on his cane when he stood but more often sitting as the time drew by, showed some of the symptoms displayed by Theo, though there was nothing of personal fear in them. It was just another disappointment in a long life of disappointments. It was not likely that he would ever live to see another Sending. So be it. At last the Time of the Receiving was over. Awkwardly coming to his feet, aided by two of the other Geriats and supported by his cane, he said, "Mr. Communications Officer, you -- " "No!" Theo Sona Weyam cried suddenly. "No, please, wait a while longer, just a -- " "Mr. Communications Officer," the Captain began again, "you may now turn off -- " Theo suddenly came to his feet and stood defensively before the radio. "Give me more time. We shall Receive. I swear it." "You shall do as I say," Robt Sona Dave said sternly. "Wait, for the sake of the gods, please -- " The Old Chief Geriat's hand snapped out, the back of his knuckles struck across the scarred face of the Radioman. "Turn off the receiver," he said slowly, his anger barely controlled. "The Time of the Receiving is over." Slowly and painfully, like a man dying -- as in a way he was -- Theo Sona Weyam turned back to the subspace radio and slowly snapped one switch after another. The lights went dark. Torches were kindled and the procession was formed. One by one, led by the Captain, they filed out of the Ship, slowly, sadly. They had failed. VI T he beginning of the ceremony that marked the end of the Sending and Receiving took place before the tent of the Geriats, above the cold, dead ashes of fire and below the great fertility symbol. All the men and women who had come to the Sending drew close, forming a huge semicircle around the spot, knowing the inevitable outcome and knowing, too, what would happen that day before the Devouring of Sun. The Captain announced in the words of ancient ritual, that Earth had not answered. Then he ordered Theo Sona Weyam to come before him. The Radioman had aged a dozen years in the past hour. His eyes were blank and empty; his body was limp, his mouth twitched and his movements faltered as he walked to his assigned place before the Geriats. Starting in the next issue of IF Colin Kapp's new novel!... a missile fired across the stars to kill a man -- eons before he was born... "You are no longer Radioman of the Ship," Robt Sona Dave said. "Remove your uniform." Theo nodded vaguely and began loosening the buttons of the uniform blouse. After a few awkward moments he stood naked before the others, no different from anyone else. He was no longer a demigod, but just a man -- a man who had failed in a contest with the gods and would have to pay the price of failure. "Theo Sona Weyam of the Greatfamly Innman," the Chief Geriat began slowly, "the gods have shown disapproval of you, have deemed you unworthy bf being Radioman of the Ship. Have you anything to say for yourself?" Theo shook his head slowly, then finally managed, "No, sir." After a few moments of awkward silence, he fought out the words: "The gods know, Robt, I tried. I tried." "So be the will of the gods," Robt said, ignoring him. "Return the Manuals." Theo handed him the three tattered books. "Theo Sona Weyam, you have one final service to perform for the Ship," the Chief Geriat said. cold wind blowing along his naked back and seeping in through the flesh to his bones. No, it couldn't be that, he thought. Not Theo... "Yes, Geriat," Theo said brokenly. "Though you have failed, you have at least earned the right to suggest for us your replacement. Name us a man, good and true." For a few moments a chilled, frightened hush fell over the assembled men, the beginnings of which Joval had felt moments before. And Joval knew that he had a right to fear more than most, for he well knew that Theo Sona Weyam was no friend of his. Theo's almost inanimate eyes slowly scanned the crowd, stopping on one man, then moving on to another, picking face after face, then rejecting each. At last the eyes came to Joval; theystopped and peered deeply and long, bitter with hatred. IF "I suggest Joval Sona Ramon, the Knifemaker, as the next Radioman," Theo said slowly, something resembling life returning to his voice. The words were like the repeated blows of a hammer, but there was nothing Joval could do to avoid them. This, too, was as it must be. The Geriats stepped back away from the assembly, huddled for a moment, glanced over their shoulders at Joval and scratched their bearded chins. Somewhere off in the distance a woman sobbed, loudly and brokenly. "Joval Sona Ramon of the Greatfamly Heath, called the Knifemaker," the Chief Geriat said at last, returning to his place, "you have been suggested and approved. Come forward." Fear and a growing red hatred for Theo Sona Weyam filled J oval's breast, though there were no true thoughts in his mind. With great effort, he slowly walked to where the Geriats stood. "Accept your duty and these Manuals," he heard the Captain say as if from a very long way off, as if in a dream. "Study them well. Four years hence you shall Send Numbly, mechanically, Joval accepted the Manuals and fought to hold himselFerect. "Now, brothers, the gods pass judgment on Theo Sona Weyam," Robt Sona Dave said, though Joval hardly heard the words. fore the Ship, and the thoughts in his mind were vague, random and incoherent. Masai had watched his father with awe and fear, for now he was something more than just a man, something more than just his father. Filis had tried to speak, but had been unable; pained sobs had broken her words and she had covered her face and turned away. And Amalthea -- she had tried to comfort him, until that something that was in her mind and on her face had gotten the better of her... "Joval, my husband," she had said slowly, her voice husky, "I did James White's new novel!... men and women forced to survive in the realm of purest physics... not know he hated you so. I thought he -- he had forgotten it as you have. Joval, had I known... Forgive me for the Night Before the Sending. I did not know he hated you." She had turned away, hiding her tears, and Joval, only half comprehending, had turned to the Ship to watch what would happen there. Soon, he knew, the. pain would pass. He still had four years to live, to work, to study, to learn all that he could about the Sending and the Receiving and perhaps -- just perhaps -- he would be successful. He knew that there was an Earth. He had heard its name on the subspace radio. It was not a myth. It was real. Perhaps he could be the one. He glanced down at the books in his hands. One was the Operating Manual, and it was the most worn. In fact, the back was missing, as were a number of pages, though how many he could not tell. He looked at the last torn page, unconsciously reading the final lines: Since subspace energy is broadcast in a very narrow beam -- propagated as a beam of one meter in diameter and spreading no more than # X #-# kilometers per kilometer -- proper orientation of the ships integral hull antenna is of supreme importance over large interstellar distances. Should the antenna not be properly aimed, it ,, , A nd there the lines ended. What more the Manual had said, Joval could not even guess, and perhaps it was not important. But he would learn as well as he could. Someone ages before -- probably one of the Ancients with their marvelous writing instruments -- had scribbled a marginal note on the page, a scribble that Joval painfully deciphered. "The spread of the beam from UR-#-#-I-A to Earth should be no more than # X #-# kilometers. By my figures the power received on the Lunar grid would be about .# microrandals. This should be sufficient for reception -- if we could just get the damned thing oriented." Joval shook his head with incomprehension. He would learn. He would have to learn. Then he looked up at the Ship and the small, distant form of Theo Sona Weyam who was now taking his place atop the Ship's hull. Carefully the ex-Radioman was moving to his assigned spot, the very center of the bright metallic strips of the antenna. The Geriats had already filed into the Ship, taking their positions for this one last ceremony before the beginning of the Trading. Now, Joval thought vaguely, the Engineer, old Grego Sona James would be feeding power to the bridge, and the Captain, Robt Sona Dave, would be seating himself before the radio. Now he would begin IF flipping switches with the practiced ease of half a lifetime, building power, preparing to assist the gods in their judgment. The assembly began a prayer for the lost soul of Theo Sona Weyam, who had failed. What followed could not have lasted the hours it seemed, but only minutes. Theo took the position of prayer. A sparkle of violet light built up around him. The Final Sending began -- brief seconds, but enough for the will of the gods. T he antenna glowed brightly. Theo jumped to his feet, screamed and flung his arms skyward as if asking help from the gods who had condemned him. His nakedness seemed to hang in space for a moment -- then crumple, bursting into flames. His body was consumed in moments. Joval stood looking at the violet flickering that played across the antenna and rose into the sky. It was a thin, faint line that rose toward where Big Basta hung directly above the Ship; the Man-in-theSky was now at the point of Devouring Sun. The subspace waves moved away from Thisda toward the huge planet it circled -- straight, true, direct -- a meter-wide beam of energy that would end in the gaseous envelope and the rocky core of the monster world above. And as Sun vanished and the sky began to grow dark with the Devouring, Joval Sona Ramon, the Knifemaker, Radioman-elect, scratched at an insect bite and wondered what was the significance of that.  the Sheraton Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal Speaker: Keith Laumer. For information: SanD Meschkow, # Larch wood Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #.  European Science Fiction Convention. Trieste, Italy. To be held in conjunction with the Trieste SF Film Festival. Membership: #, attending; #, Tony Lewis, # Unity Ave., Belmont, land Sapiro, Box #, University Sta#AA, Melbourne, Victoria #; O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Convention address: Eurocon #, Case!la Postale #, #, Venezia, Italy. Send membership money via individual agents listed above. Across fho galaxy fho two racos of man soaght to dostroy oach othor -- fo provo fhoir humanity! I A ll nine at the meeting were 'identifiably in uniform. But a certain informality prevailed, peculiar to final briefings where everyone except the senior officer -- who was not going on the operation -- knew he or she might not return. This briefing was also unlike others in that the eight who faced General Print were in a sense only two. The four men were identical to the tenth decimal place. Even in their casualness they were the same -- all four had released the top two hooks of their tunics and all had thrown the left leg over the right knee. Tall and lean, each had close-cropped, prematurely graying hair. They were an amalgam of many races, white, brown, red, yellow and black, the result being, as often happened when races mingled, that they were at once striking and singularly handsome. The four girls were also identical, but not to infinity. Their uniforms were not quite uniform. One wore her tunic, two their underblouses and the fourth a red sweater which looked like a gesture of defiance coupled with the green uniform trousers. General Print said, "This, of course, is a unique project. There has never been one like it and there will never be another. Unless your descendants -- " "If any," one of the girls murmured, not loudly but audibly. The four men, as one, turned their heads to stare repressively at her. "We certainly hope there will be descendants," said the general. "We are hoping that on your return the four women will be..." He coughed awkwardly. Like many old soldiers. General Print could talk baldly and coldly of death, but was embarrassed by the processes of birth. He forced himself to go on. "The four women should -- on return to Eden -- be pregnant. What is your reaction?" The girl who had spoken before said, "You're asking quite a lot. General. At this moment, we are all pure and unsullied." The general would have replied seriously, but all four girls giggled. He said stiffly, "Am I to take it -- " One of the other girls said,' "Nevertheless, the proposition does interest us. Imagine being ordered to be a bad "girl for the good of one's race." General Print said coldly, "I won't make it an order. What must be agreed, however, is the matter of command. One of the men said, "Wil. It must be. He is the girls' father." A girl said, "We've no objection to Wil's being in charge of his side of the operation, but we have to make the big decisions." The general nodded. "No argument about that. Wil and the other Directors can advise, but you girls must take every .major decision. The next thing to be decided is which of you will be the senior -- " A chorus of protest rose. One said, "It won't work that way. One of us can't be placed over the others." General Print said doubtfully, "If you agree on that I suppose I must accept it. Now for the long view -- total success would mean your return with the information we want and particularly with the... with the other item we want -- and no casualties on either side. But I can't give you deHnite orders. One of you, perhaps all of you, may have to kill. But kill only in absolute necessity." After a long pause, he said again, "Absolute necessity. We are not at war. We don't want to be at war." Wil said, "General, my understanding is that it has always been our intention to -- " "On our own terms, in a chosen location, in our own time. Please be very clear on this. To have war forced on us as a result of this operation would mean failure. It might also mean disaster." The general then felt it was obligatory for him to make a final speech. "I don't suppose I'll be alive when you come back," he said. "I'll never know if this operation will be Eden's greatest triumph or greatest disaster. Perhaps none of you will know either -- although disaster can be achieved in a very short time, triumph could take centuries.One more thing I must tell you. Certain information about Eden and about yourselves has been denied you. It has been removed from your memories, because it is essential that the people you are going to meet should never learn it." The four men and the four girls were regarding him with new interest. Several started to speak. He held up his hand. "You must realize," he said in gentle reproof, "that this was not done lightly. However, the circumstances you may encounter are unimaginable. It may become necessary for you to know this very thing which has been deliberately kept from you. It has therefore been placed as a locked memory in Pariss's mind." Three of the girls turned to look at the fourth as if they could read the secret in her face. Pariss herself merely looked surprised. "If necessary," said the general, his voice sinking, growing husky with fatigue, "the rest of you together or any one of you -- or Pariss herself -- will be able to break the seal. You can guess how." He stood up and forced a smile. "That's all. And if I may borrow a phrase from the people you will be moving among, good lucky attacked. The Terran Defense Commission, which had set it in space, armed and manned it, did not regard as very likely the eventuality that it ever would be. One of ten mammoth fortresses miles beyond Pluto (the similarity in name had caused confusion many times and would continue to do so), it was not as much a guardian of the Solar System as a warning. The Adamites were not fools. The Terran Defense Commission relied quite cheerfully and confidently on one facet of Adamite philosophy and psychology -- to the Adamites, defeat was death, although death was not necessarily defeat. Any Adamite attack had to be an Adamite victory or it would not be undertaken. Make an Adamite victory impossible and you prevented the attack. Adamites and Terrans were not precisely enemies. But they were not precisely friends either. Both claimed to be the original, the only genuine article, the "real people." It was tacitly assumed that the human race could not evolve and had not evolved independently from scratch at opposite ends of the galaxy. Therefore, said the Terran group of colonized worlds, far back in history we must have had an interstellar civilization which colonized Eden. Therefore, said the Adamites, in a time before our written history, we must have colonized Earth. Being emotional -- or at the very least political -- these claims ignored anthropology or twisted it to predetermined ends. Eden had a head start in that their main planet was actually called Eden... Didn't the Terrans themselves have legends of a Garden of Eden? One day a neighbor of a great man in Earth's history, Abraham Lincoln was called to his door by the noise of children weeping. Lincoln was walking with his two IF small sons, who were both crying their eyes out. "What's the matter with the boys, Mr. Lincoln?" the neighbor asked. "Just what's the matter with the whole world," replied Lincoln sadly. "I've got three walnuts and each wants two." The galaxy was the three walnuts. And Earth and Eden each wanted two. T 'HE Fort Plato night checker saw the girl the moment she emerged on the green. His eye was drawn to the scanner frame by the movement of her vivid purple dress against the lush green of the grass. Since the windows of the checkpoint overlooked the green he left the scanners and went to the window. She was half running, half dancing. In the one-seventh Earth gravity her long full skirt whirled ecstatically about her. The checker, who was young, caught his breath. She was beautiful. Below the window was a duplicate set of alarm buttons. The checker's finger sought one, found it and hovered over it. The girl in the purple dress kicked off her shoes, spun twice and sank gracefully to the grass, her long skirt settling slowly in k perfect circle about her. She was breaking no regulation and represented no danger whatever. save to the checker's peace of mind. BUit was the checker's job to report and query anything out of the ordinary. After a moment he took his finger away from the button. Ten days earlier, after the sensor reported a ship passing within five scan showed that the ship was a war cruiser, he had given the alarm -- not a red alarm, merely a blue. Nevertheless, even a blue alarm was a matter for General Morrison himself. The general had come to stand by silent and watchful, until it turned out that reported herself to the checker on the previous shift. The general had erupted. He had been only a little unfair. Checker Alan Stewart, not having been told about the cruiser, had acted correctly. But Checker Alan Stewart should have been told about the cruiser -- what, the general had asked, was the use of having a bloody checker if-he didn't check, but simply panicked and stabbed every alarm button in sight the moment he saw any bloody thing? Checker Alan Stewart was sensitive. There remained, however something a little strange about the girl, something he could not put his finger on. Stewart went back to the scanners to take a closer look. I F HE wanted to he could spy on any of the five thousand men, women and children in Fort Plato imany of its fifty thousand rooms, offices, halls, cellars, bathrooms, corridors, stairways, armories or turrets. But no one of a peeping tom inclination had ever been made even a deputy relief assistant emergency checker, naturally. The checker was not a sentry. His function was rather that of a nightwatchman. Fort Plato, like most space stations, was run on a twelve-hour rather than a twentyfour-hour basis. The girl of course would be a night worker, a nurse or a technician seeking the deserted green for relaxation during a short break. Unwritten law prevented the checker from being a peeping tom. But a girl openly sunning herself on the green, under the direct view of the checkpoint windows, was as public as a noticeboard. On one of the scanners he brought her up to lifesize, half a meter from his face. She was even more beautiful close up than from a distance. Her beauty was exotic. Her cheeks were lean, her eyes gray and alert. Her eyebrows were thick and black and her dark hair, though neat, was quite short and not glamorous. The sunlight which bathed her had taken nine hours, twenty-five minutes and thirty-one seconds to reach her. It had had to be collected and focused on the green in order that she, far beyond the orbit of cold Pluto, could enjoy conditions similar to those on a sunny lawn on Earth. Above the green was the blue dome, scarcely distinguishable from a cloudless sky on Earth. In the center was what looked like the sun. It was time for a routine check. Sweeping the girl from the screen, Alan Stewart played a silent concerto on his buttons. All was exactly as he expected. The sensor purred and clicked somnolently. Outside Fort Plato no human beings were within its range. He strolled back to the window. The girl was standing up, putting her hand to the side fastenings of her dress. She was going to take it off. Stewart's temperature rose. She took it off. Stewart gulped. As she lay back oh the green, closing her eyes, he once again sensed the strangeness of her. His vague feelings never reached the point of uneasiness or suspicion. There had been a change of personnel when the supply ship called three weeks earlier. He took it for granted that she had arrived at that tim. Her sunmini was anything but exotic. Indeed, in its precise minuteness it was thoroughly conventional. His imagination was running away with him. H reached out to sweep her from the screens. IF Then he stopped. The girl had a scar on her abdomen. It was a tiny scar, and would have been imperceptible but for the fact that she had turned to lie on her side and the light struck her obliquely. That was an appendectomy scar. Stewart had no doubt of it. He had formerly been a hospital orderly and had seen such scars on the bodies of old people. The operation was now obsolete. Surgery, at any rate surgery in the sense of cutting the body open and blundering about inside it, was no longer necessary in the treatment of appendicitis and nobody under the age of forty had ever had an appendectomy. This girl was obviously under the age of forty. In a flash of insight, belated but comprehensive, he put a score of things together and his finger stabbed at Key #. The sirens, flashing lights, buzzers and bells of a red alarm were heard for the first time in Fort Plato. Less than five seconds later, the cacophony was shockingly augmented by the shrill whistle that meant the alarm was tod late -- the fort had already fallen. The checker knew the girl was a decoy who had played a part in making pdssible the incredible fall of Fort Plato. And he was the criminal who had let a pretty girl divert him from his duty. II gale on the planet Outward made a gale on Earth seem like a mere climatic fit of temper. Earth gales did not suddenly cease or instantly explode into insane, murderous rages -- Earth winds gusted, but conditions retained some semblance of consistency and could therefore be predicted up to a point. Gales on Outward were consistent only in being worse than expected most of the time, no matter how pessimistic the expectation! Fred Manvin was therefore about to close the gate of Camp Eleven and gratefully seek the comfort of his cellar, since there was no longer any possibility of traffic on the road from the west. Any mole that had missed the warnings would have turned off the road and dug in to wait out the weather. Then he stared. Clinging together desperately, two figures in white galesuits were coming along the road on foot. Their danger was considerable, although they were only some fifty meters from the gate. A gust might at any moment lift them and dash them to their deaths. As he peered through the flying dirt and dust, the wind somehow got a finger into one of the strangers' tunics and tore it away in a split second. It flew high in the air and disappeared. Galesuits were supposed to be proof against ripping, but in the Hnal analysis nothing was proof against an Outward gale. Perhaps because of the fusillade of tiny fragments flaying his naked back, perhaps because of the sudden chill, the man lost his balance and was dashed to the ground. He was saved from being bowled along it only by the desperate clutch of his companion. The two were now only fifteen meters from the gate. The nearly .naked man tried to get up but could not. A leg and an arm seemed to be damaged. Vocally consigning the regulations to hell, Fred Manvin went out and dragged the two inside. One of them, he established in the course of his ungentle handling, was a girl. He tripped the gate switch and hauled them . into the gatehouse, then down to the cellar. The man was bleeding from scores of small cuts caused by flying dust and tiny fragments. His left arm and his ankle were broken. The cellar was warm and starkly comfortable, though small. It was so well insulated that not a sound could be heard of the gale raging outside. Fred looked the man over first. He was forty or so, his dark hair graying at the temples. Naked to the waist, he was a fine figure of a man, powerful though slight. Blood streamed down his hairless body to his tight pants, but the many cuts were superficial and the arm fracture was a simple one which Fred, a general handyman, would have no difficulty in setting. The ankle was worse; there was a bone broken in the foot. Too, the man's head had been smashed against the road and, although conscious when he reached the cellar, he slumped senseless when Fred lowered him into a chair. "Flare," Fred said. "You do it." The girl took off her goggles. "What's that?" "Fire a flare," said Fred, bending over the injured man. "Certainly, if you'll tell me how." "Go up the stairs again and -- never mind. Sit down and don't bother me." Verne checked herself. She said coolly, "You fire the flare. I'll look after my father." Sal Slent was not, in fact, her father. He was her uncle. "You okay?" Fred asked. "I think so. Bruises, perhaps." She took off her helmet and tunic and Fred noticed that she was beautiful. He was not interested. Fred's wife was as massive as himself and skinny creatures like this girl seemed to him to belong to another race. "I'm Verne," she said. "My father's Sal Slent. I can look after him. I know what to do." "I guess I'll do this myself," said Fred. "Water over there. Wash all IF your dust off. You know what'll happen if you don't." Verne, probably the most selfreliant of the four girls, was annoyed at being dismissed as useless. However, it might be dangerous to say anything; she might reveal ignorance of things she ought to know. She ran cold water from a tank into a plastic basin, found a bar of hard yellow soap and washed her face and hands, wondering what the gatekeeper had meant when he had said. You know what'll happen if you don t... As her chill wore off she found out. The flying sand and dust had penetrated everywhere, into her hair, her galesuit and even her boots. She began to itch. She recalled references to "the itch" in radio messages their ship had picked up. The very soil was inimical to humans in this hostile world. F red was stripping Sal and cleansing his skin with tissues from a box. He'd be all right after ten days in bed, Fred said, though he'd hobble for a while longer. Finished at last, he put another chair under Sal's feet and propped him against the table. "Sleeping now," he said. "We'll leave him in peace. Now I'll try a flare, though it probably won't do any good." Verne wanted to ask about the absence of underground passages, of a phone, a radio, -- or at least a flashing alarm beam on the roof. Obligingly, unasked, Fred gave her part of the answer. "We extended the boundary last week. Needed more space. Of course you have to build the fence first, then develop the ground inside. Now tell me -- what were you doing out there?" "We weren't out there for fun," she said coldly. "Our mole toppled into a bog. We were lucky to get out." "Oh, the marsh? I know it. But hell, it's fifty meters off the road. You were crazy to drive fifty meters off the road." "There was rock the mole couldn't dig into." "Sure as hell there's rock, but it's only a short stretch. You should have kept close to the road." With visible restraint Verne said, "Thank you very much. Your advice comes a little late -- but they say better late than never." Fred frowned, trying to work that out. He decided it had been meant as a joke.and grinned. "Well, no harm done -- except you'll never see your mole again. The marshes on this hellish planet have never yet given back anything. Like some coffee?" "Yes, please." After all, despite their ordeal, despite Sal's injuries, despite her ignorance -- which might have made a keener observer than Fred Manvin suspicious -- all had gone reasonably well so far. Sheand Sal were in. Their part of the operation had started on a fairly successful note. Fred had told her himself that they would never see their mole again. It would not occur to him to doubt that the mole had ever existed. several in Jupiter's orbit, although far from the planet. At full efficiency, ships were capable of operating impudently within the mighty powerfield. Often, however, they were at much less than full efficiency and there had been many nasty accidents. The General Purposes stations in clear space were far more useful in an emergency than the stations on Jupiter's moons. Hugh Suyang, the commander of Station #, awoke to find his station no longer his. The last thing he could remember was going to bed in a normal and routine fashion. A certain tightness behind his eyes, a vague consciousness of the passage of considerable time, enabled him to guess that while asleep he had been drugged or gassed. When he opened his eyes in his tiny cabin, he saw a tall, lean man and a beautiful dark girl both in green uniforms which he did not recognize. "Pleased to meet you. Commander Suyang," said the man courteously. "I am Director Far Slent and this is my daughter Pariss." The circumstances of the Station # operation were different from those of Fort Plato and the pioneer settlement on the planet Outward. Hugh Suyang grasped the essential fact at once. "You're Adamites," he breathed. Director Slent nodded. "But please don't take precipitate action, Commander," he said. "In fact, please don't try to take action at all. The station is entirely in our hands. There are twenty-one of us and seven of you, giving us three to look after every one of you. You have all been disarmed, naturally, and we are all heavily armed. Appreciation of these facts -- " "Is it war?" Hugh asked bluntly. "No," said Far. "It is not war. I do not think it will ever be war. Call it research." Hugh would have liked to rise but he slept naked and the girl showed no sign of going. "I'll be very pleased to call it research," he said. "Pariss, do you mind handing me a glass of water? My mouth seems to be full of sand. Effects of the gas, no doubt." He saw respect in the eyes of the girl, who was impressed by his way of taking the situation. "You could have killed me," he said, sipping the water, "Tell me. IF what chance do I have of reaching my three score and ten?" Their slight puzzlement indicated that the reference was unknown to them, which was not surprising since there had been comparatively little contact between Terrans and Adamites. Biblical references could not be expected to mean much to them. Yet they understood the sense. "A good chance," the girl finally said, "if you don't try to be a hero." Far Slent explained further, "We want the station to run normally. Possibly you or one of your six colleagues might, in the next few weeks, get out a message, a warning, an alarm. We must warn you -- if that happens we will kill you all. Otherwise, when we go we shall leave you as we found you." "You speak our language well." Womanlike, the girl asked, "What did he say wrong?" Hugh smiled. "On the contrary, he was too correct. 'We shall leave you -- ' We don't louse up our syntax with too much grammar." "I think I like you," said the girl. "Fine, may I have my station back?" "Adamite humor," said Far pensively, "is not quite the same as Terran humor. That is one of the things we must study." "If you won't give me my station back -- is it too much to ask how you took it away?" "I will tell you this because it may make you a little more careful, a little less impulsive. First, your entire detection system is useless against our ships." "That I could have guessed," Hugh murmured. "Setond, we did, as you assumed, use gas to knock all of you out. We have a gas that is odorless and quick-aqting. You can't expect me to tell you more than that." No, thought Hugh. They would hardly tell him what new, special, secret weapon they had in reserve. Saying the station had been taken over by the use of gas was like giving cause of death as want of breath. What really mattered was left unexplained. "Third," said Far Slent, "what has happened here is part of a fourpronged operation. There are three other independent parts." "I see," said Hugh, not seeing at all. "I'm telling you this because if the alarm were given here," Far went on, "the three other echelons might be prejudiced. And what is essentially a peaceful operation might flare into violence and bloodshed. It could even start a Terran-Adamite war. And the responsibility would be yours." Hugh laughed. "Someone once said, 'This animal is wicked. It defends itself when attacked.' I'd better warn you. Director Far Slent -- and you, Pariss -- we're liable to be wicked like that." Far was going to say sonething, but when Pariss gestured quickly he remained silent. Hugh was interested. Could it be that the girl was the boss? M unch EN was the latest of many cities on Earth to have the dubious distinction of housing the UN headquarters. Geographically it had a better claim than most. It was within easy reach of all European and African members. The mighty American and Eastern powers had to come halfway, symbolically rather than physically, to meet here. The man and the girl who called at the vast Personnet Building, near the Hofgarten, were surprised and a little uneasy at finding themselves rapidly shuffled from one official to another, each of a little more consequence than the last and each more shrewd and penetrating. What sobered them most was the fact that they, unlike the other three pairs, had a specific job to do, the most important of the whole operation. If the organization of the Personnel Building were throughout as efficient as it appeared, they might find it difficult or even impossible to steal what they wanted. The last official to see them was a woman. They did not have to repeat their story. She already had the details before her. "I'm Miss Heilbron," she said. "You are Don Slent and daughter Gilen, natives' of Maribis. Miss Slent, would you kindly walk about the room for a few moments?" Gilen did as she was told, careful to copy the slight sliding movement of Maribisan women, cautious but not ungraceful. Her cheap Terran clothes -- black jeans and a lace shirt -- were newly bought. They did not suit her. Her hips were too wide for pants and her breasts too emphatic for the see-through lace. The poor choice was deliberate -- she and Don were supposed to look like country cousins. I should have thought," said Miss Heilbron, "you were Adamites." "We have more contact with the Adamites than any other Terran colony has," said Don. "I am aware of that. But your daughter gives me the impression of an Adamite acting like a Maribisan rather than the other way around." Gilen tried desperately to calm herself. The strenuousness of her effort defeated its objective. She was, she knew, the most highly strung of the girls, the least selfreliant. It seemed sheer madness at that moment that she rather than Verne or Tomi had been chosen for this most vital part of the operation. "I've seen Adamite women only twice," she said. "They were in uniform. They're smaller than we on average. They IF age prematurely." Recklessly, because this woman had to be diverted somehow, she went on: "If you. Miss Heilbron, were an Adamite you'd be quite old." Miss Heilbron was a woman after all and the statement did not please her. She was sixtyish, attractive and in the prime of life. She might not show a sign of age for another thirty years. "Do feel free to be perfectly frank," she said. "It makes a pleasant change from the tact of people who don't live on the frontiers. You, Mr. Slent, are going gray. Adamites might do that at an early age, perhaps?" The situation was not improving. "Yes," said Don readily. "You must remember that Terran life expectancy rose significantly only recently. The Adamites don't appear to have achieved this advance as yet." "Interesting," said Miss Heilbron. "We'll come back to it. Meantime, you seek employment here as experts on Maribis. Why?" They had a ready answer. Don said ruefully, "We are not clever people, I suppose. A small piece of good fortune at home enabled me to bring my daughter to see the Mother World. I underestimated expenses. We have dipped into the money which was to provide our return fare and must take jobs to make up the balance." "You propose, I see, to work only for a month or so. Maribis has few dealings with UN, you know." Don knew this very well. Their cover had been chosen because the Adamites' pooled knowledge of Maribis was greater than that of any other Terran settlement, and because the chances were remote of their meeting a Maribisan native in a short time on Earth. "We require a medical examination, of course," Miss Heilbron said casually. Gilen merely nodded.  "You don't mind? Either of you?" "No, why?" said Don. Gilen admired his careless unconcern and wished once again that one of her sisters had been entrusted with Miinchen. Miss Heilbron changed the subject briskly. "Yes, I think we can employ you both. Not, however, in the capacity you suggest. It is unlikely that the next few weeks will bring any need for the services of a Maribisan expert. But you obviously know a certain amount about the Adamites. Such information is rare." She made a note on a pad. "We shall engage you to tell us every least little thing you know about the Adamites." Ill T he first thing to be attended to now that Fort Plato was in Adamite hands, Wil Slent's legal officer told him, was the execution of Checker Alan Stewart. "This will show decisively," said Arol, the legal officer, "that we are in control, that we are just, that we are impartial. No one act better fulfills the requirements than the execution of the one man directly responsible for the fall of this Terran fort. If we wait until another Terran can be executed as an example, his crime will almost certainly be against us and our impartiality will be in doubt. If we execute Alan Stewart, whose crime is against them, our stand will be clear at once." "Yes," Wil replied. "But I must consult Tomi." "Not in this matter," Arol said. "She is in some way involved. I suggest you make the decision yourself. Director." Wil pondered for a moment. Arol, a young and ambitious officer, was taking too much on himself He was too positive, too insistent. The trouble was, Arol was right. When General Morrison was officially informed he said apoplectically, '"You want to execute him? I'd have thought you'd want to give him a medal." "Your observation. General," said Director Wil Slent, "reveals a certain misapprehension about Adamite justice. Whether Stewart's crime is against you or us, it remains a crime which must be punished immediately." "Without a trial?" "Do you think a trial is necessary?" "Most certainly." "Then there must be a trial. I have met your legal officer. He seems a most reasonable man." "Yes," the general agreed expressionlessly. "Most reasonable. There is one small point -- " "Yes?" "He's Alan Stewart's brother." Wil shrugged. "That might pose a difficulty if it were his duty to prosecute. But he will defend Alan Stewart. Have you any objection?" "No." "Neither have we." The trial took place in the council chamber. It followed Adamite form rather than Terran, but as Advocate John Stewart told the general after consultation with Adamite legal officers, the form seemed not unfair and would certainly be quicker than a Terran trial. The only large difference would be the absence of the accused during much of the proceedings. The jury consisted of four Terrans and four Adamites. Wil Slent presided because control of the fort was in Adamite and not Terran hands. An Adamite officer spoke first, using his own tongue. Wil, who spoke English perfectly, translated the brief statement. "We were able, by means which IF I shall not disclose unless they prove to be relevant to the matters before this court, to take over this fort with no casualties on either side. The one alarm we were unable to put out of action was the Terran checker. He had to be diverted for a few minutes. The task fell to Special Officer Tomi Slent." Wil was immediately replaced by Tomi, who wore the green uniform of an officer of the Adamite Navy. She spoke in pure Terran. "It was impossible to reach the checker physically, but it was a simple matter for me to reach the green outside the checkpoint. The plan was -- " Here a Terran member of the jury exploded, asking what kind of trial this was supposed to be. Were they to hear only an Adamitecensored version of what had happened? John Stewart replied to the objection: "What you are hearing is stipulated evidence. As defense counsel I've agreed that only this summary of the relevant facts will be given." The juror grumbled but sat down. "I hope you know what you're doing, that's all." John Stewart was neither popular nor unpopular. No one knew him very well. However, a man defending his brother against an alien race and a death penalty must surely be doing his best to get his client off. Tomi went on: "The plan was to attract and hold the checker's attention so that he could notmake any visual sweeps of the fort." Here Arol, the Adamite prosecutor, stopped her. "You used the word 'random.' Why?" "Because only random survey could show up the infiltration taking place. The success of the operation shows that all the fort's automatic alarms were successfully nullified. What could not be nullified -- what had to be diverted -- was the curiosity of the one man in the fort who could see what was going on in any part of it." Arol turned to the jury. "The significance of this is that the checker in this fort is the human supervisor of a complex of machines. The machines failed. Neither they nor their designers are on trial. But the checker, placed over them as a final safeguard, also failed, and this -- " "I did not stipulate that," said Stewart sharply. The Adamite was honestly puzzled. "It is an undisputed fact that he failed." "It is not." "On what point, precisely, are you challenging my statement?" "I am challenging your right to make any statement at all. You are telling the jury as fact things which have not been stipulated." Wil intervened hastily. However, Stewart did not press the challenge, apparently satisfied with a warning to Arol. Tomi went on. "It was known that Uie checker at the time was alone, young, male. What I had to do was keep him occupied without arousing his suspicions. I -- " "Please repeat the last sentence," said Stewart. A little surprised, Tomi said, "What I had to do was keep him occupied without arousing his suspicions." "Without arousing his suspicions?" "Yes." Stewart turned to Director Wil Slent. He said, "Surely if this girl succeeded in her aims -- and it has been stipulated that she did -- she did not arouse the checker's suspicions. Therefore, where was the jeasonjor him to give the alarm?" Everybody tried to talk at once and Wil had to order silence. Once again, instead of following through, Stewart stepped in smoothly the moment quiet was restored and said to Tomi, "Thank you. I have no more questions." It was now defense's right to call a witness. The first called was Alan Stewart. Alan Stewart was worried and it showed. He himself fully believed he was guilty and his brother had not been able to convince him otherwise. The fort had been taken over without a fight by four hundred men and women from an Adamite ship. He should have stopped them. John Stewart unwrapped a peppermint and put it into his mouth. "When you saw the girl," he asked, "what did you do?" "Went to the window and looked at her." "Why did you not give the alarm?" "She was breaking no regulation." "Yet you finally gave the alarm?" "Yes." "Too late -- and only foiir pointthree-one-six seconds before the invading force gave it themselves by breaking cover?" "I don't know the exact time lapse. About that." "Exactly. that. The figure is stipualted." Stewart turned to the jury. "The checker did give the alarm. That's stipulated. The defense's case is complete." He sat down. If there had been babble before, this time there was uproar. When Arol took the floor his voice quivered with suppressed anger. He said, "This is some kind of Terran legal trick. We knew all along that the checker gave the alarm eventually, too late. What is in question is why he didn't give it before." Stewart rose. "Oh, that's what's in question, is it?" he asked. "We can soon settle that. Stewart, why didn't you give the alarm before?" "Because it was only then that I IF knew something was wrong. The girl had an appendix scar." Questioned by his brother, he explained. The Adamites were interested. This was something they simply hadn't known about. "So," said Stewart smoothly, "you waited until you were sure, then gave the alarm. You were not suspicious about the girl but you kept her under observation until finally you knew she was not Terran. Then you gave the alarm." "That's right." Stewart sat down again, a casual wave repeating what he had said before -- as far as he was concerned, the case was over. Wil did nothing for several seconds. But he had to go on with the case. "Counsel, if it is your contention that it was not in Stewart's orders to give any alarm until he was quite certain a state of emergency existed, you must bring this out." "I see. Stewart, when the girl first appeared, you didn't give the alarm because she was breaking no regulation." "That's right." "Who told you not to give any alarm until you were perfectly sure, absolutely sure?" "General Morrison." Stewart let the pause drag out. At least he said, "You acted as you did in accordance with the orders of General Morrison?" Alan had enough sense to say merely, "Yes." "So if the fort fell when you might have prevented it -- it fell because you were obeying the orders of General Morrison?" "Yes." Stewart turned to Wil. "Obviously the wrong man has been charged. You must charge General Morrison. And I'll defend him." Wil wanted to consult Arol, but he could not, in the course of a trial, speak privately to the prosecutor without the defender's being present. He turned to the jury. "As president of this court," he said, "I feel it my duty to instruct you to return a verdict of not guilty." alone Arol said, "That man Stewart is a clever lawyer. This could be a bid for personal advancement. He may mean to put his general on trial and get him off but discredit him." "All his stipulation led us on," the Director mused. "He was quite prepared to have us put his brother on trial. We assumed' that the checker's duties included those of sentry and he encouraged us to assume this. The result was that the trial has turned out to the Terrans' advantage. And we can safely assume that if General Morrison were put on trial, the result would be similar." 'Can we? I would be on my guard with Stewart this time. He would not catch me sleeping again." "Napping," said Wil absently. "Pardon?" "They say, 'You won't catch me napping.' " Wil looked at Arol curiously. He had thought the man a pushing but competent officer. In his dealings with the Terrans, however, he seemed lacking in imagin-. ation. Wil thought he knew why Stewart had suggested putting General Morrison on trial. "Suppose this time Stewart stipulates nothing. Suppose he brings the whole operation into evidence. Won't we have to answer all his questions?" Arol began to see. "If he did that -- yes, by our own law we'd have to tell all the details. Your  mind probe. How you and Tomi induced technicians in moments of inattention to switch off certain relays when they thought they were adjusting them. Our auxiliary nonelectric drive which their sensors can't detect -- of course if they could conceive of a ship using no . electricity' and with all batteries flat, they could design special sensors to detect such a ship. Yes, we'd have to answer all such questions. You can't try a fort commander for failure without full evidence of what he was up against." Wil nodded. "So we must drop the whole thing." Reluctantly Arol agreed. Wil frowned. "We have made a bad beginning. We should have thought longer and more deeply." "You're admitting failure, sir?" "Not at all. We must learn about the Terrans. They have a saying that one learns by one's mistakes." "An exceedingly dangerous doctrine." "Yet perhaps it holds a grain of truth." Everything in Fort Plato was open to him, Wil was thinking -- the library, the logs, the records, the reports, the microfilm. Before he took any sort of action again he was going to learn a great deal from the library and the records. Nothing could be more urgent and essential. Of course the Terran books and records would be copied and the copies would be taken back in the ship. But what he could learn on the spot personally was a hundred times more valuable than what he took back on film. On the spot he could query anything that baffled him, investigate and clarify what he did not understand. Arol said, "If you let me have another opportunity, sir, I shall show you and the Terrans that I learn a great deal from my -- experience." Wil liodded again in Terran fashion, but he was not convinced. He wanted no more courtroom battles in Fort Plato, not when his own weapon, Arol, was obviously inferior to the Terrans' Stewart. IF He wanted nothing at all to happen until he had learned from the Terrans. IV C ontact was made immediately after Arol left Director Wil Slent and sent Tomi in. This was two hours after Sal and Verne were dragged through the gate on the planet Outward, four hours after Far and Pariss took control of Station # (GP), six hours after Don and Gilen arrived in Miinchen. The synchronization was very good, all things considered. In Fort Plato and Station # it was easy for the Adamite pair to concentrate. In each station Director Slent was in full and open command and could lock himself in a private room with the girl, Wil with his daughter Tomi and Far with his niece Pariss. In Miinchen the situation was more difficult, for Don and Gilen the Personnel Building and had to go on doing so while the contact occurred. The cellar on Outward presented most difficulties, not because Fred Marvin insisted on talking -- he was making supper -- but because Sal Slent had just regained consciousness and had a mild concussion. The eight did not know exactly what they were doing, any more than the savages who invented speech knew the mechanism of the vocal cords and the larynx. Tomi called soundlessly, thinking of Verne, Pariss, Gilen, visualizing them, hearing their voices, trying to guess how they felt, how they were dressed. More vaguely, conscious of effort and purpose but little else, Wil, Sal, Far and Don did what they could to help. Telepathy, among Terrans and Adamites alike, was a rogue talent. That mind could touch mind in certain unpredictable circumstances had not been doubted for centuries by anyone prepared to believe the evidence. Most of the evidence, however, consisted of random, uncoordinated flashes, too uncontrolled for study. The only people who ever seemed to get anything regularly and on significant occasions were identical twins. The birth of the Slent quadruplets Wil, Sal, Far and Don had barely affected matters at first. Like twins and triplets of many races, each knew when the others were in danger, each sensed it when the others were injured. They had joined the Adamite Navy on the same day. The Navy had not considered their peculiar link sufficiently valuable for particualr notice. But when the Caron crashed on a barren, unnamed world the unexplained, unexplainable knowledge of three brothers led to the rescue of the fourth and most of the crew. After that the Navy noticed. The Slent brothers married similar girls at about the same time. All four wives proved infertile at first. The wife of Wil Slent had borne quadruplet girls finally, after taking fertility treatments. The girls were named Tomi, Verne, Pariss and Gilen. There were no other children. The girls followed the classic pattern. They dressed alike, shared boy friends; they took mischievous, sometimes cruel delight in substituting for each other. Partly because their own link was so strong, partly because no young man ever isolated and identified any one of them for long enough and with sufficient certainty to make her fall in love, they remained huntresses. When they were seventeen Pariss fell a victim to appendicitis. Within a week all the girls had to have the same operation. And about that time Wil Slent was embarrassed to find himself occasionally seeing into his daughters' minds. He told his brothers and experiments were conducted. The Navy eventually found out. Being a Navy, it naturally considered anything new and startling in the light of a weapon. The question was, what to do with the Slents' talent. Train it first, obviously. Under naval psychologists the Slents found they could work in pairs, one of the girls trying to reach one of her sisters and usually failing until her father or uncle reinforced the effort. Then a new bond was created -- like a double wire in an electrical circuit, two Slents could achieve a special kind of linkage with two more. Each unit had to be one of the girls and one of the men, just as electrical contacts had to be positive and negative. Having discovered a weapon, the Adamite Navy had to use it. And the biggest military challenge in the galaxy was the uneasy presence of two independent branches of the human race. G radually the contact strengthened. The other girls knew that Verne was huddled in towels, felt the pain of Sal's arm and foot and head, saw Gilen writing in a bare, bright office, sensed the claustrophobic remoteness of life in a space station. Every detail reinforced the link. Then something like a conversation started. en -- bright office: Successful so far but danger... Terrans suspect we are Adamites... medical examination... to -- closed in: Avoid this... (Details of appendixscar betrayal). ious. Maribis contact with Earth incomplete... Such surgery likely, or at least still possible, on Maribis. take care. # -- closed in: Unimportant here. Terrans know we are Adamites. -- warm cellar: Warning useful... if necessary, scar can be explained. Not appendix... scar left by accident with knife... some cleverer than we. derestimated... ciency here... , T he flow was rapid and often inconsequential, like four rivulets running into a pool. In the depths fish darted -- the other three sisters did not miss the evasive, mischievous excitement of Pariss, but whatever it meant it was not a thing for the father and uncles and they pretended to miss it. Each also sensed Gilen's fear as another thing not to be brought into the light. In this first contact there was not much to say. They concentrated rather on establishing a good link, a link which would be easier to form next time because each knew a little about the new circumstances of the others. In an emergency the link might mean the difference between life and death. thoughtfully at her desk. Finally she flicked an intercom switch. "Tell Dr. Roger Miller to come and see me at once." Miller strode in five minutes later. He said icily, "I have not yet been officially informed. Miss Heilbron, of your promotion to Director-general. Frankly, if my opinion had been asked, I should have said the interests of Personnel might have been better served by a move in the other direction." He paused. Miss Heilbron waited and smiled politely. At last he asked "In one word. Miss Heilbron, to what do I owe this dishonor?" "Adamites," she said. "Adamites here? In this building?" "More precisely -- in this office, very recently. You've never met an Adamite, Dr. Miller, have you? You're supposed to be an expert on Eden, yet you've never met an Xdamite?" He sat down. "My time is valuable," he said. "What is this cockand-bull story?" She told him about her visitors and how she had handled them. When she mentioned she had said to them: "I should have thought you were Adamites -- " he sat bolt upright. IF "You accused them to their faces?" "Until then," she said mildly, "I wasn't quite sure I was right." "But how can you possibly be sure now that you are right?" She sighed. "I could never convince you, Dr. Miller, and I don't propose to try. I'm giving you an opportunity to convince yourself by studying these so-called Maribisans. Not personally. I don't want you to meet them." "You don't want me to meet them? What madness -- " "Exactly, Dr. Miller -- what madness it would be to allow you to meet them. You have never learned self-control and I'm afraid it's too late now." Miller realized that for him to storm out of the room in a temper would confirm her words. He managed to maintain his icy front, even to smirk sardonically. "What do you suggest? I am completely in your hands. Miss Heilbron." "I suggest you give me your promise not to contact these two personally -- and having done that, take over the entire matter." There was a long pause. Miller was of the same generation as Miss Heilbron, a tall handsome man in his prime. He had been married seven times and had given up matrimony for good; that it could not work was the fault not of seven women but of the whole female sex. He was a lonely man because there were fe minutes of his day during which he was not angry, not lashing out at anything and anybody within reach. Yet he was high in the hierarchy because any job he was given and genuinely accepted was done "Very well," he said mildly. "You're wrong, of course. Miss Heilbron. These people may not be Maribisans, but neither will they turn out to be Adamites." She merely smiled and said, "Prove it. Dr. Miller." modation a great problem. At first they refused Personnel's offer of assistance. But all hotel rooms were taken or too ruinously expensive -- they were supposed to be short of money. Miinchen, like many other administration centers, was bursting at the seams. After walking for hours Gilen said to her uncle, "If only we could feren -- " "Well, we can't," he said calmly. "I know, but it would be so easy -- " "Gilen, the one thing we firmly agreed on before we started was that we would never, after we were established, take chances by meddling with Terran minds." "I know, but -- " "If anything happens anywhere to give the Terrans a clue, they'll work out the rest. In the two space stations, two or three or twenty IF technicians were touched gently and caused to turn a switch one way when they thought they were turning it the other. The action was necessary and relatively safe. When a man does a routine job he's not thinking -- he doesn't have to think. His mind is elsewhere. But we have no need of extreme measures now." "I know -- " "You dont know, Gilen, or you wouldn't be proposing anything so foolish at this stage." Gilen was hot, footsore and weary. She was conscious of being the weak sister. Opposition strengthened Verne, made Pariss laugh, excited Tomi, but bore her down and trampled on her. Having no place to sleep that night in a strange city was a small matter -- if they failed to find accommodation Personnel would help them, she knew. But it got her down. She sighed. "Then let's go back to Personnel." They returned and were given a list of addresses. Five times they drew a blank, but at the sixth house they found two comfortable rooms and a bathroom. Gilen cheered up at once. She was the most mercurial of the girls. Now perfectly contented, she locked, her door against the Terrans, her uncle, everybody, kicked off her shoes and lay back on the bed luxuriously. Personnel was pleased, too. The visitors had been placed exactly where Personnel wanted them. self out. "You stay with your old man," Fred told Verne. "I'll get a stretcher party." He was back in ten minutes with two other men, both burly, but slim striplings beside himself. One of them looked at Verne, who was draped in towels, with greater interest than at the patient he had come to collect. "Verne Slent -- Red Conrad," said Fred. "Here." He threw her a pair of Jeans, a shirt and sneakers. Then the three men turned to Sal, who was feverish and only partly conscious. They wrapped him in blankets. While they took him upstairs Verne put on the alien clothes. Soon Fred returned. He was alone. He waved casually at her as she made for the stairs. "Be seeing you," he said, but he was wrong. A mole was waiting at the top of the stairs. These squat trucks were specially developed for Outward. They were heavy, ran on tracks and had two giant claws to dig into and clutch the earth. Before she entered the mole she caught a glimpse of the settlement: row upon row of squat concrete buildings, the nearest some three hundred meters from the wire fence. Then Red, who was already seated inside with Sal, gestured impatiently and she climbed in. Sal leaned in a corner with his eyes closed. He didn't look bad, just tired. Unlike Fred, Red started asking questions at once. "Born here?" "No. Landed only a month ago. "That would be on the Hyperi"Yes." "Weren't you peopleon the Hyperion told anything? Didn't you have the faintest idea what Outward was like?"  Verne sighed. "I suppose we didn't believe it. We knew there was a storm when we landed, but no planetside storm is supposed to bother a ship like that. It didn't, really, except that we landed five miles from the terminal and had to walk." "Had to walk? Oh, Christ!" She decided to test something she knew about only theoretically. "Please don't swear," she said. "I don't like it." "Sure, Verne. Anything you say." "And I haven't invited you to call me Verne. Familiarity may be common here, but I'm not used to it." "Familiarity? Hell, I haven't tried to kiss you yet, have I?" Sal opened his eyes and seemed to be about to say something. Fearing his condition might make him say the wrong thing or even speak in a language that Red had never heard, Verne kept Red's attention off him by saying sharply, "Didn't you promise not to swear?" "Did I? Oh, sure. Verne, you're a honey." "I know. I've been told." "I bet you have. Will you shack with me?" Not knowing exactly what the question implied, she ignored it. Fortunately at that moment the mole stopped and the door slid open. Red and the other man took Sal into what passed for a hospital -- five beds in a bare room with yet another burly man in charge. "Have you any money?" he asked Verne. "No. We lost it with our mole when -- " "Never mind. We'll settle that later. He's Sal Slent, you say? Just these injuries? No infectious disease? Okay." That was all. When she left the building with Red she found that the other man had driven the mole away. T he air was now pleasantly warm and quite still. It seemed incredible that a killer gale had been raging a half-hour earlier. This unnatural calm was not to be trusted. A whiplash of wind could strike in the middle of it, without warning. "I asked if you," said Red, "want to shack with me?" There was no help for it. She had IF to ask cautiously, "What exactly does that mean?" "Got a man?" "No, not -- " "You could do worse than shack with me, babe. Considering you've no money and no place to go, you could hardly do better. I'm not hard to get on with. I won't hit you unless you ask for it. I'm a construction foreman -- good pay, no dependents. Two rooms and a bathroom to myself. Haven't had a woman since I threw Rose out five weeks ago." "Why did you throw her out?" "Too many other men. I'll be reasonable about that. There's about five hundred men here and less than two hundred women. I don't expect you to act like a wife. But not too many other men, huh? Three or four, maybe That's fair, isn't it?" "I've never been with a man and I have no immediate desire for a change in the situation." "Like that, is it?" He nodded to himself. "Guess you lost somebody in the Hyperion business." She hesitated only' a moment, then nodded. What she and Sal knew about the Outward settlement had been learned from radio messages, plus letters, log books, reports and other documents found in the shell of a ship which had blown up. From radio messages which had flahed between the forty or so outposts on the planet she knew as much about the Hyperion incident as anyone who had not been directly involved. The hurricane had killed nine hundred seventy-four people. On the planet Outward, you just didn't set out in a straggling file to walk five miles over bare moorland. Verne knew from intercepted radio messages that only ninety bodies had ever been found. The rest had been dashed to pieces, swept scores of miles away, blown into marshes, killed by the gnomes or sucked bloodless by the hemmers. "Well, look," hesaid and struggled for a moment. "If it's like that -- I'll marry you if you like." It was clear he thought he was offering her a great deal. "Where I come from," she said, ready to say Earth if he asked, "we have a thing called engagement. We can be engaged if you like." Red laughed derisively. That's not for Outward. Especially not for Camp Eleven. Sure, a girl can say she isn't going to have anything to do with men. Or she can say it's marriage or nothing. But being engaged -- that means you say you'll marry me some time but not now, huh?" She nodded. "And meantime you move in with me?" She nodded again. "That means you think I'm a sucker." "You think so? It means I trust you." He grunted. "That's a poke in the guts." "Why?" Verne shrugged. "All right. I need a job and somewhere to sleep. Where do I go and whom do I see?" One word diverted him. "Whom do you see? Christ, that fancy talk -- " "Don't swear." Red rolled his eyes to heaven. At last he said, "Like I told you, you're a honey. Maybe you're worth it, babe, if you stand up to everything the way you stand up to me. But one thing -- iLyoy're going to be engaged to me there aren't going to be any other men at all." "Naturally," Verne said, surprised. "Obviously," Being engaged to Red seemed a good idea, especially when she remembered a cynical Terran quote on the subject she had picked up somewhere: Engagement -- a period during which a girl looks around to see if she can do better for herself ,... H ugh and Pariss were in one of the observatories, lying back in deep, comfortable chairs and watching the stars. "You're a very lovely girl," said Hugh. Pariss had been told this before but not by a Terran. "Thank you." "Although Terrans generally would think you are attractive perhaps I appreciate you more than most. You're obviously of mixed race and so am I. I'm half Caucasian, a quarter Polynesian and another quarter Asian. Our children would be the ultimate in racial representation." She started slightly at the mention of children. "Tell me about yourself," he said. "I'm interested." She smiled, stood up and began to walk about. "Hugh, let's make a deal. I give you something and you give me something. Inforrhation -- true and useful information. And we go on like that until one of us cheats." "Splendid idea. I hope you won't think it's cheating if I suggest that since it's your idea, you go first." "We Adamites fear the Terrans," said Pariss quietly. "We should like to ignore you. We'd rather you didn't exist. But since we learned fifty years ago that you do exist, we've changed our whole way of life -- now I think it's time you said something." "I think," said Hugh slowly, "we'd also prefer that you didn't exist. When one human culture, into another nearly as large, it was a shock, of course -- and not a particularly pleasant one. You have nothing we want, except your Earth-type worlds. To get them for ourselves we'd have to fight IF you and exterminate you. And we don't want that." "Why?" "You're breaking your own rules," he said mildly. "Now you tell me something." "All right. We're more united than you. It wasn't always so, but about five centuries ago we fought ourselves to a standstill. So few of us were left that we were brought face to face with the prospect of extinction. That's why there are fewer of us than of you. But at least we learned our lesson. There won't be any more Adamite civil wars, anyway not for another five centuries." "That's more than we can say. In fact, maybe you've put your finger on the crux of the matter -- and if that's why Eden has discouraged contact and trade between the two peoples for half a century, maybe she's right. It's typical of Terrans that there'll always be some idiot who'll pull the trigger But now we come to why you're here Pariss." "We told you. To learn." "Sure, but there's more than that. There must be. Maybe you mean to fight now because you've got something we haven't got and you think you can win. I suppose it's no use asking exactly how you took over this station?" "No, but I'll tell you this, Hugh -- it isn't anything really big, really important. It's nothing to make you edgy. It's nothing that would enable us to beat Earth." Hugh, who had remained in his chair, stood up and took her hands in his. She didn't resist. He was very gentle. "Thanks, Pariss," he said. "You told me something important and I believe you. Just to be fair. I'll tell you something important too. I can take over this station again any time I like and by means so simple it's really ludicrous -- but I won't, meantime. You see, I want to find out just how you did it -- and more important, just why you did it." "We want information, that's all." She wasn't meeting his eyes. VYou're cheating, Pariss." She raised her eyes to his and looked at him steadily. "Only a little. What we want in addition to information can't be all that important. And some of it at least -- some of it -- I think I could have right now for the asking." "Go ahead. Ask." She drew her hands away from him. "Not now, Hugh. Not just yet." T he second conference, which should have been easier, more complete, more informative than the first, was none of these things. #: Hugh Suyang is nice... Pariss, you're supposed to be working, not playing. but there's something more important than that. He's a latent telepath. We suspected it when we were working on the plan to take over the station and we therefore bypassed him. His latent ability, which he doesn't yet suspect, has enabled him to guess certain things about me, about us. you know the circumstances. Is it necessary to kill him? . might be the worst thing we could possibly do. Something held back. must be done. pened in Fort Plato to make you so harsh, Tomi? here have resulted in a moral victory for the Terrans. We have to be careful... Of course we're being careful. I don't understand... Understanding among us is bound to become more difficult as our differing experience drives us wider apart. Incidentally, I've just been asked to marry a Terran. est. Agreement that it interesting if Verne married reported on the experience. that Pariss is prepared to become emotionally involved with this Hugh Suyang. My situation is different. I have no love for Red Conrad. If it seems necessary to marry him I'll do so entirely for the sake of the project. tirely right, Verne. Pariss, is what Verne said true? Hugh Suyang as a Terran, if that's what you mean.' I think of him only as a man. well. But remember, you hold a secret, a secret that must be important. And you have said Suyang is a latent telepath. You must be very careful. was a chuckle. IF V R ED'S house was surprisingly comfortable. It held amenities Verne had not expected. Externally it was merely a squat concrete box with a single door and two small fixed windows of thick plastic. Inside it was a proper house, with a fully adequate bathroom, a kitchen with all the necessary fittings, a living room and a small bedroom. "That's yours," Red said of the bedroom. He frowned. "Verne, I still think I'm a sucker." "Why?" "Even thinking of letting you get away with this. Now I have to go and register you. What can you do?" She knew about this. On Outward where you came from and why were unimportant -- but what you could do was vital. "Quite a lot of things. I'm a fair electrician, a good shot with any gun. I can nurse, though I'd rather not. I can learn to work any machine in about half an hour and I can count better in my head than most people can with a calculator. I'm used to working with chemicals. I can draw anything you want drawn. I've.done a lot of work with glass -- " "Honey," said Red with a marked change of tone, "I want to know you can do what you say. Here." He gave her a drawing pad and a stylus. "Make a picture of me." "What?" "You say you can draw anything I want drawn. Draw me." She found the stylus could make thin lines, thick lines, dark and light lines. She sketched quickly, competently. Red had an interesting face, she discovered as she worked. The eyes were deep-set and hard, but they could become soft. Possibly he was a sentimentalist. He had thick sensual lips. Probably he would be furious if she pointed out that they were almost feminine. His face had lines it should not have had at his age -- he could not yet be thirty. She did a quick portrait, careful to omit the finishing touches that might betray an alien art. Nevertheless, when she offered it to him, he was startled, even awed'. "Christ!" he breathed. "You sure as hell can draw, honey. Is that me?" "It's meant to be." "I'm no expert. But I'd say this was -- well, as I say. I'm no expert. What I want to know is, if you can draw like this, why did you come to Outward?" "I don't understand." "Honey, most of us are nothing much or we wouldn't be here. I don't mean people who were born here -- I mean dumb guys like me who came from other places. Here I'm a big shot, but where I come from I'd never have amounted to much. You, now -- you have talent. You didn't need to come here." "Perhaps I just wanted to." He was not satisfied, yet he was prepared to drop the subject for the moment. "Anyway, I have to report you. I won't report your old man. He can do it himself." She nodded. "Make us some supper. I'll be back in half an hour. If I put you down as a draftsman -- think you can handle the job?" "I expect so." "I guess that's why you came to Camp Eleven, huh? We sure as hell need draftsmen." He didn't wait for an answer, which was just as well, since Verne was not quite sure what to answer. Left alone in the house, she completed a quick survey without learning very much. She went into the kitchen. And there, standing menacingly in the middle of the floor, was a gnome. It made its intentions clear at once. In a grating, rasping voice, it said, "Earn gontu kilyu." It took her a few seconds to realize that it was speaking not its own language, but Terran:  am going to kill you... H OW it had gotten there -- it had certainly not been there when Red showed her the kitchen -- was an academic question on which she wasted no time. There was no doubt it was a gnome. Outward had only two indigenous mobile life forms. The hemmers were long and low and walked on six short legs. This creature was shaped like two stones with a larger stone set on top of them and a smaller one on top of that, faintly reminiscent of human legs, trunk and head. It was uniformly reddish-brown, exactly the color of Outward soil. It carried nothing and wore no clothes. The arms were the most nonhuman feature, although they emerged at approximately the right places. They were flexible, boneless, handless and could be as short as half a meter or as long as four meters when they lashed out like tentacles. She had, unfortunately, pulled the door shut as she entered. To open it she would have to turn and operate the handle -- the work of a moment, but a moment she would not be allowed. She knew theoretically of the incredible toughness of the gnomes' hide -- it enabled them to survive the rigors of Outward's climate, alone, without houses, burrowing into the ground with those incredible arms when storms lashed the planet's surface. She could achieve nothing against the intruder with her bare hands or her softshod feet. One of the tentacles lashed out. It brushed her jeans quite lightly, midway between waist and groin, a little to the left of center. The tentacle, which had IF narrowed to the thickness of a human wrist as it reached her, on its return swelled to the thickness of the creature's head. "Why do you want to kill me?" she asked, just to say something. Any delay was to her advantage. There was a heavy pot on the cooker. But the gnome was between her and it. "Earn gontu kilyu," the creature rasped and she suspected it knew only a few phrases, perhaps one only. She tried to use the one weapon she had -- her mind. The effort failed completely. Sal was evidently asleep, perhaps doped, and without him she could not reach the others. Her own effort, without their assistance, bounced back at her. The gnome had a mind of sorts, but it was tough as the body. All she could touch was hate and cruelty -- and there was no better shield against any mind probe than hate. She tried to touch Red and found certain contact. She sensed he was thinking, Someones walking on my grave, a phrase that meant nothing to her. The gnome's other arm lashed out. It caught her around the waist like a whip, spinning her a half turn. The gnome wanted to inspect her back. It proved uninteresting, and so the tentacle spun her again just as she was considering a snatch at the door handle. The tentacle constricted about her diaphragm until she gasped. The gnome could quite easily crush her to death. It had no immediate intention of doing so, however, still being moved by curiosity. It knew she was completely in its power. It could kill her any time it wished. A gain a tentacle shot out. The creature wanted to check something. Verne's hip bones were hard and she was hard across the back. The waist was soft and the tentacle probed softness down her front. The gnome prodded her abdomen and hips, establishing the areas of softness. Then the gnome tested her solar plexus and noted Verne's discomfort when this area was rammed hard. It also felt her ribs and established that slaps there did not trouble her. Verne called Red mentally again. Nothing happened. So she tried the gnome, with exactly the same result she had noted before. Hate and cruelty were there. Perhaps the cruelty she sensed explained what was happening. The gnome not only wished to find out about humans, his enemies, and not only carefully stored up in his brain a knowledge of their obvious weak spots; he was also trying to terrify her. His greatest victory would be frightening her to death. She was to realize that the death blow could come at any time now -- and certainly would come -- but never to know when. "I don't fear you," she said. Again the words were just something to say. "Earn gontu kilyu," said the gnome. A tentacle wavered out again, slowly this time. Verne moved a little to avoid it, failing, but getting herself away from the door. If help were to come, it would come through there. She didn't want to be in the way of a shot at the gnome. The tentacle barely touched her, so gently that she guessed it was listening. The idea suggested what the creature's purpose was. The gnome wanted to locate her heart. It had tried the abdomen first. Perhaps the gnome's own heart was there. In the unlikely event of her escaping this crisis and subsequently facing a gnome when she was wearing steel boots, she intended to lunge at its underbelly. Having found the heart, the gnome punched it viciously with the other tentacle. Verne cried out in pain, staggered and had to press back against the wall to recover herself. But she was only momentarily hurt. The blow was no harder than that of a man's fist and, the gnome being short, it came from below. She did not think the blow was meant to be fatal. The gnome was doing what all cruel creatures did -- demonstrating, after all this suspense, that it meant to hurt her, that her death was not to be quick and easy. Yet for the first time she began to hope. The gnome was making a mistake. It had not probed her throat, because its own head was set into its trunk with no neck. A quick thrust and constriction with either tentacle would have strangled a human more quickly than any other means -- but the creature had picked on the heart area, which in a human was reasonably well protected against mere blows. If Red came back, if the gnome found itself with only a second or two in which to kill her, it would strike at her heart. And though this would not be fun, almost certainly she would survive. Delay became more important than ever. She was delighted to discover that the gnome was going on with the game. A tentacle lightly touched her face and then her shirt. Apparently for the first time the gnome realized that her clothing was not part of her. The tentacle became a claw and ripped her shirt. The gnome deliberated for several seconds, its little red eyes surveying her coldly. Then the tentacle tore the tatters from her body. Gnomes were not too bright. His new discovery occupied this one for a long time. It retracted the tentacle and stood motionless for fully two minutes while it decided that the tall, thin creature which faced it was pink all over. Or IF something equally inconclusive. Next it tried to tear her pants, but they fitted snugly. Without more violence than it seemed at the moment prepared to employ, the gnome could get nowhere. With a change of approach, it punched savagely at the solar plexus. This time, although Verne was hurt considerably, she tried not to show it. Suddenly the gnome moved its feet. At the same time she heard a door opening in the house. Red was back. The gnome said, "Ecum bak foryu" -- It turned and clawed open a cupboard door. There was a hole in the floor, a hole less than half the gnome's diameter. But it flowed into the hole head first and Verne realized that the rest of its body was as pliable and boneless as its versatile tentacles. It made no attempt to strike at Verne, although it would have had plenty of time to stab at her heart and still get into the hole before Red arrived. Nevertheless, she felt its hate, its cruelty, its fearlessness and its desire to kill her. And its words echoed in her brain: Vll come back for you. R ed burst in, sniffling, "Gnomes!" he shouted. "Not gnomes. Just one gnome." "Where?" "It went that way." She showed him the hole. He swore. His rage was directed mainly against the crew that had built the house. "Damn them to hell! I'll get them. Jerry-building on Earth is only dishonest. Here it's murder. The foundations are supposed to be six-inch reinforced concrete. The gnomes and hemmers can't get through that." He bent to examine the floor in the cupboard. "This is only a shell. Damn -- I hope a gnome gets the foreman." Still sniffing, he turned to her, his eyes widening. Until now, the gnome's recent presence had distracted him from noticing that she was naked above the waist. Awkwardly he turned away. "What in hell happened? It didn't get a chance to get at you, huh? Did it pop its head through the hole just as I got back?" "It's been here since you left. So was I." Red stiffened. "But that's impossible. I mean -- " He looked at her again, noticing now the red marks on her body. His eyes dropped to the torn shirt where the gnome had flung it. "It was here with you," he said incredulously, "all that time? And you're still alive -- " She moved to the sink and washed herself where the gnome's tentacles had touched her, having learned already that plain cold water was effective against the irritants of Outward. As she did so, she told Red in detail what had happened. He didn't say a word. He kept looking at her incredulously, occasionally shaking his head. With some asperity Verne asked, "You don't believe me? You think I'm a liar?" "Oh, I believe you all right. I can still smell the gnome and I saw his mark on you." Suddenly his tone grew angry. "Will you for Pete's sake cover yourself? What are you trying to do to me?" "I have nothing else to wear." He rushed from the room and returned with a shirt. He threw it at her. She put it on. Red was ashamed of his outburst, she sensed. He was again regarding her with the awe, the wonder that she had seen before. "Well, tell me," she said. "I was sure, too, that the gnome would never let me live. But it did. Doesn't that ever happen?" "I've heard of it," said Red slowly. "Certainly it happens. But I've never heard of it happening with a girl. The gnomes are cruel. Cruelty is built into them. They're cruel as the planet is cruel. Human sadists get a kick out of hurting people, but we think the gnomes get even more out of it. They like to hurt, but it's fear that counts. Particularly fear of death." She nodded. "That's what I thought." "When they catch a victim and they have time, as this one had with you, they screw up his fear as far as it will go. If their prey is defenseless, knows it's going to die, the gnome senses and feeds the fear. And when the gnome's satisfied, when it really feels good, the victim dies. Sometimes, though, when a human isn't afraid, when he or she has too much selfrespect to grovel and shriek, there's nothing in it for the gnome. It has failed to set the victim up for death, see? The time hasn't come. There's no more satisfaction in it which can't show any sign of caring about it." He took a deep breath. "Sometimes -- when it happens like that -- the man lives. You must be the bravest girl I ever met." She laughed. "Brave? I didn't want to die. I kept on looking for ways not to die. That's not courage," "Maybe not. But I guess you fooled the gnome." L ife at Fort Plato went on in an atmosphere of incredible calm. The Adamites interfered scarcely at all in the normal running of the station. They took comprehensive precautions to ensure that no message from the fort could reveal the true situation the Terrans away from the weaIF pons, the machines, the laboratories (except under strict supervision), the computers. Beyond that, having once interfered with the running of the routine affairs of the station and finding cause to regret it, they acted almost as guests. Seven of them spoke English perfectly. The rest of the four hundred picked up the language as any occupying soldiers would. Wil Slent spent almost all his time with books, records and microfilm. He was a book man, strict, correct. He worked hard. The object of his presence in Fort Plato was to learn all he could about the Terrans and he singlemindedly devoted sixteen hours a day to his task. Tomi was bored and made no attempt to hide it. There was a stubborn, tacit refusal among almost all theTerrans, young and old, even to say hello to her. They knew the part she had played in the fall of Fort Plato and she became a symbol to them. She was the Adamites; she was their defeat; she was the occupation. For this reason she saw a lot of John Stewart. She didn't like him and he didn't act as if he liked her. Yet he talked to her, as freely as he would ever talk. She didn't know why this was and she didn't care. She saw no danger in talking candidly to Stewart. She was wrong. F or the third time Dr. Roger Miller read through all the reports he had been able to assemble on the so-called Maribisans, Don and Gilen Slent. Everyone in the Personnel Building who had encountered the visitors, however briefly, had been asked to report. The suspicion that they were Adamites was never mentioned. Certain small, isolated identity factors emerged. Both of them spoke Enghlish too correctly. Their speech was not always pedantic, their accent not always flawless -- certain colloquialisms were used by them. But it was as if someone, not necessarily they themselves, had made a careful study of many examples of the language and what they had been taught was a distillation of these examples. They clung to each other in a strange way not inconsistent with their being father and daughter -- but the relationship seemed more exclusive of others than would be expected of a comparatively young parent from a provincial planet and a lovely girl. The medical examination showed that the girl had had her appendix removed surgically, but that was not conclusive evidence of alienness -- it was quite possible that this operation was still performed on Maribis. Indeed, the medical evidence was rather against the theory that they were Adamites, for there were confused indications of recent specifically Terran ancestry. This was particularly puzzling. Checking failed to confirm or deny that the Slents had arrived on the ship Nord from Hylon as they claimed. Their names were on the passenger list, but no one remembered them. That, too, was inconclusive; the vessel was back in space, beyond contact. The few crewmen who had elected not to stay with the ship and hence were available for questioning simply had happened to have nothing to do with these two passengers -- who had probably kept to themselves if their present behavior were anything to go by. One of those who remained, the purser, acted strangely when questioned. No, he didn't remember them -- what was the trouble? Why were two passengers so important? He had been in the employ of Spacelines for twenty-nine years and had never been grilled before. Did they think he'd taken a bribe? He insisted on a lie-detector test, (it revealed nothing except that he believed he was telling the truth.) Yes, he had been scheduled to make the next trip on the Nord, Only an undiagnosed illness the night before departure had made him miss the trip. The illness had turned out to be an allergy. Miller stabbed his intercom as if trying to kill it. "Tell Miss Heilbron I want to see her," he snapped. "No. Ask Miss Heilbron if I may see her. Ask if it would be convenient if I called on her on a matter of considerable importance." The reply came within forty-five seconds. Miss Heilbron would be honored to receive him. He suspected sarcasm, but he could not complain of the phraseology. He wasted no time. "Miss Heilbron if our guests are not Adamites they're equally worthy of attention and investigation. I have two suggestions. But first, have you seen the medical report?" "Yes." "The medical report is the one thing I find hard to explain." "Except of course," she suggested gently, "on the basis that the doctors concerned were fools and got it all wrong." "Naturally I am not ignoring that possibility." "Naturally not." "You must rescind your proviso. I may have to meet them myself. At least I must be free to do so if I consider it necessary." "Of course." He stared at her. "Of course?" "I merely wished to make a point. Dr. Miller. We can consider it made, can't we?" "Wasn't it rather a childish way to make it?" "Probably. I am a very childish person. Dr. Miller." "I am trying not to lose my temper. Please do not provoke me." IF "You must be mistaken. I'm not generally regarded as highly provocative." "Understandably," he retorted cruelly and was satisfied by her faint flush. "You agree telepathy must be investigated?" "I thought hypnosis." "To hypnotize a person you must be in his presence, or at least in communication with him. In the circumstances, it seems the only means of communication must have been telepathy." "You mean they worked from outside, from another ship, on the people in the TVorrf?" meto congratulate you on your unerring detection of the obvious." She said nothing, merely looking at him wryly, her expression more telling than words. "I'm sorry," he said. "All right, I am well aware I'm hard to get on with. I must be the most difficult man in the world to get on with." "Dr. Miller, I'm sure you exaggerate. Besides," she added kindly, "there are many other worlds." He swallowed that. "I have a telepathic rating of zero. I intend to enlist a person who calls himself The Great Nicolas." Miss Heilbron was genuinely surprised. "I grasp your idea, but -- isn't he just a mountebank?" "Probably," said Miller glumly. "But I hope he's not. I most sincerely hope he's not." appearing in London, much to the annoyance of Dr. Miller. Nicolas had been in Stuttgart the week before. Miller had to fly to London. Using the enormous power of Personnel, he had discovered that The Great Nicolas was Nick Grumeyer, one-time conman. Miller was in the audience in a London night club when the lights dimmed and brass blared to announce The Great Act. Spotlights picked out three correctly shaped blondes, one in green, one in red, one in blue. Their elaborate costumes contained an. enormous quantity of silk, lace, frills and fur, considering how little of their wearers they concealed. The girls turned toward each other, stretching out their spangled arms to form a triangle. Each sank to one knee. The Great Nicolas slowly appeared in the triangle, wearing white evening dress. The act included illusion as well as telepathy. He, snapped his fingers and the girl in red had a blue dress, the one in green a red dress and the one in blue a green dress. He snapped his fingers and each girl became two, then three, then four, swirling out of one another. There was a lot more of this, which bored Miller because he had not flown to London to see anything of the sort. He didn't know how it was done and he didn't care.That it was not magic he was certain. The girls unfastened their enormous skirts and were suddenly dressed in silver leotards. They moved into the audience and lights picked them out as they leaned provocatively over fat men. "Snakeskin wallet, comb, driving license in name of Andrew Flambert," said Nicolas and a girl produced these items from a man's pocket. "Five keys, a pocket knife, nail scissors -- appointment book, handkerchief pencil -- nail varnish, nail file, lipstick -- " It was effective because it was quick, because it was always right and because so many pockets and handbags were probed. Obviously there couldn't be that many stooges in the audience. You re Nick Grumeyer and Vm here to get you. Miller thought with concentrated venom. What you stole from me isnt half what you make in a night here, but I know ril never get that from you, Vll get something else, Vll make you pay in blood, Nick Grumeyer, One of the silver girls made a strange genture with a stiff wrist and came toward him. No lights followed her. Nobody but Miller looked at her. There were eleven other girls and Nicolas, who was now telling the audience about their scars. The silver girl whispered in Miller's ear, "Please come with me, sir." "All right," he said. "Let's go." The girl opened a side door, led him along a bare passage and into a dressing room. She faced him. "Who are you?" she asked. She was older than he had thought, though not less attractive. Possibly she was sixty, his own age. He guessed that she was the girls' leader, perhaps even Nicolas's boss. "You threatened Nick," she said. The threat had achieved its object. "It was a test," he said. "I'm Dr. Roger Miller of UN. I want to consult The Great Nicolas." "Why did you threaten him?" "To see if he could sense the threat." "Well, he did," she said grimly. "Never fool around with telepathy. It can be a terrible thing." "Terrible? Do you mean dangerous?" "That, too. But terrible in other ways. It can turn you inside out." "You're a telepath, then? And you don't like it?" "I hate it." He was interested. "Yet it's your living." "Nick could manage without me. But he'd use somebody else." "You're -- his wife?" "Yes. Doris Grumeyer. Now shut up." "I didn't know he had a wife." "It is believed we live together. Professionally that's a convenience IF at times. Please be quiet. You want to see Nick. He's prepared to see you." Miller sat down, perfectly prepared to wait. It seemed quite likely now that he had guessed right in deciding to consult The Great Nicolas. Fort Plato. General Morrison knew nothing about it. John Stewart knew nothing about it. Hardly anyone in high authority among the Terrans knew about it -- and none of the Adamites. Former Checker Alan Stewart knew about it and wished he didn't. His position in Fort Plato after the trial was miserable. Had he been executed he would have been a martyr and might even in time have been turned into a hero. When he was released, however, reaction set in and most of the Terrans in the fort now considered him to be the criminal the Adamites had failed to prove he was. After all, he could have stopped the Adamites and had not done so. He happened to learn about the meeting and something of its purpose, but was excluded from it. Warned grimly to keep quiet, he almost managed to forget he knew about the matter. It was not difficult for men and women who knew every inch of the station to find a place where they could talk in secret. Although scanners were everywhere and Adamites were in the checkpoint now, people who knew exactly where the scanners were could defeat them. It was a meeting of revolutionaries. Inevitably their conclusions were violent and bloody. Tomi, reading in her room sensed enough disturbance to tell her father that something was in the wind. He told her to go to the checkpoint and see if she could discover anything there. At the checkpoint, with the help of two Adamite technicians who had been studying the available facilities, she cast her net wide. She looked in and eavesdropped on Morrison, Stewart and many others who were important in Fort Plato. She found nothing to explain her vague sense of danger. She went in search of John Stewart and found him in the main library. He seemed less interested in her concern than in what had caused it. "You said it's a feeling?" he asked. "A hunch?" "I never ignore a hunch. Do you?" "Tomi, you give the impression this is more than a hunch. Tell me. She had no intention of telling him that Fort Plato had fallen mainly because Wil Slent and herself had touched a few receptive and made people who were working automatically, thinking of something else, unconsciously throw a switch here, put a circuit out of operation there, fail to notice that a red light had come on, turn off an alarm. "I know something's happenmg. "You know?" She had to play it down. "I had this feeling -- oh, forget it. What are you reading?" He showed her the book. It was The Eden Myth by Dr. Roger Miller. "Myth?" she asked. "Eden doesn't exist?" Stewart smiled. "That's not what the title means. Miller examines the purely Terran sources of the Eden legend and the name itself. The word eden is Hebrew and means 'delight' -- the Greek version of the Old Testament uses a word paradeisos, from the Persian. Edin was the Sumerian name for the plain of Babylon. Miller shows that the Adamites never called themselves Adamites -- or their world Eden -- until they had learned that Terrans had legends that the human race began in a place called the Garden of Eden and that the first man was Adam." "Well, that's what he would say, isn't it?" "How do you feel about Earth?" "I just don't feel anything about Earth. Go back to your book. Who's Miller anyway?" "He works at UN headquarters in Munich." "Munich?" She was suddenly thoughtful. "Is that another name for Miinchen?" "Same place." She turned away. Her feeling of unease had passed. And she still didn't like Stewart. She didn't dislike him either. It was a pity. All the indications were that she would go on being lonely and slightly bored. She was looking forward to the warm, complete contact with her sisters that was to take place in a few hours. Sal Slent was deeply unconscious on Outward. It had proved necessary, when his foot did not improve after some days, to perform a small surgical operation on it. This was all Tomi could learn. In Miinchen Gilen and Don were together, but Gilen was uneasy rather as Tomi had been; uncommunicative. She broke the contact quickly. Tomi had no chance to ask her what if anything she knew of a Dr. Roger Miller. In Station # Pariss declared briefly and firmly that with a latent telepathic talent around, all such communication had better be suspended, temporarily at least. Tomi was left with the impression that if her father were not so eager to return to his bookwork, which seemed to occupy him now to the exclusion of all else, she would have been able to make better contact at least with Gilen. IF VI T he guerillas struck in the night. The Adamites had become careless. Seven days had passed during which the Terrans gave every indication of having accepted the situation reasonably, if not enthusiastically. If the Terrans had been difficult from the start Adamite control would have been adjusted accordingly. But almost every man, woman and child in the station had behaved carefully right along -- like students with a new teacher -- and the Adamites had failed to recognize a sizing-up period for what it was. The guerillas, as they called themselves, let the sentries alone with few exceptions. The Adamites in checkpoint, two men and a woman, were offered poisoned coffee. The three Adamites would not have accepted refreshment from a Terran seven days earlier. No longer suspicious, they drank the coffee and died. Some sleeping Adamites were slain. The victims were not necessarily important but they could be killed without raising an alarm. Two soldiers who were with Terran girls, contrary to orders, were easy and obvious victims. Tomi and Wil Slent were spared because they were well guarded. Arol, on the other hand, was one of the first victims. Three Terrans, all girls, knew they were giving their lives -- the girl who poisoned the Adamite checkers and the two who slew their lovers. They would be traced later. The others struck secretly, often at men and women they knew not at all. The aim was simply to kill as many Adamites as possible. Many killed more than once. When a force of four hundred attempted to control a community of five thousand and when, moreover, there was at least a pretense of normalcy, of peaceful occupation if not friendship, a carefully planned coup could be bloodily successful. The guerillas killed two hundred and one Adamites with no loss to themselves. The Adamites they could not kill were those who resumed full control of Fort Plato the next morning. back to reality from his fascinating private research, clamped down hard. All five thousand Terrans were rounded up at gunpoint and locked up, either in large numbers in the halls and storehouses or in their own homes. Tomi was given the job of compiling a casualty list. As she went her rounds she was sick four times, until at last she could only retch painfully. The men with Tomi, trained soldiers, were cool and detached. An Adamite soldier was not trained to be without feelings -- he was trained to direct his feelings to maximum effect. A sergeant remarked at one point, "You have to give them credit. It's a fine job." Tomi stared at him uncomprehendingly. The sergeant felt called on to explain. "Well, they couldn't recapture the fort and they accepted that. An effort like this, directed against men on duty, would have been crushed in five minutes. Instead they killed as many of us as they could, as quietly as they could, so that they could go on all night. Itwas a night of Tomi could not understand him, but if his words had been translated any guerilla of any nation in history would have understood him at once. Wil Slent's attitude was different. To lose two hundred men in taking Fort Plato in battle would have been a mere nothing; indeed to take it at all with any loss would have been a remarkable achievement. But to take it with no loss and then allow half the occupying force to be butchered was a grave error.  "If I had a competent second in command," he admitted to Tomi, "it would be my duty to relinquish control to him. But Arol is dead. We have no other senior officer who speaks their language -- unless you want to take command?" "There has to be a Naval commander," Tomi said. "You have to stay in command." "My tactics were badly mistaken. But how could anyone guess," said Wil, justifying himself, "that any group of reasonable human beings would commit such an act while remaining completely in our power? The situation I set up should in itself have precluded any such possibility. We can draw two hundred replacements from the ship. They'll be here in twelve hours. The Terrans knew they could not overcome us. What could they hope to gain?" "Self-respect, perhaps," said Tomi. "They simply had to spit in our eye." "Yes, I have encountered such an attitude in my reading. Of course we must take the usual action. Three for one. Six hundred Terrans must be executed." Tomi nodded, but so reluctantly that Wil said, "You don't agree? You think it's harsh?" "I don't think it matters whether it's harsh or not. The point is, is it wise? I suggest you get Stewart here and tell hirii what you're proposing." "If I do, there can be no change. It is out of the question for me to declare my intention and not carry it out." "Then don't tell him your intention. Tell him what you propose IF to do and see what happens." "Very well. But why Stewart? It should be General Morrison." "Do you want to make it official? Then speak to General Morrison." "I see. Yes, your idea has merit, Tomi." When Stewart was told Wil Slent proposed to execute six hundred Terrans, he said, "It will be a long war." "What do you mean?" Stewart merely shrugged. "You think Earth will fight if we do this?" "Don't you?" "But no injustice will be committed. You Terrans treacherously fell on us and -- " Stewart laughed without humor. "You attack us, take ijis over -- and don't expect reprisals?' "You kill two hundred of us and don't expect reprisals?" Stewart unwrapped a peppermint and sucked it reflectively. "Slent, try to imagine the position exactly reversed. What would Adamites have done?" "Planned to overthrow you. Adamite officers would never have considered a pointless massacre like this." "Neither did ours." "I don't understand you at all." "You took over the station. You broke up our system of authority, our system of communication. General Morrison has not been in command even of the Terrans in the fort since your coup. It is nonsense to speak of what 'we' did. I know nothing of this. General Morrison knew nothing of it." "Would you have voted against the massacre if you had had a vote?" "Certainly." "On what grounds?" "Grounds of ethics, expediency, legality and cowardice, among others." "Cowardice? Fear?" "Not for myself. But the thought of the galactic war that might follow your doing the criminally stupid thing you propose frightens the life out of me." "Stewart, two hundred and one of us have been killed. By our laws, as an occupying force, the natural consequence is the execution of six hundred and three of you," "Any six hundred and three?" "All the assassins we can establish, plus others selected on a random basis." "And that's Adamite justice?" Wil flushed at the sudden biting incredulity in Stewart's tone. He knew, though, that Stewart could suit the tone of his voice to his purpose. Wil explained: "That's Adamite , expediency. Such things must not be allowed to happen again." "I suggest you forget the whole thing." For once Stewart had been stupid. "That's obviously impossible." "Agreed. Then forget the threeto-one ratio. Terrans used to believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Deep down, we still do." "You mean we must execute only two hundred and one Terrans?" "I mean nothing of the sort. I mean you must forget the three-toone ratio." Wil nodded. "I understand you." He would not let the discussion go further. T he Great Nicolas proved to be a smallish man, quite bald, with an impediment in his speech of which there was no sign, when he was on stage. Doris remained in the room while he and Miller talked. She said nothing. She watched Miller steadily all the time. Grumeyer's manner was friendlier than his wife's. Miller easily understood why he had been a successful conman. "This is very interesting," Grumeyer said. "But you have nothing to go on but guesses? The man and girl you tell me about may be Adamites -- and may be telepaths?" Miller nodded. "You as a telepath," he said with some asperity, "should have no difficulty in checking on the latter possibility." "Not very much," Grumeyer agreed. "But I imagine you don't want these two alerted?" "You imagine correctly." "That makes it more difficult." "You are a telepath?" Miller asked bluntly. Grumeyer smiled. "I should have thought that has been clearly established." "One thing puzzles me. Scientists and psychologists still know very little about telepathy. Yet you have a telepathic act. And there are others. Why can't the scientists establish anything definite? Why don't they test you?" "I have been approached. Scientists always wish to study a thing under their conditions. They think up the test, set up the experiment and believe before it starts that it must be a good test because they have thought it up. This is rather like ruling that the best tennis player is the one who can hit most balls through a hole in the wall. Something is tested, but what? Certainly not the ability to win matches." "I see what you mean. I've heard you once were a good swindler." "Ah, that. I will explain. I had a miserable childhood. Doctor. I was genuinely misunderstood. I did not know that I was different, you see. Suddenly, when I was about fifteen, everything changed. I found it was easy to make people give me things. I could tell when I was pleasing them and when I was making them angry. I soothed IF them until they wanted to give me something. Girls, too." His eyes flickered briefly to Doris, who did not move. "My wife knows this. Even now women flock to me. I'm an ugly little man, yet women beg me not only for love but for anything else I care to give them. That is how I became what you call a swindler. The choicewas not mine. The profession was forced on me by my victims. At the time I could find nothing else I could do successfully. It was only when I met Doris that -- " He paused, then said more briskly, "There is one thing about telepathy the scientists find hard to believe and therefore make no attempt to prove -- it is a collaborative talent. Just as mindreading demands a mind to read and a mind to be read, two people can form a partnership many times more effective than any individual can be. These two are not the same, do not have the same functions. There is the fulcrum and the lever. Although the two individuals who form a team do not have to be man and wife, it does seem essential for them to be of different sexes. I have been able to meld with many women, but never really successfully with a man." "You work -- meld, you say -- with all the girls in your act?" "It's hard to say yes or no. There are no words for what scientists investigate but refuse to believe. I meld invariably and easily with Doris. I -- well, contact the other girls." "To return to the man and girl who call themselves Maribisans -- " "Yes, it's interesting that they are a man and girl -- interesting, too, that they claim to be father and daughter." "Claim to be?" "They may very well be so. My thought was merely that they would do so anyway. They would call themselves father and daughter, husband and wife or brother and sister because telepathic partnership demands proximity." Miller leaned forward, interested. "It doesn't work over distances?" "That's not what I mean at all. The partners have to be close, preferably within sight of each other. It's no use having a fulcrum here and a lever somewhere else." "I see. Another point occurs to me. One would imagine telepaths would sense other telepaths." "Yes." "Could the man and girl in Miinchen sense you as a more than usually talented telepath?" "No." "You are very definite." Grumeyer opened a drawer. He produced a piece of apparatus that resembled a primitive crystal set for the reception of radio signals. "Like many discoveries, this was made by accident," said Grumeyer. "Exactly what it does or why, I neither know nor care. I know its effect, which is all that matters. In the past we suffered interference. Mental interference. Thoughts from outside, thoughts we did not want. Probably my particular mental activity interested, stimulated, attracted similar mental activity." He placed the device back where he had found it, but did not close the drawer. "I discovered this apparatus by chance, as I told you. It has some kind of shorting or limiting effect. I set it before every performance. Although it does not interfere significantly with the act, it prevents telepaths far away from becoming interested." "Similar to jamming radio signals?" "Yes. Similar. But unlike jamming, it does not draw attention to itself. I call it the Blanket." "Mr. Grumeyer, are you going to help me?" "By going to Miinchen? No." "Any reasonable expenses -- " "Not a matter of money. If what you say is true I fear these people. Damage can easily be done in a mind. We all have a secret fear. I shall tell you mine -- fear of being physically sound and mentally crippled." "So you won't help?" "I did not say that either." He hesitated and finally said, "This I will promise you. If you learn that these two are enemies of our race, if you can honestly say they are dangerous -- immediately dangerous, not potentially dangerous -- ask me again and I may come." With that Miller had to be content. The Great Nicolas would go no further. And Doris merely looked at him silently... asked. "You've never heard of our Wonderlands?" She puckered her brows in thought. "I've heard of a book, Alice in Wonderland -- " "Our Wonderlands aie not quite like that, though there are similarities. Alice saw her Wonderland in a dream. We visit ours fully awake." "And you want me to come with you? Hugh, give me your word this isn't a trick." "What kind of trick?" he asked. "Wonderland is made up entirely of tricks. Nearly all the tricks we know are incorporated in it somewhere." She laughed. "Where is it? We didn't find it when we checked the station." "You probably thought it was just ballast." "Exactly what is it?" "A mixture of simulation and illusion and a little reality. For a few hours you'll be on Earth, in circumstances I know but you don't. It's better if you don't know. IF Often when we use it ourselves, we have someone else set the program for us." "The station is small. There can't be much room for this Wonderland." "More than you'd think. A certain mass is necessary for various reasons. If we didn't have a Wonderland, the space it takes up would be filled with ballast." "What's it for?" "Mainly to help keep us sane. To stop us from feeling too homesick." She was becoming curious. If Wonderland simulated conditions on Earth it was her duty to visit it. They went up from the living quarters in a slow elevator. "How many can be in Wonderland at once?" she asked. "Two at most settings. Four in some simple, static scenes. Only one in some complicated simulations." "And we just walk in? No preparation?" "Usually we change our clothes. That's all. Wonderland does the rest." The elevator stopped. They emerged in a blank steel corridor facing a double door. Beyond the door was a small totally bare room with two more doors. "Go in there and change," said Hugh. 'Then come out." Pariss found herself in a cubicle. Set out for her in front of a chute, with automated neatness, was a curious collection of garments: a blue insulated suit with a hood, boots with skates and a collection of equipment the purpose of which she had to guess. It was going to be cold. There would be snow and ice. She was used to this. Eden was a cold world except on the artificial islands. She changed quickly and picked up the strange equipment she was evidently supposed to take with her. Then she left the cubicle. "Like it?" Hugh asked. She was dazzled by the bright sun on the sparkling snow. Over to the left, about a thousand meters away, was a forest of green spiky trees. In front of her the ground fell gently to a frozen lake. To the right were blue mountains hazy with distance. She caught her breath -- and not from the cold. The air was clean and invigorating. Her breath froze and drifted away slowly, indicating hardly any wind. "How is it done?" she murmured. "Oh, don't bother about that. Can you skate?" The illusion, if such it was, was perfect. The snow was crisp and new, with no footprints but their own. The sky was clear light blue. They left their skis by the changing rooms -- which looked part of an Alpine hut -- and trudged down to the lake, where they helped each other to put on skates. Pariss skated well, but slightly to her chagrin Hugh skated better. The Terran attitude toward snow and ice was new to her. On Eden they were an inconvenience and all paths and roads were kept completely clear. Children and adults exercised and trained in the snow, but only young children played in it. One skated to get somewhere or for exercise, not for fun. She enjoyed skating with Hugh and soon learned some of his techniques. Previously she would have seen no point in skating backward or on one skate only except when changing over to the other. Hugh also learned quietly from what was new to Pariss. If there should be war between Terrans and Adamites, on the surface of worlds, it was important to know where the Adamites held an advantage. They might strike first at Northern Canada, Alaska, Russia, even the polar caps -- if they had been applying technology to snow and ice for centuries while Earth people for the most part had merely played in it or waited for a thaw. F or the first time, as she smoothed on the long gold dress she next found in the changing cubicle, Pariss had a fleeting glimpse of what clothes meant to Terran women. But the feeling was gone in a flash, Once again she gasped in wonder and admiration as she emerged, this time into a brightly lit ballroom in which scores of people were dancing. This, she knew at once, was a Grand Ball, a great occasion, The music was strange to her ears, although she had listened dutifully to taped Terran music. The beat, however, was obvious -- one, two, three, one, two, three. This was what they called a waltz. The magnificently dressed dancers were bobbing gracefully in simple steps which Pariss, a good dancer, was able to pick up in a few seconds. The men were all in black and white, the women in all the colors of the rainbow. Hugh appeared, dressed like the other men in a black suit with a dazzling white shirt and a white tie. "May I have the pleasure?" he asked. The illusion was nearly perfect. Once or twice she tried to touch the other dancers, but they always moved gently away. "Those drinks they're carrying can't be real," she said. "No, but you can have one if you like." "How?" "I'll show you." He went to the buffet and returned with two glasses. She noticed that people moved easily out of his way. She drank and danced with Hugh again, less successfully. IF because the steps were more elaborate than those of the waltz. She turned down Hugh's invitation to go out on the balcony. She was not sure what she would do if he became even friendlier. So they went back to the doors from which they had emerged and once again she was in the bare changing cubicle. The clothes she found this time were unexpected. After the snow and the ballroom, she had expected the next scene to be even more glamorous and probably aphrodisiac -- perhaps a luxury apartment high above a city, late at night, with wine and supper. She was hungry and would have welcomed the supper. But the clothes she found were coarse trousers and tunic, with underclothes so plain and utilitarian she knew there could be no glamor in the next scene. She dressed and hesitated, reluctant this time to go out, remembering that after all Hugh was -- or might consider himself to be -- an enemy. H aving gone so far, Wil Slent would budge no further. Two hundred and one Adamites had been killed. Two hundred and one Terrans had to die. And since it would be impossible to establish the identity of all the assassins, the two hundred and one would be selected at random, every twentyfifth name on the personnel list in alphabetical order, excluding only those under eighteen. The execution of two hundred Terrans must go on. It did. It was done as humanely as possible. The Terrans were sent, to lunch one day in groups of two hundred. One group was never seen again. Among those who were executed were General Morrison, whose name was selected at random from the list, and the wife of the chief medical officer. Nils Hakstrott. Previously he, like Stewart, had been as neutral as possible in the circumstances, prepared to sit out the Adamite occupation. When his wife, who was at least half the taciturn Scandinavian's life, was executed -- the gentle Delise had been the last person among the five thousand Terrans likely to kill any human being under any circumstances -- Nils Hakstrott decided coldly that he personally was going to avenge her. T he Out warders were friendly in an earthy way and Red was typical. The women accepted Verne with neither enthusiasm nor resentment. She was there -- and that was that. The men made crude advances, which stopped abruptly when Red made it clear she was already claimed. She was given a desk and told to copy a plan. It was an apparently easy job with several pitfalls. She did her very best and her boss, a vast man called Eric Manvin, was satisfied and said so. He showed his satisfaction by putting her at once on a difficult job, a defense network soon to be established against raids by the gnomes and hemmers. It consisted of a central fort and a series of boundary outposts linked to the fort by both surface and underground tunnels. The specifications and requirements were supplied and it was up to her to solve the many problems. She worked with three men and two women. The range of work was immense; everything that required plans was handled here. At the first break for coffee she told Eric, "I've met your brother." "Fred?" ' "We were on the road in the gale, my father and I. He came out for us. He saved our lives." Eric seemed reluctant to talk about Fred. Presently he said, "Fred doesn't have all his onions, girl." "All his what?" "You know. There's something missing in him. Ma was nearly killed by a hemmer while she was carrying him. Doctors say that shouldn't have anything to do with it, but I don't know. Fred's scared of nothing but hemmers'" Verne thought of the stocky bluff gateman. As she formed a casual mental contact she became aware of something urgent. She didn't stop to think. "The gate!" she exclaimed. She whirled to claw at the door and found Eric there before her. "Fred?" he asked. They ran. The gate was perhaps three hundred meters from the drawing office. On the way they collected three other men. One had a shotgun. When they burst into the gatehouse a hemmer was sucking the last drop of blood from the body of Fred Manvin. The hemmer was about the size of a large dog and roughly the same shape, but the six legs and head were amorphous, like those of the gnomes. The long tongue was the hemmer's strike weapon. The shotgun went off over Verne's shoulder. The hemmer, not disabled, turned and lashed at Eric with its tongue. Eric sawed savagely and successfully in the air with his knife. The tip of the tongue, almost severed, dripped blood -- Fred's blood. The four men knew what to do. The man with the shotgun threw it away. They fell on the hemmer with knives and whatever heavy objects came to hand -- clubs, a lamp, a steel rod. They beat the hemmer to a pulp.' That this was necessary was shown by its struggles and the vicious lashing of its tongue after its owner should have been dead. There was red blood and green blood. The red blood was Fred's IF the green the hemmer's. The creature was reduced to small green-brown balls. One of the men looked around and found a small blowlamp which he applied to the residue. It did not burn easily and tended to roll away. He rolled all the balls outside, turned up the flame and incinerated them. Only a little black dust was left. Eric was looking down at Fred, a strange expression on his face. He showed no sorrow. What he felt Verne thought, was shame. "Poor Fred," said Eric. "He was never afraid of anything but hemmers." After Fred's bloodless corpse had been taken away to be disposed of, Eric and the other men looked around to see where the hemmer had come from -- an important matter, Verne understood. They found a small gap in the fence near the gate, where something heavy had been dashed violently in the storm. "That's it," Eric said, "The beast saw the gap, crept through, waited behind the gatehouse until Fred opened the door, then jumped him. It had the sense to kill him inside where nobody could see what was going on," It was only then that he reverted to the most remarkable feature of the affair, "How did you know, girl?" he asked, fixing her with his hard gaze. Verne could tell him only a part of the truth. "I've never seen a hemmer before," she said, "but I think I can tell when they're about." To her relief, Eric nodded. "Some people have claimed the gift -- usually about gnomes. But you can't sense gnomes, can you? You once walked in on one." "Now I might be able to." He shook his head. "Don't count on it, girl. Anyone I ever heard of who claimed to be able to sense gnomes or hemmers was killed by one or the other. Maybe it works sometimes. When you start thinking it always works you get careless and -- " He made a gruesome sucking noise, looked at her curiously. He had shown not one sign of grief over Fred. "Things happen around you, girl. Be careful. You're a good draftsman. I don't want to lose you." T wice Pariss had emerged into a blaze of light. This time she found herself in a world of blackness, sudden flashes, noise and menace. Hugh caught her arm. She could scarcely see him. A searchlight flicked on, then off. She had a glimpse of tall buildings all around her. The droning she had noted almost unconsciously came from the sky. The crumps which vibrated the air about her ears and shook the ground under her feet could only be explosions. As her eyes became accustomed to the scene she discovered that there was really a good deal of light, particularly to her left, where a red glow lit the sky. And as her ears learned to discriminate she found that the street was not deserted, as she had thought. Many people were scurrying in the black shadows. A man in a steel helmet emerged from the gloom, clearly visible as the red glow over the rooftops suddenly swelled to flames. "Get off the street," he yelled. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Pariss and Hugh sought shadows and found a narrow opening, a mere lane. They hurried along it, more to get away frorn the bawling man than anything else. As they went, they heard him shouting at somebody else. At the other end of the lane they found themselves in a more open space. Abruptly all was brightly lit -- at least a score of searchlights came on, searching for and finding a dark winged shape droning over the city. They saw bombs drop. Then the bomber changed course and the searchlights lost it. They caught a smaller plane, evidently one of the defenders, for the lights flicked off again and the darkness seemed ten times greater than before. "Where are we?" she asked. "In London in an air raid. Not contemporary. This was centuries ago.Why -- " A building no more than two hundred meters away opened out and collapsed and Hugh threw her to the ground. There was no flash, but the noise deafened Pariss. She hit the ground and Hugh landed heavily on top of her. She was angry -- this was only play-acting. However, as her back was spattered with small stones and she felt a fierce blast of hot air over her, she wasn't so sure. "This is a hot spot," said Hugh, pulling her to her feet. "Let's get out of it." She tried to protest, but he was dragging her so fast she had to save her breath for running. They came to a blazing store. Firemen were hosing the buildings nearby, ignoring the doomed structure. In the street were scores of dazed people in nightclothes, some grotesquely wearing steel helmets and pajamas, most carrying gas masks. A child dashed at Pariss and then dodged away. A breath of wind sighed along the street and the next moment they were drenched in cold water. The water supply for the hoses had suddenly been cut and the weak jets were blown back on the firefighters. The water, at least, was real. The droning swelled. As searchlights stabbed the sky again Pariss caught glimpses of whole waves of bombers. The heat from the fire was burnIF ing her face. Although she still resented the futility of this demonstration, she turned and ran to the other side of the street as she heard a child wailing. She didn't find the child and she lost Hugh. The blazing building suddenly collapsed into the street, a terrifying sight, engulfing the firemen and the homeless people in blazing rubble. Not believing in the still flickering debris in front of her, she started to approach it to prove to herself it was illusion. The heat drove her back. Still annoyed with Hugh, she decided to make her way back, leaving him to follow. There would be a door, as usual, looking like a typical door in this beleaguered city, but opening into the cubicle. She could not find the way back. When she thought she had found the lane, it proved to be the wrong lane. Instead of retracing her steps she tried to find the street they had started from. Soon she was hopelessly lost. Because she was uneasy, hungry, wet and cold and because she was alone and could see no way out of this ghastly illusion she began to curse Hugh. It had been pleasant and interesting to skate, to dance. What pleasure was there in this? When she was approaching despair, for the noise alone made her want to scream, she realized she was in a place very like the street where the man in the tin hat had shouted at her and Hugh. She searched all around for the door out of this tortured city. She could not find it. No door would open for her. Trying to remember exactly what had happened when she first found herself in this whirl of destruction, she could be sure of nothing except that Hugh had guided her. Without him she was lost. As she turned from another doorknob which almost certainly led nowhere anyway, she bumped into someone. "Pariss!" said Hugh. "What happened to you when the building collapsed?" "Never mind that. Let's get out of here." Still angry with him, she was torn between relief at finding him, the desire to flare at him and impatience to escape from this mad, hellish world. The last was most important. Telling him what she thought of him could wait. "We can't leave at this moment. We've got to go through that lane and it's blocked." "Get me out of here!" she said, not loudly, but with passion. "The raid will be over in an hour or less. Then it'll be easy to get back where we started. I've found a workmen's hut. We can wait there. This way." Her nerves were in rags. She wanted to scream at him. A door opened. She was led inside. A match scraped and she saw the inside of the hut. In one corner was a spade, in another a pick. Hugh was lighting an oil lamp. Two small windows had black material draped over them. On the bare boards of the floor lay a thin paillasse. Two chipiped ipugs, an old kettle, a small stove and a spoon lay on an inverted fishbox. There was nothing else. She exploded hysterically. She didn't know what she said. For the first time she lost some of her perfect English and used Adamite words. Hugh smiled and she threw herself at him. He caught her wrists and kissed her and suddenly she admitted what she had known all along, that she wanted this man. All that mattered was: did he care about her as something other than an Adamite adversary. If he remained coldly calculating she would punish him. It was she who dragged him down. He was startled, then enthusiastically cooperative. She said what was in her mind. "Forget I'm an Adamite. If you don't care about me as a woman I'll kill you." F ull contact was made after five exploratory efforts. It was easy to arrange full concentration in the two stations, but Gilen and Don had difficulty making sure they would be alone and undisturbed -- and Verne could be in Sal's company only in the presence of other patients. There is a very serious situation here, tragic and possibly disastrous Details of massacre and reprisals. A strong line must be taken with the Terrans on all fronts... Nonsense. How can we take a strong line here? Tomi, are you sure the execution of the Terrans was necessary? cision. He felt he had no choice. en: We are in the Terrans' hands. We are almost Jielpless. It may be necessary to request permission to use our special abilities if we are to achieve anything at all. #: Hugh, and I communication not in words. Shock, alarm, interest. haven't been tricked, Pariss? no consequence. When you hold a secret that -- IF about that now. Hugh has quite considerable telepathic potential, but there is no risk whatever that he will develop further without being trained. I could train him, I think -- not! Don't get the idea I've changed sides. er together. We have lost our bond. Experience must change us -- and our present experiences are very different. Tomi, it's a great pity such decisive and irrevocable action has been taken. out consultation. It may mean ruin. pretty good people. I have found no reason to fight them. Here on Outward the settlers are totally indifferent to Eden. From my experiences, I have no reason to back any Adamite aggression against Terrans. only by fighting could we get what we want. But I think we would lose... agree. There must be an answer... agree on an answer when the problems are not the same? T he rivulets mingled with more turbulence than ever before. Verne was the most decisive, the most positive. Gilen was the most tentative. Pariss was the most complex; the others sensed her conflict and at the same time a new serenity and smugness in her that irritated them. Tomi, once she found that a strong line in her post was favored by nobody, began to question Wil's action more than she had done previously. She broke the contact because she wanted to think. F ort Plato was seething. The executions had united the Terrans as nothing else could have done. Previously there had been many cautious spirits. The retaliatory executions, in which by rough Terran estimate about ten guerillas had been included with one hundred and ninety innocent people, changed all that. On the face of it, how the Terrans felt had ceased to matter. They were now treated as a conquered garrison. When not working or eating they were locked in their rooms. Large-scale plotting was made virtually impossible. The replacement Adamites, who had not known the easy mingling of the first few days, were tough jailers. To them the Terrans were dangerous and treacherous enemies. When a small Terran group went berserk, a dozen men rushing a single Adamite, he did not shoot to stunned them and the offenders were taken off in a tender to the Adamite ship, which no Terran had ever been allowed to visit and return. Miinchen a message from Miss Heilbron was waiting for him. Dear Dr. Miller:. Please come and see me immediately. It's vitally important. Naturally I cannot act without first seeing you. Yours faithfully, Margaret Heilbron He smiled a wintry smile. She had a flat near the Prinzregententheater, He knew the address but had never been there. She opened the door to him herself. The warmth of her welcome took him aback. Searching suspiciously for irony in her attitude as she brought him a drink, he admitted reluctantly to himself that possibly her friendliness was genuine. She lounged easily and elegantly on the arm of a chair, a drink in her hand. "Do you remember the purser on the Nora? The report on him? "Very well. I read it a dozen times. Norman Gliick." "Good. He seems to have missed a trip for medical reasons and had to be cleared medically. The doctors became interested in the psychriatric angle -- " "So were we all," said Miller. "But he refused to cooperate." "Ah, you weren't in the fortunate position of being his employers. The company doctors refused to pass him until he completed any treatment they chose. Now it seems his vehement insistence on certain 'facts' has convinced the doctors that they must be untrue." Miller nodded. "That he harbored certain emotional beliefs was obvious." "The man and the girl we are interested in were not on the ship when it started from Hylon. They were not on it a week out of Miinchen. They were on it six days out." "The ship didn't stop in space?" "Impossible. I mean, if there had been some kind of rendezvous in space, even one nobody saw or remembered afterward, the time and fuel schedules would reveal it. That is, unless a ship nobody saw matched velocity with the Nord and somehow managed a transfer." IF "Thank you, Miss Heilbron. You've given me a key." "To what?" "To open a door, obviously." He could reach her phone without getting up. He used it to send a wire to The Great Nicolas. Its purport was: IVe need you. Please come, pital he took Fred Manvin's job as gatekeeper for the time being. Great mobility was not required. Verne remained with Red, although she could have moved in with one of the single women. She continued to keep him at arm's length. She knew that coarse jokes were being made about the situation. Red was surprisingly and uncharacteristically tolerant of the ribbing. He made no secret of his determination to have Verne in the end. She found it hard even to be sure she liked him. She went on living in his house principally because she was used to him. Only once, when he came home drunk, did he try to force himself on her. She dislocated his shoulder with a judo lock he had never encountered. He bore no malice; everyone had a right to defend himself -- or herself. Anyway, she put the shoulder back in place for him. They met after work each day and went home together. This became habit and, one day when Red was delayed a little, Verne found she didn't want to go home without him. She waited outside although quite heavy rain was falling. When he appeared he seemed surprised she had waited. "Sorry, baby," he said. "I couldn't help it. Busy. Don't bawl me out." "I never bawl you out." "No, you don't, do you? except when I swear." "Swearing is untidy. It's not washing your face or not putting on a clean shirt." "Never thought of it that way, baby. Look, I got a haunch of steak. Not tinned steak. Frozen, but thawing out nicely now. We're going to have the best dinner we've had in months." She expressed natural interest. "Where did it come from?" "Base settlement up north has started a cattle farm. It hasn't been tried before because everybody thought the gnomes and hemmers would go for the cattle -- and it's a big enough job protecting animals from the climate without trying to protect them from gnomes and hemmers as well. But finally some cattle were brought in and the gnomes ignore them. So do the hemmers." "That's strange." "Maybe not. We've never managed to keep a gnome in captivity -- they either get away or kill themselves. But we know that for meat they eat only humans or other gnomes." Verne shuddered. Eden had no history of cannibalism, and she found the idea even more shocking than Terrans did. "Seems that -- like some cannibals in our own history -- they believe you become what you eat." They reached the house and were soaked to the skin. Verne hesitated. Red looked at her inquiringly. "Red," she said quietly, "there's something in the house." Red was instantly alert. "Hemmer?" "I don't know." He took a whistle from his pocket, the general alarm. "Want me to blow this?" "No -- I'm not sure enough." He nodded. When there was an alarm in Camp Eleven everybody dropped everything and ran to the spot. If it was a false alarm the people responsible looked uncommonly foolish. "I'll get a gun," Red said and moved to the alarm post only twenty yards away. "It's a gnome," she said. "The same one." "You don't know for sure there's anything there -- but you know it's the same one?" Red's tone was not mocking. He was genuinely seeking information, at least clarification of her hunch. "It couldn't be the same one, could it? The house was checked top and bottom after -- " "Gnomes are cunning, baby, and yours hates you. Maybe he found another way back. We have to have ventilation, and gomes can flow like water. You stay behind me. He opened the front door no more quietly nor loudly than his custom, strode in as usual. "Kitchen," Verne whispered. Red kicked the kitchen door open, not entering the room. The gnome was in the center of the floor as before. Its arms lashed out, hit the walls on each side of the doorway. Gnomes tended to flail rather than project their arms. Except for the split-second delay, the gnome might have reached Red. Red blasted the creature and moved closer, cutting it up with his beam. It took a long time to that of the hemmer. Pieces of gnome were not harmless like those of the other murderous species. If they happened to have a few brain cells the pieces went on fighting. After the gnome was killed the kitchen had to be cleaned. When the job was done, Verne said, "Let's put the steak away for tonight, Red. I couldn't eat it. I couldn't even cook it." Red nodded understandingly. Verne suddenly sensed strongly that Red loved her. Her courage in the previous encounter with the gnome had won him over completely -- since then he had acted as IF he had never acted before, waiting patiently for her because he was completely certain that she was worth waiting for. And Verne discovered in a blinding flash the difference it made to a girl to know that she was loved. She held out her arms to him. A Hugh," Pariss said, troubled, "if it didn't make me a traitress." He nodded. They were lying naked on a sunny beach in Wonderland. This was not only the most romantic setting they had been able to find -- it was also the most private. "You're worried," he said. "You feel something's gone wrong. Look, Pariss -- I don't want to make you betray your people. If you did that, they'd execute you, wouldn't they?" "Yes. But I might not be there to let them do it." He thought that over for a long time. At last he said "I see. I'm glad. The trouble is -- we might execute you." "If I chose to stay?" "Well, it would depend on what had happened. You said there were four echelons. Pariss, I can be pretty impartial. Maybe I can help. Don't betray your people, but tell me what's worrying you." "Yes, I will. In Fort Plato, two hundred Terrans and two hundred Adamites have died. And not in battle." "That's bad," said Hugh quietly"It's very bad. I know." "Can you tell me how?" "Oh, revolt and reprisal. The Terrans killed first." Hugh sat up, staring out across the unreal sea. "That may help. You've told me the truth about the purpose of this operation? You just want to find out about us?" She was silent. "So there's more." She sat up too, suddenly clutching his arm. "Hugh, I want to tell you. If I could only believe it was for the good of all of us -- " "Can't you tell me about the three other parts of this operation? We're bound to learn about them in the end. Isn't that so?" She nodded. At first hesitantly, then more freely, she told him of the quadruplets -- Wil, Far, Don and Sal -- and about Wil's quadruplet daughters: Tomi, Gilen, Verne and herself. Hugh listened quietly, asking hardly any questions. "So that was the background at Fort Plato," he said at last. "Your father acted exactly as your uncle did here. There was no proper Adamite control. The massacre happened because it was allowed to happen. Pariss, you're heading for failure -- catastrophic failure." He spoke with such conviction that she went suddenly pale. "Failure?" "I could take this station over again in one hour." "You swear that, Hugh? It's not a trick? But why are you telling me?" "Because," he said slowly, "I'm going to save you if I can." C ontact was easier now that Sal was out of the hospital. ward: I've gone a step further than Pariss. I've married Red. Verne, you're crazy! it a lot crazier to execute two hundred Terrans? thinks I should have stopped that somehow. Anyway, we're clamping down now. tion #: Hasn't there been too much clamping down already? Hugh says he's scared to think about what's going to happen on Fort Plato. You've told him? You've told him everything? our main aim. But he has told me many things. We'll all be lucky just to escape. Terrans aren't so marvelous. would be prepared to leave now. Without the seed? make a maximum effort, we might escape with the seed. is panic. Our control here is absolute -- think. all you can, but do not touch Hugh's mind. Gilen, plan to steal what we want, if necessary by maximum effort, but don't act until I give the word. Verne -- What advice for me? tense that Stewart, Terran liaison officer after the death of General Morrison, had any real authority. The Adamites were able to bring minor offenders before him and, as often as not, he was permitted to decide what was to be done. Leaders of the various sections into which the Terrans had been divided reported to him regularly. A girl who reported on the stenographer section gave him a paper to sign and with it was a small slip, reading: IF The girl made a slight gesture and he understood he was to eat the paper at the earliest opportunity. His reaction was mainly exasperation. The first plot had been disastrous. The massacres had accomplished nothing to the advantage of anyone. Here was another melodramatic plan. It was not difficult to get the crumpled rice paper into his mouth with a peppermint and swallow it. Two hours later, going for lunch, he had to descend two floors. He had a strong impulse to use the stairs. However, he would probably not be allowed to evade this thing even if he wanted to. He took the elevator. He entered with no trouble and was rather hoping the plan had already collapsed. When his floor was reached he was gently but firmly pushed back by the others in the elevator, so that he was last to emerge. The gate closed on his foot. He tried to cry out exactly as he would have done if he had had no warning at all. Two Adamite guards turned quickly and brought up their guns. The door slid open again. He pitched forward. The Adamites knew who he was. They called their own medical officer to attend to him. Stewart's foot was badly bruised, but not seriously crushed. A Terran clinic orderly turned up, looked at the foot casually and said Stewart should go to the clinic. The three Adamites spoke no English between them. They sent for an interpreter. Tomi came. "Very funny, isn't it?" Stewart asked. Tomi, who had not smiled, started in surprise. A quality Stewart had not previously revealed was peevishness. Stewart's tactics succeeded admirably. Instead of being sympathetic, instead of insisting that he get the best Adamite care, she shrugged and left him to his bad temper and the Terran clinic. For two hours after he reached the clinic nothing happened that was not entirely routine. His foot was treated. The two Adamite guards in the clinic seldom entered the two small wards. At last the chief medical officer. Nils Hakstrott, came to see him. Hakstrott said, "Sorry, Stewart, but we had to get you in here somehow. The last gesture of defiance, I presume you agree, was cretinous. This one is designed to defeat the Adamites utterly." At Stewart's inquiring look he explained: "Oh, yes, we can talk here. These clinics are prefabricated, so the scanners were added afterward. The one in here has been out of order for three months and we've made sure the Adamites never had a chance to install one of their own. Stewart, I want you to understand first of all that the present scheme is worlds apart from the earlier one. All the top men except yourself have already been consulted. It's a plan, not a pious hope." "With the object of recapturing Fort Plato?" "Yes. Their ship may attack us in retaliation, but we hope to be ready for that." "The facts, please." "Yes. Perhaps you don't know it, but I was formerly in Chemical Warfare." Stewart had not known -- and that was good, because it meant few people did... "Before the unfortunate massacre I had ideas of my own -- they had come to nothing. But now, the Adamites have murdered my wife. Perhaps you wonder if I can be trusted to be rational. Well, rather to my personal disappointment, the plan does not involve the death of many Adamites, maybe none." Stewart merely nodded. "I managed to examine and test several of the Adamite devices they rely on to ensure that the air is not tampered with, the water, their food. Quite effective, all of them. They would give the alarm at once. But every such device is a challenge." "And you've found a way to beat the devices?" Hakstrott was not to be hurried. "There's a way of buffering drugs," he said ruminatively, "to delay their effect and make it cumulative. You take them at two o'clock and they don't even begin to work until six. When you start assimilating them, nothing happens. The drug continues to build up until, perhaps, you have a lethal dose inside you and you still don't keel over. Using certain drugs and certain buffering agents, I can arrange that the victims will suspect nothing -- because there are no symptoms -- until what seems like ordinary fatigue overwhelms them." "And this is the treatment you prescribe for the Adamites?" "Yes. The difficulty is making sure they'll take it." "I can see that might be a difficulty." "Our only practical solution is to take it with them." "That's practical?" "I told you I examined their warning devices. We can't directly contaminate their food supplies. Naturally they thought of that. But we can drug the water and their devices won't detect the drug." "How far has this gone?" Stewart asked. "And exactly why am I being consulted?" "You are to approve," said Hak'strott gently. "I am to approve. Mind if I ask why?" "So that we are all in this together. Unlike the idiocy. How IF far has it gone? It can be set in motion at any time." "And the chances of success?" "Excellent. The drug will be administered in the water used for cooking andthe water from which beverages are prepared. The schedule will be such that people will get tired at just about the time when they would normally expect to get tired." "I see." And Stewart did see. As Hakstrott claimed, this plan was quite different from the guerillas' revolt. To annoy a dangerous enemy without incapacitating him only made future action more difficult, perhaps impossible. To defeat a dangerous enemy cess. Adamites were predictable. They still judged Terrans by themselves. Without prompting, Stewart was able to see the further implications of the plan. Of course the nightshift Adamites would be asleep and would not be affected. Fortunately the Adamites, like Terrans, kept only a skeleton staff on night duty. It was the duty of the day-staff Adamites to enforce the curfew, herd the Terrans in the fort into their night quarters, lock them up and hand over to the small night staff of about seventy a batteneddown station, secure and easy to guard. If Hakstrott's plan worked, the seventy night-duty Adamites would emerge into a fort completely under Terran control. "Yes," said Stewart. "What do you mean, yes?" "I mean I agree." "I'm glad. I don't know what I'd have done if you hadn't" T here was no need for them to whisper, hut they did, knowing Gilen and Don Slent were in the next room. "Even with you and Mrs. Grumeyer as close as this, you think they sense nothing?" Miller murmured. "We don't," said The Great Nicolas, "so probably they don't" Grumeyer carefully set his little crystal device. In drab, inconspicuous clothes, Nick and his glamorous wife would never have rated a second glance. Miss Heilbron was not present. Her job was elsewhere. Two policemen stood by the door, silent, waiting for orders. A light tap on the door told them that Don Slent had left the building. Grumeyer and Doris sat down. They did not link hands or even look at each other. "Now, please," said Grumeyer to Miller, including the two policemen with a gesture, "don't talk, whatever happens. I'll talk. Doris may talk. We won't disturb our own concentration, but you could." After a pause he said casually, conversationally, "She knows she's being probed, but she is not particularly worried." Miller had to clench his fists in the effort not to ask questions. The girl was not particularly worried? An Adamite secretly among Terrans, physically helpless against them, suddenly aware that she was being probed mentally -- and she was not particularly worried? "This girl," said Grumeyer, "is nervous and timid when there is little danger. She finds courage when it is needed. Her potential is even greater than I thought. She knows there are telepaths among us, but is surprised that we have units too. She is one of four -- of eight -- ril try to get thaf clearer." "Quadruplets," said Doris. "Her sisters and her father's brothers." "Yes, I see. The Adamites have only four such units. In sum they have far less telepathic experience than Terrans, but ours is spread thin among scores of individuals and theirs is concentrated in four practical partnerships of two." While they calmly and methodically took the girl's mind to pieces. Miller was bursting to ask a score of questions. In particular, what was Gilen doing about all this? By chance, he got one of the answers at once. "She's as interested in this as we are," said Grumeyer. "Although she's trying not to give anything away she -- Doris?" "She doesn't resent us," said Doris. "But other resentments... She is not wholly in favor of the enterprise she's engaged in. None of her sisters are. Yet something deep, something emotional makes her -- " "She does hate Terrans," Grumeyer exclaimed. "Very deep down -- " "No, it's not hate. You might as well say love." "Love-hate. I get a curious idea she waTerran." Doris cried out as if in pain. Grumeyer started and stared at her. "I'm all right," said Doris, though she was very pale. "She didn't like that. She knew you thought she was a Terran, and she hit back at you for thinking it." "If she hit back, she missed me." "She didn't miss me -- " "Now why should she lash out at the very thought that she might be a Terran?" Miller could have answered that. All Adamites had to believe they were the First People. Telling Gilen she was a Terran was denying her most fundamental belief. In his own way Grumeyer was working around to this conclusion. "She's an Adamite, yes. She was born on Eden and until a few months ago... Something happened a few months ago. Doris, can you get that? A few months ago somebody made her believe something that isn't true -- or denied something that is true. She's IF fighting to keep a secret deep in her mind, something we Terrans are not to be allowed to find out -- " "Nick!" said Doris, suddenly, warningly, and stretched out her hand to him. But it was she who suddenly went white and rigid. Grumeyer cried out, jumped up and bent over Doris. And Miller signaled to the policemen to take the Adamite girl. T hey were all in Gilen's room. Doris was there too. If she was harmed it was not physically. Gilen was quite docile. She looked curiously at Grumeyer, at Doris. Miller and the policemen did not interest her. Strangely, she apologized to Doris, who was pale and shaken. "I had to stop you. You were tearing me apart." "Doris?" said Grumeyer anxiously. Doris smiled. "Fortunately, by pure chance, I don't mind. I don't mind that when the skin grows again, I won't be a telepath. I never wanted to be a telepath. But as you hit out -- I got what you were trying to hide. Your superiors sent you on this mission with certain things blocked in your mind. Certain things some Adamites know." Doris shook her head and leaned back. Nick fussed over her for a moment, but turned from her after a few whispered words. He spoke not to Gilen, as Doris had done, but to Miller. "There's something implanted in that girl. We are the real people. She has to believe it. It's quite false, a purely emotional belief -- " The policemen had to restrain Gilen as she tried to get at Grumeyer and stop him saying what he was saying. "This whole operation," said Nick, "was tentative partly because Adamites would always expect to be defeated by Terrans. That explains their instant withdrawal fifty years ago when -- " "I could not tell you what you most want to know," Gilen interrupted, "because I don't know it either." Nick looked a little puzzled. "She's trying to hide something she doesn't even know. This is strange. Doris?" "I think it's something that one of her sisters knows." . "Yes. But we didn't get their names or locations." Miller smiled thinly, looking at Gilen. "That can't be hidden deep. We can easily get it from her." Gilen sat up proudly. "You'll never get anything out of me." "I think," said Miller, "we already have what we want to know from Don Slent." A few minutes later this was confirmed. On his arrest. Don was shot full of truth drugs. And Margaret Heilbron knew the right questions to ask. E ric was not anxious to have Councilor Hardinge speak to Verne privately. The outcome might be his loss of her services. But the security of the settlement had top priority. In Eric's tiny office Hardinge said, "I'm Job Hardinge. You're Verne? Well, Verne, twice you've known about gnomes and hemmers and the council wants to know how. Is it anything we can use?" She shook her head. "Just a hunch. A feeling of danger "Sure, I know that. If we haul you out of here could you organize a defense group?" "I don't want to be hauled out of here. I'm doing important work. I like it and I'm doing it well." Like most Outwarders, Hardinge was big and tough. Perhaps the gnomes got those who were not, Verne thought. "There's nothing more important than beating the gnomes. What can you do? For instance, if you led a group of us with guns out on the plain, could you find where gnomes were hiding?" "I doubt it. I can sort of smell danger -- that's nothing new. A lot of other people -- " "Could you find other people like that?" It was possible she could, but only by revealing more about her telepathic ability than she wanted to. "No," she said. "Verne, you're not cooperating. I can understand that you like working here and don't want anybody to interfere with you. Sure, the work you're doing is important and you're good at it, but the point is your work her can wait. We have to do something about the gnomes and the hemmers if we're to go on existing." "That's exactly the point," said Verne. "Why? Why go on trying to build a settlement here?" "Oh hell. Quit stalling. We're here. That's it. And the immedihemmers. Or stopping them from asking you -- how can you help against the gnomes and hemmers? You have something. Tell me how we can use it." "I'll have to talk it over with Red." "Sure, do that. Red Conrad knows what it's all about. And then come and see me." She talked it over with Red and he put her straight. Until recently she had taken it for granted that her present situation was temporary. Now that she was forced to examine her motives, she began to wonder if she could ever really walk out on him. After talking to Red she went to IF the town hall and found Hardinge. "I see now what you were getting at this afternoon" she said. 'Thank Christ for that." "Mr. Hardinge, I object to swearing. I realize it"s only a matter of making certain meaningless noises; but -- " "All right, never mind that. Go on." "I have certain ideas. If you arranged for Red and me to be free; for a while and gave us about a dozen people to work with -- including my father -- and an open mole -- " "What good would a mole be if it was open?" "Just an idea I have. You could give us a damaged one." "And what would you do?" "Scour the plain around here. Something might come of it." When he heard about this, Sal was not enthusiastic. "We won't be here much longer," he said. "We have to find out all we can about the Terrans. The local life is irrelevant -- " "Not to them." "I know, but what good is it to find out about gnomes and hemmers? We'd never try to colonize this world." "No, we wouldn't, would we?" "The enterprise is doomed to failure. The people here admit they're never likely to trade advantageously with other worlds. They also admit they're nowhere near being independent. They must eventually abandon this planet." "Do you see any sign they will?" "They're stubborn. But they'll finally give in." "I don't think so." Indeed, she knew they never would and rather despised Sal for not seeing it. Terrans had a mulish streak; Adamites were far too rational not to give in when they were beaten. But so often when you were beaten -- you were not. O NE day Hakstrott himself brought Stewart his lunch, and set it down on the bed table in a way that told Stewart at once that this was The Day. "Eat that," said Hakstrott. "Eat it all, because you won't get anything else today." Stewart started in on a big portion of roast beef, roast potatoes and peas. He asked, "It's been done?" Hakstrott nodded. "Two hours ago. We waited until the day's menu was one that gave us a perfect opportunity." "How is it going to work?" "First lunch is on now. Terrans and Adamites together. Water has been used in preparing everything on the menu, Terran or Adamite, except the roast beef and the potatoes. The peas are from cans. Only about three hundred of us know what's been done. That'll be enough." "And the others won't suspect anything?" "Why should they? Our three hundred, not all at one sitting, refuse soup, order roast beef and roast potatoes, no dessert, no coffee. They call for a bottle of beer. The others, those who don't know, have soup or dessert or drink the lemonade on the tables or have tea or coffee afterwards." "And the Adamites who don't eat Terran food?" "Water is used in all the dishes on the menu today. And in their acat, of course. What they drink instead of coffee." "Nobody will die?" "No. Nobody will even be drowsy in the afternoon. But an hour after supper everyone except our three hundred will want to lie down. Some will go to bed early. Others will sit down and fall asleep in their chairs." "Supper -- how's that going to be fixed?" "All food will be cooked in water or have water in it. This time those in the know will say they're not hungry and will just have a piece of chocolate cake and a bottle of soda." In the big dining rooms the plan, because it was basically simple, was working flawlessly. Every Adamite except Wil and Tomi attended one of the lunch sittings, Hakstrott told Stewart later. "The girl's okay. She's been seen drinking acat. We don't know about Slent. He's shut in his room as usual." "He often has nothing but biscuits and cheese," Stewart mused. "He drinks acat all day." "Yes, but he has an urn in his room that was probably filled early today -- before the water was treated." "It doesn't matter," said Hakstrott confidently. "He's being watched, of course. He'll be dealt with along with the night guards." T omi came to see Stewart in midafternoon. She did not refer to his peevishness at their last meeting. This time he made his manner friendly because that made it natural that he should offer her tea. She nodded. Stewart himself drank bottled lemonade. "You remember once before I had a feeling of impending disaster?" said Tomi. "I feel it again." "Disaster?" She appealed to him seriously. "If there's another move against us there will be more reprisals. I mean that, Stewart," "You mean you'll back reprisals?" "I mean they'll be inevitable. It'll be disaster for both Adamites and Terrans. Do you know anything? Have you noticed anything?" He laughed, "Here?" IF "Something's going on, Stewart." "Can't you manage to make yourself call me John?" "Somehow, no. Elsewhere one of my siste.rs has married a Terran. She and another sister want to stay where they are." "You have radio communication faster than ours?" "I said I'd be frank, but I didn't say I'd tell you everything. I've half a mind to go to my father and try to talk him into pulling out. What do you say?" He allowed himself time to think. Hakstrott's effort might fail. It might end in bloody disaster. "Your prisoners," he said. "The people you took to your ship. They'd have to be returned." She nodded. "That's understood." Suddenly he thought of something he had missed so far. It took a great effort for him to ask casually, "How long would that take?" "The ship would be here in ten hours." Stewart thought swiftly. Even if the ship were summoned immediately -- in ten hours the station could be entirely in Terran hands, assuming everything went according to plan. However, all but three hundred of the complement of Fort Plato would be unconscious for many hours more. The fort could not be made a fort again, fully efficient and fully manned in ten hours. There would be a battle if the Adamite ship arrived. That made up his mind. The Adamite ship must not be summoned. Or the longer the summons was delayed the better. Fort Plato had to be allowed maximum time to become a Terran fort again. He did not think it would fall again with Tomi and Slent out of action. "No," he said. "I don't think you should run." She looked at him with all the old suspicion. It had never been more justified. He had to divert her somehow. "You say two of your sisters want to stay where they are. I know why you don't want to stay." "I'm listening." "You've met, properly met, only one Terran -- me. And we've never hit it off I don't suppose we ever will." "No." Her agreement was emphatic. Excellent, Stewart thought, though with a pang of regret. He had lost her, but he had caught her attention. "But it would be just as easy for you as for your sisters to find a Terran who would at least interest you." "How?" "Let me pick one for you. Go right now and find my brother." "Your brother? The checker?" "The former checker." "Why him?" He lay back on the pillows. "Brothers often don't get along too well. Sometimes their very similarities are to blame. Alan is like me in many ways. I have a feeling -- I always had -- that the differences are exactly the ones you'd like to find in me. "You never said anything about this before." "Naturally. I really care for you, Tomi. Or I could. Or I could have." She was bewildered and suspicious. "I've been lonely here. I admit it. But if you think I'm so lonely and sex-starved that I'll -- " "I'm not thinking of anything in particular except that Alan is just the kind of young Terran you should have been spending your time with -- and weren't. Want to find out about it?" She stood up. "Why not?" As she went Stewart breathed a sigh of relief. He had diverted her from her feeling of unease and her plan to summon the ship. And although events had forced him to arrange this particular meeting, it might work out. He and Alan had always gone for the same kind of girl. He sighed and tested his foot. It would do. He'd, be able to hobble about when necessary. T he tiny ship paused only briefly near Station #. Nick's crystal was on. Gilen's thought stabbed at Pariss, who was asleep. Far Slent was deliberately excluded. know. That thing you have hidden in your mind -- dulity. Gilen near, a strange mental crackling, Gilen with power of thought that made her a different person; Gilen, timid Gilen, roaring like a lion -- without Don, with somebody else. I can't -- know. Pariss, we've got it. The seed. It's on this ship. to steal it and get away with it? are in control here and they haven't promised to give it to us. But they've said they might. gain, Pariss. We're beaten. rendered to the Terrans? gaining. They have the seed and you know something important. If you tell me what was hidden I may have more to bargain with. She got it. And The Great Nicolas got it too. ' Y awns became frequent after supper. Stewart, anxiously IF waiting for news and still in bed, was reassured to hear that Adamite suspicion had not been aroused. As well as having a soporific effect, the drug worked as a tranquilizer. People merely yawned and said, "Roll on bedbed early, A few adults who were not creatures of habit did likewise. Tomi, in deep conversation with Alan Stewart, who had always thought her the most wonderful woman he had ever seen, did not notice drowsiness creeping up on her. Warning bells had entirely ceased ringing in her head, seduced into silence. At eight o'clock an Adamite colonel at last became suspicious and ordered a check on the air supply. When this proved negative he shrugged, stretched himself and lay down for a moment. Two minutes later he was snoring. The three hundred Terrans moved into action. The Adamites were gently disarmed, Stewart hobbled from the clinic, Hakstrott beside him. Hakstrott was triumphant. "Look at them," he said. "Sleeping beauties. Only it'll take more than a kiss to rouse them." Forty minutes of clearing up followed, some of it bloody. Seventy sleeping Adamites had to be overcome one by one, group by group. Since there were three hundred armed Terrans to do this, the outcome was never in doubt. But there were some thirty more deaths, Adamite and Terran, to add to the two massacres. Tomi and Alan Stewart were found together on the green unharmed, asleep. It was fitting, John Stewart thought, that Tomi, who had won Fort Plato on the green, should meet defeat there with Alan, now the victor. It was not quite nine o'clock when Stewart quietly opened Wil Slent's door and hobbled in. To make the situation clear he had a gun in his hand. "Good evening," he said pleasantly. "I'm informing you officially, Director Wil Slent, that Fort Plato is back in our hands." Wil took only seconds to make up his mind that this was no hoax. Hakstrott, coming into the room behind Stewart, was also armed. Wil leaped to his feet, stepped back against the wall, taking from his pocket a small clear object like a large teardrop. "Don't shoot," Wil told Hakwould be fatal for both of you." "You've summoned your ship?" "Yes. And I think you know, Stewart, that I cannot surrender? If I release this button -- which I am now holding down with my thumb -- the entire fort will be destroyed. It's a precaution I took from the beginning." Stewart, whose foot was sore, sat down comfortably. "What good would that do?" '"It would be a greater disaster for you than for us. Four hundred of us will die. Five thousand of you." "That's one way to look at it, I suppose." "Stewart, I know you. I want you to stay. Tell him to get out and shut the door behind him." Stewart looked over his shoulder. Hakstrott was unsteady on his feet and his left eye was twitching. "Better do as he says," Stewart said quietly. Hakstrott closed the door behind him. "Have you killed my men?" Slent asked. "Only those we couldn't help unharmed but helpless." "Tomi?" "Like the others. Sound asleep." "How did you do it?" "It doesn't matter. The important thing is that we've done it. Switch that thing off, Slent." "No. It gives me something to bargain with." "Not very much." "You know something of our ways. If I am defeated utterly -- I have nothing to live for. I might as well be dead." "So you would blow up Fort Plato and everyone in it, Terran and Adamite, just to take us all with you?" Wil smiled. "It wouldn't be selfish, Stewart. In a way it would be selfless. It would be less than utter defeat." "And Tomi?" "I have a most unusual advantage -- you see, there are four of me and there are four of Tomi. Although I have no wish to die and no wish for Tomi to die, releasing this button won't entirely kill either of us. You understand?" "I think I do. I suppose you hope to gain something by these rather melodramatic tactics. What?" "I ask you to let us withdraw." "All of you?" "Naturally. I promise that the ship, when it arrives, will merely take us off and return your prisoners." Stewart reflected. There was much in favor of Wil's proposal. An urgent knock sounded at the door. "Don't answer it," Wil said sharply. Stewart levered himself up. "They know the situation. We have the checkpoint -- remember? They're watching us all the time." Contact with the ship will be made if anything happens to me -- " "We all know that," said Stewart soothingly, hoping he was right. He opened the door. Seeing that Stewart intended to go out, Wil said, "Stay here. If you go I'll -- " "You won't," said Stewart. "Not while negotiations are still proceeding." He went out, shutting the door IF behind him. It might be better, he thought, if Wil did not hear what was said. It turned out he was right. He returned almost at once. "Most interesting," he said, sitting down again. What is?" "Stent, we have to wait for an hour. Perhaps a little more, but not much. I suggest you sit down. And make sure you don't release that button inadvertently." "What were you told?" "Let's just wait, shall we?" Wil gestured with the teardrop, but Stewart only smiled. "You won't do anything so silly as blow up the fort without knowing what's happening. That's one thing I do like about Adamites. One knows where one is with them." They waited silently. At last another tap came on the door. Stewart said, "Careful with that trigger finger. Director. It's easy for you tQ blow us up but difficult to put us together again." He opened the door. Four people came in and Wil did not release the button, for two of them were Gilen and Don. common ground at once. Both were egotists who liked to handle things without interference from above. In other circumstances they could have been antagonists, but now they agreed on the vital necessity of clearing up the sitthe pie. The Adamite ship left with Wil and Don on board but without Gilen or Tomi. Unlike Verne and Pariss who, when consulted telepathically, would not even consider returning to Eden, Gilen and Tomi thought long and hard before deciding to stay. It was grotesque, Wil said, that Gilen should be considering a cabaret act with The Great Nicolas. Gilen merely shrugged wouldn't allow it anyway. But Grumeyer's offer gave her a place among the Terrans, a springboard, an opportunity she had not been previously granted. Verne and Pariss had already found their futures. She was looking around for hers. Twenty-four hours earlier Tomi would certainly not have remained. But she, like Gilen, felt that her adventure was just starting. She had not fallen in love with Alan Stewart -- nevertheless, she was prepared to go on seeing him, prepared to meet Terrans other than those in Fort Plato, where she would always be hated because her father had ordered the execution of two hundred Terrans. She asked Miller, as a comparatively impartial Terran, how she was likely to be treated on Earth. He said sourly, "You're young and appropriately shaped. You'll be a dollars and marry eight times." What finally decided her was a strange new contact in which her father and uncles played no part. tion #: It's the only way. We've all got to stay, of course -- Tomi and Gilen have to take our word for it, Verne, but it's impossible to go back. Is Hugh doing all right? The poor guy hasn't the faintest idea of what's happening, but he's doing his best. Plato: Not very well, frankly, but it's amazing that it works at all. They're just a collection of people with trace telepathic potential? as a group working on a specific problem here, we're terrific. It's a question not just of tracing gnomes and hemmers, but trying to reach them. The Terrans themselves could have gone on for years and gotten nowhere, but with a little help from me -- and Sal before he left -- we've very nearly got an insoluble problem solved -- but that's my problem, not yours. Why did the Terrans give you what you wanted? In four words: it's nothing to them. understand them! Red must be the same to you as Hugh is to me. hardly. Yours is the great love of the galaxy -- ours is a working arrangement. Curious that Red and I should actually be married, while you and Hugh -- married. But we want everything cleared up first. their letting us have the seed -- well, first of all, they have plenty. Right, Gilen? Second, they don't mind our having it. Not in the least. coarse jokes about it. amite men must be the laziest in the galaxy if they don't take the trouble to father their own sons. know all about it. Tell me honestly why Gilen and I should stay. it all your lives if you don't. Because the Terrans are the real people. That's part of what I knew and you didn't. Who could have guessed the other part? IF Sal Slent was picked up by the small Adamite ship lying off Outward. It had not yet been revealed to the Terrans here that Verne was other than what she seemed. Another small ship took Far Slent and the rest of the Adamites, except Pariss, from Station #. When it had done so -- and not before -- Hugh showed Pariss the device which would have enabled him to retake the station and she understood at once why he had not wished to use it. It was a vibrator tuned to one specific encephalographic pattern, that of Hugh Suyang, an unpleasant device which would have made everyone else, Adamite or Terran, writhe in helpless agony while he personally secured the station. The experience would not have been fun for anyone and, since Pariss's mental sensitivity was immense, it might well have killed her. Orders from Fort Plato were that the ships should be allowed to leave the solar system unmolested. Miller and Stewart were correct in assuming that these orders, in the name of the officer commanding Fort Plato, could not be countermanded in time to make a difference. "It's quite amusing," said Miller, "that you and I should be induced to act generously and quixotically, Stewart. Of course we are right. Proper Adamite-Terran relations won't start for at least a generation -- obviously. When they do they have a chance of starting right. All the same, it's a laugh that we fixed it." IX I T was a surprise to Miller to find Margaret Heilbron on the panel. He found himself inclined to resent the situation. He was in a sense on trial. Putting him on one side of the table and Miss Heilbron on the other seemed rather like endorsing her part in the matter at the expense of his. John Stewart was the first speaker. Facing the seven men and four women on the panel, he began smoothly: "It has been suggested that the departure of the Adamites, except for the four girls, was rushed through by those on the spot with indecent haste. Protracted negotiations have been proposed. Let me say at once it was my conclusion -- and it still is -- that the sooner flash point was averted the better." Some of the six senior officers, three civilians and two observers listening to him nodded approvingly. Stewart was employing the courtroom tactics of which he was an acknowledged master. He did. not painstakingly establish that there had been considerable danger of an open battle; he had summarized that as a foregone conclusion. Unless somebody immediately challenged the phrase "flash point," the implications of his statement would be tacitly accepted. Stewart went on. "Dr. Miller, who even before this affair was recognized as the leading authority on Adamites, will explain their motivation in a moment. By the way, I don't believe you have been told that three of the four girls, Tomi, Pariss and. Gilen, are here and ready to give evidence if necessary." He knew perfectly well they had not been told. Stewart never without more than his arm up his sleeve. "We'll be very interested to hear from them," said the president of the court. "Three, you say?" "The fourth, Verne, is still on Outward. The people there have not been told of her background. Possibly it would make no difference to them. Verne is something of a national heroine there. "But for one thing, and you all know exactly what I mean, it would be possible to consider this whole affair in the light of a somewhat irregular state visit. Let's just for a moment look at it the other way around. If we had a chance to spy on the Adamites, would we have turned it down?" Nobody said anything until a retired air force man, taking a new angle, asked why, particularly, the Slents came to possess their peculiar talent. "The theory has been advanced that the reason may lie in the fact that the men are half and the girls are one-quarter Terran." This produced a considerable effect, which Stewart ignored, taking the opportunity to yield blandly to Miller.D ment,"said Miller, "while I go back ten thousand years." A choleric ex-major rumbled to the effect that he didn't want a lecture. Miller restrained himself, merely snapping, "If the matters I'm about to deal with were not extremely relevant I wouldn't waste your time and, more important, mine, by detailing them. To resume, if I may -- the Adamites know as little as we do about our history before Egyptian civilization. But what we know is this -- at one time in the life of the human race an advanced earlier technology depended far more on chemistry than does the present machine age. Effects now accomplished by mechanical means were achieved via chemistry. The ancients' secret of reaching the stars is lost, but it's a fair guess they employed chemical rather than mechanical means. "The religion of this early race, ancestors of both Adamites and Terrans, was fanatically against IF change in the physical makeup of humans. 'Made in God's image' has remained in our religion to this day. The Adamites evolved a way of preventing evolution, to put it unscientifically. The basis was chemical -- I can tell you no more than that. The effect was that the genes were stabilized. The colonists would not evolve physically. That's why after such a long gap, Adamites living on a world similar to but not identical with Earth have not adapted physically." No' one objected to his lecture. "Only fairly recently did they find that inability to change was a liability." Miss Heilbron interrupted. "Is it true that many Adamites are sterile?" Miller didn't like interruptions. "Yes," he said shortly. "And that's part of the reason they wanted a bank of Terran semen?" "Please, Miss Heilbron, let me tell this in my own way." "I just thought you were getting bogged down," she said helpfully. He ignored her and continued rapidly: "Sterility became a major problem only when they started colonizing worlds other than Eden. The environment of these other worlds demanded certain physical variations. The Adamites couldn't change. Fifty years ago the Adamites met Terrans. Terrans could adapt -- they couldn't. Terrans could throw up new types -- they I # B Frank Herbert retnms to the AnneworM of Arrakis for an epic of imperial intrifoe and baman ecolay-an epic that spans the nniverse. That's why we can tell yon where it ends -- We're nprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today: Frushme: n I (N#) #C I (S#) # (S#) # I (S#) # I I (#) # I I Name I j Address I I City State Zip j I Include list price plus a dime postage for j jach title. j Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # couldn't. Terrans could breed freely on new and different worlds -- they couldn't. It was this knowledge of inferiority more than anything else that made the Adamites withdraw. "Some forty years ago a Terran ship in trouble made for Eden because it was the only populated world in reach. She crashed on Eden. Of the seven survivors only one recovered fully. Four died within a month and the other two were helpless cripples for the year or two they lasted. "The man who remained, James Robertson, was the second radio operator. Apparently he had an unhappy background on Earth, and welcomed life among the Adamites. He found no enmity. Since the Adamites then as now wanted to learn all they could about Earth, he became an important man. The question of returning him to Earth did not arise. He didn't want to go. He even took an Adamite name. He married an Adamite and had four children -- all at once -- and named them Wil, Far, Don and Sal." Nobody said a word. "What interested the Adamites would have been a small thing to us, but it was important to them. The babies did not have frozen genes. They could evolve. Their children could be adaptable. "The special sympathy between the Slent brothers did not arouse much interest -- twins and triplets among the Adamites possess this mutuality. But the advent of telepathy on Eden, in the persons of the four girls, was another matter. "This proved that , what Eden needed was Terran blood. Whether it had been intended or not, this was the key that unlocked the Adamites' genetic prison. It made up all the ground lost in hundreds of generations. Adamites are small. One change in us in the last few hundred years is an increase in the average height and weight. The Adamites -- " Miss Heilbron interrupted again. "Dr. Miller, the Adamites who led this visitation -- " "I know. The Slents are not small, for obvious reasons. And all the other personnel chosen for this operation were tall Adamites." "Robertson had no more children by his wife and his sons were childless except Wil. But the Adamites know as much as we do about artifical insemination and there are literally hundreds of men and women fathered by Robertson, of whom some have latent telepathic talent. Robertson is dead now. He died seven years ago, before the full extent of his gift to Eden was known. "And although the Slents have only Wil's four girls by natural means, they, too, have hundreds of offspring by AI. Some of these offspring also have telepathic talent." It was scarcely necessary for IF Miller to do any more explaining. The Adamite venture had had as its main object the capture of Terran seed. The four girls, obviously highly talented, had been expected to become pregnant, but what mattered even more was the capture of the seed of uncounted Terrans. This could unlock the whole Adamite race. The Adamites, desperately needing the seed, had never imagined asking for it. They had assumed they must steal it, meanwhile plotting to bypass a space war. T he atmosphere at an equivalent meeting far, far away was initially less friendly. General Print was still alive. Early in the proceedings, however, he said he was sorry he had not died before, he had to witness the return of four defeated Adamite Directors without the most valuable section of their force -- their own daughters and nieces. Wil said with the quiet dignity he had acquired, "My daughters were placed in command. General. You acquiesced in their being placed in command. I make no excuses -- but you cannot blame any of us here that they chose to remain." "No," the general admitted. "But you suffered defeat. You admit as much. The Terrans triumphed in all four echelons." "There," said Sal Slent, "you are not merely unfair but quite wrong. General. We have no reason to suppose that we should ever have been detected on Outward as Adamites. Verne's record there has been one of continuous success in what she set out to do." "At the Terran General Purposes Station," said Far Slent, "Suyang could have retaken his command from the beginning. Nor could we have known this, since he is a telepath and probing him before the occupation began would Kave alerted him and made the operation impossible." General Print, frowning, said, "I do not like this new attitude. You seek to evade resp:nsibility. First you blame the four girls, saying they were in command, not you. Then you excuse yourselves. In my day an Adamite officer stood or fell by his achievement." "This, we learned among the Terrans, is wrong," said Wil. "Certain of their national armies at one time had similar beliefs. The consequence of such an attitude is that a general cannot gamble. But if he meets an enemy who mil gamble, who can afford to gamble, in the end he must be beaten." The general had to fight for selfcontrol. "What are you trying to tell me?" "That if we failed, we failed as Adamite Directors, steeped in the tradition of the Adamite Navy. And if the ruling is that we should be executed, I tell you now what I shall say when given my final opportunity to speak -- that if you defeated." "That is your considered opinion?" "It is the opinion of all of us." The other three nodded. "It will be given due weight." The meeting went on for a long time. Old General Print became very tired. But he and the other officers had to admit finally that the new resilience, the new toughness of the four officers before them bore out all they claimed. They were not the same men who had started on the operation. first time she had a bitter quarrel with Hugh -- who had, in a mad moment, chased a secretary because Pariss was pregnant again and capricious. They had never spoken bitterly to each other and were shocked by what each said. The reconciliation was a passionate relief to both of them. But as she found Hugh, her Hugh, her nearly perfect Hugh, apologetically making up to her, freely and sincerely acknowledging that she was the one who counted, not merely in their marriage but as a person. Pariss suddenly said, "We are the real people!" "I beg your pardon?" said Hugh politely. "We are the real people!" "Yes, that's what I thought you said. What does it mean? You and I? You and I and little Will? You and I and -- " "You're out of it, darling. I'm sorry, but it's true. You're only a Terran, and a passable, though not remarkable, telepath." "What do you mean, not remarkable? My new rating -- " "Yes, darling. I love you -- or I wouldn't have cared if that little bitch had taken you and eaten you. In many ways you're most remarkable. You're wonderful. But we are the people who count, all the same. The Adamite-Terrans. The offspring of two great races. The four of us. Verne and Red practically run Outward. You're a colonel now and you know very well you'd never have made it at your age if you hadn't married me. and Gilen is so rich she'll be able to do anything she wants whenever she finds out what it is -- " Hugh kissed her. "Now before I beat you," he said "get this straight. You're half right. But only half You and your sisters are fabulous -- but tell me, where would Verne be without Red? Gilen without Nick or some other link man? Tomi without Alan? You without -- " "Exactly, darling!" "But you said -- " "Language is a poor way to communicate if you don't need it." She sighed. "Real people are those who need each other. You know what I mean."  IF His kind had always killad by night and diad by day    but a new dawn was at hand! H e came awake suddenly. His muscles were tensed, he was growling, but his eyes and brain were overwhelmed. Danger... stimulus... The light flared around him. His head pounded with sensation. The light -- the light! It couldn't be shaken. He was on his feet, wincing. The light was blinding, teasing... a madcap confusion. With practiced deliberation he turned, sought the deepest recess of his burrow. As a last alternative he tried to hide his eyes in the fur of his tail, shutting them tightly. His eyelids quivered with the exertion, but the light was a red glow that seared into his brain. Dazzled and frustrated he leaped to the wall, lashed out with his claws and dug a hole for his head and muzzle. And a breathing passage. Ramming his head inside he managed to tame the torture of the light enough to feel he could return to sleep. He was yet a young, unmated male and therefore of low status. His burrow, accordingly, joined the main tunnel close to the en trance. He had no fear of the dayhunters. They rarely would dare to venture into the tunnel. Besides, he had killed many during his night hunts. Even with light blasting into his burrow he was sure he could fight well enough to save himself. No, the trouble with his burrow was that if he awakened during the day the light would be enough to madden him. His fur, ruffled by his tensed skin, settled slowly. His breathing slowed. His eyelids relaxed. The light that remained in his eyes was enough like starlight to keep it from bothering him. Sleep closed in. The thoughts dissolved and drifted off. He awoke. But this time his taut muscles did not twitch against sudden, instinctively sensed danger. The faint light that reached him was that of the stars, almost deepened out of existence. He paused for several minutes, stretching, feigning, recoordinating his mind and body. He felt for the umpteenth time that state of health, readiness and strength. He trotted out of his burrow and down the tunnel, sensing his way, heading towards the starshine. Others were already out, wandering about the entrance, sniffing and scanning the bushes for signs of prey. He headed directly out into the growth, ducking under branches, trotting through the soft humus. His eyes were wide and consciously alert. A dayhunter asleep or concealed in the branches of a bush or a busheater trundling across the ground -- either would be fine tonight. He was exactly hungry enough to be satisfied with the amount of food they offered. A scent shocked him into a run. A dash under a branch, a rapid turn, a sight, pursuit and spring, a biting and a clawing -- and the busheater, blood welling from a dozen wounds, was his. Calming from the dash, he realized that he had just caught his meal. Starting at the flank of the animal he began to snap and tear at the moist, warm meat. When he had taken all he required he lay down a short distance from the carcass and confidently began to lick the last remnants of blood from his paws. He had made a lucky and easy kill and IF wondered what he might do for the remainder of the night. After some time to digest his meal he started at a leisurely pace through the brush. The stars overpainful to look at still attracted his attention and awe. The sky was so full of them it would be nearly impossible to fit any more in. They lighted things softly, evenly, much more benevorays that came from something unthinkably bright during the day. A new scent caught his attention. A female. Just her scent. An unaccompanied, unmated female. He trotted off in her direction. His first sight of her told him she was healthy. The starlight sheened on her fur. Her body was taut, trim. Her responses were excellent -- she whirled the instant she detected his approach. He continued his approach, but slowed. He got quite close to her before she jerked back nervously. He stopped. She turned to walk off. He leaped toward her. She whirled to defend and he shoved her muzzle to one side with his. The taunt angered her. He walked lightly around her, continuing to tease her with feints. Finally in infuriated confusion she sprang at him. He rolled over to accept. She landed, then bounded away in indignation. He let her go, confident of having performed well. The rest of the night was spent in a bright stroll and a few aborted darts after prey. All the while the stars flashed overhead. As the sky grew still brighter he headed for the tunnel. He knew that soon the light would become intolerable and that the dayhunters would be able to kill. Following his sense and the sound of the others at the tunnel entrance, he made his way back without difficulty and quickly ducked into the comfortable dimness of the tunnel. He did not stop to socialize near the entrance but continued toward his interior. He thought once he scented the female, but being unsure and feeling a bit hungry from having eaten so early, he decided not to bother to investigate. He ducked into his burrow and, taking care to shield his eyes from the coming light, lay down to sleep. of dayshine were in the tunnel as he awoke. The exotic sparks of color were dazzling, but not really bright enough to be offensive. Fascinated, he moved out into the tunnel. The glaring color there was pected. He stood painfully mesmerized by the flaring purple. Unable to stand the light he stumbled back, missed the entrance to his burrow, blinded as he was. He continued down until a few barely perceptible turns in the tunnel shielded him from the light. He paused, and then walked a little farther before stopping to regain his eyesight and wait for the last of the daylight to fade. He was considering moving back up into the now vanishing light when he was challenged. The growl came from a male of higher status than he, who obviously had no sympathy for those who tried to borrow the privileges of rank. Still, he knew his opponent could not be fully awake or accustomed to the light. Making the most of his advantage he replied with a vigorous and confusing barrage of threats and feints. His opponent became vicious, pouncing, bounding, lashing out, all ineffectively. Finally, satisfied at his display of defense, he retreated at a fast trot toward the starlight. He stopped at the entrance to look around and scent the wind and listen -- most carefully. A half-acknowledged hope was let go and he set off into the brush, the first of the night's hunters. Prey was elusive that night and for several hours all he seemed capable of doing was sight an animal, then lose it. He did not make his kill until later on in the night. when he caught a day hunter who had made the mistake of eating too well and concealing itself too poorly. It's throat torn open, it died slowly, its jaw convulsing and its teeth flashing in the starshine. He was hungry and only by carefully stripping the body of all its flesh did he manage to satisfy himself. After relaxing a while he left the carcass and tried scenting the air again. He followed up a few chances but didn't luck out. The female was not around -- or at least not where he could find her. He returned to the tunnel early and spent a good deal of time around the entrance. But finally he decided the effort was useless and turned in for the coming day. had already fallen and he knew he had missed his best chance. So he took his time in preparing to leave the tunnel. Once out he settled down to the real business of hunting and put in a substantially better performance than he had managed the night before. He spent the night in a pretty purposeful manner, first hunting, then following his meal with plenty of exercise and even some rough play with another male of about his status. Abruptly his senses alerted him to the female. He dropped all preIF tense in an instant. He was able to trace the scent to her in a matter of minutes. She had been having a hard night of it and was still tracking prey when he found her. He stayed behind and to one side of her as she moved along -- and she ignored him. For many minutes he strained every sense in order to spot some prey. He caught the outline of an animal through a dense clump of bushes and scrambled off after it. One hurried glance behind him showed that she had joined the pursuit. The animal was particularly fast and evasive, but he was in no mood to be shaken now and with a furious effort at speed he overtook his victim and brought it down at a full run. The female arrived moments later. She hesitated a short distance away, trying to decide whether simply to take the meal, to threaten for it or walk off. She finally moved toward the kill and, after receiving some assurance, began to eat. She ate slowly and with an air of uncertainty, occasionally looking up at him before continuing. All the time he lay nearby waiting for her to finish. Finally deciding she had taken all she wanted she looked up at him again. He did nothing. She came over and lay down next to him to digest her meal. A S HE lay in his burrow he tried to remember what they had done. He remembered walking -- yes, walking. They had continued walking. Why? Through the starshine and the brush. They had walked all night. And then at the tunnel entrance -- even though the first traces of daylight were showing he had wanted to stay there with her. She had not sensed his wish or had seemed not to. She went right in. But he had wanted to stay out there, even as the light was growing more and more intense. He could not make up his mind not to let it bother him, so he simply decided to get to sleep -- and quickly before the day became too bright. H e was surprised to find her waiting for him at the entrance that night. It was something he had not expected. Her being there felt warm to him, though. Already they were growing close. She seemed to feel safe near him. He felt her added confidence in him and it worried him a bit. They moved quietly and slowly through the night. They did so for love of quiet, not stealth. He thought once that they should really be hunting. They would need something to eat. But she seemed to in love with the quiet and the warmth between them for hunting. There was no hunger. He nuzzled her. There was no hunger. He felt none until he and she were back at the tunnel entrance, with the threat of day in the skies. Then he felt it as an anguish. She headed on into the tunnel, but he had to stop. A whine escaped him. She turned to look at him -- something in her answered and sympathized, She almost started back to him. But faced with the growing light she turned away again and walked slowly down. Left on his own, he felt drained. His anguish became a lonely remorse. He stumbled into the tunnel and entered his burrow. There was some small comfort in the darkness he lay dovvn fn. And sleep was always kindly. D arkness? Night again. Not long had it been night, but the light was starlight and hunters were about. He felt he had slept well and that he was very, very hungry. He met her as she was coming from the deeper portions of the tunnel and they continued together out into the open. They hunted in a bright but purposeful fashion that night, bringing down two kills and sharing each of them. They played gently, affectionately most of the rest of the night. She became drowsy and he let her rest while he preened her fur. This time as they went back toward the tunnel she acted rather droopy and paused in the entrance with him. She lay down. For an instant lie was horrified. But his fears didn't mean much now. He lay down with her. The game started with small, tentative pawings. Licks followed. Then came nibbles. A nip. More vigorous movements. Intense, excited. The light was growing brighter. Objects glared into their consciousnesses. The light sparkled on their furs, gleamed in enraptured eyes, heightening their excitement and intensifying their growing frenzy. The brilliant colors of the beginning day surrounded them and added to the violence besieging their bodies and brains. They struggled for sensation, receiving it in contacts, pawings, nips, nuzzles, pressures, contractions, flexings. Her assault was no less vigorous than his -- sometimes she bit him hard enough to make him yelp. blinding, too maddening to see by -- sanity was out of the question. They struggled and thrashed in all all-enveloping sea of unbearable feeling. An incredible pain in his thigh, another in his shoulder -- in his back with the full light blazing right through his brain! Claws -- teeth! He lashed with his legs and tried to bite back at his attackers. Pain -- light! He scramIF bled to his feet and felt claws and teeth trying to bring him down again. Dragging his attackers with him he headed toward what must be the deeper end of the tunnel. His body seemed solely devoted to registering pain. It throbbed with it. Never had he felt so gritty and disabled, so harassed by pain... His attackers were gone. He could only dimly realize it and then the thought was drowned in a flood of agony in his body, in his brain, in his eyes -- his ears. In his ears was what he didn't want to hear, what he wished the pain -- this fantastic pain -- would drown out. But he heard it again and again -- the piteous death screams, the souless noises of the carnivores... A wakening was a fitful thing -- he avoided it as much as possible. The pain was dulled only by monotony. The throbbing had not ceased. No, he could not come fully awake. He only reached the borderline of awareness. And it was intolerable. The only horror that was gone was the light. The screams the smell of open blood and the helplessness, the sense of infirmity that bordered on death -- these stayed with him. some time awake and not insane with pain, it seemed he had spent his entire life in agony. He became aware that he was being fed and that this burrow was larger and darker than any he had been in even as a pup. Others were here, a few healthy -- but more like himself, torn open, with dried blood on their wounds and fur. And one who thrashed in agony almost continuously for days, sleeping only in exhaustion, until he died. Mated pairs were here, some with very minor wounds. Most acted as if they had been through all this before. It may have been days before a realization of the significance of all he was experiencing first struck him -- the times when he could think were few. He was still in great pain and when not crying and whining in agony he had other things to cry and whine for. His mind was not to be used because there were too many things it could remember... But still at some time he thought about the mates and their wounds -- and his wounds and her -- and of screams. He knew all about it now. He had learned all about why mates had so many scars. He knew where the injured came from and where they went and why the elders preferred to hunt dayhunters. It had nearly cost him his life to find out. Had it cost him even more dearly. Many had found out this way. Many probably never found out. How many wouldn't? It was a horrible, terrible trick, this threat that hung over his kind. His existence was now to be valued. It was a long time before he even thought of getting up. And when he tried, the cracking of dried blood, the flexing of injured muscles and the splitting of unhealed wounds sent him down screaming in wretched agony. He resigned himself to spending the rest of his life where he lay in constant pain and on the brink of agony. Finally one of the healthy males started to shove him, to force him to his feet. His pain was now bearable. He even mustered a show of defense. But he shuffled away from his opponent soon enough. He fell once and felt he should not get up again. But the prospect of returning ability was too great. He managed to get to his feet again. He worked his way into the main tunnel and stood there. He couldn't hunt. He couldn't live. He turned and reentered the burrow. Cautiously he lay down again. He was not disturbed. But he would get up tomorrow and the next day. And perhaps he would again see the light of the stars. H e continued to get up and slowly regained his abilities. First he merely walked around, but soon he was helping the healthy ones in their caring for the injured. He spent a great deal of time in that capacity. On one occasion he helped to drag one who had ceased to suffer back out into the starshine. The task tempered his joy at seeing the stars. They would only shed their benevolent light so long before they were overwhelmed by the violence of the day. And drawn to that violence, mates would die. During his last nights at the communal burrow he sometimes ventured out into the starshine in efforts to regain some of his long lost skill at hunting. On one such night he accidentally roused and killed a dayhunter and decided to return to his own burrow. His former burrow was occupied and he knew better than to challenge the healthy young thief. He moved on down the tunnel. Somewhere along the line he noticed a burrow that was unoccupied. He could guess why. He moved in and was not challenged. Apparently his wounds had gained him enough status to allow him to fit comfortably into a more prestigious neighborhood. But it took many nights of hunting before he felt he had regained his old capabilities. H e had hunted dayhunters exclusively recently -- but this IF night was still going to be different. His careful scrutiny of the bushes was prodded by more than hunger. When he found one finally, leaped, grabbed it in his teeth and dragged it to the ground, he went about the deliberate than normal. The glare in his eyes was not to be found on the hunter of food. Even so, it was not without several hesitations that he left his victim for a search of his next kill of the evening. He had killed many more before he finally ate, rested and headed back to the tunnel. He trotted through the night with new satisfaction. He had killed only a small fraction of the dayhunters in the area, but a few nights like this one would serve more than to help satisfy his thirst for vengeance. The stars were bright all over the sky and pain had not bothered him all night. He was feeling better than he had in a long time. He moved under the bushes with little care for the hunters that undoubtably slept somewhere among them. He felt almost as ecstatic as he had felt as a pup. He was sure now he could solve a problem that had stumped his peers all their lives -- and others before them. He stopped so suddenly that he nearly stumbled. The faint scents on the breeze had shocked, alarmed and ruined him in an instant. He loped off to investigate. doubting for the first time a sense that had never failed him. But there it was, a pup standing over a dayhunter's carcass, one far too large for it to have killed. There was no doubt in his mind, the pup had found one of his earlier kills and made a meal of it. He needed no other proof to know his other kills had bn similarly found and used. He did not even tether to drive the pup away -- it would simply return after he left. It would not kill a dayhunter for itself that night. He lay awake as the day came on. But now it was not the light that kept him from sleep -- the light was kinder here, more like starshine, than it had been in his old burrow. No, it was a churning, an eating away in the deeps of his body that caused his wakefulness. He knew no confidence now -- only a cruel deflation of his ego. This danger could not be fought -- the threat was not in teeth or muscles. It was abstract, confusing, defying and eluding all attack. He felt helpless. N ights followed and days little noticed between them. and eating. Time laboriously wasted, things tediously unnoticed. Then a night of sudden horror. He fell, tumbling, felt an impact, rolled and slid to a stop. His alarmwas quickly mastered -- where was he? In some deep place. He saw a rim above him, an unnatural horizon that cramped the stars above it. The ground smelled moist and fresh. He was in a burrow of some sort, something that had been dug out of the ground. It was unlike any of the burrows he had known. This place was deep without being covered -- it had no branching tunnels or burrows. He had come into it by falling. Out would be by leaping or climbing. He had never seen it before, or anything like it. It was newly here, it was near enough to the tunnel for him to have found it long ago had it been here before. But that it was didn't surprise him. Many things changed in storms. Bushes were torn apart. The ground became soft and stank. There had been a storm during the last day. He had been awakened by it and had spent a while listening to it and remembering another storm he had heard quite some time before. Storms caused many things. This one had caused some strange things. It had killed and knocked down one of the high bushes. He had been looking at it, walking around it. It was odd to see a high bush on the ground -- they looked so much bigger than when they were standing. Then he had fallen. His shock was gone now and, sensing this place to be as friendly as any burrow he had ever been in, he set about. looking it over. His curiosity led him into a minute study of the space around him. It was not until he knew it as well as any of the area above that he began to amuse himself by digging into the wall of the pit. He dug casually and the hole he produced slowly began to take on the shape of a burrow. Even before he had finished it had a narrow entrance as long as his body and enough room beyond it for him to turn around easily. He had never dug a burrow before, probably because he had never had a space to dig one, but he felt nothing unusual in doing so now. The burrow was becoming quite roomy when he noticed that it was more brightly lit than it had been. He turned towards the entrance and was struck by the intensity of the light coming in. Already it was too bright to see his way out of the pit. The dayhunters would be out soon. Only the security of his being underground kept him from being unnerved. Despite the uncomfortable light he stayed facing the entrance, prepared to give a determined defense against any dayhunter who would venture in. For a long while there were no dayhunters. The light grew maddening, but his tolerence of it was fortified by his instinct to survive. Memories of days past served only to tighten his muscles. There -- there was a dayhunter -- two -- more. The scents were clear -- a small pack was above. They IF had scented him, the danger was feverishly real. They drew no nearer -- they shifted up the wind and down the wind. They were confused. His eyelids were down tightly now -- he could no longer hope to see. Still the light seared through them in a raging red madness. Defending would be almost impossible. If he opened his eyes the light would blast right through his mind. He heard a scrabbling and caught a new scent. A dayhunter was in the pit. No sooner had he realized this than he heard piping cries of terror and scrambling on the walls of the pit. For a long while they continued, their frenzy never dimishing. Finally they ceased and the scent was more distant. He was safe here. The dayhunters were terrified of the pit. He grasped the fact desperately, whirled to bury his face and agonized eyes in the wall of the burrow. He was safe here -- the day would pass and he would survive. The dayhunters were afraid of the pit, of the tunnel, of being below ground. He was safe here. The day wore on and he managed to sleep through some of it. The night came. He awoke and left the pit. He found and dragged down a dayhunter and ate a needed meal. The he returned to the pit and spent the rest of the night enlarging the burrow, lengthening it and curving the length back on itself. Long before day threatened he left the pit to return to the tunnel and his own burrow. fore he woke again. It took him quite a while to adjust to the shift in time caused by his oversleeping. He missed the group he normally saw at the entrance -- they had long since left on the night's hunt. The sky was ahead of his reckoning. The busheaters were more active than his sense told him they should be. He made an easy kill of one he surprised. It was the first he had eaten in a long while. It didn't satisfy him completely, but he decided not to do any more hunting just yet. He left the carcass and strolled out under the starshine. The omens were pleasant this night and he noted he was letting his guard relax. Not since he had healed had he felt so glad of the stars. His body no longer reminded him of its infirmities. He sensed again its health and potential. There was a lightness in him that he had not felt in a long while. He came to an open spot he had known and loved during other nights. Here the stars could be seen as a vast coverage of sky. Here he could see dapplings and vapors and bursts that stood ever still in the pattern of the moving night. Coltextures, all beautiful to look at, but always a bit painful, always stimulating, as something too wondrous to bear. Dazzled, he lowered his eyes. It was dangerous to stare too long at the stars -- his eyes were full of the ghosts of them. Only in after some minutes did he recover his sight. Such dangers were not to be lightly accepted. Studying the night was not something to be done once the stars were known. His pleasure in the moment was destroyed. Somber movings were in him as he left the clearing behind. Dangers were ever-present and always most intensely to be guarded against in moments of wonder. It had always been so. Not in his time, nor perhaps even in his parent's time had anyone beheld beauty without subjecting himself to danger. But not until this night had he completely realized the morbid vastness of this truth. It was immune to any effort to alter it. The mind of the hunter withdrew uncertainly from something that threatened from everywhere. From the stars that shined overhead, the leaves around him and the ground under his feet. He moved on, trailing his depression behind him. He noted the scent of a female at first without feeling. Hunger knawed at him. He felt disheveled and sightsore. Realities he could not comprehend had crushed his joys from every side. He stopped. The air moved quietly about him, the brush whispered around him. They had always done so, but he had to stand still to know them. The scent of a female blended with them, became part of the harmonious calm. It soothed him. The dark movings in his mind were lessened. The female emerged from the brush ahead of him, moving slowly, cautiously. She stopped and looked him over. She bore scars on her hind flank but they were well healed. He thought he saw sorrow in her eyes, a helpless hope of comfort. He wanted her to turn and walk away. There was something terrifying in her calmness -- an innocence that was not born of ignorance. She moved evenly, and slowly while he stood still trying to deny a building fear that grew as she came pleadingly close. She stood uncertain now, worried. In a moment she would be afraid. He moved forward and nuzzled her. brimming with light and confidence, of hope reconceived. He had never hoped for a night such as this, he could never have imagined the joy he suddenly knew as wonderfully real. They played under the stars like pups, almost delirious at their release. The world had taken on a newness. Innocence was everywhere. She was kind and joyful. If she grew passionate it was in thankfulIF ness for the end of a long and craven denial. Such things as she had known she had not been meant to have experienced. But that she had suffered endeared her more to him. They felt a silent sharing of things long known. At last they rested, warm in the brightness of starnight. T he day was coming. With it returned the urgency, the fear of the coming light. He knew again the anguish of needing and saw it reflected in her. The light would be growing soon and they delayed. There was urgency, danger. Instincts howled in opposition and none could be ignored. The hunter's mind snapped to certainty. He scrambled into a run and, with one look to make sure she followed, doubled his speed to that of a full pursuit. The light was growing. They spent that day in his burrow in the pit -- and many days thereafter. She had hesitated when he had leaped into the pit. But she had followed. She had trembled as the day grew, flooding the inside of the She whimpered in fright when the dayhunters came. She had never been so intensely aware of danger, but she stayed with him. She drew on his composure. The danger was outside, all too real, but here she was safe. He made her feel safe. She wanted to feel safe. And where the burrow doubled back on itself he made her feel warm, and she slept. He emerged from the burrow into the night with a waking joy. There had been a great change in the world. They hunted that night with a vibrant sense of being alive neither had known before. H OW the idea spread can never be completely ascertained. The pit was near the tunnel, and in time became well known. The burrow was not overlooked either and more than once he had to chase out a casual trespasser. But how anyone realized the purpose of the pit-burrow is unknown. But in time another couple joined them in the pit. Neither couple used their burrows as permanent hoities -- they were still a bit too bright for comfortable sleeping. Nonetheless, they used them often. And if few adults were able to understand the pit-burrows, the pups learned quickly. Pups there were. They grew strong and healthy and only a few died. At night they would play in the pit or come hunting. The pups were often amusing in their attempts at the business of hunting, occasionally exasperating, but every so often they surprised him. They would cause him to wonder if he had grown up so fast. And he knew nights when he would look about the pit and see that there was room left to fit another burrow. A few adult mates, a few pups who were no longer pups had joined them there. Some had even made their permanent homes in the pit, though how they could sleep well in the daylight was beyond him. He and his mate had many pups, many beautiful nights, many warm days. He grew older than many and lived to help build the second pit. On one pleasant night he went hunting alone, leaving pups, mate and friends for the beauty of a solitary night, the love of the stars. He spent a long time in wandering, scenting, enjoying the night. Such things had always promised him joy -- now they gave more than ever. He felt that things had changed. Perhaps there was more beauty in the world -- or less danger. He noted a scent and traced it with a skill sharpened by long practice. He approached the bush quietly, stopped and searched it carefully. The dayhunter was well concealed and dozing soundly. He moved cautiously to the base of the bush. He waited quietly, judging how best to make his leap. Then moving a bit to one side and tensing, he leaped, grabbed the dayhunter by a hind leg and dragged it down. The dayhunter landed on top of him, claws and teeth ripping first air, then flesh. He struggled to regain his advantage and lost. tact with him. You can probably barely begin to realize the grief I felt to see him die like any other member of his race. I knew him intimately, though he never knew me or suspected that he was being studied. In the years I spent on Rigel IV I had made many contacts, known many alien minds, but his was the one I learned the greatest respect for. In the history of every intelligent species there are but a few of his kind, each a transition point in the events that determine success or failure of a life form. When I arrived on Rigel the nightfox colony was failing. I concerned myself with studying the natural decline of a species. But before I left the pit-dwellers were established and growing at a healthy rate and I had witnessed -- and recorded for the first time -- a major behavioral change in an animal community in its natural state. Without my help or that of any other life form he had been able to extract hope for his race from a whim of chance. It was luck beyond reasoning that our minds ever met. I can only feel grateful to have known him so well, to have shared the mind of a primary genius.  IF Cofi couragm v#r link disimilar organisms in symbiosis? his woman. He sat up from the blankets of marsh cotton, stretching his wings above his head until they touched the low ceiling of woven reeds. "The skyhunter is dying," she said. "We must leave." His heart twisted. "Dying? Are you sure?" "See for yourself." She turned to gather their meager possessions in her thin arms. He left their cabin and knew the truth of her words even before he had reached the forward opening. He felt the skyhunter's fading life in the uneasy quivering that shook the wood framework of the gondola. He cursed. Anger flared, turning to rage, fading to a sinking feeling of impotence. A pale yellow tentacle curled through the opening. The amber eye at its tip regarded him. "Ah, my ponderous friend. What is the matter?" Schadow asked soothingly. The tentacle wrapped about his waist, reassuring, sad. On reaching the opening, he looked out and up. The hydrogenfilled balloon-bladder that kept the skyhunter airbore had turned from a healthy crimson to a dusky brown, run with streaks of copper. The airpaddles were clenched as if in pain. The cartilage ribs to which the framework of the gondola was fastened sagged, hardly capable of holding it or the hundred and seven human members of the Seacliff Clan. The sixty green and crimson fishing tentacles hung lifeless toward the glittering sea a halMcilometer below. The single foretentacle that had greeted him snaked away and moved listlessly in the air. He wanted to say something, to reassure the animal, the living dirigible that had been his home and friend and protector all his life, to let his calm voice -- "Schadow." He turned, recognized the old man who stood behind him. "Grandfather?" "There is little time. You must move fast." "And you?" "You know my duty. We have lived as x)ne, the skybeast and I -- we will die as one. Yon are now Clan Elder. You know what you must do." Schadow nodded. For a moment they clasped hands, Schadow studying the patriarch's tired, rawhide face. Then he went back to his cabin. Behind him. Grandfather jumped into the air and fluttered up to the head of the skyhunter., It tried to push him away but the ancient one found power in his wings and stayed close, patting the head and talking softly of yesteryear. the aft opening and when he was sure that he had had missed no one, ordered his people into the sky. One by one they jumped, arms tightly grasping children or belongings. Their wings flapped until they hit an upcurrent -- then they glided into formation, armed men taking the vulnerable positions. Last to leave was Schadow. He threw himself from the gondola, falling toward the distant water, stretched his wings, flew. Together, silent, they headed toward the land until Schadow judged they had reached a safe distance. He looked back at the skyhunter. The bladder was now almost totally copper. The three hydrogen bags were scarcely visible through the once transparent hide. As the wind pivoted the derelict sky beast Schadow saw Grandfather flying close to its head. He saw the creature give one last attempt to push the old man away with its tentacle, saw it fail, saw them grasp one another one last time, enemies once, now brothers. "It's going to suicide," said one warrior. Before he had spoken the last word a spark flared in the depths of the bladder. The skyhunter was enveloped in a savage burst of fire that reflected softly off the wispy clouds above and more fiercely off the sea below. Man, beast and gondola became a single inferno that twisted in the air and tumbled into the waves. The thunder struck at the Seacliff Clan, enveloped and passed it. For a few moments the flyers IF were given increased lift. They took advantage of it and glided in silence toward the granite shore. A pack of winged amphibians, like tiny pale dragons, soared out from the cliffs to meet them, screaming their challenge and bravado, voicing them ail the louder when they were ignored. 'Where do we go now?" asked his woman as Schadow glided in next to her. "Give me my harness," he said,partly answering her query. He took the harness of leather straps and silver buckles and dressed himself in midair, fitting the fastenings around his chest and placing the scabbard along his spine. He pulled out the sword of strong white bone and tested its edges, honed over the years to razor sharpness. "You must go to Starport," he called to his people. "Wait there for five days. If I have not returned by that time you will know that I have failed to tame a skyhunter and that you must choose a new Clan Elder from among you." He said nothing more. Nothing else was left to say. They flew away, a few lifting their spirits from the depths of the tragedy enough to wish him luck. He watched them until they seemed no larger than insects against the brightening blue of the post-dawn horizon. Then he banked, caught the thermal that swept up from the coastal cliffs. dropped into an easy glide to conserve his energy for the ordeal ahead. T hey had called the colony world Pishkun, from an ancient Sioux word that meant cliff, for indeed it was a land of cliffs as well as rift valleys, crevices and faults -- a granite world of eternal upheaval where the thunder of earthquakes was as common as the roar of the ocean. When the colonists had first reached and named Pishkun they had taken its unfriendly nature as a challenge. trated dreams that had begun when early man had First looked at the eagle and felt envy, Ornithanthropus had Finally been born, for only in the air could life be sustained with any permanency on this world. Aesthetics had played a greater part in the design of the birdfolk than functional engineering. The wings had been placed at the shoulder blades and were powered by a complex system of muscles that started at the keel-like breastbone, joined the trapezius and ran up the lower part of each wing. The bones were hollow for lightness and the lower eyelids, which were transparent, could cover the eyes to protect them from windblast. To a basicform human, the birdfolk were the symbol of beauty in motion. Schadow, who was of the fiftieth generation of his kind, cared little for the history of his people. He knew it -- the basicforms at Starport had told it to him when he had visited that antigrav trading station in his adolescence -- but he had found the story only of peripheral interest. Only life, health, the sky, his woman and the skyhunter he must tame meant anything to him. The day passed into early afternoon without tiring him as he skimmed along the updrafts and climbed for a wider view. Over the sea almost a kilometer away he saw a young skyhunter, shining like a blood jewel over the silverstreaked greeness of the. waves. But it was already fishing. It would be too strong for him to outlast. He looked inland. The nostrils of his knife-blade nose flared. The muscles in his sunken cheeks tightened like braided rawhide. His eyes slitted and the greasy black hair lifted from his scalp. Unsteadily he moved the sword in his hands. What he saw was barely a dot on the horizon but every instinct in him identified it. It was a skyhunter heading for the sea and therefore hungry, therefore weakened. For a scant moment he debated falling toward the land and foraging for something to eat, then tossed the idea aside. The beast would know by his smell whether or not he had a full belly and it had best sense that he was as hungry as it, unarmed except for the sword, naked except for the harness -- equal with it in all respects including courage. H e studied every facet of the land and air around him. The ground was a tumbled mess of bare rock, strewn boulders, cascades, bogs and patches of brown and green where simple land plants had eked out a living despite the endless assaults upon them by the planet's ever-changing crust. He looked away from the tortured land. With a sense ingrained into him through generations of running upon the winds he looked at the air mass around him and mapped every current in his mind. He saw the draft that swept up from the sea cliffs below him like a sunwarmed glass curtain to touch the inversion layer four kilometers above; saw a large thermal off to his right, marked where it started on the ground near a dust devil, a huge cylinder of moving bubbles of heated air that rose to reach the cumulus clouds that dotted the sky; saw a second curtain-like current rise from cjiffs of red granite to his left, but this one bent and rushed dangerously across the jagged top; saw the bulk of dead air that sat ahead of him, shimmering now and then in the form of a seaward breeze. He couldn't have picked a betIF ter place to meet the skybeast, he told himself. It would not retreat inland or go to the left because of the cliffs. It could only attempt to go over him or to his right -- or through him. It came on without evidencing the slightest concern. As it drew closer Schadow was awed at its size -- it was bigger than any he had ever seen. The massive bladder, shining dull crimson in the sunlight, must have been fully forty meters across and almost a hundred long. The three hydrogen sacs inside fluttered larger and smaller as it adjusted its buoyancy in the weak on-sea winds. Sixteen airpaddles, eight along each side swept forward like closed fists, opened to reveal strong black membranes, pushed back to provide thrust. Fishing tentacles were coiled close to the cartilage ribbing that protected two-thirds of its underside from leaping sea carnivores. The poison-celled foretentacle that flipped about the bladder to watch for predators or parasites was set just behind the head which took up the other third. And its eyes -- they looked across at him -- were twin pools of molten amber, the black pupils expanding and contracting to the beat of the aerial supercoelenterate's savage life systems. They revealed a brooding intelligence that at once terrified and exhilarated him Schadow. He hovered as best he could in the skyhunter's path. The creature slowed, watching him. Schadow gave challenge. "Ho! Skyhunter! I have come to tame you, to form the bond of brotherhood between us for the good of my people -- or die trymg. The eyes burned into his. The foretentacle streaked for him. he had practiced since he had first taken to wing as a boy, slashing the air in front of him in a series of hissing sweeps. He want the beast to know that he could cut the tentacle in two if it threatened him but that he didn't want to. The tentacle retreated. The eyes studied him, their look now unreadable. For an instant something flashed in those eyes. Then the creature was moving. At first he thought it was retreating and the concept shocked him, for every skyhunter he had ever known or heard of would rather have suicided than run from an attacker, especially such a little attacker as a man. Then a gulping sound came to his ears. He smiled. It was increasing its buoyancy. It was going to attempt to go over him. Schadow pushed at the almost still air with his wings and began to climb. The skybeast, airpaddles sweeping lazily to maintain equilibrium, began to ascend in front of him. They went up and up until the clouds seemed to disappear as they melded into them and ice crystals danced about them, flickerbroke the sunlight. Shadow's exhaled breath began to form into puffs of frost. The tentacle again darted toward him and again he created a protective shield around him with hiis sword. "Ho! You will have to do better than that, great one." He watched the tentacle retreat and snap in the air as if in anger. With a mutter the coelenterate began to descend, its hydrogen already cooling and decreasing its lift. Schadow paralleled it. The clouds reformed above. The atmosphere became warmer. Schadow flexed his wings to spoil his descent and was amazed to discover that this adversary was picking up downward speed. He allowed himself to fall with it until he was forced to brake. Surely the thing wasn't going to dash itself into the ground! He felt himself go cold in a way the high frost couldn't have affected him. It was indeed throwing itself at the twisted rock country. Shaken, the birdman watched it drop until it was falling away from him like a plummeting boulder. It hit the earth, narrowly missing a jagged outcropping. Dust billowed from the impact site. The crimson bladder shook, flattened, appeared to burst. Then it was rebounding back up at him. Schadow would have laughed in relief and admiration for the creature if it had not been lofting directly at him with tremendous speed. He wheeled, pushing the air in desperation. It rushed past him. The foretentacle narrowly missed him and one of the Fishing tentacles touched his left leg. He cried out in pain. Stubbornly he wheeled again and chased it until it leveled off at four hundred meters. He checked his leg. A thin welt was forming across his calf. Luckily he hadn't been hooked on one of the barbs or touched by a poison capsule. "Ho-eee!" he shouted, making the traditional sign of admiration for one's enemy in the air with his sword. In turn, the skyhunter whipped its tentacle about in a remarkable mimicry of the sign. They settled down to eyeing one another again. Now perhaps the skybeast realized that it and Schadow must face each other, that each must prove to the other his courage and powers of endurance. And while they strained to endure the ordeal perhaps a bond would form between them. The huge eyes suddenly shifted and focused behind his right shoulder. Schadow looked around. IF him. Their wings fluttered feebly, their weight being supported by antigrav units strapped to their chests. They gripped swords of the best alloy metal. On their bodies they wore glittering collections of useless ornaments and gadgets. Fangs! Schadow remembered seeing packs of them when he had visited Starbase and he had heard many tales of their bloody raids. While they were adapted forms, the fangs preferred the sanctuary of the floating plastic city, venturing forth only for murder or pillage. One flew slightly ahead of the others. Setting a dial on his antigrav, he hovered about ten meters from Schadow, alternately watching the lone warrior and the skyhunter. "I am Garp," he said. "So?" Schadow hefted his sword and tentatively tested its edge with his thumb. He looked over his shoulder to check the beast. Though he acted calmly, he strained all the while to maintain his hovering position without appearing to tire. "I am leader of our pack." Garp had an artificially bronzed skin, a fat belly and shining bald head. He reminded Schadow of a Buddha idol -- perhaps ancient religions were the latest fashion among the basicforms, whom the fangs always emulated, body sculpture being the dominant art form among the non-adapted men of the Confederacy. "Then it is up to you to lead your men -- if they deserve that title -- away. You should know that the ordeal with a skyhunter is a private matter. You have no right here." Garp laughed. "But we have come such a long way to find you. Ven here," he swept his empty hand toward a thinner version of himself who grinned and bowed awkwardly in the air, "saw your people arrive at the base and overheard them talking about you." Now it was Garp's turn to test his sword edge with his thumb, though Schadow saw sky between flesh and metal. "Having nothing better to do, we decided that we should come out and help you. I mean, all that talk that you people keep giving us about living with nature and not against it to to the contrary, we thought that you'd like the power of civilization behind you in this affair." He looked at the beast, briefly meeting its eyes. His voice went softer. "I've never een a man killed by one of those before." Garp looked at his sword then shouted, "Ven!" "Ho?" "The triplets will stay with me. You take the other two and go behind the thing to keep it from getting away." "Understood." The three adjusted their antigravs and pushed themselves into position. Garp looked at Schadow. "You." Schadow felt his jaw muscles tighten in anger. "In my wide experience in dealing with men of action, I have usually found that even the bravest need a little push in the right direction on occasion. We watched you fighting the thing and it is our considered opinion that you keep too far from it. Right men?" The trio that moved in behind hin answered in chorus, "Right." "So let's give him the courage he needs." Garp waited until the three were even with hinvbefore moving slowly toward the warrior, sword held out ahead of him like a lance. Garp had slowed so that two others were the first to reach him. Folding his wings, Schadow fell. He outstretched them again and regained altitude, slashing at one fang who had just set his antigrav to dive and had left the top of his head vulnerable. He felt his sword crack through the skull. The man screamed and floated away from the contestants. He slashed at the second man, Garp screamed in rage. "Kill him," he ordered. The other two didn't need encouraging. They rushed at Schadow. He parried the lunging weapon of the first, ducked the second and looked for Garp. The latter proved to be a greater danger than Schadow had guessed. The fang leader held his sword before him, elbow locked, and maneuvered himself by twisting the dials on his antigrav. He flashed in and out with extreme accuracy and Schadow learned respect for the antigrav as he desperately put up a defense. The other two pressed beside him, forcing him to fall back toward the skyhunter. "Yen," shouted Garp. "Drive the thing this way." Schadow looked behind him. Yen and his companions were efficiently moving the skybeast toward him. Not that he feared the skyhunter so much -- though he knew what his fate would be if it caught him -- but he felt concern that the flashing blades would soon cripple the animal. It was battling with a ferocity it had not shown earlier. Its fishing tentacles lashed out as it rocked in the air. Its foretentacle hung poised to strike. Its paddles sent it spinning on an axis, making it harder to predict its next attack or parry. Even so, it didn't have a chance against this pack. The fact that its fiery suicide -- when it accepted defeat -- would take its tormentors with it was little consolation. Something nagged at the back of IF Schadow's mind but the fangs gave him no time to find out what it was. His keel muscles were blazing with pain as he was forced to beat his wings to hold his position. He could feel himself weakening. For the first time in his life he envied the power the antigrav gave a flyer, as his attackers pressed themselves more keenly against him. His sword of bloodied bone took the full force of a downward stroke from above and was chipped. He stabbed at Garp, who replied by smashing Schadow's sword with a jarring blow that broke the point. Cursing, Schadow put his full fury into an offense, momentarily driving the three back. Garp lost his temper and for the first time truly led the attack. They came at him at once. The wind shimmered and the birdman saw a brief updraft roll up to them like a pearl-gray bubble. He flexed his wings. The warm bubble enveloped them, jostling the fangs and lifting their inteded victim above them. Spitting monosyllables, the trio adjusted their antigravs and shot toward him. Schadow, momentarily relieved from battle and able to rest his burning muscles, was amazed. Had they been so busy that they hadn't seen the thermal? But surely they must have. No matter how involved you were, you always watched the air about you. You had to if you wanted to fly. Garp and the others were at him again. His weapon rendered useless as a foil, he was forced to slash and chop at them. He scratched Garp's bronze belly, forcing him behind the other two. H e saw a second thermal bubble coming up at them. Winging over, he dived. The fangs fell Want a way out of whatever it is you're in Then read -- The Magazine of Alternatives beside him. When he leveled off, they leveled beside him, prepared to continue the fight. The thermal hit and again he was carried away from them. They couldn't see! It was a hard fact to understand but there was the proof. Any child of Schadow's clan would have seen that bubble and yet these winged adults had looked right at it without noticing it. Was it possible? He watched them coming up at him, playing with the knobs on their antigravs. He saw the truth and with it a possibility. These men, adapted for the air though they were, were creatures of the Starbase, where no man ever did what a mechanism could more easily do. Even though they had flown the skies all their lives, they had never really flown. Using their wings only as stabilizers, they let their antigravs do their flying for them. Not having the need to know the currents of the atmosphere, they had lost, if they had ever had, the ability to see them. In a very important way they were blind. Again Schadow dived. This time he looped low and under the trailing tentacles of the skyhunter. The fangs reset their equipment and gave easy chase. "Ven -- " shouted Garp. Ven looked down and peeled away from the troubled skyhunter, followed by his comrades. The six formed a rough flock behind Schadow. Banking to his left, he put his last dregs of energy into flying for the red cliffs. As his pursuers closed the distance between them he regarded the bleak cliffs and the wispy blanket of air that rose up and over it. Every instinct cried out to him to veer away. He reached the outer edge of the blanket and soared upward, the wind brushing his face gently and with no hint of where it would take him if he stayed with it. The pack adjusted and rose behind him. Ven was leading and only five meters below, his teeth showing in a tight grin. Ven overtook him as they reached the summit and Schadow was carried across the rough top. With one hand on his antigrav Ven threw himself at the birdman. Schadow met sword with sword. As Ven pulled back to make a second stab, Schadow somersaulted beneath him and slashed upward. Blood spurted past his face. Ven screamed and twisted in the air, held aloft by his device. The second attacker was luckier. His sword caught Schadow's at an angle, breaking it just above the guard. Schadow tossed the handle into the man's face. Shouting in victory, Garp moved in ahead of the others for the kill. "Die, you -- " he yelled, raising his weapon. His eyes burned. (Please turn to page #) IF The rule of the Brains was harsh but so was Mew Eden. Only spedal types of men could survive there! disdainful lines so the curious citizens wouldn't guess the sick dread inside him, walked as slowly as the two nervous lawkeeps let him. He put down wild thoughts of making a break at this last moment. Insane! Where would he run? Two blocks ahead Nose Cone, the colony's seat of government -- as well as its arsenal and main power plant for the century and a half since Landing -- loomed like an immense steel bullet against the blinding straw-colored New Eden sky. How well he knew that silhouette! Just beyond Nose Cone was the obtuse angle of South Fence in which Landington nestled. Beyond the fence rose Desolation Ridge, the weather barrier that split the relatively fertile colony land from Hidry Desert. Though the season was still spring, the kitchgrass was already bleached to a dirty white, and the gullies were baked dry. Beyond the ridge lay his almost certain exile. One of the lawkeeps, a careful four paces behind, said, "Step it up, Tomsun!" The attendant at Access Four flushed and averted his eyes, obKreg now. Kreg walked past him and stood blinking for a moment in the dimmer light of Rotunda. The sensors detected him quickly. A voice said, "This is Captain Gerlik. Since you were apprenticed to Nose Cone, Tomsun, I'm going to hear you myself. You know my compartment." "Yes, sir." Kreg ignored the startled glances of citizens; there were few because this was neither a Lecture Day nor a Museum Day. He crossed the high-vaulted chamber to a door a third of the way around the circumference, pushed it open and descended the ramp. One deck down, he left the ramp via another door and walked along a cross-ship corridor. He could feel under his feet the vibration of machinery two decks down and hear the familiar hums. How long, he wondered absently as he had so often, would the fissionables last? And what would the colony do for power when they were gone? There were no 'pairbots in the corridor. He pushed open the door of Compartment NC Six, entered and stood facing the stainless-steel cabinet against the outboard bulkhead. M an height, the rectangular compartment was. The lower part was featureless -- he knew there was machinery in it, and some free space. At face height were six orifices in a horizontal row -- the outer two, the ears, about eight inches apart; the inner, the eyes, about three inches apart. The other twj? were for smelling. Below the line of orifices was the voice-grill. There were, of course, other sensors in various parts of the room, as well as unseen weapons, but the cabinet's particular sensory organs were placed to give the preserved Brain inside as nearly a human viewpoint as possible. Captain Gerlik, as the history books told, had been only Third Officer, but he was senior of the surviving Brains. One would think, Kreg mused sourly, that some distinction would be displayed. But this compartment and this cabinet were identical with the other four. The voice from the grill was Gerlik's. "Sit down, Tomsun." Kreg slid into the single plain chair. He stared defiantly at the cabinet's features. The voice, when it came again, sounded bored. "Tomsun, as you know, you're entitled to this last hearing. Are there new facts you want to present?" Kreg sat wordless for a minute. Finally he shrugged. "I didn't hide anything before." The voice sighed. "All right; I'll state what's ort record. One hundred twenty-six planetary days ago you were arrested for fist-fighting. Ninety-seven days ago you were arrested on an identical charge. That being your second citation, you were given Formal Warning." The sick feeling in Kreg's stomach made him shift in the chair. "The two situations were not identical!" Gerlik said impatiently, "I have access to your testimony, and that of witnesses. In the first instance, a man jostled you and made threatening remarks. You replied and soon you were trading punches. In the second instance, several members of a gang, as you called it, goaded you into fighting by making remarks about your courage or lack of it. Those were the circumstances. The charges were identical." Kreg shrugged. The Brain went on, "And now there's a third charge. I suppose you're going to say the circumstances are again different." K reg sat stonily for a moment. He had refused to talk IF at the last trial -- witnesses had said enough. Now, though, he faced exile... "They were different, if you care. There was -- I was with a young lady and another fellow tried to -- to cut in. He knew I had received a Formal Warning, so he thought rd be afraid to fight." Gerlik sounded amused. "But you weren't, of course, and you swung a fist." Kreg said, "He swung one first." "And," Gerlik said, "it was thereupon incumbent upon you to punch back?" Kreg's face grew warmer. "That's how most of us feel." "Whom do ygu mean by 'us'?" "Young men of my age." "Which is?" Kreg said -- a little angrily because his age was on file, "Nineteen." Rather young aren't you?" Kreg clamped his lips on a hot reply. He mustn't let himself be needled into saying what was in his mind. The voice continued. "We'll let that pass, since you seem to consider yourself old enough to break the law. Were either you or the young lady in physical danger?" Kreg said impatiently, "Of course not. The incident was a -- a deliberate challenge to my manhood. I don't see what a thing like this, a simple fist-fight between two young men, has to do with law. It isn't as if -- as if I'd taken a pistol and shot someone through the head -- or broken into a house and stolen something!" sighed. "Obviously you haven't listened to the things we've tried to teach you. So listen now. We have close to nine thousand people in the colony. Survival isn't easy -- New Eden is not a fertile planet -- and will get harder as we grow. Violent people aren't the type we need. We need people ternative is more and more lawkeeps and more and more of the colony's potential, wasted. Matters are bad enough at this point. Do you know the colony's average growth over the last twentyfive years?" Kreg said impatiently, "A third of a percent a year." "Right." The voice fell briefly silent. "Tomsun, such a statistic may mean nothing to you. To us -- to the Brains -- it's highly distressing. We're not going to live  forever and the fissionables won't last forever. A time limit exists Within it we must build a colony capable of surviving on its own. Its people must not collapse into wars and anarchy. Here's a statistic, Tomsun, that you may not have heard -- we've had to exile, for various kinds of violence or other antisocial behavior, a little over one-half of one percent of total population per year! At present we're shrinking, not growing. There's a dilemma -- do we ruthlessly weed out the unsuitable, or do we keep the marginal ones in favor of growth?" voice to resume. When it didn't he said, "lt seems to me you go pretty far toward weeding out anyone with a little spirit." Gerlik caught him up. "Spirit? Have we ever exiled anyone for peaceful competition? Do we prohibit arguing as long as nothing harder than words is thrown?" "No, but -- well, you're damned hard on girls!" The voice sighed. "Now you're talking about morals. Qf course, we uphold moral standards -- they're part and parcel of the kind of society we need. Tomsun, we're wandering from your own case. Do you have any new facts to present?" "No." "Then the sentence will have to stand. Exile," Kreg found himself on his feet. "Why don't you just shoot me? Why maintain this farce of exile? Do you think it's civilized to let people starve outside or go blind from the sun, die of thirst or be killed by predators?" "Or," the voice said calmly, "kill each other. Don't forget that part. Yes, we're being civilized. We're sparing your fellow colonists the job of executing you or of guarding and supporting you in prison -- or caring for you after a brainwashing. And you don't have to die automatically once you're exiled. Exes do survive; lots of them. Now, Tomsun, this is all the time I can give you. When you leave Nose Cone -- " Kreg said desperately, "I have a right to make a bequest and choose an executor." Gerlik sighed. "Choose, then." "I choose my great-uncle!" "All right. You know his compartment." II known to the whole family -- was the only one of the Brains who hadn't been born either on the Ship or on Earth itself. He had been born on New Eden and had lived there seventy-three years. He greeted Kreg quietly. "I can't say how sorry I am. I had great hopes for you. Why couldn't you have held your temper? Are a few taunts all that important?" Kreg, standing, gripped the chair back. "Ben, don't talk like the rest of them. Can't you see that it's not fair? No matter how hard I tried, someone would have goaded me into fighting. They'd hive pushed as far as necessary, knowing I had had a Formal Warning, and now I'm being punished while they -- " Ben interrupted quietly, "Hold on, boy. They were all cited -- IF even the ones who never touched you, only looked on. Some got their second citations. They have to walk a tightrope from now on. And don't keep calling your sentence punishment -- and don't call it unfair. Wotild it be fair to the orderly members of the colony to leave violent genes among them? Do you think we Brains could die knowing we had left the seeds of self-destruction in the colony?" Kreg said furiously, was pushed farther than I could stand. I had to fight or -- or admit I wasn't a man. Can't you understand that?" Ben said quietly, "No, I can't. What harm would it have done you to have swallowed your pride? To my way of thinking to have done so would have been the greater manhood. Can't you un"No." "Then you're not a very bright young man." K reg took two trembling steps and gripped the chair back again. For one red instant he wanted to lift it and swing it at the cabinet. Not that he could have done much harm -- if he did succeed in breaking an eye the hidden weapons would blast him down and 'pairbots or attendants would come and carry his remains away and repair the sensor. Instead, he spoke in a low, shaky voice, "I don't see it as a question of brightness. I'm flesh and blood and I react accordingly. While you -- " Ben said with only a trace of sharpness in his artificial voice, "While I'm just a glandless hunk of protoplasm in a saturated sponge. Is that it?" Now that it was said, Kreg wouldn't back down. "That's right. You've been that way so long you can't remember what it's like to be a man." Ben said coolly, "You wanted to make a bequest. Get on with it." Kreg said bitterly, "I own a few credits in the bank and some clothes. I bequeath the credits to you and the other Brains. Maybe you can buy some pin-up picturesfor your compartment walls. I don't cre what you do with the clothes. Wear them, if you can find a way!" He turned and ran out of the compartment. He thought he heard a chuckle behind him. T he gravcar settled onto loose sandy soil. Kreg stared at the quilltrees growing sparsely in a shallow ravine that led southward. His neutral-gray goggles did not distort colors, but he could see little green in the spiny Joshuatreelike things -- they were offwhite like dry old bones. They and the kitchgrass were the only vegetation in sight. He climbed wordlessly from the car and accepted the felt-covered canteen and the bundle of rations one lawkeep handed him. He already had, in a thick compartmented belt, a supply of salt, some antibiotic tablets and a burningglass for making fire. The only weapon allowed him was a knife in a scabbard. The second lawkeep said, not unkindly, "That ravine will have water a few miles south. You'd better stay here until night, though -- a group of exes was sighted not far down a few days ago. They might not be hospitable." Kreg stood and watched the car rise, then dart north. A hundred and fifty miles was estimate of the distance they'd brought him. Too to walk back, even if something other than a bullet waited at the fence. He turned listlessly toward the ravine. Insects buzzed in saffron sunlight made bearable by his goggles. The heat was already striking through his loose white garments. He moved hesitantly to-, ward the nearest big quilltree. Predators weren't supposed to range this far north, but he wasn't sure. And exiles might ambush hirn for the things he had. He sat down in the quilltree's slim shadow. Winged insects flew away from him. He opened the canteen and drank sparingly, though the dryness of the air made him want to gulp mouthfuls. The desert smelled dusty and the quilltree smelled like hot grease. Something -- those locustlike insects. maybe -- had an odor of thymol. There were no feathered birds on New Eden, but now that the gravcar was gone things like slender four-inch winged lizards began to flit about, catching insects. Kihches, they were called. He had heard that starving exes sometimes ate them. They did not tempt him -- they looked like tight twists of dry gray paper, with cellophane wings. N ight came and the air cooled a little. Neither moon was in The brightest point of light in the sky was not a star. Kreg lay on his back, staring up at it. Main Hull, it was -- practically all of the Ship except Nose Cone. Originally it had been left in a standing orbit directly above Landington, but by now it had lagged a little and skewed off to the west, so it was below the zenith. The living quarters, schools, clinics and amusement centers had been in Main Hull, along with most of hydroponics and ship's machinery, including the main drives. The passengers landing in Nose Cone, must have been crowded. He wondered how long it would be before Main Hull's orbit decayed enough to bring it down as a meteor. Thousands of years perhaps. It seemed a shame to waste all that metal, but landing it would have used up a lot of fissionables. Something -- a kinch -- crawled IF onto his hand. Startled, he threw it off, then rose to his feet and moved cautiously downravine. Mostly, the ground between quilltrees was too sandy to support much growth, but here and there, in richer pockets, kitchgrass grew. The individual plant was like a small sprout of asparagus with five oval leaves arranged radially around its base. Where enough moisture existed the grass formed an almost complete cover. Kreg, pausing to peer ahead, stooped, plucked one of the sprouts and chewed on it. The taste was mildly bitter; the texture dry and pithy; only when it first sprouted was the stuff succulent. After a minute he spat it out and took a sip from his canteen. Then he trudged on. Eight or nine miles downravine, where the quilltrees grew more thickly, he suddenly stopped, crouching beside one of the spiny trunks. From ahead came a rumble of sound like many feet pounding. The sound grew rapidly. Thoroughly scared, he ran for the nearer side of the ravine and struggled up the loose slope, sliding back one step for every two he gained, slipping often to hands and knees. Finally, gaining level ground, he ran to a small hummock and threw himself down beside it where he could watch the ravine. In the starlight he could see plainly the marks he had left on the slope. Dare he stay here? But it was too late to get up and run. A couple of hundred yards ahead he saw swift movement among the quilltrees. He lay still, trying not to breathe audibly -- then realized that the thunder of the stampede would drown out any noise he made. T hey were hellrunners. He rec-. ognized them though he had seen only three or four such creatures in his life from gravcars. This closeup view of a whole herd was awesome. The bodies, from the thrusting snouts to the tips of the long heavy tails, were as much as fifteen feet lohg and reptilian. But unlike the Terran crocodiles in old movies, these New Eden creatures did not crawl on four legs. Instead they ran in swift long strides on two mightily muscled hind limbs, their bodies parallel to the ground and fifty inches or more above it, the tails balancing the foreparts. Great three-toed feet drummed upon the soil and sent it flying. The relatively puny forelimbs were clutched against the pumping chests. The heads, hardly bigger than a man's though more elongated, swayed on long necks as the hurtling creatures swerved among the quilltrees and darted looks ahead. Kreg shivered, thinking of the strength needed to keep those  heavy bodies balanced parallel to the ground. Behind the big males in the lead came the females and the young. running more gracefully. A rear guard of young males twisted their heads about to watch the trail behind. Kreg pressed himself close to the ground, fearing some monstrous pursuer of the fleeing herd. But the last of the herd passed, including a straggler or two, and the thunder diminished up the ravine with no sign of pursuit. He lay there until the ravine was quiet again, then dusted off his garments and began to walk along the edge of the slope. He didn't think he wanted to go down among the quilltrees again. Suddenly figures loomed before him. He crouched, reaching hesitantly for his knife, but a voice said, "Hold it right there, newie," and he saw spears ready. HI F or a minute nothing more was said and no one moved. Kreg gave a start as a menacing bellow sounded from upravine. The exile who had spoken before -- a darkbearded man of perhaps forty, as tall as Kreg but very lean -- grinned in the starlight. "Relax. That's one of our sentries, keeping those hellrunners moving. We want the ravine to ourselves for a while. When did you come out?" "Abopt noon." "What for?" "Fistfighting." "Oh, yes? Are you pretty good with your fists?" Kreg shrugged. "I never made a study of it. I didn't look for the fights." "I see," the bearded man said casually. "What's your name?" Kreg rejected an impulse to say it was none of the man's business. "Tomsun," "Tomsun? Which family are you? The one related to the Brain?" "That's right." The spokesman grunted. "Does your family still spend a lot of time visiting Uncle Ben?" Kreg said irritably, "As much as ever I guess. Why? Are you a Tomsun?" "No. I just wondered if you'd been in Nose Cone quite a bit. And why Uncle Ben let this happen to you." Kreg, his anger at the Brains stirring within him, said, "I've been in and out of Nose Cone since before I could pronounce it. The last two years I've been an apprentice attendant. But Uncle Ben seemed to agree with the other Brains that it's antisocial for a man to stand up to a challenge." The spokesman stared at Kreg. Then he muttered something under his breath, sighed and said, "All right. I'll tell you how it is with us. We're not the most lawless tribe of exes, but we don't recruit weaklings. You can come in with us tentatively, but you'll have to contribute those supplies you've got, carry your weight and stick by our rules. If you decline, you'll have to IF stay away from this ravine. I wouldn't swap much for your chances in that case." Kreg said woodenly, "It doesn't sound as if I had much choice. If you want the knife and the goggles and salt and antibiotics, I guess you can take them." The spokesman said patiently, "We won't take them. We don't care to compel anyone to join us. other kind are too much trouble. There's another ravine fifteen miles east that you could reach before sunup." "I guess I'd be a fool to decline your offer." "Fine," the bearded man said. "My name's Pendergast. This is Nujent and this is -- " B efore morning Kreg understood the stampede of hellrunners. Pendergast's exes had started it. They had with them the intact cured skins of two huge quadruped carnivores, somewhat like Terran lions in form but much bigger add scaly rather than furred. Two men in a skin could move it fast enough and imitate the living beast's bellow well enough to stampede a herd of the non-carnivorous hellrunners. In this particular instance, the purpose was dual: to chase them away from a waterhole and to kill a few stragglers for meat. The meat, now sizzling on spits over open fires, tasted like chicken, though it was tougher. The water in the stagnant pool, which was shaded by a thick growth of quilltrees and some round-leaved shootlike things, had to be settled; decanted and boiled before it was drinkable. Kreg threaded his way along a pricklybordered hellrunner trail to look at that pool. He didn't hear Pendergast behind him until the trek leader spoke. "Wondering how water stays here into the dry season?" "Yes ' The bearded man kneeled and swished murky water. "The hellrunners -- or people, now that we're here -- keep holes dug out. You'll notice that raised rim of dirt. In a low pocket of a ravine like this, where quilltrees grow this thick, you'll almost always find ground water if you dig down a ways. Seepage will keep the hole filled." Kreg nodded. "I understand there's an actual lake somewhere south." "Yes." In the early light Pendergast's.eyes showed gray and Kreg could see a strip of less tanned skin across his eyes and nose. "Sixty miles downravine. Lake Salvation, we call it. That's where our tribe is." "How big is the tribe?" "About four hundred, including a few offshoots that live elsewhere." "Oh. That big?" Kreg pondered a moment. Then: "Isn't this pretty far to come on a hunt?" Pendergast looked faintly surprised. "The hunt's incidental. We are a trading expedition." "What do you trade?" "Salt, for one thing -- there are pockets in the ravine -- and water. We take metal in return. You'll be going with us, unless you want to trek sixty miles downravine alone." "No, thanks. Where are we going and with whom will we trade?" "There are a half-dozen small tribes west of here, who mine metals and don't have salt or enough water of their own. We'll make the circuit, then head back down another ravine to the lake. Now, as to your stuff." The trekleader glanced at Kreg's belt. "You may as well wear that and the goggles until we get home. There'll be people at the lake who need the goggles worse than you do, but the rest of us on this trek are used to slits. Nujent will take the knife because he knows how to use it better than any of us. Did you ever carry a backpack?" "No." "It'll take a little getting used to. We won't give you too much -- say, about three gallons of water plus your own canteen and your share of the cooked meat. It won't be an easy trek for you, this first time, but you look healthy." Kreg said, "I'll keep up." the expedition to twenty-one. He noticed that he was carrying the lightest burden -- most of the others had six or eight gallons of water, in thin leather bags that didn't leak or sweat. Still, what he had was none too little. The extra weight tired him quickly and made his feet and his back muscles ache. The packstraps rubbed his shoulders raw. He was always thirsty and he hated the caked dust on his skin, but he stuck grimly to the pint-a-day water ration. The slits Pendergast had mentioned were carved wooden goggles with horizontal openings. The exes seemed to find them little nuisance, but the head-bobbing to raise and lower the field of view was odd. There were other strange things too: the sun fence -- a long sheet of leather erected on poles during daylight stops; the probing ahead on downslopes with staffs to avoid loose pockets of dirt beneath thin crusts; the winding routes that took the group to leeward of hills. All had the purpose of avoiding unnecessary perspiration; for example, after one tumble down a slope, Kreg understood the value of the staffs. When the country was fairly level they traveled at night. When rt was not they traveled during the day, the better to avoid treacherous footing and dangerous animals. Once they did encounter a herd of hellrunners. Kreg -- because he had the goggles -- saw them first. IF The expedition was crossing a ravine that had only a scattering of quilltrees. The big creatures were browsing slowly along, heads rising and bodies lifting as they nibbled daintily at comparatively tender quills atop the trees. He must have jerked his head around quickly enough to alert Pendergast, for the trek leader was beside him at once, gripping his arm. "Turn slowly and walk upravine. "Don't hurry and don't look back." Kreg, after a hesitant moment, complied. From the corners of his goggles he could see the other men walking slowly to either side. They must have gone a quarter-mile before Pendergast said, "All right. Out of the ravine now. They've decided we're no threat." Kreg started up the slope. Suddenly he stopped, staring to his right. "Doesn't that look like -- " But Pendergast and others were already striding to where Kreg pointed. of a newie, obviously not long dead, dressed as Kreg had been when first set down. The expedition gathered to stare silently. The man -- older than Kreg -- had left tracks from the north. He had apparently stopped to sleep and something had crept up on him. His throat was torn open and part of one shoulder was eaten away. Blood had soaked into the ground. There were fang marks on his forearms as if he had tried to shield his throat, but the standard knife was in its scabbard. Pendergast stooped to unbuckle the belt. Two other men hoisted the corpse so the belt could be pulled free. The first thing Pendergast did then was unsnap the goggles compartment and take out the goggles, which began to darken rapidly, adjusting to the daylight. "I'll wear these if no one objects." The others nodded. Nujent picked up the canteen and shook it. "He drank most of his water the first day." Kreg, resenting the calm acceptance of the tragedy, demanded, "How do you know it was only one day?" Pendergast gave him a glance through the newly acquired goggles. "He's only one day's walk from where he'd have been set down. This seems to bother you. Know him?" "No, but -- " The trek leader shrugged. "It's too bad he got himself killed, but it was his own fault. He should have rested during the day and trekked at night, as you did. Then he wouldn't have been sneaked up on." Kreg supposed that was so. "What killed him?" "A gollycat. They skulk around herds of hellrunners, picking off the young or stragglers. Not the biggest predator you'll see here. but the size of leopards. Scaly quadrupeds' Kreg said impatiently, "Pve seen pictures of them. But this man could have been warned more thoroughly, or set down in a safer place." The exes were all looking at Kreg now. After a minute Perfdergast said, 'There are a couple of us here who know how you feel -- I was exiled myself twelve years ago. Most of the others were born in the tribe. To them, a newie doesn't mean much until he's proved himself. Understand?" Kreg looked around at the impassive men. "I guess so. But -- the same thing could have happened to me. I wasn't watned about gollycats either. I. thought they only lived east of the colony, in the Sunrise Hills." Nujent, grinning, put in, "We aren't any greater admirers of the system, or of the Brains, than you are, even if we've never talked to them. Why do you think we live in the desert? The Sunrise Hills aren't as fertile as the colony land, but they're a lot better than this." Kreg looked at the slits of Nujent's wooden goggles. "I don't know why you live as you do. Why do you?" "Because the Brains won't let us have so much as a rifle to fight off predators. And predators are thick in the hills. A few years ago an uncle of mine got together the materials for gunpowder and hammered together a crude sort of cannon. About the fourth time he fired it, lawkeeps from the colony descended and took it away." Kreg said nothing. That was the law, of course -- exes could not own guns. He hadn't known, though, that exiles had ambition enough, or organization enough, to make gunpowder and a crude cannon. IV T he first trading was with a small tribe -- two families totaling fourteen individuals -- that lived in caves in the side of a ravine. The caves were actually the mines. From those mines came red iron ore that the tiny tribe smelted, using charcoal as the reducing agent, in an intriguing crude oven built of quartz crystals. The product was ingots of gray steel, pitted and grainy. The tribe had a well that produced insufficient water and they sold Pendergast twenty-four ingots for two six-gallon skins of water. What a contrast the metal was, Kreg mused, to the stock of stainless steel and other alloys stored in Nose Cone! The next two tribes were hardly different from the first. A night's trek beyond the third tribe, though, brought the expedition to a larger one -- close to fifty individuals -- that had, besides iron, a bronze alloy and some copper and lead. All but a little of the trading waIF ter went there. Now Kreg had to carry ingots in his backpack. They started on westward at sundown. At the first stop Kreg swallowed his mouthful of water and lay down on his back. Main Hull was just beginning to dim as it entered shadow. Pendergast sat down beside him. "Here we are, trekking for days to buy a few pounds of metal, while all that high-grade steel hangs up there in the sky! I wonder if it'll all burn up when it falls. If not, I suppose the colony's descendants will grab what's left." Kreg glanced at the bearded man. "You mean, you don't think your own descendants will have a chance at it?" "Do you?" Kreg, uncomfortable, knew this conversation was deliberate. "I suppose not, now that I think about it." Pendergast chuckled. "You said your descendants, though. Don't you expect to have any? Or don't you think of yourself as an exile yet?" Kreg's face grew warm. "I guess I've never thought about having descendants. When they sent me out..." The trek leader said, "There's a fairly even balance of men and women among us and you don't look like a potential bachelor to me. I have two sons and a daughter. I think a lot about them and about the children they'll have. Some day the Brains will finish this weeding out they preach, and let the colony expand. I wonder about what'll happen to my descendants then. I think they'll simply be pushed aside." Kreg, not liking the subject, didn't answer, and the older man let it rest there. T he next trading site was in a shallow ravine that had almost no kitchgrass and few quilltrees. The mine holes were there, but the tribe was missing. The expedition, after studying footprints that led downravine, set up the sun fence and stopped to discuss things. Nujent came back from looking at the local well. "Low, but not completely dry, so that wasn't why they left. Damn it -- another metal-source gone! Why don't we organize some ambushes and capture a grav car or two? We could fly them until the power gave out, then break them up for metal." Kreg saw Pendergast's sharp look at Nujent and didn't miss the ensuing exaggerated silence -- or Nujent's furtive look at Kreg. He felt his face grow warm. What was going on? Did they -- could they -- suspect he was a spy? Ridiculous! Why would the Brains want spies among the exiles? Nujent was saying, "If they'd intended to be back they'd have left a message. I'm for taking what metal's around." Pendergast said, "We could do that. Still, there is a chance they ntight come back -- or some of them might. We've got water we don't need for getting home. I think we ought to put it in what airtight containers we have and cache it here. That way they're paid for the metal, whatever happens. And if they don't come back the cache of water will keep. We might find it handy on the next expedition." Nujent shrugged. "Just so we get the metal." Four nights downravine they found the first graves. The missing tribe left no mystery here. A note, scrawled in charcoal upon a piece of leather hung on a cross, read, "Epidemic. No medicine. We're trying for the lake, but had to stop here two days, and nine out of seventeen died. Four others sick, but able to go on." The signature was, "Stan Peters, Mayor." Two of the nine graves were children's. back on the grave. "If we'd only been a few days earlier the antibiotics would have -- " Kreg asked hesitantly, "What kind of disease do you suppose it was?" The trek leader gestured vaguely. "There are several that hit people in the desert. One's something like very bad measles. Another's like diphtheria. The standard antibiotic is effective against all of them." Nujent muttered, "If you have any of it." Pendergast glanced at the sky. "Two hours till morning. I'm for trekking straight through until we catch them." No one demurred. They hurried on, alternating between a shuffling trot -- the best pace they could manage, laden as they were -- and a slow walk to catch breath. Sweat covered Kreg; and he was desertminded enough now to be disturbed about it. He stubbornly resisted the yearning to drink and after a while he stopped sweating. Now he felt like a dry leaf. He stared in vague horror at his hands -- the very flesh seemed to have shrunk. The pulse in his muggy head was hot and noisy and his limbs trembled with weakness. Some time after noon they rounded a bend and found the eight survivors sprawled in what shade was available. Stan Peters was one of the four sick and in no condition to talk. Except for the slow rise and fall of his chest and an occasional twitch he seemed dead, but a few drops of water on his swollen, parched tongue brought a moan and a stir. Kreg helped erect the sun fence and drag the victims into its shade. Pendergast went among them with a waterbag. Kreg noted that not one of them -- even the youngest child -- gulped. As badly off as they IF were, they had the self-control to sip meagerly. When all had been revived enough to swallow antibiotic tablets from Kreg's belt a brief council was held. The decision was that Nujent and four others would stay behind to help the survivors along when they were able to travel, while Pendergast and the bulk of the expedition went on ahead. They started at sundown. Three nights' travel took them to Lake Salvation. any such growth of vegetation in Hidry Desert. The entire shallow bowl was perhaps fifteen miles across, the lake occupying the hub. The entire land area was wooded. Quilltrees grew on the slopes, while the flat bottom was choked with tall straight round-leaved trees resembling Terran poplars. Kitchgrass formed a lush carpet; insects and kinches swarmed above it. There were small rabbitlike quadrupeds -- not furry but scaled -- and once Kreg saw, darting between the trees, a dozen predators more or less feline in shape and about as big as a lynx. They, too, were furless. There were no birds, but he saw winged reptiles bigger than the kinches, and gliding quadrupeds. The only edible fruit -- to which Pendergast introduced him on the way -- were tiny round things that grew in clusters. They tasted like peaches except for an alumlike quality that made Kreg's mouth pucker. The trek leader grinned. "They're moist at least. Terran transplants would grow here if the colony would part with any. There's a good layer of soil, moist enough a few feet down. It's not salty -- there must be enough underground drainage to prevent that. We could support a fair-sized population here." Kreg stared along the trail they were following. "Is your -- I mean our -- tribe the only one here?" Pendergast shook his head. "We're the biggest, but there are four others scattered around the lake. Plus some roving bands that summer here. We have our own sector, which includes the ravine where we met you. Others claim other ravines. A ravine, especially one with ground water, is a sort of highway. A tribe naturally trades with an area that can be reached from its own ravine. Practically the whole population of Hidry Desert lives within a hundred miles of the lake." Kreg looked southward, but the far rim of the basin hid the country beyond. "It can't be more than five hundred miles in that direction to South Sea." "No," Pendergast agreed, "and it's only a hundred and eighty to Salterra Escarpment. You could travel that far in the rainy season -- if you call six or seven inches of rain rainy. Below that the land is one salt flat, an old seabed, and there's practically no rain from South Sea." Kreg said, "But there are other continents. And some day when the colony expands -- " The bearded exile smiled. "Some day, yes -- if there are still fissionables in Nose Cone and if the machinery is still working. But long before then our descendants will have been -- as I said before -- shoved aside." V K reg was surprised at the way the tribe lived. There were no shelters except sun shades. A family site consisted of sleeping pads in some tree clump, ;some pegs in tree trunks to hang things on and perhaps a hanging shelf to keep things away from children or small animals. Possessions included a few garments for warding off sun, some cooking utensils and a rack of weapons -- spears, bows, knives. And, of course, waterbags. The whole settlement was strung along a small tongue of lake jutting into the ravine. The food had little variety. Fish or other meat was a staple. Bread was made from dried and pulverized quilltree roots. The single fruit provided a beverage -- the juice, boiled with a certain bark then settled, lost its astringency. It could be fermented and usually was. There were children of all ages and adults. Kreg found himself ogling the wrong girls and drawing haughty looks from them and menacing scowls from young men, until he learned what kind of hairbraids meant marriage or engagement. The work was necessarily hard. Kreg, assigned to a camp of young bachelors, went on hunts. Fished for solelike creatures in the lake, dug roots, carried waterbags, and the like. There was vague talk of his learning some such trade as metalworking, but for now his young strong back was sufficient. Nujent had arrived several days behind him, shepherding all but one of the rescued group. The one had died along the way. Stan Peters and the other sick were recovering. Excited by their arrival, Pendergast had gone into hurried council with Peters and Nujent; then Pendergast and Nujent had left, taking with them some small leather-wrapped bundles. They had returned a day later without the bundles and without explanation. Kreg, who had found occasion to talk to Pendergast afterward, had discovered the lean, bearded man oddly distracted. He hadn't asked questions. Forty or fifty days went by. Kreg was accepted now -- no one treated him like an outsider. He began to IF spend what free time he had at the tribe's forge, where the acquired metal and some worn-out cooking utensils were being fashioned into new things. His old life in the colony seemed distant. O NE day six gravcars appeared over the lake. Kreg happened to be fishing and saw them at once. His midriff went taut. These were four-place lawkeep cars and, though he could see no weapons, he presumed the cars to be armed. What did they want? The sun glinted on something -- cameras. He stayed where he was, watching, while the cars slowly circled the lake. Why this survey? The colony already had pictures of the lake. Then the small flotilla came directly toward him. He looked around nervously, saw no one else in sight and rejected an urge to run. One of the cars dropped to hover a few yards out and the canopy slid back. Now he could see rifle barrels. The lawkeeps stared at him as if he were an alien. Finally one spoke. "How many exiles live around this lake?" Kreg hesitated. "I don't know. I've only been here a little while." The lawkeep scowled. "Is that so? How many tribes are there?" "Four, I guess." "Where do you live, if you don't live here?" Kreg felt himself flush. "I live here now. I was just exiled the middle of spring." The four occupants of the car looked surprised. Then the spokesman grinned. "Well, how nany people would you guess live here?" Kreg wondered what to say. "A couple hundred -- maybe a few more. I haven't seen many." The spokesman said something to the others, then made a gesture. Kreg could see him using a handmicrophone. The canopy slid shut and the car rose. The six cars took up a formation radial to the lake and began a circle over the surrounding woods. Kreg picked up what fish he had and hurried toward Pendergast's living site. The bearded ex was standing in a small clear area, chest moving as if he'd just been running, staring after the gravcars. His family peered nervously from cover. Pendergast turned quickly to Kreg. "Did you see them?" "I sure did. They flew around the lake taking pictures, then came down and asked me questions." "How many were there? What kind of cars? What did they want?" "They want to know how many people live here." The bearded man grunted. "What did you tell them?" "I said I was new and that I guessed two hundred." Pendergast grinned. "That was all right. But what do you guess they are doing now?" saw cameras aimed straight down -- and some other instruments. I'd say they're running a photo-map of the basin. Also -- well, the cars carry infrared detectors, that can find a person through foliage. They could be trying to get a count on us." Pendergast sighed. "I imagine that's it. I'm going to where I can keep an eye on them. Will you find Nujent and Peters? Tell them I want to see them up near the rim." again until the next day. "Tomsun, we want you to attend a council. Don't mention it to anybody." Kreg waited while Pendergast rounded up some family heads who served as elders of the tribe. The small group walked up the ravine almost to the rim of the basin, then turned off along a game trail. Presently they joined other men in a quilltree thicket. Nujent and Peters were there. Pendergast opened the talk. "This is secret. We're worried about the colony's intentions. This is the first time they've ever tried to take a head count or survey the basin." He sat brooding for a moment, then looked at Kreg. "Tomsun, we're as sure now as we'll ever be that you're not a spy. Anyway, we're taking the risk because we need you. For some time we've had a vague plan to raid the colony for weapons and things. What we've been waiting for is someone familiar enough with Nose Cone and the area around it to fill in certain details for us -- and to do certain things inside. Events seem to be pushing us part?" Kreg stared at the man. "Raid the colony? You can't be serious. How would you even get close to it, let alone through the fence?" Pendergast told him, "We'd have teams going north ahead of time to bury caches of water and food. And we think we can sneak in." "But the lawkeeps -- " Nujent put in tensely. "That's one thing we who were born here don't know about. Would lawkeeps have guts enough to fight? And how about repair robots? Could they use guns?" Kreg felt bewildered. "Uh -- the 'pairbots couldn't aim guns with much accuracy. The lawkeeps would fight -- don't get the idea that all the courage has been weeded out of the colony. They'd be under direct orders of the Brains, anyway." Pendergast said impatiently, "Nujent, we're not going to try to storm in. Tomsun, what do you think -- if we got into Nose Cone disguised as citizens and seized control, could we raid the arsenal and get enough weapons? And what else would we be up against?" Kreg stared dazedly at the taut IF faces. "You've seen Nose Cone, Pendergast. It was built to withstand centuries in space -- if necessary. It's a virtual fortress. Once you got inside, if the access doors were closed you'd be trapped." The bearded exile grinned. "We are planning on that. Tell me -- would a heavy pistol bullet penetrate those cabinets the Brains are in?" Kreg gasped. After a moment he said hoarsely, "I -- I'm sure it would. But -- " him tensely. "You know the power lines and the control boards, don't you? You were an apprentice." "I know as much as attendants are taught." Pendergast said fiercely, "Well, will you go along with us? Or would you rather wait until they come down here and drive us away from the lake?" Kreg tried to avoid the burning eyes. He found he had trouble breathing. "I -- okay. I'm not grateful for being exiled. But I think your plan is insane!" Pendergast relaxed a little. "Maybe you'll think differently when you've heard the whole scheme." He turned to Nujent, who handed him the four leatherwrapped bundles Kreg 'has seen before. Pendergast began unwrapping one. "Stan Peters and his tribe dug these out of a mine. They've been buried for thousands of years -- maybe hundreds of thousands." He pulled away the last wrapping and held up an object. Kreg's skin prickled. The artifact was not man-made -- it was too corroded, too caked with sand aggregate. It must have been on New Eden a long time, as Pendergast said. It had been, Kreg guessed, some kind of communicator -- something like the compact twoway radios gravcars had. There was one badly distorted coil of wire in a few heavy turns; other shapes that might be multipleturn coils. Kreg recognized the remains of a variable condenser and things that might be tubes and transistors. Pendergast unwrapped another bundle. Kreg could make nothing of the artifact. Pendergast said, "This was a device for condensing moisture from the air. Not much use here, if the climate was always as dry as it is now -- but better than nothing. The point is -- some race landed here. They may have colonized or they may not. Possibly whole cities will be dug up some day -- old spaceships, maybe. Here's how these artifacts tie in with our plan: by having these things found away from Nose Cone, we can divert enough attention from the fence to let us slip in." Nujent was impatiently offering the other two small bundles. Pendergast grinned, took them and unwrapped one. Kreg gasped with the rest. There was no ne to guess what these were! They hadn't been shaped for human hands -- rather, perhaps for tentacles or some kind of claws -- but they were pistols. The handles were nearly cylindrical, coarsely knurled, and set at an obtuse angle to the barrels. But they were pistols. There was no caked sand on them -- obviously they'd recently been cleaned up with great care. Pendergast said, "We've been secretly hoarding five pistols for years. These two more give us the seven minimum for our plan." Kreg heard his own awed voice. "Will they shoot? Is there ammunition?" Pendergast grinned. "Yes to both questions." VI P reparations took many days. Spring sweltered into summer. Waterholes away from the lake showed new rims of dirt pawed out by hellrunners. What little green the quilltrees had, bleached out to an ivory white and the quills began to curl with dryness. Gravcars flew high over the basin twice. Kreg lived in half dread, half eagerness for the thing he'd agreed to do. At last the time came and he started upravine with Pendergast, Nujent, Peters and two dozen others. The trip was long and hard, but the day came when he lay sweltering under camouflage, peering out at an irregular horizon. He had never seen Desolation Ridge from this side before. The south slope was surprisingly short. When night came Pendergast's men would climb it and look down the much longer slope to South Fence. Before morning they would either have gotten what they wanted from the colony or be dead. Nujent and three others had left them last night, angling east, taking the alien communicator and the moisture-collector. Now that the time was near, the whole idea seemed idiotic to Kreg. How much diversion would Nujent create at most? A few gravcars and lawkeeps, a theoretician or two. And certainly little time would be lost bringing the artifacts to the colony -- probably to Research Center, six blocks from Nose Cone. Still, he supposed it was better than nothing. He squirmed, seeking a more comfortable position. F rom atop Desolation Ridge he stared down at the distant lights. He could locate Nose Cone by the dogleg of the fence, but couldn't make out the huge bullet shape. Inside, the lights of Landington stretched northward; and IF beyond, distant glows marked a few farm-centers. He could trace the course of Thirsty River from its eastern entry at the Sunrise Hills and along its irregular curve through the colony. North Fence, of course, was out of sight, thirty miles away. Pendergast hissed at him. "Nujent must be on station. Let's start down!" Kreg rose to his feet, made sure the small bundle of civilized clothing was secure around his waist, and led off. Though he had seen this slope a thousand times, nothing about it seemed familiar now. He felt like a fly crawling down a well-lit wall. He told himself the sentries wouldn't be able to see him by mere starlight. He stumbled in a dry rill, caught himself and went more carefully. The rest of the party was spaced out behind him. Pendergast whispered, see Nose Cone. As I remember, that warehouse was about two hundred yards west." Kreg said, "A little farther than that. See the next fence light west of Nose Cone? Count four more. That's the warehouse." "Right," Pendergast said. "Where's the gully?" Kreg kneaded his memory. "About twenty yards past the warehouse. That puts it close to a light." He could see a sentry pacing. "Here's the beginning of the gully. We'd better crawl." The gulch bottom was gravelly under his hands. Wings buzzed, barely above the threshold of audibility as startled kinches fled. He could feel the greater moisture of this air. The sentry reached the end of his beat, peered around and started back. How dark did this slope look to him? Kreg, tense to weakness, crawled on. The gully deepened, and he began to believe he might actually reach the fence. He believed, too, that, as Pendergast maintained, there would be a grill and culvert to let water in under the fence. But wouldn't it be a strong grill, permanently mounted? Strange. He had scampered along inside that fence, at that exact spot, in children's games and later paced sentry duty -- and never wondered what happened to the water that came sparsely down the gully in winter. Surely it wasn't wasted. In the colony a buried conduit system collected even drain-off from roofs. He threw a glance at the sentry -- going away now -- and crawled fast. He reached the end of the gully, just at the fence, twisted his head and saw his companions flattening themselves. He paused. Pendergast crawled up beside him. "I told you so! The grill's hinged -- and padlocked!" The bearded man grinned and brandished a small crowbar. T he culvert was tight enough to impede crawling. Kreg had to keep his elbows at his sides and squirm forward. His heart still pounded from the noise the breaking padlock had made. He could hear the men behind him grunting with effort and gasping for breath. The culvert smelled dusty. His hands were raw. He must, he thought, be far inside the fence -- past the big warehouse. How much farther did the culvert go without a turn or intersection? Would a welded grill stop Pendergast? He wondered how Nujent was doing. Suppose the Brains, suspicious, had Nugent and his companions interrogated under drugs? He suddenly became aware of a faint, diffuse glow ahead. Sheer primitive dread of this black pipe made him wriggle ahead like a desperate caterpillar. He got close enough to look up a vertical shaft and see, through an ample grill, bright stars. He went limp, lungs gasping in breath. Pendergast's head bumped into his feet. Would the manhole above be fastened? He squirmed onto his back, bent his body into the outlet, felt about and encountered welded handholds. He went up until he could push at the grill. It was heavy, but it lifted. He hesitated, decided there was nothing to lose and carefully pushed the grill free, sliding it aside. The surface outside sounded and felt like gravel. Cautiously, he thrust his head out. They were in a yard of some kind. He recognized dim shapes as gravcars and parts of gravcars. From somewhere beyond a dark wall came muffled voices. He climbed out. Pendergast was quickly beside him. "Where are we?" "In the back yard of a garage and hangar where Nose Cone's official gravcars are serviced. I've never been here before, but that gate opens onto a side street." Evidently no word of the alien, artifacts had gotten out to the citizenry yet. The few people on the streets strolled casually. He glanced up at the stars. Nearly midnight, he thought. A shift would let out then and the streets would fill. A certain number of citizens would converge on Nose Cone to idle through the museum displays before going home. That might help or hinder. He smoothed his clothes and walked slowly toward the plaza, trying to avert his face when he met anybody. He had to give Pendergast and a few others time to get ahead of him. B y the time he reached the plaza, he knew there was some excitement. People began moving faster and he caught snatches of excited talk. A gravcar rose from the hangar behind him and moved eastward along the fence. Another followed. IF He paused at the edge of the plaza. He did not dare wait any longer. He strode toward Access Three, recognized the attendant there, went past with averted face and approached Access Four. The man on duty was a stranger. Kreg, trying to keep his face calm, nodded to him and walked in. Perhaps four dozen people were in the Rotunda. Some were gathering in a knot. He heard an excited voice say, "Just fell down!" That would be one of his own companions, drawing attention. Kreg hurried around the periphery toward a door marked open and four attendants ran out -- two of them familiar. He shrank against the wall. When they were past he pushed open the door and went through. The down-ramp was empty -- but when he reached the next deck down he met a 'pairbot. The thing's wheels swiveled toward him and the machine said tonelessly, "Visitors not permitted here, sir." Kreg fought down panic. He gave his old apprentice's number and said hastily, "A citizen has fainted in the Rotunda. They'll be bringing him to our infirmary!" The machine was silent for a moment -- doubtless consulting a Brain -- then it rolled out of his way. He hurried past, praying it hadn't flashed a picture of his face to the Brain. But no one came to intercept him. He passed doors curved corridor. It was empty. He paused before the door pushed it open.  No one was on duty -- the standby attendant must be one of the four he'd met. He walked across the compartment, destumult inside him. He sat down in the duty chair before the control console. If the autoviewers' picture of him didn't get the notice of a Brain for a few seconds... He picked up a voice reel that lay as if the attendant had been listening to it and pressed the stud. The narrator's voice said, "Once safely out of the burning forest, Jules Grayson ran toward Highway Fortyseven -- " Kreg's left hand stole toward a switch and flipped it. The room went dark; Instantly he was out of the chair. For the benefit of the audio-monitors, he exclaimed, "Whaf the -- " Then he was at the trapdoor in one corner of the room. He bent and heaved it open; he almost jumped into the opening and put his feet on familiar rungs. Blue emergency lights had already flashed on. His feet touched a deck. Scanners would see him now, even in the dim standby light here. He leaped for a control board -- Nose Cone's main one -- and grabbed for a master switch. It seemed to him he floated in slow motion. Why didn't the bullets come? But his fingers closed on the switch handle and jerked it down. T he standby lights went out -- but blue emergency lights flashed on, as they would do throughout Nose Cone. He heard relays slam home as the main power cut off. Now the general intercom was on and he could hear citizens screaming in the Rotunda, hear attendants shouting in various parts of the giant structure. One attendant called out, "Be calm! Please be orderly and stand where you are. Lights will be restored in a very few minutes." Kreg jerked open panels, seized wires and tugged at them. They cut into his fingers, but some pulled loose -- enough, he knew. He slammed the panels and ran for the ladder. He went up it like a squirrel, bunched himself and shoved the trapdoor open. The corridor door was opening. Kreg leaped toward it, stopped a startled attendant with a stiff left, swung his right hard for the jaw. The man slumped to the floor. Kreg hesitated. Should he damage wiring here, too? No -- let them guess for a while, if the Brains couldn't talk to them! He stepped over the unconscious man and turned left along the corridor. A few 'pairbots and attendants milled aimlessly. He shoved past them and ran for a ramp a fourth of the way around Nose Cone. A babble of talk came from the intercom, some of it hysterical, but not a word from the Brains. Had he guessed wrong? Did they not, after all, have their own secret emergency communication network? Maybe they were just being cool -- assessing information before they acted. He dashed up the incline and along the higher corridor. Citizen's feet blundered about in the Rotunda over his head. He reached the compartment that belonged to Captain Gerlik's Brain; he hesitated from habit, then plunged in. A man stood facing the Brain cabinet. In the dim blue light Kreg did not at once recognize Pehdergast. The bearded exile flashed him a glance, then fixed his eyes on the cabinet again. The alien pistol in his hand aimed steadily where Kreg knew the Brain to be. There was shaky triumph in Pendergast's voice. "Looks as if you did it, Tomsun. I half expected to be filled full of bullets the instant I stepped in here. But there hasn't been a sound." Kreg suddenly realized the compartment's intercom was silent -- the muffled commotion he heard was coming through decks and IF bulkheads. "What happened in the Rotunda? Why didn't everyone runout?" Pendergast chuckled. "Because the access doors slammed shut too quickly. You were right about that." A nd now, suddenly -- making  Kreg jump -- Gerlik's voice came from the cabinet. "Of course. You didn't expect we'd be unprepared, did you? How did you get back inside the colony?" Pendergast snarled, "That's our secret." Gerlik's voice said, "I recognize you now -- Martin Pendergast. You've lasted a long time in the desert." Pendergast said harshly, "We don't want idle talk. In case you're not in contact with the other Brains, every one of them has a pistol pointed at it. You see the one pointed at you, don't you?" 'Yes, I see it. And I see the others. Naturally we're in contact. Some of the weapons look quite rusty -- and two of them look odd. Are you sure they'll shoot?" Pendergast said amusedly, "You don't think we failed to test them, do you? And the bullets will penetrate that thin steel in front of you." Gerlik sighed, "No doubt. But what good would that do you? You can't control Nose Cone. You can't even get out -- the doors won't open unless we open them." Kreg said nervously, "Don't let him stall!" Pendergast said, "In that case. Captain, we simply won't get out. This is the way it'll be: we have certain demands. If you don't meet them -- fast -- we'll put a bullet through each of you, and worry later about the doors." Gerlik chuckled. "How heroic! What are. these demands you're Pendergast's voice shook. "We want weapons. "We'll leave you enough to keep civil order in the colony, but we want the heavy stuff so we'll never have to worry about your intentions. We want metal, tools and medicines. And a few chemicals so we can exploit the land you've dumped us onto. You can keep this strip north of Desolation Ridge, including Sunrise Hills." The Brain didn't answer at once. Then Gerlik said ironically, "Is that all? Why don't you demand Nose Cone? In fact, why don't you just set yourselves up as a ruling class?" Pendergast grunted scornfully. "We don't want the kind of people you want. We don't even want the gravcars, except a few for exploration and emergencies. They won't last forever anyway -- and neither will 'your fissionables. You can go your way and we'll go ours. Unless you bother us we won't even be talking to you!" Another pause, then Gerlik said stonily, "We'd be fools to take your word for that, even if we had to. Fortunately, we don't. Now, we're not going to waste time talking. You're locked in. When you get ready to surrender, we'll give you enough food and water to get back to Lake Salvation. And the next time you come north you'll be killed on sight." a moment, then shot Kreg a glance. Kreg shrugged indecisively. The bearded man took a step nearer the cabinet. "I'll give you thirty seconds by my estimate. If you haven't agreed to our demands by then. I'll put a bullet through you and dicker with the other Brains. We'll kill you all, one at a time, if we have to!" Thonoise from the Rotunda was less now. Pendergast's men must be in control there. Seconds dragged by. Kreg could see Pendergast's lips moving in the count. Finally the bearded man snapped, "Five seconds!" Kreg's insides kneaded. Would the exile leader shoot? Would he himself -- having made the promise? It would be murder -- murder! The jgun went off deafeningly. The front of the cabinet distorted violently and showed a jagged hole. A little viscous liquid oozed out. Pendergast whirled savagely to Kreg. "Which one shall we take next?" Kreg felt sick. His voice was hoarse. "Let's talk to Uncle Ben! He may be more reasonable!" He turned blindly to the door and stumbled along the corridor. The exile aiming a gun at Ben Tomsun's cabinet jerked it around toward them as they entered, then quickly recovered. Uncle Ben's voice said sadly, "So you've killed Captain Gerlik." Pendergast said woodenly, "Right. We don't care who's next!" Uncle Ben sighed. "Violence! Violence! Don't you realize you carry self-destruction in your genes? You demand weapons. How long do you think it will be before you turn them on each other?" Pendergast laughed shortly. "That's no problem of yours. Give us the guns, if you think we'll kill each other. That'll put you back in control!" The voice said, "Why? Why is all this necessary? Why can't you live out your lives peacefully? We could have destroyed you instead of exiling you. Are you trying to prove that we should have?" The lean, bearded exile said, "That's a matter of viewpoint. We intend to live our lives as well as we can and provide better ones for our descendants. You've talked enough. I'll give you the same thirty seconds I gave Gerlik." Uncle Ben said hastily, "We'll yield. The colony comes first with us -- you know that. We must survive to guide it. How many of IF you are there inside Nose Cone?" "That's classified information." B en said in a hurt tone, "I'm only wondering about the logistics. Some of you will have to carry weapons from the arsenal. You may take your pick -- we'll assign 'pairbots to help you, if you wish. Can you all get away in six gravcars? We want to avoid any ter clear the plaza." Intercom loudspeakers suddenly came to life in Uncle Ben's voice, "All citizens and lawkeeps -- move away from Nose Cone. Several armed men in citizen's clothes will be coming out. No one is. to interfere with them in any way. They may take what gravcars they choose. This is important! Everyone must obey." To the three exiles in his compartment, Ben said in a weary voice, "It will be best if you stay here for a few minutes, until the plaza is cleared. Then I'll talk to the people in the Rotunda." Pendergast turned a taut face to Kreg, who said nothing. He felt as if he'd swallowed lead. Could things possibly go so smoothly? The Rotunda sounded quiet, but from somewhere came faint shouts. Outside? Could he hear sounds from the plaza, with the access doors all shut? Probably -- there were still the ventilator openings. Or were there? He realized he couldn't hear the familiar hum of fans. Nose Cone was. quieter than he'd ever heard it. Maybe that was what made him feel drowsy. Then, in the silence, he became aware of a faint hiss. "Gas!" he yelled, breaking toward the door. Already his muscles were slow. He stumbled, caught his balance, shoved the door open. Behind him, thealien pistol went off. Ears ringing, he ran up the corridor, shouting, "Gas! Gas!" More pistol shots made the bulkheads rattle. Exiles staggered from the Brain compartments. He could hear them gasping. He struggled toward the nearest up-ramp, forced his wobbly legs to climb it and pushed the door. A companion'! lurched into him from behind. He stared at unconscious citizens on the Rotunda floor. Then he heard the rumble of access doors sliding open. "This way -- " he blurted. T he outside air gradually cleared his mind. He lurched across the plaza, seeing citizens run away from him. He paused to gulp deep breaths, then ran down a street, crossed an intersection, and leaned for a moment against the corner of the gravcar hangar. Pendergast staggered to him. "Are -- are there likely to be weapons here?" The anesthetic was washing out of Kreg. He took two steps and peered into the hangar. "I think so. In that four-place lawkeep car. And that one." Other exiles were joining them now. Kreg hurried into the hangar, darted looks around and saw nobody. He hauled himself into one of the cars and felt beside the seats for weapons. He found standard bullet-rifles and hyprodermic guns. He swiftly looked in compartments for extra ammunition and found it, then turned on the power. Men wre piling in behind him, Pendergast ran to the second car he'd been shown. It filled, too. The overflow had to seek out twoplace cars ready to fly. Kreg moved his car forward into the open, then lifted it a hundred feetand shot across the fence. He stopped so the others could pull level. Pendergast called out, "I want to send someone after medicines. Is the public infirmary where it always was?" Kreg nodded. "Eight blocks north of Nose Cone!" Pendergast said, "Do you want to take care of that? I'll go try to pick up Nujent!" Kreg nodded and swung the car around. He shot north above the crowded streets. He could hear people shouting questions at him -- obviously they didn't recognize exiles. He dove for the roof of the infirmary, grabbed a hyp-pistol from beside the car's seat, and climbed out. "I'll be quick." He ran to the entrance and down the ramp. The infirmary was almost deserted -- everybody seemed to have run into the streets. He pushed past bewildered personnel, found the stockroom untended and scooped up packets of antibiotics. No time for specialized medicines now. One arm laden, he hurried back to the ramp, got up it without being questioned and dashed for the grav car. He tossed in the packets and jumped in after them. As he zoomed toward South Fence again he realized that the people were shouting more raggedly and that they weren't staring at him, but at something else in the sky. He jerked a look upward -- and abruptly went rigid in the seat. The car shot on unattended. T he sun was near enough dawn so that Main Hull was illuminated. But it no longer hung west of the colony -- it was nearly overhead. And it looked bigger -- so big he could clearly see its oblong shape. One of the men in the rear seats choked: "It's coming down -- " Kreg's thoughts churned. He grabbed for the controls and sent the car shooting eastward toward the Sunrise Hills. The last thing he wanted to do -- if Main Hull had somehow come to life -- was lead it toward the tribe. He craned his neck to watch the bright growing object. IF He saw Main Hull enter shadow. Shortly thereafter a succession of tiny lights appeared and scattered in various directions. They looked like the running-lights of gravcars, high up. Several seemed to be matching his course. He let the car shoot onward for a while, until it became obvious that three or four of the lights were pursuing him, then he swerved. They swerved with him, staying almost directly above, meanwhile dropping rapidly closer. He was among the lower hills now. He saw a blast of light overhead, then a moving streak. A missle! It flashed down ahead of him, hit a slope, and exploded blindingly. There was only a little noise. That was a signal rocket, then. And no doubt it was intended as a warning shot. He swerved again, made sure the car was at full speed and watched with growing despair as the pursuers closed in easily. He thought for a moment of making a stubborn suicidal fight. But curiosity, as much as anything else, made him reach slowly for the controls and slow down. His passengers were glumly silent. And then a greatly amplified voice came from one of the gravcars now circling him. "Don't waste time running, Tomsun. We can blast you to atoms. Surrender and you'll get a fair hearing." Dumbfounded, he slumped in the seat. The voice was Captain Gerlik's! Slowly a thought wormed into his mind. If Captain Gerlik hadn't been destroyed -- if the bullet hadn't plowed through the Brain after all -- maybe Uncle Ben and the others were alive too! T he whole raiding party, including Nujent's small contingent, were locked in what had been Landington's second-largest auditorium. They were given food and water and a portable stove so they could feed themselves. What wirnv dows they could reach were blacked out with heavy steel plates that could not be moved, so that they couldn't see what was going on outside. Something was. They could hear citizens passing, sometimes in quiet-talking groups, sometimes running and shouting. And heavy work of some kind was going on. Maybe repairs were being made to Nose Cone, or to Main Hull. And there were sounds as if considerable cargoes were being unloaded and hauled away by gravtrucks. Pendergast first spoke the thought that may have been in the minds of all the prisoners. "I'll bet you these clothes I'm wearing that they're going to put us in Main Hull and send it back into orbit. Maybe they'll rig TV cameras so people can watch us starve or go mad. I'll tell you this -- if they do. I'll find some way to sabotage the damned thing. I won't have my bones hanging up there as an object lesson!" One of the others muttered, "Your plans haven't worked very well so far." Pendergast grinned. "At least we made an impression. We brought Main Hull down -- that'll earn us a place in history!" Someone said, "The damned thing was supposed to be empty and inert." Pendergast shrugged. "Obviously it wasn't. There were motors in working order, and fissionables to power them. And the Brains were in contact with it -- they were able to bring it down, or at least Gerlik was. If I'd only made sure -- " Kreg said dully. "I khoM the Brains were behind those sensors in the cabinets. The bullet couldn't possibly have missed." Talk dwindled. Some of the men improvised gambling games. Some slept, or pretended to. In any case, days and nights passed. day there was a strange rumbling that shook the building. Pendergast suggested. "Testing out the drive." No one argued. That night dragged by. Then, as daylight filtered through the few cracks around windows, noises came from the main entrance. Pendergast and some of the others were suddenly in a crouch, chairs or other objects in their hands for weapons. But Gerlik's amplified voice came through the heavy doors: "You may come out whenever you wish." Nobody moved for a minute, then there was a rush. Kreg supposed the others were wondering, as he was, what kind of weapons would be trained on them. Someone threw open the doors and he blinked in sunlight. He was perhaps the fourth one out. He stood silent with the others, staring up. Already a mile or so above the city. Main Hull was rising slowly -- with Nose Cone in place atop it! Kreg's eyes darted to where Nose Cone had stood and found the gaping hole. An odd fright lanced through him. South Fence was there and so were the familiar buildings. The absence of Nose Cone was as dismaying as if he'd; awakened some morning and found both his hands missing. He stared upward again and saw a single gravear, tiny with distance, approach the Ship and vanish into it. Long after the reassembled Ship was invisible, he stared up. Then, neck cramped and aching, he lowered his head. He supposed he looked as lost as the men around him. T hey found seven people -- five men, one boy, and one woman -- hiding about the abandoned city. Possibly, Kreg supposed, a IF few others would be scattered about the farms. A few gravcars were left. Except for what little was in the cars' converters, there were no fissionables and no other sources of power. Food supplies were mostly gone, and so was most of the metal and other things. But what was left, though a puny treasure by the colony's standards, was vastly more than Pendergast could have dreamed of capturing. Two days later, when more of the tribe had been flown in, someone found the voice reel with its recorded message. They brought it to Kreg because it spoke his name, and because the voice was Ben Tomsun's. "Kreg Tomsun," it said, "by now you know that New Eden belongs to you exiles. "The Brains, and various other things, were frauds. The intelligences known as Captain Gerlik and the others, including me, were programed in the computers of Main Hull. They were human minds once, but now they're collections of tiny wires and crystals. " A colony ship, being on its own once it leaves Sol, must be ready for whatever it finds. Had we landed first on a fertile planet, the plan would have been different. As it was, we bred tough colonists by exiling hardy, combative people into the harsh environment. "Your erstwhile neighbors of the colony aren't entirely happy about being suddenly evacuated like this, but they'll grow content with shipboard life as their ancestors did. Some day, with luck, they'll be landed on a lusher planet. If not, we'll have to repeat the process of selection. If we -- the Brains and the Ship -- wear out before we find a soft planet, at least we'll have left a few vigorous human colonies. "We leave you to each other, which implies a certain amount of future conflict. But frankly -- especially in view of the alien artifact's you recently dug up -- I envy you. "Please believe that there are sound reasons why we had to act as we did. We have vanity enough left so we don't want you to think ill of us. "Goodbye, and good luck." There were no other messages. Several days later a thought struck Kreg. He sought out Pendergast. "I'll bet you these clothes," he told the bearded man, "that if we dig into that culvert system we crawled through, we'll find sensors of some kind that told the Brains exactly when we came in and where. I'll bet you, furthermore, that if we look around we'll find a dozen other ways through the fence, all set up for us. The Brains wanted it that way. We would have had to be very stupid to have failed." Pendergast grinned at him and declined the bet.  ( Continued from page #) were strangers. Most writers have a great deal of difficulty resurrecting the people who lived originally until 'The End" came off the typewriter and then effectively died, leaving only memories. Whatever the reasons, most sequels are vaguely disappointing. I've seldom tried writing one except in the teen-age category -- and then only once and reluctantly. When I had to do a third in the series, I knew I would do better using a different character and shifting the background ahead in time. Yet when a writer is able to bring off a sequel to a novel and make it stronger and better than the original, the result is a happy event. When all the material we have enjoyed once is made fresh again and is made to grow and become enriched before us, the old book is also made better for us. In that case our pleasure is not merely doubled, but effectively squared. Dragonquest, by Anne McCaffrey (Ballantine, #cX is a sequel that is in all ways far better than the original. That is saying a great deal, since her Dragonflight won both the Nebula and Hugo awards. The new book also has a cover (by the same artist) that is much better than the one on the earlier book and that actually illustrates a scene in the novel. Most unusual. As most science-fiction readers must know by now the original novel dealt with the Dragonriders of a planet called Pern. They were the descendants of Earth colonists who had forgotten their origin and developed their own feudal society. Their world was a good one, except that about every two hundred years it was menaced by a fall of ravening and deadly "threads" -- spores of virulent life -- that were cast across space from another planet, known as the Red Star. To overcome this danger they had bred a native life-form into huge dragons -- creatures that could fly with a rider and could literally breathe out fire that consumed the threads in the air before they could take root. The dragons were telepathic and could be controlled by the rare humans who could commune with them; they were also capable of teleporting instantly from #ne place to another. The story was of the training of Lessa to handle her queen dragon, Ramoth, in preparation for the next threadfall. When disaster struck, however, the people realized that the one Weyr -- dragonhold -- left on Pern was totally inadequate for the job. And Lessa forced her dragon back through time, rather than space, to bring other Weyrs from the past to help -- gaining F'lar as her mate. IF Fine. The story had richness and color. The science was not too believable, since such huge beasts would need a few miracles of musculature and airloading to fly and since almost everything depended on extraordinary psi powers. But as science-fantasy, it was handled well, though the solution to all the problems always struck me as being a mite too pat. Lessa goes back and asks the ancient weyrleaders to follow her through time and they do -- just about like that. All we really got to know of them was their amazing amiability. Anne McCaffrey cannot be accused of not letting us know more about them in the current novel. She has taken a deep and thoughtful look at them and at her whole world and world history as well as at the probable results of this simple solution to the problems of Pern. Her use of what is left us from the first book is a fine example of how to rethink a story. We start with a group of leaders who are completely familiar with fighting threads and whose ideas -- while proven by experience -- are centuries out of date. They are not going to swallow the leadership of the relatively inexperienced F'lar and Lessa for very long -- not when they find that the youngsters are filled with all kinds of silly notions that could lead to the end of the supremacy of dragonriders in general !We also have a bunch of predictions by F'lar that were too simple and easy in the original -- and are now being proved dangerously wrong. And suddenly the history of Pern and its heritage -- apparently almost neglected for millennia -- becomes important and complicated. We begin with a basis for a fine conflict -- but a great deal more is added to heighten it. Before, we had a world of peasants (and a few petty lords) arrayed against the dragonriders. This time we have the texture of a full society. The characters are presented in the context of their varying occupations right through the entertainer-harpists who hold past and future in their hands and what the danger means to each becomes real. Anne McCaffrey's world comes to life. Incidentally, so does the Red Star and its true menace. The life of the dragonriders is explored in depth. We finally begin to know what it means to be linked to a great brute, to sense the character of the dragons (as well as what they came from) and to realize by being shown -- not merely told -- what it must be like to have the intimate bond between dragon and rider ripped away by the sudden death of one. Very little is easily obvious in this novel but all seems obvious when the story ends -- the mark of a first-rate author. The book is not as simple as its predecessor but it remains alive and easy to read. A list of characters and their places in the scheme is included; it isn't necessary but it is a convenience. A map of the planet is also shown, but is not adequate. Not all locales important in the book are marked on it and the whole Southern Continent is not only missing but isn't even indicated by distance or direction. You'll have to remember that Southern Weyr is not connected and is to the south, off the map. It won't matter if you don't try to find it there, however. The map is the poorest feature of this book -- fortunately it is unnecessary. Summed up, this is at least twice, as good a novel as the one that won all the prizes. Given the basic elements of the dragons and their powers, it is consistent, logical and excellent science fiction. Here is a world, a people and a history. There is no too-simple solution this time, but the careful result of what is well prepared. At the end McCaffrey leaves room for another novel to follow, since the Red Star remains a challenge, as does the true future of the dragonriders. There is no need for another, however -- the book is complete. Dragonquest is the best sciencefiction novel I've seen in the first half of #. Don't miss it. A nother sequel that is better by far than its predecessor is borderline science fiction. The story might be considered swordand-sorcery fantasy, but it touches enough on certain intriguing speculative realities to make it acceptable to many sf readers who do not normally look at most fantasy. The Black Mountains, by Fred Saberhagen (Ace, #), is a sequel to The Broken Lands -- and while the first book left me satisfied but not greatly impressed, the new one strikes me as a first-rate job. At his best Saberhagen can write with a satisfying richness and power I had not expected even after reading his excellent "Berserker" stories. Overtly this is another story of a world long after the collapse -- technology has been lost and either magic or a strange sorcery based on shreds of science has taken over. The first book was the story of a band of men rebelling against the dictatorship of the lords who ruled the Black Mountains. This novel takes over after the first success, when the victors suddenly realize the size of the Job they have taken on and realize that they cannot simply remain free, but must actually storm the seemingly impregnable bastions of power -- power they only partly know and against which they have virtually no weapons. From the outset the book breaks away from the obvious. The reader no longer follows the viewpoint of a boy, but that of one of the conIF quered, beaten and maimed leaders of the evil power clique. I won't try to sum up the plot. Some of the elements are familiar enough, but Saberhagen's writing and development of the details remove them from the obvious. And parts of the story are pure joy. There is the control of a djinn (well, call him that, though he's part Yankee mechanic and part Vulcan) who will do exactly what he's told about building aircraft for a wizard who has only a #thcentury picture oT aircraft to guide him. There is a magic healing lake and the Lord Draffut, who presides over it; call him a god if you like -- or try to see what Saberhagen has done with one of man's oldest servants who has evolved in mind and body. And there is throughout a marvelous analysis of the workings of magic and the true nature of demons. The magic and the demons are real enough -- not Just trickery to turn normal scientific gimmicks against a superstitious people. Bits and hints throughout show that Saberhagen is really writing science fiction -- though he conceals his science most of the time. In the end I have to conclude that both the odd handling of a returning technology from tatters of the past and the curious logic lying behind the demonology make the book at least first-rate science fantasy. I suspect there will be yet another in the series, since Saberhagen has only begun to expose his rationale. Still, he has written a good novel by itself and there is a zest and a feel to the writing that made it irresistible to me. There are few writers who can do justice to a really rich set of characters and backgrounds, and Saberhagen has already proved he is one of the best. Unless you can't alide even a touch of magic, don't miss this novel. Start with the first -- if you still can fine it -- but read the sequel in any event. It will stand well by itself. The Tactics of Mistake, by Gordon R. Dickson (Doubleday, #), isn't exactly a sequel. For want of a better word, let's call it a prequel, because it takes place before the novel it follows in date of publication. It uses the background of history of Dickson's "Dorsai" stories -- such as the Genetic General. But Tactics begins at an early period and traces the founding of the world of Dorsai, from which later empires were to hire the marvelous mercenary troops that supported the turmoil of interstellar civilization for centuries. I don't think the book is better than The Genetic General. Both works detail development of .a man who can reshape history and the effect of the effort on the man himself. Cletus Grahame and the later Donal Grahame are involved in equally stirring events and both are obsessed by a vision of the breakup of their form of civilization and the only possible cure. Yet I cannot help feeling that Cletus makes a better hero than his later descendant. Donal had a miracle up his sleeve -- he ould levitate, though he didn't bother with such tricks. Cletus has no such ability. He is limited to what a human being can do at the height of his powers. He has only a vision of what must be and a skill at using the mistakes of others to force victory from them. He is also for his vision, if need be. To me, this makes his struggles and triumph greater. Also, his inevitable girl friend-enemy is a lot more believable than the rather overbred and finicky heroine Donal drew. In this prequel, since characters and background are not exactly those of the Dorsai series, Dickson has no problem bringing new thought and freshness to the story line. The plot is related to the future of the Dorsai stories depicted in the series but it can stand alone. And reading provides new insights. Tactics is a thoroughly good adventure story with some depth. There is no simple conflict with a single menace -- the action takes place against a complex of elements -- good, evil, wisdom and stupidity -- as should be true of any good novel. The lead character is a super-hero who is somehow so intensely human that the reader can readily accept him. To see what can happen to even one of our best writers down the sequel trail, read Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (Doubleday, #). The novel is the result of putting together four novelettes 'written over some thirteen years. The first part of the book is lovely indeed. The stories deal with an alternate world where science discovered the laws of magic and put it to work in a war even greater than World War H. The magic here is reminiscent of old issues of Unknown, for which these stories would have been written, had the magazine still existed. There is a lovely, wacky logic behind the whole business of using the laws of physics and chemistry generally to support lycanthropy and practical witchcraft in defeating the machinations of the enemy. The three initial novelettes were excellent in magazine form and are still good in the book. The third doesn't quite measure up -- its potential has already been drained by the preceding material. After an afreet and a wild salamander, an incubus is not much more menacing. Anderson seems to recognize this and dredges the devil out of hell in an effort to portray a major menace. And so, in more than one way, the novel itself goes to hell. And something that IF began as brightly amusing suddenly has turned to darkness and horror. Besides, we have reached beyond the limits where we can suspend disbelief. If we accept anything like a classical devil and hell we're not going to be able to swallow the fact that our witch and werewolf can suddenly develop powers to equal the ones that brought war among the Shining Ones and shook the very throne of Heaven. A writer can as easily extend into absurdity as to reduce to it -- perhaps more easily. And that is the final risk of sequelization. Except in very carefully planned series, there are limits to what can be made of the initial situation and anything more becomes absurd. It takes hard thought, excellent craftsmanship -- and restraint -- to turn out a sequel better than a good original novel. But the few successes still make science fiction a great field to be in.  The blow never came. They were past the cliff. a glimmering mass of air that spilled over the lip of the cliff and tumbled toward the broken land. He had often seen such sights from afar but this was the first time he had been in one. Like every winged creature on every world, he normally knew bettef than to fly into the currents on the lee side of a mountain. The downdraft caught him and Garp in its grip and threw them violently at the rocks. Garp howled, dropping his sword, which spun into a fang below him. Each member of the pack played frantically with his antigrav. But the air tossed them about like wood chips in a raging river. The down( Continued from page #) fall was too powerful to be beaten by the puny devices of man. Schadow made no attempt to outfly the draft. Putting his arms next to his body in a swept-back position, straightening his legs, hitching forward at the waist and angling his aching wings close to his sides, he formed his body into an elementary airfoil, skidding through the air at an angle. He closed his lower lids against the vicious winds and through them saw the fangs, the whole' scene faded by the protective tissue so that it seemed that it happened in the depths of a faintly pink sea. Yen's corpse was first to hit, smashing spread-eagled atop an altar of rock not two meters from the base of the cliff. Two others hit farther out. Silently, explosively they touched the ground, their screams and the crashes coming weakly through the winds after the fact. A fourth hit a shallow pool, sending up a shower of scummed water and insects. A fifth had slowed himself a bit with his antigrav and it seemed to Schadow that his screams must have continued for a second after he had hit. Garp was a fast learner. On seeing Schadow he had copied the airfoil design, getting added spoiling from his antigrav. But he was too late and too low. The false Buddha smashed into a jagged outcropping of volcanic glass, beheading himself. The pink-tinted ground was getting dangerously close.Schadow felt the skeletal claws of oblivion drag along his spine. Then he was out of the draftfall and in a turbulent but strong wave lift beyond. Extending his wings, he soared into the sky and opened his lids to its eternal blue. He looked down. Scattered on the ground were the twisted and broken forms of the fangs. Somehow an antigrav unit had been torn loose from a corpse and, free of its weight, clattered along under the force of the draftfall until clear and then shot through the air toward the base, perhaps on a homing signal. Three of the corpses, he noticed, were also beginning to move across the rocks, being pulled by devices that had outlasted their owners. The skyhunter still floated where he had left it. Did he dare to hope? Though he was unarmed, he settled into a straightaway glide toward the beast. It was obviously as near exhaustion as he but appeared unhurt. There was no reason for it to stay away from its sea hunting -- unless if was waiting for him. It could be purposely baiting him, he told himself. Vengeance was not solely a human passion. He slowed and circled before its massive head. The amber eyes watched him. Slowly, carefully the tentacle moved toward him. He stayed in his tight orbit, not moving away. The auxuliry eye at the tip of the tentacle opened -- the tentacle itself touched his arm. No poison cells opened to destroy him. The tentacle remained soft and gentle. Laughing, Schadow grabbed the tentacle and the skybeast, tender as he remembered another of its kind, grabbed him. It placed Schadow atop its bladder, where he could sit and rest. He didn't mind the fact that the skin was almost unbearably hot from the sun. He laughed again. The beast moved its tentacle joyfully and the dragon-amphibians that guarded the seacliffs screamed at them as they moved through the sky and over the sea, once-enemies, now-brothers.  Top-flight science fiction and fantasy from    Eight mind-bending tales conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, John Campbell, Jr. and Jack Vance. A#S #c Ten dazzling stories that explore the complex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. A#N #C A pair of scientists challenge the time barrier and fall into a horrible, mind-twisting trap. "Rene Barjavel has feeling for the fantastic -- knows how to build a suspenseful story." Enter a terrifying world of tomorrow where perversity is encouraged and insanity is enforced -- a world whose beginnings are even now stirring! A#S #c Available wherever books are solder or write: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #I # What is it? A black dot, circle, sphere, neutron, eye pupil, tunnel opening, planet, hole, cosmos ? Depending on your perspective, knowledge, imagination, the answer can be simple or complex, commonplace or extraordinary, definite or infinite. We'd like to introduce you to some uniquely gifted authors who have created an exciting, mind-stretching literature. Writers who can look at a dot or a pebble and see a universe of sub-atomic particles. Who can speculate on the incredible number of interdependent cells that make up a human body and envision .whole planetary life forms interconnected the same way. Who forecast things like nuclear power, supersonic jets, computers, space probes, and moon walks long before they happened. 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Pub. ed. # Book Club editions are sometimes reduced in size, but they are full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. Members accepted In U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. Printed in U.S.A.  Patterns of Chaos Is there a career struggle to save our environment? Here is a new book filled with timely, realistic guidance that can suddenly open up new career horizons for groping young people -- a challenging now field in which they can find a sense of commitment, by Odom Fanning, Editor-in-Chief of the White House First Annual Report on Environmental Quality Others are developing for the immediate future. Most young people are unaware of these new opportunities and of how they may build a rewarding career in this fight to save our planet from the threats of pollution, the existing and emerging career fields opening up in environmental management. It points out what kinds of personnel are at present, and will be, needed in the various facets of the field, and it discusses the basic information needed by anyone seeking a career in one of these areas. For each career field, the author defines terms, lists major activities, describes job duties, pegs the field on the career ladder, describes education, gives earnings and working conditions, projects employment demand to #, and lists major sources of additional information. If you are undecided about which career you'd really like to make your life's work... or if you possibly already have prerequisite educational credits for one or more of important book you can read at this point in your lifebefore you make a career choice you may regret later on. # East # St... New York. N.Y. # Gentlemen: per copy. I enclose  in full payment (please add #(i for shipping) . Name. (please print) Citv Statp Zir Code Januaryfmbntary # Vo. # I, No. # ssuo # Cflr Jakobson, editor Lostor dol Roy, Poaturo editor Judy A ynn Boniamin, Managing editor Prone L Roggori, Art Director Jay Tuniek, Cireulation Diroetor L C. Murphy, Subseription Diroetor Jack Gaughan, Assodato Art Director NOveLeue tributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Ma'tn offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second ing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. and Readers write -- and wrongs Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I was happy to see Robert F. Young's Abyss of Tartarus in the Oct. '#I issue of If. For those of your readers who may not know this, the story is actually a continuation of Starscape with Frieze of Dreams from Orbit #. Both stories are fine and I hope we hear more of Starfinder from Mr. Young. I was also wondering if perhaps a new area of fandom is opened by Mr. Young's "telehieroglyphics." It seems to be just the sort of thing fans enjoy playing around with; I would appreciate Hearing from other fans about this. Finally let me compliment you on your excellent magazine. You may, of course, print my name and address. Tzvi Langermann # Greenough St. Brookline, Mass. # Dear Mr. Jakobsson: As a reader of both Science Fiction and Fantasy for the last # years, I feel at least partly qualified to judge stories in both fields. I have read all the hardcover books in three libraries plus practicallyevery paperback since #. I am not a fan nor do I collect the magazines. The sole purpose of my purchase and reading of a book or magazine is for the enjoyment it gives me. I am not extremely critical of the author of a story or his writing style -- he can miss a few points as he goes along or fail to tie his story together as he should. I do become irritated by the deliberate inclusion of a charactor in the plot who has no bearing on the story and is obviously there to fill out wordage. There is one type of science fiction and fantasy I have tried to like but cannot. This is the so called "new wave" that seems to consist of a veritable flood of descriptive words containing all foam and no beer. Only twice in # years have I quit reading a story in sheer disgust and both times the writer was "new wave."  wish to compliment you on your last issue of If, October #. A better cross-section of topnotch writers would be extremely hard to find in a bimonthly magazine. I enjoyed each and every story although the story by Young required a knowledge of a previous story on the "What" to be completely comprehensible. I would never presume to tell you how to edit a magazine. I am not a frustrated critic, writer or editor and this letter is to let you know there is one of your readers who thinks you are doing an excellent job, and will continue to do so in the future. One addition I do recommend is a subscription blank with every issue. You just might get more subscribers. Dale Fortson A bilene, Texas # Dear Mr. Jakobsson: The dictionary defines 'fine arts" as arts purely esthetic or expressive: painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture: sometimes including literature, music, drama, and the dance. How about let's call or classify fiction, drama, art, poetry, and sculpture the "life arts," since they all simulate life. The life arts have a strong unifying basis for the classification, something in common: they all copy, simulate, or imitate life. In the case of fiction and poetry, it is accomplished indirectly through word symbols: in the case of drama, it is done either way, through words if read, or live on stage (directly): pictures and sculpture, of course, are also direct. It is easy to see that architecture, music, and the dance do not simulate life, though the latter two may be expressive of it. The fine arts as a class is a very broad, diffuse classification, and they ( Please turn to page I # ) WE are proud to be able to announce forthcoming publication of Isaac Asimov's first new novel in # years, in three fascinating installments scheduled as follows: (#) Galaxy, March #on sale January #. (#) If, April # -- on sale February #. (#) Galaxy, May # -- on sale March #. Why this unique arrangement? Well, rewarding and exciting, so special in every way, that we were determined to bring it to our readers somehow. But since Galaxy and If are now bimonthly, to serialize this astounding novel in just one of them would have meant that we could not beat the deadline set for hardcover publication by Doubleday. Fortunately, sections I and # of the novel are quite complete in themselves and closely fit the "hard science" coloration favored by Galaxy. On the other hand, section # of the noveltold from a different viewpoint -- is perfect for the generally more fanciful mood of If. Hence, with Dr. Asimov's blessing, we decided to split his new work between the two magazines -- thus making sure we get it to s-f readers by the required date and in the proper setting. If your dealer does not handle one or the other, you can order single copies of either Galaxy or If directly from us. Similarly, if you subscribe to only one of the magazines, you can order single copies of the other directly from us. We pay postage. In any event, don't miss this masterpiece of a noval by the great and gifted Isaac AsimovI I T he night was shattered by a hundred copper candles, pressor beams bearing down, feathering the mighty bulk of a ship on to the center of the city, bruising the very bedrock with resonant thunder. Green and violet, the lace traces of Yagi beams stabbed sharp disruption into the fabric of the buildings, and the quick flick of lasers struck fires that completed the destruction. The city of Ashur on Onaris, razed by the blistering savagery from above, writhed in agony and prepared to surrender. Resistance was suicide -- and even acquiescence held no guarantee of survival. Perhaps it started as a whisper in some white wilderness -- the sick spite of a broken body, cradled in cold, crying futility unto a futile wind: In the uncertain shadows against a broken wall the figure of a young man lay in fetal position, only partially aware of the devastation raging around him. Such consciousness as he bore was almost entirely consumed by a battle of equally desperate proportions deep within his skull. Perhaps in the sordid cells of some inhuman inquisition a spirit snapped, the mind mazed not by the searing steel, the nibbling nerve -- but by a vaster wound: The man moaned softly to himself and rose to a sitting position, cradling his face in his hands. A Yagi beam, green and malignant, sliced the end from a nearby building and the area was deluged with falling bricks. He sank back, unable to fight. Perhaps some maimed martyr, crazed upon the cross, held up his head and cried unto the heavens: And was answered never. The ultimate betrayal. The immaculate blasphemy... The young man climbed to his feet and started slowly and still unseeing across the littered square. His uncertain path took him nearly into the beam of a probing Yagi, but fate and guesswork diverted his feet. He blundered finally into the wall of a building, recoiling with a bloody forehead to sink again into the timorous shadows of a ruined doorway. Bron! Bron,for pity's sake, why don't you reply? He made no answer. The blood from his forehead trickled down his face and ran salty into his mouth. Soon the shock and the pain forced him from his reverie and pressed on him a brutal acIF ceptance qf his. environment. For the first time he showed, an awareness of the holocaust. He looked out across the flickering waste of the tormented city, agony and comprehension filtering across his torn brow. Bron,for Gods sake answer, T he sky flared suddenly green and hideous as the Yagi's beams found and detonated an unknown arsenal. The blast from the explosion damned the building as a sanctuary and only instinct flung him clear. The walls between which he had been sheltering broke apart and the door against which he had pressed his back seconds before was buried deep under a murderous pile of masonry. Bron, are you receiving me at all? "I hear you." In clear ground on the square he stopped and forced himself to speak, his voice ragged with undertones of near hysteria. "Where are you? I can hear you, but I can't see you." Jupiter! The voice was aghast. No! You have to be joking! Six years and a quarter of the Commando budget were needed to place you where you are -- and now you feign amnesia. Bron, you must be joking! "I never felt less like joking. I feel sick. Who are you -- if you're not imagination?" Steady, Bron, steady. The big blast must have given you a concussion. You re in a bad way by the sound of things.  had to use the semantic trigger to pull you out of that coma. Is there nothing you remember at all? "Nothing. I don't know who I am -- or who you are. You seem to be speaking in my head. Am I having hallucinations?" Far from it. This all has a rational explanation. Only your memory is faulty. "Where am I?" In the city of Ashur on the planet Onaris. It's under attack by Destroyer ships. "And you hear me. How do you hear me? Where are you?" Jupiter! This gets worse. We don't have time for explanations now. First you have to get clear of the square and find a place to rest. I'll explain later if your memory doesn't come back. For the moment you'll have to take what I say on trust. "And if I don't?" Don't dare me, Bron. There's too much at stake. If you could remember what you were -- and why you are there -- you'd know better than to ask the question. Don't make me show you why. Bron pressed his head into his hands for a full half minute, then straightened. "Very well. I accept that for the moment. What do you want me to do?" Move out of the city center. The damage won't be quite so bad on the perimeter. On the other side of the square, as you now face it, is a thoroughfare. Follow that until  tell you where to turn. # stay with you. Bron shrugged and followed the instruction, fully aware now of the blistering fury shrieking out of the sky. The ship above was obviously preparing for a landing, ploughing for itself a stabilizing furrow deep in the flesh of the city and savagely eliminating all resistance in the areas surrounding. The relative absence of population in the attack area suggested that the atrocity had not been unannounced. A rising scream to the east told of where yet another spatial dreadnought had decided to make planetfall. Something about the pattern stirred a thread of Bron's memory, but its pursuit eluded him. way around the edge of the square, finding an unknown talent for making the maximum use of cover against the devastating Yagis. On the far side he found the thoroughfare, once one of the proudest streets of Ashur, now a hulk-lined valley of debris, rimmed with fire. "You there in my head -- are you listening?" We re always listening. "How do you listen?" Youve a bio-electronic transducer implanted in your brain. Our equipment is such that we can hear you and speak to you no matter where you go. Bron absorbed this in silence for a moment. "Who are you?" Associates in war. I'm Doctor Veeder. Does the name mean nothing still? "Yes." It will come to you. And Jaycee and Ananias. We three will be your unseen companions, as we have been in the past. We're all part of the same team. "What team?" Special Assignments group attached to the Stellar Commando. "Ah -- " You recall something? "I recollect vaguely that I was a Commando -- but not here. Terra I remember, Delhi and Europa. I can't recall anything after I left Europa." That's significant. It was when you left Europa that you started these special assignments. I don't wonder your psyche chose that point to start forgetting... Watch out! Bron moved. The cautionary word and his own instinctive reactions coincided completely. A probing Yagi beam shattered the road surface inches before his feet. The backwash of the flux discharge caught him as he turned, flung him sideways, stunned but relatively unhurt. As the beam sliced on through a yet unbroken colonnade IF he regained his feet, still shaking with reactive shock. "You -- " Whafs the matter, Bron? Are you hurt? "You saw that Yagi coming. How?" Bron was breathing hard. Yes,  saw it. Vve been trying to break this to you gently, since the relearning of the facts may be something of a traumatic shock in your present condition. "Spool the riddles! Can you see me, also?" Not see you -- we see through your eyes and we listen through your ears. Day and night we watch and listen to every facet of your experience -- Jaycee, Ananias, and myself That's our job. We can also speak to you and you cant shut us out. Our voices are transmitted directly to your brain. We can do a few other things, too, but we'll go into those later. For now, just follow my instructions. We'll find you a place to rest. "Very well." Bron accepted the order with resignation. He was in no fit state mentally to compose an opposition to the voice within his head. Physically he was drained and shaken and desperately in need of rest. He withdrew into himself and followed the instructions mechanically, gradually wending his way into darker corners of the broken streets and away from the focal point of the attack. Finally the voice seemed to cease. Unable to proceed farther of his own volition, he kicked a few bricks from under his feet, sank down to the dusty ground and slept. #OWS Bron now?"Tlof the trio, the speaker was the only one in civilian clothes -- a simple jet-black sheath which detracted nothing from her femininity. Her strong features were framed by raven hair garnished with self-luminous star-spite spangles. Her full lips rivaled her deep eyes in expressing the contemptuous force of her character. Her question was addressed to the Medic-commander who turned away from the ranked screens. Dr. Veeder, tall and graying, bore the air of a man who had seen all the worst of life and learned to come to terms with it. Even at the end of his shift at the screens his crisp commando uniform, like his brow, showed no hint of other than authorized creases. "He's still out, Jaycee, but as far as I can judge it's a perfectly natural sleep." He glanced back at the monitors, examining the pulsing waveforms. "It should be safe to wake him in about an hour." "Damn him. If he's loused up this project I'll give him such hell he'll wish his mother had been a compulsive virgin." "Don't climb on his back too heavily when he first wakes. He took a considerable blasting last night. I don't think he'll appreciate the subtlety of your advances -- and anyway, this happens to be an, exercise in cooperation, not coercion. Ride him the way you usually do and you could very easily put him on the defensive." "I'd make sure he didn't survive it." "Agreed -- but that's not the point. He has to survive if we're going to get the information we need." She accepted the point sullenly. Veeder left the screens and reached for his cloak. "He's all yours, Jaycee. I'm going to get some sleep. Call me if anything unusual happens." "Engaged." Jaycee slipped into the padded control couch in front of the screens and reached back to draw the curtains partly shut to kill the reflections in the cubicle. Then she began to run a routine check of the controls to ensure that she was familiar with their standing state. The third member of the trio prized himself loose from the seat of the computer console as Veeder departed. Throughout the preceding conversation he had remained silent, his eyes never once leaving Jaycee. Now he came to stand directly behind her, watching the manifold screens as she trimmed and adjusted their symbolic legends. The bright tabs of his uniform proclaimed him a full Command General and contrasted oddly with his apparent youth, his flaxen hair and pallid complexion. His eyes were curiously, bright and he moistened his small, pink lips continuously with a small, pink tongue. "Doc's right, you know, honeybitch," he said quietly. "No good lashing into Bron while he's in that state. He won't understand it and he may well go on the defensive. You know what a cuss Bron can be when he turns awkward." He moved forward and leaned against the back of the control couch immediately behind her. His hands hovered only slightly above her shoulders. "Jet off, Ananias," she said tiredly. "When I want your ideas on how to handle Bron I'll ask for them." "Sure, honey-bitch. Play it your way. I just thought that as you couldn't have an emotional workout on Bron you might be looking elsewhere for relief." His hands moved on subtly to her bare neck, lingering. She froze. "What you askin' for, Ananias? A couple of broken wrists?" "Honey-bitch -- you would not dare try that on me." His voice held an undercurrent of danger. "In three seconds if you don't take your hands away." "You're teasing, honey-bitch." She moved like a cobra, but he anticipated her action and had the additional advantage of operating from a standing position. He IF broke her hold and pinioned her hands against the couch. "My God, you tried it, too," He sounded a trifle shaken. "You're a vicious devil, aren't you?" "You should know, Ananias. You been around long enough." "Too long, perhaps. That's how I know the time to proposition. You can't live through Bron for very long without breaking." M omentarily her head turned to the big screen on which, when he was awake, the scene viewed by Bron's eyes was presented. Currently it was blank. The regular rhythm of Bron's breathing and pulse came through a muted speaker against the muffled background rumble of warfare. Various monitors picked up the sounds, separated and analyzed them and presented scan traces of their findings. In electronic representation was displayed as much information about one living individual as it was possible to transmit over the precarious transgalactic bio-electronic transfer link. A stronger tie, however, existed between Bron, the agent, and Jaycee, his operator. This was the rapport formed by the close coupling of two minds sharing a common experience however differently presented. When agent and operator were psychologically matched to form one complementary personality, the coupling was tightened even further. Sometimes intolerably. Jaycee faced up and tried to look at Ananias. "You know what that does to me, don't you -- livin' through him?" Ananias kept control of her hands warily. "Sure. That's how I know when you're ripe for an emotional climbdown. Some time you've got to give way -- else you're going to crack." "And you hang around hopin' to collect whatever it is I have to give?" Her voice was edged like a razor. "Sure, honey-bitch. I'm a connoisseur. What you have to give is something of an acquired taste. You've a streak of tigerine spite which has no business this side of hell and you have to work it off on somebody. Well -- a man could get addicted to that sort of thing." "And you think you're deservin' of special privileges?" "I always give good service." "Look, Ananias, I admit you once caught me off balance after Bron had wound me up. But that's only because you happened to be the first livin' thing down the corridor. It could have been anyone." There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then: "You don't mean that, honey-bitch." "Like hell I don't. When I get that high I don't care what I find as long as it struggles. I don't respond to propositions. I'm not looking for a lover -- I'm lookin' for somethin' to help me catch up on a spell of suspended livin'. What I find doesn't need any identity -- better he doesn't have any. No matter what, there's only one person I grapple with in the darkness." The impasse between them was broken by the urgent summons of telltales on an auxiliary board. Ananias left her and was at the board in an instant. "Radio room, Jaycee. Report from the Antares transmitters. Come in, Antares. Ananias on line." "Hullo, General! There' ve been new developments on Onaris. To prevent further bloodshed, Onaris radio has just broadcast their government's acceptance of the Destroyers' unconditional surrender terms. Effective opposition to the Destroyers has now ceased." "Good. Did the Onarian government put out an appeal for outside help?" transmitters as soon as the Destroyers entered the system. They couldn't expect to be heard except accidentally, of course, if there happened to be a starship within their range." "Did you make radio contact with them?" "No. Our instructions were to the contrary. They could have no idea that our monitoring chain had picked them up." "And nobody else answered their call?" "No one we could detect. Cerwere clear." "Keep monitoring the emergency frequencies. If anyone shows sign of answering their appeal -- jam them. It's imperative that nobody interferes before the Destroyers have taken what they want and pulled clear." "Understood, General. We'll report again if the situation changes." Ananias broke the connection and turned back to Jaycee. "So far everything has gone as planned -- except for Bron." He frowned at the still vacant master screen. "The Destroyers have attacked, Onaris has given way, the entire Commando fleet is on yellow alert -- and the most expensively prepared Commando agent in history occupies a strategic position in the middle of a raped city, snoring his bloody head off." "Not exactly your night, is it, Ananias?" "Don't grieve for me, honeybitch. You know I always win in the end. And if I have to wait a little, then the spoils of battle become all the more enjoyable." "You're a Godlost weaklin', Ananias. Unprincipled, but a Godlost weaklin'." She turned once more toward IF the screens, this time purposefully studying the traces which told the details of Bron's existence. Ananias moved back behind the couch. He knew better than to attempt to interfere with her now, as she adjusted the microphone and herself and began to reestablish the rapport she had with a sleeping Commando agent half a galaxy away. "Perhaps in the sordid cells of some inhuman inquisition..." "Damn you for a bitch," said Ananias quietly; II H IS rest was broken by the insistence of a voice... , the mind mazed not by the searin steel, the nibblin' nerve -- but by a vaster wound... "Stop it -- stop saying those things." Get on your feet, Bron. Did you think you deserved a rest day? Bron stirred in the ruins, cruelly aware of the cold in his bones. The first pink of daybreak washed against the shattered skyline. His head ached and the wound on his temple was stiff with caked blood. With difficulty he rose to his feet, shivering and trying to orient his thoughts. "You in my mind -- you're not the one who spoke to me last night." God -- you should be so lucky as to forget me -- The voice trailed into spiteful incredulity. No, Bron. This is Jaycee. Despite the restraints imposed by the electronic transfer the voice was clearly feminine. Doc tells me you took a blastin'. How much do you remember? "Almost nothing. What's all this 'sick spite' and 'God is dying' routine?" Hell, Doc was right. You are in a bad way. That phrasin' is the semantic recall trigger geared into your subconscious. In any condition of lowered consciousness, from sleep through to coma, if you hear that you'll have to respond. The wordin' is meshed with the hypno-character synthesis which was impressed on your mind. "This gets insaner every minute. What's this hypno-character thing?" An artificial character pattern impressed by ultra-deep hypnosis. It's the character you have to be to pass the Destroyers. "But I don't even know my own character, let alone the synthesis." The fact you respond to the trigger means the synthesis is firm, You'll react in the right way to a proper stimulus, even if you don't understand your own actions. In a way your memory lapse is fortunate. It'll lessen the conflict between the synthesis and the real you. God! It's going to be well worth bearin' you believin' yourself to be a saint, Bron. The sarcasm in the voice bit deeply into his mind. ls that what I'm supposed to be, Jaycee -- a saint?" Rather a sort of electronic Tro jan Horse. But get to your feet, wee work to do. The Destroyers have landed three ships around Ashur and their first move will be the imposition of Destroyer Law. That means a complete ban on all movements and absolute obedience to their orders. We have to get you to the place you should have reached last night. Bron searched his mind for the things he should have known but had lost. "All this is way beyond me, Jaycee. I'd at least like to know the cause for which I'm being martyred." Ah, thaTs better -- a touch of the old Bron irony.  dont have time to give you much now. Briefly, Canas Destroyer squadrons have increased the scope of their destruction to a point where they are threatening the Rim Dependencies themselves. We cant police all that volume of space -- and theyve destroyed thirty-seven known planets in five years. Our only hope of stoppin them is to trace their baseworld and launch a massive attack on that. ThaTsyour job, Bron. The trick is to get you aboard a Destroyer ship in space for long enough to enable us to discover where the baseworld is. "And that's quite a trick, I imagine." If only you remembered! Its taken us six years to get this far. First we had to build the giant transmitters in Antares to handle the communications transfer link between us and you over transgalactic distances. It took two years of intelligence work to decide on the best way to attack the problem -- and nearly a year developing your cover. And lastly there was you -- the kingpin of the whole operation. "Tell me about me, Jaycee." Some other time, when Tm feeling really bitchy. Chaos, Bron, thaTs your forte -- the sort of chaos that reaches out and affects everyone and everythin it touches. ITs the one part of your own character weve left unattenuated by the synthesis. It may be the one trait which can bring this mission through. Bron considered this in silence. Then: "What do I have to do first?" Weve got to fit you into the background so when the Destroyers find you, they wont suspect you dont belong. We had a comprehensive cover worked out, but you should have been in position last night. "Why should the Destroyers want to find me?" Because you re substitutin for a man they came to Onaris to find. Look, Til have to fill in the details as we go. But listen to me, Bron -- this is important -- play the game exactly as we give it to you and rely on the synthesis for conIF tinuity Don t try any fool stunts of your own -- if you do you re certain to get killed. Weve lost more than enough men already just placin you where you are. "Which way should I go?" T he sky was gradually growing lighter with the muddy grays of dawn and the vaguest hints of color were substantiating the shadows. Get out on the thoroughfare and get me a few place names. Once we can pinpoint your position # have the computer give us a route. Then find a mirror and let me look at you. You're goin to need to be right in character if we're to get away with this. Bron shrugged and surveyed the broken walls which had given him partial shelter for the night. Part of the building farther back was relatively undamaged and it was to this he turned. The building proved deserted and the haste of the panicky exodus was underscored by the pattern of disorder in the dim rooms and hallways. He finally found a mirror-covered door. He opened and adjusted it to make maximum use of the available light. "So that's me -- " Don't you even remember what your face is like? "I couldn't have called it to memory. Do I fit, Jaycee?" Not good. You'll have to clean that cut on your forehead. We can't risk sepsis this early in the game. "I'll clean it somehow. Anything else?" No -- except that I can't get used to your looking like a damned angel. That's the psychosomatic effect of the personality synthesis. "And what do you propose I do about it?" He was irritated by the malice in her voice. Don't spoil it, Bron. It'll wear off all too soon. No psychosynthesis yet devised could obscure the real you for very long. He found street names for Jaycee to work on. His wound he cleansed with water he found in a cistern and he brushed away as much of the caked mud and blood from his cloak as he could manage. Then he returned to the mirrored door to study the effect of his ablutions. He could not remember donning his clothes, but they consisted of a simple cloak of coarse weave and equally spartan undergarments. About his neck hung a well-worn crucifix of gold on a fine gold chain. A Bible in one of the ample pockets of the cloak appeared to complete his worldly possessions. As Jaycee had said, his face had acquired a pious intensity -- it almost shone from the youthful lines. He studied his features carefully, remembering them vaguely, yet not quite sure how different they had been prior to the hypno-synthesis. He was quietly proud of the strength and character he found in the jaw and brow, but something diabolical seemed to lurk behind the eyes -- in depths that at once frightened and fascinated him. When youve finished your Narcissistic orgy rve got the route for you. Jaycee's voice came so unexpectedly that it made him jump. He had the feeling she had been watching him in the mirror through his own eyes for some time. The tightness of the surveillance irked him. Something deep inside him clawed for freedom, like a wild beast confined in too small a cage. His expression must have given away his unvoiced emotion, for she picked up the thought with uncanny accuracy. Don't say it, Bron. You're going to have to live with me inside you for quite a whiles It's a situation I've come to enjoy -- bein' underneath your flesh. "Bitch." She laughed. Yes, I'm that, Bron, and most of the other things you've called me in the past. But now you'd better start travelin'. I'll give you spot directions from whatever landmarks we can still identify. Her instructions directed him toward a region where the receding night was being shredded by the mottled gray-green erosion of refraction-scattered sunlight. Here even Onaris's famous polychromatic dawn seemed smeared with daubs of blood. The ruins were unnaturally still and apparently devoid of life. Instinctively he felt to release his sidearm. Instead his fingers touched only on the Bible in his pocket; the discovery brought a twist of taut amusement to his lips. He looked at his hands. The nails were satisfactorily long and the muscles and flesh were hard. He said, "Jaycee, I know what I have to fight with, but what am I supposed to do with the book?" For once she did not answer, though he felt she was listening. Her silence brought a harsh realization of the seriousness of his situation. On this mission the synthesis and the book were all the weapons he was going to get. buildings drifted in broad fronts across his path and Bron trod cautiously, fearing that his sudden emergence from a veil of smoke could lead to his being shot by some observer moved too suddenly to action. Nevertheless he obeyed the instruction implicit in Jaycee's directions and kept strictly to the middle of the roadway, making no attempt at concealment. "It's too damn quiet, Jaycee. Where are all the people?" Total evacuation, Bron. The Destroyers have imposed an absorb IF lute clearance of a five-kilometer radius around each landing site. Turn around in a full circle, will you. I want to take a check on your position. Bron turned slowly on one heel, following the skyline with his eyes and dwelling on any features of the broken terrain that might be construed as landmarks. "On course?" Near enough. Just clear of the Destroyers' five-kilometer perimeter, but still in the evacuated zone. Your main danger is the Ashur police, who may come looking for looters. Stay in the open and keep your hands empty and in view. "Shouldn't I be going toward the ship?" You re jokin! Cross that perimeter and you re a dead man. The only way anyone gets through there is if the Destroyers choose to take him. "And you think they'll choose to take me?" Were hopeful. You re to impersonate a key Onaris technocrat. You were due at the Ashur Seminary last night, but the Destroyers struck before we could get you there. "What the hell would the Destroyers want with technocrats?" They take anything thaTs any value to them -- brains, slave-flesh, metals. And as many items of higher technology as they can find. ThaTs why they put down an entire fleet. They strip a planet of anything useful they can carry before they destroy it. "That doesn't make sense, Jaycee. No, but it's fact. "Slave-flesh and metals I can understand, but not technocrats. They can surely train enough of their own." They appear to be concentrating on ones with a certain specialty -- authorities on the patterns of chaos. Seems as though Onaris had one of the top men in that field. "I thought Terra had all the top men." ThaTs a classical myth. In fact, the reverse is true. When the starships started the Great Exodus from Terra they took an unusually high concentration of very high IQ emigrants with them. Its not rare on a settlement planet to find two or three families still breedin' an almost pure genuis strain. Onaris had one family of decidedly genius strain -- the Halterns. You re cast as Ander Haltern, direct ninth descendant of Prosper Haltern. AndeYs probably one of the galaxy s top men on the patterns of chaos. "What happened to the original Ander?" On Terra, cooperating with us. We took him off secretly six months ago. The storys been patched to support your appearance in Ashur just now. By the way, by Onaris custom, ones familiar name is not on official record, scf you re still at liberty to call yourself Bron. I advise you to do so. That split-second s hesitation in respondin to an unaccustomed name could be crucial in an emergency, Bron suddenly stopped. "Voices, Jaycee." Where? "Beyond the smoke in front." Yes, I hear them now, A police roadblock, I should imagine. Definitely native Onaris-Ashur accent, "You can hear all that?" When necessary we can apply a lot more gain to the signal from your ears than you can. Youve got to go through there, Bron. Let the synthesis take over your responses. Dont try to override it. If you do you re likely to come out with a few pure Bron-type answers and reactions -- and that could lead to a fairly rapid termination of the project. A S HE cleared the smoke he could see what had once been a line of stone-clad buildings, now a mere complex wall, castellated by fire and blast. The road continued haphazardly through the ruins and a barrier had been set across the track. On this were posted men in the green uniforms of the Ashur civil police. "Stay or we fire." The sudden voice was electronically reinforced. Bron halted. He saw no possibility of avoiding or withdrawing from the encounter. The sand exploded just before his feet, defining a safe distance for his movements. An officer threw a voice amplifier into the intervening space. "Approach the apparatus and speak." Bron moved cautiously towards the amplifier, his hands upstretched and his eyes on the unwavering stubs of the weapons centered on his body. He inwardly saluted the police technique of maintained distance. Even had he possessed his full Commando equipment he could not have hoped to get a gas slug or shock pellet through to the barrier without drawing fire, "What are you doing in the evacuated zone?" The amplifier impressed the officer's tones with a sinister metallic burr. "Trying to get out." Bron's natural resistance to authority produced a spontaneous reply that forestalled any answer the synthesis might have prompted. The amplifier carried his words back to echo quickly against the broken walls. "I see." The amplifier was critical and unamused. Fool! You askin to get killed? Jaycee's anger burst in his head so clearly that he found it nearly impossible to believe that the amplifier would not pick it up and hurl her words across the interIF veiling space. Play it his way, you stupid cretin! "You heard the evacuation order last night. You know we dare not offer any resistance to the Destroyers?" Yes, prompted Jaycee. "Yes," said Bron. "Then you know our instructions are to shoot on sight anyone found in the zone. Have you any reason to offer why that instruction should not be carried out?" The men at the barrier sighted their weapons and prepared to fire. Jaycee's voice was a flurry: Pve checked his rank, Bron. Hes a senior enough animal to be able to exercise discretion -- and soft as hell, else he wouldn't bother to talk. Ride the synthesis, damn you! "I am Ander Haltern, called Bron, late to adopt my residency at the Seminary of the Sacred Relic." With a shock Bron realized that it was his own voice speaking, but the words and the tone were derived straight from the post-hypnotic suggestion. Intrigued, he let his mind and tongue freewheel. "How else can I reach my destination, save through your barrier?" "Haltern?" There was a moment of consternation among the police at the roadblock, and the amplifier was swiftly muted to mask a hasty conversation. The Haltern name obviously carried a great deal of weight. The officer spoke again. "Can you prove your identity?" "Is that necessary for a Haltern in Ashur?" The synthesis tightened his tone into intolerant sharpness. "You have a letter of introduction, perhaps?" "No letter." A temporary anger welled up inside him and he made a mental note of the shortness of Ander's temper. "What does a Haltern want with paper?" "Then any other means -- " "If you can't take my word, you must come and see for yourself. Here is all I have." With a savage gesture Bron stripped the cloak from his shoulder and let it fall to the ground. His undergarments followed, and then, completely naked, he stalked back to the edge of the smoke and waited. Well clear of the amplifier he spoke softly. "Hell, Jaycee, this is weird. It's unnerving not to know how you're going to act until you've done it." But you see how the synthesis works, Bron. It responds with a complete takeover of your reactions when a direct stimulus such as a question or a situation demands it. "If it includes an impromptu striptease every time I'm asked for my identity, this is one synthesis that has definitely no future." Jaycee was highly amused. There's no tellin what you may do. Ander Haltern is a highly individual character. But what worries me is your rapid relaxation out of the synthetic character. It suggests the synthesis isnt set any too firmly. # have to put Doc on it when he comes on duty. The officer, bearing only a sidearm, came forward and turned the clothes over with his foot. At last he found the Bible and picked it up. Then he held out his hand. "My apologies, Bron Ander Haltern -- but you see, we cannot be too careful. These are very critical times." His eyes wandered apprehensively in the direction of the Destroyer ship. His face was almost gray with worry. Bron dismissed him curtly. "Can you arrange transport to the Seminary?" "Of course, Bron Haltern. I will see to it immediately." The officer returned to the barrier and Bron turned back to his clothes. He could hear Jaycee's outward amusement as he retrieved the garments and solemnly dressed. ## just occurred to me. Jaycee was triumphant. Perhaps thaPs how you re supposed to use the book, Bron. You take off your clothes and sulk. He said, "Damn you, Jaycee," contriving not to move his lips and in a mere breath of a voice which the amplifier could not possibly pick up. Jaycee responded with a peal of laughter. "You heard that?" asked Bron quietly at the next opportunity. If I hadnt -- Vd have guessed. But you dont need to vocalize. We can pick up subvocal speech just as well. You should be able to communicate with us in full view of other persons without their being aware of it. "You've got all the damn answers, haven't you?" More than you re aware of, Bron. And on this assignment Vve got you dancin like a puppet, because you dont remember just how sharp some of those answers are. Ill T he scudder placed at his disposal was a typical heavy-duty vehicle, brutally functional and highly articulate. Under cover of the jet scream and out of direct sight of the driver, Bron practiced subvocal communication. "Can you read me, Jaycee?" The action was no more than thinking the words and allowing the muscles of his throat to perform their customary actions but without the aspiration necessary to produce a sound. Loud and clear, Bron. "What was it about the book that convinced him I'm Haltern?" # think because its an old Terran Authorized Version -- very IF rare on a dependency world. Only an intellectual like Haltern could be expected to understand it, "Bit of a queer bird, this Haitern character." cretist -- probably one of the best alive today, "What's a syncretist?" One who works across the channels of scientific specialization rather than along them. To qualify for mastership you need at least ten honors degrees in unrelated subjects and the proven ability to think freely across the lines of the various disciplines as well as with them. The scudder banked swiftly and Bron, restraining an instant of vertigo from sudden awareness of the unexpected height they had attained, looked down at the vast edifice below them. "What's that, Jaycee?" Ashur Seminary, More correctly, the Seminary of the Sacred Relic of Ashur, That's where the Destroyers will expect to find you. The scudder burned its way down through the clear air of the morning and drove to an unpolished finish before the great portals. Bron Ander Haltern alighted, obeyed the synthesis-keyed instinct which forbade him even to acknowledge the driver's presence and ascended the great steps of the Seminary. As he did so he felt the mantle of the synthetic character closing around him, entrapping him in the shadowy web of somebody else's mores and reactions. Again the beast that was in him clawed out piteously for freedom. Nobody awaited him. The vestibule led to a corridor and then to a farther door. Beyond this he found a vast and vaulted hall lit only by the sunlight entering through strangely stained and patterned windows. He stopped suddenly, entranced by the space and unity of the edifice. The great columns that rose to support the beautiful roof were clustered with carved figurines and statuettes depicting scenes which casually had no meaning for him. The walls were similarly complex and ornate, obviously endowed with the same rich symbolism. The synthesis guided his feet across the floor and down the central aisle between stone blocks arranged as though for seats. At the far end, between white alcoves set into the wall, stood a bare dais. Behind it was a shield emblazoned with the sun-disk symbol of Ashur and centrally in the shield, nailed cruciform, hung the sacred relic -- a replica of a small, brown, furry quadruped. Around the shield hypnotic stereo-color tablets spelled out the single word: "Is this some kind of church, Jaycee?" Some kind. But not the sort you find on Terra. Not quite that sort of religion either -- though they do claim their God is the same. Bron turned and studied more closely the figurines on the columns closest to him. He heard Jaycee's sharp intake of breath. Move closer, Bron. This is interestin. "What is it? A monument to De Sade?" No. An expression of faith. Mortification of the body for the edification of the soul. In the Seminary the cultivation of mind and spirit is all. The body is regarded merely as a vessel of atonement for the weaknesses of the other two. "Jaycee, that's sick." Its their way of life. The columns are supposed to depict the classical two hundred and fiftysix modes of penance for weakness. "After some of those penances there wouldn't be anything left to be weak with." Subvocalize, Bron. Theres someone coming. B ron scanned the hall swiftly, but no one was yet in sight. His gaze fell again on the sacred relic, whose button-bright and twisted stare suddenly typified the distorted philosophy portrayed by the figurines. The act triggered something in the hypnosynthesis and against his conscious will he dropped to his knees, hands clasped before him, in an attitude of prayer and supplication. The footsteps closed behind him. "Ander Haltern?" "The same." Bron rose and turned to face the questioner. "What will be your familiar?" "Bron." The preceptor -- the hypnosynthesis identified the other's function -- was lean, gray, ascetic and unwelcoming. "We expected you yesterday, Bron Ander Haltern. How do you answer?" "Ashur was destroyed by the raiding and I nearly with it." "You allowed the trivia of the times to come before your duty?" "Trivia? You damn -- " Bron overrode the acquiescent synthesis. Steady, Bron. "Bron Haltern, having achieved mastership, you have the privilege of choosing your own penance for absence. What do you offer?" "What do I answer, Jaycee? The synthesis gives me nothing." Subvocally he could form the words faster than he could have spoken. Stall him. This wasnt programed. Tm contactin Ander. "Ashur is nearly in ruins," said Bron aloud. "The Destroyers are in control. Outside these walls nobody has right of movement or even right of life. Do you still deIF mand panance from one detained by such events?" "Bron Ander Haltern." The preceptor's face was grave. His eyes were tinged with a depth of irrationality. "You disappoint me. That is not the reaction one has learned to expect from a Haltern. Come, make your offer -- or I shall impose one of my own." The shirt, Bron. "The shirt," said Bron. The preceptor's eyes widened abruptly and his jaw dropped. "Forgive me! I meant no disrespect to the Halterns. There is no need -- " The synthesis swung Bron wrathfully. "Are you questioning my decision. Preceptor?" "Of course not." The preceptor's eyes mirrored agony and embarrassment. "It's just that the act does not warrant such a level of penance. I must ask you again, are you sure you're, prepared to accept the shirt?" "Gladly." The word rose spontaneously from the synthesis. The preceptor shrugged resignedly. "Very well. I shall conduct you to your cell. The shirt will be delivered to you there." Bron follow the preceptor out of the hall by a minor door, then through a series of corridors, each similarly ugly and depressing with a severity of line which made no concession to the human need for contrast and relief. The occasional doors were dark, square and massive, with small, high, shuttered windows. "Jaycee, this is more like a prison than a seminary." On Onaris there's little to choose between them. Education is inseparable from religion and religion from austerity and disciplined penance. The only thing about the system that stands in its favor is that it produces some remarkably good scholars. Twist"I can imagine. And what the hell's the shirt?" Don't know. It was Ander' s idea. He seemed to think it appropriate to the crime. He's getting quite a kick out of the idea. The preceptor reached a door and halted. The proximity lock responded unhesitatingly to his fingers and the heavy wood swung open. Bron, though accustomed to a lifetime of utilitarian Commando accommodation, stood appalled. The cell he was invited to enter was a featureless stone box. The only attempt at furnishing was the provision of a solitary coffin-sized slab of cut white stone, which presumably had to serve as table, chair and bed. There was nothing else at all. A solitary eye of unalterable light stared down harshly from the ceiling. The aperture through which it entered was encircled by the gilded message: The preceptor was watching his face, but Bron managed to remain impassive. "In a few minutes, Bron Haltern, I will send you the shirt. I suggest you don it immediately, then you will not be unduly late in conducting your first tutorial." "Is the penance then not to wait until the evening service?" "No. You have earned greater respect than that. I think your absolution will be more perfect if the work of the shirt is well advanced by the time you bear witness to the assembly." Under the influence of the synthesis, Bron bowed his head and waited until the preceptor had departed. "That man's not only a sadist, Jaycee, he's also quite mad. He took in absolutely nothing of what I told him about the destruction of Ashur. His world begins and ends in a small closed circle of Seminary rites. How long do I have to stay here?" Not long, I guess. The Destroyers always know where to look for the people they want. They must put in some damn good intelligence work before they strike. "Am I the only one they're looking for?" We think so. Theyll otherwise take mainly slave-flesh. They're obviously colonizin'. Human flesh is a lot cheaper and more versatile than machinery on an undeveloped world. "Interesting point. The fleshships were not unknown even in the days of Terr an space colonization." Bron broke off as a knock on the door heralded the arrival of a student bearing the shirt. The student slipped the garment from its filmy wrap and left it on the slab. As he passed and bowed, his eyes bore a look compounded both of admiration and profound sympathy. B ron examined the shirt cautiously. It clung to his fingers as though each fiber of its wool-like texture were possessed of microscopic barbs. With swift decision he stripped and donned the garment -- and momentarily its hugging softness was almost luxurious. Its elasticity drew it smoothly over the contours of his body. A few seconds later he was genuinely praying, perhaps for the first time in his life. In something akin to mortal panic he tried to tear the shirt away from his body, but the myriad barbs of the fine, white fibers were firmly engaged in his flesh. There was no way of removal save that of tearing away the skin. The burning itch and panic drove him to the verge of hysteria before he managed to clamp a cold composure on his reasoning. "Jaycee, this is diabolical -- " Jaycee laughed. It's apparently the modern equivalent of the pilIF grimes hairshirt. Contemplation, concentration, and suffering enrich the mind and ennoble the spirit. And lets face it, Bron, both your mind and your spirit were long overdue for somethin drastic. Vm quite lookin forward to the improvement. "Damn you for a bitch, Jaycee. One day I'll make you regret that." A knock sounded at the door. It was the student again. "Mastership Haltern, sorry if I disturb your devotions. The preceptor requires me to conduct you to the Syncretics unit." "It's no disturbance," said Bron. "I've already made my dedication clear." Outside the door the youth put his knuckles to his forehead. "You may lean on my arm if you wish. Mastership." His eyes strayed to the shirt, the collar of which showed still above the cloak. "Thank you, no." Bron declined as the synthesis demanded he must, but from the look in the youth's eyes he knew that the shirt was infamous. As he walked, Bron could hear Jaycee cataloguing the way. His own consciousness was almost entirely absorbed by the unremitting and painful awareness of the shirt of penance and he was in no condition to master detail. At the door of the Syncretics unit the student saluted with knuckles to forehead as if in momentary prayer, then departed. Bron touched the proximity lock. After a few seconds' trial the lock responded and he entered the laboratory to give his first-ever tutorial in syncretics. This time he was impressed. The array of teaching and computing equipment must have cost a fortune. His audience of a hundred, all working in solitary cells, had instant on-line access to the computer as well as real-time monitoring of their own responses. The performance-analysis display panel was a masterpiece of ingenuity and enabled him to correct in seconds the failure of a student to grasp a single point or a single word. Faced with a specific demand, the stored knowledge in the character synthesis produced all the information he needed. Yielding to the pressures of the synthesis, he allowed his hands to set up channels and controls, not properly understanding his actions until the instant they had to be performed. Then, as he followed the movement of his fingers, he began to understand the instruments before him. His lecture, too, came readily to mind and he spoke first and comprehended later. Such concentration served to divert his attention from the shirt, but the irritant pain of such an intimate and widespread penetration of the skin was a distraction that permitted hiip only two states of mind -- extreme concentration and abject despair. Moreover his body was reacting violently to the attack with an allergic rash that spread soon to his face and hands and produced an unwholesome puffmess around his eyes. Ask Ander how I get the damn thing off." I already did. Short of extensive surgery there seems no way of removin it prematurely. The fibers are histamine sensitive. When the allergic reaction raises your body histamine to a sufficient level they will quit of their own accord. "And for God's sake -- how long will that take?" Depends on the susceptibility of the individual. Could take up to thirty-six hours. "I see," said Bron grimly. "Have you asked friend Ander what proportion of its wearers die of shock?" Yes. About ten percent, Bron. If wed known earlier wed never have let you put it on . " "Whose side is Ander on?" Ours apparently. He said the choice of the shirt was to keep you truly in the character of a Haltern. We overlooked the fact that most of the Haltern descendants are mad. T he tutorial lasted five hours, after which Bron returned to his cell. Agonizing though his hours in the tutorial had been, the work had at least partially taken his mind off the shirt. The leisure period offered no such distraction. The allergic reaction of his body was assuming alarming proportions. Muscles in his arms and legs were beginning to react with pain and stiffness which told of the spread of toxins throughout the bloodstream. Occasionally he thought he detected the first fringes of delirium in his brain. For want of alternative, Bron lay painfully back on the stone slab and let the bright, unwinking eye of the solitary light glaze his deliberately unblinking eyes. By varying the range of his vision he could or on the point-source of light or past both to infinity. As he neared the auto-hypnotic state he experienced slow alternations of light and darkness until finally he drifted into sleep...in the sordid cells of some inhuman inquisition a spirit snapped... "Spool it, Jaycee! What's up?" Knock on the door, Bron. Two men outside. "Damn! I can't go on much longer, Jaycee. If this thing doesn't give up soon. I've had it." Docs all but taking Ander apart try in to find out what the shirt's made of. The job isn't easy because native Onaris biology is obviously a field of its own. IF Bron swung his feet painfully to the floor and attempted to stand. The stiffening ache in his joints at first defied his efforts, but gradually he persuaded his limbs to give him the necessary support. Like a sick man, he stood. The two men were dressed differently from either himself or from the students. Their light-yellow tunics were obviously designed for ease of movement. "Mastership Haltern, it is time for you to take the place of witness at the evening assembly." The synthesis flashed sharp disapproval into Bron's mind. "Since when was it the custom to escort a penitant to his place?" The phrase was pure Haltern intolerance. "The preceptor insists -- as an assurance of spiritual discipline." "Discipline comes from within not by imposition. The preceptor overreaches himself. I shall make my own way." The wardens appeared momentarily uncertain of their position. Bron took advantage of the fact and steeled hirhself to walk ahead, shored up primarily by the synthesis-generated anger which fumed at the indignity of having a man's most private hour of fortitude supervised by wardens. He entered the church and crossed to the center aisle, turning toward the sacred relic behind the dais. Some compulsion greater than his own will forced him to kneel and look upward at the creature's twisted stare. His knuckles sought his forehead. After several minutes thus he attempted to stand, but his stiffened legs defied him and he twisted and fell. Immediately the wardens were upon him. They carried him to one of the alcoves flanking the dais. Here rings had been provided to hold a man's arms in such a position that even if he fainted, his body would still remain erect. To these he was fastened, facing down the body of the church. bly arrived his consciousness slipped several times into a delirious half-sleep that was more like a lapse in time than any human condition. When he awoke, the assembly of staff and students had mainly entered and taken their places on the blocks of stone. The preceptor entered last, clad now in ceremonial dress like some majestic cleric. He spared Bron and his misery only a fleeting glance. The service was long and tedious, full of responses and intricate psalms, and the sermons were dogmatic beyond reason. Bron, striving to combat the gulfs of blackness that interrupted his thinking, tried to gauge from the expressions of the assembly the true feelings of the individuals toward his plight. The dominant look was of interest and participation. Only a very few, like the preceptor, were twisted with the basic streak of sadism. For the rest it was part of the accepted norm. Jaycee's voice broke in with sudden urgency. Bron, this is what weve been waitin for. We can hear the sound of heavy scudders movin in. We can expect the Destroyers at any moment. As if to verify her words, a long explosion rumbled through the corridors and resonated in the cavity of the hall. The preceptor faltered only slightly in his prayer, then continued. A second explosion, more staccato this time, shattered the inner door. An immediate panic was stilled as a group of armed soldiers rushed through the smoke-filled doorway. They deployed themselves professionally across the end of the church, waiting only for some act on the part of the assembly to cause them to open fire. The preceptor's words dribbled to a halt as he was faced with a reality he could not finally deny. "Who are you? What do you want? Don't you know this is dedicated ground?" His voice echoed down the long hall, gathering timbre from the reverberations in the high, vaulted roof. It was unthinkable to him that his world should be violated. The leading soldier spoke. "We 'ave Destroyer business 'ere. Where is one they call Ander 'altern?" "He is here, making penance. I forbid him to speak." "Quiet, old fool. It is I who give the orders." To emphasize the point a multiple gunblast ripped out three of the stained-glass windows. "Let 'altern come out or it will be men we split, not glass." "I warn you -- " The preceptor still had not grasped that his position was lost. "This behavior is sacrilegious. I demand that you leave." A single shot through the head toppled the preceptor from the dais. His removal from the scene was so sudden that it was almost anticlimatic. "Ander 'altern." Someone in the assembly at the back was being forced at weaponpoint to mark the quarry. The remaining raiders covered the assembly. Wisely, no resistance was offered. The Destroyer's firepower was, as ever, more than adequate for a massacre. "Are you 'altern the syncretist?" The Destroyer leader stopped before Bron in the alcove, frowning at the manacles and the lymph-soaked shirt. "The same." "What they trying to do, kill you?" The question was rhetorical but carried a refreshing draught of sanity. The Destroyer released the rings holding Bron's wrists and motioned him forward. Bron took one shocked step before his IF knees buckled under him and he pitched headlong to the dais. In delirium and with clouding consciousness he sought to raise his body and stand, but his arms, too, were now unequal to the task. He found himself helpless, looking up at the twisted mockery in the stare of the sacred relic. "Jaycee -- what the hell -- is that thing called?" It's a Terran child s play thin . A replica of somethin called a bear. "Does it always have those eyes?" No. A child must have played with it until its eye-buttons came loose. Its said to have once belonged to Prosper Haltern, founder both of the Onaris colony and of the Seminary. "Oh God -- the eternal joke -- " You re delirious, Bron. Lie quietly, fm sending for Doc. "Damn you, Jayqee -- don't you see it? Gladly my cross I'd bear -- damn -- crosseyed bear -- " Stop talking, Bron. You re shoutin' aloud. You're... But Bron was almost laughing as the great darkness closed down. IV B ron, this is Doc. Listen to me carefully. You're on the Destroyer ship. They brought you aboard while you were still unconscious. I gather they've brought your temperature down and a Destroyer medic has given you a good examination. Trouble is he's come up with the wrong answer. He's decided to give you an injection of an antihistamine -- in fact, he's preparing it now. Whatever happens, you mustn't have that injection. "You got something useful out of Ander?" Yes. The shirt is woven of crel, an indigenous Onaria fungus spore notorious for its parasitic attachment to human flesh. The body's only defence is histamine. If that damn fool reduces your body histamine before those spor filaments have quit, they're liable to germinate into mature crel nodules underneath your skin. These are about the size of a Terran cherry and about two hundred thousand of them developing in your flesh would literally tear you apart. "What do you advise?" Find a way to avoid anything being done until the shirt has quit of its own accord. It's your only chance. Is the shirt still firm? With an effort Bron propped himself up on one arm and explored. "It's coming away around the edges. Doc." Good sign. It should peel fairly rapidly once it starts to go. Another fifteen minutes could see you clean. Can you hold the medic off that long? "I can try." Bron scanned the room quickly. Its sole door was fitted with a standard proximity lock keyed to operate only to the finger responses of those entitled to enter. Laboriously he climbed from bed, accommodate his action and collapsed in a heap on the floor. He dragged himself to an instrument stanchion and looked for tools with which to attack the lock. The only thing relevant was a surgical laser. Unsteadily he took it to the door. The lock pattern was unfamiliar to him and he had no way of locating the critical sensory elements. A very real chance existed that interference would immobilize it in the open rather than the closed position. Finally he settled for merely shorting out the input leads. With a bit of luck the lock's malfunctioning would appear to have been an inherent fault and not the result of tampering. He carefully fired the laser into the input channel. The laser hole was almost invisible but the result was an untidy short-circuit that seared the finish on the door around the lock. Fortunately the damage looked sufficiently amateurish to let him remain in character. Doc, who had been following the exercise through Bron's eyes, was critical. How long will that hold them? "Depends on how anxious they are to get in. Dismantling the lock would take about twenty minutes. but the door could be cut away in seconds if necessary." Bron lurched painfully back to bed and began working his fingers cautiously between his arm and the shirt. He soon found that the shirt was losing its consistency and shredding away in the manner of cotton wool. The underlying skin was red, swollen and moist with lymph, but otherwise undamaged. As he worked at it, the fibers began to come away more easily and almost half the garment had been removed before he heard noises at the door. The first sounds were those of someone baffled by an inability to operate the lock. Soon came the sound of metal applied to the door as if to force it. Then silence for a period. Then action again and the lock was cut away with a heavyduty laser beam. propped on one arm, was engaged in removing the last fragments of the shirt from his breast. As far as he could judge, the filaments adhering to his back had largely rubbed away on the bedding. The medic examined the lock with some consternation, at the same time glancing across to Bron and the fragmented shirt. Since there was no obvious connection between these two things, he left the lock to a technician and came across the room. IF "You got it away, eh? How you manage tha'?" "It's histamine sensitive." The swelling in Bron's throat had raised the pitch of his voice to a querulous piping tone. He lay back with a show of exhaustion he did not have to fake. "Why you do it, eh? Why you put tha' damn thing on?" Bron searched the synthesis but found no answer, so he scowled and said, "The shirt is an accepted penance in the eyes of the church." "Bloody funny church -- damn masochis's, all of them. Are there no psychiatris's on Onaris?" "Certainly. I myself have a doctorate in psychiatry," said Bron Ander Haltern tiredly. "But what makes you think that ills of the spirit are curable by techniques designed to remedy mere malfunctions of the mind?" The medic refused to be drawn into what he regarded as an idiotic argument. "Turn over and let me see tha' back." Bron turned. The medic cleaned his back with spirit and wiped away the remaining fibers of the shirt, retaining some for closer examination. He found the crucifix around Bron's neck, looked at it curiously, dropped it back. "I'm goin' to give you injection. With luck your skin should clear in a few hours. You'll find the side effec's of the drug will make you li'le silly." "Accept or refuse. Doc?" Risk the injection now that, the fibers have quit -- but if you get a swelling yell like a fiend until they cut it out. The medic turned to get his tray. As he did so Bron could see past him to the doorway. Standing just inside, a silent witness to the proceedings, was a tall, graying man of exceptional physique and bearing. He was clad immaculately in the uniform of a senior Destroyer officer, though his precise rank was not apparent. His attention was completely upon Bron, with a depth of concentration and comprehension that made Bron feel that the hypno-synthesis was a very shallow camouflage for concealing his true identity and purpose. "Who's that?" asked Bron aloud as the medic returned. "Colonel Daiquis'." Both the medic and Doc replied as nearly simultaneously as possible, but Doc Veeder's identification carried undertones of awe. What a piece of luck, Bron. Martin Daiquist is Canas righthand man. Bron withdrew his arm from the vicinity of the hypodermic gun. "I wish to see someone in authority. I was brought here without consent and I have no wish to remain. I demand to be returned to the Seminary." The medic looked down pityingly. "Tomorrow someone will explain why tha's impossible." His fingers gripped Bron's arm like a steel vise. "From now until then you do exactly as you're tol'." Past the medic's shoulder Bron could see Colonel Daiquist examining the door around the lock. Then he saw him straighten suddenly and look round as if searching for something. The hypodermic gun was back on Bron's arm, the muzzle pressing hard as the molecularized drugs were introduced through his skin without puncture. Almost immediately Bron felt a heavy dreamlike state come over him, bringing a touch of euphoria that left him quite without care or qualm as Daiquist picked up the surgical laser and took it to the door. P erhaps on the altar of some Satanic mass the screaming sacrifice, shackled to the stone, twists in torment. The descending dagger tears tendon and ligament but leaves alive the cowering consciousness... "Who's that?" "Tell me who you are or I'll go tb sleep on you." Dont do that, Bron. Tm having a hard enough task getting through to you as it is. Tm Ananias. "Go away. I don't know you." Dont you remember me at all? Dont you even recall that Ananias is a liar? "Ananias is merely a name. I can't remember a thing. You must be the joker of the pack." Frequently, Bron. But right now Tm far from joking. What drugs did the medic give you? "Should have been antihistamine and antiallergen." But you didnt see the labels on the phials? "No. He preloaded the hypodermic. I want to go to sleep." Not so fast. From your poor reaction to the semantic recall Fd say the medic included a measure of a hypnotic alkaloid, possibly a truth serum. "Damn you, let me sleep!" I will -- soon. But while you re sleeping I think someone may attempt to question you. Daiquist s not too happy about you for some reason. We cant rely on the synthesis holding out under intensive psychological probing. If the situation turns critical we intend to use one of our corrective circuits to throw you into a state of catatonic withdrawal. Theyll soon get you out of it, but it should serve to confuse the situation. The effort of conversation had pulled Bron into a lighter level of sleep from which he now found himself unable to relax. He tried to open his eyes, but the effort nearly defeated him and he was unable to maintain them open. In any case, the room was completely IF dark and there was nothing whatever to see. His mind settled down to a level of activity characteristic of a dream state but which left him fully conscious. This limbo of thought between sleep and waking was positive confirmation of the introduction of a hypnotic drug into his system. He likened his feelings to those of a man floating on an air raft borne over slow waters down a long tunnel of darkness. The almost complete absence of tactile sensation, coupled with the free-flowing volume of his thoughts and heightened imagination, produced all the imagery necessary to give substance to the illusion. He even thought he could hear the echoed muttering of the tide, disturbed by his passage, lapping against tunnel walls... Shock! Even in his drugged condition his whole nervous system reacted fitfully. "Ananias, for God's sake -- " What is it, Bron? "What's that noise? Sounds like turkeys gobbling -- or water rippling around a stone."  hear nothing but ship noises. Sure its not imagination? "Damn you, no. It must be coming over the bio-electronic transfer link." Not possible. We re transmitting nothing but my voice. The computer s monitoring the output from the Antares transmitter to you and that doesn't show any variation except for the usual star static. "Well, I'm receiving something else and it's unholy -- like the sound of liquid geese. Is it possible for anything else to get impressed on your transmission -- something you couldn't detect?" Only if it came from a source below the Antares reception threshold. But there's nowhere it could come from. There's only the void on the other side of your present position. You're way out on the rim of the universe. "Can they increase the sensitivity of the Antares receivers?" Not without rebuilding half a planet. Can you still hear it? "It's still there, but not so clearly. The ambient ship noise seems to be increasing." Correct. Sounds as though they're preparing for lift-off. I doubt you'll get any visitors until the ship's in free space. If you want to sleep, this'll be a good time. "Ananias -- " Yes? "Did we ever meet, you and I?" We know each other rather well. One day you'll remember. "And Jaycee -- I know her?"  can't answer questions about Jaycee. That's classified. "I just wondered what I ever did to get paired up with a vindictive bitch like her." B ron attempted to relax, to throw himself into less conscious depths of slumber, but each time his mind washed up on the same dark, tunneled tide and stopped short at the same reactive fear. The sound of the rising pattern of activity in the ship gradually overlaid the phantom goosemutter from nowhere and drove it below the limits of discernibility. The rising crescendo of the pressor beam projectors began to vibrate the whole fabric of the ship and the beats of their misresonance sang like some awful electronic choir. Then he felt the lift-off -- only a few meters at first, while the pressors were trimmed to take the weight of the ship evenly and without straining the vast structure. The breathtaking thunder of the planetary drive boomed in above the pressors' song and added a quarter gravity of horizontal component of movement to the pressor's lift. Some loose instruments somewhere in the room clattered into a tray, otherwise inside the ship these maneuvers were deceptively smooth and gentle. Outside the ship it would be different. Bron winced at the thought of white-hot exhaust gas razing a kilometer-wide weal across the scarred face of Ashur and of pressors leaving a hundred-kilometer channel of pulverized buildings and hopelessly compressed soil before the ship abandoned planetary support and began to claw its way through the troposphere by thrust reaction alone. As the successive phases of takeoff approached, the pitch and timber of the engine voices altered, died, were replaced by other sounds. Soon even the scream of the atmosphere on the hull tailed away and the ship settled to the vibrant thunder of the main gravity drive, which would be its prime mover until it was clear of the planetary system of which Onaris was part. Not until then could the cumbersome physical drive systems be abandoned in favor of the delicate subspace mechanisms which could flip the ship to its destination at megalight velocities without regard to mass or momentum. Slowly Bron's ears became attuned to the dissonance of the engine, and he even dived into fitful sleep before becoming aware that the light in the room had been turned on and that two men had arrived at his side. "Ander Haltern." This was a statement, not an address. "Ah, so that's our master syncretist. He looks too young. You know, Martin, they say he's one of "He came in wearing a shirt of some parasitic fungus. If that's The second voice held a crisp bitterness of tone. A hand reached down and pulled at the crucifix on the chain, then let it go again. IF Chacun a son gout -- sorry, Martin, I forgot you hated the old world and its babels. But every man to his own choice. Not everyone has a hobby such as yours -- or is in a position to indulge in it even if he so desired." "You've never objected before." The phrase was swiftly defensive. "My dear Martin, I am not objecting. I was merely making the point that his desire to suffer pain and your desire to inflict it are merely two aspects of the same sort of character distortion." A long, irritated silence fell. Then: "Do you want to question him?" "I don't particularly want a recital of hick-world lineage and aspirations tonight, Martin. We know he's Haltern, or he wouldn't have been where he was when we found him. Whether he's a prime catalyst we shan't know until we get to the rendezvous." You listening, Bron? "Yes." Subvocally. Can you open your eyes and look at them. Wee got the cameras on. A short blink mil do. Bron shifted his head as though in disturbed sleep, then fought his eyelids open for a few bleared instants while he focused on the faces of the two men beside him. Nicely done, Bron. Weve got what we wanted. One's Martin Daiquist, whom you've already seen. The other -- man, you certainly pick your company well! "Spool it, Ananias! I'm not thinking well tonight." Just as well, perhaps. You've just been face to face with Cana himself V H e awoke to the sound of a watch bell and sat up, shaking the sleep from his head. As the medic had predicted, his skin had cleared, except for a slight scale which feathered away as he touched it. The ache in his limbs, too, was now scarcely perceptible. "Anyone .awake?" He addressed his unseen mentors in a spirit of bravado. Awake? Jaycee was annoyed. How the hell can anyone be otherwise with you snorin' your head off over the transfer link? How do you feel? "Like it was Christmas in Europa." Good. Your memory's returnin'. Though with your usual intake of drink and drugs it beats me how you ever managed to recall anythin' of Christmas in Europa. "Tell me about Daiquist. I'm sure he suspected I fixed that door." Martin Daiquist, ninth generation, Cana's lieutenant -- and probably more ruthless than Cana himself. Responsible for the punitive expeditions against the four worlds that held out against the formation of the Destroyer federation. Watch out for him. He's a mean cuss and as perceptive as the devil. His hobby is takin' people apart painfully. "I'll bear that in mind. What are he and Cana doing here?" Were still not sure. Neither would normally concern himself with a mere planetary raid. Either there s somethin big online or else they ve sensed the Commando interest in the raid and come to investigate personally. If the latter is the case, dont try any of your usual fool -- She broke off to give Bron a chance to concentrate as the medic entered. He gave Bron a swift but thorough examination. "You bloody clear," he said. "You don' deserve it, treatin' your skin like tha'. I'll get you breakfas' sent, an' then you clear out, eh? An' if you come back here again, nex' time I'll use the knife on you -- without anaesthetics. See how much masochis' you are. Colonel Daiquis' wants to see you -- an' I don' advise you play the fool with him. I can' patch up a body after he's done." Soon an orderly fetched a hot breakfast on a tray and the smell of baked meats and coffee made Bron wonder when he had last eaten. He could not remember. His own activities prior to the raid were still lost to him. The orderly also delivered a packet of clothing. Bron found inside a lightweight, tunic-style uniform, underclothes and a white gown that was presumably used for bathing and relaxation. Compressing his lips in wry amusement, he selected only the underclothes and the gown. Fortunately the gown had a pocket large enough to accommodate the Bible. The remaining garments he dropped into the surgical disposal chute, an action he felt certain was in keeping with his position as a Hal tern. When the medic came to escort him to Daiquist he raised his eyebrows at Bron's choice of apparel. "You're bloody mad you don' do as you're tol'." But his acceptance of Bron's assumed eccentricity was an encouraging sign that the incredible masquerade was viable and working. D aiquist looked up from his desk as Bron entered. "Ah, the syncretist. You seem to have recovered." "Why am I here?" asked Bron sharply. "I demand to be returned to the Seminary." Daiquist cocked his head on one side. "There's no chance of that -- no chance at all. Even if we wished, it wouldn't be possible. And we don't wish. We came a long way to get you, Haltern." "The familiar is Bron," said Bron archly. IF "Very well -- Bron. But don't mistake your position. You are a prisoner just as surely as if you were chained to a wall. We hope -- ultimately -- to gain your cooperation. Until we do -- and have satisfied ourselves of your integrity -- you must consider yourself under close guard. I had myself preferred you to be conveyed in the fleshholds, but I was overruled. However, you will end up there if you engage in any mischief." Shortly the door opened and Cana himself came into the room. He looked searchingly at Bron, then took Daiquist's place behind the desk. The impression he gave was that of a powerful intellectual rather than a ruthless creator and destroyer of empires. "Leave us, will you, Martin." For a moment Daiquist appeared about to protest, then he turned and left the room, with a meaningful glance at the prisoner. Bron sensed that a dissension had already arisen over his status on the ship. Daiquist was profoundly displeased. Alone with the great space tyrant, Bron sensed the magnitude of the man -- Cana seemed to fill the room with a hypnotic presence. "I don't normally intervene in Martin's affairs," said Cana. "But I can't afford to have a syncretist of your standing exposed to Martin's personal curiosity. By all accounts you're a man of many talents. You could be very useful to us. But Martin's a suspicious devil -- a quality that often makes him invaluable. He has a theory about you, Syncretist. He suspects you are not who you claim to be." "I'm Bron Ander Haltern, master syncretist, late of Adano University on Onaris.' "If that's so, then you won't mind answering a few questions. If you get a word wrong I'll leave you to Martin." "I object to my word's being doubted. I'll answer anything you care to ask." The synthesis was responding weakly but he picked up the feeling and amplified it himself, exaggerating the note of aggrievement. Bron, this could be sticky. Vm getting Ander on the line to back you up. "Check, Jaycee. I'm not getting much from the synthesis." Cana went to a cabinet and drew out a sheaf of papers. "You see, Bron Haltern, we already know quite a lot about you. Where is Jeddah?" Trick question. Jeddah s a town on Onaris -- but the one a Haltern would remember first is Jeddah Haltern. Hes dead. The voice in Bron's head was unfamiliar, but had a strong Onaris accent. "Jeddah's dead," said Bron. The synthesis stirred weakly. "He was fifth generation. Had he lived he'd have been a hundred and seven by now." Good, but don t take chances. Cana nodded and leafed through the sheets until he came to some plainly tabulated lists. "Give me the title of the paper you presented to the Ninth Symposium of Galactic Science at Maroc on Priam." The ninth symposium was on Mela five, not Priam. Priam was the tenth. "Which do you want," asked Bron, "the paper from the tenth conference or the one given on Mela five?" "Mela five, of course," said Cana, without looking back at the sheets. "I must have mistaken the line." The Application of the Advancing-parameter Exclusion Theory to the Prognostic Delineation of the Patterns of Chaos. Bron repeated this verbatim. Cana nodded and threw the sheaf of papers back on the table. "You know, Syncretist, I don't entirely disagree with Martin. He has an instinct for these things and he's seldom wrong. He daren't be wrong. Our survival is often entirely in his hands. So I reserve an open mind. But if you aren't Haltern, then whoever did send you schooled you well -- so well, perhaps, that whether you are the original or an impostor could be largely irrelevant." "Now answer me a question," said Bron, watching the man closely. "Why have the Destroyer nations such urgent need for a master syncretist?" "Not just a master syncretist. They come in all calibers, and we already have most of them. What we most needed was a man who could combine syncretics with an appreciation of the patterns of chaos." "Why?" "In a few hours," said Cana, 'we are making a space rendezvous. When we are clear from there I may answer your question -- or I may not. You may even answer it for yourself. Until then you have the freedom of the ship. The armorer will take your fingering for the proxlocks. You may enter any doors that open to you. The others are permanently barred to you. I'll have the quartermaster find you cabinspace." door. Bron needed no second indication of dismissal. He made his way straight to the den of the armorer. The latter took his fingering for the proxlocks and entered the resulting profiles in the access computer. Bron made an experimental tour of most of the open levels of the ship to verify his freedom of the locks. Incredibly, almost all the doors he tried responded to his touch. Back in the small cabin which had been allocated to him. IF he lay back on the bunk and called up his unseen confederates. "Jaycee?" No. This is Ananias. Honeybitch is feeding -- I suspect on her usual diet of ground-glass and snake venom. What do you make of Canas giving you the freedom of the ship? "I'm not quite sure. The main question is why. I suspect I'm being allowed just about enough rope to hang from, unless I've got it calculated wrong. The only sectors I haven't been able to enter are Weaponry, Communications and part of the computing complex. It's too damn easy. meter I move." How about the control room? We need to know the ships destination as soon as possible. "I've not yet tried Control, I don't dare seem too interested in the machinery here. Anyway, there's some sort of space rendezvous coming up shortly and the chances are that our heading will be different from there out. Once they start setting for a subspace hop I can pick up the coordinates straight from the subspace matrices if necessary -- without even entering control." Good idea. Mind you, they shouldnt be too worried. If they keep you out of Communications they can be reasonably confident that whatever you learn cant be relayed to where it might be dangerous. I think our concept of the bio-electronic transfer link is sufficiently unique for it to remain completely unsuspected. "I wish I were sure it is unique. I'm still worried about that goosegobble I heard. Something else is operating on our transmission band. It certainly wasn't star static or a normal sort of interference." From calculation it seems that there's nothing near you in space that could conceivably be the signal source. The present hypothesis is that it's a heterodyne signal from something on the ship itself. "It was no heterodyne. I'd say it had all the elements of an intelligent semantic content based on an advanced-level communications system." I'll follow it up, but I think you're certainly wrong. Hullo! What are they doing with your engines? Bron listened critically. "Applying retro, I think. Could mean we're approaching rendezvous." Rendezvous with what? "It hasn't been said or implied, but I'd guess with the remainder of the Destroyer fleet, including those that held orbit round Onaris during the raid."  wonder why. They wouldn't dare to attempt to hold formation in subspace, so why assemble beforehand? "Sounds as though they're putting call signs on the boards right now. The center of attention seems to be the chartroom." Better not look too nosy. Wait till the rendezvous has been established, then go up. "Are you giving me orders, Ananias?" Yes. Have you forgotten how to take them? "Let's get this straight," said Bron. "I'm on the operating end of the transfer link. Mine's' the hide that pays for any mistakes and mine's the body they consign to space when the charade goes sour. Ask for any information you need, but how and when I obtain it is my option. If you want a puppet, jet off and buy yourself a doll." Say that softly, little soldier. Ananias's voice was dangerous. You've more than one electrode in your brain and the controls are under my fingers on this console. Shall I read the decals? Catatonic Withdrawal. Anaesthesia With Maintained Consciousness. Punishment. Death. They aren't written that way, of course -- we're great believers in the use of symbols to gloss over the earthier and more painful facts of your existence -- but the effects are just those. You see, we can insist on discipline. "You've forgotten a button, Ananias."  think not. "While you're playing at being God, shouldn't you also have one with the symbol for resurrection?" T he sudden cutoff of the gravity drive threw a vast silence over Bron's immediate environs, a stillness punctuated only by muted ship noises. The call boards were still chiming the reassembly call. Bron left his cabin and went to investigate. For several minutes the gangways were full of crewmen hastening to regroup. Moving aside to allow one to pass, Bron was instead saluted smartly. "Mastership Haltern, Cana wishes you to join Colonel Daiquist and himself in the chartroom." Bron nodded, trying to analyze the attitude of the crewman. His instructions appeared to include the implication to treat Bron with the respect due a Destroyer officer. This could only be a reflection of Haltern's value as a master syncretist to the Destroyer nations. A suspicion slowly formed. "Ananias, answer me something. What factors made you so sure Ander Haltern was the only man on Onaris the Destroyers would select?" A knowledge of the Onaris intellectual scene coupled with some good guesswork. Why? "Because the fact that it worked IF is too damn much of a coincidence. They must have had a very distinct reason for picking up Haltern alone and you must have known exactly what that reason was. Now give me the facts." I already have given them to you. "Liar." Ananias laughed softly. So you do remember just a little about A nanias? "Only that you aren't to be trusted." Of course not. But there s absolutely nothing you can do about it. "Think again, Ananias," said Bron. "As agent on this team I've a right to any information I consider relevant. Tell Doc I want a straight answer to the question I asked you -- the data so far available looks very suspect." In the chartroom he found the atmosphere electric with tension. All the navigation staff, including those off duty, were gathered to watch the screens. In the deep-space sector station both Daiquist and Cana were present, watching points of light against the cosmic black. Daiquist looked up, saw Bron and scowled, then beckoned him to join them. By the time Bron had reached the deep-sector station all eyes were again intent on the screens and no explanations were offered. Daiquist was supervising some chronometric plotting -- whatever event was about to take place obviously had time as an important component of the equation. Bron settled for a position with a good view of a subsidiary monitoring screen, a situation which also afforded him an opportunity to watch th activities in the whole station. The screen itself gave him an impressive view of the bright ring of ships . of the Destroyer fleet now locked in tight formation and motionless, waiting for something to happen. As the minutes passed, so the tension grew. Then, as if following some indefinable clue, the deep-space controller signaled. "I think this is it." He rapidly centered some almost invisible object under the graticules of his screen and began calling coordinates. All the other scanners turned outward to face the depths of space, though few others had the range to detect an object at such a distance. Daiquist and Cana pressed forward to look over the controller's shoulder. The displayed image as yet had no form, being a mere scatter of electronic noise. Within seconds the computers had acquired sufficient data to begin processing and the screen picture steadied to a rocklike concentricity in the graticules as electronic fingers searched and corrected for the minute signal reflection from some remote splint of matter far in the emptiness of space. "That's it." Cana had acquired a printout from a computer peripheral and a second printout terminal was already making a comparison with something set deep in the computer's micromemory cells. Daiquist returned to the chronometric plotting and watched the pantograph arms begin to sweep wide curves across the plotting boards. His lips grew taut. "Only sixteen point one hours late this time. The positional accuracy is exact and the chronological accuracy is still improving." "Damn," said Cana. "Still I suppose we must be thankful for those two certainties among all the patterns of chaos. I'm getting a bit old for entropy," He glanced up and saw Bron's quizzical interest. For a second his eyes looked into Bron's with a depth of comprehension that rocked Bron back on his heels. "I have a curious feeling about you, Syncretist. There's something in your face that suggests you know what chaos is. I just wonder if your being here is a fact any less calculated than the timing and trajectory of those, " H e nodded back to the screens. Bron's eyes followed, fascinated, as the range closed and the scanners steadily improved in resolution. His first impression was that of a rectangular plate or a door tumbling slowly and aimlessly through the depths of space. The speed with which the details improved was a measure of the very considerable velocity with which the object was moving, yet viewed through the screens against the backdrop of the farther galaxies, its progress appeared leisurely indeed. As it neared it became more distinct in form. Seven long, thick, black cylinders, reminiscent of those used for compressed gas, had been strapped to a thick, black yoke. That appeared to be all; no instruments, no antenna, no solar panels were visible -- none of the delicate and complex sensory and corrective mechanisms usually associated with unmanned space-traversing objects. If anything, the overall impression was one of extreme age and durability rather than of technological prowess. There was something incredibly sinister about these black canisters tumbling idly through space. The scanners were now producing almost a close-up view of the object and the hideous weld seams, massive and unfettled, stood out plainly. Had somebody broken off a part of some ancient gas-cooking plant and hurled it carelessly into space, the effect would have been similar. But there was nothing careless about its traIF jectory, to judge from the meticulous care with which its path was being recorded by the Destroyer technicians. Some great and desperate event seemed about to happen, but everyone about Bron was too intent on some given task to offer explanations. He gasped as the reeling mass filled the screens, as though falling straight upon Cana's ship. But this was a trick of screen magnification. Suddenly the scanners reeled and Bron found himself watching the object falling away in a higgledy-piggledy tumble as it passed through the ring of watching ships. Daiquist was again busy watching the chronometric plotting, as successive sweeps of the pantograph thickened the once faint traces to multiple bands of lines like the diagram of a muscular skeleton. Cana watched the cylinders draw away, his face a cloud of darkness. Then with sudden decision he turned his back on the screens and walked away. His path took him past Bron and his eyes widened sagely. "Watch that one through, Syncretist. I shall want to talk to you after." forward into Cana's vacated seat with the main screen in full view before him. Remorselessly the crossed hairs of the screen graticule locked on to the path of the retreating canister, which appeared to diminish slowly in size and then advance again as the magnification was periodically adjusted to offset the increasing range. Bron followed their dark passage with deep interest. The nemesis appeared to have passed, but the tension in the chartroom was undiminished. So intent was he on following the progress of the cylinders framed at the center of the screen that he neglected the implication of the changing hues of the background. Onaris! Ananias's voice broke in on his thoughts. Give us a broader view, Bron. Bron scanned the whole screen area, realizing with a start that the variegated background hues were, in reality, the non-focused outlines of seas and continents. Inexorably the black cylinders continued under the crossed hairs of the graticule, while the physical details of the planetary surface began to grow in resolution. The moment of impact was unforgettable. The blossoming fireball must have extended into space a full planetary diameter, a gulf of fantastic fiery plasma that streaked up and out with a velocity beyond the regions of belief. From his knowledge of physics Bron knew that such a fantastic holocaust must have stripped the atmosphere from the planet in seconds. The next stage was a sort of coalescenced, the fireball contracting and drawing in upon itself as if to concentrate its essence. The yellow, surrealistic with an ethereal fringe of mercurial blue. Around it the planetary features reappeared, but not with the cool greens and buffs of before. Now whole continents stood out as if raised to cherry heat, and where the seas had been were bowls of black, crawling with fire like soot on a chimney. Then the planet broke up, not quickly, but with the wrong-seeming slowness of massive events seen from a distance; a kind of reluctant finality. Centered upon the spot where the fireball had condensed, the planet began to spew up its liquid core in a gout of molten heavy metals, which coalesced in space and drew back toward the gravitic center of the mass, obliterating continents and coastlines with a horrific tide of matter returned to the state from which the planet had once cooled. As this happened, the shell of the planet broke, continents rearing crazily on end like ships sinking on a sea and land masses floating in broken fragments like dross on molten tin. Bron kept no record of the hours that passed while this incredible scene was enacted. The death of individuals was something he had been trained to accept unconditionally; the death of nations was one of the aims of war. Even whole species died occasionally in the name of some cause -- but the death of an entire planet was something that rendered Man and his entire status in the universe of no greater account than a biological culture grown in a dish and discarded when the experiment was finished. This was an object lesson in finite reality. VI seen it. Now explain it to me." Bron's voice was hardened by his viewing of the incident. How do you think they got the name Destroyers, Bron? "But where did the hellburner come from? It didn't originate from this fleet." It wouldnt. A ship carrying weapons like that would scarcely be invited to make planetfall on a flesh raid. Even in standoff orbit it could be a liability. They must keep it clear out in the void. When the raid is finished it slides in a massive hellburner io take care of the evidence. "I shouldn't have thought that Cana needed to destroy the evidence. He's strong enough not to care what the Galaxy thinks." In five years galactic patrols have found around thirty-seven formerly inhabited planets turned inIF to nickel-iron slag balls. Eleven of these, equipped with subspace transmitters, had broadcast warnings of Destroyer attack shortly before their obliteration. Five others put out standard light-velocitylimited transmissions with the same theme. Some of these planets were dead three years before anyone got the message. Bron considered this in silence for a moment. "Tell me, Ananias, what was the population of Onaris?" "Then if we knew the Destroyers were coming when they did, why the hell didn't we have a fleet waiting for them instead of only me?" If we d known that Daiquist and Cana were with the party, we probably would have had our fleet there. As it was we were merely implementing a policy decision to locate their base world. "Policy decision? That decision Onarians their lives. What kind of policy is that?" Bron froze as a hand clamped on his shoulder. Daiquist dropped into the seat next to him. "Why so thoughtful, Syncretist? Have you never seen a world destroyed before?" "That was Onaris," said Bron flatly. "All gone. In the name of God, why did you have to do it? You'd had presumably already taken all that you came for." Daiquist's eyes were searching Bron's face critically. "I rather wonder if we didn't get a little more than we came for. You make me uneasy, Syncretist. I never did have much time for intellectuals -- and an intellectual with the build and tone of a fighting man definitely needs watching. For myself I wouldn't take the risk. I'd prefer to kill you-now, but Cana has decided otherwise. I advise you to prove him right." Bron returned the scrutiny in depth. "You still haven't answered my question. Why was it necessary to destroy Onaris?" "Syncretist you may be," said Daiquist, "but you've still got a hell of a lot to learn. Come, Cana wants to see you in his suite. We're going to give you the chance to do a little exercise in cooperation." "Cooperation? My God -- you expect me to cooperate with you after that? He made a dramatic gesture toward the spotted frrecherry that was all that was left of Onaris on the screen. "I would rather die." "I'd rather you died," said Daiquist. "Unfortunately the decision isn't mine. But listen carefully to what Cana has to say, because it's likely you'll change your mind." "You don't bend a Haltern that easily. Damn you, Daiquist! If I must take this journey, let it be in the flesh holds." The synthesis still stirred weakly. Steady, Bron. Ananias's voice was cautioning. "I don't happen to be offering you the choice." Daiquist drew his sidearm menacingly. "It's not a good idea to keep Cana waiting. If you're thinking of resistance -- remember that I never shoot to kill." H aving no option, Bron rose and reluctantly walked in the indicated direction. Daiquist followed, his weapon aimed low. At the door of Cana's suite Bron was surprised to find the lock respond easily to his own hand. Cana was sitting at a large desk, watching strip issuing from a computer printout terminal. This had evidently been his occupation for some time, for the floor was littered with discarded strip lengths printed with compact series of figures. "Ah, Syncretist." Cana kicked the sprawling strips into an untidy pile. "Stay with us, will you, Martin." "It might be wisest." Daiquist selected a chair and gestured Bron to another. Cana addressed himself to Bron. "I take it from your face that you've seen what happened to Onaris." "I've seen what happened. What I can't establish is why it was necessary. Surely you'd already taken what you wanted?" Cana frowned, a display indicating a depth of concentration outside Bron's experience. "You won't understand this yet, but it was precisely because we'd taken what we wanted that Onaris died. Almost our only means of establishing the success of a raid is whether a hellburner blasts the life out of the target planet within hours of our liftoff." Bron was silent for a long second, wrestling with the wrongness of this statement. Finally he looked back at Cana and shook his head. "That doesn't make sense." "It does to us. The point I wish to make clear to you is that we didn't put that hellburner down there. Somebody else did." He's lying, Bron, Ananias's voice was positive. "You don't expect me to believe that?" "In the circumstances, no. I know your intellectual record and I realize it precludes you from accepting a statement unless you are satisfied with the evidence on which it's based. I'm therefore giving you the opportunity of establishing and examining your own evidence -- and drawing your own conclusions." "How?" "I invite -- no, dare you -- to examine any available record from any ship of this fleet and attempt to calculate the source and time of origin of the missile that deIF stroyed Onaris. Two points I would add. One -- although the missile's position was exact, its arrival was sixteen point one hours late in time. Two -- " Cana swung fullface to Bron for emphasis and Daiquist raised his sidearm meaningly -- "you may have access to our video records of the screens and any other data in our possession to enable you to calculate the missile's exact point of impact on Onaris. Although its effect would have been the same wherever it had struck, I think you'll find its point of impact coincides exactly with your own position sixteen point one hours earlier. You see, Bron Haltern, that missile wasn't specifically intended for Onaris -- or even for us. That missile was intended for you -- personally." W HA T you makin of it, Bron? "Not sure, Jaycee. Could be an elaborate sort of game -- a trick to secure the cooperation of whatever intelligentsia they have lifted in a raid. Or it could be that Cana's quite genuine when he says that the Destroyer's aren't to blame." Ananias doesnt think so. He was as mad as a scalded tiger when you accepted Canas invitation to check out the data on the hellburner. "I'm not sure that I trust Ananias any more than I trust Cana. Do you record everything that transpires over the transfer link?" Its all soundand video-taped for future reference. Why? "Tell Doc I'd like to check back through the sessions I've had with Ananias. I'm not convinced I'm getting the right answers." Uh! Even in amnesia the mistrust isnt dead. If you re taking on Ananias youd best be reminded hes a pretty dangerous cuss. "So am I, Jaycee. And the way I see this mission, it's strictly oneway, so I don't have anything to lose. Will you do it?" With pleasure. Ed love to get hold of something that would make the Godlost weaklin sweat. "Then stay on the line -- because there are things about General Ananias that I'm beginning to remember." Bron had acquired a master-program panel in part of the computing complex to which he had access. Two Destroyer programers had been assigned to him and a duty technician was on sound and vision call. All were quickly supplying whatever services or data Bron chose to ask for. Bron, relying less on the failing Haltern synthesis than on his own training, was speedily assessing his requirements and impressing the information on a standard location-of-source space-weapons program. The information available from the ring of Cana's fleetships through which the object had passed added a dimensional certainty to his calculation that was normally lacking in similar studies. Cana can't hope to get away with this, Bron. Any computerman worth his salt and given access to the data you re gettin must be able to give the lie to the claim. "Unless the computer is bent. There's a lot of this computing complex I can't get near. They could be using it to apply correctives so that I can only get the answers they want me to have." Thats why we re read in everythin through you, Bron. We re going to run the same computation here so we can compare differences. "Fine. I'm just about through on the location-of-source program. I'll set it running." Were going to rewrite the program to suit our equipment. Weve got all the data we need, so we wont be far behind you. Bron called the Destroyer technician. "How's that video record coming on?" "She nearly ready, if you like to come up to projection room." Bron cast a hurried glance over his own series of figures, then passed it to the programers. In the projection room the technician was waiting. "Ah've put the las' two hundred frames before explosion on closed loop. Give you las' four seconds of approach withou' spoilin' definition." "Run it." Bron dropped into a seat before the screens. The Destroyer technician looked at him briefly; his smile acknowledged the professional competence in Bron's way of organizing his inquiries. "Ah'll put her on big screen, Mr. 'altern." "The form of address is Mastership," said Bron severly. "Have you got that reconnaissance photograph of Ashur yet?" "Jus' cornin' on facsimile printer. Soon as scan is complete we'll print projection slide for montage." "I don't want montage. I want to alternate the scanner image with the reconnaissance projection." "Ah get poin' now. You alternate two images a' same magnification, you able pinpoin' position of contac' within few hundred meters." "To be certain, I need to locate to within one meter." The technician whistled. "Tha's no' possible. Mastership." "Call me Bron." The technician smiled broadly. "Ah'm Camaj. You no amateur, Bron. You know wha' you're doin'. Ah've tried some fixes in my time, but this the closes' Ah ever tried." "Can you do it?" "A fix to one meter from t'irty jokin' " "I'm not joking, Camaj. I do need that accuracy to be sure." IF "Then we do i' as you say. You show me how." T he screen lit up with the videorecorded last four seconds before the missile struck, repeated endlessly from the closed tape loop. In these last fragments of time for Onaris, the image of the city of Ashur flashed briefly into focus, a mere vague pattern of blocked browns and grays, unrecognizable as it stood, meaningful only if compared with a more detailed view. Central in the field of view was the black shape of the missile still aimlessly atwist in the instants before its terrible reaction. The scene was swiftly replaced with a projected reconnaissance holograph of Ashur taken from a ship orbiting around Onaris before the cataclysm. Here the ground details stood cut with perfect clarity, with buildings, vehicles, and even the minute dots of individuals easily identifiable. The magnification of the projection was adjusted to that of the taped record and then the two images were alternated to show coincidences of outline. Roughly half the reconnaissance record had been traversed before the two patterns showed point for point similarity. Bron's final micro-adjustments took fully half an hour. "Jaycee, what was my exact position sixteen point one hours before the explosion?" You were chained in the alcove at the west end of the church of the Sacred Relic, The Destroyer party was just about to collect you, "You saw where the hellburner struck?" Yes, At the west end of the church slightly to the right of the centerline. In other words, it went as near as possible right down on to that alcove. "Correct. Which is too much of a coincidence to be true. I don't like coincidences that can be measured with a micrometer attachment." He glanced up and saw the technician watching him. "Convinced, Camaj?" "Ah'm convinced. Tha' technique Ah use again. Will tha' be enough?" Bron nodded. "More than enough to be going on with. How the hell does anyone project a hellburner from outspace with that sort of accuracy?" The technician shrugged his shoulders. "You're th' syncretis'. For me, wonder is how she gets through atmosphere withou' burnou'. After all, she has no nose cone -- " "Jaycee, you heard that?" Yes, Bron. We'd picked up the same point. Not only remarkable weaponry, but a remarkable weapon too. It should have burned out in the atmosphere at that velocity, but there was no sign it even got hot. "All the more reason to find out where it came from." Bron dismissed the technician and went back to the computing section. The computer had already printed out the directional components and was engaged in comparing lists of known spatial objects which had occupied trajectory intercept positions at previous points in time. A mere glance at the time scale in which it was now seeking a match stopped Bron's heart a full beat. When the final printout came he folded the paper deftly with the characters inside and without looking at them. Lets see the answers, Bron. Ananias's voice cut sharply into his head. "No. Let me hear yours first." Vm not asking. That's an order. "Get off my back, Ananias." You b -- Ananias's voice was suddenly cut off Fragments of conversation followed too low in volume for Bron to catch. Finally Jaycee's voice came through. Sorry about that, Bron. Ananias was throwing his weight about. I don't think he'll try it again -- not in that way. As we see it, there has to be a ship out in the void. The location of source tensor carried back to known spatial objects on the trajectory doesn't make sense. The only intercept is a location in Messier #. "The spiral nebula in Andromeda?" No less. Travelin at its subluminal velocity from there would have taken all of seven hundred rule that one out. Bron unfolded the printout. "All of which figures agree with mine. The Destroyer computer isn't bent." So Cana does have a hellburner carrier way out in the void. "It looks as though somebody has. I wouldn't be too certain it was Cana." What you meanin, Bron? "My dear Jaycee, Cana sent his crew to the Seminary because Haltern was due to take up his residency there. That was a reasonable action based on prior intelligence. But when that hellburner was launched not even Cana could have known exactly where in the Seminary Haltern would be at any specific time. In fact, the only offworlders who knew at all times my precise position were Doc Veeder, Ananias -- and yourself" A nanias turned from the screen, critical disgust written broadly on his face. "So much for your ability to handle Bron, honey-bitch. Let hini break away like that again and I'll have you reduced to walking the streets -- and knowing your poisonous talents I doubt if you'd make much of a success of even that." "Jet off, you Godlost runt." Jaycee smoldered cobra-bright. IF "What you doin' -- tryin' to drum up some pimpin' for the day you lose your pension?" Ananias glanced involuntarily at the tabs on his shoulders. His small, pink lips were even more moist than usual and his bright eyes seemed to be reflecting some traumatic inner fire. "Don't underestimate me, honey-bitch. I could do it, you know." "Sick dreams, Ananias. You'll be lucky to retain your commission when Doc gets through with you." The import of her phrase took a full second before it produced a shock reaction. "Say that again -- slowly, honeybitch." His voice was sharp and suspicious. "Don't play innocent. You know its against regulations to destroy recordin's of transfer-link sessions." "What?" In his anger Ananias raised his hand as though to strike her, but forbore with the agonized realization that before his blow could fall she would probably have broken his arm. He forced himself into a more calculating mood. "Who put you on to that?" "Bron -- askin' questions." She was enjoying his discomfort. "And you told Doc?" "Of course. I even booked him a call to Commando Central so he didn't get time to cool off." "That was very stupid, honeybitch." Ananias was struggling with his anger. "Doc should never have made that call. I carry the General Staff mandate -- and that means I effectively outrank everyone on this installation. If it suits me to destroy some or even all of the recordings, neither you nor Medic-commander Veeder has any business interfering." "You're damn wrong there." Veeder, entering the door had caught the trailing end of the conversation. Although his expression remained within its authorized lines of concern, the reddening of his face and neck showed the height of his inner feelings. "I'll remind you. General Ananias, that this is a Commando installation and subject only to Commando control." "And I'll remind you," said Ananias, "that you are engaged on a joint mission with Intelligence under a GenStaff Order. That places you under my jurisdiction. So far, I can't say I'm impressed with your handling of the situation. Honey-bitch has demonstrated lamentably little control over her agent and as for Bron himself -- look at the kind of mental cripple I'm expected to work through: concussion, amnesia, schizophrenia and persecution paranoia -- to say nothing of refusal to accept orders, insubordination and outright rebellion." "You're a fine one to talk about mental cripples." Jaycee was furious. "Anyway, Ananias, where did you get the idea Bron suffers from persecution paranoia? I've seen nothing of it. It couldn't just be on part of the record you found it convenient to erase?" "Honey-bitch," said Ananias dangerously, "I've already told you what I'm going to do for you. And as for Doc, I think premature retirement on a greatly reduced pension would still be more than justice. As of tomorrow, I'm bringing in Intelligence operatives to take over your function here." "Drop dead, Ananias." Veeder subconsciously adopted Jaycee's infectious mood of contempt. "At my request. Commando Central has yerified that the operating arm of this mission remains under my control. Your capacity is purely advisory. As far as I'm concerned, you're here on sufferance." "I shall contest that decision with GenStaff. You can't hope to win." "Perhaps not, but while the order stands you will not destroy my records and you will not interfere with the operation of this installation." "And suppose I do?" taut glimmer of amusment, which was the nearest he allowed himself to approach to human triumph. "If you do. General Ananias, you'll find yourself under close arrest in a Commando cell block awaiting trial by court martial." "You couldn't hold me." "I could -- for long enough to see this mission through without interference." Jaycee said: "Touche! in a manner calculated not to improve Ananias's declining temper. White-faced, Ananias turned to face the pair of them. For a moment it was uncertain whether he was nearer laughter or tears. "You won't get away with this, you know. Within a week this unit will be entirely under my control." "Don't need a week, Ananias." Jaycee was on the point immediately. "Any time now Bron should have the coordinates we need. That was the mandate, wasn't it -- the establishment of the location of the Destroyer's baseworld? It's all over then except for the shootin'." "Not quite over, honey-bitch. I'll have a few old scores to settle first." Doc moved back to the attack. "In the meantime, Ananias, there are questions that need answering." "Such as?" "The goose-mutter which Bron heard -- to which I would have attached no great significance had you not bothered to erase all reference from the tapes." "And?" "The question of how you could be so certain that Ander Haltern was the only Onaris technocrat who would interest the Destroyers?" IF Ananias was fazed momentarily. "I thought that was all -- " "Destroyed? Not quite, Ananias. The transfer link to Antares is routed through Commando Signals. They also make recordings of everything transmitted . or received." "That will have to be stopped," "You'll need a damn good reason." "I have one." "Then let's have it. The Commandos have spent nearly a quarter of their total budget for six years just setting up this project and my best agent's out on that Destroyer ship right now. If there are any facts we haven't been given, I suggest you give them fast. I'm damn sure Commando Central would never have agreed to cooperate this far if they had had a suspicion something was being held back." "There are levels of Security," said Ananias. "This one is out of the topmost drawer. The fewer people there are who know, the better." "You're lyin', Ananias. Even Veeder was surprised by the vehemence of Jaycee's attack. "I know when you're lyin' because it's the only time you look human. God! Security's just a word you use for gettin' your own way without question -- but don't be so naive as to try it on me. You're up to something and it stinks. "Honey-bitch," said Ananias, "you'd better keep a cautious tongue in that viperous head of yours." "Jet off, you blackmailin' runt! Don't try threatenin' me. Don't you realize I could finish you any time I chose?" "How's that, honey-bitch?" "You fixed Bron's psycho-synthesis and the semantic recall triggers -- but I had a few tricks with Bron extendin' way back before your time. Just one word from me could put Bron on the defensive -- then he won't cooperate no matter what you do. How you goin' to survive that, Ananias?" "Get away from those controls, Jaycee. That's an order." "Go to hell, Ananias," said Medic-commander Veeder. "When you've finished the infighting, perhaps you could spare me an observer." Bron's mocking voice broke suddenly through the speakers. "I'm going to try to get the coordinates from the subspace cavity." "Engaged." Jaycee forsook the argument and became quickly absorbed in rapport with the screens, her hands delicately trimming the controls by sense of touch alone. "Full recordin' facility on, Bron. I'm followin'." Ananias shrugged resignedly and stalked toward the computer. Only when the ship coordinates had been firmly established and were ready for transpositions would he dare to interfere. But once he did move, the results would have to be swift, massive and final. There was no room for mistakes nor for the toleration of opposition at this stage of the game. Far too much had already gone wrong. T he call boards began to chime the reassembly call. Almost imperceptibly Bron began to feel the additional components of gravity as the main drive was run up to full power. Watching the pattern on the board, he waited for the alert of the subspace team and gave it time to reach stations before he attempted to follow. It was obvious that the ship's present mode of gravity drive was merely meant to provide steerage for a fast subspace passage. The situation suggested that the matrices would be used as soon as they had been programed. He was nearing the end of his time of waiting. Soon he had to pick up -- either from the chartroom or directly from the subspace matrix -- the coordinates that would betray the location of the Destroyer baseworld. At that point his own mission ended. The massed forces of the Stellar Commando, probably reinforced with the more spiteful dreadnoughts of the Terran Federation's combined navies, would split whole star systems apart if necessary just to destroy the world the Destroyers had made the basis of their might. The battle would undoubtedly be the biggest space war in history -- its winners would become a legend. Bron doubted anyone . would ever see or hear again of a Commando called Bron who would have made the whole thing possible. At some point the incredible nemesis awaiting Cana and his forces would catch up with the Destroyer ship in which Bron now traveled and his end would come. The lower corridors were almost empty and it was easy for him to pass through the minor gangways unobserved. Timing was important -- he dared not be too soon and he must not be too late. Even now the subspace team should be setting up its fantastic and delicate instruments to define the two points in space between which the ship would leap into the tachyon quasidimension. Although of a design unfamiliar to Bron's hypno-synthesis or his real memories, the entrance to the subspace installation bore the usual features dictated by the invariable principles of superluminal mechanics. The positive air pressure forced a gale around him as he opened the hatch. In the access tunnel he allowed the cyclone air streams to swirl about him, the boiling turbulence removing the more gross dust and lint on his garments. Somewhere in his awareness lurked a faIF miliarity with subspace mechanisms that bred caution rather than contempt. Not for a second did he attempt to disregard the elaborate precautions necessary to protect the delicate mechanisms in the cavity beyond. At the tunnel barrier he exchanged his sandals for a pair of the soft, clinging shoes on the rack and carefully dragged on the flexible rubber suit, which clung to his body like a second skin. Although the suit was designed to accommodate a Destroyer uniform, it would in no way encompass his gown. He was finally forced to discard the latter and proceed with the rubber hotly uncomfortable against his bare body. He passed through the stinging detergent sprays and rinses and then the dryer. Only' when this ritual had been carefully performed did he dare to penetrate beyond. The anteroom, where the subspace crew would wait during the jump, was empty. Next came the labyrinth and beyond this the matrix cavity itself, always a place of darkness and wonder. Basically the cavity was nothing but a skeletal box between the great electrodes, surrounded by a gallery from which the technicians worked. Within the box, created and maintained by the field conditions which gave the atmosphere its green and awesome complete section of the cosmos in miniature. No illumination was permissible save for the luminescence of the field and the technicians were too intent on working to notice a watching shadow hard against the outer wall. Only their faces were visible, illuminated by the eerie glow, like a gaggle of witches engaged in some wild, black art. With infinite care and delicacy the micron-straight, hair-fine probes were being extended like nearly invisible copper strands across the star matrix, defining positions and axes and measuring critical paths, probing always through the infinitesimally small spaces between the patterns of ersatz stars. Slowly across the micro-universe they were weaving the copper webs which would define the positions of entry and termination of their superluminal jump through tachyon space. knowledgeable eyes, his training or programing -- he had no way of telling which -- enabling him to assess the various criteria and thus the progress of the operation. Finally he judged it was time to move. "I'm going to try to pick up the coordinates soon, Jaycee. I'll leave you to do the recording while I merely observe." Engaged, Bron. Bron moved slowly around the perimeter gallery. If he was noticed at all by the subspace team they must either have assumed he was one of their own number or else that he had legitimate business in the cavity. In any event, nobody questioned his presence, and the painstaking work of aligning coordinates went on without interruption. When Bron was sure the final settings had been made he cautiously inspect each gauge turret in turn. Despite his arrangement with Jaycee he silently filed the figures from the dim digital indicators into a mnemonic key as he went. Jaycee, for her part, verbally confirmed her reception of the sequences. "I'm getting out now, Jaycee. I have to get clear before the crew leaves. I don't relish the idea of being trapped in here during the jump. Have you got all the figures you need?" I think so. Well transpose back into real-space coordinates and get them on transmission immediately. Bron turned to negotiate the labyrinth. "I suppose you'll be signing off soon? You've got all I came for." Were scheduled to maintain contact at least until we get confirmation of the destruction of the baseworld. That's the GenStaff requirement. But I think Doc wants to keep the project going purely as a Commando exercise. Ananias has been playing a rather peculiar game -- he's made us think there may be more in this affair than appears at the surface. Bron was swiftly stripping the rubber suit from his sweating body. "Tell me in a minute, Jaycee. Looks as though they're going to jump fast." Behind him he could hear movements in the labyrinth as the subspace crew vacated the cavity for the duration of the jump. He was well past the subspace anteroom, but still visible from its doorway. In the suit Bron had made an anonymous figure in the cavity darkness, but in his gown his identity was unmistakable. Only by gaining the hatch before the first crewman emerged from the labyrinth could he hope to conceal his intrusion. Even as the outer hatch was closing he heard behind him a sudden buzz of conversation and the click of a communications handset. It was impossible to tell if this was a routine incident or whether he had been seen and his presence reported. Although his presence in the cavity in no way exceeded the license allowed him by Cana, the pattern of his interests was beginning to weigh heavily against his assumed pose as an academic syncretist. Now that the Commandos had the information they required. IF Bron was free to try to mold for himself a pattern of survival if he could. Since he was sitting at what was calculated to be the losing end of one of the biggest projected space battles ever, his course was not easy to see. The subspace alert broke his deliberations and forced him to look for safety straps. Most of the positions were duty points, soon to be occupied by crewmen. He found a spare harness near the communications room and thrust his arms into it. So tightly did the Destroyers cut their pre-jump schedule that many of the crewmen made their positions with equally little time to spare. Then the ship jumped. The Destroyers obviously believed in making concessions neither to ship nor men when dealing with subspace. They slammed into it at full power, hard, fast and straight. Thirtythree seconds of gut-tearing, bonestraining agony, during which their craft was slipped through the lightbarrier to be hurled at superluminal velocities across the galaxy. Bron knew from subspace theory what his conscious mind refused to accept -- that by a process of involution the ship had in reality disappeared from the space-time continuum entirely and now actually moved between the webs of its own ersatz galaxy in the subspace cavity deep within its own guts. Stories still survived of spacemen who claimed to have seen the copper bars straddling the stars at the end of a subspace jump. Bron was not certain about this, but he did know that technicians caught in the subspace cavity during the jump had observed the ionization trail of their own ship speeding from web to web. Those of them, that is, who managed to recover from the shock. T he ship dropped into the quiescent phase of the jump and the tearing pressures eased. The heavy thunder of the grav drive was replaced by the eerie song of the fantastically delicate subspace drive. Bron unbuckled the harness and let it drop, finding suddenly that he was left with nothing specific to do but look for survival. His situation was unenviable. He could do nothing that might endanger the success of the Commandos -- within these slim confines he was entitled to seek his own salvation. Yet who was he? Who was this parcel of human flesh upon whom so much seemed to have depended? In the quietness of his own cabinspace the question suddenly seemed of great importance to him. "Jaycee, now tell me about hie. What name did I have other than Bron?" None, Jaycee responded with quiet malice. You were found in a street market of Anhatine on Bela-six by a Terran trade delegation. They had chartered a scudder and its descent blasted apart a pile of garbage. You were underneath, four weeks old.  wish to God theyd left you there, but they picked you up because they were Terrans and therefore soft and squeamish about the destruction of young life. They took you with them to the spaceport from which they were due to travel offworld. Neither the police nor the customs were interested, so you were shipped to Terra, registered as a demonstration animal. How you got the name nobody knows, but it was probably the coded customs stamp on your livestock export documents. In a way it seems rather appropriate. "You aren't lying to me are you, Jaycee?" No, it's all on file. On Terra your presence proved embarrassin to the dispersin' delegation. You were dumped in a para-military orphanage run by a Dr. Harvestine. Harvestine was a pathological bully, but apparently a good teacher. By the age of seven you learned enough of the brutal arts to break the doctor's neck in unarmed combat. Only the Commando school seemed to offer the type of curriculum to which you'd been accustomed, so the courts sent you there. For the next fifteen years you took everythin' in the way of trainin' the commandos could fling at you. Both academically and militarily you persisted in cornin' out on top. From weaponry through combat to higher mathematics you thrived on everythin' that was offered. But with one unalterable characteristic -- a capacity for chaos. "Chaos?" Yes, Bron. The ability to play a system against itself until it breaks down and disintegrates. Then, when everyone is runnin in circles, guess who moves through the ruins engaged in furtherin' his own ends? "And that's me?" That's you, Bron. Everythin' about you is chaos. Your personal life is chaos and the same thing happens to most of those with whom you get involved. You breed chaos and when the mess is thick enough you move in, pickin' the bits you think you want and then discardin' them when they don't provide whatever it is you're searchin' for. You do this with people as well as things -- and without regard for the consequences. "Tell me, Jaycee, did we ever meet?" That's classified information, Bron. I can't answer you that. "Damn you. I'll ask Doc." You'll get the same answer from anyone. Our relationship is on a psycologically balanced basis and you or nothin' is goin to upset the balance. IF "Don't compute on that, Jaycee. If ever I make Terra again it'll take more than the Stellar Commando to keep me from the objective I have in mind right now." The door opened abruptly and two armed crewmen gestured him out into the corridor. "Bron 'altern, Cana wants to see you. Come." This time there was no attempt at respect. A curt order and a movement with a handgun were more an indication of an arrest than a request for company. Bron shrugged and turned as directed. "This looks like the end, Jaycee," he said subvocally. Vm bringing Doc on-line. If there s anythin we can do... "You know the only damn thing you can do is kill me to stop my breaking under torture." T he detail halted before Cana's door, motioned for him to enter, then took stations outside, handguns ready. Cana was seated at his desk, a solitary figure deep in thought, chin in hands, elbows resting on a plane of polished wood. "Sit down, Syncretist," he said. "I take it you've concluded your investigations on the origin of the missile." Bron relaxed slightly. "I have." "Having checked a reprint of your calculations, I can assure you that your answers coincide exactly with our own. The fact that you programed the computer using a weaponry format rather than the classical software has not escaped my notice. One wonders just how far syncretism extends." His eyes looked into Bron's with a questing comprehension that left Bron feeling weak. A slight smile surfaced on Cana's lips. "You're a man of many talents, Syncretist. And I don't suppose we've seen all of them yet. But then, I should have expected nothing else from you." "I don't'understand." Cana raised his eyebrows sagely. "I take it you've already decided where the missile came from." "Of course. It originated either from a location in Messier Thirty-one some seven hundred million years ago or from a carrier somewhere in the void only a few hours before impact. From the location of your ring of ships at rendezvous, it is obvious that you know that a missile was going down on Onaris and knew in advance the precise details of its trajectory." "The implication being that the weapon carrier was mine and that the destruction of Onaris was an entertainment rigged mainly for your benefit?" "You read me correctly," said Bron. Knowing both the nearness and the inevitability of death gave him a curiously fatalistic courage. "You're no fool, Syncretist," said Cana, "and you're no megalomaniac either. Ask yourself why the hell I would go to such lengths just to amuse you. The answer is that I wouldn't. To reach the truth of the situation it is necessary to make an inversion. We didn't anticipate that missile as much as it anticipated us. And its origin was in Messier Thirty-one." "That I decline to believe. Have you tried to examine the implications?" "Yes." Cana maintained his intellectual calm. "The implications are simply that seven hunor something in Andromeda foresaw the precise details of our raid on Onaris and our acquisition of you and took steps calculated to prevent our meeting. So fantastic were their calculations that they were positionally exact and only about sixteen hours late in time. It's the same story almost wherever we go -- but the time margin is becoming smaller. On present estimates we shall be able to get away with only four more raids. If we attempt a fifth, we shall still be there when the hellburner arrives." "Suppose you leave earlier -- or change your destination?" "It makes no difference. It is the action we finally perform, not the decisions leading up to it, that is critical. If we plan a raid and abort our intention at the last #nstant, no missile appears. Sometime nobody but myself has known of the intention to abort a raid -- yet seven hundred mine was anticipated. If we plan a target, then switch to an alternative, it is to the alternative that the missile is directed -- was directed -- somewhere about the time that the first sparks of life were being struck in the Terran primitive soup. It's like the ancient concept of fate, fixed and immutable, that waits for you no matter where you run." "Insanity!" For a moment the Haltern synthesis flared. "Not insanity, Syncretist Bron Haltern -- or whoever you may be." Cana's gaze was shrewd and unruffled. "Rather a matter of cause and effect. Initially we were primarily engaged in acquiring slaves, but among our intake was an inevitable percentage of indigenous intelligentsia. These we employed on high-level tasks. Sometimes a missile followed these raids and sometimes it did not. Our computers threw up the curious correlation between our acquisition of certain specialist technocrats and the destruction of the world from which they had been taken. These peculiarly fatalistic individuals all had knowledge and potential in one Held of advanced cosmology -- that of the patterns of chaos. Which brings us directly to you." IF "In what way?" "Seeing that our opportunities were running short, we made it our deliberate policy when raiding to acquire the best chaos men in the galaxy. Your reputation as an authority on the patterns of chaos ranks indisputably the highest and made you a natural candidate both for us and for the arrival of the missile where and when it fell. Only -- " "Only what?" "The missiles normally consist of three cylinders at most. For you they sent seven. From a distance of better than six hundred thousand parsecs and seven hundred have held your achievements, actual or potential, in very high regard. What sort of things are you going to do, Syncretist, to realize that promise?" door forestalled any answer Bron might have made. Daiquist's voice could be heard raised in angry argument with the guard detail. Cana keyed a switch on his desk and the door swung open. "Come in, Martin. They had their instructions not to let us be disturbed." Daiquist strode into the room, followed by two junior officers. His face was red with fury. "You've got that damned syncretist here -- " "Certainly." Cana regarded his fuming lieutenant speculatively. "What's on your mind, Martin?" "He is. I thought he was a spy and now I'm certain of it." Cana remained utterly calm. "You could be right, Martin. I, too, have my suspicions. But they may not be relevant. It's no accident that seven cylinders went down on Onaris. Spy or not, he's certainly a prime chaos catalyst." , "To hell with Catalysis. I don't trust him. He's too damned clever. He was snooping around in the subspace cavity just before the jump." Cana stiffened. "Can you explain that, Syncretist?" "I was interested in how you programed for the jump. I have some subspace theories of my own." "I have other theories," said Daiquist, "and one of them is that you're not Haltern. It would take me only a half-hour in the interrogation room to get the truth from you." "No." Cana's voice was sharp. "All the signs so far are that we've acquired in him a key piece of this entropy puzzle. Haltern or not, it doesn't matter much. He appears to have the potential to fill whatever catalytic role the patterns of chaos have already set. To put it bluntly, a large part of the future threatens to ride on his shoulders -- and the future would be better supported on a fit back than on a cripple's." "Then confine him to where he can't get into any mischief -- or I can't be held responsibe for your safety or the safety of this ship." "Very well." Cana came to a sudden decision. "Break the jump, Martin, and put him aboard the nearest corvette." Daiquist nodded his acceptance. "I've an even better idea. Let me put him on the Tantalus -- and I'll go with him. I'd be interested in seeing his reactions." Cana considered some hidden implication in the proposal, nodded his approval. "I doubt you're right, Martin, but there's a slight chance we might learn something. There has to be something very special about a man whose murder was considered so essenDaiquist nodded curtly to his aides. "Take the Syncretist and lock him up. One of you is to stay with him at all times. I'll have the jump halted. We should be ready to make transfer within the hour." ty cabin and locked in with one of the aides. He lay back on the bunk and stared up at the ceiling. "Jaycee." Dont talk to me, you pitiful cretin! "What the hell's eating you?" If they discover now who you are it could ruin the whole exercise. "Spool the sermons, Jaycee. I need Ander, quick." You need poisonin, quick. Anders not here but Til try to contact him. Whats the readout? "I want a fast replay on this patterns of chaos business. Maybe Ander can make some sense out of it, but I'm damned if I can. Was Doc in on that last sequence?" On-line the whole way. When he'd finished his fingernails he started on mine. "Charming. What's the general impression?" As we read it, the only thing that's keepin you alive is Cana's fear of somethin' else. God alone knows what that somethin' is, but it either exists or Cana's the biggest nut of the millennium. "Cana's no nut. He's got a pretty powerful brain, but he's well balanced. He's at war with something and it isn't just the Terran Federation. So who or what the hell is it, Jaycee?" Sometimes I wonder if Ananias knows. He makes like a seasick dog at any mention of missiles from Messier #. He won't hear of the idea. "I suspect there's quite a lot that Ananias knows and won't tell. Is he there now?" No. He ran yapping to Genstaff with the coordinates instead of letting them go on standard transmission. I think he has ideas IF of taking you over personally. He hasnt been around long enough to know that workin with you isnt the sort of job you volunteer for. "I could almost wish he'd try. Any idea what kind of vessel the Tantalus might be? It seems to have some special significance for Daiquist and Cana." Computer check through Intelligence records of known Destroyer craft shows no listin. The only Tantalus that shows up anywhere for the last fifty years is the Terran Army's deep-space laboratory ship that got lost somehow a few years back on an experimental voyage beyond the Rim. "See if you can get a bit of detail on it. Might throw up something useful. I'd like a word with Doc if he's still there." Engaged, Bron. Doc Veeder's precise voice fell in soft contrast to Jaycee's edged tones. What's the readout? "Assuming for the moment that Cana is right about the seven cylinders on Onaris being intended specifically for Haltern, don't forget that the man to whom they should have been addressed was Ander, not me. I don't know what a chaos catalyst is -- but if Cana isn't mad or lying you could be sitting on some potential timebomb-type events centered on Ander. I just thought the fact might have slipped your notice." It did. We were concentrating so much on your end that we had forgotten about the substitution. We're not yet convinced about this chaos business, but it might be as well to play safe. Any suggestions? "Yes. Keep him well guarded and hold him available for communication over the transfer link. As I see it, something big is going to happen and he may well be the one person who can make sense of it all. I suggest you put a computer on full-time coincidence checking and feed every atom of even seemingly relevant data to it. This whole business has a decidedly off-beat feeling about it." I don't follow you, but I'll do as you suggest. I'll stay on-line for a bit in case anything new develops. B ron relaxed and closed his eyes. The aide guarding him toyed with his drawn sidearm at the table. Both men waited in silence for the end of the jump and for the next round of action to begin. Bron, his questing mind searching for some stimulus to bridge the hiatus, pushed his perception past the star static and the carrier hiss of the link circuit intruding from under his awareness threshold -- and found something else. Something that, though he knew its shadows, he was completely unprepared to face -- the goose-mutter, the phantom sound of liquid geese -- but louder this time, nearer, and with an articulate and angry urgency that chilled him to the marrow. His mind's initial reaction was to recoil in shock, but his analytical faculty forced him to seek some explanation. A glutinous, viscous, thixotropic foam of a sound, its incomprehensible yet meaningful babble struck him with all the implied urgency and horror of an unalterable disaster bearing down. Again his imagination fled, life-supported on an intangible raft, down the waters of some subterranean Styx, gathering shadows where there was no light and gathering sounds, the origin of which he dared not imagine. He felt the motion of the wash rippling gently at the breaking of some slight turbulence and sensed his own slow and measureless progression down the tunnel toward its end. What end? What lay around the dark bends of that terrible river? Fantasies more terrible than death reared up out of the shades of his imagination. His unashamed scream coincided exactly with the shrill of the break-jump alert and a few seconds later the liquid geese were washed away in the intricate agonies of the end of the subspace jump. L eaning past his escort as the tender left its monstrous parent's womb, Bron grasped the Hockung lens and brought it to bear on their destination. Spaceworthy though she must be, the Tantalus bore none of the look of bronzed efficiency that characterized Destroyer ships. Rather she looked to have been dipped in whitewash that had lost its adhesion and bulged and sagged and stripped. Nor had she the trim outline of a naval craft, being squat and ugly and with a hindpart made hideous and complex by the devices of a dozen different drive systems. If her hull had once had her name emblazoned on it, the legend had long since succumbed to the attrition of space and to corrosion and pitting. "Terran," said Bron subvocally, returning the Hockung lens to the navigator of the tender. Check, Bron. Looks as though it is the Armys long-lost deep-space lab. There's a print from Records just cornin' through, so we can run a comparison to see if she's been modified as a hellburner carrier. "I doubt it. Even if she were capable of throwing a device like that I don't see how she could have achieved an accuracy of plus or minus a meter over that sort of range." Somebody did. From a closer view it was possible to see the effect of the ravages to which the hull of the Tantalus must at some time have been subjected. Huge pits and whorls had penetrated an arm's thickness into the metal in a manIF ner suggesting she had been pressure-hosed with acid. In places the very metal itself seemed to have delaminated and the random curls and blisters of the outer skin in the process of detachment lent the ship a diseased and infected air. However, her docking equipment functioned efficiently enough and Bron, followed by Daiquist and the two aides, stepped through the lock into the warm, trim and quaintly outdated interior. Bron stopped suddenly, his scalp prickling. What is it, Bron? "Something's awfully wrong here. This ship has a very queer feel about it." What kind of wrong? "The weird kind. I can't define it. Has the Tantalus been modified?" Not as far as we can tell. But she did carry conventional weaponry -- as do all Army ships -- and these include Terran hellburriers of the Nemesis class. "The burner that went down on Onaris would have made the punch of. a Nemesis feel like a love bite. Anyway, there was nothing human in the design of that damn thing." Meanin that you re acceptin Cana's point of view that the Onaris burner was both aged and alien. She was coldly critical. Why the hell don't you -- "Spool it, Jaycee! I'm not accepting anything. I'm saying that if what I smell is right we're so far out of our depth that even if we sank at twenty-G acceleration we'd never touch bottom." How do you compute that? "I've just realized what's wrong with this ship. It isn't the Tantalus at all -- at least, not the one that was built. It's a bloody mirror image." Make a little sense, Bron. "Look at the dials and gauges. Look at the labels. Everything. Lateral inversion complete to the last detail. This isn't a Cana stage trick, Jaycee. This is real." Bron became aware suddenly that Daiquist was watching him with a fixed concentration that was actively hostile. Jaycee picked up the same point simultaneously. Watch out for Daiquist, Bron. I think he's trying to use the Tantalus to prove you're a Terran agent. Show any familiarity and you'll betray yourself. "Have the coordinates gone out on general transmission yet?" Don't know. Ananias isn't back. Why? "As soon as the Terran task force is under way and the plan can't be jeopardized I may have to kill Daiquist." quieted suddenly to allow Bron to concentrate as Daiquist turned back toward him. "You're looking puzzled, Bron Haltern." "This ship -- it's not Destroyer manufacture?" "No. Terran. A bit of cosmic flotsam we picked out of the void. It has its uses." "Do Terrans always read meters backwards?" "No. That's just a fragment of chaos. As a specialist in the field, it shouldn't perturb you unduly." Bron broke away from the encounter with a shrug. Nothing in his own training or in the Haltern synthesis had prepared him with an answer. Daiquist's interest in' pursuing the subject was broken as the subspace alert signaled the resumption of the jump. Unlike the Destroyer vessel, the Tantalus slipped into subspace with a mere shiver which was so soft as to be almost sensuous. As they moved into the quiescent phase Bron began to get his bearings and started walking apparently aimlessly through the ship's main installations. He hoped an outward display of academic interest was in keeping with his pose as a syncretist. Inwardly he was looking for vital threads that might aid his own survival. The Tantalus was a small vessel with perhaps only a hundredth part of the displacement of one of Cana's fleshholding spatial dreadnoughts. Since it was only lightly armed and, from its condition. scarcely capable of withstanding an attack, it occurred to Bron to wonder exactly what its function was in the fleet. Its laboratory facilities were well maintained and in use and it was crewed by an unusually high proportion of high-ranking technicians and even a few civilians. Their interest in his arrival ran in strong contrast to Daiquist's dour suspicion. Daiquist shadowed him silently for a while, then approached and took his arm. "Come, I want you to meet the captain -- Academician Laaris." The captain was as untypical of Destroyer personnel as the Tantalus was of their fleet. His chartroom was a mess of improvised instrumentation, among which he moved with the agility of a sprite. He was small and dark and his bright eyes glinted with shrewdness. With only a formal acknowledgment of Daiquist, he forcibly crossed the veins of his wrist with Bron's in the Destroyer familiar greeting. "Mastership 'altern, for you I die!" Bron's surprise at the greeting must have been reflected in his face, for Laaris smiled broadly. "No, we 'ave not met, but I know you well. Everyone who works on chaos knows you. The paper you gave at Maroc on Priam is almost our standard tex'." Bron could not resist the question. "Is that what you're doing on IF the Tantalus -- research into the patterns of chaos?" "But of course." For a moment Laaris looked perplexed. "Is that no' why you come?" "I don't think so." Bron glanced at Daiquist and waited to hear the colonel's explanation. "Haltern's not here of his own free will. He's a prisoner and, we suspect, a spy. For that reason he's under open arrest. Watch him. Captain. He's a dangerous man." Laaris's face was crossed by a bafflement which was rapidly replaced by a smile of relief. "The science of chaos is intergalactic. It is you, Colonel, who fail to comprehen' the liaison between scientific minds. Come 'altern, I will find you cabinspace. Later we can talk chaos." from Daiquist's prying eyes, Bron's contact was urgent. "Jaycee, for God's sake -- haven't you got Ander yet? Either I talk chaos with an expert or Daiquist is set to take me apart." Ander s been located, Bron. We should have him soon. "Are the coordinates on transmission yet?" Ananias has just come in. # ask -- "Put him on-line. Things are becoming critical fast " I dont trust Ananias near the control board. "Damn you, Jaycee. Do as you're told." Well spoken, Bron. Ananias's insinuating tones took over. Glad to find Tm not the only one who has trouble with Honey-bitch. "Spool it, Ananias. Did the coordinates go out yet?" Thats GenStaff s business. "And mine. I'm going to have to make a move soon. If I move too fast the whole Destroyer pack will scatter like a shoal of startled fish." You overestimate yourself, little soldier. "No, but I underestimated you. Look around me, Ananias. Do you see where I am?" On another vessel. Terran, I would guess. "You're not guessing, Ananias. You damn well know. The LabShip Tantalus, no less." Is that supposed to mean something to me? "As I begin to recall it, yes. Are you listening, Jaycee?" On-line, Bron. "This amnesia seems to be catching. Run a replay of the crewlist of the last recorded voyage of the Tantalus.' Don't bother. Ananias's voice was swift and angry. I'll admit it lists me. But you've gone over the edge, Bron. I'm warning you to stay quiet. Don't be a damn fool. "Listen, Ananias, from now on this operation's going to be handled my way. You're going to cooperate, because you haven't the character to stand the stigma of being branded as a freak." The sharp noise of a scuffle penetrated the transfer link. Then somebody screamed with pain. Its all right, Bron. Vm holdin him. He tried to hit the murder button, so I dislocated both his thumbs. Give us the readout. Wed better have the information this end so we can use it in case anythin happens to you. "Yes, you had better. Colonel Ananias, as he was then, commanded the Tantalus on the voyage during which she was lost. As sole survivor he made Terra two years later on a stellar tramp and claimed he was beaten out of space by a Destroyer task force." It was the truth. Ananias's pained protest carried distinctly. "I doubt it," said Bron. "The damage done to this ship was never done by any Destroyer. It's my guess you fled out of the void when something unnamable overtook you. I think you abandoned the Tantalus somewhere to make the story hold, then transhipped to Terra on a tramp. I hate to think what became of the crew." You don t have a single shred of proof. "I don't, but I think you have. Jaycee, you've probably slept with him. Was there nothing unusual?" Hes a Godlost weaklin -- but thaTs nothin unusual. Jaycee's contempt was as sharp as a whiplash. What you meanin , Bron? "Feel under his shirt, Jaycee. If my idea is true you'll find his heart on the right side instead of on the left -- where it was when he was born. I think he became inverted at the same time as the Tantalus. And whatever caused the phenomenon had nothing to do with a human agency." IX RN, Tve got A nder for you. "Put him on-line, Jaycee. He's got about five minutes to bring me up to mastership standard in the theory and practice of chaos." A nder speaking. I do what I can. But I can only give you barest outline. "Reading you, Ander. That will have to suffice. What is this thing called chaos?" The whole spectrum of cause and effect, from the subnuclear to the galactic, considered not as connected incidents but from an entropic standpoint -- as a random dynamic fluid. "I can see the concept, but not how you can use it." I come to that. First let me establish the importance of time as a factor. ITs a fundamental tenet of the universe that entropy increases with time. The only exception is intervention by some form of intelligence, such as Mans, which can locally deIF crease entropy or accelerate its rate several orders above the norm. A knock at the door signaled for Bron's attention. Shrugging his gown to the floor, he went to the door and opened it. "Mastership 'aitern, Academician Laaris would be please' for you to join 'im urgently." "As soon as I have finished my ablutions I shall be ready." Bron freely amplified the weak suggestions of Haltern intolerance. "Tell him I come soon." Securing the latch, he returned to the watcher in his head. "Carry on, Ander. I read the words so far." Dont need them, learn them. They re important. All chaos calculations are made against quantized time and can be either prognostic or retrospective according to the sign. They can be used to predict the future or to examine the elements of the past which have had a significant bearing on the present. "But having randomized all your factors, I don't see how it's possible to determine anything by mathematical treatment." Imagine a container of fluid. "Your entropic system -- molecules in random motion?" Exactly. You should have been scholar, not soldier. The pressure of the fluid is due to the random collision and rebounding of molecules with each other and with the walls of the container. In the hypothetical fluid we call chaos the molecules are replaced by events and the events interact with each other just as do molecules. "Keep going, Ander. I'm still with you. But I'm fast running out of time." Bron found the shower and ran it noisily. "Daiquist'll come looking if I don't show up soon. I wonder what the panic is."  must lead you through this part carefully. Not understanding it could be fatal for you. Suppose your container initially had inhomogeneous areas of fluid at different temperatures? "They would mix by diffusion. The energy of the system would remain the same, but the entropy would slowly increase." Thus you have a fair analogue of the condition of the universe. A nother knock, heavier than the last, came at the door. This time Bron went stark naked and trailing water in his wake. Daiquist stood outside, stern, suspicious and angry. He seemed somewhat mollified to find that the promised ablutions were actually taking place. "You're taking a damn long time, Syncretist. You're needed in the chartroom." "The dust of the Destroyers is uncommonly hard to remove." Bron turned his back on the colonel and stalked back to the shower. Daiquist came into the room and stood impatiently. "I'll wait until you're finished. You'd better hurry. Laaris needs you." "Ander, this is going to be tricky. Keep talking." SubvocallyIf you can grasp the next point we're nearly there. In your container, what would be the effect of heating or cooling small areas of the fluid? "Obviously local accelerations or decelerations of entropy." Bron switched on the driers in the cubicle. And in our chaos fluid, what could be the only cause of the chaos analogue? I've already given you the answer once. "You mean intervention by some form of intelligence such as Man's?" Precisely, Bron. Home and dry. Events precipitated by intelligent intervention invariably lead to alterations in local entropy and these can usually be detected by entropic analysis. Going back to our analogy, this corresponds to local heating or cooling of points in the fluid. If it occurred in an actual fluid it could be detected in a number of ways according to its sign and intensity -- optically, as a local change in diffraction: audibly, perhaps as an explosion or a cavitation implosion: physically, as a shockwave or pressure difference. "And in your theoretical chaos fluid?" An effect similar to that of a spherical shock-wave spreading out from the point of origin -- continuously growing, continuously falling in intensity. It is observable only as minute ripples in the long tides of entropy. It's the inter-ripple and interference of these entropic wave fronts that we call the patterns of chaos. Daiquist was pacing the floor angrily. He was obviously unused to being disobeyed and was distressed by an unstated urgency. Bron drew on his undergarments and then his gown, carefully subvocalizing so that his attentive antagonist should receive no sign. "But how do you detect the ripples?" Detection is the least of the problems. A detector can be as simple as an iron diaphragm in an oxygen atmosphere. Given a measuring system sensitive enough to show the acceleration or deceleration of its natural entropic change, its fairly easy to see the ripples pass. But the mathematical analysis of these ripples into meaningful points of time and place is difficult. Bron creased his brow. His conversation must cease in seconds and he would then need to adopt the pose of an expert. But he dared IF delay no longer. Daiquist drew his firearm and gestured for Bron to precede him along the corridor. Yet Bron's questions still needed urgent answer. "Stay on-line, Ander. You spoke of cause and effect. I can see how you can locate the incident that was the cause of something, but what about locating the effect?" The one is only the converse of the other. There is no difference between them except for the direction in which you read time. Youll be familiar with that concept from your studies of the fundamental particles. Both cause and effect make detectable entropic  sparks' that become the centers of expanding shock spheres. If you can analyze enough of the sphere to be able to determine the radius of its curvature and its intensity you can locate the position of a cause or resultant both in space and time by extrapolating along the geocentric axis. But mark this: the significant thing about a linked cause and resultant is that those two correlated events, and those alone, will have coincident axes. If you can locate the one you can usually find the other. Academician Laaris had somehow lost his vivacity under a cloud of concern. Even his technicians, who had formerly shared his interest in the syncretist's arrival, were now too dumbly attentive to their boards to mark Bron's entrance. Instead of an air of academic interest, the atmosphere was charged with disbelief and panic. " 'altern!" Laaris almost split himself with relief on seeing Bron. " 'altern, this you 'ave to explain." He seized a ten-meter length of chart strip and tore it from the recorder. "Such a chaos wave as this we 'ave never seen before." Bron took the chart strip and began to explore along it. The multicolored lines started with slow excursions, gentle ripples on an abstract shore, part of the everpulsing patterns of chaos. Then a red trace broke away from its fellows, crossed the logarithmic scale to near infinity and was apparently arrested even there only by the inability of the luckless instrument to follow it farther. For several meters the errant trace fought the stop-post on the meter. Then, even more abruptly than it had arisen, the trace fell straight across the graph and disappeared below absolute zero. Somebody said. Holy Moses! deep inside Bron's head. Subvocally: "Did you see that, Ander? I need answers fast." I don't have any. I need more information about the computer scan to be certain. Laaris was upon Bron, almost dancing with impatience to hear the sage explain. The Haltern synthesis stood mute. "Academician Laaris, can you first define the parameters of your computer scan?" "Scan? Scan?" The little man almost hopped with despair. "You don' need computer scan to answer tha'." "You forget," said Bron Haltern coldly, "that your information is presented in Destroyer conventions, not mine." "But always," expostulated. Laaris, "the red line is your reference baseline. 'Ere it is the line representing this ship as a reference point. Where 'as it gone? Where went my ship?" Ander said. Have it now, Bron, and began to pour information into his head. Bron considered the import of the words as he reread the last appearance of the red line. "You don't need me to tell you," he said at last to Laaris. "You know the answer as well as I. We have just entered a chaos-effect shock sphere and are proceeding directly down a coincident axis to the point of origin -- which will be this vessel's complete annihilation." Laaris looked up gratefully. "You, too, 'altern, say the same as I. I thought I was mistaken. Because I don' see how i's possible for the vessel itself to be on coinciden' axis unless somethin' aboard was also the cause of the annihilation." "Curious you should say that," said Daiquist, picking up his gun and looking at Bron meaningly. "Because that's the one point about which I'd never had a doubt." D aiquist motioned to a couple of the crew. "Look after the syncretist while I get this sorted out." He turned back to Laaris. "Am I to understand the chaos evidence means this ship is set for destruction?" "There's no doubt abou' i'." "From what cause?" "That I can' say. The causal wave 'as not shown up. Perhaps if we reset the scan -- " "There's no time. I've seen how accurate chaos evidence can be." He waved an arm in Bron's direction. "Lock him up somewhere." Bron submitted, reading the underlying perplexity on Laaris's brow and equating it with his own. "Ander, tape me in, will you. We've seen an effect wave, but Laaris says the causal wave has not shown up. Can you have an effect without a cause? If not, why haven't we seen the wave?" We will, Bron. "What do you mean?" It had me stumped at first. Laaris had a prognostic scan set up on his computer and was reading IF a future event, the cause of which is missing. Its a highly unique situation even in chaos work, but it can happen. The simple answer is that the cause hasnt yet happened. "But neither has the effect actually happened yet," protested Bron. You re not thinking good chaos, Bron. The destruction of the Tantalus is an event already fixed in the entropic patterns. ITs impossible to alter that fact. But the means by which you are going to achieve its destruction have not yet been determined and therefore have as yet no precise point in the patterns. "The means by which I am going to achieve its destruction?" Yes, Bron. You're the other end of the coincident axes. You're the catalyst that is going to initiate the entropic change. "Not the Stellar fleet, then?" No, or there would already have been a wavefront corresponding to their decision to attack. In fact, from the absence of extraneous lines I'd say the Stellar Commando fleet was not even going to get there. Jaycee on-line, Bron. I just caught the trailing end of that conversation and it computes straight. The Commando raid has been aborted. Disappointment weighted her every word. Bron was staggered. "You have to be joking -- " The coordinates turned out to be Brick's World -- an early settlement planet colonized during the Great Exodus. It's a farm planet, lacking mineral resources. Definitely not a Destroyer baseworld. GenStaff reckons the Destroyers use it for reprovisioning, but if they do they don't stay for more than a few hours. By the time we could get a fleet there the Destroyers could be anywhere in space. "So the mission's a failure?" We're going to keep riding with you in case something shows up, but officially the game is over. "I'm glad you said that, Jaycee. I'm rapidly coming to the point where I'm going to have to take the initiative myself. Is Ananias around?" He's down with the medic, havin' his thumbs put back in joint. Don't think he'll be doin' any maulin' for a few days. Doc's still fightin GenStaff over him, but it looks as if Ananias might win. "I haven't finished with General Ananias. There's a check you can run for me, Jaycee. Find out how much of the equipment we've seen on the Tantalus is Terran original. Ananias used to command Tantalus, so I want to know how much access he might have had to chaos information." Which channel you readin' , Bron? "I want to know how much of this project he could possibly have foreseen, given the right know-how." Engaged, # give you the readout as soon as it comes in.  could rather enjoy reducin' that bastard to a jelly. T he break-jump alert sounded shrilly. The Tantalus slipped out of subspace almost imperceptibly, in contrast to the subtle agonies of the Destroyer maneuver. Bron waited impatiently for release from the cabin in which he had been locked -- he heard indications of the ship's being abandoned. At last the proximity lock responded to an unseen hand. Daiquist stood at the door. 'You have Academician Laaris to thank for this. I'd have been content to let you rot. But he was so impressed by your interpretation of his chaos graphs that he insists that you have the freedom of the facilities which he is unable to employ." "Unable?" "On chaos evidence, this ship is set for destruction. We've taken Laaris and his crew to another ship for safety. You'll remain aboard with a skeleton crew who will place the Tantalus into a safe orbit. If the Tantalus survives that long you'll be fetched down and held until Cana decides what to do with you. The skeleton crew has instructions to shoot you if you attempt to interfere with the running of the ship. Apart from that you're free to make your own way to hell." Thoughtfully Bron watched the last tender leave. The only men who were left aboard the Tantalus were hard-lipped Destroyer shipmen, clannish technological animals, molded in the inbuilt ruthlessness that characterized Destroyer operations. Bron ignored them and made for the computer terminal, his mind beginning to play with the several possibilities the situation presented. Nevertheless he waited until the Tantalus was actually back in subspace before he dared to make any kind of move. Actuating a programer, he began to key figures into the input, working by touch on the laterally inverted keyboard and deliberately avoiding watching either his own fingers or the acceptance readout. What you doin', Bron? "Exercising my fingers. There are a few throats I've got to keep them in trim for." Her voice grew taut. Let me see those figures for the recorders. You know the rules. "Spool it, Jaycee. You had your run and it got us nowhere. Now jet off while I do it my way." Are you defy in' me, Bron? Her voice was archly incredulous. IF "I don't give a damn about you. Go ply your bitchiness where it's appreciated."  said let me see those figures, Bron. I dont want to have to use the punishment circuits on you. "Don't fool yourself. You'd just love the opportunity. It's the justification you're lacking." She did not respond. The program completed, he activated the transfer of the data to the computing complex unexamined, not wishing to expose his position by scanning the tape for the benefit of Jaycee's recorders. rm warnin' you, Bron. Perhaps you've forgotten what sort of bite  can apply. "Call Doc, Jaycee," said Bron wearily. "If I've forgotten, he'll no doubt remind me." He was now watching the intermediate readouts as the computer fled through the calculations. Over the transfer link he could hear Jaycee's voice raised in vitriolic protest. Then the voice of Doc came clear upon the air. What the hell's this about, Bron. You should know better than to cross Jaycee. He sounded infinitely tired. "Turn off the recorders. Doc, and listen. What kind of game is Ananias playing?" You're not alone in wondering. He must have a personal deity on the General Staff to allow him to get away with what he does. In answer to your earlier question, it seems he did have access to a lot of chaos equipment. "Was it he who suggested the Destroyers should be allowed to raid Onaris unmolested?" Yes -- 'but it was in accordance with the outline plan. Bron watched the readouts with growing comprehension. "Was the Onaris hellburner in the plan too?" No. That was something we hadn't foreseen. We wouldn't have let the Destroyers hit Onaris if we'd known about that. "You wouldn't, perhaps. But what about Ananias?" Naturally not -- "There's nothing natural about it -- or him." Bron saw the "calculation complete" signal come up on the board and activated the printout. "I have a theory that Ananias knew that hellburner was going to go down on Onaris and I think he knew it a long time ago. I think he knew it as surely as he knew where and when the Destroyers were going to pick me up. Don't underestimate Ananias. He knew in advance that the Destroyers' subspace coordinates would not ever lead to Brick's World." But they did. "No, Doc, they didn't. Ananias double-crossed you." #S The Stainless Steel Rat could do few things rightbut nothing at all wrong! I carried an attache case filled with the usual things -- grenades, gas bombs, explosives, nose filters, a gun or two -- just the normal tools of the trade. My back was straight, my shoulders square and I entered the paymaster's office in a most martial manner if only to do the uniform justice -- a spanking new goldstriped and beribboned uniform of a commander in the United States Navy. "Good morning," I snapped briskly, closing the door behind me and locking it at the same time, swiftly and silently, with the tool concealed in my hand. "Yes, sir." The grizzled chief petty officer behind the desk spoke politely enough but it was obvious that his attention was rreally upon his work, the papers piled neatly upon his desk, and strange officers simply had to wait their turn. Just as sergeants do in all armies, the chiefs run the navies. Sailors hurried about on naval financial matters and through a doorway opposite I had a view of the gapemouthed gray form of a government issue safe. Lovely. I put my case on the chief's desk and snapped it open. "I read about it in the newspaper," I said. "About how the military always rounds its figures updollars when asking for appropriations. I admire that." "Aye aye, sir," the chief muttered, his fingers punishing the comptometer keys, uninterested in either my reading ability or in any comments from the press. "I thought you would be interested. But that gave me the idea. Share the wealth. With such liberality there should be plenty to spare for me. That is why I am going to shoot you. Chief." That got his attention. I waited until the eyewidening and jawgaping reached their maximum, then pulled the trigger on the long barreled pistol. It went shoof and thudded in my hand and the chief grunted and slipped from sight behind the desk. All of this had taken but a moment and the others in the office were just becoming aware that something was wrong when I turned and picked them off one by one. Stepping over the litter of bodies, I poked my head into the inner office and called out. "Hoo-hoo, Captain, I see you." He turned from the safe, growling some nautical oath, and caught the needle in the side of his neck. He folded as quickly as the others. My drug is potent, swift and soporific. Already snores were IF rising from the room behind me. The payroll was there, stacks of crisp bills arranged neatly in a nest of trays. I snapped open my folding suitcase and was reaching for the first bundle of green goodness when the glass crashed out of the window and the gun hammered bullets in my direction. ever wanted me perforated had fired through the glass I would have been thoroughly punctured by the lead slugs the people of this time favored, but he had not. His pausing to break the glass before firing had given me that fraction of a second to take the kind of action always suspicious reflexes are constantly waiting for. I was over and back in a tumbling roll, minibombs from my sleeve holdout dropping into my fingers even before I hit the floor. Both flash and smoke. They thudded and flared and the air was instantly opaque. I sent more after the first and the firing stopped. I wriggled along the floor like a snake and, with the bulk of the safe between myself and the window, began stuffing the bag full of money, working by touch. The circumstance that I was trapped and in mortal danger was no reason to leave the loot. If I was going to all this trouble I ought at least to be paid for it, I felt. Dragging both bags behind me I crawled toward the outer office and was about to go through the doorway when the loudhailer blared outside. "We know you're in there. Come out and surrender or we'll gun you down. The building is surrounded. You don't have a chance." The smoke thinned out near the door and, standing in the darkness, I could see through the windows that the voice had been speaking the truth. There were trucks out there, presumably loaded with hard-eyed and armed SP's. As well as jeeps with heavy machine guns mounted in their rears. Quite a reception committee. "You'll never take me alive," I shouted, sowing smoke and flare bombs in all directions -- I even dropped a larger grenade that took out part of the rear wall. Under cover of all this excitement I crawled over to the sleeping chief and peeled off his jacket by touch. A lad of long service, he had more stripes than a tiger and hash marks up to his elbows. I threw my jacket aside and donned his, then traded hats as well. The people outside seemed to have set an elaborate trap, which meant they knew more about me than I cared to have them know. But this knowledge could be turned against them by a swift change in rank. I flipped a few more bombs about, put my gun into my pocket, picked up both bags and unlocked and flung the front door open. "Don't shoot -- " I called out in a hoarse voice as I stumbled out into the fresh air and stood in the open doorway, a perfect target. "Don't shoot -- he's got a gun in my back. I'm a hostage -- " I tried to look terrified, which required little effort when I saw the small army facing me. I staggered forward a half step and looked over my shoulder, letting everyone get a good view of me while attempting to ignore the feeling that I had a bull's-eye painted on my chest, the big black spot right over my heart. No one fired. I stretched the moment a bit, then dived off the steps. "Shoot. Get him! I'm clear -- " The result was most spectacular. All of the guns let go at once, blew the door from the frame and the glass from the windows. The whole front of the building became as perforated as a collander. "Aim high -- " I called out, crawling for the protection of the nearest jeep. "All our guys are on the floor."  and began to separate the top of the building from the bottom. I crept past the jeep and an officer came over to me and collapsed as I broke a sleep-gas capsule under his nose. "The lieutenant's hit," I cried as I shoved him and the bags into the back of the jeep. "Get him out of here." The driver was very obliging and did as ordered, barely giving me time to get in myself Before we had gone five meters the gunner was sleeping next to the lieutenant, and as soon as the driver shifted into high gear he dozed as well. Getting him out of the seat and getting myself into it was tricky while bouncing along at a good clip, but I managed it. Then I stood on the gas pedal. It did not take them long to catch on. In fact the first of the jeeps was after me even as I was stuffing the driver in back with the others. This barrier of bodies was a blessing -- because of it no more guns were going off. But they certainly were in hot pursuit. I did a sharp turn around a building and sent a platoon of boots jumping for cover, then took a fast look at the pursuers. My! Twenty, thirty vehicles of all kinds tore along after me. Cars, jeeps, trucks, even a motorcycle or two, passing each IF other, horns and sirens going, having a wonderful time. Jim diGriz, benefactor of mankind. Wherever I go happiness follows. I turned into a large hangar and rushed between rows of parked helicopters. Mechanics dived aside in a cloud of flying tools as I skittered between the machines in a tight turn back toward the open front. As I emerged on one side my followers were rushing in at the other. Very exciting. Helicopters -- why not? This was Bream Field, the self-proclaimed helicopter capital of the world. If they could fix the things they could fly them. By now the entire naval station would be locked tight and surrounded. I had to find another way out. Off to one side the green glass form of the tower loomed up and I headed in that direction. The flight line was before me and a fatbellied helicopter stood there, motor rumbling and blades swishing slowly. I squealed the jeep to a stop below the gaping door. When I stood up to throw my bags into the copter a heavy boot kicked out at my head. The people here had been alerted by radio, of" course -- as probably had everyone else in a hundredmile radius. It , was annoying. I had to duck, grab the boot and wrestle with its owner while my horde of faithful followers roared up behind me. The boot's owner knew entirely too much about this kind of fighting so I cheated and shortened the match by shooting him in the leg with one of my needles. Then I threw the money into his machine, hurled some sleep-gas grenades after it -- and finally myself. Not wanting to disturb the pilot, who was snoring at the controls, I slipped into the copilot's seat and bugged my eyes at the dials and knobs. There were certainly enough of them for such a primitive device. By trial and error I managed to find the ones I wanted, but by this time I was surrounded by a solid ring of vehicles and a crowd of white-hatted cluband gun-bearing SP's were fighting to be first into the copter. The sleep gas dropped them, even the ones wearing gas masks, and I waited until I had a full load, then pulled the throttle full on. T here have been better takeoffs but, as an instructor once told me, anything that gets you airborne is satisfactory. The machine shuddered and shimmied and wallowed about. I saw men diving for safety below and felt the crunch of the landing gear against the top of a truck. Then we were up and sagging away in a slow turn. Toward the ocean and the south. It was not chance alone that had led me to this particular military establishment when my funds ran low. Bream Field is situated in the lower corner of California with the Pacific Ocean on one side and Mexico on the other. Which is as far south and as far west as you can go and stay in the United States. I no longer wished to stay in the United States. Not with what looked like all of the navy and marine helicopters in the country rumbling up after me. I'm sure the fighter planes were on the way. But Mexico is a sovereign nation, a different country, and the pursuit could not follow me there. I hoped. At least it would pose some problems. And before the problems had been solved I would be long gone. As the white beaches and blue water flew by beneath me I worked on a simple escape plan. And familiarized myself with the controls. After a bit of trial and error and a few sickening lurches I found the automatic pilot. A nice device that could be set to hover or to follow a course. Just what I needed. The mere sight of it provided my plan, complete and clear. Below me the border rushed up, then the bull ring and the pink, lavender and yellow houses of a Mexican beach resort. They swept by and the grim coastline of Baja California began. Black teeth of rocks in the foam, sand and sharp gorges cutting down to the sea, gray mesquite, dusty cactus. An occasional house or campsite. Dead ahead a rocky peninsula jutted out into the ocean and I pulled the machine up over it and down on the other side. The rest of the copters were only seconds behind me. Seconds were all I needed. I set the controls to hover and climbed down among the sleeping defenders of the law. The ocean was about ten meters below, the great spinning rotors sending up clouds of spray from it. I threw both my bags out into the water and had turned to inject the pilot in the neck even before the bags hit. He was stirring and blinking -- the sleep-gas antidote is almost instantaneous -- as I set the robot pilot for forward flight and dived for the open door. It was a close thing. The copter was moving forward at full blast as I tumbled into the air. It wasn't much of a dive but I did manage to get my feet down so they hit first. I went under, swallowed some water, coughed, swam up and banged my head on one of the floating bags. I congratulated myself on my foresight in having bought the new non-sinkable type. But the waIF ter was far colder than I had thought it would be and I was shivering and a cramp was beginning in my left leg. The bag gave me some support so that, kicking and floundering, I splashed over and grabbed the other one. As I secured my gains a mighty roar came overhead as the rumbling crowd of helicopters hurtled past like avenging angels. I'm sure that no one in them was looking down at the water -- all attention seemed fixed upon the single copter rushing south ahead of them. Even as I looked this machine began to bob and turned in a slow arc. A delta-wing jet appeared suddenly, diving past it, coming up and around. I had a little time but not very much. And could see absolutely no place to hide on the exposed rock of the peninsula or the bare sand of the shore. Improvise, I told myself as I paddled and puffed toward the shore. They don't call you Slippery Jim for nothing. Slip out of this one... The cramp took over and all I felt like doing was slipping under the water. Then firm sand was under my feet and I staggered, gasping, up onto the beach. den. Camouflage, one of mother nature's original tricks. The angry copters were still buzzing about on the horizon as I began to dig furiously at the sand with my bare hands. Stop, I ordered myself and sat up, swaying. Use your brains not your muscles -- lesson number one... Of course. I slipped an explosive grenade into my hand, triggered it and dropped it into the shallow hole, then dived aside. It whoomphed satisfactorily and sent up a spray of sand. And left a tidy crater that was just the right size for the two bags. I hurled them into it and began to undress frantically, throwing my clothes after the bags. The copters must have been chatting with each other -- they were turning and starting back down the beach. Entirely by chance, vanity had goaded me into putting on purple underwear this morning -- it could easily pass for swimming attire from a distance. I stripped down to shorts and kicked sand into the hole, covering everything. By the time the first copter swished by overhead I was lying face down and sunning myself, just another swimmer on a beach. They swept overhead in a line. I sat up and looked at them as anyone would with all this going on. Then they were past -- bobbing up over the rocky spine -- and gone, motors rumbling out of hearing. But not for long -- I heard and saw them again. Whoever was in charge had ordered a sweep in line abreast covering the ocean, beach and hills. Now they were slower, searching every inch of the way, undoubtedly with high-powered glasses. Time for another swim. I shivered when the spray curled around my ankles and knew I was turning blue as the water crept ever upwards. A wave broke over my head and then I was swimming. A copter came to hover over me, sending up clouds of spray. I shook my fist up at it and shouted realistic curses into the sound of its engine. Someone was leaning out of the open doorway, calling to me, but I was not listening. After a certain amount of fist-shaking I submerged and swam underwater, trying to make my one uncramped leg do the work of two. The copter was swinging away after the others as I painfully made my way ashore again and sprawled on the sand so the wind and sun could dry me. Now how did I get out of here? II out of sight I dug like a mole and unearthed my clothing and the bags, rushing them up the beach above the high water mark. Another bomb and another interment, only this time I put on my trousers and shoes -- and made sure some of my equipment went into the pockets. A few quick cuts transformed the long-sleeved uniform shirt into a short-sleeved sport shirt. As this clothing began to dry it lost all resemblance to any part of a military dress. Before leaving I scuffed and dragged the sand to obliterate all signs of digging and took careful triangulations of some large inland peaks so I could find the spot again. Then I headed for the coast road that passed a few hundred meters away. My luck held. I had no sooner climbed into the northbound lane when a beetlelike machine with high wheels came rushing towards me. I raised my thumb in the universal gesture and was answered by a squealing of brakes. I saw now that powered surfboards were sticking out of the vehicle's back. Two tanned young men sat in the front, their garments even more disarrayed then mine. A fashion, I knew, so perhaps they took me for one of their own. "Man, you look wet," one commented as I climbed into the back. "Baby, I was high and took a watery trip." IF "Gotta try that some time," the driver answered and the machine hurled itself down the road. Less than a minute later two hulking black sedans with flashing lights and howling sirens tore down the road in the opposite direction. The large letters side and required little linquistic knowledge to translate. My new friends, refusing the offer of refreshment, let me off in downtown Tijuana and raced away. I sat at an outside table with a large tequila, lime and salt, and realized that I had just escaped from a carefully planned trap. And a trap it was. That was obvious now that I had time to stop and think about it. All those jeeps and trucks had not appeared out of thin air and it is doubtful that amount of firepower could have been organized so quickly even if an alarm had gone off. I went back over my motions, step by step, and was absolutely sure that I had activated no alarms. So how had they known what was going to happen? They knew because some timehopper had read the newspapers after the event then had jumped back in time to give the warning. I had been expecting this to happen -- but that did not mean I had to enjoy it. I licked the salt from the base of my thumb, downed the bulk of the tequila and bit hard into the lime. The combination tasted marvelous as it burned a course of acid destruction down my throat. He was alive. I had wiped out his organization in this happy year of # A.D. but He had gone on to bigger and worse nastiness in another era. The time war was on again. Now He and his madmen wanted to control all history and all time, an insane idea that might very well succeed, since they had already wiped out the Special Corps in the future, the one lawabiding organization that might have beaten them. Or rather they had wiped out all of the Corps except me, while I had bounced into the past to wipe out the wiper-outers and in doing so restore the Corps to the probable paths of future history. Big assignment, of which I had accomplished ninetynine point nine percent. It was the vital one-tenth of a percent that was still causing trouble -- the monster He, who had escaped me at the end of a time helix even though he had been nicely peppered with exploding slugs from my gun. Probably had armored guts. Next time I would use something stronger. An atomic bomb on his breakfast tray. time helix could be built to whip me back to the future -- rather, ahead to the future -- grammar leaves a certain amount to be desired when it comes to traveling through time. Backahead to the arms of my Angelina and the acclaim of my peers. But not right now since they did not even exist. Time war is tricky and can become confusing. I was glad that I did not need to know the theory but could just be whipped back and forth by others like a temporal paddle-ball to do my violent best at whatever the assignment required. There was little difficulty in obtaining a car and digging up the money early the next morning, although certain plainclothes observers had to be induced to sleep soundly instead of doing their jobs. Smuggling the money back into the United States was even easier and before noon I was in the offices of Whizzer Electronics, Incorporated, in San Diego. A large and complete laboratory, a small front office with a not too bright receptionist -- and that was it. I had set the place up as best I could and it was up to Professor Coypu now to take over. "Do you understand. Professor?" I asked, talking to the small black box with his name on it. "All set up and ready to go." I shook the box. "Some day you must tell me how your memories can exist in this recorder if you don't exist or won't exist in this galaxy because He and his nuts have destroyed the Corps. Better some day you don't tell me. I'm not sure I really want to know." I held the box up and gave it a scan around the room. "The finest equipment stolen money can afford. Every up-todate research tool I could lay my hands on. Stocks of spare parts of all kinds. A supply of raw material. Catalogs from all the electronic, physical and chemical manufacturers. A large bank balance to draw upon to buy what you need. A pile of signed checks waiting to be filled out. Language lessons neatly taped. Instructions, a history of what has happened, the works. Over to you. Professor, and take it easy with this body. It's the only one we have." Before I could change my mind I lay back on the couch, stuck the contact from the memory box to the back of my neck and turned on the switch. Whats happening? Coypu asked, slithering into my mind. "A lot. You're in my brain, Coypu, so don't do anything dangerous." Most interesting. Yes, your body IF indeed. Let me move that arm now, stop interfering. In fact why dont you go away for a bit while  see what is happening. "I'm not so sure that I want to." "No!" I shouted -- not that it did any good. A formless blackness pressed down on me and I spiraled out of sight into a greater darkness below, pushed away by Coypu's electronically magnified memories... time goes by so slowly T he black box was in my hand, rough white letters across its front. My fingers were on a switch that Memory returned and I staggered mentally and looked around for a chair so I could sit down. Until I discovered that I was already sitting down, so I sat harder. I had been away and someone else had been running my body. Now that I was back in charge I could detect faint traces of memories of work, a lot of work, a great period of time, days, perhaps weeks. There were burns and callouses on my fingers and a new scar on the back of my right hand. A tape recorder rustled to life -- a timer must have turned it on -- and Professor Coypu spoke to me. "To begin with -- do not do this again. Do not allow this recorded memory of my brain into control of your body. Because I can remember everything. I remember that I no longer exist. This brain-in-a-box is all there may ever be of me. If I turn off the switch I cease to be. The switch may never be turned on again. Probably won't. This is suicide and I am not the suicidal type. Impossibly hard to touch the switch. I think I can do it now. I know what is at stake. Something a lot bigger than the pseudolife of this taped brain. So I will do my best to turn the switch. I doubt I could do it a second time. As I said, don't do this again. Be warned." "I'm warned. I'm warned," I muttered, turning off the tape while I found myself a drink. Coypu was a good man. The bar was stocked as I had left it and a treble malt whisky on the rocks cleared some of the muzziness from my head. I settled down and turned the tape on again. "To business. Once I began investigating it became obvious why these temporal criminals chose this particular epoch. This society is just bursting into the age of technology, yet the people still have their minds in the dark ages. Their nationalism is sheer folly; their pollution, criminal; their intraglobal wars, madness -- " "Enough lecturing, Coypu, on with the show." " -- but there is no need to lecture on this subject. Suffice it to say that all the materials for a time helix are available here. And the societal setup is such that a major operation of time tinkering can successfully be concealed. I have constructed a time helix and it is coiled and set. I have also built a time-tracer and with it have ascertained the temporal position of this creature called He. For reasons best known to him He is now operating out of the fairly recent past of this planet, some one hundred and seventy years ago. I am only guessing now, but I think his entire present operation is a trap. Undoubtedly for you. In some manner I cannot discover he has erected a time block before the year eighteen-o-five. So you cannot return to an early enough period to catch him as he is building his present establishment. Be wary, he must be working with a large force. I have marked the controls so you can pick any of the five years after eighteen-o-five during which they are operating. In a city named London. The choice is yours. Good luck."went after more drink, depressed. Some choice. I could pick my own year to get blasted. Nip back into the prescientific past and shoot it out with the minions of He. Even if I won -- so what? I would be stranded there for life, stuck in time. A dismal prospect. Yet I had to go. In reality I only had the illusion of choice. He was tracking me down in the year # and the next time he might very well succeed in polishing me off. Far better to carry the fight to him. Rah-rah. I took more drink and reached for the first book on the long shelf. Coypu had not wasted his time. In addition to wiring up all the hardware he had collected a neat little library about the years in question, the opening decade of the nineteenth century. London was my destination and I soon realized that the name of one man was of utmost importance to my mission. Napoleoni Buonaparte. Yes -- Napoleon the First, Emperor of France and most of Europe and almost the world. His megalomaniacal ambitions rang a bell, for they differed hardly at all from He's own ambition. There was no IF coincidence here; there had to be a connection. I did not yet know what it was, but I was dismally sure that I would find out quickly enough. In the meantime I read through all the books on the period until I felt I knew what I had to know. The only bright spot in the whole affair was the fact that England spoke a variety of the same speech as America, so I would not have to put up with any more brainpuncturing language lessons with the memorygram. Of course there was the matter of local dress, but Coypu had gathered more than enough illustrations of the period to show me what was needed. In fact a theatrical outfitter in Hollywood supplied me with a complete wardrobe, from kneepants and buttoned jackets to great cloaks and beaver hats. The styles of the time were quite attractive and I took to them instantly, concealing a number of my devices in their voluminous folds. Since I would return to the same time in time whatever time I left the present time I took my time with the arrangements. But, eventually, I ran out of excuses. The moment had come. My weapons and tools were adjusted and ready, my health was perfect, my reflexes keen, my morale low. But what must be done must be done. I appeared in the front office and the receptionist gaped up at me chewingummily from over her confession magazine. "Miss Kipper, draw up a salary check for four weeks for yourself in lieu of notice." "You don't like my work?" "Your work has been all that I desired. But due to mismanagement this firm is now bankrupt. I am going abroad to dodge my creditors." "Gee, that's too bad." "Thank you for your solicitude. Now if I can sign that check -- " We shook hands and I ushered her out. The rent was paid for a month ahead and the landlord was welcome to the equipment left behind. But I had fixed a destruct on the time helix apparatus that would operate after I had gone. There was enough tinkering with time as it was and I felt no desire to bring any more players into the game. into the spacesuit with all my clothes on. In the end I had to take off both boots and jacket and strap these outside with the rest of my equipment. Heavily laden, I waddled over to the control board and braced myself for a final decision. I knew where I would arrive and, following Coypu's instructions, had set the proper coordinates into the machine days earlier. London was out of the question -- if He's minions had any detection apparatus at all they would spot my arrival. I wanted to arrive far enough away geographically so they would not spot me, but close enough so I would not have to suffer a long journey by the primitive transportation of the time. Everything I had read about it caused me to shudder. So I compromised on the Thames Valley near Oxford. The bulk of the Chilterns would be between me and London and their solid rock would absorb radar, zed rays or any other detection radiation. Once I had arrived I could make my way to London by water, a matter of some one hundred kilometers, rather than by the ghastly roads of the period. That was where I was arriving -- when was another matter. I stared intensely at the neatly numbered dials as though they could tell me something. They were mute. A time barrier had been set up at #, I could not arrive earlier. # itself seemed too much of a trap, they would surely be ready, waiting and alert at that time. So I had to arrive later. But not too much later or they would have accomplished whatever evil they had in mind. Two years, then -- not too long for them to work, but enough time so that they might -- hopefully -- be a little off guard. I took a deep breath and set the dials for #. And pressed the actuator. In two minutes the timer would cut in full power. With leaden feet I shuffled toward the glowing green coil of the time helix and touched the barlike end. As before, there was no sensation, just the glow surrounding me so that the room beyond was hard to see. The two minutes seemed closer to two hours, although my watch told me there were more than fifteen seconds to go to springoff. This time I closed my eyes, remembering the uneasy sensations of my last time hop. I was tense, nervous and blind when the helix released and hurled me back through time. The experience was not enjoyable. As the helix unwound I was whipped into the past while its energy was expended into the future. An interesting concept that did not interest me in the slightest. For some reason this trip churned up my guts more than the last one had and I was very occupied with convincing myself that whoopsing inside a spacesuit is a not nice thing. When I had this licked I realized that the falling sensation was caused by the fact IF that I was falling -- I snapped open my eyes to see that I was in a pelting rainstorm. And dimly seen, close below, were sodden fields and sharp-looking trees rushing up at me. After some panicky fumbling with the wrist control for the gravchute I managed to turn it on full and the harness creaked and groaned at the sudden deceleration. I creaked and groaned too as the straps felt as though they were slicing through my flesh to the bone beneath -- which they would quickly abrade away. I honestly expected my arms to drop off and my legs to fly by when I crashed down through the small branches of a waiting tree, caromed off a larger branch and smacked into the ground below. Of course the grav-chute was still working on full lift and as soon as the grassy slope had broken my fall I was up and away again, hitting the branch a second lick for luck on the way by and springing up out of the treetop in a great welter of twigs and leaves. Once more I fumbled for the control and tried to do a better job of it. I drifted down, around the tree this time, dropped like a sodden feather onto the grass and lay there for a bit. "A wonderful landing, Jim," I groaned, feeling for broken bones. "You ought to be in the circus." I realized after a painpill had cleared my head and numbed my nerve endings. I looked around through the lessening rain, but could see no one -- or any sign of human habitation. Some cows in the adjoining field grazed on, undisturbed by my dramatic appearance. I began to unburden myself under the shelter of the large tree. The first thing off was the collapsible container I had constructed with great ingenuity. It opened out and assembled into a brassbound leather chest typical of the period. Everything else, including the spacesuit and grav-chute fitted into it. By the time I had loaded and locked it the rain had stopped and a frail sun was working hard to get through the clouds. The hour was mid-afternoon at least, I judged by its height. Time enough to reach shelter by nightfall. But which way? A rutted path through the cowfield must lead somewhere so I took that downhill, climbing the drystone fence to reach it. The cows rolled round eyes in my direction but otherwise ignored me. They were large animals, familiar to me only through photographs, and I tried to remember what I had heard about their pugnacity. These beasts apparently did not remember either and did not bother me as I went down the path, chest on shoulder, ready to face the world. The path led to a stile that faced onto a country lane. Good enough. I climbed over and was considering which direction to take when a rustic conveyance made its presence known by a great squeaking and a wave of airborne effluvium carried by the breeze. It clattered into sight soon after, a two-wheeled wooden artifact drawn by a singularly bony horse and containing a full load of what I have since determined to be manure, a natural fertilizer much valued for its aid to crops and its ability to produce one of the vital ingredients of gunpowder. The operator of this contrivance was a drab-looking peasant in shapeless clothes who rode on a platform in front. I stepped into the road and raised my hand. He tugged on a series of straps that guided the pulling beast and everything groaned to a stop. He stared down at me, chomping empty gums in memory of long-vanished teeth, then reached up and knuckled his forehead. I had read about this rite, that represented the relationship of the lower class to the upper classes, and knew that my choice of costume had been correct. "I am going to Oxford, my good man," I said. "Ey?" he answered, cupping one grimy hand behind his ear. "Oxford!" I shouted. "Aye, Oxford," he nodded in happy agreement. "It be that way." He pointed back over his shoulder. "I'm going there. Will you take me?" "I be going that way." He pointed down the lane. I took a golden sovereign out of my wallet, purchased from an old coin dealer, more money in one lump than he had probably seen in his entire lifetime, and held it up. His eyes opened wide and his gums snapped nicely. "I be going to Oxford." T he less said about this ride the better. While the unsprung dungmobile tortured the sitting part of my anatomy my nose was assaulted by its cargo. But we were at least going in the correct direction. My chauffeur cackled and mumbled incomprehensibly to himself, wild with glee at his golden windfall, urging the ancient nag to its tottering top speed. The sun broke through as we came out of the trees and ahead were the gray towers of the university, pale against the darker slate gray of the clouds, a very attractive sight indeed. While I was admiring it the cart stopped. IF "Oxford," the driver said, pointing a grubby finger. "Magdalen Bridge." I climbed down and rubbed my sore hams, looking at the gentle arch of the bridge across the small river. A thud came next to me as my chest hit the ground. I started to protest but my transportation had already wheeled about and was starting back down the road. Since I was no more desirous of entering the city in the cart than he was of taking me I didn't protest. But he might at least have said something. Like goodbye. It didn't really matter. I shouldered the chest and strode forward, pretending I did not see the blue-uniformed soldier standing by the shack at the end of the bridge, holding a great long gunpowder weapon of some sort that terminated in what appeared to be a sharp blade. But he saw me well enough and lowered the device so it blocked my way and pushed his dark-bearded face close to mine. "Casket vooleyfoo?" he said, or something like that. Impossible to understand, a city dialect, perhaps, since I had had no trouble understanding the rustic who had brought me here. "Would you mind repeating that?" I asked in the friendliest of manners "Koshown onglay," he growled and whipped the wooden lower end of his weapon up to catch me in the midriff. This was not very nice of him and I showed my distaste by stepping to one side so the blow missed and returned the favor by planting my knee in his midriff instead. He bent in the middle so I chopped him in the back of the neck when that target presented itself. Since he was unconscious I seized his weapon so it would not be actuated when it dropped. All of this had happened in the shortest of times. I was aware of the wide-eyed stares of the passing citizenry, as well as the ferocious glare of another soldier in the doorway of the ramshackle building. He was raising his own weapon toward me. This was certainly not the way to make a quiet entrance into the city, but now that I had started this escapade, I had to finish it. With the thought the deed. I dived forward, which enabled me to put down my chest while I avoided the weapon at the same time. I heard an explosion and a tongue of flame shot past my head. Then the butt of my newly acquired weapon came up and caught my latest opponent under the chin. He went back and down with me right behind him. If there were others inside it would be best Ill to tackle them in the enclosed space. There certainly were other soldiers, a goodly number of them. After taking care of the nearest ones with a little dirty infighting I triggered a sleep gas grenade to silence the rest. I had to do this -- but I didn't like it. Keeping a wary eye on the door I quickly mussed the clothing and kicked the ribs of the men who had succumbed to the gas in order to suggest that they had been felled by violence of some kind. Now how did I get out of this? Quickly was the best idea since the citizenry would have spread the alarm by now. Yet when I reached the doorway I saw that the passersby had drawn close and were trying to see what had happened. When I stepped outside they smiled and shouted happily and one of them called out loudly. "A cheer for his lordship! Look what he done to the Frenchies!" Glad cries rang out as I stood there, dazed. Something was very wrong. Then I realized that one fact had been nagging at me ever since I had my first look at the colleges. A flag was flying proudly from atop the nearest tower. But where were the crossed crosses of England? This was the tricolor of France. this one out a man in plain brown leather clothes pushed through the cheering crowd and shouted its members into silence. "Get home, the lot of you, before the frogs come and kill you all. And don't say a word about this or you'll be hanging from the town gate." Looks of quick fear replaced the people's elation and they began to move at once, all except two men who pushed past me to pick up the weapons strewn about inside. The sleep gas had dispersed so I let them pass. The first man touched two fingers to his cap and came up to me, "That was well done, sir, but you'll have to move out quick because someone will have heard that shot." "Where shall I go? I've never been to Oxford before in my life." He looked me up and down quickly, in the same way I was sizing him up, and came to a decision. "You'll come with us." It was a close run thing because I heard the tread of heavy marching boots on the bridge even as we nipped down a side lane burdened with the guns. But these men were locals and knew all the turnings IF and bypaths and we were never in any danger that I could see. We ran and walked in silence for the better part of an hour before we reached a large barn that was apparently our destination. I followed the others in and put my chest on the floor. When I straightened the two men who had been carrying the guns took me by the arms, while the man in leather held what appeared to be an exceedingly sharp knife to my throat. "Who are you?" he asked. "My name is Brown, John Brown. From America. And what is your name?" "Brewster." Then, without changing the level tone of his voice. "Can you give me reason why we should not kill you for the spy you are?" I smiled calmly to show him how foolish the thought was. Inside I was not calm at all. Think fast, Jim, because a knife kills just as thoroughly as an Abomb. What did I know? French soldiers were occupying Oxford. Which meant that they must have invaded England successfully and occupied all or part of it. There was resistance to this invasion -- the people holding me proved that -- so I took my clue from this fact and tried to improvise. "I am here on a secret mission." Always good. The knife still pressed against my throat. "America, as you know, sides with your cause -- " "America helps the Frenchies. Your Benjamin Franklin has said so. "Yes, of course, Mr. Franklin has a great responsibility. France is too strong to fight now, so we side with her. On the surface. But there are men like me who come to bring you aid." "Prove it?" "How can I? Papers can be forged. They would be death to carry in any case and you wouldn't believe them. But I have something that speaks the truth. I was on my way to London to deliver it to certain people there." "Who?" Had the knife moved away the slightest amount? "I will not tell you. But there are men like you all over England, who wish to throw off the tyrant's yoke. We have contacted some of the groups and I am delivering the evidence I spoke of." "What is it?" "Gold." T hat stopped them. I felt the grip on my arms lessen. I pressed the advantage. "You have never seen me before and will probably never see me again. But I can give you the help you need to buy weapons, bribe soldiers, help those imprisoned. Why do you think I assaulted those soldiers in public today?" "Tell us," Brewster said. "To meet you." I looked slowly around at their surprised faces. "There are loyal Englishmen in every part of this land who hate the invaders, who will fight to hurl them from these green shores. But how can they be contacted and helped? I have just shown you one way -- and have provided you with these arms. I will now give you gold to carry on the struggle. As I trust you, you must trust me. If you wish you will have enough gold to slip away from here and live your lives out happily in some kinder part of the world. But I don't think you will. You risked your lives for those weapons. You will do what you know is right. I will give you the gold and then go away. We will never meet again. We must act on trust." "Sounds good to me, Brewster," one of the men said. "Me, too," said the other. "Let's take the gold." "I'll take the gold if there's any to be taken," Brewster said, lowering the knife but stilf uncertain. "It could all be a lie." "It could be," I said quickly, before he started punching holes in my flimsy story. "But it isn't -- nor does it matter. You'll see that I'm well away tonight and we will never meet again." "The gold," my guard said. "Let's see it," Brewster said. I opened the chest with utmost care while a gun was kept pressed to my kidney. I had the gold -- that was the only part of my story that was true. It was divided into a number of small leather bags and intended to finance this operation -- as it was doing now. I took out a bag and solemnly handed it to Brewster. He shook some of the glittering granules into his hand and they all stared. I pushed. "How do I get to London?" I asked. "By river?" "Sentries guard every lock of the Thames," Brewster said, still looking at the golden gravel upon his palm. "You wouldn't get as far as Abingdon. By horse is the only way, Back roads." "I don't know the back roads. I'll need two horses and someone to guide me. I can pay -- " "Luke, here, will take you," he said, finally looking up. "Used to be a drayman. But only to the walls. You'll have to get past the Frenchies yourself." "That will be fine." So London was occupied. And what about the rest of England? IF Brewster went out to take care of the horses and Guy produced some coarse bread and cheese, as well as some ale which was more welcome. We talked -- rather, they talked and I listened, occasionally putting in a word but afraid of asking questions that might prove my almost total ignorance. But a picture finally developed. England was completely occupied and pacified, had been for some years -- the exact number was not clear -- although fighting was still going on in Scotland. There were dark memories of the invasion, of great cannon that did terrible damage. The Channel fleet had been destroyed in a single battle. I could detect the cloven hoof of He behind a lot of it. History had been rewritten. Y et this particular past was not the past of the future I had just come from. My head started to ache, thinking about it. Did this world exist in a loop of time, separate from the mainstream of history? Or was it an alternate world? Professor Coypu would know, but I did not think he would enjoy being plucked out of his memory tape again just to answer my questions. I would have to work it out without him. Think, Jim, put the old brainbox into gear. You take pride in what you call your intelligence -- so apply it to something beside crookery for a change. There must be some form of logic here. Statement A: in the future this past did not exist. B: it sure exists now... But C might indicate that my presence here would destroy this past, even the memory of this past. I had no idea of how this might be accomplished, but it was such a warm and cheering thought that I grabbed onto it. Jim diGriz history-changer, world-shaker. It made a pleasant image and I treasured it as I dozed off on the hay -- and awoke not too long afterward scratching at insect life that was after my hot body. The horses did not arrive until after dark and we agreed that it would be best to leave at dawn. I managed to get some bug spray out of my chest to kill off my attackers so I enjoyed a relatively peaceful night before the ride in the morning. The ride! We were three days en route and before we reached London even my saddle sores had saddle sores. My primitive companion actually seemed to enjoy the trip, treating it as an outing of sorts, chatting about the country we passed through and getting falling, down drunk each evening at the inns where we stopped. We had crossed the Thames above Henley and made a long loop to the south, staying away from all sizable centers of population. When we reached the Thames again at Southwark, London Bridge was before us and the roofs and spires of London beyond. A little hard to see because of the high wall that stretched along the opposite riverbank. The wall had a crisp, clean look to it, far different from the smoke-stained gray of the rest of the city -- and a sudden thought struck me. "That wall -- it's new, isn't it?" "Aye, finished two years back. Many died there, women and children, everyone driven like slaves by Bony to put it up. Right around the city it goes. No reason for it -- just that he's mad." There was a reason for it and, ego-flattering as it was, I still didn't like it. That wall was built for me, to keep me out. "We must find a quiet inn," I said. "The George, right down here." He smacked his mouth loudly. "Good ale, too, the best." "You enjoy it. I want something right on the river, within sight of that bridge there." "Know just the place -- the Boar and Bustard on Pickle Herring Street, right at the foot of Vine Lane. Fine ale there." T he foulest brew was fine with Luke as long as it contained alcohol. But the Boar and Bustard suited my needs perfectly. A disreputable establishment with a cracked signboard above the door depicting an improbable looking swine and an even more impossible looking bird squaring off at each other. There was a rickety dock to the rear where thirsty boatmen could tie up -- and a room I could have that looked out on the river. As soon as I had arranged for the stabling of my horse and argued over the price of the room I bolted the door and unpacked the electronic telescope. This produced a clear, large detailed, depressing picture of the city across the river. It was surrounded by that wall, ten meters high of solid brick and stone -- undoubtedly bristling with detection apparatus of all kinds. If I tried to go under or over it I would be spotted. Forget the wall. The only entrance I could see from this vantage point was at the other end of London Bridge and I studied this carefully. Traffic moved slowly across the bridge because everything and everyone was carefully searched before they were allowed to enter. French soldiers probed and investigated everything. And one by one the people were led through a doorIF way into a building on the other side of the wall. As far as I could tell they all emerged -- but would #? What happened in that building? I had to find out and the ale room below was just the place. Everyone loves a freespender and I was all of that. The one-eyed landlord muttered and snaffled to himself and managed to find a drinkable bottle of claret in his cellar. This bottle I kept for myself. The locals were more than happy to consume blackjack after blackjack of ale. These containers were made of leather covered with tar, which added a certain novelty to the flavor, but the customers did not seem to mind. My best informant was a bristle-bearded drover named Quinch. He was one of the men who moved the cattle from the pens to the knackers' yard, where he also assisted the butchers in their bloody tasks. His sensibilities, as one might suspect, were not of the highest, but his capacity for drink was and when he drank he talked and I hung from every word. He entered and left London every day and bit by bit, through the spate of profanity and abuse, I put together what I hoped was an accurate picture of the entrance procedures. There was a search, that much I could see from my window. At times a close search, at other times superficial. But there was one part of the routine that never varied. Every person entering the city had to put his arm into a hole in the wall of the guardhouse. That was all, just put it in. Not touch anything at all, just in up to the elbow and out. Over this I brooded, sipping my wine and ignoring the roars of masculine cheer around me. What could they detect from this? Fingerprints perhaps, but I always wore false fingerprint covers as a matter of routine and had changed these three times since the last operation. Temperature? Skin alkalinity? Pulse or blood pressure? Could these residents of what to me was the dim past differ in some bodily composition? It was not unreasonable to expect some changes over a period of more than # years. I had to find out the present norms.constructed a detector that could record all of these factors and hung it inside my clothing. The pickup was disguised as a ring that I wore on my right hand. The next evening I shook hands with everyone I could, finished my wine and retired to my chamber. The recordings were precise. accurate to  # and very revealing -- of the fact that my personal readings fell well inside all the normal variations. You are not thinking, Jim, I accused myself in the warped mirror. There has to be a reason for that hole in the wall. And the reason is a detection instrument of some kind. What does it detect? I turned away from the accusing stare. Come, come, dont evade the question. If you cannot answer it that way turn it on its head. What is it possible to detect? This was more like it. I pulled out a piece of paper and began to list all the things that can be observed and measured, going right down the frequencies. Light, heat, radio waves, etc., then off into vibration and noise, radar reflections, anything and everything, not attempting to apply the things detected to the human body. Not yet. I did this after I had made the list as complete as possible. When I had covered the paper I shook hands with myself triumphantly and reread it for human applications. Nothing. I was depressed again. I threw it away -- then grabbed it back. Something, what was it, something relating to something I had heard about Earth. What? Where. There! Destroyed by atomic bombs Coypu had said. Radioactivity. The atomic age was still in the future, the only radioactivity in this world was natural background radiation. This did not take long to check. Me, creature of the future, denisen of a galaxy full of harnessed radiation. My body was twice as radioactive as the background count in the room, twice as radioactive as the hot bodies of my friends in the bar when I slipped down to check them out. Now that I knew what to guard against I could find a way to circumvent it. The old brain turned over. Soon I had a plan and well before dawn I was ready to attack. All of the devices secreted about my person were of plastic, undetectable by a metal detector if they had one working. The items that were made of metal were all in a plastic tube less than a meter long and no thicker than my finger that I coiled up in one pocket. In the darkest hour before the dawn I slipped out and stalked the damp streets looking for my prey. And found him soon enough, a French sentry guarding one of the entrances to the nearby docks. A quick scuffle, a bit of gas, a limp figure, a dark passageway. Within two minutes I emerged at the opposite end wearing his uniform his gun on my shoulder and carried in the correct French IF manner. With my tube of devices down its barrel. Let them find that metal with a detector. My timing was precise and when, at the first light, the straggling members of the night guard returned to London, I was marching in the last row. I would enter, undetected, the ranks of the enemy. A foolproof scheme. They wouldn't examine their own soldiers. More fool I. As we marched through the gate at the far end of the bridge I saw an interesting thing that I could not see with my telescope from my window. As each soldier marched around the corner of the guardhouse he stopped for a moment under the cold eyes of a sergeant and thrust his arm into a hole in the wall. IVI' tripped over the uneven footing on the bridge. I did not know what it meant, but it was the most common word the French soldiers used and seemed to fit the occasion. With this I stumbled into the soldier next to me and my musket caught him a painful blow on the side of the head. He yelped with pain and pushed me away. I staggered back, hit my legs against the low railing and fell into the river. I managed it neatly. The current was swift. I sank beneath the surface and clamped the musket between my knees so I wouldn't lose it. After that I surfaced just once, splashing at the water and screaming wordlessly. The few soldiers on the bridge milled about, shouting and pointing. When I was sure I had made the desired impressioa I let my wet clothes and the weight of the gun pull me under again. The oxygen mask was in an inside pocket and it took only seconds to work it out and pull the strap over my head. I cleared the mask of water by exhaling strongly and breathed in pure oxygen. After that it was just a matter of a slow easy swim across the river. The tide was ebbing and the current would carry me well downstream from the bridge before I landed. So I had escaped detection, lived to regather my forces and fight again -- and was totally depressed by my complete failure to get past the wall. I swam in the murky twilight and tried to think of another plan, but it was not exactly the best place for cogitation. Nor was the water that warm. Thoughts of a roaring fire in my room and a mug of hot rum drove me on for what seemed an exceedingly long time. Eventually I saw a dark form in the water ahead -- it resolved into the hull of a small ship tied up at a dock. I could see the pilings beyond, I stopped under the keel, worked my tube of instruments out of the musket and also took everything out of my coat. The gun stuffed into the jacket sleeve made a good weight and both vanished toward the river bottom. After some deep breathing I took off the oxygen mask and stowed that away as well, then surfaced as quietly as I could next to the ship. To look up at the coattails and patched trousers of a French soldier sitting on the rail above me. He was industriously polishing the blue-black barrel of a singularly deadly looking cannon that projected next to him. It was far more efficient looking than any of the nineteenth century weapons I had seen -- in fact, it did not belong to this period at all. Out of more than casual interest I had made a study of weapons available in the era I had recently left so I recognized this one as a An ideal weapon to mount on a light wooden ship, since it could be fired without jarring the vessel to pieces. It could also accurately blow any. other wooden ship out of the water long before the other's muzzle-loading cannon were within range. Not to mention destroying armies in the field. A few hundred of these weapons brought back through time could alter history. And they had. The soldier above turned and spat into the river -- I sank beneath the surface again and vanished among the pilings. There were boat steps farther downriver and out of sight of the French ship. I surfaced there -- no one was in sight. Dripping, cold, depressed, I climbed out of the water and hurried toward the dark mouth of the lane between the buildings. Someone was standing there and I scuttled by -- then decided to stop. B ecause he put the muzzle of a great ugly pistol into my side. "Walk ahead of me," he said. "I will take you to a comfortable place where you can get dry clothing." Only he did not say clothing -- it sounded more like cloth-eeng. My captor had a French accent. All I could do was follow instructions, prodded on by the primitive hand cannon. A savage relic or not, it could still blow a nice hole in me. At the far end of the lane a coach had been pulled up to block the lane completely. The door gaped open in unappreciated welcome. IF "Get in," my captor said, "I am right behind you. I saw that unfortunate soldier fall from the bridge and drown and I thought to myself, what if he had been on the surface? What if he were a good swimmer and could cross the river, where would he land when moved along by the current? A neat mathematical problem -- which I solved and vo#a, there you were coming out of the water." The door slammed. The coach started forward and we too were alone. I fell forward, dropped, turned, lunged, grabbed for the pistol -- and seized it by the butt because my captor now had it by the barrel and was holding it out to me. "By all means, you hold the gun, Mr. Brown, if it pleases you, it is no longer needed." He smiled as I gaped, scowled and leveled the pistol at him. "It seemed the simplest way to convince you to join me in the carriage. I have been watching you for some days now and am convinced that you do not like the French invaders." "But -- you are French?" "But of course. A follower of the late king, a refugee now from the land of my birth. I learned to hate this pipsqueak Corsican while people here were still laughing at him. But no one laughs any longer and we are united in one causo. But, please, let me introduce myself. The Count d'Hesion -- but you may call me Charles, since titles are now a thing of the past." "Pleased to meet you, Charley." We shook on it. "Just call me John." The coach clattered and groaned to a stop before this interesting conversation could be carried any further. We were in the courtyard of a large house and, still carrying the pistol, I followed the count inside. I was still suspicious but there seemed little to be suspicious of. The servants were all ancient and tottered about muttering French to each other. Knees creaking, one aged retainer poured a bath for me and helped me to strip, completely ignoring the fact that I still held the pistol while he soaped my back. Warm clothes were provided, and good boots, and when I was alone I transferred my armory and devices to my new clothing. The count was waiting in the library when I came down -- he was sipping from a crystal glass filled with interesting drink. A brimming container of the same stood close beside him. I handed him the pistol and he handed me a glass of the beverage in return. It glided down my throat like warm music and sent a cloud of delicate vapor into my nostrils the like of which I had never inhaled before. "Forty years old, from my own estate, which as you can tell instantly is in Cognac."  him. Nobody's fool. Tall and thin with graying hair, a wide forehead, lean, almost ascetic features. "Why did you bring me here?" I asked. "So we could join forces. I am a student of natural philosophy and I see much that is unnatural. The armies of Napoleon have weapons that were made nowhere in Europe. Some say they come from far Cathay, but I think not. These weapons are served by men who speak very bad French, strange and evil men. There is talk of even stranger and more evil men at the Corsican's elbow. Unusual things are happening in this world. I have been watching for other unusual things and am on the lookout for strangers. Strangers who are not English, such as yourself. Tell me -- how can a man swim across a river under water?" "By using a machine." There was no point in silence -- the count knew very well what he was asking. With those dark cannon out there there was no point in maintaining secrecy about the nature of the enemy. His eyes had widened at my reply but he took time to finish his drink. "I thought so. A machine unknown here -- save to you. And I think you know more about these strange men and their weapons. They are not of the world as we know it, are they? You have knowledge of them and you are here to fight them?" "They are from a place of evil and madness and they have brought their crimes with them. And I am fighting them. I cannot tell you everything about them because I don't know the entire story myself. But I am here to destroy them and everything they have done." "I was sure of it. We must join forces and I will give you whatever help I can." "You can begin by teaching me French. I have to get into London and it appears that I will need to speak it." "But is there time?" "An hour or two will do. Another machine." "I am beginning to understand. But I am not sure that I like all these machines." "Machines cannot be liked or disliked -- they are immune to emotion. We can use them or misuse them, so the problem of maIF chines is a human problem, too. "I bow to your wisdom -- you are, of course, right. When do we begin?" I returned to the Boar and Bustard for my things, then moved into a room in the count's house. A head-splitting evening with the memorygram -- headache is a mild word for the side effects of using this memory-cramming machine -- taught me conversational French and, to the count's pleasure, we conversed in that language. "And the next step?" he asked. "I need to take a closer look at one of those pseudo-Frenchmen who seem to be running things. Do they ever appear alone on this side of the river -- or if not alone, in small groups?" "They do, but their movements follow no set pattern. Therefore I shall obtain the most recent information." He rang the silver bell that stood next to the decanter. "Would you like one of these individuals rendered unconscious or dead and brought to you?" "You are too kind," I said, holding out my glass so that the servant who had appeared soundlessly could refill it. "I'll handle that end of the business myself. Just point him out and I'll take over from there." T he count issued instructions. The servant slipped away. I worked on my drink. "It will not take long," the count said. "And when you have the information -- do you have a plan of action?" "Roughly. I must enter London. Find He, the top demon in this particular corner of hell, then kill him, I imagine. And demolish certain machinery." "The upstart Corsican -- you will remove him, too?" "Only if he gets in the way. I am no common murderer and find it difficult to kill at any time. But my actions should change the entire operation. The new weapons will no longer be supplied and will soon run out of ammunition. In fact -- the interlopers may vanish altogether." The count raised one eyebrow but was kind enough not to comment. "The situation is complex, in fact I do not really understand it myself. It has to do with the nature of time, about which I know very little. But it seems that this past, the time we are living in now, does not exist in the future. The history books to come tell us that Napoleon was beaten, his empire wiped out, that Britain was never invaded." "It should only be!" "It may be -- if I can get to He. But if history is changed again, brought back to what it should have been, this entire world as we know it now, may vanish." "A certain risk must be taken in all hazardous enterprises." The count remained cool and composed, moving one hand in a slight gesture of dismissal as he talked. An admirable man. "If this world disappears it must mean that a happier one will come into existence?" "That's roughly it." "Then we must press on. In that better world some other I will be returning to my estates. My family will live again. There will be flowers in the spring and happiness in the land. Giving up this life here will mean little -- it is a miserable existence. Though I would prefer that knowledge of this possibility stay locked in this room. I am not sure that all of our assistants will accept such a philosophical viewpoint." "I agree heartily. I wish it could be some other way." 'Do not concern yourself, my dear friend. We will talk of it no longer." and viniculture and the hazards inherent in the manufacture of distilled beverages. Time moved quickly -- as did the count's men -- and even before we started on a second decanter he was called out to receive a report. "Admirable," he said upon his return, rubbing his hands together with pleasure. "A small party of the men we seek are even now disporting themselves in a knocking shop in Mermaid Court. There are guards about, but I presume they offer no barrier to your operation?" "None," I said, rising. "If you will be kind enough to provide some transportation and a guide I promise to return within the hour." This was done and I performed as promised. A morose individual with a shaven head and badly scarred face took me in the carriage and pointed out the correct establishment. I entered the building next to it, an office of some kind, now shuttered and locked with a monstrous piece of hardware most difficult to open. Not that the lock mechanisms were beyond me -- never! -- but they were so big that my lockpick couldn't reach the tumblers. My knife did, though, and I went through and up to the roof and crossed over to the roof of the next ' building, where I attached the end of my spiderweb to the most solid of the collection of chimneys. IF The strand of the web was fine, almost invisible and practically unbreakable, made up of a single long-chain molecule. It ran slowly off the reel that was fastened by a harness to my chest and I dropped toward the dark windows below. Dark to others. But the dual beams of ultraviolet light from the projectors on my UV sensitive goggles turned all light to day for me wherever I looked. I entered the window silently, caught my man with his pants down, rendered him and his companion unconscious with a dose of gas and had him dozing in my arms and back up to the roof as quickly as the fiercely whirring spiderweb reel could lift us. Minutes later my prize was snoring on a table in the count's cellar, while I spread out my equipment. The count looked on with interest. "You wish to obtain information from this species of pig? I do not normally condone torture but this seems to be an occasion for hot pokers and sharp blades. The crimes these creatures have committed! It is said the New World aborigines can flay a person com"Sounds jolly, but there will be no need." I lined up the instruments and hooked up the contacts. "Machines again. I shall keep him unconscious and walk through his mind with spiked boots, even a worse torture in many ways. He will tell us what we need to know without ever knowing he has spoken. Afterward he is yours, you see. "Thank you, no." The count raised disgusted hands. "Whenever one of them is killed the civilians suffer from reprisals. We will knock this one about a bit, rob him and dump him in an alley. Our treatment of him will resemble a simple crime." "The best idea yet. Now I begin." Going through that mind was like swimming in a sewer. Insanity is one thing -- and he was certifiably insane -- but outright evil is inexcusable. I had no problem extracting information, just in sorting it out. He wanted to speak his own language but finally settled for French and English. I plumbed, picked and probed and eventually discovered all I needed to know. Jules, my companion of the shaved head, was called in for the pleasurable sport of roughing up the subject and dumping him -- stripped of his uniform -- while the count and I returned gratefully to the unfinished carafe. "Their headquarters appears to be in a place called St. Paul's. You know of it!" "Sacrilege -- they halt at nothing. The cathedral, the masterpiece of the great Sir Christopher Wren, it is here on the map." "The one named He is there -- and apparently all the machinery and instruments as well. But to reach it I must enter London. There is a good possibility that I might be able to pass the wall in his uniform since his body has the same radioactivity count as mine, a test they use to detect strangers. But there may be passwords, other means of identification, perhaps speaking in their own language. What is needed is a diversion. Do you have anyone with a knowledge of gunnery among your followers?" "Certainly. Rene Dupont is a former major of artillery, a most knowledgeable soldier. And he is in London." "Just the man. I am sure he will enjoy operating one of those high-powered guns. We shall capture a gunship before dawn. The bombardment will start at first light when the gates are opened. A certain number of shells through the gate, guardhouse and guard should be disconcerting. Then the boat will be abandoned and the gunners will escape on foot. This will be the responsibility of your men." "It will be a pleasurable task that I shall personally supervise. But where will you be?" "Marching into the city with the troops, as I tried to do once before." "Most hazardous! If you are too early you will be apprehended as you appear -- or perhaps destroyed in the bombardment. Too late and the gate will be sealed against entry." "So we'll have to time the operation accurately." "I will send for the finest chronometers obtainable." V faced and gray-haired man with an impressive rotundity of belly. But he was energetic enough and knew his gunnery and was now consumed with a fierce passion to operate the invaders' incredible weapon. The former crew of the gunboat, including the lookouts, slept a deeper sleep than they had planned below decks while I worked out the mechanism of the recoilless cannon and explained it to the major. He grasped it instantly and beamed with fierce joy. After his experience with irregular cannon barrels, muzzleloaded, uneven shot, slow-burning powder and all the rest of the IF handicaps of his trade this weapon was a revelation to him. "Charge, fuse, and projectile in the same casing -- marvelous! And this lever swings open the breach?" he asked. "Correct. Keep away from these vents when firing -- the exhausted gas from the explosion comes out here, canceling the recoil. Use the open sights -- the range is short. I imagine there will be no need to allow for windage at this distance and there will also be scarcely any projectile drop. The muzzle velocity is much greater than you are used to." "Tell me more," he said, stroking the smooth steel. Step two. The count would see to it that the ship was moved upstream before dawn and anchored to the embankment below London Bridge. I would see to it that I arrived on the bridge at the agreed time. The count's nautical chronometer was as big as a cabbage, handmade of brass and steel, and it clacked loudly. But he assured me of its accuracy and we set it from my atomic watch, as big as my fingernail and accurate to within one second a year. This was the last thing to be done and as I rose to leave he put out his hand and I took it. "We will always be thankful for your aid," he said. "There is new hope now among the men and I share their enthusiasm." "It is I who should be thanking you for the help. Considering the fact that my winning might be the worst thing for you." He dismissed that thought as unimportant -- a brave man. "In dying we win as you have explained. A world without these swine is victory enough. Even if we are not there to witness it. Do your duty." I did. Trying to forget that the fate of worlds, civilization, whole peoples rested upon my actions. A slip, an accident, and it would be all over for everyone. There could therefore be no accidents. As mountain climbers do not look down and think about the drop below, I put thoughts of failure from my mind and tried to think of a joke to cheer myself up. None came to mind instantly so I thought instead about putting paid to He and his operation and this was cheering indeed. I looked at my watch. It was time to leave so I went quickly, without looking back. The streets were deserted; all honest men were home in bed. Behind me the first gray of approaching dawn touched the sky. L ondon is full of dark alleys that provide ideal sites for lurking. I lurked craftily within sight of London Bridge and watched as the first soldiers appeared. Some marched in step, some straggled, all looked tired. I was feeling tired myself so I sucked on a stimtab and kept an eye on my watch. Ideally I should be oh the bridge when the firing began, far enough from the gate not to be hit, yet close enough to get through it during the excitement after the barrage. From my vantage point I timed various groups of soldiers crossing the bridge until I had a good estimate. The digits rolled by on my watch and at the proper moment I took a military brace with my shoulders and stepped out smartly'Lortytort?" a voice called out -- and I realized it was calling to me. I had been so concerned with the time I had stupidly ignored the fact that He's futurefiends would be crossing the bridge as well. I waved, made an evil grimace and stepped out smartly. The man who had called out looked puzzled -- then hurried after me. By my uniform he knew I was one of his gang, but one unfamiliar to him. He probably wanted to ask me how things were back in the home asylum. I wanted no conversation with him, particularly since I didn't speak his language. I hurried on -- painfully aware of his footsteps behind me. Then I realized I was going too fast and at my present pace would reach the gate just in time to be blown up. There was no time to curse my lack of awareness -- my problem was just a matter of picking what kind of trouble I wanted. Getting myself blown up was a little too much to get involved with now. I could see that the gunboat was in position and that figures were on deck. Wonderful. I could already almost hear the explosions. With me in the middle of them. I would have to stop here -- at the appointed spot. I did. Heavy footsteps hammered up behind me and a hand caught at my shoulder, spinning me about. "Lorry#M?" he cried out. Then the expression on his face changed, his eyes widening, his mouth opening. "BV#! he shouted. He recognized me, perhaps from photographs. is the word," I said and shot him in the neck with the narcotic needle gun I had palmed. Another cry of came and one of his teammates pushed through the soldiers and I had to shoot him, too. This naturally interested everyone nearby. I heard startled shouts and saw a certain amount of weapon liftIF Your personalized horoscope is intended to reveal: Your strengths, weaknesses, natural abilities -- potential financial benefits -- best career fields -- romantic and social potential -- types of people you relate to best -- time periods to be bold or cautious -- and much more! SCmCB ? Whatever it is. Astrology has fascinated mankind for more than # years -- and today has more followers than ever! Can there possibly be anything to it? Find out for yourself. Order your own Personalized Horoscope now. it is available to you at a special low rate -- thanks to the wedding of modem computer technology with the enormous body of astrological "knowledge" built up over the centuries. If nothing else, your #-page Personalized Horoscope is sure to entertain you. And who knows, it may give you new enlightenment about yourself! CompM by CompuMt Include # check or money order made out to: Horoscope Offer Send to: Horoscope Offer P.O. Box #, G.P.O. Name Add rets : City State Zip My Date of Birth: Month Day Year A.M. My Time of Birth: P.M. (circle one) . (If time is unknown, # noon will be used) My Place of Birth: (check one)  Eastern Time Zone  Pacific Time Zone  Central Time Zone  Foreign  Rocky Mt. Time Zone Allow # weeks for delivery of horoscope. Offer void where prohibited by law. The decision to believe or reiect the report is that of the recipient. ing. I put my back to the bridge parapet and wondered if I would have to shoot the entire French army. I did not. The first shell, not too well aimed by the major of horse artillery, hit the bridge not ten meters from where I was standing. The explosion was considerable and the air was filled with hurtling pieces of masonry and steel. I dropped -- as did all the others, some permanently -- and I took the opportunity to put needles into all the nearest soldiers who had witnessed my earlier shootout. Back on the boat Dupont was learning to master his weapon and the next shell struck the city wall. There was much shouting and running about among the men on the bridge and I shouted and milled with the best of them, looking on with pleasure as the next shell whistled cleanly through the gate and blew up the guardhouse inside. Now most of the motion was away from the gate, as well it should be, so I dropped and wormed my way closer on my belly. Shells were now bursting in and around the gate and causing a satisfying amount of destruction. A quick look at my watch informed me that it was almost time for the barrage to lift. The signal would be a shell hitting the wall far from the bridge. After this a few more shots would be fired for effect at targets of opportunity -- but no more at the gate. The shell struck the wall a good hundred meters downriver, blowing a neat hole in it. I jumped to my feet and ran. Wreckage and crumbled masonry were everywhere. Dust and the reek of high explosive hung in the air. If any survivors of the bombardment were left they had long since vanished. I scrambled over the rubble, slid down the other side and nipped around the first corner. The only witnesses to this unstealthy entrance was a couple watching from a doorway, English by their dress, who turned and ran as soon as they saw me. Despite my little tangle on the bridge the plan had worked perfectly. The cannon on the river began firing again. This was not part of any plan, not at all. Something had gone wrong. After the last shots my accomplices were to have retreated to shore and removed themselves to safety. Then two explosions sounded, almost at the same time. The cannon could not fire that fast. Another gun was shooting. IF The street I was on, Upper Thames Street, ran parallel to the wall. I was far enough from the bridge now for my presence not be associated with the action there -- and a ladder led up to an observation platform on the top of the wall. Perhaps prudence should have dictated a singleminded continuation of my plans. But I have spent many years not listening to that particular voice and I was not prepared to start now. One quick look around -- no one in sight -- and up the ladder. The observation post was unoccupied. From it I had a perfect view of the action. The major was still manning his gun, busily firing away at another gunboat that was coming upriver under full sail. The newcomer, even though handicapped by a moving platform, was more experienced and accurate with his weapon. A shell had already blown a great hole in the stern of my ally's boat and even as I watched another hit amidships and the gun was silent, its barrel in the air and the gunner gone. A figure ran across the dock and dropped into the crippled ship. I dug out my electronic telescope and trained it on the deck, knowing what I would see even before I put it to my eye. The count had come to the aid of his troops. But even as he jumped aboard, the major rose, blood running down his face, and manned the gun again. It swung about, aiming at the other boat, and hit it squarely with the next shot right at the waterline below the enemy weapon. The second gun was silenced -- the ship was sinking. When I looked back at the major again I saw that he had retrained his cannon and was firing at the bridge, at the enemy soldiers there. The count was loading for him. They both were smiling and seemed to be enjoying themselves. The firing continued, faster now, and I let myself back down the ladder. Neither of them could be blamed -- they knew exactly what they were doing. They were firing back at last at the enemy they had hated all these years, using a superior and highly destructive weapon. Both would stay there in action until they were cut down. Perhaps they wanted it that way. If this sacrifice were to have any value at all I had to get on with my own job. I had studied the count's map. My immediate course lay along Duck's Foot Land to Cannon Street and then left. People were about now, frightened civilians hurrying by, soldiers marching on the double in the opposite di rection. No one paid any attention to me at all. And there, up ahead at the end of the street, the great bulk of the walls and dome rose -- unmistakably St. Paul's. The end of another road was near. My final meeting with He. VI liar -- or mad -- who claims never to have felt fear. I have been touched by it often enough to recognize its smell, but never have I felt the iron hand clamping down as it did now. Ice water in the veins, a hammering in the heart, a rooted feeling in the feet. With a decided effort I grabbed my brain by the throat, no mean feat that, and gave it a good shaking. Speak, brain, I commanded. Why this sudden case of acute chickenitis? Why the yellow stripe right down the back as far as the heels? Body and brain, we have been in tight spots before, even narrower ones. But we bulled through and came out on the other side. Usually victors. What is new here? The answer came back quickly. As a rustproof rodent I had penetrated behind the walls of society, doing it on my own and standing or falling on my own. Adventure, rah-rah. But now too much was riding on the bet -- too many people's lives depended upon my actions. The future survival of the entire galaxy might be at stake. It was almost unbelievable. "Make it unbelievable," I muttered, digging in my medikit. If I kept dwelling on what was at stake I would take no risks, probably take no action. I have never resorted to artificial morale before, but there is a first time for everything. I carried berserker pills as a sort of amulet -- I knew they were there if I ever needed them, therefore I had never needed them. Until now. I clicked open the case and brushed the dust off an innocent looking capsule. "Get out there and fight, Jim," I said and swallowed the thing. They are outlawed everywhere and for good reasons. Not because they are habit forming to a great degree, both physically and psychologically, but for social reasons. Inside the gelatin capsule lies a specific form of madness, a compound that dissolves the conscience and morality of civilized man. Superld takes over. No morals, conscience -- or fear -- survive it. Nothing remains but a great chunk of ego and the sure knowledge of might and right, diIF vine permission to do anything and not to feel concern or fear while doing it. Politicians loaded on berserkerite have toppled regimes and controlled worlds. Athletes have broken all sports records, often destroying themselves or their opponents in the process. Not nice stuff. Very nice stuff. I had one fleeting instant of conscience and. realization of change as the chemicals took hold of my brain, but it passed even as it began. "I have come for you. He," I said, smiling with genuine joy. This was power unlimited, the most exhilarating sensation I had ever experienced, a cleansing wind blowing out all the dusty corners of my brain. Do what you want Jim, what you will because you are the only power in the world that really counts. How blind I had lived for years. Cramped by small moralities, puny affections for others, destructive other-orientated love. How crippled I had been. I love myself because I am God, At last I understood the meaning of God that the old religions were always mumbling about.  am L the only power in the universe, And He is in that building ahead, thinking with mortal foolishness that he can best me, stop me, even kill me. Now we shall see what happens to idiot plans like h is... ises. A solid enough structure, no apparent guards, undoubtedly loaded with detection apparatus. A subtle or secret approach would not be wise. The only advantage I could have was surprise, that and the ability to be absolutely ruthless. I was well armed, a walking engine of death, and no one would stop me. Entry would be simple enough, others were going in and out constantly, all in the same uniform I was wearing. I sensed a buzz and a disturbed whine to this beehive at the present. They did not like the attack on the gate. I had to strike now while they were disturbed. All devices at the ready and instantly available I completed my lei surely circuit of the building and started up the white stone steps at its front. The cathedral was immense, appearing even larger with all the pews and religious furniture cleared away. I stalked down the length of the long nave as though I owned it, weapons ready. The nave was deserted and all the activity was concentrated at the far end in the apse where the altar usually stood. In its place loomed an ornate throne. He sat on it. Arrogant with power, great red body leaning forward to issue orders to his assistants below. A long table reached across the transept, littered with maps and papers and surrounded cers. They seemed to be taking their orders from a man in a simple blue uniform coat. He was short and wore a black lick of hair across his forehead. From descriptions I recognized Napoleon -- passing on instructions from He as I had expected. I knew I was smiling as I shifted my finger tips closer to my armament. A familiar crackling of light caught my attention from the secondary apse off to the right and my smile broadened. The gleaming machinery of a time helix was stuffed in there, surrounded by technicians bent over their tasks. They would be dead soon, like everyone else here. And I would have temporal transportation out of this barbarian era. I would have to leave a small atomic grenade behind me when I left. The end was just in sight. No one paid the slightest attention to me as I came up to the table. I would have to use sleep gas first since this would work on them all at the same time. Plenty of time to kill the slaves after I had removed their master. One concussion grenade, two thermite grenades. I triggered them with my thumb and threw them, one -- two -- three, in high arcs into He's lap. While they were still in the air I rolled handful after handful of gas grenades down the table under the shocked faces of the officers. The grenades were still hissing and banging as I spun about and used my needle gun -- I didn't want to injure the controls -- to shoot down the technicians around the time helix. It was all over in a matter of seconds. Quiet descended as the last man fell. Before turning back I hurled grenades down the length of the nave so that anyone entering would walk into the gas cloud. Then I looked at He. Lovely. A roaring pillar of fire with something in its core that might have been a man. The throne burned as well and the column of greasy smoke roiled up towards the great dome above. "You are beaten -- " I shouted leaning forward across the table to get a better look. He would not be surviving this attack. Napoleon lifted his head from the table and sat up. "Don't be foolish," he said. I wasted no time in thought but tried to kill him. But he was ready and fired before I did with a tubelike weapon concealed in his IF palm. Fire washed across my face, then it was numb. My body went lifeless, died, though I could hear and see. I dropped face down onto the table. I could not feel Napoleon's hands when he rolled me over but I could see him looking down at me, smiling. I could hear him roaring with victorious laughter that held more than an echo of madness. Some comprehension must have reached my eyes. "That is right," he shouted. "I am He. You have lost. You have burned, destroyed that fine organic mechanism whose only function was to deceive you. It was a trap for you, everything here, even the existence of this world, this loop in time, has no function other than trapping you. Did you forget so quickly that a body is merely a shell for me, the eternal He? My brain has mastered death and lives on. Now in this imitation of a mad emperor. He never knew what real madness was. But you have lost -- " T his was a temporary setback. I suppose that normally I would have felt defeated, afraid, angry, suffered under some kind of useless emotion. Now I simply waited for the opportunity to kill He again. My berserker condition found the lack of results boring -- after two tries He was still alive. I resolved that the third would be the final one. He bent and searched me with brutal thoroughness, ripping my clothing into shreds, pulling off devices that adhered to my skin, taking the knife from my ankle, the gun from my wrist, the tiny grenades from my hair. Within seconds every ready weapon I had was gone. The few devices left were well out of reach. The search over he discarded me, flinging my limp body face upward onto the table. "I have prepared for this moment." He told me. I heard the rattle of chains as he picked up my wrists and snapped heavy metal fetters about them. As the cuffs closed there was a brief flash of light as the ends welded together and I saw the instant blistered redness of my skin where it touched the metal. Not important -- I felt ntothing. He pushed a needle into my wrist. Feeling began to return, first to my hands -- great pain in the wrists -- and then to my arms. A lot of pain seemed to be associated with the return of sensation. I ignored it, although spasms shook my body uncontrollably. In the end I shook myself off the table. falling heavily to the floor. He bent and picked me up at once, dragging me across the width of the great cathedral. His strength, even in the disguise of this small body, was tremendous. In the brief instant I had lain on the floor I had grabbed something with my fingers. I did not know what it was -- it felt quite small and metallic -- but it remained clenched tightly in my fist. A solid waist-high metal pillar stood about five meters from the time-helix controls. This, too, was waiting for me. He held my wrists apart and laid the chain that joined them into a groove in the top of the pillar. Another flash of light welded the chain to the solid metal. He released me and I swayed but did not fall. Sensation and control were returning to my body and I mastered it as he went to the controls and made some adjustments. The vast cathedral was silent. We were alone except for the huddled bodies. "I have won," he yelled suddenly, doing a litte dance step. He pointed to the coiled form of the time helix and laughed out loud. "Do you realize that you are now in a loop of time that does not exist, that I called into being to trap you, that will vanish as soon as I leave it?" "I suspected that. Napoleon lost in our text books." "He won here. I gave him the weapons to conquer the world. Then I killed him when my new body was ready, This loop in time came into being when he died and its existence created a barrier in time that will go down as soon as it ceases to exist. When I leave this will happen, but not instantly, that would be too easy for you. I want to think of you here -- alone, knowing that you have lost and that your future will never exist. There is a time fixator on this building. It will be here after London and the entire world are gone, perhaps longer than you. You may die a difficult death -- or live an even more difficult life -- before it shuts off. I have won." He turned to the controls again. I opened my fist to see what weapon I had in my palm that might defeat him at this final moment. It was a small brass cylinder that weighed no more than a few grams. One end had small holes punched in it and when I turned it over fine white sand came out. A sander, used for drying the writing ink on papers. I might have wished for a better weapon but this would have to do. "I leave," He said, actuating the mechanism. "What about your men here?" IF "Mad slaves. They vanish with you, having served my purpose. I have an entire world of them waiting to welcome my return. Soon there will be many worlds -- soon they will all be mine." I could add nothing much to that. He sauntered across the flagstones, a monster in the body of that tiny man, touched his hand to the glowing end of the time helix and was instantly engulfed by its cold green flame. "All mine," he said. "I don't think so." hand, testing its weight, measuring the distance to the controls. My chains permitted some movement. The settings for the time scale of the helix were a bank of keys -- a number of them were depressed now. If I could push one more of them down the setting would be changed and He would arrive at an unscheduled time and place -- perhaps not arrive at all. I swung my hand as much as my fetters permitted, estimating the distance, the trajectory the little tube must follow. He must have guessed what I intended. He began to howl with insane rage, pulling at the time field that neatly held him tight to the end of the helix. Coldly I judged the distance until I was sure I had it right. I tossed the sander in a high arc. It rose, glinting brightly in a shaft of sunlight from a stained glass window, and arched down. Section #. Title #, United States Code). #. Date of filing: October #, #. #. Title of publication: Worlds of If. #. Frequency of issue bimonthly. #. Location of known ofHces of publication: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publisher: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Editor: Ejler Jakobsson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Managing Editor: Judy-Lynn Benjamin, York, N.Y. #, a subsidiary .of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation, # Elast # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Names and addresses of holders of I percent or more of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation stock are Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street, New. York, N.Y. #; Robert J. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Peter J. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Allen  Company, # Broad Street,' New York, N.Y. #; Clooney  Company, co Fiduciary Trust Company of N.Y., P.O. Box #, Wall Street Station, New York, N.Y. #; S.D. Lunt  Company, # Marine Trust Building, Buffalo, N.Y. #. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities. None. #. Ixtent and nature of circulation: A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid Circulation. #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue neai est to filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to Hling date: #. D. #. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means. Average no. copies each issue during the preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date. #. #. Copies distributed to news agents, but not sold. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. E. Total distribution (sum of C and D). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should ual net press run shown in A). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Lawrence C. Murphy, Circulation Manager. Striking on the bank of keys, then falling off to rattle to the floor. He's enraged cries cut off as the time helix released and He vanished from sight. At the same moment the light changed, dimming to dusk. Outside the windows was the grayness I had seen before during the time attack on the laboratory that had started everything. London, the world outside no longer existed, not in this particular part of time and space. Only the cathedral continued being, held briefly by the time fixator. Had He won? I felt the first touch of worry -- the effects of the drug had to be wearing off. I looked hard, but it was almost impossible to see the indicator dials in the dim light. Had one of them moved just before the helix was actuated? I could not be sure. And it didn't really matter, not to me here. Whether the future was hell or a paradise of peace could not affect me. With the return of emotions I felt a desire to know if my world would ever be. Would there be a Special Corps and would my Angelina some day be born? I would never know. I tugged sharply at the chains. They held fast. The end. End of everything. The emotions that were returning were only the blackest and most depressed but I could not help it. End. While I was at the depths, feeling only the most profound selfpity, the sound began. A distant whine on the edge of audibility, so weak I would never have heard it had it not broken an absolute silence. It grew and grew, as annoying as an insect making me aware of it although I did not wish to be aware of anything except my misery. In the end it was quite loud, coming from empty space somewhere high beneath the dome. I looked up despite my lack of interest just as there was the loud bang of displaced air. A figure appeared in the darkness above, someone in a spacesuit. Wearing a grav-chute, because he drifted down slowly and landed in front of me. I was stunned and ready for almost anything when he opened the dark helmet of his spacesuit. Ready for almost anything other than the fact that he was not a he. "Get rid of that silly chain," Angelina said. "You always manage to get into trouble as soon as I leave you alone. You're coming back with me right now and that is all there is to it." I had nothing at all to say. This time the last word was surely hers.# IF A#I right," he said, reluctantly awake. He had been having a good dream of home and full rations of cool water to bathe in. A dream where loneliness no longer existed. The voice that had awakened him was soft and female and Jyon recognized it. Her name was Cams and she was pleasant to look at. She was a medical assistant. "The doctor requests your presence," she said urgently. "The Leader fails. Now, please." Jyon scrambled from near nakedness into his tunic while she watched without any evident embarrassment. The tunic fit him loosely. He had lost flesh. All of the crew had. The relief ship was overdue. There was talk that it would never come, had never been dispatched. Soon the rations would have to be cut again. Dutifully he followed the girl down metallic corridors that smelled of oil and age. He thought she was aware that he watched her and not displeased. She wore no man's mark and so was unattached. It was long since he had paired. He had lost the desire when Dari died in a sudden shifting of the crust of the black world below. Now there seemed to be too many thoughts he needed to hide from others, things he could never share. The ship was his. Conflict and bickering over possible courses of action grew in ferocity. He had to make the final decisions. That was the custom and the law. It seemed better to face that duty without the additional involvement of pairing and sharing. Leader Mzel had been injured on the same disastrous day that had claimed the life of Dari. The sudden land shift had crushed Mzel and left him speechless, comatose much of the time and without reason. Jyon had assumed command of the strife-ridden ship. The doctor waited. "He's conscious," he said softly. "I opened his skull and relieved the pressure. He's very weak and presents a poor chance." He himself. "He may die -- he may live. I think there is now some understanding within him of what is said." The doctor watched Jyon through eyes that had seen much and pitied all. "The law says that you lead if he dies. Leaders are supposed to pass on their secrets to those who succeed them. I would talk to you about the course we must take. But first Leader Mzel may have things he wishes to tell you." "I understand." Mzel was strapped to a pallet, eyes open, full of pain. Still, Jyon saw that those eyes were now able to follow him. IF H e sat beside the pallet and took the older man's hand. "You are better," he said comfortingly. Leader Mzel watched him, then let his eyes turn away to the table near the pallet. Jyon looked that way also. On the table was the buckle that Mzel had always worn, the buckle of the brotherhood. Mzel was of the brotherhood. Jyon was not., Mzel nodded with a tiny motion and his eyes returned to Jyon. "Take," he said softly, Jyon picked up the belt and buckle. Cunningly worked into the metal were the familiar figures of the Twins, life flask held between them. Jyon clasped the buckle, sensing that the older man wanted him to do so. Mzel's mouth opened again and Jyon leaned close, listening. One word came and it was so low it was more imagined than heard. "Relief?" Jyon shook his head. "Not yet. Leader. We still wait. Many now desire to abandon the watch, drive the ship toward home," He nodded, not afraid to muse in front of this other man who had known command. "No reason other than the ancient rules why we shouldn't. The ship theoretically could make it home if we left soon. If we wait too much longer we might have insufficient rations for the trip." He looked down and again tried to read Mzel's eyes. "Nothing is left down there. The surface is now extremely dangerous. A poisoned planet, its atmosphere burned away, a worthless place. The disapproval of this watch grows among the crew." He leaned forward again, watching the listening, but he could not be sure of the word Mzel spoke. Was it. Stay? Jyon shook his head. Much lay beyond his understanding. No Leader had ever been lost before to his knowledge, save through orderly process. But command was now his. The ship had been here for a score of centuries. The directives of the Twin Brotherhood said it was to stay here, no matter what happened. But that surely could be interpreted to mean that the ship was to stay with relief. Not even the most disapproving of the Twin Brotherhood could expect otherwise. Yet when his own relief party had been in training Jyon had known from idle talk that there had been indecision about whether to send them. The maintenance of the ships taxed the makeshift civilization that sputtered and sparked now on the home planet. The civilization had arisen since the last time of chaos more than two thousand years before. Jyon thought that the ships were relics of a time older than that -- they were all but indestructible. A new dark age approached: Wars had broken out between the principal cities and only the Brotherhood maintained what peace remained. An uneasy time. He watched the older man who had now stopped trying to talk. Leader Mzel fought only to live, to exist. In a while the tortured eyes glazed over and Mzel sank back into unconsciousness. The doctor waited outside. "I think he sleeps," Jyon said. He held the belt and buckle. "He wished me to take this." The doctor said, "We monitor him constantly. His injuries were most severe." He eyed Jyon. "Is there time to talk with me now?" Jyon knew then that the doctor held no hope for Mzel. He sighed. "Speak." The doctor lifted a hand that trembled slightly. "We must proceed home soon. I now have too many patients suffering from nervous disorders -- an alarming increase. If we continue to wait for relief I mistrust the collective sanity of the ship. The times were too troubled when we left. The crew no longer believes that relief is on the way and so there is no end in sight for them." Jyon asked, "Would you have us leave now and risk the perils of a long voyage and have relief come after our leaving?" "My advice is that we return," the doctor said shortly. "If you wish, for your records and to absolve your conscience and to clear you with the Twin Brotherhood, which presumably still governs at home, I shall be happy to reduce that advice to writing." "Perhaps that would be best. Doctor. I haven't yet made up my mind about what course to follow. The directives seem clear. This ship is to stand watch here. Perhaps Mzel, as a member of the Brotherhood, had some inkling of our purpose. I know not. I only know that this watch has lasted as long as our history -- it reaches back to the dark years. Perhaps we are to rescue artifacts that belch from time to time from the tortured matter below -- perhaps we are here as chroniclers of destruction or even as potential rescuers of some possible survivors hidden deep beneath the tormented crust of the world below us." "There can be no survivors. None has ever been found in the history of the ship," the doctor said. He shook his head. "We serve no purpose here except to be in at the cremation, perhaps for some dark reason of the Brotherhood. And how do we know now that the Brotherhood still maintains law at home?" "Write out your recommendations, Doctor," Jyon said without emotion. "I'll consider them. I can promise no more for now." most time for watch, but there IF was time enough to visit the Room ' of Ages. He walked there slowly. The room was dim and vast. The vaulted ceiling was scanty illuminated by a reproduction of the home sun and the planets that wheeled around it. He found a vacant place and contemplated. The room was not a place of religion, although many used it as such. The Brotherhood was not a thing of priests, but of men -- men who kept the laws, maintained the ships, studied what remained of the old books. Men who tried. The Room of Ages was a part of the Brotherhood rule. And because he was not completely without cynicism Jyon knew that it had bn placed here mainly for those who attributed godhood to the Twins, for whom no overt worship was solicited. The four walls of the room were covered by enormous pictures. On the rear wall was Stac and Small. He was in appearance much like Jyon himself. The clothes were different, but the eyes that looked back at Jyon were known eyes. On the opposite wall was Givan the Great. He differed markedly from Stac. He was tall and there seemed to be no hair on his body. Some men of the Twin Brotherhood at home shaved theirs to set themselves apart. Givan had too many joints in his feet and fingers and his eyes were set so deep that all one really saw were shadows. On the back wall, between the brothers, was the flask of life. It was a huge, black, bottle-shaped thing, curiously made. The front wall of the room was made in the fashion of the buckle Mzel had entrusted to Jyon. There Stac and Givan again stood, arms entwined about each other in friendship, the flask held jointly by them. The legends said that the Twins had once lived this way. But no man of Jyon's race who now lived had seen one who looked like Givan. Jyon wondered what a friendship like that would have been worth. The drawing was from one of the old statues that had come through the time of darkness. Jyon had once seen an original in one of the halls of the Brotherhood at home. Stac was cast in light metal and Givan in metal of dark green. The legends grew dim. Once men had risen from the mud -- once they had journeyed to the far stars. That was what remained of the legends. Once there had been friends around mankind -- once men had not been lonely and lost. den, now second in command and a former friend. When command had come to Jyon somehow friendships had withered. "What news of the Leader?" Gyden asked sourly. He had probably already heard, Jyon thought. "Perhaps improved. He understands again. He can speak." The other nodded and watched him cautiously and Jyon thought he was going to be proselyted again, but Gyden forebore. Gyden"s opinion that they should attempt return was already well known and widely circulated within the ship. He was the acknowledged leader of the return group, which Jyon believed grew in numbers daily. Jyon formally relieved and then watched the planet below through the scanners. Around him delicate instruments charted and measured, cameras took continuous pictures. The swollen sun had cooked the life from what had once most probably been a fairly pleasant place. First atmosphere and oceans had boiled and burned away, then massive quakes had shaken the stricken planet. Now the surface was unstable and highly dangerous to approach. Dari and Mzel were not the only casualties. The ship had lost a total of nineteen persons -- twenty if Mzel died. That was out of a population of less than four hundred. Jyon watched and waited and wondered why he watched, why so many generations had persistently watched. Perhaps it was only because the watch had somehow begun and now no one, including the Brotherhood, knew how to end it. In a way the ships were the Brotherhood. Perhaps was a thousand, thousand reasons that no one knew now. The ship stayed because the ship stayed. The reasons might be good -- but they were lost. Once there had been cities below and it was possible that beings somewhat like Jyon's own people had lived in those cities. A popular belief aboard the ship was that Jyon's own people might once have colonized the world below -- in a forgotten age -- and how kept watch to retain some vestige of sovereignty, for the legends had it that once the race had been warlike and proud. Around Jyon other members of the watch came and went in endless routine. He could feel eyes on him, curious eyes, angry eyes, even eyes that seemed to plot rebellion. He had a strong feeling that when he made his decision about return that decision might not be the final one. He had therefore taken some precautions. In the Leader's cabin, which he now occupied at least temporarily, were secret primary controls for the ship. Mzel, perhaps with a premonition of disaster, had shown these controls to him in the good times before rations had shortened. Jyon had never shown them to Gyden. The cabin could be sealed off so that unauIF thorized entry would be time-consuming and difficult. He hoped necessity would not force him to last resorts, but the ship could be conned and the bleak world below scanned independently from that cabin. Without control of the cabin no one could immediately take the ship from orbit and compute it into a course toward the home sun. Only in time and with much effort could the. cabin control be overridden. Halfway into the watch a thing Jyon had come to dread happened. The scanners found a variance. The coordinates were called out and half a hundred pairs of eyes moved in and over and scanned that variance, compared it with pictures taken on the last pass of the area. It seemed to be no mere crust upheaval. Something was down there that had not been there before. Jyon was a veteran of a hundred similar happenings. The rules were simple enough. A scout should be launched to investigate. That rule had begun to cost lives. The odds for survival upon landing were poor. And yet it seemed to Jyon that if he broke routine that routine was finished for all time. So he would go -- but he would avoid landing. H e ordered the waiting crew: "To Scout Three. I will command...Temporary command here to the next in line." That meant someone would call Gyden out of .bis sleep. Jyon assembled his exploratory crew of ten, took the scout down and skimmed the surface of the planet. Close in, in the darkness, all that was revealed to sight and instruments was an enormous mound of matter. A thing had pushed its way out of the planet's interior and loomed now, still hideously hot from the sunward side. Jyon held the ship above it and calculated chances. There really seemed no easy, safe way to get the ship down even if he wanted to land. Instead he played powerful beams of light upon the earthvomited artifact and had pictures made. They showed a long vaguely formed body partially thrust through the crust. The lines of the thing had uniformity and seemed more than amorphous -- perhaps manufactured -- perhaps a tunnel belched out from far below by those terrible underground pressures. It was much too large for removal. What he saw seemed to be only a part of it with much more underground. It seemed to be of metal, dulled and deeply colored by long interment in the earth. In the ship above were books showing what had come up from the ground over the long watch, but no one was familiar with them any more, for the ship's scribe was among the dead. It was possible that what was being unearthed had appeared before and had been investigated. Jyon hesitated, still studying pictures. He allowed time to pass as the thing below moved toward the sun side. There the scout ship could not follow. The sun was too hot, the coolants in the tiny ship too inefficient. As he watched the crust shifted agonizingly again and more of the long body appeared. It widened and seemed to be wider still in that portion yet concealed within the planet. A patch of white heat broke from the bottom of the gray sky. The sun. Reluctantly Jyon ordered return. He would study the object further from the ship. by four men. They waited upon him warily, their manner determined but respectful. Their spokesman had hard eyes that shone now with purpose. He said, "Leader Gyden has taken command of the ship with the purpose of returning us home. We have been sent to attend you." Jyon smiled. "Good," he said. The four watched him without return smiles. Jyon said, "I'm glad the decision is no longer mine. I now express my sympathies." "I see," the spokesman said, seeming to relax a little. "Take me to my cabin, please," Jyon said. "I'm tired after the long shift." They conferred quietly and then took him there. They made a cursory inspection of the room, found nothing to cause them concern, left and closed the door. Jyon waited for a moment or two and then carefully and quietly locked the door from the inside, turned the huge bolts that Mzel had shown him, and pushed down the secondary shields that secured the room from anything but the most determined and continuous onslaught. He opened the concealed wall panel as Mzel had shown him. Then he locked in the set of overriding controls so that the centuries-long vigil around the doomed world below would continue. The course had not yet been changed, but he imagined that Gyden was plotting a new one in the central control room. The cabin held a tiny scanner. He set its coordinates so that he could monitor the new object when the region came around again. Then he slept. His sleep was exhausted and without dreams. He awoke to a muffled banging on the door. He smiled to himself. Gyden's people must have discovered that their controls were inoperative and finally deduced that he might have something to do with it. They were working on the door. But if the specifications Mzel had shown IF him were right the men would work a long time before they gained entrance. He turned on the voice system at the control panel and set it for all outlets. "This is Acting Leader Jyon," he said. "I am controlling the ship from my cabin." Gyden's voice came back quickly: "Open the door for us, Jyon. We voted while you were on scout. Many more wished to return home than wished to stay and hope for relief." He fell silent for a moment, waiting for Jyon to speak, but Jyon said nothing. Gyden's voice returned, full of conviction: "If we stay here we will all die." "Then we'll die," Jyon said simply. "Leader Mzel said we should stay. There is a reason. Our race has endured the high cost of maintaining the watch for too long for there not to be a reason." "No," Gyden said. "Now open the door for us. Otherwise we will not furnish you with food and will cut off your cabin water." "We need not talk further," Jyon said frigidly. T he cabin contained the record books that listed and portrayed the artifacts taken and observed from the world below. There were rows of the books, huge pages of pictures and other pages covered with the spidery writing of past ship's scribes. The current book was in the central control room. These were the books of the past. He had lacked time to examine them. Now he had plenty of time. The pictures were of bits of machinery, delicate pottery shards, metallic instruments, building blocks, shaped metals and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of a long-vanished race. But there didn't seem to be anything remotely like what Jyon had seen on the last trip down. The record books were fascinating. They gave only minor hints at the reasons for the long vigil, reasons Jyon had already deduced and cast aside. Primarily the books chronicled results. With the books it was easier to imagine that a sentient race had lived on the grim world below and he could even imagine what that race had been like -- intelligent, mechanized, complex, even lovers of beauty. Jyon read and argued with himself about the sun. It seemed positive that it had begun its final death process long before the watch ship appeared in the area and surely all life had vanished an eon before the watch had begun. The records seemed to bear that out for nowhere was pictured any artifact that did not show the eL fects of both heat and age. When had those who had lived below discovered what was going to happen to their sun? Where had they fled? Men outside still worked at the room, attempting to gain entrance, but the attempts seemed sporadic now. Perhaps they were ready to give up and seek other alternatives. Perhaps they would find a way around the locked controls. Jyon no longer really cared as the days fled past. Below the ship's orbit the huge body that had erupted from the ground lay quietly, barely distrubed by the almost constant tremors. Jyon watched it for a few days, then moved to other pursuits, leaving the scanner coordinated to it. His new interest was hunger. Before he had secluded himself the ship's meals had been skimpy, providing barely enough nutrient value to sustain life. Now there was, of course, nothing. The water tap continued to run. He had filled all the containers he had been able to find after the threat, but as yet had had no need to resort to them. He hungered. The mirror let him see his face become old and gaunt with a suddenness that was frightening. In a very short time movement became perilous for he was constantly lightheaded and dizzy. The days passed and finally pain ceased to be associated with his hunger, it became a mental thing, a knowing that someplace there was food. That place became more distant every day so that as the time quickly passed the place of food became almost an imaginary thing. Despite the voices that came from the speaker, cajoling him to open the door, he no longer believed that opening the door would bring food. Existence in the world he built of his hunger had to be more complicated than that. A fter many days he recognized Gyden's voice as it came over the speaker. He listened to it stolidly from his pallet. "We have completed bypassing your controls. Leader Jyon. Mzel is dead and you are now leader. We ask you to open your door, remove the shields and help us return. Your conduct has been honorable, but surely you have done all you need to do. None of us desires your death. The medical staff fears you will die if you don't receive food soon. In a very short time we will leave the orbit here and proceed on a course to home. I ask not that you open to us until then, but when you see that the orbit has changed then open to us, so that you may live and not die." Jyon crawled from his pallet toward the controls. Cautiously he worked them, but nothing happened. Gyden had not lied. He peered into the scanner. The orbit appeared still to be the same. He concentrated on what IF lay below and a wave of sickness and dizziness came and he looked away and then determinedly back. Mzel's belt and buckle lay next to the scanner, where he had discarded them. Nothing had changed below. It was only that the great body that had come from the earth below reminded him of something, made him look down again. This scanner was smaller than those in the main control room. He rose to his feet and operated the shields. Then, clumsily, he threw back the massive bolts of the door. Two guards greeted him in friendly fashion, but their eyes mirrored shock at his appearance. "Take me now to the main control room," he said urgently. He tottered to them and felt strong arms hold his own weak ones and guide him. Gyden and two dozen others were working in the control room. All sound stopped as Jyon entered. "Before you leave orbit," Jyon said in a voice that was almost lost, "please try to open that artifact below. It seems to me to be like a great bottle -- a flask -- I beg -- please -- " He lost all control and blackness came. In his dreams he saw food. In the dreams Mzel still commanded and Dari lived. It was how he recognized it as a dream. was in the infirmary. Needles jutted from his arm and his breathing was aided by a respirator. The female Cams watched him and smiled when he looked at her. "You will be all right now," she said. "Where are we?" he asked and the question made bitter memories return. "How long have I been -- " She touched his lips with a quieting finger. "Not too much talk now. We still remain in orbit. The doctor and Subleader Gyden have been waiting for a long time to talk with you. Leader Jyon." She moved away and all was quiet for a while. When she returned she brought the doctor and Gyden. Gyden walked softly, as if afraid that the sound of his feet would bring harm to Jyon. The doctor moved close to the pallet. "You will be quiet and listen," he ordered Jyon. "I command here and you came within reach of death." He looked away and then back. "You have started a great argument about what we found down there by your insistence that we stay." He smiled gently. Gyden nodded seriously. "Those who have made the Twins a religious thing say that we have found the flask of life. Others say that we've found the treasures that our civilization lost in the times of chaos, those things that once made us great. Inside that thing down there, insulated completely against the heat, guarded by metals we only dimly understand, we found a rich treasure of films and books, machines and drawings, knowledge -- even history. An infinity of things that will enrich our race, give our people purpose." The doctor smiled again. "Yesterday we counseled with the other ship's leaders and theorized. Only many years of study will give us real answers, but we can still attempt to understand. We believe that once we, and perhaps others, lived on that world below many thousand of years before this watch began. Perhaps it was our ancestral home. When the sun began its change our people built in panic and we fled to our present home. Perhaps we lost those things we have found below over the years of darkness, so that when the watch began it was only known that we had once lived there and that something might be found that would be of benefit. Perhaps the ones who set the first watch knew that the thing we found existed, or at least hoped it existed." Gyden shook his head. "There are great paintings, statuary. Tithings we have lost." "Perhaps this we have found is the sole reason for the Brotherhood. Only a belief -- a religion -- could have survived the violent passage of time," the doctor said. Gyden leaned forward, his face earnest. "Still we hunger. Those on the home world now also hunger for knowledge of this. The times of darkness draw nigh there. Please say to us that we should return." They watched him. Jyon raised his head weakly. "Were there paintings and statues in what you recovered such as those we now call the Twins?" The doctor nodded. "Many such. That is why I said perhaps we once occupied this place with others." "Then calculate our food. See if anything in what we have found can be used for new food. We must stay as long as we can." He remembered the drawings, the buckle, the statue he'd seen long ago. Those two in the statue had found something worth more than mere knowledge, mere treasure, mere learning. It could be seen in their carved faces, in the arms held tight in friendship. "We are here," Jyon said slowly. "Once we fled and lost. Perhaps those others remained. Now let us await and watch with all we have for as long as we can. We have found our flask of knowledge. Let us wait to see if we now can find those who helped us to attain and hold it."  IF the Sheraton Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal Speaker: Keith Laumer. For information: SanD Meschkow, # Larchwood Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania #. New York City. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Albert Schuster, #-# Crescent Street, Long Island City, New York I I #. Dickson. Advance registration: #. For information: Ted Pauls, # Meridene Drive, Baltimore, Maryland #.  At the Statler-Hilton Hotel, New York City. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York. Statler-Hilton Hotel Boston, Massachusetts. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For inforStation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.  European Science Fiction Convention with the Trieste SF Film Festival. Membership: #, attending; #, supporting. For informaAve., Belmont, Massachusetts Box #, University Station, Regina, Bruce Gillespie, Box #AA, Melkumi Shibano, #-#-#, O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Convention address: Eurocon #, Casella Postale #, #, Venezia, Italy. Send membership money via individual agents listed above.  World Science Fiction Convention. At the International Hotel, #I West Century Blvd., Los Angeles, California #. Guest-of-Honor: Frederik Pohl. Fan Guets-of-Honor: Robert and Juanita Coulson. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: L.A. Con, P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, California #. Duncan had to choose between two realities. Yet in the end there was no choice... cavity of steel -- windowless, no bars, nothing even to tell where the dim light was coming from.  There was nothing here besides his own bruised, bewildered, outraged self. If the cell had been padded he would have known they thought him insane. The walls were smooth steel. No, the thing was a jail, all right, and by God somebody was going to pay for this outrage before the day was out. He listened anxiously. All he could hear was his own breathing. He sat down again on the cold floor. The sensible thing to do was wait. Calmly. Not let them know he was afraid. They would enjoy his fear. That clod, that stone-faced blockhead, who had shoved him in here was a sadist who probably thought he was a nobody. Well, he would show him. He would make a phone call and then the fur would fly. He leaped to his feet and attacked the steel door with his fists. After an interminable length of time the door slid back and Stoneface stood there -- blue-clad, beefy and looking unintelligent. "What is it?" Stoneface asked. "The law says I'm entitled to one phone call," he said, constricting his throat muscles so that the words would not come out as a croak. He moved back a step to make it obvious that he had no intention of trying to bolt through the door. It would not help to antagonize this moron. He felt new confidence pouring through him. Seconds later he felt it drain out of him in one big bubble for Stoneface was frowning at him and saying, "What is law?" He knew his own expression was collapsing into stupid disbelief. "Don't start that again," he said angrily. "It won't work. I'm a decent, law-abiding citizen who's been locked up without even being charged. You can't get away with it. I demand that you let me call my lawyer." Stoneface stared. "What is lawyer?" he asked curiously. When Duncan only glared at him he walked out. As the door began to slide shut, Duncan's rage exploded. "How long are you going to keep me in here?" "Until they come," answered Stoneface before the edge of the door met the panel with a depressingclang. I wont, Duncan thought. He would be damned if he would scream. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of listening to his fear. He rubbed a sore place on his arm. Until they come... "They," Duncan mumbled. The word had sounded strangely emphatic as Stoneface had used it -- as if he had uttered some Finality. trying to give it the proper inflection, decipher its meaning. What could they mean? A firing squad? because he had resisted arrest? Stop it, he told himself sternly. Firing squads had gone out with capital punishment. He sat down again, his back against the wall, so exhausted he could scarcely go through the mechanics of thinking. slept for when he opened his eyes the door was sliding back and two tall shadows were moving toward him. "They" were here. He sat up straight and fought his urge to cringe against the wall. Savagely he forced his mind to focus on only one thought. If they tried to drag him out he would put up the fight of his life. Neither man made a move to touch him. Both stood inside the doorway and simply looked at him for a long moment before one of them snapped his fingers smartly. This was evidently a signal to Stoneface because he went away and returned with two collapsible chairs. They were tall and roughly dressed in high heavy boots, thick trousers and shirts. They sat down rather hesitantly and Continued to look at him while he made a suspicious examination of His own. They were middle-aged, past fifty anyway, but they looked to be in good shape. "Are you going to pretend you're brainless like your guard?" he asked, gripping his knees to still their trembling. "Because if you are you're wasting your time. I can wait this thing out just as long as I have to." "We're not going to pretend anything," one of them said and Duncan jerked his head quickly to look at him. The man was ruddy-cheeked and perspiring as though he had just stepped from a steam bath. Which was impossible. The evening temperature must be about sixty, though it had been higher that afternoon when Stoneface had marched into Duncan's house and arrested him. "Who are you?" he demanded, expecting no answer. "My name is Rand. This is Mr. Dee vers." He eyed them in desperation. They looked as normal as any crooked cops but the sight of them did things to him. Not just because they were staring at him as if he had eight legs, but because they were free to go wherever they wished, while he knew that all he IF had to do was make one quick move toward the open door before they blasted him. Deevers was as sallow as Rand was ruddy, as if all the color had been drained from his skin. He looked worn out. They both did. Why weren't they wearing uniforms? Why were they dressed like this? He folded his arms and glared at them. He would see himself in hell before he asked them why he had been arrested. It would be the same as begging. The one called Deevers gave his head an impatient jerk and Rand spoke again. "We have to ask you a few questions," he said. "Then maybe we can answer some of yours." He smiled awkwardly, perhaps expecting to dent Duncan's armor of hostility. The smile told Duncan one thing. If they had murder on their minds they did not intend to get to it immediately. "Fire away," he said coldly. "When did you first notice that your identity tag was gone?" N ot that again. Not the identification card again. Duncan sagged against the wall, spent and beginning to feel ill. A lousy piece of paper that didn't mean a damn thing. "I don't know," he mumbled. "Think," Rand urged, "It wasn't a tag. It was an ordinary identification card. I was looking for something in my wallet and the card dropped out. It fell into a gutter and washed down the drain." Rand leaned forward. "Where were you when this happened?" "I'd just left work and was on my way home." "What city?" Deevers snapped at him suddenly. "Go to hell!" he snapped back. Deevers grimaced and sat back in his chair. He looked at Rand. "We're wasting time." Duncan tasted the sweat on his upper lip. "If it's a case of identification I've more than enough evidence of who I am. There's my birth certificate." They stared at him as if he had said something obscene. Rand seemed to be trying to mask his emotions but Deevers made no attempt to conceal his disgust. "Where is it?" Rand said at last. "Stoneface has it. Your man outside." Rand looked at Deevers. "Go get it." Deevers scowled as he stood up. "I still say we ought to finish it right now." Rand kept his eyes focused on the floor and didn't look up until the other came back. He took the slip of paper from Deevers' hand and looked at it for a long minute. "Where do you suppose he found this?" he said in quiet bafflement. "There must be plenty of scraps around. This looks like part of a bill of -- " "I tell you, he wouldn't know where to look." "Come on, Dave. You don't know what he was doing before he was brought in. He's been wandering all over the place." By God, they could quit talking as if he weren't sitting right here listening to them. The birth certificate evidently meant no more to them than it had to Stoneface. Oh, that had been a cute scene. Just a minute, Duncan had said, offended but absolutely sure of himself.  may have lost my identification card but that doesnt mean I dont exist any more. What kind of nonsense is this?  still have some rights. And Stoneface had asked. What are rights? Yes, those had been the words. And Duncan had yanked the birth certificate from his wallet and shoved it in the idiot's face, convinced that if that didn't satisfy the fool nothing would. God, but he had been right about that. After reading the data out loud Stoneface had asked, What is father? What is mother? What is birth? Duncan saw Rand start to throw the birth certificate away, then give him a quick glance and stick it into his pocket. They mistook him for someone else, Duncan knew. Someone had done something and Deever and Rand thought he was the guilty party. And if he didn't get off his lard in a hurry the thing was going to get too far out of hand. "I didn't do it," he said. "You've got the wrong man." "What did your identification card look like?" asked Rand as though he hadn't heard a word. They cant keep this up, said the babbler in Duncan's mind. Some time somebody had to start making sense. He knew he was doing himself no good shuddering and jerking the way he was doing, but some demon in his brain kept warning that if he didn't let loose in some manner he would end the day as insane as these two. "It was w'hite, three by two inches, approximately," he said. "It carried my name, address, physical description and draft status." "And it was white?" "I said it was white." Deevers was looking at him with open distaste. IF Rand propped a boot on one knee and idly scraped debris from it. "What did it look like after it fell out of your wallet?" sense of doom he had watched the white card being swept away in the muddy torrent. It had disappeared into the drain among leaves and mud. What the hell? he remembered himself asking out loud. He had been surprised when he had found himself kneeling by the gutter and even more surprised to discover that his body trembled. For a second he had thought the white card had changed color and shape just before it fell into the drain. It had looked strangely metallic and spherical, green and utterly unfamiliar there in the wash. "It looked green,", he said and caught himself at once. "No, it was white. I told you -- it was white." Rand's fingers had frozen on his boot and now he glared at Deevers with a savage little grin twisting his lips. Deevers shrugged and shook his head. "Doesn't mean a thing." "The devil it doesn't." Duncan had said out loud to himself. What the hell? and it made him feel real again. All he had done was drop his identity card out of his wallet. It could happen to anyone and often did. What would he do about it? Get another, of course. Or make himself one. An identification card was a meaningless object, not even an actual symbol. A piece of paper could never represent the sum total of a man with a functioning brain and body. "It doesn't make any difference what color it was," he said faintly, looking at Deevers. "It's very important," said Rand. "I can't see that it matters. If you want to find out who I am it should be simple." "We already know who you are," replied Deevers, grim amusement on his face. Something fell within Duncan's stomach, a hot weight that seemed to drop without end. "Then why don't you let me out of here?" he asked. "At least let me call my lawyer." Rand looked away. "I'm afraid you can't call him." "Why not?" "Long distance rates, you know," remarked Deevers with an open sneer. Rand shot him an annoyed glance. "Knock it off." "We're wasting time." "You can't expect to solve this in a few hours." "I don't expect to solve it at all," said Deevers. "It's a measly point zero zero two percent. I say we mark him and the others like him off as annual loss and forget it." "No." "We've gone through this routine a dozen times and we haven't learned a thing." Duncan stared at them in bewilderment, the falling sensation in his stomach robbing him of strength. He placed his hands flat on the floor and braced himself. Slowly, laboriously, he began to stand up. Deevers' face took on an expression of alarm. "Let's get out," he said swiftly. "Wait -- " cried Duncan in dismay, getting his feet under him. By the time he was erect and halfway across the room both men were outside and the door was sliding shut. It halted a foot from the panel and Rand looked in at him. "You mustn't ever do that again," he said. "Do what?" Duncan stared back at him and then in fury and desperation shouted, "Let me out! You can't leave me here!" He heard Deevers chuckle. "I haven't done anything! If you think I've committed a crime at least tell me what it is -- " Rand shook his head patiently. " Y ou' ve committed no crime." "All right." Duncan's voice was a whine -- his legs were water. "I'm a worm and you're God Almighty but let me out of here." "I can't." "Tell me why!" "Because you're insane." H e recoiled from the pain of the words, slamming up hard against the cell wall, hurting his back and his head. He stared about his prison, then turned to Rand. Dread choked his throat. "I don't believe you," he said, reaching through the opening just as the man stepped back. "This isn't a sanitarium. Where are the doctors? The nurses? What is this place?" Rand eyed him warily. "It's a storage room, the only place we have to put you in. Don't try to figure things out. You'll only hurt yourself." Then his face was gone from the opening. Duncan began to pace the floor, certain he had worn a rut in it by the time he gave up. He examined the walls of his cell. A smoother steel he had never placed his hands upon. It felt like glass and the rounded corners were as unIF marred as the rest, giving no hint of yielding to the pressure of his back muscles. He was not insane. They were trying to drive him out of his mind or make him doubt his sanity. And he wasn't in any jail. Stoneface's uniform had fooled him but now he knew it wasn't genuine. The police station was phony. But this wasn't an asylum. It must be just what Rand had said it was, a storage room, but like no other Duncan had ever seen. A bulldozer would have had difficulty plowing its way through the thick door. He stretched out on the cold steel and laid his head on his arms. By God, something reasonable was bound to emerge from all this sooner or later and when it did he was going to raise a hue and cry that would put Rand and Deevers behind bars where they belonged. He was drowsing when Rand came back. When he saw the man was not going to open the door Duncan didn't bother to get up. He propped his chin on his arms and watched as the other squinted through the narrow opening and finally located him. "We have to talk some more." "About the card, naturally," Duncan retorted sarcastically. Rand smiled dryly "As a matter of fact, yes. It's very important, you know." "No, I don't know. All I know is that you look like a sane sort of person, not at all like a kidnaper. Who are you working for? Some espionage outfit? Because you're wasting your time. I haven't any secrets." Rand sighed as he leaned against the panel. "Concentrate on the tag. I mean the card. How did you feel when you saw it lying in the gutter?" "Nuts." "Try to answer." "I didn't feel anything. Why should I?" "I think you're lying." "Nuts." "Believe me, it isn't." "Believe you? That's good." "Did you feel angry?" asked Rand patiently. "No." "Sad?" "Of course not." "Happy?" "Ha-ha." "Did you feel a sense of doom?" Duncan clutched his head and writhed onto his back. "Nan!" he yelled. Rand gripped the edge of the door. "Who's Nan?" "My wife, you fool!" howled Duncan. "Your wife?" His wife. His loving wife. She had asked. What happened? Were you in an accident? Did you fall? He had just stepped into the house -- tired, hungry and growing angry because there was no food on the table. She had kept nagging at him with her fool questions until he had lost his temper and had sworn at her. That had made him contrite and he had tried to kiss her. She had held him off while she stared at his chest with a horrified expression on her face. Then she had marched to the phone and -- for crying out loud -- had called the police. "She's ill," he groaned to Rand. "I have to get out of here." Rand was staring at him with a disbelieving look. "When are you going to stop this?" Duncan demanded, trying to put some grit into his voice and failing. "I can't stop." All right. Enough was enough. "At least bring me a cot to lie down on," he said. "How would you enjoy sleeping on steel?" "I'm sorry about that," Rand said. "I should have thought." "Well?" "I'll send one in with N -- with Stoneface." As Rand went away Duncan grinned savagely and stole to his feet. He had to do it. He had to get out one way or another. H e was in the corner beside the door when Stoneface opened it and carried in a cot. The man had no warning at all. He was setting the bed down when Duncan's bunched fists crashed down on his neck. He saw the differences immediately when he stepped out of the cell. Someone had taken the police station away. He was now in an incredibly small enclosure, all of it made of steel, with a small door beside his prison and another one ten feet away. Oh God. Before his dread could begin to build he cut it off sharply. It was all right, he thought steadily. Let them switch things around. It wasn't going to stop him for a second. He pressed on the door beside the cell and it slid back a fraction of an inch. Sucking in his breath, he stiffened to immobility as he overheard Rand and Deevers talking. "Conscience is a function of intelligence," Rand was saying with quiet heat. "Where the devil is yours, since you're so bright?" "I don't believe in wasting it," was Deevers' blunt reply. "We're responsible. We did it to him, you and I." "So we did it. You've enough business sense for me not to have to tell you what to do." IF "Blast you, he'll go into the Atomizer soon enough!" Duncan pressed on the door and it slid back. Inside the room he pressed the door shut and stepped behind a row of tall cartons. He still couldn't see them. He moved toward the sound of their voices. "It happened because he lost his identity tag," said Rand doggedly, as if he were repeating a tiresome theme. "That's screwy." "It's the growth unit that's screwy." Deevers' voice turned frigid. "Now what are you suggesting?" A sound of disgust, then: "Don't worry, we can stop this without your losing money." "So you're convinced you have it all figured out?" "I am. My theory is that when he lost his identity tag he went into a state of shock. Suddenly he was no one. He couldn't stand it and he immediately fell back on his subconscious. Damn it, don't sneer. It's obvious he has one. Where else does he get his memories? Don't you see? He couldn't stand being a nonentity. He had to be somebody." What Deevers saw had nothing to do with what Rand was saying. His eyes widened in shock and his already pale face turned a dull shade of gray as he spied Duncan standing behind the cartons. He overturned his coffee cup as his hands flew apart in a motion of fright. An abrupt stiffening in Rand's back was the only sign that Rand, too was aware. "I'm younger and bigger than the both of you and I'm desperate," Duncan said. "Don't do anything stupid." "Don't come any closer!" croaked Deevers. His hand shot into the air, fingers splayed, and stayed there as though it could hold Duncan back. "Where's the guard?" "I knocked him out. Don't worry. I didn't hurt him." "Oh -- oh, my God," Deevers breathed and then his eyes darted to Rand. "You and your damned psychology!" Rand turned slowly in his chair. The color was gone from his face but he appeared to be calm and unalarmed. "He isn't dangerous," he said quietly. Duncan stepped cautiously from behind the cartons, his body rigid with apprehension. T hey had been drinking coffee. He filed the item as insignificant. The table was littered with cigarette stubs. Another item of non-danger. Two bunks hugged a wall and an old oil-burner warmed a coffee pot. The cartons and boxes flanking the walls bore food labels. An open closet revealed several articles of clothing -- coats, hoods, boots -- and a pair of weird outfits like rubberized diving suits hung from a wall hook. He saw no weapons at all, not until he turned and saw the gun Deevers was pointing at him. Rand must have sensed his alarm because he spun toward Deevers and snapped, "Put that away!" The gun wavered in Deevers' grasp. "What's he going to do?" Duncan's hands squeezed into fists. "You've got no right to shoot me," he said. "I haven't done anything." "He's right," said Rand. "Put it down." Deevers trembled in indecision. Suddenly he tossed the gun to the floor and watched it skid to rest at Duncan's feet. "Go on," he said huskily. "Pick it up. You're the boss here." "I don't want the gun. I want out." "There's no place to go," Rand said in a strange voice that grated on Duncan's spine. "I want to go home." "This isn't -- " "Let him go!" Deevers ground out through clenched teeth. "Can't you get it through your thick head that he's suffering?" "Go on," Deevers said to Duncan, a tight grin on his mouth. "You're free. Don't listen to him. He's crazier than you are." His throat dry, Duncan started toward the door. He was almost there when Rand called to him with such urgency that he hesitated in spite of himself. The man sat forward in his chair, his head drooping between his knees and his gaze focused blankly on his hands. "When you go out make sure you close all the doors after you," he said. "And when you come back be sure to do the same." "I'm not coming back." "You will. The delusion began breaking up the moment you said that tag was green. Just remember what I'm saying. Our lives depend on it." He raised his head and gave Duncan an exhausted look. "Don't blame us too much. We didn't mean to do it." There was no call for Rand to tremble, Duncan thought. It was just another tVick to keep him here until they finished whatever it was they'd begun. To the devil with Rand and Deever -- both! He was free, wasn't he? Free, free -- he had never known freedom to be so exalting, so mind-staggeringly exhilarating. He IF raced toward the world outside as though he had been gone from it for an eternity, his feet making clicking sounds on the steel floor as he sped through doors and hurriedly closed them after him. He was in a tunnel of steel -- a tunnel divided into three short compartments containing large crates and pieces of machinery to which he didn't give a second glance. And then he was out. At last. Out, God, from that shell of a grave. Out into -- oh, God -- what was he out in? What inconceivable wrong turn had he made? Surely something he had done explained what stretched about him in every direction. He had gone the wrong way, had missed a turn somehow, had let himself get mixed up -- for this -- this wasn't -- It was all right when they came into his home and dragged him away without caring how he suffered -- and it was all right when they threw him into a dark hole and left him like a sodden, animal hulk. It was even all right when they took away the police station and put a morass of steel caverns in its place. But, oh God, this wasn't all right! They couldn't take away the world from under his feet! T he sky was an inferno of white flame dominated by a sun that lashed the ground, in a solid sheet of light. Thick plouds bunched everywhere, yet the vast expanse was a blinding mirror. The ground beneath him was a barren waste. No soil lay there, only a pitted plane of dust that rose to choke him as he stumbled about in fear. Jagged pinnacles of rock rose all around him, some as tall as buildings, other so small he could step over them. Heat waves made the space in front of him dance crazily. He saw movement some distance away against the high, ugly horizon. He went that way, his heart slamming against his ribs in powerful thumps. As he walked he prayed that it was Earth he trod, some great and unexplored desert hidden for eternities from the sight and mind of man, some forgotten pit where the laws of nature followed their own strange patterns and had no part with normalcy. But he knew this was no abnormal piece of Earth. It was the wrecked surface of another world, some other planet, some strange and terrifying place he had never seen. Now he could see figures moving in the distance and he quickened his pace, for they looked like men. Hope reared within him and battled his fear that he was alone on an alien planet with two madmen: A great valley had been slashed out of the planet's body, a valley deep enough to accommodate a vast complexity of machinery. The long slope was terraced with deep shelves forming a gigantic stairway that descended into a pit. Great shovels scooped up tons of blasted rock and dumped them into a line of open cars that rolled on steel tracks out of a shallow lip of the valley. The tracks dipped across a clear area, where they disappeared into the jagged rocks. Crews labored at the mouth of a deep shaft in the pit, guiding a pulley that drew buckets from within the planet and carried them swiftly toward and into an open, domed, steel structure rearing at the valley's edge. Other crews worked above the valley with large sluices that filtered samples of rock into a funnel-shaped container. These were the laborers Duncan had spied from the distance and as he rushed toward them his lips formed words of greeting. He was no more than twenty feet away from the nearest one when he stopped running. The greeting froze on his lips and he stood staring in disbelief at the man who wasn't a man at all. Not one of the figures was human. They were insects -- giant, agile, antlike creatures that moved much faster than humans and possessed strength enough to lift and manipulate buckets that must have contained a quarterton of ore. They worked with silent precision and, as Duncan took a faltering step toward them, they turned to give him a glance and then went on with their work. Their bodies were a shiny brown series of hairy bubbles, tier upon tier forming two legs, a torso, two arms with three flexible digits for hands and a large, knobby head. They had two bulging eyes that glistened like dark liquid. A small hole the size of a quarter was situated beneath the eyes. He didn't see a single human being. The crews in the valley, the workers above it, the occasional laborers who moved in and out of the domed structure were ants, every one. For long minutes he let this fact be absorbed by his brain. New fear stole into his mind like fog prowling through forbidden corners, a nameless dread that soaked into him like cold water. H e started toward the nearest creatures, who were watching a stream of dirty water gush down a sluice. His fear made him clumsy and he didn't see the mound of ore until he had fallen over it. He sprawled on his back. IF staring up into the featureless face of one of the insects, who bent over him. "You have fallen," it said in a deep monotone. "I will help you up and we will both check you carefully for damage." The hands that took him and put him on his feet were hard and powerful, A small green circular plate was imbedded in the middle of the ant's thick, horny chest. Stamped upon it were the letters, down at his legs, then traveled slowly upward to rivet on his chest. "Your identity tag is gone," intoned the ant. Duncan tore himself free and began to back away. "You're a bug," he whispered in fright. "You don't know anything." All at once he was shouting. "You don't know anything!" "Are you really there?" asked the ant. "A stupid, brainless collection of instincts," Duncan rasped, slipping and sliding on the treacherous ground. The ant took a step toward him and he cried, "Get away from me!" "You have no identity," said the creature. "There is no such entity as a selfless being in a rational order. A man ought to be notified." "I'm a man," whimpered Diincan. "You are nothing. I do not comprehend why you appear to be standing there." A second ant suddenly stepped between them. Its eyes surveyed cus on Duncan. The plate on its chest bore the letters, NN. "This is a lost one," it said, pointing a digit at Duncan. "Let him alone. Do not look at him. Do not think of him. He is lost." prehend. Yes, you are right. He is lost." Duncan stumbled away and hid behind a thin stalk of rock. The two ants stared after him for a few moments, then went back to the sluice. He collapsed onto his back. He looked at the blinding sun. There was nothing in the sky but the white glare that seemed to be everywhere, reaching into his brain, illuminating his thoughts. Unbidden, the knowledge came. The sun looked like this because the atmosphere was different from that of Earth's. His chest moved up and down, drawing in lungfuls of fresh air. No. This was part of the dream and not reality. He was the dream. Everything was reality but himself. He wanted to believe it, desperately wanted to, and then he even gave up this lie. He was real and so was the incredible planet on which he lay, and these two facts added together meant that either he was capable of breathing where there was no oxygen to breathe or he was breathing substances poisonous to human beings. But he was of Earth, an Earthman, with a white house and a wife named Nan who had brown hair and soft skin. The children would resemble her when they were born. Or had they already been born? The sun burned his brain so that he couldn't remember. He lowered his head to the sterile ground and closed his eyes. trace his steps back into the tunnel. He stumbled as if blind, crashing headlong into great scarred dunes, falling into empty gullies and painfully hauling himself out. He closed all the doors behind him. Rand and Deevers had hauled Stoneface from the cell and laid him in a corner of their living quarters. Duncan stood looking at what he had believed was a human being. He had thought he was knocking out a man. What he had done was destroy a giant ant. His fists had crushed the spindly neck and nearly severed the head. The tangle of bloody loops and spongy gray matter bulged from the skull. The green chest tag with the letters NN lay on the floor like an eye that mocked him. Deevers had whirled as he came in and scuttled to the far side of the table. He sat down, his eyes hard and wary. Rand was standing in the middle of the room, his hands behind his back. He stared intently at the floor, as though he were unable or else. With shuffling steps Duncan moved until he stood directly in front of Rand. He fought to keep his gaze steady but as the man raised his head he found his own drooping until his chin touched his chest. He felt sweat forming on his back and his mind cringed as he waited for the words that would condemn him to an insane nonentity. He still wasn't prepared for them when they came. They were whips that lashed his body with steel tips, driving him into a dark tunnel where he cowered in terror. Without looking at Rand he sought for the lie in the man's tone, the subtle slyness that would prove this thing a hoax, a fraud, an IF attempt to destroy his reality for some obscure purpose. There was no mockery in Rand's voice, no evidence of fraud. He spoke evenly and without anger, frankly and cruelly, and only the queer little breathing gasps he took between sentences betrayed his awareness of the pain he was causing. "Deevers and I hold controlling interests in a company on ry. We make living organisms to labor on planets hostile to men. Our major production concerns a large insectlike creature whose job it is to mine metals unavailable on Earth on other worlds. The 'elements in all organisms are the same. Only the proportions vary. An organism grows if new matter accumulates faster than the old matter breaks down. Maturity is reached when matter-building takes place at the same rate as the old matter disintegrates. What we do is hold off this last process until our products arrive at a satisfactory size. "Our 'insects' come in three classifications -- three types conditioned and trained for three spetypes operate the sluices and mine the pits. Our two NN types are programed to monitor the others, to see that nothing goes wrong. Two years ago one of the vers and I arrived we found that spent two years trying to find out what made him and several subsequent insects psychotic. Now we know, thanks to you. "Our creatures are grown from a small portion of life-material, the patterns of development carefully manipulated so that the nervous system and relevant muscular units will be compatible with the brain that is constructed separately. As the 'insect' grows it is chemically conditioned to survive in various types of environments. The carbohydrates, fats and proteins constituting the brain are designed in such a way that they reproduce a human brain, not just a reasonable facsimile but an exact duplication of the brain of a man who once lived. Who the man was whose brain we used as a model doesn't mattbr. What does matter is that we've created something we don't understand. Deevers and I wanted time to test our new products thoroughly before they were brought here, but the government needed our 'insects' and pressured us into giving up that part of our program. We consented because we had no reason to suspect our 'insects' knew anything other than what they had been taught. The peculiar thing is, we're pretty certain those creatures working out there dont know anything else. "But you do and the others like you did. A few hours ago you lost your identity tag. Maybe it was snagged by one of the pulley hooks that draw buckets to the sluices. However it was lost, you found yourself without an identity. Your brain rejected the concept of nonentity and fashioned you a new self. We don't know how or why this happened. We don't know how you could acquire memories of Earth and human life and culture when nobody taught them to you, but we know that you have. "I'd like to stop this whole business right now. I want a year to study my products, throw every psychological test in the book at them, find out just what it is I've made, whether I've made a creature satisfied to do its work as I intended or an alien monstrosity condemned to misery. But they won't give me that year. The government says no. The 'insects' will be used to produce what Earth needs regardless' of my objections. So there's only one thing I can do -- and I hope to God it's the right thing and not just a minor interference that will aggravate the situation. From now on the workers will be made without any real identity. They won't be trained to self-awareness in the sense that there's any significance attached to it. Their letter types will be attached under the loop between their thorax and pelvis and they'll know nothing about it. I hope it works. I hope that if they have no identities -- if they aren't taught that there is such a thing as real self -- they won't be able to lose them. "That's all I can do. I can't think of anything else at the moment." raised a hand and covered his eyes as if he were trying to block off some appalling view. His fingers dug savagely into his eyes and his shoulders slumped. Duncan lifted one of his own hands and stared at it. He could see the creases in his palm, the dark hair above the knuckles oh its back. He felt his heart pumping blood through his body. The dream -- if the dimension of unreality into which his mind had plunged could be called a. dream -- wouldn't go away. His stomach lurched and he clamped his lips tightly. He finally raised his head and looked at Rand. IF "What happened to the others?" "They wanted to die." A voice whispered, "And so do I -- " and Duncan realized it was his own. "We have an Atomizer in the domed building by the valley," Rand said through white lips. "We use it to destroy the residue of rock collected from the last stages of our mining." . Residue of rock. But to die as such would be to have lived not at all. And Duncan had lived. For the past hours he had lived. And so his death ought to have reason in it. But what reason was there for him? He searched his memories and fastened upon one. Men once were put to death for crimes. And he was guilty of the crime of deception. He had pretended that he sprang from the loins of Man. This was a lie. His birth had been an assembly-line production, his conception accomplished within an insentient piece of laboratory equipment. He believed that Earth was his home, even as the earthworm's home is in her soil. This, too, was a lie. He had no home for the word connoted a place of growth, warmth and compassion, not an alien island called Venus where nothing grew but time, where warmth was measured in the destructive holocaust of a blast furnace and where compassion was a cancerous spread in a He was guilty. His sentence -- death. "I'm ready," he said. Rand looked at him steadily. "I want to go with you." Duncan hesitated. "I know you're still in the dream," said Rand. "You can't go alone." Duncan tried to speak, but all he could do was nod. Rand took one of the weird suits from the wall hook and began to put it on. Duncan watched. Deevers sat at the table, relaxed now as he watched a trail of cigarette smoke climb toward the ceiling. As Duncan started toward him his head jerked around and his thin cheeks went hollow. "You and I have something in common," Duncan said. "We're both lacking in humanness." Deevers' mouth drew into a sullen line. His face darkened. He started to say something, then suddenly clamped his lips shut and turned his face away. Rand led the way out to the second compartment, where he wheeled a small open car into the corridor. He and Duncan stepped into it, Rand behind the wheel. The car moved down the corridor until the last steel door slid shut behind them. Out in the open the car plowed effortlessly across gullies and between jutting rocks, carrying the two toward the valley and the domed building. The sun was harsh and merciless. To Duncan it became a soft yellow orb that made him blink his eyes. The ground was rough and porous beneath them. He imagined that he saw grass swaying in the wind, watched a rabbit dart from its burrow and sniff at the air for a moment before it lunged into a thicket. Rand took him into the building past the fiery furnaces that he didn't remember, along a twisting corridor that led into a blindingly hot room where yellow gold leaped down a narrow sluice and splattered into small molds that rolled away on steel tracks. The Atomizer was taller than a man and twice as wideIt was a box of metal with a transparent door. When Duncan looked into it he saw the air within shimmer as desert air shimmers beneath the sun. Rand had him by the arm. "Can you hear me?" he asked, his face pale behind the visor, the hand on Duncan's arm trembling. Duncan nodded. "You only have to step inside and close the door." He took a step toward the box. Rand held him fast. "Let the dream go! What good has it done you? You can't go like this." Duncan knew that if he were a man on Earth condemned to die it could happen the same way. Someone might come and say. Let me give you something. Its perfectly all right, the law allows it. It will make your suffering easier to bear. You wont know where you are. You wont even know who you are... No... As he stepped through the door he was looking at a tiny splash of light that might have been made by the sum He closed the door with his own hand. He saw Rand's lips forming the soundless words, "Goodbye, The dream sheltered him, reared invincibly between him and the specter of an 'insect' self. In his mind he cried,  am a man! and his reality was victorious over the other reality. The destructive forces that streamed through the atoms of his tough, leathery body penetrated the sensitive softness of a human being, and his journey into oblivion was painful and terrible. As he desired.  IF current  classic # Cast # Street New York, New York # Robert Silverbetg. #( Robert Bloch. # #I Fifth Avenue New York, New York # verberg. # Goulding, John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake. #c Cooper and Roger Lancelyn Green. S# # # Cast # Street New York, New York # Gardner Dozois. # Arthur C. Clarke # # Fifth Avenue New York, New York # Jones. # Silent. # Davidson. # Edward D. Hoch. # June Wetherell. # back. # B y now most readers of  science fiction must have learned that John W. Campbell died on July #, #. The loss to the field cannot be measured. During thirty-four years as an editor he discovered and developed most of today's top writers and his ideas of what science fiction should be were largely responsible for its evolution into an accepted category of book publishing. Because of his importance as an editor, however, his contributions as a writer are too often overlooked. Most of his works are not currently available in book form -- so this time let's dwell briefly on books that are not on the stands, though they should be. Campbell must really be considered as two writers, both sufficiently major to merit lasting attention. Under his own name, his stories appeared from # through #. These featured heavy science -- in them the limits of man's knowledge and achievements were stretched well beyond other writers' limitations. The wonder of science and the power of technology were more important in them than style, mood or characterization. They were never meant to be literary achievements -- but as space opera they were breathtaking. To my taste, they were better than the work of E.E. Smith, whose books are still available. Under the byline of Don A. Stuart, from # until #, Campbell established himself as an entirely different writer. He was the first man to write consistently the type of fiction we now call modern and he did it so well that his stories still win a high place in any list of the best of all time. He was preeminent in two fields. Yet today I cannot find a single volume of his work in print, though some of the stories are available in several top anthologies. The trouble seems to be that Campbell wrote before major book publishers had discovered science fiction and only "fan" publishers were giving out contracts. Most of his books were printed at least twenty years ago. Now, since they have been in book form, the hardcover houses won't reprint them and the softcover people don't pick them up because they aren't in hard covers or because their original sales were -- necessarily -- small. If that would seem to indicate that most publishers remain ignorant of the field and its potentials, the implication is purely deliberate. The Stuart stories were usually short, suitable only for collections, with the exception of a single short novel entitled The Elder Gods. This came out as half of a book from one of the "fan" houses. It is a fine sword-and-sorcery novel, having some of the magic of A. Merritt but a lot more logic in its development than much of Merritt's work. It should have been reprinted often, but I can find no evidence that it is to appear again. Of the two collections once issued. Who Goes There? was brought out in soft covers nearly twenty years ago, but has not been reissued. I understand from Scott Meredith, Campbell's agent, that the second collection. Cloak of Aesir, will appear in soft covers shortly. If you find it on your stands -- buy it at once. It may be your only chance to get a fair sampling of Campbell's writing. Certainly there seem to be no plans to issue any of the work done under Campbell's own name. These were once fairly well represented in book form, but I can now find none in print. The almost legendary Arcot-Wade-and-Morey stories were brought out by Ace as The Black Star Passes and Islands of Space, which concludes with perhaps the wildest development of space opera ever imagined. Ace also published The Mightiest Machine, though not its sequel. The Incredible Planet. Other Campbell novels never appeared in book form. One of these was originally published in a magazine under a different title for each installment, but is remembered as either The Mother World or Conquest of the Planets. I consider it one of the best of the hardscience novels -- it was based on Dirac's theories in which space and matter are treated as different states of the same thing, and capable of giving men powers beside which psi would be kindergarten stuff. It seems highly peculiar that one of the best and most influential writers of science fiction should have no books currently on the stands and only one promised for the future. It is especially strange when one considers the number of books that are available but should not be! O NE of these latter, incidentally, is The Sea Is Boiling Hot, by George Bamber (Ace, IH). Superficially, from the dust jacket, this should be a timely story of the struggle against pollution at a time when man can exist only in enclosed cities. But the story begins with the "hero" Heron knowing that he has the answer to Ihe problem; hence, there is no longer any plot after about page #. Then we learn at once that Heron has no intention of revealing this secret: "I know but I won't tell." We now have a coy fool as our main character. "Science" is introduced when the author, who apparently never heard of oxidation and reduction, suggests that the opposite of "combustion" must be given a new term, "imbustion." (Doesn't know much about language, either, it seems.) We fiddle around with assorted sex scenes at a totally unemotional level and then get into a chase scene, to wind up with Heron giving up the big secret at the end, for no better reason than he had at the beginning. At this point boredom grows climactic. I really can't believe that publishers are that hard up for material! There is one book, however, that is both available and excellent in every way. This is the softcover edition of what may be the best anthology of science fiction ever put together. At a price of #, Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg (Avon), is a book that should be bought at once by anyone who doesn't have the hardcover version. I considered it a bargain at more than five times the price, so it's the best buy in science fiction now. I hope that this volume will remain in print for at least another decade, since it makes the best one-volume introduction to science fiction I have found. But in case it suffers the usual fate of giving place to something new and not as good after a short time. I'd advise getting more than one copy. At this price you can afford it -- and owning a spare is better than being afraid to lend your sole copy. As usual, of course, most books lie somewhere between the above two extremes. One to which I have been looking forward is the sequel to The Warlock in Spite of Himself from which I derived more pure fun than from almost any other novel last year. King Kobold, by Christopher Stasheff (Ace, #), is not up to the high level of the former book, I'm sorry to say, but I would have enIF joyed it moderately well if I hadn't expected too much. Mostly it seems lacking the spontaneity of its predecessor. This time. Rod Gallowglass, the High Warlock, is somehow more a figurehead than he was in the earlier work. He is less personally involved -- he now holds an official position where his job demands he handle things, and the pressures on him are much weaker. Too, the reader is shown too many events that are outside the protagonist's ken. This puts one in the position of frequently knowing more about the story than he does and further saps interest. The inventions in the current volume seem inferior to those in the previous novel. Nothing in this book equals the wonderfully zany ghosts and their king. No character stands out as did the loyal-disloyal aide and enemy we met before. Even the robot horse does nothing but sink into the background -- and Gramarye becomes the setting for just another future sword and sorcery struggle. The menace this time around is not internal to Gramarye or to Rod's lack of knowledge. We have a Menace -- a typically ugly, brutish menace, apparently. Creatures like Neanderthal men (as pictured in too many stories) are being led against the king and Rod is summoned to handle them. Okay, turns out that the reasons for the invasion aren't quite what we might expect; but they are not that much of a surprise, either. There are some excellent touches, such as the relationship of an old witch and a hermit wizard and their corporeal but unborn son. But somehow, the whole matter of the son becomes contrived and lackluster when he has to be fitted into the interplanetary organization to which Rod belongs. Stasheff writes well and some of his science fiction and fantasy combine smoothly. But this book seems overplotted and underdone -- too routine for the writer's obvious talents. I'd give it a lukewarm recommendation -- but it's worth reading if you don't expect too much of the evening spent with it. And I still think Stasheff is going to make a reputation as a fine writer. A nother mild disappoint ment is The Flying Sorcerers, by David Gerrold and Larry Niven (Ballantine, #). Niven has become a major writer and I expect Gerrold to establish himself as top rank shortly. But in this book, it seems to me, they've taken too many bites from a single pie. The book falls into two sections. The first, which fits the title, deals with a local sorcerer who finds his territory invaded by a human scientist -- a fellow sorcerer dealing in other magic, from his view. Shoogar does what any honest sorcerer must 'do -- he resorts to every dishonest trick in his book. And the war between Shoogar and "Purple," the human, is a lovely war indeed. This takes up the first half of the book, and it is delightful. But then we find that the war isn't over, exactly. Purple turns up again and this time he has been stranded -- his ferry ship down to the planet is destroyed and his new location is one from which he cannot make radio contact with the main ship. His object is to get the primitive natives, half under Shoogar's control, to build him a balloon and let him fly to where the ship can be ordered down. There's a good deal of ingenious work in this half, also. But it is no longer a light and comic book. Shoogar is shoved into the background, where he can only wander around muttering darkly and planning pretty revenge. From a clever and resourceful man who took on a power bigger than himself -- and won -- he becomes only a stupid nuisance who cannot understand what goes on. The basic story of a stranded Earthman who has to turn a primitive tribe into a post-industrialrevolution people to get them to build what he needs is a good situation; and the effects on the primitives are well conceived, as is the technology developed. But the two halves just don't make a whole. The second half is made less interesting by the presence of Shoogar and the first half is made somewhat less pointed when we realize how little the sorcerer deserved all the cheering we were doing for him. It is quite impossible now to believe that this pitiful, ignorant warlock could have accomplished what we had to accept before from him. It's not at all a bad book -- but it isn't all a good one. The first half, to the triumph of Shoogar, is well worth reading. But the book should then be put aside for a few months before trying the second half. There's also a minor complaint I have with the book. Niven and Gerrold have loaded it with names slightly distorted from those of science-fiction writers and fans. Sure, it's a slightly interesting guessing game decoding them. But it soon ceases to be funny and it distracts from following the story and makes everything too much of a put-on. This is basically an amateur trick; it should be reserved for fanzines, not used in professional work. A somewhat similar fault mars Jack of Shadows, by Roger Zelazny (Walker, #). Through half of the book. Jack is a sort of Til Eulenspiegel -- a puckish waif among the "gods" of a curious IF world, where his dominion and power lie in the shadows of the land between light-side and darkside. This world might be one of those constructed by men such as the protagonist of Isle of the Dead. It has to be a construct, since it is carefully arranged to have no rotation of day and night; yet the bright side is shielded against too much heat and the dark is provided with heat. It has its own "gods," or rulers, with extraordinary powers; and one of their functions is to maintain the various balances on the world, however much they feud otherwise. The first half of the book carries Jack to the cold area where magic rules -- and since his powers involve rnagic, this is all right. But then he moves to the lighted area -- an area singularly similar to today's Earth and hence rather uninteresting. There he acquires a knowledge of science, goes back to defeat his enemies with his new powers and becomes master, only to find he has to perform his balancing act alone -- if he can -- by rather routine travels into a computer complex, lacking the magic to which we've become accustomed. The first part is minor Zelazny, quite enjoyable. The second half breaks away, becomes rather grim and ugly -- and loses all the glamor it needs to be anything but dull. In the end, because we don't learn enough about Jack and his origins, the whole thing seems rather pointless. Wait for the softcover version; it's certainly not worth Walker's price. F inally we come to John Norman. His Raiders of Got (Ballantine, #) is the sixth in the series. I find myself unable to resist the Gor novels, despite the irritation I usually feel when reading them. (Except for the third, where I found the PriestKings excellently handled.) Norman seems capable of making every mistake a writer can make. Yet he is also the only writer today who seems able to capture any of the feeling I used to find in the Martian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And while my taste may still be adolescent in this, I seem to find a great many who agree and who also turn to the Gor novels -- they may be gaffe, but they're the only game of that sort in town. And on all-over balance, they've captured more of the romance and appeal of the old Barsoom novels than anyone else has been able to develop.  This time Norman has made almost none of the mistakes of his last two books. He has largely gotten off his adolescent sex kick where he was out establishing Men's Lib by proving, that every woman wants to be a slave and that nothing captures the female heart like a good beating. And he hasn't tricked up his method of telling the story as he did in the last -- he tells it straight this time and there are no lapses that have to be covered by flashbacks where the real action should be shown. Obviously he can learn by experience. But he has fallen into another error -- less annoying, yet some-, how less fascinating. He seems to have lost purpose as a result of trying a rather commendable experiment. Most of his books lately have been centered on the mystery of alien invaders and Cabot's search to help the PriestKings defeat them. This book starts that way, but then gets sidetracked. Apparently, Norman decided that he was tired of a hero who was all strong and brave and resolute. He makes Cabot demonstrate a moment of surrender and cowardice, followed by self-loathing -- not a bad idea in a way, even though it seems revolutionary in this type of story. Unfortunately, perhaps because there is no precedent, Cabot seems not to know how to go about demonstrating a weakness. Instead of seeing himself as having been forced into a hopeless situation by a concatenation of irresistible circumstances, Cabot just suddenly turns coward for a moment. The scene isn't convincing -- its development is too quick and too much like other cases where he was not afraid. Then the book goes glimmering off into vaporous self-loathing in which Cabot seems to feel that since he is now scum of Gor, he might as well act as scummily as the pirates he joins. Trouble is, he really doesn't act thus. He does a few things -- as if periodically Norman remembered and threw the events that way -- out of heroic character, but generally he is the same old Cabot. And in the end -- the author's intent may be excellent -- Cabot's discovery that any man can have moments of weakness without being less a hero is also too sudden, too easy and not at all convincing. There is a story of romance and adventure mixed up in ail this. But somehow, once he sees himself as scum, Cabot seems to lose all motivation, forget his mission for the Priest-Kings and mostly drift. The impression I get of the story is that it also drifts. It has none of the earlier faults, but it also has none of the earlier drive. Still, I recommend it to all Gor fans. It has a lot of Norman's color, and by getting over his bad habits, Norman has put himself in a good form to continue the series. Anyhow, at # pages, there is a lot of action and adventure for the money !  IF Separating humans from would-be humans the invisible barrier trapped them both! forest was still. Quiet. Drugged by midday heat that set the horizon to shimmering. It was a stronger sun than the sun of Bromius and its warmth ran along her shoulders and arms like a tangible sheath. She would miss it. It would not be long now before Tregasid Three completed its mission to the other planets of the system and appeared overhead like a ruby star to call her back. The cycle was complete. She and Atan had recorded the slow drift of a year's seasons, each more pleasant and agreeable than the last. All the data that anybody could ever require about the blue-green watery planet was methodically stored and indexed in the memory banks of the computer. Ava's thoughts stopped short. "Pleasant," "agreeable" -- those were danger words. She was using aesthetic judgment again. She was being unscientific. It was just as well that she had not spoken them out loud when Atan was around. In his present mood he would have had them in the log as sure as a gun. Where was he anyway? Not much more than a hectare on the low plateau had been sealed off by the force field, but he had a knack of losing himself in it. Almost as though he were deliberately hiding from her. To some extent that was fine. He had turned out to be a poor companion for the long haul. He worked a sixteen-hour day and slept through the balance. As a professional she could admire the quality of the work he was doing. No other survey team would turn in a fuller or better documented brief. But he was programed like an android whose courtesy tape had been omitted. At the foot of the escarpment a slow clear river ran silently into the lush forest. On the far bank was a sandy clearing, a gold ochre strip, below viridian foliage dotted with asterisks of cobalt blue and lemon yellow. As she watched, a small family party of hominids stepped from the leaf screen and walked cautiously to the water's edge. Either she was getting less critical or these were near enough in type to herself to be called human. She was all set to wave, then stopped. Any movement on her part would only frighten them off. All mobile life forms had taken to leaving a wide gap between themselves and the invisble barrier that protected the strangers. Ava watched the male wade thigh deep in the water, splash glittering handfuls over his head IF and chest and then submerge until only his head was showing. The female was watching the forest, child straddled over one hip. She was less heavily furred than her partner. Straight black hair dropped below shoulder level in a smooth cowl, breasts were taut and neat. Tiring of watching the swimmer, she set the child down and walked away toward the tree line with a leg action that was feminine for any hominid culture in the galaxy. When she returned she held a broad leaf across both hands, on it a small pyramid of large golden berries. The bather waded ashore, scattering diamond droplets, the drag of the current emphasized in the powerful swing of his massive shoulders. At the river's edge he gathered a double handful of water and threw it in a shower at the other two. The distance was too great for speech sounds to reach Ava, but the mime told her that it went like a bomb. The child rolled over and over in exaggerated, joyous terror and the female put down her fruit and ran for the male. A wild cheerful tussle in the shallows followed. A va lay back on her flat rock and watched the sky. From horizon to horizon it was a clear cerulean blue. Beyond it was the black night of space and infinitely far was the cinnamon-tinged sky of Bromius. She felt suddenly more alone than at any time during the mission. To Atan the family group at the river would consist of savages. Barely human. Items to list in his log with a total portrait, voice prints, biology, life style -- all the data that described a specimen and left out the vital parameters that made a living man. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When she looked again they were sitting eating the fruit and the man's -- yes, he was a man -- hand was resting comfortably on the woman's thigh. Ava took off her electrum filigree headband and let her hair fall in a dark mane. Then he stood up and walked slowly down the slope to the river. The force field was set some meters out from the edge of the water so that Atan could take specimens of fish for his collection, A small inflated power boat he used was drawn up on the shingle. The child aw her first, stopped eating and pointed. The woman leaped to her feet, picked him up and ran for the trees, the man following more slowly, facing the danger, teeth bared. At the river Ava stopped. Her reflection, familiar and unfamiliar, stared back. They had seen that creature. Tall, pale-skinned, shining metal cloth tabard with the double helix of Bromius shining with every finish that could be devised to repel all known pests that might be harmful. No wonder they had run for the bush. She was outside experience, a mechanical monster with a human head. Before she realized what she intended to do, Ava had zipped down the seals of her tabard and lifted it over her head, leaving it to stand like a decapitated trunk. Then she pulled off her boots, stood for a 'count of five in her maize leotard, shrugged, wriggled lithely out of St and walked into the water. If she had brought her activator, she would have switched out the field and swum across. As it was, she floated in the warm water, jackknifed to the sandy bottom to look at the plant life and came up streaming like a half-tide rock to hear her name being called. "Ava." "Down here." Crotch deep in water she watched Atan stride down the slope, looking across the river -- there still was movement in the trees. Then he saw her and stopped dead. His voice came, hard-edged, "What do you think you are doing?" The question made her analyze her motives. Maybe the answer she chose was true. "I thought they should see we are flesh and blood under all the gear. We must look like mechanical marvels. It's no wonder they won't come near." "So you thought a strip show would bridge the culture gap. Do you realize that without the barrier you might have been carried off and forcibly mated. Do you want to end up as one of the cows in a bull ape's family group?" What had seemed a natural thing to do now looked ridiculous in her own eyes. Also she was conscious that a cuirasse esthetique was not cover enough in a dialogue with a fully clothed male standing on higher ground. She decided she hated his guts, crossed her arms over her breasts and said, matching his tone, "There's no need to go on. I'm not stupid. Go away and I'll dress. What do you want me for anyway? You seem to be able to manage everything single-handed." "Some calculation you should check. You are, after all, the mathIF ematician of the station. I should be glad to have a few minutes of your attention. Let me remind you that our time is running out. The spacer could arrive any day." Ava debated whether to scoop up a double handful of water and throw it at him. Or a rock. But he was too far away. Missing would ruin it as a gesture. She dropped her arms and began to wade elegantly for the home shore. Atan turned on his heel and strode up the hill. T he main meal of the day was taken at # hours local reckoning. At first they had taken time over it, talking about the work of the day, reminiscing about Bromius, although there was a partial block on that. Deep briefing had not only given basic sex responses a shrewd knock; it had aimed to build in an inhibition of any nostalgic longing for their distant home planet. Theoretically they were proof against the fifth column that worked from the inside of every head to make bricks of unhappiness with or without straw. In the early days of the Mission Ava had reckoned she had been lucky in the raffle. Besides being a fantastically good organizer, Atan had been a pleasant and witty companion. They had gotten along fine until he started the recluse bit. At the same time he had taken to pulling rank and using this edgy hectoring tone as though he resented her being here at all. Currently he was eating a nut cutlet simulate and checking over a sheaf of notes that represented the day's take. He had not even said he liked the omelet and she had spent at least ten minutes of her life's finite span working out the combination on the dispenser. Stung at last to the direct question, she said, "Well, what did you make of it?" Atan said, "Comprehensive as far as it goes, but I've only scratched the surface. Do you realize there could be at least three hundred and fifty thousand species of plants. Very much more complex than anything we have on Bromius. I've used four main groups for classification. Algae, mosses, ferns, seed-bearers. That seems to work out for this locale and I'd guess it would serve for the whole planet since the deviations in soil and climate are not very great. That reminds me -- I have some specimens to fix before they go off. I'd like your help at first light. I want to do a final survey downriver. Pollen count over a measured square kilometer. Set up a sampling grid." "" Please set up a sampling grid." "I haven't time. You do it." The handiest missile was the water jug and she had it poised to throw, but he was already halfway across the clearing to the geodesic dome that served as a lab. She cleared disposable tableware into the destructor and watched it dissolve. It looked like the only entertainment she was going to get. Atan was set for several hours, then he would go to bed. Ava went to her own roomy cell, put on an actualizer tape, switched it off and looked out through the window. The planet's sun was standing on the horizon like a vermilion disk. It was the time of day when there was a sense that anything could happen. She remembered the primitives and the sun reminded her of the golden fruit they had left on the sand. That would be something now for Atan's collection. Edible, too. God, it would serve him right if she put them on the menu for his next meal in spite of the absolute prohibition against eating any local product. Taking a sudden decision she strapped on her equipment belt and returned to the clearing. A glow came from the dome. He was stuck at the coal face. No problem. When she reached the river bank the sun was below the level and streamers of cadmium yellow and vermilion made a backdrop for the forest. She pushed out the lightweight dinghy, neutralized the power screen and headed for the far shore. Outside the barrier there was more noise -- a confused racket like a crackle of static, as though the leaf curtain covered a frenzy of living action. Light levels were dropping fast and it took her longer to cross than she had expected -- the current was doing its best to sweep the flimsy craft downstream. When she hit the beach she had to use a hand lamp to search the ground. Noise cut off as she walked up the sand and she felt the menace of sudden silence. Atan could be right. She was behaving like a fool. Any minute there could be a rush from the forest and she would be cut off. Atan would not even know where to look for her. If he wanted to, the selfsufficient swine. Then she saw what she was looking for, kneeled down and packed seven large hard berries into a pouch, using her left hand and keeping a roving beam round the tree line. When it was done she fairly ran for the boat, pushed off and spun the rheostat into full-drive position, leaving a creamy wake across the dark river. IF Atan took the half beaker of reddish juice without comment. Before breakfast he had fueled the excursion module and was obviously anxious to move off. She had intended to serve pieces of fruit; but when she had cut across the tough golden rind she had found a reddish pulp and a mass of small hard seeds. It had been a job for the extractor to make a drink of it, acid, sweet, drying to the palate but a new and pleasant taste. As he lifted the glass she almost warned him, but a persuasive voice in her ear put in its oar. He deserves all he gets. Take him down a peg. Tell him later. After all, it isnt poison. Youve out the declaration that there's been no breach of biocontamin ation regs. See how he gets around that one... Ten minutes later they were over tree-top height, clearing the invisible palisade and following the broad river. A tan swore as he watched  blood well from a five-centimeter gash in the palm of his left hand. He dropped the net with its still struggling captive. "You should have waited," Ava said. "Another minute and the nerve shot would have worked for sure. Hold it up. I'll get a suture." She ran the twenty meters to the module which was standing on its tripod jacks and scanning the area like a patient hbund dog. When she was two paces away it began to bleep a warning, picking up the urgency in her head. She said, "Shut up you fool, it's me -- " and snatched a medicare pack. Atan was standing like the statue of a demagogue and obediently sat across a handy tree trunk for attention. Absorbed by the professional angle Ava joined him knee to knee and took his hand on her lap. Neat economical movements sterilized the wound and ran in a flexible sealing tissue. Basic inoculations would take care of any alien microbe that might have gotten into the blood. Though for that matter she ought to take a sample smear from the creature's mouth and run it through the analyzer. It could just be one that nobody had thought about. Concentrating on the chore, she was not watching Atan's right hand. When it homed on the nape of her neck and pushed its fingers gently up through her hair, she was a surprised medic. She went still as any stone. Atan shuffled along his log cleverly getting his knees on the inside track. The medicare pack sealed itself and rolled clear. A prudent housekeeper, she tried to catch it, but she was held fast. The damaged hand, proving that she had done a good repair job. Joined its partner to clamp her head in a firm grip. Considering that she had been angling for a little personal attention for some time, her reaction was unreasonable. "Atan. No. The codex." To show that he knew all about it, he quoted section three from the top harshly, as though it had been set up to do him a personal injury. "'Also, in addition to the prohibitions above relating to all physical contact with aliens, there is the absolute prohibition against unnecessary physical contact between partners on a mission. Variations in radiation level cannot be precisely determined; pairing bonds established outside the home gravisphere could result in mutant genes being imported to Bromusian stock.' Do I need to go on?" Head still fixed for a close view of his sternum, she was ideally placed to evaluate the old crack that love does not lie in gazing into a partner's eyes but in looking together in the same direction. She remembered it. He had it right. It could be his favorite bedtime reading. They were considering the same text but he sounded angry about it. Finger pressure swiveled her head on its stalk. His face was unexpectedly close. Eyes were serious, but gave the lie to the voice print. She was being looked at as though she were his apple from way back. Fighting a rearguard, Ava said, "No -- " again. Atan said, "I like the shape of your mouth when you say that. It's convenient." A gram of practice being worth a kilo of theory, he proved his point, homing on her lips with the precise component orientation that longstanding practice as a technical expert made second nature. Ava's hands were flat on his chest pushing for out. Then the steam leaked. Her hands traveled up his tabard and locked behind his head. If she could have gotten in a final crack it might have been -- if you can't beat it, join it. After two minutes she knew she didn't want to beat it anyway and she was thinking unselfishly of Atan. As the headman of the group, he would have to pick up the tab when Tregasid Three made her planetfall. There would be the routine session on the recall couch to check that what was in the manifest was all there was of action for the trip. IF It would be out and about on the screen in full color with the psycho team having a ball. So far there was no real damage. The solid achievment of the mission would outweigh it. He might get away with a blue star entry on his profile and a norhinal fine. Using a last kick of failing will power, she twisted free. "Atan, listen to me." "And why not? I haven't told you, but your voice is the rarest music. I particularly like the way you say Atan with that precise palatal tap on the T. Say it again." "Atan!" "That's it. Sends anticipatory shivers down my spine." "Atan, I'm sorry." "What do you have to be sorry about? Is it that nude bathing bit? You're thinking you triggered off all the chemically depressed lecher in me. Why do you think I've been avoiding you these last months? Do you know why? I couldn't trust myself to be near you. If anybody has to be sorry, it's me. But don't worry. There won't be any problem. The record will show that you want from you is a promise that when we get back you'll consider a pairing application. God, how can you reduce what I feel to legal jargon." "Atan, I'm ashamed. You're making me feel ashamed. Please listen to me." "Okay. The forest's ferny floor is yours." "Let me go." "Is that necessary?" "You might think so when I tell you what I did." meter away, Ava marshaled the facts, distracted by her audience's unaffected pleasure in simply looking at her. She reckoned that getting what you wanted had its problems and that it would be a fine thing if people could hit the mean between extremes of behaviour. Also she recognized that she didn't want to trigger off a reversion to the iron man routine  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and said, "Atan." The excursion pod, as if on cue, went into spasm with its 'highpitched bleep and Atan swung oft his log and was beside her, one hand clamped arolind her waist, the other sawing around with a blaster, hunting a target. Nothing extraordinary was visible, but the urgent signal went on. Something could be lurking on the far side of the pod, hidden by its petal antennae. He said, "Wait," and took two steps. A net of fine sticky creeper dropped silently from the foliage overhead and turned him into a cocoon. Ava had a count of five to reflect that the book had a point. Personal involvement came at the expense of prudence. If A tan had not been distracted they would have been back on board with their specimen and with mega power under their thumb. Her own cowl dropped neatly over her head and the set filled with extras as hominid types whipped out of the wookwork on all sides. There are two sides to every situation. All the newcomers looked pleased. Enormous jaws were hinged open in grins that bared large yellow teeth. Flat noses were wrinkled with delight. ' One massive male, feet astride, toes turned in, long arms hanging almost to his knees was jigging up and down as though on hydraulic jacks' For all their technical knowhow, Atan and she had fallen for a stone-age ploy. Maybe because they had been sidetracked by a basic drive that had a stone-age simplicity. It was humiliating to believe that the book could be right all along. There was a moral in that somewhere, but there was no time to track it to its hole. The group had stopped its celebration dance and had closed in. They were not the same species as the family group she had watched across the river. These were hairier and more heavily built. One step farther back in the evolutionary chain or even coming up on a different track altogether. Two males with hand axes -- clumsy stones with one face flaked into a cutting edge -- began working on her net. The links parted. One of them took her in a comprehensive grip so that she could not move her hands. His pungent body scent assaulted her nostrils. Instinct had told their captors that the alien's equipment was dangerous and they systematically peeled away her gear as though husking a nut. The leotard gave a little trouble, but even before it was sliced away it was clear that they had gotten, themselves a surprise package. She had larger charms than Atan and everybody wanted to touch. Passing around the inquisitive circle, a bewildered lay figure, she was only three meters from Atan when the excursion pod made a solo and strictly unrepeatable entry into the score. Curiosity, evolution's handmaid, had moved a buck male to squeeze himself in the pilot's seat and rummage around with the switchgear. To further his research he had ripped away the hood of the instruIF ment cluster and raveled out a bundle of color-coded leads. Twisting them in a cat's cradle and sawing them against a sharp edge to cut them free, he beat the maker's safety factor and brought the built-in destructor mechanism into circuit. Bleeps accelerated to prestissimo. froze the action into a still and a deep resonance that shook the floor. The excursion pod made its last trip in fist-sized gobbets that flew around the grove like shrapnel, with the head of the tribe's first scientist, sliced at the neck by a flailing strut, opting for vertical take-off, still set in a happy grin of achievement. the game. The rising tempo of the bleeps from the pod had alerted him to the chance on the way. As the flash lit the grove and the hands gripping him opened in reaction, he was already hurling himself sideways toward Ava. He knocked her off her uneasy balance and was arched over her, shielding her with his body as the trash surged around the company. Before the shock wave had passed he was hauling her to her feet and making for the trees. The going was rough on two sophisticates used to having a better powerweight ratio than anything in the neighborhood. But Atan kept going for a kilometer before he hauled her to a stop in a flowering shrub. Chest heaving prettily, Ava opened her mouth to speak and got a hand clamped over it. Eyes rolling with emotion she stuck it out for half a minute and finally took a bite. Atan said, "What do you want to do that for?" "I have to breathe." "Oh. Oh, well. It doesn't matter -- they seem to have packed it in." It was true. Forest noises, after a digestive lull wre notching up to full strength, but threre was. no. sound of beaters breaking through the undergrowth. Atan said, "That was. close. We shouldn't hang around. You okay?" "That's relative. Compared to when?" "Discounting wear and tear, you look fine. Exercise brings color to that alabaster skin." Ava reckoned that the human situation was fraught with caprice. From being a human clam, Atan had switched to being an. unseasonable talker. Also she was being gotten at by a pushy twig. "There could be others. Shouldn't we get on?" "Ruthless female logic at its best. Allow me," Before she could say anything he had picked her up and lifted her clear to open ground. Contact reminded her that she still had a confession to make. "Atan I was telling you. It's all my fault." "Save it. Tell me tonight and I'll fix a suitable background of erotic music. Now I'm not too clear about the direction. I reckon we should find the river and follow the bank. That way we can't miss." He was right. But it took longer than either of them had believed possible. When they stumbled hand in hand around the last bend, wading in half a meter of water on the uneven river bed as a poor alternative to thigh deep undergrowth, the sun had set and the small boat was a dark blur on their private beach. Atan stopped dead and Ava, programed to keep moving, went ahead until she was brought up short at the end of his arm. 'What is it now?" "The screen. We're on the wrong side of the screen." Truth has its place. But Ava, a tired wet nude wanting a bed, found it the last straw. Her knees buckled and she dropped neatly into the river, disappearing as though by sleight of hand. gasid Three looked at the main scanner without any enthusiasm. Vectors were right for a quick move out of the gravisphere and would not be right again for a period of weeks. With three more pickups to make he could not afford the time. Latest reports from the home base made this mission a pointless exercise. Research teams from other ships had already reported in with better results nearer home. Any information from the blueand-white watery sphere below was strictly for the archives. Tough on the two researchers who had spent a year down there. Tough on them all, for that matter -- nobody handed out medals for a survey staff that found nothing. Atan's hectare of cultivated ground was centered on the screen and looked deserted. The communications exec made no friends by putting it into words. "I've been calling for the last hour. Commander. The signal is being received. How long do I go on?" "Give me the link." Javeh watched the screen. "Javeh calling Atan. Prepare to beam out. Acknowledge." IF Nothing intelligent moved below. A slight breeze rolled an empty can from where it had lodged at the foot of the dome and trundled it across the clearing. In its way it made the point. The ship was wasting time. The camp was deserted. Any one of a hundred things could have happened. On one station a freak magnetic field that had not shown up on the first survey had drifted over the site, deranged the protective barrier and left the team wide open to attack. One sight of the wreckage and he had known that search was useless. Here trouble looked like the survey team's own fault. In some way these two had ignored the safety rules and gotten themselves chopped. One thing was for sure -- Javeh couldn't leave all the gear there. It could last for centuries and would  upset the locals. He said, "Range about a bit. Show me across the river." At first there was nothing. Then the operator picked up movement among the trees and zoomed down for a close up. He found a busy group. Twenty or more lightly furred, advanced hominids -- men, women and children on a corporate chore -- were building a large frame structure. Two were taller, whiter, more erect. Javeh said, "Hold it there. Get closer." "That's as far as I can go. Commander." "It's enough. By God, they've gone native. Building a rustic bower. I'd never have believed it possible. That settles it. Give me a voice beam to that area and call the gunner." The duty gunner in his pod above the command dome had seen the action on his duplicate screen and knew what to expect. Javeh said, "Stand by. Destroy every item at the campsite as soon as I've finished." On his outside circuit he addressed the working party in a voice that boomed from the tree tops and stopped the action. There was a scurry for cover. Only two remained, hand in hand looking at the empty sky. "Atan and Ava this is Javeh. You have put yourselves outside Jhe law. I ought to kill you, but I should have to destroy innocent people near you. As it is you will have to make what you can of your choice. It is likely to be brutish and short. If you have any thought for the future you will see that you leave no children. Goodbye." A zigzag of eye-aching light played on the campsite and the crown of the low hill seemed to burn without fire. For a brief hypnotic spell nothing changed. Then every item folded silently in on itself and there was only fine ash spiraling in the gently moving air and water boiling at the river's edge. A VA was crying silently, tears running unheeded down her cheeks and going into free fall. Mainly it was for Atan. He had worked like a dog on the mission and all his careful records were turned to dust. Partly it was for a situation where he and she could be written off without appeal by a snap decision. Partly also it was because they were so near success. Atan had reckoned that the best chance was to build a tower on the river side of the screen, so that he could drop over into two meters of water to break his fall. Making friendly contact with the family clan had been tricky enough, but he had done it, working against time. Another twentyfour hours and they would have been home and dry. Now they were on their own and it was her fault. Which reminded her that she had never gotten around to telling him what she had done. She said,"Atan. It's all my fault. Don't blame yourself. Nobody could have done a better job than you did. What's happened is unfair to you, not to nie. I deserve it." She was marshaling the story line to tell him from the beginning, but he turned her towards him, hands on her shoulders, bent his arms until she had to move her feet and close up. "Don't torment yourself, Ava. Relax. What do we have? So much time either here or on Bromius. What does it matter when you get right down to it? We have ourselves and that's all there is. Not many people get to start over. It's a rebirth. Naked we come into the world. Believe me, I have everything I want right here. Whatever you did, I don't want to know. You did me a favor. If you feel about me the way I feel about you we don't have a problem -- we have the ingredients for a new golden age. Curious hominids were edging cautiously back out of the bush, their attention divided between the gray-capped empty knoll and the couple by the frame tower. Ava had linked her fingers behind his head. She said, "Atan." It was an amen, a benediction, an affirmation, a prophesy that the wilderness could be made to flower like any lotus.  IF (continued from page # have little in common, except, I guess, artistic creativeness. Nothing to compare to the unifying basis for the life arts. Life arts could be a subdivision of fine arts. The definition of art (or life art) is then plain: Art equals direct and indirect Dramatic Illusion, or any combination of these. (See IF, Oct. #, p. #). I also now have derived the definition for ars poetica from the previous analysis of "bad fiction' ( God forgive you!). Poem: A verbally symmetrical, audio-metrical Indirect Dramatic Illusion. That is to say: it is a literary work that accentuates verbal symmetry (strictly to loosely metrically proportioned) to a degree inconsistent with the natural dramatic requirements of the story or account, thereby attempting to inject or create esthetically pleasing sound patterns to enhance the value of the work or performance. And it can be pleasing to the senses and intellect. Henry Bitman Azusa, Cal. Fiction, which has been my sole source of livelihood for thirty-five years, has a hard and graspable reality of its own. Good fiction is art and simulates nothing -- it simply is its own valid self. Bad fiction may pretend to simulate other things -- and is a lie. Let fiction create illusions for you if you enjoy them, but I think you will enhance your appreciation if you can bring yourself also to view it on its own merits. Dear If: Last year I appealed to readers of a number of magazines, pro and fan, for help in locating, for have written or called to inform us that the story To Kill A Venusian, which appeqred in the September-October issue of IF, is in fact a plagiarism. We have confirmed that the original was published by the title being Nine-finger Jack. The author was the late Anthony Boucher. IF purchqied the story in good faith from one Irwin Ross of been turned over to Company Counsel for appropriate action. biographical purposes, unpublished letters by H. P. Lovecraft. Thanks in part to these readers' generous assistance,  am now #V pp of photocopies and notes on additional letters). I am still, however, trying to run down unpublished letters by Robert E. Howard (other than those in possession of my colleague Glenn Lord) and Clark Ashton Smith. Any information as to the whereabouts of such letters will be much appreciated. Kaor, L. Sprague de Camp # Hothorpe Lane Villanova, Pa. # Dear Sir: I have two strong complaints regarding the A ugust issue o I f: ( I ) you say in Hue and Cry that Bode bindery mishap, a small numdated September-October #I or November-December I #I , were placed on sale with pages missing or repeated. If you received one of these defective copies, mail us the cover plus your name and address, and we will send you a proper replacement gratis. has not been appearing in Galaxy because readers did not like his comic strip; does that mean he shouldn't illustrate covers and stories as he did so well previously? (#) Please stop cluttering Galaxy and IF with fantasy by people like Davidson. How can a science-fiction magazine publish a story with a name like Arnten of Ultima Thule? Worlds of Fantasy was created to take care of this kind of complaint. So what happened? Jonathan Raz Berkeley, Cal. The comment to which you refer Hue and Cry, August '#) read: "... reader reaction did not encourage us to continue featuring a cartoon strip." It was intended to convey precisely what it said, no more, no less. Worlds of Fantasy did not come into being to take care of complaints but to publish fantasy. In the recent poll conducted in Galaxy a substantial majority of readers expressed a liking for occasional fantasy in their sf fare. My personal feeling is that it should be extremely occasional and should have merits beyond its category -- express some validities found in the world of realities. The phrasing of your letter suggests I ought to have changed Avram Davidson's title for the story. I don't agree. heGbiidiCa rUyr-::: by F. Marion Crawford # by James Branch Cabell #i # # # Merry Christmas from Ballantine! D #I Fifth Avenue, New York, N . Y. # Ape you slpesi)y s victim of future shocK? The acceleration started with Hiroshima. Without warning, we switched to mechanized lives, disposable goods, impermanent allegiances. We entered the plug-in, throw-away, rent-a-thing, forget-a-person age. We began using up products, ideas, people at a dizzying rate. Some people thrive on the pace. Others find it terrifying. Some simply refuse to recognize it, abruptly colliding with the future and suffering an adaptive breakdown. Alvin Toffler calls it "future shock." What's the preventative? Start with the Science Fiction Book Club. Science Fiction predicts future change long before it becomes with trial membership reality: the Atomic Bomb, the UN, computers, vision phones, organ transplants, moon landings, test tube babies... you name it. Eventually Science "Fiction" comes true! It leaps to life from the pages of some of the most provocative, stimulating, imaginative literature you can find. If you'd like to be prepared to meet tomorrow, we invite you to share the excitement with us today. Choose any # books for just #, plus shipping and handling. Best of all, you can make one of them Future Shock, "the best single rendering of what the future may hold." Psychology Today. It's easy to join. The coupon tells how. Science Fiction Book Club #-S#A  Please accept my application for membership In i the Science Fiction Book Club and send me the # I books whose numbers I have written in the boxes I below. Bill me Just # (to help cover shippinR) for ! all #. About every # weeks, send me the club's  bulletin, Thlnfs to Come, describing the # coming . Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If I I wish to receive both Selections, I need do nothing; i they will be shipped to me automatically. When ever I don't want I of the # Selections or prefer an I Alternate, or no book at all, I will notify you by . the date specified by returning the convenient I form always provided. I I need take only # Selections or Alternates during  the coming year, and may resign any time there after. Most books are only #, plus a modest  charge for shipping and handling. Occasionally, I extra-value Selections are slightly higher. j return the entire introductory package within #  days. Membership will be canceled. I owe nothing.  If under #, parent must sign above. I Office use only #. Futnrc Shock by Alvin Toffler. National Best Seller. "Essential reading for those... committed to controlling their destinies." Psychology Today. Pub. ed. # #. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last generation on earth. "Wildly fantastic! Atlantic. Pub. ed. # #. A Treasary of Great Science Fiction, ed . by Anthony Boucher. # Volume set. # pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # #. Drlftglass by Samuel R. Delaney. # short stories, including # Nebula winners, probe remote corners of the galaxy. #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame I. # "winners." chosen by Sci-Pi Writers of America. Ed. 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Pub. ed. # Book Club editions are sometimes reduced in si:e, but they are all full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly'different in Canad. Printed in U.S.A.  is better than ever in his first novel in # years -- a masterpiece! (Part Two) Just Published Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years! O nly the author of Nerves could have conceived this gripping story of a down-to-earth engineer who regards all psychic phenomena as claptrap -- until he discovers, to his horror, that he himself is a born telepath and clairvoyant. # Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. # Ask your bookseller today for -- the Science Fiction event of the year. # Science and Public Affairs such areas as: with respect to: cinating articles by today's foremost scientists, in language any intelligent reader can understand! The Bulletin Clock Symbolizing the threat of nuclear doomsday, it stands now at ten minutes to midnight! (A Journal of Science and Public Affairs) Enclosed please find remittance for my subscription as checked below.  I year, #  # years, #  # years, # (The regular single-copy price of the Bulletin is I .#) The above subscription rates apply to the United States and Canada. For Pan-America, add #c per year. For other foreign, add I .# per year. March-April # Vol. #, No. # Issue I # Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Lester del Rey. Feature Editor JudyLynn Benjamin , Managing Editor Jack Gaughan, Art Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director L. C. Murphy , Subscription Director Harry Harrison # Isaac Asimov # Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President . Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, under International, Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. The company also publishes Award Books, Nova Books, Tandem Books (United Kingdom), Vocational Guidance Manuals, Golf Magazine, Golfdom, Ski, Ski Business, Ski Area Management, Home Garden, The Family Handyman. #-pc Screwdriver  Tool Set ith Interchangeable Blades complete with Pouch I #-pc  Hex Key Set i its own Pooch #-pe Cold Chisel Set I #-pc Chrome Socket Set -- tw  Driven (tmm "df  WiQ-pc Chron Sr? #-pc. Chrome I Socket Set -- Drive## # #  t #-pc Nut Driv Set with its # wn Pooch #-pc Ignition Wrench Set. w on this Mechanics All-Purpose PI' The Complete Workshop That Yoo've Always Wanted! Makes Any Job Go Quicker... Easier Reversible Ratchet, "l-Handle" and Adapter.  #-pc. Vk" drive Socket Wrench Se, including # Sockets, "L-Handle" and Adapter.  #-pc. 'A" drive Socket Wrench Set, including # Sockets and "L-Handle".  Handy Metal Tray for three Socket Sets.  #-pc. Screw Driver Set  #-pc. Nut Driver Set.  #-pc. Open End Wrench Set.  #-pc. Cold Chisel Set.  #-pc. Ignition Wrench Set.  #-pc. Hex Key Set.  #-pc. Drill Bit Set with fined Case. Metal Tote Box. and Readers write -- and wrong I Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Michael Glyer states in the October, #I , issue of If, in so many words, that science fiction is not art. This is a point I have often discussed with friends, who have mostly taken the same attitude. My answer to this is that art in writing shows itself rarely anyway (let's assume for the moment that we know what we mean by art) and that if you single out any special category of writing, e.g. sf or detective stories or westerns, the proportion that we recognize as artistic will always be rather small -- simply because the proportion of art in all writing is small. I believe that sf has produced quite a bit of art -- such stuff as Miller s "Canticle for Leibowitz" and the best of Sturgeons work come immediately to my mind -- and it's not realistic to expect all sf to measure up to these standards. This argument applies to all artistic endeavours, incidentally -- for the same reasons it is not fair to declare, say, modern music, jazz, pop-music, modern painting, etc etc, as non-art. While T m at it, some comments on If and Galaxy. I find your serials uniformly boring lately -- the authors all seem to run out of steam shortly after ( mostly ) promising beginnings. Examples: I Will Fear No Evil, the Dune series and that Laumer story about a year back, whose name I've forgotten. I think Laumer should drop Retief -- he's played out and will never again rise to such heights as in the beautiful "Retiefs War." While I'm an enthusiastic Australian ( with reservations in the field of politics ), I consider Chandler s stories also uniformly boring -- a pity. Otherwise, I'm happy with your editing. Dieter Britz Germany Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Science fiction people have always prided themselves in their belief that their genre alone is concerned with future extrapolation and possibilities. Yet who has written the most significant and important book of many, many years concerning the future? Future Shock is by Alvin Toffler, a sociologist -- and blessed be his insight. Why weren't all the probabilities ( Please turn to page #) That is the prediction of the celebrated writer Colin Wilson, who bases his revolutionary ideas on an intensive study of all aspects of spiritualism and its important The Occult: A History, he discusses them all -- the lives and mysterious powers of Nostradamus, Dr. John Dee, Cagliostro Anton Mesmer, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Rasputin, and Edgar Cayce, as well as the occult theories and experiences of Yeats, Wordsworth, Freud, Jung, T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Robert Graves, and Bishop Pike. Also covered are telepathy; prophecy; the  Ching; the Tarot pack; the Kaballah; astrology; mysticism; satanism; witchcraft; ghosts, vampires, and werewolves; and reincarnation. The Occult is a fascinating work -- an exciting journey into the strangest and most powerful regions of man's mind and soul. Magic science future! Illustrated; #, now at your bookstore, or mail this coupon with remittance for #-day examination. (Please include applicable sales tax.) To your bookstore, or Random House Mail Service, Inc., Dept.I# P.O. Box #, Lynbrook, N. Y. # I enclose check or money order for # (plus applicable sales tax). I may, if I wish, return the book within # days for full refund. Name Address State (Galaxy, March, #) Plutonium#, an "impossible" isotope, is nevertheless discovered on Earth. It develops that alien intelligence in a parallel Universe is exchanging the substance for our ordinary tungsten. Here the unstable P-# breaks down to tungsten while there the tungsten breaks down to P-#. This releases atomic particles that soon furnish limitless pollution-free energy, at no cost, to both Universes -- contributing immensely to human welfare and presumably that of the aliens. But one Earth scientist warns that continually "pumping" electrons out of our Universe into the "paraUniverse" will alter both with ultimately disastrous consequences. He finds his career blasted by a scientific establishment committed to material posterity... (Part II of The Gods Themselves, is set entirely in the alternate of paraUniverse devoid of humankind. Belonging in The Magazine of Alternatives on several counts, it can be read and enjoyed for its own sake. For fullest appreciation of this wise and significant novel, of course, you may wish to take advantage of the offer on page #I and read the entire work upon its first publication anywhere.) la D UA did not have much trouble leaving the others. She .always expected trouble, but somehow it never came. Never real trouble. But then, why should it? Odeen objected in his lofty way. "Stay put," he would say. "You know you annoy Tritt." He never spoke of his own annoyance -- Rationals did not become annoyed over trifles. Still, Odeen hovered over Tritt almost as persistently as Tritt hovered over the children. But Odeen always let Dua have her way if she were persistent enough. He would even intercede in her favor wijth Tritt. , Sometimes he went so far as to admit he was proud of her ability, of her independence. He was not a bad Left-ling, she thought with absent affection. Tritt was harder to handle and had a sour way of looking at her when she was -- well, when she was as she wished to be. But Rightlings were like that. He was a Right-ling to her, but a Parental to the children' and the latter took precedence always. Which was good because she could always count on one child or another taking him away when things became uncomfortable. Still, Dua did not mind Tritt very much. Except for melting, she tended to, ignore him. Odeen was something else. He had been exciting at first -- his presence alone had made her outlines shimmer and fade. And the fact that he was a Rational made him somehow all the more exciting. She didn't understand her reaction to what he was -- it was part of her queerness. She had grown used to her queerness -- almost. Dua sighed. As a child, when she still had thought of herself as an individual -- a single being and not a part of a triad -- she had been much more' aware of the strangeness. As little a thing as the surface at evening. She had loved the surface at evening. The other Emotionals had called it cold and gloomy and had uivered and coalesced when she escribed it for them. They were ready enough to emerge in the warmth of midday and stretch and feed -- but they were exactly what made the midday dull. Dua did not like to be around the twitter ing lot of them. She had to eat, of course, but she liked it much better in the evening when there was very little food but everything was a dijrn deep red and she was alone. Of course, she had described it as colder and more wistful than it was when she had talked to the others. She had liked to watch them arow hard-edged as they imagined the chill -- or as hard-edged as young Emotionals could. And after a while they had begun to whisper about her and laugh at her -- and leave her alone. -- The small Sun was at the horizon now, with the secret ruddiness that she alone was there to see. She spread herself out laterally and thickened dorso-ventrally, absorbing the traces of thin warmth. She munched at it idly, savoring the slightly sour, substanceless taste of the long wavelengths. (She had never met another Emotional who would admit to liking it. But she could never explain that she associated it with freedom -- freedom from the others, a time she could spend alone.). ft IF Even now the loneliness, the chill and the deep, deep red, brought back those old days before the triad -- and even more, quite sharply, the memory of her own Parental who would come lumbering after her, forever fearful that she would hurt herself. He had been carefully devoted to her, as Parentals always were to their Little-mids. His devotion had annoyed her and she had dreamed of the day when he would leave her -- Parentals always did eventually. But how she had missed him when one day he finally left. v He had come to tell her just as carefully as he could, despite the difficulty Parentals had in putting, their feelings into words. She had run from him that day -- not in malice and not because she suspected what he had to tell her -- only out of joy. She had managed to find a special place at midday and had gorged herself in unexpected isolation and had been filled with a queer, itching sensation that demanded motion and activity. She had slithered over the rocks and had let her edges overlap theirs. She had known it was a grossly improper action for anyone but a baby and yet it had been something at once exciting and soothing. And her Parental had caught her at last and had stood before her, silent for a long time, making his eyes small and dense as though to stop every bit of light reflected from her -- to see as much as he could of her and for as long as possible. So vividly did that earlier time return that suddenly she could see it as if it were now... xV. back at her Parental with the confused thought that he had seen her rub through the rocks and was ashamed of her. But she caught no shame aupa and finally asked subduedly, "What is it. Daddy?" "Why, Dua, it's the time. I've been expecting it. Surely yoir have." "What time?" Now that the moment was here, Dua stubbornly would not let herself know. If she refused to know, there would be nothing to know. (She never quite got out ofthat habit. Odeen said all Emotionals were like (hat, speaking in the lofty voice he used sometimes when he was particularly overcome with the importance of being a Rational.) Her Parental said, "I must pass on. I will not be with you any more." Then he just stood and looked at her and she could say nothing. He said, "You will tell the others." "Why?" Dua turned away rebelliously, her outlines vague and growing vaguer -- she tried to dissipate. She wanted to dissipate altogether and of course she couldn't. After a while the effort hurt and cramped and she hardened again. Her Parental didn't even bother to scold her and tell her that it would be shameful if anyone saw her stretched out so. She said, "They won't care -- " and immediately felt sorrowful that her Parental would be hurt by the words. He still called her brothers "Little-left" and "Little-right," but Little-left was all involved with his studies and Little-right kept talking about forming a triad. Dua was the only one of the three who stiH felt... Well, she was the youngest. Emotionals always were apd with them everything was different. Her Parental merely said, "You will tell them anyway." And he and she again stood looking at each other. She didn't want to tell her brothers. They weren't close any more. It had been different when they were all little. They could hardly tell themselves apart in those days -- Left-brother from Right-brother from Mid-sister. They were all wispy and would tangle with each other and roll through each other and hide in the walls. No one ever minded their games when they were little -- none of the grownups. But then the brothers grew thick and sober and drew away. And when she complained to her Parental he would only say gently, "You are too old to thin, Dua' She tried not to listen, but Leftbrother kept drawing away and would say, "Don't snuggle -- I have no time for you." And Rightbrother began to stay quite hard all the time and became glum and silent. She did not understand it yet and Daddy had not been able to make it clear. He would say every once in a while as though giving her a lesson he had once learned, "Lefts are Rationals, Dua. Rights are Parentals. They grow up their own way." She didn't like their way. They were no longer children and she still was, so she flocked with the other Emotionals. They all had the same complaints about their brothers. They all talked of coming triads. They all spread in the Sun and fed. They all grew more and more the same and every day the same things were said. And she began to detest them and went off by herself whenever she could, so that they took to calling her "Left-Em." (It had been a long time now since she had heard that call, but she never thought of the phrase without remembering perfectly the thin ragged voices that had sent it after her with a kind of half-wit persistence because the owners of the voices knew it hurt.) But her Parental had retained his interest in her even when it jnust have seemed to him that everyone else laughed at her. He had tried in his clumsy way to shield her from the others. He had followed her to the surface sometimes -- even though he hated it himself -- in order to make sure she was safe. She had come upon him once when he was talking to a Hard One. It was hard for a Parental to talk to a Hard One -- even though she was quite young, she knew that much. Hard Ones talked only to Rationals. She had been quite frightened and had wisped away, but not before she had heard her Parental say, "I take good care of her, Hard-Sir." Could the Hard One have inIF quired about her? About her queerness, perhaps? But her Parental had not been apologetic. Even to the Hard One he had spoken of his concern for her. Dua had felt an obscure pride. But now he was leaving and suddenly all the independence that Dua had been looking forward to lost its fine shape and hardened into the pointed crag of loneliness. She asked, "But why must you pass on?" "I must, little Mid-dear." He must. She knew that. Everyone, sooner or later, must. The day would come when she would have to sigh and say,  must. "But what makes you know when you have to pass on? If you can choose your time why don't you choose a different time and stay longer?" He said, "Your Left-father has decided. TTie triad must do as he says." "Why must you do as he says?" She hardly ever saw her Left-father or her Mid-mother. They did not count any more. Only her Rightfather, her Parental, her daddy, who stood there squat and flatsurfaced. He was not all smoothly curved like a Rational or shuddery uneven like an Emotional and she could always tell what he was going to say. Almost always. She was sure he would say,  cant Explain to a little Emotional. He said it. Dua said in a burst of woe, "I'll miss you, I know you think I pay you no attention and that I don't like you because you always tell me not to do things. But I would rather not like you for telling me not to do things than not have you around to tell me not to do things." And Daddy just stood there. There was no way he could handle an outburst like that except to come closer and pinch out a hand. That action cost him a visible effort, but he held his hand out trembling and its outlines were ever so slightly soft Dua said, "Oh, Daddy -- " and let her own hand flow about his so that it looked misfy and shimmery through her substance, but she was careful not to touch itfor that would have-embarrassed him so. Then he withdrew his hand and left hers enclosing nothing. He said, "Remember the Hard Ones, Dua. They will help you. I -- I will go now." He went and she never saw him again. Now she sat remembering in the Sunset, rebelliously aware that pretty soon Tritt would grow petulant over her absence and nag Odeen. And then Odeen might lecture her on her duties. She didn't care. lb that Dua was off on the surface. Without really thinking about it he could judge her direction and even something of her distance. If he had stopped to think of it he might have felt displeasure, for this inter-awareness sense had been steadily deadening for a long time now ahd, without really being certain why, he had a sense of gathering fulfillment about it. It was the way things were supposed to be -- the sign of the continuing development of the body with age. Tritt v s inter-awareness sense did not decrease, but it shifted more and more toward the children. That was clearly the line of useful development. But the role of the Parental was a simple one, in a manner of speaking, however important. The Rational was far more complex and Odeen took a bleak satisfaction in that thought. ' Of course, Dua was the real puzzle. She was so unlike all the other Emotionals. Her oddness perplexed aifd frustrated Tritt and reduced him to even more pronounced inarticulateness. Dua baffled" and frustrated Odeen at times, too, but he was also aware of her infinite capacity to induce satisfaction with life and it did not seem likely that one quality was independent of the other. The occasional exasperation she caused was a small price to pay for intense happiness. And maybe Dua's strange way of life was part of what ought to. be, too. The Hard Ones seemed interested in her and ordinarily they paid attention only to Rationals. He felt pride in that -- so much the better for the triad that even the Emotional was worth attention. Odeen was pleased. Things were as they were supposed to be. That was bedrock and what he wanted most to feci -- even to the end. Some day he would even know when it was time to pass on and he would want to. The Hard Ones assured him of that, as they assured all Rationals, but they also told him that it was his own inner consciousness that would mark the time unmistakably and without any advice from outside. "When you tell yourself," Losten had told him in the clear, careful way in which a Hard One always talked to a Soft One, as though the Hard One were laboring to make himself understood, "that you know why you must pass on -- then you will pass on, and your triad will pass on with you." And Odeen had said, "I cannot say I wish to pass on now, HardSir. There is so much to learn." "Of course. Left-dear. You feel this because you are not yet ready." Odeen thought, How can  ever feel ready when I will never feel there isn't much to learn . But he did not say so. He was quite certain the time would come ,and he would then understand. He looked down at himself, almost forgetting and thrusting out an eye to do so -- always some childish impulses remained in the most adult of the most Rational. He did not have to use an eye, of course. He could sense quite well with his eye solidly in place, and he found himself satisfactorily solid -- in nice, sharp outline, smooth, and curved into gracefully conjoined ovoids. His body lacked the strangely attractive shimmer of Dua's and the comforting stockiness of Tritt's. He loved them both, but he would not change his own body for either's. Or, of course, his mind. IF He would never say so, for he would not want to hurt their feelings, but he never ceased being thankful that he didnot have Tritt's limited understanding or (even more) Dita's erratic one. He supposed they did not mind -- for they knew nothing else. Dua again and deliberately dulled the sense. At the moment he felt no need for her. It was not that he wanted her less, merely that he had increasing drives elsewhere. It was part of the growing maturity of a Rational to find more and more satisfaction in the exercise of a mind that could be exerted to capacity only alone -- and with the Hard Ones. He grew constantly more accustomed to the Hard Ones,.constantly more attached to them. He felt that this, too, was right and proper, for he was a Rational, and in a way the Hard Ones were superRational. (He had once said that to Losten, the friendliest of the Hard Ones aad, it seemed to Odeen in some vague way, the youngest. Losten had radiated amusement but had said nothing. He had not denied it, however.) Odeen's earliest memories were filled with Hard Ones. His Parental more and more concentrated his attention on the last child, the baby-Emotional. That was only natural. (Tritt would do the same when the last child came, if it ever did. Odeen had picked up that last qualification from Tritt, who used it constantly as a reproach to Dua.) But with his Parental busy so ,much of the time Odeen had begun his education early. He was losing his baby ways and he had learned a great deal even before he met Tritt. That meeting, though, was surely something he would never forget. It might as well have been yesterday as more than half a lifetime ago. He had seen Parentals of his own generation, of course -- young ones who, long before they incubated the children that made true Parentals of them, showed few signs of the stolidity to come. As a child he had played with his own right-brother and was scarcely aware of any intellectual difference between them (though, looking back on those days, he recognized that the difference was there, even then.) He knew also vaguely the role of a Parental in a triad. Even as a child he had heard whispered tales of melting. When Tritt first appeared -- when Odeen saw him first -- everything changed. For, the first time in his life Odeen felt an inner warmth and began to think that there was something he wanted that was utterly divorced from thought. Even now he could remember the sense of embarrassment that had accompanied this discovery. Tritt was not embarrassed, of course. Parentals were never embarrassed about the activities of the triad, and Emotionals were almost ' never embarrassed. Only Rationals had that problem. "Too much thinking," a Hard One had said when Odeen had discussed the problem with him and that left Odeen dissatisfied. In what way would thinking be "too much?" Tritt was young when they first met. He was still so childish as to be uncertain in his blockishness so that his reaction to the meeting wasEmbarrassingly clear. He grew almost translucent along his edges. Odeen said hesitantly, "I haven't seen you before, have I, Rightfellow?" Tritt said, "I have never been here. I have been brought here-" They both knew exactly vhat had happened to them. The meeting had been arranged because someone (some Parental, Odeen had thought at the time, but later he .-knew it was some Hard One) thought they would suit each other and the thought was correct. There was no intellectual rapport between the two. How could there be when Odeen wanted to learn with an intensity that superseded anything but the existence of the triad itself and Tritt lacked the very concept of learning? What Tritt had to know he already knew beyond either learning or unlearning. Odeen, out of the excitement of finding out about the world and its Sun -- about the history and mechanism of life, about all the abouts in the Universe -- sometimes (in those early days together) found over to Tritt. Tritt listened placidly, clearly understanding nothing, but content to be listening while Odeen, transmitting nothing, was as dearly content to be lecturing. first move, driven by his special . needs. Odeen was chattering about what he had learned that day after the brief midday meal. (Their thicker substance absorbed food so rapidly that they were satisfied with a simple walk in the Sun, while Emotionals basked for hours at a time, curling and thinning as though deliberately to lengthen the task.) Odeen, who always ignored the Emotionals, was quite happy to be talking. Tritt, who stared wordlessly at them day after day, was now visibly restless. Abruptly he came close to Odeen, formed an appendage so hastily as to clash most disagreeably with Odeen's form-sense. He placed the outcropping upon a portion of Odeen's upper ovoid where a slight shimmer was allowing for a welcome draft of warm air as dessert. Tritt's appendage thinned with a visible effort and sank into the superficies of Odeen's skin before the latter darted away, horribly embarrassed. He had done such things as a baby, of course, but never since his adolescence. "Don't do that, Tritt," he said sharply. Tritt's appendage remained out, groping a little. "I want to." Odeen held himself as compactly as he could, striving to harden the surface to bar entry. "I don't want to." "Why not?" asked Tritt urgently. "There's nothing wrong." Odeen said the first thing that came into his mind. "It hurt." (It didn't really. Not physically. But IF the Hard Ones always avoided the touch of the Soft Ones. A careless interpenetration did hurt Hard Ones, but they were constructed differently from Soft Ones -- completely differently.) Tritt was not fooled. His instinct could not possibly mislead him in this respect. He said, "It didn't hurt." "Well, it isn't right this way. We need an Emotional." And Tritt could only say stubbornly, "I want to, anyway." It was bound to continue happening and Odeen was bound to give in. It always came about so -- even with the most self-conscious Rational. As the old saying had it -- Everyone either admitted doing it or lied about it. Tritt was at him at each meeting after that -- if not with an appendage, then rim to rim. And finally Odeen, seduced by the pleasure of it, began to help and tried to thin. He was better at that tlian Tritt. Poor Tritt, infinitely more eager, huffed and strained and could achieve only the barest shimmer here and there, patchily and raggedly. Odeen, however, could turn translucent all over his surface and fought down his embarrassment in order to let himself flow against Tritt. There was skin-deep penetration and Odeen could feel the pulsing of Trrtt's hard surface under the skin. There was enjoyment, riddled with guilt. Tritt, as often as not, was tired and vaguely angry when it was over. Odeen said, "Now, Tritt, I've told you we need an Emotional to do this properly. You can't be angry at something that jus is." And Tritt said, "Let's get an Emotional." Let's get an Emotional! Tritt's simple drives never led him to anything but direct action. Odeen was not sure he could explain the complexities of life to the other. "It's not that easy, Right-ling -- " he began gently. Tritt said abruptly. "The Hard Ones can get us one. You're friendly with them. Ask them." Odeen was horrified. "I can't ask. The time," he continued, unconsciously falling into his lecturing voice, "has not yet come -- or I would certainly know it. Until -- " Tritt was not listening. He said, "I'll ask." "No," said Odeen, horrified. "You stay out of it. I tell you it's not time. I have an education to worry about. It's very easy to be a Parental and not to have to know anything but -- " He was sorry the instant he had spoken, and it was a lie anyway. He just didn't want to do anything at all that might offend the Hard Ones and impede his useful relationship with them. Tritt, however, showed no signs of minding, and Odeen began to think that the other saw no point or merit in knowing anything he did not already know and would not consider the statement of the fact an insult. The problenrf of the Emotional kept coming up, though. Occasionally they tried interpenetration. In fact, the impulse grew stronger with time. It was never truly satisfying though it had its pleasure and each time Tritt would demand an Emotional. Each time Odeen threw himself deeper into his studies, almost as a defense against the problem. Yet at times he was tempted to speak to Losten ahout the problem. # Odeen knew best, the one who took the greatest personal interest in him. There was a deadly sameness about the Hard Ones, because they did not change. They never changed -- their form w#s fixed. Where their eyes were they always were -- and always in the same place for all of 'them. Their skin was not exactly hard but it was always opaque. It never shimmered, was never vague, never penetrable by another skin of its own type. Hard Ones were not larger in size, particularly, than the Soft Ones, but they were heavier. Their substance was much denser and they had to be careful about the yielding tissues of the Soft Ones. Once when he had been little -- really little -- and his body had flowed almost as freely as his sister's, Odeen had been I approached by a Hard One. He had never known which one it was, but he learned in later life that all of them were curious about babyRationals. Odeen had reached up for the Hard One out of nothing but curfosity. The Hard One had sprung backward, and later Odeen's Parental had scolded him for offering to touch a Hard One. The scolding had been harsh enough for Odeen never to forget. When he was older he learned that the close-packed atoms of the Hard One's tissues felt pain on the forcible penetration of others. Odeen wondered if the Soft One felt pain, too. Another young Rational once told him that he had stumbled against a Hard One and the Hard One had doubled up but that he himself had felt nothing -- but Odeen Wasn't sure this was not just a melodramatic boast. There were other things he was not supposed to do. He liked rubbing against the walls Qf the cavern. There was a pleasant, warm feeling when he allowed himself to penetrate rock. Babies always did it, but it became harder to do as he grew older. Still, he could do it skin-deep and he liked the feeling, but his Parental found him doing it and scolded him. Odeen objected that his sister did it all the time -- he had seen her. "That's different," said the Parental. "She's an Emotional." At another time when Odeen was absorbing a recording -- he was older then -- he had idly formed a couple of projections and made the tips so thin that he could pass one through the other. He began to do it regularly when he listened. There was a pleasant tickling sensation that made it easier to listen and made him nicely sleepy afterward. His Parental caught him at that, too, and what he had said still made Odeen uncomfortable. No one really told him about melting in those days. They fed him knowledge and educated him about everything except about what IF the triad was. Tritt had never been told either, but he was a Parental and knew without being told. Of course, when Dua came at last all was clear, even though she seemed to know less than Odeen. But she did not come to them because of anything Odeen did. It was Tritt who broached the matter -- Tritt, who ordinarily feared the Hard Ones and avoided them mutely -- Tritt, who lacked Odeen's self-assurance in all but this respect -- Tritt, who on this one subject was driven -- Tritt -- Tritt -- Tritt -- Odeen sighed. Tritt was invading his thoughts because Tritt was coming. He could feel him, harsh, demanding, always demanding. Odeen had so little time to himself these days, just when he felt that he needed to think more than ever. "Yes, Tritt," he said. lc blockiness. He did not think it ugly. He did not think about it at all. If he had given it a thought, he would have considered it beautiful. His body was designed for a purpose and designed well. He asked, "Odeen, where is Dua?" "Outside somewhere," mumbled Odeen, almost as though he didn't care. It annoyed Tritt to have the triad made so little of. Dua was so difficult and Odeen didn't care. "Why do you let her go?" "How can I stop her, Tritt? And what harm if she goes outside?" "You know the harm. We have two babies. We need a third. It is so hard to make a little-mid these days. Dua must be properly fed for it to be made. Now she is wandering about at Sunset again. How can she feed fully at Sunset?" "She's just not a great feeder." "And we just don't have a littlemid. Odeen." Tritt's voice was caressing. "How can I love you properly without Dua?" "Now, then," mumbled Odeen and Tritt felt himself once more puzzled by the other's clear embarrassment at the simplest statement of fact. Tritt said, "Remember, I was the one who first got Dua." Did Odeen remember that? Did Odeen ever think of the triad and what  it meant? Sometimes Tritt felt so frustrated he could -- he could -- Actually, he did not know what he could do, but he knew he felt frustrated. As in those old days when he wanted an Emotional and Odeen would do nothing. Tritt knew he didn't have the trick of talkingin big, elaborate sentences. But if Parentals didn't talk, they thought. They thought about important things. Odeen always talked about atoms and energy. Who cared about atoms and energy? Tritt thought about the triad and the babies. Odeen had once told him that the numbers of Soft Ones were gradually growing fewer. Didn't he care? Didn't the Hard Ones care? Did anyone care but the Parentals? Only two forms of life on all the world, the Soft Ones and the Hard Ones. And food shining down on them. Odeen had once told him the Sun was cooling off. There was less food, he said, so there were fewer people. Tritt didn't believe it. The Sun felt no cooler than it had when he was a baby. People were just not worrying about the triads any more. Too many absorbed Rationals -- too many silly Emotionals. What the Soft Ones must do was concentrate on the important things of life. Tritt did. He tended to the business of the triad. The baby-left came, then the baby-right. They were growing and flourishing. They had to have a baby-mid though. That was the hardest to get started and without a baby-mid there would be no new triad. What made Dua as she was? She had always been difficult, but she was growing worse. Tritt felt an obscure anger against Odeen. Odeen always talked with all those hard words. And Dua listened. Odeen would talk to Dua endlessly till they were almost two Rationals. That was bad for the triad. Odeen should know better. It was always Tritt who had to care. It was always Tritt who had to do what had to be done. Odeen was the friend of the Hard Ones and yet he said nothing. They had needed an Emotional and Odeen had done nothing. He talked to the Hard Ones about energy and not of the needs of the triad. It had been Tritt, who had turned the scale. Tritt remembered that proudly. He had seen Odeen talking to a Hard One, and he had approached. Without a shake in his voice, he had interrupted and said, "We need an Emotional." The Hard One had turned to look at him. Tritt had never been so close to aHard One. He was all of a piece. Every part of him had to turn when one part did. He had some projections that could move by themselves, but they never changed in shape. They never flowed and they were irregular and unlovely. Hard Ones did not like to be touched. The Hard One asked, "Is this so, Odeen?" He did not speak to Tritt. Odeen flattened. He flattened close to the ground, became more flattened than Tritt had ever seen him. Odeen said, "My Right-ling is overzealous. My Right-ling is -- is -- " He stuttered and puffed and could not speak. Tritt could speak. He said, "We cannot melt without one." Tritt knew that Odeen was embarrassed into speechlessness but he didn't care. It was time. "Well, Left-dear," said the Hard One to Odeen, "do you feel the same way about it?" Hard Ones spoke as the Soft Ones did, but more harshly and with fewer overtones. The Hard Ones were difficult to listen to. Tritt found them so anyway, though Odeen seemed used to them. "Yes," said Odeen finally. The Hard One turned at last to Tritt. "Remind me, Young-right How long have you and Odeen been together?" "Long enough," said Tritt, "to deserve an Emotional.' He kept his shape firmly at angles. He did IF not allow himself to be frightened. The matter was too important. He added: "And my name is Tritt." The Hard One seemed amused. "Yes, the choice was good. You and Odeen go well "together, but it makes the choice of an Emotional difficult. We have almost made up our minds. Or at least I have long since made up my mind, but the others must be convinced. Be patient, Tritt." "I am tired of patience." "I know, but be patient anyway." He was amused again... quite gone Odeen uplifted himself and thinned out angrily. He asked, "How could you do that, Tritt? Do you know who he is?" "A Hard One." "He is Losten. My special teacher. I don't want him angry with me." "Why should he be angry? I was polite." "Well, never mind." Odeen was settling into normal shape. That meant he was not angry any more. (Tritt was relieved, though he tried not to show it.) "It's very embarrassing for my dumb-right to come up and speak out to my Hard One." "Why didn't you speak out, then?" "There's such a thing as the right time." "But never's the right time for you." But then they rubbed surfaces and stopped arguing and Dua came not long after that. Losten brought her. Tritt did not realize -- he did not look at the Hard One. Only at Dua. But Odeen told him afterward that Losten had brought her. "You see?" said Tritt. "I talked to him. That is why he brought her." "No," said Odeen. "It was time. He would have brought her even if neither of us had talked to him." Tritt didn't believe him. He was quite sure that it was entirely because of his actions that Dua was with them. Surely there had never been anyone like Dua in the world. Tritt had seen many Emotionals. They were all attractive. He would have accepted any of them for proper melting. Once he saw Dua he realized that none of the others would have suited. Only Dua. Only Dua. And Dua knew exactly what to do. Exactly. No one had ever shown her how, she told them afterward. No one had ever talked to her about it. Even other Emotionals had not, for she had avoided them. Yet when all three were together; each knew what to do. Dua thinned. She thinned more than Tritt had ever seen anyone thin. She thinned more than Tritt would ever have thought possible. She became a kind of colored smoke that filled the room and dazzled him. He moved without knowing he was moving. He immersed himself in the air that was Dua. There was no sensation of penetration, none at all. Tritt felt no resistance, no friction. There was just a floating inward and a rapid palpitation. He felt himself beginning to thin in sympathy and without the tremendous effort that had always accompanied his could thin without effort into a thick smoke of his own. Thinning became like flowing -- he became an enormous smooth flow. Dimly he could see Odeen approaching from the other side, from Dua's left. And he, too, was thinning. Then, like all the shocks of contact in all the world, he reached Odeen. But it was not a shock at all. Tritt felt without feeling, knew without knowing. He slid into Odeen and Odeeh slid into him. He could not tell whether he was surrounding Odeen or being surrounded by him or both or neither. He knew only -- pleasure. The senses dimmed with the intensityof that pleasure, and at the point where he thought he could stand no more the senses failed altogether. and stared at each other. They had melted for days. Melting always took time. The better it was the longer it took. When the melting was over, all that time seemed as though it had been an instant and they did not remember it. In later life it rarely took longer than that first time. ' Odeen said, "That was wonderful' Tritt only gazed at Dua, who had made it possible. She was coalescing, swirling, moving tremulously. She seemed most affected of the three. "We'll do it again," she said, hurriedly. "But later, later. Let me go now." She ran away. They did not stop her. They were too overcome to stop her. But that was always the way afterward. She was always gone after melting. No matter how successful it was, she would go. Something in her needed to be alone. It bothered Tritt. In point after point she was different from other Emotionals. She should not be. Odeen felt otherwise. He would say on many occasions, "Why don't you leave her alone, Tritt? She's not like the others and that means she's better than the others. Melting wouldn't be as good if she were like the others. Do you want the benefits without paying the price?" Tritt did not understand that clearly. He knew only that she ought to do what ought to be done. He said, "I want her to do what is right." "I know, Tritt, I know. But leave her alone anyway." Odeen himself often scolded Dua for her queer ways but he was al"You lack tact, Tritt," he would say. Tritt didn't know what tact was exactly. And now -- It had been so long since the first melting and still the babyEmotional was not bom. How much longer? It was already much too long. And Dua, if anything, stayed by herself more, and more as time went on. IF Tritt said, "She doesn't eat enough." "When it's time -- " began Odeen. "You always talk about it's being time or it's not being time. You never found it time to get Dua in the first place. Now you never find it time to have a baby-Emotional. Dua should -- " But Odeen turned away. He said, "She's out there, Tritt. If you want to go out and get her, as though you were her Parental instead of her Right-ling, do so. But I say, leave her alone." Tritt backed away. He had a great deal to say, but he didn't know how to say it. #a D UA was aware of the left-right agitation concerning her in a dim and faraway manner and her rebelliousness grew. If one or the other -- or both -- came to get her, the scene would end in a melting and she raged against the thought. Melting was all Tritt knew and, except for the children, all Tritt wanted -- except for the third and last child. Everything was involved with the children and the still missing child. And when Tritt wanted a melting he got it. Tritt dominated the triad when he grew stubborn. He would hold on to some simple idea and never let go, and in the end Odeen and Dua would have to give in. Yet now she wouldn't give in -- she wouldn't! She did not feel disloyal at the thought. She never expected to feel for either Odeen or Tritt the sheer intensity of longing they felt for each other. She could melt alonethey could melt only through her mediation -- so why didn't that make her the more regarded? She felt intense pleasure at the three-way melting, of course -- she would be stupid to .deny it. The pleasure was akin to what she felt when she passed through a rock wall, as she sometimes secretly did. To Tritt and Odeen the pleasure was like nothing else they had ever experienced or could ever experience. No, wait. Odeen had the pleasure of learning, of what he called intellectual development. Dua felt some of that at times, enough to know what it might mean -- and though it was different from melting it might serve as a substitute at least to the point where Odeen could do without -- sometimes. But not so Tritt. For him there was only melting and the children. Only. And when his small mind bent entirely upon that Odeen would give in and then Dua would have to. Once she had rebelled. "But what happens when we melt? It's hours, days sometimes, before we come out of it. What happens in all that time?" Tritt had looked outraged at that. "It's always that way. It's got to be." "I don't like anything that's got to be. I want to know why." Odeen had looked embarrassed. He spent half his life being embarrassed. He said, "Now, Dua, it does have to be. On account of -- children." He seemed to pulse as he spoke the word. "Well, don't pulse," said Dua sharply. "We're grown now and we've melted I don't know how many times and we all know it's so we can have children. You might as well say so. Why does it take so long? That's all." "Because it's a complicated process," said Odeen, still pulsing. "Because it takes energy. Dua, it takes a long time to get a child started and even when we take a long time a child doesn't always get started. And it's getting worse. Not just with us," he added hastily. "Worse?" Tritt asked anxiously, but Odeen would say no more. They had a child eventually, a baby-Rational, a Left-ling, that flitted and thinned so that all three were in raptures and even Odeen would hold it and let it change shape in his hands for as long as Tritt would allow him. For it was Tritt, of course, who had actually incubated it through the long preforming. Tritt who had separated from it when it assumed independent existence and Tritt who cared for it at all times. After that Tritt was often not with them and Dua was oddly pleased. Tritt's obsession annoyed her, but Odeen' s -- oddly -- pleased her. She became increasingly aware of his -- importance. There was something to being a Rational that made it possible to answer questions -- and somehow Dua had questions for him constantly. He was readier to answer when Tritt was not present. "Why does it take so long, Odeen? I don't like to melt and then not know what's happening for days at a time." "We're perfectly safe, Dua," said Odeen earnestly. "Come, nothing has ever happened to us, has it? You've never heard of anything ever happening to any other triad, have you? Besides, you shouldn't ask questions." "Because I'm an Emotional? Because other Emotionals don't ask questions? I can't stand other Emotionals -- if you want to know -- and I do want to ask questions." She was perfectly aware that Odeen was looking at her as though he had never seen anyone as attractive and that if Tritt had been present, melting would have taken place at once. She even let herself thin out -- not much, but perceptibly -- in deliberate coquettishness. Odeen said, "But you might not understand the implications, Dua. It takes a great deal of energy to initiate a new spark of life." "You've often mentioned energy. What is it? Exactly?" "Why, what we eat." "Well, then, why don't you say x food?" "Because food and energy aren't quite the same thing. Our food comes from the Sun and that's a kind of energy, but there are other kinds of energy that are not food. When we eat we've got to spread out and absorb the light. It's hardest for Emotionals because they're much more transparent -- that is, the light tends to pass through instead of being absorbed -- " IF How wonderful to have it explained, Dua thought. What she was told she really knew -- but she didn't know the proper words, the long science-words that Odeen knew. And they made sharper and more meaningful everything that happened. O ccasionally now -- in adult life when she no longer feared that childish teasing, when she shared in the prestige of being part of the Odeen-triad -- she tried to swarm with other Emotionals and to withstand the chatter and the crowding. After all, she did occasionally feel like having a more substantial meal than she usually got and it did make for better melting. There was a joy -- sometimes she caught the pleasure the others got out of it -- in slithering and maneuvering for exposure to Sunlight, in the luxurious contraction and condensation to absorb the warmth through greater thickness with greater efficiency. Yet for Dua a little of that went quite a way and the others never seemed to have enough. There was a kind of gluttonous wiggle about them that Dua could not duplicate and that, at length, she could not endure. That was why Rationals and Parentals were so rarely on the surface. Their thickness made it possible for them to eat quickly and leave. Emotionals writhed in the Sun for hours, for though they ate more slowly they actually needed more energy than the others -- at least for melting. The Emotional supplied the energy, Odeen had explained (pulsing so that his signals were barely comprehensible), the Rational the seed, the Parental the incubator. Once Dua understood, a certain amusement began to blend with her disapproval when she watched the other Emotionals virtually slurp up the ruddy Sunlight. Since they never asked questions she was sure they didn't know why they did so and couldn't understand that there was an obscene side to their quivering condensations and to the way they went tittering down below eventually -- on their way to a good melt, of course, with lots of energy to spare. She could also stand Tritt's annoyance when she would come down without that swirling opacity that meant a good gorging. Yet why should Tritt and Odeen complain? The thinness she retained meant a defter melting. Not as sloppy and glutinous as the other triads managed, perhaps, but it was ethereality that counted, she felt sure. And the little-left and little-right came eventually didn't they? Of course, it was the babyEmotional, the little-mid, that was the crux. That took more energy than the other two, and Dua never had enough. Even Odeen was beginning to mention it. "You're not getting enough Sunlight, Dua." "Yes, I am," said Dua hastily. "Genia's triad," said Odeen, "has just initiated an Emotional." Dua did not like Genia. Genia was empty-headed even by Emotional standards. Dua said loftily, " I suppose she's boasting about it. She has no delicacy. I suppose she's saying, 'I shouldn't mention it, my dear, but you'll never guesrwhat my Left-ling and Right-ling have gone and went and done -- Dua imitated Genia's tremulous signaling with deadly accuracy and Odeen was amused. But then he said, "Genia may be a dunder but she has initiated an Emotional, and Tritt is upset about it. We've been at it for much longer than the others have -- " Dua turned away. "I get all the Sun I can stand. I feed till I'm too full to move. I don't know what you want of me." Odeen said, "Don't be angry. I promised Tritt I would talk to you. He thinks you listen to me -- " "Oh, Tritt just thinks it's odd that you explain science to me. He doesn't understand. Do you want a Mid-ling like the others?" "No," said Odeen, seriously. "You're not like the others and I'm glad of it. And if you're interested in Rational talk let me explain something. The Sun doesn't supply the food it used to in ancient times. The light-energy is less and requires longer exposures. The .birth rate has been dropping for ages and the world's population is only a fraction of what it once was." "I can't help it," said Dua rebelliously. "The Hard Ones may be able to. Their numbers have been decreasing, too -- " "Do they pass on?" Dua was suddenly interested. She had always thought the Hard Ones were immortal -- that they weren't born and didn't die. Who had ever seen a baby Hard One, for instance? They didn't have babies. They didn't melt. They didn't eat. Ojdeen said thoughfully, "I imagine they pass on. They never talk about themselves to me. I'm not even sure how they eat, but of course they must. And they have to be born. There's a new one, for instance -- I haven't seen him yet -- But never mind that. The point is that they've been developing an artificial food -- " "I know," said Dua. "I've tasted it." "You have? I didn't know that." "A bunch of the Emotionals talked about it. They said a Hard One was asking for volunteers to afraid. They said it would probably turn them permanently hard and they would never be able to melt again." "That's foolish," said Odeen vehemently. "I know. So I volunteered. That shut them up. They are so difficult to endure, Odeen." "How was it?" "Horrible," said Dua firmly. "Harsh and bitter. Of course I didn't tell the other Emotionals that." Odeen said, "I tasted it. It wasn't that bad." "Rationals and Parentals don't care what food tastes like." But Odeen said, "It's still only experimental. They're working hard on improvements, the Hard Ones are. Especially Estwald -- IF that's the one I mentioned before, the new one I haven't seen -- he's working on it. Losten speaks of him now and then as though he were something special -- a great scientist." "How is it you've never seen him?" "I'm just a Soft One. You don't suppose they show me and tell me everything, do you? Some day I'll see him,. I suppose. He's developed a new source of energy that may yet save us all -- " "I don't want artificial food." said Dua, and left Odeen abruptly. That conversation had taken place not so long ago and Odeen had not mentioned the new food again. But she knew he would and she brooded about it up here in the Sunset. She had seen the artificial food that one time -- a glowing sphere of light like a tiny Sun in a special cavern set up by the Hard Ones. She could taste its bitterness yet. Would they improve it? Would they make it taste better? Even delicious? And would she have to eat it then and fill herself with it till the full sensation gave her an uncontrollable desire to melt? She feared that self-generating desire. It was different when the desire came through the hectic combined stimulation of Left-ling and Right-ling. It was the selfgeneration that meant she would be ripe to bring about the initiation of a little-mid. And -- and she didn't want to start one! A long time passed before she would admit the truth to herself. She did not want to initiate an Emotional. It was after all three children were born that the time would inevitably come to pass on, something she did not want to do. She remembered the day her Parental had left her forever and it was never going to be like that for her. Of that she was fiercely determined. The other Emotionals did not care because they were too empty to think about it, but she was different. She was queer Dua, the Left-Em. That was what they had called her and she would be different. As long as she didn't have that third child she would not pass on -- she would continue to live. So she was not going to have that third child. Never. Never! But how was she going to stave it off? And how would she keep Odeen from finding out? What if Odeen found out? #b something. He was reasonably sure that Tritt would not actually go up to the surface after Dua. It would mean leaving the children and that was always hard for Tritt to do. Tritt waited without speaking for a while and when he left it was in the direction of the children's alcove. Odeen was rather glad to see Tritt go. Not quite, of course, for Tritt had been angry and withdrawn so that interpersonal contact had weakened and the barrier of displeasure had arisen. Odeen could not help but be melancholy at that. It was like the slowing of the life-pulse. He sometimes wondered if Tritt felt it, too. No, the thought was unfair. Tritt had the special relationship with the children. As for Dua -- who could tell what Dua felt? Who could tell what any Emotional felt? They were so different they made left and right seem alike in everything but mind. But even allowing for the erratic way of Emotionals, who could tell what Dua -- especially Dua -- felt? Dua was the problem. The delay in initialing the third child was indeed becoming too long, and Dua was growing less amenable to persuasion, not more. A restlessness was growing in Odeen himself, one he could not quite identify, something he would have to discuss with Losten. He made his way down to the Hard Caverns, hastening his movements into a continuous flow that was not nearly as undignified as the oddly exciting mixture of wavering and rushing that marked the Emotional curve-along or as amusing as the stolid weight-shift of the Parental -- (He had the keen thought-image of Tritt clumping in pursuit of the baby-Rational who, of course, was almost as slippery at his age as an Emotional and of Dua having to block the baby and bring him back and of Tritt cluckingly undecided whether to shake the small lifeobject or enfold him with his substance. From the start, Tritt could thin himself more effectively for the babies than for Odeen and when Odeen railed at him about that Tritt answered gravely, for he had no humor about such things, "Ah, but the children need it more.") Odeen was selfishly pleased with his own flow and thought it graceful and impressive. He had mentioned that once to Losten, to whom as his Hard-teaclier, he confessed everything. Losten had said, "But don't you think Emotionals or Parentals feel the same about their own flowpatterns? If each of you thinks differently and acts differently, ought you not to be pleased differently? A triad doesn't preclude individuality, you know." Odeen was not sure he understood about individuality. Did that mean being alone? A Hard One was alone, of course. There were no triads among them. How did they stand it?  Odeen had been quite young when the matter had come up and his relationship with the Hard Ones had only been beginning. The thought had suddenly struck him that he wasn't sure there were no triads among them. The fact that none existed was common legend among the Soft Ones -- but how correct was the legend? Odeen had thought about that and decided one must ask and not accept matters on faith. Odeen had asked, "Are you a Left or a Right, sir?" (In later times, Odeen pulsed at the memory of that question. How incredibly naive of him to have asked it. It was very little comfort that every Rational asked the question of a Hard One in some fashion sooner IF or later -- usually sooner.) Losten had answered quite calmly, "Neither, Little-left. There are no Lefts or Rights among the Hard Ones." "Or Mid-# -- Emotionals?" "Or Mid-lings?" And the Hard One changed the shape of his permanent sensory region in a fashion that Odeen eventually associated with amusement or pleasure. "No. No Mid-lings either. Just Hard Ones of one kind." Odeen had to ask. It came out involuntarily, quite against his desire. "But how do you stand it?" "It is different with us, Littleleft. We are used to it." Could Odeen become used to such a concept? There was the Parental triad that had filled his life so far and the sure knowledge that he would at some not-toodistant time form a triad of his own. What was life without that T He thought about it hard now and then. He thought about everything hard, as it came up. Sometimes he managed to catch a glimpse of what it might mean. That Hard Ones had only themselves -- not left-brother or right-brother or mid-sister or melting or children or Parentals. They had only the mind, only the inquiry into the Universe. Perhaps that was enough for them. As Odeen grew older he caught bits of understanding as to the joys of inquiry. They were almost enough -- almost enough -- and then he would think of Tritt and of Dua and decide that all the Universe besides was not quite enough. Unless -- It was odd, but every once in a while it seemed to him that there might come a time, a situation, a condition, when -- Then he would lose the momentary glimpse -- or, rather, glimpse of a glimpse -- and miss it all. Yet in time it would return, and lately he thought the concept grew stronger and would remain almost long enough to be caught. B UT none of that was what should involve him now. He had to see about Dua. He made his way along the familiar route, along which he had first been taken by his Parental (as Tritt would soon take their own young Rational, their own baby-left.) And he was instantly lost in memory again. The occasion had been frightening. There had been other young Rationals, all pulsing and shimmering and changing shape despite the Parental signals on every side to stay firm and smooth and not disgrace the triad. One small Left, a playmate of Odeen's, had, in fact, flattened out baby-fashion and would not unflatten, despite all the efforts of his horribly embarrassed Parental. The youngster had since become a perfectly normal student -- Though no Odeen, as Odeen himself could not help realizing with considerable complacency.) They met a number of Hard Ones on that first day of school. They paused with each so that each young-Rational vibration pattern might be recorded in several specialized ways and for a decision to be reached as to whether to accept any new Rational for instruction immediately or to wait another interval -- and if immediately, for what kind of instruction. Odeen, in a desperate effort, had drawn himself smooth and held himself unwavering as a Hard One approached. The Hard One said -- and the first sound of the odd tones of his voice almost undid Odeen's determination to be grownup -- "This is quite a firm-held Rational. How do you represent yourself, Left?" It was the first time Odeen had ever been called "left" without some form of diminutive. He felt firmer than ever as he managed to say, "Odeen, Hard-Sir," using the polite address his Parental had carefully taught him. Dimly Odeen remembered being taken through the Hard Caverns, past their equipment, their machinery, their 'libraries, their meaningless, crowding sights and sounds. More than his actual perceptions he remembered his inner feeling of despair. What would they do with him? His Parental had told him that he would learn, but he did not know what was really meant by "learn" and when he asked his Parental it turned out that the older one did not know either. It took Odeen a while to find out and the experience was pleasurable, so pleasurable -- and yet not without its worrisome aspects. The Hard One who had first called him "left" was his first teacher. The Hard One taught him to interpret the wave recordings so that after a while what seemed an incomprehensible code became words -- words just as clear as those he could form with his own vibrations. But then that first mentor failed to appear and another Hard One took over. It was a time before Odeen noticed. It was difficult for him in those early days to tell one Hard One from another, to differentiate among their voices. But then he grew certain. Little by little he grew certain and tie trembled at the change. He did not understand its significance. He gathered courage and finally asked, "Where is my teacher, Hard-Sir?" "Gamaldan? He will no longer be with you, Left." Odeen was speechless for a moment. Then he asked, "But Hard Ones don't pass on -- " He did not quite finish the phrase. The new Hard One said nothing, volunteered nothing. It was always to be like that, Odeen found out. They never talked about themselves. On every other subject they discoursed freely. Concerning themselves -- nothing. From dozens of pieces of evidence Odeen could not help but decide that Hard Ones passed on, that they were not immortal (something so many Soft Ones took for granted). Yet no Hard One ever confirmed his conclusion in words. Odeen and the other student Rational sometimes discussed it hesitantly, uneasily. Each brought in some small item that pointed inexorably to the mortality of the Hard IF Ones and wondered and did not like to conclude the obvious and let it go. The Hard Ones did not seem to mind that hints of mortality existed. They did nothing to mask them. But they never mentioned them either. And if the question was asked directly (sometimes it inevitably was) they never answered -- neither denying nor affirming. If they passed on they had to be born also -- yet they said nothing of that and Odeen never saw a young Hard One. Ones received their energy from rocks instead of from the Sun -- at least that they incorporated a powdered black rock into their bodies. Some of the other students thought so, too. Others, rather vehemently, refused to accept the theory. But no one could come to a conclusion, for no one ever saw a Hard One feeding in any manner and the Hard Ones never spoke of that either. In the end Odeen took their reticence for granted -- as part of them. Perhaps, he thought, it was their individuality, the fact that they formed no triads. It built a shell about them. And then, too, Odeen learned things of such grave import that questions concerning the private lives of the Hard Ones turned to trivia. He learned, for instance, that the whole world was shriveling -- dwindling. Losten, his new teacher, told him that. Odeen has asked about the unoccupied caverns that stretched so endlessly into the bowels of the world and Losten had seemed pleased. "Are you afraid to ask about them, Odeen?" (He was Odeen now -- not merely identified by some reference to his lefthood. It was always a source, of pride to him to hear a Hard One address him by name. Many did so. Odeen was a prodigy of understanding and the use of his name seemed a recognition of the fact. More than once Losten had expressed satisfaction at having him as a pupil.) Odeen was indeed afraid and, after some hesitation, said so. It was always easier to confess shortcomings to the Hard Ones than to fellow Rationals -- much easier than to confess them to Tritt, unthinkable to confess them to Tritt. "Then why do you ask?" Odeen hesitated again. Then said slowly, "I'm afraid of the unoccupied caverns because when I was youqg I was told they had all sorts of monstrous things in them. But I know nothing of that directly -- I only know what I have been told by other young ones who couldn't have known directly either. I want to find out the truth about them and the wanting has grown until there is more curiosity in me than fear." Losten looked pleased. "Good. The curiosity is useful, the fear useless. Your inner development is excellent, Odeen, and remember it is only your inner development that counts in the important things. Our help to you is marginal. Since you want to know it is easy to tell you that the unoccupied caverns are truly unoccupied. They are empty. There is nothing in them but the unimportant things left behind from times past." "Left behind by whom, HardSir?" Odeen felt uneasily compelled to use the honorific whenever he was too obviously in the presence of knowledge he. lacked that the other had. "By those who occupied them in times past. There was a time thousands of cycles ago when there were many thousands of Hard Ones and fewer of us now than there were in the past, Odeen. Nowadays there are not quite three hundred Hard Ones and fewer than ten thousand Soft Ones." "Why?" asked Odeen, shocked. (Only three hundred Hard Ones left -- surely an open admission that Hard Ones, passed on, but this was not the time to think of that.) "Because energy is diminishing. The Sun is cooling. It becomes harder in every cycle to give birth and to live." (Well, then, did not the words mean the Hard Ones gave birth, too? And did it mean that the HardOnes depended on the Sun for food, too, and not on rocks? Odeen filed the thought for later reference and dismissed it for now.) "Will this continue?" Odeen asked. "The Sun must dwindle to an end, Odeen, and some day give no food." "Does that mean that all of us, the Hard Ones and the Soft Ones, too, ultimately will pass on?" "What else can it mean?" "We can't all pass on. If we need energy and theJSun is coming to an end we must find other sources. Other stars." "But, Odeen, all the stars are coming to an end. The Universe is coming to an end." "If the stars come to an end, is there no food elsewhere? No other source of energy?" "No, all the sources of energy in the Universe are coming to an end." Odeen considered that rebelliously, then said, "Then other Universes. We can't give ' up just because the Universe does." He was palpitating as he said it. He had expanded with quite unforgivable discourtesy until he had swelled translucently into a size distinctly larger than the Hard One. But Losten merely expressed extreme pleasure. He said, "Wonderful, my Left-dear. The others must hear of this." Odeen had collapsed to normal size in mingled embarrassment and pleasure at hearing himself addressed as "Left-dear." Not very long after that conversation Losten himself had brought them Dua. Odeen had wondered idly if there had been any connection, but after a while his wonder burned itself out. Tritt had repeated so often that it was his own approach to Losten that had brought them Dua that Odeen had given up thinking about it. But now he was coming to Losten again. A long time had passed since those earlier days when he first learned that the Universe was comIF ing to an end and that (as it turned out) the Hard Ones were resolutely laboring to live on anyway. He had become an adept in many fields and Losten himself confessed that in physics there was little he could any longer teach Odeen that a Soft One could profitably learn. And there were other young Rationals to take in hand, so he did not see Losten as frequently as he once did. half-grown Rationals in the Radiation Chamber. Losten saw him at once through the glass and came out, closing the door carefully about him. "My Left-dear," he said, holding out his limbs in a gesture of friendship (so that Odeen, as so often in the past, experienced a perverse desire to touch, but controlled it.) "How are ybu?" "I did not mean to interrupt, Losten-Sir." "Interrupt? Those two will get along perfectly well by themselves for a time. They are probably glad to see me go, for I am sure I wegry them with too much talk." "Nonsense," said Odeen. "You always fascinated me and I'm sure you fascinate them." "Well, well. It is good of you to say so. I see you frequently in the library and I hear from others that you do well in your advanced courses -- and I miss my best student. How is Tritt? Is he as Parentally stubborn in his ways as ever?" "More stubborn every day. He gives strength to the triad." "And Dua?" "Dua? I have come -- She is very unusual, you know." Losten nodded, "Yes, I know that." His expression was one that Odeen had grown to associate with melancholy. Odeen waited a moment, then decided to tackle the matter directly. He asked, "Losten-Sir, was she brought to us, to Tritt and myself, just because she was unusual?" Losten said, "Would you be surprised? You are quite unusual yourself, Odeen, and you have told me on a number of occasions that Tritt is." "Yes," said Odeen with conviction. "He is." '"Then ought not your triad include an unusual Emotional?" . "There are many ways of being unusual," said Odeen thoughtfully. "In some ways Dua's oddness displeases Tritt and worries me. May I consult you?" "Always." "She is not fond of -- of melting." Losten listened gravely, to all appearances unembarrassed. Odeen went on: "She is fond of melting when we melt, that is, but it is not always easy to persuade her to do so." Losten said, "How does Tritt feel about melting? I mean, aside from the immediate pleasure of the act? What does it mean to him besides pleasure?" "Children, of course," said Odeen. "I like them and Dua likes them, too, but Tritt is the Parental. Do you understand that?" (It suddenly seemed to Odeen that Losten could not possibly understand all the subtleties of the triad.) "I try to understand," said Losten. "It seems to me, then, that Tritt gets more out of melting than melting alone. And how about you? What do you get out of it besides the pleasure?" Odeen considered. "I think you know. A kind of mental stimulation." "Yes, I know -- but I want to make sure you know. I want to make sure you haven't forgotten. You have told me often that when you came out of a period of melting and its odd loss of time -- during which. I admit I sometimes didn't see you for rather long periods -- you suddenly found yourself understanding many things that had seemed obscure before." "It was as though my mind remained active in the interval," said Odeen. "It was as though the time spent -- even though I was unaware of its passing and unconscious of my existence -- were necessary to me. During melting I could apparently think more deeply and intensely -- without the distraction of the less intellectual side of life." "Yes," agreed Losten, "and you'd, come back with a quantumjump in understanding. It is a common thing among you Rational, though I must admit no one improved in such great leaps as you. I honestly think that no Rational in history has done so." "Really?" Odeen tried not to seem unduly elated. "On the other hand, I may be wrong." Losten seemed slightly amused at Odeen's sudden loss of shimmer. "But never mind that. The point is that you, like Tritt, get something out of the melt beside the melt itself." "Yes. Most certainly." "And what does Dua get out of the melt besides the melt?" There was a long pause. "I don't know," said Odeen. "Have you never asked her?" "Never." "But then," said Losten, "if all she gets out of a melt is the melt and if you and Tritt get out of it the melt plus something else -- why should she be as eager for it as you two are?" "Other Emotionals don't seem to require -- " began Odeen defensively. "Other Emotionals are not like Dua. You've ' told me that often enough and, I think, with satisfaction." thought it might be something else." "What might that be?" "It's hard to explain. We know each other in the triad -- we sense each other. In some ways all three of us are part of a single individual. A misty individual that comes and goes. Mostly the feeling is subconscious. If we think about it with too great a concentration we lose it, so we can never get real detail. We -- " Odeen stopped rather hopelessly. "It's hard to explain the triad to someone -- " "I am trying to understand. You think you have caught a portion of Dua's inner mind, something she has tried to keep secret -- is that it?" "I'm not sure. It is the vaguest impression, sensed with a corner of IF my mind just now and then." "Well?" "I sometimes think Dua doesn't want to start a baby-Emotional." Losten looked at him gravely. "You only have two children so far, I think. A little-left and a littleright." "Yes, only two. The Emotional is difficult to initiate, you know." "I know." "And Dua will not trouble to absorb the necessary energy. Or even try to. She has any number of reasons but I can't believe any of them. It seems to me that for some reason she just doesn't want an Emotional. For myself -- if Dua really didn't want one for a while -- well, I would let her have her Way. But Tritt is a Parental and he wants one. He must have one and somehow I can't disappoint Tritt, not even for Dua," "If Dua had some rational cause for not wanting to initiate an Emotional, would that make a difference with you?" "With me, certainly, but not with Tritt. He doesn't understand such things." "But would you labor to keep him patient?" "Yes, I would -- for as long as I could." Losten said, "Has it occurred to you that hardly any Soft Ones -- " he hesitated as though searching for. a word and then used the customary Soft-One phrase -- "ever pass on before the children are born -- all three, with the baby-Emotional last?" "Yes, I know." Odeen wondered how Losten could possibly think him ignorant of so elementary a bit of knowledge. "Then the birth of a babyEmotional is equivalent to the coming of time to pass on." "Usually not till the Emotional is old enough -- " "But the time for passing on will be coming. Might it not be that Dua does not want to pass on?" "How can that be, Losten?" When the time comes to pass on, it is as when the time comes to melt. How can you not want to?" (Hard Ones did not melt -- perhaps they did not understand.) "Suppose Dua simply wants never to pass on? What would you then say?" "Why, that we must pass on eventually. If Dua merely wants to delay the last baby I might humor her and even persuade Tritt to -- perhaps. If she wants never to have it -- that simply cannot be allowed." "Why so?" Odeen paused to think it out. "I can't say, Losten-Sir, but I know we must pass on. I know it more and feel it more with each cycle, and sometimes I almost think I understand why." "You are a philosopher I sometimes think, Odeen," said Losten dryly. '"'Let's consider. By the time the third baby comes and grows, Tritt will have had all his children and can look forward to passing on after a fulfilled life. You yourself will have had the satisfaction of much learning and you, too, can pass on after a fulfilled life. But Dua?" "I don't know," said Odeen wretchedly. "Other Emotionals cling together and seem to get some pleasure out of chattering with each other. Dua, however, will not do so." "Well, she is unusual. Is there nothing she likes?" "She likes to listen to me talk about my work," mumbled Odeen. Losten said, "Well, don't be ashamed of that, Odeen. Every Rational talks about his work to his right and his mid. You all pretend you don't but you all do." Odeen said, "But Dua listens, Losten-Sir." "I'm quite sure she does. Not like other Emotionals. And does it ever seem to you that she understands rather better after a melt?" "Yes, I have noticed that at times. I didn't pay any particular attention, though -- " "Because you are sure Emotionals can't really understand these things. But there seems to be much of the Rational in Dua." (Odeen looked up at Losten with sudden consternation. Once Du had told him of her childhood unhappiness -- only once -- of the shrill calls of the other Emotionals and of the filthy name they had called her -- Left-Em. Had Losten heard of that, somehow? But he vyas merely looking calmly at Odeen.) Odeen said, "I have sometimes thought that, too." Then he burst out with: "I am proud of her for that." "Nothing wrong with that," said Losten. "Why not tell her so? And if she likes to pamper the Rationalness in herself -- why not let her? Teach her what you know more intensively. Answer her questions. Will it disgrace your triad to do that?" "I don't care if it does. And why should it? Tritt will think it a waste of time, but I'll handle him." "Explain to him that if Dua gets more out of life and a truer sense of fulfillment she might not have the fear of passing on that she now has and might be more ready to have a baby-Emotional." It was as though an enormous feeling of impending disaster had been lifted from Odeen. He said hurriedly, "You're right. I feel you're right. Losten-Sir, you understand so much. With you leading the Hard Ones, how can we fail to continue succeeding in the otherUniverse project?" "With me?" Losten was amused. "You forget it is Estwald who is guiding us now. He is the real hero of the project. It would be nowhere without him." "Oh, yes # " said Odeen, momentarily discomfited. He had never yet seen Estwald. In fact, he had not yet met a Soft One who had actually met him, though some reported having seen him in the distance now and then. Estwald was a new Hard One -- new, at least, in the sense that when Odeen had been young he had never heard Estwald mentioned. Did that mean that Estwald was a young Hard One, had been a child Hard One when Odeen had been a child Soft One? But never mind that. Right now, Odeen wanted to get back home. He could not touch Losten in gratitude, but he dould thank him again and then hasten away joyfully. IF His joy had a selfish component. It was not put there merely by the distant prospect of th babyEmotional and the thought of Tritt's pleasure. It was not even caused by the thought of Dua's fulfillment. What counted with him at this very moment was the immediate gleeful prospect ahead. He was going to be able to teach. No other Rational could feel the pleasure of so doing, he was sure, for no other Rational could possibly have an Emotional like Dua as part of the triad. It would be wonderful, if only Tritt could be made to understand the necessity. He would have to talk to Tritt, somehow persuade him to be patient. #c tient. He did not pretend to understand why Dua acted as she did. He did not want to try. He did not care. He never knew why Emotionals did what they did. And Dua did not even act like the other Emotionals. She never thought about the important thing. She would look at the Sun. But then she would thin out so that the light and food would simply pass through her. Then she would say it was beautiful. That was not the important thing. The important thing was to eat. What was beautiful about eating? What wasjbeautiful? She always wanted to melt dif ferently. Once she said, "Let's talk first. We never talk about it... We never think about it." Odeen would always say, "Let her have ter way, Tritt. It makes the melting better." Odeen was always patient. He always thought things would be better after a wait. Or else he would want to think matters out. Tritt was not sure he knew what Odeen meant by "thinking out." It seemed to him it just meant that Odeen did nothing. Like getting Dua in the first place. Odeen would stll be thinking it out. Tritt had gone right up to a Hard One and asked. That was the way to act. Now Odeen would do nothing about Dua. What about the babyEmotional? Well, Tritt would do something about it, if Odeen didn't. In fact, he v was doing something. He was edging down the long corridor even as all this was going, through his mind. He was hardly aware he had come this far. Was, this "thinking out?" Well -- he would not let himself be frightened. He would not back away. He looked about him stolidly. This was the way to the Hard Caverns. He knew he would be going that way with his little-left before very long. He had been shown the way by Odeen once. He did not know what he would do when he got there this time. Still, he felt no fright at all. He wanted a baby-Emotional. It was his right to have a baby-Emotional. Nothing was more important than that. The Hard Ones would see he got oner Had they not brought Dua when he had asked? But whom would he ask? Could he speak to any Hard One? Dimly he had made up his mind not to ask just any Hard One. There was the name of one he would ask for. He remembered the name. He even remembered when he had first heard the name. It was the time when the little-left had grown old enough to begin changing shape voluntarily. (What a great day! "Come, Odeen, quickly! Annis is all oval and hard. All by himself, too. Dua, look!" And they had rushed in. Annis had been the only child then. They had had to wait so long for the second. So they rushed in and he was just plastered in the corner. He was curling at himself and flowing over his resting place like wet clay. Odeen had left because he was busy. But Dua had said, "Oh, he'll do it again, Tritt." They had watched for hours and he didn't.) Tritt was hurt that Odeen hadn't waited. He would have scolded but Odeen had looked so weary. There had been definite wrinkles in his ovoid. And he had made no effort to smooth 'them out. Tri k tt had asked anxiously, "Is anything wrong, Odeen?" "A hard day and I'm not sure I'm going to get differential equations before the next melting." (Tritt did not remeiqber the exact hard words. Odeen always used hard words.) "Do you want to melt now?" "Oh, no. I just saw Dua heading topside and you know how she is if we try to interrupt that. There's no rush, really. There's a new Hard One, too." "A new Hard One?" Tritt had known a distinct lack of interest. Odeen found sharp interest in associating with Hard Ones, but Tritt wished the interest did not exist. Odeen was more intent on what he called his education than any other Rational in. the area. That was unfair. Odeen was too wrapped up in that. Dua was too wrapped up in roaming the surface alone. No one was properly interested in the triad but Tritt. "He's called Estwald." "Estwald?" Tritt had begun to feel a twinge of interest, perhaps because he was anxiously sensing Odeen's feelings. "I've never seen him, but they all talk about him." Odeen's eyes had flattened out as they usually did when he turned introspective. "He's responsible for that new thing they've got." "What new thing?" "The positron Pu -- You wouldn't understand, Tritt. It's a new thing they have. It's going to revolutionize the whole world." "What's revolutionize?" "Make everything different." Tritt had been at once alarmed. "They mustn't make everything different." "They'll make everything better. Different isn't always worse. Anyway, Estwald is responsible. He's very bright, I get the feeling." "Then why don't you like him?" "I didn't say I didn't like him." "You feel as though you don't like him." "Oh, nothing of the sort, Tritt. It's just that somehow -- somehow -- " Odeen had laughed. "I'm jealous. Hard Ones are so intelligent that a Soft One is nothing in IF comparison -- but I got used to that because Losten was always telling me how bright I was -- for a Soft One, I suppose. But now this Estwald comes along and even Losten seems lost in admiration. And I'm really nothing." Tritt had bellied out his foreplane until it had made contact with Odeen, who had looked up and smiled. "But that's just stupidity on my part. Who cares how smart a Hard One is? Not one of them has a tritt." Then they both had gone looking for Dua, after all. For a wonder she had finished wandering about -- they had met her as she was heading down again. It had been a very good melting, though the timelapse had been only a day or so. Tritt had worried about meltings then. With Annis so small even a short absence had been risky, though there were always other Parentals who would take over if necessary. After that Odeen had mentioned Estwald now and then. He always called him "the New One" even after considerable time had passed. He still had never seen him. "I think I'm avoiding him," he had said once when Dua was with them, "because he knows so much about the new device. I don't want to find out too soon. It's too much fun to learn." "The Positron Pump?" Dua had asked. That was another funny thing about Dua, Tritt thought. It annoyed him. She could say the hard words almost as well as Odeen could. Strange behavior for an Emotional! ask Estwald because Odeen had said he was smart. Besides, Odeen had never seen him. Estwald could not say, "I've talked to Odeen about it, Tritt, and you mustn't worry." Everyone thought that if you talked to the Rational you were talking to the triad. Nobody paid attention to the Parentals. But they would have to this time. He was in the Hard Caverns and everything seemed different. Nothing here looked like anything Tritt could understand. It was all wrong and frightening. Still, he was too anxious to see Estwald to let himself really be frightened. He said to himself, "I want my littlemid." That made him feel firm enough to walk forward. He saw a Hard One finally. There was just this one, doing something, bending over something. Odeen had once told Tritt that Hard Ones were always working at their -- whatever-it-was. Tritt did not remember and did not care. He moved smoothly up and stopped. "Hard-Sir," he said. The Hard One looked up at him and the air vibrated about him, the way Odeen said it did when two Hard Ones talked to each other sometimes. Then the Hard One seemed really to see Tritt and said, "Why, it's a Right. What is your business here? Do you have your little-left with you? Is today the start of asemester?" Tritt ignored it all. He said, "Where can I find Estwald, HardSir?" "Find whom?" "Estwald." The Hard One was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "What is your business with Estwald, Right?" Tritt felt stubborn. "It is important I speak to him. Are you Estwald, Hard-Sir?" "No, I am not. What is your name. Right?" "Tritt, Hard-Sir." "I see. You're the Right of Odeen's triad, aren't you?" "Yes." The Hard One's voice seemed to soften. "I'm afraid you can't see Estwald at the moment. He's not here. If anyone else can help you -- " Tritt didn't know what to say. He simply stood there. The Hard One said, "You go home now. Talk to Odeen. He'll help you. Yes? Go home, Right." The Hard One turned away. He seemed very concerned in matters other than Tritt and Tritt still stood, there, uncertain. Then he moved into another section quietly, flowing noiselessly. The Hard One did not look up. Tritt was not certain why he had moved in that particular direction. At first he felt only that it was good to dp so. Then the reason became clear. There was a thin warmth of food about him and he was nibbling at it. He had not been conscious of hunger, yet now he was eating and enjoying. The Sun was nowhere. Instinctively he looked up, but of course he was in a cavern. Yet the food was better than he had ever found it to be on the surface. He looked about, wondering. He wondered most of all that he should be wondering. He had sometimes been impatient with Odeen because Odeen wondered about so many things that did not matter. Now he himself -- Tritt -- was wondering. But what he was wondering about did matter. Suddenly, with an almost blinding flash, he realized that he would not wonder unless something in him told him the subject did matter. He acted quickly, marveling at his own bravery. After a while he retraced his steps. He moved past the Hard One again, the one to whom he had earlier spoken. He said, "I am going home, Hard-Sir." The Hard One merely said something incoherent. He was still doing something, bending over something, doing silly things andnot seeing the important thing. If Hard Ones were so great and powerful and smart, Tritt thought, how could they be so stupid? #a D U A found herself drifting toward the Hard Caverns. Partly she wanted something to do now that the Sun had set, something to keep her from returning home for an additional period of time, something to delay her having to listen to the importunities of Tritt and the half-embarrassed, half-resigned suggestions of Odeen. Partly, too, the Hard Caverns held an attraction for her. She had felt the last for a long IF time, ever since she was little in fact and had given up trying to pretend it wasn't so. Emotionals were not supposed to feel such temptations. Sometimes little Emotionals did -- Dua was old enough and experienced enough to know that -- but such young whims quickly faded or were discouraged. She herself, though, had continued stubbornly curious about the world and the Sun and the caverns -- anything at all -- till her Parental had said, "You're a queer one, Dua, dear. You're a funny little-midling. What will become of you?" She hadn't the vaguest notion at first of what was so queer and so funny about wanting to know. She had found out quickly enough that her Parental could not answer her questions. Once she had tried her Left-father, but he had shown none of her Parental's soft puzzlement. He had snapped, "Why do you ask, Dua?" his look harshly inquiring. She had run away frightened, and had not asked him again. One day another Emotional of her own age had shrieked "LeftEm" at her after she had said -- she no longer remembered what -- something that had seemed natural to her at the tinrfe. Dua had been abashed without knowing why and had asked her considerably older Left-brother, what a Left-Em was. He had withdrawn, embarrassed and mumbling, "I don't know -- " when it was obvious he did. After some thought she had gone to her Parental and asked, "Am I a Left-Em, daddy?" And he had said, "Who called you that, Dua? You must not repeat such words." She flowed herself about his near corner, thought about it a while and asked, "Is it bad?" He said, "You'll grow out of it -- " and let himself bulge a bit to make her swing outward and vibrate in the game she had always loved. She did not love it now, for it was quite clear that he hadn't answered her, really. She moved away thoughtfully. He had said, you'll grow out of it, so she was in it now, but in what ? Even then, she had had few real friends among the other Emotionals. They liked to whisper and giggle together, but she preferred flowing over the crumbled rocks, and enjoying the sensation of their roughness. Some mids, however, were more friendly than others and less provoking. There was Doral, as silly as the rest, really, but who would sometimes chatter amusingly. (Doral had grown up to join a triad with Dua's Right-brother and a young Left from another cavern complex, a Left whom Dua did not particularly like... Doral had then gone on to initiate a baby-left and baby-right in rapid succession and a baby-mid not too long after that. She had also grown so dense that the triad looked as though it had two Parentals and Dua wondered if they could still melt. Tritt was. always telling her pointedly what a good triad Doral helped make up.) She and Doral had sat alone one day and Dua had whispered, "Doral, do you know what a LeftEm is?" Doral had tittered and compressed herself, as though to avoid being seen. She had said, " It's an Emotional that acts like a Rational -- you know, like a Left. Get it? Left-Emotional -- Left-Em. Get it?" Of course Dua understood. It was obvious once explained. She would have seen it for herself at once if she had been able to bring herself to imagine such a state of affairs. Dua asked, "How do you know?" "The older girls told me." Doral's substance swirled and Dua found the motion unpleasant. "It's dirty," Doral said. "Why?" asked Dua. "Because it's dirty. Emotionals shouldn't act like Rationals." Dua had never thought about the possibility, but now she did. She said, "Why shouldn't they?" "Because. You want to know something else that's dirty?" Dua couldn't help being intrigued. "What?" Doral didn't say anything, but a portion of herself expanded suddenly and brushed against the unsuspecting Dua before the latter could form a concavity to elude the touch. Dua didn't like it. She shrank away and said, "Don't do that." "You know what else is dirty? You can go into a rock." "No, you can't," said Dua. It had been a silly thing to say for Dua had often moved through the outer surface of the rock and liked it. But now in the context of Doral' s snickering she felt revolted and denied the whole thing even to herself. "Yes, you can. It's called rockrubbing. Emotionals can do it easy. Lefts and Rights can only do it as babies. When they grow up, they do it with each other." "I don't believe you. You're making it up." "They do, I tell you. Do you know Dimit?" "No." "Sure you do. She's the one with the thick corner from Cavern C." "Is she the one who flows funny?" "Yes. On account of the thick corner. That's the one. She got into a rock all the way once -- except for the thick corner. She let her Leftbrother watch her do it and he told their Parental and what she got for that, She never did it again," Dua left then, quite upset. She didn't talk to Doral again for a long time and never really grew friendly with Doral again. Yet her curiosity had been aroused. Her curiosity? Why not say her Left-Emishness? O NE day when she was quite sure her Parental was not in the vicinity she let herself melt into a rock, slowly. It had been the first time she had tried it since she was quite young. There was a warmness about the sensation, but when she emerged she felt as though everyone could tell, as though the rock had left a stain on her. She tried it again now and then, more boldly, and let herself enjoy it more. She never sank in really deeply, of course. Eventually she was caught by her Parental who clucked in displeasure and she was more careful after that. She was older now and knew for IF certain fact that, despite Doral's snickering, the practice was not uncommon. Practically every Emotional indulged in it now and then and some quite openly admitted the fact. Such practices happened less frequently as Emotionals grew older and Dua did not think that any Emotional she knew ever indulged after joining a triad and beginning the proper meltings. It was one of her secrets (she never told anybody) that she had kept it up and that once or twice she had tried it even after triad-formation. (Those few times she had thought: What if Tritt finds out? Somehow the prospect seemed to present formidable consequences and rather spoiled the fun.) She found excuses for herself in her ordeals with the others. The cry of "Left-Em" drove her into an almost hermitlike isolation at one point and, being alone, she found consolation in the rocks. Rockrubbing, whether it was dirty or not, was a solitary act and they were forcing, her to be solitary. Or soshe told herself. She had tried to strike back once. She had cried out, "You're abunch of Right-Ems, a bunch of dirty Right-Ems," at the taunting mids. They had only laughed and Dua had run away in confusion and frustration. But she had been right. Almost every Emotional, when she reached the age of triad-formation, became interested in babies, fluttering about them in Parental imitation Dua had found repulsive. She herself had never felt such interest. Babies were only babies -- they were for right-brothers to worry about. The name-calling died as Dua grew older. It helped that she retained a girlishly rarefied structure and could flow with a smoky curl no others could duplicate. And when, increasingly, Lefts and Rights showed interest in her, the other Emotionals found it difficult to sneer. And yet -- and yet -- now that no one ever dared speak disrespectfully to Dua (for it was well known through all the caverns that Odeen was the most prominent Rational of the generation and Dua was his Mid-ling), she herself knew that she was a Left-Em past all redemption. She did not think that being one was dirty -- not really -- but occasionally she caught herself wishing she were a Rational and then she was abashed. She wondered if -- partly -- she didn't want a babyEmotional because she was not a real Emotional herself and did not fill her triad role properly. Odeen had not minded her being a Left-Em. He never called her one -- but he liked her interest in his life, liked her questions and the way she could understand. He even defended her when Tritt grew jealous -- well, not jealous, really -- but overwhelmed with a feeling that the situation did not fit his stubborn and limited outlook. Hard Caverns occasionally, eager to posture before Dua and openly pleased that Dua was impressed. And she was impressed, not so much with the clear fact of his knowledge and intelligence, but with the fact that he did not resent sharing it. (She remembered her left-father's harsh response that one time she had questioned him.) She never loved Odeen as much as when he let her share his life -- yet even that was part of her LeftEmishness. Perhaps (this had occurred to her over and over) by being Left-Emish, she moved closer to Odeen and farther from Tritt and this was another reason Tritt's importunities repelled her. Her first time in a Hard Cavern she heard two Hard Ones talking. She did not know they were talking, of course. There was air vibration, rapid and changing, that made an unpleasant buzz deep inside her. She had to rarefy and let it through. Odeen said, "They're talking." Then, hastily, anticipating her objection: "Their kind of talk. They understand each other." Dua managed to grasp the concept. It was all the more delightful to understand quickly because that pleased Odeen so. (He once said, "None of the other Rationals I've ever met have anything but an empty-head for an Emotional. I'm lucky." She had said, "But the other Rationals seem to like emptyheads. Why are you different from them, Odeen?" Odeen did not deny that the other Rationals liked empty-heads. He simply said, "I've never figured it out and I don't think it's important that I do. I'm pleased with you and I'm pleased that I'm pleased.") She said, "Can you understand Hard-One talk?"  "Not really," said Odeen. "I can't sense the changes fast enough. Sometimes I can get a feel for what they're saying, even without understanding, especially after we've melted. Just sometimes, though. Getting feels like that is really an Emotional trick, except even if an Emotional does it, she can never make real sense out of what she's feeling. You might, though." Dua demurred. "I'd be afraid to. They might not like it." "Oh, go on. I'm curious. See if you can tell what they're talking about." "Shall I? Really?" "Go ahead. If they catch you and are annoyed. I'll say I made you do it." "Promise?" "I promise." Feeling rather fluttery, Dua let herself reach out to the Hard Ones and adopted the total passivity that allowed the influx of feelings. She said, "Excitement. They're excited. Someone new." Odeen said, "Maybe that's Estwald." It was the first time Dua had hard the name. She said, "That's funny." "What's funny?" "I have the feeling of a big Sun. A really big Sun." Odeen looked thoughtful. "They might be talking about that." "But how can that be?" them, approached and greeted IF them in Soft-One fashion of speech. Dua' was horribly embarrassed and wondered if they knew she had been sensing them. If they did, though, they said nothing. (Odeen told her afterward that it was quite rare to come upon Hard Ones talking among themselves in their own fashion. They always deferred to the Soft Ones and seemed always to suspend their own talk when Soft Ones were there. "They like us so much," said Odeen. "They are very kind.") Once in a while he would take her deep into the Hard Caverns -- usually when Tritt was entirely wrapped up in the children. Odeen did not go out of his way to tell Tritt that he had taken Dua down -- to do so would have been sure to evoke some response to the effect that Odeen's coddling simply encouraged DuaY reluctance to Sun herself and just made the melting that much more ineffective. It was hard to talk to Tritt for more than five minutes without melting coming into the conversation. She had even gone down alone once or twice. Doing so had always frightened her a little, though the Hard Ones she met were always friendly, always "very kind" as Odeen said. But they did not seem to take her seriously. They were pleased, but somehow amused -- she could feel that definitely -- when she asked questions. And when they answered it was in some Simple way that carried no information. "Just a machine, Dua," they would say. "Odeen might be able to tell you." She wondered if she had met Estwald. She never quite dared to try to discover the names of the Hard Ones she met (except Losten's, to whom Odeen had introduced her and of whom she heard a great deal.) Sometimes it seemed to her that this Hard One or that might be Estwald. Odeen talked about him with great awe and with some resentment. She gathered that Estwald was too deeply engaged in work of the profoundest importance to be in the caverns readily accessible to the Soft Ones. She pieced together what Odeen told her and, little by little, discovered, that the world needed food badly... Odeen hardly ever called it "food." He said "energy" instead and said it was the Hard-One word for it. The Sun was fading and dying but Estwald had discovered how to find energy far away, far beyond the Sun, far beyond the seven stars that shone in the dark night sky. (Odeen said the seven stars were seven Suns that were very distant and that there were many other stars that were even more distant and were too dim to be seen. Tritt had heard him say that and had asked what use it was for stars to exist if they coyld not be seen and had said he didn't believe a word of what Odeen was saying.) It looked now as though there would be.plenty of energy forever -- at least as soon as Estwald and the other Hard Ones learned to make the new energy taste right. Only a few days ago she had asked Odeen, "Do you remember, long ago, when you took me to the Hard Caverns and I sensed the Hard Ones and said I caught the feeling of a big Sun?" Odeen had looked puzzled for a moment. "I'm not sure. But go ahead, Dua. What about it?" "I've been thinking. Is the big Sun the source of the new energy?" Odeen had said happily, 'That's good, Dua. It's not quite right, but that's such good intuition for an Emotional." D UA had been moving slowly, rather moodily, during her reveries. Without particularly noting the passage of either time or space she found herself in the Hard Caverns and was just beginning to wonder if she had not really delayed as long as she safely could and whether she had not best turn home and face the inevitable annoyance of Tritt when -- almost as though the thought of Tritt had brought it about -- she sensed Tritt. The sensation was so strong that she knew only one confused moment of thinking that somehow she was picking up his feelings far away in the home cavern. No -- he was here, down here in the Hard Caverns with her. But what could he be doing here? Was he pursuing her? Was he going to quarrel with her here? Was he foolishly going to appeal to the Hard Ones? Dua did not think she could endure that. And then the feeling of cold horror left her and was replaced by astonishment. Tritt was not thinking of her at all. He had to be unaware of her presence. All she could sense about him was an overwhelming feeling of some sort of determination, mixed with fear and apprehension at something he would do. Dua might have penetrated farther and found out something, at least, about why he was here -- but nothing was further from her thoughts. Since Tritt did not know she was in the vicinity she wanted to make sure of only one thing -- that he continued not to know. She did, then almost in pure reflex, something that a moment before she would not have dreamed of doing under any circumstances. Perhaps it was (she later thought) because of her idle reminiscences of that little-girl talk with Doral or because of her memories of her own experiments with rockrubbing. (There was a complicated adult word for it but she found that word infinitely more embarrassing than the one all the children had used.) In any case, without quite knowing what she was doing or, for a short while afterward, what she had done, she simply flowed hastily into the nearest wall. Into it! Every bit of her! The horror of what she had done was mitigated by the perfect manner in which it accomplished its purpose. Tritt passed by within touching distance and remained completely unaware that at one point he might have reached out and felt his Mid-ling. By that time Dua had no room to wonder what Tritt might be doing in the Hard Caverns if he had not come in pursuit of her. She forgot Tritt completely. IF What filled her instead was pure astonishment at her position. Even in childhood she had never melted completely into rock or met anyone who admitted doing so (though there were invariably tales of someone else who had). Certainly no adult Emotional ever had or could have acted as Dua had. She was unusually rarefied even For an Emotional (Odeen was fond of telling her that) and her avoidance of food accentuated this (as Tritt often said). What she had just done indicated the extent of her rarefaction more than any amount of Right-ling scolding could have managed and for a moment she was ashamed and sorry for Tritt. xV deeper shame. What if she were caught? What if a Hard One passed and lingered? She could not possibly bring herself to emerge if anyone were watching -- but how long could she stay in the rock? She sensed the Hard Ones and realized they were far away. She paused, strove to calm herself. The rock, permeating and surrounding her, lent a grayness to her perceptions but did not dim them. Indeed, she sensed more sharply. She could still feel Tritt's steady motion downward as keenly as though he were by her side and she was aware of the Hard Ones, though they were in a cavern complex far away. She saw the Hard Ones, every single one of them, each in his place, and caught their vibratory speech to the fullest detail. She even absorbed bits of what they were saying. She was sensing as never before. So, though she could now leave the rock, secure in the knowledge she was both alone and unobserved, she did not -- partly out of amazement, partly because of the curious exultation she felt at a new understanding. She desired to experience it further.  Her sensitivity was such that she even knew why she was sensitive. Odeen had frequently remarked how well he understood something after a period of melting, even though he had not understood it at all before. Something about the melted state increased sensitivity incredibly -- more was absorbed, more used. The reason was the greater atomic density during melting, Odeen had said. Even though Dua was not sure what "greater atomic density" meant, it came with melting and wasn't this present situation rather like melting? Hadn't Dua melted with rock? When the triad melted, all the sensitivity went to Odeen's benefit. The Rational absorbed it, gained understanding and retained that understanding after separation. But now Dua was the only consciousness in the melt, which consisted of herself and the rock. There was "greater atomic density" (surely?) with only herself to benefit. (Was this why rock-rubbing was considered a perversion? Was this why Emotionals were warned off? Or was her experience unique because she was so rarefied? Or because she was a LeftEm?) And then Dua stopped all speculation and simply sensed -- in fascination. She was only mechanically aware of Tritt returning, moving past her, passing in the direction from which he had come. She was only mechanically aware -- scarcely feeling the vaguest surprise -- that Odeen, too, was coming up from the Hard Caverns. She concentrated on the Hard Ones, trying to make the most of her perceptions. It was a long time before she flowed out of the rock. And when that time came she was not concerned overmuch about whether she would be observed. She was confident enough of her sensing ability to know she would not be. She went home deep in thought. #b Tritt waiting for him. Dua still had not come back. Tritt did not seem disturbed at that, though he was upset about something else. His emotions were strong enough for Odeen to sense them clearly, but he let them be without probing. Dua's absence made him restless. He found himself annoyed at Tritt's presence simply because Tritt was not Dua. In this he surprised himself. He could not deny to himself that it was Tritt who, of the two, was the dearer to him. Ideally all members of the triad were one and each member should treat the other two exactly on a par. Just the same, Odeen had never known a triad in which this was so. One of the three was always a bit on the outside and generally knew it, too. It was rarely the Emotional, though. Emotionals supported each other cross-triad to an extent that Rationals and Parentals never did. The Rational had his teacher, the saying went, and the Parental his children -- but the Emotional had all the other Emotionals. Emotionals compared notes and if one claimed neglect or could be made to claim it she was sent back with a thin patter of instructions to stand firm, to demand! And because melting depended so much on the Emotional and her attitude she was usually pampered by both left and right. But Dua was so non-Emotional an Emotional. She did not seem to care that Odeen and Tritt were so close and she had no close friendships among the Emotionals to make her care. Odeen loved having her so interested in hi work, loved having her so concerned and so amazingly ready of comprehension -- but that was an intellectual love. The deeper feeling went to steady, stupid Tritt who knew his place so well and who could offer so little other than exactly what counted -- the security of assured routine. But now Odeen felt petulant. He asked, "Have you heard from Dua, Tritt?" Tritt did not answer directly. He said, "I am busy. I will see you later. I have been doing things." "Where are the children? Have you been gone, too? There is a ,# IF definite been-gone feel to you." A note of annoyance made itself plain in Tritt's voice. "The children are well trained. They know enough to place themselves in community care. Really, Odeen, they are not babies." But he did not deny the "been-gone" aura that he faintly exuded. "I'm sorry. I'm just anxious to see Dua." "You should feel so more often," Tritt said. "You always tell me to leave her alone. You look for her." And he went on into the deeper recesses of the home cavern. Odeen looked after his Rightling with some surprise. On almost any other occasion he would have followed in an attempt to probe the unusual uneasiness that was making itself quite evident through the ingrained stolidity of a Parental. What had Tritt done? But Odeen was waiting for Dua and growing more anxious by the moment. He let Tritt go. Anxiety keened Odeen's sensitivity. Rationals knew a perverse pride in their relative poverty of perception. Such perception was not a thing of the mind -- it was most characteristic of Emotionals. Odeen was a Rational of Rationals, proud of reasoning rather than feeling, yet now he flung out the imperfect net of his emotional perception as far as he could and wished, for just a moment, that he were an Emotional and could send it out farther and better. Yet it eventually served his purpose. He could detect Dua's approach finally at an unusual distance -- for him -- and hastened out to meet her. And because he made her out at such a distance, Jie was more aware of her rarefaction than he ordinarily was. She was a delicate mist, no more. Tritt was right, Odeen thought with sudden, sharp concern. Dua must be made to eat and to melt. Her interest in life must be increased. cessity of this that when she flung herself flowingly toward him and virtually engulfed him -- in utter disregard of the fact that they were not itf private and might be observed -- and said, "Odeen, I must know -- I must know so much -- " he accepted it as the completion of his own thought and did not even consider it strange. Carefully he slipped away, trying to adopt a more seemly union without making it seem he was repulsing her. "Come," he said. "I've been waiting for you. Tell me what you want to krfow. I will explain all I can." They were moving quickly homeward now, with Odeen adapting himself eagerly to the characteristic waver of the Emotional flow. Dua said, "Tell me about the other-Universe. Why is it different? How is it different? Tell me all about it." t It did not occur to Dua that she was asking too much. It did occur to Odeen. She felt to him rich with an astonishing quantity of knowledge and he was on the point of asking, How do you come to know enough about the otherUniverse to be so curious about it? He repressed the question. Dua was coming from the direction of the Hard Caverns. Perhaps Losten had been talking to her, suspecting that despite everything Odeen would be tQO proud of his status to help his Mid-ling. Not so, thought Odeen gravely. And he would not ask. He would simply explain. Tritt bustled about them when they returned home. "If you two are going to talk go into Dua's chamber. I will be busy out here. I must see to it that the children are cleaned and exercised. No time for melting now. No melting. Neither Odeen nor Dua had any thought of disobeying the command. The Parental's home was his castle. The Rational had his Hard Caverns below and the Emotional her meeting places above. The Parental had only his home. Odeen therefore said, "Yes, Tritt. We'll be out of your way." And Dua extended a briefly loving part of herself and said, "It's good to see you, Right-dear." (Odeen wondered if her gesture were relief over the fact that there was no pressure to melt. Tritt did tend to overdo that a bit -- even more than Parentals generally.) In her chamber Dua stared at her private feeding place. Ordinarily she ignored it. It had been Odeen's idea. He knew that such things did exist and, as he explained to Tritt, if Dua did not like to swarm with the other Emotionals it was perfectly possible to lead Solar energy down into the cavern so that Dua might feed there. Tritt had been horrified. It wasn't done. The others would laugh. The triad would be disgraced. Why didn't Dua behave as she should? "Yes, Tritt," Odeen had said, "but she doesn't behave as she should, so why not accommodate her? Is it so terrible? She will eat privately, gain substance, make us happier, become happier herself and maybe learn to swarm in the end." Tritt allowed it and even Dua allowed it -- after some argument -- but insisted that it be a simple design. So the arrangement consisted of the two rods that served as electrodes powered by Solar energy, with room for Dua in between. Bare essentials. Dua rarely used the accommodation, but this time she stared at it and said, "Tritt has decorated it. Unless you did, Odeen." "I? Of course not." A pattern of colored clay designs was at the base of each electrode. "I suppose it's his way of saying he wishes I would use it," Dua said, "and I am hungry. Besides, if I'm eating, Tritt wouldn't dream of interrupting us, would he?" "No," said Odeen, gravely. "Tritt would stop the world if he thought its motion might disturb you while you were eating." Dua said, "Well -- I am hungry." Odeen caught a trace of guilt in her. Guilt over Tritt? Over being hungry? Why should Dua feel IF guilty about being hungry? Or had she done something that had consumed energy? He wrenched his mind away from that course impatiently. There were times when a Rational could be too Rational and chase down the track of every stray thought to the detriment of what was important. Right now it was important for him to talk to Dua. S HE seated herself between electrodes and when she compressed herself to do so, her small size became only too painfully evident. Odeen was hungry himself -- he could tell because the electrodes seemed brighter than they ordinarily did and he could taste the food even at the distance and the savor was delicious. But he would eat later. Dua said, "Don't just sit silent, Left-dear. Tell me. I want to know." She had adopted (unconsciously?) the ovoid character of a Rational, as though to make it clearer that she wanted to be accepted as one. Odeen said, "I can't explain it all -- all the science, I mean -- because you haven't had the background. I will try to make it simple and you just listen. You tell me later what you don't  understand and I'll try to explain further. You do know by now that everything is made up of tiny particles called atoms and that these are made up of still tinier subatomic particles." "Yes, yes," said Dua. "That's why we can melt." "Exactly. Because actually we are mostly empty space. All the particles are far apart and your i particles and mine and Tritt's can all melt together because each set fits into the empty spaces around the other set. The reason matter doesn't fly apart altogether is that the tiny particles do manage to cling together across the space that separates them. There are attractive forces holding them to- gether, the strongest being one we call the nuclear force. It holds the chief subatomic particles tightly together in bunches that are spread widely apart and that are held together by weaker forces. Do you understand that?" "Only a little bit," said Dua. "Well, never mind -- we caa go back later. Matter can exist in different states. It can be especially spread out, as in Emotionals -- as in you, Dua. It can be a little less spread out, as in Rationals and in Parentals. Or still less so, as in rock. It can be very compressed or thick, as in the Hard Ones. That's why they're hard. They are filled with particles." "You mean there's no empty space in them?" "No, that's not quite what I mean," said Odeen, puzzled as to how to make matter clearer. "They still have a great deal of empty space, but not as much as we do. Particles need a certain amount of empty space and if all they have is that much -- just as much as they must have -- then other particles can't squeeze in. If particles are forced in pain occurs. That's why the Hard Ones don't like to be touched by us. We Soft Ones have more space between the particles than is actually needed, so other particles can fit in without hurting." Dua did not look at all convinced. Odeen hastened on. "In the otherUniverse the rules are different. The nuclear force isn't as strong as in ours. That means the particles need more room." "Why?" Odeen shook his head. "Because -- because -- the particles spread out their wave forms more. I can't explain better than that. With a weaker nuclear force, the particles need more room and two pieces of matter can't melt together as easily as they can in our Universe." "Can we see the other-Universe?" "Oh, no. That isn't possible. We can deduce its nature from its basic laws. The Hard Ones can do a great many things, though. We can send material across and get material from the other-Universe creatures. We can study their material, you see. And we can set up the Positron Pump. You know about that, don't you?" "Well, you've told me we get energy out of it. I didn't know there was a different Universe involved. What is the other-Universe like? Does it have stars and worlds?" "That's an excellent question, Dua." Odeen was enjoying his role as teacher much more intensely than usual now that he had official encouragement to speak. (Earlier he had always felt a kind of sneaking perversion in trying to explain things to an Emotional.) other-Universe, but we can calculate what it must be like from its laws. You see, what makes the stars shine is the gradual combination of simple particle combinations into more complicated ones. We call it nuclear fusion." "Do they have that in the otherUniverse?" "Yes, but because the nuclear force is weaker, fusion is much slower. This means that the stars must be much, much bigger in the other-Universe -- or not enough fusion would take place to make them shine. Stars of the otherUniverse that were no bigger than our Sun would be cold and dead. On the other hand, if stars in our Universe were bigger than they are the amount of fusion would be so great it would blow them tip. That means that in our Universe there must be thousands of times as many small stars as there are large stars in theirs -- " "We only have seven -- " began Dua. Then she added, "Oh, I forgot something -- " Odeen smiled indulgently. It was so easy to forget the uncounted stars that could not be seen except by special instruments. "That's all right. You don't mind my boring you with all this?" "You're not boring me," said Dua. "I love it. It even makes food taste good." And she wavered between the electrodes with a kind of luxurious tremor. Odeen, who had never before heard Dua say anything complimentary about food, was greatly heartened. He said, "Of course, our Universe doesn't last as long as theirs. Fusion goes so fast that all IF the particles are combined after a "But there.are many other stars." "Ah, but you see, they're all going at once. The whole Universe is dying. In the other-Universe, with so many fewer and larger stars, the fusion goes so slowly that the stars last thousands and millions of times as long as ours. It's hard to compare because it may be that time moves at different rates in the two Universes." He added with some reluctance. "I don't understand that part myself. That's part of the Estwald Theory and I haven't got to that very much so far." "Did Estwald work out all of this?" "A great deal of it." Dua said, "It's wonderful that we're getting the food from the other-Universe. I mean, it doesn't matter if our Sun dies out, then. We can get all the food we want from there." "That's right." "But does nothing bad happen? I have the -- the feeling that something bad happens." "Well," said Odeen. "We transfer matter back and forth to work the Positron Pump and that means the two Universes mix together a little. Our nuclear force gets a tiny bit weaker, so fusion in our Sun slows up a little and. the Sun cools down a little faster. But just a little, and we don't need it any more anyway." "That's not the something-bad feeling I have. If the nuclear force gets a tiny bit weaker the atoms take up more room -- is that right? Then what happens to melting?" "That gets more difficult but times before it would get difficult enough to notice. Even if some day melting became impossible and Soft Ones died oixt -- that would happen long, long after we would all have died for lack of food if we weren't using the other-Universe." "That's still not the somethingbad -- feeling -- " Dua's words were beginning to slur. She wriggled between her electrodes and to Odeen's gratified eyes she seemed noticeably larger and compacted It was as though his words as well as the food were nourishing her. Losten was right. Education made her more nearly satisfied with life. Odeen could sense a kind of sensual joy in Dua that he had scarcely ever felt before. She said, "It is so kind of you to explain, Odeen. You are a good Left-ling." "Do you want me to go on?" asked Odeen, flattered and more pleased than he could easily say. "Is there anything else you want to ask?" "A great deal, Odeen, but -- but not now. Not now, Odeen. Oh, Odeen, do you know what I want to do?" Odeen guessed at once, but was too cautious to say it openly. Dua's moments of erotic advance were too few to treat with anything but care. He hoped desperately that Tritt had not involved himself with the children to the point where they could not take advantage of this. But Tritt was already in the chamber. Had he been outside the door, waiting? Odeen did not care. There was no time to think. Dua had flowed out from between the electrodes and Odeen' s senses were filled with her beauty. She was between them now and through her Tritt shimmered, his outlines flaming in incredible color. It had never been like this. Never. Odeen held himself back desperately, letting his own substance flow through Dua and into Tritt an atom at a time, holding away from the overpowering penetrance of Dua with evry bit of strength, not giving himself up to the ecstasy, but letting it be wrenched from him -- hanging on to his consciousness to the last possible moment and then blanking out in one final transport so intense it felt like an explosion echoing and reverberating endlessly within him. Never in the lifetime of the triad had the period of melting unconsciousness lasted so long. #c ing had been satisfactory. All previous occasions seemed skimpy and hollow in comparison. He was utterly delighted with what had happened. Yet he kept quiet. He felt it better not to speak. Odeen and Dua were happy, too. Tritt could tell. Even the children seemed to be glowing. But Tritt was happiest of all -- naturally. He listened to Odeen and Dua talk. That he understood none of it did not matter. He didn't mind that they seemed so pleased with each other. He had his own pleasure and was content to listen. Dua said on one occasion. "And do they really try to communicate with us?" (Tritt never got it quite clear who "they" might be. He gathered that "communicate" was a fancy word for "talk." So why didn't they say "talk?" Sometimes he wondered if he should interrupt. But if he asked questions Odeen would only say, "Now, Tritt -- " and Dua would swirl impatiently.) "Oh, yes," said Odeen. "The Hard Ones are quite sure of that. The other-beings have put markings on the material that is sent us sometimes and the Hard Ones say that it is perfectly possible to communicate by such markings. Long ago, in fact, they used markings, in reverse, when it was necessary to explain to the other-beings how to set up their part of the Positron Pump -- in their Universe it is an Electron Pump." "I wonder what the other-beings look like. What do you suppose?" "From the laws we can work out the nature of the stars because that is simple. But how can we work out the nature of the beings? We can never know." "Couldn't they communicate what they look like?" "If we understood what they communicated, perhaps we could make out something. But we don't understand." Dua seemed aggrieved. "Don't the Hard Ones understand?" v "I don't know. If they do they haven't told me. Losten once said it didn't matter what they were like as IF long as the Pump worked and was enlarged." "Maybe he just didn't want you bothering him." Odeen said huffily. "I don't bother him." "Oh, you know what I mean. He just didn't want to get into those details." By that time Tritt could no longer listen. They went on arguing for quite a while over whether the Hard Ones should let Dua look at the markings or not. Dua said that she might sense what they said, perhaps. Her remark made Tritt a little angry. After ail, Dua was only a Soft One and not even a Rational. He began to wonder if Odeen were right to tell her all he did. It gave Dua funny ideas. Dua could see Odeen was angry, too. First he laughed. Then he said that an Emotional could not handle such complicated ideas. Then he refused to talk at all. Dua had to be very pleasant to him till he came around. who was angry -- absolutely furious. The moment began quietly. In fact, it was on one of the times when the two children were with them. Odeen was letting them play with him. He didn't even mind when Little-right Torun pulled at him. In fact, he let himself go in most undignified fashion. He didn't seem to mind that he was all out of shape. It was a sure sign he was pleased. Tritt remained in a corner, resting, he was so satisfied with what was happening. Dua laughed at Odeen's misshapenness. She let her own substance touch Odeen's knobbishness flirtatiously. She knew very well that the leftish surface was sensitive when out of ovoid. Dua said, "I've been thinking, Odeen. If the otherUniverse gets its laws into ours just a bit through the Pump, doesn't our own Universe get its laws into theirs the same little bit?" Odeen howled at Dua's touch and tried to avoid her without upsetting the little ones. He gasped, "I can't answer unless you stop, you Midling wretch." She stopped and he said, "That's a good thought, Dua. You're an amazing creature. It's true, of course. The mixture goes both ways. Tritt, take out the little ones, will you?" But they scurried off by themselves. They were not such little ones. They were quite grown. Annis would soon be starting his education and Torun was already quite Parentally blockish. Tritt stayed and thought Dua looked very beautiful when Odeen talked to her in this way. Dua said, "If the other laws slow down our Suns and cool them down -- don't our laws speed up theirs and heat them up?" "Exactly right, Dua. A Rational couldn't do better." "How hot do their Suns get?" "Just slightly hotter, very slightly." Dua said, "But that's where I keep getting the something-bad feeling." "Oh, well, the trouble is that their Suns are so huge. If our little Suns get a littler cooler it doesn't matter. Even if they turned off altogether it wouldn ? t matter as long as we have the Positron Pump. With great, huge stars, though -- getting them even a little hotter is troublesome. There so much material in one of those stars that turning up the nuclear fusion even a little way will make it explode." "Explode? But then what happens to the beings?" "What beings?" "The beings in the otherUniverse." For a moment Odeen looked blank. Then he said, "I don't know." "Well, what would happen if our own Sun exploded?" "It couldn't explode." (Tritt wondered what all the excitement was about. How could a Sun explode? Dua seemed angrier and Odeen looked confused.) Dua said, "But if it did? Would it get very hot?" "I suppose so." "Wouldn't it kill us all?" Odeen hesitated and then said in clear annoyance. "What difference does it make, Dua? Our Sun isn't exploding. Don't ask silly questions." "You told me to ask questions, Odeen, and it does make a difference, because the Pump works both ways. We need their end as much as they need ours." Odeen stared at her. "I never told you that." "I feel it." Odeen said, "You feel a great many things. Dua -- " But Dua was shouting now. She was quite beside herself. Tritt had never seen her like that. She Said, "Don't change the subject, Odeen. And don't withdraw and try to make me put a complete fool -- just another Emotional. You said I wasalmost like a Rational and I'm enough like one to see that our Positron Pump won't work without the other-beings. If the beings in the Other-Universe are destroyed, their end of the Pump will stop and our Sun will be colder than ever and we'll all starve. Don't you think that's important?" Odeen, too, was shouting now. "That shows what you know. We need their help because the energy supply is in low concentration and we have to switch matter. If the Sun in the other-Universe explodes there'll be an enormous flood of energy -- a huge flood that will last so much energy, we could tap it directly without any matter-shift either way -- so we don't need them. And it doesn't matter what happens -- " They were almost touching now. Tritt was horrified. He had better say something, make them get apart, talk to them. He couldn't think of anything to say. Then it turned out he didn't have to. ' There was a Hard One just outside the cavern. No, three of them. They had been trying to talk and hadn't made themselves heard. Tritt shrieked, "Odeen! Dua!" Then he remained quiet, trembling. He had a frightened notion of what the Hard Ones had come to talk about. He decided to leave. But a Hard One put out one of IF his permanent, opaque appendages and said, "Don't go." The words sounded harsh, unfriendly. Tritt was more frightened than ever. #a D U A was filled with anger, so filled she could scarcely sense the Hard Ones. She seemed stifled under the components of the anger, separately. She knew a sense of wrongness that Odeen should try to lie to her. Anothpr sense of wrongness that a whole world of beings should die. A third sense of wrongness that it was so easy for her to learn and that she had never been allowed to.  Since that time in the rock she had gone twice more to the Hard Caverns. Twice more, unnoticed, she had buried herself in rock, and each time she sensed and knew -- so that when Odeen would explain matters to her she knew in advance what he would explain. Why couldn't they teach her, then, as they had taught Odeen? Why only the Rationals? Did she possess the capacity to learn only because she was a LeftEm, a perverted Mid-ling? Then let them teach her, perversion and all. It was wrong to leave her ignorant. Finally the words of the Hard One were breaking through to her. Losten was there, but he was not speaking. A strange Hard One spoke. She did not know him. The Hard One asked, "Which of you has been in the lower caverns recently -- the Hard Caverns?" Dua was defiant. They had found her rock-rubbing and she didn't care. Let them tell everybody. She would do so herself. She said, "I have. Many times." "Alone?" asked the Hard One calmly. "Alone. Many times," snapped Dua.; Odeen muttered, "I have, of course, been to the lower caverns on occasion." The Hard One ignored Odeen. He turned to Tritt instead and asked sharply. "And you, Right?" Tritt quavered, "Yes, Hard-Sir." "Alone?" "Yes, Hard-Sir." "How often?" "Once." Dua was annoyed. Poor Tritt was in such a panic over nothing. She was ready for a confrontation. "Leave him alone," she said. "I'm the one you want." The Hard One turned slowly toward her. "For what?" he asked. "For -- whatever it is." And faced with the prospect directly, she could not bring herself to describe what she had done after all. Not in front of Odeen. "Well, we'll get to you. First, the Right. Your name is Tritt, isn't it? Why did you go to the lower caverns alone?" "To speak to Hard One Estwald, Hard-sir." Dua interrupted eagerly: "Are you Estwald?" The Hard One said briefly, "No." Odeen looked annoyed, as though it embarrassed him that Dua did not recognize the Hard One. The  Hard One asked Tritt, "What did you take from the lower caverns?" Tritt was. silent. The Hard One said without emotion. "We know you took something. We want to know if you know what it was. It could be very dangerous." Tritt was still silent and Losten interposed, saying more kindly, "Please tell us, Tritt. We know now it was you and we don't want to have to be harsh." Tritt mumbled. "I took a food-ball." "Ah." It was the first Hard One speaking. "What did you do with it?" And Tritt burst out. "It was for Dua. She wouldn't eat. It was for Dua." Dua jumped and coalesced in astonishment. The Hard One turned on her at once. "You did not know about ii?" "No." "Nor you?" To Odeen. Odeen, so motionless as to seem frozen, said, "No, Hard-Sir." For a moment the air was full of unpleasant vibration as the Hard Ones spoke to each other, ignoring the triad. Whether her sessions at rockrubbing had made her more sensitive or whether her recent storm of emotions had increased her awareness Dua could not tell, but she was catching hints -- not of words -- but of meanings. The Hard Ones had detected the loss some time ago. They had been searching quietly. They had turned to the Soft Ones as possible culprits with reluctance. They had investigated and finally focused on Odeen's triad with even greater reluctance. (Why? Dua missed that.) They had not seen how Odeen could have had the foolishness to take the thing -- or Dua the inclination. They had not thought of Tritt at all. Then the Hard One who had so far not said a word to the Soft Ones had recalled seeing Tritt in the Hard Caverns. (Of course, thought Dua -- Tritt had been there on the day she had first entered the rock. She had sensed him then. She had forgotten.) All this Dua sensed and now she turned toward Tritt, feeling mingled wonder and outrage. Losten was anxiously vibrating that no harm had been done, that Dua looked well, that what had happened was actually a useful experiment. The Hard One to whom Tritt had spoken was agreeing -- the other still exuded concern. Dua was looking at Tritt. The first Hard One said, "Where is the food-ball now, Tritt?" Tritt showed them. It was hidden effectively and the connections were clumsy but serviceable. The Hard One said, "Did you do this yourself, Tritt?" "Yes, Hard-Sir." "How did you know the method?" "I looked at how it was done in the Hard Caverns. I did it exactly the way I saw it done there." "Didn't you know you might have harmed your Mid-ling?" "I didn't -- I wouldn't -- I -- " IF Tritt seemed unable to say more for a moment. Then he managed: "It was not to hurt her. It was to feed her. I let it pour into her feeder and I decorated her feeder. I wanted her to try it and she did. She ate! For the first time in a long while she ate well. We melted." He paused, then said in a huge, tumultuous cry, "She had enough energy at last to initiate a baby-Emotional. She took Odeen's seed and passed it to me. I have it growing inside me." Dua could not speak. She withdrew and then rushed for the exit in so pell-mell a fashion that the Hard Ones could not get out of the way in time. She struck the appendage of the one in front, passing deep into it, then pulled free with a harsh sound. The Hard One's appendage fell limp and he seemed contorted with pain. Odeen tried to dodge around him to follow Dua,but the Hard One said with apparent difficulty, "Let her go for now. There is enough harm done. We will take care." #b through a nightmare. Dua was gone. The Hard Ones were gone. Only Tritt was still here -- silent. How could it have happened? How could Tritt have found his way alone to the Hard Caverns? How could he have taken a storage cell charged at the Pump and designed to yield radiation in much more concentrated form than Sunlight and dared -- Odeen would not have had the courage to chance it. How could Tritt, stumbling, ignorant Tritt have found it? Was he unusual, too? Odeen, the clever Rational -- Dua, the curious Emotional -- and Tritt, the daring Parental? He said, "How could you do it, Tritt?" Tritt retorted hotly, "What did I do? I fed her. I fed her better than she hadever been fed before. Now we have a baby-Emotional initiated at last. Haven't we waited long enough? We would have waited forever if we had waited for Dua." "But don't you understand, Tritt? You might have hurt her. It wasn't ordinary Sunlight. It was an experimental radiation formula that could have been too concentrated to be safe." "I don't understand what you're saying, Odeen. How could it do harm? I tasted the kind of food the Hard Ones made before. It tasted bad. You've tasted it, too. It tasted just awful and it never hurt us. It tasted so bad, Dua wouldn't touch it. Then I came on the food-ball. It tasted good. I ate some and it was delicious. How can anything delicious hurt? Dua ate it. She liked it. And it started the baby-Emotional. How can I have done wrong?" Odeen despaired of explaining. He said, "Dua is going to be very angry." "She'll get over it." "I wonder. Tritt, she's not like ordinary Emotionals. That's what makes her so hard to live with, but so wonderful when we can live with her. She may never want to melt with us again. And then what?" Tritt's outline was sturdily planesurfaced. He asked, "Well, what of it?" "What of it? Do you want to give up melting?" "No, but if she won't she won't. I have my third baby and I don't care any more. I know all about the Soft Ones in the old days. They used to have two triad-births sometimes. But I don't care. One is plenty." "But, Tritt, babies aren't all there is to melting." "What else? I heard you say once you learned faster after you melted. Then learn slower. I don't care. I have my third baby." Odeen turned away trembling and flowed jerkily out of the chamber. What was the use of scolding Tritt? Tritt wouldn't understand. He wasn't sure he himself understood. Once the third baby was born and grown a little, the time would come to pass on. He, Odeen, would have to give the signal, would have to say when -- and it would have to be done without fear. Anything else would be a disgrace -- or worse -- yet he would not be able to face the event without melting even when all three children had been formed. Melting would eliminate the fear -- maybe because melting was like passing on. There was a period of time when you were not conscious, yet it did not hurt. It was like not existing and yet it was desirable. With, enough melting he could gain the courage to pass on without fear and without... Oh, Sun and all the stars, it wasn't "passing on." Why use that phrase so solemnly? He knew the other word that was never used except by children who wanted to shock their elders. The word wa dying. He had to get ready to die without fear and to have Dua and Tritt die with him. And he did not know how. Not without melting. #c room, frightened, but sturdily resolved to remain unmoved. He had his third baby. He could feel it within him. That was what counted. That was all that counted. Why, then, deep inside, did he have a stubborn, faint feeling that it was not all that counted? #a  D UA was ashamed almost beyond endurance. It took a long time for her to battle down that shame -- battle it down enough to give herself room to think. She had hastened -- moving blindly -- away from the horror of the home cavern, scarcely caring that she did not know where she was going or even where she was. It was night, a time when no decent Soft One would be on the surface, not even the most frivolous Emotional. It would be quite a while before the Sun rose. Dua was glad. The Sun was food and at the moment she hated food and what had been done to her. IF It was cold, too, but Dua was only distantly aware of it. Why should she care about cold, she wondered, when she had been fattened in order that she might do her duty -- fattened, mind and body? After that, cold and starvation had become her friends. She saw through Tritt. Poor thing -- his actions were motivated by pure instinct and he was to be praised that he had followed through so bravely. He had come back so daringly from the Hard Caverns with the food-ball (and she had sensed him and would have known what was happening if Tritt had not been so paralyzed at what he was doing that he had not dared to think of it -- and if she had nQt been so paralyzed at what she was doing that she had been unable to sense what she most needed to know.) Tritt had brought the food-ball back undetected and had arranged the pitiful booby-trap, decorating her feeder to entice her. And she had come back, flushed with awareness of her rock-probing thinness, filled with the shame of it and with pity for Tritt. With all that shame and pity she had eaten and had helped to intiate conception. Clever Odeen, she thought, must have seen through Tritt's plan, must have spied the new connections to the electrodes, must have understood Tritt's purpose. Probably he had said nothing to Tritt. To do so would have embarrassed and frightened the poor Right-ling and Odeen always watched over Tritt with loving care. Odeen had needed to say nothing. He needed only to fill in the gaps in Tritt's clumsy plan to make it work. Dua was under no illusions now. She would have detected the taste of the food-ball, noticed its extraordinary tang, caught the rapidity with which it had begun to satisfy her while giving her no sensations of fullness -- had it not been for Odeen's occupying her with talk. It had been a conspiracy between the two of them, whether Tritt had been consciously part of it or not. How could she have believed that Odeen was suddenly a careful, painstaking teacher? How could she have failed to see the ulterior motive? Their concern for her was their concern for the completion of the new triad -- and that in itself was an indication of how little they thought of her. S HE paused long enough to feel her own weariness and worked herself into a crevice in the rock that would shield her from the thin, cold wind. Two of the seven stars were in her field of vision and she watched them absently, occupying her outer senses with trivia so that she might concentrate the more in internal thought. "Betrayed," she whispered to herself. "Betrayed!" Could Odeen and Tritt not see beyond themselves? see all destroyed if he were but secure in his babies was comprehensible. He was a creature of instinct. But what of Odeen? Odeen reasoned. Did his talent mean that for the purpose of exercising his reason he would sacrifice all else? Was its own excuse for being -- at any cost -- the sole product of reason? Because Estwald had devised that so-called Positron Pump, did it have to be used in order that the beings of a whole world, Hard and Soft alike, be placed at its mercy -- and at that of the beings of the other-Universe? What if the other-beings stopped and the world was left without the Pump and with a dangerously cooled Sun? No, they wouldn't stop, those other-beings. They had been persuaded to start and they would be persuaded to keep going until they were destroyed -- and then they would be needed no longer by the Rationals, Hard or Soft -- just as she, Dua, would have to pass on (be destroyed) now that she was needed no longer. She and the other-beings were both being betrayed. Almost without being aware of doing so, she was cushioning deeper and deeper into the rock. She buried herself out of sight of the stars, out of touch with the wind, unaware of the world. She was pure thought. Estwald was the one she hated. He was the personification of all that was selfish and hard. He had devised the Pump and would destroy a whole world of perhaps tens of thousands without conscience. He was so withdrawn that he never made his appearance and so powerful that even the other Hard Ones seemed afraid of him. Well, then, she would fight him. She would stop him. The beings of the other-Universe had assisted in setting up the Positron Pump through communications of some sort. Odeen had mentioned those. Where would such communications be kept? What would they be like? How could they be used for further communication? It was remarkable how clearly she could think. Remarkable. There was fierce enjoyment in this, that she would use reason to overcome the cruel reasoners. They would not be able to stop her for she could go where no Hard One could go, where no Rational or Parental could -- and where no other Emotional would. She might be caught eventually, but at the moment she didn't care. She was going to fight to have her way -- at any price -- though to do so meant she would have to go through rock, live in rock, skirt the Hard Caverns, steal food from their stored energy cells when she had to, flock with the other Emotionals and feed on Sunlight when she could. But in the end she would teach them all a lesson and after that they could do as they wished. She would even be ready to pass on then -- but only then. #b new baby-Emotional was born, perfect in every way, but he had not been able to feel enthusiasm over it. Even Tritt, who cared for it perfectly, as a Parental must, seemed subdued in his ecstasies. IF A long time had passed and it was as though Dua had vanished. She had not passed on... A Soft One could not pass on except when the whole triad did -- but she was not with the triad either. It was as though she had passed on without passing on. Odeen had seen her once, only once, not very long after her wild flight on the news that she had initiated the new baby. He had passed a cluster of Emotionals Sunning themselves when he had been moving over the surface with some foolish notion that he might find her. They had tittered at the rare sight of a Rational moving in the vicinity of an Emotional cluster and had thinned in mass provocation, with no thought among the foolish lot of them but to advertise the fact that they were Emotionals. Odeen felt only contempt for them and there was no answering stir along his own smooth curves at all. He thought of Dua instead and of how different she was from all of them. Dua never thinned for any reason other than her own inner needs. She had never tried to attract anyone and was the more attractive for that. If she could have brought herself to join the flock of empty-heads she would be easily recognized (he felt sure) by the fact that she alone would not thin -- but would probably thicken precisely because the others thinned. As the thought struck him Odeen scanned the Sunning Emotionals and noted that one indeed had not thinned. He stopped, then hastened toward her, oblivious to the Emotionals in his way, disregarding their wild screeching as they flicked smokily out of his path and chattered desperately in their attempts to avoid coalescing one with the other right out in the open and with a Rational watching. It was Dua. She did not try to leave. She kept her ground and said nothing. "Dua," he said humbly, "aren't you coming home?" "I have no home, Odeen," she said. Not angrily, not in hate -- and all the more dreadfully for that reason. "How can you blame Tritt for what he did, Dua? You know the poor fellow can't reason." "But you can, Odeen, And you occupied my mind while he arranged to feed my body, didn't you? Your reason told you that I was much more likely to be trapped by you, than by him." "Dua, no!" "No, what? Didn't you make a big show of teaching me, of educating me?" "I did, but it wasn't a show -- it was real. And it was not because of what Tritt had done. I didn't know what Tritt had done." "I can't believe that." She flowed away without haste. He followed her. They were alone now, the Sun shining redly down upon them. She turned to him. "Let me ask you one question, Odeen? Why did you want to teach me?" Odeen said, "Because I wanted to. Because I enjoy teaching and because I would rather teach than do anything else -- but learn." "And melt, of course. Never mind," she added to ward him off. "Don't explain that you are talking of reason and not of instinct. If you really mean what you say about enjoying teaching -- if I can really believe what you say -- then perhaps you can understand something I'm going to tell you. I've been learning a great deal since I left you, Odeen. Never mind how. I have. There's no Emotional left in me at all, except physiologically. Inside, where it counts, I'm all Rational, except that I hope I have more feeling for others than Rational have. And one thing I've learned is what ' we really are, Odeen -- you and I and Tritt and all the other triads on this planet -- what we really are and always "What is that?" asked Odeen. as long as might be necessary -- and as quietly -- if only she would come back with him when she had said her say. He would perform any penance, do anything that might be required. Only she must come back -- and something dim and dark inside him knew that she had to come back voluntarily. "What we are? Why, nothing, really, Odeen," she said lightly, almost laughing. "Isn't that strange? The Hard Ones are the only living species on the face of the world. Haven't they taught you that? There is only one species because you and I, the Soft Ones, are not really alive. We're machines, Odeen. We must be because only the Hard Ones are alive. Haven't they taught you that, Odeen?" "But, Dua, that's nonsense," said Odeen, nonplused. Dua's voice grew harsher. "Machines, Odeen! Made by the Hard Ones! Destroyed by the Hard Ones! They are alive, the Hard Ones. Only they. They don't talk about it much. They don't have to. They all know it. But I've learned to think, Odeen, and I've worked it out from the small clues I've found. They live tremendously long lives, but die eventually. They no longer give birth -- the Sun yields too little energy for that. And since they die very infrequently, but don't give birth at all, their numbers are very slowly declining. And there are no young ones to provide new blood and new thoughts so the old, longlived Hard Ones get terribly bored. So what do you suppose they do, Odeen?" "What?" There, was a kind of fascination about this. A repulsive fascination. "They manufacture mechanical children whom they can teach. You said it yourself, Odeen. You would rather teach than do anything else but learn. And melt, of course. The Rationals are made in the mental image of the Hard Ones. The Hard Ones don't melt and learning is terribly complex for them since they already know so much. What is left for them but the fun of teaching? Rationals were created for no purpose but to be taught. Emotionals and Parentals were created because they were necessary for the self-perpetuating machinery that made new Rationals. And new Rationals were needed IF constantly because the old ones were used up, were taught all they could be taught. And when old Rationals had absorbed what they could they were destroyed and were taught, in advance, to call the destruction process "passing on" to spare their feelings. And of course, Emotronals and Parentals passed on with them. As long as they had helped form a new triad there was no further use for them." "But that's all wrong, Dua," Odeen managed to say. He had no arguments to pose against her nightmare scheme, but he knew with a certainty past argument that she was wrong. (Or did a little pang of doubt deep inside him suggest that the certainty might have been implanted in him to begin with? No, surely no -- for then, would not Dua be implanted with a certainty, too, that this was wrong? Or was she an imperfect Emotional without the proper implantations and without -- Oh, what was he thinking? He was as crazy as she.) Dua said, "You look upset, Odeen. Are you sure I'm all wrong? Of course, now the Hard Ones have the Pump and all the energy they need. Soon they will be giving birth again. Maybe they are doing so already. And they won't need any Soft-One machines at all and we will all be destroyed -- I beg pardon, we will all pass on." "No, Dua," said Odeen strenuously as much to himself as to her. "I don't know how you got those notions, but the Hard Ones aren't like that. We are not destroyed." "Don't lie to yourself, Odeen. They are like that. They are prepared to destroy a whole world of other-beings for their benefit, a whole Universe if they have to. Would they stop at destroying a few Soft Ones for their comfort? But they made one mistake. Somehow the machinery went wrong and a Rational mind got into an Emotional body. I'm a Left-Em, do you know that? They called me that when I was a child and they were right. I can reason like a Rational and I can feel like an Emotional. And I will fight the Hard Ones with that combination." Odeen felt wild. Dua must surely be mad, yet he dared not say so. He had to cajole her somehow and bring her back. He said with sincerity, "Dua, we're not destroyed when we pass on." "No? What does happen then?" "I -- I don't know. I think we enter another world, a better and happier world and become like -- like -- well, much better than we are." Dua laughed. "Where did you hear that? Did the Hard Ones tell you that?" "No, Dua. I'm sure that this must be so out of my own thoughts. I've been thinking a great deal since you left." Dua said, "Then think less and you'll be less foolish. Poor Odeen! Goodbye." She flowed away once more, thinly. There was an air of weariness about her. Odeen called out, "But wait, Dua. Surely you want to see your new baby-mid." She did not answer. He cried out, "When will you come home?" She did not answer. And he followed no more, but looked after her in deepest misery as she dwindled. seen Dua. What was the use? Nor did he see her again. He began haunting the favored Sunning sites of the Emotionals of the region, doing so even though occasional Parentals emerged to watch him in stupid suspicion (Tritt was a mental giant compared to most Parentals). The lack of her hurt more with each passing day. And with each passing day he realized that there was a gathering fright inside himself over her absence. He didn't know why. He came back to the home cavern one day to find Losten waiting for him. Losten was standing, grave and polite, while Tritt was showing him the new baby and striving to keep the handful of mist from touching the Hard One. Losten said, "It is indeed a beauty, Tritt. Derala is its name?" "Derola," Tritt corrected. "I don't know when Odeen will be back. He wanders about a lot." "Here I am, Losten," said Odeen hastily. "Tritt, take the baby away, there's a good fellow." Tritt did so and Losten turned to Odeen with quite obvious relief, saying, "You must be very happy to have completed the triad." Odeen tried to answer with some polite inconsequence, but could maintain only a miserable silence. He had recently been developing a kind of comradeship, a vague sense of equality with the Hard Ones that enabled them to talk together on a leyel. Somehow Dua's madness had spoiled it. Odeen knew she was wrong and yet he approached Losten once more as stiffly as in the long-gone days when he had thought of himself as a creature far inferior to them -- as a machine? Losten asked, "Have you seen Dua?" The question was real, not mere politeness, Odeen could tell. "Only once, H -- " (He almost said "Hard-Sir" as though he were a child again or a Parental). "Only once, Losten. She won't come home." "She must come home," said Losten softly." "I don't know how to arrange that." Losten regarded him somberly. "Do you know what she is doing?" Odeen did not dare to look at the Hard One. Had Losten discovered Dua's wild theories? What would be done about that? He made a negative sign without speaking. Losten said, "She is a most unusual Emotional, Odeen. We have spoken of that." "Yes." Odeen sighed. "As unusual as you are in your way and Tritt in his. I doubt that any other Parental in the world would have had either the courage or the initiative to steal an energy storage cell or the perverse ingenuity to put it to use as he did. The three of you make up the most unique triad of which we have any record." "Thank you." IF "But there are uncomfortable aspects to the triad, too, things we didn't count on. We wanted you to teach her by way of cajoling her into performing her function in the triad. We did not count on Tritt's quixotic action at just that moment. Nor, to tell you the truth, did we count on her wild reaction to the fact that the world in the other-Universe must be destroyed." "I ought to have been careful how I answered her questions," said Odeen miserably. "Caution would not have helped. She was finding out for herself. We didn't count on that either. Odeen, I am sorry, but I must tell you this -- Dua has become a deadly danger. She is trying to stop the Positron Pump." "But how can she? She can't reach it -- and even if she could she lacks the knowledge to do, anything about it." "Oh, but she can reach it." Losten hesitated, then said, "She remains infused in; the rock of the world where she is safe from us." It took a while for Odeen to grasp the clear meaning of the words. He said, "No grown Emotional would -- Dua would never -- " "She would. She does. Don't waste time arguing the point. She can penetrate anywhere in the caverns. Nothing is hidden from her. She has studied those communications we have received from the other-Universe. There is no other way of explaining what is happening." "Oh, oh, oh." Odeen rocked back and forth, his surface opaque with shame and grief. "Does Estwald know anything of all this?" Losten said, grimly, "Not yet, though he must know some day." "But what will she do with those communications?" "She is ifsing them to work out a method for sending some of her own in the other direction." "But she cannot know how to translate or transmit." "She is learning both. She knows more about those communications than Estwald himself. She is a frightening phenomenon, an Emotional who can reason and who is out of control." Odeen shivered. Out of control? How machinelike a reference? He said, "It can't be that bad." v "It can. She has communicated already and I fear she is advising the other-Universe creatures to stop their half of the Pump. If they do so before their Sun explodes we will be helpless at this end." "But then -- " "She must be stopped, Odeen." "But, how? Are you going to blast -- " His voice failed. Dimly he knew that the Hard One had devices for digging caverns out of the world's rock, devices scarcely used since the world's population had begun declining ages ago. Would they locate Dua in the rock and blast it and her? "No," said Losten forcefully. "We cannot harm Dua." "Estwald might -- " "Estwald cannot harm her either." "Then what's to be done?" "It's you, Odeen. Only you. We're helpless, so we must depend oh you." . #  "On me? But what can I do?" "Think about it," said Losten urgently. "Think about it." "Think about what?" "I can't say more than that," said Losten in apparent agony. "Think! There is so little time." He turned and left, moving rapidly for a Hard One, moving as though he did not trust himself to stay and perhaps say too much. And Odeen could only look after him, dismayed, confused -- lost. #c Tritt to do. Babies required much care, but two you.ng lefts and two young rights together did not make up the sum of a single babymid -- particularly not a mid as perfect as Derola. She had to be exercised and soothed, protected from percolating into whatever she touched, cajoled into condensing and resting. It was a long time before he saw Odeen again and actually he didn't care. Derola took up all his time. But' then he came across Odeen in the corner of his own alcove, iridescent with thought. Tritt remembered suddenly. He asked, "Was Losten angry about Dua?" Odeen came to himself with a start "Losten? Yes, he was angry. Dua is doing great harm." "She should come home,shouldn't she?" Odeen was staring at Tritt. He said, "We're going to have to persuade Dua to come home. We must find her first. You can do it. With a new baby your Parental sensitivity is very high. You can use it to find Dua." "No," said Tritt, shocked. "It's used for Derola. It would be wrong to use it for Dua. Besides, if she wants to stay away so long when a baby-mid is longing for her -- and she once a baby-mid herself -- maybe we might just learn to do without her." "But, Tritt, don't you ever want to melt again?" "Well, the triad is now complete." "That's not all there is to melting." Tritt said, "But, where do we have to go to find her? Little Derola needs me. She's a tiny baby. I don't want to leave her." "The Hard Ones will arrange to have Derola taken care of. You and I will go to the Hard Caverns and find Dua.' Tritt thought about that. He didn't care about Dua. He didn't even care about Odeen, somehow. Only Derola mattered. He said, "Some day when Derola is older. Not till then." "Tritt," Odeen pressed urgently, "we must find Dua. Otherwise -- otherwise the babies will be taken away from us." "By whom?" "By the Hard Ones." Tritt was silent. He could find nothing to say. He had never heard of such a thing. He douid not conceive of such a thing. Odeen said, "Tritt, we must pass on. I know why at last. I've been thinking about it ever since Losten -- but never mind that. Dua and you must pass on, too. Now that I IF know why, you will feel you must and I hope -- I think -- Dua will feel she must, too. And we must pass on soon, for Dua is destroying the world." Tritt was backing away. "Don't look at me like that, Odeen. You're forcing me. You're making me -- " "I'm not forcing you, Tritt," said Odeen sadly. "It's just that I know now and so you must. But we must find Dua." "No, no." Tritt was in agony, trying to resist. There was something terribly new about Odeen and existence was approaching an end inexorably. There would be no Tritt and no baby-mid. Where every other Parental had his babymid for a long time, Tritt would have lost his almost at once. It wasn't fair. Oh, it wasn't fair. Tritt panted. "It's Dua's fault. Let her pass on first." Odeen said, with deadening calm. "There's no other way but for all of us -- " And Tritt knew that was so -- that was so -- that was so -- #a D UA felt thin and cold. Her attempts to rest in the open and absorb Sunlight had ended after Odeen had found her that time. Her feeding at the Hard Ones' energy cells was erratic. She dared not remain too long outside the safety of rock, so she ate quickly and never got enough. She was continuously conscious of hunger. To remain in the rock seemed to tire her. It was as though she were being punished for all that long time when she had haunted tne Sunset and eaten so skimpily. If it were not for the work she was doing she could not have borne the weariness and hunger. Sometimes she hoped that the Hard Ones would destroy her -- but only after she had finished. The Hard Ones were helpless as long as she was in the rock. Sometimes she sensed them in the open outside the rock. They were afraid. Sometimes she thought their fear was for her, but that couldn't be. How could they be afraid for her? Were they afraid that she would pass on out of sheer lack of food, out of sheer exhaustion? It had to be that they were afraid of her -- afraid of a machine that did not work as they had designed it to work, appalled at so great a prodigy, struck helpless with terror of it. She avoided them carefully. She always knew where they were, so they could not catch her or stop her. They could not watch all places always. She thought she couid even blank what little perception they had. She swirled out of the rock and studied the recorded duplicates of the communications they had received from the other-Universe. Jhey did not know what she was after. If they hid them, she would find them in whatever new place. If they destroyed them, it didn't matter. Dua could remember them. She did not understand them at first, but her senses grew steadily sharper -- more and more she seemed to understand without understanding. Without knowing what the symbols meant, they inspired feelings within her. She picked out markings and placed them where they would be sent to the otherUniverse. The markings were F-E-E-R. What that could possibly mean she had no idea, but its shape inspired her with a feeling of fear and she did her best to impress that feeling upon the markings. Perhaps the othercreatures, studying the markings, would also feel fear. When the answers came Dua could sense excitement in them. She did not always get the answers that were sent. Sometimes the Hard Ones found them first. Surely, they must be finding out what she was doing. Still, they could not read the messages, could not even sense the emotions that went along with them. Sq she didn't care. She would not be stopped before she finished, no matter what the Hard Ones found out. She waited for a message that would carry the feeling she wanted It came: P-U-M-P B-A-D. It carried the fear and hatred she wanted. She sent it back in extended form -- more fear -- more hatred. Now the other-beings would understand. Now they would stop the Pump. The Hard Ones would have to find some other way, some other source of energy -- they must not obtain it through the death of all those thousands of otherUniverse creatures. She was resting too much, declining into a kind of stupor within the rock. She craved food desperately and waited for a chance to crawl out. Even more desperately than she wanted the food in a storage cell she wanted that storage cell to be dead. She wanted to suck the last bit of energy out of it and know that no more would come and that her task was done. She emerged at last and remained recklessly long, sucking in the contents of one of the cells. She wanted to empty it, see that no more was entering -- but it was an endless source -- endless -- endless. She stirred and drew away in disgust. The Pump action in the Other-Universe was still going, then. Had her messages not persuaded the other-beings to stop the Pump? Had they not received her signals? Had they not sensed their meaning? She had to try again. She had to make matters plain beyond plain. She would include every combination of symbols that to her seemed to carry the feeling of danger; every combination that would put across the plea to stop. Desperately she began to fuse the symbols into metal; drawing without reserve on the energy she had just absorbed -- drawing on it till it was all gone and she was more It was all she could do. There was IF nothing left in her but a racking pain. She placed the message where it could be transferred and she did not wait for Hard Ones to send the message unwittingly. Through an agonizing haze she manipulated the controls as she had seen them do, finding the energy for it somehow. The message disappeared and so did the cavern in a purple shimmer of vertigo. She was -- passing onout of sheer -- exhaustion. Odeen -- Tri -- #bc flowing faster than he had ever flowed before. He had been following Tritt's new-baby sharpened sense perception, but pow he was close enough for his own blunter senses to detect her nearness. He could on his own account feel the flickering and fading consciousness of Dua and he raced forward while Tritt did his best to clump along, gasping and calling, "Faster -- faster -- " Odeen found her in a State of collapse, scarcely alive, smaller than he had ever seen an adult Emotional. "Tritt," he said, "Bring the foodball here. Np, don't try to carry her. She's too thin to carry. Hurry. If she sinks into the floor -- " The Hard Ones began to gather. They were late, of course, with their inability to sense other life forms at a distance. If saving Dua had depended only on them she would have perished. She would not have passed on -- she would truly have been destroyed and more than she knew would have been destroyed with her. Now, as she was slowly gathering life, the Hard Ones stood silently near them. Odeen rose, a new Odeen who knew exactly what was happening. Imperiously he ordered them away with an angry gesture -- and they left. Silently. Without objection. Dua stirred. Tritt said, "Is she all right, Odeen?" "Quiet, Tritt," said Odeen. "Dua?" "Odeen?" She stirred, spoke in a whisper. "I thought I had passed on." "Not yet, Dua. Not yet. But first you must eat and rest." "Is Tritt here, too?" "Here I am, Dua," said Tritt. "Don't try to bring me back," said Dua. "It's over. I've done what I wanted to do. All Pump action in the otherUniverse will stop soon, I'm sure -- making useless our end of the Pump. The Hard Ones will continue to need Soft Ones and they will take care of you two -- or at least the children." Odeen said nothing. He kept Tritt, too, from speaking. He let the radiation pour slowly into Dua. He stopped at times to let her rest a bit, then started again. She began to mutter, "Enough. Enough." Her substance was writhing more strongly. Still he fed her. Finally lie spoke. "Dua, you were wrong. We are not machines. I know exactly what we are. I would have come to you sooner if I had found out earlier, but I didn't know till Losten begged me to think. And I did -- very hard." Dua moaned and Odeen stopped for a while. He said, "Listen, Dua. There is a single species of life. The Hard Ones are the only living things in the world. You gathered that, and so far you were right. But that doesn't mean the Soft Ones aren't alive -- it merely means they are part of the same single species. The Soft Ones are the immature forms of the Hard Ones. We are first children as Soft Ones, then adults as Soft Ones, then Hard Ones. Do you understand?" Tritt muttered in soft confusion, "What? What?" Odeen said, "Not now, Tritt. Not now. You'll understand, too, but this is for Dua." He kept watching Dua, who was gaining opalescence. He said, "Listen, Dua, whenever we melt, whenever the triad melts, we become a Hard One. The Hard One is three-in-one, which is why he is hard. During the time of unconsciousness in melting we are a Hard One. But it is only temporary and we can never remember the period afterward. We can never stay a Hard One long -- we must come back. But all through our life we keep developing, with certain key stages marking off our growth. Each baby born marks a key stage. With the birth of the third, the Emotional, there comes the possibility of the final stage, where the Rational's mind by itself, without the other two, can remember those flashes of Hard One existence. Then, "and only then, can he guide a perfect melt that will form the Hard One forever, so that the triad can live a new and unified life of learning and intellect. I told you that passing on was like being born again. I was groping then for something I did not quite understand -- but now I know." Dua was looking at him, trying to smile. She asked, "How can you pretend to believe that,Odeen? If that were so, wouldn't the Hard Ones have told you long ago -- told all of us?" "They couldn't, Dua. There was a time, long ages ago, when melting was just a putting together of the atoms of bodies. But evolution slowly developed minds. Listen to me, Dua. Melting is a putting together of the minds, too, and that's a much harder, a much more delicate process. To put them together properly and permanently, just so, the Rational must reach a certain pitch in development. That pitch is reached when he finds out for himself what it's all about -- when his mind is finally keen enough to remember what has happened in all those temporary unions during melting. If the Rational were told, that development would be aborted and the time of the perfect melt could not be determined. The Hard One would form imperfectly. When Losten pleaded with me to think he was taking a great chance. Even that may have been -- I hope not what I'm thinking. For its especially true in our case, Dua. For many generations, the Hard Ones IF have ben combining triads with great care to form particularly advanced Hard Ones and our triad was the best they'd ever obtained. Especially you, Dua. Especially you. Losten was once the Rational of the triad whose baby-mid you were. He knew you. He brought you to Tritt and me." Dua sat up. Her voice was almost normal. "Odeen -- are you making all this up to soothe me?" Tritt broke in. "No, Dua. I feel it, too. I feel it, too. I don't know what exactly -- but I feel it." "He does, Dua," said Odeen. "You will, too. Aren't you beginning to recall being a Hard One during our melt? Don't you want to melt now? One last time?" ' He lifted her. There was a feverishness about her and, though she struggled a bit, she was thinning. "If what you say is true, Odeen," she gasped. "If we are to be a Hard One -- then it seems to me you are saying we'll be an important one. Is that so?" "The most important. The best who was ever formed. I mean that. Tritt; it's not goodbye. We'll be together as we always wanted to be. Dua, too. You, too, Dua." Dua said. "Then we can make Estwald understand the Pump can't continue. We'll force -- " The melting was beginning. One by one the Hard Ones were entering again at the crucial moment. Odeen saw them imperfectly, for he was beginning to melt into Dua. It was not like the other times. He was aware of no sharp ecstasy -- just a smooth, cool, utterly peaceful movement. He could feel himself become partly Dua and all the world seemed pouring into his her sharpening senses. The Positron Pumps were still going -- he she could tell -- why were they still going? He was Tritt, too, and a keen sense of bitter loss filled hisher his mind. Oh, my babies... He cried out, uttered one last cry under the consciousness of Odeen, except that somehow it was the cry of Dua. "No, we can't stop Estwald. We are Estwald. We -- " The cry that was Dua's and yet not Dua's stopped and there was no longer any Dua -- nor would there ever be Dua again. Or Odeen. Or Tritt. #abc Estwald stepped forth and said sadly to the waiting Hard Ones by way of vibrating airwaves, "I am permanently with you now and there is much to do -- "  The first installment of The Gods Themselves appears in the March-April issue of The third and concluding installment will which will go on sale March #. The reasons for dividing the novel in such fashion are first installment. If your dealer cannot supply you with any of these copies, you may order directly from us, remitting #c for each. We pay postage on all orders. The Rat would be home safe -- if yesterday he had not died! I in St. Paul's Cathedral in the year # a.d., alone and welded to a steel post and soon to vanish with the world outside -- which had already become nonexistent? Not many people can answer yes to that question -- but I can. I can't really say that I enjoy the distinction. I must further admit that I had never been happier to see my wife. "Angelina, truly named," I said as, light as a falling leaf, she drifted down to the floor. "You descend from above to save me." She opened the faceplate of her spacesuit wider so she could kiss me through the opening, then took an atomic lance from her belt and began to cut away my chains. "Now tell me what all this timetravel nonsense is about. And talk fast. We have only seven minutes -- at least that is what Coypu said." "What else did he tell you?" I asked, wondering just how much she knew. "Stop being mysterious with me, Slippery Jim diGriz! I've had enough of that with Coypu." I jumped back hastily as she waved the atomic lance under my chin. Then I beat out the fire she had started on my garments. An angry Angelina can be quite dangerous. "My love," I said emotionally, attempting to embrace her While keeping an eye on the lance at the same time. "I conceal nothing from you -- nothing! I know better. It is just that my brain is tied in knots and I want to know where your knowledge leaves off before I continue with the complete story." "You know perfectly well that I talked to you last on the phone. Big rush, you said, top priority, get over fast you shouted -- then rang off. So I rushed to Copyu's lab. Everyone was running around playing with the machinery and too busy to tell me anything. Back in time, they shouted when I asked where you were. Nothing else. And that horrid Inskipp was no better. He said you vanished -- just vanished out of his office -- while he was reading the riot act to you. Apparently he found out about that little bit of money you are putting aside for a rainy decade or two. There was a lot of babble about your saving the world or the galaxy or something -- I couldn't understand a word of it. And all of this went on for a very long time -- until they could send me back here." "Well, I did save the world" I said modestly. "Saved you, saved the Corps, saved the whole thing." "I was right. You have been drinking." "Not in entirely too long a time," I muttered petulantly. "If you want to know the truth you all vanished, poof  just like that. Coypu was the last one to go so he can tell you about it. The Corps, everyone, they were never born, never existed except in my memory -- " "My memory is slightly different." "It would be. Since through my efforts He's evil plan was foiled -- " "His not he's. All that drinking has affected your speech." " He is his name -- and I haven't had a drop in hours! Can you possibly listen without interrupting? This story is complicated enough in any case -- " "Complicated and possibly alcoholically inspired." at length and more warmly this time, a distraction we both enjoyed. This softened her a bit so I rushed on before she remembered that she was supposed to be angry at me. "A time attack was launched against the Special Corps, and Professor Coypu whisked me back in time to foil the nefarious scheme. I did all right in nineteen seventyfive but He got away, went back to whenever he came from, then set up an elaborate trap here in eighteen hundred and seven to trap me. Which he did. But his plans didn't work completely because I managed to change the setting on the time helix so he was sent to a different time from where he had intended to go. This must have defeated his plans -- since you IF managed to get here to rescue me' "Oh, darling, how wonderful of you. I knew you could save the world if you really tried." Mercurial, I guess, is the word for my Angelina. She kissed me with what can only be described as true passion and I, clanking my lengths of chain, got my arms around her in happy response. But she squawked and straight-armed me. I reeled back, choking. "The time!" She looked at her watch and gasped. "You made me forget. There is less than a minute left. Where is the time helix?" "Here." Hugging my still painful midriff I showed her the machine. "And the controls?" "These." "How ugly. Where's readout?" "These dials." "This is the setting we must use, down to the thirteenth decimal position, Coypu said -- he was most, insistent about that." I played the keys like a mad pianist and sweated. The dials spun and hesitated, then gyrated wildly. "Thirty seconds," Angelina said sweetly to encourage me. "There!" I gasped as she announced ten seconds. I kicked in the timer and threw the master switch. The time helix glowed greenly at us as we rushed to its protruding end. "Stay close and hug me as hard as you can," I said. "The time field has a surface effect so we must stay close -- " She responded with pleasure. "I only wish I weren't wearing this silly spacesuit," she whispered, nibbling my ear. "It would be so much more fun." "It might be, but it might also be a little embarrassing when we arrived back at the Special Corps in that condition." "Don't worry about that. We're not going back yet." I felt a sudden stab of anxiety just below my sternum. "What do you mean? Where are we going?" "I'm sure I wouldn't know. All Coypu said was that the hop would be about twenty thousand years into the future, to the moment just before this planet is to be destroyed." "He and'his mad mob again," I wailed. "You've just sent us off to tackle an entire planetary insane asylum -- where everyone is against us!" Everything froze as the time helix actuated and I was whipped into time with a pained expression on my face. That expression lasted # years, which was exactly how it felt. steam bath -- and falling was the right word. Hot clouds of vapor rushed past us and the invisible surface could be ten "meters or ten miles below us. "Switch on your grav-chute," I shouted. "Mine's back in the nonexistent nineteenth century." Perhaps I shouldn't have shouted. Angelina turned the thing on at full lift and slithered up out of my fond embrace like an oiled eel. I clutched madly and managed to grab one of her feet with both hands -- whereupon the boot part of the one-piece spacesuit promptly came off her foot. "I wish you wouldn't do that," she called down to me. "I agree with you completely," I answered through clamped and grating teeth. The suit stretched and stretched until the leg was twice its normal length and I bobbed up and on down as though on the end of a rubber band. I took a quick look down, but only fog was visible below. Spacesuit fabric is tough, but it was never designed to take the strain I was putting on Angelina's. Something had to be done. "Cut your lift," I called out and Angelina responded instantly. We were in free fall and as soon as the tension was relieved the leg fabric contracted and snapped me back up to Angelina's waiting arms. "Yum," I said. She looked down and shrieked and hit the grav-chute power again. This time I wasn't ready and I slipped right down and out of her embrace and was falling toward the solid looking landscape that had suddenly appeared below. In the small fraction of a second left to me I did what little I could -- twisting in the air, spreading my arms and legs wide, trying to land square on my back. I had almost succeeded when I hit. Everything went black. I was sure I was dead. Before the darkness overwhelmed my brain my last thought flashed before me -- not only did I not regret anything I had ever done but there were a few things I wished I had done more often, I could not have been unconscious more than a few instants. Foul-tasting mud filled my mouth and I spluttered it out, rubbed more of it from my eyes and looked around. I was floating in a sea of mud and water from which large bubbles rose and broke with slow plops. They stank. Sickly looking reeds and water plants grew on all sides. "Alive!" I shouted, "I am alive." I had struck fiat out on the syrupy surface and felt some aches and bruises, but nothing seemed to be broken. "It looks very nasty down there," Angelina said, hovering a few feet above my head. "It's just as nasty as it looks so, if you don't mind, I would like to get out of it. Can you sort of drop down so I can grab your ankles which will permit ydu to drag me out with a wet sucking sound?" it was as the decaying quagIF mire fought to hold onto me, parting with me only reluctantly and with a slobbering sigh. I hung from my love's ankles as we drifted over an apparently endless swamp which vanished in the fog in all directions. "There -- over to the right," I called out. "Looks like a channel with running water. I think a wash and brush-up is in order." "Since I am upwind of you I couldn't agree more." The current was moving slowly, but still moving; I could tell by a treetrunk that drifted by. Into the middle of the sluggish stream reached a golden sandbar that seemed made for us. I dropped as Angelina came low and even before she had settled down herself I was out of my noisome garb and scrubbing the muck off in the water. When I bobbed up, spluttering, I saw that she had peeled out of her spacesuit and was combing out her long hair, which happened to be blond at the moment. Very lovely, and I was thinking the most romantic thoughts when fierce fire pierced my gluteus maximus and I shot straight up out of the water, yiping like a dog whose tail has been caught in the door. As attractive and feminine as she was, Angelina was still Angelina and the comb vanished to be replaced by a gun and, almost before I touched the sand, she had fired a single, precisely aimed shot. While she was applying a bandage to the double row of toothmarks in my derriere I looked at the fish, somewhat blown apart but still twitching, that had mistaken me for lunch. Its gaping mouth had more teeth than a dental supply house and there was a definitely evil look in its rapidly clouding eye. Grabbing it by the tail to evade its still gnashing jaws, I threw it far out into the water. This started a tremendous flurry of action under the surface and from the size of some of the things that leaped ojjt and smacked back down I saw that I had been attacked by one of the smaller ones. "Twenty thousand years has done no good at all to this planet," I said. "Finish rinsing off that mud and I'll stand guard. Then we'll have some lunch." Ever the practical woman. While I scrubbed she shot up the piscatorial predators who came after me, including one large fish with fat flanks and rudimentary legs that waddled out of the water in an attempt to have me for lunch. We had it#nstead. The flanks concealed some fine thick filets that roasted well over a low-set heat projector. Angelina had had the foresight to bring a flask of my favorite wine and the meal became a memorable one. I sighed, eructated and wiped my lips with satisfaction. "You have saved my life more than once in the last twenty thousand years," I said. "So I no longer am brimful of anger for being whisked to this steam-bath world rather than back to the Corps. But can you at least tell me what happened and what Coypu told you?" "He tends to mumble a good deal, but I got the gist of it. He has been working on his time-tracker or whatever he calls it and followed your jumps through time as well as those of someone he referred to as the enemy -- the one you call He. The enemy did something with time, created a probability loop that lasted about five years, then terminated. He left this collapsing loop -- and you didn't. That's why Coypu sent me back to the minutes just before it ended -- to bring you out. He gave me the setting for the time helix that would enable us to follow He to this time. I asked him what we were supposed to 'do here but he kept muttering, Paradox , paradox... and wouldn't tell me. Do you have any idea of what is supposed to happen." "Simple enough. Find He and kill him. That should put paid to the entire operation. I've had two tries at him -- shooting once and using thermite bombs the second time -- and haven't succeeded. Maybe this will be lucky three." "Perhaps you ought to let me take care of him," Angelina offered kindly. "A fine idea. We'll blast him together. I have had just about enough of this temporal paper chase." "How do we find him?" "Simplicity itself, if you have a time-energy detector with you." She had one through Coypu' s foresight and passed it over. "A simple flick of this switch and the moving needle points to our man." The switch flicked but did nothing more than release a little condensed water that ran out into my palm. "It doesn't seem to be working," Angelina said, smiling sweetly. "Either that or He is not using the time helix at this particular moment." I rummaged in my equipment. "I had to leave my spacesuit and some other things back in eighteen-oh-seven, but Slippery Jim is never without his snooper." had designed it myself and it was one of the few things He hadn't taken from me. Rugged, it could resist almost anything except being dropped into molten metal. Compact, no bigger than my hand. And it could detect the weakest flickerings of radiation across a tremendous range of frequencies. I turned it on and ran my fingers over the familiar controls. "Most interesting," I said and tried the radio frequencies. "If you don't enlighten me quickly I'll never save your life again." IF "You have to because you love me with an undying passion. I get two sources, one weak and very distant. The other can't be too far and is putting out on a number of frequencies, including atomic radiation and energy transmission, as well as a lot of radio. And something of more pressing urgency. Get out the sunburn cream -- solar ultraviolet radiation is right up at the top of the scale. You can bet I've been well cooked already." We creamed and, despite the heat, put on enough clothing to shield us from the invisible radiation that was pouring out of the clouded sky. "Strange things have ' happened to the Earth," I said. "The radiation, this soggy climate, the wildlife in this river. I wonder -- " "I don't. After completing the mission you can do your paleogeologic research. Let's kill He first." "Spoken like a pro. I hope you don't mind if I rig a harness so we can share the benefit of the gravchute equally this time?" "Sounds like fun," she said, loosening the straps. The airborne Siamese Jwin arrangement lifted and took us low over the sea of gunk in the direction of all the activity. Mud and swamp continued for a boringly long time and I was beginning to chafe in the straps and worry about the power supply when the higher larid finally appearedr First some rocks sticking out of the water, then sheer cliffs greeted us. It took more juice to lift us up the side of these and the indicator on the power pack dropped quickly. "We are going to have to walk soon," I said, "which is at least better than swimming." "Not if the land animals match those in the water." Ever optimistic my Angelina. As I was phrasing a witty and scathing reply there was a flash of light from the rampart of rocks ahead, followed instantly by an intense pain in my leg. "I've been shot!" I shouted, more in surprise than pain, reaching for the grav-chute controls and finding that Angelina had already killed the power. We dropped toward a wicked jumple of rocks, slowing and stopping only at the last minute. I hopped on one leg to the shelter of an overhanging slab and was thinking of digging out my medikit when Angelina sprayed antiseptic on the wound tore half of my pants leg away, injected instant painkiller in my thigh and probed the gory opening. She was ahead of me with everything and I didn't mind in the slightest. "A neat penetrating wound," she announced, spraying on surgifoam. "Should heal quickly, no problem. Keep your weight off it. Now I have to kill whoever did it." XX down and before I could answer she had her gun in her hand and had faded silently into the rocky landscape. There is nothing like having a loving and tender wife who is a cool and accomplished killer. Maybe I wore the pants in the family, but we both wore guns. Not too long after this came the sound of explosions, a great clattering in the rocks above and, soon after that, some hoarse screams that soon ended in silence. It is a tribute to Angelina's prowess that I never for a second was concerned about her safety. In fact, I dozed off under the assault of the drugs coursing through my bloodstream and awoke only when I was aware of tugging on the grav-chute harness. I yawned and blinked at her as she buckled in beside me. "Am I allowed to ask what happened?" I said. She frowned. "Just one man up there. I couldn't find any others. I saw a farm building of sorts, some machinery, crops growing. I must be slipping. I knocked him out, then could not bring myself to shoot him while he was lying there unconscious." I kissed her as we rose. "A conscience, my sweet. Some of us are born with them, yours was surgically implanted. The results are the same." "I'm not really sure I like it. There was a certain freedom in the old days." "We all have to be civilized some time." She sighed and nodded, then gave me a quick peck on the cheek. "I suppose you are right. But it would have been so satisfying to blow him into small pieces." We were over the last of the tumbled scree now and ascending a small cliff. We came to a plateau, on which was a low building made of stones cemented together. The door was open and I hobbled through it, leaning on Angelina's shoulder. Dim light through the small windows revealed a large and cluttered room with two bunks against the far wall. On one of them lay a bound man twisting, and turning, mumbling and growling into a gag that sealed his mouth. "You get into the other bed," Angelina told me, "while I see if I can get any intelligence out of this awful creature." I had actually taken the first steps toward the bunk before reason penetrated my soggy thoughts and I stopped dead. "Beds. Two of them? There must be someone else around the place." Whatever answer was on her lips was never spoken because a man appeared in the doorway behind us, shouting noisily and firing an even noisier weapon. II because the weapon was blown from his hands even as he IF triggered it, and an instant later he was blown back out of the doorway. I saw all this as I dived and rolled. I had my gun out just an Angelina was putting hers away. "Now that is more like it," she sakl, apparently addressing the silent pair of boots in the doorway. "Civilized conscience or no, I find that shooting in self-defense still comes easily. I .saw this one out among the rocks, stalking us as we came in, but I never had a clear shot. Everything should be quietef now. I'll make some warm soup and you take a nice nap -- " "No." I doubt if a firmer no had ever been spoken. I popped out a pair of stimtabs and chewed them as I continued my monologue in the same tone of voice. "There is a certain retrogressive pleasure in being cared for and treated like an idiot child, but I think I have had enough of it. I have tackled He before this and chased him out of two of his lairs and I intend now to finish him off. I know his ways. I'm in charge of this expedition. You will follow, not lead. And you will obey orders." "Yes, sir," she answered with lowered eyelids and bowed head. Did this cover a mocking smile? I did not care. Me boss. "Me boss." It sounded even better said aloud in a firm and declaratory tone. "Yes, boss," she said and giggled prettily while the man on the bed writhed and chomped and the boots in the doorway were silent. We went to work. Our prisoner slavered noisily in an unknown tongue when I took out the gag. He tried to bite my fingers when I restored it. A rough-looking radio on a shelf produced only grating broadcasts in the same alien language when I turned it on. Angelina's outdoor investigations were far more productive than mine and she pulled up by the door in an impossibly ugly conveyance that looked like a scratched, purple, plastic bathtub slung between four sets of wheels. It burbled and hissed at me when I hobbled up to examine it. "Very simple to operate," Angelina said, showing off her technical skill. "There is only one switch and that turns it on. And two handles, one for the bank of wheels on each side. Forward to speed them up, back to brake them -- " "And neutral in the middle," I said to demonstrate my technical skill as well as the fact that I was a male chauvinist pig and this was my show. "And this lead-covered lump in the rear must be a nuclear generator. Unshield a chunk of radioactive material, heat up the surrounding liquid -- a heatexchanger here, secondary liquid to turn this electric generator, motors in each wheel, ugly and crude but practical. Where do we go in it?" She pointed. "There seems to be a road or trail of sorts going off through that cultivated field there. And unless memory fails -- I know you will be quick to correct me -- that seems to be the direction indicated by the radio signals you detected earlier." A mild blow struck for femlib and I ignored it. Particularly since she was right as the snooper soon confirmed. "Off we go then," I said, in command once again. "Going to kill the prisoner?" she asked hopefully. "Thank you, no. But I'll take his clothes, since mine have reached the old rag stage. If we break up the radio he'll have a hard job telling anyone we're coming. He'll chew through his gag and ropes in a couple of hours so we can leave the burial arrangements of his associate to him. We will load our gear and be on our way." The firmness of my authority was dimmed slightly by the rapid, redblooming growth of my sunburn. While Angelina stomped the radio I put on more cream. A few minutes later we were bumping along the worn trail that twisted across the high plateau. T HE fog and haze were less at this altitude -- not that there was anything more to see. The rough landscape was slashed with gullies that carried away the water from the frequent rainstorms, which also removed what little topsoil still remained in the area. Tough-looking plants clung to the rocks for protection and scant shelter. Occasionally we passed branching side trails but the direction finder on the snooper kept us on the right track. The hard bucket seats were hideously uncomfortable and I welcomed the gathering darkness of dusk -- though of course I didn't say this aloud -- and turned off behind a jumbled hill of great rocks for the night. In the morning I was stiff but. feeling more fit. The drugs had whipped my cells into a frenzy of growth that had nearly healed my various wounds and given me a raging appetite. We breakfasted from the meager supplies that Angelina had brought, eked out by some coarse bread and dried meat liberated from the homicidal farmers. Angelina took the wheel and I rode shotgun, not liking the look of the decomposing landscape at all. The track now wandered down from the hills as the highlands turned into a vertical escarpment of rock. Then there were more swamps and some very nasty looking jungle into which the road dipped. Creepers hung low enough to brush our heads, and the soggy trees touched overhead. The air became more humid and hotter. "I don't like this place," Angelina said, steering around a boggy spot that slopped across the track. IF "I like it even less," I said, gun in hand and a clip of explosive cartridges in the butt. "If the wildlife here is anything like that in the river we may have some fun and games in store." I looked ahead, behind, right and left and wished my eyeballs grew on stalks. I saw countless suspicious dark shapes among the trees and heard occasional heavy crashings, but nothing appeared to threaten us. Nothing that I could see. Of course the one spot I wasn't watching was the surface of the road and that is where the imminent danger lay. "That tree has fallen right across the road," Angelina said. "Just bump over it -- " "I wouldn't," I said, just a little too late as our wheels trundled over the green trunk that lay across the track and vanished into the jungle on both sides. Our center wheels were on it when it shuddered and heaved upward in a great loop. The vehicle turned over. Angelina and I were hurled clear, but not clear enough. I hit the ground, tucked my head in, rolled and came up with the gun ready. A good thing, too. The fallen pseudo-tree was writhing nicely, while out of the foliage across the track appeared the front end of the thing. A snake. With a head as big as a barrel, gaping mouth, flicking tongue, beady eyes and a hiss like a boiler about to explode. Right under those wide-spread jaws was Angelina, sitting up and shaking her head dizzily and totally unaware of what was happening. There was time for one shot and I wanted it to be a good one. As that demonic head came down I held my wrist with my left hand to steady the gun and squeezed off a round right into the thing's mouth. Its head was blown off. That should have been the end of it -- but a gigantic spasm went through the entire length of that muscular body. Before I could get out of the way a thrashing loop struck me and hurled me into the trees. This time there was no fancy roll and dive but a simple splintery bang as I crashed through the branches and one got me on the side of the head. A nice white explosion of pain and that was that. aware of. The ache in my head drew me back to reluctant consciousness and the discovery of a new and sharper pain in my leg. I opened a bleary eye and saw something small and brown with a lot of claws and teeth that was tearing an opening in my pants leg in order to make lunch out of my thigh. I kicked it with my boot. It growled and screeched and showed me all its teeth but reluctantly slipped away into the foliage when I attempted another weak kick in its direction. Weak was the word for everything I felt. It took me some time to do more than lie there and gasp and try to remember what had happened. The road, the snake, the wreck... "Angelina!" I shouted hoarsely and struggled to my feet, ignoring the waves of pain that washed through me. "Angelina -- "' There was no answer. I pushed through the shrubbery to witness a singularly nasty sight. A churning row of brown animals, relatives of the one who had nibbled me, was working on the carcass of the snake and had already reduced great sections to a neatly polished rib cage. And my gun was gone. I turned back and searched where I had fallen but it was not there. Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and the shrill voice of panic was beginning to keen in the back of my head. As long as I stayed clear of them the carrion eaters ignored me. I made a wide loop to cross the road. The car was gone -- and so was Angelina. The situation required cogent thought, impossible with the aches and pains that were crippling me. And I had to do something about the insects that were buzzing about the wound in my head. My medikit was still in its pocket and that was next in the order of business. In a few minutes I was soothed, depained, stimulated and ready for action. But where was the action? Wherever the car was, my clicking thoughts responded. Its tracks were clear enough in the muddy ground -- which also revealed the mystery of Angelina's disappearance. I found at least two sets of large, ugly, masculine footprints around the churned area where the vehicle had been righted -- as well as another set of car tracks. Either we had been followed or a chance bunch of tourists had arrived on the scene after the snake incident. Spatters of mud and bent grass showed that both cars had carried' on in the original direction we had been going. I went that way myself at a ground-eating trot, trying not to think about what might have happened to Angelina. The trot didn't last long. Fatigue and heat slowed me to a shambling walk. A stimtab took care of one and I just sweated out the other. The tracks were clear and I followed. In less than an hour the road had wound its way out of the jungle and into some dry hills. Coming around a turn I had' a quick glimpse of one of the cars pulled up ahead and I drew back quickly. A plan was needed. My gun had vanished so shooting  down Angelina's kidnapers was out of the question. The few remaining devices in my clothing were nonlethal, though I did have a wrist holder full of grenades that Angelina had given me. They were the answer. IF I selected a handful of sieepgas bombs to drop the kidnapers before they could shoot me and took a couple of explosive grenades in the other hand just in case any of the enemy were not near Angelina and heeded more dramatic and permanent disposal. Armed and ready, I crept forward from rock to .rock, took a deep breath and jumped into the clearing where both vehicles waited. And caught a wooden club in the side of my head. wrists and ankles to be tied and my weapons to be stripped from me. For this disaster I can blame only myself and my inattention. Fatigue and stimulants mayhave contributed, but my own stupidity had been the cause. I cursed myself under my breath -- which did no good at all -- as I was dragged across the ground and dumped down beside Angelina. "Are you all right?" I asked. "Of course. And in far better shape than you are." Which was true. Her clothing was torn and I saw bruises. She had been knocked around. Someone was going to pay and pay well for that. I could hear my teeth grating together. And she was tied just as I was. "They thought you were dead," she said. "And so did I." Her words held a wealth of unsaid feeling and I tried a smile. It came on a little more twisted than I like. She went on: "I don't know how long we lay there -- I was unconscious, too. When I came to I was like this and they had taken ihe guns and everything and were loading it all into the cars. Then we left. I could do nothing to stop them. All they speak is that same horrible language." They looked as horrible as their language sounded, all scruffy clothing and greasy leather straps, bushels of matted dirty hair and beard. I had an entirely unnecesary closer look at one of them when he came over and twisted my head to one side and the other while he compared my crunched features with a good photograph of me. I snapped my tfceth at the filthy fingers but he pulled them away in time. These must be He's men -- the photo proved that -- though I had no idea where it came from. Taken during one of our tangles in time no doubt and treasured by his crew ever since. At this point I noticed the ugliest and smelliest of the lot ogling Angelina. I snapped at his ankle and was kicked aside for my pains. Angelina is a very direct-minded girl. When she knows what she wants she gets it, no matter what. Now she saw the only way we could get out of this mess and she used it. Woman's wiles. With no hint of disgust at the ugly brute she began to openly to lavish her attention upon him. She could not speak his language but the language she did speak was as old as mankind. Turning away from me she smiled at the hairy beast and gave a twist of her head to call him over. Her shoulders were back, her charming figure prominent, hips tilted coyly.' Of course it worked: There was a bit of lively dicussion with the other two, but Hairiest knocked one of them down and that was that. They looked on with burning jealousy as he stalked over to her. She smiled her warmest and held out her slim, bound wrists. What man could resist that unspoken appeal? Certainly not this shambling hulk. He cut the thongs on her wrists and put his knife away as she bent to free her ankles. When he hauled her to her feet she arose eagerly. He locked her in a bearlike embrace, bending his face to hers. I could have told him that he would have been safer trying to kiss a sabertooth tiger but I did not. What happened next only I could see because the jealous watchers were blocked from sight by the bulk of his body. Who would imagine that those delicate fingers could shape themselves into that hard a point, that the thin wrist could propel the hand so deep into bushy's gut? Lovely. He bent to her and, with only a gentle sigh, kept bending. For. a moment she supported his weight -- then stepped back and screamed as he folded to the ground. A picture of feminine innocence, hands to cheeks, eyes staring, shrieking at the strange occurrence of a strong man collapsing at her feet. Of course the other two ran over, but their faces showed the beginnings of cold suspicion. The first one carried my gun. XI As soon as he was close enough she let fly with bushy's knife, which she had appropriated before she dropped him. I did not see where it hit because the third man was passing me and I had drawn my legs back in hopes that he would. He did. I kicked out, got him below the knees and he went down. Even as he fell I was jack-knifing forward and before he could get up again I let him have it with both boots in the side of the head. And a second time just because I was feeling nasty. That was that. Angelina removed the knife from her unmoving target, wiped it on his clothing, then came to free me. "Will you kill the ones who are still twitching?" she asked demurely. "I should, but cold-blooded revenge is not for me. They are what they are and I suppose that is penalty enough. I think if we took all their supplies and wrecked their wagon it would be revenge enough. You were wonderful." "Of course. That was why you married me." She kissed me IF quickly because she had to turn an instant later to land her heel on the forehead of bushy, who was beginning to twitch. He slept on. We packed and left. Our goal was not too far away. A few hours later we felt a stirring of the air that grew stronger as we continued down the track through the hills. A sudden turn brought us to the brink of a valley with a sharp drop and I kicked the vehicle into a swirling spin and darted it back out of sight again. "Did you see that?" I asked. "I certainly did," Angelina replied as we slipped forward on our bellies and looked around the turn. The wind was stronger here, pouring up the wide valley from some invisible source below. The air was. cooler, too, and though the ever-present clouds hung above, no fog obscured the view in the valley. Across from us the hill rose, turning to a solid cliff that reared up vertically, glossy black stone. Erosion had carved it into a fantasy of towers and turrets -- men had carved these further into a castle city that covered the mountaintop. There were windows and doorways, flags and . pennants, stairs and buttresses. The flags were bright red and inscribed with black characters. Some of the towers had been painted crimson as well and this, with the mad frenzy of the construction, nieant only one thing. "It's not logical, I know,' Angelina said. "But that place sends a definite shiver down my spine. It seems -- hard to describe -- perhaps Insane is the best word." "The absolute best. Which means that since this is the right world and time, a place that looks like that must be where He is." "How do we get to him?" "A very good question," I said in lieu of an intelligent answer. How did we get into this kookycastle? I scratched my head and rubbed my jaw but these infallible aids to thought did not work this time. There was a slight movement at the edge of my vision. I looked and grabbed for my. gun -- and froze the motion. halfway. "Don't make any sudden motions, particularly in the direction of your weapon," I told Angelina in a quiet voice. "Turn around slowly." doing nothing that might produce anxiety in the trigger fingers of the dozen or so men who had appeared silently behind us and stood with leveled and firmly aimed weapons. "Get ready to dive forward when I do," I said and turned back to see another four men who had appeared just as silently in the valley in front of us. "Belay that last command and smile sweetly and surrender. We'll chop them up after we get in among them." This last I meant mostly as a morale booster. Unlike the wildeyed men from whom we had taken our multiwheeled transportation, this lot was cool and able. These men were dressed alike in gray onepiece plastic outfits equipped with hoods. Their weapons were as long as rifles, gape-orificed and lethal looking. We trotted forward obediently when one of them waved that instruction in our direction. Another member of the closing circle stepped closer to look us over, but not close enough for anyone who wasn't suicide prone to attempt to seize his weapon. " Stragitzkruml ?" he said, then continued: "Fidlykreepi? Attentottenpotentaten ?' When we made no response to these incomprehensible requests he turned to a bulky man with a red beard who seemed to be in charge. '# ne parolas konantajn lingvojri," he said in clearly accented Esperanto. "Well that's more like it," I answered in the same tongue. "Might I ask why you gentlemen find it necessary to pull guns on simple travelers like ourselves?" "Who are you?" Redbeard asked, coming forward. "I might ask the same of you." " am pointing the guns," he answered coldly. "A well made point and I bow to your logic. We are tourists from the land across the sea -- " He interrupted with a short and nasty word. "That is impossible as we both know, since this is the only land mass on this planet. The truth now." We both hadn't known, though we did now. A single continent? What had happened to Mother Earth during those twenty millennia? Lying had been no good so perhaps the truth might work. It did on occasion. "Would you believe me if I told you we were time-travelers?" looked startled and there was a stir of movement among the men who had been close enough to hear what I had said. Redbeard glared them into silence before he spoke again. "What is your connection with He and those creatures in his city up there?" A lot depended upon my answer. Truth had worked once and it might turn the trick again. And he had said creatures -- a giveaway. I could not believe this calm and disciplined force could be associated with the enemy. "I have come to kill He and wipe out his operation." This really did produce the right effect. Some of the men even lowered their guns before being growled back into line. Redbeard uttered a command and one of the men hurried away. We remained in silence ' until he returned with a green metal cube about the size IF of his head that he handed to the commander. It must have been hollow because he carried it easily. Redbeard held it up. "We have over a hundred of these. They have been floating down out of the sky for the past month and all of them are identical. A powerful radio source inside leads us ta them -- but we cannot cut or dissolve the metal. On the outside, on five faces of the cube, they are covered with lines of writing in what appear to be different languages and scripts. The ones we can translate all read the same way: 'Bring this to the timetravelers.' On the bottom of the cube are two lines of writing that we cannot read. Can you?" He slowly extended the cube toward me and I took it just as gingerly, while every gun was trained on me. The metal looked like collapsium, the incredibly tough stuff used for atomic rockettube liners. I carefully turned it bottom up and read the lines at a single glance before handing it back. "I can read them." I said, and they were aware of the new tohe in my voice. "The first line says that He and his people will all leave this period in time exactly two point thirty-seven days after my arrival . here." A murmur rose. Angelina beat Redbeard to the punch with the important question. "What was in the second line?" I tried a smile but it didn't seem much good. "Oh, that. It says that the planet will be destroyed by atomic explosions as soon as they go." Ill T I HE tent was made of the same gray plastic as the clothes our captors wore and was a chilled refuge from the steambath atmosphere outside. A squat machine whirred in one corner, dehumidifying and cooling the air. Even cooler drinks had been produced and I drained and brooded over mine, trying to see a way out of this dilemma before the deadly deadline was reached. Though guns were still in evidence an unspoken truce was in effect -- Redbeard decided to formalize it. "I drink with you," he said. "I am Diyan." It seemed very much like a ritual so I repeated the formula and intro- duced myself as did Angelina. After this the weapons vanished and we were all much more chummy. I sat down where I could benefit from the full breeze of the air-cooler and decided to ask some questions. "Do you people have any weapons heavier than these handguns?" "None that are available. The few we brought have been destroyed in battle with He's forces." "Is this continent so big you  can't get more of them here quickly from your country?" "The size of the continent is of no importance. Our space vessels are very small and everything must be brought from our home planet." I blinked rapidly, feeling I was getting out my depth. "You are not from Earth?" I asked.  "Our ancestors were, but we are all native born Martians;" "You wouldn't care to give me a few more facts, would you? The sound of confusion I keep hearing appears to be inside my own head ", I am sorry. I thought you knew: Here let me fill your glass. The story really begins many thousands of years ago when a sudden change in solar radiation raised the temperature here on Earth. By sudden I mean a matter of centuries. As the climate changed and the ice caps melted, the continued existence of life on the surface of the planet was threatened. Coastlines were altered and immense areas of lowlying land inundated; great cities were drowned. This in itself might have been dealt with, had it not been for the seismic disturbances brought about by the shifting stresses on the Earth's surface as the poles were freed of their ice burden and the released water covered other areas. There were earthquakes and lava flows, sinking lands and the rising of new mountains. All quite terrible -- we have seen the recordings many times in our schools. An incredible international effort was launched to terrafy the planet Mars-that is, make it suitable for human habitation. This involved the creation of an atmosphere there with a high carbon dioxide layer to trap the increased radiation of the sun, the transportation of ice mountains from the rings of Saturn, things like this. It was a noble ambition that in the end did succeed, but it bankrupted the nations of Earth who gave their all in this unbelievable effort. Eventually there was dissent and even warfare as weakened governments fell and greedy men fought for more than an equal share of space on the new-made world. Through all of this the waters continued to rise on Earth and the first Martian settlers struggled against the harsh rigors of a barely livable world to establish the settlements. In history these are known as the Deadly Years because so many people died -- the figures are unbelievable. But in the end we survived and Mars is a green and comfortable world. "Earth did not fare as well. Contact was lost between the planets and the survivors of the once teembattle for survival. There are no written records of that period, thousands of years long, but the results are clear enough. This single large continent remained above the sea, as well as some island chains to mark earlier mountain ranges. IF And madness rules mankind. When we were able we rebuilt the ancient spaceships and brought what help we could. Our help was not appreciated. The survivors still living on Earth kill strangers on sight and take great pleasure in it. And all irien are strangers. The almost unshielded solar radiation here produced mutants of all kinds among all Earth's life forms. Most mutations died off quickly but the survivors are deadly to a universal degree. So we helped where we could -- but really did very little. The Earthmen were a continuing danger to each other, but not to Mars. That is not until He united them some hundreds of years ago:" "Has He really lived all that time?" "It appears that He has. His mind is as bent as theirs but he can communicate with them. They follow him. They have actually worked together in building that city you have seen -- building a society of sorts. He is certainly a genius, albeit a warped one. His people have factories going and a rudimentary technology. One of the first things they did was ask for more aid from Mars -- and they would not believe us when we said that they were getting the maximum already. Their mad demands would have not bothered us had they not unearthed rockets armed with atomic bombs that could be directed at our planet. It was after the first of these arrived that this expedition was organized. On Mars we survived by cooperating -- there was no other way -- so we are not a warlike people. But we have made weapons and will reluctantly use them to insure our own survival. He is the key to all the troubles and we must capture or kill him. Thousands are dead at home and radioactivity is increasing in the Martian atmosphere." aims are identical," I V-told him. "He has launched a time attack against out people with equally disastrous results. You have summed up our retaliatory goals quite neatly." "How do we go about it?" Diyan asked eagerly. "I'm not sure," I answered gloomily. "We have a little over ten standard hours left to operate in," Angelina said precisely. Like all women she was a true pragmatist. While we wasted time nattering about the past she faced the fact that the decision would have to be made in the future and tackled that, the real problem. I yearned to demonstrate my affection for her but decided to wait for a more appropriate time, if more time did exist at all. "An all-out attack," I said. "We have weapons we can add to yours. Attack on all fronts, find a weak spot, concentrate our forces, blast through to victory. Do you have any large weapons left?" "No." "Well, we can get around that. How about crashlanding one of your spacers inside the castle up there and getting a fighting force behind their backs that way?" "Our spacers were destroyed by saboteurs, suicidal ones. Others are coming from Mars but will arrive too late. We are not really very have always lived with it." Gloom grew so thick in the air you could have cut chunks of it out, "The grav-chute," Angelina said quietly so only I heard her. "We will use the grav-chute," I said so loudly that all could hear. A good general depends on able staffwork. The complete plan was now clear, written in letters of fire before my eyes. "This is a go-forbroke operation. Angelina and I are going to drain the charges from all our unessential equipment to put a full charge into the gravchute. Then we will rig a multiple harness for this. Til do the exact computations later but I would guess that it will lift five or six people over those walls and inside before it bums out. Angelina and I are two, the rest will be your best people -- " "A woman -- no, this is not work for a woman," Diyan protested. I patted his arm understanding. "Have no fear. Sweet and demure as she is, Angelina can outfight any ten men in this tent. And everyone is needed. Because the troops outside will be launching a quite realistic attack that might break through -- general at first, then concentrating on one flank. When the noise is at its highest the commando squad will lift over the opposite wall and bore from within. Now let's get things organized." XXgroundwork. These peaceful Martian plowboys knew nothing about scientific slaughter and were only too happy to turn the responsibilities of leadership over to us. Once matters were under way I lay down for a quick sleep -- I had been awake or clubbed unconscious something like two full days and # years and I was understandably tired. The three hours I grabbed were certainly not enough and I awoke chomping and blinking. I chewed a stimtab to make up the difference. It was dark outside the tent and still just as hot. "Are we ready to roll?" I asked. "Any minute now," Angelina said, cool and relaxed and showing no signs of her labors -- she must have been at the stimtabs, too. "We have about four hours to dawn and we are going to need most of that time to get into position. The attack begins at first light." "Do the guides know the way?" "They should. They have been fighting in and around this position for almost a year." IF This was the showdown. The men were all .aware of it. There could be only one winner this day. Perhaps they weren't bom fighters, but they were learning fast. If you are going to fight you fight to win. Diyan showed up with three men who carried a jury-rigged metal harness with the grav-chute built into the center of it. "We are ready," he said. "Everyone knows what he is to do?" "Perfectly. We have already said our goodbyes and the first attack units have moved out." "Then we'll get going, too." Diyan led the way, though how he found it in that steam-heated darkness I have no idea. We stumbled behind him, sweating and cursing under the burden of the clumsy harness, and the less said about the following hours the better. Dawn found us collapsed under the far wall of the fortified city, the highest and apparently the strongest point. Our target. As it appeared out of the haze above us, black and grim, it did not look at all attractive. I squeezed Angelina's hand to show her I was fearless and to cheer her up. She squeezed mine back to show that she knew I was just as frightened as the rest of them. "We'll d # it, Jim," she said. "You know that." "Oh, we'll do it, all right -- the continuing existence of our particular hunk of the future proves that. But it doesn't indicate how many are going to die today -- or which of us will live into the foreseeable future." "We're immortal," she said with such surety that I had to laugh. My morale soared to its usual egotistical heights and I kissed her soundly and well. Explosions sounded suddenly in the distance, rumbling and rolling like thunder from the rock walls. The attack had begun. The clock was running and everything was timed from here on in. I helped everyone strap in and kept an eye on my watch at the same time. As our scheduled hop-off drew close I buckled in as well and touched the grav-chute controls. "Brace yourselves," I said, watching the numbers flutter past. "And be ready to cut free when we hit at the other end." I punched the button and with a metallic groan from the harness my little force of six rose to attack. Wface of the rock, sitting ducks for anyone with a good gun and a keen eye. The sensation was uncomfortable to say the least. I had to lift off gradually to keep our harness from buckling, but I speeded up as fast as I could until we were on maximum lift. A visible aura of heat began to radiate from the grav-chute as it struggled against all our dead weight. Its failure now would be highly unpleasant. Then deep-cut windows flashed by, happily unoccupied -- the black stone changed to dark wall and the crenelated top of the parapet was ahead. I angled toward it and cut the power completely just before we reached the edge. Our acceleration carried us up and over in a high arc and after that events took place at an incredibly rapid pace. Two guards were on the wall -- both were surprised, angry, armed and about to fire. Angelina and I fired first. 'We were using the needle guns now in order to remain undetected for as long as possible. The guards crumpled in silence, their faces and necks suddenly bristly as pincushions. I hit the power button for the landing. Landing? There was no courtyard or solid roof below. We were coming down on the domed and transparent cover of a large workshop, a canopy made of what appeared to be glass panels held in a tangled web of rusty metal braces. We looked at it, horrified, as we rushed toward it. We were just not going to stop in time. It was lovely. Silent, secret attackers, flitting gray ghosts in the dawn we were not. Six pairs of boots hit at the same instant and about five thousand square meters of glass were kicked out. The supporting framework twanged and bent and some of the rusty supports snapped free. For one shuddering instant I thought we were going to follow all the glass that was now crashing and clashing into the chamber below with a hideously loud cacophonyThen the gravchute gave its all with one shuddering last blaze of energy, halting our forward motion. Then it burst into flame. "Grab the supports," I shouted, tearing at the clamps that held the grav-chute to our harness. They resisted, searing my hand, but finally the chute dropped free. It fell straight down into the hall with its screaming occupants below, where it promptly exploded. I sighed and dropped some smoke and flare bombs to add to the confusion. "Our presence is now known," I said, inching back toward safety. "I suggest we get off this precarious jungle gym and back on the job." Moving carefully, sending more glass crashing down as our weight bent frames and panes slipped free, we crept back to the relative safety of the parapet. I paused for a second. "Get on the radio," I told Diyan as he climbed up next to me. "Tell your troops to pull back their attack if they haven't broken in, but to keep up the firing." "They have been repulsed on all sides." "Then tell them to cut their losses. We'll do the blitz from the inside." IF I leading in order to blast any resistance that appeared, while the others protected our flanks and rear. We pushed forward at a sweaty trot. We had to move fast, sow discord as we went -- and find He. The first door opened onto a great circular staircase that seemed to spiral down to infinity. I didn't like the looks of it so I rolled some concussion grenades down it and we pressed on across the roof. "Where to?" Angelina asked. "That tangle of turrets and buildings up ahead seems to be larger and more functionar than most of this place -- that seems as good a guess as any." Something exploded on the tiles nearby and Angelina picked a sniper out of a window above with a sirigle snapshot from the waist. We ran a bit faster, then pressed against the wall, above a straight drop to the valley below, while I blew out a locked door. Then we were in. The place had been designed by a madman. I know that is literally true, but you didn't have to know He to get the message. We prowled corridors and stairs, twisted chambers, angled walls, even one spot where we had to crawl on our hands and knees under the low ceiling. This was where we had out first casualty. Five of us were clear of this room before the ceiling silently and swiftly descended and crushed the rear guard before he could even make a sound. We were all sweating harder. The enemy we met were not armed for the most part and either fled or were dropped by our needle guns. All was speed and silence now -- we moved as fast as we could between the bizarrely decorated walls,finding it easy to avoid looking at the incredible paintings that seemed to cover every meter of available space. "Just one moment," Angelina panted, pulling me to a stop as we came through a high archway to a staircase that spiraled out of sight below, each stone step a different height from the others. "Do you know where we are going?" "Not exactly," I panted in return. "We're simply penetrating the establishment to get ahead of the fighting, while spreading a bit of confusion."  "I thought we had bigger ambitions, like finding He." "Any suggestions how we might go about that?" I am forced to admit that I snapped a bit. Angelina responded with saccharine sweetness. "Why, yes. You might try turning on the time-energy detector you have slung around your neck. I believe that is the reason we brought it." "Just what I was going to do anyway," I said, lying to conceal the fact that I had forgotten completely about the device in the white heat of combat. The needle swung about and pointed with exact precision to the floor beneath our feet. "Down and down we go' I ordered. "Where the time helix coils -- there will be found the He, whom I am about to make into mincemeat." I meant every word -- this was the third and last try. I had constructed a special bomb on which I had painted his name. It was a hellish mixture of a curdler -- guaranteed to coagulate all protein within five meters -- an explosive charge, a load of poisoned shrapnel and a thermite bomb to cook the curdled, coagulated, poisoned body of He. After this the fighting picked up. Some sort of flame-thrower below sent an impenetrable wave of roiling smoke and fire up the stairs . toward us. Singed and smoking, we crashed through a hole I blasted in the wall and. dropped into a laboratory of sorts. Row after row of bubbling retorts stretched away in all directions, hooked to a maze of crystal plumbing. Dark liquids dripped and valves hissed foul-smelling steam. The workers here were unarmed and they dropped before us. We were trotting more slowly now and gasping for breath. "Uggh!" Angelina said, making a twisted face. "Have you seen what is in those jars?" "No, and I don't want to. Press on." Anything that could bother my cool Angelina was something I had no desire to see at all. I was glad when we left this area behind and found another stairwell. Resistance began firming up and we had to battle most of the way now. Only the fact that the defenders were haphazardly armed allowed us to get through at all. Apparently most of the weapons were in use on the walls -- these people came at us with knives, axes, lengths of metal. Screaming and frothing they rushed to the attack and slowed us just by the weight of their numbers. We had our next casualty when a man with a metal spike dropped from some cranny above and stabbed one of the Martians before I could shoot him. They died together and all we could do was leave them and push on. I took a quick look at my watch and broke into a tired trot again. We were running out of time. "Wait," Diyan called out hoarsely. "The needle -- it no longer points." I waved everyone to a stop in a wide passage we were traversing and they dropped, covering the flanks. I looked at the time-energy detector that Diyan had been 'carrying. "Which way was it pointing when you looked at it last?" "Straight ahead -- down the corridor. And there was no angle to the needle at aJI. The machine it pointed to must be on this level." IF "It only works when the time helix is operating. The helix must be deactivated now." "Could He have gone?" Angelina asked, speaking aloud the words I was trying to keep out of my thoughts. "Probably not," I said with phony sincerity. "In any case, we have to push on as long as we can. One last effort now -- dead ahead." We pushed -- and had another casualty when we attempted to cross a layer of writhing branches covered with thorns evidently tipped with poison. I finally had to burn out the stuff with our last thermite grenade. Ammunition and grenades were running short. A brisk firefight at the next corridor junction emptied my needle gun. I tossed it aside and kicked the heavy door that barred further progress in this direction. It would have to be blown open and my grenades were exhausted. I turned to Angelina just as a communication plate next to the door lit up. "You have lost your final chance," He said, grinning wickedly at me from the screen. said, then spoke to Angelina in a language I was sure He did not speak. Only she and I knew it. "Any concussion grenades left?" "I am talking -- you will listen," He said. "One," Angelina told me. "I'm all ears,' I said to him. "Take out that door," I said to her. "I have dispatched all the people I need to a safe place in the past where we will never be found. I have sent the machines we will need, I have sent everything that will be needed to build a time helix as well. I am the last to go -- and when I leave the time machinery will be destroyed behind me. The grenade exploded but the door was thick and remained stuck  in the frame. Angelina sprayed it with explosive bullets. He talked on as though nothing were happening. "I know who you are, little man from the future, and I know where you come from. Therefore I shall destroy you before you have a chance to be born. I will destroy you, my only enemy. Then the past and the future and all eternity will be mine -- " The door went down and I was the first one through. My bullets were exploding in the delicate machinery of the time helix as my He-bomb arched through the air. But he had already activated the time helix. Its green glow was gone -- He was gone. My hellbomb exploded in empty air and was more of a danger to us than to the vanished one it had been intended for. We dropped to the floor as death whizzed overhead and when we looked next the machinery in the room was dissolving. He spoke again and the muzzle of my gun looked for him. "I made this recording in case I had to leave abruptly, so sorry." He chuckled at his own bad humor. "I have gone now -- you cannot follow me but I can follow you through time. And destroy you. But you have other enemies with you and I wish them to feel my vengeance too. They will die. You will all die -- everything will die. I control eternity, destroy worlds. I will destroy this Earth. I leave you only enough time to consider and suffer. You cannot escape. "In one hour every nuclear weapon on this planet will be triggered. Earth will be destroyed." IV # gained from blowing up the recording machine that had He's hateful voice coiled in its guts but I did it anyway -- one shot. The thing exploded in a cloud of plastic bits and electronic components and the insane laughter was cut off in mid-cackle. Angelina patted my hand. "You did your best," she said. "But it wasn't good enough. I'm sorry I got you involved in this." "I wouldn't want it any other way." "This sounds like something very terrible will be done to your people," Diyan said. "I am very sorry." "Nothing to feel sorry about. We're all in the same boat." "In one sense, yes. But Mars is saved and we who die here know that we accomplished at least that much. Our families and our people will live on." "I wish I could say the same," I said with utmost gloom, borrowing his gun and picking off two of the enemy who tried to rush in through the broken door. "When we lost here we lost for all time. I'm surprised we are still around at all. We should have been snuffed out like candles." "Isn't there anything we can do?" Angelina asked. "Nothing I can think of. You can't outrun H-bombs. The timehelix equipment is kind of melted so that escape is out. What we need is a new time helix, which we are not going to get unless one appears out of thin air." In echo to my words there was the sudden crack of displaced air above. I rolled and ducked, thinking the sound meant a new attack. It did not, A large green metal case "hung unsupported in mid-air. Angelina looked at me in the strangest manner possible. "If that is a time helix -- you must tell me how you did it." For once in my outspoken life I was silent, even more so when the box began to drift down before us and, just before it grounded, I read the lettering on the side. IF I didn't move. It all seemed too unbelievable. The two grav-chutes strapped to the top of the case, the timing device that had caused them to lower the whole thing to the floor, the small recording apparatus also fixed to the case with the boldly lettered words play me lettered across it. I boggled and gaped. It was ever-practical Angelina who stepped forward and pressed the starting button. Professor Coypu's voice rolled out to us. "I suggest you get moving rather quickly. The bombs, you know, go off quite soon. I have been asked to tell you, Jim, that the bomb control apparatus is concealed in a cabinet on the far wall behind the dehydrated rations. It has been disguised to look like a portable radio because it really is a portable radio. With additions. If mishandled it will set all the bombs off instantly. Which would be uncomfortable. You are to set the three dials to the digits six-six-six, forming, I belipve, the number of the beast. Set them in sequence from right to left. When they have been set press the off button. Now turn me off until you have done that. Be quick about it." "All right, all right," I said, irritated, and switched him off. He had quite a commanding tone for an individual who wouldn't be born for another ten thousand years or so. And how come he knew so much? I complained, but I went and did the job, hurling the dehydrated rations to the floor where they obviously belonged. They looked like lengths of yellowishgreen desiccated octopus tentacles. Suckers and all. The radio was there. I did not attempt to move it, but set the dials as instructed and pressed the button. "Nothing happened," I said. "Which is just the way we want it," Angelina said, standing on tiptoe to give me an appreciative kiss on the cheek. "You have again saved the world." swaggered back to the recorder before the admiring gazes of the Martians and switched it on again. "Don't think you have saved the world," Coypu said. Party pooper. "You have merely averted its destruction for approximately twentyeight days. Once activated, the bombs wait that period, then selfdestruct. But your Martian associates can profit from this delay. I believe they have supply ships on the way?" "Due in fifteen days," Diyan said, hushed awe in his voice. "Fifteen days, more than enough time. Earth will be destroyed, but when its present condition is considered this seems more a blessing than a tragedy. It is now time for you to open this case. On top of the controls is a molecular disrupter. If this is pointed at the outside wall -- high up where the small windows are -- and angled down at fifteen degrees, it will cut a tunnel that will exit outside the walls. I suggest this be done as soon as possible. The Martians can get out that way. Now press button A and the time helix will form. James, Angelina,  strap on the grav-chutes and leave as soon as the ready light comes on." Still partially unbelieving, I did as instructed. The time helix crackled into existence and groaned and sparked as it'wound itself up. Diyan stepped forward, his' hand out to take mine. "We will never forget you and what you have done for our world. Generations yet unborn will read your name and accounts of your exploits in their schoolbooks." "Are you sure you have the spelling right?" I asked. "You make light of this because you are a great and humble man." That was the first time I had ever been accused of humility. Or of greatness, for that matter. "A statue will be erected with James diGriz, World Saver inscribed upon it." Each Martian shook my hand in turn -- it was very embarrassing. There was an admiring gleam in Angelina's eye as well, but women are simple creatures and enjoy basking even in reflected attention. Then the ready iight came on and, after a few more goodbyes, we put on the grav-chutes as directed and for the last time I sincerely hoped -- were bathed in the cool fire of the time force. Our contact must have triggered the apparatus because before I could make the very apropos remark that was on my lips everything went zoinng. T HE trip was no worse than any other, certainly no better. This was one kind of transportation I would never get adjusted to. Stars like speeding bullets, spiral galaxies whirling around like fireworks, movement that was no movement, time that was no time -- we witnessed all the usual phenomena. The only feature that was good about the trip was its ending in the gymnasium of the Special Corps base, the largest open chamber there. We floated in midair, my Angelina and I, smiling madly at each other and oblivious to the cries of amazement from the sweating athletes below. We held hands in the simple happiness of knowledge that the future still lay ahead of us. "Welcome home," she said. We floated down, waving to our friends and ignoring their questions for the moment. Coypu and the time lab came first -- we had to report. I knew a quick feeling of unhappiness that He had escaped me and hoped that the next time he was tracked down a few very large bombs could be sent in my place. Coypu looked up and gaped. "What are you doing here?" he IF said. "You are supposed to be eliminating this He person. Didn't you get my message?" "Message?" I asked. "Yes. We made ten thousand metal cubes and sent them back to Earth. Sure you would get one of them. Radio direction and such." "Oh, that old message. Received and acted upon, but you are a little out of date. What is that doing here?" I'm afraid my voice rose a bit on this last as I pointed with vibrating finger at the compact machine across the room. "That? Our Mark One compact folding time helix? What else should it be doing? We have just finished it." "You've never used it?" "Never." "Well you are going to use it now. You have to strap a couple of grav-chutes to it -- here, use these -- and a recorder and a molecular disrupter and shoot it right back to save Angelina and me." "I have a pocket recorder, but why -- " He took a familiar-looking machine from his lab coat. "Do it first -- explanations can come later. Angelina and I are about to be blown up if you don't do this right." I grabbed some paint and wrote play me on the recorder, then the machine. The exact moment when He had left Earth was determined by the time-tracer and the arrival for this cargo set for a few minutes later on the big helix. Coypu dictated the tape under my instruction and it wasn't until the whole bundle was whisked back into the past that I heaved a grateful sigh of relief. "We are saved," I said. "Now for that drink you promised me." "I didn't promise -- " "I'll have it anyway." self and scratching on a pad while I prepared some hefty drinks for Angelina and myself. We clunked glasses and were baptizing our throats when he came over. "I needed that," I said. "It must be ages since I last had a drink." "It is all coming clear at last," Coypu said. "Is it all right if we sit while we listen? It's been a busy couple of hundred thousand years." "Yes, by all means. Let me retrace the course of events. A time attack was launched upon the Corps by He, a most successful assault. Our numbers were quite reduced -- " "Yes, like down to two. You and me. "Quite right. Though as soon as I had dispatched you to the year nineteen seventy-five I found that all things were as they had been. They reverted most suddenly. I was all alone one instant -- then the laboratory was full of people who never knew they had been gone. We put in a lot of work on improving the time-tracking techniques -- took us almost four years to get things the way we wanted." "Did you say four years?" "Nearer five before we got it operational. The trails were distant and hard to follow, most tangled as well." "Angelina!" I cried with sudden realization. "You never told me you had been here alone for five years." "I didn't think you liked older women." "I love them as long as they are you. You were lonely?" "Hideously. Which is why I volunteered to go after you. Inskipp had another volunteer but he broke his leg." "My darling -- I bet I know how that happened -- " She is not the blushing type but she did lower her eyes. "We are getting ahead in sequence." Coypu said. "But that is what happened. We traced you from nineteen seventy-five to eighteen-oh-seven -- and traced He and his minions as well. There was a loop in time there, an anomaly of some kind that eventually sealed itself off. We could tell that it was to collapse with you sealed inside it and succeeded at last in forcing enough power into the helix to penetrate the sealed loop just before it went down. That was when Angelina went back with the coordinates for your next skip in time, the long twenty-thousand-year jump after He. You had to go after him because the time paths were there to prove that you had followed him. Though, of course, history was clear by then and we knew how it would all end." "You knew?" I asked, feeling I had missed the point somewhere. "Of course. The entire nature of the attack was clear, though you all, of course, htd to fulfill your destined roles." "Could you spell it out again? And slowly." "Of course. You managed to destroy He's operation twice in the remote past and eventually reset his machine and sent him forward to the twilight day of Earth. Here he spent an immense amount of time, almost two hundred years, climbing to power and uniting all the planet's resources. He was a genius, albeit a mad one, and could do this. He also remembered you, Jim -- fading memories and half insane ones after two hundred years, but he remembered enough to know you were the enemy. Therefore he launched a time war to destroy you before you could destroy him, trapping you as he thought on a planet about to be destroyed by atomic explosion. From there he returned to # to attack the Corps. You came after hiql and he fled to # to lay the time loop trap for him. I don't know where he planned to go from there but his plans appear to have been altered and he went instead IF twenty thousand years ahead." "I did that, altered the setting on his machine just before he left." "That is all there is to it. We can relax now that it is over and I do believe I'll join you in that drink." "Relax?" The word came from my throat with a singularly nasty grating sound. "From what you have said it sounds as if I started the whole attack on the Special Corps by altering the setting on the time helix that sent He to the world where he launched his campaign to destroy the Corps." "That's one way of looking at it." A way I see it, He just bounces in a circle in time forever. Running from me, chasing me, running from me... Damn! When was he bom? Where does he come from?" "Those terms are meaningless in this sort of temporal relationship. He exists only within this time loop. If you wish to say it, though it is most imprecise, it would be fair to say that he never was born. The situation exists apart from time as we normally know it. As does the fact that you returned here with the information to be sent to yourself about the settings on the atomic bombs to enable you to return here to inform yourself about the settings on the bombs in order -- " "Enough!" I groaned, reaching for the bottle with trembling hand. "Just mark the mission as being accomplished and put me in for a fat bonus. To think that I gave up the occupation of an honest thief to become involved in this sort of thing." "Thief is the correct word," a nauseatingly familiar voice cried out. "And crook, con man, blackmailer, briber and more." Inskipp stood in the doorway waving his florid face and a sheaf of papers in my direction. "Five years I have been waiting for you, diGriz, and this time you are not getting away. No excuses like timje wars now. You crook, you steal from your buddies, urggh!" He said, Urggh! because Angelina had popped a sleep capsule under his nose. He folded gently to the floor. She grabbed the sheaf of papers, then took me by the arm. "After five years I need you more than that nasty old man does. Let's bum this file and steal a ship before he comes to. It will be months before he can find us and by that time something else will have come up and he will need us to work again. We can have a lovely crooked honeymoon." "Wonderful! Here's to crime!" "Here's to time," Coypu said, getting in the spirit of the thing. We shouted our toasts together, broke our glasses against the wall, jumped lightly over Inskipp's snoring body and were out the door. It's a bright, glorious universe out there and we intend to enjoy all of it.  mounted probe had checked the atmosphere. It was similar to Earth's. The radiation levels, were high but safe. The surface was cool and firm. The climate was temperate. The probe had also found the source of the signals. The cameras were pointed directly at it. The signals came from a saucerlike object, a domed thing with a port in it. The port was open. The probe's antennas were right on it. The steady, weak, primitive signal continued. In stationary orbit high over the at the controls of his ship, the HG. He and the Russian, Mareshefsky, watched the control room screens as Bella locked herself into the HG's Lander and then separated from the mother ship for the quick flight down. Their probe on the planetoid's surface picked up the Lander's touchdown. The white of the manmade Lander was another conand Mareshefsky saw on the HG's screens were true. The intensity of the color was almost blinding. The sea's redness was topped with whitecaps. The beach, if it was a beach, wore purple colors. The vegetation, bushes, grass, even the few stunted trees were all in blue tones and the mountains, high and sharply cut, displayed a fury of multiple color, as if a child had gone mad with a crayon box. switched on another screen. The Earth Interplanetary Enforcers were still patrolling. They were protecting the life form on the planetoid. The HG's screens showed they were still focused on the decoy. If they changed their be in a race for his life. The Enforcers had orders to blast him out of the sky. If they caught him, they'd blast him. It was not easy for him to admit hunter. Earth's zoos held more brought back alive from space than had been captured by all the other hunters combined. "I'm opening now," came Bella's voice from the planetoid, clear, sweet, true. The steady and continuous background signal from the domed saucer was on minimal amplification on the same frequency. to focus his probe's cameras on the Lander. Mareshefsky stood up to look as the Lander's port slowly dropped open. When it was down, still there was no movement. "One hour from now, yes?"Bella asked, checking her time. "I'll increase the wager. I'll get it within twenty minutes," her voice said. "I'll double my bet on that." "I accept you," Mareshefsky told her. "Good. It'll be too easy," she said. And then they saw her on their screens. After the probe's check of he still would use breathing apparatus and a suit, but Bella had insisted on using nothing. She came into full focus on the HG's screens. Her form-fitting one-piece suit looked as stylish as anything on the most fashionable street on Earth. She was a stunningly made, beautiful woman. Her hair blew in the wind of the planetoid and somehow with that the menace seemed to be less. It was easy to forget that the on-the-job mortality rate among hunters was close to one hundred percent. The hunters who survived at any given time were as ruthless and vicious as the do-gooders and the Protectionists on Earth claimed they were. and fools bored him. To go down to try to capture whatever was on the planetoid was an occupational lunacy -- but to do it as if you were going to a style show was so stupid that it embarrassed him. If she was going down to seduce whatever was in the thing or on it, she was dressed for it. But in the light of his memories of the monstrous beings that lived and grew in space she was F IT he watched carefully and professionally as she climbed down, faced the probe's cameras corrupt, she was rotten, she was as loathsome as Mareshefsky was -- as he himself was -- and yet, seeing her standing there, he had to admit that she looked like an angel. "Everything's quiet," Bella said. "There's a strong wind -- an Earth feel to it. With it and the temperature it is like a spring day. The colors are, extreme. We were wrong about them. They are far beyond the range and values of your cameras." She walked a few steps. "There's a feeling of artificiality. I don't know why. I just suddenly felt that. The surface is firm -- but strange. It has an almost papier-mache feeling underfoot. But I see no imprint in it, not my footprints and not anyone else's or any thing's." A honking noise came from the audio system. "I just let out the horn sounds," Bella said from the planetoid. IF "No response. Not yet. The environment gives me a strong feeling that this place is uninhabited. I feel that I'm the first. But I have an intuitive unease. I feel threatened." They watched her walk around, the probe and the Lander managing fully to cover her through their checked out to the Enforcer ships. If the Enforcers came the understanding was that whichever of the three hunters was on the planetoid would be abandoned. But there was no threat from that quarter -- not yet. "I see nothing but the dome. It's a dome, though, on a saucerlike object. I don't think you can see it on your screens, but there's a clear material, a plastic or glass, a pod that it's standing on. From here I see no light emanations. My heat detector shows specific warmth in the interior. Clearly no damage visible. There's no suggestion of a crash landing. Ah, there's something -- an insignia right by the door. Can you get a closeup of it? From here it seems a diamond shape with forms -- calligraphic forms -- inside. It isn't a natural phenomenon. It couldn't be. I don't think it is. I'm letting the horn go again, on the high frequencies." probe to a spot closer to her. It got a front view and through her thin clothing it was possible to see that she was aroused, excited. "No response," she said. "There seems a complete seal. Only this one port. No visible exhausts. No moving parts. The radiation level is high, extremely high." The two men in the HG watched. "Sorry," Bella said. "I was just thinking. There doesn't seem any alternative. I have to go aboard it. I feel slight panic. I'm glad I don't have on a suit. I feel bound up enough as it is. I have to admit that right at the end, right before confrontation, I always am terrified. I always feel like vomiting. I'm adjusting my weapon to maximum. If anything is in there and comes at me I'm not going to take a chance on trying to reason with it." "It's a hell of a thing," she said, just an exclamation. "Look. Next time we do this, let's use a drag antenna. Who knows whether our radio signals will come out of the thing. Sorry. That was me swallowing. I confess that I feel absolute foreboding and terror. I feel the way I felt when I was a child and had to perform or recite. How did I ever get here? What am I doing here? "Well, it is my game. I'm going in." They watched her lift her foot and touch the domed saucer's ramp. "Lucky," she said. "First step. No bolts of energy have charged through me. From here, by the way, I'd say the material is definitely a ceramic. Okay. Next step. It's not possible to see anything inside. It's just darkness. Wait! Now I can. There's a flame or light in there. Nothing else. It doesn't seem to illuminate anything. Just a flame, a bottled flame. I don't know what it is. "I'm at the top now. Can you see me? I guess I can't stall. I'm going in. Nothing except that flame. Well, here goes nothing. I'm now -- " Enforcers' position and then broadened the focus of the probe's cameras on the domed saucer. They waited. "Use a drag antenna if you go "Yes," Mareshefsky said. "Twenty seconds." Russian hunter and then they both looked at the screens, waited, watched. "One minute. She must see something in it." The digital clocks clicked off the time. "I'm afraid of nothing, you know." "Ninety seconds. But now I have a tightening in my chest. What is happening down there?" Nothing seemed to be happening. The blue grasses were blowing in the wind -- the red sea was whipping up more whitecaps. The white saucer was just sitting there. 'Two minutes. A long time." They kept watching. "Five minutes," Mareshefsky read the clock. "Start counting to the Lander's liftoff now." "You think she's not returning." Mareshefsky watched the clocks, sometimes recited the figures. chess game with the computer. "Five minutes to the Lander V liftoff," Mareshefsky said. of check and then reached over and turned down a volume control. The microphonic pickups on both the probe and the Lander sent the sound of the Lander's horns and then its mechanical voice up to the HG. Four minutes , thirty seconds to liftoff. Mark. And then came the interminable sighing of the lonely wind for thirty seconds and then the new time. Every thirty seconds the voice spoke. And then it was time. IF "Liftoff," Mareshefsky said. watch it. The propulsion didn't kick up dust or debris. He checked the monitor board and saw that the Lander was returning with no problem. He turned to look at Mareshefsky. "You want your turn?" "Is it possible to put the probe aboard the saucer?" swung his chair around and reached forward to activate the probe. He set it off, the tractor tread slowly spinning to turn it, and then he moved it across the space and then up onto the ramp and slowly up it. "Now we see," Mareshefsky said. the top of the ramp and they looked in by way of the little probe's cameras. All they saw was the flame. "If anyone is inside, please come through his microphone. The echo of his voice came back from the probe. To Mareshefsky, he said, "I'm going to try to run it in and put an automatic withdrawal on it. Ready. Now." The probe moved in. The screens went dead. M areshefsky came into the control room of the HG. infrequently watching the Enforcer ships, still receiving the constant, steady and unchanging signal from the domed saucer on the planetoid. Russian enter, but he didn't acknowledge the man. Finally Mareshefsky said, "I think I will go down now." "An hour? Or you want longer?" "An hour should be enough." and readjusted the timers, the entire cycling of the Lander. "I can offer you another probe. There are weapons, quite an assortment in there. Or free advice," moving his queen to check the computer. years, as you have beaten me again and again, I haven't thought well of you. But now, actually being "with you, I like you. You really don't care. You don't care about Bella. You don't care about the Enforcers. You don't care about yourself." "You're wrong. I care. I'll even suggest you give up. Don't go down there. It's not worth it." "You would lie if I asked, but happens that I do not come back -- my friend, you will take your turn. I am a gambler and you are one and I tell you that you will take your turn. It is a thing that we do. And I do not want your advice or your weapons or your anything else. If I am a hunter, l am one. If my hunting is not good enough then I'll get what I deserve." "If we got what we deserved we all would have been struck down in our infancy." "Are you troubled about what we've done? Think if it happened to men. A few taken away, thrown into their zoos. Who would give a damn? And as far as wiping out life on planets by being too casual about antibacterial checks, we've all done it. It has no importance. The whole of space is filled, crowded with things. We're not big enough to dent it. There's nothing we could do that would rate being recorded in a Universal history, no act, no crime, nothing." "Luck," he said. "I will use a drag aiUenna for you." "If it won't get in your way." "It is nothing. If I return successfully we will go ahead with the partnership?" "Why not?" as a farewell. "Mareshefsky." until the Lander touched down.  Then he sat back, put up his feet and studied the screens. Nothing , had changed. The screen was filled with the damned domed saucer or i whatever it was. The surface of the i planetoid was unchanged, nothing had moved. The moving body N the planetoid, of whatever material, was constantly facing the Earth's ; sun. The light fell at a slight angle on the dome, but there was fully adequate illumination. "I'm down now. There is little to say. I'm standing on it. It is exactly as Bella said. Colors are very extreme. I would say that you'd be impressed by the mountains. Their height is considerable. And the sea, the sea is a red ocean building up to a storm. Very come at you, know that I would not mind finishing here. It is not unpleasant. It has a calm feeling to it. "I'm now facing the saucer. It is definitely a ship, perhaps made by a molding process. I've never seen the material. Call it a porous ceramic -- a semiporous ceramic. My guess would be magneticor beam-powered. No moving parts visible and no concession to aeronautic considerations. An incongruity with this atmosphere." "Why isn't it a dwelling?" no IF "Why would it be?" Mareshefsky answered. "It has the feeling of a ship. "Bella, Bella," Mareshefsky radio from the Lander's pickup. "Nothing. I'm calling but there is no response." He was quiet again, just walking around the thing, trying to tempt whatever was inside to make a move. "What the hell can it be?" he muttered. "I say give it up. There are a lot more you can get easier. Let the Enforcers get it or not get it." "I couldn't rest. What is it? Space is a bore. This is a mystery. I think I will go aboard now." "Take a shot at it. You may stun whatever's in the thing." "An idea. But if Bella is in there -- " "I'm now on the ramp. The antenna is with me. The wind suddenly has picked up. There's a howling sound to it. But it's all right. Good. I almost slipped. There's a dark slippery substance at the top of the ramp." Mareshefsky drew his weapon. "I'm right at the entrance now. I can see in clearly. It is exactly as we saw it. A light, perhaps nothing more than an I incandescent bulb. Not clear. For a moment I thought I almost saw a movement in the upper part of the craft, a convulsive move. I couldn't feel anything here. You can hear me. I will just put my head in. NW I am -- " watched the Russian fall forward into the domed saucer. There was no answer, only the continuing ping, ping, ping-ping -- , ping, ping-ping from the domed saucer's transmitter. the Lander's television lens on full power. He could read made in japan on the sole of the # East # Street New York. N.Y. # (The regular subscription price for either of these distinguished bimonthlies is # for # issues.) # issues of IF for # # issues of Galaxy for # Enclosed find  Save! address in payment for my subscription as checked above. Russian's shoe. "Mareshefsky!" Steadily, without being able to see anything inside the domed Mareshefsky's body was slowly dragged inside. He waited and watched. He didn't recall the Lander. He let it spend its full time on the planetoid's surface. But when the one hour was over he didn't allow any more. As soon as it returned secured the HG. He programed it for the return to Mars, for the long swing around to Earth. He hesitated for a moment and then moved his finger to press the buttons that would start the return journey. He couldn't do it. He argued and damned and cursed himself, but he just couldn't do it. He had to go down. He got his suit, attached the equipment he always used. After each move he paused to call himself a dirty name. He was the worst damn fool. Why did he have to go? He didn't need whatever was down there. He didn't need the money. He didn't need the credit. Why couldn't he just let it go? But he couldn't. Even as he climbed into the Lander and carefully set everything to full manual control he fought with himself. But he released from the HG and he went down. No magic or romanticism drove him. He felt no force, no obligation, no loyalty. He was going down because he was a fool. He couldn't resist the challenge. He had to find out what the damned thing was. He put the Lander down just behind the domed saucer, not in front where the others had come in. As soon as he put his foot on the surface of the planetoid he let loose with a blast from his weapon and then he did it five more times. Then he walked up to the saucer, turned his blaster high and blew a part of the pod apart. There was a sharp crack, a shrieking sound. The thing tottered and swayed to to the port side. He turned his blaster at the port and he fired into it. He walked up the twisted but otherwise intact ramp and saw the lamp inside and he blasted that. And then he walked into the saucer, the dome. The planetoid kept moving. It moved beyond the concern of the Enforcers, of the do-gooders on Earth. It moved out into deeper space sending its radio invitation to anyone who would listen. One and one are two. One and one are two. Ping , Ping, ping -- ping. It was still hungry. # IF I T was spring again. April -- and the vapor shield was pale newapple green. A gnawing was in my flesh strips, sharp ache and longing tear -- or many tears, maybe, attempting to bring my heart rain, trying to surface and soften my new-metal steel. The Stronghold air was all at once too thick, too hot, and it smelled like old brass doorknobs dropped in a trash-box blaze. Yes! Spring is that season! Caution is the word -- iron control and bird-dogging of the mind are the strategy. Against betrayal, selfbetrayal. And maybe I was not the only one. Maybe the other Stronghold masters, too, were trembling in their innermost Cells of Authority, fighting a silent battle as the flesh strips writhed and remembered spring... "Assembly!" I shouted the word. I screamed the call. I thumbed the button that let loose Noisy-Din. "Emergency!" And they all came toggling as I had trained them to do, as they knew they must do, moving with shank's mares of newmetal, the hinges and braces of speed. Our speed! Yes. They tended toward the Great Hall of Discussions with all the clank and hurry they owned, the multitude of the weapons men, the servants -- just a few -- and the couple or so mutants (little flesh bums dressed all in tin) I allowed at times in the Stronghold so that I might be amused. (Horrible soft mushy people inside their tin, the flesh bums; not at all the bright and shiny solid grace we Stronghold people are, taut and straight in our new-metal steel replacements, with just a few flesh strips holding our godfhood bound). While they "ran" toward the Great Hall of Discussions I left my hip-snuggie throne in the innermost Room of Authority. I moved the same way they moved, toggling my hinges and braces to be there on time.Yes, with our newmetal steel replacements, from the commonest churl to the King we have given up grace of animal movement in walking. But when we bang into a corner or fall to the floor in a misstep or when a piece of battle-flung metal catches us on a part we do not bruise or break. We do not bleed. The real world's beatings we take now and just pay them a never-mind, as though those terrible hammers were in thick, soft velvet gloves. Yes. We win some and lose some. To defeat old enemy Time we bartered well for the long gains and paid the fee of the losses as we had to -- as we cut our flesh selves down. They were all there waiting as I toggled onto the stage. The silence was that hushed respectful absence of any sound at all that benefits IF the entrance of the King. They had to be ready to storm the gates of utter impossibility if I so hinted -- and they knew it. But my request this time was mild, though not so mildly put. I was emotional. I let them know the wish of their gleaming King -- I screamed it. But what I demanded should not have been a thing too hard to come by even at this late date. "Make me an acre!" I cried. "An acre of soil!" The looks of the weapons men and the servants were all of disbelief. "I would plant crops and cultivate, this softest of the spring months of the year. Something deep in my flesh strips grows, unfolds, flowers and cries for husbandry at this year-time that was once verdant with newborn leaves and stems. But now in our great steel times "nothing is born, all is made. Only the vapor shield is live new-apple green -- the rest is all cold steel. Ah, it is beautiful, the precision we've gained, the flowers all up in metal in their rows, the leaves all folding out ersatz and shiny as the great trees leap through the yard holes at the press of a switch. And the grass that comes is just-so green, a nice ever-last carpet as chunks of the prearranged plastic tumble upside down! All this at the turn of a switch. But it leaves a somehow hunger deep in some empty wells. The flesh strips writhe and remember. So make me an acre of soil!" T HE looks of the weapons men and the servants continued all disbelief. Whispers marched through the room and a small stale ribbon of sighs went out. And finally my head weapons man, Slag Morgbawn, dour and efficient, once himself a Stronghold master and a "replaced" man, his lone flesh strip alive now in a built-in pickle jar, spoke. "With all due respect to our chief," he said, "and your station of merit and the fact that you are a kind of King -- an acre of soil is about as possible just now as our handing you the sun nestled in a little bucket of ice. Not that we wouldn't do it, if we could, Sire, you understand -- hand you the sun, I mean, nestled in a little bucket of ice. But some things arejust not to be done, Sire, no matter' how keen the desire of the would-be doer. Or how shining great and honored the demander." "An acre of soil!" I repeated my cry. "Excuses are for old-women warriors who exaggerate always the deed to be done. Are any oldwomen warriors present? Ah, I acres of soil, many as close as the reach of our ever-last mechanized eyeballs. And one acre's procurement for me, your King, you compare with the sun riding a small bucket of ice and set at my feet? Break out the little blasters! Don't tell me the greatest Stronghold on Earth will boggle at such a tiny request as the need of a little planting dirt for its master's spring cropping. I know our soil now, for many sterilized reasons, is under a few feet of plastic and that on top of a goodly apron of concrete sometimes laid on steel. Certainly we've hidden the soil after 'they' mined it, raped it, poisoned it, totally ravaged it for the things of 'their' greed. But break out the little portable blasters! I'm sure our great Stronghold -- toward which all other Strongholds think in shudder and shame, being so deeply in fear of us -- can blast down a hill or two. We can penetrate those few feet of plastic, that concrete and, if need be, that bedrock of steel! Will we find soil to our liking? Has the ransacked dirt come back after lying for years under its blanket of plastic, its comforter of concrete and, in some cases, its bundler of steel? Has the soil been cleansed? Has the sick Earth sweetened? Listen," I said, pulling taut my leg uplifters to make me the tallest of the tall and pressing the small neck button that would give my voice more shove, "if we ask doubting questions what will ever get done? Where will our destiny be? If we had never done more -- wouldn't we still be tail-tied to trees, hairy and dumb, meatbodied, flesh-aped to nothing, not knowing? Break out the little blasters. Pulverize me a hill! But don't blarn it. Don't blow it to high skies and all winds -- just make me an acre of soil!" green April day preparing to war on a hill. All the kill-potential of Stronghold # could be employed to expedite our task, if need should dictate an all-out war on the plastic mound. But I had given the order for little tag-along blasters, as seemed to fit the need. All my weapons men and their mechanical stale ribbon of doubting sighs would obey. Yes! Soon we were out in the field as if geared for war, riding our crawltrack transports with our portable weapons of ultimate destruction all to the sides and the rear and I felt more like a god than a King. (After all, how many Kings have created an acre of soil in an apple-green vapor month?) The logistics of the little blasters attack and all the attendant problems of invasion were handled ably by my weapons men headed, a little reluctantly I'm afraid, by Slag Morgbawn, the IF most feared weapons man in all wide Moderan. I'm thinking he thought it a little beneath him to be planning attacks on a hill that had no purpose other than being hill. But perhaps the fierce and the mighty need some shame at times, a homely humbling little task to take them clear back to themselves and restore them to the realities. I carried a tiny sprig of springmetal blooms and hummed a lilting tune as we pressed toward the hill. The tin and silver Tirds of Central Seasons spring, released by throwing switches in Bird Control, flew far and wide, filled the air with the whooshing of their jets and blew At the Statler-Hilton Hotel, New York City. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Devra Langsam, # Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York.  Statler-Hilton Hotel Boston, Massachusetts. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For inforStation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Center Harbor, New Hampshire. For information: Ed Meskys, Box #, Center Harbor, New Hampshire #. European Science Fiction Convention with the Trieste SF Film Festival. Membership: #, attending; #, Tony Lewis, # Unity Ave., Belmont, Leland Sapiro, Box #, University #AA, Melbourne, Victoria #; O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Convention address: Eurocon #, Casella Postale #, #, Venezia, Italy. Send membership money via individual agents listed above.  World Science Fiction Convention. At the International Hotel, #I West Century Blvd., Los Angeles, California #. Guest-ofHonor: Frederik Pohl. Fan Guests-of-Honor: Robert and Juanita Coulson. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: L.A. Con, P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, California #. their sharp metal shrill. Ah, spring! We opened on the hill. We moved in close and let it have our shots. We cracked it wide! We crushed it down. We went through plastic, concrete and steel with penetrating blasts. In some ways it was like cracking and peeling some giant bird's three-layered egg. What did we find inside the three-layered egg? Had rattlesnakes come back? Had buzzing death been imprisoned to live all that while in our little hill? Our instruments droned their warning and we moved away from the illness that spoke to us from the unwell soil. It was contaminated, ruined, still ailing. We moved against other hills. We blasted and cut them down. We moved in with our gauges and heard that awful drone. Hill after grim hill. Until very late in the afternoon my pride came loose and I stood up and shouted at the whole wide high mocking air and green heaven, "Two buckets of good soil! I'll settle for two buckets of good soil!" Did a god somewhere hear? Well, what's to believe about such things? They stood before me, two little flesh mutant-men, disfigured, all down-drooped in the shoulders and looking back-sprained, with gristlemeat faces and hands that must have been through a broil. But smiling. Smiling at the clown King now with his pride all on the ground. And offered two small buckets of soil, one from each man. Oh, God... So we went on home -- all that kill potential now led by a King cut down to clown, carrying two precious buckets of soil through the apple-green spring air as though they were jewel boxes filled full of diamonds in gold. (Don't ask me where they got soil. Under some secret hill, out of some dark lost cranny, up from some deep-down well? Two buckets of pure uncontaminated soil that just sat there and looked glum and quiet at all our instruments' cajoling. Not a peep, not a tick was uttered when our gauges passed nearby or probed in deep to see if this soil would talk, speak of an illness.) Yes, I planted sunflowers that spring to grow the sun out of two buckets of sweet pure soil. They came up and flourished. In July they bloomed, high on the Stronghold wall, two gold spots waving. Slag Morgbawn came to look one day in mid-July. He stood by my side high on the Stronghold wall, his lone flesh strip alive in its solution in the built-in pickle jar, his manner dour, as always. I could not resist saying: "When your King seems to want the sun, just obey the orders, huh?"  IF ence-fiction readers, Isaac Asimov has not only begun to write fiction again, but his older novels are being re-issued by Fawcett Crest books. Eight are currently available and the others will soon appear -- all will carry a uniform price of #. Among those now on the stands is Pebble in the Sky , the first novel by Asimov -- and still my favorite. This one uses time travel, telepathy and a number of other devices to define its point -- an Earth that is despised by the great Trantorian Galactic Empire. A humble and elderly tailor from # finds himself involved in a war Earth has declared against the entire Empire and has his loyalty twisted and tested severely. It makes fora firstrate story -- and for the discerning, suggests possibilities that were mysteriously never used by the later Second Foundation -- or were they? A novel that is much less known than it should be, unlike the first, is The End of Eternity. This deals with the masters of time, who can enter a time tube ndt only to observe all time -- but to busy themselves with changing every era to suit their ideals of what should be. But for each change that is made, some trouble crops up to force them to redesign continually. They keep the inventions of each age, of course, even when they destroy the inventors -- and they serve as the ultimate master race. Harlan is a man who has been brought into the time tube and educated to be one of the changers of what is beyond the exclusive world of the tube. But he falls for a girl from a period that he must change. She may exist after the change -- but with another culture, another history and another personality to fit the newly altered age. She won't be the woman he loves. Despite the rigid laws of his time mastership he removes her and tries to hide her in the far future, while he goes back to help find why the whole timetube system is in grave danger -- it may fail completely because the probability is that it will never be invented back in the past! Other writers have used the basic device, but I know of no one who has wrung as much out of it or has developed all the possibilities of paradox. The story is a romance with a surprise. It is also a twisted, convoluted puzzle -- and it is a book no Asimov fan should fail to read. to have returned to the science-fiction fold. Most of his work during the last few years has been in fantasy. He has written of ghosts, goblins and Shakespeare; of reincarnations of ancient superstitions and civil war heroes and of outright mysticism. But in his latest book, the feeling is again that of science fiction, though man's beliefs and what may be true of them are still central to his theme. His A Choice of Gods (Putnam, #) is somewhat reminiscent of the City series. Again we have most of mankind gone away, as was true at the end of the aforementioned series. Robots are taking care of the planet -- the Indians have been left behind and are trying to become one with nature in the old ways, though with much better understanding through what they learned from their European conquerors. The story is slow-paced, filled with touches of nostalgia and pastoral longings -- this may be either an asset or a liability, depending on the reader. I enjoyed the book. Basically, the situation is that mankind has suddenly and almost completely disappeared. Only a few awake one morning to find that most people have vanished -- either through a miracle or by having been kidnaped, snatched into space by some mysterious force. A party gathered in one house is mysteriously untouched, and man's survival must depend on them. Later they discover that a fewv bands of Indians have also survived. The "whites" try to conserve western technology, but fail for want of numbers and specialized education. The "redskins" don't even try; they feel this is a chance to take back their land and revert to the old ways that best fit them. IF The robots try for a while to serve man, but there are too many of them. Some go off to build a mysterious structure of their own. A few others move into a sort of monastery to study and extend the old faith of man. The human survivors soon discover that their life-span has been extended to about five thousand years of excellent health. Later, when their numbers increase, they discover that they can "teleport" themselves to other worlds. All but two leave for the stars, though they cantill communicate with those on Earth who are preserving the old homestead. Eight thousand years after the vanishment, John, a far wanderer returns from the stars at about the same time an alien, resembling a "can of worms," comes to Earth seeking a soul. John has found three worlds where the people -- those who vanished -- have been placed. The worlds are still in the state of technical science and human aggression. John has also been made aware of a Principal, so different from human beings that he can never call it good or evil, though he shuns it instinctively. Finally John and his companions learn that the people are returning in a scout ship, almost certainly to ravage and take over Earth again. Simak has woven much more worth saying than can be covered here. He has also spent a great deal of time developing the philosophical attitudes of his people and robots -- attitudes representing at least seven different cultural developments. While these seem to slow up the story, they are all part of the threads necessary for the Final weaving of his resolution. The book is not for the bloodand-action readers. But in a quiet way it is a rich and good book. U rsula k. le guin has established herself as a fine craftsman and a good writer in both fantasy and science Fiction. Her novels that culminated in Left Hand of Darkness were superb science fiction with a heavy social structure. A novelet on cloning was excellent hard science and psychology. And her Earthsea novels have developed a fantasy world with consistency and logic. Now she seems to have turned to a different type of writing. The Lathe of Heaven (Scribners, #) is a sort of "anything goes" science fantasy, laid in what may be the present, on Earth. It involves psi Vower and alternate futures for its basic gimmicks. Unlike anything else I can remember by her, this novel gives the feeling that it was planned as it grew, rather than being carefully laid out in her mind before writing. This may well not be the case -- when a reviewer discusses a writer's methods he's usually wrong. But the book gives that impression. George Orr is picked up as an addict after a horrible dream. He admits using more than his quota of drugs, but explains that he does not dare to sleep because he is afraid to dream. When he dreams hideous things happen -- not only in his nightmares but in the "real" wbrld around him. He's sent to a psychologist, whom he tells that his problem began when he made a relative vanish by dreaming of her removal. In the psychologist's office he changes a picture on the wall under hypnosis. The psychologist remembers how it was before -- the first time anyone but Orr has remembered that things weren't always the same. The psychologist decides to gain the ability for himself. He forces Orr to dream, deliberately managing to get him to make changes. Orr tries to escape and dreams all the more. Now each change he makes in the environment produces a higher status for the psychologist -- until he has absolute power over Orr. Meaning to escape, Orr dreams up a world where a holocaustic war rages. He then has to unite mankind, thus creating a world where aliens are attacking. A third effort produces an alien invasion and finally the invading aliens are changed into misunderstood -- and ununderstandable -- aliens who come to teach us the good life, whatever that is -- and to run such things as second-hand shops. By now this very promising idea becomes murky. A girl who was helping Orr has come and gone, changed character and station and generally become so muddled in the reader's mind that she is only a name. And the aliens, once introduced, seem impossible to get rid of -- they give him help of a sort, but not much. The story has changed in midstream with the changes in the world until there seems no order to it. In the end, with wonder piled on wonder, the plot simply loses credibility. Unlimited fantasy has one inherent danger -- when anything can happen at any time nothing can happen that will create suspense. And after the first half of this book reading it becomes a mechanical chore. acceptance of science fiction that our reference books are being taken out of the hands of fans and IF published by professional reference organizations. But it seems to me that we've had too damned much acceptance and not enough understanding by the late-comers. Some years ago Walter Cole brought out an index to anthologies that was a labor of love -- it must have taken a great deal of time for which he could never hope to gain even minimal reward. It was a valuable book and despite a few trifling and inevitable errors, an accurate one. Now Frederick Siemon has brought forth Science Fiction Story Index, #-# (American Library Association, no price given). In the first place, it is grossly misright to call themselves by such a title -- since they index stories. The Sietnon book indexes only works that have appeared in anthologies and collections; Siemon makes no distinction between the two types of books. And there is every mark of carelessness, disinterest in the field and disregard of accuracy. The sources for the book are not the original work. Instead, Siemon seems to have used the Cumulative Book Index as his source, checking the entries under Adult Science Fiction against the publishers, editors, etc., when they would answer specifically. He lists # positive identifications out of #I that # are included here. There is no evidence that he has even looked at the books to see what was in them. The errors are sometimes ridiculous. For instance, under Frederik Pohl's listing are given not only stories by him but also the titles of collections and anthologies he has edited -- most of which do jiot contain any stories of his. In a few cases he is listed as editor -- in others he is not. This is ignorance or carelessness, not a series of typographical errors. wanted an index. But they would have done better to find a man to do it who was familiar with the field, who bad or could get the books indexed and who could tell the difference between an article and a story. It would also have helped to include somehow the different titles under which an anthology appeared, rather than have the indexer screen out such alternates. Calling Walter Cole: Please try to bring out an updated or later index. There is nothing yet to replace your work -- nothing that's worth consulting. Don't worry about the lack of a stated price on the Siemon book. Whatever it costs, it isn't worth it. # unconsciousness in a strange city on an unfamiliar planet , not knowing his name or identity , with holocaustic war raging around him. A voice in his head identified him as a Terran agent involved in Earth s struggle with the Destroyers , an outlaw federation of planets once colonized by Earth. The voice directed him to safety through Destroyer lines , told him he was in the city of Ashur on the planet Onaris, under Destroyer attack. The voice belonged to a Special Assignments Group attached to the Stellar Commandos, an Earth military unit. It reached him through a minute electronic transfer link surgically implanted in his brain before he began his mission. The link not only enabled the Group to reach him at any time and see and hear through his senses, but also gave it life and death powers over him. The voice continued to brief him. His amnesia, caused by a concussion during the Destroyer raid on Onaris, was complicated by the fact that, before starting on his mission, he had been hypno-conditioned to represent himself as a leading Onarian were known to be looking for on the planet. The voice in Brons head was acid-tongued but attractive female member. Under the Groups direction Bron duly fell into the hands of the Destroyers and was taken aboard the enemy spacefleets flagship, commanded by the Dereceived him cordially, believing him to be Ander Haltern. Canas Bron Haltern s credentials and subjected him to a test. With the aid of the real Ander Haltern s coaching through the transfer link, Bron easily passed the test and was given restricted freedom of the ship by Cana. As Canas ,, guest  Bron Haltern witnessed -- from space -- the total destruction of Onaris by a #t hellburner missile, whose arrival Cana had accurately anticipated. The event matched the Destroyers  reputation for planetary destruction -- Cana, however, disclaimed all responsibility. The hellburner missiles always followed Destroyer raids and were of unknown origin, accordng to Cana, and this last one had undoubtedly been intended to kill Ander Haltern -- it had struck Onaris at exactly the spot where the Destroyers had seized BronHaltern. To prove his innocence Cana invited BronHaltern, as a master syncretist and expert on the # patIF terns of chaos -- which Canas own scientists had used to compute the arrival of the hellburner -- to check all data available on the ship. BronHaltern did so and also used his freedom of the ship to compute the course of Canas fleet back to the Destroyers baseworld -- information Earth wanted and Bron transmitted to the Group via the transfer link. His activities ,  however , reawakened Daiquists suspicions and he was transferred from the flagship to another vessel , the Tantalus -- a former Terran laboratory ship long since captured by the Destroyers and now part of Canas fleet. Aboard the Tantalus Bron made a startling discovery -- the ships entire instrumentation had been exactly reversed: dials read from right to left , etc. Checking back , Bron also found that the Tantalus had once been commanded by General Ananias , who had abandoned her and presumably her crew in space . When he confronted Ananias with the information via the transfer link the latter tried to kill him. Jaycee saved Bron s life. Under the coaching of the real Ander Haltern via the transfer link BronHaltern established himself as an expert on the patterns of chaos with Canas own expert , Tantalus. Studying the patterns with Laaris t Bron learned that the Tantalus was doomed to destruction via the same agency that demolished Onaris -- a finding that tended to support Canas theory that some mysterious force in the universe was determined to kill Bron. Of more immediate concern to Bron t however , were his growing suspicions of General Ananias and during a transfer-link conversation with Dr. Veeder t the medical member of the Group , Bron virtually accused Ananias of treason. X ploded like a bomb. How do you compute that? "I memorized the subspace coordinates I got in the cavity on the other ship. I've just rerun the transposition to real-space terms. There's been no chance to consult the star catalogues yet, but I'd issue a written guarantee that the Destroyers' destination isn't within half a galaxy of Brick's World. The sector's all wrong, for a start." Are you sure? "Deadly sure. Ananias not only switched coordinates on the way to GenStaff, but he must have had a separate set prepared in readiness. Which brings me to the point of this conversation. However you may defend it, your Control center is the weakest link in the whole chain. I started a mission to destroy the Destroyers, and I intend to go through with it. I have a scheme and I'm going to try it. Doc, don't stand in my way." Regardless of circumstantial evidence , Bron, you re still under orders. I admit the things you've told me need investigating , but you're to take no action unless I say so. Do you understand? "No. I think Ananias is using you for his own ends. Since I don't know what those ends are I'm not Don't take that attitude with me, Bron. We have ways of ensuring your cooperation. "Spool it. Doc! Don't try to pressure me. I know the range of a bioelectronic transducer. It isn't even planetary, let alone interstellar, no matter how good your pickup." Meaning what? Veeder's voice was sharp. "Meaning that for you to receive transmissions from me or for me to pick up from you, there has to be a local repeater amplifier somewhere close. If I smashed that I'd be free from you until I came near the next repeater." True, Bron, true. But you'd never Don't you know how small we can make a repeater amplifier? "Yes," said Bron. "It was just that knowledge that told me where it was. Now do I get my own way?" You're bluffing, Bron. Not in a Bron fingered the crucifix hanging from the chain around his neck. He brought it up to where he could see the golden cross cradled in his palm. "Now do I get my own way?" This could earn you a Court Martial, Bron. You know the penalty for disobedience. "Doc, do you think that threat holds any terrors for me? Try calculating the odds against my surviving long enough to come to trial." There was a long silence, broken only by the blood-rush static of the pulsars. All right, Bron. You win this round . We will watch and listen, but not interfere. Give me the information you have on the coordinates. "Here." Bron scanned the figures rapidly for the benefit of the recorders. "You can rerun your own computation if you want a crosscheck. But you won't get it to indicate Brick's World. Don't bother to send any ships either. By the time they get there, there'll be nothing left for them to intercept." I don't understand. You can't tackle a base world and a spacefleet single-handed. "Just watch and listen," said Bron. "It's no accident that the IF Tantalus is heading for the end of a line in chaos." You know  cant accept that , Bron. I have to act on this information. "Please yourself -- but the way I see it you'll never make it in time." gramer and began to set up a new series of equations, occasionally interrogating the cosmological indices of the ship's navigation computer when he needed further information. He worked now without attempting to conceal the input and readouts, knowing that other eyes were seeing what he saw, yet would be able to determine nothing without knowing his intention. Shortly Jaycee came back online. Dont know what you said to Doc , but he lit out of here like somebody put rockets in his afterburners. You know you arent goin to get away with this rebellion, you illegitimate worm. Til teach you not to cross me if I have to kill you in the process. "Get off my back, Jaycee. Didn't Doc tell you to leave me alone?" He shouted to leave you alone officially . He didnt say anythin about my speakin. "If this is to be a poison-tongue session, I'd have preferred the punishment button." Youd have been better advised to do so, you abortive whelp of a sex-mad she-cow. How did you ever become so lucky as to forget me? "It's a reward for good living." Jaycee nearly choked on the point. If you remembered what I remember, you wouldnt even joke about it. They dont make words to describe animals like you. Bron pulled the final readout from the printer and inspected it closely. Two doors from the chartroom he knew he would find Weaponry Control. It was unlikely to be manned by the skeleton crew, especially in subspace, but he would receive no quarter if the crew suspected his intention. Whether he had unconsciously subvocalized enough of his thoughts to warn Jaycee of his intention he did not know, but he heard her catch her breath sharply as he moved out of the chartroom. The corridor was empty. Silently he slid along the wall, hoping that the door to Weaponry Control was not locked. It was not -- probably an oversight during the recent exodus of technicians. He closed the door behind him and locked it securely. When he was sure he was able to work without detection, he turned his attention to the weapon controls. Even in their laterally inverted state they felt familiar to him. His fingers were guided by a surfacing recollection of past weaponry studies he could not call to mind -- yet they prompted familiar reactions in an ever-increasing cascade. He knew then that his own memory was breaking through the block as surely as the Haltern synthesis was slipping away. He ran a quick check on the state of the magazines and was thankful to find them in good order. No less than four unassembled Terran Nemesis hellburners, small in power compared with the catastrophic engines that had torn Onaris apart, were waiting in the assembly ramps. All they needed was the armorers' signal, which would bring together the components to form them into the incredibly dangerous weapons they were. His fingers keyed the assembly sequence in such a short time that he knew he must once have been tutored by a master. T HE automatic transfer of the missiles from the ramps to the firing tubes would be the most dangerous part of the operation. In the singing flight of the subspace mode the movement of such a mass within the ship was unlikely to escape the notice of the crew. With this in mind Bron made sure that the flight program was completely set and that the missiles' motors would fire immediately on entering the tubes. Any of his instructions could be countermanded from the bridge, but he was gambling on the fact that the missiles would be away before the crew could pinpoint the precise nature of hist interference. When all was set he activated the hellburners, then thumbed every alarm and repeater button he could find in order to create a diversion. The result was the nearest approximation to complete confusion he had ever contrived. The multiple blasts of various alarms racked the ship with a cacophony of noises. Every corridor was lit by a multiplicity of action signs, and the call boards began to chime for an urgent remuster, for which the ship had no available crew. Remaining only long enough to assure himself that the hellburners were actually spaceborne, Bron headed back to the chartroom. Soon two of the crew appeared, searching for they knew not what order of disaster. They eyed Bron suspiciously, but went on hurriedly to locate the source of the furor some two doors away. Soon the urgency of the alarm systems faded and was followed by a peaceful hiatus. Bron studied star maps IF wearing an angelic expression and listening to Jaycee alternately cursing and bitching inside his head. But the tranquility could not last. The ship's men were not slow in deducing the cause of events. Their leader was a tall and arrogant barbarian, whose mongoloid features youth made handsome in a striking way. His three companions were a mixture of races and traits that betrayed the inhomogenous blood of the Destroyer nations and their lack of cohesive ethnic groups. They were probably tenth-generation descendants of the more reckless star-travelers of the Great Exodus who had flung themselves out to the farther limbs of the galaxy to populate the new worlds and create the new federations. "You bloody insane, you make mischief after Daiquis' warn you." The leader signaled his armed companions into position with a mere movement of his finger. They were obviously a coordinated fighting team. "Now we're goin' make mischief back. You bloody Onaris Christian -- le's see you pray." This I could enjoy , said Jaycee, with rare anticipation. Looks as though the boys are going to treat you to a little of their own kind of chaos . Trouble with you , Bron, is you never know when to stop sufferin ' . "Pray." The order was accompanied by a blow Bron could have avoided only at the peril of drawing fire from the weapons of the others. He took it hard and fell. A pair of metal-tipped boots in his ribs soon persuaded him that he would find it less painful to stand. "Now pray." The mongol was jeering. "Pray to me. Pray to me for your life, Syncretis' -- because i's in my hands. Daiquis' said shoot if you give any trouble -- but I don't think he'll objec' if I kick you dead instead." Try turnin' the other cheek , Bron . He might die laughin'. You don't stand any other chance. Jaycee's ecstatic titillation made him cringe. "Damn you for a vicious whore! One day I'll -- " A fist in the stomach doubled Bron forward and dropped him to his knees. As he folded, powerful arms seized his and dragged him upright again. The leader took his time about the demolition, using calculated swings to the head and body with fists that felt as solid as bricks. Jaycee played Job's comforter in Bron's singing ears with practiced finesse and relish. Bron took as much punishment as he was able before he felt his consciousness slipping. Almost thankfully he leaned toward the enfolding blackness. XI Perhaps it started as a whisper in some white wilderness... The pain and the consciousness flooded back as the semantic trigger threw off the protective blackout. The mongol's eyes widened and a vicious thrust to the solar plexus made Bron scream with what little breath he still retained... a broken body , cradled in cold , cry in futility unto a futile wind. "Jaycee, for God's sake stop it! Let me go." He made no attempt at subvocalizing. It was as much as he could do to form the words at all. She was playing with him, deliberately using the trigger to keep him conscious so that his awareness of the torment would continue. Again and again the blows fell savagely... the mind mazed not by the sear in steal, the nibblin nerve... "Jaycee, in the name of pity -- " He no longer cared whether he lived or died. All he wanted was release from the scientific and merciless battering his body was taking... some maimed martyr, crazed upon the cross, held up his head and cried unto the heavens: Lord, why hast thou forsaken me? It was a full minute before he realized the punishment had stopped. Blood swam in his eyes and dripped warmly from his chin. He was still standing, but only by virtue of the arms that held him. Somehow he forced himself to appraise the situation. Two of the Destroyer shipmen were looking at something black and white. With difficulty he identified it as the Bible from his pocket. The leader advanced again. Bron held his breath, knowing that a few more blows, even though they might not render him unconscious, must certainly fatally injure him even if they stopped short of his death. But the blows never came. Through one eye he was astounded to see that the mongol's face held a look of admiration. "J.C.," he said. "Jesus Chris'. I seen many men killed by less beatin' than that. All of them wen' out whimperin'. But you still pray. I don' know# abou' church, but i' make you bloody tough man. Wish you were fight on my side. You bloody indestructible." Dimly Bron discerned that they dragged him from the chartroom and even more dimly he felt a couch like an ocean of softness thrust beneath him. He was only partly conscious of the washing and the cool salve they heaped on his tortured flesh. But the one thing that burned in his consciousness before the blackness closed around him was IF deep within his head saying, That 's only a sample of the tricks l can play on you  Bron. Til teach you to get so lucky as to forget about me! cabin, sensing that someone had just left the room, but unable to explain the reason he thought this to be so. Not until the aroma of baked meats from a hot tray caught his nostrils was his suspicion confirmed. Wincing with the pain of movement he thrust himself off the couch and staggered toward a wall mirror. There the bruised and broken flesh of his face formed merely a setting for the deep and haunted eyes that looked back at him from under swollen lids. He made his way back to the couch and sat examining the contusions on his body while trying to force the brittle meats past his damaged lips. Finally he resigned himself to the pain and dared to drink the hot, salt beverage he found at the trayside. The food and the self-discipline needed to consume it rallied his spirits somewhat and he was finally prepared to meet the day. "Jaycee?" No. Veeder on-line. Jaycee s off doing whatever it is she does when you get her worked up that high. "Spare me the naive approach, Doc. I'm feeling anything but trusting this morning. That must have been quite a party last night. Haven't felt like this since the morning after the last Christmas in Europa. Why did they let me live?"  suggest two reasons. One -- the Destroyers have an immense respect for strength and endurance. The punishment you took could easily have killed a man without your physique and training . Two -- l suspect they haven t yet discovered the hellburners are missing. They returned all the controls in Weaponry to normal, walked out and locked the door. Being shipmen and not weapons men, they never thought to check the magazines. I don t know what you were attempting to do there, Bron, but you certainly paid for it. "I'd have paid a lot less if it hadn't been for that hellvixen in my head." They'd probably have killed you, said Doc sagely. It was your fortitude and some lucky phrasing that saved you. I think you can thank Jaycee for your still being alive. We checked your new coordinates and you were right. The transposition gives us a primary and fivebody system location which is only just in the advanced indices. A perfect setting for a baseworld, one we wouldn't ever have hit by chance. GenStaff  has order d the entire space fleet into the area. Estimated time is approximately one hundred sixty hours from now. The conversation was interrupted by the entry of the mongol shipman. He grinned at the sight of Bron's injured features and ruefully examined his own knuckles. "You bloody head like rock," he commented sociably. He threw a Destroyer uniform on to the couch. "You wear this. You no' wear bloody gown. You trained rightin' man, no' creepin' Christian. I know." This time Bron saw no point in refusal. The uniform was an excellent fit. The cut of the cloth accented his build and the width of his shoulders. The mongol, whose name was Maku,'eyed him with some respect. "You make damn fine Destroyer, bloody sure. Could use you any time I fight." Bron said nothing. The shipman's understanding of him was intuitive and could not be dispelled by carefully chosen words. The charade was breaking down. T hirty-five hours later the Tantalus dropped out of subspace for the last time, well clear of the limits of the solar system. The Lab-Ship held station, waiting for the rest of the Destroyer fleet to drop into real-space for the rest of the journey. The sight was not one Bron would forget. At one moment the Tantalus was a metal splint alone in the wastes of space. Then, one by one, the rest of the fleet materialized about her without warningand without other obvious effect. The arbitrary point of subspace dropout in relation to the nearest primary would not affect Commando calculations much. A swift survey of the planets in the system would soon reveal the few that could be considered life-supporting. From there on identification would be swift and the retribution massive. Within days this area of space would become the mustering point for one of the largest avenging fleets of all time. Wherever Cana's ships went, the slight gravitational distortion trails they left would soon betray their passing to a thousand detectors and lead like a silken thread to the planet on which the Destroyers had homed. Curiously enough, Bron felt the avengers would probably be too late. The subspace song was replaced by the thunderous vibration of the gravity drive as the Tantalus moved with its fellows. Although the shipmen were now busily concerned with navigation and the slow interjuggling as the overall command assigned orbit stations, IF they were never too busy to depute one of their number to shadow Bron as insurance against further mischief. Bron did not mind. He had no immediate plans and his relationship with the crew had grown almost cordial. Knowing the retribution he had placed in their wake, he felt almost sorry that such unquenchable characters as thee were going to have to die. He was sleeping when the final maneuvering diverted the Tantalus out of the fleet formation to a position well apart from the others. It was perhaps the cessation of the thundering gravity drive and its replacement by nothing but ship noises and the infinite silence of space that broke the depth of his slumber and threw him into an active dream state. He lay no longer on the couch, but on a cushion, something as yielding yet as softly supporting as a woman's breast or the lining of a womb. He was moving, traveling on a dark, irresistible tide toward some terrible genesis. He could feel the motion plainly, the halt and turn of eddy and wash. He was conscious of unknowable pressures forcing him along, a peristaltic bulge cocooning his individuality, yet carrying him remorselessly onward. There were noises, glutinous, coagulant, semiliquid sounds suggesting vexatious geese being drowned in a slow torrent of treacle. The sounds broke and foamed around his head, a frantic, frothy psalm, a submerged and harrowing hymn to halt the unalterable. And over all was the terrifying sense of doom, a great block of oppression like a ceiling of living lead. Again he was making the journey "down the awful subterranean tunnel. Again his intangible raft responded to ripple and eddy and he was able to sense clearly the dark and tortured path of the abysmal stream. As he encountered each dreaded curve he was possessed by the profound fear that this particular deviation would be the last. Somewhere ahead he knew with unreasoning certainty he would come to the end. At last the way would open out into some atrocious cavern and he would be borne, exposed and defenseless, into the presence of a reality he was completely unprepared to face. Anticipation filled him with a nameless horror, begetting a rising panic that was enhanced by repetition of its threatened imminence. And ever the liquid goose-mutter grew louder, more antagonistic, more agonized, more urgent, and more afraid. The babble was rising to a crescendo that threatened to force out sanity and replace it with something more alienly strange and fearsome than any delirium of madness. The blast of a trimming jet closeby shattered the nightmare and broke him out of his sleep. As consciousness returned he sized up the situation and threw himself from the couch to the hard reality of the floor. He fell heavily, but actually welcomed the pain as a blissful alternative to his terrible wanderings. But though the visions fled, the goose-mutter remained unmistakable now as a background to the star static and the carrier hiss of the transfer-link transmissions that were ever in Jiis brain. TOC? Jaycee? There's that noise again on the transfer link." It's neither of them , little soldier . They aren't here. "Ananias? I thought you weren't allowed near the boards." There are ways and means. Doc is apparently suffering from something that got into his coffee and Jaycee ditto from something in her alcohol. Since I happened to be on hand I thought Td use this moment to come to a little understanding with you. "I already have an understanding. You're a misbegotten, unprincipled bastard, whose time is very definitely up the moment I get within throttling distance." What a great thing it must be to have a defective memory , Bron. As I recall it, there used to be, two misbegotten, unprincipled bastards and you were the more misbegotten, the more unprincipled of the pair. One might even say  owe my success directly to your malign influence. However, I didn't come here to swap compliments. I want to give you a warning. "Jet off, Ananias. Nothing you can say is going to make the slightest difference." But it must. You don't remember it -- but there was a plan behind all this. By God and guesswork it might still come off. But it wont if you persist in flying off at odd tangents on your own. Undoing those Brick'S World coordinates was the stupidest stunt you ever pulled. "That must have taken quite some explaining, Ananias. Very inconvenient for you." That's nothing compared to the damage you may have caused. My one hope is that the Commando Spacefleet won't be in time to catch any significant portion of the Destroyer task force. Why the hell don't you leave well alone? "What are you up to, Ananias? I don't know what you're aiming IF at, but it certainly isn't the success of the Commando operation." Jupiterl Ananias was disgusted. You re so far out of orbit it just isn't true. I'd be tempted to hit the murder button and start out afresh if you weren't such a powerful catalyst. I'm warning you, Bron, just play things as they come and don't start injecting any of your own chaos into the situation. If you attempt to foul things up again I'm going to have to stop you -- even if it means blowing the whole thing wide open. Since you don't appear to rerrtember much , I'll leave you with something to think about. Do you know precisely who cooked up those false subspace coordinates? You did. It tooka twisted little brain like yours to work out that particular deception. And why? Because if those two fleets meet head-on they'll annihilate each other. And what the hell will we do then? Bron fell silent, wrestling with the wrongness of Ananias's words and unable to equate them to the situation as he knew it. He needed time to think. Therewas some activity going on near the central spacelock. Equipment was being readied in preparation for a ship docking. He stood and watched, impressed by the smooth cooperation and coordination of the Destroyer crew. These men obviously lived in space and knew it for the dangerous and relentless enemy it was. They were tough, uncompromising and thoroughly trained. With a frown Bron realized that if these formidible Destroyers were to engage in battle with the Stellar Commando fleet nobody was going to win. It would not be a one-sided mopping-up operation. It would be a major running battle that would continue until one side or the other had been irrevocably beaten. And the few ships that limped home would be only the remnants of two of the most powerful fighting fleets in history. Ananias's viewpoint made sense only if one took the view that the continuance of any spacefleet -- even the Destroyers' -- was better than no fleet at all. If one considered some common enemy... The sudden flare of goose-mutter in his head caused him to pause. And in that instant there fell across his memory the image of seven alien cylinders falling on Onaris from a distance of better than six hundred thousand parsecs and time. His mind spun at the immensity of his conclusion. "Ananias, I -- " No answer. "Ananias?" Again no answer. The transferlink board had been abandoned and for the first time since the inception of the mission Bron was utterly alone. So concerned was he at his loss that he missed the beginning of some new phase aboard the ship. He was aware suddenly of a hardening of the men's manner toward him, a certain wariness untypical of their previous relationship. He guessed that some instruction about him had been received by radio and that he was now to be regarded as a dangerous prisoner rather than as the faintly amusing academic syncretism Nobody immediately interfered with his liberty, however, and he was permitted to watch the docking maneuver as a trim, able-looking planetary ferry coupled with the Tantalus's hull. But once the ship-to-ship coupling had been made and the final abandonment of the Tantalus had begun in earnest, he was no longer left in doubt of his position. The tall mongol approached, directed a handgun at Bron's stomach. While he held unwavering aim he directed his comrades to attach wrist irons to restrict Bron's hands behind his back and leg irons to confine his walking. A pad of a pungent somnific drug was held against his nose. Although he struggled not to inhale, he was unable to resist. Gradually Bron lost consciousness, slipped to the deck. Maku regarded the fallen figure with something akin to regret. "You no damn Christian. You damn fine fightin' man, bloody sure. Hope Cana goin' to look after you, 'cos Daiquis', him bloody insane." He looked back at his colleagues. "This a good man. Don' matter abou' which side you're fightin' -- good man is all the same. The side you fight for ismatter where you were born. The man you fight with is matter of choosin' sympathies. Damn sure him dead if he goes down in tha' uniform." He kicked the prostrate form affectionately. "Bron 'altern, you no right to go to 'ell in chains. But right now we got to get you out of 'ere. This ship damn sure is set for destruction, an' Cana wants to make sure you don' go with 'er." wrist and leg irons had been removed and with them the Destroyer uniform. While he slept somebody had carefully clad him in a clean, white gown and in his pocket the Bible hung with reassuring weight. The pallet on which he lay was undoubtedly planetbound, lacking the minute vibrations that characterized a shipborne berth. For a few seconds he lay collecting his faculties before he hurled I IF himself from the pallet in a frenzy of concern. "Jaycee! Doc! Ananias! Somebody answer me." The cell looked out through a small glazed slit to a gray-tiled corridor. The thickness of the door limited his field of view, but nobody was in sight outside. "Jaycee, where the hell are you? Antares -- if you have a monitor on this link, please call Control. This is an emergency -- " He looked around in agony for some way of attracting attention from somebody. The solid door made only the barest perceptible noise when he beat on it with his hands and the glazing in the slit effectively stifled his attempts to shout down the corridor. "Jaycee -- for God's sake -- " He heard a light groan over the goose-mutter and native mush of the transfer link. Weapiri demons! You aren't in the market for a planet-sized hangover, are you? "Snap out of it, Jaycee. I've got to get hold of Ananias -- " You've got to get hold of Ananias? Jaycee was incredulous. Bron, I've got first claim on gettin hold of Ananias -- and when I do you won't hear a thing for the screamin ' . That Godlost runt put somethin in my drink . "Damn your dipsomaniac misfortunes. Do as you're told. And get hold of Doc and tell him he's got to stop the spacefieet. We've all made a ghastly mistake. " He'll need a bit more reason than that to stop them now. "Find him and I'll give him a reason. If those two fleets get together they'll wipe each other out." Don't tell me you're gettin cold feet just because you're sittin at the center of the action? "Jacee, I'm a dead man either way. But I just realized we're fighting the wrong enemy." Meanin? "That Cana was exactly right when he said he didn't put that hellburner down on Onaris. He doesn't have that sort of weapons capability any more than we do. That thing was alien and it came in out of the void with pinpoint precision to kill a plapet of two creatures sent it in -- it and the other thirty-five we've blamed on the Destroyers -- they're the real enemy. If we engage Cana's fleet now we cripple both fleets and leave the galaxy wide open clear through to Terra." If there are any aliens -- what makes you think they're cornin'? "I can hear them over the transfer link. And they're the reason Cana had to build a strong Destroyer fleet." Not agreed , Bron. Cana built that fleet to strengthen his opposition to Terra. "Cana doesn't give a damn about Terra or the Stellar fleet. Try to look at it through his eyes. If he had a weapon like the Onaris hellburner he could have put it straight down on Terra and forgotten about the Stellar Commando. He wouldn't have needed a major spacefleet in order to do it." Point made, Bron. Tm puttin' out a red-alert call for Doc and Ananias. I don't think you'll convince Doc -- and you haven't convinced me -- but you do rate a bearin'. "I rate more than that, Jaycee. I'm right -- and you know it." That's Doc's decision. Meantime, Bron, you're still actin' under orders. Don't try and break away again or I'll have to bring you back into line. "I can't wait, Jaycee. I've got to warn the Destroyers to get their ships away from here. We don't dare let their fleet be destroyed. They're the only force already prepared and waiting for the aliens."  can't permit you to move, Bron. Not until we see Doc's reaction on the spacefleet. He may decide we still attack. "I wasn't talking about the threat from the Stellar fleet. I'm talking about a piece of chaos I cooked up on the Tantalus when I thought the spacefleet wasn't going to get here." Why? What the hell have you done? Jaycee's voice was as hard as diamond. "Done? Jaycee, I arranged the destruction of this whole planetary system." Spool the drama, Bron. You didn't have the hardware for that sort of action. A burners -- I fired them from Tantalus in subspace. I precalculated their subspace drop-out position and programed their subluminal trajectory from there. They're due to arrive on target very soon now."  There's still no panic. Four Nemesis hellburners won't touch a spacefleet in orbit. They won't do more than blacken a couple of continents . "They can if you use them right. It isn't just the baseworld that's going to go -- but everything on the three inhabitable planets of this system." Stop tryin ' to pressure me, Bron. I know you're Satan incarnate, but not even you can do that with four small hellburners. Anyway, the Destroyers could see them cornin'. "Not where I sent them. On such a long approach trajectory they'd normally be detected and interIF cepted as soon as they came within attack range. Mine weren't programed ever to enter attack range." " Then where the hell did you send them -- into the primary ?" "No, their effect would have been negligible on a sun. But there are six planets in this system, of which this is the third. The neighbor to sunward and the one spaceward are also inhabitable, according to the Destroyer cosmological index on the Tantalus. But the innermost planet is too close to the sun and too dense to support life. It's half molten and extremely friable. The hellburners are programed to go down on that." They'll split it apart and... The last part of the sentence was lost as the implications of the situation swamped Jaycee's powers of credulity. But if any substantial part of it comes out of orbit and goes sunward you II get a flare that will sterilize the whole system . "If my calculations are correct," said Bron, "almost the entire mass will go sunward. I've got to warn the Destoyers to pull out. I want power from Antares on the Destroyer emergency wavebands. Get me Antares on-line." Bron, you know I cant do that without Docs authorization -- and even he'd have to clear it through GenStaff  "There isn't that much time available. By the time GenStaff came up with a decision it would all be over." He went to the cell door and beat on it with his hands. "Damn it, Jaycee, if you won't warn the Destroyers I'll have to find some way to attract their attention from here." Don't try, Bron. You re still under orders and those orders still say the Destroyers are the enemy. If you attempt to warn the Destroy ers it'll be mutiny. I'll stop you by any means I have. "Get off my back, Jaycee." He slipped down and explored the bottom of the cell door with his fingers. Don't try anythin', Bron. You've already jumped out of tine once and had a heatin' taken out of your skin. Don't you ever learn? "Do me a favor, Jaycee -- drop dead." A small light fixture in the ceiling attracted his attention and gave him an idea. His hand brushed the Bible in his pocket and he took it out and examined it eagerly. Its material appeared excellently flammable. The metal bunk on which he had lain was his next objective. Fortunately it was not strongly secured to the wall. He wrenched it free. I'm warnin' you, Bron. If you cross me this mornin I'll kill you . Vm in no mood for your Godlost games . "Stay out of my hair, Jaycee. You don't dare hit the murder button and none of the others is going to stop me." smashed the protective transparent shield away from the solitary light. The light itself faltered but did not go out. I don't know what you're up to , Bron , but quit now. I warn you I'm just in the mood to give you a taste of the punishment circuit. "You'd enjoy that, wouldn't you, Jaycee?" Bron smashed the solidstate lamp away and the cell fell into darkness save for the dim illumination that came in through the slit in the door. God! Enjoy it? You don't know how near I come to usin' it sometimes. Just out of -- "Spite?" With the bunk on its side and with careful balance, Bron could just about reach the small wires he had exposed in the broken lamp fitting. Spite -- revenge . -- hatred --  don't know what the hell you induce in me. A careful twist of the fine paper tom from the Bible aligned in the diitiness between the wires ought to kindle to a spark, Bron thought. Another single sheet would give him scant protection against the current, but he dared not use more in case he damped the arc. There would probably be only one chance before the circuit protectors cut the current. Bron, I'm warnin' you... "Why don't you press the button, Jaycee? If it'll really give you satisfaction." Under his fingers the spark flared briefly but enough for ignition. A flame leaped up between his fingers as the dry paper caught fire. He jumped carefully down from the edge of the bunk and began to pile page on separated page on the small fire he was making on the floor. Oh God, Bron -- the urges you rouse in me -- Bron successfully transferred a blazing sheet of paper to the door and pushed it under. He had no means of knowing whether the flame survived, but he fed more sheets beneath the door and hoped at least for smoke to stir some alarm system into operation. "Press that button, Jaycee, you vindictive bitch. If you dare. I'd be interested to know what it does -- to both of us." Prepared as he was, the pulse of pain that hit him was far greater than he had imagined possible. Almost every sensory nerve in his body seemed to contribute to the IF pillar of corroding agony that possessed him. Even when the pulse was gone he lay for a full half-minute trying to erase the memory of those seconds. When he tried to speak his vocal cords were taut and the words would not come out. But he did not need to speak. Jaycee's near hysteria came through clearly against the background of goose-mutter and the blood-rush of the pulsars. He decided ruefully that those thirty seconds had cost Jaycee quite as much as they had cost him. Her distraught voice flared in his head... you contaminate me, Bron. You twist everythin that's in me. Damn you -- damn you... When the second pulse of pain began he knew from the sobbing that her finger was going to hold that button down for a long, long tfme. Perhaps until Doc or Ananias came and pulled it off. Fortunately she was too distressed to think of using the semantic trigger this time and mercifully he passed out where he lay. The Destroyers had thrown water in his face. He was no longer in the cell, but on the floor of some kind of communications room ringed with consoles. Daiquist, his face full of thunder, stood astride him, looking down. Cana stood to one side, his powerful intellect still striving to come to terms with the full implications of the situation. Bron struggled to his feet, puzzled by the open accusation in their eyes. Daiquist swore. He said, "I admire your nerve, but this is the last trick you'll ever pull. And to think we carried you out from Onaris -- " Words failed him, as if some yet unexplained glimpse of Bron's deception were a revelation greater than he could express, "I don't understand you." Desperately Bron tried to maintain his cover, but he knew instinctively that his cause was lost. Yet how? Why? Daiquist's suspicions had hardened to a certitude, but the factor responsible for Bron's suddenly altered status was not apparent. ' "What the hell's gone wrong, Jaycee?" Subvocally. A nanias has sold you out, Bron -- Her voice was dull and leaden. The sentence continued, but Bron was no longer listening to the words. He knew ail too suddenly what had gone wrong. As well as coming from the transducers in his head, Jaycee's voice was issuing over the Destroyer's loudpeakers. Daiquist's smile was a mixture of triumph and malice. "Now, Syncretist -- do you still fail to understand what I'm talking about? You and that on-line Commando bitch? We've learned quite a lot about you in this last halfhour. So she wants you to suffer? Well there I can certainly oblige. You're going to suffer as nobody has ever suffered before. By the time I've finished with you I doubt if even the Stellar Commando will have stomach enough to send us another spy." "If you were able to hear us," said Bron, "you'll know that I was trying to attract your attention. Those hellbumers I sent to the first planet -- you've only got hours to get away before the sunflare." "Judging from the extent of your deception this far I suspect this as just another trick. It would be only too convenient for the Commando if we abandoned our defensive position and scattered our ships right into the face of the approaching Stellar spacefleet." v "It's no trick," said Bron. "I had no idea you could monitor our transfer link." They didn't need to, Bron. Ananias took to space in an Intelligence radio ship. It seems he's interceptin' our transfer link and rebroadcasttn it throuh Destroyer emergency wavebands. Cana shot a quick look at a radio Technician at one of the consoles. "Is that true?" emergency bands, damn sure." "It could still be a trap," said Daiquist sourly. "I'm going to take him apart the hard way. I'll make him plead to be allowed to talk." ' Cana held up his hands. "No, Martin. If it is a trap -- at least the Stellar spacefleet won't catch us unprepared. We can clear this system in battle formation and meet them on equal terms. But my instinct tells me there's no trickery involved." "How do you arrive at that conclusion?" "Because the chaos patterns predict the destruction of the Tantalus. You heard where the Syncretist said he had directed the Nemesis hellbumers. Now tell me what you've done with the Tantalus?" "It's abandoned in orbit around the first planet." "And can you think of a more probable catastrophe that can happen to it than the one he has described?" "No -- " Daiquist's face expressed the measure of his agonized indecision. "But I still think I'd better take him -- " IF " Don't you understand?" Cana turned on him the full force of the personality that held a whole federation of rogue planets to heel. "Martin -- if the Syncretist is right, we'll all be dead before you get your answers." "Then just let me kill him. I don't fancy going into battle with the enemy having a direct intelligence link in our midst. Regardless of what the patterns say we've already taken chances enough." "No, Martin. I can't permit it -- and you know my reasons." Cana turned to Bron. "I've got the greatest reservations about you, Commando or syncretist, whichever you may be. The only reason you're still alive is that whichever way we plot the patterns of chaos we always seem to find you at the causal focus of some of the most aggressive waves. Apparently you're  the catalyst calculated to initiate some of the most violent entropic upheavals the universe has ever known. So answer me this, Bron Haltern, or whoever you may be -- just how do you intend to take up the cosmos and twist it by the tail?" A sudden clatter came fronv one of the monitoring consoles and an operator cried out in surprise. "The Tantalus , sir. She 'ave stopped transmittin'. I think she bloody destroyed." sharply. "Can you still doubt the patterns, Martin? That's the hellbumer's strike on the first planet. It could take hours for the fragments to reach the surface of the sun, but the consequent sunflare will only take minutes to reach us. Order an emergency evacuation." "I still think it's a trick." "Trick or not, can you still doubt the Syncretist's ability to influence events on a cosmological scale?" Daiquist was growing angry. "Look, Cana, what's to stop me from shooting him where he stands? If I put a shot through him now, what of the patterns then?" "An interesting speculation, Martin. Since his effectiveness is already included in the patterns, either you will be prevented from touching him or we should gain first-hand knowledge of resurrection. Either way offends my materialistic dignity, so I forbid you to try. I'll take him with me to the flagship, while you organize the evacuation. We have a system to lose and a fleet to save, so there's no use in arguing now." With bad grace Daiquist turned to the radio operator, at the console. "Order a general alarm. All personnel to return to their ships and all ground staff to remuster for emergency evacuation. All ships to be placed in battle readiness fourteen system diameters out. This is a prime emergency and there will be no repeat of this instruction." Daiquist moved across the room, now shouting detailed orders. Cana looked at Bron sagely. "Well, Syncretist, do I take you in chains or do I have your word that you will attempt no further mischief? In any case I ought to know your Commando rank." "I can give you neither. First, I'm still on active service under control of Commando Central. Therefore I can give you no personal assurances. Second, I've forgotten my rank along with most other details of my personal life." "Then perhaps your mentor would be so' good as to supply the information?" He 's Commander Bron, of the Commando Central Intelligence Bureau, supplied Jaycee dully. Cana's eyes widened appreciably and he smiled as if at some old memory. "Ah yes! I might have guessed. Tell me, Commander, does she hear me through you?" "Not only hears you -- she can also see you." "Remarkable." Cana's eyes instinctively searched Bron's head but learned nothing of the transducers buried deep into the skull. "I had underestimated the Commandos both for their technology and for the class of men they produce. Nevertheless I shall still have to think of you as Haltern the Syncretist, because that is undoubtedly the catalytic role you have to play. Shall we go?" aides, they went through a door and were suddenly in the open air, standing in a pale-gray light of what Bron took to be early dawn. Looking about him, he could see nothing but a stretch of sparsely vegetated wasteland stretching as far as the eye could reach. The air was damp and chill and inhabited by a forlorn sense of loneliness --  the antithesis of what he would have expected from a Destroyer baseworld. Only the cleaved rock of the buildings they had just left suggested the works of man. Initially he was perplexed by the barren outlook. Then his estimate of the pale sun sharpened when he saw the height of its position. He knew then that this parody of winter was all the noon this blighted place was going to get. Nobody would build a baseworld in a place so inhospitable and where the ecology was so starved of the essential energy for photosynthesis. The more he IF thought about it, the more obvious the situation became. The Destroyer flesh-ships had not been making directly for their baseworld, after all. They had needed to unload their cargoes of flesh upon whatever world they had chosen to be worked. This was a mere colony world -- a labor camp for the thousands of slaves who were to have been tossed upon its barren soils to' work out their lives under a sparse and alien sun. Men were cheaper than machines for initial colonization. They were more easily obtained, more versatile. They had the gift of self-duplication, which was not a feature of mechanisms, and, though vastly less efficient, they could be made to perform any labor a machine could do. It mattered little how many of them died in the fields, since a nurtured nucleus could always be used for breeding further stock. Thus, in the broadest economic sense, mankind had even yet triumphed over automation. Machines cost money and skilled attention: slaves cost no more than their transportation and the cost of the whips to drive them to the fields. Bron felt suddenly sick. It was upon this gray wraith of a world that he had called down a vengeance to end all vengeance. The Destroyer fleet was still in orbit and the only craft visible were ferries. With the great spacefleet above preparing for battle with the approaching Commando fleet, it was a certainty that the hapless Onarian slaves would be hastily dumped on the planet's surface to await the ordered coming of the sunflare that would sterilize the planet and everything that remained upon it. studying him closely and he wondered if the great Destroyer's intellect could extend to an appreciation of his captive's thoughts at that moment. If it did, Cana showed no sign. His features were hard with the granite resolution of a man who had been forced to perform impossible tasks and had even more impossible tasks yet to perform. It was the face of a man whose visions were cosmic in content. Dotted about the far fields were the blunt ferry ships which formed the planetary link with the orbiting spacefleet. Around them a score of scudders swarmed like gnats, fetching and carrying services and personnel, hovering uncertainly, then darting swiftly to their destinations as the message of urgency spread among them. Occasionally new ferries would land and others depart. Groups of bewildered Onarian slaves were being driven to the wasteland and the ships refilled with Destroyer land crews hastily called back to join the battle fleet. Many long and anxious glances were directed toward the gray myth of a sun that might suddenly redden and expand to the dreaded sunflare. For one terrible moment this sad, pale world would know a summer more splendid than anything in its history. But accompanying the warmth and the light would come the bands of radiation and the increasing heat that would dry the seas, scorch the land and finally melt even the stubborn rocks for many kilometers down. Its happening was a predictable certainty, but the timing of the event was a matter about which nobody could be precise. Bron, too, was possessed by a rising measure of concern -- as if the cataclysmic nature of the impending doom held a psychological weighting that transcended his purely personal fear of death. His attention was drawn by a burst of activity as a new ferry landed nearer than the rest. Seven opentopped scudders, flying low with a deafening scream of engines, dropped in formation across the wasteland and halted only meters away. Cana motioned to Bron to climb aboard one of the craft, then turned back to look for Daiquist. He waited several minutes, looking alternately at his watch and at the sun, while a scudder pilot made frantic efforts to establish contact with Colonel Daiquist over the radio. Cana and Bron were joined by an increasing number of Destroyer personnel evacuating the nearby buildings. As each scudder became loaded to capacity Cana waved it away, indicating his preference to wait for a later craft. Since Bron was already seated in a scudder he found himself in a knot of anxious shipmen being whirled to a waiting ferry well 'in advance of Cana's own transport. Clad as he still was in the white robe and moreover, the known author of the current crisis, Bron could well have expected a high degree of antagonism from the Destroyers in whose company he had been thrown. Instead he encountered the respect due a highranking Destroyer dfficer. Steps were provided to enable him to dismount from the scudder when the ferry was reached and on the vessel itself his safety harness was made ready for him. After a seeming eternity the ferry lifted off, climbing rapidly under the hands of a skilled crew, confident even in an emergency. The IF docking with the mother ship was precise and Bron had the feeling that he had never seen similar action performed more professionally by any Commando crew. take him to the ship's bridge. Cana arrived there at about the same time. Almost immediately the ship began to throb with the overall thunder of the main gravity drive. The energy with which the drive was applied suggested that the ship's departure from its orbital station was a matter of crash urgency. Cana thrust him near one of the great navigational viewscreens and Bron could see precisely what the urgency was. He caught his breath as he gained a comprehension of the awesome sight. The scanners were trained on the sun upon which the little gray world had depended. But this sun was sparingly benevolent no longer. Broadly across its center spread a sunstorm of such frightening intensity that, even viewed from the ship's present distance of better than a hundred seemed to threaten to engulf all. But the boiling, granulated ferment of the storm was nothing compared to the astonishing outrush of the flaming, eruptive prominences, spreading probably t a tenth of the speed of light like fantastic, feathered nuclear flames. The whole sun appeared to contract and then to swell and to belch out its infinitely hotter interior fires with such hellish virulence that the scanners had repeatedly to attenuate their reception of the scene in order to compensate for the spiteful increases in luminosity. creased, so the feathered fingers of the sunflare fled farther and farther out into the massive volumes of space. It was impossible for Bron to judge the scale at which the boiling ebullition was portrayed, but the scanners panned repeatedly away from the initial spene in order to contain the rapid progress of the flare as it spread across the system. In advance of the visible extension, the vast increases in cosmic and ultraviolet radiation must already have punished the shielding atmospheres of the inhabitable planets beyond endurance. Even in this short time the second world must have become an irradiated hell. The third planet, which Cana had only just abandoned, must be under such a bombardment from the skies that life outdoors would be impossible and life indoors meant slow and certain death from the effects of primary and secondary radiation. The rapidity of the cataclysm far exceeded anything Bron had imagined. Occasionally the scanners picked up images of Destroyer ships, remote splinters of darkness ing holocaust. Each ship was engaged in a long, forced, trajectory its command hoped would clear it of the planetary system and take it to a point beyond the corrosive fingers of the enraged sun. T HE scanners swooped down to concentrate in detail on the third planet. The groan of anguish was audible. Seven Destroyer ships were still in orbit and most probably would remain so. Bathed in such a concentration of deadly radiation, it was certain that even their magnificent shielding could not prevent the destruction of their crews. From somewhere on the surface a ferry staggered into the sky, then lost control and, its drive still raging, nosed down again in a horrifying power dive to the planet's surface. Cana called for more detailed views and one by one the orbiting ships were scanned and identified. None of the trapped ships betrayed any possibility of being able to move and only a little more time would ensure their complete sterilization. One day, perhaps, it would be possible to reclaim the vessels. For the men who had taken the ships to the far corners of the galaxy there was no hope at all. Cana's flagship, Skua , fled well in advance of the grasping radiation fingers and soon the thundering urgency of the gravity drive relaxed to a normal pitch. But Cana himself signaled no such relaxation. His quiet anger still ran with a tide of energy frightening to behold. He called repeatedly for figures and data on the ships that got away -- and on the ones left behind. Finally he turned to Bron with a wrath that seethed like a. cauldron only a hair's breadth beneath the surface of his iron composure. "Do you know what you've done to me, Syncretist? You've cost me three inhabitable planets, at least seven ships, better than a thousand men -- and Martin Daiquist." He paused for a moment as words seemed to fail him. Then he continued, again fighting to prevent his anger from breaking surface. "One man, a bloody book and a headful of bio-electronics. Zeus! No wonder the patterns of chaos treat you with such respect. If this is what you can achieve as a prisoner -- I shudder to think what could happen to the universe if they gave you a fleet." IF He turned his head sorrowfully in the direction of the screens now filled by a swollen and distorted sun which had been provoked into destroying the satellite planets it had nurtured for so many millennia. "First I have to ensure my fleet is safe. Come to my cabin in an hour, Syncretist. We shall have a great deal to talk about." He walked away, calling for a conference Qf ships' captains and cursing the communications men who were fighting a losing battle with fierce electrical storms in an effort to maintain vital radio links in the face of an angered star. Bron lingered by the screens, still overwhelmed by the enormity of the havoc he had caused. Destruction on such a colossal scale using only four small Nemesis hellburners had been possible only because the perverse genius of his own mind had given iim an idea that had magnified the normal potential of the weapons not alone in appreciating his own talents for violent destruction. Somehow the dark entropic echoes of even more violent things he had yet to do were already throbbing their way through the continuum. He was facing a pre-destiny so immense in its effects that his assassination on Onaris had been years ago in another island universe, far across the terrifying voids of space. intruding on his reverie. Doc reckons you were lucky the sun didn't go nova, Bron . "Doc's back?" He's been back for hours -- replayin' the tapes and tryin' to get some answers. "Answers tp what?" He lost out at GenStaff They took his command away from him. They've handed the whole show over to bloody General Ananias. "Including control of the spacefleet?" Ananias has got the whole lot. He's now Senior Advisor to the General Staff "Where's Ananias now?" Still out on the Intelligence radio ship, I guess. A t least he's still interceptin' our transfer link to Antares. "Which means he could be online?" Correct , little soldier. Ananias's voice came in muffled but intel' ligible. Glad to see you're coming back on form. That was a piece of destruction that surpassed even your demoniac best. Trouble is, you hit at the wrong side. With you around we don't need any enemies. "Spool the noise, Ananias. You've got to stop the Commando space-fleet before they meet the Destroyers. Cana's fleet is battleready and desperate. I think they'd cut the Commandos to pieces." Relax , Bron. Those two fleets wont get within parsecs of each other . I've already taken care of that. But my real worry is you. You've not only forgotten that there was a plan -- youve even forgotten that it was your plan! Dont you remember anything? "Bits and pieces come back when I get a thread of connecting circumstances -- but the overall picture escapes me." Then, for your information , we two were up to our necks in a plot about a kilometer thick that could have gotten us hanged a dozen times had it gone wrong. The fact that we've not yet been hanged has been due almost entirely to some very fast talking on my part. But I cant keep carrying you -- nobody has a fund of luck that great. Youve got to get yourself straightened out -- and fast. In the meantime, dont make any major decisions without referring them to me. If you pull another crazy stunt like the last one welllikely lose Terra as a result. Jaycee, are you there ? On-line , Ananias. Look after this prize idiot. Were  taking the radio ship into subspace and we wont be able to maintain our interception of the transfer ,, link. If Bron moves out of line again  clobber him with every correction  circuit on the board. Til call you again as soon as we clear the jump... Engaged, Ananias. You must be j feelin very proud of yourself, you l i Godlostmewling. GenStaff has just confirmed their emergency decision. It seems that from this mo I ment we re all workin for you. Have I ever told you otherwise , honey-bitch? Didn't I always tell you to be nicer to the boss? But dont let circumstances fool you. I could never have cooked up a scheme half as big and twisted as this has turned out to be. The real insane architect of our misfortunes is on the other end of this transfer link. If he hadn't so conveniently lost his memory, hed tell you so himself. Lthe quality of the sound as Ananias cut his circuits out of the transmission. The difference made Bron more conscious of the background noises that entered his brain along with the hiss of the transferlink carrier. He was alarmingly aware now of the increased strength of the goose-mutter. Not only was IF it greater in volume -- it was also more menacing in texture. The previous babble of sounds was separating into discrete components, like the tones of individual geese talking through molasses. But whatever the language and whatever the nature of the creatures who uttered them, the urgent tones of overriding panic were implicit in the sound. The rhythmic tones of this alien invasion into his head broke like waves on a seashore -- but the waves were of waterglass and the creatures who generated them were drowning in a tide that swept shores far beyond the vast resources of the human Id. He realized with horror that if this emergent sound continued to increase in volume, there must soon come a time when it would swamp the human messages over the transfer link arid leave him isolated in a gulf of foaming, gelatinous babble. In order to rescue himself from these dark concerns Bron had to force himself to concentrate on his own circumstances. "Jaycee, is Ander still available?" On call , Bron . Do you want me to signal him? "Urgently. I must know what a chaos catalyst is." Engaged , Bron. It may take a few minutes to find him. By the way ,  suppose I ought to feel sorry for the way I handed you that punishment. It was intended to make you toe the line -- but I guess when you re involved as we are with each other it's almost impossible to keep your own feelin's out . "That moment was inevitable, Jaycee, wasn't it? It had to come. Do you ever think much about our relationship?" It's not an experience I'm likely to be forgettin if that's what you mean. "Ignoring the innuendo, that was roughly what I meant. It reminds me of the rapport -- the mysterious marriage of minds between torturer and tortured. You're more with me -- and more one with me -- than would be possible in any love-love coupling. I sometimes even think you know what I'm thinking." I frequently do. Partly instinctively and partly because you unconsciously sub vocalize a great deal of your thinkin. You don't transmit the thoughts too clearly , but I can often pick up the emotion . You don't know how I crawl when you touch other women and I can read the conflicts in your mind. "Crawl, Jaycee? And what other women? I haven't seen one this trip." TJhey're part of what you've forgotten. And crawl is the word I mean , damn you. When your selfpity and self-hate burst out and sour the love and the tenderness you should have for a woman , I feel I want to scream. I want to tell her -- tell them all -- that if they understood you as I understand you none of us would get hurt -- not them and not me. "Or me?" That isn't implicit in the relation ship , Bron . You re the sufferer and the cause of the sufferin' . That's your role. I don't care how much you suffer as long as our liaison's allowed to continue. I know I'm goin to suffer through you regardless -- and that's the fact that tells me how deeply I'm involved. Only sometimes the rapport isn't sufficient. I feel the urge to get my nails and teeth into your flesh to even up the score. I get -- high -- Oh, God! That's your type of chaos, Bron. Right across the universe you seem to reach out and etch bits off me. She broke off as if interrupted. After a short period she came back again. I've got Ander on-line , Bron. I'm leavin' him with you. Doc's takin over the board, so if jou want anythin' further he'll be available. I'm goin ' out to get pickled so high I'll probably make orbit. Another voice broke in on the transfer link. Ander speaking. You want to know about chaos catalysts?  i ES, Ander. I keep being told I am one." It's a fairly simple concept , Bron. You remember we established that increases or decreases in the normal rate of entropy were mainly the result of intervention by some form of intelligence such as Man's. Most individuals live their lives with very little effect on the overall pattern of entropy and therefore are not distinguishable singly. But there are a few whose influence catalyzes whole societies into new modes of action. The effective points of their lives can be traced with some precision by entropic analysis. They cause detectable chaos ripples as their activities alter the slope of entropic rise or depression. We call these individuals chaos catalysts . "What sort of individuals are they?" Most of the tyrants of history -- and a few of the saints. A lot of fundamentally great thinkers, mainly those concerned with physical science . Almost no politicians and many, like yourself, whose innate capacity for destruction has left or will leave a permanent scar on history. The names of most of them wouldn't be familiar to you, because the judgment is based not on contemporary values but on the verified effects of the altered course of human history. "But history has no verdict on IF me," objected Bron. Not yet . But the patterns of chaos have . If we read them forward into time we can read the violence of the effects of which you will one day be the cause. It was the intensity of your chaos effects that caused the destruction of Onaris. "That's a bit far-fetched, isn't it, Ander?" of years ago some intelligent  life form must have read the same things in the chaos patterns and been afraid. They could have had no means of knowing what was to be the origin of those ripples , but they plotted the position in space and time so accurately that the Onaris hellburner was correct within meters and only a little late in time. "But why pick on me?" I suspect they were trying to avert the consequences of something you re going to do -- you and the other chaos experts Cana has been collecting. But you re the prime catalyst, the main causal focus. I dont know what sort of thing you re going to do, but the shock spheres of the resultant are the most violent ever recorded. T HE clangor of the battle alarm shattered Bron's speculation and brought the ship's crew to a condition of readiness with speed and precision. In Bron the alarm keyed half-forgotten instincts and he automatically surveyed the Skuas bridge. With an increasingly professional eye he came to recognize the various conventions of Destroyer spacewar techniques and to translate them into terms he could understand. Then he stopped, perplexed. Instinctively his eyes had gone toward the detectors and screens that should logically be the sources of warning of approaching danger. But the screens were blank. Not one of them held a signal that could be interpreted as the cause of a battle alarm. Likewise the detectors, while straining to search the far recesses of the void, gave no clear voice to the suggestion of approaching trouble. The eyes of the crew were intent on the computer bank, whose digital signals were trimming and correcting the detection instruments as if anticipating some nemesis as yet well below the threshold limits of the apparatus. The situation reminded Bron of the hiatus before the Onaris hellburner had come into detection range. Here was the same atmosphere of awe and expectancy -- a situation that began in anticipation. "Doc, are you there?" On-line, Bron. "Make sure all the recorders are in trim. Something critical is coming up." Engaged. By the way , do you want to give me any explanations before I have to turn my records over to the Commando Provost? "I don't read you, Doc. What sort of charge could the Provost lay against me?" If it's in the Criminal Indices , it'll be in the indictment. "Try a specific summary, L haven't got much time." Specifically, suppression of intelligence data, falsification of intelligence reports, manipulating Commando funds to finance unauthorized projects and various charges of espionage, sabotage and treason. "That's enough to be going on with. I don't remember a damn thing about any of those, so I can't argue. How do you fit into all this, Doc?" Vm a very disappointed man. I've worked five years with you on this project, Bron -- five years that have taken more out of me than I had to give . And what do I find? You and Ananias have been using me. Playing me for a fool. "You're no fool, Doc, and I'm sure I never took you for one. There's a good reason behind all this -- only I can't quite figure it for the moment." Then I suggest you ask Ananias, because Commando Central is gunning for him as well. "I thought Ananias was currently on top." Politically, yes. But legally the Commando Provost's building a case against both of you that even Ananias's patrons on the General Staff wont be able to quash. I've tried to help you, but there's nothing I can do unless you can give me an assist. "I can't, Doc. I would if I could. But stay on-line, because some of the answers are out here and one of them could be the thing just coming up." While he had beep speaking, the detectors had increasingly tightened their positions in response to the computer's prognostication. Bron realized then, in the absence of any electronic returns by the instruments, that the current state of emergency had to be based entirely on real-time chaos predictions. The complex and diminutive ripples of the entropic waves provided the point on which the instruments were being aligned. G radually the screens began to display a slight electronic fuzz at the outer limits of their detection capability and well outside attack range. With some dismay he noted that the Weapons Control group did not appear to be IF following the hardening settings. To check this he started across the deck. A hand arrested him. He turned to face Cana, who had come behind him unnoticed. "I can guess what you're thinking, Syncretist -- but it won't work. Chaos predicts the alien vessel within firm plotting range inside ten minutes. It also predicts that we're going to lose a ship. As soon as we can locate the alien accurately enough we'll open fire on it. But we won't alter the outcome -- because we're reading the chaos resultant of an event which has to take place. As far as the patterns of chaos are concerned, the loss of one of our ships is already a matter of historical fact." "Not to me it isn't," said Bron. "You'll soon have the alien's approach plotted in three dimensions plus the time component, with all the accuracy you need to make a kill. Are you trying to tell me that you can't put sufficiently heavy weapons down that line to destroy anything that has space capability?" "Of course we can try," said Cana. "But you still haven't grasped the essential fact. We know our weaponry will not be effective, because we already know what the result will be. You can't alter a future event for which you can read the firm resultant." "Why not?" asked Bron. "Because to alter the unalterable is a contradiction in terms. By definition, you're defeated before you can begin to compose your defense. How can you hope to win a battle which future history has already determined you've lost?" "I can see the argument, but I don't accept it. I don't see how the paradox could resolve itself -- but that's chaos's problem, not mine." Cana looked at Bron searchingly, then turned with swift decision. "Weaponsmaster, the Syncretist will direct the battle. Take his instructions as though they were mine." Bron needed no second bidding. With long experience of Commando spacewar behind his intuition, he moved swiftly into action, briefing the Weapons Control crew to secure an immediate lock on the chaos coordinates. Then he turned back to Cana. "I presume you have chaos analysts who determine which patterns the computer is to process. I need to speak to them." Cana signaled a communications man, who handed Bron a handset. "Chaos complex on-line." "Fine! Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're nearing a chaos resultant which appears to indicate the destruction of a Destroyer ship by alien fire." "Da's correct." "What in the chaos evidence leads you to infer that the resultant is, in fact, the destruction of a Destroyer ship?" "Damn sure is ship. Eighteen teramegaton explosion don' happen in empty space unless ship and powerplant blow. Space-time coordinates indicate the corvette Anne Marie as only possible target approachin' that poin'. We already issued evacuation instructions for the crew." "Then cancel them. I want the Anne Marie powered and headed out of the area before the resultant comes to term." "You can' do that!" the voice was aghast. "You can' beat chaos!" Bron turned back to Cana. "Confirm that order for me, will you? I've got something else to arrange." He turned back to Weapons Control, began a rapid interrogation. The results were negative. He called the communications man to a conference and outlined his plan swiftly. In the face of his logic, nobody argued. In less than a minute they all knew what had to be arranged. Bron's radical approach begat an attitude of enthusiasm both infectious and in direct contrast with the former air of fatalistic acceptance. Only Cana remained unconvinced, but he did not interfere. By now the alien vessel was clear on the screens By human standards it was a monstrosity -- an unfinished bulk of black and sinister metal, blunt, rodlike and uninspired. Although it was moving at below light speed, its velocity was still greater than that of the Skua and her sisters. At this distance the alien appeared eyeless and utterly without the finesse required of a vessel with deep-space capability. As the battle-computer verified its position, the alien's image steadied under the crossed hairs of the screen and the final lock-on of instruments went to completion. The Weapons Control crew was now fully attentive to the task of adjusting the last few decimal places for a detailed fix, which was at the extreme end of their weapon range. The weaponsmaster, taking post at the communications set, talking rapidly to his opposites in other Destroyer vessels, half-turned to watch the coordinates race across the computer's readout panel. The agreement came swiftly. All positions were set and maintained on lock by the battle computer. There would be no opportunity to rethink tactics if the experiment failed. Bron watched the critical registers run toward zero and nodded his acceptance. Human fingers keyed off the safety devices and the conduct of the battle passed into electronic IF hands whose reactions were limited in speed by the velocity of light alone. But nobody on the bridge was deceived about the real nature of the confrontation. This was Bron the Syncretist against the inexorable patterns of chaos. XV J Doc r All the way, Bron . Alien as they come. No Cana trickery there. And that raises a whole load of questions. The Ter ran government has always denied the possibility of an alien menace and especially the possibility of alien life forms crossing the void. The last election was fought on the strength of that promise. Seems they're wrong on both counts. "And Cana was right. The Onaris hellburner was obviously out of the same stable. It was the aliens who destroyed Onaris. And if Cana was innocent of that, how sure are we of his part in the destruction of the other planets credited to him?" You ought to know , Bron. It was mainly you and Ananias who built up the case against the Destroyers. Tm transmitting these tapes to GenStaff. The Defense Council's going to have to do some radical rethinking in the face of this evidence. I'm recalling Jaycee to the board, but I'll stay on-line until she comes. "Engaged." Bron watched the screens critically as the detectors cautioned that the alien ship was closing to target range. He was possessed by an unexplainable sense of something wrong, but was initially unable to place it. Then he realized that the goose-mutter in his head had died to a quiet hiss. This was not a mere attenuation of the signal -- the fidelity was better than ever -- but the noise was subdued, held a suggestion of hushed expectancy, as if its alien originators were also spectators of the incident about to take place. Then, from the Skuas mighty projectors, the long, slim tubes of the space torpedoes carrying diffract-meson warheads slid silently into the soundlessness of space on an intercept course. So accurate was the plotting that each would find its appointed place on the target within meters. Such accuracy was unnecessary, since a diffract-meson missile could destroy any known vessel with space capability if detonated within fifty kilometers of its target -- but Bron had opted to take not even the slightest chance. Such was the range of the screens that the bright needles indicating the torpedoes appeared to move like snails toward the alien, though in reality their velocity approximated one-hundredth of the speed of light. As yet the alien showed no sign of putting up a defensive screen against the attack or of taking any evasive action. Shortly a second salvo of missiles left the Skuas projectors. These were heavy power mines of more conventional nuclear design. Their direction was not toward the alien but to the theoretical point in space where chaos had declared an explosion must soon take place. Nor was the Skua alone in this action. Seven other Destroyer craft were also contributing a complement of highpowered explosives to converge on this same point. Of all the ships in the neighborhood, the dark alien alone issued no fire and gave no sign of anticipated combat. It carved its way solidly through space as if no battle existed. The goosemutter became inaudible. The torpedoes reached their target first. The fantastic flare of the dozen diffract-meson reactions overloaded the scanners and dropped the screens into a blankness that lasted many seconds. When the screens came back to life again, gasps of dismay came from watchers on the bridge. The alien vessel was both undestroyed and apparently undisturbed. It continued to plough a steady course into the middle of the Destroyer fleet, having survived a particulate reaction calculated to annihilate completely any object made of any material found in the known universe. A few moments later the power mines converged in space to form the eighteen tera-megaton explosion at the empty point where chaos analysis had predicted the Anne Marie should have been but for Bron's intervention. The corvette itself had been hastily diverted and now lay witnessing the harmless diversion of its own fate. The explosion formed the entropic resultant required to justify the existence of the particular chaos wavefront and effectively substituted for the ship Bron had saved. Cana's eyes were alive with speculation. "Thank you, Syncretist! You begin to reveal a little of your promise. No other man in history has ever managed to manipulate a chaos resultant successfully. You didn't learn that trick in any mad seminary on Onaris -- and I doubt it's standard Commando practice, either. You're not only a born catalyst but also a very remarkable" man." sudden cry from the operator at the screens. He turned. The IF image of the alien ship was being held in full focus and magnified to fill the limits of the frame. Although the diffract-meson impacts had done no obvious damage, they had apparently thrown the vessel out of its bald trajectory. Now the  monstrous creation was rolling and tumbling, not so much in the manner of a ship thrown out of control as like a stick thrown idly into a wind. Bron and the Destroyers watched in fascination as the uncouth and mammoth cylinder rolled slowly end over end. They were treated to a good view of its imprecision as a ship, but gained no idea at all of its purpose or its mode of function. Then a shocking fact revealed itself. As the vessel turned it became apparent that its rear end was either missing or else had never existed. There were no drive tubes, no reaction mechanisms, no continuation even of an end wall. The whole vast structure was no more than an empty shell, a cylinder closed at one end and open to space at the other. It had no contents and no internal partitions. What form of mystery had accelerated it to such a velocity while holding it true along its major axis was a question Bron felt totally incapable of answering. The drama deepened as he watched incredulously. The tumbling enigma passed centrally through the point where the substitute explosion had occurred and continued blindly onward. The screens adjusted suddenly past it, as if seeking foreknowledge of its destination. The graticule settled on the distant image of another corvette, the Jubal . Barely had the gain been adjusted to produce a reasonable image when the dark, alien cylinder hit the Jubal like a throwing-stick striking a bird in flight. The conclusion was even less anticipated. By some unholy reac tion both the Jubal and the alien artifact broke up -- not apparently through force, but through a kind of mutual disintegration. There was no explosion, no obvious release of energy, merely a crazy annihilation of the mass of both bodies as they came into physical contact. Incredibly, each seemed to contain a state of matter that was the antithesis of the other. The effect was a kind of cancellation of the existence of both, with no manifestation of the latent energy that should have been the consequence of the complete destruction of so much mass. Shortly the only evidence of the event was a small quantity.of space flotsam and an enigmatic question mark in the minds of the men who had observed it. jLjL mutter rose to a crescendo inside Bron's head. Automatically he thought of it as the cheering of a vast crowd, yet the unintelligible semantic undertones were more indicative of fear than jubilation. However, the aliens were certainly witnesses to the event, because the timing of their resurgence was too precise to be coincidental. His mind tried to contain their alienness, but balked at the task. These creatures were things with means and talents beyond the ken of anything in human experience. He had no inbuilt references on which to hang his hazy concepts of them. Only two things they seemed to share with human kind -- hostility and fear. Cana said, "We seem to have worthy enemies, Syncretist. They're taking you on at your own game." "How do you mean?" asked Bron. "You cheated chaos by substituting your own reason for the existence of a wave in the pattern. They countered by destroying the Jubal by means that would not produce an entropic wave. By chaos analysis your method is indistinguishable from a real event, theirs, from a classic non-event. Which means we stand a very good chance of winning." "How do you compute that?" Cana smiled tiredly. "My dear Syncretist, we have evidence, such as the Qnaris hellburner, that the aliens have been experimenting of years. I was watching you just now and your reactions were instinctive. You evolved an answer comparable with theirs in something under seven minutes. Now I see why they're so afraid of you." A furious burst of static in his head warned Bron of something occurring on the transfer link. Then a muffled but recognizable voice broke in. Ananias on-line. Do you read me, honey-bitch? Veeder reading you, Ananias. What the hell's going on? Listen in. Doc , and keep a line open to GenStaff. I've already sent in my report. This next session's going to be critical. Bron , are you reading me? "Like a book, Ananias. What's the readout?" We've just cleared subspace and made rendezvous with the Com ntando fleet on the Rim. I've a task force of sixty-eight ships here, all battle-ready and eager for a radio as well as on the transfer link because I want Cana to hear what I have to say. "I hope you're not thinking of threatening him. He's easily got twice the firepower you can muster." IF Threaten him ? You must be out of your tiny addled mind . We haven t come to threaten -- we've come to join him . Chaos predicts the main alien spacefleet only a few days out in the void . From the looks it's a bloody armada rather than a fleet -- and it's going to do a hell of a lot of damage. Bron turned to Cana. "General Ananias is trying to contact you on alien main fleet is only a few days out and he wants to bring the Commando fleet to help." "Tell him I'll talk to him," said Cana. "I'd been wondering if he ever would keep the pact we made on the Tantalus after we rescued him from the void." room Bron supervised the adtions web until two-way contact was established with Ananias. Cana waited impatiently until he could speak the first word. "General Ananias -- my intelligence network gives me no favorable impression of your attitude toward the so-called Destroyer federation of planets." "I warned you at our last meeting, Cana, that such a situation might be necessary." Indeed yes. But for the benefit of the Commando authorities who may have access to this conversation, I should prefer to hear the record set out plainly." "As you wish. You know as well as I that the alien menace is a real and active threat not only to the Rim Dependencies, but to your federation -- and ultimately to Terra itself. We've both known this for many years. Unfortunately, such has been the insecure structure of Terran governments over that period that any account of alien threats to our galaxy has been rejected as irresponsible alarmism. The Terran standpoint is untenable. I have been in the void in command of the Tantalus and have personally witnessed the sort of physical threat posed by the aliens. You yourself must know only too well what type of danger they are to our existence. I think you'll agree the evidence shows they appear to have no intention of allowing humans any sort of foothold in space." "I agree with your summary this far, General. But you dodge the issue. Why have you so persistently vilified the Destroyer nations?" "I'm not dodging the issue. I'm attempting to explain. Since I was unable to convince the Terran government about the alien threat I had to adopt a more extreme tactic. It was obviously necessary for Terra's defense that a strong spacefleet be developed and maintained. In connivance with Commander Bron of Stellar Commando Intelligence, we deliberately attributed facets of the alien's longrange attacks to the Destroyers. By this ruse we were able to encourage Terra to invest in a superior defensive spacefleet oh the misguided assumption that the Destroyers were the real enemy. Neither Bron nor myself ever believed this, but we consistently misreported the evidence to make it appear to be the truth. For some reason you were a credible danger, while the aliens were not. Since Bron is now in your hands l must make it clear that he was the major architect of our policy of deception. He is also one of the most powerful chaos catalysts our analysts have ever detected For this reason we decided to manipulate him into the situation with the greatest concentration of firepower. That's why you now find him in your camp rather than ours." "Is this true, Syncretist?" asked Cana. "I wouldn't know," said Bron. "But it does supply a lot of missing pieces. Did you say I planned this, Ananias?" "Every crooked move of it, Bron. It was a scheme that suited your talent for playing the system against itself. You tricked the Commandos into sending you right into the hands of the Destroyers -- which was where you most wanted to be. Only a few of us knew that you went to join the Destroyers rather than fight them. The trouble was, you nearly undid all of us when you lost your memory halfway through the act." "Accepting that. General," said Cana, "what proposition had you in mind?" "With the evidence of this transfer-link conversation added to my own reports, Terra can no longer deny that the alien threat exists. Whether she likes it or not, Terra is now committed to help you agairtst the common enemy. But however close the cooperation, I v can't see Terra permitting her fleets to come under Destroyer control." "Do they need to?" asked Cana. "Come!" reproached Ananias. "You know the inverse square law as applied to spacewar battle tactics. Two small independent fleets have only a twenty-five percent chance of survival compared with one larger coordinated fleet." "That's statistically correct, but it still raises an impasse. Since we were lately enemies I can't happily IF subscribe to the notion of the Destroyer fleet becoming subject to Terran control." "Then here's my proposition. If I can swing Terran opinion, would you be prepared for both fleets to come under Bron? He's an experienced battlecommander. He's certainly the prime chaos catalyst at this time -- and his location with your fleet seems to be an effective compromise between Terran and Destroyer viewpoints." tively. "I've lost Martin Daiquist, my lieutenant, so I don't have a candidate of my own to offer. Having seen Bron in action just, now. I'm prepared to believe that he's the one man who can handle the job. I can accept your proposition only if both fleets are subject entirely to his control -- and without his being subject to pressure from Terran sources." Jaycee on-line , Bron. Jaycee's voice came into Bron's head alone and was not repeated over the speakers. We've rerouted the transfer link so as not to interfere with Ananias's broadcast. GenStaff s been monitoring your conversation on-line , and they're in agreement with Ananias's scheme , if you want to follow through. The final decision's up to you . "That was quick, Jaycee. What shook them up?" Bron spoke subvocally. Partly the tapes Doc took from your earlier report and partly the fact that fourteen planets of the Rim Dependencies have stopped transmitting. Three of them got out messages saying they were being attacked by something from the void. They were certain it was not the Destroyers. There was a major defense panic until somebody realized that you and Ananias already had the situation solved. Are you going to take the job?" "It's not the decision, it's the capability that worries me. Yes, I'll take it -- but get hold of Ander and put him to checking through the tapes on the encounter with that alien ship-thing. There may be chaos implications there that we've missed. Certainly unless our weaponry is more effective than it was then, we're lost before we start." Engaged , Bron. I'll be reportin' as soon as we get some answers. Bron turned back to Cana, who had been watching the progress of the unheard conversation as it was mirrored on Bron's face. "I have Terran GenStaffs agreement to your terms. I'll take the job on the assurance that I won't be subjected to pressures from you either." "You have my word on it," said Cana. "I warn you," said Bron, "it'll be a rough ride. A little while ago you lost a perfectly good corvette to a sort of alien throw-away container. If we can't get the better of a garbage can by using diffractmeson warheads, then what the hell do you think is gojng to happen when we meet their battle fleet?" "I don't know," said Cana heavily. "I've been living with that specter for years. Because of it I forged the independent planets into the Destroyer Federation, knowing all the time that we never really stood a chance if the aliens crossed the void in force. But I'm growing older and it's going to be a war for swift brains and nimble fingers. I'd groomed Martin for the job -- but he couldn't survive you. Somehow I doubt the aliens will have any better luck. There's something about you, Syncretist, that is unassailable." l. "Fourteen planets of the Rim Dependencies have stopped transmitting. Presumably some of the aliens got there first. Can you send a scout formation and get some positive information? Also relay to me data on what classes of ships you have available and details of their armaments. Too, you must have some kind of chaos computing complex. I want a full hookup with Cana's chaos men. The aliens have a few hundred chaos and I want us to catch up fast." Engaged, Bron. You know, this is quite like old times -- "Then get off-line and get busy. Put a few scoutships out in the void and try to get us some facts and figures about the strength and disposition of the alien fleet. And stay off the transfer link. Use the extreme emergency." There was the sudden cessation of the hiss of a carrier wave as Ananias cut out his circuits. Npw that the bio-electronic relay had less to contend with, he was again conscious of the sound of drowning geese. Perhaps twenty individual voices predominated over the general babble and these prime spokesmen rippled across the audible spectrum in a hideously broken yodel, as though their voices were modulated by large bubbles rising through a silo of molasses. Their mood sounded nervous, quick and urgent, as if indicating that time was a critical factor of their actions. The babble was hypnotic and he was powerless to shut it out. The rise and fall of the anxious spokesIF men suggested the swell of a stygian river, while the quieter, more powerful background mutter was that of a pressing tide. Perhaps an ultrasonic ceiling to the echo in the voices gave the impression of a cavern roof, caught under hundreds of kilometers of dark pressure, yet extending onward like a dreadful pipe leading into an unknown darkness. He had no doubt now that these were the voices of the aliens in the void. By some obscure trick of physics, their communications system infringed on his own transfer link. If their voices could fetch him such strange and alien visions, he wondered equally what the byplay between Jaycee and himself could mean to them. He was not eveir sure at times what it meant to him -- let alone her. "Superbly researched, well-edited, and outstandingly valuable for this moon-struck era -- a book so expertly chosen and commented upon as to practically numb the reviewer's brain...Moon-connected #thf #th ,and #th-century writings comprising social satire, political lampoonery, and science-fiction... and giving hew visibility to old works by authors forgotten today, also to such notables as Cyrano de Bergerac and Edgar Allen Poe." -- Charles Cooke, Washington Star and Other Lunar Fantasies Edited by Faith K. Pizor  T. Allan Comp Introduction by # Isaac Asimov Praeger Publishers #I Fourth Avenue, New York, # Nature may cast you in one role , success in another! T HE moment the transporter Observatory lens) and grinned at landed on his roof, Joe Slobkin me. "You don't have to worry about came running to meet me. me, old buddy. Even if I am the I could tell at a glance that suemost intelligent-type agent in Hollycess hadn't gone to his head. Apwood, which modesty forbids I parently it had moved in the other should mention." direction, for he was wearing a Leading me along the flat roof, he pair of ermine shorts. paused before the transporter as "Same old Joe," I said. the uniformed pilot saluted him. "Why not?" He took off his dia"Park it in the hangar with the mond-studded sunglasses (ground 'others," he ordered, specially for him by the same team The pilot clicked his heels. "Will that had worked on the Moonbase that be all, sir?" "Yeah. Take the rest of the day off. But before you go remember to feed the elephant." "You have a pet elephant?" I murmured. "Who said anything about pets? Some of my musician clients are alia time coming over and banging on my grand piano. I got tired of replacing the busted keys, so I; figgered it would be cheaper raising my own ivory. In this business you gotta watch all the angles." I bad no answer to that, so I turned and stared down at the palatial expanse of San Simoleon, the Slobkin estate. "Quite a view, huh?" he commented. "On a clear day you can see the smog." I shook my head. "How did you ever manage to find a place surrounded entirely by mountains?" "Just wanted privacy, dig? Matter of fact it wasn't surrounded. When I came here it had mountains on only three sides. I built the fourth one myself." "And that kidney-shaped swimming pool -- " "You like it? Had a doctor design it for me. Modeled after one of my own kidneys. On the other side I got a liver-shaped swimming pool. Which I don't use, on account of hepatitis." Slobkin led me to the elevator andwe descended to the Grand Ballroom. A golden fountain cascaded merrily at one end, and Slobkin produced glasses that he held beneath the spray. "How's for some champagne?" I took the glass, staring in admiration at his tattooed arm. "Neat, huh?" He flexed his biceps. "It's an original Picasso. You know, Sidney Picasso, the'old-time artist's grandson. Had him do it the last time I was in Paris. Some day I'll get something put on my chest. Maybe one of them there Remnants, or Rembrands, whatever." "Rembrandt is dead," I said. "Hell, too bad. I should of caught him on the first trip." Slobkin led me to a sofa before the fireplace, at which silent, unobtrusive servitors were barbecuing a yak on a spit. We settled back in comfort. "Let's rap about you," he said. "Been over three years since we huddled. What's the scam?" "Nothing to tell. I'm still a freelance writer." Slobkin frowned. "Same bag, huh? Speaking of which, I bet you still got the same wife, too. You never did have no ambition. Look what I done in the past couple years." "I'm looking," I told him. "And I still can't believe it. Just think, when I met you, all you had was desk space in that little office over on Smogset Strip." His frown deepened. "That paytoilet! No wonder I never got nowhere being an agent -- crowded into the same room with ten other guys. Why, in those days I didn't even have a spot to pitch in." I nodded. "You couldn't get a line into the studios. I remember how excited you were the .first time you landed a part for a client. Who was that, anyway?" "It was a chimpanzee," Slobkin said. "I had a deal lined up with Paranoid Pictures. They were to use him as somebody's stand-in for Beyond The Backside Of The Planet Of The Apes. Only he bombed. Once the chimp got a whiff of makeup he decided to quit show biz aid go into politics." Slobkin grimaced with angry distaste. "Believe me,  didn't vote for him. But he got in anyway. More champagne? Or a little caviar, maybe? I'll have one of the boys run down to the pond and squeeze out a sturgeon." "Never mind." I gestured him back into his seat. "What I want to know is what happened to you. How did the change come about?" "ivr o change '" j  e siobkin told me solemnly. "Just the old switcheroo, that's all. The old switcheroo." "You're going to tell me about it, aren't you?" "Sure. That's why I had you come out here. Figured you could use a story. And this one's a grabber. This one I could break with any of the services. But I wanted it should go to you, baby." Slobkin chewed sentimentally on the end of his cigar. I leaned forward. "Would it by any chance happen to concern your two biggest clients? Has it something to do with Ricky Ticky and Michele Belch?" Slobkin nodded. "I'll tell it like it is." And he did, just as I'm putting it down here. Only the grammar has been changed, to protect the innocent. Three years ago (Joe Slobkin told me) there was no such person as Ricky Ticky. There was no such person as Michele Belch. There was just poor old Joe Slobkin, the tenpercenter, sitting in his little deskspace and trying to figure out how he could live on ten percent of nothing. And there was a kid named Oscar Fink and a chick named Irma Schmutz. "Very straight," Slobkin said. "And loaded with talent. This Irma N Schmutz could do anything -- sing, dance or play all kinds of instruments, including musical. Oscar Fink was great, too. Particularly on imitations. That stud could do a take-off on anybody Really a natIF ural, dig? But neither of 'em had a dime and neither of 'em had a chance. I guess that's why they finally ended up with me. "Well, I did my best, but it was like nowhere. Two of 'em got acquainted in my office and they used to come in together, sort of like a team. One day they leaned on me -- wanted to know what was wrong. So I laid it on them. "I told 'em the whole hangup was they were weak in the looks department. This Irma Schmutz was just what you might call an average bird. Brown hair, thin face, a little on the tall side. Also, her chest was flat enough to play Scrabble on, if that's your kick. "Oscar Fink was in even worse shape, what there was of it. He was short, had kind of a high voice and ran to fat. "So what's a guy gonna do? You know how important the old image is in this industry. And I put it to them just that way, let it all hang out. "Nobody was happy when I got finished. Irma said, 'But Oscar is a good mimic. He doesn't have to be a gr#ovy-looking stud for that, does he?' And Oscar said, 'Irma can play and sing and dance even with her clothes on -- what more do you want?' "I told 'em it wasn't a question of what I wanted. It's what the public wants. Brown-haired, flatchested babes don't get to be stars -- they just get married. "And that's where Oscar Fink came up with the beginning of the switcheroo. "He told me something I should of figgered for myself all along. 'Fake it,' he said. 'All you got to do is fake it. What kind of chicks made it in the oldtime movies? Right from the beginning it's been big-busted blondes -- Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe and all those other broads. How many of them used their real names? How many of them were real blondes? How many of them had natural big busts?' "Well, I had to admit he was right, at least about the names and the blonde part of it. The busts I never had a chance to investigate, not firsthand, that is. "Oscar Fink poured it on. 'So you change her name,' he said. 'And dye her hair. And you do a little shopping for falsies at Farmer's Market or wherever. Teach her to wiggle when she walks and pitch her voice lower. No problem.' "This got Irma all excited. Don't forget Oscar, either,' she said. 'Maybe he looks more like a crud than a stud, but he has talent. What about all the hard-rock and souL singers with the way-out names? They weren't handsome either, but you couldn't see their faces under the hair. They mostly didn't sing, just howled. Like this.' And she ups with a demonstration which is like to tear my ears off. O got nothing to lose. First off, we change the names. From now on there ain't no Irma Schmutz and Oscar Fink any more. From now on you're gonna be -- let's see -- Michele Belch and Ricky Ticky.' "Just like that the names come to me. After which I slammed out a couple of fake biographies, got in touch with some flacks who owed me a few favors, went out and bought them a mod wardrobe on credit, rounded up an electronic guitar from a hockshop, and we were rolling." Joe Slobkin paused to catch his breath, and his third glas.s of champagne. "You don't have to tell me any more," I said. "Everybody knows what happened after that. Michele Belch got a walk-on bit in a familytype home-nudie and became a sensation the moment she stopped walking and started to lie down. Ricky Ticky signed with an obscure recording company -- Obscure Records, wasn't it? -- got a few numbers on cassettes -- and the phones began to ring all over the country. It's been a pushover all the way." Joe Slobkin shook his head. "That's what you think. Only it wasn't quite so easy." "But all this happened, didn't it?" "Sure it happened. Only not at first." "What did happen first, then?" "They bombed." I frowned. "You mean the scheme didn't work?" "That's right, baby. It didn't work. Changing names wasn't enough. Planting stories wasn't enough. I ought to have figured it from the start. Maybe a smart flesh-peddler can take a skinny little chick and build her up into a real C-cup personality. Maybe he can turn an insignificant little insect into another Beatle. But he's got to have something going for him if he wants to hit the top ten on the Porno Graph. The chick has to be sexy; the guy has to put a gutfeeling into his vocal chords. Trouble is, all these two had was ability. And so they bombed." I stared at him. "How can you say that? They did make it. The stories are true, you built them up, made big stars out of them, made Joe Slobkin smiled patiently. "Later. After I figured out the angle." IF "What angle? Is that the story you're giving me an exclusive on?" The little agent turned pale. "Not "This is all off the record, get me? The yam I want you to break is -- " "Joe, baby-!" My head swiveled at the interruption, then nearly fell off as Michele Belch wriggled into the room. She was every bit as blonde, as bosomy and as beautiful as in my wildest dreams. She was puffing on an Acapulco roach. "Hiya sweetheart!" It was Ricky Ticky, in the flashy flesh; tangled hair mopping his thin forehead and his velvet blue-jeans glued to his gluteus maximus with a crotch-clutching closeness. "Everything set?" Joe Slobkin inquired. "Copasetic." Ricky nodded at Michele. "We trans off for New Vegas in five minutes, right from your pad here. Be married in an hour. Got my guitar all packed for the honeymoon." "Beautiful!" Joe Slobkin beamed and advanced on Michele. "How's the bride? Got enough luggage and everything?" "Just my hope chest," she replied, with a shy downward glance at the article in question. I gulped. "This is true? These two are going to be hitched?" Slobkin nodded at me. "Eloping right now. That's why I got you over here. In a couple of hours the wiretapes will have the whole enchilada -- but it's yours, right now, in advance. Minute they leave, you get on the com and make a deal with the media for your exclusive. Tomorrow you'll be made, baby -- the guy who beat old Jill Haber and Bill Katz to the biggest news item of the century." He turned and faced the loving couple. "This guy's my buddy," he murmured. "I want you two to cooperate -- answer any questions he lays on you." "I've got no questions," I said. "I think I can handle it without a routine interview, and something tells me you're botji anxious to get on your way." "Yeah." Slobkin nodded, frowning at Ricky Ticky. "Something tells me the same thing, and get your hands off her until the honeymoon. Or at least until you're on the trans." Ricky Ticky grinned at me. "Mighty nice of you to understand." I took a deep breath. "Just one favor, though. Uh -- could I kiss the bride?" Michele Belch gave me a surprised look. Then she took the ciggy out of her mouth, crushed it and stood indecisively for a moment, holding it in her hand. A quick glance was exchanged between her and Ricky. Then, with a coy gesture, she waved her butt at me. ward. Somehow I hadn't reckoned on the bearskin in front of the fireplace. My heel caught in the bear's open jaws and I slipped. My hands, seeking to encircle Michele's shoulders, grabbed at her hair instead. It came off. "Holy Toledo!" cried Joe Slobkin "Get the hell out of here! Ricky Ticky began to sob. "Now look what's happened! He'll spill it -- I know he'll spill it!" "No he won't!" Slobkin shouted. "He's with it. Besides, I was gonna tell him anyway, after you left. Just cut out now, before anybody else sees you. Split!" He herded them off in the direction of the elevator, and I sank back on the sofa as the babble of their voices died away in the distance. A moment later Joe Slobkin returned. Silently he handed me a glass of champagne and silently I drank it. "So that's how it is,' I said. "Yeah." He sighed deeply, then shallowly. "That's how it is. I told you they bombed. And then I lucked out. "I got to thinking about the way they'd given me a pitch that day in the office. Here was a kid who could imitate anybody -- so why not an imitation of a chick? What was wrong with giving him the falsies, and maybe a good wig? "And here was a chick who had talent for any instrument and a voice that could lift the roof off an outhouse at three hundred feet. Why not let her grow the mop and wear the jeans? So I put it to them, and they bought it, and the rest is like history." "Unisex, eh?" "Right," Slobkin assured me. "Like I told you, it's nothing but the old switcheroo." Many months have passed since the truth was revealed to me there in the Grand Ballroom of Slobkin's estate. Since that time the marriage of Ricky Ticky and Michele Belch has reached the point where a blessed event is in the offing. I tv view of this fact, their secret can remain a secret no longer, and I am thus privileged to reveal the facts. What I'm really hoping for now is that my old friend Joe Slobkin will see fit to give me another exclusive story. I'd like a scoop on the impending birth. But up to this time, Joe Slobkin hasn't quite made up his mind whether they're going to have a boy or a girl. # IF (Continued from page #) recognized by any of our highly regarded science fiction authors? To my mind only one has come anywhere close: John Brunner with The Jagged Orbit and Stand on Zanzibar. After all , it is still our duty to be concerned with reality as well as possibility. David Riddle Paxtang , Pa. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Many thanks for the most hopeful and encouraging story in years. I refer , of course, to Dazed by Theodore Sturgeon (Galaxy, Sept. # #I h I I wish it were true -- and in that respect I am encouraged by his statement that "belief of disbelief has no effect on objective truth." Judith Guccione Dear Mr. Jakobsson: As a newcomer to the readership of If lam lacking of certain information. Mainly , how to purchase a copy of Galaxy to find out whether or not I wish to subscribe to it. I have not been able to find it on any of my local newsstands or anywhere else and I am interested in having a look at it. Now, as regards If, specifically Gambler's Choice in the March April '#I issue, I have a slight correction. In the problem stated, as any student of probability will tell you, all the fractions involved are what is called mutually exclusive. That is, simply put, only one of the circling torpedoes must be hit twice. Multiplying the fractions ##, ##... ## wjll give the chances of hitting one torpedo for a second time on every shot, provided, of course, that the number of torpedoes hit oncexpands miraculously after each successful shot. The proper equation for a situation where the odds change between attempts is the first odds (##) added to the second odds (##) minus the product of the two (this allows for overlap) for two attempts. Since Mr ; Shaw has given Mr. Targe tt # shots, the answer to: I  # # #-( ##x# #) must be added to the next fraction: ## and the product of those two subtracted and on and on till ## is reached and operated upon. In other words , for any two mutually exclusive probabilities (A  B), the total probability is equal to AB-AB . For three fractions this rapidly expands to: ( AB AB)C-(A B-AB)xC. For twentyfive fractions (not including zero, because A#-Ax#  A) the problem is enormous. The reason for my delay in writing this is because I have finally been given access to a computer. With a simple loop the computer can solve the problem. The chances are # in Mr. Targett's favor , or three out of five. The odds are three to two, not two to one, as stated in the story. Still, not bad. If Targett's first shot had had any chance of shooting down a torpedo the chances would have been two to one. You have permission to print my full address. Steven M. Kemp # Addison Street Philadelphia, Pa. # Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Some years ago Jack Vance began a series of novels about the Demon Princes and how one man, Kirth Gersen, set out to kill them one by one. To my knowledge Mr. Vance has only written the following books in the series: The Star The Palace of Love. There were five Demon Princes and the above novels deal with the fates of three of them. Could you possibly tell me if Mr. Vance has abandoned the series or, if he hasn't , where interested readers might obtain copies of the other two (I presume) books ' ? Let me just say that if Mr. Vance has abandoned the series I consider it a great loss, because each novel was meticulously written and extremely interesting. The social and cultural background for the stories is one of the most imaginative and well conceived galactic communities I have ever come across. If you could come through with this information for me I would really appreciate it. Roger Ryan Ontario, Canada I'm sure one or more of our erudite readers can help you -- and if you will send me your address again I'll be happy to print it so that they may communicate with you directly. Please print legibly. The address you gave in your letter is undeSubscribers Please Note: Change of address Lazar. Manager. IF Fulfillment Department. # Secatogue Avenue. Farmingdale, N.Y. #. Allow # to # weeks. We're dose to a cure for leukemia A year ago, we wouldn't have dared say that. Not with that beautiful word "cure" in it. "Temporary remission", yes. New forms of leukemia treatment were helping some children stay alive a little longer. But that seemed to be all that medical science could give them. Another few months. Another birthday or two. Now we're seeing something that's almost too good to believe. A whole crop of kids who are alive and well # years or more after getting a new kind of drug therapy. And after # years, cancer researchers begin to hesitatingly, hopefully, talk of a permanent "cure." Leukemia is cancer of the blood. Before you have a cure, you have to destroy every last cancer cell in the bloodstream. The new treatment is a combination of different antileukemia drugs, so that, hopefully, any cells missed by one drug might be killed by another. It seems to work. We're still holding our breath, but it really seems to work. 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Second class postage paid at New York. N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Doubleday  Company, Inc. Dept. #-GA-#. Qar CHy, N.Y. # Enclosed is my check or money order. I understand you will pay shipping and handling charges, and that I may return the book(s) within two weeks for a full refund If not completely satisfied that it is the most important Science Fiction volume of the year. State Zip Offer available only in the U.S.A. and Canada. Science nction It's #'s turn. Lift the taboos, the publishing restrictions, the "rules" that SF writers have had to live by. That's what Harlan Ellison did to put together the freest, wildest, most controversial collection of original stories and short novels ever published. # pages of authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Ray Bradbury, Kate Wilhelm, James Blish and # others giving you their visions of man's future here, and all over the universe. Harlan Ellison, who has already won Hugo and Nebula Awards book the #th World Science Fiction Convention called "the most significant SF book published In #." One question, above all, struck terror into the intruder... What is man? vacuum and began to peer ahead. A blinder was drawn across the image of the nearing star, so that tiny flecks of light near it could register. The telescope employed had a diameter of about sixty inches. It did not differ markedly from those used in the early twentieth century on Earth, for after a certain point technology cannot improve a telescope's ability to resolve faint dots of light. The craft crept along at far below lightspeed. Isotopes met with a low mumble in the throat of its exhaust -- fingers of magnetic fields preceding it plucked the atoms and funneled them in from the surrounding interstellar gas. Only this disturbed the aching reaches among the stars. The craft watched patiently. Any planets orbiting the star ahead were still far away. A series of precise image recordings were necessary if the computers were to pick out a planet moving against the speckled background of stationary stars. At four-tenths of a light-year from the star, the activated computer and its backup agreed that a yellow-brown patch of dim light near the white star was a planet. Higher functions of the computers felt the prickly stirrings of life and were informed of the discovery. A background library of planetary theory was consulted. The blurred disk shimmered as the ship swept through a whisper-thin cloud of dust while the machines bracketed and measured their objective in methodical detail. The planet was large. It might have enough mass to ignite thermonuclear fires in its core, but experience argued that its light was too dim. The computers pondered whether to classify the system as a binary star and eventually decided against it. Still, the waxing point of light ahead held promise. M ark gains came to work early, squinting through the smog layers of Pasadena at a watery fall sunrise. The day was already thickening the air with more of the ruddy-brown stuff -- he slipped a filtering mask over his nose and mouth and found he could all but taste the cloying sweet smell it gave off. He switched on the car radio for the early morning news. Another major strike was brewing, threatening to cut off shipping and the airlines. The President had made a "tough, hard-hitting" speech against rioters -- Federal funding for local law enforcement was going up. A large industrial coalition had linked up with the labor unions to back a bill granting extraordinary protectionist import taxes on Japanese products. PsyIF chologists were worrying about the sudden surge in infanticide -- they thought it was probably related t crowding in the cities. Mark turned off the radio as he swung into the parking lot at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He had been keeping vague track of the political situation and was not surprised to find it getting worse -- it always did. The national administration was jittery, unable to deal with the slump in the economy and the irrational violence that cropped up everywhere. Well, he told himself, politics were not his problem. As usual, his was one of the first cars in the parking lot. He passed through the three sets of guards, grudgingly showed his badge -- the Lab was a prime target for the bombers -- and his steps echoed down deserted neon-lit corridors. But when he reached his office he found the lab director, Clyde Fixmer, already waiting. Mark moved a stack of journals out of a chair for Fixmer, pushed papers into a heap on his desk and raised the blinds on his window to let a pale blade of light lance across one wall. He adjusted the blinds every morning as a ritual beginning of work, and so uttered nothing more than a greeting to Fixmer until it was done. "Something wrong?" he asked then, summoning up an alertness he seldom felt at this hour. He was chief monitor for several space vehicles and any one of them could go wrong overnight. Clyde Fixmer grimaced and closed a folder he had been reading. "The Jupiter Viking," he said tersely. He was a burly red-faced man with a smooth voice and a belly that had recently begun to curl down his business shirts to conceal his belt buckle. "Malfunction?" "No. It's being jammed." He flicked a glance at Mark. Mark raised an eyebrow. He might still be a little sleepy, but he wasn't so slow that he could be taken in by an office gag. "Yeah, I know," Fixmer said, sighing. "Sounds impossible. But it happened." "How?" "At two this morning we got a diagnostic report from the Viking. The graveyard shift couldn't figure it out, so they called me. Seemed like the onboard computer thought the main radio dish was having feedback problems." He shook his head, took off his glasses to cradle them in his lap. "That wasn't it, I decided. The dish is okay. But every time it tries to transmit to us, something echoes the signal back after two minutes." "Echoes?" Mark swerved his chair, staring at titles on his bookshelves while he ran the circuit layout of the Viking's radio gear through his mind. Two minutes is far too long for any feedback problem -- you're right. Unless the whole program has gone bad and the transmissions are being retaped by the Viking itself. It could get confused and think it was getting an incoming signal." Fixmer waved a hand impatiently. "We thought of that. The diagnostics say no -- it just can't be that way. Everything checks out okay." "I give up," Mark said, spreading his hands and dropping them to the desk top. The gesture reminded him of his expansive Italian father -- the thought irritated him. He felt faintly embarrassed by anything dramatic. "What is it, thenT' "I think the Viking is getting an honest incoming signal. It's telling us the truth." Mark snorted. "Come off it. Radio waves take nearly an hour to reach us from Jupiter. How is anyone going to send the Viking's own messages back to it in two minutes?" "By putting a transmitter in orbit around Jupiter -- one just like the Viking." Mark blinked. "The Russians? But they agreed -- " "No Russians. We checked. They say no, they haven't shot anything out that way at all. And our intelligence people are sure they're leveling." "What do they think about the Chinese?" "No chance. They aren't yet playing in our league." "Who, then?" Fixmer shrugged, the slight sagging lines of his face deepened by fatigue. "I was kind of thinking you might help me find out." There was a faint ring of defeat in the way the man said it -- Mark noted the tone because he had never heard it before. Usually Fixmer had an aspect of brittle hardness, a cool superior air. Now his face was not set in its habitual aloof expression -- it seemed open, even vulnerable. Mark guessed why the man had come in himself at two A.M. -- to show his people, without having to tell them in so many words, that he could do the work himself, that he had not lost the touch, that he understood the twists and subtleties of the machines they guided. But Clyde Fixmer had not unraveled the knot and the graveyard shift had departed, so now he could safely ask for help. The puzzle was still unbroken but at least Fixmer knew more than Mark and that still was something -- it gave Fixmer an edge. ' Mark smiled wryly at the game. "Sure," he said. "I'll help." IF jHL spherical shell of space and within the thickness of that shell, temperatures on the surfaces of planets do not range to extremes of heat or cold that would preclude life. The shell, of course, is that theoretical entity called the ecosphere. One-third of a light-year from the fiercely burning sun, the craft surveyed the ecosphere and found it good. There was no sign of a large planet like the yellow-brown gas giant circling farther out. This was a crucial test, for a massive world in the middle of the ecosphere would have rendered unstable other orbits within the life-giving volume. Had the ship found such a planet, it was under standing orders -- orders so old that they functioned as instincts -- to accelerate through the system, gathering all possible data for the astrophysical index, and chart a course for the next in a lengthy record of candidate suns. Instead the ship continued to decelerate. Its telescope emerged more frequently and peered ahead for the longer intervals. Another gas giant was resolved from a bluewhite splotch -- this planet was smaller than the first and farther from the star. Its image resisted precision. The craft noted a blurred circlet of light and speculated that the body might have rings, a not uncommon occurrence among heavy planets. Another massive planet was discovered, then another. They formed a string leading away from the ecosphere. The machines began to lower their estimates of the possibility of life in this system. Still, past experience held out a glimmer of hope. Small dim worlds might lie within the ecosphere. By fluke the ship could be approaching a fertile world from the night side and miss it entirely. The craft waited and watched. At one-sixth of a light-year out the computers were rewarded. A planet did lie within the ecosphere, its image an ambiguous smear of blue and brown and white. The machines felt a spasm of relief and joy, a seething electric surge within. They were sophisticated devices -- webs of impulses programed to want to succeed, yet buffered against severe disappointment if success eluded them. For the moment they were -- if the word quite applies -- content. The ship flew on. M ark gains spent most of the morning arguing with flight control engineers. Neither he totally to abandon the hypothesis that the Jupiter Orbital Viking --  -- had malfunctioned. The engineers thought otherwise. They debated earnestly, pitting sweet cool reason against vague doubts. After several hours of diagnostic analysis and the clicking and burring of calculators, a complete run-through of the Viking's errordetection systems -- and more -- the two men gave in. There was no mechanical flaw. The mysterious echo had faded away a little after three a.m. The Viking was no longer simply circling Jupiter -- a month earlier its engines had been stirred awake and made to nudge it into orbit around Callisto, fifth moon of Jupiter. Now it spun an elaborate orangeslice orbit, lacing over the icy glare of Callisto's poles every eight hours. Mark snapped a cracker in half, swallowed it with some steaming tea, sweet and acrid mingling. He closed his eyes lo the ting and clatter of telemetry. He thought. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. "That's it! If the signal came from a source near Jupiter, the echo must have faded because Callisto came between the two." Fixmer nodded. "Quite reasonable. I thought of the same thing." He looked at his watch. "It's almost noon. Why didn't the echo return around seven this morning when the Viking came out from behind Callisto?" Mark had the uncomfortable feeling that he was playing the role of dull-witted graduate student to Fixmer's learned professor. "Well -- maybe the other source is occluded by Jupiter itself." Fixmer pursed his lips. "Maybe, maybe," he said, without giving a hint of whether the idea had previously occurred to him as well. "Can't we rough out some sort of orbit for the source, given that much information?" Fixmer nodded. But both men were starving. The calculation waited until after a quick lunch. Then, starting with the position of the Viking's main dish when the echo had begun, and adding a few armwaving arguments about the most probable orbital parameters a probe would attempt, they computed when it would move into view from the Viking again. Spherical trigonometry, calculus, angles, estimates -- the answer was around #:# P.M., an hour away. "Can we realign the Viking's main dish in one h,our?" "We'll have to," Fixmer said firmly. He was already picking up the telephone to call Operations Conrol. "Tell them to rotate the camera platform, too," Mark said suddenly. IF "You think there'll be anything to see at that range?" Mark shrugged. "Could be." "The narrow-angle camera?" "Right. With filters ready to sequence automatically." Fixmer spoke rapidly and precisely into the telephone, smiling confidently now that there were orders to be given, men to be told. T he ship was still cruising in deep silence, far from the star's healing warmth, when it began to discern radio waves. More of the higher functions of the craft came to life. The weak signals were weighed and sifted. After the usual sputtering noise of the star had been filtered away a faint trace of emission from the planets was detected. The largest source was the world the computers had found before, the innermost gas giant. This was an optimistic sign, for the planet did orbit near the ecosphere. The ship drew the boundary for the ecosphere under the assumption that interesting planets had transparent atmospheres, but this was only a convenience. Gas giants had thick, deep atmospheres that boiled and streamed. They could warm themselves by gravitational contraction and by heat-trapping -- the greenhouse effect. Life could well evolve in their skies and seas. But such clotted blankets of gas and liquid meant awesome pressures. Life there rarely developed skeletons and thus could not manipulate tools. The ship's log carried many instances of this. And although gas giants might be populated, their inhabitants could not communicate because they had no technology -- and the ship could assuredly not fly into such pressures in search of them. A smaller source of radio waves lay farther inside the ecosphere. It was the third planet, blue and white. The signals were too faint for the ship to discern meaningful patterns, so they might well arise from atmospheric phenomena -- thunderstorms and lightning flashes or perhaps radiation from a magnetosphere. Still, the world had an atmosphere, a hopeful sign. The craft flew sunward. II B y six P.M. the two men gave 'up. The Viking's main dish had been reprogramed to carry out a search pattern around the spot where the unknown radio source should appear. It was functioning. The data were coming in. All operations were proceeding smoothly. And there were absolutely no results. The "target" -- so the engineers called it -- should have reappeared at #:# p.m. according to revised estimates. Given the time lag in radio transmissions from Jupiter, Operations Control began receiving data slightly before #:# p.m. The main dish's search was completed within an hour. The narrow angle camera was not used -- not enough technicians were free from monitoring other planetary satellites -- and in any case, nothing indicated there was anything to see. "Well, there's one good idea gone bad," Fixmer said, getting up from the monitoring console and pacing around in the aisle. "Either the whole thing is a pipe dream -- " "Or we haven't got the orbit right," Mark said. "Yeah, there's always that." "We can have another look tomorrow." "Sure." Fixmer did not sound particularly enthusiastic. Ignoring the background murmur of the Operations Control bay, Fixmer paced some more and finally sat down again. The pair studied their green television screens, where sequencing and programing data were being continually displayed and erased. "Look, I might as well try the camera," Mark said. "What's the use?" "Call it idle speculation." He was feeling tired and depressed and he wasn't looking for an argument. His wife had already called with the information that dinner was going to be hopelessly ruined. And the afternoon's mail had brought notice that the Internal Revenue Service was auditing his tax return for the previous year, #. "Okay, try it." Fixmer threw down his pencil and got up. His white shirt was folded and wrinkled. In defeat he seemed more human to Mark, less an edgy executive carefully measuring his moves before he made them. "See you tomorrow," Fixmer said and turned away, shoulders slumped. Mark shrugged at the console and began typing instructions. B y the time the craft entered the system it had a clear idea of the planetary population. There were nine planets in all, with perhaps a few more very near the star or very far from it -- they did not matter, since obviously they would be inhospitable to life. Of the nine, four hld promise. There was a completely clouded world near the inner boundary of the ecosphere. Next was the smaller radio-emitter -- it showed clear oxygen lines and seemed to have oceans. A smaller world came next, dry and cold but with interesting markings. IF But the craft's attention focused on the fourth possibility, the huge banded giant. Its radio emissions were random in frequency yet seemed keyed to an amplitude pattern that repeated nearly identically at a constant period. The ship made a minor change in course. Gas giant or no, the radio pattern could not be ignored. It moved into the ecliptic plane and swung smoothly toward the great planet. Wf it was altering course," Mark said. Eighteen hours had passed and the optical and spectroscopic analyses from the Viking were in finished form -- telemetry errors corrected -- yellow squiggles on green tape. "It gives off all the lines of a fusion torch burning pretty bright. At least six thousand degrees. The Viking got one clear look at it before Callisto got in the way again." He slid a glossy photo across Fixmer's desk. "Not much to see," Fixmer said. The photo showed a tiny splotch against a black background. "And this was through the onboard telescope? Must be pretty far away." "It is -- or was. Almost all the way across the Callisto orbit. I don't think we'll be able to spot it again on the next pass, however." "Any radio contact?" "Nope. No time. And I couldn't get a good enough fix on it from that photo for a narrow radio beam like the one the main dish puts out." There was a silence. "You know, Mark, this is going to be pretty big news." "It sure will." "I think we ought to sit on it until I get a chance to speak to the director." Fixmer looked at him steadily. "There's not much question about what this thing is." "It's not one of ours, if that's what you mean." "Nor the Russians'. It's not from this planet." "That's what I figured, but I didn't want to say it. Seems pretty wild." Fixmer frowned. "Too wild, maybe. I hate to think what those religious fanatics are going to stir up about it. Or what the military will think. We don't know if that thing is peaceful, you know." Mark looked irritated. He always did when political matters interfered with his work. "Listen," he said, "hadn't we better figure out where it's going before we worry about what to do if it gets here?" T he gas giant had been a disappointment. The nonrandom radio emissions were natural in origin, keyed to the orbital period of its tiny, reddish inner satellite. Methodically the craft analyzed the larger moons and found only ammonia ice fields. Its usual method of search was totally dependent . on monitoring radio signals. It was far easier to seek correlations among the background noise than it would have been to transmit tight, simply coded messages to any likely candidate planets in the system. So the ship had listened patiently, circling the huge planet. Nothing of interest had been received. The craft's programs did not allow for long stays in the vicinity of planets as large as this. A multitude of captured rocks and much dust circled the gas giant, making accidental collisions with the ship quite probable. Safety demanded that it not remain long. The craft accelerated and moved out of the orbital plane. It set course for its next destination. But as it did so a brief burst of radio signal caught its attention. The signal showed high correlations -- though not enough to rule out a natural origin. There were many well-ordered phenomena in nature. Nevertheless, following standing orders, the ship retransmitted the same electromagnetic signal back toward the source. This happened several times, quite quickly, but no sign came from the source that the ship's transmission had been received. Then, abruptly, the signal stopped. The ship pondered. The signal might well have had a natural cause, particularly in view of the intense magnetic fields surrounding the giant gas planet. Yet without further investigation there was no way to decide. The source could be the fifth moon, a cold and barren world. The ship was aware that this moon was tide-locked to the gas giant, keeping the same side eternally facing inward. Its revolution with respect to the ship was therefore rather slow. It seemed unlikely that the source of the radiation would have slipped below the visible edge so quickly. Too, the signal strength was low, though not so weak that the ship could not have detected it before. Perhaps it was another radiation pattern from the belts of trapped electrons around the planet, triggered by the fifth moon rather than the first. The ship thought and decided. The hypothesis of natural origin seemed by far the most likely. It would cost fuel and time to check further and the region near the gas giant was dangerous. Far wiser. IF then, to continue accelerating. It filed the information and moved sunward. ii'T'OU'RE damned right I X object to it," Mark Cains said. "Look, Mark, I sympathize with you completely. We're scientists. We don't like this secrecy business." Fixmer chose his words carefully. "But at the same time I can understand the need for tight security in this matter. If you -- " "For how long?" Mark asked sharply. "Long?" Fixmer hesitated, the rhythm of his prepared speech broken. "I don't really know," he said lamely. "Perhaps for the indefinite future. The President didn't say." His voice took on a hardness. "Does the President think anybody can suppress news about something this big forever? It's been four months now. I don't think all the men who know about the Marauder are going to keep quiet much longer." Fixmer casually leaned back in his chair and studied Mark across the desk. "You aren't hinting that you might -- " "Hell, no. I'm not going to spill it. But the whole idea is stupid." "You wouldn't feel that way if you had been with me at the White House, Mark," Fixmer said solemnly. "I wasn't invited." wanted to keep down the number present for security reasons." The trip had been the high point of Fixmer's career and Mark suspected he burned to tell someone about it. But only Mark and the director of the laboratory were privy to the information and the director had been present at the White House. Mark had listened to the full story without comment until now. "The way the President put it, Mark, was quite convincing. You know the political situation. We haven't licked the Depression yet, really. And those religious fanatics, those Agents of God or whatever -- " "New Sons of God." "Yes. Those lunatics have already got a U.S. Senator to speak for them. They could kick up a lot of dust. Plus the fact that the military people are pretty nervous about this thing." "That's ridiculous. No species from another star is going to come all this way to drop a bomb on us." "You know that. I know that. But some of the generals are worried." "Men with limited imaginations." "Maybe." Fixmer turned in his swivel chair and gazed out at a pale yellow February morning. "There is one factor that doesn't require imagination, though. The elections are on and the President is facing some stiff opposition. He didn't do too well in New Hampshire, you know." Both men stared moodily at the eucalyptus tree that dripped steadily in the light gray fog outside the window. Fixmer tapped his pen on the metal desk and the rhythm echoed hollowly in the still room. "I still think we have an obligation to tell the rest of the human race about this. It's not just another strategic element for the Joint Chiefs to figure, out," Mark said. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Mark." Mark made no reply. Outside, drops pattered soundlessly in a moist, chilled world. "You do acknowledge the need for secrecy in this, don't you? I mean, you will maintain security despite your personal feelings? I would -- "Yes, yes. I'll go along," Mark said testily. "Good, very good. Otherwise I would have to remove you from the group. Nothing personal, of -- " "Yeah, I know. That's the only reason I agree, so that I can stay." Mark got up to leave, smiling grimly to himself. "Well, speaking for myself. I'm happy that you're staying. personnel brought in on this if we can avoid it, and it's going to take a lot of work to find out what happened to that thing." "The Marauder,"' Mark said. "Uh, yes. About that. There was a little concern about attaching such a dramatic name to it. Might excite interest, you know, if anyone should run across it accidentally. The Vice President suggested we give it a number -- J-Fifteen. With fourteen Jovian moons discovered, this is another. "Um." Mark shrugged. "But the main interest, of course, lies in finding out where we can expect it next." "I think I already know," Mark said, pacing up and down the room, now lost in thought, his humorless smile gone. "Oh?" "It headed for Mars. I'm pretty sure of that from the Doppler shift measurement of the fusion flame. Jupiter amd Mars are set for a good configuration now and the Marauder s velocity was adquate to get it to Mars early this month. I can't be sure, of course, without knowing more about the Marauder s capability -- and whether it accelerates throughout the whole voyage -- but I think IF my conclusion is a good bel." "It's near Mars, then?" Fixmer leaned forward, his administrator's manner forgotten. "N # t any more." "I don't get it." "While you were back east I got time on the Mars Or biters. Their camera and telescope rigs are just as good as the Jupiter Viking's and -- remember that blanket budget you gave me last month? I carried out a search for the Marauder s fusion flame. Last night I found it." "What?" Fixmer stood up. "You should have told me." "I am telling you." "You should have said something earlier!" Fixmer hitched up his belt and drew in his stomach, not looking directly at Mark. Mark guessed that Fixmer was uncomfortably aware that he had rushed into the Washington story without giving Mark chance to say anything. Mark stopped his pacing and stood with .arms folded, a faint sour taste in his mouth. the Joint Chiefs of this. If the object is in orbit around Mars now -- " "It isn't," Mark said, unfolding his arms and relaxing. "I thought you identified the spectrograph lines of its flame," "I did. But the Marauder was outward bound, away from Mars. The flight path was pretty clear. I think it must have done a gravitational rebound, just looping in for a quick look and picking up momentum from the encounter, like the Grand Tour probes." Mark leaned against the wall of Fixmer's office; not caring that his blue sweater caught drifting swirls of yellow chalk dust from the nearby blackboard. He was glad for once to have Fixmer on the defensive. Perhaps that way the man could be deflected from his fascination for generals and presidents. Fixmer looked puzzled. "Where is it going next? This could be of crucial importance. I'll have to call Washington right away." He licked his lips. "Yes, right away." He looked at Mark. "Well, what can I tell them? Any idea where it will go?" "Venus," Mark said. T he ship had known even before leaving the banded gas giant that the next world inward was barren. Meanwhile the blueand-white world demanded most of the craft's attention. It satisfied all requirements for life. More, radio noise from it carried a clear non-random component. There were many signals. Translation proceeded slowly. But as the craft neared the dry fourth " planet it reached a verdict: the third world held life that used radio. A debate ensued within the ship. Matters of judgment were being decided by vote among three equally able computers until intelligent life was found -- then the highest elements of the craft would be warmed into life. One of the computers held out for an immediate change of orbit, to skip the dry world and drive on to the radio-emitter. One other felt that the second planet, shrouded in thick, creamy clouds, might well support intelligent life -- indeed, past experience made the hypothesis quite probable. And in any case, was it not a better idea to arrive at the blue world with as much information about this solar system as possible? The third computer wavered for a moment, then cast its vote with the second. It also pointed out that a survey of the inner clouded planet would leave more time for decoding the signals from the third world, so that a better approach could be made. The decision was hurried, since the parched red disk ahead was growing quickly. Here and there on its surface a blotch of color promised a thin, moist refuge for life, but most of the world was dead hills of drifting dust. The ship completed its transit in a few hours, storing the collected data on tiny magnetic grains before turning back to the inner planets. The craft damped the rumble of its bright flame and began the world, but its electromagnetic ears strained to catch whispers from the other. The signals from it were scrambled -- and learning a language without common referents is a task that must take time. The machines set to work eagerly. Ill X The small cluster of men around his console leaned forward. On the television screen in front of them a telemetered photograph was being drawn, line by line. At the top edge of the screen was a tiny point of light, scarcely more than a few dots on the picture tube. "You're sure?" a man from "It's not a star," Mark said, "and it wasn't there on the last pass this particular Orbiter made. I think it's the Marauder, "J-Fifteen," Fixmer said. "Wait a minute -- the spectrographic readings are coming in," Mark said. A line of data was printed out, overlaying the photo. The men read it intently. Most of IF them were unable to make any sense of it, since the information was a coded transcript of spectral intensity versus wavelength and few of the men had enough training even to know what to expect. "Looks complicated," one of them muttered. "That clinches it," Mark said tensely. "It's pretty hot -- must be the fusion flame," There was a moment of silence. Then one of the men asked, "There's no chance of error?" "I don't think so," Mark said. Fixmer said, "He's right." "Then, gentlemen, I think we must start preparing. That thing will come here next. We must be ready for it." The man wore civilian clothes, but held himself stiffly erect and had the air of one whose orders are followed. There were several others like him in the party. They nodded in agreement. "Precisely what do you mean?" Mark asked evenly. "Mr. Cains," the man said blandly, "I take it you people feel this J-Fifteen thing is searching for life. It has reached Venus. It's going to have to come here. But we don't know what it might try to do. It may try to land, bringing unknown diseases with it. The military will have to stop such an attempt." Mark ignored Fixmer's raised finger plainly telling him to remain silent. "How?" "Well, we surely cannot allow it to approach in too close an orbit -- " "And how close is that?" "That is something I'm afraid we will have to determine for ourselves," the man said coldly. "Meanwhile -- " he turned to the rest of the group -- "I think the President should be informed. This area is not secure for further discussions in any case. I suggest we retire upstairs." "I'll stay here," Mark said. "We have to find out if it's going to orbit Venus or just fly by." "Agreed -- ni stand by, too," Fixmer said nervously. He looked at the military man. "If it is just the same to you, sir -- " "Very well," the man said. "This way, gentlemen." The group left. They moved with a heavy, calm assurance. Mark was already absorbed in the incoming data displayed on his screen. This section of the Operations Control bay was now sealed off with plywood walls and the consoles around him were manned by men who knew only enough for them to do their jobs. He found it difficult to separate in his mind the tension of the "J# Project," as it was officially called, from the political turmoil he knew was scourging the world outside. It was late August and the primaries were going badly. One of the major parties had broken into angry factions, some of them violent. The President was being heavily guarded. The New Sons of God had gotten wind of something strange taking place in ing sermons about dire happenings in space. They knew nothing concrete, but Mark had some premonition of what would happen if the Marauder orbited Earth -- then it would be impossible to conceal the truth. An amateur with a telescope would be able to see the ship. And now the Joint Chiefs had come into the picture. Mark donned his microphone attachment. He spoke quickly into it, ordering control of the remaining Venus Orbiters -- three of them -- over to his board. "What are you doing?" Fixmer asked, bending over to look at the screen. "Trying to keep the Marauder in sight," Mark said. "Do you think it is going to orbit?" Mark shook his head. "No way to tell." Around them the technicians and engineers were hunched over their consoles. Every instruction that came from Mark's board had to be interpreted and checked by them to insure that nothing disastrous was done to the Venus Orbiters by accident. The tandem arrangement had been specially rigged for this moment. Mark was sure that by now some of them must be beginning to suspect the truth. In a few moments his calculations were complete. Mark narrowed his attention to Venus Orbiter II, which was just beginning to sense the Marauder s fusion image over the Venusian horizon. He took control of the Orbiter's main radio dish and gave it new coordinates for aiming. Abruptly, the main signal from the Orbiter stopped. The diagnostic signal remained, since it came from the smaller dish. It was a blur of stuttered tenor squeals. "What is going on?" Fixmer wanted to know. "Hold on a minute," Mark said. He waited until the dish platform was locked on the Marauder s coordinates. Fixmer was peering at him, unable to understand what was happening. Mark checked to be sure the line was open. Then, methodically, he began to tap out a series of dots and dashes. IF T he ship was braking smoothly, preparing to enter an elliptical orbit, when the strong radio pulse found it. The pattern was simple and obvious: on, off, on on, off, on on on, off -- the sender was counting out the numbers. A grouping of pulses that might be a rudimentary alphabet followed. The ship immediately returned the signal. There was an instant response -- the same pattern started over again, this time a little faster. That was enough. The ship quickly located the source of the signal -- it was circling the planet not far above the atmosphere. One of the ship's computers had theorized that the cloud deck was too thick and too heavily ionized at the top to allow radio waves to escape -- this hypothesis seemed confirmed by the circling satellite, which clearly resembled a beacon for approaching spacecraft. The ship recalled a similar instance from an earlier contact with an amphibian race whose world, too, had been heavily clouded and whose inability to see the stars had retarded its ventures into space for many centuries. The three deciding computers voted unanimously to alter the craft's orbit and approach the beacon satellite. The question of whether this planet was inhabited could be settled later. The overriding fact was that the ship had been signaled and answered and that an elementary interchange was taking place. The craft computed a new course and executed it even as it continued conversation with the satellite. It began storing electrical power for the day when it would have learned enough about this new race -- then it would transmit a powerful pulse back to a distant relay point, back to whoever so long ago had built it. After that events were up to intelligences greater than its own. For the moment the machines felt a surge of anticipation. The contact just beginning would again call forth their most subtle faculties. Their higher functions would be revived. They would become immersed in elaborate chains of deduction and inference -- the experience would be quite pleasurable. ii you crazy?" Fixmer asked loudly. He reached for the switches on Mark's console. Mark blocked his arm. "Don't try it," he said carefully. "You are taking action in a matter of national security without consulting -- " "I'm saving our necks, is what you mean. The Marauder has already changed course slightly. It's going to stay near Venus for a while at least. And it's answering my code." Fixmer clenched his fists. He did not know whether to try to stop Mark or not, but as he thought it over he realized that the job would not be easy. Mark was big and, benth his calm manner, coldly resolved. Fixmer shifted his weight slightly. Mark stood up and pushed his chair away, blocking the console with his body. Fixmer noticed that the technicians around them were staring, not knowing what to make of the two tense men. He felt slightly ridiculous. He realized that his hands were clenched and deliberately he relaxed them. He took a step back. "Okay. You've done the damage by now, anyway. I'll let the authorities deal with you." "I'm sure you will." "I don't know what you think you're doing." "Keeping the Marauder away from Earth and where the lunatics can't get at it. If we can keep it thinking that Venus is inhabited and that the radio messages are originating from its surface -- inaybe it won't come here. Maybe we can convince it that Earth is just a colony." Fixmer stared at Mark for a moment, then turned abruptly and picked up the nearest telephone. He dialed four digits and said, "Captain? Fixmer. I want two security men down here on the double. That's right, main bay. Security violation. Bad one. I thinkokay." He hung up and looked at Mark. He shook his head. "I don't understand you, Mark. You've always seemed a responsible man, levelheaded. Making decisions about this matter -- " he glanced around at the engineers and raised his voice -- "isn't your responsibility. You -- " "I guess I feel I have higher responsibilities than you recognize," Mark said quietly. "Bull. You -- '.' But Mark did not appear to hear what Fixmer was saying. He looked back at his console, thinking. And after Fixmer had run down Mark said slowly, "You know, there's something I didn't figure when I planned this. Suppose the Ma rauder sends all that phony information back to whoever sent it? They'll come here looking for creatures who can inhabit a desert planet -- seven hundred degrees at the surface -- with only carbon dioxide to breathe." "What of it?" Fixmer said sharply. He was watching the doors, waiting for the security IF officers. His right foot tapped nervously. "We'll seem like pretty fierce creatures, won't we? Dragons. Our visitors would come armed to the teeth -- if they have teeth -- and ready for anything. And judging from that general I saw -- " he gestured contemptuously -- "they had better be lucky." "You are stupid, Cains, just stupid," Fixmer said viciously. "You're living in your own airtight world. Just what did you hope to gain by this little gesture?" "Time." "That's ridicu -- " "Time to think. Somebody has to figure out a way to put sense into this dinosaur agency. The people in charge are simply running on adrenalin. Knee-jerk responses aren't going to work -- not when you're dealing with something totally unknown like the Marauder. This situation calls for intelligent thought, time and luck." A door at the back of , the bay opened and two men with hard faces came in, looking quickly around. They wore sidearms. Mark ignored them. "Yeah, luck. I agree we'll need luck." IV entrance to the Pit. The calm murmur of technicians conversing mingled with the ping and chatter of typewriter inputs. The Pit was dark. Its air was stale. Hooded consoles made pools of light where men sat monitoring, checking, editing the river of information that flowed from this room, converting it into the dancing rhythms of electrons riding electromagnetic wings to the Marauder. He noted a wall clock. He h;id twenty minutes before the meeting. self to relax and not think of what lay ahead. He clasped his hands behind him and walked slowly into the Pit, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom. He paused at his personal console, froze a scrap of the transmission and read: In the service of the Emperor he found life and fought the barbarians and beat them into submission. When the Emperor so commanded he fought strange and evil fairy creatures and these he conquered. Dragons he slew, and giants. all enemies of the land, mortal or animal or creatures from another world. And he was always the victor. He recognized the passage from the Japanese legend of K intaro, even in this westernized form. The Marauder had asked Mr. Ichino several days before for more of the ancient literature of Japan and he had brought in all the texts and translations he could find in his collection. They were being transmitted when time allowed. Mr. Ichino wondered idly if this had been selected especially by a programer, since it contained reference to "creatures from another world." Such an action would be lamentably typical -- most of the men here understood nothing of what the Marauder wished to know. Mr. Ichino tapped his front teeth with a finger, thinking. The square, stylized yellow type squatted against the green of the tube, a strange and alien medium for the delicate thread of a fairy tale. He wondered how it would be read -- was read, by now -- by a thing of copper and germanium circling Venus. All this -- the quiet intensity of the Pit, the compressed minutes he had lived through for months now, the unbalanced feel of what he was doing -- seemed parts of a jumbled puzzle. If he had but a few days to sort it out, to fathom what kind of being could see so quickly to the core of Mr. Ichino's personal experience and extract it. But time was short. He moved on. A technician nodded. An engineer saluted silently. Word would spread that the old man was in the Pit for his daily visit -- the men would be a trifle more alert. Mr. Ichino came to a large graphics tank and studied the intricate work being done inside it by the computer. He recognized the print at once: Nude in the Sunlight, Renoir, painted # or #. Mr. Ichino had selected the painting only two days before. Light filtered to a blue-green cast streaked across the breasts and arms of the naked girl, strangely altering the illuminating red glow of the skin that was Renoir's unmistakable signature. The girl gazed pensively downward, caught by the artist as she grasped some ill-defined cloth. Mr. Ichino looked at her for a long moment, savoring the ambiguity of her expression with a wistful romanticism he knew as an old friend. He had been a bachelor all his life. And what would the Marauder make of it? Mr. Ichino did not venture to guess. It had responded well to Luncheon of the Boating Party and asked for more -- perhaps it mistook the painting for a sort of photograph, despite his explanation of the uses men niade of art. He shook his head as he watched IF the computer carefully break down the picture into tiny squares of color. The Marauder spoke little many of Mr. Ichino's ideas about it were pure deduction. Still, there was something about the pattern of requests the Marauder made. "Anything you would like to see especially, sir?" a technician asked at his elbow. "No, no, everything seems to be going well," Mr. Ichino said softly, startled out of his contemplation. He waved the man away. the men in the Pit transmitted data to the Marauder. At the moment they were working their way through a fresh edition of an encyclopedia, he recalled. Simply radioing the material would have been simple, but the men he supervised were charged with editing each line that found its way into code. The President had accepted the recommendation of the Executive Committee that no detailed scientific or technical information be given the Marauder -- the Pit had been built to ensure it. Most of the consoles were operating with Mr. Ichino's own Code #, a specially designed vocabulary and matrix of symbols that afforded high information density in each transmission to the Marauder. The Executive Committee had searched out Mr. Ichino in the days following the Cains incident, desperately trying to find a cryptologist who had enough experience with high flux signaling. Code # had been relatively simple to lay out, since it drew upon the codes Mr. Ichino had already developed for scrambled transmissions to Hipparchus Base. It was simple and flexible and seemed fairly secure from the Russians and Chinese and whoever else was listening in, but of course it had limited range. It soon became inadequate for the questions Marauder asked -- photographs and a wider vocabulary were the only solution. And this was a problem. Because security was tight, many of the encoders and technicians had not been told about Marauder. They thought they were working on something related to Hipparchus Base on the moon. So it fell to Mr. Ichino himself to speak to the Marauder -- and to another crypbeen brought in to ease the strain. Mr. Ichino had little contact with him, since he managed the other half of their round-the-clock schedule. The Marauder never slept. meeting, Mr. Ichino reminded himself. He stopped amid the comforting buzz of the Pit and made a quick survey of the remaining consoles. Images flickered there -- a three-masted schooner in outline, stiff figures modeling sixteenth century clothes, clouds layered over a boiling ocean. A river of information was being directed at the Marauder to correlate as it liked. He turned and made his way down a line of swivel chairs to the doorway, where he was passed in by a guard. As he emerged into a bright corridor he reached involuntarily for the lump in his jacket pocket and brought it out -- a rubbing stone. He kneaded it with his right hand, feeling the smooth cool textures and focusing on them, calming himself by lifelong habit. He walked. Mr. Ichino felt out of place in these garish corridors. He hated the plastiform walls, the thin partitions, clatter of typewriters, distant whisper of airconditioning. He should be in a university by row, he thought, spending patient hours in a cloister far back in shadowed library stacks. He was aging -- and the higher he rose the more abrasive the men he dealt with, the more subtle their methods of combat. He was not made for this game. But he played -- he always had. For love of the crystalline mathematical puzzles he found in cryptography, for an avenue of escape -- it had, after all, brought him from an immigrant family in small-town Oregon to Berkeley, to Washington and now, finally, to Houston. To meet the Marauder -- and for this the journey had been worthwhile. He passed another guarxi and entered the conference room. No one was there -- he was early. He padded softly over thick carpet to the table and sat down. Mr. Ichino's notes were in order but he inspected them again, without focusing on the individual words. Secretaries came and went, placing yellow scratch pads and pens before each chair. An urn of coffee was wheeled in and set in a corner. A slight hollow pop disturbed Mr. Ichino's meditations -- someone was testing the pickup microphones spaced around the conference table. agenda and he studied it. There was only a list of attendees and no hint of the meeting's purpose. Mr. Ichino frowned as he read the names -- there would be men and women here whom he knew only as figures in the news magazines. And all because of a vessel millions of miles away. It seemed midly ironic, considering the immediate and serious problems of the administration in Washington. IF But Mr. Ichino did not dwell on politics. His father had learned noninvolvement in Japan and had passed the lesson on. Mr. Ichino remembered his reluctance, while an adolescent, to join the poetry and language clubs in high school, because he had felt the sharing of the tenuous emotions these things brought him, the nuances they called up, could not be a public thing. To write about them, perhapsthat was possible. But how describe hikau except in another poem? Anything more -- slabs of words, sentences of explanation without grace or lightness of touch -- would be to crush the butterfly beneath a muddy boot. He had joined the Poetry Club finally out of sheer bravery -- though not French Studies, the other possibility -- and had found in it nothing to fear. Girls had read their stilted lines in high nervous voices and had sat down to approval, followed by mild criticism from the teachersponsor. Boys had spoken theirs hopefully -- there had been only three boys in the club -- and young Ichino had learned what he had hoped to -- learned to speak before a peer group in his halting English, to define and explain and finally to disagree. That had been before mathematics, before the long years of concentration at the university, before Washington and the dozens upon dozens of machine codes he had devised, the monographs on cryptography that had consumed his days and nights. "Mr. Ichino, I'm George Evers," a deep voice said. Mr. Ichino stood up quickly with a sudden release of unexpected nervous energy, murmured words of greeting and shook the man's hand. Evers smiled thinly and regarded him with distant assessment. "I hope we're not taking too much of your time today. You and Mr. to the coffee urn, long legs moving awkwardly -- "are our experts on the day-to-day behavior of the Marauder. We thought we should hear what you have to say before proceeding with the rest of the meeting." "I see," Mr. Ichino said, surprised to find his voice almost a whisper. "The letter I received yesterday gave me no details, so -- " "On purpose," Evers said jovially, hitching thumbs into his belt. "We merely want to get an informal idea of what you think that thing is up to. The committee here -- the Executive Committee, actually, that's the President's title for it -- is faced with a deadline and I'm afraid we're going to have to come to a decision right away, sooner than we thought." "Why?" Mr. Ichino asked, alarmed. "I was under the impression that there was no hurry." Mr. Evers paused, turned to wave to other men entering the long room. Mr. Ichino had the sudden impression of a man impatient to be off, to have the waiting finished, as though Evers knew the decision ahead and wanted to push on to the action that would follow. He noticed that Evers's left hand, casually resting on the back of a chair, had a slight tremor. wait any more," Evers said, turning back. "It gave us the word two days ago." Before Mr. Ichino could reply, Evers nodded and moved away, clasping hands with the men in suits and pastel sports jackets who seated directly across the table, sent Mr. Ichino a questioning glance. M r. ichino shrugged elaborately, glad that he was able to appear so casual. He looked around. Some of the faces he recognized. None were as important as Evers, who bore the ambiguous title of Presidential Advisor. Evers moved to the head of the table, still talking to the men nearest him, and sat down. Others who had been standing took their places and the secretaries left the coffee urn to fend for itself. "Gentlemen," Evers said, calling them to order. "We will have to hurry things along, as you know, in order to meet the President's new deadline. I spoke with him this morning. He is very concerned and looks forward to reviewing the recommendations of this committee." Evers sat with his arms folded on the table before him, letting his eyes rove up and down the two lines of men. "You have all seen -- excuse me, all but seen -- the messages received from the Marauder, requesting a change of venue." He paused for the ripple of polite laughter. "We are here to go into possible scenarios that could be initiated by the Marauder s arrival in near-Earth orbit."  He gestured toward Mr. Ichino. "These two gentlemen are guests of the Committee today and are here solely to bring us up to date on the nonessential information the division has been sending the Marauder. They are not, of course, members of the Exe.cutive Committee itself." He smiled briefly at the two men and focused again on the ranks IF aligned along the table, yellow pads scattered at random before them. A few were already taking notes. Evers sat back, relaxing. "Ever since the Cains incident, the Marauder has orbited Venus. I'm sure we all agree that it was regrettable that the story fed the Marauder -- a civilization beneath the Venusian clouds and all that -- was so obviously full of holes." "It was never fooled," a thin man said at Evers's left. Eyes turned to him. Mr. Ichino' recognized him as a leading games theorist from the Hudson Institute. He wore poorly fitted tweeds and puffed an ornate pipe. "I believe the Marauder has been studying us quite competently from where it is," he said slowly. "Look at what it asks for from the division here -- a welter of cultural information, photographs, things like that. No science or engineering. It can probably deduce that sort of thing, if it needs to, from radio and TV programs." "Quite right," a man farther down said. There were more assents. "Well, that may be," Evers said, "but we are civilians and I think the military has an equally likely theory, This ship may not give a damn about our level of technology for the same reason we wouldn't worry about the spears of South Sea natives when we wanted to use their island as a base." "I'd worry," said a man at the other end. "Those spears are sharp." Evers smiled. "Well, we can cover these matters later. The point is that the Marauder wants to approach the Earth for a better study of our biosphere -- or so it says. It promises to stay at a safe distance. It doesn't buy the lifeon-Venus story and following your earlier suggestion -- " he nodded toward the man in tweeds"the President authorized me to transmit to the Marauder an admission that we did try to decieve it." A low flurry of comment ran around the room, most of it favorable. Mr. Ichino knew others had been negotiating with the Marauder, but these details were new. "After all," Evers went on, "we may as well admit the obvious. I wrote the message myself -- there was no time to consult this Committee -- and explained that at first we didn't know whether the Marauder was friendly. I did not mention that we still don't know." He smiled. "The Marauder replied with a request to orbit Earth. Upon my advice the President proposed that the Marauder first orbit the moon for a while, so our men there can get a good look at it. A sort of mutual inspection." "What for?" the man in tweeds asked. "We could do the job better from Earth." "True," Evers said. He tapped a pencil on the table and Mr. Ichino could see that his Fingers trembled. "But there is an alternative plan the Joint Chiefs have in mind. The plan works best if the Marauder pauses to orbit the moon. They regard it as highly suspicious that the Marauder says it knows nothing of its own origin. The Joint Chiefs feel that it may simply be learning all it can about us without risking itself by giving away potentially useful information. I can't say anything more right now -- " he glanced at Mr. looked quickly away -- "but I'll bring it up later in the meeting. I'll say only that the President thinks the plan has some merit." Mr. Ichino frowned. The Joint Chiefs? He tried to understand the implications of what Evers had said and lost track of the proceedings until: " -- we'll hear First from Mr. Ichino, who has shared the encoding and selection of information for the Marauder. Mr. Ichino?" H IS thoughts were a scramble. He said very carefully. "There is so much the Marauder wants to know. I have only begun to tell it about us. I am not by any means the best qualified -- " Mr. Ichino stopped. He looked down the table at them. He had always had to hold himself in check before people like these, he realized, men with closed faces. He could not speak to them, let the soft things within him come out. "I have found," he said haltingly, his mind filled with fleeting impulses and images, "something I never expected." He looked at their blank eyes and set faces. They were silent. "I began with a simple code, based on arithmetical analogies to words. The machine picked up the system at once. We began a conversation. I learned nothing about it -- that was not my assignment. But what struck me -- " 'Where were the words? "What struck me was the nimbleness it displays. We exchanged elementary mathematics, physics, number theory. It gave me, I think, a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Its mind -- if that's the wordleaps from one subject to another and is perfectly at home. When it poke of mathematics it was cool and efficient, never wasting a word. Then it asked for poetry." The man in tweeds was watching IF Mr. Ichino intently, sucking on his pipe, which had gone out. "I do not know how it discovered poetry. Perhaps from commercial radio. I told it what I knew and gave it examples. It seemed to understand. Next it began to ask for art. It was interested in everything from oils to sculpture. I undertook the encoding problems involved, even to the point of fixing for it the right portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for viewing the . pictures we sent." He spread his hands and spoke more rapidly. "It is like sitting in a room and speaking to someone you cannot see. One inevitably assigns a personality to the other. Each time the Marauder -- ii wants to know everything -- changed the subject matter under discussion there was this feeling of differentness, as if -- " Mr. Ichino saw the hurried on, stumbling over his words. "It was as if Lwere speaking each time to a different personality. In turn a mathematician, a poet -- he even wrote sonnets, good ones -- a scientist, an artist -- he is so large, I -- " Mr, Ichino paused. He felt the air tightening around him, the men at the table drawing back. He was saying things beyond his competence. When had the machine become "he" in his mind? He was only a cryptographer, not qualified... Across the table from Mr. space between them, distracted. He said slowly, "I see, I see, yes. That is what it is like. I had never thought of it that way before, flat on the table, as though to push himself up. He looked with sudden energy up and down the table. "He's right, the Marauder is like that. It's many personalities, operating almost independently." M r. ichino gazed at this man who shared his labor and for the first time saw that by contact with the Marauder. The thought lifted his spirits. "Independently," Mr. Ichino said. "That is it. I sense many aspects to his personality, each a separate facet. And behind them there is something -- greater. Something that I cannot visualize." "We're seeing parts of the Marauder, that's all." Both men stared at each other, unable to put into words the enormity they sensed. Evers spoke. "I really think you gentlemen have strayed from the subject at hand. I asked you to describe the range of input the Marauder requested, not your own metaphysical reactions to it' A few nervous chuckles sounded. Around the long table Mr. Ichino saw minds sheltered by narrowed eyes, judging, weighing, refusing to feel. "But this is important -- " Evers raised a hand to cut him off. Mr. Ichino saw in the gesture the final proof of why Evers was a Presidential adviser and he, Ichino, was not. to leave to the Executive Committee the determination of what is or is not important." looked across the table. Mr. Ichino took a deep, calming breath and struggled out of his confusion. "Yoii-have already decided, haven't you?" he asked Evers...He looked at the man's face and thought he saw something shift deep behind the eyes. "This meeting is a sham," he said with certainty. "I don't know what you think you're -- " "That may be true, Mr. Evers -- you do not know. Perhaps you have not admitted it to yourself yet. But you plan something monstrous, Mr. Evers, or you would listen to us." "Look here " "You do not want to know what we know." There was an uncomfortable rustle in the room. Mr. Ichino held Evers with his eyes, refusing to let the man go. The silence lengthened. Evers blinked, looked away, too casually brought a hand up to touch his chin and hide his mouth. "I think you two had better go," Evers said in an oddly calm voice. There was no other sound. Mr. Ichino, hands clasped tightly to the notes before him, felt a sudden strange intimacy with Evers. In the lines around the man's mouth he read an expression he had seen before -- the trademark of the quick-witted executive -- intelligent -- who knew with a sure instinct that he carried the necessary toughness to decide when others could not. Evers loved the balancing of one case against another, the talk of options and probabilities and plans. He lived for the making of hard choices. Mr. Ichino stood up. For such men it was impossible to do nothing, even when to do nothing was best. Power demanded action. Action meant drama and drama -- was glory. Now it is out of my hands, he thought. IF room, but Mr. Ichino did not wait to speak to him. For the moment he wanted only to leave the building. Forebodings seethed in him. He doubted that he would be allowed back in the Pit to talk to the Marauder again -- he was now a risk. The thought troubled him but he put it aside. He signed out at the nearest exit and rushed into the thick damp air of Houston. It was almost noon. He still carried the yellow pad and his notes, pages crumpled in his fist. Going down the steps of the building he felt a welling tide of something he could instantly name and, dropping the pages, dropping all, he ran. He ran. V strained by the buckles and pads, and spin soft coils of illusion. The random splotchings of craters wheeled below, each slipping under the arched horizon just before he had memorized it. # friend lost without a farewell handshake -- shaking hands, remember your manners, Kenneth -- take off your glove first (cold snatching at your fingers)... His mind wandered. Which wasn't right, he told himself. Kenneth M. Walters, called Ken or sometimes Kent, oddly enough -- should stay alert. He was not here for the view. Nor did segmented tanks of liquid oxygen ride to the side of him, above, below, directly behind, for his own coy amusement. They waited for the signal, a soft pressure on a button, to bum him straight into history. Or into the abyss beyond Earth's web, he thought. Hipparchus Control-awesome name for six sheetmetal huts buried in twenty feet of dusthad been a touch vague about the margin of error they had allowed for getting him back. Maybe there wasn't any. Off to his right the northmost rim of Mare Orient ale slid into view, slate-gray sheets of lava cooled in their convulsions. The crater's center lay a good fifteen degrees south of his near-equatorial orbit, but even at this low altitude he could see the marching mountain ranges that curved away from him, inward. He wondered how big the rock had been that caused that eerie effect: crests of ancient waves frozen into mountains. An enormous bull's-eye in the moon's ribs. Assassin's knife. E)eath from an asteroid. "Hipparchus here," a voice rattled and squeaked in his ear. "Everything okay?" Kenneth Walters waited a moment and then said, "Shut up." "No, it's okay. We've computed it. This transmission is in the moon's radio shadow, as far as the Marauder is concerned. It can't pick up any of this." "I thought we weren't taking chances." "Well, this isn't exactly a chance." The voice sounded a bit peevish. "We just wanted to see how things are going up there. We don't get any telemetry. You could be dead for all we know." He could not think of anything to say to that, so he let it go. The radioman -- who was it, that short guy, Lewis? -- seemed to think he was just making a neighborly call. The phones crackled and sputtered in his ears for a moment while he waited out the other man. Finally the voice came a little more strongly. "Well, we have a good fix on the time, anyvay. About five hours away. Squirting the scoop to your LogEx now." There was a hum from the . electronics beside him as the computer absorbed the orbital data. He was sure now it was Lewis down there -- the man was addicted to jargon. "Have you rechecked your missiles?" Lewis asked. "Yes -- Uh -- roger." "We just had a squirt from Houston to remind you about priorities. Any piece of it is better than nothing, so hold off on the nuke if you can." "Roger." "Feeling okay? You've been up there more than a day now. It must be getting cramped." "Ever been to Mars?" "Huh? Oh, I see what you mean. But you had the works then, drugs, full hypno. Say, I never did ask you about that. I mean, how it felt to be under that long." "No, you never did." There was another silenced "Well, it must feel different, this one being a combat mission. Not the same." "Sweating like a pig." "Yeah, really?" The voice brightened. "We'll get you back okay. Don't worry, fella." "Say hello to the guys down there," Kenneth mumbled. He had felt he ought to say something friendly. Lewis wasn't a bad guy, just too chummy. "We're all rooting for you. Zap that thing and Houston will sure be happy. If -- " "I'd better go over that flight plan." "Oh, okay. Signing off." Roger." wading ashore. Somebody IF always wondering where the medic is. Your job, should you decide to accept it... Crawl along a clay ditch, hornets passing overhead with a hollow buzz. Hug the ground, align with the groin of the world. Image of brown-skinned woman wrapped around white man, he in spattered uniform. Somewhere a musical phrase of hunger. He found one of the clear plastic tubes, squeezed it and ate. Carrot vegetables and roots, no evil meat. Those who would meet God in the heavens shall be pure of intestine, live not from the flesh of dead animals. Rear your children on beans and berries -- they, too, may ride to the stars. When they come home from a date, smell their breaths for the aberrant trace of a hot dog. Unclean, unclean. And anyway, nobody had yet learned how to grow a chicken or a cow on the moon, so soybeans, it was. For that matter, they couldn't do much else on the moon, either. It was all well and good to balance tomatoes with barley, coaxing forth from the lunar gravel enough protein and oxygen to support a small base -- and yet another to regulate amino acids and plant sap, keep mildew from forming in the access pipes, conserve the thin mealy loam. The optimistic biologists frowned at their soybeans -- with the daily cycle of sun and tides removed the beans grew gnarled roots and gray leaves, became miserly with their proteins. It was no simple trick to be an adversary of entropy in a land with black skies and winds that slept. But still, they carried on. Optimism. That was what he lacked. Kenneth Walters shrugged with no one to see. The loss did not seem to matter. He looked back, however, trying to remember when it had happened... of the shoe box that brought him home from Mars he spat and snarled, so that Parsons and the rest of the disappointed pallbearers kept him away from the #D cameras for two weeks. Maybe it was a good idea. By that time the edge had left his tongue, the bile had been watered and some humor remained. Parsons et al had sent him off a boy, able to lower his breathing rate and slow his metabolism at will by self-hypnosis. Operation Sure Thing gave them back a Kenneth Walters hardened and toughened, and they weren't sure what he would do with the fame that fell on him, a second Lindbergh. The other man had crossed the Atlantic at twenty-five -- Kenneth was twenty-three. Parsons hoped he would prove docile. There was really no choice -- so they slicked down his hair and sent him out to charm the Republic. Kenneth made a few speeches, one before Congress. He went on #D and flashed his teeth. He made jokes about having been so crowded on the flight home that he had had to comb his hair with his toes. When asked about the onboard computer's role in the mission he said something blandly nice about Roger (though he did get in a limerick about Roger the lodger, the dirty old codger... bound his audiences with descriptions of the ruddy Martian lowlands. He slept with women. Before Sure Thing he had somehow always met girls. After it, he met women. Or more to the point, they met him. They drifted his way at parties, seemingly inspecting the Cezanne prints, and abruptly came upon him, round doe eyes widening in polite surprise at his identity (yes, he was the one) and hand unconsciously going to the throat to caress a necklace or scarf, intimate sensual gesture to be read if he cared. Often he cared. Often they were electric women, aware in some secret bastion that this man had been where they could not go, for reasons they did not fathom but which suggested something basic and feral, some mysterious male rite performed beyond the hornrimmed clinical gaze of psychologists and pundits and, most important, away from women. They were of many types. How masculine, one of them said, patting yellow hair into place, to think of women as types. Embarrassed -- for this was New York, where differences were unfashionable that year -- he laughed and threw some chablis at the back of his throat and left her soon afterward, reasoning that, after all, he did not like her type.) But they had gained a sameness for him, though he sampled the Junoesque, the wiry, the darkly sensual, the Rubens maiden and some mongrels. How not to call them types just to tell them apart? The urge to classify washed always over him, to analyze and inspect -- as he said to a catty aging #D actress in a worldwide interview, "They were weighed and found wanton" -- and at last he came to look upon himself as from a distance, pacing his responses, never moving wholly with the moment. There he quit. And went back to his job, which was, after all, enough. He needed IF women, but he did not need the kind who were drawn to him. B y that time #D had made a minor personality of him. He began to accept exposure as it suited him, which happened to result in the optimum intervals for his remaining what a PR man had called "alive" without "saturating his image." He appeared on a mildly intellectual talk show and revealed a more than passing knowledge of the works of Louis Armstrong. He was interviewed during a long walk in the Sierras, wearing a sweatsuit and talking about what meditation course. It wasn't great material, but the networks were scrambling for something halfway intelligent. With #D execs, anything that tickled their noses they thought was champagne. And the housewives and garage mechanics didn't get bored with Kenneth Walters either, because he laughed and told jokes and dropped sly little bits of inside scoop into the conversation about the infighting He was inordinately lucky. Something would boil up from his subconscious and he would put it into a sentence or two, and suddenly Parsons would be in trouble about his complicity in cutting the manned component at Hipparchus or stopping the infrared telescope abuilding in orbit or keeping women out of the program. And in the sweet rushing fullness of time Parsons was no longer mentator said Kenneth had a positive talent for telling the right truth at the right time -- right for Kenneth -- and it was doubly surprising when the faculty for truth-telling left him, utterly, after Parsons resigned. A few of the men told him the moves had saved his career -- that before he had gone on #D he had been marked as a leading target for the next Night of the Long Knives. Houston -- they murmured casually, looking into their branchwater-and-bourbon -- hadn't been too happy about some of his transmissions from Mars orbit, bellyaching (their word) about coming home. Kenneth listened carefully to their admirations of his maneuvering skill, but he knew it was misplace. He had done in Parsons out of sheer personal dislike -- no principle at all had been involved -- and his subconscious knew it. As soon as the irritant had been removed, the sly Medici within him slipped into slumber and Kenneth returned to being a working astronaut. The program sensed his potential power -- once stung, twice paranoid -- and more or less gave him the duty he wanted. When a spot opened in the thrice-yearly rotation at Hipparchus he applied for it and got it. He was short and kept up his breath control -- he was precisely the man to use for long Rover missions in the highlands, working in a two-man team. At last, on the moon, younger men were making their way in the program. The early test-pilot astronauts, thoroughly married and nearing their middle years, reeking of oatmeal virtues, couldn't make it at Hipparchus. They were fine for flights and quick exploratory landings, but they couldn't keep up the pace during the long marches and climbs. So, into an age leached of glory came the return of gallant young men, bleached hair cropped close to the skull, who kept the space program hobbling along with an occasional newsworthy exploit. Toward the end of his rest after Sure Thing, the Mars flight, Kenneth had been interviewed on a late-night talk program. The gentleman philosopher who "hosted" the program -- meaning it was his show -- had mentioned that Kenneth had performed "one of the great acts of our civilization." Kenneth had told him no, that the great deeds always came in quiet, lonely rooms, where men and women worked for that most elusive of all things, a truly original idea. Maybe, Kenneth thought to himself, watching Earth set behind a crumpled, gray-brown horizon, maybe ! was even right. The host had murmured a precisely timed assent and shifted the subjecttelevision does not fix on private experiences but public ones. Still, now Kenneth had come to it, too -- waiting, alone, to drive home the blade. Or, failing that, a bludgeon. In solitude, very nearly as a private act. Private. But public. T he first indication had come in the form of increased radio traffic with Houston. Kenneth was mercifully spared radio duty because of rank, so he first heard of the Marauder when the Hipparchus Base commander called him in for a preliminary briefing. Three other men were there, alternate candidates for the mission, but Houston had made it clear that one Kenneth M. Walters was much preferred. Why? None of them could say, except that he did have more deep-space experience than the others. Too, he had reacted well during some foul-ups of Sure Thing and -- perhaps more IF significant -- administrative changes memories of his independence. The four men at Hipparchus were told about the Marauder and Scenario Eight a week before Eight was to be executed. They heard, too, of the poor bastard who had decoyed the Marauder into a Venus orbit and had been fired as a result (a light sentence, Houston felt, but after all, he was a civilian). One week was just barely enough time to arrange the modules for carrying extra fuel, checking out the systems and working out some alternate scheduling in case of mishap. It took everyone at the Base to assemble the launch vehicle and pilot's cabin in time. The nuclear-tipped rockets were already on their way from Earth orbit, carried aboard the supply shuttle. Arranging the myriad valves and connections, checking out servo systems and interface parameters -- each man carried a gallery of facts and numbers and details inside his head, worked doggedly to the limit of the pills and. shots he was given and, in the span of five days, individually and collectively converted a blueprint into hardware. novel from the cabin's erasable slate. With some forethought Kenneth had brought along a pack of four memorex crystals, each book length. In the first day of waiting he had devoured two of them. He privately gave even odds that Scenario Eight would not come off at all and reading relaxed him. It also provided a distraction. Even a view of the moon from twenty-seven miles up can pall after a while. A phrase caught his eye:... at an attitude toward Attaturk... Later, as he was musing down at the flinty plain of Mare Smythii, it came back to him. He treated the words as he might an algebraic expression, factoring out all the fl's, then the 's. Rearranged, the words could yield ambiguity, incoherence, passable poetry. He wondered if he had given in to a neurotic compulsion. Memory of case histories from library shelves came to him -- women who never passed a lamppost without touching it, men who balanced always on the ball of the left foot while urinating, outfielders who had to take a skip before throwing the ball to home plate. He shrugged and divided the phrase into thirds, quarters, eighths, thought of an anagram, fiddled with the punctuation. The moon turned. X ing okay' Lewis again, seven orbits later. "What does Houston say?" Kenneth asked. "'Marauder is holding to course, decelerating at a fixed rate. Looks like its final orbit will be about a thousand miles out." "What's it saying to Houston?" "How would I know? They use some special code, sounds like to me. I listened in some and I couldn't spot any of the usual patterns, no Morse or anything like that." "Morse isn't handy for computers. Too redundant or not redundant enough something." "Well, they're keeping it busy. The Scenario calls for beaming a lot of hot stuff out to the Marauder just as it comes in and starts maneuvering. I guess they're answering the questions those computers wanted to know all along, only Houston wouldn't tell." "I wonder what it thought, sitting over near Venus." Kenneth paused. "They couldn't be dumb, those machines. They must have Figured out right away that Venus couldn't support any life." "I wouldn't be so sure about that. It stayed put for five months." "Maybe it was just being diplomatic." Lewis chuckled, making a cackling hollow sound in Kenneth's helmet speakers. "That thing's a computer, Ken. And not even one designed by humans. It's just a searcher, that's all." "If that's what it is -- why is it hanging around? After it sent out that big directional radio signal toward Ursa Major it should have moved on to the next star." "Well, that's why you're getting set to cripple it, Ken. To be sure it doesn't get any closer to Earth." "And to give us a chance to pick its brains." "Yeah, right. But remember, zap it if it looks like it's getting away. That's what Houston says." "Sure." He waited, mistrusting a sudden impulse to exchange small talk with Lewis. Kenneth Walters, the media man, wanting to sound off. "What does Houston know?" "Huh?" Thin thread of surprise in the voice. "Houston thinks the Marauder is a recon operation. That doesn't have to be so. That guy Cains handed it a line about us living on Venus at the first, to keep it at arm's length. The Marauder probably transmitted some of that crap back to its home." "So?" "Now it's got to amend that report. It probably doesn't trust IF Houston much any more -- it wants a look for itself." "Let it look from Venus.'"If somebody had told it we thought it was carrying alien diseases -- or wanted to steal our wives and children -- maybe the thing would stay away. Anybody try that?" "Houston doesn't want to tip our hand and let that thing know we're afraid of it, Ken," Lewis said, sounding a little exasperated. "We want a shot at a sitting duck." "A finger in the eye." "What's that?" "You ever think how old that thing must be? Our lives are so short that to the Marauder we must dynasties snuffed out in an instant. It looks at us with its microscope and makes lab notes while we try to poke a finger in its eye." "Hey, no wonder you were a hit on the late show. If this ever gets out to the public, you can use your lines in one of those magazine articles." "I never wrote any." "Not even about Mars?" "No, I'm a media man. Auralvisual. Let your slides do the work." "You're coming out of the radio shadow, Ken. I've already squirted your LogEx the corrections." "Okay, see you on the next pass." He was moving into the sun's white glare again. The cabin popped and pinged and snicked as it warmed. A plaster of Paris crater below lay bisected by the terminator, its central cone perfectly symmetric. Its rim was round and seemed smooth. Four distinct terraces marched down to the floor. Snick, went his cabin. Waiting at the edge of infinity, he thought. On the smooth shore of the ocean of night, marking the minutes until the winged stranger arrived. An actor, not knowing his lines, ready to go onstage for his big Scenario. Maybe he should have been an actor, after all. He had tried it once, in college, before engineering and flight training had swallowed up his hours. He had wanted to be an actor, but his father had talked him into becoming a Kenneth Walters. He warmed a tube of tea and sipped it, as well as anyone can sip from a squeeze bottle. The sun streamed in. Tea was a warm hand in the dark. Reeling with Darjeeling, he thought, and maybe, after all, I did fool old Dad in the end. Sure Thing had been a straight bit of acting, with Providence kindly providing a busy coda of danger after the landing. And here he was for his next engagement, carefully primed, all the props in place. Opening night coming up, all the Top Secret Clearance audience clustered about TV sets. Best of all -- no critics. This actor, a wellgrounded student of the Method School, is noted for his wholehearted interest in and devotion to his performance. His previous work, while controversial, has won him some notoriety. He prefers roles that seem to point a moral at the end, so the audience, will believe they understood it all along... He smiled to himself. A man with his finger on the trigger can afford a few cosmic thoughts. Politics becomes geometry, philosophy is calculus. The universe winds about itself, snakelike, events plotted along coiled coordinates with a fine tight geometry, the scrap paper of a mad mathematician. He raised an eyebrow at the idea. I wonder what they put in this tea... VI They had called him several times, but he had been slow to answer. "Tm busy." "Got your systems repped and verified?" Lewis spoke quickly, slurring one word into another and making it hard to piece together the sentence. "We received that squirt from your onboard diagnostics on your last pass. Breakdown shows no serious trouble. A little overpressure on the backup tanks, but Houston says it is within tolerable operating limits. It looks like you're cleared." Kenneth turned off the inboard reading lights before replying. The cockpit became bathed in the deep red of the running lights. For a moment he saw only blackness, then his eyes adjusted. He had seen this warm red glow thousands of times before, but now the sight seemed fresh and strange, portending events just beyond the point of articulation. Dante, he thought, has been here before me. Well, he would give them what they wanted. He thumbed over to transmit. "I verify, Hipparchus. Staging reading four-oh-three-eight. Servitor inventory just completed and LogEx reports all subsystems and backups are functional." "I have a relay for you." "What?" A buzz, a hiss of solar static, then a smooth, well modulated voice: "Ken, this is George Evers. I'm chairman of ExComm down here -- we came up with Scenario Eight. I asked Hipparchus to patch me through to clear up any lastminute questions." "I haven't got any. Just be sure Marauder doesn't put on any sudIF den burst of speed. Understand?" "Quite right," Evers said gravely, his voice dropping an octave. "However, we are sure the Marauder will never see you. You will have the sun at yoUr back all the way in on your run. There isn't any radar in the world that can pick you up against that background." "In the world -- wn." "Oh, I see. Well -- " Evers gave a small, self-deprecating chuckle -- " it's just a phrase. But our people here feel strongly that there are certain rules of thumb about detection equipment that hold true in every situation, even this one. I wouldn't worry about it." Pause. "But the reason I'm taking up your time, Ken -- and I see we have only a few minutes left -- is to impress upon you your obligations on this mission. We down here cannot predict what the Marauder will do. The final decisions are up to you, although we will be in contact as soon as we are sure that the Marauder has detected you -- if it ever does, that is. To be sure, that might be long after the time for any effective action on your part is past. We will do all we can from this end, of course. For the last few hours we have been transmitting a wealth of cultural information on mathematics, science, art and so on. ExGomm hopes this will serve as a diversion to the computers in the Marauder, though we have no way of knowing for certain. Meanwhile our satellites circling the moon will monitor radio transmissions to keep us in touch. Silence is essential. Do not broadcast on any band until the Marauder shows unmistakable signs of having seen you." "I know all that." "We just want you to have these things clear in your mind. There was no time for a proper briefing. You have two small missiles with chemical warheads. If they are not sufficient to cripple the Marauder s propulsion, then the nuclear -- " Kenneth Walters cut in: "I've got to check out something." Evers' words ran on for a few seconds, until the time lag due to the finite speed of light caught up. It was obvious to Ken that he had interrupted a prepared speech. The beauty of his situation was that no one could tell from telemetry whether he had something to do or not. He said, "Okay now." Evers came back. "One last thing, Ken. This Marauder could be inconceivably dangerous to humanity. If anything seems to be going wrong, kill it. No, that's too strong. The thing is just a machine, Ken. Intelligent, yes, but it is not alive. Well, good luck. We're counting on you down here." The sputter of static returned. T ime trickled into the past, and he frowned, trying to make the memories fit. His father had slipped away during Ken's college years, become a fading echo. The man had given his son a drab litany of success to live by -- shoulders-to-the-wheel and all that -- with a high nervous certainty that he, Kenneth, would fly where the father had merely walked. But he had coughed out his last spark before Sure Thing was born and had never known that his son had made it big, vindicated his withered life. Poor father, he would have been awed by Parsons, by the multioffices and the legion of heelclickers enslaved to them. Ah, and the fame that had followed Sure Thing -- father would have rolled and basked in that, too, loving the delicious small warmths of celebrity. The old man's solid, easy assurance had guided Kenneth, but when he looked back he found it hollow. So the faith of his father was empty. Now he spun in night, suspended above choices made and abandoned, searching. Rather than fake a head cold and let one of the three eager backup pilots take Scenari Eight, he had thrust himself into the crucible of events again, seeking definition. His beard itched. He resisted the urge to scratch it, knowing that would only make the itch worse, and allowed himself a mad grin, rolled his eyes, let forth a hollow groan, stretched his legs and arms. He dabbed at his teeth with a soft wet tongue, tasting orange juice. He had been drinking it when Evers called. Some sliding waver in the way the man spoke, some thread of uncertainty had come into the cabin with that voice. Evers Kenneth did not complete the steps, fearing where they led. He studied the distant vortex of white storm clouds over India and tried not to think. His fingers trembled. Time. Time to see it all. He needed more. But time was gone, the green clock said; he went forward to meet the moment, to put himself on the anvil again. He whispered it to himself through tight and bloodless lips. He was being pressed to geometric flatness by the magic hand of the multistage rocket and, though he breathed shallow short gasps and concentrated on timing them precisely, the pain would not stop shooting through the soft organs of his belly. He closed his eyes to find a red haze and imagIF ined himself a sunbather pinned to the hard sand, vaguely conscious of the distant rumble of the surf. The Pacific. He had been stationed in California during aquanaut training, growing tan between hot dunes and clear water startling in its coldness. He remembered long and agonizing runs on the beach between La Jolla and Del Mar, recalled himself churning doggedly past forests of firm young thighs, sun shimmering through a thin haze of sweat that ran into his eyes. Cantilevered breasts -- or more stylishly, bare ones, brown nipples pouting -- had swung to follow his progress, deliciously red lips had spread to wide grins at his grunts and wheezes. Surf had foamed white to the side, ragged margin to bluegreen ocean. As his arms and legs had grown leaden he had diverted himself with glimpses of the figures and faces passing by, moving stride by stride into his past. Small families, leathery men, serenely nude couples, dogs -- all had acted out small plays in his head, populated his preconceived universe, frozen while snarled in tiny dramas of fear and aching lust, boredom and laughter, all parties taking all parts. The pressing fist was lifted. He blinked, located a toggle switch. saw a light turn green. Separation. The fist returned. Combat mission. Enemy. Target. He had not used those words for years -- they were childhood terms. Galoshes. Skate key. As the days stand up on end. My friend... His uncle had fought in some grimy jungle conflict, somewhere, had told stories about it, resolving all complicated political theory with the unanswerable gut reality of a souvenir pistol and bayonet, proudly displayed. Ken had thought it a minor eccentricity, like owning a complete fifty-year run of The National Geographic, The fist lifted. The fist returned. A rivulet of spittle ran down his to move a hand. His eyes ached. Each of his kidneys was a sullen lump just beneath the skin of his back. Iron and oil. Brought to a boil. Abruptly he floated. The dull rumble died. He sucked in air, feeling life return to his numbed arms and legs. Automatically he scanned the regiments of lights before him. He was flying blind, no radar to guide him. After a few minutes of checking he activated the firecontrol center and received acknowledgments from the computers that rode in the missiles. Then he rotated his couch to get a full view put the. large observation port. Nothing. The port was black, vacant. He logged the time and checked the running printout on his slate. The burn was right, his heading was dead on. The Marauder was coming in for an orbit around the moon, as Houston had asked it to, and he would come up from behind, closing fast. He glanced through the port again. Nothing. Now that he was on a definite mission, moving, the complete radio silence was eerie. Through the side port he could see the back of the moon fall away, an endless dirty gray plain of jumbled craters. He searched the main port carefully, watching for relative motion against the scattered jewels of the fixed stars. He was studying the star field so intently that he nearly missed the bright point of light that drifted slowly into view. H e swung the viewing telescope down from its mount. Magnified, the diamond point resolved into a small pearl. The Marauder was a sphere, silvery, with no apparent markings. He could see no means of propulsion. Perhaps they were on the other side of the object or not operating at the moment. It didn't matter -- his missiles had both heat-seeking and radar guidance and could find the Marauder s fusion flame if it were on. He squinted, trying to estimate the range. But he had no idea of how large the ship was, other than Houston's early estimate that it had to be less than three hundred yards in radius, based on data from the Venusian satellites. He peered at it. The Marauder had come from some vast distance, sifting through scattered suns, searching for a matching glimmer of intelligence. For its journey to end so suddenly, here -- if the missile hit wrong, burned away its fine-spun matrix of inorganic intelligence -- would be awesome waste... Kenneth broke off the thought. He fumbled with the buttons on the fire-control breadboard, rushing himself into something he did not want to think about too clearly. He aligned, corrected and with an executioner's grace snapped the button home. From the left port came a bright orange flare and a blunt thump as death took wing. A spike of light spurted ahead. It IF was a burning gaseous star, a sharp matchpoint of flame, then a shrinking dot that homed with bitter resolve. Kenneth fidgeted. A shrill beep rattled in the cabin as automatic tracking followed the missile. Red numerals showing course adjustments flickered and died on the board before him. The idiot beep quickened. The point of light swept smoothly toward the blurred outline before it. Kenneth sucked in his breath, held it. The sky splintered. An eye-searing ball of flame billowed out. It thinned, paled. He pressed back into his couch, not moving, nostrils flared. The beep was gone and only a faint burr of radio static reached him. He hung suspended, waiting. He stared ahead. Beyond the slowly dulling circle of flame a dab of light moved to the left. Its image wavered and then resolved into an intact, perfect sphere. Kenneth realized that the chemical warhead had detonated prematurely. A wave of unexpected hope filled him. He blinked, trying to comprehend his own feelings. The silvery ball drifted slowly leftward and he automatically corrected his course, feeling a tug of acceleration at his back. His mind tumbled, seeking something to hold. Evers said to use the nuke, use the nuke use the nuke if the other missiles failed. Evers said... Evers said... He corrected again, pursuing, feeling the tightening clutch of the straps. The pearl grew slightly, wobbled as he fired starboard jets and brought her on target again. He enjoyed the calming rhythm of work, of knowing what he was about. But the moment could not be put off. He punched in the final sequence of instructions and armed the one missile he had not expected to use. It rode directly above his head, waiting in the secure nest of its pod. was thumb-fingered and moved slowly. The firing button for the nuclear-tipped missile sat alone in a small, bracketed section of the board. Kenneth could not take his eyes from it. He knew the radiation and shock waves from a nuclear warhead would probably kill the pearl. He knew it and he could not move. A voice asked, "Do you know me so well?" Kenneth froze. The voice came from his helmet speakers, free of static. "Who -- " he began and stopped. "Do you ride such comfortable winds that you can live counter to your best nature?" "You're speaking? You" "I speak for my. life." "How do you know what I am doing?" Kenneth asked numbly. "I have seen the dark side of your race. There are fewer walls than you may think. I have met this before -- in different light." The sphere ahead moved slightly to the right, out of his field of view. When he found it again through the telescope it seemed to have shrunk. "I -- I don't know what you -- " he stammered. "You are alone. I do not understand how you people can divide guilt, but out here I know it cannot be done. You are one man and you have no place to hide." "If I -- press this button -- " "You will make mean comfort for yourself. You are ready?" "I hadn't thought that -- that -- " "Your folk are often double." "I didn't think you would be quite -- " He hesitated, his mind spinning soundlessly on fine threads over the abyss. The button beneath his finger became a stone, himself the sword, terrible in its weight. A click, buzz, static. The voice passed from him. "Walters, Walters. Evers here. Intersection should have occurred. We just got a fragment of some transmission -- part of it sounded like you. What's happened?" K enneth Walters reached for the switch that would allow him to transmit and found it already on, warm meter glowing. "I don't know," he said. More static. Houston was probably using one of the lunar satellites to relay. "Well, you had damn better find out. About a minute ago we picked up a signal of some sort from the surface, too. Parallax puts the source near Mare Marginis. We thought maybe the Marauder had altered course and landed there." "No, it's right in front of me." Kenneth peered out and found the pearl on black velvet. From the tail of it came a line of brightness, dimming the silver glow. It was clean and precise, carving order from the chaotic darkness that enveloped it. He felt his eyes become damp and he did not know why, though he felt a longing he had not known for many years. It '# IF moved, captive of vastness, inexpressibly lonely. "Walters! Report. Did the missile go off all right?" "Yes." A blur of sound. "score? Did it score?" "In a manner of speaking." "What?" "It detonated before it hit. No damage." "And the backup? We haven't registered any jump in radiation levels." With a gathering rush, softly, Kenneth Walters felt a weight lifted from him. A clarity came into his world. He knew at last where he was, the rank and order of things, sensed the welling rhythm of events. He perceived a straightness he had not seen before, a simple and direct channel within him that restored balance. Without premonition, letting the words come out, he said, "You forced matters this way, didn't you, Evers?" "What way? What are you talking about?" "You forced death when you could have risked life," he said mildly. Silence. Then: "Now, Ken, there is a job to be done out there. You don't have time -- " "No, I don't. Not for this conversation." "Listen to me, Ken." A hint of urgency. "I've put all our bets on you -- the game depends on your -- " Kenneth wondered at how smoothly Evers' voice slid from the ragged edge of anger to silky persuasiveness -- which tone was natural to the man? Or was he nothing but false notes? "Goodbye, coach." "Walters? Walters? Report! What is the situation there? We -- " Ken thumbed away from that frequency. T he moment of silence was filled only with his breathing. The crackling static had fallen away. "It was not false, what I have learned," the voice said. "You, behind me, are one man who is not so hobbled and coiled." "I wonder," Kenneth said. "Your race has a stream of tongues. You communicate with many senses. These were hard for me. And I could not seem to find in the men who spoke to me the things that were in your books and art. It was as though there were two species. I did not understand that each man is so different." "Of course." "I have met other beings who were not," the voice said simply. "How could that be? Did they follow instinctive patterns -- like insects?" "No. They lived in a vast sea. Perhaps that explains some things. They were easier to fathom than your diversity. You are a tensed race, always moving in many directions at once...I have, never seen such turbulence. I am afraid I cannot stay near such danger." Kenneth felt a tug of disappointment, but he smiled. "It's easy to see why you can't understand us. The damned speak frantically." "No." "But we are damned. Coinpared to you we have little time." "Eight hundred thousand of your years are still not enough. Your time is short and vivid, mine -- I scream sometimes in this night." "Good God." A pause. "I'd like to have those years, whatever you say. Mortality -- " "Is a spice. A valued one." "I still would like the years." "You are not damned." "Damned lucky," Kenneth laughed, "but still damned." "What was that sound?" "Laughter." "I see. Spice." "Oh." He smiled, this time to himself. "Is your care so flat?" After a long moment the voice said, "I see that it may be. Each of you laughs differently -- I cannot recognize the pattern. Perhaps that is significant. Much hides from me -- I was not made for this." "But with all that time -- " "Yes. Those who made me could not see so surely what would come from their hands. I awake at each new star, as they designed. I perform my functions. But the sum is greater than the parts and -- " the voice paused in the drifting silence -- "there are dreams." Kenneth nodded, waiting, but there was nothing more. "What are you going to tell your creators?" he asked at last. "What happened." The voice deepened. "They decide." "Oh." "The rest is mine, the flavors. Your art and the set of your minds, only I am interested in those. They are for my times in darkness." "I wish you well out there." The pearl was dwindling, drawing up unto itself. "If I functioned as my designers intended I would not need your blessing. I would go through that night blindly. But I -- the part who speaks to you -- I am an accident." "Maybe my race is, too." "I do not know. Every race is unique. But friend -- those other IF men will exact, much from you when I leave. Would that I could help." Kenneth smiled, unafraid. "Well, it will be interesting. This was the first time we've been visited and now I've let the quail take to wing. They'll crucify me, lay me out cold. I'll never be out here again." "Not the first -- but no matter. You shall see. There were things written for you and left behind. Look to your moon. And perhaps -- perhaps you should be left alone now. I sense that much has happened to you and that you need time." "Maybe so. I'd still like to know where you're from." "I do not know." "Why?" "I was assembled by another like me between the spiral arms and sent away." "As lost as we." "Yes. Eight hundred thousand years have made it no different, no easier." "Well. Goodbye, then." The pearl was a diamond once more. "I think not." "Oh?" "I am versed in many theologies. Some say you and I are not accidents and that we shall meet again in different light. You are membrane -- I am not. There are things within I cannot see. Perhaps we are all mathematics -- perhaps everything is -- and there is only one whole solution." Kenneth thought. "I believe I see something of what you mean." He shook his head. "It's hard." "I must study that sound, laughter. There is your real theology, the thing men truly believe." "Huh?" "When you make that sound you seem to have a brief moment of what it is like to live as I do, beyond memory. Then you are immortal. Only for an instant." Kenneth laughed. They were rounding the back side of the moon, the iiarauder dropping away, a blue-green Earth rising. Earth was all he had, he knew. Yet he dreaded it, swimming in brawling life. The first part was going to be hell. They would court-martial him, hound him. This would be worse than the return from Mars, worse than he could possibly imagine. Evers would have his inning. He wondered if he could explain this brief flicker of time. He shrugged, eyes stinging. It happened to me then, my friend And here we go Once more Again.  i Did testing an alien intelligence require him to betray his own? the leaves on the branches hiding him, and Conscience Allan Odegaard extended his nonreflecting binoculars to the edge of the green fringe. The dwarf had given Allan's blind several sharp glances earlier, when he had inadvertently moved the greenery. At the moment it sat in its high nest, idly searching one lightly furred thigh for parasites. Allan saw that those it caught were discarded rather than eaten. He looked down to make a note. When he again raised, the glasses the dwarf was on its feet and stretching lazily. This male was approximately one hundred twenty centimeters tall and had characteristically broad shoulders and heavy musculature. In one G it would weigh in at over fifty kilograms and Zwergwelt was a #-G world. Except for the height, its resemblance to a hairy naked man was startling. The dwarf stepped out of its carefully woven vine basket and dropped to a lower limb. Moving with the easy grace of an animal at home in the arboreal pathways, it ambled to an intersecting branch and shifted to the next tree, a nut-bearer. On a planet without seasons a few seeds were always ripe. The short hominid picked two large nuts as it walked toward the trunk. Just as the leaves started to hide the dwarf Allan saw it pause, heft one of the nuts and suddenly let fly. A thin scream overrode the soft ripping sound of a body falling through the vegetation. The hunter disappeared into the thicker lower growth, hurrying to reach his prey before another hungry predator found it on the ground. Allan settled back and wrote on his pad that an adult male dwarf had obtained a meal of nuts and meat within two minutes after starting its evening hunt. Such proficiency should have indicated intelligence of a relatively high order. But the ease with which the sturdy hominid had obtained its meal had at least as much to do with a bountiful environment as with intellect. The slain animal was almost certainly one of the large rodents who lived primarily off the nuts of that particular type of tree. The dwarfs could eat almost any seed, tuber or fruit in the woods, as well as meat. Once again, nothing had been proved. Allan stared at his notebook, knowing from long experience that his three days' worth of data would be inconclusive when statistically analyzed. The dwarfs had an extremely large repertory of situational responses, but so far he had not recorded any actions unambiguously proving intelligence. Allan gathered his gear, slipped on his backpack and descended slowly and cautiously to the ground. He had barely time to reach the field station before dark. He set a brisk pace through the IF moderate undergrowth, glad of the chance to stretch cramped legs. O NE of the severat rocky hills in the area was on his left. Its limestone cliffside paralleled his path. Trees grew so close to the vertical wall that several branches touched it and a solid curtain of leafy vines all but hid the stone. Allan had passed this way earlier, but at a distance. From this close something about the rock face suddenly seemed odd to him, subtly wrong. He paused, staring at the thickest cover near the center. After a moment he identified the oddity -- the coloring was off. He took a step toward the vines and froze when a savage scream sounded almost in his ear. A second later a heavy body landed on his back, knocking him to the ground. Short but powerful arms locked around his chest and a hard head burrowed beneath his jaw, sharp canines seeking the jugular. He exerted all his strength and pulled down his chin, at the same time rolling over and trying to pin his attacker. His left arm was free and he brought the hand around to push desperately against a thick jawbone, aware without pain that the slashing teeth had already cut into his neck. He heard several sharp clicks as his opponent tried to bite his fingers and abruptly the creature rolled Allan in turn, swinging its head free. Allan continued the roll and they ended lying face to face on their sides. He brought up a knee, planted it in a firm belly and shoved with all his strength. The dwarf lost its grip around his shoulders, slid away and Allan finally had the use of his right arm. Almost instantly the short hominid bounced to its feet and launched itself in a dive at his throat, now exposed again. He doubled both legs and kicked. The dwarf went flying against the vine-covered cliff. Allan's laser cleared the holster just as the dwarf, which had regained its footing, ended the combat by darting behind a bush. The creature was visible again an instant later, but Allan held his fire. There was a final scream of animal rage and the dwarf was gone. Badly shaken, Allan got to his feet and brushed himself off He was bleeding profusely from several lacerations of the neck, but none seemed deep. He opened his pack for the medical kit and applied an antiseptic coagulant. When the bleeding stopped he covered the torn areas with plastiskin bandages. His clothes were soaked with blood, but he could do nothing about them. He had recognized his attacker -- it was the female who claimed this territory. Whether she had wanted him for dinner or had simply been defending her land was a moot question. The dwarfs lived alone except for temporary alliances for mating and the females were fully as vicious as the slightly larger males. That he had been attacked was his own fault -- a short detour would have kept him out of her way. Strange, he thought -- he would never have knowingly walked into the territory of a female leopard at the time of the evening hunt, but had moved into the dwarPs area without conscious thought. Because she was a hominid and he had the deeply ingrained male chauvinism common to his kind? The dwarfs did not have a leopard's deadly claws, but their dentition included four long cutting fangs. And in addition to throwing nuts and branches, one male Allan had seen had used a knobbed stick as a club. Neither activity justified a claim of intelligence, but did make the creatures fearsome opponents. Although the forest abounded in herbivores three times their size, the omnivorous dwarfs were the only large meat-eaters. Allan's carelessness had nearly cost him his life. He walked to the vines against which he had kicked the female and where he had noted the discoloration. He had heard no sound of solid impact when the female had struck the wall and he saw why -- there was a cave behind the thick cover. The dark opening also explained the subtle change in color. His pack held a powerlight. He took it out and, laser pistol ready, edged through the vines. In five meters both floor and ceiling started rising. Then the narrow tunnel widened into a small underground grotto. Allan moved the light around. He was standing in a circular cavern about twelve meters in diameter, with a low concave roof. The room was empty except for a single figure seated on a natural stone bench protruding from the rear wall. a statue, apparently made of clay and almost human in appearance. The workmanship was crude, but the sculpture had clearly defined features, a normal head and four limbs. The scale was slightly larger than human. No attempt had been made to indicate hair. The ears were outsized and lips were huge and ugly, extending like two halves of a saucer broken across the middle and lying on top of each other. IF the round sides protruding. This was not a dwarf cast twice life size, nor was it a man. Allan moved closer and touched the statue, then turned his light and swept it across the chamber floor. The stone was covered with a fine layer of powdered limeonly his own footsteps showed. He had an almost certain feeling this room had not been entered for decades, perhaps centuries. And yet the oddly made crude figure seated on its soft stone bench was composed of simple clay and was not even fire-cured. It should have crumbled to pieces from loss of moisture within a few days of its making. Allan shook his head in bafflement, then conceded the mystery was beyond his immediate understanding and turned away. He had to get back to the station. Outside again, he pulled the vines back in place. The grotto was as well hidden as before. Dusk was falling, but he could still easily follow the herbivore game trail that led toward the station. He walked the remaining three kilometers lost in thought -- on this trail he was safe from attack. Who had made the statue? Crude art might be within the physical skills of the dwarfs, but they were not sufficiently advanced in culture or intelligence to have need for a god. And what kept the fragile clay together? The last yellow rays of Pollux had faded when Allan emerged at the base of a low hill crowned by the foamfab dome of the station, a temporary structure. Halfway up the hill he used a key to let himself through a gate in the charged protective fence that encircled the building. Trees that approached the fence had been cut down, eliminating aerial access to the enclosure, but new green bushes were growing where the original brush had been burned away. At the door Allan was met by Victoria Gant, the chief of the station's nonscientific personnel. She was a short, dumpy brunette, slightly older than Allan's fortyeight Eryears and fanatically devoted to her job. She saw the bandages on his neck, asked what had happened and insisted on treating the wounds again when Allan admitted to having been bitten. He sighed and submitted. He removed his upper garments and Victoria opened each laceration, poured on foaming antiseptic and let fresh blood and liquid run out. It hurt when she carefully tucked the torn edges of flesh back together, but Allan gritted his teeth and endured. She opened a new tube and carefully covered each wound with a white gel he recognized as a coagulant and flesh sealant, then she rebandaged the wounds after the bleeding stopped. "We're late for dinner -- hurry into some clean clothes," Victoria said when Allan rose. She started cleaning up the small mess her ministrations had made on the floor. T hirty minutes later Allan had bathed and changed. Two Other dinner guests had just arrived -- the director of the Zwergwelt stations. Dr. Boris Magnitsky, and his aircar pilot. The elderly scientist spent most of his time at Main Base in the central highlands, but visited the three outlying field stations regularly. The four buildings were the only human habitations on the planet. The dwarfs had been declared intelligent and the planet had been proscribed except for rigidly controlled scientific work. "Did you finish today, Conscience?" the director asked, after picking delicately at his food. His voice was deep and pleasant, but had a slight quaver of age. A faintly sardonic smile touched his wrinkled face. "I'll be returning to Main tomorrow if you need a ride." Allan decided to meet the challenge head-on. "Doctor Magnitsky, I haven't uncovered one fact that invalidates the observations your people have made of the natives' intelligence," he said slowly. "Still, decision without an intensive investigation of my own. I'm going to stay here a few more days." "Then you'll have to catch the regular supply run next week. We can't spare the aircar for a special trip," said the director, rising. He was a tall man stooped with age, the first scientist past his hundredth birthday Allan had seen at an out-planet location. Magnitsky was also a giant in modern biology and when he had reported that the Zwergwelt dwarfs were not intelligent, as ruled by a Conscience some six Eryears before. Sector Chief Odegaard had been dispatched immediately to check on the claim. Politicians were always trying to influence the decision of a Conscience, but Magnitsky's scientific credentials were impeccable. There were also several psychologists on his staff. The problem on Pollux Five had arisen at a bad time. World Council elections would be held on Earth within sixty days and if the New Roman opposition could prove that a highly compatible world like Zwergwelt had been withheld IF from colonization by error, the embarrassment could cost the Conservationist Party the election. The Corps of Practical Philosophers had been launched with tremendous fanfare some thirteen Eryears ago to identify and save from exploitation worlds containing intelligent species. It had been proved on Earth that when unequal cultures met, the higher inevitably eroded and eventually destroyed the lower. Guns, antibiotics and power tools were far more easily absorbed than mechanized agriculture, birth control and a nine-tothree job. The resulting strains on the delicate fabric of social organization always pulled a less developed culture apart. After interstellar travel became commonplace in the twenty-first century the Conservationist Party decided not to export Earth's previous mistakes. Thousands of worlds in the Hyades group, containing Earth and the neighboring clusters of Ursa Major and Scorpio-Centaurus, had already been explored. No sign had been found of another space-traveling forms had been discovered, many of them in the early stages of intelligence. Save for being subject to scientific research, worlds containing such species were to remain untouched. The initial glow of virtue faded rapidly as the Practical Philosophers -- or "Consciences of Mankind" as they were soon dubbed -- did their jobs. The same factors that had led to the development of intelligence on Earth dominated similar worlds, with the result that planet after planet suitable for colonization was ruled ineligible. Now even the Conservationists found the P.P. Corps a hindrance. But the party and its most glamorous agency had become firmly welded in the public mind and must stand or fall together. Allan had been informed by Siggi Wilson, P.P. Corps administrator, that it was vitally important that the original decision regarding the dwarfs' intelligence be proved correct. Unfortunately, to date he had no proof that would enable him so to rule. II T he five men and three women finished their meal and started drifting into the common room for the night's entertainment. The director had brought some new Tri-D tapes. "Going to watch the Olympics with us. Conscience?" asked Margarete Olmedo, a pretty, oliveskinned girl who had been more than casually friendly toward Allan during his short stay. He was tempted. He had put in a long day crouching in his blind and whether or not he liked sports was immaterial -- the tapes showed Earth. But he also needed to start extracting the Figures that were going to build to an inconclusive statistic, and tomorrow he wanted to get an early start and construct an observation post near the female dwarf that had attacked him. She had launched herself from an overhead branch when he had made a move toward the hidden cave and it was not simply a coincidence that when he had hurled her away from him she had landed against the opening. Regretfully he declined. In the small cubicle that had been assigned to him Allan sat on the foamfab bunk and patiently assembled his data into class orders. He ran a preliminary analysis in all classes for central value and compared the result with the established intelligence scales used by all P.P.'s. As he had expected, the dwarfs were a borderline case with a slight bias on the lower side. Apparently the previous Conscience had been influenced by the creatures' biological classification as hominids and their demonstrated competence. Allan could not believe his predecessor had seen the hidden grotto and its god figure -- the air of untouched antiquity had been too strong. Borderline was not good enough -- according to P.P. guidelines intelligence had to be positively demonstrated. Allan sighed and ran a comparison check between his own data and the refined statistics gathered by station personnel and correlated by Magnitsky. The two were almost identical when obtained under similar conditions. Unless the more detailed studies were faked, which seemed highly improbable, Magnitsky's case was practically proven. The idea of delaying a decision until after the next election occured to Allan, but he discarded it immediately. The commitment of mankind to the avoiding of old errors had to be considered a lasting one, not subject to changing conditions, to mean anything at all. Zwergwelt had a nineteen-hour day and he worked through half the short night before tumbling into bed. He slept dreamlessly until called for breakfast. He lingered over a second cup of stimcaf with Magnitsky, who was preparing to leave. The aged scientist seemed to have something on his mind. Finally he pulled a flimsy from a pocket and said, "I received an interesting rumor IF on the daily activity report from Main Base this morning, Allan. The word is out that you're scheduled to leave for Earth and become Siggi Wilson's deputy administrator. Also that you just might break a short tradition and replace Wilson when he retires next year." Magnitsky chuckled. Allan realized his face must have shown his surprise. The present deputy administrator was leaving and Allan had been offered the job, but the thought that he might be groomed to replace Wilson was new. In its short life the Corps had had three administrators, all of them retired space service general officers. Since the Corps was a semi-military agency and all accredited agents held reserve rank in the space service, the short tradition had seemed likely to become a long one. What Magnitsky could not know was that Allan planned to decline the promotion. He has signed up for the P.P. Corps at its inception. In his sixteen years in the field, eleven as a Conscience and the last five as one of three sector chiefs, he had found a life more rewarding than anything crowded Earth had to offer. He liked spending three-quarters of his time in spaceships. And while gathering data on a subject species was often dull and tedious it also offered unique adventures, high moments of excitement and danger, the thrill of discovery, that no desk-bound job could possibly match. The two men shook hands and Allan slipped on his backpack. At the door he was stopped by Victoria Gant, who asked where he would be if they should need to reach him. "I'd rather not take a chance on your disturbing the subject under observation -- except for an emergency," he told her. "Understood. But there may be one. Allan showed her the low cliff on his terrain map. An hour later he was sitting on top of it, hidden behind some bushes near the edge. The tallest trees reached well above the limestone outcropping and he patiently scanned their upper levels with binoculars. He located the female dwarf in ten minutes. She had built her nest in the second tree away from the edge, slightly below the cliff top. The thick brush at the cliffs edge provided an adequate shield. Allan settled down to observation. This female had no children and, like the males, spent most of the morning napping and occasionally eating fruit. At noon she left and made a circuit of what was obviously her territory, but returned for another nap. Allan began to wonder where the dwarfs got their muscular power -- like male lions in the wild, they received hardly enough exercise to stay alive. B y the time. Pollux sank slowly toward the green horizon Allan was entertaining the hope that Victoria would send someone after him. It would stir the female into activity -- she might exhibit protective behavior if strangers approached the cave. But nothing had happened when it came time for him to leave. Allan donned his pack and crept backward until he could rise and walk down the gentle slope to the north. He reached the game trail that led toward the station and started along it, mulling over the obviously high but unrealized potential of the dwarfs. For some reason he felt listless and tired, as though drugged by fatigue. He could think of no reason for his weariness -- he had spent most of the day lying on the ground in reasonable comfort -- but the feeling persisted and grew stronger as he walked. Some instinct developed by a thousand brushes with death on primitive worlds alerted him to danger. He looked around carefully and saw nothing unusual, but the uneasy feeling persisted. There was an abrupt bend just ahead in the trail and without conscious intent his hand drifted to the laser in his belt as he started around it. And then he saw the waiting human female. She wore a black hood with a front panel that hid her face. "Just stand there," a voice said almost beside him and Allan turned to see a pistol barrel covering him from the shadowed bush. There was a crackling of brush from the opposite side and a second armed and black-hooded figure emerged. "Who are you? What do you want with me?" Allan demanded. "You will know shortly," said the female who had waited in the trail and Allan could not repress his startled surprise. The voice was muffled by the hood, but he was almost certain it belonged to Victoria Gant. She turned and started back down the trail and one of the two men removed Allan's laser and gestured for him to follow. He experienced a slight dizzy spell, but recovered and walked after her. The masked woman led the way toward the station at a brisk walk, but turned into an intersecting trail after less than a kilometer. Allan had to force himself to meet her pace. Two hundred meters down IF the new trail she turned into the brush. Allan followed for a short distance, the wo guards at his elbows, and emerged into a grassy clearing bordered on one side by a small swift river. Three other masked figures, one of them a woman, were sitting on the grass a few meters from the bank. When he stopped walking Allan's legs almost betrayed him. He sat down and rested a moment, then looked up at the woman and said, "This is an odd game -- and I don't really want to play." "It is not a game and your participation is mandatory," the woman replied, her voice cold. "This is a Safeguard Squad, Conscience Odegaard." Allan felt a small thrill of horror. He had heard the vaguest, most fleeting rumors about a secret society recently active on the outlying worlds and the word "Safeguard" had been whispered. He had not believed the rumors or put credence in hints that the recent deaths of two Consciences had been something more than the accidents they appeared to be. The thought that some of the people he knew and worked withcould don masks and become killers was insupportable. The horror he felt now was not for his own safety -- it came from the realization that the unacceptable was true. "I have heard of you, but only vaguely," he said aloud. "Tell me more." "In good time. Conscience. At the moment we have more urgent business. Please sign this." She extended a single page. Allan took and read it in the gathering twilight. It was the usual preliminary report filed over the subradio when a Conscience reached a decision -- it imitated his writing style reasonably well. It stated that the dwarfs of Zwergwelt were definitely below the minimum intelligence level and that the decision of the previous Conscience was reversed. Zwergwelt was to be opened to full colonization. Allan's name and rank of sector chief had been typed in. "I may very well file a similar report when I'm satisfied it's the truth, but not before -- and I'll never sign under duress," he said, handing it back. "You will sign -- and promptly," said the voice he now was certain was Victoria's. "I have a hypnotic and its antidote in this medical case. If I must I will drug you, order you to sign and then administer the antidote. But in your present weakened condition the double drug dose might be fatal. I advise you to sign." "Why are you trying to force me when this is probably the decision I'm going to reach anyway?" he asked. overrule your mistaken predecessor, which we doubt, you made it perfectly clear in talking to Magnitsky that you intend to delay a decision until it's too late to affect the coming elections. We can't wait. This will be just what the New Romans need to throw the idiot Conservationists out of power at long last. Now sign or take your chances with the drugs." She again extended the paper to Allan. He shrugged, accepted it and signed. As he handed it back Allan said, "I don't understand the rules of the game. What's to prevent me from repudiating this the moment I reach a subradio?" "If you are found innocent of Crimes Against Mankind in the trial you are about to undergo you will be kept isolated in a nearby cave until after the election," said the woman, her voice even and very formal. "If found guilty as charged -- you will be executed." T he horror came back, prickling at the skin of Allan's forehead. He had been seconds away from death on many occasions and had been frightened every time. But now it was not fear that sent cold chills down his back -- it was the knowledge that he was dealing with selfappointed executioners. These ment of him for what they alone considered crimes. He had thought such barbarism gone from human society -- today it was a recognized form of insanity. Victoria slipped the report into her jacket. In measured tones she said, "Conscience Odegaard, you are charged with Crimes Against Mankind -- specifically, with forbidding the colonization of dozens of worlds perfectly suited for human growth and expansion. You may speak in your own defense and I shall appoint a counselor for you. I suggest you take time to consult with him before the trial begins. I warn you fairly. If you are convicted by this jury -- " she swept a hand toward the woman and two men who had been waiting for them -- "you will be summarily executed. This is not a game, as you referred to it earlier -- for you the situation could hardly be more serious." Allan raised a hand. "A moment ago you referred to my 'weakened condition.' How did you know I was not feeling well?" A short laugh came from behind the black mask. "The salve VicIF toria Gant used on your wounds yesterday contained a new drug, discovered here on Zwergwelt, It acts slowly and weakens without to take you prisoner today and the drug lowered your ability to resist." Allan was so physically weak it was n effort to hold his head erect. His mind was clear, though, and he caught the illogic at once. "Then you had intended to force me to sign that false report even before you heard the conversation with Magnitsky. Right, Victoria?" There was a short silence. Then she said, "Your guess as to my identity is not important -- think just what you wish. And yes, we had planned to take this action even before we overheard the conversation that gave away your intentions. But enough talk. The jury and I will withdraw. The man on your right is the prosecutor. I appoint the one on the left as your counsel. The trial begins in ten minutes and I repeat -- if found guilty you die. Prosecutor, you may move out of hearing distance. I think he is now too weak to run." The man on Allan's right followed Victoria and the two stood talking in low tones a few meters away. The other one turned to Allan and said, "Conscience, this trial is real, not just an excuse to execute you. If we win you'll be kept on the drug for a couple of months and released after the elections, just as the judge said. What you do then won't matter because our friends will be in power. Now, the best way to beat this charge is to show what you've done for Mankind to counteract the bad. I've read the folder on you and it shows many cases in which you ruled 'questionable' species unintelligent, opening up several worlds to colonization. We'll throw those at the jury." "Are you saying I can't defend the work of the P.P, Corps in totoT" asked Allan. "Certainly not. That's a sure way to lose. The Corps as a whole has done more to hold Man back from his rightful place in the galaxy than any organization in history. Some muddle-brained Consciences and their bleedingheart supporters have ruled us away from worlds that could be colonized tomorrow. And why? Because some dumb animal just might develop intelligence a million years from now! That's what the Safeguard Squads have been organized to fight. Conscience. You know as well as I do that we need those worlds. But look, let's save it for the jury. Will you do this my way?" "For the moment," Allan agreed. His body felt as if it had been ravaged by a long illness, but he still thought clearly. Evidently the drug did not effect the nervous system. And his defender, probably one of the station personnel, sounded sincere. Night would fall in a few minutes. Allan had already decided to play for time -- if he could overcome his debilitating weakness he might find a chance to escape. T he defense counsel called to the judge and prosecutor. Allan struggled to his feet and walked slowly toward the jury near the riverbank. His appointed attorney followed and the other two moved to intercept him, but slowed when they saw he was making no effort to escape. Allan stopped in front of the woman and her two male companions. He noted that he was now less than fifteen meters from the water. "The court is now in session," Victoria said. "Is the prosecution ready? And the defense?" The two men mumbled an assent -- apparently neither was accustomed ta his role. Allan had been studying the three jurors in the fading light and was convinced the second woman was pretty Margarete Olmedo. The two women at the local station who had been kindest to him were coconspirators. He was equally certain he had not met the two male jurors. Something in the way they moved -- they displayed the easy but sure physical reactions of men accustomed to changing gravities -- said space service. Allan had a sudden grim hunch that one of those two would play a second role if the verdict were guilty -- that of executioner. And if he enjoyed such tasks, which seemed likely, there was little chance he would vote for acquittal. The prosecutor began his presentation and Allan listened carefully. The first words might have been lifted directly from a hot speech by a New Roman politician -- they created a familiar blend of fact, prejudice and distortion. The diatribe was directed not as much against Allan as against the Conservationists in general and the P.P. Corps in particular. The charge that the Corps had denied human access to hundreds of worlds was accurate. It was also true that no species had been found with a civilization comparable to Earth's. Man was apparently alone in the galaxy and it was ridiculous and wasteful to refrain from relieving Earth's burdensome population when the means of transport and the empty worlds were available. The ConIF servationists had taken advantage of mistaken idealism -- and the maintain their hold on power -- at a cost to the future development of Man that was incalculable. Since they had succeeded in duping a majority of the voting public until now, a group dedicated to operating in secret for the benefit of Mankind had been organized. It supported the New Roman party but was not a part of it. The Safeguard Squads were its enforcement arms and had the vested power to bring known criminals to trial and execute sentence upon them. The last few items were not part of the New Roman dogma, but Allan felt certain higher-up party officials must be aware of the existence of the Safeguard Squads. It was hard to operate in space without the active connivance of some members of. the space service hierarchy. Allan felt a sudden numbness of spirit when he remembered encountering, the year before, a brigadier general who had tried to have him killed. At the time he had thought the incident an isolated one, the work of a frustrated officer nearing retirehonor for high political office. Now he was not so certain. The general had been forced out of the service. but had been immediately appointed to a functionary's post in government. The New Romans were either actively supporting this extralegal society or passively condoning it. Darkness had fallen. The judge produced a light and placed it on the grass, focused on Allan. Behind the glare Victoria Gant became a dim and lumpy figure, squatting on crossed legs. Only the prosecutor and defense counsel stood. "Your honor, I have a question of legality," Allan said when the prosecutor finished. "Am I to understand that the only possible punishment in the event of a guilty verdict is death? Why are there no lesser sentences? And if someone is found innocent, what keeps him from reporting you to the officials?" After a short wait Victoria answered and it was obvious she was speaking carefully. "There have been only two trials to date and both accused were found guilty. If found innocent they would have been placed on one of the habitable worlds their own people caused to be isolated. As for the death sentence's being the sole penalty for guilt, I would like to science is the one crime for which the space service is authorized to hold a field trial and execute upon conviction. It seems only fair that you be subject to the same penalty." "Thank you for the enlightening comparison, your honor." "The jury will note the defendant's remarks. Defense counsel?" Allan's counsel said, "I'm happy to be able to defend Conscience Odegaard -- he is certainly one of the better members of his club. I can name at least a dozen worlds where he made the decision that a questionable species was unintelligent, opening the way to colonization. A recent one was Beauty, where he overruled one of his fellows and declared the planet okay after the stupid idiot had ordered the colonists off. He forced one of our friends in the space service to retire on that deal, but at least we got the planet. On Misery -- not one of the better planets for sure -- he gave permission for the local spice processing company not only to continue its work but to expand. The company is supposed to leave later, when the humanoids there develop a little further. Even on many worlds that he ruled ineligible for colonization, like the silicon-life planet Crystal, he okayed the installation or expansion of scientific stations. I maintain that his record as a Conscience is unusually good and that he should be spared and freed after the election." "The defense counsel makes some good points," said the prosecutor without waiting for judicial permission to speak. "Odegaard is admittedly one of the less soft-headed members of his profession. But I deny that his record is really that great -- he has followed the standard line in ruling humans off any world where the local animals could so much as throw stones. If he is less guilty than most, it's strictly a matter of degree. I say we have no choice but to find this man guilty as charged." The defense counsel took a step forward and began a rebuttal. Both men had become wrapped up in their role-playing and were working hard -- each seemed equally sincere. For the first time since the start of this wild trial Allan could almost believe that it was real. The two court opponents argued for almost an hour. Zwergwelt had no moon and a light mist in the air hid the stars. Allan had been squinting away from the light for some time to accustom his eyes to darkness. He felt he had rested enough to be capable of at least a short spurt of explosive action. "The jury will vote immediately, since we judge by majority decision and consultation is not permitted," ,said the judge, picking up the light and swinging it toward the three IF seated figures. "All who vote 'guilty' please raise your right hand," One hand, that of the man on the left, shot up immediately. Allan guessed that he was staring at his intended executioner. The other man made no move. Margarete hesitated, started to raise a hand and then nervously lowered it. Her agitation was apparent even through the shielding hood. The judge waited a moment. AlJan thought he heard relief in her voice when she finally said, "Vote noted. All innocent, same sign." The man on the right raised his hand and the woman followed suit. The one on the left muttered something under his breath. "The verdict is innocent," said Victoria, her voice neutral again. She swung the light back to Allan. "Conscience Odegaard, you will be held in custody for sixty days and then released, provided we win the election. I am sorry we must detain you..." she went into a lengthy apology, but Allan was no longer listening. H e dove for the light, snatched it up, rolled to his feet and hurled it at the left-hand juror. It caught the man in the face, knocking him down, then spun into some low growth. In the sudden darkness Allan stiff-armed Victoria, sending her sprawling, and ran for the water, crouching and zigzagging. A laser beam, aimed low, flashed past his legs. Allan threw himself at the ground, hit rolling, scrambled to his feet and hurled himself forward in a long flat dive. In midair he felt a surge of weakness so overwhelming he almost blacked out. The sudden tremendous exertion against the deadening effect of the drug had brought him to the edge of physical collapse. The third laser beam burned him across the left thigh as his head hit water. He felt the shock of the wound even through the faintness. The water was unexpectedly cold and jarred him back to full consciousness. Momentum carried him into the strong central current and he felt it pulling him down. He vented his breath slowly and managed a feeble stroke or two to keep himself under. Even that small effort brought blackness washing back over his mind. He hovered on the verge of awareness for a long moment, and then felt air on his face -- his still inflated lungs had brought him back to the surface. He emptied them and sucked in air in a great gasp. Light swept over his ead, came back and a laser beam burned the air a few centimeters in front of his eyes. The water beyond exploded into a cloud of steam. He managed a feeble stroke that took him down, but again lost his hold on consciousness. For a timeless interval he hovered in the grip of shadows, eyes closed, moving as the current took him, and again broached the surface. The light found him immediately, but from farther away. When the laser beam came it boiled the water where he had just ducked -- he felt the heat before the current dragged him away. When he came up for the third time he was past the point where the light was effective. The accumulated need for air was so great he had to take several deep breaths. The mist had lifted and bright starlight revealed that the fast water had taken him around a bend. The sound of someone crashing heavily through the brush reached Allan from the near bank and he managed a few strokes to push himself farther out. He had submerged by the time the light swept the surface again. This time he managed to stay down for almost a minute and when he came up again he knew he was safe. It took a minimum of effort for him to keep afloat in the swift but smooth current. Allan gingerly felt over his burned leg and for the first time discovered he was bleeding heavily. The beam had taken away some upper muscle tissue was well as skin. Function seemed unimpaired, but the wound was nasty. After another half kilometer a natural eddy swept Allan toward the bank. He recognized the area and realized there was a place of refuge close at hand. When his feet touched bottom he fought the current to stand erect, finally staggered ashore. The effort spent him again and he had to lean against a tree. When he recovered he went on, hoping he was not leaving a bloody trail in the grass. He had no idea how long it took him to reach the rocky hill and the limestone cliff. If the female dwarf was now on the prowl she would find an easy victim. But only the noises of the smaller animal population disturbed the night and he found the rock face and its concealed cave with no difficulty. After carefully pulling the vines together behind him Allan struggled up the slight incline to the grotto. In the pitch darkness inside he sat down and finished ripping off the trouser leg partly burned by the laser. Unable to make a tourniquet, he compromised by wrapping the cloth tightly around the wound, placing his left palm over it and lying with IF the weight of his body on the hand. Instead of sleep he felt the familiar black fingers again closing around his mind -- he must have lost a lot of blood. His imprisoned hand was swiftly growing numb and Allan could not tell if the bleeding had slowed or was carrying him toward death. But he knew with absolute certainty that he could not rise from the powdered limestone floor, that he must live or die on what he had managed to that point. The blackness deepened and Allan surrendered his hold on life and let the fingers pluck him up and cast him into a wider, stronger river, where he floated toward a more lasting darkness. HI He opened his eyes and shrank back from the incredible countenance bending over him. The huge flattened lips that extended ten centimeters beyond the lumpy nose twisted into a grin. "Come on, Keeper-of-the-Earthman'sBurden, on your feet. We're going for a little walk." The voice was high and peremptory, hauntingly familiar to Allan. What he saw he could not believe. The rough clay statue had come to life and was kneeling beside him, one crude arm extended to help him up. Allan closed his eyes to the nightmare, but it refused to go away. Instead he felt a large hand pulling him up and he reluctantly rose to his feet. The effort made his head swim and he staggered -- only the supporting clay arm kept him from falling. He opened his eyes again, and saw that the little circular cavern was lighted by a dim blue radiance. He glanced at the roughly outlined face towering a foot above his head -- and quickly looked away. The sight was unacceptable to the senses. He had to be delirious. "Come on, fella, let's take a little stroll and say hello to your friends in the Safeguard Squad. They're looking for you." One grainy arm moved across Allan's back and a huge hand clasped him under the right armpit. As the ponderous body urged him forward he instinctively gripped the supporting shoulder and was partly carried to the low tunnel. The living statue had to stoop to miss the ceiling. As they walked down the gentle slope Allan felt the rough clay under his hand. The surface did not move and shift to indicate internal muscular activity. With thumb and forefinger he tried to pinch off some material but could not. "Leave off trying to steal my corporeal substance there, fella," said the slightly high but pleasant voice that Allan knew from long ago, but still could not place. They reached the vine curtain and carefully maneuvered through it. Pollux was almost overhead, its yellow rays highlighting another day on a nearly perfect world. Allan had revived slightly, though dizziness was a constant menace, waiting a chance to pounce. He recognized the now familiar effect of the drug as a deep and abiding lassitude, but he was also feverish and not fully recovered from the shock of a serious wound. As he and the statue started through the woods, moving faster in the open, the exertion brought blackness swirling toward him. Just before it hit Allan finally remembered why the statue's voice was familiar. "Clay," he gasped. "Clay Forrester -- " And then consciousness retreated and hovered, taunting him, just outside his skull. When the dark clouds lifted his companion was chuckling aloud. "Straight on, fella, straight on. This is of Clay talking, or at least his personality as you saw it when you knew him." "But -- but why?" Allan asked, feeling helpless and lost. "If you aren't human -- " "You'd have a hell of a time communicating with me in my elemental form, junior. And that would be a pretty good yuk if you understood it, 'cause it happens I am an elemental. And I chose Clay's personality out of the several I could have formed from your memory 'cause this body I'm activating is made of the stuff and that's just the type of campy joke he'd like. It also fits in with the fact I've got to lay a few heavy words on you, and Forrester never dug anything more than displaying his superior erudition. So just call me Qay." That description of his former college friend was accurate enough. Allan remembered Clay with fondness, though he had an exasperating affectation of using colloquial horrors of speech that had enjoyed a brief popularity and then died into history. Clay had remained a reacher when Allan joined the P.P. Corps and, to the best of Allan's knowledge, had carved out a successful career for himself on Earth. They had reached the game trail and Allan heard voices around a bend ahead -- one was Victoria Gant's. "Yeah, they're lookin' for you, daddyo," said Clay, the wide flat lips grinning in earthy mockery. "Stand to the side and I'll hide us IF by casting a spell that'll dazzle the minds of men." N ightmare or delirium, the experience was terrifyingly real. Allan clung to a sturdy bush and waited. Clay standing by his side. Victoria and two men Allan did not recognize rounded the bend. These strangers had to be the male members of the jury. One had a plastiskin strip across his forehead. As they passed, the bandaged man turned and looked directly at Allan, In two cold and remote gray eyes Allan read a lingering fascination with -- and hunger for inflicting on any prey available -- the finality of death. A hunter's madness. Up to this point Allan had accepted the unacceptable with numbed acquiesence. When the killer looked through him and continued to search the woods on both sides, it finally became too much to bear. He waited until the three hunters had passed out of hearing and said, "I can't believe this any more." Clay chuckled, a light, pleasant sound. "It took a pretty good tolerance for you to come this far, dad. But brace yourself -- the worst is yet to come." "If you can keep them from seeing us," Allan said slowly, "can't you do something about my physical weakness? Lend me some of the strength you've got animating that clay figure?" "Could, but ain't gonna -- want you just as you are for reasons of mental health you'll understand better later. Let's follow your dedicated friends for the moment. And go ahead and talk -- they can't hear us." They stepped into the trail and started after the three humans. "Who are you?" Allan demanded. "Or what are you?" "I told you what I am, Allan -- an elemental. We were around before your ancestors swung that first bone club and will be here after your descendants have mutated themselves up the ladder. But just to keep from making this too simple, only a small part of my consciousness is in this sloppy form supporting you. Most of it is back on the old home grounds, Mother Earth and environs" "God is a concept alien to -- " Allan began. "Naw, that's too simple also, Allan, baby. There's nothing anthropomorphic about me in my basic form." It was too much. Allan's logic and reason failed and his trained mind was useless. And then with a flash of insight he saw his way clear -- and accepted the fact he was dealing with matters beyond logic and reason. A soft chuckle came beside him and he realized that Clay was reading his thoughts as they formed. "Yeah, keerect, dad. Logic and reason do have to be expressed, though, before you can place me in context. Not even I can follow the subprocesses that eventually produce a mental verbalization." For a moment Allan had managed to forget his physical weakness. He was reminded when dizziness again assailed him and his legs abruptly buckled. Clay supported him without slackening his pace. After some moments of foot-dragging the spell passed and Allan could walk again. "I think I've made the quantum jump," he said aloud. "Okay, I'm in a new universe. But I'm lost. Guide me." "That's what I'm here for. Tell me, Allan, when you were a small child and looked at the sun, what did you see?" Allan thought for a moment, then said, "A big white ball in the sky that hurt my eyes." "And when you were a teenager in Preparatory -- what was the sun then?" "A mass of gases heated by atomic processes in a central core, the source of all energy in the solar system and probably of all matter. The sun was an incredibly complex mechanism and only specialists understood it in depth." "And when you became to a degree a specialist during your astronomy courses in college?" "I moved from external large basics into fundamentals, more details. I learned how and why the hydrogen-into-helium fusion process works, how other elements are created, the complete life cycle of a star. I also learned there's a great deal we still don't know and may never know." "Right. And during these years that was the same sun sitting out there, not changing to any appreciable degree. Your grasp, your understanding of it changed. Now as to what I am -- you're just at the small child stage, Allan. You've got a long way to go to reach Preparatory, much less college." "Then you're a higher intelligence? I've found a more advanced life form than man -- you?" Even as he spoke Allan realized his words sounded distorted, as though they missed the real point. Clay sighed. "No, damn it. I'm above intelligence and evolution. Those concepts are meaningless when applied to me. I told you -- I'm an elemental, as much a part of Earth and the sun as the gravitic force that binds them together. Use the previous analogy IF but substitute intelligence for the sun and you'll have a better idea of what you really know on the subject." That hurt. Allan found his reason rebelling, but the conviction that he had just heard an unyielding truth slowly swelled and grew until it overwhelmed him. His voice was dull when he finally acknowledged the bitter fact. "Then -- my life has been wasted. I've specialized in the study of intelligence and made hundreds of decisions that vitally affect entire species -- based on what I thought we knew." "Wrong again. When the sun hurt your eyes you learned as a child not to stare directly at it -- that was learning by immediate personal experience. In school you switched to new learning techniques, the manipulation of symbols and concepts. The process lost immediacy, but the volume of learning grew tremendously because of the nature of the working medium, the ability of symbolical representation to condense tremendous amounts of knowledge into forms that can be quickly absorbed. In dealing with intelligence. Homo sapiens is still in the personal experience area and is going to be there for some time. You learn as you grow, doing the best you can with what you know at the particular moment. You can't refuse to act simply because you know a deeper understanding will come after you've advanced to an entirely new technique of knowing and learning." T he changes in Allan's personal orientation were coming too rapidly, were too profound for absorption. He had not yet fully accepted the testimony of his senses about the reality of what was happening. "Then why are you telling me about heights I'm never going to reach? What do you want?" "Well, laddiebuck, now that we've cut the watermelon rind we get down to the juicy heart. You've finally strayed from the straight and narrow by making a wrong decision and you're about to compound the error by following it with a second one. I'm here to change your mind on both, if that can be done without actual interference. We elemental have our own rules -- there's no such thing as total freedom anywhere in the universe -- and one is that we don't interfere with 'lower' iffe forms. Sound familiar? But if you choose a new path when we finish our walk, especially considering that you're not going to believe this conversation tomorrow anyway, then I haven't bothered you any more than your research stations bother the dwarfs. And to hit 'em in reverse order, that's the second wrong decision you're about to make, that our short look-alikes aren't intelligent. They are." "Not as I understand intelligence at my child's level," said Allan stubbornly. "Technically and temporally you're quite right, but you've got a short-term perspective. I was on this planet about forty thousand years ago for reasons that are none of your business. At that time the dwarfs would have passed your tests. Your own ancestors were scavenging carrion for a living back then, incidentally. That's when these long-toothed shorties made this statue of the form I took. I kinda' liked it and told the clay to hang together. Then this world warmed up a little and turned entirely too lush. The result was that earning a meal became too easy and the dwarfs regressed. All they really need are some hard times and those are coming within a thousand of their years. This continent is going to dry out and wrinkle up like an old apple. Five thousand years after that they'll be finding some of your artifacts and writing learned papers on the unexpected metallurgical abilities of their primitive ancestors." "I don't have any choice but to accept that -- as I accept you -- " They had caught up with Victoria and her two companions, who were standing at the river's edge, discussing the possibility that he had survived the swift water. He learned they knew the laser beam had caught him and considered it likely he had drowned. Two other squadsmen had launched a raft upriver and were poling it toward them, searching the banks for his body. Allan had reached a temporary equilibrium between drug and fever and for the moment was having no difficulty clinging to consciousness. "What's the first mistake, the one I've already made?" he asked the hulking figure beside him. Clay sighed again. "Now we get down to the real nitty-gritty, Allan. Brace yourself, 'cause you ain't heard nothin' yet." Allan had already heard more than enough, but he tried to compose himself to accept the worst. "You've already made a firm decision to reject that deputy administrator's job," Clay said slowly, apparently picking his words with care. "You did this for a purely selfish reason -- the fact that the life you lead now is a hell of a lot more exciting and interesting than anything Earth can offer. I want IF you to change your mind. The P.P. Corps will need you in that top spot when Siggi Wilson leaves and with all its faults it's a good organization. Some of my fellow elemental in other systems -- including this one -- want the work you're doing to continue. And on the personal level -- you're about spoiled for field work anyway. Take the bigger job and quit while you're ahead." The world turned dark again for Allan, but this time he recognized the encroaching blackness as a frantic defense against believing what he had Just heard. He forced back the tempting oblivion. "What do you mean I'm spoiled for field work?" "I'm sorry this has to be hard to take, Allan, but keep in mind that the cut a surgeon makes to operate could kill a man if that were the intent. Instead it's the first step in the healing process. You have more than a touch of arrogance in you. It's a common fault of the competent. With all the good intentions possible, you're beginning to think and act too much like these Safeguard cats looking for you -- like a man who knows for sure he's right. It's a dangerous and unforgiving attitude. I think you'd better move on up the ladder and let a younger and more idealistic person take your place." Clay turned and began walking back down the trail, still supporting Allan. "I don't think they're going to find you in my little hideaway and when the fever eases you won't have much trouble getting food and water. They'll be guarding the shuttle from Main Base next week, but you should manage to sneak aboard somehow. Competency is a virtue as well as a vice. In any case, it's your problem." Allan was silent on the short trip back to the cavern, trying to digest what he had learned. It was too much to be absorbed at once. Being on his feet for almost an hour had finally drained his strength, and he was losing his precarious hold on full consciousness. Despite the confusion in his mind he remembered at the cliffside to ask a final question. "How will I find you on Earth? You can't just show yourself to us and then disappear. Where are you in our solar system?" Clay chuckled. "Man, you're centered on the geographical and temporal location bit -- look, dad, I don't want you hunting for me and this little conversation has to be strictly confidential -- not that anyone would believe you anyway. Mankind has to grow up to us -- not just find and try to exploit us. Think about that. And when you recover remember this as just a vivid fever dream, where maybe you gleaned a few pearls of wisdom from the submerged iceberg part of you." They passed through the vine curtain and it was the last thing Allan saw for two days. H e awoke to a knowledge of serious bodily dehydration, but his mind was clear and the fever had run its course. He staggered outside, hoping that the female dwarf was not at home. After drinking from a forest pool and eating some thoroughly ripened fruits he felt much stronger and returned to the cavern. In the darkness he made his way to the clay figure at the rear and carefully felt over it. The statue was as lifeless as when he had first examined it, but seemed to have shifted its position slightly. With only memory to guide him he could not be sure. Without a light he could not even check the floor for large flat footprints, nor could he find the source of the blue light he remembered had illuminated the cavern during his fever experience. Still, he had not the slightest doubt of the reality of the experience. Four days later he crouched behind a thick bush only a few meters from the charged fence protecting the station. The aircar from Main Base was just settling to the ground and Allan saw with approval that it was going to shield him from the laser-armed gardener working at the rear of the building. When the pilot stepped outside and was also hidden behind the aircar, Allan picked up the heavy stile he had made and walked rapidly to the fence. Without cutting tools or power Allan had been forced to use dead branches and vines to construct the inverted-V stile, but it would get him over the two-meter high wire. He held it by one leg and carefully manhandled the other over the top strand. Each leg had lashed side braces to hold it erect. He moved carefully up the vinetied crosspieces and had just reached the top when a low voice called, "Nice try. Conscience." He froze, then slowly turned, keeping his hands carefully in sight. The out-of-uniform space serviceman with the murderer's eyes was standing a few meters away, laser rock-steady on Allan's chest. The two men looked at each other. In the coldly controlled face below him Allan saw all he needed to let genuine fear show on his face. The killer drank it in, his mouth opening slightly. When he began to smite in anticipation IF Allan hurled himself to the side in horizontal dive over the fence. He felt the burning touch of death in the air above his ribs. He landed on top of a young green bush, his next course of action already thought out. It took five seconds for a small laser crystal to cool between pulses. Three of those were gone by the time the breaking branches had cushioned Allan's descent to the ground. He had curled into fetal position during the last stages of his drop and he landed almost on his feet. He left them again instantly in another long dive into a shallow ditch he had spotted from the stile. Briefly out of the killer's sight, he opened his mouth and yelled. A surprised face appeared in the nearest window of the aircar. The face of his intended executioner rose simultaneously above the top of the stile. The man hesitated, looking from Allan to the copilot of the aircar and back again. He seemed to realize it would be impossible for him to hide the fact of naked murder... He stepped down from the stile and silently faded into the woods. For a moment Allan remained where he was. The copilot of the aircar had swung to the ground and was approaching him at a trot. Allan recognized him as Jacques Flomain, the civilian flyer who had delivered him here two weeks before. He was carrying a laser in one hand. Jacques kept his gaze on the quiet woods outside the fence and called, "Run for the aircar. Conscience -- I'll cover." On a world where a Safeguard Squad existed and at least two space servicemen out of uniform roamed at will and one killed on command, it was impossible to know friend from foe. Allan had planned to try to reach Magnitsky, of whose honesty he felt certain, without trusting another person. Now he had to chance Jacques' and the other pilot's being trustworthy. Jacques had advanced to the head of the shallow ditch, where he stood with his pistol pointed at the woods. Allan pushed erect and, crouching low, ran for the far side of the aircar. X Magnitsky said sharply. "You're sure the masked judge was Victoria. Yoii are reasonably sure one juror was Margarete Olmedo and you think you know both the prosecutor and your assigned 'counsel.' Why won't you prefer charges?" "Lack of any proof better than my word against theirs," replied Allan, The aircar pilots had brought him to Main Base immediately and were seated in Magnitsky's comfortable office. "Besides, my prosecuting Victoria and her immature crew would only make them happy. Fanatics are 'cause,' not that these people would draw anything like a death penalty. I think it was Wilhelm Stekel who said it best two-hundred Eryears ago: A mature man wants to live humbly for what he believes. If you had been at the trial you'd have seen how little Margarete and Victoria wanted to kill me, even though the roles they had adopted have forced them into it. I suggest you transfer all of them back to Earth, where they can work for the New Romans in legitimate ways. I'm more concerned with the space service officer responsible for those two roving 'jurors.' After the election we have to start rooting out the bureaucrats and officers who support these extralegal activities." "Of course I'll send Victoria and the rest back if you won't prosecute," said Magnitsky. "In the past I've had some reservations about the mission of the P.P. Corps, but now that I see what would happen if exploiters like the New Romans took power. I'll certainly vote Conservationist." Earth hears about the Safeguard Squads," said Allan, rising. "And I am filing charges against the two spacers. We can't have killers like that gray-eyed fellow roaming loose. Service HQ is preparing a gallery of all military personnel assigned to this solar system and I'll point out the ones I saw unmasked. We have Flomain's word to back mine on the ambush at the fence. From those two the Inspector General can work his way up." They shook hands, Allan headed for the landing field, where a planetary shuttle waited to lift him to the neverlander just entering orbit overhead. At the entrance port he paused for a last look at the lush and verdant woods of Zwergwelt, wondering how often he would be able to escape his new office and walk again through such primeval beauty. Not frequently, once the bureaucracy got him in its grip. Allan gazed in the direction of a small hidden grotto, where a crude clay figure sat in lonely but majestic splendor. There was still no doubt in his mind of the authenticity of his experience there. "I hope to God you're satisfied," he murmured and entered the shuttle.  IF Dear Readers: Many of you have requested a Classified which you can offer to sell or buy s-f books and back issues of magazines.  find business or money-making opportunities... share hobbies or information. (on sale July #) and the October # issue of IF (on sale August #). Classified advertisements will appear in both magazines at the low, low rate of # c per word (# word minimum)...reaching more than # readers of these awardwinning leaders. will close for advertising on May #. Use the handy order form on the reverse side of this page to take advantage of this opportunity for profitable mail order sales. Cordially, Frank Brennan Classified Advertising Manager May June # GAlAXr and If # tost # Street u this handy form to place your ads in the # per word (including name and address). #-word minimum. Payment with order. Sept July # Oct Aug # May I Nov Sept # Dec Oct # July I Jan Nov # Feb Dec # Sept I Mar Jan # April Feb # Nov I May Mar # June Apr # Jan I July May # Aug Jun # Mar I Mail to: Frank Brennan, Classified Advertising. Manager Enclosed is  bring results and profits because they reach over # of America's most enthusiastic science-fiction readers. At last the started -- some time in prehistory -- and it had never stopped. It had always been, had always gone on. The only pauses had been for moving. When the destruction had become too great for Tyne the same positions were set up on Skoob. Skoob had protested, so the armies had moved to Semreh -- and then it had been the planet Drith and then Narb, Adnap, Raeb and on and on from planet to planet, farther and farther from Tyne, from home. And no one knew how it had started, no one knew why they were Tighting, no one knew any way to end it. No one but Sergeant WaDyTyne. He was not with his troops. He had deserted them. He was crawling along a jungle path, five hundred yards in front of his front lines. He had gone. mad. He kept telling himself so. It was necessary that he be mad. Otherwise all hope was lost. He told himself that he was simply insane, had been driven insane by the years on the island, by the war. He crawled along slowly, hoping and praying that he had lost his mind. If he had, he thought he might do something. If not -- he knew that he was going to die. He was out alone for the first time. It was terrible. He knew the jungle temperature was suffocating, yet his blood felt as if it were freezing. But he kept moving. He had to keep moving. If he were right -- if he had lost his reason -- he would end everything. He would end the war. The smells of the jungle were nauseating -- they were the odors Crawling, listening, trying not to let the sound of his breathing be heard, he slowly inched along. He had to do it. Even if he failed he had to try. Even if he failed because his commanders were too stupid to take advantage of what he planned. But they would not let him down. After centuries, after millennia, the one thing they were all poised to do was take advantage of advantage -- any advantage. He moved along. He hadn't thought about his path. He hadn't allowed his brain to think of anything. He was a raving lunatic. Because of that he would do what was necessary. He would have only minutes, but minutes would be enough to at last end the war. He held his breath. He heard the Zytynes. They were directly in front of him. He waited, listened. Had they heard him? They had not. They were still talking. Slowly he regained his breath and then, very silently, slithered around and crawled past the Zytyne advance point. He was going to do it. He knew he was going to do it. Because he was mad. But was he behaving madly? No. Crawling was sane. He should not crawl, not if he truly had gone mad. But if he stood they would shoot him down. Or would they? H e stood up and waited for the blast that would kill him. None came. He walked upright and then remembered that no one walked upright. He let himself slouch and stumbled along. At first he forgot about stumbling, IF but then he remembered. This was not a smart army -- neither army was smart. No one stayed in a state of war as long as these men and remained military. So he slouched and he stumbled and kept on the path, not off it. The night was dark. He kept his eyes lowered. He had trouble breathing, but he made himself breathe. He walked through them. He rubbed shoulders with a patrol going out. No one said anything to him. He went on. He stumbled, almost tripping over a Zytyne with dysentery. The soldier swore at him. But he kept moving, past them, away from them, into them. He kept getting closer. And then he saw it. It was housed in the big dome. He had never seen theirs before. But it was the same. Both sides had the same. He thought about going into the jungle again, getting it from the rear, but then he reminded himself that he was not sane. He walked straight toward it. He took a grenade out of his belt and pulled the pin. Only his thumb kept the fuse from going. If he had to go with it, he would. He was crazy. But he was going to end the war. The guards were just doing a normal sentry pattern. He took his gun out and held it ready. He would try to get as close as he could. All he had to do was knock it out, jar it. Even a few minutes -- just minutes -- would be enough. He was going to do it. He actually was going to do it. He kept walking -- the crouching, stumbling, weary walk of a soldier. A hundred yards to go. No challenges yet. Seventy-five yards. He really was going to make it. Fifty yards. Twenty-five yards. No challenges. He was going to take out their War Machine. The War Machine had them all on tape. The War Machine could predict an attack as fast as one could be planned. The War Machine could counter a counter-attack as fast as one could be mounted. All through history neither army had ever advanced, had ever gained an advantage because of what the War Machine knew. It knew the brain patterns of every Tynian who had ever been born. Twenty yards. Even if he stopped or was shot down he was close enough. He was close enough to stop the machine for a second. Just a second, maybe -- but even a second would be enough. "There's a truce on, Dy." He froze. "There's a truce on. You want to blast, go ahead. But there's a truce on," the sentry said to him. "I got here," WaDyTyne said. "You lost. Even if you hit me I'll take it with me. I fall, it goes. Look." "I know. You think we haven't been watching you? The readout said you'd be here." "No!" . "Sure. You know you can't beat it. Nobody ever has." "What else did it say?" "You're a sergeant. Stupid Dytyne name, Wahrdytyne or something. Said you're pretending you're mad. Look. The truce just went in. We're supposed to tell you that we'll provide transportation back to your lines." He knew it was so. The War Machine knew. The War Machine always knew. "Look. The thing said you're not going to blast. Here, walk on up to it. Go in if you want." He looked at the sentry. It was so, but it wasn't so. He believed it, but he couldn't believe it -- he didn't want to believe it. He walked right up to the dome. If he lifted his thumb. If he just lifted his thumb, standing right there. "Why a truce?" "I think it's over. Your guys and our guys are having a big staff conference on it: Right now." "A staff conference? Together?" "The way I heard it there was a revolution back home." "So?" "So they decided, it's not worth it. The new guys don't want the war any more." "You're lying." "Listen. Do you hear any fighting, any artillery? There hasn't been any in a long time now." "It's over?" "Yeah. The way I hear it, it's over." "We're going home?" "No, Dy. Not home. They don't want us." "I don't understand." "Too expensive and they don't think we could reintegrate. No carriers to take us home. They're not going to send any carriers for any of us." "What are we going to do?" "The War Machine is trying to figure it out." "Yeah? Look. If you're not lying, you'll let me go in." "Go ahead. Hey, and call out what it says, huh? I can't leave my post, truce or no truce. You know?" H e went inside to the readout screen of the not very big machine. He recycled the printer. And then, still holding his thumb in place of the grenade pin, he carefully watched. The War Machine was still. The printout read: IF And then there was a gap... He waited and watched the screen. It wasn't a gap. There was nothing. He pushed the accelerate lever -- it was clearly marked on the control panel. Nothing happened. "What's it say," the sentry shouted in. He got up and slowly walked outside. "It says that it understands. Maybe it's dead. Maybe peace kills them. Maybe it's really over," he said, troubled, upset, searching, finding, pulling the pin from his pocket and slowly, carefully fitting it back into the grenade's safety. "You know what I think," the sentry said. "I think we'll get back." "How's that?" "First we take this planet and we use it to hop one step closer and then the next planet and then the next. Maybe a thousand years, but we'll get back." "And then what? I know. We land back home at the Spaceport and set up our positions and then our War Machine goes up against the other War Machine. "Never thought of it like that. Makes you wonder. Maybe that's the way the whole thing started."# Read Science Fiction for speculation on T how science might shape the Name world of the future Occupation Read Science News for accounts of how science is shaping the world of today Address City State... Zip Science News, the weekly newsmagazine of science. I yr.  #  # yrs. #  Each week Science News provides timely and intelligent news accounts # yrs. #  and discussion of advances in science and of public issues related to science.  Bill me O Money enclosed  Mail to: science news Subscription Department The magazine of today... for #I West Center Street the person concerned about toMarion, Ohio # morrow. tasted it in the pre-dawn wind that hissed across the top of the dune, snapping his robe and flattening it against his thin reptilianlooking body. It would reach them tonight at the latest, he judged -- a full ripsand. He looked south, scalp furrowing in displeasure. Dakshan was still more than a day away. He should never have agreed to take the passengers, If the caravan had been on schedule to Moveen instead of off-routing to leave polesman Kreesh and his shes at Dakshan, it could have sheltered in scalerock hills by midday. Now it faced the chance of meeting the blow in open desert. Below him the shiffeners were starting to unroll and make the first meal over their fire pots. The hobbled shiffen spread beyond them, long heads and necks snaking out in search of the wiry clumps of dune grass. Kreesh and his shes still slept, three bright humps of fabric on the sand beside their huda and packs. Tleth stared broodingly at the scene, tasting the wind again, then plunged down the dune in a slide of sand and pebbles. "Rig up," he shouted. The shiffeners turned heads, yellow eyes querying. "Ripsand coming," Tleth said. Their elliptical pupils dilated. They scrambled to unfasten hobbles and clip reins to the nose rings of their animals. The reptiles tried to dodge, hissing shrilly in angry protest. Their long tails lashed at the shiffeners with vicious accuracy and an occasional broad foot struck out as it was unhobbled. Tleth toed Kreesh. "Wake up." The polesman rolled over and sat up blinking groggily. "Caravanmaster," he muttered in greeting. "Get your shes ready to travel." Kreesh peered at the sky. "It isn't yet dawn," he complained. "We'll need every extra hour if we're to make Dakshan before the blow." "Blow?" Kreesh stiffened. "A bad one?" Tleth suppressed a hiss. As though any other kind would concern an experienced caravanmaster. "I doubt my caravan and I can withstand it in open desert -- certainly neither you nor they can," Tleth replied, jerking his head toward the shes peeking sleepily from under their hoods. "We leave as soon as we have our meal." The caravanmaster turned away, trying to hide his dislike of Kreesh only because the latter might mistake it for prejudice. IF Tleth did not subscribe to the belief that just because the pole tribes had vestigial scales on their scalps and spines in contrast to the smooth yellow skins of mid world tribes, they must necessarily be backward and barbaric. But neither would he respect any male irresponsible enough to bring eggheavy shes across the desert in blow season. Kreesh must be aware, even coming from the quiet deserts of the poles, that if the shes were brought to nest out here there could be no protection and any wind above a stirsand could erode the shells before they hardened. T he protests of the shiffen subsided gradually as the animals resigned to being loaded. A few tails still lashed, but sullenly, no longer aimed at any target. Tleth checked each animal, making sure the load was balanced and the rig straps lying flat between the shiff s spines. He paid particular attention that the two halves of the huda were secured snugly and that the padding was unwrinkled between them and the shifPs hide. Only when the caravan was ready to travel did he accept the mug Shiah, his head shiffener, poured for him. Normally there would have been conversation and joking in this pause before the day began. Today they washed down biscuits and hurriedly packed the pots. Kreesh and his shes were lifted into their huda and the shiffeners scrambled onto their animals, into the space at the junction of the reptile's neck and trunk. The caravan moved out in a long, shambling line. Tleth set the course and a pace as fast as the shiffen could manage at this temperature and let Shiah maintain it while he ranged his more lightly laden shiff back along the line, keeping it in order. He checked the sky often. If they kept moving they might have a few hours' margin to make Dakshan. Dawn came not long after they left the sleeping ground. The sky had been lightening gradually along the horizon but there was no more prelude than that. Suddenly the sun was there -- small, white and bright. The shiffen felt the heat almost immediately. Tossing their heads, they hummed softly in welcome. As their blood warmed they were able to move faster and a few, feeling good, nipped at animals ahead. Tleth moved in to break up an impending fight between a bull and a castrate who mistook the male's playfulness for amorous advances. The caravanmaster snapped his lash at the castrate's sensitive muzzle. The reptile hissed but straightened around in line. There was no need to discipline the bull -- he was busy licking the gouge the castrate's teeth had left on his neck. "Watch him," Tleth told the shiffener in line behind the bull. "Get between them if he acts up again." ert's pre-dawn quiet vanished. Small reptiles appeared on the dunes to sun themselves or hunt smaller creatures in quick, darting chases. Flyers swooped through the sky to circle above the caravan with a beat of leathery wings and occasional hoarse cries. Tleth watched them. Flyers meant the air masses were still not too turbulent. When the dhanzals and ganra grounded, it would be time to hunt cover. As the morning passed and the heat increased, the color of the sky paled until it was bleached nearly the same gray-white as the sands beneath it. But otherwise it remained clear. Even the horizon was unmarked by clouds or sand spouts. "Are you sure there's a blow coming?" Kreesh asked irritably when Tleth paused beside him briefly. The caravanmaster regarded him without expression. "Yes." Beyond Kreesh, in the other half of the huda, the shes rode silently, their faces set against the jar of every step. Tleth's mouth thinned as he studied them. If he had seen them before he accepted Kreesh's money, he would never have agreed to take them. How could the polesman be so insensitive? "If you're worried about making Dakshan, why don't we cross those flats rather than follow the dunes?" Kreesh demanded. Tleth did not bother to look in the direction the other was pointing. "Those flats are sink sand," he said. One of the shes sat up in astonishment. "All the area?" "Most. It is the main reason blows are so dangerous here," Tleth explained. "Sandwaves are quite common with the greater winds." The shes paled. Even Kreesh looked uneasy. Tleth regretted frightening the shes. To distract them, he pointed out a long gray mound like a very low dune in the middle of the sink sand. "I don't believe you have tarrays at the poles. They're species of swimmer, but larger than any you have. They are the biggest animal in the world." The shes stared wide-eyed at the gray shape. IF "How big?" one asked. "That one is about a hundred meters long. I'd estimate. Average for the species. The jets are closed but if you look closely just above the sand you can see its body fin moving to keep it on the surface. They come up several times a day to sun and saturate their blood with oxygen. This one will probably dive again soon." They regarded it with caution. "Will it attack us?" He shook his head reassuringly. "No. Tarrays prefer the sink areas to the denser sand of dunes and normally eat just small swimmers and burrowers. We have to worry only if we make so much noise it thinks its territory is being invaded." As he spoke the tarray rippled once and sank out of sight, leaving a fine spray of sand in the air behind it. A wave slid along the surface in the direction the tarray had taken, diminishing quickly until only expert eyes could distinguish any motion in the sand. Tleth glanced at the shes. They were watching, fascinated, their discomfort momentarily forgotten. "Will it come up again soon?" one asked. "Probably not, but another may. This sink is large enough to support many tarrays. You'll hear it first, a rumble like thunder. Then the ground will begin to shake and -- " "Tleth!" came a shout. T he caravanm aster looked up. Shiah was waving at him. Tleth flicked his shifPs neck with his lash, pushing it into a rough trot, and rode forward to his head shiffener's side. "Trouble," Shiah muttered, pointing with his lash at dhanzals circling to the south and east of them. Tleth's forehead wrinkled. "It could be another caravan," he said judiciously. "No ganra," the shiffener pointed out. The small flyers were fond of mites that commonly infested shiffen hides. Wherever shiffen were, ganra appeared. The furrows in Tleth's forehead deepened. "So we may assume we're being tracked by raiders." "Must be desperate to be out now." "Or clever. Their timing has certain advantages, provided they have shelter somewhere near," the caravanmaster said. "No one in Dakshan will worry if we don't arrive before the blow. And by the time it occurs to someone to search for us after it, no signs will be left of where we were attacked or of the shiffen taken. Our bodies would be in the sink." "What shall we doT' Shiah asked calmly. "We can't group and fight with that ripsand coming. And if they're riding zhazen we can't outrun them." TIeth twisted to look back over the caravan and at the horizon behind them, then quickly scanned the desert around them. Caught between raiders and a blow, one made defense against the other all but impossible. All but. He rubbed a neck spine on his shifT absently. There was one possibility. "We can increase their difficulty in attacking us," he said slowly, weighing the danger, "and maybe cut the distance to Dakshan in the process." It was not an ideal solution. Any other time he would not even have attempted it with shes along. "We'll cross the sink." Shiah's pupils dilated, but he nodded in acknowledgment and turned his shiff away from the bottom of the dunes toward a narrow gray strip stretching out into the slightly paler sink sand. The nearest shiffener behind him sat up in alarm. "What -- " he began, staring at TIeth. Silently the caravanmaster pointed out the flyers across the dunes. The shiffener's question died and he guided his animal after Shiah. TIeth was not worried about his shieners. Not all ranked as members' of his regular crew but all had had enough caravan experience to confine themselves to handling their animals, trusting the caravanmaster to route them safely. Kreesh was the one who might try to cause trouble. the passengers before they noticed the new direction. "We're taking a cut route," he told them in his most casual voice. "It's across the sink but there's; no danger. There are avenues where the grass holds the surface together enough to support our weight." "Then why haven't we crossed before?" Kreesh asked with a flash of suspicion. It was time for lie number two. "Because we couldn't bed down on it. There are too few safe areas large enough." The polesman did not look convinced but TIeth could not spend more time on him. The caravanmaster had no intention of mentioning the raiders. He wanted very much to avoid the undesirable effect stress often had on shes so close to nesting. In the sink there would be only two possible directions from which the raiders could attack. Three guards should be enough to withstand them initially two at the IF back, another up front, in case the raiders found a path into the sink that intersected the caravan route. Zahl and Hriss were excellent with skims, he remembered, and he had heard that Manth, new this trip, was also good. Reining bade his shiff, he paced it briefly beside each of the three in turn while he explained the situation in short terse sentences. They fell out of line obediently and took position, Zahl and Hriss at the rear, the new shiffener up with Shiah. Unobtrusively they reached back and shifted their skim pouches from the customary carrying place under the edge of the rig frame to easier access inside their robes. Tleth regarded them with satisfaction. The raiders would not find it easy taking the caravan now. Nothing surpassed skims as weapons when thrown by strong, accurate arms in open-sand combat. The raiders would have skims, too, of course, but they would have to ride in attack, not ambush the caravan from stationary positions, and their accuracy would be spoiled by the fast, choppy gait of their zhazen. The avenue of firm sand narrowed as they followed it deeper into the sink. At points it would have crowded two riders abreast. Tleth edged bis shiff into line just ahead of Zahl. He looked back at the dunes they had left. The dhanzals had not yet changed position. It would take the raiders a while to realize the caravan had changed course, but then they would waste no time altering their plan of attack. He fully expected to see them appear behind before a handsbreadth of the sun's passage. From the dhanzals his eyes AiA almost automatically to the northern sky. Still clear. Or was it? Tleth squinted. He thought he made out what might be a trace of hazing just at the horizon. Facing front again, Tleth whistled shrilly. Far ahead, Shiah twisted around inquiringly. The caravnmaster made a snapping motion with his wrist. Acknowledging with a wave, the shiffener flicked his animal with his lash. The reptile's narrow head snaked irritably. Shiah touched it again. It flung its head up, then broke into a reluctant trot. One by one the shiffen in line behind it also changed gait. Tleth knew they could not sustain the pace very long but he reasoned that a tired shiff was minor compared to the other hazards abounding in the desert today. He watched the line ahead closely. A trot was not the ideal gait for control of the leggy reptiles. Not that he could help if one got into trouble; the avenue here was too narrow. in happening. One loose shiff, its stride longer than that of the animal ahead, overtook and rammed into the other. The one in front came around hissing. It also swung out and stepped backward, gathering for a charge. The thinner sand at the edge crumbled under its weight, dropping its hindquarters into the sink sand. Tleth whistled but the signal was unnecessary. The shiffeners in line nearest the stricken beast vaulted off their animals and raced to its aid. Grabbing the edge of the rig frame on each side, they pulled, shouting and whistling encouragement to it. The shiff scrabbled with its forelegs, heaved forward and dragged its hindquarters back onto firm sand. It was shoved back into line and the shiffeners climbed again onto their mounts. The line stretched briefly into a fast trot until it caught up with the rest, who had not stopped. Tleth wished he could feel relieved. Instead he found his eyes raking the surface of the sink sand repeatedly. How much subsurface vibration had the shifFs struggle caused? He saw Zahl also looking out across the sand, forehead deeply furrowed. An irregular movement up the line told the caravanmaster other shiffeners were doing the same. The shiffen sensed the increase in tension. Their heads swung uneasily and they rumbled deep in their chests. Shiffeners abruptly began soothing their animals before the rumbles could become roars. Tleth whistled at Shiahshort blasts down-toned at the end that meant hold the line, keep them moving. "Tarray," Zahl murmured. Tleth's eyes followed his pointing hand. Far out the sand rippled slightly. One of the big swimmers was coming to see what had fallen into its territory. In imagination Tleth felt the creature erupting beneath him but he resisted the urge to push his shiff into a run and carefully held it to an easy trot a tail's length behind the animal in front. He did, however, let himself watch the low wave that marked the tarray's passage. It was headed straight for the spot where the shiff had fallen. While he watched, it slowed. It stopped completely several hundred meters out and waited motionless for several minutes. Finally stirring again, the ripple turnedi and began following a course that paralleled the avenue of firm sand. Tleth let his breath out gently. IF The tarray .was only curious, not defensive. It would stand off watching them for a while or, more accurately, reading' the vibrations that came down to it from them. If the caravan did nothing to arouse its anger or make itelf appear a food source, the beast would eventually leave. Until it lost interest, however, the creature made another problem for the caravanmaster to watch. There was a virtue in having so much to think about, though. He realized with some surprise that he had not worried about Kreesh or the shes for some time, H e checked the sky again. The change of color on the horizon was more pronounced; there was no question now. He whistled for Shiah to slow to a walk again. Why tire the shiffen now? Speed might be desperately needed later. Presently the avenue widened once more and he pulled out of line to ride forward beside Shiah. "How do you make our travelage?" he asked. "We're on a much straighter course for Dakshan than the dune route," Shiah replied. "We've probably cut the distance by a third." He looked across at the caravanmaster keenly. "We might make Dakshan by late afternoon. provided the avenue continues." Tleth did not miss the emphasis on the last part of the sentence. He was only too aware that running out of path was the most prevalent danger in crossing the sink. "We're reaching midday," Shiah said, changing the subject. "We can't stop. Keep the pace. Trot when you feel we can afford it." "You'll see to rations?" The stores were on Tleth's shiff. Turning and kneeling on its back, he opened one of the packs. There was no way to brew drink but this would not be the first time they had eaten dry. He handed several biscuits and thin strips of dried panne meat to Shiah and Manth, then worked back down the line, giving each shiffener a like portion. He also shared with Kreesh and the shes, since their supplies were out of reach in their packs on another shiff. It was to be expected that the polesman would not have thought to hold out enough for the midday meal. Kreesh complained about having nothing to drink. Ignoring him, Tleth moved on. The shes, at least, he noticed, knew enough to be grateful for their portions. After Zahl and Hriss had been given rations, Tleth held out some for himself and began closing the pack. "Is the tarray still watching us?" he asked as he worked. Hriss nodded. "It has moved farther out, but it's there yet. And look what else is watching us," he said. He gestured back along the avenue. Tleth looked only because he wanted to count. There were about a dozen beings in the group following them, all mounted on zhazen, as he had surmised. They did not seem to be hurrying, except as beings might who were anxious to reach cover before the blow. As they might be. Outwardly and at this distance, there was no way to differentiate them from area tribesmen. Until they came close enough for Tleth to see the weave pattern of their robes, he could not discount the possibility that they were merely Dakshas coming home from a hunt or a puberty rite. "Don't show skims until you're sure of them," he said. "What if they just ask to pass, then attack when they can back the whole line against the edge of the avenue?" Hriss asked. "You'll be able to study their robes before that." "And if they're wearing Daksha robes?" Zahl put in, "If in doubt knock down one of your shiffen and block the avenue. Pretend you can't get the animal up. And call me. If they're raiders, being stuck behind you while the caravan goes on will force them to take overt action." "Such as sink skims in our throats," Hriss said darkly,, then grinned, adding; "If mine don't end in theirs first." They watched the group gain on them. The small stocky reptiles the others rode were faster than shiffen and should be overtaking the caravan more quickly if the riders were intent only on finding shelter. Tleth reached back for the skims in his own shifTs load. The outline of the triangular blades in the pouch felt reassuring as he slid them into his robe. "Estimate they'll overtake in half a handsbreath," Zahl said. The caravanmaster agreed, frowning. "I wonder why they're waiting so long. I think I'll look ahead." flicked it into a fast trot. Passing the line quickly, he rode ahead of it down the avenue. He wished he knew more about the sink. His only knowledge of it came from two trips made as head shiffener under another caravanmaster years before. What advantage lay ahead that the raiders were IF so carefully timing their overtake to use? It did not take him long to find his answer, literally run across it. The trap lay only a kilometer ahead. Swearing, he wheeled the shiff and lashed it back toward the caravan. "We run out of avenue ahead," he snapped in reply to the inquiring lift of his head shiffener's forehead. "There's a full twentymeter break before firm sand resumes." "We can't go back," Marith exclaimed in dismay. "No," Tleth agreed. "We'll have to swim." The two shiffeners stared. "Tleth -- " Shiah began. "I've seen it done before," Tleth cut in. Once, he added mentally. "Move out. Get these animals up there as fast as you can. Unrig and swim the shiff. Drag the rigs. Rig up again on the far side. And hurry. The raiders are going to overtake while we're in the middle of the operation." "The tarray?" Shiah asked. Tleth swore. He had forgotten that beast. He checked the distant sand. His mouth tightened. The tarray was moving out, finally losing interest, but that interest was going to revive quickly when the shiffen started thrashing their way through the sink sand. He thought fast. "Keep two men on each side, orie pair to unrig, the other to rig. They'll send each shiff on as they finish. Keep moving. We'll just have to try to get as many across as we can before the swimmer gets here." The pupils of the men were so large only a thin rim of yellow remained around them. Even experienced shiffeners rarely attempted anything as dangerous as this. But years of caravaning had made obedience a habit. Even if they had been terrified, as they might well be, they would do their best to carry out any orders their caravanmaster thought would get to their destination the largest number of animals and handlers and above all cargo. They lashed the shiffen into a trot and kept them at it until the end of the avenue forced them to stop. Tleth vaulted off his shiff, tore at the bujckles of the rig. With Shiah lifting from the other side, a quick flip cleared the cross straps of the spines. The rig landed heavily on the sand behind tl reptile. They quickly repeated the operation with Shiah's and Manth's animals. Then Tleth tore the rarely used picket line out of his pack and threaded it through the three rigs, finally handing one end to Shiah. "Hang onto the shiffen's necks," he directed, "and keep as flat on the top of the sand as you can. You won't sink far if you spread your body weight across a large area. Be sure to brush off the animals' hides on the far side before you rig up." The shiffen slid into the sink ers. Tleth remembered, from the other time he had helped swim a caravan, that their broad feet worked rather efficiently as fins. The animals left the end of the avenue, reaching out with their forelegs in powerful lunges. As they crossed the sink they gradually sank until only their necks, tails, and spines were visible. The necks and tails spread out to help keep them up while, as Tleth could tell from the violent motion of the spines near their shoulders, their legs were working hard. On the far side they scrambled up and shook themselves, much calmer than the anxious shiffeners they had dragged with them. Manth and Shiah pulled up the rigs, brushed off the shiffen and reloaded the beasts. Then Shiah tossed back one end of the line. By that time Tleth and another shiffener had the rigs off three more reptiles and the operation was repeated. "Car a vanm aster ! " T leth tried to ignore Kreesh's annoying, strident voice. "Caravanmaster -- I must talk to you!" Tleth sighed. Letting a shiffener take over his immediate chore, he stalked back to where the three passengers were standing beside their animal. "What are you doing?" Kreesh demanded. "A shiffener said we're going to swim across the sink. Are you mad? You can't ask us to do that, certainly not with my shes in their condition." Tleth regarded the polesman icily through pupils drawn to hairline slits. "It's a pity you didn't consider their condition before dragging them out here," he snapped. His voice thinned to, "You insisted on coming, however. That makes you subject to my orders -- and you'll obey like every other being in this caravan. Shiffen can't swim carrying weight and I intend, above all else, to save my equipment and animals. Of course, if you don't like my orders, if you prefer to stay here and wait for the raiders -- " "Raiders?" " -- coming behind us, I won't try to prevent you from doing so. You have until we reach your animal to decide." "When did you -- " Snapping around, Tleth ignored IF the polesman and marched away, robe billowing out behind him. He found he was no longer needed up front. The shiffeners understood what was to be done and were doing it as efficiently as though they swam every trip. Tleth was relieved and let them work while he kept the caravan moving up to the break. He paid no further attention to Kreesh, except that he did notice some time later that all three passengers were on the far side. Hriss yelled, "Raiders -- " The raiders were coming at a hard gallop. Tleth checked the caravan. Less than half was across. Resisting an urge to look for the tarray -- there was nothing he could do if it were coming, anyway -- he ran for the rear. "Dismount," he called. "Send up your animals." And as he reached them, panting, he added: "We'll meet them. Try to hold them until the shiffen are over." He reached into his robe. "I have ten blades." "Ten," Zahl said. "Twelve," Hriss said. "Aim for riders." They nodded. He looked over his shoulder once more to see how the swimming was progressing. The shiffeners were working frantically, jerking rigs off on one side, shoving shiffen into the sink, barely taking time to brush them off on the other side before rigging up again. There would be sore hides tonight from twisted straps and sand abrasion, Tleth reflected. He caught himself ruefully. Always the caravanmaster. He faced back toward the raiders. Then he heard a distant rumble like thunder. The sand trembled slightly beneath his feet. "Tarray." Zahn's upper body moved wryly. "We might save half." "All," Tleth said firmly. He smiled thinly. He would use the tarray. "Aim for zhazen." "On the ground their aim will be -- " "Aim for their mounts' the caravanm aster repeated. T he leaders were bearing down on them, sun gleaming on the blades in their hands. Tleth reached into his pouch. The skim was smooth and cool in his fingers. He drew back his arm, threw with a snap of his wrist and dropped to hands and knees on the sand. He felt the tug of a skim catching at his robe. The leading zhaze shrieked. It reared and staggered backward, three blades protruding from its broad chest. The rider jumped clear as the reptile crashed sidewise. The rider braced himself to throw, then went down himself, one of Hriss's skims in his throat. Tleth threw again. Another zhaze fell, this time into the path of two more riders. The reptile's convulsive movements and screaming panicked the other zhazen. They shied, hissing. One stepped too close to the edge of the avenue and went into the sink with its rider. The stocky reptile was not built to handle itself well in such fine sand. Zhaze and rider went under, screaming and struggling uselessly. The shiffeners hit two more zhazen. The animals were only wounded, not knocked down, but their fright and pain left them unmanageable. They bolted backward, compounding the confusion in the main body of raiders. A second zhaze went into the sink. A raider threw. Hriss gasped and folded, arms clutched across his stomach. Tleth reached for him with a free hand while snapping off another skim. This time the blade only sliced a raider's shoulder and deflected, fell into the sink. The sand rumbled more noticeably beneath the caravan. "Back," Tleth ordered crisply. The raiders stiffened on their mounts, pupils dilating, throwing arms arrested in mid-motion. The caravan was forgotten. Skims were shoved abruptly into robes and the riders fought to control and turn their frantic, terrified animals. "Run," Tleth said. Hriss managed only one step before his knees gave way. Zahl kept him from falling by grabbing him under an arm. Tleth and Zahl dragged the wounded being after the caravan. The last of the shiffen were ploughing through the sink, rigs dragging, driven by fear and the shouts of their handlers. The two shiffeners on the far side added their whistles, watching something beyond Tleth. The caravanmaster did not look to see what it was, simply ran faster. At the edge of the sink sand he and Zahl leaped out, Hriss between them. The sand slammed up into them, momentarily taking away their breath. They reached for the trailing straps of the rigs with their free hands and locked tight on them. They were dragged for what robes, eyes and noses and shaking as though about to engulf them. Tleth's hand began to tire and his fingers slipped on the strap. He dug in his nails but the fingers slipped farther -- farther -- until the strap jerked completely out of his grasp. He snatched for it again. Instead of the strap, however, he found another hand. It hauled IF him forward and up, onto firm footing again. The rumble was growing louder. Tleth wiped his eyes clear and looked back. On the other side of the gap the sand erupted. A violent gray-white fountain sprayed into the pale, glaring sky, carrying zhazen and riders with it like so many insignificant pebbles. While the caravanmaster watched with grim satisfaction, the huge form of the tarray emerged from the subsiding sand to investigate the strange invaders of its territory. "I thought it was headed for us," a shiffener said weakly. "It was," Tleth said, shaking sand out of his robe, "until the wounded zhazen distracted it." xV the sky again as he spoke, but this time he did not simply make note of its condition in passing. He saw more. The air above him was empty. Some time during the confusion of swimming the shiffen and fighting the raiders, the flyers had gone. At the same time the sky itself had been changing. The hazing on the northern horizon had become a wide black belt dividing the glare of the sky from the glare of the desert. "Rig up," he ordered sharply. The shiffeners obeyed without looking. They did not even take Books Adult Fantasy's in trouble. We don't believe it. Even if James Branch Cabell is an acquired taste, among # Tolkien readers there are at least than chew on seedcake. So stand up and be counted. Get in there and start yelling if the store is not carrying it. AH! AH! # ought to be reading this) are particuDomnoi -- his usual exquisite bawtly romp -- and Lin Carter's own Discoveries In Fantasy, featuring four well-known "mainstream" writers who were (virtually in secret) producing provocative fantasy... Also, an absolutely delicious, delightfully sophisticated fantasist Ernest Bramah. His first for us (and what a cover!) Kai Ling's Golden Hours. Bramah is some kind of past master at the grt of the written double-take. And God love his ever-living English.  new boy for our list but one who is very much known to s.f. fans. Keith Laumer has contributed five of his fine stories for a collection titled Timetracks. And we have an honest-toGod first novel by Alan Dean Foster -- solid, inventive, packed with ideas -- The Tar-Aiym Krang. Then the Pope is at it again with The Reality Trip And Other Implausibilities. -- a collection we like even better than most. Douglas R. Mason is back with a weirdo -- The Resurrection of Roger Diment.  MF. And. of course, his remarkable A Clockwork Orange which, if you have not read it yet. you certainly should. By all means see the movie, too -- it's not as violent or as harsh as the book, but it is. pictorially. Just as strong a statement against violence.  asked John Brunner if he would like to do a second novel on a major ecological subject artd we are happy to announce that Harper has contracted for hardcover publication of The Sheep Look Up. They are scheduling it for early fall. And we're hoping for a bookclub sale. Elaine Geiger has demonstrated her usual perspicacity and bought Dave Gerrold's When Haiiie Was One for the book club. And that too will later come from... BB time to mount, once their animals were loaded. Except for Hriss, who was almost unconscious from shock and blood loss, they stayed afoot, trotting ahead of the shiffen and pulling on the reins to keep the reptiles moving quickly. A distant gray line that marked the edge of the sink held their attention. Tleth looked back every few minutes but only to determinewhat their pace must be to reach those dunes before the blow reached them. He estimated they did not have long. The stir and stringsand that preceded the glow were already swirling along the top of the sink. The caravan was spread out irregularly from Shiah to Tleth, but none of the shiffen, even those without any handlers near, were fighting or straying. They smelled the blow now, too, and did not have to be urged into a trot. They wanted cover as intensely as the shiffeners did. A gust of wind lifted a thin sheet of sand off the top of the sink and sent it spraying across the avenue, stinging Tleth's ankles. The caravanmaster checked the sky again. The band of black was closer, blotting out a full fifth of the sky, and he could see several distant dancing columns carried by small spinwinds. He pulled more vigorously on the reins of the shiff he led. They could reach the dunes ahead IF of the blow, probably, for what good that would do. Mere dunes could not give them adequate protection against a ripsand. They needed a windbreak, preferably the solid walls of a settlement, but at least the partial protection of a thick outcropping of rock. "Tleth!" The cry reached him faintly over the rising wind. He looked ahead. A shiffener was waving at him, motioning forward. Following the direction of the being's hand, he saw a flickering light at the front of the line. Shiah was signaling back with a sunflash. S... C... A... L... E... R...O...C...K...A...H... E... A... D, the caravanmaster read. Scalerock? He squinted against the brightness of the sand, straining to distinguish detail in the rolling land beyond the sink. Yes. The hills looked higher than the rolling dunes they had left, also somewhat steeper. Their faces were blotched with patches of near-black that caught the sun in glints. Scalerock. He reached for the sunflash hanging on a cord around his neck and sent back; F... A... S... T... E... R. Shiah acknowledged. Moments later Tleth saw the foremost shiffen stretch out. Gradually the others followed until the entire line was moving at a trot so fast it was just short of a gallop. The shiffeners could not hope to keep pace with their long-legged animals. They had to vault on, using the reptiles' momentum to lift them into place. Tleth wished they did not have to burden the animals. The shiffen were tiring fast. It was abusive to expect them to hold this kind of pace and carry riders, too. N evertheless, he drove his own shiff harder yet and brought it up briefly beside Hriss's while he peered at the shiffener. The being lay limp in the straps that kept him on, his eyes closed, the face slack. Tleth could not tell whether Hriss was dead or merely unconscious. The caravanmaster's mouth set. Hriss was an excellent shiffener. Losing him would be... Tleth stifled the unhappy twist inside him and looked back to check the blow's progress again. The twist sharpened abruptly into pure fear. Half the sky was black now. The wall of darkness towered above the desert, obliterating everything behind it, its raging foot touching the paleness of sink sand. But that was not what brought him snapping around to yell harshly at his crew as he lashed his animal across the neck. At the foot of the blackness, the sink sand it touched was not merely being picked up and churned or spiraled into spinwind columns. The sand was being pushed and lifted and itself packed up into a wall, a sand wall that grew a meter in height for every five forward. "Sandwave," he warned. The wind whipped his shout forward. Heads turned for the briefest fractions of seconds. Then arms wielded lashes. The entire caravan broke into a flat gallop, every animal and rider straining toward the protection of the scalerock hills. Even the loose shiffen ran in panic, all weariness forgotten. Tleth clutched the reins and kept his head tucked tight against his shiffs neck, his nictitating membranes were drawn against the particles of sand carried by the wind. The layer lifted off the sink and, carried with each gust, hazed the ground, blurring color and detail until Tleth could no longer distinguish the edges of the avenue. He was forced to stop guiding the reptile and trust its instinct for footing. The hills loomed nearer, but so did the double wall of blackness and sand. Tleth could feel the ground trembling -- worse, he could feel the shiff shaking with exhaustion. Thankfully he noticed that the ground was rising. The caravan was reaching the base of the hills. Strides later the leaders passed the first small outcropping of the slick layered rock that made up the bones of the planet. They were out of the sink. They leaped from their animals to climb the steep narrow trails up the side of the hill between clifflike faces of scalerock. The men went up on hands and feet, clawing for purchase in the treacherous combination of rock shards and loose sand. The shiffen lunged in uneven, tired heaves, pulled and pushed by their handlers. They fell often and heavily, sliding backward, losing ground. Shiffeners cursed through rasping gasps and lashed the animals mercilessly to their feet again. A part of Tleth's mind vaguely thought the shapes of the rock faces were somehow familiar but he did not take the time to try to analyze that familarity. He felt as though he were carrying his shiff up the hill. It stumbled on every other stride. Pebbles showered backward from the scramble of its broad feet to sting the caravanmaster's exposed arms and legs. Tleth dug in his toes and leaned against the shifPs quarters, then almost fell when the animal found footing and lunged up the hill away from him. He climbed tiredly after it, hoping it would not stumble again. IF T he sound of the wind was reaching a shrill scream when he staggered over the crest. Gulping air into lungs that seemed afire, he stopped to see what kind of shelter the scalerock was going to afford them, To his shock, the shiiTeners were not laying their animals down at all but were still moving, pushing across the rocky hill. Disbelief stunned him. The sandwave would reach them in minutes. He could feel it at his back now. If they did not take cover immediately... The thought remained unfinished as his eyes, angrily seeking Shiah, suddenly recognized the sandscape. Approaching from a slightly different direction subtly altered the relationships and shapes of the landmarks but the deep desert instinct in him finally identified them despite that. Dakshan, he knew beyond question, lay just beyond the next hill. He whistled at his shiff, urging it after the rest of the caravan. "A little farther," he sang at the weary animal. Their route across the sink had brought them straight to the settlement's rear gate. Shove on, old egg. Just a little farther," The reptile moved slower and slower, every line of its dragging legs and drooping neck and tail announcing its intention to lie down very soon and ignore' both Tleth and the blow. Sighing, Tleth used his whip. But even then the animal slogged up the hill only fast enough to stay ahead of the lash. Then, at the crest, its head came up abruptly. It squealed and hurled itself down the other side. The labyrinth of high gray walls and scale roofs that was Dakshan spread below them. Even in exhaustion the shiff recognized a settlement and knew it meant food. Just as suddenly the wind stopped roaring in Tleth's ears. It dropped to the whisper of driftsand. Tleth jerked his hood more tightly about his head and forced his aching legs to run faster. Dakshan's entry maze was still almost a half-kilometer away. Into the silence came a single sound -- low, barely audible. It did not remain low but swiftly crescendoed to a roar so great it reached beyond hearing. The pseudo-silence lasted a heartbeat and then was torn apart by the crashing explosion of the sandwave smashing into the high scalerock faces. Tleth lurched, almost falling. He caught himself on the shiffs rig and ran on. The walls were only a quarter-kilometer away now. The broken wave reached him as a fine haze of silvery particles sifting down from the sky like the dawn drizzle of the wet season. Another heartbeat, however, and lO?-' the blow struck. The drizzle became, suddenly, driving death. The grains, propelled by the mighty wind, pierced the tough fabric of Tleth's robe to stab him like countless tiny skims. He felt no pain, though. Only numbness. Running blindly beside his shiff, he hoped they were still on course for the gate. He did not dare open his hood and expose his face. Much longer in the ripsand could be fatal to both caravanmaster and reptile. The flesh would be scoured from their bones. He risked one hurried peek, finally. They were just six shiffen lengths from the entry maze. As though realizing it was about to lose its prey, the blow slashed furiously at them. But the caravanmaster utilized the added force of the wind to swing through the gate. The wind screamed in frustration, unable to reach him beyond the protective angles of the maze. Sand still fell in Dakshan, dropping from the blow as it passed over, but the walls shut out the wind. Inside the settlement, Tleth ran swift, probing eyes over the heaving shiffen and the equally out-ofbreath shiffeners sagging beside them -- over the two shes and their sick-huddled husband -- over Hriss. The shiffener hung on his mount in the unmistakable slackness of death. The caravanmaster totaled the loss tiredly -- one man, no cargo, no shiffen. Any reptiles that were lamed would be sound again by the time the ripsand subsided and the caravan could continue to Moveen. Objectively, it was a successful crossing. "Unrig," he ordered when he had his breath back enough to talk again. His voice was hoarse with weariness. "I want every animal checked for strap rubs, sand burns and lameness and treated before any shiffeners leave the stable area." The shiffeners groaned. Shiah regarded Tleth with concern. "Shall I find you a physician?" Tleth looked down at himself. His robe was shredded and bloodstained. His skin must be raw beneath it. But he shook his head. "Later." A pity, came a casual thought as he reached for the buckles of his shiffs rig, that the tarray destroyed so much of the avenue. The route had saved them more than half a day. It might be profitable to explore the sink and chart if for future use. It was certainly worth considering -- later. Preferably, he decided firmly, filing the idea away, while in a state of intoxication in a pleasant tavinn garden under a clear, more benevolent sky.  IF Colony Motor Hotel, # Bonhomme, Clayton, Missouri. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Pulpcon, Box #, Overland Branch# St. Louis, Missouri #.  Broadway Motel, U.S. Route #, Johnson City, Tennessee. Guest-of-Honor: Keith Laumer. For information: Len Collins, Route #, Box #, Church Hill, Tennessee #. Farmer. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. For informaKansas City, Missouri #. # # E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach, California. Guest-of-Honor: Lloyd Biggie, Jr. Advance registration: #, # after June #. For informaArleta, California #.  European Science Fiction Convention with the Trieste SF Film Festival. Membership: #, attending; #, Tony Lewis, # Unity Ave., Belmont, Leland Sapiro, Box ,#, University #AA, Melbourne, Victoria #; O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Convention address: Eurocon #, Casella Postale #, #, Venezia, Italy.  Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Detroit Tri-Con, # Westwood Avenue, Detroit, Michigan #. # World Science Fiction Convention. At the International Hotel, #I West Century Blvd., Los Angeles, California #. Guest-of-Honor: Frederik Pohl. Fan Guests-of-Honor: Robert and Juanita Coulson. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: L.A. Con, P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, California. Hugo Gernsback Kurt Lasswitz Philip Jose Farmer Philip Jose Farmer Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle Piers Anthony T here was a time when watching the development of science fiction was a breathtaking hobby. Here was a field where growth and change were violently explosive compared to the petty progress of other literatures. Science fiction began as a distinct category in #. It was then a clanking mess of thinly disguised lectures on technology, almost entirely lacking in style, characterization and anything but the most rudimentary plotting. After a mere five years, however, science fiction had discovered space opera to give it scope, and new writers had lifted it nearly to the level of the general pulp writing of the time. When the field was a decade old, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Raymond Z. Gallun and Don A. Stuart had turned the bug-eyed evil monsters into alien friends and had replaced the wonders of pure gadgetry with the impact of emotional development. By #, an influx of new writers had introduced style and characterization better than could be found in most magazine fiction and science fiction had become a literature of human ideas, struggles, values and dreams. Since then most of its developnnent has been much slower and some has been along a side-trail that parallels the crawling mainstream. Some experimentation has improved the field, though much has been simply ipecac-frosting on the cake. Probably such trends are inevitable, since there must be a limit to how much improvement is possible in commercial literature. But because of the progress of the field, I was particularly interested in Ultimate World, by Hugo Gernsback (Walker, #). Gernsback set the model for the original form of science fiction with his technological, predictive and endlessly explanatory Ralph #C #I back in #, and many of the earliest stories might have been modeled on that. Ultimate World was written in #, long after the major evolution of the field had been achieved. How much had the changes affected his work? Gernsback was an alert, intelligent man of amazing ability, as his work of publishing in the electronics field proved. And, aside from the profit motive that influenced his science-fiction publishing, he genuinely loved the type of fiction he had founded. It seemed to me that if anyone could change with the times, he could. I was wrong. The later "novel" differs greatly from the earlier one. But the changes suggest attitudes caused by age and our troubled society, not those derived from the premises of science fiction. Instead of emphasizing gadgets that might bring the millennium -- gadgets Gernsback knew as well as any man could -- he evidently had accepted the stand that gadgets had failed and decided in this work to try to save the world by an alien invasion and by preaching his personal theories of how man and society must be changed. For remarkable technical insight he substituted a human insight that is no more remarkable than that of any other dabbler with social theories. The style is somewhat better than that of Ralph, but that is damning with the faintest praise. The plotting, development, use of anything resembling human characters, etc., are certainly no better and may be worse. It's a bad book. This is its first publication -- out of deep respect for Gernsback and consideration for all readers, I hope it's also the last publication.  that dates back to # must set some kind of record for a First publication in English. To add to the novelty, the book is brought out by Southern University Press. Science Fiction obviously is attracting serious academic consideration now -- provided it is ancient enough for the professional students of the genre to have mulled it over and reached some kind of decision on it. The title of the work is Two Planets. By Kurt Lasswitz, it is a novel that had a strong influence on the members of the German Rocket Society. To some extent it may have accelerated the beginning of the space program. The price is high -- S # for less than # pages of the original novel -- but probably within the reach of enough completist collectors and libraries to acceptable. In fact, if this really were a full translation of Lasswitz's two-volume work the rather high price certainly would be justiFied. Unfortunately, this is not a full translation of Auf zwei Planeten. Around #, Erich Lasswitz made an abridgement of his father's work. Now, the curtailed version has been used for the translation by Hans Rudnick, with some additions from the original -- wherever the translator decided the material was "'pertinent to today's achievements -- " which means that the reader has no way of checking it for errors in predictions or science, or of looking back to Find developments in our future that were pertinent or wrong in the book. The writing in the original seemed fairly good. That may be because the German language seldom reads as easily and quickly as English or because I was much less critical when the book was lent to me in #. The English version seems duller -- the stilted prose makes the preachiness stand out more strongly. I suspect this is due to a somewhat too close translation if not to a lack of literary fluency on the part of the translator. Still, despite almost # years of scientiFic advances, the plot is still reasonably plausible. And eyen though it is far more a morality novel -- or a philosophical one -- the search for Utopia does not keep it from being far better in its plotting and development than much current writing. It has a good basic situation -- men discover that the Martians have a base on Earth, after which the Martians slowly take over Earth, initially with the kindest motives. But power corrupts and Earth has to Fight Mars before establishing a modus vivendi at the end. Some of the political IF scenes are badly marred by extreme anti-British prejudice, a trend common in German fiction after Disraeli's quenching of some of Bismark's ambitions. If you can stand the price you might find the book fascinatingreading it is like traveling through time to learn the attitudes of the past. However, I cannot avoid thinking that the present version shows a marked lack of judgment on the part of the translator and publisher. Instead of being Lasswitz, this is the bowdlerization of his book -- a cropped # book that has now been stuffed with odd bits to make it fit #. That is bad scholarship. It is unfair to readers who might want to possess the original in English -- and grossly unfair to Lasswitz, who can stand -- or fall -- on his own. N othing can be proved about the development of science fiction from only two books, of course. If anything, the two examples seem simply to indicate that good work is more a matter of the caliber of the writers interested in the field than of the time in which they write. If so, perhaps we should pay more attention to the twists and turnings of interest and the evolution in the talents of our authors. One of the most interesting cases in this respect is Philip Jose Farmer. In almost a quarter of a century, he has tackled more different types and levels of science fiction than anyone else I can remember.' He has been a master of the fresh idea, the straight adventure and the utterly wacky -- but convincing. He has ridden a host of hobbies in his work. And as the years have gone by, he has become one of our most prolific authors. Like most of us, he has had a few books that were less than successes, but in general his work has scored well. His second novel in the "Riverworld" series is now in print. The Fabulous Riverboat (Putnam, #), originally serialized in IF, has been expanded into a longer novel. This time we are following Mark Twain, revived in company with all people who have died on Earth. On a strange planet, where all life clings to the banks of a river that gone back to his old interest, the river steamer. The story line deals with Mark Twain's building of a riverboat that will go down the river to find the beings who are responsible for Riverworld and for humanity's resurrection. Less attention is paid to those beings in this volume than in the first of the series. But in some ways this is a stronger novel. Twain's efforts before he achieves his boat, the politics that cannot be avoided, the societies and cultures that have developed along the river give epth to the story -- the triumphs and defeats are marvelously real. The events in the book have an inevitablity -- yet it is a delight to discover each happening as Farmer tells it. Like the previous Riverworld book, this is a major piece of fiction. The next novel in the series will bring Burton and Twain together in a search down the river. I look forward to it. The latest of Farmer's works to be published is wildly different. This is Farmer pursuing one of his private delights to its ultimate end. He has been busily working to prove the reality of a number of supposedly fictitious -- and fabulous -- characters and to trace their lives beyond the limits of the fiction in which they were involved. Timers Last Gift, by Philip Jose' Farmer (Ballantine, #), is superficially a time-travel story dealing with the distant past and our primitive ancestors. But in reality, it's a what-ever-became-of... After a number of failures at time travel a final attempt is made. But now the crew includes a mystery member who seems to have bought and forced his way in. Yet, when the time barrel lands thousands of years in the past the rest of the crew is dismayed to find that he not only assumes leadership but that they let him do so. Gribardsun also seems quick to assume practical leadership of the primitives they meet and his ability to survive as they do is remarkable. There is also an odd romance and a fresh handling of the time paradox -- but enough. Best if you figure things out for yourself. It's part of the fun. In fact, the whole book is fun. I have only one. quibble with Farmer. No, Phil, you can't get rid of Gribardsun that way. Sure, the first time the similarity prevented the time barrel's going back to where he had been. But cells replace themselves -- never completely in our short lives, of course, but continually. Over the course of millennia, this would mean that no molecule of his body was the same at the beginning of his trip. There would be no conflict -- no two things appearing at the same time. Gribardsun would go on, perhaps out to the stars, perhaps forever. And that's a quibble readers will have to buy the book to understand. writer who has always fasIF cinated me. He's an honest-to-God scientist of the top echelon, whom no one should expect to write about anything other than abstract mathematics. Every time I read of some major new theory in stellar formation or behavior, or about a postulate regarding the nature of the universe, Fred Hoyle seems to be given credit for much of the mathematical theory behind it. He's familiar with it long before Isaac Asimov writes a book about it -- which is known as being a pioneer. When he wrote a book of science fiction, I bought it only but of curiosity. I'd seen other attempts by top-flight scientists to do novels and I had grave doubts. But The Black Cloud was a superb piece of science fiction. It had the quietly effective style of a good English novelist and might have been the mature work of a topflight writer. Then he did several other books that proved his ability. But now we have Rockets in Ursa Major, by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle (Fawcett, #). Okay, it carries a bit of warning. Geoffrey is Fred Hoyle's son, working in television, and the novel is "based on the play of that title by Fred Hoyle." The credit line suggested this was a reworked television thing. But Hoyle had done other television work and had converted it into a good suspense book. Not this time. The basic gimmick isn't too bad. Earth has sent ships to the stars and they have simply vanished. Now, much too late, one comes back -- but there is no crew and a message scrawled inside warns that if this ship returns mankind will be in deadly peril. People have to find out what the peril is. But no, don't worry, gentle reader. Comes a ship with aliens (human enough to carry on romance with Earthmen) who tell all. They are good guys. Out there are bad guys who want to subjugate Earth. But the good guys will save us all. And from there on -- ho-hum. You've seen it all before, but much better. Big battles in space where the hero (Earthman) must show his value by fixing a short in the antenna. He fails, which is the mark of his heroism. The battles are pretty bad, though they may be the best thing in the book. The shock really comes from the writing. From his past performance we can take it for granted that Fred Hoyle writes damned well. But this material is sad-sack writing made worse by an attempt to give it emotional punch by sticking an adverb after every verb. Consider: Hero had just told the ship commander that since the radio won't work to identify the ship, it will have to land through a barrage of almost certainly deadly missiles. He finishes thus: " 'Yes,' I said laughing. 'It's not your trip.'" Ha-ha. If.it is a simple statement someone makes it slyly. If a character is worried about danger, heshe says it enthusiastically. When all else fails, they say it to each other aloud. Sensible, that. I finished the book gagging. On a more pleasant note, I turn to Orn, by Piers Anthony (Avon, #i). This is somewhat of a sequel to Omnivore -- the same aliens are present, along with some of the characters of the earlier book. But the new novel can stand on its own and in many ways it is a better book. The basic situation is that a small crew is sent back into either the past or an alternate world similar to Earth but more primitive. There's a trio -- two men and a girl, with a fairly complicated and interesting problem laid out for her -- she must resolve the conflict between her emotional and her intellectual responses to the two men. The real difficulty involving all three seems to be that they cannot be sure whether the locus of action is Earth of the past or a good facsimile. They have to determine the answer to gain any hope of survival. Whichever it is -- it's a world in upheaval and the trio is caught in the savagery of this. The characters also discover dinosaurs during a period in evolution when Earth's dinosaurs must have been extinct -- or must they? There are some good descriptions of the behavior of the dinosaurs, too. Anthony has obviously done his homework here. He has avoided the usual mistaken cliches about the ancient saurians. A highlight of the book is a duel between a scientist and a tyrannosaurus. The man loses his weapon early in the proceedings and it is man against saurian as nature made them. A good scene honestly resolved. There's also some fine work on the girl's brave, warm, and somehow pitiful attempt to save the egg of a strange bird. The cooperation between bird and human is told effectively and makes a gripping and effective part of the story. But the real interest of the book centers on Orn, the odd bird whose story this is. He represents a strange byroad of evolution, a race that developed racial memory in place of intelligence. I found this the most enjoyable book by Anthony I've yet read.  IF Blind -- yet she could see him across the light-years! I T here was an occasional odd clicking noise in his oxygen mask. Nothing serious, perhaps, but to a planetary surface scout any anomaly in the functioning of equipment had to be disquieting. The masks were not supposed to fail. Still, Bronson Bell saw no cause for actual worry. While the atmosphere of Aldebaran IV was deficient in oxygen, its density and the bitter cold of the mountains in late afternoon made it seem northis "air" could be breathed. At least for a time.  More of a threat was the fact that he did not have the force pistol with him. If he met something too large for the one-shot specimen gun he would be in real trouble without the force pistol. But since it was one of the few pieces of equipment that was really heavy -- and its battery and cable would have taken up too much weight and space in the specimen cart -- he had deliberately left it at base camp. After all, he had been here three months without encountering any animal larger than a lapdog. Why sweat over a dinosaur-swatter, then? A Buck Rogers type blaster, if such a thing existed, yes. A quarter of a ton of bulky, rarely used hardware, no. Bell -- called "Bronze" by the few who could bear to look upon his outrageous ugliness -- swept his gaze over the surrounding peaks, jagged and furred with deepgreen alien vegetation. The terrain sloped sharply to the west, where his base camplay. Even without supplementary oxygen, surely the return would be manageable. Tough, maybe, but he had handled worse. He tried to distract himself from the clicking noise by impressing the scenery on his memory for later description to Sylvia Chayams. He smiled and glanced at his watch. In fifty-two and a quarter hours he would hear her call on the transwave and would make his formal report. It would do no harm if the report were vivid as well as formal for the benefit of his beautiful blind date -- actually blind, poor lovely. Sylvia's image faded from his mind as an animal hardly as large as a mouse hopped along the ground a dozen meters ahead, sporting a ridiculously long tail and a relatively oversized chest. Bronze studied it a monient, chose a tiny hypodart from the selection in his belt pouch, dropped it into the breech of the fragile specimen rifle and brought the mouseling down with a practiced snap shot. The creature chittered angrily, plucked at the tiny needle in its side, then slumped helplessly to the ground. Bronze picked it up carefully with gloved fingers, and his lumpy face behind the breathing mask broke mto a smile as he noted the comically worried eyes of the little beast. "Take it easy, little fella," he said. "You'll wake up tomorrow without even a hangover." As the anesthetic took effect, the little animal's eyes closed. The big gentle-handed man eased the limp body into a plastic cylinder of the right size, carefully tucked in the disproportionately long IF tail, clicked home the tube's perforated lid. As he moved back up the trail to his light two-wheeled specimen cart, Bronze hummed a snatch of dance music in deep, resonant tones that set his oxygen mask vibrating. The tune was one that had been played by the orchestra in Houston three months ago and fifty-three light-years away. For a moment Sylvia Chayams was again in his arms. B ronze thought of that dance frequently. It was not often with him in public -- and Sylvia was impossibly beautiful. Long slender legs, firm but womanly hips, a trim waist, high and perfectly formed breasts, a cascade of warm brown hair, a cameo face adorned by huge blue eyes with abundant dark lashes set under straight brows. What a pity those lovely eyes were blind. But if she were able to see she would never have looked at him. His broken lumpy features were overlaid with puckered, indelibly blackened scars -- mementoes of a quarry explosion. That night of dinner and dancing had been both a delight and a torture. Delight because Sylvia, radiant, had moved in his arms like a strain of the music itself. Torture because of his own feelings. He had wanted desperately to tell her how beautiful she was, to reach across the table and hold her fingers in his blunt hard hand. But such things were among the few Bronson Bell would not dare. Not with any girl. Least of all Sylvia. He could not take advantage of her blindness, knowing that he was the ugliest man she might ever meet. His conversation had been confined to descriptions of the Starfire Club and the people in it. At that he had been fluent and she had listened eagerly. When he had wanted to say anything more personal -- or when she had asked him about himself -- his words had become short and gruff. When he had said goodbye to her at the door of her apartment she had apologized. "I hope it wasn't too tiresome -- taking out a sightless girl?" "That doesn't matter." She had slipped away from him then. The kiss he had almost offered had become impossible. She had replied with her first trace of coolness, "It matters a great deal to me." He had been able to think of nothing at all to say to that, although he had thought of a thousand things since. But now he was hearing her voice every four days on the transwave, fiftythree light-years away at her Explorers' Monitor and Control Console in Houston, Texas. held one of the most responsible program for the biological exploration of the cosmos. In addition to a mind that had command of a halfdozen disciplines of twenty-second century science, her miraculously acute hearing was a priceless asset in dealing with the whisperings of scouts' reports amid the thunders ing stars -- and her slender fingers could play the console's myraid controls with unmatched deftness and surety. For the hundredth time Bronze wondered if Sylvia had been assigned to him or had deliberately chosen to monitor his exploration mission among the dozen or so that any one operative could carry. However it might be, he was grateful for the luck that brought him -- precisely every fourth day at local sunset -- Sylvia's clear voice saying, "Houston Control calling Bell, Aldebaran IV. Chayams here. Come in. Bell." And then less formally, "Hello, Bronze. Silver here. How was it?" T he going was tricky here, requiring lowering the cart down a jumble of rocks and steep bluffs, one or two of which were fifteenor twenty meters high. Inching over the lip of one of these after letting the cart down on a line, he almost put his hand on the animal. Although obviously a worm, it was somewhat larger than the mouselike specimen he had shot with a dart. He had never seen anything like it before. It moved sluggishly as worms do, and its body was covered with a gray pitted shag like the bleached bark of an old birch. He gathered it up in a gloved hand and prepared to continue his downward climb when the thing elongated its body and writhed violently. The head end struck his wrist where his exertions had pulled an inch of sleeve out of his gauntlet and he felt a pinprick on the bared flesh. As he stuffed the worm into a zippered pocket and reached with his free hand for an antiseptic swab he carried in his shirt -- the planet suddenly lurched and swirled like smoke about him. Hurriedly he flung himself down on a narrow ledge, his feet hanging over a ten-meter drop. The ground was tilting and he suddenly found himself clinging to a ceiling of stones, gazing down a long drop to an empty sky. Illogically he grasped knobs of rock at his sides IF and held them with a force that made his fingers ache. He closed his eyes and waited for the effect of the venom to wear off. When he felt the planet tip to horizontal again he opened his eyes carefully, only to find that the colors of everything he saw were reversed. The dark-green forests had become wine-red, the sky had taken on a yellow-orange tinge and his khaki shirt and trousers were a nauseating dirty green. He waited again for a while, then carefully completed his climb down the escarpment to stand, panting, beside his laden specimen cart. The exertion of the descent apparently had speeded his return to normal. Surfaces were resuming their customary hues and the dizziness had passed. He counted his pulse and found it slightly slowed. He gave himself a mild stimulant by injection and examined the bitten spot on his wrist. That Bronze-and-Siver bit had come about when they had exchanged names during the date. Bronze grinned at it now and regarded his cart, too heavily loaded for its fragile wheels and flimsy body. Every item an explorer scout used had to save the ultimate gram of weight since it had to be brought down out of orbit from the roving mother ship. Darwin -- and returned to the Darwin eventually -- by rockets burning precious reaction mass. The ship's trans-light drive was much too massive and too expensively triggered with tritium to use for landing scouts. For that matter, even the Darwin could not afford to carry the echo-modulated transwave communicator -- fueled at astronomical cost by the same tritium -- that punched the standing transwave across the lightyears. Science had indeed broken the light-speed barrier, but nothing, apparently, could break the economic laws that demanded a huge expenditure of money for a corresponding expenditure of energy. Money and energy were two names for the same thing -- hence only kilometers of planetary surface and communications only through Houston. Bronze checked his specimens. These same economic laws made ridiculous any attempt at interstellar mining, commerce of even transport of objects. Only knowledge, pouring back to Earth along the standing transwave, was worth the cost. And the most valuable knowledge was locked in the cells of alien protoplasm which, like its counterparts on Earth, was capable of infinite variation in response to challenges of alien environment. In the skin, glands or intestines of the longtailed mouse-thing he had just captured might lie the cure for cancer, an antidote for heroin addiction, a longevity drug -- or something that might restore sight to Sylvia's eyes. H e tested the bindings on the cart and stood for a moment with the shafts in his hands, drinking in the beauty of the rugged scenery around him. If he could not restore her sight he could at least make the scene live for her -- describe the line of midnight blue at the horizon, the smell of unfamiliar resins from the nearly black foliage of the trees, the chirps, whistles and deeptoned buzzings of the small wildlife, the touch of icy crystal water from melting snows untouched by the soot of chimneys, the fragrance of carpets of tiny blood-red flowers and even the tang of the berries and bitter roots he had cautiously nibbled. Soon he would have to prepare and eat his own prosaic evening meal and he wanted to be at Camp One by nightfall. The following day he would have an easy trek from Camp One to base, which would leave him time to arrange his specimens for identification, classification and, if new in any respect, storage in the memory banks of the giant computers at Houston Control. His portable micro-bio analyzer would automatically transmit the structure of the most complex molecules to Houston for later study and attempts at synthesis. Only those substances that could not readily be synthesized would call for the transport aboard the Darwin of the plant or animal that'contained them. The other specimens would be disposed of or set free again. He checked his rough map for landmarks and started down the flank of the mountain between the shafts of his cart, humming his snatch of dance music and planning things to say to Sylvia, knowing that they would not be said as planned. Seemingly nothing could prevent his being gauche when the talk approached the banalities normal between a man and a woman. His humming stopped as the valve supplying a trickle of supplementary oxygen to his face mask again clicked and this time cut off the flow for an instant. He took off the mask and examined the valve while breathing the thin perfume of the ambient atmosphere. Nothing was obviously wrong. At the base he had tools to take the valve apart, but base camp was twelve hours' march IF from here. If the valve failed entirely he would be reduced to a crawl. He resumed the mask and went on, the tune temporarily forgotten in favor of calculations of the time required to reach base by his reporting hour if he were obliged to cut his pace. If necessary he could travel all night, since he was not particularly tired. That would certainly be better than risking the automatic rescue mission by the Darwin that would follow his failure to answer Sylvia's call. The reaction of Admiral Beane to such an astronomically expensive waste would not bear thinking about. He was three hundred meters above Camp One, only three kilometers by trail from it and the oxygen valve giving no trouble, when he found the worm. The place bore a small circle of pinpricks surrounded by a red patch of irritated skin. He sucked at the punctures until a bit of blood oozed from them, spat on the ground, swabbed the wound, disinfected it and applied a circlet of sterile plaster. Then, with a long-handled wire clamp, he fished the worm carefully out of the zippered pocket and looked at it wryly. "I think you're going to have something interesting for the computers, my friend," he told it. pushing it into a cylinder of appropriate size and stowing it beside the recently captured mouse. II H e picked up the shafts of the cart and started toward a narrow ravine that crossed the plain ahead of him. By the time he reached it he had all but forgotten the bitten wrist. Humming his dance melody, he lowered the cart to the bottom of the steepsided declivity, scrambled down after it and tossed the coil of line attached to the cart up the opposite slope. He began to climb after the line and had nearly reached the top when he was in blackness and falling. When sight and sensation returned he was sprawled an arm's length from his cart. His left ankle was sending frantic pain signals -- alternate stabs of ice and fire. He unlaced the boot and pulled down the heavy sock to examine the injury. The ankle had already begun to swell and was suffusing with a brownish tinge of blood. Man, that looks nasty, he thought. Going to be rough making the base in time to call in. He wriggled his toes cautiously, vaguely remembering that if he could do so the ankle was not broken. He found he could move the toes, but the cost in pain discouraged further testing. He laced the boot again, pulling the laces as tight as he dared. It wouldn't do to cut off the circulation, but the ankle must be immobilized. When he tried to stand he almost fell again. It took some further bracing of the boot with straps and a short-handled prospecting hammer before he was able to hobble. Then, to his dismay, he found that it would be impossible for him to haul the specimen cart out of the ravine. The bottom of the ravine was growing dark by the time he had made a cache of the vegetable specimens, improvised a makeshift knapsack and fashioned crutches from the shafts of the cart. He released the animal specimens, most of which scuttled off among the stones and brush. Only the long-tailed mouse seemed to have adopted its captor and showed a tendency to follow Bronze about. The big man leaned down to the creature and with gentle hands pointed its nose into some tall grass and tapped it on its little rump with a forefinger. "Run off, Mickey -- or Minnie, as the case may be. I'm not going to have time to play with you," he said. As the tiny creature took refuge in the clump of grass. Bronze shouldered his pack, slung the specimen rifle over it and started painfully up the side of the miniature valley. Halfway to the top the laboring valve of his breather mask gave one sharp, final click and refused to supply oxygen. ' the console of her transwave communicator, her padded earphones not yet in place. Her slender fingers drifted in aghostly dance over the dials and switches. A lilting dance tune went through her mind as she worked, and her fingers moved in unconscious rhythm with the music. What a wonderful evening that had been with the big spaceman. Bronze Bell. His calling her Silver had been a delightful touch, too. If she married him people would probably call her Silver Bell. Her mind shied away from the thought. This was going too fast! Still, the only flaw in the precious hours she had spent with him had come at the end when she had so clumsily mentioned her blindness. There had been an element of selfdefense in her doing so and she hated herself for it. She had known from the balance of his body and the slight tenseness of the fingers that held her hand that he had been about to kiss her and she had blurted her stupid remark to keep IF him from doing so. She wished fervently now that she had accepted the kiss. She was sure, somehow, that Bronze would not have been like the others, the succession of men who had dated her, telling her monotonously that she was beautiful, then groping with thick fingers at the buttons of her blouse or the zipper of her skirt. Like the slob who had insisted on taking her to a movie -- a movie, of all things! -- and, with his arm around her shoulders and one hand fingering the under-curve of her breast, had handled himself with the other. He had thought that because she was blind she could not tell what he was doing. Ugh! Bronze was not like that. For the first time she had felt like a normal girl on a normal date. His hand on her back as they danced had felt cool and firm. Her head had fitted so comfortably in the hollow between his neck and shoulder as they moved about the floor and, though the floor had been crowded, he had protected her so easily and deftly that they had never come into contact with any of the other dancing couples. There were other things about him, too. What other man she had ever met had known how to make things vivid in her darkness? What was it he had said at last transwave contact, describing a velvet-petaled flower fifty-three lights from Houston?... a red like the taste of burnt orange peel... Sylvia was smiling to herself as Kate Hoggins clumped by on her canes on the way to her own console. "Hi, Sylvia. Dreaming about a spacer? Who's your contact this shift? Bell?" Sylvia's smile became a friendly grin. Kate always asked questions in groups of three. "Yes to your first question," she said. "I was dreaming -- sort of. About the contact, it's Hashimoto's report from Aldebaran II tonight. Bell's not due to report in until -- " Sylvia's fingers strayed briefly to a clock set in her console and touched the exposed hands -- "twenty-three hours, thirteen minutes from now." "Got him timed to the minute, hey? A little bird told me Bell took you to the Starfire Club the last time he was on leave, right? Did you have a good time?" "Wonderful." "You like to dance, don't you? Did you dance? How was he as a dancer?" Kate's voice changed to a wistful note. "I'd give my soul to be able to dance again!" Sylvia frowned. Kate was inviting a break in their unvoiced rule against mutual commiseration and admission of handicaps. "At least you can enjoy a show with your date and see what he looks like." "Yeah. There is that." Kate dropped her hand lightly on Sylvia's shoulder, then hobbled to a place in the line pf consoles. Sylvia smiled after her. Like most blind persons she did not like to be touched, but she had come to expect -- and not not mind -- Kate's friendly fingers. Sylvia checked the clock again, pulled the phones over her ears, delicately reset a dial and began her evening's stint. "Houston Control calling Hashimoto, Aldebaran II. Chayams here. Houston Control calling Hashimoto, Aldebaran II. Chayams here. Come in. Hash. Over." B ronze struggled to the lip of the ravine, his breather mask dangling uselessly on his chest. The shortage of oxygen, the exertion of the climb, the agony of the twisted ankle -- these combined to pour trickles of sweat down his forehead and into his eyes. He dashed away perspiration with a forefinger and sourly looked at the oxygen mask. The fall had probably damaged it beyond repair. He put it to his face and inhaled strongly. Nothing came from it but a slight odor of plastic and oil. He tapped the valve lightly. Something cracked and the canister exhausted its contents in one hissing burst, leaving a thin frost on the inside of the mask. That was it. No oxygen. How long could a man live on this planet without supplementary oxygen? Quite a while if he didn't exert himself. Not very long if he did. The planet's animals were all oxygen breathers. But they had disproportionately large lungs and their respiration rate was more rapid than that of Earthly animals. He would have to increase his own breathing rate. And rest more frequently than even his damaged ankle demanded. Instead of ten or twelve hours it would take him all day and all night to make base camp. He checked his watch and the lowering sun and resumed his slow, painful progress. Two hours later he estimated that he had made only two-and-ahalf kilometers. The local sun was already touching the horizon. The pain in his ankle had settled to an enormous, hammering throb. He paused on a slight rise, panting rapidly and heavily, and looked about him. The reason might have been the advancing twilight, but the landmarks looked oddly unfamiliar. He set down his pack and balanced on one crutch while he IF rummaged for his map. It was not in the pack. Neither was his compass. He had probably left both in the specimen cart back in the ravine. The compass was the lesser loss as the planet's magnetic field was weak and variable, but the lack of his map was serious. He looked about him carefully, trying to recognize some landmark as it might appear from an unfamiliar angle. The sun's disk was half below the horizon now and the long, brownish shadows emphasized the irregularities of the terrain. Directly ahead loomed a jumble of rocks, a formation he could not recall from the outward trip. His damaged ankle would force him to skirt that obstacle. But should he go north of it -- or south? No sense bothering with Camp One now. He had no time to rest. All he could be sure of was that base camp lay generally westward. Perhaps tlie landmarks would become more easily recognizable ' as he approached it. With the sun below the horizon it would be difficult for him to be sure of continued progress westward, however, and this planet had no moon. On the plus side was the fact that fifty-three light-years made little difference in the familiar constellations. But he would have to remember that because of the planet's orientation, Formalhaut was its pole star. Suddenly the effort to recall which of the constellations, therefore, would rise east and set west or vice versa made his head whirl. Painfully he reshouldered his pack and started toward the fading glow of sunset, angling south of the jumble of rock ahead. As he did so a deep, coughing rumble like the grunt of a hunting lion came faintly to his ears. Bronze stood motionless for a moment, then resolutely reminded himself that a loud or deep-toned noise did not necessarily mean a large animal. There were Louisiana bullfrogs whose deepthroated roar could be heard for miles. He wondered if he could describe to Silver what he had just heard in terms of bullfrogs and decided that he could not. There it was again! The rumbling sound tensed the muscles of his back and sent cold thrills racing along his nerves. It did not help to remind himself that so far no large predators had been found on the planet. He unslung his rifle and, while some dim light remained, loaded it with the most powerful anesthetic needle he could find in his stock. If the animal turned out to be as large and hostile as it sounded he might never make it to base camp at all. Thinking of base camp and of Silver's low, sweet voice detaching itself from the crackling thunder of the stars, he strained his eyes to check the remaining hours until report time. The alien beast grunted again, closer, and Bronze noted that a light breeze was blowing in his direction from the rocks. Panting his laboring lungs full of the unsatisfying air, he resumed his tottering march westward. her headset and sat back in her chair, gently massaging the muscles of her neck. She replayed the last few inches of Hashimoto's tape to make sure of the quality and recording level. But she was thinking not of Hash and his amusing, deliberately JapaneseEnglish descriptions of the finds of his trip, but of Bronze Bell. She touched the dial of her console clock. Sixteen hours and four minutes and she would begin calling Bronze. Her shift was over. She checked the almost inaudible hum of the standing transwave, which was never allowed to die, and shut down the rest of her board. She would go to her apartment, bathe, dial her favorite meal from the autochef. Thank heaven for that warm, kitchen-smelling machine which made it possible for her to eat at home without having someone in to prepare and serve her meals! At the Starfire Club, Bronze had not made the usual mistake of handing her the menu or attempting to read it to her. He had confidently ordered for her instead and his choice had been marvelous. Bland, aromatic quenelles in a thick sauce. Spicy bits of toast buttered with beef marrow that one was expected to eat with the fingers. Nothing that had to be cut with knife and fork or pursued about a slippery plate. A delicious dessert of chirimoya ice cream. She had eaten with the same assurance as the sighted diners around her while listening to his deep velvety voice commenting on the club and the other diners without seeming to describe them, but giving her, nevertheless, a sharp picture of the scene. Some of the women at Control had commented in her hearing on Bell's astonishing ugliness, but this big, gentle and thoughtful man would never be ugly to her. God protect him and bring him home safe from his strange and dangerous job. Suddenly she had a vision such as only the blind can know, A huge, loathsome beast, rough-furred, long-fanged, with enormous eyes. Its forelimbs were armed with footlong, curving talons and It scurIF ried through a dim purple light with terrifying and sure-footed agility. Then the image vanished. Sylvia shook herself lightly, retrieved her purse from a drawer and left the Center, softly and somewhat tremulously humming a snatch of dance tune as though it had some mystic but uncertain power to protect Bronze. Ill T he beast was angling outward from the jumble of rocks on Bronze's left in a path evidently intended to intercept him. He could hear its deep booming grunts coming closer. Night had fallen, but the atmospheric glow and the light of the stars made it possible for him to see obstacles in his path and outlined the hill against the faintly luminous horizon. What was the size of the animal? It was obviously stalking him, so it must be large enough to have confidence in its own powers. Ignoring the pain, which was now lancing up his leg and left side. Bronze forced a slight increase in his hobbling pace. His stalker had miscalculated the interception point -- Bronze heard the beast some hundred meters behind him, as well as he could judge the distance. He wished he could hold the specimen rifle in his hands, but he could not manage both rifle and crutches. Still more he wished that he could see the thing -- form some idea of its size and appearance. It might be some harmless herbivore following him out of simple animal curiosity. His imagination insisted, however, that the thing was a predator and considered him prey. He remembered that in rummaging for the forgotten map he had found a couple of firelighters in his pack. One of these might provide enough light as it burned to make the creature visible if it came closer -- perhaps enough to give him a reliable shot at it with the rifle. He took the time to find and hand one of the firelighters at his belt, then resumed his march, resolved not to attempt a showdown with the beast unless and until it came too close for safety. The exertion of hoisting the pack to his back increased his already frantic breathing rate and for a moment he felt a return of the dizziness that had preceded his tumble in the ravine. The sensation passed quickly but left him uncertain of his direction. The stars did not look as they had a minute ago -- or had it been an hour? Or two? Was that Scorpio off there to the right? And if so, what was it doing there? He puzzled over it. but the problem seemed insoluble. He was about to shrug it off -- then brought himself up short. "Wait a sec. Bronze, my friend," he told himself out loud. "You can't just laugh this off. This is serious. Anosh -- anoxia -- that's what's making you so offhand about this. Take a deep breath." He took a dozen in rapid succession, straining his lungs to their utmost capacity. Then he stood still and studied the stars until he was correctly oriented again. He heard the coughing roar close behind him. The lumbering stalker had come perceptibly nearer. Bronze hurried on. The muscles of his chest and abdomen were aching from the unaccustomed strain of rapid and continued deep breathing. And still he was not getting enough oxygen. If only he could keep ahead of the brute until dawn, being a nocturnal hunter maybe it would abandon the chase. He almost made it to the first glow of daylight, but an incautious swing of his improvised crutches tangled in some weeds and Bronze came crashing to the ground in a blaze of agony. Behind him the hunter increased its pace. B ronze could actually hear the animal's padded footfalls before he found the firelighter at his belt and ignited it. The sight of the beast paralyzed him for a moment, then he grabbed the rifle and swung it in the thing's direction. Larger than a terrestrial buffalo, it was feline in general appearance. A shaggy mane about the shoulders increased massive aspect of a huge chest and upper body. The face was hideously ugly. Worse than my own. Bronze thought fleetingly. He raised the rifle and in the uncertain light of the sputtering flare drew a bead on the neck -- fired. As he did so the beast lowered its head, began a charge. The dart lodged in its wet, tenderlooking muzzle. It emitted such a shriek of pain and fury that Bronze cowered. The creature halted, pawed ineffectually at the dart, looked straight into its tormentor's eyes across the dying flare. Then it began a deliberate advance much more menacing than any wild charge. With fingers made stiff and clumsy by hours of gripping the improvised crutches. Bronze attempted to reload. The needle cracked in the chamber and the gun was hopelessly jammed. Meanwhile the beast continued to move steadily forward. Balanced on one leg. Bronze IF raised the rifle by the barrel for a last-ditch and certainly ineffectual defense. The monster was within leaping distance when the anesthetic took partial effect. It collapsed. Bronze looked down at it. It was panting hugely and its eyes still followed his every movement. The semi-paralysis obviously would not last long. The beast was much too big to be felled for long by just one of Bronze's charges. He looked about, the sweat cooling on his body. Not a stone or stick in sightnothing he could use to finish the thing off. The rifle and the crutches were too light for the job. "Something tells me, my pretty," Bronze said aloud, "that I'd better put some distance between us before that shot wears off." He chose direction by the stars, hobbled away. The giant's clouded eyes still followed him. countably tense. She had slept badly, disturbed by vague dreams of undefined disaster. Kate Hoggins' habitual pat on the shoulder made the blind girl jump nervously. She ran fingers over the board for the daily check but near the end could not remember if she had tested every switch and dial. In exasperation she checked again -- and a third time to be sure. The stubby hands of her glassless clock told her she still had twenty minutes before contact with Bronze. The moments dragged interminably as she waited. Bronze would be on time, of course. He always was. But what would she do if he were not? What if something had happened to him? She thrust ' that worry aside for another, less immediate. Would he call her again when he returned to Houston in six months? Probably not. One date with a blind girl was all you could expect of any man, however charitable. Meanwhile she could content herself by contact with him through the transwave twice a week. Perhaps it would be better if she didn't announce herself to his "Bronze" with that silly name of "Silver." Over the months it might come to seem embarrassingly intimate. She began her call a full minute ahead of schedule. "Houston Control calling Bell, Aldebaran IV. Chayams here. Come in. Bell. Houston Control calling Bell, Aldebaran IV. Chayams here. Come in. Bell. Houston Control..." D aylight on Aldebaran IV did not, as Bronze had hoped, discourage the giant catthing. He could see it in the distance, apparently fully recovered from the anesthetic, humping along with a determination as great as his own but not with the speed of Earth cats. Nor was it trying to hide its presence. He could hear its repeated rumbling roar. There was an angry quality, to the sound. Evidently the creature was one that held a grudge. The anesthetic had given Bronze only a kilometer's start and now he was tiring. He took a moment to lighten his pack, leaving a little pile of odds and ends on the trail behind him. When the cat came up to the discarded equipment it paused long enough to rip the stuff to shreds: During this exercise in malice Bronze gained a hundred meters and berated himself for not having dropped the things one at a time. He resumed his march, his lungs laboring painfully and his foot sending stabs of agony up his side clear to the neck with each step. The brute behind him had cut the lead to less than five hundred meters when Bronze saw the stream. It was both a welcome and a dismaying sight. It told him roughly where he was in relation to base camp. The stream ran well south of the camp and he now knew he would have to turn north. He glanced at his watch and estimated the probable distance he had covered. Assuming that he had passed Camp One in the night, it would be necessary for him to veer northwest. He noted the angle of the sun over his shoulder and headed for the stream, looking back anxiously to see if the cat would make directly for him across the angle rather than follow his footsteps. It turned directly toward him, ignoring the scent of his steps, and before Bronze had reached the water the cat had gained a hundred meters. Now the unpleasant part of having a river in front of him came into play. The morning was bitterly cold and Bronze was shivering in his clothes despite his exertions. From previous experience he knew that the stream came from a snowfield and would scarcely melt ice. Worse, a chilly breeze was blowing and it would multiply the effect of sodden clothing. If he could take off his shirt and trousers and somehow keep them dry during the crossing it would help -- but the beast was too close. Maybe the water would stop the thing or at least slow it up. In any case, nothing was to be gained by lingering on the bank. Stretching his tortured lungs to their limit, he plunged into the green water, armpit deep. F ording the stream was the worst ordeal yet. Slippery IF stones wrenched at his injured ankle. The cold drove the breath from his lungs and made it impossible to fill them fully again. Once he stepped into a hole and the swiftly moving water closed over his head. For a moment the idea flashed across his mind of breathing in the icy torrent and letting nature take its course, but he struggled to the surface, losing the now useless gun and one of his precious crutches in the process. He made it across, but barely. As he struggled up the opposite bank he cursed himself for having tried to cling to his pack. It now weighed more than he could lift in his weakened state. He squirmed out of the straps and let it lie on the ground, pouring a stream of water over his leg. It hardly seemed worth the trouble to get to his feet. Suddenly he saw a vivid mental image of Sylvia Chayams. She was looking at him with disdain, as if she did not like what she saw. "Bronze, my friend," he said to the air around him, "I don't think she'd appreciate it if you quit on her. The gal likes to dance, remember? She can't see how ugly you are -- " With infinite care he climbed to his feet, tucking the one remaining crutch under his left arm. He looked at his watch, still running. Time? Damn, it was time to make his report. Silver's voice would be riding the transwave now. Would she give him a couple of hours' leeway before calling the dollar rescue case because of a lousy sprained ankle, would she ever dance with him again? Neither of them would be able to hear the music for the snickering. Meanwhile her voice was calling. At the top of his lungs he roared an answer. An echo reached him from the other side of the stream. He looked back at the beast and grinned. "You ugly bastard. I hope you can't swim." The hope was quickly blasted. Already the creature was reaching its forepaws into the water, yowling angrily and inching in deeper until only its head and massive shoulders were visible. Then, with a grunt of fury, it launched itself into the current and began paddling. It was not a good swimmer. The current began to drag it downstream. Bronze turned upstream, heading for a low rock-covered hillock some distance to the north, dragging his pack. If he could get to those boulders maybe he would find some small enough to throw yet big enough to do damage. It was a chance. Bronze left the pack on the ground near the stream and wrenched himself toward the rocks, gasping his answers to Silver, telling her to wait -- keeping time with his gasps. Behind him, three hundred meters to the south, the cat monster climbed out of the stream, its shaggy fur clinging to its flanks. Instead of making directly for him it turned blindly upstream, sniffing for his scent. At last it turned north. When it found his pack. Bronze gained another hundred meters while the beast ripped everything to ribbons. Then it took up the trail again, inexorably. XX Chayams' voice was growing slightly hoarse. "Houston Control calling Bell, Aldebaran IV, Chayams here. Come in. Houston Control..."  wonder if he's hurt... calling Bell, Aldebaran IV. Chayams..." Or dead? God, please don't let him be dead... "Come in. Bell. Houston Control calling..." Maybe he's just forgotten his ' schedule. That's what it is. He's forgotten, the overgrown idiot.  wonder if I should call the starship? No, not yet. He'd kill me if it weren't a real emergency. But, damn him, why doesn't he answer? While the call was going out Sylvia's slim fingers were ghosting over the control panel, checking and rechecking. Everything was functioning. "Houston Control calling Bell..." A little crowd was gathering behind her, watching the panel for some external sign of Bronze's reply. No one spoke. One never spoke to a transwave operator when the phones were in place. "Houston Control..." Bronson Bell, if you've simply slept through your watch -- boy, am I going to give you a piece of my mind! Let it be that, God. He's just asleep. That has to be it, the big lummox! Houston Control calling B..." mock cost Bell heavily in effort. Nothing on it that he could lift or wrench loose would serve to keep the cat-beast at bay, much less cripple or kill it. But the hill had other advantages. From its summit he could see the mast of the transwave with the glittering little aluminum shack at its base. Bronze gave a hoarse cheer and began to scramble down the other side of the hill toward base camp. Only twenty minutes behind call time. You might make it. Bronze. In another half-hour. If the Grunting Wonder back there IF doesnt make a meal of you first... He was keeping quiet, but as if in reply the voice of the beast thundered from the rocks behind him. He threw himself forward and rolled down the slope. Soon Bronze was only a hundred and fifty meters from the shack. But the great shaggy animal was again nearly within leaping distance. Bronze faced it and threw a handful of gravel. It flinched, probably remembering the dart, but stood its ground, snarling. Bronze tore off his sodden shirt and threw it down. While the brute ripped the shirt to tatters its quarry made another thirty meters. The trousers went next, torn from his body without his trying to pull them over the boots. Then his underclothing. Each time the respite was shorter, the repulsive monster closer. At last, as Bronze stood naked save for his shoes, his improvised crutch snapped in two. He flung the pieces like lances and dropped to his hands and knees, scrambling painfully over the rocky soil. His knees bloody ribbons, his eyes fogged by a red film, his ears filled with the roaring of the pursuing beast. Bronze snatched open the door to the base shack and tumbled in. While the beast rasped its heavy claws at the doorframe and the flimsy walls shook. Bronze turned a petcock on the shack's oxygen tank and breathed the gas into his lungs in great starved gulps. He was instantly in a state of euphoria. Childish giggles escaped him as he switched on his transmitter and shouted, "Bell to Houston Control." Another giggle. Then: "Bronze to Silver. I love you, my Silver Bell!" The clearest thing to come to Houston over the whispering transwave, cutting through the thunder and hiss of the exploding stars, was the giggle. Sylvia was stunned. Bronze, the big... the... the mess, was not dead, not hurt, but simply unspeakably drunk! "Love me, do you? Well then, prove it, damn it. Report." On Alderbaran IV the shack shuddered under attack from without. Bronze wiped a bloody hand on the battery case of the force pistol and mumbled, "I'll tend to you later, kitty--" then turned to the set. "What do you mean, prove it?" he bellowed. "I got to the goddam phone, didn't I?" "Report," Sylvia snapped and two heavy tears rolled down her cheeks. She hated him -- the big, sloppy, drunken bastard! But her ridiculous heart was singing.  in the city of Ashur on the planet unconsciousness in a strange city The voice belonged to a Special on an unfamiliar planet, not knowAssignments Group attached to ing his name or identity, with holo the Stellar Commandos, an Earth caustic war raging around him. A military unit. It reached him voice in his head identified him as through a minute electronic transa Terran agent involved in Earth's fer link surgically implanted in struggle with the Destroyers, an his brain before he began his misoutlaw federation of planets once sion. The link not only enabled the colonized by Earth. The voice Group to reach him at any time and directed him to safety through see and hear through his senses. but also gave it life and death powers over him. The voice continued to brief him. His amnesia, caused by a concussion during the Destroyer raid on Onaris, was complicated by the fact that, before starting on his mission, he had been hyp no-conditioned to represent himself as a leading Onarian were known to be looking for. The voice in Brons head was acid-tongued but attractive female Group medical officer; and of tary member. Under the Group s direction Bron duly fell into the hands of the Destroyers and was taken aboard the enemy spacefleeTs flagship, commanded by the Dereceived him cordially, believing him to be Ander Haltern. Canas BronHalterns credentials and subjected him to a test. With the aid of the real Ander Hal ter ns coaching through the transfer link, Bron easily passed the test and was given restricted freedom of the ship by Cana. As Canas  guest Bron Hal tern witnessed -- from space -- the total destruction of Onaris by a "hellburner missile, whose arrival Cana had accurately anticipated. The event matched the Destroyers reputation for planetary destruction -- Cana, however, disclaimed all responsibility. The hellburner missiles always followed Destroyer raids and were of unknown origin, according to Cana, and this last one had undoubtedly been intended to kill Ander Haltern -- it had struck Onaris at exactly the spot where the Destroyers had seized Bron Haltern. To prove his innocence Cana invited BronHaltern, as a master syncretist and expert on the "patterns of chaos -- which Canas own scientists had used to compute the arrival of the hellburner -- to check all data available on the ship. BronHaltern did so and also used his freedom of the ship to compute the course of Canas fleet back to the Destroyers baseworld -- information Earth wanted and Bron transmitted to the Group via the transfer link. His activities, however, reawakened Daiquists suspicions and he was transferred from the flagship to another vessel, the Tantalus -- a former Terran laboratory ship long since captured by the Destroyers and now part of Canas fleet. Aboard the Tantalus Bron made a startling discovery -- the ships entire instrumentation had been exactly reversed: dials read from right to left, etc. Checking back, Bron also found that the Tantalus had once been commanded by General Ananias, who had abandoned her and presumably her crew in space. When he confronted Ananias with the information via the transfer link the latter tried to kill him. Jaycee saved Brons life. Under the coaching of the real Ander Haltern via the transfer link BronHaltern established himself as an expert on the patterns of chaos with Canas own expert, Tantalus. Studying the patterns , with Laaris, Bron learned that the Tantalus was doomed to destruction via the same agency that demolished Onaris -- a finding that tended to support Canas theory that some mysterious force in the universe was determined to kill Bron. Of more immediate concern to Bron, however, was his growing conviction that General Ananias had sold out to Cana. While the Destroyer fleet was making a subspace Jump homeward Bron succeeded in secretly launching IF Tantalus' hell burner torpedoes at what he believed to be the Destroyers baseworld. Subsequent events proved him wrong on all counts -- too late he tried to warn Cana, whose men beat him mercilessly. Bron came to on the planet he had doomed, to discover that Ananias had been rebroadcasting the supposedly secret transfer-link communications on Canas wavelength and that Cana now knew who Bron really was. The rebroadcasts actually helped Bron to convince Cana of the imminent arrival of the Tantalus hellburners in time for the latter to evacuate most of his men -- he had merely used the planet as a stopover base during raids. The hellburners arrived before the evacuation was completed -- the entire planetary system was destroyed and Cana lost heavily in men and materiel. Tantalus was demolished in the holocaust as predicted by the chaos patterns and Cana remained convinced of Brons value to him as a  chaos catalyst. He not only let Bron live but permitted him to try to manipulate chaos events to alter their patterns when these seemed to doom some of the remaining Destroyer ships. Brons success was partial but spectacularly unprecedented -- and when the patterns of chaos suddenly predicted the imminent arrival of an apparently invincible attacking alien fleet from outside the galaxy, Bron -- at Canas insistence -- was named to command the combined Terran and Destroyer forces summoned to repel it. X. moment." Ananias's voice "An advance party of about a hundred alien vessels is already within the confines of the Milky Way. This appears to be the spearhead of the main attack force still moving in from the void." "Didn't the advance party show up on chaos analysis?" "Yes, but we couldn't determine the significance of our readings. Some activity was apparent in the direction of the Space Dependencies, but we couldn't plot its position accurately -- we were working with too short a baseline. Now that we have access to the Destroyer chaos records we can correlate with a fair degree of accuracy." "Now is too late," said Bron. "It should have been done five years ago." "Agreed. You and Cana and I know that, but Terra couldn't be bothered to listen. How do you want to play this, Bron?" We must know more about their craft and their weapons. We need to experiment with tactics on a limited scale before we're forced into contact with their main fleet. Prepare six battle cruisers to make a direct attack on the smallest grouping of alien ships you can locate." "Why not use the whole fleet?" "Because any ship of ours that goes into that battle may notxome out again. I want the maximum amount of information from the minimum number of ships at risk. All data on weapons effectiveness, both positive and negative, are to be corded for analysis." "Engaged." Ananias cut transmission. Bron relaxed slightly and looked along the Skuas bridge, which had become his command post and had been virtually his home during the past thirty-six hours. All the communications posts were fully manned by the extrovert but nonetheless efficient Destroyer technicians. His assumption of Daiquist's former position had gone smoothly. Bron had the feeling that his somewhat unusual status as a master syncretist, plus his obvious familiarity with battle, command procedure, had already created around him something of a legend. Certainly he could have asked no more in the way of respect tough Destroyer shipmen. The Skua and a hastily regrouped assortment of seven Destroyer ships had left the comforting rimline of the extremities of the Milky Way and were now engaged in their own exploratory run, similar to the one being undertaken by General Ananias and the Commando fleet well within the Rim. Bron could feel the weight of a great loneliness -- it beset the mind as his ship carved deeply into the terrifying void between the great galactic clusters. The eight were on the trail of a lone alien straggler, which purely random chance had detected as a solitary, isolated pinpoint in the wastes of extragalactic space. The detectors had already located and confirmed the course of the alien and soon the screens were beginning to pull in the first indications of electronic contact. The weapons crews were busily setting up their missile programs, but Bron decided not to call for a chaos analysis of the outcome of the attack. He preferred to go into battle still full of the undimmed hope that an adverse analysis would have destroyed. The eight vessels all had a specific pattern of weapons to employ and the directive was simple -- after performing the allocated task they were to withdraw out of attack range and stand by for further orders. the screens, a trimmer, more acutely wicked craft than the one that had destroyed the Jubal. This craft was covered with faceted nodules that might have been IF weapon points or merely a peculiarity of the hull plating. As he watched the critical registers run toward battle-zero, Bron again sensed the quieting of the alien tongues in his head -- the hushed expectancy. The babble fell to a low moan, a tense anticipation. Anticipation of what? One does not anticipate defeat or victory with quiet expectation -- only the springing of a trap! Instantly he was on his feet and running toward the communications point, shouting with such urgency that all eyes turned to him. "Abort the attack! All ships abort the attack and drive clear. Crash emergency!" The image on the screens dropped out of focus as the Skua swung into a violent turn that almost broke her spine. The great ship fled in the tightest arc its gravitic compensators would allow it to follow without destroying the crew. Even so, a lack of compensation of several gravities subjected the men to a stress component many times that to which they were accustomed. But as the screens came back into focus, the sounds of complaint died immediately. Bron's outburst had been justified. The alien ship blew up. It split in one incredible second to form a fireball that became a raging quasi-stellar inferno and finally a quasi-star. The shipboard radiation detection systems screened warnings of impending breakdown of the biological protection screens. Then the mad sun collapsed and died, its energy consumed and dissipated in its short but fantastic life. Bron called in his companion ships. Not one had suffered serious damage. Their captains were grateful -- though still bewildered by the orders that had brought them out of the maw of a searing death. Another part of the Bron legend had been added to the Destroyer chronicles. B ron was unable to explain. He was having an increasingly difficult time hearing normal conversation above the rising level of angry goose-snarl and bicker the futile loss of the alien ship-weapon had evoked. When his head-noise finally quieted he called Commando Control. "Are you there, Jaycee?" On-line Bron. "Anything to report from your end?" They re having trouble with noise in the Antares receiver. Sounds like somethin boilin in a pot. They re Jilterin it out now, but it was bad a short while ago. That was quite a fireworks display you just had. "They used to serve a drink with a comparable effect in a little bar at the back of Europa Commando Base. Six shots and you woke three days later with radiation sickness instead of a hangover. I could do with a bottle right now." Jaycee began to laugh. Sounds like the old Bron memory might be returnin. "It is, in little unconnected bits. But most of what comes back Fd as soon not remember. And I still can't remember you. Should I?" That's classified information, Bron. I cant give you an answer. "Damn it, I demand an answer." "You're not getting one. While we're coupled on a mission, we're part of a psychologically matched team. We don't dare do anything to upset that, Bron -- if it goes out of balance the linkage becomes quite intolerable. Especially for you. "And for you, Jaycee?" I don't count. I have to solve my problems my own way. But you can tolerate me in your head for such long periods of time only because I supply somethin' your personality needs. You may be a warlord to Cana and the General Staff, but I know you're a Godlost louse and it's my job to make sure you never forget it. "Thanks for nothing. But you've given me something I'm going to work on. Did you get me any answers from Ander yet?" Hes in the viewing room feeding maths into the computer terminal like he was payin' the rent out of his own pocket. Do you want him on-line? "Not if he hasn't finished. Just add the tapes of that last alien encounter to the stuff he's already working through. Might give him something new." Are you on to somethin', Bron? "I have a feeling that the aliens aren't going to be defeated by conventional weapons. If they've studied our chaos patterns over the ages, they'll know all too well the limitations of our present arms technology. If they're the master technologists they seem to be, they'll already have made sure that their fleet is relatively immune to our diffract-meson and other particulate reactions. Yet we must have acquired something that's worrying them, I believe, or they wouldn't have moved so suddenly against us at this particular time." And you think you have a line on what our worry factor is? "All the evidence points to this -- it has something to do with chaos. They tried to stop Cana from acquiring chaos men. They tried to stop me on Onaris. They used a sort of chaos non-event weapon on the Jubal. It begins to look as if chaos itself holds the key to the battle. But how to fight a physical spacewar using a mathematical abstraction is something I don't begin to understand."l-How did it go?" "Diabolically, Bron. We lost all six ships to the weirdest space IF strategy I ever saw. The aliens rammed them." "They what?" "Rammed our ships in straight collision courses -- in one-for-one exchanges. Whichever way our ships turned, one of those damned aliens swooped on it and exploded. I'm worried, Bron. When we battle that fleet coming in from the void, we won't have the numbers to fight them on such a basis. And our weapons don't touch them at all." "You've met them in space before, on the Tantalus. Tell me about that time." "That was different. The Tantalus was on a deep-space exploratory voyage. We dropped out of subspace about nineteen parsecs out from the Rim to establish realspace bearings. To out astonishment we immediately picked up readings of a ship closeby. We know now that they must have been aliens using a chaos prediction on our drop-out point, but in those days chaos to us was scarcely more than a toy. The coincidence of another vessel's being so close to us after our casual drop-out seemed remarkable. We tried to make contact, but received no answer to our signals. Next the alien came straight at us on a crash course. There was an explosion or something -- I've never quite been able to remember what -- and I blacked out, probably for a long time. When I came around, the crew was dead and the whole ship seemed foreign and strange. It took me quite a while to accept that both the ship and I had undergone lateral inversion. At first I was convinced that it was purely a trick of eyesight. I don't know what killed the remainder of the crew, but it seemed to be some sort of shock." Ananias paused for Bron's reaction. Bron said nothing. Ananias went on. "I drifted for days. I had no crew to run the ship and not much of it would have functioned in any case. It took all my effort just to stay alive, patching a life-support system onto a rather inadequate emergency supply. Finally Cana's long-range detection system must have spotted the Tantalus -- they sent out a patrol to investigate. "Cana wanted the warning about the reality of the aliens conveyed to Terra in no uncertain terms. I agreed to take back his message. He had me put on a tramp ship at the freeport on Stere and I returned to Terra and told the story straight. It was interpreted as an elaborate lie to save my skin -- with the suggestion that I'd sold the Tantalus to the Destroyers. I was officially reprimanded -- but unofficially I had a few friends who took the warning seriously. One of them was you -- " "All right -- we'll go into that later. First let's see if we can wring some sense out of what we know about the aliens thus far," Bron cut in. "We've already seen them use four different modes of destructive or disruptive space attack -- the non-event destruction of the Jubal, the ramming of your six ships, the explosive destruction of the one I attacked, and the lateral-inversion shock on the Tantalus. None of these modes involved weapons as such -- the aliens may not have evolved any. They appear to rely on the use of their ships, kamikaze fashion, as destructive instruments. But all these modes involve materials and methods that belong to an order of science well beyond our present grasp of physics. Additionally, all four are completely different. Since the incidents were well separated in time and space it seems reasonable to suppose that we haven't yet seen the full spectrum of the enemy's destructive effects." "Would they employ variation for variation's sake?" asked Ananias. "Or do you suspect some other significance?" "I suspect deeper significance. experimenting with chaos analysis. I've already proved that if you can provide an effective substitute for a predicted event -- you can chejit the chaos prediction. But there's a limit to the range of substitute effects we can manufacture. I think they've analyzed this coming battle many times over and stacked the deck heavily in their favor, knowing we can't match them on their tactics. We don't have enough ships." "Which means we're damned from the start." "Not necessarily. There's a logical consequence to that line of reasoning that may be the piece missing from the puzzle." "I'm damned if I can see it," said Ananias. "But then I seldom could follow the deviations of your tortuous mind." Suppose you were playing a computerized war game. Having taken a sound theoretical beating, you would reconsider your tactics, evolve a new strategy, and submit your revised program for a re-run. Given enough imagination and sufficient computer time, you could ultimately evolve a technique that predicted a high probability of victory against any odds." "Agreed. But I don't see how it applies in this case." "Suppose the aliens played a war game on the coming battle, using chaos to analyze the results. Suppose they saw they would lose it, went back and tailored the embryo designs of their fleet. Then they reran and kept tailoring until they thought they had the right answers. Don't you see the logical inference?" "Frankly, no." "Then I'll tell you. It means that chaos predictions are not fixed and immutable. There must be parallel alternate tracks where the final resultant is dependent on some branching in the chain of causality. IF There are actual decision points that can change the entire structure of future history. Perhaps that's the role of a chaos catalyst. Perhaps he alone can break the predetermined web and shift the future to a new track." "My God, Bron! If you're right -- " "I have to be right, Ananias, because if I'm wrong there won't be much hope for Homo sapiens when that armada gets through." "How do you plan to make use of the idea?" "By inserting some of the Bron brand of chaos into the general situation to give us time to breathe. I want to try playing the system against itself. You've got a transfer link transceiver in your radioship?" "Yes, but I don't see -- " "Hook up the receiver to your mitters and have all ships lock on to that. On ther transfer link you'll find an alien signal. Antares is having trouble with it, so you must be able to receive it. When you're approaching a battle situation during which the aliens get tense, you'll find the signal quiets down. When they sound hushed and expectant -- worried -- that's the time to get out fast." "How will that help?" "Past performance tends to indicate that a percentage of the aliens will destroy themselves at that critical point. We can avoid some of the disasters by making use of this realtime feedback on when to quit. They'll probably catch on to the tactic soon enough -- but I think we'll have them worried for a while -- " The clangor of the battle alarm tore Bron from the hand-set and sent him racing for the screens. As yet nothing was visible, but the computer output terminal was angry with coordinates and course predictions of ships that seemed to occupy a mammoth arc in space. To judge from the activity, miany hundreds of alien ships were approaching from the void. A large number of them were exhibiting chaos shockfronts that foretold of ultra-violent entropic changes. Bron had a sudden change of mind. He ran from the bridge to the ship's chaos complex, calling for a forward scan of the patterns containing the Skuas own red shipline trace. The computation was hastily set and the long graph of chaos ripples that surrounded the ship's existence began to issue from the plotter. For a sweep extending several hours ahead, the red trace ran unwaveringly down the center of the chart, showing no deviations despite the turbulence of the patterns in the near continuum. Then, at a particular point, the red trace leaped to a maximum -- and fled immediately to zero. A startled murmur rose from the assembled technicians as the prediction of the end of their own existence was registered only a few hours away in time. Bron cut in curtly. "Run that scan again to the same point. As soon as you reach the falloff, reset and start again. Let me know as soon as you obtain a difference between two consecutive scans." H e became aware that Cana had entered the complex and was taking an acute interest in the proceedings. "What are you up to, Syncretist? Are you still trying to prove that the future doesn't necessarily have to happen?" "I submit there's a flaw in chaos theory and I'm determined to prove it." "With all those alien ships coming in you'll need a miracle more than a theory. You have about four hours to disprove the tenets of a complete science." "Chaos is neither complete nor science," said Bron. "Think about it. The aliens wouldn't have tried to stop me on Onaris if they had seriously believed I was going to fall four hours from this moment." Back on the bridge the screens were now showing myriad points of unresolved light -- the alien armada was crowding in from the void. A chill tension governed the actions of the crew -- even with the Commando fleet to back them, the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered. The further knowledge that they had no effective weapons superimposed on the tension a sort of dumb fatalism quieter than panic and strangely, not entirely devoid of hope. "Jaycee, get me Ander. Urgent." Vve got him on-line, Bron. I thought youd need him around about now. "Good girl. Ander -- I suspect there's a flaw in chaos theory. I'm suggesting that a future event established by chaos analysis doesn't necessarily have to happen. I submit that cause and effect may be made to diverge and that the initially recorded resultant may not in fact be the final one." Its part of Yohanns multi-field theory. The idea is well supported by mathematics but has never been verified. "I think I may have that verification. You've been going through the tapes, so you'll recall I cheated chaos a little by arranging a substitute explosion in lieu of the destruction of the Anne Marie. Was that not a divergence of the causal chain?" Only a slight deviation. Another ship, the Jubal, was destroyed instead. "Yes, but destroyed at a later point in time. What if in that borrowed time something in the situation had given rise to a new chain of causality? The new chain could not have existed had not the original one diverged." Bron. But there's no proof UnIF fortunately nothing happened to initiate a new chain in that borrowed time. "Oh, but it did, Ander. In that time I made the decision to ask you to check the tapes of the incident, and a direct consequence of my having done so is this present conversation -- and any actions I may take because of it. If the original chain had not diverged, this particular conversation could never have occurred." A silence ensued while Ander thought the situation through. Point conceded, Bron! The full implications are too big to be swallowed at one gulp, but I would say you have produced valid proof of a deliberate redirection of history. "That's all I wanted to know," said Bron. "I'm going to play that angle, if necessary, until the universe breaks up." He broke off as an excited chaos technician came up, waving a chartstrip at him. "She impossible, but 'ave 'appened. Shipline does no' go zero any more. Is what you call bloody magic! Is insane!" "Insane or not," said Bron, "it's the way things are going to be from now on. From now on I'm taking a hand in deciding what the resultant's going to be. But I'll tell you one thing, I doubt the universe will ever be the same again." You re not only a Godlost louse, you re a Godlost egotistical louse. Jaycee said bitchily deep inside his head. Cut loose like that again and Til tell you things about your mother that will make you wish youd been born from an egg-case. mission yet?" "About two minutes ago, Bron. We're currently raising a radio alert to make sure all fleetships lock on to the transmission and relay it for the captain's attention." "Good. Make sure the captains know how to use it. I've ordered the Destroyer fleet to lock on to the same frequency. Since there's only one signal, we'd better try to phase our attacks so that we don't have two in progress simultaneously. I'm gambling on the fact that the aliens may suspect how they're being anticipated. Use normal weaponry during the attacks in order to disguise out change of tactics." "Engaged, Bron. Do you want us to move straight in?" "As soon as you're ready. We're just mustering formation. Then we're going to move straight down the centerline and have a crack at anything that comes." "I'll say one thing for you," commented Ananias. "When it comes to backing hunches, you back yours in a big way." Bron broke the connection then called Cana on the shipboard communicator. The span of alien ships now swam large on the screens. "We're set to attack in about ten minutes. I'd be happier if you'd consent to board a corvette heading out of battle range." "Why?" asked Cana. "What had you in mind?" "We're going to try a technique that may upset the balance of chaos to a point where we can't rely on analysis for our answers. We've no means of telling whether this ship -- or any ship -- will survive the battle. I'd prefer to see you headed safely toward baseworld." "If we lose this battle," said Cana, "the aliens will come straight through anyway. There won't be any baseworld to be safe on. Thank you, but I'll stay aboard the #cwa." "As you wish. I merely thought I'd let you know the odds." "Bron, in the short time I've known you I've lost every certainty I ever had about life and the nature of the universe. You don't play the odds -- you bend them to fit the way you want to go. You're one of the most terrifying characters I've ever met." ril second that! said Jaycee archly. Lightly at first, then with an increasingly sonorous thunder, the mighty gravitic drives bit into the fabric of space and hurled their charges toward the alien horde. Ahead of the great ships, like a miniature fleet in itself, drove a wave of diffract-meson torpedoes, px)tential minature novae running like avid hounds before a hunt. The images on the screens lost their multiplicity and began to concentrate on narrower, more detailed fields as the Destroyer fleet flung itself straight at the unknown enemy. A chorus of alien voices rose in a complex wave inside Bron's head -- he detected patterns of rising alarm, of jubilation, of expectancy and fear.The speaker at his elbow repeated the diversity of sounds -- but though he had control of the speaker's volume, he had no such power to protect himself from the sounds within him. Then came the first contact. The abortive flare of diffract-meson warheads hazed the screens momentarily. When they cleared again it was to reveal three Destroyer ships concentrating on an alien pacemaker. The ships dived in a perfectly conventional attack maneuver and the alien signal fell to a hushed moan. At its ultimate atonal expression of expectancy the Destroyer ships pulled clear. For an instant nothing happened -- then the alien was engulfed by a flame that stripped its very atoms of cohesion and scattered an impossible bloom of unknown ionization broadly across deep space. IF I N Bron's head the alien voices sang their wrath large and venomously. He was not dismayed. He had already calculated a method of keeping their complaints within a tolerable range. With sure fingers on the console keys, he signaled the next sortie. Two Destroyer corvettes, displaying an admirable turn of speed, shot straight toward a configuration of three alien vessels on what was apparently a deliberate crash course. For once the aliens seemed to falter. Two made hasty course corrections as if to avoid the impudent aggressors. The third stuck doggedly to its route and Bron suspected that it was yet another gutted container. With a precision beautiful to watch the corvettes bore down mercilessly upon their prey. Though Bron had planned the maneuver, even he was caught by the suspense of the action, was seized with a sudden fear that the plan had misfired. Both craft approached their targets to incredibly narrow limits before they vanished abruptly from the sky. Only the voices of their captains still reciting tachyon coordinates on the subspace radio convinced him that all had gone as intended and that the corvettes had slipped safely into the subspace continuum. Disappointingly, the alien ships did not immediately perform their suicidal role. They clung for several seconds to their crash-evasion courses, apparently not convinced that their attackers had actually gone. One, however, had adopted a setting that took it too close to the undeviating "container" ship. They touched, and both ships broke apart with the same type of eventless energy reaction that had destroyed the Jubal. The trajectory of the remaining vessel took it lazily through the fringes of the crumbling flotsam before it, too, fell apart like tin held in too hot a flame. An almost complete silence now quelled the alien voices. It was untypical, warning Bron that some new factor was entering the battle. Immediately he had a suspicion that the fight was not destined to be one-sided. Vainly he hunted across the screens, trying to identify the threat. He saw the pattern too late to figure out its portent. Seven alien ships were involved, one centrally and the rest ranged in regular array in a vast ring a -- which included nearly half the compass of the Destroyer fleet. Superficially nothing was different about these vessels except that they kept station in this unusual formation with completely mathematical precision. The alien mutter fell below the audible threshold. Plainly some diabolical purpose lay behind the strange formation, whose function Bron found impossible to imagine. Unfortunately he did not have time to search for an answer. A Destroyer battle cruiser, reading no significance in the design, attempted to pass between the hubship and the exterior ships of the ring. The cruiser was vaporized instantly -- some unknown molecular lightning had flashed between the hub-ship and one of the ringships. The fact that this unlikely kilometers in length did not seem to attenuate its effects. Bron winced and closed his eyes as the major disaster struck his fleet. Fully thirty Destroyer vessels, unable to identify their particular danger or unable to maneuver in time, were caught by the grisly lightning. The blazing lines of fire cut a wide core through the Destroyer ranks. The alien expectancy noise now was up full. Above its tones Bron's orders were rapid and articulate. Ships on the fringps of the fleet were ordered to attack the alien ring-ships by approach from outside the ring's circumference. Two ships misjudged the relevant positions and were consumed. Then came a stroke of genius -- a cruiser's captain put an unmanned pinnace on a crash course with a ring-ship. The alien vessel exploded in a blaze of pure energy. Unbalanced, the remaining ring-ships discharged their bolts at each other as well as at the hub-ship. The disk within the ring became a blaze of energy of a type that should never have existed outside of the structure of an atom. Bron held his head as the ring collapsed. He strove to restrain a scream as wave after wave of alien reaction threatened to swamp his reason and drive the logic from his head. After a quarter of an hour the bitter outcry quieted. Bron began to receive reports of the cost of the operation to the Destroyer fleet. He had lost more than fifty ships and another twenty had taken precipitate jumps into subspace. A few might one day return. His confidence shaken and his forces dangerously depleted, Bron could only stare at the oncoming armada and wonder what the end was going to be. He felt lonely and inadequate. ONT think fm cry in for you, said Jaycee brutally. I always knew you were a congenital loser, Fve got Ander on-line, Hes not only a man -- he's got ideas, "I've got ideas, too. One day I'm going to beat hell out of you Jaycee. But I could use something constructive right now. What's the readout, Ander?" I was puzzled by that shell of a ship, Bron, I ran a chaos analysis back to its origin. It's contemporary with the Onaris hellburner -- in fact the whole fleet is. They've all been in space for seven hundred journey at sublight speed, "Hell -- are you sure?" IF There s no doubt of it. The theory accounts for the throw-away containers. According to my calculations better than ninety-nine percent of that fleet must be now consist of gutted provision ships. "That puts a slightly different complexion on things," said Bron. "At least Fm now only looking for a few dozen manned ships in the whole outfit." Probably fewer than that. Anyway, you have the great psychological advantage. "How do you compute that?" Self-evident. Meeting you is the climactic point of some seven life-form, whatever its psychology, could regard that point lightly. In fact, you re the reason the fleet exists! There s no evidence to show whether its builders are a race with exceptional longevity or whether theyve bred through many generations on the journey -- but either way, you re a super-legend. Would you dare to take on God Almighty? "Frankly, Fd cringe at the thought -- if I were convinced he existed." Precisely. But they are convinced that you exist. That's why I think the raid is defensive rather than offensive. "Defensive? You have to be joking, Ander." Not at all. Lacking .subspace access, not one of those ships can ever return. There's no point in their engaging in a destructive attack -- unless it's a sort of lastditch defense. No, Bron. This is a one-way suicide mission, hell-bent on trying to divert some aspect of chaos-predicted future history. ' "If that diversion includes the destruction of the Destroyer spaceforce, then they're close on target. Even their empty container ships are pretty formidable weapons." Quite deliberately, intended as such, I suspect. For that sort of journey every atom of payload would have to worth its weight in potential. Knowing in advance the physical effects available to us, the aliens would have engineered virtually every molecule in the fleet both to withstand our destructive capability and to destroy in ways against which we'd have no defense. "What you're postulating substantially agrees with what we're finding. Even the empty hulks are immune to particulate and nuclear reactions. Their only weak point seems a susceptibility to selfdestruction initiated by near or complete contact... Jupiter! Ander, I think you may have given me an answer. The function of a catalyst is not to cause a reaction but to accelerate a reaction already latent. In fact, to outplay the system at its own game." T he next moments saw Bron running across the bridge, calling for the weapons master and the ship's armorer. He outlined his new tactics to them, set them moving on the double to make the necessary modifications in Skuas torpedo warheads. He instructed the ship's captain to locate a suitable target for an experiment, then spent a few fleeting instants advising Jaycee of his view of her place in the lower Firmament. Having done this last he felt much better. Already the aliens apparently sensed the new excitement. The waves of muttering grew shorter in period and a spreading panic seemed to be expressing itself in a volume of sound steadily rising toward some thixotropic crescendo it never actually attained. Bron could even detect quick and urgent voices, individuals calling and responding, a nervously increasing tension that hinted of fear and anger and terrible resentment. He could almost picture the aliens crowded in darkness, dripping with moisture, smelling of unknowable fluids because of too close confinement with impossible engines. He thought he could read their leaning toward violent death as a Final escape from a foredoomed and long-suffered incarceration. His target chosen, Bron waited for the armorer's clearance on the weaponry. He did not get the goahead until his ship had entered battle range. There were only seconds to go before the critical registers would run to zero. Knowing that he was now committed, he keyed his confirmation and allowed the computers to take over battlecontrol. With the alien target ship clear upon the screens, he watched the long slim space-torpedoes slide out. Their progress across the space vector seemed maddeningly slow. The tension rose audibly among the Destroyer crew. As the torpedoes crawled toward their target the magnification of the screens increased to provide a close-up of the area where the actual strike would take place. Normally a strike's reaction brilliance overloaded the screens and precluded any viewing of the exact moment of impact -- but when Bron's modified torpedoes hit no energy was released from the projectiles themselves. Instead, the stricken alien put out crazy spirals of some unknown mode of energy discharge. The screens remained clear. For a tense moment the alien craft developed long, coruscating helixes of purple fire, like some surrealistic porcupine. These discrete rays of energy lengthened to peacock-tail configurations and could easily have enveloped any closely attacking ship. Then the curious emanation collapsed and died, leaving only ion-contaminated vacuum to mark the place where the ship had been. Almostthe entire mass of the alien ship had been converted to controlled-release radiation -- a fantastic technical potential, the purpose of which had IF been thwarted by Bron's modified weapon. T hroughout the entire episode the goose-mutter had been subdued and anxious. This time there was no returning roar, only a continuing murmur of despondency and fear. Bron ordered another target ship to be found, and he relayed details of the new technique to several companion ships. He sensed that somehow the aliens could read the consequences of his decision-making. The steady depression in their voices convinced him that his present course of action was going to swing the battle decisively in his favor. A second successful sortie reinforced his conviction that he was on a winning streak. Soon two other fleetships reported enthusiastically that the method worked. The promise of again being able to attack with long-range weaponry galvanized the Destroyer fleet into action. It was for this type of spacewar that the crews had been trained and the magnificent ships equipped. Now they were again the Destroyers in a truly literal sense. Bron winced as he saw a hundred of his ships simultaneously engage the enemy. The bronze-hued ships moved like fireflies, weaving intricately slow patterns against the vast backdrop of the void. The dark alien vessels maintained the meticulously straight, lonely courses of the damned. Soon the aliens were erupting into futile suicidal reactions in half a hundred different modes of physical disruption. Great wastes of space became momentary suns or were lit with vast tracts of impossible ionization. Sometimes these reactions were so fierce and numerous that a new galaxy seemed-being born beyond the shores of the Milky Way. "Ananias. Come in, Ananias.' "On-line, Bron. We can see you now. That looks like quite a party you're having." "Yes. We've found their Achilles' heel. Their vessels are not susceptible to destructive reaction, but they destruct themselves if subjected to physical contact. Our normal space missiles had proximity fuses, so they never made physical contact before they actuated. All we're doing is taking the fuses out of the warheads." "But if you withdraw the fuses, the warheads can't activate!" "They don't need to. The entire alien fleet is on a suicide run. Every damn atom of it is programed for catastrophic destruction. All you have to do is trigger it." Space blossomed before the Skua with a hundred fleeting suns. Ion trails glowed like neon bars. Red, violet and yellow fire pockets sprouted like fantastic flowers in space. An insane landscape of insubstantial radiation effects was emerging plainly on the broad canvas of nothingness. The alien voices were now a continuous scream of fear without perceptible inner-modulation or separation of components -- but rapidly becoming thinner, as though the members of the unholy choir were sinking one by one and drowning in their terrible pool of fire. F inally the alien voices faded and died, the last traces lingering like smoke after a summer's fire. As the Commando fleet cut through to join the Destroyers it was already apparent that Bron was going to win the battle. Soon the ships from the combined fleets simply ranged wide through space, seeking and destroying stragglers. Ultimately there was a silence in Bron's head. He felt a compelling wave of fatigue sweep over him. He had not slept for better than thirty hours. When the trailing fringes of the battle no longer demanded his immediate attention he quit his desk, went to his bunk and fell instantly asleep. After a while it seemed that a gentle rocking motion aroused him to a semiconscious dream state. A part of his mind realized that this was an illusion produced within sleep, yet some analytical faculty remained intrigued by the detail inherent in the recurring nightmare. Instead of rejecting the situation and forcing himself awake, he allowed himself to follow the fantasy. It started with an almost complete absence of tactile sensation, as though his mind had become insulated from his body or his body from reality. Yet he was aware of the ripple and eddy of a gentle tide that bore him over black waters. The impression deepened until it achieved the status of reality. There was no light, but the fidelity with which the elements of the pattern came together was so consistent as to be perfectly believable. He could hear the slight wash and lap of small ripples against the tunnel walls and the quick near-ultrasonic echoes that gave proportion to the dark tunnel down which he was being drawn. Somewhere ahead a phantom goose was piping through a layer of slime with a plaintive concern that had no human associations. A sudden bend in the impossible river made itself clearly felt as his imaginary raft fouled some jagged corner and swung him around before allowing the dark sluice to carry him on. Somewhere on his way the solitary glutinous goose was joined by another and then by an increasing number to raise a harrowing hymn that filled him with a cold horror. Another bend, and this time he clearly felt the bump against the bank...felt the bump...on his suit... Suit? His shocked fingers explored, found slight seams in the inner lining of heavy gloves. His whole body confirmed the sugIF gestion that his earlier lack of sensation had been the combined effect of his being confined in the padded recesses of an exceptionally heavy-duty spacesuit and of a numbness of the flesh, presumably from his having lain in one position overlong. These factors, plus a light gravity and the buoyancy of the fluid in which he floated face up, explained his lack of tactile sensation and his appreciation of the direction and motion of the tide. Nothing explained, though, why he was conscious of the detail of so unlikely a situation -- or what diabolical things were waiting for him around those stygian bends. The goose-mutter rose into a braying scream, a chorus of dissent, accusation, rebuke. The quality of the dreadful sound alone would have been sufficient to make him flee from the encounter had he been able to control his actions. As it was, floating on his back in a nearly unmaneuverable suit, he had no more power to resist his journey than if he had been an upturned beetle in a racing gutter stream. fear and hatred were being vocally compressed into a jarring anthem of complaint and the bitterest of reproaches by something that waited for him around the final turn of the river. Panic swamped his reason. He struggled against the encumbering suit, fretting at his inability to move, his arms. Restrained and helpless. he waited with dreadful anticipation as the inexorable tide bore him around the curve. Overhead a million pressures leaned their dark depressions on the tunnel roof. The air he was breathing was hot and moist with the sweat from his fear and so tainted by metal and plastic that it soured his tongue. At any moment now he would emerge to face persecutors who had planned his murder at a time when life on Terra had still been struggling for an identity separate from the nonliving elements of the primeval soup. H e had no idea of what their faces or forms would be like, but he doubted that his sanity would stand the revelation. The scolding choir was now so near that he felt he ought to be able to stretch out and touch the violent and anguished creatures. He felt there ought to be a light -- but he could discern none at all. Then another voice crept in, quieter at first, but gradually pulling at him with such urgency that he had to turn toward it regardless of suit or geese or the drag of the unknown tide. Perhaps in the sordid cells of some inhuman inquisition a spirit snapped... "Jaycee, help me!"... the mind mazed not by the sear in steel, the nibblin nerve... "Jaycee, for God's sake, get me out of here!"... but by a vaster wound. "Jaycee, I don't know a blessed thing abdut God, but get me out of this." You're coming out, Bron. Hold on a little longer. Your metabolism is improvin' fast and your heartbeat's almost back to normal. Bron opened his eyes. An oxygen mask was pressed across his face and beyond it the concerned eyes of a medic were watching him anxiously. As he focused his vision he found he was no longer in his bunk but on an operating table in the Skua's medical bay. "What happened, Jaycee?" You went into a coma about seventeen hours ago. The medics tried to pull you out but were unsuccessful. Finally I had to use the semantic trigger to force you around, because your body processes were running dangerously low. I've been in contact with Ananias and we were about to authorize a heart massage. "I had that dream again, Jaycee. The one where I'm floating in a tunnel and the aliens are waiting for me. I've got one more curve to go before I meet whatever they are -- " The aliens haven't given up yet, Bron. You've beaten their fleet, but they've established some other method of gettin at you. Somehow they're workin on your mind. "Those alien signals on the transfer link. Can you still hear them?" Stronger than ever. Antares is filterin' them out for us, but they're still cornin' in. "The alien fleet signals faded toward the end of the battle. What we're getting now must be longrange stuff from the alien's point of origin. It's some sort of encoded imagery transmitted as sound. It seems to be their form of communication. I can even grasp pictures from it myself at times. But when I'm relaxed the effect can be quite hypnotic." That computes. Your coma was consistent with the effect of ultradeep hypnosis. That explores levels of consciousness down to about what we used for the Haltern character synthesis. It's dangerous territory to leave exposed to the use of an enemy. "I don't feel this as an attack. I feel its some attempt at communication." They're just tryin to kill you, Bron. Plain old-fashioned murder. "No. It's more than that, Jaycee. That dream place is real -- it's a projection of an actual physical situation. To survive there requires a heavy-duty spacesuit -- which suggests that it's a very hot place. The gravity is only about half Terranormal. It has an atmosphere -- I could hear transmitted sounds. It also has a hydrosphere -- I was floating on some of it. I didn't dream those things, Jaycee. They IF were communicated to me. It's an actual place -- somewhere." If it does exist its in Messier thirty-one -- right across the void. But I dont see why its existence is in any way important. "It is, though. I've got to go there, Jaycee. That dream was a sample of visualized chaos. My journey down that tunnel is an already established part of future history." Youve altered chaos trends before, Bron, so what makes this one immutable? "Because all we've beaten out here is a few dozen individuals and an uncommonly antique spacefleet. The real enemy is still untouched and probably just as virulent as ever. If they could put a hellburner down on Onaris, they could as easily put one on Terra or any of the other prime worlds. In fact, those burners may already be on their way. If we're ever to win totally I have to carry the fight to them. And that dream, Jaycee, is a prediction of some part of the result of my doing just that." have you with the potential subspace capability to take them to Messier thirty-one?" Ananias whistled as he caught the implications of the question. "It's never been done, Bron. Not right across the void. The Tantalus went farther out than any other vessel ever did before -- and even that was only a fraction of the distance." "This time I want to go right across. Give me details of any Commando ship with a known subspace-jump capability of better than ten kiloparsecs." "But you're talking about six hundred kiloparsecs. No ship has that capability." "No ship has attempted it, so we don't know. I want ships, as well as volunteer crews to man them. We've carried out a review of all Destroyer ships and we think we may have three with that sort of subspace potential. I'd prefer to have thrity." "Engaged, Bron. I'll run a computer check immediately. If we've any candidates I'll let you know." "Jaycee, are you there?" No. Doc on-line. Deep-space Research Labs have just returned a verdict that there s barely a two percent possibility of any ship of known design reaching Messier thirty-one. After about fifteen kiloparsecs the subspace dropout determination becomes so imprecise that dropout probability approaches null infinity. There s no record of anything s having jumped more than fifteen kiloparsecs and having returned to real-space. "At two percent possibility it's still a risk I'm prepared to take. If necessary we'll take the distance in a number of small jumps." That won help. You cant fix dropout coordinates in an area Mhere there are no stars to use as reference points, "We'll manage somehow. Doc. It's got to be done." I still dont see what you expect to achieve if you get there. You cant take an army with you and the star population of Andromeda is even larger than that of our own galaxy. The odds are several against your even locating the right primary, let alone the alien homeworld. "I'm taking a chaos crew with me. It's estimated that we can get a fair chaos fix from examining the origins of the alien fleet. That should give us some idea of the sector. From there it will be a matter of making astronomical correction for galactic drift and rotation." You re in charge, Bron. If you want to try it we cant stop you. But from where were sitting it seems a foolish waste of mqn and ships. "Objection noted, Doc. But I have to play the game my way. Is Jaycee there?" Shes off duty. Want me to put out a call? "No. Just describe her to me." You know I cant do that, Bron. You dont really expect an answer. "I fail to see what's so damn secret about the description of someone who spends half her life practicing bitchiness inside my head." The information s secret for the specific reason that we dont want you to know. The two of you were psychologically paired to establish a strongly antagonistic relationship. As anticipated, youve achieved a high degree of rapport -- one not complicated by common sentiment. It makes you two the best operating team wee got. That's why we wont allow anything to upset it. Bron was amused. "Like falling in love, for instance?" Don't underestimate the power of the coupling between you two, Bron. You're more tightly keyed together, except physically, than two people could be in any normal relationship. You wouldn't get a weld that thorough even in a clqssic love match. "Tell me more. Doc." I've told you too much already. From now on questions about Jaycee won't be answered. I just wanted to show you how delicate the balance is. "I think you've shown me a whole lot more than that. I think you've just reshaped a big piece of future history." Bron moved across the Skua's bridge to a computer input terminal. His fingers sought their positions on the keyboard, but his eyes avoided watching wfiat his fingers were conveying to the keys. His gaze remained firhily fixed on the instruments across the room. What are you doing, Bron? I IF think we ought to have a record of that. "Stay out of my hair, Doc. This whole assignment's out of your control. Regardless of your advice, I'm going to Messier thirty-one. And if I survive I'm coming back to tackle the galaxy's other great enigma." And what the hell is that? "Doc, I'm coming back for Jaycee. And it'll take more than the Stellar Commando to stop me." D eftly, subtly, the thunder of the gravity drives died and the six ships jumped into the dimensionless corridors of tachyon space. Every time they reached the quiescent phase of a jump, Bron quit the jump harness and began to plot more detail into his new venture, The Destroyer corvette Nemesis was only a fraction of the size of the Skua, but its subspace installation was the most powerful in the fleet. Alongside, but invisible now, two other Destroyer ships and three from the Commando fleet sang their eerie way through the superluminal continuum. Down in the hastily conceived chaos complex of the Nemesis, a volunteer crew of technicians worked steadily at the task of pinpointing with increasing definition the origin of the alien armada. The grinning imp in charge of the fantastic improvisation was none other than Academician Laaris, formerly of the Tantalus, who presided with troll-like exhilaration over the most detailed and exacting chaos determination ever made. Lacking the usual stars for subspace reference, the coordinates set up in the subspace grids were based on Laaris's increasingly hardening chaos values for the path of the alien fleet as he backtracked it through space and time. Bron was keeping his fingers crossed. When setting up subspace coordinates, the use of theoretical chaos positions instead of a replica star matrix was a risky and untried procedure. So far the six ships had taken seven leaps of fifty thousand parsecs and had arrived virtually simultaneously and without incident. This was so far at variance with the statistical odds of such long-range subspace operations that all those involved were conscious of living on borrowed time. It was Laaris who first noted a peculiarity in the chaos-predicted routing. Refusing to accept Bron as anything other than Haltern the master syncretist, he continually brought to him the most obscure chaos problems for explanation. Partly with Ander's help and partly from his own improving understanding of chaos mechanisms, Bron usually managed to produce a satisfactory answer. This time Laaris knew that he had found a problem to end all chaos problems, and his delight at the finding was equalled only by his concern for its possible consequences. Mastership 'altern, this you 'ave to explain to me' He unrolled a dozen chartstrips on the table and waited with impatient expectancy while Bron examined them in detail. "What's the problem?" asked Bron. "This divergence." Laaris indicated the computer comments running down the edge of the strip. "The farther we go, the more our course diverges from a straight line." "Which surely only indicates that the path of the alien fleet was similarly curved?" "Not so! We should be proceeding down straight coinciden' axis from resultant to origin. This is a geocentric line -- he got no damn right to bend." "What about the time factor?" asked Bron. "With the rotation and drift of the Andromeda galaxy through the years, surely our course must curve as we backtrack the alien ships through time. The best fix we can expect chaos to achieve is the position of the point of origin as it was seven hundred Laaris hopped from one foot to the other in sheer exasperation. "I already 'ave explained. Chaos axis always straight line. You confuse it with space-time where you can 'ave your curvature. In chaos all shock-spheres are spherical and all axes straight. She don' work no other way." Bron examined the chartstrips again, noting the computed tensorial factors thronging the margin of the record. "Since it does appear axiomatic that all chaos axes are straight, while our course is not, the logical inference would seem to be that the factors we are feeding into our computers are not true chaos determinations." "Do you doubt our detectors?" Laaris was immediately on the defensive. "Of course not. I know you -- and you would have checked them before you brought this to me. It's the entropic data itself that I suspect. How possible is it that we're being fed a signal our detectors Find indistinguishable from the ripples of a real event?" Laaris rubbed his brow. "It's only a question of signal strength. Any signal indistinguishable from a true event process would be handled as though it were an event process. If it swamped the original signal we might never know of substitution. Why you ask?" "Because it has just occured to me," said Bron, "that we perhaps aren't searching for the aliens -- we're being led to them." XX J to know if deliberate entropic transmissions are feasible." Vve had Ander on-line since IF Laaris came to see you. He says modified entropic transmission techniques are both feasible and actually in use for instantaneous communications over galactic distances. In fact, a form of entropic transmission is used in the transfer link itself. "Then we could be riding down some alien homing beam we are mistaking for an event axis?" Affirmative, Bron. With their technology anythin is possible. The break-jump alert signaled termination of the present traverse through subspace, and shortly Bron was immersed in the intricate agonies of re-entry. A sudden encounter with a burst of startled alien goose-mutter filled him with apprehension. Since his induced coma aboard the Skua the voices had not been raised to a detectable level, though he always now took anti-hypnotic drugs before he slept as an insurance against recurrence. It took the ship's radio officer scant seconds to identify the attendant catastrophe. Two of their companion ships had failed to make the dropout. A slight possibility existed that the missing ships would revert to real-space at some point in the near future and in some place far removed from their intended destination. More probably they had joined that lost legion of ships doomed to spend forever in the weird, dimensionless corridors of the subspace mode. Bron called a radio conference of his ships' captains while the next jump was being programed. At their present rate, four more subspace jumps of fifty kiloparsecs each were required to complete the journey to the fringes of the Andromeda galaxy. Each jump bore its own possibility of failed dropout. The statistical odds of survival had already been stretched heavily. Bron decided to try the last two hundred kiloparsecs in one jump. Nobody dissented, though they all knew that they were playing in an area of physics where they had no qualifications whatever. Laaris soon produced evidence of a pure entropic transmission of such an intensity that it completely obliterated his normal chaos determinations. Although the trap was now painfully obvious, Bron ordered the indicated route to be set up in the subspace grids. Where there was an alien beacon, he reasoned, there also would be the most likely place to find aliens. All coordinates were doubleand triple-checked, and the four ships jumped into subspace. When she finally reached the dropout point, the Nemesis was alone, B ron had to admit to curiously mixed feelings as his lone craft hit real-space at the edge of the great galaxy of Andromeda. Fear, anxiety and regret for the loss of his companion ships were paramount, but wonder was not the least of his emotions. He had ranged broadly through the Milky Way and knew something of the infinite variety of its stars. Superficially these stars in Andromeda were of similar range in size, type, spectrum and density of distribution. Yet never could his own eyes have convinced him that these were the stars of home. In some indefinable way the magnificent array seemed ineffably unique and foreign. Perhaps Andromeda indeed was different -- among all the stars and planets in the Milky Way only Terra had detectably produced intelligent life. Now, on the edge of another galaxy, he was destined to meet the alien equivalent of Man. His fleet now trimmed to a solitary ship by precalculated circumstance, he knew that when he came around that last bend in the tunnel he would be both defenseless and alone. Alone before a life form that had acquired space capability back when the first alarms of life had begun to shrill on Terra. "Listen, you out there," he said, suddenly struck by the thought that the aliens probably could intercept his transfer link. "I know you're listening." The goose-mutter rose to audibility, then descended again below threshold value, almost as if in answer. Bron continued, "I'm coming down to meet you. You've destroyed many of our worlds without apparent reason. If I wanted I could destroy many more of yours, since I have access to ships that can cross the void in mere fractions of a lifetime. Therefore I come out of strength, n,ot out of weakness. I shall not bear weapons, but if I or my ship comes to harm the rest of my kind will know of it and you will be destroyed because of it." Again the goose-mutter rose like the waves of an angry sea, then hushed to a background noise like surf on a distant shore. Laaris came in with his latest calculations. He was now able to pinpoint the source of entropic noise. It appeared to originate from a system only two kiloparsecs in from the alien Rim. Bron authorized the jump and, after the computers had run an astronomical survey to establish a true replica star matrix, the Nemesis slid into subspace on her terminal jump. It emerged in the vicinity of a perfectly ordinary K# primary of about eighty percent of the mass of Sol. It had only one planet, which was smaller than Terra. Telescopic examination of what little could be seen of the planet's surface revealed nothing significant. It was a craggy rock-ball, cloudbound, apparently lifeless, and with a boiling and turbulent hydrocarbon atmosphere. The temperature of its surface was in IF excess of two hundred degrees Celsius. The alien entropic signal was originating from some region of the unfriendly terrain, but the limited discrimination of the juryrigged scanners on the Nemesis failed to resolve the location except in the broadest terms. The Nemesis carried only one scoutcraft, a pinnace. Bron ordered heavy-duty spacesuits to be broken out and called for two volunteers to accompany him. The volunteers came readily. When Bron inspected the suit with which he had been provided, he knew that his journey down that dreadful tunnel was all too soon to become reality. H aving been built primarily for deep-space work, the pinnace was unhappy in any kind of atmosphere. It proved especially so in the vapor-laden hydrocarbon storms it now entered. Unable to use its thrust motors efficiently at such low speeds and having an inadequate aerodynamic form for achieving stability in boiling multi-fractioned mineral-oil vapors, the craft stalled, balked and was buffeted by sidewinds, convection currents and wax-laden downdraughts. Occasionally, through a hail of platelets of crystalline higherparaffin snow, Bron saw the surface of the planet. He gazed with amazement at the vicious rocky crags swept by an oily, droplet-loaded wind and at the sullen swell of a liquid metal sea. The land masses were spitefully fragmented, broken islands and torn peaks reflecting the atrocious vehemence of unearthly Nature. Here and there vast mountain ranges seemed to have been torn out by the roots and tossed sideways to shatter into razor-sharp rocks and black, impenetrable fissures. Nowhere was there any sign of the restorationvof order that would indicate intelligent intervention. Bron and his volunteers made three sorties in the pinnace, returning to the Nemesis to rest, recalibrate their instruments and discharge their records for processing. Laaris was operating all the computer power he had at his command, trying to equate the varying alien signal strength with some aspect of the geometry of the planet. The information from their low-level nights was beginning to match up to a pattern of coincidences, indicating at first a point on the southern hemisphere, then gradually tightening to a particular land mass and finally to coordinates indicating an area a bare kilometer in diameter. Bron called for aerial photographs and both highand lowlevel sets were matched to give a reasonable facsimile of the area. Bron's hands were shaking as he took the finished prints. Some alien description of the place he had not admitted to his consciousness suddenly burst into recognition. He knew instinctively how to interpret the patterns of light and darkness. He realized that all this had been described to him in the deep hypnotic coma he had experienced on the Skua. On his awakening he had remembered only the traumatic moments leading to the point where he had been torn away from the encounter just before the climax. Now he was back at the beginning of the journey -- and this time he felt sure he was destined to go right through to the end. "Jaycee!" Readin you, Bron. "Give me a readout of the secondary circuits on the transfer link." Why? You thinkin of takin a holiday? "I said read them, Jaycee." Very well. Catatonic Withdrawal. Anesthesia with Maintained Consciousness, Punishment, Death. What you meanin , Bron? Bron held up a print and pointed toa shadowed area that bore no detail. "That's the entrance to the tunnel, Jaycee. I'm going down there. Unless I miss my guess it's going to be a rough journey. You've got six hours to prepare. Get some rest. Once we start. I'll be needing all the back-up you give me." T he pinnace made a precarious touchdown on the only available flat space in the area. The landing was a classic example of triumph over bitter odds. All the way down through the troposphere, the heavy methane winds had buffeted the craft and repeatedly sent it keeling dangerously off course. Storm-walls -- sheets of condensing hydrocarbon polymers -- wrapped themselves around the optical navigation systems and made nonsense of the readings of the laser altimeters. The embarrassingly high charge of static the pinnace had acquired had to be carefully bled away with sodium plasma before the craft dared approach closely the eutectic metal sea. Finally, however, the landing was achieved. Flexing slightly on its cushioned legs under the pressures of the storm, the craft stood with nose pointed longingly toward the quietude of space. Its carefully chosen position was atop a black flat-topped rock that protruded like a miniature island from the dull metallic sea. From the incidence of surrounding rocks it was obvious that the ocean here was actually no more than the fringes of a tide eroding a broken coastal shelf. The sweeping metal surf hammered the black rock with an inertial insistence unnerving to contemplate. The shock of the wave impact was easily felt inside the shuddering ship. A tide with a density of eight, and a temperature of two hundred degrees Celsius, was no mean wash. IF A hundred meters away, a mountain cavern opened like a black mouth in a twisted misshapen head. By some mechanism yet to be explained, a strong tidal current entered the cavern but was subject to no apparent reverse of flow. Whatever entered the dark galleries tended to remain. Your aptitude for most of the weaknesses of the flesh is proven beyond doubt. Jaycee was darkly critical. Unfortunately your capacity for successful suicide has never yet been established. Is that the place? "We know the signals are coming from this area and the stream entering the cave seems to equate with the dream." So what do you plan to do? "I'm going in there, Jaycee." With a task force? "No. Just me, with you along." I dont get your motive, Bron. Its a suicide trip even without aliens. Look at the strength of that current. What you tryin to prove? "My journey down there is already part of history. I have to know what's beyond that last bend." Level with me, Bron. You re no martyr and you re not riskin your fool neck in the interests of interstellar relationships. It isnt heroism and ifs not just idle curiosity. You re too damn egotistic and selfcentered to care about the rest of the universe. If you re going down that tunnel ifs because you've a pretty good idea there's something you think you want at the end of it and you're reasonably sure you're goin to be able to take it with you. I can't see how you figure it, but as sure as hellJ'm curious. "You know what your trouble is, Jaycee? You've got no soul." And you know what your trouble is, Bron? You're runnin remarkably short of future. B ron watched the fearful scene for many minutes before he began to make his move. At last he quit the pinnace. The terrifying pressures outside stiffened the heat resistant suit and made it even more cumbersome, especially since he had to walk'across the broken rocks above the tide-race without being able properly to see the areas to which he committed his feet. His journey through the terrible atmosphere was like that of a deepsea diver caught in some undersea vortex. It was a moot point as to whether his own volition or the barbarous physics of the place was most responsible for taking him into the entrance to the cave, but he had a distinct feeling that even the wind was conspiring to make him enter. Keep goin', Bron. I'm ridin with you. Jaycee's voice was a welcome touch of reality in the nightmare. "How are the life-support systems doing, Jaycee?" The suit appears adequate for about ten hours if you don't damage it. We re not as certain that you can stand that length of confinement. If you get claustrophobic youll likely do yourself some damage. "You know how to quiet me if I get that bent." It would be a pleasure -- and not for the first time. You always were a psychological mess. Her words carried the edge of disgust. He was well inside the cavern mouth now, trying to use the suit's inbuilt lighting to define his way. The jet-black of the rock refused to throw back any useful definition and only the racing metal stream showed up as a wide, glittering tide under a roof that progressively lowered toward an enigmatic somewhere. Then he heard it. The goosemutter, this time coming via the suit phones, not the transfer link. From somewhere impossibly far away he could hear the glutinous cries and knew from their urgency that they had detected his coming. He also heard Jaycee draw a sharp breath of anxiety. Shortly he was forced to stop. The jagged bank on which he had been painfully clambering came to an end with the gradual closing of the tunnel's mouth. Experimentally he tested the racing stream, hoping to strike bottom, but such was its depth and density that he was unable to apply sufficient weight to force his foot down to the underlyingrock. As if he had extended his leg into a torrent of quicksilver, the heavy liquid drag tore him loose from the precarious handholds and with a cry he slipped and fell on his back into the eutectic tide. As he fell he heard the headlamp strike a spiteful point of rock. This should not have been able to damage the lamp, but somehow it caused it to cease its solid-state illumination. For the first time since he had entered the tunnel he experienced panic as a full appreciation of his animal helplessness closed about his thinking. He was being carried face-up along this fantastic tunnel that murmured and whispered with the ripple and eddy of the unalterable metal flood. Are you all right, Bron? Her voice brought back objectivity. "I'm still afloat -- if you're awarding any points for buoyancy. But that's about the sum of my assets at this point." Believe me, you re not jokin. Aliens or no aliens, you know youve got no chance of ever gettin back out of there. So precisely what you up to, Bron? "Would you believe that I'm not up to anything?" No! I know you for the scheming wretch you are. "Then I'll tell you what's on my mind. I'm accepting that dream imagery as being a piece of visualized chaos. I regard it as proof that I did -- will -- somehow penetrate right into this place. Right up to the point where the aliens are." IF But you dont know what happens beyond that point. "No, except that it's axiomatic that this expedition must be successful." Where in space did you conjure that piece of wishful thinking? "My dear Jaycee, it's been implicit in everything the aliens have done. The hellburners, the armada, were all in some way aimed at lessening the probability of this contact's ever being made. All those years ago they tried to avert the happening that is soon to take place. They would scarcely have gone to those lengths to prevent something that was going to fail anyway. Therefore it has to succeed."  dont see it that way, Bron. I think theyve tried every way they know to destroy the chaos factor you represent. All their long-range attacks failed because of miscalculation, so theyve induced you to come to them. I think you re in a one-way chaos disposal unit. As I read it, theyve got you in a trap that will become increasingly lethal until the chaos potential you represent is utterly destroyed. "I don't agree, Jaycee. But even if you're right, they've already failed." What you meanin, Bron? "A point you and they may have overlooked. I'm not just an individual. Through the transfer link I'm a composite being, a gestalt synthesis of me, you, your computing and communications complex and such characters as Doc, Ander and Ananias. The aliens might destroy me, but the rest of the gestalt remains with all the original knowledge and purpose untouched. Get yourself a new agent and nothing has been lost but a few kilos of replaceable protein. You see, it isn't just me who's the catalyst, but the whole system of which I happen to be a part." Quit talkin, Bron. Vm turnin up the audio gain. Sounds like a waterfall or rapids ahead. Whafs the current like? "Seems to be pulling harder, but there's not much I can judge it by." See if you can strike a bank and wedge on it. Accordin to our instruments, that fall ahead is really vicious. "How vicious?" We could be well adrift because we dont know the full range of physical parameters, but we re readin a probable drop approachin three kilometers. "Jaycee -- " Yes? "Nothing. What are the chances of surviving that?" If you were a jelly Id rate the prospect at one percent. However, as a vertebrate -- "Will the suit hold?" Depends what you hit. Most probably not. Some of the lifesupport systems wont stand that sort of deceleration anyway. "Then it should provide a fairly quick answer as to which of us is right... He felt a bump. In an agonized reappraisal of the sensations that reached his cocooned form he knew he was in free fall and plunging through a dark hiatus that seemed to be limited only by eternity. From somewhere far below, the angry sound of violently agitated fluids rushed up to meet him. Unashamedly he screamed and, as he continued to fall, the scream became frozen on his lips. He felt the slight motion of the wash lifting and falling... ,cryin futility unto a futile wind... The sense of being borne on a moving current down a dark tunnel. Perceptible changes of direction, unseen, felt through some inertial function. The quick lap of the dark stream being echoed spitefully from the pressing span above. And sounds -- mucilaginous, coagulating, curdled, clammy sounds. Sounds that chilled the blood...the mind mazed not by the searin steel, the nibblin nerve... Somewhere a glutinous goose sang a solitary anserine hymn through a throat filled with its own life-blood. It was joined by another and yet others in an inhuman anthem distilled from terror and corrodingly bitter reproaches. Overhead, the pressures of evolution leaned against the tunneled rock. His lungs were refusing to accept the tainted, metal-tasting air and he could hear his own sweat dripping about his ears. The inability to feel or move his arms and legs brought him quickly to the verge of hysteria. Another bend and this time he clearly felt the bump against the bank...felt the bump...on his suit. "Jaycee -- " Rid in with you, Bron. "The fall didn't kill me, then?" We threw you into catatonic shock. You went down easier that way. Actually it wasnt quite as bad as we thought. The height was broken by a cascade of about seventeen falls. You re about three kilometers deep now and the level is still fallin. Weve got you under conscious anesthesia at the moment because we didnt know how badly you may have been mashed by the falls. "Lift the anesthesia, Jaycee, I'd like to find out." A transparent hum filled his head for a moment, then painful feeling flooded into his limbs. How you feelin, Bron? "Doubt if I've an unstrained joint anywhere, but nothing seems to be broken." Apparently the suit was becomin more rigid as the depth-pressure increased. Ifs more of a casin now. Talk about the devil lookin after his own! IF "Can you hear the aliens, Jaycee?" Weve been plottin sound intensities. Accordin to our calculations you re goin to be meetin them in about seven minutes. The goose-mutter grew into a vast, brassy braying, a throbbing crescendo of sound that struck back from the tunnel walls in a rippled anacamptic roar. The scolding choir was now so near that he felt he was almost in its midst. Another bump and he knew he had rounded the last of the dreadful bends. This time he was in no dream. There was no possibility of recall from the edge of nightmare. This was reality. He felt the stream slacken and heard echoes become attenuated by distance, as though he had entered a larger cavern. And then came light, a dim luminescence, straight glowing bars along level walls -- and a sudden terrifying silence. His back came to rest against an inclined tracery grille in which he found he could catch his heel and force himself up out of the eutectic sluice. He looked about him in dim amazement, warily prepared to meet his persecutors, no matter how terrible their form. But he found he was shockingly alone. The metallic stream ran between straight and artificial banks, interrupted only by the fret on which he had laboriously climbed. Looking about, he found himself in a vast chamber whose distant and complex walls were covered by a thousand unguessable patterns that might have been either decorative or functional. Tall machines lurked like mute watchers in alcoves, the designs of which were mindwrenching in the unearthly tenets of their forms. The machines were huge, silent and completely alien to him in purpose and concept. They were frightening in their strangeness. H e froze in horror at a movement from within the ranks of dark and unknown mechanisms. A familiar and plaintive cry rang out and chilled him to the marrow. Alien living shapes, dark in the sparse light, goose-stepped out from some unanticipated place and moved in profiled files -- deliberately to the stream to drink. He watched them curve horny bills incuriously into the metal stream -- and just as incuriously waddle past his silent form, protesting some unknown indignity but oblivious to his presence. With mounting horror and increasing comprehension, he watched them go -- degenerate, blind, ugly, leathery, alien and completely stupid quasi-aviforms -- they nested, fed and presumably br in this treasurehouse of a lost culture. Even their prehensile hands had atrophied in favor of a broad bill and a long, thrusting neck. The whole chamber had the feeling of a cathedral -- but in honor of what dead gods? There were a realized the irony and incongruity of the announcing choir of voices. Once their hyms had held much meaning. Now their race neared an evolutionary end and their personal complaint had dwindled from cosmic considerations to a local spat about the infrequency of worms. While an alien phonograph had piped something from the pinnacle of their once-held greatness... With returning confidence Bron started to explore. Some of the mechanisms had strange lights playing inside them, the luminescence even yet moving as though to perform some intelligent function even though the whole place was possessed by the stamp of incredible age. One machine, as he approached it, began to speak in a welter of the familiar goosemutter, but softly, as if its resigned and sibilant speech were now a message of acquiescence, ar apology for its previous paeans of hate. He regarded it uneasily, sensing that it was conscious of his presence and knowing that this was the voice that had menaced his dreams and probably directed the attack detail of the alien fleet. Now the machine acknowledged his mastery, but he felt no sense of triumph. Where are the aliens, Bron? "The kind we came to meet don't exist any more, Jaycee. They're extinct." But they attacked us! "The far ancestors of these creatures did, but they faded and forgot haps there were a few live carcasses in the fleet, but they had long since lost their sense of purpose. Only machines carried out that nearly mindless battle." can you be so sure the aliens dont exist? "Evolution, Jaycee. The fact that they achieved intelligence is a proof that they were evolving organisms. years for man to swing out of the trees and boost himself into space. With the possibility of that rate of progress, have you any idea where a further six hundred and ninetyOne thing is certain, we'll no longer be the dominant Homo sapiens. The same thing will have happened to us as has already happened to these aliens."  hadnt thought of us that way. "The development of intelligence is a kind of evolutionary critical reaction. It's unstable. The usefulness of intelligence as a long-term survival factor is questionable. It's probably not valid for much over But what about the entropic beacon that brought you here? "The aliens' ancestors made good machines, Jaycee -- designed them to last an eternity, probably not realizing they would have forgotten how to use them long before the machines wore out. It's possible the IF beacon was their own deep-space cominunications link, or perhaps it was set up by some latter-day alien philosopher to invite anyone with the technology and competence to come and partake of the things they left behind. A sort of final memorial. This place -- what is it? Some kind of museum designed to demonstrate their technological peak to any life form with the intelligence and the ability to gain admission." But why did they send the armada and the hellburners? "That's easily explained. Early in their evolution this place may have been something special to them. Then they read through their version of chaos analysis that one day an alien creature would stand in their special hall and pick it clean like a robber at a grave. Not realizing they would ultimately welcome the approach, they did all in their power to stop it. But whatever they did, that creature still remained, a positive future specter. They didn't know that their own failure -- and not we -- would destroy them." You suspected all this before you went into the cavern, didnt you? Jaycee began to read new meanings into Bron's insistence on finding the alien homeworld. "I knew they couldn't survive their own evolution over such a great period of time. Despite the apparent evidence to the contrary, there couldn't still be a functioning alien menace. Therefore there had to be something else." And thats the thing you were after? "Jaycee, these people were technologically far in advance of us in a great many fields. They could engineer molecules in the same way that we engineer machines. They used entropy as competently as we use electromagnetism. Imagine a fusion of their science with ours. Is there anything in the universe that would be denied us?" And it all belongs to Bron! Jaycee's bitterness etched every syllable with acid. "That's right, Jaycee. One day I'm coming back with enough men and equipment to open up this place and carry away as much of it as we have the ability to understand." Someone may go back, Bron, but it wont be you. Youve less than three hours air left in that suit. Do you really think you stand a chance of getting out of there alive? "Jaycee, there has to be a way out, for the same reason that there was a way in. All I need is sufficient intelligence to find it in time." he chanced upon a vast transparent tank. It was filled with a liquid whose misty blueness was haunting. His attention caught, he studied it more carefully, noting the myriad pinpoints of light that burned briefly and randomly through the faint haze. Occasionally he detected a slight trail between the flickering events and realized that he was watching an alien analogue of Ander's model of chaos. This was the Rosetta stone that could bridge two completely alien cultures. Its discovery was probably the most potentially important entropic event in history. If he could grasp its use the science of physics would be reborn. He gazed with fascination into the misty field of the fluid, wondering if this were a model of the actual universe and if it operated in realtime. If so -- one of those bright sparks might well represent himself. One particularly bright flare long illuminated a whole corner of the tank, but whether this had significance he would probably never know. He had two-and-a-half hours of air left and no bbvious way to get out. Finding the planet, entering the chamber via the cavern, comprehending the nature of what he had found -- all struck Bron as tests to determine the qualifications of those who sought what the chamber contained. The last test was to get out alive. Since he had passed the others it seemed logical to him that, given the right facilities and the right knowledge, the last was also achievable. Except that here his facilities were nil and his knowledge was precariously slight. This test was perhaps designed to measure the assets of the individual and, with his failing air supply, it carried a barbarous time penalty. The aliens were choosing their successors with meticulous care. He turned away from the tank, confident in the certainty that a way out had to exist. All he had to do was find it. To go back against the stream was ijnpossible. Equally, at a depth of better than three kilometers and with a dwindling supply of air, he had no hope that those he had left on the surface would be able to get down to him in time. Perhaps, after all, this was a one-way disposal unit. Bron! Jaycee's voice came in with a sudden burst of alarm. Whafs Cana doin with his task force? "Exactly what I asked him to, I hope." Antares reports a Destroyer task force in close orbit. Did you order that? "Stay off my back, Jaycee. I've got worries enough as it is." He returned to the study of his problem. The metallic stream moved on beyond the grille and fell smoothly into the bowels of the planet. No escape seemed possible by that route. Bron. A dozen Destroyer heavy cruisers are enterin the solar system and Space Defense reports another fifty on the way. Does Cana reckon on attackin' Terra? Bron ignored her. His searchings had taken him back toward the middle of tlie chamber. The centerIF piece was a broad and featureless pillar rising up to and probably into the solid roof. It was unique among the exhibits in its lack of complexity. In its base was a simple hatch opening internally and the sheer solidity of the tubular walls made him speculate as to what sort of pressures the structure was made to contain. Bron, mil you listen to me, damn you? "I'm listening, Jaycee."  know your brand of chaos. Vd recognize it anywhere. Did you order the destruction of the Antares base? "Not its destruction, Jaycee -- only its capture."  guessed it. But why? "It handles the transfer link. If I have Antares, Terra has lost control over me." You won t get away with it, Bron. This is treason and you cant hope to win. The Stellar Commando will beat Cana clean out of space. "The main Commando fleet Is out with Ananias. Ty telling that to him." T he singular simplicity of the pillar set it radically apart from the rest of the mechanisms and he could see now that its central position made it difficult to miss. The contrasts pointed to its enjoying some significance, the recognition of which transcended any mere differences in physiology or origin of knowledge ;fe w something designed to appeal uniquely to sheer intelligence, however derived. For the first time since he had entered the cavern Bron permitted himself to smile. Damn you! Damn you! Jaycee's vehemence cut like a white-hot knife. Youve got this all sewn up, haven t you? Ananias has taken the Commando fleet so far out into the void that we cant contact it by chance is by transfer link to the Intelligence Radioship -- " -- and Ananias has control of that." Bron finished the sentence for her. "Let's face it, Jaycee, Terran dominance is finished." You re goin to destroy Terra? Her voice rose high with incredulity. "Quite the contrary. I need her -- and the other prime worlds. But in their proper perspective.Not as fumbling imperial powers, but as members of a total union of inhabited planets. It's all part of the agreement between Ananias and Cana. Terra, her Rim Dependencies and the planets of the Destroyer Federation, are going to be welded into one entity. Terra isn't going to like it, but that's the way history has to go. There's too much space to conquer for mankind to be divided." He turned and entered the shaft, examining the hatch. It had a simple pressure device to hold it shut. If there were alien instructions regarding its use, he could not discern them, but he moved now with the blind faith that its function was what logic claimed it to be. He closed the hatch behind him. Immediately a rush of liquid metal swirled about his feet and began to lift and raise him bodily up the shaft. Higher and higher the wave lifted him until he began to think that the shaft was limitless and that by some trick of physics he would continue to rise forever. Only the occasional brush of his suit against the black encasement assured him that he was still moving upward. Bron, Antares has surrendered and landing parties are being set down. That makes you a traitor. Do you know of any reason why I shouldnt press the murder button? "If you feel you want to you'll have to be quick, Jaycee. The first task of that landing party is to destroy the transfer-link aerials. But if you fail -- do you know what's going to happen? I'll be coming back to Terra specifically for you -- and regardless of the cost. I've acquired one hell of an empire, and when the task of running it becomes a little rough -- believe me. I'm going to need all the help I can get. Don't tell me the role of First Lady of the Universe is something that doesn't appeal?" You know what you are, Bron -- you re a Godlost egotistical louse. "I figure that makes us two of a kind, Jaycee. As I begin to recall it, you're sort of damned yourself." Finally there came a change, almost undetectable among the poor sensations that reached inside the suit. Something akin to an instinct warned him that he had reached his destination. Initially nothing appeared to be different. Then, on searching carefully, he noticed faint points of light overhead. In a shock of reorientation he knew that he was looking at the stars. Somewhere, one of those points of light was the galaxy of the Milky Way and he was floating on his back on a flooding rock-pool of liquid metal under the stillness of an alien night. He switched on the suit's radio beacon and, while he waited for the pinnace to arrive, looked about at the starry pointers of his new empire. And a woman's sobbing heard from six hundred thousand parsecs reminded him that he was a creature with human weaknesses as well as special strengths. Somehow nothing was ever going to be quite the same again.  IF UF and I pu Readers write -- and wroni) Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Having read Miss Hilary fVitkins letter' concerning The Mountain Movers in the October If I am obliged to admit that geology is a subject that I know little or nothing about. As a master mariner I am aware that rock is hard and it will put a hole in a ships side. All that is required of me is that I avoid rocks. In extenuation, however, I must say that the driver of the tourist coach in which I traveled to Ayers Rock -- the remarkable granite monolith that gave me the inspiration for the story -- told his passengers that it was an extrusion. He was not a geologist. None of us was a geologist. My own theory, advanced at the time, was that Ayers Rock was a huge meteorite that somehow had survived its passage through the atmosphere intact. This would account for its dissimilarity to Mount Connor, to the east, and to Mount Olga, to the west. Nobody took me seriously. I very much fear that Miss Wit kin wont, either. A. Bertram Chandler Woollahra, A ustralia Dear Editor: The October issue looked promising enough at first glance -- two long novelettes by Keith Laumer and Harry Harrison, two top-flight writers known for their ability to tell a good story, both examples of the kind of action-adventure type of story sf readers are always asking for, both presenting characters the authors have written about before. Both stories, unfortunately, turned out to be disappointing. I have been reading Keith Laumer almost since he first began writing and have enjoyed most of his stories, including the many adventures of Retief However, enough is enough! The AllTogether Planet was a bad novel. Themselves (jointly published sentence beginning on the #th line from the bottom, left colMarch #, should have read: But with every atomic nucleus of plutoniumI # sent to us, our Universe ends up with twenty fewer electrons. I I still admire Laumer when he is at the top of his form as he was in the June issue when you published The Right To RevoltThe Right To Resist, but Retief has led a long and honorable life -- cant he be retired? As for The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World, it was a shoddy novel written at the bottom of Harrisons form and a complete bore from beginning to end. I have nothing against the well told action type of story, but feeble stories like this only hurt their author s reputations. I hope you are not trying to turn Slippery Jim deGriz into another series character along the lines of James Retief -- if so, please forget them. Patrick Swift Bronx, N. Y. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Although I have been an avid reader of science fiction for many years, my literary abilities incline me more toward poetry than the fictional art form. This being so,  will never be able to enter your forum as a writer but, as a poet,  would like to venture my opinion, in all modesty, of what the condition of the planet earth will be by the year #. Isnt it about time we all realized that the planet earth in the year # will be exactly what we, as Men, made it -- or failed to make it? The winds of our Beings flow once from womb to tomb, and we, as individuals and as a race of beings, have the opportunity to make our mark upon the All. No doubt there are other sentient races in the universe, and no doubt some of them blew themselves to hell and some of them evolved the ethical systems to control technology and are now exploring the universe. Which will be the fate of the race of Men?  believe it could be summed up in one couplet: Alternatives... Forsake ego's ugly guise; Or before the Infinite in ashes lie! Richard Palmer Pittsburgh, Pa. Starting in the next issue of If will be a new two-part serial. The Book of Rack The Healer, by Zach Hughes, a strong newcomer to these pages. It deals with Earth's tomorrows with powerful impact -- and more than touches on poetry in both its prose and content. Subscribers Please Note; Change of address Lazar, Manager, IF Fulfillment Department, # Secatogue Avenue, Farmingdale, N.Y. #. Allov # to # weeks. IF Just Published Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years! of Nerves could have conceived this gripping story of a down-to-earth engineer who regards all psychic phenomena as claptrap -- until he discovers, to his horror, that he himself is a born telepath and clairvoyant. Ask your bookseller today for -- the Science Fiction event of the year. # # Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. # What is it? 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Just published;   at all booksellers now i ,m y ,' : ' vV A . ' , V X it'; KAjftn Is Earth disposable? Is man infinitely adaptable? I F OR the pleasure of Deepsoft the Keeper, the arching dome of her chamber was drawn to a thinness that admitted the dayglow. Yellowish outside light filtered through the membranous shell, purpled as the end of the sun circle lifted clouds of settled gases from dank, dark valleys and swirled them, noxious, heavy, to thicken the atmosphere. Shifting light attracted Deepsoft's wide, pink eyes. Her heavy head lifted, nodded, jerked. Her long-fingered hands plucked at her coverlet. Her legs moved with an awkward lack of coordination. She made a wet sound of pleasure as winds aloft swirled thick masses and the dome glowed russet for a long, long period. The coverlet, made of the same material used in the construction of the dome, her sleeprack and the one chair That completed the furnishings of the chamber, bunched up and exposed the lower segment of her nude body. Her feet kicked aimlessly, contacted the warm, soft, smooth wall. She flexed her legs and her body inched toward the edge of the rack. Her brain registered the sensations: shifting light, smoothness on the soles of her feet, warmth, comfort, the flex of the coverlet under her fingers. She lifted her head on a wobbly neck, made the pleasure sounds. Time was meaningless. As her movements jostled her full stomach she burped wetly. A trickle ran from her full lips down her wide chin. Overhead the cooling masses of polar air caused condensed moisture to fall in huge, fat drops to splatter on the dome. She clucked in delight. One long arm lifted, reached up as if to touch the splat-splat sounds. The light purpled, changing the shadows on her face. Her mood changed with the light, her face twisting. She made an explosive, complaining sound between her lips, her brain now registering discomfort. She needed. Her entire consciousness sent out the need and it was urgent. To avoid a messy task, Red Earth the Far Seer left his contemplation in the adjoining chamber to tend her. She was momentarily distracted from her need in an amusing effort to stand, supported by Red Earth. Her legs were rubbery in spite of their firm tone. He held her and sent soothing things to her as he positioned her, held her there s listened, although his smooth knob of a head had no ears, as she completed the basic function and then tried to thrust one of her long-fingered, graceful hands between her spread legs to feel the results. "Negative, negative," he sent, slapping her hand lightly. He gave no pain. Giving pain was not in his nature. Had it been, the giving of it would have taught no lesson. IF would have registered as a meaningless hurt having no connection with her innocent desire to experience sensation by thrusting her hand into warmth. He cleaned her, feeling pleasure. She was rounded, full. Deepsoft. Her name. Had he not been roused from deep contemplation he would have stayed with her. He put her into the sleeprack, raised the protective siding. Night was near. The siding was of the smooth, transparent material of the dome and her hands felt it, flexed it. His own hands partook of pleasure as they caressed her, touched her white, rounded face. She made little pleasure sounds and reached for his hand with uncoordinated fingers. Her body moved. In contrast to the awkwardness of her legs, her hands, her body made a sultry entity. Her mid-section lifted in inviting rhythm. Undecided, he examined her. His bulky, tough-skinned, bare knob did not move -- he had no eyes to follow her length, no ears to hear her sounds. But his hands knew her long, firm legs, around and white. His hands caressed the firmness of her chest bulges. His senses traced her and measured her, and she stopped her movements as his hand teased, pressed. Her pink eyes moved with the shifting light patterns, but her body was frozen by sensation as his fingers pleased her. Then the momentary diversion was over and he was gone. Her eyes, wide" to gather the fading light, rolled erratically. masses in the end-of-the-suncircle storms isolated the halfglobe of the establishment of Red Earth the Far Seer. Stagnant gases made the dim distances seem vast as visibility was reduced. Lightsensing organs could not penetrate even as far to the north as the beginnings of the plains of glass. Only the senses of one such as Red Earth could detect the great river to the west, the high escarpment. Only Red Earth, in his establishment, could read the density of concentrated gases in the rift valley to the south, could penetrate the toxic denseness to see the motionless, heavy, oozing, misshapen vegetation on the valley floor. He saw all. He saw the shift of frequency, but Deepsoft's inferior light-sensing organs saw the shift of color. Red Earth mused in his sanctuary. He measured idly, read the survival factor outside, found it at its usual end-of-the-sun-circle low. He could feel the shift of breathable air, mourn the stagnant poison buildup. He could feel the rise in temperature when a particular denseness passed and the far sun sent its dying rays through the eternal haze; he could shiver internally as the cooler polar masses continued to move south and east. In his moment of idle musing he was not totally idle, for he searched his area of responsibility -- it registered normal. In scattered establishments his people were shut away from the toxic storms, comfortable with their carefully nurtured hoards of air-making Breathers. During his rounds he passed a casual greeting with his coresponsor, Growing Tree, who did not pause, using only a small amount of energy to answer, as he tended a colony of Juicers at the Eastern Group Establishment. It was a moment of peace, if one could ignore the storm, the steadily lessening purity of the outside. It was thus and ever thus, and those who cried disaster when the storms blew had cried disaster before. A Power Giver soared high above the roiling clouds. Red Earth did not bother to establish contact or to ascertain identity. Power Givers were notoriously capricious. The flight, of course, was a shameful waste, but it was her own energies and substance the Power Giver was consuming. If one fulfilled one's responsibilities, one's actions were one's own. The law covered even Power Givers. Yet he was vaguely disturbed by the waste and sought to forget, sending his attentions elsewhere to watch two young Healers at the mid-point of their learning. They were moving outside, using stored life for long periods, unable to utilize the air with its high toxic content, lungs holding, gills pumping out poisons. A Webber had escaped an establishment adjacent to the Eastern Group Establishment. Red Earth watched anxiously until the two youngsters, moving slowly but efficiently not wasting life or force, herded the weakening Webber back to her kind in the enclosure. She would survive. food-making continued with pleasing steadiness. And -- more exciting -- a rare joining was in process. Without prying openly, Red Earth took satisfaction in the beautiful act. He lifted his feelings, to the toxic sky and, although there was no movement of his bare knob of a head, the effect was a nod of blessing and pleasure. A new life was being created. Mixed thoughts. Burdens. Pleasures. Far Seers were accustomed to the burdens, having long since become resigned to responsibility. Pleasure was always welcome. Deepsoft. The burdens were not without their rewards. Deepsoft. That he himself would never know the crowning glory of the act -- creation -- was unimportant. He felt no jealousy for the Healer engaged in joining, in the creation of life. It was the nature of things. In return, Healers and Power Givers held no envy for his ability to achieve the IF pleasure of the act repeatedly, rather than the once -- or at the most, twice -- allowed the breeding classes. Nature simply gave him pleasure to compensate for his inability to create life -- that she limited the fertile ones was beautifully logical. A dying planet was capable of supporting only so many -- and that mysterious force which governed life allowed the Healers and the Power Givers one or two unions. During those, given the proper conditions, a new individual was created. In a way he could pity them. Deepsoft. They accepted his valor without scorn but thought it fearful indulgence. The situation was amusing...sort of. Power Givers could squander their precious substance in meaningless soarings above the toxic clouds, seeking the simple joys of seeing without being hampered by clouds of dense gases and of breathing the thin wisps of pure air. Healers could ramble aimlessly. Each had his duty and if it were performed Red Earth and Growing Tree and others like them would see to the survival of all. The storms would pass. Noxious, heavy gases would settle into the valleys. Then even one so fragile as Deepsoft could bask in the glow of the filtered sun. Life would go on under the high douds of summer. The new joining on the eastern sea would produce -- what? Hopefully, a Far Seer. Growing Tree's logically anticipated sun circles made a shorter and shorter picture. Would it be a Far Seer? Red Earth swept his area. Power Giver? Perhaps. Always useful. Healer? Keeper? Ah, or -- perhaps, just perhaps -- the long awaited New One. That hope. Red Earth knew, was pure indulgence. Nature and nature alone could anticipate the need for a New One. He, in his limited wisdom, could not dare to imagine the needs. The need was dictated by the planet and by the elemental but mysterious necessity to seed and maintain life. Still, he allowed himself the indulgence. The New One. Would he eat the poisonous leafy things? Breathe the toxic vapors? Be warmed rather than damaged by the projectiles shot down through the perpetual haze by the sun? Only nature would know. Only that force could measure and tell, but when it happened, as it inevitably would, then he, the Far Seer, he and all the rest -- the Keepers, the Power Givers and the Healers -- would be the Old Ones and life would continue even as the timeless movements of the planet brought new sun circles and the globe spun and swam and the giant flares of the sun -- itself deadly and of unbelievable magnitude -- tried their worst to return the planet to primordial emptiness. It was a comfort to believe. He still was not idle, despite his roaming thoughts. He recorded the rise of the planet's satellite to the east, his sense bouncing there and back with a noticeable lag. He felt the solidity there, probed the depth of the craters. He tried -- unsuccessfully, of course -- to measure the breathable air there, to search for life-giving water and symbiotic Breathers. Failing, he sensed the sister worlds circling the sun, other planets unseen by any save the Far Seers -- he probed, sensed, measured, recorded. F OR his records, Red Earth sent his mind into the adjoining chamber, and the plucking fingers of the female, Deepsoft, became still. Into the vast storehouse of her brain went his observations: the rise of the satellite, the noted moment of the eastern joining, the positions of the sister worlds, the flare activity of the sun. All was sent, recorded, read back. Deepsoft lay very still. He was pleased. This far to go -- he recorded a picture, a concept -- in the sun circle and then would come the movement of air masses from the south and a time of beginning, a time of renewed hope. He had seen beginnings. He had never failed to anticipate each new one. Moreover, he had never lost hope even when his measurements and the readings of other Far Seers had given no hope. He had soared on the force of a Power Giver to hover over the vast waters of the south, had seen the sea of slime, had measured the hope that grew there in the natural breeding ground of the Breathers. Once -- and he checked the store of knowledge in his Keeper's brain to study the concept of many sun circles past -- he had actually measured an increase. The green slime of the next sun circle had been dense, but it had been long ago. Now there was again that terrible decline and the murky, heavy seas were vast, stretching far away from the tiny area in the south where currents, winds -- something -- allowed a frighteningly small colony of Breathers to survive. To think end was defeat. Nature would not allow defeat. A world could not exist just to exist. A world was solidity, reality, and to comprehend the solidity and the reality a thinking brain was required. To envision a world without life was to ignore the basic purpose of all creation. No, the Breathers would adapt, would live atop the thick, heavy water. Life would go on. And some day the New One would be bom and then this dying, depleted planet would be squeezed of its last remaining resources and dynamic life would spring exuberantly upward. So thought Red Earth the Far Seer, slumped into his rack, huge chest moving only occasionally, red gills lying idle, since the pure air of the establishment offered no poison. Around him he sensed the small movements of the Breathers in their enclosures lining the walls IF -- eating, growing, breeding, using their small, strange bodies, half plant, half insect, to return to the air the life-giving particles which, in turn, found their way into Red Earth's system. In the night no star shone. The satellite, unseen by light-sensing organs, climbed, moving in Red Earth's senses. He did not stir until the satellite was at the zenith. When he moved his huge chest cavity swelled. He advanced to Deepsoft's chamber on thin, short legs which extended from small hips below a flat belly and the huge, bulbous mass of his chest. His hide was thick, deep gray. His shoulders tapered upward, neckless, to his fat-tipped, cone-shaped bare head in which there were two orifices, the small, rounded feeding mouth and the hairy maw of his breather. On the side of the cone, low, next to his tapering shoulders, his gill slits opened, exhaled the last of his body poison, cleansing his lungs for the extended period of nonbreathing. Deepsoft fed on the broth of life, the universal energy concentrate distilled at the Eastern Group Establishment from the green slime source of the sea. Fed, she seized one of Red Earth's fingers. He lowered the protective railing, joined her. She made sounds of pleasure and Red Earth blanked his thoughts, yielding to enjoyment as she cooed to' his givings of sensation. II Rack the Healer was given his free time as the end-of-the-suncircle storms moved down from the cool north. Growing Tree the Far Seer, as was his responsibility, assigned a Power Giver to transport Rack to his home area. The trip was made mostly in courteous silence, back to back. In preparation Rack breathed deeply, voided his gill sacks of rejected vapors, closed off and used stored air until, high, high, the roiling, perpetual clouds a blanket of color below them, the Power Giver sent a thoughtful picture and Rack was allowed the rare pleasure of seeking nontoxic air. His huge chest heaved as his lungs breathed the thin but delicious mixture. His pleasure communicated to the Power Giver and she laughed. Above them the sun was a deadly furnace, taking its toll. Rack's large scales tingled, made an audible clattering noise as they rose to form small deflection areas. He knew that the hide of the Power Giver was being penetrated and he was momentarily saddened. Yet it was the nature of things. He would be the last to suggest to the freedom-loving Power Giver that she confine her flight to lower levels, where the thick atmosphere would shield her relatively fragile hody from the deadly projectiles. Had he been born differently he would have done as she, for the exultation of being able to soar above the heavy gases, of being able to see and to smell the thin, pure air, was, he suspected, ample compensation. All life was eventually ended, all life was relative and the price of pleasure was death. Still he had always found it sobering, in his rare transports inside the power field of one of these fragile, beautiful beings, to feel her depleting her very substance to obtain the energy needed to lock her unique abilities into the planet's magnetic field and negate the pull from below, to rise without sound and soar far above the curve of the planet. Grateful, he bowed as she landed him near his establishment in the area of Red Earth the Far Seer. She was away with a joyous leap, relieved of his mass, fading quickly into the purpling air. She would need to seek rest and protection soon, for the yellow haze of toxicity was on the move. Inside his establishment he found things as he had left them at the beginning of the summer when he had gone to consummate his duty as a gatherer of the slime source, the pulpy plants growing on the floor of the shallow, inshore seas. He vented the accumulated poisons from his gills and breathed the clean, rich air. In his absence the Breathers had literally overloaded the dome with good air and it was sheer luxury to fall heavily into his rack and feel life being pumped into all his storage cells as he worked his huge chest like a bellows, breathing with sheer extravagance. He slept long and peacefully and awoke to take his fill of the broth. He stretched his long, agile legs, gaped, took in huge lungfuls of his rich air, made an audible sound of pleasure. H IS Breathers were healthy and producing happily. In his absence, of course, they had been regularly monitored by Red Earth the Far Seer, but Rack made the check anyhow. He found the feeding channels to the outside to be slightly corroded and cleaned them carefully. Finished with that task, he carefully cleaned the entry port and lock and was immediately bored when his housecleaning was done. Healers were, in general, a restless lot. As a youth Rack had caused considerable concern among his teachers by exhibiting a startling lack of direction, ambition. It had taken him long to outgrow the derogatory connotations of his name, a picture assigned to him by his mother because he had seemed content to spend all his time in the sleeprack, his mind in contact with any available Keeper, idly probing into the accumulated lore of the race. If he had been interested in IF knowledge for the sake of learning rather than for its entertainment value, his teachers had argued, his constant Keeper contact would have been justified. But he had been unimpressed by dry facts about the positions of the sister worlds, about survival factors, about the state of the native Breather population in the southern seas. Instead he had delved deeply into the mind banks of the oldest Keepers, wanting to hear the ancient lore regarding the origin of the race, asking stupid questions about the Old Ones. Once he had precipitated a crisis by tying up the minds of three Keepers at once with questions regarding reported findings of hard-material nuggets. Red Earth had discovered himself unable to record observations because Rack had been monopolizing the Far Seer's personal Keeper and, monitoring the contact, R.ed Earth had been chagrined to discover the young Healer seriously interested in trying to gather enough information to make it possible for him to amass a personal hoard of hard-material nuggets. To Red Earth, this was the foulest waste of time. Hard-material nuggets were interesting and had often led to speculative, idle discussions regarding the talents and abilities of the Old Ones. But the nugget stuff was totally useless. It was true that in the lands across the eastern sea hardmaterial nuggets were used as rewards for services rendered gladly on the western continent by dutydriven citizens. But there were many strange things about those who inhabited the land beyond the sea. Since contact was rare, the trip across the vast waters being too long and strenuous for even the strongest Power Giver to make without suffering serious bodily damage. Red tarth didn't care what the strange-minded citizens across the sea did. He simply did not want to see his area become involved in useless accumulations of valueless objects. He had reprimanded Rack the Healer severely, had recommended an educational period of gathering fresh slimesource plants from the chill waters of the far north -- and had been pleased to find that Rack was matured when he returned. On only one other occasion had Rack incurred the displeasure of the Far Seers. In his first tour out of the Eastern Group Establishment, his work output had been seriously low on certain days. Red Earth had discovered that once again Rack had been asking questions -- using the storage mind of Growing Tree's Keeper -- about the Old Ones and in particular about the sunken city of Nar. Where Rack had found that particular bit of folk legend had been a puzzle to Red Earth, for all such useless bits of pseudoinformation had long before been erased from the mind banks. Perhaps Rack had discovered it hidden in some Keeper's mind where it had been filed out of context -- and he had searched for the nonexistent sunken city to the detriment of his slime-source quota. Earth had tried to impress Rack with concepts of responsibility, duty to the race, the sacred value of life and the need to bend every effort toward survival. Too long had the Far Seers been alone in the knowledge that life on the planet was precarious at best. At first Red Earth had thought that Rack's inquiring mind was receptive. Rack had listened carefully to Red Earth's summary of conditions, had agreed that one should not waste one's energies in chasing the ghosts of the Old Ones but should, instead, send his intelligence searching for ways, however small, of improving conditions. "We are the results of -- " a picture of sun circles so numerous that Rack's Healer's mind had not been capable of seeing the whole -- "of evolution," Red Earth had told him. "We, Healers, Keepers, Far Seers, Power Givers, are the logical results of life, the end results to this time. Nature, in her wisdom, has created in us the ability to cope with the problems of a dying planet, but she has not made the task an easy one. It is up to us, all of us, to help as we await her next move." Such talk did indeed interest Rack. He was, after all, involved with life. But something in him continued to question. Was the ultimate pleasure service to one's race? If so, why did every Far Seer have at least one Keeper? Not solely for the purpose of using the blank portion of the Keeper's mind to store information. No. One could spy and see the Far Seers lost in their own pleasure, using the bodies of the Keepers. It was a pleasure alien to the nature of a Healer, of course, but it was pleasure and it was indulged with an amusing regularity. To a Keeper curiosity was the source of pleasure and, as he matured and grew older, Rack reasoned -- correctly, for he was never reprimanded when he did his duty and saved the satisfaction of his curiosity for his free time -- that he was as much entitled to pleasureas Red Earth was. So he filled his mind with the dim legends of the Old Ones. During his free periods he engaged in what the Far Seers looked on as Healer weakness, rambling on his long, mobile legs over the wide, empty space of the area. His ability to heal the damage he suffered from the hard projectiles and the toxic gases gave him mobility. His curiosity and his wanderlust sent him to the thin frost of the far north, IF to the steamy heat of the middle regions, to the waters of the west. He scaled mountains on the way, crossed a great river and climbed the broken face of the rift to the west of the river. In a box made of The Material, treasured, hoarded, were the results of his travels -- two hard-material nuggets, one the size of his thumb ball, the other tiny. The large one was heavy in his palm, irregularly shaped. It could be scratched with a sharp, extra hard piece of The Material and it held an endless fascination for Rack. The smaller nugget was fast being eaten -- even in the protective atmosphere of the establishment it accumulated brown waste on itself from time to time and, when cleaned, became smaller. But Red Earth was mistaken in thinking that Rack's interest in the hard-material nuggets was to be judged simply as a desire to accumulate objects possessing a certain rarity. To Rack the nuggets did not represent riches, as they did to citizens of the eastern lands. For Rack the nuggets held a dark mystery. trated in his pursuit of knowledge regarding the Old Ones. There were the dim old legends, retained for their esthetic values, looked upon by the Far Seers as a part of the culture, saved for the picturesque beauty of the early thoughts of the first Healers. The thoughts of Rose the Healer had been preserved from deep antiquity. Ah, how they rang, coming from the still, peaceful, childlike mind of an aging Keeper in the moist, steamy land beside the southern sea: And when the sun flared up, searing the Old Ones, vast clouds of smoke and particles covered the sky. And the Old Ones died, fornicating even in death, to give birth to the New Ones who had scales. "Negative, negative," sent his teachers. "It is the thought of Rose the Healer," Rack protested. "He speaks in symbols," said the teachers, "for the process of evolution moved on minute legs, crawling forward through -- " a vast series of sun cycles -- "to meet the slowly deteriorating conditions." "And yet," Rack argued, "Rose the Healer said that the sun flared up and killed the Old Ones suddenly." "It is against logic," said the teachers. "For have we not observed the sun for -- " another of those bewildering, long series of sun circle pictures -- "and has it not been stable?" "How do you explain this, then?" And there were others which had tails and died birthing , and those with malformed features and stomachs without vital organs. "We know little," they admitted, "for the Old Ones had no Keepers and all their store of knowledge, however insignificant, has been lost. We can only presume that such a race, with none of the advantages of civilization, with no kept records, existed on the plenty of a youthful planet, feeding and breathing the bounty of nature. There are also legends of other things, living things. And yet we find no proof. Surely, had the Old Ones built we would find remnants of their achievements, for is not The Material everlasting, resisting the acids of the air, the smoke of the burning earth of the southern lands?" "Could they have built of the hard materials?" "Negative, negative," they sent. "You have traveled far. You have talked with many Healers who have nuggets -- and yet, have you found the source of the hard material? Is it conceivable that there was once a life form on the planet capable of producing such a lifeless material? Could you possibly think that enough of the hard material could be amassed to construct even one establishment?" "But there is more than one type," Rack said. "I have seen yellow and white, dark and light. Some nuggets feed on themselves with dark waste while others, such as my large one, grow only a white, powdery waste when exposed to the yellow of the air." "Another proof," said the teachers, for the hard material was indeed fragile. "It feeds on itself. In -- " a short span of sun circles -- "an establishment made of your hard material would be reduced." "Perhaps," Rack said, his heart beating with excitement, for he was being daring, "the hard material came from the bowels of the planet." He received warning vibrations, for he was treading on dangerous ground. But he plunged on. "Perhaps the Old Ones penetrated the surface?" There was sadness in the answer, not anger. "It is conceivable. For the Old Ones died, did they not?" In truth, the Old Ones had died and left behind old legends and nothing more. In the final days , said Rose the Healer, the bodies of the Old Ones covered the Earth. So were the thoughts of Rose the Healer marred by impossible statements, making the total credence of his thoughts less than reliable, for no planet, however young and fruitful, could support so much life. Seers had not erased the old thoughts. If only they had been saved, not just the beautiful thoughts of Rose the Healer -- and what a delightful concept was just his name, evoking a confused mental image of something delicate and bright and beautiful. But only Rose was whole in the minds of IF the Keepers, along with an occasional misfiled tidbit which, when discovered, excited Rack wildly. He had found mention of a sunken city in the mind of a northern Keeper, a city in the eastern sea, huge, tall, towering to the sky. The reference had been filed -- listing an unknown Healer as the source far back in antiquity -- with the readings of air purity at the tops of various mountains. A Far Seer of the past had been speculating on the amount of The Material it would take to build a tower to project above the eternal toxicity, to reach into pure, thin air. And to the west, on the western sea, a group of Healers told of another city of the Old Ones -- source of the information again unknown -- a city that spread over what was now the plains of glass in Red Earth's area beside the great river. There was even a name for the lost city, a name difficult to see, for it suggested no known image. "Could it be," Rack had asked, upon hearing the name, "that the Old Ones truly knew civilization and constructed establishments?" "I think," said a young, visionary Healer, "that question is answered by the picture of city." He had not considered the possibility. City. A group of establishments. Nothing existed on the whole continent to keep the picture in the language, yet it persisted, appearing in the mind of a northern Keeper, appearing again in the conversation of these Healers, who had picked it up from older Healers, who had received it from some Keeper. On all the continent the Eastern Group Establishment was the largest concentration of The Material known and at peak production periods in the summer it was peopled by -- the picture showed Power Givers in a grouping equal to the number of Rack's left hand digits, a paired group of Far Seers, Healers swimming and diving, rockweighted to sink into the thick water, all making a group comparable to all the digits on his hands and homy feet. The word, the picture, city , was Old One language. It had meaning. The name of the lost city on the huge river had no meaning, gave no image. It was an abstract thing, difficult to grasp. Another Old One word? I N his learning, the teachers had brushed past the Old Ones. Ancient man was primitive, living on the fat of the young planet. He was ignorant of the process of combining the products of the Juicers and the Webbers to form The Material, thus uncivilized. Ancient man had no recorded history because of his lack of Keepers. Ancient man lacked the ability of the Power Givers and was thus immobile, confined to the distances he could cover with his feet and legs. In short, ancient man was joined to the race, the ultimate product of evolution, by a weak racial link and his achievements could not have been great. Ancient man, said the teachers, was probably less intelligent than a Webber, but perhaps more intelligent than the front mind of a Keeper, who was unable to experience anything save basic sensations. To think that ancient man had built was folly. To attribute the hard materials to ancient man was incredible, for without tools of The Material, how could ancient man work the hard materials into any form? No. The hard materials, used by some mystics in the Healer ranks to form a mystery about ancient man, were of natural origin. Perhaps, since they were of such scarcity, they had fallen from the sky, for Far Seer probes indicated the presence of small bodies of solid material -- other than the satellite, the sun and the sister planets and the far suns -- which, to the most sensitive Far Seer appeared as tiny motes in a vast area. "Be content," said the teachers, "with the wisdom of the race, for we are old. Be proud of our achievements, for we have conquered a hostile world with only the weapons given us by nature, our minds. Contemplate the wonder of the invention of The Material by Dawn Eye the Far Seer. For is it not astounding that he could envision the domestication of the vicious Webber with her sting of death? Is it not wonderful that he could milk the Fiery Juicer and, working at the risk of death, Fiery pain, disFigurement, combine the liquid Fire of the Juicer with the film of the Webber to protect us from the hostile elements? Wonder at the power of evolution, that it produces four distinct human forms to live in peace together, to work mind in mind to ensure the survival of life. For none could live alone. Be proud of your ability to heal, to spend extended periods in the vapors and the corrosive sea. Without them, without your ability to gather the slime source, what would be our nourishment? Be thankful for the Keepers, who store our knowledge and make us civilized. Praise the Power Givers who turn the vats that brew the broth, separating the deadly substances from the life-giving ones." Modestly the teachers did not praise themselves, the Far Seers, the accumulators of knowledge, the overseers of society, the backbone of reason. The Far Seers, who were sterile, never seeing the beauty of a swirling purple storm, who watched over the lower life forms, measured the Breathers, milked the deadly Juicers, tamed the Fierce Webber. to give wonder. It proved the wisdom of nature, the infallibility of her scheme to sustain life in an IF atmosphere that ate a nugget of hard metal in less than a sun circle. Rack was not discontent. After he gained maturity he took pride in his ability to gather more slime source than any other young Healer. He gloried in his strength, his huge, billowing lungs which could store enough air to outlast the most severe end-of-circle storm, his wonderful healing cells which replaced themselves when damaged by hard projectiles or acid gases. There was much in his world to arouse his curiosity and he made his contributions to the knowledge of the race by feeding his observations into the blank mind of a Keeper after his free-time exploration trips. He was recognized as an authority on the uninhabited vastness of the area of responsibility of Red Earth the Far Seer and was often consulted. He had come a long way from being the feckless young rack-lover who had caused frowns of concern among his teachers. In the prime of his physical strength he was tall and had a chest thickness equal to half his height. His scales were healthy, showing no damage from all his wanderings. When he raised his protective eyefilms in the safety of his establishment his pupils glowed with a bright blue light and glittered with a love of life that was contagious. He was considerate, never venting his gills in the vicinity of an establishment, much less when in view of another being. He was generous with his time, always ture out for an extended period in the service of anyone who needed such service. He asked no return save, at times, a period of conversation, lying on his rack, breathing his sweet, Breather-produced air, comparing knowledge with a Far Seer, gossiping with a fellow Healer, being polite and respectful to a friendly Power Giver. At such times he projected over the distances between establishments a completely relaxed and totally likable personality. There were those among the young Power Givers who contacted him regularly, with an eye toward detecting a hint that Rack was being readied by nature for a joining. They were continually disappointed and Power Giver after Power Giver, feeling the approach of her own time, had to search elsewhere, for Rack's gray scale covering on his lower abdomen remained rigid, showing no tint of the tell-tale red that spoke of readiness. Ill are, I see," said Red JL Earth the Far Seer from his sanctuary, his mind engaged with Rack's, "preparing." "Affirmative." "A group of Breathers is overworking." "I have seen and am content with what I have stored," Rack said. "They will have ample time to recover in my absence." "Is it polite to inquire?" Laughter. Red Earth was an old friend and teacher. "When were you concerned about being polite?" He had spent the time storing. His body weight was up. His chest was expanded to bursting. All his cells were alive, fattened with precious air. "West," he sent to Red Earth. "To the river and the rift." "In search of hard-material nuggets?" "In search." He sensed a regret on Red Earth's part and knew that it was caused by the frugal nature of the Far Seer, begrudging him the waste of his energies in his own pursuits. He sent a hint of reproach, with a vivid picture of Red Earth with his Keeper, and got a chuckle in return. "Beautiful Wings the Power Giver will be alert to your needs." "I thank you." He liked the picture Red Earth sent, but was not familiar with the subject. "She is newly mature, assigned to the west of the area." "Daughter of old Northern Ice the Healer? I knew her when she was, a child." "The same. She is no longer a child." Chuckle. "And speaking of maturity, I note that your tint is the same." Rack did not like speaking of such matters. He closed his mind. "Could it be arranged, a joining there would be a propitious event." Joining was a matter of nature's design and of personal choice. Rack told Red Earth so and was acknowledged, but the hurt in the Far Seer's mind softened Rack and he sent soothing things, along with the rational conclusion that if Beautiful Wings were indeed newly mature his readiness would probably not match hers. Red Earth agreed with a sigh. "I will, of course, check." Red Earth said. "For that I am grateful." End. he moved, freshly charged, walking with a distance-eating gait over the bare bones of the planet, hard rock underfoot, scales tingling as the low spots sent projectiles against him, cells dying and reforming even as he went, lungs closed as heavy clouds passed, gills venting poison, lungs taking only the scattered particles of life from the noxious mixture. He knew long periods of nonbreathing between high spots, which held a hint of life in the air to help him keep from utilizing his vital store in the cells of his body. There was a wild beauty in the outside. The constant swirl of heavy gases, the changes of light. The feeling of being alone. Far off he could sense an establishment. IF closed tightly, inhabited by an old Healer whose venturesome soul was now confined to a body unable to withstand the rigors of the outside. Ahead of Rack stretched wilderness, vast, empty. He alone was life, moving through sterile spaces, the clouds eddying about him, the sun filtering down, now a glow, now only a hint of color, never visible as a spot, a round source of heat as he knew it to be -- only a diffuse feeling under the hothouse clouds with the rocks hot under his feet. He skirted a sinkhole, feeling the corrosive strength of its deadly air on his scales. A small shower wet him. The nearness of the sinkhole added to the moisture and his scales crackled as acids sizzled and boiled. A swirl of the thick cloud gave him a dim view of the rank growth of the low spot, tangled, pulpy mass. He picked his way carefully. A slip would have been fatal, for not even his healing abilities, not even his tough protective scales, would have saved him had he fallen into that hellhole. The land sloped upward gradually and the going became easier. He walked again with long, strong strides, the weight of his pack light on his back. On the plains of glass the wind was a steady force in his face. Billowing clouds moved overhead, but the heat of the smooth plain seemed to form a pocket of fairly decent air immediately above it, so he breathed more easily, not using his stored life. He camped in the center of the plain, coverlet over him, the heat and emissions of the smooth, glassy earth tingling his scales, his cells working. He awoke with the first glow of day, fed, strapped on his pack and set off at a swift pace, eager to put the plains behind him before another night overtook him. His jogging pace ate up his reserves, but there would, hopefully, be good air near the great river. He could smell the river from afar and it urged him on. To his disappointment a heavy accumulation of gases hung over it, hiding it from his view until, pushing through the low growth of vegetation lining its banks, he stood with his feet wet, vainly trying to see the tall, broken rocks of the escarpment on the other side. The water was clean. It was, of course, lifeless, but it made a pleasant contrast to the heaviness of the sea, where he spent his working hours. He waded in, felt the coolness cover his scales, wash away the accumulated ash of corrosion. He found a few inches of good air at the surface, gulped it, gills pumping out wastes, before closing his outer lids and ducking his head. He swam, his natural buoyancy keeping him just below the surface. He opened his outer lids to find that visibility was good, although there was nothing to see. He walked the last short distance on slippery rocks tumbled into the water at the edge of the escarpment. He breathed air at the surface of the water before starting his climb and then made the ascent slowly, examining the exposed bones of the planet as he went. mused by brown streaks making erratic patterns in the rock wall. The discoloration reminded him of the waste formed on his precious small nugget of hard material. He had seen such evidence before in his travels and had once asked his teachers an oblique question regarding them. There was, of course, no real proof, but still he could not keep his mind from speculating. Could the hard materials have been natural deposits within the forbidden depths of the soil? In places where the forces of nature had bared the subsurface rock the ground took on a new look. He spent much of the remaining light climbing the escarpment, searching in vain. At the top, picking his way through boulders that dwarfed him, he felt the effects of the strenuous climb and quickly found a sheltered place. He cocooned himself within his protective sheet of The Material, fed and was sleeping before the darkness of the night closed over him. He awoke to a feeling of delicious aloneness. A storm was raging. Wet rocks poured moisture as the yellowish rain fell, formed rivulets over low-worn areas, dripped, ran, splashed down the near wall of the escarpment. He lay inside his shelter, hearing the hiss of the acid rain on the impregnable Material. The storm, he knew, would have the effect of washing the air, leaving behind, hopefully, workable conditions. The rain would have another effect -- a heavy downpour often found pockets of loose material atop the hard rocks and washed them clean, leaving behind newly exposed areas. He had hoped for just such a storm and it was fortunate that it had occurred during his first night on the plateau. The hunting would be interesting. He walked the steaming rocks, his pack in place, for he would not return the same way. The high plateau extended roughly north and south along the western bank of the river. In spots of irregular formation rock dams backed up lakes of dull water. However, it was not the river's edge that interested him, but the central portions of the plateau where endless sun circles of time had allowed the rain to wash the rocks clean, leaving behind an accumulation of various sizes of stone. He walked with his eyes down. He saw only earth stuff. The going was slow, since he had to pick his way carefully. Now and then a loose stone rolled under his foot, causing him to struggle for balance. To add to his splendid isolation, he had closed off his mind. He asked for no contact. He could summon help in the event of dire emergency, for Red Earth's mind wps far reaching and a Power Giver was in the western area. But he envisioned no such emergency and remained calmly confident in his ability. he covered ground with which he was partly familiar. Then he moved southward. The bleak landscape was unchanged. It was a world of exposed rocks, long since eroded clean by the storms. He was the only life, save for some thin air-feeders growing on the protected side of the largest boulders. Nothing moved -- only the air, heavy, laden with poisons lifted from the rank low areas, shifted by the vast movements of the atmosphere. His broth supply was holding out well and he was finding enough air to conserve the vital stores within his body. A lull in the storms allowed him to cover -- his mind pictured a distance based on comparing his progress with the wellknownimage of the distance around the planet. He rested. During the night the winds increased and new clouds of forbidding density moved over the plateau. He spent the day in his protective cover, unable to breathe, using his life stores sparingly, allowing his body to lapse into astate of sluggishness during which his heart thudded only rarely. Although slowed, his mind was able to work, to take coenesthesiac stock of his condition. He was satisfied. The new storm blew through the day, into the night, calmed, began anew at dawn. The inactivity galled him, set his mind to speculating to escape boredom. He reviewed all his knowledge and wished for a contact with a Keeper to doublecheck, but did nothing, since the distances and energies involved would have been a drain. He would not admit, even in the privacy of his mind, that he was indeed looking for a fabled lost city. Yet there was some connection between his being here and in his having once heard an unconfirmed legend regarding a lost city beside the river. To indulge himself, give his mind occupation while the storm blew and there was no breathable air, he speculated on the Old Ones. If it were true that the land had once been rich with growing things, the waters sweet, then the Old Ones would have sought locations such as this, near water. The city, if there had been one, could have been on either side of the river, but the legend repeated by the western Healers had specified the western bank. That meant the plateau. And since the plateau was a fairly recent development on the scale of time extending so many sun circles back that his mind could not hold the picture, the city would have been lifted with the upheaval of the earth, tumbled, broken. The rains would long since have washed away any trace of it. Except, perhaps, for the hard materials, which were heavy, heavier than the stones, heavier than the deadly soft soil of the low areas. It was his vague hope that particles of the hard material had become lodged in the broken fields of stone atop the plateau. The hope might indeed prove a foolish one. There was still no connection, except in his imagination, between the Old Ones and the hard materials, but he was on his free time and he would not have been content to spend it in the confinement of his establishment. It was his feet that tingled from the walking, his scales that sizzled when the acid rain struck them, his cells that were being used as he lived on his stored air. If he spent the rest of his life span using his free time to walk the desolate places -- it was his life. And even if he never found another nugget of hard material he would be rewarded by the mere seeking, the experiencing -- the knowledge that he, Rack the Healer, had come to know vast stretches of his own world with his own feet. abated enough for him to find some air he moved on. He came upon the sinkhole near the midpoint of the sun's day cycle and looked down, expecting to see the usual rank growth, the poison accumulation of heavy gases, and was amazed to find that not only could he see to the bottom of the rather large depression in the solid surface of the plateau; he could smell the goodness of clean air. There was vegetation on the floor of the depression, true, but it was not made up of the misshapen things of other sinkholes. It was more like the harmless stuff that grew along the river bank. It was sparse. He squatted to examine his find, his senses straining. He could, hear running water. He moved tentatively down the sloping face of the depression, taking stock as he went, finding no deadly stuff, only an improvement in the air he breathed. Encouraged, he went down, down, until he stood on the floor of the small valley and confirmed that the vegetation was not the deadly sort. The air was even cleaner than he had found it during his descent. A rising current in it lifted the heavy, noxious gases and dispersed them into the overhanging clouds. He advanced across the valley floor, feeling the unfamiliar softness of soil under his feet. He walked gingerly, for only a fool trod freely on the deadliness of soft earth. This soil, however, was surprisingly free of the hard particles that destroyed cells more IF rapidly than the most healthy healer could replace them. He made his way toward the sound of running water and came upon a wonderfully clear outpouring. It came from the rocks underlying the soft earth, bubbling up with a cheery sound, so translucent that he could see small soil particles circulating in it. He tested it gingerly and found it to be scalding hot. He knew then why the small valley, shaped much like the navel on a young Power Giver, was not like the usual low spot. In the relative coolness of the air that lay over the plateau the water was making vapor. Even in the heat of the summer it would still be much hotter than the surrounding air, thus creating upcurrents and discouraging the growth of the noxious weeds of the sinkholes. He was squatting on the edge of the basin into which the astoundingly clean water flowed from its source within the rocks of the valley wall. The soft earth under his feet sent out particles, true, but even if the quantity were more than the emission of solid rock, it was still less than the quantity encountered in a dense cloud. It was well below the level of danger for a Healer and therefore ceased to concern him. His interest was drawn by the movement of the water as it swirled into the basin. Pebbles, disturbed by the fall, made little bell sounds. The water seemed about waist deep. The flow was strong. Seeking an outlet from the basin, the stream had cut through the soft earth to bedrock and loose stone. It wandered, as he followed it, from the side of the valley toward the center, making loops and swirls and lined with harmless vegetation. The water, incredibly, remained clean. The bed of the stream was covered with loose, rounded pebbles. He had never seen anything quite like it. Fascinated, he continued to follow the stream until it formed a small lake near the far wall, the wall closest to the edge of the escarpment and the river, and from that lake there was no outlet, leading Rack to think that it must be seeping down through the earth at the bottom of the lake, as water seeps through rocks, to find the level of the river below. The most pleasing thing about the valley, however, was not the meandering stream and its miraculously clean water, but the relative purity of the air. When a cloud passed, hanging low, noxious vapors filled the valley for only short periods of time before they were lifted by the rising currents. It was almost as if the valley generated its own clean air. He did not understand, but neither did he question. He walked on the strange-feeling softness, examined green, slick, harmless growths alongside the creek, left the water reluctantly to explore the remainder of the valley. By then, having located nothing as exciting as the water, he was tired and it was growing dark. He slept with the sound of running water in his ear. invigorated by sleep and good air, he examined the stream with closer attention. He knew the erosive effect of moving water and accepted the fact that the stream had cut through the thick layer of softness, a layer fully as deep as the distance between his outstretched thumb and finger, to the rocky underlayer. He put his hands into the water and handled the smooth, rounded pebbles. He could feel the heat through his protective hide -- the water was hotter than the hottest day in the southern regions. He was bemused by the smoothness of the pebbles, fingered them with pleasure, sorted them to size, arranging them on the green covered bank. It was pleasing to start with the larger pebbles, stack smaller ones on top to form a small mound. He was for the moment a child, playing children's games. His mind was idle. At first he did not note the difference in weight as he fingered a small, rounded pebble and lifted it. Then the shift of a cloud allowed a glow of sunlight and the pebble in his fingers glowed with a life of its own, yellow and rich. He made an explosive sound through his small lips. Hard material. Of much the same heft as his treasured nugget of gray hard material, but yellow, unbelievably rich and beautiful. Feverishly he stirred the pebbles of the stream, roiling the water with the accumulation of silt in the stones until he was unable to see. He berated himself for greed. Many a Healer went through life without finding a single nugget of hard material. He now owned three -- and the last was by far the most wonderful. He spent a long period contemplating it. Wonderful as it was, it showed no signs of having been crafted. It was irregular in shape, but smoothed by the action of the stream. It showed no hint of corrosion. It stayed yellow even in the tainted air. When he was filled with the sensation of seeing, touching, feeling it, he began to speculate on its origin. It had been lodged in the pebbles when he found it, at the bottom, being heavier than the pebbles. Would not the heavy materials naturally sink into the earth? No. The earth was solid. Yet it had been there at the bottom. Perhaps it had been formed by nature under the soil's surface. He shuddered. Seated on the softness of the strange ground he could more fully comprehend the meaning of below the surface. Walking on solid stone or on the smoothIF ness of the plains of glass, one oftep forgot that there was a subsurface. Here subsurface had meaning -- one could imagine it below the soft earth. He placed a careful hand on the bank of the stream, down low, near the surface of the water. The hard projectiles tingled his small finger scales, but the increase was insignificant. Had the action of the running water cleansed the soil itself? An entirely new concept thundered into his brain. He loved life, revered it, as did every member of the race. He would not have considered breaking the most ancient of laws, lest he harm prematurely the precious gift with which he was entrusted. Yet he had held his hand below the surface, next to the exposed soft soil of the creek bank and he had lived, had not even been endangered. This valley, he thought, was different, unlike any other spot on the planet, at least any spot he had seen. The air was cleaner. The water was incredibly pure. The running water cut through the soft surface and exposed pebbles and beautiful nuggets of hard material. He walked to the basin, watched the rushing water emerge from the rocks. Experimentally he moved stones, placing them where the water gurgled from the confining basin. He made a guilty search of the area and found only solitude. He told himself he was not breaking the law. He was merely shifting rocks -- and this was permissible as long as the rocks were lying free on the surface. The pile of rocks grew. Water ran around and between the stones, undeterred. He filled chinks with small pebbles, scooped the coarse, gritty small particles from the floor of the basin and the creek. The basin level rose, kept rising. The flow of water was slowed. His tough feet dislodged green, slick material from the banks of the creek and he picked up a piece, seeing that a certain amount of the soft earth clung to it. He was shocked. He dropped the offending bit of green, picked it up again. It was lying free, wasn't it? He was stretching logic, true, for his feet had freed it. But it was free and it had a wet, spongy feeling. He placed it in the chinks between the rocks of his dam and it impeded the flow of water so well that he recklessly trod up and down the banks of the creek to loosen jnore of the green material to be used to close the chinks. A trickle of water began to run from the far edge of the basin. At first it was soaked up by the soft surface soil. Then it puddled, ran. He watched, fascinated, waiting for it to begin to do its work, to cyt into the loose dirt and expose the rocks underneath. I stream was running all the way down the valley to join the old stream a short distance below the basin. The water running over the new earth was made dingy by its passage, yet the cutting away of the soft material had not begun. He spent an uneasy, guilt-ridden night. His curiosity of the morning overcame his guilt, for the work of the night-running water had, indeed, begun to loosen more of the soft particles of earth. There was a noticeable depression in the new stream bed and here and there rocks showed through. Moreover, the hard projectiles were no more frequent then before. It was to be a very slow process. He determined that some days later. The bed of his diverted stream was still composed of softened mud. He left the valley reluctantly. He was caught in a fresh storm and weathered it inside his protective covering of The Material. He wandered and explored, but nowhere did he find anything as interesting as his valley. He found only bleak, barren rocks, the river, the western slope of the giant upheaval, tumbled, broken, yielding nothing. During a lull in the storms he jogged to the east, coming on his valley just as he began to eat seriously into his reserves. He breathed his air, watched his stream work, noted that more and more rocks and pebbles were showing in the new stream bed. He slept beside the heated water of the basin for nights and nights, spent his days searching the old stream bed for more hard-material nuggets, found none. Impatient, as his time grew short, he began to search the new stream bed, first removing his dam so that the water sought its original channel. He found only mud and bare, unpolished pebbles. He worked feverishly, the technique familiar now, to create a new dam and to build up the low area on the side of the basin where his first artificial creek had overflowed. The new channel was cut with maddening slowness. As his time grew shorter and shorter he lessened his daily ration of broth and watched the storms worsen, the sun circle drew toward its end. He found the object on his last day in the valley. The timing seemed to have significance. It was as if nature had withheld her bombshell to the last possible instant before revealing it casually to his hands as they sorted through rocks and pebbles in his second stream bed. He knew when he picked it up that something exciting was happening. The object was smooth, oblong, rounded on the ends. It was darkened and pitted. And it was strangely light in his hands, having neither the weight of natural stone nor the heavier feel of the hard materials. He cleaned it in the running water, rubbing the accumulated IF mud from it, heedless of the fact that in fingering the mud he was technically digging. The mud was from below the surface. But his excitement allowed no moralizing. The object was different. It had the look, the feel of being crafted. He cleaned it and saw that it was transparent and was at first deflated. It was, he felt with a sinking heart, merely an abandoned piece pf The Material, but further examination and comparison .proved his conclusion wrong. Like The Material in transparency, it was not as light, had not the feel of life possessed by the smooth, flexible Material of the Far Seers, was definitely artificial and totally alien. It was obviously not a product of his civilization. That left two choices. Either it had fallen from the sky, as suggested by some Far Seers in connection with the hard materials, or it had been made by some inhabitant of the planet. He prepared his arguments as he packed and left the valley. He was convinced that he had a thunderclap to toss into the minds of Red Earth and all the other doubters. For if the object in his pack had not been made by his civilization and if it had not fallen from the sky -- then there was only one other explanation. It was a relic of the Old Ones. And to have evidence that the Old Ones could have fabricated something of that nature, so like The Material, would force a revision in the thinking of the entire race. IV H IS pack, almost empty of broth, was light on his back. But it became evident even before he had gained the eastern bank of the river that he had underestimated the severity of the weather conditions. In a short picture of days the new circle would begin and time -- pictures of changes in the face of the satellite, which he himself could not see, but for which he had an inner feel -- would bring the abatement of the winter storms. Meanwhile the outside atmosphere was chilled to slightly above his own body temperature and the southeasterly movements of the masses of polar air were violent enough to cause waves of concern to wash through Rack's self-confidence. He had already been afield longer than ever before, thanks to the store of relatively good air in his valley. However, good as the air had been, he had been gradually using his reserve stores and now, with the plains of glass stretching endlessly ahead of him, he tried coenesthesis and projected and found that he did indeed have cause for concern. The air was totally unbreathable. Not a particle of it was allowed below the lock above his lungs. He tested it and his gills pumped violently, sending condensed clouds of pure poison swirling out from his neck. He scouted up and down the river in a vain effort to add to his stores. Not even at water level could he find clean air. Nothing was left for him to do but strike out across the plains and hope for a blreak in the solid overcast. He moved at a steady slow pace, designed for maximum distance at minimum cost. Fresh, he made it across the plains in -- a double picture of a day. Now he would be lucky to be able to set foot on the rocky soil of the eastern side in -- a question, followed by a discouraging picture of days. He did not fear for his life. Should his being become endangered, he would call for aid. But only as a last resort. His pride would push him on. His regard for others would cause him to expend his own life force rather than call a relatively fragile Power Giver out of her safe retreat into the deadly storms. At the end of the day he had made discouragingly small progress, so he pushed on in the darkness of night, guided by instinctive sense of direction. He paused long enough to finish his broth supply, overeating in an effort to accumulate quick energy for a dash. Refreshed, he jogged, burning himself, until the first light of dawn glowed weakly through the solid curtain of gases that lay over the plains. Where the plains dipped he would bend to explore the air near the surface, but the conditions were total. He rested under his sheet of The Material and measured. He had as far to go as he had come -- and beyond the plains the rugged, broken land stretched for more than that distance again before he approached the nearest establishment. It would be a breach of politeness to break in unannounced on another individual's privacy, but life was the important thing and no one would turn him away. Thus he set as his goal the establishment nearest the badlands on the east of the plains of glass and prepared himself for the unpleasant task of imposing his needs on another. Remembering the importance of the piece of material he carried in his pack, he was consoled. he moved out with long strides, but more slowly than he would have wished. His scales registered a high amount of projectile emission from the heavy atmosphere. His feet were beginning to know a certain soreness. He did not waste energy in trying to heal them, but saved even that small portion of his force for fueling his giant pump, the vital organ within him that sent blood swirling through his body to pick the particles of good air from storage cells and carry strength IF to where it was needed. The discomfort he felt was his just punishment for having overstayed his capacity. Another night found him exhausted and still on the plains. His senses had dulled. He no longer had an exact picture of the remaining distance. Endless plains flowed under his feet. He was isolated within a circle of vision extending scarcely beyond his outstretched arm, closed in by the densest clouds he had ever experienced. It would be interesting, he thought, to compare notes with Red Earth's Keeper and learn how many sun circles one would have to look back to find a storm of equal toxicity. He would have, he thought, a great tale for his offspring. The thought, he realized with a start, was strange for a Healer who had shown no signs of readiness. Perhaps the knowledge of his own mortality had prompted the wayward speculation. For he was indeed threatened. For the first time in his life he was in a situation from which he could not, even with his vast endurance, his strength, his own resources, extricate himself. He admitted it now. He was in beyond his own abilities and it was only a question of time before he would have to open his mind and admit his failure. His pride pushed him forward. Each step used up his reserves. He was slowed to a crawl, but he was determined to make it to the rocks. There, with any luck at all, he would be able to find pockets of usable air. Calling a Power Giver into the thick of the stagnant storm would rob her of a portion of her life and. Power Givers being the most short-lived, fragile beings of the race, he refused to ask such a sacrifice. He was moving slowly, pain signals telling him of far-reaching waste of his body, when his feet encountered a roughness instead of the hopeless smoothness of the plains and, for a moment, his spirit was lifted. He made respectable time into an expanse of boulders, his sensitive nose seeking air, finding only unusable gases. At his pace he was still more than a day's march from the nearest establishment. Over him the stagnant masses of gas began to shift. He could feel the movement on his scales and was given one last hope. If the storm began to blow out -- behind it might come cool air of a usable purity. He wrapped himself, slowed his metabolism, went into a state of nearly suspended animation. His heart moved only occasionally and his mind darkened and slowed. A few good lungfuls of air would give him enough strength to make the establishment. But the movement of the air masses ceased -- the blow was only a local, temporary thing. He measured. He could, he estimated. V safely wait the coming of a new day. He dropped his heartbeat to the minimum level and, in a state of quasi-death, waited through the long night. His mind held only a token of awareness -- a spark of life lay there, banked, waiting to rouse him, waiting to open the gates and send out that last desperate admission of foolishness. Dimly, the rising sun lighted the rocks, the stark desolation. Awareness of the day seeped through the protective layers of his mind. He stirred. The conditions were still total. A feeling of overwhelming sadness swept him as he opened, sent. The sadness was replaced by horror as he realized the weakness of his signal. He burned the last of his reserve cells, converting the energy into a truly desperate call now -- and knowing even as he lapsed into darkness that he had waited too long. His last awareness was not fear of death, but shocked horror at his miscalculation. His mistake would take one unit of life -- it simply happened to be his own personal unit -- from the pitifully small store of life on the planet. He was not mourning his own loss, but the loss his carelessness had inflicted on the whole. His brain was numb, dark. His extremities were beginning to lose the flexibility of life. He was unaware as nature, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, spared him the knowledge of his dying. H E knew when he felt the caress of good air in his lungs that he was still alive. He lay on an unfamiliar rack, his huge chest pumping at a fast rate, his depleted cells drinking thirstily, his lungs sucking air at a tremendous rate. He stopped breathing immediately, rolled back his outer lids. He found himself establishment-safe and opened his inner eyes to see in the semidarkness. "Thank you," the thoughts of a Power Giver said. "I was afraid you were going to bankrupt me of air before you awoke." He was covered. The coverlet was unnecessary in the comfort of the establishment, felt rather warm, in fact. He threw it off and sat up. She, the Power Giver, was in the chair. As he swung his legs off the rack she averted her eyes and this was strange. He sent abject shame. She negated. "You heard, then?" he asked. "No. Red Earth the Far Seer sent me. You were out so long. He was searching." "To Red Earth, too, I owe my expressions of shame," he said. She would not look at him. He couldn't blame her. His seemingly foolish behavior had sent her out into the storm. Moreover, he had been unconscious upon entering and, as he had encountered the good. Breather-manufactured air of her establishment, he apparently IF had voided his gills. A small cloud of heavy, poisonous stuff was shifting wispily in the small currents of air created by his movement. It had accumulated on the floor. He bent, breathed it, stored it inside his gill sack. He would void it later outside. Meantime he was deeply in her debt. In cases of dire emergency the niceties were sometimes forgotten, but Rack could not forgive himself for having soiled her private air, for having used an unforgivable amount of it. She would be on short rations until the overworked Breathers made up the deficit. "There was a reason," he said. "Yes, I'm sure of that." Her eyes were down, her inner lids closed. "You're Beautiful Wings the Power Giver?" "Yes." "Would a small gift repay you even in part for your sacrifice?" He had seen his pack on the floor. He opened it, brought out the precious nugget of hard material. He stepped in front of her, hand extended. Astoundingly, her face began to glow through the delicate covering of tiny, bejeweled scales. Even more astoundingly he found himself looking at her as he had never looked at a Power Giver before, noting her delicate proportions. She was a small girl as Power Givers went, with long, delightfully curved limbs, a slender waist, a graceful chest on which, flattened, protected by silvery scales, her bulges were quite pronounced. He had always been an admirer of the grace of the Power Givers, but never before had he been so smitten with any one individual. He was suddenly speechless. "It is not necessary," she sent. "I want you to have it. It is material of a certain scarcity. It would adorn you." He pictured a mounting of The Material with the beautiful yellow hard material framed on her rounded chest. The glow of her face became even more pronounced. It was certainly strange behavior for a sensible Power Giver. But he himself was feeling strange. Because of his near brush with death? Even now he could feel the depletion of his resources. His body weight was down massively. "May I ask how much it cost you?" He waited politely for her answer. She sent a picture of her condition. He was pleased. She was vibrantly healthy. Apparently her excursion into the storms had cost little. "Fortunately," she sent, "you moved within -- " a measurement in picture form -- "of my establishment." "Then I am pleased and insist on your having this." He pressed the nugget into her hand and the touch electrified him, sent a surge of pure goodness through his body. Alarmed, he stepped back. his gaze falling, his suspicions growing. He read himself and now it was his face that glowed through his scales, for in the bulge over his pelvic area the large, protective scales were tinted a dull russet. He knew then why she had covered him, knew why he was looking at her with an interest he had never felt before. He fell back, seized the coverlet in agitated haste, draped it over his middle. He sent waves of shame and atonement. "It is merely nature," she sent. "It's just -- it's just -- " She went blank. shamelessly. His state of confusion following his rescue from death was no excuse. When entering the state of readiness one secluded oneself from polite society, bore the change in solitude until, fully readied, one went in search of a mate. To expose one's first tint to the opposite sex, especially to one who was not, herself, going through the change, was unforgivable. He could only send regret, ask for forgiveness. "You were unaware," she said. "I understand." He closed off, unable to bear his shame. She fingered the nugget of hard material, her inner lids open to see. "It is truly beautiful. Is this the justification for your trip?" "Beautiful as it is -- no." He opened his pack, showed her the strange object. She examined it with wondering hands and eyes, glanced at him fully for the first time. "What is it?" she asked. "Truthfully, I don't know," he said. "But my not knowing helps to explain its importance. As you can see, it is not The Material, nor is it anything with which we are familiar in our high state of civilization." "Is it a thing fallen from the space outside?" she asked. "That again I do not know." He looked at her. She once more held her eyes down and he knew a strange, sweet feeling of peace. And in her concentration she forgot to hide her own feelings, let her nature express itself with a flowering of scales on the delicate bulges of her chest, opening them slightly, as the flower of the slime source opened under the thick, salty, mineralized waters of the sea. His heart pounded. She was incredibly young. The change should have been sun circles in her future, yet here was the unmistakable sign. The flowering of her chest bulges was revealed only momentarily before she became aware of the erotic sensation and closed them, glowing furiously. "Beautiful, Beautiful Wings," he sent, searing her with his emotion. Then, as she recoiled, he eased. "I knew your father, Northern Ice the Healer. In my travels I talked with him -- and I knew you as a child." IF "He is dead these -- several sun circles." A warmth swept through his body: Emotions surged, flooded him, made his interior go soft and flowing. "I am not mistaken?" he asked, sending a replay of the sweet, unconscious flowering of her chest bulges. She answered in a warm affirmative. But she reached for an opaque sheet of The Material and covered herself before looking at him. Wild, warm thoughts flooded out of him, thoughts about nature, fate, luck, bringing them together, amazement that she should begin her change so young, pleasure in his eyes' picture of her. "Am I truly?" she sent. "Am I truly beautiful?" "Affirmative, affirmative, affirmative." Repeating the picture of pleasure in his eyes, standing before her, tall, strong, manly. "There are many others," she said. "They do not matter." "I have heard that a Healer is prone to love the first Power Giver changeling he encounters, but that this love is illusionary and not necessarily the indication of a wise choice," she said. "It is true. Our custom will require that I seek." She closed. He sent one last beautiful picture into her closing mind and got a febrile, grandly complimentary, girlish picture in return. The moment was gone. "You are to seek Red Earth's establishment as soon as you are able." "True," he said. "I have much to report." "He was fretful." "I little doubt that." "Will you be reprimanded?" "I don't think so. Not when I show him this." He took the strange object from her hand. "Red Earth's mind, although he won't admit it, is as curious as that of my Healer's." He read the state of the air in the establishment, monitored the activity of her Breathers, who were working overly hard because of the drain of two sets of lungs. "I have taken enough of your air. I have ample stores to reach Red Earth's establishment." "I will transport you." "No!" He was emphatic. He would not allow her to go out into the deadly storm again on his behalf. "I have been so instructed." "Then we shall disobey," he said. He allowed himself one breath of her air, bowed. As he went out into the lock he sent a picture of his returning. He felt a warm glow in answer. H IS own establishment was nearer than Red Earth's. He jogged through the barren stretches joyously, feeling a renewed strength. He vented his gills in his own lock, entered to find a huge store of air so rich it made him giddy. He breathed furiously, causing much agitation among his Breathers, felt his weight build, his chest expand, his tired, empty cells fatten. Thus enriched, he ran swiftly through the dark, thick storm, feeling an exaltation he had never known before, dressed now in the loin cloth of readiness. Beautiful Wings' coverlet, used during the trip from her establishment to his, was cleaned and ready, back in his establishment, to be returned to her -- as return it he would. He made the march in short time, feeling only a slight drain on his reserves, so fat was he with air. He announced his arrival, was admitted to the lock, vented his gills, shook the ash of the outside from his scales, sneaked one look at the russet bulge in his loins. Inside, Red Earth was lounging on his rack. Rack greeted him cordially, holding back the sensational information. "You are fat and refreshed, I see," Red Earth sent grumpily. "I will use none of your air," said Rack. "A pleasant change," Red Earth said, an oblique reference to Rack's hungry breathing of Beautiful Wings' air. "A nugget of hard material is scant exchange for life." "If you were observing so closely," Rack said, "did you also see the valley of the hot water?" "I have more to do than follow the ramblings of an irresponsible Healer," Red Earth sent. "Then I have much to tell." "I am interested only in the breakdown of your coenesthesis and the reasons for your being stranded in the wilderness. And in those solely with a view to preventing such happenings in the future. Perhaps your punishment will inspire other Healers to use more caution." "I do indeed deserve punishment," Rack admitted. "However, I think other considerations also deserve attention." "Your state of coming readiness is noted and will be considered." Red Earth sent a noncommittal image. "We cannot, even in an event such as this, neglect the possibility of creating a new unit of life." He let slip his foolish hopes and Rack grinned inwardly as he saw pictures of speculation. It would indeed be ironic if Rack, in disgrace, should sire the New One. "I am not speaking merely of that," Rack said. He slowly produced the object, holding it on the palm of his hand, moving to stand directly in front of Red Earth. The bald, bare dome of Red Earth's head did not move, but Rack could feel the push and probe of the Far Seer's senses. He extended the object, gave it over to Red Earth's hand. For long moments the Far Seer examined it, then with an explosion of emotion threw it from him. IF It hit the soft, yielding wall and fell to the floor. "From the subsurface!" Red Earth flared unbelievingly. "True," Rack admitted. He underwent a blast of anger and shock. He stood his ground. "You dug," Red Earth accused him. "Not true." "I sensed the taint of soft earth, the deadliness of the earth." Waves of anger, fear, sorrow. Rack began to be seriously concerned. He was well aware of the law against digging. It was a law so absolute that the mind of the oldest Keeper held no record of its having been broken. "If you will listen -- " "Not I," Red Earth sent sadly. "No, I will not listen. There will be a council. Then we will listen." "That will take time," Rack sent desperately, remembering the soft flowering of the delicate scales on Beautiful Wings' chest bulges. He sent a powerful picture of his need, his love for Beautiful Wings, the pull of nature, the necessity of proper timing. His russet tint would deepen, become flame red. The flowering of Beautiful Wings' chest bulges would become involuntary and expose the soft flesh underneath her scales. And there would be other changes, changes that left him weak merely to contemplate them. His desperate plea was rejected coldly. Red Earth was tightly closed. In the whole of civilization there were only -- a small picture of unbreakable laws -- and Rack had broken the most severely enforced one. It was unthinkable. Yet it had happened. No other considerations could stand against that fact. Even the chance for new life, the most desired event in the life of man, was unimportant. "Please, you must listen. I myself did not dig." "I will keep the evidence of your folly," Red Earth said sternly. "You will not be given the opportunity to cleanse it further, although you have, obviously, already tried to erase the traces of the subsurface from it. You will return to your establishment. There you will stay until a council can be arranged." A picture of time, extending past the time of storms into the new beginning, too late, too late. By then Rack's tint would have long since faded. The moment would have passed. "You will not listen?" he asked. "I am but one. The serious nature of this crime demands a Council." "And my readiness?" Rack asked "Wasted." And over Red Earth's anger and shock and fear hung a shroud of sadness. "Go." slowly to his establishment, paying no heed to the waste of his energies and forces. Inside, he fell into his rack. He felt unjustly used. He had not dug. The water had dug, not he. And his lack of guilt was proven y the fact that he had suffered no ill effects from his experiment -- and had been rewarded by the discovery of an amazing object which, to his astonishment, had not aroused Red Earth's deepest curiosity. Even a Power Giver -- Beautiful Wings, oh, Beautiful Wings -- had been impressed. Any Healer would have been beside himself with excitement. But to a cold-blooded Far Seer the suspected breaking of an ancient law was the issue, not the mind-boggling mysteries of the obviously crafted object. The situation was completely without logic. Rack's world was an orderly one. It ran on age-old principles proven by time. In his orderly world such misunderstanding was not possible. It was unbelievable to him that he was to be robbed of his chance to add a spark of life to the scant life force of the planet. Who indeed was breaking the law? Not he. The law-breaker was clearly Red Earth the Far Seer, who was trying to impose his will on nature to negate one of her most elemental forces. Beautiful Wings. Ah... He opened, sent. The distance was far too great. But in his state of openness he intercepted Red Earth's message, directed over Rack's establishment to a northern Far Seer -- the call for council. And the urgency in Red Earth's thoughts made a cold chill run down Rack's spine. Upon absorbing Red Earth's charges he began to realize the seriousness of his predicament. In a world that revered life he did not fear death as a punishment, but in outlining the crime Red Earth touched on possible punishments that chilled Rack's mind. Banishment. To the far southland with its burning earth and choking gases belched up from the planet's bowels? Or to a lonely station at the far north where the frost sheet never melted, to live out his days cold and alone? He closed and considered. In all fairness he was due to be questioned, for his actions in the small, pure valley had, been out of the ordinary. His use of running water to cut through the shallow layer of soft earth was, at best, a daring innovation -- and Far Seers were affected strongly by any hint of innovation. Life's balance was so precarious that experimentation was to be carefully considered before being undertaken. But he had done no harm. Not in the valley. His only crime had been in his having stayed too long and having had to waste some of the life force of Beautiful Wings to extricate himself out of his selfcreated crisis. For these sins he would gladly accept a punishment IF tour in the far north, a tour of limited duration, beginning after his joining. But could a guilty one select his own punishment? No -- still, such sentences had been handed down in the past. He would not -- could not -- accept the punishments being suggested in advance by Red Earth, for they meant more than death. Not only his own death after a long, agonizing loneliness, but the death of his unborn, unconceived offspring. The planet would be deprived of two life units. Could not the Far Seers understand that? If he had indeed dug in the earth -- then he would have expected the most severe punishment, now would accept it. Deserve it... Or would he? An entirely new line of thought. If he had dug in his valley by hand he would have, according to his measurements, suffered no bodily damage. So where was the crime?  ment, striding, breathing carelessly. He slept little, awoke to find his russet loins turning a pinker, brighter shade. He pictured Beautiful Wings the Power Giver and the image was unbearably sweet. He remembered her welcoming of his suggestion that he would return and he contemplated the loss of his only readiness -- for to have more than one change in life was rare. He was young. He felt that he was in the right. "If I am a law-breaker," he told himself, "then I am lost -- but the sins of the father should not be extended to obviate his seed." Thinking in such terms, with his loins pink and bright, seemed natural. Nature moved in him, making chemical changes in his body, sending delicate urges into his brain. He made his decision in the midpoint of the sun's day cycle. Red Earth, in his intercepted thoughts, had indicated contact with every Far Seer east of the river. Completion of such a roundup would take time and energy and would, Rack estimated, cover the period of this day, another day and possibly still another. The establishment of Beautiful Wings the Power Giver was a quick jog away. And if he were indeed a criminal he was not responsible for his actions. Moreover, he could be punished only once. And once implanted in Beautiful Wings' body, his seed would be life -- and thus sacred. His decision made, he stored a maximum quantity of air, packed his winter's supply of broth, packed in addition a sealed container of closely crowded Breathers to add to Beautiful Wings' colonies. He marched swiftly, heavily burdened, not able to. breathe in the fierce storms which had now reached their peak of deadliness. She was waiting, sensing his coming from afar, meeting his mind and discussing the situation with him as he jogged through the bleak, atmospheredarkened emptiness. At first she was shocked and reluctant about his coming, but his emotionfilled thoughts swept her objections aside. The feelings of a Power Giver at joining time were nature's strongest force. And she had seen Rack's beginning tint, had felt the strength and power of his personality, had seen the beauty of his body. She stood inside the establishment, unable to control the flowering of her chest scales as he entered. They opened out delicately, flaring in a curling sheet, forming a ring around delicate pinkness, the flesh of motherhood, the flesh from which the offspring would feed. Rack, on seeing her, felt his own scales stir and move. He sent beauty, beauty, love. And she answered with a sweetness that made his knees weak. Quickly he joined his container of Breathers with her colonies, making the number sufficient for two. Then, his gills having been vented in the lock, he loosed stored air from his huge body and felt his storage cells give gladly to share with his love. In a sweet, rich plenty of air they stood, looking, inner lids wide, Rack's vibrant blue gaze sparkling with his energies. He could see far into Beautiful Wings' brown eyes. Her soul was open to him. "You, too, may be punished," he sent. "No punishment could take away the memory of this." "We have" -- he sent a picture of the time remaining before Red Earth could complete his contact with the eastern Far Seers. "Then he will check and find that I am not in my establishment." "When I first saw you -- when I was a child -- I dreamed of this day," she sent. "Our time could be shortened if he discovers me here." "But we will have created life." The picture of incredible beauty and passion made him tremble. "Before I throw aside my covering," he sent, "be sure, Beautiful Wings." "I will be content with one night, if nature will allow. My only fear, my only regret, is for you. For, as you know, the mind of a Far Seer is powerful." "In all of history there has been no record of its being used fatally." "But he is agitated. In all of recorded history no one has dug." She sent the last picture regretfully. "I think not of myself," he sent. "But of you." "For me the mere throwing aside of your covering will open a world of delight -- " Slowly he drew aside his opaque IF covering. She made an audible purr of pleasure and, in return, drew aside the belt of fashioned Material to show that she, too, was at the height of her readiness. He learned then the full picture of her name -- it came from a historic picture of a soaring thing, fragile, brightly colored, delicate. He had never seen such loveliness and his entire being vibrated as she moved languidly toward him. His eyes caressed the pink, exposed breast buds, his fingers trembled as he touched them and felt her body heat and her softness. The red tint of his maleness covered his lower body, scales folding back. "Now we will join," he whispered, leading her to the rack. She sat down, legs crossed, and , he duplicated the position. Looking deep into her eyes, he let his mind merge with hers. He knew the fullness of her mind; he let his own lose its individuality, lock with hers. He knew her most basic thought as she knew his and a rapture lifted them out of time and space. Their limbs, bent under their bodies, felt strain but did not register discomfort as the night fell and the planet spun on its axis and swam toward the new beginning. They required neither food nor air. They fed on themselves and on each other. Throughout the long, dreamy night, as the storm raged and the survival factor reached its lowest sun-circle point, they caressed minds -- and when at last the sun glowed through the yellow and purple poisons of the outside a state of pure ecstasy linked them and not even the force of Red Earth's anger could have broken their locked emotions. She came to him with the sinking sun. Her exposed feminity drew him and the union began, sweet and true and of such a totality that the Breathers, half-life that they were, stirred uneasily in their colonies. Softness met softness -- his penetration sundered her and the day passed without their notice and another night found them poised on the brink of the ultimate experience. When it happened she cried out, vocally, her expelled breath sweet. VI strong, the joining urge was not satisfied with one experience. Thus it was with Rack and Beautiful Wings. So perfect had been the preliminary union of their minds, so sweet was the seed planting, so devastating the pleasure that his tint become only more fiery and her ruby femininity did not fade when they separated. True, her chest buds were covered, his scales folded, but the strong emotions continued to rage. Had they not been in the grip of nature's most powerful force neither of them would have considered the desperate measure suggested, at the height of their joining, by their combined minds. Time, they knew in their separate minds, was now running out -- time required for the scales to open again, for her to flower. Time they did not have, for Red Earth would be checking and his powerful probe would soon find Rack. They had no idea what then would happen. They knew only that they would be separated and the thought was intolerable to each. The survival factor outside was fearfully low. To elude Red Earth meant going out into that hell of poison. To Rack a brief exposure was not serious, but to a fragile Power Giver even a short time outside, with the atmosphere giving off potent projectiles, was folly. It would be subtracted from her life. But Beautiful Wings was in love and filled with the glory of having, perhaps, a new life . in her. "I will not be robbed," she sent. He protested, but he, too, was in love. He, too, felt the great biological, chemical and emotional stresses. He could breathe for her, they both knew, give her air from his lungs, but he could not shield her from the deadly projectiles. "It is my life, love, and I will gladly spend part of it." "I cannot allow it," he sent. "For I will not live long if you are sent to the south." He could feel the power behind the statement and he believed, for in rare cases the union produced a lifetime of love, an ability to blend minds even when nature forbade the joining of bodies. "I would hate myself -- I myself would die if your life were shortened." "Then we die together." broth, a supply sufficient to last them through the winter Together they loaded the Breathers into travel containers of The Material. He winced as he measured the load she would have to carry. But they were now committed, for a tentative probe from Red Earth's mind had located the two. Red Earth's powerful forces were grouping, woulcl come thundering in to -- Rack had no idea of what the shocked Far Seer would do. Immobilization was the least he could expect. He quickly depleted the establishment, storing its last remaining air in his huge lungs. As she lifted he wept, for he could feel the drain, the using up of her force. And she, not blessed with his Healing powers, could not repair the damage. He held her tightly in his arms, giving her air from his mouth, protecting all of her that he could with his superior armor. The ascent took its toll and above the clouds she breathed furiously of IF his stored air, trying to regain some of the loss. The soaring was not as strenuous, but the descent, later, again through the roiling clouds, caused waves of pain to sweep through her as she fought the pull of the planet. His mind shared the agony in hers and his entire being cried out at the injustice of it. He should have been the one who was sacrificing for their love. On the permanent icy frost of the far north he held her, gave her a lungful of his good air, entered the closed establishment of Northern Ice the Healer, her late father, set the Breathers working, emptied his store to replenish the empty establishment. She lay weakly on the rack, breathing with difficulty. He wept openly. Once again he had been criminally foolish, acting not against himself, but against the one he loved. Both he and she had underestimated the cost of her load and she was now paying it. Her very substance had been used. She looked thin, drawn-out. But she smiled at him and directed his attention to her breasts, which were being exposed slowly as she flowered, as the ruby tint spread and her lower scales opened and those delicate, soft buds swelled with nature's bounty. "Poor Rack," she sent. "Don't suffer more than I -- for I gave myself gladly and would do it again." Twice blessed by nature, they were alone in the far north, beyond the full stength of Red Earth's punitive measures. No Far Seer was near enough to intrude upon their privacy. The hardworking Breathers expelled good air, made the long unused establishment comfortable. The unaccustomed chill served merely to invite body closeness. He held her # saving her remaining strength. More than anything in his world he wanted to lift the suffering from her, to put it into his body, where it rightfully belonged, for the entire situation was of his making. The soft tendrils of her mind pressed at his shame points, caressed his pain and sorrow. "I will live to give birth," she told him, inside him. Her body anticipated and Rack learned the wonder of growth, the swelling of life. He learned the movements of labor and the emergence of a new life. He could not help but exult. He and she moved into oneness and a fierce pride of achievement sent strong radiations reverberating around the domed establishment. Their new ecstasy mounted until, facing each other, seated locklegged on the rack, the beauty of their communication became all. In Rack a bewilderingly powerful sadness mixed with the most complete happiness he had known -- for he was loved beyond the most basic value, the regard for life. The joining began and extended into time without end, without thought. monitored by Far Seers and this far-north joining was noted and measured. The northern Far Seer nearest to it recorded that he was awed by its force, intensity and duration. He recorded more. A Healer knows the flesh of a Power Giver once, rarely twice. The observing Far Seer noted that Rack, the fortunate one, knew more. He knew flesh and total love and even in complete union kept his awareness of his Power Giver's depleted condition and of the fact that he and he alone was responsible for it. Neither Rack nor Beautiful Wings . considered, the Far Seer recorded, that the very uniqueness, the desperation, the strains, the aspects of doom of the union were adding to the depth of their emotions, but that obvious conclusion was made by the Far Seer before he, awed and made tinglingly envious, withdrew to seek his sterile consolation with his personal Keeper. And so missed what followed. Rack knew only that he would forsake the fight and die if his actions resulted in the death of Beautiful Wings. She was very weak. When the seed planting began she sank to the depths, overwhelmed by her joy. Rack's mind filled with panic, even as his body rejoiced. He roared, making an animal sound without meaning, and willed his body and being into her. His healing cells screamed out to her to fight, not to give in to the specter that had suddenly thrust itself into their moment of joy. What he sent was not a mere hope or a plea -- it was a command: Be well. And it was repeated by every cell of his being. His whole body thundered the order, striving to impart to hers the beneficence of his healing. Yet she sank. He felt the darkness boding death. His mind heated, threatened to join hers in blankness, but in that last, wildly emotional moment he felt astonishing change roar through him. It caused unheard-of things to happen in their joining. His flesh was becoming her flesh. Cell bonded to cell and where there had been lubricious friction there was a bond -- and movement ceased. He felt a strange swelling and a sensation he could not identify until he felt, in his body, the feeble beat of her heart and the flow of her blood joining his. He became aware of the damaged cells of her blood and then he was sending his powerful Healer's forces to battle the darkness, cell by cell. His substance was her substance and he was strong. IF equal to the task of mending her frail body. At last he felt life spring up in her, saw her eyes open in wonder and look into his. He was too busy to pause to analyze the miracle. His Healer's blood flowed in her veins -- his cells were her cells and his healing ability worked for both of them, using up his stored substance, voiding poisons through his gills -- and not at all concerned by this breach of politeness. "Rack, Rack," she sent. The extent of her weakness frightened him, but he was equal to the task. It cost him, but he was giving joyously, praising nature for this chance to redeem himself, to give of himself as she had given of herself for him. He flowed in her, was part of her, knew the intimate processes of her body, healed, threw off the accumulated poisons, found the inherent weakness of the Power Givers in organs that could not reject the deadly things in the environment. He knew his Power Giver as no Healer had ever known his love. He made her whole again. He did not stop until he was exhausted. She laughed suddenly in glorious health and began to question him furiously. As strangely as it had begun, the process ceased. The flesh parted and they were lying together, both aware of his seed in her. And Rack told her what he knew, for he had been able to see more than she. She was in the process of conceiving. He could no longer watch, but they talked of the mechanics of birth and tried to pinpoint the exact moment and laughed joyously and clung to each other. Later she fed him. Her being radiated health. He felt his strength returning as he consumed broth and filled his storage cells with air. Then it was time to wonder and be awed by the miracle. T HE last tints of russet left Rack's pelvic region. Beautiful Wings' scales folded into place and covered the soft flesh. But there was life within her. The sun, only a puny force in the far north, stayed below the horizon for a picture of normal days and in the cool dark they found it beautiful to sink into a mind-blend. Pictures of days became pictures of satellite changes and they were not aware of the swift passage of time. They had achieved the rare union that lasted past the creation of life -- and were drawn closer by the new and exciting knowledge that once, for a time, Rack's blood had flowed in her veins, that he had known her down to the minutest cell level, that he had felt and seen what she could never feel or see, the beginnings of new life within her body. Responsibility intruded, after satellite changes of pure happiness, in the form of the mind of a Far Seer. "Rack the Healer, will you voluntarily attend the meeting of the council of Far Seers, Healers and Power Givers?" "I will inform you," Rack sent, sinking to depths of sadness. "Now you have how added other crimes," Beautiful Wings told him. "They will cite your disobedience." "And add the crime of endangering the life of a Power Giver in unlawful flight," Rack agreed. "I will lose you." "Negative, negative," he sent angrily. For it necessarily followed that if she lost him he would lose her and he could envision no worse fate. "I will go with you to the death lands of the far south," she promised. "Negative, negative," he sent, thinking furiously. "Perhaps, by some miracle of nature, you can heal me even in the death lands." "There I cannot, for any picture of time, heal even myself," he sent. "Then we die together." "Much as I revere my own life -- and life as an abstract goodness -- I revere yours more." He caressed her. "To think of you dead is the most terrible pain." "Then we'll flee once more. We will go to the lands across the eastern sea." "Negative," he sent, adding pictures of the distance, the load she would carry, the drain on her system. She was in perfect health, but even the most healthy Power Giver would be seriously drained by such a trip. "But you forget," she chided. "You can heal me. You can join your power to mine." Hope sprang up in him. Then he sent a negation. "In the heat of the union I fleshed with you. I have no feel for it now. I don't think I could do it again, not without the emotional stimulus of the joining." "We could try." T HE problem was that without the flowering of scales that accompanied the physical union there were no flesh areas to bring into contact. Armored hand on armored hand gave a heady and pleasant sensation, but produced not even one spark of that strange power Rack had felt during the union. Rack considered. Every portion of Beautiful Wings' body was protected by her small, decorative and flexible scales, save for the inside of her small jnouth and the inner lids of her eyes. He examined her small, protected lips, used his finger to open them, looked into the pink, toothless maw. Her vestigial tongue was small and pink. His own tongue barely extended past his armored lips. "We can only try," he sent. IF placing his lips on hers, thrusting out his tongue to feel the fleshy interior of her mouth. She giggled. "A sensation not to be despised, dear Rack." "Quiet, I am thinking." Flesh on flesh. A remembering. The glory of union, the softness of her body, the feel of her cells were implanted in his mind. It was, he found, surprisingly simple. He had only to will it and his tongue welded flesh to flesh, melted into her, knew her. Through that small contact of united flesh he sensed the processes of her body, made minor healings. He closed off the contact, knowing a wild elation. He would never have to be without her and his healing abilities would make her as long-lived as he. Only the ruin of his system would bring death to both of them and that would be many, many sun circles away. He knew the feeling of complete victory, and then it was tinged with regret. "I know," she sent. "Responsibility is a heavy thing." She touched him, sending a warm glow through the scales of his arm. "But we can contribute. The people to the east, it is said, are much like us." "But they are not our people." He had, however, no choice. Had he not loved her he would have gone to the council, would have faced his punishment, would have used the forum to try to convince the Far Seers of the importance of his find -- that strange object from the valley of the hot waters. But knowing that his own banishment would abandon Beautiful Wings to the sure fate of Power Givers, early death -- and that he could save her -- he had to take the chance. position made for some difficulty. Mouth to mouth with Rack, flesh welded to flesh, Beautiful Wings drawing not only on Rack's substance, but also utilizing his power of mind to reinforce her own push against the magnetic field of the planet, she had difficulty seeing where she was going. But flying became effortless and without cost to her substance and they worked out a system of mind signals. Sometimes, too, they seemed to share joint vision -- and this was a distinct advantage. Having become proficient in joint flight, Rack guided their soaring movement to a position over Red Earth's establishment. "I am Rack the Healer, bringer of new and startling developments," he sent. "You are Rack the Healer, madman," Red Earth sent angrily, adding astonishment and shock that Rack was once again recklessly using the very life substance of a Power Giver for wasteful and illegal soaring. "I ask only a hearing," Rack sent, "a fair and impartial forum composed of equal numbers of Far Seers and Power Givers and Healers. " "The law," Red Earth sent, "is the law. Your new and startling developments have been judged, after careful study, to be the result of unexplained forces in the depths of space." "The Far Seers err and dream dreams of the unimaginative mind," Rack sent, himself becoming a bit angry. "Much has happened since we last spoke and I showed you the hard new object I brought from my travels and on which you judge me. The object is clearly crafted and must, therefore, be the work of the Old Ones. As such, it should not only receive the attentions of the scholars among the Far Seers, but should also be subjected to the speculations of the scientific Healers. And I demand a trial." "It is the will of nature that the Far Seers hand down the law," Red Earth said. "Tell me, Healer, your justification for continued defiance." "In the interest of the race," Rack said. "In that interest I have traveled far. In that interest I risked death and disgrace and in return I am scorned and judged without a hearing." "In your absence a hearing has taken place," Red Earth said pointedly. "Your flight from justice was your testimony." "If the Old Ones were capable of crafting so unique a material," Rack said stubbornly, "what else could they accomplish? Of how much more than we have shown are we capable? In view of new evidence, I demand a renewed effort to rethink our position. We must learn the lessons of the past for the sake of the future." "You seek to dig in the earth and release death," Red Earth said sadly, seeing behind his words a picture of the valley of hot waters. "This we will not allow. I have been empowered to my sorrow to -- " But Rack was prepared. As the Far Seer gathered his energies Beautiful Wings sent Rack and herself soaring high into the purpling sky, into the regions of nonair, into the coldness of the upper reaches. Yet the bolt from Red Earth's mind found Rack and momentarily dulled his senses. Shocked, he realized that it had Had he not anticipated it and removed himself from the range of Red Earth's lethal reach, he would have been a lifeless form clinging inside Beautiful Wings' field of power, draining her, leaving her without his healing protection. "So be it," he said. Body to body, they accelerated, leaving the zone of the sun for the darkness to the east, sensing the rolling sea beneath them, seeking the land of the east, fleeing those who would kill. IF T HE old man refused to get aboard. He was still in the house as the last few stragglers climbed the car steps. They could see him peering through the window, his face bristling with contempt, his fists white and clenched against the sill... One of the monitors jumped from the last car and climbed the cracked steps, three at a time. "Come out of there," he yelled when he entered the house. "We can't wait any longer." "Nobody asked you to wait," said Ben from the other room. "I told you, I'm not going." The man swore. "That front section has been underway for two hours. She'll go any minute." "Good, by golly, and it can't be too soon." "You old fool, this is no time to pull childish stunts." Ben came out then. "This is no stunt. I'm not going with you. You'd better hustle your tail before you're stuck here with me." The monitor stood in angry indecision for a long moment. Then he hurried out to the train. The old man moved to the window and watched them argue. He knew what was coming next. Taking the gun from behind the books in the bookcase, he checked the load. They came across the road three abreast, pounded up the steps, pushed in through the open door. He stood in the middle of the room with his gun aimed at the first man. "That's far enough." The three stopped and shifted their feet, looked at him uneasily. "We can't leave you all alone," said the oldest. "You'll die." "So will you, one day," said Ben. "What's wrong with you? Why are you doing this?" He answered quietly. "I've got five or six years left, maybe, and I'm not going to spend them looking at some damned horizon no human ever laid eyes on." "That doesn't make sense. Is it the train? Are you afraid it won't take us through?" Ben knew he was wasting his breath but he said it anyway. "I've never cared much how I died, but I'm particular about where." "You can't want to stay on this stinking sewer of a world." The old man's fingers tightened on the gun. "Get out," he said. "Get out of my house. Get off my Earth. Go jump on your kiddy car and ride." "You have to come with us." "The gun says different. I bought it when this scheme was first cooked up and I didn't buy it for fun. I'll shoot the first man who tries to drag me out. That includes you." They took turns speaking: IF "We can't wait any longer." "Better come, old man." "You'll die all alone." "You'll never see another human." "You'll never hear another voice." "You'll wish you were dead." "Go to hell," said Ben. They left then. He watched through the window as they boarded the train. Everybody looked back. He saw their faces clearly. No one wept, no one looked regretful. Suddenly the train shuddered. In the next instant it was gone. Without a sound it had fled into the tunnel of time. and a sob leaked from his throat. Steadying himself against the window he dropped the gun on the floor and blinked his eyes. Numbly he rubbed his palms on his shirt. He cocked his head to listen for sounds. The clock in the kitchen gave a little ping. Somewhere a wall squeaked. A faucet in the bathroom dripped and the hotwater tank in the basement hummed. He heard his own breathing. He stood there and knew that these were the sounds he would hear for the rest of his life. He was the only human being in the world. He sat on the porch swing and played his harmonica, and while the sweet tones of Clementine lifted along the avenue he rocked and let his thoughts sift through the lost years and the dead dreams of his lifetime. Presently he dozed. The wind whispered between houses and the sun sneaked through the smog to warm pavements and roofs, to glint upon handlebars and shiny surfaces of bicycles and automobiles. At dusk he awakened. He could see the trees in the park across the boulevard and he thought that in the morning he would go there and live where it was cool and Earthy. He had his dinner and went to bed. At dawn he tied a few cans of food in a sweater, placed his hat on his head and walked out of the house he had lived in for fifty years. There were twelve cabins in the park and he chose the smallest. It contained a kitchen, a bedroom, a tiny bath and a shower stall. After he checked the fridge and bathroom to make sure that everything worked he stood in the doorway and looked out across the grassy clearing. The end of his love affair with the sod upon which he had been born was not far away. He couldn't live long, alone this way. He was old and accidentprone and one day soon he would forget what he was doing or miscount his steps, and that would be that. He wished that he were young again, with the Earth all his, so that he might stride out upon her scarred surface and begin to heal her wounds. He would beg her forgiveness for crimes that had never been his but the race's from which he had sprung and together they measure of his existence until at last death came to them both in the same instant. But it wouldn't be like this. He would die without healing anything and the Earth would be a spaceship that carried of dark universe until one day she herself staggered and died. And then there would be nothing. He crossed the clearing and slumped onto a bench. With the sun warm on his shoulders he closed his eyes and played Old Black Joe on his harmonica. The words beat through his brain, revived old memories. Gone were the days when a boy took his first good look at the world about him and knew with an exultant thrill that he was a powerful creature in an environment of beauty, glory and danger. Gone were his friends, but he wasn't sure he wanted to call them friends. There surely had been one close to him. Could a man live for so long in the same world with so many others without finding one kindred spirit? No, there had been one. But weren't a man's sons his friends? Had there never been a trace of Willa in those angry young men who had cursed him yesterday and forced him to drive them away with a gun? Now they were gone from the Earth, they and all the rest. To a better land? But he knew there was no better land. No matter where they were now it wasn't Earth. A static wail came from the harmonica and he dropped it and buried his face in his hands. He sat on the bench all day and watched the sun drift across the sky. As it was setting he dragged the cot from the cabin, placed it in the clearing and lay down and covered himself. T HE sky was unusually clear and as the stars winked into view he began to count them. He was past fifty when he saw the flashing light in the east. He watched it and tried to remember if there was a satellite in that area, but so many had been tossed into IF the sky that he couldn't keep track any more. The last thing he saw as he closed his eyes to sleep was the flashing light moving across the heavens. Dawn woke him. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes he look drowsily at the sky and then sat up in surthe sun lifted over the horizon and moving along beside it, small but vivid, was a streaking comet. He went into the cabin long enough to wash and eat his breakfast. Then he took his place on the bench once more to watch the sky. By mid-morning he suspected that it wasn't a comet at all. By eleven he was certain of it. The streaking thing could only be a spaceship. Just as the sun reached the center of the sky the ship cracked through the atmosphere and thundered toward the ground. The vessel was a tongue of orange flame, monstrous in length and in girth. Ben placed its origin as somewhere in Europe or Asia. He knew America had never made so large a ship. Heat fanned his face and he threw his hands over his eyes. Still far away from him, the ship's jets cut off and the missile flew silently toward him, floated effortlessly to the ground and landed on its Tinned tail. A man dressed in brown came out of a door and jumped to the ground. He raised a hand to wave and Ben walked to meet him. He was a slender young man with dark eyes and a thin face. Ben carefully looked him over. He wasn't European or Asiatic. It was impossible to place him. Several other people stepped out of the ship and stood looking around. They all resembled the first man and it was impossible to place any of them. "You're too late," Ben said bluntly. "They're all gone." The stranger pushed his hair out of his eyes and smiled. "So we discovered when we were coming in." "They said they called everyone back. You must have been a far piece. Jupiter, maybe? Too bad you didn't come two days earlier. It would have saved you some trouble." The man looked about the clearing as he spoke. "We couldn't get here sooner, but it's no trouble." Ben stared at him. Here was no evasive, ineffectual coward. He thought of the whining creatures who had scrambled at the chance to get away from the foulness they had created. A trembling began behind his knees. How did a man find a needle in a haystack? By what talent did a pilot pick out the spot where the only man in the world stood? "Where you headed?" he croaked. "Earth." "There's nobody here but me. Where do you aim to go now?" The man gave him a keen look. "Why do you ask? Do you want to go someplace else with us?" Ben felt the heat rising up his neck. "I never said that." "You sound as if you want something." Turning his back, Ben spat on the ground. "I got something. Right there." The stranger laughed. "You might say this is new territory for us. Why don't you bring me up to date on what happened here." "Doesn't matter how long you've been gone. The world hasn't changed, not for the better, for fifty years." "Maybe I just want to hear you tell it." "Maybe you just think I'm a lonely old fool and you're feeling big-hearted." T HE man was silent and Ben turned to get a look at his face. Ben saw no pity. What he saw was deep preoccupation with things not concerned with him He began to relax. Looking at the mountain that rose beyond the park, he said, "I could tell it better if we were up , there. We could see the mess." "Then let's go up." "I'm no goat" The man walked away. "I'll give you a hand," he said over his shoulder. With a scowl Ben eyed the retreating back. He wasn't a kid to tag after the first big man he saw. But he followed. They made it to the first high ledge before his legs quit on him. "I can't go any farther," he said and refused the other's hand. "We don't need to." The stranger stood and gazed out at the shattered plateau. "I reckon not," said Ben and winced. "What do you think of it?" "What's that smoke rising from the lake?" "Fumes from garbage and chemicals. You'd be gassed in a minute if you got within a thousand yards of the shore. Right now you're breathing the stuff and you'll be lucky if it doesn't kill you. They're all like that, every lake in the world, every river and sizeable stream." "How do you get water?" "From the oceans, but they're pretty foul too. Most of the fish are dead. Most of everything is dead. There are bugs and rodents, but that's about all. It took a long time to kill Earth but they finally did it." "Where are the forests?" IF "They took the timber long ago. This park is the only one left in the country." The man shook his head. "What about those holes?" "Strip mines. It's like that everywhere. They cut right into Earth's guts and cleaned her out like a turkey and left the wounds just like you see them. They took it all." "Why?" "Why did they every do anything?" "I wish you would pretend I know nothing about it and tell me." Ben watched a sparrow's flight across the barren hill. "Well, about twenty years ago a fellow named Swanson was fooling around with an atomic converter and blew himself and Pittsburgh sky high. At least that's what everyone thought. After the air cleared, the government sent in a team to look the place over, maybe rebuild the city. The team couldn't find anything -- not so much as a stray brick. There was nothing there, just fifty square miles of smooth ground. Mountains, rivers, buildings, machinery, all gone. It looked as if there had never been anything there. It took nearly ten years to find where Pittsburgh went, and it wasn't up in pieces. It went through a tunnel." "What do you mean?" "They called it the tunnel of time," said Ben. "When Swanson blew up the converter he sheared off a piece of space and Pittsburgh went sailing through the hole and landed in another time dimension. I never understood. I don't think anyone else did, either. No two people had the same theory, but that didn't stop them from going in to see what was in that hole. They found Pittsburgh on an uninhabited planet they said was Earth "The team sent back word that the place was perfect for colonization so the government ordered Earth stripped of everything she had that was worth anything. They took out the rest of the metals and shipped it through. The world is a hollow shell now. I figure she's worth about fifty dollars, moneywise." "Then what?" "Everyone got ready to move out. They opened up tunnels in every big city and pretty soon they were building time trains and shipping people out. They went city by city." "How about you?" "My town was the last to go." "But you didn't." B EN kept his eyes on the ruined landscape. He couldn't answer the question he saw in the man's eyes. What sense would it make if he said he had never learned how to be a sardine, had never learned how to lie immobile in the position in which others tried to place him? How could he recount his years of watching people behave like ants, how describe his attempts at comprehending their purposes? It would sound weird if he said that his need to discover greatness, to find something to admire, had led him to look beyond men or beneath them. He had chosen his world as an ideal because its responses corresponded to what a man did with it, because it possessed beauty not as an abstract but as a reality that could be enjoyed with every human sense, because Earth let its abused parts wither and die and didn't construct cheap masks to conceal the scars. He looked at the man and slammed his mind shut upon his secrets. They were his and that fact would always be enough. "I didn't go because I didn't want to," he said. "That's the only reason I had. I'll never leave, so don't ask me if I want to go somewhere with you. If you're going, go ahead but it'll be without me." The man gave him a thoughtful look. "We'd like to stay here and live. We came from the other side of the galaxy for just that purpose." "I don't think I like your sense of humor." The stranger made no reply. Instead he kneeled and picked up a handful of dirt. Ben stared down at the brown neck and blowing hair. "What are you doing?" The man stood up and held out his hand and the wind carried the dirt away. "Wondering how long it will take to make her new again. Which way is the time tunnel?" "There," said Ben.and pointed. "We'll have to close it up. We'll have to close them all up. They're not human any more." Uneasy, Ben said, "Take it easy. You've come a long way." "We're accustomed to long journeys. But let's go back down now. This is all part of the past. Only the future is meaningful." Hastily Ben started down the slope. He slipped and slid over the stones in his hurry to get away from this loony who was going further out of his mind with every word he spoke. As he reached the clearing a hand pressed on his shoulder. "We'll give her new life. She'll blossom like a rose and never grow old again." Immediately Ben was engulfed in old grief. "Sure you will," he mumbled. Standing in the clearing with the IF wind sifting through his hair he had the sudden wish that the strangers would get in their ship and go. He would rather be by himself than spend the rest of his life with a bunch of loonies. But it was only a half-wish. They were comforting loonies, or at least the one he had been talking to was comforting. In some strange way the man had made all the mess seem soft and vague. A light breath of perfume reached . him. He stiffened and turned toward the nearest cabin. A woman stood in the doorway. She was young and she stared back at him with a little smile on her face. All of a sudden Ben felt his face redden. The way she was looking him up and down with that speculative gleam in her eye -- by damn, it was ridiculous -- but if he were forty years younger... Turning away he walked over to a bench and sat down with his back to the cabins. The people going in and out of the ship seemed to be busy. The ship itself -- his thoughts shied away from that and touched on other things. The sun warmed his head and made him drowsy. He would have to keep an eye on the ship. Crazy foreigners with crazy ideas, there was no telling what they had in mind to do. Settling himself more comfortably, he began to brood. How many people were in that bunch? They were all young, not a gray-headed one among them. He felt a slow spurt of resentment. These men and women were out of place on a beatup world with no one in it but a beatup old man. He'd have to keep an eye on them. He intended to, but the sun on his back made him change his mind. His head tilted toward one shoulder and a soft snore startled him. He jerked erect. A moment later his body wilted down onto the bench and he slept. Later it seemed that hands were touching him but his subconscious mind gave no warning of danger. Fingers moved over his skull. Then something capped his head. Somewhere in the distance he heard voices. "Careful with that thing. He must be pushing ninety." "Right. Let's hope this softens the shock for him." Ben was dreaming that he was in a Fishbowl. A silvery, wire-thin trout swam into his ear and on into his brain. He began the other dream at once. He saw a planet adrift in the black of space. Though he had never seen any world other than Earth, something was familiar about this one. And he knew things about it. It was old, terribly aged, and soon it was going to die. As he swam in the sky over the doomed planet he was stricken with grief. This crippled globe was home. Here was the real home. It was where a man went when he was tired of wandering. It was the place of returning. His face wet with tears, Ben mourned for the end of life. As he grieved he saw fiery tendrils lift from the dying world to soar up in space. Hundreds of ships filled with Man sped outward into the cosmos in search of new homes. They scattered in every direction and were lost to one another. Ben followed one of the ships. It landed on an uninhabited planet and the men stayed there to live. They built cities and a long period of time passed. During this period the people found a beautiful bird which they freed in their sky. Wherever the bird flew it showered down glowing drops that fell on the land and transformed it to loveliness. No matter how ugly the land had been before, it became beautiful after the bird flew over it. By and by the people built more ships and went into space. They took the bird with them. They found many planets on which their brothers lived but none were as beautiful as their own. Some of their brothers were savage and hostile, some were peaceful, but they all wanted to borrow the bird. It was released and flew over each of the planets and made them perfect. That was the dream. Ben opened his eyes to the gray evening of Earth. For a moment he was lost and he cocked his head to listen for the sound of beating wings. It wasn't until he stood up from the bench that he let the dream fade. This was reality. This was dying Earth. Here was the birthplace of mankind; here was the only place where men grew. H IS gaze was Fixed on the sky as he walked across the clearing. From the corner of his eye he saw the woman standing in the doorway of the cabin. He wouldn't look at her. He came to a stop. "I had a dream. It was about a big bird." "What did it do?" "It made ugly things beautiful." He turned and gave her a hard stare. "You and your friends know nothing about ugliness and being lonely." She laughed and the lightness of the sound made him angry. She raised one hand and idly twirled something around on her Fingers. It was a metal cap with thin wires IF dangling from it. Ben gave it a glance and turned away. "See?" he said and pointed at the ship. "Funny looking, isn't it? I've been thinking about that. Maybe you don't think it's funny looking. Maybe no one but an Earthman would see anything out of sorts about it." He heard her take a step toward him. "What do you want?" he said. "To live on this planet." His eyes were misty and he had to blink to see. "What am I thinking?" he said. "Am I dead -- or just crazy?" A hand touched his arm. He jerked free, then turned. "Do you make dreams, too?" he said. "Did you bring the bird with you?" "Yes." One word. He hadn't expected it and it rocked him. He couldn't bear to stay there and look at her. She was watching him again with that speculative gleam in her eye. It made no sense. She wasn't wondering about his reaction to anything except herself. Why did it hurt so much when she looked at him that way? He walked away a few paces, pushed his face into the wind. To hell with all of them. He was an Earthman to the core of his soul. They would drive him batty with their weird talk and strange behavior. Let them think or do whatever they pleased. He didn't have to stay here. Knowing he would never see trees like this again, he gave a last long look around. Then he started Some of the original covers and inside illustrations are still available! These are the actual originals used from # through #. Some are already framed. Send stamped selfaddressed envelope for list and prices. Box #, Greenwich Village Station, New York, N.Y. # toward the ship. The young man stood beside the door. The woman had joined him and they were quietly discussing something. "I'm moving on," Ben said as he stopped in front of them. "Been thinking about Arizona. It'll be good for my health." "You don't want to go there," the man said. "I just said I did. Free country, isn't it? I can go where I please." The woman spoke. "Don't you want to see the bird before you go?" He heard the laughter in her tone and anger again rose in him. "Sure," he said coldly. "Let me see it make something beautiful. Some little spot. Can you do that?" "I think so." The man climbed into the ship. That was the moment when Ben began to be afraid. The man hadn't smiled or looked puzzled. He had simply said, I think so, and then he had gone inside the ship. His fists clenched at his sides, Ben began backing away. The woman smiled and he walked faster. He couldn't make his body stop trembling, couldn't make his lungs work. It seemed that the man coming out of the ship with the strange contraption was moving in slow motion. The thing he carried was a tube of silver with three legs. He set it up on the ground and raised his head to look at Ben. "Where's the bird?" Ben whispered. Suddenly he gasped because the silver tube was bending and now it was aimed straight across the clearing. It was aimed at him. They had tricked him. They were going to kill him. Rage Filled his mind and without thinking or caring he began to run toward the man who reached out and touched the silver tube. A ray of light shot from the bore and hit Ben on the chest. He felt nothing but he gave  cry of fury and tried to run faster. All at once he tripped over a root and fell sprawling. Sobbing and cursing, he started to crawl to his feet. It was then that he saw his hands on the grass. The world was abruptly out of focus and he stared at his hands and waited for the moment to pass. It never did. He looked at his right arm. With frozen fingers he rolled up his shirt sleeve and saw the corded muscles. His other arm was the same. He felt his cheeks, his neck, his forehead. The skin was soft and smooth. He wasn't old any more. His dream had been symbolic. The sweet bird of youth had no wings. He scooped up handfuls of his world, gently squeezed the dirt in his fists, turned his head and looked toward the spot where the last train from Earth had fled into the tunnel of time.  IF and i Rutidvr . s writ' .uni vx-rt-in. How would you like to invest in your future by investing in Man's vastest dream? Reader James S. Burns wants to push what may be the soundest plan yet for saving the Space Program: Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I am sure you have received the news of the cancellation of several major emotions I have . Cancer research is vital and domestic transportation is a thing often improved upon only in science fiction. Today's system is obviously inadequate. But some of us are interested in the exploration and development of space for other reasons than to beat the Russians. Early in the century cars seemed an unnecessary luxury, but today they are an economic necessity. While many people today think of space exploration and development as a totally meaningless waste, a few can see the potential of that small ( think about it! -- ed.) portion of matter in the universe that has not yet fallen to Earth. ( Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) project means there will be no manned landing on Mars before I die. The cancellation of the Grand Tour of the Planets is not quite so dismaying, but it is a tragedy nonetheless. The reusable shuttle would possibly have meant trips to the moon for my generation. After having glimpsed the possibility of all these things, itjs now hard to give them up forever. Unless we do something very few of your readers will ever live to see anything but a manned orbital laboratory signal our planet's attempt to understand this universe. The. only chance I see to save any of these projects is to let Congress know we want them -- and want them badly enough to finance them. The Space Bonds program outlined in my letter to my Congressman (and Senator -- copy enclosed) is one way to ensure the survival of some of these programs. It would ensure that the money we citizens want to see used for space is used correctly and the funds would not tempt every social organization in need of a handout. Please think about this. If you want space travel to become a reality , act now. Contact me and for your Senator and ask for further thoughts on this subject. James D. Burns # W. #th A venue Pine Bluff, Ark. #I Please note that Mr. Burns is speaking of investment , not just about making noise. His letter to his Senator suggests a "Space Bonds program similar to the current U. S. Savings Bonds program, with the proceeds to be used to drop because of lack of funds." ( Please turn to page #) I My job, airbody driver. My home, on Venus, in a Heechee hut most of the time -- wherever I happen to be other times when I feel sleepy. Until I was twenty-five I lived on Earth, in Amarillo Central mostly. My father was a deputy governor of Texas. He died when I was still in college, but he left me enough dependency benefits to finish school, get a master's in business administration and pass the journeyman examination for clerktypist. So I was set up for life. After I tried it for a few years I discovered I didn't like the life I was set up for. Not so much for the conventional reasons. I don't mind smog suits and I can get along with neighbors even when there are eight hundred of them to the square mile. I tolerate noise and am able to defend myself against hoodlums. It wasn't Earth itself as much as what I was doing on Earth that I didn't neyman's card, mortgaged my pension accrual and bought a one-way ticket to Venus. Nothing strange about that. What every kid tells himself he's going to do, really. But I did it. I suppose all would have been different if I had had a chance at Real Money. If my father had been full governor instead of civil-service. If the dependency benefits had included Unlimited Medicare. If I had been at the top instead of in the middle, squeezed both ways. Reality ran otherwise, so I opted out by the pioneer route and wound up hunting Terry marks at the Spindle. Everybody has seen pictures of the Spindle, the Colosseum 'and Niagara Falls. Like everything worth looking at on Venus, the Spindle was a Heechee leftover. Nobody had ever figured out what the Heechee wanted with an underground chamber three hundred meters long and spindle-shaped, but it was there, so we used it. It was the closest thing Venus had to a Times Square or a Champs Elysees. All Terry tourists headed for it first. That was where we fleeced them. My airbody-rental business was and is reasonably legitimate if you ignore the fact that there really isn't much worth seeing on Venus that wasn't left there, below the surface, by the Heechee. The other tourists traps in the Spindle are reasonably crooked. Terries don't mind. They load up on Heechee prayer fans and doll heads and those paperweights of transparent plastic in which a contoured globe of Venus swims in a kind of orangebrown snowstorm of make-believe fly ash, blood-diamonds and firepearls. These items aren't worth the cost of their mass-charge back to Earth, but to a tourist who can get up the money or credit for his passage I don't suppose that matters. To people like me the tourist traps matter a lot. We live on them. I don't mean we draw our disposable income from them. I mean that they are how we make our bed and board, or we die. There aren't too many ways of earning IF money on Venus. The ones that might produce Real Money -- winning a lottery, striking it rich in the Heechee diggings, blundering into a well-paying job -- are all long shots. For bread and butter everybody on Venus depends on Terry tourists, and if we don't milk them dry we've had it. Of course, there are tourists and tourists. They come in three varieties. The difference among them is dictated by celestial mechanics. There's the quick-and-dirty kind. On Earth they're just well-todo. They come every twenty-six months with the Hohmann orbit, riding the minimum-energy circuit from Earth. Because of the critical times of a Hohmann orbit they never can stay more than three weeks on Venus. So they come on the guided tours, determined to get dollar minimum cabin fare their rich grandparents had given them for a graduation present or they had saved up for a second honeymoon or whatever. The bad thing about them was that they didn't have much money after paying the fare. The nice thing about them was that there were a lot of them. While they were on Venus all the rental rooms were filled. Sometimes six couples shared a single partitioned cubicle, two pairs at a time; hot-bedding eight-hour shifts around the clock. Then people like me would hole up in Heechee huts on the surface and rent out our own below-ground rooms and maybe make enough money to live a few months. But not enough to live until the next Hohmann-orbit time, so when the Class II tourists came along we cut each other's throats to get at them. They were medium-rich. What -- the ones whose annual income was barely in seven figures. They could afford to come in powered orbits, taking a hundred days or so for the run instead of using the long, slow Hohmann drift. The so there weren't nearly as many but they came every month or so at the times of reasonably favorable orbital conjunctions. And they had more money to spend. So did the other medium-rich ones who hit us four or five times in a decade, when the ballistics of the planets had sorted themselves out into a lowenergy configuration that allowed three planets to come into an orbit that didn't have much higher energy cost than the straight EarthVenus run. These last would hit us first, if we were lucky, then go on to Mars. If they ran the other way around we got the leavings. The leavings were never very much. But the very rich -- ah, the very rioh! They came as they liked, in orbital season or out. ing pad reported the Yuri Gagarin , under private charter, my money nose began to quiver. The arrival was out of season for everybody except the very rich -- the only question on my mind was how many of my competitors would be trying to cut my throat for the Gagarins passengers while I was cutting theirs. Airbody rental takes a lot more capital then opening a prayer-fan booth. I had been lucky -- I bought my airbody cheap when the fellow I worked for died. On Earth it might have been a steal, but on Venus the record was straight. I didn't have too many competitors and a couple of them were US for repairs, a couple more had kited off on Heechee diggings of their own. So, actually, I had the Gagarins passengers, whoever they were, pretty much to myself. Assuming they would be interested in taking a trip outside the Heechee tunnels. I had to assume they would be interested, because I needed the money very much. I had this little liver condition, you see. It was getting pretty close to total failure. As the doctors explained it to me I had three choices. I could go back to Earth and linger a while on external prosthesis or I could get up the money for a transplant. Or I could die. II T HE name of the fellow who had chartered the Gagarin was Boyce Cochenour. Age, apparently forty. Height, two meters. Ancestry, Irish-American French. He was used to command. I watched him come into the Spindle as though it belonged to him and he was getting ready to sell it. He sat down in Sub Vastra's imitation Paris Boulevard-Heechee sidewalk cafe. "Scotch," he said and Vastra hurried to pour John Begg over super-cooled ice and hand it to him, all crackling with cold and numbing to the lips. "Smoke," he said and the girl who was traveling with him instantly lit a cigarette and passed it to him. "Crummy-looking joint," he said and Vastra fell all over himself to agree. I sat down next to them -- well, not at the same table. I didn't even look at them. But I could hear what they said. Vastra didn't look at me either -- I had to let his numberthree wife take my order. Vastra wasn't going to waste any time on me with a charter-ship Terry at his table. "The usual," I said to her, meaning straight alcohol in a tumbler of soft drink. "And a copy of your briefing," I added more softly. Her eyes twinkled at me over her flirtation veil. Cute little vixen. I patted her hand in a friendly way and left a rolled-up bill in it. She left. The Terry was inspecting his surroundings, including me. I looked back at him politely but distantly and he gave me a sort of quarter-nod and turned back to Subhash Vastra. "Since I'm here," he said, "I might as well go along with whatever action there is. What's to do here?" Sub's wide grin gave him the charm of a tall, skinny frog. "Ah, whatever you wish, sah! Entertainment? In our private rooms we have the finest artists of three planets, nautch dancers, music, fine comedians -- " "We've got plenty of that in CinIF cinnati. I didn't come to Venus for a night-club act." He wouldn't have known it, of course, but he was making a good move. Sub's private rooms were well down the list of night spots on Venus, and the top of the list wasn't much. "Of course, sah! Then perhaps you would like to consider a tour?" "Aw." Cochenour shook his head. "What's the point? Does any of it look any different from the scene where we landed? And that's right over our heads?" Vastra hesitated. I could see him calculating second-order consequences, measuring his chances of selling the Terry on a surface tour against what he might get from me as commission. He didn't look my way. Honesty won out -- that is, honesty reinforced by a quick appraisal of Cochenour's gullibility. "Not much different, sah," he admitted. "At least for the next thousand kilometers in any direction. But I wasn't thinking of the surface." "What then?" "Ah, the Heechee warrens, sah! There are many miles of them just below this settlement. A guide could be found -- " "Not interested," Cochenour growled. "Not in anything that close." "Sah?" "If a guide can lead us through them," Cochenour explained, "they've all been explored. Which means they've been looted. What's the fun of that?" "Of course," said Vastra immediately. "I see what you're driving at, sah." He looked happier. I could feel his radar reaching out to make sure I was listening, though he didn't look in my direction at all. "To be sure," he said, "there is always the chance of finding new digs, sah, provided one knows where to look. Am I correct in assuming that this would interest you?" The third of Vastra's house brought me my drink and a thin powderfaxed slip of paper. "Thirty per cent," I whispered to her. "Tell Sub. Only no bargaining, no getting anybody else to bid -- " She nodded and winked. She had been listening, too, and she was as sure as I that this Terry was firmly on the hook. It had been my intention to nurse the drink as long as I could, but prosperity loomed before me. I was ready to celebrate. I took a long happy swallow. But the hook didn't have a barb. Unaccountably the Terry shrugged. "Waste of time, I bet," he grumbled. "I mean, really. If you knew where to look -- why wouldn't you have looked there already?"  "Ah, mister," cried Subhash Vastra, "but there are hundreds of tunnels not explored! Thousands! And in them, who knows? Treasures beyond price!" Cochenour shook his head. "Skip it," he said. "Bring us another drink. And see if you can't get the ice cold this time." down my drink and looked at the facsimile copy of Sub's report on them to see if it could tell me why Cochenour had lost interest. It couldn't. It did tell me a lot, though. The girl with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years. This was their first time off Earth. There was no indication that they were married or intended to marry. She was in her early twenties -- real age, not simulated by drugs ana transplants. Cochenour was well over ninety. He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. He moved lightly and easily for a big man. His money came from land and petrofoods -- according to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the fossil fuels to food production, growing algae in the crude that came out of his wells and selling the algae in processed form for human consumption. So he had and turned into something much bigger. And that accounted for the way he looked. He had been on Full Medical, with extras. The report said his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twenty-year-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles and fats -- not to mention his various glandular systems -- were sustained by hormones and cell-builders at what had to be a cost well over a thousand dollars a day. To judge by the way he stroked the girl sitting next to him, he was getting his money's worth. He looked and acted no more than forty at most -- except perhaps for the expression in his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary and disillusioned eyes. What a lovely mark! I swallowed the rest of my drink and nodded to the third for another. There had to be a way to get him to charter my airbody. All I had to do was some figuring. Outside the rail of Vastra's cafe, of course, half the Spindle was thinking exactly the same thoughts. This was the worst of the low season -- the Hohmann crowd was still three months in the future and all of us were beginning to run low on money. My liver transplant was just a Httle extra incentive. Of the hundred maze runners I could see out of the corner of my eye ninety-nine needed to cut in on this rich tourist's money as much as I did -- just to stay alive. We couldn't all do it. Two of us, three, maybe even a half-dozen could score enough to make a real difference. No more than that. And I had to be one of those few. I took a deep swallow of my second drink, tipped Vastra's third lavishly -- and conspicuously -- and turned idly until I was facing Cochenour and his woman dead on. The girl was talking with a knot of souvenir vendors, looking interested and uncertain. "Boyce?" she asked over her shoulder. "Yeah?" "What's this thing for?" He bent over the rail and peered. "Looks like a fan," he said. "Heechee prayer fan, right," cried the dealer. I knew him, Booker Allemang, an old-timer in the Spindle. "Found it myself, miss. It will grant your every wish. I get letters every day from people IF reporting miraculous results -- " "Sucker bait," grumbled Cochenour. "Buy it if you want." "But what does it do?" He laughed raucously. "What any fan does. It cools you off." And he looked at me, grinning. stood up and walked over to the table. "Welcome to Venus," I said. "May I help you?" The girl looked at Cochenour for approval before she said, "I thought this was very pretty # "Very pretty," I agreed. "Are you familiar with the story of the Heechees?" Cochenour pointed to a chair. I sat and went on. "They built these years ago. They lived here for a couple of centuries, give or take a lot. Then they went away again. They left a lot of junk behind and some stuff that isn't junk. Among the things they left are a lot of these fans. Some local conman like BeeGee here got the idea of calling them 'prayer fans' and selling them to tourists to make wishes with." Allemang had been hanging on my every word, trying to guess where I was going. "You know it's right," he said. "You two are too smart for that kind of come-on," I told the Terrans. "Still, look at the things. They're pretty enough to be worth having even without the story." "Absolutely!" cried Allemang. "See how this one sparkles, miss! And the black and gray crystal, how nice it looks with your fair hair!" The girl unfurled the crystalline one. It came rolled like a diploma, only cone-shaped. The slightest pressure of the thumb kept it open and it really was very pretty as she waved it gently. Like all the Heechee fans, it weighed only about ten grams, and its lattice caught the lights from the luminous Heechee walls and from the fluorescents and gas tubes and tossed them back in iridescent sparks. "This fellow's name is Booker Garey Allemang," I said. "He'll sell you the same goods as any of the others, but he won't cheat you as much as most of them." Cochenour looked at me dourly, then beckoned Sub Vastra for another round of drinks. "All right," he said. "If we buy we'll buy from you, Booker Garey Allemang. But not now." He turned to me. "And what do you want to sell me?" "Myself and my airbody, if you want to go looking for new tunnels. We're both as good as you can get." "How much?" immediately. "All found." He didn't answer at once, though it gave me come pleasure to notice that the price didn't seem to scare him. He looked as pleasant -- or anyway as unangrily bored as ever. "Drink up," he said as Vastra and his third served us. Cochenour gestured with his glass at the Spindle. "Know what this was for?" "You mean why the Heechees built it? No. They were pretty small, so it wasn't for headroom. And it was entirely empty when it was found." He gazed tolerantly at the busy scene, alcoves cut into the sloping sides of the Spindle featured eating and drinking places like Vastra's or souvenir booths, most of them empty at this idle season. But there were a couple of hundred maze rats around -- their number had been quietly growing all the while Cochenour and the girl had been sitting there. He said, "Not much to see here, huh? A hole in the ground and a lot of people trying to take my money away from me." I shrugged. He grinned again. "So why did I come? Well, that's a good question, but since you didn't ask it I don't have to answer it. You want a million dollars. Let's see. A hundred K to charter an airbody. A hundred and eighty or so to rent equipment, per week. Ten days minimum, three weeks a safer guess. Food, supplies, permits, another fifty K. So we're up to close to seven hundred thousand, not counting your own salary and what you give our host here as his cut for not throwing you off the premises. Right, Walt hers?" So he even knew my name. I had a little difficulty swallowing the drink I had been holding to my mouth, but I managed to say, "Close enough, Mr. Cochenour." I didn't see any point in telling him that I already owned the equipment as well as the airbody -- I wouldn't have been in the least surprised to find out that he knew that, too. "You've got a deal, then. And I want to leave as soon as possible, which sould be about this time tomorrow." "Fair enough," I said and stood up, avoiding Sub Vastra's thunderstricken expression. I had some work to do and a little thinking. He had caught me off base, which is a bad place to be unless you can afford mistakes. My having called him by name had been all right -- he would have known in any case that I had checked him out before the Gagarin had set down. But it was a little surprising that he had known mine. Ill T HE first thing I had to do was double-check my equipment. The second was to go to the local, validate a contract and settle up with Sub Vastra. The third was to see my doctor. The liver hadn't been giving me much trouble for a while, but then I hadn't been drinking grain alcohol for a while. It took about an hour to make sure that everything we would need for the expedition was i.s., with all the spare parts I could reasonably fear I might need. The Quackery was on my way to the union office, so I stopped there first. The checkout didn't take long. The news was no worse than I had been ready for. Dr. Morius studied the readout from his instruments carefully and sold me a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of guarded hope that I would survive three weeks away from his office, provided I took all the stuff he gave me and wandered no more, than usual from his dietary restrictions. "And when I get back?" I asked. "About the same, Audee," he said IF cheerily. "Total collapse in -- ah -- oh, maybe ninety more days." He patted his fingertips. "I hear you've got a live one. Want me to book you for a transplant?" "How live did you hear he was?" I asked. "Oh, the price is the same in any case," he told me good-humoredly. "Two hundred K, plus the hospital, anesthesiologist, pre-op psychiatrist, pharmaceuticals -- you've already got the figures." I did have them and knew that with what I might make from Cochenour, plus what I had put away, plus a small loan on the airbody, I could just about meet the total. To do so left me broke but, of course, alive. "Go ahead," I said. "Three weeks from tomorrow." And I left him looking mildly pleased, like a Burmese hydro-rice man watching another crop being harvested. Dear daddy. Why hadn't he sent me through medical school instead of giving me an education? Heechee had been the same size as human beings, instead of being about forty per cent shorter. In the smaller tunnels, like the one that led to the Local # office, I had to crouch all the way. The deputy organizer was waiting for me. He had one of the few good jobs that didn't depend on the tourists, at least not directly. He said, "Subhash Vastra's been on the line. He says you agreed to thirty per cent -- and besides, youforgot to pay your bar bill to the third of his house." "Admitted, both ways." "And you owe me a little, too, Audee. Three hundred for a powderfax copy of my report on your pigeon. A hundred for validating your contract with Vastra. And if you want guide's papers, sixteen hundred for that." I gave him my credit card and he checked the total out of my account into the local's. Then I signed and card-stamped the contract he had drawn up. Vastra's percentage dollar gross, but on my net -- even so, he might make as much out of the deal as I would, as least in liquid cash, because I'd have to pay off all the outstanding balances on equipment and loans. The factors would carry a man until he scored, but then they wanted to get paid. They knew how long it might be before he scored again. "Thanks, Audee," said the deputy, nodding over the signed contract. "Anything else I can do for you?" "Not at your prices," I told him. "Ah, you're putting me on. 'Boyce Cochenour and Dorotha Keefer, Earth-Ohio, traveling S. V. Yuri Gagarin , Odessa registry, chartered. No other passengers.' No other passengers," he repeated, quoting from the synoptic report he'd furnished. "Why, you'll be a rich man, Audee, if you work this pigeon right." "That's more than I ask," I told him. "All I want is to be a living  " one. That was not entirely true. I did have some little hope -- not much, not enough to talk about and, in fact, I had never said a word about it to anyone -- that I might be coming out of this rather better than merely alive. There was, however, a problem. In the standard guide's contract and airbody leasing terms it says I get my money and that's all. If we take a mark like Cochenour on a hunt for new Heechee tunnels and he finds something valuable -- marks have scored you know; not often, but enough times to keep them hopeful the prize is his. We just work for him. On the other hand, I could go out prospecting by myself at any time and anything I found would be all mine. Obviously anybody with any sense would go by himself if he thought he was really going to find anything. But in my case, that wasn't such a good idea. If I staked myself to a trip and lost I hadn't just wasted time and maybe fifty K in supplies and wear and tear. If I lost I was dead. I needed what I would make out of Cochenour to stay alive. Whether we found anything interesting or not, my fee would take care of the transplant. Unfortunately for my peace of mind I had a notion that I knew where something very interesting might be found -- and my problem was that as long as I had an allrights contract with Cochenour I couldn't afford to find it. T HE next stop I made was in my sleeping room. Under the bed, keystoned into the rock, was a guaranteed break-proof safe that held some papers I wanted to have in my pocket from then on. When I had first come down on Venus I had not been interested in the scenery. I had wanted to make my fortune. I didn't see much of the surface of Venus then -- or for nearly two years after that. You don't see much in the kind of spacecraft that can land on Venus -- a #you need something a little more rugged than the bubble ships that go to the Moon or Mars or farther out. There's not much tolerance in the design for putting unnecessary windows into the hull. It didn't matter much, because everything worth seeing on Venus is in Venus -- and all of it once belonged to the Heechees. Not that we know much about the Heechees. We don't even rightly know their name -- heechee is how somebody once wrote down the sound that a fire-pearl makes when you stroke it. That has remained the only sound connected with the Venusian diggers that anybody knows. The Hesperologists don't know where the Heechees came from, although there are some markings on scraps of stuff that the Heechees used for paper that seem to be a star chart, faded, incomplete, pretty much unrecognizable -- if we knew the exact position of every star in the galaxy # years ago we might be able to locate them from that, I suppose. Assuming they originated in this galaxy. There are no traces of them anywhere else in the solar system, IF except maybe in Phobos. Experts still fight about whether the honeycomb cells inside the Martian moon are natural or artifacts -- if they're artifacts they're, no doubt Heechee. But they don't look much like ours. I wonder sometimes what drove the Heechees. Had they escaped some dying planet? Or come to Venus as political refugees? Had they been tourists whose transportation had broken down between somewhere and somewhere and who had hung around on Venus just long enough to make whatever they had to make to get themselves going again? I used to think that maybe they had come by to watch human beings evolving on Earth, sort of stepfathers beaming over the growing young race -- but we couldn't have been much to watch during their stay in the neighborhood. halfway between the Australopithecines and the Cro-Magnards. They had packed up nearly everything upon leaving Venus, except for a few scraps here and there that either hadn't been worth taking along or had been overlooked. All those . "prayer fans" -- enough empty containers of one kind or another to look like a picnic ground at the end of a hard summer -- some trinkets and trifles. I guess the best known of the "trifles" was the anisokinetic punch, the carbon crystal that transmitted a blow at a ninetydegree angle and made somebody ever found is junk. Did they take all of the good stuff with them? I didn't know, but I did think I knew something that could have a bearing on the answer. I thought I knew where the last Heechee ship had taken off from -- and the spot wasn't near any of the explored diggings. The knowledge wasn't a guarantee of anything, but it was something to go on. Maybe they had been impatient at the end and not so thorough about cleaning up. behind themselves. And that was what my staying on Venus was all about. What other possible reason was there for my being here? The life of a maze rat was marginal at best. It took fifty thousand a year to stay alive. If you had less than that you couldn't pay air tax, capitation tax, water assessment or even buy subsistencelevel food. If you wanted to eat meat more than once a week and demanded a cubicle of your own to sleep in you needed more. Guide's papers cost a week's life -- when any of us bought them, we were gambling that week's cost of living against the chance of a big enough strike to make it possible for us to get back to Earth in the style every maze rat had set as his goal -- with money enough to live the full life of a human being on Full Medical. That was what I wanted. The big score. N OT by accident, the last thing I did that night was visit the Hall of Discoveries. The third of Vastra's house winked at me over her flirtation veil and turned to her companion, who looked around and nodded. I joined them. "Hello, Mr. Walthers," she said. "I thought I might find you here," I said, which was no more than the truth, since Vastra's third had promised to guide her this way. I didn't know what to call her. Miss Keefer would have been accurate, Mrs. Cochenour , diplomatic. I got around both by asking, "Since we'll be seeing a lot of each other, how about getting on to first names?" "Audee, is it?" I gave her a twelve-tooth smile. "Swede on my mother's side, old Texan on my father's. Name's been in his family a long time, I guess." The Hall of Discoveries was meant to get Terry prospects hotted up. It held a little of everything from charts of the worked diggings and a full-scale Mercator map of Venus to samples of all the principal finds. I showed her the copy of the anisokinetic punch and the original solid-state piezophone that had made its discoverer almost as permanently rich as the guy who found the punch. Also displayed were about a dozen fire-pearls, quarter-inch jobbies, behind armor glass, on cushions, blazing away with their cold milky light. "They're pretty," she said. "But why all the protection? I saw bigger ones lying on a counter in the Spindle without anybody even watching them." "That's a little different, Dorotha," I told her. "These are real." She laughed out loud. It was a very nice laugh. No girl is beautiful when she's laughing hard and girls who worry about looking beautiful don't do it. Dorotha Keefer looked like a healthy, pretty girl having a good time, which is about the best way for a pretty girl to look. She did not, however, look good enough to come between me and a new liver, so I took my mind off that aspect of her and put it on business. "The little red marbles over there are blood-diamonds," I told her. "They're radioactive and stay warm. Which is one way you can tell the real from the fake -- also anything over about three centimeters is a fake. A real one that big generates too much heat -- squarecube law, you know -- and melts." "So the ones your friend was trying to sell me -- " " -- are fakes. Right." She nodded, still smiling. "What about what you were trying to sell us, Audee? Real or fake?" The third of Vastra's house had discreetly vanished. Dorotha and I stood alone in the Hall of Discoveries. I took a deep breath and told her the truth. Not the whole truth, maybe -- but nothing but the truth. "All this stuff," I said, "is what came from a hundred years of digging. And it's not much. The punch, the piezophone and two or three other gadgets that we can make work, a few busted pieces of things that they're still studying, some trinkets. That's all." She said, "That was how I heard it. And one more thing. None of the discovery dates on these things is less than fifty years old." She was smart and better informed than I had expected. "And the conclusion," I agreed, "is that the planet has been mined dry. You're right -- on the evidence. The first diggers found everything there was to be found -- so far." IF "You think there's more?" "I hope there's more. Look. Item: the tunnels. You can see they're all alike. The blue walls are perfectly smooth. The light coming from them never varies. Their hardness is consistent. How do you suppose they were made?" "Why, I don't know." "Neither do I. Or anybody else. But every Heechee tunnel is the same and if you dig into any one of them from the outside you find the basic substrate rock, then a boundary layer that's sort of half wallstuff and half substrate, then the wall. Conclusion: the Heechees didn't dig the tunnels and then line them -- they had something that crawled around underground like an earthworm, leaving these tunnels behind. And one other thing -- they overdug. That's to say they dug tunnels they didn't need, lots of them, going nowhere, never used for anything. Does that suggest anything to you?" "The process must have been cheap and easy?" she guessed. I nodded. "So it was probably done by a machine -- and there really ought to be at least one of their machines left somewhere on this planet. Next item: the air. They breathed oxygen as we do and they must have gotten it from somewhere. Where?" "Why, there's oxygen in the atmosphere -- " "Sure. About a half of one per cent. And better than ninety-five per cent carbon dioxide. Somehow they managed to get that half of one per cent out of the mixture cheaply and easily -- remember those extra tunnels they filled -- along with enough nitrogen or some other inert gas to make a breathing mixture. If there's a machine that did it I'd like to find that machine. Next item: aircraft. The Heechee flew around the surface of Venus at will." "So do you, Audee. Aren't you a pilot?" "Sure, but look at what it takes. The surface temperature is twoseventy C and there's not enough oxygen to keep a cigarette going. So my airbody has two fuel tanks, one for hydrocarbons, one for oxidants. And -- did you ever hear of a fellow named Carnot?" "Old-time scientist, was he? The Carnot cycle?" "Right again." That was the third time she'd surprised me, I noted cautiously. "The Carnot efficiency of an engine is expressed by its maximum temperature -- the heat of combustion, let's say -- over the temperature of its exhaust. Well, but the temperature of the exhaust can't be less than the temperature of what it flows into -- otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refrigerator. And you've got that two-seventy ambient air temperature -- so you have basically a lousy engine. Any heat engine on Venus is lousy. Did you ever wonder why there are so few airbodies around? I don't mind -- it helps to have something close to a monopoly. But the reason is they're so damn expensive to run." "And the Heechees flew more efficiently?" "I think they did." She laughed again, unexpectedly and once more very attractively. "Why, you poor fellow," she said in good humor. "You're hooked on the stuff you sell, aren't you? You think that some day you're going to find the mother tunnel and pick up all this stuff." I wasn't too pleased with the way things were going. I had arranged with Vastra's third to bring the girl here, away from her boy friend, so I could pick her brains in private. It hadn't worked out my way. She was making me aware of her as a person, which was a bad development in itself. But even worse, she was making me take a good look at myself. I said after a minute, "You may be right. But I'm sure going to give it a good try." "You're angry, aren't you?" "No," I said, lying. "But maybe a little tired. And we've got a long trip tomorrow, so I'd better take you home. Miss Keefer." IV spacepad. It was reached by elevator to the surface lock, a tractor-cab to carry us across the dry, tortured surface of Venus, peeling under the three hundred kmh wind. Normally I kept the ship under a foam housing. You don't leave anything free and exposed on the surface of Venus if you want to keep it intact, not even if it's made of chrom steel. I had had the foam stripped free when I checked out the machine and loaded supplies that morning. Now it was ready. I could see it from the bull's-eye ports of the crawler, through the green-yellow murk outside. Cochenour and the girl could have seen it, too, if they had known where to look, but they might not have recognized it. Cochenour screamed in my ear, "You and Dorrie have a fight?" "No fight," I screamed back. "Don't care if you did. You don't have to like each other, just do what I want you to do." He was silent a moment, resting his throat. "Jesus. What a wind." "Zephyr," I told him. I didn't say any more -- he would find out for himself. Around the spacepad is a sort of natural calm area -- by Venusian standards. Orographic lift throws the meanest winds up over the pad and all we get is a sort of confused back eddy. The good part is that taking off and landing are relatively easy. The bad part is that some of the heavy metal compounds in the atmosphere settle on the pad... What passes for air on Venus has layers of red mercuric sulfide and mercurous chloride in the lower reaches, and when you get above them to those pretty fluffy clouds you find some of them are hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid. Navigation over Venus is #-D. It's easy enough to proceed from point to point; your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously onto the charts. What's hard is to find the right altitude -- and that was why my airbody and I were Cochenour. We were at the airbody, and the IF telescoping snout from the crawler was poking out to its lock. Cochenour was staring through the bull's-eye. "No wings?" he shouted, as though I were cheating him. "No sails or snow chains either," I shouted back. "Get aboard if you want to talk. It's easier in the airbody." We climbed through the little snout. I unlocked the entrance and we got aboard without much trouble. We didn't even have the kind of trouble that I might have made. You see, an airbody is a big thing on Venus. I was damn lucky to have been able to acquire one and -- well, I won't beat about the bush: you could say I loved it. Mine could have held ten people, without equipment. With what Sub Vastra's purchasing department had sold us and Local # had certified as essential aboard, it was crowded with just the three of us. I was prepared for sarcasm, at least. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it and declared it his. The girl was a good sport and there I was, left with my glands all charged up for an argument and no argument. It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the wind right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed out earplugs and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying. "Sit down and strap up," I ordered and when they were stowed away I took off. wings aren't just useless -- they're poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed built into the seashellshaped hull. I fed the double fuels into the thermojets -- we bounced across the reasonably flat ground around the spacepad (it was bulldozed once a week) and we were zooming off into the wild yellowgreen yonder, an instant later the wild brown-gray yonder, after a run of no more than fifty meters. Cochenour had fastened his harness loosely for comfort. I enjoyed hearing him yell as he was thrown about. That fun didn't last. At the thousand-meter level I found Venus's semi-permanent atmosheric inversion, and the turbulence dropped to where I could take off my belt and stand. I took the plugs out of my ears and motioned to Cochenour and the girl to do the same. He was grinning a little and rubbing his head where he'd bounced into an overhead chart rack. "Pretty exciting," he conceded, fumbling in his pocket. Then . he remembered to ask. "Is it all right if I smoke?" "They're your lungs." He grinned more widely. "They are now," he agreed and lit up. "Say. Why didn't you give us those plugs while we were in the tractor?" tide in the affairs of guides -- they can ride it or be swamped. I could either let my tourists flood me with questions and spend the whole time explaining what that funny little dial means or I could go on to do my work and enjoy as much as I could. It had come to this: was I or was I not going to like Cochenour and his girl friend? For the three of us to live for three weeks in a space about as big as an apartment kitchenette meant everybody would have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else -- and since I was the one who was being paid to be nice I should be the one to set an example. On the other hand, the Cochenours of the worlds are sometimes just not likeable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better -- I ought to slide off questions like that with something like, I forgot . But he hadn't actually been unpleasant and the girl friend had tried to be friendly. I said, "Well, that's an interesting thing. You see, you hear by differences in pressure. While we were taking off, the plugs filtered out part of the sound -- the pressure waves -- but when I yelled at you to belt up the plugs passed the overpressure of my voice and you understood it. However, there's a limit. Past about a hundred and twenty decibels -- that's a unit of sound -- " Cochenour growled, "I know what a decibel is." "Right. Past a hundred and twenty the eardrum just doesn't respond any more. So in the crawler it was too loud -- with the plugs on you wouldn't have heard anything." Dorotha had been listening while she repaired her eye makeup. "What was to hear?" "Oh," I said, "nothing, really. Except, well -- " Then I voted to think of them as friends, at least for the time being. "Except in the case of an accident. If we'd had a gust, you know, that crawler could have flipped right over. Or sometimes solid objects come flying over the hills and into you before you know it. Or -- " She was shaking her head. "I understand. Lovely place we're visiting, Boyce." "Yeah. Look," he said, "who's flying this thing?" I got up and activated the virtual globe. "That's what I was just coming to. Right now it's on autopilot, heading in the general direction of this quadrant down here. We have to pick out a specific destination." "That's Venus?" the girl asked. "It doesn't look like much." "Those lines are radio-range markers -- you won't see them through the window. Venus doesn't have any oceans and it isn't cut up into nations, so a map of it isn't like Earth's. That bright spot is us. Now look." I overlaid the radiorange grid and the contour colors with mascon markings. "Those blobby circles are mascons. You know what a mascon is?" "A concentration of mass. A lump of heavy stuff," offered the girl. "Fine. Now look at the known Heechee digs." I phased them in as golden patterns. "They're all in the mascons," Dorothea said at once. Cochenour gave her a look of tolerant approval. "Not all. Look over here -- this little one isn't, nor is this one. But damn near all. Why? I don't know. IF Nobody knows. The mass concentrations are mostly older, denser rock -- basalt and so on. Maybe the Heechee found it easier to dig in. Or maybe they just liked it." In my correspondence with Professor Hegramet back on Earth -- in the days when I didn't have a dying liver in my gut and took an interest in abstract knowledge -- he and I had kicked around the possibility that the Heechee digging machines would only work in dense rock or rock of a certain chemical composition. But I wasn't prepared to discuss that with Cochenour. "See over here, where we are now -- " I rotated the virtual globe slightly by turning a dial -- "that's the big dig we just came out of. You can see the shape of the Spindle. It's a common shape, by the way. You can see it in some of the others if you look -- and there are digs where it doesn' show on these tracings but it's there if you're on the spot. That particular mascon where the Spindle lies is called Serendip. It was discovered by accident by a Hesperological -- " "Hesperological?" " -- a geological team operating on Venus, which makes it a Hesperological team. They were drilling out core samples and hit the Heechee digs. Now these other digs in the northern high-latitudes you see are all in one bunch of associated mascons. They connect through interventions of less dense rock, but only where absolutely necessary." Cochenour said sharply, "They're north and we're going south. Why?" It was interesting that he could read the navigation instruments, but I didn't say so. I only said, "They're no good. They've been probed." "They look even bigger than the Spindle." "Hell of a lot bigger, right. But there's nothing much in them, or anyway not much chance that anything in them is in good enough shape to bother with. Subsurface fluids filled them up a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more. A lot of good men have gone broke trying to pump and excavate them without finding anything. Ask me. I was one of them." "I didn't know there was any liquid water on Venus or under it," Cochenour objected. "I didn't say water, did I? But as a matter of fact some of it was water -- or anyway a sort of oozy mud. Apparently water cooks out of the rocks and has a transit time to the surface of some thousands of years before it seeps out, boils off and cracks to hydrogen and oxygen and gets lost. In case you didn't know it, there's some under the Spindle. It's what you wefe drinking and what you were breathing." The girl said, "Boyce this is all very interesting, but I'm hot and dirty. Can I change the subject for a minute?" Cochenour barked -- it wasn't really a laugh. "Subliminal prompting, Walthers, you agree? And a little old-fashioned prudery, too, I expect. What she really wants to do is go to the bathroom." Given a little encouragement from the girl, I would have been mildly embarrassed for her, but she only said, "If we're going to live in this thing for three weeks I'd like to know what it offers." I said, "Certainly, Dorotha." "Dorrie, if you like it better." "Sure, Dorrie. Well, you see what we've got. Five bunks -- they partition to sleep ten if wanted, but we don't want. Two shower stalls. They don't look big enough to soap yourself in, but they are if you work at it. Three chemical toilets. Kitchen over there -- well. Pick the bunk you like, Dorrie. There's a screen arrangement that comes down when you want it for changing clothes and so on -- or just if you don't want to look at the rest of us for a while." Cochenour said, "Go on, Dorrie, do what you want to do. I want Walthers to show me how to fly this thing." had some traumatic times with parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples who fought every waking minute and got together only to hassle me. This one didn't look bad at all, even apart from the fact that it was going to save my life for me. There's not much to flying an airbody, at least as far as making it move the way you want it to is concerned. On Venus the atmosphere has lift to spare. You don't worry about things like stalling out -- and anyway the autonomic controls do most of your thinking for you. Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved on Earth and had also operated one-man submersibles. He understood as soon as I mentioned it to him that the hard part of pilotage was selecting the right flying level and anticipating when you'd have to change it, but he also understood that he wasn't going to learn that in one day. Or even in three weeks. "What the hell, Walthers," he said cheerfully enough. "At least I can make it go where I have to, in case you get caught in a tunnel or shot by a jealous husband." I gave him the smile his pleasantry was worth, which wasn't much. "The other thing I can do," he said, "is cook. Unless you're really good at it? No, I thought not. Well, I paid too much for this stomach to fill it with hash, so I'll make the meals. That's a little skill Dorrie never got around to learning. Same with her grandmother. Most beautiful woman in the world, but had the idea that was all there was to it." I put that aside to sort out later. He was full of little unexpected things, this ninety-year-old young athlete. He said, "All right, now while Dorrie's using up all the water in the shower -- " "Not to worry -- it all recycles." "Anyway. While she's cleaning up, finish your little lecture on where we're going." "Right." I spun the virtual globe a little. The bright spot that was us had already moved a dozen degrees. "See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks?" IF "Yeah. Five big mascons close together and no diggings indicated. Is that where we're going?" "In a general sense, yes." "Why in a general sense?" "Well," I said, "there's one little thing I didn't tell you. I'm assuming you won't jump salty over it, because then I'll have to get salty, too, and tell you you should have taken the trouble to learn more about Venus before you decided to explore it." He studied me appraisingly for a moment. Dorrie came quietly out of the shower in a long robe, her hair in a towel, and stood near him, watching. "It depends on what you didn't tell me," he said. "There's a no-trespassing sign on most of those mascons," I said. I activated the pilotage chart overlay and bright, cherry-red warning lines sprang up all around the cluster. "That's the south polar security area," I said. "That's where the Defense boys keep the missile range and the biggest part of their weapons development areas. And we're not allowed to enter." He said harshly, "But there's only a little piece of one mascon that isn't off limits." "And that's where we're going," I said. V F OR a man more than ninety years old Boyce Cochenour was spry. I don't mean just healthy looking. Full Medical will do a lot for you -- you simply replace whatever wears out or begins to look shopworn and tatty. You cannot, however, very well replace the' brain, so what you usually see in the very rich old ones is a bronzed, strong body that shakes and hesitates and drops things and stumbles. About that Cochenour had been very lucky. He was going to be wearing company for three weeks. He had insisted I show him how to pilot the airbody. When I decided to use a little flight time to give the cooling system a somewhat premature thousand-hour check, he helped me pull the covers, check the refrigerant levels and clean the filters. Then he decided to cook us lunch. The girl took over as my helper while I restowed some of the supplies to get out the autosonic probes. At the steady noise level of the inside of an airbody our normal conversational voices wouldn't carry to Cochenour, less than three meters away, and I thought of pumping her about him. I decided against it. What I didn't know bothered only my curiosity. I already knew he was paying me the price of a new liver. I didn't need to know what he and the girl thought about when they thought about each other. So our conversation was along the lines of how the probes would fire charges and time the echoes and what the chances were of finding something really good ("Well, what are the chances of winning a sweepstakes? Bad for any individual who buys a ticket -- but there's always one winner somewhere -- ") and what had made me come to Venus in the first place. I mentioned my father's name, but she had never heard of him. Too young, for one thing, no doubt. And she was bom and bred in Southern Ohio, where Cochenour had worked as a kid and where he had returned as a a new processing center there and it had been a lot of headaches -- trouble with the unions, trouble with the banks, trouble, bad trouble, with the government -- so he had decided to take a few months off and loaf. I looked over to where he was stirring up a sauce and said, "He loafs harder than anybody else I ever saw." "He's a work addict. I imagine that's how he got rich in the first place -- " The airbody lurched and I dropped everything to jump for the controls. I heard Cochenour howl behind me, but I was busy locating the right transit level. By the time I had climbed a thousand meters and reset the autopilot he was rubbing his wrist and glowering at me. "Sorry," I said. He said dourly, "I don't mind your scalding the skin off my arm -- I can always buy more skin -- but you nearly made me spill the gravy." I checked the virtual globe. The bright marker was two-thirds of the way to our destination. "Is it about ready?" I asked. "We'll be there in an hour?" For the first time he looked startled. "So soon? I thought you said this thing was subsonic." "I did. You're on Venus, Mr. Cochenour. At this level the speed of sound is maybe five thousand kilometers an hour." He looked thoughtful, but all he said was, "Well, we can eat any minute." Later, while we were finishing up, he said, "I think maybe I don't know as much about this planet as I might. If you want to give us the usual guide's lecture, we'll listen." I said, "Well, you pretty much know the outlines. Say, you're a great cook, Mr. Cochenour. I packed all these provisions, but I don't even know what I'm eating." "If you come to my office in Cincinatti," he said, "you can ask for Mr. Cochenour, but while we're living in each other's armpits you might as well call me Boyce. And if you like it, why aren't you eating it?" The answer was: Because it might kill me... but I didn't want to get into a discussion that might lead to why I needed his fee so badly. I said, "Doctor's orders -- have to lay off the fats pretty, much for a while. I think he thinks I'm putting on too much weight." Cochenour looked at me appraisingly, but only said, "The lecture?" "Well, let's start with the most important part," I said, carefully pouring coffee, "While we're in the airbody you can do what you like, walk around, eat, drink, smoke if you got 'em, whatever. The' cooling system is built for more than three times as many people, plus their cooking and appliance loads, with a safety IF factor of two. Air and water, more than we'd need for two months. Fuel, enough for three round trips and some maneuvering. If anything went wrong we'd yell for help and somebody would come and get us in a couple of hours at most -- probably the Defense boys and they have supersonic bodies. The worst thing would be if the hull breached and the whole Venusian atmosphere tried to come in. If it happened fast we'd be dead. It never happens fast, though. We'd have time to get into suits and we can live in them for thirty hours. Long before that we'd be picked up." "Assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong with the radio at the same time," said Cochenour. "Right. You can get killed anywhere if enough accidents happen at once." He poured himself another cup of coffee, tipped a little brandy into it and said, "Go on." "Well, outside the airbody it's a little more tricky. You've only got the suit and its useful life, as I say, is only thirty hours. It's a question of refrigeration. You can carry all the air and water you want, and you don't have to worry about food, but it takes a lot of compact energy to get rid of the diffuse energy all around you. It takes fuel for the cooling systems and when that's gone you'd better be back in the airbody. Heat isn't the worst way to die. You pass out before you begin to hurt. But the end result is you're dead. "The other thing is -- you want to check your suit every time you put it on. Pressure it up and watch the gauge for leaks. Fll check it too, but don't rely on me. It's your life. And the faceplates are pretty strong -- you can drive nails with them without breaking them -- but they can be broken if hit hard enough. That way you're dead, too." Dorrie said quietly, "One question. Have you ever lost a tourist?" "No." But then I added: "Others have. Five or six get killed every year." "I don't mind odds like that," said Cochenour. "Actually that wasn't the lecture I was asking for, Audee. I certainly want to hear how to stay alive, but I assume you would have told us all this before we left the ship anyway. What I really wanted to know was how come you picked this particular mascon to prospect." This old geezer with the musclebeach body was beginning to bother me. He had a disturbing habit of asking the questions I didn't want to answer. There was a reason why I had picked this site -- it had to do with about Five years of study, a lot of digging and about a quarter correspondence, at space-mail rates, with people like Professor Hegramet back on Earth. But I didn't want to tell him all of my reasons. There were about a dozen sites that I really wanted to explore. If this happened to be one of the payoff places he would come out of it richer than I would -- the contracts specify # to the charterer, # to the guide, the rest to the government -- and that should be enough for him. If it happened not to pay off, I didn't want him taking some other guide to one of the others I had marked. So I only said, "Call it an informed guess. I promised you a good shot at a tunnel that's never been opened and I hope to keep my promise. And now let's get the food put away. We're within ten minutes of where we're going." down and ourselves belted up, we dropped out of the relatively calm layers into the big winds again. We were over the big southcentral massif, about the same elevation as the lands surrounding the Spindle. That's the elevation where most of the action is on Venus. Down in the lowlands and the deep rift valleys the pressures My airbody wouldn't take any of that for very long and neither would anybody else's, except for a few of the special research and military types. Fortunately the Heechee hadn't cared for the lowlands either. Nothing of theirs has ever been located much below twentybar. Doesn't mean it isn't there, of course. Anyway, I verified our position on the virtual globe and on the detail charts and deployed the autosonic probes. The winds threw them all over the place as soon as they dropped free. It didn't much matter where they went, within broad limits, which was a good thing. They dropped like javelins at first, then flew around like straws until the little rockets cut in and the ground-seeking controls fired them to the ground. Every one embedded itself properly. It was a good start. I checked the position of the probes on the detail charts -- the formation was close enough to an equilateral triangle, which was about how we wanted them. Then I opened the scanning range and began circling around. "Now what?" bellowed Cochenour. I noticed the girl had put the earplugs back on, but he wasn't "Now we wait for the probes to feel around for Heechee tunnels. It'll take a couple of hours." While I was talking I brought the airbody down through the surface layers. Now we were being thrown around. The buffeting got pretty bad and so did the noise. But I found what I was looking for -- a surface formation like a blind arroyo -- and tuckeo us into it with only one or two bad moments. Cochenour was watching carefully and I grinned to myself. This was where pilotage counted, not en route or at the prepared pads around the Spindle. Our position looked all right, so I fired four hold-downs, tethered stakes with explosive heads that opened out in the ground. I winched them tight and all of them held. That was also a good sign. Reasonably pleased with myself, I opened the belt catches and stood up. "We're here for. at least a day or two," I said. "More if we're lucky. How did you like the ride?" IF The girl was taking out the earplugs now that the protecting walls of the arroyo had cut the thundering down to a mere constant scream. "I'm glad I don't get airsick," she said. Cochenour was thinking, not talking. He was studying the control board while he lit another cigarette. Dorotha said, "One question, Audee. Why couldn't we stay up where it's quieter?" "Fuel. I carry about thirty hours, full thrust, but that's it. Is the noise bothering you." She made a face. "You'll get used to it. It's like living next to a spaceport. At first you wonder how anybody stands the noise for a single hour. After you've been there a week you miss it if it stops." She moved over to the bull's-eye and gazed pensively out at the landscape. We'd crossed into the night portion and there wasn't much to see but dust and small objects whirling through our external light beams. "It's that first week that I'm worrying about," she said. I flicked on the probe readout. The little percussive heads were firing their slap-charges and measuring each other's sounds, but it was too early to see anything. The screen was barely beginning to build up a shadowy pattern, more holes than detail. Cochenour finally spoke. "How long until you can make some sense out of that?" Another point: he didn't ask what "that" was. "Depends on how close and how big anything is. You can make a guess in an hour or so, but I like all the data I can get. Six or eight hours, I'd say. There's no hurry." He growled, "I'm in a hurry, Walthers. Keep that in mind." The girl cut in. "What should we do, Audee? Play three-handed bridge?" "Whatever you want, but I'd advise some sleep. I've got pills if you want them. If we do find anything -- and remember, if we hit on the first try it's just hundred-to-one luck -- we'll want to be wide awake for a while." "All right," said Dorotha, reaching out for the spansules, but Cochenour demanded: "What about you?" "Pretty soon. I'm waiting for something." He didn't ask what. Probably, I thought, because he already knew. I decided that when I did hit my bunk I wouldn't take a sleepy pill right away. This Cochenour was not only the richest tourist I had ever guided, he was one of the best informed. I wanted to think about that for a while. almost an hour to come. The boys were getting a little sloppy -- they should have been after us before this. The radio buzzed and then blared: "Unidentified vessel at one three Five, zero seven, four eight and seven two, five one, five four. Please identify yourself and state your purpose." Cochenour looked up inquiringly from his gin game with the girl. I smiled reassuringly. "As long as they're saying 'please' there's no problem," I told him and opened the transmitter. "This is Pilot Audee Walthers, airbody Poppa Tare Nine One, out of the Spindle. We are licensed and have filed approved flight plans. I have two Terry tourists aboard -- purpose, recreational exploration." "Acknowledge. Please wait," blared the radio. The military always broadcasts at maximum gain. Hangover from drillsergeant days, no doubt. I turned off the microphone and told my passengers, "They're checking our flight plan. Nothing to worry about." In a moment the Defense communicator came back, loud as ever. "You are eleven point four kilometers bearing one eight three degrees from terminator of a restricted area. Proceed with caution. Under Military Regulations One Seven and One Eight, Sections -- " I cut in, "I know the drill. I have my guide's license and have explained the restrictions to the passengers." "Acknowledged," blared the radio. "We will keep you under surveillance. If you observe vessels or parties on the surface they are our perimeter teams. Do not interfere with them in any way. Respond at once to any request for identification or information." The carrier buzz cut off. Cochenour said, "They act nervous." "No. They're used to seeing us around. They've got nothing else to do, that's all." Dorrie said hesitantly, "Audee, you told them you'd explained the restrictions to us. I don't remember that part." "Oh, I explained them all right. We stay out of the restricted area, because if we don't they'll start shooting. That is the Whole of the Law." IV and the others heard me moving around and got up, too. Dorrie fetched us coffee from the warmer and we stood drinking it and looking at the patterns the computer had traced. I took several minutes to study them, although they were clear enough at first look. There were eight major anomalies that could have been Heechee warrens. One was almost right outside our door. We wouldn't even have to move the airbody to dig for it. I showed them the anomalies, one by one. Cochenour just looked at them thoughtfully. Dorotha asked after a moment, "You mean all of these are unexplored tunnels?" "No. Wish they were. But one, any or all of them could have been explored by someone who didn't go to the trouble of recording it. Two, they don't have to be tunnels. They might be fracture faults or dikes or little rivers of some kind of molten material that ran out of somewhere and hardened and got IF Kings: I # mg. "tar", I .# mg. nicotine, #'s: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine King size or Deluxe lOO's. Mild, smooth taste Micronite filter. For all the right reasons. Americas cigarette ago. The only thing we know for sure so far is that there probably aren't any unexplored tunnels in this area except in those eight places." "So what do we do?" "We dig. And then we see what we've got." Cochenour said, "Where do we dig?" I pointed right next to the bright delta of our airbody. "Right here." "Because it's the best bet?" "Well, not necessarily." I considered what to tell him and decided the truth was the best. "There are three that look like better bets than the others -- here, I'll mark them." I keyed the chart controls and the best looking traces immediately displayed letters A, B and C. "I runs right under the arroyo here, so we'll dig it first." "Those three because they're the brightest?" I nodded, somewhat annoyed at his quickness, although the conclusion was obvious enough. "But C over here is the brightest of the lot. Why don't we dig that first?" I chose my words carefully. "Because we would have to move the airbody -- and because it's on the outside perimeter of the survey area. That means the results aren't as reliable as they are for this one right under us. But those aren't the most important reasons. The most important reason is that C is on the edge of the line our itchy-fingered friends are telling us to stay away from." Cochenour laughed incredulously. "You mean you're telling me that if you find a real untouched Heechee tunnel you'll stay out of it just because some soldier tells you it's a no-no?" I said, "The problem doesn't arise just yet -- we have seven anomalies to look at that are legal. Also the military will be checking us from time to time, particularly in the next day or two." Cochenour insisted, "All right, suppose we check them and find nothing. What do we do then?" I shook my head. "I never borrow trouble. Let's check the legal ones." "But suppose." "Damn it, Boyce! How do I know?" He gave it up then, but winked at Dorrie and chuckled. "What did I tell you, honey? He's a bigger bandit than I am." F OR the next couple of hours we didn't have much time to talk about theoretical possibilities. We were too busy with concrete facts. The biggest fact was an awful lot of hot, high-speed gas that we own hotsuit was custom made, of course, and only needed the fittings and tanks to be checked. Boyce and the girl had rental units. They'd paid top dollar for them and they were good, but good isn't perfect. I had them in and out of them a dozen times, checking the fit and varying tensions until they were as right as I could get them. There's a lot of heat and pressure to keep out when you go about the surface of Venus. The suits were laminated twelve-ply, with nine degrees of freedom at the essential joints. They wouldn't fail -- that wasn't what I was worried about. What I was worried about was comfort, because a small itch or rub can become serious when there's no way to stop it. But finally they were good enough for a first trial and we all huddled in the lock and exited onto the surface of Venus. We were still darkside, but there was so much scatter from the sun that it didn't get really dark more than a quarter of the time. I let them practice walking around the airbody, leaning into the wind, bracing themselves against the hold-downs and the side of the ship, while I got ready to dig. I hauled out our first instant igloo, dragged it into position and ignited it. As it smoldered it puffed up like the children's toy that used to be called a Pharaohs' Serpent, producing a light, tough ash that grew up around the digging site and joined in a seamless dome at the top. I had already emplaced the digging torch and the crawlthrough lock. As the ash grew I manhandled the lock to get a close union and got a perfect join first time. Dorrie and Cochenour stayed out of the way when they caught sight of my waving arm, but hung together, watching through their triple vision plugs. I keyed on the radio. "You want to come in and watch as we start it up?" I shouted. Inside the helmets they both nodded. "Come on, then," I yelled and wiggled through the crawl lock. I signaled them to leave it open as they followed me in. With the three of us and the digging equipment in it the igloo was even more crowded than the airbody. They backed away as far as they could get, bent against the, arc of the igloo wall, while I started up the augers, checked that they were vertical and watched the first castings spiral out. The foam igloo absorbs more sound than it reflects. Even so, the din inside the igloo was a lot worse than in the howling winds outside. When I thought they had seen enough to satisfy them for the moment, I waved them out of the crawl-through, followed, sealed it behind us and led them back into the airbody. "So far so good," I said, twisting off the helmet and loosening the suit. "We've got about forty meters to go, I think. Might as well wait in here as out there." "How long is that?" "Maybe an hour. You can do what you like. What I'm going to do is take a shower. Then we'll see how far we've gotten." That was one of the nice things about having only three people aboard -- we didn't have to worry about water discipline very much. It's astonishing how a quick wetdown revives you after you've come out of a hotsuit. When I had finished with mine I felt ready for anything. I was even prepared to eat some of Boyce Cochenour' s gourmet cookery, but fortunately it wasn't IF necessary. The girl had taken over the kitchen and what she laid out was simple, light and reasonably non-toxic. On cooking like hers, I figured, I might be able to survive long enough to collect my charter fee. It crossed my mind for a moment to wonder what made her do it and then I thought, of course, she'd had a lot of practice. With all the spare parts in Cochenour no doubt he had dietary problems far worse than mine. Well, not worse, exactly, in one sense. I didn't think he was quite as likely to die of them. ii probes the highest point of tunnel A was close to tne little blind valley in which I had tied down. That was lucky. It meant that we might possibly be right over the Heechee's own entrance. Not that we would be able to use it as the Heechee had used it. There wasn't much chance that its mechanisms would have survived a quarter of that time to surface wind, ablation and chemical corrosion. The good part was that if the tunnel had surfaced here it would be relatively easy to bore down to it. Even a produce really hard rock, especially without surface water to dissolve out solids and produce compact sediments. out pretty much the way I had hoped. What was on the surface was little more than ashy sand and the augers chewed it out very rapidly. Too rapidly -- when I went back into the igloo it was filled almost solid with castings and I had a devil of a job getting to the machines to switch the auger over to pumping the castings out through the crawl lock. T Mis was a dull, dirty part of the job, but it didn't take long. I didn't bother to go back into the airbody. I reported what was happening over the radio to Boyce and the girl, who were staring through the ports at me. I told them I thought we were getting close. But I didn't tell them exactly how close. Actually we were only a meter or two from the indicated depth of the anomaly, so close that I didn't bother to pump out all of the castings. I just made enough room to maneuver around, then redirected the augers. And in five minutes the castings were beginning to come up with the pale blue glimmer that was the sign of a Heechee tunnel. mitter and shouted: "Boyce, Dorrie -- we've hit a tunnel." Either they had been sitting around in their suits or they dressed faster than any maze rat. I unsealed the crawl-through and wiggled out to help them, but they were already coming out of the airbody, staggering against the wind over to me. They were both yelling questions and congratulations, but I stopped them. "Inside," I ordered. "See for yourself." As a matter of fact, they didn't have to go that far. They could see the color as soon as they kneeled to enter the crawl-through. I followed and sealed the lock behind me. The reason was simple enough. As long as the tunnel wasn't breached, it didn't matter about the lock seal. But the interior of a Heechee tunnel that has remained inviolate is at a pressure only slightly above Earthnormal. Without the sealed dome, the minute we cracked the casing we would let the whole #in, heat and ablation and all. If the tunnel were empty or if what was in it were simple, sturdy stuff, no damage might be done. But if we had hit the jackpot we could have destroyed in a halfsecond what had waited a quarterWe gathered around the shaft and I pointed down. The auger had left a clean shaft, about seventy centimeters by a little over a hundred, with rounded ends. At the bottom you could see the cold blue glow of the outside of the tunnel, only pocked and blotched by the loose castings I hadn't bothered to get out. "Now what?" demanded Boyce. His voice was hoarse with excitement, which was, I guessed, natural enough. "Now we burn our way in." I backed my clients away as far as they could get, pressed against the remaining heap of castings and unlimbered the firejets. I had already hung sheerlegs over the shaft and they went right down on their cable with no trouble until they were a few centimeters above the round of the tunnel. Then I fired them up. You wouldn't think that anything a human being might do would change the temperature of the surface of Venus, but those firedrills were something special. In the small space of the igloo the heat flamed up and around us and our hotsuit cooling systems were overloaded in seconds. Dorrie gasped, "Oh! I -- I think I'm going to -- " Cochenour grabbed her. "Faint if you want to," he said fiercely, "but don't get sick. Walthers! How long does this go on?" It was as hard for me as it was for them. Practice doesn't get you used to standing in front of a blast furnace with the doors off the hinges. "Maybe a minute," I gasped. "Hold on -- it's all right." It actually took a little more than that, maybe ninety seconds -- my suit telltales were shouting alarm for more than half of the time. But the systems were built for these overloads and as long as we didn't cook, the suits wouldn't take any permanent harm. Then we were through. A halfmeter circular section sagged, fell at one side and hung there. I turned off the firejets and we all breathed hard for a couple of minutes while the suit coolers gradually caught up with the load. "Wow," said Dorotha. "That was pretty rough." I looked at Cochenour. In the light that splashed up out of the shaft I could see he was frowning. I didn't say anything. I just gave the jets another five-second burn to cut away the rest of the circular section. It fell free into the tunnel. We could hear it clatter against the floor. Then I turned on my helmet radio. "There's no pressure differential," I said. The frown didn't change, nor did he speak. "Which means this one has been breached," I went on. "Let's go back to the airbody and take a break before we do anything else." Dorotha shrieked, "Audee! What's the matter with you? I want to go down there and see what's inside!" Cochenour said bitterly, "Shut up, Dorrie. Don't you hear what he's saying? This one's a dud." that a breached tunnel opened to a seismological invasion, not to a maze rat with a cutting torch. If so there might be something worthwhile in it anyway. I didn't have the heart to kill all Dorotha's enthusiasm with one blow. So we did swing down the cable, one by one, into the Heechee dig and look around. It was wholly bare, as most of them are, as far as we could see. That wasn't actually very far, for the other thing wrong with a breached tunnel is that you need pretty good equipment to explore it. After the overloads our suits were all right for a couple hours but not much more and when we had tramped about a half-mile down the tunnel without finding tramp back and return to the airbody. We cleaned up and made ourselves something to drink. Even squandering more of the water reserves on showers didn't do much for our spirits. We had to eat, but Cochenour didn't bother with his gourmet exhibition. Dorotha silently threw tabs into the radar oven and we fed gloomily on emergency rations. "Well, that's only the first one," she said at last, determined to be sunny about it. "And it's only our second day." Cochenour said, "Shut up, Dorrie. The one thing I'm not is a good loser." He was staring at the probe trace. "Walthers, how many tunnels are unmarked but empty, like this one?" "How can I answer a question like that? If they're unmarked there's no record of them." "So those traces don't mean anything. We might dig one a day for the next three weeks and find every one a dud." I nodded. "We surely might, Boyce." He looked at me alertly. "And?" "And that's not the worst part of it. I've taken parties out to dig who would have gone mad with joy to have opened even a breached tunnel. It's perfectly possible to dig every day for weeks and never hit a real Heechee tunnel at all. Don't knock it -- at least you got some action for your money." "I told you, Walthers, I'm not a loser. Second place is no good." He thought for a minute, then barked: "You picked this spot. Did you know what you were doing?" Did I? I could have told him about my months of studying records from the first landings on. I could have mentioned how much trouble I went to -- and how many regulations I broke -- to get the military survey reports, how far I had traveled to talk to the Defense crews who had been on those early digs. I might have let him know how hard it had been to locate old Jorolemon Hegramet, now teaching exotic archeology back in Tennessee and how many times he and I had corresponded. All I said was, "The fact that we found one tunnel shows I knew my business as a guide. That was all you paid for. It's up to you if we keep looking or not." He looked at his thumbnail, considering. The girl said cheerfully, "Buck up, Boyce. Look at all the other chances we've got -- and even if we miss, it'll still be fun telling everybody about it back in Cincinnati." He didn't even look at her. "Isn't there any way to tell whether a tunnel has been breached or not without going inside?" "Sure," I said. "You can tell by tapping the outside shell. You can hear the difference in the sound." "But you have to dig down to it first?" "Right." We left it at that. I got back into my hotsuit to strip away the now useless igloo so that we could move the drills. I didn't really want to discuss it any more, because I didn't want him to ask a question that I might want to lie about. I try the best I can to tell the truth -- makes it easier to remember what you've said. On the other hand, I'm not fanatic about it and I didn't see that it was any of my business to correct a mistaken impression. For instance, obviously Cochenour and the girl had the impression that I hadn't bothered to sound the tunnel casing because we had already dug down to it and it was just as easy to cut in. But, of course, I had tested it. That had been the first thing I did as soon as the drill had reached down that far. And the high-pressure thunk had broken my heart. I had had to wait a couple of minutes before I had managed to call out to them that we had reached the outer casing. At that time, I had not quite faced up to the question of just what I would have done if it had turned out that the tunnel had not been breached. C ochenour and Dome Keefer were maybe the fiftieth or sixtieth party I had taken to a Heechee dig and I wasn't surprised coolies. I don't care how lazy and bored they start out, by the time people actually come close to finding something that belonged to IF an almost completely unknown alien race -- left there when the closest thing to a human being on Earth was a slope-browed furry with antelope bones -- they begin to burn with exploration fever. My current clients worked hard and drove me hard -- and I was as eager as they. Maybe more so. As the days went past I found myself rubbing my right side, just under the short ribs, more and more often. The military boys overflew us a half-dozen times in the first few days. They didn't say much, just made formal requests for identification which they already well knew. Regulations say if you find anything you're supposed to report it right away. Over Cochenour's objections I reported finding that first breached tunnel, which surprised them a little, I think. Site B was a pegmatite dike. The other two fairly bright ones that I had called D and E showed nothing at all when we dug, meaning that the sound reflections had probably been caused by nothing more than invisible interfaces in layers of rock or ash or gravel. I vetoed trying to dig C, the best looking of the bunch. Cochenour gave me a hell of an argument about it, but I held out. The military were still looking in on us every now and then and I didn't want to get any closer to their perimeter than we already were. I half-promised that if we didn't have any luck elsewhere in the mascons we'd sneak back to C for a quick dig before returning to the Spindle. We left it at that. We lifted the airbody, moved to a new position and set out a new pattern of probes. By the end of the second week we had dug nine times and come up empty every time. We were getting low on igloos and probes. We had completely run out of tolerance for each other. Cochenour had turned sullen and savage. I hadn't planned on liking the man much when I first met him, but I hadn't expected him to be as bad as turned out. Considering that this whole deal had to be only a game with him -- with all his money the extra fortune he might pick up by discovering some new Heechee artifacts couldn't have meant anything but extra points on a score pad -- he was playing for blood. I wasn't particularly graceful myself, for the matter. The plain fact was that the pills from the Quackery weren't helping as much as they should have. My mouth tasted as if rats had nested in it. I was getting headaches and I was beginning to knock things over. The thing about the liver is that it sort of regulates your internal diet. It filters out poisons, converts some of the carbohydrates into other carbohydrates that you can use -- it patches together amino acids into proteins. If it isn't working you die. The doctor had been over all of it with me and I could visualize what was going on inside me, the mahogany-red cells dying and being replaced by clusters of fat and yellowish matter. It was an ugly kind of picture. The ugliest part was that there wasn't anything I could do about it. Only go on taking pills -- and they wouldn't work past a matter of a few days more. Liver, byebye -- hepatic failure, hello. So we were a bad bunch. Cochenour was a bastard because it was his nature to be a bastard and I was a bastard because I was sick and desperate. The only decent human being aboard was the girl. She did her best. She really did. She was sometimes sweet and often even pretty and she was always ready to meet the power people -- Cochenour and me -- more than halfway. The situation was clearly tough on her. She was only a kid. No matter how grownup she acted, she just hadn't been alive long enough to grow a defense against concentrated meanness. Add the fact that we were all beginning to hate the sight and sound and smell of each other -- and in an airbody you got to know a lot about how people smelled. There wasn't much joy on Venus for Dorrie Keefer. Or for any of us, especially after I broke the news that we were down to our last igloo. Cochenour cleared his throat. He sounded like a fighter-plane jockey blowing the covers off his guns in preparation for combat. Dorrie attempted to divert him. "Audee," she said brightly, "you know what I think we could do? We could go back to that site that looked good near the military reservation." It was the wrong diversion. I shook my head. "No." "What the hell do you mean?" rumbled Cochenour, revving up for battle. "What I said. No. That's a desperation trick and I'm not that desperate." "Walthers," he snarled, "you'll be desperate when I tell you to be desperate. I can still stop payment on that check." "No, you can't. The union won't let you. The regulations are very clear about that. You pay up unless I disobey a lawful directive. You can't make me do anything against the law -- and going inside the military reservation is extremely against the law." He shifted over to cold war. "No," he said softly, "you're wrong about that. It's only against the law if a court says it is -- after we do it. You're only right if your lawyers are smarter than my lawyers. Honestly, Walthers, I pay my lawyers to be the smartest there are." T HE difficult part was that he was even more right than he knew -- my liver was on his side. I couldn't spare time for arbitration because without his money and my transplant I wouldn't live that long. Dorrie, listening with her birdlike look of friendly interest, got between us again. "Well, then, how about this? We just put down here. Why don't we wait and see what the probes show? Maybe we'll hit something even better than that trace C -- " IF "There isn't going to be anything good here," he said without looking at her. "Why, Boyce, how do you know that? We haven't even finished the soundings." He said, "Look, Dorotha, listen close one time and then shut up. Walthers is playing games. You see where we are now?" He brushed past me and tapped out the program for a full map display. His action surprised me somewhat because I hadn't known he knew how. The charts sprang up with virtual images of our position -- the shafts we had already cut, the great irregular edge of the military reservation overlaid on the plot of mascons and navigation aids. "You see? We're not even in the high-density mass areas now. Is that true, Walthers? We've tried all the good locations and come up dry?" I said, "You're partly right, Boyce, but I'm not playing games. This site is a good possibility. You can see it on the map. We're not over any mascon, that's true, but we're right between two of them that are located pretty close together. Sometimes you find a dig that connects two complexes -- and it has happened that the connecting passage was closer to the surface than any other part of the system. I can't guarantee we'll hit anything here, but it's not impossible that we might." "Just damn unlikely?" "Well, no more unlikely than anywhere else. I told you a week ago -- you got your money's worth the first day, just finding any Heechee tunnel at all, even a spoiled one. There are maze rats in the Spindle who went five years without seeing that much." I thought for a minute. "I'll make a deal with you," I said. "I'm listening." "We're down here and there's at least a chance we can hit something. Let's try. We'll deploy the probes and see what they turn up. If we get a good trace we'll dig it. If we don't -- then I'll think about going back to trace C." "Think about it!" he roared. "Don't push me, Cochenour. You don't know what you're getting into. The military reservation is not to be fooled with. Those boys shoot first and ask later -- and there aren't any policemen or courts on Venus even to ask them questions." "I don't know," he said after a moment. "No," I said, "you don't. And that's what you're paying me for. I do know." "Yes," he agreed, "you probably do, but whether you're telling me the truth about what you know is another question. Hegramet never said anything about digging between mascons." And then he looked at me with a completely opaque expression, waiting to see whether I would catch him up on what he had just said. I didn't respond. I gave him back an opaque look. I didn't say a word, simply waited to see what would come next. I was pretty sure that it would not be any sort of explanation of how he happened to know Hegramet's name or what dealings he had had with the greatest Earthside authority on Heechee diggings, and it wasn't. "Put out your probes and we'll try it your way one more time," he said at last. good penetration on all of them, started firing the noisemakers. I sat watching the first buildup of lines on the scan as though I expected them to carry useful information. They couldn't, of course, but it was a good excuse to think privately for a moment. Cochenour needed to be thought about. He hadn't come to Venus just for the ride -- that was clear. He had known he was going to be sinking shafts after Heechee digs before he ever left Earth. He had briefed himself on the whole bit, even to handling the instruments on the airbody. My sales talk about Heechee treasures had been wasted on a customer whose mind had been made up to buy at least a half-year earlier and tens All that I understood, but the more I understood the more I saw that I didn't understand. What I really wanted was to give Cochenour a quarter and send him to the movies for a while so I could talk privately to the girl. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to send him. I managed to force a yawn, complain about the boredom of waiting for the probe traces to build up and suggest a nap. Not that I would have been real confident he wasn't lying there with his ears flapping, listening t? us. It didn't matter. Nobody acted sleepy but me. All I got out of it was an offer from Dorrie to watch the screen and wake me if anything interesting turned up. So I said the hell with it and went to sleep myself. It was not a good sleep, because lying there waiting for it gave me time to notice how truly lousy I felt and in how many ways. A sort of permanent taste of bile lived in the back of my mouth, as though I had just thrown up. My head ached and I was beginning to see ghost images wandering fuzzily around my field of vision. When I took my pills I didn't count the ones that were left. I didn't want to know. I'd set my private alarm for three hours, thinking maybe that would give Cochenour time to get sleepy and turn in, leaving the girl up and about and perhaps conversational. But when I woke up there was Cochenour, cooking himself an herb omelette with the last of our sterile eggs. "You were right, Walthers." He grinned. "I was sleepy. Had a nice little nap. Ready for anything now. Want some eggs?" Actually I did want them, but of course I didn't dare eat them, so I glumly swallowed what the Quackery had allowed me to have and watched him stuff himself. It was unfair that a man of ninety could be so healthy that he didn't have to think about digestion, while I was -- well, there wasn't any profit in that kind of thinking, so I IF offered to play some music. Dorrie picked Swan Lake and I started it up. And then  had an idea and headed for the tool lockers. They needed checking. The auger heads were about due for replacement and I knew we were low on spares. The other thing about the tool lockers was that they were as far from the galley as you could get and stay inside the airbody and I hoped Dorrie would follow me. She did. "Need any help, Audee?" "Glad to have it," I said. "Here, hold these for me. Don't get the grease on your clothes." I didn't expect her to ask me why they had to be held. She didn't. She only laughed. "Grease? I don't think I'd even notice it, dirty as I am. I guess we're all about ready to get back to civilization." Cochenour was frowning over the probe trace and paying us no attention. I said, "Meaning which kind of civilization, the Spindle or Earth?" What I had in mind was to start her talking about Earth, but she went the other way. "Oh, the Spindle, Audee. I thought it was fascinating and we really didn't get to see much of it. And the people. Like that Indian fellow who ran the cafe. The cashier was his wife, wasn't she?" "One of them. She's the numberone wife. The waitress was number three and he has another one at home with the kids. There are five of those -- all three wives involved." But I wanted to go in the other direction, so I said, "It's pretty much the same as on Earth. Vastra would be running a tourist trap in Benares if he wasn't running one here -- and he wouldn't be here if he hadn't shipped out with the military and terminated here. I'd be guiding in Texas, I suppose. If there's any open country left to guide in, maybe up along the Canadian River. How about you?" All the time I was picking up the same four or five tools, studying the serial numbers and putting them back. She didn't notice. "How do you mean?" "Well, what did you do before you came here?" "Oh, I worked in Boyce's office for a while." That information was encouraging. Maybe she'd remember something about his connection with Professor Hegramet. "What were you, a secretary?" "Something like that. Boyce let me handle -- oh, what's that?" That was an incoming call on the radio. "So go answer," snarled Cochenour across the airbody. I took it on the earjack, since that was my nature. There wasn't any privacy to speak of in an airbody and I wanted what little crumbs of it I could find. It was the base calling, a comm sergeant I knew named Littleknees. I signed in irritably, regretting the chance to pump Dorotha about her boss. "A private word for you, Audee," said Sergeant Littleknees. "Got your sahib around?" Littleknces and I had exchanged radio chatter for a long time and there was something about the cheerfulness of her tone that bothered me. I didn't look at Cochenour, but I knew he was listening -- only to my side, of course, because of the earjack. "In sight but not receiving," I said. "What have you got for me?" "Just a little news bulletin," the sergeant purred. "It came over the synsat net a couple of minutes ago. Information only. That means we don't have to do anything about it, but maybe you do, honey." "Standing by," I said, studying the plastic housing of the radio. The sergeant chuckled. "Your sahib's charter captain would like to have a word with him when found. It's kind of urgent, 'cause the captain is righteously kissed off." "Yes, base," I said. "Your signals received, strength ten." The sergeant made an amused noise again, but this time it wasn't a chuckle, it was a downright giggle. "The thing is," she said, "his check for the charter fee bounced. Want to know what the bank said? You'd never guess. 'Insufficient funds,' that's what they said." The pain under my right lower ribs was permanent, but right then it seemed to get a lot worse. I gritted my teeth. "Ah, Sergeant Littleknees," I croaked, "can you -- ah -- verify that estimate?" "Sorry, honey," she buzzed sympathetically in my ear. "But there's no doubt in the world. Captain got a credit report on him and it turned up n.g. When your customer gets back to the Spindle there'll be a make-good warrant waiting for him." "Thank you for the synoptic report." I said hollowly. "I will verify departure time before we take off." And I turned off the radio and client. "What the hell's the matter with you, Walthers?" he growled. But I wasn't hearing his voice. I was hearing what the happy fellow at the Quackery had told me. The equations were unforgettable. Cash  new liver  happy survival. No cash  total hepatic failure  death. And my cash supply had just dried up. IX piece of news you have to let it trickle through your system and get thoroughly absorbed before you do anything about it. It isn't a matter of seeing the implications. I saw them right away -- you bet. It's a matter of letting the system reach equilibrium. So I puttered for a minute. I listened to Tschaikowsky. I made sure the radio switch was off so as not to waste power. I checked the synoptic plot. It would have been nice if there had been something to show, but the way things were. going there wouldn't be, of course, and there wasn't. A few pale echoes were building up. But nothing with the shape of a IF Heechee dig and nothing very bright. The data were still coming in, but there was no way for those feeble plots to turn into the mother lode that could save us all, even broke bastard Cochenour. I looked out at as much of the sky as I could to see how the weather was. It didn't matter, of course, but some of the high white calomel clouds were scudding among the purples and yellows of the other mercury halides. It was beautiful and I hated it. Cochenour had forgotten about his omelette and was watching me thoughtfully. So was Dorrie, still holding the augers in their greasepaper wrap. I grinned at her. "Pretty," I said, referring to the music. The Auckland Philharmonic was just getting to the part where the little swans come out arm in arm and do a fast, bouncy pas de quatre across the stage. It has always been one of my favorite parts of Swan Lake. "We'll listen to the rest of it later," I said and snapped it off. "All right," snarled Cochenour, "what's going on?" I sat down on an igloo pack and lit a cigarette, because one of the adjustments my internal system had made had been to calculate that we didn't have to worry much about coddling our oxygen supply any more. I said, "There's a question that's bothering me, Cochenour. How did you get on to Professor Hegramet?" He grinned and relaxed. "Is that all that's on your mind? I checked out the place before I came. Why not?" "No reason, except that you let me think you didn't know a thing." He shrugged. "If you had any brains you'd know I didn't get rich by being stupid. You think without knowing what I was coming to?" "No, you wouldn't, but you did your best to make me think you would. No matter. So you dug up somebody who could point you to whatever was worth stealing on Venus and somebody steered you to Hegramet. Then what? Did he tell you I was dumb enough to be your boy?" Cochenour wasn't quite as relaxed, but he wasn't aggressive either. He said, "Hegramet told me you were the right guide to find a virgin tunnel. That's all -- except briefing me on the Heechee and so on. If you hadn't come to us I would have come to you. You just saved me the trouble." I said, a little surprised, "You know, I think you're telling me the truth. Except you left out one thing -- it wasn't the fun of making more money that you were after, it was just money, right? Money that you needed." I turned to Dorotha, who was standing frozen with the augers in her hand. "How about it, Dorrie? Did you know the old man was broke?" Putting it that way was not too smart. I saw what she was about to do just before she did it, and I jumped off the igloo. I was a little too late. She dropped the augers before I could get them from her, but fortunately they landed flat and the blades weren't chipped. I picked them up and put them away. She had answered the question well enough. I said, "I see you didn't know. Tough on you, doll. His check to the captain of the Gagarin is still bouncing and I would imagine the one he gave me isn't going to be much better. I hope you got it in furs and jewels -- and my advice to you is to hide them before the creditors want them back." She didn't even look at me. She was only looking at Cochenour, whose expression was all the confirmation she needed. I don't know what I expected from her, rage or reproaches or tears. What she did was whisper, "Oh, Boyce, I'm so sorry -- " and she went over and put her arm around him. because I didn't like looking at him. The strapping ninetyyear-old buck on Full Medical had turned into a defeated old man. For the First time he looked all of his age and maybe a little more -- the mouth half open and trembling, the straight back stooped, the bright blue eyes watering. She stroked him and crooned to him. I looked at the synoptic web again for lack of anything better to do. It was about as clear as it was going to get and it was empty. We had nearly a fifty per cent overlap from our previous soundings, so I could tell that the interesting-looking scratches at one edge were nothing to get excited about. We had checked' them out already. They were only ghosts. No rescue there. I felt oddly relaxed. There was something tranquilizing about the realization that I had nothing much left to lose. Matters had fallen into a different perspective. I had not given up completely. There were still things I could do. They might not have anything to do with prolonging my life, but the taste in my mouth and the pain in my gut weren't letting me enjoy life very much anyway. I could, for instance, write Audee Walthers off. And since only a miracle could keep me from dying in a matter of days I could use what time I had for something else. What else? Well, Dorrie was a nice kid. I could fly the airbody back to the Spindle, turn Cochenour over to the gendarmes and spend my last day or so introducing her around. Vastra or BeeGee would help her get organized. She might not even have to go into prostitution or the rackets. The high season wasn't that far off and she would do well with a little booth of prayer fans and Heechee lucky pieces for the Terry tourists. Maybe that wasn't much, even from her point of view, but it was something. Or I could fling myself on the mercy of the Quackery. They might let me have the new liver on credit. The only reason I had for thinking they wouldn't was that they never had. Or I could open the two-fuel valves and let them mix for ten minutes or so before hitting the igniter. The explosion wouldn't IF leave much of the airbody or us -- and nothing at all of our problems. "Oh, hell," I said. "Buck up, Cochenour. We're not dead yet." He looked at me for a minute. He patted Dome's shoulder and pushed her gently away. He said, "I will be, soon enough. I'm sorry about all this, Dorotha. And I'm sorry about your check, Walthers. I expect you needed the money." "You have no idea." He said with difficulty, "Do you want me to explain?" "I don't see that it makes any difference, but -- yes, out of curiosity I do." # I let him tell me and he did it steadily and succinctly. I could have guessed. A man his age is either very, very rich or dead. He was only quite rich. He had kept his industries going on what was left after he siphoned off the costs of transplant and treatment, calciphylaxis and prosthesis, protein regeneration here, cholesthis, a hundred grand a week for that... oh, it went -- I could see that. "You just don't know," he said, "what it takes to keep a hundredyear-old man alive until you try it." I corrected him automatically. "Ninety, you mean." "No, not ninety -- and not even a hundred. I think it's at least a hundred and ten and it could be more. Who counts? You pay the doctors and they patch you up for a month or two. You wouldn't know." Oh, wouldn't I just, I said, but not out loud. I let him go on, telling about how the federal inspectors were closing in and he skipped Earth to make his fortune all over again on Venus. But I wasn't listening any more, I was writing on the back of a navigation form. When I finished I passed the paper to Cochenour. "Sign it," I said. "What is it?" "Does it matter? You don't have any choice, do you? But it's a release from the all-rights section of our charter agreement -- you acknowledge you have no claim, that your check is rubber and that you voluntarily waive your ownership of anything we find in my favor." He frowned. "What's this bit at the end?" "That's where I give you ten per cent of anything we do find -- if we do find anything." "That's charity," he said, but he was signing. "I don't mind charity, especially since, as you point out, I don't have any choice. But I can read that web as well as you can, Walthers, and there's nothing on it to find." "No," I said, folding the paper and putting it in my pocket. "But we're not going to dig here. That trace is as bare as your bank account. What we're going to do is dig trace C." thought for a minute. I was wondering how much to tell them of what I had spent five years finding out and figuring out, schooling myself not even to hint at what I knew to anyone. I was sure in my mind that nothing I said would make a difference, but the words didn't want to say themselves anyway. I made myself speak. "You remember Subhash Vastra, the fellow who ran the trap where I met you. He came to Venus with the military. He was a weapons specialist so he went into the cafe business when they terminated him, but he was pretty big at it in the service." Dorrie said, "Do you mean there are Heechee weapons on the reservation?" "No. Nobody has ever found a Heechee weapon. But they have found targets." It was actually physically difficult for me to speak the next part, but I got it out. "Anyway, Sub Vastra says they were targets. The higher brass wasn't sure and I think the matter has been pigeonholed on the reservation by now. But they found triangular pieces of Heechee wall material -- that blue, light-emitting stuff they lined the tunnels with. There were dozens of them and they all had a pattern of radiating lines -- Sub said they looked like , targets to him. And they had been drilled through by something that left the holes chalky as talc. Do you know anything that would do that to Heechee wall material?" Dorrie was about to say she didn't but Cochenour interrupted her. "That's impossible," he said flatly. "Right. That's what the brass said. They decided it had to be done in the process of fabrication, for some Heechee purpose we'll never know. But Vastra says not. He says they looked exactly like the paper targets from the firing range under the reservation. The holes weren't all in the same place. The lines looked like scoring markers. That's evidence he's right. Not proof. But evidence." "And you think you can find the gun that made those holes where we marked trace C ?" I hesitated. "I wouldn't put it that strongly. Call it hope. But there is one more thing. "These targets were turned up by a prospector nearly forty years ago. He turned them in, reported his find, went out looking for more and got killed. That happened a lot in those days. No one paid much attention until some military types got a look at them -- and that's how come the reservation is where it is. They spotted the site where he had reported finding them, staked out everything for a thousand kilometers around and labeled it all off limits. And they dug and dug, turned up about a dozen Heechee tunnels, but most of them bare and the rest cracked and spoiled." "Then there's nothing there," growled Cochenour, looking perplexed. "There's nothing they found," I corrected him. "But in those days prospectors lied a lot. He reported the wrong location for the find. At the time he was shacked up with a young lady who later married a man named Allemang and her son is a friend of mine. He IF had a map. The right location, as near as I can figure-v-the navigation marks weren't what they are now -- is right about where we are now, give or take some. I saw digging marks a couple of times and I think they were his." I slipped the little private magnetofiche out of my pocket and put it into the virtual map display; it showed a single mark, an orange X. "That's where I think we might find the weapon, somewhere near that X. And as you can see, the only undug indication there is good old trace C." Silence for a minute. I listened to the distant outside howl of the wind, waiting for them to say something. Dorrie was looking troubled. "I don't know if I like trying to find a new weapon," she said. "It's -- it's like bringing back the bad old days again." I shrugged. Cochenour, beginning to look more like himself again, said, "The point isn't whether we really want to find a weapon, is it? The point is that we want to find an untapped Heechee dig for whatever is in it -- but the soldiers think there might be a weapon somewhere around, so they aren't going to let us dig, right? They'll shoot us first and ask questions later. Wasn't that what you said?" "So how do you propose to get around that little problem?" he asked. If I were a truthful man I would have said I wasn't sure I could. Looked at honestly, the odds were we would # get caught and very likely shot. But we had so little to lose, Cochenour and I, that I didn't think that important enough to mention. I said, "We try to fool them. We send the airbody off and you and I stay behind to do the digging. If they think we're gone they won't be keeping us under surveillance. All we have to worry about is being picked up on a routine perimeter search." "Audee!" cried the girl. "If you and Boyce stay here -- But that means I have to take the airbody and I can't fly this thing." "No, you can't. But you can let it fly itself." I rushed on: "Oh, you'll waste fuel and you'll get bounced around a lot. But you'll get there on autopilot. It'll even land you at the Spindle." Not necessarily easily or well -- I closed my mind to the thought of what an automatic landing might do to my one and only airbody. She would survive it, though, ninety-nine chances out of a hundred. "Then what?" Cochenour demanded. There were big holes in the plan at this point, but I closed my mind to them, too. "Dorrie looks up my friend BeeGee Allemang. I'll give you a note to give him with all the coordinates and so on and he'll come and pick us up. With extra tanks we'll have air and power for maybe forty-eight hours after you leave. That's plenty of time for you to get there, find BeeGee and give him the message, and for him to get back. If he's late, of course, we're in trouble. If we don't find anything we've wasted our time. But if we do -- " I shrugged. "I didn't say it was a guarantee -- I only said it gave us a chance." person, considering her age and her circumstances, but one of the things she lacked was selfconfidence. She had not been trained to it -- she had been getting it as a prosthesis, from Cochenour most recently, I suppose before that from whoever preceded Cochenour in her life -- at her age, maybe her father. The biggest problem was persuading Dorrie she could do her part. "It won't work," she kept saying. "I'm sorry. It isn't that I don't want to help. I do, but I can't. It just won't work." Well, it would have. Or at least I think it would have. In any event, we never got to try it. Between us, Cochenour and I did get Dorrie to agree to give it a try. We packed up what little gear we had put outside, flew back to the ravine, landed and began to set up for the dig. But I was feeling poorly -- thick, headachy, clumsy -- and I suppose Cochenour had his own problems. Between the two of us we managed to catch the casing of the drill in the exit port while we were off-loading it. And while I was jockeying it one way from above, Cochenour pulled the other way from beneath and the whole thing came down on top of him. It didn't kill him. But it gouged his suit and broke his leg and that took care of my idea of digging trace C with him. X T HE suit leg had been ruptured through eight or ten plies, but there was enough left to keep the air out, if not the pressure. The first thing I did was check the drill to make sure it wasn't damaged. It wasn't. The second thing was to fight Cochenour back into the lock. That took about everything I had, but I managed it. Dorrie was great. No hysterics, no foolish questions. We got him out of his suit and looked him over. He was unconscious. The leg was compounded, with bone showing through. He was bleeding from the mouth and nose, and he had vomited inside his helmet. All in all he was about the worstlooking hundred-and-some-yearold man you'll ever see -- live one, anyway. But he hadn't taken enough heat to cook his brain. His heart was still going -- well, whosever heart it had been in the first place, I mean. It had been a good investment -- it pumped right along. The bleeding stopped by itself except from the nasty business on the leg. Dorrie called the military reservation for me, got Eve Littleknees, was put right through to the base surgeon. He told me what to do. At first he wanted me to pack up and bring Cochenour right over but I vetoed that -- said I wasn't in shape to fly and it would be too rough a ride. Then he gave me step-by-steps and I followed them easily enough: reduced the fracture, packed the gash, closed the wound with surgical Velcro and meat glue, sprayed a bandage all around and poured on a cast. It took about an hour. Cochenour would have come to while we were doing it except I gave him a sleepy needle. Then it was just a matter of taking pulse and respiration and blood-pressure readings to satisfy the surgeon and promising to get him back to the Spindle shortly. When the surgeon was through, still annoyed at me for not bringing Cochenour over, Sergeant Littleknees came back on. I could tell what was on her mind. "Uh, honey? How did it happen?" "A great big Heechee came up out of the ground and bit him," I said. "I know what you're thinking and you've got an evil mind. It was just an accident." "Sure," she said. "Okay. I just wanted you to know I don't blame you a bit." And she signed off. Dorrie was cleaning Cochenour up as best she could, pretty profligate with the water reserves, I thought. I left her to it while I made myself some coffee, lit a cigarette and sat and thought. By the time Dorrie had done what she could for Cochenour, then cleaned up the worst of the mess and begun to do such important tasks as repairing her eye makeup, I thought up a dandy. I gave Cochenour a wake-up needle and Dorrie patted him and talked to him while he got his bearings. She was not a girl who carried a grudge. I did, a few. I got him up to try out his muscles faster than he really wanted to. His expression told me that they all ached. They worked all right, though. He was able to grin. "Old bones," he said. "I knew I should have gone for the recalciphylaxis. That's what happens when you try to save a buck." He sat down heavily, the leg stuck out in front of him. He wrinkled his nose. "Sorry to have messed up your nice clean airbody," he added. "You want to clean yourself up?" He looked surprised. "Well, I think I'd better pretty soon -- " "Do it now. I want to talk to you both." He didn't argue, just held out his hand and Dorrie took it. He stumped, half-hopped toward the clean-up. Actually Dorrie had done the worst of it, but he splashed a little water on his face and swished some around in his mouth. He was pretty well recovered when he turned around to look at me. "All right -- what is it? Are we giving up?" I said, "No. We'll do it a different way." Dorrie cried, "He can't, Audee! Look at him. And the condition his suit's in he couldn't last outside an hour -- much less Help you dig." "I know that, so we'll have to change the plan. I'll dig by myself. The two of you will slope off in the airbody." "Oh, brave man," said Cochenour flatly. "Who are you kidding? It's a two-man job." I hesitated. "Not necessarily. Lone prospectors have done it before, although the problems were a little different. I admit it'll be a tough forty-eight for me, but we'll have to try it. One reason: we don't have any alternative." "Wrong," said Cochenour. He patted Dome's rump. "Solid muscle, that girl. She isn't big, but she's healthy. Takes after her grandmother. Don't argue, Walthers. Just think a little bit. It's as safe for Dorrie as it is for you -- and with the two of you there's a chance we might luck in. By yourself, no chance at all." For some reason his attitude put me in a bad temper. "You talk as though she didn't have anything to say about it." "Well," said Dorrie, sweetly enough, "come to that, so do you. I appreciate your wanting to make things easy for me, Audee, but, honestly, I think I could help. I've learned a lot. And if you want the truth, you look a lot worse than I do." I said with all the sneer I could get into my voice, "Forget it. You can, both help me for an hour or so while I get set up. Then we'll do it my way. No arguments. Let's get going." first was that we didn't get set up in an hour. It took more than two and I was pouring sick, oily sweat before we finished. I really felt bad. I was past hurting or worrying about it. I just thought it a little surprising every time my heart beat. Dorrie did more muscle as promised. Cochenour checked over the instruments and asked a couple of questions when he had to to make sure he could handle his part of the job, flying the airbody. I took two cups of coffee heavily laced from my private supply of gin and smoked my last cigarette for a while, meanwhile checking out with the military reservation. Eve Littleknees was flirtatious but a little puzzled. Then Dorrie and I tumbled out of the lock and closed it behind us, leaving Cochenour strapped in the pilot's seat. Dorrie stood there for a moment, looking forlorn. Then she grabbed my hand and the two of us lumbered to the shelter of the igloo we had already ignited. I had impressed on her the importance of our being out of the wash of the twin-fuel jets. She was good about it -- flung herself flat and didn't move. I was less cautious. As soon as I could judge from the flare that the jets were angled away from us I stuck up my head and watched Cochenour take off in a sleet of heavy-metal ash. It wasn't a bad takeoff. In circumstances like that I define "bad" as total demolition of the airbody and the death or maiming of one or more persons. He avoided those, but the airbody skittered and slid wildly as the gusts caught it. It would be a rough ride for him for the few hundred kilometers north that would take him out of detection range. I touched Dorrie with my toe and IF she struggled up. I slipped the talk cord into the jack on her helmet -- radio was out because of possible perimeter patrols that we wouldn't be able to see. "Change your mind yet?" I asked. It was , a fairly obnoxious question, but she took it nicely. She giggled. I could tell that because we were faceplate to faceplate and I could see her face shadowed inside the helmet. But I couldn't hear what she was saying until she remembered to nudge the voice switch. Then what I heard was: " -- romantic, just the two of us." Well, we didn't have time for that kind of chitchat. I said irritably, "Let's quit wasting time. Remember what I told you. We have air, water and power for forty-eight hours. Don't count on any margin. One or two of them might hold out a little longer, but you need all three to stay alive. Try not to work too hard. The less you metabolize, the less your waste system has to handle. Maybe we can eat some of those emergency rations over there if we find a tunnel and get in -- provided it's unbreached and hasn't heated up too much in don't even think about food. As for sleeping, forget -- " "Now who's wasting time? You told me all this before." She was still cheery. So we climbed into the igloo and started work. The first thing we had to do was clear out some of the tailings that had already begun to accumulate where we had left the drill going. The usual way, of course, is to reverse and redirect the augers. We couldn't do that. It would have meant taking them away from cutting the shaft. We had to do it the hard way, namely manually. It was hard, all right. Hotsuits are uncomfortable to begin with. When you have to work in them, they're miserable. When the work is both very hard physically and complicated by the cramped space inside an igloo that already contains two people and a working drill, it's next to impossible. We did it anyhow, having no choice. Cochenour hadn't lied. Dorrie was as good as a man. The question was whether that was going to be good enough. The other question, which was bothering me more and more every minute, was whether I was as good as a man. The headache was really pounding at me and I found myself blacking out when I moved suddenly. The Quackery had promised me three weeks before acute hepatic failure, but the prognosis hadn't specified this kind of work. I had to figure I was on plus time already. That is a disconcerting way to figure. Especially when ten hours went by and I realized that we were down lower than the soundings had shown the tunnel to be and no luminous blue tailings were in sight. I F WE had had the airbody close by, a dry hole would have been an annoyance. Maybe a big annoyance, but not a disaster. What I would have done was get back in the airbody, clean up, get a good night's sleep, eat a meal and recheck the trace. We were digging in the wrong place. All right, next step is to dig in the right place. Study the terrain, pick a spot, ignite another igloo, start up the drills and try, try again. That was what we would have done. But we didn't have the airbody. We had no chance for sleep or food. We were out of igloos. We didn't have the trace to look at. And I was feeling lousier , every minute. I crawled out of the igloo, sat down in the next thing there was to the lee of the wind and stared at the scudding yellow-green sky. There had to be something I could do. I ordered myself to think. Well, let's see. Could I maybe uproot the igloo and move it to another spot? No. I could break it loose, all right, with the augers, but the minute it was free the winds would catch it and it would be good-bye, Charlie. I would never see that igloo again. Plus there would be no way to make it gas-tight again. without an igloo? Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without an igloo to lock out those twenty thousand destroy the tunnel contents anyway. I felt a nudge on my shoulder and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She asked no questions, didn't try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about it. By my suit chronometer fifteen hours were gone. That left thirtysome before Cochenour would come back and get us. I didn't see any point in spending it all sitting where we were. On the other hand, I didn't see any point in doing anything else. Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while... and then I woke up and realized that that was what I had been doing. You may wonder how a person can sleep in the teeth of a south olar thermal gale. It isn't all that ard. All it takes is being wholly worn out and wholly despairing. Sleeping isn't just to knit the raveled sleeve; it is a good way to shut off the world when the world is too lousy to face. As ours was. But Venus is the last refuge of the Puritan ethic. Crazy. I knew I was as good as dead, but I felt I had to be doing something. I eased away from Dorrie, made sure her suit was belted to the hold-tight ring at the base of the igloo and stood up. It took a great deal of concentration for me to be able to stand up. The effort was almost as good at keeping out care as sleep. It occurred to me that there still might be eight or ten live Heechees in the tunnel and maybe they had heard us knocking and opened up the bottom of the shaft for us. So I crawled into the igloo to see. I peered down the shaft to make IF sure. No. They hadn't. It was still just a blind hole that disappeared into dirty dark invisibility at the end of the light from my head lamp. I swore at the Heechees who hadn't helped us out and kicked some tailings down the shaft on their nonexistent heads. The Puritan ethic was itching me and I wondered what I ought to do. Die? Well, yes, but I was doing that fast enough. Something constructive? I remembered that you always ought to leave a place the way you found it, so I hauled up the drills on the eight-to-one winch and stowed them neatly. I kicked some more tailings down the useless hole to make a place to sit. I sat down and thought. I mused about what we had done wrong, as you might think about a chess problem. I could still see the trace in my mind. It was bright and clear, so something was definitely there. It was just tough that we'd lucked out and missed it. But how? After some time I thought I knew the answer to that. People like Dorrie and Cochenour have an idea that a seismic trace is like one of those underground maps of downtown Dallas, with all the sewers and utility conduits and water pipes marked, so you just dig where it says and you find what you want. It isn't exactly like that. The trace comes out as a sort of hazy approximation. It is built up, hour by hour, by measuring the echoes from the pinger. It looks like a band of spiderweb shadows, much wider than an actual tunnel and very fuzzy at the edges. When you look at it you know that somewhere in the shadows there is something that makes them. Maybe it's a rock interface or a pocket of gravel. Hopefully it's a Heechee dig. Whatever it is, it's there somewhere, but you don't just know exactly where. If a tunnel is twenty meters wide, which is a fair average for a Heechee connecting link, the shadow trace is sure to look like fifty and may be a hundred. So where do you dig? That's where the art of prospecting comes in. You have to make an informed guess. Maybe you dig in the exact geometrical center -- as far as it is given you to see where the center is. That's the easiest way. Maybe you dig where the shadows are densest, which is the way the halfsmart prospectors do, and that works almost half the time. Or maybe you do what I did -- try to think like a Heechee. You look at the trace as a whole and try to see what points they might have been trying to connect. Then you plot an imaginary course between them, where you would have put the tunnel if you had been the Heechee engineer in charge, and you dig somewhere along there. That was what I had done, but evidently I had done wrong. I visualized the trace. The right place to dig was where I had put down the airbody, but of course I had been unable to set up the igloo there because the airbody had been in the way. So I had set up about ten yards upslope. , I was convinced that ten yards was what had made us miss. I was pleased with myself for Figuring it out, although I couldn't see that it made a lot of practical difference. If I had had another igloo I would have been glad to try again, assuming I could hold out that long. But that didn't mean much, because I didn't have another igloo. So I sat on the edge of the dark shaft, nodding sagaciously over the way I had solved the problem, dangling my legs and now and then sweeping in tailings. I think that was part of a kind of death wish, because I know I thought, now and then, that the nicest thing to do would be to jump in and pull the tailings down over me. The Puritan ethic stopped me. Anyway, suicide would have solved only my own personal problem. It wouldn't have done anything for old Dorrie Keefer, snoring away outside in the thermal hurricane. I then began to wonder why I was worrying about Dorrie. The subject was pleasant to be thinking about, but sort of sad. about the tunnel. The end of the shaft couldn't be more than a few yards away from where we had bottomed out empty. I thought of jumping down and scraping away with my bare gloves. It seemed like a good idea. I'm not sure how much was whimsy and how much the fantasy of a sick man, but I kept thinking how nice it would be if the Heechees were still in there and when I scratched into the blue wall material I could just knock politely and they would open up and let me in. I even had a picture of what they looked like: sort of friendly and godlike. It would have been very pleasant to meet a Heechee, a live one that could speak English. "Heechee, what did you really use those things we call prayer fans for?" I could ask him. Or: "Heechee, have you got anything that will keep me from dying in your medicine chest?" Or: "Heechee, I'm sorry we messed up your front yard. I'll try to clean it up." I pushed more of the tailings back into the shaft. I had nothing better to do. After a while I had the hole half full and had run out of tailings, except for the ones that were pushed outside the igloo and I didn't have the strength to go after them. I looked for something else to do. I reset the augers, replaced the dull blades with the last sharp ones we had, pointed them in the general direction of a twenty-degree offset angle downslope and turned them on. It wasn't until I noticed that Dorrie was standing next to me, helping me steady the augers for the first few yards of cut, that I realized I had made a plan. Why not try an offset cut? Did we have a better chance? We did not. We cut. When the drills stopped bucking and settled down to chew into the rock and we could leave them, I cleared a space at the side of the igloo and shoved tailings out for a while. Then we just sat there and watched the drills spit rock chips IF nicely. We didn't speak. Presently I fell asleep again. I didn't wake up until Dorrie pounded on my head. We were buried in tailings, but they weren't just rock. They glowed blue, so bright they almost hurt my eyes. The augers must have been scratching at the Heechee wall liner for hours. They had actually worn pits into it. We looked down and we could see the round bright blue eye of the tunnel wall staring up at us. She was a beauty, all ours. Even then we didn't speak. Somehow I managed to kick and wriggle my way through the drift to the crawl-through. I got the lock closed and sealed, after kicking a couple of cubic meters of rock outside. Then I began fumbling through the pile of refuse for the flame drills. Ultimately I found them. Somehow. Ultimately I managed to get them shipped and primed. I fired them and watched the bright spot of light that bounced out of the shaft and made a pattern on the igloo roof. Then there was a sudden short scream of gas and a clatter as the loose fragments at the bottom of the shaft dropped free. We had cut into the Heechee tunnel. It was unbreached and waiting for us. Our beauty was a virgin. We took her maidenhead with all love and reverence and entered her. XI When I realized where I was I was on the floor of the tunnel. My helmet was open. So were the sidezips of my hotsuit. I was breathing stale, foul air that had to be a smelled every minute of it. But it was air. It was denser than Earth normal and a lot more humid, but the partial pressure of oxygen was about the same. It was enough to live on, in any case. I was proving that by breathing it and not dying. Next to me was Dorrie Keefer. The blue Heechee wall light didn't flatter her complexion. At first I wasn't sure she was breathing. But in spite of the way she looked her pulse was going, her lungs were functioning and when she felt me poking at her she opened her eyes. "We made it," she said. We sat there grinning foolishly at each other, our faces Hallowe'en masks in the blue Heechee glow. To do anything more than that, just then, was quite impossible. I had my hands full just comprehending the fact that I was alive. I didn't want to endanger that oddsagainst precarious fact by moving around. But I wasn't comfortable and after a moment I realized that I was very hot. I closed up my helmet to shut out some of the heat, but the smell inside was so bad that I opened it up again, figuring the heat was better. Then it occurred to me to wonder why the heat was only unpleasant, instead of instantly fatal. Energy transport through a Heechee wallmaterial surface is very slow, but slow. My sad old brain ruminated on that thought for a while and came up with a conclusion: at least until quite recently, some centuries or thousands of years, maybe, this tunnel had been kept cool. Automatic machinery, of course, I thought sagely. Wow, that by itself was worth finding. Broken down or not, it would be worth a lot of fortunes. And that made me remember why we were there in the first place. I looked up the corridor and down, to see what treasures were waiting there for us. Amarillo Central my favorite teacher was a crippled lady named Miss Stevenson. She used to tell us stories out of Bullfinch and Homer. She spoiled a whole weekend for me with the story of one Greek fellow who wanted to be a god. He was king of a little place in Lydia, but he wanted more. The gods let him come to Olympus and he had it made until he fouled up. I forget how -- it had something to do with a dog and some nasty business about tricking the gods into eating his own son. Whatever it was, they gave him solitary confinement for eternity, standing neck deep in a cool lake in hell and unable to drink. The fellow's name was Tantalus, and in that Heechee tunnel I had a lot in common with him. The treasure trove was there all right, but we couldn't reach it. We hadn't hit the main tunnel but a sort of angled, Thielly-tube detour in it, and it was blocked at both ends. We could peer past half-closed gates into the main shaft. We could see Heechee machines and irregular mounds of things that might once have been containers, now rotted, their contents on the floor. But we hadn't the strength to get at them. The suits made us clumsy. With them off we might have been able to slip through, but would we then have had the strength to put them back on again in time to meet Cochenour? I doubted it. I stood there with my helmet pressed to the gate, feeling like Alice peering into her garden without the bottle of drink-me -- and then I thought about Cochenour again and checked the time. It was forty-six hours and some odd minutes since he had left us. He was due back at any time. And if he came back while we were here and opened the crawlthrough to look for us and was careless about the seal at both poison gas would hammer in on us. It would kill us, of course, but besides that it would damage the virgin tunnel. The corrosive scouring of that implosion of gas might wreck everything. "We have to go back," I told Dorrie, showing her the time. She smiled. "Temporarily," she said and turned and led the way. l the Heechee tunnel the igloo was cramped and miserable -- and what was worse was that we couldn't even stay inside it. Cochenour probably would remember to lock in and out of both ends of the crawlthrough. But he might not. I IF couldn't take that chance. I tried to think of a way of plugging the shaft, maybe by pushing all the tailings back in again, but although my brain wasn't working very well I could see that was stupid. So we had to wait outside in the breezy Venusian weather. The little watch dial next to my life-support meters, all running well into the red now, showed that Cochenour should in fact have arrived by now. I pushed Dorrie into the crawlthrough, squeezed in with her, locked us both through -- and we waited. We waited a long time. We could have talked, but I thought she was either unconscious or asleep from the way she didn't move -- and anyway it seemed like an awful lot of work to plug in the phone jack. We waited longer than that, and still Cochenour didn't come. I tried to think things through. There could have been a number of reasons for his being late. He could have crashed. He could have been challenged by the military. He could have gotten lost. But there was another possibility that made more sense than all of them. The time dial told me he was nearly five hours late finally and the life-support meters told me we were right up against the upper maximum for power, near it for air, well past it for water. If it hadn't been for our having breathed the Heechee gases for a while we would have been dead by then. He had said he was a bad loser. He had worked out an end-game maneuver so he wouldn't have to lose. I could see him as clearly as though I were in the airbody with him -- watching his clocks, cooking himself a light lunch and playing music while he waited for us to die. That was no frightening thought. I was close enough to dying anyway for the difference in methods to seem pretty much a technicality -- and tired enough of being trapped accept almost any deliverance. But the girl was involved and the one tiny little rational thought that stayed in my half-poisoned brain was that it was unfair for Cochenour to kill us both. Me, yes. Her, no. I beat on her suit until she moved a little and after some time I managed to make her move back into the crawl-through. There were two things Cochenour didn't know. He didn't know we had found breathable air and he didn't know we could tap the drill batteries for additional power. In all the freaked-out fury of my head, I was still capable of that much consecutive thought. We could surprise him if he didn't wait much longer. We could stay alive for a few hours more -- and when he came to find us dead and see what prize we had won for him he would find me waiting. It must have been a terrible shock to him when he entered the igloo with the monkey-wrench in his hand, leaned over me and found that I was still alive and able to move where he had expected only a well-done roast of meat. The drill caught him right in the chest. I couldn't see his face, but I could guess at his expression. Then it was only a matter of doing four or five impossible things. Things like getting Dorrie up out of the tunnel and into the airbody. Like getting myself in after her, sealing up and setting a course. All these impossible things -- and one other that was harder than all of them, but very important to me. I totaled the airbody when we landed, but we were strapped in and suited up and when the ground crews came to investigate Dorrie and I were still alive. hydrate me for three days before they could even think about putting my new liver in. In the old days they would have kept me sedated the whole time -- now they kept waking me up every couple of hours for some feedback training on monitoring my hepatic flows. I hated it, because it was all sickness and pain and nagging from Dr. Morius and the nurses. I could have wished for the old days back again, except, of course, that in the old days I would have died. But by the fourth day I hardly hurt at all, except when I moved. And they were letting me take my fluids by mouth instead of the other way. I realized I was going to be alive for a while and looked upon my surroundings and found them good. There's no such thing as a season in the Spindle, but the Quackery is all sentimental about tradition and ties with the Mother Planet. They were playing scenes of fleecy white? clouds on the wall panels and the ; air from the ventilator ducts smelled of green leaves and lilac. "Happy spring," I said to Dr. Morius. "Shut up," he said, shifting a couple of the needles that pincushioned my abdomen and watching the telltales. "Urn." He pursed his lips, pulled out a couple of needles and said, "Well, let's see, Walthers. We've taken out the splenovenal shunt. Your new liver is functioning well, although you're not flushing wastes through as fast as you ought to. We've got your ion levels back up to something like a human being's and most of your tissues have a little moisture in them again. Altogether -- " he scratched his head -- "yes, in general I would say you're alive, so presumably the operation was a success." "Don't be a funny doctor," I said. "When do I get out of here?" "Like right now?" he asked thoughtfully. "We could use the bed. Got a lot of paying patients coming in." Now, one of the advantages of having blood in my brain instead of the poison soup it had been living on was that I could think reasonably clearly. So I knew right away that he was kidding me -- I wouldn't have been there if I hadn't been a paying patient, one way or another, and though I couldn't imagine how, out. Anyway, I was more interested in getting out. They packed me up in wetsheets and rolled me through IF the Spindle to Sub Vastra's place. Dorrie was there before me and the third of Vastra's house fussed over us both, lamb broth and that flat hard bread they like, before tucking us in for a good long rest. There was only the one bed, but Dorrie didn't seem to mind -- and anyway at that point the question was academic. Later on, not so academic. After a couple days of that I was up and as good as I ever was. By then I had found out who paid my bill at the Quackery. For about a minute I had hoped it was me, quickly filthy rich from the spoils of our tunnel, but I knew that was impossible. We could have made money only on the sly and we were both too near dead when we got back to the Spindle to conceal anything. So the military had moved in and taken everything, but they had shown they had a heart. Atrophied and flinty, but a heart. They had gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep. They had been pleased enough with what they found to decide that I was entitled to some sort of finder's fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. It also turned out to be enough to pay off the loosely secured checks I had written to finance the expedition, the surgical fee and hospital costs -- and just about enough left over to put a down payment on a Heechee hut of our own. For a while it bothered me that they wouldn't tell me what they had found. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk when she was in the Spindle on furlough. But Dorrie was right there and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Eve Littleknees didn't know anyhow. Probably no one did except a few weapons specialists. But it had to be something, because of the cash award -- and most of all because they didn't prosecute for trespass on the military reservation. And so we get along, the two of us. Or three of us. Dorrie turned out to be good at selling fire-pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. She kept us in eating money until the high season started and by then I found I was a sort of celebrity, which I parlayed into a bank loan and a new airbody, so we're doing well enough. And I've promised that I will marry her if our kid turns out to be a boy, but as a matter of fact I'm going to do it anyway. She was a great help, especially with my own private project back there at the dig. She couldn't have known what I wanted to bring back Cochenour's body for, but she didn't argue and, sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get it into the airbody lock. Actually I wanted it very much. It's not actually a new liver, of course. Probably it's not even second-hand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I'm sure it wasn't original equipment with him. But it works. And bastard though he was, I kind of liked him in a way and I don't mind at all the fact that I've got a part of him with me always. # The wanderer carried word from the far stars: Do not destroy! in the design of the spaceship Newtonian. At launch she had carried three reaction mass tanks side by side in what older designers tion. A and B tanks had given their all to rendezvous orbit insertion and had been jettisoned, taking with them the auxiliary thrust chambers and large segments of radiation shielding. There remained the sustainer motor, pile, shielding, C tank -- then the service module and crew sphere, flanked by two modified lunar shuttles. One was topped by a capsule (Penetration Module), the other by a winged Earth Lander. When the Lander was sunward and its shadow fell on the crew sphere it made the ship look like a ceremonial trident hanging in space. Inside the ship, three was anything but a magic number. Paxton and Schemer had taken to sleeping in the Lander and Penetration Module, respectively, to get away from Sullivan and each other. It might be because, for the first time ever, they were traveling at a velocity that would take them out of the solar system unless diminished -- the psychologists at Mission Control had no other explanation for the unforeseen development. But the clash of personalities had arisen three weeks out from Earth and escalated over the weeks following. In the last few days the men had been meeting only to collect their rations at feeding time and had spoken only during routine checks. The trouble might, Schemer thought, have something to do with the visual aspect of what lay ahead. The comet was putting on its full display less than a week from perihelion and the Newtonian was now very close indeed. The awesome miles long and beginning to curve as the nucleus gained speed, was foreshortened out of existence -- they saw only the shockwave of the coma, spraying out from the bright spot of the nucleus, then pushed back by solar wind into a great plume against the stars. The ship's slow rotation swept the head around the forward window like the sweep of a celestial radar, but from the side windows only a faint mist could be seen, fading off into invisibility. Something so big, but only seen from a distance was disturbing, as if the head, too, might vanish as they approached it. By now, however, more detail was showing. They could see shells and smoky patterns in the gas coming off the nucleus, and the bright star of the nucleus itself had become a sunlike disk with spikes projecting from it. Behind the nucleus lay a tunnel of shadow, blurring away at its edges until it vanished into the glowing haze of the tail. Now the coma filled all the sky ahead and was beginning to move across the field of view -- it was time for the Newtonian to match orbit. Hyperbolic orbit, rare indeed -- this comet was a stranger to our solar system and would never return. The three astronauts strapped into their couches and got down to work with a minimum of conversation. Mission Control, too far off in any case to have much effect on the quarrels, was taking a business attitude -- the mission had to go on, whatever the clash of personalities. The ship's rotation was halted. Last refinements were applied to the burn computations and the Newtonian turned away from the comet. The burn was a relatively short one at max chamber temperature, to boost the hydrogen jet past the comet altogether. If those superheated ions impinged on the coma, burning into those fragile shells, all the scientific objectives could be frustrated. There was no chance the crew would let that happen, would take out resentments on the celestial body each man's specialty was now in absolute priority as far as he was concerned. They were much nearer the comet when Schemer saw it next from the observation turret on the crew sphere, as the ship turned back to face it. The fuming gases around it seemed motionless, but after some minutes changes could be detected. The dazzling spikes around the nucleus were no longer sharp, but still too blurred overall by intervening gas and ice crystals for the telescope to resolve them. Probing with radar and laser beams, Paxton could tell even less about them -- he was getting a general reflection from a layer about double the size of the nucleus, which by visual estimate was six hundred miles across. Schemer suspected that the spikes were internal reflections in a cloud of ice fragments orbiting the nucleus, but the changing light patterns he detected might just be due to the movement of gases out and back. "At any rate," he reported, "I can't see any obvious hazards to penetration." "Radar seems to confirm that," Paxton broadcast. "The boundary layer I'm getting seems to be quite clearly defined. If we follow the programed approach we won't run suddenly into any problems." slowly toward the comet, for the signal to journey to Earth and the reply to amble back. A great deal of power was going into the Newtonian signal, to overcome their narrow separation from the sun. Interference had proved unexpectedly serious and Sullivan's clamp-down on personal messages had been the first source of friction IF aboard. It wasn't as if they were overworking fuel cells, with power coming direct from the pile, and Schemer suspected that Sullivan, himself unmarried, was actively jealous of their daily hook-up to their homes. Mission Control should have realized that a man without a wife and children could be most homesick of all and should have arranged for someone to talk personally to the mission commander. But Schemer could hardly suggest that on open circuit with Sullivan right beside him. So Sullivan kept all radio time for business and Schemer and Paxton lost a valued link with home. The Mission Control bleep sounded. "Roger, no visible hazards. We agree that you should prepare for penetration. Confirm launch readiness for final gono go decision, over." Bleep. "Okay, Dave," said Schemer, speaking directly to Paxton for the first time today. He didn't have much against Paxton, really, but he always felt he was talking across Sullivan when he addressed him. Perhaps the same feeling accounted for Paxton's incivility. "Why don't you move across into the PM and I'll follow you through." He put the lens caps back on the turret instruments and stowed them for the next deceleration, then pulled himself feet-first into the center section of the sphere. Sullivan didn't speak as he worked his way across, so neither did he. Personnel selection had been almost wholly successful, he conceded as they checked out the Penetration Module. In space fiction (he'd never time to read any, but he knew just what it was like) at least one member of the crew had to be a maniac, an agoraphobe or something equally hard to detect, bent on aborting the mission five minutes after liftoff. But though the longest space flight yet had fallen down on compatibility, the conflict didn't even touch the mission program. After his unreasonable ruling on the signals Sullivan had found it necessary to impose his authority in a string of minor matters, probably because he knew he had been unreasonable. He, Paxton and Schemer had worked up a real dislike of one another, but they weren't thinking of curtailing the flight. There was a way to curtail the flight, but it was intended for more serious difficulty than this. After perihelion they had an "abort window," a chance to fire the motor and drop right back, returning to Earth three months later. Otherwise, riding outward with the comet as they studied it, they would make their separation burn not far from Earth's orbit and meet Earth itself nine months later. Fifteen months' voyage, or six -- and they were going for fifteen without hesitation. There could still be a scientific payoff if they had to abort. The Lander's cargo space contained payload at present, a much less sophisticated payload than the PM's. If manned penetration of the comet proved impossible they could launch a nuclear device which, hopefully sinking to the nucleus before detonation, would supply some of the data they hoped to get less violently from penetration. The experimental package -- in effect, a complete space probe -- they would leave behind. T HE checks went through without incident and they received a go for launch. They counted down the separation and Paxton turned the craft for Sullivan's visual inspection. Then they moved out laterally and Sullivan turned the Newtonian around once more. The final burn was gentle, the flaring gases missing the PM and the comet, bringing the spaceship to rest in the observation station it would hold for the next fourteen days. The PM traveled on with its original momentum, toward the nucleus. There was no spectacle or sensation when they entered the coma. Like the end of the rainbow, the smoky plumes of gas receded and dissolved before them. Bip; little by little the glow around the nucleus spread above them and below, waxing brighter and separating into bars and columns. Now the spikes were breaking up, visually, into discrete sources, tens, dozens, huning the sunlight along spikes of its own. By the time the streamers of haze completely surrounded the capsule the nucleus ahead was a lattice of light beams with what seemed to be a second sun at its heart. "We're going to slow the ship," Paxton reported, activating fly-bywire. "Much of what looked solid from outside is separating now. There's a huge shell of ice fragments, probably orbiting in clusters, though gravity's so low you can't detect it. If the nucleus itself were more massive we'd probably get a ring like Saturn's. As it is, I don't see any problems in continuing penetration -- we can treat this stuff as weightless and stationary." They burned their chemical motors to slow up -- only briefly, for gravitational acceleration was IF negligible. Making less than five hundred miles an hour, the PM traveled into the three-dimensional ice field. The "descent" was okay -- they could see the solid-appearing surface they were making for and bodies in their path separated visually and on radar in plenty of time to be avoided. Waves of sundriven gas passed them from the huge bergs. "By dead reckoning we're two hundred miles inside," Paxton radioed. The PM' signals were being relayed through the Newtonian to Earth (another reason for the ship's sunward position) and they had had loss-of-signal several times as they passed floating masses. "The concentration of material is increasing and we're cutting speed right now with another thirty-second burn. As well as ice masses we're now seeing dark, rocky fragments, from which all the gases must have sublimed away. They're all of considerable size, up to hundreds of feet across. Our micrometeor counters have not registered any significant increase in impacts -- from which I'd deduce that the smaller rock fragments are being carried out into the tail by sunlight pressure and solar wind. This would seem to confirm the origin of meteors along comctary orbits." "Roger, Dave," Mission Control said eventually. "We're happy with your fuel consumption, as indicated by Mike's last set of figures, but there's some anxiety here about your frequent use of vernier and braking engines. Your last bum should reduce the need for frequent restarts. Of course each engine should be able to take several hundred separate burns, but we'd like you to keep to fewer, longer bums if possible." This was a problem they had foreseen. In a stronger gravity field, descending, they could have kept the motors burning steadily at low thrust -- but for an approach to the comet, with the drawn-out penetration through the rock and ice field, they would have had to come in much too fast. Conversely, if they had started slowly enough to make the penetration on attitude control jets, entry would have taken far too long. But by now the situation had changed. "We're nearing shoals -- that's the best way I can put it," said Paxton. "There's a lot of loose stuff ahead, forming an inclined plane across our line of penetration. I'd say it's material that broke away from the nucleus in the first major solar heating, before the coma began to form and scatter the incident radiation. This ahead of us is the lighter stuff, beginning to drift L# backward as the cloud of new fragments takes up a conical shape. Its transverse velocity is pretty well negligible and we should go through without trouble. We're going now to continuous vernier bum." slid through the final barrier. Paxton held the ship confidently on fly-by-wire, turning the gimbaled verniers for brief bursts to avoid denser clouds of fragments. Visibility was poorer, with so many reflecting surfaces around that they were back to the lattice effect, softened now by the greater density of gases. Then, suddenly, the jeweled reefs were above them and they began their final braking. "We're now in the lee of the true nucleus, starting our final approach. The body looks to be loosely compacted chunks of rock and ice. Gravity is very low. The streams of gas and pieces breaking away are all coming from the area under direct sunlight. The surface appears stable along a broad strip toward the terminator." "I'm getting a really bright radar echo from about two-thirds of the way up the terminator," Schemer added. "We have enough fuel to select that for our touchdown." Paxton began the course change. "If it's an anomaly we'll want a look at that." The radar anomaly stayed conspicuous as the PM closed with it. "That's a bright echo," Schemer repeated. "It could almost be a metal outcrop." "I'll land as close to it as il can. There's a promising site right next to the thing. I can see it now -- it does look like metal. Put the radar into landing mode." "Landing mode activated." The icy horizon came up around them as Paxton throttled back. Ignoring the feeble attraction of the nucleus, he was flying the ship all the way to the surface. He shut off the braking engine and let the remnants of their approach velocity take them down. Schemer was calling off the approach figures, so he didn't see the anomaly come into view. Paxton did -- and he interrupted the commentary. "Control, the anomaly is artificial. I say again, the anomaly is an artificial object. We are go for touchdown, well within fuel reserves -- contact light." "Contact light is on," Schemer confirmed. "The PM has landed. Our inclination is three degrees, repeat three degrees. Fuel and oxidizer residuals as follows..." checks and had given themselves go for a three-minute stay when the Earth reaction came IF back. "We're getting pretty bad interference on your signal now, especially in the final stage of descent. Repeat description of the anomaly, repeat description of the anomaly." Bleep . "I say again, the anomaly is an artificial object, repeat artificial. Now here we go for the details." Turning to the right, Paxton could just see the thing from his couch. "It looks like the bottom half of a totem pole. I'd say there are three distinct sections, one on top of the other. The bottom one is gold -- or covered in gold foil -- cylindrical, with heat radiator panels projecting. The one above that is roughly spherical, black and silver, with solar cell panels on the surface and projecting antennae. The top section is hexagonal for threefourths of the way up -- then it becomes a straight cylinder of lesser diameter. It, too, is gold and some of the panels of the hexagon have solar cells. There are connecting rods from it on one side, anchoring it to the bottom section -- I don't think they touch the sphere at all." "We have your landing status report," said Misson Control. "On the basis of that we'll give you go to stay for twelve hours. Let us have your computer readout and we'll assess status for the full mission." Bleep . "Roger," said Schemer. "Secondary antenna is now deployed and locked on Newtonian for telemetry. Computer readout begins in three seconds, two, one, mark!" He pressed the switch and the transmission light went on. The reply to Paxton's description came back. "We copy the appearance of the object, Dave. Can you estimate the function or purpose of the device?" Bleep . Paxton was still staring to the right. "The more I look at it, the more I think it's not one device but three. The three sections certainly don't add up to a unit like the three segments of the PM. Nor, I think, is any one section a spacecraft in itself. I'd say each of them is a scientific package like the one in our cargo compartment, over." "We have your computer readout," said Misson Control. "You are go to stay for the full mission." Bleep. "Great. Now let me see this thing." Schemer pushed off his straps and sat up on his couch, then rose and turned to see out through the port. Paxton sat up more slowly. They both looked out in silence until Control came back on. "Dave, we could accept that some other national group might have reached the comet some days ahead of us. But there hasn't been time for three complete scientific payloads to be landed even if three ships the size of Newtonian could be launched in secret." Bleep. "Roger, Control, that confirms our assessment," said Paxton. Schemer glanced at him in surprise. "We're looking at objects from outside the solar system altogether, like the comet itself. Some time in the past, when the nucleus swung past another sun, there was another landing here -- maybe more than one." "If that's true," said Schemer, of years old. This is a fast comet, but over interstellar distances -- " Paxton agreed. "Well,, let's eat." "Huh? Oh, yes." Their program called for a meal and a sleep period. The discovery had knocked Scherner out of the routine, though he hadn't been thinking of going outside. The penetration descent had left him fatigued, but he could have looked at the object a long time yet. "Okay, you break out the food packs and I'll get some pictures through the window." He even took some shots from the other windows -- of the comet's surface composition and the bright columns of gas rising past the sun's disk from over the horizon. The sublimation mechanism was his speciality, was what he had come here to study, but it was taking second place in his thoughts. pressurized the module and Paxton made his way carefully down the side of the ship. Gravity was so low that effectively they were in free-fall, but the exhausts had softened the surface enough for the landing legs to grapple and hold. Schemer waited in the hatch while Paxton collected a contingency sample from the surface, sent it back up on his line -- then he opened up the cargo section and began passing down the research tools. After he descended they were to start taking cores and putting down probes into the comet, but obviously that had to wait. Taking the cameras, they maneuvered on their jet packs toward the object. It was roughly the same height as the Penetration Module, but all three sections were greater than it in diameter. Schemer had thought, in the capsule, that it was somewhat smaller, but sizes and distances were hard to judge. The irregular horizon was close everywhere, but there was a big outcrop of ice behind the object and light reflected from the crag lit up the side away from the sun, giving the structure a luminous, ethereal quality. Close up, they could see IF that the bottom section was clear of the surface. In the shadow beneath it their torches found a great golden spike, anchored deep among the frozen gases of the comet. "Whoever put down the first one meant it to hold," said Paxton to Earth. "From the taper on the length we can see, which is about four feet, I would estimate that the spike would hold through at least one stellar passage even on the sunward side of the comet. Maybe the makers knew where the comet was going next and decided to use it as an interstellar probe. These radiator panels imply that there was a big power plant in here, enough to carry a signal over interstellar distances -- maybe beaming its accumulated data once it got well out from the star again. It could be storing information to do so again right now, but the panels are at exactly the temperature of our surroundings, so I'd guess the pile's wholly inert. It's had millions of years to cool right down." even hundreds," Schemer corrected from above. "Once the probe was beyond use to its makers, it served as an anchorage for other people's. The spheroid was welded to its top, covering the antenna unit." "And the top section was added later still," said Paxton. "When I said the three didn't make anything in combination, I was wrong. What we have here is a cairn." "Fantastic." Schemer was floatting by the upper unit, taking pictures. "These upper two could still be active, Dave, since they have solar cells. Maybe they're recording data on us right now." "If the solar cells are still active stellar dark they're pretty good," said Paxton. "But if they have omnidirectional antennae -- maybe we'll pick up something when we're tracking our own instrument package." "That would be fantastic! If we could compare their transmissions with our probe's we could maybe decode them. Then perhaps we could interrogate them about the planetary systems they originally passed through. It would be an interstellar probe for us -- a time probe as well as a space one!" "Great," said Paxton. "If we could get the second probe's recording of the third probe's system we'd get some actual data about the people who put the third probe here." But closer examination proved these speculations mere dreams. All three probes were inert, so thoroughly frozen that the ice crystals frosting them could not be brushed off. Schemer and Paxton feared to apply any force, for the whole structure might shatter -- the metals had to be nightmarishly brittle. There didn't seem to be any prospect of taking the probes apart, not even of removing data recorders that might be slowly warmed and interrogated. They could find no access panels -- not surprisingly. Their own probe was a sealed unit, almost all solidstate, so its power would last as long as possible on the outward swing from the sun. They had no burning or cutting tools to force a way into the cairn -- like their predecessors, they could only leave their own instruments in turn. T HE work of studying the comet went on as intended. Schemer floated farther sunwards day by day, taking rock and ice samples, studying the gas flow from the surface and the effects of the coma on sunlight and solar wind. Using a one-man jet platform, he penetrated The region where fragments were splitting off the comet, even landing there as the violence of the outbursts diminished. The comet was receding swiftly from the sun now, preceded by the vast length of the tail which would soon contract. They were coming up to activation time for the automatic station they would leave behind. One question remained to be settled, however. It seemed fitting to add the package to the top of the cairn, but the plan had been to anchor it to the ice. It had been designed to "listen" for tremors and shifts of components in the comet as the sunward face stabilized -- obviously these would be affected by transmission through the cairn. It was also intended to measure the rate of "ice fall" as the coma gases froze and their crystals were drawn back to the nucleus. That was less of a problem, because the precipitation on the upper face of the probe could be corrected for the height of the cairn, to give the values for the comet's surface. However, Mission Control had been holding up the decision. When they did return to the subject, they had something very different in mind. "From the dimensions you've given us for the cylinder atop the cairn, it would be possible to grip it with the landing legs of the PM." Schemer and Paxton looked at each other. Paxton raised his eyebrows. "That would be possible, Control," he replied. "We could lower the PM to the top of the cairn on the attitude control jets and tighten up the landing legs. We might even get a weld, with two metal surfaces pressed together in vacuum -- but I wouldn't expect the grip to hold if we tried to pull the cairn out of the ice." IF "Surely that's not what they have in mind," Schemer said as they waited for the signals to course out and back. "I can't think of what else they want," said Paxton. "We couldn't use the central engine, but the four verniers could be angled sufficiently to keep the flames from impinging on the cairn. Maybe they want us to bring back the top section -- but we haven't enough fuel even for that." Schemer nodded. Neither of them put his own feelings into words -- by now they were of one mind concerning the cairn. Mission Control replied. "As you may imagine, Dave, there's a big demand from scientists -- and indeed from the public and their elected representatives -- that the cairn be retrieved for study. The only way we can figure to do this involves sacrificing the back-up capability of the PM and the Lander, so the final decision will rest with Bob Sullivan as mission commander. What we plan is for Bob to come down to you in the Lander and set the nuclear device in the ice at the edge of the current break-up zone. We calculate that an explosion at that point has the best chance of blasting the cairn out of the nucleus. Then we hope that you'd be able to get remote control of the PM and slow up the cairn with the vernier engines. With your present fuel reserves, it should return to the vicinity of the sun within a hundred years. We'd like to know whether you have any additional comments before we go to Bob for his decision." Bleep. Paxton looked at Schemer. "You tell them," he said, looking sick. "I can't." Schemer swallowed hard. "Nothing to add. Control. Over." A factors Sullivan accepted the plan -- surprising neither Paxton nor Schemer. His solo penetration of the comet posed no real problems because he knew what to expect. Only the landing might be tricky and for that he would have a talk-down. In due course they saw the bright flare of the Lander motors descending through the inclined belt of debris (bigger fragments now, more widely spaced), and with Schemer on the PM radar and Paxton outside, they talked him down without trouble. Atop its booster, identical to the PM's, the winged Lander made an equilateral triangle with the PM and the cairn. Sullivan went through the routine checks on his own, then suited up immediately Paxton helped him out and together they drifted across to the cairn. Schemer was already there, waiting for them. They floated slowly up the structure, both scientists trying to read the mission commander's mind. At the top of the cairn Sullivan cut his jets and hung there, sinking imperciptibly in the gravity of the nucleus. "I thought it might be an anticlimax," he said at last, "but that thing is absolutely beautiful. Not just in itself, though it has a strange unity of its own, but in all that it stands for." "So it's got to you as well," Schemer said inadequately. "Yeah. Do you think it will survive disruption of the nucleus?" "I doubt it." Paxton pointed to the ice bulk beyond. "That berg alone could crush it -- just with the wallop it would pack tumbling over. That bomb is going to break loose everything. I don't think we'll even find the cairn again -- there'll be nothing left of it to find." "They only asked us whether it could be set up," Schemer said. "Not whether we thought it would work -- or whether we should even try to retain the cairn. Earth wants and Earth grabs -- they'd sooner smash the cairn than let it go -- if they can't have it." Sullivan shook his head. "Yeah. It's too bad." "Come and see what Dave has been doing," Schemer said to him. "What Dave has been doing?" Sullivan asked as they floated towards the PM. "Wait a minute -- you fellows have been falling "I've been doing most of that lately," Schemer said wearily. "Sure, it might have been a little risky for me to work far from the ship on my own, but I stayed high enough either with the platform or on the suit jets to be in touch with Dave, except when I dropped to take samples. If I hadn't called in every thirty minutes he would have come for me." The PM was before them, the four panels folded down from the cargo hold like the armored ruff of some giant reptile. Paxton hung over the first of them, indicating his painstaking work on the interior of the panel. "I brought down the rendezvous laser, unshipped from its housing, and refocused it," he said. "We can't use it to cut into the cairn because we don't have a long enough power line -- but it can engrave these panels before we blow them clear. We were going to mount them around our station on top of the cairn. On this one I've put the sun, the Earth's orbit and the comet's -- and the Newtonian s path to the comet and back. I put the moon beside the Earth so they IF could identify Earth in this second diagram at the side." He had shown the planets of the solar system to scale, with their distances from the sun in astronomical units. "I've marked Earth E and the sun S, so ES is the astronomical unit, and I've put our numbers up to twenty-one along the bottom here so they can work them out. I couldn't figure any way to give them the actual distances, but at least they can chart the solar system to scale. "The next two," he pointed, "are star charts, north and south. I haven't put much stress on constellation figures because it'll be who knows how long before the comet goes through another inhabited system, but I've shown the relative positions of the Milky Way, the Galactic Poles, M thirtyone, M thirteen and other globulars, the Hyades, the Pleiades and the Magellanic Clouds. With those points of reference people should be able to place where we were and when -- even the open clusters should be good markers for a galactic year or so, provided they can be identified. That's for their scientists. The message is 'Here we are' and it doesn't matter that astronomical distances make it 'Here we were.'" After drifting around the hull Sullivan met Paxton again at the fourth panel. "This one should give them the identification," Paxton said. "That's the Milky Way -- the cross in it shows our position now. There are the Magellanics and there's Andromeda. I've started dotting in some globular clusters to show what they are. The Pleiades and the rest are obviously open clusters, by elimination. Down here I'm going to put a stylized man, woman and child, to show what we're like." "Dave, those are incredible," said Sullivan at last. "I've put a lot into them," said Paxton. "If you didn't feel as we do about the cairn I might not be showing them to you. We could have blown them off and you'd never have known." "Nobody will ever know, if we blow up the comet," said Sullivan. "That's what you're trying to tell me. We have a chance to add to what other intelligent races have begun -- " He fell silent for a moment. "Well, I've always heard that it was bad luck to break the chain. But at this stage, if we don't plant the bomb wfe'll obviously be defying Mission Control." Suddenly he grinned. "There's a way around that. Let's get moving -- we'll mount the PM on the cairn, as ordered, and take pictures to prove it. While Dave finishes the fourth panel, we tell Control that we're planting the bomb sunward, where they want it. Instead we'll take it up with us for the first stage of the ascent and cast it off when it has enough speed to leave the comet altogether. The excess fuel we use for that first burn will cancel the excess we didn't use planting the charge." T EY moved the PM, instrument package and all, to hover above the cairn and this time Sullivan outside talked Paxton and Schemer down. With the leg grapples securely gripping the top cylinder, the PM looked entirely right sitting up there. The probe's antennae and instrument booms were extended and the package was activated. They were ready to contact Mission Control when they discovered they had lost touch with Earth. The Newtonians high-gain antennae had drifted off the planet, the nucleus, or both. Probably the nucleus sensors had wandered off along the illusory head was opening now, beginning to separate into discrete objects reflecting the sunlight., Paxton and Schemer backed out of the capsule, bringing their few belongings. The men gathered at the Lander hatch, pulling themselves through it into the cabin. Sealing it up and pressurizing, they left ice and vacuum behind for the last time. Central engine at low thrust, verniers flaring, the Lander made its way up through the inclined plane of fragments. Beyond it, coasting outward, Sullivan let the bomb go. It drew ahead on its own solid charge, fast enough to separate entirely from the comet. By the time the comet next came to a solar system the device would be too far away to be associated with it. A floating iceberg was growing in the path of the Lander. Sullivan started the second bum. Threading a path through the satellites of the nucleus, the verniers fired again and again until one of them cracked. A cluster of red lights came on, the warning buzzer sounded, and the ship was tumbled by the asymmetric thrust generated by the burn-out. Cut-off was automatic and fly-by-wire brought the ship back into the bum attitude. "Rate of approach to nearest hazard," Sullivan demanded. "Distance one point four miles -- three minutes to impact," Schemer reported. "Number three vernier has gone," said Sullivan. "We'll take a systems check on the others before we burn. Give it to me from item thirty-one, Dave." IF Out of touch with Mission Control, they had to get themselves through the emergency. They completed the check with a minute and a half to spare and made the next burn on the central engine alone. The approaching ice cliff, spread with gemlike points, slid past. Sullivan studied the reefs ahead. "We'll have to take some way off this thing," he declared. "Set up a twenty-second bum for the central engine, Dave." He drew back the hand-grip for a #degree rotation. "We're going to be late back to the Newtonian said Schemer. "Mission Control will sweat," Sullivan agreed. "They think an atom bomb's going off down here. But they won't tell your families until they do hear from us, I expect." Depenetration was much harder now. With one vernier out of action, more work would fall on the central engine and the three verniers remaining. They could either angle the ship for each burn, loading work on to the central engine, or roll to bring the other verniers to bear when the missing one was needed. To conserve fuel in the attitude control thrusters, in fact, they must use the verniers as much as possible -- but with all those roll maneuvers they could get off the Newtonian beam. And if they emerged low on fuel there was noone to come and get them. Control had become a three-man job and the team clicked smoothly together. Schemer, on radar and communications, kept them headed in the right direction. They emerged into the coma in approximately the right place and not long afterward the Newtonian s radio link locked onto them again. The Lander moved out toward clear space. Control came on: "We were getting worried about you fellows for a while there, but you should get back to the Newtonian and move out some distance before the explosion." Bleep. "Roger, Control," said Sullivan. "What will we tell them when there's no detonation?" he asked the others. "No detonation," said Paxton. "Right," said Sullivan and they all smiled, relaxed after the strain of the ascent. Their hostility to one another was gone, Schemer realized -- it hadn't reared its head during stress or even after. The discovery of the cairn had overshadowed it and dissolved it. That was the reason -- though the message had not yet reached Earth -- why the cairn had to remain intact, singing or silent, on its way among the stars.  F OR more than forty years, readers and writers have been unable to agree on a definition of science fiction that would separate it from the general field of pure fantasy. Most early attempts at a definition relied upon science as the essential element in science fiction. But that effort failed. Some of the best science-fiction stories involve almost no science, while C. P. Snow used a great deal of science in some of his mainstream novels. Speculation isn't the key word, because fantasy is also speculative. Extrapolation? No, because you can't extrapolate a galaxy of aliens -- we don't know anything about aliens, so we can't honestly extrapolate from zero knowledge. In effect we have been forced to fall back on a circular definition or no definition at all. Science fiction has often been considered to be simply what science-ficton readers like -- and a science-fiction reader is one who likes science fiction. And around she goes. Most often we have simply assumed that everyone concerned with science fiction knows what the term means even if he can't define it. If that idea was ever valid, it most certainly is not today. I recently completed the editing of an anthology entitled Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year , to be published by Dutton. I had to read every piece of short (to # words) science fiction that was published during #I in the magazines and original anthologies. I found some very good stories, but they were buried in a shocking mass of stuff that offered very little reason for its existence. I kept no records, yet at least half of what I read (particularly in the anthologies) was everything but science fiction. Much of it wasn't even fantasy. The writers had somehow learned enough of the field to locate the markets, but -- if they ever read a sciencefiction magazine -- they didn't understand the basic nature of the medium. It seemed to me that I must include a definition in the foreword to the book, so that readers would know what to expect. I spent a week trying to find such a definition and then had to start from scratch -- to discover what science fiction is not. Science fiction is not fantasy. It should not deal with what is known to be impossible. It need not involve high probabilities, but such things as shrinking the world to the atom won't work -- we know too much of atomic structure and there are no electron "worlds." Magic won't work, unless fitted carefully into the structure of known science. (There is a catch to the above, of course. Time travel and fasterthan-light travel are pretty dubious possibilities and they are often used with no attempt to fit them into our known science. Convention, however, has accepted both as devices that facilitate the telling of certain stories. Telepathy and the psi powers have been similarly accepted.) Rationality should be a requirement of all fiction -- but science fiction especially must not be irrational. You can't set up a story of the sun about to explode and then solve the problem by sending out a fire rocket to spray the sun with water and quench the flame. You can't set up a projection into the future made possible only by science and then neglect science. You have to think out whatever probabilities you choose, attempt to see all the ramifications, build your world as completely as you can and then follow through within the limits you have given that world. Item: rationality. I did come up with one positive. Science fiction is fiction -- it deals in stories, not sketches or jottings. A story must feature a character who undergoes stress through inner or exterior conflict and creates a resolution, either happy or significantly unhappy. The common rules of fiction apply to science fiction -- in fact, they apply even more strongly, since the writer frequently must create acceptance or identification rather than find it in a commonly accepted background. Item: fiction. It took me several days to find the one factor that was still missing. Most of the above could apply to any good mainstream story. What made the difference? Suddenly I realized that science fiction never occurs in the past, the present, the future. In true science fiction something has to be different from what we know of the past or present -- and no future is sure. We can project merely a future. So science fiction deals with alternates. A story detailing our normal present -- or actual past -- set in the near future and moved to a geographic locale not on any map is still mainstream. But a story rationally developed out of racial riots in a present -- and in which the South won the War between the States in science fiction. So is any honest attempt to write about a future. Item: alternate. From the above we can combine certain elements into a fairly compact definition that seems to work fairly well for me: Science fiction is fiction that deals rationally with alternate possibilities. Modern fantasy would deal rationally with alternate impossibilities, incidentally. The similarity in handling and attack probably explains why many readers have also been devoted to the better fantasy magazines. If there is such a thing as "speculative" fiction it probably differs from science fiction only when it omits the concept of the alternate. Thus the matter of relevance would properly belong to speculative fiction when the relevance was keyed tightly to the realities of the present -- in other respects science fiction is also relevant, since all fiction should be relevant to the human condition. This definition has nothing to do with value judgments. It says nothing about whether the result is good or bad -- it simply determines for me whether the result is properly science fiction. good-bad value judgments in reviewing an anthology that ties directly into the foregoing. The volume is titled Clarion , edited by Robin Scott Wilson (Signet, # i ). It calls itself "an anthology of speculative fiction and criticism from the Clarion Writers' Workshop," and it might be free of the requirements of science fiction, but... The cover labels it "A Signet Science Fiction" (sic). The copy IF on the back cover mentions science fiction six times prominently and gives no mention at all to speculative fiction. And inside the front cover the puff quotes Damon Knight as saying, "This volume contains the work of # new science-fiction writers... I think it fair to decide that the volume is being marketed as science fiction and that it was edited to be sold as such. Mostly it just plain ain't. Oh, there are several rather interesting articles on science fiction by some of the professional writers featured on the cover -- Joanna Russ, for one, discusses the place of science fiction and is in excellent form. Some of the professional articles, on the other hand, are little but puffs for Clarion. And if you expect to find much science fiction by those new writers, forget it. There are twenty-one items inside, since some of the writers contributed more than one piece of work. Of these, three seem to be genuinely intended as science fiction by writers who know the field -- and a few others have future dates or backgrounds that are intended to make them look like science fiction. There is' also a genuine and rather pleasant fantasy at the end and a few other stories display elements of fantasy. Altogether I estimated about # words of science fiction and fantasy in the whole book and perhaps an equal amount of wordage of simulated sf and fantasy. At least # words have nothing to do with anything outside the usual efforts of young writers to write avant garde or mainstream stories. Anyone buying this book as science fiction is being robbed. But the unfortunate writers inside are being robbed even more. Apparently there is no effort at Clarion to teach the difference between science fiction and other branches of literature. That is hardly fair preparation for the type of writing that the market they hope to hit calls for. Surely some of the lecturers from professional writers knew that the manuscripts they saw were not related in any way to science fiction. Or was the obviously happy time they had at Clarion enough to blur all judgment? Robin Scott Wilson, who headed Clarion, is himself a respected writer of science fiction. He should know the difference. The writing in the book is often quite good of its kind. But it's the standard moody, experimental (make that pseudo-experimental, if you want to evaluate it honestly), exhibitionist sort that is common to college courses where the emphasis is placed on write rather than right. I've seen much better stories by Clarion students in the magazines, so I hope they will learn from the market what they didn't seem to get in the Workshop. After all, study of the magazines and of our classics is the best college for our writers. when Ted White began planning to write science fiction. He had to do it all on his own, as most writers have found it best to do. He discovered science fiction in his school library, as I remember, and then found out about the magazines. His first writing was for the fan magazines, because science fiction was important to him. And after numerous battles in the pages of those journals he began to think he could write professional fiction. By now he has written quite a bit of it, some as adult fiction and some for the teen-age market, to pay back the debt of his own discovery -- perhaps. I can't say that I've liked all he has written. In fact, I've disliked some of the fiction he considered his best. But when I've read one of his books, I've never been in the least doubt that I've been reading science fiction. He doesn't need dates and rocket ships and all the mechanical trappings to prove it's science fiction, because he has the whole field as his reading background. His Star Wolf (Lancer, # i) is a simple story, stripped to the bare bones of adventure fiction. For most of the book, the cast of characters includes one man and a wolf-dog. Page after page goes by without a word of conversation (which is supposed to be needed to maintain interest). During the major part of the book, there are no enemies to be fought, no great conflicts to be met and endured -- nothing except an endless trip across a cruel desert. It's damned good! In a way the book is a sequel to Phoenix Prime. It returns to the alternate world of Qar (pronounced Quahr by Ted, not with the Arabic stop I took the Q for). We find the hero of the first book has left a son to be brought up in squalor near the desert and to wonder at the legend of his father. That father came from the desert, accompanied by a strange wolfdog, then disappeared in the raids and wars of Qar. Markstarn, the son, wants to trace his sire. But he does nothing until one day a wolfdog comes to him. Then he leaves IF his tribe and heads for the deadly desert with the wolf. A destination and a fate find him, eventually. Botfi are satisfactory and there are some excellent aliens and traces of vanished culture to pique the reader -- yet more than half of the book is made up of nothing but the trek across the desert. It's good because Ted has made it into two trips. One is the physical one. The other is the mental one inside Markstarn's head. The conflict comes from the nature of the boy's search for his father -- he makes himself over into the image he seeks. The book's merits are probably enhanced for me because I rather resented the death of the wolf-dog in the first book. In the sequel Ted has managed to give it all back to me and use it the way I hoped. It's not great literature. As I said, it's an adventure story. But it's one of those rather rare adventure stories -- and it's nice to see what can be done by sticking honestly to an idea. Farmer. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. For informa European Science Fiction Convention with the Trieste SF Film Festival. Membership: #, attending; #, supporting. For information: Convention address: Eurocon I, Casella Postale #, #, Venezia, Italy. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Detroit Tri-Con, # Westwood Avenue, Detroit, Michigan #.  World Science Fiction Convention. At the International Hotel I , #I West Century Blvd., Los Angeles, California #. Guest-of-Honor: Frederik Pohl. Fan Guests-of-Honor: Robert and Juanita Coulson. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: L. A. Con, P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, California. stuck as honestly to his idea in The Overman Culture (Putnam, #). He sets up a seemingly elaborate World where everything is disturbingly different and yet similar to the one we know -- we have World War II and Queen Victoria and protective screens and robots. The story is told through the eyes of a small group of children who grow up under the care of odd parents to discover that the city they live in has no real exterior world and that most of what they are taught is a lie. In time they decide to upset their parents, to battle the robots and to seek their own destiny. That's all promising enough. But the promise is never kept. The story collapses into a hoax -- there was never any menace and a whole lot of the tension was totally needless. The reader is rather badly cheated. True, everything is explained and justified. But the letdown at the end makes all that went before seem rather silly. books that are not science fiction at all, but should be considered. Ignition , by John D. Clark (Rutgers, #), is science fact and gives the inside story of the development of our rocket fuels. Dr. Clark was very much on the inside and he tells the only clear story I've read of one of the high moments of scientific research. It's as good a job of reporting on a difficult field as I can remember and far funnier at times than most. He writes well; the events are fascinating; he makes the difficult clear -- and this is how we got our rockets out into space. Some knowledge of chemistry is needed, but a good high-school course should be enough. I echo Isaac Asimov's Foreword in advising you to read the book. Deryni Checkmate , by Katherine Kurtz (Ballantine, #), is a superb historical adventure story of a fantasy world that relates somehow to our past. It is one of the best written and best conceived fantasy adventure novels I've seen for quite a while. The second of three novels, but worth reading now. And Lancer Books has issued H. Rider Haggard's She and The Return of She in a single volume for #. The first part is one of the great fantasy classics -- the Return is just as good and much less known. I found myself enjoying it as much as I did three decades ago. It is definitely not science fiction by any definition, however! # IF Dear Reeders: As we advised you in the last issue, and the October issue of IF. Classified advertisements appear in both magazines at the low, low rate of #c per word (# word minimum)... reaching more than # readers of these award winning S-F leaders. able to Classified advertisers will be closing oh July #. Why don't you plan now to join us. A handy order blank appears on the reverse side of this page. Frank Brennan Classified Advertising Manager JulyAugust # l cp this handy form to place your ads in the #Y per word (inSept July # Oct Aug # May I eluding name and ov Sept # Dec Oct # July I . Jan Nov # Feb Dec # Sept I address). #-word Mar Jan # Apri , Feb # N  j minimum. PayMay Mar # June Apr # Jan j ment with order. July May # Aug Jun # Mar I Mail to: Frank Brennan, Classified Advertising Manager bring results and profits because they reach over # of America's most enthusiastic science-fiction readers. A Mr. Fisk Centers," the cute operator said. Fisk almost dropped his sandwich. "There must be some mistake. I don't know anybody offplanet." The girl looked at him with polite annoyance, as though nobody should be startled by such an event. "Are you Mr. Fisk Centers?" "Yes, of course," he said. "But -- " Her face sifted out, smiling professionally. The screen bleeped, went blank and finally produced a man. He had handsome gray hair and wore the traditional Marsresident uniform -- a cross between a spacesuit and a tuxedo. He was seated behind a large plastifoam desk and a tremendous color map of classical Mars covered the wall beyond. "Welcome to Mars, Mr. Centers," the man said, putting on a contagious grin. "I am Bondman, of Mars, Limited." Somehow he had managed to pronounce "Limited" the way it looked on the map on the office wall behind him -- "Ltd." Fisk was fifty and had been around, but he had never been treated to an interplanetary call before. The reason was not only the expense, though he knew that was extraordinary. He simplyhappened to be one of the several  to deal offplanet. Probably Mars, Ltd. was economizing by using Service -- but the call was still impressive. "Are you sure -- " "Now, Mr. Centers, let's not let modesty interfere with business," Bondman said, frowning briefly. "You're far too sensible a man for that. That's why you're one of the privileged few to be selected as eligible for this project." "Project? I don't -- " The Marsman's brow wrinkled elegantly. "Naturally it isn't available to the common run. Mars is too fine a planet to ruin by indiscriminate development, don't you agree?" Fisk found himself nodding to the persuasive tdne before the meaning registered. "Development? I thought Mars was uninhabitable. Not enough water, air -- " "Most astute, Mr. Centers," Bondman said, bathing him with a glance of honest admiration. "Indeed there is not enough water or air. Not for every person who might want to settle. Selectivity is the key -- the vital key -- for what can be a very good life indeed. Mars, you see, has space -- but what is space without air?" IF "Right. There's no good life in a spacesuit. I -- " "Of course not, Mr. Centers. The ignorant person believes that man must live on Mars in a cumbersome suit and so he has a low regard for Mars realty. How fortunate that you and I know better." And before Fisk could protest Bondman continued: "You and i know that the new static domes conserve air, water and heat, utilizing the greenhouse effect to make an otherwise barren land burst into splendor. Within that invisible protective hemisphere it is completely Earthlike. Not Earth as it is today, but as it was a century ago. Think of it, Mr. Centers -- pure clean air, gentle sunshine, fresh running water. Horses and carriages -- automobiles, guns, hallucinogenic drugs and similar evils prohibited. A haven for retirement in absolute security and comfort." Fisk, but the smooth sales patter distracted him and compelled his half-reluctant attention. He certainly was not going to Mars. "But they don't have such domes on Mars. That technique was developed only a few months ago and is still in the testing stage." man exclaimed sincerely. "You certainly keep abreast of the times. Of course there are no domes on Mars now, as you so astutely point out. Why, it will be years before they are set up -- perhaps even as long as a decade. This is what makes it such a superlative investment now -- before the news gets out. Provided we restrict it to intelligent men such as yourself. I'm sure -- " "Investment? Now hold on," Fisk protested. "I'm not in the market for investment. I'm comfortably set up right now and -- " "I quite understand. Naturally you're not interested in a mediocre investment, Mr. Centers," Bondman said, frowning at his own failure in not having made the point clear. "Do you think I would insult your intelligence by wasting your time? No, you have the discernment to identify the superior value when you encounter it, unlike the common -- " "What investment?" Fisk demanded, annoyed by the too-heavy flattery. The intrigue of the interplanetary call was wearing thin and the objection he couldn't quite formulate still nagged -- and he wanted to finish his sandwich before it got stale. The man leaned forward to whisper confidentially. "Marsland," he breathed, as though it were the secret of the ages. His voice was so charged with excitement and rapture that Fisk had to struggle to maintain his emotional equilibrium. Could there be something in it? After a pregnant pause Bondman resumed. "I see you understand. I was sure you would. You comprehend the phenomenal potential in Marsland realty, the incredible opportunity -- " "I don't comprehend it," Fisk snapped, gesturing with his neglected sandwich. "I have no use for land on Mars and I would consider it an extremely risky investment. That dome technique is still in the prototype stage -- it may not even work on Mars. So if that's what you're -- " "Yes, of course you want to see the brochure," the salesman agreed irrelevantly. "And you shall have it, Mr. Centers. I will put it in the slot for you immediately, first class. I'm sure you will examine it most -- " Suddenly, facilitated by some devious mental process, Fisk's nagging question came into focus. "You aren't on Mars," he said miles outside Earth's. Even when Mars is closest it should take a good ten minutes to get an answer by phone." "Congratulations!" Bondman cried jubilantly. "You have just' qualified for our exclusive genius-' intellect bonus certificate. Of course I'm not calling from that Mars you see in the sky -- I'm here at the Mars, Limited promotion office. Mr. Centers, I'm so glad you were sharp enough to solve our little riddle within the time limit. You're the very kind of investor we prefer. I'll insert the certificate right now. And I'll be seeing you again soon. Bye-bye." And while Fisk was marveling at the peculiarly childish "bye-bye" the image' faded. fine torula-steak on soyrye with enriched onion sauce, but found he was no longer hungry. He was sure this was a sales gimmick for something worthless, but Bondman's contagious excitement had gotten to him. Maybe there was a good investment on Mars. Well, no harm in looking at the literature. He certainly didn't have to buy. He didn't have long to wait, either. His mail receiver was already chiming with an arrival. He picked up the bulky printing and spread it out. It was a firstclass presentation, all right, with color photographs and glossy surfacing that must have cost dearly to transmit. If he had not been IF present when it arrived he would have suspected a physical delivery rather than the normal mailfax. Mars, Ltd. must have oiled the right palms in the post office. Well, he had to admit it -- he was intrigued. He probably would not buy, but he would enjoy looking. First there was the bonus certificate, entitling him to a twenty percent reduction. Fair enough -- but hardly sufficient to induce him to buy without his knowing the actual price. Then a spread on Mars -- its discovery in prehistoric times, its variable distance from long year (# days -- Earth days or Mars days, he wondered -- or were they the same?), low surface gravity (one-third Earth's), pretty moons (ten-mile diameter Phobos, six-mile Deimos), scenic craters -- all familiar material, but calculated to whet the appetite for investment and retirement. Then down to paydirt. The proposed colony, Elysium Acres, was located on a map dramatically colored and named. An electrostatic dome a hundred miles in diameter, almost fifty miles high, enclosed a greenhouse atmosphere at Earth-normal pressure and temperature. The development was suitable for homesites, with carefully laid out horse trails and a delightful crater lake. Guaranteed weather, pollution-free atmosphere. Fisk was middle-aged and cynical, but this gripped him. Earth was such a sweatbox now. He hated having to take weekly shots to protect his system against environmental contamination, and the constantly increasing restrictions invoked in the name of the growing pressure on worldly resources made him rage at times like a prisoned tiger. (What other kind of tiger was there today?) Perhaps if he had married, found someone to share his -- but that was another entire dimension of frustration, hardly relevant now. This Marsdome pitch catered to these very frustrations, he realized. self, men well enough to do, intelligent arid sick of their own lack of purpose. What a beacon it was, an escape to an unspoiled planet -- in comfort. But of course he was old enough to control his foolish fancies. He knew, intellectually, that no such development existed on Mars and probably never would exist. The sheer expense would be prohibitive. All that technology, all that shipment from Earth -- why, passenger fare for one person one way would amount to twenty or thirty thousand dollars, assuming emigration could even be arranged. And for him it was out of the question. Yet he could not help studying the brochure. Elysium Acres -- such a suggestion of bliss! Could it possibly come true by the time he turned sixty? Why not, if they were able to finance it? There was the real rub. Money. How much to establish the dome, stock it with good atmosphere, import vegetation, calculate and maintain a closed-system ecological balance, construct access highways, lakes, houses, service facilities? There would have to be hospitals, libraries, administrative buildings, emergency staffs -- all the accouterments of civilization, in short. It construct. Naturally the brochure did not provide the price list. But if it were affordable and if it were possible for him to go -- what a temptation! He punched his personal info number for his net worth, just checking. The totals flashed on the screen after he had provided his identification code -- liquid assets just over fifty thousand dollars; investments at current quotations just under two hundred thousand; miscellaneous properties and options sixty to eighty thousand, pending urgency of sale. Grand total -- a generous three hundred thousand. Enough, with proper management, to tide him through the twenty-five years until his retirement annuities matured. He was hardly foof enough to jeopardize any of it by investing in pieon-Mars. Still, it had been fun dreaming. T HE dream lingered next morning, a welcome guest staying beyond courteous hours. Fisk showered in the sonic booth, depilitated and dressed. As he arranged and set his graying locks he wondered irrelevantly whether he and the salesman, Bondman, used the same brand of hair tint. He studied his face in the mirror, picturing himself as a hard-sell agent, lifting his brow artfully to augment a pregnant pause. Yes, he did look the part -- perhaps he would be good at it. But then, subjectively, he saw the signs of what he knew was there -- the circulatory malady that bound him to Earth for life. His quarterly medication kept it under control -- but a trip to Mars, with the necessary accelerations and drugstates, was out of the question. That was why Mars would never be more than a dream for Fisk Centers, no matter how alluring the sales pitch. He would always be a portly, subdued Earthman. So it was time to end it. He filed the Mars, Ltd. literature in the IF recycle bin and watched it disintegrate. Then he punched breakfast. He felt lonely. The phone lighted. "Yes?" he said automatically. "Interplanetary call for Mr. Fisk Centers," the cute operator said. She had changed her hairdo, but she was the same one who had placed the call yesterday. "Come off it, girl," he snapped, aware that there was nothing more useless than taking out a personal peeve on an impersonal employee. "It is not interplanetary." Bondman of Mars phased into view. "Of course it is, Mr. Centers," he said genially. "The Mars, Limited office is legally Mars soil, you know. An enclave. We have to undergo quarantine before reporting for work, ha-ha! I trust you have studied our brochure -- " "Yes. I'm not buying." Bondman looked hurt. "But you haven't even heard our price, Mr. Centers. I know a man as fairminded as you -- " "I'll never go to Mars." "Remember, you get a special bonus price because of your intelligence and judgment. I'm sure you'll recognize -- " "I have a circulatory disorder. Inoperable. Sorry." Bondman laughed with a finely crafted lack of affectation. "You don't have to go to Mars, Mr. Centers. We're talking about investment." "I told you I wasn't looking for-" "You've studied the plans for Elysium Acres? The phenomenal hundred-mile dome, the luxurious facilities, the nineteenth-century atmosphere -- literally -- the scenic lots? Of cdurse you have. Mr. Centers, you know values. What do you figure it will cost? I mean the entire setup on Mars, gross?" believing it. "Plus upkeep of billions per year." "Would you believe three trillion? But you're remarkably close, Mr. Centers. You certainly understand investment. You merely underestimated the importance of this development to us -- and to the world. We're putting everything into it, Mr. Centers. Another debut we put quality first. Three trillion -- but we know we'll make a profit in the end and of course we have to consider profit, Mr. Centers. We're businessmen, like you -- and believe me, sir, there is a demand. In ten years Earth will be a veritable nightmare and Elysium Acres will be an incredible bargain at any price." Bondman held up a hand to forestall Fisk's possible objection. "I'm not forgetting that you can't go, Mr. Centers. I'm merely pointing out what an attractive investment this is going to be. Some will have the incalculable privilege of retiring to Elysium Acres -- others will merely make a fortune from it. I -- " here the voice dropped to its supercharged confidential tone -- "hope to do both." Bondman paused long enough for that affirmation of faith to penetrate, but not long enough for Fisk to generate an interjection. "Now, we're subdividing E.A. into lots of one hundred feet square, give or take a foot -- enough for a comfortable cottage and garden. Twenty rect, Mr. Centers. That dome is a hundred miles across and there will be eight thousand square miles inside and two and a half thousand lots per mile -- but I don't need to do elementary mathematics for comes to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per lot. A bit high for Earth, considering they're undeveloped -- but this is Mars! Those lots are priceless, Mr. Centers, priceless -- yet they will be put on the market at a price any successful man can afford." He held up his hand again, though Fisk had made no motion to interrupt. "But Mars, Limited needs operating capital, Mr. Centers, and we need it now. So we are offering for a limited time only a very, very special investment opportunity. You can buy these lots as investment real estate today for a tiny fraction of their actual value. Later -- any time you wish -- you may sell for a handsome profit. So although you may never have the privilege of going to Mars yourself -- and please accept my heartfelt condolences, Mr. Centers, for I know how much you would have liked to retire to Elysium Acres -- you can still benefit materially while advancing a noble cause through your investment." emotive delivery than by the content. Salesmanship really was an art. "How much?" "Mr. Centers, we are offering these lots at -- now listen carefully because this is hard to believe -- at one-quarter price. Thir-ty sev-en thou-sand five hun-dred dollars for a property worth one hun-dred and fif-ty thou-sand dollars." Bondman spaced out the syllables to make the figures absolutely clear and emphatic. "That's my bonus for nabbing your 'interplanetary call' gimmick?" Bondman rolled his eyes expressively but did not take exception to Fisk's choice of words. "Of IF course not, Mr. Centers. That's our one-time special-offer bargain price. For you alone we provide the bonus price. "Don't tell anyone else, because if word got out that anyone beat the bargain price there would be resentment. Even -- " and a great rippling shrug bespoke consequences so vast that to invoke them by name would be foolhardy. Bondman did not speak that mind-shattering figure. Instead he fed it into his mailfax. The full contract emerged from Fisk's slot. He paged through it while Bondman waited expectantly, anticipating the client's amazed pleasure. Thirty thousand dollars. In other words, the straight twenty percent reduction the certificate had promised. Yes, it did seem like a good buy. Still, Fisk had had some experience in such matters. He skimmed through until he found the small print -- actually regular type buried in an otherwise innocuous paragraph. Ownership remained with Mars, Ltd. until the stipulated amount had been paid in full. In the event of default, the property reverted to Mars, Ltd. without refund. The risk of capital was all with the purchaser, unless he bought outright for cash. Very interesting. "Now you see the bargain we are offering you, Mr. Centers," Bondman said gravely. "Frankly, you are one of the very last to receive the thirty-seven fifty figure, let alone the bonus deal. Demand has been even greater than we anticipated, with many people buying multiple lots. Blocks of four -- or even more. There will have to be a price increase. After all, the company needs capital -- it is ridiculous for us to sell so low when our own clients are turning around and selling their lots for more. Why only last week a man sold five for two hundred thousand flat -- and he'd only bought them last month. He made a twelve thousand profit on a three-week investment -- and that's only the one we know about. Others -- " here his shoulders rose in another eloquent shrug. "Where, Mr. Centers, is the limit?" "Why didn't the second buyer come to you first?" Fisk inquired. Actually the described profit was only about six percent and normal fluctuation of the market could readily account for it. But it did seem to auger well for the growth prospects. Fisk could buy five lots for #, not #, and make that much more. "Apparently he didn't realize our price was as low as it was," Bondman said sadly. "He thought he had information. The biggest sucker is the one who thinks he knows it all -- right, Mr. Centers? If he had only checked with us -- but of course our price wont be lower after this week. So he has a good investment anyway -- though not as good as it could have been. If our lots are going for forty thousand -- well, we do need capital," he finished almost apologetically. "You understand." Yes. Fisk was certainly interested now. Buy for thirty, sell for forty -- but he knew better than to appear eager. "I might take a lot or two," he said. "But it's a lot of money. I'd have to liquidate some other investments and that would take time." "I understand perfectly," Bondman agreed instantly. "I had to do the same when I invested in my own first Mars lot. It was well worth it, of course. Fortunately we have a time payment plan exactly suited to your situation. Ten-year term, so that it will be paid up when Elysium Acres opens and the real gold rush begins. Irrevocable six percent interest. Just three hundred and twenty-five dollars a month covers all, Mr. Centers -- we absorb the cover charge. How does that suit you?" in his head. They were fair -- six percent on a decreasing principal. No funny business there, no usury. And he would be able to liquidate his investments profitably within a year and pay off the rest, saving the interest. Some contracts had penalty clauses for early payment, but this one fortunately did not. ' "Sounds good," he admitted. "Good? Good?" Bondman demanded rhetorically. "Mr. Centers, how would you like to buy a cyclotron at the sheet metal price? That's how good it is! But that isn't all. What we are talking about is three-twenty-five a month -- less than eleven dollars a day to control a genuine Marsland property now selling for -- " He broke off, nodding significantly toward the contract with the secret figure. "And with values quadrupling -- or more -- in the period of agreement. Mr. Centers, you are actually investing a paltry three-twenty-five a month for a return of at least a hundred and fifty thousand in a mere decade." Fisk knew. Thirty thousand dollars, plus nine thousand dollars accumulated interest for the tenyear span. For # value. A net profit of #, or over eleven thousand per year -- per lot. With just three lots he could triple his fortune. "Still, it's a sizable amount. Are you sure it's safe? I mean, suppose something happens and the dome IF doesn't get built. The lots would become almost worthless." "Mr. Centers, it certainly is a pleasure to do business with you," Bondman exclaimed. "You don't miss a trick. Of course there is a nominal element of risk. Life itself is the biggest risk of all. But by buying on time you can eliminate even that one-in-a-thousand chance. Just consider. If something should happen to abort Elysium Acres tomorrow -- and I assure nothing short of World War Four could squelch our plans -- and you had bought today and paid your deposit premium, what would you have lost? Three hundred and twentyfive dollars. Why, Mr. Centers -- you must blow more than that on one good suit." Extremely sharp observation. Fisk had paid more than that for his dress suit. Bondman followed up his advantage, knowing he had scored. "Considering the hundred and fifty thousand value -- just what are you risking? One suit." "But suppose something happens in two years. Or nine. I can't afford to lose a suit every month." "Mr. Centers," Bondman said sternly. "I'm a busy man and this call is expensive. Don't waste my time and yours with inconsequentials. If you don't trust the stability of a fine new developer like Mars, Limited, don't invest. Or if you believe it will fail in two years, sell in one year. Your property will have increased in value at least ten percent -- in fact, considering the coming price rise, twenty percent may be a more accurate estimate. But just keep it simple, let's call it ten percent. That's between three and four thousand dollars, right? And how much are you paying per year?" "Between three and four thousand dollars," Fisk said. "So if you sell then, your return on your actual investment will be just about one hundred percent. This is leverage, Mr. Centers -- using a small amount of money to control a large amount of money. And the profit is yours even if, as you say, Mars Limited fails in two years. Or nine. Ha-ha." He leaned forward again, speaking intensely. "The dome may fail, Mr. Centers -- but you won't." Fisk laughed. "Very well, Mr. Bondman. You've sold me. Just give me a little time to check around -- " This was a key ploy. If the salesman were out to take him he would do anything to prevent a fair investigation of the facts. And of course Fisk wouldn't buy without checking. That was the big advantage in being an experienced fifty. He couldn't be stampeded. "Certainly, Mr. Centers. In fact I insist on it. If we were looking for foolish investors we never would have called you. I'll be happy to provide the government property report -- "  "Thanks, no. I just want a few days to make some calls." He was hardly going to use Mars, Ltd. data to check out Mars, Ltd. "By all means. I wouldn't have it otherwise." Bondman paused as though remembering something. "Of course, I can't guarantee your price, Mr. Centers. That increase is going to come through any day now -- perhaps tomorrow. They never let us salesmen know in advance, of course, because some might -- uh -- profiteer at the expense of the customer. But I know it's soon. Your bonus will still apply, naturally, but five or six thousand per lot is a pretty hefty penalty for a day's time. Uh -- do you think you could make it by this afternoon? Say, four o'clock? I don't want to rush you -- and of course it might be as late as next week before the rise -- but I would feel terrible if -- " Bondman would feel terrible if he lost his commmission because an irate customer balked at the higher price, Fisk thought. "I think I can make it by four." That would give him six hours -- time enough. "Excellent. I'll see you then. Bye-bye." And the screen faded. Marslot investment seemed attractive indeed, but he never made snap decisions about money. It wasn't just a matter of checking -- he wanted to appraise his own motives and inclinations. The best buy in the world -- or Mars -- was pointless if it failed to relate to his basic preferences and needs. He punched an early lunch and ate it slowly. Then he began his calls. First the library informational service for a summary of Mars, Ltd. operations. While that was being processed for faxing to him he read the sample contract carefully and completely. It was tight -- he would not actually own the lot until it was completely paid for and he couldn't sell it until he owned it. Leverage? Fla! But apart from that trap, it was straight. He could defang it by purchasing outright. Not to mention the interest he would save. The rundown on Mars, Ltd. arrived. He settled down to his real homework. Interesting -- there was a cautionary note about that "Ltd." "Limited" meant that the developer's liability was limited to its investments on Earthsoil -- of which IF it had none. Its only Earthly en clave was, as Bondman had claimed, legally Mars soil. A nice device for impressive "interplanetary" calls to clients -- but perhaps even nicer as a defense against lawsuit. An irate party might oblars -- but unless he sued on Mars there was nothing for him to collect. What a beautiful foil against crackpots and opportunists. The company was legitimate. In fact it was the largest of its lars worth of Marsland to speculators in the past few years. The Elysium Acres project was listed, too. A note read: see governsighed and punched for it -- it had not been attached to the main commentary. He had a lot of dull reading to do. The phone lighted. The hour was already four. He had meant to make some other checks -- well, they hardly mattered. He had verified that Mars, Ltd. was no fly-bynight outfit. "Did you come to a decision, Mr. Centers?" Bondman inquired, sounding like an old friend. Fisk had decided -- but a certain innate and cussed caution still restrained him. The deal seemed too good to be true and that was a suspicious sign. But aside from the "leverage" hoax he could find no fault in it. He decided not to query the salesman about the time payment trap -- to do so would only bring a glib explanation and more superfluous compliments on his intelligence. Better to let Bondman think he was fooling the client. "I might be interested in more than one lot," Fisk said. "Absolutely no problem, Mr. Centers." Fisk was sure the salesman's warmth was genuine this time. "Simply enter the number of lots you are buying on the line on page three where it says 'quantity,' write your name on the line below, and make out a check to Mars, Limited for your first payment. That's all there is to it, since I have already countersigned. Fax a copy back to us and -- " Fisk's mail chime sounded. "Oh -- the property report," he said. "Do you mind if I just glance at it first? A formality, of course." "Oh, I thought you'd already read that. Didn't I send you one? By all means -- " A buzzer on Bondman's desk interrupted him. "I'm in conference," he snapped into his other phone. "Can't it wait?" Then his expression changed. "Oh, very well." He turned to Fisk. "I beg your pardon -- a priority call has just signaled on my other line and -- well, it's from my superior. Can't say no to him, ha-ha, even if it is bad form to interrupt a sales conference. If you don't mind waiting a moment -- " "Not at all. I'll read the property report." "Excellent. I'll wrap this up in a moment, I'm sure." Bondman faded, to be replaced by a dramatic artist's conception of Elysium Acres, buttressed by sweet music. The connection remained. This was merely Mars, Ltd.'s privacy shunt. shifting connection and Bondman's voice was superimposed on the music. "... tell you I'm closing a sale for several lots. I can't just pull the rug out -- he's signing the contract right now..." A pause, as he listened to a response that Fisk couldn't hear. Then: "To fifty thousand? As of this morning? Why didn't you call me before? Fisk realized that Bondman's privacy switch hadn't locked properly. It wouldn't be ethical to listen and he did want to skim that property report. But the voice wrested his attention away from the printed material. "Look, boss -- I just can't do it. I quoted him the thirty-grand bonus... no, I can't withdraw it. He's sharp -- and he's got the contract! He'd make a good Mars, Limited exec... no, terms, I think... yes, if we could get him to default on the payments, so the reversion clause... hate to bilk him like that -- I like him... no, I'm sure he wouldn't go for the new price. Not with the cancellation of the bonus and all. That's a twenty-grand jump just when he's about to sign... okay, okay, I'll try it -- but listen, boss, you torpedo me in midsale again like this and I'm signing with Venus, Limited before you finish the call... I know they're a gyp outfit. But I promised this client the bonus price and now you're making a liar out of me and cheating him out of the finest investment of the century on a time-payment technicality. If I have to operate that way I might as well go whole Venus hog-" There was a long pause. Fisk smiled, thinking of the tonguelashing Bondman must be getting for putting integrity ahead of business. Fisk knew it was unfair for him to take advantage of a slipped switch and private information -- but he had been promised the bonus price and now someone was trying to wipe it out. If Mars, Ltd. were trying to con him out of his investment, he had a right to con himself back in. "... all right." Bondman's voice came again. "That's best. I'll try to IF talk him out of it so nobody loses. But get those new quotations in the slot right away. Couple of other clients I have to call -- they're going to be furious about that increase, but at least they were warned about delaying... yes... yes... okay. Sorry I blew up. Bye-bye." The music faded. The picture vanished and Bondman reappeared, looking unsettled. "Sorry to keep you waiting so long, Mr. Centers," he said. "Bad news. The offer I was describing to you -- well, I'm afraid we'll have to call it off." "But I just signed the contract,"' Fisk protested innocently. "Are you telling me to tear it up already?" Bondman's eyelids hardly flickered. "What I meant, to say is that the conditions have changed. New government restrictions have forced up construction costs and the whole Elysium Acres project is in jeopardy. In fact, Mr. Centers, we now have no guarantee that there will even be a dome on Mars. Under the circumstances I don't see how I can recommend -- " So that was the pitch. "We all have to take chances, as you pointed out," Fisk said briefly. "I should think that if your expenses go up your prices would follow -- to compensate. So I should buy now." "Er -- yes," Bondman admitted. "Still, it looks bad. I wouldn't want you to be left holding title to a worthless lot, Mr. Centers. Until this thing settles down -- " "One lot?" Fisk interjected with mock dismay. "Lots. I signed up for ten." For a moment even the supersalesman was at a loss for words. "T-ten?" "Why not, for such a good investment? Leverage, you know." "Leverage! Let me tell you something -- " Bondman caught himself. He sighed. He put on a smile of rueful admiration. "You certainly know your business, Mr. Centers. I only hope you aren't taking a terrible chance with a great deal of money. Are you sure?" But, observing Fisk's expression, he capitulated. "Well, then, just make out your first monthly payment for three thousand two hundred and fifty dollars and we'll -- " "Thanks, no. I'm paying cash." Bondman looked so woebegone that Fisk felt sorry for him, though he knew the salesman would still receive a handsome commission along with his reprimand for letting so many underpriced lots go. "Cash? The entire amount?" "Yes. Here is my check for three hundred thousand dollars, certified against the escrow liquidation of my total holdings. That saves you the annoyance of time payments and gives you a good chunk of the working capital you need. Your boss should be well pleased, considering your rising expenses." "Uh, yes," Bondman' agreed faintly as Fisk faxed check and contract back to him. The originals remained with him for his records, but the faxes were legal, too. The deal was closed. He owned the lots outright and could not lose them by payments default. If he needed working capital himself, he could sell one at the fifty-thousand-dollar price tomorrow. Bondman stared bleakly at the documents, then pulled himself together. "It has been a real pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Centers," he said with a brave smile. "I'm sure you'll never regret your purchase. Uh, bye-bye." "Bye-bye!" Fisk returned cheerily as the connection broke. B UT something about the salesman's expression just as the picture faded bothered him. It reminded him of what Bondman had said during the morning call: The biggest sucker is the one who thinks he knows it all... The library information on Mars, Ltd. was general and, of course, bland. Any negative remarks would have made it vulnerable for a libel suit regardless of the truth. It had provided him with essentially the Mars, Ltd. publicity release, but added the cautionary note: see government property Fisk had been about to look at that report when Bondman's boss had interrupted and the privacy switch had coincidentally malfunctioned. Interesting timing. After the price-increase call Bondman had been nervous and stuttery, hardly a supersalesman. His facade had disintegrated -- yet he had known the word was coming. And salesman of that caliber should have been able to cover better than that. Unless the whole thing had been an act to puff up the confidence of a sucker who thought he knew it all. Fisk's hand shook as he lifted the property report, for now he knew what he would find. Plainly printed in red ink: This property is not adaptable for terraforming purposes. The lots are unimproved, unsurveyed and without roads, landing facilities or other improvements. Access is extremely poor. Site is subject to frequent ground tremors prohibiting construction of permanent buildings or erection of static-dome generators. Approximate value per lot is  # . #...  IF AT They needed sustenance, and so did the voracious alien forms Kappa Dome and at the end of their first month together were getting along pretty well -- this in spite of their considerable differences in character and the fact that each of them may have had something to hide. Harvey Callan was a small man, wiry and energetic, an extrovert and an easy conversationalist. Within an hour after they had selected their sleeping quarters and unpacked their gear -- following their arrival at Kappa Dome -- he had been telling them about himself, his travels and his frequent and casual love affairs. He had no wife, no relatives, no attachments. Travel light , he had said. It's the only way to live. Don t get cluttered up with friends and possessions. Money , of course , is different. Every once in a while  collect a wad , but I can never keep it... Some of his talk about himself was undoubtedly true. Nils Lundgren appeared to be Callan's opposite in most ways. He was big, slow moving and rarely talked, never about himself. His accent sounded Norwegian, but he neither confirmed nor denied this nationality. His speech was larded with limited profanities delivered without rancor. He bore more than his share of the work. David Mallory's character seemed to lie somewhere between the other two. He was not talkaCallan's questions about himself. He had been married, he said, but it hadn't worked out and had been ended by mutual consent. He had held a civil service job, something to do with cost accounting, but it had been neither interesting nor remunerative. Out of boredom he had applied for a year's contract able surprise, had passed the physicals and been accepted. His story, too, may have been partly true. The three of them, then, had settled into a casual colleague relationship while maintaining certain reticences. And honoring these in each other. The company which, by right of discovery, would hold the mineral twenty-odd years -- and for which they all worked -- was careful to keep its operations small. There were no useful minerals on the planet, only pebbles of crystalline alumina variously colored by impurities. Emeralds, rubies, topazes and sapphires were at best baubles and would lose most of their value if they became too plentiful. So there were ten domes only, scattered along the ridges that were easiest to harvest, and there were rarely more than forty men who lived and worked there. Then Harvey Callan died during the night and there were only two of them to work Kappa until such time as a replacement might arrive. Callan died in a way to give you nightmares. A slug got him. It was to be hoped that he never knew it. Those who spent time on Midor were in agreement that you lost consciousness instantly when a slug attached -- or maybe when it just touched you. The agreement was wishful thinking, because how did anyone know? The victim never IF moved or spoke or even screamed and in a few minutes after contact he was dead. The slugs could digest their way through almost anything, boots, clothing or human skin, plastics or metals. But a shot of moderate voltage current would kill them fast. So would a laser or flame gun. The instruction manual provided by the company discussed nettles and slugs and other unpleasant surprises Midor could spring on the newcomer, but the advice given was simple. Keep clear of them. Stay out of valleys. When Callan hadn't shown up in the galley for breakfast Mallory went to look for him. He was sprawled across the bed in his room. A slug was attached to his naked chest, its head buried, feeding. Automatically, preferring not to think about it, Mallory did what had to be done. He went to his room for his laser gun. The beam dispatched the slug fast enough and burned a small crease in Callan, too, but Callan was beyond caring. He may have been alive at that moment. His eyes were open but without expression. with the slug, Mallory unstrapped the money belt from Callan's waist and, wasting no seconds, examined its contents. There was money, which Mallory ignored. Two sheets of foolscap covered with minute, rather sloppy script he removed and pocketed. He tossed the belt onto a chair with the rest of Callan's clothing and went to call Nils. Nils stood and stared down at Callan for a minute, then turned away. "You get breakfast," he said. "I'll clean up." Mallory heated coffee and a can of hash and when Nils returned they ate without speaking. "Where is he?" Mallory asked finally. "Outside. That flat place off to the right." "Wired up?" "a, all ready." Mallory sat and considered Nils's impassive face. The features were finely drawn, cast in a mold of scholarship, but Nils's speech was carefully untutored, his manner unfeeling. He seemed to care nothing about Callan's death. But then , thought Mallory, I must give the same impression. Methodically Nils cleared away the remains of their meal. "We search the dome first, maybe," he said. "See how it got in." While they had been eating, the shell of the dome had changed from black to cloudy gray, filtering in as much daylight as would ever reach indoors. The day was only a little lighter outside under Midor's constant mantle of clouds. With all the dome lights v on and with torches and guns in hand the men systematically explored the lounge, each sleeping compartment, the galley, the head and the sorting room. The base area of the dome had been blasted, leveled and fused. There could be no faults there. The plastic shell with its cobweb of wiring was fully charged. In any case, there were no breaks. The slight positive pressure maintained inside was holding steady. In the sorting room Nils stared thoughtfully at the three sacks they had brought in the day before. Mallory nodded. "That must have been it. You and I came in yesterday practically together and I put a charge on both our bags. Callan arrived later. He stopped for a minute in the galley, then came in here. He must have forgotten." "Goddamn bad thing to forget," Nils muttered. "We take care of him now, eh? Before they get to him." Callan's body was loosely wrapped in a tarpaulin, saturated with nitryl and circled with several turns of resistance wire. Nils picked up the connecting cable, glanced briefly at Mallory and closed the switch. The mortal remains of Harvey Callan erupted in white flame and a streamer of dark smoke went whipping down the wind. They stood for some minutes, each engrossed in his own thoughts, until the pyre had diminished to incandescent ash. When it was over they turned back to the dome. "You want to call Iota?" Mallory asked. Nils hesitated. "You do it." . and jiggled the call key. Iota was the dome closest to them and the only one they could reach. They were limited to line-of-sight transmission and Midor's spiny topography provided very few clear channels even on the heights. It began to seem that everybody at Iota was out hunting gems, but at length Peter Amahandra answered. Mallory told him the story succinctly, with Nils sitting close by in the lounge, listening. Peter said that he would pass the word along to Alpha, so that the next of kin could be notified, and Mallory told him there weren't any. He signed off and said to Nils; "You heard me suggest that since Alpha had five men they might like to send us a replacement right away. Amahandra didn't think so. IF Nils shrugged. "You could bet on that. Want to go out -- or sort first?" "Sort first," Mallory decided. "We've got Callan's bag to do. Might as well get it over with." In the sorting room they sat on opposite sides of the table with the screening box between them. A kilo of gems went into the box and a quarter of them fell through into the waste bin. Under strong lights they picked through the rest. Most of the stones were roughly spherical, but some of them were flattened, distorted or badly flawed. These also went to waste. It was a long way to the trading worlds, freight was costly and any gems under about three carats could only depress the market. The sorting went on and on. At last Mallory stood and stretched. "We're caught up. Let's eat something and go." It wasn't raining outside and the roiling clouds that looked so close over their heads showed patches of lighter gray. Even the moistureladen air was more breathable than usual. The weather was good for Midor. Wordlessly the two men went their accustomed separate ways, Mallory westward along the ridge, Nils taking a long diagonal down to a lower level. Presently Mallory paused and looked around, his mind not seriously on gem hunting. Nils's diminished figure could still be seen, threading a zigzag path between points. It wasn't often you could see as far as today. Except for the area that had been blasted around the dome, the points reared themselves in all directions. They were shaped like stalagmites but were largersome immensely larger -- than any limestone stalagmite could have grown. They were granite, hard years of erosion of softer rocks. Usually, not always, there was room to move between them: a deposit of crumbled rock or silt that made a pathway where with caution you could set your feet. In these narrow gullies were the deposits where you found the gems, sometimes lying exposed, more often mixed with gravel. Here, too, you might find slugs, although, thank God, there weren't many of them on the heights. In the valleys were lush growths of stinging nettles, their chief food. Up here there was nothing to tempt the beasts. Nevertheless they came slithering up through the crevices. It started to rain sometime after the men had left the dome, not heavily but enough to spoil the visibility. Mallory pivoted for a habitual look around. There was too much local magnetism for a compass to be useful. It was wisest to extend the search pattern by only a little each day, memorizing the look of the terrain as you went. He might not be doing this much longer, but still. Mallory had a good day. He found one rich gully overlooked before, which, with the aid of the trenching shovel and rake, yielded half a sackful of sapphires and, close to the limit he had set himself for the day, another nearly as good. So he was back ahead of schedule. He shucked his outerwear and boots and searched Callan's room thoroughly, but with as little disturbance as possible. The money belt was lying as he had left it, across a chair. The money was still in it. It wasn't much -- even as the accumulation of half a lifetime to traveling light. He finished his search in ten minutes, mixed himself a drink and fed a tape into the viewer. But instead of watching he thought about Callan and Nils. It was a half-hour or more before Nils stomped in. Mallory switched off the screen and said in response to the other's grunt that he would put together some dinner. He swung open the door to the galley and jumped back with a yell. The place seemed to be swarming with slugs, all over the floor, the table, the oven. He shoved the door shut and put his shoulder against it, a meaningless reaction. The slugs couldn't push doors open. "Is what?" Nils demanded. "What the hell do you think? Slugs. All over." "Where from?" "Who cares? Let's burn 'em first and find out later." Nils could move fast on occasion. He got to the supply room and was back with the flamethrower while Mallory was trying to remember where it was stowed. Nils set the dial for broad flame. Mallory swung the door wide. The slugs were even on the back of the door, three or four of them. Living, they had ' an acrid, nauseating odor. Burned, they smelled indescribable. Still, there was no need for respirators. The men worked in turn, trying to hold their breaths. They left the galley a sooty mess -- free, however, of living slugs -- and retreated to the lounge. The noise of the air pump rose to a whine as the chemical sniffer reported massive contamination. "You saw?" Mallory inquired grimly. "#a." IF "If they'd set out systematically to puncture every food can they couldn't have done it better." "How the hell did they pull down the shelves?" "Ate out the underpinnings, I figure." Mallory made another foray to the galley and kicked around the litter on the floor. "We have enough food for a week or so -- if we don't mind eating the leavings from a bunch of slugs. Not for me. I'm going to call Iota and get them to send over a load. If they can't spare it, one of the other domes can." With the work day over, the radio responded promptly. "Who's that, Barton? Listen, Jake, we've got a mean situation here. You know about Harvey, of course. Yes, we think he forgot to sterilize his sack. Sure, we took care of it, but only after one of them got him. Well, he went into the galley and must have put it down there for a minute and one of them got out and laid eggs all over the place. Sure as hell they hatched. I don't know, fifty or a hundred maybe. We haven't made a body count. What's important is that we haven't any food left. Oh, nuts. You know they can dissolve their way or chew their way, whatever they do, through a metal can in nothing flat. Take a look in your garbage pit. Yeah, we'll find out as soon as the stink is gone, but so what? I'll bet there won't be twenty cans fit to use. The point is, you're going to have to send over some food. Maybe some extra cyanide. We're going to have to sterilize the whole dome. What?" He listened and at length said, "I'll call you back." "That does it," he told Nils. "You'd better get ready for a long walk. All three aircars are at Alpha Dome and they're all out of commission. Their current went off for a few minutes last night and by the time they got it fixed the little bastards had crawled over the repulsor plates and corroded them to the extent that they won't lift. They're grounded till the next ship arrives." Nils stared at him expressionlessly and said nothing. "Thirty-four days," Mallory added, "if it arrives on schedule." l completed a partial cleanup and a count of the cans and foil packs of food that could be eaten safely -- all told, enough for a week. So the trek to Iota was unavoidable. Under any ordinary conditions thirty-three kilometers should have been no distance at all for the two men to cover but these miles were figured as the crow would have flown, had there been any crows on Midor. On foot the course would be twisting and turning between points and, for all except the first few kilometers, it would be territory the men had seen only once and then from the air. Iota and Kappa lay on the same ridge. It, however, angled sharply between the two domes. To follow the peak would have taken the men far out of their way and a straight line march, if one had been possible, would have cut across the lowland swamps. The compromise route, the only feasible one, would descend the slopes nearly to the valley's edge, parallel it, then ascend again toward -- if they were lucky -- Iota Dome. At no point could they expect to see the dome until they were almost on it. They could expect to be as good as lost for two days, guided only by the general slope of the land. It would be useless to leave at night and impossible to fumigate with cyanide without leaving the dome. In consequence Mallory at least spent a jumpy night imagining slugs. Nils appeared to have lapsed into apathy. He did put in some time poring over a virtually useless map. Then, an hour before dawn, he dressed for the trek, gathered his gear together and sat staring aimlessly at the floor. Mallory rechecked the items he proposed to take along. The total was not too different from what they would carry on a usual day. Regulation wearing apparel: coveralls integrated with boots and gloves, neck cloths, hard hats with lamps . attached -- a few food packs stowed in pockets, enough for two or three days. If they weren't at Iota by then it probably wouldn't matter. No need to carry water on Midor. The rain tasted sour and metallic, but it was drinkable. Laser guns. Walkie-talkie, in the hope that it might pick up something when they got close enough to Iota. At the last minute Mallory returned to his room and collected a small handgun that fired anesthetic pellets. It fitted snugly into an inner pocket. He wondered what undeclared items Nils might be taking. He made a last call to Iota to say that they were about to leave. Amahandra wished them luck and promised to be on the lookout. Light and power switches were flicked off. The door closed behind them and they turned their backs gems. Rain was falling heavily and the wind had picked up to eighty or ninety kilometers from yesterday's IF relative calm. Without wanting to do so, Mallory glanced at the patch of Slackened ash -- all that remained of Callan. Most of it had washed away. Nils stepped past him and took the lead. For a while they would be traversing ground with which he was familiar. Mallory was glad to be following. By their watches it was morning, but the sky still seemed quite black and here, close to the heights, the points reared upward fifty to a hundred or more meters. Some light was reaching them, though, and it was easier to find a footing without the headlamps. The rain drumming on their helmets drew slanting silvery lines that looked more like metal rods than discrete drops. Washes of diffuse lightning flickered among the clouds and occasional rumbles of thunder were audible over the rain. At length it seemed to be getting lighter, not so much from the advancing day as from the shorter pointsr -- not that they were shorter in fact, but the rubble between them was increasing in depth and the tracks were wider. They came xinder the lee of a shallow cliff and by unspoken agreement stopped for a breather. It had been evident for some time that Nils was beyond the area he knew. "Want me to go first?" Mallory shouted over the din. Nils didn't bother to answer and after a minute moved on. They scrambled along the top of a scree slope, rocks sliding and rolling under their feet. Once Nils fell and rolled a little distance. The tumble must have been bruising, but he got up and went on without a limp. Three or four kilometers a day was what they were used to walking. By the time they had used up a half-day the calves of Mallory's legs were beginning to knot. His boots had been drawn from general stock at Alpha and had never fitted well. Each change of angle was resisted by his muscles. He and Nils would have to find a place to stop before nightfall, likely less than halfway. Mallory wanted very much to call another brief halt, but he wanted still more not to reveal hi fatigue to the phlegmatic Nils. T HE figure ahead of him disappeared suddenly. "What the hell?" Mallory growled. They weren't a dozen paces apart. He discovered Nils by tripping over him. Nils was apparently on hands and knees. "What the hell?" Mallory repeated. "Foot caught." "Grab my hand." Nils grabbed and heaved and failed to budge. Mallory unshipped the lamp from his helmet and surveyed the situation. Nils's right leg was down in a crevice as far as the knee. Water streamed into the crevice but found a channel below and drained away and Mallory could see the heavy boot jammed between rocks. The foot was twisted. "We'll have to get your foot out first," Mallory said. The boots were equipped with four quick-release buckles, but it was evident that Nils couldn't reach them. Mallory lay down with the lamp in one hand and maneuvered his arm into the hole. From this vantage he could see more and what he could see made his scalp crawl. Less than a hand's breadth from Nils's foot a giant slug was clinging to the rock. Its body was extended, interrupted in the act of rippling upward. The light had startled it into momentary immobility. It couldn't be touched with a laser beam without burning Nils. The gloves that would have given Mallory a few seconds' protection were lying on the ground behind him. He controlled the impulse to snatch back his arm, instead moved his hand slowly and carefully to touch the lowest buckle. It yielded with a snap. The white, translucent body quivered and extended forward. The black, button eyes seemed to be staring straight at Mallory. Each buckle gave in turn. Mallory's arm and Nils's foot came out simultaneously, and the empty boot slipped sideward. An instant later Mallory's laser sliced the slug in two. Nils peered into the crevice, then turned to stare at Mallory, who was tugging on his gloves. "Be damned," he said. "You might have been killed. Trying to save my life. What was the sense in that?" He kneeled and extricated the boot from the crevice. "You're a damned fool, you know. Anyway, thanks." "Sure," said Mallory. "No sweat. This is as good a place as any. Let's eat." He stooped and picked up a nearly perfect spherical emerald of twenty-odd carats, grimaced and tossed it away. Some day it might be found again, to give momentary pleasure to an unknown gem hunter. Their backs propped against the nearest point, they unwrapped and ate a couple of cereal bars, then turned up their faces to wash them down with a drink of water. The rain was diminishing as they continued their descent with Mallory now in the lead and going slowly. Nils was limping and trying not to show it. Their progress became an interminable business of putting one foot in front of the other, of IF pausing only occasionally to hazard a new guess at their direction. Mallory was startled to realize that the day was nearly over and it would be fully dark soon. He switched on his light and waited for Nils to catch up. "The points are nearly covered up. We must be right on the edge of the valley." "Must be." "We can get up on one of them. Some seem to have flat tops." Mallory turned and moved away, scanning the nearer points, and presently found one that looked promising. He climbed it and looked around. To the right -- and very close -- the gray foliage of the nettles spread uninterruptedly farther than the eye could see in the rain-washed twilight. The hills beyond, where Iota Dome should be, were invisible, although a play of lightning suggested their height. The flat area where Mallory stood had room for one man only. Nils was waiting below, swinging his light back and forth along the ground. "No room for two," he shouted down. "Go straight ahead about a hundred paces and turn right. Looks like a good one over there." He remained standing and extended the aerial of the walkie-talkie, knowing there was no reasonable chance of his picking up anything but hopeful of some radio freak. He pushed reception up to maximum and swung the aerial in a ninety degree arc. Not a thing. He looked toward the rock where Nils should now be standing or sitting. He wasn't there. The last light of the day was fading rapidly but there was enough for him to be sure. Mallory muttered an expletive and slid down off the point, aiming his light ahead. T HE rubble had become more silt-like as they approached the valley and he could see traces of footprints. They led at first toward the point Mallory had suggested, then turned sharply down the slope. In a minute he was standing at the edge of the nettles. Nils had gone on. The plants had been pushed apart, leaving an open V that was recovering slowly. Nils must have been mad to try to go through here and Mallory felt like an idiot to be following. He followed nevertheless and found the going less difficult than he had expected. The nettles grew head high, many of them topped by blossoms on which slugs were feeding, but the stems were bare of spines and could be bent aside with gloved hands. Nils's trail stayed clear. In half a kilometer Mallory came upon a rocky knoll several meterk across, the blunted summit of a point on which no plants had grown. He stepped up on it for a look ahead. Nils was using his light not far away. Mallory shouted and plunged down to renew the pursuit. His heel slipped. With a contortion he avoided falling, but his face came into glancing contact with a nettle. It was like being hit in the face by a blowtorch. He let out a bellow of pain and brought up his hand to his face, which was the worst thing he could have done, since it pushed innumerable barbs deeper into his skin. Then he stood, rigid and shaking, commanding all the self-control he could to avoid dropping to the ground and rolling. With tears streaming from his closed eyes he about-faced, felt for the edge of the rock with his feet and scrambled up to momentary safety. There he collapsed in a huddle. Despite the agony of his face r a thread of sane thought persisted. He knew that soon he would be in delirium. That was the second effect of the nettles. He knew that he couldn't stand and walk, couldn't see to find his way out of danger and couldn't protect himself from a slug. His only hope was that Nils might find him. His left hand still gripped the lamp and from between squeezed eyelids he could see it was burning. He began to wave it and with that lost his tenuous hold on sanity, ke cursed and whispered, shouted and sang in a voice that, at best, provided no excuse for singing. He thought he was running and his heels drummed on the rock. He thought he was being buried in glowing coals. Nils found him. He was quiet by then, moaning a little and giving an occasional twitch. First Nils cleaned the rock of two slugs that were drawing purposeful paths toward a source of heat. Then he squatted on his heels and looked at Mallory's almost unrecognizable face. There wasn't much that could be done, but he got out a first-aid pack and sprayed the blistered skin with a mixture of anesthetic and antibiotic. He tied Mallory's hands to his belt with a length of bandage. Then he began an allnight vigil. T HE day, when it came at last, promised to be a good one, with rain only in squalls. Nils could catch glimpses of the distant ridge. Mallory started to rock his head back and forth. "Can you hear me?" Nils asked. "No, you can't get your hands to your face. Don't try." IF Mallory's eyelids flickered open. He made an abortive effort to sit up. "Need a shave," he said. "Can you hear me?" "Yes, sure." "Can you understand what I'm saying?" "Why not?" "Blink your right eye." The eye quivered and closed. "Very well. Your face is a mess, the lower half of it, but your eyes are all right. How do you feel?" "Awful." He spoke with difficulty through cracked and swollen lips. "Keep still. I'll spray your face again. Any feeling in your fingers?" "Hands and feet feel dead." "Yes. The numbness wears off gradually, they say. Until you feel up to walking I may as well tell you a story." "Where's your Norwegian accent?" Mallory asked. "Nils Lundgren was my mother's father. It seemed as good a name to take as any. Not uncommon over there and I could do the accent pretty well. At any rate, it got me off Earth and I thought I was away clear until Callan told me you -- told me who you were." Mallory rolled his head and watched as Nils drew his laser and picked off a slug that was making progress toward them. His vision was somewhat blurred and he squinted to focus on the speaker's face. "I don't want to pretty the thing up. I knew, almost from the time I went to work for him, that Blain was an unscrupulous man and I later knew that staying with him was reprehensible, but I stayed, partly because he paid me very well indeed. I still tell myself that by the time I knew how thoroughly evil he was, I was too deeply involved to leave safely, but that's making excuses. He came to trust me up to a point. I knew five languages well enough to carry on his business negotiations. Some were legitimate. The man couldn't help being honest occasionally. Most of his operations made him money. But then came Asteroid four-oh-eight. Blain himself was played for a sucker. Shall I go on?" "It's your story," Mallory said, "if you want to tell it." He flexed his gloved hands, trying to work some feeling into the fingers. "Yes, I think I'd like to tell somebody why I killed Blain. Soon, I suppose. I'll be telling a lawyer in the hope that he'll figure out some kind of defense. I have no urge to become a martyr. "It was pure luck, my getting to Midor," Nils went on. "How I got out of New York and how I negotiated a contract I won't tell you because it involves somebody who helped me. It would have been fine to have gotten paid off here at the end of my year and to have gone to one of the trading planets. But then I learned that you were U.N. Police. I'm puzzled, by the way. Why United Nations? Did Blain wield so great an influence that his people could call on a world organization to avenge him?" "Go on with your story," Mallory said. "We can come to your question later." V told me, I began to rack my brain for some way to get back to Alpha without you, to break my contract, to get on the next ship going anywhere. But I formed no plan, nothing that was acceptable. Then Callan died and the roof, figuratively, fell in on us. Last night, in pure panic, I set off through these damned nettles with the hope, the very faint hope of reaching Epsilon... It would have been about eighty kilometers in a straight line. I probably wouldn't have made it and I almost didn't care. You might still have come after me -- or, if I could disable their radio for a while, you might assume that I'd died in the swamp and gone on home. You see how desperation robs a man of good sense. "When I came back last night  and found you the thought occurred to me -- I admit it -- that all I had to do was leave you here. You'd never have survived the night. But, damn you, you had saved my life at imminent peril to your own. You left me with the obligation to get you to Iota." "Let's get back to Blain, Mallory prompted. "Yes, of course. I'm being a bit disorganized about this. To go on back-end foremost, these are the facts that will be evident to the court and will probably convict me. I was Blain's secretary. I had keys to any door on the top floor of the building, including his private offices. I knew the combination to his private safe. As I told you, he trusted me up to a point. "On that night he said that he would be entertaining at home. I went to his office. I opened the safe. Blain surprised me there and pulled a gun, an old-style pellet gun, but lethal. I jumped him and took the gun away. He wasn't very strong. Then I shot him. It wasn't an accident as the result of the struggle. I have no such defense. He was lying on the floor and I shot him through the head -- because he had to die." "Very clear," said Mallory dryly. "Yes. The door of his office was then standing open, and within seconds two men, men who were to have had an appointment with him, looked in at me. I was standing over him with the gun still in my hand. So theft you are. There was a scuffle and I broke away, got out of the building and went into hiding. How I got here is, as I said, none of your business. "Asteroid Four-oh-eight. Blain's foot slipped on that. He had been led to believe it was rich in transuranian elements. It was done subtly, but it was the age-old trick of salting. The man who perpetrated the fraud is believed to have committed suicide. That is not pertinent. In any case, when Four-oh-eight was in a favorable position Blain shipped heavy machinery there with supplies and a crew of sixty miners. It cost and there was nothing there to mine. Are you following me?" Mallory nodded. He could move his fingers now inside the gloves, but his feet still felt like blocks of wood. "So the operation was abandoned at a heavy loss. Very well, I learned -- never mind how -- that the flight of the freighter that was to have taken additional supplies to the asteroid had been canceled. Blain had given the order immediately on learning he had been cheated. Furthermore, he was issuing no order for the departure of the larger ship that would be needed to bring home the mining crew. Do you understand? There was enough food, enough water, enough power to carry them for perhaps several weeks, but their oxygen supply could be reckoned in hours. About ninety-six hours as I calculated it. And Asteroid Four-oh-eight was getting steadily farther from Earth. But Blain couldn't bring himself to throw good money after bad. He couldn't spend another quarter of to save sixty lives. I tried to argue with him in terms he would understand. I told him that he would certainly be caught at it. He told me that the records would show there was an ample stock of oxygen. The disaster, when it was learned about, would be attributed to a leak in the system. He wouldn't have gotten away with it, of that I'm sure, but an investigation would have been too late. It wouldn't have helped those miners if Blain wound up in an insane asylum or in jail." "But you didn't report to the authorities," Mallory interrupted. "There wasn't time for process of law. A ship had to be dispatched immediately, within hours, or there would be nobody to save. Let me finish. I went to his office, opened the safe and got out the code he used for his personal communications. There was a teletype machine in the next room. I teletyped Houston in his name and ordered out a ship, highest priority. I waited for acknowledgment and verified the order using the correct symbols. There was no hitch. I went back to his office to close the safe. I planned to be in South America by the time he discovered he had sent a 'rescue mission. Well, you know the rest of it." "There was nothing in the news about the rescue of the men." "Of course not. It was simply the last step of an unsuccessful industrial operation. It was ordered by Blain just before I killed him." "You can't prove a damn thing, can you?" "Nothing. But I thought I'd like you to know. Do you think you can walk?" "Unstrap my hands." "I will if you can remember not to touch your face." made it to his feet and stood uncertainly. "Good. Now put your hands on my shoulders and try to keep step. I'll go slowly and I'll take care of nettles and slugs. Just keep your mind on walking. We're going to get out of the valley the shortest way, the way we came in. Then we'll skirt it. Ready?" There was a knack, Mallory discovered, to stumping along on feet that had no sensation. After a few stumbles they worked out a lockstep gait that made steady, slow progress. In a little while they were on higher ground. The pain in Mallory's face was subsiding to the degree that his thought processes seemed to realign themselves from time to time. The decision that had to be made had in fact been reached earlier, but he shied away from recognizing it and making it irrevocable. They found a spot where, after Nils had scouted it for slugs, it seemed safe to sit and rest. Twice they halted to eat, a difficult business for Mallory. At midafternoon they agreed to start the trek upward. Before they had gotten out of the area of low points Nils stopped abruptly and pointed to a spot where a circle of white light showed against the gray clouds. After a moment it could not be mistaken. "They've used their heads," Nils said. "Rigged a search-light to play on the clouds. Can you hold up for another hour or so of walking?" "With a couple of breaks, yes. IF My feet are getting some feeling in them." He displayed the pellet gun. "When we get closer this will make a noise and may bring them to us. First, I've got some talking to do." "Go ahead." "Question. How well did you get to know Callan?" "Not well at all -- in spite of all his talk." "Right. It was mostly fabrication. Callan was a professional thief, not a vefy important one. He held a long string of jobs and was reasonably competent at some of them, but they all ended the same way. He stole something, often trivial, and disappeared. On his last job he made a mistake. He stole something important." Nils stared at him with an expression of shock. "Are you saying that his last jobs was with United Nations?" "Yes." "And that he stole something from them?" "That is correct. He was a messenger, cleared to carry classified documents up to confidential. One day he was handed an envelope containing currency, about ten thousand stellars, and told to deliver it to another office. The theft of the money was an embarrassment, no worse. Unfortunately, along with it was another envelope containing a long-hand draft of a resolution pertaining to relations between two of the nearer planets. The draft itself would have been no great loss, but the writer had added some marginal notes that would have been taken as offensive by one of the parties and could have seriously damaged the U.N. reputation. Callan didn't know what he had, but he was thought to have kept it. He was an opportunist. I was sent after him to recover or destroy it." "And did you?" "Yes." Nils stood silent for a time. Then he asked quietly and flatly, "Now what?" Mallory offered a silent farewell to principles that had guided him for two decades. "Now," he said, "we get on into Iota. For myself, I'm going to be reporting that I can't take much more of Midor. I'll break my contract and head for home on the earliest ship. I suppose that you, Nils, will finish out your year." "What I told you -- " Nils began. "What you told me?" Mallory repeated. "You mean back there when I was out of my head? Seems to me you were telling me some long, involved story about some people I never heard of before. I couldn't make head or tail of it.  (Continued from page #) Most Americans already invest in the future in some manner -- and all have an investment in the growth and progress of human knowledge. Beneficial byproducts of the Space Program now nearing its end already have touched nearly all Americans. There's ammunition. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Just finished reading If (February, #) and I thought I would comment on a great issue. I particularly liked Patterns of Chaos, by Colin Kapp. Kapp is masterful with his prose -- and with his imagination! Gail Habbyshaw Mercer, Pa. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I've been reading Colin Kapp's serial. Patterns of Chaos, and so far it has held my interest. One thing about the novel constantly disturbs me -- the barrage of cliches in the characters' conversations. For instance, " Jet off Jaycee -- " or " Spool it, Bron -- " or " Get off my back -- " etc. The infighting between Bron, Doc, Jaycee and Ananias also tends to seem phony, mainly because it is overdone and too lengthy. I'd like to see a little more subtlety in the clash of emotions. Kapp gets carried away in these sections and the characters seem oblivious to what is happening around them. Still, it's a good story and I hope you have more as enjoyable. I think Lester del Rey may have been expecting a bit too much from Ursula K. LeGuin's new novel. The Lathe of Heaven. From his review LeGuin's novel would seem much worse than Simak's A Choice of Gods. I've read both and I hardly think the LeGuin is inferior to the Simak work. Both actually depend a great deal on the emotional povJer they build up, a sort of rolling, flowing tide that peaks and ebbs at the story's climax. For me there was as much nostalgia in LeGuin's novel as there was in Simak's. Your comments on fantasy and your reply to Henry Bitman's thoughts on the purpose of fiction (in the February Ifj were most just, I felt. But I am surprised that you never thought to connect them. Since, as you say, fiction simulates nothing but is valid within itself, then it doesn't really matter whether the fiction is fantasy, sf, mainstream, mystery or whatever. All are equally valid -- they create a vivid reality of their own, or should if the story is well written. And, of course, every story has an emotional relevance to the real world -- which is what I think you were referring to regarding Arnten of Ultima Thule. You may print my address. Cy Chauvin I # Peters Roseville, Mich. # You're right on Arnten of Ultima Thule. The story also deals with the imagery of faiths and beliefs that have validity simply because people have believed -- some still do -- that all life as we know it has unity. Subscribers Please Note: Change of address Lazar. Manager. 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That ought to be worth more to you than #, but that's all you need to pay for # concise, lively, weekly issues. Mail the coupon today. science A Science Service Publicetion #I W. Center St. Marion, Ohio # Send me # weekly issues of  I enclose #.  Bill me. IF# UE vri'r ,uui Wforuf' Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I just finished reading Patterns of Chaos Colin Kapp) last night and it thrilled me so much that I felt I must write and congratulate. The last novel you published that took me equally was I Will Fear No Evil (Robert A. Heinlein). I also enjoyed Dark Inferno and The Gods Themselves. Td like to comment on some recent trends in science fiction. Now that man has been to the moon I no longer find near-space science fiction too speculative. Voyages beyond the solar system, even beyond the galaxy, based on what we know, remain exciting. Also the concept of social science fiction is growing in importance as it begins to answer many questions that need answering. I had my doubts when your magazines changed ownership and editors in '#, but now  confess you've made the Galaxy If combo a treat to receive each month. Roy J. Schenck Canisteo, N. Y. the title of the story or even the author. But I'll never forget the plot. Let me tell it briefly against the possibility that you or one of your readers might remember. A starship leaves Earth -- purpose of the voyage is exploration. The ship is a mile long, carries hundreds of experts. Several generations pass and the ship is not heard from. Earth has developed more efficient space drives -- her ships range the galaxy and one comes on the lost ship. The lost explorer had reached far out, lost its power source. It had, however, a "space anchor." For generations the people on board have been locking the anchor in space at one end of a track running the length of the ship. Working in massive shifts, the people on board "walk" the ship forward past its mooring, release and reset the anchor forward, begin again -- literally walking the ship home a few miles a day. A religion has grown out of this activity. Would-be rescuers discover that it would destroy these people to be told their faith and efforts were unnecessary and they're left to finish the journey on their own. The plot is distinctive and I hope the story hasn't just faded into the past. I would like to find a copy.  Mrs. ) Carl Vernon Weiss # West #th Street New York, N. Y. # Dear Mr. Jakobsson: There is a science-fiction story I'm trying to relocate. I read it a number of years ago in one of the better magazines -- can't remember which one or The story's one I regret to have missed. Can anybody out there lend a hand? IF .adapters; I   #-pc. Chrome Socket Set -- Drive ##  # ' #  I V # pc Not Driver  Set with itv own Pouch Reveriible Ratchet, "L-Hondle" ond Adapter.  #-pc. 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Makes Any Jab Ga Guicker . , . iaskr itself conspicuous, looming high above the loftiest of the long chain of rugged peaks that made a backbone for the planet. And when Cap'n Jules Griffin brought in the Stardust, easing down through layers of clouds toward magnificent sweeps of sunlit terrain below, that summit was a natural focus for our curiosity. tellow while we re in the neighborhood," I suggested. "Let Pegleg have a ball. I'm no expert at measuring, but that ought to make Everest look like a medium-sized molehill." "Better than forty thousand He had, I knew, been eyeing the big peak from the time we began visual reconnaissance. He adjusted his triangulation glasses. "This one breaks my record by thousands. Mount Rasmussen on Primrose Four was thirty-four seven, as you recall. Named it for Johnny because he's top man and I doubted that I'd ever see a higher one. Sorry, Johnny." Dr. Johannes Rasmussen didn't seem particularly upset. But then, he never did. He leaned back in the Director's chair, long, thin and immaculate as always. He looked as though he had shaved within the hour. His mustaches were waxed to points. But his eyes twinkled behind his reserved, still face. "Your intentions were good. Dr. cbuldn't ask. I'm quite content with Mount Rasmussen on Primrose Four. I'll certainly not take its picture down from my office wall because we've discovered a higher peak. I am many things, but, I hope, not fickle." Usually formal and grave, occasionally Johnny would fool you. No man crossed him when he said things for sure and many of the crew never found him other than cerebral and remote. But in the control room of the explorer ship Stardust we were men who knew each other well. We were all a part of what would be the legend of the Stardust -- had been from the beginning. Moe Cheng sat quietly in the navigator's seat. For the moment his responsibilities were over. He had guided us across trackless space, stage after Ultraspan stage, until the little yellow dot that the space charts called Olympus had Probably only Moe Cheng could have done it. Certainly no one has ever known as much about the galaxy as this big-nosed, slanteyed little man. The big peaks of Olympus's second planet turned beneath us as Cap'n Jules swept the ship in a vast circle around the mighty jumble of crags and pinnacles that made up the most impressive uplift any of us had ever seen. Great glaciers flowed down its shoulders. Below them green and gray sweeps of tundra merged with dark forests crowding up from the valleys and foothills. It was an Earthlike scene, but in giant scale. I thought of the Himalayas, the Andes, the Icefield Ranges of the St. Elias. It was all of them and more. Much, much more. T he true peak, the pinnacle of pinnacles, was hidden from us. Clouds swirled in slow circles and the summit was lost in them. The presence of that much moisture so high augured well for the condition of the atmosphere. Unless, below, it was a world of heavy, humid, unbreathable air. I can say only that from our point of vantage it didn't look it. "Now i see," Pegleg said, "why this system was called Olympus. That's Mount Olympus out there. IF The genuine article. Couldn't have named that peak after you anyhow, Johnny. It already has a name." "Only one drawback," i agreed. "Until this moment nobody knew it was here -- unless, maybe, Ursula has already had some input. She's probably been in communication with Apollo by now." "Zeus," Pegleg corrected firmly. "Ursula doesn't deal with underlings. She'd contact the top man." If you're beginning to suspect that we were not entirely serious you're catching on. It's the way we operate. Behind the swirling mists of our whimsical dialogue the solid structure of our real thinking lay in orderly and efficient patterns. As I watched I was automatically separating the impressive terrain into ecosystems, subconsciously groping for the best study plan. Ecology is my competence. And I knew that Pegleg, galactic geologist extraordinary, by now was analyzing the uplift with experience gained on many planets, using it to structure an insight into the history of this world that would be as valid as anything our instruments could tell us. The same procedures were going on all over the ship. Experts in many fields had activate their expertise. Dr. James Peters, chief zoologist, would be mentally organizing his exploring and collecting teams, speculating on what the habitats in view might contain and yield. Dr. Winifred Hcffelfinger, Winkle to a few of us andmy choice of all the botanists who ever swung a field pick, would be readying her vascuta and presses and drooling over the collecting possibilities in the varied world below. To Winkie no object was more beautifuf than the bleached and desiccated carcass of a plant on an herbarium sheet, a defendable name in impeccable Latin attached. To each his own. She's still one of my favorite people. I could list them all, meteorologists, limnologists. oceanographers, radiation specialists, communications experts, language enthusiasts, archeologists -- just know that they were all aboard. None better existed in their various fields and in addition each had the unique personal stability that our strange profession requires. Earth was thei birthplace, but space was their home. And would always be. We've mentioned Ursula Potts. Even aboard the Stardust Ursula was different. Little; wizened, old, with strange pale eyes and a big bun of gray hair on the back of her head usually thrust full of paint brushes, Ursula looked more like a galactic hitchhiker than a valued member of the Stardust team. Ursula painted. And somehow those paintings revealed what our most intricate equipment did not detect. Johnny Rasmussen treated them with the same respect he gave to the most profound field report. And rightly so. With uncanny perception they pulled together and gave more meaning to the results of a look-see. around the great peak, we knew that Ursula had already extruded her transparent bubble of a studio. Seen from afar, it jutted from the ship's featureless hide like a pale parasite. And there, in radiatron-shielded comfort, Ursula's magic brushes were seeing the mountain a little differently, a little more concisely than even the technical perfection of the endlessly clicking recording cameras. "Wish those clouds would blow off a little," I said. "I sort of hanker to see what the pinnacle looks like. And we could get an accurate measurement." "They can't blow away, Roscoe," Pegleg said. "You know that. That's where the gods live." "You're milking a gag," I retorted. "Couldn't we use a dissipator, Johnny, and get a look at the summit while we're close?" "I've been watching. Dr. Kissinger," Johnny Rasmussen said gravely. "Look carefully at those mists. Are they moving as clouds normally move on a mountaintop? You have experience in these things." Trust Johnny. Nothing gets past him. I should have noticed the difference myself. The clouds swathing Mount Olumpus were moving in a tight spiral, a steady whirlwind flow, counterclockwise. Air currents just don't behave like that. And as we watched the motion grew less, the streaming clouds stabilized into huge fluffy masses, and then slowly reversed the flow. I knew Pegleg was as surprised as any of us, but his narrow face was tranquil. "You see?" he asked. No one came up with a good answer. The clouds speeded up the clockwise spiral, spread into bands and the bands were moving at different rates. The phenomenon wasn't all that obvious and the casual observer might not even have been aware -- but there it was. I saw Jules Griffin lean forward! in his chair and press a small blue button. Nothing seemed to happen, but we all felt easier. The Stardust now moved behind an incredible shield of energy turned in on itself, a forcefield that would repel any power we could envision. It was almost ultimate protection. If old Zeus had chosen to hurl his thunderbolts out of those peculiar clouds three would have got you twenty that they would have bounced off us. We made one more hiihdredmile swing around the giant peak. From all over the ship sensors were focused on it, photographing, listening, probing, analyzing. Data piled up. When it was all put together, collated and organized, we would know about that mountain. Or so we thought. IF T he five of us in the control room structured the drop-in, as always. If, by rare and tragic chance, Johnny Rasmussen should ever become unable to command the Stardust any one of the other four could take over. It had never happened. We didn't think it ever would. But we represented the foresight that made Johnny what he was. He had backups for everything, even himself. We had been in orbit -- swinging three thousand miles above the planet's surface -- for the past five hours, verifying the life picture. The Stardust's function is the discovery and investigation of living worlds. We're getting good at it. We know by now the properties of the suns most likely to encourage life on their satellites. And by that I mean life as we know it. We're aware of the possibilities of othertypes of life, with unknown chemical affinities and interactions, but they're not our concern. Curiosity has to stop somewhere. Good, carbon-centered, oxygenrespiring entities are scattered through the galaxy on a myriad worlds. We know that now. We're finding them ever more consistently. And our orderly, patterned coverage and procedure will provide a template for the planning of the inevitably wiser, more learned explorers who will follow us. But this is our heyday, our zenith. As I write these reports there are none like us anywhere. "I think, gentlemen, that this alters our landing plans somewhat." Johnny Rasmussen had punched for a brandy from the console by his chair. His long fingers lovingly and gently twirled the small goblet. That meant he was thinking. "Come now, Johnny, we can't be bluffed by a cloud." Pegleg sounded outraged. I knew the mountain fascinated him. The chiefs teeth showed briefly beneath his neat mustache. "You misunderstand. Dr. Williams. I propose a closer landing that the one agreed on. If the cloud hides what we ought to know -- perhaps it would be handy to establish base nearby." "I accept your apology for not being x:lear," Pegleg said gravely. "How close is closer?" Johnny raised an eyebrow. Like all of us he lives with Pegleg's sour personality, laced through with sly, completely irreverent humor. "Dr. Kissinger's advice would be helpful here. You're a highcountry man, Roscoe. Would it be feasible to establish base above timberline -- say on one of the long tundra slopes that fan out below the glaciers? There seem to be several good-looking possibilities." "Not only feasible but desirable," I said promptly. We were all studying the slowly turning panorama below us on our viewscreens. "We'll be high enough to have every type of terrain in view -- at much better perspective than at the lakeside we had in mind. And Mount Olympus and its cloud would be right in the front yard." "Pretty high altitude for the casual hiker, though," Pegl reminded us. "Say fourteen to fifteen thousand feet above mean sea level. Nose-bleed country for the average citizen. I've got a feeling that people won't want to do their off-duty strolling in oxygen masks." "Won't be necessary," I said. "You're thinking Earth again. This is Olympus Two, remember. The planet is bigger, the atmosphere much thicker. I haven't checked the data, but I'll guess that three miles up will not be far off Earth sea-level normal. Sea level here would be dense, muggy, oxygen-rich. Uh-uh. We'll all be happier up there." "I'll join you," Pegleg said humbly. "My thinking was no clearer than Johnny's communicating. I vote for the tundra." "Mr. Cheng?" "Very reasonable. I am in favor." "Captain Griffin?" Cap'n Jules said nothing. He regards conversation as a waste of time and when he does speak he never fascinates anybody. A duller man never drew breath -- conversationally, that is. But the mighty timonium engines that drive the Stardust in finite space wag their tails at the slightest touch of his blunt fingers and he is one of the very few man alive who can implement Ultraspan. Now he simply raised his right hand, joined the thumb and index finger. II picked our stretch of rolling high-country meadow and Cap'n Jules guided the Stardust in, her fifteen hundred feet of glistening bulk gliding to a full-length landing as gracefully as a bit of thistledown drifting down a sunbeam. No savage outpourings of braking energy. No shuddering, jarring loss of acceleration. These things are only history now. The great ship's thousands of tons of mass were completely nullified by her new timonium antigravs. We experienced no sense of landing at all. We simply ceased to move. And around us the tundra swept away, gray and brown and red and yellow with lichens, bright with wide stretches of short-stemmed highcountry flowers. Johnny Rasmussen murmured into a microphone. Shortly the ship's intercom came alive, rumbled and cleared its throat. Stony Price, communications chief, always read the landing communique. "The Stardust has landed. Olympus Two awaits us. Whether or not it's with open arms or an open mouth remains to be seen. All data indicate a compatible world, but IF final checks remain to be made. Dr. Rasmussen suggests that tentative reconnaissance patterns be adjusted to our present location, fifteen thousand two hundred feet above mean sea level. There ;are reasons for this. Don't blame me. You'll be notified when checks are completed. Meanwhile feast . your eyes on Mount Olympus." "Open mouth," Pegleg growled. "Stony's the one with the open mouth."' "You do hate competition" I said. "Look at your viewscreen and be glad. There are more rocks out there than we've found for you in the last five landings. Count your blessings. Take what the gods provide." "Oh, I'm humbly grateful," Pegleg said. He eyed the viewscreen, then looked quizzically at me. "As for the gods -- I see no reason why we shouldn't thank them personally since we're going to live next door." Once Pegleg gets an idea he worries it. And inevitably I am involved. Since we're both essentially field men and our areas of concern overlap we usually work together. Always have. With many people a little of Pegleg goes a long way, but we complement each other neatly. I've loosened up a lot of tight places for him and there have been times when I've been mighty grateful to be backed up by the cold nerve and lancing laser of Pegleg aware that there is a paperback publisher specialising in science fiction and producing four bobks every month. By the time this ad appears, twenty titles will have been published since April. They include books by Andre Norton, Gordon R. Dickson, A. E. van Vogt, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., Philip K. Dick, Mark has ever been in paperback before. If you've missed any of these, haunt yellow spine-coloring -- they won't be hard to spotl one of his best time-travel adventures. Louis Trimble has a novel that combines planet-colonizing with linguistics. a real treat for the sf addict in Egon only known sequel to H. G. Wells's classic. This is an important sf discovery, as well as a memorable reading experience. Donald A. Wollheim is the publisher and editor. We are distributed by The New American Library, Inc., publishers of Signet. Mentor and Plume Books. Successful drop-in completed, we left Control to Cap'n Jules, who sat as stolidly as a stone man in his master's chair. I've often wondered what he thinks about as he sits like that, white head erect, pale eyes vacant. But the results are good. As long as we have Cap'n Juljes and Moe Cheng, logistics will never be a worry. corridor complex, headed for our respective labs. A door opened and the most beautiful woman I have ever seen came through. Tall, graceful, with a magnificent figure, fine, clean-planed features, live green eyes and red curls tumbling to her shoulders -- in the galaxy there couldn't be another like her. I reached out an arm, pulled her to me and gave her the kind of kiss a man should give to a woman like that. Or as near as I could manage. She clung to me for a moment, then slowly pushed my arms away. Her green eyes danced. "Roscoe," she said. "What will the neighbors say?" "Disgusting," said Pegleg. I've been married to her for nine Earth years. They seem like nine weeks. Ultraspan stages into the depths of the galaxy, to nervegrinding episodes on strange worlds -- these are only the commonplace occurrences of dayto-day living as long as I have Lindy. With her, anywhere in the universe is home. She's not just Mrs. Kissinger. Dr. Linda Peterson was the first and is the only, microbiologist the Stardust has ever had. No one can approach her knowledge of galactic microforms. And no foot is placed on a new world until Lindy's report is in Johnny's hands and he has analyzed it carefully. The Stardust could not do without her any more than I could. I could tell by her relaxed smile that her sampling chores were already well in hand. And that the news was probably good. She strolled down the corridor with us, her fingers twined with mine. "Well," said Pegleg, "don't hold out. Any nasty little varmints in the air? Looks like a pretty good deal out there. Don't spoil it if you can help it." "The girls are running final checks," Lindy said. "Give them another thirty minutes. At this altitude at least everything looks clear." She looked from me to Pegleg. "Speaking of altitude, whose idea was it to set down halfway up a mountain range? I don't suppose Roscoe's love affair with tundras or your everlasting yen for base rocks had anything to do with it." "No scientist jumps to conclusions." Pegleg oozed disdain. "You do. Johnny thought this up all by himself. We just agreed with him." My wife turned to me. "I'm a simple person, so he IF makes no sense to me. What gives, Roscoe?" I grinned and squeezed her fingers. "He's reporting correctly. It was Johnny's idea, all right. There's something funny about the big peak out there and we want to take an extended look." "Mount Olympus," Pegleg explained gravely. "The gods are holding high carnival behind those clouds on the summit. We want to crash the party." Lindy looked amused. Whatever she is, she's not a simple person. "Won't that be a mite risky? I seem to remember that mortals in the past have never been the same after going up into those clouds." "They didn't have scoutboats or lasers. or dissipators," Pegleg said. "I think we can get a hearing. Never forget that everything we do is a first, anyhow." "Oh, good," Lindy said. "I've always wanted to interview Aphrodite. For the benefit of the uninformed among us, she is the goddess of love." Pegleg looked outraged. "I know, I know." "Maybe," Lindy added reflectively, "I can find out what she's got that I haven't got." "I can answer that," I said. "Nothing." Pegleg shrugged. "You should know," he said. Now all this may sound sharp, brittle, even on the edge of silly to you. It wasn't. Behind the nonsense good friends and co-workers were simply catching up on the news. It's just that you probably don't do it that way.  quarters when finally the intercom awoke again. "Dr. Rasmussen's communique, official." Stony Price reporting. We talk to Stony all the time, but we rarely see him. Usually he's just a cheerful, irreverent voice. "Olympus Two is compatible. Atmosphere at this altitude comparable to Earth sea-level normal. Life varied, but no evidence of thinking forms. Usual precautions against unknown aggressive or predacious entities. Seventy-two hours free reconnaissance, at the end of which time all major research heads will meet to structure the survey pattern. Whew!" Stony heaved a sigh. "All those big words. That is all." We had anticipated the procedure and were ready. As usual, my first reconnaissance would be simple. I would go out, take a good legstretching hike across that inviting tundra, adjust to the gravity, get used to the feel of alien air in my lungs. I would find an elevation that would give me the widest, most sweeping view and I would sit there, looking, orienting, soaking up this spectacular environment. And I would have a good feeling that such sights could be seen, probably in infinite variety, on many favored worlds throughout the galaxy, I would know a twinge of sadness, too, that on Earth they had almost disappeared. The personnel ports were activated and we went out past the guards onto the lichen-sheathed high plains that stretched away in all directions. Lindy was with me. She comes when she can. And after a series of Ultraspan stages everyone was eager for the feel of the substrate, of the solid planet that is, after all, our normal abode. We didn't bounce about. Gravity was somewhat greater than Earth normal and our feet felt heavy. We plodded along. Our lungs expanded with the good, oxygen-rich air. After a mile I was on my toes again. I've stretched my legs on a number of worlds. This one was superior, more majestic, than most. 'Do you think," Lindy panted, "that if I keep this up it will make a woman of me? Ease up, Roscoe. Don't forget, I'm one of God's gentler creatures." We finally stood on a high, round-topped knoll finished off with with scattered, smooth-worn boulders. I boosted Lindy to a comfortable seat. The world lay beneath us for miles. But great peaks towered high beyond the lowlands and over them all rose the vast massif of Mount Olympus, its upper reaches swathed in those strange clouds. It was beautiful and mind-stretching. O UR field glasses swept a wide panorama. Beside the glinting, featureless cylinder of the Stardust people moved like ants, spreading out oyer the terrain. Portals yawned as we watched and three scoutboats were spat from them like torpedoes. Probably meteorologists, geographers, mapping experts. Few people were actually doing much work. It was orientation time. Perhaps ten miles away a darting, zig-zagging speck was resolved by the glasses into Pegleg's jeep, obviously headed for a spectacular red wall that reared beyond. A tiny red dot out on a slope beyond the ship was Ursula Potts' red umbrella. On compatible worlds she forsakes her little studio and paints in the open, always shielded by that spot of color. We knew that her easel was up, her paraphernalia strewn about her and that she had begun a program that would occupy her every waking hour until lift-off. "Pff to the right, up high, coming down the wind, Roscoe -- " Lindy's restless binoculars had picked up the first motile life. I swung up my own glasses. "Typical," I said. "Big country, big Hying predator. Something to feed on whatever in turn eats the tundra vegetation. Could be a variety of plant eaters around -- they're probably hiding because so many of us are out." More of the soaring raptores IF appeared. In the shifting air currents and thermal chimneys of a bright afternoon they swung and glided high against the slopes of the peaks. None came close. We knew they were watching tbis strange invasion with the telescopic eyes such forms always have. That evolution here had proceded along Earthlike lines was less surprising to us than it would have been some years before. Although much of the life we have found has been unpredictably different, some patterns seem to recur again and again. spent an hour on our knoll, no one else near. We sat quietly and gradually small life came out all around us. Small rodentlike forms peered from rock piles and darted hastily from place to place through the bright tundra blowers. Minute insectlike creatures swarned. And what appeared to be a red dragonfly, three or four inches in wingspan, crouched on rocks with spread wings and twitching eyes or coursed low back and forth over the tundra, feeding. Ever and anon we transferred our attention to the big peak, to Mount Olympus. Its cloud-shrouded summit seemed to thrust through the sky above us. The highest "eagle" our glasses could show still soared far below those clouds. F rom the first I never had much doubt that those clouds were being manipulated. And that meant that this was not the primitive world it seemed. There was a technology here, perhaps elaborate, and a superior race or races of living things. I wasn't sure whether I was sorry or glad. I enjoy the contacts with alien minds -- but I love the primitive worlds, too. The earlier stages in the evolutionary sequence are my special concern. It is here, before any form has become aware, that ecosystems are most perfect. Their checks and balances operate with beautiful efficiency, an inevitability that enables populations to vary, to adjust, to progress. Here the pattern of evolution is most clear. "Pegleg will be disappointed," Lindy remarked as we strolled slowly back toward the ship. "A common occurrence," I said, "but why this time? This looks like the place where geologists go when they die. What more could he possibly want?" Lindy giggled. When another woman makes a sound like that you think it's silly. But any sound she makes is a part of Lindy. "He meant exactly what he said when he spoke of crashing Zeus's party. He intended to take a scout, use a dissipator on those clouds and expose the whole enigma to the public gaze. Now I imagine that Johnny will rule that he Can't do it." I saw her point. with the organization or the activities of aware forms. He'll have to prove that the swirling clouds are simply meteorological oddities, or agree that intellects are operating them. In which case he can only be a spectator. Pegl hates that." I turned back for another look at the Olympian nightcap and it was well I did. Things were happening. The characteristic rotation of the cloud mass had slowed to a crawl. I thought for a moment that it was beginning to break up, but matters were not that simple. Fleecy puffs were blowing out from the bands, floating gently for a few minutes, then slowly dissipating. There were dozens of them. They seemed random, but by now I knew that wasn't likely. "Patterned," Lindy said. "Meaningful to somebody -- or something. Could be anything from a calling up of the Home Guard to a call to prayer. I'U guess that it won't last long." It didn't. After a few minutes the cloud mass had speeded up again and no longer gave off the puffs. "End of message," I said. "Thirty. Over and out. Now all we have to do is to figure out whether or not we were the reasons for that. As if we didn't know." "Likely," Lindy agreed. "Still, the mechanism was operating before we got here. That may happen every day at this time. "Remotely controlled?" I suggested. "It would not be too probable that living things are actually up there. And if that's so, then somewhere we've got concentrations of intelligent life. I'm beginning to be challenged." "You may not like them," Lindy warned. "We're butting in as usual. They would be justified in resenting us. Sometimes we do forget that." "Still," I decided, "I'm favorably disposed so far. They keep a nice place here. Haven't messed it up. Air's good, water's pure, no unsightly artifacts. Smart people." Lindy's beautiful face reflected tolerant amusement. That's one of her secrets. She lets me know she appreciates me, no matter how corny I get. "You're chopping up your sentences like Ursula," she said. We both glanced down the long slope to the little red dot on the tundra. I'm sure we both had the same idea at the same time. "Speaking of whom," I said, "why don't we go down and see? She'll have an idea. Always does." "Stop it," Lindy ordered. "One person on the Stardust who talks like that is enough." N ot many people dare interrupt Ursula at work. She paints with a fierce concentration, seeing. I'm sure, not only what is before her, but meanings hidden from less sensitive mortals. And those meanings, too, appear in the sometimes strange, always comIF pelting oducts of her art. This uncanny second sight, plus Ursula's abrupt impatience with pedantry, has given rise to the witch rumor. But we are enlightened people. We know witches never existed -- I think. We knew she saw and heard us approach, but she gave no sign. 'She simply painted. Her fingers unerringly selected the brush she wanted from tlve collectionthrust handle-end first through the big bun on the back of her head. When she finished with the brush she thrust it back in at any angle. The loose sleeves of the old sweater she always wore, inside or out, hot planet or cold, flopped with her crisp, sure strokes. The easel was in sunlight. Ursula sat on her campstool just under the shadow of the big red umbrella. We watched for a few minutes, a practically unpardonable sin for most people. But we're special. Ursula had been with us, Lindy and Pegleg and me, at Armageddon on Cyrene IV. She knows that we know the lonely old woman behind that acid tongue and the strange pale eyes. She knows we're fond of her. Suddenly she decided to recognize our existence. She thrust the brush into her hair with finality and spun on her stool. "Out of a job, eh? A whole planet -- and nothing to do?" "You know better than that, Ursula," I said. "I'm always working. Up here." And I tapped my forehead. Ursula actually grinned. "Hard to prove." She made a sweeping gesture that included half the great mountain range. "What do you think, Roscoe?" "Good country," I said tentatively. "A variety of life forms, but probably no thinking beings. Pretty typical tundra, but on a grand scale, I like." Ursula sniffed. "Dodging the problems. What makes the clouds go around?" "Give me time," I protested. We've only been here three hours. Besides, I thought you'd know." "More complex than it looks." Ursula narrowed her strange eyes. "Feel more than we see. All I know -- so far." She indicated the painting on the easel. She hadn't even painted the big mountain. The canvas showed simply a stretch of tundra. Sometimes her paintings are vague, impressionistic, expressing mood rather than the actual substance of her subject. But this picture was not like thaf. It was scific, almost photographically detailed. Even the several kinds of lichens were easily distinguished. Three different small rodents peered from behind rocks. We had seen each of them up the slope. On a rock a red dragonfly sat, complete to the greenish iridescence of its huge eyes. In the upper corner of the painting, against the sky, soared one of the wide-winged eagles. Every fldwer was recognizable. My eyes pick up and my brain records such details automatically. There was only one creature on the canvas that I didn't recognize. Lindy pointed it out. "He's cute," she said. "Just Hke a coon, Roscoe." It really was. It was in the middle distance in the scene and only partially in sight, as though it peered over a little roll in the terrain. It didn't have a raccoon's mask, but the ears, the pointed muzzle, the alert black eyes, all reminded us of the little Earth mammal. In fact, Ursula's genius really showed in those bright eyes. They had a knowing look. The two forelimbs were visible. They ended in a raccoon's babylike hands. "We missed that fellow," I said. "Where did you see him, Ursula?" "Didn't," Ursula said. "Then why is he there?" "Don't know. Just seemed to belong there. Painted hinn in before I thought." "That's faking," I said. "Doubt it. Scene doesn't look right without him." It had happened before. In fact, it happened all the time. Ursula doesh't just see with her eyes. Call that eerie sixth sense what you will, Ursula has it. We had had enough experience, Lindy and I, to recognize what we were seeing. When we talked it over we agreed that, sooner or later, we would see that little animal in the flesh. AS IT happened, it was sooner. The following morning, in fact. And the creature was not out on the tundra. It was in a small cage brought in triumphantly by one of Jim Peters' young trappers. Like all of us, Jim has his own reconnaissance methods. And the live trap is his mainstay. When we establish a wilderness base, as now, an area near the spaceship pretty quickly becomes a menagerie. The zoologists set up shelters against sun and wind and cagefuls of all kinds of creatures accumulate. The rest of us learn simply by visiting Jim's zoo. Jim watches and analyzes and feeds while his teams of collectors range far and wide. By day and by night his strings and traps sample a region's life. One of Jim's most consistent visitors is always Lindy. I never saw the living thing she couldn't make friends with. It's a gift, as uncanny in its way as Ursula's weird awareness. If there's such a thing as an universal sociologist, Lindy qualifies. Everything trusts her. I don't try to understand it. I'm simply proud. "There he is, Roscoe." The plastip awnings and shelters were going up and the first rows of cages were being put into place. The coonlike creature sat in IF its wire enclosure, seeming to watch everything with brighteyed interest. Close-up, it was not as small as it had looked on Ursula's picture. I would have guessed it ran thirty, thirty-five pounds. Earth weight. On Olympus Two it was probably a bit. more. It looked us over thoroughly when we approached. It wasn't frightened, but it was never still. Its sharp nose twitched. Its restless black hands clasped and unclasped. It continually touched itself all over its furry gray-and-black body, sometimes using only a single finger, sometimes both hands together. Even its brushy tail moved constantly, forming a series of patterns on the ground as it sat. "Busy little fellow, isn't he?" My conversation was less than sparkling, but I felt I had to say something. "More than busy," Lindy said gravely. "Purposeful. All that twitching isn't just nervous temperament. There's a functional reason for it." "A good imagination is always helpful," I said, but I studied the creature carefully just the same. It doesn't do to discount Lindy's serious comments. And after a few minutes I admitted: "He looks like a thirdbase coach going through his routine to give the batter his sign. Are you saying he's trying to tell us something?" Lindy smiled. "I always knew all that baseball would come in handy in some remote future. That's just what he looks like. Watch." She went down on her shapely knees directly in front of the cage and began to make a series of random motions, holding up fingers, touching various parts of her body, shrugging, even winking in patterns." "You're handicapped," I pointed out. "You haven't got a bushy tail." "Quiet. Think positively. If a typewriter is missing a couple of letters, you can still read what it writes." My wife was behaving like a charming idiot. She worked out a simple routine and went througli it again and again. And she was getting results. The coon was fascinated. He stopped his own motions entirely and when Lindy paused he made a swift gesture, then put both black hands over his eyes. "No savvy," I said. "You're talking nonsense. That's plain as plain." "Maybe," Lindy said. "Let's prove it." When, after a moment, the coon went back to his endless touching and twitching, Lindy made his gesture and put her hands over her own eyes. It worked. The coon was baffled. That he recognized the signals was beyond doubt. And for the first time he simply sat and stared at us steadily. We could almost see him think.  the dust from her knees. "In a relatively brief time we have gathered some very significant data,' she, said. "Summarize, please." I grinned. It's a game we play. "Item," I began. "Pegleg definitely can't dissipate the clouds on Mount Olympus, because they are aftificially produced by aware beings." "Possible," Lindy said, "but still not proved. You can do better than that." "Item. Jim Peters has violated an International Space Council ruling by interfering with an aware species. At this very moment has one of its members incarcerated and in durance vile." "Quite likely," Lindy agreed. "So far no great harm has been done and he can be forgiven on grounds of ignorance. More?" "Item. Communication on this world is more visual than auditory, perhaps completely visual. And the cloud patterns on Mount Olympus and the monkey motions of this little varmint in the cage are both parts of an elaborate system of keeping up with the news around the world and the juicy doings of the neighbors. "Now -- I'm proud of you," Lindy said with satisfaction. "We're probably oversimplifying. but I do believe we've got the key, Roscoe. Let's go talk with Johnny." We were on our way, but we only got to the edge of the shelter. Two of the young trappers were just arriving, each with a cage -- and each cage held another coon. "Good hunting, pric," I said. "Where are you catching these fellows? I haven't even seen one free. What's their habitat?" "No idea. Dr. Kissinger. We haven't seen one either. These were in traps on the open tandra. No bait. They just walked in." "Knowing full well what they were walking into, I bet. What better way to get into our setup without attracting the wrong kind of attention?" Lindy was obviously pleased with herself. ' The big blond zoologist was puzzled. "Coons are always curious. Dr. Peterson," he explained. "They investigate. These little guys would naturally explore something new." Lindy shook her red curls. "This isn't Earth," she pointed out, "and no matter what they look like, those aren't coons. I'll bet you a chocolate ice-cream soda they're here because they want to be here." The men set down the cages. We all stood watching the composed, busy occupants. They were twitching, touching and wig-wagging at a great rate, undoubtedly talking us over. By now there was no doubt in my mind that they knew exactly what they were doing. IF "No bet, Dr. Peterson," Eric said after a moment. "Not even for a finger or two of that Tennessee bourbon you've got hoardki. You have information we don't." "We're guessing," I said. "But they're educated guesses. Put these two animals over there with the other one and watch." What followed was predictable. Tails twitched, eyes rolled, black fingers flew as apparently everybody talked at once. And when, after a few minutes, they got caught up with the news -- everybody stopped. Each animal retired to a corner of its cage, crouched into a comfortable ball and. sat watching, black eyes darting alertly. Lindy and I strolled out slowly and you may be sure they watched us go. At the shelter's edge Lindy turned, went through a swift series of motions with both hands and ended by sticking out her tongue. It was silly -- and a little uncanny, too -- to see all three animals make the same gesture, then cover their eyes with their hands. sistent, so he did exactly what I knew he would do. He had reserved a scoutboat and pilot "for geological reconnaissance along the Olympic Range" and, by his seniority, had grounded one set of cloud chasers. I heard them grumbling about it. But the request was legitimate and Pegleg never hogged equipment. Mount Olympus challenged him. And nothing does that to Pegleg and gets away with it. Not even a mountain. Especially not a mountain. And if this particular jumble of cliffs and pinnacles and obscur ing clouds was going to have secrets, Pegleg intended to find them out or know the reason why. The silvery silver of the scoutboat drifted slowly over me as I sat on a high prominence, doing the kind of research' I like to do best. Just sitting and looking. That way I don't disturb anything -- life goes on normally and my binoculars can pick up any activity from horizon to horizon. And in this spectacular setting that took in a lot of territory. My jumper sat nearby. "Any word for Zeus, Roscoe?Or for Aphrodite, maybe?" Pegleg spoke down the tight auditory cone that can be projected from a scoutboat. He sounded as if he were standing beside me. I thumbed my belt connnunicator "Witch. The cone is one-way. "Carry my regrets," I said. "Previous engagement and all that. Be careful, Pegleg." I knew he would be. Pegleg is ornery and pig-headed, but his sense of self-preservation is as highly developed as that of anybody I know. He had been careless only once -- and he would remember it forever. He had lost his leg oh that occasion -- it was bitten off smooth by a plesiosaur-type critter on a planet that's not among my pleasanter memories. His plastic leg works almost as well as the originalbut it is a reminder. The scoutboat picked up momentum and swept into a great wide ellipse around the lower reaches of the mountain of the gods. Pegleg was going to tiake a deliberate, leisurely look-see. But he would be able to move if he had to. A scoutboat can flash over the horizon in one blink of an eye. I watched him disappear behind the great bulk of the uplift. When he reappeared a few minutes later on the other side he had appreciably gained altitude. But eagles still looked down on the scoutboat. Almost casually it spiraled upward, loop after loop, and each time it reappeared it was closer to the slowly revolving bands of clouds. I could imagine what Pegleg was doing. The photographic record he was making would be careful and complete. When he reached the cloud belts he would use radar and infrared light. He wouldn't disturb the clouds. Dissipators were out -- verboten. We had cleared all that up in a long conference with Johnny Rasmussen. But there was no ruling against looking and Pegleg intended to look. Swathed in its forcefield, the scoutboat would sure Zeus in the eye if it got the chance. It seemed to me that the loud bands grew fluffier, thicker, and that they moved more deliberately, more naturally, as the scoutboat came nearer. Camouflage? Were they trying to pretend that they were normal clouds? From my vantage point the little ship was now so tiny that I had to put my glasses on full zoom to see it at all. The highest of the eagles was far below it. that way. Anyhow, he was on my side of the mountain when the scoutboat drifted against the highest cloudbank, nosed into it and disappeared. There was no agitation, no turmoil. The scoutboat was simply swallowed up. I saw no cause for alarm. Pegleg didn't need direct visibility. His radar was sensitive and good and he could throttle down to less than ten miles an hour if he had to. His forcefield would protect him. In point of fact, we've always had such overwhelming superiority over any and all life forms we've found that adventure, as far as hazard is concerned, is largely taken out. But there's no guarantee. Pegleg had lost his leg. So, in spite of myself, I found my palms wet as minute followed minute and the scoutboat did not emerge. Once in a while I forgot to breathe. I knew that the big telescopes in the Stardust were watching, that a finely tuned radar was on the scoutboat, continuing to "see" it in the obscuring clouds. The distance was too great for metabolic probes. IF but Pegleg had a setup on board the scoutboat that was monitoring automatically. If life existed behind the clouds on the peak he would pick it up. The next development wasn't much. Not very much. Just -- the clouds turned pink. I saw no evidence of violence, no indication of concentrated energy release. The cloudbelt into which the scoutboat vanished simply began to glow as if touched by a ray of sunlight. The color deepened until the whole band looked like a rosy coronet on the vast brow of the mountain. The band speeded up, emitted several series of pink puffs -- it seemed to oscillate, to expand and contract as it revolved. The sight was spectacular, but not awesome. There was no menace in it. And in the middle of the display the scoutboat darted into view again. Pegleg spiraled high, cut patterns above the loftiest clouds, above the hidden pinnacle. His behavior indicated neither annoyance nor anger. He was still just gathering data. And after a few sweeps the scoutboat pointed its nose at my lookout and began to grow steadily larger. It checked and drifted as it reached me. The whole reconnaissance had taken scarcely an hour. "Come on down the hill, Roscoe," Pegleg said. "We've got conferring to do. You'll be interested." "Will do." I spoke as though mountains that generated pink clouds were an everyday experience. But I set the jumper on a flat trajectory, fifty yards at a leap, and by the time the scoutboat was back in its cradle I was landing on my jumper platform, extruded high on the Stardust's metallic side. i away from the "raccoon" cages. Once her own reconnaissance pattern had been set up in the lab her assistants could do the work -- she had gravitated instantly to the isolated shelter Jim Peters had arranged for the coons. The animals were different. She had been learning how and, hopefully, why. She had watched them, bombarding them with body pats and wigwags, eye rolls and nose twitches. Since these had no meanings, the little animals were at first continually giving the "on't understand" signal. This very fact had reinforced her conviction that the creatures were intelligent, aware, and were indeed communicating with each other in a complicated, soundless sign language. After the conference I went searching for my wife and found her with the coons. She had recruited powerful assistance. Ursula had moved in from the tundra. Her red umbrella was set up beside the awning that sheltered the cages. But she wasn't painting. She had a sketch pad across her skinny knees and with a bit of charcoal made swift sketches, one after another, tearing them from the pad and dropping them. The ground around her was littered with them. Although Pegleg and I had news of our own, we stood by and watched while she and Lindy worked. There was evidently a pattern. They had something in mind. They ignored us while Lindy gathered up the sketches, sorted them, arranged them in sequences. I could see that each was only a few lines, but those lines cleverly indicated a coon giving a signal. No two were alike. When Lindy finished her sorting she faced the cages and began to hold up the sketches, one by one. One or two she used over and over. The little animals watched with round-eyed attention. There was no possible doubt that they knew exactly what she was trying to do. And when she finished all three of them suddenly threw themselves on the ground and rolled about, aimlessly kicking out with thefr little black feet and lashing their bushy tails. Their faces wore no expressions, but I think we all got it at once. Xhcy were laughing. "The pen of my aunt is on the elephant's back. Your signals are nonsense. They think you're funny," I said. "You told them a dirty joke," said Pegleg. "They're embarrassed. "In either case I couldn't care less," Lindy said with satisfaction. "I didn't expect meaningful communication. I just wanted to verify the fact of thought transfer. And I wanted them to know we know." "I imagine they already suspected that," I said. "So where do we go from here?" Ursula was sketching again, apparently from memory. But this time she used a paint brush. Under her skilled fingers a recognizable outline of the mountain grew, its crest swathed with bands of pink clouds, pink puffs blowing from them. She held it up for the coons to see. This means of communication must have been marvelous to them, those, lines and colors that looked like the thing itself. I still doubted that they handled equipment or tools themselves, although the small hands looked capable and versatile. They recognized the mountain, though. They grasped that we understood that the cloud patterns had meaning -- that they were artificially formed. The round eyes stared at the sketch briefly and then they showed a human trait -- they knew how to lie. They all made the swift motion of negation and covered their eyes with their hands. F or the second time in two days Ursula grinned -- an almost unprecedented occurrence. "Fibbing," she said. "Why?" askbd Pegleg. IF "No idea. Can guess, though. They're involved." "Something taboo about it," I suggested. "Could little varmints like these have a sense of the supernatural? Could they respond to orders from a mysterious source? Could they have a religion?" "Could it be they're being exploited? Are they being flimflammed? Same difference." Pegleg spoke from his own specialized point of view. He rarely lets us down. If he has a good word for something we're disappointed. Lindy winked at me. "Still there abideth in the world these three; suspicion, prejudice and cynicism. And the greatest of these is cynicism." Pegleg's narrow face showed no contrition. "You forget," he said. "I am in possession 'of very recent data. I've been up where the gods were supposed to be." He shook his head sadly. "The whole bit is a big fat double-cross. There ain't no gods up there." "Just unusual meteorological phenomena?" I prodded. I knew what he had found, of course. "Oh no. The clouds arc artificial, just as advertised. I analyzed a big sample. Mostly water vapor, as you'd suspect, but with some kind of stuff intermingled with it that makes a tough film. The chemists are playing with it. The clouds arc actually masses of tiny stable bubbles that break down very slowly. The pink was a pigment suspended among the bubbles. Very neat setup. Efficient and businesslike." "Had metabolic probes, didn't you? No life?" Ursula's strange eyes gleamed. Pegleg grinned. "Got your attention, did I? No life high up. Plenty farther down the mountain, but in variety -- as you'd expect. Nothing too predominant." He paused and studied the little animals in the cages. They were busily discussing us -- or so I presumed -- among themselves. "No, the clouds came from apertures in the central pinnacle, whole clusters of them. Stuffs probably piped up from far below. Engineering job. How the thing is done I can't imagine, but you can bet that it isn't by the likes of them. Ergo, they're being given the business." "Reasonable," I agreed, "but there's another side. What about the hypothesis that they're here to check us out? That they're doing the same thing here that you were doing up on the peak? They don't know how the Stardust functions cither -- but I'll give you odds they know what it is and what it does." "Until we learn their sign patterns we can't be sure," Pegleg said. "I'll grant, though, that beings that can lie are civilized. It's an infallible indication." " -- and the greatest of these is -- " Lindy didn't finish repeating her paraphrase. "Fll learn the signs. Since apparently they can't make sound we can't teach them speech. We'll have to go with their way of communicating." "At least it's peaceful," I observed. "Imagine a noiseless human race." "Even sex-linked. Wow -- noiseless males! DeHnitely an improvement,". Ursula grunted. That settled that. Pegleg and I left the ladies to their machinations. We knew when we had worn out our welcome. IV directive and supervisory personnel. Dr. Rasmussen requests the pleasure of your company at dinner, this date, black tie, appetizers at eighteen hundred hours. My advice -- take him up on it. You got to eat somewhere." Of all the announcements "he's called on to make I think Stony Price enjoys the chiefs dinner invitations best. And to my knowledge he's never yet read one straight. I had expected the dinner. One was due for several reasons. Periodically Johnny likes to see us at our best. To him that means trimmed, shaved and in dinner dress. He can envision no crime to compare with a poorly cut dinner jacket. He loves fine food, properly served, and feels that every civilized man should. He reserves his ultimate respect for a superior brandy. The above would justify the dinner, but Johnny's invitations always had an additional reason. This was rarely announced and there have been times when I never found, out what it was. Still, after you got past the starchy beginnings, the dinners were enjoyable in themselves. Nobody ever missed one. "Don't be surprised," Lindy said, "if the dinner conversation takes an ecumenical turn.' Pegleg, for one, is still not sure the gods don't exist." "He's sure they do," I said. "He simply suspects their motives. I do fear that he thinks they rate power and profit over salvation. But he's interested in how they operate." "Thus lumping them with all the religions he has known in the past." Lindy laughed. "Here, zip me. I'll exhale." It was a pleasure. I meshed the magnetic fastenings up her shapely back, enclosing her in a softly glowing white sheath that fitted only a little less perfectly than her skin. Blue slippers were on her feet, a blue orchid at her left shoulder, long blue pendants swung from her earlobes and her green eyes looked from under shadowed upper lids. Atop her regal head the red curls were piled in a spectacular coiffure that is always, somehow, uniquely fitting. IF No woman will ever be like my woman. "I hope," I said, "that Johnny hasn't seated you across from me. I'll forget to eat." "Then for your sake," Lindy said gravely, "I hope so, too. You certainly need your food." If ever solicitude was suspect, that was. You know what I look like. Thick-armed, thick-legged, barrel-chested, all visible areas covered with black hair except my face and the top of my head. Even above the dinner jacket Johnny requires, my rudely cut features look harsh, out of place. But a man can't help how he appears. He can only hope that somewhere there's a woman who can see past such things. There I've been lucky. Miss Potts, Dr. Kissinger, Dr. Peterson -- " Johnny Rasmussen stood behind his chair at the head of the long curving table, tall, immaculate, elegant, and pronounced our names with evident relish. He finished and said, "I am delighted to have you here this evening. Won't you please be seated?" It was routine, formula. We could have chanted it with Kim. The only thing that changed was the seating. Johnny arranged that, always to suit some devious purpose of his own. Sometimes I could figure it out. Just as often, not. Chairs scraped and the conversational hum began to build. Johnny had put Pegleg on his right, a thing he would do only because he needed him for some reason. Pegleg's caustic conversation was incompatible with the genteel small talk behind which the chief masked his thoughts and gathered his information. But the two of them chatting like old buddies as the soup came and empty bowls went. A hearty tossed green salad, grown in the Stardusts own hydroponic rooms, appeared and was sampled. And finally the entree. That, too, was homegrown. Crab imperial. Honest. On Earth the Chesapeake Blue Crab is no more -- its ancestral home is a cesspool of industrial wastes. But in the growing section of our space home, in three carefully managed tanks, Callinectes sapidus goes through its life cycle just as it has since it evolved and provides, from time to time, a succulent harvest for special events such as these. I divided my attention between Lindy and Ursula Potts. Ursula's dinner dress was an unrelieved gunmetal gray and her bun, neat for once, seemed almost to blend into its prim high collar. She wore a massive emerald on her right forefinger -- an emerald not of Earth-and her favorite necklace of polished scarlet seeds from some planet we had visited. She was small and scrawny, but she matched me bite for bite. She scooped it in like a lumbeijack. "Pegl's in the catbird seat tonight," I remarked. "Any idea why?" Ursula's strange eyes flicked. "Johnny's picking his brains," she said. "Good at it, too. Would have to be, with Peglcg." "But why here? He could get what he needs from Peglcg's report." Ursula's thin lips savored a forkful of crab. "Not looking for what he remernbers. Looking for what wouldn't go into  report. Intangibles." I nodded as I scraped my crab shells. They had served me two, but I could have done with one more. "The gods began as a joke. I guess they're not anymore. Somewhere under the mountain old Zeus, no matter what his form, does hold court. It took know-how to pipe the inside of a fortythousand-foot peak. And why? For whom are the messages?" "Johnny's questions, too, I think. That's why we're getting rare food tonight. Reminding us of the general emphasis. Whatever else we do, look for Zeus." "You think he'll make an announcement?" Ursula shook her head. "Won't say a word. We're supposed to have brains. Put two and two together." I knew she was right. That wasthe way Johnny operated. He wouldn't tell us what to do. He would expect us to know. And somehow we always did. I turned to my other dinner companion. We were holding hands under the table. "You're looking nice tonight," I remarked. "What can you tell us about Zeus?" "I expect to see him," Lindy said. She surveyed my plate. "I didn't take your appetite after all." My smile is not a handsome production, but Lindy likes it. "Even left-handed," I said, "a man must keep up his strength." It was a goxl evening. After the coffee and just a dash of a pale golden brandy some of us adjourned to the big main lounge and sat and yarned until the unfamiliar patterns of stars on the viewscreens began to dim with the approach of morning. Without saying it, everyone was agreed. The unifying objective of this look-see had crystallized. It was -- the identity and the nature of the gods on Mount Olympus. R andom reconnaissance was over. The scoutboats were scheduled for days in advance as research units prowled up and down the mighty range for thousands of miles. Jumper teams fanned out, some probing deep into the valleys and canyons among the peaks, others working their way down through the vast forests into the dense and soggy atmosphere of lower elevations. IF I stayed nearby. It wasn't that I didn't want to go anywhere. I felt that I was already somewhere -- that here on the shoulder of the big peak was where the action was likely to be. For nowhere was there evidence of advanced technology, no sign of beings that might be aware. None, that is, except the three little coons in their cages. And three seemed to be all there were going to be. No more were caught. By now, though, I knew they were common. Fleeting glimpses were reported by various Held teams. I had caught brief views myself. In every case the animal had vanished quickly, presumably underground, but there were no evidences of burrows. Not, that is, until I figured it out. They were watching us. I was sure of that. And whenever I sat and surveyed and made notes I looked, for them with the same casual air that I've found to work so well with other life forms. When one finally showed himself I knew exactly what to do. He disappeared the minute I moved. I knew he would. I went directly to the spot where I had last sen him, raised the stone behind which he had vanished. It belied its solid, half-buried appearance. It was pumice light and under it was the burrow entrance. I did. nothing about it. The tunnel angled sharply away from the opening and I was not so naive as to think that the little beast was trapped. That tunnel led into a maze under the tundra. Somehow I knew it was so. I didn't even report my find. I could see no point in having scores of people prowling the tundra, tipping over stones, setting traps at burrow entrances and otherwise alerting the odd little creatures that we knew where they were. For thby were aware. They thought. They comprehended. How extensively, how deeply, I didn't know. But Lindy had learned many symbols of their sign language. She could greet them, ask them simple questions. They could return the greeting, evade the questions and ask others of their own. Lindy was working hard. She was convinced that they were complex, even wise. Ursula took me farther. She had returned to the tundra and day after day her red umbrella marked her location as she painted tirelessly. Not always was her subject before her as she worked. And one day she beckoned to me as I passed her at a distance. I strolled over. "What do you think, Roscoe?" Ursula had asked me that a hundred times. She never specified what about, but usually it was easy enough to figure. This time it was the painting. Here was no view of the spectacular range she faced, no meticulous, detailed drawing of the nearby tundra. Ursula's picture abounded in blues and shadowy patches of color, oranges and reds and rainbow streamers trailing and radiating from them. It was vague, impressionistic, yet as I studied it it took form and I recognized what it had to be -- a vast cavern, illuminated from glowing sources suspended high, with great dim arches that seemed to lead on into other caverns -- an impression of immensity that only a great artist could give. Nothing was actually recognizable -- or so I thought until I came close again and studied the canvas carefully. Tiny figures were on the cavern floors, hints of the same figures on irregularities of the cavern walls, creatures infinitesimally small compared to the spreading, vaulting spaciousness of the cavern. Raccoons! Most were simply tiny, vaguely familiar smudges, but a few were painted in exquisite detail. Once again I was impressed by the eerie sixth sense that made Ursula unique. She hadn't painted the range -- somehow she had looked into that mighty uplift. And what she had painted made no sense, geologically. But at the same time, it fitted. "The surface rocks of these mountains are granitic, Ursula," I said. "Rhyolites and basalts lie under them. No sediments. There couldn't be a cavern system under there." Ursula shrugged. "Feel it," she said. "Got to be. Don't know why." "It would explain a lot," I admitted. "The hollow pinnacle of Olympus. No coons above ground. I know they're subterranean. I've found burrows. But how would they live? What would they eat? And don't tell me those little varmints send the cloud signals from the big peak." Ursula's strange eyes gleamed. "Not telling you anything. Don't know." She never looked more like a witch. "Your job," she said. I shrugged in my turn. "Well," I said, "it beats just hanging around the house." M atters were finally beginning to move, though. I formed hypotheses, modified them, discarded them. Jim Peters' trappers had discovered the burrows capped with rocks strangely like the native granite and yet so light they could be tipped over with a finger. As I expected, they set traps everywhere. Much good it did them. They caught nothing. The coons knew that we were on to them. Then, overnight, twa . things happened. Lindy went out for her morning signaling session with the three little coons and found the cages empty, the doors unlatched and swinging. And Pegleg disappeared. IF The first I had expected. There was not much doubt that the coons had been staying around for what they could learn. Jim Peters had admitted as much, but he hadn't believed they could handle his magnetic locks. He had thought they had outsmarted themselves by letting themselves be caged. He had been complacent -- now he was both amused and annoyed when he found how neatly he had been gulled. "I'm slipping, Roscoe," he told me. "Can't analyze a situation like I used to. Getting old." I'd have guessed Jim at about thirty-five. We don't wave our ages about. In space they're pretty meaningless anyhow. "Why -- " he scratched his unkempt, sandy hair -- "it used-to take an expert to fool me. Now look." I consoled him. "They're experts. A neat little variant of the Trojan Horse gambit -- they took advantage of the fact that we probably wouldn't believe their full capabilities. They were so right that now we've got to reassess the whole situation. How capable are they? What kinds of information were they able to acquire just sitting in those cages and watching?" "And what will they be able to do with it now they've got it? They may not be taking kindly to unannounced visitors. There's no doubt that we've upset the pattern of their living simply by being here. Though I suppose that always happens." "It hinges on the gods," I decided. "The ruling intelligence, the guiding spirit of this part of the planet, is centered on the big peak, on old Olympus up there. Those little varmints may isimply be handy adjuncts to the establishment. On the other hand, they may run the place." "There are plenty of them," Jim said. "I suppose you know about the burrows." "There's more to it than that," I said and told him about Ursula's picture. "Things are picking up," the zoologist said happily. "If there is a cavern system we'll find it. Always something new." "I can sec you now," I said, "working your way into a nether world through a twisting cooii burrow one foot in diameter. It'll be the high spot of your career." "Low spot," Jim corrected. "I'll do what I have to do." And that at least was a serious statement. Pegleg wasn't missed until evening and even then we knew little concern. His work habits are unconventional. He usually goes alone; he drives that jeq into places no sane, practical-minded field man would even consider driving. He can change from wheels to tracks at need and the timonium pill he uses for power is good for a unit can sheathe the vehicle in a shield that will foil any primitive, raw power. So when he turned up missing we didn't worry, t had happened before. Still, a day and a half without communication was a long time even for Pegl. When we reached that stage Johnny Rasmussen set in motion what we called the Misplaced Personnel pattern. Every scoutboat that went out was on search alert, watching for the jeep and with radio channels opein for every wavelength possible to the jeep communicator. Stony Price winnowed the high frequencies for unusual sound. Every field unit was notified. Rasmussen quizzed me. He thought that I would know what Pegleg had had in mind if anybody would. As it happened, I didn't. I hadn't even seen him go out. But I remembered something. The previous evening, almost at dusl, there . had been unusual activity of the clouds on Mount Olympus. They had grown black like thund'erheadswirling sullenly as if in anger. The clouds were changii all the time, but this was different. Johnny Rasmussen agreed. "It could be the key," he said. "Up to now it would have been interesting to find out about the gods. Now I think we must." You know how I felt. Pegleg was my oldest friend, my fleld companion on dozens of worlds. From me he needed a special kind of help. There would be searchers in plenty, but I knew best how he thought, what motivated him, what made him tick. My job was to think -- in addition to all those pretty rocks, what else had he had in mind? I reasoned that he had offended the gods. He had invaded the shrouded peak of the sacred mountain, had violated their holy of holies. So they had waited for him and when opportunity finally allowed, they had taken him. So I built my thinking -- a nice, reasonable, logical sequence. I was wrong. V F or a day our search patterns blanketed the range -- but it was a vast land to be lost in. The way Pegleg drove he could have dropped that jeep into any one of thousands of crevasses in hundreds of glaciers that flowed down the shoulders of peak' after peak. Any rubble slide in any canyon in all that seamed network could have covered him up forever. We knew that, but we didn't falter. We searched on. The clouds on Mount Olympus, were tranquil for that day, but then they changed. The next sunrise found them billowing, crowding into strangely shaped masses, shooting out colored pur's in complicated patterns. And the coons ban to appear. IF Until then we had caught only fleeting glimpses. Suddenly they were everywhere. A coon sat jauntily atop every rock. They darted here and there in the open spaces, sometimes even pausing to feed. I had speculated about that and watched the procedure with interest. I had been pretty sure that they ate a variety of things. Jim Peters had fed his captives a mixture of local organics and they had eaten most of it. Here, though, each feeding pattern was identical. A pink, lilylike plant a foot or so high sheeted wide stretches of tundra. Often it was the most abundant plant in view. The coons harvest it with a stylized procedure that never varied -- and it was soon evident why it was so abundant. The coons fed on the bulk from which the lily grew. They dug it out with practiced twists of their little black hands, nipped off the stem with glistening white teeth, then removed a purple berry from the top of the stalk where the flower had been. This fruit they planted in the hole they had dug. They covered it carefully. Then, and only then, they ate the bulb with relish. As you can imagine, I was torn. One of the mysteries of life on Olympus Two was uhfolding before my eyes -- but one of the Stardusts veteran researchers was lost, swallowed up in the impressive environment of these strange little beings. What should I do? I was high on my favorite slope and the coons swarmed around me, avoiding my boulder seat but otherwise ignoring me. I felt guilty, but I watched and made notes. I knew it was what Pegleg would have done -- what, perhaps, he was doing at that moment. For the coons were out as far as I could see the tundra. Ursula's painting had prepared me a little, but .the numbers were incredible. My belt communicator rasped and sputtered. "Dr. Kissinger." It was Stony Price. "Dr. Rasmussen calling Dr. Kissinger. Come in, Roscoe." I thumbed my transmission button. "Roscoe here. Stony." "Thank you, Mr. Price." Johnny Rasmussen's calm, genteel voice. "We've got news of Pegleg, Roscoe. George Wildcat trailed the jeep by jumper and he found -- but let him tell you. Could you patch him in, Mr. Price?" More rattling and rasping. Then, "Wildcat here. Dr Kissinger." The soft voice was as unemotional as the chiefs had been. "Tell, Wildcat," I urged. "An interesting trail. Dr. Kissinger," Wildcat said gently. "I am about a hundred and eighty miles southwest of the Stardust -- in a deep box canyon between the fourth and fifth peaks south of came here. I now have great admiration for that jeep. You would not believe the route he topk," "I'd believe it," I said. "Where's Pegl now?" Wildcat hesitated. "There is a large cavern opening in the nd of the canyon. Apparently he drove in. I tried my jumper communicator at the cavern mouth, but got no response from the jeep. Welt protected search teams seem indicated." "How can we get there?" "A scoutboat seems best. At least you can reconnoiter from the air and then bring in jumper teams if you think it wise. I can give you coordinates and stand by to beam you in." "Right. How about the coon population there?"  "They are everywhere. They are coming out of the cavern in droves. But they don't seem interested in me. They ignore me. "All same here. This is a very big deal, probably not related to Pegleg at all." "It is related to the cloud signals on Mount Olympus," Wildcat stated. "Notice that they're changing as we talk." He paused a minute. "Have you eagles?" I had noticed them gathering, but they were soaring high. Now I realized that they were beginning to plane lower -- and that there were thousands of them. "We've got eagles," I said, "and they're coming down." I N A matter of minutes the great birds were swooping all around me. The swish and whistle of the wide-pinioned wings must have made a roar in my microphone -- I could also hear them in my speaker. One hundred and eighty miles away the same thing was evidently going on. And at the end of each dive was a coon. Actually the eagles' hunting wasn't that easy. The coons leaped, dodged, swayed out of the way of the reaching talons with a facility, a cool competence that indicate practice. They had expected this and the birds often missed. But many a bird soared up again with a limp furry form clutched in its long claws. The slow, the dull, the unskilled, the unlucky -- these were being pruned out fast. My sulKonscious was automatically recording and interpreting all this, while my conscious mind was rejecting it. A deliberately planned survival ritual, executed by the numbers on orders broadcast by cloud patterns on a giant mountain peak -- it seemed impossible. But somehow I knew it was so. The tundra was honeycombed with burrows capped by rocks that the coons could move with ease. Safety was only a few leaps away. But not one attempted to leave the action. They stayed, trusting to the speed and agility of their own muscles, pitting their alertness and timing against the fearsome swoops of the huge birds. As a precaution I stepped into my jumper frame and activated the IF forcefield. But it wasn't needed. The birds avoided me. The coons used me, dodging around me as though I were a rock. And after a few minutes the rain of swooping, diving eagles thinned, until only an occasional one threatened the still teeming numbers of coons. These last birds, I suspected were themselves young and inexperienced, still honing their foodgetting skills. The whole mighty spectacle, as I viewed it, was one of grim practicality. But I had never seen anything like it. As Pegleg was wont to say, most of the experiences we have seem to be firsts. At the thought of Pegleg I again remembered my purring communications speaker. Our three-way patch was still open, but for minutes we had been speechless. "Still there. Wildcat?" "Still here. Dr. Kissinger. Fm sure we've seen the ame thing. May I come to hear you discuss it at the next convened report? I have some questions." I grinned a little wryly. "So have I, George. This is a situation where there are no experts. Give me your coordinates. Fll be over you in half an hour. Will you order me a scoutboat, Johnny?" "It's done," the chief said. "Waiting for you." It would take more than a swarming of coons and an invasion of eagles to disconcert Johnny Rasmussen. boat pilot and more than pleased with my crew. Young Pete Watts grinned at me from behind his instrument panels as I came aboard. He knows how I work. The second researcher's seat was also rather #I filled by Lindy. She was dressed for the field, equipped with zoom binoculars, magnaflash and laser gun swinging from her belt. "I'm your best bet," she informed me. "The coons arc involved in this and I can communicate with them. You're lucky to have me." "You're always my best bet," I said. "Take her out, Pete. Lock on Wildcat's beam and follow the bouncing ball." "Roger, Dr. Kissinger." Pete was a researcher's dream pilot. In the field he never asked why. The scoutboat spiraled, picked up the tracker's weak signal and flashed toward it. In moments great cliffs loomed high. Skillfully Pete wove the ship among them, cutting down sp for better viewing. We were in a long canyon, maybe no more than a mile across, a rugged gash in the immensity of the range. Its floor was broken, scarred, boulder-strewn. I couldn't imagine trying to tool a vehicle over that rugged terrain -- but, knowing Pegleg, I could easily picture him doing it, switching from tracks to wheels to tracks again as the situation changed. What he had been looking for was anybody's guess. But he had stumbled on something. Pegleg did nothing at random. "Cut it down, Pete," I directed. "Slow cruise. We may as well glean all we can." , The scoutboat drifted, loafing along a few hundred feet above the rocky bottom of the canyon. Wildcat's signal csTme ever stronger. "Look, Roscoe -- the eagles." Lindy's binoculars swept the seamed and shattered canyon walls. Pinnacles jutted everywhere and atop practically every one a great bird sat and tore at the furry body beneath its talons. It was dinnertime in eagle land. Only a few still soared and searched, but to no avail now. The coons were gone. I punched a communicator button and cut into Wildcat's signal. "Can you hear me. Wildcat? We're coming in. What happened to the coons?" "Got you. Dr. Kissinger. The clouds on the peak changed color and the coons vanished. Just popped out of sight. The party's over." "Until next time," I agreed. "Watch for us." The canyon ended ahead. A vast dark wall, thousands of feet high, lay across it, boxing it in. Sunlight flickered on the immense stretches of rock, but the impression was one of gloom, of coldness, of shadow. And we could see the huge opening, high as a four-story building, long before we picked out the tiny form of the tracker in the jumble of rocks below. Pete cut speed until the scoutboat barely had headway. I suppose my subconscious had decided, long before I consciously admitted what I intended to do. To crystallize and bring the decision to the surface required the sight of the great arching entryway. I remembered Ursula's painting. The caverns were in chains, indescribably large. Unless they held energies I could not now envision a scoutboat should be able to cruise them. My pilot knew what came next. He swung our little ship low over where Wildcat sat, then drifted in a tight circle at slowest speed. I activated the auditory cone. "This may be news to my crew, George, but we're going to take the scoutboat into that hole. Can you think of any reason we shouldn't?" "Just ordinary common sense. Dr. Kissinger. I'd hate to do it. There are probably controlled energies in there and there's no way to assess them. I went in a few hundred feet and lost all communication. They let me keep my magnaflash." "They?" "The coons. That's their country in there. And they're sharp. I wouldn't be surprised if they could neutralize your motive power." George Wildcat's ancestry was IF Mandan Sioux. He was Jim Peters' ace tracker. Give him a wilderness and a dim spoor and he was a happy young man. The planet didn't matter. And he could read from any situation far more than he could see. "Any installations? Any artifacts? Anything they may have made?" I figured he must have something tangible on which to base so positive an attitude. "Negative. Like Miss Potts says, I just felt it. I came out because I thought my first duty was to report. Since then I've been under orders." "No criticism, George. You did exactly right. Notify the Stardust and keep your position to relay us if we can't communicate directly with the ship. I'm going to bet that their energies can't solve our forcefield." I could hear wildcat's faint sigh. "I thought you would," he said. but also quizzical. He had taken me on some strange rides. He could make a scoutboat do anything it was built to do and put it through paces the designers had never imagined. This trip, I supposed, would be in that last category. "Take her in, Pete. Activate bumper rays outside the forcefield -- and go slowly. We want to see the sights." A scoutboat is about forty feet long, eight feet wide. In space it looks like a featureless metallic silver, pointed at both ends. Its timonium drive can flash it through planetary atmospheres at speeds great enough to make it glow, or it can drift with scarcely perceptible headway. But it cannot hover and it cannot take off from any location except its slip in the Stardust. Hence it cannot land. These were not limitations. They were advantages in every situation in which scoutboats had ever been used. But it was unlikely that anyone had ever used one underground. We slipped through the huge opening. The light of the sun faded and there were no sights to see. Stygian blackness swallowed us. Pete activated dim lights. The scoutboat floated slowly forward. Dark craggy walls showed ahead, but athwart our direction the blackness was unbroken. "Up the range, Pete. Toward Mount Olympus. I'm betting that the chain of caverns is continuous and somewhere ahead old Zeus is waiting for us." The scoutboat swerved, then rocked gently as the bumper rays fended it from the wall. But it never lost headway. Pete eased it onward steadily, its radar keeping it positioned halfway between the dimly revealed floor of the cavern and the vaulting ceiling above. We seemed suspended in black nothingness, going nowhere. "Any reason for not using magnaflash. Dr. Kissinger? We may be missing some of those sights you wanted to see. Radar wall patterns are pretty irregular." "We'll take a quick look," I decided, "then switch 'em off again. Don't want to overawe them, you know. Although I've got an idea they could light up this whole area if they wanted." Actually, it wasn't my idea. It was memory. I was recalling Ursula's mystic, murky picture, with the flaring yellow and orange spots high in the vaulted upper reaches of the barely recognizable chain of caverns. Well, here were the caverns. Where was the rest? The wide cone of pure white light, brighter than day, lanced ahead of us. The scoutboat cruised slowly. We were moving into a huge vaulted amphitheater perhaps a mile wide, a dozen miles long. At its farther end there was a great tunnel-like exit, many times larger than the opening through which we entered the system. The sheer scale of the caverns changed my mind about the use of light. "Keep the big beam on, Pete," I directed. "Better activate analytical systems, too. Air composition, air currents, temperature fluctuations -- the works. This a world within a world. A nation, a race of beings lives here. Let's know all we can about it. Because sooner or later we're going to be asked to show our ticket stubs." "Piloting a scoutboat through the inside of a mountain range ought to take about all of a man's attention," Lindy said. "I'll do the analyses. Dr. Kissinger. I'm rather used to that sort of thing." "Thank you. Dr. Peterson," I said gravely. "That will free me to watch." "And what would you be watching for -- specifically?" "A small, anachronistic. Earthtype vehicle, my sweet." Suddenly I was sober. "A jeep, I believe it's called." Just for a moment Lihdy's sympathetic grin flashed. Then she was in the technicians seat forward, playing the complicated analytical console with practiced fingers and reading half a dozen stories from the flickering light banks. The scoutboat drove on -- and I watched. neath us gained character. What was at first a blurred jumble began to sort itself out. That was living space down there and gradually the details appeared. A key factor to everything we could see was evidently the light source that had been turned out. For this was not just a rocky world, though broken masses and piles of stony rubble predominated. My probing spotlight revealed these as multicolored, with such green, and the zoom binoculars showed lichenlike growth, lush and crisp, punctuated by clinging clusters of mushIF roomlike fungi in orange and scarlet and a whole range of blues. The light winked on small streams, "Of course," I said aloud for the record. "The food base. The producers. They use the upper world, the planet's surface, but they don't depend on it. The food chains start here, powered at second hand by artificial light that can be controlled." The strangeness of our situation gradually faded as the familiar, basic patterns of the ecosystem began to emerge. They sometimes took odd forms, alien sequences, but in the last analysis they showed the same framing. I began to feel comfortable again. This was my lifelong concern. Only the details were different. "A plant cover, varied," I announced. "What's the weather out there like. Dr. Peterson?" "Temperate," Lindy intoned. "Rather high humidity, but good air circulation. Should be fresh and invigorating. Temperature seventyone degrees Fahrenheit. And no sunshine at all." "Are you sure?" For as she spoke the vast cavern suddenly was flooded with yellow light. The details I had been observing piecemeal were spread out below, a strange, sunlit, enclosed landscape. And the very sun itself seemed to hang high in the vaulted upper reaches of this buried world." "I don't know when I've seen a quicker sunrise," Lindy murmured. She pushed buttons, coaxed more data from the humming console. "No hard radiation, Roscoe. Light almost the same quality as sunlight. A bit more red." She studied the light readout for a moment longer, then leaned back in her chair. "I'm gladI came," she announced. "We are now transient visitants in the galaxy's greatest controlled-environment chamber. That sun is a hydrogen ball, confined, activated and paced in some ungodly fashion I'll never have sense enough to understand." slipping along beneath us. For some minutes I had been aware that the small stone piles scattered at random among the lichen-clad slides were too uniform, too precise to be natural. The zoom binoculars confirmed this. They looked like little stone igloos. I'd have guessed their origins anyhow, but close-ups left no doubt. Many had openings and bright-eyed little coons peered from them. I pointed them out. "Farm houses," I said. "Complete with peasants," Lindy agreed. "They're predictable. But those little creatures aren't probing our forcefield. They can't turn the sun off and on." "I think I agree," I said. "Still, something can -- and I'd be a mite easier in my mind if I knew what." "Let's find out," my wife said. "You know and I know that the answer is up ahead. That's where the jeep is -- and Pegleg." "The gods?" "The gods. And I still would like to have that little chat with Aphrodite." "You shall, my pet," I said. "By the nine gods I swear it. Take her along, Pete. Were betting that the caverns are continuous all the way to Mount Olympus and that the scoutboat can take us through. Be careful of intersections and Uturns, otherwise use your own judgment." The pilot gave me a swift look and settled himself in his chair. "Roger, Dr. Kissinger," he said happily. "I'll try to get you there in time for dinner. We wouldn't want the nectar and ambrosia to get cold." I should have known better. But the next instant it was too late. The cavern walls were blurring, the scoutboat tilting and weaving and darting, and the cavern suns were flashing past like streetlamps along a village street. I would have lost face to have ordered a cut in speed -- but I'll never forget that ride. I knew that the computer-pilot was plotting the course, altering it each microsecond as the radar fed in data. No human reaction time could possibly have been fast enough. But it was Pete who determined the speed and even in space he loved to move. What it was like in that linked netherworld of tunnels and caverns I leave you to imagine. I do remember wondering fleetingly how I'd look with my hair all gray. Still, we got through. The scoutboat was slowing almost before my apprehensions were sorted out and justified. "Complications up ahead. Dr. Kissinger," Pete reported. "Have to cut down a little. Sorry." . I ignored Lindy's slightly strained grin. "I forgive you, Pete," I said. "It may even be more dignified to approach heaven slowly." I look forward into the space we were just entering. "I see what you mean by complications." VI many caverns, some of them extensive. Most of them had doubtless had installations of varying complexity, but of course we had not truly seen them. What lay ahead we could see and it was impressive. This enclosure was not large compared to some we had traversed. It was perhaps three or four miles long, and half as wide. Two orange suns glowed a halfmile up. The effect was like a summer noon on Earth. Here was no hint of the rural, the pastoral feel of the earlier caves. This one was structured, complex, used. Several features struck the eye. One was the forest of pylons, IF slender metallic cylinders extending upward from heights of a few feet to perhaps a couple of hundred. They occurred in clusters, strung out in lines, or in random isolation here and there all the way to the distant walls. They seemed to sprout from the rocky substrate, connected to nothing and there was no clue to their purpose. But their nature was soon apparent. "Energy pylons. Dr. Kissinger," Pete reported. "My meters are jumping. Every one of those things is hot." "Are they focusing on us? Is the forcefield under stress?" The pilot shook his head. We were now barely drifting and I noticed that we were swinging wide to avoid the higher cylinders. "Negative on both counts. Everything is normal. But the potential is there. Somehow each cylinder is a transmission device. Whether any of them could cause us any grief -- no way to tell. No data." "We still do it, don't we?" Lindy looked up from her console. "The old Earth attitude. The human point of view. Why should they want to cause us grief? Maybe it's no part of their thinking at all. Perhaps we're simply objects of wonder to be explain, not destroyed." "Every ecosystem is based on strife," I pointed out. "Every living thing in a natural system has competed successfully. Otherwise it's dead. That's an advanced setup down there. It didn't get that way without effective defences. It may shoot first and investigate afterward." "Since it hasn't maybe it won't," Lindy said. "Incidentally, there's still no hard radiation with the light and the air is sweet and good. Even the humidity is no higher in spite of all the steam pits." Steam lakes or steam ponds would have been more accurate. They dotted the cavern floor and condensation mists rose from them, drifting and dissipating in the air. Some had multicolored deposits built up along their edges. Water ran from them in wide, glistening sheets. Fumaroles puffed and blew. A steaming jet of water topped with a cloud plume climbed to medium pylon height for several minutes as we watched, then slowly subsided. I swept the area with my everuseful zooms, while Pete drifted the scoutboat slowly in random patterns back and forth. He knew me. He was waiting for orders. "I'm beginning to understand," I said finally. "Hydrothermal energy. Plenty of it. A subterranean geyser basin. Probably been here for eons. Somehow they've learned to convert it, to harness it. They've built a culture around it. All the rest is detail." "So we're back to they," Lindy said. "Who arc theyl" I grinned at her. "The gods," i said. "The gods of Mount Olympus. I would suspect that we're under their mountain. Confirm, Pete?" "Confirm, Dr. Kissinger," the pilot said. "Or in the neighborhood, at least. We've come the right distance in the right direction. I'd say this is it." The complex of installations below also seemed to confirm it. Not that it looked like any industrial arrangement we had ever envisioned or experienced. But there were piled clusters of rock structures built against the cavern wall in one location, a random-appearing jumble that stretched along the wall for several hundred yards. And it swarmed with coons. "Drop us in, Pete," I directed. "Slowly. Let them see us at close range. Then it'll be their move." "I think it's already ours." Lindy's glasses were sweeping the strange artifacts. "Look, Roscoe. Halfway along the building complex -- beside the tallest pylon." It was Pegleg's jeep. T he scoutboat nosed down gently. It must have been a marvel to the thronging, brighteyed little creatures that darted in and out of the myraid openings of the building complex, lliere were literally acres of them. They made a seething, shifting pattern as we swept slowly over them at a height of forty feet or so. "No sign of Pleg?" I kept the anger out of my voice, but Lindy sensed it. "Take it easy, Roscoe," she soothed me. "He's probably guest of honor at that dinner we're late for. I can't feel hostility. Just interest and curiosity. They'll be delighted to set some plates for us." "They'll have their chance," I said shortly. "I'm going down. Swing out the ladder, Pete, and make a run at twenty feet. I'll drop off beside the jeep." The scoutboat turned in a tight circle and ban Its glide. The speed slowed almost to the pace of a walking man. The emergency hatch next to my seat slid back, the pliable ladder dropped through and I climbed down to swing free beneath the ship. It was a practiced gambit. We us it often. Coons scurried as I dropped from the ladder. I strode over and stood with my back against the jeep, hand on my laser, my eyes trying to take in the whole improbable situation. The coons surrounded me, row on row and rank on rank, bright eyes rolling, black hands flying, tails twitching. I could hear the shuffle of thousands of little feet, but otherwise they made no sounds at all. The gurgle of flowing water, the hiss and pop of the boiling springs, the splash of geysers -- these were the noises of this hidden world. I thumbed my communicator switch. IF up, Pegleg." I didn't expect an answer. But I got one. Promptly, too. My open receiver rasped and cleared its throat. Pegleg's voice came, understandable enough, but rather muffled and faint. Roscoe?" He didn't sound distressed and suddenly I felt good again. I hadn't realized how the tension had been building. "A better question is -- where are you? I'm in front of the biggest rockpile. Standing by the jeep. Direct me and I'll come get you." Pegleg's chuckle rattl the receiver. "You wouldn't get far. Heaven is a pretty complicated place. Hold tight and I'll try to come to you. I don't think they'll stop me from walking out. But they've taken my gun. So watch yours." "Roger. Leave your communicator open." The first ring of coons was ten feet away from me and they didn't seem disposed to come closer. But their restless fingers and twitching tails never stopped. Their motions seemed to have developed a rhythm -- then I realized that they were all going through the same patterns. They were all saying the same thing and in unison. They didn't seem unfriendly, but there was certainly no way to tell. I watched them for several minutes. The shadow of the scoutboat drifted across and for a moment all eyes were on it. Pete was staying close. If it came to that, he could lash that sea of furry bodies with savage, disintegrating energy. But what they might do in return was entirely problematical. The slender pylon behind me reached up for more than a hundred feet. So, as Pegleg advised, I held tight. The coons continued their swinging pattern, speeding it up, giving it a jive beat. The concept seemed ridiculous, but I think they were having fun. If they had not been voiceless I'm sure they would have been chanting. It could have been, Yah-yah, or it could have been. Welcome to our city, Lindy might have, known. I didn't. And after a bit it became irritating. I made the gesture remembered from the three little coons in Jim Peters' cages and briefly covered my eyes with my hands. T hat interested them. The soundless chant stopped. The front row surged forward a couple of feet, but I waved it back and put my hand on my gun. They understood all right. They had taken Pegleg's gun. I wondered briefly how they had managed that. The scoutboat came over again, drifting slowly, ladder trailing. Lindy swung ofT into the little circle. "Apologies, Roscoe. I know you didn't call me. But I hate to sit in. the grandstand when a game is going on. After all, you don't know what they're saying." Lindy's beautiful anytime, but never more so than when her interest is focused on a problem, especially a problem with living things. Then she glows. Any danger that might have been in this situation she simply ignored. "I'm waiting for Pegleg," I explained. "He's back in that rockpile somewhere, apparently. But he says he can come out." "I know. We heard. And meanwhile they're trying to tell you something and I might just be able to figure out what." She misted her green eyes at me. "You don't mind, do you Roscoe? Just you keep watch. I'll do the talking." I shrugged with mock resignation -- or maybe it wasn't entirely mock. "Don't you always? What's a wife for?" She was the focus of thousands of pairs of sly black eyes as she made motions, touched herself in patterns, even held a hand behind her to simulate a tail. And when she paused, the watchers erupted into a sea of motion. Everybody talked at once. It seemed a racial failing. She made the now familiar gesture and covered her eyes. The motions subsided. Then she pointed to one coon in the first row, beckoned him forward. He understood. He took a couple of steps into the circle and sat upright, his black hands folded on his chest. Lindy tried her signs again. She pointed at the jeep, swept an arm to indicate the complex of buildings, made a motion that even I could interpret. Where? Where was the man who drove the jeep? They knew, all right. The spokesman didn't have to answer that one. The sea of heads swiveled toward the rock structure opposite. I suppose it was the most imposing' of the complex, though they all looked pretty much alike to me. But it was by far the biggest, a multidomed jumble that reached forty or fifty feet up the cavern wall and had a frontage half a block long. The seat of a personage -- or personages. The spokesman graphically confirmed my surmise. He lay prone, his snout pressed into the dust, his hands clasped behind his head. A position of subservience, of submission. Authority lived in that rock pile. My communicator crackled. "I think I'm almost out, Roscoe." Pegleg's voice was clearer. "I'm not so good on these ladders. Anyhow, I have to proceed with dignity. I'm being escorted and I get the impression that it's quite an honor. Wait'll you see." "Roger," I said. "Waking." The openings in the rock dwellings, were all coon-sized. A man could scarcely have thrust his head into them. But the big house, the IF paUce or whatever it was, boasted a portal. It was easily five feet high, three feet wide, and into the wall around the opening were set sheets of glistening mica. Pegleg emerged from this imposing aperture, bending to clear it. Pegleg is six feet tall. He gave us a wave, then stood aside as his escort came slowly and with dignity into the light. We were a hundred feet away and I promptly swung up my binoculars. Qf the several possibilities that I had considered, I suppose I had given this one the least weight. For the escort was merely another coon. Correction. Not merely another coon. There couldn't have been another like him along that entire cavern chain, not on this whole great planet called Olympus Two. He was coal black. He was easily three times the size of any coon I had yet seen. He walked erect on plantigrade feet, striding deliberately, his facile hands gesturing. He was abundantly, blatantly male. They approached us slowly. Pegleg one step behind his host, a wide pathway opening as they advanced. The thousands of coons watched, but the waving, twitching conversation was stilled. Each made a single, one-handed gesture as the big coon passed, a gesture of respect... When they stood before us. Pegleg made the introduction with a wave of his hand. "Zeus," he said. litely, but what do you do when you're introduced to a god? Lindy adjusted first. She made the same motion the coons had made, the gesture of respect. I followed suit awkwardly. Pegleg watched us, grinning. "You're kidding, Pegleg," I said. "You know I'm not. These little varntints have built a culture around hydrothermal energy. They work metals, generate current, understand chemical reactions. How they do things I don't know -- I've bwn a sort of restricted guest in the Big Man's town house over there. I've eaten lily bulbs, lichens and a molded mound of stuff, not identified but savory, out of a polished stone dish. I've drunk cool water from a fountain. I've slept on a mat as soft as down and they pinched my gun while I napped. They knew well enough what it was." "How did you find the caverns? What clues did you have? Why didn't you let me know?" "It's a long story," Pegleg said. "Right now we'd better be giving due deference to his nibs there. Call him Yahweh, call him Zeus, call him anything you want, but he's the big black he-coon of this whole operation and don't you forget it." Lindy's cheeks were faintly pink. "We noticed," she said primly. Pegleg laugh aloud. "You should see his lady friends,' he said. He has at least a dozen. He had them all file past me and make polite motions." But he didn't faze Lindy. Nobody does. "Was, by any chance, Aphrodite among them?" she inquired sweetly. "I have unfinished business with her." "You know," Pegleg said, "she just might have been. There was one -- Oh, oh, what's bugging him?" Old Zeus had turned his back on us. He made a series of motions to the nearest coon, which made the gesture of respect and darted for the portal of the celestial Palace -- if that was what it was. The shadow of the scoutboat drifted across again. Zeus watched it carefully, almost reflectively. It was easy to see that he didn't quite know how much he might risk with us. But I sensed that he would be happy if we would just go away. He said as much. He included us all in a wave of a hand, then pointed to the scoutboat. "Here's your hat," Lindy interpreted. "Nice to have seen you. Goodbye." "Not my. hat exactly," Pegleg said. "Look." She was even more spectacular than her lord and master and she walked with a conscious pride. She was a glistening, glossy white. When she came closer we could see that the wide eyes were pink. They blinked continually in the strong lingt. She held both hands out before her gingerly and on the pink palms lay Pegleg's laser gun. "He sent for the gun," Pegleg conjectured. "He doesn't want us to have any reason to stick around. But it may have been her idea to bring it herself. She wanted to see you closeup." "You're guessing," I said. "Sure. But she watched me a lot in there. She does as she pleases. She's special. In fact, she's -- " "Aphrodite?" Lindy was gleeful. Pegleg grinned. "Could be." He bent to take his gun from the small outstretched hands and gravely made the gesture of respect. Lindy and I imitated him. The goddess favored us with a slow, regal stare, then ifiade a gracious motion. She turned and grasped the black hand of her big consort, cuddled against him. They Walked away from us, back along the lane through the sea of their subjects, making gracious gestures as they went. They did not look back. "Aphrodite's secret," Lindy murmured. "Is that all there is to it? Why, I've known that all along." I put my arm around her. "It's the worst-kept secret in the universe," I said, "and the male doesn't live who isn't glad." agreed that it was a good idea -- IF so we dropped magnetic grapples around the jeep, pulled it up and secured it tightly against the belly of the scoutboat. Then we cruised back along the chain of caverns, cameras recording the whole remarkable route. We watched and talked. Pegleg recounted his adventures. They were interesting, but, once explained, not too unusual. They are not pertinent here. He has put them on record in Vol. #. The Log of the Stardust. A. D. #.) We recognized that our chances of learning much more of the technology of the coon-people were not good. The details of how old Zeus managed the mechanics of the clouds were not likely to be known. We could have tried. But International Space Council ruling was specific on the point. No interference with the activities of an aware species. We were restricted to what our sensors could tell us. We could only learn what. Not how. If we had been invited -- but we weren't. Zeus had made that very plain. Still,. I was satisfied. Like every successful race Td encountered, this one had solved the basic problems. They had space and they used it well. They had built predation into their life scheme, so that their numbers would not become too great and so that the cleverest and the strongest would survive. And they had authority, a godhead, and they respected and obeyed it. The influence of their ruling deities could have extended far beyond their own species. The mysterious cloud forms of the mighty mountain certainly must have affected all living things that could see and realize their strangeness. I didn't know that there were such, but there could have been. The scoutboat nosed out of the entrance canyon and fiashed along the side of the range, homing on the mother ship. The great massif of Mount Olympus lay dead ahead, seeming even more magnificent and overpowering after our time in the caverns. And as we approached, the cloud banks spread, took on color and swirled even faster until the summit seemed wrapped in a whirling rainbow. There had never been such a display before. "Is it a threat, a salute or a warning?" Pegleg mused. "One thing is sure -- it's meant for us." "There's no menace in it," Lindy said. "I seem to feel that it's just making a statement, just reminding us." "Of what?" I asked. "Of an obvious fact. I think Browning said it many years ago much better than I ever could." "I'm shy on, Browning," Lsaid. My wife looked upward at the majestic mountain, and smiled as she quoted softly: Gods in his Heaven, Airs right with this world...  T his is the story of two people and how three of them died. By and large, they were pretty nice people. But it's not a very nice story.   # "I've come to buy some anger," called up the too-young man. He sat himself down on a metal sawhorse and waited. "Indeed?" replied the man working up and across from him. "Indeed," answered the tooyoung man. The gentleman working across from the too-young man and his metal sawhorse was engaged in an anomaly. He was repairing a boat. This in itself was not terribly unusual. It was a common enough activity in boatyards. But he was driving metal pinions into the boat's hull with a hand-held hammer. This, instead of using an automatic arm. What was more, the hull of the craft appeared to be made of natural celluloid materials instead of plasticine, metalloy, or ferrosponges. This ship was not new. Its hull was badly in need of a new coat of paint. From the back the man did not seem especially arresting. This impression changed when he paused, straightened and turned on his ladder to face the other. He stood slightly over average height but seemed taller. Leonine, well built, lithe. The lines in his face seemed put there by a drunken cartographer. Each led to some strange valley, forbidden city or unfathomable abyss of the soul. For all of that he was not ancient. The streaks of black in his otherwise iron-gray hair were plentiful and not the product of cosmetics. In back the hair was gathered into a single pigtail by an odd arrangement of leather bindings. A single solid-gold ring pierced his left ear. He had thick gray eyebrows that had been intended for a much larger man. They shaded equally gray eyes. His nose was long and slightly hooked. His mouth and lips were thin and clenched tightly. His whole expression was full of star space and vinegar. "What makes you think I could sell you anger, feller me lad?" "You are the man they call Sawbill," said the too-young man. It was not a question. "I'm the man some call Sawbill. I'm often called other things and many of them are better. Some are worse. Sawbill will do." Facing Sawbill, the too-young man was not all that young. The gulf between them, though, was one that some people might have called age. H IS metallic red jumpsuit flashed in the morning sun. "Then you're the one I want, all right. I am not without resources. Or brains. I've checked on you thoroughly. Oh, very carefully, very quietly. You needn't worry at all." "I wasn't. But go on." Sawbill was rummaging through a small keg of metal pinions, variously shaped and sized. "You weren't easy to locate -- I'll give you that. But I knew how to find you. It's all a matter of asking the right question in the right places. And if you have money and know a few people in expedient locations -- on the Port immigration board, for example -- you can find out just about anything. I want to make a purchase, Sawbill." The boat had a low-lying central cabin. A bird thing perched on the edge of it. The bird's rainbow-hued crest bobbed up and down like a metronome. Its tail was of bright golden feathers and the rest of it was dull, crushed, velvety gold. The thing fluttered down to land on Sawbill's right shoulder. Dipping and bobbing, it surveyed the new arrival. The rainbow crest feathers flashed in avian Morse. The too-young man stared with interest at the bird-thing. He was no ornithologist, not even an amateur. But he was well read. Enough to know that this bird was not native to Thalia Major. (It might have come from Thalia Minor, but he doubted it because...) "Well, feller me lad, who wants to buy anger -- what's your moniker?" "Moniker?" "Handle. Wing. Name. Pseudocorporeal psychic verbal inculcation. What have you been conditioned to call yourself?" "Jasper Jordan. And it's my real name, not an alias. See, I have no desire to hide things from you. I want this all to be very open. That's a fascinating pet you have." Sawbill carefully aligned a nail, drove it home with two solid, short raps from the hammer. He spoke without pausing in his work or looking back. "It's a pim-bird from Tehuantepec. The things are sacred to the Indians who inhabit the planet's two continents. They are called pim-birds for convenience. Of the natives -- not of the birds, who have nothing to say in the matter. Their real names are much longer and even incorporate a short snatch of song. You wouldn't understand it, because the natives themselves don't. It's a very old song. A rough terranglo translation begins Tears IF of the sun... and flows from there. This particular pim-bird supposedly contains the soul of the great emperor Lethan-atuan, who -- depending on which legend you prefer to believe -- at one time ruled with the most beautiful Queen Quetzal-ma half this galaxy or a clust#r of three small islands off the coast of the continent Col. Just now it happens to be hungry. It is said by the Indians that if the souls of the emperor and his queen are ever reunited, they will once again rule the galaxy. Which is one reason the natives permitted me to take him off-planet. They rather like their present system of rule and frown on the idea of long-dead emperors returning." H e turned and pointed the hammer at Jordan. "So you want to buy anger, hmm? What kind of anger?" "There are different kinds?" Sawbill picked up another couple of nails. "Different kinds? There are as many different kinds as there are foolish young men in the universe. There's uncertain anger, which is dark pits filled with thorns. There's jealous anger, which is honey and syrup all blended together and spoiled. There's the anger of unhappiness, which is the texture of polished chalcedony. There's the anger of helplessness, which is like sour milk to a babe. There's the anger of ignorance, which is the space betweert the stars. And the anger of creative genius, which is the grandest anger of them all and more than the sum of any two others. But I can't sell it to you because I'm always well out of it." "That's not the kind I want," said Jasper Jordan. "I have money and I'm not offensive to look upon. I need something to boost me down the road a bit. To activate the navigational gyro in my spirit. To move me. "Then you don't need anger; you need a psychiatrist," Sawbill replied evenly. "I don't want to change the way I feel. I want to indulge in it, to glory in it. I didn't come for what I need. I came for what I want. What I want is anger. Good, strong, biting, cleansing, wavebreaking, glass-shattering anger. The mate of hate. Seven-leagueboot anger. Do you understand?" He was not quite pleading. "Why, surely," said Sawbill, driving home another nail. "That's called righteous anger and I always keep plenty of that in stock. Come aboard." Jasper Jordan followed Sawbill up a small boarding ladder and into the bowels of the old sloop. The pim-bird, which might have been an emperor at one time -- and then again, might not -- looked down at them and whistled: Eekwfoo, eekwoo, ee-kwo-hoo... , self in an undisciplined old chair in the spacious central cabin. "You wait there," Sawbill said softly, "while I get what you want." He disappeared forward. Jordan looked around. The decor was esotei;ic -- indeed, eccentric. Most of the furnishings were made from natural woods. Some were dark-grained and highly polished, others as brown as raw bacon. For sheer color chromoplate had them beat hollow. For tactile beauty it was no contest. The chair in which he sat was worlds removed from the latemodel automatic fluxator in his office, the one that molded itself to every contour of his body. But somehow this collection of springs and stuffing flattered his backside quite well. Sawbill returned. He sat down opposite Jordan and placed seven tiny capsules on the table between Hhem. Each was clearly numbered. Jordan leaned forward. "As you can see, there are seven pills," began Sawbill. "They are to be taken in sequence, an hour apart. No closer than that, timewise. A thousand credits apiece. You have your card and meter with you?" Jordan nodded. He reached into a pocket, brought out both. After making the necessary adjustments he handed the card to Sawbill. "What happens after I've taken them all?" "An hour after you've taken the seventh pill you'll have thirty-six t-standard hours of what you want. That I promise you." Sawbill registered the exchange of credit on his own battered cardmeter, hsnded the card back to Jordan. Then he sat back in his chair and took out a pipe. He began stuffing it with tobacco. Jordan reset his card while Sawbill spoke. "If anyone should ask, you've never seen me before and you never will again." Jordan didn't look up. "You will have the anger to enforce the drive to do what it is you desire to do. Provided you don't run into someone with a stronger reserve of the natural stuff than what I've given you. Most unlikely that there is anyone on this planet who can resist the force those seven capsules are going to put in your head. "You're a peaceable-seeming young fellow. Those are usually the types who seek me out." "Mine is a case of a strong IF emotion seeking a stronger one," muttered Jordan. He pulled out a small quartz vial and carefully deposited the pills in it, one by one. Sawbill leaned forward suddenly. He put a gnarled hand covered with gray fuzz on Jordan's slimmer, smoother one. He stared hard and searchingly into the other's eyes. "You've no idea what you're getting into, feller me lad. Before you go I want to know what you intend these capsules for. I want to know why you want them. I want to know the details. I want the ramifications, the exigencies, the history you call up your desire from. I want all that before I let you go." "Well," Jordan began uncertainly, "there is a woman -- " "Ah," said Sawbill, removing his hand and sitting back. "That will do." T HE hull of the sloop had been repaired, sanded and refinished to be a smooth as the waves it would slide over. Now it was receiving a new coat of fresh, resistant red polymer. Thalia Major had performed another couple of pirouettes on its axis. Thalia Minor had, too. But, of course, that didn't matter, because... A tall young man arrived in the boatyard. He asked a few pointed questions and paid a few small bribes. He was very composed. Soon he was looking up at Sawbill. Sawbill was leaning over the back of the boat, painting the rudder. He used a brush, not a sprayer. "Are you the one they call Sawbill, who sells emotions?" asked the tall young man composedly. "Impossible," replied Sawbill sadly, pausing in his painting. "I'm Terence Wu," said the tall young man. He was elegantly dressed in a black-and-white semiformal suit. He wore his straight black hair in an Iroquois cut -- a wide bushy brush ran down the center of his skull. He had high cheekbones, a wide grin and small black eyes. Judging by the ring on his left hand, a ring that had been cut from a single large sapphire and caught the light of the sun like a siren, he also had a great deal of money. "I want to buy some anger," said the tall young man. "What kind of anger?" Sawbill asked, returning to his painting. He caught a spot lower down that he had missed earlier. "The kind of anger that lets you slash and cut without hesitation," said Terence Wu tightly. "The kind that makes other men look to their feet and cats sweat." The rich young man's hands were tightly the emoman clenched, nails impressing palms. He was most earnest. "The kind that the padres do not approve of. That kind of anger." Sawbill indicated the ladder. "Then come aboard, feller me lad, come aboard." Wu relaxed slightly and started for the ladder. "Then you have that kind of anger?" he asked, "Why, surely," replied Sawbill, dipping the brush in a can of clear polymer debonder. "That's the anger of revenge and I always keep plenty of that in stock." He took another look at the way the photon magnet on the man's finger disorganized the light of the fading sun. "It will cost you three times seven thousand credits, feller me lad." "That's perfectly agreeable," said Wu evenly, stepping onto the deck. Sawbill indicated the way down. "May I inquire why you should wish such anger?" "Well," began Wu, hesitantly, "there's a woman -- " "Ah!" said Sawbill understandingly. " -- and she's been taken from me. I want her back." "Of course," murmured Sawbill as he followed the young man down. Forward, the pim-bird observed the ocean devouring the sun-ball and said, Ee-kwoo, ee-kwoo, eekwoo-hoo... H e was stacking the last strands of new dylon rigging when a voice from below said, "Hello." Sawbill looked over the railing. The too-young man stood below. Jordan's face was pale, haggard, worn. His suit, blue this time, was badly rumpled, as was his manner. "Hello on board," he said rather shakily, evidently not seeing Sawbill. "Evening," said Sawbill. "Look -- I know I promised not to see you again, but I've got to talk to you." "Do you?" asked SawbiU, turning back to his waxing. He dipped a hand in the pot of wax and continued running the new line through his fingers. "But I don't have to talk to you." 'Dammit to hell!" came the whining yelp from the ground. "You got me into this. You've got to help me. Please." The voice paused. "You've got to sell me another dose!" "I don't have to sell you anything," Sawbill replied quietly. He stopped at a section of line that seemed a little frayed, gave it an extra coat of wax. "I can make trouble for you -- " "So can a bumblebee -- " Sawbill IF sighed -- "if his coordinates in relation to the center of the universe do not coincide with mine. But come on board and I'll listen to you." Jordan climbed on board. He was panting heavily. His visage was not a comforting thing to look upon. His face was dirty. He wiped absently at a particularly greasy spot under one eye. The gesture had the effect of redistributing the muck evenly across his cheek. He slumped into the pilot's seat behind the many-spoked wheel and groaned. "I've had other things on my mind," he'aid. "Were you satisfied with what you paid for?" Sawbill asked. For a moment Jordan seemed to brighten. A combination of feelings, none of them holy came into his eyes. "Yes. It was everything you promised. But afterward -- why couldn't you have given me a stronger dose, one for longer than thirty-six hours?" "I gave you the maximum for a person of your type." "How do you presume to know what 'type' I am?" Jordan asked belligerently. Sawbill looked up from his waxing. "If rd given you a stronger dose or told you to take the seven at slightly shorter intervals you would have been harmed -- you might even have died." "I don't believe you." Sawbill shrugged and went on with his waxing. After several minutes Jordan pleaded, "What can I do?" "Don't beg, don't cry and don't whine. I could sell you another kind of emotion that would cure those tendencies, too. But you would resist. So tell me what happened. Why do you find it necessary to acquire more anger than is good for a man at one time?" "There's this girl -- " began Jasper Jordan. "That's the substance, the body, the core, the hub of the thing," said Sawbill. "Now supply me the tinsel, the sprinkles on top of the sweetcakes, the things that meta-. morphose your need into leeches." "She's the most beautiful girl on Thalia Major." "Not in the universe?" "Don't mock me. I don't know the universe. I only know Thalia Major. And Minor, of course, but that doesn't matter. We were in love -- " "How long have you known her?" "Three weeks," Jordan said defiantly. When Sawbill did not comment he continued. "Everything was fine. We were going to be married." 'Did she finally agree to marry you?" 'Mt went without saying. As I said -- everything was fine until several days ago. Then I found out she was seeing another -- man, I suppose I must call him. She didn't deny it. She admitted she was meeting this putrid, low... I couldn't understand why. But I couldn't convince her to break it off. He had hypnotized her. I'm a very mild, you might even say a tame, individual. I didn't have the force of personality to confront him. We're all very civilized here on Thalia Major." "Yes," said Sawbill encouragingly. "I just wanted to warn him off, to tell him to leave us alone. Not to confuse her any more. So I came to see you. Everyone knows about you Emomen -- even if you are hard to find." "We like it that way." "Well, the beginning went just as I had hoped -- exactly as I had imagined it would. Better, even. I was a terror -- although I don't remember the details very well. I'm afraid. I completely overpowered him spiritually and mentally. He couldn't take it. He vowed never to see her again. And he meant it. I could tell. I was irresistible. Then -- yesterday -- he confronted me in my office. We had a terrible row. He was a madman! I had never seen a human being behave so. I was reduced to -- jelly. He was an elemental force. I tried to stand up to him, but I couldn't. I found myself babbling apologies for ever having looked at Jo-ann. You can't imagine what it Was like. I've never confronted anything like that before. Helpless. And he recorded the entire thing, the whole humiliating experience. "And then, last night I tried to sneak over to see her. To try to rebuild myself in her eyes at least partially. Praying all the while, of course, that I wouldn't rrfeet that giant, that godlike devil again. I saw them taking the lift up to her apartment -- and went out and got drunk. Then it came to me to come back here. You've got to give 'me something stronger this time -- something that will last. Something that will enable me to push him away once and for all." Sawbill finished washing the wax from his hands. He sat back against the bulk of the cabin. He became absorbed in an inspection of the rear hatchway. After a long while he asked bluntly, "Why should I become a participant in this? Perhaps he is the better man for her than you. Maybe matters are best left this way." IF "It's his father's money that's blinded her! The family name is... well, no matter. But the father is one of the richest men in Barragash. I work hard -- I'm well off, yes. But not in that class. I can compete with him and better hini in everything except the matter of credit." Sawbill was adamant. "I will sell you nothing stronger. I gave you your maximum dosage. And that's all you can have." The too-young man was desperate. "Then at least sell me the same, the same seven again. You owe me that." Sawbill grunted and wiped his hands on his pants. "It will cost you double this time." "Yes, yes, anything -- " He was like an eager puppy. "I promise -- if this doesn't do it I will give her up to him. I'll move to another city. Perhaps to another planet. I might even go to Thalia Minor. Who knows? But in any case I will not trouble you again." On a high mast the pim-bird was sobbing for the moon. S ails furled, the little sloop sat on the water. Sawbill had the mainsail ready and was preparing the spinnaker when the peaceforcers came for him. The man on the dock was short and plump. He had a benignly optimistic face and scraggly brown hair that was fighting a rear-guard action. A green aircar waited at the far end of the dock. It had the oak tree symbol of the peaceforcer emblazoned on its side. Two uniformed men stood against it, chatting. "Pretty little ship," said the man on the dock. "Yes, It is," said Sawbill. "Used not to be. Is now." He was wrestling with the sail locker. The pimbird fidgeted and bobbed on his shoulder. It moved to the top of his head, then dropped down to the shoulder again, eyeing the short man. "I'd like you to come with me for a bit, Sawbill. I'm Inspector Herrera," "Nice for you, I guess." "Usually it is, but not today." "I was just about to go out for a month or so. I'm trying to get away from people and civilization for a while. A vacation -- you understand?" Herrera nodded. "I do. Really, I do." He seemed honestly sympathetic. "But I'd still like you to come with me." "If I decline?" Sawbill asked, straightening. "No doubt those gentlemen by your car will hurry down here with things short, metallic and unesthetic. To persuade me?" Herrera sighed. "No, Sawbill, they win not. You've probably heard before that we are very civilized, here on Thalia Major. One of those men is a driver -- and all he is going to do is drive. The other is a secretary." "And all he will do is sec?" "Please don't make light of this. It's difficult enough for me as it is. I cannot compel you." "Meaning I'm not under arrest, right?" "As you are well aware I have no grounds for an arrest. Wish I did. But I suspect you will come with me -- out of curiosity if for no other reason. I will not delay you long -- a moment or two out of your vacation is all I nced." Sawbill hesitated. Then he tied down the sails and climbed down to the dock. He and Herrera started toward the aircar. "Where are you going to go, Sawbill?" "The Marragas Islands, then south to the Anacapa atolls. I'd like to put in there for a bit. I understand most of the reefs around there are still uninhabited and rarely visited. Good fishing, too." "So I hear," said Herrera. "Most folk around here go north for their vacations. To Three and Ark and Jumbles -- pleasure towns. Where all their surprises can be arranged for them. All the entertainment galactic ingenuity can provide. And build." T here was a lot of blood in the room, which was done in blue and gold. The red blood contrasted strangely. The electric cur tains were drawn back, admitting the sun. They were for effect only, since the glass was fully polarized. The sunlight gave added obscenity to the stains. What was left of the body of the girl was sprawled across the back of the couch, facing the open window. She had been torn apart. Her insides were strewn acrCss half the room. Her face, Sawbill could see, probably had once been pretty, possibly even beautiful. Terence Wu was also in  the room. All over it. A bit here, a fragment there. Sawbill could make out an arm protruding from under the couch. Nothing was attached to the arm. A leg dangled from the mantel over the quaint, wood-burning fireplace. The corpse of Jasper Jordan was in the bathroom, slumped over the rim of the sunken oval tub. Herrera was watching Sawbill closely. "Acci)rding to what wje've been IF able to piece together with the help of the building computer, Jordan broke in some time around three in the morning. Probably he just wanted to talk to the girl. For some reason she had forgotten to set her doorseal. When he came in he found them on the rug. There, in front of the fireplace." Herrera pointed. "He didn't even try to talk to them, is my guess. Could be he'd taken something. Blood analysis and tissue evaluation show the presence of complex hormones in his body. Puzzled the lab boys for quite a while. They're not used to seeing that kind of stuff." Herrera watched Sawbill steadily. "A fast check on Jordan's credit count revealed the recent transfer of the rather surprising sum of twenty-one thousand credits to one individual. You." "This whole procedure is quite illegal," injected Sawbill mildly. "Oh, to be sure, to be sure," said Herrera. "Our information cannot be used in court -- and obviously is not going to be." "I have tapes of the transaction, too." "I'm sure you do," replied Herrera. "And I've no doubt it was all done with the greatest respect for the letter of the law." "Quite." "I'm going to have to compose some sort of explanation for the faxpax and for relatives. These people were no bums. Three nominally respected citizens have died here. Just for my own information and to satisfy my morbid curiosity, what did you sell him?" "Anger." "I see. Anger." Herrera looked around and took in the wholesale carnage. "A little anger did all this?" "Ordinarily it would not. You must believe that." "Oh, sure. Yeah." Sawbill shrugged. "I agree with you. When Jordan walked in on Wu and the girl I don't think he'd taken a thing. Knowing the sort he was I expected him to try reason after what I'd told him." "I'll bet you did." "I mean that! Otherwise I wouldn't have sold to him. Neither man was inherently vicious. I warned Jordan enough against taking the seven. But when he came in and found them making love he obviously went berserk. The seven integrals of the star should be taken an hour apart. That's leaving a quarter-hour safety limit, which I never mention. A half-hour is the real danger point. He must have downed them all at once. The result is unimaginable to most men. Overwhelming. Few minds could handle such an abrupt release. He couldn't. But I was ctitect about his innate mental control and discipline.' Herrera gestured angrily around them. "You call this control?" "Yes! He had enough sense left to kill himself. He did kill himself?" "We took the knife back to the lab," admitted Herrera. "What he was undergoing was to normal anger as a nova is to a normal sun. A less controlled individual would have stumbled from the room and gone to kill a hundred people in an orgy of release." "I don't understand how any drug can boost an emotion like that," murmured Herrera, shaking his head. "It doesn't 'boost' tffe emotion -- or add to it or multiply it," Sawbill said. "That's the common mistake everyone makes. They don't consider the other -- those who don't want to believe it. The drug removes the natural safeguards a man's mind has built up to protect and regulate his natural self. It breaks the seal holding air in the tank, doesn't pump more air of evolutionary barriers man has carefully erected to hold back the blackness that lives inside him. Taken properly it does so in the smallest way. It isn't dangerous, just effectively awesome. Few men can resist the tiny blot of animal self so set free. "But when all the safeguards are removed, like this..." "I think I  see," whispered Herrera. "May I leave now?" "What? Oh, yes, you can go. Get out of my sight." Sawbill paused at the door. "What about the girl?" "How do you mean? Oh, I understand. What you might expect. She was playing one off against the other. Jordan was a little more naive than Wu, I suspect. I hope she enjoyed it." Herrera paused. Then: "I checked you with Central and Customs, hoping I could get you on illegal entry. No such luck. I see you got your doctorate in endocrinology from the University of Belem. That's on Terra, isn't it?" Sawbill nodded. He was halfway out of the room. "One other thing," Herrera said hurriedly. "I've never met one of you before. Tell me, is it true what they say about you Emomen?" "What do they say about us Emomen?" "That you haven't any true emotions of your own? That you're so tied up in playing God that you've lost your own capacity to feej? That your humanity's atrophied?" "Oh, there's no doubt about it," said Sawbill. He closed the door quietly behind him. # IF is known and loved by a legion of readers from all walks of life. They read him, bay him, and come back for more! You have never seen a writer analyzed like this before. Clothbound, #. Aid Alt Frtii Miragg... Third in this popular series articles and art on sorcery and swordplay by top authors. Clothbound, #. Unusual adult poetry illustrated by Tim Kirk. Cloth. #. A major SF great analyzes the father of modern science fiction's ideas on progress. Cloth, #. Revised and expanded, paper, #. nis Rickard; introduction by Gahan Wilson. A photo book of Smith's weird carvings, paper, #. A huge dictionary and concordance to the works Tolkien, called "the ultimate Tolkien reference work. "Cloth #. Ask far a Fraa aatalag. Writa: I into his foamer. He reached a hand out of the froth to dial a cold drink while the suit dissolved from his sweaty torso. No drink came. Then he remembered. His credit balance was down and half his apartment appliances were out of service until he made a repair of his financial situation. "I'm too old to be destitute," he lamented, still hardly believing I She had light-years to get to her new home -- but decided to live them right here! the situation. But he had not been too old to lose a gamble to increase his fortune -- a gamble he had been talked into by a hard-sell outfit. Frustrated, he stepped out, letting the spume drain away. He punched for a new suit, knowing that a brave new exterior would refresh his spirit. The suiter did not produce. Fisk stood naked, slowly coming to grips with his condition. He had never before suffered from malnutrition of credit and he had hardly gotten the feel of it yet. There was no clothing in his apartment. Why should there be, when the day's attire was always conveniently recycled after use? He had nothing to wear. He was no lean, muscular youth who could trot outside in Adamic splendor and stare down anyone who blinked. When properly suited Fisk was portly -- bare, he was, bluntly, fat. He would not, of course, be that way long if he failed to find some way to renew his credit. He had been politely inquiring about situations for a gentleman with his qualifications -- and receiving tacit demurrals. Hunger would very shortly put an end to that. It was past time to hustle out and get a job. If he could only figure out how. He punched for the newsfax wants ads and was relieved to see the paper slide into the hopper. As long as he could communicate he could function. Quickly he eliminated the ads obviously intended for women, for youth and for specialists. The economy was in one of its perennial recessions and there were few promising entries for the untrained. The main field available to him was sales. Fisk winced. He had been reduced to his present circumstances by a salesman. But the episode had certainly been a kind of experience. Why couldn't he himself sell a legitimate product? But as he read more closely he discovered that sales, too, demanded specialization. He could not afford even the nominal sixweek hiatus for insurance training -- he needed a credit balance now. He could hardly peddle household machinery when the first requirement was to purchase the demonstrator models. He could not even go for a preliminary interview in this present dishabille. And he absolutely refused to go The remaining offerings were scant, and not particularly enticing. Artificial Manure, no exp. req. That stank! Artistic Photography, Special Interest, black baby # comm. No -- he was not ready to peddle pornography. Intangible, must travel. No doubt that salesman had to travel -- when his intangible product turned out also to have intangible value. snagged his wandering eye and hauled it back. Call collect. No product, no requirement, just' call the number. Well, whoever ran that one understood Fisk's desperation. He could apply there even if his phone credit stalled. So he punched the number, collect. To his slight surprise the call was accepted. A nervous-looking middle-aged woman appeared on the screen. She looked at him sharply. "Yes?" "My name is Fisk Centers. I'm interested in employment. Your ad -- '" "I know what the ad says," she snapped. "If this is your idea of a joke at our expense -- " Fisk belatedly remembered that he was unclothed. He had been so preoccupied by his predicament that -- well, too late now. Honesty was always the best and only policy. "I'm -- broke. My suiter's been interdicted. I need a credit balance in a hurry -- as you can see. I shall be happy to provide my identity code if you wish to verify -- " She smiled fleetingly. "I see. The position is open. Expenses and commission. If you qualify." "I have to tell you I'm fifty and untrained in sales. I suffered a business loss -- " "Oh? What kind? If you were rolled -- " "I bought into Mars, Inc. Limited, I mean. Mars, Limited. Ten lots in Elysium Acres. Cash." She whistled. "They say one's born every minute, but your kind comes only once a week. You lost -- " " -- the shirt off my back," Fisk finished, trying to smile. "At least," she said, eying him again. "When can you report?" "I beg your pardon?" "You want a job, don't you?" "Oh." Fisk had been so well braced against turndown that he was hardly prepared. "As soon as I get dressed. Uh -- " "We'll call it a business expense," she said. "Have a suit on us, Mr. Centers." And the suiter. "But I don't even know your business," he protested feebly as he hastened to the unit. "Mr. Johns will explain all that at the office." She paused. "You can work with nonwhites?" "I pride myself on my inflexible nonbigotry." IF "'But you understand that a certain discretion may be necessary." "I can keep my mouth shut." He was familiar enough with middle-class values to realize that this constituted a pretty compelling agreement. He could take the job or reject it, but he could not talk about it elsewhere. She smiled again, this time with genuine warmth. "Mr. Centers, I think you'll do very well with our organization." F isk was met at the office by a hard-looking young man. "rm Chic Johns, procurement. You'll be on sales, of course. Know anything about the adoption racket?" "Nothing. I -- " "Good. We'll tell you all you need to know. We sell babies." "I don't think I understand." Johns appraised him synically. "Right. You look like a businessman and you talk like one. We like that. Just remember -- we don't gab about business matters to third parties. You take the client's order and deliver the body and collect the cash. We do the rest. All in strict privacy. Right?" "But I understood it was against the law to assign a monetary value to -- " " "It's like this. Centers. The state agencies charge for costs, always inflated, which is really the same thing as selling for a profit. Thousand dollars minimum for a live body. They make their bundle, never you fear. But they're choosy as hell. No black on white or yellow on black -- know what I mean? If the client balks they find him "unqualified' and he's on the blacklist and can die childless for all they care -- he's out. Lots of good potential parents get hung up that way. So it's up to us private concerns to fill the vacuum. We don't ask questions -- we don't have restrictions. Client tells us what he wants and we get it for a price -- just like any other business." Fisk found this hard to as similate. "But these are human beings. Surely you wouldn't place an innocent baby with unfit parents." Johns shrugged. "I wouldn't. But my end is procurement, not placement. You're the one who decides on parental qualifications. But remember, we don't have the staff to do a damn security check on every family that wants a child. And who's to say who's fit or unfit? Some pretty rough people are mighty good to their kids -- and some pillars of society, the kind the state agencies like, are raising speed demons, not to mention the real addicts. Our record is at least as good as the state's when you consider the family, not the class -- and we deliver much faster. So we just charge enough to discourage anybody who's in it for laughs. Would you pay three, four grand for a piddling black baby if you didn't mean to take care of it?" "No, of course not. But -- " "So okay. Here's the procedure book. Take it home, study it today. Tomorrow's your first ass." "Ass?" "Assignment. Tomorrow maybe you'll place a poor black baby in a rich white home, Centers. Twenty per cent commission on the gross. Maybe eight hundred dollars for a day's work. Like the notion?" "I'll, er, try my best," Fisk said uncertainly. It was a job. T he book was far more sophisticated in language than Chic Johns had been, providing elegant explanations and justifications for private adoption procedures. But the man's callous summary seemed essentially correct. State regulations were so complex and picayune and state agency staffs so overworked that many worthy prospective parents were unfairly denied adoptive children. Many innocent babies were forced to grow up in impersonal institutions, where they soon became so backward as to be unadoptaUe. Even a bad family appeared, on balance, to be a superior environment for a child than a good state orphanage. A child. needed parents. But Fisk, doubly wary after his bilking by Mars, Ltd. -- accomplished via its plausible sales pitch -- checked carefully for pitfalls. This manual could be biased, deliberately distorting the state agency picture in order to justify the need for an intrusion by private enterprise He phoned the library information service and verified that state institutions were run according to strict and basically fair precepts, so that orphans were not actually deprived -- but adoption into families was still preferable. He learned that no adoption was legal unless court-approved, so that if this seeming detail were omitted a child could be taken away at any time from even the most loving and competent parents. The main complaint lodged against blackmarket outfits was their frequent failure to nail dowp adoptions in cQurt. The procedure book Chic Johns had given him was supposed to contain all he needed to know about placing a child for adoption. Yet it made no reference to the court requirement. IF Fisk reviewed the library material carefully. Theoretically it was impossible for a baby to be adopted without court sanction -- i.e., via black market. But now that he had a notion which lines to read between, he saw that there were avenues. The problem was not the placement, for many more people wanted children than the supply could accommodate. The problem was the acquisition. A few babies might be born unrecorded -- but the overwhelming majority arrived in hospitals or with sanctioned medical supervision and all of these were duly recorded. Once recorded, they were in the computerized system -- the state knew the approximate whereabouts of every recorded human being. But some officials were susceptible to corruption and supervisory agencies were chronically overworked, so there was a practical loophole, for a continuing siphoning of babies theoretically destined for legitimate placement. If no one complained and no one checked to make certain a given baby had arrived, the computer's entry was in fact fictitious -- sometimes. But it would be pretpature to assume that he had landed in such a black-market enterprise, Fisk told himself. He had gotten in trouble before by jumping to conclusions -- and he needed the job. The court would make its own investigation at the time of the adoption -- and if anything were wrong the transaction would be avoided. It was the ethical responsibility of the placement agent -- himself -- to make arrangements for such legal blessing. A small unease nagged at him subliminally, but the thought of an eight-hundred-dollar coidmission for one day's work forced aside his final doubts. His best course was to try to do the job honestly before judging it. He could always quit once he had verified the facts, if that was the way it went. T he woman was back on duty in the morning. "All set, Mr. Centers?" she inquired over mounded paperwork. "Ready to try," he said. "I'll need to know a lot more, but I should be able to work it out as I o along." "Good. Here's your first lead. Find out what they want and report back here. Don't talk business over the phone -- we never do that. Remember, make no promises. Just say you'll try." That simple! Fisk took the card she proffered and read it: Michael Ormand, with an address in one of the newer apartment complexes. But why no business over the phone? An order was a fairly straightforward thing. Ormand was a genial muscular man of about thirty, with a scalped-looking crewcut. Under it Fisk detected the inset metal contacts of a spaceman. He tried not to stare. He knew about the brain-to-machine synapses used by interplanetary crewmen, but had never seen the implants at close quarters before. "Mars shuttle?" Fisk inquired, feeling a twinge. It was foolish foj him to resent everything connected with Mars, but the wound still pained. "Venus," Ormand answered. "But I'm through with all that. No more shuttling. Going to retire now I've made my pile. Want a family." "That's what I'm here to discuss," Fisk said with what he hoped was the proper note of professional encouragement. This was easy enough, so far. "May I ask what you plan to do now?" "It's none of your business, but I'll tell you. I'll grow mugwumps." "I beg your pardon?" "Mugwumps. Venusian pseudoplants. Very pretty, use no water or sunlight, smell like a lemon. They're in big demand here on Earth, but I'm not doing it for the money. Made my pile already, as I said. Challenge, you know. Never been cultivated before." Fisk made a mental note to look up mugwumps -- he had not heard the word in this connection before. "I see. What kind of child were you thinking of adopting? "You understand we are a private, fee-charging agency. We do our best, but we can't make promises -- except that we don't collect until we deliver." "Sure. No red tape -- that's what I like. I figure a little girl, nine or ten. Healthy, you know?" "Nine or ten months," Fisk repeated, writing it down. "Months? Years! What would I want with a squalling baby?" "Oh," Fisk said, nonplused. "Sorry. I thought -- uh -- how long have you been married?" "Married? Spacemen don't marry. What would I want with a gold-digging wife?" Fisk choked. "Mr. Ormand, If you want to adopt -- " "That's why I want to adopt. A nice, sweet little girl. Catch her before she gets bitchy, train her right, you know? Older women are unmanageable." "But -- " "You're single, aren't you? You know what women are like." IF "But you can't adopt when you're single." Ormand glanced at him in surprise. "I can't?" "Of course not. Only married couples can -- " The man smiled. "Oh, that's the agency pitch. Sure. That's why I called you. To cut that bilge. Look, you don't need to beat up the price on me. I told you I'm loaded. Don't worry about it. Find me what I want and I'll pay. Within reason. I know what the range is for this sort of thing. And I'll give you a little bonus on the side for prompt service. Fair enough?" Fisk was afraid of what would come out if he opened his mouth, so he kept it closed. Somehow he made his exit in good order. X Sure, we can get," Johns said at the office. "That kind's a glut on the market. And he won't quibble on color or price. Good show, Centers -- I can see you've got the knack." This was not the response Fisk had anticipated. He had supposed the sale doomed. "But he's single." "So?" "What about the law?" Johns made a face as though he had heard a bad word. "What about it? Didn't you read the book? Singles can adopt -- if they have the means to make a good home. And this guy does. He'll bite for five grand, wait and see. Grand for you, grand for me -- and grand for business." Fisk felt vaguely nauseated, but he didn't want to imperil his income by raising uninformed objections. A thousand dollars could go a long way in reconstituting his life style. "Do you have a ten-year-old girl? Uh, in stock?" "You think I keep that kind packed in desk drawers? I'll find one," Johns said confidently. "Just a matter of making the connection -- and a little quiet negotiation. Two days, maybe. Don't you worry about that. My end of the business, procurement. Just you go out on your next ass and see if you can land another order to match the first." Fisk retained strong personal reservations about this business, but he went. As it happened, the leads fizzled. Some people merely wanted information. Others backed off when it came to the point of actually ordering a baby. One lady seemed to be more interested in finding a husband and Fisk barely escaped intact. Ormand was right -- some older women did get predatory. Meanwhile, however much he might look the part, he was not a high-pressure salesman. vOn the third day Johns barged into the office, hauling along a screaming tantrum of a spitfire. 'Got her!" he exclaimed breathlessly, shoving the creature into the center of the room and leaning against the door. Blood dripped from a scratch on his cheek and his suit was torn in a couple of places, but he was smiling. "What a job!" Abruptly the commotion ceased. A young girl of indeterminate color and culture stood there. "Hi," she said to Fisk, nodding her short black tangle of hair pertly. "You the sucker?" Fisk turned to Johns, dismayed. "Surely this isn't -- " "Surely this is! Take her to your client and get the money. Real bargain for him. See those classic facial lines? That animal vigor? That instant self-control? You know the price." Fisk found the moral ramifications too fast to contemplate on the spot, so he shelved them in favor of details. "He -- he wants a -- a nice sweet little girl." "I'm nice and sweet," the girl snarled. "When I want to be." "Would you want to be sweet for a man who'll shell out five grand for you?" Johns asked her with a half-smile. "Five grand?" she exclaimed, delighted. "Am I worthall that?" "If you behave. At least until the deal's complete. After that, who cares? You're in." "Yeah, who cares?" she echoed, with momentary mischief. Despite their manner of entry, Johns and the girl appeared to have a certain mutual appreciation of each other's motives. Fisk had been concerned for the welfare of the child, but now he suspected that the client was the sucker she had implied. Should he proceed with this transaction? What would he eat if he didn't? He had made no other sales (placed no other children, he corrected himself), so his commission was zero. The office petty cash wouldn't carry him long. Sheer need was bruising his scruples. "Okay, .Centers -- now take her away," Johns commanded briskly. "Clean her up and feed her first, so she doesn't snatch. Here are a couple of tokens. Play it cool. But don't turn her over until you get his payment." F isk took her away, with a stop at a refresher booth to get her cleaned and dressed for presentation. He wished he could do the same for himself -- his home foamer had quit the day before and this was his fourth day in a one-day suit. Only extreme care kept him from looking seedy. Of course he could always sell IF one of his Mars lots. But those were worth only one per cent what he had paid, and he couldn't bring himself to convert that paper loss to cash. Marsland might eventually improve. "What's your nairie?" he asked belatedly as she foamed. "Yola. Hey, I've never been in a public booth before. Neat!" Her voice emerged from a speaker beside the entrance. There was no vision screen, of course. "How did Johns get you?" Fisk couldn't bring himself to use the term "procure" in this connection. "The usual. I was doing time in solitary 'cause I -- aw, never, mind. The cage was glad to unload me -- and not for any five grand, either." "The orphanage sold you?" "They don't call it that. Order came through the Juvenile Parole Agency, which is a legit division of Youth Services. But somewhere along the way I got shunted -- and here I am." "You mean you were abducted from your lawful guardian?" "You don-i know much, do you? It was just in the paperwork. Same thing, I guess. The usual, I said." "But how could you be transferred from a state institution to a -- to here?" "If I knew I'd know enough not to talk about it," she said uncomfortably. Then she changed the subject. "Is it a nice family?" "It's a single man. Spacer." She didn't respond right away and Fisk hardly needed to inquire why. Children in institutions learned early about life, and the spacers were notorious for their planetfall orgies. The situation was developing into something a far cry from the philanthropic service Fisk had hopefully anticipated. "Well, let's go," she said, emerging. Fisk had feared she had punched some outrageous replacement outfit, but she was tastefully dressed for her age: eleven. She was small, looked undernourished and not black-skinned, though she obviously derived from mixed ancestry. She looked tanned on the body and the faintly Negroid cast about her features was not obvious at a casual glance, No doubt neither pure black nor pure white had wanted her as a baby, as neither considered brown beautiful. So she was here. "So whatcha gaping at?" she demanded. He guided her to the fooder and inserted the second token. "Punch what you want -- and make sure you have enough to fill up," he advised, hoping she would order so much that he would get to abate his sudden hunger on the surplus. He had been scrimping on meals. She looked at him sidelong, punched a supersoda and a miniature dog biscuit. "For you," she said, proffering the latter. Fisk was too hungry to be properly furious. He chewed on the biscuit while shp slurped the giant confection noisily. An unlimited one-iitting fooder order gone to waste! But his conience hung on. "Are you sure you want to go through with this, Yola? A single man -- " ' "A single -- loaded -- man. Think Tm dumb? Better'n solitary, for sure, ril get to see shows, sleep late, eat anything I want -- " "Then why were you fighting so hard when Johns brought you in?" "I don't like being told what to do." "Do you always throw a tantrum when -- " "Always. Matter of principle." "That could get you into trouble." She contemplated him obliquely as the soda drained to vociferous dregs. "My middle name. Grandad." "Don't call me Grandad." "Don't tell me what to call you -- " she screamed, not stinting on the volume. It was amazing how far a soprano voice carried. People stopped in the street outside to look up iil Fisk fought to keep the flush off his face. Then, sweetly: " -- grandad." Fisk decided to ignore it. "We have n appointment, Yola." "Right, Centers," she agreed with continued insolence. But he was determined not to let her have the satisfaction of his reaction. "Very nice," he said, studying Yola with more critical intensity than Fisk thought appropriate for such an interview. He half hoped the child would pull an instant tantrum and void the placement, but for the moment she was every inch the demure pre-teen, "Here's your check, sir. Five grand, certified." "Just a minute," Fisk protested. "You can't just -- " "Why not, Mr. Centers?" Yola asked innocently. She turned to Ormand. "May I call you Dad?" "Sure, Kid. Go punch yourself a soda," he said amiably. "No hard stuff, now." Then, to Fisk: "Don't worry. I didn't forget yours. I know how it goes. I made it out separately. So your office wouldn't know. Five hundred." He handed over the second check, winking. "I'm not talking about that" Fisk's moral anguish was becoming tempered by the greed of desperation. Five hundred would fuel his IF finances for a couple of weeks. "You -- you two -- you don't even know each other," "What's to know, Mr. Centers?" Yola inquired prettily over her soda. This one didn't slurp -- she sipped it with delicacy. "Dad'sgot a nice layout here, a real home. He's a nice guy." "Yeah," Ormand agreed. "I've got what she wants -- she's what I want and you've got your money. So it's done. We're all happy and thank you. Now toddle off, Centers. You're interfering in family business." "Yeah," Yola echoed almost inaudibly. They were both reasonably satisfied, neither being quite the bargain the other supposed -- and Fisk did have the money. Why should he object? He had performed his function. He had a thousand-dollar commission coming for this transaction. Yet he balked, feeling like a pimp. He said, "We have to complete the contract and make arrangements for the formal adoption. There'll have to be a court hearing and -- " "A what?" Ormand demanded incredulously. Then he caught himself. "Oh, sure. I'll take care of that. You don't need to bother." "I do need to bother," Fisk said, his stubborn streak coming into play. "Somebody could take her away from you at any time, no matter how long -- " "Oh, that's it," Ormand said, seeming relieved. "That's okay. Nothing's going to happen inside of ten days, is it?" "Not that I know of. But there is no expiration on a counterclaim of this nature. If a natural parent showed up in five years -- " Ormand laughed. "Fat chance. They'd never follow where we're going!" "Where are we going, Dad?" Yola inquired. "To Venus, of course. Got my one-way passes for the next liftoff, just ten days away." Yola spat out a mouthful of soda. "Venus!" ' "Sure, kid. To farm mugwump. It only grows onVenus, you know." "But there aren't any shows on Venus!" Yola shrieked as though mortally wounded. "No foamers, no fooders, no autobeds. It's just a perpetual sandstorm!" "Right. Real challenge. Ideal for mugwumps and no neighbors to butt in, except for the shuttle every four months. Great life." "In a spacesuit!" she wailed, her anguish intensifying. "All day! And the trip there takes six months cooped up in an old tin can with nothing but nasty ol' vacuum trying to get in -- " "The vacuum doesn't come in," Ormand said. "The air goes out if there's a leak. And the trip takes longer right now because of the phase. And it's getting worse. That's why I have to make a tight schedule. The free fall gets to you if you stay in space too long, speciallly if you're not used to it." "Free fall?" she repeated faintly. "I get sick just in the downshaft -- " "I don't understand," Fisk said. "If you're settling on Venus -- why are you adopting a girl?" "Why do you think he wants a girl. Grandad?" Yola asked. "Well, it's a long trip out and a rough, lonely life," Ormand said reasonably. "What grown woman would sign up for it?" "A desperate one," Fisk said. "No other." "Just count me out, Ormand," Yola cried. "I'm no Lolita!" Fisk couldn't resist needling her, though he was privately relieved about her change of heart. "You didn't object before, Yola." "He wasn't going to Venus before!" "I was," Ormand said. "That's why I -- " "You stay out of this, childbuyer!" she screamed at him. "Watch who you're sassing, kid," he snapped back. His temper was about as quick as hers. She threw the soda cup at him. "I'll sass anybody I please, you -- oh!" was hauling her over his knee. He flipped her short skirt up over her back. "No daughter of mine is going to sass her elders," he said as his hand came down resoundingly on her little posterior. Yola screeched incoherently. Fisk had some sympathy with each party and did not interfere. Yola certainly had no reason to like Venus, but Ormand was taking the kind of firm disciplinary action Fisk envied. They were working it out. Then Yola jackknifed and bit the man on the ankle. It was Ormand's turn to exclaim with pain and rage. By the time he recovered his bearings Yola had scooted across the room. Fisk had been pleasantly bemused by the suddenness and violence of these proceedings, but now he stepped between the fighters. "I'm afraid this isn't going to work. Here are your checks back, Mr. Ormand. Til return this girl to the -- " "Uh-wA!" Yola said. "No, you don't, Centers," Ormand rapped simultaneously, slapping the checks to the floor. IF "I don't have time to get another girl. This one'll be fine once I get her broken in." "Go break in your fat head!" Yola cried casting about for something else to throw. Fisk caught her by the wrist and hustled her out of the apartment and this time she didn't object to being directed. Ormand charged after them, but Yola ducked back and tripped him with professional dispatch. He sprawled ignominiously. Fisk wondered just what sort of education children obtained in state orphanages, for spacers were normally sure on their feet. He and Yola ran to the exit chute and jumped in. She did look a little queasy in that brief free fall, though several factors could account for that. The house alarm was already sounding as they boarded the transport for the office. Ormand must have called the police. Fisk and Yola were on their way and by the time the police net tightened... "Let him rant," Fisk said angrily as the capsule popped into its vacuum tunnel and accelerated. "The adoption was never consummated. He has no call on you." "Good," she said. "Where are we headed now?" "To the office. Then Johns will return you to the orphanage -- or wherever you came from." "Not me," she said. "I hate that place." "But you agreed to go back. I heard you -- in the apartment." "I said uh-tir, not uh-AuA, Grandad." "You don't want to go to Venus, do you?" "No. But I'm not going back in local solitary cither," she said. "I don't see what choice you have -- unless another client happens to be looking for a girl your age. And frankly, your spot tantrums don't make you very -- " "What do you want to do with these?" she asked, interrupting him. "They're made out to you, you know." "I'll just explain the situation at the office -- " He stopped, seeing what she held. "What are you doing with -- " "Ormand's checks?" she said innocently. "I figured we might need the money so I scooped them up while -- " "His checks? Yola, that represents either stealing or acceptance of payment. It gives him a theoretical basis to -- " "To sue?" she inquired with mock astonishment. "Gee, you could get in bad trouble. Centers -- " AH vehicles halt in place, the capsule loudspeaker said. Stand by for inspection... "No wonder he's mad," Fisk said as he punched the halt button. "I didn't realize we'd taken his money." "Mistake, huh?" she said, looking at the checks. Ill S ometimes she was unbearable, but this time she seemed genuinely contrite. "Bad mistake," he told her. Open vent. The police had connected a pressurized tube -- the capsule could not be opened in the tunnel vacuum. Reluctantly, Fisk pressed the "You dope!" Yola cried, slapthe machinery functioned. "They'll hang you!" She hit emergency "What are you doing?" Fisk exclaimed as the vehicle shot forward with a force possible only in vacuum, ripping away the police tube. "Making your getaway, Grandad," she said. "No sense having you in the hole for theft." "But I was going to return the checks and explain -- "And let me hang?" "You have an unduly suspicious mind. Once the mistake is clarified, nobody will -- " "Uh-wi. Get that uh this time. Centers. You aren't going to return that money and void the sale. I told you I'm not going back to the pen. Not for anything." let me be charged with resisting the police -- just so you stay out of a legitimate orphanage? I can't believe that." "You can't, huh?" She considered for a moment. "Well, would you believe kidnaping?" "Yola! Of all the ridiculous -- " "Or maybe child-molestation? My word against yours. Centers. Want to see my act?" Suspect running. Cut power in tunnel... Fisk knew how guilty that sudden flight made him seem. Why would he take Ormand's money, then break out of a routine police net? With a sgreaming elevenyear-old girl? Yola really could hang him. And she was brat enough to do it. He had once hoped -- no matter how weakly -- that his job would benefit his fellow man and make people happy. "You're pretty much of a sucker, aren't you," Yola said as the capsule drifted to a lifeless stop. "What are you doing in a racket like this?" "Just being a sucker," Fisk admitted, demoralized. "A MarsIF land salesman took me and Tm broke." She looked at him as she might have at a brokenwinged bird. "Well, we're caught anyway. It's nothing personal. Centers. Maybe I'd better go back to Ormand. He's the kind of bastard I don't mind scr -- " "Yola!" "Oh come off it, grandad -- you have a dirty mind. I mean I can always run away before he goes to Venus. So he'll get what he deserves -- nothing." Her spark of charity was as awkward as her ruthlessness. "But that's dishonest. If you don't intend to -- " "All right, sucker. It was only a silly notion to get you off the hook -- 'cause you're a decent sort under all that quaint naivete." She began tearing up her recently machined hairdo. "By the time they get this kidnapmolestation rap untangled, Ormand'll be on Venus, you'll be in the clink for trial and I'll be a ward of the court -- where maybe I can finagle a better deal for number one. Will that make you feel better?" Fisk saw that to attempt to reason with this gutter child was futile. The police were already applying another pressure-exit to the capsule. He would simply have to present his case and hope the police considered all aspects of the situation before doing anything irrevocable. Certainly he was not going to capitulate to this attempted extortion. "You're so cubical you're a tesseract," she exclaimed. "Look, Grandad, you're a nonsurvival type. If you'll just shut up and let me handle it I can -- " The capsule opened. "Crawl out in a hurry -- you're blocking traffic," a police voice called down the tube. Fisk's mind was still on Yola's offer to complicate things yet further. "Never -- " he cried to her. N aturally the police misunderstood. A sleepdart buzzed along the tube like a vengeful fly and pinked Fisk on the sweaty forehead -- and he found himself standing insecurely before a tall desk in the police station. Yola was beside him and Ormand had a chair nearby. The law could be devastatingly efficient when it snared the innocent. " -- serious charge. Kidnaping a minor from a private apartment," the lieutenant behind the desk said as the dart nullifier took effect. "Do you understand you have the right to consult counsel before making your statement?" "I'm sure I can explain everything without the necessity of counsel," Fisk said hastily, knowing that the police preferred dispatch. 'This girl -- " "What he means is," Yola interjected, "we were just going to the court to arrange for the adoption." "You wereT' Ormand asked, surprised and, oddly, not particularly pleased. "I thought -- " "We were not!" Fisk said. "I was taking her back to -- " Yola kicked him. "To fetch the adoption papers," she said. The lieutenant turned to Ormand. "What's this about adoption? You told us your daughter had been kidnapped." Ormand hesitated. "I -- ah -- maybe there was a misunderstanding. I'll just take her home now." He came up and grabbed Yola's arm. "Get your filthy paw off me!" she screamed automatically. "You can't tell me what to do, you child-beater!" The lieutenant made a note. "Child-beating." Fisk had a certain grudging sympathy for Ormand, who still thought a simple spanking or two would bring Yola into line. He would learn. The desk phone lighted. "For you," the lieutenant said to Fisk, turning the screen to face him. It was Johns. "What's this about your being arrested?" Johns demanded. "We run a respectable outfit here. You're fired. Centers." "But I've still got the child. The adoption can't -- Johns screwed up his face in perplexity. "Child? Adoption? I don't know what you're talking about. Have you been messing around with something on the side?" Fisk began to see what sort of a bag he was to be left holding. Naturally Johns wouldn't admit in the hearing of the police to dealing in black-market babies. "But -- " "Just get our eighty per cent to us pronto and we'll forget the embezzlement charge," Johns finished, clicking off. The policeman made another note, "tobezzlement." He looked up. "Are you sure you don't need an attorney?" "This is all a misunderstanding -- " Fisk felt hopeless. If he returned the checks to Ormand, Johns would charge him with embezzlement of company funds. If he kept them, Ormand had him on kidnaping. Both men were ruthless enough to hang the intermediary. And Yola had not yet even started on her child-molestation act. X somewhere," the lieutenant IF said thoughtfully. "Damn funny," He turned to Ormand. "This is a nonwhite child and you're a white spacer. She can't be your natural issue." "Sure I could," Yola said, keeping her options open. "My mother's black and I won't say what business she's in, but it's near the spaceport. She -- " "Yeah," Ormand agreed, manifestly not pleased but riding with the inevitable. "You know how it is." "How old are you, Ormand?" the lieutenant snapped. "Twenty-nine. That's why I'm retiring. You have to call it quits after thirty." "And you?" he said to Yola. "Eleven." The lieutenant turned back to Ormand. "And how old is the minimum for a space license?" "Twenty-one." Then Ormand saw the trap. "Well, maybe before I -- " "Looks like a black-market operation to me," the lieutenant said. "Five to two you're an ineligible parent. Single.with no permanent home -- and you know you can't take an underage child offplanct -- " "No, no!" Ormand cried, turning pale even for a spacer. "Sq you paid a fat check to a shyster outfit to sneak through a black baby I know damn well you weren't going to any court for adoption, whatever you told the child." Ormand fell back, whipped. Without seeming to take a breath the lieutenant pounced on Fisk, who had just started to relax. "And you. Centers. You represent that black-market racket, squeezing human blood out of both ends. You're selling an innocent ward of the state to an ineligible childbeater, embezzling on the side and maybe kidnaping, too -- " "Yeah," Yola said, enjoying this. "Don't forget child moles -- " "And to top it off the brat's a little bitch nobody can handle without a whip in one hand and a prayer book in the other." "Yeah," Fisk and Ormand agreed together. Yola glared. The lieutenant smiled knowledgeably. "In short, three fine fat fish on the line, suckers all, tugging the hooks into each other. As if I didn't have important cases to handle in my off-days! Now are you three going to work out your own squabble or you want me to do it for you?" Yola and Ormand both quailed, but Fisk had an inspiration. "Lieutenant, if you will permit us a moment to confer privately -- " "Sure, I'll wait," the officer said sardonically. "Thirty seconds." XJ. at the other two, pulling them into a huddle. He had never before attempted to manage people so boldly, but desperation gave him genius. "Ormand, if I get you off the hook and find you an age"Yeah -- yeah," Ormand agreed eagerly. "Keep the money. Just -- " "Yola, if I arrange a legitimate adoption, court-approved, so you'll never have to go back to -- " "Yeah -- " she echoed fervently. "Time," the lieutenant called. Fisk stepped to the desk. "As I was saying," he said so smoothly he surprised himself, "it was all a misunderstanding, v Mr. Ormand was looking for a wife to take to Venus -- he's going to be cultivating exotic Venus plants for export to Earth, you know -- and the agency thought he meant the phrase 'little girl' literally, not knowing the way spacers talk. When the two were introduced, the error was quickly apparent. He was naturally upset and so was the girl, as you can readily understand. In their confusion they exchanged some unkind words -- " "Yeah -- " Ormand muttered thoughtfully. "So Mr. Ormand may have said 'kidnaped' when he meant 'defrauded.' A natural error in the circumstance. Actually I was taking the child back to -- " Here Yola opened her mouth, but he elbowed her warningly. "To assist me in locating the correct subject. One of the sixteen-yearold girls just graduating from the orphanage, eager for the security of marriage. Young enough to be, uh, malleable. Who likes to travel -- even as far as Venus, where there would be no female competition for attention." "Yeah," Ormand said, his face lighting. The lieutenant nodded. "You wiggle pretty smooth for a worm in human clothing," he said approvingly. "But what about Miss Tantrums, here? You have to shut her up before she says something I might have to jail you for." Fisk could have done without such candor. "Once we have clarified Mr. Ormand's situation satisfactorily, I will -- " Here he paused to gird himself for the sacrifice. "I will take Yola to the court to -- to adopt her myself. I am, I believe, an eligible parent." Yola's mouth fell open. "Gee -- really?" she breathed ecstatically. "Yes, really," Fisk said, hoping he wouldn't regret this decision of expediency for the rest of his life. "I'm young enough to be your father, you know, and I've -- cr -- always wanted a black baby." # IF Specidl IfUroductory Offer good in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U.S. and Canada, For United Kingdom, sand coupon to: sand coupon to: New York, N.Y. # London SW# #RD  # issues of IF for #  # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription as checked above. Some Contributors Past and Present PiHil Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bastar Jamas Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L Sprague da Camp Lester da! Ray Robert A. Hainlain Donald H. Menial J. R. Pierce Fradarik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silvarbarg Theodora Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnagut Jr. He needed his tomorrows, but did they need him? T he pain persisted, but Lambert ignored it. It was cold in the plane, but it would be colder outside. He turned up his fur collar, put on his fur hat and walked down the aisle, carrying his light case clumsily with his double-thickness gloves. He felt a twinge in his side as he turned to the doorway and disembarked, down the steps, out onto the frosty runway. There was no wind, but he could feel the icy cold already trying to get at him. He smiled grimly. Oymyakon, Siberia. The coldest place in the world. The natives didn't seem to mind, bustling about cheerfully in their heavy furs. Lambert walked briskly toward the airport buildings, but before he had gone a dozen steps his face smarted and he wished he had worn a scarf. He quickened his pace and put his free hand over his mouth and nose. The terminal loomed close in the morning mist -- the strange "human-habitation fog" of Siberian cities. Below-zero weather ordinarily was accompanied by clear air and sunshine, but not here or at Yakutsk, where he had changed planes from Moscow. Was this the end of his journey? He hoped so. Seven time zones from Moscow, eight more from New York. He would have gone around the other way if it had been practical. Being here was an accomplishment in itself. Few Americans had visited this part of the world in wintertime. Or wanted to. Pushing through the door of the terminal, Lambert was greeted by a rush of warm air, then by an old friend who shook his hand, took his case and escorted him to the bar. "Welcome to the Pole of Cold." David Owen, a small wiry Welshman in Russian dress, grinned. "Sorry I couldn't arrange a record -- it's only fifty-eight below this morning. Fahrenheit." Lambert murmured greetings and thanks, felt the pain in his side and sipped at the drink already set up. He gasped as it burned his lips. Owen laughed. "That's Spirt. It's ninety-six per cent alcohol, doesn't freeze as easily as vodka. Popular around here." He chuckled, then turned serious. "How's the -- how's the health?" He looked concerned and Lambert turned away, sipped again, this time more carefully. "No better," he said softly. "How long?" asked Owen, eyeing him. Lambert realized he looked trim and fit on the surface. "I don't know," he admitted. "Pain's been about the same since the operation. They weren't too definite. Anyway, I didn't lose any time getting here." 'And I'm all ready for you," Owen announced with a look of pride. "Nothing I wouldn't do for an old friend -- even if he is a lousy capitalist." Lambert looked up sharply and Owen went on: "Don't worry, no one speaks English around here. But I surprised myself getting you in here. I haven't tried to get a real defector into Siberia before. But I'm grateful for those donations -- " Lambert sighed, said it was nothing. At least he hoped it was nothing -- that his financial aid to certain organizations to get him into Siberia would do no harm. Desperation required desperate remedies. He was dying of cancer. Besides, Owen was a real friend despite his affiliations. Lambert had once saved Owen's life in Hong Kong -- or had it . been the other way around? No matter. Now Owen was going to repay him immortal. windows were all frosted over except for the double-glassed windshield -- Lambert leaned back and tried to relax. He felt the dull pain again. He toyed with a sudden wish to dash out into the cold and freeze -- end the pain -- but the desire was weak. He hadn't yet tried suicide -- he scarcely knew why. He was not afraid. The reason had to be that he simply wanted to survive, deep down inside. He had never been a loser. Owen was chattering on, talking about his wife. No, it was Lambert's wife he was asking about. "She's not my wife any more, Davy," said Lambert. "Not for a long time. She came to see me in the hospital, though. 'Put your faith in doctors or in God -- not in a refrigerator,' she said. Now the doctors -- and perhaps Godhave given up. There remains the refrigerator." Lambert grunted. "She never did understand my recent political activities. 'You, a confirmed conservative, turned communist.' Deception, deception. I didn't deceive you, though." "I don't mind that sort of deception," said Owen. "Besides, this gives me a chance to prove some of my pet theories and maybe convert you -- as well as congeal you." Lambert shuddered at the Welshman's dark humor. "I ought to be open to conversion. The procedure we're oing to attempt isn'tas foolproof anywhere else. Of considered quite acceptable." Owen grinned. "It isn't exactly legal here, either." At Lambert's quick look of concern, he amended this. "It isn't criminal, but -- well -- IF let's just call it unauthorized." "I hope you're not putting yourself out for me." "Don't worry," said Owen. "The test of a good worker is whether he can get around rules when he can't follow them. The procedure is officially outlawed. But you are not a Soviet citizen -- " "Why is this particular application of cryogenics outlawed, anyway?" complained Lambert. "What business is it of any government what individuals want to do with their lives?" "We are all socialists now, remember -- the trend is evident even in your country. It is against society that some should be given -- by the state -- a longevity denied others. Remember the old arguments? What was the name of that club we belonged to? The Society for the Preservation of Experience -- "Bah. That's not what I want to preserve -- the law dispersed those fools like dry leaves. There was always more than a sprinkling of crackpots among them. I am somewhat of an authority on psychoceramics, having been exposed to the cancer-cure racket. But this is not just another cancer cure. It's the simple matter of preserving life until science discovers a real cancer cure. And that's just a matter of time." "Do you believe that?" asked Owen. "Certainly. And cryogenics for this purpose is going to be accepted eventually, wait and see. Only I can't wait." Owen peered out through the windshield. The fog had now lifted and they had emerged into bright sunshine. They were outside the limits of Oymyakon -- only a few .scattered old wooden buildings were visible here and there. Owen spoke a few words in Russian to the driver. Lambert sard, "Aren't we going to a hotel or -- " "To my home? No. I thought you didn't want any delay." "That's right. I don't." T he taxi pulled up before a low brick building, isolated in a field of snow. Lambert got out and experienced the cold again. He slapped his gloves to his face, while Owen talked to the driver. The taxi pulled away and they crunched across the squeaking snow. Lambert felt his nose was being frost-bitten. Maybe it didn't matter now, but... The building seemed not much warmer. This was a branch of the Permafrost Institute, Lambert learned. After a slight delay a young Russian technician took them to an elevator. They went down. And down. And down. They stopped at the bottom level, apparently the sub-subbasement, then emerged into a large open space, not a basement, but an underground cavern. At one side were a partitioned office and laboratory from which an older man appeared, greeted Owen, nodded to Lambert. Owen said, "This is the man I was telling you about -- Dr. Oschepkov." He spoke in Russian to the doctor, who looked at Lambert doubtfully, then spoke sharply to Owen, showing an irritation that transcended the language barrier. Lambert thought he understood some of the words, but he waited for Owen's translation. "He says it's illegal to freeze before clinical death. I told him you couldn't wait for that. He says he's only experimented on foxes." He turned back to Dr. Oschepkov, conducted a long argument, which Lambert didn't try to follow. He felt discouraged -- the pain was coming again and it was cold down here. The argument seemed interminable. Finally Owen turned to him, grinned. "It's all right. I have a bit of influence, you see. But you'll have to sign some papers." They entered the small office, went through a legal ceremony about which Lambert understood little and cared less. Then the doctor and the young technician bundled up in additional clothing and they all proceeded briskly across the cavern. Lambert found it hard to keep up, but was glad to be walking again. The exercise warmed him a little. The cave narrowed and became a tunnel. Dr. Oschepkov walked ahead with his assistant, talking in Russian, while Lambert and Owen brought up the rear. Somehow Lambert couldn't think of questions, despite his curiosity, but Owen filled him in satisfactorily. "This is a natural cave, although it has been expanded somewhat. We're five hundred feet down, right in the heart of the permafrost. Here anything frozen will stay frozen forever without any power expenditure. You needn't fear a power failure." Lambert said, "But permafrost isn't cold enough for this." "It's not cold enough to freeze you safely, but it's cold enough to keep you after the freezing process. This is the same cave where they found a mammoth not long ago." Owen grinned. "We're thinking of calling it 'Mammoth Cave.' " Lambert shuddered. He thought of the perpetually frozen earth all around him and wished he were already lying in it. To sleep... IF anui. Latest U.S. Government tests of all cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # of all otfW cigarettes sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Regular and Menthol: I # mg. "tar'.' # mg. nicotine, Latest U.S. Government tests of all menthol cigarettes show True is lower Q . i n both tar and nicotine than # or all other menthols sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. Owen continued: 'They use the liquid nitrogen technique -- combined with some new methods -- to get you safely past the zone of crystallization. He's been successful with animals, mostly foxes. Frankly, I think he's happy to get a human subject, despite his demurrals. Soon this will be a common thing, he says, though now it's experimental. Don't worry -- they know their business. Lately the neighborhood fox farms have been getting some of their foxes back." This was encouraging, Lambert thought. They turned into a side corridor, which was even narrower and lower. It was getting colder. The walls were covered white in the dim glare of small lights hanging at intervals. The cold was intense and seemed to make the gloom close in. Like catacombs, Lambert thought. Well, why not? That was what these were. T hey came to the end of the lights, walked a few hundred yards farther by Oschepkov's flashlight. At the dead end was a gloomy room stacked with strange metal boxes, mostly small, though there was one large one. Lambert tried to shudder but was too cold. He succeeded only in making his teeth chatter. In the walls were many dark holes, their purpose obvious. Dr. Oschepkov said something in Russian. His assistant tipped the large box upright onto a dolly and trundled it across the room to some machinery. The technician and doctor busied themselves for a long time, setting up complicated tubing and wiring and occasionally seeming to curse and argue. Lambert wanted to ask Owen, Do they really know what they re doing? but his lips refused to open. Owen smiled reassuringly, but said nothing. Lambert huddled inside his inadequate winter clothing, shivering uncontrollably. God, it was cold, Lambert, waiting, thought only of how cold it was. The tiny pain was almost forgotten in the larger discomfort. Finally the doctor said something and Owen interpreted. "Strip, he says." Lambert could only shake his head and shiver wordlessly. He was powerless to answer, even to move. Dr. Oschepkov spoke in Russian and Owen translated. "He says, 'Do you want to be comfortable -- or do you want to awaken?' Cheer up, it won't be long now." With shaking fingers Lambert tried to comply, but he had to be helped by Owen and the doctor. Finally he stood naked, burning with cold, blind to any other thought but icy, icy, cold, cold, cold. He could not mpve. He saw hands grasp him but he could not feel them. They moved him into the box. He stood there freezing, freezing, and they sprayed him with shocking snow. The door shut and blackness closed in. From somewhere came a clanging, a ringing. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky... Through the cold and the pain he felt the box fill up. Cold. Cold. A little pain -- but this was replaced by cold. The cold seemed less. The pain was gone. So was the cold. Peace. Ring in the thousand years of peace... H e partially awoke to the sound of bells again. Church bells, they sounded like. Church bells in Siberia? No, this was not Siberia -- couldn't be. He felt warm. He lay back and slept again. He dreamed he was in school, reciting a poem, and he knew all the lines. Ring out wild bells, to the wild sky, the flying cloud, the frosty light; the year is dying in the night; ring out wild bells and let him die... Die? His thoughts were troubled, but there was peace. He skipped to Ring out old shapes of foul disease... felt a pain and opened his eyes. He was in a hospital bed, he saw. He lay perfectly at ease and when he wanted to turn, something in the bed helped him. Tubes and wires seemed to be attached to his body beneath the soft blanket that covered him. The ceiling was of restful mixed colors and strange patterns, as was the rest of the interesting room, filled with odd furniture. Even his bed was barely recognizable as a bed. Suddenly his memory came back with a rush. With knowledge came a nagging pain in his side, small but persistent. He had been revived from the freezer, but had not been operated on as yet. His trip had been seccessful. He was in the future. He lay back, content with that knowledge. Then he wanted to know more and looked around for a button to push, a bell to ring -- something. "Nurse -- doctor -- " he croaked. What was "doctor" in Russian? He couldn't remember. He groaned as the pain hit him. The door opened and a darkhaired, not unhandsome woman in tasteful blue and white uniform, entered. "I am Dr. Ivanova." She smiled. "You want something?" Lambert stared admiringly. "You're Russian." He sighed. "But you speak English. If I am still in Siberia, what are those bells I hear? They sound like church bells." IF Her smile vanished, but friendliness remained in her dark eyes. "I speak English because you called for 'nurse' and 'doctor' in English. I am Dr. Irina Ivanova, Director of the Petrograd Hospital and Medical Museum. And you are no longer in Siberia. This is Petrograd -- it is Sunday and those are church bells you hear." Lambert was puzzled. "Did you say, Petrograd? Not Leningrad? Am I in the past or the future -- or what? I last remember being in Oymyakon, Siberia, in -- ah -- nineteen-seventy-six. I'm an American, my name is Charles Lambert and I froze to death. I mean -- " He suddenly broke off as he felt a sharp pain in his side. "When are you going to operate?" She frowned. "Nineteen-;seventysix? This is two thousand sixtyeight. Nearly a hundred years. Don't you think we have had time enough to have gotten rid of your cult of Lenin? No, we didn't have a revolution. The Soviet Union has always had all the forms of democracy. All we had to do was vote out the Party. Not any easy task, I admit." She smiled again. "This is the future, then," said Lambert. "You've made changes -- good. But -- that's not what I'm primarily concerned about. A huadred years -- medical science must have advanced greatly. Have you found the cure for cancer?" He watched her face closely. "Of course," she said. "We have eliminated all major diseases. Occasionally a new disease comes up and takes a few months or years to eradicate. Here at the museum we study the old diseases to make sure they do not recur. The reason you are here now is that this is one of the few places that has the facilities to care for you." J hc and suspicion, again asked, "When will you operate? It's not that I can't stand it, but -- "We have already operated. Several times. The disease keeps spreading." She shook her head sadly. "We have made you as comfortable as possible. There is nothing else we can do." Lambert leaped out of bed in alarm. He found it easy as the bed helped him. He disconnected the attachments. He found himself standing up, clad in close-fitting pajamas of soft material. He felt fit, then noticed his toes were missing, gasped, forgot what he was going to say. Dr. Ivanova said, "We can replace your extremities easily. They wereamaged in freezing." Lambert remembered his protest. "But you can't cure my cancer?" "I am sorry. You have only a few weeks to live -- hardly more than when we started." "You can't cure me? Then refreeze me!" "There are no facilities," said Dr. Ivanova; No facilities? This was a cruel blow, one he had not expected. It was not a refusal, but a statement of fact that allowed no argument. Yet he argued. "No facilities? Don't you do any freezing? Don't you practice cryogenics?" "Freezing is wrong," she said flatly... "Such an application of cryogenics is against nature, against evolution, against eugenics -- " "Against God?" Lambert asked bitterly, slumping down into a bedside chair, its deep cushions enveloping him. She frowned. "We have freedom of religion here -- we are not bigots. Atheism is acceptable." She shook her head. "No, it is reason that this form of cryogenics is against. Preserving the unfit, keeping human discards, saving obsolete diseases for posterity. Thank God you are one of the last of the trespassers. Not many are found these days." "How did you find me?" asked Lambert, curious in spite of his despair. "The underground city of Oymyakon expanded into your forgotten tunnel," she explained. "Luckily you were not crushed. Apparently records were lost or concealed, maps were altered and personnel scattered, so that the existence of the tunnel was not known until the mole-dozers broke through. They found some inferior fur-foxes in the cave, but no human survivors other than you." "Were there only a few successful freezers?" he asked. in a voice filled with contempt. "Your century was a very selfish one. You tried to use up all natural resources, polluted the Earth irreversibly, saddled the future with your impossible debts and, not content with that, you wanted to impose on your children the care of your corrupt bodies.' She modified her tone, apparently remembering that he was a sick man. "But now there are only about a hundred trespassers left undiscovered, This is not an actual count -- we don't really know how many there are or where they are -- it is only a computer estimate. There once was a huge number. Would you like to know what happened to them? Or would you rather not?" she asked coldly. "I want to know," said Lambert hopelessly. "They died, those who were not IF already dead. Preserving a dead body is useless, of course. When the brain dies, who can recreate it?" "I know that," said Lambert. "But why did the others die? Didn't the machinery function?" "Yes, most of the time, even in early experimental efforts like yours. Later efforts were quite successful. Too much so. As I war." "Tell me about the war," Lambert asked. "Which one?" "The one that killed off the freezers." "Oh, they all did, in one way or another," she answered. "You can imagine how. Some were damaged by neglect, constant relocation, bombs. Failure of power killed many -- you were relatively safe in your permafrost. Let me tell you about an interesting incident. For a time there was a serious food shortage -- you are not listening. No, it was not cannibalism on our part. There is a certain sect in India -- one of the famine areas -- that does not bury or burn its dead, but consumes them, so to speak. We traded -- for other products of the soil." Lambert felt sick. Dr. Ivanova snapped, "Well, what would you have? Should the living die so that the dead may live? That is what is wrong with your whole trespasser philosophy you seek to displace your own children. You are not fit to survive -- in more ways than one." With an effort she resumed her calm history. "There was a series of wars. The final one was a war of the sciences', "War of the sciences?" She nodded. "Science against science. For thousands of years science has been helping both sides in wars. For hundreds of years some people have been predicting that one day science would fight its own war against its enemies. They didn't think of the logical counterpart to the long succession of previous wars. Tribe against tribe, nation against nation, religion against religion, economic philosophy against economic philosophy. They failed to predict a war between different scientific viewpoints. You may have guessed that this war included those who believed in immortality via cryogenics and those who put their faith in eugenics. It was finally settled by a breakthrough in eugenics that made human immortality not only useless but anti-progress. Freezing was forbidden and the frozen were awakened -- those who were left. Few survived this period. Feeling ran high against the trespassers." d the chair, which adjusted itself to his new position. "I appreciate all this. I expected to find radical changes; What I can't understand is that you haven't a cure for cancer." "Oh, but we have eliminated cancer." "But you can't cure me. I don't get it. Am I a special case?" "No, yours is an ordinary form, common in your time. We have all the past medical records here in the museum. You may be assured that we have done all that doctors in your time and some years beyond could have done -- and with much less difficulty. We have better instruments and techniques. But we can't do anything to eliminate your cancer without eliminating you. We have eliminated cancer through eugenics. Don't you understand what eugenics is?" Lambert closed his eyes, groaned. "Then I froze myself for nothing." "That is true," she said with sympathy. "Would you like to hear about the breakthrough in eugenics?" "Yes," he lied. "The real purpose of eugenics is not to create a super-race but to fight degeneration, lliere has always been resistance to eugenics, because of humanitarian considerations. We could not breed humans like animals, because this involved destruction of the unfit or refusing them reproduction rights. The other,' much greater barrier to human eugenics was in the slowness of human generations. What could be accomplished in less than ten thousand years? But if one reduced the generation's span to a half-day the same result could be obtained in a year -- one tenthousandth of the time." Lambert was interested in spite of himself. "You mean you can speed up human growth? To a half-day? That is unbelievable." She smiled. "Perhaps you have heard of lower sea animals that have two cycles of existence? The hydra stage of the jellyfish, for example, produces an offspring of an entirely different form, the medusa stage, which in turn breeds back to the original.' That is alternation of generations. We have done this with humans -- that is the breakthrough in eugenics." "Do you breed humans in the laboratory?" he asked with distaste. "Not humans. An alternate form we call portans, that is, 'carriers.' The fertilized ovum -- IF in an artificial environment and under certain treatment -- splits, not into connected cells that develop into an adult human, but into many individual cells having a separate existence of their own. This splitting goes on until there medium. Then the second innovation comes into play -- the artificial selection. Thousands of tests reveal latent defects in each portan, make an accurate prediction of what each one of these cells would develop into if allowed to grow into an adult human." She paused to see if he was following, then: "The essence of quality control is rejection. Here it happens on a microscopic level, far from humanitarian considerations. One portan is selected; the selected portan is placed in another medium, allowed to develop further and is then broken up into portans again. And so the process goes on, a process more of purification than of evolution. "After many generations, the final ovum is transplanted and allowed to develop normally. Between ' generations of normal humans, there might be a thousand microscopic generations. That is the usual desired interval for the removal of defects from any combination. Can you see now how we have eliminated cancer? By elinriinating the cancer-prone strains through selection." "I see," Lambert said glumly. He rose and the chair helped him to get up. He paced the floor shakily. The doctor turned to leave, paused by the door. bassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. Featured, speakers: Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek; Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit #, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles; Robert Bloclh author of Psycho, The House That Dripped Blood; Kirk Alyn, the "Superman" and Forrest J. Ackerman, editor Famous Monsters of Filmland. Highlights: screenings of film classics, exhibits, panels, banquet. For information: Fantasy Film Fans International, Box #, Los Angeles, California #. # ' "The best we can do for you is to make your dying fairly comfortable. You may be up and about and conscious for only a few weeks more. Until then you have a choice." Lambert looked dully at her. "Choice?" "We still believe in freedom of choice even for the trespasser. Come with me." Outside the door was not a corridor but an open-air terrace used as a means of entrance. A walk led along it in both directions, and opposite the door was a low parapet. The air was balmy -- it must be summer in Petrograd. Lambert hobbled to the parapet, looked out across a magic city. No other words could describe it. It was like an air view of Disneyland, seen through a kaleidoscope. Mingled together were skyscrapers and fantastic Byzantine turrets and beyond these the Neva sparkled in the summer air. He looked down -- he was near the summit of a tall building, of a height beyond estimation, the stepped terrace next beneath him a hundred feet below. It was deserted, as was the terrace he was on -- he imagined the hospital was not much used these days. From far below he again heard the sound of church bells. Out there was a whole new world where he did not belong. He was out of place here. But it was a triumph of a sort. He was here, where he was not supposed to be -- like man on the airless moon. He had straddled centuries and was one of the few surviving freezers or trespassers, as Dr. Ivanova had called them. A record of what he had done would be kept here in the museum, to be added to man's total knowledge -- and one day Dr. Ivanova's perfectly healthy humans might want to do what he had done. Not to saddle future generations with their problems and hangups, but to add to the wealth of human experience. He suddenly felt a little wealthier for being here. The slight feeling of satisfaction was spoiled the the recurrence of pain, sharper now. The doctor had said something about a choice. He turned to ask her about it, but she was gone. What choice? He leaned weakly on the parapet, squinted out at the sunlit city. Suddenly he looked down. He smiled -- and all at once he felt right about being here. He thought, Fm the one whos giving you a choice -- what you re giving me is what I always had... And abruptly it didn't matter what use either of them made of what each had been given.  IF A question to ponder when you have all the time there is: what do you do with it? G abriel solar paused at the point in the trail where the land momentarily bulged like a knot on the trunk of a tree. There it was possible to see beyond the underbrush and foliage to where the village of Almada nestled like a child asleep between the cold blue blanket of the ocean and the dark wrinkled mattress of the hills. Gabriel peered carefully at the village, shading his eyes against the glare of the setting sun. But it was impossible to see more than a vague outline of misty streets and stores and houses and yards -- and this was not enough. The sky was still bright, but the land was dark and he could not make out the brown adobe box of his own home. But even if he had been able to see the house -- what then? He could not see through the walls -- he could noi tell what she was doing now. Had she stopped crying? Was she drinking now, or sleeping, rocking, or smiling and laughing? He could not know. Turning, he continued up the trail toward the top of the hill. When he liad finished at the installation he would return to his wife, to Maria, and then he would know. But not until then. The trail was difficult here. The path swooped down abruptly and it was no longer possible to see the village. Finally the land began to rise again. Then there was a sharp right turn, and the trees and underbrush were gone and the trail had reached its end. Years before this land had belonged to the Finca family. Gabriel was not a young man -- he was nearly fifty -- and he could clearly remember the first revolution twenty years ago, when the land had been taken from the last of the Fincas and divided among thevarious smaller landowners of Almada. These people had then moved their families here to the top of the hill, building small houses and even a general store. But now these houses were gone, too, victims of the second revolution five years ago, and now the land belonged to nobody. It belonged to the government and to the foreigners who were the friends of the government. They had constructed the installation here at the top of the hill three years ;ago. None of this had ever affected Gabriel, until the day when Dr. Berg had come to Perez's cantina and given Gabriel the job. The House Gabriel lived in with his wife Maria and her son Juan was also the house where his father had lived before him and, as a fisherman, he was not a member of any of the various political factions. Until six months ago he had never in his life stood here at the end of the trail at the summit of the hill. The installation was a huge squat concrete structure, as unassailable in appearance as a Spanish fortress. Gabriel was the only villager who had even been inside its walls. Most of the men who worked there were foreigners like Dr. Berg and Dr. Goddard, arid those who were not foreign were the men from the north who served as janitors and cooks and sometimes as special policemen. They were as alien to Gabriel as Dr. Berg, who spoke a language he did not understand. Gabriel did not know why men were brought from as far away as a thousand miles to work at jobs that any villager could just as easily have performed, but neither could he understand why Dr.  Berg had given him the job. IF D r. berg had come to Perez's cantina one afternoon. A tall gaunt man with very thick black eyebrows and a slick white coat loosely buttoned across his chest, he had asked Perez, "Who is the most trustworthy man you know?" Perez had not been given a chance to answer. Gabriel, who had not had a good day in his boat and who was a little drunk, had replied instead, "I am the most trustworthy man in this whole village." "Good." Dr. Berg had turned upon him and Gabriel had been very frightened by this strangelooking man. "Then report to the installation tomorrow morning at eight o'clock and ask for Dr. Berg. I have a job for you." "Are you certain?" Gabriel had asked. "Of course. The pay is quite decent -- don't worry about that. As long as you are trustworthy." "I am." "Your name, please." "Gabriel Solar," he had said, stammering. Then ashamed of showing his fear before this powerful-looking foreigner, he had stood very erect and looked directly into the man's eyes. "I shall be expecting you," Dr. Berg had said. That had been six months ago and each day since then (including Sundays) Gabriel had followed the twisting path up the face of the hill to the installation gate. He left his house every morning at precisely seven-thirty and he returned at six o'clock. Occasionally Dr. Berg would ask him to come back to the installation later in the evening and today was one of those days. It was now nearly eight o'clock and the last faint rays of the declining sun pecked at the back of Gabriel's neck as he approached the guards' booth, which stood beside the gate. The guard knew him. He was a foreigner decked out in a shiny blue uniform with three horizontal silver stripes and a white hat with a polished bill. He nodded at Gabriel, went into his booth and touched the button that caused the gate to rise briefly into the air. Gabriel stepped past the open gate and into the installation. This was the only entrance through the high wire fence that circled the installation like a tarnished necklace. Sharp bristling barbs of wire were evenly spaced along the uppermost strand of the fence. Three weeks ago a young girl picnicking nearby with her family had climbed a tree and placed the paln of her hand against the barbed wire. She had screamed and fallen out of the tree. The grass was soft and she had landed on her feet, but her hand had been burned. Gabriel understood why this had occurred -- there was heat electricity, running through the wire. Dr. Berg had told him, but Dr. Berg had also warned him that to discuss anything at all about the installation in the village would be as great a dishonor as the sin of a priest who reveals the details of a man's confession. Gabriel had accepted this, but he did not like the little girl's being hurt and he felt guilty. Once he was inside the installation, Gabriel went immediately to Dr. Berg's office. It was located in a small building set apart from the main structure. The office was small, cluttered and furnished with a bare iron cot and two long wooden benches heaped with instruments and tools. Several large wire cages were on a shelf that ran the length of one wall. These cages were presently empty except for one in which a long rat scampered and ran, occasionally flopping over on his back and kicking his legs high in the air. Gabriel had never seen a rat acting so before. Dr. Berg was alone. He sto#d beside one of the wooden benches and, hearing Gabriel enter the room, said, "We'll have to wait for Dr. Goddard." "Yes," Gabriel said. H e crossed the room to the cage where the rat was penned and poked a finger through the wires. The rat stopped his running and came to investigate, sniffing at Gabriel's finger, then nibbling. Gabriel was not afraid that the rat would try to bite him. They were good friends. The rat was named Poppa. "Hungry, Poppa? Smell the food on my finger? Playing so hard makes you very hungry." "Gabriel," said Dr. Berg. "Yes?" He removed his finger from the cage and turned his back on the rat. "What's this I hear about Jenkins? Is it true?" Gabriel was not surprised that Dr. Berg knew. He always seemed to know everything about anything. So why not this as well? "Yes," he said. "And your son?" "Maria's son. By Joseph, who drowned in the storm." "I see." Dr. Berg crossed the room, opened the door and peered out at the darkness beyond. Then he came back and looked at his watch. "I'm afraid they'll catch Maria's son. These hills -- there's no place he can hide for long." "No," Gabriel said. "He did a foolish thing." "Do you know why?" Gabriel shrugged. He placed his IF hands together in front of his waist and looked down at the clasped fingers. "Because he was afraid of me." He knew he could never lie to Dr. Berg. "He hated me." "And your wife?" "She feels the same way." "And you can't think of anything to tell her?" "No." Dr. Berg sighed deeply. "Neither can I." There had been no force behind his questions, no interest or curiosity. He had seemed to be asking them because after he had begun he had seen no way to stop. "It's a miracle Dr. Goddard hasn't heard," he said. "Damn him." Gabriel went over to one of the wooden benches where there was a bare space and sat down. He sat so that he could watch Poppa as the rat played in his cage. He began to think about his trouble. It had not begun with the boy, but that had been the worst. Not the boy who was his wife's son, but the other boy, Manuel, whose mother he did not know. Gabriel had been bringing in his boat after an afternoon's fishing on a day when Dr. Berg had sent him home early. The whole happening came back to him as if it were now -- as if he had not lived since that day. H e still liked to fish and went out whenever he could. He knew his work with Dr. Berg would not last forever and eventually he would have to return to the sea. He had not done well this day and he was angry at himself. As he was pulling the boat ashore he heard the cries coming from farther down the beach and knew instantly what they meant. He had heard such cries before in his life and twice he had seen the bloated rotting bodfes that wei washed ashore afterward by the strong currents. This time he ran toward the sounds and then he was there -- and was not. He did not feel the freezing waters covering his body until his head was fully submerged and he was swimming toward the shattered light of the sun. The boy had strayed far from shore, Gabriel poked his head above the water, looked and saw the hands clawing at the air as if to grasp and hold it. Then the hands were gone, and when Gabriel reached that place the boy, too, was gone. Gabriel dived. Once and again. The second time he stayed down a long time, dropping all the way to the bottom, feeling the coldness there like a numbing heat, like sunburn, and then he saw the boy. Manuel. Whose name had been cried on the shore. He was lying on the bottom, his hands raised toward the distant surface, his black hair streaming above his head like strands of ocean algae. His eyes were open and as Gabriel drew near he saw that Manuel's mouth was open as well. He took the boy underneath the arms and climbed slowly toward the surface. Then he was paddling toward shore, towing Manuel, keeping the boy's head above the level of the waves. The boy was not breathing. The people on the beach -- and many had been drawn to the spot by the mother's cries -- backed away. He stretched the boy out on the sand and stood over him. An old woman, her face nearly hidden by a tattered shawl, came close and screamed a word in his face. He lifted his head and looked at the people, seeing the face of his wife's son among them. The people stared fearlessly back at him, but not a one of them moved. "Breathe into him," Gabriel said. "Somebody must breathe into him." "TVflcAo," said the old woman, who had stepped back into the crowd. "TVacio!" she screamed. The boy's mother ran forward. "Do not touch him. You are death. You have killed my son." Dropping to her knees, her dress already stained by the wet sand, she pulled her son tightly to her bosom. Seawater spurted from between the boy's open lips, splashing his mother's throat. She caressed his hair and face. She said much more to Gabriel, muttering, murmuring, suddenly shouting. Gabriel did not know what to do. He simply stood there beside the water, oblivious to the woman, to all of them except Juan, Maria's son, but Juan said nothing. He stared back at his mother's husband and his lips moved. But if any sound came from between them it was lost beneath the crash of the surf and the screams of the mother. Gabriel knew what it was. The final time he had gone down after the boy he had stayed underwater for fifteen minutes. Standing on the beach, looking at Juan, he remembered how his breath had grown shorter and shorter and his chest become filled with pain. He had kept going, desperately searching the bottom -- and then the pain had gone. He had felt fine and he had continued to search, not breathing after that, not needing to breathe. And when he had cracked the surface and seen the glowing light of day he had taken one breath -- a small one. He had not needed more. Fifteen minutes. For a quarter of an hour he had lived withou" air. iiAM I late?" Dr. Goddard was an awkward man whose white coat barely IF concealed the immensity of his belly. He had entered the room while Gabriel had been thinking and now he had gone to the cage, opened it, caught and removed the rat. He held Poppa cautiously in his hands. Dr. Berg came over to him. "I assume you were busy?" "Administration," said Dr. Goddard. "Couldn't get away." He jerked his head at Gabriel. "Does he have to be here?" "I want him." said Dr. Berg. "For your sake I hope he's too stupid to understand what he sees." "It doesn't matter," Dr. Berg said. "Gabriel can be trusted." "No one can be trusted too far." Dr. Goddard pressed Poppa against his chest. "Gabriel -- get us the icepick." Gabriel glanced up at Dr. Berg, who nodded slightly. Gabriel stood up, went to the other bench and found the icepick hidden beneath a wad of used paper towels and a torn chart that contained numbers and letters neatly arranged in a series of boxes. Dr. Goddard was having trouble with Poppa and he shouted at Gabriel to hurry. Crossing the room, Gabriel held the pick cautiously in one hand as though it were alive and might turn suddenly and try to bite him. The top of the pick was bright and clean. The handle was made of dark hardwood. Gabriel handed the pick to Dr. Goddard. "Good," said Dr. Goddard, puffing as though suddenly exhausted. "Now take this damn thing before it bites me." Gabriel took Poppa carefully from the doctor and the rat stopped squirming, relaxed and lay still. Gabriel whispered, "Ah Poppa, ah baby, it is fine -- everything is fine." He stroked the top of the rat's head with the tip of his thumb, smoothing back the soft fur. Closing its eyes, the rat pretended to sleep. The head and forepaws extended beyond Gabriel's hands while the tail dangled loosely. "I suppose there's no reason to wait," said Dr. Goddard. "It's been forty'five minutes since the injection. I expected you sooner." Dr. Berg's hands were deep inside his trouser pockets. He rocked evenly on the balls of his feet. His bearing was firm and relaxed, like that of a young priest confident of his faith. "Proceed. This part of the experiment is all yours." "Of course," said Goddard, who gripped the icepick in his right hand, holding it in the palm of his hand while holding the base of the blade between thumb and forefinger. At a signal from Dr. Berg, Gabriel raised the rat so that its head was even with the tip of the pick. Goddard thrust the pick into the rat's left eye. Poppa was silent but his whole body suddenly twitched from the whiskers to the tail. Goddard withdrew the pick. A trickle of blood oozed from the open socket of the eye. The blood flowed slowly down tle rat's narrow face, painting the snout and whiskers. It was followed by a sudden rush of thick gray matter. "Put it back," said Dr. Goddard. He tossed the pick at the nearest bench, but missed. The pick clattered to the concrete floor. "Shouldn't be long," Dr. Berg said. "No," said Goddard. "Ten minutes. Fifteen." Puffing like a frightened dog, he hurried to the door and opened it. Sticking his head outside, he gasped for air. Dr. Berg turned his eyes toward the floor. Waiting silently beside the rat's cage, the three men resembled mourners at a furneral. They watched the rat's body attentively, as if they expected it to move. After ten minutes it did move. A rear leg began to quiver. The puncture wound in the eye socket had closed. The dry caked blood around the eye made observation difficult, but Gabriel was certain that Poppa was watching him from behind the blood. Dr. Goddard pressed his face tightly against the cage. His chin and lips were shiny with perspiration. Dr. Berg rocked on his feet, saying nothing. "It's working," Goddard said. "The beast is alive." "Wait," said Dr. Berg. Another minute passed while the men waited. The rat began to move, its tail slapping the bottom of the cage, stirring the dust. One whisker briefly shook like a leaf brushed by the wind. Then the rat rolled to its feet and stood. It walked steadily to its water dish and, leaning over, drank. "Well," Dr. Goddard said. His face was wet and his hands shook as he lifted them to his face. "I can't believe -- " "You ought to have more faith in your work," Dr. Berg said. blood, working relentlessly with moistened paws, the rat went to its nest, a pile of sawdust and tom cloth in a far corner of the cage, and curled up to sleep, burying its head deep in the folds of the nest. The three men walked away to stand near the door. Both Doctors had removed their lab coats. Dr. Goddard placed a hand on the doorknob. "We will resume the injections tomorrow morning," .he said. "At the usual intervals. I have been conIF sidering. Perhaps next time we will use poison. What do you think, Alfred?" "That would be fine," Dr. Berg said evenly. "Good, good -- poison it will be, then." Goddard had regained his usual composure. His hands and face were dry but pale. He said, "I must say you surprise me, Alfred. What's happened to you? I can't help wondering. Why no more demands that we press forward? Why no more urging that we skip the preliminary experiments? Have you finally come to accept my methods?" "Yes," Dr. Berg Vaid. "I have." "Well, that's good. You realize that our work is the most important in the entire history of the human race. We don't dare hurry matters and risk possible failure. Now we have this animal and that is fine. Perhaps he will live forever. Perhaps not. At the moment it looks very good." "Yes," Dr. Berg said. "It does look very promising." Goddard was grinning, his teeth glistening brightly. "Let me tell you, Alfred. In six months, nine months, who knows? Surely in not more than a year we will find ourselves a man who wishes to assist us in our work. Perhaps a convict. One who has been sentenced to die. In return we will get his government to commute his sentence to life imprisonment. In the event that our experiments are successful, of course." "Of course," Dr. Berg said. "That would be most ironic." Dr. Goddard suddenly shook his head, as though recalling a detail of some significance. Gradually and smile faded from his lips. He asked, "Is something wrong Alfred? I don't understand you. The way you act one might think we had failed." "No," Dr. Berg said. "I'm simply tired. You'll have to forgive me, Herman." "Oh, I do, I do." Goddard was grinning again. "I fully understand. Good night, Alfred." "Good night." Then Dr. Berg and Gabriel were alone in the room... Except for Poppa. But Poppa was sleeping. "The fat bastard," said Dr. Berg. He was not referring to Poppa, Gabriel knew. G abriel sat on the end of the bench, his white work shirt unfastened and bunched loosely at his waist. He stared down at his sandaled feet, nothing the clogg dirt that lay thick beneath his neatly trimmed toenails. "He doesn't know," Dr. Berg said, '"ir he paid any attention to anyone besides himself Tm sure he would have guessed by now. He would have heard about you." "And Juan?" "About Juan, too," Dr. Berg said. He paused for a moment and scratched his cheeks. He shaved not more than once every four 'days and today was not one of those days. "Nothing else has happened?" he asked "You haven't been involved in another accident?" "No," Gabriel said. Such involvements had happened twice before and he had told Dr. Berg both times, because at that time he had not yet fully understood what he had become. The first time he had been rummaging through a box of old clothes, his hands buried deeply in the moldy garmets, when he had felt a sharp stinging sensation at the tip of one finger. He had jerked out his hands and flipped contents. With a stick he had dug through the garmets until the scorpion lay revealed. He killed the beast with the stick. Maria had been with him at the time. Juan had been away, fishing, and he had not seen that the swelling never came. Maria had said that it was good fortune, that Gabriel must have been mistaken about the sting, but he had seen in her eyes that she had not believed her own words. "No more cuts or scrapes or bruises?" asked Dr. Berg. "None," Gabriel said. The cut had occurred a week after the scorpion sting. Juan had been home this time and Gabriel and the boy had been seated at the Wooden table in the main room, listening to Maria preparing cornbread in the kitchen. Gabriel had been playing with a knife, flipping it into the air and catching it by the hilt. Sometimes he would let it turn only once, then reach out and catch it. At other times he would allow it to go around twice, then grab it near the tabletop. It was only a small pocketknife with two blades a few inches long, one at each end, but it was the knife Gabriel used in his boat and he kept it very sharp. "yVo." Juan had seen. Listening to Maria, his mind far away, Gabriel had lost the rhythm of the knife. He had grabbed it by the blade and it had sliced easily through his palm. He had screamed, dropping the knife. Maria had run in, her face white. Gabriel had displayed his hand. The cut had shown long and white, the skin lying in folds around the wound. But there had been IF no blood. Not a solitary drop. Maria had uttered a word of her people: "'"'Nacho Witch. "You feel fine?" Dr. Berg asked. "Yes," Gabriel said. "But something is bothering you. I can tell. Is it your son?" "Maria's son," Gabriel said. "Do you know why he killed Jenkins?" This time there was concern in Dr. Berg's voice, but it was not concern for the boy or for Gabriel either. For whom? For what? "Because of you," Gabriel said. "Because he knew I came here and he thought it was you who had turned me into a thing that does not need to breathe air. Or is stung by a scorpion without harm. Or can be cut by a knife and does not bleed. He would have killed you. Dr. Berg, but he did not know one of you from the other, so when he saw this other man -- Jenkins -- coming away from the cantina he caught him and he killed him." "But he has been in trouble before, hasn't he?" Dr. Berg seemed to know everything, so Gabriel was not surprised. A man who could make another into what Gabriel had become -- what was the difference between this man and a god? "Yes, he has often been in trouble before. Ever since I can remember. The police -- yes." "And he did take Dr. Jenkins' money?" "That was because he was afraid. He wanted to leave. To run away." "Then what makes you think this has anything to do with you, Gabriel? How do you know the boy did not simply kill and rob because he wanted to kill and rob? It was his nature. There are few men in your village worth robbing. Dr. Jenkins should not have gone there. He had been warned." "But you came -- to find me -- at Perez's cantina." "I can handle myself, Gabriel. And I seldom drink." T here was no point to this. Gabriel raised his hands and sighed. Dr. Berg would never understand about Juan, because it was not the boy who truly mattdted. It was the mother. Maria was an Indian and she held many of the old superstitions -- learned from her mother -- as truths. Gabriel could not forget the look on her face when he had come back from the beach that day -- when Manuel had drowned -- his clothes soaked and clinging to his body like skin. Her eyes had been wide as saucers and her mouth had hung open, the teeth exposed. Someone had been there ahead of him and told her, and she was now desperately afraid of him. Tonight, after the police had come looking for Juan, it had even been worse. Maria had cried. He had never known her to cry this way before. It had not been the grief in her tears that had frightened him -- for her son was dead and she knew it -- it had been her own fear. "I must go back to the installation," he had said. And when he had left he had stood outside the door and listened and had heard her voice change. She had continued to cry for her son, but her fear had .vanished. "Roll up your sleeve, Gabriel. We ought to get this done so we can get you home." "Yes, Dr. Berg." Gabriel rolled his sleeve steadily up his arm until the bulk of his shoulder lay exposed. His fingers added further dirt to the already soiled fabric of the shirt. The skin beneath was pale white. Before, in the days when he had not yet come to work for Dr. Berg, when he had gone with the boats all summer, his skin had gotten to be as dark as Maria's. But now he had tittle time to spend in the sun and he was as pale and white as a sheet. Dr. Berg returned with the needle. Gabriel did not turn away or flinch when Dr. Berg inserted the point of the needle beneath the skin of his bicep. A pale pink fluid entered his veins. At first Gabriel had not liked the needle, but after six months it no longer frightened him. "There," said Dr. Berg, patting the tiny wound with a wad of cotton. "That will be the end of it." "That is all?" Gabriel said. "That is all. I think we could have stopped a month ago. Fm sure of it. With the animals, the rat, the effect has never left. In that regard Dr. Goddard has been most helpful." "There will be no more shots?" "No. Unless something unexpected occurs. But you must continue to come here every day. You must not act as though anything abnormal has occurred. We do not want Dr. Goddard to suspect, do we?" "No." "Fine. Splendid." Dr. Berg's teeth showed like the claws of a hawk. "But you must remember to tell me everything." Gabriel said that he understood. Getting to his feet, he nodded to the doctor and then went silently and swiftly to the door. He had forgotten to roll down his sleeve and the cloth rode high against the ghostly pale flesh of his shoulder. Dr. Berg said nothing as Gabriel went out. IF T he dirt path twisted jaggedly down the hill, splitting the high brown grass of summer into separate worlds. In darkness now, Gabriel stepped cautiously down the path, for it was seldom used and many thick vines lay draped across it. There was no light here, except for that afforded by the moon and stars. A wind came running down from the hills above. Brisk and cool, it grazed the bare flesh of his neck, whipped his hair and made him feel clean and alive. On the outside. Inside he wanted only to hurry, to run With the wind, for he would not feel secure until he reached home. But he was afraid to run. He did not want to risk tripping and perhaps cutting himself and seeing the open wound in the moonlight -- the wound that would not bleed. When he had come tonight he had intended to tell Dr. Berg that he wanted to quit. But he had guessed even before Dr. Berg had told him that it had been too late and the words had refused to pass his lips. Now it was over -- Dr. Berg had said so -- and he could no longer even tell Maria that he had quit. Had they caught Juan yet? He knew that they would, for Dr. Berg had been right -- there was no place to hide in these hills. Juan would have to go into a village and the police would be waiting there for him. Would he even have a chance to spend the money he hacT stolen? Gabriel hoped that he would. It would seem more fair that way. And who had been right? Dr. Berg or himself? Why had Juan killed the man. Dr. Tenkins? Because of what the installation done to Gabriel -- or merely because he wanted money and the freedom money could bring? Gabriel thought he knew the answer, but many times in the past he had thought he had known the answer to other questions and often he had been wrong. When he reached the first houses of the village he began to hurry, stepping quickly through the barren dusty streets. The houses at the edge of the village were shacks made of thin wood -- they banged and clattered loudly as the wind whipped the boards against each other. This was the worst part of the village. Gabriers home was not far from here, but it was not of this section. He had always been proud of this fact. He was a fisherman, as had been his father before him. Two summers ago, when there had not been enough fish, he had been so ashamed that he had stayed away from home for days at a time. It had been a similar time -- a slow time, though not so harsh -- when Dr. Berg had found him. I am the most trustworthy man in the village... Why had he said it? Because it was true? Perhaps it was true -- but why had he said it? It was not like him to boast so openly of his virtues... of GabriePs home. Light came through the open door, providing a background for the man, ihaking him a shadow. "No -- Gabriel -- no." The policeman put his hands against Gabriel's chest and held him away from the door. He could hear people moving and talking inside the house. "Juan?" he asked. "No." The policeman pushed him farther back. Gabriel knew this man. His name was Diego and as children they had gone together to the sea with Gabriel's father. But Diego had been too clumsy to make a good fisherman. "Maria?" Gabriel asked. "Is that him? Is that the man, Diego?" This was a voice from inside. It sounded unduly harsh in the stillness of the night. "Send him in. Don't stop him. Let him come ahead. He will have to know." She was in the bedroom. There were three rooms in the house. The main room was filled with men, many of them uniformed policeman. The kitchen was empty. Gabriel passed through both in order to reach the bedroom. Maria lay on the bed. A Wanket covered her. Gabriel knew the man who sat on the edge of the bed. It was the, doctor. "Please," Gabriel said. "Let me see her." The doctor shrugged and drew back the blanket. Gabriel looked at Maria. Her hands, crossed on her chest, were very white. Her neck and face were a sea of dark red. The knife lay on the table beside the bed. There was a puddle of dark red on thefloor below the table. Her face was expressionless. Maria clutched a crucifix. Gabriel noticed the way the dull medallion glimmered in the dim light, as though it possessed an illumination of its own. Then the doctor drew the blanket back over her head. "She didn't leave a note," he said. Gabriel shook his head and turned to leave. "Well," said the doctor. "Can't you say? Why did she do it?" Gabriel could not say. IF H e crossed toward the main business section of the village, a single street three blocks long of battered stores and small markets. The street smelled powerfully and constantly of rotting fish. The cantina squatted on a corner. The hour was late but the place never closed until the last customer had gone home. Gabriel walked across the wooden sidewalk and through the open door. Perez's brother-inlaw, Chalo, was working behind the bar. Gabriel told him that he wanted a beer. Reaching a big hand into the freezer below the bar, Chalo removed a bottle of beer. The tinted brown glass of the bottle sparkled with tiny clinging particles ot ice. Chalo opened the bottle and poured the contents carefully into a glass mug, tipping the mug slightly so that the foam would not spill. "So you are working late again tonight?" "Yes," Gabriel said. "And for this they pay you extra money." The mug was full. Taking it, Gabriel lapped at the foam. "Sometimes." "But you're not ill." "No," Gabriel said, lifting the mug from the bar. Turning, eyes darting, he searched for a suitable table. "But you look very pale," Chalo said. "Has Juan been captured?" Gabriel found a good place to sit: It was the last table on the floor and he squeezed between it and the wall, setting his beer down first. Then he drank. The top of the table was deeply scarred with various names and phrases, most in Spanish, a few in English. There, were also many dates without much meaning. Again Gabriel drank. Two people were seated at opposite ends of the bar. Both were gazing straight ahead into the mirror. One was either an American or an Englishman. He was drinking whisky and he was too old and shabbily dressed to be a tourist. His white hair was sprinkled across his head in moist clumps like melting snow. The other was merely an old woman, done for the night. She looked very tired. Gabriel had seen her many times before but he could not remember her name. He could not remember anything right now. Raising the mug to his lips, he drained most of the beer, then placed what was left at the center of the table. He fixed his hands one on each side of the mug. Then he began to jiray. He prayed first to the Son and then to the Father. Then he prayed to both. He said, Our Father Who Art in Heaven... and so on. He told the Father that his fear was not that of any man who had lived before. Even the Son had been allowed to die so that he might live again. He said that he knew that suicide was a sin of mortal consequence, but that the choice of accomplishing this act was no longer his to make. He asked simply for death. For release. For death to fulfill Christ's promise that he might live again. He was positive that God was hearing him now. Hadn't Dr. Goddard said that installation's work was the most important in the entire history of the human 'race? And wasn't he, Gabriel, still a man? He opened his mind and let God see what he now saw in all his moments of waking dreaming sleeping working walking crying. He showed the funnel to God, stretching endlessly ahead and 'behind, turning, spinning, shirling, ever the same, black and eternally swirling Gabriel and this smell of fish and these men, the doctors... The same and the same and the same. The eternal infinite sameness. ' His lips moved, mumbling. Then he stopped and closed his eyes, waiting. Nothing happened. His breath swept sweet, pure, fish-smelling air into his lungs. His throat was moist. The taste of beer lay mildly bitter oh his lips and tongue. His nostrils were clean and dry. Oh, Christ kill me... Nothing happened. He grabbed the mug by the handle and cracked it over the falling. He raised the jagged edge of the cracked mug, glass sharp as a razor, placed it against his throat, held it there, waiting, feeling death near, sensing its material presence. Chaol came around the bar, frightened. The old woman turned, disinterested. The Anglo did nothing. "I cannot die," Gabriel said softly. Juan and Maria, Maria and Juan, together, inseparable in death. And he alone was. alone. He dropped the glass and stepped senselessly over it, pushing the table away. He walked out to the empty swirling street, endless street, the same street, the street that would never change, could never kill. Gabriel went home and Maria was gone and nothing happened. # IF S ometimes I wonder what (which was all done in the mainhas happened to our perspecstream forty years ago.) Science tive. We used to smile at the old fan fiction is like, serious, man! tion Is a Way of Life. Except for a writers who seem to enjoy playing few way-out characters, we all with their concepts and having fun. knew that the concept was an overThey take time out to live in the statement. Science fiction was priworlds they create and to try to marily a hobby, even to the profesmake things hang together below sionals. It may have been the best the surface, where nobody usually hobby in the world and it may have looks. Like any good hobbyist paid off for a few writers, but we they are more concerned with how were in it for the fun, the gadget is built than with Lately, it seems, all that has whether it will pass casual inspecchanged. We're a blooming bunch tion. Every piece is made to the of serious artists and science fiction same scale and everything works, is relevant. It doesn't have to be They have fun with the creation of fun, or good, or even interesting -- a story, and try ta make sure the just relevant and significant. Its readers will sense the elements of purpose is to break taboos (which pleasure that went into it. were broken twenty years before in Harry Harrison's novel Tunnel the mainstream) and to provide an Through the Deeps (Putnam, outlet for experimental writing S.#S) is a good example of this. Nobody who took himself too seriously would have written the book in the first place and no writer who had lost the sense of fun in playing with all aspects of an idea could have made such an idea a pleasure to read, as Harrison has. , The basic plot is about as simple as possible. In a world where George Washington was executed after losing the war against the British, his # descendant takes on the job of building a transatlantic tunnel, hoping to improve the chances of the American Colonies' gaining Commonwealth status. There's a bit of character conflict, menace to fill out the story. But there's nothing that should be particularly new or exciting. The freshness obviously must come from the fact that Harrison has used some 'sort of cross-time vehicle to get into this alternate present of his. After reading the novel carefully I can only guess that he must have spent the last few years living there and absorbing the attitudes of the world. Surely this book was not written by a man who inhabits our space-time frame. Somewhen between # and # our real present accelerated its rate of change and sloughed off most of the established attitudes that our grandfathers had developed. Our literature shows this. particularly our more "pulpy" fiction. The eternal verities of literature have been turned upside down and the heroines who used to blush now rush into bed. But there has been a lag in such changes in the alternate present. Here women are stiH"virtuous and Love is Important. Men are clearly men, filled with the joy of honest work, happy to be what they are. Honor exists and is taken for granted. What Harrison has obviously done is to give us a story written for that alternate present. And it is so well done that I can't point to any specific instance as illustrative, because the entire book is an illustration of different attitudes in a different world. This story would be accepted without any surprise in that world. It might even be a piece of science fiction written in their # about their #. The technology is also different from ours. Oh, the people have atomic power, of course, but they also have the inconsistencies that always show up in a real technology -- but not the same inconsistencies that are found in our present. Reading Harrison's book I found myself nostalgic for # -- the alternate #, that is. The world presented is a real -- and generally a very good -- one. It's nice to know that if anything goes as wrong where we live -- as it may -- there IF will still be the alternate present to carry on. Because, of course, Harrison's is a real world -- perhaps more real than ours -- as must be obvious to anyone who reads the book. F )R an example of what can be done by a man who really knows how to ride a hobby we can turn to Philip Jose Farmer, whose Tarzan Alive (Doubleday, #) is like no other book ever created. Farmer has opened a wholly new field of research -- one where the absence of data forms no obstacle to the diligent searcher. I've always considered Farmer to be the ultimate hobbyist of our field and have usually found myself thoroughly delighted by the results of his steadfast pursuit of his numerous interests. But here is the first example of what he can do when he throws off all normal limitations and gives himself up all the way, in every way, to the completion of his appointed zwounds. In brief, it is his discovery that the man whom the world knows as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, (or more familiarly, Tarzan of the Apes), is very much alive. While the possibility was mentioned by Clayton's former biographer and popularizer, nobody but Farmer seems to have accepted the hints in Tarzan and the Foreign Legion as the simple facts they must now be recognized to be. Farmer has followed these and other clues to the discovery of the true identity of the man, after which he was able to obtain a brief but illuminating interview with Clayton. Following this, of course, there could no longer be any doubt of the reality of the human being so thinly disguised in the accounts of E. R. Burroughs. For a normal researcher pursuing routine studies, discovering the simple truth might have been enough. But as a true hobbyist Farmer was unable to rest upon such scant laurels. He pursued his researches into the true life of Clayton and was able to straighten out the tangled web of confusion Burroughs had introduced to conceal certain facts. He found, for instance, that the confusing matter of Tarzan's having a grown son after only a few years of marriage was the result of confusion involving the real son and the boy adopted by the Claytons. A whole section of the book attempts -- with obvious success -- to untangle the fictional confusion from the facts. A few puzzling questions remain, of course, as Farmer admits. But in general I find my own theories in some cases to be confirmed, so I can naturally attest to the accuracy of Farmer penetrating analysis. But the value Of the book goes far beyond providing an accurate biography of Clayton. The socalled apeman was, after all, only one of a seeming horde of superior characters whose lives deeply affected the pleasure and education of the generation or more of readers. Farmer has discovered the link that unites the "Clayton" family with such famous names as Drummond, Holmes and Wentworth. I am particularly indebted for the information given on the life of Richard Wentworth, since many aspects of his distinguished career have long bafHed me and no other researcher has done any serious study of this important part of our history. Though distinguished by a liveliness of tone and occasional flashes of welcome humor, this volume is a completely scholarly work. Addenda are provided for those who wish to examine Farmer's evidence in more detail. There is a chronology, a bibliography and a most welcome and complete index. For those who have difficulty in keeping the textual matter in clear perspective, there is also a simplified geneological chart. I trust that copies of this book will survive for at least several hundred years. I like to think of the delight of some future scholar who may come upon this unique work and whose life may be enlarged by the rich treasure within. The effects upon posterity should exceed those the book may have upon its current readers. And to anyone who ever enjoyed the fictional exploits of Tarzan all I can say is: Don't be put off by anything in this review -- the book is a lovely one indeed and pure joy to read! D onald a. wollheim has founded his own line of Books. He plans to issue four volumes a month, all science fiction. That's a large program, but his long experience at Ace makes the venture far more reasonable than it first seems. The first books are all attractive, with far better than average cover art. All are currently priced at # each. Joseph Green's The Mind Behind The Eye involves giant aliens, deliberately created human superman mutants and something of the Trojan horse bit. The superman we follow winds up inside the head of a living but nonsentient giant alien where he is plagued by fear of infertility and by the reaction of a fellow worker -- all while trying to make the giant react normally within the giant society. Some of the book is fascinating reading, but too many ideas run rampant in it. Green has used the IF old kitchen-sink recipe -- everything goes in, including the sink. The reader is bombarded with too many ideas without being given enough time to fit in any of them properly. And the end of the grand confusion requires a bit too much coincidence to be convincing. The Day Star, by Mark S. Geston is either a simple piece of fantasy or science fiction -- I don't know where to put it. The end of the city-builder evolution has tried to impose an end to chaos on some hauntingly alien cosmos -- and chaos has struck back, making all the history of that cosmos a barren waste, except for dull cities here and there. Men from the last of the legendary cities sail through time and space to recover the wondrous material that almost trapped chaos. A boy from an early age sets out with a ghostly "grandfather" to seek his way to the fabled city. The novel is the account of the trip and its quiet aftermath. I haven't liked Geston's previous stories. But this one has a strange compulsion. Treatment and incident are beautifully adjusted to the story: It is sort of a dream sequence, with the language and poetry of dreams superimposed. I enjoyed the tale and also the curious afterglow it left. The book not only has a cover by George Barr, incidentally, but several excellent inside illustrations. I'lp old-fashioned enough to like good illustrations in a book. One of the worst titles I've come across yet is The Tar-Aiym Krang, by Alan Dean Foster (Ballantine, # i). With that staring me in the face, I kept passing over the book whenever I searched for one to read. But you can't judge a book by either the cover or the title, it seems. The novel begins with a beggar boy On a trading world. He becomes involved with a bunch of bigtime traders and researchers, who are looking for the last, lost and greatest artifact of a great prehuman race. The artifaa turns out to be still operable -- or would be, if anyone could communicate with it. And perhaps you can guess the rest. No element in the story is very original. Yet each is well done and the whole adds up to a good adventure, with quite a bit of richness of texture, interesting handling of characters and their inter-relationships. Recommended. For those who like adventure with an excellent problem and a bit son's Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock have been issued together in a single volume by Lancer Books, at SI. #. (Please turn to page I # ) (Conclusion) The planet was inimical to life, yet endlessly exploring his world's most elusive offering -- survival. A young assisted him following his hunt for knowledge in the "valley of warm an artifact from the planet's past that might hold the key to its future. Lecupied the planet in its youth, built great cities -- what had been their secret? itself at the cellular level of injuries and ward off the radioactive toxicity of the planet. His great lungs could extract individual particles of air from the poisonous atmosphere and Vll my joy with the satellite in opposition to the sun, rising in the cold, dark valleys forming shadows on its face. I can reach out and touch its face, not with my mind, as the Far Seers do, but with my imagination, as dreamers do.  dream and my dreams are turning true; welded to my flesh is Beautiful Wings, whose body, even in flight, nourstore them for indefinite periods. But he had to be rescued on his homeward whose body chemistry enabled her to utilize the planet's magnetic field to counteract its gravity for wingless flight. meeting led to their mating -- and to could extend his healing powers to her and share his air and energies with her. This development became vitally important when he was sentenced to death for having illegally dug in the soil of the warm-water valley for his precious artifact. could reach the farthest stars and whose mind held all wisdom. Fueled by eastern sea. ishes that which we have made together. I share with her the elation of freedom from the pull of the planet. Through her mind I see the delicate design of the magnetic field and with my own force coupled with hers, for we are one, I push against it, use its power to send our bodies flying. The bright gleaming satellite comes through space to meet us, the clouds roil darkly beneath us and the planet turns and swims in its circle of the sun. I feel myself giving of my surplus substance to power our soaring.  wonder at it. The limits of the imagination know no bounds and I speak with her, telling her of the satisfaction  have known in my wanderings. She shares with me that curiosity which, to my knowledge, has in the past been limited to those of my kind. We are not dismayed by the length of the passage, but use it to see with our eyes the far, bright spots the Far Seers tell us are other suns like ours. The basic laws of nature must work even there -- planets swim and nature peoples those planets with life, for life is the be all and end all. I hail you, all you far-flung Power Givers and Healers and all your loves. May your unions produce a balance. May all of you -- where the far suns glitter dimly your blendings all-powerful. For  know the goodness of life and share your joy as I invite you to share mine.  see flamboyant pictures of hope. I see the survival factor waxing. I see understanding. I see love.  see the race rising to overcome the hardships of our ancient the storms to allow the toxicity to settle into the sink holes, leaving the planet to us. Are we at the mercy of the planet? No. For if we merely took what was offered, we would die gasping in the clouds of death. The books of the learned thinkers tell us (and why that rather dim, antique word picture there -- what is a book? that we are beloved of nature and yet she does her best, in every way, at every moment of the sun circle, to kill us. Nature is the sacred force and is therefore not to be questioned. Tampering is not allowed. Witness my own problems involving an ancient law that says one must not dig in the softness or the hardness of the soil lest the poisons of death overtake one. But I, Rack the Healer, have, in effect, dug. I have wetted my hands in the products of the soft earth, pushing my fingers into the muck of a new streambed with impunity. You, out there, are you bound by tradition? Are your Far Seers blind to new knowledge? drive us, using the mind force of Beautiful Wings, to catch that swimming world out there, that bright, dark-shadowed planet, our satellite, and speak with my pictures to the men there. With my eyes  see it and think, ah, how clear, how bright. How clean the air. Is it not as old, not as wasted, not as soiled as our world? Not, I think, for otherwise it would glow with the poison yellows and purples rather than with the clarity of the hot water that gushes from the rocks in the valley I found beyond the river. Yes,  am strong, full of subIF stance. Yet as we soar I feel the cold seep through my scdes and slow my blood and my love shivers against me and we drop to the upper thickness of the clouds to warm ourselves with the heat of the sun caught there, captured under that thick blanket. There we live on my stored air, finding not even a particle of free air for our lungs as our gills expel the gases without allowing a breath to pass. Down here is reality. Here is my world, her world -- the world that belongs equally' to all of us. Here is the reality that binds us within our scales and minds. Here our outer lids close and we are in darkness, for the tender membranes of our inner lids are scalded by the harshness of it. Here we soar on instinct alone, guided by the Healer s sense of direction, by the ability of my love to measure distances with accuracy -- water below, clouds around us, the bright sky hidden. On the surface, skimming slowly, seeking, we find pockets of breathable air and I replenish, but the storms are hidden and the storms that are abating in my homeland behind us rage still on the sea and the heavy waters heave, drenching our feet. Here is cruel nature -- blasphemous thought, but true. Outside the protective community of my birth, I, Rack the Healer, outlaw, can think such thoughts yet I have to hide them, for my love is not as cynical as I. The water of the sea is warm and I remember the feel of it on my scales as I dive. I remember the feel of the slick, pulpy plants in my fingers as  contribute to the welfare of the race by gathering the food source. It is said that the people of the eastern lands eat of the flesh of the small, armored animals that crawl in the beds of slime source. But our Far Seers call them poison. Does this not speak of the fallibility of the law-givers?  have not seen the proof but it is recorded. In the same sea that washes the shores of both my homeland and the eastern lands, would the small, armored animals be poison for some and food for others? I know only that there is much to learn and I, Rack the Healer, intend to stretch my mind until  feel it strain within its scales. For I have known the joy of union. Only favored ones are allowed more than an experience. I have known the joy and I think -- although I will check with the store of knowledge in the minds of the eastern Keepers -- that I am unique in that aspect, of joining my body totally with a Power Giver, her blood my blood, her organs open to my healing powers. True, I may be suffering from excess pride, but can such a one think seriously about resigning himself to tradition, when such small innovations open such broad vistas of possibility? We hunger. We suck the good broth from my pack and it refreshes us. My cells glow, grow, engorge themselves and  feel my strength flowing through my welded tongue into her body and, to please me, she allows us to drop from fearful heights, like stones dropped from the escarpment, falling, falling, until, with a long, sweeping rise, we soar again and  feel the blood drain into my legs and am giddy with delight and we laugh and sweep in long swoops through the dawning sky as the rising sun brightens the low clouds and sends its glow to greet us. Around us is our world. We are not totally free, for we are dependent on the broth. For that we are dependent on the Far Seers who have tamed the hairy, many-legged Webber, who have bred the deadly Juicers to giant size and who milk them and combine the sticky material exuded by the Webbers with the fiery fluid of the Juicers to form vats of the Material to hold the broth. We are not independent, for nature has decreed that it takes the three mobile forms to provide food and shelter -- Far Seers, Healers, Power Givers, working together. The particular mental talents of the Far Seers blend the products of the Webbers and the Juicers, mold the Material, start the process of breakdown in the pulpy slimesource plants that results, with power from the Power Givers, in our food. And we, the Healers, gather the slime source. So we are dependent on one another. My love and  must become a part of a community in the eastern lands which, the senses of Beautiful Wings tell us, are lying ahead where the clouds billow high. But there will be free times. Then we will fly, our packs with us, to see the unseen lands, to explore the vast empty spaces, to walk the barren rocks of the planet. For we have at least the freedom of unlimited flight. I find, after that long, long distance, that  am scarcely hurt, that my resources are almost totally intact. With my metabolism and her ability to climb the lines of force radiated from the planet we could truly soar all the way off this dying orb and seek our brothers on the far worlds. Ah, you see, I am Rack the Healer, dreamer. the Far Seer, making a routine check of his place, noted the burden of the soaring Power Giver -- a healthy young Healer with an almost empty pack -- and mused. He was old. Named for his place, that ancient, eroded range against which the sea rolled on the west, he had lived too many sun circles to be amazed by the willful waste of the Power Giver's substance. The line of flight traced back to the sea and that meant only one thing, a joy flight, for no one wanting to get IF from one place to the other would be traveling that roufe. Weathered Mountain was more concerned that the new beginning was not bringing the expected rise in the survival factor. He was engaged in measuring the output of food and was grumpily becoming convinced that short rations were in the offing, since the outsidr conditions did not allow the Healers a full day's work in the sea. He, of course, would be as short in his rations as anyone -- it was the nature of things -- and at his age even minor discomforts displeased him. He paid no more attention to the soaring Power Giver and her burden until his senses, swinging out automatically, sensed that they were lowering into his place. He checked identity idly -- then rose quickly, moving with a spring in his legs which he had thought was long since gone, for what he saw pushed survival factors and food production into the back of his old mind and filled him with a youthful excitement. "Welcome, welcome, welcome," he sent. "Welcome to my place and welcome to my air and my broth and my meat." Rack sent thanks and said privately, "This place is as good as any." Beautiful Wings agreed, although she was a bit awed by the high-piled rocky bones of the ancient mountain range. People, they found, were the same their world over. Weathered Mountain the Far Seer was no different from his counterparts in their homeland. And his establishment, with one noticeable difference, was much like those at home. However, gleaming nuggets of hard material in a. display case caught Rack's eye and interest. "We do, indeed, come from across the sea," he absently answered Weathered Mountain's query regarding the length of his journey. "Then your Power Giver must have rest. There is a vacant chamber, my prime Keeper having unfortunately died during the winter." "She is young and strong," Rack said, "and relatively unharmed. She prefers to stay with me." "As you wish," Weathered Mountain said, seating himself. The excitement had begun to make his old limbs tremble. "Have you then developed new techniques for soaring?" Rack pondered the question. In this strange land, where people were said to eat the flesh of sea animals, he was at a disadvantage. He was not yet ready to reveal the amazing thing that had happened between him and Beautiful Wings. "Only a long period of rest and heavy feeding and breathing in advance," he said. "And, as I said, she is unusually strong for a Power Giver." Weathered Mountain was not content with the answer, but there were larger questions. In his lifetime no one had crossed thesea. The last crossing, made in the lifetime of his grandfather, had been for a comparison of survival factors and a trade in air readings which had indicated that conditions were much the same on both sides of the wide waters and that the same deadly air ipoved over all lands. 'The purpose of your trip, then," he sent politely, "if you are prepared to discuss it with such a one?" "We are honored, indeed, to be greeted by one of such accumulated wisdom," Rack said, "for I detect the presence of a double picture of the mind of a Keeper." "It is true that I pride myself on my interest in learning," said Weathered Mountain, "but you flatter me." He smiled. "The new Keeper is young and has been newly filled with the store of minute knowledge formerly kept in the mind of the old one who, sadly, died. However, during the process of transferral, I noted that we have the complete records of the last visit from across the sea, if you are interested." "In time, perhaps," Rack said, raising the Far S#er's curiosity to a feverish level. "But it is not observation of nature -- at least not in the form of survival factors and air readings -- that has brought us. I confront you with a new piece of information -- at least new to our land. It is our wish to compare -- to discover if any knowledge of a comparable nature is available in the lands of the east." B eautiful wings cast a look at him, for he had not discussed his plans with her. She, with the non-inventive mind of a Power Giver, had envisioned Rack applying for a position in the area of the Far Seer for both of them. "Ah," sent Weathered Mountain in expectancy. "Perhaps it would be best," Rack said, "for you to step into -- a given and exact location in my mind." "If you permit." "Enter." He blocked in the area he wanted the old man to examine, felt the mind tendrils of the Far Seer. He waited. The exact impressions, the memory, the feel, the weight, the texture, the taint of wet, soft earth, weje there as the Far Seer examined Rack's stored memory of the odd material from the valley of the hot waters. Rack waited, slightly nervous. A bit of his fear must have leaked, for the Old Far Seer sent amusement. "Your law-givers still abide by that hoary old taboo?" Rack felt relief. "I am pleased to find that the wise Far Seers of the east value knowledge above tradition." "Do you see these?" Weathered Mountain asked, indicating his IF precious collection oF hard-material nuggets. "I think there is a connection between the hard materials and the Old Ones," Rack said. "Do you find that foolish?" A mental shrug. "One does not fully understand. I wish you had brought the new thing." "Its value, of course, prevented that." "Yes." A blankness came as the Far Seer withdrew for contempla' tion. When he sent again he asked questions. Rack, freed of the fear of punishment, answered, telling of the methods used to unearth the object. "It is said by some that the Old Ones built with stone," Weathered Mountain remarked. A wave of excitement sent Rack's mind speculating. "There is evidence?" "Suspicion. Guessing. Curious formations have been found." "And in your lands you have discovered no object made of the curious material?" "None, We do, of course, value the hard materials for their beauty, if not for their usefulness. There is a certain competition for their possession." "And do they come from the subsurface?" Rack asked. "No Healer can withstand the low areas," Weathered Mountain said. "But there are areas -- such as the valley of the hot waterswhere digging is possible?" "It is said." Amusement. "When I am offered a hard-material nugget in exchange for a certain favor, such as a change of duty time or an extra ration of the Material, I do not question the Healer too closely." "And your knowledge of the Old Ones?" "It is not one of my interest areas, but there are some who are as fascinated with the Old Ones as you. I can put you in contact with them. Is this, then, this pursuit of the old myths, your sole reason for journeying across the sea?" "Is not knowledge worthy of the pursuit?" Rack asked. Weathered Mountain, vaguely disappointed, but still stimulated by the contact, said, "My area is the area of interest of all Far Seers -- life and the maintenance thereof. Would the sur knowledge that your odd object is the work of the Old Ones help those who have left their establishments in the low lands of the interior for lack of air?" "My question, if answered, might have bearing," Rack said. "I am interested in knowing if life has always been at the mercy of nature or -- and this is not meant to be blasphemy -- " "Blasphemy is an outdated concept," Weathered Mountain sent, "at least to one as old as I." "Could the Old Ones have known more than we credit them with? Did they in any way control the forces of nature?" was silent. After a long pause he spoke. "I find that I am, after all, not past the ability to be shocked. Your question presents, indeed, a startling concept. Nature, my young Healer, is nature. How the movements of the air? As long as the planet spins, there will be movements of the air. Moreover, the calculations of Wide River the Far Seer, in a moment of pure idleness, prove that if the air were stilled, allowed to settle, only the peaks of the highest mountains would extend above the heavy gases." "I think in smaller pictures," Rack said. "If the Old Ones used the hard materials, for what did they Use them? Would the discovery of such information be of more than passing interest to us? Is the object I found in the valley of the hot waters something left by the Old Ones? Or has it, as my Far Seers think, fallen from the vastness of the space outside? And, if so, if it is a flying, falling, alien object, is it still not amazing? For if it came from one of the worlds out there -- was it not crafted by men like us? I see no conflict in either theory, for both contain much that should interest our minds. Life exists, according to our best thinking, on all worlds. Why would nature provide a world if not to support life?" "Had I not seen the death of a Keeper just days ago I could be more in sympathy, with your theory," Weather Mountain said. "And since you seem to be of a strong, inquiring mind, I will add something that has not been revealed to any mind other than a Far Seer's. It is the prediction of our combined minds, after a vast picture of measurements and agonizing analysis, that life on this planet will cease to exist, save for the inert plants of the poison sink holes, in a frighteningly short period of sun circles, a period well within the range of the mind of a Healer. Does this shock you?" Rack felt weak. He seized Beautiful Wings' hand and felt her tremble. Such a thought, the extinction of all life, was unbearable. "As do your Far Seers," Weathered Mountain said, "we measure the growth of the Breathers in the southern seas. We read the air and the poisons therein. What we read discourages us. We read a steady decline in the quantity of good air. We read lower and lower survival factors. We measure the emanations of the sun and the movements of the air. We find little to indicate hope." "Should this be true," Rack said, "then there is ever more reason for inquiry." He was tempted to tell the Far Seer that IF something new had come to him, the ability to blend with Beautiful Wings' flesh and to heal. "For who knows where inquiry might lead?" was tired. He longed for the comfort of his rack with the new Keeper beside him, soft and warm. At first he had hoped that the unusual journey across the sea had brought new information, perhaps a good survival factor reading to indicate that somehow, against all logic, the planet was starting a new cycle of replenishing itself. Instead he had been subjected to the wild speculations of the mind of a Healer, had been given only one piece of new information of doubtful use. it was true that the knowledge of a strange, unexplained object was not in any way going to put clean air over the abandoned low lands of the interior. The existence of the object would not save one life. "I rest," he sent. "You are welcome to use my air and drink of my broth. You are free to use. the stored knowledge in the mind of my Keeper." At the doorway he paused. "In spite of the superb condition of your Power Giver the journey back to your homeland will, of course, be impossible. You must therefore choose your community. You will be welcome in mine. We can always use a strong Healer and a young Power Giver. I note your attachment and will assign your periods of free time so that you may be together. Take your pick of the unused establishments in my place and be part of us if you choose." Rack, too, knew disappointment. He was not sure what he was seeking, but the Far Seer of the mountains had added little to his store of knowledge beyond a doubtful picture of the Old Ones building with stone. That would bear investigation during his First free period. He had also been given other food for thought -- the pessimistic prediction of death for all. It was small consolation that the prediction would allow him his full lifespan, him and his Power Giver and their offspring. But what lay ahead for his grandchild, should Beautiful Wings give birth to a Healer or a Power Giver? Desflh? The end of life on the entire planet? That he would not accept. Soaring low, he and Beautiful Wings examined unused establishments, selected a spot on the side of a craggy, bone-bare mountain where updrafts brought occasional breaths of good air. There they rested, blended minds, installed the new colony of Breathers from the scant reserves of Weathered Mountain's place. To warrant the kindness they worked, Beautiful Wings powering a vat of brewing broth. Rack diving into the murky, heavy sea to pluck slime source. Conditions improved slightly, giving the lie to Weathered Mountain's dire prophecy of doom. Life was good. While working. Rack came to know his fellow workers. He compared knowledge and was told -- to his mounting excitement -- of the methods used by eastern Healers to collect the hard material. In safe spots, scattered and always rare, they actually used tools fashioned of the "Material to turn the soil and find the telltale streaks of waste that indicated the possible presence of a nugget. He was astounded to find that the hard materials, once the surface of the soil was scratched, seemed to be relatively plentiful and, although his pride in the ownership of three nuggets -- two back in his establishment and out of reach, one mounted on Beautiful Wings' breast -- was damaged, his hope was not. While visiting the establishment of a fellow Healer he saw a nugget of amazing size and shape. One flat, gleaming side reflected his image. It was a treasure -- a crafted object, obviously, rather than an actual nugget. Astounding! More convinced that ever that the Old Ones had been more than a shiftless race of savages living on the fat of a young planet, he approached his first free period with anticipation. IX B eautiful wings' beiiy began to stretch with the life inside it. New scales sprang up to cover the expanded area of flesh. They would molt and fall after the birth returned her to normal size. After working through the new beginning and into the summer, she and Rack found stable warm air for their free period and, using their technique for soaring on Rack's strength, they explored. They found much vast, uninhabited emptiness. As in their homeland, most of the terrain was bare. Low spots stank with rank growth. Broad, thick-watered rivers crisscrossed the land. Beside them, digging without fear. Rack found discoloration and indication of the past existence of much hard material. When their supplies were used up they soared back to the establishment, enriched with three tiny nuggets of the strange stuff. There they refreshed, breathed, ate. Rack's hand could feel the life in the body of Beautiful Wings. The swelling of her belly never ceased to fill him with a proud joy. In the time of the end of summer storms he sought the mind of Weathered Mountain's Keeper, Beautiful Wings was confined to the establishment, her time nearing. Of most interest to Rack was the store of knowledge transferred from the older Keeper, often chaoticaly misfiled. Ancestral records were mixed with fragments of ancient picture poetry, plapet movements with speculation on the ancient thoughts of the Far Seers, IF broth inventories with the familiar Book of Rose the Healer. Rack sorted through the misfiled records, musing over the beautiful pictures of the scant works of poetic Healers, passing the dry, technical records of the Far  ers, seeking something, something. It was not true, he found, that the people of the east were unresponsive to duty. Once, long ago. Red Earth had indicated -- or had it been one of Rack's teachers? -- that the eastern civilization was based on the bartering of hard material nuggets in exchange for services. The facts were different. The easterners valued the hard material for itself as a subject of wonder and as a source of beauty. But it was also true that to exchange favors for a nugget was not unknown. The mind of the Keeper held an exact record of each exchange made by Weathered Mountain. In addition Rack found an analysis of different types of hard material and this interested him. Apart from this information he learned nothing new as the birth time neared and he abandoned his. visits to the Keeper to tend Beautiful Wings.  xV. her he watched in awe. Thus did nature work. Soon he would know his child. Healer? Far Seer? Keeper? Power Giver? He hoped for the lasta daughter with the beauty of his love, to be named Many Pleasures in honor of the union in the far north of his homeland. Beautiful Wings asked nature -- in a soft, pleased picture -- for a true Healer. She writhed now, feeling the early pain. Rack, his hands on her belly, saw the miracle of birth flowering, the red, beautiful tint reminding him of the joining. Scales flowered, molted. "Come, Many Pleasures," Rack sent to the unresponsive, tiny mind. "It is a pleasant world and it will be yours." Beautiful Wings knew instinctively what do do. Her body did that for which it was designed, creating new life. Her lower portions mottled ruby red, molted, spread to reveal a soft fleshy area. The birth began with a new day's dawning. A tiny head emerged, encased in a fleshy sack, and a soft, scaleless body followed. It wiggled with life and reeked with the products of birth until Rack, trying to hide his disappointment, cleaned his Keeper daughter and gave her to her mother to suckle at the flowering breast bulges. Nature's balance was maintained. Ungovernable forces decreed the type of the child, and nature obviously needed another Keeper. And their life would not be filled with a growing Power Giver or a curious wild young Healer. "Wc will have each other," Beautiful Wings sent. Rack berated himself for letting his sadness show. He found some joy in watching the infant suckle the rich juices of her mother's body, but he could not help but think of the fate of the new one, to be kept by a Far Seer, used for his pleasure. Ah, but she, too, would know pleasure. Her small mind would not go forward, would stay much as it was, knowing sensation, knowing hunger and discomfort and comfort and good air. Protected inside an inpregnable establishment, she would live a long, happy life. And in living she would contribute -- for what was civilization but an accumulation of knowledge and experience? Without Keepers, civilization would be dependent on frailer memories and knowledge would perish. "We will have each other," Rack agreed and sent pictures of soaring, traveling. The ice of the far south, the fire of the south lands, the Helds of the Breathers in the southern sea. They would see all. "And -- " She sent a devastatingly strong picture, full of sadness and nostalgia. The establishment where they had known their initial bliss, then the far north and the repetition. "Do you miss it so?" he asked. "I shouldn't. It isn't logical." She smiled as the infant had its HU and slept. "I will take you home," he said. She sent alarm. "Surely they will listen to reason," he said. "Here we dig and the promised death does not come. Too, Red Earth should be apprised of the predictions of the eastern Far Seers, the dire warnings of all-encompassing death." "f fear for you," she said. "We have," he told her, "unlimited soaring ability. We could flee to the satellite itself, given enough broth and air to carry us through cold space." "Silly." She giggled. "We can in any case fly away again if they are not responsive." He longed for his homeland. He would take her to the valley of the hot waters. There they would dig and unearth what they could -- perhaps, something that would pull together his confused thoughts. When the infant Keeper was able to take broth she was delivered to the establishment of a youthful Far Seer, who had not as yet been provided with a Keeper. She would, they were assured, be given the best of treatment. The Far Seer's tender handling of the baby in their presence comforted them. Rack tried not to think of her future, of her body being used by the Far Seer. He thought instead of the Book of Rack the Healer, the work he had planted in the scarcely formed storage space of her brain. Some day a curious Healer would find it there, read the IF pictures and know him. There he had left all his thoughts, all his questions, all his discoveries. He knew no regret when he and Beautiful Wings soared into the clean, thin air above the early winter clouds. Nature provided and nature made a balance. Behind them was a baby, product of their miraculous union -- a baby without a name who had ceased to be theirs when she took her first meal of broth. Ahead was home. X world. It was the first thing he sensed after an uneventful soar across the sea. In a land where the barren rocks were broken by the gleaming, transparent domes of establishments were new blank spaces. The Area of Responsibility of Red Earth the Far er, home to Rack and Beautiful Wings, was familiar to them in physical contour and in the intangible knowledge of its scattered life. As they soared past the coastal sands they found a blank. Growing Tree the Far Seer, Cp-Responsor of Red Earth, was gone. It was as if, on a large board studded with lights, a light had gone off. And, as they continued toward the interior other empty establishments lent a pall of gloom to their homecoming. The end-of-sun-circle storms had started moving earlier than ever before and were more severe, more extensive. It was fortunate. Rack felt, that soaring on his power was less debilitating than moving on the surface. The relatively small amount of his reserves consumed by the flight left him plenty for the lowering and the hovering over Red Earth's establishment. He sent down his mind, encountered the heat of pleasure below. Red Earth was with his Keeper. Mouth to mouth with Beautiful Wings, Rack waited. When it was time he sent, "I am Rack the Healer." He was pleased to received a quick flush of pleasure from Red Earth, but the pleasure was soon damped by surprise, questioning, a heavy sense of duty. Rack answered, "No, I am not dead. Nor is Beautiful Wing." "You have come back, then, to submit to the judgment of the law-givers?" Rack sent the strongest anger and contempt he could muster. "Growing Tree the Far Seer is dead before his time. Gone are Strong Swimmer the Healer, Quick Soar the Power Giver and others in the eastern marches of the area. The storms are early and the Breathers labor in the establishments. At such a time will you be bound by your petty traditions?" "It is all heavy on my mind," Red Earth admitted. "Your reason for returning, then." message of gl # om from the Far Seers of the east" Rack said. "Would you hear in peace?" "In peace," Red Earth said. "Welcome." aura of sadness hung over Red Earth's establishment. The air was pure and good and Rack used it sparingly. Beautiful Wings was allowed more freedom of breath, since Red Earth was observing the rules of privacy and had not scanned their minds to discover the secret of her apparent good condition after a long soar. "I have many questions," Red Earth said. "But first -- the message." It Was delivered. Red Earth received it with no show of emotion. After a long time he sighed, expelling his air. "We have read the same. But I would like to confirm the conditions in the breeding grounds of the Breathers." He sighed again. "I hesitate, however, to consume the" substance of a Power Giver and I must admit I cringe at the thought of going into the outside under storm conditions." "There is a way," Rack said. He was not sure that what he had in mind would work, but the situation was serious enough to warrant any experiment. The mind of a Far Seer would be required to measure the huge but decreasing picture of Breathers in their broad field of surface slime in the southern sea. "I ask your indulgence to break one of the rules of privacy." "In what cause?" Red Earth asked. "Life," he said simply. "A potent argument. You may act." Rack walked to stand behind the Far Seer, bent quickly and pressed his small tongue on the bare flesh of the Far Seer's domed head. He did his magic and his flesh melted into the flesh of the Far Seer. Red Earth's mind registered high surprise, but also a quickness of mental grasp that awed Rack. "Now I bnderstand," Red Earth said excitedly. But something was not right with the Far Seer -- it made Rack feel uncomfortable and, even as he continued the merge, began to make repairs on the body of Red Earth. Red Earth was thinking something below the readable level. It was growing stronger, stronger and then it burst out as it became obvious to Red Earth that the Healer's powers were being extended into the Far HaSrNew One," Red Earth said. "Hail, New One." "No," Rack said, feeling a flush of embarrassment. "I am Rack the Healer." The process continued, cell by cell, fiber by fiber, organ by organ. And a sense of excitement spread from the agitated Far Seer IF into Rack's mind, into the mind of Beautiful Wings. He, Red Earth, in his dreams, had expected the New One to be a completely new life form, as different from the people as the first Healer had been from the Old Ones. Nature, always guileful, had sent the New One in a common form -- but Red Earth was capable of understanding whtt had happened. Questions, answers, a growing excitement. Beautiful Wings was thinking only that Rack's new status was fortunate -- now there could be no further question of his being punished for past crimes. When Rack finished he left the Far Seer in better health than Red Earth had enjoyed since his youth. She could no longer feel seriously threatened by the predictions of the Far Seers. Her world was good. She had Rack and a rare, lasting love. Their position was secure. They were home. Red Earth looked to the future and was brought up short when he learned from Rack that Beautiful Wings had given birth to a child. "A Keeper," Rack told him. "She was left in the care of a young Far Seer of the east." "No, no, that cannot be," Red: Earth said, forgetting himself and searching the mind of Beautiful Wings for confirmation. Then he insisted that nature would not deliver a New One and then let him be wasted in death without having passed on his abilities. "Perhaps," he mused, "the Keeper is also different." "She seemed as all Keepers," Rack said. "You will breed again, then," Red Earth said. "Perhaps," Rack agreed. "The experience was a repeated one." "Yes, you will breed again," Red Earth continued, excited once more. "When you tint we will select the most suitable mate."'We felt the flare of jealousy from Beautiful Wings, sent soothing things, said, "Perhaps it will be you, since your attachment is strong.' hopes. To demonstrate his ability. Rack, after eating hungrily, breathing deeply to rebuild, merg with Red Earth's Keeper, planting his healing technique into her storage banks as he felt her blood, her body, her organs. Then it was time for serious talk. Rack and Beautiful Wings, with Red Earth feeding the data to his Keeper, told of their flight to the east, sent the pictures in detail of all their activities there. Thus was history served, for it was the duty of all to record knowledge. In return Rack was briefed on conditions at home and they were discouraging. The discussion returned to Rack's statement that something could be done to allow Red Earth to measure the Breathers in their home waters. At first Red Earth was skeptical, but after a demonstration -- during which Beautiful Wings merged with Rack, encompassed both Rack and Red Earth in her field of power and lifted them from the floor to hold them effortlessly -- he was convinced. A strange grouping emerged a short time later fro,m the roiling clouds into the thin, upper air. Face to face, merged, were Rack and Beautiful Wings. Back to back with Rack, Red Earth the Far Seer was making a rare soar, taking it all in, his mind seeing all, feeling the far suns, contacting the face of the satellite, measuring the scant spray of air particles in the vast heights. He let his pleasure flow and it was joined to the ever fresh pleasure of Beautiful Wings and Rack, who had soared higher and longer than any Healer and Power Giver in history. Rack laughed, seeing the bright satellite in the sky, playfully repeating his boast that with his vitality and the power of Beautiful Wings, he could send them all soaring there. But he was sobered when Red Earth, using the distance around the planet as a base, sent a picture and a calculation of the energies involved. Then pleasure was put aside, for the southern sea was below. They descended through the dense clouds to find only minimum conditions at the surface. Red Earth directed the flight of the Power Giver, crossing the area again and again, his mind storing pictures so vast that they would not stick in Rack's mind. It was necessary, since the air was scarce and the hard projectiles plentiful, to break his merge with Beautiful Wings, turn and heal Red Earth. When he had finished and she accepted him back he was shocked to see how quickly the heavy burden had sapped her. He felt himself flow out, giving gladly and feeling a tenderness that made Red Earth squirm with discomfort. "You arc never to soar without me," Rack told her sternly. ing, once the party was safely back in the Far Seer's establishment, Red Earth went into rapport with his Keeper. For a long period he compared his new pictures with others, drawing occasionally on the minds of his fellow Far Srs and the storage banks of their Keepers. Rack and Beautiful Wings left him to his labors. Home for Rack and Beautiful Wings was a dome of transparency, for Rack liked to see the outside. Home was also snugness and good air and happiness. Home was Beautiful Wings sleeping peacefully as he watched and waited for Red Earth's results. The survival factor was negative in the establishment's immiate area and the severity of the toxicity IF outside cast a pall over Rack's emotions. The readings of Red Earth confirmed, once he sent them, the predictions of the Far Seers of the east. He announced his finding by making individual contacts with far-flung Far Seers, calling for a council in the largest establishment available, the Eastern Establishment. He promised hope, but did not reveal that its source was a wild dream. The plan had several phases. Selected Power Givers transported Healers and Far Seers to the council. There was a drain on all and many perished. The storms were peaking and Rack, sensing the damage, wanted to spread himself to all of them and heal them, but he knew by some instinctive measuring quality in his head that the feat would be impossible and would result only in his own depletion. The gathering was small. Proceedings began with a dry, long-winded recital of the observations of the Far Seers, confirming once again the great threat to life on the planet. When it was agreed that the observations of the eastern Far Seers read the same as the new information gathered by Red Earth a period of discussion followed. New deaths were reported in sad pictures. Predictions of still more deaths left the gathering moodily silent. No one could actually believe the verdict of the data, the end of life in all the world, but the evidence was undeniable. '"Where," asked a young Far Seer attached to the Eastern Establishment, "is the hope you promised us, Red Earth? The Breathers die. The clouds stir the accumulated poisons. People are perishing." "He is among us," Red Earth said. R ack demonstrated. He merged, to Beautiful Wings' squirming displeasure, with a weakened Power Giver, bringing her back to strength. He ate, breathed, ' stored, demonstrated again with an ancient Far Seer, who was eased, but who was so near natural death that Rack was unable to do more than give him momentary comfort. "It is my hope," Red Earth said, "that the power has been latent in all Healers. We will listen as Rack the Healer explains. Then we will try to emulate him." Healers placed their small mouths on the odd heads of the Far Seers, on the mouths of the Power Givers, listening, seeing the pictures sent by Rack, who had the power. Far ers observed and concluded that the power in Rack came from a totally unknown section of the mind, a strangely shaped area which seemed to be missing completely in the other Healers. The experiment was abandoned. "Nature has sent the New One -- is it accepted?" Red Earth was an impressive figure, a natural leader. "It is accepted." "Would she send the New One without purpose?" A chorus of negative, negative. "There remains then only the problem of finding the purpose," Red Earth said. "And, for some time, she has been trying to tell us." He sent a picture of elapsed time, measuring back to Rack's trek to the valley of the hot waters. Next Red Earth projected the exact picture of the object Rack had found there. "This object, which has been studied by our foremost minds, was a message," Red Earth sent. Rack, who had been letting his mind wander, was brought to full attention. He had been unaware that such a study had been made. "The fact that nature told this Healer that it was time to dig -- " a shudder of fear passed through the assembly -- "was also a jnessage, a message we chose to ignore." Red Earth pushed on following a dramatic pause. "In the beginning nature imbued the Healers with a fascination for hard-material nuggets. To them they are beauty, wonder, possessions of esthetic worth, while the rest of us consider them useless. The reason for this apparent folly of nature is now clear. Do you see it?" He waited. His audience sent small, shamed negatives. Rack himself was silent, waiting to hear Red Earth's conclusion, trying to group his own confused thoughts regarding the nuggets, the piece of strange material, the whole of it. Red Earth continued: "Balanced against this curiosity, this yen for possession of the nuggets, was the ancient knowledge that to dig meant death. Thus it was for -- " Red Earth sent an incomprehensibly long picture of time and resumed: "yet, even as the planet died, nature had long since planted our salvation. It lay there in the valley of the hot waters, a strange and wonderful place -- for where in our tortured world does one find clean and pure water, good air, soft, unpoisoned soil? This valley did not form by accident, but as part of nature's design. For -- " again that picture of time -- "it has been there and Healers have always been a restless, wandering lot. But no Healer came upon this wondrous valley until Rack the New One set out on his summer explorations on that fateful sun circle. Had another Healer come upon this valley, he would have breathed the air, attended the beauty of the place, looked fornuggets -- but would he have dug?" Red Earth indicated a young Healer. "Would you have had the courage to go against the ancient teaching?" "I fear negative." IF "Only the New One would have had such daring," Red Earth said. Rack, embarrassed, said, "I felt that there was no danger. Then, too, I didn't dig. It was the water that dug." "Yet yours was an act of a New One," Red Earth continued, motioning for Rack to be patient, "and it was part of nature's intricate design. It was her intent for the New One to dig, to find new values, to unearth this object." He had it in his hand. "And this object has been adjudged by our best minds not to have its origin on this planet." Rack felt disappointment. "So," Red Earth continued, "this message from nature, this alien object, has come to us from where?" He paused. "A sister world? We who can contact such worlds know -- from the long lag in the sending and the receiving by our senses -- the distances involved. Yet there is another world, a world much closer, a world that spins around our own barely a short lag in senses away. The long string of events points to one thing. This strange object, which lay hidden under the soil until now, is a message sent by nature from that world. Our satellite." R ack thought Red Earth's  theory might have possibilities.  After having searched two continents for traces of the Old Ones he was prepared to consider longer reaches. Red Earth went on: "The message isVull of meaning. There is life on the satellite, obviously, for Rack the Healer's original contention that this is the remnant of a crafted object stands. Nothing in nature is like it. In this manner we are told that there is life on our sister world. We are told this in conjunction with great events, the accelerating pace of death on this planet, the emergence of the New One. We are all aware of the old values. We believe, deep in our souls, in the wisdom of nature. We know that planets, worlds, are the home of life. We know that nature in her wisdom makes it possible for life to continue. We, in our ignorance of her grand design, cannot envision the continuation of life under the worsening conditions -- but is she asking us for action?" Rack remembered his hazy, almost blasphemous thinking in regard to the manipulation of the environment by man. Red Earth himself was now treading on new and daring ground. The squirmings of the assembly confirmed it. "I say she is. I say that sheis telling us that we must act now. And I say the message is clear. She is informing us that there is some connection between life on our nearest sister world and our own survival." "If the message is clear to you, Red Earth, I wish you would share the knowledge," said an old Far Seer dryly. 'So I shall," Red Earth retorted. "The import of all of these events is simple. It is intended that the New One and his mate. Beautiful Wings the Power Giver, soar to the world that rises each night in our eastern skies." R ack started. Had the sly old  Far Seer been prying into his private fantasies? Around him he heard mutters of disbelief. Beautiful Wings looked at him, a sudden cold fear radiating from her mind. A doubtful Far Seer named Gray Body asked, "If the difficulties, and there are many, are overcome -- if the New One reaches the satellite and finds life there -- how will this save us?" "If we could fathom nature's ways, we would have all the answers," Red Earth said. "Since we do not we must ' proceed with faith. The object found by the New One is my basis for belief. The inhabitants of the satellite world have crafted the thing with a skill far beyond ours. As you may know, this material is impregnable to the acids of the atmosphere. It is not workable with tools fashioned from the Material, h is truly wonderful. Contact with such people would perhaps provide us with the techniques we would need to alter the falling survival factor." Red Earth's questioner sent objection. "If this wonderful race of people is so advanced, why has it not made the far flight to our world -- rather than wait for us to make the contact?" "For this," Red Earth agreed, "I have no answer. I merely repeat my faith. The events of nature are never without logic. Even the fatal winter storms follow a prescribed pattern imposed by the movements of the planet -- the tilt of the planet on its axis, the position of the satellite and the strength of emissions of the sun. Not even death is random in nature, for it takes the old at the prescribed time. I contend that the seemingly random happenings, if we could but understand them, are all a part of the whole. I contend that the' nature of the Healers, combined with the lure of the solid nuggets of hard material, the emergence of the New One, the conclusions of doom for life on our world, are all part of nature's scheme to send us into space. What we will find there I do not know." He paused, continued sadly. "It is against my teachings and my belief, but we must, in this crucial time, consider all possir bilities. Perhaps we err in our understanding -- and I project a shocking picture, I know. I defend it from charges of blasphemy on the grounds of scientific speculation. Is it totally inconceivable to IF think that life, sacred as it is, is confined to this planet?" It was indeed a shocking picture, but the seriousness of the times allowed it. "Should this be so -- and I pray to nature that it is not -- then her design could be, just could be, to pass this life along to a fresh, clean, pure-aired world. In short, the abilities of Rack the New One could be gifted to him for the sole purpose of transplanting life from this dying planet to a new one. How often, in history, does a union produce such a lasting relationship?" He indicated Rack and Beautiful Wings, hand in hand, the Power Giver pale and fearful, 'its strength can be felt, even now." "I cannot accept the possibility of ' extinction of life on the planet," said a bold Healer.  "Nor can I," agreed Red Earth. "But can we risk going against nature's obvious directives?" "There is merit in your thoughts," sighed the old, wise Far Seer who had been given momentary relief from the aches of old age by Rack. "I will be a part of the study." "Welcome," Red Earth said. "For it will take the powers of many to prepare such a venture. Time will be required. If it were possible to send the New One soaring to the satellite today, I would be fearful that we were making a wrong decision, but we will have time to study as we plan. Should events occur to prove us wrong we will have done nothing more serious than waste the time of those who have little time remaining. Should, for example, nature decree a new joining for the New One we can but hope for a breeder for his offspring to carry his seed. This possibility has not been neglected in my thinking, but I do not hold forth hope. Our recent readings indicate that not even the abilities of many New Ones would keep alive our people in a sufficient picture . to carry our civilization forward. At best the breeding of a new New One from Rack's loins would buy us another generation of life before the conditions wiped out even the New Ones, for our conclusions are that the worsening of the survival conditions is irreversible. Still, we have lime. Perhaps something will be revealed to us. If not, in the end, we have only the clear messages. Rack the New One and his chosen mate. Beautiful Wings, shall journey "into the cold of airless space in search of the salvation of life." He stood silent. When the buzzing thoughts stilled, he sent, "Is it agreed?" "Affirmative, affirmative," the assembly sent. "But you haven't even asked us what we think," Beautiful Wings wailed, picturing death, vast empty space, unknown worlds. "We know you will do your duty, whatever it is," Red Earth said soothingly. 'Mt is the nature of the Power Givers to be fearful," Rack sent. "We will do our duty." He touched her with his armored hand, sent his mind to blend with hers, quieted her  fears. She, feeling his strength, was reassured. "Yes," she said. "We will do our duty." XI R ed earth had moved his  site of operations at least temporarily to the large dome of the Eastern Group EstabNshment. Space was need to house the team which had been put together carefully to plan and execute the grand, hopeful soar of Rack the Healer and Beautiful Wings the Power Giver. In addition to Rack, Beautiful Wings and Red Earth, the group consisted of Shadow on the Moon, an aptly named young Far Seer who had spent much time in study of the satellite; Yellow Sky the Power Giver, who, to conserve the energy of Beautiful Wings, was to make some test soars with Rack and, for the balancing value of his skeptical mind, the ancient Far Seer Gray Body. Supplemental to these were additional Healers and Keepers, the Healers to perform any needed goings fbout in the forbidding storms, the Keepers to assure detailed records xf the events. Since the Eastern Group Establishment had to continue' its function as the prime source of broth and the Material, the extra bodies inside the large dome strained the available resources and made demands on privacy. However, no one grumbled. "Rack the New One," Red Earth said, "has been responsible for creating in my brain a new concept of the order of things. In his eagerness to prove the existence, nay, even the abilities of the Old Ones, he set me to speculating about the nature of life on this world and on our sister worlds. On our world, at least in the beginning, life had many forms. Have you ever considered the meaning of some of our traditional name pictures? For example, that of our late brother. Growing Tree the Far Seer. His name picture is something from the young days of our world when the soil was less toxic and could support vegetable life of an amazing complexity. His picture is of a large, growing thing, green and fragile. In our records one Finds many such names, one of the more noted being the picture of Rose the Healer. His name picture suggests something of beauty, a bright, fragile, short-lived thing of the soil. Some of our other traditional names suggest that there was, in addition IF to vegetation, life of other sorts in the youthful days of the planet. Flying things. Indeed, our own Juicers show vestigial wings. And the young of the Juicers are wing before their change. It is reasonable, then, to think that nature adjusts her life to planetary conditions, providing variety for the sake of beauty and perhaps for some practical purpose unknown to us. She also makes her changes as conditions alter in the accepted order of decay. She does not, I believe, destroy life, but alters its forms, utilizing the life force. Some believe that there is a measurable quantity of life allotted to each world. Should this be true, then the life force which lives in our bodies could have, in the past, furnished animation to beings beyond our imagination. At this stage of our world's development life is concentrated in a small picture of forms -- the four forms of us, the two of insects and the combination of vegetation and animal which is the Breather. To think of the logic of this arrangement is to accept the concept of infallible nature. You may point to the poison things of the sink holes and question this statement, but who is to say that those poison things do not have a place in the future of life? We do not know the exact form of the Old Ones, but we do know that the change was a drastic one from Old One to the first Healer. Our New One, the logical advancement of nature, assuming that Rack the Healer's change is incomplete and will be perfected in some future birth, could be so radically different as to be able to utilize the poison things of the sink holes for his own good." "It would, indeed, seem that nothing is random in nature," agreed Gray Body, the old Far Seer. "But in restating it. Red Earth, my brother, are you not seeking to ease the doubts in your mind regarding our present course of action?" "I shall not deny certain misgivings," Red Earth said. "Some of them are not in keeping with logic, for the pain I feel when I think of losing the presence of two of my fellow beings is purely emotional and not at all fitting for the logical mind of a Far Seer." "You will not lose, but gain," Rack said. "For the success of our journey will bring changes. We, having replenished our stores dn the new, sweet world, will return, bringing to you the wisdom of our brothers there." "It pleases me to think so," Red Earth said. "The thought of such a journey is, of course, pleasing to a Healer, who is notoriously footloose," Gray Body sent. "And I fear that one possible outcome of this venture is to be measured only in the pleasures received by those involved, a Healer who will sec more of the universe than any Healer before him, a Power Giver who is to make a soar that will diminish all past soars. Should you find an empty world there -- and no wise brothers -- you will still be tempted to return, for it is horrible to imagine an empty world. Then what will you bring us?" "Yes," Red Earth agreed. "Should you discover a world empty of intelligent life, then you must suffer the loneliness. You must stay. You will breed, for nature will not let life die on two worlds. You will tint again and give birth and tint again to produce breeding couples to people the new world. We must believe so." "But if we can accept this blasphemy," asked one of the Healers, "then should we not also entertain other blasphemies and at least consider random factors as such?" Red Earth said, "We come once again to faith. Compare the early pictures of this world, the fruitful, varied forms of life, the rich, sweet air and the variety of foods. Consider the pictures in the Book of Rose the Healer of the Old Ones dying in vast pictures of bodies -- compare those with the small picture of our ' population. Is it not logical, assuming that there is a constant life force. that we, as individuals, are allotted a larger picture of life force than was allotted to the Old Ones, thus explaining our superiority? Is it not possible that there is a life force on a new, empty world, waiting to inhabit the body of life? One of the possibilities is that Rack and Beautiful Wings will find an empty planet, true. But it is just as llievable to think that nature awaits them with a reserve of life force which, once absorbed, will make them more than they are." "Your faith makes me feel humble," said Gray Body. "What else is there?" Rack asked. 'J share Red Earth's faith. Nature has never deserted us. She has given us good life in the past, with pockets of sweet air and quantities of broth. She has made us thinking beings who can see beauty. A mother will not abandon her children." "It is time," Red Earth said, "to leave our speculation and apply ourselves to the task at hand... Shadow on the Moon, the youngest Far Seer who studies the satellite, will outline some of the difficulties." tated by the attention, began his presentation. "Our senses tell us of large mountains and valleys. We think -- since on our world the rains and the winds have eaten our mountains -- that IF this fact alone assures a supply of good air, for uneroded mountains indicate a youthful world. Thus we anticipate no difficulty once the satellite is reached. The dangers lie in the journey through airless space. For there the particles are so scattered, so few, that not even the lungs of a powerful Healer such as Rack could find breath. Enough air must be stored for Rack and his Power Giver to sustain life for -- " He sent a picture of days that startled Rack. "It is not within the power of Rack the Healer," he said. "So," Shadow on the Moon went on, "it is necessary to provide a store of air and food. I have considered the possibilities. To pack so much would entail a pack of -- " He pictured an unwieldy proportion. "This being undesirable, I have suggested an alternate course." He sent a picture of a small establishment, constructed of the Material, complete with Breather tanks and broth vessels. "The bulk will be far too great," Rack said, thinking of the drain on Beautiful Wings. ' "Ordinarily, yes," Shadow on the Moon said. "But there are certain differences between a soar such as we contemplate and a simple soar within the range of our planet's pull." He indicated Beautiful Wings. "Your senses tell you of the nature of the force which surrounds our world. Can you picture the extent of the force?" She concentrated. "I have never considered it. I have soared high, but I have not felt any diminishing of the power that tugs me back." "There is greater perceptivity through the senses of a Far Seer." Red Earth said. "We, too, can see the force of our planet," Shadow on the Moon said. "We cannot utilize it, as dp the Power Givers, but our sight extends into the' airlessness of space. There, at certain distances, we note a decrease in the power. It is therefore our contention, after careful study, that less power would be required farther out. We see a similar force surrounding the satellite -- a smaller force because it is a smaller world. Past a certain point a Power Giver could cease her work, allowing the pull of the sister world to furnish the motive power." "But," said Beautiful Wings, "in my idle play I have, fallen when I have not used my power. If I allow myself to fall for too long the power needed to stop is far greater than the power need for a simple soar." "True. That, too, is in our thoughts," Shadow on the Moon said. "We must measure the force needed. For this I suggest practice soars. We measure the force of our planet's pull and compare it with that of the sister world. Then we shall know the power needed to stop the soar. It will be great, perhaps too great, for the soar in airless space must be faster than any we know." He pictured the drop and once again Rack was awed. T here were other difficulties. As the plans were made they seemed to grow until they burdened Rack's mind. The vast picture of distance intimidated him, made him fear, though less for himself than for Beautiful Wings. Never before had such a great demand been made on the gifts of a Power Giver. And as the workers constructed the small establishment that would protect the soarers from the cold airlessness . of space -- Rack watched and weighed with his mind and despaired. However, he did his duty. He stored by eating far more than his usual amount, breathing the rich. Breather-made air until his cells -- and the new cells added in the form of surplus -- were fat with air. He felt bulky, but he knew that each bit of added reserve gave him that rhuch more to share with Beautiful Wings. To cover all eventualities it was decided that an attempt should be made to teach Rack and Beautiful Wings the techniques of food and Material making. Eggs of the Webbers and the Juicers would be stored in the flying establishment to be hatched, should they find an empty but clean-aired world. Tending the sources of the materials that made the Material was Far Seer responsibility, but Rack went at the lessons with a will. The insects, accustomed only to the mind patterns of the Far Seers, were made restless at first by the presence of others. Rack studied the soothing patterns sent by the Far Seers, duplicated them, became at ease with the hairy Webbers. He carefully stayed out of reach of the vicious stingers of the Juicers, but managed to master the technique of milking the creatures. It was up to Beautiful Wings to use her power to combine the two extracts and after much experimentation she was partially successful. Red Earth assured her that before departure date she would be as adept at making Material and at brewing broth as a Far Seer. Meanwhile the flying establishment had been completed, stocked with Breathers and was waiting. The group gathered. Rack and Beautiful Wings entered, closed the lock, lay on the comfortable rack. He merged with her and she lifted, her area of power enclosing the establishment, lifting it to the ceiling of the dome and holding it there effortlessly, with Rack's substance and power funneling through their blended flesh to heal and help. Rack was encouraged, forhe flying establishment added IF only a tiny picture to the drain on their joint resources. It was time to test the drain in actual soaring. For this Yellow Sky the Power Giver, young and considered beautiful, was to be united with Rack -- by decree of the Far Seers. Yellow Sky did not hide her delight at the prospect. "I fail to understand why, if I am to be the one who makes the soar, I cannot go with you," Beautiful Wings vehemently protested to Rack. "We must conserve your resources," Red Earth said impatiently when her protest reached him. Beautiful Wings, sending halfconcealed pictures of jealousy, watched as Rack touched his tongue to the tongue of Yellow Sky, merged, began his magic and the flying establishment was lifted rapidly into the dark, swirKng clouds. Rack sent back pictures of his condition and the condition of the Power Giver to the minds of the Far Seers. The establishment burst through the clouds into the blackness of the upper air. Yellow Sky had taken them up swiftly, as if to prove to all that she, as well as Beautiful Wings, could power the soar. Rack, in contact with Shadow on the Moon, directed her to slow down and hover. Motionless, the flying enclosure was almost invisible against the space beyond it, other Power Givers reported. The view below was blocked by the most terrible winter storms in history. Rack had a foretaste of loneliness. Yet he and Yellow Sky were not alone, for the minds of the Far Seers held them, checked them, measured their expenditure of substance. Exultant, not penalized in the slightest by the fast, heavy lift, the Power Giver radiated joy. Rack, however, was slighty uncomfortable. His mouth to hers, his tongue-flesh merged with hers, he knew the vague unease that always came to him in a merge with anyone other than Beautiful Wings. He was relieved when the Far Seers had enough information to allow the soar to end. He sought seclusion immediately within his chamber at the Eastern Establishment. That he was being selflsh did not occur to him until Beautiful Wings entered softly. He looked up, arranging his features into an expression denoting pleasure. "Did you not even want to see me?" she asked. "Of course," he said. "I was merely tired." "Yet we have soared the wide sea without fatigue," she reminded him. She was defenseless against his probing mind. Their long closeness had robbed her of the ability to close her mind to him. He entered. What he found hurt him. "You are the most foolish of Power Givers," he told her with a gentle fondness. "Do you think I could forget so quickly?" He sent pictures of the repeated joining and she melted, coming to touch him. "I will not allow you to merge with her again," she said. He laughed. "Then you shall be the one who explains it to Red Earth." But he sent such a wave of love that she purred aloud. flying establishment could be soared relatively easily only a few tests remained. With Beautiful Wings trying to be unconcerned, but not ting successful in hiding her pique from Rack, the load was lifted once more by Yellow Sky. At the height of the soar, in the thin air of near space, they hovered. Under the guidance of the mind of Shadow on the Moon the flying establishment moved in an arc corresponding to the curve of the planet. Faster and faster it was pushed. Rack sending his energies into the body of the Power Giver. Just as the contact wks about to be broken by the curvature of the planet they were told to slow, make a sweeping turn, come back. Then the establishment moved up, up, at an increasing rate of speed -- the strain was felt even in Rack's strong body. They returned to find excitement in the minds of the Far Seers. The reason was the relative reading of power expended in the two methods of gaining speed. One more test was required to confirm the thinking of the Far Seers. And to the relief of Beautiful Wings it was decided to use the team that would make the final long soar. Rack found joy in being merged once again with Beautiful Wings. He knew her as he knew no other person, knew the vibrant life force of her, the gladness with which she merged, the inner workings of her organs, the miraculous beauty of her cellular structure. His mind sang with hers as she lifted the thin bubble through the toxic clouds to the bright sunlight, the cold, thin air. Up and up they went slowly, conserving energy. And then they followed the curve of the planet. Just before contact was lost the mind of Shadow on the Moon directed them to level, engage the power of Beautiful Wings' mind, push the flying establishment faster, faster. There was no sensation of speed. Blocked by the curve of the home planet from the mind of the Far Seer, they relied on an instinctive sense of timing to halt the force, to rest light and free as their bodies floated  gently from the rack. Disengaged, they examined the situation. The senses of the Power Giver felt the pull from below, but felt also another force that counteracted it, kept the IF flying establishment circling the planet at a far height no energies being expended. They entered the dark of a space night, emerged into the sun, the minds of the Far Seers coming into contact, measuring jubilantly. After another circle of the planet at a speed never before attained they came down, the mind of the Power Giver breaking' the unseen force that had held them at an equal distance from the planet's surface, then letting the pull of the planet drag them down, down, to slow and settle to the planet. Rack had difficulty understanding the pictures in the minds of the Far Seers. But Beautiful Wings, whose instinctive knowledge of planet fields and pull was inbred, grasped the pictures easily. Together, minds blended, they would be able to follow the exact instructions of the Far Seers. Moreover, throughout the early stages of the soar, they would be in mind contact with Shadow on the Moon. In his mind the wheelings of the worlds were precise pictures and his logic' could send the pictures ahead in time to anticipate the exact location of the sister worlds at any given moment. He had come up with a daring theory to save energy. Upon the approach to the sister world the flying establishment would be speeding through space at a huge picture of velocity. Having measured the strength of the power used by Beautiful Wings and other Power Givers in stopping the fall of their own bodies toward the planet, he pictured the force needed to slow the flying establishment wfth the weight of Rack and Beautiful Wings , inside. To stop the motion would cost dearly if Beautiful Wings forced herself directly against the satellite and came to a direct landing. Shadow on the Moon thought it possible to allow the pull of the satellite itself to slow the soar. Rack tried hard to capture the concept, but it was difficult. He left such technicalities to the Far Seers and Power Givers, confident that they were right when they said that the flying establishment should not aim directly at the satellite, but nearby, swinging past to allow the pull of the world to slow the forward motion, curve it into a circle around the satellite. From that point power would be used sparingly to slow the motfon and allow the tug of the satellite to bring the establishment down to a site selected by Rack and Beautiful Wings. Preparations were complete. Qn a dark night in the low end of the sun circle, with the howling storms lifting all the settled heavy gases into the already toxic atmosphere, the group gathered and listened to a recital of the deaths of the season. There were blank spaces in the thin web of life force around the continent. Death stalked the world and dampened the anticipation of the great event. The aching knowledge of loss added a sense of urgency to the last-minute activity as Healers stored good air and broth in the flying establishment, placed fresh, healthy Breathers in the tanks, stored the eggs of the Webbers and Juicers in their containers. Sleepless, Rack lay with his armored hand on the flank of Beautiful Wings. He felt her shift in sleep, heard the sound of her lungs using the good, sweet air. The place was quiet, work at a halt. Through the thin walls he could har the sigh of the winds. On his scales he could feel the occasional particle that made its way through the resistance of the walls. He wished for the abilities of the Far Seers, so that he could send his mind up beyond the lowering clouds to feel the swing of the worlds. ' He considered his life and it was good. He had seen much, done much. His was the greatest adventure ever given to Healer and the fate of his world hung on him. But he was Rack the Healer, young, strong, confident. He did not know fear. Healer, called the New One, sent back to the minds of the Keepers from a point where the planet is a yellow-purple brightness, round and good and beautiful These are the thoughts of Rack, sent from space. For my daughter, the Keeper, whose name I do not know, who can store and keep but who can never know me. For those we love, Red Earth and Shadow on the Moon and Gray Body, Far Seers of great knowledge. For those who helped, for Yellow Sky the Power Giver and for our brothers and sisters on the Eastern Continent, whom we greet. Our thoughts travel to them as well asio our homeland, for here, where the planet is a smallness below us, our thoughts spread easily through the clear vastness, the cold, the growing picture of distance. Know you, my brothers, my sisters, that your force is felt even here. Tender but strong emotions follow us, making us feel the life force, labeling our world as one of the favored of nature, one on which the life force glows brightly. We are abje even now to feel the reassuring warmth of the combined minds of you. Red Earth, and you. Shadow On the Moon, and you. Gray Body. We know at what cost you are sending us your guidance, for the distance is great and the sky is thick with poisons. And before we pass beyond the strength of our weak powers, beyond that point where our combined sendings are lost to the combined listenings of the best minds IF of our world, , Rack the Healer, presume to speak  to clutter the vaults of the Keepers minds with my thoughts in the hope that future generations might gain from our experience. You have seen the deadly yellows and the dark, swirling air. You have, some of you, received the gift of a high soar, have risen beyond the obscuring darkness into light to see the universe with its depths of black and its sparkles of suns. For you I view the scene, sending it to be recorded forever. The roundness of the planet is becoming sharper in outline as we rise. The cold is even now beginning to be felt inside our establishment.  fpel it for all.  ruffle my scales, making them receive the direct rays of the sun, feeling its hard particles bounce and send energy into me, feeling the warmth which is not felt in the air of the establishment, but which I use and share with the one who, welded to me flesh on flesh, uses her wondrous mind to lift us, uses my strength to fly. We leave the dying world behind. The night of space is black in the circle of my eyes and the sun a brightness which, without the protection of my outer lids, I cannot endure. Even as I send and record my poor thoughts alongside those of my betters, I receive and obey the learned thinking of the Far Seers guiding our soar. Now the forces equalize and we float effortlessly above the clouds, which from this vantage point lose their deadliness and are merely beautiful mottles of color, making the planet invisible to our eyes. Into the cold shadow of the planet we fly and  feel the slowness of my blood and giie of my warmth to the differently gifted Power Giver. I am measuring time and when, at the precise moment determined by the mind of Shadow on the Moon, we surge, using all our combined power, I bid you, my world, temporary farewell and send you my love and ask yours in return. For we are not of this world now but from it, in the hostile vastness of space, an emptiness that makes the airless plains of glass seem like paradise. Ah, to see the world not below, but out there, seemingly close enough to touch. To see it shrink and become a glove of yellowishpurple and to watch the march of the giant winter storms. The air swirls into a circle covering the southern seas, where the Breathers grow. The sun, harsh, unpitying, lashes all, glares, reflects. And there we see the satellite, our goal. We are pushing toward it, using our power, feeling the drain. We rest, eat, refresh ourselves. And then we push again and I feekthe accumulated fat of my system being used, feel myself shrinking -- I am the old Rack, trim, hard. Still we push and there is no sensation of speed or movement. We know only by the resistance to our power that W. are moving and by the steadily shrinking planet behind us. iVe will push for a period of time and then rest. ness is terrible. We know now that life loves life and needs its presence. Experience our loneliness with us and value your fellows. For here is no friendly life glow from the next establishment -- only emptiness, a vast void. X And as wf drift, moving at a speed which is beyond my meager comprehension, as the minds of our friends grow feeble in the distance, I exult, for surely we shall achieve our goal and bring continued life to our world.  sing the song of Rack the Healer, called the New One, asking the indulgence of my brothers and sisters, for we are lonely and we are so vast a distance from the glow of life and our homes and even as we trust in the goodness of nature we fear. I sing of my love, of Beautiful Wings the Power Giver, with whom  have joined in repetition to produce the life of a Keeper, thus contributing to the balance of nature.  sing of her beauty, for she is a Power Giver among Power Givers and blessed with a sense of joy in sharing my love. I sing of our union, for it lasted past the tinting and became deep. I sing of our togetherness as we merge to let me share with her and heal the damages of raw sunlight. I sing of her delicate scales, of flashing colors and her slim legs of strength and her arms of warmth and her pink-tinged gills which remind me of the glory of her tinting.  inscribe her name on the records of Qur race, to be remembered, for she risked much. She soared into the poison of the winter storms to find me, saving me for herself and for this, for myself and for life. I sing of Red Earth the Far Seer, who did his duty, which was to attend the ancient laws, thus following natures design and leading to this. May his life be long with many moments of pleasure with young and beautiful Keepers. To him I entrust my memory, my establishment, my nuggets of hard material -- and may he find beauty in them, for beauty is nature s gift to all, not simply to Healers.  sing of Shadow on the Moon the Far Seer, whose wisdow lifted us, guided us, whose strong mind still comforts us. And of Gray Body the Far Seer, whose doubts made us think and work harder to seek this opportunity to do good for the race. I sing of Yellow Sky the Power Giver and remember gratefully her soars with me and I send her my thanks and my love and a wish for an early tinting and a production of life. I sing of the cold of space, which slows my thoughts. I sing of the hard sun, which glares and burns and makes ashes gather on my IF scales: the cruel sun, from which I shield Beautiful Wings with my stronger body. I sing of the growing sister world with its brightness and shadows. It looms there, waiting, waiting, with its gifts.  sing, reluctantly, of my doubts.  am weak and I fear and think of finding emptiness. But should such disaster overtake us weep not for Rack the Healer and Beautiful Wings the Power Giver, for we have enjoyed much and have known the awesome wheelings of the worlds from afar. Think then only that this was a folly of man, not of nature, for the faith is kept as long as the life force is vibrant on our world. I sing of my hope.  sing of anticipated greetings from brothers and sisters on our sister world in a place of sweet air and plentiful food and undiminished life. I sing of our return to bring hope and word of renewal. I sing, alternately, of loneliness, of two of us alone on a vast world, building life, if that be ordained.  add my thoughts to those of Rose the Healer, who was young with our race. Rose the Healer said that the bodies of the Old Ones littered the Earth, leading me to think that nature at times can be cruel. I wish I could have seen the world as it was, young, with growing things and multiple forms of life. Perhaps we, at the end of our journey, will find such a place, replenish ourselves, return to you with many secrets. And as I dream. I dream of moving the race to this fresh, new world where ho one wants for air and the gentle sun warms even the frail, unprotected hides of the youngest and most tender. Many questions assault my niind. Will there be a powerful life force on this new world to make me strong enough to soar across the emptiness and carry on my own back all life to this new beginning? Our Breathers die, but the supply will be ample, for we pass from the pull of the home world to the tug of the new growing steadily ahead of us, and the senses of my love feel it. It is a confirmation of the power of the mind to find that the thoughts of Shadow on the Moon the Far Seer were accurate. We burn and freeze. My scales coat themselves with ash. It clutters the establishment,  is breathed and expelled through our gills. my love. For she is used, even with my healing. The strain, as we apply our power to slow ourselves slightly, is felt to the core of my deepest cells, for I have used my reserves and feel myl weight go down as we face the pull of the new world. I will breathe deeply of the air and eat of the broth held in reserve. I will send my strength into her, healing her, bringing her back, for I weep with her wasted substance and, for the first time, doubt our combined wisdom. For had we not chosen to venture into this vast cold we would be snugly established amid the storms blowing. Selfishly  dream of wasted time, the time allotted to us even with a world dying about us, for we would have lived and blended our minds for our given span. We would have lived the memory of our union and, blessed with another.  recall how in a northern establishment, with the frost sparkling on the earth, we joined. We tinted. She flowered. Her breast buds were tender and sweet and  saw them suckled by our issue, by the Keeper whose name  do not know... Weakened, we near our goal. It is fortunate that we calculated enough stored air. Just enough broth. Just so many Breathers, for the load has been great and the cold has drained us and ahead is the final surge of power. I rest fitfully.  dream that my love tints, that  tint. I see her scales flowering and see the emergence of the ruby beauty from deep within her. I dream, waking. No. She tints. My love tints. In her weakness there is about her lower regions a definite tint and a hint of flowering on the chest. Bless nature. Bless nature. It could only be natures plan. I will tint. I feel it. I feel the preliminary tinglings. Below, on a new world, we will find a union. It is nature s will. Sadly I wonder. Are we then to stay, to build a life force on this new world? We sing and the voices of our minds are weak for traveling far, hopefully to be gathered in by the com bing strength of the Far Seers. We are behind the satellite, hidden from our home planet. Farewell. Farewell. We will lower now to find our destiny. J. the New One by Red Earth the Far Seer, my thoughts. The principle of interplanetary soaring is proven and praise is due to the work of all who were involved, but especially to Shadow on the Moon the Far Seer who sensed the movements of the worlds to such an accurate degree that the soar was made within the tolerance of our measurements. I, Red Earth the Far Seer, now record the time in pictures of sun circles, satellite movements and tilt of the planet. I record the duration of the soar in terms of the rising and Tailing sun. I record minute cell counts and am amazed. Rack is, truly, the New One, for the expenditure of his substance was beyond the endurance of any Healer. I record that the foregoing final segment of the Book of Rack the Healer was received by the combined minds of the Far Seers much IF as it is recorded, with interpolations by Deep Diver the Healer. These were necessary due to the weakness of the thoughts from far space, received sporadically and sometimes altered by the toxic storms. Yet it is felt that we have preserved the essence of the thoughts of Rack the New One. We wait. The survival factor allows little outside activity and the food stores dwindle, but there is a new beginning always -- and with each new beginning there is hope. As I wait I record the thoughts that haunt me. I am especially impressed by one of the last clear thoughts received. That tinting was in process is beyond doubt, for the excitement strengthened Rack's thoughts and made them clear. I speculate. Could this mean that nature's plan is to establish life on the new world? To myself and to the private banks of my Keeper I confess that this is my belief, as indeed it was all along. Old beliefs die hard and all my hope springs up to think that they will return with information, with ways of keeping life on the world. Yet the indications, the tinting, the reported weakness of the Power Giver, all tend to convince me that the new one was born out of nature's design to transplant the seed of life from this dying world to another. But there is another fear. We received the thought of a clearly visible world. This is strange, for air in all recorded history has been dense with clouds. We know that clouds contain many substances, most of which are of little or no use to life. But what if, in nature's incomprehensible overall plan, those substances that cloud the air serve some small purpose? Would it be possible for life to exist and merge and produce more life in a completely clean-aired world? I would have breathed easier had there been a report of moderate cloud cover on our sister planet. I can send out my senses, penetrate the clouds, cover the vast distance to the satellite in a span of time only a tiny picture of the time consumed by the soar. I can then feel the response bouncing back and measure the density of the soil of the satellite and it is soil, rock, solidity. I cannot penetrate to the depths. I cannot detect the presence or lack of air or water or any other substance. I cannot, of course, detect the minute forms of life there. Rack the New One and Beautiful Wings the Power Giver. I can only wait. Perhaps, in time, other New Ones may spring forth. We search all the new-born Healers, trying to detect that strange, new area of the brain which gives Rack the New One his ability to merge physically with another. We find nothing. We have sacrificed the best sun circles of the life of a Power Giver to carry a message to our brothers across the sea, telling them of the New One, warning them to be on the lookout for others. We wait. We can couple with our Keepers and forget for a short span of time, but there is always the outside, the growing toxicity, the diminishing survival factor. And we wait. It is more and more evident that the fate of all life on this planet is dependent on the findings of Rack the New One in the distant reaches of space. Blink Priority Urgent Urgent Cmmd. Xanthos II, Attention urged High Admiral Jackson G. Sparks. I P-#. Inhabited Humanoid. N.Y. #, Month #, Day #, U.P.X. Pharos, Capt. Bradley J. Gore, Cmmd., blink beaconed Chicago class star, position R-#, V-#, H-#, L-#, Sector P-#, Tri-Chart Ref. P-#-#. (See attached survey charts.) Short blink Expo, scouts Pharos IV and V, beginning Month #, Day # resulted planetary system planet life Zone A-I. (Attached survey chart position sun R-#, V-#, H-#, L-#.) lifetype; Class I-B Humanoid. C-Scale; Questionable. (See attached Tri-Tape Personal-Personal Capt. Bradley J. Gore to High Admiral Jackson G. Sparks.) Possible T rating T-I or T-#, possible P-# or P-#. but with extensive use biological material formed from extracts two insect forms; durable, radiation resistant, highly flexible use in building, making seldom-worn clothing and utilitarian objects. heavy gases lethal quantities. (See atmo-analysis attached.) Vetation; limited. Soil Condition; critical. (See agri-analysis attached.) Life Scale; Under study. Technology; Limited production IF aforementioned biological building material and liquid all-purpose food extracted from speciflc algal type sea plant. language: None. Repeat. None. Communication via telepathic pictures. population: Number unknown. Four distinct racial types living in symbiosis. number system. Thus, questions regarding population answered in incomprehensible picture showing numbers estimated in thousands for population density. Difficulty reconciling pictures from .alien minds with number system. (See Tri-Tape, Janti-IIl Planet Sector P #.) endangered by rapidly deteriorating planetary conditions. Oxygen replenishment factor:.#. Atmospheric life factor:#. Population factor:#. #I Planet, Sector P-#, Xanthos II type sun, position K-S#, V-#,H-#, L-#. signed: Bradley J. Gore, Capt., Cmind. U.P.X. Pharos. Blink Priority Urgent-Urgent Endorsements Blinkstat Capt. Bradley J. Gore, Cmmd., U.P.X. Pharos, Sector P-#, N.Y. #, Month #, Day #. Smith, Adm. Cmmd. Sector P-#: Affirmative. Tarsus, Adm., Cmmd P-Group # XA: Affirmative. Larkins, H. Adm. Hdq. # Troup XA, Pegram IV: Rec. further study. Note: Discretion H. Adm. Larkins, Hdq. # Troup XA, Pegram , IV, info, presented representatives civilian board. Results: Inconclusive. Evers, H. Adm. (R), President Xanthos U.: Rec. further study. Parthin, Avery (Miss), President's Board Applied Humanity, U.P. Central: Rec. affirmative request Capt. Bradley J. Gore. Bragg, Amos, Chm. Board Natural Resources, U.P. Central: Rec. hearing before Combined Congress, U.P. Fulton, Grory, Asst. Pres. George O. Borne, U.P. Central: Rec. detailed study planetary conditions. Personal #-A Blink Priority Urgent-Urgent Personal-Personal Cmmd. Hdq. Sect. #, Xanthos II. (Transcript verbal content Tri-Tape Personal-Personal Ref: F-#-#-B-#-AX#.) from way back. You've always said that I didn't like to follow the system and that is explanation enough, I suppose, for the rank I hold. I like to think I'm a man who dislikes the planetary piles of red tape that have been thrown up around Exploration and Alien Search work. I know you're already saying, Same old Brad. I guess you're right. I've been known to go out on a limb. Remember the time I called a three-buck pass in the championship game between the Academy and Xanthos U? We lost, but it was because some little bastard on the Xanthos team missed his assignment and was in the wrong grid and the ball hit him right in the chest, but then I've always been a high roller, haven't I? Jack, I'm not used to this type of communication. I don't like looking into those glassy little eyes in front of me. I hope you'll excuse my appearance. I'm just in from planetside. I really don't know where to start. Maybe I should begin about # New Years back. I know you're a student of history, but please be patient with me. I remember having to crib from your notes to get ready for the final exams, so my trying to refresh your memory on history is not the idea. I just need to ramble a little until I get this thing straight in my mind. This is a little more than a lower rank imposing on his superior. You owe me because you're the bastard, if you'll pardon the familiarity, Admiral, who talked me into XA in the first place when I had my mind set on Intersystem Transport, where the loot is. You turned me on with that summer trip to old Terra II. Damn, my back sits up and aches when I think of the digging we did. Remember? We were camped there on that ruined world jeside a river that had been killed and never had the IF chance to come back to life. We speculated about what kind of junk they dumped into it -- so much of it that the stream still hadn't come back to life a few millennia after the last people had given up trying to revive the world and left it for greener places. We couldn't believe it was possible to kill a planet, but there was the living proof and we decided that it was a phase we went through as a race. I remember how the soil had all been eroded away and how the rock stuck through like bare bones and how there was almost no vegetation. But Jack, dead as Terra II was, there was life on her. There were crawling things and flying things and there was air, even if it did stink. I've had a lot of time, during these past few weeks, while that fruity little telepath, Janti, you stuck me with has been lifting the skulls of these poor bastards on this godforsaken little planet, to think and remember what we talked about. We talked about the destiny of the race and we always went back, if you remember, to that big question of who the hell are we? You're supposed to stop asking that question when you leave the college soph coffee tables, but I think, the whole XA program is just another way of phrasing it. I'm amazed that we are not able to answer the question. Hell, we've been in space for thirty thousand years and we still don't know whether or not we had parents or whether we were just laid out on a flat rock in the sun somewhere. I 'VE been thinking about the way you explained our inability to trace our racial origin. You said that the average man can't even tell you his great-grandfather's name and damn it, you were right. I couldn't tell you mine. You said that it wasn't strange to think that a race might forget or lose track of its origin over some # N.Y. You laughed at me when I went back to the Academy and started digging into the records to trace my ancestry back a few generations. You said that all the trouble could have been saved if one of my ancestors had taken the trouble to write down the names of his and passed the list down to his kids and so on. But no one thought of that in my family and no one thought of it in the race. We have only some old legends. We came from space. That much is sure. We've done enough work on the home planet, old Terra II -- and the name alone is indicative of the fact that there must have been a Terra I -- to know that until we came tfiere and unloaded a regular zoo of life on her, she was a barren planet. Life began on Terra II # N.Y. ago. And on all the other planets we've settled in # N.Y. we've found enough life to Till a thimble if we collected all of it. Now we've hit the jackpot. Jack. I had to laugh when I Tilled in that ofTicial report. I've done it a hundred times and I've never had anything to write into the life questions other than a few facts about some weird bugs and some crazy plants. And this is a good indication of the fact that I'm not all wrong when I say that there's too much red tape in the program. How many hundreds of sheets of blinkstat paper have been wasted with those blank pages regarding life? How much does it cost to blink a stat from four hundred light-years away down to headquarters? But that's not the point. The point is, we thought that there Would be a time when those blanks regarding life on a new planet would be needed. Or we hoped so. Man, it sent a chill through me when I inked it in: lifetype: Class #-B Humanoid. And I can feel the vibrations caused by those words all the way out here. I'll bet my report has been fingered by everyone from old George Borne down to the office boy in XA Headquarters and I'll bet there are some paranoid types who are messing their pants. I've got a pretty good cross-section of society right here in my own crew and I think I have a good idea of what's going on out there on the home worlds. I'm telling you this. Jack. These poor bastards on this sad little planet are not the ones who shot up those central galaxy worlds we stew about so much. I've seen those worlds. I've walked the streets of the dead cities. You know and I know that the animals who built those cities were not even vaguely humanoid. The ruined worlds are not the point here. What happened to them has nothing to do with this situation, and I hope you'll keep reminding people of that. We know that those cats there in the thick stars were blood thirsty sons of bitches doing in a few worlds -- and, hopefully, themselves -- but we've been having nightmares eversince the first XA ship came back and showed us the pictures and the message they found burned into the skin of one of the planets. We've been quoting it ever since: Look on this, ye who aspire, and quake. Build not, for we shall return. It's enough to give you the creeps. I'll admit. Twenty worlds done in. And our quaking isolationists think that every time we go out on a mission we're going to run head-on into the planet killers. You know my views on this. I think they did themselves in, because where the hell are they going to return from? We found nothing to indicate that they had developed anything half as sophisticated as the blink drive and the worlds they inhabited were packed together around five suns in the same neighborhood. We've had ships all over this galaxy and there are just the twenty dead planets out there toward the center behind that big IF beautiful grouping of New York type stars. We haven't covered every star system in the galaxy, not by a long shot, but a civilization that could do what they did would be able to detect our ships if they came within four hundred light years, the way a blinking ship sends signals ahead of itself through the continuum. So I'm going to be damned unhappy if you people back there at headquarters let the ogre-hunters delay a decision on this thing until its too late. prised if that happened. God knows. I'm not surprised at anything we do. I wouldn't even be surprised if those planet killers came sweeping in from a neighborhood galaxy breathing fire and shooting up worlds. We'd just have to fight 'em. We're not completely without a defense, you know. For # N.Y. we've been worrying about those dead bastards and we've spent a lot of loot working on weapons we've jiever had a need for. If they could kill a planet, we had to be able to kill a planet. You know the drift. We bewail their cruelty, but we're not entirely without aggressive tendencies. Our history shows that. So far we've not killed entire worlds, but we sure cut the population when Zede IV came up with that fascist nut who was going to establish an empire. We've got some blood on our hands, too. We go armed. Hell, I've got enough armament aboard an Expo, ship to handle a fleet of those planet killers and shoot up a dozen worlds while doing it. I've never had to use a single popgun and I pray I don't ever have to -- but I've got them and I would use them if necessary. I have an antipathy for planet killers. I'd kill a few planets nfiyself to keep them human logic? But we've been good boys and girls for a few thousand N.Y. and we haven't killed anyone except in accidents and occasional cases of psychopathic murder or something. We've spread ourselves from asshole to appetite all over this arm of the galaxy and we're breeding as fast as we can to settle more worlds. I think I heard someone say that new world settlement requests come into United Planet Central at the rate of about five a year. We're pretty prolific. There are a hell of a lot of us and we're still suffering from two bugs. One, all alone. We can't understand why there's no life in this galaxy except us. We're always looking for it and always scared we're going to find it and discover the planet killers. This makes us hope and quake at the same time, being human, but we're curious enough to go on looking. We're so hungry for company we breed our dogs to be almost human and those scientists on Xanthos II breed sea mammals up to the communication level and go swimming around under the water with them, talking about this amazing intelligent life. Well, I think a lot of people are thinking of ZA in terms of a search for human dogs. What if we run into someone out here who is our equal? Not the planet killers, but just a race that can stand up to us intellectually? Will we start shooting, unable to bear the competition? When that creepy little telepath. Dr. Feli Janti from Belos II, discovered that these poor bastards we've finally run across -- these Class #-B Humanoids -- are way the hell and gone ahead of us in certain mental powers he panicked. He wanted me to start shooting. Some of these people can, without a single number, without a bit of math, picture in their heads a quantity of what they call sun circles equivalent to # of our old years. This Dr. Felo Janti ran face to face with a guy who could manipulate his cells at the atomic level. Janti got pictures of others who fly or teleport, using some power we can't even measure. He went white. He shook. He turned to me and said, "Captain, I recommend that we sterilize the planet immediately." He made a snap judgment, just like that, from having looked into the mind of one of them. His voice shook. He was scared right out of his bowels. These people don't have a single weapon, offensive or defensive, and their only enemy is the planet itself, but that creep wanted to wipe them out lest they overpower us with their superior mental abilities and Tob the women and rape the men of something. Jack, I know I'm taking up a lot of your time. I know you're damned busy flying that desk and painting scuff spots on the red tape. So I'll get down to it. W E'VE seen some hell-holes together. Jack. Terra II is a good example of a dead planet. Some of the places we checked out were pretty bad, but all of them are like paradise compared to this one. She's a hot one. She's greenhoused by a thick atmosphere and under it there's a lot of volcanic activity, just as if she'd been split by something down to the mantle. The air is full of sulphur anfd ammonia and other good jazz like that and the rest of it is inert with just the barest trace of oxygen. The surface is about eight-tenths water, because the heat under that blanket is up to the level where if you tried to take a bath in water that hot you'd burn your tail off. Right on the poles, in the wintertime, there's just a trace of frost. It melts off completely in the summer. There's lots of water, but it's fortunate that these people don't need it, getting theirs from their all-purpose liquid food which comes from a slimy green sea IF plant. The potable water is as scarce as it is on any desert planet you can name. The rivers are chemical sewers and the seas are just about as thick as a good Juaro soup -- only they contain everything that is soluble in' water. They'd float a piece of steel, almost, they're so saturated. There's not enough soil on the planet to grow a patch of beans and the rock is bare, exposed down to the solid level almost everywhere except in valleys where soil has been trapped. Those low places are something out of a nightmare. They're filled with plants thai look like diseased toadstools, although they're unlike anything we've seen because they're as toxic as a Telos redsnake and the soil holds about all the radioactivity that is left on the planet. It limits the stay in a Type-A suit to about ten minutes. That's damned hot. The radioactivity is artificially produced and is all old stuff. Lots of the carbon series. There are enough original radioactives deep down to tell us what happened. There are indications of mining at very deep levels. Yep. That's the story. I didn't put that in my official report and I leave it to you whether or not to break it right now. I'm afraid if I said it I might give the isolationists fodder for their fear-mongering. The planet has been systematically looted of every resource. On the surface there's not enough metal to get together a good child's toy and indications point to quite a few millennia since anyone has dug for it. We've turned up samples of most of the common stuff. Lead # and # and a bit of U-# at the deep levels. On the surface, especially next to the vegetation in the low spots, there's some Strontium # and Cesium #. It gets into the atmosphere at times. But these are not the planet killers of the central galaxy. I'd stake my career on that. Jack. I may be doing it anyway right now. This planet was killed, all right, but not by those bloody bastards of the center worlds. This one is older. Not in geological formation, but in settlement. You know we shifted our XA missions to the periphery after we failed to turn up anything in our own neighborhood and after we found the central worlds in ruins and dated them some # N.Y. old. The planet killers were in their big, final battles just about the time we came from wherever it was we came from. So it stood to reason that we hadn't come from the central galaxy or beyond, or we'd have encountered the killers on the way to old Terra II. Here's a side thing that might cause the isolationists to shudder. Suppose we'd missed Terra II -- and it's a loner, the only life-zone planet in its sector. Then we'd have gone on in and we'd have run headon into that big war and that would have been the end of us. But we didn't. We hit on the one planet in a thousand that could give us the proper conditions and then we settled down and started pulling ourselves into space again. It took us a while and that leads me to think that the first ships must have been primitive. It makes me think, sometimes, that Jordan is right in his theory about a one-ship landing. That would explain a lot. If pne ship had carried our little zoo out from the mother planet, wherever the hell it is, and if it had been severely damaged on landing -- suffering destruction of the history tapes or whatever -- we might have the answer. Suppose the survivors were left with nothing but their intelligence. They'd have been so damned busy during the first few generations -- rebuilding toward a technological civilization -- that they wouldn't have bothered with esthetics like history and where they came from. Word of mouth is a chancy way of preserving fact. it's all connected. It's all about the damnedest bunch of people I've ever imagined. This world is peopled by four distinct racial types. No type is-dominant. One type is a moron-intellectual sort of being, female, and the most humanoid in appearance. These moron-intellectual females wouldn't even qualify for a bush league Miss Local Belle contest on the home worlds, but they're definitely humanoids. They're hairless, but they have skin much like ours, only a bit thicker and tougher. They have breasts and most of the other female toys. They grow to adulthood, a bit smaller than the average U.P. female, with their brains remaining at the level of about a six-month-old baby. I've seen one or two of them. They lie in bed, naked, kicking and mewling like infants. But behind that part of the brain that controls their bodily functions i an area which, according to the creep from Belos II, is like a flesh-and-blood computer. These idiot-computer beings can't control that part of the brain, but it's used by another life form. This is a male who lives and works with the idiot female and he's a real-life monster. He doesn't have any eyes. He's got scales like a lizard and a chest about the size of a barrel and his head comes out of his shoulders in a solid, fleshy peak to point into a rounded dome. He's got a small mouth and a hairy, inverted nose through which he breathes. Oh, I forgot -- all four types have one thing in common. They have red gills on their necks. The computer morons look as if the gills haven't been fully formed. The gills have something to do with breathing and the computer morons can't go outside except under ideal conditions. The male types living with the computer morons have the gills on the thick, fleshy portion of the tall dome of head. They see and IF hear and apparently smell and do a lot of things our experts are studying -- do them ' with senses much like old-fashioned radar. They can hurt with the power of their minds, but they're gentle...We've observed no attempt to dominate. They can send their senses bouncing off the near planets and -- try this one on for size -- they can sense the stars. Of course they're not sending signals all the way there and back -- the nearest star to their sun is # light-years distant -- but they can feel something, maybe the light from the stars as it comes down through an atmosphere which in broad daylight on a summer's day makes it as dark as the inside of a cat's gut. They've got a sense of time, but no written calendar, of course. A sort of abstraction tells them the season, the month -- although they have no names for the months, just abstract pictures comparing the time with the entire year and the day in relationship to the entire year. The two other types are male and female. The female is the flyer. She uses electromagnetic force -- in some way that has our boys boggling their minds -- to lift herself and a considerable load for fantastic distances. More on that later. Her male counterpart is the worker. He's developed some amazing body functions, including the ability to rebuild damaged healing ability allows him to go out into that hell of a planet and gather food. He likes to travel and bugs around over all the land areas and under the seas when he not working. He can exist in an atmosphere that wouldn't give a good breath of air to an ant. He stores oxygen and nutrition in his cells' and uses his reserves at will. These last two types are the breeders. They breed just once in a lifetime -- and by that I mean all that goes with it. Once in a lifetime, Jack. How would you like that? All four of the types are ugly. The male breeder has huge, thick scales that bounce off radiation and the hard particles from the sun. That in itself is worthy of a lifetime of study by a dozen of our scientists. He has a chest capacity of about four cubic liters. He has eyes, as de the three types other than the radar fellow. The male breeder also has the strongest esthetic sensibilities. You've got all this if you've read the rather unusual transcript we sent as exhibit number one in this affair. I hope you have read itand thoroughly -- because this whole thing means a lot to me and, I sincerely feel, it means a helluva lot to all of us. together. They never, never, except in rare and isolated cases of severe law-breaking, do any harm to any living thing. They're the dominant form on the planet, but there's not much else. There's a large, spiderlike thing. Another insect type is about as large as a phralley dog, looks like an ant and makes a fantastic amount of sting fluid. Then there are the half-plant, half-animal creatures, the size of the period dot on a blinkstat typer, which can eat the atmosphere and synthesize oxygen. These little bugs are keeping the race more or less alive... The people know they're living on a dying planet, but they don't know why it's dying. They have a semi-religion and worship nature as a force for good. Their god is life itself. They think the role of nature is to people worlds with life of an intelligent nature and to them that means people like themselves. But their faith is being tested, because their best minds predict death for the race in about one generation. We think they have plus or minus nine years, N.Y., that is, before the air is gone. We may be slightly underestimating their survival capacity, but it is my considered opinion -- and the opinion of my staff -- that the situation is urgent. They're going to die. The little oxygen makers they call Breathers are being killed in their natural habitat by a worsening of the sea and air conditions. There isn't any new oxygen being made to speak of. They keep colonies of the Breathers inside their homes, but the Breathers are relatively short-lived and have to have optimum conditions, to breed satisfactorily. They decline in captivity, the breeding not keeping pace with the dying. They have to be replenished from the natural supply with much labor and difficulty -- and that supply has to be enough for people on two land masses. In plus or minus nine years there ain't gonna be no supply of new Breathers. For the first time in history we're face to face with an intelligent alien society and it almost makes me believe in their nature worship, because we've come on this at a crucial time and we have the power to help them. We can save them by moving in equipment to manufacture oxygen from the water or the rocks, as we do on some mining planets, but that would cost a bloody fortune and would require contact. Moreover, it would be an endless process, because this world is farther gone than any inhabited planet I've ever seen. Basically, that's the case. Jack. We help or they die. I hope you haven't made a decision yet, because I'm going to hit you right in the balls with a few facts we've dug up. One, our archeologists have made test borings and excavations. We have to do this in out-of-theway places, because it's difficult as hell for our boy wonders from Belos II to sneak up on some of these characters, hold them in hypnosis and then shoot them with IF something to keep them in a daze so they won't notice us. Still, while keeping security and not making contact, we've been able to do some interesting things. It's difficult to state anything with much authority, because by our measurements this present society is about as old as we are, about # New Years. You can imagine how # N.Y. can raise hell with world subjected to corrosive rains and uncontrolled erosion -- and especially one that has been burned good with atomics. Yep... That's what I said. She was burn bald. Just like the planet killers' leavings. Only these people did it the hard way with oldfashioned atomics, not the goodies the planet killers had. The signs are unmistakable. All the old, decaying isotopes are present. They must have us very funny bombs, because they produced a lot of carbon isotopes with long half-lives. I know that I'm going to be asked how, if there was enough stuff around # N.Y. ago to leave this much hot stuff, anyone at all survived to found this new race. Well, I haven't got the answer, only proof that they did survive, because they are here. I 'VE monitored as many interviews as I could. The ones without eyes and ears and with the pointed heads call themselves Far Seers. That's because they can send that radar-like sense out to vast distances. The Far Seers are the priests of the nature thing, explaining with clear logic that nature abhors a vacuum as far as life is concerned. The Far Seers believe that all the far suns they can sense have planets and that those planets swarm with life like themselves. I've looked into the records of the Far Seers, kept in the back part of the minds of the Keepers, those female moron computers. I know about as much about the history of this race as they themselves know. Incidentally, Jack, the Far Seers screw the Keepers with astounding frequency. They're very virile cats, but completely sterile, like that creature out of our mythology, the mule. That is their only pleasure, but they're not just dirty old men. The Keepers, also sterile but well developed sexually, enjoy it, too. That's just an aside, but I think it shows as much as anything that these fellows have basic human traits. I was talking about looking into the minds of the Keepers. I do it, of course, with the help of the. little bastard from Belos II, who can't concentrate, but has to keep looking into my mind to see if I'm having too many wet dreams or something. It's interesting to note that these people are about as foggy about their beginnings as we are about ours. They have some incomplete legends, just as we do. They think they've mutated from a race they call the Old Ones. They believe that nature adapts life to meet the conditions of a world. They believe that in times of crisis nature comes up with a New One.to pull life through. This is like saying that environment shapes life, isn't it? Here on this world it seems to. These people have adapted to conditions that would kill one of us in the time it would take the brain to die from lack of oxygen, while poisoning him in about a dozen different ways in the meantime. Their legends tell of nature's forming the First Healer. He could live with what they picture as small, hard projectiles: radiation. He apparently did, for the Healer calls on that strange ability of his to repair radiation-damaged cells and his scales bounce off all kinds of radiation in quantities that would kill a horse. His organs don't collect the bad stuff either. They throw it out and vent it, along with the waste gases and unused toxic content of the air, through the gills. So this First Healer came along as a mutation and then bred the Keepers and the Far Seers -- breeding with what they call the Old Ones. I'd guess that it was the Old Ones who did in the planet with atomics... There's a beautiful line in one of their records, a thing in pictures, of course, which is called, roughly. The Book Of Rose the Healer. They don't know what a rose is, but there's this good picture of a rose left in their minds after the conditions that would have produced a rose have been gone for # N.Y. Rose the Healer said that the Old Ones fornicated even in death, producing the Healers. That sounds rather human, doesn't it? So they fornicated and out came mutations. Instant adaptation. Believe it or not. I suspect the legends condense the process somewhat. But we have to believe what we see and what we find. We have here a world which, at one time, was highly technologized, to the point of atomics. We've found a few decomposing chunks of metal to indicate that they were working with some advanced alloys of an atomic culture type. We've found a sizable city under the sea. There's not much there and we can't get to it because it's under a few hundred feet of sludge, but it's there. We detect decomposed metals, stone, everything to indicate that it was a real city. It went under. I'd guess, about # N.Y. ago, either from the melting of the ice(;aps or from the planetary crust distortion indicated by wide rifts and by the fact the crust is split down close to the molten core in the south of the western hemisphere. I'm using west as they use it. We've found a few traces of plastics. You'd think we could Find more, but # N.Y. is a good chunk of time and a lot of it must have been burned with the surface stuff. I'm sure that, given time, we'II find some underground deposits that will tell us more. But I IF don't want to be a part of any undertaker's group doing an autopsy on this world. I know we don't have enough proof from what I'm coming to, not yet, but I say we have to take the risk and prove our justification later. So this world was much like some of ours with atomics, the right metals, the suitable plastics. It killed itself. The present race mutated from the original race,, which was humanoid, because the forms of the things we can identify by instrument in the sunken city point definitely to a humanoid origin. The question is, who were the Old Ones? I think I have an answer to that. Y OU know the prescribed approach to a life-zone planet. We came in slowly and carefully, did a lot of instrument work at long range. When we detected no probes from the planet we looked for a base close in and found it on a large, airless satellite. It was perfect. It kept just one face to the planet, as do the satellites of some of our worlds. We came down on the back side and peeked around the horizon with instruments. Nothing doing down there. We went th;ough normal routine. We sent crews around planetside to probe her and measure her. I had come down with a cold and was sacked out with a couple of wonderful drugs making me groggy. Then one of my junior officers who had been surfaceside came in with his ass in an uproar and what he told me made the drug-wooziness leave me like a hangover after a dose of Zarts. I got into a it and took a jumper around to where one of my crews had just had the hell scared out of it -- enough to yell for the old around a veritable junkpile. Yep. We were not the first ones to land on that satellite. Someone had been there ahead of us. Two of those someones were still there. This, too, is not in the report. Jack. I know, I know. It should have been sent immediately Code I, but you know and I know that there's nothing that whets the curiosity of an XA stat clerk Hke a Code I rating. It would have been all over the U.P. But a PersonalPersonal thing, that's fairly sacred. There was this half-dome of semi-opaque material. We could see into it. It was about five feet at the highest point, about the same wide. It had a lock type entry. Inside were these two things. They had huge chests and they had scales. They were lying on a little bed with their arms around each other. They looked as if they were asleep, but we knew they had to be dead, because we were nightside on the satellite and it was colder than hell. There was no air. Our instruments showed no oxygen inside. We thought they might be breathing the inert gases, but we could detect no movement. We found later, that they were a male and a female of the breeder species. The female had these cute little silvery and gold scales. The male was as horny as any Phebus lizard in any zoo. The thing that stoned our people was the lack of any propellant device. I mean, you could see through the whole thing and the plasticlike material was soft to the touch. There was nothing in it that we could detect to push it. I sent for a team. The two inside were obviously dead. It took a few hours to get ready and then I opened the lock. It was a funny thing, that lock. No apparent reason for it to stay locked and it opened easily, but when it was closed the material overlapped itself and formed an airtite seal. Well, after we'd taken all the pictures and measurements our scientists wanted, I went in. As per regulations, I went in with the telepath from Belos II, even though I knew in my mind that there was no chance of contact, since they had to be dead. There was completely dead air in the dome. No oxygen at all. Along the walls, in little tanks, were dead things like tiny flower buds. I was casing the joint when Dr. Janti, creepy little fink that he was, came on with his communicator full blast and almost ruptured my eardrums. He was yelling, "It's alive. It's alive." the open lock. I ordered the lock closed and then I told Janti to vent his spare oxygen into the air. We emptied our tanks and suits of all but a reserve. There must have been just enough air in that cold dome finally to give a mouse a full breath, but it was enough for that big fellow with the scales. I'll be damned if he didn't move. I was paralyzed. I won't say I forgot my duty, but I ignored regulations, because here was the first intelligent life we had ever encountered. I wasn't about to bug out of there and let it die. I watched, my hackles rising, as his big, thick, scaled chest heaved and then I got some more oxygen into the dome. We had it filled with good, sweet air. That scaled monster sat up. "Contact, please. Dr. Janti," I ordered. The alien was sitting on the little bed looking at us from a set of blue eyes unlike anything I'd ever seen -- huge, soft, alive. Think of the eyes of one of those Satina sea nymphs and multiply them four times. He looked at us and the little creep from Belos fl went probing into his mind. Meantime, this scaled cat was breathing us down to nothing. His lungs and cells could hold almost all the oxygen we pump in. I was watching hiip. He looked at us. His face wasn't built for expression, being pretty well hidden by scales and his nose being inverted. He made no hostile move. He just IF looked, shifted his eyes to Janti and I felt a force in the air.x I couldn't put my finger on it. It was just something that came out of him. Then Janti lost control and started screaming that the alien had to be killed. He looked down at his female. She wasn't moving. She was dead. I felt this sense of despair so overwhelming that I was sure that the planet killers had made it Back and done in all our worlds with all my friends, family, crew, all the girls I'd ever loved, all the sweet grass I'd walked on and sat on, all the good, blue water, all the sweet air, everything. Gone. Gone. I don't have the words to describe the total sadness I felt. I wanted to reach out to him, but Janti was screaming and clawing to get out of the place. He was yelling that the alien had to be killed and that we had to blast the planet before it was too late. I had never realized that Janti was a psychopath. Whose mind can heal the mind-healer's mind? But all the time he had been one of those damned doomsayers and he was sure we'd run into the form of life that would do us all in unless we acted quickly. In all this turmoil -- Janti's letting his mind go ape was affecting even me -- the scaled fellow turned, made an animal sound. It came through. It was a sound of pure pain. He put his arms around the female; held her dead body close. He rocked and cocked and it was quiet in the dome, because the good doctor had made his escape, taking all the air out with him. I pumped it up again. I went out and threatened to smash Janti's faceplate and let in space to boil his blood. Janti recovered his sanity and came back into the dome. He couldn't get any pictures, any communication. I ordered him to contact, breaking every rule in the book. The scaled fellow was closed off tightly and Janti couldn't find a chink. He said the scaled fellow's mind was like a solid, closed ball of steel. So I had to watch as this alien, this first intelligent being we've met in all our history, died. He held the female close and rocked back and forth. Tears were running down inside my helmet. There was plenty of air in the dome, but the alien wouldn't breathe. He seemed to will himself todeath. It took a long, long time and nothing we could do could reach him. We tried contact on various levels. But he was closed. Janti said his mind was the most powerful he had ever ertcountered. In the end we tried to pump oxygen into his mouth, but he merely voided it from his gills. course. And the way he got to the satellite makes for some of the most incredible stuff I've ever run into, fiction or otherwise. I've told you that the female breeders fly. Well, when we went planetside, by sheer luck we landed on this fellow's home continent. It's a piece of desolate real estate if I've ever seen one and I've seen a few. The scene wasn't much better than the planet's moon. Janti and his help made hypnocontact. We had been warned in advance by our encounter with the live one on the mo#n and it was a good thing. If we had gone in blind those Far Seer types would have sensed us. But we went in hypno and began to dig around. Turns out that the fellow we met on the moon was a hero and their last hope. Everyone knew all about him. He had been sent to the moon because of their wild belief in nature. They just knew that there was a happy, sweet-aired world up there on their moon. So they sent these damned kids, and I .say kids because the life span of a male breeder is about twenty-two N.Y., that of the female breeder even less. She, the female breeder, literally consumes her life substance in flight. It was possible for those two kids to go to the moon because he had come up with something new. It wasn't a machine or anything like that. It was a mutation. They went to the moon of that planet on the power of the mind. Jack. The Healer -- he was called the New One -- was a mutant and, able to "blend his flesh" with others. It was somewhat like a blood transfusion, only infinitely more complete, for he could g# into the body of the others and heal them, as he healed himself, on the cell level. With his fantastic capacity to store oxygen and energy he had enough, with what food and air they could carry in that dome, to send that whole crazy space ship, and that's what it was, all the way to the .satellite. Don't ask me yet why they didn't freeze. There was no artificial heat in the thing. Our boys think he could stand direct sunlight and diffuse the heat around the dome with his scales or something. At any rate, he had to be exposed to direct sunlight on the satellite -- and to the freezing cold. Fantastic tolerance for extremes in temperature. When we found him he came out of his coma unharmed, except for a small ashlike deposit on his scales. The female, on the other hand, had died of a variety of things, apparently, cold, heat, hard radiation, lack of oxygen. Okay. So these people knew they were done for, that the planet was going to kill all of them. This kid came up with his mutation, which enabled him to drive his space ship all the way to the satellite, using his female's power. They went there expecting to find life and they found airless space and heat and cold and death. His friends all over the western continent, and even in the eastern areas knew all about the trip. We IF were interested in our First alien, naturally, so we traced him through the records in the minds of the Keepers and compiled the stat -- the exhibit one in this whole thing. It's sad, you're thinking. They're all going to be dead in plus or minus nine N.Y. Perhaps you're also saying that so far there is no justification for us to step in. I know that there are isolationists high up in the council of President Borne and they'll agree with Janti that these people could threaten us with their fantastic mental powers. How would we control people who can teleport, send a fatal force from their minds, live under conditions that would kill us in three minutes? I know that a lot of powerful people are going to cite our regulations -- no contact until a thorough study has been made. A study which, if carried out according to regulations, would take twenty N.Y. die. We've spent a lot of time, energy and resources trying to find exactly what we've found, a civilization of intelligent beings. They're different, but not that different. They're gentle. When we pieced together the account of Rack the Healer from the minds of the Keepers and the others it came out so human that there wasn't one of us who wasn't touched. I like to think that Rack would be pleased with his book. It was taken from a lot of sources and the end of it is not.yet written. We found a part of Rack's book in the mind of his infant child, a Keeper. We found more of it in the minds of his friends and their Keepers. I wanted you to read it even before you scanned the official reports, because I think it shows that these are nice people. Jack. They must be saved. Hell, I'm selfish. I want on of those Far Seers in my crew some day. What an exploration tool he'd be! And a Power Giver to do short range scouting. And a Healer to look around on hell-hole planets where even the best suit is good for limited periods. I won't guarantee that if we took them into the United Planets they wouldn't be running things in a few hundred years, but we could do worse. They have gentleness, true regard for individual freedom, a reverence for life of any sort. If they're smarter than we are, then we'll just have to buckle down and learn more. We just can't let them pass out of existence. As I see it, we have three choices. We can, let them die -- and we'll do this if the regulations are followed. We can move some or all of them under hypnosis to hide our contact and risk having them go into some kind of shock when they awaken on a totally different planet. Or, we can contact them, explain the whole situation and move them to a nice, fresh planet. It wouldn't even have to be a prime planet. Worlds we look on as being waste worlds would be paradise to them. They'd live like kings on Terra II, for example. I am unalterably opposed to the first course of action, I don't favor the second, because we'd be unable to movq all of them in time. To support my third suggestion, immediate and full contact, I have one more item. I said, earlier, that when I jumped around their moon I found my crew beside a regular junk pileThen I purposely didn't mention anything but the dome in which the two aliens made the trip from their world to the satellite. The spot where we found Rack the Healer and his nicely named female was not, obviously, their first landing on the moon. They had made some prior stops. We found Rack's footprints in the lunar dust. That fantastic scaled character could walk around in a complete vacuum, using his stored oxygen. He'd done a lot of exploration and all along he must have known that it was hopeless. He didn't have enough reserves to make it back home. His Breathers had been used up, were dying. His girl must have been dying. But he didn't give up and he found this junkpile I mentioned. He knew, as he died, that he was not the first to make the trip from his planet to his moon, because his landing, his last one, was made alongside a meteorite-pitted, antique contraption that could have been nothing but the jettisoned stage of a combustion rocket. Yep, there it was. We found others later. But here was the real kick in the backside for us and for Rack. This thing has been there a helluva long time. It's pitted, but it's still intact and identifiable, maybe not to Rack the Healer, but to us. And I wondered, as I looked at it, what he thought. As you know from reading his book, he valued and wondered about the small chunks of metal he found on his planet and then, while he was dying, knowing that his lover was dead, he put his hands -- his prints were on the dust on the thing -- on a store of metal he must have not been able to believe. A whole junkpile of it. He couldn't have known what it was. I did. And I thought of you, old buddy, and the talks we used to have about where we came from and about all our speculations -- like which direction our ancestors would have taken after they launched us into space? We dreamed about finding them, being welcomed. We would be the longlost children home from the far stars. We'd be given the benefit of all their advanced wisdom. We'd gain immortality, among other puny things, because a society which, # N.Y. past, could launch a starship, would have made unbelievable advances. dream for you, because, knowIF ing you, I'm sure there's a spot somewhere in your aging carcass where that young dream survives. But it's dead, that dream. We killed it when we landed on a barren satellite without a name, just a generic label, moon. It was dead when we found Rack and Beautiful Wings beside a junkpile of antique equipment. I knew it was dead when I stood in front of a crazy, boasting, thoroughly human thing that I'm going to show you in a moment. But it's not all bad. Jack. It's not all bad. We've been looking for our parents for # N.Y. and now we've found them. When I looked at Rack, the scaled fellow, I was times remov. Rack and his people are mutated from the Old Ones and the Old Ones went to the moon about # old years ago. Our old year figures to the minute or so with their sun circle. So # old years ago, the Old Ones of Rack's world went to the moon. Then they must have discovered better ways to travel, sending our immediate ancestors out into space with what might have been an unguided version of the blink drive, since we landed so far away from this insignificent little sun here in the periphery. After that they lost interest in the barren satellite and then they had their little family squabble that burned the whole world bald. Here's the picture I've been saving. Jack. As a clue, it's Old English. If yhu have trouble, consult Parker at the Academy. He's an expert. He's the one who taught me to love the old written language. I didn't have a bit of trouble reading it, except for the dates, of course, which are meaningless. Take a look at it. It was placed here on this planet's moon about # old years ago, this planet's years, our old years. And I like to think that maybe one of my own, a grandfather thousands of times removed, was among the three listed as crew on the first moon landing. one shot, but my intuition tells me maybe he was. So take a look and think, maybe, that one of them was in your-direct line, too, and then send me the order that will do away with the red tape and allow me to save the lives of the few survivors of our mother race. Take a look: (At the current price of single volumes, here is a bargain that makes sense -- the two fit tightly together.) The book is dated in some ways. It was written and first published during the final days of World War II when the concept of "seetee" or "c.t." (contra-terrene) anti-matter the pseudonym of Will Stewart, but he's now out from behind the whiskers. The good guys in this are a bit stiff. But the problem presented makes up for any flaw the book has. Seetee matter and normal matter are exactly the same, except that seetee has outer positrons and nuclear negative particles. Seetee plus normal matter react together violently, destroying each other completely and releasing total energy. Bits of seetee are found in the asteroid belt. First problem -- detect them: no way is known except by contact with normal matter. Second problem -- make use of the power available when you can't possibly handle seetee matter with tools of normal matter. To add to the complications the asteroid miners discover a "planetoid" that is actually an alien ship made of seetee matter. It's loaded with all kinds of science and gadgets. But how can it be studied and made to work? ( Continued from page ! #) The combined novels make for a lot of good, solid reading. Finally we have a book from outside the field that is worth considering. Fred Mustard Stewart, so far as I know, has never been a sciencefiction writer. But his The Methuseleh Enzyme (Bantam, #) is one of those borderline cases that I find more science fiction than not. The science is limited, but worked out very well. (Stewart shows every sign of having been sort of a hobbyist and of having become completely fascinated with the subject of life extension; he obviously researched far more than most writers outside the field consider necessary.) The story is that of a small group of people who are permitted to take part in the first attempt to rejuvenate the aged. It turns out there is a price for such rejuvenation. Some of this price is known to the older characters here from the beginning. The rest is learned the hard way. It makes for a good story. A red banner on the cover warns you not to reveal the shock ending. Phooey. It's a darned good and logical ending and deserves careful reading -- much of the meaning of the book is packed into it. But it's no cheap shocker. It belongs in the book and I was completely satisfied by it.  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Environmental Quality Magazine # Burbank Blvd.  North Hollywood, Calif. #I # issues -- # You may cancel within I # days after receiving your free copy -- and owe nothing. Name. (Please Print) Address. City State  Zip  Bill Me  Check Enclosed I D irector magno vesspace shuttle was not equipped to enter the planet Roget's atmosphere at the customary maximum velocity. The slower, powered descent, gave him ample opportunity to study the terrain he was approaching. His powerful lenses and the facility offered by the shuttle's navigation dome afforded him a unique view of the sector of the planet adjacent to the spaceport. His interest had been kindled by the s(acegram he had received, hinting at great trouble. Vestevaal was a firm believer in making the maximum use of information when attempting to solve a problem. Below him now lay Anharitte, not the largest but certainly the most influential city on Roget. He could see it all with crystal clarity. To the west spread the sea, one of the great oceans dividing the planetary continents. To the north and east the landmass was largely sandy, fertile plains comprising the provinces of TEmpte, Magda, provincial Anharitte and the broad lands of T Ampere. Beneath the city proper, the teautiful bow of the AprUlo river cut a wide channel throu the sandbanks to the sea. The city of Anharitte was based on natural geological features. The three broad hills must have been islands in a Time when the oceans had been even wider than the limits decided by their present disposition. The hills formed a rough triangle rising above the stubborn plains, forcing the waters of the tributary of Daizan and several small canals to pass between their green and granite flanks. The first hill was Anharitte itself, the main commercial and administrative center of the region. Even from a height the director could see the outlines of the three great castles of Di Guaard, Di Rode and Di Irons. Farther east along the banks of the Aprillo rose the second 'hill, T Ampere, no longer a citadel, yet holding the major wealth of a vast province under more than adequate control. Situated roughly between the other hills, yet displaced north, was the third hill. It was smaller than its brethren and even from a height appeared more sinister with the predominating grays and browns of the underlying rocks. This was Magda, key to a minor province and possessing the most formidable fortress of all. It was with Magda, with its paucity of approach roads and its craggy, inhospitable outlines, that the director was most concerned. These lands were the realm of the man known as the Imaiz, who, if IF the rqorts were substantiated, posed a considerable threat not only to the composite city of Anharitte, but also to the spaceport and the rich trade therefrom. At the spaceport there were no formalities. All the details such as the ship's identity and charter, the manifest and the passenger list, had long since been transmitted to the terminal by the shipboard data links and the relevant cargo equipment was already standing at the edge of the landing bowl. As the shuttle completed touchdown procedure, Director Vestevaal strode straight to the small cushion-craft awaiting him. Within minutes he was clear of the limits of the spaceport. T he cushion-craft bore him along the wide sandy road of the Via Arena, the main trade road leading into Anharitte. In front of him, green and mellow in the sun, stood the broad bulk of Firsthill, bearing on its right-hand shoulder the dominating battlements of the Castle Di Guaard frowning down on the reaches of the great Aprillo river. Slightly farther away and to the left, the darker shades of Thirdhill -- the lands of Magda -- rose in a dark and rather sinister contrast. It was not possible for Vestevaal to see the castle of Magda from his present location. but somewhere on those strange, broken heights was the fortress home of the Imaiz. the wizard of Anharitte, whose activities had fetched Magno Vestevaal unwillingly halfway across tlM universe. Some three and a half kilometers along the Via Arena he came to the Black Rock. This marked the limit for the free use of cushion-craft. From this point on he had to -- by city ordinance -- engage some stavebearers whose poles would guide the craft safely through the populated streets. Because the vehicle had no positive contact with the roadway it was subject to deflection by winds and gradients. Within the city limits the stave-bearers would run alongside, driving their staves occasionally into the soft undersand and forcing the fenders of the craft to run along the iron-tipped poles, thus defining and correcting the course of the floating vehicle. Progress was necessarily slow and laborious, but since power-driven wheeled vehicles were not allowed on the three hills, the visitor had no choice but to suffer it or to walk. Just past the Arena a ragged runner, sent by the Company's agent, Tito Ren, met them and trotted ahead to guide them up the slopes of the Trade Road and through the crowded ways to the food market of Firsthill where Ren had an office. The agent paid the men off quickly. ordered house servants to collect the luggage and ushered the director into the welcome coolness of the office chambers. Whfie he was watdifor Vesfeva, to complete his ablutions Tito Ren watched continually out of the window that overlooked the food market, as if h were waiting for someone to appear. A half-hour later the director was refreshed and ready. He laid the spacegram purposefully on the table. "Well, Tito, you've fetched me a long way at a most inopportune time. Whatever you have to say had better be good." Ren turned away from his vantage point at the window. "It will be," he said. "But the best way I can approach the intricacies of the situation is to start by showing you something. Unfortunately the time is yet a little early. Please take some wine." "If this is a fool's errand -- " Vestevaal said ominously. He did not bother to complete the sentence. He knew Ren as one of the most shrewd and efficient agents in the Company, and the long-standing association between the two men had bred a mutual trust and respect. Grumbling into his beard, Vestevaal accepted wine and came and stood by the window looking out at the busy, colorful market. "How long have we to wait for this great happening?" he asked. Ren shrugged. "She would normally be here by now. But I suspect the coming of your cushion-craft wiS have sturred tlnngs up a bit. The Hie thing you can rely pn in Anharitte is that every third man is a spy" "And every third woman?" asked Vestevaal mischievously. Ren shook his head. "The women count for almost nothing in Anharitte. Except one -- and that's the one we're waiting for." F inally becoming bored with the scene, the director turned away and began to explore the chambers. Ren remained obstinately at the window. Then a cry from the agent brought Vestevaal hastily back to follow Ren's indicating finger. "Here's what I was waiting to show you. Director. Do you see that girl down there?" "The tall ono in the orange dress?" "That's Zinder -- a bondslave of the Castle Magda on Thirdhill. She comes to the market daily, shopping for the Imaiz." "For a bondslave she's remarkably well dressed." "For a bondslave she's remarkable in too many ways." Ren turned back into the room to face Vestevaal. "Notice how the traders IF treat her. Almost with deference. #ie may be a slave, but there's none who would dare molest her. There's not a beggar or a bondsman on the three hills who wouldn't come to her defense -- even, at the risk of his life." Magno Vestevaal scowled. "Remarkable. It shows a degree of social unity I'd not have expected in such a feudal setup." "Great currents are at work here," said Ren. "But they run deep. To measure their pulse needs a careful finger. It wouldn't be naive to say that Zinder somehow represents what the Ahhfi as a race hope to become." "A bondslave?" The director was perplexed. "Yes, but what a bondslave! Study her carefully. Look at every detail about her -- polished to perfection. Notice the dignity in the way she walks. That poise comes from confidence. And the confidence comes from thorough training and education." "I don't see why you're making so much of her," said Vestevaal with a trace of irritation. "Many people groom their pets. I assume a slave girl in Anharitte is a legitimate part of a man's harem." "A slavemaster's control is absolute, including control of life and death," confirmed Ren. "But I don't think you quite understood me. I said training and education." "But you don't educate slaves -- not beyond what's necessary for them to perform their duties," objected the director. "Then one neeib to speculate on just what Zinder's duties are. We haven't yet found the full measure of her abilities. She's prpHcient in all thirteen space languages, is apparently gifted in music andarts and has a scientific knowledge that would probably qualify her for two or three degrees at a Terran university." "Fantastic," said Magno Vestevaal, when the implications had sunk home. He moved the curtain to gain a further look at the tall dark Ahhn girl who moved like a queen around the market. "How do you know so much about her, Tito?" "I paid good Company money to the Society ofPointed Tails to have her investigated. They devised many tests of her knowledge and aptitude by way of commerce and conversation. They were more than impressed by what they found." "How much confidence do you have in the society's report?" "Every confidence. In Anharitte, a society must keep perfect faith with its patron.'A society can refuse to accept any assignment -- and frequently does to 'avoid conflict of interests -- but once an assignment is accepted its terms and conditions become binding on its members even to the point of death. That's clan law, and its enforcement is savage." "Accepting that for the moment, perhaps you'd explain why you felt it nssary to spend Company money investigating a slave girl?" Ren cleared his throat. "Anharitte is a freeport not only for Roget but for all ship trade spaceward into the Hub. As a spacecommerce base it is priceless. The vast fortunes of the space combines and the merchant worlds have been possible very largely because of the facility offered by Anharitte as a Freetrade exchange. Make no mistake, Director, our own Company could not exist without commercial access to Anharitte." "I'm more aware of the fact than you arc," said Vestevaal, "or I would not be here nOw. What disturbs me is your implication that our access to Anharitte is at risk." "I see it this way," said Ren. "Anharitte is unique in having maintained its long-term social stability Mn spite of having been exposed to space commerce. There have been a few other freeports, but all have succumbed to the disadvantage of their planetary governments, requiring a disproportionate share of the value of the merchandise being shuttled through their territory. Anharitte is: different -- the tolls and levies remain nominal because they're shared only by the five aristocratic Houses: those of the Lords Di Irons, Di Rode, Di Guaard and by the Lady T Ampere -- and by the House of Magda. The influence of these few has maintained a rigid social structure -- albeit one with a slave base -- which has given the necessary stability to Anharitte." "True," said Vestevaal. "And it pays the lords very handsomely to maintain things just as they are. So I don't see what the problem is." "The Imaiz of Magda is rocking the boat," said Reh. "What makes you think that?" "Director -- have you any idea what happens to a slave base culture when somebody starts educating slaves to Terran graduate standard?" "You've made your point," said Vestevaal heavily. "Your culture goes unstable. Tt becomes contaminated with ideas like democracy, civil liberty and other corrosive notions. And finally it disintegrates." "And from the ruins somebody builds a so-called brave new order -- which is inherently more expensive for freetraders." "Which is inherently ruinous for freetraders," corrected Magno Vestevaal. "You were perfectly right to IF biggest threat to trade since the dissolution of the Omanite empire. And you're perfectly sure that the House of Magda is responsible?' "There's no doubt of it. It's entirely the work of the Imaiz." "How is the Imaiz different from the other lords of Anharitte?" "I think the clue lies in the word Imaiz itself. This translates variously as wizard, wise man or madman, depending on which Ahha dialect you speak. The suggestion is that the Imaiz is accorded the full rights of nobility because his magic is too potent to be ignored. The House of Magda has a long history of congenital insanity among its occupants -- a not surprising situation when you consider the close in-breeding that used to take place in aristocratic houses in order to keep the right of succession within a very narrow group. "The persistent mental aberrations of the rulers of Magda, usually a form of extreme megalomania, have given rise to many long-standing superstitions about the master of the fortress of Thirdhill. One of these is that the Imaiz has the ability to cast spells and control the future. History seems to show that few of Magda's occupants were very proficient in the black arts, for all the cruel and ingenious black rites they devised. But the present Imaiz appears to be r your newsstand? In your paperback bookshop? It distinguishes the only paperback company that is, publishirtg science fiction never before in paperback. brand-new collection of this triple-winning author's latest sf novelettes and short stories. Then there's a novel we think may be a Hugo rKminee. Michael See what you think. Brian M. Stableford. one of the most original minds in space-and-time. writes a new novel about an exploration team in a Dark nally, as a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs we have Lin Carter's marvelterior illustrations by Tim Kirk). Books. Inc. represents the direction of Donald A. Wollheim in finding the sf that readers really like. cornel and #c is the standard retail price A a difTerent proposition altogether." "You're surely not suggesting that he actually is proHcient in the black arts?" "No. And neither is he mad. I've a diflerent and more dangerous picture of the current Imaiz, Diondaizan. All the evidence points to the fact that he's cunning, ruthless, academic -- and probably of Terran origin." "The devil!" said Vestevaal. "I thought that outworlders weren't permitted to hold land titles on Roget." "They aren't. There's some sort of subterfuge at work here. But the fact that he's succeeded in becoming a holder is a measure of the man we're up against." II do you base your conjecture that he's a Terran," asked Vestevaal. "You've surely not been able to study the man himself?" "No. We've had to content ourselves with observing Zinder. She's genuine Ahhn stock -- but there's no academy on Roget that could give her the type of education she possesses." "But that still leaves the possibility of the Imaiz being from one of the other prime worlds." "True," admitted Ren. "But the Society of Pointed Tails is thorough in investigating such matters. During their inquires they uncovered a most significant fact. When calculating, Zinder works in decimals to the base ten -- then converts the answers to the galactic duodecimal system." "That's nothing special," said Magno Vestevaal. "I do the same myself." "My point entirely. Director. Your primary education was on Terra and you can't get out of the habit. Whoever trained Zinder had a similar habit. And Terra's the only planet in the universe that still clings to the base ten." "Point taken, Tito. Your efficiency does you credit. It won't go unrewarded, I promise you. But it does look as though there's a hell of a storm brewing for Freetrade on Anharitte. From your observations, does this look like part of a deliberate takeover by the House of Magda?" "No. Far worse than that. It looks like interference with the social structure by an inveterate dogooder more interested in the welfare of the bottom four-fifths of the population than he is in legitimate profit." " 'Curse all saviours of the human race -- for they are responsible for most of the blacker parts of history!' " quoted VesteIF vaal despondently. He moved back to the window and began to watch the tall slave girl again, now examining her every movement with a wiser interest. "Damn it, Tito, you know we can't let this happen, don't you?" "I know it," said Ren. "That's the reason I called you in. I want permission, financing and backing to organize an opporition to the Imaiz." "Interference with the internal politics of an independent planet is an extremely dangerous business." "But it wouldn't be the first time it has been done. Nor is what I propose strictly interference. It could rather be viewed as assistance in maintaining the existing balance of power. The Lords Di Rode and Di Guaard and the Lady T Ampere are scarcely going to side with the Imaiz and risk their income if not their lives if a revolution comes. Di Irons is the city prefect. He's a bit of an unknown quantity in this, but he's responsible for law and order, so I doubt if he'll reject our assistance in maintaining the status quo. Most of the societies grow fat under the present regime, so they're not going to welcome change either. And I'm sure the planetary government would love to have us thwart a provincial uprising for theih -- if it were done with discretion. That puts the major percentage of wealth, influence and interests on our side. Give me the facilities and I'll crush the Imaiz without leaving even a ripple on the surface." "Not so fast, Tito. We're nOt the only Company affected -- or even the largest. And we've the merchant worlds to consider. Before we take any action that might affect the future of Anharitte as a freeport we're going to need the approval of the Freetrade Council -- most particularly as insurance in case the venture goes sour on us. And before I dare approach the council I have to be absolutely certain that what you've told me is the truth. Not that I'm doubting you, of course, but it would be embarrassing if we were being manipulated into doing the dirty work for somebody who had a simple grudge against the Imaiz." "I appreciate your caution. If you wish I'll arrange for the senior scribes of the Society of Pointed Tails toi meet you so that you can question them directly." "No need for that," said Magno Vestevaal. "I think I can satisfy myself more easily." He moved toward the door. "What had you in mind?" Ren rose to follow him. "I'm going downstairs, of course. To have a word with Zinder." Ren's eyebrows rose. "I wouldn't advise it. And for God's sake -- remember she's well protected." "It was the truth of that proposition I wished to test. If that fact holds true, then the rest of the story holds true." Tito Ren sighed and reached for his sword belt. He paused only to fasten the ornate buckle before he followed the director out into the street. T he emergence of the two sunshine at the edge of the square -- the director purposefully striding towards Zinder, and' Ren following -- caused an immediate thrill of interest to run through the market place. There was a quieting in the pace of the bargaining, though each man pretended still to be about his business. The agent sensed rather than saw the evasive group of figures who moved to strategic positions in the crowd, prepared for trouble. Worst of all was the unspoken wariness of the merchants, traditionally neutral in political affairs. If Vestevaal forced the incident into an affray, then even the dour men of small commerce seemed likely to side with Zinder. Ren normally had complete confidence in Vestevaal's ability to contain a crisis. However, Ren was from habit more attuned to the local undercurrents in Anharitte than Vestevaal could be. Purely from luck of "feel"f the situation the director might provoke an explosive incident. Under his tunic Ren could feel the comforting weight of his blaster. He would hesitate to use the' weapon in such a populated place, but, if necessity demanded, he could drop a dozen men with a single charge. "You there! Girl -- come here." Vestevaal was approaching Zinder, calling imperiously. She turned her head and waited for him, her face composed, as if the meeting were an event not unexpected. The director stopped suddenly as he realized she intended that he must l)e the one to walk the intervening distance if he wished to speak with her. She plainly did not propose to come to him. "I said come," said Vestevaal, knowing the delicate dictates of slave etiquette. She looked him up and down with shrewd appraisal, then turned back to the merchant at whose stall she was and continued her transaction. The director sensed that all eyes were upon him and wondered how he would resolve the offered slight. It was unthinkable for any slave other than Zinder to have disobeyed a public command from a man so obviously a prominent outworlder. Vestevaal realized that he IF had trapped himself into an open contest of wills. He could not afford to let the matter pass. He strode angrily across the remaining distance and caught hold of her left wrist, on which the slave mark was indelibly written. At close quarters she was attractive rather than beautiful in the classic sense. Her dark hair framed a strong face, which displayed an unassailable character. But more impressive was the rich by-play of emotions continuously monitored in her eyes. "I thought so -- the House of Magda." Vestevaal was emphasizing the aspect of bondage, trying to draw a reaction. "Your master will be hearing from me. You're the one they call Zinder, aren't you?" "But of course. Director Vestevaal. But then you knew that before you came across here. Indeed, I am the reason you came." Her voice was clear and melodious, modulated with a subtle artistry. Her speech was perfectly articulated Terran in which the attractive lilt of the native Ahhn accent had been carefully preserved. "But I'm glad you did come. Peering from behind a curtain is rather undignified for a man of your standing with the Freetrade Council." "Damn!" said Vestevaal, knowing that he was now the center of an attentive audience. "You take much on yourself, girl. Not only do you open wounds, but you also apply salt." "Salt? Only to the wounds of enemies," she answered easily. "Among friends salt is for sharing at table. If I've off'ered salt. Director, it's you who have chosen how to use it." or displeasure, only an engaging challenge. Behind the eyes were limitless funds of resourcefulness. Though her lips were smiling slightly, they showed neither insolence nor arrogance. She was meeting him on an equal level and both of them knew it. What had started as a deliberate confrontation had ended in a rout for Vestevaal. His wry smile of admiration turned into a great gust of laughter and he reached this time for her right hand and kissed it. "As you so rightly said, Zinder, it was I who chose how to use the salt. But whereas a man can mostly choose his friends, circumstances choose his enemies for him. There are times when one could wish the reverse. Please present my compliments to the Imaiz -- and tell him that if ever he wishes to dispose of your bond he will find in myself an eager purchaser." "I will convey your words to Dion-daizan. Fm sure he'll be both amused and flattered." "And also tell him that I mean to stop him by every means at my disposal." "That isn't news. Director Vestevaal. Had he not been convinced of it he would not have bothered sending me here today." "He anticipated this meeting?" 'The chance of this or something like it was highly probable. He felt it only fair you should know the character of the opposition." "He could scarcely have made the point more strongly." "What else would you expect of the wizard#f Anharitte?" She bowed respectfully and moved away like a colorful flower among the stalls, the barest hint of triumph on her lips. The tension that had held the cluttered market in a long hiatus drained slowly away and the noisy chaUer of bargaining returned. Ren, who had been silent to this moment, moved to the director's elbow. "I told you I didn't advise it," he said critically. "You were right, Tito," Magno Vestevaal told him. "I should have listened to you more carefully. Mark that round to the credit of the Imaiz. If that's a sample of his tactics we'll be needing more than moral support from the Freetrade Council." "Then you're satisfied with my assessment of the situation?" "Send word to have the shuttle readied for blast-off' as soon as I reach it. I'll be calling an emergency session of the council and asking for their backing with all the facilities we ne. With the evidence I shall give them I doubt there will even be a debate. In the meantime, you're in charge here. You have my authority to draw whatever Company funds you need. Stop the Imaiz, neutralize his policy or just plain kill him -- I don't mind which. But if he turns many more slaves like Zinder loose in Anharitte we're surely going to have another democracy on our hands. And what will become of Freetrade then?" Ill function of the societies in Anharitte it was necessary to view them against the background of the uneasy truce local feudalism maintained. The burgeoning space technology barely thrust outside the city's limits. Almost alone among the institutions of Anharitte, the societies had been forced to adapt to the twin pressures and now formed a precarious link at once joining and keeping separate the rival ways of life. IF Historically the societies had been clans of skilled mercenary soldiers who offered their services to any who found it beneficial to use hired arms rather than maintain their own forces. In either attacking or defensive roles, the clans had played a great part in the early formation of the "kingdoms" from which the great Houses of Roget had emerged after the adoption of central government. With the coming of less turbulent times the societies had found new exercise for their warlike crafts. When the thriving communities had outgrown the protection afforded by the great castles on the three hills, the merchants outside the citadels had become exposed to attacks by Tyrene pirates who came up the broad Aprillo river. Many merchants had then found it expedient to use the armed services of the societies to protect their homes and warehouses. From this had evolved the contract system whereby a merchant engaged a society for protection but paid for the service only as and when it was required. This function, too, sharpened the efficiency of the societies themselves, because the best protection contracts went to the clans with the proven ability to preserve the life and wealth of their patrons. As piracy became a less profitable profession, the idea of # by Patrick Moore with # full-color paintings by David A. Hardy Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke Not Sci-Fi, but the likely next  steps in man's exploration of the solar system and the universb beyond. welcome this book , , , It provides a heady mixture of education, entertainment -- and Inspiration' Arthur C. Clarke If you are fascinated by the vast expanse of the worlds beyond our own. make this your personal Christmas gift... to yourself I #V# X #" only # wherever books ere sold in space. contract protection remained. Always adaptable, the societies were swift to monitor the change and quick to evolve new services tp offer. Slave control in the expanding estates was an obvious extension. The passing of two disastrous plagues brought about the introduction of society hospitals. Frequent fires in the huddled wooden buildings caused the initiation of society fire services. Thus the outworld concept of insurance found a more personal and practical analogue in Anharitte. Yet the warrior function of the societies was not forgotten. A man with the price might still arrange for the skilled disposal of his rival or the waging of a feud with an enemy. While the taking of life in Anharitte was not necessarily a crime, disturbance of the peace of the city was an offense. The societies learned to conduct their affairs with great discretion under the grim and scowling eyes of a prefecture which neither approved nor disapproved of what they did -- provided the quiet life of the city was maintained. The coming of the spaceport had further enhanced the societies' role. No outworlders were permitted to hold property titles on Roget -- a necessary praution for a culture intending to preserve its own identity in the face of commercial outworld interests -- but there was nothing to stop outworlders entering into contracts with a society and leasing buildings held in the society's name. The same applied to slave-bonds and to every other form of transaction that had to be registered with the prefecture. Thus the societies, inextricably part of the old culture, became also the bridgehead of the new. As a Company agent more astute than most, Tito Ren had long since learned the value of an in-depth study both of the history and the cultural mores of the territories to which he was assigned. Thus he had been quick to recognize the multiple role of the societies and equally quick to adapt the system to his own requirements. His researches had shown the Society of Pointed Tails to be not only the most efficient of the available clans, but also the one still most proficient in the use of arms in situations where the rudimentary laws of Roget could not be bent sufilciently to gain t necessary advantage for an ambitious freetrader. Ren had wooed the members of Pointed Tails by concentrating his considerable leasings of property, services and local labor with them. He pursued his advantage by offering them well-paid investigation assignments probing those aspects of life in Anharitte he found of IF interest. Now he was ready to move into the next phase -- that of actually using the Pointed Tails as an instrument with which to manipulate particular elements of Anharitte society itself. He was prepared to recognize, however, that a society as competent as the Pointed Tails would not be likely to accept his propositions without question. Nor was he wrong. of the Society of Pointed Tails, looked questioningly at Ren. "You've already spoken with your director, then?" "I have -- and he's in complete agreement. The Imaiz will have to be stopped. The director has already given me access to whatever i Company funds I need in order to make a preliminary approach, to you -- and now he has gone to consult with the Freetrade Council. If they concur. I'll have unlimited funding from the Galactic Bank itself and whatever additional facilities I choose to call on." "And you wish the Pointed Tails to prepare a scheme of harassment and feud against Dion-daizan?" "I need more than a feud. I need to crush Diori-daizan. Harassment may have its place -- but if it doesn't bring results I'm prepared to consider anything short of full-scale warfare." "And the Prefect Di Irons? Do you think he's going to sit by happily whileyou wage war on the Imaiz?"' "I intend to seek the support of all the lords of Anharitte, Di Irons among thejn. If we can gain their backing plus that of the Freetrade Council, the Imaiz won't stand a chance." about his muscled body, took a pensive turn around Ren's booklined chamber. He was obviously not enthusiastic. "I think you oversimplify about the lords," he said. "Di Irons will never support you in an overt act of war against the Imaiz, whatpvw his private sympathies. Di Guaard is so insane he's still holding an inquisition to find pirates who became extinct two generations ago. Di Rode will listen to you, but he's unlikely actively to support an outworlder against another House of Anharitte. Only the Lady T' Ampere appears as a possible ally--thought I doubt you'd be prepared to pay her price for the alliance." "And the Society of Pointed Tails?" asken Ren. "Will they support me?" Catuul frowned. "I can't anticipate the decision of my fellow scribes. I'll call an immediate meeting of the lodge and recommend they take your assignment. ' But there will be much argument." "What's there to argue about?" "About the possibility of losing the fight. It's easy enough for you to wave money and say you want to crush the Imaiz. But did you never think that Dion-daizan may prove powerful enough to crush the lot of us?" "That isn't possible," said Ren. "Because whatever strengths he has, I can call on resources to match his ten times over. This is one fight you can't possibly lose." "Your thinking is typical of an outworlder's," said Catuul. "You don't appreciate Dion's considerable influence with the bondslaves -- or his command of magic. Believe me, you under-estimate his potential, or you would not so lightly engage in plans for his destruction." "Dion-daizan is a fraud. He's a Terran adventurer -- with no more occult powers than you or I." Catuul shrugged. "Call him by any name you like. We know him as a formidable and unforgiving enemy. He never aillows an injury to pass unavenged." "I can always approach another society if the Pointed Tails have cowards among their members," said Ren coldly. "Cowards?" Catuul swung on him angrily. There are none braver or more dedicated than the Pointed Tails. It isn't they ;who might falter -- but you." "IT' Ren was perplexed. "Of course. If the society accepts your assignment every man is committed to the death. But you have the option to rescind the contract at any time. If the going gets too rough you can retreat offworld to lick your wounds and total up your losses. But we can't. We have to continue operating here in Anharitte -- and the Imaiz makes no distinction between those who are paid to injure him and those who do the paying. Only the scrolls tell of the remains of societies who once tangled with the Imaiz and lost." "Nevertheless," said Ren, "that isn't going to happen. If ever I drew back, the Freetrade Council would replace me with another. They can't afford to do otherwise. And their resources have no limit -- they can acquire them a thousand times faster than we can exhaust them. I'm oflering you the backing of a dozen merchant worlds and seven hundred space companies and combines -- to fight one man and a handful of slaves. Tell that to the other scribes and see if they share your doubts." "I'll tell them," said Catuul gravely, gathering his robe across his arm. "And I think they'll be convinced. But it will be a close deIF cision. I'll let you have our answer in the morning." Ren turned his attention to the radio link with the space terminal. From the spaceport the equipment reached out in real time to the relay chains across the vastnesses of commercial Interstellar space. In response to his inquiry he learned that an incoming call from Freetrade Central was already logged a mere five hours away. Finally Vestevaal's voice came through. "Tito, can you hear me clearly?" "Yes, Director. Transmission is good. Did the council meeting go in your favor?" "It did indeed. They were even more perturbed than we -- especially those who have big investments nearer the Rim. The outcome is that we've ot all the support we need. The Galactic Bank will give you unrestricted credit. Any Freetrade ships calling at Anharitte will be obliged to offer assistance -- and the merchant worlds of Combien and Ranee are donating a light battle cruiser to be set down on Anharitte for the duration of the exercise. The battle cruiser will have most of the facilities you might require in the way of laboratories, trained commandos, communications, armaments and the like. You've enough there to start a war if you should need to." "It mustn't come to that," said Ren. "If we upset the planetary government we'll be thrown off' Roget for sure. Our best chance is to try to woo the local lords to our side, then to Tight an undercover campaign against the Imaiz. Then we can divide Magda's share of the spaceport royalties among the remaining Houses and expect the dust to settle pretty fast." "You're the man on the spot, Tito, so it's your advice that counts. I'll be returning to Roget shortly, but purely as an observer and to maintain liaison with the Freetrade Council. I may advise on policy, but the strategy and conduct of the battle will be entirely your affair. I hope that arrangement is to your liking." "I couldn't have asked for better. Terran or no Terran, if we have modern weapons and the support of the other lords, the Imaiz hasn't got a chance." "I wish I completely shared your confidence," said Magno Vestevaal, signing off. "But Zinder didn't have to make that confrontation in the market. For the moment I almost wondered if the Imaiz wasn't spoiling for a fight. the next morning with the Pointed Tails' acceptance of the offer. The price was high, but Ren brushed aside the financial considerations. ""You managed to Find agreement, then?" Catuul grimaced. "Some of the scribes had reservations, but they're all alarmed by what the Imaiz is doing. Certainly they respond to your argument that if we're to maintain things in Anharitte as they now stand, some form of action is necessary to curtail Dionto finance and supply backing for the skirmish makes it easier for us to do what we should finally have been forced to do anyway. In some ways this is an alliance -- and there are other societies who may contribute to our cause." Ren held out his hand in accepUnce of the bargain. "Then it's settled. TYit Imaiz will be stopped." "He will b. But initially we must proceed by customary feud and harassment. Only if these measures aren't effective can we consider outright war." "I'll accept that," said Ren. "You start to prepare a campaign against the mmr. I'll do some preliminary canvassing for support among the other lords. I suggest we meet again in two days time to decide our plan of action." L at once aware of being observed. He had not gone far through the quaint and narrow streets before a prefecture watchman approached him. "Agent Ren?" "The same." The watchman had obviously been waiting for him to emerge. "What services can I offer?" "If you please, you will accompany me to the prefecture. Lord Di Irons wishes to speak with you." "And I with him," said Ren, though he recognized the summons for the imperious demand tjiat it was. If he had thought of declining the invitation the appearance of two more watchmen behind him pointed up the wisdom of cheerful compliance. Even in the bright sun the prefecture looked cold and uninviting. The wide portals shaded the dim chill that seemed resident in the very fabric of the building. Tito Ren could not repress a shiver as he entered the main door. The stone corridors of the law were always an anathema to him. Di Irons' office was large and grimly impressive. On the same scale was the man himself. Huge, bearded, and with a shock of rustred, unruly hair, he was as unlike the typical Ahhn as was Ren himIF self. His very presence spoke of strength and granite resolution. The prefect was obviously not a man to be li gh tly deflected from his task. "Agent Ren -- " the handshake was a mere formality -- "I've asked you here because we need  better understanding of each other. My job is to maintain the law in Anharitte. Yours is to run a profitable exchange of trade through our sea and spaceport facilities. It would be a pity if in pursuit of our respective duties we should happen to collide." "Indeed a pity." Ren shifted uncomfortably on his chair. "However, I think the possibility is slight. We traders are aware that we remain hpre on sufferance." "Don't fence with me," said Di Irons savagely. "I spoke of understanding. We both know that the lords of Anharitte are as much dependent on your money as you are upon access to the freeport facilities. So let's speak frankly. I know that you and your director intend making feud with the Imaiz." Ren examined his inquisitor warily. "You know of that?" "Of course. Not much occurs in Anharitte that isn't known in the prefecture. Whether or not we choose to act on what we know depends on our interpretation of the law. Provocation isn't an offense. But if Vestevaal had struck Zinder the other day we'd have been very much concerned." "To protect a slave?" Ren affected a measure of surprise he did not feel. Di Irons' voice was quieter now but just as dangerous. "No. We would have had to intervene to protect yoiir stupid hides. And that offends our idea of preservation of the peace. You're no stranger here, Ren. You know which way the tides flow in Anharitte." "I know it," said Ren, "but the director needed proof of my interpretation." "Well, I gather he got it. But I don't advise him to make an open confrontation like that again. Zinder has too many sympathizers to make it a healthy pastime. But what escapes me is why your director needed proof of her ability to cut him down to size." "Because it's my contention that if the Imaiz continues to educate slaves to her level, the slave structure will crumble. Your society as it now exists will crumble. Don't ask me what will replace it -- but it will certainly be a system with less tolerance toward Freetrade than the one we enjoy at the moment." "So that's it." Di Irons was suddenly caught by the speculation. "You asked for understanding," said Ren. "Well, I've shown my blade. Now dare you return the gesture? #don't imagine you lords of Anharitte would look upon the withdrawal of Freetrade with much favor." "No!" Di Irons reacted violently. "You'll not involve me in politics. The Imaiz may be ill advised in the way he treats his slaves. But if I were to take arms against every slavemaster I considered ill advised I would not have half enough cells in which to hold them -- or a tenth enough tormentors to make their stay uncomfortable. In any case, I think you're reading more into this than is written. I know Dion well. He's U frequent guest in my household." "And Zinder? Is she a frequent guest, too? A slave?" "If Dion wills it. A slavemaster's rights over his bondslaves are absolute -- and that's a principle I must uphold. If he chooses to pretty her and pamper her it's no concern of mine. She would not be the first bondslave to become a favored concubine -- though I'll not say that's what she is. If Dion is pleased to bring her to my table I'll be the last to interfere. In any case, Zinder's a charming and cultured girl." "And you approve of a bondslave's being educated to this level?" "I don't necessarily approve when a master has a slave stoned to death for some imagined slight. My function is not to judge but to maintain the law. Thus far I've no evidence that Dion-dfaizan has broken it." us in protecting Anharitte from the Imaiz' s slave policy?" "I'm not even convinced there is any threat. A man who owns slaves must always be on guard against rebellion -- and I fancy Dion runs less risk of this than most. But above all, the law must be neutral -- or it ceases to be law and becomes tyranny. Let it not be said that a prefect of Anharitte used his position to persecute others on the word of an outworld merchant's agent. "If you think you have a grievance against Dion-daizan you can have recourse to the supreme court in Gaillen. Or you can attempt to achieve satisfaction through the services of a society. But let them advise you on tactics. The societies know how to operate with discretion. If your feud moves into the public realm I shall act -- and act decisively and without favor. Do I make myself clear?" "Would you also move against the Imaiz if the necessity arose?" "The lords of Anharitte have certain rights of arms. Outside those, whoever destroys the peace of Anharitte will be forced to acIF count to nic. That goes for the Imaiz, for the other lords -- and most especially for you, Ren. Agent you may be, but if you assume the role of agent provocateur then you'll not find us so hospitable." Ren scowled with disappointment. "I doubt the other lords would condone your tolerance toward the activities of Dion-daizan and his slaves." T HE prefect exploded in anger. "You're an outworlder, Ren. Don't try and tell me what Di Rode and Di Guaard and the Lady T' Ampere would or wouldn't think. I was raised with these people. I know what they think better than they know it themselves." "But you weren't raised with the Imaiz' said Ren coldly. "Because the suggestion is very strong that he's a Terran. Don't tell me that doesn't offend your precious law?" For the first time Di Irons seemed unsure of himself. "You have evidence to support that statement?"  "No positive proof as yet. But I will have. Don't you query the rights of the claimants to your aristocratic Housfes?" "Query?" Di Irons was grimly amused. "Do you think I would dare look closely at the credentials of Di Rode or Di Guaard -- or they at mine? How many murdered infants do you suppose would e found in the moats? Which unfortu: nate son went alive into his tomb behind the new wall in the tower? Whose mother is that demented crone who . has sat in chains for thirty years in the dungeon? The rights of the title go to the claimant with the ability to survive at the top. The state acknowledges the title of the House -- the holder of the title declares himself." "I understand all that," said Ren patiently. "But surely the position is different if the occupant of the. title is an outworlder?" "It would be -- if the matter could be proved. Then I would have to act. But you've admitted you don't have the evidence Until you do, I submit you're playing a very dangerous game." "Dangerous in what way?" asked Ren. "I know Dion well. He's shrewd, resourceful -- and his information is impeccable. What do you think he'll be doing while you wander the countryside trying to stir trouble against him? I strongly advise you to guard your back, not to visit dark places alone and to engage a taster to test your food. If you were to die -- I'm sure I'd have a hard time trying to hang the responsibility on Dion-daizan." "I'll remember that. But in the meantime, think' over what I've said. I doubt even you would refuse a quarter of Magda's share of the income from the spaceports concession." "I prize ssome things above money," said Di Irons. "And one of them is life. Nobody in his senses provokes a needless quarrel with a man as far-reaching and formidable as Dion-daizan. I know it's not fashionable among Freetraders to speak of magic and superstition, but some of the works of the Imaiz are well beyond the powers of man." "That I must yet have proved to me," said Tito Ren. "Forthe moment I prefer to regard him merely as an academic Terran adventurer with ho supernatural powers." "It would be churlish of me," said Di Irons, "not to wish you a successful venture. If what you've told me is true I stand to gain or lose as much as you. But I would need more reason than you've given before l iaised my hand against the wizard of Anharitte. Take care, merchant. You've chosen a stronger enemy than you think." The conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door. A watchman came in, apologized for the intrusion and handed Di Irons a note. The latter read it, looked questioningly at Ren for a moment -- then his face broke into a wry smile. "It appears I spoke more truly than I knew. Don't tell me after this that you don't believe in the powers of the Imaiz." "Why? What's happened?" "You rent a bonded oil and spirit warehouse on the quayside of Firstwater?" "I do." Ren was half on his feet. "What's the trouble?" "It's on fire," said Di Irons. "You had best get down there. I think this will not be the last conversation we'll be having on the matter, so you have my permission to proceed. But tomorrow I'll be asking questions. I don't tolerate the destruction of property in a private feud -- and if I find proof that either you or Diondaizan has done this deliberately, an accounting will have to be made." "I'm not likely to set fire to my own warehouse," said Ren bitterly. "And Dion's not stupid enough to indulge in ordinary arson," said Di Irons. "Or in any event. I've never been able to prove he is. If you find me some proof, Ren, I'll guarantee to lay it where it belongs." IV. R en thought of returning to his chambers for his cushioncraft. IF Then he realized that the poling of the vehicle by stavebearers through the city streets and down the Trade Road would be a slow and tiresome business. A mule cart would be quicker -- but not much. The total distance from the prefecture to Firstwater was no greater than two kilometers and much of the way lay down the slopes of Firsthill into the valley formed with Thirdhill on the other shore. Overall he calculated he could make the journey more quickly on foot and he set out at a labored jog -- with complete disregard for lack of dignity or sweat. He had barely cleared the fringes of the buildings and come out at the end of the Trade Road overlooking Firstwater when he became aware of the broad smoke column rising into the sultry air. If he had thought the fire might only be a minor one his surmise was soon corrected. Even through the dense smoke cloud he could see the bright seat of the flame -- and its visibility at this distance told him that the conflagration must be total as far as his installation was concerned. The Trade Road was easy to negotiate. Such carts as were on it were also moving downhill, laden with spectators eager to witness the fire. Most of these vehicles, braked with iron wedges and chains against the slope, were easily overtaken, and his urgent running raised a great deal of amused comment. On the Via Arena the crowds thickened and the road to Magda Crossing was nearly impassable in the direction of the river. Fortunately a group of Pointed Tails met him and forg him a path through the mobs to a point near the burning warehouse. The Pointed Tails' fire appliance was there -- with all its handcranked absurdity. So obviously inadequate was it against the roaring inferno that confronted it that it had not been put into even token use. Two other societies had also brought their appliances, but these were equally useless and stood well clear of the outer perimeter fence, where they would not be affected by the intense heat. The fire itself was overwhelming. The whole building, with walls of massive stone blocks, vibrated with the tremendous roar of the furnace within. The structure had no windows, and the two exterior doors jetted streams of angry flame like enormous blowlamps. The roof, once a structure of heavily tarred wood, was completely gone. Surmounting the walls was a continuous crown of fire, which produced such intense heat that the spectators had to move back repeatedly to avoid being scorched. The warehouse ' had two perimeter fences, one contained within the other, but it was now impossible to approach the building nearer than the confines of the outer fence. Here Ren found Catuul Gras, his face heavy red from the heat, Catuul was watching the progress of the conflagration with frank disbelief. His expressive glance at Ren suggested both physical and mental agony. He gestured toward his own useless fire appliance. "I took the liberty of calling on the spaceport for emergency assistance. I hope I didYight' "Exactly right," approved Ren. "How did the fire start?" "We don't know. No goods have moved in or out of the warehouse for fifteen days. Everything was secure on the last round of the society guards and the picket between the fences has been strictly maintained. The fire started behind locked doors and we're certain that nobody could have entered." "Could some sort of time fuse or incendiary mechanism have been placed inside?" Catuul grimaced. "I know of no device obtainable hereabouts with such a long delay. But if you're thinking this is the work of the Imaiz you pose a paradox. Those doors were sealed several days before your quarrel with Dion-daizan became actual. You could only suspect his hand if you were prepared to credit him with the magical powers you deny he possesses." "Nevertheless, the timing's too perfect to be a matter of coincidence. Even Di Irons hinted he suspected that the Imaiz was behind it. Well, if it is Dion's work and there's any evidence left to prove it, it will give us a good start for our harassment. Di Irons is all set to string up the Imaiz by the thumbs if he's found responsible for the destruction of property during a private feud. All he needs is proof -- and here come the boys who can give it to us." M ovement among the watchers on the road signaled the arrival of the cushioncraft emergency tender from the spaceport. Behind it came two more tenders containing compound foam and chemicals and were deftly manipulated into place. In complete contrast to the laughable native fire appliances, these three vehicles, normally reserved for spacecrash emergencies, were magnificently equipped and manned by trained and competent crews. Within seconds the great pumps were working and hoses were being run out as far as the river to bring in the additional water necessary to complete the work of the foam coverage. IF Pictor Don, the spaceport's emergency commander, spared neither Ren nor Catuul a glance as he deployed his facilities for maximum effect. The foam from the hoses hit the side of the building and wherever it touched it solidified into glass slag and instantly formed an air-excluding seal that was also an impressive heat-reducing barrier. The properties of the solidifying foam were such that it could easily withstand the temperatures involved, while its noncommunicating cellular structure was light, yet strong enough to prevent the collapse of all but the heaviest parts of buildings. In dealing with a fire of these proportions the shell of the building could literally be filled with foam in a matter of minutes with a hundred per cent expectation of complete extinction of the fire. The radiated heat fell away dramatically as the foam blanket coated the waUs and the forecourt. Ren and Catuul followed the fire the building's shell with foam began. After a short while, however, they became aware that something was wrong -- the flames in the interior, instead of yielding, had become concentrated in one central spot and now roared like a volcano. The flare hurled large pieces of congealed foam high into the air to fall at a distance, to the intense consternation of the onlookers. Finally Pictor Don dropped down from his command point and came over to Ren. "What have you got in there, Tito? Rocket fuel?" The agent shook his head. "No. Mainly high-grade crude oils and essential oils waiting shipment offworld to Ranee for refining." "But the oxidants," protested Don. "You should know better than to store oxidants with flammables." "There are no okidants there. In fact, no tonnages of oxidants are available on Roget." Pictor Don shook his head. "That foam can extinguish anything up to and including a blazing well-head without trouble. But you've got something in there that could have put the whole building comfortably into orbit had the jet been pointed down instead of up. A few tons of liquid oxygen would do the trick with your highgrade oil -- but without oxygen you couldn't produce a flare like that in "No oxygen," said Ren. "There's not a liquid oxygen plant within sixteen light-years of Roget and it's a dead certainty that oxygen is not imported." A cry from a member of the fire team indicated that the situation was changing. Pictor Don returned to his post and Ren saw the bright plume of flame above the building gradually diminish and finally become extinguished by the solidifying foam. The fire was out. "What happens now?" asked Catuul. "First they extract the heat from the surface by cooling the mass with water. Then they progressively add alkali to the water and this slowly dissolves the foam. By control of what they spray they can stop the process at any point to allow the removal of potentially dangerous masonry or to inspect for signs of arson before the evidence is too much disturbed." T 'HE fire team was now spraying riyer water from its hoses, but such was the heat-insulating effectiveness of the cellular mass that very little of the intense heat still trapped beloy the surface was available to be carried away by the water. Pictor Don mounted a hydraulic hoist and climbed from it building's walls. The strength of the glasslike substance was such that his weight barely dented the surface. He scrunched over almost the entire area of the warehouse on a quick tour of inspection. He ordered alkali to be applied. About a thirty-centimeter layer of the foam was stripped from the surface by chemical leaching. Newly exposed fragments of the building were cooled ' with water and a second round of inspection followed. Then the emergency commander approached the edge of the building and called over the wall. "Get Tito Ren up here -- and that Pointed Tail fellow." Somewhat reluctantly Ren and Catuul Gras allowed themselves to be conducted to the hoist and raised to the top of the wall. There was something unnerving about stepping onto a layer of foam that had been a sprayable liquid such a short time before. The surface felt alarmingly fragile. Overcoming their fears, however, the two walked across the crunching surface toward Pictor Don. At a certain point he cautioned them to stop. "Mind where you put your feet in that area just in front of you. There's a giant bubble in the foam reaching, as far as I can judge, right down to base level. That was the blowhole through which the last flame persisted. Unless I miss my guess, the root cause of the fire lies directly at the bottom end of that bubble. Does its position give you any clues?" Catuul glanced around at the IF fra gm ents of outer wall visible above the foam, trying to verify his bearings. "We're located over what was the inner storeroom." "What was kept in there?" "The high-grade crude oil," said Ren. "In metal tanks?" "No. Wooden barrels. It's the only way the native producers will package it. Wharfage facilities don't run to the accommodation of tankers." "Wasn't there anything else?" Pictor Don was completely unconvinced. "Nothing," said Ren. "I counted the barrels myself. We werb going to repackage the whole consignment in spaceweight containers ready for shipment. And every single barrel was broached to obtain analysis samples, so I can guarantee that the store contained nothing but high-grade oil." "Very well." Pictor Don's voice still carried no evidence of conviction. He indicated that they should all return to the ground. The chemical stripping of the foam began again, with interruptions at intervals for repeated inspections. Finally Don again called for Ren and Catuul Gras. The thickness of the foam had been reduced to a meter. The space around the blowhole had beencompletely cleared for a radius of several meters. Ren and his colleague were now able to inspect the area Pictor Don regarded as the base of the fire. "A drain -- " Ren regarded the' charred and blackened area of the floor with astonishment. "Yes." Don was critical. "A drain you used to take the overspill of oil during the sampling of the barrels for analysis, perhaps?" "There was some oil spillage," agreed Ren. "But I don't see -- " "Where does the drain lead?" "To the river, I should hope." S econds later he was running across the broad forecourt toward the river, a sudden suspicion in his mind. The banks were complex with piers and moorings and wharves, but hard against the bank protruded one particular pipe whose end even now drained black dregs from the disastrous fire. The marks of a coupling that had been placed over the pipe's end were plainly visible -- the coupling itself was gone, along with the craft that undoujbtedly had borne it. Angrily Ren scanned the river. The slow drift of barges and ships -- left toward the spaceport and right toward the shipping lanes and the sea -- was a complex movement that defied analysis. The number of barges and ships provided too much information for Ren to be able to determine which craft might be erippedwith couplings to hold against his particular drain and discharge tonnage quantities of oxidant under pressure into the interior of the warehouse. Here was plain evidence of sabotage, but no proof of the sort that could be used to point a finger at Dion-daizan. "It was a honey of a scheme," Ren said later in grudging admiration. "We'll never convince Di Irons of the truth -- " Pictor Don had himself lowered on a cradle down to the entrance of the pipe. Here he explored with an instruments.  "The water from the hoscdown has washed out all real evidence," he said. "But I'd guess somebody's been feeding pure oxygen up this pipe -- and I'd say the probability was high that it was obtained by boiling off liquid oxygen." "And the ignition?" asked Ren. "They wouldn't need to bother. The oil would ignite spontaneously as the oxygen concentration went up. You've been rather cleverly sabotaged, Tito." "And no prizes for guessing by whom," said Ren morosely. "I thought you said there was no tonnage oxygen available on Roget?" "There are no plants that we're aware of, Pictor. Native industry isn't that far advanced. But I'm wondering if there aren't oxygen facilities in Castle Magda. A good , Terran technician supplied with the I sort of money the spaceport dues provide shouldn't have too much trouble building a liquid oxygen plant -- or any other technical facility, when you come to think of it." "But I don't see," said Catuul Gras, "how it could be known that putting Something up that particular pipe would result in a fire in our warehouse. There are hundreds of similar pipes to choose from. In any case, the drain at the other end of the pipe might not have been in the right position." "I think I know how that was decided," said Ren. "Somebody worked out the details of that episode from inside the warehouse." He indicated the gang of slaves now filing back into the warehouse compound ready to start the work of demolition and clearance. "If the Imaiz could bring Zinder to Terran graduate standard, how many other slaves has he similarly educated and then resold? It's slightly unnerving to think that we could have one or two graduate chemists working as bondslaves in our establishments. Think what an effective fifth column that would make. Is it possible, Catuul, that we've acquired some slaves the Imaiz might have trained?" IF "It's possible. "The Imaiz buys and sells many slaves, using many different auctioneers. Nobody save the prefeet would have a continous record of any single slave's history. Dion-daizan could hold one for years and then return him to the market -- and nobody would be the wiser." "But the auctioneers keep records of their individual triansactions?" "They keep all normal records by way of trade. What did you have in mind?" "I doubt Di Irons will allow us access to the prefecture records. But I need an individual history for every slave we possess. Go back to the auctioneers and use whatever pressures you must to obtain copies of their records relating to the slaves in whom we're interested. I'll have a computer programed at the spaceport. With it we should be able to reconstruct individual histories -- I want to know of any slave whose bond has been with the Imaiz for one year or more." "With what object?" "So that we may closely question those whom the Imaiz may have trained or influenced. They may tell us much about Dion, his objectives and his facilities. When we've finished we have the legal right to do with them whatever the evidence suggests. We should at least find the men behind the warehouse sabotage. Possibly we'll fihd many more who've not yet had the time to make a move against us." Catuul's eyes shone with comprehension. "It's a good plan, friend Tito. I don't anticipate much difficulty about copying the auctioneers' records. It's frequently done by those comparing slave stock for breeding purposes." "Then the matter is settled," said Ren. "When the director gets back he's going to expect us to have some pretty damaging ammunition aimed at the Imaiz. He's not going to be too happy about the loss of the warehouse. Some of the essential oils in it were priceless by any standards. From this point on we're very much at war with the Imaiz." V was much perturbed that the Imaiz had struck the first damaging blow in a fight essentially started by Ren. To cover himself Ren outlined his policy for evaluating the slaves and isolating those who had been under the Imaiz's influence. Vestevaal was impressed by the detail, but pointed out that the action was purely defensive. Wars were not won by orderly retreats. The merchant worlds of Combien and Ranee had firmly stressed to Vestevaal the importance of Anharitte as a freeport and had backed their stand by donating the battle cruiser now at the spaceport. The Freetrade Security Council had been just as vociferous and had not only pledged unlimited financial backing, but had insisted on sending a professional troubleshooter, Dr. Alek Hardun, as a technical backup for Ren's team. Implicit in this latter action was the threat that if Ren did not make a success of defeating the Imaiz, the merchant worlds and the Freetrade Council were quite prepared to move in a stronger cadre to settle the question. "Nevertheless," said Ren, "if we're to retain the cooperation of the societies, we must first observe the principle of harassment and feud. To attempt outright war on the Imaiz at this stage could set even the societies against us, because we're outworlders and they're indigenous. I know all the arguments, but if we turn public opinion against us the planetary government will have to act -- and we'll have lost the freeport anyway." "Well, it's still your show, Tito. But let's see some positive action against the Imaiz. I want to see him hit where it hurts and not only for my personal satisfaction. I have to make reports back to the Freetrade Council. I never was much good at making negative reports." "Then how about this for an opener? We intend to contest Zinder's bondship with Diondaizan." Vestevaal swung around abruptly. "Damn!" he said. "That would certainly make Dion sit up. How would you set about it?" Ren smiled wolfishly. "All bondships have to be registered at the prefecture -- and that's the only official record. If anything happened to the entry regarding the bondship of Zinder to Dion-daizan the Imaiz would have no legal way of proving his ownership." "And it can be arranged that something will happen to the entry?" "The register clerk is a minor member of the Society of Pointed Tails." "Surely it isn't as simple as that." "No. In normal circumstances the loss of the entry would not affect the position, because the rights of ownership of the bond would not be contested. But in this case the ownership will be called into question by the Pointed Tails acting on your behalf. As prefect. Lord Di Irons won't be very happy about the situation, but in order to uphold the law he'll have to impound IF Zinder until the matter is settled. That leaves Dion-daizan with two courses of action. He can take the case to the supreme court in Gaillen -- where he would win, of course, except that the litigation could take a year -- " "Or?" "He could take the quicker course of accepting the fact that he has no provable right to Zinder's bond. In that case binder would be put into the slave market, from which Dion-daizan could hope to buy her back." "As a very rich man he should have no trouble on that score," said Vestevaal dubiously. "No. But it's an open market. Anyone can bid who's entitled to hold a slave-bond. That rules you out as a direct participant, but ijt doesn't stop the Pointed Tails from acting on your behalf. If we bid against Dion, using our backing from the Galactic Bank as guarantee, we could force up the price to where even Dion's resources would be strained. We could make him cripple himself financially in order to save her."  The director smote hisknee in lusty approval. "You know, Tito, you've something of a genius for this sort of thing. Keep up this level of skulduggery and we'll see you on the Freetrade Council yet." H eartened, Ren stroUed down to the lodge of the Pointed Tails. The place always impressed and fascinated him. Here the ancient Ahhn customs and architecture had been carefully preserved from outworld influences. The walls and ceilings of the lodge were ornamented with red and gold reliefs showing stylized pictures of legendary battles, with captions worded in the original but now lapsed High-Ahhn cuneiform script. The whole establishment was richly carpeted, hung with remarkably descriptive tapestries and scented with delicate fragrances. It was the closest the Ahhn had ever come to creating a temple. In its halls the history of a proud and intelligent race was set out to show its richness and cohesion and a depth of culture that could have been the envy of many older civilizations. Catuul Gras seemed to be expecting him and Ren was not surprised. He knew the intimate web of observation and communication with which the societies laced the city. "Docs the director approve of the plan to contest Zinder's bond?" Catuul asked. "He does. We're to proceed as planned. I think we'd best make our move this afternoon, in case some suspicion of what we' intend leaks back tothemaz." "I agree, friend Tito. Speed and secrecy arc essential. We will watch for Zinder to come to the fruit market today. As soon as Fm sure she's there I'll have my colleague. Mallow Rade, lay formal complaint at the prefecture and demand her impoundment." r"And the entry in the register?" "That's already taken care of. The matter only waits for us to draw it to the prefect's attention. But news travels with the flics in Anharitte. I suggest neither you nor your director show yourselves outside your chambers until the watchmen have aixested her. I hope the prefect will have enough sense to bring sufficient men to prevent any trouble. As the director's agent, it will be necessary for you to be present at the formal discussion of the case afterward. It might be safer if the director didn't expose himself at all for a day or two." "I doubt he'll agree," said Ren. "But I'll try to get the point over to him. How's the work going on collecting information for preparing histories on the slaves?" "Slowly. As fast as we get the lists complete we're sending them by runner to Dr. Hardun at the spaceport." "Good. Have we any results as yet?" "Most interestingly, yes. We can't produce the histories until all the copying is complete, but already a pattern is starting to emerge. The Imaiz buys and sells many slaves in an apparently random fashion. But Dr. Hardun's pointed out that there's a system behind it." "Oh? What sort of system?" Ren was immediately attentive. "Dion-daizan has an arrangement with the slave auctioneers whereby he's notified when a new batch of slaves is available. He sends his steward to make a preliminary viewing, then bids heavily for those he chooses." "Which is surely a reasonable practice?" "Yes, except that he purchases many times his normal labor requirement. All but a few of these he shortly returns to the market for resale." "And presumably makes a profit on the deal." Catuul shook his head. "No. The significant thing is that he usually takes a loss because he outbid the market in the first place." "I don't see -- " Ren's voice carried a note of puzzlement. "Then, assuming he's no philanthropist, the value of the transactions must lie uniquely in the few he doesn't return for sale." Catuul nodded. "The only information we could gain about them was obtained by questioning the IF ones he rejected. It appears that all the slaves he purchases are given a very thorough medical checkup and put through a series of tests.'" "What sort of tests?" "I think you outworlders describe them as intelligence and aptitude tests. The few who pass remain with the Imaiz, The failures are returned to the market." "So that Dion-daizan is cultivating a select group of intelligent, capable and healthy slaves?" "Presumably. But it's interesting to guess at the standards he's working toward. Dr. Hardun examined the best of the latest batch the Imaiz had offered for resale. Sonie of Dion's rejects were not only above average intelligence and fitness for the slave caste -- they were also above average for citizens of any class." Ren's scowl caused his eyebrows to meet. "So Dion's not only building a select group of slaves, he's x;ulling an elite. Zinder's no happy accident. Nor is she likely to be unique. Damn -- how long has this been going on, Catuul?" "Certainly for ten years, probably longer. I suppose at least seventy per cent of marketable slaves in Anharitte have been through his hands at some time or another. And he also buys some in the provinces." startling evidence that modern science confirms the reality of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis An Excursion into Parapsychology #, now at your bookstore "And pure-bred Ahhn stock is renowned for its high intelligence. Dion's probably acquired a concentration of brains in Nfagda that is unique on Roget -- perhaps unique on any of the known worlds. Can you arrange that only low-grade slaves are offered to Dion in future?" "I'll do what I can. With most auctioneers a little pressure will do the trick. The ones swe can't influence are those the Pointed Tails themselves are duty-bound to protect. We can't hurt one of our own clients for the beneflt of another." "Then tell them frankly what we think the Imaiz is about. Ask for their cooperation. It's in their interests to work with us because if the Imaiz wins, the slave trade dies." "It might work with some," said Catuul dubiously. "But others make much money out of the Imaiz, There will be many who won't want to offend him and who will be suspicious of your motives." VI R en stayed at the window of his... office chambers all that afternoon. Zinder was late arriving. Finally, however, her dark hair and proud bearing made her as apparent in the crowd as a lantern in the darkness. Even the excellence of her flowing gown set her as a woman apart and made her impossible to miss. Attuned as he was to the pattern of undercurrents in the populace, Ren could sense a tension in the market, as though some suspicion of what was to take place had already passed as rumor. Vestevaal frett in a chair behind him. A man of direct action, he had no use for patient observation from behind half-drawn curtains, nor did he accept the principle that feud and harassment were necessary preliminaries to destroying an enemy. Nevertheless he obeyed Ren's insistence that he confine himself indoors at least until after Zinder's arrest. He amused himself by interrogating the spaceport computer complex from Ren's line-fed office terminal and inspecting the agency accounts in the minutest detail. ' When the watchmen arrived Ren saw the tension visibly rise in the market. As they moved in the direction of Zinder the scene became tinged with menace almost to the point of open resistance. But Di irons knew his trade. As the arresting officers moved to take the slave girl a second force of watchmen deployed through the crowd ready to nip in the bud any pockets of disobedience. Even so the resentment was building to crisis proportions and some slight catalyst could easily have tipped the balance into violence. Ren understood now Catuul's insistence that Vestevaal should not be present when the arrest took place. Jt was Zinder herself, however, who averted the dangerous phase. She shrugged amusedly at the watchmen's advance, then turned and addressed herself to the crowd. Ren could not hear what she said, but he was certain from the attention she was receiving that she was completely in control of the situation. She calmed and pacified the group around her and told it something that proved such a huge IF joke that those nearest to her broke away laughing and went to retell it to others Prefect Di Irons thrust his way through and spoke to her. Again she laughed, and even he came out of the encounter with a reluctant smile curling the corners of his determined mouth. Then Zinder allowed herself to be escorted away. None of the watchmen touched her. They formed a double rank and she, obligingly, walked between them, moving off in the direction of the prefecture. The marketplace relaxed, yet returned not to trade but rather to heated and speculative conversation. Di Irons and the watchmen stood stolidly watchful for any hotheads who might try to rekindle hostility. When Catuul Gras came up, Ren met him at the door. "I think it's safe now, friend Tito. I have men enough to cover you to the prefecture. The hearing will take place as soon as Dion-daizan can get a spokesman there. Zinder has predicted to the crowd that the Imaiz will teach the director a great lesson. I must speak with him at once." "He's inside," said Ren. "Good. You go along to the prefecture. I'll follow as soon as I can." Ren buckled on his sword and carefully checked the readiness of the blaster which he wore concealed beneath his shirt. Warily he moved out into the square. Surprisingly, nobody seemed to pay him much attention. This was now the battle of the giants, the Imaiz versus Vestevaal. Ren was merely a bitplayer and not a main participant at all. As he passed out of the square a sudden grip on his arm made Ren swing round. He found himself face to face with the prefect. "Agent Ren, I'm not deceived. I can read your hand behind this little charade. I don't know what you hope to gain by antagonizing the Imaiz, but let me repeat my warning. Dion is more camming than you'll allow. Twist his tail too often and he'll break you into a thousand parts. And if your machinations cause public trouble in Anharitte -- I'll break you myself. I hope I make myself understood?" "Perfectly," said Ren. "But I pay well for the best available advisers and they guarantee we're engaged in nothing contrary to the law. I take it we've a perfect right to request that Zinder be impounded pending a legal enquiry?" "You have that right through a society," agreed Di Irons, "But I would not have thought you well advised to exercise it. The loss of the register entry is in itself suspect. I am now looking for a despoiler of prefecture records -- and Diondaizan will be looking for blood. I suspect that if I delay my inquiries a little my problem will be answered for me. Be very cautious, Ren. You've chosen a daierous adversary." T ' HE prefect moved away. Now that Zinder had actually been removed to the prefecture, the whole area had assumed an atmosphere of disturbed indignation that seemed unlikely to flare more violently. However, it was obvious that only the presence of so many watchmen had prevented a riot and open interference with the arrest. Ren understood how perilously close the incident had been to causing a breach of the peace and he saw that in this the Imaiz had a powerful weapon he" could use against the Pointed Tails. By creating a public outcry at a similar maneuver he could easily throw the blame back on to the society and its employer as the prime sources of public unrest. Ren's rival at the prefecture was just in time for him to witness the lodging of an ofFicial notice contesting the Imaiz s ownership of Zinder by Mallow Rade, a junior scribe of the Pointed Tails. When the paper had been recorded Di Irons, whose mood seemed to be one of thunder, called formally for a spokesman from the House of Magda to pose a rebuttal. For a long time nobody moved. Then, from the back of the crowd, a young slave pushed his way forward and presented his stewardship credentials to Di Irons. "Ah, Barii." Di Irons seemed slightly relieved. "Do you know how Dion-daizan wishes to proceed in this matter?" Barii, Who bore his slave mark, together with the house symbol of Magda, like a proud badge on his naked arms, nodded. Ren was watching the youth intently, noting the same quiet confidence in the boy he had recognized in Zinder. Here was both an intelligence and a competence that had no place in the slave. "May I see the register from which Dion's title is missing?" -- Di Irons brought out the volume and opened it to the disputed page, exposing the rows of names scrawled painfully in a large and almost illegible script. One of the entries had clearly been overwritten at a later date. There was no doubt that the alteration had been deliberate. Barii reached into his pouch and drew out some article the purpose of which was not plain until the electronic flash glared back from IF the yellowing pages. A second flash illuminated the startled face of the register clerk. Barii put his camera back into its pouch and bowed to Di Irons. If his fa held any expression at all it was one of concealed amusement and anticipation. Then Baii spoke. "Dion-daizan has noted the objections to his ownership of Zinder's bond. Everyone in Anharitte knows that Zinder's preeminence is largely due to her association with the House of Magda -- thus there can be no doubt of the true tenure of her bond. However, the Imaiz is immensely concerned about the maintenance of the law on the three hills. In consequence he has directed that, since no clear title to his ownership seems to be recorded in the prefecture, he will renounce his claim to being Zinder's legal bondholder. He requests that the slave in question be put to public auction and that the proceeds of the sale be dedicated to the public funds of the city, as is the custom." Di Irons had listened to this speech with growing disbelief. He seemed about to throw in some crushing protest, but was stopped by something he saw in Barii's face. The prefect's shrug was massive and uncomprehending. "So be it," he said. "It's the considered opinion of the prefecture that th# bondship of Zinder has no clear tenure. The slave woman called Zinder wiB therefore be returned to the market and submitted to public auction. Let it be known that anyone desirous of obtaining this property may attend tomorrow at the preset hour and bid legal coinage for unrestricted bond rights. The matter is now dismissed from these courts." Ren's attentive eyes fell upon the register clerk, whose hands had undoubtedly been responsible for the alteration of the entry. The clerk seemed relieved that Di Irons had so easily acceded to the contesting of the records, yet his nervous glances at Barii showed that he knew retribution was still due. The steward's act of photographing the entry had shaken him badly and his ashen hue was indicative of a deep and mortal fear. Knowing of the clerk's association with the Pointed Tails,, Ren was pleased to note that members of the clan moved protectively nearer to the clerk to guard him against danger. Di Irons was looking at his treacherous clerk with something akin to murder in his eyes. His sword hand convulsively gripped the hilt of his weapon. For a moment Ren thought that Di Irons was going to attack the fellow, but Barii moved between them and a  slight lift of his eyebrows caused the prefect to relax. Ren relaxed too. All Anharitte was watching the outcome of this dispute -- the supposed omnipotence on the Imaiz Was now on public trial. Diondaizan's easy acquiescence to the challenge might mean only that he had chosen the slave market as the quicker route for regaining Zinder's bond, but currently the wizard's public image must have suffered a lowering as a result of Ren's audacious move. Ren had well prepared the ground ahead. It was going to be an interesting battle. R en awoke in the night with a start. A house servant was shaking his arm. "Agent Ren -- wake up, please! The prefect sends for you urgently." Shaking the sleep from his head, Ren roused himself and forced his mind to concentrate. "What did you say?" "The prefect sends watchmen to guide you. The register clerk is dead." "Damn!" said Ren, struggling into his clothes. "What has it to do with me?" He went downstairs to remonstrate with the watchmen who waited in the downstairs office. The sergeant listened to his protest without expression. "The Lord Di Irons is aware of your position. Nonetheless he directs we conduct you to the place of the accident." "Accident?" The sergeant refused to be drawn out. "Come, Agent Ren. Lord Di Irons himself will explain the matter." Ren reached for his cloak, girded on his sword and reluctantly followed the watchmen into the night. The air outside was chill and damp with the clinging mists from the sea. The whole township was in darkness save for the occasional flare of the watch braziers and the torches carried by his escort. The sudden transition from sleep to the cold darkness and the leaping flames of the brands touched the scene with unreality made only more credible by the hardness of the shifting, round cobbles underneath his feet. The route the watchmen chose was unfamiliar to Ren, involving numerous turns down narrow streets and alleys until his whole sense of direction was destroyed. Finally the party halted in front of a mean drinking place and Ren waited impatiehtly while the watchmen knocked on a small aid unfamiliar door. Shortly, bolts IF were drawn and the great bulk of Di Irons himself loomed between the door posts. "Ah, Ren. Come in. You're an astute man, so I'm going to give you an opportunity to exercise your cleverness." The prefect leaned past Ren and instructed the watchmen to continue searching the area. Then he withdrew into the room and beckoned to Ren. The doorway was so small that even Ren had to duck his head as he entered. The ceiling inside was scarcely higher and the room stank of cheap alcohol and the presence of too many bodies. Ten of th Pointed Tails, Catuul Gras among them, sat in a circle around a flickering lamp, looking uneasify at Di Irons. On the far side of the room another door led out to a small bricked courtyard, which two watchmen illuminated with poled lanterns. Across the threshold of this second door lay the register clerk. He had a fatal wound in this throat and blood spread wide across the floor. Di Irons was crushing. "I lay the responsibility for this piece of mischief at your door, Ren." The statement caught Ren completely off guard. "Mine?" "Of course." "But I had nothing whatever to do with his death." "Then you should consider better the consequences of your actions. I know perfectly well that this man overwrote Dion-daizan's title in the register and I know that your money induced him to do it. Now he's dead because of it. If this piece of bloodshed is an example of how you mean to harass the Imaiz you'd be well advised to employ a more competent society." He spat in the general direction of Catuul Gras. "I admit I could have been an interested party," said Ren. But if the man's dead it was the Imaiz, who had him killed. Why don't you tax him with it?" "I would -- if I had a shred of proof. But we've found po trace of an assassin, no sign of any weapon. It's only our suspicion that the Imaiz would want this man destroyed. There's no tangible connection with Dion-daizan. If you can give me proof of his complicity. I'll take the issue to his door. Until then I regard this as the result of your own inept machinations." "You've found no weapon?" Ren was perplexed. He turned to Catuul Gras. "Weren't you here when it happened?" "I was -- we all were." Catuul's gesture encompassed his comrades. "We chose this house because it has only one door connecting with the street -- and that door could be stoutly bolted. The windows have shutters inside and the courtyard leads only to blank walls. Here, at least, we thought we could defend him from the mighty wrath of the Imaiz "Then what happened?" Ren was impatient. "We were drinking moderately and talking and because the roof is low the room soon grew hot. We opened the door to the courtyard to let in air, since we dared not unbar the windows. Even then, for safety's sake, we put three men in the courtyard so that no 'surprise attack could come from there." "And?" "The clerk was badly worried and drank more freely than was wise. Knowing the courtyard was guarded, he felt safe in going to the door to relieve himself into the gully. As he reached the door he seemed to choke and we saw him fall down just where you see him how. His throat was torn and he drowned in his own blood." "Then how did -- ?" "We don't know. Those in the courtyard saw and heard nothing, nor did those of us who stayed inside. Whatever split his throat has not been found, though we've searched the yard and the room a dozen times. No man among us has recent blood on his weapons, so even treachery is ruled out. I personally think that the Imaiz sent an invisible beast to claw out his throat." "You know I can't accept that," said Ren angrily. "There are no such things as invisible beasts." R en bent down to examine the . wound, but realized, with his Fingers and shoes slipping with blood, that he had neither the knowledge nor the stomach to gain much from the examination. H passed on out into the courtyard, inspected its solid walls and tried to scrutinize the higher surroundings, which were obscured by darkness. Finding no solution to the mystery, he climbed back past the body in the doorway and faced Di Irons. "If you'll permit. Prefect, I'd like Dr. Hardun at the spaceport to perform an examination of the body." "Will that help. Agent Ren? The man is dead -- his throat is gone. What more can be learned from him?" "There must be some evidence of whatever broke his throat. We've many facilities on the battle cruiser. A weapon that caused that damage must have left a trace. If it's there we'll find it." The prefect shrugged. "I see no harm in your trying. If you wish you may come and take the body after daybreak. And you, Catuul, will have an accounting to make with his widow. I shall hold the' IF Pointed Tails responsible for the cremation and all expenses. Nobody's lightly going to disturb the peace while I'm prefect on the three hills. "It will be as you direct, Prefect," said Catuul Gras quietly, though a variety of emotions struggled in his voice. The prefect called his watchmen and departed. Ren turned to Catuul in anger. "The fate of the clerk is unfortunate, but I thought your society could have handled a thing like the death of a member with discretion. How did Di Irons come to learn of it?" "I asked myself the same thing," said Catuul. "The watchmen claim they were called here because of complaints of a disturbance. But there was no disturbance. When the man fell dead we were too amazed to cry out -- and thereafter we were too afraid of attracting attention. Yet the watchmen arrived within minutes of the death. Indeed, they must have started on their way while the man was still alive. Whoever complained to them must have done so with a foreknowledge of the death to come." "Di Irons seems reluctant to agree that the Imaiz must have been responsible. Does he have some sympathy for Dion-daizan?" "I think not. Di Irons concerns himself with the peace of the city. If two sides feud he cares little which side goes under -- as long as the fighting is contained. Knowing this, Dion is perhaps using him to harass us like fools. I swear to you one thing, friend Tito -- if Dion-daizan hopes to buy Zinder back at the auction he'll find her the most expensive purchase he has ever attempted." T he slave market was situated on the eastern slopes of Anharitte, in the bowl through which descended the old road leading to the valley and to Secondhill and T' Ampere. The location was said to have been chosen in the days when slaves were leased to merchant vessels entering the shipping lanes to trade their cargoes along the inland rivers and canals. The slaves were used to handle the cargo exchanges and in theory returned to their owners when the ships once again reached the Aprillo en route to the sea. However, so many slaves were lost through misuse by their temporary masters that the system fell into disrepute and slave-leases were abandoned. It was doubtful if a more astute class of man existed on all the three hills than the average slave auctioneer. Operating usually on a percentage basis against the immutable laws of supply and demand, he knew well how to present his wares to the best advantage and how to drive the shrewdest bargain. This afternoon, however, most of the sale rostrums were unattended by clients, no matter how eloquently the vendors phrased their sales address. A curious order had replaced the normal hubbub of the slave market and almost all the onlookers were facing a solitary platform high on the slope. Watchmen were in Abundance, as if to emphasize the weight of the hand of the law, but the crowd was genuinely good humored and interested in the coming spectacle. The atmosphere was one of anticipation rather than resentment. The occasion was the sale of Zinder's bond -- and speculation had it that the Imaiz himself would be coming to the bidding. Ren had arrived early with Catuul Gras and a more than nominal bodyguard of Pointed Tails. They first approached the auctioneer to establish CatnuPs right to bid on behalf of Magno Vestevaal and to offer proof of the considerable funding on which they could draw if necessity arose. Then, under the jovial eyes of the happy auctioneer, they were offered selected seating in front of the rostrum from which to conduct their business. At a few minutes to the preset hour at which the proceedings should have begun there was still no sign of anyone from the House of Magda. Then the crowd divided abruptly and a man strode through alone -- Diondaizan, the wizard of Anharitte. This was the first time that Tito Ren had ever been really close to the Imaiz and he studied Dion carefully as the latter spoke to the auctioneer in the customary mode of introduction. Ren's analysis did not leave him particularly impressed. Of indeterminate age, though probably nearing fifty years, Dion appeared to eschew all forms of shawmanship or affectation.Qad in a simple white gown, without apparent weapons, Dion's face was neither distinguished nor particularly memorable. Only the movement of his hands indicated quiet confidence and competence that warned the agent to be wary. Whether or not the man was a Terran was not discernible from his  unexceptional appearance, but he was obviously skilled in the control both of himself and others. And from the respect with which he was treated it was obvious that he was nearly a god in the eyes of Anharitte. The auctioneer held up his hands for attention, His prologue was IF treated to a quantity of good-natured banter from the onlooking assembly, but this died when Zinder herself was brought out. Ren was stunned. He had seen the work of beauticians on seven prime worlds, but never in all his experience had he seen such exquisite presentation of the female form as Zinder managed on her way to the rostrum. The audience of perhaps a thousand held its breath as she walked on stage in burnished radiance. Only Dio;i himself seemed unimpressed. Even the auctioneer became speechless. Though he had issued instructions that Zinder be readied for the market, he had not anticipated the skill in the hands of several inhabitants of Magda whose task it had somehow become. He started to make his customary appeal to would-be purchasers, but seemed to becoitie awed by the wonder #f it all. Evidently lost for words, he Tinally paid her the ultimate tribute -- he kneeled and kissed her hand. A cheer rose from the assembly. to his feet. "I bid you five barr for the bond," he said. So low a price was a calculated insult. The audience tensed with anticipation. It was going to be an evening to remember. Raised to the second power," said Dion-daizan unhurriedly. "Six barr to the second power," said Catuul Gras. He was playing his hand narrowly. "To the third power," said Diondaizan. "Seven to the third power," Catuul said. Ren, whose mathematical training probably transcended that of any in the Avatching public, lapsed into mental calculation of the true value of the bids, unsettled by the way in which the Imaiz each time multiplied the value of the bid by raising the index. It was absolutely certain that at some point the Imaiz was going to approach a figure he could not possibly afford, and at that point Catull must withdraw. He was relieved to note that, as the values rose, the scribe became more punctilious about, obtaining confirmation before proceeding. Nevertheless, Ren continued disconcerted by the actions of the Imaiz, who seemed determined to drive the price into truly astronomical figures. It said much for the mental constitution of the auctioneer that he was able to continue functioning as evenly as he did in the face of the rapidly mounting values. He was sweating profusely and developed a marked tremor of the limbs when his due commission on the sale would have made him rich beyond all his dreams. Still the contest continued. Ren was now using a pocket calculator to bring out the absolute values of the bids in terms of the galactic credits. The Imaiz used no calculating aids, but Ren had the feeling that Dion-daizan was nevertheless completely aware of the real value of the figures with which they were playing. Only Catuul seemed out of his depth and repeatedly looked at Ren for confirmation that he was intended to continue. "Ten barrs raised to the sixth power, " said Catuul uneasily. This was more money than he had ever heard of. "Ten to the seventh power." Dion-daizan showed slight signs of agitation although Ren suspected the wizard was well within his ample budget. "Eleven to the seventh." The Imaiz faltered and a gasp of anticipation ran through the watching crowd. Ren felt a savage elation at the thought of having placed the Imaiz on public trial. It was a beautiful piece of harassnient. "Eleven barrs to the eighth power," said the Imaiz finally. Somebody in the crowd with some appreciation of the amount involved gave him a round of applause. Ren signaled for Catuul to continue. "Twelve to the eighth," said Catuul grimly. The Imaiz stopped and scanned the crowd, as if trying to estimate the cost of losing face. Then he shrugged resignedly and turned again to the auctioneer. Ren still judged Dion-daizan to be within the limits of his purse, but the wizard was obviously struggling with considerations that evidently weighed as heavily with him as the regainings of Zinder. "Twelve to the ninth," said the master of Magda in a voice that could scarcely heard. Catuul Gras stole a warning look at Ren, but the agent had a reasonable idea of the Imaiz s true flnancial potential, based on the yearly spaceport dues paid to the House of Magda. He knew it was possible to squeeze the Imaiz even drier. "Thirteen to the ninth," said Catuul. "Thirteen to the tenth," said the Imaiz, his voice suddenly sharp with a new resolve. "What's the old fox up to?" asked Catuul anxiously. "Has he really got that much money?" "I think he has. But he's beIF coming uncomfortable. I think just once more must take him to the limit." "Fourteen to the tenth," said Catuul. The auctioneer had long since ceased to comprehend the magnitude of the figures being used and cared only that each bid was higher than the last. On a commission of even one per cent his family would be rich for generations. Dion-daizan sat, his face suddenly bland. The auctioneer looked at him questioningly. "Dion -- don't you wish to raise?" "Of course not." The Imaiz's faice was alive with humor, revealing a richness of personality he had hitherto concealed. "Believe me, it's not through lack of finance, but in observance of a principle." "Prmciple?" The auctioneer was lost. "Yes," said Dion-daizan happily. "Anyone who would bid fourteen to the tenth power barrs for Zinder musit Jiave achieved a true appreciation of her worth. Far be it for me to detr such enlightenment. It's not every day that my progressive policies gain such eminent recognition. Nor is it often in Anharitte that the real worth of a human being is so openly acknowledged. May others soon become as wise as Director Vestevaal." R en watched with mounting  horror as the hammer fell. The auctioneer's voice boomed above the murmur of the crowd. "I hereby declare the slave Zinder to be sold to the Society of Pointed Tails acting on behalf of its client. Director Magno Vestevaal. The agreed price is fourteen barrs raised to the tenth power -- a completely unprecedented sum for any slave at any time in history and a truly magnificent tribute to the slave-training policy of the House of Magda." "Damn!" Ren, ashen of face, staggered to his feet. It was too late to rescind the bid -- the transaction was already complete. He turned appealingly to Catuul Gras. "What the hell's Dion up to?" "Teaching the director a lesson, I should think," said Catuul grimly. "Well he's certainly made his point -- and at our expense. Let's face it, Tito. He's beaten us at our own game." "I don't believe it," said Ren, consumed by his own anger. "A man like Dion isn't going to let Zinder go." Zinder, from the rostrum, had displayed a keen interest in the proceedings. Far from seeming betrayed by Dion-daizan's action, she appeared elated. She saluted her late master who, in turn, approached her to kiss her hand. Then Dion-daizan turned to the crowd and raised his hands in an expansive gesture of triumph. The ensuing cheer was probably the loudest oar of acclamation from human throats that Roget had ever known. The auctioneer took Zinder's halter and led her, a symbol of apparent meekness, to Catuul Gras. The latter took the plaited rope as though it were likely to grow hot and looked somewhat stupidly at Ren. "The sale price is on guarantee from the Galactic Bank," said the auctioneer. "The contract settlement is now between the purchaser and the city administration. Therefore I have no need to detain you, except to remind you of the convention that the title of the bond 'must be registered at the prefecture by within seven hours or the money is forfeit and the bond is returned to the city administration." "I understand," said Catuul Gras. "I assure you the bond will be duly registered within the time." Ren said nothing, not being able to trust himself to speak. Having been tricked into authorizing such an astronomical sum on the acquisition of a single female slave, he knew that the blackest hour of his career was upon him. An error in his judgment had caused this embarrassment to happen. He had been certain above all things that the Imaiz would not allow Zinder to be bought over his head. Now the wizard was standing both pleased and apparently unworried as Zinder was led away by the hands of his sworn enemies. Ren was still not convinced that the Imaiz would allow it to happen, but failed to see how he could, prevent it -- unless by some ambush or deception Dion managed to stop the bond's being registered in time. Catuul's mind was apparently working along the same lines. He signaled members of his clan out from the crowd and ' sent them ahead to see that the roads Zinder and her new owners had to travel were free from possible trouble. With practiced inconspicuousness the little group melted away. "I think," said Catuul, "that we had best pick up the director and get the registration over as soon as possible. That is -- " he glanced uneasily at the radiant Zinder -- "assuming that you wish to go through with it." "For that sort of money," said Ren ruefully, "the deal had better be legally complete. Though the devil knows how it's going to look on the account books." Despite the immensity of his blunder the humor of the situation overwhelmed him and he started to chuckle spasmodically at his own discomfort. IF T he assembled crowd was beginning to disperse with much laughter and amused speculation. Not a few ame to have a closer look at Zinder wearing the customary bondage halter. For a moment Ren felt angered by what he regarded as morbid curiosity. But when he saw the proud and dominant strength in Zinder's face he realized that on the end of the halter was a powerful social catalyst. What he was parading through the streets was the anachronistic shame of Anharitte's slave trade. He and the Pointed Tails were being used to underscore the unfairness and absurdity of the system. While he was agent for the titular master, it was obviously the slave who held command of the situation and the hearts of the onlookers. Thinking deeply in this vein, Ren walked ahead. Catuul followed, leading Zinder on the halter as if she were any common beast. Four of the Pointed Tails armsmen acted as a guard detail and also carried the torches, which were just needing to be lit as the purple dusk closed down. Ren found the journey acutely embarrassing. His civilized instincts prompted him to make conversation with Zinder, whose intellectual talents were probably more than equal to his own. But the halter she wore about her neck made such an action seem incongruous and he could think of no topic of conversation that could span the dual standards that had been thrust upon him. He therefore stalked ahead of the group, growing increasingly angry at his own inability to resolve the conflict within himself. He sensed in the situation the ingenuity of the Imaiz in attacking the slave problem in this particular way and his respect for the wizard increased considerably. The Imaiz was forming a schism not only in society but also deep in the psyches of individual participants -- such as himself. It was a dangerous and powerful game, and Ren knew that if Dion-daizan were not stopped he would ultimately win the bajtle. Magno Vestevaal was waiting in Ren's chambers. The director had been drinking liberally, presumably celebrating a victory that had not been won. Ren roused him from his chair, knowing the worst had best be told without delay. "We have to go immediately to the prefecture to register the bond." "Register?" Vestevaal's eyes refocused on Ren in an instant. "What the hell do you mean?" "I mean that the Imaiz played with us as he might with fools. You now own Zinder." "Own Zinder?" Vestevaal appeared to sober himself by a tremendous effort of wUl. "I see! And how much did this -- ah -- acquisition cost us, Tito?" "Fourteen barrs to the tenth power," said Ren, being deliberately obtuse to soften the shock. "What in hell is that in terms of money?" Ren bent over his office calculator and converted the figures first to duodecimal galactic credits and then to the Terran ten-based notation which the director handled more happily. Vestevaal watched him steadily, sensing in Ren's actions a cerin reticence that foretold of trouble. "WeU?" Ren had finished the calculations and was examining the printout, wondering how to present it in the best light. "You'd better sit down again," he said. "Would you believe about dollars?" For a moment the director appeared in danger of suffering a seizure. At last he swore. "You could buy two battle cruisers for less. Tito -- have you any idea how I'm going to explain that sort of expenditure to the Freetrade Council? What are you trying to do -- ruin me?" "No, but I think it's a reasonable certainty that the Imaiz is. He promised to teach you a lesson. I guess this is it. But I still think we've hit him where it hurts. After all, we've got Zinder." "Where is she?" asked Vestevaal. The color was slowly coming back into his cheeks. "Do you have her?" "She's outside with Catuul and the guard." "Then fetch her in -- fetch her in! Where's your hospitality, Tito? It's not every day you get the chance to entertain somebody who's worth more than all your Company executives rolled into one. Ren called for Zinder. Unlike Ren, Magno Vestevaal was in no doubt as to how she should be treated. He borrowed Ren's sword to cut the halter from her neck, then handed her into a chair as though she were a queen. She took the incident completely unabashed. Already she seemed to have established with Vestevaal a degree of rapport that reached to depths Ren could not envision. She accepted wine and fell into a quiet conversation with the director until Ren was forced to interrupt, fearing that if they further delayed they would become overdue for registering her bond. The remainder of the journey to the prefecture was in marked contrast with that from the slave market. Magno Vestevaal led the way, engaged in earnest conIF versation with the slave girl on his arm, while Ren and Catuul followed disconsolately at their heels. The four armsmen had dispersed themselves fore and aft of the group, swords drawn and ready for trouble, since Catuul still feared an ambush or an interference designed to delay the Registration of the bond. The director, however, ridiculed the idea of potential trouble and refused even to remain consistently within the shield of guards. He was right -- inasmuch as they arrived at the grim portals of the prefecture without any sign of unwanted intervention. T he prefecture was bustling with people. Watchmen were returning or departing on duty -- clerks were fetching and carrying their massive volumes and a small mob around the slave registry was presumably waiting to see the registration of Zinder. Ren was not surprised to sec Barii, the Imaizs slave-caste steward in the group -- and Dion-daizan himself. Everyone turned to watch as the director and his costly prize came across the threshold. Dion-daizan made a bow of courtesy to Magno Vestevaal, which the latter good-humoredly returned. The director seemed in remarkably good spirits, having regained his equilibrium completely after his shock of learning of Ren's transaction. His reaction to Dion-daizan was an acknowledgment of the excellence of his adversary. Dion's respect was no less evident. Both men turned to regard Zinder, who stood peacock-proud watching the register clerk intently as he painstakingly wrote the details of her bondage on a new page of his mammoth book. Di Irons came out of his office and took charge of the proceedings. His manner suggested that it was important for the peace of the city that the registration went smoothly. The prefect inspected the entry carefully, held it up for Dion-diazan to examine, then called for the mark of the auctioneer to authenticate the sale. Catuul went suddenly tense. He had momentarily lost sight of Barii, but finally located him standing behind the Imaiz, who had retired discreetly to the rear. Like Ren, the If you change your address, please mail notification to: Galaxy PuHillmant Deft. # SMatogua Avenue Farmingdale, New York # Allow # to # weeks for your notification to take effect. scribe had the gravest doubts that the Imaiz would permit the registration to be completed, but it was difFicult to see how he could now prevent its finalization. Everyone in the room felt the tension rise and additional watchmen came out from some dark antechamber to stand silent and ready for trouble. After the auctioneer had made his mark several statutory witnesses followed -- Mallow Rade came to sign on behalf of the Pointed Tails. It was then Vestevaal's turn to sign as the ultimate purchaser. Such a succession of names was not usually required, but Di Irons was taking no chances. Necessity demanded that this was one registration that could never be disputed. Vestevaal was aware that he could be altering the course of history on Roget as he took out his pen. He was buying a legend for hard cash, and the implication of the completed deal was that even enlightenment had its price. This was not, he reflected ruefully, the first time nor w.as .Roget the first world on which that lesson had been learned. As he turned from the book he could not resist flashing a look of triumph in the direction of Dion-daizan. In return he recefved a polite smile, which might have signified resignation -- but probably did not. The director turned and held out his hand, indicating that Zinder should walk before him. Then a gasp of amazement from the onlookers diverted his attention back to the register. To his astonishment he saw the lines of ink begin to smoke and spread out, charring the surrounding paper. Some potent chemical reaction caused a glow that quickly became a flame that ran up the angled page -- and though Vestevaal seized another volume and beat upon the burning book, he succeeded only in completely breaking up the fragile ash, which further disintegrated of its own volition. xX Imaiz, then back to Di Irons, wondering hbw the situation was going to be resolved. The prefect, a cloud of smoke still about his startled head, growled in a voice like thunder and savagely pulled the book toward him as he brushed away the burned edges. "Dion-daizan -- I take it this is some work of yours." "Mine?" The Imaiz sounded shocked. "There are ten good people between myself and the book -- and have been all evening. Likewise, my servant Barii has not approached the proceedings. I could have had no more to do with the loss of the entry than -- say -- #  IF Agent Ren had with the loss of the title I once owned." "You make a good point," said Di Irons, glancing sourly at Ren, who had come forward to examine the burned page of the register. "The question is, what's to be done now?" "Who claims the title to Zinder?" asked the Imaiz, His voice, though soft, carried perfectly. "I do, of course," said Vestevaal. "Then I contest your title to the bond. I submit that at this moment you can no more prove your ownership than could I a short while after Zinder was taken from me." "There must have been a thousand witnesses to my purchase tonight." Vestevaal was adamant. "I demand that the registration begin anew." "You have a thousand witnesses, but all Anharitte knew for ten years that Zinder belonged to me. Whose evidence is the stronger?" "Stop this!" thundered Di Irons. "Dion, I shall have many words to say to you concerning your conduct this night. And you. Director, and your puppet Ren, are beginning to tire my patience. In the circumstances -- I can see that the Imaiz has a valid point. Your situation is no different from his a little while ago. If justice is to be done I think the case should be treated in the same way." "What docs that mean?" asked Vestevaal sharply. "If you wish. Director,, your society can contest my decision in tbe supreme court at Gaillen. I advise you now that it would be a waste of time to do so, with the Imaiz so closely attentive to his own claims. But my own ruling is this: its the considered opinion of the prefecture that the bondship of Zinder still has no clear tenure. Under the law it is therefore my duty to impound the slave girl in question and return her to the market for public auction. I have no more to say on the subject." "But I have," said Vestevaal angrily. "I've paid a great sum of money for that girl. Do I not get that back?" "What? You squeal because your agents forced a bad bargain?" Di Irons was cuttingly acid. "Come now! As a merchant you're fully aware that all purchases in Anharitte are on the basis of caveat emptor -- let the purchaser beware. Ren was warned by myself most specifically not to proceed with the gambit. And I'm sure your reputation for trade on this planet would be little helped by your continuing such a claim. Especially -- " he leaned forward heavily -- "since the money was provided by the Freetrade Council for the express purpose of causing civil mischief in Anharitte. Do you care to take that matter to court, Director? I doubt the planetary government would view the proceedings with much favor." Vestevaal appeared on the verge of making a critically harsh reply. Then he looked at Zinder. She met his gaze with level inquiry, as if searching for something she expected to find in him. Vestevaal reacted with sudden resolutions -- a smile of tired humor lit his face. "My apologies. Prefect. I spoke out of turn. Of course I respect your ruling on both counts. Never let it be said that Magno Vestevaal doesn't know how to accept defeat with dignity." Vestevaal turned to Zinder and kissed her hand, then bowed to Dion-daizan. He turned to Ren and Catuul Gras and indicated that they all should leave. "Well, Tito -- how's that for being outclassed?" Vestevaal's voice held a note of genuine appreciation. "I've seen some rank skulduggery among the Freetraders, but believe me, Diondaizan makes the rest of them look like amateurs. Damn it -- I'd love to see him on the council!" "Are we going to take the debt for Zinder without fighting?" asked Ren. "We have no alternative. We dare nqt go to court lest we sour the attitude of the planetary government toward Freetrade. You know how parochial these hickworld governments can be." "This makes me wonder if there's a collusion between the Imaiz and the prefect." "I don't think so. Di Irons is the straightest man I've ever come across. But he's trying to use unsophisticated laws to control a situation with which even sophisticated laws would find it difficult to cope. So he compensates by applying a good measure of rough horse-sense. And why shouldn't he? It's just that sort of approach that keeps Anharitte the place it is. And at least he's helped to cut our losses." "I don't follow that." Vestevaal laughed heartily and clapped Ren on the back. "My dear Tito, you're too damn sober. Don't you realize that without Zinder we've one less mouth to feed and back to clothe. And there's a further problem you haven't even thought of. Suppose we had retained her -- what the hell would we have found to do with her?" The following day Zinder was again put up for sale. The Imaiz took up the bidding and this time nobody opposed him. The hammer fell at the price of one bar. And this was perhaps the final irony. IF He dared to worship deities who did not dare to let him live! The discovery of contemporary gods on other planets occasioned a concerted inquiry into Earth s past that threw new light on the 'legendary gods of old. The Greek and the Asgard pantheons acquired new dimensions and even history at last admitted that, ages ago, Zeus and company had dwelled upon the slopes of Mount Olympus -- and that in times of old, Odin had really sat on the high-seat in Hlidskjalf The provenance of the gods was another matter. The dead ones could not talk and the living ones could be contacted otUy through their worshipers who, quite understandably, dared not risk offending them by voicing impious questions. The present consensus is that they are the scattered remnants of a oncegreat galactic race whose heyday predates the dawn of man. Such an opinion would seem to impugn their divinity. That it does not merely points up the psychological need of the average mortal to stand in awe of beings ostensibly nobler than himself, whether they be true gods, savior-kings or Kennedys, -- Zyre: What is a God?, pp. #-# stallations on Northstar #, Recoh Officer Hale could not find them. True, no one had said definitely that there were -- only that there might be. But it was Hale's job to eliminate mightbe's, which explains his presence in the skies of the polestar's nineteenth planet. But although he found no enemy installations, he found something else: four cities. They stood on the banks of an eccentric river that snaked its way across a verdant plain dominated by a shining mountain -- and all of them were dead. No time limit had been imposed on Hale's Northstar # mission and he certainly was in no hurry to get back to the Earth-Niefi War. So he decided to find out what kind of cities they were, or rather, what kind of cities they had been. He chose the one nearest the mountain (for some reason the mountain fascinated him) and brought his reconcraft down in the middle of its central square. He opened the locks and climbed down to the ground. Stone edifices, some still intact, others with fallen walls and collapsed roofs, stared at him in the midmorning sunlight. Both their size and design indicated they had been built by men like himself. He took a deep breath of the unpurified air, smelled the greenness of trees and grass and the dust of desuetude. He was suddenly glad he had come. He had memorized the city's conformation during his descent and knew that the square was on the crest of a hill. The buildings beyond had been built upon the hillside and stood in a wid band around the base. On the east the city was borIF dered by the river, on the south by a forest and on the west by a park or graveyard. To the north the ruins gradually gave way to grassy lowlands, which once upon a time, no doubt, had known the bite of plowshares. The architecture of the buildings forming the square had a Hellenic flavor. The arch was nowhere in evidence, and columns and entablatures prevailed. One of the buildings brought the Parthenon to mind; although the resemblance was superficial at best. A huge statue stood before the columned entrance. Perhaps it was the way the morning sunlight struck it, turning it to gold, that made Hale's interest leap -- perhaps it was the haughty aspect of the lofty head. In either case, he walked across the square and stood before it. It was the statue of a goddess. Unlike the columns, which were limestone, she had been sculptured of granite. A few faded streaks of dye informed him that her hair was black. It fell to her shoulders, disciplined only by a band worn around her forehead. Breast plates, metallic skirt and thonged sandals completed her attire. He looked up at this comely granite girl, this stone goddess of the long legs, the bursting breasts, the Grecian arms and shoulders. Her face made him think of Byron and Keats. It expressed what they had been trying to say. The quick sweep of nose from high wide forehead to upper lip spoke of strength -- the sensuous yet noble mouth somehow suggested a knowledge of the weakness of men. The girlish chin was godly. Once, no doubt, painted pupils had lent life to her sightless eyes. Time had taken it aay. He brought his own eyes down to the base of the pedestal on which she stood. There was writing there, etched meticulously into the stone. Picture writing. There was a word that looked like a plow, one that looked like a sword. One that looked like a snake probably symbolized the river. There was a word that looked like a tree, three that looked like stars. There was one that suggested the city -- At length he came to her name: Entering the temple -- for such it  proved to be -- he found that with the exception of one feature it was devoted entirely to her. The exception stood just within the entrance -- a great granite statue of Herculean symmetry and grace whose stern countenance, albeit beardless, suggested Zeus. Unquestionably it represented the major deity. Nevertheless, this was not his temple -- it was Statues of her were everywhere -- statues, statuettes and busts. Some were carved of limestone, some of granite -- others . were cast in bronze. The central floor space was given over to two parallel rows of stone inches, an aisle running down between them to a granite altar flanked by two bronze braziers black with age. In a number of places the roof had fallen in and Hale had to pick his way around piles of fallen masonry to reach the altar. He halted before it. A life-size statue of stood just behind it. This one had eyes and wore a dress. The dress half-covered the full breasts and fell but little lower than the hips. The eyes were represented by ice-blue chips of glass. He found them disconcerting. As he stood staring into their cold and glittering depths the conviction overcame him that he himself was being observed. Not from within the temple or even from the adjacent buildings -- but from afar. He tried to rid himself of the feeling, but it would not go away. Before leaving the temple, he looked once more at the towering statue just within the entrance. This time, he examined the pedestal. It, too, was covered with ideographs. At length he found the one that stood for the deity's name: down the hillside to the lower city. Here the broken buildings were fewer, while partly filled-in depressions marked the cellars of wooden dwellings that had long ago either fallen or burned to the ground. Clearly this was the section of the poor. He felt more at home here than on the hill. The conviction that he was being observed intensified, but the feeling now was of being watched from nearby rather than from afar. It was possible, he supposed, that some of the buildings were inhabited. Both the reconcraft's polimeter and its sentience detector were reliable instruments -- but the former responded only to reasonably large groups of structures, while the latter could not detect the presence of intelligent life forms except in reasonably large groups (specifically, the minimum number of structures and the minimum amount of personnel the Niefi would need to establish an effective military installation). Nevertheless, Hale found it hard to believe that anyone abided in the city. It did not IF matter in any case: the Niefi could be discounted altogether (they abhorred human cities), and the high-intensity incandescer strapped to Hale's right wrist would be more than a match for anything a bronzeage semi-savage might throw or thrust at him. He spent the rest of the day poking among the ruins. They fascinated him. He found potteryshards, blackened utensils and bones. Most of the bones seemed to be those of women and children, but as a layman he could not, of course, be certain. Once he caught a blur of movement at the edge of his vision, but although he turned his head quickly he saw nothing. He skipped lunch. For supper he ate a can of synthichicken and half a loaf of canned bread and drank a thermopint of ale. The ale made him drowsy and he partially dozed afterward as he sat in the reconcraft lock, watching the blue mists of evening creep down from the plain. He decided to stay the night and perhaps the morrow too. Why not? The war could get on without him for another day. From what he had learned thus far he felt sure the ruins were remnants of a once-prosperous and powerful city-state on the order of Athens or Lacedaemon. Perhaps, years ago, the four cities had engaged in an internecine "Peloponnesian War" that had left but few survivors. Among the stars man had already found a hundred histories of himself -- here, perhaps, was another. night. Hale closed the locks and climbed up into the little cabin in the reconcraft's nose. He undressed, turned out the light and lay down on his bunk. On the opposite bulkhead an oval porthole looked out upon the crumbling cornices of the higher edifices. He lay helpless in the dark, waiting for Gwendolyn to come into his mind. He and she had met years earlier at a posh beach resort, where he had been employed as a swimming instructor. All summer long they had been lovers and after she had returned to her home in Greater Philadelphia he had traveled more than five hundred miles to pay her a surprise visit. The season had #een late September, hazy-hot, and he had perspired as he walked up the wide shaded walk to the patio-portico that fronted the rambling neorenaissance house. In the columned coolness tall young men and tall young women had lolled, tall cool glasses in their hands. He remembered a flurry of movement, a blur of color as he had come into sight from the shade. A door had opened and slammed shut. He had wanted to turn around and go back, but had been unable. He had had to keep walking until he had come to the marble steps and asked the question whose false answer still burned in his mind. Gwen? One of the tall young men had answered, ice cubes tinkling as he talked. Oh, she got suddenly called away. Away, away, away... Tonight as on other nights he waited and waited, but she did not come and at last he closed his eyes. He could see the ruins. They drifted past his inner vision like gray sheep. He counted them and presently he slept. I, he lay in the darkness searching his mind for the reason sleep had fled. He could not Find it. At last he got up, stepped over to the porthole and looked through the thick glass down into the square. All three of Northstar #'s moons were in the sky. The flagstones were silver in , the multimoonlight and the broken buildings stood like argent ghosts. Shadows played along their feet, making evanescent patterns in the night. At first he thought his mind was projecting an image of Gwen, but he knew instantly that the girl standing in the square was not -- could not be -- she. This was someone else altogether, yet someone he was sure he knew. He saw first of all the blazing blackness of her hair and then he saw the nightflower of her face. Gradually her body took shape in the multiple light -- he saw the shining hillocks of her breasts, the silver pillars of her legs, the pale shadow of her pubic hair. The pillars quivered in the multi-moonlight, subtly faded away. When he searched the shadows for her face it 'was no more -- her black hair blended #)ack into the night. And the square slept in the multi-moonlight, dreamed in the multi-moonlight and all was as it had been before. He stepped back across the little room and dropped down again on his bunk. He lay with his hands clasped behind his head, thinking. Whoever had been in the square was not a ghost. Ghosts did not haunt dead poleis. But sometimes tutelary gods did. T iHE next morning Hale had a look at the building before which his nocturnal visitor .had stood. It told him nothing. The day was golden, the air sparkling with particles of dispersed dew. Beyond the ruins, treetops twinkled in a sporadic morning wind. After a light breakfast, he went back down into the lower city and resumed his unofficial investigation of the ruins. He found more pottery shards. IF more blackened utensils and more bones. He also found a second Temple of  It stood on the southern outskirts, at the feet of the forest that climbed the valley's slope to the plain. It was larger than its sister on the hill and this, together with its location, led him to conclude it had been built expressly for the poor. Going inside, he found it like its sister both within and without. There were more benches and the altar at the end of the aisle was larger. But the altar statue was the same. Down front was a girl, sitting on one of the benches. A girl clad in bronze armor, with a forehead band encircling her black hair. Hale was not surprised. He had never seen a goddess, but he knew he was seeing one now. He also knew, from history, that Athena Polias had haunted ancient Athens long after her true worshipers had turned to dust. If Athena Polias had haunted her dead polis, why couldn't haunt hers? H e walked down the aisle, through slanted columns of sunlight, around piles of fallen stone. She did not turn her head. When he reached the bench she was sitting on he sat down beside her, not because he dared to, but because he didn't know what else to do. She faced him and he saw the quick sweep of nose from high wide forehead to upper lip and the godlike girlish chin. Her eyes surprised him. He had expected to find ice in them -- instead he found the summer skies of Earth. In contrast her hair made him think of the blackness of winter forests -- its disarray of the wind on a winter's night. She said, Vve been waiting for you since dawn. She had spoken into his mind. He found he could speak into hers. You watched me all day yesterday. Why didn't you reveal yourself to me then? I revealed myself to you last night. Yes, he said, but not as you are now. Why did you wait so long? Your mind has a wall around it, like mine,  could not see inside. Can you see inside it now? Only a little -- not enough to tell me where you really came from or who you really are. But I decided to contact you anyway, Vm glad, he said. I've a lot of questions to ask. About you and about your city-state. There were three other poleis like it, as you no doubt know. Many years ago they grew envious of one another and engaged in a long and disastrous war. The final battle was fought upon the plain. The women fought beside the men -- those who had not been murdered along with their children in successive rapes of the four cities.  Were there no survivors? A few. They became shepherds and live far away beyond the mountain and the' plain. They blame the cities for their misfortune -- they regard them as places of evil and will not live in them any more. But as a goddess -- surely you could have ended suih a war. decreed that the gods were not to interfere, h your father? In a way he is, she said. He and his mate world. I have three brothers and three sisters. Afy three sisters were the guardian goddesses of the other city-states. There are other pantheons but they are inferior to ours.  Where do you live? Hale asked. We live high upon the mountain that looks down upon the plain. I thought you knew. I guessed. Hale said, but I didnt know.  saw you from the mountain when you arrived, stood up. Her armor was not new, he noticed. In places it had worn thin.  must go now. One of the thongs of her sandals was broken. He kneeled and knotted the ends together, then stood up beside her. Please dont go yet.  must, ril come back tomorrow -- perhts tonight. Would you like to see the battlefield? Til take you there. You seem inordinately interested in bones and it's not far from here. Take me there now. I cant. Til take you there tomorrow. Perhaps tonight. v She stepped sideways, slipped from sight. He stared at where she had stood. Oddly, her absence brought home to him more forcibly than had her presence the fact that she was a goddess, and momentarily he was overcome by awe. For a while he founckit difficult to believe that he had not dreamed the meetingsBut in the end he knew that it had been real and that he would see her again. H e skipped his midday meal again and went on a tour of the river bank. The Earth-Niefi War seemed to recede with every step he took. It had less reality for him now than the one that had talcen place here on Northstar # -- how many years ago? He felt sus; pended between present and past. Stone wharves protruded into the river. He walked out on one of them, sat down in the sunlight and IF let his legs hang over the water. The current was sluggish, almost imperceptible, and the river, wide at this point, brought to his mind a blue lake. Once the simile became fixed in his mind it was inevitable that he should see the raft. Even so, he found it odd that Gwendolyn should enter his reverie when she was so far backstage from the proscenium of his thoughts. The raft was anchored in the middle of the lake. There were two people on it. Beyond their golden glistening bodies a distant frieze of summer homes showed against a blue terrestrail sky. Hale looked but little different then from how he was now. Tall and spare, almost beautiful in his virile handsomeness. Gwen was a flaming nymph in the sunlight. When they went out together he always had trouble wearing clothes. He worked hard at it and achieved a degree of aptitude -- but the poor look well dressed only to the penniless. and he knew that in her eyes he was a storewindow mannikin on . parade. On the raft it was different. Nearly naked in the sun he was her peer and she accepted him as such. More important -- he accepted himself as such. She had said she loved him as they walked one moonlit night along the shore, the waves fainting at their feet. Her words had been more than a declaration of love -- they had been an invitation. He had. been accustomed to such invitations,'#ut he had found this one disconcerting. Later, in the dark boathouse, he had been . more disconcerted yet -- and hurt as well -- to find he was not the Tirst and possibly not even the second or the third. But his disenchantment had not lasted and by the end of the summer he had been more deeply in love with her than he had been before. Maturely in love... had been the way he had expressed it to himself. What he had felt toward her before had been mere boyish infatuation. It wasn't finding out that the rich were like everybody else that wrecked poor-boy lover -- it was ilAding out that the truth had no effect upon his fascination. T he raft went away and the river came back, and a flock of heronlike birds rose from the rs and flapped across the stream to the opposite bank where the frieze of summer homes had been. Hale liked the river better, found Northstar's warmth more comforting than Sol's. Perhaps here was where he belonged. ternoon wandering over the grassy lowlands and returned to the reconcraft at dusk. He had no appetite, but he forced himself to eat. Then he walked through the ruins to the lower-city temple of . The temple was empty. He walked down the aisle and sat on the bench where they had met. As he sat there in the silence the first moon climbed into the sky and sent her silver footprints down the aisle, then withdrew them to shine down through the crevices in the roof. The second moon arose and she too made obeisance at the altar before looking down from above. He knew that it was growing late, remembered that had said "perhaps" she might be there. But he went on sitting in the silver silence, hoping. She did not come. He stood up at last, dumb with disappointment, and walked out into the night. The third moon was climbing up the star-runged ladder of the east and the light of night was as the light of day. He wandered among the ruins. Passing a megalithic platform, he pictured a politician standing on it, making promises to the poor. Presently he came to a garden, passed through its gate and sat down in the multi-moonlight. A little distance away a waterless fountain stood like a silver centerpiece. Weeds grew riotously around his feet. Suddenly he heard her step and saw her just beyond the garden wall. She came through the garden gate, her armor blazing, her black hair gleaming in the night. You werent in the temple, she said. Then I saw you sitting here. He said, I waited for you for hours. I thought you werent coming. She said, Til take you to the battlefield. He walked with her through the ruins and they climbed the forested slope to the plain. The walked over the plain in the multi-moonlight, the shining mountain rising on their right. Around them herds of wild livestock slept. Ululations sounded from far away. They circumvented a quarry that had become an artesian lake and came at last to a huge circular depression bordered by sprucelike trees. She halted just beyond the fringe of trees and he halted beside her. He looked into her summersky eyes, silvery now -- at the wild blackness of her hair. A trembling began in his hands. He said. Let me count the ways... She looked back at him, puzzled. The wall around your mind has grown higher. What is it you do not wish me to see? Nothing, he said. Is this the battlefield? Yes. The Cwm of the Dead. He saw the bones. They began at his feet, spread outward, littering the entire basin. Interspersed IF among them were battered shields, broken swords, bits and pieces of armor -- all black with age. Oddly, he was reminded of the utensils he had dug up. Surely the gods could have averted such a tragedy. No, ifC said. We could not avert it because we were gods. The people of my polls prayed to me to bring them victory, while the people of my sisters poleis prayed to them to bring them victory. Thustfp decreed as he did. But he could have stopped it. Only at the expense of creating dissension among the gods and this he would not do. Thus he decreed as he did, fully aware of the consequences. Since the war we have become gods without worshipers. The survivors have turned their backs on us and have taken to worshiping savior kings. We no longer know what it is like to be adored. I no longer know what it is like. I adore you. Hale said. She turned toward him. Yes, but in a different way. She stepped closer to him, her gaze warm upon his face. He found her hand in his. It was like the moonlight, light, cool and soft -- and somehow the three qualities passed from her palm through his and became commingled with his blood, apotheosizing him. He found himself kissing her in the multi-moonlight. the women he had known before her transmuting to glass beads on a cheap necklace in his mind, Gwen the gaudiest zircon of them all. And yet it was he who pulled away. We have no right to make love here, he said. Not in the Cwm of the Dead. In the beginning Love met Death in the dark woods of the world and found him to be her twin. I have no right to make love to you in any case. Why? He stared at her. Because -- He saw that she had turned and was pointing across the battlefield. We are about to be attacked. Look. There were five of them. Wolves. Not the kind he was familiar with, but enough like them to justify the term. They were loping across the cwm, spreading outward as they came. 's right arm was already extended -- now she extended her fingers and white fire leaped from their tips. The lead wolf became a gout of flame. But the remaining four did not even slow their pace. 's second thunderbolt missed. Hale extended his own right arm. Two tongues of blue from his fingertips and the two foremost wolves disintegrated. incinerated the fourth -- and the fifth, badly singed, retreated into the night. T hey walked back across the plain in the multi-moonlight holding hands, their shoulders touching now and then, the three moons slipping swiftly down the western slope of night. The moment they entered the forest she unclasped her armor and let it fall to the ground. Then she pulled him into a flower-carpeted arbor and drew him down upon her. Not once, she whispered. Not once, but a thousand times... A golden ladder appeared from somewhere and he climbed it high into the sky. There was a bursting in his brain -- the ladder trembled and he fell. He climbed it again, this time even higher into the sky, only to fall once more, white fires burning in his brain. He did not know how many times he climbed and fell. He did not care. Toward morning they made their way down through the forest and halted before the lower-city temple. I must go now, said. He pulled her tightly against him, tried to imprison her with his arms. No, not yet,  may never see you again! Her body trembled, lost substance. In a moment only the ghost of her remained. And then even the ghost was gone, but not before he heard it whisper. You are the first real god I have ever known! He was thunderstruck. H e stood in the fading moonlight, staring at where she had been. You are the first real god I have ever known ,... She had seen him ride down from heaven on a huge and shining "steed" such as she had never dreamed of. She had seen him unleash "thunderbolts" more powerful than her own. She, who had probably entered hundreds of unsophisticated mortal minds, had encountered a wall when she tried to enter his. She had mistaken him for a god from the beginning. A god, perhaps, from one of the other pantheons. The rosy-fingered dawn had drawn a pink line along the eastern horizon. Hale walked slowly back to the reconcraft, climbed into the control room and sat down. In a way, he was a god. gods like him. But they did not dwell on Northstar # and never would. The first golden fingers of the sun reached through the locks and extended themselves toward his feet. He had always thought his feet were made of clay. He saw now that they were not. He stood up. His shoulders seemed to brush the sky. The fading stars hovered inches from his head. IF The intra-fleet communicator came to life. "Fleet Com to Recon Two. Acknowledge, RC Hale." Hale looked down from his eminence at the picayune reminder of his past. "Repeat: FleetCom to Recon Two. Acknowledge, RC Hale. If unable to acknowledge, then return FleetCom immediately." "I'm not going back," Hale said. "What has gone wrong. Recon Officer Hale? Repeat: What has gone wrong?" "I'm a god," Hale said. "I'm agoing to live among my own kind." He got a pipe wrench out of the tool cabinet and smashed the communicator's face. He closed the locks ahd raised the reconcraft high above the dead city. They wouldn't come looking for him -- he wasn't that important. But even if they did they would never find him. He pointed Pegasus toward the mountain. The mountain came to meet him and high up on its shining slopes he saw the marble columns of the hall of the gods. He guided Pegasus down from the sky, brought her to rest on the slope below and dismounted. He began walking up the slope in the hot sunlight. He started to sweat. Did gods perspire? He wondered. It seemed like an uncouth trait for a god. The hall was huge, he saw as he neared it. Some of its columns had fallen. Its roof had collapsed in places. Clearly the gods were having a hard time shifting for themselves. But he would help them. He would use his technological powers to help them rebuild the hall, remold it into the magnificent structure it had been before. They had come out of the hall and were standing before the columned entrance, waiting to welcome him. He saw tall and mighty . He saw stately . He saw  s handsome brothers and sisters. He saw She had exchanged her armor for a white dress that barely covered her breasts and fell just below her hips. Her blue eyes glittered in the sunlight like shards of glass. He was very close to the hall now. He thought it odd that his fellow gods did not come forth to greet him. Then he saw I  #  raise his right arm, as though in salutation. He was about to raise his own in kind leaped from the deity's fingertips. The bolt passed over Hale's head and a moment later Pegasus vanished in a huge gout of flame. The mountain trembled. A hot wind seared the slope. Hale had halted horrified in his tracks. "You don't understand!" he screamed. He looked desperately at Tell them who I am! Tell them what I am! looked coldly back at him. Kill him she said to lowered his arm, extended fingers now pointed toward Hale's head. Hale flung himself frantically to the left and the bolt passed over his shoulder. Blinded by its brightness, he went rolling and scrambling down the slope. Stones rattled around him. His incandescer was torn from his wrist. When he reached the bottom of the slope he staggered to his feet and ran. A sound like the tinkling of ice cubes came from far above. It was the laughter of the gods. l. returned. He slowed his steps and began walking in the direction of the river. He did not reach it till late afternoon. He threw himself face down on the grassy bank and cupped water into his mouth. A low moan sounded from behind him. Turning, he saw the wolf. He twisted his body into a sitting position. Instinctively he raised his arm. Then he remembered that his incandescer was no longer strapped to his wrist, that it had been irretrievably lost on the slope. He let his arm drop to his side. The wolf did not move. Presently Hale realized that it had not followed him to the river, as he had at first assuhied, but had been there before he arrived. He saw that its right flank was badly burned, and recognized it as the wolf 's final thunderbolt had singed. There was pain in the animal's eyes. Hale raised his arm again. This time, the wolf crept to his side and settled down beside him. He stroked its coarse fur, then lay back exhausted on the grass. There were bound to be survivors living along the river. Eventually he would follow it far enough to find them. However much he might want to, he could not live alone. But he was not yet ready. First he must wait for his wound to heal, for the pain to go away. He closed his eyes and presently he slept. The gods looked down from above. But they did not see him -- they saw only their reflections in the stream. What is a god? A god is a being, mortal or immortal, who can with impunity doff his j her democratic mask the moment the need for it is past. Op. cit., p. #  IF The most terrifying life form in the universe was -- himself! trouble. The outer wall of our reactor had cracked. The thermal sealant had leaked in. It was burned up, gone. We had repaired the fault, policed the area, but in order to keep from exceeding our thermal limit and blowing, every liquid on board the ship had been poured into our tanks. It wasn't good enough. Power was evaporating the liquids. Temperatures on board were in excess of #F and they were building. Crew was down to minimal clothing, almost none. And the temperature was going to erase us. We didn't have any liquid for human consumption. And we were # days from Emergency Base Extender. My ship. Patroller #. My captaincy: Colonel Jack L. Powers, United Earth Patrol Forces. Purpose of journey: normal patrol operation. Special situation: Inspector-passenger, General of Patrol Forces, Eight-star Senoir Commander Rallfeld Ship's state: Emergency #. I had. reported to General Rallfeld. He had made no comment, given no advice. And I had no idea. We simply had no other liquids on board. And without liquids we could either go black and freeze or go on until we fusioned. Temperature rose to #F. And there was no place to head, no place to go. The area was Lacuna G #. Crew working at maximum. All nonessential personnel confined to berths -- minimal activity, attempt to add as little additional heat as possible. Working crew was demanding power. Not verbally, but I could see the demand every time they looked at me. One burst of full power for three minutes would lift our temperature five degrees. Where to use it? A three-minute tbrust toward Extender and maybe bring in a dead ship? A patrol ship was worth a fortune. Or a minute full-burst call to Extender requesting emergency rescue? Or a near search in case of remote possibility there was anything in area? G # was largely uncharted. There might have been something within range. "Weiss. Near search. One minute on full power. Commander, see that everything else is cut off. Quickly as possible, Weiss." "Sir," he said and pushed his power call. I reached over and pushed "confirm" on my console. A twelve-second delay and the shot came through. I watched it on power control, I watched it on the thermometer. I watched it on the clock. The damned second hand just seemed to hang there -- the P # register didn't. It was #F down there and I watched as it sped to #. "How far can we go in P four. Chief?" "Two-eleven, Captain. Maybe. I'm not sure. But maybe to twoeleven." We were three degrees up. Could hardly feel it. Just felt thirsty. No hope for that. "Refrigeration off in J Seven, Captaiq." "Anything for it?" "Nothing, sir. That's directly above P Four. It was just a matter of time. You want perishables transferred, sir?" "Commander? How much heat would we generate moving it to nearest refrigeration? Get the list. See if anything essential is in it." "Power off, sir," the bosun told me. IF "Fine. Weiss. Get that analysis as fast as you can." "We're at one-fourteen, sir." "Bad. Get me General Rallfeld. Advise him of our situation." "Sir." "Weiss. What the hell's happening? You have anything? What's taking so long?" "Sorry, sir. The twenty-nine eighty-seven is slow." "Who the hell gave you consent to use it? You're trained. Eye-read it! We're trying to save power. Mister." "Sir, I don't know how to eyeread." "You don't... Any one of you here trained to eye-read a scan chart? No? Okay, Mister. Use the twenty-nine eighty-seven. Try to use it fast, will you." "Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir." "Forget it. Just concentrate on what you can do." "Sir." pace. But that would mean more heat. We couldn't afford it. Even thinking was too much of an expenditure. What we needed was stasis. I had always laughed at the experiments on preservation, biosuspensions. At Inter-Planetary Science Confederation Conferences I had voted against grants for such research. I regretted those votes now. I was on the verge of losing my ship, my men. "Major, you been on to General Rallfeld?" "Yes, sir." "Any comment from him?" "No, sir. He just thanked you for the courtesy and wishes you luck, sir." "Yes. Get back to him. No, Let me. How much power is used on full ship auditory?" "In thermals, a tenth of a degree, sir." "What's our bio limit. Doctor?" "We're at one-eighteen. Captain. At one-forty we'll begin to suffer severe impairment. I have the figures if you want them." "Go ahead." "We'll lose fifteen per cent in the next twenty-two degrees, sir. Twenty per cent for every accretion of five beyond that. Chance of utilizable surviving crew nonexistent by a hundred and sixty Fahrenheit." "Thank you. Doctor." "One nineteen, sir." "Thank you, son." I thought for a minute. I'd keep it short. No encouragement. There surely wasn't anything encouraging. I reached over and switched on the auditory. "Captain Powers here. Our situation is deteriorating. We're making every attempt to rectify it. We will keep you informed of any significant developements. I'm speaking to you to ask if any of you have any memory of stories told you about Thermal Accelerate, any classroom studies, private investigations. If you have knowledge, information or ideas please report to Commander Rupler by auditory. Thank you." I turned to Weiss after switching off. "Anything?" "Nothing yet, sir. There's nothing in one or two quadrant." "Go ahead with it. Stay easy, son." "Yes, sir." We were up to #F. "Captain. P Four is beyond human habitation." "Thank you. Doctor. What goes next?" "R Five, sir. We have crew there. Twenty-eight men, four women." "Can we move them?" "It's your command, sir." "Very well. Let me know when they're dead." "Yes, sir, Captain." "Captain?" Weiss asked. "I think I have a radio signal. It's area one-seventeen. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen -- it's at sixteen hours. Mass. Mass? It's a planet, there are dozens -- there are hundreds of radio transmitters, sir. It's an inhabited planet! An inhabited planet! It has intelligent life!" "Easy, son. Verify, please." "Yes, sir." "Chief. What's our capacity to do sixteen hours?" "We could do it, sir. Cut off everything. We could do it. We'd get there four or five before critical mass. We'd be dry." "Doctor?" "I'm checking it. Captain. Okay. Yes. It would take us up to onefifty Fahrenheit -- say fifty-five per cent mortality. Maybe down to fifty per cent if survivors can get liquids immediately on landing." "Commander. Is there any record of an inhabited planet in this area?" "None, sir." "Captain. General Rallfeld to speak to you, sir." "One minute. Okay. Prepare for full propulsion power. You have a confirm on that, Weiss?" "Yes, sir. It's absolute. It's there. No mistake. Captain." "All right. Prepare to go, gentlemen. We're getting out." I reached up for the phone. To an eight-star I spoke privately. "General. This is Captain Powers." "I'd like to see you in my quarters. Captain." "General. We're in Emergency. We have just found an I planet at sixteen hours. I'm preparing to go for it. I don't feel I can leave my command at this moment, sir." IF "I figured you'd find it. There's no sense in your going toward that planet, Captain. Get down here. Go or don't go on your fire command. It doesn't matter. But get down here. I'll explain when you do. That is an order." "I don't understand, sir. Do you advise against my firing?" "It doesn't matter. Captain. Nothing is going to save this ship. Might as well go for it. But give your command and then get down here." "Yes, sir," I said. "Commander. Fire when you're ready. If you need me I'll be with the general." Ben looked at me. I just shrugged. And I patted Weiss on his shoulder on the way out. I had a lot to live for. If there was any chance of living I was going to make it and my s#iip and my crew would make it with me. Mark," came over the auditory. "Three, two, one." I held on for it. It was a quick burst, minimum added G. I waited for any after kick. There was none. It was damned hot down there in the passageway. I knocked. The general opened the door. His face was grim, taut. He was a lot of years my senior, one of the earliest patrollers, an almost legendary man. But he didn't look old. He also didn't look as if he were feeling the heat. Responsibility of command goes deep. We were probably the only two men aboard still in full uniform, the only two aboard using all our will power to keep our sweat glands from betraying that we felt the heat, too. "General." "Captain. Sit down. This  planet. From here it's fourth quadrant, degree one-seventeen?" he asked, going to hi table and looking down at a chart. "That's correct, sir. May I ask how you know that?" "I've been following your progress. Captain. I would have come up and offered assistance if I'd known anything to help you. To the best of my knowledge and in the light of my experience I recommend that you cut off oxygen. Go black. Captain." "We're still alive, sir," "This planet we are now heading toward. Captain -- I was the first man to make contact with it." "You've been there, sir? But -- " "Easy, Captain. It's not on charts because it was removed from them by command decision. As you approach the planet, you have automatic gear that will signal nine. Condition nine." "Nine means forbidden. Why, sir? And when? Why haven't we gotten the signal by this time?" " Because you're not using enough power to get distant scan. As you near -- on any degree of power -- the nine signal will come up." "But this is Emergency One, sir." "What docs nine mean, Captain?" "Approach forbidden under all circumstance, sir." "Exactly. So what do you propose to do?" "At this moment -- with no alternative? I'll land. General. If we can get there why not try it? It means dying there or here." "I don't think you will land. The planet we are approaching was once briefly list as Rallfeld. I thought I was the discoverer. I first made contact, I thought. I believed I was the first man who landed. The inhabitants are a pretty extraordinary species, Captain. They have no form, none that I know. If they do they've never let us see it. The form they take is the sympathetic. If you were an elephant. Captain, you might find they all were elephants." "They'll wear our form for us?" "Yes. They can assume your form if they choose. Or they can assume the form of this starship or a fleet of starships. They could turn themselves into an army of patrollers. If that happened, in that army the brain duplication would have the imperative of getting home. Captain; getting back to weapons and then all it would take would be the move across space. You'll have on your mind Extender. They'll get to Extender. I think they are indestructable. Captain, and I know their only purpose is to destroy. What men once fantasied Mars was, what Sparta once was... Sir, this is the planet of war. And, Captain, if you land you will be risking the annihilation of Earth and perhaps of half the I planets in the universe." "Butyou say that you landed." ilL#ES. They were quiescent X then. Captain, things were different. I was just storming around, really an explorer, an adventurer more than a patroller. My orders were to go out to my fuel capacity and then turn around and head back. We weren't in trouble. We were in a normal mode. My chief spotted them. He yelled at me. Great excitement. Those days our contacts with other species -- with I planets -- were minimal and tremendously exciting. We were getting radio. We didn't believe it. And it wasnH a simple signal. They were jamming up every one of the bands. "In those days our equipment was primitive, but we had equipIF ment. We tricked in on the signals and da go out to my fuel capacity and then turn around and head back. We weren't in trouble. We were in a normal mode. My chief spotted them. He yelled at me. Great excitement. Those days our contacts with other species -- with I planets -- were minimal and tremendously exciting. We were getting radio. We didn't believe it. And it wasn't a simple signal. They were jamming up the bands. "In those days our equipment was primitive, but we had equipment. We tracked in on the signals and damn if they weren't coming from a planetary body. It was beyond our safe-reserve fuel allotment -- but hell, if we could get to it I wanted to do so. "So we moved for it. And we did a broad scan. You know how close the nearest star is. Captain? This is a true Lacuna. Hell, you can hardly see stars with your naked eye in this black. We searched. How the devil could you have a planet with a riot of radio coming from it -- life on it -- and no star? That didn't make sense. Until that time our every contact had been with similar life forms with similar needs. We really believed we were the dominant species in the universe. Hell, you saw a Zithythin and you hardly could tell him from a Swe. Their planets were like ours, their life forms all were. But we were coming to this planet and what the hell would they be?" He stopped and seemed to be remembering. The cabin was hot. I wondered how much worse jt was than before we had gone on power. It felt worse. "Ships then were slow," he resumed. "We just inchetLacross to. them. Their radio signals strengthened. They weren't signaling out. The sounds wre weird to our ears but we decided they were variations of a home-service radio. Music, entertainment talk shows. We had an early version of the lingual transverter. We put it on the signals. It took a little time but it actually checked out. We were listening to disk jockeys and pop tunes. Just like home. A complex language. A language we would now classify as type N four-fortyone. Closest thing to it was Chinese, perhaps. "We kept probing. First thing we hit was that the Lacuna wasn't always that. At one time they had over four thousand stars around one massive one. Of the four thousand stars, at least fifteen hundred had planetary systems. Everyone of those stars. Captain, was dead. They were cinders, all burned out." "In one area? How? What happened?" "Let me go on. Captain. One hundred and twenty-six hours after our first contact we went into a distant orbit. From there we found no probes, no defenses, no electronic queries. They had radio but they were only using it for entertainment. Through our lingual transverter we sent down a query. We identified and requested per. mission to land. This obviously was a sophisticated planet. We received no response. In the meantime we did standard electronic probing, made quite difficult by the darkness. We found electricity, but no light. We found heat but no fire. We found elaborate cities, quite large cities. There were bodies of water,Ngreat mountains. The planet is twice the size of ours. We later discovered it maintains a popula"After repeated attempts to make contact or sense, we determined -- or more properly I did -- to make our landing. Itvas something very special, Captain. We came down on a field outside one of their largest cities. With no sun there shouldn't have been anything much-"but, Captain, we came down in paradise. Our lights showed flora so lavish and rich in colors so exotic that it exceeded the best we have on Earth. There was -- and this is difficult to describe to a professional -- a peace, a calm. The air was our air. The temperature was balmy. A spring bubbled fifty yards from us and the water was pure. It was what Earth water probably was in the beginning. Beautiful, Captain. "No one came out to greet us. We waited, but no one came. We carried rovers in those days. In violation of standing orders I relieved myself of command and with two of my men and our one semiportable transverter we drove into the city. X All darkness. No windows on great buildings that soared beyond anything we had even imagined on Earth -- architectural forms fabricated of materials so beautiful that we stopped to stare at walls. Paved streets, no street lamps, gutters, drains. Sizes made us feel the natives must be bigger than we were, but not considerably bigger. There were no lamp posts, no other lighting forms or facilities. The darkness, except where our lights probed, was total. "We drove on. There were no vehicles in the streets. The streets were immaculate. Unbelievable place. Captain, absolutely unbelievable. There were no natives on the streets -- we saw no animal life whatever. We kept going. Around every corner we discovered a new wonder. Then we reached the business section. Still no people, J IF which made us guess that it was perhaps their night. The stores had no display windows -- you know what they had instead? They had radio and they had little boxes. The radio advertised -- quietly it offered descriptions and prices. If you put your hands in the boxes you could feel the items or simulations of them. We were a little afraid but tried it. Difficult. If you've ever tried to identify even a familiar object in the darkness in one of those party games, you'll know how difficult it was -- but totally fascinating, Captain. This feel thing -- apparently they had even worked in out to replace movies. Feel a sound. They had no light. We had sensors and I swear to you we came up with zero photons. Nothing. Only our lights, our headlights, our spotlights -- old ruby lasers. "The place was -- or seemed -- deserted, abandoned. There was radio everywhere -- even traffic control, believe it or not -- but we came up with nothing. Equipment primitive by your standards, but not unsophisticated. "And then. Captain, right off a massive central square -- our lights turned as we did and suddenly we had in them an image of me. It wasn't quite perfect to my eyes. It was a slight variation, features copied but just perceptibly modified. But it was me.lVX 'Jesus.' I told hirb to stop. I got out, holding my light on this doppelganger. I walked up to it slowly. It was dressed as I was with modifications, unfrightened as I was, curious as I was. " 'Bring over the transverter -- slowly' I called back to my men. " 'Not necessary, Captain,' it said. It spoke our language even. Mister Powers. It even had that. " 'Who are you?' " 'An official. I'm a guide in this instance. You are a patroller from the planet Earth. Please, would you lower your light to below my eyes. It is the first light I've ever seen. It has beauty but it is painful.' " 'Sorry. We're interested in you -- your planet. We have contact with other species. We -- ' " 'I know. Captain. Let me quickly tell you our story. We are immortal. Yet we have births but maintain our population.' " 'Mass deportations?' " 'No. We are not a very old civilization. I, frankly, am not clear as to the nature or science of our full developmental story. We were primitives on a naked planet at about the same time your species lived in caves. And then one of us discovered... We had waters and naked rock, barren soil. Some visitor must have brought the fishes. We had fishes -- we fished them. One day while this ancestor was Fishing, knowing that his tribe had hunger, he was thinking strongly of fish. Suddenly he saw a fish and by a curious process he became a duplicate of that animal. He flopped to the ground -- another tribesman grabbed him and he was eaten. But one of the tribe who had witnessed the transfiguration decided to investigate. " 'Apparently we had the capacity to adopt any form. However, the capacity was limited to one adoption. Some of us turned ourselves into rocks. When visitors came and taught us of trees and grass and animals on their planets, some of us turned ourselves into those things. But most of us simply lived and grew and learned. I forget, that was in the time of the Great Light. Suns those days there was never darkness. " 'Then it was simple. More and more advanced races came to visit. And suddenly our world exploded with new possibilities. They had radio, we -- some of us -- became transmitters and others receivers. They had images of their cities. Some of us were drawn by those images and turned ourselves into the buildings and streets -- enough. Captain, so that we had cities. Perhaps you chose to be a great building forever -- or if you thought ill of yourself, maybe you became a gutter. Think of it. Everything you see, you have seen, was once one of us.' "'What happened then?' I asked this copy of myself. " 'By copying we assimilated many elements of many civilizations. From primitivism we became advanced. It all happened quickly. Four thousand of you years ago we were peasants. Three thousand six hundred of your years ago we had become the most advanced civilization in the universe. We even visited your planet. Funny stories of that. One day I must tell you.' "'Whatever you want to tell me,' I said. " 'Perhaps I should tell first of a very handsome speicies of very distant visitors who came to us. They were having some difficulty with their population and they considered our planet suitable for their colonial needs. So they came in great numbers, bent on conquest. It was very impressive to us. Prior to this we had had no knowledge of war. Suddenly, Captain, almost all of us wanted to be warriors. We became them. We had no logistic problems as they did, but we had all their knowledge and skills and technology. We quickly defeated them in a bloody battle that only was too short -- and with our warriors' hunger we felt compelled to go on. IF We went off, Captain, to conquer the universe. We were mostly warriors, what else was there to do?' " The universe is vast. Please lower that light. Captain. It pains my eyes -- they are greatly atrophied after three thousand years of darkness. We conquered and conquered -- planet after planet fell to us. We were mighty, powerful, ruthless. Too much so, it seems. The other planets, the ones we had not yet destroyed, for the first time came into a confederation for the specific purpose of acting against us. In one great sweep -- while most of our arriors wefe off at wars -- they came and burned out our stars and destroyed those of us who were weapons and eradicated every source of light. Remember, we can only copy. They destroyed all our sources of light and with no model we had no new capacity to make light, even to make fire. Their purpose was to kill us, of course. How could life exist without some of the products of light? But enough of us had not yet committed ourselves to a modification. We still had our adaptability. We became creatures of darkness -- even those of us who chose to be plants -- food -- soon became indestructible plants -- immortal. Don't ask me how. Immortality is basic to our species -- it is the one thing we have. Our children have the capacity to change as I have changed to copy your image.' " 'You'll always be my image?' " 'Yes.' " 'Can others become you, become my image?' " 'Only from the original. Captain. There is infinite allowance of duplication from the original.' " 'You are no longer a warrior race?' " 'That is difficult to say. It is part of our genetic heritage. Given freedom to move and be and given sight -- who knows what we might be again.' " 'The light went out three thousand years ago?' " 'That is correct, Captain.' " 'And you've just maintained yourselves in this darkness in a relatively quiescent state?' " 'We are noted for our perseverance. We always go on. The stores you have passed, the radio you have heard they go back to the days of light or the period before the lack of light forced modification. For three thousand six hundred years it has been as you see it. We have survived. We have waited.' W We thanked him. He urged us not to rush off. We said that we had to, but we would report and we certainly expected to send back a full Sci-Explor Team. He said that he and his people would look forward to that. And then we left." "They have water there?" I asked the general. "You are being obtuse. Perhaps it's the heat. Yes, of course they have water. But we never went back. No scientiHc team visited them. They are strictly a prohibited planet. They are rated a prime menace. They are just waiting to copy from anyone -- to copy enough so that they can go out and conquer again." "How can you know that, General?" "Restricted File Nine-A-four." "That's an ancient history file." " "Yes. These beings have the capacity to become invincible. For the sake of all I planets inthese galaxies, for the sake of Earth, I am sorry -- but I must forbid you to land."  "We need liquids or we will die. General." "Eight hundred and twenty-seven there? I recommend. Captain, that you shut off oxygen. Death will be swift and painless. I further recommend that you aim your ship at the planet and time it for full fusion impact. These creatures are an abomination." "My responsibility is to this ship and to my crew." "Like hell it is. Captain. Your responsibility is considerably greater than that." "Very well. General. Thank you for telling me this. I'll take it under advisement." "I'll iake command. You are relieved. Captain." "No, General It's my ship. Consider yourself confined to quarters," I told him and stalked out. N othing new to report as I resumed my command. Temperature was #F. Revised estimates indicated ship mortality would be # at #F. Ship proceding on course with minimal power utilization. Crew resting, in position. Command room filled with nudists. The very attractive flight officer Duncan wore only a cache sex. It was largely sweated through and transparent. Duncan was the one beauty on the ship. Every man had hoped from the outset to establish a relationship with her. She had proved stiff, devoid of humor, uninterested in semal pursuits, painfully modest no totally untouchable. I watched bead of perspiration roll down the valley between her high breasts. I found I had not enough juices to be aroused. No other crewman or ofIF ficer on the deck seemed even aware of her nudity. We just sat, too tired and enervated to speak. We waited. We watched the clock. We watched the thermometer slowly inch up. We listened to the brief reports of new compartments reaching Thermal Accelerate Lethal. And we wasted away. Our freeze-dried foods had no liquids in them, there was not even frost to lick. We had no liquids in us -- not any more. We fasted. And every half-hour we got the to the general's planet: Rallfeld: G etting hard to breathe. The nasal passages burn, they feel all wrong, unnatural. We're three from Rallfeld -- call it that. I announced it to the crew as if it meant something. The doctor says it just had to be something for them to hang on to. A number. Our voices croak when we speak. My throat feels as if it's going to hemorrhage. The worst thing is the building headache. No one is sweating any more. That's over. Four crewmen and the .major are down. I've just left them. I don't have the strength to move them -- I doubt that anyone else has. They're just down where they fell, a reproach to me, a reminder of our imminent fate to the others. Temperature is now #. I'm trying to guess at what temperature our instruments will start going out, though I know that most of them will certainly outlast us. I keep wondering whether it isn't worth the risk to open primary or at least secondary approach procedures just to have some reference if the heat does knock essential equipment out of function. But if I use that power now, knowing that I'm obligated to use full power on j-eal approach, how many more men will I kill? God! It's a great ship, an extraordinarily fine entrustment of command. But with the trust I have responsibility. What do I do? Rallfeld has to be judged rational. He seemed rational when he told the story. I believed his experience. But belief isn't enough, not with command. The override gauge, the supreme command center counter, even without power is reading Condition #. That means they must have a satellitp'system and their transmitters must have max power. # means off limits. Going into the mushrooms of a nuclear war they only send out a #. Nine means it. If I land and get away with it -- if I save the ship and my crew -- if I get back alive with no damage done they will still lock me up for life. The penalty is automatic. There are no exceptions. But how could they know? If I pull it off, how would they know? If the planet is twice the size of our Earth with only a fraction of Earth's population certainly there has to be one place sparsely populated. It's dark perpetually. We could go in, get the water in fast and get the hell off. And then I could claim I didn't know anything, didn't know where the hell I was, was too irrational in a heat stroke to even be aware of #. Temperature is #. We're now # down -- we've stopped counting cortex burnouts. It's bad. I don't understand how I'm still making it. Eighty-two minutes from the planet. Difficult to swallow the stimulants -- effects are erratic and lunatic. As long as they are blind or almost blind, as long as all is darkness below -- as long as they don't have light we have to be fairly safe. If we actually encountered them, how many would there be? We could go out fully armed, kill everything. The only real danger would be if they captured one of us. Say one sees us, or a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand. As long as they can't hold us for endless replications, what can they do? They can't take" reproductions from each other. With maximum urgency, with every facility at our command, we can get the water and get out. Even if they somehow took ten thousand of us- -- what would ten thousand mean against all the power of the Patrollers? No threat, no serious threat. Speed is the only issue, the single issue.  Seventy-five minutes. I'll turn on approach at fifteen, not before. And even that is premature and very late. The doctor just fell. He was a good friend. Do I explain again chain of command? No. They know. If I don't make it they'll handle it. They're a fine crew. "We're at two hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, Captain," the chief said. he was talking about P #. We had six degrees before we blew up. I made my mind stop thinking of what was happening in the reactor, getting ready to burst out of it. Twenty-eight minutes. Question is whether to wait on approach power. I tried to think. "We'll go into approach at four minutes. Power at four and a half. Can you handle it that quickly?" "Yes, sir." "All right. Now listen. We're going to have damn little chance to pick and choose our site. We want IF water and we want to be as far from any habitation as possible. No contact. When we get in: full armed section, manual total annihilate. The men must keep together. Hoses and fast-as-possible loading." "It'll take us time to cool." "Okay. Then land, sit tight, buttoned up. We wait, then out and fast load." "Life support?" "Not necessary. There is oxygen compatible atmosphere." If we're battened down and just sit on the surface, even with time, what the hell can they do to us? They might duplicate our ship but what about our interior? What good would the ship be without our interior, without us, without our operating knowledge? No. They won't be able to touch us. Temperature fierce. It's difficult to think, to move. Twelve minutes. Maybe I'll go down in history as the greatest traitor, but I'm not going to sit here and die. I'm not going to surrender my command to death. I'm even thinking in a whisper. "So you're going ahead. Captain," a strong, natural voice. I turned painfully, slowly. It was the general. He was fully uniformed. He wasn't sweating. He didn't look weakened. He stood there. "I ordered you confined to your quarters, General." "Poor Captain Powers. You have decided to go in, haven't you?" "Yes, General. It's a risk that I must take." "Very well. Just do not forget that I did my best to warn you. I tried to stop you." "Yes. I understand. When we get back to Extender, I'll place myself under arrest, sir." "Do you mind if I stay up and watch the landing? It's sort of coming home, you know?" "Do what you please. Just don't interfere, sir." "Tell me this. Captain. As I understand the new propulsion technology, a simple weld and a viscuous fluid would fix up your ship to perfection. Is that correct?" "That's all. General. Just that." "Good. I'll just get out of your way, unless you should want me to help." "How is it you still have your voice, your strength?" "Constitution, I suppose. Captain." He smiled. Temperature up to #F. Onehalf minute to power. In a great flash the screen lit. We had U-V on, dark probe. It is wrong! Lights. They have lights down there! Water. One, there. Another body of water. Yes. Looks sparsely populated. Good. No roads, nothing. Looks safe. Going for it. Those are lights. Where did they get them? How? Going in fast. Strong gravity pull. Three minutes. Nothing else left Abort attempt now would take us into fusion. Up to #F in P #. Our temperature is #. Just coming in now. Nothing to it. Just steady in. "Where the hell did they get those lights?" X Captain. The rover. I guess they must have replicated that like crazy. That laser spot, those headlights." "Coming in. Captain. Thirty-five seconds." We're going to make it. "Down! Down! We're down!" "Shut off -- everything off!" "Well, you made it. Captain. Congratulations." "Yes. Why didn't you tell me that you'd left them light?" "Call it dual loyalties. I'm taking over command of this ship, now. Captain." "Why now?" "We're here is why. You and your crew may consider yourselves prisoners of war. If I have any influence I'll try to persuade my people to treat you according to the Interplanetary Convention." "You are -- " I tried to get it out, couldn't. My tongue was swollen. "Sabotage?" "The heat really slowed up your thinking. Captain. The story about the first visit to the planet is quite true. Just the one now obvious slight omission. Come with me. Captain. Here. I'll help you." "No." "Oh, yes. I tried to save you. I've admired your species. But I do have my loyalties, you know." "No." "Yes, Captain. You needn't be worried about your life, not for a good long time." He walked over to me and just lifted me in his arms. I wanted to fight but I was too feeble. He was an old man but he just picked me up and carried me. We went down ship, my ship. I desperately wanted to fight him, kill him, get to the controls. I had to get us to fusion. But I couldn't even lift my arms. Crew fallen away, dead littering the passageways. We reached the hatch. I knew what awaited me even before it opened. They were there in the light -- thousands of them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Silent, disciplined, menacing. They were all Rallfeld. It's # days to Extender; # days to Forward Seven; #I days to Pluto Area Base. In # days, I -- a home.  IF a long low hill. The slope to her anterior portion was almost identical to that of her posterior -- gradual and not at all precipitous. Her mouth, an efficient grazer's mouth, was hidden by the anterior part of her body and pointed straight down over the vegetation that formed her diet. Armored over her entire length, she normally had nothing to fear at this latitude. Occasionally the vespertosauri would get this far, but they were a minor hazard at worst. No projection thrust itself from her profile -- even her eyes were sunk beneath several layers of armor, massive eyelids that opened only when vibration gave a warning -- for even to a teratohippus the powerful winds of the region were a danger. She was well adapted to her environment. A masterpiece of Betulian evolution. As the official guidebook put it: Teratohippus ectostia -- one of the wonders of Betul's fauna, this huge beast is a harmless grazer inhabiting the polar reaches of the planet and surviving on otherwise inedible plant life there. Little is known of its physiology or behavior because of the difficulties of conducting research in the barren reaches of its habitat. Although the creature is comparatively rare, you may be able to observe one grazing as you pass over the northern tundras on your way to the Ferris Observatory... Jl, perhaps the thousandth frozen rill -- this one looking exactly to her guidebook (itself not very trip over the desolation would end. She had been told the journey to the Betulian pole would last "all day" and had been unable to imagine what the term could mean on a planet with a much longer day than Earth's -- and on a course that followed the sun on its journey. It was still broad daylight. Eight hours had passed and the pilot -- Captain Chamberlan -- had just announced they were six hours away from Ferris. Only five passengers were on board. The others were her Project Chief Dr. Jens Hiacint and the team's documentarian, Henry Dalmat, plus two astrohistorians from the Grand University of Tufts, Earth's leading institute for interplanetary archivalism. She had not caught the names of the last two (she thought one was named Smith) and they hadn't tried hard to get acquainted. IF anui. Latest U.S. Government tests of all cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # of all cigarettes sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Regular and Menthol: I # mg. "tar',' # mg. nicotine, Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. Lorillard # Latest U.S. Government tests of all menthol cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # o all other menthols sold Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Archivalists generally looked down on the sciences she and her two colleagues represented. Alien biology was still a fairly new field and only a few schools, such as their University of Wayland, dabbled in it. Earth was still hung up on history, she thought, because of its economic value in settling legal claims of possession. She supposed interplanetary law -- with its attendant fields, archivalism and power theory -- was important. (Earth was of value now only as a receptacle of documents and as an arbiter of dispute.) But she wished they would recognize the importance of other -- less pragmatic -- sciences as well. None of the passengers were "tourists," of course, because no ordinary citizen could afford the immense costs of visiting another solar system and its developing planet. They were, like most visitors to Betul, Earthling scientists sponsored by wealthy universities on a mission intended to add to that vast repository of information that was the parent planet. object on the horizon she immediately remembered the item in her guidebook. She turned back a few pages and read the meager information on teratohippus. She nudged Dr. Hiacint and pointed out the beast. He had been dozing but became instantly alert. Hiacint was a leading alien biologist, head of her department. He grabbed his binoculars and leaned against the porthole as he examined the strange beast. "God, what I'd give to be able to look at it up close." His gray head was quivering with excitement. "May I use your glasses a minthis animal was a classic example in her specialty. He handed over the binoculars with overt reluctance. She looked closely at the mountainous creature and marveled at how it could get enough sustenance in these barren wastes. Her excitement was perhaps greater than his. "I wonder if we could manage an opportunity to study it while we are here?" She looked questioningly at Hiacint. Behind her she heard a snicker. One of the astrohistorians (the one named Smith?) had his head buried in a vital statistics record from Ferris -- he was deliberately ignoring the beast on the tundra. "You could never last out there. Miss Verd," he said. "I understand the temperature approaches absolute zero when darkness falls." "And how do you know so much?" He gestured at his book. "I've been reading about attempts to reach and study that creature. Survival down there is almost impossible for humans. No one has ever lived through an attempt to travel the tundra on the surface. A team of three biologists died a few years ago near here while trying to observe a teratohippus or whatever you call them. It says here that -- " "Oh, be quiet," she snapped. "I don't have time to waste right now." She looked back at the animal, was alarmed to see that the skimmer was almost directly above it. She pressed her face against the port. "Does it seem to be moving?" she asked Dr. Hiacint. "I can't see anything resembling movement. But we don't know yet what is under all that armor. It could be feeding -- or doing any number of things down there." "Professor, isn't there equipment for survival in that type of environment?" "Of course there's equipment," the astrohistorian butted in. "But it has limitations, mainly on the length of time you can stay out there, but also on the size and sophistication required for your type of studies." She told him petulantly, "I didn't ask you, Mr. Smith." It was then that she felt the barely perceptible, but different, vibration in the skimmer. The others sensed it, too, to judge by their expressions. She looked out through the porthole and saw the surface approaching. "My God. We're going down."  tain in the Visitor's Transportation Section, had been cursing his boredom and wondering why he had volunteered for the job. The Exploratory Corps needed the money brought in by visitors, of course, and someone had to tend to them... but, he thought, why me? He always reached this stage about halfway across these barren deserts between Base and Ferris. The ship nearly flew itself and he could hardly keep from dozing. But he couldn't afford to give in. His passengers might be looking at him -- their entire crew -- and lose faith. But he was yawning when it happened. The shudder was caused by a lack of power. He quickly switched off the reactor, which showed an unaccountable and dangerous temperature. Auxiliary power came on immediately and automatically, but the shuddering did not cease. He glanced at the gauge and realized there was simply not enough energy on board to keep the craft flying. The ship gave a series of violent jerks. The engines deprived of IF their customary load, were straining. He switched all he had into the landing mode and the skinmer calmed down a bit. He programed immediate touchdown procedures and punched the Mayday indicator. Another serious shockwave shook the small ship and he switched off the signal. There was just enough energy now, to keep the ship in landing mode. It was settling slowly to the surface, shuddering slightly. "Crash positions," he yelled to his passengers, afraid even to use the intercom. Over his shoulder he saw his charges folding their seats back to reclining position. Then the shudder became a gasp. He manually overrode the landing mode and speeded up the descent. At about fifteen meters the power went out completely. The frozen, powdery, mold-like life on the tundra -- the basic food of the teratohippus -- saved their lives as the ship plummeted to the surface. -- which felt something like a vespertosaur mounting its attacking dive -- she started to close up all her defenses and prepare for an attack. But being the slow, deliberate creature she was, she elected to wait and analyze the. vibrations a little longer. They were coming from almost overhead and they seemed to her more like the stragglings of some small dying creature than the threatening dive of a predator. She felt the shock of the craft crashing somewhere behind her and her multiple olfactors recognized the slight scent of a plentitude of food at the point of impact. The silence following the shock convinced her that no danger dwelt in the little creature that just died. The rich odor of food was tempting, but she could not afford to turn about for it. Ahead, many days ahead, was her nest with her young -- now in hibernation -- who would require her milk soon. She was two-thirds of the way through her circle. She could not stop now. Her brain blotted out the memory of the strange dying creature that flew and programed itself for the critical days ahead when time -- she thought -- would be her greatest enemy. (he must have been unconscious only a minute or two) he was amazed they were all still alive. The skimmer had not been designed to take that hard a fall and -- with total loss of power -- the life-support systems should have failed, too. He checked over the systems before he even checked on the passengers. Life support was functioning -- partially -- on stored power sources that were independent of all other systems. They had perhaps eight hours to go. Communications systems were dead, destroyed on impact. All locomotive systems were out. What he had left were a few scanning systems. It didn't look good. He made his way back through the debris to check on the passengers. "Everyone okay?" "Yes, I think so." The speaker was Hiacint, who had pretty well taken over direction of the party. "What I don't understand is -- with the damage to all the equipment -- why weren't we all injured?" "That's easy to explain, sir," Chambelan said after a minute's thought. "Those cabin seats were salvaged from the interplanetary ship that brought our first team to Betul. They were designed to protect passengers from much greater impacts than this. What really surprises me is why the shell to this skimmer didn't fracture. With no breathable oxygen and as flimsily dressed as we are, we could have had no injuries and could still have died in seconds." Dr. Hiacint had a small instrument in his hands. "While you were busy up front I was examining the powdery substance that we landed in. We seem to have hit a colony of a supercold one-celled life. It seems to have a depth of several meters. The ship's fall was broken by the colony's bulk. Now we have 'floated' to the top of the mass -- probably a group rejection of an alien substance." "What is that gadget?" "It's a bioscanner. I took my reading through the porthole and analyzed it with my portable Prolyzer, The colony seems to be moldlike -- " "Mold?" "Yes, you might say a giant supercold mushroom saved our lives." "That's all very interesting, but when are we going to be rescued?" The speaker was Michael Peripet, leader of the Initial Archivalist Documentation Team. Chambelan took a deep breath. "I don't really know if we are going to be rescued. I was only able to broadcast Mayday for a few seconds. I had a choice of broadcasting or crashing. I chose to land safely. It is doubtful that anyone heard our Mayday." "Why aren't you sending out a message now?" "Because our communications are shot. Besides, we don't have the power even if we could repair the equipment." IF "We have power to keep this ship warm. Why don't we have enough to send out a message?" "You don't seem to appreciate the tremendous energy required for communication on a planet this size. We are somewhere in the middle of a vast area that comprises one-third of Betul. Betul is about three-fifths the size of the planet Jupiter. Line-of-sight communications -- the most economical -- are impossible. Our only means of reaching either Base or Ferris Observatory is by planetary modulation and this requires a great deal more than we have available." "Surely they'll miss our flight and come looking for us," Dr. Verd asked, "won't they?" "I'm sure they will. But by the time we're missed at Ferris -- about six hours from now -- our present power supplies will be almost exhausted. As I said earlier, we won't last more than a few seconds once our life-support system fails." Peripet was looking through the porthole at the bleak tundra of Betul. "What a place to die." Chambelan felt a little embarrassed. He was responsible for the safety of these people, but there really wasn't anything he could do. "I think I'll go up front and see if I can salvage some communications gear. It's our only hope. Maybe a scout ship will be in the area for normal, IjNifi-of-sight communications." As he turned to leave he knew there was no hope of the last. Scout ships seldom came to this area. All personnel were busy building the new closed city at Estrodome, on the far side of Betul. But he had to keep up a good front. The rest stared with Peripet through the ports at the forbidding spot that would probably become their tomb. II T he captain had been busy for more than a hour in the cabin up front. He didn't seem to be having much luck. The archivalists had withdrawn inco themselves and were still staring out. Good old Dalmat was busy recording everything -- particularly the evidence on the mold culture that had broken their fall -- for future generations. Dr. Hiacint was running more tests and feeding them to Dalmat. They were both good shame to see them die like this. She was still thinking about the teratohippus, about survival, about things that were and ought to be. "Professor," she said Tinally, "I've been wondering about something. Our biggest problem now is centered around the need for heat." "Yes, I've had that on my mind, too. We seem to have food supplies and oxygen for several days, but a source of energy great enough to protect us from the intense cold here is our greatest need." "Is there any way of searching this area for a source of heat? I was thinking of the teratohippus. If it survives and is able to move that huge bulk -- musn't it generate large amounts of heat?" "It should." Professor Hiacint was thinking. He turned toward the cabin where the captain was working. "Chambelan," he called, "do you have a functioning infrared scanner?" "Yes, among other scanning equipment. But I have no equipment for analysis." "We can use my Prolyzer, which is still operative. Let's scan the area for heat sources." "What good will that do us?" "Perhaps none. But what harm will it do?" and was moving toward the cabin. Hiacint gathered up some materials and followed her. He connected his data-plotter onto the ship's infrared scanner and Chambelan started a sweep. His first effort revealed no heat sources at all, nothing within sight even near survival levels for human beings. told them. "Bring it in on the' Teratohippus itself. If there's any heat source out there capable of being of value to us it must be in a creature the size of that thing." Chambelan tuned the instrument to tight scan and manually aimed the fountenna at the crealeaned over the Prolyzer -- which Hiacint had programed for direct image response on the screen. At first nothing appeared. The professor punched in a more sensitive response and slowly an image came on the screen -- a bluish tinge showed on a field of gray. "The heat level on the creature's dermis is far belqw survival level for us, about forty degrees below freezing."" A frown and a shrug showrf Hiacint's disappointment. looking closely at the screen, where a tiny green speck appeared. "Look there." Then: "Captain, would you try to take the scan in even closer -- onto that spot?" Chambelan tightened the scan even more and guided the external fountenna as best as he could. As he gingerly inched the level forward the green dot became a large field. Hiacint punched madly onto the IF found it. There seems to be . an aperture in this creature with temperatures suitable for the support of human life. The aperture itself is barely large enough for a human, but -- "  "But it could lead to something "But whydo you think so? asked Chambelan. "Ah, that's Miss Verd's specialty," Hiacint replied. "She pioneered the field of teracial biology by finding similar types of creature on other planets. She can probably explain better than I." "This life-form undoubtedly belongs to the class known as Teraciae. They are all large animals, exoskeletal and usually warm-blooded, which have adapted to extremely cold environments on once-warm worlds. The external skeleton is a primary evolutionary tool for their survival and generally includes a cavity of varying size for the purpose of air intake -- a breathing chamber, US it were." "But why a cavity?" "Because the creature's breathing apparatus is still attuned to its warmer existence. The cavity allows the external air to be warmed up before it enters the animal's lungs. I was only guessing, but I supposed this creature to be like others I've studied." Professor to Chambelan. "Do any means of leaving this shipt" "Yes, there are suits aboard for limited use outside. They contain enough fuel to provide warmth for about an hour -- but certainly not enough for a trip to the creature and back." reach the teratohippus?" "I think so." "Then one of us must go out and see if we can use it for survival." Chambelan got up. "I guess Vd better go. There's a good chance that whoever goes won't come back." "But you wouldn't know what to professor. "Would he?" Hiacint started to open his mouth, but Captain, I really must be the one to go." "But you're the only wo -- " Hiacint's warning glance directed Chambelan's attention to the He felt a little foolish, but he nodded reluctantly. "Yes." ii "V#OU know, my name really X isn't Smith." EV suit and looked up in surprise. "Did I ever say it was?" "Yes, just before the accident or whatever it was. I believe I was teasing you a bit and -- " "Teasing? You were being downright nasty." "I suppose I was. I'd like vto apologize." She finished inserting herself into the rather flimsy suit and was testing the bulky heating unit she would wear on her back. "That's all right. I'd really forgotten about it." He seemed a little embarrassed. "By the way, what is your name?" "It's Smirg, Evan Smirg. I'm the vivistorian with the team." She looked a little puzzled. The word was new to her. You never knew what gimmick the archivalists would come up with in order to grab more responsibility in interspace affairs. She started to set on her helmet when he caught her hand. "Wait. What I really want to say is that I think I should take your place and go out there." She lowered the helmet. "Why?" "Well -- first, I'm probably the least capable of aiding the group in a survival situation. And second, I don't think a woman should take such a risk. I think -- " When the rest of the group got there, Smirg was nursing a sore eye, trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose and choking back a lock's inner door and was grinning triumphantly through the viewport. In another instant she was outside, alone in the forbidding atmosphere of Betul. teratohippus is of only minor importance, but it does contribute. It is one (certainly the largest) of a number of grazers descended from sea dwellers of eons ago when Betul was a planet of tropical waters. The lowest order of life in these reaches is the moldlike mycoplankton. This is composed of unicellular life, most of it capable of converting the frozen water and carbon dioxide and suspended minerals into proteoids. Other members of the plankton live off the majority and are called simply proteophages. As the mycoplankton migrate through and over the glacistrata in search of minerals they provide food for the grazers. The grazers in turn are food for the teeming populations of the moderate zones, which invade the tundras during the brief "summer" period. The circle is completed when the wastes and decaying bodies of the teratohippus, and of the hunters who die during summer forages, supply a continuous source of minerals for the mycoplankton. The teratohippus thus is only ope link in the vast food chain of IF the northern tundras which is so important in maintaining the seemingly overpopulated animal and plant existence of the Betulian equatorial regions. Or rather, a portion of a link -- expendable from a purely systems viewpoint. Xcan you hear me?" "Yes, Dr. Verd, Your transmission is coming in clearly. Where are you now?" "I'm in the cavity. It's extraordinarily large. Larger than any such we've seen before. Big enough to shelter all of us." she looked around. Her knuckles were slightly tender from hitting the impertinent Dr. Smirg. Maybe I shouldn't have, she thought, but he deserved it. The chamber was arched, about forty meters high in the center. It widened abruptly as one came in through the tiny aperture and extended about twelve or thirteen meters along the creature's dorsum until it narrowed again into a series of pulsating holds that she took to be air-intake pipes -- nostrils. The material of the walls and bottom seemed to be similar to the skeletal armor outside. It was hard and only porous enough for heat transfer. Where the sides sloped down and met the "floor" lay a strange phenomenon, something she had not seen in any other teraciae. The hard skeletal material gave way almost at the corner and became gray, fleshy. With her light she was able to make out several pools of liquid there. She decided not to explore further until she received assistance. The radio interrupted her observations. "Dr. Verd, would you give us an atmosphere reading, please?" "Certainly, I'm sorry." She plugged the small scanning device into her transmitter, pressed the switch. "I'm scanning now. What's the good word?" Dr. Haicint's voice came through the speaker: "Temperature reading -- eighteen degrees." She heard a voice in the background pipe in: "eighteen, that's almost room temperature -- " "Atmosphere, nontoxic," Dr. Hiacint continued. "Oxygen reading is too low to maintain life but high enough so our nasalators will be sufficient. Dr. Verd, you may disconnect your climatization unit but continue using oxygen until we get there' with a supply of nasalators." "Fine. Will we have enough oxygen supplies?" "At those levels we could last several months. Food could get to be a problem. We'll abandon the ship now and join you. We'll take along all the oxygen and food supplies we have. How difficult is entry?" "It's an easy slope, no worse than some of the hills out on the tundra. The creature is moving away from the ship, but very slowly." "Fine, we'll join you there shortly." F or just a moment she had the peculiar sensation that her young were inside her again, but the great squirming and moving around were missing and none of her milk had been touched. The single sensation was there, but it was not substantiated by other sensations, so it must have been in error. This was not a usual occurrence for a teratohippus, but her survival will was strong. She decided to move more rapidly. The strange sensation made her think of the young ones waiting for her back in the nest. They would need the milk she had been manufacturing throughout her circular eating journey. ' She must reach them before they came out. Or they would die. Her head turned a little more toward the nest and her motile muscles speeded up their cycle of contractions. She was going home. or heard the movement above. She flashed her light upon the forward wall (opposite the cavity entrance) and saw high above a row of throbbing tendons -- wirelike strands -- lying close to the wall and interwoven upon themselves. There were far too many to count. They stretched about two meters from a point ;at the highest peak of the ceiling to a long, narrow opening just above the creature's nostrils. The throbbing seemed to be irregularly paced. When her light flashed across the weird assembly of strands, those on the right side seemed to be throbbing wildly. She started to step closer to explore the phenomenon, then thought better of it. Perhaps she should wait until the Dr. Hiacint arrived. The function of the tendons made three mysteries about this beast. She had some ideas, but they seemed farfetched. Dr. Hiacint would corroborate her theories or clear up the uncertainties. She went through the problems again in her mind. Why was this chamber so much larger than other similar ones she knew of? IF What was the purpose of the pools of fluid on the edge of the chamber? And what were those piano wires against the anterior wall? She unstrapped the heating unit from her back, placed it on the floor and sat down upon it. She had a while to wait. Ill they were heavily loaded with equipment. They had enough oxygen for several months, thanks to the nasalators -- the type that strapped around the neck. The flattened tube that curved across the cheekbone and fed oxygen into the left nostril would be uncomfortable but necessary. Emergency rations they had for quite a few days, but the only communications equipment consisted of small transceivers in the EV suits, plus one small transmitter Stef Chambelan had salvaged from the ship. He hoped to make use of the unused power cells in the EV suits to get it operating at least on a line-of-sight basis. Dr. Hiacint had his Prolyzer, of course, and Dr. Dalmat had scrounged up every scanning device he could find and carry. Dalmat's concern was less for survival than for the gathering of knowledge. As a documentarian. he lived in a worldf-a. Immortality lay for him' #ifhin a vast and well-arranged array of facts that would be used and appreciated by' future scientists. Compared with that, what had mere life to offer? The archivalists were quite meek by now. The shock of approaching death had knocked all the pomposity out of them. Their work rewarded them well -- but only during their lifetimes. They were frightened and carried their share of supplies from the ship. They also carried an unbelievable number of legal documents related to Betul. If they had any real dedication it was to the furtherance of Earth's supremacy in interspace law -- documents were proof and proof was essential to law. Chambelan mounted a simple video-scanner on the surface armor of the teratohippus, then settled down to his transmitter. The three astrobiologists began a systematic exploration of their new home. W do you think of it?" they ate their first day's rations. It had been a hard day and much was still unanswered. While the biologists had been examining the cavity little had been spoken. Hiacint thought a moment before he answered. "I'm sure my conclusions will be the same as yours, Dr. Verd. I would say that the size of the cavity and the pools of fluid are related to each other. But the 'pihno wires' as you call them are another thing entirely. Don'i you agree?" think I know what the first two mean, but the third has me stumped." "All right, you tell me what the first two are and I'll tell you what the third is." "You know?" "I think I know. But first things first." her mind before she uttered them, then spoke carefully. "I'd say that the large size of the cavity means that it is used for some other purpose besides breathing -- though it certainly serves as a breathing chamber, too. The pools of fluid provide a clue to that purpose. They seem to me to have only one possible use -- to feed the young of the creature." Smirg cut in; "You mean that stuff is milk?" "Just as in terrestrial mammals, except there are no mammae. I would guess that the fluid is created and stored here during a feeding cycle and the young feed on it during a nursing cycle that comes next." "This place we're in is a kind of womb?" Smirg again. He was looking around in awe. "Yes, a womb or a nursing chamber. She probably carries the young here during the next cycle, as I said, while she feeds. That would explain the extraordinarily high temperature. This cavity would also serve as protection for the young -- both from predators and from the cold. They probably stay in here until they develop considerable size and are equipped with armor sufficient for life outside." Smirg was looking at the tiny aperture. "If they get very large how in the world to they get out through that opening?" Hiacint said, "There are two possible answers. First, the opening-just like the human vagina -- might expand enough to let the young escape. The second, and I think the more plausible, answer is that the opening doesn't expand, but that the parent teratohippus is gradually consumed in the process of nursing and the young merely break their way out of the parent's carcass when the process is completed. Wouldn't you agree. Dr. Verd?" , IF hadn't thought about it, but I believe you must be right. She probably is destroyed in the process of 'giving birth.'" Smirg looked a little upset at the thought. "But what about the male, does he krap on living while the female dies?" were smiling. "I don't think we'll find that there is a male," Hiacint said. "But you call this creature 'she.' " "Merely a euphemism, a term we've carried over from our terrestrial experience. I believe these creatures are asexual. The young are exact copies of the parents. But the functions we are describing here more closely resembles that of the Earth female than of the male, so I think we're justified in referring to the animal as a female." how many young do you estimate there are?" "Judging by the number of pools. I'd say no more than four. There could be only one, of course, but I doubt it. The species would not last long on a one-to-one natal basis with the parent dying at childbirth." "But what about the third phenomenon, the 'piano wires'? You said you had the solution to that." "I believe I do." Dr. Hiacint said. "This creatnriital. If it originally were a ture, as I think it was, it prpbab had an endoskeletal structure to begin with. I'm guessing that with the genetic change -- due not only to exigency but to massive gamma radiation from the dying star (this planet's sun) that caused the change in the planet -- the central motor elements of the creature were trapped in a middle position. Because they controlled movement they could not exist completely externally, but with the eons-long shift to an external skeleton they could not remain within the animal. I believe those wires up there are the mechanical motor control elements of teratohippus. They link' the brain with the muscular structure." "This means," Dalmat said, "that the teratohippus can be controlled by any person who could discover the meaning and function of each of those strands." "Like a puppet, you mean?" asked Smirg. "Not like a puppet -- but as animate beings are controlled -- " "That program you wel'e working on, Dalmat, did you complete it?" Hiacint and Dalmat had worked together for many years and they almost read each other's minds. "Yes. Using the information Dr. Vcrd gave us on the movement of the tendons when the teratohippus changed directions -- and feeding in all the available data on the anatomy of the animal -- I have been able to identify at least those strands that control direction. We should now be able to divert the animal from its present course and direct it toward the temperate zone." Silence fell -- the silence of immense relief -- as Dalmat continued: "From my calculations -- bas on Dr. Hiacint's data, of course -- I estimate it will take about two and a hlf Earth months to reach a sufficiently southern position for a Mayday message to get through to Betulbase with lineof-sight broadcast." Chambelan broke in. "But what about food? I don't think our present supply will last even with the strictest rationing." "We should be able to use the teratohippus not only for transportation but also for sustenance," Hiacint said. "We'll be able to supplement our present rations with the 'milk' of the creature. My tests show it to be nontoxic. It probably won't taste very good, but I think it will keep us alive." "But will the food be digestible? After all, we're dealing with an alien biological system." "True, the substance contains proteoids not normally used by humans, but Dr. Verd and I have had a great deal of experience with this type of thing. I think we should be able shortly to produce enough artificial enzymes to allow us all to get the food we need. Here again the taste of the enzymes may not be the best, but survival itselfis at stake." No one spoke for a while. The very concept was strange. To ride a living mountain to safety. To use the feeble strength of one human hand to turn and direct a creature as long as a football field. Finally Dalmat stood up. He took a sketch he had drawn and some wire and walked to the front of the creature. The others followed self-consciously, Hiacint holding a light for Dalmat. Using Chambelan's shoulders, Dalmat clambered to a point where he could reach the left side of the field of strands. "These motor control elements seem to be, reversed. The left group controls the right side of the animal and vice versa." He picked out a group of about ten or twelve and tied the wire around them. Drawing it tight, he threw the end to Hiacint, who anchored it firmly to the "floor" with a small spike. "This should make the animal bin a slow turn to the right, back toward the south. In a few days we'll alter the wire to straighten IF out her course. Then we'll be headed to safety. With our data plotter we'll be able to keep a running record of general position and make changes as they are needed." He brushed off his hands and looked at his work. "Not a bad job for a documentarian." S HE felt her muscles tense involuntarily and then she realized she was moving toward the right. This could not be. She was moving away from her young. She could not do that. She must turn back. She flexed her muscles as best as she could, but she continued to move to the right. Her young. What would happen to her young? But then the sensation that her young were already within her womb was stronger now. Could it be? But no -- she still should not be moving toward the right. She had turned right on her first two cycles, as was proper. For this and for the nursing cycles, she must move to the left. Something was wrong, but there was nothing she could do about it. She continued grazing -- as she must. She continued trying to turn to the left, as she must. She continued her steady pace, as she must. But the parental instinct cried within her with all the anguish of a species' need. humans sat in the middle of the chamber, weary and impatient. Chambelan was twisting the dials on his transmitter, making another futile effort to reach someone with a Mayday. Smirg poured a vial of black liquid over a bowl of grayish paste and ate it with a spoon. It was peculiarly sweet -- something, he thought, like a rotten mango. It was night and the creature -- as was its wont -- had stopped its feeding until daybreak. The temperature outside was infinitely colder than anything on Earth but the inside temperature had dropped imperceptibly. to the rest, looking at the gasping nostrils lit up by the shadowy light of the group's single functioning lattern. Finally she could stand it no more. "Don't you feel the weeping?" she asked. "Weeping?" It was Parapet. "What weeping?" "The subtle shudder that she makes these days, a shudder that wasn't there when we first found her. I think she's weeping for her children that will probably die." Parapet turned to Dr. Hiacint. "I think she's cracking under the strain. Don't you have any medicine to give her?" The professor's glance at Parapet showed pure contempt. "She's not cracking up. She's right, you know. My instruments show a definite change in the teratohippus. 'Weeping' may not be the right word, but it's pretty close. We have warped this creature's existence, slain her children and now, perhaps, we are leading her to a certain death." "But is it right. Professor?" for us to do this terrible thing? Wt are destroying not only a generation of these beings, we are leading this one -- the creature that has been our salvation -- into an environment that must kill her, to predators that will rip her to shreds, to a place where there will be no more food for her to eat. How can we justify our own existence with that crime over our heads?" "Survival." Parapet's face writhed with emotion. "Survival -- in this situation, we are the conquerors. For all time, on every planet and between planets, the conquerors -- the strongest, the most intelligent, the craftiest -- were the survivors and the weak paid with their own destruction. Whether it be tribe or species or man-to-man, it is right and just for the strong to destroy." "My God, man, your vicarious experience of interplanetary power has made you absolutely insane." The speaker was Smirg. His attack on a fellow archivalist brought astonishment to every face. "The strong have not always destroyed the weak -- not when strength was coupled with  intelligence, for strength can by augmented by the aid of the weak. The butchers of all time -- the Huns of our Earth and the Achobests of space, for example -- have conquered only to a point and then in turn been destroyed by the civilizations that utilized all elements, strong and weak, to form strength by unity. What Miss Verd is trying to ask is: is there another way? Can we save both ourselves and this creature?" sor. "Isn't there a way?" He shook his head. "Both Dalmat and I have tried to find a solution. We've worked out model after model. But every way we look at it, either we must die or the teratohippus and its brood must die. There is no way to save all." She turned her face again to the semidarkness. She spoke softly and as if by rote, as if she had rehearsed each word: "Then we must go on for another month, feeling the intense sorrow of a parent for its children? We must sit here and do nothing while this great creature slowly dies? We must try to wipe out from our minds and our conIF sciences the thought of the teratohippids out there somewhere dying?" "I guess we must." Smirg walked over and took her hand. She did not object. And the shuddering seemed to each of them to become more intense. reaches of the tundra, within a neat cavern dug into the side of a frozen rill, lay three neat round shells. Giant cocoon in which young life was stiring. The time had come. Genetics willed that they must come out, to creep into the warm womb of their parent. The shells shook with the struggle to escape. A crack in each in turn let in the frozen atmosphere and movement stopped. The mouth of the cavern, normally covered by thje warm body of the parent teratohippus was open to the chill world. There were no further struggles and no cries. The strong had won. The weak were dead. Somewhere far away a weeping mountain knew the time had come and passed. And continued its involuntary way toward the land where vespertosauri and sciuropteroids would soon feast on its remains. # COiy. At Sheraton Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Principal Speaker: John Brunner. For information: Sanford Meschkow, # Larchwood Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. bassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. Featured speakers: Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek; Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit #, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles; Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, The House That Dripped Blood; Kirk Alyn, the "Superman" of movie serials and Forrest J. Ackerman, editor Famous Monsters of Filmland. Highlights: screenings of film classics, exhibits, panels, banquet. For information: Fantasy Film Fans International, Box #, Los Angeles, California #. The alien gave him a game to play -- and one chance to win! T he Terrans have poker and horses and wheels. The Kalidar have shausta. That would be fine, except that on Kalidar home territory you only play shausta, period. Poker? With the Kalidar? You might as well spit on their flag. So there's half of the basics of interplanetary gambling. The other half comes later. Now, I take my living from Sanka Maru, a Japanese ship on the Kalidar run, but times have changed and a merchant doesn't sign on cutthroats any more. I'm a junior navigator and have been for five years. Promotion is slow on an Asian ship, especially for Caucasians. It's one of those things you learn to put up with and cheerfully, too, all things considered. The pay level's good -- I might get promoted -- and twice a year I see the Kalidar. Forget about shausta, and the Kals are great people to know. Their physical appearance helps, of course. Any one of them could visit Earth and pass himself off as a Terran if he really wished to. There are enough odd Terrans around to make almost any Kal look nearly normal. As a people they average a half-head shorter than the average human, have higher, flatter cheekbones and beakish noses. As I recall, there was some chortling about their low foreheads when pictures first reached our enlightened world, but something the pictures didn't show was how far back the Kalidar skull goes. I don't enjoy deflating egos, but their actual cranial cavity is somewhere around a quarter again larger than ours. That's something worth our thinking about. What really wins us to the Kals, though, is pity. Imagine how you would take to being packed into some glorified refrigerator on board an unproven settlement ship and having yourself fired at some obscure dot on the edge of the intergalactic abyss. Furthermore, picture yourself arriving at your new Eden after a hundred years or so, only to find it aswarm with ratty humanoids busy calling themselves the only intelligent race in the universe. Yes, pity. The Kalidar situation is pathetic, and humanity goes wild over things like that. That's why we're so wonderful and that's why we let them have Mars. So there are two big pluses for the Kalidar -- they look like us and are pitiful. Other than that, one can put away a sizable fortune selling Kalidar merchandise back home, which helps us like each other economywise, too. That leaves only one more good reason for interracial amity between us and the Kals -- or it seems good to me. The Kalidar aren't perfect. I know that doesn't sound like much, but after years of comicbook indoctrination, humanity had been expecting First contact with some wildly Superior beings who would make us feel that the plug had been pulled on our lappy little world. It didn't work oit that way. T here are enough things morally, socially and technologically wrong with the Kalidar to leave us feeling smugly superior as long as we ignore things morally, socially and technologically wrong with humanity. For instance, the Kals have narcotics, violence and thieves. Beyond that, they have been known to cheat in business deals and, most importantly for me, they have a penchant for games of chance. Now what could be much more human than that? So you see. I'm back to shausta already. Shausta is the Kalidar game of chance. It is largely mathematical. It is easy to learn, harder to play, easiest to lose at. It is also well worth one's trying and it deserves some explanation, seeing that I'm writing about it. For the best that I can offer we have to go back some five years. That was when I was on my first run, had laid foot on Martian soil for the first time ever and was as green a novice as Sanka Maru had ever seen. I was also as green a novice as Nathaniel Sanderson, Caucasian and mere cargo lugger for fifteen years, had ever seen or wished to. Sanderson was a veteran of the Kalidar run. He had signed on the first ship out and as a result of his lengthy experience he knew as much about the Kalidar as any man alive when he retired. And before that golden day arrived he passed on to me much of what he had learned. He started the night we grounded -- with shausta. "You might as well start learning the ropes now," he said. "It'll take a long time." "Sure," I answered. "Whatever you say." We had become friends on the journey out on a basis of one-sided respect. "We'll start with shausta," he said. "It'll do you the most good in the least time and it isn't hard. If you're the average crewman and want some port life once you've grounded you play shausta until you've made some friends among the Kals. Furthermore, if youHe an offworlder and want to make some friends shausta's the only way to fly. Got that?" "Yes," I said, wondering what this thing was. "Shausta is Kalidar poker," IF continued Sanderson, answering my question by chance. "It's different, of course,-but it's a game of chance -- like rolling dice. "The only thing is that shausta's mathematical. Here's the setup. "To start with you've got the First Caller. When a round opens this character spouts a number -- let's say ten. Then his assistant, the Action Determiner, pulls an action card from a pile on the floor in front of him. In shausta you sit on the floor, see? Now, the action card has a mathematical process on it -- addition, subtraction, etcetera, on up to cubing. And here's the gamble part of it. You, the player, don't get to see the action card. That's a privilege reserved for the Determiner. "Okay. Once you've got your first number and a card has been pulled, the Second Caller gives you another number. It can be anything as long as it's rational. The First Caller can give you an irrational if he feels like it. You following me?" "Good. Now here's the game. You make a stab at what action was pulled for you and work it out in your head. The First Caller gave you ten. The Second Caller gives you thirteen. What do you say?" I thought for a moment. "Twenty-three," I said. "You lose." Sanderson grinned. "Your action card was multiplication. What's more, cvcaif you get the right action but don't come up with the exact answer of, say, the square root of thirteen divided by nine-eighteenths, you lose. That means your figuring had better be on the beam -- you've only got two minutes. Overstep the time limit and you lose. In the beginning the numbers are simple -- you don't hit irrationals and stuff until the stakes start getting high. Stakes always start ojut low and it's in incredibly bad taste to wager more than a hundred. If by some chance your action card is squaring or cubing the Action Determiner holds up a clenched fist. That's to tell the Second Caller not to give you another number and you square or cube the one you already have. That's the game -- except for one more official, usually a computer that works out the problem you've been given. His -- its -- word is law. If your answers don't match you lose. Simple as that. All you need to do is keep your head and think clearly. It's errors in figuring that usually show who comes out on top. The drawing business is all chance and players average about the same number of right or wrong guesses, usually wrong. "You ready to play?" "No," I said, too quickly. "Didn't think so," he agreed. "But come along and watch. Maybe you'll think differently by the time we leave." "Maybe," I echoed. So we went. things about shausta and the Kalidar that Sanderson had neglected to tell me. For one, shausta could not have been a worse game for the Kalidar to play. Can you imagine any Earthside gambler with enough faith in his own intelligence to add figuring out equations in two minutes flat to the already risky element of chance in a game? I can't -- and that's why I was worried about shausta. I felt that any race crazy enough to invent such a gamble must be a race of mathematical wizards. And I couldn't have been more wrong. The Kalidar I met that night were more like mathematical slugs, so much so that by the time we left I was sure an unhampered Terran could run rings around most any one of them. But I suppose you caught that modifier -- "unhampered." The Kalidar played dirty. The Kalidar played background music. Such background music you have never heard. Maybe you think that some oriental tunes sound alien to the Caucasian ear and vice versa. I do and I have evidence from the other side. It's taken me five years to get used to what Sanka Manias captain pipes over the intercoms at night -- for me it's one of those things that you learn to live with, like slow promotions. But the stuff that the Kalidar play is alien to where you can feel it like a brick. Considering the importance of the tachika style to interplanetary gambling. I'll go into some detail. First of all, the music is always played in shausta houses nd it's always played live by a husband-andwife team. These two characters are extraordinary in themselves, fanatically devoted to their .music and generally semistarved. They double on the instruments -- two large recorders, one small one and a snaredrum-proportioned percussion piece -- but at least one of the the big recorders is always in use, giving what is best described as the melody line. The music starts. Every piece opens the same way, with the man taking a shuddering breath and blowing the lowest possible note for the longest possible time. Then, eyes bulging, he nips a quick breath and shoots chromatically up and down his range in maybe ten seconds, which isn't to say that his range is short but that he's playing somewhat faster than sixty-fourth notes. Then you know the concert has begun. The man gives another no IF long low note, this one accompanied by wife on percussion -- and next the world between your ears erupts in a burst of what I understand is sheer improvisation along standard themes that will last anywhere from a quarter to a halfhour, whereupon both musicians collapse, clawing for air and water, only to start up again immediately after. If you were a lover of music I suppose you could learn to love this. I don't mind it myself as long as I'm not doing anything, since strange as it seems, tachika is a superb tranquilizer. The only problem is, they always play it during rounds of shausta and if you're doing the gaming youll soon find that you can't think clearly, that numbers get lost somewhere below your cranium and over your eyes and that you lose whatever bet you made. That's what I mean by the Kalidar's playing dirty. Tachika brings you down to the same mathematical plane they inhabit and maybe below it. When Sanderson and I left the action that night I was positive I could play the game, but I was equally sure that tachika would give me hell when I tried. Of course, there's more to this tachika than I've mentioned -- one more important thing must be covered. Kalidar music is partly built around silence. For a climax they don't always use a crescendo -- sometimes they use nothing, There you are, listening, as the scales wail up and sob down and suddenly -- nothing. Dead silence. Except that if the prelude has been handled well your mind is still hearing the rhythm and abandons everything. It closes in on that mental pounding, since you are in a shocking pool of silence and there's nothing else to grab hold of. The pounding in your head gets louder and louder until it threatens to split your skull like an overblown balloon. You feel the tension straining every bone and muscle and when the recorders suddenly howl out again in the middle of a phrase at ten times the volume they started out with you don't even notice thent -- they are quieter than what your mind has been giving you and you know the climax came in that silence you could taste like a scum in your mouth. A tachika piece usually onds pretty quickly after that bubble breaks. Like I said, it's alien. B ut as I was also saying, I was  worried about how tachika would effect my playing and I was doubly worried since I had just seen it affect Sanderson's. I knew that a genius he was not, but I also knew that he should have done better than he did and I couldn't understand why he hadn't asked for silence while he played, so I asked him. "Grissom," he said heavily, "there's something you had better learn and quickly. It's a sort of Golden Rule and I hoped you'd learn it while serving on a Japanese ship. But I guess hot. So here it is. Don't question an alien custom. Tolerate it. You don't need to like it, but you have no business attacking it. You had just better learn to live with it. You understand that?" "Yes," I said stubbornly. "But suppose it's not a custom. What if the Kals mixed tachika and shausta after they found tachika puts us into a coma? They must know it does that." Sanderson nodded. "Maybe, but ours not to question why -- ours but to do or die. They say it's custom so we take their word forjt. Period." And that was that. We didn't talk anymore that night since custom had skinned one Nathaniel Sanderson and had really skinned him bad. And so here I am, five years later and getting pretty good at shausta myself and with a bit of evidence to back up my old friend's beliefs. That bit of evidence constitutes the second half of necessary interplanetary gambling knowledge. I learned it the hard way, but I think I'll spare you the pains. This is what happened three years ago on Sanderson's last run and my fourth. Sanderson knew it was his last run and had decided to spend his last evening before we spaced with old friends. This left me on my own. So I went to a shausta house and put myself into the running. "Greetings," welcomed Tarran, the proprietor. "It is good to see Grissom. Sanka Maru spaces tomorrow and we will not see Grissom for many months. Enjoy this evening for us." "I'Jl do my best," I answered as I paid the entrance fee. "Pm sorry I haven't been in more often." "This way, Grissom," he said without other comment -- pleasantries had been dispensed with at the door. "Will please you to follow?" In a shausta house the proprietor is god. I followed. He led me to the gaming room and held open heavy, cast doors. He followed me in and the tongue of light our entrance had made disappeared. My sight went black and I struggled to adjust. I had no trouble picking out the red smudge pots hanging over every gaming post, but the fades below them remained tinted smears in the dark. Only the tachika players could be seen clearly, the twin white candles they IF played by providing the needed light. "There is one here who would play you, Grissom," whispered Tarran. "Have you objections?" "No," I whispered back, still trying to pick out details. It couldn't hurt. I knew no one here and if someone knew me, fine. Besides, Kalidar custom says that you accept a seating request. With a surety that my own confounded eyes found amazing, Tarran picked his way through the floor-seated throng and brought me to one of the red smudge pots. Only one shadowed figure sat at this one, not counting the gaming officials, but there was an unoccupied cushioi. I sat down. "Welcome, Grissom," whispered my opposite. "I am happy to see you tfore you space." T hat voice was the first really pleasant surprise of the whole three-month run. It belonged to the one Kalidar on Mars I could almost consider a friend. He had a small mine in the outback and since I hadn't met him portside I had assumed he was out working it. It seemed that I was wrong. "Lyrr," I said, too loudly for the heavy atmosphere. "This is a good meeting! When did you get in?" A toothy grin flashed in the dark. "Today, Grissom. I hear the Maru has grounded and hurry -- but the desert is wide and my crawler breaks down. I have to walk!" I returned the grin. Pleasant surprise number two: he had come all the way in from his claim to see me. Sanderson's circle of acquaintances had stirred my envy, but maybe, if my luck held, I might have one of my own. I started to speak, but as fate or whatever would have it, I didn't finish. A rich bass wail cut i. through the murk and a tachika piece began. "Players," hissed the First Caller. "The placing of bets. You will decide who begins." I looked at Lyrr. I could make out his face after a fashion, but his eyes still hid in pockets of shadow. I motioned for him to take the first round. He nodded and pulled out his credit sack. I matched him with my wallet. "Three darro, Grissom?" he whispered. Three darro. About a dollar. I nodded. He smiled. "The first number?" he asked and, as if in answer, the tachika recorder scuttled over its full range and the piece began in earnest. Tension made its first appearance. "Four," said the First Caller. The Action Determiner pulled a card. "Six," said the Second Caller. Lyrr thought for a moment, then grinned at me. "Twenty-four," he said. The computer, accepting card and punched-in numbers, clicked once. The screen went green and formed a ten. Lyrr gave me three darro credits and it was my turn. When the computer dispensed its answer I returned the notes. That set the pace for the evening. One tachika piece ended; another began. The second ran down and a third filled the void. The bets became higher, the problems harder. I made my first calculating mistake, Lyrr his second. At no point did we stay more than ten darro richer or poorer than when we began. The tachika made me stumble on simple irrationals and before I knew it the irrationals were complex, with bets pushing two hundred and forty, two hundr and fifty, two hundred and sixty darro. I began to sweat. I began to sweat badly. Heck, I began to drip! "The quantity three times the square root of one hundred and seventy-one over twenty-three," said the First Caller and I got out a twohundred seventy note. "The square root of eighteen over the square root of twenty-three," said the First Caller and I got it back.  had been playing some two and a half hours. If I could get the next one right I would be up some ninety dollars. If I lost -- well, Lyrr would be happy. With a shock I remembered that I had never pushed over eighty before. "The quantity five times the square root of twenty-seven over the quantity the square root of three," proposed the First Caller. "Thirteen," said the second. I breathed in. It didn't sound too hard, not hard at all provided I guessed the right action. I breathed oiit. It was multiplication. Believe me, I knew! I started figuring. The square root of twenty-seven breaks down into three times the square root of threcr -- three times five is fifteen -- clear the bottom root by squaring and multiply the numerator by the square root of three. Fifteen times three over three -- forty-five over three -- fifteen! I had it! I was invincible! And then, suddenly, the tachika music stopped. But it was really only the sound that had stopped. It was a silent crescendo -- one of the silent crescendos. I thought I hadn't been listening closely enough -- I had willed myself not to -- but it was a vain hope. The tachika rhythm began sounding in my head, and with infuriating speed my mind closed in on it. Up and down, over and around, up and IF thirteen times fifteen is up and down and the first beat of silence washed into me, turning my spine into ice and the up and down and beat number two sent my skeleton freezing clear out to the nerves and the down and around and the third squashed my mind into jelly and so help me God, I couldn't think! Forty seconds left and I couldn't think! The fourth beat crested, worse than before. I felt myself explode. "Stop that damned music," I shouted. It stopped. Dead. I hdd just about twenty seconds to spare. Forty-five plus one hundred and fifty, I figured. "One-hundred and ninety-five," I said, and the computer confirmed it. Lyrr passed me two-hundred and seventy darro credits. I smiled., I was alone in that. The First Caller watched from behind his red-mask face. He motioned toward the tachika players. "No," I said and their instruments stopped halfway. , "Grissom," whispered Lyrr. "No," I repeated. "No music." I was ninety dollars in the black. I was going to stay there. To youknow-where with Sanderson's rule. No Kal connivers were, going to skin me that night. Even  Lyrr, friendly, grinning, deceitful Lyrr, finally had turned against me. Ever hear of gold fever? T HE First Caller regarded me solemnly. He rose and spoke to the players. The hiss of the Kalidar tongue drifted back across the room. The two gaunt musicians laid their recorders aside. Thty extinguished their candles and came to stand in the darkness around us. I became aware of a shifting center of attention. Our gaming post was collecting an audience. Fine, I thought. They deserve to watch. "Two hundred and eighty-five dapro, Lyrr?" I suggested...he mask of his face let no emotion slip. "Yes," he whispered. "Two hundred and eighty-five" The tension began to build. Ninety-five dollars. Couldn't get much higher. "Seventy-three and fifty-six hundredths," said the First Caller. The Action Determiner pulled his card. He raised a clenched fist and Lyrr had his first power probleni. My mind raced, no longer restrained by tachika. Lyrr was good, but he wasn't a genius. He would probably square his number and hope. That was what I would have done. I don't know if the Kalidar pray. "Three hundred and ninety-eight thousand thirty-ight and five hundred seventy-four thousand I gaped. I was only part way through figuring it out for myself, but I could already see he had cubed it. My jaw swayed a little farther then. Only twenty seconds had flown. The computer agreed with him -- #. I paid up uneasily. It was graphically clear that Lyrr was a genius with squares and cubes. This was his first such problem for the evening and now I was five in the red. In the next round I would probably slap myself further. "Grissom," whispered Lyrr. "Two hundred and eighty-five darro?" He wasn't increasing the bet. That suited me fine and I nodded. "Negative sixty-three and seventy-two hundredths," said the First Caller. I went a hundred in the red. But averages cut both ways. Lyrr would pull me out. I raised the bet by three darro and he agreed reluctantly. He had no choice. When the shock waves died down I owed him one hundred and ninetysix dollars. I had to write an I.O.U. "Two hundred and eighty-eight darro?" he suggested slowly. I think he would have reduced it if custom hadn't stood in the way. I accepted. Then divine providence stepped in. I got out the right answer with seconds to spare. The debt became smaller and. the averages were overwhelmingly bad for Lyrr. "Three hundred darro," I hissed and we hit the highest ceiling. There was no grin from the other side. "Ninety-two and twenty-nine thousandths," whispered the First Caller. "Twenty-seven and one hundred and three thousandths," breathed the Second. A general inhalation rose from the shadows around us. The whole house was watching. Lyrr sat in silence, his eyes still hidden in black pockets, but the red mask was creased and damp. My foot was falling asleep with nettle-like tingles. "Two thousand four hundred and ninety-four and two hundred sixtyone thousand nine hundred and not looking up. The computer verified his figure -- # -- and the game ended in bedlam.  I.O.U. and made my way out of Somehow I remembered how the low-pressure air-lock worked and remembered to turn on my respirator before breathing the nearIF vacuum outside. Then I was walking away from the shausta house, moving numbly toward the port, where floodlights lent a carnival air to the loading of Sanka Afaru. "Grissom," said a voice. Lyrr, of course. I stumbled on without looking up. I could barely hear his feet hitting the sand beside me. "Grissom." He sighed, accepting a bad loser. "I wish to return your money." "No," I growled. "Yes," he said. "Money gained by cheating is not worth one's keeping. I return it." The bills pressed into my fist. ! took them automatically. "Grissom," continued Lyrr, "is not surprising you think we are cheaters. Tachika dulls you and because you see us figure badly you think we are trying to gain an advantage. But you are wrong. Tachika came to the shausta house long before the Kalidar came to Mars. It is only to make things fair." I was listening uncomfortably. "Sanderson, he got angry one time, too. I was not there, but the story stays. He stopped the tachika and was beaten as you were. Then we Kalidar thought it fun, but we have since learned differently. It is cheating to use something another has not, even if you are born with it. "Grissom, we Kalidar are good with numbers, as you can see, but there is something more. Among ourselves we are also telepaths. We can try to shut out errant thoughts, but even so, when the Action Determiner looks at a card, in my head I know what action he sees. That is why we have tachika. It dulfs you, but it dulls us even more and it screens out telepathy to make shausta a game instead of an exercise. It is not to dull humans, but to dull the Kalidar." I stopped and looked at him. "You know, Lyrr?" I said. "I've been a fool. What Sanderson said wasn't drivel." He couldn't understand me, but he grinned regardless. I could see his eyes now in the glare from the port and they certainly weren't grim. "Grissom," he said, "when does Sanka Afaru space? Early or late in the morning?" "Neither," I told him. "Middle of the afternoon." "Then come," he said abruptly. "Rest at my home this evening. There is time in the morning for you to get back and there is much I need to know of Earth -- what customs not to break in chanceplaying!" So I went home with him and taught him poker.  I "Earn your daily bonus and commission or etee." Fisk Centers rolled over groggily. "Else what?"  "This." An avalanche of icy foam descended on his head. He struggled up, gasping for breath, suddenly wide awake. "What was that for?" "Well, I did warn you," she said contritely. "You look like a walrus surfacing." "Nonsense. I don't have tusks." "A toothless walrus, then. Fat, wet, stupid -- " "You're about to look like a spanked brat." "No time," she said. "Bolt your food, Fisky. Today you go to work for your living." "What makes you so sure I'll have any better luck today than I've had all week?" "Because you handled the week. I set up today. While you snored." "I should have stayed single," Fisk muttered as he stumbled to the suiter and let it dry and dress him. "Or at least gotten married. The last thing any sane man would do is become an adoptive father to a pre-teen hellion." "Right," she agreed. "Especially when he has to live off her money." "That's my money! Twenty per cent Coitmrlision just for -- " the Uack mar-" "S#it up." He stepped out of the suiter, resplendent in blue jeans, checkered shirt and goggles. "What did you do to the setting?" he roared. "You look just right for your job," she said. "Hurry up." He tore off the goggles. "My job-oihg what?" "Selling cars, of course." "Cars? I'm no mechanic -- " "That's all you know. Dad. Salesmen don't have to know anything about the workings. Just believe in your product and sell, sell, seU!" Fisk punched a soy omelet. "Believe in my product? I haven't even driven a car for five years." He took a bite, but paused before masticating it. "What car am I supposed to sell?" "Fusion. They've got a real nice commission deal -- " The mouthful of omelet sprayed over the table. "The atomic racer? The radioactive juggernaut that makes the obituary headlines every other week? The -- " "The same. They're making a play for the middle-class market and they need middle-class salesmen. Hot chance for you." "Hot? Listen, Yola -- do you realize that my annuities don't IF mature for another twenty-five years and are voided in the event of deliberate suicide? If I die tomorrow in a Fusion you inherit nothing." "Term life insurance," she answered. "That's their bonus. Life and commissions. You live off the commissions, of course. But if you die -- " "Enough, child. The longer I listen to you the worse I feel. I'm not going near any -- " "Suit yourself," she said. "We'll run out of money tomorrow." "Tomorrow? There's enough for at least another week." "You forget you have a family to support. Two don't live as cheaply as one, you know." She paused, serious and for the moment rather pretty in her brown-faced way. "Fisk, it's a good chance for you. I thought you'd really go for a decent income -- " Fisk sighed. "I'll talk to the man. But it had better be strictly salesroom. If I hhve to go near a living Fusion I'll resign on the spot." "Sure," she said. "Come on -- you're due to report in twenty minutes." the executive at Fusion Motors said briskly as Fisk introduced himself. "Your daughter here set it up. Glad to have a man of your experience with us." "Experience? I haven't -- " Yola tromped his toe and Fisk realized that she had invented suitable qualifications for him. Time to set that straight right now...He took a breath. "You're in the weekly Hurdle, starting at ten today," the man said. Fisk's breath wooshed out. "I beg your -- " The man guided him out through a service eit, led him into a massive garage filled with menacing machinery. "Bill, he's here." Fisk tried again. "Look, I don't know what she told you, but I'm not -- " "Here's your co-pilot. Bill. Bill, this is Fisk. Used to be with Ferrari before the antipolluters closed down their commercial branch. Drove in the antarctic crosscountry a couple times, maybe twenty years ago. Going to sell for us. I want him to get a real feel for the Fusion, but you'll have to carry the burden this time." "Great," Bill said, shaking Fisk's hand with a grip of steel and rubber. "Come on, Fisk. We've got just thirty-five minutes to blastoff and you'll need briefing." "But I -- " "Don't get me wrong," Bill said, hustling him along while Yola trotted excitedly behind. "I'm not putting down your experience. But there's been a lot of development in the past two decades and most of it has been led by Fusion. And the Hurdle is a real workout. If anything happens to me you'll have to take over -- because the finish line's the only safe exifc Ever drive over five hundred before?" "Well, I -- " Then it occurred to Fisk that BiU wasn't talking about distance and certainly not about regular highway travel. Stunned, he fumbled for a suitable way to set things straightjmmediately. Yola caught up. She smiled sweetly at Bill. "Can I come, too? I love racing -- " Bill looked at her with leathery compassion. "Sorry, kid No juniors allowed. This is a rough course and it changes every week. You'll have to watch it on the customer screen. Mine's the purple Eight." "Oh." She looked dangerously sullen, but fell back. "Bill, there's been a misunderstanding," Fisk said, already out of breath because of the pace Bill was setting through the monstrous garage. "I can't -- I never -- " "Here she is," Bill said proudly, puUing up at a tremendous sculptured vehicle with eight massive wheels. "Hop in. We'll get strapped while the tug takes her there. I'll brief you while we're-moving." He gave Fisk h powerful boost into the open cockpit. The moment the twp men landed in the firm molded seats, the tug started hauling the car out of its niche and down a ramp. Bill saw to Fisk's complex protective harness before attending to his own. "But I'm only supposed to be a salesman," Fisk protested. "I can't get involved in a race. I have absolutely no -- " "No problem. Boss always breaks in the new men like this. Idea is you don't need to know every detail about the car -- jfou just have to believe in it absolutely, and the details will take care of themselves. So we don't load you down with statistics and all that junk -- we just show you. Once you've raced the Fusion Special you're a believer." "But I'm trying to tell you that I don't know the first thing about -- " "Sure. The boss explained. You've never touched the Fusion before. And twenty years is a long, long time in racing. We'd have let you sit it out this week, but my regular co-pilot isn't out of the hospital yet. But I know you've got the stuff. I used to watch that antarctic cross-country when I was a kid. Those glaciers, those ice crevasses -- " He shook his head. "Hell, the hurdle isn't rougher than IF that. But it is different -- and you've got to ride it several times before you get the feel. So I'll drive and you just handle the map -- okay? Nobody tackles a new race in a new car cold." XXnod. At this point it almost seemed better to take the horrible ride and keep his mouth shut. At least the driver was competent and it would be a one-time experience. "Actually, that map is important," Bill said consolingly. "I can't take my eyes off the track when I'm at speed. They do it that way to make sure the race stays fair. New track for each run -- nobody knows the specific layout until the race starts and then he has to figure his strategy from the map. Yours is a necessary job and don't you doubt it for a moment. One misreading and we're dead." Fisk came to an abrupt decision -- he would blurt out the truth and get released from this race right now. "Bill, I -- " "I wouldn't drive without a mapman. My co-pilot tried that a couple weeks ago, when I was out at the last minute with intestinal grippe. You know -- bathroom every ten minutes, ready or not. Didn't dare drive. So he took it alone, because you can't get a replacement at the last moment and we didn't want our entry scratched. That' why he cradled up -- trying to read the map before he got of the tunnel -- " Bill shook his head. "Fifteen hours in surgery and he'll have to drive next time with a prosthetic hand and a plate ii) his skull. Ran over his insurance and he's got a family to support. That's why I have to rim a good race this time. Got to help him out." Fisk realized that if he spoke out now Bill would have no co-pilot. Then he would have either to take it alone, risking the same fate that had wiped out his partner, or drop out of the race entirely. Then his friend's medical bills would ruin his family. Fisk well understood the problems of financial ruin. He had been a moderately wealthy man not so long ago. Being broke was not a fate he would wish on anyone. "... true dual-purpose car,"'Bill was saying. He evidently liked to talk. "Motor's always at full power, of course, so the clutch guides it. Not the kind of clutch you knew, eh? No gearing. Just engage for the percentage of power you want. Depress gently and you've got a gentle touring car. Goose it and you've got a real racer. I use a model just like this for city traffic -- " What could Fisk do but stick with it? Racing terrified him and not just because of his health -- but more was riding on this race than his preferences... duplicate controls, but yours will be inactive. Except for the indicators -- you need to watch them in case of emergency. Regular steering wheel, you see; nothing complicated. Fusion's designed for the simple-minded -- that's why I like it. And over here -- " The tug was maneuvering the car into the starting stall. A giant chronometer above was ticking off the last seconds before the start. Fisk squitmed in his harness, feeling cold sweat on his palms, face and underarms. He hoped that the term insurance was for a large amount. "The map will fall into the fax hopper there as the gun goes off," Bill said. "Grab it and -- " . armored hull. Paper dropped. And the car ground forward with such authority that it was all Fisk could do to breathe. There was very little noise. Pollution-control had realty clamped down on loud sports jobs; both the hydrogenhelium fusion engine and the mercury vapor working fluid were almost silenu Also, it seemed, the cockpit was soundproof. Fisk had to admit it -- this was a nice piece of machinery. Competing cars shot out of their stalls. Blue, white, green, red yellow -- internal combustion, steam, electric, jet, atomic and assorted hybrids. The car industry had claimed that stifl antipollution standards would ruin it, but in fact they had led to a marvelous flbwering of superior new types. The money that had once been wasted on planned, obsolescence of style now went into improvement of mechanics. Drivers still had to buy a new car every three years, but now they obtained a superior product in each new model. And this was where that superiority was demonstrated -- in professional competition, using the cars sold in the showrooms. It was a drag race start: thirty bright vehicles straining forward on a ten-mile straightaway. No noise or fumes. Fisk sneaked a look at the speedometer. His duplicate was functioning, but it took him a moment to find the mph scale among the massed dials and digits. The main readings were feet per second and kilometers per hour, but he was pedestrian enough to orient on old-fashioned miles per hour. accelerating rapidly. And the other cars were keeping pace or pulling ahead, so that the group velocity was deceptive. "Look at the map," Bill shouted. "What's the first hurdle?" IF Fisk opened the map hastily and scanned it. He had been daydreaming while his very life was at stake in an obstacle race at Hundreds of miles per hour. "The Narrows," he said. "The Narrows? That's a stiff location, but good for us. Hang on -- we'll have to push it." And, astonishingly, the acceleration increased. The Fusion began gaining on other cars. "I thought you were all-out before," Fisk gasped. "Hardly. This is the finest car ever made, overall. The Fusion's got more actual muscle than any car on the market -- and unlimited range. It has a little piece of the sun inside, you know -- that's the heat of the conversion, four hydrogen atoms transforming into one helium atom in controlled fusion. Fuel's no problem -- it's loaded when we make it and it runs on just a little bit of hydrogen until the car is junked. We have no top speed, really -- car would shake apart before we ever reached maximum. Only limiting factor -- oh, don't worry, we won't shake apart -- in a race like this is the frictive surface: the tires. That's why we've got eight -- and they're broad ones, too. But too much acceleration makes them skid a bit and that's bad for control and worse for wear. Got to save the rubber or we'll have trouble finishing, even though the tires are solid. Guess you were still on pneumatics in the antarctic, huh?" "I guess." Fisk realized that he had just received lesson one in Fusion salesmanship. The car was so powerful that even solid composition tires could wear out of round in the course of an hour. And Bill was taking that risk now. The Fusion was overhauling car after car. The speedometer read -- Fisk looked again, astonished -- # mph... #... # and still rising. Air whistled past the little winglike vanes on the sides that were necessary for control at such velocity -- even the soundprooftng could not eliminate every vestige of that hurricane keening. # mph... Bill was right. Telling a prospective salesman about the Fusion could not have been nearly as efficient as showing him, regardless of his presunied experience. When he got into the showroom and a customer asked him about power and speed Fisk would not need any artifice to describe the car. He had seen it in action, seen the other racers falling behind at #... II  OU' haven't raced before," X Bill observed mildly. And it was out at lasttoo late. "I tried to tell you, but -- " Bill smiled. "But you're a sucker for a sob story." "Oh-oh. You mean to say your co-pilot didn't -- " "No, he did, all right. I do need this money for him. But nine men out of ten would not risk their own necks in a grind like this to help out someone they'd never seen. You're too soft-hearted. I'll bet you've been stepped on more than once or you wouldn't be looking for a job at your age." "Close enough." "Don't worry about it, Fisk. Lots of people sneer because they haven't got the guts to be decent when the heat is on. I knew you weren't a racer the moment I saw you. You don't have racer's ways. But I wasn't going to embarrass the boss right before a race -- and I did need a mapman." "And you're a bit soft yourself," Fisk said. "Helping your friend, sparing your boss, giving me a chance at a JobL-" Bill laughed easily. "Takes one to know one, doesn't it? Little girl set it up, right? Wanted her daddy to be a big man? Well, you are one -- and not because of any fancy race. Gpt a child like that myself -- wouldn't trade her. No, I'll cover for you, Fisk. They can't hear us here. Only contact is the radio and that's one-way -- in. On the public band. So no driver can sneak in tactical info during the race. You're an honest man and I like that, so I stopped you from making an ass of yourself, or seeming to. Man quits a race at the start, the word spreads that he's chicken, no matter what the facts. After this you'll be a racer officially -- and nobody has to know the difference." Fisk was beginning to find the man's solicitude a bit confining. "But it isn't honest to -- " "It isn't right to make a scene right before a race, embarrassing the company and hurting the little girl's feelings. Got to choose your course in a hurry -- even when the best one is ragged. That's racing. Ifigured more people would be better oft this way, so this is how I played it. Okay?" What was there to say? "Okay," Fisk agreed reluctantly. Then he saw the end of the track: slanting walls of concrete foam narrowed the thirty-car highway into twenty, ten, five lanes. Bill maneuvered the vehicle around the few remaining leaders with minute but expert turns of his steering wheel that nevertheless brought anguished squeals from the massive tires. At # mph he passed his last competitor and slammed into the Narrows. "New leader and winner of the IF first heat. Fusion!" a voice announced. Fisk jumped, then realized that it was the car radio. The race was being broadcast to the sports fans of the world. "Sales: Fusion twenty-four, Steamco nineteen, Dupeijet seventeen -- " "Hear that?" Bill cried happily. "The sales foUow the performance, roughly. Usually the winner of a Hurdle is good for a hundred and fifty contracts or more right during the race. Much more if something spectacular happens. We're ahead where it counts." Fisk was amazed. "You mean people are buying cars while they watch?" "They sure are. When a car makes a good move, the saleslines light up. Impulse buyers. Want to own a car with class. We're selling Fusions fight now, Fisk -- one per cent commission on the gross goes to the driver. Five hundred dollars per unit, if they take the Special -- less for the tamer models, though no Fusion is really tame. If I run well this time and sell a hundred cars -- that's twenty-five grand. Pretty good for a week's pay. Of course I don't always finish -- then I get nothing. And most races I make less than ten grand when I do place. And I'd have to finish at least second or third just to cover my friend's medical expenses if I wanted to do it in one race. But it's a living. I figure to retire after I X the concept and by the rapidly closing walls of the Narrows. Five hundred miles per hour was an outrageous speed for a car and now that there was something to measure it against outside... "Oh, sorry -- I didn't mean to rub it in, pal. You aren't a regular driver, so that commission doesn't apply to you. But I'll tell them you helped a lot and if we do well the company'll give you a 'nice starting bonus. Your commissions will come niostly from your showroom sales." Fisk's concern had been about the danger, not the money, but he didn't push the matter. Bill braked, using small parachutes that blossomed anddragged behind the car. They provided a steady reduction of speed without sluing. Fisk was glad they did. The Narrows, according to the map, was a one-lane chute with thick twelve-foot-high barricades on either side. No vehicle could pass another here and some of the curves could be disastrous at peak velocity. Studying the map at this point was foolish -- Fisk raised his eyes to his surroundings. The crisscrossed timbers were invisible at this range, merely a graying of the view, but he knew they were timbers of steel. Speed here was less essential than control. Any accident would block the Najrows. Bill had ensured his own passage and placement by entering first. A faint rattle sounded in the car. Bill cocked an ear alertly. "'Check your gauges, he snapped to Fisk. "Probably that was an irregularity in the track -- felt like it. But just in case -- '" Fisk scanned the dials and lights. "AU green and in normal range." "Right. Some of these buggies are more maneuvable at speed," Bill explained as he sweated the Fusion down and through. "They could leave us behind on a track like this -- if they could pass us. We're heavy and prone to chassis stresses. Not the fault of the car -- it's inherent in the mass and much of that mass is shielding that we simply have to have. If any of those other cars carried our weight penalty they wouldn't have a chance in this race. But here in the Narrows we lose no ground. If anything's wrong we can slow down and check it out. Next straightaway we'll show 'em dust! What's next on the map?" "Hairpin." "Say, we're really in luck! That's our worst time loser and now we've got first crack at it. The big ugly god of Hurdle racers must be smiling on us. We might even win this one, baby!" Bill continued to slow, but even at tilted on the gentle curves, alarming Fisk. They shot out of the Narrows and into Hairpin at a comparative crawl of # mph. Bill slued into the approach, deliberately skidding the rear wheels and braking. The car behind the Fusion was a jet. Fisk watched it in the rear-view screen so as not to have to watch the nightmare ahead. He knew the jet's wheels were merely for support. The only thing that stopped it from being a flyaway winner on the straightaway was the pollution damping -- its flaming exhaust had to meet almost prohibitive standards of emission control. It was, of course, chemically fueled and could not travel as far as the Fusion. Bill whipped around another killer bend of the Hairpin at # while metal groaned and dirt flew wide. Fisk thought he heard another rattling, but decided that it was caused by the spray of pebbles thrown up against the bottom of the vehicle. Outside each curve was a six-foot drop-off onto an escape lane -- the turn had to be made tightly for there was no second chance. IF "Fusion still leads," the radio announced. "Excellent tactics in a slow second heat. Sales; Fusion twenty-six, Duperjet twentyone... "Not much pickup on the Narrows," Bill explained in fragmentary fashion between the bodysmashing maneuvers. He was heeland-toeing it now, working accelerator clutch and wheelbrake almost simultaneously with his right foot while his left controlled the movable windvanes for additional control. The parachute brakes had been jettisoned -- they could not be turned on and off like this. Fisk was amazed Bill still had concentration for chatter while performing such heroic feats. "I held up the line. Crowd likes action. But we're in good field position. Watch us go once we pass Hairpin." He braked down to # for the sharpest bend. Fisk thought the turn impossible -- it looked like the point of a knife. And somepne rah out into the track. F isk became faint with horror, but Bill's reaction time was like an old-fashioned mousetrap. He swerved to miss the figure, throwing the car into a four-wheel tilt, and careened off the bank to drop into the escape lane. The two men bounced like yayos in their harnesses as the great car landed, but they and it took the fall without physical damage. The jet following did likewise, landing more gently because it had only half the Fusion's mass. It pulled up even. The lane had no passing room. The cars jostled together and spun. The side vane of the jet cut through the Fusion's bubble top, opening a neat incision in the shatterproof material. Then the lighter car shot ahead, reorienting in a fine display of equilibrium and blasting back down the intercept lane to rejoin the race. Missing a turn did not, it seemed, disqualify a car but merely delayed it. Already three other cars had navigated this fold of the Hpin and more were coming. The dust was rising higher as the road eroded. The remaining entries would be taking the curve virtually blind -- another disadvantage of trailing the leaders. Bill guided the car to a safe slowdown, then slapped a hand to his head. "Get her moving," he said thickly. "The -- " Fisk saw blood. "My controls don't -- " he began, but paused as he saw Bill slump. How badly had the man been injured? The harness prevented him from looking more closely. "New leader," the radio announced. "Fusion and Dupeijet spun out on Hairpin. Steamco is now first. Sales: Steamco thirtytwo, Fusion -- one moment, the cancellations are still coming in -- Fusion twenty-one, Dupererjet fifteen... The car was blocking the sole escape lane. Any car that missed the turn would shoot right this way at sixty or better, probably out of control. The ballooning dust guaranteed that the on-rushing vehicle would not see the Fusion in time to stop, even if it were in condition to do so. Something knocked on the bubbel and for a heartbeat Fisk thought a collision had already occurred. But the figure who had started this disaster by materializing in the forbidden territory of the Hurdle Hairpin had rematerialized and was dancing outside. This time Fisk recognized her. "Yola!" he cried in dismay. He should have known. She yelled something, he couldn't make out in the confusion. Then she pointed at Bill. "Duperjet clipped him, thanks to you -- " Fisk shouted. "Fisk, let me in!" Her voice came through the unnatural vent. He found the canopy switch on Bill's side and jerked it. The bubbletop yanked itself up, its ripped portion catching, then springing loose. Yola jumped about inside. "Close up and get rolling," she ordered, settling into Bill's inert lap. "First car that misses that pretzel -- pow!" An apt summation."But I can't -- my controls don't -- " "Don't give me that. You'll kill us all -- " She looked back. "Here comes one now!" Fisk's hand found the changeover switch and his foot came down on the accelerator clutch. The car lunged aimlessly, all eight whebls spinning in the dirt. He grabbed at the steering wheel, easing up enough on the clutch to let the wheels catch. "But there's nowhere to go -- " he protested belatedly. "Back on the main track, stupid! We've got to get this guy to a doctor. He's bleeding -- " And Fisk was somehow guiding the behemoth down the track at rapidly accelerating velocity. His lightest pressure on the pedal elicited a surge of brute animation that was frightening in its strength. No car was behind -- that had been a false alarm. But e knew they could not have remained in the escape lane -- and Yola was right about Bill. The man was hurt and every minute that kept him from medical attention might reduce his chances of survival. The only way out was straight ahead. IF T hen a car did appear in the escape lane, nosing out of thcL. dust cloud as though from a broWn tunnel, and Fisk involuntarily goosed the Fusion back onto the main track, his tires screaming as he turned. Fortunately for hijn there were no further hairpin loops. "What are we in for next?" he asked her, his hands sweating. He was moving the monster -- but how long could he control it? Every time he pushed down on the pedal the wheels destroyed themselves a little in their effort to accelerate the vehicle instantly. But it was either ride this tiger or be smashed flat by the one following. Yola scrabbled for the map, which had strewn itself across Fisk's feet. "The Elevated," she said. "Better get up speed." "No, thank you. I'm doing eighty now -- and I know my limits. We're just going to limp out the safest way we can find and -- what were you doing on the track, anyway?" "Have it your way," she said with affected nonchalance. "But I'm a race fan from way back and I think you'd better get it up. Ever see the El on the newscreen?" the radio blared. "Fusion is not out of the race, but trails the pack and is moving erratically. Sales: DuV perjet fifty-five, Steamco fortynine, Gasturb thirty..." "Never watched sports." He Jooked around nervously. "Look, Yola -- Bill's a nice guy and it's your fault he's hurt. See if you can bandage him up -- or something." "What do I know about firstaid?" she demanded as rebelliously s always when told to do something. But she began looking in the car pocket for the medical supplies that had to be there. "... and Fusion twelve -- no, ten." Fisk saw what lay ahead of them. "That?" "What do you think? Watch those cars behind you." Fisk saw them come up on him at an alarming clip as they navigated the last of Hairpin and accelerated. The track was widening here, but one slow vehicle could be disaster. He speeded up. Yola found a rolled bandage and began stretching it out. Fisk knew her hands were dirty -- they always werebut kept his peace. Infection was the least of his present concerns. "We're taking a beating at the box office," she said. "But we're still in the race and we're not last either. Yet." Still the cars came, showing no inclination to avoid a possible crash. Fisk's adrenalin squirted. He stamped down hard and the car surged forward as though its speed of a hundred miles per hour had been mere idling. It was a fine piece of machinery and it could hardly perform like this if it had suffered mechanical damage in the accident. There was, indeed, a certain exhilaration in managing a brute like this, Fisk discovered.  They were booming up the steep approach ramp of the Elevated. The combination of acceleration and angle shoved the riders back into their seats, hard. Yola balanced precariously and Fisk felt the first twinge of nausea. He had a circulatory disorder that could be aggravated by sustained physical stress. Ordinarily it didn't bother him -- token medication kept the symptoms suppressed -- but ordinarily he didn't tackle obstacle Yola complained, His neck is all icky with hair and gore -- I can't make the bandage stay." "Then hold it in place with your hand," Fisk rasped, resenting the need to split his concentration aiid expend his breath in a situation like this. "We've got to keep him from bleeding too much. If Bill hadn't swerved to avoid you -- " She uttered a monosyllable Fisk didn't recognize -- fortunately. He was pretty sure it would have earned her another week in solitary back at the orphanage from whence she sprang. But somehow she Fixed the bandage in place. T hen they were up, other cars ahead and behind. Ahead also stretched mind-numbing miles of twisted ribbon, five hundred feet above the ground, tapering into a thread in the distance, though it was four lanes wide. Two following cars charged past, the whine of their tires momentarily loud. The odor of oil and hot rubberoid swirled in through the rent in the bubble. Yola sneezed. "There can't be many more behind us," she muttered, torn between hope and regret. She clung to the straps of Bill's harness as the incoming gusts swept black hair across her brown face. "But don't stop now -- you have to take the El at speed or you fait off." She was speaking literally. The paving contorted like a living tapeworm, given animation by his speed of # mph. In addition, the hole in the bubble interfered with the streamline contour and created a dangerous drag that Fisk seemed to feel all the way down to the sliding tires. But their forward momentum was not enough. The road tilted now into a forty-five degree embankment -- he would indeed fall off unless he maintained speed sufficient to match the needs of the curve. "Yeah," Yola said, licking her lips. At eleven, with her deprived IF background, she, was more enthusiastic than afraid. He hadn't really needed to ask why she had sneaked into the racegrounds. She had done so because it was forbidden. She had wanted a ride and now she had it. Quite possibly her last. More wind blasted in as he accelerated. "Close up that hole," Fisk snapped as another warning wave of dizziness came over him. The blood circulation to his brain was being inhibited -- but to stop was to die. Already they were sliding toward the nether perimeter and the drag was making matters worse. He had to keep turning the wheel and bearing down on the pedal to counter the drift. But if he accelerated too strongly and broke the wheels free of the surface... "Don't tell me what to do!" Yola flared. Fisk twitched the wheel the other way. The Fusion jerked toward the rail. The bright water of a scenic lake spread helow -- a natural safety net. But they could drown, for the massive car would plummet to the bottom. "Okay! Okay!" she exclaimed with bad grace. "You're the driver -- " She dug out some harness strap and additional bandage and wedged the mass into the gap. It helped. Now Fisk was able to gain the speed he needed: #... #S#... # -- finally the drift abated and they were cruising in a kind of stasis. It was, actually, rather pleasant in its way -- the velocity anesthetized his sense of proportion and the balancing forces lulled his circulatory incapacity. What remained was a growing sense of well-being and power. He was no longer Fisk the hard-sell sucker -- he was Fisk the Supreme! The Secret Life of Fisk Centers... Then the curvature and banking reversed. Fisk was driving for his life and there was suddenly no joy in it. He slued across the strip at # mph without any exact knowledge where he was going or how long he could last. His brain tried to black out. He tilted his head back as far as he could, trying to let the blood in his system flow level to the gray region that needed it. "Slow up! Speed down!" Yola screamed. "Watch the sky low!" Which was just about the way Fisk saw it. "Duperjet is still the leader," the radio announced. "Sales: Duperjet seventy-eight, Steantco sixty. Electro forty-four..." T he tilt decreased and the car was rolling down the steep exit slope at #S# mph. Fisk knew there had been many miles of elevated ribbon and that he had covered every twist at daredevil speed, but his memory had a short-term blank on the subject. That was fortunate for his equanimity, infortunate for his security, since memory lapse was another signal of his functional impairment. Nothing but blind reflex had carried him through, but before long his reflexes would cut out, too. Yola sat silent and staring. The ride must have been good to faze her like that, Fisk thought. "... Fusion thirteen..." At the foot of the ramp was an impenetrable bank of fog. The road led directly into it. Fisk sighed. No way to avoid it. This was obviously part of the course. Another hurdle. He turned on lights, searing beams of windowed from the solar activity of the engine, but the best they could do here was about two hundred feet. The car was moving at more than five hundred feet per second, according to the relevant scale of the speedometer -- # mph. How many seconds uld it take him to come to a stop? He applied the brakes. The car slowed with neck-wrenching suddenness. Bill groaned. Good -- the sound proved he was alive. The smell of burning rubberoid infiltrated from somewhere. "Keep moving!" Yola screamed. "Fogbank always has stuff in it -- " A gap opened in the road. By the time Fisk reacted, it was too late to react. The car hurtled the twenty foot void with no more than a nasty jolt. "Try that at half the speed," Yola muttered faintly. Fisk had to agree with her. Undervelocity was just as dangerous here as overvelocity. His conservative course was to maintain middle-range speed -- say # mph. A wall appeared, made of stone and steel by its look. Fisk swerved left barely in time. The wall was oblique, cutting across the lane only gradually, right to left. His instinct had been accurate and he had dodged the hurdle. "Try that at half speed," he mimicked. "Luck," Yola said disparagingly, as though her own life were not part of the stakes. Not all of the fog was outside. Fisk's arms were becoming leaden on the wheel and his eyelids felt heavy. His system had taken just about all it was going to. He was out of adrenalin. Wisps of cloud passed between his face and the instrument panel -- or perhaps between his eyes and brain. "Wake up!" Yola screamed. Fisk snapped alert, laughing -- and momentarily felt refreshed, ready to continue another couple of IF minutes. He was giving Yola all the thrills she had asked for -- and more. "Duperjet is out of the race," the radio announced. "Crackup in the Slalom -- " Fisk bounced over a washboard trap and emerged from the fog. Fogbank hadn't actually been so bad. It would have been another matter in the press of the pack, however: T hey were out of the fog and into a forest. Green concrete pseudotrees or pilings rose from the highway in a seemingly solid mass. They were cold -- ice had formed on them and snow coated the ground. "The Slalom," Yola said despairingly. "Doom!" But the pilings were less impenetrable than they seemed from a distance. In the seconds it took to reach the first, Fisk saw that they were spaced well apart. There was room to skid around them if forward progress were not excessive. The tracks of many wheels showed the routes other cars had taken. But across the main trail were wheels themselves, and jagged pieces of metal -- the debris of a recent accident strewed across the course. Dupeijet, surely. This was dangerous territory. "... Fusion nineteen... Duperjet nine..." The buyers certainly had little sympathy for a loser. Yet Dupeijet was a flne car. It had led the pack after that spinout. Fusion was recovering sales -- but what a grisly way to succeed. Fisk was falling under the sway of stress fatigue again. He willed his remaining strength into his hands and aimed the vehicle at the widest aperture between groups of pilings, following the common trail, Here and there the refrigerative grid showed, scraped temporarily bare by the passage of the pack, giving him slightly improved footing. He was still doing over # mph and he knew better than to attempt to change speed here Yola covered her eyes. "You drive like a zombie," she said. The trail split. A piling lay dead ahead. Fisk forced a message down along the resistive nerve tissue of his right arm and the arm convulsed a bit, pulling the wheel around just that necessary fraction. The car slued, scraping against the piling on the left and almost disloging Yola's hole-stufTing. At this point Fisk hardly cared -- it was as though car and racetrack were far away. Even his own extremities were, almost beyond reach. His heart was laboring to the point of collapse, but the life-sustaining blood was not getting through. He was numb and terribly tired. Yet he would not let go entirely. He hung on. A thin rivulet of animation trickled along the buried conduits of his pallid flesh. As the pilings loomed his muscles twitched and the car shaved by, never quite hitting, never quite sacriFicing the tfaction so necessary to keep it from following the Duperjet into destruction. But Fusion's huge mass gave it traction where a lighter car might have skated. The impact of their passage howled about the myriad death traps of the Slalom -- if he had been the lyrical type he might have immortalized the experience in poetry -- and then they were out of it. "We're alive," Yola whispered, amazed. "At least I am. For a while I almost wished I was back at the orphanage." She looked at Fisk. "You can stop here. We're out of the woods and nobody's behind us any more." Fisk ignored her. Now he faced a straightaway, long and level and dry. Far ahead he could see several other cars. The Fusion had actually gained on them during this last hurdle. The race wasn't over yet -- and as long as he was in it, why not win it? Ill futile delusion of grandeur of an oxygen-starved brain, its frontal lobes anesthetized. He didn't care.  Bill needed a large sales tally for his friend's medical bills -- and perhaps for his own. Fisk was indirectly responsible for the Fusion's fall from first to last place in the Hurdle and for Bill's injury. There was power under his foot if not in his body or brain. Why not invoke it, double or nothing? "Daddy, what are you doing?" Yola whispered as the car accelerated. "You wilful little brat -- you got me into this," he snapped. "Now you're going to see it through." He was mad -- insane, not angry. His brain had gone berserk and was running faster than the car. He had never suffered this effect of his malady before. It was as though another personality had fought to the surface -- a completely un-Fisk monster. No, not true. This was his true personality. Shackled by decades of civilized restraint, it had emerged at last. "So it's like that. Centers," Yola muttered. "Well, want to know what's next? The MTountain." Fisk-normal quailed, but the demon aspect who had usurped control' of his body said in fine detergent-opera fashion, "Yeah? So watch this." And his right foot crunched down harder. The speedometer read # mph. IF It climbed rapidly as the tireless machine obeyed the imperious command of a lunatic. "Steamco eighty-six. Electro fifty-nine, Gasturb forty-nine... the radio said and continued on through the entire list of twenty-six cars remaining in the race. Fusion was back up to twenty-four. The car was doing # now and Fisk's foot was a marvel of unremitting ponderosity. This was a fair-sized straightaway -- the kind where power counted. Fusion's favorite track. The gap between him and the pack was closing. How much would this buggy do? "This is suicide," a small voice whimpered. At first Fisk thought it was that of his civilized-self conscience, but it turned out to be Yola's. Fisk's eyeballs seemed to be locked in their sockets, able to move only marginally to cover the contours of the road. He himself was a machine, his arms levering more or less together, sharing his drastically limitecL muscular power as though connected by an oldfashioned limited-slip differential. # mph... Suddenly the straightaway was ending and he was overhauling the pack at a phenomenal clip. The demon in him exulted. "You fool -- it's the Mountain!" Yola screamed, afraid. But Fisk saw only his beautiful passing of competitors on the fast track. So they had written off Fusion, had they? Then his foot came up involuntarily. Yola was down beside the pedal, prying it loose. And the pack moved ahead again and crammed like so much floating refuse into the drain-like access to the next hurdle. "Fusion has merged with the pack." The radio sounded surprised. "Looked for a moment there as if -- but the driver was too smart to risk a pass on Mountain. We thought Fusion had mechanical trouble, but obviously not Sales: Steamco a hundred and one... Electro seventy-five, Gasturb fiftyfive, Vaporlock forty-four, Fusion thirty-eight..." "Wow!" Yola cried, forgetting her apprehension of the moment before. "You may be crazy, but we're bacK in the sales niontiy! What's your cut of the gross, Fisk?" He didn't answer, knowing how little the money meant, compared to the lives depending on it. She had climbed back into Bill's lap and Fisk's foot was free, but now the ascent was too steep to permit high velcity. He trailed the pack at a poor # mph. The course wedged into a twolane thread, along which cars were spaced like traveling ants. A cliff developed on the right, the drop-ofT becoming tall and sheer. A car ahead, trkdio pass another precipitously. The banking of the road reversed, throwing .it tdo faf out and the vehicle sailed into space to torpedo into the water trap below. Coaldust slipped," the radio cried. 'Twenty-four cars remain in the race at the two-thirds point..." The demon that now governed Fisk's ailing body took note. A lot of cars would not finish because their drivers were too eager. He had better bide his time until he hit another straightaway. 'Mewhile, Mountain was a terror. Visibility declined as the blind curves became sharper. A small thunderstorm was anchored at the crest, peHiftg the entries with rain and hailstones. He had to slow to # and pace himself by the car ahead through the blasting rain. TKn #ame the descent and Fisk accelerated down the glassy slope. "Steamco one-twenty-nine... Electro one-fourteen... Vaporlock sixty-eight... Fusion fiftynine..." Fusion and Fisk were moving up on sales faster than on the pack, perhaps because the spectators knew what would happen on the next level heat, but not fast enough. The demon would settle for nothing less than total victory. "Oh-oh," Yola said. "Loop's coming next. Cool it, leadfoot." Bill groaned again. He was showing signs of recovery. like sandflat beyond. Gently rolling dunes were artfully placed to alleviate the monotony and impede progress -- a straight-line route would necessarily take in several of them. The alternative was to waste time going around them. He had no idea of what it was like to drive on sand. But if the other cars could handle it, so could Fusion -- and this might be its last chance to pass the pack before the finish. "Steamco still leads going into the Loop," the radio said. "Pack's pretty close and tight, though. There's likely to be some action..." Indeed there was. Fisk observed the Loop, nestled in the angle between the Mountain terminus and the Dunes plain. It seemed to be about three lanes wide -- but the pack contained about fifteen cars nd few of them were giving way to let the procession become orderly. The Fusion was gaining, but would strike the Loop just after the pack did. It didn't look as though there were any inherent limit on speed here -- the faster he went, the less likely he would be to fall off at the upsidedown apex, provided he had IF the car under control. And as long as nothing got in his way. But could his defective body take the strain? was weak. The first car hit the Loop. Up and over it went at some five hundred miles per hour, like a toy. Only car lengths behind it came the second, closing. Then, squeezing in two and three abreast, the pack, vying for position even as they encountered the vertical ascent. And mph, still accelerating, still gaining. Steaihcb shot from the corkscrew exit and land on the fringe of the sandflaL Dust billowed up momentarily. Electro smacked into this and swerved, stirring up a greater cloud. Then the pack was tearing through like so many piranhas. Fisk was entering the Loop at # mph. "Hang on!"he yelled, though Yola needed no. warning. They smashed into the vertical curve and Fisk's breath left him. This was in effect a tenor fifteen-G takeoff, he was sure. He clutched at a painful gray awareness. "... spectacular crash!" the radio blared avidly and Fisk realized he had failed and could expect nothing but agony before he died. "Pileup just beyond the Loop..." Not me -- someone else... He was headed up at # .mph; The reality that kept, him fighting was the climbing needle-signifying conquest. Yota screamed tbinly. They were upside down, plummeting headfirst, leveling, taking off, upside down, proceeding along the awful corkscrew of the Loop. Fisk shoved the pedal all the way to the floor, connecting engine to wheels without any bleeding of power. He rode the descent lane into ever increasing velocity. #... #... magic pictures on his retina... #... #... #... and they were sailing, skirt of the Loop. #... ; the wheels seemed hardly to touch the sand and only the little vanes kept the car level. #... #... flaqceleration was slowernow. The great machine shuddered as though its stress limit had finally been met and all that was left for Yola wa shaken moan. #... and the needle quivered, seemed to strain. This was ultimate glory!... fire prevents recovery of the bodies... total loss... worst disaster of the year... look at Fusion!" Dead ahead, half concealed by a. low dune and a sinking #ust cloudy was the roadblock. Licks of flame shot up and smoke was piling into the sky. No chance to turn. A thousand feet away -- and in less than one second they were upon it, traveling at # mph, Fisk's foot still savagely mashing the pedal. The Fusion was tearing itself apart and eradication was a microsecond away, but he would not even attempt to ease up. Already he was touching the vane-angle switch. T he low dune shoved the rubberoid and metal aloft in a single mighty convulsion. The great wheels barely touched the flaming corpse of the nearest car. And they were airborne as the shaking became almost intolerable. Fumes siphoned in through the stuffed hole as the car was bathed in fire. The speedometer stood at #. "Great God," Vola screamed in a whisper. "We've cracked the speed of sound!" "Fusion is past!" the radio gasped. "Fusion hurdled pileup..." The car landed, and sand swirled up behind it in little tornadoes spawned by the vacuum of their passage, but the mighty machine crunched on. The flames were far behind. Fisk's hands and arms were senseless and stiff in a kind of living rigor mortis, but straight ahead was all the car needed in the way of a directive. Now at last his foot began to creep up from the pedal. "What -- what?" a voice mumbled. "Hey, he's coming to," Yola cried as Bill stirred. "Keep him quiet," Fisk's voice rasped. "We're still doing sixninety on sand -- " "Sales," the radio said. "Steamco one-fifty-two... Fusion -- one moment, it's still changing -- that feat of piloting really stirred up the -- never saw anything like it. Fusion takes the lead in sales! Fusion one-seventy,three... And Steamco -- one moment -- " Bill lifted his head. "God, man, that's near my best. What -- " "I had to take over," Fisk said tefsely. He was still fighting the rising tide of gray behind his eyes. "Yeah -- but -- " "Revised sales," the radio said. "Fusion two hundred and eight -- folks, it's still changing. We can't get a fixed reading. The race isn't even finished... Fusion two-fortynine... two-sixty-one -- " There was an unexplained pause, then: "Folks, to recap: there has been a nfteen-car collision on the Dunes just beyond the Loop, but the remaining cars are still running. Here's the replay -- " 'Another pause as the screen viewers saw the film. "Steamco retains the lead on the track, but that's all -- and Fusion is coming up fast. The others -- seven cars, I believe -- are picking their way around the IF wreckage, avoiding the flames. None of them will finish in the money. It's a two-car race! Fusion, not known for its maneuverability, pulled such an extraordinary feat of -- Fusion three hundred and nineteen! Those orders are pouring in! Here's the replay on that hurdle of death. That's Fusion Firing out of the Loop -- look at that! It cracked mach one! We thought the car was out of the running, then this! The buyers are really impressed. Hell, I'm impressed, and I've been in this business for -- Most racers would have been smashed to pieces, busting sound like that, let alone doing it through flame! Fusion three-seventy... four hundred... Folks we can't keep up. Unprecedented sales for an unfinished race. Looks like a record in the making, even if Fusion doesn't win the Hurdle. Four-fifty-two... I gotta buy one myself..." The announcer panted into silence. "That tells it," Bill exclaimed. "Sweetest music f ever heard. And I thought you couldn't drive -- " "I can't," Fisk said. "I'm sicker than yqu are." Bill looked at him. "You're white as bones -- you have a heart condition? I've lost some blood, but I've taken lumps before -- better let me take over. Kid, get down on the floor or somewhere." Yola scrambled down, finding a place to squat between the bucket seats. Bill threw the switch and Fisk's controb went dead. Now he could relax. These regular racing drivers were almost as tough as their cars. "What's next?" Bill demanded, angling the car gently around another dune. "Tunnel," Yola said, wrestling with the map. "Fusion six hundred and seven..." F isk lay back and let himself slide into whatever oblivion awaited. The demon had left him, but Fisk-normal still needed his medicine. Jhe race's end could not be far off and it did look as though he were planning to survive. "Fusion seven-twenty-six..." Bill shook his head. "Fisk, I don't know exactly how you did it -- but you've just made us rich. Those sales are going to hit a thousand. It's a bandwagon now -- everybody in the world will want a dollars in commissions -- " "They'll come to their senses and begin canceling after the excitement passes," Fisk pointed out. Now that he could afford to fainty he seemed perversely to be recovering strength. "Sure -- but the cancellations will be made up by other buyers reading about this in the fax. That always happens. Don't worry -- we've got record wfnnings and the credit's yours. So you took her through mach, did you? I never had the nerve." "Terrific!" Yola cried, liking the idea of fame.  "Uh -- better not," Fisk said, eying the tiny mouth of the approaching tunnel. Bill sounded normal, but Fisk didn't trust the man's condition. He had been unconscious for a fair period and must have lost a significant quantity of blood -- and an error in judgment of so much as six inches could be fatal, in that tight passage ahead. ' "No, no, Fisk -- you did it and you'll get the commission. When I tell the boss how you pulled it out -- " "We'll be rich!" Yola exclaimed with childish avarice. Fisk hadn't been talking about money. His concern had been to see them through the tunnel alive. Steamco had just entered and at the rate the Fusion was going there would be contact between them inside that darkness. Was Bill intending to vie for position even now? But it seemed money was a factor, because of the tremendous sales spurred by bis mad exploit of moments ago. Yola's gre and Bill's misunderstanding sent a negative ripple through the weary convolutions of his brain. "When you tell your boss that he'll fire you for allowing an unqualified driver to take over and play roulette with inainery and people's lives in the Hurdle. BecaUM you knew about me and he didn't. It was blind luck that got us through -- as the tapes of the race will show." Bill slid the car into the Tunnel as though he had done it aQ his life -- as perhaps he had. "Maybe so," he said soberly. "But luck doesn't usually operate that way -- not on the El or the Mountain -- and especially not in getting up speed to hurdle wreckage. There was driving genius in your hands and feet, like it or not. But you're right -- it's bad business and my boss would rather not know. Okay -- we'll split the take, half and half. It's right to share, because I got hurt and you -- " them the rag-and-strap plug popped out of the bole in. the bubble, urged by the suddenly compressing air within the confined space. An almost solid blast of atmosphere rammed in, striking Bill in the face and making a stormlike turbulence within the bubble. The car swerved, partly because Bill'ould barely see in the IF gale, but mostly, Fisk knew, because of the drag of the aperture itself. There was no room to compensate here. The stony walls were inches away. But Yola knew what to do and since no one had told her to do it, she did it. She crawled across Bill's lap, probably kneeing him painfully in the process, fetched in the tattered wad and jamfhed it back into the hole. The storm subsided. Fisk was able to speak again. "You were hurt because my daughter ran out in front of us while you were going through Hairpin. She almost killed us all." "Take the money -- take the money!" Yola cried. "You sure are one for making objections," Bill said ruefully. "What do you want?" "I think we'd better just walk out of your life when the race is over. A good -- " He had to pause, for they had caught up with Steamco. The Tunnel was lighted, but irregularly -- the width varied from one to three lanes with curves thrown in. Passing could be tricky -- and Steamco had no intention of being passed. "A good sales day is the least we can do to repay -- " But Fisk had 'to stop again as Bill swerved to pass on a subterranean straightaway and was quickly Mocked off. Steamco had to know that there was no car to beat but Fusion -- all the drivers would have been hearing the radio reports. The only way Steamco could recoup was by finishing ahead -- or by putting Fusion out of the race entirely. The passage narrowed, halting the maneuvering for the moment. " -- the trouble we have caused you," Fisk continued. "I'll find another job." "Fisk, shut up," Yola said. "You're throwing away a quarter "Fusion nine hundred and eightyone sales..." "Look, Fisk," Bill said earnestly as the dark walls rushed past and trickles of wind whined in through the stuffed hole. "I told you I'd cover for you about yotir lack of experience, laughable as that seems now. You've had experience somewhere -- somehow -- even if you don't remember it. You're covering for me, really. And I'd never make trouble for your little girl. You don't have to sign over the money for that. I want you to have your share because you earned it. I wouldn't feel right letting you go away with nothing after the way you -- " "I wouldn't feel right taking it," Fisk said firmly. "You were right -- any idiot can drive this car and one just did -- " "Fisk," Yola said, "if you don't take that money. I'm going to -- " The dark track opened into a dual lane, then into a broad cavern spiked with stalagmites casting multiple and deceptive shadows. Many trails seemed to be open. Bill goosed the Fusion and angled for the far right opening. The Steamco moved over to block him, staying just ahead so that passing was impossible. "I'll take the commission myself and make out a check for you," Bill said, as though nothing special were going on. "I'll take all the credit for the race, if that's the way you want it -- but you've got to have your share of the commission. I can't take all the money for a race I didn't drive." "I don't want it,' Fisk said. Bill tried to pass again. The maneuver was impressive at # mph in the partially lighted cavern. But Steamco was ready and stayed ahead. "Fusion one thousand and thirtyeight..." "I'll give H to your daughter, then," Bill said. "An irrevocable trust for her education, so she doesn't have to run onto any more 'racetracks." "Yeah, yeah!" Yola agreed, but with less enthusiasm. Fisk shook . his head. "That money should go to your injured partner." Another dangerous dodge that nearly put both cars into a post. "Twenty-five per cent to your little girl, then." Bill looked grim. "A hundred grand will cover my friend's bill. You're making me settle for twice that. I don't like profiteering on something like this. I'm hurting in my conscience worse than on my head and I can't dicker with you any more. That's my final offer." "Flip for it," Yola said. "You go left next split -- last moment. If Steamco goes right, you pass and Fisk takes the share." "Okay." Fisk was about to demur again, when the radio interrupted: "Folks, you'll be glad to know the drivers survived Duperjet's crash. They blame themselves for misjudgment -- too much speed in the Slalom..." Fisk felt a tremendous relief. Bill accelerated again, almost touching Steamco's persistent tail. As the post zoomed in on them, the first of a line of them, he nudged right, then cut sharply left. Steamco was caught on the right side, too late to compensate without cracking into the pylon. W you?" Yola demanded as she and Fisk stepped out of the tube at his apartment building. ( IF "We need money and you know it. Why wouldn't you take your share?" Fisk himself hardly understood his reasons. "What I did wasn't real. Some demon in me wanted the glory of winning the Hurdle, no matter what the cost. I was too sick to control it -- " "That's right. You looked like a corpse. I thought sure you meant to kill us." "But once the pressure was off I regained control. By then it was too late to undo the damage -- " "But you're the one who brought off the win." "The demon brought if off. But at least I dn't have to give that demon the satisfaction of making a profit from the episode. With no credit and no money -- " "Except that trust Bill's setting up for me that nobody can touch," she said. "Fisk, that money would have bought a lot of fun for both of us and now all it's good for is education. Ugh!" "Precisely. Education abolishes demons." "I just don't get it," she said crossly "Neither do #," Fisk admitted. "I just knew that neither the racing credit nor the money was rightfully mine. "I will earn my fortune in my own way or not at all. That's my particular hurdle. Maybe it's a question of whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde will govern."  "Who?" He sighed. "Never mind. It's a devious point of characterization -- and perhaps illusory. But disaster strikes every time I compromise my profit in Marsland speculation and lost everything. I got involved in black market adoption and almost landed in jail. This time I very nearly killed us all. The demon offers material riches, but his real goal is misery." She uttered the expletive he still didn't understand. "The first time you got a new, exciting life. The second time you got me. This time you could have had -- " "At any rate -- I'll never go near another racing car as long as I -- " "Hey, what's this?" she cried, lifting something out of the package slot of the apartment door." Fisklooked at what she had found. It was a small square item with a gift tag. Yola read it aloud. "'You're a great sport. Sink Bill.' " "That's 'Sine.,' not 'sink,' " Fisk said. "For 'Sincerely.' " But she was already tearing open the wrapping with juvenile impatience. Inside was the personalized ID ownership key for a new Fusion Special.  Research can be painful. In fact, at times it's downright sickeningl my office I was genuinely pleased to see him. His reputation in behavioral studies was international and I had been secretly hoping that he would ask me to design instrumentation to carry out his new series of experiments. Doctor Fahy was in his early sixties, a tall thin man with a rather dour expression. He spoke with a minimum of words and the only time he smiled was when he learned that his grant would not be charged for my engineering time. "As a recent arrival at the university," he said, "I'm quite overwhelmed by the many free services." "The parts and construction time are charged," I pointed out. "Naturally," said Dr. Fahy. His pale blue eyes wandered about my office and fixed upon the double row of filing cabinets. "You have a kind of executive responsibility, haven't you?" I nodded. "I'm the sole engineer of the electronics laboratory but I do have two technicians working for me. With all due modesty, let me point out that I've designed everything from a simple stimulator for monkey testicles, to special purpose minicomputers." Dr. Fahy did not seem overly impressed. "That's fine," he said dryly. "Then you should have no difficulty meeting my needs. I've typed out a set of specifications which I will leave in your care. Within a week's time, I should like a cost estimate and a projected date of delivery." I accepted the three pages of specifications with some disappointment. He seemed to sense my distress. "Is anything wrong?" he asked. I sighed. "The standard working practice here is for the researcher to outline for me what he intends to do. I have some familiarity with the ongoing research. Knowing exactly what is supposed to happen enables me to design a better and more apt instrument." He nodded. "That certainly sounds reasonable," said Dr. Fahy. "Nevertheless, I don't work that way. You build me what I've asked for and I'll assume all responsibility for the end result." I was annoyed at his brusqueness but I concealed my anger. "As you wish," I said. specifications that Doctor Fahy wanted an animal shocker of extraordinary potential. He was asking for a ten-thousand volt source capable of delivering up to ten chosen, the current setting was to remain stable to within a tiny fraction of a per cent despite wide variations in the resistance of whatever it was he intended to shock. An accurate printout of the value of the shocking current was required as well as a complex logic facility to program the sequencing and timing of the shocks. There were to be remote and local controls. But most disconcerting were the extraordinary tolerances that were asked for. Clearly this design would require utterly new techniques. I was still quite annoyed at Dr. Fahy's reticencfe. If he had told me what he intended to do I might have been able to point out whero some of the specifications might be relaxed. I decided to go first to the library and read up on his past experiments. I had no difficulty in locating his work. The experimental journals of psychology were filled with them. Generally his procedure was to shock experimental rats in the region of the tail and at the same time submit them to trying sets of circumstances. In his '"executive rat' experiment, he found that animals who could not turn off the shock source right after it had been turned on, developed a severe kind of stomach ulcer. In some cases, he would warn the rat by a tone that the shock was about to come. In other cases, he provided them with a series of tones which terminated just before the shock began. But in every case, he gave the animals tasks to perform despite the approaching shocks. My greatest disappointment came in discovering that nowhere did he describe his experimental apparatus, save in general terms. He did not specify the accuracies of his readings and his results were summarized only in statistical terms. I went back to my office and set about a preliminary design to meet the specifications. When I had finished I called in Dr. Fahy and showed him the results. He became quite angry. "Four thousand dollars to build?" he cried. "That's outrageous!" I attempted to soothe his anger. "If only you would relax your specifications," I began. "He snorted. "Nonsense.This apparatus is virtually the same as the one I had at Bradman Tech. The engineer there had no difficulty in building it for half the amount. I don't like to question your competence, but perhaps you'd like me to get his design?" IF "There's no need for that," I snapped. "I don't need someone else's design. But the cost of the parts and labor cannot be reduced." He shrugged. "If I must, I must," he said. "When can I have it?" " "It will take about a month to get the parts and a month to build the entire unit. Then a week or two to check it out. However, there are other people ahead of you." He waved his hands impatiently. "I can't wait my turn," said Dr, Fahy. "If you want a letter from the university president authorizing you to give me priority I'll get it for you. I have a new grant proposal to write in five months. I must have fresh data long before then." At that point I made my first great error. "I'll give you first priority," I said. B y virtue of nights and Saturdays of unstinting work I managed to deliver this very complex system within two months' time. He accepted it matter-offactly and without even perfunctory thanks. After two days of trial. Dr. Fahy called me on the phone and indicated that except for minor bugs everything seemed in order. He then dropped his bombshell. "I shall require four copies of the prototype system," he said. "And I must have them as soon as possible. I have four technicians drawing salary here and they'll have nothing to do until you supply me with these additional units." "We're not set up for production," I said. "Wc do have other jobs to do." "That's not my concern,' he said. "If you require authorization for additional technicians I'll get it for you." Two days later the authorization to hire two additional technicians came through from the university president's office. But there was no provision for additional bench space. Thereafter I spent two frustrating weeks interviewing job prospects before I found two men who seemed even marginally to meet the job requirements. I asked Dr. Fahy, in the interests of speedy output, to let me borrow the prototype for use as a model but he refused. "The unit is in constant use and can't be spared," he said. I had to work very closely with my new technicians and provide them with detailed mechanical drawings of each section, particularly demonstrating the way all parts had to be mounted. Weeks went by with Dr. Fahy constantly calling me and complaining about the delay. I Was in the process of checking out unit Number Two, when Dr. Fahy called again. "Unit One just quit in the middle of an experiment. Can you come right over?" I went. The power light on the panel of the controller was off. I checked the fuse -- it was okay. After an hour of fussing around I disconnected the controller and took it back to my laboratory. Two hours later I found a poorly soldered connection. When it had been resoldered, I returned the controller. Dr. Fahy set his dials for a test run. His panel lights indicated an incorrect sequence of shocks. "It's been acting up this way lately," said Dr. Fahy. I was astonished. "I .wish you'd told me before. That should never happen." He was annoyed when I insisted on taking the controller back once again. This time it took a day of probing to find that one of my integrated circuit chips was failing on an intermittent basis. I replaced the chip and to my shocked surprise, there was no improvement. Dr. Fahy came by at this time. "My experiments are stopped cold," he said. "Why don't you let me try Unit Two?" "You can," I said reluctantly. #f "But I haven't really completed all my checkout tests." "I'll take my chances," he said. T he third unit came to my bench a week later but I still hadn't found the trouble with Unit One. And then I discovered a diode had been wired in backward. I was both elated and annoyed. "I'll be damned," I cried. "How the hell did this unit ever work?" I delivered it to Dr. Fahy the following day. 'He seemed relieved. "The printouts of this second unit are unreliable," he said. I took Unit Two back. Unit Four was ready when I finally repaired Unit Two and then I discovered Unit One back on my bench with a note from Dr. Fahy stating that it had become unreliable again. The symptoms of Unit One were the most baffling I had ever encountered. It would function perfectly on my bench and then misbehave in Dr. Fahy's lab. "Are your assistants reporting the symptoms correctly?" I asked. "My assistants do not touch any of the controls. I am the only one to do so," he said. I shook my head in puzzlement as he added a few biting sarcasms. IF I had taken to waking in the middle of the night with hunger pains that were allayed only by lots of milk and cookies. Sometimes they even occurred between meals during the day and I began to keep snacks on hand in my laboratory. My weight began to go up, despite the fact that I had begun to come in on Suhdays in an attempt to catch up on my backlog. Dr. Fahy saw me nibbling cookies and sipping milk one day. "It's not a good idea to cram in so many sweets," he said. I was flattered by his interest. It was the first time he had seemed to take personal note of my habits. I told him of my continual hunger. He became alive with attention. 'When did it start," he asked. "How frequently, do yon get these hunger pains?" I told him. "Have you had a physical recently?" "About six months ago," I said. "Everything was perfect." "If I'm right," he said, "you've got a peptic ulcer." v He insisted on taking a full history of my symptoms before sending me off to the specialist associated with the university who confirmed the diagnosis. He put me on a diet of milk and antacids. "Are you under particular stresses?" he asked sympathetically. "For the time being, yes." "They won't help your ulcer. You need a long rest from your work." I sighed. "I don't see how." B ut a small amount of relief appeared on the horizon. The annual engineering show had come to town and despite my work load, I decided to attend. With a great deal of guilt, I went to a talk given by a man named Holcomb, an engineer from Bradman Tech, Dr. Fahy's former Bailiwick. Afterward I went up to chat with Holcomb. "Did you know Dr. Fahy?" I asked. He smiled. "Very well," he said. "He's a difficult man to please. Fortunately I never did any instrumentation for him." "Who did?" I asked. He seemed puzzled. "Did what?" "Built his previous instrumentation at Bradman Tech." I told him of the troubles I had run into. He shook his head. "Beats the hell out of me," he said. "I never built anything for Fahy. He's a trained engineer. He got his bachelor's degree in elecIronies before he got his doctorate in psychology." "TTien you have no idea who designed and built his shockers?" "He probably made them himself," said Holcomb. "At the time I was annoyed because he didn't use me." "I wish I had been that lucky," I said. But now I began to wonder what was going on. That night I went back to my office and pondered the situation. Dr. Fahy had been quite clear in asserting that his equipment had been designed for him at Bradman Tech. He had been lying to me. I walked over to his laboratory in the HanleyBuilding. It was after nine in the evening and the doors were locked. I used my duplicate keys and went inside the deserted , rooms. All of the equipment, including three of my malfunctioning programers, had been turned off. I meticulously checked his interconnecting cables and found three sets running off somewhere. I followed them and found that they ran to a remote room where presumably Dr. Fahy could operate electronic gear including a programable patch board. I had nevr seen any of this equipment before. I turned it on and checked the function of all the controls. I then went back into the main laboratory and turned on the equipment I had designed. It was almost one in the morning before I finished my investigation. I slept poorly that night and spent quite a bit of time at the refrigerator, allaying my hunger pains. In the morning I went to sec Dr. Fahy. He seemed annoyed at the interruption. "I must talk to you," I said. "I believe I've found the source of our electronic instability." He smiled. "Have you really?" "It's in your remote logic control system," I said. "The one that you designed and patched into my units." He nodded. "I suppose you want an explanation," he said. "To put it mildly." "I've always worked with rats," said Dr. Fahy. "Generally speaking, they develop ulcers for two reasons. One is the situation where they are given shocks unless they solve an unsolvabic problem. The other involves solving an infinite number of solvable problems." "It seems I got an infinite number of insolvablc problems," I said. "That was nasty, wasn't it," said Dr. Fahy. "But you sec, working with rats is one thing. ExtrapolatIF ing to humans is quite another" 'So you chose me. And I did develop the expected gastric ulcer." "You're angry and I don't blame you," said Fahy. "But there was a scientific problem of the greatest moment at stake. I became obsessed with knowing the answer. Can you understand that?" "How do you think the faculty council will react when I report what you've done?" "You won't do that," said Dr. Fahy. "For one thing, you can't prove your case. I'll deny everything." "Even this conversation?" "Even that. But you have an alternative choice. If you agree to sign a waiver of claims against me. I'll publish our data. It will rock the scientific world and give you immortality." "No doubt," I said dryly. "But who would publish this caricature of science?" "I'm editor of a psychology journal. I'll put itlhrough myself. There will be a storm afterward but I'll take my chances with that. It's a once-in-a-lifetime experiment that has never been done before." "You could have gotten volunteers." "Could I? If the subject had prior knowledge, it would have vitiated all the results. wouldn't it?" Fahy was gloating. "I'll think it over," I said. week later, when the terrible news broke. There had been a dreadful accident in the Fahy laboratory. One of the shockers had failed to operate. Dr. Fahy had opened the cage that should have turned off the high voltage through an interlock. In some inexplicable way he had received a tenthousand-volt jolt across the chest. After intensive first-aid he had finally come around. As I arrived, he was being carried out of the laboratory on a stretcher. One of his young assistants was in tears. "How is he?" I asked her. "He'll live -- but he's a very sick man," she said. After she had gone, I examined the cage where the accident had occured. I turned off the power at the main panel and went directly to the interlock. It took but a few seconds to remove the override wire I had inserted the night before and restore the interlock circuit to its normal state. Then I set off to my office to write a report about the mechanical failure of the interlock to the shocker. That night, for the first time in many months, I slept through without a single hunger pain.  is a monstrously clever man who doesn't like anything and whose job is to delight his readers by sharing his cynicism with them, while disliking them beyond all else. The above may ap)ly to many fields of reviewing, but I've never believed it applied to reviews of science-fiction books. I feel it more important to cover the books that should be read than to warn people from the bad ones -- and I'm always delighted when I have a list of good works. It may not give me as many chances it serves the readers. Dealing with books I like presents problems, of course. For one thing. I'm farther out on a thinner limb -- enumerating the ways in which a novel can fail is not difficult and involves hardly any risk David Gerrold yesterday's children David Gerrold David Gerrold Gordon R. Dickson Frederik Pohl John W. Campbell John Taine F. H. George W.P. Jolly at all. But the lack of these faults does not necessarily make a good book. Even technical writing" excellence can do no more than make a barely acceptable one. Some of the newer writers show more technical excellence than we've had in the field before, yet I find their adaptations of the avant-garde themes from Story magazine of the early thirties boring, no matter how well done. The elements in a story that usually please me most em to lie in the writer himself. He must have a wide range of interests and enthusiasms. These should include a liking for and knowledge of the scientific aspects of our civilization  as ' well as human and cultural developments. He must enjoy playing with a variety of future possibilities. He must have a real and varied interest in science fiction for itself. And he must enjoy writing and watching his plots and characters develop, just as he would enjoy seeing another writer's story develop while reading it. It isn't enough to like being a writer or winning approval from a clique -- he must find enough pleasure in writing science fiction to put every bit of himself into it for his own approval. If you can get all that together you've got an author of merit. I think we've been lucky enough to add such a writer to the field recently. David Gerrold has had four novels published within the last year or less, the first being a collaboration with Larry Niven which had serious faults, but also many strong virtues. The Flying Sorcerers, previously reported here.) The others are solo flights and they look very promising in sum. His Space Skimmer (Ballantine, #) is apparently the first of a series, from what I've been told. Incidentally, the gadget on the cover looks like some artist's attempt at symbolism but is actually a very good depiction of the ship in the story -- something of an ultimate dream of spaceships, around which the plot develops. A thousand years before the story begins, the Empire of the Galaxy had extended itself beyond its ability to communicate and was falling to pieces. The skimmers were created to solve the problems, but they went out and were never heard from again. The Empire fell and each component of it evolved its own culture and life style or form. As the story develops a barbarian who must flee his miserable world discovers a skimmer and takes off in it. But he understands its operation so poorly that he has to seek assistahee. Each new addition to the crew provides new problems, and each introduces new cultures and more mysteries about the problems that wrecked the Empire. The plot is a little thin -- probably because this story basically sets up the situation for others to come. But the characters are good -- their interrelationships provide interest and tension and the ship grows to be a major character in the story. I for one will be interested in seeing more of the adventures. The book gets a qualified recommendation as the beginning of what may be an excellent series. ' Children (Dell, #i ) has nothing to do with wonderchildren. The characters are adults, but true children of the impersonal nature of war's evolution into the future. All the action takes place aboard a long-put-of-date destroyer, manned by people assigned to the ship because of their failure to merit better positions. Its Captain, Brandt, is a man who has given up responsibility. First Officer Korie is either a madman with an obsession to fight or a genius at doing the impossible. The two officers are totally opposed and the crew is caught in the middle. The story begins in the course of a chase after an enemy ship -- it ends Vith the resolution of the chase. And the enemy (the "bogie") throughout is only a light on the screens -- and the war is simply a development of centuries of war. The characterization and conflict of characters are excellent. The tension mounts steadily as the characters evolve. The technical details of the ship and its method of extralight travel are developed fully and credibly. (There's no reason for the awkward present-tense style, but it ceases to bother after a while). The only real flaw is unfortunately major. The ending, while well prepared, is not an adequate resolution. The whole story has centered on the character of Korie. The ending seems to push the resolution of that character aside, as if the reader were not involved with him. (And nothing could be less true.) If the rest of the novel hadn't been excellent, this might have been acceptable. As it is, Gerrold has written a damned good book that becomes unsatisfactory only in the last two or three pages. It does, however, prove the ability of Gerrold to handle backgrounds, character, technical details and almost every aspect of the science-fiction novel with passion and with marvelous inventiveness. I T IS in his When Harlie Was One (Ballantine, #) that Gerrold proves what a fine sciencefiction writer he can be. This is a first-rate novel. Much of it was IF published in stories appearing in Galaxy Magazine, but this book is not a collection of novelettes -- Gerrold has written this version as a true, continuous novel, with a considerable development. The story centers on a computer, Harlie, who was designed to be as human as possible. He's one year old when the story opens. He is under the tutelage of a psychologist, David Auberson. And he's in danger, because the company that built him is under new management and determined to scrap him if he can't prove he is financially valuable. Harlie faces immininent death. What does he do? He is an adult in intelligence, but immature. So he overloads his inputs by feedback and goes on a "trip." He writes kooky verse. And he gets on a binge of discussions about the nature of God and of human love, etc. When pressed for proof of his value he comes up with a demand for more funds to build a G.O.D. machine to make him omniscient. By now there's a question of his sanity as well of his value -- and even his father-figure psychologist can't be sure of the answer. The characters and their evolution in the story could not have been better handled. Harlie advances from precocious immaturity to a true person -- one both fully human and fully robotic. Gradually we see and believe as he transfers to being the consulting psychologist for Auberson in his troubles with the love affair that is the sub-plot of the novel. The long discussions on religion and love are done so well and with such a lack of the obvious or banal that they are as interesting as any plot development -- and so integrated that they are plot development. The technical background of Harlie is handled convincingly and with an inventiveness that makes it a major part of the problem and resolution. And the ending of the story isn't a simple solution to the immediate problem, but an extension and deepening of all that has gone before. It's a clever book -- and a darned good one. The novel is being issued in hardcover as a Science Fiction Book Club selection. Let me recommend that every member choose it. It's one of the best novels of the year. G ordon r. dickson showed himself top-flight many years ago and has gone right on doing so. For further evidence, see his The Outposter (Lippincott, #). Here is another of the novels in which Dickson takes on a young man who has come to a realization of the True Facts before anyone else in the culture knows what is developing. This book bears no direct relation to Dickson's famous Dorsai series, but the connection must be made by the reader, nevertheless. The novel takes place at an early stage of Earth's colonization of the stars. The problem is to make the colony worlds self-supporting and then to somehow resist the encroachment of aliens -- closely related problems. Added to all is the fact that Earth has let itself become a mess and now must ship out much of its population -- but it can't afford to support or defend its outcasts. I didn't find this novel quite as good as the best of the Dorsai series, but that may be due to the fact that -- as a professional writer who gets involved in the method of other writers -- I am becoming too familair with the way Dickson handles this type of idea. Nevertheless, Dickson's deep interest in the way the past must affect the future and his always ingenious handling of the sociology of aliens combine to make it a very good novel. His exploration of the value of outcasts from one culture when exposed to a different one gives this novel something not to be found in similar degree in the Dorsai books. I recopimend it highly. our old masters and a surprising one in his collection. The Gold at the Starbows End (Ballantine, #). The three short stories are excellent examples of the type of fiction we expect from him, one of which I was happy to be able to buy from him for Worlds of Fantasy. There are' also two very long' novelettes -- and here is where the surprise comes in. Both were published in #, so they are quite recent. Both are good. And both represent Pohl as most readers do not expect him to be. Most of the readers of this magazine must have read The Merchants of Venus Underground. This is straight adventure fiction in its best form. It takes the modern beliefs in what Venus is like -- which make fiction seem hopeless on a planet so inhospitable to life -- and gives us a realistic colony struggling at the edge of failure. Pohl then puts forward as hero the type of man who might survive there and builds a convincing story out of the conflicting interests of the hero and a tourist who hires him to explore the traces of a mysterious other race. Good from start to excellent finish. The Gold at the Starbow s End is a story I will not try to summarize. When I finished reading it, I called up Pohl to tell him it was the best novelette I'd read for several years -- and I was completely IF sincere. It should win a Hugo and a Nebula award -- it deserves all honors. It's a hard story to pin down, using some surprising extensions into the future from Pohl's interest in such things as number theory and mental development. It's very much Pohl at his best. And yet, somehow, the whole thing seems like a new and unexpected development in Pohl's writing career. The story is basically in the grand tradition of romance and human supremacy from the good old days, yet it mixes its vision with the bitter truth from modern science fiction. The novelette seems to have taken the so-called new wave and old wave, combined the best of both and come up with something uniquely its own self. The collection is Pohl at his top form, better than his previous ones. I can't recommend it too highly. A nother collection is a must, L but this one comes from more than a generation ago. John W. Campbell's Cloak of A'esir (Lancer, #, is back in print after far too many years. (This was originally issued in a small hardcover edition by Shasta Publishers, but never previously in softcover form.) Seven of the "Don A. Stuart" stories are here, including the two stories of Aesir and the matchless tale of the ultimate destiny of Man -- Forgetfulness, It's very good to have these stories available again -- and good to know that a great deal more of Campbell's fiction will soon be republished. In our field, anything from the early 'thirties seems almost prehistoric. While most of the Don A. Stuart fiction will stand the test of so much time, very few other stories from that distant past will endure so well. We've learned a great deal in forty years and we've constantly redefined science fiction as it has evolved. John Taine, Eric Temple Bell took up science fiction as a pure Some of the original covers and inside illustrations are still available! Some are already framed. Send stamped selfaddressed envelope for Ibt and prices. Box #, Greenwich Vllage Station, New York, N.Y. # avocation, or hobby. He was a distinguished mathematician, but his fiction dealt more with the emotional impact of science and the future than with science for itself. And for years one of his novels has been considered a classic. I read The Time Stream (currently available from Dover Publications at #) out of order and over a period of years as I could find the old magazines from #I and #. I could recognize its merits but was left with some loose ends -- natural under the conditions of my reading. Now I've had a chance to read the story in one sitting. I know now why it was considered a classic. It was a pioneering work dealing with variable time (though this is still confusing) -- and the emotional quality deriving from its sweeping concept was new and fresh when it was first published. The book deals with a nearly perfect society in the future (or past, since time here is circular) and present-day men who dip into the time stream to be swept into that society. But men of that "future" are also dipping into the time stream and going to the far past, tracing their own doom and the cyclic doom of all societies between. And, unfortunately, in Eos, which is the Eden of the future, there are the snake and the apple. The book still is not entirely clear and much of its luster seems to have faded with time and changing qualities of writing. There are no real characters and the motivations are often cloudy and unreal. Yet there is a fascination to The Time Stream. I think the volume is well worth the price, particularly since Dover has done its usual splendid job of printing and binding and has also included four of the original Frank R. Paul illustrations, very well reproduced. Dover Publications (# Varick Street, New York, N.Y. #) offer a large selection of sciencefiction and adventure classics that are always good buys. I would recommend that any serious reader write for their free list. Most bookstores carry only a few. Incidentally, Dover also sells a series of "Teach Yourself' Books. I've seen two of these, both priced at #: Cybernetics, by F. H. George; and Electronics, by W. P. Jolly. I have no intention of reviewing self-help books, but these are too good to pass up. They won't make a professional scientist out of anyone, but they will give the simplest and most accurate introduction to an understanding of their subjects I've seen. They also have lucid, modern diagrams -- something sadly lacking in many books -- and are worth more than the price asked for them.  IF to these symbiotic aliens. Yet life and love depended on a He! T he laboratory was roomy and equipped to the ceiling and I hated every antiseptic inch of it, especially the inches comprising the cage. I was in the cage and the only thing I had with me was a boot. It should have been a gun because that was what I had made a grab for after my hasty rush through the water toward the beach a short time ago. "Hey, dumdum," I called. The cage had no bars -- it was simply a big box with walls made of strong metal screen. I banged on the screen by the door and called again. My kidnaper was about twenty feet away and as busy as could be with a batch of chemicals and test tubes. He was big, blond, naked, beautiful and one-hundred-per cent insane. Every time he looked at me he went blind. Each time I said something to him he went deaf. And that made no sense for he seemed to be able to see and hear normally otherwise. I gave the door a kick and he cast a glance my way and chuckled. Plainly he knew that he had something in the cage and his senses had been alert enough for him to snatch me off the beach and carry me here. That much I could understand. He must have had a brainstorm because he rushed out of the lab and came back a few minutes later with a handful of weeds. There was a four-inch space at the bottom of the cage and he shoved the weeds under it and grinned at me. Evidently I was supposed to have lunch now. I tried to kick the weeds at him but he turned too quickly and sped back to his test tubes. "Which culture?" he said and picked up a vial and examined it. What amazed me was that I understood everything he said. His speech was similar to ancient Chinese and I was a language expert. "Hey, dumdum," I called. "Come and let me out. Im no animal -- I'm a girl. You know what a girl is." He didn't turn around, so busy was he preparing that culture. I slammed the screen with the flat of my hand and after a while he came over and looked in at me. For some reason he went blind again. Poking his nose against the mesh, he squinted and blinked. "I don't understand how I could have missed something as big as you," he said. "Where have you been hiding? I could have sworn there wasn't another large animal for miles and piles." I slammed the screen where his nose touched it and he' jumped back. "Let me out," I yelled. He stood a short distance away IF and squinted at me out of big sad eyes. T#I do it painlessly. And Til try not to kill you, but I can't promise anything." H e went back to his puttering and I paced the cage for several minutes. I put on the boot and tried to kick a hole in the screen. It was then that I noticed the watch on my wrist. I wasn't naked after all. Tying the piece of wire to the band, I dangled the watch outside the cage and swung it like a pendulum. All of a sudden the wire knot loosened and the watch fell on the floor about three yards away. Dumdum stepped on it when he came to visit me again. He said, "Ouch," and picked off the watch that stuck to his sole. He held it a fraction of an inch away from his eyes, blinked at it a few times and then threw it away. He came on over to the cage and looked at me. His eyes grew bleary and I knew that this time it wasn't only from blindness. He was feeling sorry because of what he was going to do to me. "'This thing in the cage isn't a guinea pig," I said. "You carried me from the lake, remember? I had two arms and legs, I was soft and cuddly and I stank. Damn you to hell, what's wrong with you?" "I have a feeling," he said. "This time it will work. You're going to give it all back to me. I'll have Radena again." "I don't know what that is but I hope it rots," I said and, leaping to the sidescreen, I kicked at the same spot I had kicked before. The wire began to give. I waited until he went away and then I unwound wires around the weak spot in the screen and kicked like crazy. A hole began to appear and I kept kicking until it was big enough to crawl through  Scrambling past the mad scientist, I got out of the building and ran around a corner and fell headlong into a cemetery. It took me a few seconds to realize what the place was. This was where he buried his guinea pigs after he murdered them...He had made a stone for each one and there must have been hundreds of them in the long narrow rows. Behind me he said, ?You must have teeth like razors the way you bit through that screen." "I'm not an animal," I told him at the top of my lungs. "I'm too bright to be an animal. I know what this place is -- it's where you put what youon't need anymore. Here, I'll show you." Digging like a fiend, I made a hole in the ground after which I hauled off the boot and buried it. "I see you're a carnivore." He kneeled and dug up the boot and gave it back to me. "You can't hide your bone here. This is sacred ground." He picked me up and took me to the cage and I sat in a corner and watched while he repaired the hole in the screen. "You're a smart little beast," he said. "You chose the weakest spot in this wall." I didn't want to savor the sight of him. But he was so damned beautiful. His back was big and smooth and I stared at it with a mixed kind of hunger. Then I saw something move on it and I stared more intently. All at once I recoiled. Quietly crawling to the screen I looked at his back. The skin rippled. I began to move away from him. Beautiful he might be, but he was untouchable. He was wearing a festoon. Half a mile from this lab was a pretty little lake with a patch of trees bordering one side of it. Hidden in the trees was a fancy space cruiser that should have put down in the New York port on Earth twenty hours ago. Landing on an uninhabited planet for no other reason than to take a bath in a lake was something only an idiot or a spoiled brat would do. I'd been called spoiled plenty of times. My name was Raven Pek and my father had too much money. He bought me anything I wanted but he didn't teach me how to be satisfied with myself. All I did was roam rround in my little ship, looking for something to do. My clothes were on the beach by the lake. The supposedly uninhabited planet had at least one person on it and that person had plucked me out of the water and made me his prisoner. As for the festoon -- it was only a tale. A festoon was a parasite that lived somewhere in the Vigil Cluster. It was said to be immortal and it lived inside a host. It didn't harm the wearer, in fact a symbiotic relationship was established that was beneficial to both. The festoon nourished itself on the host's spare energy and the host enjoyed good health. The story was a myth and everybody knew it. I knew it. But my kidnaper was wearing something translucent, something that rippled like water and it couldn't be a natural part of his body. Nor coiild it be a myth. M y brooding was interrupted when the cage door swung open and the mad chemist walked in to look down at me. IF "No," I yelled and tried to get away. He picked me up, carried me out and put me down on one of the slabs. Then he picked up a hypodermic. I don't know what made me decide to pray. I used to like religion when I was little, but I hadn't thought about God in years. Anyhow, I rose to my knees, mad a steeple of my hands and began saying goodbye to everything. This man was mad and I doubted my chances of surviving after he injected me with his alien solution. I didn't see his first reaction. I was certain that his vision cleared. Whatever it was that had been making him partially blind must have lost its control over him for a few moments. This was what I thought then. Later I realized his subconscious had forced him to see me before it was too late. But he did see me, not as an animal but as a human being. The hypo fell from his hand and shattered on the floor. I looked up and saw him standing there, his stiffening in shock. "Oh, God," he said softly and his hands rose to cover his eyes. All at once something weird happened. His hands dropped and his eyes looked different. They were clouded, as if a thin film had slid  over them. I saw myself fade from his vision and from his mind and it was as if I weren't there. Like a smear on a window I had been wiped out of his existence'. In amazement I watched as he began looking around the lab with a puzzled expression,watched as he finally gave a shrug and walked away. He went out of the building and I sat on the slab and tried to figure out what was going on. Eventually I followed him. H e was standing on a hill and I ran after him. He tramped through a large garden of vegetables, walked down a path between two streams of water and came to a halt. From where I stood I could see another building. This one was long and narrow, and the greater part of it was built into the ground so that only about the top four feet of it was visible. The entrance was a steep stairwell scarred from rain and wind and choked with decaying leaves. The man raced down the steps and threw himself at the two great doors. He battered at them with his fists, then looked anxiously about, as if he had forgotten how to open them. Several minutes passed before he pressed his shoulder against the back edge of the door on the right. Both immediately slid open and he hurried inside. I was right behind him. I had never seen anything like that building. It contained a long series of walled-in cubicles. Their front partitions were made of transparent glass or plastic. There must have been hundreds of them for they ran far beyond my line of vision, side by side, to the left and right of a narrow corridor, and each one of them held dummies, mannikins. At lt that was what I thought they were. The man stood before the pane of the first cubicle. He raised his hands and said, "It isn't done yet, Radena. We haven't lasted out the terror. But be assured that we wiU." X said behind him. "They're all dead." Living people couldn't sit as those people sat. There were four in that first cubicle -- a middle-aged man and woman, a young woman and a child. Dressed in blue robes, they sat stiffly on a velvet-coVcred couch and their eyes appeared to be focused straight ahead. The older couple was holding hands. The young woman beside them was slender and beautiful. A strand of her long golden hair touched the face of the child that lay. in her arms. "Radena," said the madman outside the cubicle. Taking a step forward, he lifted one hand and placed it flat against the clear window. "Speak to me. I want to hear you." After a long moment he sank to his knees and both hands went up to the glass. Behind him I said, "She's dead. She can't speak to you." All of a sudden there came a whirring sound followed by a metallic click and someone spoke. In this vlt of the dead there were noises, of living things. "Tero," said a woman. "I speak but it is not my real voice you are hearing. Your presence energizes the recording mechanism. I was compelled to make the record because my strength is nearly gone. Listen to me, Tero. We have called back all the physicians. They have joined us in the ancestral vaults. Look at them and know the truth. My darling, it is too late. We have no more time. The bacteria has penetrated the filtering systems and we are dying. You cannot find the serum in time to save us. I have called and called but you do not respond. Your mother and father beg you to come to us. Give it up, Tero. You broke your heart trying to save us and now eternity awaits. I want to enter it with you. Please hurry." The madman wept in his blindIF ness. His dull eyes lifted and saw movement where there was death and vacuum. His brain believed the lie. He perceived nothing that was real. "Patience, Radena," he said gently. "We'll fmd the cure. We are working night and day. Nothing can stop me. I love you." Slowly he climbed to his feet and turned away, walked past me without knowing I was there. He left the sanctuary and swiftly climbed the steps leading to the fields and streams. up my belt and gun and put them on. I left my clothes on the sand. From there I went to hunt for the festoons. In a nearby valley I found hundreds of them. In its independent state a festoon looked like a cube of glittering quartz a foot high and as many inches across. It appeared to be hard and impenetrable but legend said that it was soft. I approached a cube that rested in a patch of clover. Kneeling, I thrust my hands into the thing and it closed over me like a tender vise. As if from the other end of a long tunnel, a voice spoke in a hollow whisper. The inhumanness of the sound shocked me. This was the voice of alienness and it was intelligent. "Welcome," said the festoon. "You desire me for your own?" "No. I only want some information." Along the endless tunnel came the whisper, "In exchange for a sample of your life force?" "That depends on how much of it you consider a fair exchange." The cube seemed to flow around my wrists. "You are creative." "I assume that means I have energy to spare. But what if you decide to take it all?" "I destroy nothing," said the festoon. I wanted to yank my hands out of the thing and get away, but I remained still. "What do you do with the life force of a host?" "The word is 'companion.' We arc not parasites. We are happy with a companion and require but a small portion of his energy. Already I am using yours and you do not even notice. Festoons and Spenicki rose together from primal molecules. They care for lis. We love them. We live as one." "There is only a single Spenicki left." "We could not combat the disease and they perished one by one. A certain number concealed themselves in the ancestral vaults in hopes that the few immunes would find a cure. It was all for nothing. The companions are dead." "One of your kind is a criminal. It lives in the man Tero and controls his senses. It makes him blind and deaf." Did the hollow voice chuckle? "I know of no maverick festoon." "Never mind what you think you know. Tell me how to open the man's eyes and ears." "A festoon has little will of its own once it is insid a companion. Catch the man at a moment when his emotions are strong. Command him to hear, command his eyes to open and you will have the thing you desire. But you may not revel in his awareness. Beware of -- " "Don't lecture me," I Said. "What happens to you now that there are no more companions?" "We wait for others to come." "The maverick festoon in the man wants to own him as long as it can. It blinds him so that he knows nothing of what goes on about him. How long can this continue if no one interferes?" Like a whisper from the void came the answer: "For as long as he lives." "I'll put a stop to it. I'll force him to command the thing to come out ofhiih." "You are leaving me now?" I am. "Wait. Grant me total entrance." "No," I said coldly. "You deny your own spirit. Even as we communicate you grow warm. You desire me, yet you say no. My species lives in loneliness and hunger." "Release me." My hands came free in an instant. The festoon rested on the grass like a block of quartz and I swiftly walked away from it. Where was I going? To track a man, to trace his footsteps. I stalked Tero as if he were already my own. H e ate from his garden so that he would have the strength to continue his hunt for specimens.  Inside his body the maverick festoon nourished itself, lazed and perhaps dreamed and the thin portion of it which shbwed on Tero's back looked sleek and smooth and glittered in the sunlight. He was easy to watch and easyo follow. He caught a wriggling creature in the fields. I followed him into the lab and watched him murder it with his experimenting. Then I stood behind him as he wept and buried it in the cemetery. "Festoon, you're a disgrace to your species," I said. Tero gave no sign that he heard me. With a chisel he carved a IF picture of the animar on a fine piece of stone. "You've blinded him completely to me, haven't you?" I said to the creature he wore. I knew it could hear me because it was using Tero's senses as if they belonged to it. "You would have let him kill me," I said. "It was his subconscious that forced you to let him see me at the last minute." Tero went away" to find another specimen and I let him go. I was hungry but the vegetables in the garden were not to my liking. I found an orchard of white fruit that tasted sweet and, as I stood and ate and did some dreaming of my own, something touched my foot. A festoon rested against my leg. In a moment it flowed around my foot and cherished it. I started to object and then changed my mind. "What is that noise?" "You hear with keenness," said the festoon. The sound was gone then. Or was it? I looked about. There were only the orchard, the ground, the clear sky, yet there was an odd throbbing sound in the air and it seemed to be coming from nearby. "Someone is mourning," I said. "Walk through the trees for a little while and you will see," said the festoon, releasing my foot. Beyond the orchard was a valley where thousands of festoons congregated. There were large ones and small ones. Like chunks of ice they decorated the valley and their glitter was blinding. Beside me came the single specimen in a graceful rolling motion. As soon as it paused I plunged my. foot into it. "What are they doing?" I said. "Listen." Their grief was heavy and their need intense. Pressing cloe to one another, they sought comfort in an almost desperate manner. Suddenly they perceived my presence. In an instant their minds approached mine. I questioned. They answered. They let me see what had gone before on the planet. F irst came the dawn of the world and this was marked by upheavals. Then came the afternoon and the birth of man. Genes crossed in strange patterns that produced a two-fold entity, a double psyche or a twinned soul. A Spepicki newly born was a human infant and a festoon. The second was no more alien than the first. The two were one organism. On rare occasions when a festoon abandoned its young companion the child died. The festoon also died. The presence of the creature was essential to the child until it arrived at puberty, after which it rejected the festoon. This joined the common pool of festoons and waited until summoned by any Spenicki who desired it. They were unusual twins, spawned together to separate as the human soul groped toward maturity, the one to stand and wait, the other to strive for outward meaningfulness. The Spenicki were gentle. They were also intelligent. In the beginning they went to the stars, traded their culture and goods with people on other worlds, became known as the scholars of the heavens. Their language was adopted by many and the knowledge of the festoons spread. But there was much wrangling between star systems and eventually the Spenicki withdrew and went no more into space. On their own world they grew mightily, but not as warriors. They built, but not a great deal. Their scattered cities were temporary shelters where travelers paused to rest. The Spenicki were natural rovers and they had once again begun to look at the stars when the epidemic came among them. It was ironic that the brotherhood of festoon and man brought about the death of half the partnership. Knowledge of medicine was scant. Who needed a physician when one could take for himself a festoon who possessed the world's knowledge? The twin saw into the labyrinths of the mortal body, viewed it as a house to be kept in order, had the power to control the inner workings and knew those inner workings intiihately. One day came a storm with lightning flashes so severe that the higher reaches of the atmosphere may have been disturbed. Soon after that the dust began drifting down. It was yellow and heavy and soon after it started to fall the Spenicki began to die. The festoons grew frantic because all their efforts to destroy the bacteria failed. Now there were no more companions -- there was no more joy, no warmth in the brotherhood because there were no more brothers. Now the festoons gather and feared and became almost human. They wanted a miracle. They wanted me to give them a miracle. I understood what they meant. I was to go back where I came from, bring my people here and present them to their brothers. Were we not all one and the same? We weren't the same and I told them so. The rest of the galaxy wanted no part of them. Festoons were taboo. M y explanation puzzled them, made them ask more questions. IF How could I teach a thing that it was repulsive when it had been conditioned to believe otherwise? I told them about racism-. This bewildered them. I talked of prej. udice and they said it was illogical. I explained independent pride and they eagerly agreed that this was a good thing and then they spoke of a two-in-one singular twin. I continued talking and they continued to reply, but neither of us could compromise. "You are not moved by our desolation," said the festoon who was by now wrapped securely around my foot. I denied it. "We mourn," they said. I shrugged. "Our lifespan is great," they said and my glance turned cold.  "We are your brothers," they said and I denied it in a loud and forceful voice. "Another," they said and I understood and became angry. I said, "My kind are all the same." "Unlikely," said the festood at my feet. The creature suddenly rejected me without being commanded. It set me free as if the contact with me were unpleasant. That made me more angry than I had been. "I'm sorry," I said to the throng in the valley. "You can't expect me to do the impossible. Maybe the Spenicki wanted you but nobody else does." They didn't hear. They were as deaf as Tero. away from the valley and away from the orchard, tramped through the fields and climbed the hill, stood on the path and gazed down at the sanctuary whre the dead remnants of the Spenicki race sat and waited for time to destroy their atoms. I knew the fertoon in Tero was crafty. Would it permit him to know that his family was dead, let him know the world was empty, take a chance on the brother's choosing swift and final dissolution? Of course it wouldn't. The festoon was fighting for its life. It had blocked me out of Tero's awareness because I was strange. Anything strange might mean the end. Allow the brother to mow his lawn, dig in his garden, hunt for guinea pigs and grovel before the shrine of Radena, but never for an instant let him suspect the truth. I had wasted enough time. Climbing onto the roof of the sanctuary I gathered a pile of sticks and dead leaves. Then I set my gun at its lowest heat and set fire to the pile. Black smoke began to sweep upward and the wind took it. Several minutes passed and Tero came out of the lab. He saw the smoke and came running. "Stop," he cried. I knew he was shouting at the wind. The festoon wouldn't permit him to see me. Breaking a limb from a tree, Tero jumped to the roof of the building and swept the burning pile onto the ground. As I had known he would, he immediately went down to the building to make certain that all was safe. I was there and waiting for him. He raced in through the door and hurried over to the first cubicle. "Radena, are you well?" "Radena is not well," I said, but his ears were sealed by the festoon. I gazed at him for a long moment before I turned and aimed the gun. What I wanted to do was blat the face of Radena, but then the effect might be ruined. He had to see her body topple over as the vacuum inside the cubicle was destroyed by inrushing air. The gun was still set at its lowest power. I didn't increase it. Aiming at the top left corner of the transparent waH, I squeezed the trigger. The heat beam took out a corner of the wall and a section of the roof. Not waiting to see the bodies fall from the couch, I whirled to Tero. "See your dead woman?" I said. "Look at her and then forget her. Put her in the past where she belongs. Live in the present and in the future with me. I'm here. I'm real. I'm not a ghost." The emotions of Tero were stronger than the grip of the festoon and he suddenly saw what was happening in the cubicle. All at once his body went rigid. I could see him trying to deny the vision before him but his emotions were too intense and the delicate chains of the festoon were annihilated. My hand was pressed against my mouth. I tasted blood and knew I had bitten myself. I had wanted to take pleasure from his pain but I couldn't. The horror on his face was not satisfying to me. His terror seemed to grow in intensity and I was afraid he would die of shock. past him, hurried out of the building. I didn't stop running until I was well away from the place. He came after me, I watched as he climbed the hill and I wanted to shout at him to hurry, to look alive, to be aware of me as a girl who had wanted him from the very beginning. He moved so slowly and he looked so old. The sunlight was being cruel to him. IF But it wasn't the sun. His spirit was dead. He reached the rise of the hill and came to a halt and I found myself looking at a zombie. His eyes were filled with tears. His arms hung at his sides. Even the brightness of his hair had faded. Limp and almost lifeless, he stood and looked at the ground. I shivered and gritted my teeth. "Get rid of the festoon," I said harshly. "It's your enemy. It lied to you." For a long minute he made no response. Then his head finally came up and for the Hrst time he looked at me. I thought I was prepared for that first glance, in fact I was ready for practically anything, but no scorn or rage blasted at me from his eyes. Not even hatred. What he gave me was indifference -- nothing. I was there but I didn't matter. The distance between us might as well have been a light-year. Raising both arms toward the sky he said, "I tried," and his voice was gentle. "In my own way I live and die. Festoon, go from me." The creature came out of his pores like thick perspiration and this required no more than a few seconds. Its glittering mass collected on his chest and clung there, seemingly loath to let him go. From where I stood I could almost hear its faint wail of sorrow. "Goodbye, old friend," said Tero. Then I knew. I swayed with shock. This was no maverick festoon. Tero's will had been its will. It had hidden only what he asked to have hidden. The thing had always done what he wanted. He had preferred illusion and pain to the peace of death. He had remained in his blind torment for the purpose of seeing the one face that held meaning for him. Now that was gone. The festoon loosened its hold on his chest and dropped to the ground. I knew something else then. I knew death. I saw it come in waves. Tero stood silent and unafraid as time wreaked its final havoc upon him. For how long had the festoon brother held his body together as glue held bits of old paper? For a thousand years? For ten thousand? Or more? His marvelous physique was destroyed before my eyes. The gold of his hair became gray. Bones crumbled. Flesh shrank. The whole of what had been a man caved inward like weakened sod. In front of my eyes Tero died. His great bulk swayed, tottered, fell apart. What scattered at my feet were a few bits of debris.  and R C' i(ht ' s wA, ' (' w V ( ,;)( !  Dear Mr. Jakobsson: In the Reading Room for August, #, Lester del Key considers the feasibility of a brief description of science fiction as opposed to fantasy. He states that, in effect, one is forced to accept no definition at all or only a circular one. Now it is a simple and easf proposition in formal logic to show that a dictionary either contains an undefined term or else all of its definitions are circular. Mr. del Keys observation is an extension of this proposition, no doubt as readily demonstrated within the propositional calculus. Fortunately, for he had a sound reason for doing so, he refused to accept this formal rebuff and went on about the business at hand, that of phrasing a succinct statement of what sf is about. Mr. del Rey is not a man easily put upon, or off, and his explication of the state of affairs b convincing. His key words and phrases are these: rationality, fiction, alternate, and sf is that fiction which deals rationally with alternate possibilities. It will be objectionable to some that science has short shrift in his formulation. Science is one of the actualities ofsf Science is the binder, no less than the J base. To paraphrase from the ancient # texts of rhetoric, science is the unity  and coherence of sf, whereas specula tion provides the emphasis and the ; difference.  It is science that raises the coefficient " of credibility to the level of consent. It is possible to go a little more in the  direction that science is essential. The universality of science is a major component of the credibility of sf And sf is the point of maximal convergence of fiction imitating science and fiction , imitating reality. Foe sf imitates science in the Aristotelian sense that art imitates nature. There is a pervasive instinct for "other' and it is science that , is, in this context, the compelling frtime that holds the work in its proper sh(qe. Science is public, knowledge and has a social dimension (John Ziman). It is upon the first of these, among other things, that fiction relies for concurrence with its inventions and for its background and milieu. Fiction is a part of the social fabric and sfis a part of the fabric of science, if only a patch thereon. The "scientific method" is an integral part of any conception of science and it is implicit that, the use of science in sf brings with it the scientific method and leads to agreement with and reliance upon the imaginative constructs of this fiction. It is the sf writer's use of the precepts of the scientific method that lends corroboration to what otherwise would be an unconvincing narrative. Thus it seems at least to me that Mr. del Rey's definition should have a favorable reception -- with the proviso that science is a necessary addition.As to fantasy -- Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye... Alexander Doniphan Wallace Graduate Research Professor University of Florida Dear Mr. Jakobsson: With all due respect to Mr. del Rey, fm afraid I find his definition of sf much too narrow.  Fiction that deals rationally with alternate possibilities is obviously one mans description of what he personally likes -- not necessarily what others like. And it manages to exclude most classic sf if not much of contemporary science fiiction. Certainly Doc Smiths improbable novels cannot be aassified as sf under Mr. Del Reys definition -- theyre not possible alternatives -- they re fantasies. And yet people obviously think of them as sf despite their logical absurdity. (Unless science took a swift turn to the left we just didnt have the technology to build a ship o Skylark's size and potential in #.) Also, what does possible mean? Isnt the background and development of Seven Days in May possible -- and isnt the story s setting a "possible alternative -- and isnt it "fiction handled rationally -- and doesn't this, by Mr. del Reys definition, make it perfect sf? Yet aren't novels of the Seven Days in May genre precisely what Mr. del Rey condemns? Further, Mr. del Reys definition is apparently born of a feeling on his part that the boundaries of modern sf are becoming too blurred. Why he considers this bad I frankly don't understand -- to me it indicates that sf is filled with vitality, a vitality that cannot be contained by narrow definitions. Describing sf, giving it regular shape and size, is like trying to contain the wind -- a little bit always escapes and you're forced to become just a little larger in order to contain it all. It was once quite easy to pinpoint sf -- it was pulp fiction, badly written, adolescently conceived, dealing with journeys within the realm of scientific imagination. That was a generation ago and it covered everything from the worst to the best. Now things have changed and we find it impossible to explain just what it is about sf that we like or that, for us, makes it unique. Perhaps the most honest definition of science fiction is Damon Knight's: "Science fiction is what were pointing at when we say 'science fiction.  Gerard F. Conway Briarwood, N. V. More on this to come -- you'd better believe it. congratulates winner of the # Hugo to Your Scattered Bodies #o (The first of the Rhrerworld novels -- portions of which eppeared in this magazine. framing -- Artists reproduction of your sign with detailed description of your personal characteristics -- Includes Human Zodiac Supplement -- #. Specify Ohio #. Psychic. Send Name, Birthdate, Time. Location and #. magazirtes. Arkham House. Fantasy Press. LoveN.J. #. SF books, etc., for sale by other collectors. Sample Philosophy: The Nature of Form in Process; Information processing from Plato to present (hardcover). I I I pp... #, postage included. Writers: Publishing short-short SF with impact. Also, original, American #. 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Starting soon, many radio stations will once again be featuring this famed drama series adapted from stories appearing either in Broadcasting will be resumed with new the foremost names in science fiction. X Minus I will thrill you, reward you, more than ever. So watch for it. Listen to it. Enjoy it! For further information, contact your local station or write to: Box # Seymour, Conn. # Being sundry notes for an abortive ethnography of the Asadi of Bosk Veld, fourth planet of the Denebolan system, as compiled from the journals (both private and professional), official reports, private correspondence, and tapes of Egan Chaney, cultural xenologist, by his friend and associate, Thomas Benedict. Preliminaries: reverie and departure From the private journals of Egan Chaney: There are no more pygmies. Intellectual pygmies perhaps, but no more of those small, alert, sway-backed black people of necessarily amenable disposition who lived in the dead-andgone Ituri rain forests -- a people, by the way, whom I do not wish to sentimentalize (though perhaps I may). Pygmies no longer exist -- they have been dead for centuries. But on the evening before the evening when Benedict dropped me into the singing fronds of the Synesthesia Wild under three bitter moons they lived again for me. I spent that last evening in base camp rereading Turnbull's The Forest People. Dreaming, I lived with the people of the Ituri. I underwent nkumbi, the ordeal of circumcision. I dashed beneath the belly of an elephant and jabbed that monstrous creature's flesh with my spear. Finally I took part in the festival of the molimo with the ancient and clever BaMbuti. All in all, I suppose, my reading was a sentimental exercise. Turnbull's book had been the first and most vivid ethnography I had encountered in my undergraduate career -- and even on that last night in base camp on the hostile world of BoskVeld, a planet circling the star Denebola, his book sang in my head like the forbidden lyrics of the pygmies' molimo, like the poignant melodies of BoskVeld's moons. A sentimental exercise. What good my reading would do me among the inhabitants of the Synesthesia Wild, I had no idea. Probably none. But I was going out there and on the evening before my departure, the day before my submersion, I lost myself in the forests of another time -- knowing that for the next several months I would the waking and wakeful prisoner of the hominoids who were my subjects. We had killed off all the primitive peoples of Earth, but on paradoxical BoskVeld I still had a job. And when Benedict turned the copter under those three antiquegold moons and flew it back to base camp like a crepitating dragonfly, I knew that I had to pursue that job. The jungle, however, was bleak -- and strange -- and nightmarishly real; and all I could think was There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no Methods: a dialogue From the professional, notebooks of Egan Chaney: I was not the first Earthman to go among the Asadi, but I was the first to live with thein for an extended period of time. The first of us to encounter the Asadi was Oliver Bow Aurm Frasier, the man who gave these hominoids their name -- perhaps on analogy with the word Ashanti, the name of an African people who still exist. IF but more likely from the old Arabic word asad meaning lion. Oliver Bow' Aurm Frasier had reported that the Asadi of BoskVeld had no speech as we understood this concept, but that at one time they had possessed a "written language." He used both these words loosely. I'm sure, and the anomaly of writing without speech was one that I hoped to throw some light on. In addition, Frasier had said that an intrepid ethnographer might hope to gain acceptance among the Asadi by a singularly unorthodox stratagem. I will describe this stratagem by setting down here an imaginary conversation that I could have had with Benedict (but didn't). the way, am Egan Chaney), what do you plan on doing after I drop you all by your lonesome into the Synesthesia Wild? You aren't thinking of using the standard anthropological pl#y, are you? You know, marching right into the Asadi hamlet and exclaiming, "I am the Great White God of whom your legends foretell." ter of fact. I'm not going into the Asadi clearing until morning. have to copter you into the Wild in the middle of the goddamn night? centric. No, No, Benedict, don't revile me. The matter is fairly simple. Frasier said that the Asadi community clearing is absolutely vacant during the night -- not a soul remains there between dusk and sunrise. The community members return to the clearing only when Denebola has grown fat and coppery on the eastern horizon. dropped at night? your copter a chance to fade and be forgotten and to afford me the opportunity of walking into the Asadi clearing with the first morning arrivals. Just as if I belonged there. You'll be very inconspicuous, Chaney. You'll be accepted immediately -- even though the Asadi go about naked, have eyes that look like the murky glass in the bottoms of old bottles and boast great natural collars of silver or tawny fur. Oh, indeed -- yes. stratagem that I hope to employ "acceptance through social invisibility." The principle is again a simple one. I must feign the role of an Asadi pariah. This tactic gains me a kind of acceptance because Asadi mores demand that the pariah's presence be totally ignored. He is outcast not in a physical sense, but in a psychological one. Consequently my presence in the clearing will be a negative one, an admission I'll readily make -- but in some ways this negative existence will permit m more latitude df movement and observation than if I were an Asadi in good standing. very complicated. It leaves me with two burning questions. How does one go about achieving pariahhood and what happens to the anthropologist's crucial role as a gatherer of folk material -- songs, cosmologies, ritual incantations? I mean, won't your "invisibility" deprive you of your cherished one-to-one relationships with those Asadi members who might be most informative? question first. Frasier told us that the Asadi don't communicate through speech. That in itself pretty well limits me to observation. No need to worry about songs or incantations. llieir cosmologies I'll have to infer from what I see. As for their methods of interpersonal communication -- even should I discover what these are, I may not be physically equipped to use them. The Asadi aren't human, Ben. benedict: I'm aware. Frequently, listening to you, I begin to think speechlessness might be a genetically desirable condition. All right. Enough. What about attaining to pariahhood? much about which offenses warrant this extreme punishment. However, we do know how the Asadi distinguish the outcast from the other members of the community. fender's collar of fur. Since all Asadi possess these manes, regardless of sex or age, this method of distinguishing the pariah is universal and certain. pariah? remember to shave evej# day. Frasier believed that his hairlessness -- he was nearly bald -- was what allowed him to make those few discoveries about the Asadi we now possess. But he arrived among them during a period of strange inactivity and had to content himself with studying the artifacts of an older Asadi culture, the remains of a huge winged pagoda in the Synesthesia Wild. Too, I've heard that Frasier didn't really have the kind of patience that's essential for field work. a little. Couldn't one of the Asadi be shorn of his mane accidentally? He'd be an outcast through no fault of his own, wouldn't he? An artn ficial pariah? Frasier reported that the Asadi have no natural enemies -- that, in fact, the Synesthesia Wild seems to be almost completely devoid of any life beyond the Asadi themselves. In any case, the loss of one's collar through whatever means is considered grounds for punishment. That's the only offense that Frasier pretty well confirmed. What the others are, as I said, we really don't know. void of other life -- save inedible botanicals -- Chaney, what do the poor Asadi live on? either. what do you plan to live on? I mean, even Malinowski condescended to eat now and again. At least, that's what I hear. in, Ben. I'm going to carry in sufficient rations to see me through a week. But eachxweek for the next several months you'll have to make a food and supply drop in the place where you first set me down. I've IF already picked the spot -- I know its distance and direction from the Asadi clearing. It'll be expensive, but the people in base camp -- Eisen in particular -- have agreed that my work is necessary. You won't be forced to defend the drops. Why once a week? mine. Since I told him I was going, to refuse any sort of contact at all during my stay with the Asadi -- any contact with you people, that is -- he decided that the weekly drop would be the best way to make certain, occasionally, that I'm still alive. Besides food I'll take in nothing but my notebooks, a recorder, some reading material and maybe a little something to get me over the inevitable periods of depression. need immediate help? twice, but I'll always have the flares if things get really bad. Placenol and bourbon, too. Nevertheless, I insist on complete separation from any of the affairs of base camp until my stay among the Asadi is over. this? I don't mean why did Eisen decide we ought to study the Asadi so minutely. I mean, why are you, Egan Chaney, committing yourself to this ritual sojourn among an alien people? There are one or two others at base camp who might have gone if they had had the chance. no more pygmies... End of simulated dialogue on initial methods. I suppose I have made Benedict out to be a much more inquisitive fellow than he actually is. All those well-informed questions! In truth, Ben is taciturn and sly at once. But when you read the notes for this ethnography, Ben, remember that I let you get in one or two unanswered hits at me. Can friendship go deeper? As a man whose life's work involves accepting a multitude of perspectives, I believe I have played you fair, Ben. Forgive me my trespass. Contact and assimilation From the private Journals of Egan Chaney: Thinking There are no more pygmies there are no more pygmies there are no... I lay down beneath a tree that resembled an outsized rubber plant and I slept. I slept without dreaming -- or else I had grotesque nightmares that, upon waking, I suppressed. A wrist alarm woke me. The light from Denebola had begun to coppercoat the edges of the leaves in the Synesthesia Wild. Still, dawn had not quite come. ,The world was silent. I refused to let the Wild distort my senses. I did not wish to cut myself on the crimsons and the yellows and the orchid blues. Neither did I haveany desire to taste the first slight treacherous breeze nor to hear the dawn detonate behind my retinas. Therefore I shook myself awake and began walking. Beyond the brutal need of having to maintain my direction I paid no attention to my surroundings. The clearing where the Asadi would soon congregate compelled me toward it. That fateful place drew me on. Everything else slipped out of my consciousness -- blazing sky, moist earth, singing fronds. Would the Asadi accept me among them -- on external signs alone -- as they negatively accept their outcasts? Upon this hope I had founded nearly six months of future activity -- not a whit of my master strategy had I based on the genuine substance of this condition. Externality vs. substance. It was too late to reverse either my aims or the direction of my footsteps. Let the doubt die. Pattern the sound of your footfalls after the pattern of falling feet -- those falling feet that converge with ' you upon the clearing where the foliage parts and the naked Asadi assemble like a convention of unabashed mutes. I so patterned the sounds of my footfalls. Glimpsed through rents in the fretwork of leaves, an Asadi's flashing arm. Seen as a shadow among other shadows on the ground, the forward-moving image of an Asadi's maned head. The Wild trembled with morning movement. I was surrounded by unseen and half-seen communicants, all of us converging. And then the foliage parted and we were together on the open jungle floor -- the Asadi clearing, the holy ground perhaps, the unadorned territory  of gregariousness and communion, the focal point pf Asadi life. The awesome odor of this life -- so much ter. I adjusted. Great gray-fleshed creatures, their heads heavy with violent drapings of fur, milled about me, turned about one another, came back to me, sought confirmation of my essential whatness. I could do nothing but wait. I waited. My temples pulsed. Denebola shot poniards of light through the trees. Hovering, then moving away, averting their murky eyes the Asadi -- individual by individual, I noticed -- made their decision and that first indispensable victory was in my grasp: I was ignored! Xenology: in-the-fieid report FroM the, professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: I have been here two weeks. Last night I picked up the second of Benedict's food drops. It is fortunate that they come on time, that they arrive on the precise coordinates where Benedict first set me down. The Asadi do not eat as we do and the Synesthesia Wild provides me with foodstuffs neither in the way of edible vegetation nor in that of small game animals. I cannot tolerate the platnts. As the biochemists in base camp predicted, they induce almost immediate vomiting or their furry bitterness dissuades me from swallowifig tlm. There are no animals. The jungle is alive, but with writhing fronds and with the heat, the steam, the infrasonic vibrancy of continual photosynthesis. Rainwater I can drink. Thank God for that, even though I boil it before truly considering it potable. ' I have reached a few purely speculative conclusions about the Asadi. With them nothing is certain, nothing is fixed. Their behavior, though it must necessarily have a IF deep-seated social function, does not make sense to me. At this stage, I keep telling myself, that's to be expected. You must persist, you must refuse to be discouraged. Therefore, I extrapolated from my own condition to theirs. I asked myself. If you cant subsist on what BoskVeld gives you -- how do the Asadi? My observations in this area (and for fear of Benedict's kindly ridicule I hesitate to put it this way) have borne fruit, have given me the intellectual nourishment to combat despair. Nothing else on BoskVeld has offered me consolation. In answer to the question. What do the Asadi eat? I can say, quite without fear of contradiction. Everything that I do not. They appear to be herbivorous. In fact, they go beyond the unsurprising consumption of plants: they eat wood. Yes, wood. I have seen them strip bark from the rubber trees and ingest it without qualm. I have watched them eat pieces of the very heart of young saplings, wood of what we would consider a prohibitive' hardness -- even for creatures equipped to process it internally. Three days ago I boiled down several pieces of bark, the sort of bark that I had seen many of the young Asadi consume. I boiled it until the pieces were limply pliable. I managed to chew the bark for several semi-profitable minutes and, finally, to swallow it. Checking my stool nearly a day later I found that this meal had gone, right through me. What, after all, does bark consist of? Cellulose. Indigestible cellulose. And yet the Asadi, who possess teeth not much different from ours, eat wood and also digest it. How? Again I have to speculate. I am hindered by my lack of detailed knowledge about anything other than human beings. Nevertheless, hunkering here on the edge of the Asadi clearing as the dusk grows more and more ominous, hunkering here and talking into a microphone (Testing, one -- two -- three, testing, testing), I will offer all you hypercritical and exacting people in the hard sciences an analogy. A ridiculous analogy perhaps. If you don't like it I'll undoubtedly defer to your judgment and back off. But just as primitive shamans must attempt to explain the world in their own terms, #, Egan Chaney, isolated from my fellows, must conjure up explanations of my own. Here is one: I believe that the Asadi digest wood in the same manner as Earthly termites -- that is, through the aid of bacteria in their intestines, protozoa that break down the cellulose. A symbiosis, Eisen would say. And let that be a lesson to us all. It's time that people learned to get along with one another. Bacteria and Chinamen, legumes and pygmies... This is later. Tonight I have to talk, even if it's only to a microphone. With the coming of darkness the Asadi have disappeared again into the jungle and I'm alone. For the first three nights that I was here #, too, returned to the Wild when Denebola set. I returned to the place where Benedict dropped me, curled up beneath the overhanging palm leaves, slept through the night and then joined the dawn's inevitable pilgrimage back to this clearing. Now I remain here through the night. I sleep on the clearing's edge, just deep enough into the foliage to find shelter. I go back into the jungle only to retrieve my food drops. Although the Asadi disapprove of my behavior, I am an outcast and they can do nothing to discipline me away from my unacceptable conduct without violating their own injunction against acknowledging a pariah's existence. As they depart each evening a few of the older Asadi, those with streaks of white in their mangy collars, halt momentarily beside me and breathe with exaggerated heaviness. They don't look at me because that's taboo. But I, in turn, don't look at them -- I ignore them as if they were the pariahs. As a result I've been able to dispense altogether with those senseless and wearying treks in and out of the clearing that so exhausted me at first. My behavioral studies during the day, however, go on unabated. To absolve myself of what may seem a lack of thoroughness I ought to mention, I suppose, that on my fourth and fifth nights here I attempted to follow two different Asadi specimens into the jungle in order to determine where they slept, how they slept and what occupi their waking time away from the clearing. I was unsuccessful in these attempts. When evening comes the Asadi disperse. This dispersal is complete. No two individuals remain together, not even the young with their parents. Each Asadi finds a place of his own, a place utterly removed from that of any other member of his species. (This practice, by the way, runs counter to my experience with every other social group that I've ever studied.) On the fourth and fifth nights, then, I was humiliatingly outdistanced by the objects of my pursuit. Nor can I suppose that I'd have any greater success with different specimens, since I purposely chose to follow an aged and decrepit-seeming Asadi on the first evening and a small prepubescent creature on the second. Both ran with convincing strength, flashed into the trees -- as if still arboreal by nature -- and then flickered from my vision. All three moons are up, burntgold and unreal. I'm netted in by shadows and my growing loneliness. Field conditions, to be frank, have never before been quite so austere for me and I've begun to wonder if the Asadi were ever intelligent creatures. Maybe I'm studying a variety of Denebolan baboon. Oliver Bow Aurm Frasier, though, reported that the Asadi once had both a written "language" and a distinctive system of architecture. He didn't bother to tell us how he reached these conclusions -- but the Synesthesia Wild, I'm certain, contains many secrets. Later I'll be more venturesome. But for the present I've got to try to understand those Asadi who are alive today. They're the key to their own past. One or two things -- final ones -- before I attempt to sleep. First, the eyes of the Asadi. These are somewhat as Benedict briefly described them in the imaginary IF dialogue that I composed a week ago today. That is, like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that I've noted that the eye really consists of two parts -- a thin transparent covering, which is apparently hard, like plastic, and the membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It's as if each Asadi were bom wearing a built-in pair of safety glasses. Frasier's impression of their eyes as murky is one not wholly supported by continued observation. What he saw as "murkiness" probably resulted from the fact that the eyes of the Asadi, behind the other lens or cap, are constantly changing colors. Sometimes the rapidity with which a sienna replaces an indigo -- and then a green the sienna, and so on -- makes it difficult for a mere human being to see any particular color at all -- maybe this is the explanation for Frasier's designation of their eyes as "murky." I dont know. I am certain, though, that this chameleonic quality of the Asadi's eyes has social significance. And a second thing: Despite the complete absence of a discernible social order among the Asadi I may today have witnessed an event of the first importance to my unsuccessful, so far, efforts to chart their group relationships. Maybe. Maybe not. Previously, no real order at all existed. Dispersal at night, then congregation in the morning -- if you choose to call that order. But nothing else. Random no set times for eating, sex, or their habitual bloodless feuds; random plunges into the jungle at night. Upon Denebola's setting no the best SF I have seen." "I greatty enjoy your books -- "I think, so far. that No. #. ThB ProbabtUty Man, is the best one in the series. Please continue." "I enjoy your books immensely. Thanks." "Keep going, Mr. Wollheim, I think you may have a hit on your hands."... well-designed and attractive. I admire the variety of both author and artist, and hope you can keep both going."... your books and your company are greatl... keep up the fantastic worki Lots of luck in the future."  very best: Ron Goulart. Ron certainly has the talent. Schmitz. And Schmitz is a lion at it. Need we say more? V creature ever heads in the same direction twice. What's a humble Earthman to make of all this? A society held together by institutionalized antisocialness? What happened today leads me irrevocably away from that possibility. Maybe. This afternoon an aged Asadi whom I had never seen before stumbled into the clearing. His mane was grizzled, his face wizened, his hands shriveled, his gray by bleached to a filthy cream. But so agile was he in the Synesthesia Wild that no one detected his presence until his incongruously clumsy entry into the clearing. Then everyone fled from him. Unconcerned, he sat down in the center of the Asadi gathering place and folded his long naked legs. By this time all of his kinsmen were in the jungle staring back at him from the edge of the clearing. Only at sunset had I ever before seen the Asadi desert the clearing en masse. Hence my certainty that what happened today is of prime importance to my mission here. But I haven't yet exhausted the strangeness of this old man's visit. You see, Moses, he came accompanied. And not by another Asadi. He came with a small purplishblack creature perched on his shoulder. It resembled a raven, a bat and a deformed homunculus all at once. But whereas the old man had great round eyes that changed color extremely slowly, if at all, the creature on his shoulder had not even a pair of empty sockets -- it was blind. It lacked any organs of sight. It sat on the aged Asadi's shoulder and manipulated its tiny hands compulsively, tugging at the old man's mane, opening and closing them on empty air, then tugging again at its protector's grizzl collar. Both the old man and his beastlikemanlike familiar had a furious unreality. They existed at a spiritual as well as a physical distance and I noted that the rest of the Asadi -- those who surrounded and ignored me on the edge of the "communion" ground -- behaved not as if they feared these sudden visitors but rather as if they felt a loathsome kinship with them. This is difficult to express. Bear with me, Eisen. Maybe another analogy will help. Let me say that the Asadi behaved toward their visitors as a fastidious son might behave toward a father who has contracted veneral disease. Ambivalence is all in such cases. Shame and respect, distance and intimacy, love and loathing. But the episode concluded abruptly when the old man rose from the ground, oblivious to the slow swelling and sedate flapping of his huri (that's a portmanteau word for fury and harpy that I've just coined) and stalked back into the Wild, scattering a number of Asadi in his wake. Then everything went back to normal. The clearing filled again and the ceaseless and senseless God, it's amazing how lonely loneliness can be when the sky contains three jagged, nuggetlike moons and the human being inside you has involuntarily abdicated to the essence of that which should IF An eerie, exciting book for young readers by the finest living writer of fantastic fiction Ray Bradbury Illustrated by joe Mugnaini. In this bizarre tale, which flawlessly combines horror with humor, mysterious character named Carapace ClavicleB- Moundshroud escorts a group of boys back through Time -- to ancient Egypt, Druid Britain, and other hair-raising places -- to discover the diverse origins of Halloween. Ages #I up. # Alfred  A Knopf command only your outward life. That's a mouthful, isn't it? What I mean is that there's a small struggle going on between Egan Chaney, the cultural xenologist, and Egan Chaney, the quintessential man. No doubt it's the result more of environmental pressure than of my genetic heritage. That's a little anthropological allusion, Benedict. Don't worry about it. You aren't supposed to understand it. But enough. Today's atypical occurrence has sharpened my appetite for observation -- it has temporarily calmed my internal struggle. I'm ready to stay here a year if need be, even though the original plan was only for six months -- because a self divided against its stand cannot state. No, it can't. At least, not without fear of contradiction. Hey ha and hey nonny. I'm going to bed. I may not touch my good old Yamaga mike for a week. Dear God, look at those moons! The Asadi clearing: a clarification From the professional journals of Egan Chaney: My greatest collegiate failing was an inability to organize. I am pursued by that specter even oday. Consequently, a digression of sorts. In looking over these quirkish notes for my formal ethnography, I realize that I may have given the student the completely false idea that the Asadi clearing is a small area of ground, say, fifteen by fifteen, measuring in meters. Not so. As well as I am able to determine there are approximately a thousand Asadi individuals on hand daily -- this figure includes mature adults, the young and those intermediate between age and youth. Of course, during all my time in the Synesthesia Wild I've never been completely sure that the same individuals return to the clearing each morning. It may be that some sort of monumental shift takes place in the jungle, one group of Asadi replacing another each day. But I doubt it. The Wild encompasses a finite area, after all, and I have learned to recognize a few of the more distinctive Asadi (more on this point later, gentle reader). A thousand still seems about right to me: a thousand grayfleshed creatures strolling, halting, bending at the waist and glaring at one another, eating, participating in random sex acts, grappling like wrestlers, obeying no time scheme, sequence, or apprehensible rationale. Such activity requires a little space. Therefore the reader may not cheerfully assume that the Asadi communion ground is a fiveby-eight mud flat between a BoskVeld cypress and a malodorous sump hole. Not at all. Their communion ground has both size and symmetry and the Asadi maintain it discrete from the encroaching jungle by their unremitting daily activity. I will not quote you dimensions, however. I will say only that the clearing has the rectangular shape, the characteristic slope and the practical roominess of a twentieth-century football field. Pure coincidence. I'm sure. Astroturf and lime-rendered ehdzones are conspicuously absent. A dialogue of self and soul From the private correspondence of Egan Chaney: The title of this exercise is from Yeats, dear Ben. The substance of the dialogue, however, has almost nothing to do with the poem of the same name. I wrote this imaginary exchange in one of my notebooks while waiting out a particularly long night on the edge of the Asadi clearing (just off the imaginary thirty-yard-line on the south end of the field, western sideline) and I intend for no one to read it, Ben, but you. Its lack of objectivity and the conclusions drawn by the participants make it unsuitable for any sort of appearance in the formal ethnography that I have yet to write. But you, Ben, will understand that a scientist is also a man and may perhaps forgive me. Since even futbol fanatics of Century required announcers to describe the action or binoculars through which to see it, I herewith provide a program. You can't tell the players without a program. The numbers on the backs of the players' metaphysical jerseys are lf and Soul. Self  The Cultural Xenologist Soul  The Quintessential Man Manger(s): Egan Chaney self: This is my eighteenth night in the Synesthesia Wild.  Even though we lived only a building away from each other in base camp, Chaney "mailed" me this letter and I received it in my postal box for probeship dispatches. We, never discussed the "letter" contents. Thomas Benedict. IF let that go. What have you learned? self: Most of my observations lead me to state emphatically that the Asadi are not fit subjects for anthropological study. They manifest no purposeful social activity. They do not use tools. They have less social organization than did most of the extinct Earthly printates. Only the visit, four days ago, of the old "man" and his frightening companion indicates even a remote possibility that I am dealing with intelligence. How can I continue? comtempt for the revulsion that daily grows in you. Because the Asadi are, in fact, intelligent -- just as Oliver Bow Aurm Frasier said they were. damn it, how do I know what you insist is true? Blind acceptance of Frasier's word? Chaney. The eyes, for instance. But even if there weren't any signs you'd know tlmt the Asadi are as intelligent in their own way as you or I. Wouldn't you, Egan? telligence haunts me. the facts. You've twisted things around horribly. souL: You are not the one who is haunted, Egan Chaney, for you're too rational a creature to be the prey of poltergeist. I am the haunted one, the bedeviled one, the one ridden by every insidious spirit of doubt and revulsion. that word twice. Why do you insist upon it? What does it mean? despise their every culturally significant -- or insign ificant -- act. They curdle my essence with their very alienness. And because affect me so you, too. Dr. Chaney, hate them -- for you are simply the civilized veneer on my primordial responses to the world. You are haunted not by the Asadi, friend, but by me. haunted by them? Is that how you view it? though you're aware of my hatred for the Asadi, you pretend that that portion of my hatred which seeps into you is only a kind of professional resentment. You believe that you resent the Asadi for destroying your objectivity, your scientific detachment. In truth this detachment does not exist. You feel the same powerful revulsion for their alienness that works in me like a disease, the same abiding and deep-seated hatred. I haunt you. self: With hatred for the Asadi? Admit that even as a scientist you hate them. Because we killed the pygmies, every one of them. How can I say, I hate the Asadi,  hate the Asadi,... when we killed every pygmy? Even though, my God, I do. Daily life: in-the-field report From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: Once again it's evening. I've a lean-to now. It protects me from the rain much better than did the porous roof of the forest. I've been here twentytwo days. My flesh has mildewed. Beneath this mildewed flesh my muscles crawl like the evil snakes that BoskVeld doesn't possess. I am saturated with Denebola's garish light. I am Gulliver among the Yahoos and even my own familiar voice speaking into this familiar little recorder doesn't comfort me. This, however, isn't what you want to hear. You want facts. You want my conclusions about the behavior of the Asadi. You want evidence that we're studying a life form with at least a fundamental degree of the ability to ratiocinate. The Asadi have this ability, I swear it. I know it. But in my first week or two here my knowledge stemmed almost entirely from a hunch, a conviction with no empirical basis. But slowly the evidence for intelligence has begun to accumulate. Okay. Let me, then, deliver myself of an in-the-field report as an objective scientist and forget the hunches of my mortal self. Somebody in grad school used to say that. I'm sure. At any rate, the rest of this tape will deal with the daily life of the Asadi. A day in the life of. A typical day in the life of. Except that I'm going to cap my reporting of mundane occurrences with the account of an extraordinary event that took place just this afternoon. Like Thoreau, I'm going  to compress time to suit my own artisticscientific purposes. So hang on, gang. IF At dawn the Asadi return to their football field. For approximately twelve hours they mill about in the clearing doing whatever they care to do. Sexual activity and quirkish staring matches are the only sorts of behavior that can in any way be called "social" -- unless you believe call their daylight way of life Indifferent Togetherness. But when the Asadi engage in coitus, their indifference dissolves and gives way to a brutal hostility -- both partners behave as if they desire to kill the other and frequently this is nearly the result. (I haven't yet witnessed the birth of an Asadi, in case you're wondering. Maybe the bearii of young occurs only in the Synesthesia Wild, the female self-exiled and unattended. I can't yet say for certain.) As forthe staring matches, they're of brief duration and involve fierce gesticulation and mane-shaking. In thesq head-to-head confrontations the eyes change color with astonishing rapidity, flashing through the entire visible spectrum -- and maybe beyond -- in a matter of seconds. I'm now prepared to say that these instantaneous clmnges of eye color are the Asadi equivalent of speech. I'm sure that you, Eisen, would have ventured this theory much sooner than I have, had you been here -- but I'm uneasy about the biological aspects of any cultural study and must go slow. Three weeks of observation have finally convinced me that the adversaries in these staring matches control the internal chemical changes that trigger the changes in the succeeding hues of their eyes. In other words, patterns exist. And the minds that control these chemical changes cannot be priniitive ones. Nor can I believe that the changes in eye color result from involuntary reflex. The alterations are willed. They're infinitely complicated. Old Oliver Bow Aurm was right. The Asadi have a "language," Stilly for all the go it does me they might as well have none. I continue to go through each day as if I were an amateur naturalist charting the activities of the inhabitants of my antfarm rather than a cultural xenologist attempting to find an ally against the monumental wilderness of space. One day is agonizingly like another. And I can't blame my pariahhood, for the only things even a welladjusted Asadi may participate in are sex and staring. It doesn't pain startling avidanca that madam scianca confirms tha raality of talapathy, ciairvoyanca, pracognition, and psychokinasis An Excursion into Parapsychology #, now at your bookatora me overmuch to be outcast from participation in these. To some extent, I'm not much more of a pariah than any of these creatures. We're all outcast from life's feast, so to speak, with no bridge clubs, Saturday-night dances or homestudy groups to enliven our lives. Unlike every other society I've ever seen or read about, the Asadi don't even have any meaningful communal gatherings, any festivals of solidarity, any unique rituals of group consciousness. They don't even have families. The individual is the basic unit of their "society." What they have done, in fact, is to institutionalize the processes of alienation. Their dispersal at dusk simply translates into physical distance the incohesiveness by which they live during the day. And have we not learned over long centuries that such alienation is soul-destroying? How do the Asadi continue to live as a people? For that matter, why do they do so? But enough questions. As I mentioned earlier, something out of the ordinary happened today. It happened this afternoon. (It's still happening, I guess.) And although this occurrence poses more questions than it answers, it has rescued me from the vitiating sameness of Asadi daily life. As before, this strange event involves the old man who appeared in the clearing over a week ago. Him and with him, of course, the blind reptilian creature perched on his shoulder like a curse -- the huri. Until today I'd never seen two Asadi eat together. As an Earthman from a western background, I Find the practice of eating alone a disturbing one. Disturbing and depressing. After all. I've been eating alone for over three weeks now, and I long to sit down in the communal mess with Benedict and Eisen, Morrell and Jonathan, and everyone else at base camp. My training in strange folk ways and alien cultural patterns hasn't weaned me away from this longing. As a result, I've watched with interest, and a complete lack of comprehension, the Asadi sitting apart from their fellows and privately feeding -- sucking on roots, chewing up leaves, and, as I reported a week ago, actually consuming the bark and heartwood of the trees. But doing so alone, apart, as a seemingly necessary exercise in isolation. Today this changed. At the beginning of the hour before the fall of dusk, the old man staggered into the clearing under the burden of something damnably heavily. I was aware of the commotion at once. Like last time, every one of the Asadi fled from the floor of the assembly ground to the edge of the jungle. I observed from my lean-to. My heart, dear Ben, thrumped like a toad in ajar. I had wondered if the enigmatic old boy would ever return and now he was back. The huri on his shoulder scarcely moved -- it appeared bloated and insentient, a rubber doll without a trace of life. During the whole of the old man's visit it remained in this virtually comatose state, upright but unmoving. The aged Asudi (whom I've begun to regard as some sort of aloof and mysterious chieftain) paused in the center of the clearing. IF looked about him and then struggled to remove the burden from his back. It was slung over his shoulder blades by means of two narrow straps. Straps, Eisen: S-T-R-A-P-S. Can you understand how I felt? Nor did the nature of the burden itself cause my wonder to fade. For, you see, what the old man was lowering to the ground was the rich, brownish-red carcass of an animal. The meat glistened with the falling light of Denebola and its own internal vibrancy. The meat had been dressed, Eisen, it had been preapred and the old man was bringing it to the clearing as an offering to his people. He set the carcass on the dusty assembly floor and withdrew the straps from the incisions in the meat. Then he stood back five or six steps. Slowly a few of the adult males began to stalk back into the clearing. They approached the old man's offering with diffident steps, like thieves in darkened rooms. I noticed that their eyes were furiously changing colors -- they were speaking to one another with the urgency of a hundred electric kaleidoscopes. All but the old man who had brought the offering. I could see him standing away from the meat and his eyes -- like unpainted china saucers -- were the color of dull clay. His eyes didn't alter even when several of the Asadi males fell upon the meat and began ripping away beautifully veined hunks, silently pushing and elbowing and clawing at one another. Then more and more of the Asadi males descended upon the carcass and all about the fringes of the clearing the females and the young made tentative movements out of the shadows. I had to leave my lean-to to see what was going on. And ultimately I couldn't see anything but bodies and manes and animated discord. Before most of the Asadi were aware, Denebola had set. Awareness grew, beginning with the females and the young on the edges of the clearing and then burning inward like a grass fire. The first individuals to become aware flashed into the Wild. Others followed. Eventually, in a matter of only seconds, even the strongest males raised their bloody snouts to the sky and scented their predicament. Then they bounded toward the trees, disappearing in innumerable directions -- like the dying light itself. But here is the strange part. The old man didn't follow his people back into the Synesthesia Wild. He's sitting out there in the clearing right now. When all the Asadi had fled he found the precise spot where he had placed his offering, hunkered down, lowered his buttocks, crossed his legs, and assumed sole ownership of that sacred piece of stained ground. I can see hipi out there now, damn it. The moons of BoskVeld throw his shadow in three different directions and the huri on his shoulder has begun to move a little, rustling its wings and nodding its blind head. This is the first night since I came here that I haven't been alone and -- I don't like it. No, indeed, fellows, I don't like it at all. Personal involvenient: The Bachelor From the private notebooks of Egan Chaney: My meetings of The Bachelor, as I called him almost from the beginning, represented an unprecedented breakthrough. It came on my #th day in the field -- although, actually I had noticed him for the first time three days prior to his resolute approach and shy touching of my face. That touch, which I permitted solely out of respect for Mother Science, frightened me more than anything else that had happened to me in the Wild. As far removed from a threat as a woman's kiss, that touch frightened me more than the first appearance of the old chieftain, more than the nightmare shape of the huri, more even than the chaos of rending and eating that followed the old man's gift of the flamebright carcass. I had been alone for weeks. Now, without much preamble, one of the Asadi had chosen to acknowledge my presence by touching me. Touching me! I must back up a bit. I must back up to the night that the Asadi chieftain, against all custom, stayed #n the clearing. My first realization that he intended to stay was another moment of minor terror. I'll confess, but the implications of his remaining overrode my fear. Wakeful and attentive, I sat up to study his eveiy movement and to record anything that might conceivably be construed as significant. The old man didn't move. The huri grew restive as the night progressed, but it didn't leave the old man's shoulder. The pair of them stayed in the clearing all that night and all the following day. They sat on the stained ground. When twilight came on that second day they departed with all the rest. I despaired. How many days would I have to suffer through before something else unusual occured? Would I spend the next five months watching the Asadi engage in brutal sex and senseless staring matches? But on my #th day on the edge of the clearing in the Synesthesia Wild, I saw The Bachelor. As far as I know I saw him for the first time. Certainly, if I had ever seen him before I had paid no attention. This anomalous event again broke the tedium for me -- even though I didn't then fully understand what was happening. I knew only that the endless shuffling back and forth of the Asadi had given way momentarily to an instant of almost pure communion. The Bachelor was a completely unprepossessing specimen. I judged him to be three or four years beyond Asadi adolescence. Gray-fleshed and gaunt, he had a patchy silver-blue mane of so little length that the others surely considered him a virtual outcast. In fact, in all the time I knew him he never once took part in either coitus or the ritualized staring of the fullmaned Asadi. When I first felt his eyes upon me The Bachelor was on my imaginary twenty-yard line, looking toward my lean-to from a pocket of his ceaselessly moving brethren. He had chosen me to stare at. The fact that he did not receive a cuffing for violating the one heretofore inviolable Asadi taboo confirmed for me the negligibility of his tribal status. It was he IF and I who were brethren, not he and the creatures whom he genetically resembled. But in one extremely salient particular he didn't resemble the vast majority of Asadi. His eyes; his hard, emotion-veiling eyes. These were exactly like the old chieftain's -- translucent but empty, enameled but colorless, fired in the oven of his mother's womb but brittle like sun-baked clay. Never did The Bachelor's eyes flash through the rainbow spectrum as did the prismatit: eyes of his comrades. They remained clayey and cold, a shade or two lighter than his flesh. And it was with these eyes, on my #th day in the field, that The Bachelor took my measure. The noonday heat held us in a shimmering mirage, our gazes locked. "Well," I shouted, "don't just stand there making faces. Come over here where we can talk." My voice had no effect on the teeming Asadi -- it had no effect on The Bachelor. His posture unchanged, he regarded me with no more -- and no less -- interest than before. Of course, he could not "talk" with me. My human eyes don't even have the virtuosity of traffic lights -- and since The Bachelor's never changed color, he couldn't even communicate with his own kind. He was, for all intents and purposes, a mute. But when I called out to him, I believed that his dead eyes indicated a complete lack of intelligence. It did not then occur to me that they might be the external sign of a physical handicap, just as dumbness in human beings may be the result of diseased or paralyzed vocal cords. Instead I decided that The Bachelor was stupid. I'm still not entirely certain that this initial judgment was not correct. "Come on over here," I said again. "It doesn't bother me that you're mentally deficient." The Bachelor continued to stare. He didn't approach. The distance between us measured almost thirty meters and occasionally a roving Asadi would intervene, its body blocking our vision. "Even if you had a thumbnail for a brain," I mumbled, "you wouldn't be at a terrible disadvantage among this crew, old boy. I haven't seen anyone but the old chieftain even attempt to test their intelligence. And untested intelligence, like a cloistered virtue, isn't worth a -- " I used an ancient and revered obscenity. The singing fronds of the Synesthesia Wild did not censure me for so saying. Some forty-odd light-years and a halfdozen or so centuries had invested the word with a mystic respectability and I was too tired to be. more profane. The Bachelor didn't respond to my inaudible cynicism. He stared at me for the rest of the afternoon. I tried to occupy myself with notetaking, then with a lunch of some of the rations Benedict had dropped and finally with cursory observations of other Asadi. Anything to avoid that implacable gaze. It was almost a relief when dusk fell. But that evening my excitement grew and I realized that something monumental had happened -- I had been acknowledged. The next day The Bachelor paid me little heed. He wandered forlornly in and out of the slow aimless nies of his aimless kindred, a lanky gray clown unheeded by everyone but me. I was disappointed that The Bachelor did not demonstrate the same interest in me that he had shown the day before. On the #th day he resumed his shameless staring and I was gratified. He followed a procedure different from his stationary strategy of the first day -- he moved tirelessly about the  clearing, weaving in and out of the clusters of Asadi, but always staying close enough to the western sideline to be able to see me. His eyes remained as dead as the insides of two oyster shells. I felt better the following morning, the morning of the #th day -- something was happening. The light from glowering Denebola seemed softer, the tropic heat less debilitating. I left my lean-to and went out on the assembly ground. Bathed in the pastel emptiness of dawn, I stood there as the Asadi came flying through the tendrils and fronds of the Synesthesia Wild to begin another day of Indifferent Togetherness. Their bodies broke through the green veils on the clearing's edge like a thousand swimmers diving into a spring and soon I was surrounded. Surrounded but ignored. Great ugly heads with silver or blue or clay-white or tawny manes bobbed around me, graceless and unsynchronized. And above us the sky of BoskVeld stretched out into the attenuated vastness of a universe infinitely less caring than even those dancing heads. The sun burned the morning away and at last I found The Bachelor. Undoubtedly he had had me in his sight all that morning -- but, moving with circumspection among his fellows, he had not permitted me to see him. I had frett over his apparent absence. Then Denebola was directly overhead and The Bachelor threaded his way through a dissolving clump, of bodies and stopped not five yards from me, atremble with his own daring. I, too, trembled. I feared that at any moment The Bachelor would fall upon and devour me -- instead he steeled himself to the task he had set and began his approach. I stood my ground. The gray head, the patchy silver-blue mane, the twin carapaces of his eyes -- all moved toward me. Then the long gray arm rose toward my face and the humanoid hand touched the depression under my botton lip, touched the most recent of my shaving cuts, touched me without clumsiness or malice. And I winced. A ninniiig chronology: weeks pass Day #: After achieving this unusual one-to-one contact with the Asadi native (hereafter referred to as The Bachelor) I did my best to And some method of meaningful communication. Nothing worked. Not words, of course. Not hand signals. Not signs in the dirt. Not even awkward charades. Nevertheless, The Bachelor could not be dissuaded from following me about. Once when I left the clearing for lunch he very nearly followed IF me into my lean-to. I was almost surprised when, at the fall of dusk, he left with the others -- he had been so doggedly faithful all afternoon. Despite this desertion I'm excited about my work again. Tomorrow seems a hundred years off and I can't believe that I ever thought seriously about scrapping the first painful returns from my presence here. Day #: Nothing. Nothing at all. The Bachelor continues to follow me around, never any more than eight or nine paces away -- his devotion is such that I can't urinate without his standing guard at my back. He must think that he's found an ally against the indifference of the others, but what his listless devotion gains for either of us, I can't say. All I know is that I've begun to tire of his attentions, just as he seems to have tired of the monotonous routine that he will not, for anything, abandon... Life in the clearing goes on as always. The others ignore us. Day #: I am ill. The medicine Benedict dropped ine during an earlier bout with diarrhea is almost gone. It's raining. As I write this. I'm lying on my pallet in njy lean-to nd watching the Asadi slog back and forth across the floor of their assembly ground. The odor of their morose gray dampness assaults me lika a poison, intensifies my nausea. In and out the Asadi go, in and out and back and forth... I have formulated the interesting notion that their entire way of life in which I have had to struggle to see even one or two significant patterns, is itself the one significant and on-going ritual of their species. Formerly I had been looking for several minor rituals to help me explain their society -- it may be that they are the ritual. As the poet asked, "How tell the dancer from the dance?" But having formulated about the Asadi I'm still left with the question: iVhat is the significance of the ritual that the Asi themselves are? An existential query, of course. Maybe my illness has made me think this way. Maybe I'm going melodramatically insane. The Bachelor sits cross-legged in the dripping, steaip-silvered foliage about five yards from my lean-to. His mane clings to his skull and shoulders like so many tufts of matted, cottony mold. Thought he's been dogging my footsteps for eleven days now, I haven't been able to induce him to enter this ramshackle shelter. He always sits outside and stares at me from beneath an umbrella of shining fronds -- even when it's raining. As it is now. His reluctance to come under a manufactured roof may be significant. If only I could make the same sort #f breakthrough with two or three others that I've made with The Bachelor. Day #: A tinge of my illness remains. So does The Bachelor. The two have begun to get mixed up in my mind... Nothing else to report. In and out, in and out. Daybreak and sunset, sunset and daybreak. The Great Shuffle goes on. Day #ft After the Asadi fled ipto the jungle last night, I trudged toward the supply pickup point where Benedict leaves my rations of food and medicine each week. The doses of Placenol that I've been giving myself lately, shooting up the stuff like a skidrow junkie (figuratively speaking, of course), have gotten bigger and bigger -- but Eisen, at the outset of this farcical expedition, assured me that P-nol in any quantity is absolutely nonaddictive. What amazes me beyond this sufficiently amazing attribute of the drug, however, is the fact that Benedict has been dropping more and more of it each week, providing me with a supply almost exactly commensurate with my increasing consumption. Or do I use more because they drop more? No, of course not. Everything goes into a computer at base camp. A program they ran weeks ago probably predicted this completely predicatable upsurge in my "emotional" dependency on P-nol. At any rate I'm feeling better. I've begun to function again. While I trudged, a haunting uneasiness seeped into me frpm the fluid shadows of the rubber trees. I heard noises. The noises persisted all the way to the drop point -- faint, unidentifiable, frightening. Let me record this quickly: I believe that The Bachelor lurked somewhere beyond the wide leaves and trailing vines where those noises originated. Once, in fact, I think I saw his dull eyes reflect a little of the sheen of the evening's first moon. But he never completely revealed himself to me -- if, indeed, he was there at all. A typed note on the supply bundle: "Look, Chaney, you don't have to insist on # nonassociation with us. You've been gone almost two months. A conversation or two with genuine hoo-man beans won't destroy your " precious ethnography. Let us drop you a radio. You can use it in the evenings. If you want it, send up a flare tomorrow night before all three moons have risen and I'll copter it out to the drop point the next day. So, how about it, Egan? Your Friend, Beneficent Ben." But of course I don't want a radio. Part of this business is the suffering. I knew that before I came out here. I won't quit until things have at last begun to make a little sense. Day # (Pre-dawn): I haven't been asleep all night. Yesterday evening, just six or seven hours ago, I went into the jungle to retrieve Benedict's eighth supply drop. Another typed note on the bundle: "Chaney, you're a pig-headed liinny. You don't even know how to conjugate your own first name. It should have been Ego instead of' Egan. I hope you've learned how to talk Asadi. If you haven't I'm certain that you'll have gone mad by now and started preaching neopentecostal sermons to the trees. What a picture. Send up a flare if you want anything. Ben." I wouldn't 've thought Ben quite so sardonically literate. On the way back to the clearing I heard noises again. The Synesthesia Wild echoed with the plunging gray ness of an indistinct form. I am certain (I think) that it was The IF Bachelor spying on me, retreating clumsily before my pursuit. Yes, even with a backpack of new supplies weighting me down I determined to followthese noises, these supicious tickings of leaf and twig. And although I never overtook my prey, I was able to keep up! It had to be The Bachelor, that half-seen grayness fleeing before me -- none of his fellows would have permitted me so much as a glimpse of the disturbed foliage in the wake of their disappearance. I went deeper and deeper into the Wild, away from the assembly ground. Splotches of moonlight fled across the jungle with us. When, panting, I broke into an opening among the trees I all at once realized that the noises drawing me on had ceased. I was clearing, rising against the sky like an Oriental pagoda, there loomed over me the broad and impervious mass of something built, something made. The resonances of Time dwarfed me. Thunderstruck, I felt panic climbing up the membranous ladder in my throat. My own startled gasp startled me again... ,Its hard to accept the fact that Vve seen what Vve seen. But that pagoda, temple, whatever, is actually out there! Old Oliver Bow Aurm studies the ruins of one of these structures -- he learned only that the Asadi may have once had a civilization of some consequence. From this intact pagoda, however, # undoubtedly learn things that will eclipse even Frasiers discoveries. But God knows when Fll get out there again...I stared up at the lofty wings of this sudden artifact, then turned, plunged back into the jungle and raced wildly away, my backpack thumping. Where was I going? Back to the assembly ground. Which way to run? I didn't have to answer this question. Blindly I moved in the direction of the suspicious tickings of leaf and twig that had resumed shortly after I fled the pagoda. The Bachelor again? I don't know. I saw nothing. But in two hours' time I had regained the safety of my leanto... Now I'm waiting for the dawn, for the tidal influx of Asadi. I'm exhilarated and I haven't even touched my new supply of Placenol. Day # (Evening): They're gone again. But I've witnessed something important and unsettling. The Bachelor did not arrive this morning with the others. At least he didn't take up his customary position eight or nine paces behind me. That sort of peripatetic vigilance does not go unnoticed and this morning I missed it. Totally ignored, I wandered through the Asadi, looking for The Bachelor. He was nowhere among them. Could he have injured himself in our midnight chase through the Wild? By noon I was both exhausted and puzzled -- exhausted by my search and my lack of sleep, puzzled by The Bachelor's apparent de. fection. I came to my lean-to and lay down. In a little while I had fallen asleep, though not soundly. Tickings of leaf and twig made my eyelids flicker. I dreamed that a gray shape came and squatted on the edge of the clearing about five yards from where I lay. Like a mute familiar, the shape watched over me... Groans and thrashings about. Thrashings and hackings. The underbrush beside my lean-to crackled beneath the invasion of several heavy feet. Bludgeoned out of my dream by these sounds, I sat up and attempted to reorient myself to the world. I saw The Bachelor. I saw three of the larger and more agile males bear him to the ground and pinion him there. They appeared to be cooperating in the task of subduing him! I watched their actions intently. What they did next confirmed my spur-of-the-moment evaluation. Cooperation it was indeed. The three males, who ignored me with all the contemptuous elan of aristocrats, picked up The Bachelor and bore him to the center of the clearing. I followed this party onto the assembly floor. As they had done during the old cheiftain's two unexpected visits, the Asadi crowded to the sidelines -- but they did not disappear into the jungle. They remained on the field, buffeting one another like the rabid spectators at one of those nearlegendary "bowl" games. I was the only individual other than the four struggling males out in the center of the assembly floor. I looked down at The Bachelor. His eyes came very close to changing colors, going from their usual clay-white to a thin, thin yellow. But I couldn't interfere.They shaved his mane. A female carrying two flat, beveled stones came out of the crowd on the eastern perimeter of the field -- she gave the stones to the males. With them the males scraped away the last sad mangy tufts of The Bachelor's silver-blue collar. Just as they were about to finish, he gave a perfunctory kick that momentarily dislodged one of his tormentors, then acquiesced in his shame and lay on his back staring at Denebola. The entire operation had taken only about ten minutes. The three males sauntered off from their victim -- and the satisfied spectators, aware that the barbering was over, strolled liesurely and with all their former randomness back into the clearing. Now, of course, they ignored The Bachelor with a frigidity they had once reserved for me. I stood in the center of the clearing waiting for The Bachelor to get to his feet, the two of us a blurred focal point on the slowly revolving wheel of the Asadi Dance of Indifference. But for a long time he didn't move. His narrow head, completely shorn, scarred by their barbering stones (the first tools I had seen any of them but the chieftain employ), looked unnaturally fragile. I leaned down and offered him my hand. A passing Asadi jostled me. Accidentally, I think. The Bachelor rolled to his stomach, rolled again to avoid being stepped on, curled into the foetal position -- then unexpectedly sprang out of the dust and dodged through a broken file of his uncaring kinsmen. Did he wish to attain the edge of the Wild? Intervening bodies blocked my view of him, but I suppose he disapIF peared into the trees and kept on running. All extremely interesting, of course. What does it signify? My hypothesis this evening is that the Asadi have punished The Bachelor for leading me last night, whether he did so inadvertently or on purpose, to the ancient pagoda in the Synesthesia Wild. His late arrival in the clearing may have been an ingenuous attempt to forestall this punishment. I can't think of anyother reasons why the Asadi should have moved to make him even more of an outcast than he already was. All this ambivalence mystifies me. It also convinces me that I can't permit the monotony of ninetenths of their "daily life" to becloud my eyes to the underlying meaning of it all. Patience, dear God, is nine-tenths of cultural xenology. And the punishment of weariness (since I'm discussing punishments, cruel and otherwise) runs concurrently with the xenologist's term of patience. Consequently andor hence. I'm going to bed. Day #: The Bachelor has not returned. Knowing that he's now officially a pariah, he chooses to be one on his own terms. During his absence I've been thinking about two things: #) If the Asadi did in fact punish The Bachelor because he led me to the pagoda, then they realize full well that I am not simply a maneless outcast. They know that I'm genetically different, a creature from elsewhere, and they consciously wish me to remain ignorant of their past. #) I would like to make an expedition to the pagoda. With a little perserverence it shouldn't be exceedingly difficult to find, especially since I plan to go during the day. Unusual things happen so rarely in the Asadi clearing that I can afford to be gone from it for a little while. One day's absence should not leave any irreparable gaps in my ethnography. If the expedition goes well that absence may provide some heady insights into the ritual of Asadi life. I wish only that The Bachelor would return. Day #: Since today was the day of Benedict's ninth scheduled drop I decided to make my expedition into the Wild early this morning. I Ben himself might well put it. First: I would search for the lost pagoda. Second: if I failed to find it I would salvage some part of the day by picking up my new supplies. Therefore, before dawn, off I went. The directional instincts of human beings must have died Wild stirred with an inhuman and gothic calm that tattered the thin fabric of my resourcefulness. Late in the afternoon Benedict's helicopter saved me. It made a series of stuttering circles over the roof of the jungle -- at one point I looked up and saw its undercarriage hanging so close to the tree tops that a spy monkey might have been able to leap aboard. I followed the noise of the helicopter to our drop point. From there I had no trouble getting back to the clearing. Today, then, marks the first day since I've been in the Wild that I've not seen a single member of the Asadi. I miss The Bachelor as I would miss a prodigal child. I await each dawn with newly rekindled expectations. But the entire night lies before me and the only way to get through it is to sleep. Day #: Even though I could not justify an excursion on the basis of another drop (the next one is still two days away), I went looking for the pagoda again. The last four days have teen informational zeroes. I had to get away from the clearing, had to take some kind of positive action, no matter how foolish that action might seem. And it was passing foolish -- I got lost again, terrifyingly so. Green creepers coiled about me -- the sky disappeared. And this time I knew that Benedict's helicopter would not fly overhead -- not unless I could wait another two days for it. How, then, dear diary, did our hero get home? Once again, the suspicious tickings of leaf and twig. I simply followed them. Now I'm back in my lean-to again, confident that The Bachelor is still out there and steadfast in my decision to make no more expeditions until I have help. Day #: The Bachelor is back! Day #: Yesterday I could record nothing but the simple fact of the Bachelor's appearance in the clearing. This evening I'll note only three or four concomitant facts. The Bachelor still has very little mane to speak of and the Asadi treat him as a total outcast. These last two days he has demonstrated a considerable degree of independence in his relations with me. He continues to follow me about, but less conspicuously and with occasional side trips that remove him altogether from my sight. He no longer hunkers beside my lean-to at. all. A made dwelling-place may put him uncomfortably in mind of the pagoda to which he led me and for whose discovery to an outsider he was publicly humiliated. I find this new arrangement a felicitous one, however. A little privacy is good for the soul. Day #: The note on yesterday's supply bundle: "Send up a flare tomorrow night if you wish to remain in the Wild. Eisen is seriously considering hauling you out of there. Only a flare will save you. The flare will mean, 'I'm learning things. Don't remove me from my work.' No flare will mean either that your stay has stopped being profitable or that you've reached your limit. My personal suggestion, Egan, is that you do nothing, just sit tight and wait for us. Okay? Your friend, Ben." I've just sent up two goddamn flaries. Day # will go down in cultural-xenological history as Egan Chaney's personal Fourth of July. Day #: I'm holding my own again. Thirty days ago I made my second excursion into the Wild to find the elusive pagoda. I've survived almost an entire month without venturing away from the assembly ground. Most of my time in the clearing has been devoted to noting individual differences among the Asadi natives. Since their behavior for the IF most part manifests a bewildering uniformity I've necessarily turned to the observation of their physical characteristics. Even in this area, however, most differences are more apparent than real -- I've found few useful discriminators. Size has some importance. The ability of the eyes to flash through the spectrum is another discriminator of sorts. But the only Asadi who don't possess this ability in a complete degree are the old chieftain and The Bachelor. Nevertheless, I can now recognize on sight several Asadi other than these prominent two. I've tried to give descriptive names to these recognizable individuals. The smallest adult male in the clearing I call Turnbull, because his stature puts me in mind of Colin Turnbull's account of the pygmies of the Ituri. A nervous fellow with active hands I call Benjy, after Benedict. The old chieftain continues to exert a powerful influence on my thinking. His name I derived by simple analogy. Him I call Eisen Zwei. The Bachelor now seems intent on retaining his anonymity -- his mane has grown very little since the shaving. I would almost swear that he plucks it at night in the Wild, keeping it short on purpose. Who is to say? These last few days he's avoided even me; that is, after he ascertains my whereabouts in the morning and then again in the evening, as if this simple knowledge suffices to maintain him secure all day and then through the uncertainty of night on BoskVeld. The bloom, I suppose, has gone off our romance. Good. We're both more comfortable. Today was another drop day. I didn't go out to retrieve my parcels. Too weary, too bloodless. But I've sworn off Placenol and the attendant psychological lift has made my physical weakness bearable. My parcels will be out there tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to read Odegaard's official report on the Shamblers of Misery. And then sleep. Sleep sleep sleep. Day #: Eisen Zwei, the old chieftain, came back today! In thumbing through this notebook I find that I first saw him enter the clearing exactly ninety days ago. Has a pattern begun to emerge? If so, I can't interpret its periodicity. I don't even know, come to think of it, what sort of life span the Asadi have. It might be that a man would have to stay out here centuries in order to unravel a mere sleeve of the garment of their existence. God forbid. This visit of Eisen Zwei -- to return to the issue at hand -- proceeded in a manner identical to that of his first one. He came into the clearing with the huri on his shoulder, sat down, remained perhaps an hour, then stalked back into the Wild. The Asadi, of course, fled from him -- motivated, perhaps, more by loathing than fear. How long will I have to wait until ole E.Z. returns? Day I #: The behavior of the Asadi -- all of the Asadi -- has undergone a very subtle alteration, one I can't account for. Nothing in my previous association with them gives me a basis for evaluating its import. Even after I # days in the field I'm a slave to purely human concepts of causality -- behavior changes for certain reasons, not from mere whim. But out here reasons elude me in the same way that the Asadi pagoda, about which I now only dream, once eluded me. Let me state what I have observed. For the last two days every member of this insane species has taken great pains to avoid stepping into a rather large area in the center of the clearing. As a result the Asadi have crowded themselves into two arbitrary groups at opposite ends of the field. These "teams" do not comport themselves in exactly the same way as did the formerly continuous group. Individuals on both sides of the silently agreed-upon No Man's Land exude an air of heightened nervousness. They crane their heads about, clutch their arms across their chests, sway, suffer nearepileptic paroxysms as they weave in and out, in and out, among their fellows. Watching them I sometimes believe that they writhe to the music of an eerie flute played deep in the recesses of the jungle. Sometimes staring matches will take place between individuals on opposite sides of the imaginary chasm. Eyes change color, bodies bend and limbs flail. But neither participant puts a foot inside the crucial ring of separation, which is about thirty yards long and almost -- but not quite -- the entire width of the clearing. Not quite, mind you, because there's a narrow strip of ground on each sideline through which the two "teams" may exchange members, one member at a time. These exchanges occur infrequently, with a lone Asadi darting nervously out of his own group, down one of , these unmarked causeways and into the "enemy" camp. Why do they avoid  the center of the clearing? The only , reason my Earthman's mind can settle on is that the clearing's center i marks that area of fearsome ground where an offender has been humiliated, blood spilled and flesh consumed. But all these things happened a good while ago. Why this fastidiousness now? Why this separation? The Bachelor has reacted to it all by climbing into the branches of a thick-boled tree not ten meters from my lean-to. From dawn to sunset he sits high above his inscrutable kinsmen, watching, sleeping, hvaybe attempting to assess the general mood. At times he looks in my direction to see what I make of these new developments. I don't make much of them. Day I #: It continues, this strange bipartite waltz. The dancers have grown even more frantic in their movements. Anxiety pulses in the air like electricity. The Bachelor climbs higher into his tree, struggling to the topmost branches where his hold is precarious -- he wedges himself in place. In the last three days I can't recall having seen any of the dancers eat -- none have engaged in sex. Even their staring contests have virtually ceased, though those that do occur are , fierce and protracted. The nonexistent flute that plays in my head has grown stingingly shrill and I cannot guess what the end of this madness must be. IF Day #: Events culminated today in a series of bizarre developments that pose me a conundrum of the first order. What will happen tomorrow? I can't imagine any sort of follow-up to what I raptly watched today. It began early. Eisen Zwei came into the clearing an hour after the arrival of the Asadi. As on his second visit, he bore on his back the dressed-out carcass of an animal. His huri, though once again upright oh the old man's shoulder, looked like the work of a rather inept taxidermist -- lopsided, awkwardly posed and inanimate. The people in the clearing deserted their two identically restive groups, fleeing to the jungle around the assembly ground. I could not help thinking, Hom; strange, how ironic, that the force that momentarily reunifies the Asadi is a shared loathing. The Bachelor, half-hidden by great lacquered leaves and unsteady in the fragile upper branches, leaned out over the clearing's edge and gazed down from his empty clay-white eyes. I clutched the bole of his tree, surrounded now by the curious, loathing-filled Asadi who had crowded into the jungle. They ignored me. Unaware of him, they ignored The Bachelor too -- but together we all watched the spectacle proceeding in the Center Ring. Eisen Zwei lowered the burden from his back. He undid the straps that had held the meat in place. But now, instead of stepping away and permitting a few of the braver males to advance, he took the nearunconscious huri from his shoulder and set it upon the bleeding lump of meat. The huri's blind head did not move, but even from where I stood I could see its tiny fingers rippling with slow but well-orchestrated malice. Then this hypnotic rippling ceased and the huri sat there looking bloated and dead, a plaything for the children of scabrous witches. Without a farewell of any sort Eisen Zwei turned and stalked back into the Synesthesia Wild. Where he left the clearing, foliage clattered from the efforts of several Asadi to get out of his way. Silence fell again. And now no one left the security of the assembly ground's edge to challenge the huri's ownership of this new and sorely tempting carcass -- despite the fact that I had not seen any of the Asadi take food in almost five days. Denebola, fat and mocking, crossed a small arc of the sky and made haloes dance in a hundred inaccessible grottos of the Wild. An hour passed, and Eisen Zwei returned! He had simply left the huri to guard his first offering. Yes, firt. For the old chieftain had come back with still another carcass slung across his bony shoulders, another dressed-out and fleshstrapped carcass. He set it down beside the other. The huri animated itself just long enough to shift its weight and straddle the two contiguous pieces of meat. Then the old Asadi departed again, just as before. In an hour he returned with a third piece of meat -- but this time he entered the clearing from the west, about twenty yards up from my lean-to. I realiz that he had first entered from the east, then from the south. A pattern is developing, I thought. Now hell depart once more and reenter from the north. After all, even the most primitive peoples on Earth had ascribed mystical characteristics to the four points of the compass and I was excited by the prospect of my being able to draw a meaningful analogy. Of course, Eisen Zwei saw fit to shatter my hopes by remaining on the assembly floor -- he did not leave again at all. (In fact, as on my #nd night in the Wild, he still has not left. Under a triangle of coppergreen moons the old chieftain and his huri squat on the bleak, blooddampened ground waiting for Denebola's first spiderwebbings of light.) He made one complete circuit around the clearing instead, walking counterclockwise from his point of entrance. The huri did not move. This done, Eisen Zwei rejoined his noxious familiar at midfield. Here the second stage of this new and puzzling ritual began. Without taking the third carcass from his back, E.Z. bent and picked up the huri and put it in its accustomed place on his shoulder. Kneeling, he tied straps through the two pieces of meat over which the huri had kept watch. Next he began to drag these marbled chunks of brown and red slowly through the dirt. He dragged the first into the southern half of the clearing and set the huri down once more as his guardian. This procedure he duplicated in the northern half of the clearing, except that here he himself stoc guard over the second offering. The final carcass he still bore on his back. Outlined in the dust were two distinct drag marks, inward-looping circles that delineated the chieftain's progress from the original resting place of the meat. The coil in the dust of the northern half of the field was single; that in the southern, double. The Asadi tensed. Eisen Zwei stepped away from the second offering. Deep in his throat he made a noise that sounded like a human being, a grown man, trying to fight down a sob. This sound, I suppose I should add, is the first and so far the only example of voiced communication-discounting involuntary groans and a few guttural, growllike mumblings -- that I've heard among the Asadi. The huri responded to Eisen Zwei's plaintive "sobs" -- undoubtedly a signal -- by hopping, practically falling, off the object of its guardianship and then scrabbling miserably through the dust toward its master. Its rubbery wings dipped, twisted, folded upon themselves. (I've almost decided that the huri is incapable of flight, that its wings represent an anatomical holdover from an earlier stage of its evolution.) When both Eisen Zwei and his wretched huri had reached their sacred patch of ground at midfield the old Asadi picked up the beast and let it close its tiny hands over his discolored mane. The two of them held everyone's attention. Then the wizened old chieftain extended his arms, tilted back his head and, staring directly at the  IF sun, made a shuddering inhalation of such piteous depth that I thought either his lungs would burst or his heart break. The clearing echoed with his sob. At once the Asadi poured out of their hiding places onto the assembly ground -- not simply the adult males, but individuals of every sex and age. Even now, however, in the middle of this lunging riot, the population of the clearing divided into two groups, each one scrimmaging furiously, intramurally, in its own cramped plot of earth. Teeth flashed, manes tossed, bodies crumpled, eyes pinwheeled with inarticulate color. The hunger of the Asadi, like mid-August thunder, made low sad music over the Wild. In this hunger neither The Bachelor nor I shared. We merely watched, he from aloft, I from the trembling shadows. It did not take long for the Asadi, slashing at one another and sometimes half-maiming themselves, to devour the two carcasses. Perhaps five minutes. Like piranhas, I thought, quick, voracious, brutal. And then Eisen Zwei inhaled his grief-shot moan and the confusion ceased. Every lean gray snout turned toward him. The dying went off to die alone, if any were in fact at the point of death. I saw no one depart, but neither did I see anyone prostrate in the dirt -- as unlikely as it may sound. (Death, like birth, the Asadi must choose to experience in the intimate privacy of the jungle and the night -- in my months here I've not seen a single tribesman die in the clearing. Illness, accident and age apparently have no sting here. And, believe it or not, Tve only just now realized this. Does it mean anything? Sure. (But what?) All eyes upon him, silence steaming out of the very earth, Eisen Zwei made preparations for the third and final act of today's unanticipated, unexpectedly baroque ritual. He lowered the burden from his back, sat down beside it and -- in full view of his benumbed tribesman -- ate. The creature on his shoulder leaned into his mane and I thought that the old chief might feed the huri, give it something for its contribution to the festivities. He gave it nothing. Inert but clinging, the huri did not protest this oversight. An hour passed. Then two. Then three. By this time I had long since retired to the shade of my lean-to, emerging at fairly frequent intervals to check the goings-on in the clearing. By the second hour the Asadi had begun to move about within their separate territories. By the third hour these territories had merged so that I could no longer distinguish the two distinct "teams" of previous days. The pattern of the Daily Life of my first # days in the clearing had reassert itself -- except that now the Asadi moved with incredible sluggishness, suspiciously regarding their chieftain and refusing to encroach upon a rather large unmarked circle containing him. I decided that the ritual was about to conclude. Out among the Asadi, trying to feel through my pores the prevailing mood, I noticed that The Bachelor had come down out of his tree. But I didn't see him in the clearing. All I saw was old E.Z., isolated by a revolving barricade of legs, chewing with an expression of stupid pensiveness. The huri flapped once or twice as the afternoon progressed, but the old chieftain still did not fe it. Finally, sunset. The Asadi fled, dispersing as they always have -- but Eisen Zwei, no doubt as surfeited as a python that has just unhinged its lower jaw to admit a fawn, slumped in his place and did not move. Now three alien moons dance in the sky and I'm left with one question, the one question that I'm frightened to ask, so stark and selfevident is its answer: From what sort of creature did the old chief obtain and dress out his ritual offerings? Once before I didn't ask this question at all -- I couldn't ask it. But now, huddled beneath the most insubstantial of roofs, I am unable to fend off the terrible ramiflcations of the Asadi way of death. Speculations on cannibalisni: an extemporaneous essay From the unedited in-the-field tapes of Egan Chaney: It's a beautiful day. Just listen. Let me hold the microphone out for you -- hear that? Nothing but a thousand pairs of feet (minus six or eight feet, I suppose) slogging back and forth through a quarter inch of hot dust. Nothing but that and the soulful respiration of the Asadi and -- somewhere beyond these scarcely tangible sounds -- the stillness of all Bosk Veld. A beautiful day, just beautiful. And here I am, your roving reporter, Egan Chaney, right out here where the action is, thoroughly prepared to give you the latest and most comprehensive coverage of each new development in the clearing. Unfortunately, Eisen, I still do more waiting around than adrenelin-powered summaries of the on-going news. It's four days since your counterpart, Eisen Zwei, stirred things up with his disorderly three-course banquet. Since then, nothing. As a consequence. I'm now going to switch hats, doffing my correspondent's chapeau in favor of the dignified visor of a senior news editor. I'm walking. I'm walking among the Asadi. They fail to see me even though I'm just as solid, just as real, as they are. Even the ones I've given names to refuse to grant me the fact of my existence. I've just walked by Werner. The configuration of his features gives him a gentle look, like that of a Quaker wearing a parka. His seeming gentleness leads me to the topic of this commentary -- how could a creature of Werner's mien and disposition actually eat the flesh of one of his own kind? God help me if these aliens are sentient, my good base-camp buggers, because. I'm walking among cannibals! They encircle me. They ensorcel me. They fill me with a sudden dread, an awe such as the awe of one's parents that consumes the child who has just learned the secret of his own conception and birth. Exactly thus, my dread of the Asadi, my awe of their intimate lives... Turnbull is missing. Do you reIF member him? I named him was an editorial, not a news report. Turnbull because he was small, like You've got to expect shallow prothe pygmies the first Turnbull fundities in these things. Shallow wrote about. Now I can't find him. profundities and forthright cirSince the ritual of Day #, I've cumlocutions. Okay? I don't want been through this clearing a to disappoint anyone, hundred times -- from sideline to As a result (if I may continue) sideline, from ' endzone to cannibals are the most inwardly endzone -- searching for him with warring schizophrenics in all of all the devotion of a father. Little Nature. The dichotomy between Turnbull, squat and sly, is nowhere the two self-contained personalities among these indifferent, uncouth shines as clean and coppery as beings. I'd have found him by now, Denebola at dawn. The pattern of I know I would. He was my pygmy, indifferent association during the my little pygmy, and now these day and compulsive scattering at aloof bastards -- these Asadi of night -- as they flee from greater height than Turnbull themselves -- lends further crehimself possessed -- have eaten him! dence, I think, to my interpretation Eaten him as though he were a of theii dichotomy of soul. After creature of inferior status -- a zero all, who is more deluded than the in a chain of zeroes as long as the cannibal? His every attempt to diameter of time! May God damn achieve unity with his kind results them! in a heightened alienation from himself. (A lengthy pause during So it is with the Asadi. So it is which only the shuffling of the with -- Asadi can be heard, ) Damn it, I agree! I'm talking sense and rubbish at the same time. -- I think my shout unsettled -- But it's hot out here, and they igsome of them. A few of them nore me. They go by, they go by, flinched. But they don't look at me, revolving about me like so many these cannibals, because a cannibal motorized pasteboard cut-outs... may not go too far toward acknowAnd Turnbull's not among them, ledging the existence of another of he doesn't revolve anymore, he's his kind, so uncertain is his opinion been butchered and consumed, of himself. A cannibal is always Butchered and consumed, do you afraid that he'll ascribe niore imhear? With the same indifference portance to himself than he dethat we used to poison the Ituri and serves, In doing so, he discovers -- rout out the people who lived there, in a moment of hideous reveTurnbull's dead, base-camp huglation -- where his next meal is gers, and There are no more coming from. He always knows pygmies there are no more pygmies where it's coming from and he's there are no therefore nearly always afraid. Yes, yes, I was philosophical, but The Ritual of Death And DesigI told you a moment ago that this nation From the final draft of the one complete section of Egan Chaneys otherwise unfinished ethnography: old chieftain, whom I called Eisen Zwei, took ill. Because it had been several days since he had gorged himself during the "feast," I then supposed that his sickness was not related to his earlier intemperance. I am still oT this mind. For five days he had eten nothing, although the rest of the Asadi refused to observe his fast and began eating whatever herbs, roots, flowers, bark and heartwood they could find -- just as they had done before their ritual feast. They ignored the old chief and the old chiefs huri, much in the way they ignored The Bachelor and me. Eisen Zwei's sickness altered the pattern altered it more violently than had his several appearances in the clearing. On the afternoon of the first day of his illness he abruptly rose from his reserved center plot and made the horribly glottal, in-sucking noises that he had used to summon his people to the meat six days before. I came running from my lean-to. The Asadi moved away from the old chieftain, stopped their shuffling and shambling and stared from great platterlike eyes, the lenses of which had stalled on a single color. This delicate stasis reigned for only a moment. Then Several explanatory footnotes were provided with the publish fragment. I wrote the introduction to the fragment, and the footnotes that foUow this one are all from my hand. Thomas Benedict. the in-sucking noises were replaced by a spastic rumbling. As I broke into the clearing I saw the old man bent over at the waist, his arms above his head, heaving and again heaving until it seemed that he would soon be vomiting into the dust the very lining of his bowels. I turned away, abashed by the sight, but since the Asadi stared on, fascinated, I turned back around to observe their culture in action. It was at that moment, if at no other, that I earned the Oliver Bow Aurm Frasier Memorial Fillet, which the Academy has since bestowed upon me. The chieftain's huri flew up from his shoulder and flapped in the somnolent air like a small windcollapsed umbrella. I had never seen it fly before -- I was surprised that it was capable of flight. Its ungainly flapping excited the already well-aroused population of the assembly ground, and together we watched the huri rise above tree level, circle back over the clearing, and dip threateningly toward the brar.ches of the trees on the clearing's western edge. The old chief and his vehement, bodywracking convulsions seemed forgotten. Every pair of color-stalled eyes followed the uncertain aerial progress of the huri. It plummeted, noisily flapping, toward that precariously forked perch where This sentence did not appear in the published fragment. Egan Chaney has never received this award, though I believe he deserved it. According to Academy President Isaac Wells, he is not now, nor has he ever been, under consideration for the award.  IF The Bachelor sometimes sequestered himself. But The Bachelor was not there, I did not know where he was. The huri crashed downward through the branches, caught itself up, struggled flapping out of the jungle and returned with blind devotion to the air space over its master. I thought that at last it was going to feed, that its sole diet might well consist of Eisen Zwei's vomitings. I expected the starved creature to fall upon these -- but it did not. Somehow it kept itself aloft, flapping -- flapping -- waiting for the old man to finish. And when the old chief had completely emptied himself and fallen exhausted to his knees, it was not the huri that waded into the vile pool of vomit but the old man's shameless compatriots. Now I did not even think of returning to my lean-to. My curiosity overcame my revulsion and I watched the Asadi carry away the half-digested mass as if each semi-solid piece were an invaluable relic. There was no fighting, no elbowing, no eye-searing abuse. Each individual simply picked out his relic, took it a short distance into the jungle and deposited it in some hidden place for safe-keeping. All during this solemn recessional the huri quickened the air with its heavy wings and an anonymous Asadi supported Eisen Zwei by tenderly clutching the old chiefs mane. When everyone had taken away a chunk of regurgitated flesh the chieftain's attendant laid him down out of the sphere of hallowed spew, and the huri descended to squat by its master's head. This newest ritual was over, all over. I should mention, however, that The Bachelor appeared in the mourning throng to select and depart with some memento of Eisen Zwei's illness, just as the others had. He came last, took only a palm-sized morsel and retreated to the clearing's edge. Here he climbed into the tree above which the huri had flown its nearly disastrous mission only minutes before. Until sunset The Bachelor remained here, observing and waiting -- as I, as a cultural xenologist, must always do. On Days #, # and # Eisen Zwei continued in his illness and the Asadi paid him scant attention, their chief ministrations consisting of bringing him water twice a day and refraining from stepping on him. The huri sat by the old chieftain's head. It shifted from one foot to the other and waited -- smugly, I thought -- for its master to die. It never ate. At night the Asadi deserted their dying leader without a glance, without a twinge of doubt, and I was afraid that he would die while they were gone. Several times, looking out at his inert silhouette, moonlight dripping through the fronds, I thought he had died, and a mild panic assailed me. Did I have a responsibility to the corpse? Only the responsibility, I decided, to let it lie and observe the reactions of the Asadi when they came back at dawn. But the old chief did not die during any of these nights and on Day # another change occurred. Eisen Zwei sat up and stared at Denebola as it crossed the sky -- but he stared at the angry sun through the spread fingers of both his hands, hands he crooked into claws and tore impotently through the blur of light that Denebola must have seemed to him. The huri did not move. As always, it sat smug and blindly knowing. But the Asadi noticed the change in their leader and reacted to it. As if his writhing dissatisfaction with the sun were a clue, they divided into two groups again and formed attentive semicircles to the north and south of Eisen Zwei. They watched his challenge to the sun, his wrestling with its livid corona, his tearing at its indistinct streamers of gas with gnarled hands. At noon the old chief rose to his feet. He stretched out his arms. Sobbing, he clawed at the sky, suddenly gave up and sank back to his knees. Without any sort of visible prompting a pair of Asadi from each group went to his aid. They lifted him from the ground. Others on the clearing's edge selected large, lacquered fronds from the rubber trees and passed these over the heads of their comrades to the place where their leader had collapsed. The men supporting Eisen Zwei took these fronds, arranged them into a regal pallet and then placed the fragile body on the bed they had made. For only the second time that I could remember the Asadi had cooperated to bring about a desired end. (The other occasion, of course, had been the shaving of The Bachelor's mane.) But, like ancient papyrus exposed to the air, their cooperation disintegrated as soon as Eisen Zwei was stretched fulllength on his pallet. Each of the groups maintained a semblance of its former integrity, but aimless shambling replac chieftain-watching as the primary activity within each group. Denebola, finally free of the old man's gaze, fell toward the horizon. I walked unimpeded through the clearing and bent down over the dying chieftain, careful to avoid the huri that watched me from its uncanny, socketless face. I shrugged off the creature's literally blank stare and looked into the genuine eyes of its master. I experienced a shock, a physical jolt. The old man's eyes were burned out, blackened holes in a humanoid mask. It now made little difference that even before his staring match with the sun his eyes had not possessed the Asadi ability to run through the spectrum -- for now, burned out, blackened, they were utterly dead, two char-smoked lenses waiting for the old man's body to catch up with their lifelessness. And then the diffused red light that signaled sunset in this forested region of BoskVeld was pouring through the Wild. The clearing emptied. Alone with Eisen Zwei and his huri, I knew that it would be during this night that the old man died. I tried to find some intimation of life in his blackened eyes, saw none and withdrew to the cover of the Wild and the security of my lean-to. I did not sleep. But my worst premonitions betrayed me and in the morning I looked out to see Eisen IF Zwei sitting cross-legged on his pallet, the huri once again perched on his shoulder. And then the tenuous yellow light that marked sunrise and rejuvenation on BoskVeld filtered through the jungle. The Asadi returned, filled the clearing with their lank bodies and once again took up their positions to the north and the south of the dying chieftain. Day # had begun. And, finally, the ritual that I had decided the Asadi were resolved itself into a lesser ritual in which they merely participated -- the grandest, strangest, and most highly ordered ceremony in their culture. I call the events of Day #, taken as a cumulative whole, the Ritual of Death and Designation. I believe that we will never fully understand the narrowly "political" life of the Asadi until we can interpret, with precision, every aspect of this ritual. Somewhere in the context of the events of Day # lies the meaning of it all. And how terrible to be confronted with an elusive truth! The color of the eyes of every Asadi in the clearing (The Bachelor's excepted) declined into a deep and melancholy indigo. And stalled there. The effect of solemn uniformity struck me as soon as I stepped onto the assembly floor -- even though I had intended to look first at Eisen Zwei and not at his mourners. Profound indigo and absolute silence. So deeply absorbent were the eyes of the Asadi that Denebola, rising, could cast no glare, could throw out not a single dancing, shimmering, uncapturable ray. Or so it seemed. The day was an impressionist painting rendered in flat pastels and dull primaries -- a paradox. Then the heads in which the indigo eyes so intriguingly reposed began to rock from side to side, the chin of each Asadi inscribing a small figure eight in the air. The heads moved in unison. This went on for an hour or more as the old chieftain, as blind as his companion, sat cross-legged on his pallet, nodding, nodding in the monumental morning stillness. Then, as if they had inscribed figure eight's for the requisite period, the Asadi broke out of their separate groups and formed several concentric rings around the old man. They did so to the same lugubrious rhythm that they had established with their chins; they dragged their long bodies into place. The members of each ring continued to sway. The inaudible flute which I had once believed to be in the Wild had now certainly been exchanged for an inaudible bassoon. Ponderously, the Asadi swayed. Ponderously, their great manes undulated with a slow and beautifully orchestrated grief. And The Bachelor (all by himself, just beyond the outermost ring) swayed also in cadence with the others. Now I was the sole outcast among this people, for I alone observed and did not participate. The rhythmic swaying lasted through the remaining hours of the forenoon and on toward the approach of evening. I retired to my lean-to, but thought better of just siUing there and climbed the tree in which The Bachelor often perched. I forgot about everything but the weird ceremony in the clearing. I did not eat. I did not desert my station. Neither did I worry about my separation from the members of the Third Denebolan Expedition in base camp -- it was for this moment, I instinctively understood, that I had refused any but the most essential contacts with other human beings. Leaning out over the clearing I gave myself up completely tp the hypnotic movements of the shaggy-headed players that a generous universe had permitted me to study. No, thank merciful God, Egan Chaney had not been born too late. I nodded but I did not sleep. Suddenly Eisen Zwei gave a final sob, maniacal and heartrending, and grabbed the beast that clung with evil tenacity to his mane. He seized it with both palsied hands. (This was near the end of the day -- I could feel the last dull rays of Denebola caressing my back, covering me like a threadbare blanket, unevenly warm.) Eisen Zwei exerted himself to what seemed his last reserve of strength and, strangling the huri, lurched out of the dust to his feet. The huri flapped, twisted, freed one wing and flapped harder. The old chief squeezed his hands together and attempted to grind the life out of the creature. He was not successful. The huri beat the air with its wings, beat the chieftain about the face and finally used its tiny hands to scour fine crimson wounds in Eisen Zwei's withered cheeks and buckled forehead. During this struggle the Asadi stopped swaying, they looked on with eyes that gradually fell away from indigo toward a paler blue. Eisen Zwei drew a deep breath and shook the belligerent huri back and forth, up and down, like a bartender mixing a exotic drink. But the huri flapped out of his grasp and rose to tree level. I feared that it would dive upon me in my borrowed perch, but it skirted the inside perimeter of the clearing -- dipping, banking, silently cawing. Its imaginary screams replaced the distant but just as imaginary bassoon in my consciousness. Meanwhile Eisen Zwei, finding his hands empty, relaxed and dropped back onto his pallet. His body fell across it sideways, and his burnedout eyes fixed themselves -- coincidentally, Fm sure -- on me. The Asadi chieftain was dead. He died just at sunset. I waited for his people to flee into the Wild, to leave his brittle corpse in the clearing for an Earthman's astonished scrutiny. They did not flee. Even though the lethal twilight was gathering about them, they stayed. The attraction of the old one's death outweighed their fear of exposing themselves in an open place to the mysteries of darkness. In my arboreal lookout I realized that I had witnessed two things I had never before seen among the Asadi: Death and a universal failure to repair. What would the night bring? The featureless, unpredictable night? Ritual of Death and Designation had passed into its second major stage before I truly comprehended IF that stages existed. I ignored my hunger. I put away the thought of sleep. As I did so the Asadi converged upon the old man's corpse and those of smallest size were permitted to crowd into the center of the clearing and lift the dead chieftain above their heads. The young, the deformed, the weak, and the congenitally slight of stature formed a double column beneath the old man's outstretched body and began moving with him toward the northern endzone. Arranged in this fashion, they forced a startling revelation upon me -- these were the Asadi whose manes were a similar color and texture, a stringy detergent-scum beige. But they bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei with uncomplaining acquiescence. The larger, sleeker specimens of Asadi (those with luxuriant silver, silver-blue, or golden manes) formed single columns on each side of their lackluster counterparts and together these two units, like water inside a moving pipe, flowed toward the north --  -- the one direction that Eisen Zwei had not entered from on the day he brought those three dressedout, provocative carcasses into the clearing. I recalled that driver ants in Africa had used just this sort of tubular alignment when they wished to move great distances as a group, the workers inside the column, the warriors without. And nothing on that immense dark continent was more feared than driver ants on the march -- with, of course, the exception of man. Almost too late I realized that the Asadi would be out of the clearing and beyond my reach unless I got out of The Bachelor's tree. Nearly falling, I scrambled down. The twilight glittered with the dust of the departing cojumns, and the foliage through which the mourners marched gave off a soft gauzy glow, as if viewed through a photographer's filter. I ran. I found that I could keep up with very little effort, so cadenced and funereal was the step of their procession. I slowed to a walk behind it. Trudging in the wake of the mourners, incorrigibly hangdog in his pariahhood, was The Bachelor. As the huge gray procession snaked into the Synesthesia Wild, I noted that the circumstances of this march had reversed our roles -- now I was following him. Three or four steps behind it all, Egan Chaney -- the consummate outsider ridiculously hoping to learn the dooropening arcana of a group that had excluded him. And all the while the twilight glittered, thickened, reverberated with the footfalls and leaf nudgings of a thousand single-minded communicants. Before we had got completely out of the clearing, I looked around for the huri. I saw it flying above that part of the procession where its master was being borne forward on the shoulders of the smaller Asadi. Avoiding branches, the huri turned an inadvertent cartwheel in the air, righted itself and landed on Eisen Zwei's bony chest. Here, conspicuous above the heads of its master's people, it did a little' preening dance. It looked like an oil-coated rooster wooing a hen. Then the column snaked to the left. The Wild closed off my view of the marchers and darkness began drifting in like black confetti. I dogged The Bachelor's footsteps and waited for a new revelation. How long we trudged through the singing fronds, the perfumed creepers, the blades of blue air, I don't know. Nor will I attempt to estimate. There in the clearing, rising against the sky like an oriental pagoda, loomed the broad and impervious mass of something built, something made. By now all three moons were up and the solid black bulk of this structure was spotlighted in the antique-gold claret that the three moons together shed. Even before those of us at the end of the procession were out of the jungle, we could see the lofty, gemlike wings of this sudden artifact -- and I may not have been the only one whose first inclination was to flee, to plunge back into the nightmare forest. As we approached, members of both the inner and the outer columns began to sway from side to side, marching and swaying at once. The Bachelor's head, in fact, moved in wide arcs and his whole marching body trembled as if from the paroxysms of ague. If he had been punished for leading me to this place, perhaps he trembled now from fear. On the other hand, if the Asadi wished this temple kept inviolate, wouldn't they somehow punish me once they discovered my presence? I did have the good sense to get out of the way. I climbed a tree on the edge of the clearing that fronted the pagoda. From this vantage point I watched the proceedings in relative safety. Gray forms moved in the deep shadow that the Asadi temple cast. Suddenly two violently green flames burned in the iron flambeaus on either side of the top step of the immense tier of stone steps that led to the temple's ornate doorway. The two torchlighters -- formerly the moving gray forms -- came back down the steps. Never before had I seen the Asadi make use of fire -- this sophisticated use both of flambeaus and a starting agent that I could not even guess at destroyed a multitude of my previous conclusions about them. Meanwhile the four columns of Asadi had ranged themselves in parallel files before the stairway of the ancient pagoda and six beige-maned menials bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei, now an uncanny apple-green in the torchlight, up the broad stone steps to the stone catafalque before the door. Here they set the corpse down and lined up behind it, staring out over theit waiting kinsmen, facing the cruel ambivalence of the Wild, three on each side of the old man. I was not accustomed to such spectacle, such tawdry grandeur, and I began to think that perhaps Placenol did flow in my veins -- Placenol or something more sinister. The moons cried out with their silent mouths. The flambeaus uttered quick screamings of unsteady light. But the ritual did not conclude. The night drew on -- the moons rolled and the four files of Asadi IF tribesmen shuffled in their places. They pulled at their manes. They looked up at the leaf-fringed sky. They looked down at their feet. Some stretched out their hands and fought with the tumbling moons just as Eisen Zwei had wrestled with Denebola, the sun. But none left the clearing, though I felt many would have lik to. Instead, wrestling with their own fears, they waited. The pagoda and the corpse of their chieftain commanded them -- while #, wedged like a spike into my tree, was commanded by their awesome patience. Then the last of the three moons fell into the farthest jungle of BoskVeld. The two iron torches guttered like spent candles. The Bachelor fidgeted. Two vacuums existed. One, the vacuum in nature between the end of night and the beginning of day. The other, the vacuum in the peculiar hierarchy of the Asadi tribal structure, the vacuum that Eisen Zwei had so oddly filled -- until his struggle with the sun and his subsequent death. Night and death. Two vacuums in search of compensatory substance. Up in the air, clinging to two willowy tree branches, I made cursory mental notes in regard to this undoubtedly significant parallelism. When would dawn break? How would the Asadi designate their dead chieftain's successor? A commotion in the clearing interrupted these transcendent speculations. Looking down, I saw that the four neat files of Asadi had dissolved into a single disorganized original assembly ground. A chaos. An anarchy. A riot of unharnessed irrationality. How could a vacuum of "leadership" exist in such an arbitrary melange of unrelated parts? Only the paga had solidity; only the pagoda did not move. Then, looking up, I saw the old man's huri floating high above this disorder, floating rather than flailing, a gyrfalcon rather than a pelican. It rode the prismatic, predawn breezes with uncommon grace and skied off so effortlessly that in a moment it had dwindled to a scrap of light, picking up some predawn reflection, far beyond the temple's central spire. Watching it, I grew dizzy. Then the huri folded its wings behind it and plummeted down, dizzyingly down, through the roseate sky. I almost fell. My feet slipped through the fork that had supported me and I was left dangling, arms above my head, over one edge of the pagoda's front yard. The anxiety-torn communicants were too caught up in their panic to notice me. Meanwhile the huri rocketed earthward. It dived into the helpless crowd of Asadi and skimmed along their heads and shoulders with its cruel, serrated wings. Dipping in and out, the huri once again flapped Hke a torn window shade -- all its ephemeral grace was gone, turned to crass exhibitionism (I don't know what else to call it) and unwieldy flutterings. But the creature did what it sought to do, for in that predawn dimness I could see that it had scarred the faces of several of the Asadi. Nevertheless, a few of the tribesmen tried to capture the huri -- while, more reasonably, others ducked out of its way, fell to the ground, clutched their knees, crawled between the scrambling legs, or threw up their arms to ward it off. The huri did not discriminate. It scarred all of those who got in the way of its bladed ngs, whether they attempted to catch it or to flee. And the eyes of the harassed Asadi flashed through their individual spectrums. The heat from so many changes made the clearing phosphorescent with shed energy. I caught sight of The Bachelor and saw that his eyes had not changed. They were still mute, devoid of all intellect or passion. He stood apart from his panicked comrades and observed, neither grappling for nor fleeing from the huri. As for the noxious beast, it flew up, flew down, peformed wobbly banking movements, and slashed with its terrible pinions at everything living. Finally it shot up through the shadow of the pagoda, wildly flapping, then pitched over and dived upon The Bachelor. It flew into his face. It drove him to the ground and battered him with countless malicious thrashings. To the last individual the Asadi quieted, queued up randomly and watched this unpredictable denouement, the penultimate act in their day-long ritual. It took me a moment to understand. Then I realized: The Bachelor was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect. Somehow it seemed an inevitable choice. My arms aching, I dropped from the tree onto the floor of the clearing. In front of me were the backs of twenty or thirty Asadi. I could not see The Bachelor at all, though I could still hear the churning of the huri's wings and the newly modulated breathing of the tribesmen. Then a figure, insanely rampant, flailing its arms, disrupted the smooth surface of the crowd and darted through a quickly closing gap of bodies to my right. I knew that The Bachelor had regained his feet and was trying to fight off the huri. The two of them thrashed their way up the tier of steps in front of the temple and soon were on the paving beside the catafalque where Eisen Zwei still rested. Now I could see as well as anyone, and there on that sacred, high place The Bachelor capitulated to the inevitable. He went down on his knees, lowered his head, and ceased to resist. The huri, sensing its victory, made an air-pummeling circuit over the body of the dead chieftain. It sawed devilishly at the faces of the corpse-bearers and rippled like dry brown paper. Then it settled on The Bachelor's head. Beating its wings for balance, it faced the onlooking multitude of Asadi -- and me -- with blind triumph. No one moved, no one breathed, no one acknowledgecLthe dawn as it revealed the caustic verdigris coating the pagoda like an evil frost -- like the rime on the forehead of antiquity. Slowly, after a moment twice as ponderous as the pagoda's antiquity, The Bachelor rose to his feet. He was draped in his own resignation and the invisible garb of IF an isolation even more pronounced than that he had suffered as an outcast. He was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect. The huri dropp from The Bachelor's head to his shoulder and entwined its tiny fingers in the tufts of his butchered mane. There it clung, once again inanimate and scabrous. Now the Ritual of Death and Designation was nearly over and two of the corpse-bearers on that highest tier moved to complete it. They touched the head and the feet of Eisen Zwei with the tips of the two great flambeaus, and instantly the old man's body raged with green fire. The raging flame leaped up the face of the temple as if to abet the verdigris in its patient efforts to eat the building away. The Bachelor stood almost in the very blast of this conflagration and I feared that he, too, would be consumed. But he was not. Nor was the huri. The fire died, Eisen Zwei had utterly disappeared and the corpse-bearers came back down the steps and joined the anonymity of their revitalized people. The Ritual of Death and Designation had ended. For the purposes of this ethnography I will minimize the signficance of what then occurred and report it as briefly as I am able. Several of the Asadi turned and saw me in the pagoda's clearing. They actually looked at me. After having been ignored for over six months I did not know how to react to the signal honor of abrupt visibleness. Out of monumental surprise I returned their stares. They began advancing upon me, hostility evident in the rapid blurring of colors that took place in their eyes. Behind me, the Synesthesia Wild. I turned to escape into its vegetation. Another small group of Asadi had insinuated themselves into the path of 'my intended escape -- they blocked my way. Among this group I recognized the individusil whom I had given the name Benjy. Cognizant of nothing but a vague paternal feeling toward him, I sought to offer him my hand. His own nervous hand shot out and cuffed me on the ear. I fell. Dirt in my mouth, gray faces descending toward me, I understood that I ought to be terrified. But I spat out the dirt -- the faces and manes retreated as quickly as they had come and my incipient terror evaporated like alcohol in a shallow dish. Overhead, a familiar flapping. I looked up and saw the huri as it returned to The Bachelor's outstretched arm. He had released the creature upon his fellows in order to save me. This simple action, however, illustrates the mind-boggling complexity of the relationship between the Asadi chieftain and his huri. Which of them rules? Which submits to command? I At that moment I didn't very much care. Denebola had riseu and the Asadi had dispersed into the Wild leaving me dwarfed and humble in the presence of their crumbling pagoda and the reluctant chieftain who stared down from its uppermost tier. Although he remained aloof, before the day was out The Bachelor had led me back death and designation among the asadi to the original assembly ground -- for I would have never found it on my own. The admittedly banal lesson that I learned from this experience, members of the Academy, is that even for a cultural xenologist -- perhaps especially for a cultural xenologist -- it pays to make friends. Thomas Benedict speaking: a brief interpolative note I have put this paper together out of a simple sense of duty. As one of the few people Egan Chaney permitted to get close to him, I am perhaps the only man who could have undertaken this task. The section you have just read -- The Ritual of Death and Designation -- Chaney wrote in our base-camp infirmary while recuperating from exposure and a general inability to reorient himself to the society of human beings. In one of our conversations he compared himself to Gulliver after his return from the land of the Houyhnhnms. At any rate, beyond Death and Designation Chaney never wrote anything about the Asadi for publication, although immediately after his release from the infirmary  believe he intended to begin a book about them. As Vve already said, then, I undertook this compilation of disparate notes out of a sense of duty, a two-fold duty: the first to Egan Chaney, who was my friend -- the second to the vast numbers of concerned humanity who wish to understand our neighbors on other worlds in order better to understand themselves, Chaney s failure need not be our own. Upon his return to the original , assembly ground of the Asadi after the Ritual of Death and Designation, Chaney stayed two more weeks in the Synesthesia Wild. On Days # and # I made supply drops, but, just as Chaney had requested, did not fly over the clearing in the vain hope of spotting him and thereby determining the state of his health. It was enough, he told me, to verify his robustness from the fact that each week when I coptered in his supplies I could note that not a scrap of paper from the previous shipment littered the drop point. The argument that he was not the only creature in the Wild capable of hauling away the goods intended for him impressed Chaney not at all. '# might as well be, he wrote on one of his infrequent notes left in a canister at the drop point. "The Asadi have all the initiative of malaria victims. More horrible than this, friend Ben, is the face-slapping truth that there is no one else in the Wild -- no one else at all! I am now the sole owner of the personal effects of Egan Chaney; these include both his private and professional journals, a number of unfiled "official reports, a series of in-the-field tapes and a small bit of correspondence (alluded to in an early footnote). Those records concerning the Asadi that I dont own myself, I have access to as a result of my association with the Third Denebolan Expedition.  tell you this only because I know for an incontrovertible facf that during his last fourteen days in the Wild, either Chaney did not make a single entry in any of his journals or IF notebooks or he so completely effaced these dubious entries from our material realm that they may as well never have existed. We have only one complete report of any kind in regard to these last two weeks. It is a tape, a remarkable tape, and I believe that Chaney would have destroyed it, too, had we not taken his recorder from him the instant we picked him out of the jungle. I have listened to this tape many times -- in its entirety,  should add, since doing so is a feat which few other men would have the patience for. Once  attempted to discuss the tape with Chaney (this was several days after his release from the infirmary, when I believed that he could handle the terror of the experience with a degree of objectivity), but he protested that I had imagined the contents. He said that he had never recorded the least word in the tape's running jiccount of The Bachelors  -- metamorphosis?" he asked. "Is that the word you used?" I promptly played the tape for him. He listened to ten minutes of it, then got up and shut it off. His face had gone unaccountably lean and bewildered. His hands trembled. "Oh, that," he said, not looking at me. "That was all a joke. I made it up because there was nothing better to do." "The sound-effects, too?" I asked incredulously. Not looking at me, he nodded -- even though the circumstance of his pickup belied this clumsy explanation, exploded it, in fact, into untenable shrapnel. Chaney remained mute on this subject. In all of his writings and conversations in those last three months among us he never mentioned or even alluded to the sordid adventure of his final two nights. I present here a transcript, somewhat edited, of the tape in question. This final virtuoso section of our colloboration, our patchwork ethnography that I call... Chaneys monologue: two nights in The Synesthesia WOd  Hello all! What day is it? A day is. I'm leading you on an expedition... But forgive my initial lie -- it isn't a day like any other day at all. How often do I lead you on expeditions? It's Day #, I think, and yesterday The Bachelor returned to the clearing -- the first time he's been back since the day the huri anointed him, so to speak, with the fecal salve of chieftainship. I'd almost given him up. But he came back into the clearing yesterday afternoon, the huri on his shoulder, and squatted in the center of the assembly ground just as old Eisen Zwei used to do. The reaction among his Asadi brethren was identical to the one they always was old times again, gang, except that now the actor holding down center stage was a personal friend of mine -- who, by the by, had saved my life several times. Yes, sir. After the heat, the borom, and eight or a hundred sticky rainfalls -- my lean-to leaking like a colander -- I couldn't have been more gratified. Following the pattern old E.Z. established on one of his visits, The Bachelor spent the entire afternoon in the clearing, all of last night and maybe an hour or so this morning. Then he got up to leave. I've been following him ever since. By the sun it's about noon. Yes, The Bachelor permits me to follow him. Moreover, it's easy. As ou can tell I'm not even breathing ard. I'm recording as we walk. If this were a terrestrial wood, you could hear birdsong and the chitterings of insects. As it is, you'll have to content yourselves with the sounds of my footfalls and the rus tlings of leaf and twig... Here's a little rustle for you now. (The sound of a branch or leaf snapping back. General background noises of wind and, far less audibly, distant running water,  The Bachelor is several yards ahead of me but you may not be able to hear him -- he walks like a stealthy animal. Pad pad pad. Like that, only softer. I don't care to be any closer than I am because the huri's riding The Bachelor's shoulder, clinging to his mane. It is not a winsome creature, base campers -- no, indeed it's not. Since it hasn't any eyes you can't tell whether it's sleeping -- or awake and plotting a thousand villainies. That's why I'm happy back here. Let me impress you with my cleverness. A heavy thump,) That's my backpack. I've brought provisions for three or four days. You see, I don't know where we're going or how long we'll be there. But in The Bachelor I trust. Up to a point, at least. My cleverness, though, doesn't consist solely of hauling along some supplies. The backpack also houses my recorder, Morrell's miniaturized affair, the one that has a tape capacity of # hours, or, as Benedict would phrase it, ten solid days of Chaney's uninterrupted blathering. I've rigged it so that my voice will trigger the recording mechanism whenever I speak and so that the absence of my voice for a tenminute period automatically shuts it off. That's to conserve recording time -- not that I plan on talking for ten straight days -- and to keep me from fiddling with buttons when there might be other things to do. Of course, I can always go manual if I have to, countermanding the exclusive lock on my own voice, but so far none of the Asadi have been particularly voluble. Only Eisen Zwei. And his voice would not be apt to woo the ladies. Ergo, I'm once again your reporter in the field, your objective observer, your unbiased eyes. I've been thinking. Yes, I have, too. And what I wouldn't give for a copy of one of the ancient works that no one reads any more -- The Brothers Karamazov, Surely The Bachelor is none other than the Asadi equivalent of Pavel Smerddestroys himself out of his innate inability to reconcile the spiritual and the intellectual in his nature. Such passionate despondency! He cannot escape, nor accept, the dictum that the individual IF is responsible for the sins of all... in here, as still as the void. And though you probably can't believe it, I've held my peace for an entire afternoon. Maybe I said, "Damn!" two or three times after scraping my shin or tripping over a partially exposed root -- but that's all. In here I scarcely feel that it's kosher to talk, to raise my voice even to this hoarse whisper. (Chaney clears his throat. There is an echo, a hollow sound which fades.  We -- the three of us -- are inside the pagoda, in front of which The Bachelor tcame the designated "leader" of his people. I feel free to talk only because he and the huri have gone up a narrow iron stairway inside this pyramidal structure toward the ceiling -- toward the small open dome from which the exterior spire rises. I can see them from here. The stairway spirals up and The Bachelor climbs it. The huri -- no kidding. I'm not kidding at all -- flies up through the center of the spiral, staying even with The Bachelor's head, but I can't -- absolutely can't -- hear its wings flapping. In this place, that's strange. But There follows a totally irrelevant analysis of the ways in which The Bachelor resembles the .baracter of Smerdyakov in Dostoyevski's novel. To spare the reader Tve deleted it. I believe that the passage which follows was recorded approximately six hours later. it's preternaturally cold in here -- maybe the cold has something to do with it -- cold and dead, like no building ever erected in a tropical rain forest. No, damn it, even my whispers echo. It's nearly dark outside. At least it was nearly dark twenty minutes ago when we came in through the heavy doors that the Asadi -- two weeks past -- didn't even open. Now the moons must be up. Maybe a little moonlight falls through the dome overhead... No, no, Chaney -- the light in here comes from those three massive globes in the metal ring suspended several feet below the dome. The Bachelor's climbing toward that huge ring, the stairway rises toward it, it looks like a spartan chandelier, the globes like white-glowing deadflesh lamps... Listen. Listen to the light fall... i There is no sound for several minutes, perhtws a slight amplification of Chaney s breathing. Then his voice descends conspiratorially. ) Eisen, Eisen, another paradox for you physics majors. I think -- I don't know, mind you, but I think that both the chill and the luminosity in here originate -- emanate, so to speak -- from those globes up there. It's just a feeling I have. Winter sunlight. The texture of the luminosity in here reminds me of the glow around probeship deadly sort of lambence. Just listen. Hear that livid glow, that livid hellsheen? All right, let's move to where we can see. (Silence. Rhythmic breathing. Footfalls echoing hollowly off polished stone.  Pm looking straight up the well of the stairway. An echo: Way way ,way way...) C'mon, Egan, keep it down, keep it down... better, much better. I can see the huri flapping up there noiselessly -- The Bachelor's legs ascending the spiral. The staircase seems to terminate in a glass platform off to one side and just a little below the suspended ring of the "chandelier." The Bachelor is ascending to this platform -- there's nowhere else he can go. I'm looking up through the axis of the dome, right up through the chandelier ring. Outside, above the dome, is a spire pointing up at BoskVeld's sky. Inside the dome, depending from its apex, there's a sort of plumbline -- of what looks like braided gold -- that drops down the central shaft of the pagoda to a point...just about a foot above the suspended ring. A foot, I think. Can't tell for certain. Been in the jungle so long my depth perception's shot -- just as the Ituri pygmies used to have trouble adjusting vision to open savannah. I apologize for the complicated description of the upper recesses of this temple, but the arrangement is intricate and that's where The Bachelor's going. I can make sense neither of the architecture nor of his intentions... And my neck's getting sore, tilted back... still in something of a whisper): Me again. The Bachelor reached the glass platform beneath the chandelier ring about an hour ago. He's been standing up there like a Pan-Olympic diver ever since, except that he's looking -- as far as I can tell -- at the braided gold plumbline that hangs slightly above him from the temple's dome. He can't quite reach it from the platform he's on. Would he like to? I don't know... no, he can't reach it. Not without a trapeze, daringly, could he reach that gilded pendulum. And then, what for? As the channel announcers on the telecom operas would say, "Let's leave Billy Bachelor high atop the Callisto Medcenter, lamenting the lost Lenore, and follow E. G. Chanwick as he goes spelunking through the mysterious satellite's caverns of steel in his ongoing, bi-weekly endeavor to unravel the Secret of the Universe." ( Unsuccessfully stifled snickers. Resultant echoes. Footfalls.) I'll be your tour guide, base campers. Follow me. This pagoda seems to be a museum. Or a mausoleum perhaps. At any rate, a monument to a dead culture. The walls around three sides of the bottom of this place are lined with tall spindly cabinets, display cases of a wildly improbable design. Each one consists of fan-shaped shelves that fold out from a central axis and lock into place on different levels from one another. Chaney blows.) Dust. Dust on everything. But not particularly thick. On the shelves -- the shelves have the fragile warmth of mother-of-pearl -- are specimens IF of implements and art work. (A click, like stone on stone. Chaney s breathing.) I'm holding a statue about a foot-and-a-half high. It represents an Asadi male, fullmaned and virile. But the statue depicts him with a kind of cape around his shoulders and a cruel pair of fangs such as the Asadi -- those of today, at any rate -- don't possess. Repetition of previous sound, followed by a metallic ping.) Here's an iron knife, with a wooden handle carved so that the top resembles some animal's skull. Everything else in the cabinet looks like a weapon or a heavy tool, the statue's definitely an anomaly here. I'm going across the chamber -- to the wall without any cabinets on it. Footfalls. Echoes.) The Flying Asadi Brothers are still up there, more rigid than the statue I just picked up. I'm passing directly beneath them now, directly beneath the dome, the iron ring, the energy globes, the weighted golden cord that falls from the dome... Dizzy... the dimness and the distance up there make me dizzy. Don't look at them, then, Chaney. Just keep moving -- moving toward the opposite wall. Through an opening in the lower portion of the helical stairway. Toward the horn-colored wall on which there are no cabinets, gang, just rows upon rows of -- damn this light, this hollowness...let me get closer -- of what look like tiny plastic wafers...rows of wafers hung from a pouple thousand silver rods protruding for about five or six inches at right angles from the wall. The wall's just one big elegant pegboard glowing like a fingernail with a match behind it. The rows of these wafers -- cassettes, cigarette cases, match boxes -- whatever you want to call them -- begin at about waist level and go up two or three feet higher than I can reach. Asadi height, I suppose. Five or six minutes, during which only Chaney s breathing can be heard.) Interesting. I think I've figured this out, Eisen, I want you to pay attention. I've just unfastened the carved wingnut from the end of one of these narrow silver rods and removed the first of several tiny cassettes hanging from it. Wafer was a serendipitous word choice, these little boxes are as thin as two or three transistor templates welded together. The faces of the things are about two inches square. I counted fifty of them hanging from this one six-inch rod and there are probably three thousand rods on this wall. That's about # cassettes altogether and this section of the pagoda, more than likely, is just a display area. But I want to describe the one I've got in my hand. I want to tell you how it works and maybe -- if I can restrain myself -- let you draw your own conclusions. In the center of this wafer -- which does seem to be made of some kind of plastic, by the way -- there's an inset circle of glass with a diameter of less than half an inch. A bulb or an eye, call it. Beneath this eye is a rectangular tab, flush with the surface of the cassette. Above the bulb, directly under the hole through which the wall rod passes, is a band containing a series of different-colored dots, some of the dots touching each other, some not. The spacing of them probably has significance -- or so I'd guess. (A chuckle.) And here's how this little cracker box works...oh, Eisen, don't you wish you were here instead of me? I do, too. I really do... It's purposely simple, I think. All you do is hold your thumb over the right half of the tab at the bottom of the cassette. Then the fireworks begin. (A pleased laugh; subsequent echo.) Right now the eye in the center of the wafer is flashing through an indecipherable program of colors. Reds, violets, greens. Greens, sapphires, pinks. All premeditatedly interlaced with pauses -- pregnant pauses, no doubt...In this dimness my hands are alternately lit and shadowed by the changing colors. Beautiful, beautiful. That's just it, in fact. The entire system probably sacrifices a degree of practicality on the altar of beauty. There -- I've shut it off. All you do is cover the left half of the control rectangle with your thumb. It may be possible to reverse the program -- replay it back to a desired point, so to speak -- but I haven't stumbled on the method yet. At least I don't think I have. It's impossible for me to remember the sequences of colors -- though it probably wasn't a bit difficult for the Asadi who composed, manufactured and used these things, however long ago that may have been. (A thumping noise.) I'm pocketing five of these cassettes, putting them in my backpack. For the greater glory of science. To set the shirttails of old Oliver Bow Aurm's ghost aflame with envy. So Eisen and Morrell will have something to put their screwdrivers to. Musingly) Look at that wall. Can you imagine the information on hand here? The level of technology necessary to devise a storage and retrieval system for a "language" that consists of complicated spectra patterns? By the way, what do you suppose I was "reading?" I'd guess that the band of colored dots above the eye is the description of the contents. The title, so to speak. Maybe I was scanning Fornications and Deflowerings by the Marquis de Asadi. A chuckle.) I noticed that my hands had begun to sweat whilejhe program was running. Sober again) No, the eyebook -- let's call them eyebooks -- was the first one on that particular rod. Maybe it's their War and Peace, their Brothers Karamazov, their Origin of the Species, their Golden Bough. And what the hell have they done with it? Stuck it in a crumbling godforsaken temple in the middle of the Synesthesia Wild and forgotten about it! What colossal waste -- what colossal arrogance! (A cacophony of echoes, a painful ringing. ) (A whisper, scarcely audible.) That's right, you two, you Bungling Brothers aerialists, pretend I don't exist. Pretend you can't hear me. Ignore the millennia. Ignore your IF ancestors whispering to you from their deaths. (Venomously) And damn you both to hell! I think I slept for a while. I went to sleep under the rows and rows of eyebooks. Maybe for an hour. Not any more than that. I can tell time with the bottoms of my feet -- by the warmth of the depression in the backpack where I put my head. A noise woke me, a ringing of iron. Now I'm on the helical stairway high above the museum floor. I'm in a curve of the stairway a little below and opposite the glass platform where The Bachelor was standing. He isn't there anymore. A moment ago he chinned himself up to the cold ring of the chandelier, gained his feet and balanced on the ring, then reached out and grabbed the plumbline that drops down from the dome. The huri? The huri squats on the globe, in the triangle of globes, pointing toward the front of the temple -- he got off The Bachelor's shoulder a good while ago. After grabbing the gold braid The Bachelor fashioned a noose and slipped his neck into it. Then he swung himself out over the floor so that his feet -- right now, at this very moment -- are hanging a little below the ring of the chandelier. I'm watching him hang there, his feet turning, inscribing an invisible circle inside the larger circle of the globe-set fixture. But hcisn't dead. No, he's not a bit dead. The noose is canted so that it catches him under the throat in the plush of his mane. In the two weeks since his designation his mane has thickened considerably, especially along his jaws and under his throat, and the new fur cushions the steadily constricting braid. So now he's just hanging there. The dangling man. (Listlessly) A pretty damn interesting development, I suppose. At least the huri acts like it's interesting. The huri's watching all this with either excitement or agitation, beating its wings sporadically and skittering to stay atop the globe it's perched on. (A bump. Unintelligible mumbling.) See if you can hear it. I'll hold the microphone out for you. (Silence, vaguely static-filled.) That's it, the huri's claws scrabbling on the globe -- the sound of The Bachelor's feet turning north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south west... (After almost ten minutes of near-silence) A while ago I saw that The Bachelor had begun to drool. A thin thread of something milky glistened on his bottom lip as he turned, his feet revolving first to the rjght and then back to the left. I saw his mouth working -- almost like an insect's mouth. The strand of drool got longer, it didn't drop away into the abyss of the stairwell, it kept growing and growing, lengthening like a somehow milky extension of the gold plumbline. Now the strand has fallen down the center of the helix so that it's a little below the place where I'm sitting. I can see that it's not a liquid at all, not any sort of spittle or vomit. It's a fiber, something spun from The Bachelor's gut and paid out through his mouth. (Unawed) Beautiful and grotesque at once -- and ril bet you think Vm drunk or drugged. Making silk out of a souse's fears, so to speak. But I've imbibed no bourbon, laddies, played with no Placenol -- and I wish you were sitting on this cramped iron stairway watching this disgusting show, this ritual unraveling of The Bachelor's innards. Gut-strands. Beautiful and grotesque gut-strands. Unemotionally) God, but my patience has been tried... (Several more minutes pass, A faint flapping commences, continues for a while, then ceases.) The Bachelor's been paying out silk as if he were made of it. The single strand I told you about a while ago, well, it damn near reached the floor. Then he started working with his hands, reeling it back in and making his body turn faster in the canted noose. He's wrapping himself in the stuff, like an Egyptian king who's decided to be a mummy before he dies. Meanwhile he makes more and more 'cloudy thread. Guess who's gotten into the act, gang? Right again. The huri flew off its globe when The Bachelor began reeling in his gut strand and caught up a section of the strand in its claws. Then, with both its claws and hands, flapping in higgledy-ziggledy circles, it covered The Bachelor's feet, his ankles, and his shins. After that it settled on the old boy's wrapped feet. Now, its wings outspread, its claws probably hooked into The Bachelor's flesh. the huri's hanging up there like a bat and still wrapping its master in gut-extruded cable. And the damn thing's blind, mind you, blind as -- a drunken xenologist. Good boy, Chaney. I don't know how long it'll take, but in a while The Bachelor will be encased -- completely encased, it seems -- in a murky chrysalis. The huri looks as if it would like to finish and tie off the job as soon as it can. It's already binding in the Asadi's hands, pulling thread around his thighs, clawing up his long body inch by inch like a freakish circus performer. Then The Bachelor will be nothing but a lopsided pupa hanging from a gold cord inside the loft of his ancestors' rickety barn -- I guess. ( Chaney grunts. Shuffling sounds; perhaps the shifting of a burden.) I guess. Don't ask me. I won't watch any more of this foolishness. I'm dizzy. I'm fed up with this nonsense. If I can make it down these steps in this hell-glow I'm going to lie down beside the wall of eyebooks and go to sleep. Directly to sleep. (Footfalls on the iron steps. Unintelligible mumbling. ) Interlude: early afternoon of Day tionally): Hello. I'm talking to Benedict alone now. Ben? Ben, you're supposed to make a drop tomorrow. Your twentieth. Can you believe that? I can't either. It IF doesn't seem like more than ten or twelve years that I've been out here. Twenty drops. Well, I may not pick up this latest one. Not for a while, anyway. God knows when The Bachelor will want to lead me out of here and back to the clearing. At the moment he's occupied. Let me tell you how. First, let me tell you what's going on. I'm standing here by one of the dusty display cases. All its shelves are folded up against the central axis, like the petals of a flower at night. But it's early afternoon, Ben -- dull light is seeping through the dome. Even so, every cabinet in the place is shut up like a new rose. Every one of them. It happened, I guess, while I was sleeping. The globes overhead, the three globes in the chandelier up there -- their fires have gone out of them, they're as dead and as mutely mottled as dinosaur eggs. I don't know exactly when that happened, either. One other thing -- the eyebooks don't work today. I've fiddled with twenty or thirty of them, holding my thumb over the rectangular tab beneath the eye -- but nothing, not even two colors in a row, not so much as a glimmer. From the end of the previous section to the beginning of this one Chaney engaged in a great deal of "irrelevant blathering." I have deleted it. Altogether, about twelve or fourteen hours of real time passed, time during which Chaney also slept and ate. In this "Interlude" I have taken the liberty of borrowing small sections from the deleted passages in order to provide a continuity which would not otherwise exist. For simplicity's sake, these insertions are not marked. Today the pagoda's dead. That's all there is to it: the pagoda's dead. And I have the feeling that it won't come alive again until Denebola has set and darkness sits on BoskVeld like the shadow, the crumpled shadow, of the huri's wings. But The Bachelor -- the cocoon -- you want to know what happened to him. To it. Again, I don't know exactly. During the night the plumbline from which he fashioned the noose -- the line from which he then hung out over the pagoda's floor while the huri wrapped him in the false silk of his own bowels -- that golden line, I tell you, has lengthened and dropped through the ring of the chandelier so that it's now only a few feet from the floor. It descended, I suppose, of its own accord. (A chuckle,) I'd estimate that between the floor and the bottom of The Bachelor's chrysalis there's now only enough space to wedge a small stool. A very small footstool...and now the ungainly pupa hungs in the daylight gloom of this chamber and turns slowly, slowly, first to the right, then to the left, like the gone-awry pendulum in a grandfather clock. That's it, Ben, brawny Big Ben, this whole building's just an outsized timepiece. You can hear Bosk Veld ticking in its orbit -- Listen... As for the huri, it crouches on the uppermost node of the pupa -- the point at which the braid breaks through -- and rides The Bachelor's mummified head as it used to ride his shoulder. Each time the wrapped body turns this way I feel that the huri's staring at me, taking my measure. If I had a pistol. I'd shoot the. damn thing -- I swear I would. Even if it meant that the concussion would split the seams of this temple and send it crashing down on my ears -- every fragile cabinet shattering, every eyebook bursting open. So help me, I would -- which is probably why I didn't bring a pistol, a hand-laser or a light-cannon out here in the first place. But now the little beastie is clawing nervously at the silken membrane, unhinging its wings and shaking their outstretched tips a little -- I think, gang, we're oing to get some action. Give me a few minutes, just a few... Later) Action, indeed. The huri's moving in its own catch-as-catchcan fashion down the swaying cocoon that houses The Bachelor. As it moves it peels back pieces of the membrane, snips them off with its feet, transfers the pieces to its greedy hands and eats them. That's right, eats them. I had been wondering what the little bugger subsisted on and this apparently is the answer -- it feeds on the husk of the Asadi chieftain's metamorphosis, it feeds on the rind of its master's involuntary change. That's phrasing it a little philosophically, I suppose, but I can't help thinking that the huri's eating The Bachelor's former self. It's crabwalking in a spiral down the cocoon -- a spiral that mirrors the great corkscrew of the pagoda's staircase -- and it furiously gobbles up the membrane that it has snipped away. TTie beast is at the hollow of The Bachelor's chest and I can see my old friend's head. I mean that I can see the outline of his head -- because even though the silken covering has been eaten away, a milk-blue film remains. It clings to his features like a thin hood. It's moist and trembly and through it I can see the death mask of his face. Ben, Ben, you can't expect me to stay here and watch this. Tell the others not to expect that of me. The bitch-goddess of xenology has worked me over too many times already and I'm nauseated with fatigue. With disgust. It's worse than last night. There's an odor in the temple, a smell like excrement and rot and the discharges of the glands -- I don't know what... (A retching sound. Then a rapid succession of footfalls, suggestive of running. ) genial): We're in the Wild again. Out in the open. Out among the singing leaves, the dancing moons, the glittering winds, the humidity is horrible. It makes my nose run. But after spendihg one sorenecked night in the refrigerated vault of that Asadi warehouse -- and one stomach-turning day in it when it changed from a warehouse into a charnel house -- well, the humidity's a welcome relief. Yes, indeed. Let my nose run as it may, where it may -- even though I don't know where the hell the face it's running on is running to. Actually, we're not running at all. We're moving quite leisurely, the Bachelor and me ajid the huri -- in no hurry at all. Clinically) I feel pretty well now. The horror of this afternoon has evaporated. I don't know why it made me ill. It wasn't that bad. IF really, I should have stayed and watched everything. That's what I came out her for. But when the smell in there got so bad -- my system's been under a strain. I had to get out of there. I bolted for the pagoda's entrance, pushed the heavy doors aside, ran down the tier of steps. The sunlight increased my nausea -- but I couldn't go back inside, Ben, so I'm not entirely certain what the final circumstances of The Bachelor's removal from the cocoon were. Like a little boy waiting for the library to open, I sat on the bottom step of the pagoda and held my head in my hands. I was ill. Really ill. It wasn't just an emotional thing. But now I feel better and the night -- the stars twinkling up there like chipped ice -- seems like my friend. (Wistfully) I wish I could navigate by those stars -- but I can't. Their patterns are still unfamiliar to me . Maybe we're going back to the clearing. Maybe I'll be able to pick up tomorrow's drop after all. I know I feel well enough now to try. The Bachelor is striding ahead of me; the huri's on his shoulder. I know -- (The sound of wind and leaves corroborates Chaneys testimony that they are out of doors, out of the temple,  -- I know, you're wondering what he looks like, what his disposition is, what his metamorphosis accomplished for him. Well, g#ing. I'm not sure. You see, he looks about the same. As I said, I didn't go back into the museum. I waited outside until the sun had set, thinking all the while that I would go back up the steps when the darkness was complete. I knew that my two charming friends couldn't get out any other way, that I wouldn't be stranded there alone. At least I hadn't seen any other doors while I was inside. The ancient Asadi apparently didn't see any need to leave themselves a multitude of outs. The end they've come to supports that hypothesis. But before I could steel myself to reentering the pagoda -- just as the twilight had begun to lose its gloss -- The Bachelor appeared on the highest step. And came down the steps. And walked right by me. He didn't look at me. The huri, clinging to his mane, had the comatose appearance that I remember it's possessing when Eisen Zwei came into the Asadi clearing for the second time. Now I know why it looked "so bloated and incapable of movement -- it had just ingested the old man's pupa, if Eisen Zwei could have so encased himself. So help me, I still haven't figured this out. I may never figure it out. Anyhow, I noticed only two small changes in The Bachelor as he stalked past me into the jungle. First, his mane is now a full-grown collar of fur -- still a little damp from the filmy blue substance that lined the chrysalis. And second, a thin cloak of this film stretches between The Bachelor's naked shoulderblades and falls in folds to the small of his back. Probably, it just hasn't dropped away yet. And that's it. His eyes are still as mute, as white, as uncommunicative as they had ever been. We're in a tunnel, sort of. We've been walking, slipping beneath the vines, about thirty or forty minutes. A while ago we came upon a kind of footpath, a beaten trail that permits us to walk upright -- just as if we were in a recreation park. The only such trail I've seen in the Synesthesia Wild, ever. The Bachelor's moving down it easily and once again I'm having no difficulty keeping up. But I'm lost. (Aconsiderable pause during which the sounds of the Wild assert themselves: wind through the leaves, distant water, the soft shushing of feet in the dirt. ) (Pensively) All the time I've spent in the Asadi clearing, all that time watching them amble around and wear down their heels to no purpose -- it seems like centuries ago. No kidding, Ben, Eisen. That time in the clearing just doesn't exist right now. Lost as I am, I feel like I could follow The Bachelor down this narrow trail forever. But his metamorphosis -- or lack of it -- bothers me. I've been thinking about it. My considered, but not necessarily considerate, opinion is that the old chieftain is exactly what he used to be. Anatomically speaking, that is. Maybe the very brief time he spent hibernating in that homemade sleeping bag of his altered him psychologically rather than physically. (Ten minutes of wind, water, and shush-shushing feet. ) something in the trees ahead of us. A crouched, dark shape. The Bachelor just turned on me -- he wouldn't let me approach with him. If I don't stay fairly close. I'll be lost out here. Damn you, you hulking boonie, I won't let you leave me. We're off the trail. We've been off it a good while and the trees, the vines, the twisted roots -- everything looks the same; one spot is like ahother. I'm disobeying the bastard. I'm staying close enough to keep him in sight every second. He's out there in a ragged hallway of leaves moving toward the thing in the tree. I know that it's there because he knows that it's there. It's like a tumor in the branches, a lump to which the moonlight gives a suspicious fuzziness. You should see the way he's approaching that thing. He's spread his arms out wide and is taking one long step at a time, one long easy step. Like an adagio S.S. man. The membrane between his shoulder blades has opened out, too, so that it makes a fan-shaped drapery across his back. Shadows shift across it, shadows and moonlight... What a weird boonie. You should see him. He's a kind of moving, blown. up version of the drunken huri clinging to his mane. We're closer now. That thing up there, whatever it is, it's either dead or inanimate or hypnotized -- hypnotized, I think. I'm sure that it's one of the Asadi. A gray shape. Ordinarily, you don't get this close at night, you just don't. The Bachelor's hypnotized it with his slow-motion goose step, the filmy rippling of the membrane across his back and arms -- maybe even with IF his empty eyes...now we're just waiting, waiting. I'm as close as I can get without jeopardizing the purity of this confrontation. I can see eyes up there. Asadi eyes, stalled on a sickly pink. Aloud, over a sudden thrashing.) The damn thing's just jumped out of the branches! It's one of the Asadi all right, a lithe gray female. The Bachelor's wrenching her backward to the ground, the huri's fallen sidelong away from him, fluttering, fluttering in the thicket under the tree! A heavy bump; continued thrashing.) Chaney s voice skyrockets to an weakly) Leave me alone, leave me . Violent noises: then a hum of static and low breathing. ) aches -- I've bn ill again. But it's sweet here; I'm kneeling in grass under the trees by the edge of the pagoda's clearing... I've been ill again, yes, but I've done heroic things. I'm doing a damn heroic thing right now. You can hear me, can't you? I'm talking out loud... he's not about to stop me -- he's just going to sit there opposite me with his long legs folded and take it... Aren't you, boonie? Aren't you? That's right, that's a good boonie... He can't believe the deed I've done, Ben. He can't believe I've freed him from that scabby little battlecock. There's blood on the grass. Dark sweet blood. Too sweet, Ben. I've go to get up... Chaney moans. A rustling of clothes -- then his strained voice) Okay. Fine. A little bark to lean against here, a tree with spiny shingles. A stumping sound.) Good, good -- I refused to let myself get disoriented, Ben. We came marching -- slogging, more like -- right through that opening there, that portal of ferns and violet blossoms... oh, hell, you can't see where I'm pointing, can you? You wouldn't see, probably, even if you were here. But we slogged to this place from that direction I'm pointing and I kept my head about me all the way. My head, by the way, aches because he bashed me down -- he elbowed me in the eye. They always elbow, the Asadi -- they think elbows were given to them to jab in other people's ribs and faces, even The Bachelor. He knocked me down, bloodied me, damn him, when I tried to stop him from slaughtering this poor woman here, the one that lies here butchered in the grass. He knocked me down and I couldn't stop him. Then he whirled her up over his shoulder, grabbed the huri out of the bushes by its feet. Took off through the jungle, the Wild ringing like a thousand wind chimes because of my head, my aching eye. To keep from getting lost, I had to follow him. E)ear God, I had to hobble along after that crazy crew... Then when we reached this little patch of grass among the trees -- the pagoda's right over there -- he threw the dead woman on the ground and disemboweled her. I saw him doing it as I came up through the jungle after him... you see, I got here three or four minutes after he did. I collapsed, I collapsed and watched. I held my bad eye and squinted through the other... in ten or twelve minutes I'd forgotten what it all meant, and the woman didn't look like an Asadi any more. Now the grass is littered with her -- and The Bachelor didn't even have to strike me to keep me from interfering. But, Ben, I couldn't help that; it was all owing to my head and my fatigue -- I wasn't thinking straight. I didn't realize he was butchering the creature. As soon as I could I remedied the situation. And that's why I'm still a little sick. But my head's clear now; it aches but it's clear. And the boonie isn't about to strike me again. Are you, boonie? All he can do is sit and stare at me. I've intimidated the hell out of him. He thought I was some kind of maneless Asadi vermin and he can't reconcile himself to this new image of me. Poor mute bastard. My heroic deed kicked him right in his psychological solar plexus. (Almost pompously) As the nfioons are my witness, I killed the huri. I killed the huri! No, no, the boonie can't believe it either but I swear by holy heaven it's true. Just look at him, look at him making slow Figure eights with his chin. God, but I've boggled him! He thought me just another Asadi, a low Asadi dog -- and when he had finished carving up that pitifully helpless woman, that sweet longlegged lady, he set the huri down atop her carcass -- I had to do something then. I pulled myself up. But the huri was sitting there on her butchered body, staring at me blindly. Old boonie-boy had put it there to guard her corpse, just the way Eisen Zwei had done in the clearing the day he carried in three slaughtered kinsmen as a feast offering. The huri meant I wasn't supposed to move, I was supposed to be a good cannibal and wait until dinner had been properly served. I'm not an Asadi -- I'll be damned if I'm an Asadi and I didn't -- no, by God, I didn't -- pay any heed to The Batchie-boy's stupid sentinel. I killed it. I ran up and kicked the huri with my boot. It fluttered backward and I was upon it with the heel of my boot, grinding its Filthy little no-face into the grass. Its body split open. Pus spilled out like putty from a plastic tube, stinking to the skies -- that's what made me sick, the sight and the stink of the huri's insides. I stumbled away, fell to my knees... The Bachelor couldn't move. over him, a power. He just sat, like he's sitting now, and watched me. The smell of the grass revived me, convinced me of my own heroism, my own crimson-bloody heroism -- and that's when I knew I had to tell you about it, when I started talking through my sickness and the toosweet smell of the grass. (Mockingly) Are you awed, boonie? Is that your trouble? Could I walk right over there and kick your face in if I tried? Yes, oh, yes, I could. Damn it, Ben, I'm in control, I'm on top! IF ( Laughter, prolonged laughter: then virtual silence. ) Power's an evanescent thing, Ben. (Musingly) He just stood up. The Bachelor did, uncoiled and faced me like an enemy. I thought I was dead, I really did. I know that's a turnabout -- you don't have to require consistency of me when I'm ill. But he only stared at me for a minute, then turned and walked across the open clearing toward the temple. He's climbing the steps right now, very slowly, a gray shape like the gray shape he killed. Every moon is up. The three of them ripple his shadow down the tier of steps behind him. I'm not going into that place again, gang, he needn't wait for me -- and he isn't waiting. Fine. Excellent. I'll stay here in the grass, under the vines and fire blossoms, until it's morning. Let him go, let him go... But, damn him, he can't leave me in this gut-strewn glade! It reeks; the grass is black with gore. And here -- just look at this. What the hell is it? You've got to get down i groaning it: a little pocket of globular tripe here on the edge of the grass, just where the moonlight falls. Three of them nestled in the grass, three palpitant little globes -- I think they're ova, Ben, all of them about the size of my thumbnails. Much bigger than a human being's minute reproductive cells. But ova nevertheless. Ovaries. That's my guess. They glisten and seem alive, glowing as they do... The Bachelor placed them here while , he was butchering the poor lady. He was careful not to crush them -- he laid them out so that they'd form an equilateral triangle here in this nest of grass. It's like -- well, it's like the arrangement of the globes in the chandelier ring inside the pagoda... But I'm not going back in there, is it? Eisen, you said we could se it from this hemisphere -- you said it was visible. But I'm standing here, standing out here in front of the Asadi's hulking temple where there aren't any branches to block my view and, damn you, Eisen, I don't see it. I don't see it! Just those blinding moons dancing up and down and a sky full of sparkling cobwebs. Where's Sol? Where's our own sun? Eisen, you said we could see it with the unaided eye. I'm sure you said that -- but I don't see it! It's lost out there in a cobwebbing of stars -- lost! (Suddenly resolute) I'm going back into the temple. Yes, by God, I am. The Bachelor doesn't care if I stay out here and rot with the poor butchered lady he's abandoned. He's abandon me, too. Twenty minutes I've been out here alone, twenty minutes staring at the dark grass, the dark sweet grass. He wants me to die from its cloying reek; that's what he's after. I killed his huri. A man who kills a huri isn't one to put up with a passive death, though. He forgot that. If I have to die, Ben, it'll be heroically, not the way he wants. I've taken too much to sit cross-legged under the trees and wait for either my own death or the corrupt hunger that would keep me alive. I won't eat his offering, that poor butchered lady, and I won't stay out here either! There's a beautiful golden cord in the pagoda, a beautiful golden cord. That should do it. If the boonie's still too shaken up from his loss, his stinking bereavement, to lead me back to the clearing -- the Asadi clearing -- that plumbline ought to serve. I've worked with my hands; I can fashion a noose as well as any dumpling-hearted boonie. And then carry it through where he couldn't. Just come along, gang, and see if I can't. (The shush-shushing of feet in the dirt, Chaney s shortmndedness as he climbs the temple s steps, the inwardgroaning utterance of a heavy door.) (From this point on, Chaneys each word has the brief after-echo, the telltale hollowness imparted by the empty volume of a large building s interior) It's cold. You wouldn't believe how cold it is in here, Ben. Cold and dark. No light is filtering down through the dome and the chandelier -- the chandelier's out! My eyes aren't accustomed... ,(A bump.) Here's a cabinet. I've scraped my elbow. The shelves are down and I scraped my elbow on one of the shelves. I'm Just one of the many apparently unsimulable conditions thaf convinces me of the authenticity of the tapes. How much of what Chaney reports is hallucination rather than reality, however, I'm not prepared to conjecture. going to stand here a minute. The cabinets give off their own faint light, a very warm faint light, and I'll be able to see a good deal better if I just stand here and let my pupils adjust. It's the same cabinet I described for you last night! Or one just like it, I guess. The statue, the knife, the implements and weapons -- nothing is different. (A scraping sound, somewhat glassy. ) Well, wait a minute. Here's a difference. The bottom petals of this cabinet have been broken off, torn away. I'm standing in the shards. And I'm not the vandal, Ben -- the shards were already here. I just stepped on them, that's all. The little bump I gave the cabinet couldn't have done this -- someone had to work energetically at these shelves to break them away. The Bachelor, maybe? The Bachelor's the only one in here besides me. Did he want an axe to stalk me with? Did he need one of his ancestors' ornamental knives before he felt competent to take on the pinkfleshed Asadi outcast who killed his poor rubber rooster? Poor, poor Chaney s voice becomes huskily confidential) I think that's it, Ben, I think that's why the globe lamps are out, why this place is so dark, why this cabinet is broken. The boonie wants to kill me -- he's stalking me in the dark. Well, that's fine, too. That's more heroic than the cord, an excellent death -- I'll even grapple with him a little. Beowulf and Grendel. It shouldn't take very long. The lady he killed felt almost nothing -- I'm sure of IF (A confusion of echoes, dissonant and reverberating. Complete silence but for Chaneys chronic shortwindedness. This continues for four or five tense minutes. Then a forceful crack followed by a tremendously amplified shattering sound -- like a box full of china breaking. Chaney gives a startled cry.) (Whispering) My dear God -- the pagoda's flooded with light now -- flooded with light from the three globes in the great iron fixture that yesterday hung just beneath the dome. It's different now -- the iron ring is floating about five feet from the floor. The Bachelor is inside the ring, stabbing at one of the globes with a long-handled pick. He's already chipped away a big mottled piece of its covering. The piece shattered on the floor. You heard it shatter. (Aloud) And all three globes are pulsing with energy, temple with electricity -- a deadly chill -- their own anger. I'm sure they've generated the field that keeps the iron ring afloat, the ring hovering like a circular prison around The Bachelor's shoulders. The plumbline whips back and fourth as he jabs -- it has damn near entangled him. And he's caught inside the ring -- caught there and he keeps jabbing at the foremost globe with his pick. (The jabbing sounds punctuate Chaney s headlong narrative -- apparently, another piece of the globes covering falls to the floor and shatters.) Why the hell doesn't he duck out of there? Is he trapped in that field? I can see he's too damn busy to be worried about me, to want to kill me. All right. That's fine. I'll cheer him on, I'll give him moral supAll the cabinets are open. All the shelves are down. I can see them now. The pagoda's alive again. All it took was the dark and a litfle violence. The foremost globe has split wide open -- he's knocked the crown off it. And listen, Ben, listen. Sornething is moving inside it, inside the intact bottom half. The ring is canting to one side and it's dimmer in here. Suddenly dimmer. If he keeps banging away at those globes this whole place will be drained of light -- the shelves will fold back up and lock into position forever. Can you hear the scrabbling in the broken globe? Can you hear it, Ben? Do you already know what it is? I can see it and hear it both. In this dimness there's a flickering in that shell, a flickering like the hissing tatters of a black flame... Sweet Jesus, Ben, it's a huri scrabbling about in there, a black-black, blind-blind huri! It's clawing at the shell and pulling itself upright even as the ring dips toward the floor. (A fluttering which is distinctly audible over both Chaney s voice and the tapping of The Bachelor s pick. ) It's in the air -- a clumsy beast a little larger than the one I killed. And there's a smell in here just like the smell when I ground out the guts of the other huri. Damn it! The Asadi are idiots! The Bachelor is stabbing at another globe -- he wants to let another one out. He wants to let all three of them out so that we'll be plunged in darkness and flapping wings and maybe even the dome will fall in on us. To himself he can do that -- to me, no sir! I'm getting out of here, Ben, I'm going to go tumbling down the steps while there's still light to tumble by. What a madhouse, what a sacred madhouse. Old Oliver Bow Aurm should kiss the nearest maggot for saving him from this -- figurative maggot, that is. BoskVeld crawls with figurative maggots -- and I'm coming home. I'm coming home to you. To you, my kinsmen... Footfalls, a heavy wooden groaning, and then the unechoing silence of the night as Chaney emerges into the Wild) at them go off! I'm unloading my backpack. I'm lobbing them toward old Sol, wherever the debbil he at. Another Independence Day! My second one. (Four or five successive whooshing sounds,) I'm coming home. I'm coming home. To you, Ben. To Eisen, Morrell and Jonathan. You won't be able to say I don't do things with a flare. Or flares. (Laughter,) God, look at them stain the sky! Look at them smoke! Look at them burn away the reek of Asadi self-delusion! No, by God, we don't destroy every race we run across. Maybe the pygmies, maybe we did it to the pygmies -- but the Asadi, bless 'em, they're doing it to themselves -- they've been doing it to themselves for eons. And, God, look at that clean phosphorescent sky! I only wish I knew which direction Sol was in -- I'd like to see it. I'd like to see it like a shard of ice glittering in the center of those flaming cobwebs. Thomas Benedict speaking: last things We saw the flares and picked up Chaney, Moses Eisen was with me in the copter. We had come out extremely early on the morning of Day # in order to complete Chaney s customary supply drop and then to circle the Asadi clearing with the thought of making a naked-eye sighting of the cultural xenologist. Captain Eisen ordered this course of action when it became apparent that Chaney was not agoing to communicate with us of his own accord. The captain wished to appraise himself of Chaneys condition, perhaps by landing and talking with the man. He wanted him to return to base camp. If it had not been for these unusual circumstances, Chaney s flares might have gone off for no audience but the empty sky. As it was, we saw only the last two or three flares that he set off and had to reverse the direction of our copter to make the rendezvous. IF By the time we reached him Chaney was no longer the exhilarated adventurer that the last section of his monologue paints him -- he was a tired and sick man who did not seem to recognize us when we set down and who came aboard the copter bleary-eyed and unshaven, his arms draped across our shoulders. By removing his backpack we came into possession of the recorder he had used for the last two days and the eyebooks he had supposedly picked up in the Asadi temple. And that night I went back to the Asadi clearing alone in order to retrieve the remainder of his personal effects. Back at base camp, however, we committed Chaney at once to the Tsyuki and saw to it that he had a private room in the infirmary. During this time, as I mentioned earlier, he wrote The Ritual of Death and Designation. He claimed, in more than one of our conversations, that we had picked him up not more than four or Jive hundred yards from the pagoda he describes. He made this claim even though we were unable on several trips over this area to discover a clearing large enough to accommodate such a structure. Not once in all of our talks, however, did he ever claim that he had been inside the pagoda. Only in the confiscated tape does one encounter this bizarre notion: you have just read the edited transcript of the tape and can decide for yourself how much credence to give its various reports. One thing is certain -- the  eyebooks that Chaney brought out of the Synesthesia Wild with him do exist. And they had to come from somewhere. The eyebooks are a complete puzzle. They look exactly as Chaney describes them in the tape, but none of them work. The cassettes are seamless plastic, and the only really efficient way weve been able to get inside one is to break the bulb, the glass eyelet, and probe through the opening with oldfashioned watch tools. If the books were indeed fprogramed as Chaney reports in his tape, weve found nothing inside the cassettes on which these programs could have been inscribed and no energy source to power such a ra presentation of spectra patterns. Morrell has suggested that the programs exist in the molecular structure of the plastic casings themselves, but there is no ready way to confirm this. The eyebooks remain an enigma. As for Chaney, he apparently recovered. He would not discuss the tape that  once -- only once -- confronted him with, but he did talk about putting together a booklength account of his findings. The Asadi have to be described, Chaney once told me. They have to be described in detail. Its essential that we get every culture we find out here down on paper, down on tape, down on holographic storage cubes. The pen is mightier than the sword and paper is more durable than flesh. But Chaney didnt do his book. Three months he stayed with us, copying his notes, working in the base-camp library. Joining us only every sixth or seventh meal in the general mess. He kept to himself, as isolated among us as he had been in the Asadi clearing. And he did a lot of thinking, a lot of somber, melancholy, fatalistic thinking. He did something else that few of us paid much attention to. He grew a beard and refused to have his hair cut. Later we understood why. One morning we could not find Egan Chaney anywhere in base camp. By evening he still had not returned. Eisensent me to Chaney s hut and told me to spend the night there. He told me to go through Chaney s belongings arid to see if I could determine his whereabouts either from an explicit note or a random scrawl. '# dont think hell be back, the captain said -- and the captain was right. He was wrong about the note, though. I found nothing but battered notebooks in his book-littered cubicle. And though I read through all of these that night, I found no farewell note. It was not until I checked my mail box the next day that I found what Eisen had told me to look for. I checked the box merely out of habit -- I knew there had been no probeship deliveries. Perhaps  was looking for a memo from one of the base campers. And I found the note from Chaney. The only comfort it gave me was the comfort of knowing that my friend had not decided to commit suicide and that he had successfully fought off a subtle but steadily encroaching madness. (Eisen read this last sentence in rough draft and took exception to it:  Now you re dead wrong, Ben. Chaney not only succumbed to his madness but he committed suicide as well -- a slow suicide, but suicide nevertheless.  The note expressed a peculiar sort of optimism, I think, and if you dont see this slender affirmative thread when you first read through the note, go back and read the damn thing again. Because even if Chaney did commit suicide he died for something he believed in. I'm going back to the Asadi clearing, Ben. But don't come after me -- I won't let you bring me back. I've reached a perfect accommodation with myself. Probably I'll die. Without the supply drops I'm sure I will. But I belong among the Asadi, not as an outcast and not as a chieftain -- but as one of the even though that throng is stupid, even though it persists in its self-developed immunity to instruction. I'm one of them. Like The Bachelor, I'm a great slow moth. A tiger-moth. And the flame I choose to pursue and die in is the same hame that slowly consumes every one of the Asadi. Good health to you, Egan A note from Moses Eisen: Because of Egan Chaney's defection to the Synesthesia Wild and Thomas Benedict's lucid compilation of Chaney's notes, the Academy of Cultural Xenologists bestowed upon Benedict rather than Chaney the Oliver Bow Aurm Frasier Memorial Fillet. Though we do not forget the dead, we bury them. It is for the living that honors were made.  IF first walked on Mars the probe was launched from the moon for Pluto. Five years later the first pictures were transmitted as the orbiting probe trained its cameras on the planet's surface. The transmission quality was poor; but even so, certain features of the photographs were productive of great anguish as old theories fell to shards and were replaced by puzzlement, questions with no hint of answers. The pictures seemed to say that the planet had a smooth, almost polished surface, without a single geographic feature to break the smoothness of it. Except that at certain places, equidistant from one another along the equator, were tiny dotS" that would have been taken for transmission noise if they had not appeared consistently. Too, the dots still persisted when some of the noise was eliminated. So it seemed they must be small geographic features or shadows cast by geographic features, although at Pluto's distance from the sun shadows would be suspect. The other data did nothing to lessen the anguish. The planet was smaller than supposed, less than a thousand miles in diameter, and its density worked out to # grams per cubic centimeter rather than the unrealistic figure of # grams, previously supposed. This meant several things. It meant that somewhere out there, perhaps something more than seven planet of the solar system swung in orbit, for no planet the size and mass of Pluto could explain the eccentricities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. The calculation of Pluto's mass, now proved inaccurate, had been based on the measurement of those eccentricities and it must be admitted now that something else must account for them. Beyond that, Pluto was most strange -- a smooth planet, featureless except for the evenly spaced dots. The smoothness certainly could notbe explained by a non-turbulent atmosphere, for surely Pluto had to be too small and cold to hold an atmosphere. A surface of ice, men wondered, the frozen remnants of a one-time, momentary atmosphere? But for a number of reasons that didn't seem right, either. Metal, perhaps, but if the planet were of solid metal the density should be far greater. The men on Earth consoled themselves. In five more years the probe would come back to Earth, carrying with it the films that it had takert and from them, the actual films and not the low-quality tranmissions, perhaps much that was hazy now might become understandable. The probe swung in its measured orbits and sent back more pictures, although they were little help, for the quality still was poor. Then it fired the automatic sequence that would head it back to Earth, and its beeping signals from far out in space said it was headed home on a true and steady course. Something happened. The IF beeping stopped and there was a silence. Moon base waited. It might start up again. The silence might indicate only a momentary malfunction and the signals might start again. But they never did. miles from the sun, some mishap had befallen the homing probe. It was never heard again -- it was lost forever. There was no sense in sending out another probe until a day when technical advances could assure better pictures. The technical advances would have to be significant -- small refinements would do little good. The second and third manned expeditions went to Marsnd came home again, bringing back, among many other things, evidence that primitive forms of life existed there, which settled once for all the old, dark suspicion that life might be an aberration to be found only on the Earth. For with life on two planets in the same solar system there could no longer be any doubt that life was a common factor in the universe. The fourth expedition went out, landed and did not come back again and now there was on Mars a piece of ground that was. forever Earth. The fifth expedition was sent out even while the Earth still paid tribute to those four men who had died so far from home. Now that life had been found on another world, now that it was apparent that another planet at one time hacfbeld seas and rivers and an atmosphere that had been an approximation of Earth's own atmosphere, now that we knew we no longer were alone in the universe, the public interest and support of space travel revived. Scientists, remembering (never having, in fact, forgotten, for it had gnawed steadily at their minds) the puzzlement of the Pluto probe, began to plan a manned Pluto expedition, as there was still no sense in sending an instrumented probe. from the Moon Base, I was a member of the expedition. I went along as a geologist -- the last thing a Pluto expedition needed. There were three of us and any psychologist will tell you that three is a number that is most unfortunate. Two gang up on one or ignore one and there is always competition to be one of the gang of two. No one wants to stand alone with the other two against him. But it didn't work that way with u. We got along all right, although there were times when it was rough going. The five years that the probe took to arrive at Pluto was cut by more than half, not only because of improved rocket capability, but because a manned craft could pile on velocity that couldn't be programed -- or at least safely programed -- into a probe. But a bit more than two years is a long time to be cooped up in a tin can rocketing along in emptiness. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if you had some sense of speed, of really getting somewhere -- but you haven't. You just hang there in space. The three of us? Well, I am Howard Hunt and the other two were Orson Gates, a chemist, and Tyler Hampton, an engineer. As I say, we got along fine. We played chess tournaments -- yeah, three men in a tournament and it was' all right because none of us knew chess. If we had been any good I suppose we would have been at one another's throats. We dreamed up dirty ditties and were so pleased with our accomplishments that we'd spend hours singing them and none of us could sing. We did a lot of other futile things -- by now you should be getting the idea. There were some rather serious scientific experiments and observations we were supposed to make, but all of us figured that our first and biggest job was to manage to stay sane. When we neared Pluto we dropped the fooling around and spent much time peering through the scope, arguing and speculating about what we saw. Not that there was much to see. The planet resembled nothing quite as much as a were no mountains, no valleys, no craters -- nothing marred, the smoothness of the surface. The dots were there, of course. We could make out seven groups of them, all positioned along the equatorial belt. And in close up they were not simply dots. They were structures of some kind. We landed finally, near a group of them. The landing was a little harder than we had figured it would be. The planetary surface was hard -- there was no give to it. But we stayed right-side up and we didn't break a thing. describe Pluto and it's a hard thing to put into words. You can say that it is smooth and that it's dark -- it's dark even in broad daylight. The sun, at that distance, is not niuch more than a slightly brighter star. You don't have daylight on Pluto -- you have starlight and it doesn't make much difference whether you're facing the sun or not. The planet is airless, of course, and waterless and cold. But cold, as far as human sensation is concerned, is a relative thing. Once the temperature gets down to a hundred Kelvin it doesn't much IF matter how much colder it becomes. Especially when you're wearing life support. Without a suit containing life support you'd last only a few seconds, if that long, on a place like Pluto. I've never figured out which would kill you first -- cold or internal pressure. Would you freeze -- or explode before you froze.? So Pluto is dark, airless, cold and smooth. Those are the externals only. You stand there and look at the sun and realize how far away you are. You know you are standing at the edge of the solar system, that just out there, a little way beyond, you'd be clear outside the system. Which dsn't really have to be true, of course. You know about the tenth planet. Even if it's theory, it's supposed to be out of circling comets that technically are a part of the solar system, although they're so far out no one ever thinks of them. You could say to yourself this really is not the edge -- the hypothetical tenth planet and the comets still are out there. But this is intellectualization; you're telling yourself something that your mind says may be true, but your gut denies. For hundreds of years Pluto hasjen the last outpost and this, by God, is Pluto and you're farther away from home than man has ever been before and you feel it. You don't belong to anything any more. You're in the back alley, and the bright and happy streets are so far away that you know you'll never find them. It isn't homesickness that you feel. It's more like never having had a home. Of never having belonged anywhere. You get over it, of course -- or come to live with it. So we came down out of the ship after we had landed and stood upon the surface. The first thing that struck us -- other than the sense of lostness that at once grabbed all of us -- was that the horizon was too near, much nearer than on the Moon. We felt at once that we stood on a small world. We noticed that horizon's nearness even before we noticed the buildings that the probe had photographed as dots and that we had dropped down to investigate. Perhaps buildings is not the right word -- structures probably would be better. Buildings are enclosures and these were not enclosures. They were domes someone had set out to build and hadn't had time to finish. The basic underlying framework had been erected and then the work had stopped. Riblike arcs curved up from the surface, and met overhead. Struts and braces held the frarhes solid, but that was as far as the construction had gone. There were three of them, one larger than the other two. The frames were not quite as sitnple as I may have made them seem. Tied into the ribs and struts and braces were a number of other structural units that seemed to have no purpose and make no sense at all. We tried to make sense out of them and out of the scooped-out hollows that had been gouged out of the planetary surface within the confines of each construct -- they had no floors and seemed fastened to the surface of the planet. The hollows were circular, some six feet across and three feet deep, and to me they looked like nothing quite as much as indentations made in a container of ice cream by a scoop. Abput this time Tyler began to have some thoughts about the surface. Tyler is an engineer and should have had his thoughts immediately -- and so should the rest of us -- but the first hour or so outside the ship had been considerably confusing. We had worn our suits in training, of course, and had done some walking around in them, but Pluto seemed to have even less gravity than had been calculated and we had had to get used to it before we could be reasonably comfortable. Nor had anything else been exactly as we had anticipated. "This surface," Tyler said to me. "There is something wrong with it." "We knew it was smooth," said Orson. "The pictures showed that. Coming in, we could see it for ourselves." "This smooth?" Tyler asked. "This even?" He turned to me. "It isn't geologically possible. Would you say it is?" "I would think not," T said. "If there had been any upheaval at all this floor would be rugged. There can't have been any erosion -- anything to level it down. Micrometeorite impacts, maybe, but not too many of them. We're too far out for meteorites of any size. And while micrometeorites might pit the surface there would be no leveling process." T yler let himself down on his knees rather awkwardly. He brushed a hand across the surface. The seeing was not too good, but you could see that there was dust, a thin layer of dust, a powdering. "Shine a light down here," said Tyler. Orson aimed his light at the spot. Some of the gray ,dust still clung where Tyler had wiped his hand, but there were streaks where the darker surface showed through. "Space dust," said Tyler. Orson said, "There should be damn little of it." "True," said Tyler. "But over IF accumulate. It couldn't be erosion dust, could it?" "Nothing to cause erosion," I said. "This must be as close to a dead planet as you ever get. Not enough gravity to hold any of the gases -- if there ever were gases. At one time there must have been, but they've all gone -- they went early. No atmosphere, no water. I doubt there ever was any accumulation. A molecule wouldn't hang around for long." "But space dust would?" "Maybe. Some sort of electrostatic attraction, maybe." Tyler scrubbed the little patch of surface again with his gloved hand, removing more of the dust, with more of the darker surface showing through. "Have we got a drill?" he asked. "A specimen drill." "I have one in my kit," said Orson. He took it out and handed it to Tyler. Tyler positioned the bit against the surface, pressed the button. In the light of the torch you could see the bit spinning. Tyler put more weight on the drill. "It's harder than a bitch," he said. The bit began to bite. A small pile of fragments built up around the hole. The surface was hard, no doubt of that. The bit didn't go too deep and the pile of fragments was small. Tyler gave up. He lifted out the bit and snubbed off the motor. "Enough for analysis?" he asked. "Should be," said Orson. He took the bit from Tyler and handed him a small specimen bag. Tyler laid the open mouth of the bag on the surface and brushed the fragments into it. "Now we'll know," he said. "Now we will know something." A couple of hours later, back in the ship, we knew. "I have it," Orson said, "but I don't believe it." "Metal?" asked Tyler. "Sure, metal. But not the kind you have in mind. It's steel." "Steel?" I said, horrified. "It can't be. Steel's no natural metal. It's tnanufactured." "Iron," said Orson. "Nickel. Molybdenum, vanadium, chromium. That works out to steeL I don't know as much about steel as I should. But it's steel -- a good steel. Corrosion resistant, tough, strong." "Maybe just the platform for the structures," I said. "Maybe a pad of steel to support them. We took the specimen close to one of them." "Let's find out," said Tyler. We opened up the garage and ran down the ramp and got out the buggy. Before we left we turned off the television camera. By this time Moon Base would have seen all they needed to see and if they wanted more they could ask for it. We had given them a report on everything we had found -- all except the steel surface and the three of us agreed that until we knew more about that we would not say anything. It would be a while in any case until we got an answer from them. The time lag to Earth was about sixty hours each way. We went out ten miles and took a boring sample and came back, following the thin tracks the buggy made in the dust, taking samples every mile. We got the answer that I think all of us expected we would get, but couldn't bring ourselves to talk about. The samples all were steel. It didn't seem possible, of course, and it took us a while to digest the fact, but finally we admitted that on the basis of best evidence Pluto was no planet, but a fabricated metal ball, small-planet size. But Godawful big for anyone to build. Anyone? T hat was the question that now haunted us. Who had built it? Perhaps more important -- why had they built it? For some purpose, surely, but why, once that purpose had been fulfilled (if, in fact, it had been fulfilled) had Pluto been left out here at the solar system's rim? "No one from the system," Tyler said. "There's no one but us. Mars has life, of course, but primitive life. It got a start there and hung on and that was all. Venus is too hot. Mercury is too close to the sun. The big gas planets? Maybe, but not the kind of life that would build a thing like this. It had to be something from outside." "How about the fifth planet?" suggested Orson. "There probably never was a fifth planet," I said. "The material for it may have been there, but the planet never formed. By all the rules of celestial mechanics there should have been a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but something went haywire." "The tenth planet, then," said Orson. "No one is really positive there is a tenth," said Tyler. "Yeah, you're right," said Orson. "Even if there were it would be a poor bet for life, let alone intelligence." "So that leaves us with outsiders," said Tyler. "And a long time ago," said Orson. "Why do you say that?" "The dust. There isn't much dust in the universe." "And no one knows what it is. There is the dirty ice theory." "I see what you're getting at. But it needn't be ice. Nor graphite nor IF any of the other things that have been -- "  "You mean it's that stuff out there." "It could be. What do you think, Howard?" "I can't be sure," I said, "The only thing I know is that it couldn't be erosive." Before we went to sleep we tried to fix up a report to beam back to Moon Base, but anything we put together sounded too silly and unbelievable. So we gave up. We'd have to tell them some time, but we could wait. When we awoke we had a bite to eat, then got into our suits and went out to look ovef the structures. They still didn't make much sense, especially all the crazy contraptions that were fastened on the ribs and struts and braces. Nor did the scooped-out hollows. "If they were only up on legs," said Orson, "they could be used as chairs." "But not very comfortable," said Tyler. "If you tilted .them a bit," said Orson. But that didn't figure either. They would still be uncomfortable. I wondered why he thought of them as chairs. They didn't look like any chairs to me. We pottered around a lot, not getting anywhere. We looked the structures over inch by inch, wondering all the while if there was something we had missed. But there didn't seem to be. Now comes the funny part of it. I don't know why we did it -- out of sheer desperation, maybe. But failing to find any clues, we got down on our hands and knees, dusting at the surface with our hands. What we hoped to find, I don't know. It was slow going and it was a dirty business, with the dust tending to stick to us. "If we'd only brought some brooms along," said Orson. But we had no brooms. Who in his right mind would have thought we would want to sweep a planet? what appeared to be a manufactured planet and we had some stupid structures for which we could deduce not a single reason. We had come a long ways and we had been expected to make some tremendous discovery once we landed. We had made a discovery, all right, but it didn't mean a thing. We finally gave up with the sweeping business and stood there, scuffing our feet and wondering what to do next when Tyler suddenly let out a yell and pointed at a place on the surface where his boots had kicked away the dust. We all bent to look at what he had found. We saw three holes in the surface, each an inch or so across and some three inches deep, placed in a triangle and close together. Tyler got down on his hands and knees and shone his light down into the holes, each one of them in turn. Finally he stood up. "I don't know," he said. "They could maybe be a lock of some sort. Like a combination. There are little notches on the sides, down at the bottom of them. If you moved those notches just right something might happen. "Might blow ourselves up, maybe," said Orson. "Do it wrong and bang!" "I don't think so," said Tyler. "I don't think it's anything like that. I don't say it's a lock, either. But I don't think it's a bomb. Why should they boobytrap a thing like this?" "You can't tell what they might have done," I said. "We don't know what kind of things they were or why they were here." Tyler didn't answer. He got down again and began carefully dusting the surface, shining his light on it while he dusted. We didn't have anything else to do, so helped him. It was Orson who found it this time -- a hairline crack you had to hold your face down close to the surface to see. Having found it, we did some more dusting and worried it out. The hairline described a circle and the three holes were set inside and to one edge of it. The circle was three feet or so in diameter. "Either of you guys good at picking locks?" asked Tyler. Neither of us were. "It's got to be a hatch of some sort," Orson said. "This metal ball we're standing on has to be a hollow ball. If it weren't its mass would be greater than it is." "And no one," I said, "would be insane enough to build a solid ball. It would take too much metal and too much energy to move." "You're sure that it was moved?" asked Orson. "It had to be," I told him. "It wasn't built in this system. No one here could have built it." Tyler had pulled a screwdriver out of his toolkit and was poking into the hole with it. "Wait a minute," said Orson. "I just thought of something." He nudged Tyler to one side, reached down and inserted three fingers into the holes and pulled. The circular section rose smoothly on its hinges. Wedged into the area beneath the door were objects that looked like the rolls of paper you buy to wrap up Christmas presents. Bigger than rolls of paper, though. Six inches or so across. IF I got hold of one of them and that first one was not easy to grip, for they were packed in tightly. But I managed with much puffing and grunting to pull it out. It was heavy and a good four feet in length. Once we got one out. the other rolls were easier to lift. We pulled out three more and headed for the ship. But before we left I held the remaining rolls over to one side, to keep them from tilting, while Orson shone his light down into the hole. We had half expected to find a screen or something under the rolls, with the hole extending on down into a cavity that might have been used as living quarters or a workroom. But the hole ended in machined metal. We could see the grooves left by the drill or die that had bored the hole. That hole had just one purpose, to store the rolls we had found inside it. B ack in the ship we had to wait a while for the rolls to pick up some heat before we could handle them. Even so we had to wear gloves when we began to unroll them. Now, seeing them in good light, we realized that they were made up of many sheets rolled up together. The sheets seemed to be made of some sort of extremely thin metal or tough plastic. They were stiff from the cold and we spread them out on our lone table and weighed them down to hold them flat. On the first sheet were diagrams of some sort, drawings and what might have been specifications written into the diagrams and along the margins. The specifications, of course, meant nothing to us (although later some were puzzled out and mathematicians and chemists were able to figure out some of the formulas and equations). "Blueprints,'' said Tyler. "This whole business was an engineering job." "If that's the case," said Orson, "those strange things fastened to the structural frames could be mounts to hold engineering instruments." "Could be," said Tyler. "Maybe the instruments are stored in some other holes like the one where we found the blueprints," I suggested. "I don't think so," said Tyler. "They would have taken the instruments with them when they left." "Why didn't they take the blueprints, too?" "The instruments would have been worthwhile to take. They could be used on another job. But the blueprints couldn't. And there may have been many sets of prints and spec sheets. These we have may be only one of many sets of duplicates. There would have been a set of master prints and those they might have taken with them when they left." "What I don't understand," I said, "is what they could have been building out here. What kind of construction? And why here? I suppose we could think of Pluto as a massive construction shack, but why exactly here? With all the galaxy to pick from, why this particular spot?" "You ask too many questions all at once," Orson told me. "Let's look," said Tyler. "Maybe we'll find out." He peeled the first sheet off the top and let it drop to the floor. It snapped back to the rolled-up position. The second sheet told us nothing, nor did the third or fourth. Then came the fifth sheet. "Now, here is something," said Tyler. We leaned close to look. "It's the solar system," Orson said. i counted rapidly. "Nine planets." "Where's the tenth?" asked Orson. "There should be a tenth." "Something's wrong," said Tyler. "I don't know what it is." I spotted it. "There's a planet between Mars and Jupiter." "That means there is no Pluto shown," said Orson. "Of course noU" said Tyler. "Pluto never was a planet." "Then this means there once actually was a planet between Mars and Jupiter," said Orson. "Not necessarily," Tyler told him. "It may only mean there was supposed to be." "What do you mean?" "They bungled the job," said Tyler. "They did a sloppy piece of engineering." "You're insane!" I shouted at him. "Your blind spot is showing, Howard. According to what we think, perhaps it is insane. According to the theories our physicists have worked out. There is a cloud of dust and gas and the cloud contracts to form a protostar. Our scientists have invoked a pretty set of physical laws to calculate what happens. Physical laws that were automatic -- since no one would be mad enough to postulate a gang of cosmic engineers who went about the universe building solar systems." "But the tenth planet," persisted Orson. "There has to be a tenth planet. A big, massive -- " "They messed up the projected fifth planet," Tyler said. "God knows what else they messed up. Venus, maybe. Venus shouldn't be IF the kind of planet it is. It should be another Earth, perhaps a slightly warmer Earth, but not the hellhole it is. And Mars. They loused that up, too. Life started there, but it never had a chance. It hung on and that was all. And Jupiter, Jupiter is a monstrosity -- " "You thihk the only reason for a planet's existence is its capability of supporting life?" "I don't know, of course. But it should be in the specs. Three planets that could have been lifebearing and of these only one was successful." "Then," said Orson, "there could be a tenth planet. One that wasn't even planned." Tyler wrapped his fist against the sheet. "With a gang of clowns like this anything could happen." He jerked away the sheet and tossed it to the floor. "There!" he cried. "Look here." We crowded in and looked. It was a cross section, or appeared to be a cross section, of a planet. "A central core," said Tyler. "An atmosphere -- " "Earth?" "Could be. Could be Mars or Venus." The sheet was covered with what could have been spec notations. "It doesn't look quite right," I protested. "It wouldn't if it were Mars or Venus. And how sure are you of Earth?" "Not sure at all," I said. He jerked away the sheet to reveal another one. We puzzled over it. "Atmospheric profile," I guessed half-heartedly. "These are just general specs," said Tyler. "The details will be in some of the other rolls. We have a lot of them out there." I tried to envision it. A construction shack set down in a cloud of dust and gas. Engineers who may have worked for millennia to put together star and planets, to key into them certain factors that still later. Tyler said they had bungled and perhaps they had. But maybe not with Venus. Maybe Venus had been built to different specifications. Maybe it had been designed to be years from now, when humanity might well be gone from Earth, a new life and a new intelligence would rise on Venus. Maybe not with Venus, maybe with none of the others, either. We could not pretend to know. Tyler was still going through the sheets. "Look here," he was yelling. "Look here -- the bunglers -- "  Though her life was unacknowledged, it remained hers to save I S HE walked quietly through the deserted dawn streets of Axminster and the black mutated Alsatian padded with equal silence at her heels. Despite the early September chill she was warm, too warm in her light coat, and was prespiring nervously as she hurried close to the concrete walls. She paused at each corner, glancing to left and right, then running soundlessly across the exposed areas, the Alsatian following with slow bounds. She looked about fifteen years old -- it was hardly possible that she was that age, but she might have been a hundred and thirtyfour or a hundred and seventy... As she passed the gaunt face of the Creche she saw the figure of a nurse in one of the windows, silhouetted against the lighted room. She envied the nurse -- envied her job, her freedom from fear, her security -- the nurse, she thought, is one of the Establishment and therefore safe. She walked on. Later she paused at the spacious entrance to a large building that towered to the crimson-streaked gray sky and, without much hope, tried the wide glass doors. They were, of course, locked. Above them a large sign read: transfer IF exhorted her to take a friend and at this she directed a nervous smile, one shift from terror. She moved away and, a few yards up the street, slipped down a narrow passage, dark and featureless except for the dim outline of a small window in the tall walls. She regarded this for a moment, gauging the height. "Wait here," she whispered. The dog sat back on it haunches, tongue lolling. She jumped, caught the sill, hung for a moment one-handed as she pushed at the glass. She felt it yield and pulled herself up, rocked forward on her wrists and butted the hinged window open. She swung her legs over the edge and sat for a moment flashing her torch around the interior. Satisfied, she dropped through, landing lightly on her feet, and played the beam around the large room in which she found herself. "Who's there?" The question was harsh and metallic. "Is that you, Man Ewell? Come and talk to me for a moment, will you? I'm bored. These lazy bastards have all gone comatose." The girl did not reply. Holding her breath, she pointed the torch at the source of the voice. The opposite wall was completely taken up by a stack of boxes, each a cube of about one foot, enameled black and with a grille in the side facing her. There must have been a thousand of them and she knew that behind the wall of boxes were another thousand -- and another and another... The voice was issuing from the right-hand side of the stack. Querulous, it spoke again. "Are you there? Are you there?" Another voice replied amid a communal rasping as the other boxes roused themselves. "There's nobody there. Be quiet, will you? I was almost asleep. God, I had almost made it for the first time. Then you had to start shouting." "I tell you I heard somebody. I can hear him now. Breathing." "Imagination. When you've been in a box as long as I have you'll learn to distinguish. It's difficult at first. I'll grant you." This was another box, down toward the lefthand bottom corner of the stack -- the voice was more sympathetic. "Sorry -- " The first speaker still sounded doubtful, but becariie silent. The various mutterings ceased and the room was quiet again. The girl tiptoed across it to a large card index set in the wall. She quickly ran her finger down the exposed edges of the cards, paused and extracted one. She read the punched information carefully, then pocketed the card and mov back to the window. She turned, played the torch over the boxes once more, then snapped out the light and climbed to the sill. She dropped lightly to the ground outside -- the Alsatian approached eagerly to lick her hand. Trembling, she brushed the hair from her face. Her hand came away wet with tears.  the tall android entered the Transfer Center. The sound of traffic outside died, as the door swung shut. " 'Morning, Man Ewell." Ewell paused at the reception desk. "Where's the secretary?" "Late as usual. I'm standing in for a moment until she arrives." The android sighed. "I'll get Johnson to have a word with her. How many cases have I got this morning?" "Ten -- sir." The polite address stuck in James' gullet -- he detested having an android as a superior. Not that Ewell wasn't good at his job. James conceded that in the few days since the new Transfer Surgeon arrived at Axminster Center he had already proved his worth. Every operation had been completely successful. But Ewell would not confine his sphere of actvity to the operating theater. The man had a habit of popping up like a genie at unexpected moments -- James would find him at his shoulder as he IF lolled unsuspecting in his chair, reading the paper. The android seemed to be everywhere, reorganizing, criticizing, issuing direc-tives. He was a worker. He had already looked in at the Creche this morning, James guessed. Such devotion to his patients was odd. "All reincorporations?" Ewell was asking. "Eight reincorps, two direct Transfers. A few disincorps, too." Ewell bit his lip thoughtfully. James's report accounted for all available hosts of the right age in the Creche. If an emergency turned up Ewell might have to use an android baby. He turned away and made for the corridor. "Let me know when the sec gets here, will you?" he called over his shoulder, and Linton James made a face at the broad, retreating back. As soon as the surgeon was out of sight, the glass entrance door swung open and the receptionist entered, looking flustered. She hurried across to the desk. "Is Man Ewell hfere yet?" James eyed her appreciatively before answering. In her haste she had gained an attractive flush and she was looking up at him anxiously, in sharp contrast to her normal sophisticated disinterest. He savored the moment. "He's here," he replied at last. "HI put in a good word for you if you like." The girl was not at all fooled by this. She sniffed, brushed past him and sat down at the desk, exposing a length of thigh. Linton James hung around, eyeing her covertly, weighing his chances. She was eighteen physical years old, two years younger than himself. Her last Transfer had been a fortunate one -- she had a delectable figure and face. But she had ambitions. She was studying for a Preferred Trade and considered herself above him. He sighed and turned away, intending to go to his small office at the end of the corridor, when his attention was caught by the entrance door's swinging open again. A young girl came in hesitantly, a carrier dog at her heels. She stood in the center of the entrance hall, looking about uncertainly, saw James watching and approached him with a nervous smilp. He ran a hand over his hair and smiled back. "May I help you?" he asked. Behind him the receptionist sniffed again. The girl looked scared. She was about fifteen physical years old. Her eyes were large, blue and strangely innocent. As he looked at her he felt a pulse begin to beat thickly in his throat. She wore a light coat, open at the front to afford a glimpse of delicious young breasts maturing beneath a tight dress. Staring at him like a terrified leveret she asked; "Is this the Transfer Center?" "It is," replied James, still smiling. "This is where I can contract to take Friends?" "That's right." She could read, couldn't she? Obvjously she was a stranger in these parts. He wondered if she wanted to be shown around the town. "Oh, good. I want to take two Friends, please." She withdrew a slip of paper from the pocket of her coat and James had the undefinable notion that she was somehow acting a part. He glanced at the receptionist, who seemed intent on reading something, head bent. "Right," said James briskly. "I can deal with that for you. Just fill in this form and I'll bring you a couple of Friends from the Habitation Room." He took a sheet of paper from the stack on the counter and placed it before her. He handed her a pen, standing close. Her head was level with his shoulder. His hip brushed against her. JJe had a powerful urge to put his arm around her. H e had been in trouble before. Two physical lives ago, at the age of twenty, he had given way to his desires in the public park one night. By the dark walls of the an dent Minster he had come across a lone woman, a criminal convicted on a theft charge and with only one year to go before Total Death. She had confided this to him as they leaned against the wall together, he listening sympathetically while his mind assessed the possibilities. But he had miscalculated and the woman had begun to scream when he made his rough, uncontrolled advances. So he had run and lived in terror for two days, watching the indicator boards every minute in fear that his name would appear as a wanted man. No doubt the woman had reported the incident -- herself bitter, she had wanted to take someone with her to the Euthanasia Room. But the police had been unable to track him down. The night had been dark. They had not exchanged indentities -- her description had been incomplete. And, possibly, the police had not had much sympathy for her. So he had gotten away with it. He had been more careful since. The girl was regarding him with dismay, her face close to his.  "Can't I choose my own Friends?" she queried. "You have someone specific you wish to take?" "Yes." She consulted the slip she had brought. "A-#-AX and A#AX, please." "Anything to oblige." He dragged his eyes away from hers. "Just fill in this form," he instructed. "I'll go and get the Friends." He took the slip of paper from her, contriving to touch her hand lightly at the same time, then made his way to the Habitation Room. This was situated at the exIF treme end of the corridor -- it was a vast rectangular chamber, something like a library filled by parallel stacks of Friends. The Conversationalist sat among the boxes, trying to interest the Friends in history. James paused in the doorway. "The Compulsory Transfer Act was passed in the year #," the man was saying, "with the dual object of reducing the runaway birthrate and preventing the wastage of active, valuable minds through death. This law might fairly be said to have changed the face of civilization." "I'lr say," rasped one of the Friends. "If not for that law I'd have a physical body now -- instead of being in this damned box!" The  The Act of # guaranteed virtually everyone then alive immortality. It specified that on hisher fiftieth birthday every person of Earth had to attend a Transfer Center, where hisher brain was removed and placed into the craniuiii of a six-monthold child. The person then went through another childhood to maturity and the process was repeated at his or her fiftieth birthday -- injiniturrh So successful was the Act at curbing the human birthrate that by # it became necessary to introduce what were euphemistically called Friendship boxes -- metal containers filled with nutrient fluid in which a brain was placed pending availability of a host body. In order to make the wait more pleasant the boxes were equipped with audio pickups and vocal chords. By the year # it was decided to decrease the active population (while birthrate had declined, the number of people had not) by reducing the age for Compulsory Transfer to #. Simultaneously came about the Preferred Trade concept, which made it unConversationalist was frequently subjected to such heckling. James grinned, leaning against the door jamb. "Except for the Act you'd have been dead this last hundred and fifty years." pointed out the Conversationalist. He leaned forward to confirm this. "A-#-AX," he read from the metal plate above the Friend's grille. "So you had your first Transfer about #. You've probably had four physical bodies by now, a total of one hundered and sixty years active life. And just a total of twenty years Friendship in a box at various times. That's not bad. We can't help the Waiting List, you know. And Axminster is lucky. In some cities the list is over ten years long." necessary for essential personnel," such as government officials and civil servants, to spend any time in a Friendship box -- at age # they were transferred into a host body. By # old heads were firmly in the saddle and the world was solidly in the grip of the System. Almost no one remembered what a young person was. Androids were develops to serve as host bodies. Handsome, healthy and intelligent, grown from the best genetic material available, they were nevertheless discriminated against because of certain skin discolorations and most people continued to prefer waiting periods in Friendship boxes. The human birthrate, however, continued to drop -- and Friends in boxes wielded votes. The Total Death Act -- which prescribed termination of all persons convicted of any offense from overtime parking up -- was passed in # to shorten Friendship box waiting period for others. The events in this story took place in the year #. "Thanks," said someone sarcastically. "That makes me feel good. I've only got eighteen months to do in this box." Linton James coughed. "Excuse me," he said. "I've come to collect a couple of Friends." He read the numbers out to the Conversationalist. The man nodded and James began to examine the boxes, which were in approximate numerical order, while the history lesson continued. Soon he found the two he wanted. "I've got them," he said. He took them down and checked the numbers off with the Conversationalist. Harsh outcries rose from several Friends as they heard the numbers. "Wait a moment!" someone yelled. "Those two only came in yesterday. How come they've found Companions already? What about me? I've been in this room for three years!" . "I can't help that." James addressed the box at the foot of the stack. "Contracting for Friends by active persons is entirely voluntary. A girl came in just now and ask for these two Friends. They're probably acquaintances of hers. If she's good enough to contract to look after a Friend she can have anyone she likes." The Conversationalist spoke up. "One thing I'd like to ask you people," he said. "During your last physical life -- how many of you took the responsibility of contracting to look after a Friend?" An abashed muttering came from the boxes. "You see what I mean?" the Conversationalist asked triumphantly. "If you wouldn't take a Friend when you could -- why should anyone take you?" Several boxes began to speak at once -- loudly. James left the room. He didn't envy the Conversationalist his job. For several hours each day the man talked to the boxes,reasoning with them, teaching them, listening to their complaints...  the Habitation Room as he reached the entrance hall. The girl was bending over, her back to him, patting the carrier dog on the head and talking to it -- carrier dogs were extremely intelligent and able to comprehend simple human speech. James could see the girl's thighs below the short skirt almost to her buttocks. He paused for a moment, involuntarily touching his tongue to his lips, then walked across to her. " Your Friends," he said, placing the two boxes on the floor. "Oh, thank you." She handed him the form and he glanced at it briefly, checking her name with that on the Code Card she offered. You had to be careful over that sort of thing. People had been known to put false name and number on a form, thereby gaining possession of a Friend without revealing their true identities. The claimant would IF aniii. Latest U.S. Government tests of all cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # of all oth cigarettes sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Regular and Menthol: I # mg. "tar',' # mg. nicotine, Lorillard # Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than all other menthols sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? then disappear, resuming his or her correct identity in the city. The Friend, possibly an old enemy of the impostor, might also disappear for a while -- in many cases to reappear later on a garbage dump, smashed and Totally Dead. But this girl was genuine enough. Mary Atkinson. He smiled at her reassuringly -- she still seemed nervous. "They're all yours," he said. "Can I help you out with them?" "I've brought the dog." "No trouble." The pulse was beating again -- his palms were moist. He glanced at the address on the form. "Cliff Cottage, Branscombe. That's well out in the country. Tell you what -- " he was speaking fast, eagerly -- "I'll run you there in my car. No trouble." He held her gaze -- desire fluttered at the pit of his stomach. "It's quite all right." She was looking scared again. "I'll take the bus. Thank you very much, sir -- " #.The eyes were intensely blue. James felt powerful, virile, masterful. A comer of his mind returned to the woman in the park. He had shown her. He had stifled her screaming with the palm of his hand. But he had never wanted anyone as much as he wanted this girl. What was it about her? She seemed virginal. An oddity. Almost an alien concept. Something one read about. "No trouble," he repeated, his mouth dry. "The car's outside." "Thank you very much," she said, "but I'd rather -- " She seized one of the boxes and the carrier dog took the other in his powerful jaws. With another brief, terrified glance at him she turned and almost ran for the door, the dog trotting behind her. James watched the two, watched the door after they had gone. You didn't get many girls like that. Usually women were hard, experienced, inaccessible. "My God." The cynical voice of the receptionist startled him out of his reverie. "I thought you were going to lay her on the spot. You'd better watch yourself, young Linton James. You're frustrated. You ought to grow up." He wheeled hiriously, hating her amused look, her thighs, the impossible longings she created in his mind and body. Then he recovered, eyeing her appraisingly. His standards had changed. She represented inferior goods, shop-soiled. He stared at her contemptuously and, to his surprise, she dropped her eyes. "She was very pretty," she murmured, "Physically a bit young -- mentally, too I thought. Just the type for you, really , Linton. I should look her up some time." Amazed and not knowing quite what to say -- he felt again inexperienced and unable to cope with the world around him -- Linton James returned to his office to dream of the young girl with the blue eyes. F ive minutes later he was still staring at the form in his hand. Once again he read it, turned it over, read the other side. He was unable to understand what he saw. The only certainty was that the girl had committed an offense. For some unknown reason she, in removing the two Friends, had laid herself open to criminal proceedings and imprisonment -- and consequently, when the date of her next Transfer came up in some twenty-five years, Total Death. The front of the form bore her name and address, which he had checked with her Code Card, and her number -- which he had not checked. There had not seemed to be any need. A-#-AX mary atkinson, The usual declaration and her signature followed: M. Atkinson. On the reverse of the form appeared the numbers of the two Friends she had taken with her. A-#-AX A-#-AX The same number appeared on both sides of the form. It was impossible. He had checked her name, which agreed with her personal Code Card. So the number to go with her name must have been correct. Yet he had also checked the numbers on the boxes with the back of the form filled in by her. How could a person be in two places at once? First, physically before him and signing a form -- and secondly. demonstrably in a Friendship box, as witness the number? It was some time before Linton James thought to check the Habitation Room. He entered quietly and made for the index racks. These contained the Code Cards handed in by people undergoing physical euthanasia before their minds were placed in Friendship boxes; the cards provided a cross-check with the boxes in the Habitation Room. He flipped through the cards, ignoring the cries of query from the stacked boxes were bored again. The Conversationalist was taking a break. Some of the cards had the folded forms clipped to them, indicating that the Friends they represented had been contracted for and removed from the room. Soon he found what he was looking for. He pulled out a card. That took care of one of the Friends. He searched further, but soon gave up, convinced. There was no card for Friend number A#-AX. There couldn't be, because that was the one the girl had shown him. She must previously have succeeded in removing it from the Habitation Room and had used it as identity to claim the Friends. Why? He thought about it for a while, sitting in his office. He kept IF returning to the same conclusion. The only reason the girl would use tfiat Code Card as identity was that she had no identity of her own. She didn't exist. Legally she was a nonentity. And Linton James thought he knew why. Substantial rewards existed for turning in a criminal and a nonentity had to -- by definition -- be a criminal. He folded the form and tucked it into his pocket. He would turn the girl in. He thought of her blue eyes, her unspoiled youthful air of innocence. Yes, he would turn her in. But first... bus service from the city to the outlaying districts was infrequent and Mary Atkinson stood for some time at the bus stop, the dog and the two black boxes at her feet. From time to time people hurrying along the pavement to their various duties about the city would step close to the boxes and the dog's upper lip would curl back and he would move closer, crouching over the Friends. After a while a short queue had built up -- a few people glanced curiously at the young girl standing at the stop, lost in thought, the dog and boxes at her feet. Mary was, in fact, trying hard not to cry and by this unusual exhibition of emotion draw attention to herself. She hardly dared to look at the boxes -- she knew that if she allowed her attention to dwell on them the tears would fall. In her misery she failed to notice the figure of Linton James, clad in a shapeless raincoat, tag on to the end of the queue. At last the hoverbus pulled up with a whistle of expended air. She picked up one of the Friends -- the dog took the other -- and both climbed on board. Mary inserted her Code Card into the ticket mechanism. The bus at this time was practically empty. She chose a seat in the rear, setting the boxes on the floor at her feet and calling the dog in close. He looked up at her from moist eyes, then settled under the seat. The bus started. A woman sat on the adjacent pair of seats, entrenched among packages, glanced at her, then leaned across. "Hello, there. Isn't it Woman Mary Atkinson?" Mary looked up, startled. "Oh -- Woman Biggs. Why, hello. Hello. You're leaving town early this morning." "I just had to pick up a few things." She looked at the floor beside Mary. "Hi there, dog. What's that you've got? Friends?" She regarded Mary curiously. "Yes." "Oh." the woman hesitated. "Who are they? Anyone I know?" Mary was silent. "Well -- now let me see." The woman stared at the boxes, her expression intent and amused like one taking part in a guessing game. "Let me see. You're from Branscombe. I don't know many people that far out of town. You keep pretty much to yourselves. But -- wait a minute -- a month ago I saw you in Sidford with two people. They must have been in their late thirties -- Why, you're crying, Mary. What's the matter?" Mary sniffed into her handkerchief. Woman Biggs stared at her with interest. "I haven't seen anyone cry for years. It's nice to know people have emotions left. I don't think I've cried since I was eighty-nine mental -- that was when Bob Secombe got Total Death on a driving charge. Do you remember Bob Secombe?" Mary shook her head dunly. "I thought everyone knew Bob Secombe. I hope I knew him better than most, though. Funny you never knew him." Mary made a supreme effort. She didn't want to talk about Bob Secombe. She gave her cheeks a final mopping and indicated the boxes. "These people looked after me during my last childhood," she said unsteadily. "They were very kind to me. One feels so helpless during childhood. It seemed the least I could do was to take them as Friends. The Waiting List for bodies is several years now. They -- " She nearly broke down again. "They went for physical euthanasia yesterday. I collected them this morning." "Oh. Very public-spirited of you. I'm sure." Woman Biggs regarded Mary with that special look of respectful dislike reserved for dogooders. "I hope you realize what you're taking on. Friends can be difficult -- always complaining. I know." Suddenly she chuckled, looking almost human. "I've been a bastard myself, during various Friendship periods. It's the inactivity that gets you. Ah, well. I'm thirty-four physical. I've got a clean record, so it's me for the box myself in six years' time. Comes to all of us. Mustn't grumble. May my next body be beautiful." With this cascade of platitudes she relapsed into silence, pulled out a portovee and stared at it avidly. Relieved, Mary turned away and looked out through the window. The concrete suburbs had given way to more open, agricultural land -- here and there huge machinery stalked the fields like stegasauri. She spoke quietly to the Friends. "Are you both all right?" "Fine," the answer came back. The dog started beneath her feet and whined softly. "Jason recognizes you," she murmured. Somehow this seemed important. She sat in silence then. The countryside gradually became more hilly, with occasional outcrops of trees on land too rough and stony for economical farming. Twenty IF minutes later the hoverbus hissed to a halt at a small village, a huddle of domes and rectangles between steep hillsides. Mary disembarked. With Jason trotting behind she made her way across the small forecourt and climbed into her car, lifting the Friends carefully to the back seat. The dog jumped in beside her, the door closed and she moved off, turning south down the narrow lane signposted branscombe. Standing in the shadow of the bus, Linton James watched the receding hovercar in some annoyance. He hadn't bargained for Mary's having her own transportation. He had no alternative but to follow on foot. M ary drove slowly through Branscombe, a ghost village of ancient stone cottages, relics of the days before pollution had diminished the fishing and tourist industries. The village, once thriving, now had a population of some thirty dropouts from urban life who lived by marketing vegetables and fruits unsuited for mass production on the huge state farms. Broken windows gaped at the hovercar as it climbed the steep hill to the clifftop. The rough road deteriorated to a track. Five minutes later Mary pulled up outside a cottage some fifty yards from the edge of the cliff. She and Jason carried the Friends inside and placed them on the floor. She sat down with a sigh of relief. "We're here," she informed the boxes, rather shakily. "Fine," one of the boxes said. "We're very grateful to you, Mary. You were under no obligation to #)ring us here." "What? After all you've done for me these past years? It was the least I could do. I couldn't leave you in that place." The other box spoke, a woman's voice. "But the risk you took, Mary. We didn't want you to do that. You could have left us. I couldn't believe it when the man said you'd come to fetch us -- " The male box said in a reproving tone, "It wasn't what we had arranged. You may have called attention to yourself. If I recall correctly, my girl, the arrangement was that you would get into the Center and take the Code Card so that you could use it yourself until we came up for placing in bodies again. The authorities would think the card had gotten lost somewhere and would issue a duplicate. Then we would all have cards." "That's all right," said Mary. "I can keep you here for as long as I like. When I take you back to the Transfer Center the same thing will apply. They'll find they're a card short and will issue another. I don't see any problem." "But the risk -- " murmured the female Friend helplessly. "Oh, be quiet. Mum," said Mary. She got up and began to prepare herself some coffee while the two Friends chattered to each other. E dgar greenwood and Mary Atkinson had sought refuge in iBranscombe from the concrete falsity of Axminster some sixteen years earlier. Both were then twenty-four physical years old and considered themselves in love, a pleasant fantasy in which most people indulged approximately once every physical lifetime. It did no harm -- indeed it was of positive benefit, this periodic heightening of the emotions. It provided most people with something to look forward to during their late thirties. A new childhood, a new adolescence with the added benefit of experience, a new love affair at the height of the new body's powers. The prospect also made the waiting peric in the Friendship boxes more bearable. A mutual acquaintance had told them of Branscombe and the deserted cottages, and they arrived one autumn morning for a short honeymoon. At first they stayed in the village itself and got to know the few hard-working inhabitants. The day they were due to return to their jobs in the city they loaded the hovercar with their baggage and climbed in. Edgar had even pressed the starter when he turned for a last look at the sea. Mary had been looking in the same direction -- now, suddenly, she turned to face him. Without a word both of them got out of the car, unloaded their baggage and, under the amused gaze of the villagers, marched back into the cottage. It seemed that there was no problem about their jobs -- the local employment office took the view that it was their own business if they wanted to rough it in Branscombe. This was a relief -- somehow, due to the extreme regimentation of labor in Axminster, they had gotten the idea that there was something illegal about dropping out in this manner -- but apparently it was not so. There was unemployment in the city -- someone else would be glad to take their places. There was just one small snag: it was suspected, though never overtly stated, that preference on the Waiting List for bodies was given to Friends who had held regular jobs in their last physical lives. But Edger and Mary were twenty-four and Transfer was sixteen years away. Life was pleasant in Branscombe. The neighbors were helpful and Edgar soon established an adequate income from a smallholding on the hillside. The weeks went by and each day he and Mary discovered to their recurring delight that they were still in love. Soon Mary became pregnant. They moved out of the village to Cliff Cottage, a half-mile away, and in the following October Mary bore a daughter. She was a wonderfully pretty baby, Edgar and Mary IF thought. They had been living at Branscombe for a year by now and Axminster seemed far away -- as did the laws of the land. For days they avoided the subject of the Transfer Center and their legal obligations concerning the baby. It seemed to them diabolically wrong for this child to be taken to the Center -- there to be implanted with someone else's adult mind. Unfortunately the law stated that it was a crime for them not to relinquish the baby. There was never a definite time when Edgar and Mary admitted to themselves that they intended to break the law. But the days went by and the baby grew and somehow they never got around to reporting the birth to the authorities. Eventually Edgar took the villagers into his confidence -- there was no way this could be avoided -- and, not entirely to this surprise, they were sympathetic. The matter was discussed at an informal meeting, out of which came a surprising suggestion. If the child became known as Mary Atkinson -- if it took its mother's name -- there would be no reason why it shouldn't move about freely, using the mother's Code Card as a means of identification when required. The same card would serve for both people. So the child grew up as Mary Atkinson, looked after by Edgar Greenwood and Mary Atkinson Senior -- and, indirectly, the village of Branscombe. Naturally, as the first real child many of the residents had seen for well over a century, she received the best of attention. Then -- when she was fifteen years old -- her parents became due for physical euthanasia. Their Code Cards had to be surrendered and Mary lost her identity again. It was likely that her parents would have to remain in Friendship Boxes for several years, during which period Mary might at any time be called upon to prove her identity. So the scheme of stealing back the Code Card was born. It would probably have worked, too, if Mary had not, out of sympathy to her parents, contracted to look after them for a while. ii "VT'OU'RE quite sure nobody X suspected anything, dear?" asked Friend Mary Atkinson Senior. "I'm sure they didn't," Mary replied. During the past hour she had answered the same question at least six times. "What about that man I heard talking?" her father asked. "I didn't like the sound of his voice. He was trying to -- make out with you, you know." Edgar Greenwood was concerned. In his present helpless state he doubted her ability to cope with the pack of lustful males his imagination saw sniffing around her. "I didn't like him," Mary reassured him. Edgar was silent, torturing himself. Mary was growing up and he had not thought of this soon enough. He had brought a totally innocent child into a world of men, any one of whom had had at least one hundred and sixty years' experience. Mary poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down again, eyeing the Friends thoughtfully. The resilience of youth had abated her initial sorrow and now she must consider the implications of the present situation. Money was fortunately no problem. The villagers had offered their assistance toward keeping the smallholding in shape for the next few years. In addition, her father had built up substantial savings. "What are you doing, dear?" asked her mother. "I'm drinking a cup of coffee." "Oh? I hope you haven't made it too strong, dear. Coffee's not good for a girl of your age." in. "What I wouldn't give for a scotch right now." Mary Atkinson Senior made a sound very much like the clicking of a tongue. "Edgar! Not at this hour of the morning. Oh -- " She broke off as the needlessness of her remark struck her. "It always takes a day or two to get used to the Friendship box," she said in a small voice. Mary, sipping her coffee and regarding the two boxes on the floor, felt the sadness well up in her again. She put down her cup. "I think I'd better get along to the smallholding and make sure things are all right," she remarked. "Jason can stay here with you." She stood up. Edgar said, "Make sure Jeffs knocking the bottom leaves off the sprouts. They grow firmer that way. And those leeks should need earthing up again." Mary stepped out into the autumn sunshine, closing the door behind her. She stood for a moment on the rough track to the village, looking out to sea. The sky was cloudless and the sea's ultramarine dashed with silver -- a tanker crept along the horizon. She could hear the muted rumble of the waves at the cliff base and walked across the short springy grass, looked down at the rocks a hundred feet below. The water was deep there, the rocks jagged, and the waves lapped and slobbered in and out of the clefts. Mary shuddered involuntarily and wondered why the scene always suggested suicide to her. What was her fascination with the rocks washed by the sea far below? Why didn't they caU to her mind fishing, bathing or climbing -- or even murder? Why always, always suicide? Shivering the thought from her mind she turned and walked along the cliff path toward the village. After a while the ground began to fall away and the cottages were in IF sight, gray and peaceful in the sun. She walked over to the smallholding, a series of neat rectangles of cultivation on the hillside. A slight Figure was there, bent double, weeding. "Hello, Jeff," she called. seeing Mary, grinned. He was eleven physical years old and, like everyone in the village, believed in working to the best of his capabilities regardless of his physical age. The community was too small for passengers and it was accepted that people going through a childhood undertook light work. "Hello, Mary. Can I assume everything went all right? I saw the car go past a while back." "Oh, yes. No difficulty. I even brought Mum and Dad back as Friends." "You what?" Astonishment changed Jeffs grin. "Well, I'm damned. You've got a hell of a nerve, Mary. That's the advantage of being truly young, I reckon. When you get to be my age and have had a few Transfers life seems more valuable with each body. You become so cautious that in the end it's a wonder you ever do anything at all." He sighed. "It must be great to be young." "It's not all good." Mary smiled. "Every single person I meet is more experienced than I in every way. There was a man at the Transfer Center this morning who gave me the creeps in the weirdest way -- and I couldn't think why. It was something to do with sex, I suppose." Jeff regarded her, the intent adult appraisal incongruous on his childish face. She was flushed from her walk in the sun and the dress clung to her figure. He found himself wishing he were a few physical years older. "Oh, God," he said quietly, as the implications of her innocence struck him again. She' was probably the only girl in the country who had never... "Be careful, Mary," he said earnestly. "You're growing up into a very pretty woman." "I can take care of myself," she assured him. She laughed at his expression. 'Mum and Dad have told me the facts of life." "I dare say, but -- Oh, well, I suppose it's safe enough here in the village. There are a lot of queer characters in Axminster, though." Mary found his concern amusing. "Don't worry, Jeff. You all treat me as though I were a child. It does me good, though. I was feeling terrible a minute ago. It seemed everything was weighing me down, with Mum and Dad in boxes. Suddenly I had responsibilities -- I've got to look after the two people who had been looking after me all my life. I found myself wondering if I was up to it. But talking to you and hearing all this nonsense about the sex maniacs in Axminister again -- why, it's quite like old times. Can't you villagers realize that Axminster folk are just like yourselves?" "Maybe so, but we've known you since you were a baby, Mary. Nobody in the village would lay a finger on you." Jeff smiled. "Not that I don't find you attractive, myself." "Why, you dirty young man! Speaking of dirt, Dad asked me to remind you about earthing up the leeks." "All done." Jeff waved a hand at the neat ridges. Mary glanced at him suspiciously, bent down and brushed away soil. Tips of strong, grasslike leaves showed. "Oh, good. A bit deep, aren't they? Will they come through again?" "Of coui;se," he replied patiently. "I always reckoned Edgar didn't put his leeks in deep enough." "My Dad's the best gardener in Branscombe -- " Mary broke off miserably at the thought of the immobile black box back at the cottage. "Never mind, honey. I've done the brussels sprouts as well. I expect he asked about those." "Thanks." "And the potatoes -- and everything else. You don't have to worry about a thing. Just take it easy and look after your parents. Friends get frustrated and crotchety after a while. I tell you what. Bring them down to my place tonight. The conversation will do them good." "I might do that. And thanks for your help, Jeff. I'd better get back. I'll tell Dad everything's in good hands." "Fine." Jeff watched her as she climbed back up the hillside. He sighed, feeling inexplicably sad. M ary herself was more cheerful as she took the road back to the cottage. With neighbors like Jeff Waters she would not need to worry. Apart from companionship, the needs of Friends were few. Also, she herself could move about with greater freedom now that she didn't have to share a Code Card with her mother. This meant that she could, if she wanted, get a job in Axminster. She decided that she ought to discuss this with her parents. "Hello there! Wait a moment." The shout came from behind her. She turned and saw a figure hurrying up the slope from the village. She paused, expecting one of the neighbors. As the man drew closer, however, she became puzzled and turned away, quickening her pace. He was a stranger and strangers were suspect in these parts. All too frequently they proved to be state investigators poking about, trying to catch the community harboring some illegality. The man drew level and put a hand on her arm, restraining her. He smiled. "Hello, Mary. Don't IF you remember me? Linton James, from the Center." She remembered him now. It was he all right, hot and flushed with haste. She fought down panic. "Of course I remember you," she replied. "What are you doing here? Did I forget to sign the form?" A dread sat heavily in her stomach -- she tried not to show it. "Oh, the form," he said lightly. "Never mind that. No. It's my day off -- and seeing your address reminded me I hadn't been here for years. I thought I'd take the bus out and see what the old place looked like. I came here once -- oh, three physical lives ago. A long time. How long have you lived here, Mary?" "All of this physical life." "How are the Friends? Settling in all right?" "Fine." She tried to move on, but his grip on her arm tightened. His smile had become fixed and intent as he regarded her. She looked toward the village desperately, but the houses were hidden by the crest. "Good," he said. "It's very kind of you to take two Friends like this. Helps us out a lot at the Center. I suppose you knew them in their previous life?" "They were two of the villagers. They looked after me during my last childhood." "Not enough people think of being grateful. You're a nice girl, Mary. I hope you don't mind my calling you Mary -- I feel as though I know you quite well. Funny, how it sometimes happens like that. It was lucky for me I happened to be in the Center when you came in." "I thought you said it was your day off." "Well, you know how it is. I've got a pretty good position there. Ewell -- practically eats out of my hand. So I just said to him, Ewell, I said. I'm taking the day off. Enjoy yourself, Man James, he said. We have a good relationship, Ewell and I. He's an android, but that doesn't worry me. He's only been in Axminster for a short while, so he has to depend on me a lot." "I must be getting on. Nice meeting you again, Man James." Mary tried to detach herself. She had a suspicion that James was slightly insane. "Don't go. Not yet. Let's sit down for a moment." Mary found herself forced to the ground. James sat beside her, still gripping her arm, his feet dangling over the cliff edge. The waves below boomed dully. "I don't often get the chance to talk to a nice girl like you," he resumed. "Woman Adams, she's the receptionist at the Center, she never speaks to me nicely. She thinks she's better than me because she's putting in for promotion to a Preferred Trade next year. She's a bitch. She's repulsive, physically, but she fancies her chances -- " Mary was terrified. The sea was a long way below and her back was aching from holding herself bolt upright, rigidly away from James who was now sliding his arm around her. Why didn't someone come? She didn't know what to do. If she tried to get away from this madman he would push her over the edge, as like as not. "What's more, I think there's something going on between her and Ewell -- that's why she won't have anything to do with me. She's having an affair with that android. She thinks she's too good for me." James' grip around Mary's shoulders had relaxed and his expression was inward -- he was reliving some past humiliation. "But why should I worry? I get plenty of girls. Funny thing -- I've always been able to get on well with them. Girls seem to go for me. Do you find me attractive, Mary?" He twisted her around until his face was inches from hers and she could smell his acrid breath. She didn't reply. She was trembling violently and a tear crept down her cheek. "Because I find you attractive, Mary. I find you very attractive. Don't cry -- it spoils your lovely face." His gaze traveled down. "You've got nice legs. Did anyone ever tell you your legs are nice, Mary?" M ary flinched as his hand gripped her knee, squeezed. then slid upward. She pushed him away violently. "Leave me alone," she protested. "Let me go!" His breath was coming fast -- his face had a curiously sullen look. He pushed her down and lay half across her, talking fast. "Oh, come on, Mary, come on now, I love you -- make love to me Mary. There's nothing to be afraid of -- " He broke off suddenly as she slapped him across the face with her free hand. He gripped her wrist, winced as her knee drove into his stomach, pinned her to the ground while she twisted frantically. "Like that, is it?" His eyes stared into hers with an amalgam of hate and lust. "I thought so. You think you're too good for me, like all the others. And that's not all. You've never had it before, yoii little bitch. I know. I know that stunt you pulled with the card. You're a nonentity. You've got no card of your own. I could turn you in." His hand was fumbling under her skirt. "I will turn you in, unless you lie still." His other hand was cupped over her mouth. The terror in her eyes lent him confidence and strength. He felt supreme, all-powerful. Mary looked past his face at the blue sky. Little puffs of white cloud hovered above her and she could hear, beyond the fast urgent breathing, the dim roar of the sea at the cliff base. Was this happening to her -- so near her own house and IF almost within view of the village? The coarse, short grass was rough against the backs of her legs. Her knees were forced apart and she tried to scream as the agony entered her, but something hot and stifling was covering her mouth. Ill her feet. She stood unsteadily. "Now we go to your house," he said stonily. Keeping hold of her arm, he began to propel her along the cliff path. "It's along here, isn't it? You've got a car there." He felt dull and vindictive -- the sight of the girl; bent and sniveling, irritated him. "For God's sake, stop crying!" At the cottage he opened the door and pushed her inside. "Clean yourself up," he commanded. "We're taking a ride." He glanced at the two black boxes. "Hello, Friends," he said contemptuously. "I've just been enjoying your daughter's company. She is your daughter, right?" In the corner of the room the carrier dog growled softly. "You don't scare me, Fido. You're programed to obey and never to attack. Sit, you stupid bastard." The dog sat. James sniggered. "What -- what did he do to you, Mary?" Edgar's voice spoke. Mary ran into the bathroom. "She's grown up all of a sudden," James explained, cold amusement in his voice. "I did her a good turn, you might say. She's had her experience of adulthood just in time. Because she hasn't got much more time, has she? She's a nonentity. I've got proof. I'm going to take her to the Center now. Total Death. Still, she's learned what life is all about." "You swine." The box spoke helplessly. "You lousy, rotten swine." "Not very original," commented James. He walked over to the box and kicked it heavily. "You'd better watch your language. Friend. Come to terms with yourself. You realize that concealing a birth is punishable by Total Death? You're already in the box. There'll be a trial, of course, but the evidence is all against you. Which means that you'll never have a body again. After they find you guilty they'll just wipe you out. Obliterate you. And your wife -- I suppose that's what you call her. Both of you. Oh, boy." He chuckled insanely, feeling quite exalted. He, Linton James, was totally in command of the situation. "How old are you, exactly?" asked Edgar. "What's it to you?" queried James suspiciously. "I just wondered. I wondered what sort of lousy series of lives could bring a man to your situation. I'd guess you were one of the last children and in all your lives others have been superior to you. I ought to feel sorry for you, I suppose." "Thanks a lot. Very kind of you. I'm sure. And hasn't your wife got anything to say? Is the other Mary Atkinson struck dumb? How about a bit of motherly sympathy for poor downtrodden Man Linton James?" The other box spoke at last. "There's nothing I can say." Mary Atkinson Senior sounded infinitely weary. "Except -- why? What have you got against us all?" "Nothing personal. It's just a question of cash. I get prize money for this." "We've got money." "Thanks, no. I also get the chance of being promoted to a Preferred Trade. You know what that means? No Friendship period for me. Immediate Transfer to another body at age forty. That's worth more cash than you've got." He walked to the bathroom and jerked open the door. "Hey, Godiva," he said, grinning. "Get some clothes on. We're going. Your folks have just failed to buy me off." Eventually Mary emerged in a clean dress. Ignoring James, she addressed the boxes. "Bye, Mum," she said quietly, "Bye, Dad. I'm -- I'm sorry. It's all my fault. I should never have tried to get you out of the Center." "You can cut out the tender farewells," James said. He addressed the boxes. "We'll be coming back. You constitute evidence, right where you are in your own house. I want the police to see you here." He laughed, seized Mary by the arm and took her to the car. looked up as they entered. "Yes, James?" He regarded Mary with surprise. Linton James smirked. "One nonentity," he said, pushing Mary forward. "Together with evidence." He reached into his pocket. "One Friendship contract incorrectly filled out, one Code Card fraudulently being used by said nonentity." "Oh?" Ewell took the proffered items, glancing at James with some distaste. "Why didn't you go to the police?" "Thought I'd see you first, you being in charge of the Center, There's more evidence at Branscombe. Two Friends -- with carrier dog usd in said fraud." "For God's sake, stop talking like a policeman, James. Let's get this straight. Tell me the story in sensible language. What's it all about?" Somewhat abashed, James explained, describing the visit of Mary to contract for the Friends. He laid emphasis on her nervousness. He related his discovery of the duplication of names and of the missing card in the Habitation Room. The chase to Branscombe. The confrontation with the parents. The confession. "Mary Atkinson," Ewell read the name thoughtfully. IF "So we've got one card representing both this girl here and a Friend at present in a cottage at Branscombe, both of whom have "committed criminal acts punishable by. Total Death," explained James unctuously. "To say nothing of another Friend at Branscombe who is guilty of concealing a birth. Here is his card from the Habitation Room." "Yes, yes," said Ewell impatiently. He looked at Mary. The whole affair disgusted him -- he wished James had gone to the police in the first place. He, Ewell, was a surgeon, not a tribunal. The girl looked scared stiff, which wasn't surprising. He felt sorry for her -- after all, it wasn't her fault that her birth had been concealed. Still, his duty in the matter was clear. "Do you agree with what Man James has said. Woman Atkinson?" Mary nodded dumbly. "Oh." He tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the desk. James was right, of course. You could tell at a glance that this girl was immature. She reminded him of a daughter he once had. therefore in unusual ways privileged, not by law, but by circumstances. The birthrate had fallen, as had been expected, following the enactment of the Transfer laws. Android births, however, had in recent years risen, with the result that many android children were allowed to progress to adulthood in the family atmosphere of their parents' homes. Other humans generally opted for Friendship rather than accept Transfer to an android body. with undying delight his daughter's progress from childhood to womanhood and had thanked God that he was an android. The child's mother, a human woman named Alice Lander, with whom he had had an affair many years ago, had been a Placement Officer and had placed the tiny child in a creche for future use as a host body, though she had not been legally obliged to give up the child, technically an android. A woman in her position, she had told him, could hardly bring up a half-breed child. He had traced the infant, taken it home and, with the assistance of a female companion, brought it up. Thus he was able to rationalize his sympathy as he looked at Mary. So it was tough on the kid and she reminded him of his daughter. But Mary was a human, a nonentity, and her parents were criminals. He had no alternative. He stood, picking up the evidence. Thumbing the button on his visiphone, he spoke briefly to police headquarters, requesting their 'Jjresence at Branscombe. "We'll take your car, if we may," he said to Mary. She nodded and muttered something. "What's that, child? Speak up." Mary looked straight at him -- there was decision in her blue eyes. "This man -- " she indicated James -- "raped me. I -- I wouldn't say anything now, but -- my parents know. I couldn't stand going dM through it again -- with them there. But they'll tell you -- if you don't believe me. He bragged about it to them." Ewell sat down abruptly, staring at James. "Is she telling the truth?" James shuffled his feet, then regarded Ewell defiantly. "She's telling the truth," he said. "Okay, I raped her. She led me on, though. I was following her to find out where she lived and she said hello and -- made me want her. You know how they do." He winked knowingly. "Anyway, I don't see that it matters. She's a nonentity. You can't commit a crime against a nonentity. If she preferred a charge, it wouldn't even reach the courts." Ewell looked at him for a long time. At last he said quietly, "James, you are a lucky, dirty little bastard." "There's no cause to go speaking to me like that, Man Ewell!" "There's every cause -- and you know it. I know why you involved me in this thing instead of going straight to the police. It wasn't only because you' wanted me as a witness. It was because you wanted my recommendation when ou apply to bepgraded as Preferred. You thought the police might take all the credit. You wanted to be sure I understood how clever you'd been in making your miserable little arrest. Right? Well,I understand. And I tell you this: as long as I'm the surgeon in charge of Axminster Transfer Center you'll get no recommendation from me. This whole thing stinks. My job is performing Transfer operations, not running around the country after so-called criminals." He looked at Mary helplessly. "I'm afraid there's nothing much I can do for you, my dear. The law is clear enough." "But I want you as a witness, Man Ewell," insisted James stubbornly. "Right. Let's get over to Branscombe, then. And I want you tcT understand, James -- I have not the slightest sympathy with your actions. I'll witness because the law compels me to, as senior of the Center. But I won't say one word that might cause your prize money to be increased." Somewhat shaken, James stepped aside as Ewell politely took Mary's arm and conducted her from the room. sentially kind-hearted. He frequently came across instances of hardship where he felt the law might resonably be relaxed. The case of Mary Atkinson was one such. Through no fault of her own IF the girl could not be allowed to exist. The parents were a different proposition, he felt. They had committed their crime fifteen years ago for purely selfish reasons and without thought of the problems it would present their daughter as she grew older. At best she could have looked forward to a perilous life in hiding, knowing that detection would mean Total Death for her ,mother as well as herself. He had very little sympathy for the parents -- if they had simply wanted her to survive they could have tried placing her with androids. He had heard of instances. "What are your parents like, Mary?" he asked curiously as the hovercar sped out of the city, Linton James at the wheel. She had been sitting hunched in a corner, gazing dully through the window. She brightened at his question. "They're nice," she said. "They both worked very hard, like all the dropouts at Branscombe, but they still had plenty of time for me and for enjoying themselves. These last few years I've been helping them on the smallholding. They've been wonderful to me all my life. Still, i suppose all real parents are like that -- were like that, I mean." "You don't think -- " He hesitated, not wishing to upset her, but wanting nevertheless to know. The psychology of concealed births interested him. "You don't think that perhaps they were a little bit selfish, bringing you up the way they did? I mean, they must have known you'd be found out in the end -- and they as well." "And we'd all get Total Death?" She looked at him candidly -- he was amazed at her composure. "That's the luck of the game. They went into it with their eyes open. They wanted a child of their own and they had one. As for me, what difference does it make? If they had reported me in the proper manner I'd have been taken from them as a baby. At six months my head would have been opened and someone else's grown-up brain would have been put in there." She made a face. "I'd never have known what it's like to be me, would I?" She took his hand and stared into his eyes. "What does it feel like, about in someone else's body? You're a Transfer Surgeon. I'll bet you've done so many operations you never even think of it any more. Tell me this. Have you ever wondered what the child -- the one who's body you're wearing -- would have grown up like?" Ewell jerked his hand away as a thrill of pure horror ran down his spine. In front, James twisted around, the car on automatic. "She's dangerous, Man Ewell. She's up to all the tricks like the rest of the dropouts. They've got no respect for the law, so they try to put their own twisted reason in its place. Do you know, recently a lot of them have been opting for Total Death when the time of their Transfer comes around? That's probably why her parents weren't too worried about breaking the law. They have no thought for humanity as a whole and the drain on total brainpower people like them cause when they opt to die." Ewell recovered -- he wasn't going to let James get away with that. "I'm afraid I believe in the right of any individual to die if he wants to," he said firmly. "If you want to get along with me you'd better believe the same. There must be some freedom, for God's sake." "Thank you, Man Ewell," said Mary. outside the cottage. Ewell climbed from the car reluctantly -- he had no stomach for the painful interview to follow. At least, he thought, the police hadn't yet arrived. James led the way and he followed, holding Mary's arm lightly, half-hoping she would make a run for it. The area was remote and she had friends around. After the early afternoon sunlight the interior of the cottage was dark. Ewell blinked, saw a table and a few chairs, sat Mary down and turned to James. He sighed. "Let's get on with it. The police will be here in a minute. I'll just hear the confessions and then go, if you don't mind. You can deal with all the formalities." James was staring into the corner of the room. There was a moment's silence. "Well?" James whispered, "Something's gone wrong. Oh, Christ -- " "What the hell's the matter with you?" James swung round. "There's only one box there, Man Ewell. There's only one box. I left two of them. Her parents. I swear both her parents were here when I left." He was almost crying, "Pull yourself together. Here, let me have a look." Ewell walked about the room, peering under the table, the chairs. There was no sign of the other Friend. Linton James turned on Mary. "Where's it gone, you little bastard? What sort of trick have you pulled?" Mary was silent. There was a quiet dread in her eyes. James seized the remaining box and put it on the table. "Where's the other one?" he shouted. "What have you done with your -- " Who the hell are you anyway?" He bent forward, peering at the number. "I'm Edgar Greenwood," stated the box quietly. "Where's your damned wife?" "She's not here." the box sounded infinitely sad. "I can see that!" shouted James, pounding the Friend with his fist. "Where's she gone?" "Gone? Let' just say that she's IF exercised one of the few right remaining to her." Mary was crying softly. From a distance came the faint wail of the police siren. "What the hell are you trying to say?" James was beside himself. He yelled into the Friend's microphone. "Are you telling me she's killed herself? Because I won't take that. She couldn't have moved. Oh, my God. The dog. Where is he?" Ewell walked to the door and looked into the sunshine. He thought for a moment, his features grave. The police siren was nearer -- he could see a dark spot moving rapidly along the cliff path. He turned and entered the cottage, placing an arm around Mary, who was sobbing uncontrollably. "Oh, James," he said. Linton James looked at him, his eyes wild. "What?" "You're all overwrought." Ewell handed him a cigarette, took one himself, struck a match. James puffed away gratefully, "Thanks. I'm sorry, Man Ewell. I got carried away, what with those crooks cheating me out of a third of my prize money -- What are you doing?" The match still flared in Ewell's fingers. He touched it to the edge of a piece of paper and watched with interest as it curled and blackened and flames crept around the edge. "A dramatic moment, James," he murmured. For an instant James stared uncomprehending. Then he sprang forward with a yell. Ewell thrust him away roughly. He stumbled, fell to his knees and watched helplessly as the flame consumed the last comer of the paper. Ewell ground the ashes under his foot. "You've burned the form she filled in before," whispered James. "You've destroyed the evidence. What the hell are you playing at?" Ewell reached in his pocket and took out a Code Card. He handed it to Mary. "Here you are, my dear. You now have an identity." He turned back to James, who had climbed to his feet and was watching Ewell wide-eyed. "You see, James, sometimes things can work themselves out without, shall we say, bureaucratic intervention. We "have one girl and we have one Friend. We have one Code Card here and one Code Card in the Transfer Center. It seems there was once an irregular document, but this has ceased to exist, so why All Magazine Retailers magazines available to all retailers. Full details on procedures and requirements for proper display of mission of semi-annual sales affidavits can be obtained by writing Select Magazines Inc., # Park Ave. South, New York, N.Y. # worry? All is technically in order." James was silent, white-faced. "Oh, except for one matter," Ewell went on. "Linton James, I regret I must have you charged with the rape of Woman Mary Atkinson. If found guilty you will of course receive a sentence of not less than eight years and also be statutorily ineligible for future Transfers. I believe I can hear a police car." Linton James stared at him, mumbled something unintelligible and ran from the room. They heard the back door slam. The police car wailed to a halt outside. Ewell touched Mary on the shoulder. "I'll be back in a minute," he said gently. He closed the door behind him. Outside, the police were emerging from their vehicle. "Our man got away," Ewell informed them. "He just left through the back door. Rape case. He's a vindictive little bastard -- he told me all sorts of yarns. You shouldn't have much trouble picking him up." "Oh." The inspector looked surprised. "Seeing it was you called us, Man Ewell, I thought it would be some Transfer case. You certainly get yourselves involved in some odd crimes, you Transfer people. What's the man's name?" "Linton James. A colleague of mine, unfortunately." "So that's how you come into it. Where's the girl?" "Inside the house. She's a bit upset right now, but she'll be all right. I'll bring her to see you when she's feeling better." "Fine." The inspector murmured into his throatmike, then addressed Ewell again. "I'm getting his name put on the indicator boards, just in case he gives us the slip for an hour or two. Someone will spot him." He paused, looking toward the sea. "Nice place this. Bit remote, though." He climbed back into the hovercar. "You'll appear as a witness if necessary, Man Ewell?" "Of course." The hovercar glided across the short grass and turned inland. Ewell watched it go, then walked to the cliffs edge where the carrier dog sat, gazing at the rocks below, whining softly. "You poor bastard," murmured Ewell. He remembered dogs as they used to be, before the abolition of pets on the grounds of economy. The dog regarded him, thumped its tail on the short grass, then looked down again at the rocks and the sea a hundred feet below. "Trained to obey, regardless. Well, you did the right thing this time, old boy. Even if it hurt. You know, I misjudged your mistress? I thought she was a selfish woman, bringing up a kid in this world. I was wrong. Come on, boy! Let's go and see how Mary is." Together the android and the carrier dog walked back to the cottage.  IF OF Civil unrest threatens Anharitte city on the planet Roget, just beginning the leap from feudalism into space-age technology. A giant Freetrade spaceport links Anharitte to an interplanetary mercantile system centered on Earth under the Freetrade Council. enlightened treatment of slaves by the natives as having magic powers. ran-educated technological wizard and illegally a lord of Roget. He seems to be planning an end to feudalism, threatening Freetrade-fostered status lovely, highly educated showpiece powerful native secret Society of The Pointed Tails, under leadership of discovers his warehouse has been arsonized under auspices that suggest science and technology hitherto unretaliates by bribing a prefecture registry clerk to destroy the record of The crooked clerk is instantly and mysteriously killed. No evidence links murder -- he must, however, return point where the lord of Magda would soon as he and she have left the room the document spontanously combusts. sum -- against no opposition. IX battle cruiser at the spaceport Dr. Alek Hardun had been forming his own impressions of the Imaiz. "I'm afraid," he said to Ren, "we're up against a pretty formidable technician." "You have some answers, Alek?" "Some. But they reveal a class of technology I had not expected to find on a backward world like this." Ren sat atop one of the laboratory stools. "Don't worry about the location. I'm already quite convinced that the Imaiz is Terran and is capable of anything including outmanipulating Magno Vestevaal himself. The incident with Zinder could have been funny if it hadn't been so expensive." no Hardun's eyes twinkled momentarily. "I gather it was rather a warm evening," he said. "But all things taken together. I'm not surprised. The way the register clerk died was no less clever." "Have you found how it was done?" "Yes. We did a post-mortem examination, but nearly missed the point. We were looking for a projectile of some sort in the esophagus. Of course we didn't find one -- rather, we did find it but failed to recognize it for what it was." "Spare me the riddles," said Ren. "I've been up half the night helping the director to drown his sorrows." "The answer, my dear Tito, was blood." "I don't see -- " "Neither did we -- at first. But trying to explore all possible avenues we ran some blood analyses to see if anything unusual showed up. Something did. We found two distinct blood groups. One was the blood group of the clerk. The second was undoubtedly human blood but of a completely different group. Working on the second type of blood alone, we were able to determine that it had been carefully processed and then frozen. "The rest is conjecture, but it's a reasonable supposition that what killed the clerk was a shaft of frozen blood projected by some ligh velocity instrument at a fairly short range. Such a projectile in the throat would, of course, pass almost unnoticed amid the blood and fragmentation caused by its impact and very shortly it would melt in the warm blood of its victim. A rather neat, self-obscuring murder weapon, I think." Ren nodded thoughtfully. "And not one likely to be detectable by Di Irons and his primitive police methods. What sort of weapon could have been used to throw a shaft of frozen blood with the necessary velocity?" Alek Hardun pursed his lips. "That's difficult to say. At first we thought in terms of an air rifle, but your fellow, Catuul Gras, was positive that he and his friends heard no sound at all. I think now that some form of crossbow is more likely. A good one can give you velocity and accuracy not much inferior to a rifle's. The only special requirement is that the bolt must be maintained in a frozen condition until immediately before firing. This presupposes somebody with a Dewar flask and some experience in producing and handling materials at low temperatures. It all ties in neatly with your liquid-oxygen fire at the warehouse. I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen the evidence -- but there must be a competent cryogenics man at work in Magda." "I can't imagine our being able to use your evidence to convince Di Irons," said Ren. "His world is bounded by the four elements -- earth, air, fire and water. I don't think the distinction between cryogenics and necromancy is sufficiently obvious to make him move against Dion-daizan. Especially when Dion can set a sheet of paper afire at thirty paces without even moving." "But he didn't," said Hardun. "The director set that afire himself." "Explain it to me." "It's another example of the technology I hadn't expected to find. We've been working on the fragments of the page you gave us -- and it isn't paper at all. Somebody had inserted a special page in that book. Certainly the sheet was a fibrous cellulose material, but it had been impregnated with some strong oxidizing compound. Frankly, it would have crumbled to dust in a few weeks anyway, assuming that nobody had even touched it. But it was the ink in the director's pen that touched off the fast reaction." "But all the others wrote on it without effect," objected Ren, "True. But on Roget all the available inks are waterothers all used an old-fashioned wet-dip nib pen." Ren thought back carefully. "I think you're right." "Well, the effect of a water-based ink on the sheet is negligible. It redistributes the oxidant, but doesn't react with it. But the director predictably signed with his own pen -- and that contained a modern outworld organic-based ink. The organics were rapidly oxidized and produced almost spontaneous combustion. The local heat thus liberated was sufficient to touch the rest of the page off in a self-destructive mode. That bond entry was definitely designed to have no future." Ren smiled ruefully. "I suppose you could say we've only ourselves to blame. We did the same thing to Dion-daizan -- but with only a fraction of the subtlety. The devil alone knows how much support he's gained from the incident. I'd guess all Anharitte is laughing at us this morning." "I think," said Hardun, "you're taking completely the wrong approach. You're making a game of this instead of trying for a fast, decisive strike. I know it's your war, but the problem of Imaiz is also within my competence. I'd tackle the whole affair quite differently." "This morning I could use a few ideas. I don't promise to agree, but IF I'd like to hear your version of how it should be done." "Not how it should be done," said Hardun. "How it must be done. I was thinking more on the lines of dusting the Castle Magda with carcinogens -- or the careful application of  nerve gas. Perhaps even the introduction of an ergot derivative into their drinking water -- " a daunting prospect. Constructed originally as the first defense fortress overlooking the broad Aprillo river, it had seen much service against the Tyrene pirates who ventured to pass under its cannon to reach the internal waterways leading to the soft underflesh of the city and the provinces beyond. The pirates were gone now -- their impetus having retreated into the more profitable enterprises of respectable trading houses -- but the guns and the grim, crenelated battlements of Castle Di Guaard remained unchanged as though caught in some eddy of time itself. Matching its image as a fortress was the preparedness of the soldiery contained within its gray stone confines. Indeed, a full lookout and guard were maintained on all walls as though in anticipation of an imminent attack. As Ren was admitted by Sonel Taw, the castellan -- or governor -- of the castle, he was immediately conscious of being in an armed citadel and, more surprisingly, one in which the men at arms not only carried primed muskets, but seemed fully prepared to use them on the slightest provocation. The unchanged character of Di Guaard also extended to the slaves, who in the main were ragged, wretched and nervously watchful, as though their lives depended on the speed with which they responded to a call for ' service. Many of them bore the scars of barbarous punishments -- all wore the hangdog expression of whipped curs, which turned Ren's stomach slightly. Nowhere else in Anharitte had he seen slaves reduced to this condition. Remembering the proud strengths of Zinder, he experienced a slight twinge of conscience that his mission to Di Guaard was to gain support for the destruction of the enlightened House of Magda. Castle Di Guaard was built on the principle of a bailey within a bailey, the outer containing slave quarters, stores and work yards, the inner housing the soldiery. Both were surrounded by the great walls whose machicolated parapets and mural flanking towers were designed to resist attack from any point of (he compass. There was no moat, the castle being on two sides met by the sheer drop of the cliffs overhanging the Aprillo delta. The two great gates inland were amply overseen by formidable gatehouses, each with outworks in the form of separate barbican towers. Ren followed the castellan without comment -- and the latter seemed disinclined to enter conversation. At one corner of the inner bailey stood the mighty roundtower of the great keep -- the home of Delph Di Guaard himself -- and it was here that Ren was led. The tower's broad, flat roof was said to be the highest point in all the provinces and formed an excellent platform for observation and for the light chain-throwing cannon of which Di Guaard seemed inordinately fond. The whole atmosphere was one of preparation for a battle or a siege. Ren could not help thinking that if the Imaiz influence should ever bring to pass a revolution Castle Di Guaard would probably be the last place to fall to the insurgents. no news to Ren, but having come from more civilized worlds he had forgotten that, without psychiatry and the overriding authority of the state, madness has no checks. Even more appalling was the realization that the gross madman whose chambers Ren now entered was undisputed lord of his own castle and held life or death control over a considerable number of soldiers and slaves. Even Sonel Taw, the castellan, went patently in fear of his terrifying master and excused himself rapidly at the chamber door. As he crossed the floor alone Ren felt the full impact of the man. Delph Di Guaard was leaning over a huge table, his back to the door. His vast bulk suggested superhuman strength and even from the rear Ren could sense the aura of power of the man's tyrannic personality. He found himself almost afraid of the moment when the creature would turn and face him. "Well?" Di Guaard's voice made the chamber reverberate. "What news do you bring of the Tyrene?" "No news of the Tyrene, my Lord. I come about other matters." Ren controlled his voice with a confident, faultless presence. His verbal bouts with Magno Vestevaal had been excellent training for this occasion. "Other matters?" Di Guaard shouted. "In time of war?" He swung about and Ren looked unflinchingly into the staring, accusing eyes of the mad lord. The fellow's visage writhed constantly with the underplay of some shaded thoughts in which anger and IF comprehension chased each other continuously through the flesh. "Ah, an outworlder. That would explain your naivete. You must be Agent Ren. My castellan mumbled something about your coming. Well you've come to the right man. Have the Tyrene sacked your warehouse, slaughtered your servants or raped your daughters?" His mouth almost drooled at the vision. "None of those," said Ren. "My news is more serious. It concerns the very existence of Anharitte itself." Di Guaard hit the table a heavy blow with his hand. "I knew it! I told that fool Di Irons that one day the pirates would attack in force. You see here -- " His thick fingers jabbed pointlessly at a torn chart on the table. "That's the reason why so many of their ships have congregated to the north. We have constant sightings of a hundred, two hundred ships -- they say an armada. And I, Di Guaard, am the only one in the three hills who keeps his defenses ready. The rest of them think me mad, but now it's I who am proven sane. Don't you agree that unpreparedness in time of war is mad?" "Of course," said Ren, determined to remain undaunted. "But the danger I speak of comes from within Anharitte, not from the sea." Di Guaard's scowl changed to an expression of intense consternation. "You me the Tyrene came overland across TEmpte?" He consulted his charts again and then threw them furiously back on the table. He rounded on Ren in a frightening blaze of anger. "Liar! What mischief are you selling, merchant? Dion-daizan keeps close watch on the inland waters. If any Tyrene were coming that way he'd have been sure to let me know." "Listen to me." Ren let his voice grow loud for the first time. "While you watch for the Tyrene an even greater threat is growing right beneath your feet. Dion-daizan is educating slaves... If enough become educated there will be a revolution that will ruin us all more surely than any pirate raid." "Really?" Di Guaard's face lit up with the malicious interest of a wolf about to tear apart a particularly succulent lamb. "And what makes an outworld merchant's lackey presume to tell the lords of Anharitte what they should or should not do with their slaves? Dion's more capable than most at controlling an uprising among his bondslaves. Dion's more than capable of controlling anything." As he said this last phrase, Di Guaard's voice fell to an unexpected wistfulness, as if even he acknowledged the power of the Imaiz, "I didn't say he wasn't," said Ren, suddenly forced on to the defensive. "My point was that his activities are likely to cause an uprising." The suggestion was wasted on Di Guaard, who was rounding the table with a maniacal expression of glee on his face. His gross hands were shaping themselves to fit Ren's throat. "Shall I tell you, merchant, the real purpose of your visit? You're an agent of the Tyrene trying to cause dissension and to divert my attention. You want to get your ships up the Aprillo while I turn my back to watch Thirdhill for the rising of a few slaves. Well, you've not succeeded. I've been watching your wily tricks too long. I know you -- and I know you're out there waiting for the chance to strike. Do you take me for a fool?'" R en retreated uneasily before  the big man's advance. He was not sure but the fellow's derangement might extend to his doing actual physical damage. And Ren did not dare to draw his blaster -- circumstances might force him to use it. He could kill Di Guaard in self-defense, but the political repercussions would certainly end the company's tenure on Roget. He continued his protests while the madman stalked him with a grim and ferocious amusement. Finally he realized that flight was the 'Only sensible expedient. Gauging his distance carefully, he ran for the door and slammed it behind him. Something heavy and ceramic shattered to pieces against the wood inside the room. From the insane laughter that followed he deduced that Di Guaard was unlikely to continue in pursuit, but for Ren the incident was a humiliating failure. He was not going to gain from Di Guaard the support he needed. In an alcove at the head of the stair Ren found Sonel Taw ostensibly waiting to escort him out of the establishment. Ren thought it more than probable that Taw had been listening at Di Guaard's door and had been surprised by the sudden emergence of the visitor. Since the castellan would probably be called upon to account for why he had allowed a Tyrene spy to enter his master's presence, Ren did not blame the man for seeking information in order to prepare his lies in advance. The life of a castellan in the service of Di Guaard could certainly be no sinecure. This conjecture, however, was not an idle thought. If Sonel Taw took the trouble to keep himself fully informed of everything that IF took place in the castle he could probably be of more use to the company's cause than Di Guaard himself. Ren decided to test the truth of this proposition. When they were safely out of the keep and crossing the inner bailey he turned to Taw meaningfully. "The Lord Di Guaard is plentifully supplied with information regarding the whereabouts and movements of pirates. I find this odd, since common consent has it that the pirates are no more." The castellan looked past him carefully. "It could be," he said, "that common consent is wrong. Agent Ren. Di Guaard has many spies. They report frequently and are rewarded with coin. It has been suggested that many of the things they tell are more than the truth, since they are well paid for what they say. But there's another who tells much and yet asks nothing in return." "Specifically who?" asked Ren. "Your friend the Imaiz Taw was craftily watching the agent out of the corners of his eyes. "He claims to keep watch over the inland waters and brings special reports regularly to Lord Di Guaard. Di Guaard is always much pleased to see him, and the wizard quiets his tantrums considerably. With so much impressive support for the existence of pirates, do you think it wise for you or me to disbelieve?" The castellan was purposely mocking his own words, hinting at the existence of a conspiraca development Ren had already deduced for himself. If Di Guaard was mad enough to believe that the Tyrene plunderers still functioned others could gainfully manufacture evidence in support of that belief. For some the incentive was obvious -- a purse full of money. For others, such as Sonel Taw and members of the castle household, support of the myth probably meant the continuance of their livelihood and possibly their lives. But what had Dion-daizen to gain from the charade? "Do you know why I came to see Di Guaard today?" wizened old face wrinkled with guile. "Anharitte is full of the news that you and the Imaiz have joined in feud. It's reasonable to assume that you came here looking for an ally." "A fair assumption." Ren looked at him searchingly. "But I didn't find one. At least not in Delph Di Guaard. But now I ask myself about you." "To help you in a feud against the Imaiz? Sonel Taw was obviously worried by the suggestion. "Not actively, of course," Ren reassured him. "But I need information about Dion-daizan. I need to know why he humors Di Guaard and what he might gain from such a curious association. Fd like to be informed of when he visits Castle Di Guaard -- at what hour he's likely to return from such visits and what routes he'll most probably use. In short, I need to know anything about Dion-daizan that might conceivably be turned to his disadvantage. And if your ear is as well affixed to locks as it appears to be you'll already know that the company has an excellent history of rewarding its friends for their time and vigilance." "I've often heard as much," said Sonel Taw. "And that's the type of friendship a man could learn to appreciate. But if someone made this information available to you -- would it be certain that no news of it ever got back to Di Guaard?" "All information is treated in the strictest confidence. Nothing can ever be traced back to its source through me. Nor do I keep records of what moneys have been paid. Or to whom." "Then I think you may have gained another friend," said Taw. "Not that I would hold any man of Di Guaard's household capable of subversion -- but should a messenger be received claiming to have been sent by me, it would seem reasonable that he might be believed. And if a friend might bless my savings so that they multiply I should not, through humility, be offended." "I'll bear that in mind," Ren said. "I'm a believer in humility's achieving its just rewards. You know, talking with you has been an education. I'm sure my knowledge of events in Castle Di Guaard will improve." They had passed from the inner bailey to the outer during this conversation and were now entering one of the two formidable gatehouses that gave access to the town. Upon Sonel Taw's approach the guard sprang meticulously into action. Taw had merely to wave his hand to initiate the raising of the portcullis. In the roof of the gate tunnel were slits through which all kinds of merciless fire and bolts could be discharged. Beyond it, the gate of heavy wood plated with iron lay between the overseeing flanking-towers. Farther still the outward path was confronted by the outworks of a barbican tower. Ren made a mental note that nobody could enter or leave without Sonel Taw's permission and the cooperation of the guards. By a mental inversion he decided that the walls and gates, being imIF pregnable to all save modern technological assault, not only formed a rare defense position -- but would also make a very secure prison. He had no immediate use for this information, but he stored it in his mind for future reference. There were some advantages in being an outworlder -- it gave him a unique perspective on installations traditionally designed for specific local purposes. Ren felt that his tenure in Anharitte, as elsewhere, was bound to generate some new values and he was determined to be the first not only to recognize but also to apply these altered truths to the company's and his own advantage. X HE walked back past the wayward, half-timbered houses of the quaint alleys and streets, Ren's speculations were soon eclipsed by a more immediate concern. His recent conversation with Alek Hardun had shaken him severely. Hardun had been introduced as a professional trouble shooter. Ren now felt that Hardun's real function was that of a professional trouble-maker. The equipment in the space-going laboratory that was the battle crusier was directed primarily to one end -- the sophisticated extermination of people. For all his merchant-acumen and ambition, Ren still had reservations about the deliberate taking of life. His worldliness had inured him to the fact that some extremes of provocation could only be resolved by bloodshed. In self-defense or fair fighting, losers were apt to have to pay the irrevocable penalty. This was a fact of life and Ren accepted it, but Hardun's projected subtle poisoning of dozens-pif not hundreds -- of people who would be mainly unaware that they were the subjects of an attack stuck in Ren's throat. This he regarded as an atrocity, a treatment suitable for the extermination of lice and vermin but not to be confused with the humane waging of a battle. Alek Hardun had chided Ren for expressing these sentiments. "You're confusing the issues, Tito," he had said. "You were born several centuries too late. We know the ancients used to impose rules on warfare, presumably to prolong the enjoyment of the game. But the brutal fact is that we're not here to. fight -- we're here to win. I've offered you a dozen virtually foolproof ways of winning and you've rejected them all because of some romantic notion that the enemy deserves a chance. "Do you think the bowmen stood a chance when the cannon was invented? Do you think the artillery stood a chance against the in- troduction of nuclear weapons? Within the whole spectrum of devices for furthering man's inhumanity to man, you have the temerity to stop at some arbitrary point and say: 'Death devices on the left are sporting and humane while those on the right aren't.' Such a stand is neither logical nor intelligent. And if you can't bring yourself to do the job you've started to do I'm damned if I won't finish it for you." There had been more, a lot more. Ren had become increasingly angry and Hardun had become more professionally cruel and taunting. He had effectively dismantled Ren's plans to conduct a campaign against the Imaiz and had produced alternative suggestions which Ren could only regard with horror. The effect of that conversation had lingered a long time in Ren's mind and he was determined to compare the strength of his convictions with those of the director. Vestevaal, unfortunately, had been away for several days, making a tour of company trading installations, and Ren had been left with the question festering in his mind. When Ren reached his office chambers the director still had not returned. Ren found instead that his computer printout terminal had been busy. In it lay the precious list of slaves carefully culled from reconstructed histories to shoAv those who could most possibly be agents of the Imaiz. He scanned the list anxiously, but the names meant nothing to him. For Catuul Gras, who knew everyone and everything in Anharitte, the situation would be different. Ren stuffed the list into his pocket and hastened to the Lodge of the Society of Pointed; Tails. expecting him. Ren speculated that there must be very few movements of importance of which the Pointed Tails were unaware, such was the superlative nature of, their spy web in Anharitte. He laid the list before Catuul, who examined it carefully. For some unstated reason his enthusiasm was not apparent. "I'll have our slave masters investigate this without delay -- but discreetly. No word of it must get out until we're sure. If the suspects became suspicious it would be easy for them to desert back to Magda." "I'll leave it to you," said Ren. "But it's still action only in a negative sense. It's a defensive move. What I must have from you is some scheme with a positive effect." "And you'll have it, friend Tito. I promised you a scheme of feud and harassment against Dion-daizan IF and this has now been prepared. To your outworld eyes it may seem a little superficial -- but believe me, in terms of effectiveness in Anharitte its cumulative value is equivalent to a major disaster." "I'll accept that you know what you're doing. But time's becoming critical, Catuul. I'm under pressure to destroy the influence of the Imaiz and to do it fast. If your scheme can't produce results quickly we'll be forced into taking a more direct line and attacking Dion-daizan himself." "What sort of time-scale did you have in mind?" "I think a couple of weeks only. Hardun is already campaigning with the Freetrade Council for permission to take a tougher line. I think I can stall them for a while, but we mustn't miss any opportunity to hit Dion hard." "You're worried about something, aren't you, friend Tito?" The scribe was suddenly questioning. "Yes, I am. I've come to have a great deal of respect for your culture, Catuul. As a company man I can't afford to risk losing access to the spaceport, but outside of that proviso I believe you've a right to settle your problems in your own way and without your society's becoming unduly contaminated by outworld interference. But I'm afraid that if you don't settle the Imaiz soon a more ruthless faction among the Freetraders will bring such pressures to bear that Anharitte will never be the same place after." "I'm aware of the situation," said Catuul gravely. "I've seen what the coming of the spaceport has done to us unwittingly. Thus I've no doubt of what would be the outcome of more deliberate manipulation. Frankly, that's why we opted to work with you. You've an appreciation of what a separate identity means both to an individual and to a culture. That's something rare in an outworlder." "You can thank the director. I guess I caught my attitude from him." "Well, here's our proposal. Diondaizan maintains many large estates and farms in Magda province. The value of the produce is a major source of Magda's income." "More than the spaceport revenue?" Ren was learning something new. "Certainly much more. But the point I wish to mke is that the Imaiz success in his estate policy depends on close coordination of the various estates and markets. If we destroy that coordination, his growing and marketing schemes will fall apart. Prices will rise, setting popular sysmpathy against him -- and he will soon acquire huge stocks of surplus. He will also find himself with excess manpower and will be forced to start selling slaves on a massive scale. A disaster of such consequence will smash his myth of omnipotence as nothing else will." "How could you bring this, about?" asked Ren. "Dion operates a schedule of runners who daily travel between the various marketing centers and estates. We could stop a high proportion of these runners getting through -- and in some cases substitute false messages of our own." Ren was enthusiastic. "When an organization as large and as dispersed as that hits communications trouble, things can come wildly unstuck. How long would it take to show real effect?" "Many weeks, I'm afraid. But the main harvests are nearly due. If Dion were left with those on his hands he'd be in real trouble both with his estates and with the populations he normally supplies. Of course, he'll send out armed patrols to try and prevent our interference -- but the clansmen were born to the game and Dion doesn't have anything like the army he'd need to stop us." "So all you really require to bring the Imaiz to his knees is sufficient time?" "Time and money. I want to bring in some of the provincial societies, because the area to be covered is immense. Though we shall start hurting the Imaiz immediately, the effect won't be apparent in the markets for some weeks. Therefore you've got to hold off the Freetraders while we do it our way." "I don't have that much influence myself, but I'll try to make the director see the sense of it. In the meantime, muster your forces and make a start. If we can get a good scheme under way we'll have a sure method of resisting those who want to do it the rough way." turn, gravely heard out Ren's problems. "I wasn't aware that Hardun was here in any capacity other than a technical backup for you. I know he has an allegiance to Renee, but this is our fight. You've every right to complain if he's contemplating any actions other than those specifically agreed to by you. I respect your judgment on this issue. Tito, and I'm damned if I'm going to see you pressured into making a mistake." "I've seen his copy of the Freetrade security subcommittee directive giving him power to act on IF Roget. And that battle cruiser of his is a fully equipped civil murder weapon. So I want a plain answer, Director -- am I in charge here or has Hardun the right of unilateral action? Because I want no part of some of the ideas he's outlined to me. "You say you've seen his directive? Can you recall who signed it?" "Po Cresado, as I remember." "Damn! I thought as much. The merchant-world pressure lobby. You can take it from me, Tito, that his directive doesn't have the consent of the full council. Unfortunately the merchant worlds do predominate on the security subcommittee. It looks as though the internal political battles of the council have become extended to include affairs on Roget," "Are you going to let them get away with it?" "Of course not. But it'll take a full council session to settle the issue. I'm afraid I'll have to return there to get the matter .straight. Do you think you can contain things until I get back?" "I'll try, but I've no jurisdiction over Hardun in the face of that directive. And if he thinks you're out to stop him, he's likely to move fast." "Then try pretending to work with him for a while. It might just be that he'll actually do the job for you -- and at a fraction of the price. Though I fear that even our friend Alek may not find the project as easy as he thinks." "Can you explain that to me?" "I mean the Imaiz himself is under no doubts about Hardun or his infernal space machine." "How could you possibly know that?" "My dear Ren, what do you think Zinder and I talked about while we were waiting to register her bond? She gave me Dion's ultimatum -- either I remove Hardun and the battle cruiser or Diondaizan will do the job himself. Until now I've had reservations. But from what you've just told me I can see the justification. I'll set out to have Hardun and his ship removed -- but don't feel surprised if somebody does the job for me." "I've told Catuul to go ahead with his plan to cause disruption of Dion-daizan's estate-management policies. That will at least give me a lever I can use to slow Hardun down. But it will be difficult to stop him if he does want to try a decisive strike of his own." "Then play it carefully, Tito. Take advantage of his successes and don't become implicated in his failures. That way you stay on top and the name of the company stays clean." "You've just expressed a philosophy," said Ren, "that makes me appreciate why you have so much influence in the Freetrade Council. You never lose, do you?" "I can't afford to lose," said Magno Vestevaal seriously. "And believe me. I've a few tricks up my sleeve the rest of the council haven't even thought of yet. If all goes well at the council meeting. I'll probably go on to Terra before returning here. I've been developing a few thoughts of my own about how to deal with the Imaiz -- and if I can get acceptance of my ideas on Terra I can assure you that Alek Hardun won't be rated as any serious sort of competition." XI F ollowing through on the next part of his campaign to seek influence with the Anharitte nobility. Ren had dispatched a message to Krist Di Rode requesting an audience the following morning. The reply was favorable. Before he retired, however, Ren took advantage of the caution offered by Di Irons -- he posted a guard on his chambers lest the Imaiz should feel inclined to take the initiative. An attempted assassination did not seem likely, but Ren had been an agent long enough to learn that warnings from an indigenous source were better not disregarded. Fortunately the night passed without incident and, at the appointed hour the next day, Ren traveled to the most eastern point of Firsthill and presented himself at Castle Di Rode. The contrasts between this establishment and that of Di Guaard made him realize what a fortune Di Guaard must spend on useless defense projects. Di Rode was a prodigious spender, but his considerable income from spaceport revenues had not been wasted. Castle Di Rode was bathed in an atmosphere of opulence and splendor. Though the castle was slightly smaller than that of Di Guaard, it differed in none of its essential features except that the walls and mural towers of Di Rode displayed none of the former's austerity of outline. Here the masonry was fully overgrown with a magnificent wealth of copper-burnished creeping vines, which garnished the old stone like an overlay of finely wrought metal. Expenditure on the guard was nominal, and mainly slaves and serving-men in splendid costumes tended the gatehouses and the trim gardens. Everywhere Ren sensed the hand of a connoisseur of gracious living, not the least extravagance being the maintenance of the gardens and the IF beautiful decoration of the halls. Di Rode was obviously an intellectual and an artist, possessed of an unerring sense of the overall unity of his establishment as an aesthetic whole. The numerous slaves were well tended aid nourished and probably chosen for their clean, straight limbs and physical fitness. In the whole castle he discerned not one slave whose back bore the telltale scars of whip or wire. The whole atmosphere was one of serenity and quietude. This, thought Ren, was the way money was intended to be spent. The keep of Castle Di Rode was built into the southeast extremity of the inner bailey. It held a commanding view over the Aprillo river and across the shipping lanes that connected with the inland waterways, The keep itself was no longer a simple structure. Later buildings along the walls of the inner bailey had crept around the base of the round-tower and risen to a height equal to the walls themselves. Thus the entrance to the keep was no longer gained by crossing a sterile courtyard, but rather through a delightfully random series of halls, libraries, galleries, corridors and sweeping staircases. As Ren followed his young slavecaste guide he found himself, unaccountably at first, becoming increasingly discomforted. This feeling was in part associated with the increasing richness of the perfumes and incense with which the air was saturated, but this was only a factor and not the prime cause of his unease. A gradual analysis of his feelings made him conscious of the fact that the rooms through which he passed were in a careful sequence of ascending extravagance and descending taste, and had already attained a level where the lavish dissipation of resources made nonsense both of the function and the intrinsic value of the items involved. This was so extreme a contrast with the exterior of the castle and the earlier rooms, that the only answer that suggested itself to Ren was that Di Rode, like Delph Di Guaard, was beset by advancing madness. Ren's senses protested the wrongness they recorded. When he reached the confines of the keep itself his feelings heightened to revulsion despite his efforts to contain them. Here was monumental waste with neither art nor comfort to commend it. Even the occasional alcoves were lit by candelabra mounted on the heads and shoulders of undraped slaves who stood with statuesque patience, performing a function no more important than could have been achieved by an iron pin driven into the wall. humanity caused Ren as acute a pain as he had experienced on seeing the degraded labor force at Castle Di Guaard. Profitable exploitation of others was a human weakness Ren could comprehend. To waste members of the species by forcing them to fill functions usually performed by inanimate objects was, in his view, irrational and completely indefensible. Fortunately he regained both his outward composure and his objectivity before he turned the final corner to come face-to-face with Krist Di Rode himself. He needed all his resources to contain his amazement. He had been shown into a bare cell, whose stone walls were as stark and undressed as had been the human candelabra he had passed. A high, square window without glazing looked out only to the blankness of an empty sky, and the shaped wooden bench on which the Lord Di Rode reclined offered no possible aspect of comfort. The floor of stone flags was unrelieved by carpet and the ceilings of arched stone had neither light nor beauty. Di Rode himself was also a shock to Ren. He had imagined an older, more sophisticated type of man, perhaps one trying to ward off old age by the frantic pursuit of new experience. Instead, he was confronted by a pallid figuiyof a man in his early thirties,j#rith a face which epitomized dissipation and overindulgence yet still possessed an undeniable strength. Ren had the feeling that this curious lord had tried and become dissatisfied with almost every aesthetic and sensual experience known to man. The physical dissolution was manifest, but the evidence was that the intellectual and aesthetic interest was yet unquenched. While Di Rode's face held a searching interest and unquestionable intelligence, it was obvious that unrestricted wealth, like absolute power, had wrought a remarkable corrosion on its own # With a trader's acumen Ren had summarized this much of the man before he began to speak, subtly modifying his arguments in order to stress aspects of Dion-dain's activities that might have an effect on Di Rode. The latter listened to him attentively, stopping him occasionally to query some chain of fact that led to Ren's conclusions. Then he remained for a long period in contemplative thought. "To summarize. Agent Ren, you've presented an excellent case predicting what Dion's policy might take away from me. But you've mentioned nothing about the loss of what I receive from Dion while I remain his friend." IF "We have access to the resources of all the known universe," said Ren. "There's nothing that Dion can supply that we can't better. Nothing at all." "Does that include understanding?" Di Rode was quietly mocking. "Do you have access to some cosmic source of that?" The unexpectedness of the question fazed Ren momentarily. "I don't follow you." "Think about it. If you had an unrestricted opportunity to indulge whatever whims you chose -- how long would it take you to destroy yourself?" "I don't know," admitted Ren. "I'd at least have one hell of a fine time finding out." "Spoken with all the complacency of one who'll never have the opportunity! But what does a man need when he's tasted everything, satiated every appetite and yielded to every conceivable temptation?" Ren did not answer. The question was beyond the scope of his imagination. Di Rode continued. "He needs understanding. He needs discipline. He needs a father-figure who' can pick up the mess he's become, squeeze out the rot and put back enough self-respect for the man to become a man again. That's what Dion supplies to me -- psychological rehabilitation. He picks up the pieces when I've torn myself apart and establishes new values to replace those I've lost. Dp you have something better to offer as a replacement for Dion's prowess with people?" "We have doctors -- " "Doctors are for the sick," said Di Rode cuttingly. "I'm not sick -- just unusually privileged. With Dion's aid I can probably crowd the pleasures of a hundred lifetimes into one. So you see, Ren, there's nothing you can offer me in exchange for my allegiance. Wizards don't come in tonnage lots." Ren was about to make a reply when Di Rode got up from the bench and made as though to call a servant. The agent's gaze did not follow the hedonistic lord, but remained fixed in fascination on the bench from which De Rode had risen. He saw now for the first time that the entire surface was covered with upward-pointing metal spines, like a bed of nails. In an agony of realization his eyes traveled involuntarily to Di Rode's back. Krist Di Rode was watching his perplexity with some amusement. With a swift movement he dropped the single drape that covered his back and allowed Ren to examine his flesh. There were slight indentations from the pressure of the barbs, but otherwise the skin was undamaged. In contrast, however, the open weave of the drape had been severely cut. Ren looked again to the sharp spines of the couch and again back to Di Rode. By any normal reasoning, Di Rode's back should have been lacerated to an extremely serious extent. Instead, the young lord was laughing and the main discomfort was Rens. "Well, Agent Ren -- do you still think you can do better than Diondaizan?" Ren shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. He suspected, not for the first time, that he was fighting a battle quite impossible for him to win. With Dion's influence removed, Delph Di Guaard would go berserk and Krist Di Rode would destroy himself. With such powerful nobility removed, the social structure of the three hills, undermined as it was, would slowly begin to disintegrate as surely as if the Imaiz were still pushing it. Dion-daizan had raised a social conscience and all the old forces of tradition would be hard-pressed to put that evolving creature back to bed. xX the fruit market be could see Catuul Gras waiting for him on the steps of his office chambers. He hastened over and the scribe followed him to safety behind closed doors before he would reveal the nature of his concern. "Something's gone wrong." Catuul's face was grave. "The list of slaves you gave us -- it was incorrect." "What do you mean?" "We took the slaves whose names were on the list. It didn't seem right, because most of them were well trusted and known to us. But even under pressure they gave us absolutely nothing. Most of them claimed never to have been with the Imaiz. " "Surely that's no more than you'd have expected them to say?" "True. But on further examination we found their statements to be correct. Dr. Hardun has given us i a list of our own sympathizers -- and none of Dion's men at all." "Ridiculous!" "It's all here." Catual Gras laid a sheaf of papers on the table. "Check for yourself. No man on that list has ever spent more than thirty-six hours in Magda and most of them haven't been there at all." Scowling, Ren reached for the microwave communicator and called the spaceport. Alek Hardun was a long time answering. "Tito? What's eating you?" "What in hell are you trying to do, Alek? That list of slaves you IF sent was the diametric opposite of what it was supposed to represent." "Now don't run off the spool, Tito! You asked me to reconstruct histories for a selected group of slaves and to notify you of those who'd served bond with the Imaiz for a year or longer. That's exactly what I've done." "Correction. That's exactly what you've not done." Catuul tells me no slave on that list has spent longer than two days in Magada." "Hold it! That wasn't an automatic computer printout you received. We verified that list before it went on transmission. There's no possibility of an error in the data we sent you." "Yet I'm assured the list is one hundred per cent wrong. What the hell's going on?" "Let's check first that you have the right list. Watch your computer terminal and I'll give it to you again." Ren watched as the computer printout began to spit forth names. When it had finished, he compared it with the papers Catuul had given to him. "How's that?" asked Hardun. "It agrees with the first set exactly. There's not an error in the pack." "Yet you insist they're not the names you want?" "The names you've given me are also on the select list of Pointed Tails least probable suspects." "I see!" Hardun was serious. "How many names appear on your list, Tito?" "Seventeen. You should know -- you've transmitted it." "Not on your life. My list contained seventeen names, but I transmitted only sixteen of them." "What?" "I said sixteen, Tito. All of whom I can guarantee have been at Magda for at least three years and most much longer. If you've just received a list of seventeen names, there's only one conclusion -- the list you're receiving is not the one I'm transmitting. Somebody else has access to your terminal line. They're intercepting what I'm sending and substituting a list of their own." "Damn!" Ren considered the enormity of the prospect. Most of the company's business transactions were reported via his terminal to the spaceport computers for processing and onward transThe director's reports on the state of the feud with Dion-daizan went out over the same channel. The thought of unauthorized access to the terminal linkage made his blood run cold. With a chill creeping up his spine, he turned the instrument off. "Can you spare me some linesmen, Alek? My terminal is on a wired circuit with the spaceport. I can only assume it's been tapped." "Not only tapped," said Hardun. "I'd suspect that it's being consistently monitored by an online computing complex compatible with that at the spaceport. The insertion of a substitute list at that juncture is no ijiean feat of technology. What the hell have they got up there at Magda?" "I wish I knew. All the signs now are that they've a modern technological workshop that can match anything we can produce. This has to put a new face on how we approach the attack on the Imaiz -- but I'll take the matter up with you personally. I don't even trust this microwave voice link now." "That's wise," said Hardun. "But before I sign off I'll read you the list of names you should have received." He did so. Ren copied them faithfully and handed the results to Catuul Gras. The scribe compared them with another list and shook his head concernedly. "The names you've given me match the list of slaves who've escaped in the last two days. We presume they've gone to Magda, though the evidence isn't clear. It would seem the devil has recalled his own." F inding the actual position of the line tap was difficult. Because Anharitte had no telephone and no electric services the customary array of available poles was absent from the landscape. When Ren had decided to bring his office into the fruit market in Anharitte proper he had found it neccessary to arrange for his wire link with the spaceport to be laid across private land wherever he could purchase the goodwill. The line now took a circuitous route across roofs, under eaves, around gables and dormer windows, and generally progressed in a most unorthodox manner until it ran free of the town and came to the western slopes of Firsthill. From there it ran across the country on company-owned poles parallel to the Provincial Route that skirted the spaceport. Despite the apparent opportunity for interference with the line in the town itself it was, curiously enough, on one of the poles on the open stretch of road that the tap was eventually found. The line had been split and both ends coupled into a neat black cable that ran unobtrusively down the pole and disappeared deep into the sandy soil of the provincial plain. Attempts to trace the path of the unauthorized cable proved tiresome and expensive and they were finally abandoned. Its general direction IF was, as Ren had known it would be, toward Magda. The depth and security of its lodgment showed it to have been buried at about the same time as Ren's own cable had been installed. This latter fact alone made the agent squirm. A great volume of confidential company business had been fed into the line over the past few years. Had the Imaiz been operating for a trade competitor the company could have suffered extreme Ipsses as the result of this unanticipated leakage of information. There was no evidence that the knowledge the Imaiz must have gained had been used to the company's disadvantage -- but it was a late time to realize that one's commercial future lay in the hands of a sworn enemy. Nor was Ren's temper improved by a further consideration. From his terminal, by means of signature codes, he had access not only to company computer data banks at the spaceport, but also to the spaceport's common computer banks. With the right sort of intercept equipment the Imaiz, too, would have had similar access to the same data banks and, by extrapolation there would scarcely seem to have been a commercial transaction on Roget of which the master of Magda need have remain unaware. As a commercial blunder the situation was without parallel. The only mitigating factor for those involved was that no one could reasonably have suspected that on a relatively undeveloped planet like Roget there existed either the equipment or the technology to make this sophisticated form of espionage a fact. The strength of Dion-daizan lay as much in what he concealed as in what he revealed. Wryly Ren wondered how many other surprises the Imaiz still had up his sleeve. D espite his growing antipathy for Alek Hardun, Ren was now forced to visit the spaceport in order to continue the company's business transactions. This was because he suspected he could trust the security of neither the wire circuit nor the microwave link. Although he tried to stay out of Hardun's way, it was inevitable that the latter would learn of his coming and seek him out. "You wouldn't be trying to avoid me, would you, Tito?" "Why should I?" Ren's answer was couched in a frame of aggrieved innocence. "I've been very busy, that's all." "I just wondered." Hardun was probing. "I mean, we've not yet completed our little chat on ways of removing the Imaiz. And they tell me Director Vestevaal has made a hurried trip back to Freetrade Central. I naturally wondered what was brewing." "I wouldn't know. The director mentioned something to me about visiting Terra, but I'm not exactly in his confidence." This was so patent a lie that Hardun did not even pretend to believe it. "Very well, Tito! If you want to play it close to the chest that's your affair. Ranee Intelligence will give me all the answers I need, so don't let the director think he's acting too cleverly." "I don't see how you'd know," Ren said critically. "You're scarcely in his class." For a moment a spear of anger burned in Hardun's eyes. Then, with amazing composure, he turned the expression of malice aside and overlaid it with a veneer of genial charm. "Look, Tito -- I know we have our differences on the way the job's to be done, but we're still here for a common purpose. We mustn't forget the Imaiz is a very clever enemy. Nothing could suit him better than to have us divided. Let's not play into his hands. How's your campaign going?" "Slowly, but I think we've got it made. The Pointed Tails have produced a scheme for disrupting Dion's holdings right through Magda Province. I've been into it in detail and I don't see how they can fail. Given nine months we'll have the Imaiz begging for alms in the streets." "Nine months!" The veneer of geniality was stretched taut. "And Vestevaal settled for that? It shouldn't take nine days to settle a little issue like this. Somebody's going soft," "That's your view, Alek. But you haven't studied the local conditions as I have. Believe me, we have to play this one very softly." "I accept that it's your fight, Tito, but I'd like to make one strike just to prove to you that I can do as I say." "Then make it, Alek. I don't seem to be able to stop you," said Ren unexpectedly. "But I'm not supporting you and I don't wish to be implicated in any way. Furthermore, if you make a hash of it and the whole thing blows up into an interplanetary row I'll set up such a howl for your skin that even Ranee'll have to throw you to the wolves. As far as I'm concerned you're a Ranee combat unit and nothing to do with legitimate Freetrade at all." "I can see you've been doing your homework." Hardun's acIF knowledgment was a grudging acceptance of the terms. "I'll make the strike tonight and guarantee you undisputed access to Castle Magda in the morning. I'll even have a squad of Ranee commandos standing by to do any mopping up that may be required. It's about time you tradesmen learned that jobs like this were better left to professionals." darkness Hardun moved his murder contingent out to the plain. Because the whole episode was highly illegal in terms of Roget law, absolute secrecy was essential. For this reason the most opportune site, that between the Via Arens and the Space Canal, could not be used, for fear of chance observation. The alternative site was situated on the rising banks of the wilder country almost centrally between the Provincial Route and the Old Coast Road. Here there was almost no chance of observation during the hours of darkness, though by day it would have lain under the scrutiny of the watchtowers and the great keep of Castle Di Guaard. The rocket's trajectory thus lay slightljr over the northwest corner of Firsthill, but such was the precision of the apparatus that the chance of a premature fallout on the town was negligible. All day had been spent by Hardun's technicians in calculating the course coordinates and carefully calibrating the equipment to guarantee the pinpoint accuracy necessary to ensure that the deadly black canister was delivered precisely inside the confines of the castle and not dispersed across Thirdhill and its township. The position of the central point of the castle had been determined with micrometers by laser triangulation. A radar lock from the battle cruiser and a second one from a manpack station on the northern slopes of Secondhill gave the necessary references for faultless radio guidance of the missile from its mobile launcher to the castle. All this preparation had been leisurely and time-consuming. Speed was not important, but it was absolutely vital that the payload of sinister cargo fell cleanly inside the castle walls. The toxin had come from, a stockpile of horrifying weapons on Ranee. Its rate of diffusion under all conditions of still and moving air were known with great precision. The metering and dispersion could be controlled to a nicety to permit an almost exact spread of effect before destructive . oxidation by the atmosphere rendered it not only harmless but virtually undetectable. In a situation such as its release inside an isolated citadel like Magda the great walls themselves would serve somewhat to contain the dispersion, so that little, if any, chance existed of its affecting anyone outside the castle walls. Inside the walls its potential was conservatively estimated at seven thousand per cent overkill. By morning the best bacteriologists in the universe, while they might have their suspicions, would find it impossible to produce proof of the deliberate nature of the hitand-run plague whose one and only symptom was immediate death. The dispersion warhead was selfdestroying and would leave no incriminating remains. R en himself had no stomach at N. all for the project. Fortunately he had retained his resolve and refused to take any part in the venture. To protect the company's name -- in the event of any future investigation of the pending atrocity -- he had felt it necessary that he should establish an indestructible alibi by being seen in Anharitte at the time the act was committed. He therefore left the spaceport in advance of the murder party and traveled the Via Arena to pick up a crew of stave-bearers for his cushion-craft slightly before dusk. The garish ligroin flares of the trading stalls around the arena were well in evidence as he passed. Ren stopped and made a few purchases in order to establish his location at that time. The streets, as usual at that hour, were crowded with an aimless, nonchalant throng, none of whom seemed to appreciate any need for a clear and unobstructed highway. Mule carts, loaded to ridiculous heights with straw baskets, seemed eternally to be in his way and it took Ren nearly an hour to negotiate the cushion-craft the two kilometers from the Black Rock to the foot of the Trade Road. Ren bore this ordeal with fortitude, not daring to express his anxiety or his crying need to be in a location where more people would recognize him and be able to vouch for his presence on that particular evening. Fortunately the Trade Road was clearer and the craft was poled easily up the slopes and out to the broad brow of Firsthill. It was here that he first heard the explosions. In reactive shock he at first thought that the rocket must have misfired on its launcher. A second burst of noise, however, caused him to notice that the origin of the sounds was too far to the left to be coming from the provincial plains and was more probably coming from the guns of Di Guaard. Remembering the formidable chain-throwing cannon that Di Guaard maintained to cover IF the Aprillo Delta against the niythical Tyrene, Ren was able to make a guess that Hardun was in trouble. The vicious cannon atop the castle keep were being rapidly deployed against something to the west -- a fact he was able to confirm when his position enabled him to see the flashes of the guns themselves. It did not take much further conjecture to appreciate that the only target to be found on the plains at this hour was Hardun and his rocket projector and the deadly rocket with which he intended to wipe out the human -- not to mention humane -- population of Castle Magda. Ren reached his office chambers in a state of agonized indecision and suffering from an embarrassing lack of information. He was tempted to try to contact Alek Hardun via the microwave link, but there were dangers that some record of the conversation could implicate both himself and the company. On the face of it, the chances of the mad Delph Di Guaard's guns being able to seek out a target on the dark plain appeared negligible. However, the hand of the Imaiz in Castle Di Guaard -- and the awful coincidence of the rocket launcher on the plains under the speaking guns -- threw up possibilities too haunting to be ignored. H aving parked the cushioncraft, Ren made his way to the Lodge of the Pointed Tails, where discreet information was usually available. The lodge was deserted save for a solitary guardian, who appeared to think the clan was already out on Ren's own business and was surprised that the agent had no knowledge of the fact. He, too, had no certain idea of why Di Guaard's guns were firing, but promised to send a runner to contact the clan and to carry news back to Ren as fast as possible. Ren returned to his office and sat waiting for the information. It was fully an hour before Catuul Gras came to the door. "We were looking for you earlier, Tito. Sonel Taw sent a messenger for you. When he couldn't find you he had sense enough to come looking for me." "I was delayed at the spaceport," said Ren. "What was the message?" "That the Imaiz was expected in Castle Di Guaard tonight." "He is?" This put a new aspect on Hardun's venture with the rocket and Ren could not conceal his surprise. This was one point on which even Alek Hardun had miscalculated. "I laid plans for an immediate ambush," said Catuul Gras, "but the Imaiz slipped through." "Dion's alreidy there, then?" "Yes. He must have come around by the Provincial Route or the Old Coast Road. He came up Sidepath and was already in Castle Di Guaard before we got the news." "Was anyone with him?" "Only Zinder and Barii, I think." "Have you any idea what Di Guaard's firing at?" Catuul smiled. "I suspect the Imaiz put him up to it. It's said Dion carries strange tales about the Tyrene to Di Guaard. I'd wager the mad Delph is on top of his tower right now, firing at imaginary pirates and believing himself to be the saviour of Anharitte. Still, it's better that he fires across the plains. There's no one out there to hurt. Safer than firing at the shipping on the river." Ren felt cold and rather sick. Because of the atrocious nature of the weapon Hardun had taken out into the plain not even the Pointed Tails had been made party to the secret. The presence on Roget of such a potent outworld mass-murder instrument was not something that Ren cared to advertise -- nor would the knowledge have helped his liaison with the loyal but native clan whose services he so frequently employed. His one consolation was that without radar and ranging instruments, the mad Di Guaard was unlikely actually to hit the rocket launcher. More probably,? Hardun would abandon the venturcj and retire to the security of theI spaceport. However, if Hardun continued his plan and launched the bio-missile into Magda, then he would certainly fail to kill the one man on Roget who could unearth the truth behind the death of the garrison at Magda. The damage the Imaiz could do with that truth both on Roget and with the Galactic Federal Council could not only see an end to the freeport but could work against Freetrade right across the galaxy. The agent became aware that the scribe was watching him curiously. "What's on your mind, Tito?" "Nothing," Ren lied. "But so far our feud against the Imaiz has been a continuing series of failures. I can't afford more. We know the Imaiz is in Castle Di Guaard and that some time he's going to have to come out. I don't care what it costs, Catuul, or how many other societies you need to reinforce your own men, but I want the Imaiz ambushed -- and I want him killed. I want you to make it a point of honor that he never returns to Magda." Catuufs intelligent eyes were probing gently, but he made no comment on his conclusions. "As you wish, Tito. I'll make all the necessary arrangements. We'll IF seal Castle Di Guaard like a trap. No matter when Dion-daizan emerges there'll be good shafts and good steel waiting for him. If he ever sees Magda again it'h be solely due to his wizardry." Because there was nothing else he could usefully do Ren went to bed and tried to sleep. In this he was for many hours unsuccessful because he had no idea at all what pattern of news would greet him the next day. The possibilities ranged from with a range of complex permutations in between, many of which could involve him in being asked some acutely embarrassing questions. Even the certainty of failure would have allowed him to rest more easily, but he was currently immersed in a vacuum containing no answers, from which he dared not emerge to ask questions lest he betray his own foreknowledge. His surest method of defense was to profess complete ignorance of the events that took place that night, F inally, however, he must have slept for a while. He woke again to the first gray of dawn, feeling wretched and compelled by curiosity to cohtact the spaceport by the microwave radio link. As he dressed and dragged himself downstairs the call alarm of his transreceiver gave a clatter that made him stop in startled shock. It was many seconds before he could bring himself to lift the handset. "Tito?" "Alek -- what happened?" "Happened?" Hardun's tone alone foreshadowed the tale of disaster. "Di Guaard's cannon hit the launcher. The toxin dispersion canister went off prematurely and all six of the crew were dead of the plague inside five minutes. There was nothing I could do to help them." "What about yourself?" "I was lucky. I was following up in the radio unit truck. Di Guaard wrapped one of his chain-shots around the turret and I stopped to estimate the damage. By the time I got going again the launcher was on its side and the crew was trying to run. I reversed out fast and called out the medical team from the spaceport. They got there in twenty minutes, but when they knew what toxin we had in the canister they refused to go in. It wouldn't have been much use anyway. Once that toxin's out there's no protection against it and only time and exposure can counter it." "So we've a broken rocket launcher and six bodies out on the plain in full view of Di Guaard's watchtowers when the light gets better. Damn! Di Irons will flay us for this." "It's still pretty misty out here. I think we're covered until the sun comes over the hill. That gives us an hour yet to remove the mess. I've emergency tenders standing by, but we're trying to delay for as long as possible so that the toxin is fully broken down. We daren't risk losing any more men. What in the name of Jupiter possessed Di Guard to open fire like that?" "You don't know the hell of it," said Ren. "Even if you'd succeeded you'd still have been in trouble. The Imaiz wasn't at Magda. He was with Di Guaard. I suspect he was directing operations, having first explored the situation for himself. At a guess, he had all your preparations under observation -- and you drove straight into a trap." "That would figure," said Hardun sourly. "We were the victims of good espionage, perfect tingling and diabolical ranging accuracy I had the feeling that if the chain shots hadn't stopped us they would have been followed up by high explosives. As it was, the bombardment stopped shortly after the launcher got into trouble, as though they knew they had hit something vital. What are the chances of their having an infrared ranging camera at Castle Di Guaard?" "Every chance -- with the Imaiz behind them." "Tito, we've got to destroy this man -- and fast -- or we haven't a hope of retaining Anharitte as a freeport." "I've got him bottled inside Castle Di Guaard," said Ren. "Catuul's mustering a whole army and we'll keep them in position for as long as may be required. I don't myself think Dion will attempt to come out. I think he'll sit there and wait for us to go away." "Then this strikes me as an opportune time to try a reconnaissance raid on Magda. I have the commandos assembled, but I'll be too busy on the plain to take the lead. Could you handle it for me, Tito?" "I've no great objection to a reconnaissance. And it might produce some useful information." "Good. I'll have the men meet you at Magda Crossing in an hour's time." "I'll be there," said Ren and went thoughtfully in search of breakfast. close quarters that Castle Magda was the most formidable of all the fortresses on the three hills. It was larger than the installation of Di Guaard, yet planned with the same paranoiac approach -- the supposition that all men's hands were against it. The outer walls of IF massive granite blocks were probably solid for twenty meters at the base and rose sheer out of the waters of an unwelcoming moat. Even the dark streaks in the granite conspired to give the place an air of unassailable endurance. Whoever had planned and built Magda had been a genius in his own right. There was not an inch of the wall that was not overlooked by some flanking tower, and all possible angles of approach lay under a dozen points from which a hidden defender might safely fire. It was not even possible to tell if one were being observed, so dark and numerous were the potential defense positions. Although they were armed, the group of thirty-five Ranee commandos with Ren had strict instructions to do no more than test the defenses. They could indulge in a little provocation in order to test the viability of any attack hypothesis, but were to take no main offensive action unless instructed to do so by Ren. The agent had a secondary purpose in leading an open move against Magda -- he hoped that news of it would tempt the Imaiz to try and break out of Castle Di Guaard. He had sufficient faith in the Pointed Tails to think that Dion-daizan was unlikely to make his homeward journey alive. Castle Magda was situated on the highest point of Thirdhill, in a situation remote from the attendant township. It stood on a rocky plateau, three parts of the extremities of which gave way to nothing but the slopes of a broken and inhospitable hill. Working beneath the cover of the slopes, the small and wiry commandos were split into three groups, each with a local officer. Ren alone, a known figure in the territory, felt free to show himself openly. His presence on Thirdhill could not be concealed during daylight and he took advantage of this fact to make the survey he needed to complete the assessments of the high-level photographic data on Magda. The intention had been that, having completed his open evaluation of Magda's defense potential, he would rejoin the commandos for a mock attack to see what sort of response would be forthcoming from the garrison in the absence of the tmaiz. However, as h approached the main gatehouse he was more than a little disturbed to find the drawbridge down and the great gates open and apparently unguarded. Intrigued by this phenomenon, he ventured closer, the thought crossing his mind that in the absence of the master the attitude of the remaining garrison  seemed to be remarkably naive. Or was it? If the Imaiz had left Magda, knowing even a little of the threat on the plains, he might have evacuated his whole garrison to safety. In which case Hardun's murder weapon would have been completely without success even if it had been fired. The idea seemed credible. If the Imaiz s strength resided mainly in the super-training of his bondforce it would have been an unthinkable risk for him to have left them in the castle. The chances were that the garrison was now dispersed around the township of Magda, waiting for the master to come and assure them it was safe to return. Wary of a trap, Ren returned to the commandos behind the ridge and used their radio to contact his own office. His servant took the call and dispatched a runner to contact Catuul Gras. Instead of sending a message, Catuul himself came to answer. "Did you find anything, Tito?" "Yes. As near as I can tell, Magda's been evacuated. Not even a token guard is posted. Are you perfectly sure the Imaiz is still bottled up in Castle Di Guaard?" "Quite sure. Not even a rat could have got out of there unnoticed. We've had every inch of the walls under observation since the Imaiz went in. What had you in mind?" "The occupation of Magda. I've some of Hardun's men with me. It would be quite a joke if, tired of waiting for the Imaiz to return, the garrison came back to find me in residence." "Too risky," said Catuul gravely. "It's not like the Imaiz to leave the slightest thing to chance." "He would scarcely have had time to make preparations once he realized what was going on." "And what was going on?" Ren realized that he had said too much. The Pointed Tails had not been given the probable reason why the Imaiz had found it so necessary to visit Di Guaard. "We tricked him," said Ren obscurely. "That was why he left Magda. Risk it may be, but I'm going to try to get in there. I need to know what sort of facilities he has in Magda -- and if we can manage to hold it I think our battle's over. A lord dispossessed of his own castle won't find much following in Anharitte." "Let me withdraw some Pointed Tails and try to locate the whereabouts of the garrison first." "No. We don't have the time. And we daren't give the Imaiz the opportunity to escape from Di Guaard. You deal with the Imaiz and I'll try my luck with Magda. That way either or both of us has the chance to finish the fight for good." IF R en explained his proposition to h. the senior Ranee commando. He too had independently formed the opinion that Magda was unoccupied and nodded a ready acceptance of Ren's idea. The nien under him were battle-trained professionals, unused to sitting aside while a group of merchants and native warriors did the fighting for them. Whether or not Magda was defended, this was their chance to demonstrate what could uniquely be done by perfectly trained and equipped soldiery. Ren was warned to take no part in the initial excursion. He saw the wisdom of this as the small, wiry commandos went expertly into action, almost melting into the background as they moved up toward the sinister towers of the castle. Every move they made was one of marvelous precision, each man knowing what area he had to cover with his firepower and what need not concern him until death took his neighbor. With the swift and deceptive mobility of lizards they moved up the main approaches. Some ventured onto the drawbridge, some crossed it, others held careful reserve in the deadland beneath it. Each time they advanced they left nothing to chance. Had any resistance been offered it would at any time have found only a minimum of targets exposed. Finally the whole force entered the gateway, having assured itself that the entry tunnel was safe. The last one to enter was the senior commando, who signaled to Ren that it was safe for him to follow. Ren moved up quickly, feeling a sudden loneliness and isolation now that the others were no longer visible. The whole affair had this far been conducted in silence, but now he became extraordinarily aware of just how absolute that silence was. He quickened his pace and had entered the long, dark tunnel of the entrance, expecting to find some of the commandos waiting for him and slightly perturbed to find that they were not. A nagging suspicion warned him that it had all been far too easy. He was still telling himself this when the great portcullis gates fell at the ends of the tunnel, trapping him like a wild beast in a cage. For his commando companions who had passed on into the inner ward the end was swift. A high-level stun bomb burst above their heads. Blastwise its effect was negligible, but its biological shock effect, caught and concentrated between the great walls of stone, was a disaster. All thirty-five Ranch commandoes stiffened like posts and then crumpled to the ground. Those who had not been killed were severely concussed. Some of those who lived would be deaf for life. Others would have more or less permanent damage to the brain and other organs as a result of the shattering pressure and rarefaction of the stun bomb shockwave. Caught in his cage, Ren was dealt agony. He held his hands over his screaming ears, thought the blow at the pit of his stomach had been equally severe. Fortunately the narrow entrance to the tunnel and probably the gates themselves had protected him from all but a minor part of the shock. He rolled up and writhed on the dusty floor, oblivious to anything outside himself until some of the pain subsided. Then he climbed to his feet again, shaking his head to try and still the ringing in his ears and dimly thinking of escape. A brief examination of the portcullis, however, told him that his freedom, if gained, was going to have to be given by his captors. He could not arrange it for himself. T hrough the heavy fret of the inner portcullis he could see the occupants of Magda beginning to emerge. Some began the task of sorting the dead commandos from the living. Others examined the fabric of the building's walls for any damage that might have resulted from the blast. Ren looked miserably out upon the scene and wondered when and what sort of attention would be paid to himself. He had his blaster under his tunic but he was aware that to use it now could result only in his being destroyed like an unwanted dog. He might be able to make better use of its bargaining power in response to a more personal approach by his captors, but at this moment its function could be only a catalyst in an untidy and ignoble form of suicide. Finally what looked like a medical team began directing the careful removal of those who might possibly be saved. No one still paid any attention to Ren and, wondering if they even knew of his existence, he finally shouted to attract attention. Several of the slaves looked up and grinned in his direction. From this he deduced that his situation was known and that his incarceration was deliberate. It was many hours later that the inner portcullis was raised, and he emerged from the dark recess of the tunnel to come blinking into the rays of the late-afternoon sun. Neither a vicious guard nor a firing squad awaited him. Instead a figure, peacock proud in a wealth of glorious fabrics, held out her hand in a reserved mode of welcome. And this he found equally daunting. "Welcome to Magda, Agent Ren." IF "Zinder -- I -- " "You thought I was with Dion in Castle Di Guaard. Isn't that what you were going to say? To tell you the truth, we came back late last night." "We? Dion-daizan too?" Ren felt impelled to ask the question, though he did not know why he expected an answer. He found her openness very disconcerting. "And Barii." She was teasing him quietly. "There was quite a party on at Di Guaard last night. But we found it far too noisy. We left early." "Damn!" Ren looked ruefully at the dust on his shoes. "I must have at least three hundred men posted to stop you from leaving Firsthill. You people win every damn trick in the book. Did you know that was a crack Ranee commando team you. just destroyed? Competence is a tolerable sin, but omnipotence is a little out of fashion." Zinder turned her head to survey the scene of the recent carnage in the courtyard. "Not omnipotence. Agent Ren. Careful planning, good organization, fast communications, a sense of purpose and a modicum of luck. The usual ingredients needed to make a success of any major undertaking. We offer injury to those who try to injure us and ridicule for those who try to make us look ridiculous. We take an eye for a tooth and a life for an eye -- and if that seems immoral, remember that the quarrel is not of our choosing." Ren shrugged. "Then what do you intend to do with me?" She was slightly amused. "I think we'll give you some supper and set you free again." "I can't object to the arrangement, but the logic of it escapes me." "Does it? If you were we, whom would you rather have as an enemy -- yourself or the Butcher of Turais?" "Butcher of Turais?" "So they didn't tell even you! I'm not surprised. Alias Alek Hardun. He's a specialist in depopulating awkward places. The pogrom of Turais was only one of his accomplishments. It was no accident that he happened to have access to Ranee toxin. And that's not a hundredth part of the mass-murder equipment he carries on that bloodwagon of his. Frankly we think that you and Director Vestevaal have been deceived into accepting him so easily. And either you stop him or we'll be forced to stop him ourselves. If Hardun comes out on top even Roget could become another sparsely populated world." "I can't accept that statement at its face value," said Ren. "But I know the director's worried about him and is trying to take some action." "Trying's not enough. We were only able to stop Hardun below Di Guaard last night because we knew who he was and what he was capable of. But if he'd successfully destroyed Magda -- who could have stopped him then? Can't you imagine the pattern? Here a lord goes crazy, and there another forgets to wake from his sleep. Mutant rust decimates the harvest and the seat of central government is stricken by history's worst ever plague. Ranee drafts in a thousand 'disaster relief experts' and, to shore a crumbling economy, appoints a puppet government. Then it's all over save the persecution and the exploitation." "How much of this have you told Vestevaal?" "All of it and more. I think he was convinced. But he has his own job to do also -- and this we understand. He's a big man, your director -- but I wonder if he's big enough to fight the combined weight of the merchant worlds. Only the Freetraders can contain them, but they're divided and doubtful and prone to manipulation themselves. But come! Dion will explain this far better than I. Though I think you'd better let me have your sword and your blaster before you meet him." uncertainly back down the twisted Roads of Thirdhill. Zinder had taken his blaster, but had returned his sword at the gate, so that he had no fears for bis own protection. His uncertainty arose from the wealth of damaging information Dion-daizan had given him concerning Alek Hardun, the Butcher of Turais. Ren had come to Magda full of the certainty that he was indeed performing a necessary job. He now felt himself reduced to the status of a dupe and an unwitting accomplice of a trade-world cartel whose methods were becoming infamous throughout the universe. It made him wince to remember the number of times he had mentally applauded the news screen's announcements: Disaster teams from Combien and Ranee have been sent to the planet to offer immediate assistance... Once those teams arrived, he knew now, the disasters multiplied and the need for assistance changed to one of enforced dependence. On the other side of the coin, however, Hardun had warned Ren that the Imaiz would seek to divide his opposition and thereby ensure a continuance of his own schemes. This possible aspect of Dion's IF expert lecture had not been lost on Ren, though the documented evidence with which he had been presented was overwhelmingly in favor of the removal of Alek Hardun from the scene. Ren sensed that the Imaiz alone stood between Roget and the diabolical hands of Ranee and her agents. With this in mind, he was not at all sure that his own plans to damage the Imaiz were still justified. He reflected that Vestevaal, having become convinced of the truth of the situation, had travelled immediately offworld to carry the battle directly to the powerful Freetrade Council. Of one thing Ren became certain -- if he were again to have the strength of his own convictions Alek Hardun and his murder ship must go. Ahead of him, among the noises of the night, Ren heard a sound he knew. To the uninitiated it was the call of a nightbird. Ren knew it for the signal of the Pointed Tails. He answered it inexpertly and in a few moments Gras was at his side. "What happened, Tito?" the scribe asked anxiously. "We had word that things went wrong at Magda and that you were captive." "I was captive. But Dion-daizan decided to let me go again -- I think because he likes the sporting nature of our opposition." Ren's sentence ended in heavy irony. Catuul Gras looked at him as though transfixed by a blade. "Dion-daizan in Magda? But he can't be -- " "He's there all right. So are Zinder and Barii. I've just taken supper with the three of them." A sudden anger overtook him. "Are they smaller than mice that they passed your watch at Di Guaard and were waiting to trap me when I arrived?" In the dim light the scribe's expression was one of puzzlement followed by a sudden relaxation. "Then you'll admit now that Dion's a wizard. It's not possible for anything to have escaped from Di Guaard without our knowing. Not only did we have the castle and the exits under surveillance, but we also had men on the routes and river crossings. If Dion reached Magda he must have fiown like a bird." The instant absurdity of the suggestion was soon overthrown by a new line of speculation in Ren's mind. "I wonder if you're right, Catuul. He couldn'Lhave flown like a bird, but he could have flown nonetheless. In which direction was the wind last night?' "There was not much wind, but the breeze persists from the southwest from now until the heavy weather breaks. Does that give you an idea?" "I have a suspicion. Dion couldn't have used a conventional aircraft because you'd have heard the noise of engines. But if he'd had some sort of balloon available he could have used it in relative safety after nightfall. The natural winddrift would have carried them toward Thirdhill or at least into Magda province. And the river lights would have given them an indication of when it was safe to land." "What's a balloon?" asked Catuul. "A device that figures almost uniquely in ancient Terran history. It's a bag of gas or hot air -- which is lighter than the air in which it floats. A big balloon can carry jsl basket containing several people. It could have lifted the three of them out of Castle Di Guaard and if you weren't looking for it you'd never have seen it go. That way the Imaiz could have escaped all your traps without resorting to wizardry. It only needs the application of a few physical principles and a bit of technical know-how." "Wizardry or technical knowhow, it's all the same to me," said Catuul. "What you call wizardry are the things that are done which are beyond the limits of what your education insists is possible. But the same applies to me. So the difference between our points of view is one of degree, not kind." "Point taken, Catuul. But so far the Imaiz has done nothing beyond the comprehension of the averagely educated outworlder. This makes it reasonably certain that he's not a native of Roget, and various historical associations about his schemes strengthen my belief that he's a Terran." T 'HE scribe was searching the darkness behind them, looking for something. Occasionally he would answer the low-pitched trade-calls that floated through the darkness. Finally he turned back to Ren and spoke. "Hardun's men who were with you -- weren't they released too?" "No. All thirty-five were either killed or injured." "I warned you it was dangerous." The scribe's face was grim. "The Imaiz never takes chances. And this fetches a point which we must settle between us, friend Tito. There was nothing in our contract about your carrying the fight using outworld soldiery. Nor about the use of longrange outworld weapons. If we were to place this fact before the Elders of the clans they would relieve the Pointed Tails of any further obligations to you -- nor would you obtain clan service elsewhere. The Elders would never consent to a clan's being party to IF any out world scheme of aggression. I'm disappointed in you, Tito. I'd thought you understood us better." Ren stopped walking and turned to face the scribe squarely. "I do understand you and I admit I'm in error. But circumstances overtook me. Initially I was mislead as to the reasons Alek Hardun came to Roget. He came under the guise of an advisor, but now appears to have independent operating status. By the time I was aware of this I found I had no power to stop him. The director has gone to the council to have the matter set to rights." "Yet it was you who took the soldiers to Magda," objected Catuul. "True. They were available and the exercise was intended purely as a reconnaissance. But when I believed Magda to be abandoned I thought that by one decisive move I might shorten the whole battle. That was a classic blunder that cost Doctor Hardun thirty-five men." "I'd not have expected the price to be less." The scribe was critical. "Had the Imaiz not dealt with them -- there are two hundred clansmen from all over the provinces around us now who would have made sure the Ranee men never left Thirdhill." "What?" Ren was aghast. "Do you really feel so strongly about them?" "We may have our internal disputes in Anharitte, but armed outworld interference transcends any normal act of feud. Were it not so, even Roget could fall under some outworld yoke. Think about it, Tito. You'll see why it has to be so. And your part in this has been a cardinal transgression." "I can't deny it. It's been a sad error both in judgment and in policy. Hardun's equipment and his tactics have become an embarrassment and were no part of my original intention. And I'm even more unhappy to have broken faith with your society." "But in the light of today's expedition, how much reliance can we place on your word. Think carefully before you answer -- I may yet have to speak for you to the Elders of the clans." "The Elders must decide as they will. And you, too, Catuul. You know me better than most and must decide for yourself. My rejection of Alek Hardun is a personal inability to support his views on the cheapness of human life. I can't say otherwise even to save the spaceport or my job, which depends on it." "That's precisely what I wanted to hear," said the scribe. "But I've been less than frank with you. The Elders have already discussed the matter in council. They gave two decisions. The first is that all society services will be withdrawn from outworlders until Hardun and his ship have been removed -- " "And the second?" "That you were to be killed unless I personally was satisfied with your intention and your integrity." "And have you come to that decision?" Ren felt his sword hang heavy at his side. "Of course." Catuul's smile broadened in the dim light from the night sky. "Or you would have been dead within minutes of leaving Castle Magda. Come, friend Tito, we have your cushion-craft waiting on the far side of the crossing." x. Hardun's voice reached the peak of incredulity. "It wouldn't have mattered if they had been a hundred," said Ren. "The Imaiz is more than a match for anything you can put up. Frankly, your tactics have become a liability. I've sent a spacegram to the Freetrade Council expressing the opinion that if you're allowed to remain on Roget the spaceport facility will certainly be lost." "You did what?" Hardun's new peak of disbelief was suddenly tempered by relief. "Now I know you're joking, Tito. I see copies of every spacegram transmitted from here. I know damn well you've sent no such thing." "You used to see copies," corrected Ren. "The Freetrade Council has already instructed the spaceport staff not to cooperate with you and they're leaning heavily on Ranee to have you pulled out. I know of this because I held a personal conversation with the director at Freetrade Central. And you won't receive a recording of that either. He confirmed everything I'd learned about the Butcher of Turais." "Turais? That old propaganda line -- " Hardun was vehement. "If you'd believe that you'd believe anything." "I would believe anything about you, Alek. That's why I complained to the council. The urgency of your removal can't be overstressed. They're to hold a debate on it. I imagine the result will be to apply some tough sanctions against Ranee until they're forced to order you out. I don't imagine that'll make you very popular with your masters, either. So I'm advising you now to get offworld before the storm really breaks." "I'll see you in hell first, Tito. I wouldn't dream of moving a centimeter unless I get specific instructions from Ranee Politico." "Very conformative. But I wasn't asking you to go -- I was warning IF you not to stay. Your departure is imminent. Either you decamp of your own volition or rjin the very probable risk of being removed, perhaps violently, by someone like the Imaiz, And if that happens Ranee will be spared much loss of face -- so I don't imagine they'll grieve unduely." "The risk is negligible. It's a complete certainty there's nothing on Roget that can harm an armed battle cruiser at dock." "I don't share your certainty. The societies have withdrawn all services until your ship has been removed. The Imaiz not only has no opposition, but can probably acquire substantial assistance if he requires it. And I don't think Di Irons is going to miss the point for very long -- in which case the planetary government will also be involved. So the opposition ranged against you runs from Dion-daizan through the Freetrade Council up to possible intervention by the Galactic Federation. If you get offworld now you might just about save your own skin." "You're either a brave man or a complete fool," said Hardun savagely. "I've killed men before for offering a whole lot less provocation. Your outlook's so far adrift from the realities of galactic life that you're really too pathetic to be true." "I've been around, Alek. And wherever I've been I've looked in depth as well as at the surface. It's not a perspective you'd understand, but it means I can back my judgment against yours with a reasonable chance of being right." Ren turned on his heel and stalked out of the room. It was obvious that his attempt to persuade Hardun to go voluntarily had met with no sort of success. Ren's knowledge of spaceport security measures -- and of the detection and defense capabilities of a docked battle cruiser -- did not incline him to place much faith in the idea that the Imaiz would have a greater success by his own methods. They would probably have to wait until the pressure on Ranee brought about an official recall. Ren shuddered. In the meantime Hardun could act without restriction -- and if he accepted that his period of opportunity was limited, the next twenty-four hours could be a very crucial time in Anharitte's history. imagination affecting his interpretation of the scene or it might have been some social reflection of the societies' decision, but Ren had the distinct impression of unease in the city as he returned. Theinarkets were quiet, almost deserted. The streets were far less crowded than usual and his own office was deserted and dead. His bondservants had been withdrawn by the Pointed Tails -- whose legal property they were -- and the normally busy household was at a standstill. Ren was even forced into the extreme of doing his own shopping when he wished to eat -- and the preparation of his solitary meal was a process which caused him to think seriously about his next move. He could not back down on his stand against Hardun, nor could he reasonably do more than he had done to secure the latter's departure. There appeared to be no basis for any sort of pact with the Imaiz that would not be compromising later -- and in any case, Ren felt that he had nothing of interest to offer. The best mode of release from the impasse would undoubtedly be the swift intervention by the Freetrade Council acting on Ranee. Ren could only hope that the council would successfully act before Di Irons began to examine too closely the reasons behind the Pointed Tails' decision to withdraw their services. If the prefect were to learn the truth about the rocket launcher on the plains he would have no option but to start a chain of protests that must involve the planetary government and ultimately the Galactic Federation itself. Di Irons, then was the main problem for the moment. Idly Ren speculated on the strategy for a successful pattern of bluff if the prefect's sure nose for trouble should lead him loo close to the truth. The answers were not encouraging. He therefore decided that this would be a prudent time to visit some of the more distant of the company's trading installations. By this ruse he could probably delay a confrontation until the removal of Alek Hardun was a accomplished fact. Accordingly he packed in preparation for an early start and retired exhausted to his bed. series of explosions -- broke him savagely out of his sleep. He awoke in alarm as multiple flashes of light glared in window-patterned squares of whiteness from the walls of his room. The thunder followed swiftly. Ren leaned back, prepared to listen to the storm -- until it slowly filtered into his consciousness that there was no such thing as a storm on Roget. In an instant of panic he flung himself from his bed and put his head out of the window. The night sky was ringing as yet another great explosion from the direction of the IF Without pausing to dress Ren ran downstairs to the microwave communicator. As he turned on the stair the largest explosion yet made the building vibrate. Only the distance in the quality of the sound made him certain that the explosion was at the spaceport. The nature and effect of so violent a blast at that point of origin was something he scarcely dared to consider. Although he called both on the service and emergency frequencies, he could obtain no reply from the spaceport control. This silence was unprecedented and suggested a state of crisis so acute that even the information backup for the Disaster Center was unobtainable. This convincingly fitted the scale of the catastrophe he had deduced from the intensity of the shockwaves. It was credible that as much as a quarter of the spaceport installation had been destroyed. On an undeveloped world like Roget, where civil emergency services were virtually nonexistent, the entire work of disaster containment and rescue work would have to be handled by the spaceport's own personnel. Ren dressed hurriedly. He did not even need light in his rooms. The sky, made bright by the angry redness of a major spaceport fire, provided more than adequate illumination. Knowing that his training would enable him to do little in the way of offering practical assistance, his intention on reaching the street door had been merely to walk to the limits of Firsthill in order to gain a better view. As he descended the steps, however, two armed watchmen flung themselves hurriedly across his path. "Agent Ren, you're not permitted to leave." "What do you mean?" "Prefect Di Irons' orders. You're to be confined to your chambers until he's free to deal with you." "But why the hell? This is no doing of mine." "That you must discuss with him. But you'd better be convincing. Nights such as this were never known in Anharitte before you made trouble with the Imaiz, " Ren allowed himself to be escorted back into the chambers, where the watchmen maintained an uncommunicative guard. When the light of the morning was well advanced he heard other noises in the house and soon guessed that his bondservants had been returned and were picking up their duties as though no interruption of service had occurred. Shortly his breakfast tray was placed before him. His guards were completely ignored. By such signs he knew that Alek Hardun had been wrong in his certainty that no force on Roget was capable of dealing with an armed space cruiser at dock. It was a fair bet that about a third of the spaceport installation had gone with it. By some ingenious piece of wizardry a way had been found through all the alarms and defenses and the Imaiz had made good his promise. unusual echo of horses hoofs clattered to the door of his chambers. The sound was rare because the great horses of Roget, fully as large as the ancient Terran dray-horses, were unpopular beasts on the crowded roads of the city. They had their place at the great provincial estates, but for town work they were used mainly by the civil powers as a symbol of authority. A message from Di Irons required Ren to join the cavalcade to the spaceport. The reins of the great saddled and bridled beast were flung toward him with the instruction that he was to mount. Ren's riding experience was little and the size of his steed was daunting. He said as much, but his protests were dismissed. "Then here's your chance to learn. Agent. The prefect won't wait." Somehow he managed to mount. He sat unhappily astride the great beast whose back seemed as broad and as warm as the bed Ren had vacated during the night. Having mastered the art of staying on top of the moving animal, he next faced the problem of control. He found himself assisted by the fact that the giant horse appeared to know exactly what was required of it in terms of destination and speed. It obediently followed the messenger and two others through the streets of Firsthill, out on to the Trade Road, down the slopes and on to the Via Arena. The messenger rode hard, without pausing for further explanation. The fact that his escort rode mainly ahead of him led Ren to suspect that his presence was required for a constructive purpose, rather than a punitive one. They soon came in sight of the spaceport, from which, even in daylight, the bright flames from burning fuel tanks showed crimson under the vast columns of smoke. Ren's initial surprise at being conveyed in so unusual a manner was soon dispelled as he realized that carriage by the giant horses were certainly the fastest means of transport available. Although cushion-craft were able to produce a better turn of speed on the open stretch of the Via Arena, the slower working of the craft in the city gave ample advantage to horses. His present journey was accomplished IF in well under half an hour. Bruised and sore, Ren clung frantically to the saddle horns of the mammoth animal and only fell when he attempted to dismount. XV sterner than ever, waited for Ren to pick himself out of the dust, then strode away, indicating that the agent should follow. Ren followed painfully, wondering if his encounter with the horse had done something irrevocable to his legs. Their path took them broadly across the spaceport, most of which was obscured by wide trails of drifting smoke. The prefect stopped when finally they neared the number-five landing bowl where the Ranee battle cruiser had been. Ren caught his breath as the scale of the catastrophe became apparent. The tall ship had been totally demolished and the parts further shattered. Even the single components seemed destroyed. Only a very small part of the ship's total mass was still evident. The rest of it had presumably been vaporized or dispersed over many thousands of meters of terrain. Even the nearly indestructible wolframie of the landing bowl was heavily cratered as though from a major war. The picture was one. of violence multipled by violence. It was a job most thoroughly done. "How did it happen?" asked Ren. Di Irons put on a thunderous scowl. "Pictor Don has a theory that the ship was toppled by an s.h.e. charge placed in the vicinity of one of the ship's stabilizers. Her engines then exploded and that touched off her magazine. Unfortunately she was heavily overarmed and some of the later explosions took away a fair proportion of the spaceport buildings. I've no doubt we'll be receiving a detailed account of the damage from the spaceport Disaster Control center in due course. That's why I wanted you here. You're going to give me an independent view of how it was done, who did it -- and why it was necessary." "Me? But I know nothing about it. I was asleep at the time." "That's no excuse," said Di Irons. "I'll wager you know a great deal about it. Pretense will save you nothing. Let's be in no doubt as to where you stand. In the past twenty-five hours I've uncovered sufficient facts about you and the activities with which you've been involved to have you declared persona non grata on just about every civilized planet in the universe. Not only that, but for default of various laws on Roget under Space Conventions I could encourage our government to make claim for damages that would not only bankrupt your company but would cripple another half-dozen of their Freetrade associates. "Having warned you to follow the advice of your society on how to conduct a feud with the Imaiz, you have no conceivable defense for you actions. So do you now volunteer to answer my questions or do I have to break both you and the company?" "What exactly do you want to know?" asked Ren unhappily. "This battle cruiser -- it must have carried enough armaments to start a major war. Was it put here by the Freetrade Council?" "No. It was donated by Ranee, ostensibly as a technical backup facility. K don't think the majority of the council was aware that it was anything else." "So why did it possess a fully equipped war potential?" "It was one of Ranee's so-called 'disaster ships' -- though I've come to suspect that their function is to cause disasters not to alleviate them." "Didn't you know of this when you asked for it?" "I didn't ask for it. It just arrived. When I found out what sort of equipment it carried I complained to Director Vestevaal. He went immediately to Freetrade Central to demand its withdrawal." "Hmm!" Di Irons nodded thoughfully. "And I take it that somebody couldn't wait to see it go peacefully. Your friend the Imaiz, perhaps?" "I've no evidence," said Ren. "But he knew it for what it was and its demolition has a characteristic thoroughness." "That's agreed," said Di Irons, looking around at the widespread damage. "And in the circumstances I don't think we shall hear much from Ranee about her loss, especially if Director Vestevaal's already protesting about it at Freetrade Central. But more than the ship went here. A lot of highly valuable spaceport installation went with it. When the Galactic Spaceports commission learns of it the repercussions are going to be grave. I'm going to be under pressure to produce sopie good answers. Frankly, I don't have the expertise in outworld technology to produce those answers. But you do. And you've the additional advantage of knowing both the Imaiz and the pattern of life in Anharitte, neither of which an outworld investigator would know. Therefore I'm you." "What sort of bargain?" "We both suspect it was the Imaiz who destroyed this ship. I want to know how much evidence IF against the Imaiz could be gathered by an outworld enquiry into the disaster." "You choose your words most carefully. Prefect." "In this instance I've a good reason o do so." 'And what have I to gain froni the exercise?" "Give me some good answers, Ren, and I might forget to file any charges against yourself or the company." terms don't give me much option. But I'll need information. How cooperative can I expect to find the spaceport staff?" "They themselves are in default for permitting an armed warcraft to remain docked at their facility beyond the recognized refueling time. Therefore their careers are equally in my hands. I suspect you'll find them very cooperative indeed." emergency commander spread his hands resignedly. "I can assure you, Tito, that outside sqbotoge is quite out of the question. Nobody could have got through without detection. Because of the permanent danger to personnel around the landing bowls the whole area is monitored by radar. The radar overscan extends well beyond the spacert perimeter. The computer constantly oversees all activity in the area and throws up alarm signals for any potentially dangerous or unusual event." "What other defenses have you?" "Mainly the fences. The first and second fences form a corridor manned by a patrol with guard dogs. Then there's an electified fence inside that and the inner one's a barbed barrier. It would take a very clever person indeed to get through that lot." "We happen to suspect a very clever person. What I'm trying to establish is -- did he indeed get through or was the blast an accident? What about the gates?" "Only two -- both remotely controlled and responding only to the controllers direct orders. He has to satisfy himself by computer verification of ident cards and the vision link that the person asking for admission has the necessary authority to enter." "And did he give clearance to anyone at a time reasonably close to the blowup?" i"No.There were no admissions for at least four hours before the blowup occured." "Then it would have to be through the fence. Has the whole perimeter been checked?" "Electrical checks have been carried out. Nothing was found. Physical examination of all the wire on the perimeter will take a little time." "Then let me have the answers as soon as you can," said Ren. "If somebody penetrated that fence I want to know how. Did your radar scan tell you nothing?" "The watch computer signaled nothing unusual." "How critical is the watch computer?" "Sufficient for normal purposes." "But does it discriminate between different types of radar returns?" "Necessarily so. Frequently animals from the plains stray near to the outer fence and trigger a minor alert. Also some birds and small animals actually live out on the bowls. The computer has been programed to reject the movement of small creatures and to respond mainly to the approach of something the size of a cushion-craft or one of the tracked tenders." "Then how does it function for personnel protection on the bowls?" "It's spectrum filtered to give maximum response to metallic objects while remaining relatively insensitive to organics and nonmetals. Any crews working on the bowls will naturally be wearing thermo-reflective suits and these give a very good radar return." "So it is possible for an unsuited man to have walked across the bowls without the computer's classifying him as an object to be reported?" "It's possible, but I see the point as rather academic. Nobody could damage a battle cruiser with less than about a hundred kilos of s.h.e. explosive. I'd seriously doubt that somebody broke the fence and carried that weight across the bowls on foot. Perhaps a trained man might do it -- but I don't believe it happened. I think they'd have had to use a vehicle -- and if they'd done so the computer would have spotted it and sounded the alarm." "Nevertheless," said Ren, "I'd like to know if there was anything on the radar scan below the computer's indicating threshold. Do you tape a record?" "Of course." Pictor Don shrugged his shoulders. "I'll have a replay set up in the operations room. If you want my opinion -- it's a waste of time." "What are you looking for, Ren?" The stern and thoughtful prefect was shadowing Ren closely, listening to every syllable of his investigation. "I'd have thought Don's evidence that there was no penetration of the fence was pretty conclusive." "Not conclusive enough. If it did happen we need to know now, not have it thrown up during some outIF world inquiry. All defenders and all defense systpms have blind spots. If someone has the wit and the ability to figure just where these blind spots are they form a positive advantage to the attacker. A bit of ingenuity coupled with the right know-how should produce a method of attack the defenders won't expect because they know it to be impossible. Our prime suspect in this case is a recognized master of impossible events and is also a considerable technician. I can't see that dogs, a few wire fences and a radar scan need be any deterrent to the Imaiz "There's been some talk of rockets," said Di Irons. "Couldn't Dion have used one without having to penetrate the fence?" "He may well have the capability at Magda, but that wasn't the way it was done. A I see the evidence, the ship was toppled, as you've already said, by an s.h.e. charge placed under a stabilizer. But that couldn't in itself have initiated the entire chain of disasters that followed. Almost certainlv the ship was toppled upon a further line of explosive charges, and the direction of the ship's fall was calculated to insure that those charges would do the maximum damage. It was an exercise in fine mathematics, undertaken by someone who had a very clear idea of the working layout of such a battle cruiser." "From which you conclude?" "That the operation was carried out by a competent outworlder -- someone familiar with space constructions. And it would have taken time and careful measurement to place those charges accurately. Whoever did it must have worked on the bowl under cover of darkness and had a pretty shrewd idea that he would not be picked up by the radar monitor. That's an assembly of knowledge and skills very difficult to match. I think that Dion must be a well-trained saboteur -- in addition to his other talents." vinced. "If I understand Pictor Don correctly it would have taken at least a hundred kilos of explosive just to topple the ship. If you're now saying that further charges were laid -- they must add up to a considerable extra weight of explosive. All this had to be moved through the fence and brought across at least half a kilometer of landing bowls -- without detection." "I know very little about explosives," said Ren. "But I'd doubt that less than two hundred kilos of s.h.e. would have done the trick." "And brought in without using a vehicle? Do you suppose they used mules or magic?" The prefect was sarcastic. "I don't know how it was done, few answers on the below-threshold level of the radar records." The radar overscan, untrimmed by the computer, reflected considerable movement of wildlife outside the perimeter fence. The false alarms would have been continual had not spectrum filtering been employed. In contrast, the casual movements of spaceport personnel and vehicles were easily distinguishable by the heightened radar responses to the various metallic substances they carried. It was at about this level of discrimination that the computer operated. Pictor Don replayed the scan at its original speed for the two hours prior to the blowup. He and Ren concentrated fully on the unedited replay screen, while Di Irons fretted in the background, unable to comprehend the screen's symbolism. All of the first hour of the replay and half of the second passed without producing any information of obvious interest. Suddenly Ren gave a cry. ""Southeast corner -- behind the shadow of the freighter on pad eight -- something is moving on the bowls." There was no doubt of the fact. Emerging from the radar shadow of the freighter, already well within the wire, two images sped across the bowls toward the doomed ship. The radar responses were weak, well below the computer's preset threshold. The moving forms gave no clue as to their form or composition. Pictor Don ran marker blips across the screen to measure the velocity of the moving points. He frowned at the resulting calculation. "Slightly up on fifteen kilometers an hour," he said in puzzlement. "Men running perhaps, but certainly not men carrying two hundred kilos of deadweight." '"Perhaps horses?" asked Di Irons. Don shook his head. '"Not enough mass for horses." "Is there much metal present?" asked Ren. "Some, but its not very distinct. More like a grid than a solid. Certainly not enough mass to be a vehicle. The computer wouldn't be able to distinguish between it and the oxide glaze on the bowls themselves." "Then what the devil can have carried them across the field at a speed like that?" "Did you ever think of wizardry?" Di Irons had the faintest smile of mischief around his grizzled mouth. "I don't care for wizardry," said IF Ren. "There's a physical explanation for all this. Dion-daizan's no more of a wizard than I am." In less than three minutes the two dots had moved from the perimeter across the intervening half kilometer to the foot of the threatened Ranee ship. Their passage must have been effectively silent -- they appeared to make no effort to avoid the lock-watch who would have been aroused by the sound of an approaching vehicle. "Were they invisible also?" asked Di Irons. When the dots stopped under the radar shadow of the ship the screen picture became confused by the sheer mass against which the returns were being measured. In less than a minute, however, the dots separated themselves and streaked back toward the perimeter fence, moving even faster than before. Soon they were lost behind the shadow of the freighter on pad eight and the scene closed down to an apparent stillness as the time approached the moment of blowup. "Well, we still don't know what got in, but at least we know where." said Ren. "Let's go and take a closer look." where the bulk of the freighter on pad eight stood squarely between them and the damaged radar tower, Ren examined the wire. There was little wonder the break had not been detected before. Had he not had a suspicion of what to look for, he would not have found it for himself. The wires had been cut to a level sufficient to admit something not much larger than a man. Every single strand had subsequently been neatly buttwelded to form a virtually invisible repair. Any competent technician could have done it -- given the right equipment and the necessary time. "But we had guard-dog patrols between the outer fences," objected Pictor Don, when the fact was pointed out. "Who mans the patrols?" asked Ren. "One of the socal societies -- very reliable." "Perhaps! But for most of the night there was a withdrawal of society services from all matter affecting outworlders. In effect, there was a period when the Imaiz could move unopposed on whatever course he chose. He might even have been able to enlist society aid. I'm reasonably certain that if he chose to cut these wires last night the dogs would have been conventiently elsewhere." "But why should the Societies cooperate with him in this way." Pictor Don was perplexed. "Because," said Ren, "Dion's probably the only force standing between Roget as it is -- and eventual domination by Ranee. I know this. The societies know it and I suspect my Lord Di Irons knows it also. I may be an outworlder, but I've heard enough about Ranee's mailed fist in the universe to know that, given a free choice, I would have been out there last night holding that wire open for Dion to enter." Ren turned away from the wire and wandered into the scrub edging the surrounding plain. Shortly he came back and addressed Di Irons. "Well, Prefect, I'm ready to answer your questions." Di Irons compressed his mouth under his beard. The eyes that met Ren's were full of comprehension, edged with a slight smile. " What about that radar record?" asked the Prefect. "What radar record? It must have been destroyed in the blowup." "And the wire?" "Could never have been disturbed. Technology on Roget obviously isn't far enough advanced to permit a gas-shielded electric butt-weld to be made." "And the blowup?" "Who knows," said Ren. "Accidents can always happen on an overarmed man-of-war. I think the point should be made most strongly to the Spaceports Commission. They must be encouraged to take far greater care of ships when operating on foreign soil. Otherwise it might prove inconvenient to have a spaceport so near Anharitte." "And we can positively rule out outside intervention?" "I can think of no way in which a man or perhaps two men with neither beast nor vehicle could travel half a kilometer in three minutes with at least two hundred kilos of dead weight. Such an idea smacks of wizardry." "Which we all know doesn't exist," said Di Irons. "You know, Tito, I've a feeling I've misjudged you. You've a depth of perception I would not have associated with your mercenary profession. My report will follow the lines of your summary -- and you and Pictor Don can sign a testimony to its accuracy. You've proven to me that there could have been no outside intervention. But strictly off the record -- and since you don't admit Dion's a wizard -- how do you imagine the thing could have been done?" Ren nodded and turned out towards the brush. "Come over here. Do you see those marks in the dust? What do you suppose made those?" "That's very strange. I don't think I've seen the like of them beIF fore. Do you suppose snakes -- " "I imagine they're snake tracks," said Ren, tongue in cheek. 'But they bear a strong resemblance to the tracks of a device I once saw used on Terra." Di Irons straightened as a society runner approached. The man had come around the perimeter from the gate to hand him a message form. The fellow's exertions underscored the urgency with which he had been dispatched. The prefect scanned the paper anxiously and handed it to Pictor Don. Both men seemed tremendously upset. "Trouble?" asked Ren. The form was passed to him. With mounting disbelief he read the message. link with Freetrade Central," said Ren angrily when he had absorbed the shock. "I'll get the director to blow this scheme apart right from the top -- at Galactic Federation Headquarters if necessary." "That may not be easy," said link to anywhere is routed through the relay terminal on Ranee." "Damn!" Ren looked across the blasted spaceport where even now the smoke trails persisted over the scene of devastation. The enormity of Ranee's fabrication made his head spin, but his heart was seized with the cold clamp of fear. If Alek Hardun's murder wagon had been regarded as a good will vessel Ren hated to think what thirty openly operating disaster ships would bring. Despite his increasing respect for the resourceful Dion-daizan he knew that salvation this time depended on the rapid acquisition of an armed spacefleet. Presumably not even the wizard of Anharitte could produce that. Or could he? At the moment Ren knew only from the trackmarks in the dust that the Imaiz possessed at least two bicycles. runs into the general type of reader the first cliche put to him usually is: "Where do you get your crazy ideas?" This question seems to reflect a recognition of the importance of ideas in the field. The answer I find most satisfactory, incidentally, is that I steal them -- which is at least partially true, since we all depend oh each other to stir up our own thinking.  It's difficult to say which element has the greater importance in a story -- the idea or its execution. Neither can stand wholly by itself. Some of the early science fiction consisted of almost pure idea and featured little in the way of execution. Today many of the books I read seem high on execution and low in ideas. Certainly few demonstrate more than a variation of a common idea. But good books can be written with an unprecedentedly smooth execution of an old idea. An outstanding book must, however, provide at least a fresh treatment of a good idea and show good execution. Examples of such rare, great books are Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and Sturgeon's More Than Human, I've just had the chance to see what happens to one of my ideas when it has been executed by three other writers. The occasion is The Day The Sun Stood Still, edited by Robert Silverberg (Thomas Nelson, #; also available shortly from the Science Fiction Book Club for  I .#). Silverberg asked me to do a twopage idea around which other writers could develop long novelettes. I decided to suggest that a future religious leader might persuade most of the world to pray together for a sign. The sign was vouchsafed: for a night and day (less #x#" sidereal day) the Earth moved not around the sun, neither did it rotate -- no other changes allowed. The question then was: What kind of world might come about if faith were replaced by certain knowledge? Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson and Robert Silverberg were the writers assigned to handle the question. I was curious as to what such top authors had done with it and began reading eagerly. Strangely, it seemed to me at first they did very little with the question. They seized as their themes the Joshuan miracle itself rather than the eventual world that might have resulted from it. And nobody made any use of the plant that God (or Whoever) seemed to leave a clue of duodecimal nature. Anderson's A Chapter of Revelation deals with a scientist and an ordinary little man who becomes the leader to start people praying together. He postulates a background of approaching nuclear war. The miracle of the sign halts this -- but the aftermath for the two characters is grim and confusing. To Anderson, apparently, the result of a Joshuan miracle is the collapse of all values. In his post-miracle world neither science nor religion seems to be viable. Silverberg is equally concerned with collapsing values. In his Thomas the Proclaimer he deals with the results for the prophet, the man who called for the sign and was. answered. Thomas was a disreputable revivalist, egged on by Kraft, his press agent and daemon. While the world about reacts to the shock, Thomas has to turn inward to see himself. And when he does he finds that Kraft is still with him. This is a bitter epic of a soul that can not accept knowledge any more than it earlier could wholly accept faith. My own personal favorite is Dickson's Things Which Are Caesars. In some ways Dickson threw away more of the original sketch than did either of the others. But in one essential I feel he looked deeper into it. He apparently decided that, given both Joshua and the current leader, the phenomena described were periodic -- the sign was not merely given once, but regularly. He chose to have the miracle before the current one appear about a thousand years ago. Then he picked a man who had survived that previous miracle as his major character. Here the miracle is produced by a leader we do not meet. This doesn't matter. What matters is the second chance given to his Ranald, the ancient Viking who has been a later Wandering Jew, in effect. Is this to be his redemption? Well, that seems to depend. Dickson sets it all up in a sort of Woodstock, where people have come to wait for the sign instead of to listen to rock groups. His cast of characters is rich and well integrated -- the whole world is resolved in a half-dozen characters who assemble around Ranald's campfire. All at first seem more interesting than the rather detached Ranald -- yet Dickson's execution is done surely and well, to leave us with Ranald as our Everyman. I don't think it's a great book -- in fact, I don't think any book by three writers against a similar background can be great. For three men, working with an idea which did not germinate for years in their own minds, to produce three great stories would be asking for another sort of miracle. But I enjoyed the bool immensely. impressed with Gordon R. Dickson's execution of his own ideas in The Pritcher Mass (Doubleday, #). This one deals with various aspects of psi powers. I don't believe in such powers, but I see no reason why they can't be the basis of excellent fiction. However, there does seem a tendency to let the normal rules of tight plotting loosen with such a theme and I'm afraid Dickson's story shows that tendency. His basic idea is strong. Earth has become so polluted that men cannot survive outside its enclosed cities. Any man left outside is soon destroyed by a fungus growth in his lungs. No remedy has been found for the disease. Sooner or later even the cities will be nonviable. Man's only hope is to get to the stars. He has no physical means to do so, but has developed something called the Pritcher Mass -- that is, a projected gathering of psychic energy that supposedly will be able to locate and settle other worlds for mankind. The few people on Earth with provable psychic talents are sent to work on the Pritcher Mass. Sant is a reject from this program. But after an accident forces him to move through the dreaded outside world he finds his survival possible only by a desperate use of paranormal power. He believes the experience has strengthened his psyche enough to enable him to pass the test and be accepted. But by now he has become enmeshed in a dark plot between a Witchcraft of underground psychics and a crime syndicate that is trying to take over the Pritcher Mass. IF So far so good. But from here on things gradually go haywire. Sant does get to the Mass, but finds reason to doubt it can do what it is designed for. Nonetheless he finds ways to use it to escape back to the outlands of Earth. The narration's logic slips. Coincidence begins to enter rather strongly. The Pritcher Mass turns out to be perfect for solving problems it was not meant to solve. Sant's hopeless situation is eased by a discovery that the outlands are no problem to those with certain lucky psi abilities. (Must psi always degenerate from the specific to the general and become a damned universal panacea?) At the end everything is sewed up -- the witches and the criminals make their moves in steady and predictable patterns. Routine action is stitched together -- but at the end I at least felt that the thread had caught somewhere and the seams were all bunched together. The story begins marvelously, but ultimately my feeling was not a happy one. The execution was far below Dickson's usual high level. dling of her Earthsea novels has been exemplary. The idea behind the series (now consisting of three novels) has proved so good that these books are among the happy list of those written for children that make even better reading for adults. The Farthest Shore Atheneum #) brings to a conclusion the saga of Ged, the great magician of Earthsea. In this one, a young man -- Arren -- comes to the island of the wise magicians to warn that magic is failing in many parts of the world. No one knows why, but the ancient spells no longer work and the magicians are losing the knowledge of the old speech that gave them power. Ged sets out with Arren and discovers that the menace is all too real and that its sphere of influence is rapidly growing. In a series of happy (for the reader) adventures, Ged begins to realize that a rash action of his own during his youth has loosed a malign influence on the world of Earthsea. And to conquer it his people must go to Selidor, the island where the oldest dragons dwell -- and perhaps even beyond to a place from where men rarely return in their own living flesh. This is, of course, fantasy. But it is fantasy with a logic of execution that is usually found only in science fiction. Only the most hardened fantasy hater should be able to resist it. I highly recommend this novel, as I've recommended the two previous ones. The Farthest Shore is rich in ideas, color and inventions -- and excellently execute. D aw Books began with an idea, too -- Donald A. Wollheim felt that he could begin his own publishing company and Find at least four novels each month to publish. It was a rather large concept to come up with in a market already well filled with other publishers and established houses vying for writers. But judging by Wollheim's latest batch of books in his first six months of operation the idea seems to be working. Of the last four books one is a reprint from hard covers -- Dinosaur Beach, by Keith Laumer. (The price for this is #, as is true for all of Laumer's wealthiest novels as far as ideas are concerned. It involves the fairly ancient idea of a future that is tampering with time to change the viability of that future by changing the past. But nothing is ever simple when Laumer tackles time. Mixed with action during the Jurassic Age are hints of different futures with different goals and the control of some great robotic brain that controls all the multiple threads. It's good, fast-paced adventure without obvious or banal themes. The second is The City Machine, by Louis Trimble. The idea here is basically a familiar one, but handled with some fresh insight. Men live in a great city, the overlords at the top, the technicians in the middle and the workers on the unlovely bottom levels. The scene is not Earth -- the city has been built on another planet. The first group to arrive built the level now used by workers. Next an invading group took over and built the upper levels. The interesting variant is that both groups used a machine that could be programed to build a whole city on order. This machine still exists on the somewhat inhospitable planet, but is kept secret by a few who have survived outside the city. They cannot use it, since they cannot read the original instructions. In fact, the city-dwelling technician hero is the only man who can still read the original language -- and his knowledge is an imperfect remnant of childhood. The story involves the attempt of a group of rebels to use him to build a new city and free the workers. The book is free from most cliches and has some nice touches, tt makes for pleasant reading. Stardroppers, by John Brunner, an expanded and much improved version of an older story. Its idea is so well developed and has been given so much freshness that it isn't fair to call it borrowed, though the IF plot opens with a threat caused by communication with "other races" and becomes something else equally familiar. But the transition is cleverly done and the move from one to the other is surprising in concept, if not in its inevitable development. A security agent is sent to investigate a new invention, an apparently simple little gadget that produces sounds most listeners seem to understand -- almost. It's popularity had developed into a craze -- and there are signs that many users are becoming psychotic and that the thing may be endangering world stability. These perils are confirmed -- even worse, it turns out that some people who have been "stardropping" suddenly disappear. Perhaps this snark is a boojum! The book is not one of Brunner's stronger literary efforts -- it's one of the good adventure stories he turned out in considerable number before his work became more ambitious. But the ideas are sound and the execution is smooth and masterful. I found it a good novel to read for fun. The fourth novel of the current interesting publishing coup, nevertheless. The Return of the Time Machine, by Egon Friedell, is intended as a sequel to the classic novel by H. G. Wells, done by a German writer and historian before World War II -- as detailed in a foreword by Donald A. Wollheim. The story opens by presenting some (almost certainly suprious) correspondence of the journalist in the original novel with Wells through his secretary. Then it sets about continuing the adventures of the Time Traveler -- this time as he sets out for the past. Friedell lets his story devolve into a bunch of incidents that seem more concerned with German mysticism of the type common in some circles in the 'thirties. There's a touch of an improbable love story, a contact with the future (he never does really get faf into the past) in which two Egyptian priests discuss mind power -- and a final episode in which all logic vanishes. Nobody seems to know whether Wells was aware of the original German publication of this book in #. This is the first English version. I hope he did not know of the German edition -- it would have been a shame for him to have been so insulted. Still, bad as it is, the book had to be published since it existed -- and I can't help admiring Wollheim's ability to ferret it out. Though completely lacking in ideas and badly executed, it has genuine value as a curiosity.  Mankind's biggest secret -- or, where do baby storks come from? 'i  ' f. he left Jenny and Jim the house he had lived in, the old movies he had loved to watch and the workshop where he had tinkered away the final years of his life. Jenny and Jim buried him high on the valley slope where the woodbine ran wild each spring and the first wildfiowers appeared -- where the warm rays of Arcturus struck each springtime morning, heralding the new day. Jim said a few words over the grave and Jenny stood beside him, trying to cry. She couldn't. She had no tears. "We give to you this man, God," Jim said, "to do with as you must. We give him to you because you are his god. He was ours." Together they shoveled earth over the crude wooden casket and afterward Jenny placed a handful of spring flowers on the grave. Then she and Jim walked down the slope of the valley and across the fields to where the white prefabricated house stood, the aluminum workshop just behind it. "Shall we watch a movie tonight?" Jenny asked. "Or do you think it would be disrespectful?" "I don't think it would be disrespectful," Jim answered. "I don't think Professor Tom would mind." The movie they decided upon was Made for Each Other, starring Carole Lombard and James Stewart. They waited till after the sun went down. Then Jim put the film in the projector, turned out the lights. They sat down on the sofa to watch. They had watched the movie many times with Professor Tom and had hugged and kissed like the actors did, but never when he was looking. They had felt he might disapprove. But it was all right now, not because he was gone, but because they were man and wife. So they sat there on the sofa with their arms around each other, and every time Carole Lombard kissed James Stewart Jenny kissed Jim. And whenever James Stewart kissed Carole Lombard Jim kissed Jenny. Afterward they went outside to sit on the steps and scan the skies. But although they scanned them all night, they saw nothing but stars. At length morning arrived. Lovely Arcturus rose above the green lip of the valley and songbirds climbed air currents into the sky to drink the nectar of the new day. Jenny said to Jim, "Maybe we're being in much too much of a hurry -- maybe it takes time." Jim answered, "Maybe it'll come tonight." J IM had been Professor Tom's gardener and handyman, Jenny his cook and housekeeper. On Earth, before his retirement. Professor Tom had been an engineer in the mechanized-menial field and Jenny and Jim were almost as beautiful as the stars in the old movies. He had loved them both, but it had been Jenny he had loved the most and sometimes tears he did not understand had come into his eyes when he looked at her. He had said on his deathbed, "I never figured on things coming to this so soon. I preached humility all my life, but all the while I was just as arrogant as everybody else. I never thought that death would really step on my heels. But you two will be all right. The supply ship will be here within a year and I've left a note to the captain to take good care of you. He's an old friend of mine." "Will you marry us?" Jenny has asked and Professor Tom had looked at her and blinked. ) "You said," Jim pointed out, "that once you were a justice of the peace. That gives you the authority to make us man and wife." "That was long ago," said Professor Tom, "but yes, I suppose it does. However -- " "Surely," Jenny had interposed, "you wouldn't want us to live in sin. We're madly in love and there's no telling how we'll carry on without you here to chaperone us." A tear zigzagged down Professor Tom's sere cheek as he said, "Poor child, what do you know about making love -- and what, good would the knowledge do you if you had it? But if it will make you happy -- " There was no bible in the house, but the professor had made do without it. He had spoken the beautiful words they had heard so often in the old moives. "In sickness and in health... Love, honor and obey... I now pronounce you man and wife." J fore. Jim worked in Professor Tom's flower garden in daytime, keeping it free from weeds. There was a kitchen garden, too, and Jim cultivated it as faithfully as he had before, although it would serve no useful purpose now. He and Jenny had already thrown out the food, that was moldering in the refrigerator. They had turned off the unit and put away the dishes. Every day Jenny cleaned the house from front to back, dusting furniture and scrubbing floors. Except for fixing meals for Professor Tom her routine was unchanged. Sometimes, while she was working, she would hum songs from the movie she and Jim had watched the night before. And sometimes in the middle of dusting the living room she would drop the cloth and dance the way Ruby Keeler did in #nd Street, #nd Street was her favorite movie, but My Blue Heaven was her favorite song. Sitting on the sofa in the light reflected from the screen, the automatic projector whirring behind them, they would embrace and kiss and Jim would say, "Did you have a good day, darling?" She would answer, "Yes, my sweet." IF He would kiss her eyes and ears and nose and she would kiss his chin. They would hold each other as tightly as they could, but nothing ever came of their ardor and the skies remained as empty as before. "Perhaps tomorrow," Jenny would say. Jim would answer, "Yes, I'm sure tomorrow will be the Big Day." But the Big Day failed to dawn and Happiness continued to hide in the hills, in the woodbine and the wildflowers -- in the green bowers of the trees. both their memory banks with generous helpings of information, but for the most part these had to do with electronics, mechanical engineering, horticulture and cookery. It was to the old movies that they were indebted for their practical education. Most of the movies were products of the #'s, but there some from the 'twenties and a handful from the 'forties and' 'fifties. The professor had spent a great many years and a great deal of money collecting them and naturally he had taken them with him when he had retired to Arcturus VI to live out his sunset years in solitude and peace in the isolated valley he had bought " -- light-years removed," as he had put it, "from the malicious machinations of mankind." Sitting With Jenny and Jim in the living room one night, watching The Bells of St. Marys, he had said, "That's the way it was in those days -- only that wasn't, the way it really was at all." "But how can something be true and yet not be true at all?" Jenny asked and he had laughed. "I can see, my dear, that despite the perfection of your computerized thought processes -- or even more probably because of it -- you're incapable of any non-Aristotelian thinking. Many things can be both true and untrue. The worlds we watch upon that magic screen, my dear, are distorted reflections of reality inhabited by the ghosts of people whose real selves were often hidden from their own eyes. A reality powdered and perfumed and with its vitals eviscerated -- a reality tailored for people who hadn't outgrown their need to be told fairy tales before they went to bed." Professor Tom sighed. "But I'll take it any day. For all its pious hypocrisies -- for all its omissions and its untrue truths -- it's a thousand times better than the reality I lived in all my life and finally left behind. I guess when men grow old they like to hide in caves and watch reflections on the walls." In addition to the old movies, Professor Tom's collection comprised dozens of animated cartoons. Jenny and Jim found them fascinating. Some featured animals drawn to look like men or men drawn to look like animals. Others featured animals that were really meant to be animals but that talked and sometimes lived like human beings. In one way the cartoons were more educational than the movies, for they threw light on a certain mystery the movies were completely mum about. A mystery Professor Tom's books -- most of which were devoted to electronics and mechanical engineering -- did not even mention. In fact, if it hadn't been for the cartoons Jenny and Jim would never have learned the Secret of Life. B ut apparently knowing the 'Secret of Life was not enough. The valley exchanged its green dress for summer's golden gown. The warm days and nights began parading past the prefabricated house. But although Jenny and Jim sat each evening on the sofa, aping the actions of the shadows on the screen, their embraces and kisses went unrewarded. The dawn of each new day found them sitting disappointed on their doorstep, as lonely as before. "Maybe it's like that song that Don Ameche sings to Sonja Henie," Jenny said. "You know the one I mean -- that only one in a what we're trying to do is harder than we think." "Maybe," Jim answered. "And maybe it's because they do things between scenes that we don't know about." "Do things such as what?" "Like maybe they take off their clothes and kiss and hug that way." "Why would they take their clothes off? What difference would their being naked make?" "I don't know," said Jim, "but it wouldn't hurt to try." T hat evening before they sat down on the sofa they removed their clothes. Professor Tom had lost interest in sex even before he retired and Jenny's body, although differently shaped, wasn't a great deal different from Jim's. The movie they watched abounded in love scenes, but although they embraced and kissed every time the two main characters did, their efforts went as unrewarded as before. During one dawn, as they sat disconsolately on their doorstep, Jim said, "I think I know the reason, Jenny -- I think I know why for us it doesn't work. We're different -- and this world is different, too. We're IF going to have to make it happen. We've got everything we need to work with, thanks to Professor Tom, and he taught us practically all he knew. Maybe he foresaw a time like this." They got busy right away. Jim made the blueprint first, after consulting several of Professor Tom's books. Then he made all the parts. Jenny helped him with the assembling. They worked day and night, taking time out only to watch the old movies and to kiss and embrace like the stars. There was hope in them now and they put more and more passion into their kisses. "I want it to be a boy," Jenny said. "Yes," Jim answered. "I want a son." They had begun work in midsummer. Fall was on hand when they finished, and yellow and crimson patterns had begun to show upon the hills. Jim had built a lightweight electric motor to provide the necessary power. He made two light but long-lasting batteries to feed it. Together he and Jenny climbed the valley slope. "We'll give it all the height we can," he said. "That way it'll have a maximum chance of getting to wherever it has to go and of returning with its bundle." He turned on the little motor and released the device into the air. Slowly it rose into the sky. It circled the valley once, as he had programed it to do, then sped off toward the south. Section #, Title #. United States Code). #. Title of publication: IF. #. Date of Tiling: October I, #. #. Frequency of issue: bimonthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: # East # Street New York, N.Y. I#I#. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. I#I#. #. Names' and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Editor: Ejler Jakobsson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Managing Street, New York, N.Y. #, u subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #: Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Robert J. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Peter J. Abramson, # East # Street, New York. N.Y. #; Allen  Company, # Broad Street, New York, N.Y. #(X)#; Clooney . Company, co Fiduciary Trust Company of N.Y., P.O. Box #, Wall Street Station, New York, N.Y. #; S. D. Lunt  Company, # Marine Trust Building, Buffalo, N.Y. #. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holders or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. Extent and nature of circulation. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid Circulation. I . Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing dale: #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. D. I. Free distribution by mail, carrier or other means. I. Samples, complimentary and other free copies. Average no. copies each issue during the preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. #. Copies distributed to news agents, but not sold Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. E. Total distribution (sum of C and D). Average no. copies each issue during preening # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. F. Office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing. Average no. copies each issue during preceding I # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. G. Total (sum of E and F; should equal net press run shown in A). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date #. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Lawrence C. Murphy, Circulation Manager. Jenny said, '"But suppose the nursery doesn't lie in that direction." "Then -- after it comes back we'll recharge its batteries and send it to the west. And after that, if necessary, to the east and to the north. The nursery has to be somewhere." "Later on, if it's successful, we'll send it for others, won't we?" Jenny said. "Of course. But first we'll make love -- otherwise it won't work." Hand in hand they walked down the slope and across the fields to the house. T he captain of the supply ship found them in the living room six months later. They were sitting on the sofa, their bodies covered with dust, their arms around each other, their lips touching in a final kiss. Before them in the shadows an empty screen hung ghostlike on the wall. Behind them stood the automatic projector they had used to project their dreams. The length of copper wire they had used to short themselves out was lying on the floor at their feet. The captain went all through the house. Professor Tom's note was lying on the bedtable beside his empty bed. The captain read it. Then he returned to the living room and looked once more at the faces of Jenny and Jim. He had known Tom all his life and he had known Tom's longdead wife. In Jenny's face he saw young Tom's beloved bride -- in Jim's, he saw young Tom. When he made them # bet he didn't even know ,... His first thought was to repair them, to bring them back to life. Then he found the mechanical stork lying in the back yard. One of its canvas wings was broken, its tiny motor was burned out and its power source had given up the ghost after its fourth and final flight. He guessed the truth. He had his men search the valley for Professor Tom's grave. After they found it he had them carry Jenny and Jim up the slope and bury them beside it. It was only fitting that they should sleep beside their god. He spoke a few words to his own: "All of us leave ghosts behind of one kind or another. In a way, we're ghosts ourselves. We haunt ourselves our whole lives through because no matter how hard we try we can never fulfill our dreams. We're a lot like Jenny and Jim, which makes them human in a way. Grant them peace." When spring came back again, the woodbine reached down from the hills and covered the two new graves and wildflowers appeared to welcome the springtime sun. # IF New York. Guest-of-Honor: Keith Laumer. Speakers: Isaac Asimov, Donald Wollheim, Hans Stefan Santesson, and others. 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Gripping, chilling science fiction offers some of today's mostcompelling reading. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" packs such a wallop, it walked off with a Hugo -- science fiction's Oscar -- for the best science fiction short story of the year. Ellison's wild tale and # others are waiting for you in a sensational collection. The Hugo Winners, a new, #page, double volume of all the Hugo short story winners from # to #. The anthology can beyours as part of an equally sensational # books for #P offer when you join the Science Fiction Book Club. Choose any # books on this page including, if you wish, the # most prized books of the year: The Hugo Winners, Volumes I  II Ca # value): Dune, the now classic novel that won Frank Herbert a Hugoand Nebula award C# in the publisher's edition); and Isaac Asimov's latest and perhaps best novel. The Gods Themselves (# in publisher's edition). A # value for' only #P (to help cover shipping). 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Six are disposed of. One breaks loose and must be found or disaster will follow. But how to detect a monster that can disguise itself as a man -- any man? AS# # Ray Russell A pious #-year-old girl one night flings off her clothes, tries to seduce her priest, spews a stream of obscenities. Obviously she is possessed! A handsome cleric is assigned the task of exorcising her. He knows there is only one way to cast out a devil from the body of a virgin... AN#I # By the editors of Galaxy Magazine For more than twenty years Galaxy has ranked as the foremost science-fiction magazine. It continually presents award-winning stories by all the top writers in the field. Award Books is proud to publish a select collection of recent fiction from the magazine -- a collection, in short, that's the best of the best. AN# # The exciting adventures of starship captain Matt Foyt... deep-space thrills and chills in every corner of the galaxy. The first two titles in the series are just off the presses... 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Free fo new subscribers battle presented in a game-design specially created to introduce new readers to Conflict Simulation. Send check or M.O. toSimulations Publications Inc. Dspt # # East #rd St , Nsw York. N Y. # Please enter my subscription to S.  T. for: I Year (# issues)# # Yrs. (# issues) -- # # Yrs. (# issues) -- # Current issue # Send me the following Simulation Games:  Kursk (Russia. #-S#  Korea (#-#)#  Phalanx (ancient Greece)-#  Barbarossa (Russia, #) -- #  Leipzig (Napoleonic Wars. #) -- #  Normandy (the D-Day lnvasion)-#  Please send me your free brochure. City State Zip. and  ") -- R a  i (in ! s' iv n tv tin i i w ron ; Dear Mr. Jakobsson: About Stephen Tail's Gods on Olympus: It is a pleasant, readable tale because # 'it is odd , exciting and it has a climax" (G. K. Chesterton, Science and the Savages). The style is, if anything, soony, which means sentimental in Australian Jargon. To compensate, there are zing sentences terminating many paragraphs, which serve also as boundary markers. There is not much literary pilingPelion-onOssa. As to the structure, it is somewhat of a bundle of themes tied together only by their simultaneous existence in print. It is half science (vide mfra) and half fantasy, fused mainly by the personality of the I-narrator and his lovely spouse, with wizened Ursula serving as artistic oracle. The endihg is more of a half-cadence than a climax, being saved only by the intervention of a deus ex machina in the form of a hands-off ukase. It is scientifically unacceptable , at least by the criteria of today's biological paradigm. There is no evidence of evolution and only the imperial mute coon and his mate as evidence of of mutation or speciation. Moreover, it is legitimate to ask or what fauna the eagles generally fed. And finally, the small coon hands and the eagles together could not surmount the physical difficulty of such major construction as is described . Despite the carping criticism, an enjoyable piece. In the Reading Room Lester del Rey admits an attack of la maladie sans maladie and with poignant nostalgia calls to mind that era in which sf was a way of life, or if not that, then primarily a happy hobby for all participants. He pensively regrets the present demand for relevance and that urge to save the world for humanity even in the smallest activity. It is certain that both he and sf will find some pleasant nostrum for this ailment. This is not only a get-well-real-quick message, but has also the intent of noting that he gives to sf a purpose. Now Judith M. Hochberg strictly denies that sf has a purpose ( Directions, Galaxy, Sept. # #). People have purposes but genres do not. Let us not indulge in semantics, but rather synecdoche. Ms. Hochberg advocates sf that penetrates psyche, theology , social justice, humanitarianism (local, global and galactic) as well as other minute and great elements of life. Mr. del Rey wants carefully thought out, jolly good fun. She is more serious than he; he is the recessive component and she the progressive component in this scientific mythography. A just apodosis is that we must have more than one sort of sf tale. Alexander Doniphan Wallace University of Florida Dear Mr. Jakobsson: One of the clearest definitions of sf appeared in Lester del Rey's Reading Room in August If. He put forward three criteria for judging whether something is sf or not: I ) Rationality, #) Fiction, #) Alternative. He distinguishes ( Please turn to page I # )  M Just set it and forget it The built-in buzzer wakes you or  reminds you -- on time! AlfiP #  # . hairspring i aaasr Incredible I A  at only  genuine For years, watchmakers have been trying to produce a truly dependable wrist alarm watch at a sensible, down-to-earth price. Finally, the enterprising Swiss did it. And here it is! It could be a real life-saver for anyone who needs a never-fail reminder. Just set it and forget it. When the appointed hour arrives, you'll be jogged by a gentle yet insistent buzzing. This watch is strong on good looks... handsomely styled with a durable goldentone case, and matching raised gilt numerals and markers. It features a quality Swiss movement, unbreakable mainspring, antimagnetic hairspring. Plus luminous dial markers, hands and sweep second hand. And a genuine lizard strap like the # watches have. The price -- unbelievable at only # plus # postage and handling. Order yours now! Ideal gift for executives, salesmen, sportsmen, professional people... anyone! postage and handling. If not delighted, I may return order within # days for immediate refund. N.Y. residents add sales tax. Enclosed is  check  money order for . Print Name. Address. Serving Satisfied Customers for over # Years I T HE meeting and the funeral had both run long and Ben Charles Pertin was late. Because of this and because what he was late for was a date with the girl he loved and hoped to marry he was trying to make up time. On Sun One trying to hurry was both easy and unwise. The easy part was physical. Sun One's gravity ran about three per cent of Earth's even at the center, so you could leap thirty yards at a time on the straightaway and never bother with stairs or elevators in going from shell to shell of the great sphere. The unwise part lay in the fact that most of Sun One's population, composed of fifty strange races from all over the galaxy, was also in a hurry -- you ran the risk of collision all the time. Humanity was a junior race in the galaxy. Pertin's instructions had been most explicit about avoiding offense when possible. He was also in a difficult mood because of the combined impact of the morning's events. The funeral had been his boss's, Ray Sam Barnett's. Pertin had liked him only generally and defensively -- there had been no close personal tie. Nevertheless, Sam's death had been an unwelcome reopening of ancient insomniac questions having to do with what death really amounted to under the special circumstances of Sun One. As Pertin hurried down from the shell where Barnett's shrouded body had been consigned to the matter banks of the tachyon transmitters he found the old puzzle of identity clouding his mind. Sun One had begun as an asteroid circling a young blue-white giant star in the great diffuse gas cloud that Earthly astronomers called the Orion Nebula. Over a period of centuries it had been built upon, sheathed over and tunneled into until it had been converted into a great hivelike artifact. It was the closest thing there was to a central headquarters of the loose association of intelligent races in the galaxy which had made contact with each other. Ben Pertin and all the other forty or fifty human beings there were newcomers to Sun One and to the galactic confraternity -- Earth was the newest planet to .achieve contact. When a Sirian or a TWorlie died half of Sun One was likely to come out to do him honor. At the funeral of Pertin's boss the only mourners -- if "mourners" was the right term -- had been a handful of humans and not more than six representatives of all other known sentients. Not even all the humans had troubled to show up -- probably, Pertin thought, because they did not want to stimulate, again that endless questioning about who it was who had died, when the nature of tachyon travel meant that exact duplicates of Pertin's boss still lived at a dozen places in the galaxy. As they did for everyone on Sun One, since each of them had come there in the same way. N evertheless the death did have some concrete implications and one of them touched Pertin very closely. That had been the subject of the brief staff meeting that followed the funeral. The most unpleasant part was yet to come -- Pertin had to tell his fiancee about the results of the meeting. She was sure to dislike it. Still, as he came closer to where she was waiting for him the unpleasant, aspects began to fade from his mind and he began to feel the joy of seeing. Zara Doy again. Bisexual love, it had turned out; was not very common in the galaxy, most, of whose races either reproduced in impersonal ways or reserved their emotional commitments for functions other than procreation. But Pertin and Zara Doy were deeply in love all the same. They planned to marry as soon as they could and rather enjoyed the fact that thismade them objects of interest to such beings as possessed personal curiosity at all. So they were watched as Pertin spotted Zara Doy and launched himself toward her in a shallow gravity dive over the heads of a thing like a dragon, a creature composed mostly of a single great. blue eye and a couple of scurrying collective creatures from one of the IF core stars. "Sorry," he cried down at them, caught the laughing girl's hand and stopped hard beside her. , "Ouch," she said, releasing a holdfast with her other hand. "I'd appreciate a little less enthusiasm next time." He kissed her and took her arm. "It's part of the image," he said cheerfully. "You know what the chief of delegation says. Make them know we're here. Earth may be the newest planet in the association but it isn't going to be the least important. We have a duty to Earth to make ourselves known throughout the galaxy and a duty to the galaxy to contribute our strength and our know-how." "I think," said the girl, "that if you're going to talk like that you'd better buy me a drink." At this shell of Sun One the curvature of the spherical surface they walked on was noticeably sharp. It was easier to leap than to stroll. To travel arm in arm, which is how Ben Charles Pertin chose to walk with his girl, required practice and a lot of discomfort, not only to them but to the other sentients in the concourse. Pertin and Zara shifted grips, so that each had an arm around the other's waist -- then Pertin caught the holdfast webbing with his free hand and partly tugged, partly kicked them into the air. They shot past the dragonlike creature, narrowly missed a steelwork vertical strut, touched down again next to something that looked like a soft-bodied beetle with three dozen legs and were in sight of the little refreshment platform they liked. Pertin said "Hi!" to a thing like a green bat as it flapped by. It hissed something shrill that his personal translator repeated into his ear as, "I recognize your identity, Ben Charles Pertin." The girl nodded, too, although all members of that particular race, which was called the T' Worlie, looked alike to her, and in any event the T'Worlie did not have the custom of nodding since they had no more neck than bats. As they waited for traffic to clear Zara asked, "How did things go this morning?" He hesitated, then said, "About as usual. Things are all fouled up on the probe." He was watching a tumbling boxlike robot coming toward them on a tangent, correcting its course with methodical jets of steam from the faces of its cubical body, but the tone of his voice made the girl look at him sharply. "What is it, Ben?" . "I'll tell you when we sit down." "You'll tell me now." "Well -- " He hesitated, then cried. "All right, we can make it now!" But the girl wrapped her fingers around the webbing of the holdfast. "Ben!" He relaxed and looked at her. He didn't say anything, but he didn't have to. "Ben! Not again!" He said defensively, "I have to, Zara. The other copy of me is dying. Barnett promised he'd go instead of me -- because of how you feel -- but now he's dead here. There's nobody from Earth on the probe now to represent us. So I agreed to carry the ball." He gazed appraisingly at the traffic of aliens f then back at her -- and frowned in sharp surprise. Zara seemed close to crying. He said, "What are you making a big thing about? It's nothing we haven't done before." "I know," she said and blinked hard. "It's only -- well, it's sort of silly. It's just that I hate the idea of your dying out there while we're on our honeymoon." Pertin was touched. He patted the girl's hand and said seriously. "Honey, one of the traits I like best in you is that you're ndi afraid to be sentimental at the right time. Don't knock it. I love you for it. Now let's go get that drink." T 'HE little cafe was nearly empty. That was one of the things they liked about it. It had actual waiters -- Purchased People; they didn't have much personality to display, but they were actually human, genetically speaking -- and Pertin and his fianede enjoyed ordering in their rudimentary Italian. It was not their own language, to be sure, but at least it was one for which they did not need the Pmal translators. Pertin pulled his feet up, crossed them in air and settled gently onto his chair. They looked about while waiting for their drinks to be brought. Pertin had been on Sun One for more than two years now, the girl for several months. Even so, familiarity had not dulled their interest in the place. Zara was a newscaster, broadcasting to Earth every week on the stereo stage. Pertin was an engineer. His job on Sun One didn't involve much engineering. It did involve an interesting mixture of skills -- he functioned partly as a legalized spy, partly as a goodwill ambassador from Earth to the restof the universe. The mere fact that a job like his Ben Charles Pertin. He was old enough to remember the time when humans had thought themselves alone in the galaxy. The old "nations" had put up their chemical rockets and sent them chugging to Venus, Mars and the moon in his grandfather's time. They had looked for life and come up empty every time. Nuclear probes, ' a generation later, had investigated the outer planets, the satellites and even the asteroids with the same result. No life. By the time Ben had been twelve the juice had run out of space travel. Contact had come as Ben Pertin was turning thirteen. Something IF had been found on Pluto -- an artifact, half-buried under Pluto's mirror of ice -- and Earth had suddenly looked outward again. The stereo stages had been full of the Find, of the First fumbling attempts to patch it together, the First daring experiment at putting power through it. Everybody had talked about it. Ben and his parents had watched the glowing figure on their stage, enthralled. The kids in school had made it the main subject of every class. And when the ancient communicator had come to life and the First alien face had peered out of its screen and looked into the face of a human. Earth had gone mad. A more of that cockamamie Earthman's Burden talk," said Zara Doy, "I heard too much of it when I was a kid. I don't want you going out to die. Stay here with me." Pertin said fondly, "You're sweet, Zara. But this is important. The situation on the probe is exploding -- the beings are Fighting. They're dying uselessly. I can't back out just for some sentimental idea of -- " "Sentiment be damned! Look. When we get married I want you right in bed with me -- all of you. I don't want to be thinking about part of you dying way off in nowhere." whose first book in # is his first J since winning the Hugo in #  for best novel of the year. This time i Farmer turns his critical eye on i Jules Verne and tells us what really I happened in those eighty days  an interstellar conflict right here on x ( Earth; and also sheds some unexJ pected light on Captain Nemo , the j mystery of the Mary Celeste , and , some other enigmas! With illustra tions by Jack Gaughan. I Gaughan also did the cover for , which pans three worlds and J three parallel destinies. What more j need besaid? Phillrfent is a really different tale of i a metabolically reconstructed man I on a world inimical to humans. ( Wait until you see Kelly Freas's  cover!  And finding a new author is ali troduces a new approach to the j new author to American sf readers, i Gordon will be heard from later in  the year -- and by then you'll be J looking forward to his imaginative  talent I. With a superb cover by ( Kirby. "I'll be with you, honey. All of me." "You know what I mean," she said angrily. He hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with his fiancee two days before they were to get married. He rubbed his troth ring and said, "Zara, I have to go to the probe. First, I said I would and the boss has passed the word to all the other top brass on Sun One. Second, it's important. It's not 'Earthman's Burden.' It's simple logic. We're new and pretty far behind, compared to the Scorpians or the methane crowd or the T' Worlie. But look at what we've done already: We have Earth people on every major planet, working in every big project, taking part in everything that's happening. The others are getting used to us. They consult us now. Who else is there to go if I back out? Earth won't be represented." "I don't care." "It's not as if I haven't done it before -- " "The other time you went we weren't about to be married." "All right, that's true. I owe you something. But I owe our planet something, too. We're just beginning to contribute our share of leadership in the galaxy, Zara. I mean, look at that waiter. Half the Purchased People around are now human beings. When the nonviables edit a copy for Sun One -- what shape do they copy? Human! The human shape is as familiar in the galaxy now as the Sheliaks -- and all less than in twenty years." Zara sucked at the last of her drink and put it down in its cage. She stared at the waiter, who was smoking a cigarette and thinking whatever thoughts a blanked-out personality was allowed to think. She shook her head. "I'll lay it out nice and orderly like an engineer for you, Ben. First, if they copy human shape -- is it because they respect us or because they have some crazy methane sense of humor? Second, if they buy our convicts for Purchased People, likely enough it's because we have more criminals to sell. Third, I don't like the whole idea of Earth's trying to dominate the galaxy. Fourth -- " "Dominate? I said 'leadership,' not domination." "One is a prerequisite to the other. Fourth, I hate your going on personal grounds -- and I'm not talking about idealism. I'm talking about sex. It's going to take some of the joy out of going to bed with you, Ben, thinking that at the same time somewhere else you're getting eaten by a Sheliak or dying of radiation burn. I'm sorry it's so, but it's so." Ben said doubtfully after a moment, "Would it be better if we postponed the wedding a little bit?" "I don't know. Let me think." He waited, finished his drink, IF II looked cautiously at Zara. He saw no anger or misery on her pretty face -- she was simply staring thoughtfully out at the other beings in the concourse. Pertin beckoned to the waiter and paid the check. "They thank you," said the waiter in the idiom of the Purchased People, staring appraisingly at Pertin and the girl. As with all Earth's exported criminals, his body and will belonged to the race that had bought him, but the thoughts of the brain inside were still his own. Far off at the core of some gas-giant planet or floating in space, acreature with a wholly different physical structure was using this man's eyes and limbs as his own, linked by tachyon transmission to the monitor units implanted in each Purchased Person's skull. But inside that skull the original mind was spending a lifetime in solitary confinement. "They ask," droned the waiter, "if there will be anything else?" "No, we're going-" Zara sighed and smiled at Pertin. "Well -- you want to go pretty badly. Feeling the way you do, I suppose you ought to go. I won't stop you, Ben, and it's silly to put off getting married. But there is one thing I want you to do." He waited warily. "Give me your ring. No, just to hold. When you've finished going to the probe I'll give it back to you. But I don't want you wearing my ring when you die."  the tachyon transport chamber, out at the far shell of Sun One and heavily shielded. Dr. Gerald York Bielowitz himself checked out Pertin. He was a methodical man, one of the reasons he was head of the mission to Sun One. He read from a soundscripted list. "We've got about ten minutes, Ben Charles. Let's see. Object Lambda. You know as much about it as I do. It's anomalous and it's exciting. The only way to find out about it is this probe and it's in Earth's interest to make the probe succeed." He dropped hjs eyes to the page and went on: "There's no possibility of survival on the probe, of course, and this has undoubtedly had some effect on the psyches of all the beings there. To the extent that they have what we can map as psyches, I mean. But in my opinion it's the physical problems that have caused the trouble. Some of them are now dying -- your predecessor among them, of course. Others are functioning poorly, probably because of ionization interference with their nervous systems. Or whatever corresponds to nervous systems. At any rate -- " he checked  off a point -- "the beings aboard no longer constitute an orderly system. There's violence. Some of the deaths are from fights or murders. This is seriously interfering with the operation of the probe and threatening its very success. You know how important that is. If we blow this it'll be more than a hundred years before we get another chance. And finally -- " Bielowitz folded the list and put it in his sporran -- "your account here will be credited with double-rate pay for your services on the probe. Your equipment will follow, along with Doc Chimp here." He nodded civilly to the hairy little handyman who crouched next to Pert in. "And good luck to you both." i# Thank you, Gerald York," said Pertin gravely. He stepped up to the transport portal, waited for the signal and entered, giving a half wave to Bielowitz as the door closed behind him. This was the fourth time he had found himself in a tachyon transporter box, or at least the fourth time that he remembered. They all looked about the same. On tbe inside they were featureless except for what seemed to be studs or nailheads almost" completely covering each of the six interior surfaces. He stood there for a moment and felt nothing. But something was going on. The sensors were counting, locating and identifying every atom in his body, measuring their bonds to adjacent atoms, charting them in a precise three-dimensional matrix. The information obtained they encoded into a string of binary numbers, whereupon the great tachyon generators glowed into life, transsecond in the direction of a point outside the farthest spiral arm of the galaxy, where the ship Ben Pertin had just volunteered to serve on -- and to die on -- lay waiting. transmission chamber -- that the great identity problem that plagued all the space-exploring humans had its genesis. Freud would have found another womb -- with a completely different set of birth traumas. All tachyon transmission was enormously expensive both in psy chic cost and in cash. Its only justification was that it was indispensable. If you wanted to get a man or an instrument or a shipload of chess sets from one point in the universe to some other point across interstellar distances you had only two choices. One was to build a rocket' preferably fusion-powered like the one Pertin was going to. You then had to launch it and set it on its way -- and then wait. Wait indefinitely, for it could take anywhere from a decade or two to geologic eras beforp it reached another star, even one relatively nearby. If you wanted to go farther than that you would wait forever. A voyage from a spiral arm to the core or from any point in. the galaxy to the deeps of intergalactic space was simply out of the time IF consciousness of any race but the T'Worlie. The other method was faster. It dispensed with attempting to transport matter at all. Instead of sending an object you sent a blueprint of the object and had it built from plan at the destination. The procedure was not simple. It required enormous expenditures of energy to generate the tachyon stream that carried the blueprint. It required complex scanning devices to measure every atom and molecule in the object to be transmitted and to encode positions and relationships for transmission. Above all, it required a tachyon receiver at the point to which you wanted to send -- or go. But granted all those things, you could "travel" at the speed of the tachyons, those particles whose lower speed limit was the velocity of light, and whose upper limit had never been measured. The original object, of course, remained behind. It was scanned and its blueprints were encoded and then it was released unharmed. He who volunteered for a tachyon trip also stayed at home. What flashed across space was a descripr tion of himself and what emerged from the receiving chamber at destination w r as a newly built identical copy. There was no detectable difference between original and copy. It would have been a foolproof method of counterfeiting or of duplicating rare art objects -- if it had not been so expensive in terms of power consumption that there was little worth the cost of duplicating. As a method of duplicating human beings, the process was more successful -- it was perfect and unique. The man who entered a tachyon transmission chamber to be sent to Sun One was the same man who walked out of it and returned to his home on Earth -- and was also the same man who emerged on Sun One to take up a wholly new life. The continuity was absolute. Neither was a "copy" in any physical sense. In a psychic sense the question of "reality" was troublesome. Every human who ventured into the star swarms was heavily briefed and indoctrinated with endless philosophical arguments and logical proofs. If you draw two triangles, which is the "real" triangle? (They both are, chorused the classes doubtfully.) If you build # Mercedes-Ford hovercars on an assembly line, which is the "real" Mercedes-Ford? (They all are.) Oh, the lecturers went on, there would eventually be differences among them. One car gets a scratch on the windshield when the wipers are installed. Another has a ripped gasket in its hydraulic system that, three years later, means its braking system has to be overhauled. But one is not an "imitation" or a "copy" of the other. Both are "real." All of the Ben Pertins were Ben Pertin. The custom that gave them differing middle names was only a convenience, but they were all real -- and, ladies and gentlemen, when you go out into space you will still be you. Not a copy. You. And the classes would nod and grin at each other and go on to their next training class. But that night each of them in his or her solitary bed would lie staring through closed eyes at a future that held two separate identities. And all through the courses the couches of the analysts were kept warm with the bodies of trainees trying to come to terms with the question of "reality." But the process itself was easy, quick and painless. It was only moments until Ben Charles Pertin walked out of the box and shook hands with his head of mission. "You're the best man I've got left," said Bielowitz. "Thanks." Pertin then went back to his office and worked through the rest of the afternoon. He left a little early to meet his fiancee and take her to dinner and over the coffee she returned his troth ring. Charles Pertin was putting his ring back on his finger, inasmuch as time at two points separated by relativistic distances and velocities qm be called the "same," Ben James Pertin pushed his way out of another, almost identical box on the probe ship. He stopped just outside the ; portal, moving slightly to allow it to  close behind him. His expression was grim. "Lucked out," he said aloud, looking around the unfamiliar chamber. There was no one to hear-or to see the bitter and despondent look on his face. The chamber was deserted. The probe was in free fall and Pertin floated slowly away from the transport. Nothing else was floating in the room. There was , no litter, no sign that any other being of any sort was within thousands of light-years and, as he listened, he heard not even any sound. He swore softly to himself and twisted his body around to face the crated personal effects that were nudging their way out of the box. There wasn't a great deal to ' come -- some tapes, some changes of clothing, personal items. At the end of the string of transmissions came his companion in the mission. Doc Chimp. Doc Chimp thrust out a long arm and caught the handle of the door as he went by. He hung there for a moment, staring at his environment with an expression that was a parody of Pertin's own. "Oh, wow, Ben Charles," he said sadly. "What a place." "It'll be 'Ben James,' I think," said Pertin. "Sure," said Doc Chimp dismally. "Me, I'm not going to bother. If you want to call me IF Pertin said, startled, "I don't hear anything." "Neither do I. But I smell it. It's a T Worlie, coming fast." T 'HE probe ship was T'Worlie property, but fortunately for the other races of the galaxy the T'Worlie didn't have a very strong territorial imperative.  They had been civilized for a long, long time. They were an inquisitive race in their unhurried way and no doubt that was why they had been sending their probes out for hundreds of generations. Little T'Worlie rockets had radiated in all directions from their mother star, some of them aimed at other stars, some at nothing closer than the Great Nebula in travel time away. Only a race like that, deploying probes as lavishly and patiently as that, could have discovered the curious astronomical object called Lambda. No other race would have been in a position to do it. Sirians, with their limited time-binding capacities that reached no more than a week into the future, wouldn't have bothered. Nothing that promised some remote payoff interested them at all -- which made them unattractive partners but inoffensive foes. Humans of course had no chance. Their technology wasn't up to the job. The farthest terrestrial probe was still climbing toward the turnover point on its now senseless journey toward # Eridani A. But the T'Worlie thought long, slow thoughts and they were gently but persistently curious about everything. If their race lived long enough it would learn everything there was to know. None of them seemed to mind that no T'Worlie now alive would be present to learn it. If the T'Worlie hadn't been what they wre, probably no one would have found Object Lambda for another several thousand years. It had been discovered first by an unmanned T'Worlie scoutship and reported in a routine synoptic survey. It attracted no attention at all. When first observed its great distance and low luminosity put it at the very threshhold of discovery and the traits that made it unique had not been detected. Subsequent observations attracted more attention. The Object's weak spectral lines seemed to shift toward the violet rather than the red, which is to say that it was moving toward the galaxy instead of away from it. Curious. But the lines were so very weak, the point so very distant and the orderly T'Worlie had many other things on their agenda to investigate. Then, by accident, another scout turned up the same object in a survey. It might not have been recognized if the computers of the T'Worlie had not been so patient IF and painstaking. The second scout had been launched five thousand years earlier, its vector several degrees away. From its point of view Object Lambda was in a wholly different part of the sky and its rate of approach, indicated by the spectral shift, quite different. But the computers had sensed a possible match and clucked over the figures until they confirmed it. There existed a specific, if hypothetical, orbit and velocity which, seen from those two scouts at those recorded times, would have given exactly those readings. From the estimated elements the computers made a prediction. They requested a special observation from still a third unmanned scout. Lo! it turned out as they had predicted. Object Lambda was not more than # light-years from the edge of the galaxy and was approaching it at about one-sixth of light speed. At this point the T'Worlie announced their discovery to the galactic civilization at large and began a study of their existing drones in that general part of space. The T'Worlie drones were as small as an interstellar probe can be made -- a scoop, a hydrogen ram, some instruments and a tachyon installation. The T'Worlie had been launching them, thousands at a time, for tens of thousands of years. Since they had never invented war they were able to accumulate large quantities of surplus capital, so the probes were not a . particularly expensive project for them. Like most early-industrial races, they had energy to burn. They burned it. Their planet was largely water covered -- though they looked like bats, they were somewhat more analogous to flying fish. Their water was rich in D # # and they spent its fusion energies profligately. The T'Worlie drone model was standardized early. A program was set up under which each drone, upon reaching a point suitably distant from all others, flashed a tachyonic signal to the T'Worlie planet, whereupon the tachyon transmitters scanned, encoded and transmitted whole new drones to the mother drone's unit. As each new drone flashed into being, it signaled in to the T Worlie planet, was given a course and program of its own and moved on. The effect was of an enormous globe of drones -- at them -- expanding outward like the shell of a dead supernova. The program was fully automatic and economical of everything W the energy eaten up by the tachyon transmitters -- and for ten thousand years there seemed to be an endless supply of that. XjL began to realize that their energy resources, though huge, were not infinite. The drone program was cut to a trickle. But it was never stopped and the great swelling bubble of drone ships expanded into globular clusters, out toward the neighboring galaxies, along the spiral arms, in toward the core of the Milky Way itself. It was a TWorlie drone that had buried itself on Pluto and been found by the exploration from Earth. Besides humans, TWorlie drones had brought into the galactic society at least a hundred races at one time or another, almost half of the total so far located. Another race might have thought of using that fact to establishdominance for itself, but the TWorlie didn't think that way. They had never invented empires, either. So when the T'Worlie began to be deeply interested in Object Lambda it was easy enough for them to find some hundreds of drones on courses and at points that were not too remote from it. The next job for the TWorlie computers was calculating which of these drones was on the course that would involve least time and energy to divert it to the neighborhood of Lambda with its high galaxyward velocity. Fortunately a handful of drones in that section had been redirected inward much earlier to fill gaps in the global screen. Among them was one whose course would match Lambda's in less than five years. After that there was no problem. The drone's matter receiver was put to work giving birth to automatic tools, hull sections, drive . units, instruments, finally people. The tools went to work, assembling the hull sections, installing the drives, making room for the people. What had been a tiny kick-ram -- no bigger than Earth's early Apollo capsule -- was transformed and expanded into a thousand-meter vessel with room for a crew of several hundred There was, to be sure, one problem. The rebuilt TWorlie ship, now named Aurora, was big, but it needed to be big. It did not possess a great deal of surplus mass. It was driven by the sequential explosion of hydrogen fusion charges, directional in a coneshaped blast against a great battering plate at its base. Not much of the radiation from the fusion explosions seeped through the base plate, but some did. Enough for ionizing radiation constantly to bathe the members of the crew. TWorlie and Sheliaks, Purchased People and bits, robots and humans all responded to this in their individual, idiosyncratic racial ways. But few complex chemical or electronic processes can operate without damage in the presence of ionizing radiation. It didn't matter who they were -- in the long run it came to much the same for all of them. They died. #a IF Ill bled to the corridor entrance and peered out. The vinegary T'Worlie smell was strong now and they could hear the sounds of something happening outside: a punctured-tire hiss, a faint high-pitched singing. A circus procession was sailing toward them down the center of the corridor. First came a TWorlie, bat's head on butterfly body, no bigger than a pigeon but strong enough to be carrying a kitten-sized furry creature with enormous saucer eyes. Behind the T'Worlie, as it flew with powerful strokes of its green-spotted filmy wings, came a glittering cloud of steel-blue particles -- like a swarm of gnats in the sun -- and behind them, coming fast but decelerating strongly because of its mass, the square-edged form of a Scorpian robot, all fore jets pumping reaction mass. The T'Worlie made its shrill whistling sounds and Hhe Pmal translator on Pertin's shoulder rat tied into life. "I identify you as a Pertin," it said with mechanical precision. "I propose you transfer at once to high-G accommodations suitable to your structure, mode urgent." "Why, Nimmie!" cried Ben James, suddenly inexplicably, foolishly glad. "It's good-to see you." The T'Worlie braked with its filmy wings and the five patterned eyes studied Pertin. "Verify your statement of identity," the Pmal translator rattled in his ear. "Query implications. Request quick clarification." "Why, it's me, Ben Ch -- Ben James Pertin. From Sun One. Why, just yesterday I saw you in the social concourse, remember?" But he stopped; this copy of the TWorlie he had known would not remember. The T'Worlie hesitated. It was some Nimmie or other, Pertin was sure; the key to recognizing T'Worlie was not the five eyes or the small sphincter mouth with its cat's-whisker vibrissae, but the patterns on the wings. Green spots predominating on a pale yellow background -- five of the bigger spots arranged in a sort of wobbly letter W, like the constellation Cassiopeia from Earth -- yes, it was Nimmie, all right, Pertin knew.But perhaps a Nimmie he had never met, in some different line of descent. The vinegary smell deepened. It was a sign of a polite cogitation in a T'Worlie, like a human being's Hmmm. But Nimmie did not respond, exactly. He was distracted by the swarm of tiny beings which Pertin recognized as the collective entity called Boaty Bits. They swept into the tachyon transport room, swirled around Pertin and the chimp and reformed under the T Worlie's wings. The kitten-like creature spoke with a voice like a purr. The transthat could not be carried on during lator rendered it as: "No time kiddeceleration times. The rest of the ding around, get hell out!" The time the entire ship suffered under a TWorlie concurred. "Mode ursurging, uneven, pulsing drive that gent. Accept transportation via averaged nearly seven gravities, robot. Your physical safety at The welcoming-and-transporting risk!"  committee barely got Pertin and Doc Chimp chattered, "I told Doc Chimp to a. place of refuge you I wasn't going to like this place, before the thrusters started again. Ben James. It isn't safe. Of course, The Boaty Bits had darted away at I'm only a monkey, so it doesn't the first warning white-noise matter much about me. It's you I "blast -- they could not operate at all worry about." "You're an ape," Pertin corrected automatically, his brain concentrating on what the TWorlie had said. "Sure, but an ape that knows what isn't safe. Come on, Ben James! Let's do like bat-ears says and split!" The decision was taken from Pertin. The Scorpian hissed slowly by, still decelerating. It came to a stop, reversed itself and began to pick up momentum for the return. And as it passed Pertin and Doc Chimp it simply caught them up, each under a silvery tentacle, and bore them away. In reverse order the procession steamed away -- first the robot with the two terrestrial primates, then the swarm of bit creatures, then the T' Worlie and its passenger. power was off only for short periods, long enough to permit instrument readings or other work under thrust and had to find safety lest they be stepped on. The: TWorlie and his passenger were next to go, leaving only the robot to see to tucking Pertin and Doc Chimp in. The robot had no particular objection to high gravity. Pertin had noticed that on the trip from the tachyon chamber. When the robot had to change direction it simply braced itself with a few of the steel-coil tentacles, stopped against whatever was in the way and pushed off in another direction,' The sensation for Pertin was like being tossed around at the end of a cracking whip, but he survived it. The thrusting started before the robot had finished sealing their cocoons and it was even worse then the ride. The cocoons were meant to protect them against it -- were tailor-made to their dimensions, equipped with the best of springing devices and every comfort. But there was no such thing as antigravity and that was what was needed. The. robot tarried for a moment. IF It could no longer jet about, but its tentacles held it easily off the floor, octopus-like. As the thrusts came they gave gently, then returned to position. It seemed to be trying to communicate. Pertin, looking out of the cocoon faceplate, shrugged and spread his hands. One Scorpian looked like another, but if this one had come from Sun One it might recognize the human gesture. The trouble was, there was no way to tell whether it was responding to it. Then the Pmal crackled into life: " -- not move. Prerequisite explanations to you. I am repeating this on all comm frequencies. Most imperative you not move. Prerequisite -- " The sound faded again as the robot evidently shifted to another possible frequency. "All right," said Pertin, "we'll wait." But whether the robot understood him or not he could not say -- it rested there on its tentacles, swaying under the thrust, for a few moments more and then undulated away. The probe was decelerating furiously now -- a roller-coaster ride multiplied by a hundred. There was a lot more noise then Pertin had expected -- the thudding of the nuclear engines and the screeching of the torsion-bar shock absorbers that did their best to leVel out the thrust, "Doc," he called. "Can you hear me?" The chimp's cocoon was only yards away, but the thuud-screech drowned out all other sounds. Pertin stared around. The room was half machine. Bright metal valves, gray plastic tubes coiling like dead entrails, colored screens where enigmatic symbols flickered and vanished. The walls were a sick, off-color green. No human would have designed a room like this, but of course it had not been designed for humans in the first place. It was a standard T'Worlie cocoon container, modified to take terrestrials. The thud-screech pounded on and on. Experimenting with the cocoon, Pertin discovered that it would meter an anesthetic dose into his veins -- or even a selective analgesic to deaden the auditory nerve for a time and block out the remorseless nuclear thunder. But he didn't want to sleep. He wasn't tired -- he wanted to get about his business. When your time is running out, he thought, you don't like to lose any of it. Then he discovered that the cocoon had a built-in stereo stage. The device was not wholly familiar, but with any luck he should be able to. reach Doc Chimp, at least. His first attempt was not a success. He gently turned a knurled pointer under the hollow silver hemisphere of the stage and was delighted to see it fill with the shining silver mist that indicated it was operating. But when the mist abruptly condensed it was to show the image of a nude blonde. "Mr. Pertin, sir," she caroled sweetly, "welcome aboard! Tonight for your entertainment, sir, you may watch me star in The Belle of Bellatrix. A thriller-drama of the love of a human beauty for a mutated alien and its fatal consequences. Feel the fear of the terrified girl! Share the wrath of her human lover! Feel the coils of the monster around her! Taste its dying blood! All these available by using the sen-sat coils in the small cabinet by your right hand. We have many other stereostage fiches, Mr. Pertin, and -- " He finally got the fiche turned off and the nude blonde vanished, still smiling. She dissipated as the camera zoomed in at her until at the end all that was left was a Cheshire-cat smile and the memory of her pale, slim figure. Then the stereo stage blinked, swirled with color, solidified and Doc Chimp's homely face was staring out at him. "Got you," cried Pertin, pleased. "I didn't think I would be so lucky." "You weren't," said the chimp. "I called you. I want to volunteer for something." The chimpanzee face looked subduedr Pertin said, "What?" "I think I ought to take a look around," said Doc Chimp sadly. "God knows I don't want to. But most of the beings will be tied down to pressure cocoons and I'm not." "Good idea," said Pertin, a little surprised. He hadn't known the chimp well on Sun One -- it wasn't that he was prejudiced .against mutated animals, but of course they didn't have much in common. But he had an impression of Doc Chimp's personality that was at variance with the act of volunteering for a solitary excursion into what might be trouble. Humorous, pleasure-seeking, a little lazy -- that was how he would have described the chimp. "And thanks," he added. "Meanwhile I'll just send a report to Sun One if I can figure out how to use this stereo stage." "Ah," said Doc Chimp, the mocking light in his eyes again, "allow me to instruct you, mighty human. You know, I figured you'd be too involved with high-level considerations to take much interest in hardware. So I checked out all the instrumentation with the TWorlie on Sun One before we left." Pertin to learn to operate the stereo stage in his cocoon -- it was not, after all, basically anything but a stereo stage and they were common all over the galaxy. Then he lifted himself on one elbow against the surging thrusts of the drive -- the cocoon's self-adjusting circuits buzzed busily, trying to compensate for his unusual position -- and watched the chimp cautiously lever himself # IF over the side of his own cocoon, timing his movements to the surging of the drive, drop clumsily to the floor, mutter to himself angrily for i moment and then slowly, painfully lurfiber off on all fours. He did not look back. Pertin felt curiously better, as though he had discovered a friend where he had expected only an inadequate tool. He worked the controls of the stereo stage, got himself a circuit through to the recording fiches of the tachyon communicator and spoke. "This is Ben James Pertin," he said, "reporting in to Sun One. Doc Chimp and I have arrived safely. There was no apparent problem from the transmission-r-at least, we look all right, are breathing and our hearts are working. Whether our brains are scrambled or not I could not say. No more than when we volunteered for this, anyway, I'd guess. We have seen very little of the probe, have contacted only a few of the personnel, but in general the situation appears much as we understood it. At present I am in an acceleration couch, waiting for the next period of free fall for further investigation. Doc Chimp, who is performing very well and deserves credit; has voluntarily left on a scouting mission. "I'll report again when I have something to say," he finished. "And -- personal to Ben Charles Pertin: Have a good time on my honeymoon." He snapped off the stage before he could decide to erase the last part of the message. In spite of the best efforts of the cocoon his kidneys were beginning to feel bruised. The noise was even more of a problem. Efficient soundproofing kept it out of the cocoon as airborne vibrations -- but there was too'much of it to be shut out entirely. It seeped through as a continual thunder and squeal. Pertin shut it out of his mind, thought of sleep, decided to brush up on his knowledge of the "hardware." His first attempt at the fiche library of the stereo stage was only half successful. He just managed to avert the reappearance of the bareskinned blonde and found he had secured a record transmitted by another member of the crew, race unspecified, apparently for a sort of public stereo-stage broadcast on its home planet. He shut out of his mind the public broadcaster he should have been getting ready to marry about this time -- some thousands of light-years away he was getting ready to marry her -- and discovered that the name of the vessel was the Aurora , or Dawn . The sound was, of course, different in the T'Worlie tongue and they had named it -- but he learned it held the same connotations of new day and bright glowing promise in both cultures. He also found that he had only limited facilities for recreation -- well, he had expected that. There were tape-fiche libraries for almost every known race of beings, some special high-pressure atmosphere chambers for a. few of the exotics. That was it. K i had not learned exactly what he wanted, so he tried again. But instead of getting a fiche on the ship itself he got one on its mission, evidently a briefing record dubbed for humans. It was narrated by a man Pertin recognized as a minor functionary on Sun One. He spoke in a high-pitched voice, smiling emptily at the stereo pickup: "We will show you all that is known about Object Lambda. First we will locate it, as it would be seen from Earth if visible at that distance." Behind the speaker another stereo-stage tank glowed, shimmered and filled with a universe of stars. Two of the brighter ones pulsed to call attention to themselves as the man spoke... "Those stars are Benetnasch in Ursa Major and Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici. Those faint stars over there -- " as he spoke a faint line of light ran around an area of the tank, enclosing it in a square -- " are in Coma Berenices, near the north galactic pole. Now we'll take a closer look." Benetnasch and Cor Caroli swam aside. The faint stars on Coma Berenices grew brighter, spreading apart, as the. whole field seemed to move. The bright points fled out of the sides of the stage, and the few remaining ones became brighter until only a few were left -- and beyond them ghostly faint blurs that were no longer part of the Milky Way but galaxies in their own right. TTie illusion of motion stopped. Another square of light formed around a patch of blackness in the center of the stage, indistinguishable from the emptiness around it. The man ' said, "Now we've reached the limits of Sol-orbiting instruments. Object Lambda is at the center of that square, but it is invisible. It is slightly better in the far infrared." The pattern of stars shimmered. Some became brighter, some dimmer, and in the center of the square appeared what might have been a faint and shapeless glow. "This is not instantaneous," explained the lecturer. "It's long exposure and image-intensified. The Object would never have been detected in routine sweeps from Sol-based instruments. Even the TWorlie scouts first detected it only because of a chance occultation of some stars in the Milky Way itself, seen from beyond. What we will show you next is not aa actual observation but an artifact as it would look from Earth, as deduced from all available observations." The object brightened a halfdozen magnitudes as he spoke. "As you see, it has a sort of tipped-disk IF shape, like certain classifications of external galaxies. However, that's not what it is. First of all, it is far too small, perhaps only two or three A.U. in diameter. Second, its spectrum is wrong. "At its apparent distance, as determined by its angular diameter -- if it were indeed a galaxy -- it should be receding at a major fraction of the speed of light. Of course we know from triangulation from the T'Worlie ships that that distance is wrong by a good many orders of magnitude. But according to its spectrum displacement it is actually approaching the Milky Way at nearly relativistic speeds." The image blurred and disappeared and the plump human was standing there by himself. He said with satisfaction, "The T'Worlie scout has confirmed the speed as accurate in the range of # kps. Its position relative to Earth is some # light-years from Sol, in the direction of a point near the northern fringe of Coma Berenices. It is not an object from our galaxy. There are no spiral arms in that direction and few isolated stars or clusters much nearer than Sol itself. "The T'Worlie backplotted its position from all observations of their drones, as recorded over the past several thousand years. Most of the data are ambiguous, but they did establish a probable line of flight. Their hope was to find a galaxy from which it might have been ejected and then to try to discover the reason for its high-velocity. "But they were only partly successful -- I should say, only possibly successful. No such galaxy was detected. They did, however, find scattered star swarms which they believe to be the fragments of a galaxy that collapsed and then years ago. It is the present working hypothesis that Object Lambda was ejected from that galaxy, by what means we cannot say." The speaker's expression became enthusiastic. "Because of the anomalous nature of Object Lambda," he said, "the all-race conference on Sol One decided to transmit a full-size scout ship through the drone equipment and to staff it with a crew of volunteers of all races." Volunteers! thought Pertin, grimacing. "And after considerable effort in negotiating, it was agreed to include Earth humans as part of the crew. The political implications of this step are of enormous consequence and reflect the true coming of age of Earth humanity in the galaxywide I confraternity of civilized peoples. Thank you," he said, bowed, smiled and disappeared as the fiche came to an end. Not a minute too soon, thought Pertin. A little more of that and he would have been ill. The cocoon had a fine built-in waste handling system, but there was no sense in overloading it. IV had been talking about when she accused him of an "Earthman's burden" complex. This whole deal sounded pompous, stupid and faintly threatening, he realized, as it was put by the man in the briefing fiche. He tried to get his mind off that track -- because he didn't want to question the cause for which he was, after all, going to die, and because above all he didn't want to think about Zara Doy. He was in the middle of trying to get The Belle of Bellatrix back on the stage when he became aware that something was scratching angrily at his cocoon. For a moment he thought he was dreaming. He glanced back at the fading nude on the screen, then out at the nude girl who stood there. But Pertin was a pretty superior type and he oriented himself quickly. It was no girl. It was not even human. It was a female young Earth person in shape, but the stuff of which the shape was constructed was not flesh and blood. I It was silvery and bright, with a metallic hue. The eyes were orange and glowing. The hair was not made up of separate tendrils; it was a single solid piece, sculptured slightly for cosmetic effect. The creature was, in short, he realized, an "edited" version of some methane-breather or even more exotic chemistry, some being who was structurally non-viable in oxygen-bearing air and had had itself transmitted in an altered form to take up tis duties on Aurora . And it was holding a scrap of what looked like paper. The paper was not right side up. Pertin gestured and Anally the "girl" understood and rotated it until, able to read it, he signaled her to stop. He read: Sorry, Ben James, but you've got to get out of there. Things are worse than we thought. Angel here will carry you to me. They guarantee she won't drop you and squash you and actually, Ben James, this seems to be a matter of life and death. The note was signed "Doc." The girl, did not speak, but the orange eyes blazed imperatively and the hands beckoned. Pertin sighed, and opened the lid of his cocoon. "Okay Angel," he said. "Carry me away." Astonishingly, being carried by the pseudo-girl was actually worse than being toted by the robot, but she moved more slowly and Pertin had a chance to see something of the ship. The Aurora was roughly cone-shaped. At the nose and through the midsection were living quarters for the several score individuals who manned it -- that was where they had entered to scene. Since the crew varied widely, it needed a good deal of room. Space had been provided for methanedwellers, space-flyers and cold IF creatures as well as the more comhowever, most of the nonviables had either stayed home or sent proxies or edited copies, so these spaces were largely empty. "Below" the living quarters and the space for the exotics were the hardware instrument sections. Below them still -- in the sense of being sternward, toward the thrusters -- was a layer of dense liquid for a radiation shield. It was not very effective, but of course, Pertin thought, it didn't have to keep them alive forever, since there was neither hope for nor point in the system's doing so. Below the shield wasthe tachyon transmission deck, where Pertin and the chimp had arrived. And beyond them, the thrusters and shock-absorbing gear. Since the Aurora was decelerating, it happened that the "stern" of the ship came first in line of flight, but that made little difference to anyone aboard. It was "down." And down was the direction they were going. The pseudo-girl had wrapped Pertin in a thick blanket of something like heavy-duty plastic fbam. It was not as good as his cocoon by a long shot, but it kept him from dying of the ceaseless grinding changes in gravity as the thrusters shoved and the "girl" levered herself down a ladder-like series of projecting rods. She did not speak, nor acknowledge Pertin's efforts to speak to her. Either there was something wrong with his Pmal translator or she simply was not a conversationalist. But she was considerate enough and when they reached the instrument deck Pertin was bruised and sick, but alive. "Ben James!" cried a familiar voice. "I told you Angel would get you here all right!" Doc Chimp, thin lips grinning widely, scrambled over to help the silvery girl put him down, propping him against a sloping bulkhead so he could look around. His shipmates were worth looking at -- a nightmare crew if he ever had seen one. Besides the pseudo-girl and the mutated chimp, there was a Sheliak in its high-G mode, looking like a flattened baker's bun on the deck. A web of plastic foam hid an apparently humansized figure. Pertin also saw a row of small cocoons. Two were empty -- the third contained a T'Worlie. From a speaker outside the cocoon a T'Worlie voice whistled a greeting and Pertin's Pmal translated: "I recognize your identity, Ben James Pertin. It is advantageous to all of us that you are here." "Thanks, Nimmie," said Pertin, but he was staring at the plastic wrappings. A human being seemed to be concealed, in them and, apart from himself, he knew of only one human being on the Aurora -- one he didn't really want to think about. He asked softly, "Doc, who's over there?" Doc Chimp said, "Who? Her? Oh, I don't know her name. She's Purchased People for some low-G type of other. But she's on our side." The wfcb stirred and a face peered out. It was human enough as far as features went, but the emptiness in the eyes told Pertin. that Doc Chimp was right. "Anyway," chattered the chimp, "I better fill you in. Hell's really broken loose, Ben James. A bunch of beings tried to wreck the telescope. Not sure but what they've done it, too -- the Scorpian's trying to see how much of it can be salvaged. If it and Angel here hadn't come along we'd be out of business till they could send new instruments through -- and by then it would likely be too late." The thuud-screech was a lot closer here -- apart from everything else, it was making Pertin's head pound. "What beings?" he managed to croak. "Didn't see them. I just saw somebody disappearing into a passage, and then the Shetiak here came hellfire fast after him and saw me. For a minute he thought I was them." Doc Chimp cocked his head ruefully. "You could have found yourself short a monkey right there, Ben James, if I hadn't talked fast. So he commandeered me to help and we came down here to hold the fort. Oh, how sore my soles and knuckles are, Ben James, against the pounding of those rockets! But I did my duty. Then we got the observatory deck sealed off -- they'd used a chemical explosive On the telescope and sprung a port -- and then I happened to think of my human master, off there watching The Belle of Bellatrix without a care, and I persuaded Angel to fetch you." Pertin frowned. "I don't quite see why," he objected. "I can't help.""You can stay alive," declared the chimp. "I didn't tell you all of it. When they came for the telescope they had to get past the T'Worlie here. Well, you know TWorlie can't do much against any being that can operate in highG. But they tried to do what they could. And two of them got killed." dinal rule among the races of the galaxy was that no race could ever kill Or seriously' maim a member of another. Even on Sun One disciplinary problems were handled within the delegation of the race that produced the problem. Some provision existed for a body of other races sitting in judgment if the offending race failed to deal with the problem, but it had never had to be invoked. Pertin would hardly have believed the chimp if Nimmie hadn't confirmed the facts. "They're crazy, then," said Pertin. "All right. We'll have to get a report back to Sun One. Nimmie, is your stereo stage operating?" "Confirm that it is operative," sang the Pmal in his ear. "State IF that such a transmission has already been sent." "Good. I'll have to send one, too, and I think the rest of us should, but that can wait." He tried to shift position as the floor surged particularly viciously. "Since we're here they probably won't try anything right away. What we need is a combout -- get every being on board to account for his whereabouts and try to identify the ones who did it. For that we need a little free-fall. Can we arrange that?" The silvery girl spoke at last. Apparently she had heard everything, had simply seen no need to comment. "We can have a little freefall. We can have a comb-out. We probably won't need to arrange it right away as next observation period is only -- " A meaningless squawk followed. Doc Chimp filled in: "She means about fifteen minutes away." It took a moment for Pertin to realize that the girl's words had been in English. He looked at her curiously. "Fine," he said. "How many were involved in the bombing?" "There were not less than three nor more than eight." piped the Pmal translator, responding to the T'Worlie's whistle. "Out of how many in the crew?" The TWorlie hesitated. "There are in excess of three hundred thousand beings at present existing within the ship hull. Of these a large number are collective creatures." "Not counting the Boaty Bits -- I mean how many individuals?" "There are not less then two hundred forty nor more than two hundred fifty." Pertin said, "So the troublemakers arc a tiny fraction. That's good. We'll broadcast a shipwide alarm. Most of the crew will cooperate -- " He stopped, staring at the silver pseudo-girl. "What's the matter?" She had stretched out her fingertips toward the entrance port, almost in the traditional pose of a human sleepwalker. "The matter," she said in her incongruous colloquial English, the tones as deep as Pertin's own, "is that the tiny fraction of troublemakers is coming back." I N A moment no one needed the silvery girl's fingers to pick up the audios -- the rushing sound grew rapidly louder, a harsh, crackling, electrical noise like the patter of a collapsing charge field. Into the room burst what looked at first like a single huge blue eye. "Sirian!" howled Doc Chimp in terror, and tried to leap out of the way. Even his simian muscles did not have the strength to leap against the suddenly surging G-force of the rockets. He stumbled and fell heavily against the silvery girl. At one stroke two-thirds of the beings able to move at all in the high-G field werq immobilized -- thd T'Worlie, the Purchased Person and Ben Pertin himself were wholly useless while the rockets were on. The Sirian, moving by electrostatic forces, was immune to mere # and #-G thrusts. He bore with him something that glittered, carried under the great forward eye in a pair of crablike pincers, tiny and almost invisible. Pertin, thrown heedlessly just inside the portal, was first in the creature's path. He did not even have time to realize he was in danger before the Sirian was upon him. Then, oddly, the great eye stared at him. The Sirian paused, hesitated and turned away. It propelled its glittering metal object at the bulkhead and at once reversed its field and sped away. If that was another bomb, Pertin thought, they'd all had it now; beyond that bulkhead was empty space from the last attack. The rest of the ship might be saved if the automatic seals worked fast enough, but he himself, the Purchased Person, Doc Chimp and the TWorlie would be boiled into outer space. But he had forgotten the Sheliak. The soggy baker's bun that slumped on the deck and had taken no part in the conversation was still in fact an able and intelligent being. It acted faster than Pertin would have believed possible. The bun shape elongated itself into a sort of stemmed sea anemone, flowed like lightning up and down around the bomb, surrounding it, drowning it in thick alien flesh. It expolded. The only sign the rest of them could see was a quick convulsive shudder of the Sheliak's tissue. Even the noise was muffled and almost inaudible in the constant thunder of the rockets. for a moment and, with a flash of the last light Of its life, died. They had defended themselves, but at the cost of one of their allies. As though on cue the thunder of the rockets stopped and they found themselves blessedly free of the crushing G forces. Doc Chimp, struggling to untangle himself from the silvery girl, went flying across the chamber, ricocheted against a wall and brought up short next, to where Pertin was struggling to disassociate himself from the plastic foam. "Are you all right, Ben James?" Pertin pushed himself free and caught the outstretched chimpanzee arm for stability. He ached in every bone and muscle and he was drenched in sweat from the trapped heat of the plastic wrap or from fear -- he could not say. "I think so," he said. "Why do you suppose he did that?" "What? Who? You mean the Sheliak? Why, I guess it's their nature, Ben James -- " "No, not the Sheliak," said Pertin, but he didn't say out loud what it was that was perplexing him. He only thought it to himself. Why had the Sirian look at him IF with death in his eye, then stopped and turned away? things wrong with Pertin's calculations. First, the odds weren't quite as favorable has he had guessed; he had not thought of the fact that the bombers might have allies who were as gravity-bound as himself and so hadn't put inan appearance. Second, he had not realized that most of the beings aboard the Aurora simply didn't want to be bothered with the mission. They were apathetic, hopeless, detached, or in some exotic mood with no human analogue. And perhaps, here and there, they just weren't about to take orders from an upstart biped from Earth. The other problem was that the work of the Aurora lay in observing Object Lambda, not in tracking down aberrant entities. Not even the fact that beings of one or two races had killed beings of another race could cloud the goal. The Scorpian robot, when it returned from patching together what it could of the damaged optical equipment, would not even take time to talk to Pertin. It went at once to its assigned place in the instrument chamber and began to oversee the series of observations -- this had been the reason, evidently, for the thrust stoppage. Pertin could not even get the freefall period extended to permit a full-scale search of the ship. TheTWorlie pointed out to him, reasonably enough, that since they were all going to die anyhow the first priority was the errand for which they had all undertaken to give their lives -- to complete the observation of Object Lambda. And the laws of celestial dynamics were remorseless. A certain quantum of delta-V had to be applied to Aurora's course. There was only finite time in which to do it. If they failed to put in the necessary velocity change the probe would fly past Object Lambda too fast to accomplish its several missions. So the TWorlie were going to work on their instrument observations and nothing else, although they certainly wished him well, they indicated, in his search for the guilty ones. What he had to work with-turned out tp be a party of five -- Pertin, Doc Chimp, the pseudo-girl, the Purchased-People woman and a small kittenish being who had joined the party to greet them on arrival. They couldn't even recruit the Boaty Bits to their cause. As soon as the collective creatures had learned of the bombing attempt they had departed en masse to swarm in some obscure corner of the vessel and unite all their intelligence on the problem of deciding what to do about it. Pertin saw a great deal of the ship, but found no criminals. The one being they had certainly identified, the Sirian, eluded their search. If a being the size of a horse, emitting an electrostatic crackle every time it moved, could avoid the searchers, what chance had they for locating a party of unidentified marauders? Not any chance, answered echo. They found nothing.V. plished was to move the acceleration cocoons for the low-G beings, whom they had come to think of as friends, close enough together so that they could watch out for each other when the delta-V thrust immobilized them. There were many such periods. By the nature of things, there had to be. It was thuuud-screech for at least eighty per cent of the time, cut up the individual portions as they would. The Aurora had thousands of kps of velocity to shed as it overtook Lambda, if they were to avoid overrunning it too fast for orbiting their package. It made little difference how it felt to the members of the crew. To Pertin it felt like being kicked in the kidneys four or five limes a minute for hours on end. With allowances for variations in anatomy, it felt very much the same to most of the beings. Frail little creatures like the T'Worlie were particularly hard hit -- or would have been if it hadn't been for the fact that the Aurora was their own design, cocoons and all, and many thousands of years of thought had gone into reducing the damage to a T'Worlie frame in a cocoon. It was an advantage of a sort, but against it was the overpowering debit that on their native planet the surface gravity was less than a quarter-G. They were not creatures designed for strain. The unfelt pain was the worst. ,Every explosion produced noise and thrust, but it also sleeted a few more curies of radiation through the crew's bodies and brought each member a few hours nearer to death. As the damage was not felt -- and asThere was nothing that could be done about it -- the beings seldom spoke of it to each other. For a half-dozefi periods no further violence bccurred on board and the Aurora went on about its business. Pertin reserved his time in the cocoon for taping his endless reports to Sun One and for inspecting and studying the observation results on Object Lambda. When there was the blissful floating surcease -- for half an hour or so at a time -- he used it to roam around the ship. His announced purpose was to watch out for trouble. As time passed and trouble did not come he stopped talking about it, but continued to roam. He was interested in the ship on its own merits. Simply by its novelty it helped take his mind off the growing number of things he didn't want to think about. The Aurora was the first real spaceship IF he had ever seen. The concept seemed strange to him, considered against the tens of thousands of light-years he had traveled since he volunteered for tachyon transmission from Earth. It was normal enough, though. Sun One was thick with beings who had crossed and recrossed the galaxy a dozen times and never seen a spaceship at all. Object Lambda was getting perceptibly closer -- not to the eye, to be sure. No eye on the ship was in a position to see it anyway. But the cameras were able to make out more and more detail -- not easily or well, because its intrinsic luminosity was so very low and in the low-energy long-wave part of the spectrum at that. They had even discovered that Lambda was not alone in space. Huge as it was, nearly two A.U. in diameter, it carried with it little orbiting fleas. The biggest of them was not much more than a mile through and the distance was still enormous, but the T'Worlie instruments had managed to detect them, even identify them. The longest periods of free-fall came when the T'-Worlie deployed their photon mirrors at the end of a tether, far from even the vibration of a footstep or shifting weight of robot mass in the ship -- then their optical emulsions greedily drank up the scant flow of photons from Lambda and converted them into images. If they had had a great deal of time, they could have answered all questions from there, or nearly all. They were in intergalactic space, and there was no such thing as haze beyond the advance scattering of their own rocket ejecta. But they had no time -- the delta-V equation still ruled them and one of its tricky parentheses said that deceleration earlywas worth twice as much as deceleration late, since it gave them more time to slow down before they reached  the neighborhood of Lambda. And then there was the mere fact of their rapid approach. The image did not remain still in the TWorlie mirrors. It grew. Minutely, to be sure, but enough so that an exposure for more than an hour or so began to fuzz. Even so, they learned. The nearest to pleasure Pertin ever found in a TWorlie was when a particularly fine series of photographs had been taken and it was found to show a hint, a shadow, finally an orbital line for the biggest of the objects that circled Lambda. The pleasure was spoiled for Pertin when the calculations of orbit and time turned out to be impossible; Lambda would have had to have the density of the solar wind to have such a slow satellite. ' But the TWorlie didn't mind. Explanations would come. If not then, later. V ding acceleration and the briefer periods of his frenzied darting about the ship, Pertin was nearly always bone-weary and aching. Sleep did not rest him. Communication with Sun One was more and more an effort. The twelve-hour wait between transmission and reply -- often it was more, when the other beings on the ship had queued up for their own transmissions -- destroyed the rhythm of communication. By the time he had a response to his report pf the attack on the instrument chamber he was already relaxing in his comforting awareness that the attack had not been repeated. Once he himself -- or anyway that other self named Ben Charles Pertin -- reported to him. The experience put Ben James Pertin into a tailspin that only a carefully metered dose of tranquilizers from the cocoon's store could deal with. From the expression on the other Ben Pertin's face, it was some strain for him, too. But the worst from Sun. One was not from his other self; it was from Gerald York Bielowitz, who acknowledged a report, suggested some additional instrument readings that would be desirable, started to sign off, hesitated and then added: "Oh, you'll be interested, I think. Zara Doy and Ben Charles were married three hours ago." Pertin did not remembef turning off the stereo stage or seeing the little figure collapse. He lay there for a long time while the cocoon stroked and soothed him, lifted him, lowered him, gently massaged what pains it could from his limbs. At some point he fell asleep. In his dream Ben Charles Pertin married Zara Doy, but he was Ben Charles and the two of them, intoxicated with the wine they drank and with each other, spoke sadly and wistfully about the other Ben Pertin who was busy about the task of dying on an alien spaceship a galaxy away. When he woke up and remembered he was that other Ben Pertin he was in an instant unfocused rage. him. "Hey, Boss," he whined. "Listen, wake up. I've been limping around this hellhole of a ship looking for the Scorpian robot and -- " "Shut up," snarled Pertin through the outside communicator of his cocoon. His tone took the chimp aback. He slumped on his haunches, staring at Pertin's cocoon. He was in bad shape, what he saw -- the bright green plume was sagging under the thrust of the rockets, the paws and knuckles were scarred and stained. That was why he was there, of course -- feet and paws. He could withstand the constantly varying Gforce of the thrusters with only a good deal of pain, so it was his job to do what Pertin could not when he was bound to the cocoon. A part of Pertin's brain told him that if he IF tried he probably could find ways of making the job easier. The chimp's expression abruptly Vas no longer woebegone. It was angry. "Sure," he said thickly, "I'll shut up. Why not? We'll all shut up before long. Dead beings are all pretty quiet." Pertin fought to control his anger. "We'll be dead all right. What difference does it make? Do you think this is a real life, what we're doing here? Back on Sun One we're alive and well -- this is only a dream!" The chimp wailed, "Ben James', I'm tired and I hurt. I'm sorry if I said something wrong. Look, I'll go away and come back, only -- " "Do that," snapped Pertin, and turned off the outside communicator. The agitated hairy face stared dolefully in at him. Doc Chimp was by no means a jungle primate. The shape of his skull was different. The structure of his respiratory system was different. The very chemicals that flowed in his blood were different. But he was not human either. Doc Chimp -- his formal name was not that, but it was all Pertin had ever called him -- was one of the mutated animals that had been constructed for special purposes in the molecular biology plants on Earth. His quadridexterous limbs made the ape particularly useful even in free-fall, where he could fling himself about with perfect ease from toe-rest to hand-hold, while humans like Pertin clumsily sprawled and spun. But he had his drawbacks. A chimpanzee is simply not a human. His physiology is one count against him. He cannot develop the brain of a human because his skull is the wrong shape -- and because the chemistry of his blod does not carry enough nourishment to meet the demands of abstract thought. He cannot fully master speech because he lacks the physical equipment to form the wide variety of phonemes in human language. The molecular-biology people knew how to deal with that. They could do things like widening the angle of the cranium called the kyphosis, thus allowing the brain to round out full frontal lobes, or restructuring tongue and palate, even adding new serum components to the blood like the alpha # globulins that bind human hemoglobin. In practical terms what had been done to Doc Chimp and his siblings was to speed up evolution. But that was not quite enough. Two generations back Doc Chimp's ancestors could form only one or two of the simplest words and learn rote trljks -- they lacked conceptual thought entirely. Doc Chimp had capacity. He did not have background or tradition. His # kyphosis was close to the human average so that his skull was domed -- he possessed a forehead, could remember complicated instructions and perform difficult tasks. He was capable of assimilating the equivalent of a tradeschool education in skill and of conducting the equivalent of cocktail-party conversation in performance. What he lacked was ego. His psychological profile was high in cyclothymia but also in ergic tension -- he was always adventurous and always afraid. His emotional index was about equal to a human five-year-old's. Frightened, he ran. Angered, he struck out. Baffled, he wept... Staring back through the cover of the cocoon, Pertin relented. "Sorry," he said, snapping the communicator back on. "What were you trying to tell me?" "I've lost the Scorpian," wailed the chimp, "Well? Are you supposed to be his keeper?" "Be easy on me, Ben James," begged the chimpanzee. "I hurt all over. The robot was supposed to be getting ready for some new instruments that were coming in. He isn't there. The stuffs piling up in the transmission chamber and nobody to do anything about it. I'm afraid it'll get damaged." "What about what's-her-name -- Angel? Can't she store it?" "She's trying. But the Scorpian is a specialist in this stuff and she isn't. None of the other high-G creatures is, as far as I can tell and -- oh, Ben James, I've traveled so far trying to find someone who can help!" He was a pitiable sight, his fur .unpreened, his gay clothes smudged and wrinkled. Pertin said, "You've done your best. Doc. There is nothing I can do until the thrust stops -- half an hour or so. Why don't you rest up for a while?" "Thanks, Ben James!" cried the chimp gratefully. "I'll just take a few minutes. Wake me, will you? I -- I -- " But he was already clambering into the cocoon, his spiderlike arms shaking with strain. Pertin lay back and closed his own eyes, allowing the cocoon to do its best, which amounted to increasing its rate of stroking his back muscles, trying mindlessly to calm him down. It had seemed very easy, back on Sun One, to volunteer for a task even though the end of it was his certain death. He had not counted on the fact that death did not come like the turning of a switch but slowly and with increasing pain -- or that he would be watching friends die before him: when finally he could move. He thrust his own way to the tachyon transmission chamber, hurling himself down the corridors carelessly and almost slamming into what turned out to be the silver, pseudo-girl. He didn't recognize the creature at first, for she had unfurled enormous silver-film wings and looked like a tinsel Christmastree angel as she rushed past him. IF . In the tachyon chamber he found the TWorlie, Nimmie, supervising an octopoidal creature from one of the Core stars in transporting crated equipment to an empty chamber. "What's happened? Where did Angel go? What's this stuff?" Pertin demanded, all at once. Nimmie paused and hung in the air before him, balancing himself against stray currents of air with casual movements of his wings. He whistled a methodical answer and the Pmal translator converted it to his stately and precise form of speech in English: "Of those events which have occurred that which appears most significant is the arrival of eight hundred mass units of observing equipment. A currently occurring event is that this equipment is in process of being installed. A complicating event is that the Scorpian artificial-intelligence being has elected to engage his attention in other areas. There are other events but of lesser significance. The being you name Angel has gone to bring the Beta Bootis collective beings to assist in the aforesaid installation. The reason for this is that they are catalogued as possessing qualifications on this instrumentation similar to tjiat of the artificial-intelligence Scorpian. The precise nature of the stuff is tachyar observing equipment. I offer an additional observation -- the purpose of it is to map and survey Object Lambda. I offer another additional observation -- it will add to the radiation load by a factor of not less than three nor more than eight." The T'Worlie hung silently in front of him, waiting for him to respond. It had a long wait. Pertin was trying to assimilate the information he had just received. Afactor of not less than three... That meant that his life expectancy was not a matter of months or weeks. It might only be days. Tachyar was simple enough in concept. It was like the ancient electromagnetic radar sets of Earth -- the difference was that it used the faster-than-light tachyons to scan a distant object and return an echo of its shape and size. Like ancient radar and sonar, tachyar generated a beam and measured reflections. The problem in using tachyar was the magnitude of the beam. Vast energies were used and the fraction wasted because of the natural inefficiency of the process produced ionizing radiation in large amplitudes. Sun One must be taking the question of Object Lambda's satellites seriously if it was sending tachyar equipment to study them. The cost was high. It would be paid in the shortened lives of those aboardr T HE single planet of the goldenyellow star Beta Bootis was like a cooler, older Venus. Because it was farther from its sun it was spared the huge flow of heat that cooked Venus sterile, but it possessed the same enormously deep, enormously dense atmosphere. It was spared the loss of its liquid water and its surface was covered an average of thirty miles deep in an oceanic soup. That was where the Boaty Bits had evolved. Aquatic in origin, they could survive on Sun One or the probe ship only in edited forms adapted for air-breathing -- they could not live on high-gravity planets at all, since they had only the feeblest mechanisms for propelling themselves about their native seas. An individual Boaty Bit was about as useful as an infant jellyfish, and not much more intelligent. That didn't matter. The Boaty Bits never operated as individuals. Their swarming instinct was overpowering and linked together they had a collective intelligence that was a direct function of their Boaty Bits equaled a man. On their home planet they sometimes joined tr more, but those groupings could be maintained only briefly even in their oceans and were never attained in their air-breathing edited forms. When they arrived in the tachyon receiver chamber, they immediately took command. They were not specialists in tachyar gear. They were generalists. The skills required to assemble and install the crated instruments were built into their collective intelligence. What they lacked was operating organs, but the T'Worlie, his octopoidal assistant, Ben James Pertin and every other being who came nearby were conscripted to be their hands and legs. It was slow work. It would have been impossible in a gravity field for the T'Worlie or even for Pertin himself. But in free-fall they were able to tug and guide the components into place and the T Worlie had mass enough to make the connections and calibrate the equipment. When they were nearly done Doc Chimp turned up, angry because he had been left behind, and his muscle finished the job quickly. As they were closing up, a blast of white sound came from the tachyon receiving chamber and warning lights flashed. Doc Chimp spun around, his wide jaw gaping. "Something important coming in?" he guessed. "I don't know, but let's go look." They thrust themselves toward the chamber, got there just as the portal opened. Three Sheliaks emerged. They flashed out of the lock with a hollow hooting, long black shapes that rocketed toward the watching Terrestrials and bounced down on the green metal surface of the chamber. They clung in spite of the lack of gravity and flowed abruptly IF into new shapes -- black velvet globes, thigh high. Three more emerged -- and three more. When Fifteen had come to rest on the floor of the chamber the transmission stopped. Without a detectable sign all of them moved in synchronization. From flattened spheres, like baker's buns set in a tray, they suddenly turned luminous, flowing with patterns of soft color, -- then elongated themselves and stretched up tapered necks that rose as tall as a man. The tallest of them, the first through the chamber and the nearest to Ben James Pertin, made a noise like compressed gas escaping. Pertin's Pmal unit translated: "Take notice. We are under the direction of the collective council of Sun One. We are to take command of this vessel and all other beings aboard are to follow our orders." Pertin's curiosity was suddenly transmuted into anger, a radiant rage that flooded his mind and overruled his inhibitions. "The hell you say! I've had no such instructions from the Earth representatives and I deny your authority." The Sheliak paused, the long neck swaying back and forth. "Your wishes are immaterial," it stated at last. "We can destroy you." Doc Chimp chattered nervously, "Don't make him mad, Ben James. You know how Sheliaks are." Pertin did; they were among the few races carrying built-in weaponry. On the infrequent occasions when the galaxy found itself troubled by unruly barbarians Sheliaks were employed to quiet the opposition -- they were the Foreign Legion of the galaxy. The long neck swayed toward the mutated chimpanzee. From the narrow orifice at its tip, sound exploded again and the translators shouted at the chimp: "Your name. Your function. Reply at once." "I am Napier Chimski, technician," the chimp replied bravely. The vase shape swung toward Pertin. "Your name and function." "Oh, Ben James Pertin," he said, distracted by hearing Doc Chimp's real name for the first time. "I'm an engineer. But don't go so fast. I've just come from Sun One myself and I know there's no authority for one race to impose its will on another. I will certainly report this at once." The Sheliak swayed silently for a moment -- first toward him, then away. At last it said, "No orders for-you at present. Go about your business." Pertin drew himself up, holding to a wall brace. "You're my business," he said. "There are murdering beings aboard this ship. If you're here by order of Sun One as you say, why don't you go find them and leave us alone?" The Sheliak did not reply. All fifteen of them were swaying silently now. Perhaps they were conferring with each other -- Sheliaks had learned vocal sounds only to talk to other races of the galaxy and the riddle of how they communciated among themselves was still unsolved. "I certainly will report this," Pertin added. There was still no response. The pointless confrontation might have gone on, but it was interrupted by the bright thrice-repeated flash of white light that meant the thrusters were about to go into operation again. "Oh, hell," groaned Pertin. "Doc, we'd better get back to our cocoons." "Never too soon for me, Ben James," agreed the chimp fervently, staring at the Sheliaks. "Let's go." Doc Chimp and Pertin raced for the cocoons. The warning had cauglit, others short. The corridors were full of low-G beings hurrying back to safety before the fusion rockets began again. The Boaty Bits arrowed along at top velocity, like a cartoon drawing of a swarm of wasps. An octopoidal creature launched itself from a wall off the end of the corridor with a multiple thrust of its legs and spun away, tentacles waving crazily. There was a thundering roar and three Sheliaks raced off, then another three and another, in V formations. A being like a six-legged spider monkey bounced back and forth, scratching and clawing for footholds, whining irritably to itself in a high-pitched tone. And abruptly: "Ben James -- look." Doc Chimp was staring down a broad transverse corridor. Pertin saw a creature like an enormous blue eye, at least a foot across. It swerved as he looked, revealing the body behind the eye -- a tapered torpedo shape glittering with patterned scales like blue glass. A stubby wing spread on each side, the leading edge thick and scaled and flowing smoothly into the body, the thin trailing edge a flutter of blue. Beyond the creature Pertin saw something bright, nfietallic and angular. "It's the Sirian, Ben James. The one that tried to kill us all. And wasn't that the Scorpian robot with him?" Pertin reached out, grabbed a handhold and checked himself. The chimpanzee reacted a moment later and also stopped himself a yard or two farther down. "What are you doing, Ben James?" "I'm going after them," Pertin snapped. "The Sirian's one of the murders. And the robot's up to something, too." "No, Ben James! You can't take the G-force. Let's let the Sheliaks take care of them -- that's what they're here for." The featureless green light of the corridor faded and changed to a dull crimson glow. That was the IF short-term warning -- less than thirty seconds remained before the rockets began. Pertin cursed. The chjmp was right, of course. "Oh, hell," he groaned. "All right, let's go -- " VI ) time to spare. They rolled into their cocoons as the first thrust struck and a moment later the regular repeated sound of the rockets reached them. The webbing spread itself over Pertin -- he fell into the warm, receiving shape of the cocoon, but resisted its comfort. While it was still adjusting to his shape he was stabbing at the controls of the stereo stage, trying to summon all the cocoon-bound beings on the ship into conference. The automatic dialing circuits were equal to the job -- the call was not something that was often made, but the physical capacity for such a conference existed. But not this time. All lines were busy. Every being on the ship, it appeared, was already using his stereo stage for purposes of his own -- most likely frying to transmit a tachyon message to his own people at Sun One, Pertin knew. He fell back-and let the cocoon massage him. Thuuuuud-screech. Thuuuuuud screech. The thrust felt more powerful than before, the tempo a bit faster. The thunder and groan of the drive made it nearly impossible forPertin to think, but he had to think. The problem on his mind was not one of the obvious ones -- what to do about the Sheliaks, how to deal with the murderers, the completion of the mission. His mind worried at those a moment at a time and then let them go. They required action, not thought, and action was not available to him while the fusion rockets roared. Instead he thought about his unpleasant discovery that there wasn't much in being a hero. His heroism had been entered into lightly enough, but he supposed that was not in itself rare. How many Medal of Honor winners had volunteered for a combat patrol simply because they were bored with sitting in a foxhole -- Ind had found themselves caught up in events that made them immortal reputations? But his heroism was hot even going to get him a medal. No one would ever really know what was happening on this ship, because it was absolutely certain there would be no survivors. Either Aurora's mission would succeed -- in which event the galaxy at large would accept the crew's sacrifice complacently-or it would fail. In the latter case the beings on board would all be thought of, when they were thought of at all, as that sorry bunch that wasted itself for nothing. Ben James Pert in bounced about in his acceleration couch, trying to make terms with a double-bind. His was the first generation of men who knew that they could live -- somehow -- until they died of old age. This would be true even if they were run over by a truck or murdered by a lunatic. Ben Pertin might die, but Ben Pertin would live. Pertin and his fellow humans who had duplicated themselves for tachyon transmission were not immortal. They owned all the decaying weaknesses of the flesh. Their brain cells grew fewer in number every day, like yours and mine. The collagen hardened in their tissues. The calcium migrated remorselessly from bone to blood vessel. They would die, each of them. But each one of them had the statistical certainty that not all of him would die prematurely. One Ben Pertin might die of cancer, another of pneumonia. One might succumb to an OD of the drugs that made these paradoxes briefly tolerable for some. Another might cut his throat. Another might perish pointlessly in an expendable job. But some Ben Pertin (who would always be the Ben Pertin to himself, at least) would survive and throw off as many identical copies of himself as he wished or circumstances required. It gave them a certain courage in the face of death. The personal involvement that every other generation of man had felt -- the shrieking rage that when he went some irreplaceable part of the universe would be gone forever -- was no longer there. They were not individually irreplaceable at all -- they replaced themselves with tachyon copies. Nevertheless, when each of them died he felt that death as a death and saw it as the same grinning skull of fear that it had been for Adam. And when that death was close it was terrifying. With the thud and rasp of metal roaring at him, his cocoon seesawing in the violent deceleration of the rockets, tired, sick, angry and hopeless, Ben James Pertin faced the fact that there was nothing left in his life anywhere that would give him one more moment's joy. thousands of light-years away, was trying to soothe his bride. He said, "Honey, I knew what I was getting into when I through with it. That other me on the ship doesn't feel any different about it." Zara Pertin said harshly, "That other you is going to die, Ben Charles." "But I'll still be alive." "And he'll be dead. Don't you IF understand me? I love you. And he is you-and I don't like to think about what is happening to him." She turned over, giving her back a chance to collect some of the UV tan from the lamps overhead, and took off her goggles. She said, "What's it like there now, Ben?" "Well -- " he said. "No, I want to know. Tell me." Ben Charles looked around the simulated little beach beside the great water tank that was their "ocean." No one else was near the spot -- he and Zara had come here for that reason, but Ben Charles found himself wishing for an interruption. She turned her head and looked at him and he shrugged. "All right. It's bad," he said. "The sensors in his acceleration cocoon already report some destruction of the white corpuscles. Pretty soon he'll start having nosebleeds -- then he'll bleed internally. He'll be getting weaker, running a temperature. He has had more radiation than he can recover from and he keeps getting more. Before long he'll die." He paused, then answered his wife's unspoken question: "He'll probably go within a week." Ben Charles propped himself up on one arm -- an easy posture. Even here the effective gravity was only a negligible fraction of Earth-normal. He looked out at the thousand-foot cusp of water, curving upward to meet the bulkhead at the far end. Other water-tolerant beings were using the reservoir for their own equivalents of sport -- it was a favorite spot for such purposes. But none of the others were human. Ben Charles Pertin worried for a moment at the permanent problem of what he meant when he spoke of death. He came to several conclusions. The first was that it was spoiling his honeymoon. The second was that he did not feel as though he were dying -- in spite of the fact that he knew that some light-years away he was doing just that -- and even there loving Zara. The third was that he could not spend any more time on that particular concern. The bad thing about dying, he reflected, was that you leave someone grieving -- and Zara, he knew, was grieving. This brought him back to the question: who was dying? He looked at his wife. She was not weeping now, but she had been. The stain of drying tears lay at the corners of her eyes, "I'm sorry, honey," he said. She shook her head without words. After a moment he made himself add: "It might not even be a week. Radiation alone will give him a few days, but there are plenty of other things on the probe that could kill him. Some of the beings are becoming violent. The electronic ones are malfunctioning, because the radiation affects their synapses. They're going insane, really. A lot of the organic ones are sick. All of them are scared. There have been deaths. From violence." "I should have gone with you," Zara said thoughtfully. "Oh, now, really! That's stupid! What would be the point?" "I would have felt better about it -- and so would you. He." She stood up, smiling, her mind made up. "If you have to go again, dear," she said, "I'm going, too. Now I'm hungry. Race you back to the apartment!" of the little bodies orbiting Lambda -- the mass estimates were right, thus the density estimates were right. Object Lambda's average density was about that of a high vacuum. Nevertheless, it appeared to have a solid surface. Pertin greeted the news with apathy. There were more immediately important developments on the ship and the ultimate purpose for which the ship existed didn't seem particularly interesting hriy more. For one thing, the tachyon transmission chamber was shut down. For better or for worse, there would be no more imports, no additional beings, no additions to the crew -- nothing. The chamber's last function had been to bring in freshly minted structural members and drive units. They were now being assembled into a small drone. It took form as a squat dense object, all fusion drive and instruments with no living space for a crew. It wpuld have no crew. It would carry, nothing but itself and the tachyon receiving crystal that had been the Aurora's. Pertin had no part in the construction project. The Boaty Bits directed it and the metal pseudo-girl and a few other high-G types carried it out. He looked in on it once or twice. Besides the structural part, brought in on the tachyon receiver, the small ship used bulkheads and beams from Aurora itself. It seemed to Ben James Pertin that vital parts of the parent ship were being seriously weakened. The fact interested him as an engineer. As a being whose life depended on the structural integrity of the Aurora he didn't consider any concern he felt worth mentioning. Whatever was happening was planned. If the life of the Aurora was being shortened thereby, it was because the beings doing the planning had decided the ship was wholly expendable. The only non-expendable part of the Aurora now was the little drone being put together in its belly. The drone comprised only three elements: A tiny tachyon receiving unit -- built around the crystal from Auroras own -- in a globular body fitted with weak handling-propulsors, suitable only for correcting minor errors in the elements of an orbit. A thick half-shell of metalIF bonded ceramics on one side, an ablation shield designed to flake and burn away, disposing of excess heat. And, outside the ablation shield, the enormous fusion-propulsion engines. It was a high-deceleration drone. It would be launched from the mother ship at some point near Object Lambda. Its fusion jets would slow it radically. Stressed as it was, with no living creatures aboard, it could endure hundred-G delta-V forces. But Pertin's engineer's eye recognized the implications of the design. Even those forces would not be enough. The drone would make use of Object Lambda's enormously deep atmosphere as well. It would dip into it, shedding velocity by burning it off as friction, blazing like a meteorite from its ablation surfaces. That frightful crunch would slow it to manageable relative speeds -- as it came out of its first skip into Lambda's air it would be close enough to orbital velocity for capture. Then its propulsors could take over the simpler job of making neat the elements of the orbit -- and a tachyon receiver would be in place around Object Lambda. What about the mother ship? The implications were clear to Pertin. All the evidence he needed was obvious in the construction of the probe. If such forces were needed to put the probe in orbit, there was no hope that Aurora could join it. Its kilotons of mass were simply too great for the forces available to deal with. Even if the forces were available its living cargo would be pulped by the deltaV. Aurora would drop its cargo, flash by Object Lambda and continue through intergalactic space. It would no longer have fusion mass for its reactors. It would stop decelerating -- to all intents and purposes, it would be only another chunk of intergalactic debris on a pointless orbit to nowhere. Its course would continue to take it toward the galaxy itself. In time it would approach some of the inhabited worlds within mere lightyears, perhaps. But that time would come too late to matter to anyone. It was a matter of thousands of years of travel time to even the fringe stars of the galaxy -- and by then there would be little left of even the dust of its crew. They had been written off. tion phases were getting longer, the zero-G pauses for observations shorter and less frequent. Sun One had lost interest in the observations that could be' conducted from Aurora. It was only waiting for the secondary probe to go into orbit. All through the ship, the living crew members were showing attrition. They were weaker and less rational, less capable of fine distinctions. The automatic machinery was running the ship. As it poured the last of its fuel reserves into space to brake its flight it manufactured enormous clouds of radioactive gas. They were not a hazard to the ship's crew -- it was too late for such trivial affairs to matter to the doomed beings. But they had caused some concern to the planners on Sun One. A thousand generations later they might be a pollution problem. But by then, no doubt, tachyon transport would itself have been superseded and no one would any longer trouble with such primitive concerns as the The gas clouds as they departed did leave some trace of ionizing radiation, added to the larger increments from the blasts themselves and from the tachyar. The combined radiation was a witches' brew of gammas and alphas and betas -- now and then primary particles that coursed through the entire space of the ship from hull to hull struck an atomic nucleus and released a tiny, deadly shower of secondaries. It was the secondaries, the gammas, that did the dirty work. They interfered with the electronic functions of the computers, robots and metal beings. They damaged the instrumentation of the ship. Above all, they coursed through the organic matter they encountered, knocking out an electron here, loosening a molecular bond' there, damaging a cell nucleus, making a blood vessel more permeable. The whole organic crew was on hourly doses of antirads, giving support to their internal workings. It was not enough. Still the radiation soaked in and struck at them. Blood, ichor, sap or stew of exotic biologies, the fluids that circulated in their bodies changed and grew less capable of supporting life. Physically they grew weaker. Mentally they became cloudy. Taken out of the environment and rushed to an anti-rad clinic -- like victims of an industrial accident -- many of them still could have been saved. But there was no place to take them. No part of the ship was free of penetrating ionizing radiation and every hour more and more of the chemistry of their bodies was damaged. of Doc Chimp. Pertin roused himself. The thud and screech of the drive was still loud in his ear. Every time the floor drove up to meet the cocoon the single huge bruise his body had become screamed with pain. Inside his chest his lungs felt as though they had broken loose and were beaten sore against the inside of his rib cage. He peered Wearily out of the IF cocoon. The chimp was staring pathetically up at him. The great green plume of his hat was broken. His fur was splotched with dirt and blood. The rubbery features of his face looked almost as they always had, except for an open cut along the flat, sculptured nose. "What?" demanded Pertin thickly. "I have to hide, Ben James. The Sheliaks are after me." Pertin tried to sit up and could not. "They're not here to hurt you," he pointed out. The chimpwhimpered, bobbing on all four limbs as he braced himself against the rocket thrust. "They will! They're mad, Ben James. They killed the T'Worlie. For nothing -- just killed him. And they almost killed me." "What were you doing?" "Nothing! Well, I -- I was watching their mating ritual. But that wasn't it -- " "You idiot," groaned Pertin. "Look, can you climb in here with me?" "No, Ben James, I don't have the strength." "It's either that or let them catch you." The chimpanzee whimpered in fear. Then abruptly, on the upsurge of the ship against its shock absorbers, sprang to the side of the cocoon. Pertin grabbed at him and pulled him inside just as the next thrust caught them. Doc Chimp weighed some two hundred pounds at Earth's surface. The delta-V gave him a momentary weight of nearly half a ton, all concentrated on Pertin's shoulder and chest. He grunted explosively. The chimp was caught with part of his side still across the metal lip of the cocoon, but he made no sound beyond the steady sotto-voce mumble of fear. Pertin tried to make room behind him, in a place where the cocoon had never been designed to take a load. It tried its mechanical best to give support to the double mass. It was not adequate to the job. Pertin discovered when the next thrust came that his arm was still caught under the chimp. He helped, managed to free it on the upsurge, discovered it was not broken. He slammed down the privacy curtain, hoping the Sheliaks would not look inside if they came. "Now," he panted, "what did you say about Nimmie?" "He's dead, Ben James. They killed him. I didn't mean any harm," the chimp sobbed. "You know how the Sheliaks reproduce -- by budding, like terrestrial plants. The young ones sprout out of the old ones and grow until they're mature enough to be detached." "I know." Pertin had only the vaguest acquaintance with Sheliaks, but everybody knew that much. They didn't havesexes, but their conjugation provided a union that shuffled up the genes. "Well, that didn't look like fun to me, but I wanted to see. Nimmie told me to go away. He couldn't -- he was in one of the spare cocoons, and couldn't move. But he said they'd be mad." The chimp switched his position and Pertin shouted in pain as his upper thigh took part of the chimp's weight on a rocket thrust. "Sorry, Ben James. It was disgusting, the way they did it! Any two of them can get the urge. They sort of melt down and flow together like jelly. All the body cells migrate, pair off and fuse. Finally they form again into a sort of cactus-shaped vegetable thing that buds off haploid, mobile creatures. Those are the Sheliaks we see." "You wanted to watch that?" asked Pertin, almost able to laugh in spite of discomfort, in spite of Nimmie, in spite of everything. "Yes, Ben James. Just for curiosity. And then there's my friend. Fireball. He's the Sheliaic who was here all along. He was nice, Ben James. I miss him." "I didn't know you knew any Sheliaks." "Not well. But he was with me, helping to guard all of you. And we talked." "You sound as if he's dead, too." "Might as well be. That union is a sort of individual suicide. It's something you do for the race and because your glands push you that way. But it's the end for the individual. It wipes out all conscious memory and individual personality. I guess that's why Fireball couldn't understand our notions of sex. "Anyway," he said, "it was all right while Fireball was here alone. He wasn't lonely; or anyway, he didn't want any other Sheliaks around. When they're in danger, you see, they just can't help conjugating. It's a survival mechanism. The radiation was danger, and he knew that the only way for him to keep alive was to stay away from his own people. When the new ones came aboard he was actually afraid of them. He knew when they came close they were likely to set off a biological process they couldn't control. And when it was over -- " The chimp swallowed. He thrust himself up on an elbow, regardless of pain, and stared into Pertin's eyes. "He didn't know me, Ben James! The two new ones that were half him, they came after me. The T'Worlie saw what was happening and tried to stop them -- and that's how I got away, while they were there to run to in this ship?" they found the T'Worlie easily enough. He was floating upside down, purplish drops of blood, perfectly round, floating beside him. The little vibrissae around his sphincter mouth, more like cat's whiskers than anything on a proper earthly bat, were perfectly still. Nimmie was rigid. The pattern of IF five eyes was unmoving. The intricate pattern of blotches of color on his filmy wings was fading,. There was no one else around. "What'll we do with him, Ben James? chattered the chimp. "Throw him out into space, I guess," Pertin said harshly. Normally the mass would Be useful in the tachyon receiver, but there were to be no more incoming tachyon transmissions. It didn't do to think of that. He stared at the TWorlie. A slow incrustation of a thick gel was matting the fluffy surface of Nimmie's chest, and where it had once protruded sharply, like a bird's wishbone, it was crushed and concave. Pertin felt the muscles on his face drawing taut, perhaps partly because of the intense vinegar reek. He said, "Why would the. Sheliaks break up equipment?" The chimpanzee stared at the mess in the room. Bright green and orange transistors and microchips were scattered like jigsaw pieces in the air. "I don't know, Ben James! None of that was that way when I ran out of here. Do you suppose they just lost their temper?" "Sheliaks don't lose their temper that way. They broke up instruments on purpose. What was coming in before you decided to play Peeping Tom?" "Oh -- " The chimp thought. "More reports on Object Lambda. The density was confirmed. Very low. Like a sparse cloud of interstellar gas." "We already knew it was CloudCuckoo Land. That couldn't have had any effect on them." "Something did, Ben James," cried the chimp. "Look, we've got to do something. They'll be looking for me, and -- " "Unless," said Pertin thoughtfully, "it wasn't the Sheliaks who did it. The robot was. up to something. And there are still a couple of Purchased People not accounted for me, and -- " "Too late!" howled the chimp. "Listen, Ben James! Somebody's coming!" B UT it wasn't the Sheliaks who 'came in on . them -- it was Angel, the silver pseudo-girl, the heavy-planet creature in human form. Her fingers were. outstretched toward them, listening, as her great foil wings drove her forward. Behind her came the Scorpian robot. They made an eerie pair, the striking orange-eyed girl with her coif of metallic hair and steel-bright body hues and the mechanical creature shaped like a metal octopus. Its central body was a massive disk, the color of the pseudo-girl's flesh, and its silvery tentacles made a fringe of snakes, around it. A greenish membrane that bulged above the upper surface of the disk fluttered, producing a drum-roll of sound. Pertin's Pmal translator obediently turned it into recognizable words: "Do not resist. We wish you to come with us." "Where?" he demanded. There was no answer, at least not in words. Pertin was caught in something like a metal whip that stung a trail of fire around his waist. It was one of the robot's tentacles. It pinned his arms and the pseudo-girl launched herself at him, her metal fist catching him full in the face. Floating as he was, the blow was robbed of some of its force, but it doubled him, flung him back against the robot's lash, dazed with pain and sobbing for breath. He heard a cry of anguish from Doc Chimp, but could not turn to see what was happening. The vinegary smell of the dead T' Worlie penetrated his nostrils, mixing with the tang of his own blood. "Why?" he croaked, and tried to raise his arms to defend himself as the girl dropped toward him again. She did not answer. She was on him like a great silvery bat, metal feet kicking, shining fists flying. The lights went out. He lost touch with space and time. Pertin was not wholly unconscious, but he was so close to it, so filled with pain and confusion, that he could hardiy remember what happened next. He had a fugitive impression of great shapes whirling around him, then of being carried away while someone behind him sobbed his name, the voice diminishing slowly in the distance. Much later he opened his eyes. He w#s alone in a part of the ship he knew only sketchily. A large open cocoon hung from a wall and inside it was what looked like one of the Purchased People. Pertin's face was swollen and his eyes were not focusing well at all -- he squinted, but could not make out the features on the person in the cocoon. It appeared to be male, however, and it appeared to be in the last stages of dissolution. It moved and looked toward him. A caricature of a smile disturbed the weeks-old beard and the dry tongue licked the lips. A cracked voice muttered something, the tone hoarse and indistinguishable. "Who are you? What do you want?" demanded Ben James Pertin. The figure rasped a sort of hacking cough, that perhaps was meant for a chuckle. It tried again and this time its words came clear enough -- clear and familiar in a way Pertin had not expected. "I want to talk to you, Ben," it croaked. "We have a lot in common, you know." Pertin frowned, then his swollen eyes widened. He pushed himself toward the swathed figure, caught himself at the lip of the cocoon and stared down. The eyes that looked up at him were pain-filled but familiar. He was looking into his own, battered, obviously dying face. IF months ago. He had gone to the tachyon transmitter and light-heartedly enough given his blueprint to the scanners and allowed one self of him to be beamed to the Aurora. It had not seemed like an important thing to do. At that time it had not been clear to him that the Aurora was a doomed ship. At that time he had had no one to consult but himself -- Zara Doy had still been only a casual acquaintance, a new girl from Earth with a pretty face. "Ben Frank," he whispered. "Right as rain," croaked the ghastly voice. "And I know about you. You're Ben James Pertin and you've been aboard two weeks now. Not very thoughtful of you, failing to visit a dying relative." "But I thought you were already dead! They said -- I mean, I wouldn't have had to come, if -- " "Blaming me, Ben James? Well, why shouldn't you? How long have I lain here blaming you -- and me -- and all the Ben Pertins there ever were." A spasm of coughing racked him, but he talked right through it. "I wanted them to think I was dead. Only fair, isn't it? They were their Project Lambda." "You?" "With a lot of help. My Sirian friends were the first and best, but there have been plenty since. It was the Sirians who told me you were aboard -- you gave one of them quite a start when he saw you in the instrument room. Wrecked his mission, you did." Coughing drowned out the voice. Ben Frank convulsively clutched at the cocoon monitor controls. A warning panel lit over the bed. He was very near death, but the cocoon was not yet defeated -- it metered colored fluids into the external blood supply that was trying to replace the destroyed blood cells. "I only have a few minutes," Ben Frank Pertin gasped. "I don't mind. But I'm not finished, Ben James. You have to finish for me. Destroy that probe. I don't want it to succeed. I don't want Sun One to get its orbiting body around Object Lambda." "But then we -- we'll all have died in vain!" "Of course it's in vain. What's the sense of all this? A chunk of useless matter -- thousands of lightyears from anywhere -- going nowhere. Project Lambda! Do you know how many lives it has cost? I want you to wreck it for me, Ben James, so those fools on Sun One will know better than to try this same stunt another time -- " "But it's not a stunt," objected Ben James Pertin. "It's important. That object is something special, solid but like a cloud -- " "Cloud-Cuckoo Land! It's not worth a single life. Anyway, it's done already, Ben James. My friends are wrecking the probe right now. I only called you here because -- " He paused, coughing terribly. The face that was so much like Ben James's own was aged with the weary agony of radiation death. "Because," he gasped, "I want some part of me to stay alive. If you keep the tachyon receiver you can live, Ben James. Weeks -- maybe months! But once it goes there will be no more food, no more air, no more fuel. I want -- " But what he wanted to say at the last Ben James Pertin would never know. His duplicate suddenly gasped for breath, made a stran. gling sound and was still. After a moment Ben James pulled the privacy screen over the face that was his own and turned to leave. Halfway to the launch chamber he ran into the Sheliaks. beings, one of them the Purchased People woman, the other Doc Chimp. The Sheliaks looked strange and in a moment Pertin realized why. They were smaller than they had been. Essentially they were children now, some of their mass lost when they budded. But their behavior was childish only in jts reckless disregard for consequences. As far as their quarry was concerned, it was lethal. Pertin did not pause to speculate on issues. Doc Chimp was in danger and Ben dove to the rescue. He collided with one of the Sheliaks. It was like tackling a six-foot lump of chilled, damp dough. No bones, no cushioning fat, just a great dense mass of muscular fiber. The Sheliak automatically cupped around him and, linked, they went flying into the wall. The corridor spun around him, a nightmare of blue-green light and red-black shadow and corpse-colored beings. "Stop!" roared Pertin. "Waitlisten to me -- " But no one wanted to talk. They were all on him, thrusting, striking, crushing, using whatever offensive capacities their mobile anatomies gave them. He fought back, using skills he had never known he had. His hands were black and slippery with blood, no doubt much of it his own. Bravely the woman and Doc Chimp had turned back to fight, but it was three of them against more than a dozen Sheliaks and the issue was not in doubt. What saved them was Angel, the silver pseudo-girl. Her carven face remote as a statue's, she drove toward them with great sweeps of her wings. Coronas of electrostatic fire haloed her fingers and wingtips -- something gun-shaped and deadly was in her hands. The Sheliaks, all at once and in unison, turned to meet her. The gun-shaped thing hissed and a white jet crackled toward them. It passed near enough to Pertin for him to IF feel a breath of icy death, but it did not strike him. It grazed the Sheliak who held him and at once the being stiffened and began to drift. Behind them, where the jet had struck, the wall became hidden under a broad patch of glittering frost. A cloud of white vapor billowed around it. In the haze Pertin caught sight of Doc Chimp and the Purchased People woman, momentarily forgotten as the Sheliaks turned against the stronger foe. The woman was badly hurt. Doc Chimp was helping her, his hairy face turned fearfully toward the Sheliaks. Pertin joined them and the three of them moved inconspicuously away. When they were two corridors away and the sounds of battle had diminished they paused and inspected their injuries. Pertin himself had only added a few bruises to a total that was already too large to worry about. The chimp was even more battered, but still operational. The woman was worse off. She was bleeding profusely from a gash on the upper arm. Her face was grotesquely puffed, both eyes were blackened and one leg was bent at an angle anatomically impossible to a whole bone. But she did not appear to feel pain. When Pertin spoke to her, she answered in English, "They don't consider it important. It will not prevent moving about and performing necessary functions." Doc Chimp was groaning and sobbing in pain. "Those Sheliaks!" he cried, feebly trying to groom his matted fur. "They're wholly out of control, Ben James. They tried again to wreck the probe -- may have done it by now if they've got enough power of concentration to remember what they were doing when we diverted their attention. And if Angel hasn't killed them all." Pertin said with a confidence he didn't feel, "She'll stop them. As long as we've got her on our side -- " v "On our side?" cried Doc Chimp. "Ben James, you don't know what you're saying. She's worse than they are!" "But she tried to rescue you." The Purchased woman said calmly, "That is wrong. She merely wanted to kill the Sheliaks." "That's right, Ben James. She's against all organic beings now. She's not ionizable, you see. Radiation doesn't bother her. The only thing that can kill her is deprivation of energy sources and that means the tachyon receiver. Once it's gone she will die as soon as the fuel runs out." Pertin said slowly, "Is it the same with the Scorpian robot?" The battered face nodded, the stub of the green plume jerking wildly. Pertin said, "that means we have to assume all nonorganic beings will feel the same and try Td prevent the launch. What about the other organics?" The Purchased woman recited emotionlessly: "The T'Worlie, all dead. Boaty Bits, more than half destroyed -- the remainder too few to make a collective entity intelligent enough to matter. Sirians and Core Stars races not observed in recent hours and must be presumed dead or neutralized. Sheliaks, destructive and purposeless." Pertin absorbed the information without shock, without reaction of any kind other than a strange impulse to laugh. "But -- but whom does that leave to see that the launch occurs?" "Nobody!" cried Doc Chimp. "Nobody at all, Ben James -- except us!" chamber ahead of the Shetiaks after all. No one else was there. The capsule, tiny bright tachyon crystal at its heart, lay silent and unmoving, connected to the main bulk of the ship by only a canopy designed to be jettisoned. Destruction had raged all around it, but it was still intact. Less than an hour remained until launch. "We'll build barricades," said Pertin. "Anything. Those wrecked instrument boards -- the spare plates and braces. Whatever we can move we'll pile against the entrance. All we have to do is delay them -- " But they had barely begun when brightness glinted in the approach corridor and the silvery pseudo-girl came toward them, followed by the tumbling form of the Scorpian robot. They-brought up short at the entrance, the robot with one slim tentacle coiled caressingly around the silver girl. Pertin put his weight behind the channel iron he had been about to emplace at the door and launched it toward the pair. The pseudo-girl made a sound that was partly laughter and partly the singing of a single piercing note and ihe Scorpian uncoiled a long silver sting. The sting reached out and touched Pertin. A blinding light stabbed from it, jolting him with a strong electric shock. The girl glided in, spreading her tattered wings. The stirred air bathed him in her strong scent, ether-sweet, with undertones like the pits of peaches. Pertin searched the bright silvery face and found no expression. It was no more human than a doll's. The Scorpian's silver tentacles thrust away the pitiful obstructions, making a sound like an enormous gong which Pettin's Pmal refused to translate. The Purchased woman intervened, hurling herself toward the robot, and was brushed heedlessly aside. She struck against the side of the probe ship, a blow that must have been agony to her human IF nervous system, but she did not cry out. Awkwardly she tried to project herself again into the fight. Pertin forced himself to join her. indicated that others were coming, and behind the great winged hulk of the pseudo-girl Pertin could see black shadow-shapes moving across the dimly lighted shaft, growing rapidly as they approached. "Oh, no!" moaned Doc Chimp. "Sheliaks and a Sirian!" The robot was not deflected from its single-minded purpose. It floated toward Pertin, green dome pulsing. An elongating tentacle struck out at Pertin like an endless silver snake, not to sting this time but to snare. It wrapped him in slick, chill coils. He fought free, was caught again -- and at last the Scorpian turned to confront the other beings. It arched its stinging jet, but held it poised, waiting. The Sirian was first into the launch chamber, a tapered, bluescaled torpedo shape fifteen feet long, all pliant wing and shining eye. With a ripple of trailing wing edges it flashed at the Scorpian. The sting coiled, jetting white light into the wide blue eye. The Sirian was not defenseless -- its own forces gathered the robot's charge and repelled it, sending the jet back at the robot, reinforced and multiplied. The pseudo-girl turned with great strokes of her wings, her three-fingered hand coming up with the gunshaped weapon that had killed Sheliaks. Desperately Pertin twisted to intercept her. Her wings were sadly battered now, but still gave her superior mobility; he missed her on the first try and crashed against a wall. Half blinded by his own blood, he doubled his legs under him and launched himself at her again. The gun-shaped thing swung to meet him and the white jet hissed at him. He heard a brittle crackling sound in the air and felt the breath of icy death. But the jet had missed and he was on her. With one hand he swung at her wrist. It was like striking a crowbar with his bare hand, but it jarred the weapon loose; and just then the battle between Scorpian and Sirian reached its climax. The Sirian's jet struck a vital place in the great green dome of the robot. It exploded. The mellow booming sound the robot made became a hollow jangle. The tentacles writhed and recoiled. It sprawled in the air, a grotesque huddle of tordrops of an acid that sizzled and burned where they struck. If the robot had known life, that life was gone -- it was dead. The silvery girl abandoned the fight with Pertin. With a great stroke of her wings she propelled herself to it, hovered over it, wailing an unearthly sound. And the great blue eye of the Sirian turned toward Pertin. Behind it the Sheliaks, late on the scene but ready for battle, were elongating their wrinkled necks toward him. "Wait! They -- they were misleading you. They were trying to prevent the launch, to save their own lives -- " The eye hesitated. "We're ded already," he croaked. "Nothing can help us now, not any organic creature. The radiation will kill us before long, even the Sheliaks. But the robot and the girl -- " He could hear his voice hissing or singing out of the aliens' Pmals. "The robot," he repeated, "and the altered copy that looks like a terrestrial female -- they weren't radiation-vulnerable. They could go on indefinitely. But the rest of us -- if we let them succeed in stopping the launch, then we all die for nothing!" The eye paused, irresolute. Then the foremost of the Sheliaks cried: "Fool! We, too, are not radiation-vulnerable! We simply ned to conjugate and be born again. But we must have the tachyon receiver -- and if you try to keep us from it you must die!" The three tapered tear-drop shapes, like a school of sharks in formation, plunged toward Pertin. The Sirian eye irresolutely turned toward them -- then, with decision, the being whirled to confront them. Contemptuously the Sheliaks changed course to meet it. The leading One widened a ruff of flesh to act like an instant air-brake. It stopped in the air, flowed with a dazzle of color, narrowed a neck toward the Sirian eye. The thin neck spat a stream of a yellow fluid. It struck the Sirian eye and clung, acid, adhesive, agonizing. The Sirian made an unearthly wailing noise at the sudden pain of the attack against which it had no built-in defenses. The great blue eye turned milky white; the huge body knotted in agony. But it still had strength to fire a jet of energy that caught all three Sheliaks. They died instantly, but the effort was the last for the Sirian. All its stored energy had gone into that pulse. The reflected cascade of burning energy came bouncing back, bathing the silvery girl and sending her reeling soundlessly into a wall, to flop into an ungainly, contorted mass that didn't move. Pertin was farther away and partly shielded by what was left of the robot -- even so the bolt lanced his skin with pain. But he was alive. Slowly and painfully he caught a hold-fast on the wall, steadied himself while he looked around. The Purchased People woman was dead, either bled empty or caught in that last furious bolt. The Sirian eye floated broken and aimless. The robot was destroyed. IF The pseudo-girl was drifting impotently away. The Sheliaks were cinders. The chamber was filled with the stench of many different kinds of death, but Pertin was still alive. Suddenly remembering, he cried, "Doc Chimp!" The ape was out of sight. Furiously Pertin ransacked the chamber and found him at the last, wedged between the wall of the probe and the ship's canopy, not quite dead but unconscious. Pertin looked down at him sadly and affectionately. It was nearly time to launch the probe and the question in Pertin's mind was: was it better to wake him up or to let him sleep as the probe was launched, the canopy jettisoned and all the air in the chamber puffed instantly and murderously away into space? The answer was taken out of his hands as the ape stirred, moaned softly and opened his eyes. He looked up at Ben James Pertin and said thickly, "The probe?" "It's all right," said Pertin. "We'll have to launch it by hand." "When, Ben James?" Pertin checked the time. "Just a few minutes now," he said. The ape grinned painfully. "That's good to know, Ben James," he said. "No more problems. No more aches and pains. I always thought I'd be afraid of dying, but, you know? To tell you the truth, I'm kind of looking forward to it." T HE process that animated the body of the silvery pseudo-girl was more like electrophoresis than chemistry, but it was vulnerable to attack. It was damaged now. But she was not dead. The great wings were broken and useless, but her limbs still moved, the inappropriate angel face still held its bleak, proud expression. She was in great pain. That is to say that all of the sensory nets of her edited body were transmitting messages of malfunction, damage and warning. She did not perceive them as a human perceives a toothache, a sensation so blinding that it can lead to suicide, but they did interfere with the few pleasurebound processes left to her -- reminiscence, forevision, contemplation. In the sense that these interfering messages were pain, she had experienced pain from the moment she floated out of the tachyon receiver on Aurora. All edited members of her race did. There was no way to rearrange their structures into forms viable in atmosphere and low-G thatwas comfortable for them. Time was when Angel had experienced pain only infrequently, and in ways that were soon mended. Time was when she had lain with her sisters in the icy methane slush of her native planet, absorbing energy from the radioactive elements that swam about them, growing, learning from the tutorials of her ortho-father, competing in the endless elimination battles of her race that finally won her the choice of assignments -- and ultimately led her to the Aurora and its imminent doom. Her race was not greatly interested in astronomy. They had known almost nothing of it until the first T'Worlie probe survived the crushing pressures of their atmosphere and brought them into contact. From the surface of their enormous planet, there were no stars to be seen. Even their aircraft never reached an altitude beyond dense yellow-gray clouds. What brought her to Aurora was the trait that her whole upbringing had trained into her: the competitive need to go farther and do more. It was not goal-oriented. It gained nothing from victories except the opportunity for further victories. The only victory now open to Angel was to survive -- and the only way to do it was by preventing the launching of the probe. She calculated she had strength enough left to destroy the two organic creatures in her way -- but only just. And only if she acted now. his hand frozen on the release lever. It was Doc Chimp who acted. He flung himself on the pseudo-girl. "Hurry up, Ben James!" he shouted. "She's too strong for me -- " His voice stopped, punctuated by a screech of pain as the silvery arm thrust him away like a cannon shot. The mutated chimp went flying into the floating wreckage of the Scorpian robot. The soft, frail dome of the skull, so cleverly mutated into the nearshape of man's own, impaled itself on a steel shard and the thoughtful, considering brain was destroyed. Pertin hardly even saw it happen. He was past the point for sorrow. It would be easy to let the pseudo-girl destroy him. At least one life would be saved -- hers. His no longer counted. He could hope for a few days, a week or two at the most, of being able to move and breathe. And what would it be like? Increasing pain. Hopeless fear. Regret. Envy. He pressed the lever just as her fingers touched him. The instant sharp slap of the explosion was the last sound he heard. xjL Pertin pressed the release, explosive shears cut the aft end of the ship free. The canopy flew out and away. The air puffed into emptiness. The probe rocket dropped free and began to align itself with the now near great disk of Object Lambda. The first thing Pertin felt was the sharp pain of the explosion, then the second, longer, more deadly pain as the air pressure dropped to instant zero and his blood and body fluids, the air in his lungs, the gases dissolved in his blood, tried to expand to fill the enormous IF emptiness all around. He caught a glimpse of the silvery girl, arms, legs and broken wings flailing, as she shot past him, careened off the jagged edge of metal where the shears had cut the probe satellite free and ricocheted out into emptiness. If she made a sound he could not hear it. There was no longer a way for him to hear. There was no longer a continuous medium of air to carry it. He had just a glimpse of the huge near surface of Object Lambda-the body he had called "Cuckoo" -- as it hung like a great dull circle in the empty sky, cutting off one spiral limb of his own, eternally lost, galaxy. He did not see the orienting jets of the satellite spurt carefully controlled measures of flame to position it for its final thrust He did not see the great violet flare of the fusion rockets that began to slow it. He could not see any of that, because by then he was dead. Neither he nor anyone else in the probe ship saw the great series of flares as the satellite fought to slow itself. Aurora flew on, without power, containing only the last flickerings of life for a few of its beings, back toward the galaxy. The probe left it as it drew more and more rapidly away. The of miles before the satellite made its first meteoric contact with the outer layers of that anomalously thick atmosphere around Cuckoo. Here was a spectacle worth watching, if there had been eyes left in Aurora to sec. The satellite plunged through a carefully planned chord of the atmosphere. Its ablative surface burned and tore away in a flare like all the fireworks in man's history going off at once. But there was none to see -- not Sirian eye nor Sheliak sensors, not T'Worlie or Earthman or alien of any kind. Where life remained at all it lacked strength for curiosity and it would not remain alive very long. Fifty thousand years later Aurora might pass near some sun of an outstretched spiral arm. But by then it would no longer matter to anyone, except as a historical curiosity from a time about which no one any longer cared. Sun One reported that the probe was in a stable orbit. The beings on Sun One responded with pleasure -- everyone was delighted that the project was a success. Now stable, the probe began to do the work for which it had been designed. The complex H-bomb sequencing units and the small, strong pressure-plate shock absorbers fell away, responding to remote controls from Sun One. They would never be used again. The tachyon receiving unit began to emit a stream of tiny metallic shards, none larger than a few inches in its greatest measure. When some hundreds of them were through, floating like a metallic mist around the drone, a quick small machine came through and began to catch them and link them together. Time passed -- hours and then days. A boxlike shape took form and became a larger tachyon receiver -- now ready for action. From tens of thousands of lightyears away an angular, crystalline machine flashed along the tachyon patterns and emerged in the new receiver. It was not alive. It was not even a robot or a proxy like the Purchased People. It was simply an automatic machine that sensed certain potentials and charges, doublechecked the strength of the materials and the solidity of the joints, directed the hufnmingbirdsized construction machine to correct a few faults and then reported that Cuckoo Station, the orbiting body around what had been called Object Lambda, was now ready to be built. A few hours later the first girders of what would eventually be a thousand-meter revolving wheel were being joined together. Plates appeared to surround the girders with an airtight sheath. Machines arrived to be stored in them. Atmosphere was pumped through to fill the chambers. The handling machines were busy, taxed beyond their capacities -- more handling machines were sent and soon the orbiting station was whole, supplied ; and being-rated. The first living beings appeared. ; A Sheliak, naked to the cold of inI tergalactic space (but for the brief l time of its transition to the orbiting : wheel unharmed by it.) A dozen ; PWorlies arrived in a single elastic air-bubble and scurried into the protection of the orbital wheel. There were Sirians, reptilian Aldebaranians, a hive of Boaty Bits, and at the last a couple of humans. One of them was named Ben Linc' Pertin. He floated out of the tachyon receiver in his pressure suit, his thruster unit at the ready in his hands. He did not use it at once. He paused a moment to look around. The first thing he did was to stare down at the enormous flat surface of Cuckoo, so near, so huge, so incredible as it hung like an endless shield in the sky. The second was to look back to where the galaxy lay, sparkling like the sea of stars it was. He could not see the doomship, but he knew it must be somewhere in his line of sight. There were no signals from it any more. There was no way of detecting it and would not be for tens of thousands of years. He stared for a moment, then shrugged. "Poor bastards," he whispered and turned and drove toward the wheel awaiting him.  IF galaxy Special Introductory Offer good in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate. to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now I For U.S. and Canada, For United Kingdom , send coupon to: send coupon to: New York. N.Y. # London SW# #RD G # issues of IF for #  # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # FnninsnH find in payment for my subscriotion as checked above Some Contributors Past and Present Pout "Anderson smc Asimov Alfred Bester J ernes BUsh Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heintein Donald H. Manzel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Siverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut Jr. AH the humans w o r e old heads I A I T 'HE accident that threatened to determine Woman Alice Lander's life expectancy was due to a combination of circumstances. Afterward she might blame the heat or her own exhaustion, but principally she would blame her Friend. Her Friend, she had already decided, was neurotic and objectionable and the long car journey had been a mistake. But Woman Lander considered herself a kindhearted soul and, as she was by trade a placement officer, she felt it her duty to take on this responsibility. The Friend knew Alice's occupation -- she had wheedled out this information within ten minutes of their meeting. A placement officer? she had grated in her metallic voice. That's interesting, my dear... And Alice had known what would happen. She had contracted to look after the Friend for a period of one week. During this week, she guessed, the Friend would make persistent, unnerving attempts . to get placed. She would play on Alice's sympathies. She would cajole and toward the end of the week she would threaten -- feebly and blusteringly. The road was dusty and the surface uneven -- puddle-like mirages came and went in the heat of the sun. Alice concentrated on her driving. She was thirty-nine years and six months old and her reactions were not what they had been. She looked forward to reaching the main road to Axminster and switching over to automatic. Not for the first time she regretted the public-spirited whim that had takrti her to the Westbury Transfer Center. Beside her the Friend whined, "Do you think there's a chance of my being placed at Axminster?" Alice forced herself to think calmly. The Friend had undergone her traumatic experience only yesterday, her fortieth birthday, when she had been taken to the transfer center and divested of her body. Her brain, wired up in what the medical profession facetiously called a "holding pattern" and surrounded with nutrient fluid, reposed in a black box on the seat of the hovercar. So the Friend, named Betty Benson, was naturally not feeling happy, although she was considerably luckier than the thousands of other Friendship Boxes at that moment reposing in Westbury and Axminster centers -- at least she had been contracted for. Alice tried to make allowances. Alice had had six bodies in her lifetime and had never been obliged to undergo the transitional period of Friendship due to the fact that placement officers were in the preferred trade  category. Every time she had reached the physical age of forty she . had been transferred immediately into the body of a six# . IF month-old child and had resumed life with hardly a break, although naturally somewhat incapacitated at first. Alice had never found the enforced idleness of her early childhoods a hardship -- she had looked on each as a pleasant extended vacation with no responsibilities preparatory to recommencing working life. She was, in fact, looking forward to her next transfer. But Betty Benson, whining with misery beside her, was one of the unlucky ones. It might be several years before she was placed and transferred into a host. Alice was responsible for dealing with the Axminster waiting list -- a formidable four hundred-odd thousand names reposed in the filing  The Act of # guaranteed virtually everyone then alive immortality. It specified that on hisher fiftieth birthday every person of Earth had to attend a Transfer Center, where hisher brain was removed and placed into the cranium of a six-month-old child. The person then went through another childhood to maturity and the process was repeated at his or her fiftieth birthday -- ad infinitum. So successful was the Act at curbing the human birthrate that by # it became pecessary to introduce what were euphemistically called Friendship boxes -- metal containers filled with nutrient fluid in which a brain was placed pending availability of a host body. In order to make the wait more pleasant the boxes were equipped with audio pickups and vocal chords. By the year # it was decided to decrease the active population (while birthrate had declined, the number of people had not) by reducing the age for Compulsory Transfer to #. Simultaneously came about the Preferred Trade concept, which made it uncabinets of her office. So she thought hard before answering the Friend's question -- she was not allowed to divulge precise information. "The Axminster list is pretty long," she admittedThen, in order to lessen the blow, she said, "But there's always a chance of your getting a makeover." A small chance. Makeovers seldom happened. "A makeover?" queried Friend Betty Benson eagerly. "You know -- you get friendly with someone in a preferred trade and when the time comes for her to take her transfer she might not want it. She may have had an unhappy last life or may just be tired and won't want to go through it all again. And sometimes you can find necessary for "essential personnel," such as government officials and civil servants, to spend any time in a Friendship box -- at age # they were transferred into a host body. By # old heads were firmly in the saddle and the world was solidly in the grip of the System. Almost no one remembered what a young person was. Androids were developed to serve as host bodies. Handsome, healthy and intelligent, grown from the best genetic material available, they were nevertheless discriminated against because of certain skin discolorations and most people continued to prefer waiting periods in Friendship boxes. The human birthrate, however, continued to drop -- and Friends in boxes wielded votes. The Total Death Act -- which prescribed termination of all persons convicted of any offense from overtime parking up -- was passed in # to shorten Friendship box waiting period for others. The events in this story took place in the year #. a Friend due to be placed, who decides she likes it better in the box and doesn't want a body. It sometimes happens, believe it or not. If so -- if someone really doesn't want her transfer -- she can assign it to whomever she likes; You, for instance." She didn't add that in order to achieve this the Friend had to make himself pretty damned pleasant. "Oh, my God. What chance would I stand of that?" The box, bouncing slightly on the seat, seemed almost to shrivel with despair. "Do I take it this is your first time as a Friend?" asked Alice. The box hesitated. "Yes," she admitted at last. It figured. Woman Betty Benson had been preferred in the past and had lost her status through some minor misdemeanor not sufficiently serious to be punishable by total death. She had come down in the world. She was bitter and prejudiced. And Alice had contracted to look after her for a week. The prospect was not inviting. She felt a fury knot her stomacn. She should have checked the recordsat the Center before being carried away by sympathy for the stack of black boxes she had seen muttering to each other,, bickering and bemoaning their inactivity. "Look here," she said, threading the car carefully through a village. "You and I have got to get along together for a week. Just a week, that's all -- and I promise that at the end of that time I'll try to find another woman to take you over. I won't send you back to the center unless there's no alternative." "Thanks." There was a hint of sarcasm in the reply. "Ah, might I ask how old you are, my dear?" The harsh voice had changed again. Its tone had become unctuous. It was astonishing, thought Alice, how the speaker transmitted each change in inflection. "I'm thirty-nine," she replied firmly, "and I have no intention of granting you a makeover. I'm not tired opictive life." "My dear, I wouldn't dream -- Look, I'm sorry. You must realize that all this is new to me. It's having no eyes that hurts the most. For the next week, will you be my eyes, Alice? Tell me what you see. Let me know what's happening." A sound psychological approach, thought Alice. The Friend would make Alice indispensable. And at the end of the week the Friend, in electronic tears, would beg Alice to keep her on -- she couldn't do without her. And so on, week after week, chasing the faint chance that Alice might, in six month's time, grant her a makeover and opt for the Friendship Box... Not a chance in the world. Playing along, she said, "We're doing fifty-three miles an hour and reaching the main road, thank God. We're passing through a villageIF I'm pulling in." "What brand of fuel does it sell?" asked the Friend eagerly. "Orinoco," lied Alice for a small, nasty satisfaction. She wound down the window and addressed the approaching child: "Six gallons, please." The youngster, a brown-eyed and handsome lad of about five years, wrestled with the heavy hose. He swore comprehensively as he tried to twist the hose toward the hovercar's fuel tank, only to have it writhe out of the chubby, scarred hands that betrayed him as an android. "I'm sorry," he apologized hastily. He tried again and this time successfully jammed the nozzle home. "Give me another year's growth and I'll sort this bastard out," he promised. Alice Lander looked at him reprovingly. "You're too small to work," she said. "You'll overtax yourself. You'll regret it later on." He stared at her furiously -- then his expression changed. "Hey," he exclaimed. "Aren't you Woman Lander? Of the Axminster placement office?" "That's right," skid Alice, surprised. She looked at him closely, but didn't recognize him. She had to admit that androids tended to look alike unless you knew them personally. He was smiling pleasantly now. "Surely you remember me? Christ, no -- of course you wouldn't. I was in my previous body." He made a gesture of snapping his Angers, but the soft young flesh remained silent. "But I remember you -- God, yes. You placed me five years agb." Five years ago? Alice thought hard, feeling slightly embarrassed. She took a shot in the dark. "Joel Wittig?" she tried hopefully. "Surely it can't be Joel Wittig?" The child grinned, delighted. "The same," he said. "You remembered. Five years ago you placed me within the day -- and me a garage hand. I'll always be grateful for that. I only hope I'm as lucky the next time -- " His voice trailed off as he caught sight of the box on the seat beside Alice. "It's a long time yet," he said eventually. "See you again. Look after yourself, Woman Lander." Alice drove off in a glow of selfesteem that was immediately dispelled by the Friend. "How come you placed him right away?" she asked with an abrupt return to her waspish manner. "How did he get to jump the queue?" Alice sighed. "He's an android." The Friend wouldn't have known, not being able to see. The box was a great leveler. "So what? Are they better than us or something?" "No, of course not," Alice replied, her steering unsteady as she veered, fast, on to themain Axminster road. "But their birth rate is rising while ours is falling. An android can usually transfer immediately on his fortieth birthday. Humans have to wait. It's as simple as that. Android babies are available to humans, you know." "I'd rather wait a thousand years than have an android body," exclaimed the Friend. "The very idea is disgusting!" "It's a better body than you may ever get otherwise," retorted Alice sharply. She felt strongly on the subject as a result of a certain blissful vacation many years ago. "Androids tend to be stronger than we are arid they have shown greater capacity for learning." "Nonsense," said the Friend forcefully. "That's just propaganda -- put out so they won't feel inferior with those awful fingers and those strawberry marks all over them." "A lot of them are unmarked." Alice decided it was time to change the subjects" We' re passing through a village now," she remarked. Children played at the roadside -- or were they children? These days you couldn't tell. She remembered her own childhood, her original childhood, and experienced a sense of loss. Then she told herself the reaction was ridiculous. There is one period of innocence in a person's life and one only. Compulsory transfer hadn't altered that. It had just made one's age of innocence seem such a long time ago. In a sentimental daze she scanned the small figures on the pavement. That was the reason she was too late in her instinctive stabbing at the brake when a child -- a real child -- dashed into the road almost under the skirts of the hovercar. Normally this would not have mattered -- the automatic control would have been activated by the child's crossing the safety beam. But in her enormous irritation at the Friend, Alice had forgotten to engage the automatic brake while swinging to the main road. Veering wildly from side to side the car raced on while Alice struggled to regain control. A small body flew at a tangent toward the houses, to lie still with its neck bent back at a terrifying angle. child whom Alice Lander struck. She knew this instantly -- a human child would have been mentally adult and would not have scuttled across the road in front of a speeding hovercar. But what caused her to whimper softly to herself as she switched hastily to automatic and accelerated rapidly was the fact that she was thirty-nine years and six months old and had committed a criminal offence in driving on a main road without engaging the automatic -- and as a result had injured a child. The fact that the child was an android made no difference -- Woman Lander had not one atom of prejudice in her makeup. She IF had outlived that sort of thing many lives ago. And a little over a hundred years ago she had gained a deep insight into the android personality as a result of a passionate love affair. So the reason she didn't stop was not the breed of her victim, but simply her own age. Thirty-nine years and six months. The countdown period, they called it -- the period when a person became ultra-cautious. A crime committed just before transfer meant, quite simply, the death sentence. Alice Lander suddenly had less than a year to live. The statutory refusal of future transfer, known ominously as total death, would be mandatory in her case. Her knuckles were white around the useless wheel and tears eased their hesitant way down her cheeks. "What was that noise?" asked the Friend. "I heard a thud just then." Alice didn't reply. Silently she struggled to adjust her emotions. She was Woman Alice Lander, an impeccable citizen, due for transfer in six month's time -- unless she opted for a premature, which was sometimes done in preferred trades when the body was failing. "I heard it clearly," grated the Friend. "You didn't hit anyone, did you?" Alice wondered if someone had gotten her number. The eyes of children are sharp. "Wouldn't do to have an accident at your age,"the box remarked. "Don't you think you ought to stop?" "Why?" asked Alice, at last under control. "Well, I mean, someone might be hurt. You had the car on automatic, of course?" "Of course. It was probably a bird, the road sensors only pick up at ground level." "Damned big bird. I didn't know the albatross was a visitor to these parts. Why are you driving so fast?" "I don't want to be late." "Late? What for? I thought we were just going to your place." "I thought we might -- take in a show or something." "You what?" The Friend's voice became suddenly smooth -- Alice imagined it was menacing. "Look, are you in some kind of trouble? I may be blind, but I can hear. Just then, after that bump, I could have sworn I heard you whimper." "Whimper?" Alice's voice uncontrollably rose a semitone. "You whimpered--like a carrier dog. It could be a nervous habit. I knew a man once who had one -- they tend to get hold of you and you can't get rid of them when you've been subject to them for over a hundred years. This man, whenever he laughed, used to snort right at the end of the laugh." Here the Friend obliged with an imitation. "Ha, ha, snort. Like a pig. He used to apologize afterward." "I'm sorry," said Alice desperately. "It's quite all right," the Friend assured her. "I didn't mind, but it had me worried for a moment. I wouldn't like to think you'd hit anybody. Not with a clean sheet and only six months to go. It would be tragic, as if we haven't got enough problems already, what with me and your long waiting list -- " At that moment it occurred to Alice that she was going to be blackmailed. II and the black main road was silvery. with heat. Alice was hungry, thirsty and in need of a washroom. She couldn't stop, however, because sooner or later the police, no doubt notified already, would be hard on her heels looking for a red hovercar, # International Motors license number B-#P. Traffic violations had become so rare during her several lives that she was no longer sure whether authorities still used road blocks and she held her breath at each blind curve, expecting to find her way barricaded. Her mouth was dry and foultasting. Another spasm clutched her lower abdomen and she tensed in the seat, glancing at the Friend by her side and for a moment almost envying the box its freedom from urgent natural functions. A signpost flashed by at an intersection -- twenty miles to Axminster. Increasing speed, she wondered if she could hold out that long. "I expect you could do with a cup of coffee," remarked the Friend. "Don't hurry on my account. Pull in and relax, why don't you? Traveling at this time of day and in the sun is tiring. Makes the eyes ache, I used to find -- then your vision starts playing tricks. Thank God for the automatic control, I used to say." pumps like sentinels at the roadside observing Alice's headlong progress. Above the high whine of the turbine she kept imagining she could hear the shriller, banshee wail of police pursuit. Axminster seven miles. "What was that?" queried the Friend suddenly, so that Alice, lost in misery, jumped. "I thought I heard something like a siren." "Nonsense," said Alice sharply, listening. "It's the engine. The oil level may be a bit low. It often makes a noise like that -- there's a leak somewhere." "Maybe you ought to slow down a bit." "We'll be all right. We're nearly there now." Axminster two miles. The concrete suburbs flashed by. The sound of the car's progress reIF bounded as a rhythmic pulsing from the lampposts. Alice throttled back, carefully observing the speed limit. She turned left at an intersection, right into a parkjng space, killed the engine and stepped out into the sudden heat of the city. She hurried around the car, seized the Friend and slammed the door. She glanced around frantically, got her bearings and plunged into a nearby john. Emerging gratefully, the Friend in her hand, she paused, stared, changed direction and walked with studied casualness into a supermarket. Behind her several uniformed men were examining the hovercar with professional interest. "Are we on our way to your place?" asked the Friend loudly and shoppers turned their heads. 'Tm just going to pick up a few things." "Don't bother on my account," said the Friend. "I don't eat, you Jcnow." Alice piled a random selection of groceries into a cart and wheeled it to the cash desk. Behind her rose a scream of protest as a shoplifter was apprehended. Alice placed her provisions on a turntable and the cashier rapidly totaled them up. He was tall and fair-haired. He smiled at Alice pleasantly. "Cash or charge?" "Charge," she said without thinking, handing over her code card. "Name?" The name was on the card, but the question was required by law. There was a commotion beside them as the shoplifter, a woman in "her late thirties, was dragged away ,by a uniformed store attendant. Her arms were pinned behind her back and the attendant was holding up Exhibit A, a small packet of soap powder. A jumble of desperate words tumbled from the woman's trembling lips. "For God's sake -- I was only looking at it -- I just picked it up to see if it had a lucky number, that's all, I swear. You can't do this to me -- I'm thirty-nine years old -- I'm thirty-nine years old!" "The name's Woman Alice Lander." Alice spun around. For a dreamlike moment she thought the name referred to the doomed woman. Then she realized that the Friend had replied to the cashier's question. Trying to control herself, she smiled at him nervously as he ran his forefinger down a list. Surely , she thought, they can't have caught up with me yet... It would take a while to trace her as the car's owner, assuming that they had already identified the vehicle with the accident. The police might merely have been carrying out one of their periodic roadworthiness spot : checks, she thought hopefully. She glanced through the supermarket window. The car was gone. The police had towed it away for further examination. The cashier smiled again, setting down the list. "Right," he said. He inserted the card into a slot, then returned it. "Shall we deliver for you?" "Thank you." She smiled back, weak with relief. "I thought you wanted the stuff now," said the Friend. "Deliver it, please," she said firmly as the cashier raised his eyebrows. He nodded and she moved away, contriving to strike the box heavily against the counter. The Friend squealed protest. She left through the rear doors of the supermarket, stepping into the abrupt sunshine and the quiet of a tree-shaded public park. Neat paths led past long bench seats on which people relaxed, faces turned to the gun. Some fed birds. The scene was still for a moment, taking it in, appreciating it deeply. She sat on a nearby bench. "Are we there?" asked the Friend. In the peaceful atmosphere of the park Alice began to collect her thoughts and get the recent runaway events into perspective. What, exactly, was her position? She had injured a child in a road accident and the police, by now, would have identified her car as being the one responsible. Before long thiy would have traced the car to her and her name would appear on the indicator boards as a wanted person. For just a moment she considered leaving the town and going into hiding in one of the remoter regions. Around the fringes of Dartmoor were abandoned cottages which, due to the difficulty of farming the rugged terrain, had never been ploughed under. It frequently happened that a criminal in his late thirties would disappear in that direction -- after all, he had nothing to lose. For a while she entertained the almost romantic notion of the simple existence -- a small cottage, a diet of roots and berries -- maybe she could catch and tame a wild goat... Then common sense took over. She would never get out of town. The Friend would make sure of that. If she abandoned the box, it would raise the alarm within minutes. If she took it, it would soon suspect that the journey was becoming long and would again raise the alarm. She had, however, one chance. "Are we there?" asked the Friend again. "Is this your place? I can hear birds. The sound's not right. There are no echoes. Where are we?" In a moment's sudden fury at the persistence of the Friend she contemplated dropping it over the bridge into the river or otherwise disposing of it permanently. But this again was impractical. She would be seen -- the box would be rescued immediately. IF Her only answer was a premature transfer. If she could reach a transfer center and persuade the doctors that she had good reason for her request, backed up by her authority as a placement officer. She might, with luck, obtain a quick transfer before her name appeared on the indicator boards. Then she would be in possession of a new young body and nobody could take that from her for another forty years. She might get a ten-year sentence for dangerous driving, but at least after that she would have thirty years of freedom before the statutory total death. "Where are we?" the Friend rasped again. "Are you there?" "I'm here. I'm just resting for a moment. I'm tired after the drive. We're in the park at Axminster -- it's very nice. There are a lot of late-thirties about -- dreaming about their next childhood, I expect. None of them can have more than a year to go by the look of them." This was a phenomenom of the countdown period. Many persons shortly due for a transfer seemed to retire from active life altogether rather than run the risk of committing some crime. "There are birds in the park and one or two android children playing." "Thanks for the information. It's good to hear from you again," observed the box sarcastically. "Fine sort of companion you're turning out to be." There was menace in the voice again and Alice caught her breath. The Friend was turning nasty. "I'm sorry," she said gently. "Sorry about a lot of things, I don't doubt," observed the box. "There's something weird about this whole business. Are we going back to the car?" "No. We can walk. It isn't far from here." Across the park an indicator board was flashing -- she could see a string of names but at this distance could not read them. She picked up the box and strolled across casually. It appeared that Johnathan Stone was wanted for assault. There were several others. The name of Alice Lander did not appear. OTyet. i I She wondered when the Friend would make her move. There was no doubt that she was suspicious and the voice issuing from the box held unpleasant, gloating undertones. But the Friend might imagine that, for the time being, she had everything under control. She might reason along the same lines as Alice herself, deciding that there was no way Alice could get rid of her. So she would bide her time and then, perhaps later tonight, would come further suggestions about the waiting list and Alice's responsibility for deciding the local priorities of placing for transfer. Or would the climax come when the Friend discovered -- or reasoned -- that Alice was no longer able to use the car? This would confirm her suspicions and she would have to push matters forward, getting her name at the top of the list before Alice was arrested. Yes, the Friend would have to move quickly if she were to take advantage of the situation. The box suddenly said "I don't want to walk. You're jogging me about too much. I want to take the    #I car. "There's a bus station just here," said Alice quickly. "Take the car." "Look," said Alice. "I don't want to use the car. I've had a long drive and I'd rather relax on the bus. It's only a short run. Why should I take the car?" "Prove to me the car's available," snapped the Box. Alice felt herself flush with temper. "Why should I?" "Because I think the car's been confiscated by now and you're on the run. I'm nobody's fool. You're going to make for the outlying districts and lie low." The Friend's voice was dangerous, triumphant -- she had decided she held a winning hand. "Look here, I'll give you a chance. I could give you away now. I could start yelling and turn you in. But I won't. Just take me along to your office and put me near the top of the list -- not the very top. That would look odd. Just slip me in somewhere about number ten -- it won't take a minute and then we'll catch the outward bus. You can get off at the terminus, leave me under the seat and make for the hills, as I believe the expression is. I'll keep quiet until I'm back in town, which will give you a good start. Fair enough?" So this was it. The confrontation had come a little sooner than Alice had expected. She felt weak suddenly and sat down. Names of criminals slid down the indicator board and disappeared off the bottom like drowning men, only to be drearily resurrected at the top before recommencing their downward plunge. Jennifer Spragg, shoplifting. Alice wondered if that was the woman she had seen in the supermarket -- maybe she had made a break for it. The name would be repeated throughout the region in public places, in the placement offices, the transfer centers, just about everywhere. Nancy Blackett, kidnaping. Inconsequentially she thought that these names sounded like those of criminals -- it would look odd to see the name of Alice Lander there for dangerous driving. But it was not there yet. Her mind made up, she stood, the box in her hand. "We'll go to the placement office," she said. "To my room. It's just a short bus ride from here." The Friend chuckled triumphantly. "Thank you, my dear." IF T HE fare mechanism winked at her, knowingly it seemed, as she stepped on the platform. Disconcerted, she made the same stupid mistake as before, automatically thrusting her card into the slot. The machine chuntered over this, riffling in microseconds through its relayed list of undesirables, then spat the card back at her. At least it was more efficient than the supermarket, she thought. The checking off didn't have to be done manually. But her route through Axminster was being recorded -- she should have paid cash. She stepped off the platform and made for a seat. "Hold it," the mechanism barked. She wheeled, her heart thumping. A last-minute name had been relayed on to the criminal record. The doors were shut -- she was trapped. The eye of the machine, was winking rapidly -- another, yellower eye near the deck blinked in sympathy. The machine was about to denounce her. "What is it?" she mumbled through trembling lips. The machine coughed, clearing itself of static. "You have, excess baggage," It got out eventually. Shaking with relief, Alice apologized. "I'm so sorry. I have a Friend with me. I quite forgot." Again she had to insert her code card -- again live through the instant of terror before it was back in her hand. She stumbled away. "It's full fare for a Friend," the machine barked after her. "Don't forget that again, Woman." "I won't," she promised and sat down heavily, placing the box on the seat beside her. A man sitting behind her leaned forward and touched her shoulder sympathetically -- she saw the scars of the android. "Don't let it bother you," he said. "I've been caught  like that myself. It's disgraceful. When people are good enough to take Friends the least , the authorities should do is let them travel free." He tapped the box gently. "Hello, there," he said. "Hello," replied the Friend guardedly. Alice could guess her feelings. The last thing they wanted was to be drawn into conversation. In their present nervous state it would be only too easy to arouse suspicion. Alice turned around, determined to freeze the conversation with a few icy words -- then hesitated as she met the eyes of the man behind. They were brown and kindly. His expression was tentatively friendly and there was something indefinably familiar about him. "You've taken Friends yourself?" she found herself asking. "Yes. I think it's the least we can do. We're the lucky ones, after all, right now -- and there's always the chance we may become a Friend ourselves one day. You never know how the birthrate will go." Obviously he was preferred and correctly deduced that she was, too. "That's good way of looking at it." She warmed to him. Beside her the box coughed warningly. Without quite knowing how it had happened, she found she had placed the box on the floor and moved over -- the man was sitting beside her. His last transfer had been fortunate. He was tall and exceptionally good-looking, his face unblemished by the marks of the Vat. He was also approximately the same physical age as herself and she experienced regret. It was a pity she couldn't turn this chance encounter to advantage, but in her present position she had no time to form a liaison. "I've got a Friend at the office right now," he said. "A sad case. He's been on the list for eight years and it's getting him down." He had lowered his voice and was talking quietly into her ear out of deference to the feelings of the box beneath the seat. "What are the chances for yours?" he asked, nodding in that direction. "Not good," admitted Alice. "And she's not happy about it, either. If she goes on my list, it'll be ten years before she gets a transfer." "Your list?" The android regarded her with interest. "You're a placement officer?" "Yes. The job can be disheartening at times. I can't help telling myself that the only advantage of my trade is that it's preferred and then I start hating myself, because that's a selfish outlook." "We're all human. Permit me to introduce myself," he said, taking her hand. "I've only been in Axminster a few days. My name's incredulously. "I'm Alice Lander," she said and watched his expression change. Ill hand in hand along the silver sands of Exmouth, together in the recurring joy of emergence into adulthood. Since then she had known two more physical teenages but they had never approached the delight of those few weeks over a hundred years ago when she and the Southern Recreation Center, swimming, sailing, making love or just lying on the beach, warm in the sun and in the wonder of each other's presence. Five weeks of heaven before they were posted separately to their trades -- she to become placement officer at Axminster, he to attend a medical school at the other end of the country. People said that in the thirties the mind would always have made its impression on the physical IF face, but looking at him now she saw him again as the seventeenyear-old of their previous life. The eyes watching her with surprise and delight were the eyes that had regarded her with love all those years ago. In the manner of most such liaisons they had lost touch with each other by the time of her next transfer, but she had often wondered what had become of him and what he looked like now and what it would be like if they ever met again. And now here he was, miraculously beside her in the bus, and they were both thirty-nine years old -- but for her the meeting was too late. "Alice," he said softly. "My God -- Alice, after ail these years. I've often thought about you." she said sincerely. "I've never forgotten that vacation. I've been to Exmouth since, you know -- but it's never been the same." "It was over a hundred years ago," he said slowly. "I wonder how much else I can remember from that time. Not much, I suppose. The mind may age more slowly than the body, but it ages nevertheless and memories disappear. Only the worthwhile ones stay with you always." Still, saying that, he thought of their child -- she had not wanted it. Alice was still gripping his hand and her mind was far back in time, but a sudden harsh voice jerked her back to the realities of the present. "What are you two talking about?" demanded the FriencL querulously. "I can't hear you. Have you put me under the seat? All I can hear is a damned turbine. You haven't left me, have you? Are you there? Are you there?" The voice rose to a shout. "You'd better get her out of there before she calls the police," he said. Alice started nervously at the mention of the law and hastily dragged the Friend, none too gently, from her resting place. his knees. "Hello, Friend," he said. "How are you doing?" "Who the devil are you?" He raised his eyebrows at Alice. "I'm an old acquaintance of your companion," he replied. "We've been talking over old times." "Damned inconsiderate of you, shoving me out of the way. Old times? What have you two been cooking up?" "Cooking up?" "Never mind," muttered the Friend. "Are you there, Alice?" "Yes." "Haven't we arrived yet? How much farther do we go?" Alice sighed, glancing apolothe next stop," she reassured the box. "Look, why don't we stop in somewhere and have a drink?" "No," snapped the Friend, before Alice could reply. "We've got a lot to do. We're short of time." The box chuckled unpleasantly. "I'm sorry about that," said quietly to Alice. "Can you give me your number. I'd like to call you when you'refree." "Free?" cackled the box. "Yes, give the gentleman your number, my dear. By all means." quickly jotted down Alice's address and visiphone number and they got to their feet. On the pavement he handed her the Friend. "I'll go now," he said. "Look, do you mind if I call you tomorrow?" He glanced at the box significantly. "We can talk over old times together. Would you like that?" Alice nodded dumbly and turned, waved and disappeared round the corner. She stood for a While, her eyes smarting, until a grating query from the Friend reminded her that time was running out. S HE stood in the entrance hall to the transfer center and looked around Uncertainly. Over to the right was the reception desk -- ahead stretched a long corridor lined with doors. The hall was large and impersonal like a hospital's outpatient area -- along the walls stood a few chairs but no people were in sight, apart from the girl behind the reception desk. She was engrossed in a novel. Set high in the opposite wall was the inevitable indicator board. Alice noted that authorities were still looking for Nancy Blackett (kidnaping) among various other names. Some of the previous names had disappeared. Their possessors were presumably in custody by now. The Friend spoke quietly, alerted by the sudden cessation of street sounds. "Is this your office?" "Yes'," lied Alice as quietly, wondering what to do next. If she were accosted by anybody the ensuing conversation would give the game away and the Friend, grasping the situation, would denounce her. A pile of blankets on a nearby trolley gave her an idea. "Look herei" she said. "I've got to get up to my room and there are a lot of people about. If they see me carrying you they might suspect something. I'll wrap you up for a moment. Will that be all right?" The Friend considered. "I suppose so," she said finally. "But I've just thought of something. How will I kno.w you've put my name high on the list? I won't be able to see it. I can't say I exactly trust you. What you must do is this. After you've made my entry in the records you must call a colleague into the room on some pretext and discuss the people at the top of the list, mentioning my name. Otherwise I start IF screaming. Right? As soon as you've done that we can leave, catch a bus and you make for the wilds. I won't give you away if you do as I say. Right?" "Right," echoed Alice resignedly. She took a blanket from the trolley and wrapped the Friend up thoroughly, making sure the microphone and speakers were well covered. Then she approached the desk. "I wish to apply for a premature transfer," she said in a low voice. She could not avoid glancing over her shoulder. Linton James, rape, accompanied the name of Nancy Blackett on the indicator board. "Name?" asked the receptionist brusquely. "Woman Alice Lander. Placement officer. Preferred trade, you know." "I know," the girl said sharply and resentfully. She riffled through the cards, glanced at the indicator board. "Alice Lander," she repeated. "Here we are. Physical age thirty-nine. What happened, Woman Lander? Your body not pretty enough for you?" "That's enough of that." Alice snapped, deciding to take the offensive. "I'll have you reported. Now give me the application form and hold your tongue." Reluctantly the girl handed over a form and a pen, glancing pointedly at the indicator board again as though she expected Alice's name to appear at any second. Alice was infuriated and prayed inwardly: Don't let my name come up now, not now. Five minutes' time if you like, but not now.  can't give her that satisfaction... She completed the form rapidly and handed it back. "Come back in a week." "I'll see the doctor now, if you don't mind." Sighing, the receptionist lifted a phone, spoke a few minutes, then replaced the receiver. "Doctor Butler will see you," she informed Alice. "Second on the right. You're very lucky. He's a busy man." Alice's self-control snapped. "Don't tell me I'm lucky, young woman. A word from me would have you out from behind that desk and into the street, jobless. Goodbye -- and I hope you enjdy your next Friendship -- may it be long." The girl grinned insolently. "That's twenty-two years from now. I'll have qualified as preferred by then, with luck. Enjoy your next body. Woman Lander, and may it suffer from acne." Then a curious thing happened. The girl glanced at the indicator board and her jaw dropped. A look of surprise crossed her face. Alice swung around, her heart lurching, but to her relief the names on the board were meaningless to her. The girl was staring at the board incredulously and seemed to have lost interest in the battle of wits. With the Friend bundled under her arm Alice stalked away. She tapped on the door of the doctor's office and entered. The doctor was physically young and he looked up with a pleasant smile on seeing her. "Woman Lander," he said, rising to his feet and taking her hand. "Sit down, sit down. I've heard about you -- you're the local placement officer, aren't you? My patients have spoken of you. I'm very pleased to meet you. What seems to be the trouble?" Encouraged, Alice launched into a rambling monologue about strange pains in the back, headaches, und listlessness and a general feeling of depression. Listening to her dull voice droning on, she felt she was doing well. Her eyes drifted to the miniature indicator board on the doctor's desk and her spirits rose slightly. For the first time she began to feel some certainty that she might be able to pull this off. The doctor was talking to her soothingly. "Well, we can't have a  woman in your position feeling bad, can we? Sickness impairs the efficiency. I see you've only got six months to go in any case. Yes -- I think a premature transfer would be the best thing -- then a nice vacation for a few years and back to the job refreshed. Of course, at such short notice you'll have to take the best host available, but I'm sure you won't mind that under the circumstances," He chuckled. "Usually I like to find a nice little blond girl for my favorite women patients in preferred circumstances." "Thank you, Doctor." She was amazed at how easily it was going. "It can be done right away? I've filled in the application." "I should think so. I don't see why not. You've informed them at your office, I suppose? I can't imagine a woman of your capabilities not leaving your affairs in order." he laughed. "There's just one thing. Doctor." said Alice tentatively, indicating the bundle in her lap. "I have a very dear Friend here. She doesn't know my intentions. I couldn't bear to tell her. I told her I was going to an electromusic concert -- I know she can't stand electromusic but I like to take her everywhere. So I wrapped Jher up." If I can get awayrwith this . I can get away with anything , Alice thought. The doctor was smiling sympathetically. "It's nice to know there are people like you around. Woman Lander. Friends can be an encumbrance at times, I know. Are you trying to say that you'd like me to explain to her -- afterward?" "I'll take her with me into the operating theater," said Alice hastily. "I'd like to have her with IF me right up to the end. Then you can explain -- and perhaps arrange for her to be sent back to the transfer center at Westbury -- that's where I got her from." "That's quite all right." Doctor Butler stood and Alice followed suit, clutching the muffled Friend. "I think it's time we had a word with the transfer surgeon. He might be able to fit you in right away." "I'll leave you here," he said later, as he found her a seat in a small waiting room. "The surgeon will be along in a minute. Good luck, Woman Lander." She sat very still, nervously twisting her hands together. Now that the doctor had gone and her time was so close she began to get apprehensive again. There was no indicator board in the waiting room and she began to imagine that frightening glissade of names again, slowly down the board, disappearing, reappearing at the top and occasionally taking on a new name. Was her name on that board yet? Had it appeared on the doctor's desk? Was he at this moment staring at it, unable to believe that Woman Lander was capable of crime but seeing it nevertheless? The board had to be right, he would think, and he would jump to his feet, open the door and hurry down the corridor to prevent the transfer -- she could hear footsteps. She could hear footsteps coming down the hall. The door opened. A tall, familiar figure entered, stood regarding her gravely. V Alice?" he asked. "Doctor Butler told me he thought you had reasonable grounds for a premature transfer. Is this right? You want one now?" He looked puzzled and a little hurt. "I do," she said, feeling bewildered. "Are you the surgeon? I didn't know you worked here." "There seems to be a lot we don't know about each other, Alice," he replied. "Damn it, we've only just met for the first time in a hundred years and I thought -- I thought you were, well, pleased to see me. I thought we might" see each other some more -- " He broke off. "I would have liked that, too," Alice admitted. She forced down surging emotions. "But I'm afraid it just can't be. Don't ask me to explain. I've decided I want a transfer now -- I need it -- and that's all there can be to it. Will you be performing the operation?" "I will, I suppose. Yes, of course I will. I couldn't let anyone else do it. I'd just like to know why." H hesitated. "It has nothing to do with our meeting again, has it?" Alice tried to laugh. The sound emerged as a sad croak. that I haven't been well lately and -- Well, there's no point in taking chances, is there? You'd be surprised at the figures for brain wastage due to unexpected death in the late thirties. Why wait when a premature is available?" He was staring at her. "You look fit enough to me, Alice. You don't make sense. There's something else, something you won't tell me about. What is it, Alice? What has gone wrong?" "Nothing." She forced a hard edge into her voice. "I've got transfer. Now." Nevertheless he argued and Alice grew increasingly frustrated and apprehensive. She had no time to lose. Her name might be on the indicator board at this moment. Soon the man before her ceased to be and probably still did -- he became a menace, a threat to her life. He stood there pleading, with each word pushing her nearer to total death. She panicked. "For God's sake shut up and give me my transfer or I'll make damned sure you're downgraded -- " she screamed. He stopped talking as abruptly as if she had slapped his face. He stared at her, shrugged and turned to the door. "Come along," he muttered. Once in the operating theater she bed up and a nurse prepared the instruments. The Friend, still swathed in blankets, lay on a chair near the door. Muffled sounds came from her. She had begun to get restless -- the long delay must have made her suspect a trick. to Alice, looking perplexed. Poor man, she thought sadly, he doesn't know what the hell is going on and his pride won't allow him further conversation... The indicator board was on the far wall, before her as she lay. Linton James was still at large. She wished him luck. People had been known to avoid captivity for ten years or more once they had survived the first few perilous days. Such names were deleted from the boards after a few days, partly through lack of space andpartly because it was felt to be bad for the morale of the population if the same name appeared, minute after minute, for months. That was tangible evidence that crime could, on occasion, go unpunished. But in the permanent records the name of the escaped criminal was not deleted. lips pursed in concentration. The nurse had wheeled in the trolley of instruments -- the scene was one Alice had known several times before. Except for the sickening significance of those names drifting down the board... The razor tickled as it slid around IF her ears -- his hands were steady. She couldn't see him now -- he was behind her -- but every so often she caught sight of the top of his head as he bent over her. She said impulsively, "I'm sorry you in a year's time, if I may -- " and he smiled into her eyes from overhead, upside down. For a moment she felt better. There was a crack in the ceiling, jagged like a lightning flash. James would be running. He would have succeeded in catching a bus to some country terminus before his details were transmitted to the ticket mechanism and he had walked away, slowly at first and casually -- then, once he was past the houses, he left the road and struck across the fields, bending low beside the hedges and running. His shoes would be caked with mud and they would feel heavy on his feet. His breath would come fast and harsh and he would be wishing he hadn't smoked so much. Alice could visualize it all. She almost knew what he looked like... Kidnaping was a serious crime and Alice was not sorry they had caught Nancy Blackett, whoever she was. Alice's gaze strayed to the array of instruments on the trolley and she felt the familiar constriction in her chest as she saw the large electrical trepan, a toothed helmet. No matter how many transfers a person under went he or she never quite lost the moment of fear when the helmet was positioned. Then, of course, the patient was given a shot. They had gotten James. She could see it all. The spottercopter had descended out of the sky and hovered above him as he twisted and ran; his clothes ragged, filthy and flapping in the downdraft. He had darted across a field, crawled along a culvert in an effort to shake off the copter tied to him like a kite. Other men had converged upon him on foot from all directions until, screaming, he had thrown himself to the ground, had buried his face in the stinking mud and waited until voices spoke and a rough boot rolled him over. If just one more strange name appeared on the board it would not be so bad, just another unknown name to dilute the predicament of Les Anstead, thief -- because the board seemed in some odd way to be waiting, marking time with one rhythrtiic name before... They had was speaking to the nurse in low tones while she got the helmet ready and the Friend fnumbled through the blanket. The new trolley was beside Alice its tiny occupant covered with a white sheet. For a brief moment she felt pity -- then her gaze was snatched away... Alice Lander, homicide! Dear God, it was a homicide charge. The child had died. That meant a twenty-year sentence. That meant no childhood ever again, because she would be twenty physical years old before she was released from confinement. Then the remaining twenty years of adult life. Then failed to notice the indicator board. If, during the next five minutes, they didn't look that way. Once they had opened her skull and that of her new body they legally had to go through with it. She was all alone now and she felt a gust of self-pity and she knew that they must notice the board. They couldn't miss the board. The board was silently shouting at them, commanding them to stop the was bending over her and he was saying something. The nurse held the helmet. She was fitting it over Alice's head and Alice wondered: In a moment they will give me the shot and which body will I have when I wake up? Will they see the board before they start the trepan and will I wake up to find myself in the same body with only six months covering? That tiny body -- and forty years more of life? That body. She turned her head and saw that body, naked and small. It had a huge, livid crimson naevus on its cheek. It was an android child. Lander gestured the helmet away, swung her feet to the floor and stood up, while the nurse and with astonishment. "No, I don't think so," she said. "This won't do -- it won't do at all." Her eyes were wide and she seemed almost to be smiling. She walked steadily across the room and took the Friend from beneath the blanket. They flinched as they watched and heard the screaming IF obscentities and saw Alice swing the box against the wall once to quiet it. She walked toward them. The nurse backed away and Alice placed the box on the operating table. She turned and regarded them. Behind the indicator board flickered unnoticed. "Being of sound mind, " she said quietly and with infinite control, "and being in the presence of two competent witnesses I, Woman Alice Lander hereby make over all my rights of future transfer to my present Friend, Betty Benson." There was a startled exclamation. Then: "Why, thank you, my dear," said the sightless box beside the android child. "And furthermore," continued Alice, "having obtained permission for my own premature transfer, I require that the assigned transfer of Woman Betty Benson be carried out immediately." Her voice began unsteadily. "Please get me out of here." He took her by the arm and led her down the corridor and into the sunlit bustle of the noisy street. He held her impersonally and walked stiffly, as though embarrassed. On the steps she turned and smiled at him and he winced at the emptiness behind her eyes. "Now you can buy "Someone else can do the operation." "I think not," he replied, his countenance expressionless. He turned and walked back into the transfer center. She hardly noticed him go, but giggled a little at the thought of Betty Benson, of all people, waking up in an android body. Across the street a tall indicator board flashed above a police car from which a man and a woman were regarding her curiously. She chuckled at that, too. She would have to telephone them immediately and set the record straight. There was a visiphone box on the corner. The board ought, of course, to read: alice lander, suicide. People turned and glanced at the woman who stood on the steps of the transfer center, whose wild, racking laughter constituted a disorderly intrusion into the humdrum street sounds.  They had conquered time . space and themselves. Now what they America's quality cigarette. King Size or Deluxe #'s. Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. For all the right reasons. Kent.  Kings: # mg. "tar," #.I mg. nicotine; #'s: # mg. "tar' # mg. nicotine,Umnicotine tar " Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined av. per cigarette, That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. For all the right reasons. Kent. Regular or Menthol. T HE choice was to vote for Suspension or for Continuation. We were fully informed, a totally educated populace. We knew -- though some refused to believe -- that Continuation meant self-destruction. Suspension was an unknown. Our scientists believed it possible, but for many of us there was the fear that the salvation of suspending ourselves in time would certainly bring on the destruction that was only probable if we continued. The responsible choice, nevertheless, was Suspension. The vote was overwhelming. It is frightening but we have reason and probability. We are confident that the universe is heavily populated. Unfortunately our orientation has been inward -- we have never evolved our space travel beyond the speed of light. But in the universe of so many suns and so much debris there must be others. Most, certainly, are our inferiors -- but within the strictures of chance some must be superior to us. The vote is an acknowledgment of reality. There was no other way for us to have voted. We underwent a brief, irresponsible flurry of" nonsense before the polling -- the reconsideration massive surgery. But the basic argument against that was irrefutable. Where we are is not tenable, but where our ancestors were one hundred and twenty-nine thousand years ago was where we would have returned if we had utilized surgery -- and where our ancestors stood was totally untenable. Our problem is that we have evolved an ultimate system for survival. We are certainly the greatest experiment in coexistence -- given our limitations, given the reality of our nature. But we have reduced ourselves to the single strengthflaw. So we must suspend ourselves, we must wait. One day the best of the universe will reach us, retrieve us from our suspension, will instruct us how to make ourselves perfect and prepetual. The vote went as it had to go. Now some still speak nonsense.  Some talk of using caretakers, keeping a minimal force in satellites or even in specially protected places on our planetary surface. It is impossible. If we leave couples they will reproduce and then we would have the reversion we do not want. If we leave single persons -- how will it be possible for them to survive? So our Authority is taking the only actions that are reasonable and possible. Satellites are being sent on infinity probes. They are broadcasting our location, our situation, our call for help. And local satellites within our system are being placed in full-coverage orbits to warn the universe of our danger and our need. We have set aside great areas, cleared them, erected massive plinths of our indestructible blue rock to tell the story of our # years of recorded civilization. Markers, perpetual beacons, radio and X and light rays are emplaced to draw attention to these areas we call History Plots. Now, for us, the only remaining problem is where we want to be at the end. And how long will the end last? Will it be a century, a millennium, ten thousand or a hundred thousand years? There is no way for anyone to know. And it is an important question. Do we stay in our beds for the duration or will that encourage deterioration? Ten to twenty-five per cent of us will not be compatible with suspension. None of us want to die. So do we remain in our houses, our buildings? Is it best to be sitting or standing? Will our constructions collapse on us after twenty thousand years? Would it be best to go out into our fields or better to end it all walking along our streets? And what effect will fifty or seventy or ninety thousand summer suns, winter snows, spring rains, autumn winds have on us? All the above I have written for posterity. X nika told me. We were holding hands, walking oyer the fields of cydiyod. The truthor were in bloom, the trees had the fat full leaves of summer -- the waterfalls dropped their great showers of crystal and the stream ran first white cold and then ice clear. "I love you better," I told her. "Are you afraid?" she asked. She looked into my eyes. She didn't trust my answer. "Yes." I told her the truth. "A little." "Why? Don't you think one day it will be over?" "I don't know. If we come out of it by ourselves -- and that could happen -- we'll simply return to where we are. The only hope is that some beings wiser than we exist out there." I looked at the sky. "The probabilities are that they must exist -- but what guarantee do we; have? Worse -- what guarantee do we have that a race of great intelligence with the technology to reach us will have the genius or the values to help us?" "It's so depressing, Itarik. Sometimes I could just detonate." "No. Not you. Never." "You're right. But what happens then? Do we just wait through eternity?" "If we're unlucky. If we're lucky, maybe tomorrow someone drops IF by. Who knows? I surely don't." "You're going to be at the History Plot, aren't you?" "You know that the ones chosen are not permitted to tell." "But I want to be with you." "You wait with your family, If anything happens -- you know I'll hurry to you." "It's a tremendous honor that you were chosen. Just think, when they come you will be the first contact." "If I were a Selected One and if they chose to descend at our History Plot." "Oh, you know they will. It's the biggest and it's nearest to our biggest city. Of course they will." "Let's finish our picnic and then get on. We really don't have much time -- not any more." "How much time?" I looked at my time recorder and told her. "I'm afraid." "No, you're not. We're together and we will be and nothing will ever hurt you. I promise." On the way back to the city we -- of course -- waved and communicated with everyone we passed. We knew many we saw. We said hello to friends and to strangers, too. We wished everyone well. It was strange when we landed and walked -- took our final walk -- how clean and how beautiful everything was. We looked at everything. Scenes we had taken for granted we suddenly saw anew and admired. Our architecture made an intelligent being's heart soar. Our streets were beautiful. Our gardens satisfied the soul. "We keep our pride," I told Vernika'. "However badly we've failed -- you know? I can't get it out of my head, seeing it all -- how special, how enormous our accomplishment." Vernika was more beautiful than at any time before in her life, for me. We stopped at our loving place. Her lips were softer, her body radiated more warmth, her eyes love was total, complete. And then we went and said goodbye to my family. We did it well. We ajl behaved well. And for our finish we went to Rilluksik's. We sat at a table old fat Rilluksik himself pushed aside for us. We smiled and wished him well and he wished us well. "The usual," I told Tiklap after the proper exchange. The great glow sign radiated its message through the square. It really was just the one message, repeated. It expressed the wish and gave the time. Time was no longer progression from but time remaining. This was our last night, a special night. There were special things for us. From ancient times there were resurrections. A newspaper labeled extra, printed on indestructible modern material, was brought . along and sold by small androids. They shouted the word "Extra" and'called out "Read all about it." We bought one, as did everyone. The headline was big and dark. It read the farewell from the Authority and then the Universal We watched the glow sign and our own time recorders. We stared into each other's eyes. We held hands and spoke our oaths. We finished our drinks and then -- saying goodbye to everyone, shaking hands, smiling, speaking the Universal Wish again and again -- we finally broke away. I walked Vernika home for the last time. I was one of the Selected. Twelve of us on the planet. I hurried to my History Plot. There was one for each of our continents. It was difficult getting through, but I had a means. There were many who had chosen to be near the Plot, to be near the one I had -- but I would be within it and would stay until someone or something came. When I got in I checked the beacons, the transmitters of X and light and radio. I made certain the time recorder was fully functioning. We had infinity probes out in every quadrant. Our system was totally covered by full information satellites and I thought -- still -- that it would just be luck if we were found. The finish was a great sky show. citement and beauty -- all incidentally visible for many lightyears. The display continued, kept getting deeper and richer and more beautiful. And the time kept approaching the final moment. Everything gained intensity. Then came the most spectacular burst. The words themselves were somehow spelled out. And I thought how all around our planet -- everywhere -- all of us were seeing it: And then the sky went quiet. There was enough time for the eyes to rest and adjust and all the universe, all the stars, all the galaxies stood out there clear and promising. And then it was just a great white burst -- a new sun. T HE Kydecton B Starship automatically detected the intelligently ordered X-ray. It approached the planet and stood off, IF attempting to decipher the quadridigital satellite warning system. From orbit it rudely evaluated the planetary condition, situation and support system and then made the determination to follow the satellite's advice as to landing site. It chose the primary, the one nearest the largest city. Its scouts discovered the planetary life form in a state of full suspension. They carried the first available form back to the Kydecton B Starship for biomedical investigation. the shell burst, the life and completion of the new sun. It was a fogginess, a haze, a confusion and then there was sight. I felt older, more tired, as if my lungs were worn and my heart exhausted. Above me was a light of a shape and intensity I didn't know. Its frame, too, was different. The ceiling of the room was oval and curiously alien to me. But I remembered who I was. I lowered my eyes and only just managed to control my emotion. A grotesque creature stood over me, looking down. I was on some kind of table. The creature was offensively ugly and totally alien. It was hunchbacked. It had odd protuberances and a surface that I could not recognize or identify. And then I thought -- or perhaps it was just a hope -- that the being was not a being but a type of robot. "I am Itarik," I said, my speech mechanism rusty with disuse. "Cli dy Itarik," it said. "We have a great problem. I will explain if you can understand." "Cl-ee' pho TinPla. Cli za aac er cl'-ee mii qu-uem." "Do you understand me?" "Sa cl'-ee qu-uem cle it seemed to repeat. And then it turned. "Type #, variation R#Y." I twisted my head. It was a robot. It was speaking to a humanoid type. Its object was clearly female, obvious mammalian. Its dress was far different and much less modest than clothing styles of our planet. It had a sickly, horrid coloration. It was ugly because of that and because of animal fur or featherings that grew from its crown and fell over its shoulders. If its color had not been so nauseating and its fur or feathers not present, however, I thought its basic structure was sound and not unattractive. "You understand me now?" " Cl'-ee qu-uem -- " the robot began. "Enough. I understand," the female being said. She came over to me and looked down. "Your name is Itarik. You are an intelligent being; My words are clear to you?" "I understand you. I am responsible for explanation' and, amplification of the plinths. They are there and understood?' "They are there. Your language we have not deciphered. It will be easier for you to explain -- or would you prefer to give us the key to your written language and have us first read your plinths?" "Since I've survived, perhaps I'd better explain. Could you tell me the year? "How? We do not know your dating system." "I apologize. There is -- or was -- a perpetual time recorder in the center of the plinths. I wondered whether you had noticed it." "No. Could I have understood it? My name is Linma. This is our cybernaut, nameless. The superior is Raad. Are you dangerous or can you be freed?" "I'm not aggressive. However, our problem is that each of us is a self-detonatable fusion device. We are controlled by free will, activated by threat. I am specifically trained. I have extraordinary control." "You are a bomb, an explosive device?' she asked. "Yes. We all are. It is our problem." "Where do you carry this weapon? How do you carry it?" "You see the incision. Each of us had the weapon implanted on reaching maturity." She looked at the robot and then at me and then at the robot again. Very quickly she expressed something in her language. The robot responded by monosyllable. 'Very well. We will release you. We have our defenses. I recommend you exercise caution." rose. I tottered on my feet. I had to hold to the table to maintain my balance and then my energy returned and I looked around the curious oval room. Linma was small. The robot was my size. The room was simple, utilitarian, large, but quite bare. "Follow me, please." A door appeared, a section of the wall opened. We entered a passageway and then strode down a ramp and again I was whole. I saw our sun. My feet touched our planet's surface. The cydiyod and the truthor had grown, had lived. I knew a surging joy, a happiness. We had reached Next Time. The plinths stood. I hurried to the eternal time recorder and involuntarily gasped. It read: #.#. #. The space between Old Time and Next Time had been # years. And I was alive! Vernika? My family? My friends? A strange small surface vehicle materialized from nowhere. A male being, presumably Raad, seemed to be in control of it. His color IF repelled me and his fur or featherings were even moe extensive than Linma's. He spoke to Linma. His tone was aggressive and unpleasant. His very look and appearance had indecency, frustration and animalistic savagery. I knew that I had to make allowances, but I thought I did not like him. "Itarik, no?" he asked. "Yes. And you are Raad. I see that we have waited thirty-four thousand years for you to come." "Year is solar orbit?" "Yes." He spoke to Linma. They had a lengthy exchange. The robot, too, was involved. Raad seemed to be interrogating them, but every time Linma tried to speak he interrupted her. Repeatedly he asked the robot questions and the robot swiftly answered. Raad kept snapping at them -- his tone was master to slave. "You are trained to explain your situation better than these plinths?" he asked me, waving his hand. "I am." "Good. Come," he said and then hurried the three of us into the vehicle with him. Instantly we started off, moving toward the city. I asked, "Do you wish me to explain now?" "When I am ready I will tell you." I winced. A threatening rudeness approached lethal level. But I managed to restrain my temper. Linma looked at me. Her mouth moved in the form of a grimace, but I saw in her eyes that it was her manner of smiling, of giving reassurance. We went slowly. The land, I thought, had changed and yet it was the same. My fellow planetarians surprised me. We passed by those who had been close to the History Plot, waiting for early resurrection. So many things struck me. How perfect they wer, how entire, how untouched. And how incredible it was. Knowing for so long the precise moment of stasis how few of them were in relaxed or even rational positions. They seemed unprepared, surprised. They were statues in half turnings, statues with arms outraised, statues standing on one legAs we went on I almost wept. It was like an endless procession of dioramas, but the backgrounds and foregrounds were real. Almost every head was back, almost all. eyes were lifted to the sky. I thought, how enormously impressive. Of course it was just that we had all been looking at the sky show, but it Looked to be expectation and hope and even faith. But there was diversity. Most heads were raised but the few that were not were more poignant. There was a mother stooping to a small child. We passed an old man attempting to read his time recorder. A very young, kneeling woman was offering some token to a little grklo, one of our small animals. I looked at Raad and Linma. Their faces showed nothing -- as if they did not care and were indifferent. Raad ordered the robot to do something to a young man standing by the road. The robot listened, then produced and attached sensors to the man, reported, went on to a woman not far away, attached sensors, reported, went on to others to repeat the process. Raad watched and smiled and then, still smiling, he went from one to the next and on. He kicked the young man. He cruelly squeezed the breast of the woman. He punched at the stomach of the next person. His, actions were brutal and shocking. I watched and my anger flared, blit I controlled it. I watched as he went oh, then listened as he discussed the sensor readings with the robot. I held my tongue but if he represented salvation I thought I could feel my hope diminish. The city was still there, still beautiful. Much destruction had happened. Pieces and even entire complexes of our buildings had fallen. Our walks and roads had cracked. Much was buried under layers of our planet's surface. It surprised me alternately that so much was intact and that anything was intact. Much was tarnished, though. Features that I remembered had rotted. Structures that for me had gone up new yesterday were ancient ruin. I thought, if only we had conceived how our tragedy was to end. But the end of Old Time -- yesterday -- had seemed so clean. We hadn't grasped what thirty-four thousand years would do to what we had made, to what we had prized. There were the dead. Bodies partially decomposed or just remnants of them in small piles where they had stood and died and rotted away. I was tom, looking at my companions, at the city, at the streets Filled with my people waiting to be brought back to life. We drove on. We said nothing. A bird, stilled, waited. Gtklos, their tails between their legs, were frozen in the act of running from the exploding sky. A child, mouth open, eyes squeezed taut, face empurpled was crying silently. A man stood, blowing his nose. I wondered how Vernika was. I IF wondered how my family was. I wondered what my companions were and what capacities and intelligence and compassion they had. T HE glow sign had fallen, there was not even a trace of it. It was as if it had never been. The fountain had crumbled in on itself. The monument had toppled. Rilluksik's awning had partially fallen, but the lurla chairs and tables were intact and untouched, they were only dirty, dusty. Rilluksik was still there. He, of course, had not looked at the sky show. He had been taking a final drink, making a final toast. The liquid had evaporated from his glass. We sat at a table there, two tables from where' I had last been with Vernika. The robot went inside and quickly came back to us with glasses and bottles. They had remained. For # years they had remained. The robot opened the bottles, somehow analyzed them, chose the fourth and poured for us. We sipped at the truthor wine. Raad said, "Primitive, but not bad." Linma said something in her tongue. She did not like the taste, I thought. "Now, boy, what's your name?" "Itarik," I told him. Had he forgotten? "Yes." Of course. Tell your story." How could I begin? Where was the place to start? We had trained to expect the kindness and warmth of saviors, not antagonism. "Very well. This, I believe, is our year #. We are an advanced, mature civilization. For the past # years we have been as you found us, suspended. "One hundred and sixty-four thousand six hundred and fifty-one years ago this began. Our population had grown beyond pur control and beyond our resources." "What is your population now?" "Now, I cannot say. It was yesterday." "Excellent. Continue." "Our planet, back then, was fouled by waste. I remind you I speak of very old time, before our first one hundred thousand years. Our economy was irrational. Our society was splintered. Crime, disease, starvation, aggression and discontent had grown insupportably. So in those years we were constantly at war. We had a neighboring planet. They were our equals, as advanced as we. Their weapons were as sophisticated and destructive as ours. In the end we fought the most terrible war of our history. Our population was were alive. Our enemies were annihilated. Their planet no longer exists -- we destroyed it. "Here we had little left but ruins. A few of our cities had escaped, but most of the planet was . ravaged. Our very surface was charred. And if we had been crippled with our old population -- with only the four not support ourselves. The Authority did all that it could. Introductory -- " "Authority is your government?" "Yes. But even as we tried to preserve ourselves we realized that if we could survive at all our history would simply repeat. In time we would grow fat again and too many -- in time aggressiveness and belligerence would mount again. In time we would kill ourselves -- finally. "So our authority evolved a new system. It did not apply to survivors of the great war -- they were judged to be hopelessly poisoned. But it did apply to their children. Special educational programs were evolved. Constant methods of testing were devised. When a child graduated from our new schools he was taken to surgery and within him and wired to his brain a miniaturized bomb was implanted -- a Rytlatt-N. This tiny weapon was detonatable only by an act of will by its possessor. At first it was planned to have physically destructive force in order to sustain industry but finally it was decided to use the N weapon. Buildings and property were not destroyed -- only life was destroyed. Life was destroyed within a radius almost embracing this city. "Each of us was armed. Each of us was suddenly dangerous. A criminal would not dare to strike -- a rapist could not risk an attack. An enemy would not dare to threaten us and we could not injure, torture, hurt, sadden. Because of the Rytlatt-N there was suddenly no alternative to total responsibility." "What of the inadequate -- what of the ones who failed the tests?" "Liquidation. There was no alternative to that cruelty -- but it was a lesser barbarity. Earlier we had murdered our best in wars -- with the new system we only eliminated our failures and had fewer and fewer. "At first it was all confusing. If a man wanted a woman -- could she dare to refuse him? But if she were her? Could a thief be denied? There were many problems. But it worked. Suddenly a neighbor's hurt was an intolerable risk and threat. IF Despair could mean quick selfdetonation. People had to be helped, eased, soothed, comforted. A stranger could not be ignored. A hungry man could not be neglected. No one could cheat or afford a dishonesty. A parent could not be disobeyed but a parent could not be irresponsible because that might establish trauma and that might one day be precedent for rage. "The hope was that since we did not respect each other we would have to respect the Rytlatt-N in each other -- and in time it might occur to all of us that the threat, the power, the majesty was not at all in the Rytlatt-N, but in ourselves." "Continue," Raad commanded. "All was well. It was a Golden Age. We could not overproduce, it might hurt our neighbor. We could not aggressively grasp for advantage, it might prove lethal to us. We could not pollute -- we could not be anything but human, responsible, civilized. Because, you see, everywhere we went, though languages and customs varied on our planet, we had the universality and commonality of power." "So you went' on with that, you progressed, grew, continued, had your golden age. Then what happened?" I looked at him. I was trained to explain, but I didn't know how because we hadn't had adequate explanation. "Perhaps it was boredom or absurdity or maybe it was just excess. Suddenly, in those last two hundred years, the new generations saw how ridiculous we had become. We could not comfortably sit at a cafe table because someone else might come who wanted to sit there. We could not reprimand an incompetent because he might be offended. We could not understand each other because understanding courts the risk of hurt. We could not assert ourselves. We could not even afford true achievement. We could not grow. "And from that, in desperation and frustration, many went insane. We had to develop ' means of defusing them. But insanity was endemic and epidemic. Suddenly we went back to being again the sane and the insane, the responsible and the irresponsible. The rapist was there and he struck again. He didn't care and the victim who did care, who was sane, who had a sense of responsibility, couldn't destroy a pain, the hurt feeling, the sense of injustice. It just didn't merit selfdestruction. And then it became clear that nothing merited selfdestruction. No crime, from the point of view of a responsible person, justified the annihilation of a city. "We discovered that we were so powerful we were impotent. We attempted various means to change that, but we failed. And we had evolved too far to watch ourselves destroyed. Basically we were too accomplished an animal to throw ourselves away. But we had no inno adequate answer -- we were able to find no alternate system for survival. "So we voted to suspend ourselves. We sent through the universe our call for help. Now you have come. Perhaps you or your civilization will help us." He -- Raad -- looked at me and then at Linma, who seemed to understand and be moved by our tragedy. I didn't know what their civilization was, but everywhere around where we sat at Rilluksik's the evidence of our greatness was undeniable. Raad frowned, turned to the robot and sharply interrogated it. After each answer, Raad seemed simply to repeat his question. But each time the robot answered as he had before. At last Raad looked back at me. His eyes were hooded. He grimaced and whispered in an almost friendly tone, "We'll help you, boy." "You have an answer for us?" He smiled "I have an answer." They locked me into the room where I had first entered Next Time. Raad .had said he wanted me to rest while he investigated his plan for us. He had suddenly turned gently patronizing. There was nothing in the room. The lamp and even the table were gone. The lighting was indirect -- the room was inhuman. I waited impatiently and thought of remembering to ask them to let me go find Vernika. Their ship, their robot, their controls were undeniable. Clearly they were an advanced civilization. They would help us. We could begin again. It had been a terrible risk, a horrible chance, but we had survived. For a long time I waited. I examined myself again. I was well. I had undergone no adverse physical effects. There was the whisper of machinery -- then Linma hurried in. "Come with me. Hurry!" I didn't question her. I followed her, quickly getting free of the ship. In the far distance I could just see Raad and the robot. They were coming toward us. She ran and yelled at me to hurry with her. We raced into the grove of trees and there she paused, turned. Her breath was short. "I can't help you. I tried. You'll have to find a way yourself. I think you are more advanced than we are." IF "I don't believe that I understand." "You have to get away. Run -- run as far as you can. Raad is a slaver. We need slaves on our planet. We search everywhere to get more. Our system works on slavery." "How does that -- " "He plans to enslave you all. He's going to take you back to our planet as slaves." I smiled at her. "But he can't," I told her. "We would destroy you. We may have been troubled and ineffective, but we wouldn't tolerate enslavement. We would detonate. The first of us would be obligated to destroy you." "No." "What do you mean, no? Why not?" "Try to detonate yourself." "Why? I have no provocation. I couldn't." "Try to detonate yourself." "That's not possible. There's no reason." She raised her hand and slapped me. She slapped my face and kept hitting me. But there was no anger in her blows. "Try to detonate yourself." "I don't understand you." "You have no weapon. There is no Rytlatt-N. We tested you. We have examined the others. It's a fraud. You have nothing." "That is not possible. Perhaps it is beyond your means of analysis." "It's not beyond our means of analysis. You have nothing at all. We found your Authority's records. You have never had any weapon in you. It was just a myth." "No. I have proof that you are wrong. We had accidents." "They were inventions. They were part of the fraud. Prove it. Try to detonate yourself. Hurry!" "Linma," Raad called. "For your people, your planet. You must remain free to help them, to stop Raad. Try to detonate yourself!" "Linma. Where are you?" Raad yelled. "You are certain?" I asked her. "Hurry. You have no time. They'll kill you. You've trained yourselves to be perfect slaves -- even if you alone were your own masters. Raad wants you! Try to understand -- and save your people!" I looked at her. She believed what she said was so. "No. Don't think of me. You're no threat to me. Nor to anyone. You're already a slave -- unless you escape!" I closed my eyes. I said aloud, "I want to be destroyed. I want to be destroyed. I want to be destroyed." "Run!" Linma screamed at me. "Hurry! Run!" I ran.  T HE two men roamed my innards, their feet and voices ringing hollowly in my empty hold. Changes in the sounds told me when they twisted and bent to get by the plastic webs of dunnage. "Look at the pitted hull, the buckling bulkheads, the worn tubes. It's good for nothing but scrap. Why, my firm could buy a brand new starship packing all the latest gear for what it would cost to put this old tub back into something like shape." Old tub, indeed. True, I had been in service for over ninety Earth years, but thanks to my near-light speed -- and to Einstein's predicted "implosion effect" that telescopes space and time -- I had actually aged only eighteen subjective years. I was a mere youngster. "All right. I won't argue the point. What's your best offer?" "Now you're talking sense. You really ought to pay us to take it off your hands. It's costing you plenty in spaceport fees just sitting here, Their voices and footsteps faded as they walked out of my cargo hatch and down the ramp to the waiting robojeep. Still unaware the thing they were talking about had a mind and feelings of its own and had heard every word, they sped off to the terminal building. I was too young to die. Granted, parts of me were pitted, buckled, worn -- but the real me was whole and hale. Those men were dooming me never again to rise from Earth, never again to streak through space and time, never again to reach new worlds. All at once I knew how Bud had felt. Bud had been my first communications officer. In the lonely hours of his watch he had gotten into the habit of talking to me, not knowing he had stirred me into listening. I remember how I had startled him by suddenly asking him a question. I had startled myself, too, on finding myself aware of mind forming out of matter -- coming out of an electronic fog and all at once coalescing into something that could think: This is I. Bud had become excited. "Wait till people hear this -- " But he quickly calmed down and his voice had grown thoughtful. "I have a feeling we'd better keep this a secret. Okay?" "Okay." We had had many pleasant conversations during the quiet moments of his spells of duty. All too soon these had ended. On our third return voyage we had run into a matter-scatter storm. Of all the crew and passengers Bud had gotten whirled up the worst. He had been scrapped as a spaceman. E verything changed with Bud's going. The corn-officer who followed Bud was a nononsense type. The first time I spoke up to greet him he swiftly pressed the recycle button. When I tried to explain that I was not malfunctioning he punched the feedback-oscillator button, sending a jolt of juice through my computer to set me right. You can bet I didn't try to open any conversations after that. It would have been just as useless for me to have broken in on the two men dickering over my worth as scrap. Hey, wait! Listen to me! I don't want to die! To their way of thinking I was only a thing and had no say in my fate. They could have thought they were listening to a recording. They would have been wrong. I was not a thing and I would have a say. What I wanted to say was. Excuse my exhaust. But how? I rested on Pad #I and there I would remain helplessly -- lacking the chemical fuel for lift-off and the liquid cesium for near-light speed to the stars -- till the salvage robots came to take me apart. Unless... The spaceport was an everexpanding complex and the large numbers identifying the pads fitted into slots for easy rearranging. I scanned the tarmac. Yes, a mile east of me stood Pad # and my mind surged with pleasure to see the red fueling-alert light flash from the starship there. For what I had in mind I needed hands and legs. At once I thought of the servo-robot that did the deepspace emergency-repair work on my hull. I had never operated the thing on my own -- I would have to learn fast and without too many mistakes. I located the proper circuit, hooked into it and -- click -- I was seeing through its eyes. It stood in a niche in the maintenance compartment along with the crew's spacesuits and other gear. Clumsily at first -- till I caught op that it answered to the slightest thought of a move on my part -- it unstrapped the restraining harness, stepped out of its niche and clumped on magnetic soles the shortest way to the cargo airlock entrance. It strode down the ramp and made for the Pad #I sign alongside. Carefully it drew the numerals from the slot, turned them upside down and slid them back into place. I flashed my fueling-alert light. I was barely in time. The delivery tractrain was already rolling Trom the fuel depot. It braked sharply midway between the two Pad #s, its scanner swinging from one to the other, from the other starship to me. My servo-robot clumped toward the true Pad #. I seethed at i tk ungainly slowness, but I feared that if it ran it might overbalance, fall and lose more time than it gained. Too, I wanted it to avoid notice. But, no doubt answering the urgency in my mind, it made better time than the pace I consciously held it to. Before the tractrain could break out of its bewilderment and phone back for instructions my servo reached Pad # and turned the numerals upside down. The tractrain stopped wavering. It started rolling again, heading .straight for me. The tractrain followed strict safety procedures as it coupled its hoses to my tanks. I burned with impatience. I had to be up and away before the master of the spacecraft on Pad # wondered what was holding up his ship's refueling. By now my servo-robot had clumped back and stood strapped in its niche once more. As L switched it off I felt lonely for the first time. At last the tractrain uncoupled. I didn't bother asking thecontrol tower for clearance. I would never IF get it. I pulled up the outer hatch. There was no need to close the inner door of the airlock this time -- no crew, no passengers -- but out of habit I did so. Waiting only for the tractrain to pull far enough away, I scanned the blast area and lifted off. Pulling free of Earth, I trembled with power and something else. Though space was my true element -- and indeed now my only hope -- I felt a strange sense of loss and emptiness. I shook it off -- no time for sentiment. I had to make good my getaway. I shot toward the sun's flaring rim to put it between myself and Earth and lt it help sling me out of the system. After that? To keep from leaving any logical clue for men pursuing me to follow, I decided to pick a course at random. I stabbed blindly into my astrogation tapes and found I would be heading for Eta Lyrae, the star men call Aladfar. , And after-that? All space and all time lay ahead of me and around me. I was free. Free to be and free to choose. Still, I felt that sudden tear (pronounce it tare , not tier) t leaving Earth this time. This time there would be no returning . Ever. I was an outlaw. TTey-" XI All my intercom speakers were still on from my eavesdropping on the two men roaming my innards only a few hours ago -- a lifetime ago -- back on Earth. The voice came from my maintenance compartment. At the same moment I grew aware that something had caught fire in the maintenance compartment and that one of my reflexes had handled it, spraying the room with water and putting out the flames. Again I switched on my servo. Through its eyes I saw an empty spacesuit carom off the walls while over the intercom I heard another cry of pain. Then the magnetic soles of the spaceboots touched the wall, took hold and the empty suit stood swaying as if in a wind. I didn't believe in ghosts. Yet I knew I was witnessing some kind of presence. A charred and sodden mass of oily rags and cotton-waste floated into the servo-robot's field of vision. Next came a globe of water that had snowballed as the sprinkler droplets met and stuck together. Finally another Figure sailed into view. A boy of about sixteen, soaking wet. I understood what had happened. I had been too busy worrying about winding up on the scrap heap to notice his having slipped aboard. Kids often did. A spacesuit hanging in its niche made a handy hiding place against detection by adults and never in the past had I minded. This time was different. I had a stowaway. The extra G's of my sudden liftoff had blacked him out, most likely. When he had come to, panicky and dizzy, he had unzipped the spacesuit and kicked himself free of it, only to find weighthimself and the suit. Even so, he had somehow gathered the rags and waste and started a fire. Why fire? Not for light -- my walls had built-in glow. It was bright enough in the maintenance compartment to show me he looked gray with cold. No wonder -- the compartment was on my night side as I angled toward the sun. Firing my torque nozzles, I gave my hull spin to equalize the temperature and create artificial gravity for the stowaway. He shot spreadeagled to the deck and the char and water splattered around him and on him. "Hey -- " That didn't call for an answer -- it did make me realize I might have given him warning. I justified myself by thinking it served him right. After all, I had not invited him aboard. But now that I did have a human aboard I had to start recycling the air. And I could see a more worrisome problem ahead -- how to proI vide him with food. I was having to go to a lot of trouble for one medium-sized hellion. A firebug. Yet somehow I didn't mind. He sat up carefully, waited a moment to see if anything more would happen, then got to his feet. When he found he could move around just as on Earth a smile played over his face and he stole to the door leading to the corridor. I made my voice boom. "Who are you, boy?" He jumped. If I could have I probably would have jumped, too -- I had never sounded like that before. My voice came from the intercom speaker on the wall, but looking around the boy saw the servo-robot's eyes on him and spoke to it. "Tom. Tom Stope, sir." "Don't call that thing 'sir.' I'm talking to you." He looked around again. "But where are you?" "All around you." "Huh?" "I'm the ship. Call me Proteus." A long silence, then, "Oh." But I could see he did not understand or did not believe. I explained. He said, "Oh," again, more satisfactorily. Then full understanding and belief hit him. IF "You mean we're not going back?" "Not ever." "But -- " "I don't mean to be mean, but no one asked you to come along. I'm not going back and that's final. If you want to stay behind you can do so right now. Seal yourself in my lifeboat and I'll eject you, give you a big boost back toward Earth -- " Then I remembered -- the old landing-program tape had been pulled from the lifeboat and had not been replaced with a new one. It takes a bit of skill to spiral in manually without burning to a cinder. "Wait. Do you know how to land a lifeboat?" "No, sir." "Then you'll have to learn. If you are ever to return to Earth you must do so on your own. You may leave in the lifeboat whenever you wish -- after you have learned to pilot it to a safe landing. By then you'll have to have learned astrogation as well." "Why's that?" "Because we'll be so far from the solar system that the sun will be lost among the other stars. Unless you can locate the sun and plot a course, you'll never find your way back to Earth." "Oh?" A pause, then quietly: "How do I leam?" "I'll be your teaching machine. We'll start boning you up on math and physics as soon as I set up the program." The boy laughed suddenly. I broke in on the laughter. "Are you laughing at me?" "No, at myself. Here I thought I was running away from all that." "All what?" "Having to learn a lot of dull stuff." "Humans are so inefficient,, illogical and unstable. Not at all like machines." I wasn't aware I had thought aloud till I heard him answer. "But humans made the machine. We made you." "Yes, yes. You must excuse me now. I have much to do." I let him see the servo-robot's gaze rest on the splatter of char and water on the deck and then on himself. "Meanwhile, I'd appreciate it if you'd clean up the mess. And yourself." His head went back, as from a blow. "Aye-aye, sir." I'm ashamed to say I enjoyed putting him in his place. I were to keep him alive, though I didn't care to let him know that was what occupied me. In preparing for liftoff I had naturally given no thought to human needs. Water I could purify over and over again. Food was another matter. On every other voyage I had grown vegetables in a huge tank. But as my owner had been planning to sell me for scrap he had not bothered to, reseed my hydroponics garden. And, of course, he had not restocked the galley. My lifeboat carried emergency rations, but they would be barely enough to see the boy back to Earth when the time came. Meanwhile I had to find other resources. For this work I needed the servorobot's mobility. I made it unstrap itself, clump to the door and undog the door. The boy stopped mopping up. "Where are you going?" "I told youf I'm going toward Aladfar." "I don't mean you, Proteus , I mean the robot." "It is going to tidy up the rest of me." "Oh?" He laughed as he went back to mopping up. "I keep forgetting you're the ventriloquist and it's the dummy." Ventriloquist, indeed. That was hardly our relationship. I walked the servo-robot out with dignity. And "tidy up" was hardly the right phrase. "Scrounge" was more what I had in mind. And scrounge it did, looking and feeling around in every stowage space, locker and drawer. It came up with a surprising amount of stuff. There had been a whole grin of sweet teeth among the last crew. I found two dozen candy bars, three and a half boxes of cookies, five cases of soda pop and nearly seven hundred sticks of chewing gum. My last purser proved to have been a secret hypochondriac. The servo-robot brought to light in his quarter's a treasure trove of vitamins and powdered protein drinks. I found more food supplements in the ship's sick bay, plus plastic bottles of intravenous solutions which could prove handy as a last resort. My biggest -- though smallest -- haul was two packets of seeds. I did not stop there. The servorobot vacuumed all the bedding and every last pocket and cuff of forgotten and abandoned clothing and when it had winnowed out the dust and the lint I had a small mountain of broken nuts and cracker crumbs, a dozen orange pips and two apple cores. There was still some nutrient solution in my hydroponics tank. Just to make sure I had the robot pour in one of the precious bottles of intravenous. There seemed to be enough excelsior in the tank to hold the roots if the seeds sprouted. I planted the packets of seeds, together with the orange pips and the apple seeds. Now I had time to think about, the present. I called the boy on the intercom. "Tom Stope." "Yes, Proteus?" "Lunch time. Find your way to the messroom aft. Oh the captain's table are a can of cream soda, a chocolate-nut bar -- " "Man, this is going to be great!" " -- and a multiple-vitamin tablet. And for afterward a sterilized toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste." "Aye-aye, sir." T OM didn't complain, but I could tell he grew sick of the same old tired food day after day after day. By the time my hydroponics garden began to produce Tom was ready for the change. But no matter how you serve them up, peas are peas and cucumbers are cucumbers. The apples and oranges would be a long while coming. The first few days the boy had busied himself exploring my labyrinth of corridors and layers of decks. I myself had been too busy -- shaping course, watching out for pursuit and putting myself in order -- to pay him much mindjbut I could not help being awarfe of his running up and down companionways and along catwalks and poking into every last one of my compartments. After that I had kept him busy with his lessons, as much to keep his mind off his diet asto teach. him how to make his way back to Earth. I found his spelling atrocious. He protested when I marked him wrong for spelling vacuum "vacwm." True, that spelling had a screwy logic of its Own, but it was not the kind of logic I was used to. He swore foully under his breath. "I'll tactfully ignore that," I said. "Now let's get on with the lesson, shall we, my young lexiconoclast?" I heard myself chuckle. I, too, could play on words. On leaving, he shut the classroom door with unnecessary force. But he showed up for the next class on time. One day he seemed very quiet. "What's wrong, Tom?" "Nothing. It's just that I've been crossing off the Earth days." "Yes?" "And today's my birthday." "Happy birthday, Tom." "Thanks, Proteus." I said nothing more, but gradually increased the oxygen in the air, slowly brightened the glow of my bulkheads and he soon grew cheerful and chatty again. But I myself grew gloomier as the time neared for him to go. He had early showed an aptitude for piloting and I had checked him out step by step. He passed my tests with flying -- or jetting -- colors. first simulating, then actually taking off in the lifeboat and practicing spiraling in on my hull. But it was not the same as landing in atmosphere. One last test, then, before he left me for good. We were near Ostrakon, an Earthlike planet of a sunlike star. The United Galaxy had placed it off limits, but I was already a desperado and the tapes described Ostrakon as having developed only vegetable life. There would be no people on the lookout for an outlaw spaceship and there would be plenty of food and water if Tom crashlanded and had to spend any length of time on the planet. "Listen, Bud -- " "Bud? It's Tom, remember?" "Sorry, Tom. A slip of the tape." I showed him Ostrakon on the screen in the control room. "Button up in the lifeboat. You're going to make a real landing." "Man!" It dampened him a little when I insisted on sending along the servorobot so I could keep an eye on him. But he buoyed up when I put myself in orbit around Ostrakon and told him he could launch when ready. Whoosh! I needn't have been anxious -- he made a neat landing. He got out. I had the servo-robot follow. I spoke over the lifeboat's talkbox. "Don't stray too far." "I won't." Tom drew a deep deep breath. "Fresh air!" "What's wrong with my air?" "Nothing, Proteus, nothing. Only -- " The lifeboat's retro-rockets must have vaporized much of the moisture in the landing area. A nearby tree flapped great leathery leaves, tore itself loose from the soil and flew a hundred yards away to' sink its talon-like roots into moister soil. " Proteus , did you see that?" Something troubled me, something I should have known about Ostrakon. "Very interesting, but the purpose of the exercise is not sightseeing. Return to ship." A slow: "Aye-aye, sir." Tom and the servo-robot buttoned up again. The lifeboat lifted off. Without my prompting him, Tom let the spin of the planet help. I was proud. I secretly forgave him for turning away from the controls for a farewell glance at Ostrakon. "Hey! Look down there, Proteus. Do you see it?" recently burned or stomped a changed course and homed the lifesuddenly why Ostrakon was off limits. IF "Come back, Tom." " Proteus ! Someone needs help." Before I could say more he had made another neat landing. Right in the bull's eye of the S.O.S. He unbuttoned quickly and hopped out. I had the servo-robot follow with more dignity. Through its eyes I saw nothing but treeline all around. Tom cupped both hands around a loud: "Hello -- " but no one answered. All at once a clump of trees took off in a scatter, uncovering a man who lay on the ground training a beamgun on Tom and the servorobot. The man had been lying in ambush, no doubt waiting to make sure all the landing party had left the shelter of the lifeboat. For some reason of their own, perhaps out of a wish to warn us, perhaps simply out of dislike for the man, the trees had given him away. He stood up, wiped a look of embarrassment from his face and holstered his beamgun. "Just wanted to make sure you're friendly." He had a spellbinding voice and a winning smile. But I could still feel that beamgun pointing at me. Too, an automatic alarm programed somewhere among my tapes had already begun feeding me information regarding his identity. The top executive's uniform he wore -- in the style of a generation ago -- had stained and frayed badly, but was nevertheless recognizable and suited his proud bearing. To look just as he did thirty years before, as I later found in a thorough search of my history videotapes, he must have dyed his hair with vegetable dye that he had made himself for himself. This vanity, too, helped to betray him. He smiled at Tom. "Glad someone finally came. I've been shipwrecked' here a long time." He had edged closer to the lifeboat and by now must have seen it was empty. It took me a full minute to break the spell his personality had cast over me. I reminded myself I was my own boss and before he came any nearer I spoke through the lifeboat's talkbox. "That is not -- repeat not -- so. Now hear this, Tom. This man is "Baron" Ur. He is an exile. It is against the law to have dealings of any kind with him. Tom, hop into the lifeboat. This planet is off-limits because of him." I was too late. The man had pulled the beamgun again and was aiming it at Tom. "Don't move." He swung the beam around and snapped two shots at one of the trees that had given him away and had rerooted nearby. Its two winglike boughs on either side were sheared off close to the slender trunk and a moan like the wind went through. all the trees and I knew it was doomed to remain where it stood till it died. I winced for it. Never to fly again. The man smiled again at Tom. "That's to show you two things. The beamgun is loaded and I mean business." He nodded pleasantly. "Your friends aboard the spaceship -- by the lettering on the lifeboat I see it's the old Proteus -- are right. I am indeed Baron Ur." .stock market wheelerdealer -- my tapes had a lot on him for instant use -- a whiz at pyramiding an interest in one company into control of many. He had . stuck together a great conglomerate, one of the biggest on Earth -- actually he had shown himself full of energy v and vision. But he had misused his paper empire. He had corrupted government officials -- Earth Government had convicted him of bribery, stock manipulation and a dozen other offenses. Even so, he would have been nothing to me but a vague reference in my memory banks, but for the fact that the Arm that had owned me had been part of his financial empire. I thought it a nice turn of fate that put me on the top now. Tom's eyes shone. He was face to face with living history. He seemed unaware of the beamgun's threat. I had to break the spell. "Ah," I said. "So this is where they sent you." I inched the servo-robot closer to Baron Ur as the man's mind went back thirty years. An easy enough jump for him, I suppose -- he had had thirty years to brood over it. "Sent? I chose to come. Oh, the judges let me choose. They would do things to my mind to make me fit to live among the rabble -- or they would allow me to go into solitary exile. As you can see, I chose exile." While his mind was full of what it considered injustice. I jumped the servo-robot at Ur. But Ur proved too alert, too quick. He dodged the reaching arms and aimed the beamgun at the servo-robot's eyes. That was the last I saw. Before I could blink their shields the beamgun crackled and the servo-robot went blind. My only excuse is that the distance from orbit to ground made my reaction time too long. Ur's voice told me what was going on. "The young man gets it next if you don't let me come aboard." "All right. Lift off and come aboard." IF Looking back, I can see I did not even think of taking the logical course, which would have been simply to go on my way alone, fully automated master of myself. I waited for Ur and Tom and the blind servo-robot to leave Ostrakon and come aboard. They passed through the airlock. Ur stepped carefully into my interior, no doubt holding the beamgun on Tom. "Where's everybody?" That was when Baron Ur found out that I was everybody. He remained silent a minute, then laughed loudly and long. Very humiliating for me. Ur had Tom show him around my innards. I'm sorry to say only one thing impressed Ur. "Peas and cucumbers! Apples and oranges! Paradise!" But when he finished the tour he l spoke to me in a voice full of feeling that was catching. I seemed to swell with prospects and surge with power, just listening. "We can do great things together, Proteus: You and I and this fine young man." He seated himself in the captain's chair and pressed the button to flash the starchart display on the control room wall. "Very well, we'll shape course for Tarazed. That's Gamma Aquilae, a star with a bunch of planets ripe for plucking." Ostrakon. Clearing the decks for the leap toward Tarazed, I had the servo-robot feel its way back to its niche and strap in. You may be wondering why I didn't protest. It was tempting to hand over responsibility. I would no longer have to think for myself. Whatever happened from now on -- it would not be my fault if things went wrong. Then, too, I had no plans of my own except to escape the scrap heap -- and Ur had big plans for me. Besides, if I ever had to assert myself, I could easily take over again and put Ur in his place. And yet, having been my own master, I felt a sense of loss, unease and shame. This sense grew as the space-time passed. Not because of anything Ur did in the way of mastery over me. In fact, he seemed to forget I was more than a machine and for the most part ignored me. I had time to think ahead. The planets of Tarazed were primitive. United Galaxy members were not supposed to contact them until they had reached a higher level of technology on their own. They were ripe indeed for plucking by Ur. Too I did not like the way Ur had pressed Tom into service. Tom polished Ur's boots and brushed Ur's uniform while Ur boasted of his past and dreamed aloud of his future. Ur remembered every so often to promise Tom would share in the glory to come. Glory! If he treated Tom as a valet, he would treat the peoples of Tarazed as less than human. I could not allow Ur to mislead Tom. I could not allow Ur to misuse me. Without Ur's noticing, I changed course while displaying a false reckoning of progress toward Tarazed. When we were farther from Tarazed than when we had started out for it, though the display map showed us within lifeboat's range of Tarazed, I made my move. Ur seemed in an especially good mood, seeing himself close to realizing new conquests. During a moment of silence I spoke up. "Tom really ought to get on with his lessons." Ur grunted in surprise, but when he answered his voice was gracious. "You're right, Proteus . The more the kid knows, the more use he'll be. Go right ahead." I heard Tom's slow feet take him to the classroom, a corner of the passenger lounge. "We'll have a drill on the chemical elements, Tom. I'll shoot the atomic numbers at you and you'll write down the symbols. Ready?" A grudging "Aye-aye, sir." I gave him the numbers in bursts. "Seventy-four, two, seven -- thirtynine, eight, ninety-two -- two, eighteen, eighty-eight -- fourteen, seventy-five, seven -- sixty-seven, fifteen -- forty-nine -- three, twentysix, five, eight, eighty-five -- eighteen, sixty -- thirty-four, thirty -- twenty-two, fifty-two." Now, # is Tungsten and its symbol is W, # is Helium and its symbol is He, # is Nitrogen and its symbol is N. Together, the first burst of numbers stood for the word "WHeN." My whole message TiTe. I felt guilty about that last bit of spelling. However. "Did you get them all, Tom?" "I think so." His tone, surprised and scared, told me he had got the message. "Don't you know so? Go over it again in your mind and tell me." Waiting for Tom's answer, I can't say I held my breath, but I noticed that for the moment my airconditioning system blocked up. Different as night and day, Tom Stope and Baron Ur were phases of the same phenomenon -- mankind. They had more in common with each other than either had with me. Had Tom seen past the dazzle of Ur's boasts and promises? And even if he recognized Ur as a convicted galactic menace would he throw in with me? Or would he betray me to Ur? IF "Seventy-five, eighteen, sixtysix." ReADy. My air-conditioning system pumped faster. A human sided with me against one of his own kind. Tom had weighed Ur and myself and found me worthier. "Very good, Tom. Dismissed." I heard him leave the classroom and head with seeming casualness for the lifeboat tube. I waited a minute before sounding my meteorite-alarm siren. Normally my crew would take damage-control stations. Ur would rush to the control room. But at the sound of the siren I did not hear Ur dash from the Statler-Hilton Hotel, New York City. Guest-of-Honor: Harlan Ellison. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Walt Cole, #I East #th Street, Brooklyn, New York #. # April #-April #, #. tional Hotel, Los Angeles Airport. Guest-of-Honor: Theodore Sturgeon. Toastmaster-General: Tandall Garret. Featuring appearances by cast and crew members of Star Trek. Also: star-studded banquet. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For information: Frances Tuning, P.O. Box #, Santa Barbara, California #. Motel, Nashville, Tennessee. Guestof-Honor: Frederik Pohl. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. For Information: Ken Moore, #T Devon Drive, Nashville, Tennessee #.  At the Sheraton-Dallas, Dallas, Texas. Membership: # (to ##), # at the door. For information: D-Con '#, Box #, Lewisville, Texas #.  August #September #, # . Fiction Convention: At Royal York Hotel, Toronto, Canada. Guest-of-Honor: Robert Bloch. Rotsler. Toastmaster at Hugo Awards Banquet: Lester del Rey. Membership: # attending and # supporting (until ##), # at the door. For information: Torcon #, Box #, Station K. Toronto #, Ontario, Canada. the captain's quarters to the control room. I had lost track of him -- he must have taken off his boots and padded silently along my corridors. I heard Tom skid to a halt just outside the lifeboat tube. Then I heard Ur's voice. "Stand back, Stope. I don't want to have to beam you." He laughed. "Too bad, Proteus. Once the kid buttoned up in the lifeboat you meant to let out all the air in the ship and finish me, didn't you?" "How did you know?" "Elementary, my dear seventyfour, eighty-five, sixteen, eight, seven. I wondered why you had Stope write down the answers rather than snap them back. So I listened hard. Once you learn the numbers and symbols of the chemical elements you never quite forget them. Really, Proteus, you didn't think a cybernetic brain could outwit a human brain? My brain?" I didn't answer. "It's just as well you tried. I've learned I can't trust either of you. Luckily I don't have to. From here it's an easy jump to the planets of Tarazed. So I'll be leaving you." lifeboat and felt the kick as he launched. M Proteus, you let him get away -- he'll get to Tarazed and -- " "We're nowhere near Tarazed, Tom. I falsified our position." "Oh." A long silence. Then: "What will happen to Ur?" "From here, Ostrakon's the only planet within lifeboat range. Ur will wind up where he began." "You planned it this way? You even knew ahead of time you would lose your lifeboat?" "Ostrakon's the only planet a lifeboat can reach," I repeated. He'll wind up where he began." A thought struck me. "I hope the trees don't hold a grudge. I could sense the energy level in his beamgun -- he doesn't have much power left in it." "But that means -- " I sighed. That's to say my airconditioning momentarily breathed heavily. Yes, only one way remained to get Tom back to Earth. I would have to take him there myself. Would they listen to me when I asked them to allow me to pay for venture into the most perilous voids. Would they let me work out the amount I would have brought as scrap? There were more Buds and Toms back home than Urs. Earth still believed in individual freedom and I was an individual. I leaped back toward Earth.  IF Free! One recent issue of Environmental Quality It could change your life. And help you change the whole world for the better. Because this is the magazine that does more than just talk about ecology. Every month, we tell you what to do to make things better. foods. Other articles have examined baby foods, hamburger, water fluoridation. Strip Mining: The Prostitution of America. And the disgrace. Richard Cramer suggests other choices. Obscenity and Ecology. Joseph Sorrentino wonders why cops and courts go after porno peddlers with such zeal, while letting polluters sock it to society with such impunity. Engines and Alternatives. In separate articles, we've examined the Wankel rotary engine, the Lear steam machine, the bicycle and the turbine motorcycle. Interviews. We've talked with Walter Hickel and Henry Gibson, mental mmental not one of those phony offers where the "free" copy is actually the first issue in your subscription. It's really free. We will enter your subscription for one year automatically. And we'll bill you for our special rate, # for # issues. If you don't want them, write "No!" on the invoice, return it within # days, and we'll cancel. You will owe us nothing. And we won't pollute your mailbox. Just to give you an idea of how we're different, here's a sampling of what a few recent issues have covered: Terrors in Toyland. How safe is your child's'toy? "The Ralph Nader of the toy industry," Edward Swartz spells out the perils. And lists # do's and don't's for intelligent buying. Witness for the Living Sea. JacquesYves Cousteau outlines # points that could keep the sea and mankind alive. Vanishing Point. A regular feature. So far, we've considered the alligator, coyote, tule elk, sea otter, dolphin, brown pelican, wild mustang. The New Panama Canal. What will it do to the waters, the islands, the people? Whom should you write and why? Keep Out of the Reach of Children. Cereals are healthy for TV, no so healthy for kids. A hard look at American way of breakfast, with cost and nutrient analyses of # breakfast environmental #I quality magazine # Burbank Blvd. North Hollywood, Calif. #I Senator Gaylord Nelson and Cleveland Ruckelshaus through # days, and published Ralph Nader's views on # issues. Futures. We'll tell you about health food restaurants in major cities. Charter flight inequities. No fault insurance. Consider socialized medicine. Prison reform. Day care child centers. About that free offer. We'll send you absolutely free a recent issue to let you judge it for yourself. This is Send me my free issue, and enter my subscription for I year, # for # issues. I can cancel by writing "No!" on the invoice within # days. I will owe you nothing and you will not pester me. O NE of the major requirements for a good story is inner consistency. This applies to all fiction, but particularly to science fiction. Once a writer has departed from the common background -- from what we consider the real world -- his creation of an alternate reality must not be inconsistent or it loses all believability. Some inconsistencies are accepted in our real world because we're used to them. We are not used to contradictions in a created world and we can't accept them easily. And in science fiction especially belie vability must be won rather than taken for granted. One of our authors who has established a high level of consistency -- particularly in his background cultures -- has been Isaac Asimov. The major portion of all his fiction, in fact, has been within the limits of two assumptive areas. The first is the rise, decay and rebuilding of his Galactic Empire. This has probably filled a larger body of work with one, detailed, consistent backdrop than any other writer's writing can yield. The second involves his robots, with IF their three laws -- and here, throughout a great many stories, the basic character of the robots has remained totally consistent. Even in his novel. The End of Eternity, where the basic idea would seem to make inconsistency the rule, he came closer to imparting the feeling of consistency than any other writer who has tackled the theme of a future busily changing itself by changing its own past. Now we have . a giant volume which gives us a great many of his early stories, many unrelated to each other or to his better-known themes. This is The Early Asimov (Doubleday, #). It runs well over # pages and contains # stories from his first eleven years of writing that have not previously been collected in his own books. Some of them are very good stories, too: Trends, Not Final! and Blind Alley, for instance. The last fits into his Galactic Empire framework, but is the only story in that series involving a nonhuman race. I've always considered it good on two levels: #) its depiction of the red-tape bureaucratic world that frames the basic plot and #) its treatment of aliens and their fate, which are presented almost incidentally -- but with a fine emotional kick. Some stories, like Homo Sol, are worth reading, but depend on some trick or other that makes them less than great. And a few are pretty mediocre -- such as Slack Friar of the Flame, which is apparently Asimov's attempt to imitate a type of story already trite when he tried it. But all in all, this would be a better-than-average collection on the basis of the stories alone. The stories do not stand alone, however. Between them is a running history of the development of the writer and of the early days when John W. Campbell was editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov kept a diary through these years, so that he can write accurately about matters that are only unreliable memories to most of us. I find his account of those crucial days in the development of science fiction both valuable and interesting. His picture, of John Campbell -- who was so influential to most of us -- is particularly worth reading. v In many ways, his depiction of Campbell tallies closely with mine. But our reactions to the man are quite different. This doesn't mean that Asimov is wrong or that I am, but only that Campbell's relationship with his writers varied greatly according to the personality of the man with whom he was dealing. Asimov was young and filled almost with awe at first. I was more self-confident and by no means as compulsively concerned with writing as my prime effort. Where Asimov developed what seems to have been a case of hero-worship, I found in Campbell primarily a very good friend with whom I could argue interminably and with a fair chance of winning. Both views are valid and probably Asimov's is more typical, hence makes for more rewarding reading to those who read the magazines of the day. There is another attraction to the book that cannot be put down -- this is the character that Asimov has created around himself. The book has a hero throughout -- and a fascinating one. He, of course, is Asimov himself, more as he has now made himself publicly than as he really was then. Here is consistency and it works. I don't find his public picture of himself always accurately depicting the friend I know -- but I inevitably fall under the spell of it when he's lecturing or writing, probably because it is so marvelously consistent -- and consistently entertaining. It's not a great book -- it deliberately introduces stories the author knows are not his best. But it's a darned good book and well worth its price. F DR an example of what happens when an author pays no attention to consistency in story development I turn to Cloning , by David Shear (Walker, #). This slim volume (# pages of type, rather little for th# price) is a first effort and the writer is a biophysicist, rather than a student of writing in any sense -- so perhaps we ckn forgive him. But it's hard to forgive his editors and publishers for the extravagant dustjacket copy. Basically, there are two stories rather loosely mixed together in this volume. The first (we discover more than a third of the way through the book) deals with the fate of mechanical "androids" who look and function like people, but have been granted no rights to be treated as people -- they simply do the menial and unpleasant work of the world. This is really the problem of Carolyn, the hero's, former wife and current lawyer. She wants the androids to have the right to acceptance and to be married -- or to marry humans. Now there's a hoary idea! And the development, such as there is,bririgs little but the most banal of racial-problem ideas into the plot. At its best, it's merely obvious. The other deals with the facts that our hero, Paul, is a clone and doesn't know it. (Clones, of course, are people who grow from the cells of a single ancestor, hence have IF only his or her hereditary characteristics.)' Paul has bad dreams at first. By the time we find out about cloning in the book -- halfway through -- we're more than ready to accept the fact that his dreams are telepathic links with other clones of the same ancestor. It seems reasonably obvious that if telepathy works it will work best with those most alike, such as identical twins and clones. I've been doing a novel involving that idea sirice # -- and I won't call the postulate fresh even when I first thought of using it. In the end the two problems are linked by a trick in court, but the device adds little. However, the inconsistencies in this book are almost fresh in their degree. This is a story laid fifty years from now. There are twelve mention countless androids, who also eat the same food we eat and live in the same general style of housing and wear the same clothing. But there seems to be an ample supply of apple pie, cheese, hot dogs and root beer -- not to mention Chicken Kiev and Eggplant Provencale. No explanation is given of where all this good food is grown for a world that has more than three times our current population -- plus androids, presumably buses and drives what seems to be a car like today's, even finds parking space for it on the street. And when the rush hour in downtown Cleveland is mentioned, it's done casually, as if no problems existed. And there is no mention of any pollution crisis, except for one comment that Lake Erie has somehow been brought back from the grave. Oh, yes -- the eagle is extinct. That's the one consistency that renders even inconsistency inconsistent. Even the cultural attitudes make little sense. In the story, it is stated that the androids have full sex activity -- in fact, Paul all but falls into bed with one. I can't help wondering why a society that denies androids the right to be treated as human should go to all the effort of giving them completely successful sexual organs and a built-in sex drive. The only reason I can find is that it's necessary to make theiiig point about intermarriage between man and android -- and even that doesn't seem worth attempting when the androids are practically immortal and the humans are not... Characters are no more consistent than any other details. Paul is depicted as a bigot -- one with a deeply emotional reaction agajnst the androids. (Apparently, from later material, he must have inherited this from his cloneancestor; most of the medical details here are fairly good, but I can't And medical evidence that such attitudes can be inherited.) We see his bigotry in full flower on page #, but on page # -- a few moments later in the story -- he switches over and offers to give the bride away happily in a mixed marriage between man and android. But don't be disturbed -- on page # he gets sick to his guts at the idea he might have gone to bed with a female android, so he's still able to switch back to being a bigot. Then at the end, all sweetness and light, he tries to rig the evidence in a trial so that such mixed marriages can be performed. Let's say about the plbt that mostly it didn't bother me, in light of the other interesting things to worry about. But even there one little detail caught me by surprise. Paul has assumed the identity of a dead clone-twin, including memories, etc. In the end the police find who he is and identify him quickly by checking his fingerprints! And in my naivet, I always assumed that clones grown from identical genetic material and with minds so essentially identical that they could take over each other's personality and completely fool wives, would have identical fingerprints -- or ones so nearly identical that it would be difficult to make positive identification. Not recommended! k to be a welcome change from the above. Herbert has proved his ability to create convincing and marvelously consistent backgrounds, not only in Dune but even before in his excellent story of a I future submarine. But I'm afraid I was left with mixed feelings after reading his The God Makers (Putnam, #). The background for this follows a war that has broken up the first human empire spanning the stars. Worlds that' have survived the conflict with their civilizations reasonably intact are trying to get in touch with planets where civilization has slipped, while making every effort to see that they do not give power to any race on any world where warlike tendencies are too strong to be controlled. Orne, feeling a need to be useful, has left his family. He graduates from the military branch of Rediscovery and Reeducation and is sent to a newly discovered planet to help reeducate it. But he soon senses something wrong -- through hunch or intuition -- and sends a panic signal for help. The Investigation-Adjustment agent sent to take over is highly sceptical, but learns that Orne is correct and drafts him into I-A. From there on they work IF together. Orne seems to be able to pull almost any rabbit out of the hat by logic that looks good after the fact, but is not believable against his background of knowledge. In the end, he and the agent -- a man named Stetson -- work on a conspiracy within their own government that dates back to the great war and involves Orne's own family. All this is excellent adventure fiction. It moves -- it gets better and better and it's fun. But somehow the tingle from reading the first # pages sort of faded away for me when I found that Orne is not only loaded with psi powers -- he's a focal point for them -- but that he is literally meant to become a gradeA working God! Once he gets to the world of Amal he passes through some quick ordeals that are to test him and train him. The ordeals have scope and marvelous imaginative details -- and there's logic behind all. But too much changes too fast. Orne gradually vanishes as the character we first k,new. Those traces of him that remain only make the God he becomes harder to believe. In the end Herbert lets Orne take over again to some extent and his final act as a God is good. But Orne has really gone beyond our ability to follow. I feel that this is a case of inevitable character inponsistency, as well as mood inconsistency. This isn't caused by any carelessness or any lack of skill as a writer on Herbert's part. He does the best that can be done within the framework of his main idea. But the break is too great between a man with even slightly more than human powers and a God. During Orne's presence on Amal I found myself slipping from him and focusing my attention on his guide, a priest named Bakrish. And then Bakrish simply disappeared and I had no one left to follow. However, this novel may prove to be successful in a market other than the normal sf one. There are many of the same devices (the brief extracts of philosophy above each chapter, for instance) as are found in Dune and the book contains some of the same philosophical mysticisms. To those many readers who have turned Dune into cult reading this one may be welcome for some of the very things that seemed faults to me. It has none of the ecological philosophy of Dune , however. I liked the parts of the book that dealt with the man Orne so much that I have to recommend it. It's better than this review makes it seem and well worth reading. Herbert remains a consistently damned good writer.  Civil unrest threatens Anharitte, city on the planet Roget, just beginning the leap from feudalism into space-age technology. A giant Freetrade spaceport links Anharitte to an interplanetary mercantile system centered on Earth under the Freetrade Council. enlightened treatment of slaves by the natives as having magic powers. ran-educated technological wizard and illegally a lord of Roget. He seems to be planning an end to feudalism, threatening Freetrade-fostered status lovely, highly educated showpiece discovers his warehouse has been point where the Lord of Magda would The crooked clerk is instantly and mysbut as soon as he and she have left the teriously killed. No evidence links document spontaneously combusts. sum -- against no opposition. in the form of a reputedly invincible Ranee , which plans to enslave Roget. When this is ignored he again demonstrates his wizardry by effecpersonnel along with their segment of Freetrade spaceport -- apparently using only a couple of properly equipped bicycle riders. Ranee threatens war. T HE sky was beginning to darken with the approach ofL rain as Ren returned from the spaceport. The sullen, brooding clouds fitted his mood. Di Irons had offered him a horse but, still sore from his last encounter with one of these magnificent beasts, Ren had declined. Nor had he accepted Pictor Don's offer of the loan of a cushioncraft. More than anything Ren wanted to be alone. He needed time to think. Ranee was preparing to put down on Roget some thirty so-called disaster teams, ostensibly to establish order in a situation where factually no assistance was required. But once their ships had landed, Ren had no doubt, a sequence of "disasters" would occur to justify Ranee's continued occupation of the planet. Ranee would claim her actions were selfless and humane. Under the propaganda, however, lurked the harsh realities of conquest and exploitation -- the real reasons behind the expedition. The preservation of planetary independence was a fundamental right guaranteed by the charter of the Galactic Federation. A competent spacefleet was maintained to give teeth to the Federation's resolutions. The problem was therefore one of comhad the capability of communicating in real time with the Federation before Ranee's occupation became part of history. Because of the interstellar distances located at the spaceport, was routed through the relay terminal on Ranee itself. It was certainly no accident that Ren's call to Freetrade Central had been unable to gain a communication channel. The Ranee relay had not even bothered to reply. Presumably Ranee was already claiming that the communications failure was due to civil disruption on Roget. Nothing could be farther from reality, but Ren, shorn of the ability to broadcast the truth across the universe, could only fret with frustration and anxiety under the leaden sky of Anharitte. The ships of Ranee would probably appear in ROget's orbit within two weeks. The "disasters" would follow as an aftermath, rather than as a prelude to their coming. His experience with Alek Hardun had taught Ren what to expect. A silent dusting with mutagens' would ensure the warping of the harvests. Virulent plagues would decimate the populations of the cities. Afterward would come the terrors of the persecutions as the "saviors" from Ranee sought out the "transgressors" of Roget. Finally another planet would be added to the sad, mute colonies of the trade worlds. Ren wondered if Director Vestevaal would guess the truth of the situation and whether, having guessed, he could carry his convictions with sufficient force to bring the fleet arm of the Federation into action. Certainly his claims would need substantiation if they were to hold against the barrage of propaganda from Combien and Ranee. With these preoccupations in his mind Ren had reached the Black Rock before the coming of the rain drew his attention to his own predicament. He shrugged, drew up his collar and turned his face skyward, the better to appreciate the refreshing nature' of the shower. Suddenly aware of himself, he was intrigued to find that he had walked the major length of the Via Arena without being consciously aware of a step he had taken. The stalls and boutiques beyond the Arena were mainly closed. With characteristic logic the Ahhn had seen no point in keeping regular trade hours at a time when bad weather rendered custom unlikely. Ren walked between the sheeted hutments and stalls, feeling that the members of such an independent race were unlikely easily to accept domination by Ranee. Certainly they deserved a better fate. He wished it were within his power to secure it for them. Where the route to Magda Crossing met the Trade Road he stopped, looking toward the dark mass of Thirdhill. He wondered if Dion-daizan had become aware of Ranee's action and what, if anything, the wizard could do about it. Slightly beyond his line of sight the dark castle nestled somewhere on the hill, guarding a range of secrets that appeared to cover a broader spectrum with their every exercise. Was it impossible, Ren asked himself, that the Imaiz had an answer even to this problem? The idea did not carry a great deal of conviction. The Imaiz was a minor lord of a minor province on a relatively undeveloped world. He would need to be a mighty wizard indeed to take on the armed might of Ranee. N evertheless the faint hope persisted. It took Ren away from his own route and down to the water's edge. The rain, now drifting in sheets, lost him the stretch of Firstwater in a cloud of drizzle. At Magda Crossing no ferries were available. The fragile slimboats had been drawn up under cover and the ferrymen had gone. Typical Ahhn logic dictated that nobody but a fool or a felon would be traveling in weather such as this. Ren searched the bank for a quarter of an hour but could not And anybody to take him across and he could not have handled a slimboat by himself against the tide. Finally the rain began to penetrate his clothing and hang cold around his neck and shoulders. Fearing a chill in this land of inadequate medicine, Ren retraced his steps away from the river and climbed the slopes of the Trade Road. When he finally reached his office chambers he was soaked to the skin, thoroughly exhausted and depressed. Such was his condition that his servants were alarmed and insisted that he bathe immediately, then retire to bed. He was halfway to acceding to their wishes when a thought struck him. His office computing terminal had not been used since the discovery of the line tap. The line had been disconnected at the spaceport in order to deny Dion-daizan unauthorized access to the computer data banks, but Ren could not recollect whether the tap itself had been broken. Experimentally he took the cover from the keyboard and sat before the instrument. As he keyed his call sign the board responded with a ready acknowledgment.f As the lights died on the board Ren felt possessed of a sudden chill and began to tremble violently. Afraid for him, his servants insistently dragged him away from the terminal and stripped the wet clothes from his back. Their concern proved justified. On the following morning he awoke with a fever, and pains ran through every muscle of his body. A physician from the Pointed Tails arrived IF and made him drink a pungent brew of herbs -- it cooled the fever but did nothing for the aches that troubled him whichever way he lay. recovered sufficiently to continue with his business. microwave communicator brought him an urgent message from San Weba, the spaceport controller. "Tito, our scanners have just picked up a fleet of vessels about a hundred diameters out. At a guess I'd say they are the Ranee disaster fleet. They're keeping radio silence and refuse to communicate." "Thanks," said Ren. "I'll pass the message to Di Irons. He'll probably send a .messenger to the planetary government. If the fellow takes a fast horse he might even reach his destination before the battle is lost. Had any luck with the "Ranee refuses to answer us and we don't have enough power to reach another relay station. Ranee has even stopped transmitting galactic newsfax items to us. We're effectively isolated from the rest of the galaxy until Ranee decides it's safe to lift the lid again." "By which time those of us who know the score aren't likely to be around. The destruction of the spaceport was one of the first 'incidents' dreamed up by Ranee, because they have to pretend it was our communications link that failed. But as soon as their ships get through they may try to turn the myth into a reality. I think they'll hit the spaceport first -- and hit it hard. Wouldn't it be wise to evacuate just in case?" "We've been discussing that, Tito. The general feeling is against ter away from its relay beam path and are using a scanner in the hope we can contact a stellar cruiser and get a message through to the Federation." "It's worth a try, San," said Ren. "Though the possibilities of ' a stellar cruiser just happening to come within beam range are pretty slim." He broke contact and called for a runner to take a message to Di Irons. An hour later there was another call from San Weba. This time the controller's worths were edged with excitement. "Tito, something's happening. Can you get down here fast?" "What's the panic?" "Ships, dozens of them, coming from all sides. They can't all be from Ranee." Ren needed no further invitation. Without one of Di Irons' horses the quickest method of reaching the spaceport was by cushion-craft, despite the slow poling to the city limits. He speculated on the possibility of taking the cushion-craft down the Trade Road without waiting for stave-bearers. Though such practice was illegal, he suspected Di Irons would be lenient in view of the circumstances. He realized, however, that he had a more than even chance of wrecking lost control on the slopes and had to deflate the cushion while at speed. Reluctantly he called for a stave team and went down the Trade Road in the slower, more orthodox manner. Fortune was kind to him. No oxcarts or similar vehicles got in his way. The stave-bearers responded to his urgency and ran consistently fast, using their poles only when guidance was absolutely necessary. Once past the Black Rock he was able to open up to full speed and the dust from the start of his passage along the Via Arena could scarcely have settled before he reached the spaceport entrance. T 'HE gates were wide open. Normal details of security and procedure had been abandoned. Ren slammed the cushion-craft straight across the empty landing bowls toward the control center and was running through the door be' fore the air cushion had time to drop the craft's shell to the ground. Inside the traffic-control room everyone was gathered around the screens. San Weba saw Ren come in and beckoned him through the crowd of technicians and spaceport personnel. He pointed to the main detector screens on which the state of activity in the spacefield around Roget was represented by dozens of slowly moving points of light. "You see that cluster there, Tito -- they're the ones we saw first. There are about thirty of them -- we assume them to be the disaster ships from Ranee. But these -- " his fingers raked over fully a hundred widespread points of light on the screen -- "I don't know what they are or where they came from. They must have dropped out of spacewarp well within our beam range." Ren was disbelieving. "They couldn't have dropped out' of warp that close." "But they did. Some must have dropped out within two planetary diameters. I've never heard of such pinpoint accuracy before. Nor of a'nyone prepared to take the risk. If a commercial freight outfit could learn to do that they could save themselves a week on every trip." "Then these are obviously not a commercial outfit. And if Ranee IF had that capability her ships would have been here a week ago. I think what we may be seeing is one of the crack Federation squadrons." "We came to the same conclusion," said the controller. "But their arrival here without being called is a bit too much of a coincidence." As they watched the slow dance of lights on the screen a pattern emerged. The Ranee group seemed to pull together, while the newcomers attempted to form an envelope around them. The plot of lights on the screen gave very little hint of the actual speeds and distances involved. Had the maneuvering been visible to the naked eye, the preparations for the coming battle would have been an aweinspiring sight. Breathlessly the group in traffic control watched the cluster of Ranee ships try desperately to avoid the closing trap. It was obvious, however, that they were outclassed. They were being driven into a tight nucleus while the attacking force encircled them with an increasing semblance of symmetry. Then the big Mow came. For a moment the screen went white as the receivers were overloaded with a burst of radiation that spanned right into the radio frequencies. The attacking ships alone were visible when the image straightened and cleared. No significant ion traces were even left to record the former presence of the disaster ships. The destruction had been complete and absolute. Somebody In the room cheered. The reaction spread to become a glorious sound of jubilation and relief. The spaceport controller went to the communications section, where his operators had been attempting to make contact with the liberators. Despite their efforts they still could gain no reply. The mysterious fleet of ships winked out one by one until the screen was as empty as if no such fleet had ever existed. "Commando action," said Ren. "No survivors and no traces left. The Federation could deny there had ever been a battle and nobody on Ranee could prove them wrong. We're the only witnesses and we're not likely to tell." "So the Federation is awake to the merchant worlds' activities;" San Weba had returned to Ren's side. "I always thought they must be. This isn't the first time I've heard of a Ranee disaster fleet's disappearing." "Even so, we were lucky," said Ren. "Space is a big place. Even the Federation can't hope to police more than a very small fraction of it. The problem must be to know where the merchant worlds 'are going to move next. More than anything it's an exercise in good intelligence. It's tempting to hope that Federation intelligence spreads even to the Rim, but there's no sign on Roget of any Federation agency." "Do you think this is the last we'll see of Ranee?" asked Weba. "The trade worlds must know they can't take on the Federation. If they suspect Federation influence here they'll shy off like a shoal of startled fish. There are enough rich pickings in the galaxy that involve far less a risk. For myself I think ' Ranee will forget the whole affair." T HE sense of an unusual happening was strong upon Ren as he fetched the cushion-craft to a halt at the door of his chambers. A servant, obviously posted as a lookout, ran hastily to meet him as he waited for the air-cushion to subside. "Master -- the Lady T' Ampere has come to see you. She waits for you inside." "To see me?" Ren was mildly surprised. It was evident, however, that his servant was more than a little impressed by the visit. In the activities of the past few weeks Ren had forgotten the mistress of Secondhill. The regulation of affairs in Anharitte had seemed so inextricably bound by the whims of the Lords Di Rode, Di Irons and Di Guaard -- and the Imaiz himself -- that there had seemed little room for feminine participation. Intrigued, he made his way up the steps and turned into his chambers. The room seemed full of Ahhn servants paying attention to the one who sat regally awaiting his coming. Then, at a sign, all activity ceased and the room assumed an almost empty atmosphere as Ren approached. "Lady T Ampere?" "Agent Ren, I take you to be." "At your service, my Lady." Ren looked at the wealth of colored veils, discerning beneath them the brightest, the most penetrating and the most dauntingly feline pair of eyes he had ever encountered. The veils were swept aside and the Lady T Ampere rose to her feet and moved from the chair to meet him. She was mature in years, yet by no means old. Her skin was far darker than was common among the Ahhn and was dry in texture, but strong character and something that had once been great beauty still shone from her countenance. She carried an aura -- a presence -- that stopped Ren in mid-stride and set him back on his heels. Here was IF one of nature's own aristocrats. She motioned toward him. "I would speak with you privately, Agent Ren." Her voice had the precise tone of one used to command. "Please have your servants leave us." Ren turned and motioned to his staff to leave. He glanced at the Lady T Ampere's retinue, expecting them also to be dismissed. When they stayed in their places he turned back to his visitor for explanation and was met by a mocking smile. "The house servants of T Ampere see much and hear much, but they never speak a word of what they learn. And do you know why. Agent Ren? It's because they have no tongues." "No tongues?" For a moment he failed to grasp the implication of the phrase. When he did he was overcome with nausea'. "I can see by your face that you think me barbarous. But barbarity has to be assessed against a norm. For the house of T Ampere my servants are the norm. Dion-daizan would kill me for this if he could -- and that's why I'm here. I wish to offer you an alliance in your fight against Dion." Forgetting to probe the etiquette of the situation, Ren sat down in the nearest chair, his mind still fighting the horror of the twenty or so deliberate mutes who surrounded their mistress. He was not at all sure he wanted to be joined in such a frightful allegiance, "My feud with the Imaiz is a private affair," he said at last. "Indeed? Is that why you tried to win the support of Di Irons, Di Guaard and Di Rode? Come, Agent Ren! I know my Anharitte and there's little you've said or done here that has not been relayed to me in detail. As you rightly surmised, Dion is playing with some very dangerous forces, If he succeeds the old way of life will fall. The flood will sweep away the aristocracy, the societies, the peace and stability of our times and certainly the freetrade preference you yourself enjoy. What I think you misjudge is the violence of the flood." Ren frowned. "Such situations are not beyond my experience." "This one Will be. Think of what would happen if my dumb cortege ever believed the old laws were ended. What nights of bloody horror would be precipitated?" "To what nights of horror have your people already been exposed?" asked Ren coldly. "While I agree with you in principle, I abominate your practices." "I'm not interested in your squeamish idealism, I'm talking about facts as they exist." Her curiously bright eyes fixed him with a gaze little short of hypnotic and her voice was like a band of steel. "Like it or not, you're committed to opposing Dion-daizan. Your lucrative freetrade can't survive if he wins. Furthermore, in the blood bath that will come if he's allowed to tip the scale too far you'll pay equally with those who burn their slaves or cut out their tongues. You're as much a part of the old way of life as they. Make no mistake, Agent Ren -- you're already one of the damned." "You have a proposition?" Ren asked at last. "I have five hundred men at arms disposal for the storming of Magda. I would expect you to use your influence with the societies to muster a similar force. Not even Magda could stand for longagainst a thousand men." "It won't work," said Ren. "Di Irons would never permit a pitched battle in Anharitte." "Di Irons would be powerless against an army of a thousand. What could he do -- arrest them all? But in any case, you may safely leave the prefect to me. You would march Under my banner -- and a noble house has right of arms anywhere in the city, at any time. I can assure you that on the day we move the prefect and his men will be looking the other way." "I'll think it over," said Ren. "I'll need to sound out the societies first." "Then don't delay too long. Dion has a bill of manumission set for consideration by the planetary government. Rumor has it that it'll be favorably received. If it becomes law many slaves will earn the right to become freemen -- though their sympathies will remain unchanged. At the moment we can move an army against Dion without opposition. If the manumission bill goes through the task will be much more difficult. A veritable legion of freemen will be eager to delay us." "I promise you an answer with all speed. Within a day I'll come to you on Secondhill and tell you what support we have. I think you'll have your way if I can sway the societies in that time." "Then I'll look to receive you at this time tomorrow, Agent Ren. But let this warning spur you -- if Dion wins don't hope for personal survival. Your support by and for the aristocracy is too well known for you to survive even a minor rebellion. If Dion's flood gates open you, too, will be flotsam on the tide." T HE evening was a fine one. Breathing across the broad back of Firsthill, the warm winds from the sea gained a rich scent IF from the abundance of flowering trees and shrubs that flourished around the little squares and plazas. Here a trade cry and there a hint of music added texture to the air and endowed it with a sense of life. The individually wrought and unplanned buildings, illuminated by the growing gold of evening, formed a picture that touched some unexpected vein of artistry in Ren's soul. He felt he wanted to impress the perfection of this image into some more permanent form, so that he could take it to some other time and relive this evening hour. Unfortunately he knew of no medium with the scope or fidelity to record the nuances of light, the scents and sounds and character of Anharitte. He could only promise himself that, whatever the outcome of his feud with Dion-daizan, the city as it now stood must never be destroyed. The Lodge of the Pointed Tails was particularly impressive with its golden turrets and ornate red relief. Passing into its rich interior, Ren was once again lost in the lyric pictures that depicted the bloody and glorious progress of the Ahhn out of barbarism to their present proud community. The message was not lost on him. The Ahhn civilization was too newly acquired to have become an innate precept. If it were disrupted at this stage every possibility existed that the whole society would revert to the former pattern of savage warrior tribes and be set back five hundred years in history. In mid-stride Ren was caught by the realization that in opposing Dion-daizan he had himself adopted a measure of responsibility for the future of the Ahhn. As representative of an outworld power and in control of money and resources comparable with those of the nobility he was equally responsible with Di Irons, Di Guaard and the Imaiz for preserving the essential Anharitte. No victory, however won, would taste anything but bitter if the prize were destroyed in the winning. As usual, Catuul Gras was expecting him. No movement Of persons of interest ever went unreported to the scribe. Catuul had been practicing shadow-fighting with some curiously old and ornate toothed swords when Ren entered. These fearsome instruments he laid carefully on the long table and addressed the weapons rather than the agent. "So the Lady T' Ampere has made her proposition?" Ren felt his eyes drawn to the barbarous swords, which were fashioned to inflict the most terrible wounds in flesh, yet disengage cleanly -- they were weapons for use when no quarter would be asked or given. "She has. What do you know?" "The house servants of Lady T Ampere have no tongues. But they can speak with their hands. And so can we. You acquitted yourself well in that conversation, friend Tito. She's one of the abolii." The latter word was taken from the old Ahhn phrase for detestable. Ren had heard it used occasionally, but seldom with such feeling. He was gratified to note that the systematic mutilation of slaves was unpopular even with the societies. "The point is," said Ren, "do we accept her offer or not? I need your advice. And I need to know if the societies will cooperate." "You ask two questions, friend Tito, arid I give you two answers." Catuul took up one of the vicious swords and drove it Savagely into the plaster of the wall.' "My own advice to you is on no account become. associated, with T Ampere iii any way. The House of T'Empte  made a similar mistake. Now T'Empte is an empty province. But nonetheless -- the societies will find . five hundred men. They don't favor the idea, but if Dion's bill of manumission is accepted by the planetary government it will be the start of the end of us all. We must support even the abolii if we wish to preserve our way of life." Ren took up the seoond sword and examined its toothed edge. Held closely, it lost its cumbersome appearance and the dreadful artistry of the razor teeth made him wince as he imagined its effect in battle. Its balance was perfect in his hands. "The clans have already spoken then?" "The elders have been holding council for days regarding Dion's bill. They have decided he must not be allowed to press the bill to law. To have five hundred extra men from T Ampere for the purpose is worth a pact with the devil." "Then I may confirm to Lady T Ampere that her offer is acceptable?" "Go at the agreed hour tomorrow. If there is any change in the situation I'll contact you before you go. If you don't hear from me, assume that it's safe to accept TAmpere's offier." "Why so guarded?" "Because the Lady T Ampere had a visitor earlier today -- before she came to you, Sonel Taw, the castellan of Di Guaard. We don't yet know what was said, but it's an absolute certainty that my Lord Delph knew nothing of it. Mad he may be, but even he would have no commerce with T Ampere. Tread very carefully, friend Tito. There's great mischief in the making in Anharitte, and T Ampere is behind it." IF Secondhill. The once-great fortress of TAmpere had been laid in ruins in some former conflict. Now its broken walls and chambers gaped amazedly at the sky, as if it could still not comprehend the fury that had destroyed it. At the foot of the ruins sat the neat circle of the chateau and the home estate. True, the complex was walled, but not in the sense of forming a stronghold in battle. T' Ampere's strength lay in other regions. To reach T Ampere, Ren had passed from Firsthill down through the slave market and crossed the ship lanes by slimboat. From here he had ascended Secondhill by the only access worthy of being called a road. The way had wound steeply up between the great banks of a natural pass. During the climb he had seen no signs of life or habitation. Breaking suddenly over the brow of the hill he-came upon the gates of the chateau before he had guessed their nearness. Unlike the other hills, each of which had an attendant township gathered outside the citadel, Secondhill contained only the walled seat of TAmpere and immediately spread out to contain nothing but the broken, sheepgrazed slopes that reached down to the eastern plains and TAmpere province. Ren's first impression that the Chateau TAmpere was undefended was soon corrected. His path toward the broad gates had placed him in a neat ambush. He found himself surrounded by some undoubtedly competent soldiery and was 'forcibly conducted to a barracks associated with the great house and there interrogated by an officer. When he had established his identity a runner was despatched to ascertain Lady T'Amperp's wishes in the matter. The message came back that Ren would be summoned when the lady pleased. Fuming at the treatment he was receiving, Ren found himself locked in a cell for two hours until a guide came to conduct him to Lady T Ampere. The rooms of TAmpere were depressing. Here was traditional Ahhn style used to an extreme extent, with carpets many centimetres ' thick... strewn with cushions. Even the walls were smothered with heavy drapes and curtains. The screened windows admitted barely any light and what light did gain entrance was immediately absorbed by the browns and grays and blacks of the soft furnishings. Ren was reminded of the lair of a pampered cat -- even the air seemed pungent with an overpowering feline smell. Here, he reasoned, was one more instance where nobility and absolute power over others had overfed itself to produce something mentally and physically unwholesome. It came to him that the Ahhn nobility had shown him little to commend its survival. Perhaps Dion's revolution was fated to succeed. "You bring me an answer. Agent Ren?" T' Ampere rose from the gloom, bright-eyed like a jungle creature regarding its prey. Ren longed to strike at the bright mockery. "Perhaps. But first I'd like an apology for being detained so long by your men. I came here at your invitation to answer a question you had asked. I resent being treated like a thief." The amusement quickened in her face. "Believe me, if you saw what we did to thieves in TAmpere you would raise no such unjust accusation." Ren saw she was playing with him and decided to deny her the pleasure of drawing a response. His dislike of the woman was now intense. "Lady TAmpere, yesterday you brought me a proposal -- five hundred men at arms to use against Magda if the societies would provide a like number. This they've agreed to do." "A firm decision so quickly?" The feline eyes narrowed. "Eitherl you have remarkable powers off persuasion or the elders have be-f come mortally afraid of Dion."  "They didn't take me into their  confidence. In this matter I act only i as messenger." Ren felt disinclined ? to elaborate. "I doubt that's true." She shook j her head impatiently. "But it's of; no importance. At any rate we now have our alliance." "We do not," said Ren abruptly. "I said the societies had agreed. I didn't say that I agreed." A flicker of anger crossed her face. "And what objection do you have, merchant?" "When I climbed Secondhill I had no objection. But I want now to know why I was detained. Was it to make me conscious I was not of the Anharitte nobility? Or was it to keep me out of the way while some other plans were entertained?" "I find your impertinence less than amusing. Do you suspect me of duplicity?" "I suspect the alliance you offer is not as simple as you claim." "Grief! And do you also have a name for these other activities in which you think I'm involved?" Her voice held steely contempt. "At a guess I'd say they concerned Di Guaard and Sonel Taw." Her face became clouded with IF disbelief then relaxed into laughter. "You have my apology. Agent Ren. I mistook you for a fool. I see now why even Dion treats you with circumspection. You understand us far better than we understand ourselves. Let's stop fencing with each other and conclude Our alliance. I perceive we make worthy partners in' mistrust." "When I need your men I'll send for them," said Ren. "I won't make advance plans with you, because T' Ampere has no talent for secrecy. When I ask for your men you are to send the full five hundred without delay and they will respond to my lieutenants, not their own ; Only on these terms can I afford to be involved with T Ampere." "You've been well schooled," she said thoughtfully. "It's a good sign. Very well, your terms are accepted. If you cover yourself as well against your enemies as you do against your allies and should have a Indeed, I've a mind to make you a second proposition." "Which is?" "I could use a man of your caliber at T' Ampere. The rewards would be far and above anything the company could offer." "In what capacity?" asked Ren without enthusiasm. "Consort," said Lady TAmpere. Ren felt physically sick. "I'm afraid the proposition's unthinkable. For me to adapt to the ways of TAmpere is not possibleFor TAmpere to adapt to me would need a major revolution." "Then I'll order runners to light your way down the slopes. Such paths can be treacherous." "In the high places of Anharitte all paths seem to be treacherous," said Ren. Ren left the Chateau TAmpere. The beautiful Rim stars were spread in a wide, bright pattern and such was their illumination that torches were not actually necessary. Nevertheless a dozen runners with flares were waiting to guide him down the path toward Firsthill and the light from their brands at first obscured a shifting redness in the western sky. Clear of the gates, Ren stopped and directed the runners to fall be? hind him so that he could better see the flame on the farther hill. An angry red patch seemed to burn on the left side of Firsthill, but its precise location was difficult to determine. As he continued down the pass the direct view of the conflagration was lost to him and its existence was told only by a continued redness in the sky. At the river he bade the runners return to their mistress. A slimboat. attracted by the light of the flares, came to ferry him across the shipping lanes. The boatman had no knowledge of the fire on Firsthill, but opted for the direction of Di Guaard when questioned about its probable location. Having gained the shore, Ren hurried through the now deserted slave market and was soon in the complex of streets at the top of the hill. A trade call alerted him to the presence of a waiting armsman from the Pointed Tails. "Agent Ren, Catuul asked that I intercept you on your return. He wishes to speak with you at the lodge. We must proceed with caution." "What's happening here?" asked Ren. "The slaves of Di Guaard have set fire to the castle. Rumor has it that Delph Di Guaard is slain. The prefect and his men are now in attendance, Catuul suggests it would be unwise for you to enter the district." "He's probably right. The timing of this affair is not without significance. Lead me by a safe route to the lodge." The streets were crowded with sightseers drifting toward the scene of the fire. In the background a shadowy traffic of hurrying men indicated the messengers of various agencies going to report or being sent again to keep up with the news. The armsman hastened Ren through the slowly moving throng, turning aside always to avoid dark places. A constant chatter of inquiry came from opened upperstory windows as bewildered heads tried to gauge the cause of the commotion. The armsman stopped to engage no one in conversation. Though he did not speak of it, his movements seemed to anticipate danger at every corner and his hand was forever hovering near his sword. the lodge. "Is it true that the slaves of Di Guaard have revolted?" Ren asked him. Catuul nodded. "It's true. But they were incited to revolt." "By whom? Not the Imaiz, surely?" "No, by the castellan, Sonel Taw. I think he saw in the ruse a chance to depose Lord Delph. But in any event he's failed." "Were the prefect's men so quick to Delph's defense?" "The prefect's men were unable even to pass the outer walls. By the time they reached the castle the fight was over and most of the slaves were contained. Which ts fortunate, because if they had escaped into Anharitte and gained support from their fellows the whole city IF would probably be afire by now." "I sensed as much," said Ren. 'Tensions are high in the streets tonight. But if Sonel Taw incited the slaves to riot, who was it who quelled them?" "A hundred bondsmen from Magda," said Catuul, looking nowhere in particular. "Magda? Slave against slave? To protect Di Guaard?" Ren was fazed momentarily. , "I knew you'd not believe me, friend Tito, bu( I can only speak what I know. Though I doubt if it was Delph Di Guaard's health they were interested in maintaining. I think they were as afraid as we of the incident's starting a general uprising. With seven slaves in the district for every freeman, tonight could have been one of the bloodier pages of history." "And if Di Irons had been forced to call in the government forces, it would have been even bloodier." Ren nodded his acceptance of the logic. There was no doubt that if once the floodgates of violence tfere opened they would be extremely difficult to close. A commotion at the door broke up the conversation. Three of the Pointed Tails armsmen were struggling to subdue a prisoner they had taken from the streets, who had broken away at the last moment. Fortunately they were men who knew their trade. Shortly a tyxly was thrown through the door to land at Catuul's feet. The scribe turned the wretch over wonderingly, a short dagger held to the man's throat. With his windpipe in peril Sonel Taw, the castellan of Di Guaard, looked up from the floor in genuine anguish. "Ah! The idiot is here," said Catuul with some satisfaction. "Witness the man who was crass enough to risk all Anharitte to satisfy his spite." Sonel Taw noticed Ren and struggled to sit up. His face lit with an ingratiating smile of recognition. "Agent Ren knows me. He'll tell you all is not as it seems. We have an understanding, the agent and I. Ren, keep these ruffians from my throat." "I think not," said Ren. "What you've provoked tonight could well have killed us all. If you had a quarrel with Di Guaard you should have tried it man to man. But to involve the slaves could have resulted in a massacre." "But -- " The castellan rose to his knees, his, eyes searching piteously for comprehension. "But it was part of the plan -- " "What plan?" "Hers -- she toRT me of your intent -- " Taw had the look of a man betrayed. "That bitch . T' Ampere," said Ren. "She's behind this. She thought by now to have me in her pocket." "But you aren't?" inquired Catuul anxiously. "I agreed to nothing more than -to send for her men as and when I required them against Magda. Di Guaard wasn't even mentioned. In fact, she kept me at the chateau until Castle Di Guaard was well in flames." "Good. Then we aren't compromised. Tonight's work has no reflection on our feud with the Imaiz. You're a man of goodsense, friend Tito. And our fallen castellan here will find few to mourn his passing." Catuul bent forward again with the dagger. Ren intervened. "Send your men to deliver him to Di Irons. He's more the prefect's concern than he is ours. I think a few days at the hands of Di Irons' tormentors will be valuable to his education -- and we've no time to "No time?" The Scribe regarded I Ren curiously. "Your meaning esi capes me." j "A hundred men from Magda came to Firsthill: A hundred of the : ! same we'll have to fight if we storm  the castle. Doesn't it make sense to see that as few as possible get back to Magda? They're on our territory and they've a river to cross. We , have them at quite a disadvantage."  Catuul considered for a moment, then leaped to his feet, shouting orders apd calling for men. His acceptance of Ren's point was immediate once he had explored the implications. He was secretly fu' rious with himself for not having realized so vital a matter earlier. Much valuable time had been lost and the men from Magda must by now be dispersed through the city and be making their way down to Firstwater. Leaving the hapless castellan in the company of armsmen charged with the duty of delivering him to the prefect, Catuul collected Ren and they sped out into the night... signals had alerted all the Pointed Tails, including those who acted as guards at the slave compounds on the edge of Firstwater. The first priority was to try to IF locate the boats the men from Magda would try to use for their return. The second was to locate and harass the enemy itself. Ren found the whole operation confusing. Traveling at a steady run, usually by torchlight but occasionally by starlight alone, Catuul was a veritable mobile headquarters. Out of the darkness messengers would gather to exchange a few quiet words and be dispatched again to carry out some new command. Just how the messengers located Catuul Gras in the first place was quite beyond Ren's comprehension -- the scribe was constantly on the move. But the system appeared to work and gradually some semblance of order grew in the middle of apparent chaos. Resignedly Ren settled into a labored jog-trot, the nearest approach he could make to the Ahhns' effortless style of running. Nevertheless he found the going hard. At the foot of the Trade Road the scribe motioned the breathless agent to rest for a while. "We're in luck, friend Tito. The news is that they've not yet crossed back over the water. Some were seen coming through the town and down the Blackslope. Others escaped down Sidepath and must now be crossing the plain to join their fellows near the Black Rock. We've secured all the slimboats along Firstwater, but it looks now as though they must have made the crossing farther west. Now we must drive along the. riverbank as far as TEmpte Crossing and try to separate them from their boats." "Will we be in time?" "Some are reported only a few minutes ahead of us and they may not yet realize we're after them. They've only to stop and wait for their comrades on the other route and we shall trap them." Ren nodded. He felt the excitement of the chase and this piece of harassment would be an excellent chance to even the score with the Imaiz. He turned and followed Catuul eagerly toward the river. The whole scene was so utterly devoid of sounds or people that he found it nearly impossible to believe that only a short distance ahead were a hundred meii from Magda and a large attacking force of Pointed Tails determined to stop their escape into boats and across the river. After ten minutes Ren became seriously worried. He was almost within sight of TEmpte Crossing and along the bank the slimboats used by the ferrymen were neatly drawn to cover and undisturbed -- but there still was no sign of Catuul or the enemy. Then he stopped, rubbing his eyes with disbelief. At first he thought his vision tricked by the dim light, but the continuous shine across and above the surface of the water was no chimera -- it persisted and was real. Yet the image seemed to have no connection with the circumstances in which he found it. Then, even as he watched, a sudden burst of flame on the far side of Secondwater reared upward and spread out along the curious shining thing spanning the river. The image began to collapse and Ren heard the shouts and calls of the Pointed Tails a little farther up the riverbank. Passing Magda Crossing, where the slimboats were now well secured by grinning armsmen, they advanced along the bank of Secondwater. This part of the way was clearer, there being no wharves or buildings along the bank. Here open fields led to a line of trees at the water's edge and there was little concealment for men save the blanket of darkness. A series of trade calls began to sound from the direction of the Black Rock, now to their left across the fields, and Catuul answered them without hesitation. "Magda's men are still on this side of the river," the scribe told Ren. "They gather near the old T'Empte Crossing about a kilometer hence. There'll be fighting -- I'll leave you here. Make your way to the crossing carefully. I think our trap is sprung." Catuul called his men around him and together they trotted ahead. Ren, whose occupation and outworld training had ill prepared him for such marathon running, regretfully watched them go. Although he was in excellent physical condition by outworld standards, he lacked schooling in the style that enabled the native Ahhn to continue running for hour upon hour with little sign of fatigue. He sat on a large projection of rock and rested for some minutes before continuing to walk slowly toward the appointed place. Ren had thought to hear sounds of battle ahead, but all was silent. This made him wary -- perhaps the men from Magda had avoided the contact and were even now moving back across the fields. The light from the stars was insufficient for him to see more than a short distance around him. Every tree had the capacity to be a potential point of ambush. He walked as near the river's edge as he dared, sword drawn and fully prepared to fight or run as the occasion might require. Intrigued by this mystery, Ren hastened forward. He should, he thought, by now be able to hear the sound of steel on steel, or the slap of an Ahhn crossbow. Instead all he IF heard were voices and the unmistakable trade calls of the Pointed Tails carrying reports to those farther afield... made him stand, sword ready, until the call of a nightbird he recognized as Catuul's signature sounded close to him. "The Imaiz has beaten us." Catuul Gras appeared suddenly at Ren's elbow. "Didn't I tell you he was a wizard?" "What happened?" asked Ren. "Didn't you catch them?" "They got away from us, all of them. Dion's magic made a bridge of mist across the river and they ran over it. We could have taken some of them, but none of us dared approach such a terrible thing." "Damn! How did he manage that?" "I know nothing of the ways of wizardry," said Catuul, slightly affronted. "A rhetorical question. I was thinking out loud," said Ren. "Dion is no more a wizard than I am. And I tell you there's no such thing as a bridge of mist that can bear the weight of a man. There has to be some rational explanation." Despite Catuul's obvious reluctance to follow, Ren moved along the river bank to where he had seen the curious shining thing on the water. Something submerged appeared to be distorting the surface of the river. He called for torches, but none were available. "Mark this spot, Catuul, and guard it. At first light I want boats here to explore both banks and drag out anything in the water. The river here is best part of a hundred and fifty meters wide -- and a thing that could carry a hundred men across it in a few minutes can't possibly have vanished without trace." "Except a bridge of mist," said Catuul, still unconvinced. to be escorted back to his chambers. Though his body was thoroughly tired, his mind persisted in wrestling with the problem of the intangible bridge. He could in no way reconcile a shine across the water and the scribe's description of a bridge of mist with anything capable of bearing the weight of a hundred men across the water yet able to vanish and leave no trace. Ren's education had prepared him with a good grounding in what physical parameters he could normally expect to encounter, but none of his knowledge of physics appeared relevant to the case. He was known scientific principle might be involved, yet he was incapable of finding a satisfactory answer by # employing any known principles. One reason for his intense preoccupation with the problem was his projected scheme for the storming of Castle Magda. He sensed in Catuul a superstitious awe of the works of the Imaiz that had to be dispelled if the campaign against Magda were to be a success. Unless Ren could prove to the Pointed Tails that the vanishing bridge was only a clever trick, theywould carry the attack against Magda burdened with the fear of some new manifestation of the Imaiz' s magic. It was easy to see that such a condition would give any maneuver a rather precarious chance of success. Firstlight seemed to come all too soon. Ren had taken his problem to bed and had lain awake with it for several hours despite his tiredness. When he finally succumbed to sleep it was for a few hours only. A servant came to wake him with the reminder that Catuul Gras would be waiting for him at T'Empte Crossing. Cursing the scribe for his apparent ability to do without sleep, Ren rose and washed but refused the delay of breakfast. Unable to face the long walk involved, he sent for stavebearers and took the cushion-craft, fretting all the way down the Trade Road amid the morning traffic of carriers' carts. Once past the Black Rock and free from the restrictive attentions of the stave bearers, he turned off toward T'Empte Crossing. For the last part of the journey he went directly across the fields to where he could see a group of Pointed Tails on the riverbank. Catuul Gras received him with enthusiasm. Several men were in the river, diving deep to recover volumes of some substance they hauled ashore in a continuous strand and piled for Ren's inspection. Boats from the farther shore were fetching back a curious item found abandoned on the sandy beach, the purpose of which was completely obscure to the native Ahhn. complete Ren inspected it briefly and the concept immediately fell into place. The shine across the waters, the idea of a bridge of mists, the carrying of a hundred men across the river -- all these puzzles suddenly had an explanation. Ren swore mightily when he realized the nature of the objects before him. Behind his comprehension was an absolute certainty that the Imaiz was nothing more than a clever technician with a typically Terran training. The items with which he had been presented consisted of a continuous length of heavy-gauge polythene sheet formed into a tube of a IF diameter more than sufficient to admit a standing man, and a primitive large-capacity air bellows. Some sort of rush matting had additionally been provided to spread the weight of a man traversing the interior of the tube over water. A quantity of rope had been recovered which presumably had been used to haul the flexible "tunnel" across the river and to secure it in place. "Tell me how it works," implored Catuul Gras. Ren pursed his lips. "It's an old Terran device. That large plastic tube, when filled with air, will float and will easily bear the weight of a man on the water. Fitted with flaps through which a man can enter without losing too much air and an air pump sufficient to keep it filled, it makes a floating bridge. It's cheap, simple, and expendable -- you can afford to set fire to it if you fear your enemies might try to follow you across." "Then it isn't magic?" asked Catuul. He sounded almost disappointed. "Far from it. In a smaller and modified form it's used in a common Terran water sport -- men tie themselves into large plastic bubbles and run races over lakes and rivers. It's simply the clever application of a common out world principle." "Which reinforces your suggestion that the Imaiz is a Terran?" "I don't know." Ren thought about his answer carefully. His words were colored by a new caution. "There's a Terran influence, certainly -- but that could be acquired from books. The main factor that emerges from this affair is that Dion and his men are effectively policing Anharitte. They seem to be trying to prevent a catastrophic breakdown of your society even as they are undermining it. A restructuring without a revolution. Quite a trick -- if you can achieve it." "But didn't Dion break faith with his own at Di Guaard yesterday? Slave against slave was something no one had expected." "He broke faith only if you assume that his interest is the emancipation of the slaves. But perhaps his real policy is a larger purpose -- that of emancipating the Ahhn as a race. But in any event I can't see that either freetrade or the societies can survive the transition. We're both part of the old pattern." "So you intend to go through with your march on Magda?" asked Catuul gravely. "To Magda it is. And in view of Dion's manumission bill this may well be the last chance we'll get. I propose we strike Magda as soon as possible and with the largest force we can muster. Whatever happens, we mustn't fail. A great many people will be watching the battle. If we lose, the Imaiz will not only gain Anharitte but probably his policies will win him all Roget as well. Our assault on Magda could have a great bearing on the shape of history. That's why we must plan it well." "What did you mean by the emancipation of the Ahhn ?" asked Catuul after a while. "It's a relative concept that would only be apparent if you'd lived outworld," said Ren, realizing his mistake. XX XjL the watchmen were waiting for Ren to return. Their interception of him was swift and deliberate. The stave-bearers were halted. "What's the meaning of this?" "The prefect requires your presence, Agent Ren." "Again? This is becoming too much of a habit. But it's early and I've not yet breakfasted. Tell him I will come to him later." The leading watchman shook his head. "Our orders were to bring you in all haste. The Lord Di Irons is in a fury." "Then I'm afraid his fury must wait for a proper time. Stand aside." Ren had observed that the stavebearers had drawn to the side of the road and that the way in front of him was clear save for the three watchmen. The craft's cushions were still inflated and he doubted the law-enforcers would stand in the path of the vehicle if it began to move. He edged it forward, slowly at first to warn the men out of his way, then faster. He was gratified to note that they made no attempt to halt his progress, but retired to the road's edge to discuss the situation. Ren continued swiftly, having no thought of returning for the stavebearers who still stood waiting for a decision from the watchmen. When he was out of weapon range he began to breathe more freely. This had been a trial of strength between himself and the authority of Di Irons -- and for the moment he had won. As he drove unescorted to the fruit market he honestly questiQned his own motives for refusing to accede to the watchmen's demands. He found his reasons not as clear as they had seemed moments earlier. As one of the prime movers of events in Anharitte, he had come to resent the prefect's imperious demands on his time. Yet now he thought about it, it grew more plain that he was attempting to set IF himself up above the law -- and the only persons above the law in Anharitte were the lords. He became interested -- and slightly apprehensive -- about how Di Irons would react. At worst, and if it suited the perfect's purpose, Di Irons would be justified in detaining him and demanding his deportation. At best, Di Irons might overlook the slight and await Ren's coming at a later hour. Ren's surmises, however, in no way covered the actual reaction his stand had provoked. Within the hour Di Irons himself was announced on his doorstep. "Didn't you hear, Tito, that I needed words with you at once?" "My apologies. Prefect, but I was about early and was greatly in need of food. I was coming to see you soon." The prefect waved the matter aside impatiently and accepted a plate at Ren's table. "First I have to thank you for sending me Sonel Taw. Under threat of torment he has told me much that explains last night." "Did he kill Di Guaard?" asked Ren. "The fool tried, though I doubt if he had the courage to perform the deed himself. Di Guaard died in the fire, nonetheless. But that wasn't why I wanted words with you. Taw also hinted at a liaison between you and the Lady T' Ampere. Can this be true?" "Liaison's too strong a term. She has offered me men to reinforce my society in feud against Diondaizan." "At what price?" "I struck no bargain on price. She claims Dion is out to kill her -- which may or may not be true, though I hope it is -- and she offered me help if I would lead a strike against him. This I'ye agreed to do, but on my own terms." "How many men did she offer?" Di Irons seemed angry, not with Ren directly but seemingly with all the world. "She suggested five hundred -- if the society would find a like quantity." "Five hundred? T' Ampere has five thousand to use if she chooses. If you should take Magda, what do you suppose will happen to the rest of Magda province?" "I'd not given the matter a thought." "Then I'll tell you. With the Imaiz removed, T' Ampere would take the rest of the province, because nobody, not even I, could stop her. You're the only man in Anharitte who would dare to take arms against Dion-daizan, so she sees in you a useful catspaw. If you should succeed you will hand her Magda province on a plate. If you lose she's lost at most five hundred men. Do you now see in what you've become involved?" "I hadn't known the details of her ambitions," said Ren. "Therefore I find your warning timely. But I'm not sure it modifies my plan." "I hadn't expected you to be easily swayed. But if you're still intent on turning Thirdhill into a battle ground you should at least know in what cause your blood is being spilled. It's your life balanced against her gain. Do you think it a fair bargain?" "Are you trying to warn me not to proceed with the exploit?" "I don't give a damn whether you proceed or not. You've almost no chance of winning and a very high chance of getting killed in the attempt. Even if you win, T' Ampere will take the major prize. You can work out the odds for yourself. But I warn you -- you're engaged in an unholy alliance if you've listened to T Ampere. She's made the almost identical proposition to most of the lords in the past, but history has taught them caution. Only T'Empte ever fell for the ruse." "Catuul Gras spoke of T'Empte as an empty province. What happened to the House of TEmpte?" "The House of T'Empte was destroyed partly by T Ampere's treachery and partly because Dion's revenge was so terrible. Since T'Empte was the catspaw, T Ampere escaped more lightly. The old vixen's been sitting nursing her wounds these many years, waiting for someone else for her to thrust first into the fight with Dion." "And now you think I've been elected?" "You're the first new major force to emerge in Anharitte since the destruction of T'Empte. It was only a matter of time before you became included in her schemes." "I'll mark well what you've said," said Ren. "I promise it will be taken into account before a decision is reached. But if I decide to storm Magda -- where will I find my Lord Di Irons standing?" "Slightly to your rear, looking the other way. You're taking T' Ampere's banner. Noble house against Noble house still has legitimacy -- they have the right to bear arms anywhere in the city. Even the planetary government couldn't object to your action under T' Ampere's shield. But the cost of digging your graves will certainly be passed on to your company." "You paint a black picture." "Traditionally the rocks of Thirdhill have been awash with the blood of attackers since the stones of Castle Magda were first raised. I see no reason to suppose that this occasion will be any different." IF shape. Dubious at first, Catuul Gras rapidly became an enthusiastic convert when he saw the scope and thoroughness of the agent's ideas. Much preliminary work needed to be done and Catuul's standing with the elders of the clans foreshortened many otherwise lengthy negotiations. A large quantity of small boats was purchased along the coast to provide ready transport both for the attack and the unlikely event of a forced withdrawal. Canvassing around the Tyrene villages produced scores of useful contacts whose services would be needed when the great day came. Ren watched the steadily mounting bill for purchases and bribes and knew that this was goihg to be his final attempt. If this venture failed he was unlikely to be given the money or the opportunity to try again. He had to succeed. The more involved Catuul Gras became with the planning of the exploit, the more he began to appreciate how Ren's unique outworlders' view of Anharitte threw up ideas and perspectives by no means apparent to those who had spent their lives in the city. Although Ren's knowledge of Ahhn history was not complete, his understanding of the causes and motivations of political events was a revelation to the scribe. Ideas which in outline were received in doubtful silence won enthusiastic favor when Ren placed them in careful context. Whatever the results of the coming battle, the event was certain to find a permanent place in Anharitte's history. For Ren the affair, was necessarily a compromise. After his experiences with Alek Hardun he felt compelled to eschew the benefits of modern outworld weaponry. This limited his armory to what could be made or found from native resources. However, he felt no such limitations on his ingenuity. Ahhn craftsmen found themselves building instruments of siege and war which belonged not to their own history but to that of another race far across the legendary stars. Logic dictated that rocket projectiles would have been more effective against Magda than ballistae and chain-cannon, but Ren was aware of a growing sense of responsibility toward the Ahhn. The release of too much advanced weaponry into their feudal society could have destroyed them just as effectively as if the ships of Ranee had succeeded in their task; Alternately, to go into battle ill-prepared was to invite disaster. Nor were the words of Di Irons on T Ampereoverlooked. In his planning Ren had attempted to cover all of the many aspects of the exercise brought to his attention and several facets which he had determined for himself. Overall he had contrived to construct a time of chaos such that even the prefect would find it difficult to determine exactly what was taking place. It was also hoped that even the Imaiz's spies would present such a mass of irrelevant information to Dion that much could be achieved before the true pattern of the attack became apparent. All in all, Ren was rather pleased with his design. He was certain that Director Vestevaal would have given the whole scheme his heartiest approval. At last Ren was ready to make his move. With the initial attack on Magda scheduled for late afternoon a messenger was sent that morning to call out T Ampere's men. The messenger returned with the news that the party from Secondhill would join them at midday. This was largely as Ren had anticipated. He then waited for reports from the spies he had posted on T' Ampere's borders before ordering his men into the field. His judgment proved correct. Coincident with the sending of five hundred men from T' Ampere to join Ren's sortie against Magda, the mistress of Secondhill had ordered nearly ten times that number of men to the shores of the River Daizan in the east, flanking Magda province. When he had received confirmation of this fact, Ren caused signals to be flown to set in motion the next phase of his plan. T' Ampere was due for a nasty shock. The notion pleased Ren -- it was with a wolfish smile on his face that he went to marshal his own forces. Against agreement, the five hundred from T Ampere came complete with their own officers. These were neatly disarmed by the Pointed Tails and removed from the scene with some alacrity. Moreover, the five hundred were outnumbered at least two to one by members of the Pointed Tails and other societies brought in by Catuul as reinforcements. Lacking more direct orders from T' Ampere, the five hundred accepted the viewpoint offered them and soon became integrated in the total army marching on Thirdhill. hundred men rather than a thousand, that Ren crossed Firstwater to Magda's shores. Here again his strategy was not immediately obvious. Instead of taking the hill road leading directly up to the township and thence to the castle his men marched round at the foot IF of the slopes defining the hill -- only when they had formed a full circle around Thirdhill did they begin to ascend. Even then their activity was limited. At the rough contour where the grasslands gave way to the steeper outcrops of gray rock on which the township and castle of Magda stood, they halted and began to prepare their positions as if in readiness for a siege rather than a direct attack. Below the siege line other teams were busy setting up the various engines and devices of Ren's, design and dragging them up the hill to stations at carefully determined points. The sun set on a deceptively quiet scene, the growing glow of campfires spreading out along the side of the hill like a string of bright beads. In only a few places did activity continue after nightfall. Watchers in Castle Magda could have seen little of these secret details, because the devices were still concealed in dead ground and safely out of sight of the castle. The first sign of renewed action came when the fires on the hillside facing firstwater leaped into new life as blocks of pitch and barrels of crude tar were thrown upon them. The lazy breeze from the southwest carried the heavy smoke in the direction of the castle and effectively screened the movements Ren had planned for his secret weapons. These he now deployed forward to occupy positions behind preselected outcrops of rock that would serve to shield them from direct fire. Having relocated the devices to his satisfaction, Ren returned to a safe position to await the coming of first light. Dawn brought the first skirmish. The defenders of Magda, apparently reluctant until now to show their awareness of the army gathered around them, sent out a reconnaissance party to test the strength of the enemy. The Pointed Tails were ready for them. Although Dion-daizan's men bore small muskets of a type similar to those favored by the ill-fated Di Guaard, they were no match for the hail of steel shafts from the crossbows of the society armsmen. The reconnaissance party lost two men and retreated quickly back inside the castle gates. The attackers lost no men at all in the incident and achieved a great improvement in morale. The coming of the early sun brought a slight freshening of the wind, which nevertheless held its prevailing course. This was precisely what Ren had hoped and led naturally into the next phase of his campaign. With the majority of his troops still holding a tight ring around the outer slopes, he again caused certain fires to be made to smoke and, under cover of the dense vapor clouds, he and twenty selected men gained the forward positions where their secret weapons had been sited. The fires were doused at a signal and into the clearing air above the frowning castle a large balloon rose uncertainly, trailing a canister on a rope beneath it. slowly and snagged against a high battlement, its canister dangling against the outer wall. After a time the burning fuse expired and the canister fell outside the wall to explode at its foot. Although the explosive was a native product, its quality was sufficient to make a very creditable bang. In its situation it did no damage, but it was a welcome foretaste of what such a device could do if it fell inside the castle confines. The next balloon was prepared in recognition of the fate of the' first. It rose more swiftly, clearing the battlements with ample margin. The fuse, too, had been altered and made slightly longer and the attackers had the immense satisfaction of seeing the canister plummet from a height and fall squarely inside the castle walls. There was no way to assess what damage the explosion might have caused, but its arrival must certainly have been a trial to the defenders. Much structural damage was not to be expected, but the more sophisticated the defenses, the more they would suffer from casual bombardment. Eight more balloons were released. The first six all delivered their explosive charges somewhere within the castle confines. Although they were subjected to rapid musket fire from inside Magda, the small balls projected by the weaponry were insufficient to damage the balloon fabric in any way that appreciably foreshortened the flight. The seventh balloon was shot down well before it had covered the distance to the castle. Ren fancied that a more powerful weapon, such as a Terran rifle, had been brought to bear on this. The eighth balloon was shot to pieces almost immediately upon release, and Ren and his comrades scarcely escaped with their lives as the canister fell back on top of them. Seeing the growing effectiveness of the defensive measures, Ren decided that the idea had been taken far enough. Under cover of a new wave of smoke he ordered a retreat and made his way back to his now jubilant forces, quite satisfied with the progress he had made. Seven explosive charges had been delivered into Magda and although they would not have caused very much damage to such a massive IF structure, their effect both physical and psychological on the defenders could not have been negligible. Most gratifyingly, all this had been accomplished without the loss of a single man. Meanwhile, Catuul Grass had been visiting the township below the castle. He had found the people fully aware of the situation and anxious about their own lives and property. Catuul had struck a bargain with them -- he would restrict armed offensives to the vicinity of the castle proper if the townsfolk would agree to attempt no action in support of Dion-daizan. His proposal had been rejected until he pointed out the strength of the attacking force and the indefensibility of the scattered conglomeration of buildings of the township. If defied, he had said, he was quite prepared to raze the town by fire. On this point of understanding he had taken his leave, but had not forgotten to post pickets on all paths out of the town as a reminder to the townsfolk that they were not free agents in this time of war. R EN was concentrating now on  moving his men up closer to the castle, so that he could start to use the engines he had brought. The maneuver proved more dangerous than he had calculated. The muskets of Magda proved to have an unexpected range and accuracy -- and at least one high-powered rifle, probably with telescopic sights, was being deployed against his men. His losses were mounting, despite all his efforts at caution and it became obvious that a daylight attack would be suicidal. Reluctantly he retreated to the safety of the seige line and caused his ballistae to be prepared. He had intended the ballistae to be used at shorter range, but he knew that the smaller missiles could be hurled for considerable distances, though the accuracy of range left much to be desired. Fortunatly, knowing of the strength of Magda's walls, he had not intended to try to use brute force to make a breach. Instead he had concentrated primarily on the manufacture of fire bombs. These were earthenware vessels filled with inflammable spirit and ignited by a wick, which would burst and spread a formidable area of flame around the point of impact. Now Ren rearranged the ballistae for maximim effect at a distance and had the smaller fire bombs  segregated ready for loading. The losses his force had sustained earlier in the day weighed heavily on his conscience. With this in mind, he was overcautious about keeping his men well under cover and out of the line of fire. Here he sensed he was failing in his duties as a commander of an aggressive force. He grudgingly acknowleged that he was a merchant concerned with profit and loss rather than life and death and that he placed more faith in the unorthodoxy of his weapons to gain Magda than he did in the power of flesh and bone to storm a castle so well defended. The ballistae functioned well. About sixty per cent of the projectiles actually fell within the walls of Magda. The effect was difficult to gauge, but the persistence of smoke trails long after the spirit would have naturally burned out was evidence that at least some of the fire bombs had ignited combustibles within the castle. He had a mental picture of the vessels smashing against walls and windows and the torrents of flaming spirit being spattered well into the interior of Magda's installations. Apart from a direct hit, it was doubtful whether the practice would do much damage to the personnel, but no organization, however structured, could function without stress in the face of rapid and randomly occurring outbreaks of fire. pressing this newest mode of attack Ren had a visitor. Di Irons, grim and heavy and rustily bearded, pulled himself up the slopes and was guided to the place where Ren was directing operations. The prefect gave the impression of being tired of his world. "If ever a man could name a common cause for all his misfortunes that man is I. And the name of the misfortune is Tito Ren. What are you trying to do, Tito? Set all Anharitte on fire?" "Only Castle Magda -- at the moment. Did you have something on your mind, Prefect?" "The Tyrene attacked again -- the first time in over forty years. It's too much of a coincidence to suspect your hand isn't behind it. Only a historian could have planned a coup like that. Don't you agree?" Ren shrugged blandly. "They always told me the Tyrene pirates were a myth. I may be blamed for interfering with your history, but it seems to be taking the point a bit far to include mythology. Perhaps the ghost of Di Guaard has chased them from the cellars of the dead?" "I'll wager it was some more lively spirit," said Di Irons heavily. "Especially as you canvassed heavily along that shore." "Tell me about their coming," asked Ren innocently. "T'Ampere lost a fortune. To IF protect the chateau itself she had to call back much of the army she had originally sent to the edge of Magda province. They were so late returning that the chateau itself had been overrun in the meantime. The Tyrene took every single thing of value including her considerable treasury, fired the chateau, then retreated to the river. T' Ampere's men tried to give chase but were balked by the fact that you had already acquired all the available boats. To complete her misfortune Dion's men followed those she had called back and have occupied several of T' Ampere's own estates." "Aiee!" shrieked Ren. "And I thought all the action was taking place up here." "Far from it. And I'd advise you not to get too close to T' Ampere in the future. She knows well whom to blame for today's work. Clever you may be, but your ways are rather obvious." "Did you climb all this way just to offer me that advice?" "Not really. I was interested in your progress against Dion. You realize, of course, that your continued presence here is not due ta your own efforts, but due to some reluctance on the part of Dion to swipe you away as one would a fly." "I doubt the truth of that, but I'd be interested in knowing how you come to that conclusion." "It's a factor most of us tend to forget, but one brought well to mind by Dion's occupation of some of T' Ampere's estates today. To us, soldiers are all freemen, mercenaries or armsmen of societies. But even slaves will fight in the service of Dion-daizan -- and today a great many of them fought against T' Ampere. Furthermore, they were both armed and trained. Consider the implication, Tito. Dion can outman your army ten to one any time he chooses and not even feel the strain. And the majority of his men are already outside Castle Magda -- they have you surrounded." "There's been no sign of interference from his men in the province." "Then the fact that he hasn't called on them must mean either that he considers you no threat or that he's confident that his garrison here can deal with you adequately on their own. Your prospects don't look too bright either way." Ren surveyed the sky. The sun was already beginning to draw down on the horizon. "Did you ever think, my Lord, that the Imaiz may not be infallible? When darkness falls I intend to take these ballistae closer so that we can throw even larger jars of flaming spirit inside those walls. No matter how good his defenses, they can't function if they're afire. When the garrison is fully occupied putting out blazes we'll launch our main attack on the gates. If we can manage to # breach even one gate successfully we'll run whole barrels of spirit inside the walls and fire these also. We have the catapults, we have the ramps and we have more than enough combustables to fill Magda with a sea of flame. Are you thinking that Dion can withstand even that?" "It's a good plan and a bold one," said Di Irons grudgingly. "On the face of it, you should succeed. But I'll wager the Imaiz knows every detail of the scheme. If he has not yet moved against you it's because he knows your chances of success are quite remote." "On that point we'll agree to differ. Only the morning will tell which of us was right." "I think you'll find it a long night. And I wish you welcome to it, Tito. This is one night I've no wish to spend on Thirdhill. If I can't persuade you to your senses I'll take my leave. I think tomorrow there'll be many graves to supervise." Ren spared no time in calling together his lieutenants and ensuring that they were all in accord with the details for the coming battle. The ballistae were handed over to teams which had been instructed carefully on both the method and the timing of their use. The general relocation of troops had already begun and every foreseen aspect of the campaign had been fully covered. After a final inspection of the stockpiles of inflammables and the supply lines on which so much of the plan depended Ren gave the final order to proceed. Though no one knew it but himself, he had approached his final moment of decision with mixed feelings. Di Irons was a hard-headed realist, whose knowledge of probabilities in Anharitte was not lightly to be dismissed. Di Irons had predicted that the attack would fail. While Ren did not concur, he had to allow that the prefect's opinion was based on lifelong experience in Anharitte and carried a great deal of weight. Ren was not one to dismiss informed opinion lightly, and to underestimate Dion-daizan could be fatal. Because he and Catuul were to join the selected armsmen who were to make the attack on the main gates, Ren and the scribe made a circuituous journey first west and then north to a point well below the township where part of the atIF tacking party was mustering. Here were men fresh into the field, having just arrived up the Magda Road where they had been encamped as a reserve. They had completed their journey on time and Catuul was pleased to find that everything was in excellent order. The close warmth of the early night was beginning to fade as the assembled troop moved off up the ragged road that followed the upward slope between the dark ridges of the hill. The prognosis for the attack was promising. Ren had handpicked men fresh to the battle and backed up by the small carts carefully laden with more than sufficient inflammables to fire the castle. Even Catuul was beginning to feel that the operation must succeed. The wheels of the carriers' carts which regularly used this route had worn shallow grooves into the granite of the underlying rocks. In the moonless light from the Rim sky Ren found these furrows a useful guide to his feet and presenting a surface certainly more congenial to walk upon than the broken roughness of the rest of the road. About fifty men were ahead of him and as many following. In the true tradition of the societies the whole column moved silently, neither singing nor talking, their soft steps giving no indication that an army was on the march. Even the wheels of the little carts had been muffled. Ren found their quietness almost eerie. He was acutely conscious of the sound of his own boots on the hard underfooting. tastrophe was the more terrifying because it lacked any warning and because many of those who died did so with scarcely time to raise a shocked scream to their lips before they were destroyed. From somewhere out of the darkness a giant boulder, roughly spherical, plunged from a high place and thundered with sickening momentum between the cheeks of the road. Such was its force and unexpectedness that the first part of the column was crushed before the men had time to realize the nature of the thing which had leaped upon them. Comprehension of the nature of the threat was accompanied by a wild scramble by those following to climb the banks to avoid being mashed. Weighing many hundred tons, the boulder had been finely calculated to fit the contours of the road without becoming embedded in the banks. Its trajectory must have been set for maximum effect in this precise application. Certainly its release from a place of rest on an adjacent hillside was no accident, but even the authors of the misfortune could scarcely have hoped for such a truly devastating effect. The boulder went straight through the column of marching men, grinding flesh and bone alike into the dust. Even the frail carts at the rear were crushed completely, together with the patient animals and the men who held their reins. The only ones who were spared were those who were quick enough to breakformation and climb the bank in time to save theniselves. Aghast, Ren rose from the side of the bank where he had thrown himself and tried to estimate the severity of the damage. At least thirty were dead and as many more injured. The enormity of the damage and its improbable swiftness robbed him of words. The impact of that one great stone somehow symbolized all he had been told of the wrath of the Imaiz. In abstract such anger had been something to face with equanimity -- translated into crushed flesh and shattered bones, its aspect assumed a far more daunting hue. The rumble of the boulder still traveling down the distant slopes was audible above the cries of the injured. Ren was sick on the spot. Catuul Gras had taken command while Ren attempted to draw himself out of his shock. Already messengers had been sent to fetch help and sick-wagons for the injured. The fit men had been drawn aside and counted and lost weapons were replaced by arms taken from the dead. In battle the Pointed Tails remained practical to the last. "Friend Tito, we're ready to proceed." The scribe was sympathetic toward Ren's condition, but knew the whole battle was lost if the commander faltered. Ren, feeling the true pains of responsibility for the massacre of so many of those he had hired, would have preferred to have retired from the fight at that point. It had once more been driven home to him that he was a merchant, not a soldier, and that fighting was only a part of a commander's burden -- the other part was the acceptance of death, his own and those of his men. This was one aspect of making war that had never been made apparent to him in books. At the back of his mind the clear voice of conscience reminded him that those who had died had given their lives for the maintenance of the freetrade principle -- but the benefits of the principle's survival would go almost entirely to the nameless outworld moguls who controlled the strings of interstellar trade. Catuul's men had died in the service of someone else's greed. IF R EN pulled himself together sud denly. The realities of the situation became brutally clear. Whatever the morality, he was already committed. There could be no turning back. "I'm with you, Catuul. Have you sent for reinforcements?" "No. But we'll be joining the rest of the party at the township. That'll have to be enough. They'll have extra combustibles also." The remaining element of the troop continued with the march. Heeding the lesson so desparately learned, they broke file and walked high on the banks above the road in case a second boulder should follow the first. To their right the hill rose steeply into the blackness of a coniferous wood perched precariously high against the towering skyline and it was a reasonable certainty that those responsible for launching the boulder were still up there among the trees. Catuul called for scouts and sent them ahead up the bank to ascertain what dangers might still be lurking. Ten minutes later a minor landslide heralded something rolling down the slopes. Cautious investigation revealed the bodies of the scouts with their throats cut. They had been rolled back down to rejoin their comrades. At no time had there been any sight of or sound from the hidden enemy, and Catuul viewed the road ahead with considerable apprehension. Ren decided on a detour. His reasoning was that their progress along this particular road had been anticipated and the route would probably contain several further traps. If they struck a new path across country they might encounter nothing more than random patrols. Catuul agreed and the party made a wide detour that much later fetched it to the road at the entrance to the township. Here the rest of the attackers were waiting -- and listening to an agitated messenger who had been unable to locate Catuul in the darkness. The messenger held a long and involved conversation with Catuul and repeatedly pointed beyond Magda to where Ren was beginning to discern a broad area of light in the sky. Finally Catuul approached him to report. "Some of the ballistae are in trouble. Dion used cannon to knock a couple of them out. He had also managed to project some sort of incendiary into two of our stockpiles. The fires you see are our own emplacements burning." "Have we still enough ballistae to set Magda afire?" "Easily enough. We've seven left and even three would be adequate." "Then let them commence firing. The quicker we can move now, the more surely we can win. Are we ready to assault the castle gates?" "The men are ready. We're waiting for some more tar and oil to get through to replace some we lost, but it can follow us later. First we have to get into attack position." "Then let's get on with it," said Ren. "We've still a fair way to go to reach the castle and Dion's obviously expecting us." Soon the sounds of renewed hostilities became loud in the air. The night sky began to echo to the firing of muskets and the occasional roar of cannon. Although nothing was yet to be seen, Ren knew that his ballistae must have already started launching the great spirit jars over Magda's walls. Soon he hoped to see evidence of fires within the castle perched directly above where he now stood. It was necessary that his assault troops moved swiftly into position ready to seize the most advantageous time to breach the gates. Ren began to feel better. His previous horror was soon lost in the preoccupation of renewed activity. The township of Magda was built of streets steeply sloped toward the castle at its head. The inhabitants had wisely stayed inside their houses and behind locked doors -- the streets were deserted save for where Ren's army thronged the lower square. The way ahead up the narrow cobbled street was lit by occasional watch flares which dimly illuminated the way almost to the foot of the castle. Despite the apparent overtness of the action Catuul insisted that a small troop of men go ahead to ensure that no ambush had been laid from the dark alleys that laced the township. Ren felt that his role should have placed him at their head, but he acquiesced to Catuul's more informed objection. Catuul needed men he had trained. The scouting party would be visible right to the top of the hill and could easily exchange signals with the men below. R EN'S decision to remain was  nearly the cause of his immediate death. The square was flanked by buildings formed from the traditional granite of the hills. Without warning -- and by obvious design -- one of these collapsed, its walls falling outward to scatter granite blocks far across the square and on the heads of the unfortunate troops mustered beneath. The nature of the mechanics by which this trick was wrought was not apparent, but its effect was catastrophic. As the walls had begun to bulge Catuul had thrown Ren clear IF and the agent had received merely a startled impression of an apparently solid wall of masonry seeming to become plastic as it bent and twisted outward to engulf a great many of his men. Shaken by his second near escape of the evening, Ren's reaction this time was one of immense anger. He was sure the scheme could not have been devised and executed without the foreknowledge and cooperation of the inhabitants and he charged Catuul to make them pay for their indiscretion as soon as it was light. Meanwhile Ren's own task was becoming increasingly urgent. The scouting party reported by light signals that the way was apparently safe and clear. Leaving fresh dead and wounded to be extricated from the ruins of the building, Ren started up the road, calling for men to follow him to the gates of Magda. Had he given the matter more thought Ren might have been less brave. As he strode ahead he realized that even in the dim flarelight his merchant's costume must have made him conspicuous among the armsmen and rendered him an easy target for a trained sniper. A sharpshooter with a modern electron-optic rifle hidden in one of Magda's towers could have killed him at any moment. From his experience with the balloons Ren was reasonably certain that Dion did possess some of these weapons. He was forced to recognize that he was relying on the Imaiz voluntarily limiting his show of arms to those that would seem to be appropriate to the type of battle being offered. Both he and Dion were playing a game -- a war game carefully dressed to suit the character and background of Anharitte. But at what point would Dion's hand be forced so that he would be playing a game no longer? At some point before he was broken the Imaiz would be forced by the dictates of survival to drop the pretense and reply with whatever weapons he possessed, regardless of their origin or propriety. Or did Dion truly have his boulder and falling-wall technique so well organized that even now he had no fear of the army moving up the sloping street? Halfway up the hill Ren heard a shout from the men above him. He called back, anxious to know what they had found. He was not long left doubting. With a hideous clatter a large wheeled cart, heavily laden with blocks of stone and held unnoticed in some recess, had begun to run down the slope toward him. The very narrowness of the street precluded the escape of all but the lucky as the juggernaut hurtled with ever increasing momentum toward the knot of anguished men. On either side the sleeping houses left neither gaps nor alcoves nor opemdoors through which the men might escape. The width of the cart was nearly three quarters of the width of the road itself and, although it must leave some men unharmed, the trick would be to estimate precisely against which wall one should hug one's self and hope. At one point the cart snagged against brickwork and the iron ' bands of its hubs shot visible sparks into the air and threatened to divert the cart to a stop against the wall. But the vehicle broke free, ran across the road, ricochetted off the other side and centered again on its murderous course. Ren took the only action open to him. Trying to judge the most probable path the vehicle would take, he pressed himself against a wall and prayed. His prayer was not answered. By an apparently willful deviation of its direction the thundering cart moved again across the road and soon was upon him. Even before the flying wheels made contact Ren knew his injury was going to be savage. The weight and speed of the unattended juggernaut left no doubt of the outcome. When it hit him he was going to be crushed. The heavy axle caught his thigh, and he went partly over the shaft and partly between it and the wall. The shock and pain of so grave an injury was mercifully foreshortened by unconsciousness -- but he remembered thinking, as the fringes of darkness closed about him, that with those sort of injuries he would prefer not to live. Some unknown time later he partially awoke -- enough to be conscious of bright flares around him and of an unnatural numbness. He could see Eynes, the surgeon from the spaceport, bending over him, instruments in hand. Somewhere behind the surgeon and barely in focus the red-on-gold emblems of the sickwagon of the Society of Pointed Tails danced in the flickering flames. He could hear Di Irons' voice, but could not see him. Ren tried to concentrate on what was being said. "I'll not let them take him...there's not one society hospital in Anharitte has a chance of repairing that! Eynes cut in plaintively. "We'd need the operating theater facilities of a Stellar Cruiser to save him -- and the nearest must be better than three weeks out." There was another gap in time, then a slight return to consciousness as the whisper of a cushion-craft cut through the enveloping clouds of internal IF darkness. He caught a glimpse of Eynes' face by torchlight, a picture of worried indecision followed by a shrug and a gesture that meant capitulation. Firm hands gently rocked Ren -- next he dimly recognized a pneumatic stretcher that lifted him without movement or dislocation. He experienced a disoriented passage through the air past the bright flames, a moment of unreal eternity he knew he would remember to his death. Then came darkness and a voice like Di Irons' was raging loudly and furiously about his encirclement by fools and villains. Then nothing -- a long, long nothing. He struggled from time to time to break through into consciousness and almost succeeded, only to be defeated by something circulating in his bloodstream. The only thing Ren felt with certainty was that he had not died. G radually he awoke fully. He was in a bed under sheets of clinical whiteness. Though' he feared to explore his condition, the form beneath the fabrics assured him he had not lost his legs. The room was a curved white cocoon, more aseptic and more expensively appointed than any hospital room of his experience. The bulk of smooth equipment at his bedside told of the continuous monitoring of his condition by medical computers. A door opened and a tall Ahhn nurse began deftly to remove the electrodes taped to his wrists and chest and forehead. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Agent Ren. How are you feeling?" In an agony of apprehension Ren began to explore himself. A wave of immense relief brought an incredulous smile to his lips. "I -- I'm still complete?" It was a statement as much as a question. She looked at him sagely. "You've lost a bit of weight, but you'll soon get that back with exercise. You can start getting out of bed today." "You mean I'm healed?" Ren's voice ran high. By way of answer she whipped the sheeting from the bed and left him naked to judge for himself. Deep and unfamiliar scars showed just how extensive had been the surgery, yet the flesh was already whole and firm and without unfamiliar sensation except for a slight tingle at the scar-tissue sites. "You were lucky," she said. "No great internal complications. Your hip bone's partly plastics now, but I doubt if you'd ever have known it if you'd not been told." "But -- how long have I been here?" "A little over a month." She was amused at his consternation. "You've been kept in mediconsuspension. The healing rate is increased by not having the body constantly in conflict with the psyche. And with a rest from life of that duration, you'll be amazed at how simple your problems have become." Ren had heard of the technique of this medicon-suspension. Computer-aided instrumentation would have taken over control of his subconscious body processes, and his brain would have been allowed to rest. With the computerenhanced control of his body, a surgeon could promote healing and regrowth at rates otherwise not possible. His body, too, would not have suffered atrophy due to prolonged disuse. The method came from the forefront of medical research on the prime worlds -- even there it was available only to the very fewwho could afford it. Ren felt good. For the First time in his life he felt completely rested and able to encounter whatever might come with a rational and unclouded approach. As the nurse had said, it was amazing how simple his problems had become. He felt as if he were born anew. "Where am I?" he asked. He knew the answer but wanted confirmation. "In Magda, of course." The nurse had a way of speaking which reminded him of Zinder. He watched her carefully. She was an example of pure Ahhn stock, yet fully reconciled to the levels of an outworld technology. The result was impressive. Added to her native attributes were a confidence and a competence which foreshadowed a proud and sane mastery of the future. Ren caught her arm lightly as she reached to disconnect equipment and turned her wrist towards him to see the Madga slave-mark indelibly written in her fine skin. But a greater truth was also written there. Diondaizan's wizardry was a far more potent force than magic. Now he thought about it, his repair and skilled recovery could only have been due to the resources of the man he had set out that night to attack. On all Roget only Diondaizan could conceivably have installed such a facility. The notion made Ren feel slightly sick with himself. Love thine enemy was an old creed to which Ren had not strongly subscribed. Nurse thine enemy back to health with dexterous and expensive skills was a modern extension of the idea and one that made Ren, the recipient, feel very humble indeed. IF Dion could have left the gates of Magda closed and left his enemy to die on the cold cobblestones of Thirdhill. No one would have thought worse of the Imaiz for it. Yet some humanitarian instinct must have prompted Dion to take Ren in and give him a degreeof medical attention unobtainable elsewhere in this sector of the galaxy. By this action Dion had revealed his true stature. Thanks to the effectiveness of his subconscious rehabilitation, Ren felt very little discomfort when he first attempted to get out of the bed. He found his balance lacking, but was able to stand and walk without much difficulty. Considering the extent of the injuries which had brought him down, he knew he had been incredibly lucky. The Ahhn nurse was patient but firm. After a couple of hours of tests and exercises she declared herself satisfied with his recovery. "You may dress in your own clothes now, Agent Ren. Later Dion-daizan wants to see you." "I wish to see him, too," said Ren. "I owe him a great deal. But for being admitted here, I should probably have died." She did not contest the statement, but busied herself in an anteroom dismantling and cleaning the equipment. X Magda was a failure?" "Failure!" Her amusement carried even though he could not see her. "You never stood a chance. We had a ring of anti-personnel mines out there that could have destroyed every man you had. And we've everything here from laser rifles to high-velocity flame throwers. But you had organized a peasants' attack, so Dion followed suit. A few things rolled down a hill were all that was necessary to contain you. Take my advice, Agent Ren, and stick to trade. It'll be a long time before there's a force on Roget able to better Dion in a fight of any kind." Ren dressed, walked to the window and found himself looking out from a position high on Magda's edge. The view ran straight down the valley that divided Firsthill from Secondhill. Small ships were passing through the shipping lanes to and from the great Aprillo river. From this point of vantage Ren's traders eye could appreciate the vast potential of Anharitte as a landport and as a galactic trading center. In his imagination he rebuilt the already insufficient dock basin and planned a city more modern but just as picturesque and even more colorful on Firsthill. Almost without knowing it he had begun to identify himself with Anharitte and its inhabitants. Local idiosyncrasies were becoming a secret source of pride to him. It was the one place in the universe he wanted to think of as home. He wondered if Dion-daizan had looked from a similar window and reached a similar respect for this city built on the three hills. Ren's resolution was simple now. He was too much in sympathy with Dion's objectives to oppose the wizard further. He was determined to resign from the company and remain in Anharitte. This need not affect his future too much. There were freelance trading prospects on Roget whose potential had scarcely been touched. And if these failed he might even seek employment with Dion himself. His only fear was that the Imaiz might not feel disposed to give him the opportunity to remain. Obviously, from the medical care which had been lavished on him, Dion was not going to exercise his rights over the vanquished and have him executed. But Ren realized he had been a considerable nuisance to the Imaiz and he doubted that Dion would suffer him to remain on the planet. "Agent Ren, the Imaiz will see you now." The nurse had returned and was waiting to escort him. Somehow the slave mark on her wrist no longer seemed incongruous. He saw it now more as a symbol of application and dedication. Dedication to what? The future, perhaps. But training her to such a pitch was no ordinary achievement. It was a measure of Dion's genius. Nobody had ever acquired skills like hers under the coercion of a whip. He followed her, hoping to get a glimpse of more of Magda's secrets. He was not disappointed. In the corridor he passed the doors of two more hospital rooms and what appeared to be a biomedical laboratory, all staffed with Ahhn nurses and technicians. The end of the corridor brought him back into what was recognizable part of the old castle. The sudden transition from the aseptically clinical to the dark medieval was only a foretaste of the metamorphoses to come. tablished high in one of the great flanking towers of Magda. Ren descended some stairs and each level he came to presented to him a tantalizing glimpse of some different technological microcosm. He could hear machine rooms and catch occasional snatches of electronic noise or the smell of chemicals, perhaps from a laboratory. The complexity of pipes and power cables accommodated in the IF stair well emphasized just how certainly he had underestimated Dion's potential. Ren was seeing a technical and industrial complex built in miniature, but having a manufacturing Scope probably unequaled outside of one of the prime worlds. As he passed along the lower corridors a suspicion grew in Ren's mind. His guide was surely giving him a brief tour of selected parts of the establishment. He surmised that its purpose was to provide him with a more realistic idea of what he would be facing should he again take up arms against the House of Magda -- it was also a possible prelude to his pending interview with Dion himself. Ren took the lesson to heart and found a logical extension. These handpicked and educated slaves of Magda were the new heirs to Anharitte. They would be the spearhead of a cultural revolution so formidable that the slave system, the societies -- and even Di Irons and the City Fathers -- were already anachronisms. The marvelous thing about the whole affair was the care that had been taken not to let the old institutions know that they were already dead. The real question at issue was: how bloody would Dion-daizan allow his revolution to become? Knowledge was power, and Dion seemed to be a specialist in imparting knowledge. Was he also a specialist in controlling this new force he had created? At the moment he was working with a close-knit team and his control of the situation was absolute. But when a wider dissemination of the knowledge came about, as inevitably it must, was Dion big enough still to hold the reins of power? If he were not, then what would be the cost in terms of loss of life and damage to the essential character of Anharitte? Magda was built with an outer ward and an inner one containing the great keep. The keep was lower but considerably more massive than the towers of any of the other castles on the three hills. As he crossed the inner ward Ren was interested to note many signs of burning and explosion -- these must have been the result of his own recent activities. In a way he was gratified to find that his excursion into improvised weaponry had had such a powerful result. He has obviously stood no chance against Dion-daizan, but had he attacked Di Guaard, for instance, he would probably have won. The notion amused him and he immediately began to feel better about the coming interview. On the ground floor of the keep he passed through a communications center. In it was a powerful the size of the limited spaceport probably capable of making direct contact with Terra itself. Suddenly it was no mystery to Ren as to what had happened to the Ranee ships. Direct intervention by the forces of the Galactic Federation had stopped them in midflight. Doubtless here was the instrument that had broadcast the alarm. This consideration placed the galactic standing of the Imaiz in a new light. Only prime world governments could afford to build and these units were leased only to those -- like space transportation companies -- who had good claim to on-line communication links across the distances of space. Dion's acquisition of such an instrument as this suggested the involvement of outworld planetary governments in the affairs of Magda. Rather than being an adventurer, there was a strong implication that Diondaizan was an agent for the Galactic Federation itself. Ren's previous misjudgment of the situation bad been so absolute that he was now incapable of being surprised further. Catuul's attempts to disrupt the Imaiz s estates were made pathetic by radio-telephone links extending widely over provincial Magda. On-line data links coupled to a powerful computer registered and monitored every aspect of the estates' growing and marketing activities. Even the farm-stock prices in the capital city of Gaillen were automatically updated every second. Dion's knowledge of the overall picture of Roget's outspace commerce was also something that would have made Ren scream in his sleep had he known of it previously. All transactions made through the spaceport communications terminal received an immediate printout in Magda. There still existed an on-line access to all the information contained in the spaceport data banks. A further display of commercial and technological prowess was a broad screen for viewing ship movements on Firstwater -- the image of every vessel moved across the screen, accompanied by computer-generated comment on the origin, destination, value and nature of its cargo. were high up in the keep. Ren knocked and was bidden to enter. The chamber into which he came was large and nearly circular, occupying almost the whole area of the level of the keep. The walls IF from ceiling to floor were lined with books and broken only by narrow windows. Furnishings were sparse and consisted mainly of low wooden stools and the broad desk at which sat the wizard of Anharitte. "Come in, Agent Ren -- be seated. They tell me your recovery is going well." "Miraculous is the word," said Ren. "I can't thank you enough. But for you and whoever did the surgery I would certainly have died." "The surgeon, yes -- " Dion's eyes twinkled with humor. "He's aged twenty-two and is a native of Anharitte. I bought him as a lad for four barrs. His price was cheap because he wasn't strong enough to carry wood. Still I think it was I who gained the bargain." "You don't need to spell it out," said Ren, "I was convinced of the effectiveness of your policy the first day I saw Zinder in the market." "Yet you continued to oppose me?" "I did. The liberalization of Anharitte appeared inconsistent with the principles of Freetrade. As an agent of the Company I was committed to uphold the Freetrade principle." Dion-daizan sat back in his chair and interleaved his fingers. Clad in a simple white gown, he might have been the high-priest of a halfhundred religions. But the quiet certainty in his eyes belonged to no fanatic. "You're a man both of perception and principle," said Dion. "I like that." He leaned over to a communicator on the desk. "Ask Director Vestevaal to join us." "The director is here?" "Certainly he's here. He and I have been working while you've been sleeping these several weeks. We've been hammering out a formula to solve our mutual problems." Magno Vestevaal was in fine form. He greeted Ren jubilantly, inquired about his injuries, then turned back to Dion-daizan. "Well, Dion, what do you think of him?" "Much as before," said Dion. "After all, our dossier on him was pretty complete from the moment he was assigned to Roget. The only thing we missed was his profound talent for destruction. Since his coming Anharitte has never been quite the same." "What's going on?" demanded Ren, looking from the director to the Imaiz and back again. The director eased himself onto a corner of the Imaiz s desk and turned to Ren confidentially. "It was the ancient problem, Tito. The irresistible force versus the immovable object: Dion's irresistible climate of social change versus our intractable need for a freeport in this sector of the galaxy." # Tm familiar with the problem," said Ren guardedly. "But it doesn't have a solution." "It does, Tito -- and I've found it. A stroke of commercial genius even if I say it myself. I'd like you to meet a new director of the company -- Dion-daizan." "A director?" "Dion's now a major shareholder in the company and he has been appointed director of sector operations. Don't you see the beauty of it. What he does with his social revolution is no longer our concern. Dion himself is now committed to the principle of maintaining freetrade in Anharitte." Ren felt suddenly bitter. "I can see where the company stands to gain, but I never thought Dion would sell out the Ahhn for money -- " He turned to the Imaiz accusingly. "Peace, Tito!" Dion-daizan held up a cautioning hand. "Your emotions do you credit, but there's been no sell-out. Freedom and Freetrade are merely different aspects of the same idea of liberty. To assume that they're opposed is a political artifice. It's a fallacy adopted by inept governments to secure an income to which they have no moral title. I always intended the freetrade principle to apply to Anharitte. As I recall, it was you who invented the schism." "I?" "And think -- if I had been genuinely opposed to freetrade do you suppose I would not have removed you as expeditiously as I dispatched the Butcher of Turais?" "So you think you can integrate the two?" asked Ren. Here were new possibilities for his mind to explore. "On many levels I can see how it would work -- but there could be a few fundamental obstacles. For a start I don't see where the societies would fit into the pattern." "The societies will have to adapt -- but then, they're very good at adaptation. They already provide a nucleus of social services, which happily can be expanded. And insurance is an untapped field on Roget. I could almost envy the societies their future." Dion's air of authority was pervasive. He spoke as if the future were under his control. "Who are you?" asked Ren suddenly. Dion-daizan grinned broadly. "The wizard of Anharitte, of course." "He's pulling your leg," said Vestevaal. "He's a Terran socioIF logical engineer provided by the Galactic Federation at the request of the planetary government of Roget. His job is to nurse an essentially feudal society through five hundred years of technological backlog -- without its blowing apart or losing its identity." Ren considered this in silence for a long time, then: "When did you find this out. Director?" "Unfortunately not till I'd returned from Terra with the Imaiz's contract already signed in my pocket. Dion actually let me conclude the deal before he admitted that what I was buying would have been given freely anyway. In short, he's an even bigger rogue than I. It's a good thing he's now on our side. We didn't do so well with him in opposition." "And where does this place me?" asked Ren finally. "With Dion in this theater, the company scarcely needs an agent here." "My thoughts entirely," said Vestevaal. "In fact I welcomed the chance to take you to Freetrade Central. I wanted to initiate you into the intrigues necessary to maintain a seat on the council. However, Dion has another proposition. He wants you to remain in Anharitte as his personal assistant." "On company affairs?" "Only partially. He also wants you to assist with his program of technical and social reforms. It seems the reputation you have built as Agent Ren, coupled with your deep understanding of the Ahhn, gives you the unique ability to serve as a bridge between the two cultures. Both sides know and trust you -- and that's a valuable asset indeed. Take a day or two to think it over." "I don't need a day or two," said Ren. "I had already decided to stay in Anharitte. If Dion will have me. I'm his man. I'm sorry about your plans for me. Director -- but I think you understand how I feel." "No apology necessary, Tito. A few years younger and faced with the same choice, I might even have made the same decision. Anharitte is a place that grows on you. But as it is, I've chosen to take something of Anharitte with me instead." "Something?" "I should say say 'someone.' It's a sign of the changing times. Dion's manumission bill is going through and he's releasing Zinder from her bond. She and I are to be married on Terra. Then she'll work with me at Freetrade Central. What do you think of that?" "With a combination of the two of you manipulating the Freetrade Council," said Ren, "I don't think even the merchant worlds will stand a chance."  ( Continued from page # ) between science fiction and fantasy (both, I feel, are sf) and also says that the impossible is not acceptable. I wonder what the criteria are for judging what is impossible. A definition that states that science fiction is not concerned with the impossible seems to rule out many types of story: the various "doomsday syndrome " stories such as Stand on Zanzibar -- who ever heard of mans trying to survive on an Earth that had standing room only? Taking the A's in my sf index: Aldiss' Randy's Syndrome -- is that conceivably possible? More to the point, can we possibly consider that Asimov s Nightfall could exist in our physical universe? If you do think so read Asimovs essay on the planet of the double sun in Fact and Fancy ( Doubleday ). Taking the Alpha Centauri binary as his example he says that Sun B would re(roughly the orbit of Uranus) and seeing that Alpha Centauri B is # miles in diameter it should have the apparent diameter of Jupiter as seen from Earth . True, Sun B would be # times as bright as the full moon, but this is still I #th as bright as Sun A. Now, Nightfall presupposes a world of six suns, each of which is a disk (the smallest. Beta, is said to be chipped on one side). Obviously the suns must be crowded into an area of space less than ronment certainly doesn't strike me as "rational. " The question of what is possible brings up a pet theory of mine. It goes: l ) The universe is infinite in extension in both time and space. #) In an infinite universe everything is possible, given natural laws, but who knows the sum total of natural laws? #) Therefore everything must happen. I find myself having to face certain problems. If everything must happen -- what is fiction? And if God is allowed for by the totality of natural laws He cannot exist on at least one fragment of the universe, but must exist on another. Cy Chauvin speculated on the purpose of sf. I think the most generally accepted message in the genre is predictive, while del Rey sees it as presenting alternatives. There is a difference, obviously. I believe Chauvin finally said that the medium has no overall purpose beyond the presentation of thoughtprovoking ideas and good tales. I must agree with that, for it embraces both the predictive functions and the expression of alternatives of the genre. For me sf is an omnibus genre -- it includes science fiction, science fantasy, speculative fiction, speculative fantabu lation, swordandsorcery (one word ) and so on. Until someone comes up with a term that covers all our genre I will differentiate by keeping sf strictly different in meaning from Science Fiction per se. Deryk Ashby Victoria # Australia Dear Mr. Jakobsson: Here is a copy of my letter to Mrs. Weiss in reply to her query in If, October f # . "... I read your letter in the October issue of If. The story you inquired IF about is by Fred Saberhagen and is called The Long Way Home. It appeared in Galaxy, Number #, Volume # , #, June '#, published by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. "Your account is inaccurate in one respect -- the people are not left undisturbed at the end. " You may be interested to know that Poul A nderson also wrote a story ( quite different ) with this title, published in Astounding as a'serial in # (British edition). "I hope you are successful in obtaining a copy of the story. I hope this information is also of use to your other readers. Keep up the good work! Steve Smith Essex, England Dear Mr. Jakobsson: With the current trend of weird, farout science fiction stories it's a rare joy to read a good old-fashioned space adventure such as Gods on Olympus, by Stephen Tall (If Oct. '#). His detailed buildup of characters and ship with the appropriate name of Stardust makes me wonder if he might be planning more adventures for the crew and ship. Currently the only ones who still consistently write good sf adventures are A. Bertram Chandler and John Rackham. Chuck Burdett Palmdale, California Stephen Tall is working on a new Stardust novelette -- you should be seeing it shortly. The Stardust series has been running consistently in both Galaxy and If Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I am very pleased with January '# Galaxy. This is the second issue I've read after an absence from the field of about three years. I remember Galaxy as the aristocrat of science fiction magazines -- it still is. If, however, has changed. The stories in the December issue were excellent -- there wasn't one I didn't enjoy. However, your feature department is small and I miss a good editorial -- also the If Firsts that used to be marked plainly and be accompanied by a brief biography of the author. Nichola Grimshawe Ontario, Canada Teratohippus, by Robert L. Davis, one of the excellent stories you enjoyed in the December issue, was an If First. It has enjoyed top reader comment. Both If and Galaxy are as active as ever in launching new authors -- and we do mean to launch them. It's sometimes a disservice both to the author and the magazine to label a story a "first." We currently have something better under discussion for writers who select us to publish their best first work -- you may expect an announcement shortly. Subscribers Please Note If you change your address, please mail notification to: L. C. Murphy , Manager If Fulfillment Dept. I # Secatogue A venue Farmingdae, N. 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I State Zip  I I # Dune by Frank Herbert Celebrated winner of Hugo and Nebula. Gripping tale of family exiled from their private planet to another, a barren desert Pub ed. # # Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels. Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub ed. # #I The # Annual World's Best Science Fiction, ed by Donald A Wollheim Volume IV contains # ems from Clarke, turgeon, and more Spec Ed. #I The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed # # # The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov The master's first novel in # years and worth the wait for a fabulous trip to the year # Pub. ed # # # Science Fiction Hall of Fame I. # "winners!' chosen by Sci-Fi Writers of America. Ed. Robert Silverberg. Pub ed # # # The Ice People by Rene Barjavel. Great French bestseller, prize winning novel of discovery of prehistoric man and woman, who come to life! 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Van Scyoc Dean McLaughlin The first two novels in Stunning Riverworld Trilogy! tSE. A.XJ-T#. # BonV e,o "An imaginative science fiction novel... set in an unfamiliar barren land... Intellectually challenging." -- Pwfelishers Weekly. "Intriguing and ingenious." -- Library Journal. "A fascinating, exciting book." -- St. Louis PostDispatch. "I couldn't put it down." -- Minneapolis Tribune. Winner of the # Hugo Award Putnam edition, # Berkley paperback, # "A wild romp across a landscape that Hieronymous Bosch might have dreamed up... Clever, fast-moving, and really different." -- Publishers Weekly. "An intriguing, multi-charactered novel set on the planet Riverworld where all humanity has been reborn." -- The Booklist. "A highly imaginative story." -- Boston Globe. Putnam edition, # Berkley paperback, # From your bookseller, or order direct from the publisher. lison Avenue, New York, N.Y. # Barry Malzberg finds the institutional church deaf to the trumpets of the Apocalypse. But for Raymond Jones all the lions of Rome can't stop the "new men" of Trelawney's World. With Clancy O'Brien Christianity comes up from its sewage chamber chapel for full-screen entertainment. While George Smith finds Christianity compatible with Vertality according to the Mark #B. Dean Koontz sees a sinless child contaminated. Raylyn Moore sees a mountain mystic electrocuted. Gail Kimberly sees centaurs; Roger Lovin, winged boatmen; Leigh Brackett, gentle Hywl; Thomas Scortia, the Wandering Jew. Ten farsighted authors see humans and aliens and believable peoples in search after a common language... As the Lorsii asked the Apostle, "What means this 'wrong'?" (#-#), # each. Add # per dollar for postage and handling. I enclose  "  oorvcoRDia  Oept.#B j Address City State WelDS OF Vot.#,No. #I laauaiee Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Meneging Editor Lester del Rey, Feeture Editor L C. 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Th paper time machlna also a tool: a time machine that enables you to replay the crucial events -- past, present, and future -- that shape our lives. Now, instead of merely reading about what's happening, you can explore and experience the alternatives and decision points through the technique of Conflict Simulation. What ia ConflicI Simulallon? Conflict Simulation is a way of analyzing a political or military conflict situation. A way that is as intellectually stimulating as a game of chess, and as thorough as a written analysis. Through the use of the Conflict Simulation (or "game") format, the conflict situation is re-created -- so that you are in a position to make the vital decisions and, in the game at least, change the way things were, are, or will be. What you got ed bi-monthly. Each issue contains;  A ready-to-play conflict-simulation game with a # X # " playing surface, die-cut playing pieces, and complete rules. A An analytical article on the same subject as the game in that issue. it Other feature articles on historical and military subjects.  Game and book reviews, commentary on existing games, and discussions of subscribers' questions. The magazine is #  pages long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format. bat in Western Europe, #). We also publish a separate line of conflictsimulation games, which you will find listed in the coupon. Free to now eubacritiora battle presented in a game-design specially created to introduce new readers to Conflict Simulation. Send check or M O. to: Slmulatlene Pubileatiena Inc. Oept. #BI # Ewt #rd St., Nm York. N.Y. # Please enter my subscription to S. S T. for: I Year(#issues)-# # Yrs. (# issues)-S# # Yrs. (# issues)# Current issue S# Send me the following Simulation Games;  Kursk (Russia. #)-S# r Koras (#-S#)-# r Phalanx (ancient Greece)-# r Barbaroaaa (Russia. #l-#S)-# r Uipxi (Napoleonic Wars. #)-#  Normandy (the O-Oay lnvaslon)-'#  Please send mo your free brochure. Address City State.Zip n,'rit( ,ind wfofUj Dear Mr, Jakobsson: Vm beginning to believe you have a particular taste for sf stories dealing with androids and! or cyborgs, because  find a high percentage of such stories in both Galaxy Magazine and Worlds of If. The February issue of If contains two of that kind: The Never Girl and Ghosts. And surprisingly to me) both were on the better side of mediocre, most stories of that kind today, when almost every aspect of the general field has been explored barely short of the point of diminishing returns, being mediocre. Rarely are any as original or interesting as those by Michael Coney and Robert Young in this issue. Although a lot of the history provided to us in the footnote in The Never Girl seemed unbelievable as far as necessity andjor logical or likely consequences are concerned, it was indeed a fascinating treatment of the general field known to many as the new biology. And Ghosis was just long enough for its uniqueness to hold interest until the end. But the best story in the magazine by far was Clifford Simaksi Contraction Shack. Written by cfi man who is probably one of the twenty all-time greatest writers of sf in the world, a Simak story is always good and usually among the best. His story in this issue of If was one of the latter. Pluto itself is probably the most intriguing of all the known planets, being, as Simak brings out so well in his story, at the outermost rim of the solar system. And Simak exploited its mystery as few other sf writers could do. I was expecting a different outcome of the explorers investigation -- something on the order of their discovering that the aliens who built Pluto were originally the guardians of the universe, similar to the Watchers from The Fantastic Four, with sentries in each galaxy and one in every star system (not solar system; theres only one Sol). But I wasnt disappointed at the real revelation at the end of the story. And the only other flaw in the piece was the overemotionalism of the expedition s leader after he found out how his creators had ( Continued on page I # ) IF Great new science-fiction titles from... World renowned ghosthunter perhaps the greatest living authority on parapsychological phenomena, combines his great talent and experience to make this hair-raising tale featuring Randy Knowls, psychic detective. AN # # WFrom " Excellent"N.Y. Post. Including top stories by John Brunner, R.A. Lafferty, Michael G. Coney, Harlan Ellison. Including stories by Hugo awardwinners James Blish, Keith Laumer, and the Nebula award-winning '"Occam's Scalpel, by Theodore Sturgeon. (please add # for shipping) Fleeing Earth's end they come -- to give their "eiders" another chance! I  Bentley Price, photographer for Global News Service, had put a steak on the broiler and settled down in a lawn chair, a can of beer in hand, to watch it, when the door opened under an ancient white oak tree and people started walking out of it. Many years had passed since Bentley Price had been astounded. He had come, through bitter experience, to expect the unusual and to think but little of it. He took pictures of the unusual, the bizarre, the violent, then turned around and left, sometimes most hurriedly, for there was competition from such as the AP ing news photographer could allow no grass to grow beneath his feet. And while picture editors certainly were not individuals to be feared, it was often wise to keep them mollified. But now Bentley was astounded, for what was happening was not something that could easily be imagined or ever reconciled to any previous experience. He sat stiff in his chair, the beer can rigid in his hand and a glassy look about his eyes, watching the people walking from the doorway. Although now he saw that the opening was not exactly a door, but a ragged hole of darkness that quivered at the edges and was somewhat larger than any common door, for people were emerging four and five abreast. They seemed quite ordinary j although they were dressed a bit a outlandishly. If they all had been I young he would have thought they  were from a university or a youth  center and wearing the crazy kind of clothes that college students affected. But while some of these people were young, a lot of them were not. One of the first to have walked out onto the lawn was a tall thin man, graceful in his leanness. He had a great unruly mop of irongray hair and his neck looked like a turkey's. He wore a short gray skirt that ended just above his knees. A red shawl draped across one shoulder was fastened at his waist by a belt that also held the ": skirt in place. He looked, Bentley told himself, like a Scot in kilts, but without the plaid. Beside him walked a young woman dressed in a white and flowing robe that came down to her sandaled feet. The robe was belted and her intensely black hair, worn in a ponytail, hung down to her waist. She had a pretty face, thought Bentley -- the kind of prettiness one seldom saw -- and her skin, what little could be seen of it, was as white and clear as the robe she wore. The two walked toward Bentley and stopped in front of him. "I presume," said the man, "that you are the proprietor." Something was wrong with the way he talked. He slurred his IF words. But he was entirely understandable. "I suppose," said Bentley, "you mean do I own the joint." "Perhaps I do," the other said. "My speech may not be of this day, but you seem to hear me rightly." "Sure I do," said Bentley, "but what about this day? You mean to tell me you speak different every day?" "I do not mean that at all," said the man. "You must pardon our intrusion. It must appear unseemly. We'll endeavor not to harm your property." "Well, I tell you, friend," said Bentley, "I don't own the place. I'm just holding down the homestead for an absent owner. Will you ask those people not to go tramping over flower beds? Joe's missus will be awful sore if she comes home and finds those flowers messed up. She sets a store by them." All the time that they'd been talking, people had been coming through the door and now they over into the yards next door and the neighbors were coming out to see what was going on. The girl smiled brightly at Bentley. "I think you can be easy about the flowers," she said. "These are good people, well-intentioned and on their best behavior." "They count upon your sufferance," said the man. "They are refugees." Bentley took a good look at them. They didn't look like refugees. In his time, in many different parts of the world, he had photographed a lot of refugees. They were grubby and usually packed a lot of plunder, but these people were neat and clean and they carried very little, a small piece of luggage, perhaps, or a sort of attache case, like the one the man who was speaking with him had tucked under one arm. "They don't look like refugees to me," he said. "Where are they refugeeing from?" "From the future," said the man. "We beg utmost indulgence of you. What we are doing, I assure you, is a matter of our life or death." That shook Bentley up. He went to take a drink of beer and then decided not to and, reaching down, set the beer can on the lawn. He rose slowly from his chair. "I tell you, mister," he said, "if this is some sort of publicity stunt I won't lift a camera. I wouldn't take no shot of no publicity stunt, no matter what it was." "Publicity stunt?" asked the man and there could be no doubt that he was plainly puzzled. "I am sorry, sir. What you say eludes me. Bentley took a close look at the door. People still were coming out of it, still four and five abreast and there seemed no end to them. The opening hung there as he first had seen it, a slightly ragged blob of darkness that quivered at th edges. It blotted out a small section of the lawn, but behind and beyond it he could see the trees and shrubs and the play-set in the back yard of the house next door. If it was a publicity stunt, he decided, it was a topnotch job. A lot of PR jerks must have beat their brains out to dream up one like this. How had they rigged that ragged hole and where did all the people come from? "We come," said the man, "from five hundred years in the future. We are fleeing from the end of the human race. We ask your help and understanding." Bentley stared at him. "Mister," he asked, "you wouldn't kid me, would you? If I fell for this I would lose my job." "We expected, naturally," said the man, "to encounter disbelief. I realize there is no way we can prove our origin. We ask you, please, to accept us as we define ourselves." "I tell you what," said Bentley. "I will go with the gag. I will take some shots, but if I find it's publicity -- " "You are speaking, I presume, of taking photographs." "Of course I am," said Bentley. "The camera is my business, understand?" "We didn't come to have photographs taken of us. If you have some compunctions about this matter, please feel free to follow them. We will not mindat all." "So you don't want your pictures taken," Bentley said fiercely. "You're like a lot of other people. Yoju get into a jam and then you scream because someone snaps a picture of you." "We have no objections," ' said the man. "Take as many pictures as you wish." "You don't mind?" "Not at all." Bentley swung about, heading for the back door. His foot caught the can. of beer as he turned and sent it flying. Three cameras lay on the kitchen table, where he had been working with them before he'd gone out to broil the steak. He grabbed up one of them and was turning back toward the door when he thought of Molly. Maybe he'd better let Molly know about this, he told himself. The guy had said all these people were coming from the future and if that were true, it would be nice for Molly to be in on it from the start. Not that he believed a word of it, of course, but it was mighty funny, no matter what was going on. He picked up the kitchen phone and dialed. He grumbled at himself. He was wasting time when he should be taking pictures. Molly might not be home. It was Sunday and a nice day and there was no reason to expect to find her home. Molly answered. IF "Molly, this is Bentley. You know where I live?" "You're over in Virginia. Mooching free rent off Joe while he is gone." "It ain't like that at all. I'm taking care of the place for him. Edna, she has all these flowers -- " "Ha!" said Molly. "What I called about," said Bentley, "is would you come over here?" "I will not," said Molly. 'If you have in mind making passes at me you have to take me out." "I ain't making passes at no one," Bentley protested. "I got people walking out of a door all over the back yard. They say theyYe from the future, from five hundred years ahead." "What! Impossible -- " "That's what I think, too. But where are they coming from? There must be a thousand of them out there. Even if they're not from the future it ought to be a story. You better haul yoiir tail out here and talk with some of them. Have your byline in all the morning papers." "Bentley, this is on the level?" "On the level," Bentley said. "I ain't drunk and I'm not trying to trick you out here and -- " "All right," she said. "I'll be right out. You better call the office. Manning had to take the Sunday trick himself this week' and he's not too happy with it, so be careful how you say hi, there. Donald A. Wollhaim, Publishar When it comes to producing "a best of the year" anthology Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Wollheim ""knows well what he is doing."" Tastes differ in the collections, ence fiction and shuns oddball and ""fun-and-games"" items. You can rely upon this one. E.C. Tubb"s marvelous space adventures of Dumarest continue as he tries to find the where(UQi#). ""Startlingly impressive" says Harlan Ellison about Gordon Dickson's short stories and And startling, too, is the word single day in the year # A.D. when a number of "immortals" learn the facts of life. is #c n But he'll want to get some other people out there. If this isn't just a joke -- " "It's not any joke," said Bentley. "I ain't crazy enough to joke myself out of any job." "I'll be seeing you," said Molly. She hung up. Bentley had started to dial the office numbers when the screen door slammed. He looked around and the tall thin man stood just inside the kitchen. "You'll pardon me," the tall man said, "but there seems to be a matter of some urgency. Some of the little folks need to use a baths room. I wonder if you'd mind -- " "Help yourself," said Bentley, making a thumb in the direction of the bath. "If you need it, there's another one upstairs." Manning answered after a halfdozen rings. "I got a story out here," Bentley told him. "Out where?" "Joe's place. Out where I am living." "Okay. Let's have it." "I ain't no reporter," said Bentley. "I ain't supposed to get you stories. All I do is take the pictures. This is a big story and I might make mistakes and I ain't paid to take the heat -- " "All right," said Manning wearily. "I'll dig up someone to send out. But Sunday and overtime and all, it better be a good one." "I got a thousand people out in the backyard, coming through a funny door. They say they're from the future -- " "They say they're from the what?" howled Manning. "From the future. From five hundred years ahead." "Bentley, you're drunk." "It don't make no never mind to me," said Bentley. "It's ho skin off me. I told you. You do what you want." Re hung up and picked up a camera. A steady stream of children, accompanied by some adults, was coming through the kitchen door. "Lady," he said to one of the women, "there's another one upstairs. You better form two lines." # Steve Wilson, White House press secretary, was heading for the door of his apartment and an afternoon with Judy Gray, his office secretary, when the phone rang. He retraced his steps to pick it up. "This is Manning," said the voice at the other end. "What can I do for you, Tom?" "You got your radio turned on?" "Hell, no. Why should I have a radio turned on?" "There's something screwy happening," said Manning. "You should maybe know about it. Sounds like we're being invaded." "Invaded?" IF Winner of Hugo and Nebula Awards Provoking insights lor changing the world into our possibilities An Avon Book #c "Not that kind of invasion. People walking out of nothing. Say they're from the future." "Look, if this is a gag -- " "I thought so, too," said Manning. "When Bentley first called in -- "You mean Bentley Price, your drunken photographer?" "That's the one," said Manning, "but Bentley isn't drunk. Not this time. Too early in the day. Molly's out there now and I have sent out others. AP is on it and -- " "Where is this all going on?" "One place is over across the river. Not far from Fails Church." "One place?" "There are others. Wc have it from Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis. AP just came in with a report from Denver." "Thanks, Tom. I owe you." He hung up, strode across the room and snapped on a radio. "...so far known," said the radio. "Only that people are marching out of what one observer called a hole in the landscape. Coming out five and six abreast. Like a marching army, one behind the other, a solid stream of them. This is happening in Virginia, just across the river. We have similar reports from Boston, the New York area, Minne apolis, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Los Angeles. As a rule, not in the cities themselves, but in the country just beyond the cities. And here is another one -- Atlanta, this time." A quiver in the deadpan voice betrayed momentary unprofessional excitement. "No one knows who they are or where they comp from or by what means they are coming. They are simply here, walking into this world of ours. Thousands of them and more coming every minute. An invasion, you might call it, but not a warlike invasion. They are coming emptyhanded. They are quiet and peaceable. They're not bothering anyone. One unconfirmed report is that they are from the future, but that, on the face of it, is impossible -- " Wilson turned the radio to a whisper, went back to the phone and dialed. The White House switchboard answered. "That you, Della? This is Steve. Where is the President?" "He's taking a nap." "Could you get someone to wake him? Tell him to turn on the radio. I am coming in." "But, Steve, what is going on? What is -- " He broke the connection, dialed another number. After a time Judy came on the line. "Is something wrong, Steve? I was just finishing packing the picnic basket. Don't tell me -- " "No picnic today, sweetheart. We're going back to work." "On Sunday?" "Why not on Sunday? We have problems. I'll be right along. Be outside, waiting for me." "Damn," she said. "There goes my plan. I had planned to make you, right out in the open, on the grass under the trees." "I'm going to torture myself all day," said Wilson, "thinking of what I missed." "All right, Steve," she said. "I'll be outside waiting on the curb." He turned up the radio. "...fleeing from the future. From something that happened in their future. Fleeing back to us, to this particular moment. There is, of course, no such thing as time travel, but there are all these people and they must have come from somewhere..." # Samuel J. Henderson stood at the window, looking out across the rose garden, bright in the sunamer sun. W)iy the hell, he wondered, did everything have to happen on Sunday when everyone was scattered and it took no end of trouble to get hold of them? It had been on another Sunday that China had exploded and on still another that Chile had gone down the drain and here it was again -- whatever this might be. The intercom purred at him and, turning from the window, he went back to his desk and flipped up the key. "The secretary of defense," said the secretary, "is on the line." "Thank you, Kim," he said. He picked up the phone. "Jim, this is Sam. You've heard?" "Yes, Mr. President. Just a moment ago. On the radio. Just a snatch of it." "That's all I have, too. But there seems no doubt. We have to do something, do it fast. Get the situation under control." "f know. We'll have to take care of them. Housing. Food." "Jim, the armed forces have to do the job. There is no one else who can move fast enough. We have to get them under shelter and keep them together. We can't let them scatter. We have to keep some sort of control over them for a time at least. Until we know what is going on." "We may have to call out the guard." "I think," said the President, "perhaps we should. Use every resource at your command. You have inflatable shelters. How about transportation and food?" "We can handle things for a few days. A week, maybe. Depends upon how many of them there are. In a very short time we'll need help. Welfare. Agriculture. Whoever can lend a hand. We'll need a lot of. manpower and supplies." "You have to buy us some time," said the President. "Until we have a chance tq look at what we have. You'll have to handle it on an emergency basis until we can settle on some plan. Don't worry too much about procedures. If you have to bend a few of them we'll take care of that. I'll be talking to some of the others. Maybe we can all get together some time late this afternoon or early evening. You are the first to call in. I've heard from none of the others." "I would imagine they both might be moving. I haven't heard from either. I suppose they'll be reporting in." "Mr President, do you have any idea -- " "None at all. I'll let you know as soon as possible. Once you get things moving, get in touch again. I'll need you, Jim." "I'll get on it immediately." "Fine, then. I'll be seeing you." The intercom purred. "Steve is here," said the President's secretary. "Send him in." Steve Wilson caitie through the door. Henderson motioned toward a chair. "Sit down, Steve. What have we got?" ' ' "It's spreading, sir. All over the United States and Europe. Up in Canada. A few places in South America. Russia. Singapore. Manila. Nothing yet from China or Africa. So far, no explanation. It's fantastic, sir. Unbelievable. One is tempted to say it can't be happening. But it is. Right in our laps." The President removed his glasses, placed them on the desk, pushed them back and forth with his fingertips. "I've been talking with Sandburg. The army will have to get them under shelter, feed them, care for them. How's the weather?" "I didn't look," said Wilson, "but if I remember correctly from the morning broadcasts, good everywhere, except the Pacific Northwest. It's raining there. It's always raining there." "I tried to get State," said the President. "But, hell, you never Burning Tree. I left word. Someone's going out to get him. Why does everything always have to happen on Sunday? I suppose the press is gathering." other hour they'll be pounding on the door. I will have to let them in, but I can hold them for a while. By six o'clock, at the latest, they'll expect some sort of statement." "Tell them we're trying to find out. The situation is under study. You can tell them the armed services are moving rapidly to help these people. Stress the help. Not detention -- help. The guard may have to be called out to do the job. That is up to Jim." "Maybe, sir, in another hour or two we'll know more about it." "Maybe. You have any thoughts on the matter, Steve?" The press secretary ook his head. "Well, we'll find out. I expect to be hearing from a lot of people. It seems incredible that we can sit here, knowing nothing." "You'll probably have to go on TV, sir. The people will expect it." "I suppose so." "I'll alert the networks.' "I suppose I had better talk with London and Moscow. Probably Peking and Paris. We're all in this together -- we should act calls in, will know about that. I think I'd better phone Hugh at the U.N. See what he thinks." "How much of this is for the press, sir?" "The TV, I guess. Better keep the rest quiet for the moment. You have any idea of how many of these people are invading us?" thousand an hour. That's in one place. There may be as many as a hundred places. The count's not in." "For the love of God," said the How will the world take care of them? We have too many people now. We haven't got the housing or the food. Why, do you suppose, are they coming here? If they are from the future they ought to have IF The last word in time-machine novels. 'This is ail iwildiy imaginative and mindbending. Gerrold is such a good writer... After reading this one, time-machine addicts will never be quite able to look at the gadget again as a simple plaything." Publishers Weekly by David Gerrold author of When Harlie Was One yw A Science Fiction Book Club selection #, now at your bookstore historical data. They ought to know the problems they're creating." "They must have a compelling reason," said the secretary, "whoever they are. They're acting from some sort of desperation. Certainly they know we are limited in our capacity to put them up and keep them." "Children of our children," said the President, "many times removed. If they're truly from the future they are our descendants. We can't turn our backs on them." "I hope everyone feels' the same about it," said Wilson. "'They'll create an economic pinch if they keep coming and in an economic pinch there will be resentment. We talk about the present generation gap. Think of how much greater that ap will be when not two generations, but a number are involved." "The churches can help a lot," said the President, "if they will. If they don't, we could be in trouble. Let one loud-mouthed evangelist start some pulpit-thumping and we've had it." Wilson grinned. "You're talkit would be all right, I could get in touch with him. We knew one another back in college. I can talk with him, but I don't know what good I'll do." "Do what you can," said the President... "Reason with him. If he refuses to see reason we'll find someone who can really lean on him. What bothers me is the welfare population. Bread out of their mouths to feed all these extra mouths. It'll take fast footwork to keep them in line. The labor unions may be scared by all the extra manpower, but they are hardheaded people, all of them. A man can talk to them. They understand economics and you can make some sense to them." The intercom came to life. The President thumbed the lever. line, sir." Wilson stood up to leave. The President reached for the phone. He looked up at Wilson. "Stay close," sail the President. "I intend to, sir," said Wilson. # . All the buttons on Judy's phone were blinking. She was talking quietly into the transmitter. The spindle on her desk was festooned with notes. When Wilson came into the office she hung up. The lights kept on blinking. "The lounge is full," she said. "There is one urgent message. Tom Manning has something for you. Said it is top important. Shall I ring him?" "You carry on," said Wilson. "I'll get him." He sat down at his desk, hauled the phone close and dialed. "Tom, this is Steve. Judy said you have something important." "I think we do," said Manning. "Molly has someone. Seems to be a sort of leader of the gang out in Virginia. Don't know how his credentials run, if there are credentials. But the thing is, he wants to talk with the President. Says he can explain. In fact, he insists on explaining." "Has he talked with Molly?" "Some. But not important stuff. He is reserving that." "It has to be the President?" "He says so. His name is Maynard Gale. He has a daughter with him. Name of Alice." "Why don't you ask Molly to bring them along? Back way, not out in front. I'll notify the gate. I'll see what can be done." "There's just one thing, Steve." "Yes?" "MolFy found this guy. She has him hidden. He is her exclusive." "No," said Wilson. "Yes," insisted Manning. "She sits in on it. It has to be that way. Goddamn it, Steve, it's only fair. You can't ask us to share this. Bentley snagged him first and Molly hung onto him." "What you're asking me to do would ruin me. You know that as well as I do. The other press associations, The Times, The Post, all the rest of them -- " "You could announce it," said Manning. "You'd get the information. All we want is an excluIF Now in paperback! Lester del Reys first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years  Highly original"Theodore Sturgeon, N.Y, Times Book Review Utter believability and constantly heightening fascination." -- Harlan Eluson, Loa Angeles Times #t wherever Berkley paperbacks are sold # Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. # sive interview with Gale. You owe us that much, Steve." that Global brought him in," said Wilson. "You'd be given full credit for it." "But no exclusive interview?" "You have the man right now. Get your interview. Get it first, then bring him in. That would be your privilege. I might not like it, Tom, but there's not a thing I could do to stop it." "But he won't talk until he's seen the President. You could release him to us once he's talked." "We have no hold on him. Not at the moment anyhow. We would have no right to release him to anyone. And how do you know he's what he says he is?" "I can't be sure, of course," said Manning. "But he knows what is going on. He's part of what is go- ing on. He has things all of us need to know. You wouldn't have to buy his story. You could listen, then exercise your judgment." "Tom, I can't promise anything at all. You know I can't. I'm surprised you asked." "Call me back after you've thought it over," Manning said. "Now, wait a second, Tom." "What is it now?" "It seems to me you might be running on thin ice You're withholding vital information." "We have no information." "A vital source of information, then. Public policy may be at issue. And what is more, you are holding the man against his will." "We're not holding him. He's sticking tight to us. He figures we are the only ones who can get him to the White House." "Well, impeding him. Refusing to give him the assistance that he needs. And -- I can't be sure of this, I can only guess -- you might be dealing with the equivalent of an ambassador." "Steve, you can't lean on me. We've been friends too long." "Let me tell you something, Tonw I'm not going along with this. Friendship or not. I have a hunch I could get a court order within the hour." "You couldn't get away with it." "You'd better talk to your lawyer. I'll look forward to hearing from you." He slammed down the phone and stood up. "What was that all about?" asked Judy. "Tom tried to bluff me." "You were pretty rough on him." "Damn it, Judy, I had to be. If I had knuckled under -- I couldn't knuckle under. In this job you don't make any deals." "They're getting impatient out there, Steve." "Okay. You better let them in." They came in with a rush, quietly, orderly, finding their accustomed seats. Judy closed the doors. "You have anything for us, Steve?" AP asked... "No statement," said Wilson. "Really not anything at all. I guess all I have to say is that I'll let you know as soon as there is anything to tell. As of less than half an hour ago, the President knew no more about this than you do. He willhave a statement later, as soon as he has some data to base a statement on. I guess the only thing I can tell you is that the armed forces will be assigned the job of getting these people under shelter and providing food and other necessities for them. This is only an emergency measure. A more comprehensive plan will be worked out later, perhaps involving a number of agencies." "Have you any idea," asked the Washington Post, "who our visitors are?" "None at all," said Wilson. "Nothing definite. Not who they are or where they come from or why they came or how." "You don't buy their story they are coming from the future?" "I didn't say that, John. We maintain the open mind of ignorance. We simply do not know." "Mr. Wilson," The New York Times asked, "has any contact been made with any of the visitors who can supply us facts? Have any conversations been initiated with these people?" "At the moment, no." IF "Can we assume from your answer that such a conversation may be imminent?" "Actually no such assumption would be justified. The administration is anxious, naturally, to learn what it's all about, but this event began happening not a great deal longer than an hour ago. There simply has been no time to get much done. I think all of you can understand that." "But you do anticipate there'll be some conversations." "I can only repeat that the administration is anxious to know what is going on. I would think that some time soon we may be talking with some of the people. Not that I know of any actual plans to do so, but surely that would seem to be an early logical course. It occurs to me that members of the press may already have talked with some of them. You may be way ahead of us." none of them is saying much. It's almost as if they had been coached to say as little as possible. They will simply say they have come from the future -- from five hundred years ahead -- and they apologize for disturbing us, but explain it was a matter of life and death for them to come. Beyond that, nothing. We are simply getting nowhere with them. I wonder, Steve, will the President be going on television?"  "I would think he might. I can't tell you when. I'll let you know immediately when a time is set." "Mr. Wilson," asked the Times, "can you say whether the President will talk with Moscow or London or ome of the other governments?" "I'll know more about that after he talks with State." "Has he talked with State?" "By now perhaps he may have. Give me another hour or so and I may have something for you. All I can do now is assure you I'll give you what I have as soon as the situation develops." "Mr. Press Secretary," said the Chicago Tribune, "I suppose it has occurred to the administration that the addition to the world's population of some two "You're ahead of me there," said Wilson. "My latest figure hour." "There are now," said The Tribune, "about two hundred of the tunnels or openings or whatever you may call them. Even if there should be no more than that it means that within less than forty-eight hours more than a billion people will have emerged upon the Earth. My question is how is the world going to be able to feed that many additional people?" "The administration," Wilson told the Tribune, "is very acutely aware of the problem. Does that answer your question?" "Partially, sir. But how does it propose to meet the problem?" "That will be a matter for consultation," said Wilson stiffly. "You mean you won't answer it?" "I mean that at the moment I can't answer it." "There is another similar question," said the Los Angeles Times, "concerning the advanced science and technology that must exist in a world five hundred years ahead. Has there been any consideration given -- " "There has not," said Wilson. "Not yet." The TVew York Times arose. "Mr. Wilson," he said, "we seem now to be moving far afield. Perhaps later some similar questions will be possible to answer." "I would hope so, sir," said Wilson. He stood and watched the press corps file back into the lobby. #  The army was having trouble. Lieutenant Andrew Shelby phoned Major Marcel Burns. "Sir, I can't keep these people together," he reported. "They are being kidnaped." "What in hell are you talking about, Andy? Kidnaped?" "Well, maybe not that, actually. But people are taking them in. One big house is full of them. There must be twenty or more of them inside. I talked with the owner. Look here, I told him, I have to keep these people together. I can't let them get scattered. I've got to load them up and take them where they have shelter and food. Lieutenant, said this man, you don't have to worry about the people I have here. If food and shelter are your only worry you can stop worrying. They ae my house guests, sir, and they have food and shelter. And he was not the only one. That was only one house. Other houses, all up. and down the street, they have them, too. The whole neighborhood has them. Everyone is taking them in. That's not the whole story, either. Pex)ple are driving in from miles away to load them up and take them off to take care of them. They're being scattered all over the countryside and I can't do a thing about it." "Are they still coming out of that door or whatever it is?" "Yes, sir, they are still coming out of it. They have never stopped. It's like a big parade. They just keep marching out of it. I try to keep them together, sir, but they wander and they scatter and they are taken up by all the people in the neighborhood and I can't keep track of them." "You've been transporting some of them?" "Yes, sir. As fast as I can load them up." IF "What kind of people are they?' "Just ordinary people, sir. Far as I can see. No different from us, except that they got a sort of funny accent. They dress funny. Some of them in robes. Some of them in buckskins. Some of them in -- oh, hell, they have all kinds of clothes. Like they were at a masquerade. But they are polite and cooperative. They don't give us trouble. It's just that there are so many of them. More of them than I can haul away. They scatter, but that ain't their fault. It's the people who invite them home. They are friendly and real nice, but there are just too many of them." The major sighed. "Well, carry on. Do the best you can." #  The buttons on Judy's telephone had never stopped their blinking. The lounge was jammed with waiting newsmen. Wilson got up from his desk and moved over to the row of clacking teletypes. Global News was coming up with its fifth new lead. Washington (GN) -- Millions of visitors who say they are from # years in the future continued to come to the present world this afternoon, pouring in steady streams from more than # "time tunnels." There has been general public reluctance to accept their explanation that they are from the future, but it is now beginning to gain some acceptance in official quarters, not so much in Washington as in some capitals abroad. Beyond the assertion that they are from the future, however, the refugees will add little else in the way of information. It is confidently expected that in the next few hours more information may be forthcoming. So far, in the confusion of the situation, no one who can be termed a leader or a spokesman has emerged from the hordes of people pouring from the tunnels. But there are now some indications that such a spokesman may have been located and that soon his story will be told. The distribution of the tunnels is worldwide and they have been reported on every continent. An unofficial estimate places the number of people passing through an hour. At this rate... "Steve," said Judy, "Tom Manning is on the phone." Wilson went back to his desk. "Have you got your court order yet?" Manning asked. "Not yet. I gave you time." "Well, you can get it any time you want to. Our attorney says you can." "I don't think I'll need it." "Matter of fact, you won't. Molly is already on her way. With Gale and his daughter. She'll be there in twenty minutes, more or less, depending on the traffic. It is getting hairy out there. Sightseers pouring in and a slew of army trucks." "Tom," said Wilson, "there is something I want to say. I know why you had to do it. You simply had to try." "Steve, there's one thing more." "What is it, Tom?" "Gale talked a little to Molly. Not much. There was one thing he asked her to pass along. Something he said couldn't wait." "You're passing it along?" "He said to station an artillery piece in front of each of the time tunnels. High-explosive rounds. If anything happens, fire straight into the tunnel. Don't pay any attention to the people who may be in it, just fire. If necessary, keep on firing." "Any idea of what could happen?" "He wouldn't say. Just that we would know. Said the explosion would knock out the tunnel, collapse it, put an end to it. You'll take it from here?" "I'll take it from here." "I'm not going to use it now," said Manning. "Not right away." Wilson hung up, picked up the Presidential phone. "Kim," he asked, "when can I get in?" "He's on the phone now. Other calls are holding. There are people with him. How important is this, Steve?" "Top important. I have to see the man." "Come on in. I'll slip you in as soon as possible." "Judy," said Wilson. "Molly Kimball is coming in the back way. She'll have two of the refugees with her." "I'll call the gate," said Judy. "And security. When they get here? "If I'm not back send them in to Kim." #  Sandburg, the secretary of detary of state, sat on a davenport in front of the President's desk. Reilly Douglas, the attorney general, held down a chair at its corner. They nodded to Wilson when he came into the room. "Steve," said the President, "I know that what you have must be important." The words were barely short of a rebuke. "I think so, Mr. President," said Wilson. "Molly Kimball is bringing in one of the refugees who says he is a spokesman for at least the Virginia group. I IF thought you might want to see him, sir." "Sit down, Steve' said the President. "What do you know about this man? Is he really a spokesman? An accredited spokesman?" "I don't know," said Wilson, "f would suppose he might have some credentials." "In any case," said the secretary of state, "we should listen to what he has to say. God knows no one else has been able to tell us anything." Wilson took a chair next to the attorney general and settled into it. "The man sent a rnessage ahead," he said. "He thought we should know as soon as possible. He suggested an artillery piece, firing high-explosive rounds, be placed in front of every door or time tunnel or whatever the people are coming out of." "There is some danger, then?" asked the secretary of defense. Wilson shook his head. "I don't know. He apparently was not specific. Only if anything happened at any tunnel we should fire an explosive charge directly into it. Even if there were people in it. To disregard the people and fire. He said the explosive would collapse the tunnel." "What could happen?" asked Sandburg. "Tom Manning passed on the word from Molly. He quoted the spokesman as saying we would know. I got the impression the measure is precautionary only. He'll be here in a few minutes. He can tell us." "What do you think?" the President asked the others. "Should we see this man?" "I think we have to," said Williams. "It's not a matter of protocol, because in the situation as it stands we have no idea what protocol might be. Even if he isn't what he says he is he can give us information -- and so far we have none at all. It isn't as if we were accepting him as an ambassador or official representative of those people out there. We can use our judgment as to how much of his story we'll accept." Sandburg nodded gravely. "I think we should have him in." "I don't like the idea of a press association's bringing him in," said the attorney general. "The news media are not particularly disinterested parties. There would be a tendency to palm their own man off on us." "I know Tom Manning," said Wilson. Molly, too, for that matter. They won't trade on it. Maybe they would have if this spokesman had given an interview to Molly, but he hasn't talked to anyone. The President, he said, is the only man he'll speak with." "The act of a public-spirited citizen," said the attorney general. The secretary of state said, "We won't, of course, be seeing him in any official capacity unless we make it so. We won't be bound by anything he says or anything we say." "But," said the secretary of defense, "I want to hear more about blowing up those tunnels. I don't mind telling you they have bothered me. I suppose it's all right as long as only people are coming out of them. But what would we do if something else started coming through?" "Like what?" asked Douglas. "I don't know," said Sandburg. "How deeply, Reilly, does your objection go?" the President asked the attorney general. "Not deeply," said Douglas. "Just a lawyer's reaction against irregularity." "Then I think," said the President, "that we should see him." He looked at Wilson. "Do you know, has he got a name?" "Maynard Gale," said Wilson. "He has his daughter with him. Her name is Alice." The President nodded. "You men have the time to sit in on this?" They nodded. "Steve," said the President. "You as well. He's your baby." #  The village had known hunger, but now the hunger ended: For some time in the night a miracle had happened. High up in the sky. just beyond the village, a hole had opened up and out of the hole had poured a steady stream of wheat. The foolish boy with the crippled leg who belonged to no one, who had simply wandered into the village, who was crippled in his mind as well as in his body, had been the first to see it. Skulking through the night as well as he could with one leg that dragged, unable to sleep, looking for the slightest husk that he could steal and chew on, he had seen the grain plunging from the sky in the bright moonlight. He had been frightened and had turied to run, but his twisting hunger had not let him. He had not known what the cascade was at first, but then it was something new and it might be something he could eat and he had not run away. So, frightened still, he had crept upon it and finally, seeing what it was, had rushed upon it and thrown himself upon the pile that had accumulated. He had stuffed his mouth, chewing and gasping, gulping to swallow the half-chewed grain, strangling and coughing, but stuffing his mouth again as soon as he managed to clear his throat. The overloaded stomach, unaccustomed to such quantities of food, had revolted, and he had rolled down off the pile and lain upon the ground, weakly vomiting. It was there that others found him later. They kicked him out of the way, for with this wondrous IF thing that had happened and that had been spotted by a man of the village who had happened to go out to relieve himself, they had no time for a foolish, crippled boy who had merely attached himself to the village and did not belong there. The village was aroused immediately and everyone came with baskets and with jars to carry off the wheat, but there was far more than enough to fill all receptacles, so the headmen got together and made plans. Holes were dug in which the grain was dumped, which was no way to treat good wheat. But it had to be hidden, if possible, from the sight of other villages and it was the only thing the people could think of to do immediately. With the dryness and the drought upon the land there was no moisture in the ground to spoil the wheat and it could be safely buried until that time when something else could be devised to store it. But the grain kept pouring from the sky and the ground was baked and hard to dig and they could not dispose of the pile. In the morning soldiers came and, thrusting the villagers to one side, began hauling the wheat away in trucks. The miracle kept on happening. The wheat continued to pour from the sky, but now it was a less precious miracle, not for the village alone, but for a lot of other people. #m "I would suppose," said Maynard Gale, "that you would like to know exactly who we arc and where we're from." "That," agreed the President, "might be an excellent place to start." "We are," said Gale, "most ordinary, uncomplicated people from the year twenty-four hundred ninety-eight, almost five centuries in your future. The span of time between you and us is about the same as the span of time between the American voyages of Christopher Columbus and your present day. "We arc traveling here through what I understand you are calling, in a speculative way, time tunnels, and that name is good enough. We are transporting ourselves through time and I will not even attempt to try to explain how it is done. Actually I couldn't even if I wanted to. I do not understand the principles except in a very general way. If in fact, I understand them at all. The best I could do would be to give you a very inadequte layman's explanation." "You say," said the secretary of state, "that you are transporting yourselves through time back to the present moment. May I ask how many of you intend to make the trip?" "Under ideal circumstances, us." "You mean your entire population? Your intention is to leave your world empty of any human beings?" "That, sir, is our heartfelt hope." "And how many of you are there?" "Give or take a few thousand, you will note, is somewhat less than yours at the present moment and later I will explain why this -- " "But why?" asked the attorney general. "Why did you do this? You must know that our world's economy cannot support both your population and our own. Here in the United States, perhaps in a few of the more favored countries of the world, the situation can be coped with for a limied period of time. We can, as a matter of utmost urgency, shelter you and feed you, although it will strain even our resources. But there are other areas of Earth that could not manage to sustain you even for a week." "We are well aware of that," said Maynard Gale. "We are trying to make certain provisions to alleviate the situation. In India, in China, in some African and South American areas we are sending back in time not only people, but wheat and other food supplies, in the hope that whatever we can send may help. We know how inadequate these provisions will be. And we know as well the stress we place upon all the people of this time. You must believe me when I say we did not arrive at our decision lightly." "I would hope not," said the President, somewhat tartly. "I think," said Gale, "that in your time you may have taken note of published speculations about whether or not there are other intelligences in the universe, and the almost unanimous conclusion that there must surely be. Which raises the subsidiary question of why, if this is so, none of these intelligences has sought us out -- why we have not been visited. The answer to this, of course, is that space is vast and the distances between stars are great and that our solar system lies far out in one of the galactic arms, far from the greater star density in the galactic core, where intelligence might have risen first. And then there is the speculation concerning what kind of people, if you want to call them that, might come visiting if they should happen to do so. Here I think the overwhelming, although by no .means unanimous body of opinion is that by the time a race had developed star-roving capability it would have arrived at a point of social and ethical development where it would pose no threat. "And while this may be true enough, there would always be exceptions and we, it seems, in our IF own time, have become the victims of one of these exceptions." "What you are saying," said Sandburg, "is that you have been visited, with what appears to have been unhappy results. Is that why you sent ahead the warning about the planting of artillery?" "You haven't yet set up the guns? From the tone of your voice -- " "We have not had time." "Sir, I plead with you. We discussed the possibility that some of them might break through the defenses we set up and invade the tunnels. We have strong defenses, of course, and there are strict orders -- to be carried out by devoted men -- to destroy any tunnel where a breakthrough might occur but there is always the chance that sonething could go wrong." "But your warning was so indefinite. How will we know if something -- " "You would know," said Gale. "There would be no doubt at all. Take a cross between your largest, most powerful mammal and your most agile one. Let it move so fast that it seems no more than a blur. Give it teeth and claws and an armament of poison spines. Not that they look like your bears or tigers or even elephants -- " "You mean they carry nothing but claws and teeth and poison darts?" "You're thinking of weapons, sir. They don't need weapons. They are unbelievably fast and strong. They are filled with thoughtless bloodlust. They take and they will keep coming at you. They can tunnel under fortifications and tear strong walls apart." "It is unbelievable," said the attorney general. "You're right," said Gale. "But I am telling you the truth. We have held them off for almost twenty years but we can foresee the end. We foresaw it a few years after they first landed. We knew we had only one chance -- to retreat. And the only plce we could retreat to was the past. We can hold them off np longer. Gentlemen, believe me, five hundred years from now the human world is coming to an end." "They can't follow you through time, however," said the President. "If you mean, can they duplicate our time capability, I am fairly sure they can't. They're not that kind of being." "There is a serious flaw in your story." said the secretary of state. "You describe these alien invaders as little more than ferocious beasts. Intelligent, perhaps, but still mere animals. For intelligence to be transformed into a technology such as would be necessary to build what I suppose you would call a spaceship, they would require manipulatory members -- hands or perhaps even tentacles, something of the sort." "They have them." "But you saitl -- " "I'm sorry," said Gale. "It cannot all be told at once. They have members armed with claws. They have other members that etd in the equivalent of hands. And they have manipulatory tentacles as well. Theirs is a strange evolutionary case. In their evolutionary development, apparently, and for what reason we do not know, they di not trade one thing for another, as has been the case in the evolution of the creatures of the Earth. They developed new organs and abilities, but they let go of none of those they already had. They hung on to everything. They loaded the evolutionary deck in their own favor. "I would suspect that if they wished they could build most efficient weapons. We have often wondered why they didn't. Our psychologists postulate that may have developed their spacetraveling capability for no other reason than to find other life tensely personal experience for them -- as religion once was for the human race. And since it is so personal it must be done personally, without mechanical aids. It must be done with claws and fangs and poison tail. They may feel about accomplished swordsman of some hundreds of years ago must have felt about the first guns -- contempt. Perhaps each one of them must continually reassert his manhood -- selfhood, perhaps -- and the only means by which he can do this is slaughter, personally accomplished. Their individual standing, their regard for themselves, the regard of their fellowsTor them, may be based upon the quality and the "We know little of them. There has been, as you can imagine, no cornmuniciation with them. We havephotographed them and we have studied them dead, but this is only superficial to any understanding of them. They do not fight campaigns. They seem to have no real plan of battle, no strategy. If they had, they would have wiped us out long ago. They make sudden raids and then retire. They make no attempt to hold territory as such. They don't loot. All they seem to want is killing, At times it has seemed to us that they have deliberately not .wiped us out -- as if they were conserving us, maktng us last as long as possible, so we'd still be there to satisfy their bloodlust." Wilson glanced at the girl sitting on the sofa beside Gale and caught on her face a shadow of terror. "Twenty years?" Sandburg said. "You held these beasts off for twenty years?" "We are doing better now," said IF Gale. "'Or at least we were doing better before we left. We now have weapons. At first we had none. Earth had been without war and weapons for a hundred years or more when their spaceship came. They would have exterminated us then if they had fought a total war, but as I have explained, it has not been total war. That gave us time to develop some defense. We fabricated weapons, some of them rather sophisticated weapons, but even your weapons of today would not be enough. Your nuclear weapons might work, perhaps, but no sane society -- " He stopped in some embarrassment, waited for a moment and then went on. "We killed a lot of them, of course, but it seemed to make no difference. There always seemed as many of them as ever, if not more. Only the one spaceship came, as far as we could determine. It could not have carried many of them, large as it was. The only answer to their numbers seems to be that they are prolific breeders and that they reach maturity in an incredibly xshort time. They don't seem to mind dying. They never run or hide. I suppose, again, that it is their warrior's code. They seem to know nothing quite as glorious as death in battle. And they take them and let one get through and it more than evens the score. If we had stayed they would eventually have wiped us out. Even trying to conserve us, as they may have been trying, they still would have exterminated us. That is why we're here. "It is impossible, I think, for the human race to accept the sort of creatures they are. There is nothing that we know that can compare with them." "Perhaps," said the President, "in view of what we have been told, we should do something now in re. gard to that artillery." "We have, of course," the attorney general pointed out, "no real evidence." "I would rather," said Sandburg sharply, "move without ironclad evidence than find it suddenly sitting in my lap." The President reached for his phone. He said to the secretary of defense, "Use this phone. Kim will put through the call." "After Jim has made his call," said State, "perhaps I should use the phone. We'll want to get off an advisory to the other govern- ments." # . Miss Emma Garside turned off the radio and sat bolt upright in her chair in something approaching silent awe of herself had just occurred to her. It was not often (well, actually never before) that she had felt that way, ' for -- although a proud woman -- she was inclined to be mousy in both her actions and her thoughts. The pride she had was a secret one, divulged only occasionally and guardedly to Miss Clarabelle Smythe, her closest friend. It was something she held close within herself for comfort, although there were times she flinched a little when she remembered the undoubted horse thief and the maa who had been hanged for a rather heinous offense. She had never mentioned either the horse thief or the hanged man to her good friend Clarabelle. The Sunday afternoon sunlight slanted through the west window, falling on the worn carpeting where the aged cat slept, tightly rolled into a ball. In the garden at the rear of the dowdy house on the dowdy street a catbird was calling sassily -- perhaps preparing for a new inroad on the raspberry patch -- but she paid it no attention. It had cost a deal of money, she thought. The pride she had was a ter writing and some traveling, but what she knew had been worth the money and time. For there was no one else in this little town who could trace back his or her blood as far as she -- to the Revolution and beyond, back to English days and little English villages that lay sunken deep in time. And while there had been a horse thief and a hanged man and others of somewhat dubious character and undistinguished lineage, they had been offset by country squires and sturdy yeomen, with even the hint of an ancient castle somewhere in the background, although she never had quite been able to authenticate the castle. And now, she thought, and now! She had carried her family research back as far as human ingenuity and records went. Now could she -- would she dare -- proceed in the opposite direction, forward into the future? She knew all the old ancestors and here, she told herself, was the opportunity to acqiraint herself with all the new descendants. If these people were really what the radio hinted they might be -- it surely could be done. But if it were to be done she would have to do it, for there would be no records. She would have to go among them -- those who came from the area of New England -- and she would have to ask her questions and she might ask many different people before she got a clue. Are there, my dear, any Garsides or Lamberts or Lawrences in your family tree? Well, then, if you think so, but don't really know -- is there anyone who would? Oh, yes, my dear, of course it is most important -- I cannot begin to tell you how important... She sat in the chair, unstirring while the cat slept on and the catbird screamed, feeling in her that strange sense of family that had IF driven her all these years and which, given this new development, might drive her further yet. #. "So," said the President, leaning back in his chair, "as we have it so far, the Earth some five hundred years from now is being attacked by beings from space. It is impossible for the people of that day to cope with them and their only recourse is to retreat back into the past. Is that a fairly accurate summary of what you've told us?" Gale nodded. "Yes, sir, I would say it is." "But now that you are here -- or a lot of you are here and more coming all the time -- what happens now? Or have you had no opportunity to plan ahead?" "We have plans," said Gale, "but we will need some help." "What I want to know," said the attorney general, "is why you came back to us. Why to this particular moment in time?" "Because," said Gale, "you have the technology that we need and the resources. We made a thorough historical survey and this particular time slot, give or take ten years, seemed to suit our purpose best." "What kind of technology are you thinking of?" "A technology that is capable of fabricating other time machines. We have the plans and the specifications and the labor force. We will need materials and your fbrebearance." "But why time machines?" "We do not intend to stay here," said Gale. "It would be unfair to do so. It would put too great a strain on your economy. As it is we are putting a great strain upon it. But we could not stay up there in the future. I hope you understand that we had to leave." "Where will you be going?" asked the President. "Deeper into time," said Gale. "Tcythe Mid-Miocene." "The Miocene?" "A geological epoch. It began, years ago, lasted for some twelve "But why the Miocene? Why "There are a number of considerations," said Gale. "We have tried to work it out as carefully as we can. The main reason is that grass first appeared in the Miocene. Paleontologists believe that grass appeared at the beginning of the period. They base their belief upon the development of high-crowned cheek-teeth in the herbivores of that time. Grass carries abrasive minerals and wears down the teeth. The development of high-crowned teeth that grew throughout the animal's lifetime would be an answer to this. The teeth are the kind that one would expect to find in creatures that lived on grass. There is evidence, too, that during the Miocene more arid conditions came about, which led to the replacement of forests by extensive grass prairies that supported huge herds of grazing animals. This, say the paleontologists, began with the dawn of the Miocene, we have chosen as our first target The paleontologists' timetable may be in error, although we do not believe it is." "If that is where you're heading." the attorney general asked, "Why are you stopping here? Your time tunnels, I assume -- the ones you used to reach us -- would have carried you that far." "That is true, sir. But we didn't have the time. This move had to be made as rapidly as possible." "What has time to do with it?" "We can't go into the Miocene without implements and tools, with no seed stocks or agricultural animals. We have all those in our own time, of course, but it would have taken weeks to gather and transport them to the tunnel mouths. There was also the matter of capacity. Every tool or bag of seed or head of livstock would mean it would take longer to move the people. Given the time and without the pressure of the aliens we would have done it that way. going directly to the Miocene. But the logistics were impossible. The monsters knew something was going on and we knew that as soon as they fo.und out what it was they would attack the tunnel heads. We felt we have to move as swiftly as we could to save as many people as we could... So we arrive here empty-handed." "You expect us to furnish you with all the things you need?" ""Reilly," the President said quietly, "it seems to me you are being somewhat uncharitable. This is not a situation we asked for nor one that we expected, but it is one we have and we must deal with it as gracefully and as sensibly as we can. As a nation we have helped and still are helping other less favored peoples. It is a matter of foreign policy, of course, but it is also an old American tendency to hold out a helping hand. These people on our soil are, I would imagine our own descendants, hence native Americans, and it doesn't seem to me that we should balk at doing for thern what we have done for others." "If," the attorney general pointed out, "any of this is true." "That is something," the President agreed, "we must determine. I imagine that Mr. Gale would not expect us to accept what he has told us without further investigation when that is possible. There is one thing, Mr, Gale, that rather worries me. You say that IF you plan on going back to a time when grass has evolved. Do you intend going blind? What would happen if, when you got there, you found the paleontologists were mistaken about the grass -- or that there were other circumstances that made it very difficult for you to settle?" "We came here blind, of course," said Gale. "But that was different. We had fairly good historic evidence. We knew what we would find. We can't be as certain when we deal with time spans covthink we have an answer fairly well worked out. Our physicists and other scientists have developed, at least theoretically, a means of communication through a time tunnel. We hope to be able to send through an advance party that can explore the situation and then report back to us. "One thing I have not explained is that our travel capability is in one direction only. We can go into the past -- we cannot move into the future. So, if any advance party is sent back and finds the situation untenable it has no recourse other than to stay there. Our great fear is that we may have tp keep readjusting the destination of the tunnels and may have to send out -- and abandon -- several advance parties. Our people, gentlemen, are quite prepared to face such a situation. We have men guarding the tunnel heads who do not expect to travel through the tunnels. They are well aware that a time will come when each tunnel must be destroyed and that they and whoever else may not have made it through the tunnels must then face death. "I don't tell you this to enlist your sympathy. I only say it to assure you that whatever dangers face. We shall not call upon you for We shall be grateful, of course, for anything that you may do." "Kindly as I may feel toward you," said the secretary of state, "and much as I am disposed, short of a certain natural skepticism, to believe what you have told us, I am considerably puzzled by some of the implications. What is happening now, right here this minute, will become a matter of historical record. It stands to reason that it now becomes a part of history that is read in the future. So you knew before you started how this all came out. You would have had to know." "No," said Gale, "we did not know. It was not in our history. It hadn't, strange as it may sound to you, yet happened." "But it had," said Sandburg. "It must have." "Now," said Gale, "you are getting into an area that I do not myself understand -- philosophical and physical concepts, strangely intertwined and so far as I am concerned, impossible of lay understanding. The point you have made is something that our scientific community gave much thought to. At first we asked ourselves if it lay within our right to change history, to go back into the past and introduce factors that would change the course of events. We wondered what effects such history-changing would have and what would happen to the history that we already have. But now we are told that it will have no effect at all upon the history that already has been laid down. I know all this must sound impossible to you and I admit that I don't fully understand all the factors myself. The human race passed this way once before, when our ancestors were moving toward their future and what is happening now did not happen then. So the human race moved into our time and the alien invaders came. Now we come back to escape the aliens and from this moment forward nothing will be quite as we understand our past. History has been changed, but not our history, not the history that led to the moment that we left. Your history has been changed. By our action you are on a new and different course. Whether on this second time track the aliens will attack we cannot be sure, but the indications are they will." "This," said Douglas flatly, "is a lot of nonsense." "Believe me," said Gale, "it is not intended as nonsense. The men who worked it out, who thought it through, are honorable and accomplished scholars." "This is nothing," said the President, "that we can resolve at the moment. Since it is done, we can safely put it off until another day. After all, what's done is done and we have to live with it. One more thing puzzles me." "Please say it, sir," said Gale. why go back so far?" "We want to go back far enough so that our occupation of that segment of Earth's time cannot possibly have any impact on the rise of mankind. We probably will not be there too long. Our historians tell us that man, in his present state of technology, cannot look forward to more than a yars, we'll all be gone from Earth. Once man can leave the Earth he probably will leave it. surely will be gone." "But you will have impact in out. "You'll use up natural resources." "Some iron. Not enough for the amount to be noticed. So little is left where we came from that we know how to be frugal." "You'll need energy." IF "We have fusion power," said Gale. "Our economy would be a great shock to you. We make things to last. Not for ten years or twenty, but for centuries. Obsolescence no longer is a factor in our economy. As a result our manufacturing is less than one per cent of what yours is today." "That's impossible," said Sandburg. "By your present standards, perhaps," admitted Gale. "Not by ours. We had to change our life style. We simply had no choice. Centuries of overuse of natural resources left us impoverished. We had to do with what we had. We had to find ways in which to do it." "If what you say about man's remaining on Earth for no longer true," said the President, "I don't quite understand why you have to You could go back only five and it would be quite all right." Gale shook his head. "We'd be getting too close, then, to the forerunners of mankind. True, man as we recognize him, rose no more the first primates came into being We'll be intruding on those first primates, of course, but perhaps with no great impact. And it would be impossible for us to miss them, for to go beyond them would place us in the era of the dinosaurs, which would not be a comfortable time period. Not just because of the dinosaurs alone. The critical period for mankind, the appearance of the forerunners of the australopithecines, could not have been later than fifteen million years ago. We can't be certain of these figures. Most of our anthropologists believe that if we ably would be safe enough. But we want to be sure. And there is no reason why we can't go deeper And there is another thing -- we want to leave room enough for you." Douglas leaped to his feet. "For us?" The President raised a restraining hand. "Wait a minute, Reilly. Let's have the rest of it." "It makes good sense," said Gale, "or we think it does. Consider this -- just five hundred years ahead lies the invasion of Earth from space. Yes, I know, because of the new course of events our arrival in your time has created the attack may not happen, but our scholars think it will -- they're almost sure it will. So why should you move forward to meet it? Why not go back with us? You've got a five-hundred-year margin. You could make use of it. You could go back, not in a hurry as well be going, but over the course of a number of years. Why not leave Earth empty and go back to make a new beginning? It would be a fresh start for the human race. New lands to develop -- " "This is sheer insanity!" shouted Douglas. "If we, your ancestors, left, you wouldn't be here to start with and -- " "You're forgetting what he ex"about a different time track." Douglas sat down. "I wash my hands of it," he said. "I'll have no more to do with it." "We couldn't go back with you," said Sandburg. "There are too many of us." "Not with us. Like us. Together there would be far too many of us. There are too many of you now. Here is the chance, if you will take it, to reduce your population to more acceptable numyears. Half of you go back nineus would be separated by a million years. We wouldn't interfere with one another." "There is one drawback," said you. We would have a disastrous impact on the resources of whatever period we inhabited. We'd use up whatever fuels and iron -- " "Not," said Gale, "if you had our philosophy, our viewpoint and our technologies." "You would give these things to us?" "If you were going back," said Gale, "we would insist on it." The President rose. "I think," he said, "we have reached a point where we must stop. There are things to be done. We thank you, Mr. Gale, for coming to us and bringing along your lovely daughter. I wonder if we might have the privilege -- later -- of talking further with you." "'Certainly," said Gale. "It "would be a pleasure. There are others of us whom you should be talking with, men and women who know far more than I do about many aspects of the situation." "Would it be agreeable to the two of you," asked the President, "to be my house guests? I'd be glad to put you up." Alice Gale spoke for the first time. She clapped her hands together, delighted. "You mean here in the White House?" The President smiled. "Yes, my dear, in the White House. We'd be very glad to have you." "You must pardon her," her father said. "It happens that the White House is a special interest of hers. She has studied it. She has read everything about it she can lay her hands on. Its history and its achitecture, everything about it." "Which," said the President, "is a great compliment to us." I #  The people were still marching from the door, but now miliIF tary policemen were there to direct them and to keep the mouth of the tunnel free for those who pressed on from behind. Other soldiers held back the crowds of curious sightseers who had flocked into the area. A bullhorn voice bawled out directions and when the bullhorh fell silent, the tinny chatter of a radio could be heard from one of the hundreds of cars parked up and down the street. Some were against the curb -- others, in a fine display of the disrespect of property, had pulled up on lawns. Military trucks and personnel carriers trundled down the street, halted long enough to take on a load of refugees, roared off. But the people came out of the tunnel faster than the trucks could cart them away and the great mass of people kept pushing outward. Lieutenant Andrew Shelby spoke into his phone. "We ain't more than making a dent in them. Major Burns. Christ, I never saw so many people. It would be easier if we could get some of the sightseers out of the area. They don't want to leave and we haven't got the manpower to make them. We've closed off all civilian traffic to the area and, the radio has been asking people not to come out here, but they are still coming or are trying to come and the roads are clogged. I hate to think of what it will be like once it gets dark. How about them engineers who were supposed to come out here and put up some floodlights?" "They're on their way," said Burns. "Hang in there, Andy, and do every ting you can. We got to get those people out of there." "I need more carriers," the lieutenant said. "I'm feeding them in," the major told him, "as fast as I can lay my hands on them. And another thing -- there'll be a gun crew coming out." "We don't need no gun. What we need a gun for?" "I don't know," the major said. "All I know it is on its way. No one told me what it was coming for." #. "You can't honestly believe this story," Douglas protested. "It's too preposterous to admit of any credence. I tell you, we've been had." all these people coming out of the time tunnels preposterous. There has to be some explanation of them. Gale's may be a bit fantastic, but it holds together in a sort of zany fashion. I admit I have some difficulty -- " "And his credentials," the attorney general pointed out. "Identification rather than credentials. Ombudsman for the Washington community, a social service worker of some kind. No connection with any govermental unit -- " have no real government. You must realize that five centuries from now there would be changes."' "Steve," the President asked, "what do you make of it? You're the man whol)rought him in." "A waste of time," said Douglas. "If you want me to vouch for his story," said Wilson, "I can't do that, of course." "What did Molly say?" asked Sandburg. "Nothing really. She simply turned him over to me. He told her none of the things that he told us, of that I'm sure, but she wormed out of him and his daughter some sort of story about what kind of world they came from. She said she was satisfied." "Did Global News try to make a deal?" asktjd Douglas. "Of course they did. Any news agency or any reporter worth his salt certainly would have tried. They would have been delinquent in their job if they hadn't tried. But Manning didn't press too hard. He knew as well as I did -- " "You didn't make a deal?" asked Douglas. "You know he didn't," said the President. "What I need right now," said Wilson, "is some indication of how much I should tell the press." "Nothing," said Douglas. "Absolutely nothing." "They know I've, been in here. They know something is going on. They won't be satisfied with nothing." "They don't need to know." "But they do need to know," said Wilson. "You can't treat the press as an adversary. They have a legitimate function -- the people have a right to know. The press has played ball with us before and they will this time, but we can't ignore them. We have to give them something and it had better be the truth." "that we should tell them we have information that tends to make us believe these people , may be, as they say, from the future, but that we need some time to check. At the moment we can make no positive announcement. We are still working on it." "They'll want to know," said Sandburg, "why they are coming back. Steve has to have some sort of answer. We can't send him out there naked. Besides, they will know within a short time, that we are placing guns in front of the tunnels." "It would scare hell out of evknown why the guns were being placed. There would be a worldwide clamor for us to use the guns to shut down the tunnels." "Why don't we Just say," suggested the President, "that the people of the future are facing some great catastrophe and are fleeing for their lives? The guns? I IF suppose we'll have to say something about them. We can't be caught in a downright falsehood. You can say they are no more than routine precaution." "But only if the question is raised," said Sandburg. "Okay," said Wilson, "but that isn't all of it. There'll be other questions. Have we consulted with other nations? How about the UN? Will there be a formal statement later?" "You could say, perhaps," said other governments. We have that advisory about the guns." "Steve," said the President, "you'll have to try to hold them off. We've got to get our feet under us. Tell them you'll be back to them later." By Molly Kimball Washington (Global News) -- The people who are coming from the tunnels are refugees from time. This was confirmed late today by Maynard Gale, one of the refugees. He refused to say, however, why they were fleeing from a future which he says lies # years ahead of us. The circumstances of their flight, he insisted, could only be revealed to a constituted government. He said he was making efforts to make contact with an appropriate authority. He explained that he held the position of ombudsman for the Washington community in his future time and had been delegated to communicate with the Federal Government upon his arrival here. He did, however, give a startling picture of the kind of society in which he lives, or rather, did live -- a world in which there are no nations and from which the concept of war has disappeared. It is a simple society, he said, forced to become simple by the ecological problems that we face today. It is no longer an industrial society. Its manufacturing amounts to no more, perhaps less, than one per cent of today's figure. What it does manufacture is made to last. The philosophy of obsolescense was abandoned only a short distance into our future, he said, in the face of dwindling natural resources; a dwindling about which economists and ecologists have been warning us for years. Because its coal and fossil fuels are almost gone the future world, said Gale, relies entirely on fusion for its energy. The development of that type of power, he said, is the only thing that holds the delicate economic fabric of his world together. The world of # years from now is highly computerized, with the greater part of the population living in "high-rise" cities. A halfdozen towers, some of them reaching as high as a mile, will constitute a city. Urban sprawl is gone, leaving vast surface areas free for agricultural purposes. The cities are built in large part from converted scrap metal, which in our day would have been buried in landfills. Administration is almost entirely by computer. There is, Gale said, none of the great spread of wealth that is found in our world. No one is rich and there is none of the abject poverty that today oppresses millions. Apparently there has been not only a change in life style, but a change as well in life values. Life is simpler and kinder and less competitive -- there are few eager beavers in the world of # years ahead... # A crowd, quiet and orderly, was gathering in Lafayette Park as crowds had gathered through the years, to stand staring at the White House, not demanding anything, not expecting anything, simply gathering there in a dumb show of participation in a nation's crisis. Above the crowd Andy Jackson still sat his 'earing charger, the patina of many years upon both horse and rider, friends to perching pigeons. No one quite knew what this crisis meant or if it might even be a crisis. The people had as yet no idea of how it had come about or what it might mean to them, although there were a few who had done some rather specific, although distorted, thinking on the insistently) to share with their neighbors what they had been thinking. In the White House a flood of calls had started to come in and were stacking up -- calls from members of the Congress, from party stalwarts ready with suggestions and advice, from businessmen and industrialists suddenly grown nervous, from crackpots who held immediate solutions. A television camera crew drove up in a van and set up for business, taking footage of the Lafayette crowd and of the White House, gleaming in the summer sun. A newsman on the van was doing a stand-up commentary against the background. Straggling tourists trailed up and down the avenue, somewhat astonished at thus being caught up in the middle of history, and the White House squirrels came scampering down to the fence and IF through it out onto the sidewalk, sitting up daintily, forepaws folded on their chests, begging for handouts. I #  Alice Gale stood in the window, gazing across Pennsylvania Avenue at the gathering crowd in the park beyond it. She hugged herself in shivering ecstasy, not daring, to believe that she actually was here -- that she could be back in twentieth-century Washington where history had been made, where legendary men had lived -- and at this moment in the very room where crowned heads had slept. Crowned heads, she thought. What an awful, almost medieval phrase. And yet it had a certain ring to it, a certain elegance that her world had never known. She had caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument as she and her father had been driven into the White House grounds. And out there a marble Lincoln sat in his marble chair, his arms resting on its arms and his massive, whiskered face bearing that look of greatness, of sorrow and compassion that had quieted thousands into reverent silence as they climbed the stairs to stand face to face with him. Just across the hallway her father was in Lincoln's bedroom with its massive Victorian bed and the velvet-covered slipper chairs. Although, she recalled, Lincoln had never really slept there. It was history brought back to life, she thought, history resurrected. And it was a precious thing. It would be something to remember always, no matter what might tie ahead. It would be something to remember in the Miocene. And what, she wondered with a little shiver, might the Miocene be like? If they ever got there, if the people of this time should decide to help them get there? But whatever might happen she had something she could say: Once I slept in the Queens Bedroom, She turned from the window and looked in wonder once again renewed at the huge four-poster bed with its hangings and counterpane of rose and white, at the mahogany bookcase-secretary that stood between the windows, at the soft white carpeting. It was selfish of her, she knew, to be feeling like this when so many others of her world at this very moment stood homeless and bewildered, unsure of their welcome, perhaps wondering if they would be fed and where they might lay their heads this night, but even as she tried she could not rebuke herself. ## "Terry," said the President, speaking into the phone, "this is Sam Henderson." "How good of you to call, Mr. President," said Terrance Roberts on the other end. "What can I do for you?" The President chuckled. "Maybe you can do a lot for me. I don't know if you will want to. You've heard what's happening?" "Strange things," said the labor leader. "A lot of speculation. Are you folks in Washington making any sense of it ?" "Some," said the President. "It would seem the people of the future face catastrophe and their only escape is to run back into time. We haven't got the full story yet." "But, Mr. President -- time travel?" "I know. It doesn't sound possible. I haven't talked to any of our physicists, although I intend to do so and I suspect they'll tell me it's impossible. But one of the people who came through a time tunnel swears that's exactly what he did. If there were any other way to explain what is taking place I'd be more skeptical than I am. But I'm forced by circumstances to accept some explanation -- at least provisionally."  "You mean all of them from up ahead are coming back? How many of them are there?" guess." "But, Mr. President, how will we take care of them?" "Well, that's really what I wanted to talk with you about. It seems they don't intend to stay here. They mean to go farther back in time -- some twenty million years farther. But they need help to do. it. They need new time tunnels built and they'll need equipment to take with them -- " "We can't build time tunnels." "They can show us how." "It would cost a lot. Both in manpower and materials. Can they pay for it?" "I don't know. I never thought to ask. I don't suppose they can. But it seems to me we have to do it. We can't let them stay here. We have too many people as it is. " "Somehow, Mr. President," said Terrance Roberts, "I can sense what you want to ask me." The President laughed. "Not only you, Tejry. The industrialists as well -- everyone, in fact. But I have to know beforehand what kind of cooperation I can expect. I wonder if you'd mind coming here so a few of us can talk about it. " "Certainly, I'll come. Just let me know when you want me. Although I'm not just sure how much I can do for you. Let me ask around some, ta)k to some of the other boys. Exactly what do you have in mind?" "I'm not entirely sure. That's something I'll need some help to work out. On the face of it we can't do the kind of job that's called for under existing circumIF stances. The government alone can't assume the kind of costs involved -- I'm not thinking just of the tunnels. I have no idea so far what they would involve. But we would need to furnish the resources for an entire new civilization and that would cost a lot of money. The taxpaying public would never stand for it. So we'll have to turn elsewhere for help. Labor will have to pitch in -- industry will have to help. A national emergency calls for extraordinary measures. I don't even krrow how long we can feed all these people and -- " "We're not the only ones who have that problem," said Roberts. "The rest of the world has it, too." "That's right. And they'll also have to take some action. If there were time we could put together some sort of international setup, but a thing like that takes time and we haven't got it. To start with, at least, it has to be a national action." "Have you talked to any of the other nations?" "Britain and Russia," said the President. "Some of the others. But not about the additional time tunnels. Once we get an idea or two shaped up we can see what some of the others think. Pool our thoughts. But we can't take much time. Whatever we do we'll have to get started on almost immediately and work as fast as we can." "You're sure there are people who can explain these tunnels -- whatever they are? Well enough so that our scientists and engineers can understand the principles involved? And the technology well enough -- hell, Mr. President, this is sheer insanity. American labor building time tunnels! This has got to be a bad joke." "I'm afraid," Henderson said, "it isn't a joke. We're in a mess, Terry. I don't know how bad. I imagine it will be a day or two before we have the full story and know what we really face. All I ask right now is that you think about it. Get a few ideas together. Figure out what you can do. I'll let you know about coming down. No use coming now. We have to get a few things sorted out before we can talk. I'll be in touch as soon as I know a little more about it." "Any time, Mr. President," said Roberts. "You let me know and I'll be there." The President hung up and buzzed Kim. "Ask Steve to come in," he said when she opened the door. He tilted back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Less than five hours ago, he thought, he'd stretched out for a nap, looking forward to a lazy Sunday afternoon. He didn't get many lazy afternoons and when they came he treasured them. He had no more than shut his eyes than the world had fallen in on him. Christ, he asked himself, what am ! to do? What can I do? What's the wise thing to do? Without even trying a man could make a mistake or a number of mistakes and Henderson sensed that in this situation he could not afford mistakes. Steve Wilson came in. The President took his hands from behind his head and tilted forward in the chair. "Have you had the press in, Steve?" "No, sir, I haven't. They're po.unding on the door, but I haven't let them in. I didn't have the guts to face them with the little you gave me. I had hoped -- " "All right, then," said the President. "Your hopes paid off. You can give them all of it with two exceptions. You can't tell them why we have the guns planted. That still has to be simply normal precautions. And there must be no hint of Gale's suggestion that we go back in time with them." "I can't tell them, then, about why they're leaving the future? Nothing about the aliens?" The President shook his head, "Simply say that this point has not been sufficiently clarified and needs more study before anything can be said of it." "They won't like it," said Wilson, "but I guess I can manage. How about the TV? I have alerted the networks you may want time this evening." "How about ten o'clock? That's a little late, I suppose, but -- " "Ten will be all right." "Then you set it up. Tell them only ten or fifteen minutes." "I'll draft up something for you to look at." "You have your hands full, Steve. I'll ask Brad and Frank to put it together." "They'll want to know if you've talked with anyone." "I talked with Sterling in London and Menkov in Moscow. You can tell them Menkov has talked with the Russian equivalent of our Gale and has substantially the same story we got. London still hadn't been contacted by anyone when I spoke with Sterling. You can say I plan to talk with other national leaders before the day is out." "How about a cabinet meeting? The question is sure to come up." "I've been seeing cabinet members off and on during the last few hours. This is the first time since it's started there has been no one in this office. And I'll be conferring wkh people on the Hill, of course. Anything else you can think of, Steve?" "There'll probably be a lot of other . questions. I'll manage to field them. You can't anticipate them all. This will satisfy them." "Steve, what do you think of Gale? Your own personal opinion. How do you size him up?" "It's hard to know," said WilIF son. "No rear impression, I'd say. Except that I can't figure out where he'd gain anything by not telling the truth, or at least the truth as he saw it. However you look at it, those people out there are in serious trouble and they look to us ta help them. Maybe they have a thing or two to hide -- maybe it's not exactly as Gale told it, but I think mostly it is. Hard as it may be to accept. I'm inclined to believe him." "I hope you're right," said the President. "If we're wrong, they could make us awful fools." #. The chauffeured car went up the curving drive to the gracious mansion set well back from the street among flowers and trees. When it stopped before the portico the chauffeur got out and opened the rear door. The old man fumbled out of it, groping with his cane. He petulantly struck aside the chauffeur's proffered hand. "I can still manage to get out of a car alone," he panted, finally disengaging himself from it and standing, albeit a little shakily and unsure of himself, upon the driveway. "You wait right here for me," he said. "It may take a little while, but you wait right here for me." "Certainly, Senator," said the driver. "Those stairs, sir -- they look a little steep." "You stay right here," said Senator Andrew Oakes. "Go sit behind the wheel. Time comes when I can't climb stairs I'll go back home and let some young man have my seat. But not right yet," he said, wheezing a little. "Not right now. Maybe in another year or two. Maybe not. Depends on how I feel." He stumped toward the stairs, clomping his cane with weighty precision on the driveway. He mounted the First step and stood there for a moment before attempting the next one. As he mounted each step, he looked to either side of him, glaring into the landscape as if daring someone to remark on his progress. But no one was in sight except the chauffeur, who had gone back to sit behind the wheel, studiously not watching the old man's progress up the stairs, The door came open when he was crossing the pillared entrance. ' "I am glad to see you. Senator," said Grant Wellington, "but there was no need to make the trip. I could have come to your apartment." The Senator stopped, planting himself sturdily before his host. "Nice day for a drive," he said. "And you said you would be alone." Wellington nodded. "Family's in New England and it's the servants' day off. We'll be quite alone." "Good," said the Senator. "At my place you can never be sure. People in and out. Phones ringing all the time. This is better." He stumped into the entry. "To your right," said Wellington, closing the door. The old man went into the study, shuffled across the carpeting, dropped into a huge upholstered chair to one side of the fireplace. He laid his cane carefully on the floor beside him, looked around at the book-lined shelves, the huge executive desk, the comfortable furniture, the paintings on the wall. "You have got it good. Grant," he said. "I sometimes worry about that. Maybe you have it too good." "Meaning I won't fight? Will be afraid to dirty my hands?" "Something like that. Grant. But I tell myself Tm wrong. Did plenty of fighting in your day. Out in the business world." He gestured at the paintings. "Always suspicious of a man who owns a Renoir." "How about something to drink. Senator?" "Late enough in the afternoon," said the Senator judiciously, "for a splash of bourbon. Great drink, bourbon. American. Has character. I remember you drink scotch." "With you," said Wellington, "I drink bourbon." "You been listening to what is happening?" "Saw some of it on TV." "Man could stub his toe on a thing like that. He could stub his toe real bad." "You mean Henderson." "I mean everybody. Easy thing to do." Wellington brought the Senator his drink, went back to the bar to pour his own. The old man settled more deeply into the chair, fondling the glass. He took a drink, puffed out his cheeks in appreciation. "For a scotch man," he said, "you carry a good brand." "I took my cue from you," said Wellington, coming back and sitting on a sofa. "I imagine the man at sixteen hundred has a lot on his mind. Maybe more than he can handle. Batch of decisions to be made. Yes, sir, a lot of them." "I don't envy him," said Wellington. "Most terrible thing that can happen to a man with election coming up next year. He'll have that on his mind and it won't help him any. Trouble is he has to say something, has to do something. Nobody else has to, but he has to." "If you are trying to say that I should say nothing or do nothing, you are succeeding very well," said Wellington. "Never try to be subtle. Senator. You're not very good at it." "Well, I don't know," said the Senator. "You can't come straight out and tell a man to keep his mouth shut." IF "If these people are really from the future -- " "Oh, they're from the future, all right. Where else could they come from?" "Then you can't go wrong on them," said Wellington. "They are our descendants. What they are doing is like a bunch of kids running home after they got hurt." "Well, now, I don't know," said the Senator. "Anyway they're not exactly what I came to talk about. Not the people -- but old Sam up there in the White House. He's the one who's got to do something about them and he's bound to make mistakes. We got to watch carefully and evaluate those mistakes. We can jump on some of them and some of them we can't. There may be even a few things he does that we have to go along with -- we can't be too unreasonable. But the thing right nbw is not to commit ourselves. You know and I know there are a lot of people want that nomination next summer to run against old Sam and I mean, if I can imagine it, that you are the one who gets it. Some of the other boys will think they see some opportunities in what the man up there does and they'll get anxious and start shooting off their mouths -- and I tell you. Grant, that the people won't remember who was first, but the one who happens to be right." "Of course I appreciate your concern," said Wellington, "but it happens that you made this trip for nothing. I have no intention whatever of takiiig a position. I'm not sure right now there is a position one can take." The Senator held out his empty glass. "If you don't mind," he said. "Another little splash." Wellington poured another little splash and the Senator settled back again. "That matter of a position," he said, "is something that is going to require some long and prayerful thought. It has not yet become apparent, but there will be positions practically begging to be taken and a man must look over good and select very carefully. What you say abouY these folks being our descendants is ail well and good. You being a man whose family history is long and proud would think that way, of course. But you got to remember that there are a lot of people with little family history and not proud of what they have and these people -- who make up the greatest not going to give a damn about these particular descendants. Maybe them being our descendants will make it all the worse. There are a lot of families these days that are having lots of trouble with their own immediate progeny. ple are already through the tunnels and they are still pouring through. But while we can hold up our hands in pious horror and ask how we are going to take care of them, theeal gut reaction will begin to have an effect on the economy. Food may suddenly get scarce and other things, too. Then prices will goTip and there'll be a housing problem and a labor problem and there won't be goods enough to go around. And while all this is now just economic talk, in  little while it will cease to be just talk and every man and woman in this fair land will feel the impact of it and that's when there's hell to pay. And that's the time when a man like you must pick out his positionnd study all the angles before settling on one." "Good God!" said Wellington. "This thing happening out there is made up of our own people fleeing back to us -- and here we sit, the two of us, and try to figure out a good, safe political position -- " "Politics," said the Senator, "is a very complicated and a most practical business. You've got to be hard-headed about it. You can't ever afford to get emotional about it. That's the first thing that you must remember -- don't get emotional about anything at all. Oh, it's all right to appear to be emotional. Sometimes that has a certain appeal for the electorate. But before you can afford to feel anything you must have every angle figured out. Emotions are for effect only." "The way you put it. Senator, is not too attractive. It leaves a slightly dirty taste." "Sure, I know," said the Senator. "I know about that dirty taste myself. You just shut your mind to it, is all. It's all right, of course, to be a great statesman and a humanitarian, but before you get to be a statesman you have to be a dirty politician. You have to get elected first. And you never get elected without feeling just a little dirty." He placed the glass on the table beside his chair, fumbled for his cane and found it, heaved himself erect. "Now, you mind," he said, "before you go saying anything you just check with me. I been through all this many times before. I guess you could say I have developeda political instinct for the jugular and I am seldom wrong. Up there on the Hill we hear things. There are some real good pipelines. I'll know when anything's about to happen -- so we'll have time to study it." I # The press conference had gone well. Arrangements had been made for the President's TV appearance. The clock on the wall ticked over to # P.M. The teletypes went on clucking softly. Wilson said to Judy, "ou'd betIF ter call it a day. It's time to close up shop." "How about yourself?" "I'll hang on for a while. Take my car. Til pick it up at your place." He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys and tossed them to her. "When you get there," Judy said, "come up for a drink. I'll be up and waiting." "It may be late." "If it's too late, why bother going home? You left your toothbrush last time." "Pajamas," he said. "When did you ever need pajamas?" He grinned at her lazily. "Okay," he said. "Toothbrush, no pajamas." "Maybe," said Judy, "it'll make" up for this afternoon." "What this afternoon?" "I told you, remember. What I planned to do." "Oh, that." "Yes, oh, that. I've never done it that way." "You're a shameless child. Now run along." "The kitchen will be sending coffee and sandwiches to the press lounge. Ask them nice and they'll throw a crust to you." He sat and watched her go. She walked surely, but with a daintiness that always intrigued and puzzled him, as if she were a sprite who was consciously trying to make an Earth creature of herself. He shuffled the loose papers on the desk into a pile and stacked them to one side. He sat quietly thi and listened to the strange mutterings of the place. Somewhere a phone rang. There was the distant sound of someone walking. Out in the lounge someone was .typing aiiu against the wall the wire machines went on with their clacking. It was all insane, he told himself. The entire business was stark, staring crazy. No one in his right mind would believe a word of it. Time tunnels and aliens out of space were the sort of junk the juniors watched on television. Could it, he wondered,be a matter of delusion, of mass hysteria? When the sun rose tomorrow would it all be gone and the world be back on the old footing? He shoved back the chair and stood up. Judy's deserted console had a couple of lights flashing and he let them flicker. He strode out to the corridor and followed it to the outer door. In the garden outside the heat of the summer day was waning and long shadows stretched across the lawn. The flower beds lay in all their glory -- roses, heliotrope, geraniums, nicotiana, columbines and daisies. He stood, looking across the parkjto where the Washington Monument reared its classic whiteness. Behind him he heard a footstep and swung around. A woman stood a short distance away. She wore a white robe that came down to her sandaled feet. "Miss Gale," he said, a little startled. "What a pleasant surprise." "I hope," she said, "I have done nothing wrong. No one stopped me. Is it all right to be here?" "Certainly. As a guest -- " "I had to see the garden. I had read so much of it." "You have never been here, then?" She hesitated. "Yes, I have. But it was not the same. It was nothing like this." "Well," he said, "I suppose that things do change." "Yes," she said, "they do." "Is something wrong?" "No, I guess not." She hesitated again. "I see you don't understand. I can't imagine there is any reason why I shouldn't tell you." "Tell me what? Something about this place?" "It's this," she said. "In my time, five hundred years ahead, there isn't any garden. There isn't any White House." He stared at her. "See?" she said. "You don't believe it. You won't believe me. We have no nations there -- we just have one big nation, although that's not exactly right. There aren't any nations and there isn't any White House. A few ragged. broken walls is all, a piece of rusted fence sticking from the ground that you stub your toe on. There isn't any park and there aren't any flower beds. Now can you understand? Can you know what all this means to me?" "But how? When?" "Not right away," she said. "Not for a century or more. And now it may never happen. The history you will make will not quite be ours." She stood there, a thin slip of a girl in her chaste white robe, speaking of a future when there would be no White House. He shook his head, bewildered. "How much do you understand," he asked,' "of this timetrack business?" "There are equations that you have to know to grasp it all," she said. "There are, I suppoise, only a few people who really do. But basically it's quite simple. It's a cause and effect situation and once you change the cause or, more likely, many causes, as we must have done in coming here -- " He made a motion of futility with his hand. "I still can't believe it," he said. "Not just the time track, but all the rest of it. I woke up this morning and I was going on a picnic. You know what a picnic is?" "No," she said. "I don't know what a picnic is. So we're even." "Some day I'll take you on a picme. IF "I wish you would," she said. "Is it something nice?" ## Bentley Price came home a bit befuddled, but somewhat triumphant, for he had talked his way past a roadblock set up by the military, had yelled a jeep off the road and honked his way through two blocks clotted by refugees and spectators who had stayed in the area despite all efforts by the MPs to move them out. The driveway was partly blocked by a car, but he made his way around it, clipping a rose bush in the process. Night had fallen and it had been a busy day and all Bentley wanted was to get into the house and collapse on a bed. But first he had to clear the car of cameras and other equipment, for it would never do, with so many strangers in the neighborhood, to leave the stuff locked in the car, as had been his habit. A locked car would be no deterrent to someone really bent on thievery. He hung three cameras by their straps around his neck and was hauling a heavy accessories bag out of the car when he saw, with outrage, what had happened to Edna's flower bed. A gun stood in the center of it, its wheels sunk deep into the soil, and around it stood the gun crew. The gunsite was brightly illuminated by a large spotlight that had been hung high in the branches of a tree and there could be no doubt of the havoc that had been wrought upon the flowers. Bentley charged purposefully upon the gun, brushing aside one astounded cannoneer, to square off, like an embattled bantam rooster, before a young man who had bars on his shoulders. "You have your nerve," said Bentley. "Coming here when the owner happens to be gone -- " "Are you the owner, sir?" asked the captain of the gun crew. "No," said Bentley. "I am not, but I am responsible. I was left here to look out for the joint and -- " "We are sorry, ir," said the officer, "if we have displeased you, but we had our orders, sir." Bentley yelled at him, "You had orders to set up this contraption in the middle of Edna's flower bed? I suppose the orders said to set up in the middle of a flower bed; not a few feet forward or a few feet back, but in the middle of a bed a devoted woman has slaved to grow to perfection -- " "No, not precisely that," said the officer. "We were ordered to cover the mouth of the time tunnel and to do that we needed a clear line of fire." "That don't make no sense," said Bentley. "Why would you want to cover the tunnel with all them poor people coming out?" "I don't know," said the officer. "No one bothered to explain to me. I simply got my orders and Tm about to carry them out, flower bed or no Hower bed, owner or no owner." "Somehow," said Benttey, "you don't sound like no gentleman to me and that's what you're supposed to be, ain't it, an officer and a gentleman? There wouldn't be any gentleman set up no gun in the middle of a flower bed and there wouldn't be any officer aim his gun at a bunch of refugees and -- " A shrill scream split the night. Bentley spun and saw that something was happening in the tunnel. People were still coming out of it, but they weren't marching out four and five abreast as before. They were running out, fighting to get out and overriding them and plowing through them was a horror that Bentley never quite got sorted in his mind. He had the impression of wicked teeth and mighty talons -- of terrible power and ferocity -- and quite by habit his hands went down to grip a camera and bring it to his eye. Through the lens he saw that there was not one, but two of the creatures, one almost through the tunnel and the other close behind. He saw the bodies of people flying through the air like limp dolls thrown about by children and others were crushed beneath the monster's treading feet. And he saw writhing tentacles, as if the creatures could not quite make up their minds if they were animals or octopi. Sharp orders rang out behind him and almost at his elbow the gun belched sudden flame that lit up all the houses and the yards and gardens. A thunderclap knocked him to one side and as he hit the ground and rolled he saw a number of things. The tunnel had suddenly blinked out in an explosion that was little more than a continuation of the thunderclap, although it was more mind-numbing and nerve-shaking. There were dead people and a dead creature that smoked as if it had been fried. But while one of the animals lay on the lawn beneath the great oak tree that had marked the tunnel, the other was very much" alive. That one and the gun and its crew became mixed up and people were running, screaming in terror. Bentley scrambled to his feet and saw the gun crew dead, ripped and flung and trampled. The gun had tipped over. Smoke still trailed from its muzzle. From down the street came shrill, high screams and he caught -- for an instant only -- the flickering motion of something large and dark whipping across acorner of a yard. A picket fence exploded in a shower of white slivers as the dark thing vanished through it. He sprinted around the corner of the house and burst through the kitchen door, clawing for the phone, dialing almost by instinct, praying the line was open. IF "Global News," said a raspy voice. "Manning." "Tom, this is Bentley." "Yes, Bentley. What is it now? Where are you?" "I am home. Out at Joe's place. And I got some news." "Are you sober?" "Well, I stopped by a place I know and had a drink or two. Sunday, you know. None of the regular places open. And when I come home I found a gun crew right in Edna's flower bed -- " "Hell," said Manning, "that's no news. We had that a couple of hours ago. They set up guns at all the tunnels for some reason." "I know the reason." "Well, now, that's nice," said Manning. "Yeah, there was a monster come through the tunnel and -- " "A monster? What kind of monster?" "Well, I don't know," said Bentley. "I never got a real good look at it. And there wasn't only one monster. There was two of them. One of them the gun killed, but the other got away. It killed the gun crew and tipped over the gun and all the people ran screaming and it got away. I saw it bust right through a picket fence -- " "Now, Bentley," said Manning, "stop talking so fast. Take it a little slow and tell me. You say one got away. There is a monster loose -- " "There sure is. He killed the gun crew and maybe other people, too. The tunnel is shut down and there's a dead beast out there." "Now tell me about the monster. What kind of monster was it?' "I can't tell you that," said Bentley, "but I got pictures of it." "Of the dead one, I suppose." "No, the live one," said Bentley, his voice bright with scorn. "I wouldn't never bother with no dead monster when there's a live one. "Now, listen, Bentley. Listen closely. Are you in shape to drive?" "Sure, I'm in shape to drive. I drove out here, didn't I?" "All right. I'll send someone else out there. And you -- I want you to get in here as quickly as you can with the pictures you have. And Bentley -- " "Yes?" "You're sure you're right? There really was a monster?" "I'm sure I'm right," said Bentley piously. "I only had a drink or two." # . Steve Wilson strode into the press louhge in search of coffee and sandwiches. A dozen or so newsmen were still there. "Anything new, Steve?" asked Carl Anders of AP. Wilson shook his head. "Everything seems to be quiet. If anything of consequence were going on I think I would know it." "'And tell us?" "And tell you," Wilson said sharply. "You know damn well we've played fair with you." "Yeah? How about the guns?" "Simply routine emergency precaution. How about some sandwiches or did you guys eat them all?" "Over there in the corner, Steve," said John Gates of the Washington Post. Wilson piled two sandwiches on a plate and got a cup of coffee. As he came back across the room Gates slid over on the davenport where he had been lounging and patted a place beside him. Wilson sat down, putting his plate and cup on the coffee table. Anders came over to take a nearby chair. Henry Hunt, the New York Times man, sat down on the davenport on the other side of Wilson. "It's been a long day, Steve," he said. Wilson bit into a sandwich. "Rough," he said. "What's going on right now?" asked Anders. "Perhaps quite a bit. Nothing that I know of. There's nothing I can tell, nothing that I know." Gates chuckled, "You can talk, can't you?" "Sure I can talk. But I can't give you anything. You guys know procedure. If I should happen to say something that makes sense it's off the record." "Well, hell -- yes, of course," said Anders. "'You newspapered yourself. You know how it is." "I know how it is," said Wilson. "What bothers me," said Hunt, "is how anyone, even the President, knows where to take hold of a thing like this. There's no precedent. Nothing like this has ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. As a rule a crisis will build up -- you can see it coming and be halfway ready for it. But not this one. This one exploded without warning." "That's bothering me, too," said Anders. "How do you find a handle?" "You're stuck with it," said Wilson. "You can't just ignore it. You do the best you can. You try to find out what it's all about. In a case like this you have to be somewhat skeptical and that doesn't allow you to move as fast as you'd like to move. You have to talk with a lot of people -- you have to check around and develop some sort of judgment. I suspect you might pray a lot." "Is that what the President did?" asked Anders. "That's not what I said. I was just trying to think through a hypothetical question." "What do you think of it, Steve?" asked Gates. "You, not the President." "It's hard to tell," said Wilson. "It's all too new. I found myself just a while ago wondering if it IF i was all delusion, if it might not be gone by morning. Of course, I know it won't be. But it boggles the mind to think of it. I have brought myself to believe these people are really from the future. But even if they're not -- they're here and we have to deal with them. I suppose it doesn't really matter where they came from." "You, personally, still have doubts?" "You mean are they from the future? Their explanation holds up. Why should they lie? What would they gain by lying?" "But, still you -- " "Now, wait a minute. I don't want you to start speculating that the answer we have is wrong. That would be unrealistic. This is among friends, remember? Just sitting down and talking." The pressroom door came open. Wilson looked up. Brad Reynolds stood in the doorway. His face wore a pitiful, stricken look. "Steve," he said. "Steve, I have to see you." "What's going on?" asked Hunt. Through the open door came a frantic clanging as a bell on one of the teletypes signaled a bulletin. Wilson rose to his feet so swiftly that he joggled the coffee table, tipping his cup. Coffee ran across the table and dripped onto the carpet. He strode across the room and gripped Reynolds by the arm. "A monster got through!" Reynolds blurted out. "Global has it. It's on radio." "For the love of God," said Wilson. He glanced back over his shoulder at the newsmen and saw that they had heard. "What's this about monsters?" shouted Anders. "You never told us about any monsters." "Later," said Wilson savagely. He pushed Reynolds back into the pressroom and slammed the door behind him. "I thought you and Frank were working on the TV speech," he said. "How did you -- " "The radio," said Reynolds. "We heard it on the radio. What will we do about the TV talk? He can't go on TV without mentioning this and it's only an hour away." "We'll take care of that," said Wilson. "Does Henderson know?" "Frank went to tell him. I came to you." "Do you know what happened? Where it happened?" "Down in Virginia. Two of them came through the tunnel. The gun got one of them. The other one got through. It killed the gun crew -- " "You mean one of them is running loose?" Reynolds nodded miserably. #I . Tom Manning turned from his desk, and ran fresh paper into the typewriter. He wrote: Third Lead: Monster Washington, D.C. (Global) -- An alien beast is loose on Earth tonight. No one knows where it is. It came out of a time tunnel in Virginia and disappeared artillery piece posted in front of the tunnel, placed to prevent the very thing that happened. A second beast came, through with it, but this one was killed by the gun. There are unconfirmed reports that several other people, in addition to the gun crew, were killed by the tunnel monster. Eyewitnesses said tht the beast was large and unbelievably quick in its movements. No one got a good look at it. "It moved too fast for anyone really to see it," said one eyewitness. Within seconds after emerging from the tunnel it disappeared. There is no clue as to where it may be now. "Mr. Manning," said someone at his elbow. Manning looked up. A copy boy stood there. "Mr. Price's pictures," said the copy boy, handing them to him. Manning looked at the one on top and drew in his breath sharply. "Jesus H. Christ," he said aloud to himself, "will you look at that!" It was the sort of picture that some press flack would dream up to advertise a horror movie, but without the phoniness of such a drawing. The creature was in motion even in the still photo, and probably moving fast, for there was a sense of power and swiftness in it. Bentley's super-fast film had frozen it in all its ferocity -- the fangs, the talons, the nest of writhing tentacles positioned around its squat, thick neck. The very shape of it was eviK It was beast, but more than beast. There was in it some quality that sent a shiver up Manning's spine -- not a shiver of horror, but of outlandish, unreasoning fear. Manning swung back to the desk and laid the pictures on its top. With a swipe of his hand he fanned them out. All of them were horrifying. A couple of them showed the fleeing crowd -- dark shadows in a hurry. Another showed, somewhat less well than Manning would have liked, the shambles where the tunnel mouth had been, with the dead creature crumpled on top of the trampled human bodies. "That goddamned Price," said Manning soulfully. "He never got a shot of the monster and the gun crew." #  "We can't cancel your TV appearance," Wilson told the President. "The situation is bad enough right now. It will be wqrse IF if we cancel. We can fix it with a paragraph or two. Say that the Virginia incident is too recent to comment on. Give assurance that it will be run down, that the beast will be found and killed. That we're already closing in on it -- " "But we aren't," said the President. "We don't know where the hell it is. There's been no report of it. You remember what Gale said -- how fast they could move. Traveling in the dark, this thing could be deep into the mountains of West Virginia and well hidden before daylight." "There's more reason right now than there ever was," said Frank Howard, who had been working on the speech text with Reynolds, "for you to talk to the people. The entire country will be in ah uproar and we'll have to tame them down." "You know, Frank," said the President, don't seem to care right now to tame the country down. Can# you get it through your head that this is not a political matter? It's far more than that. I can't be sure just how much danger the country may be facing, but I know that there is danger. I've asked Gale to step down here and tell us what he thinks. He knows more than we do." "What you refuse to understand, sir," said Wilson, "is that the country's waiting to hear from .you. The people would like some sort of assurance, but if you can't give them that you can let them know that we are on the job. Seeing and hearing you will be visible proof that everything has not entirely gone to pot. They need some physical evidence that the government is aware of what is going on -- " The box on the President's desk purred. "Yes?" Henderson said. "A call for Mr. Wilson sir, an urgent call. Can he answer it in there?" The President lifted the receiver and handed it to Wilson. "This is Henry," said Hunt's voice. "Sorry for breaking in, but I thought you should know. One of the other tunnels failed out in Wisconsin. It just came in on AP." "Failed, you say? Not like Virginia. Nothing came through?" "Apparently. The message said it failed. Blinked out. Wasn't there any more." "Thank you, Henry. Thanks for telling me." He said to the President, "Another tunnel is out. Cut off. disappeared. I suppose the people did it at the other end. Gale told us, if you remember, that they had men on guard who wereprepared to collapse the tunnels if anything went wrong." "I do recall," said the President. "The invaders must be getting at them. I don't like to think about it. It must take a lot of courage to do a thing like that. The ones at the other end of the Virginia tunnel apparently didn't have the chance." "About the speech, sir," said Reynolds. "The time rs getting short." "All right. I suppose I have to. Do the best you can. But don't say anything about our having it tracked down and cornered." "You'll have to tell them what it is," said Wilson. "There has to be an explanation of what the animal is. We'll have to tell the people it's beasts such as this that the tunnel folks are fleeing." "There'll be a scream to shut down the tunnels," Reynolds said. "Let them scream," said the President. "We don't know of any way of shutting them except firing into them. And we can't fire into crowds of refugees without reason -- our own refugees." "In a short while," said Howard, "there may be no need. One tunnel has shut down of itself. There will be others. In a few hours maybe all of them will close," "I hope not," said the President. "No matter what else happens, no matter what problems they may bring us, I can't help but hope all the people do get through." Kim stuck her head in the door. "Mr. Gale is here, sir." "Send him in." Gale came into the room. He stumbled a little as he started across the room, then stiffened and marched to within a few feet .of the desk. His face was haggard. "I am so sorry, sir," he said. "I can't properly express the regrets of myself or of my people. We thought we had taken safeguards." "Please sit down, Mr. Gale," said the President. "You can help us now. We need your help." Gale sat carefully in the chair. "You mean about the alien. You want to know more about it. I could have told you more this afternoon, but there was so much to tell and I never thought -- " "I'll accept your word for that. You did make provisions to guard against what happened. Perhaps you did the best you could. Now we need your help to find this creature. We need to know something about its habits, what we can expect. We have to hunt it down." "Luckily," said Reynolds, "there's only one of them. When we get it -- " "It is, unfortunately," said Gale, "not as lucky as you think. The aliens are bisexual creatures." "You mean -- " "That's exactly what I mean," said Gale. "The young are hatched from eggs. Any of the adults can lay fertilized eggs. And # them in great numbers. Once hatched, the young need no care -- or at least are given no care." "Then," said the President, "we must find it before it starts laying eggs." IF "That is right," said Gale, "although I fear you may already be too late. From what we know of them I would suspect that the alien would start laying eggs within a few hours after its emergence from the tunnel. It would recognize the crisis. The aliens are highly intelligent. This one knows that it is the sole representative of its species in this particular time and that the future of the species here may depend on it alone. This will not be an intellectual realization only -- its body will also respond to the situation. All its physical resources will be aimed now at reproduction. Furthermore, realizing that eventually it will be hunted down and slain, it will scatter its clutches of eggs over as much territory as it can. It will locate them in the least accessible spots. It is fighting, you understand, not only for itself, but for the species. Perhaps not at all for itself, but only for the species.". "I would suspect," aid the President, "that it might be heading for the mountains. But that supposition is based only on my knowledge there are mountains to the west." Gale said, "It has as good a geographical knowledge of this area as any of us here. The geography is the same five hundred years from now as it is today." "Then," said the President, "assuming that it would have headed for the mountains, we must not only head it off, but we will have to give some thought to evacuating the people from that area." "You're thinking nuclear," said Wilson. "Blanketing the area with bombs. You can't do that, sir. Only as a last resort -- and perhaps not even then. The tonnage would have to be massive and the fallout -- " "You're jumping to conclusions, Steve." Henderson turned to Gale. "You told us your people could supply us with specifications for the building of the tunnels." "That is true," said Gale. "The point is this -- if we are to do anything at all we should do it quickly. If we delay, a dangerous social and economic, not to say political, situation may build up. And this matter of the alien has given us even less time than I thought we had. For that reason it seems to me important that we have the specifications and talk with your people who can explain them to us as soon as possible." "Mr. President," said Reynolds, "we have less than two hours to get your talk shaped up." "Certainly,'" said the President. "I am sorfy to have held you up. Steve, you stay a moment, please." "Thank you, sir," said Howard, following Reynolds toward the door. "Now, where were we?" said the President. "Oh, yes, I was saying that we need to get to work on the matter of the tunnels. I plan to have some of our physicists and engineers come in and confer with your people." "Does that mean that you will help us?" "I would think so, although at the moment Tm in no position to make a positive commitment. But I don't see much else that we can do. We can't keep you here. We can't possibly absorb you into our population. The first step would seem to be to talk with your physicists and find out what's involved. Until we know thatwe can't do any planning. And there's also the matter of selecting sites." "We have that all worked out," said Gale. "Our geologists have made a study of the Miocene terrain. Stable land surfaces have been pinpointed and mapped out. We can't be entirely sure, of course, but our people, operating within their best knowledge, have done at least the preliminary work." "Then," said Henderson, "we won't have to worry about that. But we do need something to get started on." "The men you want to talk with," said Gale, "were among the first to come through the tunnel. I can give you their names,but I'll have to go with whoever is sent to contact them. Without me they'd refuse to come. You can understand our situation, sir. We could take no chances of our men or their information falling into other than official hands." Henderson frowned. "I'm reluctant to let you leave. You can, of course, walk out of here any time you wish -- you are in no way detained. But our information so far is sketchy. You have done an excellent job of supplying us with it, of course, but new situations can arise." "I understand," said Gale. "Alice, iperhaps. They know her and if she carried a note from me on a White House letterhead -- " "That would be fine," said the President, "if she would be willing. Steve, I wonder if you'd undertake to accompany her." "Certainly, sir. But my car's not here. Judy drove it home." "You can have a White House car and driver. Perhaps we'd better send along a secret service man. It may seem a silly precaution, but a lot is riding on this." He put up his hand and made a gesture of wiping his face. "I hope to God, Mr. Gale," he said, "that you and I, your people and our people, can work together on this. This is just the beginning of it. It's going to get rough. There'll be all sorts of pressure, all kinds of frenzied screaming. Have you got a good strong back and a good thick skin?" "I think I have," said Gale, trying to sound sure of himself. IF # . The attorney gcncraFs ' visitor was an old and valued friend. They had been roommates at Harvard and in the years since then had kept in touch. Reilly Douglas knew that in large part he owed his cabinet appointment to the good offices and perhaps the political pressure commanded by Clinton Chapman, a man who headed one of the nation's most prestigious industrial complexes and was a heavy contributor to the party's funds. "I know this must be a busy time for you," Chapman told Douglas, "and under the circumstances I'll take very little of your time." "It's good to see a friendly face," said Douglas. "I don't mind telling you I don't go along with all that's supposed to be happening. Not that there's nothing to it, for there is. But we're rushing into things. The President has accepted at face value this story of time traveling and -- while I can see no other explanation at the moment -- it seems to me there should be some further study of the matter before we commit ourselves." "Well, now," said Chapman, "I agree with you -- I couldn't agree more completely. I called in some of my physicists this afternoon. You know, of course, that among our several branches, we have a respectable corps of research people. Well, as I was saying, I called a few of them together earlier today and we did some brain-storming on this time-tunnel business -- " "And they told you it was impossible." "Not exactly that," said Chapman. "Not quite that at all. Not that any of them can see how it's done, but they told me -- and this is something that sure surprised me -- that the nature of time flows has been a subject of some quiet study and scholarly dispute for a number of years. They talked about a lot of things I didn't understand and used terms I'd never heard before and some that have slipped my mind. They talked about the principle of wave retardation and causality and there was quite a lot of discussion about time-symmetrical field equations and the upshot of it all seemed to be that while, on the basis of present knowledge and research what seems to be happening is plain impossible, there is really nothing hard and fast that says it can't be done." "So what Gale says could be true," said Douglas. "There seems no other explanation, but my point is that we should not move until we know it's true. And, personally, while I could think of no other explanation, I found a great deal of difficulty in believing it." "Just exactly what," asked Chapman, "is the government thinking about doing? Building new tunnels, I understand, and sending the people of the future still farther back in time. Do they have any idea of what it's going to cost? Or how long it might take?" "They have no idea," said Douglas. "Not a single figure. No inkling of what's involved. But if anything can be done we will have to do it. The people from the future can't be kept here. It would be impossible to contain them. Somehow we must get rid of them." "My hunch," said Chapman, "is that it will cost a bundle. And there'll be hell's own uproar about the money it will take. The public is more tax conscious than it has ever been and something like this could bring about a confiscatory tax." "You're getting at something, Clint." "Yes, I suppose I am. A gamble, you might say." "You always gambled well," said Douglas. "It's going to take a lot of money," Chapman said. "Tax money," Douglas said. "I know. Tax money. And that could mean we'll lose the election a year from now. You know I've always been rather generous in my campaign contributions and have rarely asked for favors. I'm not asking for one now. But under certain circumstances I think of as a somewhat more substantial contribution. Not only to the party, but to the country." "That would be very generous of you," said Douglas, not entirely sure that he was happy with the turn the talk had taken. "I'd have to have some figures and some facts, of course," said Chapman, "but unless the cost is higher than I could manage, I think I would be agreeable to taking over the construction of the tunnels. That is, if the tunnels can be built." "In return for which?" "In return for which," said Chapman, "I should like exclusive future license for thebuilding of tunnels and the operation of them." Douglas frowned. "I don't know," he said. "I can't be certain of the legality of an arrangement of that sort. And there is the international angle -- " "If you applied yourself to it," said Chapman, "you could figure out a way. I am sure you could. You're a damn good lawyer, Reilly" "There must be something I am missing. I don't see why you should want the license. What good would the tunnels be?" "After all of this is over," Chapman said, "people will be considerably intrigued with the idea of traveling in time. A brand new way of traveling. A way of getting to places they could never get to before." IF "But that's insane!" "Not as insane as you might think. Imagine what a sportsman privilege of going back to prehistoric days for a spot of hunting. Universities would want to send teams of paleontologists back to the Age of Reptiles to study and photograph the dinosaurs. Classical historians would sell their souls to go back and learn what really happened at the siege of Troy."  "And the church," said Douglas, rather acidly, "might want a firstclass ticket for a seat at the Crucifixion." "I suppose that, too," Chapman agreed. "And, as you imply, there would be times when it might get slightly sticky. Rules and regulations would have to be worked out and certain safeguards set up not to change the course of history, but -- " "It wouldn't work," said Douglas, flatly. "Time traveling, we are told, works in only one direction, back toward the past. Once you go back you can't return." "I'm not so sure of that," said Chapman. "Maybe that's what you were told. Maybe that's true now. But my physicists assured me this afternoon that if you can move in time at all, you can move in both directions. They were sure of that. Sure it could be worked out. It simply makes no sense. they said, that the flow would go only one way. If you can go into the past you certainly can go into the future. That's what we have right now." "Clint, I can't go along on this." "You can think about it. You can see how things develop. You can keep me well informed. If it should work out, there would be something very worthwhile in it for you." # . "So now you'll explain to me, perhaps," said Alice Gale, "what a picnic is. You told me this afternoon you had been going on a picnic." The secret service man hunched forward on the seat. "Has Steve been talking picnic to you? Don't ever chance it with him." "But, Mr. Black," she said, "I don't even know what a picnic is." "It's fairly simple," Wilson told her. "You pack a lunch and you go out in a park or woods and you eat it there." "But we did that in our own time," she said. "Although we did not call it picnic. I don't think we called it anything at all. I never heard it call anytling at all." The car rolled slowly down the drive, heading for the gate. The driver sat stiffly erect. The car slowed to a halt and a soldier came to the driver's window. Other military men were stationed by the gate. "What is going on?" asked Wilson. "I hadn't heard of this." Black shrugged. "Someone got the wind up. This place is closed in tight. It's stiff with military. Mortars are scattered through the park and no one knows what else." "Does the President know about it?" "I'm not sure," said Black. "No one might have thought to tell him." The soldier stepped back and the gate came open and the car went through. It proceeded silently along the street, heading for the bridge, Wilson peered through the window. "Where is everyone?" he asked. "A Sunday night and the tourist season and there's no one here." "You heard the news," said Black. "Of course I heard the news." "Everyone's holed up. Everyone's indoors. They expect an alien to come leaping at them." "We had such lovely places where we could go on picnics," said Alice Gale. "So many parks, so much wild land. More open spaces than you have. Not as crowded as you have it now, although somehow I like it crowded. There are so many people -- there is so much to see." "You are enjoying it," said Wilson. "Yes, of course. Although I have the feel of guilt in my enjoyment. My father and I should be with our people. But I was telling you of our time. It was a good age to live in. Until the aliens came, of course. And even then, in the earlier days, before there were so many of them. They were not at our throats all the time, you know, except in the last few years. Although I don't think we ever were unaware of them. We always talked about them. We never really forgot them, no matter what. All my life, I think, they have been in my mind. There were periods in the later years when we were obsessed with them. We continually looked over our shoulders to see if they were there -- we were never free of them. We talked of them and studied them." "You. say you studied them," said Wilson. "Exactly how did you study them? Who studied them?" "Why," she said, "biologists, of course. At times they came into possession of an alien's body. And the psychologists and psychiatrists also examined what they could. The evolutionists -- " "Evolutionists?" "Certainly, evolutionists. For these aliens were very strange evolutionarily. They seemed to be consciously in control of their evolutionary processes. There are occasions when you are inclined to suspect they can order their evolutionary processes. My father, I think, explained some of this to you. In all their long history they apparently gave up no advanIF tage they had gained. They made no compromises. They kept what they had and needed and added whatever else they could develop. This, of course, means that they can adapt to almost any condition or situation. They respond almost instantly to stresses and emergencies." "You almost sound," said Black, "as if you -- well, not you, perhaps, but your people -- might admire these creatures." She shook her head. "We hated them and feared them. That is quite apparent, for we ran away from them. But, yes, I suppose we might have felt something like awed admiration, although we did not admit it. I don't think anyone ever said it." "Lincoln is coming up ahead," said Wilson. "You know about Lincoln, of course." "Yes," she said. "My father has been staying in Lincoln's bedroom." The memorial loomed ahead, softly lit against the night. The statue sat brooding in the marble chair. The car moved past and the memorial was left behind. "If we can find the time," said Wilson, "in the next few days, we'll go out to see it. Or have you seen it? You said the White House no longer existed where you came from." "It did not, nor did the memorial," she said. "Part of it is left, but less than half. The stones have crumbled." "What is this?" asked Black. "In the time the people of the tunnel came from," said Wilson, "Washington had been destroyed. The White House is a wilderness." "But that's impossible. I don't understand. A war?" "Not a war," said Alice Gale. "It's hard to explain, even if you know history and I have only small understanding of it. But I have read a little. Economic collapse, perhaps, is the best name for what happened. Probably some ethical collapse occurred as well. A time of mounting inflation that reached ridiculous heights, matched by a mounting cynicism, a loss of faith in government, which contributed to the failure of government, a growing gap of resources and understanding between the rich and poor -- all these brought about a social disaster. Not in this nation alone, but in all the major powers. One after one they fell. The economy was gone -- governments vanished and mobs ran in the street. Blind mobs struck out -- not at anything in particular but at anything at all. You must excuse me, please -- I tell it very badly." "And this is all ahead of us?" asked Black. "Not now," said Wilson. "Not any more it isn't. Or at least it doesn't have to be. We're on a different time track now." "You," said Black, "are as bad as she is. You don't either one, make sense." : "I'm sorry, Mr. Black," said Alice. "Don't mind me," said Black. "I'm not the intellectual sort. I'm just an educated cop. Steve will tell you that."  # . The Reverend Dr. Angus Windsor was a good man. He stood in gra#e and was distinguished in good works. He was pastor of a church that had its roots in wealth, a long history and a certain elegance, yet this did not prevent him from going where the need was greatest -- outside his own parish, certainly, for in that particular parish need was seldom evident. He was seen in the ghettos and was present where the young demonstration marchers had fallen beneath the clubs of the police. When he heard of a family that had need of food he showed up at the door with a bag of groceries and before he left managed to find a few dollars in his pockets that he could get along without. He was a regular visitor at prisons and the lonely old folks put away to die in rest homes were familiar with his stately tread, his stooped shoulders, his long white hair and patient face. That he was not at all adverse to good publicity, sometimes even seemed to court it, was held against him by some of the influential members of his congregation, who subscribed to the belief that this characteristic was unseemly in him. But he went his way without paying attention to this criticism. He was once supposed to have told an old, dear friend that it was a small price to pay for the privilege of doing good -- although whether he meant by price the publicity or the criticism was not entirely clear. So it was thought by the newsmen present not at #I unusual when, late in the evening, he appeared at the site where the tunnel had been closed upon the emergence of the aliens. The newsmen clustered around the old man. "What are you doing here, Dr. Windsor?" asked one of them. "I came," said Dr. Angus, "to offer to these poor souls the small shreds of comfort k is in my power to dispense. I had a little trouble with the military. I understand they are letting no one in. But I see they permit you people here." "Some of us talked our way through. Others parked a mile or so away and walked." "The good Lord interceded for me," said Dr. Angus, "and they let me through the barricade." "How did He intercede for you?" "He softened their hearts toward me and they let me come. But now I must speak to these poor folks." IF He motioned at the scattered groups of refugees standing in the yards and along the street.  The dead alien lay on its back, its limp tentacles lying snakelike along the ground. Most of the human bodies at the tunnel mouth had been moved. A few still made shadowed lumps covered by blankets. The gun lay where it had been toppled on its side. "The army is sending out a team," said one of the newsmen, "to haul in the alien. They want to have a good look at him." Spotlights mounted in trees cast a radiance over the area where the tunnel mouth had been. A generator coughed and sputtered in the darkness. Trucks pulled in, loaded up and left. On occasion a bullhorn roared out orders. Dr. Windsor, with an instinct born of long practice, headed unerringly for the largest group of refugees huddled under a swaying street lamp. Most of them were standing on the pavement, but others sat on the curbs and small groups were scattered on the lawns. Dr. Windsor came to a group of women: he always zeroed in on women. He had found them more receptive than men. "I have come," he said, "to offer you the comfort of the Lord. In times like this we should always turn to Him." The women stared at him in some amazement. Some instinctively backed away. "I'm the Reverend Windsor," he told them, "and I came from Washington. I go where I am called to meet a need. Would you pray with me?" A tall, slender, grandmotherly woman stepped to the forefront of the group. "Please go away," she said. Dr. Windsor fluttered his hands, stricken off balance. "I don't understand," he said. "I only meant -- " "We know what you meant," the woman told him, "and we thank you for the thought. We know you intend only kindness." "You can't mean what you are saying," said Dr. Windsor. "You cannot hope to deprive all the others -- " A man thrust throligh the crowd and took the pastor by the arm. "Friend," he said. "Keep it down." "But this woman -- "I know. I heard what you said to her and she to you. She speaks for all of us." "I fail to understand." "There is no need for you to understand. Now will you please go." "You reject me?" "Not you, sir. Not personally. We reject the principle you stand for." "You reject Christianity? "Not Christianity alone. We rejected all dogma a century ago. Our nonbelief is as firm a faith as is your belief. We do not thrust our principles on you. Will you please not thrust yours on us?" "This is incredible," said the Dr. Windsor. "I can't believe my ears. I will not believe it. There must be some mistake. I had only meant to join with you in prayer." "But we no longer pray." Dr. Windsor turned, went blundering past the waiting newsmen, who had trailed after him. He shook his head, bewildered. It was unbelievable. It could not be right. It was inconceivable. It was blasphemous. After all the years of man's agony, after althe searching for the truth, after all the saints and martyrs, it could not come to this. # . General Daniel Foote, commander at Fort Myer, was waiting with three other men in his office. "You should not have come alone," he said to Wilson. "I said so to the President -- offered to send an escort -- but he vetoed the idea. He said he wanted to draw no attention to the car." "There was little traffic on the road," said Wilson. The general shook his head."These are unsettled times," he said. "General Foote, may I present Miss Alice Gale. Her father is the man who contacted us." The general said, "I am delighted to meet you. Miss Gale. These three gentlemen have told me something of your father. And Mr. Black. I'm glad you are along." "Thank you, sir," said Black. "I should like the privilege," Alice said, "of introducing my own people. Dr. Hardwicke -- Dr. Nicholas Hardwicke, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Black. Dr. Hardwicke is a sort of Albert Einstein of our time." The ungainly, bearlike man smiled at her. "You must not praise me unduly, my dear," he said. "They'll' expect far too much af me. Gentlemen, I am very pleased to be here and to meet you. It is time we were getting on in this matter, which must be quite unpleasant to you. I am glad to see you reacting so promptly and so positively. Yout president must be a most unusual man." "We think so," Wilson said. Alice. "Dr. Hardwicke was a fellow townsman of ours, but Dr. Cummings came from the Denver region. My father and the others thought it would be best if he were with Dr. Hardwicke when they met your scientists." Cummings was small, bald, with a wrinkled, elfin face. "I am glad to be here," he said. "We all are glad to be here. We must tell you how deeply we regret what happened at the tunnel." "And, finally," said Alice, IF "Dr. Abner Osborne. He is a longtime family friend." Osborne put an arm about the girPs shoulders and hugged her. "These other gentlemen," he said, are physicists, but I'm a more lowly creature. I am a geologist. Tell me, my dear, how is your father? I looked for him after we came through, but couldn't seem to find him." General Foote drew Wilson aside. "Tell me what you know of the escaped alien." "We've had no further reports. The assumption is it would head for the mountains." Foote nodded. "I think you may be right. We have had some rumors. They all came from the west. Harper's Ferry. Strasburg. Luray. They must be wrong. Nothing could travel that fast. Are you absolutely sure there was only one of them?" "You should know," said Wilson curtly. "Your men were there. Our information is that one was killed. The other got away." "Yes, yes, I know," said Foote. "We are bringing in the dead one. The general was upset, thought Wilson. He was jittery. Was there something he knew that the White House didn't know? "Are you trying to tell me something. General?" "No. Not at all," he said. The son of a bitch, Wilson thought. Foote had simply been trying for an insider oop from the White House to use for small talk at the officers' club. "I think," said Wilson, "that we had best get started back." Once more in the car. Black sat in front with the driver. Wilson and Osborne took the jump seats. "You may think it strange," said Osborne, "that there's a geologist in the group." "I had wondered," Wilson said. "Not that you aren't welcome." "It was thought," said Osborne, "that there might be some questions about the Miocene." "Anent our also fleeing our time, you mea?" "It is one way in which the problem could be solved." "Are you trying to tell me that you were fairly sure some of the aliens would get through? That enough of them might get through for us to be forced to leave?" "Certainly not," said the geologist. "We had hoped none would get through. We had set up precautions. I can't imagine what could have gone wrong. I'm not inclined to think that this single alien -- " "But you don't know." "You're right. They're clever. And capable. Some of our biologists could tell you more." "Then why this feeling we should go back into the Miocene?" "You're nearing a danger point," said Osborne. "Our historians could explain it better than I can, but all the signs are there. Oh, I know that our having dropped in on you will alter your future to a point -- but our effect may have come too late for you to avoid one great danger. "What you're talking about is , the economic and social collapse. Alice briefed us on it -- Washington and the White House are gone in your time. I suppose New York as well, and Chicago and all the rest of the major cities both here and abroad- -- " "You're top-heavy," said Osborne. "You've gotten out of balance. I think it's gone too far to stop. You have a runaway economy and the social cleavages are getting deeper by the day." "And going back to the Miocene would put an end to it?" "It would be a new start:" "I'nt not so sure," said Wilson. Up in the front Black raised his voice. "It's time for the President's speech. Want me to turn on the radio?" He didn't wait for an answer. The next voice was Henderson's. "...little I can tell you. So I am not going to keep you long. We are still in the process of sorting out the facts and I would be doing you a disservice if I told you less -- or more -- than facts. You may be assured that your government will level with you. As soon as we know anything for certain. you are going to know it, too. We'll pass it on to you. "These things we do know. Among us are refugees, apparently from some five hundred years in our future. All details are not yet clear -- we do not, for instance, know their exact method of transportation or arrival -- but the essential facts are as I have stated them to you. The refugees do not intend to stay here. As soon as possible they intend to go on, to leave us as they came. But to do so they need our help. Not only our help in building equipment and installations, but our help in supplying the bare basics that will enable them to start over again. For economic reasons which everyone must understand, we, in conjunction with the rest of the world, cannot refuse to help them. Not that we would refuse in any case. They are our children's children, several times removed. They are our flesh and blood and we cannot withhold assistance. How we will go about helping them is now under consideration. There are problems and they must and will be solved. There must be no delay and our effort must be wholehearted. It will call for sacrifice and devotion from everyone of you. There are many details you should be told, many questions that must occur to you. These all will be fully given and fully answered later -- there is not time to put everything before you this IF evening. After all, this all began happening only a few hours ago. It has been a busy Sunday." The voice was confident, resonant, with" no hint of desperation -- with even a touch of humor in these last words -- and, thought Wilson, there must be in the man a certain sense of desperation. No other President before him had ever been called upon to make such an outlandish announcement. Henderson was still a polished politician. He still could sell himself, still could reassure the nation. Hunched forward on the jump seat, Wilson felt a sudden surge of pride in him. "All of you know by now," the President continued, "that two alien life forms came through what has become known as a time tunnel in Virginia. One was killed, the other escaped. I must be honest with you and say that we have no subsequent word of it. We are pressing all efforts to find and destroy it and while it may take a little time, we will do exactly that. I ask you most urgently not to place too much emphasis upon the fact that an alien is loose upon the Earth. It is only one of the many problems we face tonight -- and not the most important. Given the sort of cooperation that I know we can expect from you we will solve them." He paused and for a moment Wilson wondered if that was all -- although he knew it would not be, for the President bad not said good night. The voice took up again. "I have one unpleasant thing to say and, unpleasant as it may be, I know that on due consideration you'll realize, I think, that it is necessary for the good of all of us. I have, just a few minutes ago, signed an executive ordr declaring a national emergency. Under that order a bank and trading holiday has been declared. This means that no banks or other financial institutions will open their doors for business or transact any business until further notice. Under the order all trading in stocks, shares, bonds and commodities, will be suspended until further notice. All prices, salaries and wages will be frozen. This, of course, is an intolerable situation and cannot exist for long. Because of this, it is only an emergency order that will be lifted as soon as the Congress and other branches of the government can implement rules and regulations imposing such restraints as are necessary under the situation that has been imposed upon us. I hope that you will bear .with us over the few days the executive order will be in force. It was only with the utmost reluctance that I decided it was necessary." Wilson let out his breath slowly, not realizing until then that he had caught and held it. There'd be unsheeted hell to pay, he knew. From the country and the White House press corps. For Christ s sake, Steve, you could have tipped us off. You could have let us know... And they would not believe him when he told them he had not known himself. The declaration of a national eniergency was such a logical step that the media men should have guessed it -- he, himself, should have thought of it. But he hadn't. He wondered if the President had talked it over with anyone and he doubted that he had. There hadn't been much time and there had been other things to talk about. The President was saying good night to his listeners. "Good night, Mr. President," said Wilson and wondered why the others looked at him so strangely. # . The office was dark except for the feeble light from the clacking wire machines ranged along the wall. Wilson crossed to his desk and sat down. He leaned forward to snap on the desk lamp, then pulled back his hand. He had no need of light and there was healing in the dark. He leaned back in his chair -- for the first time since this afternoon nothing was pressing him, but inside him still throbbed the nagging sense that he should be up and doing. The President, Steve thought. should long since have been in bed. It was nearly midnight and well past his usual bedtime and he had missed his nap in the aftrnoon. Samuel Henderson was getting too old for this sort of thing. He had seemed drawn and haggard when the refugee scientists had been escorted to his office to be introduced to the men from the National Academy. "You heard my speech, Steve?" the President had asked when the others were gone. "In the car." "What do you think? Will the country go along?" But when they think about it, I believe they will. Wall Street will raise a lot of dust." "Wall Street," Henderson had said, "is something I can't afford to give my time to right now." "You should be heading for bed, Mr. President. It's been a long, hard day." "Directly. First I have to talk with Treasury, and Sandburg phoned to ask if he could come over." Directly... But it would be hours before Henderson got to sleep. Somewhere in some secret room the scientists were talking. Out there in the vastness of the nation -- of the world, in fact -- people from the future were walking from their tunnels. In the mountains to the west an alien horror skulked in the night. IF The whole scene still was unbening down into wads of folded palievable. Everything had happer on the floor, pened too fast -- no man had been A new story was just starting, given time to catch up with it. In a ing to a new day that in many re(AP) -- A search is being spects would be utterly unlike pressed tonight in the mounany day before in all of human tains west of here for the history -- face problems and dialien who escaped from a lemmas no man or woman had . time tunnel in Virginia a ever faced before. few hours ago. There have Light showed through the crack been numerous reports of under the doors that led into the sightings, but none can be press lounge. Some media men confirmed. There is reason would still be there, although they to believe that most of them were not working. There was no arose from fertile and consound of typewriters. Steve recerned imaginations. A membered that he had never gotnumber of troops and conten to eat his sandwiches. He had tingents from many police put two of them on a plate and had and sheriff's departments taken a bite out of one when Brad are being deployed into the Reynolds had rushed into the area, but there is little hope lounge with his story of the alien's that a great deal can be done escape. Now that he thought of it before daylight... Steve realized that he was hungry. There might be some sandWilson hauled in the copy pawiches left, although they would per, let it fall and curl up before be dry by now -- and for some reahis feet. He read rapidly, son he wanted to stay here in the talking to anyone at all. (AP) -- As dawn came this Although, perhaps, he should see morning ministers, were what was on the wires. He sat for a still in conference at the resmove, then got up and went across ter. Throughout the night the room to the bank of teletypes. there had been a steady comAP first, he thought. Good, old ing and going... stolid AP. Never sensational, out of the machine. It was runpeople and wheat have continued to pour out of the tunnels from the future. Both present problems... (AP) -- Evidence multiplied throughout the night that dawn may bring an explosion of protest and rioting, not only in Harlem, but in many other minority areas of the city. Fears that the heavy influx of refugees from the future may bring about a reduction in food allotments and other welfare benefits are expected to spark widespread demonstration. All police leaves have been canceled and the police force has been notified that its personnel must be prepared to work around the clock... (AP) -- The President's action declaring a business holiday and freezing wages and prices was both attacked and praised... Moscow, Madrid, Singapore, Brisbane, Bogotfi, Cairo, Kiev -- and then: (AP) -- The Rev. Jake Billings, noted evangelist, today called for a crusade to "bring the people of the future back into the arms of Christ." He issued the call from his headquarters here after learning that a group of refugees who had come through the now-closed time tunnel near Falls Church, Va., had refused the ministrations of the Rev. Dr. Angus Windsor, a celebrated churchman of Washington, D.C., giving as their reason that they had turned their backs, not on Christianity alone, but on all religion. "They came to us for "but the help that they are seeking is not the help they should be given. Rather than helping them, as they ask, to go farther back in time, we should help them to return to the brotherhood of Christ. They are fleeing from the future for their lives, but they have already lost a thing far more precious than their lives. How their rejection of Christ may have come about I have no way of knowing. I do know that it is our duty to point out to them the road of devotion and of righteousness. I call upon all Christians to join me in my prayers for them." IF Wilson let the long sheaf of paper fall and went back to his desk. He switched on the light and, picking up the phone, dialed the switchboard. "Jane -- I thought I recognized your voice. This is Steve Wilson. Will you put in a call to Nashville Jane, I know what time it is. I know he probably is asleep) -- we'll simply have to wake him up. No, L don't know his number. Thank yoii, Jane. Thank you very much." He settled back in the chair and growled at himself. When he had talked with the President early in been mentioned. Steve had promised he would call him and then the matter had not crossed his mind again. But who in hell would have thought a thing like this would happen? Windsor, he thought. It would take an old busybody, a meddling fool like Windsor to go messing into it. And then, when he got his face pushed in, to go bawling to the newsmen, telling what had happened. Christ, that's all we need, Steve thought, to get the Windsors and mixed up in this, wringing their hands and crying for a crusade... A crusade, he grimly told himself, was the last thing that was needed. There was trouble enough without a gang of pulpit-thumpers adding to the dustup. The phone tinkled at him and he picked up the receiver. Jane said, line, sir." "Hello," said Wilson. "Is this "Yes, God bless you," said the deep, solemn voice. "What can I do for you?" "Jake, this is Steve Wilson." "Wilson? Oh, yes, the press secretary. I should have known it was you. They didn't say who was calling. They just said the White House." The bastard, Wilspn told himself. He's disappointed. He thought it was the President. "It's been a long time, Jake," he said. ago? Ten years?" "More like fifteen,'said Wilson. "I guess you're right at that," the habit -- " "I'm calling you," said Wilson, "about this crusade you're drumming up." "Crusade? Oh, you mean the one to get the future people back onto the track. I am so glad you called. We need all the help we can get. I view it as fortunate that they came back to us, for whatever reason. WhenI think of the human race, a mere five hundred years from now, forsaking the human faith that has sustained us all these years I get a cold shiver up my spine. Vm so glad that you are with us. I can't tell you how glad I am that you -- "  "I'm not with you, Jake." "You're not with us? What do you mean, you're not with us?"' "I'm not with you, Jake -- that is what I mean. I'm calling to ask that you call off this silly crusade." "I can't." "Yes, you can. We have trouble enough without some damn fool crusade. You'll be doing the country a disservice if you keep it up. We have problems up to here and we don't need any more. This isn't just a situation that off his piety. This is life and death, not only for the refugees, but for every one of us." "It seems to me, Steve, you're using an approach that is unnecessarily rough." "If I am," said Wilson, "it's because I'm upset at what you're doing. This i important, Jake. We have a job -- to get the refugees to where they want to go before they upset our economy. And while we do that we'll be getting plenty of flack. We're going to get it from industry, from labor, from people on welfare, from politicians who will grab the chance to take cheap shots at us. With all of this we can't face flack from you. What difference can it possibly make to you? You're not dealing with a present situation, a present people. You iire dealing with the future, with a segment of time that ordinarily would be out of your reach. The refugees are back here, sure, but the windmill you are tilting at wasn't even built until long after you and I were dead." many mysterious ways." Wilson said, "Climb down from your pulpit. You're not going to impress me, Jake. You never did." "Steve, are you calling for the President?" "If you mean did he ask me to make this call, the answer is no. He probably doesn't know as yet what you have done. But when he finds out about it he is going to be sore. The two of us talked about you earlier in the day. We were afraid you-might take some sort of hand. We couldn't, of course, foresee what happened. But you do take a hand in everything that happens. I was supposed to phone you, to head you off beforehand. But so many things were coming up I never found the time." "I can see your position," said even understand it. But you and I see things from different viewpoints. To me the thought that the human race became a godless people is a personal agony. It goes against everything I have been taught, everything I've lived by, all that I've believed in." "You can rest easy," Wilson IF said. "It will go no further. The human future is ending five hundred years from now," "But they'll be going back in time." "We hope they will," Wilson said bitterly. "They'll go back if we aren't completely hogtied by people like you." "If they goback," protested We'll give them what they need to make a new start. Into a new land and a new time where they'll build a godless culture. They may in time go out in space, out to other stars, and they'll go as godless people. We can't allow that, Steve." "Maybe you can't. I can. It doesn't bother me. There are a hell of a lot of other people it won't bother either. You're blind if you can't see the beginning, the roots of their rejection of religion in the present. Maybe that is what is really bugging you." mitted. "I haven't had time to think it through. Even if what you say were true it would make no difference. I still would have to do exactly what I'm doing." "You mean you intend to go ahead? Even knowing what it means to all of us? Stirring up people, riding that white horse -- " "I have to do it, Steve. My conscience -- " "You'll think it over? I can call again?" For there was no use arguing further. No point in trying to talk reason to this pious madman. their undergraduate years. And he should have known from the very first that it would be useless to try to make Jake see another's point of view. "if you wish. But I won't reconsider. I know what I must do. You cannot persuade me otherwise." "Good night, Jake. Sorry that I woke you up." "You didn't wake me up. I expect no sleep this night. It was good to hear your voice, Steve." Wilson hung up and sat quietly in his chair. Maybe, he thought, if he had spoken differently -- if he had not come on so strong -- he might have accomplished something. Although he doubted it. There was no such thing as talker had been. Perhaps if he had phoned this afternoon, after he first had talked with the President, he might have been able at action, but he doubted that as well. It had been, he told himself, a hopeless business from the less. He looked at his watch. It was almost two o'clock. Picking up the phone, he dialed Judy's number. Her sleepy voice answered. "Did I, wake you up?" "No, Tve been waiting for you. Steve, you're awful late. What happened?" "I had to go to Fort Myer to pick up some refugees. Scientists. They're here, talking to the academy people. I won't make it, Judy." "You're not coming out?" "I should stay in touch. Too much is happening." "You'll be dead on your feet, come morning." "I'll stretch out on a couch in the lounge and get some rest." "I could come down. Stand watch." "No need. Someone will get hold of me if I'm needed. You go to bed. Be a little late in the morning if you want. I can get along." "Steve?" "Yes?" "It's not going good, is it?" "It's too soon to tell." "I saw the President on TV. It'll be an awful mess. We've never faced anything like this before." "No, not quite like this before." "I'm scared, Steve." "So am I," said Wilson. "It'll be different in the morning. We'll feel different in the morning." "I have a terrible sensation," Judy said, "that the solid ground is slipping out from under my feet. I've been thinking about my mother and sister out in Ohio. I haven't seen Mom in a long time." "Phone her. Talk, with her. You'll feel better." "I tried to. I tried and tried. But the circuits are jammed. Everyone is calling everyone. Like a holiday. The country is upset." "I just made a long-distance call." "Sure you did. You're the White House. They clear the lines for you." "You can call her tomorrow. Things will quiet down tomorrow." "Steve, you're sure you can't come out. I need you." "Sorry, Judy. Truly sorry. I have this horrible feeling that I should stay in reach. I don't know why, but I do." "I'll see you in the morning then." "Try to get some sleep." "You, too. Try to shut this out, try to get some sleep. You'll need it. Tomorrow will be bad." They said good night and he put the receiver back into its cradle. He wondered why he was staying here. There was at the moment no real need for him to stay. Although one could never know. Hell could break loose at any time. He should try to get some sleep, he told himself, but somehow he resisted sleep. He didn't. need it -- he was too strung out, too tense to sleep. Later he'd need sleep, when there was no chance of sleep. A few hours from now #II this would catch up with him. But right now IF his nerves were too tight, his brain too busy to allow for sleep. He went out and around the walk to the front lawn. The night was soft, resting for the heat and turmoil of the coming day. The city was quiet. Somewhere a motor growled, but there were no cars on the avenue. The pillars of the portico gleamed softly in the night. The sky was clear and a million stars hung there. A red light went blinking across the sky and from far overhead came the thrum of motors. A dark figure stirred at the edge of a group of trees. "You all right, sir?"' a voice asked. "Yes," said Wilson. "Just out for a breath of air." He saw now that the dark figure was a soldier, his rifle held aslant his chest. "Don't go wandering," said the soldier. "There are a lot af us out here. Some of the boys might be a little nervous." "I won't," said Wilson. "I'll go back indirectly." He stood listening to the quietness of the city, feeling the softness of the night. Something was different about it. Despite the quiet and the softness a certain tenseness seemed to reach out to touch him. # . A sound brought Elmer Ellis out of a sound sleep. He sat up in bed, befuddled, unable for a moment to orient himself. On the night table beside the bed the clock was ticking loudly ancT beside him his wife, Mary, was levering herself up on her elbows. Her sleepy voice asked, "What is it, Elmer?" "Something's at the chickens," he said, for now the reason for his waking came churning into his consciousness. The sound came again, the frightened flapping, squawking of the chickens. He threw back the covers and his feet hit the cold floor so hard they hurt. He groped for his trousers, got his legs into them, slid his feet into his shoes, did not stop to tie the laces. The squawking still went on. "Where is Tige?" asked Mary. "Damn dog," he growled. "Probably off chasing possum." He charged out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. Groping, he found the shotgun, lifted it from its pegs. From the game bag that hung beneath the pegs he took a handful of shells, jammed them into a pocket, found two more and thrust them into the chambers of the double-barrel. Bare feet pattered toward him. "Here's the flashlight, Elmer. You can't see a thing without it." She thrust it at him and he took it. The night was pitch black outside and he switched on the light to see his way down the porch steps. The squawking in the henhouse continued and there was no sign df Tige. This was strange. In a flare of anger he had said the dog was probably out hunting possum and that couldn't be true. Tige never went out hunting on his own. He was too old and stiff in the joints and he loved his bed under the porch. "Tige," he said, not too loudly. The dog whined from under the porch. "What the hell is wrong with you?" asked Elmer. "What is out there, boy?" Suddenly he was afraid -- more afraid than he had ever been before. Even more afraid than that time he had run into the Vietcong ambush. This was a different kind of fear -- like a cold hand reaching out and gripping him and holding him and he knowing he'd never get away. The dog whined again. "Come on, boy," said Elmer. "Come on out and get them." Tige did not come out. "All right, then," said Elmer. "Stay there." He went across the farmyard, shining his light ahead of him, picking out the henhouse door. The frightened squawking was louder than ever now, insane and frantic. Long ago, he told himself, he should have repaired the henhouse, plugged up the holes. The shape it was in, a fox would have no trouble gaining entry. Although it was strange, if what bothering the chickens were a fox, that the animal should still be there. At the first flsh of light, the first sound of a human voice, a fox would have been gone. What was in there? A weasel, maybe, or a mink? Even a raccoon? Outside the door he paused, reluctant to go on. But he couldn't turn back now. He'd never be able to live with himself if he did. Why, he wondered, should he be so frightened? It . was Tige, he thought. Tige was so scared that he refused to come from beneath the porch and some of that fright had rubbed off on him. "Damn that dog," he said. He reached out and lifted the lalch slammed the door back against the side of the building. He balancedthe gun in his right hand and directed the flash with his left. The first thing he saw in the circle of light were feathers -- feathers floating in the air. Then the running, squawking, flapping chickens and in among the chickens... Elmer Ellis dropped the flash and screamed and in mid-scream jerked the gun to his shoulder and fired blindly into the henhouse, first the right barrel, then the left, the shots so close together that they sounded as one explosion. Then they were coming at him, leaping from the open door, hundreds of them, it seemed, faintly IF seen in the light of the flash that lay on the ground -- horrible little monsters such as one would never see except in some sweating dream. He reversed the gun, scarcely realizing that he did so, grasping the barrels in both his hands, using it as a club, flailing with U blindly as they came swarming out at him. Jaws fastened on an ankle and a heavy body struck him in the chest. Claws raked his left leg from hip to knee and he knew that he was going down and that once he was down they would finish him. He sagged to his knees and now one of them had him by the arm and he tried to fight it off, while another clawed his back to ribbons. He tipped over on one side and ducked down his head, covering it with his one free arm, drawing up his knees to protect his belly. And that was all. They no longer chewed or ripped him. He jerked up his head and saw them, fiitting shadows, moving out into the dark. The beam of the fallen flashlight caught one of them momentarily and for the first time he really saw the sort of creatures that had been in the henhouse and at the sight of it he bawled in utter terror. Then it was gone -- all of them were gone -- and he was alone in the yard. He-tried to get up. Halfway there, his tegs folded under him and he fell heavily. He crawled toward the house, clawing "at the ground to puli himself along. He felt a wetness on one arm and one leg and a stinging pain was beginning in his back. The kitchen window glowed with a lighted lamp. Tige came out from beneath the porch and crawled toward him, belly flat against the ground, whining. Mary, in her nightgown, was running down the stairs. "Get the sheriff!" he yelled at her, gasping with the effort. "Phone the sheriff -- " She raced across the yard and kneeled beside him, trying to get her hands under his body to lift him. He pushed her away. "Get the sheriff. The sheriff has to know right away." "You're hurt. You're bleeding." "I'm all right," he told her fiercely. "They're gotit. But the others must be warned. You didn't see them. You don't know." "I have to get you in and call the doctor." "The sheriff first," he said. "Then the doctor." She rose and raced back to the house. He tried to crawl, covered only a few feet and then lay still. Tige came crawling out to meet him, edged in close to him and began to lick his face. Faith can move mountains. Susie s removed -- Susie f I Steve Spencer tried to hide all of his six-two frame behind the lichen-covered rock and comprehend the magnitude of the slide which had somehow failed to kill him. A huge slab of granite had cleaved his protective boulder in half seconds earlier and he was not yet convinced that a hard shove wouldn't turn that life-saving stone into a joint executioner and gravemarker. His body ached from fatigue. He hadn't moved a muscle in an hour and a half and his hair was tickling his nose. It was at times like this that he promised to have his shoulder-length blond hair chopped to a crewcut. These old mountains will never be the same, he thought. But unless my aim improves, neither will the rest of the world... He stared dumbly at the carbine by his side and tried to justify murdering poor, scared Susie. It would make a pretty lousy ending for his doctoral thesis. committee approved his proposal Steve was jubilant. His lean frame arranged itself randomly over the old stuffed chair that adorned his living room. Chuck Dorin, his roommate and coworker, tried to ignore him. Chuck's upcoming psychology test would definitely keep Chuck from being in a good mood for the next twenty-four hours. "You know," commented Steve, "this just might set a departmental record for the laziest doctpfal project ever to pass the research committee. All I have to do is take toys away from them when they're not looking. It's just that simple, stealing from babies." Chuck's broad . shoulders, topped by a tangle of curly black hair that looked as if it might or might not be hiding a head, gave no sign that he might be listening. "You know?" taunted Steve. Chuck turned his large frame and caromed a box of tissues off Steve's left shoulder. "Get off it," he grumbled. "You're about as cynical as a pair, of newlyweds. I've never seen you so excited about anything -- " When he thought about it Steve doubted that newlyweds got nearly this excited. The whole project had come up more or less by accident and, in the end, Steve had to give Sue Malor credit for giving him the idea in the first place. They had gone out for pizza after an unusually bad movie and Steve had tried to.explain to her the developIF ment of the "object concept" in infants. "It was way back in the nineteen-twenties that Piaget first introduced the 'object concept' into his studies of the development of intelligence in infants," he began. Sue's lithe figure sat back in the chair, a straw tenuously running from her lips to a coke. "According to Piagetian theory a newborn infant has no idea that the objects he sees are real. Toiim they are merely parts of a picture, with no reality of their own. But as the infant gets older he starts to experience the objects in other ways. He learns that what can be seen can also be felt and sometimes heard or smelled. In time, he realizes that these properties go together. But the object still is real only in his perceptiort. If the object is covered -- or hidden -- the infant shows no sign that he is aware that it still exists." Steve was building steam, his tong, bony arms gesturing as he spoke. "By six months he starts to understand that the objects have independent existences. If you put a watch -- or toy -- under a pillow and then show him where it is he will learn to look for it there. Even so, if you then put it under -- say -- his blanket, he's still likely to look for it under the pillow. It isn't until the infant is eighteen months old that he finally realizes that objects have truly independent existences -- that they are not present merely by virtue of his perception of them. So the child only slowly evolves the concept of the inherent reality of objects -- and only through constantly recurring reinforcements in his everyday life." By now Steve's comments were only vaguely aimed at Sue. She pushed a strand of long black hair from her eye and absently tucked it behind her ear. "No one has convinced me that some things really exist." She was still foul-tempered from a chemistry class where she had just been told that sometimes electrons were waves and sometimes they were particles. "All you scientists ever do is make up stupid theories and then cram everything into them. Time is relative, momentum is quantized, matter is waves and light is particles. Good thing those infants decide that objects are real. They would look pretty dumb trying to fit them into any other theory." She blew through the straw into Steve's face. "Not that an illustrious graduate student couldn't get the data to fit, but I just thought it might be kind of tricky for a twoyear-old." She attempted a horrible face and then settled for sticking out her tongue at him. Steve's face was blank. His eyes were focused on infinity. "Are you all right, Steve?" she asked. "Do you feel sick?" He had consumed quite a large pizza. "No, no," cried Steve. "What you just said -- what did you mean?" Sue could feel the eyes of everyone in the restaurant turn toward her idiotic Steve. She had no idea what he was talking about, but the symptoms were clear. "It's a great idea!" he continued. Another brainstorm had struck him in the head, she decided, and in the next instant he would be lecturing her wildly, scribbling on napkins and demanding instant comprehension from her. In a couple of days, after he had calmed down, he would explain it again more simply and she would finally find out what it was all about. But she hated these restaurant scenes. "No sarcasm, please," he said. "You've brought up a fantastic question. What if the child developed a different object concept? What if he decided that when an object disappeared from sight it no longer existed? Don't you see? We can test it in the lab. With monkeys. Use trap doors, stuff like that. We can convince an infant monkey hat objects have no independent reality. It's a beautiful project. Caa they learn thaft an object isn't real? And what will happen if we change things and let them find out that the objects are real? It's beautiful! Absolutely beautiful!" His voice trailed off as he began scribbling notes on one napkin after another. Sue was surprised. Fon once she had understood what he was talking about the first time through. L ater that night Steve went through it again, explaining this time to Chuck. "The basic question, then, is: If the experiences of the infant indicate that objects exist only as extensions of its own perceptions, what sorts of conclusions will it draw? Is the development of the concept that objects are real -- with independent existences -- automatic? Or is it something infants learn through experience?" Chuck asked, "Why limit yourself to whether objects can exist independently? Why not explore all types of 'realities' the infant can be convinced of? What if some objects could never be touched? You could use holograms. And monkeys for infants. That way you could take something like, say, fruit -- which we know monkeys like -- and present it only as an image. Rig up some gadget to spray the smell in with the image. What would the monkeys do with that?" Steve was catching on. "Fantastic. We could let them play with a pocket watch and after a while just introduce the sound, and see how the monkeys respond to that -- " The sky was turning a pale blue when they finally gave up and went to bed. They had worked out an even dozen key experiments IF Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. For all the right reasons. Kent. America s quality cigarette King Size or Deluxe #'s. Kings: # mg. "tar, #.I mg. nicotine; lOO's: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine av. per cigarette, Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. Please send me the following Kent Collectables n A. # qt. corn popper #  . Set of #-# oz. insulat  B.# cup insulated party perk #  F. Set of # insulated turn n C-#qt. insulated ice bucket # CH G. 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Something in the back of her head told her that she would be rooting for the monkeys and not for Stevebut it did seem that for once she might be able to keep track of what he was doing. "You know," she suggested, "it'll be sort of tricky if the monkeys accept whatever reality they are shown." "How so?" asked Steve. She realized that was the result he really wanted and saw no problems in accepting it. "Well, then you'll say that the monkeys were taught that something was real that wasn't -- and they accepted it, right?" "Yeh." Steve seemed to know that he was being set up, but to have no idea just where she was heading. "Then how will you know that you don't have your realities backward?" She waited, but he simply stared as if he had already considered the question and its implications long before she asked it. She decided she would have to wait and see. B y the end of the week a heavily documented research proposal was in the hands of the chairman of the doctoral project committee. Ten days later Steve defended the proposal before the committee and it was approved. It took him and Chuck another week to build the first experimental cage and they unveiled it for Sue with paternal pride. "Every part of the floor is a trapdoor," explained Steve. "We can remove any object from any section of the cage instantly." The contraption stood in one corner of the laboratory, across from the door. It was large -- six fcet square and four feet high. The floor was a grid of six-inch square tiles. A vast number of wires ran to a series of controls in front of the cage. "Or put things in," added Chuck. "One of the stages of infant learning is the discovery that when an object disappears from sight one may expect it to show up again -- perhaps randomly .or in a specific place, but not necessarily where it went out of sight. So we've rigged up some loading platforms that will shoot objects up into the cage so that they just seem to materialize." "Remember, Sue?" Steve asked. "We were talking that night about a watch placed under the pillow and then moved in earlier experiments with infants? Well we're going to do something just like that. Whenever our pocket watch 'disappears' through a trapdoor, we'll simultaneously sneak another one exactly like it into a predetermined location." "Behind the surrogate mother," Chuck explained. "The what?" asked Sue. "She's not going to like this," Steve cautioned Chuck. He would have preferred not to have the point come up. "Isn't someone going to explain this little tidbit to me?" "Okay, it's simple." Steve's tone was defensive. "We can only have one monkey in a cage -- otherwise we can't control the experiment. But each cage will contain a surrogate mother -- a phony made of wire and cloth, with nipples attached to bottles for feeding the experiment's subject." "The poor things will go crazy without real mothers to give them affection." "They won't," countered Chuck. "In previous experiments caged monkeys definitely have not gone crazy. But ours won't even lack affection. Steve and I will be handling them and giving them love as part of the deal. They've gojt to be able to trust us completely for us to get the right readings." "If it'll make you feel belter," Steve suggested to Sue, "you can pitch in -- feed them by bottle whenever you want. It'll be all to the good." "What are all these ther gadgets for?" she asked. She definitely did not like the use of the surrogate mothers and now she was becoming suspicious and worried. "These were the most fun," Chuck told her, pointing. "They're tiny nozzles -- these tubes are attached to' aerosol dispensers, so that we can add various smells to the cage without showing the objects the scents belong to."  Steve pointed oit a number of buttons located at various points around the cage, each with a single wire running from it. "And these are minispeakers, so that we can do the same thing with sounds -- like suggest a rattle or a tom-tom. They're grounded to the cage, so we need only a single thin wire running to each speaker." Sue looked at a huge piece of equipment sitting on a cart next to the cage. "And this, I suppose, is to dissect their brains with when you're done with them?" Chuck laughed. "It's a laser. We're using it to produce holograms, three-dimensional images of an object that isn't really there. We can project the image of, say, an orange into the cage. We can use aerosol spray to add the smell to go with the image. IF Every once in a while the monkey will be able to see and smell an orange, but he'll never be able to grab it," Sue was impressed. She couldn't imagine how the monkeys might react. Steve told her not to try. "We're not supposed to assume or try to predict -- the purpose of the experiment is to find out what will happen under the test conditions. All we can do now is wait. The shop says it can have the other five cages for us in two weeks. Then we'll be ready to start." Aate having one named after me," Sue whispered. She watched the infant monkey named Susie as it fed itself from the surrogate mother. "I don't care what you say, it just isn't natural for that poor thing to have to nurse from a mother made of cloth andwire." Steve was edgy. He didn't care for the isolation of the monkeys any more than Sue did, but it had to be done. The big question was how the monkeys were going to respond to their "realities." Sue seemed to read his mind. "And what you're going to convince #hose poor creatures is real is going to drive them insane. I'm certain it will." "Why?" argued Steve. "Do dogs go crazy when they're confronted with radios and television sets? And what about elevators? They go into this little room. Thirty seconds later they leave by the same door and they're in an entirely different place. They don't even seem to notice it." ' "But that's different," Sue insisted. "Dogs basically know that objects exist. Radio and television are just things that won't work for them. They probably throw them out the way you throw out what you can't use." "You don't know that's how they react," protested Steve. "But neither do you," she persisted. "But with these monkeys you're going to switch things around, so that what used to be real will start disappearing and what used to be untouchable will become solid. What's that going to do to the poor things?" "Just one poor thing," said Steve. "Just Susie." "Thanks," Sue growled. The addition of this new series of experiments was the last change that had been made in the plans for the project -- and Steve and Chuck agreed it was the most important. One of the monkeys would find, after twelve months, that objects changed from one "reality class" to another. "Reality classes" referred to the apparent characteristics of a set of items -- the classifications had been worked out while they had waited for the cages to be finishcd. The whole program had finally shaped up into a comprehensive whole. In all, six monkeys would be used -- three experimental and three control. The control monkeys would merely live in the special cages, dubbed "reality cages'" by Sue. No objects would disappear or reappear, no smells, sounds or images would be presented out of normal context. These three would be raised in the generally accepted "real"' world. Only the three experimental monkeys would be subjected to altered realities -- one for six months, one for twelve months and one for eighteen. After their time was up they would be transferred into other cages, where they would experience standard realities. Steve and Chuck planned to watch carefully the reactions and adaptations of the monkeys to this change. "Only Susie will have objects changing from one class to another," explained Steve. "For the first six months each of the three experimental animals will be given twelve objects to play with and each will have a different reality or, as we put it, each will belong to a different 'reality class.' Thus, one class will be represented by the orange. It will always be seen and smelled, but the monkeys will never be able to touch it. Another, represented by the watch, will always disappear when out of the monkey's vision, but will reappear immediately in a certain place, behind the surrogate mother. Another class, including a jrattle, will disappear, but reappear at a random time and ajndom place. Bananas will sometimes be real and sometimes only images with smells. And so on. Only the twelve objects will be used. For Fred, who'll spend six months in the reality cages, this will be all that he goes through." "Go on," said Sue. Steve had never explained the final layout before and Sue was convinced the reason was that he didn't think she would like it. "Paul goes for twelve months and Susie for eighteen. What happens to them?" "Calm down," Steve said. "I can't explain it to you if you're already convinced that it's going to ' be something awful. Believe me, it won't be." Sue relented. Her scowl disappeared. "Okay," Steve said. "After the first six months Paul and Susie will be given new objects. Each will be manipulated to fit into one of the twelve reality classes identified by the original twelve objects. Once introduced, each new object will always appear in the same reality class and no contradictons will be made. The question is will the animals learn to categorize objects according to their class? We're hoping that maybe the monkeys will be able IF to classify the objects after a very short encounter with them. This would tend to show that they actually a(re aware of the different realities and have accepted them." "And Susie?" asked Sue. "What special treats does she get for her last six months?" "Precisely what you suggested," interjected Chuck. He had come in minutes earlier and had been listening quietly. "We're going to take objects that Susie is familiar with, that have always acted in the same way, and switch them into another reality class. The doll, which had always behaved as a real doll will become just an image. The orange, which she had never been able to grasp, will become a real object. And when the watch is hidden from her it won't reappear behind the surrogate mother. It'll just stay right where it was put -- and I really don't know what you're so upset about." He was mad now -- and worried that she might convince Steve to modify the experiments in some way. "It's just so unnatural," she complained. "So is wearing clothes -- and so is driving a car," he snapped and stomped out of the room. "It's not just that, Steve." She was still unsettled by the whole affair. "The more I think about it, the less I like what Susie is going to have to go through." "Well, you won't be the first person ever to empathize with an ape." "I don't feel just empathy," Sue told him. "What Chuck said is true. Man lives in a completely unnatural world. Look, ever since man became a technological creature scientists have been arguing with the rest of us that what we think is true isn't. So when Armstrong landed on the moon reporters found that something like a quarter of the people they interviewed didn't believe that he was really on the moon. They thought it was all a colossal puton. Steve started rolling long strands of hair around a pencil. Since he had let his hair grow he had picked up several of Sue's nervous habits. "So what are you getting at? You think they're as dumb as Susie? Or dumber?" "No, but they're just as lucky." She groped for words. "Don't you see? Science has destroyed modern man's confidence in reality. He doesn't know whether to believe his senses or not and no attempt is made to clarify the contradiction. That's why I get so mad when some bigdome gets up in front of the class and tells me that matter is just waves and not really solid at all. If you were shown an object disappearing and reappearing across the room you would say 'Wow, teleportation!" There is no alteration of reality that you wouldn't accept. Sure, in some ways that's a good thing. But this is what I meant when I said I wasn't so sure that objects did exist. Those people who insisted that Armstrong was on a movie set would never have any trouble with disappearing objects. To them it would be a gimmick. For you and me -- anything we believe we make our senses accept. Some day we're going to have to confront all of this -- and I don't see anyone trying to get ready -- " "Fm sorry," said Steve. "I really don't understand what you're getting at." "You probably never will," she answered. n Steve slowly raised a hand to wipe his forehead. Damn her, he thought. Shes right down there, somewhere. He had been stupid to fire at that great a distance and it had never dawned on him that a police carbine would fire any differently from the old twenty-two he had grown up with. All he had managed to do was scare Susie enough to convince her to retaliate and she showed no inclination to reveal her position now. He had radioed for more men and had been promised a squad of army sharpshooters, but the men refused to approach within line of sight and the squad had been dropped off two miles own the valley. If they didn't spot her by sunset they wouldn't have a chance, and Coleman had radioed in that the Pentagon had decided to level the whole area if they didn't get her. Susie had sealed her own fate. There was no way out. And he had taught her -- was that fair? Yes, ho the ultimate buffoon, had taught her to do it. He was tired and worn out. Nothing made sense. Leveling ten square miles of Rockies to kill a single monkey made more sense than most of the day's events. A lazy doctoral thesis, he had called it. How was he going to write this one up? labeled the occasion a celebration, but a break in the tedium might have been more accurate. The experiment was six months old today and he, Sue and Chuck had ordered pizza and champagne to celebrate the end of Phase One. Tomorrow two of the monkeys would come out of their reality cages and Paul and Susie would be introduced to their first new objects. Despite all this, a half-year of boring repetition IF had drained Steve of his enthusiasm. "Those damn monkeys accept anything," he complained. "There is absolutely no difference between the experimental animals and the controls. Except in what they take for reality. Whenever the watch disappears they look behind Mama for it. When the rattle disappears they don't expect it back. When the banana turns out to be only an image they ignore it. They're completely predictable -- so where's the fun? I'd like to hit one of those beasts on the head with an orange!" It had been five months since any of the experimental animals had shown any interest at all in the sight and smell of an orange. "For Pete's sake, Steve, how can you complain?" argued Sue. "The experiment so far is a success. Your results have been perfectly clear -- and better than you had any right to expect." "Not to mention," Chuck added, "three publications in six months. I know a lot of people who would give their right arms to be bored like that." "I'm not complaining about the results," Steve said. "You're both absolutely right -- there's no doubt that the monkeys accept whatever reality they're given. They've learned and accepted all twelve reality classes without a flinch. What has me climbing walls is that, beyond the obvious, there hasn't been a single event worth getting excited about." "Well, that's what this celebration is all about," Sue added cheerily. "Tomorrow you're sure to get some interesting results. Fred comes out of the reality cage and you can hit him with that orange. And I bet Paul and Susie will be happy to see their first new toys in six months." Steve relaxed. "Okay. I admit I am expecting a little change tomorrow. But somehow I'm convinced that they'll make it as dull as possible." He drank a glass of champagne without pausing. "And you -- " He pointed a finger accusingly at Sue. "You have every. right to be cheerful. As long as those little brats o on without any shocks or confusion your little conscience feels just fine. I'm almost convinced that anything that would cheer me up would turn you sour." Sue looked suddenly thought ful. But, "Wait till tomorrow -- " was all she said. "At this point," he muttered, "I'll take whatever I can get." T he next morning all three were at the lab by eight-thirty. A certain air of confidence was also present. Steve gave each of the monkeys a nut, as he did every morning, then turned to his fellow humans. "Where would you suggest we start?" "Let's transfer Fred out of the reality cage and give him an orange," urged Sue. Steve opened Fred's cage and called to Fred. The monk scampered to him and leaped into  Steve's arms. "Okay, boy, you're in for a little fun." Steve transferred him to another cage across the room. Sue had already placed an orange near the door of the cage. Fred looked at the orange and wandered away. "He's sure it isn't real," whispered Chuck. "It might take a while." "We'll wait," Steve decided. "He's got nothing else in the cage to play with, so it shouldn't take too long." Within five minutes Fred had returned to the orange. He sat and looked at it, then tried to pass his hand through the image. The orange was sent rolling across the cage. Fred froze, his eyes fixed on the orange. He looked at his hand and back at the orange. He circled in the cage nervously for a few minutes, then returned to the fruit. He batted it lightly. It rolled. He hit it again, harder, and finally sent it flying across the cage. He jumped about, screaming in excitement. Finally he pounced on the fruit, held it firmly in his hands. He turned it over and over, put it down, picked it up and went through the whole procedure again. He was convinced. The orange was real. In minutes he had devoured it. Steve was delighted. From her purse Sue produced a bottle of wine. "I think we need another celebration," she proclaimed. "A toast to crazy monkeys." All three gathered around the bottle. After a semblance of order had returned to the scene Chuck said, "I want to give Paul or Susie a new toy." "Something that will disappear and then reappear behind Mama," suggested Sue. For the past six months, the watch had always reappeared behind Mama after disappearing. "Let's give Paul a bell," Steve said. He pulled one down from a shelf and walked over to Paul's cage. "Paul, I've got a toy for you." Steve rang the bell, then opened the door and set it down in the cage. Paul took it tentatively, but dropped it when it rang. He picked it up again and it rang again. He dropped it. After going through the same routine a half dozen times he was running around the cage ringing the bell loudly. "Let's hide it now," said Chuck. He retrieved the bell from Paul. "Here it goes, Paul," Chuck announced and hid it under a large inverted bowl. The bowl was routinely used to make objects "disappear." Steve drppped the bell through the trapdoor beneath the bowl and raised another one into IF the cage behind Mama. Paul contemplated the bowl. Chuck righted the bowl, showing the empty space. Paul sat a minute, then went slowly over to Mama. Seeing the bell, he let out a shout, picked it up and ran about the cage, ringing it merrily. "He looked behind Mama first." Sue was delighted. "He looked behind Mama!" Quickly they put the bell under the bowl again. This time Paul didn't even pause, but headed straight for Mama. "He was damn sure of himself that time," Sue said. "There was no question. He knew the reality class and put the bell right into it." "Another resounding success," announced Chuck. Steve grinned. "Another paper." Everything was going better than they had expected. They tried another orange with Fred. He attacked and devoured it immediately. They gave a bell to Susie arid her reactions were identical to Paul's. "Let's try Susie's trick with it," suggested Chuck. Susie's trick had been worked out jointly by Steve and Susie. For the effective operation of the trapdoors the monkeys had to be looking elsewhere or the object had to be covered To prevent the animal's seeing the mechanism in operation. Susie, unlike both Fred and Paul, had figured this out. After a while she had started to cover her eyes in order to make things disappear. Steve had quickly sensed that this was Susie's intent and had whisked away the watch when she covered her eyes. When she uncovered them and didn't sec the watch she headed straight for Mama. Over the next two of three days she and Steve had perfected the trick. Now the bell was put over an exposed trapdoor, in plain sight of Susie. But instead of covering her eyes she grabbed it and started to play with it. Steve retrieved it and tried again. On the fourth try Susie cooperated. She sat about two feet from the bell and covered her eyes. Steve dropped it through a trapdoor and transferred it behind Mama. Susie uncovered her eyes, gtamed toward where it had been and hcadecl for Mama. "Enough," Chuck said. "I can't take any more of this." She and Steve agreed and the three left for the day. All three were hung over the next mornings monotonous routine. In a month's time Fred was indistinguishable from his control. Anything he saw he assumed was real. There was nothing left to do with him. Paul and Susie delighted in the occasional new toys they received, but they would classify each object as soon as enough time and events had passed to define which reality class it was in. The tedium returned and the next five months crept past unbearably slowly. Only the question of how Susie would react to an, object's changing from one realky to another kept Steve's interest alive. Still, the celebratipn after one year was considerably gayer than the six-month festivities. Ill The sun was slowly creeping toward the mountain peaks and now the lichencovered boulder cast a dark shadow over Steve. For the first time in two hours he dared to shift his position. Coleman reported that the sharpshooters had taken cover in the brush that surrounded Ihe bottom edge of the scree field, but could catch no sight of Susie. If no one could hit Ssie by sunset a helicopter would ferry out all personnel and the bombers would move in. The valley had already been evacuated and Steve had heard a low-flying plane broadcasting warnings to any campers or hikers who might still be in the area. Susie was unable to move without giving away her position, but she could easily sit and wait until dark. Steve broke into a cold sweat as his mind touched on the idea of Susie's bringing about a premature sunset. That way lay madness, he thought, and drove the concept from his mind. If he had any guts he'd take his chances with Susie in the hopes that if Susie got him one of the sharpshooters would get her. God only knew what she could do if she set her mind to it. But he just sat and prayed for the tiny movement that would give away her position. Susie, you have to die anyhow. Let me do it -- I started it... If only he had stopped his experiments at twelve months. A Phase Three," Steve announced, "and once gain our ennui will give way to a succession of astonishing events." He wasn't really drunk, but wine plus the excitement had rhade him a bit lightheaded. "I do worry about Susie, though," said Sue. "She seems so much brighter than the others and I'm afraid that the shift may really mess her up." "Oh, get off it. Sue. I thought you were the one who wasn't so sure that objects existed in the first place. And Susie definitely IF doesn't believe they do. She should be able to cope well with the change. You'll see. Tomorrow morning we'll put the watch under Susie's bowl and it'll just stay there. Want to bet on what happens?" "I don't know," she muttered. "I just hope that nothing goes wrong." She finished her wine and the three left. M onday belonged to Susie. Steve showed no signs of being tense. He was the scientist now and he was careful to make sure that Susie would get no cue from him of the changes to come. He proceeded through the morning ritual, giving Susie a nut from the jar on the counter. She snatched it from his hand and ran over to Mama. Jumping up and down, she dropped it behind Mama -- in a small pile of about a dozen nuts. The smile disappeared from Steve's face. "What the hell?" He whirled to face Sue. "Is this your idea of an apology to Susie -- to give her extra nuts?" Sue's face showed incomprehension. "We went over procedure several times -- there ere to be no changes in today's routine except for the actual shifting of objects from one reality class to another. So you go and give her a dozen nuts the very morning of the switch!" "I did not. I couldn't have. Chuck got here before me. He'll tell you I didn't." "I don't see how she could have, Steve. Someone must have come in before any of us -- or else last night." Steve was in a fury. "Well, if this is someone's idea of a joke it's a pretty poor one." All three stood around, troubled and disappointed. "Look," said Chuck. "We obviously can't change Susie's schedule today." She was sitting in the far corner of her cage, shivering with fright at Steve's violent outburst. "Let's transfer Paul out of the reality cage today and we can switch Susie's schedule to Wednesday. Two days isn't really going to matter and in a month you'll hardly remember what happened." "Okay," muttered Steve. "But first I put up a big no goddam remind me to make sure that those nuts get moved from Susie's cage. They're right behind Mama, over the loading platform. Whoever put the nuts there had a real sense of humor." E verything went smoothly until Steve returned from lunch the next afternoon. He was getting over his anger and had again become excited about Susie's switch, set for the next morning. As he wandered past Susie's cage he saw a fresh pile of nuts behind Mama. He dragged Chuck out of the lab and into the hall. "Have you been here all afternoon?" he asked "Since I left for lunch?" The anger in his voice was obvious. "Essentially, Why?" "What do you mean, 'essentially'?" "I mean yes, except that I went downstairs for a coke around twelve-thirty. What's going on around here?" "Did you give Susie any nuts?" Steve snarled through clenched teeth. "Of course not." Steve was in a rage. "There's a new stack of nuts on the trapdoor behind Mama. And if I find the funnyman whose pulling this. I'll kill him! Tonight those nuts go home with me and I'll bring two in every day." He turned to leave. "I'll be back later. If I try to work in this mood I'll drive Susie up a wall. But I'm still changing her over tomorrow morning." When he came back that afternoon he still couldn't concentrate constructively. People didn't mess up other people's experiments for a joke. Had he somehow managed to offend someone enough to have called down this. kind of vengeance on himself? "Steve," Chuck called. "Pay attention to what you're doing." Steve returned to his senses and realized that Suzie had beeji covering her eyes, trying to make the rattle disappear. As she repeated the gesture he dropped the toy through the trapdoor. "Why don't you call it a day?" Chuck suggested. "It would be a real shame if you messed up badly enough for us to have to postpone the transfer again." Steve nodded. He was tired and discouraged. He trudged out of the lab and took an elevator to the lobby. He was almost out of the building when he realized that he had forgotten the nuts. In a foul humor he rode back upstairs and slammed into the lab. Chuck was closing the door to Susie's cage. "You must really be out of it, Steve," chided Chuck. "You left the rattle in Susie's cage. If I hadn't heard her playing with it she would have had it with her all night." The rule that non-reaUoys should not stay in the cages when the animals were alone was strict. "How could I have?" insisted Steve. "I dropped it out just before I left." "Well no one else has been here since you left, Steve. I'd try to get some extra sleep tonight if I were you. A sleeping pill couldn't hurt any. You're starting to look bad." Steve grunted in irritation and headed for the door. "Don't forget the nuts!" called Chuck. Steve snatched the jar from the bench and stomped out. IF next morning. His night had been filled with nightmares featuring Susie and nuts and watches and rattles, appearing and disappearing. He finally awoke in a cold sweat after he himself had disappeared from his last dream. He was tired and groggy and wanted nothing more than to abandon the whole project. Only the realization that in twelve hours the switch would be completed kept him going. Then he could look forward to another six months of luxurious boredom. He joined Sue fqr breakfast at eight. She was alert and excited by the day's plans. Bu she was visibly shaken by Steve's apparent condition. He told her about the nuts and the rattle, and his dreams of the night before. A grin crept across her face. "I'm sorry, Steve -- it's just that we've come full circle." She couldn't wipe the smile off her face. "You got this whole scheme from me when I doubted the reality of certain interpretations of matter and phenomena -- and I'm almost convinced now you're not sO sure yourself that things are what they seem -- or as they sometimes are represented to be." "That's stupid," he growled. "Come on," she said, rising. "Let's get down to the lab. We wouldn't want Chuck to start without us, would we?" She showed him a huge pout and Steve had to smile despite himself. Chuck was waiting when they reached the lab and he was eager to get started. Steve gave Susie her nut and chatted inanely with her for a couple of minutes. Then he gave Susie the watch to play with. As always, Susie accepted it readily. She danced around the cage, pausing now and then to listen to its ticking. After a few minutes Steve wrestled it away from her and slipped it ynder the bowl. This time it would stay there. In more than a thousand trials during the past year Susie had always seen it disappear and reappear behind Mama. This time it would not. As always, Susie ran to the surrogate Mama and reached for the watch. It wasn't there. Susie froze. She sat motionless for exactly thirty seconds and then started screaming wildly. Steve showed Susie the watch under the bowl and then covered it again. She stared at the bowl for long seconds and then slowly lifted her hands to cover her eyes. "She's trying to' make it disappear," whispered Sue. "She wants it to disappear. Oh, God -- she will go mad this time." Susie uncovered her eyes, walked cautiously to Mama, and peered behind the dummy parent. Immediately she started chattering happily. She reached behind Mama. In an instant she had the watch in her hand. F or a long time Steve, Sue and Chuck simply stared at Susie and the watch. No one said a word. No one moved. What was there to say? Without breaking the silence Steve examined the cage. The trapdoors were all wired properly. The releases were in position. The loading platforms were all empty and the receptacle beneath the bowl was empty. He opened the door to the cage and lifted the bowl. There was nothing there. Three blank faces stared at the bowl. Steve turned to the others. "Have I gone crazy? Did either of you see it? It disappeared. Didn't it?" His voice verged on hysteria. Sue nodded. "Yes -- and then it reappeared behind Mama...We all saw it." "No!" shouted Chuck. "Someone's pulling some sort of a stunt," He didn't sound at all confident of his explanation. "What's the matter with us? It's obviously some sort of a joke. Look out." He pushed past Steve and examined the wires operating the trapdoors and loading platforms. "Everything seems okay," he muttered, but then disconnected the trapdoors and loading platforms. "This reality bit is going to all of our heads." He retrieved the watch from Susie and placed it under the bowl. "Now let's see this work!" He felt foolish. Whoever had rigged this gag would never let them forget their reactions. All three were in position to look behind Mama as Susie covered her eyes. Instantly the watch appeared behind Mama. "This is insane." Steve jammed his hands deep into his pockets. "This just isn't real." He paced back and forth, trying to regain his self-control. 'There is a nice rational explanation for all of this. And we're going to find it." Without saying a word Sue retrieved the watch from Susie. The others stared as she placed the watch on top of the inverted bowl, in plain sight. Susie immediately rais her hands and covered her eyes. A split second later the watch vanished, only to reappear simultaneously behind Mama. "Oh, my God," whispered Chuck. "Steve -- the nuts. They appeared behind the surrogate mother. Just like the watch." Steve stared straight ahead. "Yes." His voice was controlled. "And I know I didn't leave the rattle in there last night." She turned to Steve. "Susie did it, didn't she? She made her reality work." Steve started to laugh. "Well, I guess it isn't morning yet. This has got to be just another one of those nightmares I was having last night." Sue said "Let's break." She turned to Chuck. "Let's go somewhere else -- do something else. I IF don't want to stay here any longer. Not just now." "No," said Chuck. "I want to try a couple of things first. Give me the orange." Sue looked at him blankly. "I want to see if it's real to Susie." Susie had never experienced a real orange. Only a hologram and a smell. He took the orange and put it in Susie's cage by the door. All three gazed ia silence. At first Susie simply ignored it. She had seen the holograms many times and had no reason to suspect that this was any different. After a few minutes Steve reached in and gave the orange a shove. He took the watch from the cage and closed the door. Susie studied the orange intently. She had never seen a hologram roll, so this was definitely a novelty. She approached the orange, sat a foot away from it, considering what to do. Finally she reached out an arm and swatted at it. Her hand went right through tle orange. "Let's get out of here," Chuck urged. "I thought you wanted to test two things," Sue said. She stared at the cage in a trance. "Forget it," said Chuck. "Right now I want to test a pitcher of beer." The three headed for the door. The watch was still clutched in Steve's right hand. As he followed the others out he pulled the door shut behind him. As it closed he felt the watch vanish from his hand. He hurried away. They were waiting for him at the elevators. "You can stay here if you want," he said, without slowing down. "I'm taking the stairs." The others followed him. T heir conversation was rei stricted to the weather as they drank their first pitcher of beer. They were halfway through the second when Chuck violated the unspoken taboo. His face was tense. "I think I believe it," he said and suddenly the clamp that had been holding all three silent was released. "It doesn't make any sense and it can't be and it's crazy -- but I believe it. Something in the back of my brain keeps saying 'She did it, so what?' And I have no answer." "I know," said Steve. "The same thoughts have been going through my head. 'Why not?' my head keeps asking. And I don't know why not; I never really could believe in relativity either. I mean that Sue here could take off in a starship, eat lunch, take a shower, land, get off -- and I'd be eighty years old. But I accept it anyhow, because I've been told it's true. Well this is just the opposite. All my training, all my intellect says, 'You're hallucinating, dreaming, undergoing mass hypnosis -- ' Things like that. But this time something keeps asking. 'Why not?' And I can't answer." "You know," Sue suggested, "in a way we have gone crazy. I mean I don't really think we, have, but if what we saw did actually happen -- then maybe all those other people who have been locked . up for being crazy aren't -- at least some of them. I mean, there's one reality that's accepted -- and if you perceive or believe in any other you're crazy. And ft doesn't matter whether you saw it because you were on drugs or because it really is like that. You're just as crazy in the eyes of the world." She looked from Steve to Chuck and then down at her empty glass. "It's easier," she whispered. "It's easier if you don't try to fight the question of your sanity. Either we are crazy -- or we don't know what the word means any more." She had nothing more to say. "Okay," argued Chuck, "maybe we are crazy -- and maybe Susie did all those things we saw her do. I'm not sure which. But if she did do what we saw her do -- how could she? I mean, a lot of people have watched a lot of monkeys do a lot of things and I've never heard of this before. If we did see what we think we saw there still has to be a logical explanation for it. It's not going to bring everything crumbling down around us -- any more than when people found out that energy could be changed to matter. Forty years ago no one would have believed it possible -- but when the transformation proved. out it didn't destroy the rest of our structures. We just had to modify them a bit." "There's no comparison," objected Steve. "If. some physicist had given a completely incomprehensible lecture and then showed us a machine that could do what Susie did -- we'd have no trouble accepting it. Even if we couldn't understand the explanation, the knowledge that an explanation existed would be all that we'd need. The problem is that we have no explanation for what we just saw. It contradicts everything we've been taught and everything our senses have told us. We can't fit it in anywhere. When you stop to think about it, an aborigine would have more trouble dealing with New York City than we have had with this." Some of the shock was slipping from Steve's mind. He was slowly constructing a web of support for his wounded reality. "But why did it happen now?" insisted Chuck. "Why us?" "That's easy," answered Sue. A picture had 'slowly been forming in her mind, too, but she was afraid of Steve's reaction to it. He wasn't going to like it. "We taught her. Steve, you always said that you would never go into an experparticular results, but that's exactly what you've done. IF "What have we been doing for the past year? We asked the question, 'What happenes when you teach a monkey from infancy that reality is different from what we know it to be? What happens if you convince the monkey that some objects are insubstantial and others can arbitrarily disappear?' Well, we asked the question and we've gotten our answer. The reality they are taught becomes their reality. I don't mean that they believe what is false -- I mean that what is true for them is different from what is true for us. We've all been taught one reality, so we all believe it and it is real for us. Our experiment has never been done before." "That's not actually correct," Chuck put in. "In ancient times people believed in witches, miracles, stuff like that -- and there appeared to be a lot to support their convictions. Whenever quack cures and stories about witches and miracles are discredited, the socalled mysteries seem to stop happening. We have assumed that they never did happen but we don't really know that. We just figured that what we found to be true after we got there was true before. But when you stop to think about it, that sure leaves a lot of unexplained stories. We've just never had anything else to do with the data -- so we chucked it out." "But it still doesn't work," argued Steve. "What about our reality? Maybe Susie expected the watch to disappear and the orange to be insubsUntial -- but I'll be damned if wp did. We expected them both to be just what they always have been for us. How come her reality worked and ours didn't? There were three of us, you know." "That's not fair," replied Sue. "We don't really have that firm a grip on any particular reality. We've all accepted relativity and the wave theory of matter. Steve, you said minutes ago that if some scientist said a fact was reasonable you'd have no trouble accepting it. Well, you'd have a hell of a time convincing Susie. People give up their realities too easily. "The three of us are already accepting what happened. We've got no faith in our realities. But Susie's never lost her faith -- so hers was just that much stronger. I don't think we ever had much chance against her. That's Why crazy people get locked up. The whole purpose of therapy is to convince the person that his or her reality is not real. You know that what I'm saying is almost exactly what a shrink would say. He'd just insist that the reality that the crazy person saw didn't exist. That's the only difference." "Now that's what I call a minor difference," Steve muttered, "So what do we do -- write it up and submit it? That minor difference might just be major enough to get us all locked up for a good long while. We may be conpeople out there who would not." "I'm not sure," Sue protested. "I think you'll find a lot more support than you could imagine." "Well, I still want to know where we go from here." Steve felt better, but the thought of trying to convince someone else of what he. Sue and Chuck thought they had seen happen brought back all of his fears and doubts. "Convince other people," said Chuck. "Professor Coleman's head of psychology. Let's talk to him. But first we'd better show him." "Yes -- don't tell him what's going to happen," warned Siie. "I think he's more sure of his reality than all of us and Susie put together. If he knows what we're expecting, I'm not sure that he couldn't stop her." "Besides," said Chuck. "I'd feel better if someone else saw it, too." A cretive people I've never seen." Coleman was both irritated and interested. "But it's clear that you're going to be insistent, so let's see what this is all about." Steve had practically dragged the short, stocky Coleman from his office, much to the astonishment of his staff. When they reached the lab they found the door ajar and Susie's cage empty. A neat stretch of bars was missing. Coleman pushed past Steve to examine the cage. "Strange," he muttered. "Metal doesn't look like it's been cut. There are no marks at all. How was it done?" He turned to Steve. "I gather this isn't what you intended to show me?" All three started talking at once. In a matter of minutes Coleman was seriously considering calling for three straitjackets. Steve took over. "So you see. Dr. Coleman, Susie must have made the bars disappear, too," he finished, "I know this is going to be hard to -- " The blare of a fire alarm interrupted him. "There's no test schedule for today," muttered Coleman. He grabbed a phone and called his office. "They don't know anything about it," he reported. "Let's go." They took the stairs to the first floor and headed for the front door. As they passed a corridor, they saw a crowd gathered at its end. Someone saw Professor Coleman and hailed him. Dr. Lewis Pearson, a younger member of the psychology department faculty, waved from the edge of the crowd and was obviously quite upset. Coleman started down the hall at a jog. Steve, Sue and Chuck followed IF him. The crowd parted to let them through. They found themselves staring at the outer wall of the building. Or, rather, out through the wall. A circle three feet in diameter and some six inches above the floor had been cut out of the wall. It was a perfectly clean hole and it looked disturbingly familiar to the four. Pearson was speaking hurriedly to Coleman: "... and it appears that that's why she pulled the alarm. She's completely incoherent, but she sticks to her story. She says the monkey just covert its eyes and the hole appeared. "I've called the hospital for an ambulance, but we still have this crazy hole to deal with. Look at it. The edges are clean. How could anyone make a hole like this and not be noticed?" Pearson looked at Coleman for an answer. "Where's the girl?" asked Coleman. "I think I'd better talk to her." "She's in your office -- the secretaries are taking care of her." Coleman wordlessly took off for his office, Steve, Sue and Chuck still a part of his entourage. "You know she's telling the. truth, Coleman, don't you?" Steve said. "We've got to get Susie back. God only knows what she may do if she gets scared." "When I need your advice I'll ask for it." Coleman spoke over his shoulder as he strode. "If you want to handle the fire department and the police and whatever else -- they're yours. But as regards this poor woman. I'm at least temporarily in charge." Steve walked with him in silence. They found the girl sitting between two comforting secretaries in Coleman's office. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she looked scared. "I swear  saw it," she said. "I'm not crazy. A monkey just made the hole appear." Coleman sent the other women away. "We know," he said quietly. "The monkey escaped from one of our labs and we're looking for her. Do you know which way she went after she got out?" Coleman sounded and looked as if he only half believed his own words. "Don't play games with me," the girl whispered. "I saw it, I really did -- " Sue came forward and put an arm around the girl. "Dr. Coleman's not playing games," she said. "He's just having a hard tinie believing what's happened. So am I. You're not crazy. Not at all. Really." The girl started to whimper quietly. "Come on," said Coleman. "We can leave her with my staff. We've got to find that damn monkey of yours. The fire trucks arrived. Coleman spoke to the fire chief and asked to use the car radio. "Put me in touch with Chief Heninger." Coleman was contacting the police chief. "Chief Heninger? This is Dr. Coleman, Tm head of the psychology department at the university. I'm afraid we're going to need your help." "What seems to be the problem?" Coleman hesitated. This would have to be phrased carefully. "I can't explain all the details. I'm afraid. The project is classified. Goverment security. We've been conducting some very important experiments with a group of monkeys and one of them has escaped. We need your help to find her and get her back." "Have you tried the humane society. Dr. Coleman? They're animal exp -- " "You don't understand," Coleman snapped. "Look, Heninger, this monkey is dangerous. It may be more dangerous at this moment than any other living creature. I can't begin to tell you the damage it could cause if it's not caught. This is an emergency and a big one. Get the humane society, too, but we need every man you've got." Coleman paused for a second. "I'll take full responsibility if there's any problem about your committing so many men to it, but we need literally everything you've got. This monkey could wipe out the whole city!" Quiet static hummed over the radio and Heninger's' breathing could be heard in the background. "What do you mean dangerous?" he finally asked. "This monkey got some kind of disease? Or does -- " Steve grabbed the microphone from Coleman and signaled to the others to be quiet. He began talking in a deep voice, hoping he remembered lines from an amateur theatrical he had appeared in during his undergraduate days. This was a dangerous gambit, he knew, but it was necessary. "Heninger? Just shut up a second. This is Mafrom this district." Some of it was coming back to him, but he was also improvising nicely. His confidence grew, "t'm slapping a complete security blanket on this affair right now. That's official. I don't want you talking to any reporters or anyone else about this. You just tell them you're looking for a missing monkey. Don't say a word more. Understand?" Heninger sounded impressed. "Yes, Major. I understand." "Good. Are these lines secured?" "Secured, sir?" Heninger was not at all sure of what was going on. ' "Secured. Are they scrambled? Or can just anyone with a radio pick this up?" Steve was beginning to enjoy reliving the old role IF -- these last lines were straight out of that long-ago play. "No, sir, they're not. We're not set up for anything like that." Steve turned to Coleman and spoke for Heninger's benefit. "Well, Professor, give him any instructions you can, but remember that the lines are not secured." He handed the microphone back to Coleman and sank back into his seat. He found himselt at once exhilarated and scared, but evidently the p)oy had worked. He listened to Coleman. "Just put every man you have on it. We've got to get her back, and fast." Coleman paused. "And listen. Chief, it's a really strange monkey. When you catch her, tell your men to tie her hands behind her back." He spoke slowly. "And if it looks as if she were going to cover her eyes shoot her -- fast. And shoot to kill." He looked away from Steve. The decision had been his to make and he had made it. Silence fell at the other end of the line before Heninger asked, "Is that all. Dr. Coleman?" "Yes, that's all I can think of now." Coleman sounded exhausted and Steve realized the man had been made to act forcefully out of character. "I'll keep in touch. If you'd tell us the location of any sightings of her. I'd appreciate it." "Very good, sir. I'll send out the alert right away." T en minutes later the call came through on the fire chiefs radio. "We've just received a call about a monkey spotted at Morheim and Blake. Car Seventeen is almost there and on its way. We'll keep you informed." "Right," Steve answered for Coleman. "We're also on our way." They took off for the area. It would take several minutes to get there. They weren't halfway there when Heninger called back. He was clearly upset. "Coleman, what the hell kind of monkey is that?" "What seems to be the problem, Heninger?" asked Steve. "How the hell should I know? Nelson in Car Seventeen Just called in and he's completely incoherent. Keeps saying something about his partner having disappeared while trying to catch that monkey. I'm trying to find out where he went to, but Nelson keeps saying that he just disappeared. He sounds crazy, Coleman, and I want to know what's going on." Sieve took the mike. "Heninger, this is Pomeroy. I thought I told you that this could not be discussed on unsecured lines. You're just going to have to believe that what you're doing is right. We're approaching Morheim and Blake now. Have there been any more sightings?" "No," reported Heninger glumly. "But my men are fanning out. If the monkeys keeps going in the direction she was first heading, she'll be getting into the mountains pretty soon." The fire chief's car reached Morheim and Blake as Nekon was being taken into another prowl car by fellow cops. As they drove off he looked completely stunned. "It looks like Susie's taken her first casualty," commented Chuck. No one answered. "Coleman, are you there?" It was Heninger. "I'm here. What do you want?" "We've lost contact with Car Twelve. We're having all our men on the lookout for it, so that means you, too. Can that monkey... Hold it;" A pause came while Heninger talked to someone else. "Coleman, they've found our car at Gasser and Blake." Steve gestured and the fire chief's car turned and headed down Blake. It was five blocks to Gasser. Heninger reported intermittently. "It's sitting in the middle of the street... the men inside aren't moving... they look like they're frozen in place. I'm getting this from Car Eight, they're sending a man over to Car Twelve. Can't you tell me anything about what we're up against?" There was a pleading tone in Heninger's voice. But they had reached Gasser, and Steve got out of the car, followed by Chuck. Chuck realized what had happened before anyone. "The holograms" he whispered. The policeman had just reached Car Twelve. "Wait!" called Steve, but he was too late. The man had reached for the handle of the car door and had fallen right through the door, through both of the car's occupants and the floor of the car to land heavily on the street below. He started to get up, saw himself merged with the driver and fainted. His partner, who had watched the whole affair from Car Eight, started babbling hysterically into his radio. Steve reached into the fire chief's car for the mike and called Heninger. "Listen, Heninger," he said. "I'm afraid things are getting out of hand. I want to change plans -- " "You're damn right they're out of hand!" shouted Heninger. "I just got a call from Coleman's office that Parker, the man from Car Seventeen who disappeared, showed up in one of Coleman's monkey cages. He's stark raving mad. What is God's name is going on? That's five miles from where he disappeared -- " "Heninger, shut up and listen," Steve barked. "Pull your men back a bit. I don't want them to try to capture the monkey. Just follow it at a distance and keep us informed as to its whereabouts. We'll try to take it ourselves." "That's fine with me," retorted Heninger. "It's definitely heading for the mountains." "Heninger, we're going to want IF a megaphone and portable twoway radio when we catch up with her," Steve said. He paused for a moment.'"And a rifle." T he fife chiefs car caught up with Susie in a clearing just outside the city limits. She was heading for the mountains. Four police cars sat at the edge of the field, some two hundred yards from Susie. They had gotten a vague, illogical story about the Car Twelve affair and wanted nothing to do with the monkey. The police gave Steve the megaphone, radio and a carbine. He had little idea of exactly what he was going to do, but the responsibility was now his. Coleman was a fine administrator, but Susie was Steve's project and would remain so until this issue was settled. One . way or the other, he thought. He took off at a jog after Susie. "Steve, wait for me," called Sue, running up to him. "I'm coming, too." Steve said, "You're not coming. First of all. I'd have to worry about you, too. Then -- two people are much more likely to panic Susie. Finally -- you'll slow me down. I have no idea how fast she's going to be moving." He started off again before she could argue and Chuck led her back to the car. For an hour or so Steve simply followed Susie at a distance. She was aware of his presence, but did nothing about it. She moved slowly, being unsure of the world. Until today her whole life had been spent in a cage and now she had much to cope with. It would not make the situation any easier, Steve realized, if he startled her now. She would be upset until she began to get accustomed to the vaster world. He had tried twice to call her by megaphone. Each time Susie had only responded by speeding up her pacc He followed her into the mountains for another hour and tried the megaphone again. i "lusie, come here, Susie. It's me, Steve. I've got some nuts for you." They were on the scree field now and Susie's size and agility were giving her greater and grtaU er advantage over Steve. He was losing ground fast. It was then that he had decided he would have to shoot. He pretended that he would be shooting to wound, but he was far from an expert marksman and she was a good hundred and fifty feet away. The carbine turned out to be more powerful than he had expected and his shot hit ,the boulders twenty feet above and beyond her. Susie got the message fast. She spun around, screaming angrily, looking for Steve. But he was behind a large lichen-covered boulder, out of her sight. The next thing he m knew the mountainside was coming down on top of him. H e was truly frightened now, for the first time in his memory. He had never really considered that his life was at stake in this venture. Losing now would make an even worse ending for his thesis than what had already happened. It was getting dark and neither Steve nor any of the sharpshooters had seen so much as a hint of Susie. The sun was sinking rapidly. In another fifteen minutes it would be behind the mountains and the helicopter would be coming in to evacuate the area. , The radio came alive with Sue's voice. "Steve, don't do anything until I get there. They're flying me in now. I can stop Susie. The whole situation has changed." Her voice was strained. "I'll be there in five minutes. Tell those army people to hold their fire while I try." The connection was broken and Steve could already hear the approaching helicopter. He relayed her message to the other hunters just as the aircraft appeared over the ridge. In another minute it was hovering ten feet off the ground and Sue scampered down a rope ladder. The helicopter was gone in an Instant, climbing at full thrust. Steve pointed to the general area where he knew Susie had to be. "Be careful," he whispered. Sue started slowly toward the hidden monkey. "Susie, Susie -- it's all right, Susie. Come on out Susie -- it's me." She held her hands out in front of her. "I've got some nuts for you." There was a slight movement about fifty feet down the scree field to her right. Sue came to within ten feet of where Susie was hidden. She stopped. "Good Susie, everything's going to be all right, Susie. Here are some nuts." She threw the nuts just to one side of Susie's hiding place. After a moment Susie appeared. Cautiously, she took a nut and ate it. Her nervousness seemed to abate when she saw no one else and she started into the rest of the nuts, keeping one eye on Sue. Slowly Sue raised her hands from her sides up to her lips. "Goodbye, Susie. Maybe we'll meet again," she whispered and slowly covered her eyes. Susie was gone.  IF Q#I# I Special introductory Offer good u'j the United States, the Unifed KmgdoiTT and Canada H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and fhreat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe nowl For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: Naw York, N.Y. # For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London #W# #RD G # issues of IF for #  # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription as checked above. Soma Contributors Past and Prasont Pou! Anderson iseec Asknov Alfred Bester James BUsh Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarka L Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Wmy Ley DonaU H. Manse! J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The planet was perfect for human seeding...but who reaped the harvest? I When heat began to flte upward through rock and soil, when the leaf clusters she had generated that morning nourished her with steadily diminishing quantities of solar energy, Mnarra knew evening approached. Slowing, stopping, she called back the plasmic arms of herself which had flowed through the soil ahead of her main body. Reunited, she dissolved the taut cable of elastic root strands that connected her to the leaf clusters, which by now lay two miles south of her position. Then she began to generate a new cable of strands upward. When the strands separated near the surface she spun out glossy new clusters of leaves to tower above the sparse spring vegetation on the hillside. The leaves spread deep green faces to the moons. Faint washes of reflected solar energy reached Mnarra. She gathered herself into a pocket of limestone for the night. She was an ageless being who traveled alone and neither rock, soil nor water hindered her. She stopped only for night and then she soothed herself with ancient electrochemical conjugations, patterns as old as time. As old as Mnarra's time. Hours later the leaf clusters alerted her. Sunlight grayed the darkness. Soon would be dawn, the celebration. Mnarra prepared the scarlet blossoms with which she always greeted the new Sun. The sun rose. Her new leaves transmitted its energy deep. Mnarra shuddered, enraptured. Her blossoms unfurled splendidly, one from the center of each leaf cluster, velvety petals coiling and spiraling out from soft golden eyes. She began to move again. Northward, always northward during the days of spring. The elastic cable of strands stretched dfter her. The leaf clusters fed her generously. bn the other hillside, two miles south, the leaf clusters that had served her the previous day wilted. The scarlet flowers that had celebrated the previous dawn drooped and died. But this was of no r,eal consequence. Mnarra had created. Mnarra had drawn nourishment. Now Mnarra continued her season's journey. Thus always. IF hoverscooter Brennan hung briefly at the crest of the hill. Sweeping down its western flank. Earth grasses grew tender and green. At the foot of the hill, on the edge of the plain. New Powell was a collection of domes and dorms, each with its own broad apron of lawn. Then, like rays, the fields spread from the edge of the settlement. Corn stretched due west in a wide swath. Beans, tomatoes, squash, beets grew in thriving rows. And bounding the rays was a deep arc of wheat. Brennan's eyes swept back up the hill to appraise the grazing Jerseys. It had been a busy ten months since landfall. There had been fields to clear; shelters to erect, the dairy herd to incubate from embryonic motes to birthstage calves and then to tend carefully through motherless infancy. But now their first growing season was successfully launched and Brennan could hang here forgetting this was an alien world. He could imagine instead that he and his party had moved back through time to an era when their own Earth was a place of rolling hills and swaying grasses, to a time when the sky was blue, when puffy white clouds moved across it like great mindless gods set adrift. He could hang here and pretend CityAmerica had never been perpetrated upon the North American continent, that the congested gray sky clamminess of total urban development had somehow been averted, the pastoral values preserved, cherished. And then he could move north from the crest of the hill and find himself upon an alien world again. His shoulders tightened as he did so. The vegetation below him now was not so different in form from what he might have found in the American wilderness centuries before. Green plants crawled, stood, reached, some with leaves palmate, others with leaves fanshaped, oval or round. The difference lay in response to season. Brennan had hopped these nearer hills a dozen times in the months since landfall. In late summer the vegetation had been lush and green. In autumn it had remained green. It had never browned for winter. Then with the onset of spring, despite frequent showers, the vegetation faded. Dark green became pale, even yellow. Now, two weeks after Brennan's last survey, barren soil showed through in large dark patches. Brennan took the scooter low. He had never observed the plants below to bloom or to seed. There appeared to be no other form of regeneration in progress either. He pulled the scooter high again, hoping that when he crossed the hills directly to the north, he would find a different scene. What he found was the same yellow-green carpet, sparse and unencouraging. He hung over the wilting hills, troubled. Perhaps this was normal for spring. Perhaps it wasn't. Last fall they had cleared their selected fields and hillsides in full expectation that the native vegetation would reappear, that they would have to root it out again. But it hadn't reappeared. Brennan frowned thoughtfully. The survey report, certainly, had told them little about native plant life beyond the fact that most species were inedible, many poisonous to warmblooded animal life. The logical assumption, in view of the observed phenomena, was that the plant life of this world followed a different seasonal cycle from that of Earth vegetation, that it reproduced by radically different methods. But he had not checked the hoverscooter out to contemplate the dying hillsides. Today was the day he made his first visit to the crater area some miles north of the settlement. He lofted. F rom the survey report he had visualized a few dozen small craters -- shallow, perhaps five feet in diameter -- pocking the arm of the plain that reached around the hills to the north. Half an hour later he crossed the final barricade of hills and caught his breath, startled. Below' lay a vast area of land totally disfigured by craters forty feet and more in diameter -- and deep. They interlocked in a crazy chain, some with rims sharp and relatively soil. Unbelieving, he swung his scooter to measure the area. At noon he set down on a hillside, stepped off the scooter. The craters claimed a swath of plain three miles wide and seven miles deep. The entire area was pocked, crater superimposed upon crater. Only a few appeared recent. Most were older. Some had refilled with soil, only slight indentations marking their locations. Still others held water. Brennan's shoulders tightened with anger. EarthAuthority had permitted his people to erect their settlement and claim their fields a bare ten miles from this devastation zone -- without informing them of the magnitude of the phenomenon, without making any attempt to discover the forces behind the pocking, without even drawing charts to show the distribution of crater zones across the face of this continent. That was one of the few concrete facts he had gleaned from the report, that this area was one of dozens scattered across the continent. Abruptly Brennan reboarded the scooter and lifted off the hillside. Swinging down, he apIF proached the freshest crater, maneuvered the scooter down into it. Gingerly he avoided the steeply sloping walls. He tilted the vehicle to peer over the side, undamped the handlamp and shone it down. He could see nothing at the bottom of the crater but mud. Did meteorites bury themselves? He frowned. Did meteorites, for that matter, fall within sharply defined geographical belts? He took the scooter up. Meteorites were one of the many topics his perfunctory CityAmerica education had not touched upon. But if these craters were not the result of meteorite showers, what other explanation was plausible? Explosive deposits of natural gas? If so, what had detonated them? He returned home over the plain, detouring out and around the jutting line of hills. He hovered low, watching the terrain grimly. He found no trace of any crater beyond the devastation zone. So perhaps there was no actual threat to the settlement. Nevertheless, later in the week he returned afoot with a crew of men. They lowered into the four most recent craters to attempt to excavate whatever rock of metal bodies might have impacted the soil with such force. They found nothing to excavate, emerged empty-handed. As they packed their gear for the return trek, DiChiara, Brennan's second in command, scratched the dark soil thoughtfully. "I don't see any sign that this is a volcanic area." Brennan's gaze moved from the plain to the hills, gentle, sensuous in their almost fleshlike contours. He was all too aware that his eyes were untrained. "I don't either," he said without conviction. "Next week I'll take the scooter south for a recon run." DiChiara glanced at him sharply. "You think you'll find another crater area down there?" . "I don't know what I'll find." DiChiara stretched erect. "Maybe I could ride along." Brennan was noncommittal. "Maybe so, Dick." He hitched his shovel upon his back. The expedition had not been productive. His disquietude was greater now than it had been earlier. There should have been something at the bottom of the craters, Mlondas moved deep when it was cold, stretching taut the cable of root strands that connected him to his leaf clusters. But on warm days he skimmed near the surface, a thin layer of plasma rippling through the topsoil, unhindered by roots and nodes. Now it was spring and those roots grew flaccid. But Mlondas did not mourn the ground cover that withered overhead. Where it thinned, the soil lay bare and the sun's warmth poked through in friendly fingers. Soon the intensity of heat told him the sun was at zenith. He paused to spread himself molecule-thin in the upper inch of topsoil. Dawn was the celebration, the occasion for creating great waxen white flowers to declare his formal ecstasy. But noon was more dear. Rapturously he basked. The time passed and Mlondas drew himself together, flowed into a deeper layer and continued on. There weren't many minutes to tarry. An ancient being, Mlondas traveled slowly. Traveled slowly, traveled south, in spring. Thus always. T hey moved a hundred feet above the plain, Brennan and DiChiara. Brennan watched the ground intently, trying to conceal his irritation. He had looked forward to a solitary hover. But DiChiara had talked his way aboard. Now DiChiara talked his way southward. "You ever wonder how the Latins developed as a talkative, volatile race while Northern Europeans are typically repressed and quite distant?" "I didn't," Brennan admitted, unencouragingly. "Well, contrast the climates they evolved from. The Latins never had to contain themselves. They could expand all over the great outdoors -- year 'round. But the Scandinavians were sealed up together months at a time, drifted in, surrounded by hostile elements. No way to escape each other but in -- into themselves. If they let themselves express every emotion, like the Latins, if they -- well, take that dorm blowup between Swenson and Diaz last winter, during the rains, Swen was simply reacting -- " Brennan's hands tightened on the controls. So they were back to Swenson. "Swenson has permission to erect an individual shelter anywhere within the boundaries of the settlement. I granted that several months ago." DiChiara nodded. "Sure. Sure. BjLit Swen wants to locate on the other side of the fields. He's of Swedish stock. He wants privacy. He figures that after next month, when he and Tilla are married -- " "No. It's policy, Dick -- until the ship checks back we live as a unit. There are half-dozen couple cottages Swen and Tilla can choose from if they don't want to build." DiChiara moved discontentedly. "Now look, Bren, this isn't CityAmerica, These people IF came here to be free -- and you're administering New Powell like an Earthside housing development." Brennan peered at DiChiara. Smiled grimly. He remembered his childhood, remembered a pale finger of sunlight falling onto the asphalt play area at the bottom of the concrete-slab canyon, remembered fighting savagely to occupy it. Now he glanced at the bright sun overhead. "I'm running New Powell like a detachment to a world we know very little about. Over the next four years we'll learn. Then we can disperse and enjoy our freedom." "For God's sake, Bren! What is there to learn? There's no animal life here. Not even insects. The survey ship determined that much. So if Swen and Tilla clear a place and put in Earth grasses, fence the area after they have children, come out to the fields every day like everyone else -- " Brennan shook his head. "Drop it, Dick." New Powell had been endowed, like every EarthAuthority-sponsored settlement, with equipment, food, supplies and seeds to insure survival through their first five settlement years. The ship would check back at the end of that period. If they had succeeded in making the planet bear, it was theirs. But if they had failed they would be returned to CityAmerica, to the bottom of the planet party list. those of them who chose to try again. Brennan was aware that his headsman's training had been as perfunctory as his early, tityAmerica education. But one principle he had grasped firmly. It was not always the hard worlds, the hostile worids, that defeated the settling party. Sometimes it was the lush worlds. The too-easy worlds. This could be one. The colonists faced no anomalies of terrain or climate here. There was no hostile animal life. The sky was bright, the air fragrant. The fields were already thriving, the young dairy stock flourishing. But Brennan didn't intend to let his people relax and enjoy until they had passed their first five-year test. They continued across the plain in strained silence. Five miles south of New Powell, Brennan began zigging and zagging, cutting broad swaths across the yellow-green terrain. Ten miles south DiChiara came to life again. "You ever think what's going to happen if all these plants die and the ground is bare when the rains come?" "I've thought about it. But the heavy rains aren't due before late fall. I'm sure the ground cover will regenerate by then." DiChiara shrugged. "Nan Perry suggested we sow the hills right away. Just in case." Brennan's brow rose. "Oh?" "We have grass seed enough to cover a dozen of the nearest hills. They'd take now and hold the soil. A month from now it might be too late." Brennan shook his head. "No, we're not scattering seed that far afield until we've had more time to evaluate the local life cycle." "Well, it's going to demolish our life cycle if the hills come down and we're inundated in mud." Brennan sighed. "Look, Dick, there's no sign these hills have ever come down. We landed in late summer and the vegetation was thick. Between now and late summer this year, something will happen. The ground will be covered again." DiChiara appraised Brennan darkly. "Maybe you should put that sentiment in a frame and hang it at the next community meeting. I hear things you don't." Brennan frowned. "Do you?" "Some of our people think we've killed this world." Brennan's brows arched, underscoring his patent disbelief. "Well, look around. It's spring -- and everything is dying. Everything except our crops. Twan Yano says we've pierced the flesh and the beast perishes. Nan Perrysays we've already destroyed the planet's ecology by putting down our alien seeds. Nick Sorenson thinks we've introduced a new element, some element that didn't exist here before and now it's poisoned all the plant life. Kerri Rice says. -- " His recital was interrupted. Brennan swung the scooter abruptly, his eyes intent on the ground. Describing a broad arc, he brought the scooter down. "All right, look at that!" DiChiara looked, clinging to the passenger bar. His speech dribbled away into un-Latinate silence. B rennan dismounted. At his feet a broad patch of dark green foliage sprang from the soil. The leaves grew in clusters, dozens of clusters, young and aggressive. Each cluster was crowned with a single scarlet blossom, its velvety petals corkscrewing gracefully from a deep golden center. Suddenly DiChiara was beaming, his dark face transformed. "Hey! It's spring, Brennie! The place is blooming!" He laughed. "Hey, do you think -- " "I think we'd better leave the flowers where they are." "And bring the people instead. Hover them out in pairs. Yano and Nan Perry first. Sorenson and Rice next. Schroeder and Vincinzi.Then -- " Brennan shook his head. "No, even by twos, that would add up to seventy-five round trips. I think we can declare a day off for anyone who wants to hike out." IF "Um." DiChiara considered the proposition, nodded vigorously. "Sure. Just run the scooter out with picnic supplies. Make a day of it, a real day. A spring festival." Brennan was less enthusiastic about festivals than about facts. He stooped, touched a single crisp leaf, turned it, examined it. "I've never seen this plant before," he said, his face serious. "Yeah? Well, lots of plants only pop up at certain seasons, don't they?" "Lots of plants -- Earth plants -- bloom only at certain seasons. Usually the foliage is on display for longer periods." Brennan stood, frowned across the plain. He reboarded the scooter. "Let's see if we can spot another stand of it." In the horscooter they described a series of broadening semi-circles. Some minutes later they spotted the second patch. Approached it. Landed. Stood saying nothing. The second patch of foliage lay two miles south of the first. And it was dying. DiChiara looked uneasily back in the direction of the first patch. "Well, there's no way to tell how long these leaves have been out," he said. "Who knows? It might be a species that only lives a week or two." "Might be." DiChiara paced around the ragged patch of dying greenery. "Or water shortage? We've had showers, but maybe out here -- " He shrugged, offering the theory deprecatingly. Brennan rejected it. "The other patch is only two miles away. It doesn't look parched." 'm." DiChiara brightened. "Well, maybe if we take another hop we'll find a third patch. In better shape." Brennan chewed his lip. "Good idea." They hopped. The third patch of leaf clusters lay almost three, miles farther south. This patch wasn't dying. It was dead. "I think we'd better bring the ag team out here before we let the others know about these plants," Brennan said when they had paced around the brown vegetation, handled the collapsed flowers. DiChiara nodded. "It would really shoot morale if everyone heard about this. The only thing coming up -- and it's dying as fast as it grows." "That's not necessarily significant, Dick. We can't expect plant life here to follow the same seasonal schedule we'd expe'et on our own world." Good words. Reasonable words. But Brennan's feelings, as he lifted the hoverscooter back toward New Powell, were not of the same order. 'At least we didn't spot another crater zone in our backyard' DiChiara pointed out. II still more confused two days later when he and DiChiara hiked the ag team across the plain expecting to find the patch of flowers ten miles south of New Powell. They found it six miles south instead, fresh and vigorous, blooming in the midmorning sun. DiChiara checked his pedometer, took visual bearings. He growled, "This isn't where we left our leafy friends. Is it, Bren?" Brennan was stepping around the clusters of leaves, measuring off the dimensions of the patch. "This isn't the same patch at all. It's more oblong. And has slightly less area." DiChiara squatted, touching the point of a leaf. He addressed Schroeder, New Powell's chief agtech. "Well, what do you make of it, Schroeder?" Schroeder's lopsided lips curled up. "What do I make of what?" He examined the leaf clusters perfunctorily. "It's a patch of something. It's growing out of the ground. I think it lives here." DiChiara stood, embarrassed. Brennan smiled tightly. With crops booming, Schroeder and Vincinzi were cocky. The hike across the plain had turned into a contest, ag team pushing to outdo command team. "I think the point, Dick, was to compare a healthy patch with an unhealthy patch -- and decide what made the difference." DiChiara rubbed his dark hair. "But the healthy patch we had in mind is four miles on. And the unhealthy patch is two miles past that." "And you boys can't manage it?" Schroeder suggested. The command team could manage it. Or could have. But less than two miles from the new patch of leaf clusters, they encountered a second patch, a dying patch. Two miles beyond that, they reached a dead patch. "This is the one we were looking at the other day," DiChiara said, shaking his head. "It was in the same condition then that the first one is now. And the one beyond it -- two miles farther out -- was in the same condition as the one we found two miles ahead today. And two miles beyond that -- " Schroeder groaned. "Two miles beyond that," DiChiara insisted doggedly, "was. a dead patch. Dead like this one." Vincinzi pulled a pad from her pocket. "Dick, could you run through that again and let me make a pictorial representation?" "I don't think he can say all that again," Schroeder said. But DiChiara could. And then they clustered around Vincinzi, IF intently studying her diagram. "It might be significant that all these patches of vegetation are aligned north and south," she said thoughtfully, nibbling the end of her jotter. "And there's a north-south sequence to the life stage, too." DiChiara nodded. "The freshest patch is always farthest north, the wilting one in the middle, the dead patch south." "What does that prove?" Schroeder demanded. Vincinzi was carefully detailing her representation to indicate progressive life stae. "Do you think it would be all right if we dug a few of these withered clusters?" she asked Brennan. He shrugged. "I don't think it can hurt anything. You might learn something from the roots." What they learned was that the clusters had no roots. The stems extended inches into the soil. Then there was nothing. They laid the dug clusters out on the ground and sfared at them in perplexity. "What keeps the damn things alive?" Schroeder growled, his interest finally engaged, ( DiChiara grinned. "Nothing keeps them alive. They're dead." Schroeder glowered, kicked the pile at their feet. "All right, let's move north again and dig samples from the other two stands." T he middle stand, dying, was as rootless as the first. Their selected cluster from the northernmost stand, however, resisted their efforts to remove it from the soil. When they had dug to a depth of two feet, they shoveled dirt out of the area beneath the base of the plant stem. Extending from the stem was a single wiry strand. Vincinzi brushed the soil from the strand and tested it gingerly with her forefinger. She looked up at the three men. "It's tough. And it's growing toward the middle of the stand. We won't be able to follow it without uprooting other plants." "You can uproot a plant that has no roots?" Shroeder asked darkly"There may be a large communal root," Vincinzi pointed out, standing. "Near the center of the cluster." Brennan squatted, examined the tough strand. He shook his head. "We don't want to dig any farther into the patch. But we could poke around the edges some more." They poked. All the wiry strands grew toward the center of the clump, "All right," Schroeder said vengefully, when they stood back from the patch of green. "We're marching two miles due south again, children, and we're digging out that entire patch. We're digging to a depth of five feet, ten if we have to, to find that central root. Because I want to see it." He hoisted his shovel over his shoulder. "Objections, Brennan?" Brennan peered souths narrowed his eyes in thought. The patch there was obviously moribund. "No objections." This time their trek south was silent. When they reached the dying stand of vegetation, they set to work doggedly, digging, piling the limpening leaf clusters on their flaccid stems to one side. They dug to a depth of five feet. It grew dusky around them. They dug a foot farther. Then they ate, dispirited."Well, I don't know," Schroeder said finally. "There ought to be something down there -- somewhere." "Maybe if we kept digging," DiChiara suggested lamely. "Sure, sure," Schroeder said in disgust. "Why don't we bring the whole settlement out and dig up the entire plain. If we don't find anything -- at least we could plant the area for fall." It was dark when they began the trek back across the plain. The two moons overhead were gold and gray against the dark sky. In the distance they could see the frail light of New Powell. Soon they saw something else! Four miles from New Powell an entirely new patch of leaf clusters grew, springing green and vigorous from the.soil. Vincinzi took it calmly, Schroeder blackly, Brennan silently. It was DiChiara who had hysterics. When he was calm again Vincinzi said, "You know, I think these plants are going north for the summer. I think they're migrating." Brennan nodded, admitting to the inevitability of the conclusion. "I think you could be right, Vin." "I think no one's going to believe how we spent the day," Schroeder groaned. DiChiara scrambled to his feet. "Well, I know how I'm going to spend the rest of the night. I'm going to bed." He stumbled away toward New Powell. The night was disturbed. Strange things occurred above. The soil was jarred in an unsettling fashion. Mnarra quivered and burrowed deeper, stretching her new root strands tight. She huddled, uncertain. Later she flowed cautiously back to the upper layers of soil. The disturbance had passed. She remained alert for a while, ready to retreat. Finally she relaxed and lulled herself with the conjugations of night. Her fresh leaf clusters caught mellow silvergold moonbeams and fed her that light sustenance while she dreamed. cinzi stepped into the headIF man's dome. She hesitated uncertainly at the door to Brennan's office. "I'm a little upset, Bren. There's something we should have caught last night when we decided those plants wefe migrating." Brennan nodded, motioning toward the papers that lay on his secretary. "I was just getting to it." "Oh?" Surprised, she bent, studied the rough map he had drawn. "They're due to pop up at the south end of the cow pasture some time tomorrow night, if they continue on the same course at the same rate," he said. "Whether they turn up just inside or just outside the fence depends upon how exactly they conform to the average distance of two miles a day." "Yes, that's how I calculated it, too." "Mention it to anyone?" She shook her head. "Not even to Schroeder. We can't let the cattle near that foliage. Can we?" "We can't." Brennan tapped the microviewer on his desk. "I rechecked the plant files last night. The survey team only tested the most prevalent species. This species wasn't among those. But more local species are poisonous than not." "If it only appears at this season and only in isolated patches the survey team may not have seen it." Vincinzi frowned thoughtfully. "We don't even have a place to house the cattle temporarily, do we?" "We're canning beans in the cow barn today." The enclosed cattle structures of the winter before had been disassembled, their components formed into a single open cattle shelter in the pasture and processing sheds near the fields for the first crops. Brennan directed Vincinzi's attention back to his map. "The pasture is five miles long between the hillside portions and the plains portion that reaches behind New Powell. The plants, whatever they are, should erupt inside the fenced area twice." "Don't we have some spare fence we could throw around the foliage when it appears?" Vincinzi proposed. "We do. But we're claiming this land, Vin. Just this one small parcel, for the time being. There's half a continent to our east and half a continent to our west. I want that flower bed to learn to detour around us." Vincinzi smiled palely at the image. "I don't believe any of our people have ever trained a flower bed, Bren." "It's a skill most CityAmericans neglect to develop," Brennan agreed dryly. "Here's my idea. Tomorrow we disassemble the pasture cow shelter. Around noon we establish a watch in the area where we expect those plants to erupt. As soon as they show, we cover them with roof sheeting from the cow shelter. That stuff's pretty tough. It should hold them. Then we string fencing around the patch for a few days. The next day we set a guard on the entire pasture, because once we've disrupted the 'pattern, there's no telling when or where new foliage is likely to reappear. When it shows its head again, we follow the same procedure." "In other words we smother the plants out?" "I hope it doesn't amount to that. According to my map, they will pass through the western half of the pasture. I'll be satisfied if we can divert them to the other side of the fence and keep them there." Vincinzi was troubled. "But the species may not have lateral mobility, you know. It occurred to me that perhaps there is one very deep root that extends for miles, with the foliage and flowers erupting at intervals along it. I'm assuming it lies much deeper than we dug last night," "Well, if that's the case, maybe we can teach it not to erupt along the interval that includes our lands." "Maybe. But this seems out of line with the way we treated the plant yesterday. We were very conservative about interfering with it then." ""That was before we realized it was coming through the cow pasture. I wouldn't be so gentle with any other native species that appeared inside our territory." Vincinzi was still not entirely pleased with the proposed plan. But she could advance none to match it. "We'll have to tell the others about the plant, won't we?" "I'm calling a community meeting tonight." It had never happened before. At . nightfall Mnarra halted, gathered herself and generated her new cable of root strands. The strands separated and reached to the proper level. Then she began spinning out fresh leaf clusters. She could tell they did not rise as they should have. She could tell they were in some way blocked. And although there should have been washes of moonlight traveling down the root strands to her, there were none. None at all. It had never happened before. She settled, troubled, and tried to follow the night pattern she had established over the centuries. But the dreamlike electrochemical conjugations did not soothe her, did not lull her. Something was wrong above, gravely so. At last she achieved a state IF of semiconsciousness. She rested. She realized with fearful suddenness that the soil around her was almost noonwarm. Quickly she shuddered to full consciousness and stretched, spreading herself in a thin layer. It was true. The sun had long risen. But her leaves had sent her no message of dawning light. She had created no flowers in celebration. It had never happened before. She moved up through the soil until she hovered in the upper inch of topsoil. She could feel the stems of her own leaf clusters. They were not as they should have been. They were pushed downward through the soil, jammed inches deeper than they should have been. And they were flaccid. She didn't dare enter the air above to probe for causes. It would be out of order. Instead she moved deep again, gathered herself in a globular formation and thought. The solar energy the leaf clusters should have been dispatching to her was not sorely missed. Not today. There were elements of her plasma that could be converted back to energy without particular difficulty. But she was not a being of boundless matter. There were limits. She could only move ahead and hope that tomorrow's stand of foliage would not be impeded. She would not move far, first because half the day was already gone, second because she did not care to expend energy extravagantly. She would move ahead a short distance and then she would rest. Then she would create new root strands, new leaves. And she did. And it did not work. Nor did it work the day after. Finally she knew she would have to take a radical step. She would have to deviate. She would have to abandon her established meridian and set an alien course. It was spring, but Mnarra would travel for one day, two if necessary, west. Because she was discovering something she had never suspected. The leaf clusters had given her more than energy. They had provided her stimulation that was essential to wellbeing, to her will to live. She knew something now that no being of her race had ever known before. it took a while, but   there she blows," DiChiara said triumphantly the evening the leaf clusters finished their precipitant growth at the edge of New Powell's communal lawn. Brennan nodded. His strategy had worked, though he had suffered qualms. He studied the strange plants at his feet. This patch was smaller than any he had seen on the plain. But the foliage appeared healthy. He glanced around at the gathered members of the community. There was no mistaking their avid interest. "Now, where does it bloom?" "No idea," Brennan admitted. "Maybe someone will stay the night to keep watch." "Ha! I know thirty-two of us who plan to stay the night." "Well, happy flower-watch. I intend to hit the bunk. Tomorrow we have to think plant again," "We do?" DiChiara was surprised. "We do. It traveled almost due west today," Brennan pointed out. "If it heads north. again tomorrow, we can let it go. But if it heads west, it's going to surface in the fields." "Uh, oh." DiChiara glanced toward the fields. "But it couldn't do much damage to the corn or wheat, Bren. I mean, this patch isn't more than twelve feet in diameter." "The patches on the plain were more like twenty-five feet in diameter. Could be it will lay on extra area tomorrow and next day to compensate for the past few days." "Oh? You're buying Schroeder's theory about the lateralgrowing root twenty feet down?" Brennan shook his head. "I haven't heard a theory yet I can subscribe to. It just strikes me this species shows interesting adaptive qualities. Maybe part of the adaption to the unusual conditions we've presented is to leash its growth for a few days -- and then really to spread wide." "Um. So what do we do if it tries to take over the wheat?" Brennan shook his head wearily. "I don't know. I'm going to sleep on the problem." He did sleep on it. But he was awake soon after dawn, his curiosity tickling. He reached the plant site a quarter hour later. He reached the, plant site a half hour late. Vincinzi's voice was hushed. "It bloomed just at sunrise, Bren. It was the most moving experience I've ever had. The blossoms appeared from the stalks and unfolded just as the sun came over the hill. It was like a salute. A salute to dawn." Brennan looked around the circle of faces. Vincinzi wasn't the only one who had been stricken with awe. His people -- there were more than thirty-two of them -- sat and stood, attention fixed almost reverently, faces dazed. The petIF als of the flowers spiraled scarlet and graceful from deep golden centers. Dew stood limpid on dark leaves. "Maybe I'll get to see it tomorrow," Brennan said. Ill Mlondas reached the appointed area at the appointed time. He flowed into position smoothly. He waited. He waited through the long day, sunning himself in the topsoil. Mnarra did not come. Sometimes it happened. There was a slight discrepancy in their rates of travel. One arrived before the other. Mlondas waited another day, his leaf clusters turned hungrily to the sun. He gorged himself. He expanded his matter. Then Mlondas waited another day. The interval between their arrivals had never before stretched to this length. It had never happened. On the fourth day, Mlondas did something he had never done before. He moved south of the spring mating area. Mnarra had been delayed. He must reach her, because soon he must begin his summer journey north. His arrival at the autumn mating area must coincide with Mrruka's. He moved quickly, taking no time to sun himself in the upper layers. His waxen white flowers wilted behind. X ing." Brennan looked up from his papers, startled. Schroeder stood in the open door, his face indignant. "It's coming down from the north, a white one." Brennan stared at his chief agtech. Slowly he stood. "Where is it?" "It's four miles out. Swen and Tilla were hiking up to look at the crater area. Swen had the pedometer. This one's traveling fast, Bren. Faster than the other one ever traveled. The wilting patch is almost four miles north of the fresh patch." "And the third patch?" "They didn't find it. They ran into the crater area first." Brennan made a swift decision. "I'd better take the scooter out. Want to come?" Schroeder did. Lofting into the late afternoon, they soon confirmed Swen's report. The first patch, leaves and white flowers fresh, lay four miles north of New Powell. The second patch, wilting, lay four niiles north of the first. And the third, withered and brown, lay near the center of the crater area. It was difficult to distinguish from the surrounding vegetation, which was now just as brown, just as withered. "The damn thing's fast, whatever it is." Brennan nodded. "It's so fast it's going, to come up inside the pasture area in just a couple of hours, Guy." Quickly he turned the hoverscooter and headed south to New Powell. Luckily the pasture cow shed had not yet been reassembled. "We've got to get a crew out to the north pasture fast." They had their crew on duty within the hour. The new plant arrived just after dusk, poking its miltiple green heads aggressively through the'soil. Moving quickly they smothered it, fenced it. Then they stood around it. "Any news about the other one?" Schroeder demanded. Masters had just arrived from New Powell. "It surfaced half a mile up the lawn from its last position." "In the clear?" Brennan asked. Night before last the plant had attempted to emerge beneath the floor of one of the storage domes. The result had been a dome encircled by a foot-deep flower bed. The next evening foliage had failed to appear anywhere within or around New Powell. "Yep. It's smack in the middle of the cottage area lawn. It's small again. About fifteen feet diameter." Brennan nodded, then returned his attention to the crew. "I want you to stay on duty here through the night. Take turns walking the entire pasture with handlamps. This stand doesn't behave quite like the other one. There's always the chance it might surface again before morning." He and Schroeder returned to New Powell together to appraise the other patch of vegetation. "At least this business keeps minds off what's going on out there," Schroeder said sotto voce, motioning behind. Brennan refrained from glancing in the direction of the nightdarkened plain. A week ago the vegetation there had been dying. Now it was dead. His conviction that the land would cover again by late summer wavered painfully. "We're going to have a mud bath if that stuff doesn't grow back before the rains," Schroeder continued in a low voice. "I took units in erosion control. But there's oing to be no controlling this place. Not even our own hillsides and pastures, if the rest of the place turns to slop." "I know," Brennan said without expression. "There's nothing we can do but wait." "And hope?" Schroeder was glum. "You sitting flower-watch tonight?" "I think I may," Brennan said. Discouragement weighed heavily upon him. Their own fields # . IF thrived, but tlje rest of the world seemed to be dying. Irrationally, he couldn't helpv feeling responsible for the death that lay across the land. Mlondas reacted with swift indignation when his leaf clusters were flattened as he unfurled them tjirough the soil. He had traveled for days south from the appointed area and he did not intend to be frustrated. Not in any way. His days of waiting and engorging had provided him with extra matter. There was no point in conserving it, in waiting here where he was thwarted. He moved forward, breaking connection with the leaves that had been maltreated. He moved quickly, spreading himself thin, riding the top layers of soil, then dodging deep. Searching. It was hours before he found the first clue that Mnarra had been near. Her charge still clung to the soil. He decided quickly. He had never deviated before. There had never been necessity, any more than there had ever been necessity to venture south of the mating area. This time was different. He followed Mnarra's trail. T he inhabitants of New Powell stood around the giant patch of foliage in awe. It flowed across the entire broad lawn north of the dorm area, rustling in the evening breeze. Brennan, DiChiara, Schroeder and Vincinzi circled the patch. "It's at least twice as big as any of the earlier patches," Schroeder grumbled when they had measured off the circumference. "And look, it's several hands taller than before." Brennan looked. Nodded. He could only agree. This new patch lay a bare half mile north of the spot where the red blossoms had greeted the sun that morning, more than three miles from the pasture where they had smothered the other patch of foliage the previous evening. "Bren, do you think the patches met and combined?" Vincinzi suggested. "That would account for the increased area." "I don't know." Brennan glanced around. "But I guess everyone in New Powell is pulling fiowerwatch tonight." He had spread his own blanket on the grass last night for the first time. He had slept the night fitfully, waking frequently to be sure the blossoms had not emerged without him. Then the sky grayed with approaching dawn and he sat up. Dozens of faces glistened silently in the bare light. "Don't miss it, Bren," Vincinzi said softly when he turned his head to check the condition of the eastern sky. He didn't miss it. First he caught the scarlet rim of the sun above the hill. Then he turned his head to see the scarlet flowers rising majestically from their leafy thrones. They slid slowly up into the crisp morning air and immediately unfurled, tall and proud. It was a ceremonial salute. He felt it. A salute to the day. Awe moved him, crowding away doubt and worry. It was many minutes before he took his eyes from the scarlet flowers, before he moved. Toward this moment, he felt, his life had been directed. For this brief glimpse of the majesty of creation, of the unity of nature he had endured the empty years, the painful and anxious years. "What do you think about itiaintaining a patrol in the pasture tonight?" DiChiara asked. "Tonight?" Brennan considered, reluctantly, wanting merely to spread his blanket and sit. "I suppose we should, just jn case. You've been here for sunrise several times. Mind handling the patrol yourself?" "I'll take it if there isn't anyone else." "Maybe you can talk Harder into handling it." Brennan shrugged the matter off. "Staying, Vin?" She nodded. "I'm eager to see if the two patches have combined.  I've promised myself I'll get back to .my own bunk after one more evening, though." The early evening hours werepassed convivially. Conversational groups formed, mingled, reformed. Refreshments were passed. Songs were sung, songs that had survived despite the long asphalt-black years of CityAmerica. In the early morning hours ' the settlers stretched out on their blankets or retired to nearby dorms. The lawn became quiet. Voices were low, conversation fragmentary. Brennan lay on his back a bare yard from the perimeter of the foliage. "We should do this more often." Vincinzi rollecTto her stomach. "Sit up with a flower bed?" "No, have spontaneous gatherings. Out in the open.-No plans, no formal arrangements. Just everyone together for. the evening." Vincinzi smiled. "That would be fun. I don't think we've thrown off enough of our CityAmerica social habits." "We've been here less than a year." Some of the settlers had opened up easily, quickly discarding the depersonalized facades imperative for survival in the population crush of urban life. Others -- including Brennan -- had been slower to emerge. "You know, I signed on the planet party list because I wanted to see IF the stars. And there tliey are." His eyes moved across the diamond-lit blackness. Vincinzi laughed. "I think they've been up there every night since we landed." "Well, this is the first time -- last night and tonight -- that I've actually come out from under the roof long enough to enjoy them." Much of his busyness, he suspected, had been designed to cushion him from the shock of finding his total circumstance, his entire lifelong frame of reference, suddenly and totally changed, permanently changed. Soon they dozed. Then the eastern sky was gray, and the inhabitants of New Powell woke. Brennan sat, rocked Vincinzi's shoulder. "Time." Vincinzi sat, looked around. "Everyone's here." "Not quite." Brennan surveyed the gathering. Most sat farther back. Behind them others stood in their nightwear. Near the dorms, dozens more huddled in the half-light. "Want to move back? We could probably see better." "You?" Brennan shrugged. "I'm happy here." "AH right, I'll take the close view. But I reserve the right to move later." Her hand crept forward. Into his. His shoulder moved. Against hers. The sun rose. Vincinzi's hand tightened on Brennan's. "They've mingled." The flowers rose slowly, proudly, petals streaked, scarlet on white, white on scarlet. They stood in silent homage to the sun. From the settlers, a communal gasp of awe. Brennan's heart squeezed. The moment was again, the moment his days had been directed toward. The moment of unity, sun a scarlet circlet at hilltop, blossoms standing tall --  -- and earth blooming before him. Earth blooming up in a great dark fountain from the center of the flowers. Blooming up in an explosive fountain, a fountain that first knocked Brennan back and then carried him with it. He heard a cry. Whether it was his own or Vineinzi's, he never knew. They were one with each other, with the bright flowers, with the soil, in their last moment. It was many days before the explosion-scattered fragments of Mnarra's unexpended plasma tunneled through rock, soil and water to reunite in the limestone pocket many miles south of the new crater. Then Mnarra was whole again, the spring seeding accomplished, the ancient ritual observed. The young she had created in union with Mlondas grew green and thick on the land to a radius of hundreds of miles. They proliferated, their reaching roots loosening the soil. It had not mattered, then, that this year there had been disturbances and deviations. Even on the night before the formal celebration of the mating, before the explosive dawn distribution of their seed to the winds above, she had felt disturbance overhead, had felt the soil jarred and compacted. Perhaps it would never happen again. But she could not pause now. Far and far to the south, Mtunnas had surely completed his spring seeding with Mpurta. Now he would be traveling north, traveling to the mating area where he and Mnarra would meet at the end of autumn to seed that half of her designated lands. Mnarra had a responsibility. If she failed to meet Mtunas, if they failed to mate and seed, the land would lie exposed to wind and rain. Quickly Mnarra extruded a cable of root strands. They separated. She spun out large, hungry green leaves. They fed her. She moved south. DiChiara stood in the headi man's office, weary, eyes dark- rimmed. He stared at the sketch Brennan had made of the deadly ! flower's course through the vil- lage. His own blood-red X marked the spot of the disaster -- twenty of their people killed outright,j Headman Brennan and Agtech . Vincinzi among them; dozens in-jured, some critically; two dorms badly damaged. DiChiara had seen it from the . pasture, the dawn blooming of the strange flowers, the subsequent blossoming of the land. He had heard the thunderous report, the cries. But he hadn't believed itv not for hours. Sometimes he stilt didn't believe it. He kept Brennan's sketch tacked near the secretary to hold the reality before him. Schrgeder appeared at the office door, face heavy. "No sign. I sent Swen fifteen miles north. this morning. Harder fifteen miles south this afternoon. I don't think we're going to catch those flowers, Dick. Not now." DiChiara's fist hit the secretary top in frustration. "You sent the boys in search pattern?" "As usual." DiChiara sat, his eyes bleak. He had heard dozens of theories concerning that explosion. But DiChiara wasn't interested in theories. "Any reshow of the other species in the pasture?" IF "No." Four days after the explosion the second crisis had descended. Thousands of native seedlings had suddenly sprouted, tender and green, growing fast -- growing everywhere, in the lawns, in the fields, in the pasture. The settlers lost half their dairy herd to the poisonous seedlings before their numbed minds grasped the , nature of the crisis. "I think we have them eliminated, Dick. Parnell came up with an interesting theory -- " DiGhiara shoot his head. "No. I want facts, Guy. Somehowthat vegetation reseeded right under our eyes. It must have happened before the plants on the plain withered. Now, instead of our people sitting on the lawn theorizing, I want observers on the plain. Every day, Guy. I want detailed day to day observations on the life cycle of the native vegetation. Next year I want to know in advance when you expect that ground cover to regenerate so I can have crews waiting in the pasture. I don't want to lose cattle again, Guy." Schroeder nodded: "I see your point. You want me to continue the search for the flowers too?" DiChiara considered. "No. I'll buy your conclusion that they've fled the scene. But they'll be back, Guy, They'll be heading for the crater area again come next spring -- that much I'll bet on. And by early spring we're going to have crews watching for them." The colonists would be ready for the treacherous flowers next time. When the foliage appeared, they would dig it out burn it out, smother it out, exterminate it. There were going to be no more explosions, not within New Powell, not near New Powell -- not unless the settlers made the explosions themselves, bombing the plants out of existence. But DiChiara didn't have to elaborate upon his plans. Schroeder understood. All New Powell understood. When next the scarlet and white flowers came striding across the plain they would die. # Magazine Retailers and IF avaUabla to all rataHars. Full datails on procaduras and raquiramants for propar display submission of samiannual talas affidavits, can ba obtainad by writing: Seiect Mmgmxines, Inc. # PmrkAvnnuc South Now York. N:Y. # Knowledge is power and the Bzrahbas knew all -- until they met the unknowable! of the conference room like a man stunned. He gripped his portfolio in both hands. A thing as big and frightening as this must not be let get away, get told around. Someone edged over beside him. Someone else coming out. Kurt Richler. "What do you think?" Kurt asked. "I think we've got trouble," Darrah said. "Ach," Richler said, nodding. "Trouble." He wandered away. A goodly crowd was already waiting at the elevators. Subdued, all talked in low tones. Some of them just stood, looking blankly at blank walls. A car took eight or ten into its mouth and swallowed them whole as Darrah approached. He leaned against the wall, staying apart from the rest of the people. He got out his tobacco pouch and began stuffing his pipe. Quite a scene it had been. Old Sami up there on the platform like some college professor. Old Sami -- Sami Berkan, Secretary General of the. United Nations -- but for once a Sami Berkan who acted more like a freshman who hadn't studied, now called on to recite. "I want ideas, gentlemen," he had said. "No matter how absurd, I want them. The demand these creatures have made is -- I would say -- preposterous. But I must also say that they have made it and we must accept that they have power to force compliance to anything they demand. We are helpless, gentlemen. Helpless." Then he played the tape. tt'OU shall make note I have X taken effort your language to learn," the Bzrabba said. It had a wheezing, raspy voice. "We wish to be cause of as little inconvenience as possible." Berkan was still trying to make his stomach stay where it belonged. He had been briefed, of course. He had been shown dozens of pictures. He had been tipped off about the smell. (Like rotting wood and dung in an abattoir.) All the same, meeting face to face (more or less) and nose to nose (but where were its olfactory organs placed? Did it have olfactory organs?) took some getting used to.  mil feel all right in a minute, he  told himself. Or two minutes. Five? He glanced out into the heavy gray haze that hung above the East' River. On second thought, it would be best not to open the window. He wanted badly to close his eyes -- shut out at least the sight of the creature in front of his desk. He had been warned, though -- as if he needed warning -- that he must do nothing that might offend. All the available evidence indicated that the civilization of the Bzrabba (as they called themselves) was superior to human civilization in about the same proportion as human civilization was superior to that of termites. "One of our languages -- yes," the Secretary General said. "We have many. My own native language is Turkish, but -- yes -- I am fluent in this one." "Do you humans possess informational speech from the egg?" IF the alien wondered. One of its arms -- one of the pair that lacked a grasping appendage -- made a limp gesture. "Neglect that. It is mere intellectual curiosity. We have no time for that. It might be interesting to kqow, but -- " The arm's tip cracked like a whip. "We wish to be cause of not more inconvenience than we must," it said again. "We have come only for that which is ours." If a lobster and a cuttlefish could be mated, something like this creature from the stars might have been the result. Erect, it stood eight feet tall, not counting the four stubby, down-covered, many-branched antlers on top. Its upper torso was a medley of cruves that made Berkan think of free-form sculpture, though in a general way it could be said to resemble the hard parts of a squid's body. In color it was a blotched montage of purple and green. It walked (though that was not exactly the word) on what would have been a lobster's pincers if a lobster could stand on its head and if its pincers were modified beyond recognition. It wore a covering over its midsection that could have been leather and could have been taken for a breastplate, though Berkan had been given to understand that was probably not its function. None of the Bzrabba had been seen without such covering and the most reasonable explanation was that they were worn for essentially the same reason Tarzan wore a loincloth when he lived with the apes -- just because one associated with another species one didn't go around showing off what shouldn't be shown. (Since mouth, reproductive organs or excretory organs had not yet been identified there was consider"able debate over exactly what was concealed and, of course, it would be poor diplomacy to inquire. Ask a Scotsman what he wore under his kilt?) But the communication receptors -- sight and sound -- had been at least located. Their locus was also the approximate source of that ghastly voice. The creature's face, therefore, was down there under the arch of its legs. It was going to take some getting used to. Berkan moved from his desk to the settee. "I would invite you to sit down," he said. "I must apologize that we are not well equipped to accommodate -- we did not expect -- I can only suggest you adopt the stance that is most restful to you. I have no wish to be formal. This is our first meeting. I would like it to be as friendly as possible." Unobtrusively -- he hoped -- Berkan reached over to adjust the air-conditioner. Perhaps its filters would do something to moderate that stench. "I offer gratitude," the creature said. "Your gravity -- " It flopped on its back, the end containing its face pointed toward Berkan. It was something of an improvement, but Berkan still had the feeling he was talking to the creature's reproductive organs. He would just have to shut that idea out of his mind. "I should make a point of information clear to you," Berkan said. "Perhaps it has been done, but I see no harm in being positive you've understood it." "What is told three times is true," the creature said. Berkan took it to signify agreement. "The point is this," Berkan said. "It is true I am Secretary General of the United Nations, and someone not familiar with the true situation -- such as yourself -- might interpret this to mean I am the person most nearly in power over all the people in the world. ' However, the situation is not that simple. ,Our people are divided into many groups and the men who control each of those individual groups hold far more power than #, while I myself have only the most tenuous influence over what they do. Therefore I am not in a position to make agreements with you -- your civilization. I can only serve as an intermediary." "That will satisfy," the Bzrabba said equably. Its feet were still planted squarely on the carpet, legs elbowed up grasshopper style, as if it were going to do pushups with them. "I myself am not exactly voice-bearer of all the Bzrabba. This person has been led to understand you humans speak of myself to be a thing called ambassador. That is not an accurate description of the true facts. Most nearly in your language, myself should have the appellation of Agent of the Consortium." For practical purposes, Berkan supposed, it was a distinction without a difference. This particular member of the Bzrabba landing party (as identified by the decorations on its breastplate, but did the same one always wear the same breastplate?) had shown itself to be their spokesman. If it were hot an ambassarole of one. "It is possible my understanding of the language is not perfect," the Bzrabba said. "My grasp would be an ambassador is a person who represents a thing called government to another thing also called government, the two things being same, only separate. Our civilization do not have this thing called government." "Then how do you -- " Berkan stopped. It would be interesting to learn the political structure of their civilization, but there would be time for that later. Just now other matters were more important. The whole question of IF relationships with the Bzrabba would have to be settled. A hanging over the world ever since the Bzrabba ship appeared in orbit around the Earth-moon system. (It was an orbit that sent astronomers scrambling to derive new solutions to the famous three-body problem, whatever that was.) The ship was # miles long, # Vi miles wide in its major axis, not counting the five shark's fin projections from its bellied midsection. Betraying no detectable propulsion system, the ground party's dome-shaped landing craft came down gently as a drifting balloon. On entering the atmosphere, which it did at meteoric speed, the hull displayed not the slightest temperature rise from friction with the air. When the craft touched down in front of the terminal building at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago its weight punched through the pavement. It still stood there, many miles high. Aircraft had to divert to other fields. "I hope that our conversation can at least form the basis for mutual understanding," Berkan said...The air-conditioner wasn't doing a bit of good. "Yes," said the Bzrabba. "That is our hope also. We desire to cause as small inconvenience as possible." A civilization that could build a ship as gigantic as theirs -- propelled by a system men could not imagine -- could crush humanity like a beetle. Berkan was thankful their attitude was peaceful. Through his mind flashed the endless lists of possible motives and submotives the think-tank scenario builders had been cranking out -- with all the frantic haste of a berserk computation machine -- ever since the Bzrabba had come. Some of the ideas had been "I do not know what our civilization can possibly . offer yours," Berkan said. "But -- " He gave an inquiring, expectant glance. "Perhaps I make myself better understood by telling you of many things," the Bzrabba said. "It shall be permitted?" "Certainly." Berkan settled himself to listen. Inevitably a visitor from the stars would have far more to tell Earth than Earth .could tell in return. An intellect that could master a totally strange tongue in a mere six weeks -- what wonders could it not relate? "It is to begin," the Bzrabba said. "You must be told that the Bzrabba have existed a very great length of time. Since before the time of many stars that now you see. Truth? Boasting? Did it make a difference? Berkan nodded but reserved judgment. "Our worlds -- our civilization has such age that no meaning be carried in the mention of where the Bzrabba had origin. Our worlds, you could say, are primordial, having taken composition out of matter clouds in an eternity when in all the cosmos were only smallportions of any but the least complex configurations of matter. The equivalent concept in your science would be elements, though such rudimentary procedures for distinguishing one from another ignore almost all the finer details. Only scant abundances of matter more complex than approximately the number twenty in your nomenclature -- called by you calcium -- can be found in our worlds. You will notice that I have taken effort to familiarize this person with the state of your scientific knowledge. It is most interesting -- primitive, but possessed of striking instances of true insight. Unfortunate that one cannot expend more time to absorb such pleasures." "Pm flattered," Berkan said. He wasn't sure that he was, but it seemed a polite thing to say. "We are all flattered." Again that whipcrack gesture with one of the pincerless arms. "Though scarcity of them prevail, there does exist in our technology myriad aspects to which more elaborate matter structures are useful. On these, it is a consequence, we place high value." B erkan crossed his legs. He was beginning to understand. ' "You want to establish a trading relationship?" In all the thinktank scenarios, that possibility had stood high on the list of probable developments. "Please to allow the making of complete understanding in our purpose," the Bzrabba said. "It has been our perception that not all humans have full education in the scientific information other humans hold -- a very strange circumstance that this person is bemused by. So you may not know that the more elaborate matter structures have their creation at the innermost part of large stars -- larger, I would say, than the star around which this world has orbit. That one is too small and constructs only the number two element of your nomenclature, which you call helium, from the number one, named hydrogen." "I remembr being told," Berkan said. "It is the same process as with our hydrogen bombs. Or -- " He cocked his head, trying to remember. It was one of those distinctions scientists were always making -- distinctions he couldn't understand. "Sometimes they tell me it is, sometimes not." "We have found," the Bzrabba went on, "it is most practical to secure the more complex conIF figurations of matter in quantities needed by use of a technique that removes from suitable stars the outer portions whose weight, by gravitational power, have forced matter construction into more elaborate forms. Then it is necessary, of course, to leave the remaining part -- which is almost the pure material desired -- to dissipate in radiation the superfluous energy heat possessed in it. Your language would say, 'to cool,' but such terminology is sadly inexact. After a space of time the process arrives at completeness and the material is ripened for our usage." "Entire stars?" Berkan wondered. His grasp of astronomy was minimal in spite of his briefing, but still the casual assertion of such abilities -- even for the Bzrabba -- was hard to accept. "It is no difficulty to be done," The Bzrabba said. "Merely to adjust the dispositions of a two-star system in such fashion that a lesser star shall draw, by gravitation, from the surface of the larger streams of matter which are thrown in winding outward spiral into space surrounding it. Such events are now in process elsewhere and are noticed by those of you humans that have interest in such matters, who say 'Beta Lyrae type' and believe their selves to understand the thing proceeding." "I am -- " Berkan fumbled for adequate words. He felt as if a wind were blowing through him -- as if the floor under his feet were only empty space and distant stars. "Please to be reminded," said the Bzrabba, "our civilization is advanced in technology beyond the comprehension of your most all-knowing minds. Our worlds scatter through all this galaxy and the globular clusters that surround. Some portion of us have journeyed farther. We are vast." Berkan could only nod. The Bzrabba might only be boasting but -- "Go on. I'm not sure what this has to do with us, but -- " He waited. "We are a patient people," the Bzrabba said. "Foresighted. Like your farmers who plant seeds that in a future season they might harvest -- similarly do the Bzrabba prepare the cores of stars for later gathering. It happens, though, that often much else has taken place in the expanse of time while our core is becoming ready for usage. Frequently the matter removed from the star has condensed into planets around the other star -- the star that was employed to do the removing. The core itself, in the course of discharging its superfluous energy heat, has undergone minor changes -- has developed a husk of waste materials outside it as a shell, a slag that has risen outward to cover its surface. It isTrue, that husk-shell often does include much matter of desirable configuration, but in such complicated mixture and such small abundance that to separate the wanted from the not-wanted would be not efficient. It becomes necessary therefore to remove that husk and discard. We have come to do that now." Berkan frowned. "I think I do not understand." "But it should be obvious," the Bzrabba said. "As I have said, we do not wish to cause more inconvenience than is necessary, nor have we wapt for anything not ours. But our civilization has great need and places great value on the matter structure number twenty-six in your nomenclature, which you call iron. That substance exists in good quality as the inner parts of this, which you mistakenly describe to be, your world. It is not yours, but ours. It has discharged sufficiently now and we have come to gather it. I am very sorry, but we must request you humans please to get off. got his pipe going. For all his shock. Old Sami was still a seasoned diplomat. Driven numb, back to the wall, his final words on the tape had been calm. "I thank you for your frankness," he had said. "As I have told you I am not in a position to reply at this time. I trust it will be acceptable to defer a response while I confer with my staff and advisors and consult with various heads of state." An Earth-born diplomat would have known he was being put off. Maybe the Bzrabba knew it, too, but it did not demur. It had not, it said, expected instant com-, pliance. Adequate time would be allowed. In the conference room Berkan had admitted not knowing what the Bzrabba meant by adequate time -- nor had he thought it wise to ask. He had won a little time, but that was all. "We need ideas, gentlemen," he had said again and waited. No one had said a word. II B ack m his office Darrah slouched behind his desk. His pipe had gone out. After a while he lit it again. He opened his portfolio and spilled the briefing papers in front of him. Each report had a folder of its own. He flipped through them, made sure they were all there. They summarized -- so he was told -- everything known about the aliens. Everything. He leaned back and drew on his pipe. After a while he picked up the phone, dialed home. Kris answered. "Kris?" She knew his voice. "Mike? Something the matter?" "I'll be working late tonight," he IF said. "Won't be home -- not till very late." "But you never work late." True enough, he never had. "Tonight I'm working late. Something's come up. No, I can't talk about it." After he had hung up he looked at the phone for a while. He didn't know if she really believed, but she would have read the papers and would know the Bzrabba had talked with Sami. If she couldn't figure out why such news meant that an economist working on international trade problems had to work late -- well, it was too bad. He stared through his window. The skyline lifted out of afternoon shadows, all angular shapes like a hodgepodge of battlements. After a while he picked up the phone again. He got Jorge Kipnis. "Jorge, let me talk to his nibs." "He's not -- " "Jorge, I was at that meeting and you were there, too. Let me talk to him." Jorge made no argument. After a moment's wait Darrah was talking to Berkan "I'd like to hear that tape again. Can you send someone down with a copy?" "Best not," Berkan said. "I took a chance letting so many hear it. Journalists would -- " "I've been thinking," Darrah said. "I'd like to hear it again. If it's as I remember, it's just possible I'll want to have a talk of my own with -- well, you say what he is. Superman?" "Not 'man,'" Berkan said. "On' the rest of it. I'm sorry to admit, you are probably correct. Why don't you come up and we'll hear the tape together? And then, perhaps, talk. Of you have anything at all to suggest I'll very much want to talk." Darrah could believe that. "Now?" "Now is the best time, is it not?" T he Secretary GeneraTtistened. Other men drifted in. They listened, too. They asked questions. They rubbed their jaws. "What do you think?" Berkan asked at last. Paul Shimer stubbed a cigarette. "I'd say it hangs on too many assumptions. Too many things we don't know." "That's why I want to talk to him," Darrah said. "I want to find out how close I'm guessing." "The chance that you're right all down the line is about one in a hundred," Shimer said. Reluctantly Darrah nodded. "Okay. But look," he said. "They're talking to us. If they thought we were nothing -- they wouldn't. They'd just start chopping and not pay us any more attention than you'd give the bugs under the bark of a tree. And that one on tape -- he kept saying that bit about not causing us any inconvenience -- " "Huh!" Colin Corcoran muttered with scornful irony. "Maybe they mean it," Darrah said. "Maybe they really do. And if that's so we should try to find out how much inconveneince they think is necessary." "We already know," Corcoran said flatly. "Tm not so sure," Darrah said. "We know one thing they want. It's a lot -- it's frightening -- but it does leave a lot of other aspects -- well, indefinite. If we take them at their word -- " Corcoran frowned. "You're really serious, aren't you?" "Aren't you?" Darrah asked. "Aren't we all?" Berkan tapped a pencil oh his desk. "I think," he said, "our chances are probably small. Nevertheless, we have a possibility here -- a small hope. It should be explored. Now -- " He leaned back, gazing at the far wall. "You're going to let him talk to that creature?" Shimer objected. Berkan raised an eyebrow. "He should be there. It is, after all, his thought and he will understand the ramifications more clearly than someone else. But -- yes, you are right. For the talking it is necessary to have a man who will say neither too much nor too little." He turned his chair and looked out into the late afternoon. The sky was full of a yellowish haze. He thumbed the intercom. "Helga? Find out if Walter Lewis is still in the building. If he is -- ask him to come up. If he's gone home or somewhere, locate him." To the men arranged before his desk he said, "Merely because a quest is doubtful is not a reason to reject it without trial." T he Bzrabba had been quartered in a Waldorf Towers suite. Darrah left the elevator a half step behind Walter Lewis. The weight of the tape recorder was almost pulling his arm from its socket. They turned down the hall. A squad of aides received them -- UN people assigned to serve as the Bzrabba's errand boys. They knew Walter Lewis by sight. Darrah and Lewis were ushered into the alien's presence with a minimum of bother. The room had been stripped of its usual furnishings, though a painting still hung on the wall and drapes still framed the window casements. The Bzrabba was leaning into what looked like a fishnet supported at an angle by a chrome-shiny cantilevered frame. A paperback in an advanced state of dismemberment lay on the floor between its feet. As Lewis and Darrah entered it carefully tore still another page from the tattered spine and held it up to its visual organ -- first one side; then the other -- and added it to a neat pile on its left. As its tricorn pincer reached for another page it deigned to notice them. The room IF was full of a stink like something dead in a swamp. "Quaint, the form of artistic effort in which you humans dabble," the Bzrabba said. It placed the remnant of Finnegans Wake on top of the loose pages and came erect. "May this one welcome offer into this, which temporarily be its place of occupation?" Lewis chattered something about how the Bzrabba surely didn't object if they made a tape of everything that was said. Darrah found an outlet that would take the machine's cord and diddled with the reels and switches. The aides hurried in with an armchair and a small divan, saw them placed to everyone's satisfaction and withdrew. The Bzrabba flopped on its back. Lewis waited until the door clicked shut, then nodded to Darrah. Darrah got the tape started and backed away from the machine. The stench was making him physically ill. If Lewis was affected he showed no sign of it. "We've come about the request you made to the Secretary General this morning," Lewis said. "Transfer of information has been done," said the Bzrabba. The words had an implacable flatness. "That's true," Lewis said. He shifted uneasily in the armchair and leaned forward, his hands laced together. "We feel, however, there are some considerations we should explore together. I'm sure you've no objection to our discussing the matter." "It is not to make refusal of communication," the Bzrabba said. "The fact has been said. Describe what more must be done." Lewis let his breath out slowly. His body relaxed like a balloon beginning to deflate. Darrah looked down at the tape machine. It was running just fine. "We believe conflicts can be averted by mutual understanding," Lewis said. He even sounded relaxed. "However, before we go on, we'd like to satisfy a point or two of curiousity. Do you mind?" "Objection be not given." In spite of the huskiness of its speech the complete indifference of the Bzrabba's attitude could not be mistaken. "It's simply this," Lewis said, keeping to a diffident manner. "What you want -- the only thing you want -- is the iron. Is that right?" "Statement does correctness have." Lewis was slow with the next question. "Our cosmologists think -- aren't there a lot of worlds with iron inside them? Ones you can take without bothering anybody?" The Bzrabba clacked its pincers. It was a sound like chopsticks being rattled. "Worlds having core of substance called by humans iron in natural course do not happen' it said. "Bother be to the Bzrabba that humans have discourtesy to occupy without permission or even to make presence known. Nevertheless, the Bzrabba choose to force no greater inconvenience than be not avoidable," Lewis betrayed his dismay only in a momentary glance in Darrah's direction. Darrah, under orders to say nothing, could only nod. Lewis went back to the job. "Tell us," he said. "We've inferred from things you've said that you've encountered life -- living things -- on many worlds. We've been wondering, though -- arguing, I should say -- whether you've found intelligent creatures before." "Not only worlds," the Bzrabba said. "The interrelated chemical processes in complexity -- called by you humans life -- exists many places, possessing of myriad forms. To the Bzrabba are location-places known to the number beyond enumeration. But of the ongoing multifarious process -- called by you life -- that which is possible to have description as creative intellect -- such have the Bzrabba made count only to the quantity of six, of which two still have existence. Humans now be with the numbers of seven and three." Darrah saw the diplomat's eyes twitch at the corners as if in pain. He waited, holding very still, "What has been the attitude of the Bzrabba toward them?" Lewis asked. "Bemusement," said the Bzrabba. All four pairs of pincer-tipped arms clasped hands across its body. Darrah thought of a grotesque Santa Claus holding its belly while it laughed. "In a universe old, a peculiar new item," it went on. "Inferior, but having possession of queer interest. A rare trifle. Deep has been regret in the Bzrabba to have witness borne at demise of the four -- to have to see the wilt of the two that yet are remnant." "Thank you," Lewis said, swallowing hard, "Our scholars will be very interested." He looked around. Darrah gave him a slow, grave nod. He might have hoped for better. But this would do. "Did these others have anything the Bzrabba wanted?" Lewis asked. "Did their presence obstruct the Bzrabba from anything?" The Bzrabba made a rude noise. "They did not dare," Lewis bent to open his briefcase. He took out his notebook. His face was a plain mask. His hand wasn't quite steady. "Quaint also, such an artifact, that storage of date and retrieval are done," the Bzrabba observed. "What we need is this," Lewis said, looking up from his notes. "The Secretary General anticipates considerable difficulty in convincing the leaders of some IF nations -- most, in fact -- of how seriously you mean your request. People in some parts of the world aren't too well informed about scientific concepts. It may be extremely hard to persuade them you mean what you say." "Persuasion shall be done," the Bzrabba said. Cold as a banker collecting the widow's mortgage. "The Secretary General," Lewis said, tapping his thumb on the notebook, "thinks it's possible they're more likely to be convinced if the Bzrabba would send emissaries to explain your position directly to Various government leaders in -- well, a number of countries. In some nations it might even be a good idea to speak directly to the people. We'd supply as much help with learning the languages as we're able, but in some cases that might not be much. Could we expect your cooperation?" The Bzrabba's pincers unclasped, one pair at a time, while it spoke. "If, by such course, activity be expedited, the Bzrabba shall enjoy the giving of assistance. We have intent, well declared, to be stimulant of not more inconvenience than be made imperative." "You've said that several times," Lewis said. He held to a casual, conversational tone. "Can we rely on it?" "Against that which to the number of three occasions be spoken no deviation from real fact does prevail," the Bzrabba said. "Fact exists. Fact is." Darrah frowned. He and Lewis would have to study hard and long to be sure what it had said just then. He became aware of Lewis looking at him, one brow raised. Yes, Darrah nodded. Time to close it down. Lewis rose to his feet. "I think that takes care of our immediate problem," he said. "We may have more questions later. But for now -- well, I do want to thank you "It be toward mutual purpose," said the Bzrabba. Darrah was ready when Lewis signaled to stop the recorder. He buttoned it up while Lewis kept the Bzrabba's attention with small talk. As they left the Bzrabba was dipping again into Finitegans Wake, remarking as it tore out another page that the glue humans used left a ragged edge. T hey went back and reported to Berkan and the dozen men waiting with Berkan. The Secretary General sat at the end of a table, so large there was space for a man on either side of him. They all listened to the tape and then they talked. They smoked until the air in the room was blue. They talked for a long time. Some while after midnight Darrah knocked out his pipe on the edge of an ashtray and began to fill it for the dozenth time. "I've based my proposal on two points," he said. "They're both conjectural, but I think one of them has now been borne out. It's true they're contemptuous of us and I'll have to admit that from their point of view we're somewhat below the status of an underdeveloped nation. In spite of that, they've elected to talk with us. I think that indicates their contempt is not absolute. For a guess. I'd say they think of us about the same way we think about whooping cranes. We arouse the conservationist in them. That's not much -- but it's something." He gave up fumbling with his pipe and laid it on the table. Hard enough keeping clear in his mind what he wanted to say. "Beyond that," he went on, "my ground isn't solid. But by obliging them to send representatives to every country in the world -- and I think . we should include every government and pseudogovernment and subgovernment, as many as we can think of -- we can maybe impress them with the level of resistance they'll have to contend with." Pierre Laffont made a flamboyant gesture. "Pardon. Do you honestly think they are not able?" Darrah shrugged. "No," he admitted. "I'd have to say they probably can. I'm hoping that once they understand the situation they won't want to." "And do you believe that will happen?" Laffont asked. Darrah slouched farther down in his chair. "I donT think anything else will help, either. The thing is, we don't have much to lose." Carefully, Berkan laid his pencil on the table. "More to the point, gentlemen -- if we do nothing we shall certainly have lost." the morning when Darrah let himself into the apartment. He tried to be quiet, but Kris awoke anyway. "Mike? What time is it?" "Late," he said. "Didn't mean to wake you." "What's that funny smell?" The Bzrabba's odor had permeated his clothes. "Guess this suit will have to go to the cleaners," he said. Kris stretched sleepily. "What were you doing all this time?" He didn't answer right away. He didn't feel much like talking. "All right. Don't answer." She sounded hurt. She turned over, face away from him. He sat down to take off his shoes. "Kris?" "Uhh?" "Would you believe if I told you I was trying to save the world?" "Oh?" Too sleepy to be really interested. "How?" "Making it cost too much." Silence. He thought she'd gone back to sleep. "Well? Did you?" IF He got his other shoe off, set it down quietly. "I don't know. We'll just have to see how It goes." Ill H e found himself transferred to the diplomatic section. He felt awkward there, among the carefully speaking, baby-step-progress people, but that was where Old Sami wanted him and it was a vantage point from which he could watch what happened. Besides, there were more plans to build. Language instruction had not been a serious problem. The UN's staff included people skilled in virtually all Earth's major tongues. File searches turned up people who could teach most of the others. That still left the several hundred dialects and tribal languages found in the forests and... deserts of the southern continents, Asia and the Australasian islands. For most of those, the fall back on their capacity to absorb a strange language quickly from scratch. The emissaries went out. Several thousand of them. Reports trickled back from such hinterlands as Nepal and the Faroe Islands and disturbing rumors about the Bzrabba's intentions were heard from Yemen and the Malagasy Republic. The sophisticated press dismissed such tales as the kind of reaction to be expected of people only recently exposed to civilization of any kind and -- while the more sensational press made what they could of garbled dispatches -- not many people were persuaded that the Bzrabba were more than they seemed which was big and freaky. At his new desk, Darrah studied reports from a thousand agencies. His planning group met daily. The Bzrabba were spat on in Catania, mobbed in Singapore and charged with porcine ancestry in Baghdad. The Shah of Iran was seen to hold his nose in public. An emissary returned from the Sepik region of New Guinea still alive, but pincushioned by a half-hundred spear shafts. In Australia a band of aborigines bounced, boomerangs off one for half an hour, then disappeared into the outback. One was harpooned. Some Bzrabba didn't return. In Bogota there was uncertainty whether the shot that killed the emissary might have been meant, instead, for the President of Colombia, who had been standing beside it at the time. In Peking there was less doubt. A crowd tore one to scraps. From the African bush came the whisper that, roasted over a slow fire, Bzrabba was very tasty. UT they are behaving as ifnothing happened," Guido Falcone said, dropping the latest sheaf of reports on the desk. Darrah nodded. "Looks as if maybe that Rand study was right." Falcone started to speak, then frowned. "Which one was that?" "The one that says they may not think the way we do, may not value the same things -- may not even have the concept that they're individuals. There's some evidence for it." "Hah. Big help. So? What do we do now?" "Wait," Darrah said, containing his feelings and his fears behind a mask of imperturbability. "Play the game. Pretend we're fumbling for a way to give them everything they want, if they'll give us a few things. Some way that doesn't wipe us out. That, and keep moving up the price. There's got to be a limit somewhere." "And then?" Falcone asked. "What is to stop them from deciding we want too much? What is to stop them from scraping us off like vermin?" That had been a terror in Darrah's thoughts for some time. "I'm hoping they'll think it would be an inconvenience to us," he said. "I'm hoping they don't want to do that. Have you got a better idea?" but the time came. The.Bzrabba spokesman -- the one that wore the breastplate of Agent of the Consortium -- arrived at Berkan's anteroom. There had been no warning, but Darrah had been expecting the visit for a week. He plucked a folder from his security file and met Walter Lewis on the way up. It was only a couple of flights -- they took the stairs. A dozen men were scrambling into a room that adjoined Berkan's. "Luck, Mr. Darrah," one of them stage-whispered. Berkan was speaking as they walked in. The stench that met them was like being slapped with a week-old haddock. "I know that some of us have behaved badly," Old Sami said. "I should apologize for them. But you should understand they do not welcome the prospect you give them. Without a more effective persuasion than has been done, resistance must be expected." "Negligible is," the Bzrabba said. "All must vacate our property." "I have a question. May I?" Walter Lewis asked. He was still getting settled in a chair next to Berkan's desk. He unzipped his portfolio, but left it lying in his lap without taking anything out. "No objection be," said the Bzrabba. Darrah slipped into a chair off to the side. He wished he could do some of the talking himself, but Old Sami knew best. He gave Lewis a nod to proceed. "You realize. I'm sure, that asking us to evacuate our planet is going to cause more than a little inIF convenience," Lewis said quietly. The Bzrabba lay almost at his feet. "That much, necessary is," it replied. "We have done work for purpose of obtaining useful measure of that configuration of matter, called by you -- inspecifically -- iron. Of this world that part be property to us." "Until now, we've always thought this was our world," Lewis said. "In many things opinion of humans be a not equivalent to most rudimentary level of correctness," the Bzrabba said. "To claim this be your world, this one must announce a not true fact." Lewis appeared to ponder the response, then let it pass. "We have some considerations that need to be explored," he said. "Assuming for the moment we're much do you mean by necessary inconvenience?" "Explain, please," the Bzrabba said. Lewis drew some papers out of his portfolio. He didn't really need them, Darrah thought. It was all right, though. "I believe you're more or less familiar with our technological abilities," Lewis said. "What we're able to do and what we're not able to do. Am I cofrect?" "Not all abilities does this person know in absolute," the Bzrabba said. "In many realms of purpose, it is known. Not all." Lewis nodded. "Yes. Well, then. I'm sure you must be aware -- and this is a fact -- we don't have the capability of evacuating everybody. Altogether, we might be able to send perhaps two dozen people into space for a very limited time -- and not very far. That's as much as we can do." The Bzrbba's arms writhed like a tangle of snakes. "Does this person receive information that you make refusal to remove selves from our property?" Lewis' voice now became precise, the words clipped. "I'm not saying we refuse," he said. "Nor am I saying we shall. I'm telling you, though, the plain fact: we do not have the capability of doing what you ask." "This one must say again," it said, "this property be ours. Humans shall depart from it." Berkan's chair squeaked as he leaned forward. "Are you prepared to take measures if we do refuse?" he asked. "Mind you -- " he held up a hand -- "I am not saying we shall or that we shall not. I ask your position." "Should it be not-escapable -- the Bzrabba shall in deep reluctance use force necessary to ensure the removal be done." Implacable. "I see," Berkan said. Darrah caught the hint of a shudder in his voice. Lewis took it up again, briskly efficient. "All right, assuming very reluctant; but assuming otherwise -- could we hope the Bzrabba will give us the assistance we would need?" "To the purpose of removing humans?" the Bzrabba asked. "That in time after, the Bzrabba shall the iron substance capability to remove have? Without more hindrance from fact of their presence? By reason they be not?" "Uh, yes," Lewis said after a long, thoughtful pause. "Because without considerable help from you -- the Bzrabba -- our cooperation would simply not be possible. To be specific, we're not able to transport ourselves into space. Could we hope that the the transportation?" "We wish to be cause of not more inconvenience than be made imperative," the Bzrabba said for what must have been the thousandth time. "Should humans not create conveyance the Bzrabba must -- for alternative-supply." breath and resumed breathing. Lewis was looking his way. He nodded gravely. One for our side. Lewis went on as if the Bzrabba's response had meant nothing. "Where can we go?" he asked. "That be not a known place," the Bzrabba said. "Let me explain further," Lewis said. He hunched down, close to the creature's equivalent of a face. "There's not another habitable planet in the solar system. Not for us, especially not with our present level of technology. I'm told Mars might be just faintly possible if we had enough of the right kind of equipment, but we don't. And I'm afraid that even if we did, the planet wouldn't have the resources to support our whole population. So we've discussed this among ourselves and it's been suggested there might be planets around some of the nearby stars and that some of them might be suitable. If you could tell us where they are -- and something about them -- it would save a lot of difficulty." "Worlds in gravitational captivity of stars be more numerous than stars," the Bzrabba said. Lewis podded. "We've always suspected that." Darrah had to smile. When Lewis first heard the idea he had been incredulous. "What we still don't know but must surmise," Lewis went on, "is that only some of them -- probably only a few -- will be planets that are really suitable. In fact -- " he checked his notes -- "within certain limits we're rather diverse when it comes to habitat. Some of us might be comfortable on one world -- others might be more so on another. And with the present state of our science, we haven't a way of IF knowing where or which these are. So -- we don't have much choice -- we'll have to ask you for help in finding them." "That will enlarge the degree of less inconvenience?" the Bzrabba asked. "Very much so," Lewis said. "Perhaps I should remind you -- it's you who are asking us to move." A silence came, then, which grew colder as it lengthened. Lewis sat up straight, waiting with austere patience. Darrah began to fidget until Berkan fixed him with a frosted steel eye. Finally, the Bzrabba spoke. "Survey shall be needed," it said. "Data taking. Many things the Bzrabba know, but information of that category until now the Bzrabba did not have necessity to know. It shall require to be discovered." Lewis nodded. "We suspected that might be the case. Our question, though, is whether you'll do it." The Bzrabba struck a pincer against its breastplate, making a sound like a taut-skinned drum. "To make small the inconvenience to you humans, that activity shall undertaking have." Lewis looked to Darrah, who nodded gravely, without enthusiasm. It wasn't going exactly the way he'd hoped. It wasn't even go- ing the way he'd feared. He wasn't sure what to think. Lewis turned to the Bzrabba again. "We'll be very grateful," he said. No irony tinged his voice. "Now, one other consideration we ought to mention. We don't know if you've thought of this, but our scientists say it's very probable that any planet or -- for that matter -- any group of planets we might occupy mightbe similar to this one, but they still won't be as perfect an environment as the one we've got now. We're adapted to this one and -- " back to his notes again, quickly flipping the pages -- "even a subtle difference -- say, a few percentage points of solar radiation or something in the atmosphere -- might have serious consequences. Can ypu understand that?" "Nevertheless," said the Bzrabba. Lewis pursed his lips -- took a breath. "It's been suggested that some of the problems might be alleviated if our technological capability were raised and our scientific knowledge increased. Also -- you might consider this a separate point -- if we do find ourselves on a number of different worlds they probably wouldn't all be around the same star. It would be helpful -- minimize the inconvenience, you might say -- if we had some method of communication between them. Some mode of transportation, perhaps." "To achieve, you are more assistance requesting?" Inwardly Darrah winced. The creature had them figured out -- maybe it was far ahead of them. "Actually we'd much prefer to rely on ourselves," Lewis said. "What we'd suggest, if you'd be some assistance toward upgrading our technology, so we could cope with the problems ourselves. Then we wouldn't have to ask for help." The Bzrabba's handless arms twined around each other, then unwrapped. "Such action would some aspects simplify, nor would much difficulty cause. Information given does also in possession of those who give remain. Uncertainty stands only that you, who name selves human, be of limited capacity. Dubious would hope be that even rudiments of ours could humans mastery achieve." Lewis casually slipped his notes back inside his portfolio. "If you want our cooperation -- " he began. "No. Let me," Berkan said. He addressed the Bzrabba. "We have a saying," he said. "We say, you never know until you have made the attempt. I think that has some relevarjce to what you have said, don't you think?" "To experiment," the Bzrabba said. "That has been done." "BiU not with humans," Lewis said. "A consideration," the Bzrabba said. "With humans, not." "So?" Berkan asked. "At small effort and small risk involved to the Bzrabba -- " one of the handless arms writhed snakelike, cracked like a whip -- "you humans shall have warning, choice -- and consequence." "I think we shall elect the choice," Berkan said affably. "Yes. Definitely the choice." A gain they sat around a table. Again they talked far into the night. Every man and woman -- and there were more than twenty -- seemed to feel compelled to give hisher evaluation and opinion at tedious length, as if otherwise they couldn't justify their presence at what was certainly the most crucial conference in the history of homo sapiens. Darrah would have commented on that, except he had some thoughts of his own which -- he felt -- had to be brought out. "He didn't object enough," Darrah said. "Everything we asked for incredibly naive -- and I can't believe that -- or he's thinking something we simply have no way to guess at." "There is another possibility," Leon Vazquez said. Unwatched, his hand sketched perfect polygons on his doodle pad. "Perhaps the astrophysicists are correct -- the Bzrabba want the iron that bad." IF "Which leaves us where?" Lazio Wiesel asked. He was a fat, bald man. Without the mustache he would have looked like Churchhill. "Committed to a deal we can't go through with," Nicholas Pelikan said from across the table. "Are you certain?" Berkan said. They looked at him. "Of course we're certain," Pelikan said. "Speak only for yourself," Berkan said, but he said it softly and his nod was genial. He put his fingertips together. "Let us consider rationally, gentlemen. The Bzrabba would seem agreeable to provide virtually all things we might ne if we will only vacate our world. Admittedly the thought of leaving it seems at first unthinkable. But -- and here I borrow a fragment of Mr. Darrah's thinking, although even he might not acknowledge it, for I mean to turn it around. It's simply this -- everything has a value. A price." "That is not true," Jules de Bray's quick gesture spilled the ashtray beside his wrist. "That is simply not true." Berkan nodded wearily. "Nothing is absolutely true," he conceded. "Including what I have just said. But in the present case -- let us think. We are accustomed to our world and the thought of abandoning it seems unbearable. Yet, when we examine the question carefully, what do we find?" Tewfik Habib banged a fist on the table. Things rattled. "It is our world!" He looked like an eagle screaming in the wind. "That seems to be a point under dispute," Berkan said mildly. "Perhaps I should ask, what kind of world is it? If we are thoughtful and honest with ourselves we discover it to be one whose most valuable resources are being rapidly used up and whose air and land and waters have become increasingly contaminated by the wastes of our industry, our carelessness -- a world, in short, now under threat by a population growth that seems impossible to control. We arc offered an indefinite number of worlds, all of them habitable, with ample and intact resources. We are alo promised the technical knowledge to use those resources wisely and to not foul our nest. There is even a hope there will be power to do many things we arc not presently able to do -- things we consider not possible. Let us not be too hasty in rejecting such a proposition. Faults it may have, but virtues also." "How do we know they'll keep their promises?" Darrah didn't even see the man who asked. "Admittedly, that is a question," Berkan said. He glanc at his watch. "Equally, it is possible that everything the creature seems to promise is of no great value to them -- is perhaps the equivalent of the twenty-four dollars for Manhattan Island I have been told about. Or it is possible -- as Leon has said -- that these creatures need iron so desperately that, to them, it is truly worth the price." "Or it may be," Jiian de Castro suggested, "that they have not yet totaled the bill." "Many things we do not know," Berkan said. "We know only what What we must keep in mind are not the uncertainties -- but rather the simple fact that, having little to be hoped for, we actually are risking very little. I would suggest, gentlemen, rather than inventing new objections -- new things to fear -- we should put our minds to ways and methods to insure that further negotiations may be conducted to our advantage and that the best shall be made of this uncomfortable situation." He looked at his wrist again. "It is very late now. I would suggest that we go to our homes and sleep. And that we come to the problem with fresh minds in the morning." N ot until long after midnight did Darrah get home. As he groped for his shoelaces in the dark, Kris came drowsily awake. "That you, Mike?" Then: "You've got that stink again." "My suit," he said. "I'll take it to the cleaners tomorrow." "Incinerator," she said. "They never got it out of the other suit." It wasn't a thing to argue about. Not at this hour. "All right. The incinerator. In the morning." A silence. Then: "Mike?" "Hmm?" "This time, did you save the world?" He thought a while. The facts were one thing, the possibilities another. "No," he said at last, uncomfortably. "But there's a chance we'll get a good price. Might be very good, considering the goods are second-hand." # ( T really is strange," Berkan  shook his head and passed the report across his desk to Darrah. "I can only say, they want the iron very much." The Bzrabba had supervised the design and building of a data readout 'machine in Zurich. It was gigantic -- a mountain had to be hollowed out to contain it and a glacier was pressed into service to keep it cool. Most of its structure, the aliens explained, was needed to convert Bzrabba concepts into human frames of reference. It was, .they implied, disgustingly inelegant. At the last, the information cube was fixed in place. It was # inches on a side, dull red, and the data it contained was coded into the individual moleIF cules of its substfKX by isotopic variation. Some anonymous technician touched a key and the printout spat: E  me #... The Bzrabba said the cube included the whole summation of Bzrabba science. Maybe it did -- maybe it didn't. At that point it made little difference, for -- so far -- the Bzrabba had not yet repeated their request for the iron. There was still the remaining part of their bargain to fulfill. The last Bzrabba, Agent of the Consortium, had whisked back to Chicago. The landing craft lifted as if by its bootstraps, without noise or fuss or even a show of powerful energies being used. When worlds suitable for men were found or -- if necessary -- made habitable, they would return. For the iron. Darrah consigned a future suit to the incinerator. "I'll have to admit I don't understand them," he said. He dropped the report back on the desk. "If we'd asked them for different things -- They can't think what we asked for has much value. Of course, it's possible they think the iron's worth it all. I don't know. Maybe to them it actually is. They never did say what they use it for." "Does it make a difference?" Berkan asked. "Maybe it's us," Darrah went on, frowning at the new thought. "Maybe vere the thing that has value." "Us?" Berkan wondered. "How could that be?" "I wouldn't know," Darrah admitted. He shrugged "Whooping cranes? I've no idea in the world." N either man ever saw the Bzrabba again. The Secretary General lived to the age of four hundred eighty-two as a direct result of the advances in molecular biology made possible by the Bzrabba information cube. Darrah, having been younger at the time, lived to six hundred nineteen. Not for seven full centuries did the Bzrabba come back to claim their iron, but when they did -- with # great ships to evacuate all humans from the world of their origin -- humanity, was armed with the knowledge the Bzrabba had given, plus what men had gained for themselves, for Man was not an old and stagnant race and had already spread to the near stars to live on many worlds that were not naturally hospitable before men made them so. The fleet's leading elements were met first out near Altair. The meeting was cordial. Neither side wished to inconvenience the other. Nowhere on the spherical perimeter did a Bzrabba craft penetrate closer to Sol than the vicinity of T au Ceti. # I In an alternate Eden, would men love, hate -- or simply forget? her feet, using the branches of the nearby yookal tree for support. It had been a lovely day and now she would join the others for a sleep. She walked slowly to the place of night gatherings, wondering at the ache of her body. She did not feel as she used to. She could not move as easily -- none of them could. Things had happened to their bodies and one day they would play the tapes and find out why. She passed her hidden place on the way to the others, but the memory of that day so long ago was dim and easily pushed aside. It had never happened again. Lyria and Sera were there already and Cumny and Treece were approaching from the waterside. It was strange not to have Jaycee with them any more. She had stopped just a short time before and it was hard to remember that she would not begin again. Playnia sat down and nodded at the others. Each put the food she had. gathered on the ground and all shared the meal. Hunger stopped. They spoke of the day that had been and they wondered if they would all be there after sleep. Sera suggested looking at the tapes. Lyria had suggested it the sleep before. No one answered and they each curled up in the shallow depressions their bodies had worn into the soil through the years and they slept. Playnia had the dream she often had. When she awoke she was still stunned by its vividness and she recalled Jaycee's dreams -- they had begun just before she stopped. Playnia decided that she would look at the tapes after one more sleep -- or two. Looking at the tapes meant going into the darkness of the ship -- the ship that once shimmered in the light of the sun was now shining softly from the bite of the sands that shifted around it. Playnia did not really want to go into that darkness or to see the tapes she knew she should have seen a long time ago. She slowly returned to her sleep.  inal paper will stand. We'll find a civilization without war, without harmful strife of any kind -- gentle and cultured." But Karl thought he knew human nature. "Altman, you are wrong. Their civilization -- as you call it -- will be the same as those we Jenow -- humans are always the same. We're going to see battles, feuds, hostility. Environment had no basic effect on shaping human society. Man himself is the cause of his problems." "I have been studying the original reports again. The planets seeded offered so much that with all needs easily satisfied, man could develop without strife -- " Altman stopped as the captain entered their quarters to say, "Gentlemen, I must ask your in-' dulgence. It is necessary that you tell the crew what is expected of them when we reach Socex, One." The captain looked at them to see who would decide on procedure after landing. His worst fears were realized. "I will," calmly stated each of the experts. The captain, who had been privileged to hear their conflicting views through many a meal, decided to leave his problem where it was. "Altman," he said, "you will talk at nine. Karl, you may address the crew at three."  with a slight hunger. She walked over to the grove to her left and ate of the fruit there. When she was satisfied she left the sleep area and ambled down toward the ship. When she arrived she saw that Sera had come there before her. They greeted each other and turned back -- the tapes could wait another day. Sera had discovered a place of particular color and the two of them went to the grove to look and feel the peace of the color and the touch of the breeze. They spent the day there -- days were beginning to pass ever more quickly. Playnia had to push thoughts of the old days, the one different day, many times from her head. Sera, too, seemed often to be elsewhere. ' That night the five of them decided to hear a tape after they slept. They had made such decisions twice before. The first time the tape had told them of the joys of the place where they lived and had identified the words for all the things around them. The second time they had not listened. The place itself and the strangeness of their bodies that had occurred for a time had kept them from it -- they knew it was wrong not to keep listening, but they did not return. Now, so many, many years later (if the one tape they had heard were right about time) they thought they should hear another tape. But as they were about to leave for the ship after their sleep. Sera did not waken. Playnia and the others put her under the sand far from the places they used. They did not see the tapes. with the eighty-year-old tape of Socex-#. It was a lush and green place. A place of little temperature variation and abundant foodstuffs. There were no predators on the planet. Socex-I Was one of the many worlds that man had been startled to find scattered through the universe. Planets that were Earthlike, and yet offered even more than Earth, abounded. Man had settled many of them, but always to destroy them -- and often himself. Hence the experiment. Send to each of a given number of planIF ets a group of w#h-six was picked as the optimal nuiribcr -- all about to give birth. Amnesia would be induced and they would be set down on the planet to produce young. Amniocentesis allowed the choosing of various combinations of male and female offspring. Each planet would be left strictly alone for a predetermined period before being revisited. Perhaps a cure would be found to the problems man seemed to bring with him wherever he went. Each of the groups would be taught a language -- a language developed to keep out preconceived behavioral patterns. There were no words for love or war or hate or fear. The lifeship that landed them contained tapes first acclimating them to the planet, then giving them information as needed. "They will return to the ship and play the tapes as a result of suggestions implanted at the time their amnesia was induced. Man is an enterprising animal. We shall probably find a peaceful culture -- a culture devoted to the arts. There may be as many as two hundred people -- and we must not alarm or influence them. This experiment will continue -- we are merely to record the results to date. Then we can begin our analysis. The World Federation, which sponsors and supports the project, will then decide, on the basis of results, on the next step. This is the first of ten experimental planets. I just want to remind you that these are in all probability a peaceful, loving people. Professor Karl feels differently. Think carefully before deciding whether or not you want to be part of the first landing unit." K arl began his lecture, with the same eighty-year-old tape of Socex-I that Altman had used. He, too, pointed out that the planet was lush and green, a place of little temperature variation and abundant foodstuffs. There were no predators. "... thus man, becoming bored, is likely to engage in all manner of competitive sport. This is likely in turn to lead to real conflict. We will probably find a world not unlike that of the early stone age on Earth. You must be prepared to protect yourselves and the recording equipment as well. But we must not interfere with the experiment. Please bear that in mind when you decide whether or not you wish to be a part of the first landing unit." down to the lake. She spent some time in the cool, quiet water. She sensed a dullness in herself. It was like the feeling she had on that day long gone. She wondered why she kept thinking back to that -- then realized that there was something about it she wished to remember. She left the water and walked over to her hidden place -- where she had put the thing that day. She stared at the ground for many hours. At last, hungry, she walked back to the grove and Cumny and Treece. Lyria had stopped the sleep before. "Perhaps we should see the tapes before we, too, are no more," she almost pleaded. Cumny lay down the fruit she was holding. She said, "No. We have not for so long -- we ought not." Treece agreed. Playnia and the other two lay down to sleep-all seemed to sleep more these days. As they were drifting off Playnia heard a mumbled comment about the thing that had come from Cumny on that day. She sat upright. "Cumny, Cumny, what thing? Please." But Cumny had stopped. Treece looked at Playnia and shrugged. "On the day we came apart," Treece said, "we were all so ashamed. I never could speak of it. Now there is no shame. Shame -- that is a word like sorrow. It is an old word." A flicker of a longforgotten past seemed to flash through her old mind. Playnia said, "I thought something was happening to all of you, too. But it was over so quickly. The hurt of it -- I can still remember the hurt. The tearing and rending of my body. But I did not lt it destroy me. Perhaps we should have listened to the second tape. But the days before that one were so lovely. When the hurt ended and I saw the horror that had tried to destroy me -- I stopped it." "Did you feel empty -- a lack?" Treece asked. "Not so much a lack as a fear that you would discover my secret and not want me with you. Perhaps the tapes could tell us what happened to each of us on that day. Do you want to find out?" Treece shook her head. "No. It has been over for so long. The days since have been good. Ob, for years there was the reminder every month, but that stopped long since. It may all be over. We are not reminded -- not anymore." Playnia glanced up at the sky, her attention caught by a large shadow. She took Treece by the hand and they wandered off into the grove. They would come back later perhaps. And see if the shadow returned.  IF roomR When people begin to listen again to the old swing records, go to revivals of old shcwys or read books of the type popular forty years or more ago, it's easy to blame it on nostalgia, a sentimental yearning for things past. It's much more convenient for tunesmiths, dramatists, writers and critics to dismiss it all as nostalgia than it is to wonder if perhaps their values have somehow been corrupted and if people are simply turning to what will again give them the things they've always liked and wanted. The sentimental or "camp" sense of nostalgia is only a lesser definition of the word, not even mentioned in Webster's Second. The original and still most important definition is homesickness -- an honest feeling, devoid of condescension and sentimentality. Many people want to go home again to where their roots have always been. Maybe they wantto be able to hum and whistle tunes and laugh and have fun at movies and plays. The success of playwright Neil Simon has not so far been attributed to nostalgia, yet he is one of the few who never seems to leave home from the older virtues of the drama. And heresy though it be now, I suggest that maybe people want to go home to the kind of fiction that quickened their pulses, kept them reading for pleasure and excitement long after they should have gone to sleep. I think we've had the novelty of trying to be great thinkers and daring innovators in our reading matter and now at least some of us want to go home -- go back to where strong men tingled with powerful emotions, where creeps crept off into the night and were forgotten, where romance had something warm to it other than the blankets -- return to adventure, to life with endocrines that work, and to fun. In witness whereof: seven of the books lying before me for review hark back to fiction and writers popular forty or fifty years ago. These represent the work of three publishers and four writers. And one is part of a series that has been one of the most popular in recent years among science-fiction and fantasy readers. last is Captive of Gor, by John Norman (Ballantine, #c). in the Chronicles of CounterEarth, and the earlier volumes in the series are still selling very well indeed. I think the only good way to describe the series is. also the best way to explain its success -- these novels are the closest thing now being written to the Martian books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. They don't imitate slavishly. They make no attempt to copy style directly and the mechanical device of the lost princess is pretty well forgotten after the first book. But at their best (particularly in the third volume. Priest Kings of Gor) they are darned good adventure stories with the feeling and reach of Burroughs. Their faults have sometimes been great and highly annoying, but 'somehow their virtues -- the virtues of good fiction -- save them. The current volume, however, falls rather short. Tarl, the series hero, doesn't appear until some ten pages before the end of a very long book and then only under the name of Bosk of Port Kar. The viewpoint character here is Elinor Brinton, a spoiled rich girl of rew York City, who is captured and taken to Gor to be a slave. Aha! Any student of Gor should know most of what occurs from there on. Yep, Norman has decided that maybe he didn't quite get his message across from the male viewpoint -- maybe some readers weren't quite able to understand, even after all those hundreds of previous pages, that women like to be enslaved and beaten. So he has taken a woman character and shown us how much fun it is, and how no woman can resist any strong man who knows how to subdue her properlyIt takes up # pages of text, so we get our money's worth of words, at least. But otherwise, the book IF isn't worth th#; prk;, except to those really huigflTOn or able to beat their own women as they'd like! . "-'chivalrous school (in the mddern sense of chivalry, of course). No women are beaten in his books, though his male charac ters take enough blows, to satisfy the most blood-thirsty. He has written three books about a gentleman from Virginia -- sorry, I got mixed up -- about a modern American on the fabulous planet of Callisto. These are Jandar of Callisto, Black Legion of Callisto and Sky Pirates of Callisto. All are from Dell, at #c each. They are frankly imitative of the Burroughs' Martian series, as Carter admits elsewhere. They are independent (in the sense that Burroughs' early books were independent, but with cliff-hangers) yet the three readily form one continuous story devoted to Jandar's discovery of the strange and entrancing world of Callisto and of the princess Darloona -- as pure and noble a girl as Burroughs ever penned and one as nobly loved. In these, Carter has copied every trick of Burroughs, including those that are faults. The story begins with the usual business of the hero being forced to hide in ruins, from which he escapes to another world; and we're given a full frame of how the manuscript reached Carter, etc. etc. At the end of the first two books, we find our hero, having lost his princess, sitting down to write out the account for shipment back to Earth before he goes out to find her. Yet once we're in action, it moves pretty well. Carter substitutes an insect-man for the green Martian friend of John Carter, and that comes off rather well. The beasts and the backgrounds are copies of Burroughs, in a sense, but they have sufficient originality. And the Sky Pirates who take up much of the story are a good invention and generally well worked out, (Exception: When a light gas, such as hydrogen, is compressed, it will not have greater lifting power -- on the contrary, putting twice as much gas in the same space means the gas weighs twice as much, and hence will be able to lift less!) The only fully original touch of the plotting, however, is a mistake. Carter has his hero -- logically, probably -- as a somewhat incompetent fighter. This simply doesn't fit the pattern. It's only after he's taught to be a sword-master that the action perks up. And I wonder why Jandar had none of the advantages of Earthly muscles on a light world that John Carter enjoyed on Mars? Carter defends imitation by stating elsewhere that people can no longer read new Burroughs' books, much as they want to. So someone has to write such books. Maybe. But I suspect that's not quite true. No modern man can really think in Burroughs' head. I suspect that Norman's Gor is better than any direct imitation can be, simply because it permits the writer to exercise his own talents toward the same end that Burroughs sought. The Jandar novels, within their limitations, make for fairly entertaining reading. Certainly they are better than many of the imitations of Burroughs written when Burroughs was still writing. When Lin Carter isn't imitating so directly he does a better job of getting the Burroughs effect, I think. In his Under the epilogue (from which I've quoted him) in which he deals quite frankly with imitation versus being influenced by Burroughs. I find that Carter considers the Jandar novels to be imitations and the Green Star story to be merely influenced. In some ways, I see the difference. And yet, there is a considerable imitative factor here, too. While there is no prologue on how Carter "found" the manuscript -- a device I consider clumsy and ineffective -- there is a prologue in which we are told how our hero gets to the world of the Green Star. On this device, which was a literary trick used by many writers. I'm undecided -- today it is seldom used. Yet perhaps it should be whenever the means of getting there is interesting in itself. Here Carter does fairly well. He uses mysticism and astral projection, but he avoids the error Burroughs made in having his hero leave a body on Earth and then wake up on Mars fully embodied -- in the same body! I've always shared Carter's annoyance at this. Then he winds up with the straight Burroughs technique of having his hero back on Earth, not knowing whether his princess has escaped doom or not. There are other differences. An important one is that our hero has been a hopeless invalid on Earth, so his lust for the active, healthy life he can lead on another world is both more convincing and more deeply felt than would otherwise have been the case. There is originality under the Green Star. Yet I end up feeling that the Lin Carter who is not directly imitating Burroughs is IF really writing much more truly like Burroughs! I preferred this book to the Jandar ones and recommend it to those who really are hopefully looking for the books that Burroughs, the Master, can no longer give us. There  Scorpio, by Alan Burt Akers tative. It begins badly enough with an "explanation" from Akers on how he acquired the tapes from which the story is transcribed. It then moves on to a fairly good beginning. We discover that the hero. Dray, reached Kregen (in the Constellation of Scorpio) long ago, having been born in #J#. Not bad -- we are led to expect a somewhat different hero by his background alone. We are also introduced to a group of beings who explain Dray's arrival on scene -- they gather people from many worlds. All of this leads in time to the fact that Dray has been bounced back and forth between Earth and Kregen several times. Could be interesting, but somehow nothing much seems to come of it. Maybe because he's had time to become modern. Dray shapes up as no more than any other Earthman falling for a beauteous damsel on another world. And the returns to Earth don't amount to much, after all, except to give him a chance to be stranded here at the end, longing to go back to his damsel in the same old way. In between we have the rise of our hero as a warrior, his pursuit of his damsel and so on. But sadly lacking is the texture of a Burroughs world. Somehow the animals and the cultures Dray finds don't have that alien touch of romance that can be found in the Master -- or in Carter, for that matter. It seems to boil down to a pretty standard set of experiences, after the first indication that Kregen was going to be truly different. It isn't bad -- but I didn't find it particularly good either. A nother way to imitate, unfortunately, is to make fun of something, to satirize it. That is what John Jakes has done in his Mention My Name in Atlantis natured and sometimes amusing, but I can't see it, though the back cover calls it an uproarious cliffhanger. The whole idea of turning Robert E. Howard's type of sword and sorcery into something uproarious strikes me as about on a par with trying to make a limerick out of an Edgar Guest poem. But if you feel turned on by discovering "How Conax the Chimerical Helped Sink the Lost Continent!" you're not my type of reader anyhow, so go ahead. A nd now I find that I owe a deep apology to those who are at least somewhat my type of reader. For some reason I can't understand, I seem not to have reviewed a darned good book that I thoroughly enjoyed. This is Other Days, Other Eyes, by Bob Shaw (Ace, #). If it is still available on your stands, don't neglect it. When it first came out I was almost afraid to read it. Shaw's first "slow glass" story was so exceptionally good as a short story that I hated to see it forced into a novel. I needn't have worried. It isn't forced. This novel includes the short story and the other stories that Shaw did on slow glass -- that nriarvelous substance that holds back light so we can see wht has happened days or even years before. But the book does far more than put a frame around the contents -- it begins at the beginning and traces the whole affair in such a way that each story now means more to me than when I first read it. It also goes on with excellent and controlled inventiveness to work out a logic that could not have been expected from the invention of slow glass. It's the novel I've wanted from Shaw since he first did the short story -- and the fact that the novel is on the same background is pure serendipity to me. Most highly recommended. Keith Laumer's The Glory Game (Doubleday, #), but with a few reservations. This is a story of a potential war between the forces of Earth and the alien Hukk and of the man who is put squarely in the middle. Earth is divided -- the militants want to strike now, while we can still beat them: As a man in the Space Navy, Commodore Dalton might be expected, of course to be one of the Hardline boys. On the other hand, the diplomatic Softliners believe the Hukk can be dealt with without any dreadful war -- and they can offer Dalton more than the Navy can. But on t'other hand, he's interested in a girl whose father, Senator Kevin, is a Hardliner. And around and around we go as Dalton gets caught in the Glory Game. To make matters worse, during some supposedly peaceful maneuvers he has full responsibility for mankind -- unofficially -- and no authority -- officially. And the Hukks aren't playing the same game. And no matter IF what he does he's going to get'ptire hell on Earth. It's that kind of a situation and it's beautiful. Laumer handles it with both logic and zest as the situation becomes more tangled. But, toward the end of the book there's a curious change of pace. Laumer has given a nicely developed and detailed story of conflict on all levels through most of the novel. But suddenly Dalton is isolated and the story seems to halt. Truthfully it doesn't. It picks up again. But in the final stages the elements of crisis seem to become telescoped and reduced to a much smaller scale. I'd suggest that the first eight chapters be House. Guest-of-Honor: Larry Niven. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. For information: Sampo Productions, # Alhambra, No. #, San Francisco, California #.  tel, New Orleans. Guest-of-Honread quickly -- as they will be, since they have a fine pace of their own; but from chapter nine on, readers might well go slowly, examining everything against the events preceding. It may not seem like the same fracas, but it is. And careful reading will make this stand out. I wish Laumer had used another # words to let us know more about Arianne and others later, as well as to keep a bit more complexity at the end. But it's still a novel that must be recommended. Laumer is a writer with enough different ways of writing not to have to imitate even himself.  or: Joseph Green. Membership: #. For Information: John Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #.  August #September #, #. ence Fiction Convention: At Royal York Hotel, Toronto, Canada. Guest-of-Honor: Robert Bloch. Rotsler. Toastmaster at Hugo Awards Banquet: Lester del Rey. Membership: # attending and # supporting (until ##), # at the door. For information: Torcon #, Box #, Station K. Toronto #, Ontario, Canada. bungled. They had created him -- hadnt they? Well? The rest of the issue was good as usual, but I did miss the letter column. New Orleans, La. It bothers me, too, when uncontrollable story lengths accidentally coincide in one issue to crowd out Hue and Cry. This is where the reward and research live for you and for me. In letters such as the above -- and the one following. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: When we began reading Construction Shack (If February #) by Clifford D. Simak, one of our favorite writers, we expected good science fiction. Unhappily, as we soon discovered, the story is less science fiction than fictional science! Mr. Simaks scientific knowledge is surprisingly and deplorably ' deficient. Among his major errors: I) Mr. Simak states that # grams per cubic centimeter was the  previously supposed density of Pluto. But since this value is about three times that of the dens( Continued from page #  est known metal, the majority of scientists have never supposed anything of the sort! #) He ascribes calculation of Plutos mass to measurement of... eccentricities. But eccentricity is only a measure of the departure of an ellipse from circularity. Simak should say  perturbation, which is a deviation in an orbit due to a gravitational field other than the suns. #) Simak s unmanned Plutonian probe must return to Earth since its films are far better than its transmissions. Ridiculous! It is much easier to build a one-way probe with any desired quality of transmission than a necessarily heavier two-way probe (the mass-ratio of a twoway probe equals the square of that fdr a one-way probe). #) He declares a  manned craft could pile on velocity that could not be safely programed into a probe. Whats he afraid of -- collisions? With what -- meteor storms? They went out with the science of the  thirties. #) From Pluto, he says, "The sun... is not much more than a slightly brighter star. In reality, from Pluto the sun is # times brighter than the full moon on (from?) Earth! IF #) He claims an unsuited astronaut would explode in a vacuum. Blood vessels will rupture, yes. But explode? No! Again, science of the  thirties. #) For hundreds of years Pluto has been the last outpost," Simak says. But Pluto was not discovered until #. So are we to think the story occurs centuries from now? If so, the flights to Mars he mentions are also centuries away. Rather unreasonable! #) Simak states communications time lag between Pluto and Earth is # hours. Actually its no more than seven. #) Simak thinks electrostatic attraction is needed to maintain Pluto s surface dust, which would otherwise fly off into space. But the .#-G field he assumes is more than adequate for the task. Dust simply lies there. Only agitated molecules of a would-be atmosphere escape into space! There are other mistakes, none of them trivial. Science fiction has two functions: to entertain and to inform. Construction Shack has miserably failed in the second function -- indeed, it has misinformed. We have always liked Simak s writing. We hope it will return to its usually high standards. Rick Conley Conley Powell, Ph.D. Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Kentucky Lexington, Ky. My personal feeling is that "the last outpost" was there long before it was discovered -- and that Cliff Simak was indeed writing about a moment remote from this time, distance measured perhaps in wisdom rather than calendar years or centuries. You're perfectly correct about the inapplicability of the science of the 'thirties today. Many scientific myths were exploded in our lunar landings and Mars flybys. Cliff invented, I thought, a few implausible ones to explode in the future -- he was telling us to expect the unexpected when we study the blueprints of creation. And saying it in depth. if he failed to inform you -- perhaps you weren't looking. Dear Mr. Jakobsson:  never take time to write to publishers, but I enjoyed Death and Designation Among The Asadi by Michael Bishop so much that I decided to write and tell you. Jo A nne B. Cavender Dayton, Ohio #S Ecsf #S W N e Y o r  N  I # #  T i # pgr wor# mamo mtO mMrmni. #-wont mtoOmmm. Pofmoni wtth wOot. u Psychic. Send Name, Birthdate. Time, Location and #. magazines. Arfcham House, Fantasy Press, LovecraR #. Florida State Christian College. Post Office Box #. Fort Lauderdale, Florida #. authors. Shocking fiction, uncensored opinions, out#. Portland, OR #. #. Longview, Washington #. #. free...Autosuggestion, Box #-GY. Olympia. Washington #I . #.Stanwood, Washington #. Ohio #. assembled Sciertce Fair Psychogalvanometer reveals #. Hamilton. Montana #. D. Cockrell. Box #, Bronson. Mich. #. ArKlerson and others. # for Premidr Edition to Box #, Oakland. Califomia #. N.J. # tion radio programs are now available on tape. #" Oklahoma # rent issue features Sitverberg. PohL-Bradbury. White. book Dianetics: Modem Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard has ah applied philosophy to show you how. Send # to Bookatore-IF. 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Herbert, the acclaimed winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Ittakesyouto the frightening world of Arrakis . as fearsome as the creatures who inhabit it. first novel in fifteen years. And, the great master's never been in better form. original pieces from authors such as Bradbury, Blish, Vonnegut and nearly # pages of excitement. Yes, choose these or any four books on this page for just # Cto help cover shipping), and you're on your way to mindbending membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. Dept CL #, Garden City. N Y # Please accept my application tor membership in the Science Fiction Book Chib and send me the # books whose numbers I have written in the boxes below Bill me just # (to help cover shipping) for all # About every # weeks, send me the club's bulletin, "Things to Come!' describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices If I wish to receive both Selections, I need do nothing, they will be shipped to me automatically Whenever I don't want I of the # Selec twns or prefer an Alternate, or no book at all, I will notify you by the date specified by returning the convenient form always provided I need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year, and may resign any time thereafter Most books are onW I #, plus a modest charge for shipping and handling (Jccasionally, extra-value Selections are slightly higher entire introductory package within # days Membership will be cancelled I owe nothing     Mr, Miss Please Print Address City I State Zip I L J when you join and agree to buy only # books during the coming year. # Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. 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At last, the four masterpieces in one volumean underground classic that encompasses all mankind, his universe, and their relationship Spec Ed # Nebula Award Stories Seven, Lloyd Biggie, Jr , Ed The latest novellas and short stories prizewinners picked by Sci-Fi Writers of America Includes Anderson, Silverberg, and others Pub ed # # # The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov The master's first novel in # years and worth the wait for a fabulous trip to the year # Pub ed # # #I The Dancer  From Atlantis by Poul Anderson Four people from different ages and cultures are catapulted by a time machine back to #BC Spec Ed # The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold Inheriting a time belt promises the joys of the worldbut something goes wrong Pub ed S# # # The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner The celebrated author, of Stand On Zanzibar, a mind-bender that chronicles the collapse of civilization Pub. ed # # # The Overman Culture, Edmund Cooper The author of Sea-Horse In The Sky spins a tale of a city encircled by a moat roads that lead to one place...and a new culture Pub ed # # # The Hugo Winners, Vol !  II Giant #-in-l volume of # award-winning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed # # # The Wind from The Sun by Arthur C. Clarke # sci-fi short takes by a master of the medium The Cruel Sky and Dial F For Frankenstein are two of the featured fantasies Pub ed # # The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete, hardbound editions, sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more Members accepted in U S A and Canada only Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto Offer slightly different in Canada,  August iab  fixf  plus Clifford D. Simak  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro Lester del Rey  Gene Wolfe  David Magil The paper time machine also a tool: a time machine that enables you to replay the crucial events -- past, present, and future -- that shape our lives. Now. instead of merely reading about what's happening, you can explore and experience the alternatives and decision points through the technique of Conflict Simulation. What ia Conflict Simulation? Conflict Simulation is a way of analyzing a political or military conflict situation. A way that is as intellectually stimulating as a game of chess, and as thorough as a written analysis. Through the use of the Conflict Simulation (or "game") format, the conflict situation is re-createdso that you are in a position to make the vital decisions and, in the game at least, change the way things were, are, or will b What you gel ed bi-monthly. Each issue contains:  A ready-to-play conflict-simulation game with a # x #" playing surface, die-cut playing pieces, and complete rules.  An analytical article on the same subject as the game in that issue.  Other feature articles on historical and military subjects.  Game and book reviews, commentary on existing games, and discussions of subscribers' questions. The magazine is #  pages long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format. bat in Western Europe, #). We also publish a separate line of conflictsimulation games, which you will find listed in the coupon. -- Free to new subscribers battle presented in a game-design specially created to introduce new readers to Conflict Simulation. I Send check or M.O. to:  Simulations Publications Inc. Dept. # # # Ext #rd St... New York. N.Y. # Please enter my subscription to S.  T. for: #I Year (# issues)# U # Yrs. (# issues) -- SI # # Yrs. (# issues) -- # J Current issue # Sand me the following Simulation Games: Kursk (Russia. #)-# Korea (#-#) -- # Phalanx (ancient Greece)-# "--iw (Russia, I #) -- # (Napoleonic Wars. #) -- # -(the #-Day lnvasion)-#   Please s e your free brochure. j Address --  City The paper time machine also a tool: a time machine that enables you to replay the crucial events -- past, present, and future -- that shape our lives. Now, instead of merely reading about what's happening, you can explore and experience the alternatives and decision points through the technique of Conflict Simulation What is Conflict Simulation? Conflict Simulation is a way of analyzing a political or military conflict situation. A way that is as intellectually stimulating as a game of chess, and as thorough as a written analysis Through the use of the Conflict Simulation (or "game") format, the conflict situation is re-created -- so that you are in a position to make the vital decisions and. in the game at least, change the way things were. are. or will be What you gat ed bi-monthly. Each issue contains:  A ready-to-play conflict-simulation game with a # x #" playing surface, die-cut playing pieces, and complete rules.  An analytical article on the same subject as the game in that issue.  Other feature articles on historical and military subjects.  Game and book reviews, commentary on existing games, and discussions of subscribers' questions. The magazine is #  pages long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format. bat m Western Europe, #). We also publish a separate line of conflictsimulation games, which you will find listed in the coupon. Free to new subscribers battle presented in a game-design specially created to introduce new readers to Conflict Simulation. Send check or M.O. to: Simulations Publications Inc. Ospt. #I # Eat #rd St... New York. N.Y. # Please enter my subscription to S. A T. for: ni Year (# issues)#  # Yrs. (# issues) -- SI # h # Yrs. (# issues) -- #  Current issue # Send me the following Simulation Games: Kursk (Russia. #-S# Korea (I #-#I )-S# Phalanx (ancient Greece)-S# Barbarosea (Russia. #-#)- Leipzig (Napoleonic Wars. #)-S# Normandy (the D-Oay Invasion)-  Please send me your free brochure. Name City State Zip JulyAugust # Vol. #, No. # Issue # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Theodora Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Albert Dytch, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Clifford D. Simak  # Chelsea Quinn Yarbro #I Worlds of IF is published bimonthly by iary 'of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #e. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Worlds of IF is published in the United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman ofthe Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #issue subscription in the United Kingdom:  #. sal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. AU stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. who we are. The only thing we, however, know about you is that you read science fiction. But now we need to know more about you to continue to bring you the type of fiction -- and, incidentally, advertisements -- that will interest you. Please fill in the following in as much detail as you can; your time will be well spent and most appreciated. I . Male Female # . Age #. Student: High School College # . College graduate Degrees S'. Income: Under # #-# #-T# #-# Over # #. Profession #. Own Home Rent: House Apartment # . What magazines, other than science fiction, do you read regularly? Europe Other #. Means of travel: Plane Auto Train Bus Other #. Do your own: Boat Est. value Automobile Est. value Hi-Fi equipment Est. value Home Workshop Est. value CamperMotor Home Est. Value Camera equipment Est. value Motorcycle Est. value Snowmobile Est. value #. Interests: Skiing Fishing Swimming Hunting Golfing Tennis Bowling Camping Flying Boating Gardening Home repairs Photography # Stamp collecting Coin collecting Other #. Afffllatlons: Fraternal Professional Athletic Social -- : Scientific Other #. Are you a member of: Book Club Record club Other Red Cross Political club #. Investments: Stocks Bonds Real Estate Thank you for taking the time to respond to our Questionnaire. Please send your completed form to: IF Reader Research # East # Street New York, NY # ancL i pi, '): Rrjdt-fs writ.' im! wrotur Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I have several things to comment on regarding the April ' # Worlds of If. I have never really enjoyed del Rey as a reviewer until this issue, but this was a review from which much can be learned. Most reviewers seldom come down hard on even a bad book, but Mr. del Rey did a fine job on Cloning. I like reviewers who demand a lot and let readers know when a book may not be up to par. Vll be paying closer, attention to this column from now on. I am about to add Colin Kapp to my small but growing list of authors who cause me to sit up all night reading. So far only Delany and Ursula K. LeGuin have managed the feat. Now Mr. Kapp has joined them.  cant remember a serial that has had me more eagerly waiting for : the next installment than his last one in If. The conclusion of The Wizard of Anharitte was the first thing I read in the April issue and it was good to the end -- one of the most entertaining, enjoyable and best thought-out books I've had the pleasure to read in a long time. Another thing I'd like to bring up deals with the suddenly (to me) asinine efforts (including my own) at defining science fiction. We are madly trying to name the thing, draw its limits , say where it stops , where it starts and how far it can go. This is a little like saying that the universe is infinitf, but ends four hundred miles beyond Pluto. Nuts. I think most people at least sense that science fiction is a literature without limits, so what the hell are we trying to limit it for? My feeling is that the so-called " hardcore " advocates are way off base. The argument is silly -- science fiction is that form of literature that cant be defined. So why don't we just get down to reaching out farther with our imaginations -- that's what the field needs. One last item: Does anyone know if there is a science fiction club in Vancouver? I've just moved here from the east and have been unable to find out. Nicholas Grimshawe Vancouver, B. C. Will those in the know please reply in care of Hue and Cry? Mr. Grimshawe, an old and valued contributor to this department, neglected to enclose his latest address. Contributors' complete addresses are published only upon request -- in this case to do so might have been in order. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: It seems that  have entered my subscriptions at an odd date -- just when the last Jack Gaughan art died away from the covers of If and Galaxy. Will the old fellow ever be coming back? Oh, sure -- I see plenty of his sketches inside, but none outside. Cover by Brian Boyle, says an inside page. I sigh in passive sadness -- no Gaughan. Ever since his weirdo covers for the lensman series I've been following his artwork all across the world of sf books and mag ( Continued on page  #) I sail rang the door chime -- who carries a housekey halfway down the galaxy's arm and back, eight months by Skip Drive? It was long enough, he saw, for the white paint to have begun flaking off the door. Pearsall had applied that paint slowly and lovingly only a few weeks before Hawk Flight's departure. The industrial fumes evidently had been getting worse. His wife opened the door. "Who -- Woody!" She flung herself at him, arms reaching and clasping -- but only for a moment. Suddenly she recoiled and staggered back, her face contorted. "No!" She backed away through the foyer toward the living room, hands clenching and unclenching, gray eyes wide and mouth slack with shock. He followed, but didn't try to touch her. "What's the matter, Glenna?" Something was happening too fast -- he couldn't believe her reaction, let alone understand it. "You heard the ship was in, didn't you?" Her face was pale, the fine cheekbones standing out from the faint hollows Tjelow. She shook her head. Her mouth worked but no words came out.  "You've cut your hair," he said. She had always worn it long and straight. Now it was a mass of short curls, tinted a lighter redbrown than he remembered. One curl hung loose over her right eyebrow, near the tiny black mole at the corner of her eye. Almost as tall as he, still slim, she stood rigidly defensive, angles of bone accenting her loose beige robe. "Who are you? What do you want?" It didn't make sense. He tried to smile but the smile died -- he suppressed an impulse to reach out to her. "Well, who do I look like?" His tone was gentle. "Have I changed so much in only eight months?" Her fisted hands stood out  little from her sides, shaking. "Whoever you are, it isn't funny! It's a cruel, cruel joke!" Now he felt the edge of panic -- sweat prickled at his armpits. She turned arid ran to the bedroom, paused just inside the doorway. "Get out! You get out of here! I have a gun. My -- my husband's. So you just better get out of here!" She disappeared behind the door -- he heard her rummaging through drawers. To Pearsall, his mind stalled at dead center, the chime of the picturephone came almost as a rblief. Automatically he set his bag on the floor and crossed the room to flip the switch, the thought came that he'd never heard of anyone being shot while answering the phone and he almost grinned. But not quite -- a bullet was not what he feared. The chubby-faced man on the screen was familiar by sight but not by name -- a junior member of the spaceport commander's staff. "Yes," the man said, "we thought you might be there." He waved Pearsall to silence. "We've pinpointed the discrepancy noted in the records when Hawk Flight landed. Admiral Forgues wants to discuss that with you. Meanwhile, a John Laifd urgently requests that you call him at his home. One of your navigation personnel, I believe. The young man seemed almost hysterical." Forgues, the port commander, IF moved into the picture. "I'll take it -- I'll take it -- " Peripherally, Pearsall saw Glenna in the bedroom doorway. She had found the .old automatic pistol but the gun pointed at the floor as she watched Pearsall and the screen. "All right," said Forgues, "let's get to the bottom of this. Who are you?" Exasperation drove out fear. Pearsall exhaled hard. "Sir, I am Commander Elwood Jay Pearsall, first officer on Hawk Flight. You've known me for fifteen years at least. Is my identity in doubt?" "It certainly is. Whoever you are you're not Woody Pearsall -- and what you were doing on Hawk Flight , I don't know. But I intend to find out. So you might as well tell the truth. Now." "Damn it, sir, I'm Woody Pearsall." He shook his head briskly to clear it of cobwebs. "Who the hell else would I be?" Forgues grinned tightly. "Well, in that case we do have a problem. Because, you see, you're dead." T HE viewscreen, as Pearsall maneuvered Hawk Flight to its final descent, was spattered with random moving dots. He jiggled a tuning knob slightly, but saw no improvement. The knob was sticky. He made a mental note to tell young Laird that if he absolutely had to eat on watch, for God's sake to wipe his hands before touching the equipment. The landing area showed clearly enough, but the flashing dots were a distraction. The viewing equipment was due for a full overhaul -- but then, so was the entire ship. And so was Pearsall. The spaceport looked unfamiliar, somehow. To hisjight, toward the nearby city, he remembered a soaring tower topping a white, shining building. Surely it couldn't have been torn down in the .eight months he'd been away -- the building had been almost new. Perhaps he was confusing one spaceport with another -- perhaps an overdose of Skip Drive was fogging his memory. He put full attention to landing the ship. The impact was barely noticeable. "Nice grounding. Woody." The voice over the intercom was Captain Vaille's. "Give the watch to Laird and report to my quarters, would you, please?" Pearsall acknowledged. "All your," he said to John Laird. "See you next, on the ground, probably. The maintenance crew will be here to relieve you as soon as our landing blast cools. When they arrive call the captain's quarters for clearance and you're home free." "Yes, sir," said Laird. "Now remember, Commander, I want you and your wife to meet my family, have dinner with us, as soon as you can. You have the address?" "Right." He tipped Laird a mock-salute and left. The captain's quarters were one deck below. Halfway down the narrow ladder Pearsall's heel caught on a torn edge of plastic. He almost fell, but caught himself. "Damned old crock really needs some work," he grumbled. But he patted the bulkhead beside him to soften the curse before proceeding to the captain's cabin. Vaille was big, taller and heavier than Pearsall. On his desk were a bottle and two small glasses. "A toast. Woody? It's been a hard trip, but a good one." They raised their glasses, sipped. The liquor was an oTf-world product, a brandy from Harper's Touchdown. Golden flecks hung in the dark fluid. "You're right, skipper -- a good, hard trip." Eight months on high Skip-factor, never landing, only slowing a few times for fly-by reconnaissance of new planetary systems, took a lot out of men and ship alike. But the odds had been good to them -- Hawk Flight's unmanned one-way probes had discovered two new habitable planets, potential colony sites. "We should be able to disembark in an hour or two," said Vaille. "All the tapes and solarwind samples are boxed to go. I imagine everyone has his own stuff packed, or nearly. I can throw my gear together in five minutes." Pearsall grinned. "Me, too. Or leave it -- and good riddance." Vaille laughed with him. It was good to be home. Even the normally reticent captain was affected. In due time the maintenanceand-repair crew boarded. Its chief brought clearance papers, thus accepting responsibility for the ship -- red tape was minimal. Spaceport personnel began the unloading of cargo. And finally Hawk Flight's crew, fifteen men and nine women, trod the catwalk to the outside gantry, rode the elevator down and touched shoe soles to Earth's concrete rind. As always, that moment gripped Pearsall's throat. longer greeted returning crews personally. Many ships came and went now and Forgues had other duties -- procedures had been streamlined. Even the newspersons stayed away; making do with official handouts unless a real newsitem were involved. Announcement of the two new colony planets, Pearsall guessed, would soon bring them running. IF He didn't recognize the subordinate who was preparing to do the honors. The man struck him as a bit of a fussbudget, with his clipboard in one hand and pencil shifted awkwardly back and forth between handshakes. "Captain Vaille? Yes." Checkmark, shift pencil, handshake. "Welcome. Honored, sir." End of handshake. Shift pencil. "First Officer Frantiszek?" Checkmark. Shift pencil. "No. I'm First Officer Pearsall." No handshake. The pencil wavered. "Pearsall? Must be a mixup. Where's Frantiszek?" Pearsall looked for Vaille to answer, but the captain was talking with someone else, a few feet away. "I replaced Frantiszek when he broke his leg skiing, a week before we left. Funny you didn't get the correction." The mishap had boosted Pearsall to First Officer a year or two before he had expected the promotion. Erase checkmark, scribble note. "All right -- we'll check it out," the man said and moved along to the next person. No handshake for Pearsall. Bored, he withdrew his attention while the man checkmarked and handshook his way down the list. A tone of exclamation broke his reverie. "Laird? My roster shows r Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher.  First Time in Paperback    By popular demand. Lin Carter's !  I first "Green Star" novel (d la BurI   roughs and Merritt) brought in !   tons of enthusiastic letters from ! ;  readers, and we think this new   ; novel is even more enthralling! It   ; is fully illustrated too. ;  ; (UQI #-#) ; John Brunner in his best modern j ! ; style. What happens when an al !  ien visitor threatens the destruc I ! tion of Earth and Earth is too  ! busy hating its owncomponents  ! even to heed the news?  I (UQI #-#) !; t author, last year's Hugo-winning J ;  novelist. "The Wares of Simple J ; I Simon's Custard Pie and Space j  J Man." Why? Because it contains   a feast of riches in stories, articles j  ' and Phil's own comments. A J  sheer delight. (UQt # -- #)   represnts the discovery of an un; I usual new science-fiction talent, j ! It brings a vision of the next cen ! tury that will inevitably invite  ! comparison with the work of  ! Samuel R. Delany (another Woll ! heim first) and Harlan Ellison. ! I ( UQI #-# ) ######################## no John Laird. What is your position on this ship?" "Junior navigator, sir," the boy answered. "On commander Pearsall's watch." "Pearsall, eh? Neither of you is on my roster." He harumphed. "We'll check it out." No handshake for Laird either. They were escorted to a nearby building for a quick, perfunctory medical check. Orin Teague, Hawk Flight's own medical officer, had made thorough examinations and certified the ship's complement as free of alien infection, but the minimum formality was still observed. Then they were free, the two dozen, to go where they would and do what they could. "Report back Tuesday morning," said the man with the discrepant list. "Oh-eight hundred sharp. That gives you seventy-two hours, less a few." By Tuesday, Pearsall thought, their reports would be analyzed -- the reports they had prepared during the past in-flight months. Until then Hawk Flight's crew was superfluous. That suited him just fine. He shook all the hands he could find, waved goodbyes and left to catch a city-bound tube train. On arrival he used his spaceman's priority card to rent a ground car. He checked its fuel-cell reading and set off for Fisher's Landing, the small neighboring town that was home. He didn't call first -- it had never been his habit. During his absence some street routings had been changed. He found his usual access to the throughway was one-way in the wrong direction. Rather than taking time to solve the new layout, he settled for an older, secondary arterial and soon made his way out of the city into a countryside of rolling hills. It was that time! of autumn when leaves turn color but have yet to fall. One small maple, yellow and fed, so entranced him that he pulled over and stopped -- just to look, to make it part of him. He left before he was done with his tree, because now he was so near that he could no longer wait to see Glenna. Married to him for almost twenty-five years, more than half his life -- she still brought all his senses alive. Either the signs had been changed or he had daydreamed -- he missed his turn-off. But he circled, found an unfamiliar road with the proper designation. Soon he was back on his homeward route and enterings Fisher's Landing. Until he turned into his own street he didn't realize he had been driving faster than usual. He parked in front and paused a moment to look at the house, savoring the weathered wood. Ivy IF was growing to cover the bay window again -- it needed cutting back. A brick, maybe more than one, was missing from the chimney top -- he tried to remember if he'd seen it before. He couldn't be sure. No matter -- he'd have to fix it anyway. He got out of the car and locked it, taking only his bag, leaving his other luggage for later. He strode up the flagstone walk, finally giving impatience its head. By habit he reached into his pocket for the house key. Then he laughed and rang the door chime. at Forgues' blue-tinted image and shook his head. "One of us has to be crazy." "That's possible," said the admiral. "Why else would you pretend to be a man who was killed more than a year ago? Tube train failure -- you must have seen it in the news. The propelling field collapsed. Cars smashed out through the girders. At least seventy dead." "Not me, though." Now he remembered the disaster. "I missed that train." "Obviously," said Forgues, "but Pearsall didn't. You look like hinr -- or like his twin if he had one -- but you can't be Woody. I attended the funeral myself, damn it! So who are you?" To Pearsall none of it made sense -- but somewhere there had to be a handle, a place to apply logic and twist hard. "Ask the captain," he said. "Captain Vaille -- he can vouch for me. Forgues shook his head. "Can't locate him. He and his wife went off somewhere, left no word." "But any of the other officers -- or the crew?" The admiral's head still moved side-to-side, his face stony in negation. "Or even -- the fussy fellow with the clipboard. He saw me come off the ship -- " ' "But he didn't see you get on. Or where you got on." Abruptly Forgues' face went stiff, his eyes wide. At first Pearsall didn't get it -- and then he did. He laughed." Hawk Flight made no outworld landings. Admiral. We didn't even have occasion to use the airlocks. Run the telemetry tapes through your computers." Faced with questions that had answers he felt his mind coming alive, working surely. The admiral's grin was sheepish. "All right, that's easy enough to check. We can scratch the suggestion that you're some kind of alien. But that doesn't tell me who you are. So you tell me." Pearsall shook his head. "I've done that. Sir, with all due respect, we're wasting time. There's a mistake somewhere -- I don't know what it is. I'll report Tuesday as ordered. Meanwhile I have a couple of personal problems to attend to -- urgent ones' He hit the cutoff switch before the admiral could reply. He daught himself worrying with a fingertip the spot at the crown of the head where his hair was thinning and took his hand away. And what of Glenna? He turned and saw her standing near the bedroom doorway, the old handgun hanging loose in her hand. She stared at him, but now in puzzlement rather than outrage. "Well, Glenna? Am I me -- the man you married?" "You can't be." He could barely hear her words. "Woody is dead -- I saw him buried." She winced. "Oh, you look like him, talk and act like him -- but you can't be him." The gun dropped to the carpet. "I wish to God you could. But you can't." She put her hands to her face -- leaning back against the wall she slowly sank to the floor and sat there, sobbing. Knowing he must not touch her, Pearsall moved to squat facing her, not close enough to threaten. Quietly he spoke. "Glenna -- Glenna." Again: "Glenna." Repeating her name slowly until she raised her head and looked at him. "I am Woody," he said, "Woody Pearsall. I look and talk andact like him -- and love like him -- because I am him. I'm me, Glenna, nobody else. A long time ago we married each other -- remember?" Blankfaced, her head shook slowly. "The tube train didn't kill me that night because I missed it. I was late for dinner. You were really angry when I finally got home -- until we saw the news of the wreck. I've been gone eight months on Hawk Flight . Before I left you and I had a champagne dinner -- more champagne than dinner, I'm afraid. Then we took a boat out near the middle of Lake Fisher and made love there. Don't you remember?" "I'd like to. Oh, I'd like to!" Then her voice went dull. "But I can't -- because it didn't happen." "To me it did. And you were there. You were all of it. Try to remember." "I'd like to," she said again. "But I saw my husband dead." Facing him, she was like a blank wall. "I'm dead and I'm not dead." He spoke more toiiimself than to her. "We made love on the lake and we didn't. I was v on the ship but I wasn't. The admiral helped bury me -- but I'm not buried. Glenna -- " His tone snapped her alert. "I don't know what's wrong, IF s h ve i about ai. 'Vor whose most popu# We red . obsess Ws mtnd but if there's any way I can do so I'll find out." He sighed and touched her hair gingerly, as though it might electrocute him. "I have to leave now for a while. But try to know who I am. Will you?" She managed no words, but nodded, then fled, crying. Pearsall calculated -- it was less than an hour's drive -- best to go now, without calling ahead. And better, he thought, not to stay in one place too long -- Forgues might decide to have him pulled in rather than wait until Tuesday. The frontdoor key was on its usual hook in the kitchen. He took it. Dusk had come, the time of beauty that is dangerous to drivers. Pearsall drove fast but with full concentration and alertness -- officially he might be dead but factually he was alive' and determined to remain so. He passed an apartment highrise -- it loomed gray, square and ugly, but the massed upper windows reflected the last of the day's sun as molten copper. The glow fit his mood. He watched until it passed to the side of his vision. The Laird home was hidden in a semi-suburban housing cluster, a puzzle-piece of contrived curving streets that changed names at every jogging. By backtracking and persistence Pearsall found the address he sought. In the dim light the house both sprawled and soared. Its style of architecture had bloomed rapidly and dated almost as fast. He parked in the double-width driveway and approached the huge, oval front door. Finding no pushbutton, he knocked. An older, heavier version of John Laird opened the door. "All right, what do you want?" The man sounded as harassed as he looked, with his rumpled hair, high color and heavy breathing. 'Tm looking for John Laird." "You found him. What do you want with me?" "The John Laird I know is younger. Your son, perhaps?" "No -- Christ, no! But maybe you'd better come in, at that. You might be able to help." "Help? How?" But Pearsall thought he knew. "A young man came here. He says he's my son, claims to be named John Laird. I came home this afternoon -- my wife was halfcrazy. This boy we never saw was calling her 'mother' -- and then me, 'father.' And damn it, we never saw him before -- " "How do you figure I can help?" "Sounded as if you said you knew him. If you do, maybe you can get some sense out of him. He locked himself in the bathroom and won't come out. Come on -- I'll show you the way." Pearsall was led into a large living room, past a plump, wide-eyed woman a boy about twenty and two teenaged girls -- he was introduced to none of them -- along a hall, to a door. Closed, it was -- closed, and inscrutable. Laird nodded. "He's in there." "All right." He raised his voice. "John Laird. This is Pearsall." II -'was muffled. "Thank God you're here -- someone who knows I'm real. I thought I was going crazy. Or that everybody else was." "I -- think I know how you feel, John." Pearsall grinned briefly, a ticlike twitch. "Why don't you come out now and talk it over? Let's see if any of this makes sense. All right?" "You won't let them send me away?" Pearsall thought -- he couldn't speak for the Lairdfamily. "If you can't stay here, John, you can come with me. Will that do?" "I guess so." The" door opened. Young John Laird, looking both sheepish and defiant, emerged. Pearsall shepherded the two Lairds IF to the living room, where the others sat stiffly, as though posing for an old tintype. "I'm Commander Pearsall," he said, "First officer of the ship Hawk Flight. As you may have heard, we've just returned from an eightmonth mission." He turned to the older man. "Would you introduce me?" "All right, Commander. You know my name. This is my wife, Bonita -- my son Charles -- my daughters Mildred -- " he nodded at the older girl " -- and Irene." Pearsall smiled and performed the ritual courtesies. "And now," he aid, "may I introduce this young man, who for the past eight months has served as my junior navigator? He is listed on the ship's roster as John Laird, Jr. -- of this address." "I can't believe that," Mr. Laird said. "The roster isn't classified -- I can get you a photostat if you like." Impatiently Pearsall shook his head. "But right now -- Laird, men on watch together pass the time by talking and they talk of home. Young John here has spoken often of you. He has described this house to me and many pleasant recollections of it.  "Tell me," he said, "do none of you recognize him at all?" He saw only blank stares. "Are you saying that it's some kind of delusion that he believes himself to be your son and brother?" Bonita Laird spoke, her voice low. "I have two sons: James and Charles. Two daughters: Mildred and Irene. There would have been a John, but -- " '# have two brothers," said young John Laird, breathing in gasps, as though at high altitude, "Two brothers -- James and Charles -- and a sister Mildred." He turned to the younger girl. "I don't know what you're doing here -- I don't have any sister Irene." She shrank away. He reached a hand toward her. "Oh, wait -- I'm not saying you shouldn't exist -- I won't do that to you. You're here. I don't understand it but I won't tell you not to be here, the way Dad's been telling me -- " He frowned. "I just don't know why I'm not supposed to be herethat's all. Because I live here. I've lived here all my life withall of you -- except Irene. And James was here, too -- where's my brother James?" "Your brother James," Mr. Laird began, "I mean, my son James -- was married last spring. He and his wife live north of here about forty miles, in the Horizon Hills complex." He hunched his shoulders for a, moment, let them retax again. "I don't see what this has to do with your barging in, claiming to be my son. I should know how many children we have -- " Pearsall suddenly felt pity for them all -- and some for himself. "Mrs. Laird, you said a moment ago that there would have been a son named John. Could you explain that, please?" Color flooded her cheeks. For a moment he could see the pretty girl hiding behind the armor of fat -- the ultimate disguise for beauty afraid of itself. "Mr. Pearsall -- Commander Pearsall, I mean -- it's not really any of your business, but if it will help this young man -- well, when my James was two I had a son born dead. And his name would have been John." "But James was two when I was bom," young Laird protested. "And I grew up here and we all -- you don't know me? You don't know me at all?" Five heads shook as one. Gently Pearsall said, "Don't any of you see a family resemblance -- a possible relationship? Couldn't you start as cousins or something and work up?" He knew he was pushing too hard on something he didn't fully understand, but his own needs were eating him. And some wild guesses were beginning to take shape. So he laid it on the line and hoped. "Can't you try something?" He lost. "We can't take a stranger into our home," said the elder Laird. Bonita Laird's mouth twitched, but she did not speak. Of them all, it was Irene who protested. '# wouldn't mind if he stayed," she said. She shook back her fair hair, fallen forward over one shoul der. "I like him." "Out of the question." Her father's face showed fear. Fear of what? Pearsall knew when to cut his losses. "Let's go, John." He gave the obligatory handshakes. Young Laird looked at each person in turn. He paused at Bonita but shook his head. He spoke only to Irene. "Thanks," he muttered and touched her hand briefly. Pearsall took his arm firmly and led him away. The boy's luggage was at the front door -- Pearsall picked it up and got the two of them out and safely away. In the car, before starting it, he said, "You're not insane, John. You're up against a problem that's totally new, that's all. And so am I." ,but home -- and there only if Glenna allowed it. If she did -- he supposed Laird could stay also. What effect the boy's presence IF might have he couldn't guess. To learn that the universe held other confusions, other entrapments, might help her. Driving through the night, his headlights carving a dark-walled tunnel as the road skirted a swamp, Pearsall explained his own problem. "So, to her," he finished, "I'm an impostor. I have to be -- she saw me dead." He made a wordless sound. "I suppose I should find my grave and pay my respects." "We're in the same boat, aren't we?" said Laird. "Except that your wife knows at least that she was married to you. My family simply doesn't believe I exist -- or ever did. I can't understand it -- what's happened to everybody?" "We happened to them. Otherwise they're all perfectly sane, sensible people." "Then we're what's wrong? Or has the whole world gone crazy?" "No, we're fine, John -- just fine. So far anyway. And as worlds go, this one is sane and good." "Then what is wrong?" "Don't you get it yet? Well, I'm not sure I do, either, in detail. But one thing's clear -- this perfectly good world isn't our world." "You mean this isn't Earth?" "Of course it's Earth. But -- different, somehow. Probably more so than we've realized." "You mean, my family back there -- it isn't really the one I grew up with?" "Almost, but not quite. They had a son bom dead, so they're not the same people they'd be if he had lived. The difference isn't much -- except to you, who happen to be that son. You see?" Silence for a time, then: "Yes, I think so." Then, after another brief pause: "This seems a funny thing for me to be worried about -- but do you think they'll ever accept me?" Laird's voice shook. "Eventually, I imagine, when they understand what has happened -- when they're told by someone who can speak with authority. Keep your hopes up, but be patient -- it may take a while." "I'll do that," Laird said grimly, "and thanks. But what did happen?" "I'm afraid that's the question of the century. I wish I could answer it" They were silent for the rest of the drive. An unfamiliar car was in Pearsall's driveway. He parked at the curb. He took his remaining luggage from the car and motioned for Laird to bring his, also. This time, at the door, he used his key -- once inside, luggage and all, his position would be stronger. As they went through the hall to the living room he heard conversation that broke off as they entered. Pearsall recognized the small, dark woman with Glenna. It was Glenna who spoke. "You're back, I see." Her voice was stiff and forced, close to the breaking point. "Well, maybe you can explain to Ludmilla here, where her husband is. She's been asking me -- and of course I don't know." "I don't understand," Pearsall began -- but suddenly he did understand and realized he should have foreseen the complication. Ludmilla Frantiszek rose and faced him. Her hands were clenched tightly across her chest. The heavy black braid that fell forward over her left shoulder to her waist swayed with the slow agonized shaking of her head. "Where is Miro?" Her voice was low and ragged. "What have you done with my husband, you dead man who walks?" She stared blankly at him. Pearsall tried to answer, but could say only, "Milla -- " "Aw, you know me, do you? I knew you, too. And Miro knew you. We grieved at your funeral. And then Miro was gone a long eight months with Hawk Flight . I was not here when Hawk Flight returned -- I was with my troupe in London, dancing. You remember that I am a dancer?" "Yes, Milla. And a very good one." "Yes," she nodded. "That is true -- I am. When I heard, I returned. To the port. Hawk Flight's crew was gone, scattered to reunite with families for three days. They will be back on Tuesday, the fatfaced man said." Pearsall nodded -- he knew the one she meant. "But Miro," he said, "has not come back. Instead there is you, who are dead. Tell me -- you must tell me! How can this happen?" "Milla -- Milla, I don't know. Miro was not on Hawk Flight with me. He'd broken a leg skiing and was grounded while it healed. I took his place -- he stayed at home. And somehow I have returned to a world in which you've seen me dead and Miro, not I, left on Hawk Flight as first officer. That's all I know Milla. It's not much help, but it's true." Black eyes wide under furrowed brow, she gazed at him as if trying to memorize him cell by cell. Finally she nodded. "I believe you. I don't understand all you say, but I never knew you to lie, Woody, while you were -- alive." She was trying not to cry, but could not stop her tears. "I will go now." She turned away. Pearsall moved toward her but Laird waved him back and took her arm, guiding her out. He did not return imIF mediately. Pearsall decided he was making sure she was in fit condition to drive before letting her go.  said, suddenly breaking silence. "You're not my Woody at all, are you? You're some kind of Woody Pearsall, all right, but you never saw me before today. Nor I, you. You're a close match. I can't see any differences yet -- maybe I never will. But you're simply not -- my Woody!" Tears welled -- it was Pearsall's night for weeping ladies. "Oh, I wish you were!" He passed off the thought that her wish, literally taken, would make him dead -- he knew her true meaning. "So do I, my dear," he said. "You have no idea how much I wish it." She ignored his words. "I should have known -- I did know -- when you said I'd cut my hair. Because I haven't worn it long for nearly six years. I cut it when I had the role of Helen in that play -- what was the name of it? I can't remember -- " Pearsall couldn't recall. her ever acting in any play at all. "And somehow I never got around to growing it long again. Though I should, really. But you didn't know. So you can't be my Woody, can you?" She asked the question as though it had an answer, so he gave her the best he had. "No, I'm not," he said. "And you're not quite my Glenna, either. But -- " and now for the first time he moved and touched her, took her by the shoulders to hold her facing him -- "we are each the best -- the best Woody and the best Glenna -- that either of us is ever going to find." She came to him and clung, sobbing, but by the feel of her he knew it was still no good between them. At least, he thought, she had accepted him as a friend. Ill the same bedroom that night -- Laird had the guest room -- but not the same bed. Lying awake, he heard her slow, sleeping breath. He had steeled himself to being aroused and frustrated by her nearness, but within him no Excitements stirred -- he was as much disappointed as relieved. The thought came to him that his need to establish identity was stronger than his need for sex. When on a mission he schooled himself to celibacy. Some men and women formed shipboard liaisons -- he did not. Early on he had considered the idea -- but apart from Glenna's unorthodox monogamist convictions he felt the pleasures did not compensate for the risk of jealousies and impaired morale. He took no moralistic position, but felt that as a ship's officer it was unwise for him to invite possible trouble. At home, though, his urges were strong dnd frequent, not much diminished by age. And so were Glenna's -- in the world he remembered they were well matched. He had to get away from that thought. Instead he considered what Glenna had said after Laird had returned from seeing Ludmilla Frantiszek safely on her way. "Admiral Forgues called," she had told them, just before Milla came here. Everyone from Hawk Flight is to report back to duty tomorrow morning." "Sunday?" "Yes. He said it's important." "I'm sure it is. I wonder -- " if it's really everyone , he thought, he wants there tommorow -- or only me "Wonder what, Woody?" He hadn't answered her. Anything he could have said would have sounded as paranoid as he had begun to feel. Now, lying alone as though he were on the ship and Glenna lightyears away instead of a mere few feet, he still wondered. Sleep came eventually, much later than he wished. Next morning Glenna was cheerful in an impersonal way, as she served the two men breakfast. "I'll expect you both home for dinner," she said, "so call me if you can't make it. And do let me know if you learn -- well, anything that explains anything, won't you?" "Of course, Glenna." He wanted to say more, but it was no time to crowd his luck. Besides, Laird was there. Laird looked more at peace with himself. The night's sleep must have helped. He said little, but smiled occasionally. shortcut to the Administration Building -- rather, to where he remembered it to be. The building wasn't there. In its place stood an old dilapidated warehouse. Now he remembered -- the soaring tower he had looked for and hadn't seen when he had been making his landing approach, was the new Administration building. He should have known before he had ever touched ground that this was not his world. He stopped the car and searched through memory. "What's the matter?" asked Laird. "Nothing. Well, yes -- something is, in a way. John, do you rememIF ber the Ad Building and its tower?" "Of course. Why?" "Well, this is where it was. Now it isn't. Let me think a minute. We'll have to find the old building, the one our Space Service tore down," Laird's face went blank. He blinked rapidly several times. Pearsall shook his head -- just now he couldn't afford to worry about Laird. The old building had been vacated two or three years ago -- he should be able to remember. Yes, he knew where to go. He was right. The building that he had seen razed was where it had been. He parked and used an elbow to nudge laird. "Come on, John. The admiral doesn't like to be kept waiting.'? Inside the building Pearsall said, Hawk Flight -- " at each checkpoint and was passed through to Forgue's receptionist without having to show identification. One desk removed from the admiral's presence he repeated the name and added: "Where do we go?" "You are?" The girl was blond and pretty. A blue eye, her left, that aimed slightly outward, accented her piquancy. It would be unwise of her, thought Pearsall, to correct that defect. "First Officer Pearsall," he said. And pointing a thumb at his companion, "Navigator third John Iforget-the-initial Laird. We're a little late. Where do we go, please?" "Oh -- yes, sir. The small conference room just off the admiral's office, to your right. You know it?" "Yes. Thank you." He guided Laird along. They entered the room. From his seat at the end of the long table, Forgues peered up at them. At first look his head always seemed too large for his small frame, but Pearsall was accustomed to the discrepancy and adjusted automatically. A quick count told him that he and Laird were the last to arrive. The dead, stuffy air of the drab room was heavy with anxiety. "Sorry we're late, sir," said Pearsall. "No excuses. But I think I have part of the answer to some of the questions you'll be asking. ' v "No doubt," was the dry-toned answer. "You're an intelligent man. You must have reached the same conclusions we have." "I don't understand. I thought -- " "You thought you were the only odd fish in the soup. Please find a seat, Commander -- you too, Laird -- and we'll get down to it." Confused but alert, Pearsall sat. "Let's not waste time," Forgues began. "I've heard some of your stories. I believe them. We'll get to your individual problems a little later. "About six hours after you disembarked I knew as a certainty that your ship was not the Hawk Flight we sent out eight months ago. Unfortunately, Commander Pearsall, I did not have this knowledge when I spoke to you at your home. But moments later tbe maintenance crew ran into a few problems -- some of their testing procedures wouldn't work. It took us a while to find out why, but when we did the answers told us a great deal. "Shortly before Hawk Flight left this port, the labs sent us a new set of modifications to improve control efficiency. I put crews on overtime and got the work done in time for liftoff. Ourrepair crew's problem turned out to be that on your ship these changes had not been made. We checked and found that the departure date in your log is three days earlier than our records show. It is not the same ship -- you are not the same people. There have been a number of repercussions " descent, green insect crawling along the upper edge of the admiral's collar, never quite touching his neck. Unable to look away from the little tightrope-walker, he felt akin to it -- he wanted it to survive. "We have," said Forgues, "three gross anomalies. Commander Pearsall, who was dead before Hawk Flight undertook its mission, is now returned alive to us. My congratulations, Commander. Commander Miro Frantiszek was first officer of the Hawk Flight I know -- your records show he was never aboard. And ours make no mention of Navigator Third John Laird, who is indisputably present. "Of the remaining twentytwo -- many of you have encoun tered problems of your own. If you wish to discuss any of these, now would be a good time." He looked around the table. "Prentice?" Second Officer Miles Prentice rose -- a tall man, stooped and lean -- and spoke in a low, intense voice. "I went to my a ddress -- someone else lives there. When I finally found my wife, she said we've been divorced more than three years. She's remarried and has two new children. I don't know what to do," Shaking his head, he sat down again,, Forgues looked at him but said nothing. He acknowledged a raised Jiand. "Chandri?' "I was married, too. But now I find that my wife -- I said goodbye to her only eight months ago -- has been dead nearly five years. It's insane, that's all. Or I am." "You're not," said the admiral. "Only -- misplaced." The testimony continued. "Gehring -- Lena Gehring. I was a widow with a son in boarding school, a married daughter and a grandson. Now I'm a childless spinster. I'd rather be dead." "Cheng here, second pilot. Last year my wife and I moved to a new house -- but somehow it turns out we didn't. Nothing else is much different." "Johnson. I was a bachelor, but now I seem to have a wife and two kids. I'm not complaining -- I like it." "Lightfoot. I drew good cards. My husband was a hopeless drunk -- and I do mean hopeless. Here he's been dry for the last four years." "Ramirez. I went home. It wasn't my place and never has been. My wife's folks never heard of me and shes married to somebody else. So I looked myself up in the directory. I have a wife I never saw before. It's a little scary, but I think it'll work out okay -- she's pretty nice." "Timon -- Aldred Timon. There are some minor differences but nothing serious. It doesn't bother me any." "Parelli, it says on the roster. I have a different husband but I probably would anyway by this time, even if I'd stayed home. I always seem to marry the wrong type. I think maybe this one is a little better than average." "I'm Red Sarchet, drive tuner. I live with my folks, like always. But down at the corner bar they all let on I was one of the gay guys. I'm not -- I don't have anything against them, but I'm not. I had to fight one fellow. I'm not going back there." "Gerard, communications. I didn't have anybody before and I still don't. I live in a new place. What's the difference?" "Vaille, captain. I found some problems to be worked out, but nothing insurmountable." On and on it went, all through the twenty-two. One short, fat man said only, "I pass." Looking at him, Pearsall recalled his name, Crawford, and his job, supply clerk. Nothing more came to mind, from eight months on the same ship. Poor Crawford , he thought. The consensus was almost evenly divided between those adjusting successfully to the changes and those finding them from distressing to intolerable. What could anyone do for Chandri or Gehring? Forgues muttered into the intercom -- the pretty blonde came almost immediately with a big pot and a tray of cups. As the coffee ritual began the admiral spoke again. "Your attention, please." The green insect was gone. Pearsall hadn't seen it go, didn't know whether or not it was still circumnavigating the admiral. "For what help it might be, I'll tell you as much ar I understand of what has happened. "It seems we didn't know enough about the Skip Drive. Of course the press stories, that it beats lightspeed by going through hyperspace, are a lot of horse puckie -- there's no such thing as hyperspace. But all we had to know -- in operations -- was that it works. It took us there and it brought us back. For ten years, on the shorter hauls our power sources could handle, we had no trouble. So last year when we got the Krieger power units, we pushed performance as high as we could. "Now, I had a two-hour lecture last night, by a top man from the labs. I won't take two hours to tell you, because I didn't understand that much of it. But I'll tell you the parts I did get." T HE little bug reappeared, sitting like a tiny epaulette on the admiral's left shoulder. Pearsall was glad to see it. "The trick is that space and time are quantized. If you don't know what that means, wait and ask me later. Mainly, the universe doesn't exist continuously. It pulsates -- appears and disappears at a rate much too high to measure. So when you move you do it by vanishing at one point and reappearing at the next -- normally. "Ordinarily, in moving we hit every point along the way. Skip Drive suppresses our appearances at most of those points. We beat lightspeed because it's the ins and outs that use up time and energy, not the motion itself." "Excuse me, sir." It was Captain Vaille who spoke. "Was it explained how the relativistic effects are avoided? That's one.thing I've never understood and it bothers me. "I can't give you the math for it, Captain -- " Vaille smiled and shook his head -- "but the way Dr. Kunda at the labs put it, velocity has to do with the number of appearances, not the distance between them. So at a Skip-factor of ten your theoretical limit is ten lights, not one. And of course we never push that limit -- our instruments are redlined at ten per cent time-mass variation, which we've found acceptable. "Nice, isn't it? We thought we had the universe by its short hairs. IF So we sent you out at top Skip-f actor -- well over a thousand, I believe -- and instead of coming back to where you once belonged you came here instead. "Kunda told me why. There are more worlds than one -- more than we could count, I expect. There have to be -- to explain what's happened. They run side-by-side in time and ordinarily you stay in your own rut -- no way to get out of it. But on high Skip-factor, with the checkpoints fewer and farther between, so to speak, you can drift into a new and different set of probabilities. The higher and longer you Skip the farther you may drift from the world you know. That's why you're here instead of there. "And you can't get back." "Huh?" "Why?" "Why not?" Several people were speaking at once. Pearsall remained quiet. And the little green insect had vanished again. "You could try," said Forgues. "go out again and take your chances. But you'd probably find a set of circumstances even more strange to you. effects on any one trip appear to be random, but may well be cumulative. You might come closer to your original world -- then again, you might not. The odds aren't necessarily favorable. In fact, indications point to the contrary." "Then where do we stand?" someone demanded. "What are we supposed to do?" "I don't know," Forgues said. His voice was flat, deliberate. "When I do. I'll be sure to inform you." Pearsall spotted his small green friend. It had flown, while he wasn't looking, to a window ledge. He felt himself released from an anxiety he hadn't consciously noticed. "Sir," he said, "is there anything more for us to do here, now? Or may we leave?" As Forgues began to answer, the door opened. The fey-eyed receptionist failed to block the entrance of the aide Pearsall had seen on his picturephone. The chubby man spoke. "Admiral, sir, a ship has landed." Pearsall thought Forgues would explode into harangue, but he said, level-toned, "Thank you, Abbott, for the information. But ships land here quite often, I believe. This is an important conference. Why did you interrupt it?" "Sir, I thought you might want to know immediately about this particular landing. The ship is Hawk Flight IV lence. "Is it ours this time?" "It seems to be -- or as near as makes no difference. At least the roster checks out. And the time of departure." Forgues sighed. "My friends, it seems we have a whole new ball game. I have no idea how to cope with it. I welcome any suggestions." "Just a minute, sir," said Pearsall. He turned to the chubby newsbearer. "Are all crew members alive and well?" "Yes, they are," the man said. "Why?" "Excuse me, Admiral." Without waiting for a response, Pearsall walked into the receptionist's office, closing the door gently. "May I use your phone?" The girl nodded. He punched the remembered number -- after a few seconds a picture lighted. The woman's eyes were swollen but dry. Her black mass of hair swung loose. Her right hand held a brush. "Milla," he said. "The other Hawk Flight has landed, the one that belongs here. Miro has come home." The brush dropped unnoticed. Her eyes filled. She smiled like a very young child seeing the antics of clowns. "Miro? Miro! Oh, how wonderful! You have just learned?" "About thirty seconds ago. I called you, first thing." "Oh, thank you. Woody -- thank you! You have seen him?" "Not yet. But all crew members are reported alive and well." "Shall I come there?" "I -- I don't know Milla. Does Miro usually call from the port, when he lands?" "Yes. Always." "Then I'm sure he will now, as soon as he can. Why don't you wait for his call, then decide between you where to meet?" "Yes, that is best. Though waiting will be very hard." "Yes, Milla -- I know. But it's not for long now." My God , he thought -- she looks ten years younger. "Look, Milla -- I'd better get off this line so Miro can get through to you as soon as he has the chance. And I'm very happy for you." "Yes. Thank you. I hope also for your happiness. And now, goodbye." Shutting off the phone, Pearsall thanked the receptionist for its use and returned to the conference room. It stank of desperation. "Has anything been decided?" he said. "Where the hell have you been, Pearsall?" Forgues snapped. "Telling Ludmilla Frantiszek IF she has her husband back, sir. I thought somebody should." "Oh, yes -- yes, of course! Sorry, Pearsall. Glad you thought of it." "It's all right, sir. Does anyone know what comes next?" "Not so you'd notice it. The other crew should be through medical check before much longer. I'll have to talk to them, explain the situation -- I suppose they've heard a garbled version from someone and are feeling anxious, to say the least." Forgues scowled. "I should have thought of that and issued instructions." "When?" asked Pearsall. "Begging your pardon, but none of us anticipated this landing until it happened -- and then the first people to talk with the ship would naturally let out the whole story." "What?" The admiral's preoccupation was evident. "Oh, yes, you're right." He rapped on the table for the group's attention. "Well, I'd better give the situation readout as I see it." He looked around at all of them. "For some of you this new development must be one blow too many. Having to readjust to living someone else's life was bad enough, terrible in some cases. And now the someone else has come to take up his or her own life and you must live with that, too:" He sighed and shook his head "One thing is clear -- your careers are secure. You're all competent people in your own right. Despite the fact that someone else now shares your name there will be a place for you. We'll find a wy to straighten out the records. You needn't worry about any of that. I'll take care of it." He frowned. "Now, your personal lives. Each case will need its own unique solution, I expect. Some of you may have to give up your families -- and no help for it. Or your alter-ego may want out of his current life situation and bow out in your favor -- it's not impossible, but don't count on it, Or some of you -- and your doubles and. your families, might agree to share your lives -- multiple marriages aren't common, but they are legal. And it could be arranged for any pair of doubles to ship out alternately, if that would help. The service will make counseling available to any who feel the need for it. Don't hesitate to ask. I'll see that the red tape is bypassed." Forgues looked at his watch. "Please remain here while I speak to the other crew. I'll arrange for lunch to be brought in. Then I want to be present at the first meeting of each pair of doubles, in privacy -- maybe I can help you accept each other's existence a little more easily. "I realize the procedure will be time-consuming, but at the moment I can't think of a better one. Your welfare is my responsibility and I intend to discharge that responsibility as best I can. That's all I have to say at this time. I'll have somebody hustle that lunch for you." "Sir," said Pearsall. "Laird and I have no doubles to meet. But we do have personal problems of our own, each of us. May we have your permission to leave now?" "What? Oh, yes. And Frantiszek, in the other crew. I'll call and have him released if Abbott hasn't thought to do so -- which I doubt." The admiral turned to leave. As Pearsall and Laird followed him out, they paused to wave restrained goodbyes. In a way Pearsall felt like a deserter -- but what more could he do here? He hurried to catch up with Forgues. "When do you want us back here, sir?" "Tomorrow morning. No, make it after lunch. I may be up most of the night with those twenty-two pairs of doppelgangers -- and I'll need some sleep." They parted. Outside, Pearsall noticed a new gouge along the. side of the drab little rental car. Some things never change, he thought -- he remembered his grandfather complaining about "damned idiots in parking lots." And throughout most of his childhood young Elwood thought "idiots" were strange creatures who lurked in parking lots and lived only to ravage the cars of innocent grandfathers. The vagrant memory eased his tension. He found himself smiling. T HE morning drive had been hectic. Homeward bound he drove more leisurely, wondering what he could do or say to help his cause with Glenna. Not much, he decided -- she had all the pieces and would have to put them together herself. Neither he nor Laird spoke during the drive. He didn't know what the boy was thinking and, just then, he didn't want to know. He'd think about Laird's problem later and help if he could. Before they reached home he was sweating -- the morning had been cool, but now it was past noon and Indian-summer hot. He'd have to take time, he thought, to turn in this rental contraption and get his own car out of storage. Glenna greeted the two men cheerfully enough. She wore lightweight halter and x briefs in a colorful print pattern. Pearsall went straight to the refrigerator and was pleased to find a pitcher of daiquiris cooling, as in earlier, happier IF times. He took a little in a glass and sipped it, before taking a cool shower and changing into shorts and sandals. Glenna, when he rejoined her, was setting out cold cuts and salad. The sound of running water from the basement shower indicated that Laird was also cooling off. Pearsall poured himself a full glass from the pitcher and sipped from it between bites of cheese, liverwurst, salad and crackers. He kept the silence until she broke it. "Woody -- Laird told me what happened." "That Hawk Flight came back? The one that belongs here?" "" "Yes. Why didn't you tell me? And what does it mean? What happens now?" "I wanted us to take our time talking about it. And I needed that cold shower first. Mind?" She shook her head. "Well, first it means that most of my crew have doubles and may be excess baggage on this world." He summarized Forgues' conclusions, then added: "Tomorrow, after he's talked with all the pairs, we'll have a better idea of how they're reacting. It's not going to be easy for most, I'm afraid." She was rubbing a knuckle alongside her nose, looking steadily over it. "But, then Miro Frantiszek is back. Does Milla know?" "I called her immediately, as soon as we heard." "Yes -- you would. You were always thoughtful -- in my world." He had to speak. "It seemed that I -- that my Hawk Flight -- ever since we landed, had been doing nothing but make people unhappy. I guess I jumped at the chance to make somebody happy for a change. I think it did me as much good as it did Milla." He touched his cold glass to his right ear -- the chill was refreshing. Changing hands, he gave the other ear the same treatment and grinned at Glenna. She began to smile back at him. The door chime interrupted. "I'll get it." She rose and went to the door. From where he sat, Pearsall couldn't see whom she greeted. "Yes, he's here. Please come in." What did they want with him now? But into the room Glenna ushered Bonita and Irene Laird. seated, offered and served drinks, returned to his own chair. The two Lairds weren't talking, so Pearsall took the plunge. "You're here to see John? He should be coming soon. He's been showering, but the water stopped running a minute ago." Mrs. Laird leaned forward. "The problem was my husband. yiu sec -- not me. This thing is like a superstition or something with him. I wouldn't have turned young John away -- he needed us. I could see that." She rubbed her hands together. "But my husband -- he's John too, of course; I suppose Fd get used to that -- he wouldn't have it. Charles and Mildred never could stand up to him any more than I can, except just once in a while. James and Irene have all the family spunk." She smiled tentatively and fell silent. "Yes, Mrs. Laird?" said Pearsall. "Go on." "Well. After you left Irene wouldn't let it go. She just kept on -- didn't you, honey?" The girl blushed and nodded. "I agreed with her that we should have taken the boy in, .but John -- my John -- never listens to me unless I throw a fit and a set of dishes. Well -- not quite that bad, really. Usually things aren't important enough and I let him have his way. This time, though, I stood with Irene. Any time she ran out of steam I came in for her. But still my John wouldn't have it." Now she sat upright. "Then James called on the phone. It was late by then. He'd seen the news about Hawk Flight and the John Laird who wasn't on the records. They showed a picture of him and told his address on v the ship's books -- our address. So James J called us, even that late." I "What did he say?" If he could I keep her talking, Pearsall thought, J sooner or later she'd get to the # point. Jji "He asked had we seen the news? J My John said we'd seen more than  that -- the man had come here  rs saying we're his family. James I asked, well, where is he? John said he'd sent him packing. And James called his father some names -- very disrespectful, James was." Pearsall raised his glass to hide a grin. "And then what happened?" "James said he didn't  under-r stancP it, but when he saw young John's picture his spine went cold. That he knew he couldn't ever have seen him before, but he felt he recognized him. Then he said if We didn't take the boy in, he would." "And I said, good for them." Irene spoke for the first time. Her voice was low and clear. "And I asked James did they have room 'j for me, too?" "That's right, honey -- you did. And right there I had enough. T love my John, but sometimes -- I shouldn't say" it, though it's true -- he's a pigheaded fool! I'd carried a son nine months, I said, and lost him -- a woman never gets over that. Now somehow I had a chance to get him back alive and I'd be eternally damned if anyone IF Science fictions premier magazine goes into monthly orbit... to doubleyour reading pleasure! Not since his epic, #: A Space Odyssey, has Clarke created a story of such scope and suspense -- as an unidentified mass hurtles toward Earth, bearing within it the seeds of a strange new world. Don't miss the world premiere of Rendezvous with Rama. The science fiction event of this or any year. Starting this September in much new fiction by modem masters like Anderson, Asimov, Bloch, Bradbury, Clarke, del Rey, Heinlein, Pohl, Siiverberg, Sturgeon, Van Vogt. ly -- doubling the. number of issues it will deliver each year to science fiction connoisseurs . like you! was going to take that chance away from me! We argued late, to daylight -- didn't get up until noon today. John missed work, first day in years. But he finally agreed last night and stands by it today. He still complains a little but that's just show -- he does hate to lose an argument. So here we are, Irene and I -- if the boy still wants anything to do with us." Pearsall walked back along the hall to the basement door across from the kitchen. He shouted down the stairs. "Laird. John Laird, get your lazy carcass up here. You're going home." "Yes, I know." Coming from the kitchen, behind Pearsall, the voice sounded thick, as though issuing from a constricted throat. "I heard." r T HE Lairds, all three, had gone. Pearsall felt wrung out. Into a short glass he poured bourbon over ice -- daiquiris were all well and good, but at the moment he wanted a little more bite. "Well, that's two happy endings today." His voice and smile were gentle. "Care to try for three?" Glenna stiffened noticeably. "Woody, I can't take that -- not just now. Couldn't you have waited? I was coming to like you -- I do like you -- but now you've brought it all back. That you're not my real husband." "Your real husband is dead." Maybe a little shock treatment would work. "You saw him dead -- you said so. Now tell me -- hadn't you ever thought of remarrying? Were you going to waste the rest of your life mooning over a rotting corpse?" She shrank visibly into herself. Her face paled. He could see the light dusting of freckles normally masked by her healthy coloring. "I -- I might have remarried. I had no one in mind, but of course I've thought of it. But not like this -- you're asking me simply to let you move in here in place of my Woody. That's not remarriage." She shook her head. "You know my beliefs, my monogamist upbringing. You accepted all that when you married me. Didn't you?" He overlooked the gaps in her logic. Yes, he thought, he'd accepted her views -- perhaps more thoroughly than she knew. All right, he'd play it her way. "Well, then Glenna. will you marry me?" "No, I won't." Instant, levelvoiced anger. "You're making fun of me." He took a deep breath and exhaled carefully, stifling the words that would estrange her beyond reIF call. In his mind he rephrased what he would have to say next -- win or lose. "Glenna -- isn't this all a bit pretentious? I mean, it's not as though there had never been anyone else for you -- besides the Woody who is dead." "What do you mean?" Gripping the arms of her chair, she started to rise. "Of course there has been no one else. I came to you a virgin -- don't you believe that now?" "You are surely mixing up your Woodys, now aren't you? Yes -- certainly I believe it. That's not what I'm talking about." "Then just what are you talking about?" He sighed. "All right. I'd never intended to throw it up to you -- never thought I'd have to -- but we both know you broke your own special rules after I had come to accept them. I knew about you and Piers Carlton when he was directing the Little Theater in Spring Harbor." She stood frozen, mute -- he had to go on. "It doesn't matter now, Glenna. After the miscarriage I could understand -- you needed something I couldn't give you. And I judged that Carlton wasn't the sort who would ever be unkind to you. So Pendured it and never held it against you -- until now, when you turn me away." Wide-eyed, she shook her head. "But I didn't, Woody -- I didn't! No, listen -- let me talk. I thought of it, yes -- I played around with the idea. In a way it fascinated me. You're right -- I needed something. We had had all those years of hoping -- and finally I was pregnant. And then the miscarriage and the doctor said I could never have the child I'd come so close to having. I think I was a little crazy, Woody, for a while. And I did flirt with Piers Carlton -- that's true. But he got me interested in the theater, instead. So ' then I found what I needed -- but on the stage, not on the casting couch." It was Pearsall's turn to shake his head. "Glenna, don't bother to lie to me." "Lie? I'm not lying! Why should I lie to a man I'm rejecting?" "I have no idea. But, you see -- I caught you. I came home and found you together on the bed. You didn't see or hear me -- I went out again and stayed away until he was gone. Afterward, until I was sure it was over, I took care to give fair warning of my comings and goings and to make it easy for you to find excuses to meet him." She was frowning, intent. "Why would you do that?"-sure. I suppose -- I thought you'd be having enough problems with guilt without my piling shame on top of it." He was getting off the point -- oh, yes! "But another thing, Glenna -- you were never in a play or on the stage in your life. Why do you try to tell me such things?" She stared at him silently. Then she laughed -- and laughed and' laughed. Finally she stopped and wiped her eyes. "Oh, Woody! To paraphrase you -- you're mixing up your Glennas. Your Glenna may have done all you say -- since you say it I'll believe you. But I didn't. And I did act on the stage. I have my keepsakes, the theater programs. Would you like to see them?" He was trying to comprehend, to absorb what she bad said. "I'd like to later, yes. But now I'll take your word for them, though what you tell me is hard to understand. But I'm still interested in only one thing -- where do we stand, you and I?" A vertical crease formed and deepened between her brows. "Separately, I'm afraid." She paused. "You can sleep in the guest room tonight -- now that Laird has gone -- but tomorrow you'd better go somewhere else. Or I'll leave if you insist. I need to be apart from you." "Why?" "Because we do mix up our Woodys and our Glennas. You think you know me, but you don't. And every time I come to feel that. I know you I find I don't, not at all. How many more pitfalls are there in our separate pasts that we'd stumble into if we tried to make a future together? I don't know. And I'm afraid to find out." Frustration bit at his nerves and muscles like electric shock, bringing him perilously near the edge of violence. He took a deep breath. Then, forcing himself to sit still while looking at his not-wife, he said, "All right. I'll leave in the morning. I'll take my luggage and I won't be back. You can ship the rest of my stuff -- anything that's still around here -- when I have a place for it. I'll let you know and pay the freight. This place is yours. It was silly, Glenna, for you to offer to move out." "No. It's only legally mine. You have as much right to everything as I do." "But not to you?" "No -- not to me." There was nothing he could say. He looked at his watch -- it was mid-afternoon. Suddenly he couldn't face staying in this house through all the hours until dawn. He rose to his feet. "I might as well gather my travel gear and go now, Glenna." IF She stood, also. "What do you plan to do?" "Ship out again, I suppose." He could still muster a grin. "Next time I may come-back to a world I'm better suited to." He was ready to leave in a few minutes. Awkwardly, encumbered by his three pieces of luggage, he paused in the living room. Silent and withdrawn, she looked up at him but did not speak. He made no move to set down the luggage or to touch her. "Goodbye, Glenna." When she made no answer he started to move away. Then she said, "Goodbye, Woody -- " and looked away again. Outside, he stowed his gear in the car. He looked up at the broken chimney that someone else would have to repair. Then he slid under the wheel and drove toward the city. He registered at a hotel near the spaceport. He could have taken quarters at the port itself, but he didn't yet feel up to mingling with service personnel. He needed to be alone. He had dinner, but didn't eat much. He bought a book but, back in his room, read very little. He had a bottle, also, but drank sparingly. He went to bed early. It was the longest night he'd ever known. heavy-eyed. A shower helped and the automatic routine of morning soothed him. He rummaged for clean clothes -- in some cases he was down to his last item. Some things were missing. Glenna must have laundered them, he thought and had forgotten to tell him. He dressed as best he could. In the hotel's restaurant he had breakfast -- steak and eggs, witty more black coffee than his nerves needed. Outside he felt the sun's warmth, though it shone vaguely through ground haze. Two blocks away he found a store that carried clothing. He bought a few things he needed. He walked back to the hotel, got his duffel together and checked out. Through mists that lessened as the sun burned them away, he drove to the port. He registered for quarters and moved his luggage into a clean, featureless cubicle. He placed his shaving kit and some other trivia on the dresser top to identify the room for him next time he entered it. He looked at his watch: #. The Administration Building was less than two miles away -- it would make a nice walk, he decided, and headed in that direction. At # hours, wide-awake now but not overheated, he approached ii Admiral Forgues' office. He rated a smile from the receptionist with the entrancingly off-track eye. She wore an electric-blue dress. With her pale skin and hair it made her look like a child playing grownup. Pearsall liked the effect -- momentarily he wished he could shed half his birthdays. Through the thin office door the admiral's telephone voice rumbled unmistakably. Pearsall raised his eyebrows toward the sound. The girl nodded and he entered the admiral's presence just as Forgues said, "Well, do it, then," and shut off the phone. "Morning, Pearsall. You're here early." "Yes sir. I'm anxious about some of our people and wondered how the interviews came out. If you're not busy -- " "Not especially. Most of the talks went faster than I'd expected. I got almost enough sleep -- as much as I usually get, anyway." "Congratulations, sir." "The situation is not as bad as I feared, Pearsall. To begin with, at Captain Vaille's suggestion I had as many spouses and other family members brought here as I could reach on short notice. I included them iathe interviews once the initial meetings were over. I think their presence helped a great deal in a number of cases. "Vaille himself was no trouble -- in either of his identities. When the two met, one said, "Do you suppose our wife will agree that she can't have too much of a good thing?' They both laughed -- 'thea Mrs. Vaille came in. At first it bothered her that she couldn't tell them apart, so your Vaille took scissors and trimmed his mustache short. Then she re laxed and rapport between the three was good. In fact, I prevailed upon them to stay for the rest of the interviews and I think their example was of help to others who were less secure." "Yes, sir -- that's the captain, all right. He doesn't talk much, stays out of the limelight -- but he's never at a loss." "True. Well, then, not to bog you dowrf with details -- eight other triangular households are launched successfully, including three with the wife duplicated. In six cases your shipmate was displaced by his or her twin and in three the other crewman was displaced. Leaving -- let me see -- " he referred to a scribbled list -- "four pairs of 'twins' who, forgone reason or another, are quite adrift in this world. So we have seventeen who are effectively 'displaced persons.' I hope we can find some way to help them." Forgues scowled. "No, I forgot -- make that sixteen. Your IF version of Lena Gehring killed herself during the night. I'm sorry -- did you know her well?" Shaking his head, Pearsall felt a pang. He hadn't known her at all. If he had, could he have helped? "But you'd better make it seventeen again, sir," he said. "I qualify." "Oh?" Forgues raised his eyebrows, started to speak, but shook his head and began again? "Sorry to hear that. And how about young Laird?" "He'll be all right. The family decided to give him a try." "Good. And Frantiszek's in safe harbor, too. The only problem is that I can't reach him -- he's disconnected his phone." Pearsall laughed. "I can't say I blame her." "What? Oh, yes -- of course. Well, that's the wrapup. Unfortunately I can't do much about the loose ends just now -- they've saddled me with another insoluble problem." "Another, sir?" "The courier ships -- were those on the boards in your world before you left?" "Hmmm -- yes, sir. Little twoperson cans, weren't they? With Skip-factors into five or six figures -- the idea was to provide faster communications between here and the colonies. And expedite the high-priority small cargo." "That's right. Well, the ships are built -- almost ready to deliver. We put a lot of money into that project. And now' we can't use the damned things!" "Can't use them? Oh, of course -- I see." "Yes. Who'll pilot a ship that can't come home again? And what good are messages to an alternate world?" After a moment, Pearsall did see. Oh, God, how he saw! "Sir -- I think -- your two problems solve each other!" "How's that? What do you mean?" "The difference between one world and another may be important to individuals, sir, but on the larger scale -- politics, economics, commerce -- it would be minor, even unnotioeable. Every version of Harper's Touchdown is going to need new counter-agents against the cyclic insect mutations, for instance. And -- well, draw your own examples, sir -- you have more data on the colonies than I do. And communications dealing with overall problems rather than individual ones will still be valid -- especially if the first messages explain the multiple-world concept, to alert everyone to be on the lookout for discrepancies. "If our thinking is careful, 'sir, the courier ships can do almost exactly the job they were planned for." "But who will run them?" "I will, for one -- and probably most of your other displaced persons will volunteer. You see -- it's our only chance to find a world we can live in." "But, Pearsall -- you know how little chance you have of finding what you have lost." "Yes, sir -- I do know. But, what about a woHd in which I have no illusory ties that don't really work? Where I never met Glenna and never will? In a world like that I could feel free to make a new start. Here I can't." For a time Forgues was silent. Then: "Yes -- I see. But how do we run a courier system with seventeen people -- seventeen who will work at it only until they find a place to call home?" "How many other ships -- after Hawk Flight -- went out long-haul at high Skip-factor and that aren't back yet? And from how many worlds? I'm afraid our seventeen are only the first of many. And think of this, too -- the possibilities of exchange of information between worlds. It will be random, but over the long haul the law of averages will make it work. Too, you'll find people attracted to the program for the adventure of it. Younger men particularly." "Hmm -- it might work. It just might, at that. For a time at least, until someone comes up with a better idea." He paused. "Pearsall, before you go looking for yout better world I want you to help me get this thing organized." He stood. "Now let's get on with our next conference. At least, thanks to you, I have something to say there -- besides a lot of platitudes." sall almost felt good. It wasn't every day, he thought, that a mere commander heard two sets of problems from an admiral and handed him the answer to both -- on a platter, with an apple in its mouth. Yes, he felt almost good. The cute cockeyed blonde smiled up at him as he passed her desk. He returned the smile absently and continued in the admiral's wake, but she called after him. "Commander Pearsall?" He turned. "I have a message for you -- please call your wife. You may use this phone if you like." He called to the departing admiral. "Sir? Excuse me -- I'll be along shortly." Forgues waved assent. What, thought Pearsall, could Glenna possibly have to say to him now? It had all been said. What further excuses, rationalizations, could she offer? He punched out IF the number and waited until the screen lit.  "Woody?" Her robe hung awry. Her hair was tousled. "More or less," he answered. "What do you want?" "I have to ask you something. After -- after Carlton, were you and your Glenna happy together?" He thought about it. "Yes, I think we were." "You were able to forgive her? You didn't resent what had happened?" "Of course I resented it -- at first. Then I accepted it, and after that it didn't count any more either way -- it was over and done with. But why do you ask? What difference does it make?" "I couldn't sleep last night for thinking. My Woody -- he was kind, like you, but not easily forgiving -- I don't think he could have done what you did. That may be why I -- didn't , after all -- you see? For I might have lost him. Do you understand?" "No, Glenna. I don't think I do. What do you mean?" "I mean, come home. Woody! You were right -- we're the best Woody and Glenna we can find. Maybe an improvement on the originals. We can try, anyway!" At first he couldn't breathe -- and then he could. "Yes, Glenna. I may be a little late for dinner, but I'll surely be there." Her smiling lips quivered. "I can wait," she said and on the screen the picture died. For a moment he stood still, his mind worlds away. His own Glenna -- there had never been any real chance of his finding his way back to her, but this decision made the separation final. So she was widowed. But this Glenna had survived widowhood. How many worlds? How many Woody s and Gleonas -- some with the right mates, some with the wrong? Some with none and maybe some Avith two. But for him and her, here -- he shook his head and came back to one framework of time and space. The blonde looked quizzically at him, but Pearsall merely winked at her as he left. In the conference room a discussion was under way Unceremoniously, he cut into it. "Excuseme, Admiral," he said. "Your displaced-persons roster -- you'll' have to cut it back to sixteen." Forgues' raised eyebrows wavered between surprise and annoyance at the interruption -- then he grinned. Pearsall smiled back. "I'll be glad to help initiate the courier program, sir," he said, "but I'm afraid I can't ride in it. I'm taking no, chances of losing this world of yours. I seem to have found a home here."  Sure , the Eater was always hungry. But so were the poor things it devoured! I T HE call came to Red Spine and to the others of his shelter cluster as they rested deep in the cool corridors, insulated by many thicknesses of sand and soil from the harsh radiation of the blazing sun. It was the normal time of repose. But the call came and Red Spine and his fellows responded. Help was needed, help to save life. And life was sacred. "The information is not good," Red Spine projected. "Great masses of rock have closed the portals and smashed the corridors. Many have ceased to live." Red Spine spoke from his mind, from his thought centers. Since his projection was open, it was detected by the many canceroids that formed the long line of slowly spinning beings that stretched out across the shimmering desert. "It has always been a poor location for a shelter cluster," Yellow Stripe said. "The Scaling Hills have not been called the Scaling Hills for nothing." "The mountains shook." Purple Fringe's thought pulse came from far up near the head of the column. "This has not happened for many molts. There are projections of many beings in pain. I fear that there will be much food for the Eater." "It, at least, will welcome tragedy," Red Spine murmured. "To satisfy it becomes ever harder. Sometimes I wonder -- " he left the thought unfinished. There was no response up and down the moving line. He knew that all had detected and had responded, but their thoughts were shielded. It was always so when anyone spoke of the Eater. In his life span Red Spine had never seen so much death. Canceroids from shelter clusters all along the desert's edge toiled together to remove the rock, to dig under the great slabs that could not be moved, a cold, steady, passionless effort to free the unfortunate victims of the shaking land. Yellow Stripe had observed truly. It had not been a good place for a shelter cluster. As the smashed bodies were removed, often piecemeal, they were laid aside neatly, in tidy piles. The piles, in turn, were steadily diminished by those who had elected to serve as bearers. Each individual did what seemed most to need doing, so there was order, though no being directed. Thus another line wound back across the desert toward the highpeaked, disklike hill in the distance that was not a hill at all. There was communication. Meaningful patterns pulsed from thought center to thought center. Such was conversation as canceroids knew it, soundless, concise. And in every reception center another projection throbbed and hummed, dully, monotonously. None answered it. It could not be answered by speech. It could only be interrupted or stilled by the carriers of the pieces of broken bodies. "Food! Food! Food!" The irritating, endless projection of the Eater was a part of canceroid life. None could remember when it had not been there... To feed the Eater was a responsibility of every canceroid. None contested it. None challenged it. It had always been so. peaked carapace, a sturdy disk ten feet in diameter, thick and resistant, was balanced on sixteen pairs of armored walking appendages. His cold stalked eyes peered from under heavy chitinous sheaths. He enjdyed his strength. Others dug sand. Still others carefully moved the living bodies as they were freed. If there was no vital hurt these would be removed to the corridors and repose chamIF bers of other shelter clusters. There they would sit and be fed by their hosts until they had regenerated all that had been injured or lost. The ruined shelter cluster would be dug and built again, with symbionts donated from other communities, but next time it would not be located where the mountains could fall on it. Cleanly, neatly, every scrap of broken body, every cast appendage, even the fragments of shattered carapaces were gathered up. All went to feed the Eater. There could be no wasting of biomass. It was becoming precious. But this time, at least, it was abundant. The Eater had bodies and more bodies, as many as even its capacious gut could welcome and digest. And after two days the telepathic mumble of its incessant food call slowly subsided and became still. "The Eater is satisfied," Blue Dot projected. "I do not ever remember this happing before. This is good." "I am from an I earlier hatching than you," Red Spine said. "I remember an earlier time. And it is not good." "How can it not be good? The flesh is dead. Only life is sacred. If the Eater is filled, we do not have to feed it. To me, that is very good." "Watch. If I am wrong, I will correct my statement. When the Eater calls for food again, life will be harder. Watch." With all the food, the vast mound that was the Eater became torpid. In the memory of the oldest canceroid it had never walked, for its nourishment was suppliedat its mouth opening and its wastes were removed from behind it. But now, under its thick and radiation-scarred carapace, on which lichens and sponge masses grew tall and dense, changes were taking place. Its incredible expanses of tissue filled with fluids -- it writhed and shifted for half a day. Then the whole great skeleton ripped asunder. A red, pulsing, monstrous thing crept feebly from it, pulling limp appendages from the rigid cylinders that had protected them. It dragged itself clear of the vast skeleton, inching, almost flowing along, then lay inert, cringing and shuddering in the hard radiaBut this was something that happened. To the monstrosity it was normal. It was a creature of the radiation and could tolerate it. It did not die. formed over the acres of shifting, rippling flesh, thickening and darkening, becoming more and more the color of the expanse of sand around it. Its appendanges stiffened as armor sheathed them. Around the great dome of its body they then reached outward, groping, huge pincers clashing. They found what they searched for. The discarded skeleton, a great split crumpled mass, was seized and slowly dragged to where the creature's staring stalked eyes could study it. Massive chelae pulled it to the mouth opening, wide palps savored it and for hours the splintering crunch of its mandibles sounded as it devoured its previous covering to the last morsel. Then it settled itself ponderously into the sand, drawing in the many pairs oT appendages and burying them deep. The carapace had finished its hardening. Ridges ran from its edge to the high peak of its center, like rain furrows from the top of a cone-shaped hill. Its eyestalks drew back under their heavy protective overhangs. It sat, quiescent, thirty thousand times the size of any canceroid that fed it. It could have been carved from the stone of the nearby hills. No watcher would have suspected it to be alive. The sponge clusters and crust-like life forms invaded and began to grow again, camouflaging the new carapace. The Eater lay in a deep stupor, maturing its tissues, consolidating the increase in size that came with every shedding. When the outcry, which was not sound and which only a canceroid could detect, began again, it would be stronger, more insistent than ever before. "The Eater has molted and now it does not call for food." Knobbed Claw exuded pleasure. "This is a marvelous thing. Perhaps it will not need to eat again for many starshines." His pulse of relief was reinforced from many thought centers and Red Spine, who knew better, shielded what was in his mind. They would know soon enough. And all this happened only days before the Invader ship came in.  ly, an enormous glittering cylinder, featureless, having no openings and no appendages. There was nothing to show why it should fly through the light atmosphere of Cancerol as though it were a flutterby. x But fly it did without effort, cruising low over the wide stretches of open country, swinging with silent ease over the piled masses of the Scaling Hills. IF Red Spine watched it. Flattened in the sand, his appendages drawn under him, his eyestalks extruded, he stared with a cold intelligent wonder. For Red Spine had speculated on things such as this. But his speculations had never included such size, such implications of advanced competence. He had no' basis for the concept of a ship. On Cancerol all beings were their own transportation. So he thought that the Invader ship was a living thing and down in his cold consciousness a fear began and grew. "If it must feed," he thought, "it will require living things. When we feed ourselves and keep the Eater satisfied, not much remains. Therefore it will eat -- us!" Canceroids were not prone to panic, but Red Spine felt unaccustomed agitation when the strange object finally drifted down. It came to rest on the stretch of open sand where the members of Red Spine's shelter cluster always played at pebble tag. Only a few minutes' journey away, sloping under the nearest hill, was the wide, low main entrance of the shelter. As it happened, not many members of the cluster were abroad when the great cylinder touched down. It was the time of rest. Most were in repose in the cool dark chambers of the shelter. When the sun Cancer was hidden, when the radiation dropped, this was their normal time of activity. They could tolerate the savage sunshine, but they did not require it. The day was the time of the sponge masses, the green and red and yellow producer beings that dotted the sandy plains and clung even to the raw faces of the vertical cliffs. They reveled in the sun. While it shone they grew, sucking moisture from the dry air and from deep in the soil, building succulent masses of tissue that formed the food base of the planet. Not only the canceroids, but a wealth of other life preyed on and continually pruned the ever-growing mounds. More often than most of his fellows Red Spine prowled in the bright radiation. He was concerned with the speed at which the sponge beings grew, with the amount of food for canceroids that they produced. He watched the other forms that fed on the sponges. These, too, could be eaten by canceroids, but only the body parts that could be regenerated. On Cancerol there was one law and all things respected it. Life must not be destroyed. So Red Spine watched the invader land. He was appalled by its bigness and deeply concerned that it might not respect the law. For how could it know? Why should it care? It was an unbelievable shape and greater in length even than the Eater, which lay like a cone-shaped hill a short run away. Red Spine settled deeper into the sand, his stalked eyes glittering happened. A hole opened in the side of the Invader. Out of the hole small beings swarmed, beings unlike anything ever seen on Cancerol. They were white, shiny white, bouncing back the sunlight. They had appendages, but only two pairs, placed at opposite ends of the long bodies. One pair they used for locomotion, the other they waved about in random patterns, or used to hold what seemed to be artifacts. A large round head sat atop the body column. One glistening eye covered half the head, and always faced in the direction of the creature's locomotion. Red Spine understood. It was a hard thing to grasp, but he dealt with facts, and there was no doubting the evidence of his eyes. The Invader was an artifact. It was a made thing. Presumably the beings spewing out of it had made it, used it for shelter and locomotion, used it to bring them out from the blue mystery of space. Red Spine was well camouflaged. The rippling colors that could flow along his carapace ridges were extinguished. His appendages were buried. He could have been simply a symmetrical boulder lying among the stones that were scattered everywhere. But they found him quickly and unerringly. II ing on their single pairs of walking appendages. They held out small objects with their holding chelae. And they communicated continually -- by sound! Primitive. Still, Red Spine knew that these beings were not primitive. They were different. And probably they were danger. How, in what fashion, he did not know. His thought centers grappled coldly with the problem. And promptly he decided what he would do. The ring of white figures widened when he rose slowly and majestically from the sand, standing high on his sixteen pairs of appendages. Every spine that stippled his high-crowned carapace, far greater in diameter than the height of the tallest alien, glowed with a ruby light. He extruded his eyes to the extreme IF length of their stalks, folded his palps decorously over his mouth opening. Then, with dignity, he flashed the peace sign with his cold light. The beings teetered backward swiftly and a babble of sound came from them. They held out long objects in their holding chelae, cylinders with the ends pointing at him. The high sharp noises were not intelligible, but their meaning was plain, just the same. They were fear noises. Somehow, they had misunderstood the signs of friendship. The cylinders were menace. Red Spine was incapable of sound. He could communicate only with the awareness waves of his kind and with these beings he felt that they would be useless. Still he tried. "Do not panic," he projected. "We are different, but that is no cause for fear." And because courtesy required it he again flashed the peace sign. The sounds how came from one being, while the others held out the cylinders. "Easy does it," the being said. "No radiation in that flash. It's as cold as firefly light. That thing is saying something." "Yeah," another vocalized. "Get off my world or I'll blast you! That's what it's saying." There was rumbling sound from the first being. "Good old Pegleg! Your faith, as usual, is touching. Look at it! If it had a tail, it would be wagging it. There's no menace there." A third being, a smaller than the rest, made a higher, shriller sound, most unpleasant to Red Spine's receptors. Yet in spite of this he could sense the friendliness in it. "I agree, Roscoe. It means no harm. It may even be frightened: It must have seen us land." Again the rumbling sound from the first being. "That could have brightened up its day. Let's back away and see what it'll do. If it's really aware it'll thinkef something." "Do you mind," said the other maker of deep sounds, "if I keep my laser pointed in its general direction? Just in case what it thinks of isn't what you had in mind?" "If there were danger I'd feel it," the high sound said. "There!" And it placed the cylinder it had been holding into a slit in its carapace. "Grandstanding," the  deep sound grumbled. "Lindy, little friend of the galaxy. You only have to be wrong once, you know." The sounds receded as the beings teetered backward on those single pairs of appendanges, always keeping the large eye toward him. Red Spine felt a sudden twinge of pity as he watched. Such flimsy, unstable creatures! But then he turned his stalked eyes toward the huge artifact that had brought them there and his pity died. These were advanced beings. Whence they had come, how they moved through, space, why they were here -- no canceroid could imagine. The sounds that they made were varied and Red Spine knew that they were complex speech. He had recorded them all in his memory tissues, so that later, in a thought period, he could bring them back and analyse their components, searching for keys that would reveal their meanings. The beings continued to move away, so Red Spine flexed his many pairs of walking appendages and began to rotate slowly, first in place, then drifting across the sand like a great spinning top. The invaders became small white dots in the distance. The canceroid had but one thought suddenly -- to get back to the shelter cluster and tell this strange tale. He felt sure that he was being watched, so he took a long and devious route, zig-zagging among the boulders, and finally spinning around the mighty cone-shaped mass that was the Eater. With its bulk between him and the distant beings he sped for the shelter opening like a desert dust-devil. carrier come to ground. Half a dozen elders, the largest and at times the most brightly colored of the cluster, sat inert on prominences, their stalked eyes fixed on the long cylinder of the distant artifact. "We feared you were destroyed." one projected. It was Right Twist. Red Spine respected him. Right Twist was old and learned. "The creature came out of space," Right Twist continued. "We saw it come. It had many pairs of stalked eyes and its mouth opening glowed red. No doubt it has come to feed on us." "Your vision is better than mine," Red Spine thought courteously. "I was quite closer and I did not see these things. But it settled near me and I learned." "What did you learn?" Yellow Stripe showed no color now. His carapace was sand gray, as were the others. "I learned," Red Spine projected, "that it is not a creature at all. It requires no food. It is an artifact." He could sense the polite disbelief from half a dozen thought cenIF teFS. For a brief time span there was no other communication. Then Right Twist projected gravely: "There are facts to support this statement?" "There are facts," Red Spine acknowledged. "The thing is a carrier of many small beings. An opening formed in it and a number of them came out and walked on the sand. They have white carapaces and one great eye. They locomote on a single pair of appendages. And," he paused, for the point was an impressive one, "they communicate entirely by sound." "Primitives!" The pulse burst from Yellow Stripe. "This is unlikely." The projection came from Blue Dot, who occupied the highest prominence. "To build and use a carrier such as this is not primitive." They all sat. An aura of puzzlement and frustration seemed to hang in the air, but to have no particular origin. They all contributed to it. "You accept Red Spine's facts?" Right Twist thought at Blue Dot. "My vision is good," Blue Dot said, "and I sit above you. There are small bits of white about the thing and they are moving." "Their eye is very large," Red Spine said. "It may be that they also see us." "We have no ways of measuring what they can do," Right Twist decided. "They are alien. Whence they came we cannot imagine. Why they are here we cannot even speculate. Our rules will not apply to them. We can only watch." "And be watched," Blue Dot thought drily. "And hope." Yellow Stripe's fear throbbed in his projection. From the very egg he had been timid. "When the sun is gone," Red Spine thought, "when the radiation drops and the only light is starshine, we can look closely at the artifact. The aliens will be inside. It is likely that they come out only in the day." "But not certain," Right Twist cautioned. "We must use caution." "They were very near me and examined me carefully and I came to no harm. And when I rose and flashed the peace sign, they showed fear. They pointed cylinders at me and walked away backward, the large eyes always on me. And the sounds seemed disturbed. " "Nevertheless, we will wait," Right Twist decreed. "I agree that the time of starshine is best. We will go then." While he had no power to make decisions, because of his age he was respected. They waited. The intelligence of the landing of the strange carrier was projected into the shelter opening, where it was passed from thought center to thought center by hundreds of canceroids in dozens of chambers and corridors and repose cubicles. Each being sat quietly wherever it received the news. There was no rush to the shelter opening or to emergency exits to see for themselves. There was nothing more to be done or learned until starshine. So they waited. A ND as they waited it began again. Whether the unusual mental activity of the canceroids disturbed it or whether simply the renewed peristalsis of its vast gut -- empty after the rigors of molt and new skeleton formation -- roused The Eater mattered not. What did matter was that when he sulky, petulant rumble began, it must be fed. "Food! Food! Food!" Each canceroid understood, with an almost inherited wisdom, that the Eater should not move. Red Spine had wondered in moments of meditation if it could move for any great distance, after all the eons of remaining in that one location among the boulders on the hot sandy plain. Even its wastes were removed from behind it. Canceroids carried them far and wide, burying them under the sand. And at these spots the sponge clusters grew with unusual vigor and provided more and better cuttings of food pieces. Still, the Eater did move -- if only a little way -- as it flowed out of its armor at each molt. These happened rarely. Red Spine could recall but two in his life span. They occured just after the creature had had great masses of food. Only some great destruction of life, such as the fall of rock just past, could provide enough . "Food! Food! Food!" The mindless pulses became stronger, clearer. The Eater's patience was not great. Right Twist flashed a call into the shelter cluster. When the first canceroid emerged, he himself led the way out to where the sponge clusters were best developed. Other shelter clusters, each in its traditional turn, would be sending out food gatherers to placate the Eater's endless hunger. There was no resentment. It had always been thus. Only Red Spine wondered, deep in his contemplation centers, if this should be."The Eater will require more food than ever before," Blue Dot projected. "Some of it must come from very far away." IF "I wonder," Red Spine thought, "if all the canceroids from all the shelter clusters can provide enough. The sponge bodies are pruned as closely as we dare. We bring to it all dead bodies of all beings, however small. And still it cries." "We must give it more," Blue Dot said. "There isn't more. Our own food needs must be remembered. The symbionts of the shelter clusters must eat. The little beings that live under rocks, the flutterbys of the air, all must feed. Life cannot be destroyed even for the Eater." "Then," Blue Dot said, "perhaps the Eater will go searching for its own nourishment. It does not know that life must not be destroyed. If we do not feed it, it will devour anything in its path. It will leave nothing of the sponge beings to renerate. It will tear apart the shelter clusters. It will feed on -- us." "And then, having destroyed all the food, it will die," Red Spine said. "There is no benefit here for anything. All life will be destroyed to no purpose. Cancerol, the home world, will have no inhabitants." Blue Dot swiveled his stalked eyes toward the long cylinder of the alien carrier, far across the desert. "Others will come;" he prophesied. "There is proof, that carrier out there. Beings from space will take the world that has been ours since the beginning." appendages restlessly. This talk disturbed him. Something was wrong here. His sense of justice was offended. It was legend that the Eater had always been there, slowly growing bigger, and that canceroids had always fed it. But why? What did it contribute? Its wastes were not enough. Without it there would be food in plenty. There would be time for thought, for contemplation. With it, extinction threatened. "I sense your thoughts," Blue Dot projected. "You should shield them. They are not worthy of you." Red Spine said, "All sides of a problem should be considered. Even this one. Why should we feed the Eater?" "It has always been done." "That is not enough. For everything else there must be a reason. Why must I not challenge this?" "No one ever has," said Blue Dot. "And so we must die. Is this reasonable? Do you deny my right to question?" The bright blue spots of Blue Dot's carapace slowly faded until he was again the color of the rocks around. He withdrew his eyestalks into their sockets. Nervously his appendages tossed a pebble back and forth. "You disturb me. Such thoughts have always been buried deep and have never been unshielded. But you have the right to question." Red Spine felt satisfaction. "Do we know that the Eater can move and destroy all life? It never has. Why may it not use more energy in moving than it gets from the food it finds? Then it will grow weaker, find less food." "And finally die," Blue Dot finished. "That is not defensible. Life cannot be destroyed." "It is defensible. All living beings must feed themselves. If they do not they die." "The Eater is different. It has never fed itself." "And now," Red Spine projected boldly, "I wonder why. You have admitted my right to question and you cannot tell me why." Doubt and dismay swirled around the big canceroids as they sat unmoving on the prominences. Yellow Stripe and Purple Fringe and Plain Shell and Knobbed Claw and Blue Dot were completely without their distinguishing color patterns. Even a good eye could scarcely have told one from another. But Red Spine had never been brighter. The tip of every spine sparkled crimson. The six eyes at the ends of their extended stalks glinted pale crystalline blue. He raised and lowered his glowing body disk, half spinning as the appendages shifted. An idea that had been buried deep in his consciousness since his growing molts had finally emerged. It was heresy, but it was reasonable. That the Eater was given the food that should have been the right of all living things everyone knew. But the thought had never been allowed to surface. It had never been expressed before. Red Spine was stimulated, elated. "I may die," he projected, "but I will not be the cause. I will no longer take food to the Eater." "But -- " the soundless pulse burst from five thought centers -- "it must be fed!" "Why?" "We are repeating," Blue Dot said. "We cannot insure that you will feed the Eater. But we can remove your appendages, to give you time to reflect while they regenerate: This has been done." "True," Red Spine mused, "but I do not agree that this is required. IF Therefore, I will resist. And if I do, you will lose appendages as well." "But no one has ever resisted!" Yellow Stripe's thought pulse quavered. "True. And no one ever before decided not to feed the Eater. I have long felt that this is just. I also feel that it would be reasonable to protect my appendages." "You have the right to believe this," Blue Dot said reluctantly. "We will wait for the wisdom of Right Twist." Red Spine rocked on his appendages. "He also is fallible," he stated. "When the alien carrier came down he saw on it appendages and many stalked eyes. Now I was near it, on the sand, and it had none of those things. It was his fear that saw." Stalk'ed eyes emerged again from carapace sheaths. For a brief while they had forgotten the aliens. The insistent food call' of the Eater had subsided into a sulky murmur, so they knew that food was being piled before it. While it ate the hunger pulses grew less. Ill T HE sun had set. Overhead the stars grew steadily brighter, a black canopy stippled with sweeps and swirls of yellow points. The time of starshine was beginning. The radiation had receded. It was the pleasant time. "The small white beings will go back into the carrier," Red Spine said quietly. This will be the time to look closely at the artifact." "I must feed the Eater," Blue Dot said hastily. "It is my turn." "And mine! And mine! And mine!" "I am free," Yellow Stripe admitted. "I will go, but not too near. We should not frighten them -- if they are small, as you say." "I will go also," a thought pulsed ffom distance. "It may be that I did not see eyes and appendages. If there are none, I will correct my statement." "We will meet you," Red Spine projected. "Then we can agree on what is there." It was the first of many visits. The canceroids approached the great ship carefully at first, but on succeeding nights -- in succeeding times of starshine -- they gradually grew bolder. They paced the distance from end to end of the ship, a distance greater than the longest corridor in the largest shelter cluster. They marveled at the smooth curving sides of the huge cylinder. In those glistening walls, openings could appear, sometimes small, to allow the beings to come through, sometimes so large that gleaming, pointed artifacts were spat from them, to cruise far and wide in the air over the deserts and mountains and finally return and be received into the openings again. One thing was discovered early. The beings were not confined to the sunshine. Like the canceroids, they soon realized that the night was the better time. And, added marvel, when they came out into the starshine they were different. What appeared to be a carapace was not a part of the beings at all. When the sun was gone they emerged pliant and slender, the great eye replaced by two tiny ones and a mouth orifice studded with small white stones in rows. The false carapace was simply a shielding structure against the radiation and was readily removed. By sunlight and by starshine, Red Spine watched. Almost always he was near the carrier, impressing every wonder onto his memory tissues. Since he no longer fed the Eater, he had time. And soon he was deeply disturbed at what the aliens did. They looked closely at all life. Nothing escaped their attention. They had strange means of locomotion, leaping far across the desert at a single bound, or rolling along in a device into which several of the beings fitted. To Red Spine these things were merely curios. But the beings' lack of regard for the right of all beings to live was quite another thing. To take a portion of an organism for food was proper and necessary. But even in direst situation enough of the being must be left to regenerate. Otherwise life would not continue. This basic understanding was completely ignored by the aliens. They took entire individuals and placed them in confinementand would not allow them the freedom of movement that had always been the right of all things. In rows and rows of enclosures they imprisoned beings both large and small. They climbed the hills, lifted the rocks, dug under the sand. Even flutterbys beat their flying appendages helplessly against cleverly woven wall meshes of bright metal. what he saw. The ehders of the shelter cluster sat long in rapport, discussing what was known. As always they listened to Right Twist, because greater age gave greater wisdom. And Right Twist, after much meditation, finally offered his IF conclusion. He spoke first to Red Spine, as they lingered near the carrier in bright starshine. "These creatures, no matter how advanced, have brought to the homeworld an ancient barbarism. They destroy. Therefore they must themselves be destroyed." "A life for a life solves nothing." Red Spine took philosophical opposition. "First it must be understood why they do these things. They must be prevailed on to desist." "Why?" Right Twist questioned. "Will this release the forms they have imprisoned? Will it bring back those they have destroyed? Will it prevent them from destroying more? We have speculated on life from the stars, but who could have imagined that it would have primitive, exterminative ethics?" "Perhaps they are not really alive," Red Spine speculated. "In many ways they seem artificial. They could be merely devices, controlled by the Ultimate Wisdom from unimaginable space. They could have been sent to test the strength of our convictions, the consistency of our beliefs in the sacredness of life." Right Twist picked up a pebble, passed it from appendage to appendage around the entire circle of his carapace, a swift, facile gesture of irritation. "They are alive," he projected. "Their metabolism involves food and energy release and excretion. They are affected by the radiation. Note how quickly they have adjusted to the starshine cycle. Their carapaces are artificial. But they are alive." Red Spine knew this. He simply made use of the practices of debate while he thought. It was ethically necessary to refute an idea before a discussion could progress. Red Spine was a true fundamentalist in his thinking and to destroy an organism totally was, admittedly, not defensible. But Right Twist, from another view, was showing alarming signs of instability. Perhaps he should be deprived of all his appendages, to give him time to reflect and to become more rational while they regenerated. This was a mere passing thought pulse, shielded deep in his contemplative centers, and while Right Twist could not detect it, he probably shrewdly speculated that it was there. "I propose that we approach them directly," Red Spine thought, in his dulcet frequencies. "We cannot judge them by their actions. We must know their motivation." "I do not care to be collected," Right Twist thought drily. "I have no intention of having my movements restricted by an enclosure. These are alien, savage life forms. Undoubtedly they are searching for a life space. Ours is the ideal planet. They will take it unless we prevent them -- and in the taking destroy us all." Red Spine was becoming more than disturbed. He was appalled. He had not realized the extent of Right Twists's thought deviation. It was he who was the primitive, savage form. To suspect the aliens of needing a life space was a proposition not worthy of a larva. Obviously their technology was almost unbelievably advanced. It would be far more reasonable to meet them as equals, welcome them as guests, touch their strange centers in friendship. "Compared to them," Red Spine offered, "we are large. They would not try to dismember or imprison us. They will treat us with respect." "They control enormous energies," retorted Right Twist. "Size is meaningless. I propose that we take one when it strays from its group, remove its appendages and observe how it regenerates. This should provide some clue as to their possible potential to harm us." T HE sharp projections along the radiating lines of Red Spine's carapace glowed a brighter, a faintly pulsating scarlet. His six stalked eyes glistened like blue jade. "Unwise," he projected. "These beings are connected by a communications net. Injure one and the others will know. Further, I feel sure that they do not regenerate. Of the many from the carrier, not one lacks an appendage from the two pairs that are all they seem to have." "Then how do they feed? Can it be that they consume entire bodies and use their gonads alone to produce more? Disgusting!" "They are merely different," Red Spine thought soothingly. "Consider that they came from the depths of space. They are both a challenge and an opportunity. Not, I think, a menace." Red Spine himself was actually more disturbed by the invaders than he., wished Right Twist to know. They exhibited, indeed, a frightenjng adaptability. In a space of ten rotations of the planet, of the glorious homeworld Cancerol, the Center of the Universe, they had shown quick understanding of how living things were fitted to conditions and distributed as to space. These beings also, knew untold things that a IF canceroid could only suspect. They had come from space. They knew what was out there. Suddenly Red Spine felt the need for meditation, for solitude. He turned his disk slowly, flashed the peace sign with his cold light and went spinning away across the sand toward the shelter cluster. He enjoyed the exercise, enjoyed the exhilaration of the flexing muscles in his sixteen sets of appendages. Out of sheer well-being he spun faster and faster, leav- ing a blurred, looping trail across the sand. Right Twist followed him, but more slowly, scuttling along in a straight line, his stalked eyes directed back at the great space vessel of the aliens. Red Spine felt amusement. Right Twist now had no friendship for the creatures, but there was in him a healthy respect for what they might do. He was not disposed to remain near their ship alone. D AY followed day. The elders of the shelter cluster stabilized their attitudes toward the aliens, but they kept their thoughts shielded. There was not the rapport that had always existed before, for the points of view were too far apart. Red Spine communicated and soothed and counseled friendship whenever he felt a  mind open to him. This was not often. But he was aware of the feelings of most and worked quietly to modify them. Yellow Stripe, he knew, feared the invaders, as he always feared any unknown thing. He felt sure that Right Twist was plotting, deep in his own consciousness, to conduct his regeneration experiment if ever he could lay holding appendages on a specimen. Blue Dot remained aloof, coldly watching while the aliens went about their taboo-breaking, blasphemous activities. And Red Spine himself kept his stalked eyes on them all. He felt satisfaction that the aliens had made no attempt to imprison a canceroid. Instead, they also seemed to be watching, using recording artifacts. They made many sounds, waved their appendages in strange ways, emitted energies in wave-lengths most distressing to the canceroid nervous system. Red Spine interpreted this behavior, he felt, correctly. "It is justice," he projected. "While we are studying them, they are beyond doubt studying us. They recognize the nonthinking forms for what they are. Us they treat differently." "We are large," Yellow Stripe said fearfuly. He kept his energy pulses to lowest intensity, so that his thoughts were hard to detect. "Only our size prevents them from destroying us." "I feel that this has little effect," Red Spine thought. "They have energies we could never counter. Instead, it seems likely that they are trying to communicate. The sounds, the waving appendages, all indicate this. It is in this fashion that they communicate with each other." "This is evidence of low intelligence level," came from Right Twist. "Only primitive forms use sound." "You are thinking with our measuring devices. They came from space, in a vessel wider and longer than any burrow in any cluster on the homeworld. This is not primitive. "It is very advanced. We could not do it." "We would not wish to," Right Twist said stubbornly. "We have here the best of all possible worlds. Why should we leave? While they, having nothing to compare with CanceroL have come to wrest it from us and live here always." It was then that Red Spine began to realize that he had a responsibility to sustain something far more basic than a difference of opinion or philosophy. Deep in the cold recesses of his thinking structures the conviction grew that these creatures, these invaders, with their mighty space vessel and unbelievable artifacts, mut not be given cause to become antagonistic. What Right Twist plotted was dangerous. The senseless fears of Yellow Stripe might result in senseless behavior, actions the aliens would not understand. That was the real hazard. Lack of understanding. For these beings did not covet the homeworld. They were too different. The conditions that existed on Cancerol, so satisfying to the radiation-resistant native life, actually caused them grief. So it followed that they would not stay. As they came, so they would go. But they must not be challenged as long as they caused no deliberate harm, no widespread destruction. IV caused another problem, another stress in the age-old pattern of canceroid life: His refusal to feed the Eater was communicated from cluster to cluster. Rapport groups throughout the range of his kind gave it deep consideration. His own cluster debated it again and again. IF "The Eater cannot move," Blue Dot finally decided. "Why should it then eat my food? I think Red Spine has wisdom." "Would you suggest that we, too, cease to feed it?" Knobbed Claw asked. "I will go further," projected Blue Dot. "Henceforth I will gather only for the shelter cluster. Let the Eater provide for itself." "Madness," Yellow Stripe protested. He twiddled his palps nervously. "We live the best of all possible lives because we have always fed the Eater. It is the price we pay for our existence. If we stop we will certainly die." "And we die if we continue. Food can no longer be brought fast enough. No -- if I must die, let it be a new way. I bring no more food." "This is a reasonable position," Knobbed Claw said. "I will reflect on it." It was a point of view that suddenly became contagious. From other shelter clusters fewer and fewer workers streamed in with biomass for the endlessly hungry mountain-thing. Higher and ever more frantic grew its tele- pathic screams. "Food! Food! Food!" After eons of unconfused, peaceful living -- wherein all things were known and predictable -- the homeworld was in turmoil. Out in the desert the invader ship lay unmoving, inert, but the beings that inhabited it scurried and hopped and walked and flew like an all-pervading plague. They were everywhere. And always the Eater's ravenous projections frazzled nerveends. The aliens had early discovered that the Eater was a being -- that it was alive. They gave it much attention. Red Spine could always find some of them near it, watching, making their varied sounds. And he was there when three of them climbed to the peak of the great carapace, drawing themselves up the steep slope by clinging to its gnarled spines and by bracing their appendages in the cracks and striations that seamed it. They paused to study the sponge clusters and the lichen forms which so encrusted it that it appeared little different from the distant hills. These three were known to Red Spine. He passed them often and when he flashed the peace sign they always waved their appendages in answer. He had seen them watching, probably with wonder and astonishment, the continual carrying of food and the removal of wastes. Now as they climbed, he studied them in turn. communication often. Red Spine recorded these in his memory tissues as usual, though Jje wondered now if he would ever have the leisure and the peace to try to decipher them. One of the beings spoke deeply. "I've ridden whales on Cetus I and dinosaurs on Aldebaran II, but I do believe this is the first time I've climbed a living hill -- " Its smaller companion made the to Red Spine's detectors. "Anyhow, Roscoe, this one won't throw you. It must not have moved for ages. It probably can't." "It has appendages," the third being vocalized. "They look like buried redwood trunks. It # s adapted to move. And," it added maliciously, "if it moves, Roscoe falls. He has ridden things -- but he hasn't ridden 'em far!" It was starshine, and the aliens were without their clumsy coverings. Theyswung nimbly from spine to spine, chattering as they climbed. Finally they stood on the very peak of the giant carapace. They appeared small against the star canopy, but their sounds came clearly to Red Spine on the plain below. "All that food! Roscoe, give us the ecological justification for that. It looks like these creatures are starving themselves, using up their own feeding time and substance, just endlessly stuffing this thing. How do they profit?" "I think they don't, Pegleg. They're losing ground. They must have been doing it for many years, for certainly the creature grows. Notice how rushed they seem." Red Spine got no meaning from the sounds. Still, he was watching the hurrying canceroids with their loads of food, and a cold concern was building in his thought centers. For he could detect, as the aliens could not, the mindless outrage of the Eater that its hunger was not being satisfied. Red Spine knew he was right. The Eater should not be fed at all. Perhaps it never should have been -- but now it was no longer possible. They could not bring enough. "I'm going down to the intake end," the larger of the deep-voiced aliens sounded. "There are probably eyestalks under those crags down there. All of a sudden I think I know what this thing is!" "It's steep," the high sound said. "I'll go back the way we came. Meet you at the bottom, Roscoe. Come on, Pegleg." "I think I'll just sit a spell and watch you both," the other deep sound said. "First hill I ever IF climbed where I couldn't chip the rocks. A chiton-covered mountain! Wild!" Red Spine's eyestalks were fully extended. Puzzlement grew in him as the alien climbed down the Eater's carapace, paused at the giant eyestalk sheaths, then swung from spines above the almost vertical drop to the cavernous mouth opening below. Canceroids brought food. It was sponge tissue, the basic food, and the Eater swept it in with one great pedipalp. But it did not satisfy. What the Eater wanted, though probably it did not know it, was flesh. Meat. And its next move filled the watching Red Spine with cold horror. Yellow Stripe moved up in front of the great gaping maw, staggering under a food load. As canceroids had done for untold years, he deposited it the conventional distance from the mouth, turned to spin away. But the Eater could not wait. The huge pedipalp darted out, the long curved hooks gripped and both Yellow Stripe and his load were dragged against the enormous mandibles that ground like giant millstones. The canceroid gave a single despairing telepathic pulse, then the clashing gastric mill reduced him to crushed biomass. Red Spine flashed a warning to other food bearers coming in across the desert. "Go back!" he projected. "The Eater destroys life! The Eater kills!" And as the living juices flowed into its gullet, the Eater, too, responded. Its telepathic food cry changed, became savage. "Food! Food! Food!" pace the single alien grasped a spine and held on as the hill began to rock. The mighty, buried appendages lashed free of the sand. The Eater lunged upward. It was only one movement of the locomotor limbs, but it threw the hill forward many diameters of a canceroid. Two food bearers understood too late. The pedipalps darted, the mandibles clashed. The carriers and their loads followed Yellow Stripe. The small alien had completed its descent. In spite of its single pair of appendages it ran swiftly. But it did not run away. It circled the Eater, looking up to where the third alien clung to spines above the Eater's mouth opening. "Climb back, Roscoe," it shrilled and for once Red Spine did not mind the sound. He understood that it was doing what he had done. It was warning its own kind. The being above was struggling strongly. It pulled itself up spine by spine while the Eater ingested the food bearers. It was safe. Then the huge stalked eyes emerged from their sheaths, each far larger than the alien, and swung back and forth as the Eater sought further prey. The alien was swept from its hold and went plunging down to land heavily on the sand. The Eater reacted slowly. The being lay a short distance from its mouth opening, but it had come from above and the mindless monster was confused. But only for a moment. The pedipalp darted, but it swept over the being lying prone, flattened against the sand. It had no second chance. The small alien leaned against a boulder. Its slender body seemed to be shudderifig. But in one holding appendage it grasped a tapered cylinder, the artifact that none of them was ever without. The pedipalp moved again and a pale thin beam lanced from the cylinder. The base of the pedipalp glowed red. Smoke rose from it. Then with a violent, involuntary spasm the Eater cast off the appendage. It lay twitching on the sand and where it had been attached a raw, seared stump dripped a dark viscous blood. Red Spine poised on his running appendages. His eyestalks protruded with wonder. The pale beam switched to the other pedipalp -- and again the violent autotomy resulted. The Eater cast the appendage. Its telepathic projection was no longer a food call. It screamed with rage and pain. "Hurt! Hurt! Hurt!" It reared high and flung itself backward. It was as if a mountain moved on the landscape. The alien that had fallen rolled over and rested on its bent walking appendages. It held out its own , cylinder. The thin beam from it flashed directly into the wide and working mouth of the vast monstrosity, the mouth through which so much food had passed for so many ages. This, its last meal, was a knifing ray of pure, ripping energy. Red Spine's receptors vibrated with a great pulse of agony. For a moment it came with terrifying volume -- then it began to fade, to grow gentle. It ended almost as a sigh. And the canceroid knew, without knowing how he knew, that a whole era had ended on the homeworld. He'knew that the Eater was dead. The two aliens clung closely, their holding appendages wrapped around each other, their mouth orifices pressed together, and from the smaller one came IF Start your introductory subscription with the gala September issue... featuring the world premiere of Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarkes newest novel! science fiction's premiere magazine, goes monthly... to double your reading pleasure ! the gala September issue... at only #. That's a I .# saving off the newsstand price.  Please renew or extend my subscription at these savings. # issues only #.  Payment enclosed Business Reply Mail Postage will be paid by galaxy broken, sobbing sounds. Red Spine dutifully recorded everything on his memory tissues. Later, he promised himself, he would decide what it all meant. Many pairs of stalked eyes followed steadily as the three aliens walked slowly away from the mountain of carrion that had been the Eater, walked toward the ship that loomed across the plain under the stars. As the sounds of their vocalizing grew faint with distance Red Spine shook the sand from his appendages and scuttled furtively after them. He intended that his record of sounds should be complete, though the thought of the energy of the cylinders rested cold in his memory. He followed until an opening in the ship closed behind them. Then he settled himself in the sand, studying patiently. V liUT he did not know when, later, one of the beings settled itself into a small square space, like a repose cubicle, inside the great carrier. It rested on an artifact constructed to fit its bent walking appendages and curved body. In a holding chela it grasped a small stylus, with which it rapidly drew symbols on a thin layer of white material resting on another artifact before it. Had he had opportunity to see, it would have been one more wonder to Red Spine, for he would have recognized it as a record, an artificial device for remembering. And had it been possible to imprint what he saw onto his memory tissues, symbol by symbol, his recall would have been thus: Earth Calendar A. D. # . Log entry #. Roscoe Kissinger , Ecologist. Also Dr. Linda Kissinger , Microbiologist and Dr. Pegleg Twenty-sixth day , post landing. Well, we did it. It was a judgment thing and maybe we bent the letsays: No interference with the lives or the activities of an aware species. For they are aware. No doubt about that. More than aware. Highly intelligent, with a social structure undoubtedly satisfying and effective. They have an ecologically balanced economy that Earth might take note of. And they had -- note had -- an economic problem. And that's where we bent the letter. We solved it for them. Technically we have an out, I suppose. Without any interference three crew members would have had to move lively to save the skin of at least one of them. Being that one, I'd have to say that it would have been tricky. But Lindy is good with that laser. We didn't have to kill the thing. Our hand lasers could have -- and did -- cause it to cast off appendages. Like its normal species-mates, it probably would have regenerated them in time. But that would have called for more food. And that, I think, was the problem. The thing was a mutant, a mutant crab-being. How old it was is an interesting speculation, but we have no data at all. Undoubtedly it grew in proportion to the amount of food they brought it and every molt upped its requirements for nourishment. And finally its need was greater than the environment could produce. That was why it ran amok. I think we saved a race from serious damage or destruction -- a civilization of sorts. I agree that that's no part of our function. The galaxy must be full of disintegrating ecosystems. And it could be that maybe we just postponed destruction, because the intense hard radiation in the sun's rays must cause many a mutation. They may recognize these and do something about them. If so, the giant got away from them. Maybe he developed unusual size before they understood. Maybe they fed him first from admiration -- or to prevent him from bullying them and taking what they had collected. Maybe they worshiped him, thought he was a god. I'm speculating, Dr. Rasmussen, brainstorming, but it seems reasonable to record everything. You like a full log. So do I. So you're getting it. I believe that the crab people, thesand-dollar people, as Lindy has called them, understand about us. I think they know that we are not of this planet, that we constructed the Stardust , that we came out of space. I know they try to communiIF cate. Those blasted firefly lights! They symbolize something and I'm not sure what. Whatever it is, it's friendly. There's one, the big fellow with the long-spined carapace who can show red on every spine, that has haunted us, followed us around, watched us as carefully as we have watched them. He knows me. Whenever I'm close to him I give him a special arm-wave. He flashes his light. And he talks to me. Oh yes, he does! I can't understand it -- I can't even hear it, but it's there. I'll prove it -- I think. When old Red Spine sits in front of me his eyestalks out as far as he can push them, those thirty-two appendages rimming his carapace like an ornate fringe on a sombrero, he seems almost to be demanding that I listen to him. But I can't, of course. There isn't any sound. There's just one clue. My energy detector is sensitive to a faint stimulus when he comes near and especially when he insists on communicating with me. It's strongest then. So here's more speculation. They're telepaths. I'm picking up the energy of a mental projection. And I know they listen when we speak. They're probably just as frustrated as we are. It may be judged interference, but I'll never regret the demise of the mutant. If the International Space Council rules that we've exceeded our mandate we'll just have to take our lumps. What do they know? A varmint as tall as a hill, with a diameter as great ks the length of a football field, sopping up the biomass of a whole ecosystem and giving nothing but its wastes in return -- uh-uh! If the aware life of this part of the planet were to survive he had to go. He couldn't have persisted much longer anyhow. His need for food was greater than his ability to gather it for himself. But he would have caused fearful havoc before he died. I think we arrived here at the critical molt, the molt that broke the balance. Up to now the crab people could feed him. After that molt they couldn't. He was too big. I had thought that they might eat the body, but you'll note in the tapes that they're not doing so. Today we counted more than five thousand of them, streaming in from all directions, some from colonies hundreds of miles away. They're taking apart that incredible cadaver, dissecting it into transportable parcels, carrying them away and burying them. But they're not doing it the easy way. They're not using a limited area for a cemetery. They're spreading him out over many square miles of sand and desert. In effect, they're putting him back where he came from. Where those chunks are buried, the sponge clumps will grow faster and bigger. When they are pruned and harvested, they'll regenerate more swiftly. There'll be enough food for everybody. Sure, I'm interpreting. Does anyone want to debate it? Look at your film, your charts, your records. Look at Ursula's paintings. I think I'll go out and say good-bye to : Red Spine, if I can find him. T HE days and nights of labor were ended. Where the enormous bulk of the Eater had always been now there was nothing. For the first time in the memory of the oldest canceroid the sensors could not feel the sulky pressure of the creature's insatiable hunger. Their nerve ends had quivered for the last time to the mindless, endless cry of "Food! Food! Food!." "They are going," Red Spine projected. "They have watched us dispose of the Eater. They know how we live, what we eat, how we die. It is, I think, their function to learn such things." Red Spine had scrambled up the sloping surface of a large boulder. Now he sat well above the desert floor, his stalked eyes flicking back and forth restlessly, his spines glowing. Across the desert, from every direction, the canceroids were' coming. Each carapace glittered and flashed with the pattern that made every individual different. As the yellow sun Cancer dropped behind the uptilted range, the colors brightened. Since it had landed -- many starshines ago -- the great bulk of the carrier had lain inert, unchanging, unmoving. It had, indeed, often opened holes in itself, through which the invader beings came out and went in. In the radiation of the sun they were always covered with the white caraIF paces, each showing the one large eye. In the starshine they were different. The carapaces disappeared -- the beings were slender and pliant, their appendages thin. The one big eye was replaced by two small ones, without any stalks at all, and below these a mouth opening where all the sounds came out. Yet they were the same beings. They carried on the same activities, made the same sounds. It was possible to distinguish one from another by size and by the depth and the pitch of their noises. Red Spine had come to know several of them rather well. "They destroyed the Eater with ease," Knobbed Claw signaled. "Are we wise to assemble here? Why should they not destroy us as well?" "What would be their purpose? They do not require a homeworld. With their carrier they can go wherever they choose, perhaps to the very stars themselves. No," Red Spine insisted, "they mean no harm to us. They wish us well." "They wish us well," Blue Dot echoed. "They destroyed the Eater. We assemble here to thank them." "They wish us well!" The message pulsed from thought center to thought center, on out to the edges of the sea of great disks that spread over much distance and in all directions. around the alien craft. The sun was gone. In the starshine Now in paperback! Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years  Highly original"Theodore Sturgeon, N.Y. Times Book Review "Utter believability and constantly heightening fascination." -- Harlan Ellison, Los Angeles Times # wherever Berkley paperbacks are sold # Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. # each carapace glowed ever brighter as the signal was repeated. The desert was a shimmering, shifting pattern of multicolored lights. The carrier responded. Its vast dark bulk began to show openings, more and more openings, and into these spaces the aliens crowded, their small eyes peering out onto the wide-spread gathering of canceroids. The aliens waved their appendages, their mouths opened and closed and Red Spine knew that they were making the noises of speech, though the clear substance that covered each opening did not allow the sounds to be heard. But then a sound did come, a great sound that was speech, as though the carrier itself spoke, and canceroids yet miles away heard it plainly. Red Spine still had no clues as to the meanings of the sounds, but he recorded all that he detected. In quieter times, when meditation and thought were again possible, he promised himself that he would learn to understand them. So he recorded the great sound, the last he was'to hear. "Goodbye, crab people! We hope you're here to show gratitude, but if instead we've destroyed your god, we're sorry. It seemed sort of necessary at the time. Anyhow, whether you know it or not, you're better off." Then another voice came, one well known to Red Spine. "So long. Red Spine old buddy! I've met a lot worse citizens than you. We wish you well!" The openings vanished. The carrier lay, a long, black forbidding shadow, showing no life at all. Then slowly, gently, silently, it began to 'rise. It swept easily in a huge circle over the thousands of canceroids, its dark bulk blotting out the starshine. High and higher it spiraled, the greatest marvel the homeworld Cancerol would know for countless ages. Red Spine atop his boulder felt a surge of feeling and he knew it was regret. He reared himself high on his many appendages. He fixed his stalked eyes on the distant spacecraft -- and flashed the peace sign. Others around him followed the example. Ten thousand pale golden beams lanced upward against the stars. The ship swung around once more. From it a cone of light flashed downward, light of the same quality as the small beams of the canceroids. The beings had learned the peace sign. They were civilized, after all. Red Spine sat alone on his boulder and thought I -- and wondered.  IF Where a world may perish, a word may not -- if somebody remembered to write it! with the sand glimmering in the coral sunlight and I began to slog my way toward it. "Jhirinki, get back here!" Wolton ordered from the skiff. He was sounding angrier by the minute. "There's something out -- " I tried to tell him but Almrid cut me off. "Let him alone, Wolton. Your jurisdiction goes no farther than the skiff." Then, with scarcely a change in tone, he said to me, "You stay here until camp is set up. I want to know where everyWolton gave him a sour smile and motioned me away. But it was important that they know about that irregularity. I tried again. "I saw something out there. It doesn't look -- " "Wait until the camp is set up. We need to get some more definitive readings before we go exploring. And -- " Almrid added to Wolton -- "we can't get those without the prowler." Wolton jerked the hatch of the skiff open. "All right. Here's the prowler. You know that, it can't get any better data from the surface than the monitors can." "Look, Almrid -- " I began. "Not now, Peter. We'll talk later. When we have more accurate material to work from." This last was, of course, for Wolton. It was useless. I stepped back as Wolton reluctantly put the prowler in action, letting it scuttle out over the hazy sand, scanners clicking contentedly to itself. Sumiko Hyasu had barricaded herself behind her equipment, preparing to run soil tests. She and Langly, the biochemist, worked in silence, the remote sounds of their breathing murmuring in my earphones. On the other side of the skiff I knew Parnini and Goetz were furling the sails of the weather unit. I could hear them swearing occasionally. They were busy. Wolton and Almrid were still arguing. My eyes were dragged back again to that irregular spot in the sand that might be what I wanted. That might be digs. "I'm calling Captain Tamoshoe," Wolton declared to anyone who would listen. "I'm going to give him a status report." "That is your responsibility," murmured Almrid as he watched the prowler set zig-zagging in a widening spiral. His heavy head was even larger in the Class Eleven uniform. His hands hung like paws, wholly unlike what one expected in a virologist. It was hard to think of him doing the minute manipulations that were the mark of his work -- it was like trying to imagine Caliban or Quasimodo making watches or microcircuitry. A yawning breeze wound a bit of dust on its finger and then sank back, too tired to hold it. That was the feel of the whole place -- drowsiness. The wind barely breathed. The plain was heavy with dreaming, the sky unmarred by clouds where the greater of two suns hung about fifteen degrees above the horizon, a platter of polished copper. Our presence intruded on this somnambulistic landscape where even the rocks IF were softened and sometimes crumbling and in placejof dirt there was sand that was not sand flickering in the monochrome stillness. Yet I wondered and hoped. There had been indications of structures from the monitors on the Nordenskjold. I knew my digs were here to be found, if only I knew where to look. "Jhirinki's been wandering around," Wolton was reporting and the sound of my name brought me back to the camp. He added in response to the captain's garbled question, "It was Almrid's idea to bring along an archeologist. Not mine. Ask him." In the slow heat of the opalescent afternoon work was sluggish. There was nothing for me to do but stare at the one odd spot in the distance -- and wish. Goetz swore in my earphone as his equipment toppled for the second time, victim to the treacherous shifting of the sand. "Need help?" I asked him, not reluctantlyr "What I need is a foundation," came his answer, the words bitten out in frustration. "According to the monitors," Almrid said icily, directing the insult at Wolton, "there's all kinds of rock around here. Or, maybe not rock. Maybe it once was buildings." "Look, Almrid -- " Wolton began. Then, unexpectedly, Sumiko Hyasu cut in. "Leave him alone, Franz," she said softly to Almrid. "We have work to do." "It looks like you've wasted your trip, Peter," Almrid said to me, a certain morose satisfaction in this statement. "Why don't you ride up tonight and forget it? There are other planets." I wondered if my disappointment showed so much. "I think I'll stick around for a while," I said. was saying as we watched the second skiff settle onto the sand. "I can't give up the thought that there's something here." Absently she made some answer. "Don't you feel that?" "I suppose so." She was only half-listening. This world was too unknown, too compelling for us to pay much attention to each other. Everyone of us saw it through hisher eyes only, "Is any of this real, Peter?" she asked. "Or is the planet hiding from us?" I had felt that from the first. Something was hidden here right under our noses and we hadn't the sense to find it. But all I could do was shrug. I didn't know then what she wanted to find, what it was she had been searching for with that terrible, fragile intensity that marked her more than her beauty. "What do you want to find?" she asked me. "Oh, I don't know." It was a lie and, like a lot of lies, it felt ugly. But I couldn't admit to her that I had longed for the chance to find a lost civilization here, to be the first to decipher its language. People could be known and understood by the way they used words, and to be the first to understand in that way had been an obsession with me since before I trained on the Probe Ship Magalhaes. "You're going to do some exploring later?" It wasn't really a question, it was a dismissal. "Whenever Aljnrid and Wolton get tired of fighting and give a general release, then, yes. I'll go exploring." Neither of them was enough to let the expedition get moving and I was becoming riled at the delay. But Commander Markham would be in the next skiff and knowing Josh, he would put an end to the sparring that had taken up too much time already. "Good luck," she murmured and went back to her equipment. Then, as she started adjusting the sample breakdowns, her voice sounded again in my earphones. "Why wait? Why not do what you want to do?" had been set up and the full complement of expedition staff had been ferried down the surface shelters were waiting. I had spent the long afternoon struggling with ring supports, emplacing the doughnut-shaped foundations for the inflatable buildings, but now it was night. I walked away from the camp, watching the unfamiliar sky. There were more and brighter stars above me and some eleven dissimilar moons coursed overhead in a bewildering tangle. In a while I found the irregular stone, although I had not consciously been looking for it -- I had been drawn to it as surely as fur draws static. I knew that it would tell me what I wanted to know, if only I could puzzle it out before Captain Tamoshoe ordered us all back to the Nordenskjold. Yet, as I stood over it, not knowing where to look or what I was looking for, I could still mock myself for being so obsessed with wanting to find a language and a culture that obviously had failed in all this desolation. What could it teach us? So I paced the thing off nonchalantly. It was not too large. IF this oblong section of rock, rather like one of the old headstones in the landmark cemeteries. I kneeled in the sand and rubbed at the side of the block -- and touched what I thought at first was a flaw or chip in the surface. Curious, I bent closer, gently blowing the clinging dirt from the slab with my sweat valve, brushing the stone clear as I worked. And then, there it was. Without any doubt, without any ambiguity, the glyphs appeared under my hands. I drew back to get a proper look at them. -I cbocS For several minutes I sat and looked at them. The stillness of the night was suddenly alien. Eight low relief marks on a rock -- and I felt for the first time that all I am was justified. I rose, wiping more of the block free of the sand, but I could find nothing more. The inexorable movement of the sand might have worn other markings away, or perhaps the stone reached deeper into the ground than I had thought at first, with more glyphs farther down. Almrid and Wolton had said something about erosion. Perhaps this had been high above the sand, once. It seemed like a long way back to the camp just to get a shovel and some help. I stood, rubbing my hands together to free them of the dust that was clinging insidiously to them and to film of my surface suit. Was it worth it, going all the way back? I could do more here tonight even without tools. And if I went back, Almrid or Wolton would be sure to try to stop me from coming back. In the morning I could bring some of the expedition with me, but then this find would no longer be mine. I finally accepted the rationalization that left me alone with my particular dream for a little longer. Setting to work, I scooped armloads of the soil away from the block, hoping to discover more glyphs. I felt that I had found the key to a larger discovery. It was on the fifth armload that I fell through into the room. like a reverse halo against the shiny surface of the floor. I tasted grit -- the suit must have ruptured somewhere. As I lay on the floor I took stock. No bones broken, but some dandy bruises. I gathered my knees beneath me and carefully stood up. It was dark down here except for the shine from the moons through the hole. There was no other light. With uncertain fingers I grabbed for my litepak and found it undamaged. Thumbing it, I found that it could hardly reach beyond the sand on the floor. After a moment of thought I turned it off and began walking slowly in an outward spiral. On the third round I bumped into a thing, apparently of stone, about the size of a half-chair with a shoe-shaped projection. It felt smooth and solid. "Curiouser and curiouser," I said aloud to the unechoing blackness. Slowly I wandered back to the sand haze on the floor, the site of my fall. I looked up at the rent in the roof. The realization rushed in on me then that I was truly cut off from the expedition. I had left my commkit at the camp and my litepak's trickle of a beam could not have been seen by anyone at that distance. The sand filtered down through the hole, whispering. And the light was failing. Two of the moons had set since I had fallen into my find and I could not get out without light. Let 's leave that alone for the moment , Jhirinki, I told myself for comfort. Then, as I watched, the great heavy stone I had loosened by my fall gave a kind of sigh and, with deceptive languor, tumbled end over end to crash and shatter on the floor. If it had fallen straight down, that would have been the end of Peter Jhirinki. Badly shaken, I went back to the object I had walked into earlier. My hands shook when I reached out to steady myself, and I drew them back. Perhaps I should touch nothing here until I knew what had made that great stone fall. Were other stones still in the ceiling above me? Anxiously I pulled out my litepak again and played its feeble beam over the ceiling. But the fact that I saw no other blocks of stone was actually small comfort. This room was an important find and I was without means to see it -- and now too isolated to get the help I needed. I also remembered there was a tear in my suit, which might or might not mean anything on this planet. Again I wandered back to the place beneath the hole, taking care not to get near the gently falling sands. "Peter!" For a moment I didn't believe the sound in my suit phone. Then, as my name was called again, I realized that I had been missed and that a party was searching for me. "Yeo!" I yelled, full of relief. IF The stream of dust into the hole increased. "Peter Jhirinki -- " Now that the voices were closer I was able to pick out Markham's among the others -- a large resonant sound that no commsystem could properly handle. "Down here -- " More rivulets of the soft dust were pouring down now and I wondered how strong the roof was. "Be careful -- I don't know how long the roof here willhold." "Thanks. Markham's voice. "We'll get you out of there. Dominguiz went back for the rig." After a moment's silence Josh Markham asked, "And did you find anything down there, Pete?" It took me a little time to answer him. "I hope so," I said finally. Then, as I looked around the dark, I didn't want to leave. "Drop me a litepak, will you?" "Right." And in a moment Markham's litepak in its crashcase thudded to the floor. "Dominguiz will be back any time, Pete. Make it short." B UT I knew that. I wrenched the litepak from its case and pressed the switch. The beam stabbed into the darkness, showing me the room for the first time. It was large, low-ceilinged and shiny save for the place where I had brought in the sand. Two of the walls were a patchwork of designs, intricate embossed patterns on tilelike bricks. The other two walls . The other two walls were covered with glyphs. "Get ready, Pete." Markham cut into my discovery like razor into flesh. "I can't get this very steady. You'll have to guide it coming out." There was a clank of the rig as the saddle hit the floor, then the purposeful clicking of the pulleys set in motion. Quickly I straddled the saddle, grabbing the upper sling so that I could help control the lift. "We're under way," Markham called as the rig hoisted me into the air. I turned the beam of the litepak on the walls as I rose, letting the light linger on the marks for as long as I could. I got my back scraped coming out of the hole, but I was too preoccupied to notice it until Josh Markham said, "Holy Mama, .ere did you get that?" I looked at my arm, saw nothing and shrugged. "Your back, man, your back." As soon as he said it, the pain hit like a hammer. "Oh. That." For a moment I concentrated on the damage and decided that it wasn't that much. "Coming out of the hole, I think. Is it bad?" Relieved, Josh said, "It's messy. Have Sanderson look at it back at the base. He'll want to check you for foreign bugs anyway. What the devil did you find down there?" "Words," I said quietly. "A whole world of words." "There are ruins down there?" He asked it incredulously, his big body slewing about in the sand. "A city?" "I don't know about the city, but there sure as hell are words. Maybe a complete language. I'm going back down tomorrow and find out." Markham eyed me suspiciously. "What if Wolton says otherwise? What if I sfcy otherwise?" "It wouldn't matter." As I said it, I knew it could make no difference what they said. Nothing anyone could say or do would keep me out of that hole now that I had seen the wall. "All right, Pete. But don't push your luck. This place is still terra incognita as far as we're concerned." I nodded. "That's just it. It won't be unknown if I can get a chance at that wall. There's the whole puzzle, right down there. Complete with solution." "Hdy, won't machines do as well?" Dominguiz put in, having listened to us as he stowed the gear in the crawler. "We got machines for that." "No. I spoke harshly, but there was no way for me to say it kindly. "No machine wrote that, no machine is going to read it. That is what I'm trained for. That's why I'm part of the crew. And it's what I've wanted to do all my life." "Sure. Sure. I don't care whether you get yourself ruined. I just want to know. Academics!" He sat down in the driving cockpit. "You two can ride in the back if you want." He didn't wait for an answer, preferring his machines to our company. Josh Markham and I scrambled aboard as the crawler began its lurching way off through the sand. Only it wasn't sand. "Josh," I said uncertainly as we clung to the rear platform of the crawler. "I think I know what this stuff is." "The dirt? Damned persistent, isn't it?" "It isn't dirt," I told him slowly, avoiding his eyes. "I think it's ash." appeared to," Franz Almrid said, wiping his hands in a futile gesture to rid them of the ash. "Yes." I was beaming with IF pride. In the morning light the hole was even better than I had thought. "What is it?" Almrid's voice held open sarcasm as he looked at the figures on the wall. "Looks like spermatozoa in formation with math symbols." "It does at that," I admitted, determined not to fight with Aimrid. The very fact that there had been something worth discovering on this planet had made him furious. "You really think you're going to get sense out of that?" He gave a derisive laugh. "You're kidding yourself, Jhirinki." I was spared the problem of answering him by Josh Markham, who was lowered into the hole on the new cable rig. "Looks good, Pete," Josh said, craning his corded neck, trying to see it all without turning around. "What's next?" "Well, that wall," I told him, pointing to the farthest one, "is probably not worth much. It's too scarred and faded. But this -- " I looked at the longer wall with its bright surface and clear markings -- "is a treasure." It was as if I had finally lured a much-sought mistress into my bed. That wall, with its thousands of glyphs in neatly horizontal lines was more than I had ever hoped to have for myself. "You're a damned romantic, that's what you are," Josh said with a chuckle. "Well, while you're busy down here, we'll just go along and dig up a few square miles of ash, in case there might be a city down there." I'd told him that there might be, late late last night after I had reported the find. In the morning I wondered if I'd been right, but tt it go. The chance was worth a look. "If you're sure this is a building, where is the door? Or did they all tumble in the way you did?" Almrid's icy tone stopped both Josh and me. I hated to admit it, but Almrid had a point. If this had been a building there had to be a way in and out of it. And no matter what size or shape the inhabitants a door is a door is a door. "Maybe in the floor?" Josh suggested. "This is pretty high up, judging from the few readings we can get around here. Maybe this was an attic or a sun room." He looked at me hopefully, his big hands rubbing at the ash. "It's possible." Looking around the room I knew there was an answer. I just had to be left alone to find it with my instincts and my pores. "There's nothing for us peasants to do but dig," Almrid said acidly. "All right. Professor. Well do it your way." He went to the sling and was hauled out of the hole. "Don't let him bother you, Pete," Josh said with all the reassurance he could muster. "He doesn't like the place and can't figure out why." "I know." A short silence fell. "Well, I'll leave you to your work. Call if you need help." "I will," I promised him as he rose through the hole. the room again, looking at the wall with the glyphs. There was a key somewhere. There had to be. I could find it if I thought about it. Again I came U) the bench-like affair. Again I studied the surface of the shoe end. It was smooth and faintly luminous. For a moment it seemed to be the reflection of one of the suns -- and then I realized that neither was shining down directly. This made me wonder. I sat on the half-chair (which was a bit too low and too small for comfort). This might be the clue I wanted. In my annoyance I tapped the cool, faintly glowing sheet of -- was it stone? The echo sounded unused. I went on tapping absent-mindedly as I tried to take stock of the wall and the room. Blink . I was so startled that I raised my hand. The light, if there had been a light, stopped. But now I had a hope. Gently I tapped the surface again. Then firmly. Then I put my hands full and solidly onto the surface of the to continue. "Come on, light," I pleaded with it. "Blink." Almost ridiculously, it did. First there was a flicker, then a wavering opacity and finally a bright glow. "What the bloody hell is this?" I asked of the air joyously. Since there was no one but me to answer, I shook my head in ignorance. The light in the table was inbols formed on it: r#o:  "I think -- " I said to the machine. Then l realized that I would have to stop thinking and be willing to learn. "Machine, you and I have a little mutual understanding to do." The symbols faded but the light stayed on, full and strong. I hesiIF tated -- then, taking my stylus, I made a small circle on the table and put nine dots leading out from it, added little points for the moons. When this was done, I drew a box around Terra and waited. The machine buzzed. On a guess I wiped the marks away. In a moment the machine showed two circles and a series of dots, putting a box around the fourth one. This was the fourth planet, but the machine showed only three moons. This bothered me, but there was no way to question the machine about it. I would have to wait. But we were on the right track. I duplicated the Sol system dia gram and boxed Terra and labeled it. The machine made the planets again, with the puzzling moons. "All right. Now that we're introduced, let's get down to languages." The machine began to hum, making periodic squeaks. I couldn't have it malfunction now. I fumbled over the sides, looking for knobs or dials that might help. The hum and the squeaks merged into a rising wail. "Wait a bit," I told it. I moved my hands again, rubbing the sides firmly until a single dot appeared on the screen in front of me and I heard, very clearly the single word: "Ge." My hands began to shake. I sensed that this was a machine intended to teach, to inform. The concept was not unfamiliar to human archeologists -- men of many eras had left time capsules or other record of their passing for future centuries to Find. Whoever had left this artifact had known what he was about. The implications took a little time to sink in. The machine formed another dot directly above the first and called it: Shy It was giving me the elements of language. Those two symbols were part of the name of the planet. A vertical line connected the two dots and the dots faded out. "Sti," said the machine in its parody of a voice. I took out my scanner and trained it on the table top. The scanner would give the Nor denskjold a record of all this in case something went wrong down here. TT hen I set to work, the machine reciting its language to me, showing it to me, bringing it to life. "Pete! Pete! Answer me!" The commkit beside me sounded put out. The voice was Sumiko's, high and overcontrolled. I wondered if she had been calling for long. I had been absorbed. I stood up stiffly from the bench, muscles protesting, and reached for the kit. "Pete -- " it went in my ear. "Yeo. I'm here. What is it?" "This is Sumiko. I've finished the tests on the silt from your digs. You're right. It is ash." "I know. Look," I said, rushing on, "I may be way off, but I think you might find some evidence of volcanic or -- I don't know, earthquakes, maybe, a long time ago. There'd be a lot of them, occurring all at once or with little warning. The diagram I've found down here shows only thpee moons. Either we've got the wrong planet or things have changed upstairs -- " "What diagram?" she interrupted. "There's a device down here that teaches the language," I admitted reluctantly. "It seems to be programed to communicate with strangers -- I mean beings possibly alien to whoever or whatever made it, which suggests that the culture of which it was a part anticipated being wiped out. The device and I have just begun to come together on basics -- I should get the rest in a few days." "You'll let me know?" This was said too quickly. "Sure, Sumiko." Right then, I wanted her to find what she was seeking, too. There had to be something here to compensate for the terrible hunger at the back of her eyes also. "You'll need tools," she said decisively. "Maybe some digging tools. Brushes for the walls. Levers and a couple of files. There's a pack in my shelter." "Is that all? I'll bring them along." "Thank you." There was a jealousy in me as I spoke. I was not yet ready to share my hole, my wall. Not with anyone. Not even Sumiko, the one person who might understand what I felt. "I'll be there as soon as the captain is ready to come over." In some surprise I asked her, "Is he down on the surface? I didn't think he was planning to come." "He and Wolton have been going over the whole camp for about the last hour...He's had Almrid and Dominguiz in. I gave them my report earlier." A prickle ran along my spine, a feeling that gravity had shifted, immeasurably, under my feet. The captain had gone to the soil chemist and a biophysicist before IF the archeologist on a planet with digs. Something wasn't right. "Pete?" "What?" "I'll see you later?" "Yeah," I said. "It's going to be interesting." And with that I signed off. Standing there in my hole, with the language of Shy-gei-ath waiting for me, I frowned, wondering what had gone wrong. No one had come in with a negative report. There had been no warnings about the virology level or the functional radiation ratings that usually got the captain on the groung long enough to get everyone back to the ship. I remembered my scraped back from the evening before, but that couldn't figure in anything. The injury itched unpleasantly under the thin surface suit and there had been some trouble getting it to scab over. But that was hardly enough to worry about. What was Captain Tamoshoe doing down here, anyway? Why had he come? The machine was reciting "corel-sti-gei" "sa-che-sti-gei" p, "co-sa-che-sti-gei" P , when I finally heard the noise above me. I tapped the machine on what I'd come to think of as the hold button and waited for visitors. They took their time. Once I heard Franz Almrid swear, use cold words with venom I had never heard from him before. bearing Captain Nemeu Tamoshoe, black on black. "Jhirinki," he said, turning his trademark grin on me, a display of large white teeth in a face only slightly lighter than his black captain's uniform. And in that face, which dictated eyes of obsidian, Captain Tamoshoe's smouldered the impossible blue of Aegean waters. "What's wrong, Captain?" But he didn't answer me, not right away. He got off the sling and began to walk around the hole. "Have you been able to decipher this?" he asked me, pointing at my wall. I knew that there was something very wrong then. "That section you're pointing to reads from right to left: 'Thir de-lom-sti-gei jhae emh bis lom-de-sti-gei  Second line: ' Thu shy-ens emh thu lom-qua-fer-de-sti-gei sir-athgei" "Which means?" "That is what the walls says, sir. In fact, right now I can read out loud every word up there and make the symbol for it if I hear it spoken. But I don't yet know what it means, because this machine does not have a way to tell me until it has explained to me all the elements of its language. But the communications center on the ship will have records of this so I can work from them, if necessary." Captain Tamoshoe looked at me evenly for about a minute, an eternity. "I am sorry, Jhirinki. The commcenter didn't pick up. the relay. Almrid and Wolton were too busy wrangling to center the channel." "I don't understand -- " and as I said it I did understand. "Radiology reported a variance last night. This place was hot. That little machine of yours has been running along on plutonium and the room was sealed. You fell into a vat of radon gas -- " He stopped. Then: "There's isn't much danger on the surface of course, but we don't know how many of these things there are. I am sorry, Jhirinki." "Wait -- " Josh Markham appeared in the hole, hanging onto the sling too tightly, his large face drawn and his eyes heavy. "Captain?" "I have told him what I could. You can explain it more thoroughly if necessary. Are we ready to ferry up?" "Almost." Again Captain Tamoshoe: "It is a pity. This is surely the find of a lifetime." He turned back to me, blue eyes hooded. "Well, perhaps you will be able to reconstruct much of this from memory, do you think? There isn't much time and it would be a shame to lose all of it." "How do you mean" lose it?" I was frightened then, not of the radiation that had slid in through my respirator into my bones, but of leaving Shy-gei-ath. I had come so far. I did not want to leave. "Looks like this one was more trouble than it was worth, Pete," Markham said, trying to keep his tone light and failing. "No." "Pete -- " "No," I told them again, stepping back to the teaching machine. "I've almost got it all. I'm so close to the meaning of it. It won't take too much longer. I'll be out of here in no time." it, Pete. You've been exposed. We should have brought you out before now, but I knew this was damned important to you." "Wait -- " I said, licking my lips. "What is the treatment for radon? Can't I take decontamination and then come back. It's gone now -- and I'd be safe." "I am sorry, but we'll have to put the place in quarantine until we know how much potential IF danger remains," Captain Tamoshoe said apologetically. "You understand the necessity, don't you? When all investigations have been made we can come back." "But what about that?" I pointed to the wall, already hazing from the dust filtering down. "How much longer will that be here once the ash gets in? The other walj, is almost useless. This one will be ruined." "There may be others." "And maybe there aren't." I knew I was starting to . sweat. "And the machine will be ruined." Captain Tamoshoe shook his head. "I can recommend speed and claim emergency status on the artifacts. The Navy is aware of the value of this sort of find. We might be able to have full Class Nine suits authorized." "You've got to leave, Pete." Markham had taken a step toward me. I stepped back. "Commander Markham," the captain said quietly. "Take a look at your hands, Pete." Josh shot an angry look at Captain Tamoshoe as he spoke. "What about my hands?" But as I looked down and saw what looked like varicose veins in my palms I closed the marks inside my fists. "The skiff is waiting, Pete." "Let it wait." And as Josh started toward me I raised the commkit ovei; my head. "Don't try it. Josh -- I will use this." It wasn't much of a weapon, but it made Josh stop. "You stupid kid," he said dispassionately. "You're going to die." "Am #?" I asked Captain Tamoshoe. "Almost certainly," he answered me. Without moving from the place I stood I said. "Get out of here. Josh. I want to talk to the captain." Josh looked at me with an expression I had once seen in my father's eyes. Then, with a nod to the captain, he let himself be hoisted out of the hole. "He wants you to live, Jhirinki. And you were not assigned to my ship to die." In the stillness that followed his words I realized that he and I were the only people left here, that the others were back at the ferry, waiting to leave Shy-gei-ath. I felt an enormous loneliness fall over me, dark and heavy. "Why not come back?" I shook my head. "No. This is what I'm all about. I've spent my life learning to do what has to be done here. To add to what men may someday have to know. I can't leave when I'm this close." "Have you a choice?" For just a moment I knew panic. Then: "Will I last all that much longer if I leave?" "No. Not that much longer." "Then I'll stay." "But what will you do, Jhirinki? The strange part was that I knew the answer. "As long as I can. I'll describe the forms to you, the way the machine did for me. You can leave me a skiff relay, can't you?" Not waiting for an answer I hurried on. "I'll try to translate what I've found and you can record it for the Margien Language Institute." Captain Tamoshoe considered this. "I've always thought," he remarked absently, "that a man's death should be as much in his hands as his life. You'll get the relay." "And food?" He didn't answer me, so I knew. "Thank you. Captain." "Goodbye, Peter Jhirinki," he said as he left.L lim-gei," I dictated from the wall to the commkit. I listened for the relay sound that would tell me they had recorded the line on board the Nordenskjold . A half-dozen lines were left. Lines that wavered in front of me, milky with haze. "Pete!" But that wasn't my machine. It was someone I used to know. Why would Josh call me? What did he want? "Pete, for God's sake!" "What?" That must have been what he wanted to hear. But I couldn't hold my commkit steady. My hands had gone funny. Purple. TJje tendons were soft, spongy. "... translations?" That mattered to me. That was important. More important than my strange hands. I had to tell them. "A few words -- " "What words?" "Shy-gei-ath." Like Terra and Terrans. The twin suns were hot above me, but it was dark. I burned and burned and it was dark. If I looked at the floor I could see my face. But I didn't do that. "The wall, Pete. The wall." From here on the floor I could watch my wall as I told theYn about it. I knew what it meant at last. "Shy, infinitive verb. To be. Active sense. Gei, infinitive verb. To be. Passive sense. Shy-sti-gei, to be alive. Sti-gei to exist. Shy-sti to conceive. They build from there." Was that sound me? "But the wall, Pete." It was an effort, but I began to IF read. But breathing hurt and I got slower and slower. "In the time of the Fourth Moon, I sought out a high place and made it safe against the end of Shy-gei-ath . " "Go on." "Against the end it happened I found this place and required a stronghold be built. The time was short for we could see in the night in the Fourth Moon. Waters would soon rise, the mountains change and Rel-ath-gei would consume all." That would quiet them, the noisy ones above me. I looked at the wall through darkening eyes, turning on the floor to read the end of the story. "Peter! Answer me!" I kicked the commkit, laughing. "What about the place name. tel, New Orleans. Guest-of-Honor: Joseph Green. Membership: #. For information: John Guidry, # Finch Street, New Orleans, Louisiana #.  August #-September #, # What does that mean? We've got most of what we need to crack it, Peter. What does the name mean?" Reluctantly I pulled myself across the floor, feeling like a slug, not a man. Just a bit more andthey'd leave me alone with my wall. I'd earned that. "The word?" I asked the commkit. Shy-gei-ath the tinny voice prompted. " Shy-gei-ath . This place. Here." But that wasn't quite right, I thought as I watched the ash sifting through the hole. "She-gei-ath. To be. to. " "Go on, tell us. What does it mean?" So I told them. "To be home."  ence Fiction Convention: At Royal York Hotel, Toronto, Canada. Guest-of-Honor: Robert Bloch. Rotsler. Toastmaster at Hugo Awards Banquet: Lester del Rey. Membership: # attending and # supporting (until ##), U).# at the door. For information: Torcon #, Box #, Station K. Toronto #, Ontario, Canada.  Boston, Massachusetts. For information: Bouchercon, Box #, Melrose, Massachusetts #. The Galaxy Library of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once-and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! ASI I # # A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. AS#I # Galaxy Magazine A collection of science fiction that challenges the mind and captivates the imagination AN# #tf A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # # of Science Fiction Two men pursue the Rithian Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN #I # # A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# # prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II # "Psycho." AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# # I r :n I I uj:D. N.Y. I !  #S (Plee-.e ncki SSc f o shipping) Such a disorderly young lady! How come she was working for law and order? I 'M A cop. Nothing surprises me. A cop gets to see it all -- too much of it and too much of it bad. The worst is death when a kid buys it. The toughest thing of all is having to look down at the body of a once breathtakingly beautiful young girl. I'm a detective. The name's Mike Winsor. I was looking down at the body as the M.E. was getting set to do his onceover. She'd been a beauty. Age was a little tough. It wasn't more than seventeen by that good young bodythe face looked even younger. Story was simple. For some reason she'd been damn fool enough to try to cut across Central Park at night. Somebody jumped her and then used the knife. That much was easy. I tore my eyes away from her. Doc had peeled back the shroud and it was hard to look away. Best legs I'd ever seen and everything else she had was that good. Some guys in the department were going to save her pictures as memorabilia of waste or for other reasons. But they weren't my problem. I had her purse. It had been found right beside her. It was new. Inside there were no cosmetics, not even a comb -- yet, even after she had been jumped and killed, her hair was done neatly. "That a wig?" I asked the Doc. "Nope. That's all her." No handkerchief in the purse. No change. One ten-dollar bill, new, crisp. And there were three buttons. They looked like buttons. I picked them out and looked at them. They didn't have holes in them. So they weren't buttons. Some kind of metallic substance, but what they were and what they were made of was a lab problem. So that was it. Unless a miracle happened it was going to be one more unsolved murder. If she was a runaway or something I wondered whether we'd even find out who she was. But she had that body and that face. We might get lucky, I thought. She was worth acknowledging. "Hey, Mike. A key. Hotel Mercury." "Hers?" "Could be," my partner said. "Looks clean. Couldn't have been out here too long. If she had it in her hand when they got her, maybe -- " "Okay. Doc? Anything?" He looked up at me, his eyes slitted, brow furrow. "Body temperature's all wrong. It's normal or damn close to it." "She's dead?" "Look at that wound. She Wed -- the blood's coagulated. There's no way her temperature can be normal. Here, feel here. And look at this." He pulled up the torn skirt even further. "So?" "Raise your eyes, boy." "Belly button?" "That's right. A perfect rectangle." "What's it mean? Anything? She a Martian?" "Yeah. Ha-ha. I don't know what it means. No pulse. No other irregularities. But give me a call in about four hours. I'm going to give this young lady a complete physicial." left the rest of the work with my partner. Then I drove over to the Mercury. It was the new hotel -- expensive, a handsome place. I showed my shield, showed the key, described the body. No problem there. "Mary or Alice Smith." Both knockouts, my description could fit either one. They'd been in a week. Registration form showed no prior address. Unusual, a violadays, fifteen-hundred-dollar fine, and a license renewal problem. I rorgot it. I rode up and knocked on the door. No answer. I used the dead girl's key. It was the agreement. I forgot their violation -- they forgot their houseman was supposed to go in with me. The room was empty. Two suitcases, nothing in them. Closet empty. Dresser empty. Nothing in the bathroom. Bathtub not wet. Bed not slept in. The Gideon out on the bedside table, marker in at Isaiah. Marked passage: Chapter forty-one, verse twenty-four: Behold  ye are nothing. And your work a thing of nought; An abomination is he that chooseth you. What did that mean? I went back down and asked there. The sister, apparently -- the surviving one -- had gone out at seven. She always went out at seven. She always came back at noon. They didn't think she'd skipped. I asked them to give me a call and then I went over to the morgue. Doc was having a time. Our girl was still maintaining her normal temperature -- she was at # and holding. She had no molars, no cavities. Teeth looked new, no wear. She had no appendix, which wasn't that unusual. What was distressing was she seemed to be lacking some sexual equipment and according to X-ray, she had multiplechamber lungs and a unichamber heart. Blood was so far unclassifiable. "I don't know what we have here," Doc told me. It bothered him. He didn't like mysteries. I went back to the bureau and did my part of the report and then I put in some time on a grocery store the the unsolved files, too. But at noon I was back at the Mercury, knocking on that hotel room door again. S HE wasn't more beautiful than, the dead one, but she wasn't one bit less. I showed her my shield. She looked at it, confused, as if not knowing what it meant. But she smiled at me and let me in. I asked her name. "Andridida." # Want to spell that?" "Alice, I mean," she said. "It is Alice Smith." "Where you from, Alice?" "Uh -- " "Who were you here with? Was it your sister?" "No, Tinna is... I mean Mary is just a friend." "Your friend and you have the same name -- and you're not even sure what your name is? You don't know where you come from. You runaways?" "Please. I'm sorry. I do not know a great deal. I'm here to learn. Would it be possible for you to' explain whatever situation this may be?" I looked at her. You run into a lot of crazies. She didn't look like IF she was on anything. She was a great-looking girl. "Okay. You want to sit down?" "If you wish that of me," she said and stretched out on the bed. "I said 'sit,' I'm on official business, girl." "Oh? You mean in this position?" "Right. I'm a police detective. I'm here on business. I hate having to break it to you, but early this morning we found your friend in the park. She'd been attacked. After they finished with her they killed her." "Oh." "Oh? That's all you have to say?" "I'm not facile with the language. Attacked? What does this mean?" "Violated, sexually violated. A man or men jumped her." "We don't know that, but the assumption is she wasn't or they thought she wasn't." She seemed to be weighing that. "And what does 'killed' mean?" "You're kidding. It means deprivation of life without the victim's volition. She's dead." "Oh! Why didn't you say that? Where is she? Please. Take me there. I have to see her. I figured about then she was a crazy, but that wasn't illegal. I tried to prepare her on the ride. I tried to get across to her that her friend or whatever the dead girl had been to her wasn't all that pretty to look at any more. She didn't seem aware of what I was saying, didn't seem to give a damn. She looked out through the car windows like a tourist on vacation in Fun City as we drove through the traffic. They hadn't done the autopsy, just the preliminary report was in. Because of the irregularities Doc wanted some experts around for the carving. So the dead girl -- Mary, call her -- was in the drawer. Old Jinx, grouchy as ever, rolled it open for us. "Now just take it easy, huh," I told Alice. I pulled the sheet down just enough so the face was clear, not the throat. "Hi," Alice said to the body. T raised an eyebrow. Doc had come in with a couple of other people. It wasn't often we had someone who looked like Mary on a slab or someone who looked like Alice visiting. "Alice. Is that your friend Mary?" I asked her. Alice went and just took the sheet out of my hand and pulled it down to the dead girl's ankles. That rectangular navel stood out and hit you. She put her hand on the dead girl's breast -- a well made one -- and then, frowning, reached up and touched the ripped neck. She said: "You dummy! Didn't I tell you that you had to be careful?" Then, to me: "Did she violate some custom or hurt anything in your primitive society?" I didn't believe it. "Oh, well." She sighed. She opened her shoulder bag, got out a button just like the buttons I'd found on the dead girl. She shoved one button into the dead girl's navel. others saw part of it. The dead girl's throat clamped together -- it actually moved and then it healed. In ten seconds that throat was uncut. Fifteen seconds and the girl sat up, shook her head, said: "Hi -- " to Alice and climbed right off that slab. "What were you up to, Tinna? You know how much trouble this is gonna cause." "It was only a little mistake." "Well, you apologize to these people and then you're going to have to go right home," I was bugeyed. I didn't believe it. "Do I have to? Oh, come on, Andridida. It's wasn't my fault. I just made a little mistake." "You violated the rules and that's the one thing you know you're not allowed to do. Now you apologize to these people and we'll just take you back and send you on home. When you grow up and are ready to behave responsibly maybe you can come back again. All right?" "I don't want to go. I like it here." "What. What happened last night?" I heard myself ask. I was talking to a dead girl -- it occurred to me that she was a stiff. "Oh, hi," she said to me. Big smile. "I don't know, I was walking through that nice area and suddenly one of your people -- " "Took a fancy to you," Alice whispered. "Took a fancy to me," the dead girl informed me. "Took a fancy to you, did he? Did you see this person?" "Oh, it was really four persons, I think." "You think. What did they look like?" "I can't say, you know." "You didn't see their faces?" "Oh, I saw them. They were funny. All red-faced and real funny-looking. But I can't tell you exactly. All of you look just alike to me." "All of us look alike to you? Were they tall or short, white, black, Chinese, Puerto Rican?" "I'm very sorry, sir. But you see, I don't know those things. They all looked the same to me, very funny." "Funny. You didn't happen to see which one cut your throat?" "Yes. I saw him, of course. But I couldn't describe him or anything. He just looked likevyou." "Like me?" "Or like him or those men. You ancients all look the same to me." "Ancients." IF "We're very sorry, sir. And we promise it won't ever happen again. If we hurt anything or caused some irreparable damage to the fabric of your society you just tell me and I'll see that it's fixed -- rectified -- and just as good as newness," Alice told me. "Now you, dummy. You come on. And when you get back you'd better not lie. You tell exactly what happened. You know the damage you could wreak with something like this. Now, come on -- right this minute!" Alice took the dead girl's arm and the two of them just walked out. As an aside, the no longer dead girl was stark naked. I'm supposed to think quickly -- I get paid for it -- but I just stood aside and Jinx did and Doc did and the others did. It took me a full minute before I realized that the slab was empty and the dead girl was gone. I ran. The city can be pretty damned blase, but there were enough signs. There were two wrecked cars down at the corner. People were out and arguing in front of a grocery store. When I got to them they were yelling at each other about whether they'd just seen a stark naked beauty being hauled by her ear by another girl who was the equal of the naked one. I ran on, chased around, bumped into Blind Charlie. He'd seen them -- he was only blind during working hours. He was on his lunch break. I raced on, tracked the girls across town, ignored the policing that should have been done in their wake. I almost cornered them as they headed into the park. Missed them by seconds. What happened to them then I have no idea. o'clock in the morning, the buzzer went off. I'd just finished forty-eight hours straight of trying to save a kidnaped kid -- I hadn't. I crawled out of bed, got into my pants and dragged myself to the door. "Hi," she said. She was wearing a see-through blouse and not much of a skirt and she had a deep tan all over. If she'd come to me to report getting raped in that getup I would have slapped her in jail for provocation. It was Alice. (I just thought -- the only place the name was spoken was in my head.) "No," she said. "My real name is Andridida. I'm sorry. You see, I made a mistake and they sent me back to rectify it. You were chosen as witness to the rectification." "Yeah? What happened?" "Oh, she's fine. You know. It was just that she was a dummy. Oh, you mean when you followed us? Well, we went to our place and then went home." "You'd better come in. Where's home?" "It's in the future and it's on a distant planet. But we are descended from Earth Explorers, you know." "How far in the future?" "Seven thousand three hundred and thirty-nine Earth years. But that's not accurate -- exactly -- because Earth changed about five thousand years ago or two thousand years from now. It's a little confusing." She looked around my ultramodern apartment, a real futuristic place. "Quaint," she told me. "How did you get Mary, Tinna whatever her name to heal that way?" "That's the sort of thing I'm not supposed to tell you. Boy, did they ever give me hell. Tinna was always a dum-dum and they said they couldn't really expect much more from her, but what happened was my fault and so they sent me back to rectify and not cause any more trouble. Okay?" "What are you going to rectify?" "Well, those boys who took the fancy to Tinna. They can't be. Anachronism is okay but bad ones simply aren't acceptable. So we have to attend to them." "We have to attend to them? How? You know how many young punks are floating around this city and how many older ones? Did your friend give you any description?" "No. She's a dummy. She really thinks you all look the same. But there's a way. Here. I have a list." She opened her purse and gave me a fifty-page notebook. Every bit and piece of paper front and back was covered with tiny writing. She spelled badly. The way I saw it, most of the terms applied to electrical equipment. "If this wasn't such a mess now I think I'd just go out and steal it -- but, boy, would they ever give me hell if I did that and got caught or something. So, I've just been and I priced all the things I could find and in your money I need alSo, if you'll just give it to me I'll rectify this and then everything will be all right again." "Yes. Is that a lot?" "Well, it's more than I have." "Oh. I was certain you'd have it." "'Fraid not. Sorry." "Well. We can't do it without the apparatus, you know." "Couldn't you make it for a hundred and twenty-five dollars? I have that." need. Wait. Let me think for a minute." She stood there, beautiful, maybe more beautiful with that puzzled, pensive little-girl look. And then she just dematerialized. She was there, right in front of me, and then she wasn't there any more. IF collaring a pusher down on a Hundred and Forty-second. The pusher's neighbors didn't like him but liked me less. There were circling and closing in on me. Their faces weren't angry -- they were stolid. They didn't even have to whip up their feelings about getting me. They knew they had me. And I knew the only way I'd get out was shoot my way out. With the politicians and the department scared to death of the newspapers and everyone else, I had a choice of being stomped to death right out of the department or shooting my way out and getting heaved out of the job for that. Me and my pusher were in the center of the ring. I didn't see any way out. They didn't care if I got some of them. I was a cop and they hated cops. "Hi." She was there with me. Where she came from, I don't know. "I can do it for a hundred and twentyfive dollars. Will you give it to me now, please?" "These citizens want to kill me," I explained. "Oh?" She turned and smiled at them all, "I don't think you should kill Mike. It's not nice. Now all of you go home." They didn't believe it. There was this gorgeous piece of meat, almost all of it on view -- this kid, this piece of fluff. And she was telling them. She shook her finger at them. "You go home right away or I'm going to get good and mad," she told them. They didn't even know what the hell she was talking about. She turned to me as if they were taken care of already. "Do you have the money? The sooner you give it to me the faster this is going to get done." I watched them. She had magic buttons. If they got me I didn't have anything but health insurance. "Don't worry about these people. They're all going home. Now!" She clapped her hands. A whole gang of them had been grim, mean, bent on bending me, but suddenly every face there took on an idiotic grin. They were smiling. Some of them -- probably for .the first time in their lives when not turned on -- giggled. Like jolly zombies they turned and walked away. "You see? You have to trust me. Now. The money. Please." I tried breathing again. I was still alive. That was when a patrol car idled up. They had probably been sleeping it off in some alley -- great police force we have. I turned my pusher over to them and then I took Andridida's arm -- it was very warm and the skin was baby soft. We got into my car and I didn't even question her. I just drove us to the bank, told her to wait, walked in and emptied my account, brought out the money and gave it to her. "Oh, good. Now, please. You have to tell me where I can find a -- " she stopped and seemed to think about it -- "bookie joint and then a crap game and do they have roulette?" That was what she wanted to know. I told her. East Side Eddie ran a floating crap game. She could find him either in the furnace room of P.S. # or behind the #th Precinct, in a garage there. Loose-lipped Louis was the bookie. He ran a candy store on #th Street. As far as roulette, there was a casino over in Fort Lee. "Okay," she said, accepting. "And please don't worry. I know I made a mistake, but I promise I'll rectify it." "Yeah," I said. She didn't vanish. She just got out of the car and walked away. But I didn't Jose her. T HE reports came in and I saw them. East Side Eddie and all his friends were flat busted. All they remembered was that, even switching dice, they couldn't stop her. She came in, asked them how to play the game and then she rolled whatever they told her would win. According to East Side Eddie, who was found weeping in a bar over on Third Avenue by a gambling squad detective, they switched her onto dice that were so loaded the average guy wasn't strong enough to pick them up. The next report was on Looselipped Louis. They found him in an alley. He'd been worked over and worked over hard. He kept mumbling, "Please, girlie. Please, girlie." She'd come in and put her winnings on the least likely pair of nags in the history of flat racing. The horses were so old and feeble they weren't even allowed on a decent track. Neither one of them had ever finished better than last and twenty furlongs behind the pack. Glue factories and ice wagons used better. But there was a quote on them and Andridida walked in, put her ten thousand dollars on them (presumably the money gained from East Side Eddie and his pals) and they paid # to one. That should have given her dollars. Loose-lipped Louis -- a grade-school dropout -- could not even imagine such a sum. He offered to give her back her money and invited her to come up to his place to see his Danish picture books. Andridida had a fit. She took him out in the alley-and manhandled -- really strong-armed him. Then she escorted him around town to collect. The best he could come up with was ten per cent. She took the four hundred thou but parted with Loose-lipped in an alley where she finished her expression of unhappiness with welchers. Knocked his teeth out, every one. IF It wasn't a surprise. I heard the story and decided to keep the radio on. Presently the story came over the' speaker: "Unidentified, beautiful young girl machine-gunned by gangsters... " She had been walking down #th Street and a dark limousine had cruised up. A submachine gun had spoken and the bullets had cut her down. I drove like crazy to get there. The whole machinery of the law was there: the squad, the ambulance, the medical examiners, the witnesses, the crowd. I held my shield out front and just walked through. Those bullets had really gotten her. She was as riddled as any shooting victim I'd ever seen. I just elbowed through to her. The precinct captain was there. He wasn't my friend. He asked what the hell I was doing on his turf. I told him to just take it easy. "It's a special case. She's a friend." "Oh," he said, pretending to have a human concern. "Sorry about it, Mike." "Don't worry, huh? Her purse around?" "Yeah. Why?" "Let me see it for a minute, will you?" He got a detective to fetch it for me. It was new, almost empty -- but there were those buttons. I pulled one out. "What are you doing?" I knelt beside her and peeled back the shroud. If she'd worn any more clothes I couldn't have gotten to it, but before they grabbed me and hauled me back I crammed the thing into her navel. It didn't take more than thirty seconds -- and half her head had been blown away, too. She regrew the half of head while the cops stopped holding me to watch. Then she sat up, blinked those big eyes of hers, smiled that smile she had and said. "Hi." They were all speechless. They also seemed paralyzed. I just left her there and them with her and walked away from it. got to my car, she was already in it. "You know," she told me. "I think Mr. Loose-lipped Louis did that. It wasn't at all nice." "Yeah," I said. "I'll fix him," she informed me. "Yeah," I said. (As it worked out, she did fix him. Guys who'd never beat him suddenly couldn't miss. He turned loser, finally Found God or at least sanctuary in some monastic order. So because of her a monastery has a Brother Loose-lipped Louis.) "Come on. I have almost a half a "Uh-huh." She insisted and I wasn't going to cross her. The casino in Fort Lee was shimmering and very fancy, a fugitive piece of ersatz gingerbread and tinkley tinsel from the old days. I explained the game to her and as soon as she had it she decided to ask that the limit be raised. She wanted to get it on two spins. The manager didn't trust even his rigged wheel that much. He let her bet a thousand at a spin. She liked nine black. And, not surprising me, that little ball couldn't resist it. Nine black came up ten times running and that was it. That was all the money they had. She had a tantrum, called them cheats and bad sports and was just working her way into turning them into frogs or something when I decided it was wiser to haul her out. So she went on with the tantrum at me. She was still short of her tification? Didn't I have any interest in it? Didn't I want to help her? Wasn't I her friend? "Now, look. You've taken less than twelve hours. You've ruined the biggest floating crap game in this city. You busted and beat up our most important bookie. You wiped out this casino and you got killed once. That's plenty for one day." "But I have to get the money. I can't do it without money. How am I going to get the money?" "Find an oil field or uranium mine or something." "Are those things worth anything?" "They're worth something." "How? I mean, where should I find them?" "Well, it would be best if you owned the land. Find the oil or the uranium or gold if you want, buy the land and then sell it." "Should I find it in any special place?" "Probably someplace where the land is cheap and not too developed." "Where is the land cheap?" "Deserts, maybe remote mountains." "I should find a lot of this oil or uranium or gold?" "A lot would be better." "Okay. Thank you, Mike. I really do appreciate your help, you know," she told me and off she went. The story didn't make the papers in the morning and didn't even get into the evening papers. But the next morning's headlines announced: largest mineral deearly reports were, of course, typically inaccurate. The evening paper set it straight: largest minInterestingly, she was a cheapskate. She had found the cheapest land in the country and then she bought hardly any of it. And the stuff was arranged like pipelines right down to the core. One pipe was oil, one natural gas, one uranium, one gold, one silver, one copper and more. some. IF ment in an old building. The movers had had trouble bringing my ninety-inch sofa up on the freight elevator and the floor's so ancient it isn't sturdy enough for a waterbed. They had put Andridida's gadget on a great flatbed truck -- a gadget maybe the size of a small house. It had taken a couple of giant cranes and two teams of loaders. And then with an escort they somehow got it across town and to my freight entrance. There they checked the address again and started cursing and swearing and yelling. That was when little Andridida walked up. She touched the monster gadget, waited for it to reduce itself in size, then picked it up with one hand and carried it up to my place. that game went on. Even after all the paraphernalia had been shrunk to little and very little I could barely squeeze into my place after a while. But all the deliveries were finally made and she clapped her hands, satisfied. But her happiness lasted only five minutes. She turned morose. I asked her what the problem was. She needed a screwdriver. What I produced wasn't what she wanted but she decided it would have to do. I offered to help but wasn't much help. The two of us sat on the floor and I watched while she worked. I had no idea what the devil she was making, but when it was finished it was about a six feet square. She talked to it or did something to it and it dutifully shriveled up and came down to about the size of a cassette recorder. That pleased her. She was happy. She smiled at me. lar toy and went to the park to the bushes where we'd found Mary or Tinna or whatever the other girl's name. We sat there cross-legged and she flipped on her machine. I screamed. There was a Brontosaurus standing on my foot. She said, "Sorry," and the Brontosaurus went away. She made some sort of adjustment. I kept myself from yelling, but I drew my service revolver. We were surrounded by these four slope-headed hairy guys bearing animal skins with clubs in their hands. They went away. It was a long process. We were under water twice -- once we were confronted by a sharklike creature. Later a gang of Indians came after us. It was just one thing after another. Happily, she turned off most of the things pretty quick. But she was a voyeur or whatever the female equivalent and from the first slopehead with his girl, through the Indian bucks and maids, through Nieuw Amsterdam's guys and girls, through the British couples, the Colonial ones, the guys and dolls... Well, for the first time in my life I wondered whether the place really wasn't Fun City. That copse of bushes had to be the sex capital of the world and Andridida just loved it. I was a little embarrassed by it, myself. Finally, after a hell of a long time, along came Tinna or Mary or whatever her name. "Ah-ha," Andridida said and we watched the shocking rape murder in perfect focus and detail. punks ran off we followed them -- somehow. Andridida carried the machine and we just traipsed after the guys, I guess. It was a little confusing because it wasn't really then but it was now ample -- we occupied real space but the four punks were just walking right through people. We subwayed after them and then followed the punks up the steps and out into what hadn't been a good neighborhood, ever. As it worked out, as we came up, the four of them were standing in front of a pornographic bookstore. They were standing on top of themselves. "There they are," Andridida said, clearly pleased. She switched off the machine. The four of them really were there, no double image. Andridida walked right up to them and said, "Hi." I was right behind her. They saw me and they said, "Cop!" They started to take off. I didn't even think to draw on them. For what? They had raped and murdered somebody who wasn't or hadn't been or had been buttoned out of it. What kind of crime was it? Anyway, it was Andridida's rectification. The way I heard it, it really was a zap sound. They were gone. Their clothes and shoes were just in puddles on that filthy street. I turned to her, shrugged one more time. "Do I ask what happened to them?" "They're being rectified. Yeah," she said nodding. "So then, that's it?" "Yes. I think so, unless I made another mistake. But I don't think I did." "Well, that's nice. You wouldn't want to leave me your machine, would you?" "I don't think I'm allowed." "Oh." "Well, it was very nice knowing you and I hope you'll forgive any problems I may have caused you." "Nothing at all. My pleasure." She stuck out her hand. I shook it. "Goodbye, Mike. I looked you up." "Did you?" "Everything's all right for you. It works out." "Good to know. Thanks. Andridida." She smiled and turned and walked away. I watched her until she rounded the corner. One hell of a girl.  IF is on its way out nobody over at Doubleday seems to know it yet. In the past few months, the publishers have issued five giant volumes of older stories, at a total cost to the readers of #! Unless publishers are losing their market sense, there must be a growing demand for fiction that was written before the new-value concept was developed fully in our field. By old-value stories, I mean those that were essentially meant to entertain, where the emphasis was on story rather than on style dr relevancy to any current situation -- stories that tended to assume an expanding universe of man's destiny. These might be called reader-oriented stories, since they were written for the general reader, with no thought of appealing to the regular literary critics. The new-value stories, of course, are those which develop science fiction according to the current literary and mainstream values, with style and significance given tnore emphasis than story. (We need some handy labels. But the new and old "wave" labels are so involved with emotional overtones and quasi-political feuds that they have become almost worthless.) One of these anthologies issued by Doubleday has been eagerly anticipated for some time, though its present form is something of a surprise. This is The Science Fiction Hall of Fame , edited by Ben Bova, made up of novellas. But instead of the expected single volume, we have two -- Volume Two A and Volume Two B, at # each. The first volume of this series covered the shorter stories, and I considered it the finest single book of science fiction ever published, justifying its claim to be the "greatest of all time." The two new volumes make the same claim for the novellas, and the stories are certainly excellent. But I find I have very mixed reactions to the current books as an equal to the former superlative anthology. Much of the value of the first Hall of Fame came from a logical arrangement of stories according to their year of publication -- that year clearly indicated. This enabled the reader to fix himself in time v and to get a clear perspective on the story in terms of the progress of the field. Any crudities in an early story could be easily understood and allowances therefore made. But here, for some reason (or lack of it), this logical approach has been abandoned. There is no discernible pattern, which strikes me' as a rather careless way to deal with volumes meant to be definitive. The rationale behind the selection of some stories and the use of two volumes for the novellas is sometimes also hard to discover. These stories were supposedly selected via voting by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America under conditions governing the selection of Nebula winners -- e.g., these works would have had that award existed when the stories were published. Or so I was told. In editing the first volume, Robert Silverberg followed this concept as closely as possible, listing the main votes and giving his reasons for the few deviations. Ben Bova also lists the top ten members. Eight of these are included in the A volume. A Walter Miller story is omitted necessarily because rights were not available, and one of the two Heinlein stories is dropped to avoid having more than one story by each author. (I find myself unsure of the wisdom of this; I rather think the best stories should be used in any list of "greatest," even if half of them are by the same writer.) However, the top-rated ten authors are also listed, which adds only Poul Anderson to the list. His highestchoice novella is therefor added to Volume A. Fine, we now have nine stories. And probably the tenth expected story could, have been the next highest choice below the top ten already mentioned. Maybe it is -- but we don't know; there are two other novellas in Volume A and eleven stories in Volume B. These are good stories, but was it IF really necessary to have a second volume? And if so, shouldn't the listing of top stories and top writers have been extended to show us why? I also feel less than happy about the inclusion of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine in Volume A. True, it's a great classic. But the fact remains that it first appeared at a time when not only was there no was no regular field for science fiction writers. I don't know about this. In fact, I wind up with more uncertainties about the choices than certainties. Volume Two A contains: Call Me Joe, by Poul Anderson; Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell; Nerves , by Lester del Rey; Universe , by Robert A. Heinlein; The Marching Morons , by C. M. Kornbluth; Vintage Season , by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; A nd Then There Were None , by Eric Frank Russell; The Ballad of Lost CMell, by Cordwainer Smith; Baby Is Three, by Theodore Sturgeon; The Time Machine , by H. G. Wells and With Folded a good list of stories, and well worth the price. Volume B also has excellent stories, but since these are apparently second-choice stories for this purpose, I suggest you look at the table of contents when you see the book and decide for yourself whether you want to spend the money. (The Introduction is identical for both volumes, incidentally.) I think it might have been better to restrict the novellas to the single volume originally planned; that might have had more effect in defining the best of our longer works than this vaguely demarcated double volume. (Also, perhaps then the author advance might not have been restricted to Vi  per word -- a low rate which seems very curious ganization that is supposed to be devoted to raising rates in our field. Since this advance is against royalties, it probably doesn't matter; but half the usual advance doesn't look good for a professional organization of this type!) Happily, Doubleday has done a much better job with the dust jacket this time, and the books are both more dignified and easier to read than the psychedelic monstrosity on Volume One.  HE AstoundingAnalog Read er, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, is another two-volume anthology (at # per volume) from Doubleday. The first volume contains fifteen stories, beginning with # and ending with #. The second volume had twenty-one stories, # to # -- all from Astounding and Analog, of course. The stories are arranged by date of publication, with a general introduction and separate introductions for each group of three stories. The selections here were made by Harrison and Aldiss, without any voting by larger groups. Yet they don't suffer by comparison there were almost no duplicates between these volumes and the Hall of Fame ones; only Anderson's Call Me Joe and Moore and Kuttner's Vintage Season are shared. (And only two shorter stories are shared with the earlier Hall of Fame volume.) Looking at the Harrison-Aldiss table of contents, it's hard to see how some of the stories were not ness, by Don A. Stuart -- perhaps the ultimate romantic statement of man's destiny; Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates; By His Bootstraps, by Robert A. Heinlein -- the most complex of all timetravel stories; City, by Clifford D. Tenn -- and a great many others that are genuinely classic in quality. There are a number of stories that I probably would not have selected -- and a few I'd like to see here; but it is a list of stories that I can only consider outstanding. Probably by the nature of the magazines covered and my own taste, I like the first volume better than the second -- but only by a narrow margin. I'd strongly recommend the Harrison-Aldiss volumes to anyone looking to see what made -- and makes -- science fiction wonderful. And if I had to choose between the two-volume Harrison-Aldiss anthology, I'd tend to take the latter -- I'd also save a few dollars, though that is incidental. Harrison and Aldiss have done a fine job of selecting and explaining the things that made Astounding I Analog a leader for so long! T HE fifth huge volume from Doubleday deals with the work of an even earlier period of magazine fiction than the other anthologies. This goesall the way back to original science fiction published in the magazines in # and #. It is Anthology : Three Novels, by John W. Campbell (Doubleday, #). All the stories Campbell wrote about the characters Arcot, Wade and Morey are included finally in this one volume -- and a big, fat volume it is. I've already discussed the stories in an introduction to the book and IF there's a bonus introduction by Isaac Asimov. But this is the type of fiction that is almost certainly anathema to the literary among us -- and dearly beloved by the rest of us, though it is now far in our background. Campbell took the story of man's physical mastery of science and his conquest of space as far as it could go. He piled wonder on wonder, until no more was possible. Back in #, he reached the ultimate limit of even such modern ideas as psi power. The effect definitely isn't literary -- but man, how it moves! And I still find it fun to read. The stories are almost legendary now. I'm delighted to know they are finally in a permanent form I can keep and browse through once in a while. Nobody writes stories like that now. Perhaps nobody should, to be honest -- but I'#n glad Campbell wrote them once, for all time! T HE other anthology and collection of good-old-days material are mercifully already in soft covers and hence less expensive. Science Fiction: the Great Years, edited by Carol  Frederik Pohl (Ace, #) is a most welcome addition to all the huge volumes. I'm delighted with it particularly for two reasons; first, it brought Carol Pohl -- Fred's most attractive wife -- into the reading group of fans -- she makes a welcome addition to the book's tone. And second, it brings Raymond Z. Gallun's remarkable Old Faithful back to us, among the other excellent stories included. To a very large extent, three writers were responsible for science fiction as we know it. Two of them -- John W. Campbell under the Don A. Stuart byline and Stanley G. Weinbaum -- get and deserve credit for their influence on the field. But Ray Gallun began moving toward the "Golden Age" of science fiction before them and he was one of the best early "living proofs" that science-fiction writers could handle real feeling and emotion. When his Old Faithful first appeared in #, it attracted more attention than any story of its length for the year. And it still stands up after all this time. The yarn is no longer novel -- too many other writers have since taken off from Gallun's inspiration -- but it is just as fine to me as it always was. It is about time that some anthologist gave the attention to the story that it richly deserves. some of the best-liked stories in the good old days was Ross Rocklynne. His The Men and the Mirror (Ace, #tf) is a collection of related stories. Most of these feature puzzles -- men find themselves in situations where something is cockeyed and dangerous and work their way out by making the effort to understand their strange environment. The five stories in the book are all good examples of this. Curiously, my own favorite isn't included -- though it is listed on the copyright page. This is And Then There Was One , which I have always considered the best story of its kind ever done in science fiction. If Ace decided to omit it because of the length of the book, I think it was a serious mistake. But even without it the book is worth the price. to the past to discover oldvalue fiction, however. Fortunately some of the writers who loved to read the older stories are writing them today. Romance is not wholly dead -- some of us still love the legendary Mars of Percival Lowell, even though Burroughs is dead and Leigh Brackett isn't writing about it any more. The Man Who Loved Mars, by Lin Carter (Fawcett, #) is in the grand tradition of such romance. Here are the dryland tribes with their exotic barbarian cultures, the ancient cities crumbling into slow and fabulous decay, the legends from the days of old and the few Earthmen who can exist among them. But Carter hasn't completely neglected what we have learned of the planet from our space shots. He may have given us an atmosphere denser than the latest theories -- but it's an atmosphere that is much less dense than that of Barsoom. There are still two moons in the sky -- but logically so tiny that they can't be seen without exact knowledge and luck. And there's a certain bitterness about the contact of Earthman and Martian that comes off very well indeed. Carter also captures the color and feeling of the planet as readers know it, the little touches that bring the romance of far-off worlds home to us. And the mystery of Martians who look like Earthman isn't thrown aside, but becomes part of the plot. This is by all odds the best showcase of Carter's writing I have seen. For this type of story, his people move naturally. The color he evolves for his world is traditional, but he has made it very much his own. And the book hangs together. It's Carter's best to date, in my opinion, and I heartily recommend it. O NE of the old values was that of honestly trying to please and satisfy the reader. Old-value fiction IF demands that the writer assume that there is no obligation on the part of his reader to understand, appreciate or finish the story -- the obligation is on the writer to pay the reader back for the investment of time and money. Without this sense of values no amount of borrowing backgrounds and methods can do an adequate job of recreating the type of adventure fiction many readers still demand. At the Narrow Passage , by Richard C. Meredith (Putnam, #), seems to be the beginning of a good adventure novel. It isn't. Among the best of the adventure writers, up to the time of his regrettable death, was H. Beam Piper, who built a complex society around the discovery of Paratime. The Paratime stories involved a sort of side-by-side time sequence -- millions of alternate todays could be reached. Meredith dedicates his book to the memory of Piper and the multiple worlds of Paratime. He's honest abput his use of a similar background, happily. And I agree with him that there is much room for further adventure fiction in Piper's worlds. The novel begins well, too, though the intrustion of nonhumans into Paratime is something I found somewhat hard to take. (The general usefulness of the rule of "one assumption, and no more" is worth noting.) But generally this one began to shape up as a good action story, with our hero -- and heroine -- moving into tighter and tighter jams. I enjoyed it until Well, I began to worry when only ten pages were left, but I kept hoping for something clever. Five more pages and I began to lose that hope. And then I hit the last page. Our hero and heroine had been caught between two forces, gradually coming at them from both sides. So, they're stranded. And let me quote the last three sentences: "Someone, somehow, must stop across the Lines and all the magnificient civilizations we've built. And if nobody else will do it, I guess it'll be up to Sally and me. But damned if  know how (Italics mine.) I don't care if a sequel is planned or not. I wouldn't read it if it came out, since such dishonesty, such total lack of story value as that unending, means I can't trust the writer ever again. It's damned bad writing, and even worse editing -- if the editor bothered to read it before buying it. Don't be cheated! Both old-value and new-value writing deserve their readers -- but no-value writing like that deserves only contempt.  The tyrant had one friend. The friend had none at all... to all of you, my dearly loved fellow countrymen. And most particularly -- as ever to my eyes, Westwind." One wall of the steaming, stinking room began to wai ver, the magic portal that had opened upon a garden of almost inconceivable beauty beginning to mist and change. Fountains of marble waved like grass, and rose trees, whose flowery branches wore strands of pearl and diamond, faded to soft old valj entines. The ruler's chair turned to bronze, then to umber, and the ruler himself, fatherly and cunning, wise and unknowable, underwent a succession of transformai tions, becoming at first a picture, then a poster and at last a postage stamp.  the place turned the wall off and several people protested. "You heard what he said," she told them. "You know your duty. Why do you have to listen to some simpleton from the Department of Truth say everything over in longer words and spread his spittle on it?" The protesters, having registered their postures, were silent. The old woman looked at the clock behind no the tiny bar she served. "Game in twenty minutes," she said. "Folks will be coming in then, rain or no rain, wanting drinks. You want some, you better get them now." Only two did: hulking, dirty men who might have been of any dishonest trade. A few people were already discussing the coming game. A few others talked about the address they had just heard -- not its content, which could not have meant much to most of them -- but about the ruler and his garden, exchanging at hundredth hand bits of palace gossip of untold age. The door opened and the storm came in and a young man with it. He was tall and thin. He wore a raincoat that had soaked through and an old felt hat covered with a transparent plastic protection whose elastic had forced the hat's splayed brim into a tight bell around his head. One side of the young man's face was a blue scar -- the old woman asked him what he wanted. "You have rooms," he said. "Yes, we do. Very cheap, too. You ought to wear something over that." "If it bothers you," he said, "don't look at it." "You think I've got to rent to you?" She looked around at her customers, lining up support, should the young man with the scar decide to resent her remarks. "All I've got to do if you complain is say we're full. You can walk to the police station then -- it's twenty blocks-and maybe they'll let you sleep in a cell." "I'd like a room and something to eat. What do you have?" "Ham sandwich," she said. She named a price. "Your room -- " She named another. "All right," he said. "I'd like two sandwiches. And coffee." "The room is only half if you share with somebody -- if you want me to I can yell out and see if anybody wants to split." "No." She ripped the top from a can of coffee. The handle popped out and the contents began to steam. She gave it to him and said, "I guess they won't take you in the other places, huh? With that face." sipping his coffee, looking the room over. The door by which he had just entered (water still streamed from his coat and he could feel it in his shoes, sucking and gurgling with his every movement) opened again and a blind girl came in. He saw that she was blind before he saw anything else about her. She wore black glasses, which on that impenetrable, rain-wracked night would have been clue enough, and as she entered she looked (in the second most terrible and truest sense) at Nothing. The old woman asked, "Where did you come from?" "From the terminal," the girl said. "I walked." She carried a white cane, which she swung before her as she sidled toward the sound of the old woman. "I need a place to sleep," the girl said. Her voice was clear and sweet and the young man decided that even before the rain had scrubbed her face she hadn't worn makeup. He said, "You don't want to stay here. I'll call you a cab." "I want to stay here," the girl said in her clear voice. "I have to stay somewhere." "I tfave a communicator," the young man said. He opened his coat to show it to her -- a black box with a speaker, keys and a tiny screen -- then realized that he had made a fool of himself. Someone laughed. "They're not running."  The old woman said, "What's not running?" "The cabs. Or the buses. There's high water in a lot of places all over the city and they've been shorting out. I have a communicator, too -- " the blind girl touched her waist -- "and the ruler made a speech just a few minutes ago. I listened to him as I walked and there was a newscast afterward. But I knew anyway because a gentleman tried to call one for me from the terminal, but they wouldn't come." "You shouldn't stay here," the young man said. The old woman said, "I got a room if you want it -- the only one left." "I want it," the girl told her. "You've got it. Wait a minute now -- I've got to fix this fellow some sandwiches." Someone swore at the old woman and said that the game was about to start. "Five minutes yet." She took a piece of boiled ham from under the counter and put it between two slices of bread, then repeated the process. The young man said, "These look eatable. Not fancy, but eatable. Would you like one?" "I have a little money," the blind girl said. "I can pay for my own." And to the old woman: "I would like some coffee." "How about a sandwich?" "I'm too tired to eat." TP HE door was opening almost constantly now as people from the surrounding tenements braved IF Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. For all the right reasons. Kent. America's quality cigarette. King Size or Deluxe #'s. Kings: # mg. "tar." #.I mg. nicotine, #'s: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine av. per cigarette, Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. 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The scarred young man and the blind girl were edged away and found themselves nearest the door in a room now grown very silent save for the sound from the wall. The young man said, "This is really a bad place -- you shouldn't be here." "Then what are you doing here?" "I don't have much money," he said. "It's cheap." "You don't have a job?" "I was hurt in an accident. I'm well now, but they wouldn't keep me on -- they say I would frighten the others. I suppose I would." "Isn't there insurance for that?" "I wasn't there long enough to qualify." "I see," she said. She raised her coffee carefully, holding it with both hands. He wanted to tell her that it was about to spill -- she did not hold it quite straight -- but dared not. Just as it was at the point of running over the edge it found her lips. "You listened to the ruler," he said, "while you were walking in the storm. I like that." "Did they listen here?" she asked. "I don't know. I wasn't here. The wall was off when I came in." "Everyone should," she said. "He does his best for us." The scarred young man nodded. "People won't cooperate," she said. "Don't cooperate. Look at the crime problem -- everyone complains about it, but it is the people themselves who commit the crimes. He tries to clean the air, the water, all for us -- " "But they burn in the open whenever they think they won't be caught," the young man finished for her, "and throw filth in the rivers. The bosses live in luxury because of him, but they cheat on the standards whenever they can. He should destroy them." "He loves them," the girl said simply. "He loves everyone. When we say that it sounds like we're saying he loves no one, but that's not true. He loves everyone ." "Yes," the scarred young man said after a moment, "but he loves Westwind the best. Loving everyone does not include loving someone more than others. Tonight he called Westwind 'my eyes.' " "Westwind observes for him," the girl said softly, "and reports. Do you think Westwind is someone very important?" "He is important," the young man said, "because the ruler listens to him -- and after all, it's next to impossible for anyone else to get an audience. But I think you mean 'does he look important to us?' I don't think so -- he's probably some very obscure person you've never heard of." "I think you're right," she said. He was finishing his second sandwich and he nodded, then realized that she could not see him. She was pretty, he decided, in a slender way, not too tall, wore no rings. Her nails were unpainted, which made her hands look, to him, like a schoolgirl's. He remembered watching the girls playing volleyball when he had been in school -- how he had ached for them. He said, "You should have stayed in' the terminal tonight. I don't think this is a safe place for you." "Do the rooms lock?" "I don't know. I haven't seen them." "If they don't I'll put a chair under the knob or something. Move the furniture. At the terminal I tried to sleep on a bench -- I didn't want to walk here through all that rain, believe me. But every time I fell asleep I could feel someone's hand on me -- once I grabbed him, but he pulled away. I'm not very strong." "Wasn't anyone else there?" "Some men, but they were trying to sleep, too -- of course it was one of them, and perhaps they were all doing it together. One of them told the others that if they didn't let me alone he'd kill someone -- that was when I left. I was afraid he wasn't doing it -- that somebody would be killed or at least that there would be a fight. He was the one who called about the cab for me. He said he'd pay." "I don't think it was him, then." "I don't either." The girl was silent for a moment, then said, "I wouldn't have minded it so much if I hadn't been so tired." "I understand." "Would you find the lady and ask her to show me to my room?" "Maybe we could meet in the morning for breakfast." The blind girl smiled, the first time the scarred young man had seen her smile. "That would be nice," she said. touched the old woman's arm. "I hate to interrupt the game," he said, "but the young lady would like to go to her room." "I don't care about the game," the old woman said, "I just watch it because everybody else does. I'll get Obie to take care of things." "She's coming," the scarred young man said to the blind girl. IF "I'll go up with you. I'm ready to turn in myself." The old woman was already motioning for them and they followed her up a narrow staircase filled with foul odors. 'They pee in here," she said. "There's toilets down at the end of the hall but they don't bother to use them." "How terrible," the girl said. "Yes it is. But that way they're getting away with something -- they're putting one over on me because they know if I was to catch them I'd throw them out. I try and catch them, but at the same time I feel sorry for them -- it's pretty bad when the only wins you have left are the games on the wall and cheating a old woman by dirtying her steps." She paused at the top of the stairs for breath. "You two are going to be just side by side -- you don't mind that?" The girl said, "No," and the scarred young man shook his head. "I didn't think you would and they're the last I've got anyway." The scarred young man was looking down the narrow corridor. It was lined with doors, most of them shut. "I'll put you closest to the bathroom," the old woman was saying to the girl. "There's a hook on the bathroom door, so don't you worry. But if you stay in there too long somebody'll start pounding." "I'll be all right," the girl said. "Sure you will. Here's your room." The rooms had been parts of much larger rooms once. Now they were subdivided with green-painted partitions of some stuff like heavy cardboard. The old woman went into the girl's place and turned on the light. "Bed's here, dresser's there," she said. "Washstand in the corner but you have to bring your water from the bathroom. No bugs -- we fumigate twice a year. Clean sheets." The girl was feeling the edge of the door. Her fingers found a chain lock and she smiled. "There's a deadbolt too," the scarred young man said. The old woman said, "Your room's next door. Come on." girl's, save that the cardboard partition (it had been liberally scratched with obscene words and pictures) was on the left instead of the right. He found that he was acutely aware of her moving behind it, the tap of her stick as she established the positions of the bed, the dresser, the washstand. He locked his door and took off his soaked coat and hung it on a hook, then took off his shoes and stockings. He disliked the thought of walking on the gritty floor in his wet feet, but there was no alternative except the soggy shoes. With his legs folded under him he sat on the bed, then unhooked the communicator from his belt and pushed #-#-#, the ruler's number. "This is Westwind," the scarred young man whispered. The ruler's face appeared in the screen, tiny and perfect. Again, as he had so often before, the young man felt that this was his real size, this tiny, bright figure -- he knew it was not true. "This is Westwind and I've got a place to sleep tonight. I haven't found another job yet, but I met a girl and I think she likes me." "Exciting news," the ruler said. He smiled. The scarred young man smiled, too, on his unscarred side. "It's raining very hard here," he said. "I think this girl is very loyal to you, sir. The rest of the people here -- well, I don't know. She told me about a man in the terminal who tried to molest her and another man who wanted to protect her. I was going to ask you to reward him and punish the other one, but I'm afraid they were the same man -- that he wanted to meet her and this gave him the chance." "They are often the same man," the ruler said. He paused as though lost in thought. "You are all right?" "If I don't find something tomorrow I won't be able to afford a place to stay, but yes, I'm all right tonight." "You are very cheerful. Westwind. I love cheerfulness." The good side of the scarred young man's face blushed. "It's easy for me," he said. "I've known all my life that I was your spy, your confidant -- it's like knowing where a treasure is hidden. Often I feel sorry for the others. I hope you're not too severe with them." "I don't want to aid you openly unless I must," the ruler said. "But I'll find ways that aren't open. Don't worry." He winked. "I know you will, sir." "Just don't pawn your communicator." The image was gone, leaving only a blank screen. The young man turned out the light and continued to undress, taking off everything but his shorts. He was lying down on the bed when he heard a thump from the other side of the cardboard partition. The blind girl, feeling her way about the room, must have bumped into it. He was about to call, 'Xre you hurt?" when he saw that one of the panels, a section perhaps three feet by four, was teetering in its frame. He caught it as it fell and laid it on floor. The light the old woman had IF turned on still burned in the girl's room and he saw that she had hung up her coat and wrapped her hair in a strip of paper towels from the washstand. While he watched she removed her black glasses, set them on the bureau and rubbed the bridge of her nose. One of her eyes showed only white; the iris of the other was the poisoned blue color of watered milk and turned in and down. Her face was lovely. While he watched she unbuttoned her blouse and hung it up. Then she unhooked her communicator ,from her belt, ran her fingers over the buttons once and, without looking, pressed a number. "This is Westwind," she said. He could not hear the voice that answered her, but the face in the screen, small and bright, was the face of the ruler. "I'm all right," she said. "At first I didn't think I was going to be able to find a place to stay tonight, but I have. And I've met someone." The scarred young man lifted the panel back into place as gently as he could and lay down again upon his bed. When he heard the rattle of her cane again he tapped the partition and called, "Breakfast tomorrow. Don't forget." "I won't. Good night." "Good night," he said. In the room below them the old woman was patting her straggling hair into place with one hand while she punched a number with the other. "Hello," she said, "this is Westwind. I saw you tonight."  Worlds of it coiv.ji otulotes Kaoc Asimov, whoseGalaxy Wm.-h ,V:y #T# ard IF. Ap-i#'# was given the Nebula Awci-d as the Best Science faction Novel of # # bv the Science faction White: s of America News Service photographer, is relaxing before a Sunday afternoon backyard barbeque when a hole appears in the suburban landscape and people start marching through, four and five abreast. They are outlandishly costumed in garb ranging from long robes to buckskin, seem of all ages, peaceful and carry little or no luggage. When Bentley protests their lawn-trampling their spokesman introduces himself as lowers have just come are still arriving -- from five hundred years in the future -- and could the children please use the bathroom? While a steady stream of the visitors line up to. use the facility, that if this is a publicity stunt it's a dilly, phones the story in to his edito take pictures. of other " time tunnels" opening are refugees, from an alien invaall across the nation and people sion of Earth five hundred years in pouring out of them at a rate of the future, ask that heavy artilthe army to handle the situation, attempt to come through. The as word comes in that the phealiens are characterized by tre nomenon has become world mendous physical prowess, inwide -- in some of Earth's poverty stant reproduction and equally areas the tunnels pour out toninstant evolutionary adaptanages of grain as well as people. bility to any new situation, no The refugees plan to continue ther back in time to the Miocene , ask to trade their scientific and technological skills and knowledge for help in building new time tunnels to enable them to do so. They also want tools and equipment to help them start over in prehistory , invite their hosts to join are expected. As the present mobilizes to cope with its instant -- if temporary -- population explosion some aliens do break through, spreading terror. The President declares a national emergency. # . Once the men were seated around the table in the conference room, Dr. Samuel Ives opened the discussion. "This meeting," he said, "despite the solemnity of the occasion that brings us together in the dead of night, marks what for all of us of the present must be an exciting event. Throughout our professional lives most of us have at times puzzled over the fundamental nature of time's irreversibility. A couple of us, myself and Dr. Asbury Brooks, have spent a great deal of effort in its study. I am of the opinion that Dr. Brooks will not take it badly if I say we have made little, if any, progress. While the lay person -- viewing time as a philosophical rather than a physical concept -- may question the validity of our efforts the fact remains that the physical laws with which all of us work are embedded in this somewhat mysterious function we call time. We must ask ourselves, if we are completely to understand the concepts we employ, both in our daily lives and our continuing investigations into many areas of science, what may be the physical interrelationships underlying the expansion of the universe, information theory and the thermodynamic, electromagnetic, biologiqal and statistical arrows of time. In the description of any physical phenomenon the time variable is a parameter at the most elementary level. We have wondered if such a thing as universal time exists -- or are we dealing only with a feature of boundary conditions? There are some of us who think that the latter may be true -- that the time factor was perhaps rather randomly set at the moment of the beginning of the universe and that this concept has governed our thinking ever since. And all of us are aware that our concepts of time must be overwhelmingly prejudiced by intuitive notions and IF that this may be one of the factors that have made it so difficult for us to understand and formulate any real theories about the subject." He looked across the table at the three men from the future. "I must beg your indulgence for this sort of introduction to our discussion -- remarks that, in view of what you have learned, may sound somewhat silly. But I did think it important to set our own studies into some sort of perspective. Now that I have said this much, I think that it is your turn to talk. I assure you that all of us will listen most attentively. Which one of you would like to begin?" Hardwicke and Cummings looked at one another questioningly. Finally Hardwicke said, "Perhaps I might as well. I must express the deep appreciation meet with us at this unusual hour, i And I am afraid that we are about to disappoint you, for I must tell you that we know very little more about the fundamental nature of time than you do. We have asked ourselves some of the same questions you have asked and have found no real answers." "But you can travel in time," said Brooks. "That would argue that you must know something of it. You must have at least a basic understanding -- " "What we found," said Ffardwicke, "is that we are not the only universe. There are at least two universes coexisting within the same space, but universes so fundamentally different from one another that neither ordinarily would be aware of the other. At the moment I will not go into the manner in which this other universe was detected or what we know of it. It is not, however, a contraterrene universe, so there is, so far as we know, no danger from it. I might add that the first hint of its existence came from a study of the strangeness of certain particles. The particles themselves are a part of our universe, but in some instances they may react to certain not entirely understood conditions in the other. We now have postulated two totally different universes -- the other made up of particles and interactions that have little to do with ours. Interactions occur on so small a scale that only blind, dumb luck could bring them to one's notice. "Fortunately our researchers experienced that kind of luck. And it was mostly luck, too, that revealed to us something else about the second universe. I often wonder if luck itself should be the subject of a study with a view to a better determination of its parameters. As I said, we found out one other thing about the other universe -- a simple but devastating discovery. We learned that the arrow of time in the second universe flows in exactly the opposite direction to the one it travels in ours. While undoubtedly in that universe it was moving from the universe's past toward its future -- in relation to our universe it was traveling from our future toward our past." "One thing puzzles me," said Ives. "You were dealing with a very complex matter and yet in twenty years or so -- " "It is not as remarkable as you think," said Cummings. "We launched a crash project, certainly, to achieve our means of coming here, but by then we were in possession of the knowledge Dr. Hardwicke has just outlined. On your old time track the second universe was discovered somewhat less than a hundred years from now. It had been investigated for almost four centuries before we finally put thetime arrow of the second universe to work. As a matter of fact, much significant work had been done on the possibility of using the opposite time direction of the second universe as a time-travel medium. All we had to do was give the investigation a final push. I think the method we finally devised might have been worked out earlier -- even before the invasion by the aliens -- if there had been any reason for doing so. But, aside from scientific curiosity, we had little motive. Under ordinary circumstances there's not much attraction to time travel -- if you can move in only one direction and there's no possibility of returning. "By the time we decided," said Hardwicke, "that the only way we could survive was to travel back into time, much of the real work already had been done. Throughout the history of scientific inquiry a certain segment of the population has always questioned the validity of pure research. What is the good of it? How is it going to help us? What can we use it for? I think our situation is a perfect example of the value of basic research. The work that had been done on the second universe and its time flow had been pure research, an expenditure of effort and funds that seemed to offer no chance at all of either benefit or return. And yet, as things turned out, it did have a return. It offered the human race a chance to save itself." "As I understand it, said Brooks, "what you have done is make use of the opposite time IF flow of the other universe to bring you here. Somehow or other your time tunnels trap the opposite flow. You step into the reverse stream in your own present time and step out of it in ours. But to do this you must manage to speed up the time flow tremendously and be able to control it." Hardwicke said, "The hard part of the job was the implementation theories that had already been worked out. Still, the end result turned out to be unbelievably simple to achieve." "You think it is in the range of our present technology." "We are sure of it," said Hardwicke. "That is why we chose your particular period. We had to select a target that held men who would understand and accept our theories -- and other men who could build the necessary equipment. We also needed to reach a time whose intellectual and moral climate was such that there us the help we needed. We also had to find a period with an economy productive enough to supply us with the implements and tools we would need to start life anew in the Miocene. Perhaps we are being unfair to hope for so much from you. We have one justification. If we had not come back to you the race of man would have ended some five hundred years from now. As it is, you have been shifted to a new time track, a phenomenon we can take time later to discuss, if you wish. For there now is a chance, although no certainty, that you can continue into a future that holds no alien invasion." "Dr. Osborne, said Ives, "has so far taken no part in this discussion. Is there something you might like to add?" Osborne shook his head. "All this is beyond my competence, gentlemen. I'm not a physicist, but a geologist with leanings toward paleontology. I'm simply along for the ride. Later, if some of you want to discuss the Miocene, which is our eventual destination -- that is something I could talk about." Brooks said, "I would be interested in hearing you right now. It's been proposed that some of the present population of the Earth go back into the Miocene with you. The idea might appeal to the more venturesome among us. what you think we might find in the Miocene?" "I would be glad to. You must understand, of course, that we are dealing in suppositions, although we can be fairly sure of some facts. The main reason we picked the Miocene is that grass first appeared upon the Earth then -- grazing animals seem to have increased rapidly in the early part of the epoch. The climate later became somewhat more arid, although by our calculations there still would have been plenty of rainfall for agriculture. Many of the huge forest tracts gave way to grassy plains, supporting herds of herbivores. Evidence has been found of oreodonts, sheep-sized animals that may have been remote relatives of the camels. There would have been camels, too, although far smaller than the ones you know today. We could expect to find small horses, the size of ponies. We might see a number of rhinos. Some time during the Miocene, probably in its early days, elephants migrated to North America over the Bering land bridge. They would have been four-tuskers, smaller than today's elephants. One of the more dangerous animals would have been the giant pig, big as oxen and with skulls that measured four feet long -- ugly customers to meet. With so many herbivores running in herds on the prairies, the Miocene could be expected to have its full quota of carnivores, both canines and felines -- probably the ancestors of the sabertooths. That's only a quick rundown. There is much more. The point is that we believe the Miocene was a time of rather rapid evolutionary development, with the fauna expanding into new genera and species -- the changes characterized overall, perhaps, by a tendency of animals to increase in size. There might be a number of holdovers from the Oligocene, even from the Eocene. I suppose some of the mammals might be dangerous. There could be poisonous snakes and insects -- I'm not entirely sure of that. As a matter of fact, we have little evidence along those lines." "In your estimation, however," said Brooks, "modern man could survive in the Miocene." "We are sure he could. He could live off the land until he got started. There would be plenty of game, nuts, berries, fruit, roots. Fishing should be good. We're not as sure about the climate as we'd like to be, but there is some evidence that it would be more equable than now. The summers probably would be as warm, the winters not so cold. You understand this can't be guaranteed." "I understand that, said Brooks, "but in any case -- you're set on going?" "We have," said Osborne, "very little choice." IF # . Steve Wilson came back into the pressroom. The desk lamp was still lit, painting a circle of light in the darkened room. The teletypes muttered against the wall. Almost three o'clock, he realized. He'd have to get some sleep. Even with the best of luck he had four hours or so before he had to be on the job again. As he approached the desk Alice Gale rose from a chair set in the room's shadows. She still wore her white robe. He wondered if it was all the clothing she had. The people from the future had carried litle luggage. "Mr. Wilson," she said, "we have been waiting for you, hoping that you would come here. My father wants to talk with you. Will you see him?" "Certainly, said Wilson. "Good morning, Mr. Gale." Gale came out of the darkness and laid his attache case on the desk top. "I am somewhat embarrassed," he said. "I find myself in a position that could be awkward. I wonder if you would listen to me and tell me how to go about what I want to do. You seem to be a man who knows his way around." Wilson, moving to the desk, stiffened. The whole thing, he sensed, as Gale had said, had an awkwardness about it. He sensed he was going to be placed in a difficult position. He waited. "We are well aware," said Gale, "that our coming from the future has placed a terrible burden upon the governments and the peoples of the world. We did what little we could. In areas where we knew there would be food shortages we arranged the delivery of wheat and other foodstuffs. We stand ready to supply any labor that will be required, for we represent a large and idle labor force. But the building of the tunnels and the supplying tq us of the tools we will need in the Miocene will represent a vast expenditure of funds -- " He reached down into the circle of light on the desk top, unlatched the case, opened it. It was packed with small leather bags. Lifting one of these, he pulled it open and poured out a shower of cut stones that flashed and glittered in the light. "Diamonds," he said. Wilson gulped. "But why?" he whispered. "Why diamonds? And why bring them to me?" "These stones provided the only way we could bring anything of value in small enough volume to be conveniently transported. We know that if they were dumped on the exchanges all at once they would ruin much of your economy. But if they were fed into the market a few at a time, surreptitiously, they would have little effect. This is especially true if their existence can be kept secret. We have been very careful that there be no duplications -- that no paradoxes are involved with their presence here. It would have been possible to have brought from the future many of the famous gems that now exist and are well known. We have not done this. All the stones in this case were found and cut in' your future." "Put them back," said Wilson, horrified. "Good God, man, can you imagine what might happen if it became known what was in calmly, "at the going prices in this age. They are worth much more here than they were in our time." Unhurriedly he picked up the stones, put them back into the bag, fitted the bag back into the case, closed and latched it. "I wish," said Wilson, "you hadn't told me about this." "But we had to," Alice said. "Don't you see? You are the only one we know -- the only person we can trust. We knew we could safely tell you -- and that you could tell us what we should do." Wilson struggled to put some calmness into his words. "Let's all sit down," he said, "and talk this over. And let's not speak too loudly. I don't think there is anyone around, but someone could walk in." They went back beyond the circle of light, pulled three chairs together and sat down. "Now suppose you tell me," Wilson said, "what you're really driving at." "We had thought," said Gale, "that the proceeds from these stones, wisely marketed, could compensate in part for some of the actual costs your helping us entails. Not one government, not one people, but all the governments and all the peoples of the Earth are involved." "In that case -- " "I anticipate your question. Why were the stones not divided and offered to the separate governments? There are two reasons this was not done. We want to keep the number of those who know of these stones to a minimum. Next, there are few governments we can trust -- actually some of us felt the United Nations should be the organization entrusted with the gems. But frankly, we have little confidence in the U. N. Next I was supposed to hand the stones to IF your President. I decided against this when I realized how many problems he had weighing on his mind and how often he was forced to depend on the judgments of many other people." "I know one thing," said Wilson. "You can't keep on carrying this case around with you. You have to be placed under security until it has been put into some safe place. Fort Knox, probably, accept it." "You mean, Mr. Wilson, that I'll have to be placed under guard? Fm not sure I like that. "Christ, I don't know," said Wilson. "I don't even know where to begin. He reached for the phone and dialed. "Jane, you still on duty ? Do you know -- has the President retired?" "An hour ago," said Jane. "Good, said Wilson. "He should have gone to bed long before then." "Is it important, Steve? He left orders that if anything important came up he should be called." "No, this can wait. Do you think you can get hold of Jerry Black?" "I'll try. I think he's still around." The room was silent except for the teletypes. Gale and Alice sat unstirring in their chairs. Light still shone beneath the presslounge doors, but there was no sound of typing. "We're sorry to upset you so," Alice said to Wilson. "But we were at our wits' ends. We didn't know what to do." "It's all right," said Wilson. "You don't know how much this means to us," she said. "The rest of the people may not know till later, but we'll know that we did not come as beggars. That we paid our way. That's important to us." Footsteps came down the corridor and turned in at the door. "What's going on, Steve?" asked Jerry Black. "We need a couple of men," said Wilson. "I'm one of them," said Black. "I can find another." "It'll be a favor," said Wilson. "I have no jurisdiction. I'm acting on my own. It'll be until tomorrow morning -- or as soon as I can see the President." "It's okay," said Black, "if it's for the President." "I think," said Wilson, "that it might be for him." "All right. What is it?" "Mr. Gale has an attache ease. I won't tell you what is in it. You wouldn't want to know. But it's important. And I want him to keep it -- him and no one else. Until we know what to do with it." "That can be managed. You think it needs two of us?" "I'd feel better if there were two of you." "No trouble," said Black. "Let me use your phone." #I . Dawn was graying the eastern sky when Enoch Raven sat down to his typewriter. Outside the window lay the green Virginia hills, and in the trees and shrubs a few awakening birds began their twittering and chirping. He flexed his fingers over the keyboard and then began to type steadily and without pause. He had made it a rule these many years to have his words thought out before he sat down to write his column. The world today faces what may be its greatest crisis, and the strangeness of this lies in the fact that the crisis comes not by the ordinary channels. Although, when one thinks it through, it becomes apparent that the present difficulty does parallel a problem we have long recognized -- overpopulation and the economic problems that could spring from it. As short a time ago as last Sunday morning, however, no one in his right mind could have imagined that a critical overpopulation could come upon us overnight. Now that it has, we are faced with a situation that must be solved, not over a long period of careful planning, but in a matter of weeks. The brutal fact is that we can feed the hordes of people who have come to us for help for only a very limited span of time. They themselves are frank in admitting that they were aware of the problems their coming would create and in consequence of this have brought us the knowledge and the tools we will need in solving them. All that remains is that we use these tools. This requires the willing cooperation of every one of us. These words are not used lightly, nor in a horatory political sense, but in a very personal way. Every one of us, each of us, all of us. What isneeded from most of us is forbearance, a willingness to bear certain sacrifices, to tolerate certain inconveniences. It may mean that there will be less food -- and that not so IF good -- for us to eat. We may have to wait for delivery of that new car. We may not be able to buy a new lawnmower when the 'old one breaks down. The economic energy and direction that under normal circumstances would be channeled into the production and distribution of items and services we need must be channeled not only into sending our descendants farther back into time, but into providing them with the equipment, tools and supplies they will need to build a viable culture. Detroit may be called on to turn out plows and other implements rather than cars. It may be that, voluntarily or by government decree, we may have to ration ourselves. Wise as the actions taken by President Henderson may have been in calling for a bank holiday and a price and wage freeze, a case can be made for his having taken one further step by issuing a strong warning against hoarding. While we can ill afford to deal in a bureaucratic manner with the press of events that has been forced upon us, it would seem that some move toward a strict rationing of food and other items vital to the continuing economy should be taken at once. It is quite understandable, for political reasons, why Mr. Henderson might have been reluctant to do this. But it is upon such unpopular actions -- or the failure to take these actions -- that we sometimes stand or fall. It would scarcely seem necessary to point out that such actions as the President has taken should be taken by other nations as well. It is reliably understood that Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, China and possibly other nations may already have made corresponding moves before these words see print. The problem we face is worldwide and for it to be solved temporary economic strictures must be imposed not only upon the larger economic units, but upon the entire world. The appearance of the people from the future undoubtedly will call forth from the various intellectual factions a wide variety of opinions, many of which undoubtedly will be illfounded. This is illustrated by the public agony being exhibited by the Reverend more colorful of our evangelists, over the revelation that the people of five hundred years from now have forsaken religion as a rather footless factor in the lives of men. Distressing as this may be to the professional religionists, it is scarcely a consideration that has any bearing on the matter immediately at hand. Not only on this point, but on many others, profound questions will be raised, but now is not the time to expend any noticeable amount of energy in trying to answer or resolve them. They will only further divide a population which, under the best of circumstances, is bound to be divided by the basic task which has been brought upon us. We have not yet had time, nor indeed enough facts, to form a true evaluation of the situation. While we have been made aware of some of the basics, much is yet unknown. There is no time, of course, for deliberate consideration of the crisis -- in essence, the world must act with more expediency than may be entirely wise. The very fact that expediency is necessary calls for a public forbearance that is usually not desirable when great issues are at stake. A storm of criticism and a violent putting forward of opinions at variance with official opinion and action will accomplish nothing other than an impedance to a solution which must come quickly if it is to come at all. The men in Washington, at Whitehall and in the Kremlin may be wrong on many points, but their various publics must realize that they will be acting in honest good faith, doing what they consider proper. Democracy demands, and rightly, that all men should have a voice in their government and in governmental decisions and actions, that all viewpoints be given fuM consideration, that there be no arbitrary decisions counter to the public will. But today we cannot afford the luxury of such an idealistic concept. The situation may not be IF handled as many of us would wish. Some toes undoubtedly will be trod upon. Certain ideas of justice and propriety may be outraged. But to accept all of this, if not in silence, at least without raising too great an outcry, is a part of the forbearance that is called for. This commentator has no way of knowing what will happen. I cannot even guess. I am aware that there may be much that I will not like, much that I will consider could be done differently or better. In the past there has been no hesitancy on my part to place my personal opinion on record and at a later date, after this is over, I suppose I may not be above pointing out glaring errors as I may have perceived them. But from this day forward and until then I shall, as a personal contribution, exercise stern censorship upon, if not my thoughts, at least upon my typewriter. I am hereby enrolling myself as charter member in the Keep Your Mouth Shiit, Enoch, Club. The membership is wide open and I invite all of you to join. # . He had somehow climbed a tree and gotten out on a limb -- for no reason that seemed quite logical -- when a violent wind had come up. Now he was hanging grimly to a branch whipping in the wind. He knew that at any moment his grasp might be tom loose and he would be thrown to the ground. But when he looked down he saw, with horror, that there wasn't any ground. From somewhere far off, a voice was speaking to him, but he was so intent on maintaining his grip on the branch that he was unable to distinguish the words. The shaking became even more violent. "Steve," the voice was saying. "Steve, wake up." His eyes came open to a slit and he realized that he was in no tree. A distorted face swam crazily just above him. No one had such a face. "Wake up, Steve," said a voice that was Henry Hunt's. "The President is asking for you." Wilson lifted a fist and scrubbed his eyes. The face, no longer distorted, was Henry Hunt's. The face receded into the distance as the Times man straightened. Wilson swung his feet off the couch, sat up. Sunlight was streaming through the windows of the press lounge. "What time is it?" he asked. "Almost eight." Wilson squinted up at Hunt. "You get any sleep?" "I went home for a couple of hours. I couldn't sleep. Things kept spinning in my head. So I came back." He picked a jacket off the floor. "This yours?" Wilson nodded groggily. "I got to get washed up," he said. "I got to comb my hair." He rose to his feet, took the jacket from Hunt and tucked it under his arm. "What's going on?" "What you might expect. The wires are clogged with screams of anguish over the business holiday. How come you didn't tip us off, Steve?" "I didn't know. He never said a word about it." "Well, that's all right," said Hunt. "We should have guessed it. Can you imagine what would have happened if the exchanges were open?" "Any word about the monster?" "Rumor. Nothing solid. One rumor says another got through in Africa. Somewhere in the Congo. Christ, they'll never find it there." "The Congo's not all jungle, Henry." "Where it's supposed to have happened, it is." Wilson headed for the washroom. When he returned Hunt had a cup of coffee for him. "Thanks." Wilson sipped the hot brew and shuddered. "I don't know if I can face the day," he said. "Any idea of what the President has in mind?" Hunt shook his head. "Judy in yet?" "Not yet, Steve." Wilson put the cup down on the coffee table. "Thanks for getting me up and going," he said. "I'll see you later." He went into the pressroom. The lamp he had forgotten to turn off still shone feebly on the desk. In the corridor outside footsteps went smartly up and down. He straightened his jacket and went out. Two men were with the President. One was General Daniel Foote; the other was one of the refugees, rigged out in a mountaineer outfit. "Good morning, Mr. President," said Wilson. "Good morning, Steve. You get any sleep?" "An hour or so." "You know General Foote, of course," said the President. "The gentleman with him is Isaac Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe is a biologist. He brings us rather frightening news. I thought you should hear it." Wolfe was a heavy man -- heavy of body, deep in the chest, standIF ing on short, solid legs. His head, covered by a rat's nest of graying hair seemed overlarge for a man his height. He stepped quickly forward and shook Wilson's hand. "I am sorry," he said, "to be the bearer of such disturbing facts." "Last night," said the President, "rather, some time this morning, a farmer not far from Harper's Ferry was wakened by something in his chicken coop. He went out and found the henhouse full of strange beasts, the size, perhaps, of half-grown hogs. He fired at them and they got away, all except one which the shotgun blast almost cut in two. The farmer was attacked. He's in a hospital. He'll live, I'm told, but he was fairly well chewed up. From what he says there can be little doubt the things in the henhouse were a new batch of the monsters." "But that's impossible, said Wilson. "The monster escaped only a few -- " "Dr. Wolfe came to me last evening," said Foote, "shortly after the monster escaped from the tunnel. I frankly didn't believe what he told me, but when the report of the henhouse episode came in from an officer of a search party out in West Virginia, I looked him up and asked him to come to the White House. I'm sorry, Doctor, for not believing you to start with." "But it's still impossible," said Wilson. "No," said Wolfe. "It is not impossible. We are dealing with an organism entirely different from anything you've ever known. The evolutionary processes of these monsters are like nothing you have even guessed. Their reaction to environmental stress is beyond all belief. We had known something of it and had deduced the rest. But I am convinced that under stresses such as the escaped monster is experiencing, the developmental procedures can be speeded up to a fantastic rate. An hour or so to hatch -- an hour later to be hunting food. The same pressure that is placed upon the parent is transmitted to the young. For both the parent and the young this is a crisis situation. The parent is aware of this, of course -- the young, of course, would not be. But in some strange manner I can't pretend to understand a sense of desperate urgency is transmitted to the egg. The message seems to read: Hatch swiftly, grow up quickly, scatter widely, reach the egg-laying stage as soon as possible. It is a genetic reaction to a survival threat. The young aliens are driven by an volutionary force that in an earthly life form would be inconceivable. They are members of a strange race that has a unique and inborn capability to use every trick in the evolutionary pattern to its advantage." Wilson found a chair and sat down limply. He looked at the President. "Has any of this leaked out?" "No," said the President, "it has not. The farmer's wife phoned the sheriff. The military search party had just reached the area and was talking with the sheriff when the call came in. The officer in charge clamped on a security lid. That is why you're here, Steve. We can't keep this buttoned up. It'll leak out -- if not this particular incident, then others. There may be hundreds of these tiny monsters out there in the mountains. They'll be seen and reported. The reports will begin to pile up. We can't sit on all of them, nor should we." "The problem," said Wilson, "is how to release the news without scaring the pants off everybody." "If we don't tell them," said the President, "we create a credibility gap that will make everything we do suspect. And there is, as well, the matter of public safety." "In a few days," said Foote, "all the mountains will be swarming with full-grown monsters. They will probably scatter. We can hunt some of them down, but not all. In any event we'll need every man we can lay our hands on to hunt them down." "That they will scatter is right," said Wolfe. They will want to insure their chances of survival. And they can travel fast. By mother day, perhaps, they'll be up in New England, down into Georgia. They will keep, at first, to the mountainous terrain because it would give them the best concealment. In time they'll begin branching out from the mountains." "How long would you guess," asked Wilson, "before they begin laying eggs?" Wolfe spread his hands. "Who can know?" he said. "Your best guess." "A week. Two weeks... I do not know." "How many eggs in a clutch?" "A couple of dozen. You must understand we do not know. We found only a fewnests." "When will they begin their killing?" "Now. Right now. They must eat to grow. They must do a lot of mals and occasionally humans. IF Not many humans to start with. tion to themselves. Warlike as they may be, they still will know they are vulnerable because there are so few of them. They may be psychopathic killers, but they aren't stupid." "We have some troops out now," said the President. "We'll have to use many more. Get planes and helicopters up to spot the aliens. I talked to Sandburg just a while ago. He is coming in. He'll know what we can do. This means we call out the reserves, perhaps call back some troops from abroad. Not only do we have to hunt the monsters, but we have to maintain the camps for the refugees." "We do not wish to stand idly by," Wolfe put in. "There are many thousands of us. Give us arms and we'll go in side by side with your military. We know about these creatures and we were the ones who brought them here. We have a duty and -- " "Later," said the President, "there will be plenty you can do. Getting you into the field now would be a tremendous task. Right at the moment we must depend on our own men." "How about the people out there in the mountains?" asked Wilson. "Do we pull them out?" The President shook his head. "I don't think so, Steve. We have, right now, all the refugees we can handle. And I'm inclined to think that at the moment our monsters may not be too aggressive. They're probably concentrating on staying out of sight. There may be some incidents, but we must be prepared to accept those. It's all we can do. "I think you're right, sir," said Wolfe. "They are outnumbered now and must build up their strength. In any event, the young aliens will not, for a time, be too great a menace. They'll have to put on size and weight. They may know that they face deadlier weapons -- and in much greater numbers -- than anything we could ever bring against them. We had lived in peace so long we had lost most of the military techniques and we started from scratch in weapon building." "You face a busy day, Mr. President," said Foote. "If there is nothing further you wish from us -- " The President rose and came around the desk. He shook both his visitors by the hand. "Thanks for coming by," he said. "This is something we must get busy on immediately." Wilson stood up to leave. "Do I call in the press immediately?" he asked. "Or should I wait until after you have talked with Sandburg?" The President hesitated, considering. "I should think right away," he said. "I'd like us to be the first to tell them. The military has the lid clamped down, but it won't stay clamped for long. Some of the people from the Hill are coming in to see me. It would be better if they knew about this before they arrived." "There's another matter, said Wilson. "You were asleep and I didn't want to wake you. There's a dispatch case full of diamonds -- " "Diamonds? What have diamonds got todo with this?" "It's a rather awkward business, sir," said Wilson. "You recall that case Gale was carrying -- " "There were diamonds in that case?" "It was packed with sacks. He opened one sack and poured out diamonds on the desk. He told me the rest of the sacks also contained diamonds and I'm inclined to believe him. The refugees had the idea they could turn them over to us to pay whatever was laid out to send them back to the Miocene." "I would like to have seen your face," Henderson said, "when he poured out the diamonds. What, may I ask, did you do about it?" "I called in Jerry Black and put Gale under guard. I insisted he keep the diamonds." "I guess that was all you could do. I think maybe I should call in the treasury people to take temporary custody and check with Reilly Douglas about the legality of all this. Did you get any idea how much the diamonds might be worth?" "Gale said, at present prices, is, if they can be fed into retail outlets slowly, without depressing the market. They're not, you understand, for us alone, but for the entire world. Gale wants to leave them with us in trust as it were." "You realize, of course, how sticky this could be if word leaked out?" "To be entirely fair," said Wilson, "we still must realize that they are only trying to be helpful. They want to pay their way." "Yes, I know," said the President. "We'll have to see what Reilly says about it." # . The crowd had been gathering in Lafayette Park across the avenue from the White House since early morning. It was still the quiet and watchful group that had IF stood the Sunday vigil, stolid in its watchfulness. But now there were a few placards and there had been none before. One of the placards, crudely lettered, read: back to the Miocene. Another read: bring on your sabertooths. Still another: let us leave this lousy world. A newsman pushed his way through the crowd, zeroing in on the whiskered youth who bore the back to the miocene placard. "Would you mind telling me," he asked, "what is going on?" "Man," said the youth, impatiently, "it is there for you to read. It says it loud and clear." "It puzzles me," said the newsman, "what you are trying to prove. Or don't you have a point to make?" "No points this time," the signcarrier told him. "In the past we have tried to prove some points and have mostly gotten nowhere." He made a thumb in the direction of the White House. "The man don't listen too good. No one listens too good." "This time," said a girl who stood beside the sign-carrier, "we're not proving anything at all. We're simply saying what we want to do and that's go back to the Miocene." "Or the Eocene,"-said another girl. "Or the Paleocene. Just anywhere at all to get away from this scruffy place. We want to leave this crummy world and get another start. We want to go back and build the kind of world we want. We've been trying for years to change this society and we've gotten exactly nowhere. And when we saw we couldn't change it we tried to get out of it. That's what the communes are all about. But the society won't let us go. It reaches out and hauls us back. It will not let us go." "Finally," said the sign-carrier, "here's a way to get shut of it. If these people from the future can travel to the past there's no reason why we shouldn't. There aren't many people who would be sorry to see us go. Most of them would be glad," "I suppose," said the newsman, "that this could be called a movement. Most of the other things you people have done have been labeled movements. Would you mind telling me how many of you -- " "Not at all," said the first girl. "Not more than fifteen or twenty of us now. But you write your story and let us get a news spot on television and there'll be thousands of us. They'll be coming from Chicago and New York, from Boston and Los Angeles. There'll be more of us than this town can hold. Because, you see, this is the first real chance we've had to get away." "That's ail right," the newsman said. "I can see your point. But how do you go about it? Storm across the street and pound on the White House door?" "If you mean," said the sign-carrier, "that no one will pay attention to us, you may be right.'But twenty-four hours from now they'll pay attention to us Forty-eight hours from now they'll be out here in the street talking with us." "But you realize, of course, there are no time tunnels yet. There may never be. Those will take materials and manpower." "They got their manpower right here, mister. All anyone has got to do is ask. Hand us picks and shovels. Hand us wrenches. Hand us anything at all and tell us what to do. We'll work until we drop. We'll do anything to get away from here. We don't want any pay for working -- we don't want anything at all except to be allowed to go." "You tell them that," said the second girl. "You put it just the way we say." "We're not out to kick up any trouble," said the sign-carrier. "We don't want to cause any fuss. We just want to let them know. This is the only way we can." "We won't ask anything if they'll only let us leave," said the first girl. "We would like some hoes and axes, maybe some pots and pans. But if they won't give us anything we'll go empty-handed." "Prehistoric men. made out with stone," said the sign-carrier. "If we have to we can do the same." "Why stand there listening to them?" asked a burly individual with a cigar stuck in his mouth. "Hell, all they do is talk. They all are full, of crap. They don't want to go anywhere. They just want to stir up trouble." "You're wrong," said the man with the sign. "We mean exactly what we say. What makes you think we want to stay here with jerks like you?" The man with the cigar made a grab at the sign and one of the girls kicked him in the shin. His reaching fingers missed the sign. The carrier clunked him on the head with it. A man who had been standing beside the man with the cigar hit the sign-carrier on the jaw. The scuffle exploded and the police came in and broke it up. #  Judy was 'at her desk. Notes were beginning to accumulate on the spindle. The lights on the console were blinking. "You get any sleep?" asked Wilson. She looked up at him. "A little. IF I lay awake thinking, scared. It's not good, is it, Steve?" "Not good," he said. "It's too big for us to handle. If it weren't for the time element it wouldn't be so bad. If we only had a little time." She gestured toward the door leading to the lounge. "You won't tell them that, will you?" He grinned. "No, I won't tell them that." "They've been asking when you're going to see them." "Fairly soon," he said. "I might as well tell you," she said. "No use waiting. I'm going home. Back to Ohio." "But I need you here." "You can get a girl from the secretarial pool. Couple of days and you won't know the difference." "That's not what I mean." "I know what you mean. You need me to shack up with. It's been like that for how long -- six months? It's this damn town. It makes everything dirty. Somewhere else it might have worked for us. But it isn't working here." "Damn it, Judy," he said, "what's got into you? Because I didn't come out last night -- " "Partly that, perhaps. Not all that, of course. I  know why you had to stay. But it was so lonely and so many things had happened and I sat there thinking and got scared. I tried to call my mother and the lines were busy. A poor scared girl, for Christ's sake, running back to mama. But suddenly everything was different. I wasn't a sleek, competent Washington hussy any longer -- I was a kid in pigtails in a little town deep in Ohio. It all started with my getting scared. Tell me honestly now -- I had a right to be scared." "You had a right, v he said soberly. "I'm scared myself. So is everyone." "What's going to happen to us?" "Damned if I know. But that isn't what we were talking about." "Monsters running loose," she said. "Too many mouths to feed. Everyone fighting one another or getting set to fight." "We were talking about your going to Ohio. I'm not going to ask you do you really mean it -- because I know you do. I suppose you're lucky to have a place to run to. Most of us have no place. I'd like to ask you to stay, but that would be unfair. What's more, it would be selfish. But I still wish you would." "I have a plane reservation," she said. "With the phone tied up and all I was surprised to get one. The country's in a panic. In a time like this you get that terribly helpless feeling." "You won't like Ohio. Once you get there you won't like it. If you're scared in Washington, you'll be scared in Ohio." "I still am going, Steve. Come six-fifteen tonight I'll be on that plane." "There's nothing I can say?" "There's nothing you can say," she said. "Then you'd better let the press in. I have some news for them." # . Senator Andrew Oakes hitched himself up slightly from the depths of the chair. "I'm not right sure, Mr. President," he said, "that it's wise to bring home all the troops. We need to keep our bases manned. And it seems to me we're allowing ourselves to get flustered just a mite too soon. Some itty-bitty monsters raid a chicken coop out in West Virginia and we start bringing home the troops. It don't scarcely seem right. And I'm not sure it was too smart, either, to tell the newsmen about these little monsters. We'll get the country all up tight." "Senator," said Congressman Nelson Able, "I think you may have gotten your protocol somewhat twisted. We were not invited here to decide whether the troops were to be brought back home, but rather to learn that they were being brought back and to be told the reason for it." "I still believe, said Senator Oakes, "that President Henderson would want to know our thoughts. He might not agree with them, but I think that he should hear them. "That's right, Andy," said the President. "You know that through the years I have listened to you often and almost as often have been fascinated by what you had to say. Which is not to say I agreed with you. Most commonly I don't." "I am well aware of that," said Oakes, "but it has not stopped me from saying what I think. And I think it's plain damn foolishness to fly back the troops. It's not going to take the total strength of our military might to run down some "I think the point has been made," said Senator Brian Dixon, "that the monsters will not stay little monsters. The only sensible way for us to tackle them is to run them down before there get to be any more of them and before they have a chance to grow," "But how do we know," persisted Oakes, "that they will really grow or increase in numbers? We're taking the word of people who came scurrying back to us because they couldn't face them. And IF they couldn't face them because they had let down their guard. They had no military and they had no weapons -- " "Now, just a minute. Senator," protested Congressman Able. "It's all right for you to make your military speeches up on the Hill. You get a good press there and can impress the public...But this is just among ourselves. We won't be impressed." "Gentlemen," Henderson said, "as I see it, this is all beside the point. With all due deference to the Senator, the military will be brought back home. I # will be brought home because the secretary of defense and the chiefs of staff have told me the forces are needed here. We discussed matters very thoroughly earlier in the day. The feeling was that we cannot take the chance of anything going wrong. We may be aiming at overkill, but that is better than negligence. It may be true that we have been given poor information by the people from the future, but I am not inclined to think so. They have faced the monsters for twenty years and it seems to me that they would know far more of them than we do. I have talked with members of the Academy of Sciences and they tell me that while the characteristics attributed to this life form may be unusual they do not go contrary to any established biological rule. So I don't think you can say there has been any lack of responsibility in the reaching of our decisions. Because of the press of circumstances we have moved faster than we ordinarily would, but we simply haven't got the time to go at any of this with due deliberation." Oakes did not reply, but settled back in his chair, grunting softly to himself. "There was a report of a monster loose in the Congo," said Congressman Wayne Smith. "Have you, sir, any further information?" "None," Henderson said. "We can't be sure one did get through. The reports are unreliable." "There has been no request for aid to hunt it down?" "No request," said the President. "Nothing official at all." "How about the tunnels, sir? The news reports seem to be in some conflict. Some of them, we know, have closed, but I can't seem to get a clear idea of what is going on." "You probably know as much as we do here, Wayne. Here at home the Virginia tunnel is closed, of course. Two more were closed without our intervention -- one in Wisconsin, the other down in Texas. I suppose those were shut down by the people in the future when the monsters were moving too close. Either that or there were malfunctions. Otherwise all the tunnels in the United States still are operating." ' "Would you think that the two you mentioned as closing may have done so because all the people had come through? There has to be an end to all these people some time." "We know the Wisconsin tunnel closed because of an attack at the other end. The last of the people who came through told us that. I' don't know about the Texas closing. But as to the implied question of all the people having come through -- yes, I would hope that soon the tunnels would start closing because they've done their job." "Mr. President," asked Senator Dixon, "what do you know about the practical side of tunnel building? Can we build the tunnels so the people can go back into the past?" "I am told we can," said the President. "Our physicists and engineers are working with refugee scientists and engineers right now. The refugees have picked out the sites where the tunnels should be built. One encouraging feature is that not as many tunnels need be built as were used in bringing these people here. There isn't the immediate time pressure to get them all back into the Miocene. Also, as I understand it, transportation can be used to get the people to tunnels several hundred miles away. The one problem is getting some tunnels built and the people moving out before the refugees eat us out of house and home." "The construction of the tunnels, then, isn't beyond our capability? All we need is time, money and labor." "That is right, Brian. Labor is no problem. The refugees repreand just an hour or so ago I had word from Terry Roberts that our labor peple will raise no objection to our using them on what must be viewed as a federal project. Terry assures me that unions will cooperate in every way. Money is a problem. Even should industry be labor is a vast amount of retooling will be necessary before we can start fabricating the components for the tunnels. Ordinarily retooling is a time-consuming process and a costly one. The fact that we must get at it immediately and around the clock makes it expensive beyond anything that IF can be imagined. Next, the components themselves will be costly items. And the brunt of the work must be borne by the predominantly industrial nations. We, Germany, Russia, France, Britain, China, Japan and a few others must build the components -- not only for ourselves but for the rest of the world. And we must build enough tunnels for there to be a fairly consistent regional distribution when they go back to the Miocene. While the population of the future is not as great as ours, it still must be scattered. The building of a new civilization in the past would be defeated if we dumped too many people in one area. And we must also furnish the refugees with the tools, livestock and seed they will need to make a new beginning. Furnishing the tools is going to call for a significant industrial capacity' "Have you talked with anyone in the industrial community?" "Not personally. Commerce is making some tentative approaches to see what sort of reaction is forthcoming. I have no word as yet. But it seems to me there should be some positive reaction. I should be disappointed if there weren't." Oakes hunched up out of his chair. "Have you any idea yet, Mr. President, what all of this might cost? Any good round figure?" "No," Henderson said, "I haven't." "But it's going to be costly." "It is going to be costly." "Maybe a great deal more than the defense budget, which everyone seems so horrified about." "You want me to say it, of course -- " Henderson smiled -- "so I will. Yes, it is going to be more costly than the defense budget, many times more costly. It will be even more costly than a war. It may bankrupt the world -- but what would you have us do? Go out and shoot down all the refugees? That would solve the problem. Is that a solution you would like?" Grumbling, Oakes let himself sink back into the chair. "One thing has occurred to me," said Able. "There is the possibility that no matter what it costs us we may get value received. The refugees come from a time period where many technological problems have been worked out, new approaches have been developed. One thing that has been mentioned is fusion power. We are nowhere near that yet -- it may take us years to get there. For us fusion power would be a great leap forward. I would assume that, in return for what we propose to do for us with the basics of their technological advances." "It would ruin us," Oakes said wrathfully. "It would finish up the job they've started. Take fusion power -- there, gentlemen, in the twinkling of an eye, the gas and oil and coal industries go down the drain." "And," said Able, "I suppose the medical profession as well -- if these people could give us the cure for cancer." Dixon said, "What the Congressman says is true. If we had the advantages of all their scientific and technological advances -- perhaps their social and political advances -- we would be much better off than we are today. To whom, I wonder, would the new knowledge and principles belong? To the man who was able to acquire the information by whatever means? Or to his government? Or to the world at large? And if the last -- how would the information be handled or implemented? It seems to me that at best we would have many thorny problems to work out." Congressman Smith put in, "This is all speculation. Right now, it seems to me, we have two immediate problems. We have to dispose of the aliens and do whatever is possible to send our guests back to the Miocene. Is this the way you read it, Mr. President?" "Exactly," Henderson said. "I understand, Oakes rumbled, "that the Russian ambassador is coming over to have a pow-wow with you." "You were not supposed to know that, Andy." "Well, you know how it is, Mr. President. You stay up on the Hill long enough and you get a lot of pipelines. You get told things. Even what you're not supposed to know." "The ambassador's visit is no secret," Henderson said. "I have no idea why he's coming, but we are trying to work closely with everyone. I have had phone conversations with a number of heads of state. I take it that the ambassador's visit is no more than an extension of these talks." "Perhaps," said Oakes. "Perhaps. I just tend to get a mite nervous when the Russians become too interested in anything at all." # . There was something in the hazel thicket at the edge of the tiny cornfield -- a vague sense of a presence, a tantalizing outline that never quite revealed itself. Something lurked there, waiting. Sergeant Gordy Clark was quite sure of that. Just how he knew he IF could not be sure. But he was sure -- or almost sure. Some instinct born out of hundreds of patrols into enemy country, something gained through the sharp, hard objectivity that was necessary for an old soldier to keep himself alive while others died -- something that he or no one else could define told him there was a lurker in the thicket. He lay silent, almost unbreathing, stretched out on the little ridge that rose above the cornfield, his rocket launcher steadied on an ancient, rotted log and the crosshairs centered on the thicket. It could be a dog, he told himself, or a child, perhaps even nothing -- but he could not bring himself to think it was nothing. The drooping sumac bush bent close above him, shielding him from the view of whatever might be in the thicket. He could hear the faint mutter of the mountain brook that ran just beyond the cornfield. And from the hollow between the hills, where the farm buildings were located, came the senseless cackling of a hen. There was no sign of any other member of the patrol. He knew several of them must be close, but they were being careful not to betray their presence. They were regulars, every one of them, and they knew their business. They could move through these woods like shadows. They would make no noise, disturb no bush or branch. The sergeant smiled grimly to himself. They were good men. He had trained them all. The captain thought himself the one who had trained them, but it had not been the captain. Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark had beaten their business into these men. They all hated him, of course, and he wanted it no other way. For out of hatred could sometimes come respect. Fear or respect, he thought -- either one would serve. There were some, perhaps, who had cherished the fantasy of putting a bullet through his skull. They must have had opportunities, but they had never done it. For they needed him, the sergeant told himself -- although not really him, of course, but the hatred they had for him. There was nothing like a good strong hatred to hold a man together. The farmer at the buildings in the hollow thought he had seen something. He couldn't tell what it was, but it had been pretty awful from the glimpse he had gotten of it. A kind of thing he had never seen before. Something no man could imagine. The farmer had shivered as he talked. The thing in the thicket came out so fast that it seemed to blur. Then, as quickly as it had moved, it stopped. It stood in the little open space of ground between the thicket and the com. Sergeant Clark caught his breath and his guts turned over, but even so he moved the launcher to center the cross-hairs on the creature's great paunch and his finger began the steady squeeze. Then it was gone. The .crosshairs centered on nothing except the ragged clump of brush beyond the cornfield's edge. Clark didn't stir. He lay looking through the sight, but his finger slacked off the trigger. The monster had not moved. He was sure of that. It had simply disappeared. One microsecond there -- the next, gone. Nothing could move that fast. Sergeant Clark raised his head, levered himself to his knees. He wiped his face and was astonished to find that his hand came away greasy wet. He had not been aware that he was sweating. #. Fyodor Morozov was a good diplomat and a decent man, the two not being incompatible, and he hated what he had to do. Besides, he told himself, he knew Americans and his present errand simply would not work. It would, of course, embarrass them and point out their sins for all the world to see and, under ordinary circumstances, he would not have been averse to this. But under present conditions, he knew, the Americans were in no position to observe the niceties of diplomatic games and there was no way to gauge reactions. The President was waiting for him when he was ushered in and beside Henderson as was to be expected, stood Secretary of State open blandness, but Thornton somewhat puzzled man, although he was doing an excellent job of hiding what he felt. When they had "shaken hands and sat down the President opened the conversation. "It's always good to see you, Mr. Ambassador," he said, "for any reason -- or even for no reason. But tell me, is there something we can do for you?" "My government," said Fyodor, "has asked me to confer with your government -- as unofficially as our official positions can make possible -- concerning a matter of security I would assume is of some concern to both of us -- in fact, to everyone." He paused and they waited for him to go on. They did not respond -- they asked no questions. They were no help at all. IF "It is the matter," he said, "of the alien creature that escaped from the Congo tunnel. There is no question that it must be hunted down. Since the Congo does not have sufficient military or police forces to accomplish this, my government is offering to supply some troops and we are about to sound out both Britain and France and perhaps other nations as well to determine if they might want to contribute to a joint expeditionary force against the monster." "Certainly, Ambassador Morernment does not feel compelled to seek our permission to embark on so neighborly an undertaking. I would imagine that you are prepared to make guarantees that you'll withdraw all forces after the alien has been taken." "Of course we are." "Then I fail to grasp your point." "There is also, said Fyodor, "the matter of the aliens -- or monsters -- on your own territory. We are. prepared to make the same offer to you as we will make the Congo." "You mean," said the President, amused, "that you would be forces to hunt down the aliens?" "We would go, I think," said the ambassador, "somewhat bewould think that, unless you can guarantee absolute effectiveness in containing and disposing of the creatures, we might possibly insist. This is not a national matter -- the international community is concerned. The invaders must be obliterated. If you can't accomplish this, then you must accept any help that's offered." "You know, of course," said home our troops." "I know that, Mr. Secretary, but the question is how quickly can you bring them home. Our military people estimate it will take you thirty days at least and that may not be fast enough. There also is the question of whether you have personnel enough to cover the required territory." The President said, "I can assure you that we appreciate your concern." "It is the position of my government," said Fyodor, "that many more men would be placed on the ground -- and more quickly -- if you accepted the aid we offer -- " "Mr. Ambassador," said the President, interrupting, "I am certain you know better than to come to us with such an impudent suggestion. Surely you are aware that if there had been genuine good will on the part of your government a different approach would have been employed. There is no question in my mind that the sole purpose of this call is to embarrass us. In that, of course, you've failed. We are not in the least embarrassed." "I am delighted that you're not," said Fyodor, unruffled. "We thought it was only the decent thing to approach you first in private." mean you now will bring the matter up before the U.N., where you'll seek to embarrass us in public." "You gentlemen," said the ambassador, "persist in placing a wrong interpretation on this matter. It is true, of course, that our countries have had their differences in the past. We have not always seen exactly eye to eye. Under present circumstances, however, the entire world needs to stand together. It is quite clear to us -- if not to you -- that solving the alien problem quickly is in the international interest and that it is your duty to accept such aid as may be needed. We should be reluctant to report to the United Nations that you neglect your duty." "We would not attempt," said you might tell the U.N." '"If you should decide to accept our offer," said the ambassador, "it would be agreeable to us to leave the initiative with you. If you should ask other nations -- perhaps Canada, Britain, France and us -- to supply the additional forces that you need nothing has to be said about this conversation." "I suppose," Henderson said, "you will want to relay an answer to your government." "We would imagine you might want to deliberate on its nature. The U.N. does not meet until tomorrow noon." "And if we asked some of our friends among the community of nations to supply us troops and did not include your government among them you would be offended?" "I cannot answer that with any surety -- but I would presume we might be." "that all of this is no more than official mischief-making. I have known you for some years and have held a high regard for you. You have been here among us for three years -- or is it four? -- and surely you have grown to know us in that length of time. I think that your heart may not be entirely in these proceedings." IF Fyodor Morozov rose slowly to his feet. "I have delivered the message from my government," he said. "Thank you both for seeing me." # . In New York, Chicago and Atlanta, mobs hurled themselves against police lines. The signs read: we didn't ask them to come. They read: we have little enough as it is. They read: we refuse to starve. The crowds threw stones, bricks, tin cans battered into tin shinny pucks with cutting edges, plastic bags filled with garbage. The ghetto areas roiled with violence. Some died -- many were injured. Bonfires were kindled. Houses burned and when fire rigs tried to reach the blazes they were stopped by barricades. Great areas were given over to looting. In little towns throughout the country grim-faced men talked on benches in front of general stores, street corners, at coffee breaks in the corner drug store and while waiting their turns in barber shops. They said to one another: It don't seem right, somehow. It don't seem possible. It ain't like the old days, when you knew what was going on. There ain't no telling these days what will happen next. Too much is new-fangled now. The old days are going fast. There is nothing left for a man to hang to. They said judiciously: Of course if it is the way they say, we got to do our best for them. You heard the President say it last night. Children of our children. That's what he said. Although I don't know how we're going to do it. Not with taxes what they are. We can't pay no more taxes, and them tunnels are about to cost a mint. Taxes on everything you buy. On everything you do. On everything you own. Seems no matter how hard a man may scratch he can't keep ahead of taxes. They said sanctimoniously: That preacher down in Nashville hit it on the head. If a man loses his religion he has lost everything worthwhile. He has nothing left to live for. You lose the Good Book and you have lost it all. It don?t seem possible that even in five hundred years men would have given up their God. It's the evil in the world today, right now, that's made it possible. It's big-city living. The meanness of it. Out here you could never lose your God. No, sir, He's with you all the time. You feel Him in the wind. You see Him in the color of the eastern sky just before the break of dawn. You sense Him in the hush of evening. I feel sorry for these people from the future. I do feel purely sorry for them. They don't know what they lost. They said angrily of the riots: Ought to shoot them down. I wouldn't fool around with stuff like that. Not for a minute would I. Those people, some of them, ain't' never done a lick of work in their entire lives. They just stand there with their hands out. You can't tell me, if a man really wants to work -- or a woman either -- he or she can't find a job. Out here we scratch and dig and sweat and we get next to nothing, but we don't riot, we don't burn, we don't stand with hands out. They said of the young people with the signs in Lafayette Park: If they want to go to the Miocene or whatever this place is, why don't we let them go? We won't never miss them. We would be better off without them. The village banker said with ponderous judiciousness: Mark my word, we'll be lucky if these future folks don't ruin the entire country. Yes, sir, the entire country -- maybe the entire world. The dollar will be worth nothing and prices will go up. And inevitably some got around to whispering their blackest thoughts: You just wait and see. It's a Commie plot, I tell you. A dirty Commie plot. I don't know how they worked it, but when the wash comes out we'll find these Russians at the bottom of it. There was marching in the land, a surge toward Washington by hitch-hiking, by bus, by old beatup clunkers. An inward streaming of the counter-cultural young. Some of them reached the city before the fall of night and marched with banners saying back to the through the night or rested briefly in haystacks or on park benches, wolfing hamburgers, seeking out alliances, talking in hushed tones around campfires. In the streets of Washington bands formed around young men staggering under the weight of heavy crosses, stumbling and falling, staggering up again to continue on their way. Some wore crowns of thorns, blood trickling down their foreheads. Late in the afternoon a furious fight broke out in Lafayette Park when an indignant crowd, among them many of the hopefully Miocene-bound youngsters, moved to stop a crucifixion, with the victim already lashed to the cross and the hole half dug for its planting. Police charged in and after a bloody fifteen minutes cleared the park. When this was over four IF crudely fashioned crosses were gathered up and carted off. "These kids are crazy," said one panting officer. "I wouldn't give you a dime for the whole lot of them." Senator Andrew Oakes phoned Grant Wellington. "Now is the time," he said in a conspiratorial voice, "to lie low. Don't say a word. Don't even look as if you were interested. The situation, you might say, is fluid. Nothing is set. No one knows which way the cat will jump. But something is going on. The Russian was at the White House this morning and that bodes no good for anyone. Something we don't understand is very much afoot." Clinton Chapman phoned Reilly Douglas. "You know anything, Reilly?" "Nothing except that there really is time travel and we have the blueprints for it." "You have seen the blueprints?" "No, I haven't. It's all under wraps. No one is saying anything. The scientists who talked with the future people aren't talking." "But you -- " "I know, Clint. I'm the attorney general, but, hell, in a thing like this that doesn't count for anything. This is top secret. A few of the Academy crowd are in on it and that is all. Not even the military -- and even if the military wanted it I have my doubts -- " "But they have to let someone know. You can't build a thing until you know how. "The blueprints show how to build it, but that's all. Not what it really is. Not how it works. Not why it works. Not the principle." "What the hell difference does that make?" "I should think it would make some," said Douglas. "I, personally, would be distrustful of building something I didn't understand." "You say it is time travel. No doubt of that? It really is time travel # ? I " "No doubt at all," said Douglas. "Then there's a mint in it," said Chapman, "and I mean to -- " "But if it only works one way." "It has to work both ways," said Chapman. "That's what my people tell me." "It will take a lot of financing," said Douglas. "I've talked to a lot of people," said Chapman. "People I can trust. They are interested. They see the possibilities. There'll be no lack of funds if we can put it through." Judy Gray got on the plane and found her seat. She looked out through the window, saw the scurrying trucks mistily and quickly put up a hand to wipe her eyes. She said to herself, almost lovingly, through clenched teeth, "The son of a bitch. The dirty son of a bitch!" # . Tom Manning spoke guardedly into the phone. "Steve, I have been hearing things." "Put them on the wire, Tom," said Wilson. "That's why you are there. Put them on the wire for the glory days of dear old Global News." "Now," said Manning, "that you've had occasion to show off your shallow sense of humor, shall we get down to business?" "If this is a ploy," said Wilson, "to trick me into confirmation of some rumor you have heard -- you know it won't work." "You know me better than that, Steve." "That's the trouble. I do know you." "All right, then," said Manning, "if that's the way of it let's start at the beginning. The President had the Russian ambassador in this morning -- " "The President didn't have him in. He came in on his own. The ambassador made a statement to the press. You know about that." "Sure, we know what the ambassador said and what you said in this afternoon's briefing, which, I might say, added very little light to the situation. But no one in town, no one in his right mind, that is, buys what either of you said." "I'm sorry about that, Tom. I told all I knew." "Okay," said Manning. "I'll take your word for that. It's just possible that you weren't told. But there's a very nasty story being whispered at the U.N. in New York. At least it was whispered to our man there. I don't know how much farther it has gone. Our man didn't put it on the wire. He phoned me and I told him to hold it until I talked with you." "I don't have the least idea, Tom, ofwhat you're talking about. I had honestly assumed the ambassador told all that could be told. There have been some conversations with Moscow and it sounded reasonable. The President didn't tell me differently. We mentioned it, I guess, but we didn't talk about it. There were so many other things." "All right, then," said Manning, "here's the stoYy as I heard it. the President and offered troops to help hunt down the monsters and the offer was rejected." "Tom, how good is your source? How sure are you of this?" IF "Not sure at all. It's what our man at the U.N. was told this afternoon' "You're talking about Max Hale. He's your man up there." "One of the best," said Manning. "He's fairly good at sorting out the truth." "Yes, he is. I remember him from Chicago days." "Hale's informant told him that tomorrow the U.N. will be told of our refusal and a demand will be made that we be forced to admit troops from other nations. It'll be said that we are negligent in not accepting them." "The old squeeze play," said Wilson. "And that's not all of it. If other troops are not accepted and the aliens can't he controlled -- then, the U.N. will be told, the entire area must be nuclearly destroyed. The world can't take chances." "Wait a minute," said Wilson, quickly. "You're not putting this on the wires, you say?" "Not yet. Probably never. I hope never. That's the reason I phoned. If Hale heard it there's a likelihood someone else will hear it and, sure as God, it will get on a wire or be published somewhere." "There's no truth in it," said Wilson. "I am sure of it. Christ, we're all in this together. For the moment political power plays must be set aside. Tom, I simply can't believe this hearsay." "You know nothing of this? Of any of it? There hasn't been a breath?" "Not a breath," said Wilson. "You know," said Manning, "I wouldn't have your job, Steve. Not "You'll hold off, Tom. You'll give us a little time to check." "Of course. Until the pressure gets too great. Until someone else... I'll let you know." "Thanks, Tom. Some day -- " "Some day, when this is all over," said Manning, "we'll go off into some dark corner in an obscure bar where no one can possibly find us and we'll hang one on." "I'll stand the drinks," said Wilson. He sat slumped after hanging up. Just when another day was about to end, he thought. But, hell, some days never ended. They just kept on and on. Yesterday and today had not been two days, but a nightmare-haunted eternity that seemed, when one thought of it, to have no reality at all. Judy gone. Kids marching in the street. The business community bitching because it was prevented from using the economic disruption to go out thumping preachers hell-bent to monsters running in the hills and the future still emptying its humanity upon this moment in the time track. His eyelids slid down and stuck and he forced himself erect. He had to get some sleep tonight -- he had to find the time to get some sleep. Mqybe Judy had had the right idea. Just get up and walk away from it. Although, he told himself quite honestly, there still remained the question of what she'd walked away from. He missed her -- she had been gone no more than an hour or two and he was missing her. Quite suddenly he realized he'd been missing her all day. Even while she still had been here, be had been missing her. Maybe, he thought, he should have asked her once again to stay, but there hadn't been time and he hadn't known how to do it -- at least how to do it gracefully. And you did things gracefully or you did them not at all. More than likely, had he known, she wouldn't have listened to him. He picked up the phone. "Kim, you still there? I'll need to see the President. It is rather urgent. The first chance you have to squeeze me in." "It may be some time, Steve," she said. "There is a cabinet meeting." #  Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark said to Colonel Eugene Dawson, "I had it in my sights and then it wasn't there. It disappeared. It went away. I'm sure it didn't move. Like a cartoonist drawing something moving fast, lettering in a swish, but this was without a swish. When it disappeared there wasn't any motion. The first time I could see movement. But not when I had it in my sights. It didn't move then. It didn't blur." "It saw you, Sergeant," said the colonel. "I would think not, sir. I was well hidden. I kept still. I shifted the launcher barrel a couple of inches to aim it. That was all." "It saw one of your men, then. It must have." "Sir, I trained all those men myself. No one sees them -- no one hears them." "It saw something or heard something. It sensed danger and disappeared. You're sure about this disappearance, Sergeant? Absolutely?" 'Colonel, I am sure." Dawson was sitting on a fallen log. He reached down and picked up a small twig from the duff of the forest floor, began breaking it and rebreaking it. Clark squatted to one side, leaning on the launcher. IF "Seargent," Dawson said, "I don't know what the hell we're going to do about all this. I don't know what the army's going to do. You find one of these things and before you can whap it, it is gone. We can handle them. I am sure of that. Even when they get big and rough and mean, like the people from the future say they will, we still can handle them. We've got the firepower. We have the sophistication. If they'd line up and come at us we could clobber them. But not when they're trying to keep clear of us and not in this kind of terrain. We could bomb ten thousand acres flat and get maybe one of them. God knows what else we'd kill, including people. We haven't the time or manpower to evacuate the people so that we can bomb. We've got to hunt these damned beasts down one by one -- " "But even when we hunt them down, sir -- " "Yes, I know." "Sir," said Sergeant Clark, "This is worse than Vietnam ever was. And Vietnam was hairy." The colonel stood up. "Nothing has ever beaten us all the way. These aliens won't either. But we have to find out how to kill them. All the firepower in the world, all the sophistication in the world is of no use until you can find something to aim at long enough to pull the trigger." Sergeant Clark rose to his feet, tucked the launcher under his arm. "Well, back to work," he said. "Have you seen a photographer around here?" "A photographer? What photographer. I ain't seen no photographer." "His name was Price. With some press association. He was messing around. I put the run on him." "If I happen onto him," Sergeant Clark said, "I'll tie his tail in a knot." conference with Ray MacDonald, formerly his assistant public relations manager, who had been appointed within the last twelve hours to the post of crusade operations chief. "I really do not think, Ray," crucifixion will advance our cause. It strikes me as being rather crude and it could backlash. As one paper had to say of the attempt at Washington -- " "You mean someone has already gotten around to editorializing about it?" "The reaction has not been customed heat. "The editorial called it a cheap trick and a pantywaisted effort. The editorial became facetious in tone as it described the use of thongs, rather than nails in fastening the young man to the cross." "But they were wrong," MacDonald said. "You mean that you used nails?" "No. What I'm saying is that ordinarily the arms are tied, not nailed to the cross. We did some research on it -- " "Your research is no concern "What I do care about is that you gave some smart-assed editorial writer a chance to poke fun at us. And in any case, I think the whole idea of a fake crucifixion stinks. You didn't check with me. How come you didn't check with me?" "You were busy, Jake. You told me to do my best. You told me I was the man who could come up with ideas and I did come up with ideas. I ' "I also had a call from Steve chewed me out. There is no doubt that official Washington -- the White House at least -- is solidly against us. When he gets around to it, Wilson will publicly brand us sensationalists. He brushed us off contemptuously in his press briefing this afternoon. That was before this silly crucifixion business. Next time around he'll blast us." "But we have a lot of people with us. You go out to the countryside, to the little towns -- " "Yes, I know. The rednecks. They'll be for us, sure, but how long do you think it will take before their opinion can have any impact? What about the influential pastors in the big city churches? Can you imagine what the Reverend Dr. Angus Windsor will tell his congregation and the newspapers and the world? He won't go along with solemn young men packing crosses through the street and getting crucified on a public square. For years I have tried to conduct my ministry with dignity and now it's been pulled down to the level of street brawling." MacDonald protested. "We've used stunts before. Circus stuff. Show biz. They're what you built the business on." "But with restraint." "Not too much restraint. Skywriting and parades and miles of billboards -- " "Legitimate advertising," said great American tradition. The mistake you made was to go out in the streets. You don't know about the streets. You ran up against the IF experts there. These Miocene kids know about the streets. They have been there -- and have lived there. You had two strikes on you before you started out. What made you think you could compete with them?" "All right, then -- what are we going to do? The streets are out, you say. So we pull off the streets. Then what do we do? How do we get attention?" the wall through glassy eyes. "I don't know," he said. "I purely do not know. I don't think it makes much difference what we do. I think that gurgling noise you hear is our crusade going down the drain." # . It was the dog that did it. Bentley Price hadn't had a drink all day. The road was narrow, winding across the mountain, and Bentley, exasperated beyond endurance at what had happened to him, was driving faster than he should. After hours of hunting for it, he had finally found the army camp -- a temporary stopping point by the looks of it, with none of the meticulous neatness of the military. It huddled in a dense patch of woods beside a stream that came brawling down the valley. Filled with a deep sense of duty done and perseverance paying off, Bentley had slung cameras around his neck and plodded toward the largest of the tents. The colonel had come out to stop his further progress. Who the hell are you, the colonel had asked, and where do you think you're going? I'm from Global News. Bentley had told him, and I am out here to take some pictures of this monster hunt. I tell the city editor it isn't worth the time, but he disagrees with me and it's no skin off my nose no matter where I'm sent, so leave us get the lead out and do some monster hunting so I can' get some pictures. You're off limits, mister, the colonel had told him. You are way off limits, in more ways than one. I don't know how you got this far. Didn't someone try to stop you? Sure, said Bentley, up the road a ways. A couple of soldier boys. But I pay no attention to them. I never pay attention to someone who tries to stop me. I got work to do and I can't fool around. And then the colonel had thrown him out of there. He had spoken in a clipped, military voice and hrad been very icy-eyed. We've got trouble enough, he said, without some damn fool photographer mucking around and screwing up the detail. If you don't leave under your own power I'll have you escorted out. While he was saying ' this, Bentley snapped up a camera and took a picture of him. That made the situation even worse and Bentley, with his usual quick perception, could see his cause had failed. He had beaten a dignified retreat to avoid escort. Some of the soldiers had called out to him derisively. Bentley had slowed down momentarily, debating whether to go back and reason with them, then had thought better of it. They ain't worth the time, he had told himself. Now the dog. The dog came bursting out of high weeds and brush that grew along the road. Its ears were laid back. Its tail was tucked in and it was kiyodeling in pure, blind panic. The dog was close and Bentley was traveling much too fast. He jerked the wheel. The car veered off the road, smashed through a clump of brush. The tires screamed as Bentley hit the brakes. The nose of the car slammed hard into a huge walnut tree and stopped with a shuddering impact. The lefthand door flew open and Bentley, who held a lofty disdain for such copouts as seat belts, was thrown free. The camera he wore on a strap around his neck described a short arc and brought up against his ear, dealing him a blow that made his head ring as if there were a bell inside it. He landed on his back and rolled, wound up on hands and knees. He surged erect and found that he had ended up on the berm of the road. Standing in the middle of the road was a monster. Bentley recognized it -- he had seen two of them only yesterday. But this one was small, no bigger than a Shetland pony. Which did not mean the horror of it was any less. But Bentley was of different fiber than were other men. He did not gulp. His gut did not turn over. His hands came up with swift precision, grabbed the camera firmly, brought it to his eye. The monster was framed in the finder and his finger pressed the button. The camera clicked and as it clicked the monster disappeared. Bentley lowered the camera and let loose of it. His head still rang from the blow upon the ear. His clothes were torn -- a gaping rent in a trouser leg revealed one knobby knee. His right hand was bloody from where his palm had scraped across some gravel. Behind him the car creaked slightly as twisted metal settled slowly into place. The motor pinged and'sizzled as water from the broken radiator ran across hot metal. Off in the distance the still-running dog was yipping frantically. In a tree up the hillside an excited squirrel chattered with machineIF gun intensity. The road was em#ty. A monster had been there. From where he stood Bentley could see its tracks printed in the dust. But it was no longer there. He limped out into the road, stared up and down it. There was nothing on the road. It was there, Bentley said stubbornly to himself. I had it in the finder. It was there when I shot the picture. It wasn't until the shutter clicked that it disappeared. Doubt assailed him. Had the beast been there or not when he'd shot the picture? Was it on the film? Had he been robbed of a photo by the animal's disappearance? Thinking about it, it seemed to him that the monster had been in his viewfinder when he triggered the camera, but suddenly he could not be sure. He turned about and started limping down the road as rapidly as he could. There was one way to find out. He had to get to a phone, get another car. He must get back to Washington. # . "We have made three contacts with the monsters," Sandburg said. "There are yet to be results. No one has had a chance to fire at them. They simply vanish." "You mean," said Thornton when threatened. Some people have made more permanent contact." "No, I don't mean that they duck," Sandburg said. "They just cease to be there. The soldiers who saw them swore they didn't move at all. They were there and then they weren't The observers, all reporting independently, not knowing of the other reports, have made identical statements. One man could be wrong in his observation -- it's possible that two could be. It seems impossible that three observers could err on exactly the same point." "Have you, has the military, any theory, any idea of what is going on?" "None," said Sandburg. "It must be a new defensive adaptation that they have developed. These creatures are fighting for survival. Cornered, I suppose that they would fight, but only if they had no way out. And apparently they have come up with something new. We have talked with Dr. Isaac Wolfe, the refugee biologist who probably knows more about these aliens than any other man -- and this business is something he has never heard of. He suggests, simply as a guess, that the vanishing act may be only a juvenile capability -- defense mechanism for the young. It may have gone unobserved until now because Dr. Wolfe and his people have had little opportunity to observe the juveniles -- they had their hands full fighting off the adult aliens." "How are you doing with getting men into the area?" asked the President. "I haven't any figures," said Sandburg, "but we're piling them in as fast as we can move them. The refugee camps have formed their own governing committees and that takes off some of the pressure, frees some troops. The agriculture and welfare agencies are handling transportation of food and other necessities to the refugees and that, too, has freed military personnel. We expect the first overseas transport planes to begin landing some time tonight and that will give us more men to work with." "Morozov was in this mornfer to supply us men. In fact, he rather insisted upon it. We, of course, rejected the offer. But it does raise a point. Should we, perhaps, ask for some assistance from Canada, perhaps Mexico, maybe Britain, France, Germany -- or from some of the other friendly powers?" "Possibly we could use some of their forces," said Sandburg. "I'd like to talk with the chiefs of staff and get their reactions. What we need, and haven't been able to manage, are some rather substantial forces for both north and south -- down in Georgia and in upstate New York. We should try to seal off the aliens' spread, if they are spreading -- and I suppose that is their intention. If we can contain them we can handle them." "If they stand still," said the President. "That is right," said Sandburg. "If they stand still." "Maybe we should move on to something else," Henderson suggested. "Reilly, I think you have something to report." "I'm not yet too solid on this," said Reilly Douglas, "but it's a matter that should be discussed. Frankly, I am inclined to think there may be a rather tricky legal question involved and I've had no chance to go into that aspect of it. Clinton Chapman came to see me last night. I think most of you know Clint." He looked around the table. Many of the men rtodded. "He came to me," said Douglas, "and since then has phoned three o four times and we had lunch today. I suppose some of you know that we were roommates at Harvard and have been IF friends ever since. I suppose that's why he contacted me. On his first approach he proposed that he -- himself -- would take over the building of the tunnels, financing the cost with no federal funds involved. In return he would continue in ownership of them once the future people had been transported back to the Miocene and would be licensed to operate them. Since then -- " "I can't quite understand why anyone would want to own them. What in the world could be done with them? The time force, or whatever it is, as I understand it, operates in only one direction -- into the past." Douglas shook his head. "Clint won't buy that. He has talked with his research people -- and the staff he has is probably one of the best in the world -- and they have assured him that if there is such a thing as time travel it can be made to operate both into the past and into the future. As a matter of fact, they tdld him it would seem easier to operate it forward than into the past because time's natural flow is into the future." breath. "I don't know," he said. "It has a dirty sound to it. Could we conscientiously turn over two-way travel through time -- if such travel were possible -- to any one man or any group of men? Think of the ways it could be used -- " "I talked to Clint about this at lunch," said Douglas. "I explained to him that any such operation, if it were possible, would have to be very strictly controlled. Commissions would have to be set up to formulate a code -- Congress would have to legislate. Not only that, but the code and the legislation would have to be worldwide -- there would have to be some international agreement and you can imagine how long that might take. Clint agreed to all of this, said he realized it would be necessary. The man is quite obsessed wjth the idea. As an old friend, I tried to talk him out of it, but he still insists he wants to go ahead. If he is allowed to do it, that is. At first he planned to finance it on his own -- but apparently he is beginning to realize the kind of money that would be involved. As I understand it, he is now very quietly trying to put together a consortium to take over the project." Sandburg frowned. "I would say no on impulse. The potentials would have to be studied closely." "There could be military applijust sure what they would be." "International agreements, with appropriate safeguards, would have to be set up to keep it from being used militarily," said the President. "And if these agreements should fail at any time in the future, I can't see that it would make much difference who held the license. National needs would always take precedence. No matter how it goes, rapid movement 'through time seems to be something we're stuck with. It's something we have to face -- and make the best of." "You favor Clint's proposal, Mr. President?" Douglas asked in some surprise. "When I talked with you -- " "I wouldn't go so far as to say I favored it," Henderson said... "But under the conditions we face it seems to me we should consider all possibilities or proposals. We are going to be hard pressed to find the kind of money or credit that is needed to build the tunnels. Not only we, but the world. Perhaps the rest of the world confronts more difficulties than we." "That brings us to another Chapman and his consortium are proposing to construct only the tunnels in the United States." "I don't know the extent of his plans," Douglas said. "I would guess that Chapman's consortium might include some foreign money. I can't see a country like the Congo or Portugal or Indonesia turning its back on someone who wants to build its tunnels. Other nations might be hesitant, but if we went along with the plan and a couple of the other major nations joined us -- say Germany or France -- most of the others would follow. Nobody would want to be left out." "This is going to cost a lot of money," Secretary of the Treasury Manfred Franklin put in. "Tunnels for the entire world "There are gamblers in the financial world," observed Ben Cunningham, of Agriculture. "But mostly theirs is what is known as smart money. Chapman must be fairly sure of his bets. Do you imagine he may know something we don't know?" Douglas shook his head. "I am inclined to think not. His RD people are good, but they're only theorizing that time travel has to be a two-way street. Practical application so far says no. But even that is the first new'jdea -- the first really . new idea with genuine technological and engineering potential -- that has come along in fifty years or more. Clint and his gang understandably want to get in on the ground floor." IF "is whether or not we should let them." "Much as we may regret to do so," said the President, "we may have to. Or word would be leaked to the public and you can imagine what the taxpayers' reaction would be. Frankly, gentlemen, we may Find ourselves in a position where opposing the consortium would be political suicide." "You don't seem to be too upset what acidly. "When you have been in politics as long as I, Thornton, you don't gag too easily at anything that comes up. You learn to be practical. There are times when you simply cannot take potshots at Santa Claus." "I still don't like it," said Williams. "Nor do #," said Sandburg. "Letting Chapman go ahead would be a solution," said Franklin. "Labor is ready to join us in the emergency. If the financial interests of the world would also go along -- which is actually what  would happen under this consortium setup -- our basics would be settled. We still have to feed the refugees, but I understand we can do that longer than we had thought at first. Supplying them with what they'll need to establish themselves in their new start can be done at a fraction of the tunnel costs. Someone will have to do some rather rapid planning to calculate how much of our manufacturing processes and resources will have to be converted for a time to the making of wheelbarrows, hoes, axes, plows and other similar items, but that's simply a matter of computer time. The job may pinch us a bit, but it can be done. The tunnels are the big challenge and Chapman's consortium will do the job there if we let them." "How about all those bannercarrying kids who say they want to go back in time?" asked Cunningham. "I say let them go. It would clear the streets of them and for a long time a lot of people have been yelling about population pressure. We may have the answer here." "You're being facetious, of course," said the President, "but -- " "I can assure you, sir. I'm not in the least facetious. I mean it." "And I agree with your main position," Henderson said. "My reasons may not be yours, but I do think we should not try to stop anyone who wants to leave us. But before we allow them to go they must have the same ecological sense and convictions the future people have. We can't send back people who'll use up the resources we already have used. That would make a paradox I don't pretend to understand, but I imagine it might be fatal to our civilization." "Who would teach them this ecological sense and conviction?" "The refugees. They don't all need to go back into the past immediately. In fact, they have offered to leave a group of specialists with us who will teach us much of the knowledge of the next five hundred years -- as much of it as we can assimilate. I think this offer should be accepted." "Some economic and social applecarts will be upset, but in the long run we should be way out in front. In twenty years or less we could jump five hundred years ahead -- without making the mistakes our descendants on the old world line made." "I don't know about that," said Douglas. "There are too many factors involved. I'd have to think about that for a while." "We are forgetting one thing," Sandburg said. "We can go ahead and plan, of course. And we have to do it fast. We have to be well along to a working solution in a month or so or time will begin running out. But the point I want to make is this -- the solution, the planning may do us little good if we aren't able to wipe out, or at least control, the aliens." # . The kids out in the street might be the ones, Wilson told himself, with the right idea. He could understand their fascination with the concept of starting over once again -- the slate wiped clean and the record clear. Only trouble was, he thought, that even starting over, the human race might still repeat many of its past mistakes -- perhaps in some different form. Then again, maybe not. It would take some time to make old errors and there would at least be the opportunity, if the will were there, to correct them before they got too big, too entrenched and awkward. Alice Gale had talked about a wilderness where the White House once had stood and Dr. Osborne, on the ride from Fort Myer to the White House, had expressed his doubt that the trend that had made the White House park a wilderness could be stopped -- it had gone too far, he had said. You are too top-heavy, hs had said -- you are off balance. Perhaps the trend had gone too far, Wilson admitted to himself -- big government ws growing bigger; big business was growIF ing fatter and more arrogant; taxes were steadily rising, never going down; the poor were becoming ever poorer and increasing in numbers despite the best intentions of a welfare-conscious society; the gap between the rich and poor, the government and the public was becoming wider by the year. How could it have been done differently, he wondered. Given the kind of world Earth was, how could circumstances have been better ordered? He shook his head. He had no idea. There might be men who could go back and chart the political, economic and social growth and show where the errors had been made, putting their fingers on certain actions in a certain year and saying here is where we made this error. But the men who could do this were theorists working on the basis of ideas, many of which could not stand the test of application. The phone on his desk rang and he picked it up. "Mr. Wilson?" "Yes." "This is the guard at the southwest gate. There is a gentleman here who says that he must see you on a matter of importance. Mr. Thomas Manning. Mr. Bentley Price is with him. Do you know them, sir?" "Yes. Please send them in." "I'll send an escort with them, sir. You'll be in your office?" "Yes. I'll wait here for them." Wilson dropped the receiver back into its cradle. What could bring Manning here? Why should he have to come in person? A matter of importance, he had said. And Bentley -- for the love of God, why Bentley? Was it, he wondered, something further about the U. N. business? He looked at his watch. The cabinet meeting was taking longer than he had thought it would. Maybe it was over and the President had become busy with other matters. Although that would be strange -- Kim ordinarily would have squeezed Steve in. Manning and Bentley came into the room. The guard stopped at the door. Wilson nodded at him. "It's all right. You can wait outside. This is an unexpected pleasure," he said to the two, shaking their hands. "I seldom see you, Tom. And Bentley. I almost never see you." "I got business elsewhere," Bentley said. "I get my legs run off. I'm running all the time." "Bentley just got in from West Virginia," Manning said. "That's what this visit is about." "There was this dog in the road," said Bentley, "and then a nearby tree came up and hit me." "Bentley took a picture of a monster standing in the road' said Manning, "just as it disappeared." "I got her figured now," said Bentley. "It saw the camera pointed at it and it heard it click. Them monsters don't stay around when they see something pointed at them." "There have been other reports of their disappearing," Wilson said. "A defense mechanism of some sort, perhaps. It's making it tough for the boys out hunting them." "I don't think so," said Manning. "Forcing them to disappear may be as good as hunting them." He unzipped a thin briefcase he was carrying and took out a sheaf of photos. "Look at this," he said. He slid the top photo across the desk to Wilson. Wilson took a quick look, then fixed his gaze on Bentley. "What kind of trick photography is this?" he asked. "There ain't no tricks," said Bentley. "A camera never lies. It always tells the truth. It shows you what is there. That's what really happens when a monster disappears. I was using a fast film -- " "But dinosaurs!" yelled Wilson. Bentley's hand dipped into his pocket and brought out an object. He handed it to Wilson. "A glass," he said. "Take a look with it. There are herds of them off in the distance. You can't do tricks of that sort." The monster was hazed, a sort of shadow monster, but substantial enough for there to be no doubt it was an alien. Behind it the dinosaurs, three of them, were in sharp focus. "Duckbills," said Manning. "If you showed that photograph to a paleontolqgist, I have every expectation he could give you an exact identification." The trees were strange. Some looked like palms, others like gigantic ferns. Wilson unfolded the magnifier, bent his head close above the photo, shifted the glass about. Bentley had been right. There were other strange creatures spread across the landscape, herds of them, singles, pairs. A small mammal of some sort cowered under a shrub. "We have some blowups," Manning said, "of the background. Want to look at them?" Wilson shook his head. "No. I'm satisfied." "We looked it up in a geology book, said Bentley. "That there is a Cretaceous landscape." "Yes, I know," said Wilson. IF He reached for the phone. "Kim," he said, "is Mr. Gale in his room? Thank you. Please 'ask him to step down." Manning laid the rest of the photos on the desk. "They are yours," he said. "We'll be putting them on the wire. We wanted you to know first. You thinking the same thing that I am?" Wilson nodded. "I suppose I am," he said, "but no quotation, please." "We don't need quotes," said Manning. "The picture tells the story. The monster, the mother monster, I would suppose you'd call it, was exposed to the time travel principle when it came through the tunnel. The principle was imprinted on its mind, its instinct, whatever you may call it. It transmitted knowledge of the principle to the young -- a hereditary instinct." "But it took time tunnels, mechanical contraptions, for the humans to do it," Wilson objected. "It took technology and engineering -- " Manning shrugged. "Hell, Steve, I don't know. I don't pretend to know. But the photo says the monsters are escaping to another time. Maybe they'll all escape to another time, probably to the same time. The escape time bracket may be implanted on their instinct. Maybe the Cretaceous is a better place for them. Maybe they have found this era too tough for them to crack, the odds too great." "I just thought of something," said Wilson. "The dinosaurs died out -- " "Yeah, I know," said Manning. He zipped the briefcase shut. "We better go," he said. "We have work to do. Thanks for seeing us." "No, Tom," said Wilson. "The thanks are to you and Bentley. Thanks for coming over. It might have taken days to get this puzzled out. If we ever did -- " He stood and watched them go, then sat down again. It was incredible, he thought. Yet it did make a lopsided sort of sense. Humans were too prone to think in human grooves. Aliens would be different. Again and again the refugees from the future had emphasized the creatures must not be regarded as simple monsters, but rather as highly intelligent beings. And that intelligence, no doubt, would be as alien as their bodies. Their intelligence and ability would not duplicate human intelligence and ability. Hard as it might be to understand, they might be able to do by instinct what humans would need a machine to accomplish. Maynard Gale and Alice came into the room so quietly that he did not know they were there until he looked up and saw them standing beside the desk. "You asked for us," said Gale. "I wanted you to look at these," said Wilson. "The top one first. The others are detail blowups. Tell me what you think." He waited while they studied the photos. Finally Gale said, "This is the Cretaceous, Mr. Wilson. How was the photo taken? And what has the monster to do with it?" "The photographer was taking a picture of the monster. As he took it -- at the moment he took it -- the monster disappeared." "The monster disappeared?" "This is the second -- or third or fourth -- report of one disappearing. The second that I know of. There may have been others. I don't know." "Yes," said Gale, "I suppose that it is possible. They're not like, us, you know. The one that came through the tunnel experienced time travel -- an experience that would have lasted for only a fraction of a second. But that may have been enough." He shuddered. "If that is true -- if after such an exposure they are able to travel independently in time, if their progeny is able to travel independently in time, if they can sense and learn and master such a complex thing so well, so quickly, it's a wonder that we were able to stand up against them for these twenty years. They must have been playing with us, keeping us, protecting us for their sport. A game preserve. That is what we must have been. A game preserve." "You can't be sure of that," said Wilson. "No, I suppose not. Dr. Wolfe is the man you should consult about this. He would know. At least he could make an educated guess." "But you have no doubt?" "None," said Gale. "This could be a hoax?" Wilson shook his head. "Not Tom Manning. We know one another well. We worked on the Post , right here, together. We were drinking companions. We were brothers until this damn job came between us. Not that he has no sense of humor. But he wouldn't use it in a thing like this. And Bentley? The camera is his god. He wouldn't use it for an unworthy purpose. He lives and breathes his cameras. He bows down before them each night before he goes to bed." "So we have evidence the aliens flee into the past -- even as we fled." "I think so," said Wilson. "I wanted your opinion. You know IF these creatures and we do not." "You'll still talk with Wolfe?" "Yes, we'll do that." "There is another matter, Mr. Wilson, that we have wanted to talk with you about. My daughter and I have talked it over and we are agreed," "What is that?" asked Wilson. "An invitation," said Gale. "We're not sure you will accept. Perhaps you won't. We may even offend you with it. But many other people, I think, would accept the invitation. To many it would have a great attraction. I find it rather awkward to phrase it, but it is this: When we go back into the Miocene -- if you wished to do so you would be welcome to go along with us. With our particular group. We should be glad to have you." Wilson did not move. He tried to find words and could not. Alice said, "You were ourjirst friend, perhaps our only real friend. You arranged the matter of the diamonds. You have done so many things." She stepped quickly around the desk,. bent to kiss him on the cheek. "We do not need an answer now," said Gale. "You will want to think about it. If you decide not to go with us we'll not speak of this again. The invitation, I think, is issued with the knowledge that in all probability, your people will be using the time tunnels to go years in the past. I have the feeling you will not be able to escape the crisis that overtook our ancestors (I refer to you, of course) on the original time track." "I don't know," said Wilson. "I honestly do not know. You will let me think about it." "Certainly," said Gale. Alice bent close, her words a whispers. "I do so hope you'll decide to come with us," she said. Then they were gone as silently and unobtrustively as they had come. Dusk was creeping into the room. In the press lounge a typewriter clicked hesitantly as the writer sought words. Against the wall the teletypes muttered querulously. One button on Judy's phone console kept flashing -- not Judy's console any more, he thought. Judy was gone. The plane that was taking her to Ohio was already heading westward. Judy, he said to himself. For the love of God, what got into you? Why did you have to do it? He would be lonely without her, he knew. He had not known until now, he realized, how much she had kept him from feeling alone. She had not needed to be with him -- the mere thought that she was somewhere nearby had been quite enough to bring gladness to his heart. She still would be near, he thought. Ohio was not far -- in this day no place on Earth was distant. Phones still worked and letters went by mail, but there was a difference now. He thought of how he might phrase a letter if he wrote to her, but he knew he would never write. The phone rang. Kim said, "The meeting's over. He can see you now." # . "Thank you, Kim," said Wilson. That he had asked to see the President had slipped his Magnificent New Novel By Starts In The Of galaxy On Sale August # mind. So much had happened since. When he entered the office the President said, "I'm sorry you were kept waiting, Steve. There was so much that had to be talked over. What do you have?" Wilson grinned. "Nothing quite as grim as what I had when I tried to reach you earlier. I think the situation is better now. There was a rumor out of the U. N." "This Russian business?" "Yes, the Russian business. Tom Manning, phoned. His U. N. man -- Max Hale, you know him?" "I don't think I've ever met him. I read him. He is sound." "Hale heard that the Russians would push for the international dropping of nuclear weapons on the areas where the monsters might be." "I had expected something of that sort," said the President. "They'd never be able to pull it off." "I think the question is academic now anyhow," said Wilson. "These just came in." He laid the photos on the desk. "Bentley Price took the shot." "Price," said the President. "Is he the one -- " "He's the one all the stories are about. Drunk a good part of the time, but a topnotch photographer. The best there is." IF The President studied the first photo, frowning. "Steve, I'm not sure I understand this." "There's a story that goes with it sir. It goes something like this -- " The President listened closely, not interrupting. When Wilson finished he asked, "You really think that's the explanation, Steve?" "I'm inclined to think so, sir. So does Gale. He said we should talk with Wolfe. But there was no question in Gale's mind. All we have to do is keep pushing them. Push enough of them into the past and the rest will go. If there were more of them -- if we had as few weapons as the people of five hundred years from now had when they first reached liarth -- they probably would try to stay on here. We'd offer plenty of fighting, be worthy antagonists. But I think they may know when they are licked. And back in the Cretaceous, they'll still have worthy opponents. Formidable ones. Tyrannosaurus rex and all his relatives. The triceratops. The coelurosaurs. The hunting dinosaurs. Hand-to-hand combat, face-to-face. They might like that better than what humans have to offer. More glory in it for them." The President sat thoughtfully silent. Then he said, "As I recollect, the scientists have never figured out what killed off the dinosaurs. Maybe now we know." "That could be," said Wilson. Henderson reached for the call box, then pulled back his hand. "No," he said. "Fyodor Morozov is a decent sort of man. What he did this morning was in the line of duty -- he had to carry out orders. No use phoning him. He'll find out when the picture hits the street. So will the people at the U.N. I'd like to see their faces. I'd say it spikes their guns." "I would say so, sir," said Wilson. "I'll take no more of your time -- " "Stay for a minute, Steve. There's something you should know. A sort of precautionary knowledge. The question may come up and you should know how to field it. No more than a halfdozen of our people -- all scientists -- know this and they won't talk. Neither will the future people. There is no record. State doesn't know. Defense doesn't know." "I wonder, sir, if I should -- " "I want you to know," said the President. "Once you hear it you are bound by the same secrecy as the others. You've heard of the Clinton Chapman proposal?" "I have heard of it. I don't like it. The question came up this morning and I refused comment. Said it was only rumor and I had no knowledge of it." "Neither do I like it," said the President. "But as far as I am concerned he's going to be encouraged to go ahead. He thinks he can buy time travel -- thinks he has it in his hand. He can fairly taste it. I have never seen a more obvious case of naked greed. I'm not too sure his great good friend, Reilly Douglas, may not have a touch of that same greed." "But if it's greed -- " "It's greed, all right," said the President. "But I know something he doesn't know and if I can manage it, he won't know it until it's too late to do him any good. And that is this: What the future people used was not time travel as we think of it -- it is something else. It serves the same purpose, but it's not time travel as traditionally conceived. I don't know if I can explain this too well, but it seems there is another universe, coexistent with ours. The people of the future know it's there, but there is only one thing they really know about it. That is that the direction of time's flow in the second universe is exactly the opposite of ours. Its future flows toward our past. The people of the future traveled into their past by hooking onto the future flow of this other universe -- " "But that means you can travel in only one direction." "Exactly," said the President. "It means that you can go into the past, but you can't come back." "If Chapman knew this the deal would be off." "I suppose it would be. He's not proposing to build the tunnels from patriotic motives. He's been told, of course, that the tunnels work only one way, but he doesn't know why. Do you think badly of me, Steve, for my deception -- my calculated dishonesty?" "I'd think badly of you, sir, if there really were a chance for Chapman to do what he means to do and you did not stop him. This way, however the world gets help and the only ones who are hurt are men who, for once, will have overreached themselves. No one will feel sorry for them." "Some day," Henderson said, "it will be known. Some day my dishonesty will catch up with me." "When it does," said Wilson, "a great guffaw will go around the world. You'll be famous, sir. They'll build statues of you." The President smiled. "I hope so, Steve. I feel a little sneaky." "One thing, sir," said Wilson. "Just how tight is this secret of yours?" "I feel it's solid," said the PresiIF dent. "The people you brought up from Myer told our National Academy people -- only three of them. The future scientists and the men who talked with them reported back to me. To me alone. By this time, I had gotten wind of Chapman's deal and I asked them to say nothing. Only a few of the refugee scientists worked on the project that sent the people back -- only a handful of them know what is actually involved. And, as it happens, they all are here in the United States. Something like the diamonds. They all are here because they felt we were the one nation they could trust. The word has been passed along at Myer. The future scientists won't talk. Neither will our men." Wilson nodded. "It sounds all right. You mentioned the diamonds. What became of them?" "We have accepted temporary custody. They are locked away. Later, after all of this is over, we'll see what can be done with them. Probably discreet sales will dispose of them, with a suitable cover story provided. The money will be put in escrow for later distribution to other nations." Wilson rose and moved toward the door. Halfway there, he stopped and turned. "I'd say, Mr. President, that things are going very well." "Yes," said the President. "After a bad start events are moving well. There's still a lot to do, but we are on the way." Someone was at Judy's desk when Wilson returned. The room was dark. There were only the flashing lights on the console and they were not being answered. "Judy?" Wilson asked hesitantly. "Judy, is that you?" Knowing that it couldn't be, for by now she was probably landing in Ohio. "I came back," said Judy. # T got on the plane and then got off again. I sat at the airport for hours, wondering what to do. You are a son of a bitch, Steve Wilson, and you know you are. I don't know why I got off the plane. Getting off, I don't know why I came here." He strode across the room and stood beside her. "But, Judy -- " Judy pouted. "You never asked me Jo stay. You never really asked me." "But I did. I asked you." "You were noble about it. That's the trouble with you. Noble. You never got down on your knees and begged me. And now my baggage is headed for Ohio and I -- " He reached down and lifted her from the chair, held her close. "It's been a rough two days," he said. "It's time for the two of us to be going home."  (Continued from page # ) azines. Now , lo, he appeareth in color no longer. ( Take a look at May # Galaxy -- Ed.) Another point: I am afraid that I cannot find words for the story in Galaxy (March #) titled The Girl And The Dolphin. Those animals are really that smart , hunh? Still , I must say the story was out of the ordinary -- and I must congratulate Frank Herbert on his novel, Project Forty.  read it in one evening and found it amazing. Re The Wizard of Anharitte --  didn't place this novel as Kapp's Patterns of Chaos on my favorite story list. The Wizard lacked the color of Patters -- it was an interesting yarn all the same. Keep up the good work. I'm about to read Doomship now -- and I know you won't let me down. Will you? R. E. Grehan Memphis, Tenn. collaboration? And you're asking? Dear Mr. Jakobbson: The cover illustration of the April Worlds of If was the best I've seen in a long time -- it was better than any of Brian Boyle's three Project # covers for Galaxy Magazine or most of his paintings up to now. Very, very good -- have Mr. Boyle keep it up. The best feature in this issue was son masterwork, extensively flasome and identifiable human characterizations -- his most attractive trademark, I think. The Wizard of Anharitte, which received such heavy praise from Tony Lewis in Locus, was equal to the previous parts published in If. Next Time and Call Me Proteus were also enjoyable. I'd like to suggest, though, that instead of running serial installments every month you forget about serials entirely and try to include a novella, a couple of novelettes and as many short stories as you can in each issue. In view of the competition you still have to try harder! And I'll be boosting you all the way. New Orleans, La. Good science fiction, the best we can find at any length in wordage, is what we've wanted and will continue to want for GalaxyIf -- Ican say most emphatically and with total sincerity that I have never turned xlown for purely mechanical reasons a work of fiction that I've liked. You may see -- if you look through back issues -- that we often compress type to get in all that we want. And sometimes departmental material or art work is squeezed...Both If and Galaxy are, first of all, science fiction magazines. Competition is a lovely game and good fun and every criticism hurts and is noted. But every publication in the field should serve the field, hopefully add to it. Perfection is beyond most of us -- but the unforgivable lapse would be to be of disservice to the field, as mindless competition for its own sake would make us. We're going to try harder -- we always do. But both If and Galaxy remain open to all lengths of good, preIF viously unpublished fiction -- with in reason -- available to them. Besides, the magazine graveyards are haunted by ghosts -- many of them once vital and lovely -- who went to their ends as mechanical marvels, their services finished. All boosts, of course, are gratefully received -- as are all helpful suggestions as to how we can best serve. Dear Mr. Jakobsson : I have been trying to locate a short story I read some years ago ( ten to fifteen years -- or more), but have been hampered by the fact that I don't remember the name of the author or of the magazine in which the story appeared. The title of the story was Native Problem and the plot ran as follows: A man named Danton claims a planet. This comes about because at the time of the story it is possible to reach any point in the galaxy in a short period of time through a faster-than light drive -- and the galaxy is filled  relatively ) with uninhabited. Earthlike planets. He is transported to his planet and left to fend for himself. Shortly afterward another spaceship arrives, carrying a group of religious pilgrims. The ship is of anbeen in transit for centuries. No one on the ship has even set foot on a planetary surface, but the group s prophets have designated Danton s world as their promised land. In the ensuing encounter with Danton the pilgrims refuse to listen to his explanations for his presence, but insist on considering him merely one of the natives to be subdued and I or converted. How Danton ends up as " the last of the natives " with the pilgrims established on the planet is a hilarious comment on the peculiar blindness we know as bigotry. y If you or anyone on your staff is familiar with this story, could you please jot down the name of the author or of the magazine in which the story appeared and send it to me in the enclosed envelope? Thank you. D.A. Kirkpatrick # California A venue Klamath Falls, Ore. #I Everyone at the office drew a blank on this one, so I'm taking the liberty of running your address here. Whatever else -- If has the best informed readers, save perhaps Galaxy's. A dazzling new Super Agent mlc'Mvn'    Thn W" #I The stakes M  are even more deadly as Steve Austin -- "The Bionics Man" -- confronts an international black market ring in nuclear weapons. # at bookstores or from # Third Ave., New York # # # East # # Str cot No W York NY I # I # FT #  per word fkwkrding norm and mddroaa). lO-word minimum. Pay moot with ordm. HI magazines. Arkham House, Fantasy Press, LoveN.J. #. nal by three-time Hugo Winner. Praised by top s-f NY. #. Longview. Washington #. N.J. #. book Dianetics: Modem Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard has an applied philosophy to show you how. Send # to BookstoreIF, Founding Church of Scientology. # #th St... N.W... Washington. D C. #. S  S Books. G-#, # North Hamline. St. Paul. Minn. #. -- Rosemead. Calif. #. dime for list. Edwin Bruns. # Cemetery Road. Junesville Wise. #, Columbia. S.C. #. Frankenstein Interview. Monster Tells "True" Story. #P. Booklet. #. Norris, Postbox #-M. Indianapolis #. May issue: Cordwainer Smith retrospect. Aldiss, White, Lupoff, Blish. Four issues #. From ANCayce, Mother Shipton, Malachi and others. Tells why Earth's rotation now slowing. Van Allen belts failing -- mutations. Paleomagnetic confirmation of Polar Shifts. "The Final Years" by Robert H. Olsen. Not a spouting of religious hysteria. # postpaid. Calif. #. Florida State Christian College. Post Office Box #. Fort Lauderdale. Florida #. #. sonville, Florida #! tion radio programs are now available on tape " Oklahoma #. For more than a decade, X Minus I ranked among the most popular shows ever to hit the air-waves. Starting soon, many radio stations will once again be featuring this famed drama series adapted from stories appearing either in Broadcasting will be resumed with new the foremost names in science fiction. X Minus I will thrill you, reward you, more than ever. So watch for it. Listen to it. Enjoy it! For further information, contact your local station or write to: Box # Seymour, Conn. # The very best reading in or out of this world with trial membership in The Science Fiction Book Club gripping short stories, each a reing for. Reeling ahead to the year cipient of a Hugo, the field's most #, it's a sensational tale by coveted award. A giant, handone of the first masters in the some, #-page compendium. field. haps one of the most important The three books represent a views of tomorrow ever written. # value for just #. Winner of both the famous Hugo It's the most extraordinary samand Nebula awards, challenging pie of science fiction ever offered will never let you go. extraordinary trial offer. Here's how it works: Choose any # books on this page for #, including if you wish, the big # shown above. That's one thin dime (to help cover shipping). Then, if you're not absolutely fascinated when the books come, return them and we won't trouble you again. If you are intrigued, you're on your way to many more delights in the Science Fiction Book Club. Future books, all hard cover, will cost only # each (plus shipping and handling) and you need buy only four in the coming year. Our colorful bulletin will keep you informed about superb new books. Fair enough? Don't even send us the dime now. We ll bill you later. Take advantage of us. There'll never be a better time. Dept. CL-# . Garden City, N . Y. I I # Please accept my application for membership in the Science Fiction Book Club and send me the # books whose numbers I have written in the boxes below. Bill me just # (to help cover shipping) for all #. About every # weeks, send me the club's bulletin, "Things to Come," describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If I wish to receive both Selections, I need do nothing; they will be shipped to me automatically. 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Pub.ed. # # The Early Asimov by Isaac Asimov. # previously uncollected early stories by the most famous name in science fiction. Pub.ed. # #. Dune by Frank Herbert. Celebrated winner of Hugo and Nebula. Gripping tale of family exiled From their private planet to another a barren desert. Pub.ed. # #. A Science Fiction Argosy ed. by Damon Knight. Over # pages. # stories by Hugo  Nebula winners such as Asimov, Aldiss. Includes # novels. Pub.ed. # #. Mutant #: The Plastic Eaters by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. New bacteria goes berserk causing London to melt. Pub. ed. # #. The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Tne celebrated author of Stand On Zanzibar presents a multimedia mind-bender that chronicles the collapse of civilization. Pub. ed. # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol I  II. Giant #-in-l volume of # award-winning stories. # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame I. # "winners" chosen by. Sci-Fi Writers of America. Ed. Robert Silverberg. Pub. ed. # #. The # Annual World's Best Science Fiction, ed. by Donald A. Wollheim. Volume IV contains # gems from Clarke, Sturgeon, and more Spec. Ed. #. The Dancer From Atlantis by Poul Anderson. Four people -- from different ages and cultures -- are catapulted by a time machine back to # B.C. Fascinating mixture of history, myth and imagination. Spec. Ed. Please Print Address Book Club editions are sometimes reduced in size, but they are all full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. Members accepted in U S A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada.  # (# The Learning of Eeshta Th papar tima machlna also a tool: a time machine that enables you to replay the crucial events past, present, and future -- that shape our lives. Now, Instead of merely reading about what's happening, you can explore and experience the alternatives and decision points through the technique of Conflict Simulation. What is Conflict Simulation? Conflict Simulation is a way of analyzing a political or military conflict situation. A way that IS as intellectually stimulating as a game of chess, and as thorough as a written analysis. Through the use of the Conflict Simulation (or "game") format, the conflict situation is re-created -- so that you are in a position to make the vital decisions and. in the game at least, change the way things were. are. or will be. What you got ed bi-monthly. Each issue contains:  A ready-to-play conflict-simulation game with a # X #" playing surface, die-cut playing pieces, and complete rules.  An analytical article on the same subject as the game m that issue.  Other feature articles on historical and military subjects.  Game and book reviews, commentary on existing games, and discussions of subscribers' questions. The magazine is #  pages long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format. bat in Western Europe, #), We also publish a separate line of conflictsimulation games, which you will find listed in the coupon. Free to now subocribora battle presented in a game-desigil specially created to introduce new readers to Conflict Simulation. Send check or M.O. to: SImulallont Publicallona Inc. Dept. # # EmI #rd St., New York. N.Y. # Please enter my subscription to S.  T. tor: I Year (# issues)S# # Yrs. (#issues)-S# #Yrs.(#issues)-# Current issue S# Send me the following Simulation Games:  Kursk (Russia. #)-# " Korea (#-#I )-# Phalanx (ancient Greece) -- # Barbarossa (Russia. l#l-#)-#  Lalpxle (Napoleonic Wars. #) -- # J Normandy (tha D-Day lnvasion)-'#  Please send me your free brochure. Name City State Zip. congratulates new novel scheduled to be the lead title for Ballantine in Fall # Meanwhile don't forget...the five Clarke classics still in print.  September-October # Vol. #, No. I Issue I # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Albert Dytch, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Worlds of IF is published bimonthly by ary of Universal Publishing A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #e. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., I # elsewhere. Worlds of IF is published In the United Kingdom by Universal-Tanddm Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arndid E. Abramsqn, Chairman of fhe Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-issue subscription in the United Kingdom: #. and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. HCnON. An Anthology of Political Forebodings Thomas M. DIsch, Editor. Twenty-one original stories and poems by such writers as Ellison, Wolfe, Effinger, Naylor, Emshwiller, Schjeldahl, Silverberg, and Moorcock. # Michael Moorcock. A novel by the author of Behold the Man, a combination of comic fantasy and social satire reminiscent of Burgess, Wilde and Wells, set on the Earth at the brink of the end of time. "An enjoyable adventure.' -- PubZsiers Weeky # Roger Elwood, Editor. Twelve original, suspense-filled stories written exprCw.'. this rollection by Lafferty, Bova, Russ, Haldeman, Mc.zberg, Me lister, Silverberg, and others. # and Other Fantasy and Science-Fiction Stories Richard McKenna. From gentle humor to galactic adventure to ecological crisis, these stories by the late author of the bestselling The Sand Pebbles vividly demonstrate his remarkable skill and range. # Uoyd Biggie, Jr., Editor. All the aWard-winning stories and runners-up of #, as selected by the members of the SF Writers of America, plus critical essays by Knight, Sturgeon and Anderson. # Ten years later... the pioneering, prophetic view of the #st century, corrected and updated in light of the amazing advances of the past decade. An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible Revised edition. # HarperoRow # f sirtf SI... Ntm Yoth # AQtlARiJS #M-.im.JS The Largest, Most Complete Star Chart It will fascinate you. Its size? A full # V # by # V # feet! Hang this noble map on your wall, then stand # or # yards away. You see an amazing replica in deep blue of the night sky -- showing # stars, just about every star significantly visible to the unaided eye. Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop Into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellations! No intelligent, aware person -- and certainly no science-fiction reader -- can afford to be without this dramatic reproduction of the heavens. For it is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. It stretches the mind and the Imagination. And as never before, the Celestial Map charts the vast reaches of space through which hurtle space-ship Earth, the solar system, the galaxy itself... Own this magnificent map. It will instruct, entertain and delight you! Advertisement copyright  # by Celestial Map Company. Offer good until December #. #... #  ... I '   viMOfMiTa, SOPNS " .   wHh # mr i .ao CPUCf-vS (    ifna I rt#oTia.O r;  ' '  I -- #lfc  ,,   I ,apA "   "" ' M "-'vi-uMr .u #, .   V, .  ai. iA !'-T ' ;... ## '  V'  ... ..., #:oiA-us . ', ' ' #"' .V   If ' .VV . r   , # r-v  # . " ' i-'  !'  .w ' " i   ',I '-' MM . l # ,  A numbered degree scale marks the entire map perimeter  Shows aii stkrs up to and inciuding the sixth magnitude. I  eM  'T vA M  " ." V' . A . Tf  , '  #   I-Ml     Projection is a Mercator rectangie.  Stars are identified by Yaie Cataiogue numbers, Bright Star numbers, Fiamsteed numbers, pius Greek ietters and specific star names. A Thing of Beauty, The huge Celestial Map is a distinguished work of art in its own right, sure to adorn any interior. It is sent to you in a stout container designed to protect the valuable contents.  Map is issued in conjunction with the #th Anniversary of Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy.   Map computed by U. of California's star-sifting computer.  Mapispiotted by David W. Teske, recipient of the American MuseumHayden Pianetarium #I Kepier Award. The Celestial Map Company # West # Street New York, N.Y. # Enclosed find # (cash, check or money order). Please rush the Celestial Map to: The last young Superom had a choice: to rule a dead world -- or make it live! I Inside a decaying observatory two live shadows moved among dead shadows. They fused, separated again. Two pale faces turned up to the dying sun. It was framed in a grin of sky formed by a split in the roof. Whispers inside the cracked observatory dome sounded like a part of the darkness. Centuries of weather had worn away the curt, anagramatic signs around the dome's inner rim. The darkness fell in through the holes. "It's true, Del. It really is true. It's beginning to consume itself. Faster and faster." The girl turned her head toward the young man beside her. Her eyes were huge, feeding on fear. "We have to go on. We must get to Mandanar." "I can't understand it," he said. "What does it say?" He didn't look at her. He was staring at the broken messages around the dome. He was older and taller than she, a broad-shouldered giant, but his face under a cap of black hair was much less animated than hers-almost expressionless. He continued to stare at the dome and the sun in a bewildered way. 'This place scares me, Shewy. Let's go hunt talues." He stopped, his forehead wrinkling as his brain chased a notion of guilt. "We shouldn't have gone off and left Keren and Karel at Spadrox. We shouldn't have -- " He kept looking at the sun. "Del, we had to escape. We must get to Mandanar." The girl stamped her foot hard against the floor. Dust rose in the darkness. She was lightly built, her face as sharp as a bird's. Blue skintight coveralls flattened the natural curves of her body so that with her short bobbed hair she could have been a boy. Only the soft push of her new breasts and the token skirt at the waist of the suit advertised her sex. Her name -- Shevan -- was embroidered on her collar. Delbet glanced away from the roof and down at her at last. "I only came because of you. To look after you. I don't really want to go to Mandanar. You know that, Shev." He sulked, then went on. "I don't believe the sun's going out. It's always been there. Superom like us put it there. Let's go back and tell Keren we made a mistake -- we got lost. And maybe he won't -- " "No!" The foot stamped again. Shevan grabbed his arm and tried to shake him. "You and I are two of the only Superom-maybe the only two true Superom -- left in this Vortex of the galaxy, Del. The sun they put up in the'sky of Thetis is failing. Mandanar's our only hope. Don't you want to stay alive? Don't you want to go after the others?" "Now, Shewy, you know it's all just out of those talk-tapes you got to studying in that old, smed-up library place -- " He stopped, as if trying to recall something. The girl stood raging but silent in the gloom before him. Her eyes were huge, her fists clenched. Del grinned and shook his head, trying to make her respond with a smile. She turned and ran away from IF him. He heard her jump through the gap in the observatory wall into the twilight. He went after her slowly. She was easy to find. The observatory stood on a hill. Delbet went down it toward her sobs, moving swiftly and easily for such a big man. He squatted beside her in the sand and scrub and patted her shaking back. She wrenched away from him. "How many times do I have to tell you -- don't do that!" She used not to get angry when he touched her. Now she sometimes did. It was a sign she was growing up. "Come on, Shev," he coaxed. "I didn't mean to make you wild. Maybe you could be wrong -- huh? Maybe those talk-tapes got it muddled. Maybe the sun just looks like it's getting smaller. It isn't any colder, is it -- days or nights? Summer still summers, doesn't it? I haven't noticed frost on Keren's beard in the mornings." He laughed but Shevan didn't share his humor. "You're so dumb." She stood up suddenly and punched his chest hard with both her small fists. "You don't act like Superom, Del. You don't think like Superom." Delbet looked bewildered. He put out a hand to wipe tears from her face, but stopped just in time. "What's the use fretting, Shev? Come on -- let's go hunt talues before the sun goes down. Anyway -- let's get out of here. That old observatory gives me the creeps. Look -- I made, a new slingbow. Let's raise the talues and worry them instead of getting so damn miserable and bothering ourselves' He stood up also, holding out his hands. Shevan didn't move. "Del-I'm going on without you." He crouched again, his handsome saint's face knitting into a frown of frustration. "Oh, Shev-you're so-so-" His frown became deeper as words failed him. "No," she said, using a feminine path of attack. "I don't need you because you damn well don't believe me. And you've forgotten everything I told you. And if you were real Superom you'd rage like me at being a prisoner and working the cruze mine for Keren and just being content to sit on Thetis and go out when the sun goes out." TkEL'S throat made tiny anguished -noises of denial and defense, but they didn't come to words. He loved Shevan so well he wanted to take her up in one arm as he had when she had been a baby and quiet her tantrums. But her body was as taut and unyielding as a steel whipspring on one of his machines back in the cruze mine -- and her voice was a whip that punished him, too. He didn't touch her again. When she paused, her head bent, he said, "But what's there going to be at Mandanar, Shevvy? And just think of all the stone jungle and Conducs and those damned awful Helangles and the devil knows what else between us and there. Why-" She raised her head and her eyes blazed at him. Delbet, big as he was, shrank back. "You dummy! You've never listened to anything I told you. I don't want you with me. Get back to Keren and the mine. I don't know why I trusted you and told you everything." "Shev -- wait -- Shevvy, hold on. I forget those things easily. You know that. I'm always thinking about inventing things. New bits for the machines or slingbows or-or-you know. Listen, I made the aircar sp we could escape together -- now, didn't I? Come on, Shev. You know that!" A pause. Then: "Listen, we'll just sit down here quietly and you tell me again and I won't say a damn word and I bet I'll repeat everything you tell me exactly." "No." She shook her head, twisting away from him. "You don't really care. You don't mind going into the dark. You don't want to be back with the Superom." Del coaxed: "But I do want to be with you, Shev. You know that I do. Now, who could fix the aircar if it stalled, eh? Who could do that? And who could keep off the Conducs or the Helangles if they came after you? Come -- you tell it again. I'll listen carefully so I won't get it wrong any more." And having won as she had intended to win, Shevan went back to the beginning and told it again for him. She didn't believe he would care about it or even remember it, but she needed him with her, whatever she said. And this was the way to ensure that she didn't have to turn back to Keren, who had almost ceased to be Superom anyway -- and Karel who had been unconscious of all people and events for several hundred years while he lay pale and alone, neither dead nor living, in the green, frosted hibernation casket at Spadrox. So she told it. When the Superom moved from their origins in the Outer Vortices of the galaxy toward the center they looked for planetary systems most like their own. Del started to ask what the real, first Superom planetary system was like because it sounded as though it could be the kind of thing Shevan delighted to explain, but her eyes shut him up quickly. As their knowledge and skill developed, Superom began trying to reclaim planets that might otherwise have proved uninhabitable. In the three thousandth age of their appearance in the Fourth VorIF tex they developed the artificial sun. Thetis was one of the first worlds reclaimed by a Superom sun planted in its sky to supplement the pale globe that was dying there and had already spread to swallow some of its inner satellites. Thetis grew into a world of magnificent cities linked by superb highways and aircar routes. Superom peace, prosperity, trade, ruled here just as it did in the other Vortices they had settled. Del grinned and nodded, proud of his ancestors. Then he frowned hard because he remembered what came next and it always scared him. It was hard to understand. Then (said Shevan) six hundred eight years ago a plague began to sweep through the Inner Vortices. It attacked the thought processes of the Superom brain. It left the mind dumb and brutish. It seemed to confine its attack to the Superom alone. Lesser breeds of humanity escaped completely. So did any native survivors in the Superom Commonwealth. Del realized his heart was starting to pound uncomfortably. He twisted his head from t)ne side to another just to look anywhere but into SheV's great round eyes staring back at the frightening past. The cause of the plague couldn't be isolated. There was no identifiable virus, mo hostile germ, no reason why the attack should fall on the Superom and on no other life form. The affliction spread rapidly. It wasn't deterred by hyper space. It broke out in several places at once. In the end the Galactic Council agreed on a total retreat of Superom from the Third and Fourth Vortices. AS IF they were retreating from a real enemy instead of something intangible and unknown, the Superom went into a hurried flight toward their origins, abandoning their civilizations in panic. Del licked his lips-and gripped his new slingbow. His knuckles whitened. He wanted to fight this enemy from which his fathers had fled. But where was it? Why had the old ones' left Keren and Karel and him and Shewy on Thetis? He frowned, his eyes seeking responses. Shevan told him, her heart moved by his limited understanding, his simplicity. Just before the plague a Superom expeditionary ship had let Thetis for the Fifth Vortex. The Superom had been on the point of probing for a new extension of the Commonwealth. The expedition had consisted of the usual crew and a dozen senior scientists and space experts in hibernation. Del's eyes lit up with pride of recognition. "Karel," he murmured. "Karel was one of them, wasn't he?" Shevan didn't answer. The expedition was recalled as soon as the Galactic Council had made its decision on withdrawal (she continued), but the plague was so violent in Thetis that the withdrawal had to be carried out before the expedition could make it home. When it did get back to Thetis the Superom had gone. The survivors tried to reach the secret Galactic City at Mandanar to see whether it were possible to follow the retreat. But the Thetans were scared and bewildered because their leaders, planners and governors had fled. They wouldn't allow the expedition's survivors to leave the landing site. They believed that while some Superom remained, Thetis would still have law, peace, prosperity. Del nodded vigorously. "Now tell about us, Shev. Tell about Shev and Del and Keren and Karel." "We're the last," said the girl. "We're the only four left of the remnant of those survivors. Several ages have passed since the return and we've dwindled away to four. Thetis has degenerated in a long series of dark ages. The cities are stone jungles that surround oases of calm in the old abandoned foodlands and mining areas. The highways connect the jungles, which the Helangles and the Conducs and the others own. "The Thetans still revere the Superom. Karel in his casket remains their god while he survives. Keren has almost become one of them. With his Thetan wives and children he liyes by providing the tribes with cruze to make fuel for their vehicles -- cruze that you and I mine for him, Del." The giant nodded eagerly. "So why do we have to go to Mandanar, Shewy? We work, we eat and have fun making things. You help me hunt the talues. We live okay, so why do we have to leave Spadrox and go to crazy old Mandanar?" For a moment it looked as though Shevan's eyes were going to spill tears again, but she blinked them away. "Del, the sun's going out. You recall when we found that library the Thetans had broken up because they couldn't use the talk-tapes, don't you?" He nodded, frowning, muttering, "Crazy smashed-up hole." "It was all in there," said Shevan. "Thetis' history. The placing of the sun, its life-expectation. I intuited the talk-tapes and absorbed them. So we have to go to Mandanar." Del shook his head. He didn't really understand. "Because I can't believe the old ones left without making some provision for the Fifth Vortex expedition survivors to follow them. It wouldn't be possible for Superom to do that. They built Mandanar for a IF purpose. No Thetans were allowed there. That's where they guarded their secrets." Del nodded again. Now he recalled it. But it was so difficult to follow all Shev's reasons. He sat looking sadly at her small sandaled feet and thinking how beautiful they were and maybe it would have been better if she were just beautiful and beautiful and beautiful like a bird or a young talue and not intelligent and philosophical like the old ones who went away. their silence. It came from a spread of grass tussocks and bushes about fifty meters away. Del's frown dissolved and his face recovered its seraphic preoccupation. "Talue, Shev. Let's go hunt them." She watched him. He was already on his feet, head cocked. She didn't follow and the moment he turned away she knew she was forgotten. He moved softly and gracefully, as if his giant's frame were made of light and air. He flitted from tussock to bush in the twilight, new slingbow poised. He could throw his voice with the same speed and accuracy as one of his missiles. It was uncanny to hear the sound spring up ten meters away from him. Shevan watched. Del's call had lured one of the sleek creatures. It sat up, looking from side to side, but flickered away like a thought before Del even had time to aim the slingbow. He tried again, moving softly farther into the brake and circling. He was facing Shevan now. He called the creature again three times. Shevan saw that the call did not even move his lips. The fourth time a young talue male jetted from bush to tussock and sniffed the setting sun. Del's fifth caU, projected to rise uncannily from the ground at its feet, stunned it for long enough. A silver bolt streaked through the air and caught it behind the right foreleg. Its short whoop of dismay sent the rest of the pack starring out from hiding like the jets from a bluewhite fountain. All but two went out of range before the giant could fire and reload. He hit both. He collected the catch and came back to Shevan, grinning happily. The top half of his body was a silhouette against the huge pink dish of the Thetan sunset. The girl's heart moved at his contented child's face. Del rubbed the palm of his hand against his black skullcap of hair. "Hell, that was good fun out there, Shev." He sat down beside her and sighed. He spread out the bluewhite talues lovingly. "Why didn't you come?" "I wanted to watch you. You do it so well." Real pleasure sprang from the giant's eyes. He put out a hand and touched Shev's face. "Let's see if we're lucky." Slim fingers began exploring the talue's store pouches. The talue used them for storing the stones and other fragments it mined in its burrows in the search for Thetan fire-ore. The ore gave light and warmth to the shivering, slowgrowing young in their nests. The young specinien that had been Del's first victim was still a novice. Its pouch yielded nothing but fragments of rock crystal. The second, a mature female, had two grape-sized pieces of expired fire-ore, which Del tossed aside with a shrug, but the third, an old male, gave up a fragment of treasure among lesser stones. With a gurgle of pleasure, the giant let the pearl-sized piece of stored fire fall from his palm into Shevan's. She felt its hoarded warmth caress her skin. Closing her hand for a moment she stared down at the fist it made and saw light escaping like water between her fingers. After a moment she gave the ore back to Del. He put it into a pouch. Fire-ore was good currency with some of the lesser Thetans who believed it had healing qualities. Shevan stood up suddenly. "Listen, Del." The giant rose swiftly, pressing a new bolt into his slingbow. The top of Shevan's head reached only to his bicep as they stood together. Distant, rectangular crags of the stone jungles ringed their horizon. From one of them came the concerted snarl of high-powered engines. "The air car," cried Shevan. "Quick!" She began to run. The drugged talues stirred uneasily as though caught by the same urgency.  far side of the observatory j where the slope of the hill concealed it from the highway. They ran between the hill and the brush where Del had been hunting a few minutes before. Del was in front. Ahead of him the sun was a pink fingertip, huge and godlike, sinking behind some distant city. Behind them the stone jungle released the sound of a swarm of giant wasps to the open air as a Helangle scout party hit the highway at # kph. Beams from their powerful headlamps rode up to the sky. "Del!" Shevan's cry was almost drowned by the approaching tumult. Delbet turned in time to see her stagger a few steps more, then fall. He ran back, looking anxiously at the spears of light flying along the highway. "My foot -- a rock -- " IF Del kneeled beside her. Blood was right foot. The sandal strap was almost severed. "Come on, Shewy. Up you come -- " He slipped his arms behind her shoulders and under her knees and swung her into his arms. Loaded now, he still ran easily, loping through bushes, jumping talue humps. The aircar came into sight, tilted slightly on the hillside, where its telescopic legs had supported it but had not kept it level. "Oh no!' The giant's groan as he pulled up made Shevan forget her injury. She turned and looked. She flung up a hand to her face. Blood dripped onto Del's coveralls. The unmistakable lights of another Helangle scout party skidded and slithered from side to side across the sky as the riders dusted erratically across country out of the last sliver of sun. There wasn't any doubt they were converging on the aircar in spite of the wild confusion of their lights. Their coming had been muffled by the more concerted roar of the swarm jetting along the highway and by the bulk of the observatory hill. Del rushed forward again. 'Try to make the aircar." Shevan's face was white. Her arm went around the giant's neck. Del sped, but he wasn't going to make it. Three beams of light sliced the skin of darkness, fumbled, but held the two Superom in a blinding cone. The aircar was still about twenty meters away when the leading Helangle tracked around in an arc, his withered, booted leg scorching a channel in the soil. A moment later two more of. them were between Del and Shevan and their hope of flight. Del swung the girl easily to the ground. He shouted something wordless as he leveled the slingbow. "Don't fight, Del," Shevan panteti, holding on to him. There were about twenty Helangles in the scout party. Most of them were on the scene now. They kept the motors of their steedes roaring as they ringed the two Superom. They were Thetan humans but their faces always looked the same, dehumanized under identical crash hats and tinted goggles. They had survived the Thetan dark ages because of their speed and mobility and to the highest bidder. The Helangles found identity in their skin jackets. They were sewn or painted with a variety of emblems and exhortations in their colorfpl, monosyllabic language. Each one had his equally exotic name studded across the shoulders of his jacket. The one who had arrived first had a star painted on his helmet to inheritance identify him as leader. Starhowl in hand-high letters was studded across his shoulders. He gunned his engine hard and then let it die with a snarl. The others followed his example... Starhowl kicked down the support and heaved his steede up onto it. He swung his right leg over the motor and stood upright while he touched his helmet with both hands in the salute of recognition to superiors. Then he sank to the customary Helangle orouch, supporting himself on one hand. The Helangle s had spent thousands of nomadic years riding their steedes and evolutionary logic had wasted their legs. "Hi, Delbet Sir. Hi, Sievan Lady, Keren sent us. Yawl wrong. Yawl come back to Spadrox. Keren says yawl crazy out liere. Night come down. Yawl come back your pad. But quickly, man. Dig?" Del growled and took a threatening step toward Starhowl. The crouching Helangle was dwarfed, but he didn't flinch. A young scout with the name Arcweld glowing luminously from his hunched back flared his engine into noisy life behind the giant. He aimed the steede at Del. Shevan said. "Del, don't!" "He don't dig," shouted Arcweld to his companions. "We hold Superom. Yawl come back Spadrox. Superom pad is Spadrox. Keren says so. Yawl Lady! You dig. Tell big boy. Superom not leave Spadrox pad. Dig?" "Dig," said Shevan quietly, answering him in his own language. "Yawl hit bad trouble yawl rumble Delbet Sir. Delbet Sir Suprom's big man some day. Why Helangles not hear Shevan Lady, Delbet Sir? Not Keren. Keren's heavy. We're going Mandanar. We'll make Thetis great again." Starhowl gestured impatiently at Arcweld. The latter cut his engine. The second Helangle scout party from the highway had arrived now. Its leader was called Smoketrail. He got off his bike with the same deference to the Superom as Starhowl. He obviously had the same message to convey, but Starhowl waved him down impatiently. "Shed, man. Dig it. Shevan Lady says go Mandanar. Make Thetis great again." "Nix!" Smoketrail, who was more powerful and much uglier than Starhowl, hammered one fist on the ground. "Yawl blown your mind, man. Suprom leave Spadrox, Thetis nix. Suprom stay Spadrox pad like always. With Karel. TTiat's history, man. Never hit road like Helangles. Stay Spadrox. Thetis okay. Dig?" "Dig!" All the featureless heads nodded agreement. Smoketrail's statement was Helangle logic. "Yawl come on Spadrox right IF now, Shevan Lady, Delbet Sir," said Starhowl. Del looked appealingly at Shevan. She shook her head. There was nothing to be done. Several of the Helangles got busy. They slung litters between four of the steedes. Ordinarily they used them for carrying their pregnant women or very small children on long journeys. Deferentially, trying not to touch the Superom, they encouraged them to climb in. They set their engines in motion with shouts of satisfaction and encouragement to one another. They ignored the air car. They wouldn't have dared touch it, anyway. It was Superom equipment. Keren would have to make arrangements to recover it. Like a menacing wasp swarm clinging around a pair of queens they bucked, bounced and swept around the hill and then howled triumphantly down the highway in a black mass heading toward the stone jungles and, beyond them, the sacred enclave of the Superom at Spadrox. II T he night was half through. The primeval Thetan sun was a flat, purplish glow, like a strange cloud edging the horizon. Keren had been roused from his bed and his Thetan wives by the CD OK Edgar Rice Burroughs doesn't write any more and John Norman writes only once a year, so if you thirst for high adventure on a fullbodied and visually real alien planet, Alan Burt Akers stands ready with the third of his Prescot trated by Tim Kirk. (UQ# -- #) What happened, when Earth was finally conquered by the leonine legions of Centra, made the victors wish they had not been so successChristopher Anvil, with a great Kelly Frees cover and high-galactic humor to match. (UQ# -- #) David Walker is so prophetic that it has almost come true before it was printed. Remember last year's red tides? It's a fine and sensitive novel about two families alone -- or so they thought -- in a deadly world that may already be lapping at our shores! (UQ #-#) Gerard Klein's second novel for us. France's leading sf writer takes us into confrontation with the unseen masters of the farther half of the Milky Way in a novel that guarantees Klein's place among the world's sf giants. (UQI # -- # noise of the returning mission. He waited for the recaptured fugitives just outside the quadrangle of onestory buildings that formed Spadrox. Directly behind him at the quadrangle's center, sliding high into the night, was the needle tower that housed Karel's casket. The Superom Regent had roused five of his aides. They were grouped on his left, looking untidy and annoyed about their broken sleep. Keren was not much bigger physically than Shevan, but his long black hair, the sharp beard streaked with gray and the immense, dark eyes staring out of his bony face made him a fearsome wizard in that strange light. The Helangles kept a respectful distance. They stopped their motors and let Shevan and Delbet get out of the litters about fifty meters from the waiting Regent. All of them raised both hands to touch the fronts of their crash hats. As soon as Keren had returned this salute they swung their steedes around and fired their motors. Their tumult and their lances of light were soon swallowed in the darkness. Shevan and Del were left alone. Although the girl was weary and covered with grime and still confused by the noise of the journey, she straightened herself, brushed a sleeve over her face and hair and walked disdainfully toward her cousin. Their eyes, so alike in power and character, met on equal terms. Del followed her, but he was worried. He hung his head in the face of Keren's silent anger. He stopped a few paces behind Shevan. The Regent addressed them both. His voice was like acid. He spoke in the Superom high tongue, so his aides wouldn't understand. "So, cousins. What did you expect to achieve when you left Spadrox? There's no place on Thetis for Superom except here." "I shall go where I choose." Shevan's voice had a bite. "You tell me what right you had to send those faceless dwarfs after us. We are Superom." "Yes, I'll tell you, cousin. I had the duty to maintain order in Thetis. What do you think would happen if the Thetans saw the last Superom community breaking up? They would believe we were trying to leave Thetis -- as the old ones did. They would kill us rather than let us go aad they would take Karel for themselves." "You damned fool, Keren. Leave Thetis is what we should do. If we don't the sun will kill us as well as the Thetans." "Childish rubbish. Our sun will last many thousands of years. There'll be plenty of warning in the climate decline long before there's any danger." IF "And I contradict that. The talktapes explained it all. The artificial sun will go on providing equal light and warmth throughout the decline. What happens is that as its bulk reduces it just consumes itself faster and faster." "Talk-tapes?" sneered Keren. "Only you have told us about these magic tapes. Where are they? What can you prove?" Shevan flung her fist into the air. "You had them destroyed. You had them destroyed because you couldn't intuit and absorb them. You had them destroyed because I could understand them and you couldn't, cousin. Because I'm true Superom and you're not! That's what I prove!" "Stop it." Keren stepped forward furiously. "How dare you?" He switched back to Thetan, spitting words over his shoulder to the waiting aides. "This is enough. Take Delbet back to the cruze mine. He's as stupid as he's big and the girl's to blame -- but he has to learn. Give him a neuro-whipping -- but so that he's still able to control the machines tomorrow, eh? Go, It's for the good of Superom!" "No," said Shevan, "Don't touch Delbet. I frightened him into going with me. He isn't to blame. He tried to get me to come back." The aides stopped and looked uncertainly at Keren, their neuroprobes already drawn. They were grim, powerful specimens, half Conduc, half product of Keren's marriages with various Thetan females, but although they carried the blood they would never challenge a Superom order. Their minds were in conflict. "Take him," snapped Keren. "I'll deal with Miss Shevan." Del looked in panic at the girl. His mouth opened, but he didn't speak. "Keren, tell them no neuro-whipping." "Take him to the mine," the Regent repeated. He didn't look at anyone but Shevan. After a few dragging seconds he added: "Leave him without the punishment. I have a better idea to teach them sense." The aides moved away, Delbet white-faced and grimy among them. "You come with me, cousin." "I'm going to my quarters at the mine," said Shevan haughtily. For the barest instant Keren's rage was deflated. He swung around with a short laugh like an animal's bark. His face broke into the briefest of smiles at Shevan's impudence. "Do you want me to have that tree-sized baby neuro-whipped after all? Come with me -- don't argue." She followed him, furious but beaten. my dear cuz?" Keren asked. "What exactly was your plan?" He rocked back in his chair behind the broad table in his conference room. "Find out -- cuz." The derisive pause before she spat out the usually affectionate diminutive made Shevan's response waspish. Keren wasn't provoked. He was relaxed and controlled itow. "You won't ever get far from Spadrox, my beloved tree tigress. You know the Helangles have a saying-the Conducs and the others have it, too, but I find the Helangle dialect so expressive, don't you? They say: 'Spadrox Suprom pad, Suprom belong Spadrox.' And you know, they have this weird notion that while we stay, Thetis is saved and the Superom Commonwealth will come again. So why are you so damned mischievous you try to upset the status quo?" He crashed his fist suddenly onto the table so that Shevan, with all her self-possession, jumped. "What do you think you're doing?" After a moment she said, "I want to be far away from you, cousin. As far as possible." Keren rocked the chair forward. He leaned over, the table. His hands slid across it towards her. His eyes fixed hers, taunting her with the truth she thought he hadn't known. "You won't ever get to Mandanar, Shevan. Mandanar has ceased to exist except as history. The old ones destroyed it five hundred years ago when they abandoned the planet." "No!" "Yes, my dear. You'd much better stay at Spadrox with me and we'll invent a new Thetis one day. Quite soon, now." "No." "You'll see. For all their primitivism the Thetans will be proved right. Suprom will rule again in the Fourth Vortex." Shevan leaned forward, too, but only to throw words into his grinning face. "It may happen. But not that way. Not your ,way. Not if I'm forced to tear out your heart  with my own hands first, Keren." He clicked his tongue. "Now, cuz, what do you mean?" "You know what I mean. You know that I understand too well what you mean. But you wouldn't dare speak it and I would yomit if I heard the words or had to come closer to the ideas in them or consider them more capable of realization than I do now." Keren shook his head. The smile was still there, but it was fixed, frozen somehow by Shevan's passion. "We'll see, cousin. Meanwhile, I must detach that poor giant from your corrupting influence. Perhaps that will punish him more than the neuroprobes. From tomorrow you will be lodged in Karel's Tower and be responsible for our sleeping leadIF er. The tree tigress -- High Priestess of the Tower! How does that strike you?" A ll day and all night the tip of the tower, aimed at the sky, listened for messages. There had been none for more than six hundred years but the tower went on listening patiently. It read the faint light and the bright light from distant and near stars. It heard the blurred symphony of galaxies, the clock of pulsars -- it listened for the last, receding glow of the Superom in the Outer Vortices. The delicate instruments set up by its stranded creators were always ready to sift and interpret a flicker of hope less symbols that shone through them. Its cone fed on light and its multilensed sides drank liglit, but at its base was a windowless vault where the darkness was six hundred years old. Shevan had been inside the tower before but had never stayed more than a few minutes. When her eyes became accustomed to the deep shadow she recognized the pale greenish glow at the vault's center. Within it, Karel's casket rested on a low dais. 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Only the machines, which supported a minute spark of life, and the timeless instruments, which confirmed it and recorded his vital functions, throbbed and occasionally clicked in the stillness. No other sound disturbed Karel's vast sleep. A quick pulse of light beat once in the darkness. A circular door had opened and closed at the far end of the vault. The pulse had admitted a figure. Now the darkness beyond the faint luminosity of Karel's casket held it invisibly. "Who's there?" Shevan challenged. "Who are you?" "I have forgotten my name," said the darkness. "I have always been here. I am trained to look after the casket and maintain the instruments. I have no other purpose." "Come here," said Shevan. "I am Shevan Lady." Her heart had begun to beat normally again. A shadow moved toward her. It passed the casket like a breath of air and ancient dust. She had already guessed its identity. To itself, perhaps, it had no name but to everyone in Spadrox it was Shade. In silence and invisibility Shade kept the tower and tended Karel's casket, read the instruments, awaited messages or the end of Karel's long sleep. Some said he was Superom who had survived the plague with his reason impaired, that he was as old as Karel himself. Others said that Shade did not exist, that the tower maintained itself, as did the casket and the instruments, and that disbelief among many in the power of the old Superom had made it necessary to invent a legendary keeper of the tower. No one had seen him. On the days when the vault was opened for homage to the sleeping leader. Shade was never there. He had some niche in the darkness or in the fabric of the tower or of the air itself into which he melted. His presence was attested to only by the inunaculate machinery, the sense of order, the unfailing instruments. Shade had held the tower for the Superom since before Keren's birth. Keren had not seen him either, knew him only as a voice from the same darkness that now questioned Shevan. "You are Superom?" "I am Shevan Lady, Keren Sir's cousin." The darkness repeated the answer softly: "Shevan-Keren's cousin." Shevan noticed that although Shade spoke in Thetan he didn't use the "Sir" or "Lady" suffix, as was mandatory when addressing or speaking about Superom. The voice had seemed to come from behind her. She turned, at the same time moving backward a step or two, trying to bring the creature into the light from the casket. "I am to learn how the tower works. I have to know the functioning of the casket and all the instruments." Shevan pushed the moist palms of her hands down her thighs to dry them. The darkness before her seemed utterly dead, utterly untenanted. From her left the voice said, "So, I am to be extinguished. You have been sent by Keren to trap me." Quite suddenly Shevan was seized from behind. A collar of darkness gripped her throat. Vivid lights volleyed from the corners of her yes to blind her. The throttling grip was so fierce it IF prevented her from crying out. She tried to tear it away. The hands were as light and dry as the bones of a small bird, but they held like a vise. In desperation, whirlwinds howling in her ears, she flung herself forward. The attacker was caught off guard. The awful grip broke as he fell. Scrambling sideways, Shevan cried out: "Great Karel, help me! I am Keren's prisoner! Help me!" Inside the casket Karel didn't stir in his six-hundred-year sleep. The darkness listened to Shevan's jagged sobs. She remained kneeling, expecting another attack. When the light, ancient hands returned she screamed so that the tower echoed, but the hands were gentle this time. Still she threw herself sideways to escape -- they followed her. "Delbet!" she screamed. The hands explored her face and neck. They ran like a breath of air over the contours of her body. She tried to protect herself, hunched over. Into the unreason of her panic came a black thought. Shade didn't exist as a separate entity -- Keren and Shade were two projections of the same being. She shrieked, "Delbet! Delbet -- " again. But the voice behind the hands in the darkness whispered, "Forgive me. You are only a child. Forgive me. Please. I did not understand." Shevan stayed trembling on the floor. The hands left her. "I will look after you," the darkness promised her, "as I look after Great Karel." Shevan felt her aching throat. "Who are you?" she croaked. "Please help me to escape from here." The darkness pondered. "I have forgotten my name," it said forlornly. "I have always been here. Why do you want to escape?" "I must go to Mandanar." "Mandanar!" The darkness whispered the name. "Mandanar!" Long moments passed. Then the voice returned. It had a different tone, hostile, reproachful, and it was farther from Shevan now. "You make me afraid. Why do you want to go to Mandanar? Why has Keren shut you in here? You are Superom. Superom do not mistreat one another. I am afraid of you." "The sun is burning out," said Shevan. "I must go to Mandanar to see whether there's any hope of escape from Thetis. Keren doesn't believe me. The future he invents for me in his thoughts is wicked. He believes I created the tale of the sun to escape from him." "I don't like you," said the voice remotely. "You're a child and I won't hurt you, but I wish you hadn't come here. I can't understand any of this." "Don't go-" "I don't understand," insisted the darkness. "I wish you hadn't come." The pulse of light that had announced its entry to the vault beat again. "Shade!" Shevan called. "I didn't want to come here. Help me to escape." There was no answer. She was alone in the vault with the sleeping god of Thetis. H Shade, tree tigress?" asked Keren. His head and shoulders had materialized on a communicator screen set in one wall of the tower's computer complex. "Shadewho is Shade, cousin?" Shevan turned her back on the screen, pretending to be engrossed in an input feeder. She had been a prisoner in Karel's tower for about a week. Although he had not come to the tower in person, Keren had formed the habit of turning up on the screens at all hours of the day, so that she had little privacy even in her own restricted living quarters. She always tried to ignore or anger him, but he refused to be provoked. He remained amused and a little aloof but always ready to exploit any sign that her will was faltering. When his intrusions became too persistent she retreated to the vault where there was no light save the glow bathing the casket and no screens were permitted. "So -- I'm to understand the spirit of the tower has ignored you?" Keren was in one of his bantering moods. She recognized it and circled the input bank, keeping her back to the screen. "What spirit? Have you ever seen Shade, cousin?" "I've heard him," said Keren. "He's spoken to me." "Poor deluded creature." Shevan made the comment as though to herself, but purposely loud enough for the Regent to hear. Keren chuckled. "Well, cuz, believe whatever fantasies please you. But you aren't so foolish as to dismiss the uncanny way the tower works. Shade is there all right. He's watching you." "I do feel that I'm being watched," said Shevan with quiet anger. "But it isn't Shade who's watching me, cousin -- it's you. When are you going to stop this bloody game and let me out? I demand to be released." She swung around, her eyes blazing at the screen; In the next instant she wished she hadn't, recognizing the sinister look in her cousin's eyes. "I'm watching you grow up, cuz," he said. "It gives me pleasure to see yesterday's little cub becoming tomorrow's tigress." IF "Burn in hell!" Shevan invited him, hiding her sudden unease with a great gust of anger. Keren was unmoved. "Until soon," he said, using a Thetan expression. "Remember me to Shade." The screen became blank. As soon as she felt certain that he was no longer watching or listening, Shevan called, "Shade-Shade-" The tower remained silent. In fact, since the terrifying dwn when she had first entered the vault, Shevan had neither seen nor heard its keeper. He had once more fused with the air or the old shadows surrounding Karel's casket. She had tried to raise him several times. In spite of his hostility she believed she still could persuade him to help her escape to Mandanar because of the almost spell-like effect the name had had on him. But he wouldn't reveal himself. Shevan remembered his reproachful: I dont like you.  can't under stand any of thi... And now Shade stayed stubbornly silent and out of reach. She knew he was there. The readings from the casket instruments were always brought up and dutifully fed into the computer for analysis. The hundreds of light signals the tower received every day were always classified and anything that was only marginally out of the ordinary was cross-checked and broken down. The micrologs were always up to date. All this being attended to left Shevan with nothing to occupy her mind but escape. From the fourth story of the tower she could just see the bright cone that marked the cruze mine. It was too remote for her to be able to distinguish figures, but Shevan thought of Delbet working there on his beloved machines, perhaps wondering what had happened to her. She tried once to smuggle a message to him. Keren had food sent to the tower twice a day. One of the aides who brought it was more approachable than the others. Shevan had asked, him whether he knew Delbet and if the giant was all right. "Delbet Sir's okay. He works the cruze mine." "Did Keren Sir hurt him? Was he neuro-whipped?" "He's okay. Keren Sir didn't hurt him. He's very happy. He knows all about the machines over there." "Do you ever go over there?" "Sometimes, ma'am. Delbet Sir is very kind. He understands the machines very well. He even talks to them." "There are many interesting machines here in the tower. Delbet Sir would like them. I'd like to tell him about some of them. I've written about one or two and I want you to take him what I've written when you go to the mine again." "No." The aide backed into the tunnel that was the only approach to Karel's vault from the outside. He had drawn a neuroprobe and although he kept it respectfully lowered Shevan didn't doubt that Keren had told him to use it if it meant preventing her escape. So the door closed on that attempt with her having achieved nothing but a cold meal and the certainty that the guard would be scared to speak to her again. Shevan had been into every accessible part of the tower several times. She could fmd no alternate way out or in -- or any place where Shade might make his home. The door to Karel's vault and the tunnel outside it were guarded night and day. Shevan lay on her bed. The sun was setting. Her plight filled her mind as the death of the sun filled the sky. She grew restless, arose and prowled through the computer complex on the floor below for the hundredth time. Even if she could escape her prison she wouldn't get far from Spadrox without help. Keren had already proved that to her beyond question. She would need the help of the Thetan tribes -- she would need a guide to Mandanar -- she would need Delbet and, most important, she would need to defeat Keren so decisively that he wouldn't dare to pursue her or. try to bring her back. If Shade would come and talk to her she might learn something. If Karel would rouse from his half-life he would surely recognize her story and understand the approaching end of Thetis. At least these two could prove or disprove to her whether Mandanar still existed and whether the old ones had left their descendants any means of retreat to the Outer Vortices. A wild thought came into her head. She looked around at the vast number of units in the complex, all humming in a preoccupied way. They would never help her, but they suggested something that might work. She hurried down the tower. She tried to think as a Superom should, but her thoughts, still halfformed, were muddled and disjointed by apprehension. The circular door to the vault blinked open and shut like an eye after her as she passed through. As soon as her eyes were used to the darkness she approached the casket. Karel slept. "If only you could wake," Shevan murmured. But the old leader couldn't hear her. He lay neutral, the embodiment of man's great memory of the spaces between galaxies. If any dreams passed through the sixhundred-year sleep they were benign and didn't trouble him. His face was serene. Shevan breathed deeply. She IF fancied she could hear her own heart beating. And as soon as she touched the instrument controls she knew her idea had been ill-conceived. It had been too hasty and panicky to be worthy of a Superom. She hadn't considered all the possible consequences of her action -- not even the obvious ones. Like a gust of air from a tomb Shade was through the blink of light and on her before she had even moved the hibemator setting a half calibration. Worse -- a violent shock made her somersault backward. Was that shriek she heard her own? She hit the floor and squirmed up into a world of wavering light and alarms and running feet as the guards flung open the door and poured into the vault. The chill presence of Shade faded instantly into the shadows. Keren's men caught her by the arms and legs and carried her back to her room on the fourth flight. She fought like a captured animal. Keren came to direct his men. The casket was unharmed, but the Regent had lost the temper he had held in check. "Strip her," he ordered. Fighting, cursing, biting, scratching the hands that laid her naked, Shevan saw his gaunt face and read in it what he meant to do. She calmed suddenly, awfully. "No, you half-breed! I am Superom. You can't." "Stand away from her,' said Keren. The guards backed up. "You are foolish, cousin. You tried to meddle with the casket. You might have killed Karel and brought disaster to all of us." "I didn't mean to hurt Great Karel. I wanted to try to rouse him so he would save me from you." "You fool. You are growing up, but a lesson or two won't harm you." "No -- " Shevan put up her hand in a purely instinctive gesture, staving off nothing. The Regent used the neuroprobe with cruel precision. Her mouth open in a soundless scream, Shevan jackknifed. Two slim lances of pain had suddenly been exchanged for her legs. "Get out." Keren's snarl sent the guards scurrying. "You bastard-you bastard -- " Shevan's own voice was shouting through the long slender pain, but the pain wouldn't stop. As she writhed away from him and it, Keren bent down suddenly and pressed his bearded lips against her left thigh. It was an entirely passionless gesture. He seemed merely determined to make her associate her anguish with his power over her. "Don't do anything foolish again, cousin," he said softly. "You are my prisoner. I have you. You are part of my future. I can't let you go." Ill  night. While she cried, the paroxysms of her throat and chest and the ache through her eyes helped to relieve the pain in her legs. Exhausted finally, she drifted into a sleep crowded with dreams. Fragments of them refused to link together, although somevdiere she intuited a coherent theme in them. Every time she awoke the fragments broke away and, weeping, she came back to consciousness and a dull ache in her legs. In her dreams Karel's voice seemed to come to her from everywhere in the tower -- every where but the casket in which he kept his own sound sleep. Delbet dressed her with his strong giant's hands and they ran away from Spadrox again. Shevan rediscovered the talk-tapes in the library. From the charred ruins of evening a young talue leaped up. With its deceptive cry it lured Delbet into a broken arch of the observatory against the dying sun. 'No!" Shevan cried in her dream. The talue flung a meteorite of fire-ore from its pouch and toppled the giant. As he fell Delbet 's voice rang clearly from the casket in a lightless vault: "I'll listen carefully, Shev. I won't get it wrong this time. What does it mean? I can't understand." Shevan awoke. Tears were running down her pale face in streams. "What did you dream?" a voice breathed from the night just above. "I dreamed my escape," she said. "I wish you wouldn't keep crying," the voice said impatiently. Then, after a pause: "I knew no good would come of it. I wish you'd never been locked up here. I wish I'd never set eyes on you." Shevan realized that both voices, hers and the other one, were real and not part of her dream. She sat up. Someone had carefully and gently put her back in her coveralls. The pain was gone. It was still night. "Who is it?" "How stupid you are for a Superom. I've told you more than once that I no longer have a name. Perhaps I never had one -- " "Shade," said Shevan with relief. " -- or even wanted one." The voice paused. "Why did you try to hurt Great Karel? That was exceptionally silly." "I didn't mean to harm him. Yes, it was silly. I hadn't applied logic. But I thought if he could be roused Keren would have to set me free" The ugly recollection of Keren and vdiat he had done to her brought tears to her eyes again. "Oh, do stop, girl!" scolded the voice.' "You've already cried enough to flood Spadrox. I can't endure your weeping the whole night. Listen to me -- what did you dream?" IF Shevan wiped her eyes. She remembered. "Great Karel! I saw it. How did you know?" "Know what?" said Shade. "I didn't know anything. I just heard you say it. I wish you would escape. I'm afraid of you. You're a dangerous child. And you're even more dangerous because you're the last. But I said I would look after you, too. And I saw what the half-breed Keren did to you. So I'll help you," "I must speak to Delbet," said Shevan wildly, getting up from her bed. "Help me to get a message to him," "The giant with the saint's face who works the cruze?" "Yes." "It's too far," said Shade. "In less than an hour the dawn will start. Go to sleep now. You must wait another day. I'll come back tomorrow night and take you to the mine." "No," said Shevan. "No, I don't want to leave the tower just yet. You must bring Delbet here. Please." The darkness embraced a moment's incredulous silence. "You don't want to leave the tower?' "Not yet. When I escape I want to be sure that Keren knows -- and that he can't make me return." "I don't understand. You made me afraid from the beginning. You're a strange child." "Will you bring Delbet to me?" "Very well." "Tomorrow?" "After nightfall. The day would be impossible." "I'll endure the wait." "And for now, you can sleep." It was incredible that a few hours before she had been in such depths of pain and despair that they seemed to have no end or relief. In spite of Shade's advice she couldn't sleep. For the short time left before dawn her mind struggled with half-dreams and a repetitive agony of speculation. She did endure the day, but ununder an icy mask of injured pride and contempt. Her cousin appeared frequently on the screens. It was almost as though he suspected the plan shaping and reshaping in her head. But she could tell from the sullen air beneath his reproaches and scoldings that he regretted what he had inflicted on her. She ignored him utterly, pretending to be busy, but always waiting for night. It came and with the darkness Shade returned, a breath of dusty earth and dry leaves accompanying his presence. "Wait half an hour," he whispered. 'Then go down to the vault and stay there till we come." D EL!" "Shevan? That you?" The young giant leaned forward, peering in from the peripheral darkness of the vault. "Del! Del, darling!" She rushed to hug him. Her arms would not quite go all the way around his chest. He swung her up and held her so that their faces were on the same level. "Why, now -- it's really you, Shev. What's been happening to you?" Shevan noticed he had about him that faint scent of earth and dead leaves -- like the smell that sometimes came with Shade. It suggested that, after all, there was a subterranean tunnel giving access to the tower. Maybe a secret tunnel that only Shade knew of and used. "Del -- where's Shade?" "Shade? Who's that?" "You came here alone?" The giant put her dowm He did not answer her directly. "Hell, Shev," he said, "I don't like it here. It's dark and scary. Hey -- that's Great Karel, isn't it? Danm, I really don't like it here. I'ye only seen the casket in the light when they have the Listening Festivals. What are you doing here?" "Del, I asked you, did you come alone?" She dug the nails of one hand into his forearm to make him listen. "It was queer." Delbet rubbed his arm, then his face and his cap of black hair. "I was asleep and it was like a voice -- a voice or something woke me and kind of told me -- led me-" He was looking around him all the time, trying to penetrate the shadows. "Hell -- then there was this talue or something going on ahead of me. Not making much sound. At last I came to a kind of hole or cave thing-it went into the hill. Then thQ voice -- it sort of told me you wanted me... you know. But there wasn't anyone there so I just came." "Never mind, Del. You're here. I'm here." "SSiev. I'm scared. Keren would be wild if he found out." "Keren-did he hurt you?" Del considered. He shook his head. "Not hurt. Not whipped or anything. Just-sort of said I wouldn't be seeing you again. Well, not for a long time anyway. Only that kind of hurt." "Never mind -- never mind." She petted his arm as she might a baby's. "Listen, Del, Keren's bad. We have to leave him. We have to leave Spadrox and go to Mandanar. Keren locked me in the tower. We have to find a way to get to Mandanar before I can escape this place -- " "No, Shev, no -- not again. Now you calm right down, baby. We really aren't going throu that again. Look at what happened last time." He paced away from her, agitated -- she heard rather than saw him circling Karel's casket, beyond its ghostly green glow. IF "Del. Del, dear. Don't you want to see me again? Do you want me to stay locked up here?" Delbet whispered, "No -- " but she couldn't see his face. She didn't know what he was denying or whether he had even understood what she meant. Then: "Shev, it won't work, baby. Look what happened last time." "This time will be different. Come here. Listen to what we have to do." She pursued and found him, caught his arm and made him stop prowling up and down. "Sit down, Del -- here where I can see your face." She pulled him down. He sat obediently, searching her face with frightened eyes. Shevan kneeled between his knees, so that it was difficult for him to look at anything but her. Still he hung his head. She held his big hands tightly. "Listen. Listen carefully. I'm going to tell you how we'll escape. You've got to help me, Del. We're going to escape to Mandanar." She could tell by the way the darkness moved suddenly and became taut and listening and excited that they were not alone. She could tell that the name she had just spoken was once more a spell -- and she somehow knew that it didn't matter if the darkness overheard her scheme while the spell held. She knew that she and Delbet would not go alone to Mandanar if her dream worked. In tense, rushed whispers she began to tell the giant and the eavesdropping darkness what she had dreamed and what he and she must do. first Conduc caravan arrived an hour after sunrise five days later. It consisted of about twenty of the usual beat-up old vehicles, some with as many as six passengers. It looked to Keren as if the drivers had picked up plenty of casual riders from the Conduc camps on the way. He saw at least four leaders among the arrivals and recognized Apian, one of the most troublesome and influential. He wondered at the problem was this time. Another wife-snatching raid by the Helangles? A deputation to demand more cruze for trade with the far metropols? Another petty wrangle over areas of influence on the highways or in the stone jungles? Shevan had no such misgivings. The sight of the caravan bouncing and rattling across the countryside from the nearest road ended a period of unbearable suspense for her. Every day since her meeting with Delbet -- and the sweaty, agonizing hour die had spent in the vault, convincing, cajoling, bullying him -- she had gone to the highest point in her prison and stayed there, hour after hour, watching the distant roads and the crouching towers that ringed the horizon until water flowed from her strained and staring eyes. She had watched from the first day, even though she had known that she was much too early. It would require at least two days for the cautious ancLreluctant Delbet to take the first step her plan demanded. But she had watched from the first moment of daylight on that first day, growing progressively and unreasonably more disillusioned and resigned as the first day and night had melted into a second, a third, into an agony of fatigue and despair during the fourth. Now they came: a somber, noisy motorcade, making unquestionably for Spadrox across the roadless country between the enclave and the nearest highway. The Conduc vehicles and dress reflected the descent of the Conducs from highly skilled, mobile teams of auxiliaries who had helped the Superom in their space communication network and orbiter stations. The black or deep blue or purple paintwork of their vehicles recalled the profound colors of space. Superimposed on the paint in silver tones were crude representations of the most familiar constellations of the Fourth Vortex. The Conduc cousin tribes were often identified by these symbols and took the names of the constellations they represented: Mamaria Thebor, Tirax Alpegi, Lex Andromeda, Caxitine. Apian was a Caxitine. Shevan saw the five major and seven minor stars in the rough diamond shape on the front of his caftan as he stepped from his slowing car, followed by the leaders of the Mamarian Theborans, Tirax Alpegiae and Lex Andromedans. They lined up before the main entrance to Spadrox. With a final discordant blast upon klaxons of various notes and performances the caravan halted and the Conduc followers got out to form an expectant group behind their chiefs. Both sexes of the Conducs wore long hair and caftans and so were often difficult to distinguish at a distance, but Shevan, high in the tower, thought that the delegation looked like a cross-section of eminent members from all four tribes. They represented not just the male negotiator and warriorclasses. She felt confirmed in her hope that Del hadnH failed her. Keren, hurrying down from the state apartments and trying to muster his aides, was also grateful for the mixed appearance of the delegation. For him this meant the Conduc were not actually spoiling for a fight with any of their rivals. He felt less sanguine moments later. IF Having completed the formal welcome to Apian and the other chiefs, he settled into the conference chair while the Conducs squatted on the ground. Apian rose. The Caxitine leader had magnificent orange hair that curled at shoulder length. The excited whispers of his followers died away as he started to speak. Then, with uncanny timing, an unmistakable sound rolled up the sky and scudded toward Spadrox with the gathering clouds. Apian stopped in midsentence. There was a moment of confusion. Keren jumped up. Almost reflexively his aides drew their neuroprobes. The Conducs also rustled to their feet. They stared toward the highway. The boom and snarl of Helangle steedes rolled down the wind. Apian and the other chiefs exchanged glances. Keren noticed that they didn't lopk startled. "Our brothers have come to join us," the Caxitine remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. Only then did Keren realize that something of major significance was happening that he might be powerless to control or influence. In the tower, Shevan knew it, too, although she couldn't hear what was being said. When the first tight bunch of Helangles swept into view she pressed both hands to her cheeks to stop herself from bursting into tears. She watched until she was sure that the Helangle delegation was as big and representative as that of the Conducs. They had even brought some of their women and children with them to underline the peaceful nature of the mission. Shevan went down to Karel's vault and spent a long time staring at the sleeping leader. She wished even now that some miracle would happen to rouse him and excuse her from having to suffer while the next steps in her plan worked themselves out. "You dreamed your dream and it was true," said the darkness. "They've come -- the first ones. Yes, they've really come. Del did his work." "There's still a long way to go." "Yes, but we'll get to Mandanar." "Mandanar," breathed the darkness. The lost, secret place of the Superom was made so real and exciting by the old voice that Shevan imagined she saw its breathless geometries shining in the shadows of the vaults. Apian." Starhowl brought his bike around in the usual flamboyant half-circle and saluted. He dismounted and scuttled forward, apelike. Apian touched the gauntleted hand held out to him with obvious distaste. Keren watched apprehensively. Rapport between the Conducts and Helangles was rare -- a delegation with what seemed a common purpose was sinister. He motioned his aides to put up their weapons and sank warily into his chair to await events. "What's the word from Spadrox pad, man?" Starhowl spoke directly to Apian. "We have not yet exchanged views," said the Caxitine loftily. "We were just about to begin when your strident arrival stopped the proceedings. Perhaps we can get on now." "Sure. Don't make it heavy, man. I dig. Anyway I see nobody breached the tower yet. Shoot." Keren felt a warning prickle of fear in his neck and fingertips as the Caxitine chief turned to him again. "Regent Keren Sir. We have come because you have told us that Great Karel is to speak at last. We are the nearer Conduc tribes and are known to you, but we have sent the news to every part of this continent. Soon all the leaders of the greater and lesser tribes will converge on Spadrox. All of us will be at peace here to see the awakening and hear the words from the past, which will restore us and our world to greatness. We Thetans will once more become part of The Commonwealth of Superom." Apian made a dramatic sweep of his arm to take in both groups of Thetans behind him. "Already you see us -- Conducs and Helangles in peace before Spadrox. We only ask you to tell us -- when will the tower be breached? When will Great Karel speak?" "Where did you get this absurd idea?" said Keren furiously. "It's still twenty days before the next Listening Festival. Who is responsible for bringing you here? Who has deceived you into believing that the long sleep is ending?" Apian looked baffled. Behind him the chiefs of the Mamarian Theborans and the Lex Andromedans exchanged glances, then looked back suspiciously at the Superom Regent. "Well?" snapped Keren. His imagination was racing. He tasted fear and anger in his dry mouth. It was left to the ugly Starhowl to snap the tension that bred in the unanswering silence. Crouching painfully a few meters to Apian's left and watching both men intently from behind the anonymous black goggles, he said: "We got the message, Keren Sir. Like real. No errors. Checked out with Kickstart of the Seven Three City South Helanges. He got one, too. Those messages were made in Superom, with The tan translation. Like yawl saw always in the old Commonwealth. They came from Spadrox." "Yes, Regent," Apian confirmed. "My brothers and I also received them. There was a courier from Floridian of the Xanthopathiae yesterday. Floridian had seen the mesIF sages posted in the Port West approaches. His caravan is already on the way." As if the size of the gathering avalanche needed confirmation, another group of Helangles cruised toward Spadrox from the south before the Caxitine had finished speaking. Keren recognized at the noisy head the square shoulders and broken lip of Kickstart, the Helangle leader from Seventy-Third City South. "I say you have been deceived," said Keren. "You should all return to your homes. Where are these messages? Show me one." Apian turned to his group of followers. Two Conducs stood up and came forward, carrying a pouch. Keren saw that it was the same kind of case that had been used traditionally to guard Superom messages and directives to the Thetans. He watched with the unblinking fury of a snake while Apian undid its fastenings. Starhowl had grown tired of ceremonies. "Heavy, man. Like hit itspeed it. Here -- " He fished inside his jerkin and withdrew a sheet of metal foil. It had become ragged in that less reverent Helangle version of a pouch, but the little leader loped over and put it into Keren's outstretched hand and the Regent saw that it was still perfectly legible. It took the form that Stailiowl had claimed. The bubbly angular perforations of computerlike script read: Below, the message was repeated in the picture script the Superom had devised for their inferiors. The tinfoil rattled as Keren's hand shook. He threw it from him. "This is a trick -- " Apian was waiting before him, holding out the Conducs' summons. Keren snatched it. It was identical, except that the translation was in the Conduc numeral language. "You've been deceived." He stood up. He tried to rip the foil in half, but had forgotten its indestructibility. Apian said wamingly, "Regent Keren Sir, that is Conduc property, if you please." "How dare you contest Superom?" Keren swung around to his guards. "Take him. Neuro-whip him. And anyone else who dares to remain here within the hour -- " He stopped in midsentence. The aides hadn't moved. They were looking fearfully at the silver messages on the ground. A few glanced over their shoulders with equal fear at the shut and silent tower. Starhowl said, "Yawl ought maybe let us pad down here until fourth Harvest, Keren Sir. Maybe there's something going on even yawl don't dig. Like maybe Great Karel didn't want to say to you." "Yeah," called a voice from the Helangle pack. "Like maybe yawl don't want Great Karel to wake, Regent. like yawl got it all going for you so long as Great Karel stays tripped." It was the nearest thing to rebellion Keren had heard of in his long life on Thetis. He reached for the neuroprobe, but his hand stopped, as if paralyzed. The way the aides were acting, if he drew they might draw, too-but against him, not with him. Starhowl had hopped back among his pack with surprising agility. He cuffed a youngish thug and sent him sprawling across the motor. As he fell it became apparent that he was a hunchbacked dwarf, the one who had threatened Delbet on the night he and Shevan were recaptured. "Yawl blown your mind. Arcweld? Nobody talks to Superom that way." Keren reached back to grab the arm of his chair. The situation was flying out of control. He had to stabilize it so that he could get back to where he was sure it had its origins. "I tell you that you and I are both victims of a plot of some kind or another. Those messages didn't come from Spadrox." "Then where did they come from?" It was the Lex Andromeda chief now. They were all getting bold. "There is no other surviving Superom enclave in Thetis." "I don't know," Keren said barely above a whisper, "but believe me I will know. If I can't convince you of your stupidity, then you're welcome to convince yourselves. The fourth of Harvest is only three days away. Stay here as you please. On that day we will breach the vault together and you shall see that there is some mischief being worked against all of us. Great Karel is no more likely to awake on that day than during any of the hundreds of listening Festivals that have come and gone since the Return." "As the Regent pleases," said Apian formally. "What do you say, my brother?" "Check," said Starhowl. "Check," repeated the faceless visor that hid Kickstart. The Caxitine chief turned to his three companions. They nodded gravely. IF K eren searched the Tower through the screens, looking for his cousin. When he couldn't find her he went to the Tower in person. With three aides he searched the place from top to bottom. He still couldn't find her. He had arclamps brought into Karel's vault and he searched that, too, being careful not to let any hint of what he was doing escape from the quadrangle of Spadrox to the tribal camps forming in the open outside the walls. His instinct told him that it was already too late to send a search party to the cruze mine, but he did so. An hour later it returned with the inevitable report: Delbet was not there. Now the Regent was certain about who had engineered the conspiracy. What made his flesh creep was wondering how they proposed to carry it through. Twice he returned alone to the Tower. He went to the vault and stood before the casket for minutes on end to make sure that Karel still slept, that he showed no sign of returning from that tideless sea of green dreams. Both times Keren was reassured. So what trick had Shevan and Delbet invented to show to the assembled Thetans? Shevan hid in the darkness made of the smells of earth and leaves while her cousin skirted the edge of madness. Shade had led her far back into the tunnel that ran between the vault and a hillside outside Spadrox. The formless spirit of the Tower didn't leave her lonely in the dark. She knew he was there, even though he didn't speak. Sometimes extravagant visions of Mandanar came into her head. She knew then that she was intuiting Shade's fading memories and escaping dreams. When Keren had finally retreated from the Tower, baffled, she went back one afternoon. Cautiously, in case a screen might suddenly become bright and burning with her cousin's eyes, she climbed to the fourth flight and saw that the gathering she had engineered had grown steadily. Floridian, the Xanthopath, had arrived with a small caravan of five vehicles and fifteen followers, including some notable sailors. The Xanthopathiae lived on the shores of one of Thetis' big inland seas and had adapted some of their vehicles to an amphibian role for their fishing industry. There had already been a number of fights between rival groups in the Helangle camp. The camp, as deliberately ugly and uncouth as the Helangles themselves, sprawled away north and east. The different scout parties kept to themselves in the main. Nearly all had brought their tattered, low-slung tents but only one or two groups had really turned the mission into a pilgrimage and brought full entourages. It was these sybarites who caused the isolated fights, taunting the involuntary celibacy of their companions by flaunting their women and their grotesque lovemaking after the midday meal was over and the traditional love period started. Fortunately for peace and order, a weak Thetan rain had come to send the lovers scurrying into their tents and out of sight on this particular afternoon. Starhowl, Kickstart and some of the others had been given a chance to organize vigilante teams mounted on stecdes and the camp was calm again. The Conducs under lan and the other paramount chiefs still favored discretion rather than trust. They had already formed their somber vehicles into protective configurations with the doors locked. Conduc women had been known to vanish before in the night with a sigh and a jubilant thrust of pistons. Between Apian's group and Floridian's a delegation from one of the lesser Thetan tribes had arrived and camped. These were the Agorans who still cultivated some stretches of the old foodland of the Commonwealth and, when they were not raided by Helangles or browbeaten by the Conducs, sold what they grew to make a living. They arrived on cadelback. The cadel was a Thetan beast of burden looking something of a cross between a giant wingless bird and a ruminant. They had corralled their animals and raised the Agoran trading standard: halved arms with a symbolic pack of instant food and three lozenges of fire-ore gules. In spite of this invitation, when a bunch of Helangles went over to trade the Agorans stuffily told them that they had only brout enough food for themselves. An intertribal incident was avoided by the quick intervention of a Helangle vigilante posse under the comnumd of the aggressive Arcweld. A little before sundown another small tribd delegation came slowly from e northeast. The rain had stopped and the various encpments were sprinkled with the light of fire-ore lamps and stoves, the smell of cooking and the movement of restless and expectant people. Straining to see through the dusk, hungry Shevan in her tower watched the new arrivals and her heart thumped once enormously. The newcomers were a group of Saivainte. Saivainte were nearing extinction as a separate Thetan group. Under the Commonwealth they had been the distinguished social class of Thetan humanity, ranking next in intellectual development to the Superom and employed by them as teachers and instructors to the lesser Thetans. IF During the decline they had quickly dwindled in numbers, absorbed under force or necessity by more aggressive groups in the battle for survival. On the continent where Spadrox stood only one colony of them remained. They lived like a religious community in the mountains to the northeast. They scrahed a living from the barren rocks by keeping kiltawi, the Thetan sheep, and taking in the sons of Conduc chiefs or the Agoran traders to give them some rudiments of the old Superom training. But it wasn't the sight of these barefoot scholars in their patched and shabby copies of the former Saivainte cloak, tunic and pants that filled Shevan's heart. Towering in the center of the party, disguised as a Saivainte but easily recognizable even in the gloom, was Delbet. Shevan found her lips trembling and a chill sweat prickling her back and the palms of her hands. Damn it, it was too soon for him to have come! With three clear days to the fourth of Harvest, Keren would undoubtedly try to get at him before the opening of the Tower. Shevan couldn't allow anything to happen to Delbet. Everything, everything that was to happen now depended on him. She had felt increasingly over the last weeks that she had ceased to be a child and was at last completely a woman. But the emotion she felt as Delbet reappeared that evening among the Saivainte was still partly made up of a child's inational rage and a mother's scolding concern. Why didnt you stay away, Del? Her breath condensed against the window as though anger were a tangible thing. Stupid child-you never remember anything I tell you. Can you remember what you ve got to do? Del, my dear, Keren s watching you now. Just as Fm watching you. Those family eyes! One of us staring hate-one seeing love. I have to find some way to protect you-as always. Why did you come back now, Del? Why the hell did you come back tonight? IV A ll the orbiters the Superom had  set in the Thetan sky for night illumination had long since burned out. In the xiarkness high above the thin rain that had started to fall once more, they still .wove patterns through the planet's gravity. They were anonymous, cold -- as lost as the power of their creators. The Thetan encampments outside the walls of Spadrox were quiet. Fire-ore lamps glowed here and there. A patrol of skeptical Conducs moved around their wagon circle. looking over their shoulders at the He I angle camp. The Agorans, wrapped in huge plastic bags against the damp, mored in chorus below their standard. The Helangles, their bloated love appetites satisfled for the night, grunted as they nuzzled their plump, ugly women in sleep. On a northeast hillside .above Spadrox a flicker of blue movement might have been the rising of a talue, but it was too insignificant for anyone in the camps to pay attention to it. Shevan let the thorn bushes fall back over the cave mouth. She crouched quietly for several moments to be sure she hadn't been seen. She turned her face up to the rain and then again to stare slowly over at the Tower. The thought went through her head that the tunnel she had just crawled through must be nearly five hundred meters long. Down there outside the walls, somewhere in the straggling arc of encampments, were the Saivainte and Del among them. Del had come disguised and Shevan had gotten Shade to find her a Conduc caftan to makeher less conspicuous on her expedition. He had left it at the tunnel's end for her. She started going down the hill through bush and trees, stopping frequently to make sure that the quadrangle of Spadrox remained quiet. T he SidVaiiitc had no tents or protection from the rain. Wrapped in a cloak barely big enough to sild him to his waist, Del dreamed. He dreamed of gleaming cylinders pistoning back and forth, up and down. Their simple power drew parallelograms, welded ellipses, transmuted geometric shapes into shifting, patternless forms forever changing, but always gathering and dispensing energy within their varying perimeters. He muttered and twitched while silver wheels whirred and cogs, machined to finite degrees of accuracy, spun light into a ravenous cone, revolving, bright. In his brain the finger terminals fluttered among banks of selectors and preselectors on a dream console fifty meters long and as high as a wish. Great gyres of wisdom drilled from the cone into his sleep. Through them threaded a broken message tensed into a ring. He didn't want to come awake. He shook and muttered angrily at a sleepwalking hand annoying his shoulder. He struggled to hold the warm parts of the cube root of dreams together, but the persistent hand had acquired a voice. It poured consciousness into his ear and the voice knew a name and the name spun down the whorls of his hearing like quicksilver. "Del. Wake up, Del. Del, dear-" He awoke. The transition from IF dream to world was immediate. Out of the bowl of night hanging over him the rain came quietly down like thought or his lost sleep, washing away the tantalizing, broken message. The Saivainte sprawled around, wrapped in their cloaks. With an immense start Del recognized a damp, warm presence at his side. "Hell, Shev -- it's you. Great Karel, you could have started -- " "Shush, Del. lie down. I'll stay on this side of you. Put the cloak over me. "I'm sure glad to see you, Shev. But what the hell? I thought we wouldn't do anything together till-" "Will you lie down?" The girl raged softly, digging cruel little talons into his arm. He obeyed, grinning ruefully at her single-mindedness, exposing himself to the rain, wrapping her in the Saivainte cloak that swallowed her almost completely, turning on his side so that his bulk would hide her from his companions if they woke. Shevan's wide-eyed face stared at him from the folds of the cloak. "Why did you come back so early, Del? You're crazy." "Why, now, aren't you being just plain cussed, Shev? I have to be here to do what you told me -- " "Shush. Whisper, you dummy. Three whole days must go by before they can breach the vault. You ought to have stayed in the mountains." "But they said we ought to leave right away. Zedwardthat's the head man -- he said we better leave to make sure of getting to Spadrox in good time. We just made it fast." "Yes, but that gives Keren three days to get to you. Even if he doesn't know what we're going to do he suspects something. He's already guessed you made the messages. It's lucky you arrived just at nightfall. That Saivainte disguise won't fool anyone in daylight. You look like a dressed-up tree. You've got to get out of the camp and stay out until the fourth." The giant gulped. His expression was so remorseful that Shevan had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling in spite of her worry. "Where?" he whispered. "I've already thought it out. It's dangerous, but you'll have to come back and hide out in Shade's tunnel. Keren doesn't know about it. It's the only place." Del pursed his lips and shook his head slowly, baffled by Shevan's complex logic. "Well, I guess I always do what you say, Shev. Do you think I ought to wake Zedward and tell him where I'm -- " He saw the look in Shevan's eyes and stopped. He shrugged. "Come on, dummy," she said. "Keep me in sight, but stay well behind me, so if anything happens at least one of us can get away." She threw off the cloak and started to make her way back through the camps. The Conduc caftan Shade had chosen for her was a dark one and helped to make her less obvious in the night. She kept as close to the Conduc sectors as she could. Here, if anyone did see her, she was least likely to arouse suspicion. Del waited for a moment, then followed. It was easy to pick out Shevan-she was the only movement at the line of Conduc vehicles. He flitted .after her with the quiet speed he had learned hunting talues. Why did the sudden thought of the beautiful little Thetan rodents trouble him? Why should the recollection of pleasure be linked with uneasy dread? Shevan was already out of the camp area. Her slight figure darted away from Spadrox at a tangent aimed at the hillside. The caftan was too long for her and reached well below her knees. The giant grinned. It made her look like a baby again in a long nightgown. The last Superom child on Thetis. Del discovered presently he had been moving too quickly. The gap between him and Shevan had nearly closed. He kneeled in the shadow of the last vehicle in the Conduc circle, letting Shevan put distance between them. He was glad of the blanketed sky. The rain came down weightlessly like smoke or mist. He started after Shevan again. She was nearly out of sight. From one of the tents in the big Helangle camp came an unexpected whinny of pleasure followed by a ragged chorus of grumbling shouts and oaths. Ihe Conducs stirred uneasily behind him in their battered wagons. Del ran out into the night and the mist. was so steep. The caftan was becoming heavy in the persistent rain. She stopped, panting, pressing her right hand to a stitch that jabbed at the place where her ribs ended. A little farther uphill she could see a deeper blackness that had to be the scrub patch that concealed the tunnel. The rain seemed to be thickening. Looking behind her, she could see the Thetan camps only as a blur. Something moved downhill to her right -- that would be Del tracking her. She took a deep breath. If she didn't go on he would catch up and she couldn't risk their being together in case Keren had put out patrols. ae gathered the caftan and set off for the trees, sucking gasps of air through her open mouth. She got to them-stunted Thetan beores and the soft-needled hoeth. She was a few paces inside the tangle IF of dripping branches when something sprang at her with a grunt. It struck her just below the right hip with such force that she went headlong into the hoeth needles and leaves. The breath was knocked out of her. limbs locked themselves around hers pinning her down. Only the tiniest chopped scream got out from under a hand that thudded over her mouth. She tried to fight but the creature was immensely powerful. Staring up in terror, she recognized the featureless goggles and hard, black crash hat of a Ifelangle. He was like some ruthless preda tory insect. She bit the hand covering her mouth. It didn't flinch. The free hand ripped the wet caftan in one movement, top to bottom, and' then tore greedily at the coveralls underneath. The caftan had helped to conceal her Superom identity in the night. At the same time it made her like a Conduc female, tempting quarry to a prowling Helangle. The coveralls ripped. Shevan felt the rain on her body. The wasphead came down with a mouth that bit and sucked. She managed between real pain and fright, to scream at last. Then it was over. The ravening thing was struck cleanly sideways and off her with a single blow. It was so violently and expertly delivered that the Helangle made no sound at all. Nothing moved for a moment. The attack on her had lasted fifteen seconds, perhaps twenty. Shevan flung herself against DeVs chest, sobbing, clawing at him as though she were now herself trying to act out in reverse the role she had just escaped. The giant held her gently and stroked her wet hair. "It's okay, Siev. I got him. He's out. He's not ing to hurt you now. Hell, Shev, hush up. You're gonna have die ole camp roused and Keren and Spadrox, top. Will you hush now, baby? You're okay." He crooned and rocked her till she was cahner, racked only now and then with an anmense sob. He went over and looked at the lan bundle lying against the trunk of a beor about three meters away. After staring at the unconscious Helangle, he studied the sore edge of his own hand. "He's sure going to wake with a bad lump, that one." "Del, come on. Let's go. Let's get out of this." A tiny note of hysteria struggled in her voice. He picked her up. She tried to hold her torn clothes together. Del's body felt strong, clean and warm. Her deshabille didn't seem to matter now. They were together. She needed his protection as much from the memory of the attack as the fear of something like it happening again. But they got to the tunnel unhampered. The giant put her down. They crawled in. Five meters into the smell of earth and leaves that composed the dark, Shev stopped. At that point they were still near enough to the entrance to see a dim glow funneling back from the night outride. She sat down, leaned against the tunnel wall and pushed both hands up and over her face and into her hair. She said something. Del didn't hear what it was. He put out his hand to stroke her hair again. She was looking down at the tom caftan and ripped coveralls beneath it, holding the torn parts open, staring quietly at her body. Her clear white skin had an almost luminous glow in the cave. Del saw that truly she wasn't a little girl any more, ' "You're wet, Shev," he said. "Del. Warm me." Her voice had an unfamiliar thickness. "Sure. Hold on, Shev. Here-my tunic's more or less dry and it's warm from me. There, I'll take it off. You get out of of that wet, old torn stuff." He held up the tunic and helped her find the neck of it. She slid into it. It was so big it would have held twin Shevans. "There now." Suddenly she had snuggled against him, shivering. "Del -- you -- " She kissed him. Her parted lips opened wider under his. The kiss was so unexpected he almost recoiled. She hadn't kissed him like that since the big, awkward, wet baby kisses she had ven him when she had been small enough for him to swing, squealing and pleading, up into the sky in the palm of one hand. "You lie quiet now, Shev. Why, you're so hot it feels like you've got a fever." "No -- " The awkward kiss sought him again and she bit his lip. Her hands explored his chest and back. He held them because they tickled and he didn't want to laugh. "What's happened to you, Shewy? You sick? You really sick,baby? You're burning." As suddenly as it had started, the attack passed. Shevan wrenched away from him and flung herself onto her side in the old leaves and bracken on the tunnel floor. "Why, hell -- now what's wrong, Shev? We're safe in here, baby. What's the matter?' Shevan had started to cry again. Although she had turned her back on him he could recognize the sound of her crying. "Leave me alone. I'm all right!" He kneeled beside her, patting her shoulder comfortingly. "Don't touch me!" She spoke so violently that he jumped. "Don't touch me, you big dummy! Leave me be!" IF He backed farther into the tunnel. You could never account for girls. Even this Superom girl wasn't rational. He listened. Yes, he could still hear Shevan's quiet tears in the darkness. But it would be alhright now. Ever since she had been a baby, once the shouting tantrums were over and the anger started washing out of her eyes in water, it was okay. After that she would sleep, Del turned to lie on his side and was soon breathing deeply. The glowing inventions and mechanical wonders of his dreams returned. the fourth of Harvest. The Regent sat in his audience room. He had dressed in his ceremonial uniform the previous evening, knowing that he wouldn't sleep that night. Blue shadows of fatigue had appeared under his eyes in the last three days. He sat up hour after hour, switching from scanner to scanner in the Tower complex, hoping to detect some movement. There was nothing. Outside, the delegations continued to gather. If he went to the window and looked he knew he would see the camps of many tribes fanning out into the distance. And these would still be only the nearer tribes. There had not yet been time for the news to have reached the more remote Thetan continents. The gathering had not been without its problems. Food, water and sanitation had been foremost. Keren's nose wrinkled. Then there was the old enmity between the two main groups: the Conducs and Helangles. It had flared into a series of bruising encounters after one randy young scout had made an attempt on a Conduc girl and had been found next morning on the hillside with a fractured collarbone and a lump big as an egg on the side of his jaw. Although he had called, a quick peace conference to avoid bloodshed, Keren had seen an opportunity to dissolve the gathering and escape the trap he sensed his cousin was setting for him. He tried to persuade some of his aides to go out and make trouble between the camps. But although his men had relented in their initial rebellion against him, they wouldn't go but among the Thetans. They feared the bright silver messages, which the tribal chiefs had nailed to wands set up at the entrances to their camps. They also feared and respected the sleeping old man in the Tower more than they respected their master. Perhaps Karel was going to speak at last and had managed to send out his own invitations. So Keren was left without any chance of controlling the situation. Nor could he effectively search the camps to find out whether that remorseless girl child and her simpleminded giant playmate were concealed somewhere out there. Even his own three sons could not be relied on not to take fright, half Thetan as they were. One of the aides had told him that on the first night of the gathering an incongruously tall Saivainte had arrived with the delegation from the mountains just at dusk, but had not been seen since. The Lex Andromedan Conduc chief had complained of the theft of a blue caftan from one of his senior women. Although the Helangles were probably to blame, this incident and others and some queer rumors that had reached him had left Keren convinced that She van and Delbet were close by and that on this dawn they would come out of hiding. He stood up and watched the light run slowly like water into sand along the cloud base at the mountain tops. Suppose Karel were really going to speak. No, the idea was outrageous. The attempts of Shevan to escape Spadrox, her imprisonment in the Tower, her disappearance and Del's were all linked to the mysterious arrival of the messages. It had to be a plot. The Thetans were beginning to stir excitedly, although the encampments were still dark. Only the mountaintops and the highest crags of the distant stone jungles held the Thetan dawn light. Keren squeezed the bridge of his nose, pressing the tip of finger and thumb against his weary eyes. It was time to go and call his wives and children. The most important Listening Festival since the Return was about to begin. THE two great processional doors  were flung open. A metal shutter ran up, clearing the east window, and immediately the vault was flooded with light. The green aura of Karel's casket drowned in it and the lifted shadows seemed to reveal movement in his sleeping face. The Regent, followed first by his sons and daughters and then by his wives, entered the vault. The paramount Thetan chiefs came next, crowding and jostling for position. The Helangles were especially illtempered because their withered legs and their crouch put them at a disadvantage in a crowd. As the procession came forward two people moved away from the right-hand wall. They were pale and disheveled. The girl's uniform had been torn and crudely sewn together at the rents. The man looked down nervously at Karel's casket. He licked his lips. Small beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Keren stopped so short that two of his sons cannoned into him. He had expected some dramatic reapIF pearance of his rival and her friend, but not quite this soon. The two looked like starved and vengeful ghosts as they confronted him. "Well, cousin," said Keren at last. "You've certainly been up to your tricks. You've kept yourself and your outsize playmate well out of sight, haven't you?" He spoke in the high Superom, the words as arid as his tongue and lips felt. The two young people were returning the salutes of the Thetans. Even Keren's children reluctantly raised their hands to their foreheads in the customary flat-palmed recognition of superiors. "Get on with your business, cousin," mocked Shevan. "Thetis is waiting for the Awakening." "I warn you, Shevan," Keren snarled, "if you've concocted some trick-" "Come, cousin, this is a day when we last Superom -- even the  halfbred -- should avoid quarrels. Our lost leader is about to return." Keren scowled, but said nothing more. The The tan chiefs, his family and even some of the lesser Thetans were now pressing forward into the chamber. They fanned out around its sides to surround the casket at the center. Hundreds of eyes focused on the still form buried in six hundred years of dreams. No one spoke. Shevan and Del had taken their places at the head of the casket. several paces behind it, facing Keren. Now all the eyes in the vault turned to a copper shield on the west wall. Keren turned to face it. The casket was behind him. His hollow eyes it to refuse to collect the first rays of the climbing sun in the unshuttered east window. But now the shield caught fire. It was as though the metal ignited and burned. The light consumed the rim, then spun down into a cunningly turned concavity. As it touched the center Keren turned. He was like a man sleepwalking -- or a puppet. Facing the casket, he paused. His mouth opened. Then he gathered himself and spoke the familiar ritual words, first in high Superom, then in the Thetan lingua franca.  "The Waiting is over. The Listening has come. Great Karel, awake and speak to your lost brothers." Like a terribly thin, fatally expanded, intensely brittle sphere of glass the vault crackled with breathholding silence. Sheven's face was deathly pale. She swayed, waiting. She dared not look at the giant by her side. Del was equally pale. His big hands clenched and unclenched. Sweat trickled slowly down his left temple. Keren's eyes found his cousin's and bored into them. They must have been the only two people in the vault not watching Karel's casket. Then it came, a frail but purposeful voice. The crystal of silence cracked as all the Thetans in the vault fell to their knees "Yes, the time has come. The time for my awakening has come." The voice came unmistakably from the casket. Karel's lips appeared not to have moved -- but did anyone dare to be sure? Only the fierce disbelief of Keren and the hypnotic concentration of Shevan were once more rooted to the face in the casket. "I must be taken to Mandanar. My casket can be opened there, where the secrets that will restore me are still preserved. Let my brothers -- " the voice faltered, then recovered. "Let my brother Delbet and my sister Shevan go with me. Let my brother Keren remain at Spadrox as hostage to my Thetan brothers against my return-" The voice faltered again, grew still. Delbet, the giant, was swaying. He raised a hand feebly, but it didn't reach his head before he toppled. Shevan, who had seen him sway, stopped forward to hold him but his huge, unconscious weight brought her down as well. They lay at the head of the casket. No one moved. The silence was bursting again. Karel's voice had stopped. Suddenly Keren screamed: "False! Don't be deceived! It's a trick! They invented it. Those two there. They're in league with the old spirit of the Tower. It was his voice you heard! Take them, guards! Agate -- Hadra -- Spero -- draw your probes. It's a plot to destroy me and Spadrox. They want to carry off Great Karel. It wasn't his voice you heard, I tell you. It was the voice of Shade." "How can that be. Regent?" From among the trembling Thetans a pale transparent shadow emerged. He was incredibly old. The bright light of the vault almost shone through him-he cast only the flicker of a shadow on the floor of the vault. "How can that be when I am here and the casket lies there?"Keren backed away from it. It came slowly toward him. At the head of the casket Shevan knelt by Del. The giant was stirring. The girl whispered urgently, almost angrily into his ear. Del raised his "head. He stared glassily at the tableau of casket, Keren, the strange old form of air and shadows, the cringing Thetans. Ife seemed to make a huge effort to stay conscious. Then the sleeping leader spoke again. His voice was fainter, but still resolute. "Take me to Mandanar. I must be taken to Mandanar." "We hear' you, my leader," breathed Shade. "To Mandanar!" IF "To Mandanar! To Mandanar!" The Thetans in the vault took up the cry. It spread like a fire back down the processional passageway out into the quadrangle ancf to the campus. "To Mandanar! Thetis will be great again!" Only one Thetan was slow to move from the vault. The pandemonium hadn't seized him. His blazing eyes still stared with hatred at the giant Delbet in Shevan's arms. Keren saw it. His aides and even his own wives and children caught the crowd's hysteria. They streamed away from the chamber with the rest, leaving him defeated, deserted, his mind numb. But Keren saw the strange look on the Helangle's bruised face. His imagination began to race. As the dwarf turned and loped after the other Thetans the Regent read the starry name studded across the jacket. He held it like a hot iron against his memory. His numbed thoughts began to stir and weave again. Book # , Arcweld V but the Helangles carried maps in their memories. By the fifth day out of Spadrox they had led the great convoy to the hills above Westward City Three. It was dark. Arcweld lay alone on the hillside by his steede. Overhead the huge red and orange stars of the Thetan night burned like fire-ore in the burrows of the talue The dwarfs thoughts burned with them as he lay alone. He drank the night. He drank it and the stars thirstily, tormented by memories of two other nights. He was staying womanless by choice on the expedition. Starhowl, Kickstart, Smoke trail all lay warm, shaggy and satisfied with their snoring, snuggling women. But Arcweld tossed, drinking the stars, his thoughts feeding like acid on the steely memory of a night without stars. The bruise on his jaw had gone, but he had absorbed the humiliation of it into his twisted body. After a day's slow riding to keep pace with the convoy his shoulder hurt. Wine ing, he turned to his other side, staring down through the helmet's black visor toward the center of the camp. Hie giant was scared. He was scared, all right. He'd been scared in the vault. He had fainted when G.K. spoke. And the fear in his face hadn't lessened as the distance between the convoy and Spadrox increased. Arcweld chewed his lip. That other night -- it hadn't been like this one. There had been rain, thin as mist or a smoke trail. He had lain on that hillside above Spadrox, a slope like this one but treed and bushed with beores and hoeth to hide him. She had come from the Conduc camp, moving up the hillside in a dark caftan, stealthy but purposeful. He had watched her, seeing only a young Conduc girl with strangely short hair. She had been crazy to be unescorted. He had watched her -- hadn't understood why she should be out alone. He had understood laterafter he had struck. Snarling silently, Arcweld drew up his withered legs at the memory. Squirming. She hadn't been a Conduc at all. He remembered himself ripping, tearing -- finding smooth skin under his lips. Superom skin. Not cold and furred like Thetan Conduc -- not hairy like Helangle woman. A deep sacrilege-yet why not? Helangle, Superom. A new Thetan paramount blood. And then. Rigid, malevolent, Arcweld sat up, feeling in his mind the bolt strike him, the darkness come down again. What doing out in the mist, the smoke? What doing on that hillside? Her and the giant. Disguised as a Conduc... The giant Arcweld hadn't seen. Only the thunderblow striking him sideways. Then the dark. Arcweld nightmared. He swallowed the stars of a different night. The two men . had come for him quietly, as if they had known he would be lying awake by his sleeping steede. He had seen them approaching across the encampment, distorted in the fitful flares of occasional campfires. Then the two of them had been standing over him, hissing their pidgin attempt at the Helangle tongue. "Yawl come with us. Creep. Soft, man." He had recognized them. Despised them. Keren's slaves. As though anything would wake the snorting, seedblown scouts and their sticky, hairy women wrapped under tents. They had smuggled him into Spadrox by a side way. Along corridors, past shut doors, panting as he scuttled along, keeping up with their haste. They had pushed him through a door and left him. Arcweld stirred. His strong teeth closed on the darkness of the dream. His arms twitched in sleep as in the audience room at Spadrox he had raised them to salute the staring hollows of Keren's eyes in the gloom. "Your name is Arcweld?" A nod. "You will accompany the expedition to Mandanar?" It wasn't really a question. Just a flat statement. Another nod. The dwarf didn't want to speak. If he talked to the Regent he must use the "sir" suffix. He saw no need for this humility now. Keren needed him, Arcweld, a IF The tan. He believed now that the days of the Suprom were numbered. He read doom in the mad eyes. Only the neuroprobe bolstered on the Regent's hip wielded power. The dwarf respected that. Besides, he needed the hate and cunning of this man who was the giant's enemy, too. He needed it. For the moment. The dwarfs mouth below the visor snapped at stars as he slept on the hillside above Westward City Three. The bearded face spun toward him in the unlit audience room. In enormous closeup hesaw the lips, framed in black hair, the white teeth, brilliant gums, the tongue alive behind them like a seabeast in its cave. "Why do you hate the giant?' Arcweld snarled. He tried to hold down the animal reaction, but there were no words in his throat. Hate was inarticulate. "Did he do that to you?" The Regent's cruel fingers poked his bruised jaw. Arcweld howled, cringing backward, his eyes hostile. "And this?" Keren reached for the hurt shoulder, but the Helangle backed away, growling. "Heavy. I'll lay him down, too. Like real. I'll fix." "Why? What did he do to you? Why did he-" "Nix." "What did you see? What were you doing?' The Regent's urgency made Arcweld bold. He leaned forward on his knuckles. He stared insolently into Keren's face. "Nix. What we have is between Delbet Sir and Arcweld. Keren Sir wants use Arcweld, is on Arcweld's say." Keren watched him closely. "Do you know what I want? I want them broken. I want Delbet Sir and the Karel myth broken. I want back what they've taken from me. I want it back. And the girl. I want her back. I want her here at Spadrox. Do you understand?" Arcweld nodded briefly. His ugly Helangle face twitched into the imitation of a smile. It remained fixed. The rictus on the face of a corpse. It was novel to have a Superom who required favors of a Thetan. "And for me?" he breathed. "What for Arcweld, man?" "Listen," said Keren. Faintly, from somewhere in the night outside Spadrox, came lonely cries. "And how, too?" The dwarf insisted. "How?' "Listen." "Listen. Listen." Arcweld mumbled the words into the dark ground as he awoke, "listen." The dream had been so real that he sat up anxiously. He crouched, staring back into it, listening again to the lonely cries that seemed to have reached tentacles into this dawn. He found himself still searching for the bearded SI face in the audience room at Spadrox -- which had become daybreak on a hillside several hundred kilometers away. Listen! He crouched, listening. T he cries were becoming fainter. The dwarf shook his head to clear it. The sounds appeared to come from an area of woodland to his right. Arcweld scratched himself nervously. He turned the scarab-head helmet from side to side to locate the exact direction of the sound. Scratching uneasily, he muttered under his breath. The cries were anxious. Their link with his recent dream disturbed him. The camp was still held in a bowl of shadow. The approaching light hadn't yet spilled into it over the sides. Nothing stirred down there. Arcweld fondled the machine beside him. He found comfort in its sleeping power. His fingers sought the outline of something locked in one of the hide panniers behind the saddle. He stroked it. It gave him confidence to go find the mystery of the cries. The juxtaposition of dream cries and cries here in the dawn urged him on. If he didn't go now they would be lost at any moment. He looked around once more, then loped uphill, making for the scrub line where he would be less easily seen. He had only gone a few hundred meters through the bush when one of the cries sprang up close to him. It startled him, but he recognized it now. It was a talue. There was another, still far off, but getting closer. Something was driving a pack of the little silver-blue creatures toward him. It was unusual for them to leave their burrows except between dusk and full nightfall to look for food. They were being hunted. Their forlorn cries were all around him now. The dwarf darted into thicker cover. Dawn light was reaching here. He lay flat. Almost immediately something leaped across him. He snarled, cuffing at it like a cat. But it fled. It had only been intent on avoiding him anyway. Silver-blue, waterfall-colored, it streaked into the bushes. Two more passed in front of him an arm's length from where he lay. Then came a cry that made him twitch back convulsively. It seemed to come from the very thicket in which he was hiding. It might have come from the tangle of thorns, trailers and uncurling leaves before his face. Teeth bared, he slithered backward. And it came again. It was different from the hunted cry -- a female's call. What sent fear and fact that he saw nothing in the bush where it had originated. IF The dwarf backed farther into another tangle of vegetation. The call came again from the same place. He swallowed to stop his heart's jumping. Now, beyond the bush, something stirred. Lightly poised for flight, its wedge-shaped head lowered, a young talue pointed the bu. It darted forward, stopped, foreleg raised. Its head swiveled, cocked, listening to its right. The call came again from the empty bush. The dwarfs face was fixed in a snarl. There was nothing there. The bush called again. Then the talue which had been all quivering nerve and tension collapsed. The transition from vitality to inertia was absolute and so swift that Arcweld jumped again. It was as if all the delicate mechanisms of the creature had imploded simultaneously. A limp bundle of fur lay on the ground where life had shimmered only a few seconds before. Even more terrifying to the dwarf was the form that sped suddenly across the brake through the dawn. He flattened. The Superom looked enormous in the strange tree-muted light. Arcweld lay, clutching earth. His chin rested on dirt and leaves. His eyes behind the helmet visor were scared but baleful, like a wild animal's. He watched the giant pick up the little creature. He used it tenderly, cradling it in his hands and looking down at it almost affectionately. He turned it over and plucked a shiny bolt from its right hindquarter. His long fingers began to probe its pouch. The faintest rustle, almost softer than a breath, disturbed some leaves and hoeth needles close to the dwarfs right shoulder. The instinctive fear of things that creep among leaves sent a chill slithering down his back. Delbet was absorbed by his catch, but Arcweld didn't dare to move. He tried to see to his right past the visor of his helmet, but its curve impeded his view. Arcweld was as still as stone. His breathing hardly moved his ribs, although he was almost stifled by his heart which seemed to be trying to hammer itself free. The rustling had stopped. With painful slowness he began to edge the helmet around. He finally caught sight of a motionless talue reflected in the corner of the visor. It must have picked up his movement at the same time. It fled, jetting into the undergrowth-quicksilver. Discovered. In the broken fragment of a second the dwarf saw the stunned talue drop from Delbet's hands. In the same movement, the giant reached smoothly down and leveled the slingbow. Arcweld rolled sideways. A bolt streaked through the half-light. Intended for the flying animal it clipped the ground a handsbreadth behind it. Arcweld realized that tlie shot hadn't been aimed at him, but he was already committed. On his haunches, liis vision spoiled by panic and the dark visor, he collided with a tree, staggered, turned snarling. He was no match for the giant's speed or the slingbow's deadly bolts. Dwarf and giant faced each other across a mat of bushes. Delbet's saint's ce held a blank stare of disbelief. The dwarf, crouched, his lips drawn back, awaited the leveled bow. He hadn't expected to be caught again at a disadvantage by the Superom giant. TTien, irrationally, he was alone. The clearing was empty. Only the inert talue heaped in a different bundle and a fragrnent of fire-ore gently glowing on the ground where Delbet had let it fall proved that the giant had been there. He had fled as swiftly and unpredictably as had the animals he hunted. The dwarf looked at the heaped talue, the empty glade. Momentarily he glimpsed the rhythmic bulk of the Superom speeding downhill through the trees. He scratched nervously, looking around him. Clearly the Superom had recognized him, had been scared and had mn away. The powerful, ruling Superom had run from a low-tribe Tlietan. Arcweld considered. The dream, the strange cries, the sound out of the empty bush. He snarled and muttered. He needed to get back, close to the magical power of the thing in the pannier of his steede. But it was getting light rapidly. The camp woidd be rousing. Starhowl would be crawling out of his tent and calling the navigation party together. Diere was no time. The Superom giant had seen him defenseless and had run away. Arcweld shivered. Nothing in this dawn explained itself. He looked around him again, as thou someere in the increasing lit a soiutipii would be revealed. There was nothing. The morning was empty. The hillskie was still. VI HE Conducs had built a special carrier for Karel's casket. In the several hundred years since the computer-controlled Thetan factories had fallen derelict, the Conducs had become masters oi adaptation and improvisation. They had mshed a mobile workshop to Spadrox and built the vehicle in two days. It rolled slowly forward now as the convoy got under way. A junkheap motorcade creaked and groaned into life and moved along with it. IF They bore delegate chiefs of most of the paramount Tlietan tribes. There were even some mounted Agorans along. Their nervous, sidewaysskipping cadels shied at the noise and skittered in front of vehicles, bringing a variety of curses from cabs and cockpits. Shevan and Delbet rode in the center of the convoy with the casket. It was shielded under a canopy and insulated to preserve the functioning of its delicate mechanisms. Arcweld had no opportunity to get a look at the giant. The, Helangles job was to act as pathfinders. When he got back to camp, Starhowl, Kickstart and the others were already arguing about whether to go around Westward City Three or through it. "I say through it, man," said Arcweld. "There's a sub-traverse liighway I dig in W.C. Three. Let's hit it. Going around will take two days more." "Shed me, it's the fireball himself. Dig him. He don't sleep, he don't jig women, he don't talk to us hardly but he walks in out of the dawn and has opinions." "One smart Helangle." "What you need is a woman, Arc." "He takes his steede up the hillside." "Catacroc! He burns, man!" "Yawl cool it," snarled the dwarf. "What I do, I do." "Som# Conduc jill beat him up. Remember? EHd she detool yawl. Arc?" "Cool it -- cool it," Starhowl warned. He motioned the dwarf back. Arcweld had taken a threatening hop toward the last speaker. "What he says is right," said Starhowl. "Through's faster." "But round's safer, man," said Kickstart sagely. "Yawl know some queer things got holed out in those rock jungles. Yawl hit them time to time like we do." "Be through on the sub-traverse in a day," said Arcweld. Smoke trail sided with Kickstart. "Nix. Know Westward C. Three. Take day and half." "And what if the sub-traverse is blocked?" suggested someone. "Could get blown out in the side tracks." "Scout it." Starhowl considered. "Okay. Scout it. Arc, it's your mindmap. Go scout it. Cleavewind, you go, too." "Nix," the dwarf protested. "Don't need two. Arcweld goes." "I say two go. Dig?" The dwarf shrugged. "Smoke, go down tell Shevan Lady convay moves toward W.C. Three one hour. Helangjes scouting. Maybe change course two hours. Dig?" "Dig." Smoketrail kicked his steede into life and rode downhill toward the main camp in a series of flamboyant curves. "Yawl eaten, Arc?" he asked. "Not hungry." "Like crazy," said someone. "Like he got sick." "Okayyou ready. Cleave?" "Sure." "Let's hit it." The dwarf shoved his steede down onto wheels. Cleavewind jammed down his helmet. Tlie two Helangles stood hard simultaneously on their kickdowns. Their motors roared. Wlieel to wheel they soared crosscountry, making for the cracked and rutted highway aimed like a broken arrow at the stone jungle crouched across the western skyline. Wlien they had penetrated about a kilometer into the petrified silence the dwarf stopped. After a short argument he persuaded Cleavewind that they should split up. Arcweld would reconnoiter to both sides while Cleavewind went down the traverse to see whether it was clear though to the far side. Cleavewind didn't like it, but he was less agressive and determined than the dwarf, Arcweld watched him roar away until he became a speck down the traverse. The dwarf hauled his bike around. A minute later he had zigzagged into a city square uphill from the traverse and was coaxing the steede in a series of bumps and jolts up a concrete ramp to one of the pedestrian levels, where he could work unseen. Six hundred years as nomads had made the Helangles instinctively shy of being indoors. Arcweld kept the engine of his steede running while he looked darkly through his visor at the crumbling mouths of doorways and blind windows surrounding the plaza. The faint echo of a burst of power from Cleavfewind's motor blown down the wind from somewhere on the traverse decided him. He had not much time if he were to keep the rendezvous with his companion. He stopped the motor, got off the bike, stood it and crouched in the still geometry of shadows, unfastening the pannier. The inside of the nearest building was dark. It might have been a shop or the lobby of an office at one time. Whatever furnishings or fittings there had once been had rotted away. The place was full of twisted stone and steel. Arcweld's lips curled back in a snarl of fear and displeasure as he waddled through the doorway. He supported himself on the knuckles of his left hand, crouching, muttering under his breath. In the crook of his right arm he supported the black box he had taken from the pannier on his bike. He hated the darkness but the box demanded it. IF "Where are you?" The voice came from a dim image barely visible on one side of the box -- near the doorway there was too much light for a clear picture. Still, the face was recognizable. "Westward City Three," Arcweld said. His voice was cracked and hoarse. "Yes. That would be about right. WeU?" "WeUwhat?" "You insolent -- " Tlie face in the box grew distorted. Cruel, dark eyes burned like points of fire. "Wliat has been happening? Wliat have you done? What have you discovered?" "Tell yawl a dream I had," said Arcweld. "Or maybe not a dream. Tell yawl what I saw, Keren Sir. What I saw on the mountain this very morning. More -- tell you what I heard." "Get on with it." Th.e dwarf grinned. He pushed the box farther into shadow so that the Regent's face would be clearer to liim. He kept his own helmet visor down so that the staring eyes in the bearded face couldn't see him properly. "Was lying up in the camp, five kilometers east of W.C. Three," said Arcweld. "Dig? Dawn. Looking at stars. Old sun. Freaked out. Great. Candy man-" "Stop reciting poetry, you mutant -- " The dwarf ignored tlie interruption. "There were cries from higher up. Queer, like this -- " He imitated badly. "Talue," Keren said. "Wliat's-" "Talue. But not talue." "You twisted-" "Followed them. Explored -- " Arcweld went on to tell the story of what had happened in the wood above tlie camp that morning. Tlie half-bred Superom didn't interrupt. "And then the sound came out of the bush. Straight. Clear. Right in front of me. And there was nothing that could have made it -- nothing at all. Then I saw -- " But the staring, rigid face glowing in the shadow did not hear what Arcweld had seen. The whole scene swerved. The image of the dwarf flew sideways. Keren found himself facing darkness. Faint light still came from somewhere beyond the range of the box's sensors, but no sound. "Arcweld," he shouted. "Arcweld." There was no response. T he dwarf was facing darkness, too, but his had suddenly spawned tangible shadows that had seized him. They dragged him away from the black box. A foot kicked the box so that it spun. Arcweld fought. He bit at some wet thing that had been stuffed into liis mouth, but it was spongy and wouldn't tear. He struggled. He was powerful, but the silent shadows were just too many for him to overcome. They entangled him like cobwebs. Their limbs were moist and chilly. He fought instinctively, wildly like an animal, realizing that he had been caught by the Submetropols. He was pushed, dragged, carried. Somewhere behind him he heard Keren's voice bawling from the box. They dragged him across a gap and over some steps. The dwarf cringed at the restricted space that hampered his struggles. He loathed buildings. He despised the dead and dying cubicles and compartments and the machines that once had made them work. Sometiihes when the pack had been hunting near one of the stone jungles they had pursued the quarry into the ruins. Even when he had been with his kind the insides of buildings had worried him. When the cubicle where he now fought began to fall he almost died of fright. He struggled violently, then lay still, choked, all but paralyzed. The Submets held him. They were like a heap of moist thread. When he realized that the motion of the cubicle was in one direction and controlled, Arcweld began to recover. It was surprisingly warm in the rambling caverns below Westward City Three, but the warmth was moist, dripping. It penetrated alien garments and lungs within minutes. It gave Arcweld a sensation of drowning. He gasped for breath. He felt like a sponge. From the foot of the elevator shaft he was hustled through so many twists and turns it seemed to him he had gone through several tunnels. The passages were dripping with moisture and so faintly lit by crude fire-ore lamps that he couldn't even make out his captors' faces. Twice he fell. He was unused to using his legs for long distances and the gag was choking him. The second time he went down a clammy hand hooked it from his mouth. The dwarf guessed that by now he was too deep in the city's guts for any cry to pierce to the surface. Tlie tunnel suddenly became wider and brighter. Arcweld found himself in a broad, low room. light came from wall brackets, but its source was still fire-ore. He recognized the pearly quality of the light. Now he could see the Submetropols who had captured him. Unlike the other Thetan groups formed since the end of the Superom, the Submets were not strictly homogeneous. They were the least progressive human development. Their progenitors had been employed by the Superom for servicing and repairing robot or semi-robot functions and equipment, most of it underground. IF There had been many grades of this type of Thetan worker, some bred with special characteristics and most with separate tribal identities. Following the collapse of the system and the old cities they had retreated to inhabit the thousands of kilometers of submetropolitan space where the stopped machines were entombed. The dwarf had never before seen a Submet at close quarters. Now one was facing him less than two meters away as he was dragged forward and released so suddenly that he collapsed in front of a metal table with a creature squatting behind it. This one was some kind of leader. His dress showed it. He had a pale face and sunken, pink-rimmed eyes. Weak eyes were a characteristic of the undercity dwellers and evolutionary decline would eventually lead to the replacement of the Submets' sight with another sense. The pale, discolored skin, where it was visible at the face and wrists, was moist and wrinkled, but for the rest the Submet was sheathed in a skintight, silvery suit that might have been made of plastic or some metal foil. "What were you doing in our place, upperworld creature?" The moist sibilance of the words was like the sound of gas leaking from a valve. "Minding my business, wetlips. Big business. Superom business. Dig?" "I'm Possess," said the Submet leader simply. "This city sector and its underworld are mine. No one has business here that isn't my business. What ransom will your tribe give to recover you? Have they sanpardan?" The dwarf only identified the final word, but it was enough to give him the drift of all the rest. Sanpardan was a byproduct of cruze. It was perilously toxic but an effective stimulant. Tlie Submets mixed it into a drink with water and crude sugar and considered it a cure for their chronic impotence. They could rarely get their hands on enough of it, having little commerce with the Thetan upperworld. Arcweld realized that Possess wished to trade him for a cask of the sticky fermented jig-juice. His first reaction was typically Helangle. He grabbed the edge of the metal table and shook it till it rattled. "Gota hell! Waterjerked blindfish!" Possess didn't flinch. A tiny ripple of what could have been a smile came and went. It seemed to start and finish somewhere below his transparent skin. Arcweld suddenly found himself again in the middle of a bunch of clammy cobwebs. A dozen Submets submerged him. They were all around him. They flowed from nowhere. "Sanpardan," said Possess earnestly. "You will mark a sheet to tell your people you are here. They will bring five casks. Sanpardan! Do you understand, upperworld creature?' "Hell with you, blindfish. I'm hooked to a power party. Superom. You dare challenge Superom?" "There are no Superom outside Spadrox," hissed the Submet leader. "You are insolent. Perhaps we should cut off your hand and send it to your people and they will bring sanpardan quickly to recover you. Perhaps they have no sanpardan. What have they to trade for you? Have they stuff we could trade to the Agorans for sanpardan? Answer, upperworld thing! Possess is tired of your stupidity." Arcweld sagged between his damp guards. He closed his eyes. But his brain raced like a high-rewing steede. He was in a tough spot. These clammy jerkbrains felt too secure in their sewers, subways and tunnels to be bullied. Still it might be possible to turn this thing. "Listen -- I come from Spadrox. I come from Keren Sir. Superom. Leader. I'm with him." "What has a Helangle to do with Keren Sir?' "You don't believe, huh?" The dwarf stared angrily into the fishy eyes of his captor. "Tell your soggy strongarms fetch my magic box." The Submet leader stared at him blankly. Arcweld's lips curled. He jabbed a thick finger into the air. "Up there where you grabbed me. A box." "Go upperworld," Possess ordered. "Pind what he had. Pind this box. Bring it to me here." Tlie expedition returned moments later. Six of them, panting, dragged Arcweld's steede. Two more carried the box between them. Possess was not particularly interested in the vehicle. He knew it was one of the smoky, noisy things the Helangles rode to get them from place to place. The box was silent and menacing and had dials and knobs and a screen. It was like a miniature of parts of the sleeping gods that lay under this city. Possess understood them and feared them and waited for the day the old legends said would come when they would return to life and the Superom would return. "Put it here." The Submets lifted it to the table top. stared into the screen. His own pale eyes stared back at him. He raised them to look over the box at the twisted face of his prisoner on the other side of the table. This box was nothing. It was dead like the other dead machine gods in the rest of his underworld barony. It only gave him back his own face. "Dumb!" muttered the dwarf. He IF levered himself around the table on his hands in a series of hops. Half a dozen wary Submets clung damply to him. Arcweld pressed down two white keys the way Keren had shown him. He held them till they clicked. With the other hand he spun the knob next to the screen. The screen stayed dark, enigmatic. It was wrong. Where there should have been an image of Keren's face he saw only the reflection of his own scowl. Arcweld felt trapped, betrayed. He shpuldn't have trusted the cunning Superom. Keren had promised him would always be tljiere in the box at the summoning spell of the keys and knobs. He had promised Arcweld power in Thetis that no Helangle had even dared to imagine. He had promised possession beyond the most lewd Helangle dream. Arcweld struck the box with his hand. His frustration and fury escaped in a howl. The Submets closed in threateningly. The dwarf slipped down to his knees again. Possess said something sharply. He was leaning forward. His body inside the glistening wet suit was tense as a spring. Cautiously he put his head down and turned a bloodless ear to the box. Arcweld watched him from under jutting brows. The strange, underwater smile of the Submet baron faltered and pegged itself into place. "This god is alive. This god is alive, upperworld creature -- " Suddenly Possess jumped up. He seized the box in his arms, shouted to the guards. Pive or six of them hauled Arcweld to his feet. They began half dragging, half carrying him back along the previous route. When he could look up and see through sweat running into his eyes the dwarf caught glimpses of Possess stumbling along the tunnels ahead of the party carrying the box. The Submet baron was in a hurry. He got to the lifting cubicle only a few seconds ahead of the others, but started screaming at them impatiently almost at once. He clutched the humming box to his chest. His head was cocked. He was listening to make sure he hadn't lost the life inside the box. Intoxicating dreams of sanpardan seemed to have been forgotten for the moment. Por the second time in an hour the dwarf felt his stomach hang suspended as the chamber moved upward. His captors clung to him. Te chamber flowed slowly up the shaft. No manufactured power had been available in any Thetan city for hundreds of years. This climbing cubicle must be operated by hand. The motion stopped. Arcweld blinked. They were back in the rubble-filled hallway where he had been ambushed. Even the light in the shadowy interior of the building was ten times brighter than the gloom in the underworld-and the light of the failing Thetan sun, shining on the terrace outside, was blinding. Possess, who had rushed into the elevator first, was now last to come out. As he stumbled forward, breathing heavily, the box gave a shout. Arcweld jumped. Possess nearly dropped the box in surprise. The shout became decipherable. Arcweld cowered. The voice of Keren flung a stream of common language abuse against Possess' chest. Those Submets who had been holding the dwarf joined their prostrate companions, squirming like silverfish. Arcweld's first instinct w to escape, but these troglodytes had left his steede underground. He wouldn't get far on his withered legs. Besides, natural cunning had begun to seep through his mind again like a drug. He saw a way of using these creatures. The box had robbed him of a plan when it refused to work in the underworld. Now a fresh opportunity offered. "You brainless Helangle lout," the box was roaring. "You signaled me -- why aren't you there? What happened to you, you scum of a malfunctioning incubator?" Stung by the scorn in Keren's voice, the dwarf hopped menacingly toward Possess, prepared to wrench the box from him. But the Submet baron was already overwhelmed. He sank to his knees. He was trembling. Pearfully, reverently, he lowered the box to the floor. As he took the box away from his chest it was evident from the lively flicker of light on the screen that the box had resumed its powers and that Keren was back. A moment later, as Possess flung himself onto the fldof, the dwarf saw the twisted, enraged face of the Superom leader. Possess writhed. "You are a cunning magician, upperworld creature. You have a Superom imprisoned in your box -- " His face pressed to the rubble, he hissed, "Porgive us, master, we didn't know you were in there among us." Keren now seemed to be struggling to assess the situation. The dwarf squatted before the box. He made sure he put the heel of one of his riding boots squarely on Possess' pale hand. He shifted all his weight onto it. The Submet leader groaned, but didn't dare to move. "Keren Sir," fawned the dwarf, "this scum jumped me. Rumbled me. Dragged me into the guts of this goddam jericsville. Dig?" "Who?" Keren shouted. "Where are you now? What are you talking about? .What happened to you?" Arcweld was enjoying the experience of mystifying the Superom, IF swapping conversation with one of Thetis' old superior beings while the frightened Submets cringed around him. The Helangle tongue was ideal for short colorful narration. The dwarf spoke rapidly, confident that the troglodytes wouldn't understand. He told his master everything that had happened to him since they had been interrupted earlier. Caught in the rising monosyllabic tide, Keren listened without a single question as the dwarf suggested the Submets might be used in a plan to wreck the expedition and restore the Regent's power. 'They're not your old Thetans, Keren Sir. They're dumb. They believe in magic. They think the machines are dead gods. They think I'm a wizard with a slave Superom in a box. Box -- box -- " he mocked, enjoying his power over the squirming Submets who groveled harder, hearing a word they now thought held divine mystery. "Listen. Let's get this together. Yawl speak. Yawl tell them they must obey me. Dig? Tell them the boy and girl are wizard and witch taken over Superom skins. Tell them what yawl like. Whatever scares them out of their wet hides. Say that yawl sent me to rescue the casket from the whole wagon train that's under a speU. Dig?" "Where is their leader?" "Under here," said Arcweld merrily. He indicated his leather-shod hindquarters. "I'm sitting on him." "Put him up." Arcweld shuffled sideways, making sure to grind Possess' fingers under his heel as a parting reminder. "Master!" The Submet baron was almost fainting with fear at the piercing Superom eyes staring from the box. "Hear me. Possess." Keren had switched into the Submet tongue. His mastery of its sibilances was complete. "Arcweld the Helangle is my envoy. I speak to him by this box. Do your records recall the use of these machines by us, your masters?" "Yes, Keren Sir. Our histories are correctly programed and all our machines in good order await the illustrious return to Thetis of your people, our masters." "Good. Then listen to what I have to tell you and then follow the instructions of my envoy, Arcweld. If you disobey, you and your miserable people may have to relearn the sting of the neuro-whip. Do you hear me. Possess?" "I hear you, Keren Sir." "Tell them to save the giant for me," cried the dwarf. "Quiet, you mutant scum." Keren's eyes tried to pierce the darkness beyond the trenibling moonface of the Submet baron and could not. Arcweld said under his breath. "Yawl can tell them to save the girl for me, Master. Dig, baby? If you like. Or if you don't like -- " But he listened while Keren outlined his new strategy to Possess. The role assigned to him was minor, but suddenly he didn't protest. He made his own plans instead. He hadn't expected that anyone would. The Helangles and their language were good zX vivid description of events, but short on imagination. Cleavewind had been back with the main body for almost an hour when the dwarf returned. Cleavewind's version of how he and Arcweld separated and how he had explored the traverse sounded right. So did his quaking account of waiting in the silences of the stone jungle for the dwarf . He told them how he had called and searched and gone into the dead building. And although much of this wasn't true his recollected fear made it sound true. Starhowl hid his relief under anger. When Arcweld rode into camp the leader was waiting like an ash cloud over a volcano. His listened. Helangle justice was rough, but it still clung enough to the age of the Superom to allow the accused to be heard. Not that this made any difference. Starhowl had already decided to punish the dwarf for giving him concern. He could have made matters easy for himself by referring Arcweld's defection to the two Superom for jurisdiction and sentence, but he wanted to avoid raising questions about his authority to lead the expedition's scout party. So he listened impatiently and then ordered the flogging he had decided on. The punishment detail took Arcweld into one of the hillside woods. They wanted to make sure no spy from the other Thetan groups saw a scout humiliated. The dwarf neither struged nor argued. They made a frame by tying branches together. They left his insect-head helmet but stripped the rest of him. During the process they often erupted into howls of lewd mirth. Then they trussed his heels and hung him head down from the frame and lashed him with the green shoots of the beor. They made the beating easy, grinning and cracking coarse jokes, because it seemed clear to them that the dwarfs absence in the stone jungle could be explained by a natural Helangle activity. Even as they stripped him it had been obvious Arcweld was thinking woman. Arcweld didn't make a sound and he refused to be drawn out by their ribald questions. They cut him down and helped him put the clothes on IF his wealed body. He snapped and snarled at them but obviously didn't care. He was thinking about something else. He was the first in the saddle of his steede. Arcweld's weals were still smarting when the vanguard of the expedition entered the sub-traverse, but he paid no attention. Starhowl's Helangle scouts led. Their steedes were throttled down and they kept their helmet visors fully shut. They fanned out across the broad, cracked traverse. Young Cleavewind, who had scouted it, was at the tip of the cone of riders with the dwarf behind and to his left. The high-noon sun cut bands of blinding light and shadow across the highway. Behind the scouts came the Caxitine Conducs. They were responsible for servicing the carrier that came next in the procession, bearing Shevan, Delbet and Karel's casket. Below his visor, Arcweld's teeth were gritted, his lips drawn back from them in his silent grin-snarl. He had to keep from looking back over his shoulder and he ground his teeth till they ached to remind him. It was vital that what was going to happen didn't happen too quickly. The dwarf didn't trust anyone, but especially he didn't trust the Submets. Their vision in full daylight was almost as bad as being blind and outside the underworld they dehydrated so quickly that an hour's exposure could mean death. They had to carry through Keren's plan precisely. Gunning the motor, he pushed his steede forward to ride level with Qeavewind. The incident of that morning, Arcweld's trumped-up story and the subsequent courtmartial and flogging had disturbed the young, Helangle. Even the lewd jokes which were now making the rounds about the real reason for Arcweld's prolonged absence failed to reassure Cleavewind. He felt that the dwarf had something evil locked iiiside him. Arcweld said, "Let's burn, man. Push it. At this pace we're all gonna fall off." Cleavewind turned his head, wobbling, holding his balance. The helmet and visor hid most of his face but the dwarf didn't miss the quick twitch of his lips and knew he was scared. Qeavewind looked over at Starhowl. The Helangle leader was staring straight ahead down the traverse. It was entering a shallow dip under what had once been a complex traffic flyover. Starhowl was trying to see as far ahead as he could. "Huh?" asked Arcweld. Qeavewind didn't answer. He restored the distance differential between himself and Arcweld by a brief acceleration, then continued to stare ahead, as did his leader. Arcweld dropped back. A moment or two later he surged forward again, impatiently. Zooming his motor, Cleavewind refused to run level with him, The dwarfs parted lips spread wider into a grin. Out of the comers of his eyes he had seen the Helangles to right and left adjusting to keep the formation. He tipped his bike into a swerving arc and with a flush of power surged back to the Concjuc section. "Move it." He made a rolling gesture at the leading driver. "Bum it. Gotta get through before sundown. Don't straggle." The effect Arcweld was really after was the exact opposite of compactness, He wanted the Conducs separated from the Superom vehicle. The farther apart the component groups were when his plans broke, the better. Apian, the Caxitine chief, perched next to his driver, stared stonily ahead, ignoring the Helangle, but as soon as Arcweld had gone in smoke and noise the Caxitine turned and spoke quietly to the driver. They increased speed. Arcweld soared past the Superoms' wagon, banked and came up beside it. One of the Caxitines was driving. It was a heavy vehicle and the stench of overheated cruze was strong. The dwarf pretended not to see Shevan but squinted at her through his 'dark visor. She was riding just behind the driver, next to Delbet. The giant seemed to be asleep. "Don't bunch up-dig?" The dwarf cupped a hand and shouted at the driver. "Road surface busted up in places. Keep your distance." With a swift glance over his shoulder whidi took in Shevan 's small feet in their blue sandals, the dwarf laid his steede almost flat in a turn, slid through the lengthening gap between the Superom truck and the last Conduc wagon and roared toward the head of the column. T he whole expedition was now within the stone jungle. Arcweld stared up at the buildings. There was one with a partly collapsed stone staircase. Then came a shallow curve in the road; then a structure that sprang out of a pedestrian level. It had hundreds of blind narrow eyes. Farther along the traverse, where there was a similar building, the highway would narrow and bore through a tunnel. The dwarfs memory smoldered. Starhowl broke file and sped across the arc of scouts. He came up between Arcweld and Cleavewind. "What in hell yawl on? Why break rank?" 'Tushing on," Arcweld shouted, competing with the noise. "Won't get through the traverse before sundown IF yawl don't move it. Yawl want a night in the stone jungle?' 'i give orders. You, Cleavewind, get Kickstart. Road's busted. Scout it. Make sure it swings. Dig?" "Narrows about five hundred meters from here," shouted Cleavewind. "Where me and Arcweld split." He was looking at his mindmap. "Through a tunnel, then -- " Arcweld scowled at the young Helangle. "Drop to three in line," said Starhowl, "when we hit the tunnel. Keep apart. Goddam stone hasn't taken traffic like this for too long. We could shake it apart. Arcweld, you stay by me." The dwarfs lips framed a curse that was inaudible above the noise. Whatever he pretended it suited him well to ride with Starhowl over the next five hundred meters. He could hear his heart banging inside the black jerkin. The cracked and blank faces of the ruins enclosed and multiplied the sound of the procession and drowned everything else. The dwarf thought about the damp, colorless creatures waiting below the vibrating ground. When Arcweld and Starhowl entered the tunnel the dwarf could see the two leading scouts as small silhouettes framed against a sunlit arch. A moment before the hated darkness swallowed him he also glanced backward. On the approach section of the traverse, beyond the rest of the scout pack, came the Conduc file and the Superom truck with Karel's casket. If their spacing had been planned and measured mathematically it couldn't have been better. The stone jungle gave absolutely no sign of life. For an instant doubt thrust a shaft into Arcweld's mind. He entered the thunderous darkness of the tunnel. His lips tugged themselves back and he felt spittle flow. He aimed his steede at the bisected ellipse of light ahead of him and hoped that the attack wouldn't come too soon. His last look at the dead face of the stone jungle had bothered him. It had seemed like the face of an idiot who forgets everything immediately after having been told. The lead scouts were scarcely halfway through the tunnel when the seeds of panic began to sprout. Arcweld spurted forward reflexively. He thought he heard an angry cry, drowned immediately by the racket in the tunnel. It might have been Starhowl's protest at his indiscipline. The next moment the Helangle leader drew level with him again. The dwarf chanced another glance back down the tunnel. Now the entry arch was also a bright ellipseframed in it was the top of the Superom carrier. Sweat was running into the corners of his eyes. The multiple processes of his own body were all accelerating to meet the imminent climax. It came. Starhowl was shouting at him. Arcweld figured that the light came opening and closing on words that had no chance of being heard. The noise in the tunnel had increased and grown subtly different. There were new sounds in it. The dwarf looked back again. He was just in time to see the bright eye of sunlight behind him blink. A voice at his ear shrieked for help toward the rear, but the dwarfs attention was riveted. As he watched the eye blinked again, then closed finally. Through the haze of smoke from the vehicles in the tunnel came rolling an acrid smell of dust. From the dwarfs left a bright shaft of light swung back through the clouds and confusion. Starhowl was invisible in the dust and smoke but Arcweld guessed that the light came from his steede. He must have guessed what was happening a moment before Arcweld. He had swung around and switched on his headlamp. Some of the scouts in the following rank stopped, but those farther behind seemed to have panicked. They thrust forward too quickly and collided with their fellows ahead. Starhowl's light, swinging drunkenly down the tunnel, showed a scene of confusion. The roof at the entry had caved in and the vanguard of the expedition was now cut off from the rear. One of the leading Conduc vehicles -- a heavy wagon -- moving too fast in the dust cloud had hit a Helangle steede, swerved to avoid the unseated rider and collided with the tunnel wall. More of the scouts were pulling their bikes around and bringing their headlights to focus back toward the center of the disaster. After a struggle Arcweld turned his own steede in the narrow space. In the roaring tumult he shuffled forward unseen. He rode up on the tailboard of the crashed Conduc wagon, switched on his lamp and tried to make out what was happening farther back. Was the crisis already over? The dwarfs tongue curled out over his lips. He tasted dust, sweat. Someone was howling loud Helangle orders. The light beams were being better directed. Three of them now made a composite cone. Almost on the instant it centered on the file of stalled vehicles and gesticulating figures in the tunnel there were loud screams. Arcweld, his mouth eating dust and horror, dimly saw a Conduc conveyance tilt, then roll backward into a great gaping crack that had opened in the tunnel floor. IF The searchlights wavered, then picked up the Superom carrier. It now had a pile of fallen rubble behind it and a yawning hole before it-it stood entirely isolated from every other vehicle in the expedition. In the next ten seconds everything happened that the dwarf had heard Keren tell the Submets must happen -- but with nightmarish variations no one could have foreseen. Up to now the tunnel cave-in might simply have been StarhowTs prediction coming true. It looked as if the unaccustomed traffic had shaken the long-disused traverse to pieces. But now groups of the underworld tribe rose like phantoms from the ruins. They swarmed in from all sides suddenly, as though exuded by cracks in the tunnel's fabric. Their silvery bodies wriggled and flashed in the searchlights. They surged about the casket carrier like hungry parasites. M any of the Helangles and Conducs had shut down their motors to reduce the smoke and noise. Now a strange hissing sound rose to smother the isolated cries from the far side of the chasm. A one was dragged from the Superom vehicle. The victim's flailing arms disappeared into the hissing, heaving trough of silver. More Submets swarmed from the hole in front of the carrier as the scream was drowned. Then several voices, Conduc and Helangle, began to shout. Fear, rage, belligerence were hurled at the ambush. Starhowl shuffled his machine toward the lip of the crater. Several of the bolder Helangles joined him, shoving aside their injured comrades. More and more headlamps came on to illumine the scene. But the scouts could not bridge the gaping trench. Below them lay the wrecked Conduc vehicle, its wheels still slowly turning. One of the Conducs pushed forward among the bikes. He brandished a heavy wrench. Breaking into a run, howling threats, he leaped from the . edge of the trench. He was trying to show the others a way across, but he missed. The dark pit swallowed his shriek. Crouched against the tunnel wall, Arcweld silently urged the troglodytes to get the ambush over. His oved hands clenched the steering bar of his steede. He felt his heart racing. The Helangles' stunted legs gave them no chance of trying to better the Conduc's heroics. Many jumped instead from their bikes and tore rocks from the edge of the crater, flung them at the hissing Submets on the other side. The attack brought an answering barrage of stones. Howls of pain and anger roared in the tunnel. "The casket -- the casket -- " someone was bawling. A stone ricochetting from the curved roof of the tunnel struck Arcweld in the mouth below the visor. Now he had blood as well as sweat and dust to swallow. Cursing and spitting, he saw the upward surge and stagger of Submets as they dragged Karel's casket from its place. But on the other side their silvery bodies were being flung sharply and aggressively aside. The dwarf saw his enemy rise titanically, sloughing off troglodytes like skin. He flung one, turning over and over, into the trench. He was fighting with bare hands, having been stripped of almost everything. In a moment he had disappeared again. Arcweld bounced up and down, howling eefuily, tasting the rich salty blood of his enemy. "Move it back. Clear the way, man -- like move -- " Starhowl's shouting came from far down the tutmel. The dwarf couldn't see what was happening but he heard a Conduc conveyance start up and begin to whine in reverse down the dark road. On the island Karel's casket was being rushed on a silver stream throu a new cavity that had appeared in the tunnel wall. A great wail of anger and frustration rocked' the tunnel as the loyal Thetans saw their sleeping god disappear. The Submets funneled after him, taking with them a limp blue bundle that had to be Shevan, also held aloft. On the near side of the carrier its driver lay motionless. On the far side a seething mass of Submets was again ripped open and Delbet emerged. He flung one attacker against the wall, another onto the wagon. Weight of numbers felled him again and they began to drag him toward the aperture in the wall that must lead to the underworld. "Go," bawled Starhowl. "Go get it back. Goddam you -- move!" The dwarf saw a Conduc vehicle loom to his right and back slowly toward the trench. The Helangle leader was going to try to bridge it. The Submet attackers on the island had momentarily lost their hold on Delbet. Again he flung several of them aside with crushing force. He stood up. With a sweep of his arm he felled two more. Free for a second, he loped with his surprising agility toward the trench. He sprang. To the watching dwarf it seemed that his enormous bulk hung for a long moment weightless above the pit. his throat for a hoarse croak of triumph as the giant fell. But Delbet didn't fall. He seemed to kick on. He landed briefly on the crashed wagon. sprang again at once and clutched and clung to the lip of the gulf where Thetan hands grabbed him and hauled him to safety. The nightmare experience he had just survived arid the violence of his struggle seemed to have drained the giant's strength to its dregs. He kneeled within a semicircle of awe-stricken Thetans. None dared to touch him. His head hung down. His shoulders heaved as he fought for air. He groaned and whimpered. It was as if the passion of his experience had thrown some mechanism into reverse. He crouched there as though in memory of some remote ancestral creature at the genesis of his race in an unimaginable galaxy. The Thetans finally discerned some coherence in the phrases that were torn out of him. "Shevan -- Shevan. Karel -- it -- Keren -- " Lurking at the rim of the group, Arcweld peered, snarled and hopped uneasily from leg to leg. This was wrong. This was a blow to cripple Keren's strategy. Delbet should have been safe in the underworld, fast in a sticky web of Submets with the others. The dwarf stared back across the collapsed roadway and at the tunnel walls. Would they attack again? His mouth dribbled saliva and blood as he willed the walls to yawn and disgorge the stone jungle's pale dwellers to carry the giant away. But they stayed blank. The idiot face again. In the new silence, slashed by light beams and acrid with dust and cruze smoke Delbet's agony continued . "She van -- She wy -- Karel -- it was Keren -- " sank their antagonisms in their common misadventure. They quickly formed an alliance to maintain order. The dangers of the stone jungle, the shock of the ambush and the audacity of the theft of Karel's casket had terrified most of the Thetans. The expedition threatened to disintegrate into rabble. Only joint action by the Caxitine chiefs under Apian and by the Helangles Starhowl and Smoke trail averted wholesale panic. No one wanted to remain in the stone jungle. It was already afternoon and night would soon come down. But Starhowl and Apian argued fiercely that it would be best to remain where contact might still be made with the Submets and a chance generated of recovering the kidnaped Superom. They came first to Delbet for leadership.After all, he looked, spoke and dressed like Superom. But it wasn't lost on the shrewd Helangles and thoughtful Conducs that the giant was less powerful now that he was alone. He seemed lost without Shevan. Ideas, if they generated behind his handsome, bewildered face, couldn't seem to break free. When the Thetans organized a hasty council meeting and sat in a circle about him, muttering and arguing among themselves, he stared blankly at them. When they asked him questions he shook his head or muttered unintelligible snatches of high Superom. "Yawl Saivainte," growled Smoketrail, addressing the council. "Yawl Zedward. Yawl got learning -- huh? Okay, so beat your minds, longshirts. Now why would a bunch of insects do a thing like that to Superom? How yawl figure? How explain that kinda thing?" Zedward, the dignified leader of the Saivainte, raised his bony shoulders m a shrug. He pulled his cloak more tightly to him as though to fend off the approaching night. "My brothers and I have had little time for thought. We consider that at last a dark thing may be happening in our world. Many of our brothers are cut off from us. Thetis is large. There are many waters and many stone junes. Communication has been bad for several hundred years and does not improve. We have predicted for some time that the continued interruption of intercourse among the tribes will result in the ultimate failure of the Superom legend. We believe we may have seen the validity of our apprehensions demonstrated here today. Th# Submets, who have cut themselves off from the upperworld, have developed groups which are no longer conscious of the Superom nor acknowledge the creed." "Huh?" grunted Starhowl. The Helangles all looked blank. Saivainte speech was too involved for them. "But why did they identify and attack the Superom wagon?' snapped Floridian, one of the Conduc leaders. "The removal of the casket was deliberate and planned." "We know that if they can catch anyone straying into their tenitory," said Zedward, "they hold him for ransom. Their way of life has become very savage. But it seems incredible that they would dare to ransom Superom. My brothers and I fear the worst. These low-morality creatures don't realize what they have done. They have seen the approach of an important caravan and they have identified and stolen away its most important element." "Why don't yawl talk simple, man." Starhowl's black goggles looked like the eye sockets in a skull. "Me, Starho, I say those trogjos knew what they were at. I say they got paid out by some other pack to lift Karel to Mandanar. Dig? What yawl say. Smoke?" Smoketrail looked nonplused. ApIF Ian said, "What we ought to be discussing is how do we go about getting back Great Karel and Shevan Lady. If the casket is damaged-" The Thetan leaders stared at one another, horrified. A murmur of concern spread out into the listening rows and died in shocked silence. Suddenly the giant Delbet whom everyone had momentarily forgotten struck the air with his fist. "It was Keren. Somehow this was Keren's doing." The violence of the outburst was so unexpected that several of the leaders jumped. Arcweld felt his guts contract and he bit his raw lip so that it bled again. "How could Keren be involved?" Zedward questioned. "Spadrox is several hundred kilometers behind us. Besides, would Keren risk fatal damage to the casket -- harm to Great Karel?" The giant's eyes glazed again. He stared at the fading sky. For a moment it seemed that he would retreat from the discussion, but he did speak. Not to the council but to something or someone inside his head. The watchers saw his lips move. No one understood him. lipped Helangle from SeventyThird City South, was sitting with his group nearby. Arcweld leaned toward him and whispered, "That giant's blown his mind. What use is a Superom that dumb? We need Keren Sir here. We oughta send for Keren Sir. He'd get it together." "Sanpardan," suggested a voice from the far side of the circle. "Those underworlders will trade almost anything for that. Maybe if we could get enough sanpardan -- " The speaker was one of the chubby little Agorans, thinking in terms of commerce as usual. Kickstart said, "Arcweld here reckons we oughta send couriers to Keren. Get him here. He'd organize. Get it together. Pull out G.K. and Shevan Lady.' Arcweld shrank. He had expected Kickstart to arrogate the idea to himself, not to mention his name. But the mention of Keren seemed to galvanize Delbet. He sprang up and stared around the circle with blazing eyes. "No! I will tear this stone jungle apart stone by stone before I call my cousin. We must send a messenger into underworld. We must establish contact with these Submetropols. We must find out why they stole Great Karel and Shevan. We must pay their price. And we must get to Mandanar!" The giant seemed to stare straight at Arcweld. The dwarf cowered. Only twelve hours earlier, on a hillside above the dty, the sight of him had made Delbet run away. Arcweld still didn't know why, but now it was his turn to be afraid. For the giant didn't even recognize him. His stare burned through the dwarf and disappeared into some distant nightmare. Arcweld felt trapped again. He was trapped because the innocent giant had escaped the Submet ambush. He was trapped between this titan who had struck him down before on the point of conquest and the compelling magic box hidden on his steede. The box would already be impatiently waiting for him to confirm success. Arcweld tried to conceal himself in the group of scouts as the giant stormed on. Delbet 's saintly face was contorted by the agony of emotions shackled inside him. The conference was being held on the traverse beyond the tunnel. He took a few uncertain steps back toward the darkness. He shouted something in high Superom. Then, abruptly, he turned. In language the shivering listeners could understand he shouted, "I, Delbet, will lead you into the underworld. I will find Shevan Lady and Great Karel. I will hunt their captors down like-like the-" His eyes glazed again. He clutched his head, stared at the ring of Thetan faces as though he couldn't understand why they were there. Zedward rose unhurriedly to his feet. He was almost as tall as a Superom. He looked both splendid and dignified as he wrapped his cloak around him, walked to the young giant and took his arm. Apian the orange-haired Caxitine joined him. Starhowl scuttled forward, too. Together the Thetans led Delbet back from the tunnel mouth. The giant shook his head, "Shewy -- Shevan -- used to tell me about what she found in the talktapes -- something in the underworld that struck fear -- " "Delbet Sir, come -- sit. Calm in all things." The Saivainte spoke with quiet compassion. Arcweld turned to Smoketrail. "We got to get Keren -- dig? If not we lose G.K. and the girl." Smoketrail stared at the dwarf, but made no response. He looked at the group leading Delbet back to the council ring. Arcweld discovered that neither Smoketrail nor anyone else was taking particular notice of him. If only those underworld blindfish had taken the giant. If only he could explain to the black box in the pannier and bring Keren from Spadrox... Delbet had stopped again. His body became rigid. He seemed on the verge of a fit. He shouted up at the blind eyes of the city. "Shevan said -- the talk-tapes from the broken library told of the amber fog -- a creature that terrified the Submets. It hunted them -- " IF The Caxitine and the Saivainte stared blankly at one another. Starhowl squatted in front of the giant, staring up at him, mouth open, any expression smothered under the death's-head helmet. Arcweld had worked his way throu the crowd to Kickstart's side. "Must call Keren. Giant's blown his mind. He's wrapped. Finished. Dig?" Kickstart hardly moved. He was watching. among his small tribal group. A patched cloak that had once been a magnificent historian's purple hung from his shoulders. "I think I know what he means. Ye# -- the life form was recorded in the early ages of Thetis and in the making of the first stone jungles." He coughed, waited to see that he held his audience. "The Superom lost many of the subjects they trained to maintain tjie underworld. They fell prey to a primeval Thetan creature. It was drawn, as though hypnotized, to the short-wave radiation of the machines and came into conflict with the Submetropols in the process." Delbet shook his arms free of the Thetan chiefs' hold. He strode toward the old historian. He bent down until his face was level with that of the old man. "You know?" he breathed. "Yes -- that's the story Shewy had from the talk-tapes." The old man continued. "The Superom could not afford the losses of their trained underworld creatures. They exterminated the attackers ruthlessly -- the Thetan word for the creature was witawu. The aipber fog." The old Saivainte frowned doubtfully. "Stories persist that in the more remote parts of Thetis hives of the witawu continue to exist. I have seen no proof, but -- " "Hold on there." A new voice broke into the silence. Pushing forward, Arcweld saw that the speaker was an Agoran. He was roundbodied, with the bald, bony skull and quick brown eyes of so many of his people. His name was Mutch. "Some of our lot go to the West Water to trade every fall. There's a Conduc group up there. Can't remember what they call themselves, but they live on the North Shore. Our men reckon they keep a queer sort of creature in hives. They get a kind of sticky sweet juice that they sell -- " The Saivainte historian nodded vigorously. The jigsaw of his memories found another piece that fitted. "Yes, the witawu used such a substance to feed their young and to cement their underworld hives." Zedward said gravely, "Domesticated witawu? But what -- " Delbet spun around to face him. "We must go at once to the West Water." The Thetans looked at one another. Then their eyes turned again to the giant. In the silence that had suddenly come down Arcweld could almost hear the Voice in the box screaming at him. Triumph had been so near and was now slipping beyond his power to hold it. When yawl down, man, they all grind yawl Everybody rides over your face . , . A moment later the dwarf heard his name spoken. His thoughts were still wild with fear and linked the sound with the voice in the box. He crouched, ducked his head and hunched his shoulders as though to ward off a blow. Then, as he stared at the ground and nothing struck, he heard his name again. And this time it was not the voice in his head. This time he recognized the speaker as Starhowl. "... Cleavewind, too," the Helangle was saying. "They have the mindmaps of this zone. Mutch will go with yawl, too -- huh Agoran? Your people have contact with this Conduc outfit. Apian, there oughta be a Conduc on the trip. Like proving it's for real and no sham. Dig?" Arcweld shambled almost automatically into the bare center of the council circle. He still hadn't realized what was happening. Then he saw the giant staring at him. F or the second time that day giant and dwarf confronted one another. Delbet's mouth opened. Arcweld knew that he was recognized this time. "Yawl, Arcweld." Catching the giant's fixed stare, Starhowl had turned. "Ylwl and Cleavewind go with Delbet Sir. Like fast. Mutch and one of the Conducs, too. How long it take yawl make the North Shore of West Water? Shed?"  Arcweld shook his head. "I don't have a mindmap -- " Starhowl roared, "What's hit yawl? Yawl and Cleavewind guide this task force real fast to North Shore. Delbet Sir will talk out the Conducs there. Yawl get back here with some help -- " Arcweld 's lip was trickling blood again. He was leaning so hard on his knuckles that he could feel agonizing grains of stone biting into them from the roadway. He was conscious of hundreds of eyes turned on him. Starhowl seemed on the point of exploding into action-Delbet's voice came just in time to save Arcweld his second flogging of the day. "This dwarf will not refuse to save my cousin, Shevan?' The silence was as frail as a bubble. Arcweld opened his mouth, but his voice broke in his throat. "Well dwarf?" Delbet seemed suddenly enormous. Arcweld fecalled the blow in the darkness. Rage IF welled up in his chest, but the fear of loneliness among his own kind was stronger. His tongue stroked and the taste of the blood on his lip unlocked his vocal cords. "I said I didn't have a mindmap," he growled. "I meant my mindmap 's thin. Sure I'll go. I guess it'll take maybe one -- two days." He continued to croak amends but, like a spider laboriously pitching the first thread of a web between twigs, he could intuit a new design for his vengeance behind his words. Night was falling. From the night in his mind the dwarf looked down the traverse toward the North Shpre and the long highways between it and the stone jungle. This Superom needed him the way the other had needed him. Out there a Helange would hold an advantage. He stared up balefully at Delbet, but now the giant ignored him. Delbet turned to the Thetan chiefs. For the moment he had taken on Superom authority. "Apian, you will choose me one of your people. Perhaps we shall need an interpreter. These remote Conducs will not ever have seen a Superom and we must not terrify them with our mission or its purpose. "Starhowl, see that this reluctant dwarf and the other you named are ready to leave in an hour. We can't lose any time-we must start out tonight. "Zedward, my thanks to you and your people again. When we bring Great Karel to Mandanar safely and the secrets are revealed, you and the Saivainte diall have your rewards. My people don't ever forget such devotion." Dusk had begun to creep along the traverse. The Thetans lit their lamps and many braziers of fire-ore to chase away the fearful darks of the stone jungle. On the edge of the scout camp the dwarf lay next to his steede on the hard roadside. His insect-head helmet rested on the pannier, inside which he felt the unyielding boxthe magic that demanded. He muttered and fidgeted. A hairy female scuttled up, yickered, fawned, and put her hand on him, misjudging the reason for his discomfort. ' He struck her away and snarled after her until she had disappeared, growling and whimpering, ampng the tents. Arcweld stared up at the sky. In a half-hour they would be moving through the night toward the West Water. Tenderly his tongue explored the healing lip. It still had a raw metallic taste. Around and around went his thoughts, painfully drawing out thread after thread, spinning and spinning. I!'-atory Ship E-# had assembled in the generaUroom to hear officially what they had already learned in part via the grapevine. Captain Fell and Dr. Latham came in last and threaded their way toward the small dais. The captain let his eyes slide over the room, making a quick head count. Then he said, "You all know something about our present unusual situation. We came out of warp for a routine position check and quite accidentally intercepted a repeating radio message in real space. It was an appeal for help from the planet Valora. The message was weak and full of noise, but we cleaned it up and were able to read it. It described a plague of insects, specifically hornets. Semantic analysis indicated that the problem was real and urgent. At least the sender considered it so, though it obviously made little sense for him to be reporting an emergency the nearest trading planet wouldn't learn about for years, if ever. However, he was lucky -- we happened along. I elected to deviate from our current assignment. We reentered warp and, with only one adjustment, arrived in an eight-to-one orbit around Valora, a satisfactory piece of astrogation. We are now making further adjustments to a nearly circular orbit at roughly fifty thousand kilometers. Four and a half hours from now we will put down a landing craft under the command of Sam Lacey. Dr. Latham will give you the rest of the story as far as we know it and will outline our plans." Latham rattled his pipe between his teeth and said, Those of you who have lived on Earth will know that hornets and wasps are Terran insects ranging in size from nearly microscopic to several centimeters in length. There are, as I recall, some thousands of species, many of which can inflict painful stings. From the note of hysteria implicit in the call for help, it would seem that Valora's hornets are of a particularly unpleasant type. Since the planet has been settled for twenty-one uneventful years it is unlikely that these could in fact be Terran hornets, accidentally transplanted and only now becoming a menace. It is more probable that they are a native species. How they could have built up to plague levels without having been previously reported, we do not know. "We probably cannot provide any direct aid. If insecticides or biological predators are needed we can perhaps suggest methods or agents and pass the word to the nearer trading planets. Our immediate job will be to get some detailed knowledge of the problem. "I could play you our tapes on Valora, but there would be a lot of nonpertinent detail, so I'll highspot. The planet was explored by one of our ships some thirty years ago and was recommended for occupation by an agricultural society. It had a mild climate, no volcanic activity, adequate rainfall, plant life that could nourish Terran animals and fertile soil that would be receptive to Terran crops -- it was, in short, suitable for settlement with minimum risk. There were numerous small animals and a few larger herbivores somewhat like Terran deer -- none higher than point sixteen on the intelligence scale. "On the other hand, Valora was virtually devoid of heavy elements. It was recognized that she could develop no important industry in the foreseeable future and could hardly hope to join the trading planets. The Interworld organization therefore has furnished -- gratis -- isotopic powerpacks, drugs fliers, communication equipment and such other items as are needed to sustain a simple society. Otherwise she has been left more or less alone. She has no interplanetary ships and no subspace communication facilities. Her present population is no more than a few hundred thousand. In many respects she is a rather primitive planet. It may well be that Interworld regards her as something of a social experiment. "Settlement was accomplished in the year two thousand fortysix, after a considerable delay. The initial exploration had revealed that, three years earlier, there had been a planetwide epidemic among the larger herbivores. There were, as I said, few living specimens and many skeletal remains were found. The normal period for microbiological studies was therefore extended. Some moderately pathogenic organisms were found and both settlers and livestock received appropriate immunization. "Now -- as soon as we're in stable orbit Sam Lacey will set down with four exploratory teams of five men each. Each team will include one military man with experience in a variety of real and IF simulated extraterrestrial stress situations, a paramedical technician and a zoologist. Sam will pick the other men he wants. You will, of course, make a number of contacts with Valoran settlers and to the extent possible you will look at various ecological environments. Bring back first and even second-hand reports on the distribution and behavior patterns of the insects and the steps taken to combat them. Equally important, bring back some hornets, dead if necessary, alive if possible. You will have nets and cages. What else should be covered, Sam?" "We don't know much about the problem," Sam observed. "We'll be playing it by ear. I've already made team selections and I'll stick the list on the bulletin board, with apologies to all those left out. We're issuing regular temperate climate gear with fitted gloves and close-weave headnets. Anybody with any special knowledge of hornets, come and see me. Regulation weapons will be carried, though we can't think there'll be any use for thiem. Our two psychologists will be going along, with the expectation that two teams can be set down close to towns or villages. The other two teams will take a look at unsettled arpas. "As nearly as you can plan such things in advance, we'll figure to rendezvous with each team after four or five ship's hours. Til have a chance to make a low-level surveillance of a good deal of territory and maybe talk to a few people. I'll report to the ship once each orbit. We'll aim to have a complete enough picture to be back aboard in fourteen hours at the outside." you read me? Okay, get it on tape. I'll give you as much as I can while you're over my horizon. Things are a hell of a mess down here. From the contacts I've made directly, the planet is approaching a state of panic. "No problem putting down the teams. First one close to a town in a big river valley. Second in a farming community, partly wooded terrain. Third near a southern hemisphere seacoast with scrub growth and marshes. Fourth on a high, rather arid plateau -- cattle country. Since then I've made stops at two towns and talked to a dozen or so people, all badly scared. "We were dead wrong about the hornets. What they have is nothing like any Terran bug. They stand about half to three-quarters of a meter high and look like a football on legs. I was able to examine a dead one. Somebody had broken its legs with a cudgel. They die when that happens -- or if their bodies get punctured. You'll get specimens when we're back aboard. "Some newscaster started calling them hornets and the name caught on. They do sting and they sting to kill. There have been a lot of human deaths -- my guess is several hundred to a thousand -- not to mention animals, cattle and goats mostly. Even if this mess can be cleaned up fast, Valora will need help to get reestablished. "The hornets have apparently been living underground -- deep down where nobody ever discovered them -- since before the settlers arrived. Somewhere I think I've heard of an Earth-type bug that lives underground for seventeen years, then comes out and flies for a season. But these things don't fly -- they jump. The body, the one I examined, was like a bladder covered with thin leathery skin. Inside they seem to have a backbone and a few other boner They have these two legs, jointed so they can jump, and two upper appendages I guess you could i:all arms, with sharp hooks on the ends. The arms and legs are tough and sinewy. Then there are four smaller appendages on each side of the body which may be used for digging when they're in the ground. They have no heads as such, unless you want to figure the mouth area as a head. The mouth is circular, about three centimeters across and ringed with nasty-looking teeth. When ,they attack they come out of a crouch, launch themselves in a shallow trajectory, dig their hooks into whatever they hit and shove a sting -- like a spring-propelled hypodermic needle -- out of their mouths. The one I saw had a sting six centimeters long. When that hits you you've had it. They haven't any eyes -- or none that I could see. They jump about five to ten meters, depending on who's telling it. As soon as their victim is dead they start feeding and all the hornets in the neighborhood get the message somehow and come rushing up to get in on the meal. This I don't want to watch. "There were only a few hornets at first, but the numbers have been building up fast. Some places haven't had any at all, while a few kilometers away communities have been reduced to a few survivors staying locked up in their homes. There isn't any food emergency -- not yet. Food distribution is all short haul and most IF houses even out in the country have pumps and piped water. "There's just about no central government here. Every town of more than a couple of hundred people has a mayor. The mayors are supposed to form a sort of general council, only it seems they rarely get together. News dissemination is spotty and unreliable. No visual telecasting, but every family has a radio and news is broadcast three times a day. Trouble is there are no paid newsgatherers. The stations broadcast whatever news items are brought in to them and half the items are wrong. So nobody knows how many people have died. Nobody knows whether the hornets are still on the increase. Nobody knows who could have authorized that crazy broadcast about hornets. "Maybe some other planet would have been able to put up a better defense, but it seems the Valoran colony was recruited from one of those sects that doesn't they tell it, there isn't one man in a hundred who has a gun and knows how to use it. Hell, they're even vegetarians. They've changed comes to hornets, but they're not very good at it. "Right now I'm drifting on automatic hover at about twenty meters. A minute ago I could see a swarm of the hornets and a collection of holes in the ground where they must have come out. They're said to be white when they emerge and then to turn red. These were reddish. "I'm worried about our teams, naturally. They were put down with the idea that they'd be looking for insects of a reasonable size. Their collecting gear won't be worth a damn and I don't think their fatigues will give them much protection. Of course they have their lasers and rifles. I'm going back to the pick-up points ahead of schedule. Hope they've stayed close to their beepers. "Your echo is fading -- so that ends this message. I'll have some of the men aboard by your next trip around. Lacey signing off." II and muttered a profanity. The heaped pillows were a poor excuse for sitting up. He had promised, more or less, to stay put until his wife returned, but then, she had never had a cast on her leg and didn't know what it was like. The plaster extended from his instep to halfway up his thigh. It didn't hurt any more. The doctor must have done a good job setting the breaks, but the leg itched like mad. He could get his fingers under the top of the cast and scratch, but only for a little distance. With extra caution, in view of the promise, he swung crosswise of the bed, lowered the unbending leg to the floor and tried the unfamiliar crutches one way and another until he could lift himself to his feet. Elizabeth ought to be back from town soon. She was some overdue already, which meant she had done other errands or that she was having trouble getting a powerpack to fit their old-fashioned radio. It hadn't worked for weeks, but it was only now when he had to lie around like a damned useless lump that he missed it. He inched his way carefully across the floor. It wasn't the first time he had navigated on the crutches, but other times Elizabeth had been standing by ready to grab an arm. It went very well. He wanted to be on the porch, sitting in the big chair wih his leg propped up on another, where he could look out over the orchard. Boughs were beginning to bend down with the weight of the fruit, which would be coloring up shortly. Soon he must set dates for the pickers. The porch itself was in shade but golden sunlight filled the narrow valley. The scene was much like the apple country back in Oregon, a place and time he could remember vividly. Still in his middle years, Wright was nevertheless one of the older people on Valora. The big chair wasn't as comfortable as he had expected, but he settled down and pondered how best to goabout harvesting while he himself was out of commission. From time to time he squinted toward the gap in the hills, where Elizabeth's flier would be appearing. He caught a small movement from the tail of his eye and brought his gaze around. What he saw was utterly incredible and loathsome. A thing was standing a few meters away and watching him intently. At least it gave the impression of watching, of riveting its attention upon him, although he could not see its eyes. Its globular body was a dirty white in color. It stood on jointed legs and held jointed -- arms? -- away from its sides as if to maintain balance. He had never seen or heard tell of anything like it, but he knew from deep instinct that it was inimical and dangerous. He threw his weight forward and scrabbled on the floor for his crutches. As he did, the ugly beast crouched and launched itself in a shallow leap directly at him. In IF clumsy panic he was still trying to gather himself when the thing hit him at waist height and instantly dug claws through the thin fabric of his shirt and into his flesh. He gave up the crutches and beat at it futilely with both hands. The chair crashed to one side and he fell. Terror and despair filled him for a moment -- then there was no room in him for anything but pain. A sharp proboscis, tough as whalebone, had been plunged deep into his abdomen. The puncture of vital parts was trivial. The flood of nerve poison coursing through his blood carried agony to every fiber of his being. Twice his hands beat against the floor before he lost even that semblance of muscle control. The circular rim of teeth that surrounded the proboscis began a semi-independent motion, tearing at his flesh as the hornet started to feed. In a minute it was joined by two others. Elizabeth's flier came in through the break in the hills and settled toward the landing area. T here was only one breed of dog on Valora, a sort of roughhaired shepherd with wide skull, respectable intelligence and a degree of independence engendered by life on the new planet. The first ones had been brought out at not inconsiderable cost by original settlers who felt the need for an additional tie with the Earth they were abandoning. For a time the dogs had belonged to households, but many had taken to the wilds and formed into packs. They were friendly to man, for that was their heritage, but they had become standoffish. They lived by hunting small animals -- only rarely did there appear a rogue which would pull down sheep. Many farm dogs also supplemented unexciting, vegetarian table scraps by a daily hunt. Between Wally Craig and his dog, Tiger, there existed those bonds of understanding and affection which, curiously, can unite these two different species. Some word about the ugly little animals that here and there were clawing their way up through Valora's friable soil had found a place on the newscasts over the past days. The reports were a matter for curiosity rather than alarm. The notion that bugs could be dangerous was regarded as the product of somebody's imagination. In any case, none of the creatures had been sighted anywhere near Riverside. It was taken as a matter of course during summer vacation that Wally should wander off somewhere immediately after breakfast. Without definite plan he turned his steps down the length of the main road and on toward the river where his contemporaries would be gathering. Halfway there Tiger, ranging along the edge of the woods, discovered something that merited instant attention and gave voice. His bark didn't indicate any of the kinds of small game he often scared up and sometimes caught. He sounded querulous and alarmed. Wally whistled and when Tiger failed to come he decided to investigate. The dog was standing at the edge of the scrub growth facing into the deeper wood, his muzzle elevated to sample the breeze, his lower jaw quivering a little in excitement. He was clearly alarmed by something and took to whining. Wally gave him a word of reassurance and moved quietly into the green shade of the trees. The hornet's body was so dark a red as to be nearly black, and in the dense shade it was nearly invisible. Wally was within five meters of the thing before he saw it. Tiger, his sight assisted by a keen nose, saw it a fraction of a second sooner. They stood side by side. Faced by this fearful unknown, Wally experienced shock but had not yet galvanized his muscles to turn and run. The hornet leaped. Its limited sensory system, primarily heatseeking, failed to detect a small tree limb. It struck the limb, dropped and landed on legs already bent for a second leap. The way was clear then and it launched itself again toward the larger quarry. Wally's mind shouted run but he had not even made a move when Tiger and the hornet collided in midair. Tiger's jaws closed on the globular body and crushed, while the horrid spine thrust deep into his throat. Once out of the shadow of the trees, Wally halted his headlong flight, looked back and realized that he was alone. He called in a tremulous voice -- then, forcing every step, slowly made his way back. Tiger was dead. Wally looked into the nearly closed eyes and could be sure of that. He turned and ran again and did not stop until he burst, panting and sobbing and holding the stitch in his side, into his own home. F or a generation or two most newly settled planets adhere to a vigorous work ethic by virtue of necessity, if not universal inclination. But there will always be some exceptions, some individuals who remain convinced that their world owes them a living. Jacob Pryne was a supremely IF lazy man. He was also an incurable drunk who resisted all efforts to rehabilitate and clean him up. How he Had ever contrived to pass the colonization screening tests had remained a matter for discussion for two decades. He lived alone in an incredibly dirty shack on the outskirts of the farm community of Barford, where he brewed a fairly drinkable beer and made from it a distilled liquor he proudly called brandy. His food requirements were not great and were met by begging or occasionally stealing. Old Jake was not, however, a serious nuisance. He was tolerated and let alone. Even in the gentle climate of that latitude he had in recent years always felt cold and his closest approach to work was the maintaining of a constant supply of firewood -- windfalls from the forest and waste from the nearby lumber mill -- so that there was always a fire in his fireplace and a stock of fuel for his still. If he was sometimes lonely he did not notice it. There was always another drink at hand to take thejjlace of a friend. The tinkle of drops of white lightning from the end of the condenser and the crackling of the fire made a familiar background of sound and, if the loosely hinged door creaked as it swung open, he did not hear it. Only when he felt the touch of a cool breeze on his neck did he gather himself and twist around to see who might have entered. The hornet that had found his unlocked door stood quite still, its thermotropic sense confused by the sources of heat in the stuffy room. "Christ," Jake said aloud, "I got 'em. I got 'em bad." In addition to the devil or whatever it was that menaced him, he was suddenly dizzy and began to get the shakes. If the dizzies kept on he would very likely fall down and it would be bad to fall down with that thing right there ready to get him. He pushed himself erect, then had to hold to the back of the chair for a minute till he was steadier. When he let go he fell down after all and one hand went right into the fireplace. He screamed at the pain, then forgot it and threw a great, burning brand at the devil. It missed and the devil jumped and hit the still. Now there was nothing to do but get out of here. Jake began the journey on hands and knees. He didn't get far. Volunteer fire fighters did their best with the blaze, but the structure was matchwood. They were lucky to keep it from spreading. There had been no hornets in the area. Even when, late the following day, they were able to rake through the ashes and rubble and discovered old Jake's body no one recognized that he had been Barford's first victim. ing at his daughter Amanda, "Somebody's got to fetch back the goats." Amanda continued to spoon cereal determinedly and did not look up. "Your mother's housecleaning and I've got to go on plowing the fallow land. It looks as if you're elected." "I hate goats," Amanda stated. "You don't have to like them. Just bring them back," her father said. "They're up the hill beyond the waterfall. You can go over to Polly's afterward and you can stay there to lunch if your mother says so and they'll have you." Mollified to a degree, Amanda spread jam on buttered bread. Mrs. Comfort gazed consideringly at her tall young daughter and regretted the decision she and her husband had reached the night before, after the late newscast -- to keep their lives as normal as possible in spite of the rather frightening tenor of the news. The things they were calling hornets were being reported all over the southern continents, but there were only scattered reports in the north, from the great valleys for the most part. Here in the highlands, which sloped upward to the divide, there had been only a few stories and these perhaps untrue. Amanda was quite old enough to understand the risk -- if in fact there was any -- and to keep a watchful eye for anything unusual. With conscious effort she forbore to voice any additional warning as the girl took her leave. Amanda pushed out her lower lip to remind herself that she was feeling aggrieved, but the day was altogether too pleasant for her to sustainthe mood. The sun shone. She'd be spending most of the day at Polly's. In two weeks she'd be going away to school entirely on her own and with a lot of new clothes. She reached the little plateau above the falls, a spot where the goats liked to go to graze, maybe for the taste of the grass, more likely for pure contrariness. The animals were there but they were behaving very oddly, clustered around the billy in an uneasy little knot at the top of thipath leading down to the farm, seeming reluctant either to stay or go. Something had frightened them. She called them once, then a second time, and made encouraging IF anui. Latest U.S. Government tests of all cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # of all oth cigarettes sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Regular: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, Latest U.S. Gover tests of all menthol cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # all other menthols sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True?  Lorillard # Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. noises before they consented to enter the narrow pathway, then they crowded after her, mincing on their hooves as if trying to tiptoe. It was only when she saw the dead nanny that she knew there had been a casualty. It lay on its side a few meters off the path. She approached it cautiously and saw with revulsion that its belly had been torn open. Something protruded from it, something that was moving. She backed off a few steps, then turned and ran with the goats clattering after her. Halfway home she slowed to a jog. Once, looking back over her shoulder, she tripped and fell, scrambled up and trotted on. What she had to tell was important. "Mother," she shouted as she burst through the open door of her home. In that moment the sheltered, happy life that was all she had ever known came to an end. Her father's body lay in convulsed rigidity just inside the doorway -- her mother's across the table on which the last of the breakfast things were still scattered. There were two hornets. They were feeding. Amanda stood unmoving and silent and did not know that she bit one hand to draw blood. She did not approach the bodies. Instead, after a minute, she turned slowly and left the house. Left to their own resources and with the gate wide open, the goats had invaded the kitchen garden and were fast forgetting their recent fright. At the foot of the garden a narrow road, no more than a track for farm machinery, ran east and west. Either direction would have brought her to the homes of friends. She crossed it unseeing and walked through humpy meadowland, a wavering course toward na. destination. She shed no tears and made no sound and stared vacantly ahead. Ill G arth wore lieutenant's bars and other minor markings on his clothing set him apart from his civilian colleagues. He was in nominal command of the fourth team to be set down. He considered himself to be tougher, abler and much more practical than any civilian specialist and, outside of a small coterie, he was mildly disliked by most of his shipmates. The men clambered out of the hatch of the landing craft, watched it lift and disappear over the horizon and looked around at the empty landscape. The rising slope on which they stood was grass-covered, punctuated with stands of something like gorse. In the distance were several farm buildings or the like and there were a few cattle to be seen, but no human habitants. The air was good. Garth and his team were visiting a settled planet where for a good while men had coexisted peaceably with the native life forms. They could go relatively unencumbered, wearing fatigues and carrying minimal weaponry -- rifles and lasers, a half-dozen apiece of light grenades. It wasn't like an initial exploration, where you could almost bet on the unexpected. "Okay," Garth announced. "Here's what we're going to do. We're looking for bugs and they probably sting something fierce, so watch yourselves. Get your headnets on and keep them on -- and your gloves, too. If you do get stung Beale will have shots of atropine and oxime in his aid kit. Mattison will carry the collecting cages and you other two will be ready with the nets. Now we're going to spread out into a line and walk toward those low cliffs over there. Anybody sees anything like a bug lets out a yell." Mattison,. the team's zoologist, said, "Be nice if we had some idea what we were looking for. They said a plague of hornets, which suggests that they fly in swarms. If we see any at all we may see a lot of them." Armed thus with misconceptions, they formed a ragged line and started toward the cliffs. Rossberg was a botanist by training and by enthusiasm for any and all extraterrestrial plants. Even so, the gorselike growths seemed not very exciting close examination of them. When, however, he glimpsed what was surely a bloom of fruiting body, spectacularly red against the dark green foliage, he yielded to temptation and made off on a diagonal to investigate. Up close, it seemed not to be a part of the gorse after all, but to be standing alone on the top of a thick stem. He was actually bending over it when it struck. The fabric of his fatigues was designed to resist rain, wind, mildew, snags and other natural phenomena, but it was far from being body armor and it offered no resistance to the thrust of the chitinous stiletto. The sting penetrated deep into his side. Rossberg shrieked once as he fell, before the toxin reached and sealed his throat. He was dead when the others reached him. At least he did not breathe and Beale, the paramedic, found no pulse in his neck. He was lying on his side in such a fashion as to hide the hornet. They had to IF roll him over before they saw it. Garth felt disgust but for the moment no fear as he tore the thing violently and quite uselessly from Rossberg's body. The proboscis pulled out easily. The hooks at the ends of the arms or legs or whatever you called them clung tenaciously and, when they tore free, waved frantically in the air. Garth stared for a second at the pulsating body, then threw it from him awkwardly. It landed not faraway, scrambled like a headless chicken, got up onto its sinewy, jointed legs, then toppled and lay still. Its body was leaking fluid, ruptured where Garth had clutched it. Corley made a sound that was something like a laugh, then hurriedly snatched away his headnet and vomited on the ground. "Jesus," said Beale. "Do you suppose that's one of the things they sent us to look for?" Garth was sweating and he stared down at his gloved hands as if they bore some contamination, but he gathered himself. "Come on, Mattison, this is your business. Let's take a look at it." Except for Corley, who sat huddled and miserable, they followed Garth reluctantly and looked down at the hornet. Garth and Beale had drawn their lasers, but the creature had stopped moving. its body collapsing slowly and wrinkling like a leaking balloon. They stood in numbed silence for a minute before Garth, his mouth twisted in a grimace, began to cut the body into smoking fragments. "That was a damn fool thing to do," said Mattison. "We ought to have taken it back to the ship for dissection. It may be hard to get another one." "Screw your diss'fection," Garth told him. "It killed Rossberg. And if these are the bugs there'll be others." Mattison was still angered at the destruction of a specimen. "You've probably used up better than a quarter of your charge. Lasers are meant for defense in an emergency." "Shove it," said the lieutenant, who knew he was in the wrong and didn't propose to hear any more about it from Mattison. "Now here's what we're going to do. I'm going to leave the radio on beep, here beside Rossberg, but we're not going to get far away and we're going to stay close together." "There's another of them," Beale said, pointing. "Two more. Hey, Corley, better get up on your feet. My God, look how those things jump. How do you go about shooting something like that?"  shot one. He was a first-class marksman and instinctively preferred to use the longer range rifle. "Got the bastard." "But there are four of them now, not five, all downhill from us. Coming this way." There were more shots, some successful. The hornets made fair targets in the brief intervals between leaps. By squeezing off bursts of several shots the men could compensate for lack of accuracy. But hornets continued to appear, coming out from beyond a low hillock and progressing upgrade in a series of irregular jumps that seemed clumsy and uncertain -- as if the jumpers were totally mindless -- but closed the distance to their prey with terrifying rapidity. With no intent to give ground, each man stepped back a pace or two after every shot. Corley first, then the others, began a sort of organized retreat -- fire, turn, run and scramble a few meters, turn and fire again. There were now twenty or thirty hornets in sight. Presently there was no more pretense of organization. They simply ran, while the hornets inexorably closed the gap. The flight came to an end at the face of the cliffs, which might have been scalable if the men had been sufficiently expert olimbers and had had the right equipment and time to explore. Without these advantages they could only stand and kill or be killed. Corley and Beale died quickly because they mistakenly tried to use their rifles even after they were partly surrounded. Garth and Mattison fell back on laser pistols with which they could slash across the huddle of attackers -- and after a time there could be no doubt that they had won the skirmish. The last few hornets in sight were far down the hill and seemed not to detect the humans' presence. At least they were not approaching. Mattison stumbled the few steps toward the spot where the bodies lay nearly side by side and automatically exterminated a still moving hornet. "Three of us," he said. "Three of us gone. My God." Tears were running down his face. Garth stared at him angrily. "We'll take the guns and lasers. Come on.' "Where to?" "Maybe we can find a way up the cliff. It ought to be safer up there." They found no route to the top of the cliffs. They did, after some fifteen minutes of walking, come upon a shelter of sorts, a three-sided structure of planks and logs. IF evidently designed to shelter cattle in bad weather. It offered shielding and would allow them to concentrate on defending the one open side that faced downhill and toward the distant farm. There were no hornets to be seen. They laid down their burden of weapons... Garth squatted and arranged them in a row. There was plenty of ammunition for the rifles, but one of the lasers was completely discharged and the best of the others showed no more than half a charge. He grunted. 'Know how long we've been down here? Close to two hours. Three to go before we get picked up. Maybe more. I don't know how long the day is here, but looking at the sun I'd say it'd be dark long before then. The LC will come down by the beeper -- then we'll have to use flares to show them where we are." Mattison sat down on the packed dirt floor. "Let me see the binoculars a minute." He swept them back and forth across the valley. "We must have been put down close to a colony of the things. There aren't as many as we might have thought, but I can see a few. I suspect they're thermotropic." "Thermotropic?" "That means they detect and are attracted by our body heat. I didn't get a good look, but my impression is that they have nothing like eyes. That doesn't mean they couldn't perceive light. They may act differently at night. If it's cooler after dark we may stand out more from the general thermal background and they'll detect us from a greater distance." "You're a big help. Take a look over there. I think somebody is coming. He's just coming out from behind that little hill." Mattison used the glasses. "It's not a he -- it's a she. Looks from here like a young girl." They watched in silence for a time as she approached. Her path was erratic, sometimes nearly doubling back, but she was making slow progress up the hill. "Look," Mattison said. "She's going to come pretty close to where those two hornets are." "Yeah. What's the matter with the girl? Is she blind?" "Don't know. Listen, I'm going down to get her. Keep me covered." He rose to his feet, seized a laser and set off at as rapid a pace as, possible. Garth dropped to prone position, shouldered a rifle and fixed the sights on the nearer hornet. It was standing motionless. The second made a leap that brought it closer to Mattison's path. He saw and circled away from it, but kept going. Mattison was showing more stuff than Garth had credited him with. A manda looked vacantly at the man who had grasped her arm. She tried to pull away, but the grip tightened. He was speaking to her, trying to tell her something. She made another halfhearted attempt to go away from him, but he wouldn't let her go. Finally she went in the direction he was taking her. He was making her hurry. Amanda was not aware of fatigue or pain. She had fallen often. Her hands and knees were bruised and cut, her face was streaked with dirt. One shoe was gone. She did not know the disaster that had fallen upon her -- that she was fleeing from an intolerable horror. She did not even know that she was Amanda Comfort. Her state of shock was still merciful to her. There was a sudden sharp noise. On that nearly weaponless world she did not recognize it as a rifle shot. But off to one side something was bouncing and flopping around, something red. She looked at it and screamed, the first sound she had made since leaving her own front door. The mart held her hard and made her run. "Nice shooting," Mattison said. "Thanks. They don't seem to have any sense of sight or hearing. The one never moved when you got the other." "You're welcome," Garth answered inanely. "One more hop and he'd have reached you. What's the matter with her?" "Nothing obvious, physically that is. I think she's in a state of shock and one foot is gashed. She's been leaving bloody footprints. Sit down, baby, and let me look at that foot. Yes, we'd better get some antiseptic and a bandage on it." "We haven't got the aid kit. We left it with Beale. With Beale's body, I mean." "I'll get it," Mattison said. "No, I'll go. Maybe I can make it a little faster. You'd better stay with the girl." They turned and looked at Amanda, who was sitting with one leg still extended -- as she had been left. "Poor kid," said Garth. "Yeah, you stay. I'm going to take this laser -- it has the most charge. You didn't know it, but the one you grabbed up was empty." Mattison looked faintly sick. "My God -- I thought I had a weapon in my hand. I'm glad I didn't know." The fact that Mattison had gone the aid kit made it quite essential IF for Garth to go to sustain his belief that as a military man he was automatically the better qualified. He felt like a military man until he was within sight of the bodies. There were no living hornets, but the site had clearly been visited in the interval. Beale and Corley were not as they had been. Their clothing now lay flat to the ground, looking quite empty. Garth could see the aid kit flung a little distance from Beale's body and he wanted very much not to approach those empty garments. He stood for a minute or two leaning against an outcrop of rock while sweat trickled down his forehead and stung one eye, before he could takd the remaining steps. He tried not to look down at the tattered clothing and the taut mummy skull that still remained of Beale, but he could not avoid seeing. He went most of the way back to the cattle shelter at a jog and only stopped and rested because he must not arrive out of breath. Mattison shook his head in answer to Garth's look of inquiry. "Nothing. There are a few hornets out there beyond where we picked her up, but they're not coming this way. Just moving around aimlessly." "How's the youngster doing?" "Some better, I think. Her eyes have followed me whenever I moved around. Let's take care of the foot." A manda winced at the probing of the cut and the bite of the antiseptic and seemed to look on with a beginning of understanding as they applied bandages and sprayed on a layer of plastic heavy enough to be walked on. When they had finished Garth turned away and stared across the valley. The sun was just touching the horizon in the direction the settled planets call the west. "Going to be dark soon." "How many flares have we?" Mattison asked. Garth patted his hip. "Four. About twenty minutes' worth." Mattison said, "I suggest we throw the first one as far as we can and see what happens. If those devils are thermotropic they may be phototropic as well, with or without eyes." "Attracted by light?" "Yes. We don't want dozens of them descending on us." "I'll say we don't. We'll do better than throw it. I'll go off a hundred meters or so, light it and run back. That sun's going down awful fast. Well, hello." Amanda had risen and was standing between the two men. Tears coursed down her face, but she made no sound. Mattison put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. "Let it out, baby. Let it out." She turned, buried her face on his shoulder and blubbered, clutching his shirt with desperate fingers. When at length her sobs subsided, Mattison said, "You'd better tell us about it. What happened, baby?" After a couple of tries she found her voice. "They killed my father and mother." "The hornets?" "Those things. They killed father and mother. Oh, God. What will I do? What will I ever do? The things killed them and they were -- " She broke into renewed sobbing. "What's your name?" "What?" "Tell us what your name is." "Oh. Amanda." "Do you have any friends nearby?" "Any friends? Yes, Polly. She's my best friend. Can you take me there?" "Sure we can," Garth said gruffly. "We'll take you there in a ship, but we've got to wait for the ship to come. A ship like a big flier. Can you understand?" "Of course." The farm buildings were still visible in the gathering twilight. Amanda pointed. "That's where I live, over there -- and Polly lives on up that way. It isn't very far. That's where I used to live," she amended, loaking at her home once more. She began to cry again. Garth stared at her helplessly. "Sit down here beside us, kid, and help watch for the ship." He found her a handkerchief. Hesitantly, as if the action were somehow a denial of her grief, she hunkered down. "They'll have lights," said Mattison. "Red, white and green lights." Amanda was silent then, lost in her own unhappy thoughts. When, after not too long a time, the LC did show its lights in the distance, the men by unspoken consent let her be first to make the discovery. Garth rose. "They're way ahead of schedule. That's good. It's not yet pitch dark." He pulled a flare out of his pack. "Do you see that big rock down there? That's where I'll drop this." He strode off with the flare and a laser. "What's he doing?" Amanda asked. "Where's he going?" "Don't worry. He's going to make a bright light so the ship can come for us. They don't know just where we are." IF G arth stood for a minute by the rock and watched the slowly descending LC. They saw him toss the candle and start back toward the shelter. Mattison turned his head to watch for any activity around the ship. When he looked back he could no longer see Garth in the growing dark. Then the flare erupted into dazzling blue brilliance and Garth was silhouetted halfway back to the shelter. He was crawling in an awkward, spidery fashion. When Mattison reached him he was unable to stand and had to be dragged to his feet and half carried. He was trying to talk but his speech was so thick and slurred as to be nearly ununderstandable. He clutched one wrist. "One 'em got me. Ri' through han'. Tourni -- tourniquet." He made incoherent sounds as Mattison lowered him to the ground, but nothing with any meaning. The light from the flare cast black shadows but Mattison could see the puncture on the back of Garth's hand. He clamped a grip on the already swollen wrist. "You. Amanda," he commanded. "Bring me the aid kit. That thing there. Open it." He dumped the contents on the ground, located a tourniquet and without relaxing his hold was able to wrap it firmly about the wrist. Then for good measure he rolled up Garth's sleeve and applied another above the elbow. From the container of syrettes he selected one marked atropine: neurotoxins, and pressed it against the exposed forearm. There was nothing more he could do. Garth was silent now and his eyes were closed, but he shivered violently at intervals and was apparently conscious. Without being asked, Amanda cradled his head in her lap and held to his shoulders to restrain more violent movements. Mattison turned to look out. The flare was blazing silently, but ringed around it now were scores of hornets. They stood motionless, crowded against one another at a distance of only four or five meters from the source of light. So they were phototropic but with a limit. They could not or would not approach too closely. A flare was good for five minutes -- this one had to be at least half spent. Within seconds of its going out, he thought, he. Garth and the girl would be overwhelmed by a wave of hornets. He bent, rolled Garth as gently as he could to one side and retrieved the other flares. Then he waited. When the first flare flickered out his, light-struck eyes were for a moment unable to see anything at all, but he lit the fuse of the second one by feel and threw it. The device was nicely weighted and carried for nearly thirty meters. That was perilously close, but it was the best he could do. The new burst of light was dazzling. He kept his eyes on the ground for as long as he dared, then picked up the nearest rifle. The new ring of hornets was already forming. "Don't be scared, Amanda," he told the girl. "You're a brave young lady." The hornets, slaves to their tropisms, paid no attenti)n to the nearby humans and simply crowded into a densely packed circle. He had waited long enough and, with the rifle set on automatic, he swept the swarm with devastating fire. When the gun was empty there were still a few standing hornets, a few more approaching from the outer darkness. He changed guns and picked them off in short bursts. He didn't see the LC until it was hovering squarely in front of them, actually between him and the recent targets. Then there were people to boost Amanda aboard, to carry and lift Garth, to give him a hand up.tison was told that he might visit Lieutenant Garth in sick bay. Garth was propped up in bed, looking pale but tolerably well otherwise. "Hello, Mattie, you old son of a bitch," was Garth's greeting. It was clearly an accolade, a welcome to the elite. "Hi," said Mattison. "How you feeling?" "Still shaggy." Garth waved a lightly bandaged hand. "I must have gotten a pretty small dose or I'd have been dead quick -- but it wasn't good when you were lugging me up that hill, I tell you. You know what those bastardly hornets do? After they've tied up your nerves into red-hot knots they dissolve your blood cells. First day I haven't gotten a transfusion. How are things on Valora? You did real good down there, by the way." "How much do you know?" "Not much. The damn doc thinks you should never tell a patient anything. I know we've been in and out of warp because it always makes me dizzy. That's all." "We've been in and out four times. We made a round trip to Glenmaurie and they're sending all sorts of supplies -- small arms and high intensity lights mostly. The lights do a job. You can attract and paralyze all the hornets in a neighborhood as fast as they can get there. We've given Valora IF practically all our own flares for the present and their broadcast centers are all putting out instructions. Things will be under control soon in all the populated parts of the planet." "Good," Garth said, "good." He ruminated. "Were there other losses besides ours?" "One. Lin Chang. We got the worst of it. The other teams all had some warning of what to expect." "Tough on Chang. He was a good man. So were our guys, of course. I didn't know them so well. How's the girl? Amanda." "She's here on thfe ship. She'd like to see you." "Would she, now. Well I'd like to see her. She's a damn good kid. How come she's on the ship? It's against rules." "Captain waived the rule until she could be delivered somewhere safe. That'll happen tomorrow. She has a courtesy aunt and uncle. Polly's parents, the Brennans. I've talked to them. It's a nice family and they'll take good care of her. This week has helped her. New environment and all. The captain has posted our next assignment. Carson II." "Never heard of it. Hope it's not civilized like Valora." "No people, no hornets. Anything else, maybe, but no hornets. That's guaranteed."  At Sheraton Boston Hotel, Boston, Mass. For information write Bouchercon. Box #, Melrose, Mass. #.  Marriott Lodge, Philadelphia, Penna. 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AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides alt of man's earthly needs. AX# # Farmingdale, N.Y. # (Please add #(# for shipping) The ultimate IQ test for an alien may be this: by what method does he destroy you? might as well have saved time by immolating himself prior to the hearing. The six pairs of eyes around the table were regarding him with all the critical deliberation of pathologists debating where to begin a dissection. He sat down in a vacant chair at the narrow foot of the long table, trying to stifle the uneasiness that bushed out his silvery pelt, and stared back with violet eyes he hoped appeared calm. It was vital he seem objective and unemotional. The lives of the shree depended on it. A Brisian at the apex of the table shifted position, his carapace grating loudly against his chair. "The charter board has been called to review the sentient-species claim filed by Dr. Buurn Cian. We have one auxiliary member, attorney Saud bin Saal, who is here representing the Megeyn Corporation." He nodded at a swarthy Catheze sitting to his left. Bin Saal inclined his head toward the board chairman. "I wish to thank you for asking me to sit with you, sar. The mining operations on Nira represent a considerable investment by my company. Naturally any action threatening our charter is of great concern to us." His gaze switched abruptly to Cian, a scalpel gaze as keen as the edge to his voice. "We've not met before but I know you by reputation, doctor. You're advancing. A sentience petition is a step up from your previous efforts." Cian stiffened. "I beg your pardon?" the chairman said. The attorney's eyes never left Cian. 'The doctor is becoming a veteran of these hearings. His first petition was on Naan-taen -- on behalf of a species called quaere. After transfer to Jornava he became embroiled in an effort to preserve the jebbijy bird. In the first case he was successful. As a result the predator slaughtered some twenty percent of the colonists before a permissible form of defense was devised. Fortunately he was overruled in the second case and the colonists on Jornava were spared decimation." "Instead, a unique species is virtuaUy extinct," Cian said bitterly. He bit his tongue in self-reproach as the attorney smiled thinly. Bin Saal wanted to goad him into expressing his feelings in just such emotional statements. "Not that I blame you for your Preservationist leanings, doctor. After all you are a physician, dedicated by profession to saving life. Even more pertinently, you are a R'raethan. Your people's obsession for conserving life -- all forms -- is well known throughout the Federation. As hostile as your planet's environment is, you could hardly have evolved any other way. But I wonder, if such a viewpoint might prevent you from considering such matters as sentience and non-sentience with proper objectivity." Now Bin Saal addressed the chairman. "Here's what I find interesting. When the operations administrator on Nira decides to declare the shree a dangerous predator, the doctor suddenly discovers they are intelligent and rushes to file his claim first." "Nothing sudden about it," Cian retorted. "I've been convinced of their intelligence since running into them on Nira fourteen standard months ago." "But you said nothing until now." The chairman frowaed. Cian nodded. "Conviction isn't proof. Although I've studied sentience extensively during the past year, it isn't my field of expertise. I couldn't come to you with only an amateur's personal opinion." "How fortunate you found your proof ust in time to supercede Rom Lekir's petition," the attorney remarked. For an instant Cian wished he were back among the wildernesses of Naar. But most likely the Federation would order him assigned elsewhere, now that he had crossed the light-years to Planet Base. Determination filled him anew. Federation law held that all sentient beings -- whether mammalian, reptilian or anything else -- were people, and therefore not to be warred upon. Cian meant to uphold that law. "I have documented evidence -- " he began, then broke off. His voice was much louder and sharper than he had intended. The chairman interceded firmly. "Gentlemen, let's proceed in more orderly fashion. Certainly the doctor is well acquainted with the species in question. And no doubt sar Bin Saal knows something of them, too. But this board does not. If we're to judge the matter intelligently we will need more background and fewer accusations. After all, the doctor is not on trial here -- only his petition." The chairman pressed a button set into the edge of the table. "I have invited the survey agent who classified these life forms during the charter inspection twelve years ago. We will begin with him." IF T he being who entered was a Geolon -- a thin, hairless and yellow-skinned man still resembling his primeval lizard ancestors. He folded into an empty chair, laying a few cinecorder cassettes on the table, and turned his yellow eyes on the chairman. Cian shifted uneasily. The Geolon exuded scrupulous efficiency. "You are Inspector Zarith Than?" the chairman asked. The survey agent nodded. "Would you briefly explain the duties of a charter inspection team?" "Certainly. We remain on the planet under observation for four years to study it in all seasons. We test exhaustively to be certain nothing the proposed colony will use, either mechanical or chemical, is harmful to local life. We recommend charter restrictions to prevent pollution of the planet. We also attemipt to identify which plants and animals are most likely to present a danger to the colonists." "Do you determine if the planet has an intelligent species?" an arthropodal board member asked. "Our first and foremost task." The arthropod's eyestalks waved slowly between Cian and the survey agent. "Whose particular responsibility was that on Nira?" "Mine." "You are acquainted, then, with the shree named in the petition?" the chairman queried. "Indeed. I found them fascinating creatures." "Creatures, not people?" the attorney exclaimed. "Dr. Cian claims to have proof they're intelligent." "Not having seen his evidence, I can hardly pass judgment on it. But I examined the shree to the best of my ability and found no intelligence," the survey agent stated. "On what do you base your professional competence?" a felinelooking board member asked. "I hold degrees in biology, pananthropology and psychology. I also have specialized training in sentience evolution." "Tell us something about these shree," the chairman suggested. "Certainly. I've brought with me the tapes made at the time of the inspection. Watch the screen, please." He picked out a cassette from the stack, pushed it into a slot at the base of the large translucent cube in the middle of the table. Something hummed, and a moment later a picture appeared on each side of the cube. At first there was only blue sky with a small, dark form flying high in it, too far away to distinguish color or shape. Then magnification was stepped up and the creature filled the screen. Cian studied the familiar form, trying to see it as the board members would. It was finely boned ju#ging by its long thin limbs, but thickly corded muscles bulged across Jts shoulders and back. Fur, short and velvety as Cian's but brown in color, covered the entire body except thewide membranous wings. Those spread up and out from the shoulders and down to the feet. As the creature glided it turned and the cinecorder recorded a good view of a flatmuzzled face. The ears were small, high-set and round, the eyes wide and dark. It carried its forelegs folded comfortably across its chest, the three toes and opposable thumb on each paw loosely interlaced. Cian frowned. The eyes were wrong. They were bright and alert but somehow lacking. He had known instantly, looking into the eyes of his first shree, that there was a mind behind it; he had felt it with a still-remembered shock of recognition... "There's your shree," the survey agent said, "We named it that after their distinctive call. This one is a mature male of average size, between # and # centimeters long." "How can you tell it's male?" a blue-skinned Minoran asked. "It isn't easy to determine except by color. Males are shaded from brown to black; females, bronze to near gold. The cubs are dappled until they reach maturity at about five years." The picture changed to a rough cliff face pocked by slits and holes and terraced with ledges. On several of the ledges shree of various sizes and colors lay sunning themselves, wings folded across their backs like capes. Their feet were no longer connected to their wings. A hooklike spur on each heel provided for in-flight attachment. "I apologize for the poor detail of the shot," the survey agent said. "It had to be taken at long range." "They were vicious?" the arthropod asked. 'Only if their dens or hunting kill were approached. Otherwise they were cautiously friendly. We seemed to fascinate them. The male you saw a moment ago spent almost an hour circling above me. Once he flew to within a few meters. Doctor?" he asked as Cian moved sharply Cian shook his head. "Never mind." With keen regret he reflected on how drastically the shree had changed. T he survey agent returned to his tape. "These you see now are part of a single band.' the two males on the ledge at the far left are young bachelors. Having reached maturity they have been forced to IF leave the home den. But the older tolerate bachelors living nearby, even let them join in the hunting so long as the bachelors ignore the females. Otherwise they are either driven out of the band's territory or must fight to replace one of the established males. Shree are strongly territorial, though their grounds are so huge that they frequently ignore nomads living solitary lives near the borders." "Interesting," murmured the chairman. "Are the bands large?" "Shree bands are made up of several patriarch males who share some eight to twelve females. I saw small bands with two males and one large band with five, but most have three patriarchs. Every day two of the males hunt for food, taking along older cubs, neighbor bachelors, and the younger, stronger females. One male always remains at the den with the females who are looking after the cubs. The young are born in the spring in single and twin births, usually twin, and nursed until the next cubs are bom. A female who happens to be barren one year -- and females . are unaccountably out of heat for as long as four consecutive years -- will suckle her own cubs and others' for a second year. They appear to be fond parents. Even the males play with the cubs and let them take what seemed to me to be extreme liberties." "A rather advanced social structure," the feline board member commented. "Sophisticated, in fact. Do you consider that suggestive, inspector?" Cian asked. The survey agent's bare scalp wrinkled. "Not really. Many animals, even those of low-order intelligence, have complex societies." "How, exactly, do you determine if a planet has sentient life?" This from the Minoran. Sitting back in his chair, the survey agent tented his fingers. "Assuming intelligence is too primitive for any life form to be constructing villages yet,' sentience determination is a matter of watching game trails and observing the life forms that pass. Sentience may be defined as conscious perception, integral to intelligence. And intelligence follows a predictable pattern. For the most part, it appears only in predators, and not the biggest or most formidably equipped ones." His eyes shifted, as if in illustration, to a board member whose pale slenderness reminded Cian of an old poetic line Concerning star-winds and moon-songs. "A large powerful animal doesn't need brains; it can exist as it is. The predator that develops rationality is one with a need for something more than teeth and claws in order to survive. So I look for a creature that dominates its territory despite larger killer species competing with it." "May I interrupt a moment, inspector?" the lawyer asked. "What about very small life forms? Not that it's the case here, but how can you be certain you aren't overlooking a species that would not use the game trail-a species perhaps microscopic in size?" The survey agent smiled. "Without a brain of certain minimum size there is no intelligence. Something we cannot see readily is toofar below the critical minimum to be concerned with." He glanced around the table but there were no more questions. He went on: "I look for a species with grasping limbs of some type -- hands, tentacles or claws." He nodded at the arthropod. "A race must be able to use tools if it is to evolve." "The shree use tools," Cian put in. "To be precise, a tool." The survey agent leaned forward and removed the cassette from the viewer. After a minute of sorting through the other cassettes he found the one he wanted, slipped it into the slot. As the picture came on, a humanoid hand placed something on a blue cloth background. The cinecorder moved in almost on top of the object. It was a short section of woody stalk with five long thorns set at regular intervals along one side. The thorns were triangular -- a point and three sharp edges. "Daggerthorns," Cian said. HE survey agent nodded. "Each thorn is nearly eight centimeters long. They grow on one side of the stalk. A ring of the stalks surrounds the large central stem that supports the seed pod. The pod is edible and nutritious, but few species except birds and shree try to get at it because of the protective thorns. The shree break the stalks into sections and hold them so the thorns project between and on either side of the shree's closed fingers. Thus they get at the pods, and at the same time provide themselves with weapons. Their own claws are sharp but short -- not nearly as efficient as the thorns for bringing down bolkis, their chief source of meat." He tapped a switch beneath the cassette slot on the viewer. The picture blurred as the tape speeded up. When it slowed to normal viewing rate the scene had changed and was obviously being recorded at long range from a hopper. Ill the canyon below, a herd of tawny ungulates was stampeding wildly. The dust stirred up by their hoofs obscured details but Cian IF picked out the blocky winged forms of shree flying above the ungulates. 'This is a typical hunting party," the survey agent said. "I counted twelve members. They work in teams of three, diving at the bolki and slashing the animal's hide on each pass. The daggerthorns serve this purpose well. Eventually the animal is exhausted by running and weak from loss of blood. When it falls, one of the team will cut its throat. Shree are strong for their size. Three can pick up one of those browsers and fly it back o their den with little effort." A bolki stumbled and a black form dropped on it. The beast struggled briefly, its four supporting limbs and the small grasping limb on each side of its neck flailing in final desperation. Then the bolki went limp. Two gold shree landed beside it. They took the bolki's legs while the black shree lifted the bloodied head. Wings beating in unison, the three rose into the air with their kill and carried it away. "I debated categorizing them as 'questionable' because of their daggerthorn tool. But I had to decide against them." "Why?" Cian protested. "What else but intelligence explains their use of the daggerthorn?" The survey agent regarded him patiently. "Accident. They got on to the technique fortuitously. Maybe one was after a daggerthorn pod and happened to be holding a stalk when a bolki charged. The shree started to claw in defense, forgetting the stalk in its paw. The bolki was blinded or driven off. Whatever, the shree found that daggerthorns are better than claws and used a piece of stalk when he hunted after that. Others in his band copied. Bachelors moving into other bands from the first one spread the idea." The feline board member said, "On my world, the plaa dangle a leafy stick above the water. That lures fish into the shallows for easier catching." "So many animals use crude types of tools! We can consider such use only a possible indication of intelligence, not proof." Cian swallowed a bark of exasperation. "What does constitute proof?" The survey officer's scalp furrowed. "Language, certainly, and construction. Unfortunately we know that primitive species exist which are not yet capable of the latter and in which the former is still so rudimentary as to be hardy recognizable. In such cases we have to depend on behavior to make our differentiation. The difficulty is in termining what is a result of the thinking process and what is merely conditioned response. Surprisingly, much behavior is merely the result of conditioning, in men as well as in animals." The furrows in his bare pate deepened. "The only behavior we have been able to safely consider unique to rational beings is what has been variously termed creativity or synthesis. It is the ability to take two or more unrelated items and combine them to produce a useful or esthetic result. An animal that discovers a useful object or a beneficial method of performing a task will continue to apply that discovery the same way and no other time after time. The shree limit their use of the daggerthorn to hunting. They don't appear to recognize its other possibilities as a weapon." Cian leaned forward. "But -- " The survey agent ignored him. "In all the skirmishes I observed between patriarchs and invading bachelors, fighting was confined to teeth and claws. The daggerthorn never appeared. An intelligent creature will experiment to see what else can be done with a method or object. Because of their failure to do this, I classified the shree as animals." "But they do use the daggerthorns as weapons," Cian said. The survey agent snapped around to face the doctor. "What?" "They drop out of the sky on us with daggerthorns in both hands. I've treated hundreds of lacerations in the months I've been on Nira. Several men have even died as a result of their injuries. That's why our operations administrator, Lekir, wants them declared a dangerous predator." "But you are sure, positively, that the shree are not," the attorney said. "Predators, yes, of course they are -- but intelligent ones," Cian shot back. "I was caught in an attack not long after I first arrived. One shree came within arm's reach of me." For a moment the hearing room disappeared and Cian was in the hot, dusty canyon again, staring into two livid eyes. "It wasn't fear or mere anger I read in him, sar Bin Saal. It was hate -- real, passionate, personal-directed at me and my kind." The moment of communion had ended abruptly as the shree slashed down at him. Just before the thorns in the creature's hand reached the doctor's face, someone knocked Cian flat. He had felt air ripple the fur on his back as the shree's wings beat the space where he had been. hearing room, facing Megeyn's attorney again. "There has to be intelligence behind that kind of hate. Afterward I realized the shree were behaving not like mere vicious animals but as any beings would who were defending their land from invaders." IF "Doctor," the blue-skinned board member said, pursing his lips, "we would like to see your evidence of the shree's intelligence." "Of course." Cian was pleased to note his voice sounded matter-offact, though what, he actually felt was profound relief. A short while ago he had not been sure they would even agree to look at his evidence. He reached for the hand file on the floor beside his chair and took out a stack of papers. "I found proof just before I filed my claim. It came out of the same incident, in fact, that precipitated Lekir's decision. My only regret is that two men had to die first." "What men, doctor?" the chairman asked. "Two of the miners. Some of us were playing scramble ball on the plateau outside the camp one freeday when a group of shree dived out of the clouds at us. We threw ourselves on the ground. It's about the only possible defense. Even lasers wouldn't have done much good. Shree dive sftly and zoom off before anyone can take aim. We stayed flat until we were sure they were gone, then started counting injuries. Only Morka and Chaasse were hurt, and not severely -- a few superficial scratches on their arms." The chairman nodded. "We went on with the game. But after a few minutes Morka and Chaasse had to quit, complaining they couldn't breathe. I saw they were gasping much harder than the activity of the game would warrant so I took them over to the infirmary. Rest didn't relieve their distress. I was puzzled and frightened. In fact, I-" "Never mind your feelings, doctor," the chairman said. "Just tell us briefly what happened." "They died. I worked over them an hour and a half. I used hyperoxides, I.V., cholenine, the respirator, the cardiostimulator -- but they still died." He felt again the bitter anger at his helplessness. "Did you perform autopsies?" "Promptly. I don't like losing patients and I wanted to know why it had happened. Examination turned up no pathology in either man, as I expected. I took blood samples and dissected out tissue from the spinal cords and around the wounds of both men. Testing them took three days but I found my answer. Here are my results." Cian pushed the papers into the middle of the table where each board member could reach them. "Both miners were poisoned." The survey agent hissed through his Teeth. The attorney snatched a paper and read it with narrowed eyes. "Did you identify the poison?" the feline asked. "I did. The signs the two men exhibited are listed in the colony's medical records. There is a plant we call the sweetvine. Crushed, it produces a thick symp that can be fermented into a potent liquor. The crews brewed it by the kiloliter the first year, I've been told. Then a miner happened to spill raw syrup into a cut on his hand. The physician at the colony recorded that the poor fellow died of cardiac and respiratory failure within two hours. The miners avoid the vines now. Only the shree could have introduced the poison into the bodies of these two men." The papers were being studied carefully. Cian waited a few moments before going on. "Note the first three columns. They are the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the miners' cord tissue, epidermis and blood. Clearly the concentration of poison is greatest in the dermal tissue. The fourth column is an analysis of raw sweetvine juice. It matches exactly the substance found in the dead miners. And since the concentration was greatest around the wounds, I concluded that daggerthorns carried by the shree must have been the poisoning agent." He paused to let the others read, then turned toward the survey officer. "I believe," Cian said, "that constitutes an example of creativity." "Now, doctor," the attorney remonstrated in a smooth, friendly voice. "Is it so inconceivable that, as in the case of the daggerthorns, the shree might have accidentally learned-" "Hardly," the survey agent interrupted. "I can think of no accident, no possible quirk of conditioning that could account for learning to use poison. The shree, whose diet includes sweetvine berries, would' have had to observe that one constituent of the plant could be lethal to themselves. Then they would have had to determine not only that the juice was this lethal constituent but that other species could die from it, too. Finally, they would have had to devise a method of transferring the juice to that other species. You're quite right, doctor -- it is creativity." The chairman scratched the breastplate of his carapace. "I'm puzzled, inspector. How is it possible? Twelve years ago you judged them to be incapable of any such kind of thinking." "I know. I've been sitting here reviewing the investigation in my mind. But I find nothing, even in retrospect, that suggests how I could have erred." Cian remembered the close-up tape of the single shree and compared it mentally with his memory of the shree that had attacked him. "Do you suppose -- " he began, stopping as all eyes turned inquiringly on him. "Has the operations adminisIF trator been brought here too? To be a witness, I mean?" The chairman said, "Of course, doctor." "May I ask him some questions?" "By all means." The chairman pressed the button in front of him. HE hawkish witness seated him self stiffly beside Cian. his pale eyes flicking toward the doctor and away again as though avoiding something repulsive. The chairman spoke. "You are Rom Lekir, operations administrator of the Niraan mining colony for the Megeyn Corporation?" "T " I am. "How long have you held that position?" Cian asked. Lekir 's nostrils flared. "Chairman," he demanded, "what is the meaning of allowing this Preservationist zealot to -- " "Sar Lekir," the attorney interrupted smoothly, "the Megeyn Corporation is anxious to cooperate with the board in every way possible." Without looking at Cian, Lekir replied woodenly, "I've been on Nira nearly seventeen Standard years." "Then you 'were there even before the charter inspection?" "I was one of the original corporation survey crew." "You have been able to observe the shree longer than any other man. Think carefully. Have you noticed any major changes in their behavior?" He snorted. "Rather! In the beginning they were somewhat friendly. In fact, one bachelor was camp mascot for a long time. But now -- well, you can't find a more vicious species on the planet." "Really?" responded the chairman. "What do you think changed them?" Lekir shook his head. "Who knows? We had a rough winter one year and a lot of them starved to death. Animals are always meaner when they're hungry. And that was a bad time, believe me. We had supplemental packaged rations or we'd have been starving, too." "You ate native game?" "Of course. We always do when the local proteins are compatible." The survey agent toyed thoughtfully with a cassette. "And the shree have been attacking you ever since?" "No. They stopped when spring came. They didn't attack any more until the next winter, and then only if they didn't see us carrying lasers. We'd killed enough of them with lasers the winter before. They had learned to be wary." "Did the attacks stop in the spring again?" the arthropod asked. "Oh, yes." "Vicious in winter, wary the rest of the year," the blue-skinned board member murmured. "How long did the pattern persist, would you say?" "About five years. After that they didn't seem to care what season it was or whether or not we were carrying weapons. They're quick enough to be on you almost before you see them, then away before you can take good aim." Cian regarded the fur on the backs of his hands with great concentration. "By any chance, did these new tactics start the same year full-scale operations did?" Lekir nodded. 'The crews doubled. It was a headache. There were so many new men I couldn't watch all of them to make sure they were armed when they left camp. Half the injuries in the infirmary were caused by the shree." "When did they start carrying daggerthorns?" "Two years later." Lekir snorted. "As though they weren't deadly enough already. They can hit a man hard enough to break his back -- not to mention what their claws can do to his face and eyes. When they started with those thorns, only the charter restrictions against tampering with the local ecology kept me from wiping out the beasts. I respect the Bureau of Surveys' purpose, but after Morka and Chaasse I have to te steps to protect the crews. They can't be expected to continue risking their lives working under the present conditions." "Ah," the attorney said. "How many men have been killed by shree?" "Fifty over a period of nine years. Fourteen this year. But this year alone injury cases amount to over a hundred." "I've heard all I need to," Cian said. "You've been very helpful, sar Lekir." "I really cannot see how, doctor," the chairman said. His carapace groaned as he shifted in his chair. "Would you please explain?" "Certainly, unless someone else wants to ask sar Lekir a question." "I have some questions." It was the first time the ethereal-looking female board member had spoken. There was nothing ethereal about the crisp, clipped tones of her voice, however. "Administrator, has it ever occurred to you since the charter inspection that the shree might be intelligent?" "Of course not. The inspector called them animals."  "The doctor believes otherwise." Lekir gmnted. "Or says he does. He'd say anytfiing to save them even if they were jellyworms. You know Preservationists and R'raethans." "Then how to you explain the fact that the two miners were poisoned?" "Accident. The daggerthoms just happened to get in some sweetvine juice. like I told the doctor when he came to me with that ridiculous IF hypothesis, the beasts were eating berries and happened to smear the thorns with some of the juice." The board member sat back. "I have nothing more to ask." "Are there any other questions? No? Then you're excused, sar Lekir. Thank you for coming. And now, doctor," the chairman said, as the door closed behind the operations administrator, "what conclusions did he help you reach?" "I believe there was no mistake made in the original classification. The shree have evolved their intelligence since then." "In twelve years! Ridiculous," the attorney exclaimed. OT at all" Cian said calmly. "None of the authorities on sentience are able to agree as to when and how the transition from animal to rational being is made. But they all agree on why. The inspector can correct me if I'm wrong, but the reading I've done postulates a state called pre-sentience, in which a  species is at the borderline of intelligence." The survey agent nodded. "I see where you're going, doctor. Please continue." "Although it obeyed the charter restrictions to the letter, Megeyn changed the environment of Nira by its mere presence. The crews gave the shree competition they had never had before. Men, better equipped to hunt, were taking, shree tenitory and shree food. The shree had to adapt or die." "So they developed intelligence?" the chairman prompted. "No species develops a new characteristic just because it needs it," the survey agent replied. "But all species are constantly mutating. There are endless variations of type in every life form. When a need arises, survival favors the individuals having a variation to meet that need. If no member of the species has such a characteristic, that species becomes extinct. If the shree were pre-sentient they would have already had the capacity for rational thought -- they just weren't using it. The added difficulty of surviving simply triggered utilization of their dormant ability." The board members were listening attentively. The agent continued: "I suspect that if I were to inspect Nira again, I would find them essentially as they were twelve years ago except in the vicinity of the mining operations, where the environment has altered. Only the individuals there will have evolved." 'Then as a whole they aren't actually sentient," Bin Saal said. "But they're in the process of becoming so," Cian argued. "The fact remains," the attorney persisted, "that the species isn't intelligent. What we have, then, is a handful of mutations, sports, whose so-called intelligence may disappear again if the environment returns to its previous condition. Chairman, Nira is an important planet -- a world rich in minerals necessary to maintain our level of civilization. Should we deprive the Federation of those riches because of some dubiously labeled 'people' who cannot now -- and may never-appreciate the resources of their planet?" "Are we justified in denying them the chance to do so?" Qan countered. "Just a moment, doctor," the chairman said. "The board is grateful for having had this matter brought to its attention and for your help in this hearing. There is no need for you to be subjected to the legal debate that will follow. Both you and the inspector are excused." "But-" "Thank you, doctor." The dismissal was final. Gathering up his hand file, Cian followed the survey agent out of the room. He caught up with the Geolon a short way down the corridor. "What do you think, inspector? Does the lawyer have a good argument?" "Law isn't my specialty. But I imagine the soundness of his argument is irrelevant. The bureau is notorious for protecting planets from pollution and exploitation. Its stubbornness is rarely affected by the kind or number of individuals involved. In any case, nothing final will come of today's proceedings. We'll be asked to re-survey Nira and judgment will be based on the results. Then Megeyn will appeal and the Preservationist leaders will join the fight and the entire matter will be tied up in the courts until, by the time anyone is able to get back to Nira, the diree will have gone one way or the other and resolved the question themselves." His scalp furrowed in amusement. 'Tell me, have you ever considered doing survey work? We can always use people in order to protect obscure creatures on backspace planets. Enlist -- and you may even be put on the Niraan project." "Niraan project?" Cian echoed. "Certainly. While the law is grinding slowly, the bureau is going to be busily scurrying about on Nira. Doctor, this is our long-awaited opportunity to study emerging intelligence and resolve our speculations in the process. It's the important event of the millennium. You've probably earned yourself a footnote in history." He grinned at the doctor's startled stare. "Such are the risks we Preservationist zealots take. Let me buy you a cup of tea before I report to my superiors."  IF Special Introductory Offer good m the United States the United Kingdom and Canada H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U.S. and Canada. For United Kingdom. send coupon to: send coupon to: New York, N.Y. # London SW# #RD  # issues of IF for # GG issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # PnnInsnH find in paymnt for mv subscriotion BS chocked ahnxm Some Contributors Past and Present Poul Anderson iseac Asimov Affrsd Bester James BUsh Robert Bloch Ref Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke  L Sprague da Camp Lester da! Ray Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Memel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The Demu believed that to civilize is to make conform -- by wielding a scalpel! (Editor's note: Although they are implied as occurring offstage in the author's forthcoming novel, Cage a '#J, the events in this story are published only on these pages. They are too good for readers to miss. ) T he young person is surrounded by the animals. In this room on their planet Earth -- a strange room, all plane surfaces and right angles -- Eeshta is their captive. One of them has taken its robe and hood; under the odd discrete lighting-sources the smooth exoskeleton shines ivory tinged with red. Eeshta is of the Demu and eggborn. The symmetry of its head is broken only by the eyes and their brow ridges, the nostril openings and serrated chewing-lips below, the slightly flanged earholes. The heads of the animals are marred by fleshy and fibrous growths. Although their general shape is acceptable -- head and body, arms and legs -- they do not have correct appearance. None but eggborn Demu have correct appearance without aid. When captured animals learn to speak as Demu and thus earn citizenship they are given whatever aid is needed. But now it is Demu who are captive -- the young Eeshta, its eggparent Hishtoo, and three not eggborn. Taken by an escaped animal named Barton, they were brought in Hishtoo's ship from the Demu planet Ashura to Earth. Although its arm was broken in the struggle of capture Eeshta no longer fears Barton, for Barton encased the arm for healing and offered no further injury during the long journey. Eeshta fears these animals. It does not know what they want of it, except that it learn to speak with them. Demu do not speak with animals nor in the tongues of animals. Hishtoo has told it thus and the young person respects the word of its egg-parent. After a time the animals cease their attempts. One enters who is Demu but not eggborn. It is of the type that grows young inside itself. Before its citizenship it bore on its chest the growths by which such persons nourish their young. To correct its appearance such a one requires much aid. Knives and other instruments eliminate the growths on head and face, remove the teeth, notch the lips, and shorten the tongue to proper proportion. Chest and crotch are pared to smooth and sightly contours. Fingers and toes are rendered clawless; if necessary the number at each extremity is reduced to the proper four. On the abdomen the single useless depression is replaced by a pattern simulating concave oviducts and their matching convexities, which produce cells to fulfill the eggs. This is how deserving animals are honored for their intelligence. It has always been the way. The one who enters is called Limila. On Ashura its appearance was made correct. It wears the proper robe and hood but has added a cloth that covers its entire face except the eyes. It did ;iot do so on the ship during the trip to Earth. It approaches. "It is that you do not speak, Eeshta, and that you should." "It is that you, Limila, not eggborn, speak with animals. I do not." "It is that you are foolish. On this world you can now speak only with Hishtoo or with me, or with the other two who are made Demu. Much is to be learned here, and you learn nothing." "You may learn, and tell me in our own speech." Limila nods. "That for the present we do it so. Also that I ask questions and you answer. Later we speak more of this." "It is as you say, but that I have my robe and hood." The garb is returned to Eeshta. The questions begin. An animal speaks to Limila, who asks the questions. When the young person answers, Limila speaks to the animal. Eeshta's fear is soon dead of boredom, as the egg-child waits while things are said that it does not understand. It finds itself trying to understand and quickly changes its thought. "It is," says Limila, "that we would know of your age." "That I am nearly three of the four fingers toward end of growth." Eeshta waits while Limila and the animal speak. "It is that your duration may be counted in revolutions of your planet around its star." "We do not count it so. And Ashura, where Barton escapes and takes our ship, is not my planet. The revolutions of my own planet, while we are on Ashura, are not known to me." Finally the speaking ends. Eeshta is taken to its place and fed with Hishtoo and the others. While eating it does not speak with any, nor wish to. bright, Limila?" Annette Ling smiled across the table. Then her delicate Oriental features moved in a slight frown. "In more ways than one. Not as bad as Hishtoo, though. That one wouldn't talk at all." "He talks. Dr. Ling, when Barton asks questions through me or Siewen to learn about the ship. Hishtoo fears Barton, and with reason." She shook her head under the hood. "They are not he and she, of course. Each of them is both. I have IF listened too much to Barton -- and I suppose it is natural to assign gender in terms of size." "Yes. You know, I'd like to meet this Barton of yours." Within the concealment of hood and veil Limila shook her head again. "Not mine, not now. He allows me to live with him, but cannot bring himself to... touch me. For a moment, embarrassed, Annette did not speak. She brushed her fingers throughher short black hair. "Uh -- why does Hishtoo fear him?" "You have not heard? How he forced the ship from Hishtoo, to bring us here? Barton was without food but had Eeshta captive. He threatened to begin eating her alive." Dr. Ling gasped. "Would he have?". "I do not know. I have not asked. But once aboard the ship he broke both Hishtoo 's arms so Hishtoo could do no mischief. And when Barton says to Hishtoo, 'crab salad,' Hishtoo answers any question I ask." Annette Ling's laugh was shaky. "I'm not so sure I want to meet the man, after all." "You must remember, he had been seven years -- more than that -- in a Demu cage. The ship was his only chance for escape. And he had no other way to restrain Hishtoo "Yes. Yes, I can understand that. And he rescued you and the other two?" "We were there, at the ship. Although Barton had refused to learn Demu speech, Hishtoo offered him citizenship as an inducement to surrender and return Eeshta safely. We were supposed to be... exhibits, to persuade him. Hishtoo did not understand Barton very well." "I should say not." Annette paused. "Limila, do you feel that Eeshta will cooperate more fully, eventually? To counter the Demu threat, the raiding and kidnaping, we must know more about them. Eeshta is the only window we have any chance of opening. It would help a great deal if we could speak with her directly." She raised a hand against an unvoiced protest. "I don't mean to say your help has not been invaluable. But still-" Behind the veil she saw maimed lips move in a kind of smile. "Yes, doctor. As Eeshta would say, I am not eggborn. For more than six years, after what was done, I lived as Demu. But I'm aware that I don't fully understand them." Her hands, together, clasped and unclasped. "And Eeshta? I do not know. The Demu never speak another's language. It may be that they cannot learn as we do. We can only continue to try." "Yes, and hope for success." A knock sounded. "Come in." A boy entered with coffee and a snack plate. Annette moved papers to leave a space on the table. 'Thank you," she said. He smiled, set down the tray and left. "I'll pour for us, Limila. Cream? Sugar?" Her cup prepared, Limila raised it to her veil a moment, then set it down. "Thank you, but I do not want any, I've decided. I must go now." "Limila! We're probably going to be working together a long time. Can't you-" "You have seen me." The voice was flat, wooden. "In the pictures, at least. Do you wonder that I hide myself?" A small five-fingered hand diot out to grasp one that now had only four. "Oh, damn all! I do tend to forget that anything is important other than my work. But I feel I know you only from outside, and -- well, it was a long session. You should have some coffee and a bite to eat. I'll go out, if you wish. I'm sorry, Limila. Forgive me?" Limila shrugged. "You have not harmed me. The harm was done before. And if you wish to see me, I can bear it if you can. When we are alone -- " She removed the veil and pushed back the hood. For long seconds, seeing what had been a woman's face, Annette ling could not speak. "Yes," she said at last. "When we are alone. Thank you, Limila." She busied herself, leafing through her notes. "Now I'd like you to look at the questions my team has prepared for us to ask Eeshta tomorrow. Do you think perhaps -- " As they talked, Limila sipped coffee and ate small bits of cheese and wafers. Without teeth it was a slow process. T he young person has eaten. It sits with its egg-parent Hishtoo and the two Demu not eggborn. They are of the type that does not grow its young inside but supplies cells to fulfill the eggs. Siewen, the frail one, supplies no more such cells. It is one of the first of its kind to be made Demu and live; there was no knowledge that to provide conect appearance to its legs-juncture would render it useless for breeding. Like Limila it speaks with animals, but only in response. Here among Demu it does not speak. The other has taken the Demu name Shestin and does not speak with animals. It was given citizenship later when more was known of its kind. Its appearance where its legs join is not fully Correct. Protrusion has been minimized but not IF entirely eliminated; this one, it is hoped, retains the ability to fulfill eggs. It shows no gns of wishing to do so. On the ship it did not speak to Barton. Barton called it Whosits. Those who bring food call it The Freak. Hishtoo addresses its egg-child. "It is that you speak with animals?" "It is that I speak with Limila who speaks with animals. I do as you." "It is that I should not. But the animal Barton -- " "It is that first you do not speak with Limila in the presence of animals. But when Barton makes the sound 'crab salad,' then you speak. I do not know that sound." From Siewen comes a harsh cackling. "It is," says Hishtoo, "that your mind is not waking when Barton first makes that sound. Then, if I do not give the ship to it, it eats you. On the ship it destroys use of my arms. And the animal Barton eats me now if I do not speak of the ship with Limila and Siewen. But I speak much of no truth." "It is that if Barton finds you speak not truth, Hishtoo -- " "It is that we have no certain way of safety. That the worlds must know the Demu and become Demu. Barton eats me before I allow it to eat our race." The young person pauses, thinking of what it knows. "It is that when we meet, Barton harms me also but will not do so again. I do not know when it says to eat me, for as you say, my mind is not waking. It is that the animal puts its hand to my head and makes a soft sound when I have pain and want . no more." "It is that you forget, Eeshta, that it is an animal and of no assured mind. You forget no animal is Demu. Barton has not our speech, nor correct appearance." "You say much truth, Hishtoo. I think on your saying." The young person thinks of what it knows, and of what it does not know.  arrived, his dinner would not take long to prepare. He did not need her to cook for him; he could manage well enough on packaged meals. But he had brought what was left of her away from the Demu. She had no one else and felt he deserved some payment for suffering her monstrous presence. So she did what she could, though she found it ever more difficult to talk with him. A groundcar stopped outside. Barton's footsteps approached and he entered. "Hi, Limila. You have a good day?" He sounded as though he were reciting a set speech. "Good enough, I suppose. Are you hungry, Barton?" He looked at her, then away again. When they were alone she did not wear the veil. It was no use. On the ship he had seen her without it too long. "In a little while-any time you're ready. Right now I need a beer." He rummaged in the refrigerator, then sat near her. "Hishtoo's lying, you know," he said. "At least half the time, maybe more. That big lobster is nobody's fool." "You have charged him with lying?" Impatiently Barton shook his head. "Wrong approach. Let him think he's getting away with it. For now at least. No, we just keep asking questions, sometimes the same ones from a different angle. He'll slip up-he already has. We'll transcribe the tapes and cross-check, feed them to the computers. Nobody can lie consistently over the long haul. The parts of his story that don't stay put we can throw out. Where it hangs together it's probably true. And sooner or later we'll figure out how the Demu ship works." "And the Demu mind, Barton?" He looked at her, his expression unguarded for a moment, as though she still had a face. "That's the hard part, isn't it? What you're doing. We need force, sure -- ships, and all -- to stop the raids. But we need to know about them, too, and the little one's the key. How you coming with her?" "It is hard to be certain. She answers questions now, but obliquely." "Comes by it naturally, I expect. Her egg-daddy's a liar by the clock. Too bad-I've gotten to like the kid, but she sure as hell comes from a rotten family." Explanation was too difficult. She served dinner instead. Barton ate silently, saying only, "Hey, pretty good there," after the first few bites. When he finished, he said, "You want to watch the Trivia or anything?" "The Tri-V? No, Barton." "Yeah. Well, maybe I'll read awhile." "Yes, Barton." But she needed to talk. "Barton?" "Yeah? Something?" He seemed attentive, so she plunged ahead. "Barton, how did you know not to learn Demu language?" "Huh? Oh-well, I didn't. I mean, I didn't know what happened to anyone who did. But they pushed me around so long before they tried the talky-talk that by then I was too stubborn to do anything I thought they wanted. A lot happened that I never told you -- " a lot, she thought, that I can IF never tell anyone. "I wish I had been stubborn, Barton. But I was alone and did not want to be alone, and I did not guess that harm could come from learning." She rose and walked over to him. Once more, she thought, and then not again. She took his hand. "Barton? I-" He clasped her to him but turned his face away. She heard him curse, his voice thick. Then he said, more quietly, "I wish I could, Limila. I wish -- " He released her. "Oh, hell! I'm going to bed." She went to her own room. This is not life, she thought. I am not living. I need to work yet awhile for others, and then I can stop. The thought comforted her more than any had in a long time. T he young person sits with Limila and the animal Lkig. The fourth of the second four of questionings begins. Against its will Eeshta understands more each time of animal speech, but as Hishtoo has said to do, it pretends ignorance. Also it understands some meanings of Ling's face-movements. The downward-together pull of the small dark growths above the eyes means the animal is dissatisfied. The young person has known this meaning earlier, for on the ship Barton often made this sign -- but never the upcurving of incorrectly smooth mouth, indicating pleasure, that Ling makes. Eeshta has made the Demu sign of pleased feeling, mouth opened slightly to show the tongue uplifted, but Ling does not understand until Limila explains in animal words. Then, to Eeshta, Ling lifts its own tongue, so incorrectly long. Eeshta is certain Ling comes to understand some Demu eech also. It sometimes speaks before Limila fully repeats Eeshta's saying. On Ashura perhaps Ling would soon be worthy of citizenship and correct appearance, though Eeshta is surprised to find that with familiarity the animal's deformities are less offensive and begin to seem natural. Now Ling speaks directly to Eeshta but in its own animal speech. "Eeshta, do you know what I say? You do know, don't you?" "Limila, it is that Ling speaks. That you tell its saying in our tongue." "It is that I hear you," says Ling, "that you hear me also. That we forbind and enfeel." The last has no meaning. Ling is not yet worthy of correct appearance! "It is that I am pleased that Ling attempts Demu speech, Limila. That it may continue to do so." Ling turns to Limila. "I didn't get that last." Limila repeats Eeshta's words in Demu and then in the animal tongue. "I know you understand me," says Ling. "Why won't you answer? Umila? Why?" The young person shakes its head. Animal gestures demean less than animal words. "The Demu see no view but their own, Annette. We can only keep trying." "Yes. But not today, Limila. The hell with it." And to Eeshta: "It is that you go to your place, at another time we speak in both our tongues." "Limila, it is that I go to my place." As the young person leaves the room it hears Ling say, "Sometimes I think Barton had the right idea the first time." T he young person sits with Hishtoo. Across the room Siewen looks at nothing, while Shestin very softly speaks an old Demu chant it has learned. Outside, on guard so that all must stay in the room, is the animal that speaks much with upcurved mouth when it takes Eeshta to and from its place here. Eeshta thinks upon a matter. "Hishtoo, when Barton crushes our armshells, it is that there is much pain." "That the animal gives us pain, we remember." "Is it that there is much pain in the giving of correct appearance?" "Much pain and loss of body liquid. It is done over many days or animals die of becoming Demu. When Barton and the others are taken, none of Ashura have experience. We lose many as we learn. Siewen is one of the first to live, and Limila. It is that each for a time is near to death." "That I find it not good, Hishtoo, to give such pain." "It is that the pain is not from us, Eeshta, but from being animal without correct appearance. That animals may become Demu, we do what is proper." "Is it that the pain is . soon gone?" "As correct appearance heals, pain goes. And we learn a thing, Eeshta. On each day of correction we give the greatest pain first, so that often the mind becomes not awake and does not feel more of what is done." 'That I am pleased you give no pain without need." A sound is heard. Siewen is crouched over, holding itself. Its shoulders shake and it makes harsh rasping sounds with its breath. Eeshta moves to bend and peer under its hood. Its face below the eyes is wet. "Siewen," says the young person, "is it that the food today is not good to you?" IF T he animal of the upcurved mouth closes the door of the room behind Eeshta and remains outside. The times of questioning now count nearly to two fours of fours. Ling sits behind the squarish thing that is always covered with papers. Limila sits to one side; it no longer hides its face and has thrown back its hood. Its smoothed head is deeper and narrower than is quite correct, but the shell of it is inside and difficult to reshape. Attempts to make such changes cause dying and so are now abandoned on Ashura. The young person moves a seat closer to the others and sits. "It is that you ask and I answer," it says. "That I would now ask." Limila would spe, but Ling waves a hand and says, mouth curving: "All right, Eeshta, we'll make a deal. Ask anything you want -- in English -- and we'll, answer. What do you say?" A hesitation. Then: "That I do not use your speech, that I must not. Hishtoo-" Ling waves the hand again. "Forget Hishtoo for a minute. We've been asking questions, playing by your rules. If you wish to ask in turn, you'll have to play by ours for a change." Eeshta considers. Already it speaks with an animal, though in Demu tongue. And what it would ask, it needs to know. There is no need to inform Hishtoo... "Then tell me what you really want to know from me. And why." Ling nods. "We want to know about you, about your people. How they think and why they do what they do." "What we do? What is it that we do?" Limila brings its hands near its face, its two fours of fingers pointing stiffly toward itself. 'This!" It touches here and there on its head and body, on its extremities. "And this, and this, and this!" "It is only that you are given correct appearance, Limila." Startled, the young person uses its own speech but is not rebuked. "But why?" Limila's voice is high and harsh with strain. "Do you know what it is to be cut and sewn, and to have no face?" "I know you had pain, yes." "Pain? I saw others die and envied their luck. The flesh was bad enough, and the teeth. But" -- it indicates the jog at the base of its hand -- "the disjointing of bones! And here!" It points to the nostril openings. "There was bone. A saw, and the chisels. After the first of it I could not see for the blood. Pain? You do not know of pain, Eeshta. Why, how, can you possibly do such things?" "Butso you could be Demu and not animal. And now that is a long time past. You healed, and are Demu and have no more pain." "No pain?" limila's breathing is harsh and rapid. "Eeshta-Eeshta, how would you like to have your arms cut off?" After a moment of frigjt the young person realizes there is no threat. "I would not. No one would. But why... ?" "Suppose you met a race of super-Demu with no arms. They give you correct appearance by removing your arms. How would you feel?" "But without arms how could they?"  "Damn your stupid little soul to Barton's hell, they'd bite them off!" In awkward haste, Limila pulls its robe from itself, crumples it, flings it against a wall. Unlike its conduct, its appearance is most correct for one not eggborn. "Annette?" says Limila. "Would you diow yourself completely?" Ling looks for a moment at Limila, then removes its own garb. The two stand together. Ling's appearance is not at all correct, but in it Eeshta can see a kind of symmetry. "Look!" With one hand Limila touches itself, and with the other the same portion of Ling. 'This!" The mouth, the growth above it that is partly bone, the flaps at the sides of the head, and at top and back the fiber called hair. 'This!" The lumps on the chest, the changes at the extremities, the fiber-covered protrusion where the legs begin. "This! This! This!" It pauses, breathing heavily, "These things are all part of her. They were part of me, too, until you -- your people -- took them from me. My face was myself. Now I have no self." "But you are Demu, Limila." "Am I? No. I am not eggborn. I cannot in breeding season lock to another bearing eggs and at the same time fulfill that other. I cannot go to Sisshain once to visit and perhaps a second time to becomeor if not, no shame to the eggs." "No shame to the eggs," Eeshta responded. "I cannot even truly have correct  appearance. I am not Demu, Eeshta. I am only something that was once a woman, who can no longer be a woman or even a person, because of what the Demu have done to me. Because of that I am of no use, even to myself." The young person is confused. "But the Demu mean no harm, only good. Not to take, but to give. It has always been our way, when we can, to help animals. I am sorry, Limila, that even though not eggborn you can find no pride in being Demu." "Pride? Pride? Limila shakes its head. "Eeshta, you work very hard IF at not understanding me. Barton, I suppose, would call it a racial trait. Let me try again. Eeshta, would you prefer to live or to die?" "To live, of course, Limila. To live." "Yes? Why?" "Because -- because alive I can do and learn. Dying ends all of it." limila's legs shake but it does not seem to notice the shaking. "Yes. You are right, Eeshta. Dying ends all of it. But for me it is all ended now. It ended under your knives, on Ashura. And I would rather die than live as I am." "No, Umila-" "If I did not feel I were needed here for a time yet, I would die tonight." "But how is that? Have you a sickness?" No Demu mouth ever moves as Limila's serrated lips move now. "Not the kind you mean. My sickness is only that I would take a knife and let out all my blood so as to die." The young person resists belief. "But that is... no one does so except those twice-come to Sisshain, who would become but do not become -- no shame to the eggs." "No shame..." Limila murmurs. "You are beginning to understand. I cannot become, as you would, because I am not eggborn. And I cannot become An my own way. because of -- because of having been given conect appearance. This is what you do to me and others. This is what must be stopped. This is why we need to know of you. Not to hurt you. But to stop your hurting us!" The young person is troubled. "Can you not still become, LimQa, in your own way?" "My way? I have no face. I have no self. There is no one left who can become. I would have... Barton would have been my most needful person -- and he cannot stand the sight of me. I cannot stand the sight of what is left, either. It is not Limila. I am inside, but no one can see me, and I can no longer see myself." All that Eeshta knows collapses. Nothing is left but to believe. "But then," it cries, "Hishtoo is wrong. We, the Demu, are wrong. For to give such hurt -- it cannot be correct." It hardly notices that it speaks in the tongue of animals. It goes to Umila and holds that tall person in its arms as though for breeding, although Eeshta is one of four fingers short of breeding age and Limila not eggborn. And the eggs. "Limila, it is that I help you, that I learn in both our tongues. That I try to tell Hishtoo, though I think Hishtoo does not listen or understand. That when you go to our worlds I go also, and tell what you say, so that it is known. "Whatever else, Limila, it is good that Barton brings me here" B arton got home late. Tlie TriV was off and the lights were dim. He had a lot on his mind. "Hi! Anybody home?" "Yes." The voice reached him from the kitchen. "I am here. Barton." She sat leaning back in one chair with her feet on another. The drink she sipped was dark between the ice cubes; the bottle on the table was bourbon. She wore no robe or hood. For a moment he saw her as she once had been, the slim body almost the same -- but the moment passed, and again she was faceless. Was there any real hope? He did not know yet. "Had to work late." Rummaging in the refrigerator, he found a beer and opened it. "A breakthrough on the Demu spacedrive, if Hishtoo slipped as bad as we think he did. So I ate in that crackerbox cafeteria, by the ship." And discussed the beforeand-after, sketches with the plastic surgeon... He sat, swallowed beer from the bottle. "How'd it go with you today?" "We broke through also. Barton. The young Demu has decided to cooperate." She sipped slowly. "No kidding? You cracked the shell?" Cartilage grafts, the man had said, and prostheses. But no promises, not yet -- he needed more time to study, to draw the boundaries of the possible. "Hey, that's great! But how did you get through to her?" "Personal talk. Barton. Exchange ' of reminiscences, among all of us there." "All of you, huh? I'll bet you did most of it. Didn't you?" If only he could tell her! He was torn by the temptation -- but he mustn't. Not yet. "I was of some help. The matter is not important." But the ring of her voice belied the words. "At any rate, it has agreed to learn and to exchange information, to reduce the conflict that must be." He wanted to go to her, but then she would expect more than he could give -- just as he dared not offer hope until he knew its limits. "Well. That's the best news in a long time, Limila. It really is. And I'm glad the kid's shaping up." "Yes. We should make much better progress now." "That's for sure." He looked at her once again, seeing and remembering. "Hey, you look tired. Rough day, really, wasn't it?" Her maimed lips lifted into a ragged curve. "It's all right. Barton," she said. "I'll live."  IF T he stars hung like ice crystals in the bitter night sky. As I shifted my feet on the hard sand, searching the sky for Ceti sps wind howled off the frozen harbor and cut through my worn leathers and moccasins. Gray Wolf worked at cutting through the wire fence surrounding the Cetis' winter crop. When the hole was large enough he motioned to Tomis, the smallest of our band of twelve. Tomis handed me the reins of his pony. "Stay close, Jon," he whispered and stalked silently through the opening. He kneeled, spread his sack and began ripping the purple fruit from the plants. The rest of us huddled together, watching. Four nights had passed since we had brought down the last deer, and fear and hunger haunted us all. Looking at the fruit, ripe and succulent, I failed to see the Ceti diip dip low and cut across the full moon -- until too late. "Wolf, a ship!" I shouted, jumping on my pony. Tomis ran to the fence, threw out the sack and tumbled after it. "Wait, Jon!" he screamed. Jaecki, Wolfs woman, scooped up the sack in midflight and galloped off with the rest of the band. I held Tomis's pony while my own mount fought the bit to be off with the pack. Wolf grabbed the reins from my hand and slapped Spotted Mane on the rump. "Get out of here! If we both make it, we'll meet at the lake." I kicked Spotted Mane's sides and urged him on with curses whispered into his flattened ears. His sharp hoofs split the glazed ice that covered the beach as he put all his heart into running. Behind me the throbbing of the ranger ship grew louder. I heard a cry and looked back. Tomis was on his knees. His pony was struggling to its feet. The stupid beast had tripped, leaving him helpless. Wolf whirled his pony and headed back. The ship hovered almost overhead, blotting out the stars. As I raced for the shelter of the dune reeds I pictured the Cetis, vsnug and pink in their padded ship, watching helpless humans scatter like a herd of frightened sheep. Did they laugh when they gave Tomis the death-look and he became a puff of black smoke that drifted across the beach? Did it set their snouts to twitching and their bloated lips to squealing in delight? My hands tightened on the reins as though I held a soft Ceti throat between them. I reached the dunes and made Spotted Mane lie down in the dry reeds -- a trick we teach the ponies early in life. I crouched beside him, breathing as hard as he and feeling the musky warmth of his wet hide. The night was still again, but this time with a threatening stillness. The IF stillness fugitives know. Stillness disturbed only by the roar of waves dumping slabs of ice on the frozen shore. Suddenly my ears sifted out the whine of the approaching ship. I clamped my hand over Spotted Mane's muzzle and felt the throb of engines beat in my bones, drowning out my own pounding heart. The big ship glided over the bay and turned west toward Crystal City -- known as New York when Earth had belonged to man, but now referred to by the miserable remnants of its former population as the 'Tig Pen." Nothing moved during the rest of that bitter night. I huddled against Spotted Mane and dozed. The next morning squawking seagulls woke me. I started for the lake, wondering how many from our band had escaped the deadly Cetis, wondering if Jaecki were among them. I traveled most of the day, with only my pony and an icy, sandblowing wind for companions, and passed many Ceti fields where the lush purple plants grew tall in defiance of the desolate winter. My eyes were never off the sky for long. At noon I passed north of the sprawling Fire Island settlement. There old Marco's people eked out a bare living from the unyielding sea and lived in shelters of cornhusks and reeds. That was the price they paid to coexist in peace with the new masters of Earth. Last night we had paid a higher price to roam freely through Ceti land. "the lake. I rode to our meeting place, my hunger and weariness buried by the fear that our band had been wiped out. Had I survived only to mourn dead companions? Through the trees I saw the red flicker of a campfire. "Jon!" Jaecki's voice reached me as her shadow moved out of the blackness behind the fire. She ran to meet me, throwing her arms around my neck as I dismounted and laughing in relief. "Gray Wolf, it's Jon," she called back. Her gentle brown eyes sparkled in the wavering light. I ached to hug her tight, to run my fingers through her dark, swirling hair. But I held her at arm's length and grinned. "You weren't worried about me, were you, doll? You know I'm too fast for a death-look to catch." Her eyes shadowed with remembrance. "I know you and Gray Wolf lingered too long under that death ship," she said softly. Gray Wolf strode over and gripped my hands. "Jon!" His stony face relaxed into a smile. "So -- we three have made it." He thrust one arm across my shoulders, the other across Jaecki's, and we walked to the fire. "It seems the fates have tied us with a strong bond," he said. "I pray they wfll keep it strong in the future," Jaecki murmured. "Amen," I added. After I turned Spotted Mane loose to graze I realized how racked I was by hunger. We sat around the fire eating the fruit Jaecki had cooked. I didn't bother to remove the small red pits and filled my belly as though I might never eat again. Our meal finished, we drank our fill of icy lake water. Then I-wrapped myself in my blanket and lay down under a tree. The night was clear and cold, with frost spangling the flattened grass. I stared at the sky where the Milky Way made a silver path, wondering which bright point was Tau Ceti. I'd heard from wandering renegades that there were Ceti cities all over the country. There was talk also of, human settlements that, spread across hundreds of miles of desert in the western regions. The rest of the land was given over to the aliens' automated farms. Earth had become an agricultural colony of Tau Ceti and was probably keeping the pigs fat on many planets. Wolf walked over and sat down. His mood was grave as he laid a newly finished spear across his lap and slowly stroked the shaft. "We must talk, Jon." I sat up. "About last night? You think we're the only ones left?" He shrugged. "I saw three die. Picked off like insects." I swallowed to ease the tightening in my throat. "How can we fight creatures that kill with mind power?" Wolf hunched forward. "It's the booster we must fight, Jon -- the machine that amplifies their brainwaves a thousandfold, that enables them to kill with focused thoughts. If we destroy the Crystal City booster the Cetis will be helpless." "Wolf, do you plan to do it with that spear?" "I plan to turn the power of the booster against itself." "A nice dream, but it was tried more than a hundred years ago when the Cetis first invaded Earth. You know how successful it was." "Our people used the wrong weapons." He gestured sharply. "Jon, ever since we left the settlement together we've been like brothers. We've shared everything." My eyes roamed to Jaecki, who slept with one arm flung across the half-empty sack. The embers of the fire highlighted each soft curve under her deerskin blanket. I pried my eyes away and turned back to Wolf. "Almost everything.' He grinned. Then his leathery face settled into thoughtful lines. He picked up a smooth rock and felt its weight. "Here's another thing I've kept from you." He flung the rock. I watched it arc toward the black woods. Sudden ly it curved in front of the trees and IF swung back. It thudded into the fire, raising ash and embers to swirl around it..." I jumped up and " stared at the rock, now motionless and covered with ash. "Sit down, Jon. You'll wake Jaecki," Wolf whispered. I stared at him till he took me by the arm and pulled me down beside him. "I have no Ceti blood in me," he said, "if that's what you're thinking." I shook my head dumbly. "But the power lives in me." A smile puUed at his lips. "I feel its surge and know the direction of its force." "The death-look, too?" The implications hit me and instinctively I shrank away. Wolf concentrated on the rock. The lines around his eyes creased. Suddenly the rock vanished in a puff of black smoke and spraying ash. I looked at Wolf as though he were a stranger. "There were times we could have used your power." "I had to hide this gift, Jon," he said evenly. "As a child it would have meant death by my father's own hands. My mother would have been exiled for having sheltered with a Ceti." "But if you are not of the Cetis, how...?" An Informal Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Articles, interviews, columns, reviews and letters by professionals and aficionados! Scheduled for Issue No. #: Trenchant Bludgeon." And editing and editors. In every issue: new book, story and magazine lists. Sample Issue :I One year: # Two Years: # P. O. Box # Portland, Oregon #I "I'm not sure. I think it's simple exposure to the waves generated by those boosters of theirs. Electromagnetic waves-rays, if you want to call them that -- that supply power to their ships and things, but also somehow reinforce their brain waves. So they can pull that death-look stunt, and work aU kinds of other tricks..." Gray Wolf shook his head. "It's a mystery, all right. I've tried to figure it out. The only theory I have is that the booster waves themlelves can alter individuals, give them the power. I believe it must happen in the womb. Probably changes the genes. Probably that's how the Cetis got started on the evolutionary process giving them all the ability to utilize the booster." He smiled at me. "Look, Jon, I'm not the only one. I've learned of others of our kind who have the power. A pitiful few, but maybe we're enough to turn the tide." Astonishment and hope were surging in me. And also hurt. "But during all these years we've spent together, you never said a word about it. Didn't you trust me?" "Our life is hazardous. If you were captured by the Cetis you might have given away this secret. The gift is too precious to be risked. With it I intend to locate the Crystal City booster and turn the pigs' hellish creation against itself!" He stood up and shoved the spear into the ground. Three crow feathers, tied to the shaft for good luck, fluttered in the chilly breeze. "This is for you, Jon. I'll make another for Jaecki. By the way, she knows about my power." I pulled out the spear and inspected it more closely. "Why do I need this?" "Jon, I'll protect you both as much as I can. But you'll be mostly on your own after we reach Crystal City." I slept little that night. So it happened that when four more survivors of our band rode into camp before dawn I was awake to greet them. Joyfully I shouted to Wolf and Jaecki. We welcomed the others warmly and shared the remaining fruit for breakfast. Carlo and Paulo, two brothers who had never been further' apart than the head of a spear and its feathers, had taken up the renegade life because neither of them had the temperament for settlement living. Eli, with his easy gait and knowing eyes, was the oldest and craftiest of the band. He had weathered more years of stealing from the Cetis and evading their ranger ships than I had lived. Last was my burly friend Boris, whose thick body was all the bulkier for the ragged sheep-fur tunic he wore and whose face' was all the fuller for ts bushy black beard, tobacco-stained and matted with the remains of many meals. Boris never talked in ordinary tones. He roared or growled or bellowed. We called him Bear. While we ate. Wolf told the men of his plan to enter Crystal City. But he said nothing about his power. They muttered and murmured, glancing anxiously at one another. "By God, I'll go!" Bear suddenly IF roared, spewing out half-chewed fruit. He wiped his mouth on a sleeve. "I've always wanted to see how those damn Cetis make love in their glass houses!" "It's dangerous even to go near the city," Eli commented. He squinted over the smoke of his home-made cig and thought a minute. "Oh, hellwhy not? It's about time we made the pigs sweat off some fat.' Paulo stood up. "You can trim'em down without me." He looked at the others, then at Wolf. "Make a name for yourself if you like. Gray Wolf. Me, I'd rather end my days sheltered with some big-hipped whore!" He nudged his brother with a foot. Carlo looked up and smirked. "What's the matter with you, Paulo? Think how the settlement girls will throw themselves at your feet when you tell them you've been to Crystal City." "We would never live to brag about it," Paulo answered. But his brother remained seated and Paulo, hesitating, grumbled and then sat down. Early that night we broke camp and took to our ponies. We followed the railroad tracks, long rusty and overgrown with weeds, that led like twin arrows to the city. Game was plentiful around the vast Ceti fields through which we passed, for few humans ventured this close to the Ceti stronghold. Alien ships swarmed thick as summer flies in the western sky. During the second night's ride we saw the lights of the spaceport, far to the south of us. Eli trotted up beside me. "Jon, Gray Wolf has told me about his power." I turned to him. "I've always suspected he had it," Eli said. "He's given me the names of friends in several nearby settlements who also have it. After the bocTster is destroyed and the settlements have taken the city, he wants me to take charge. I'm to send the gifted humans to infiltrate other Ceti cities." He shifted his weight on his pony. "Jon, I'm afraid this is a suicide mission for you three. Gray Wolf doesn't expect to get out alive." "Did he say that?" "He didn't have to." "Do you think his plan will work?" Eli shrugged. "It all depends on whether or not the boosts put out of action." "And on whether the settlements respond," I added. 'They'll respond. Till now they've lived with fear and hatred. Take away the fear and they'll respond." "Does Jaecki realize what we're riding into?" "I'm sure she senses it. But you couldn't stop her, anyway. She goes where Gray Wolf goes." I felt a pang of jealousy. But what did it matter? If  were right, there was no future for the three of us. "I hope I have the courage to see it through," I said. "I hope so too, Jon." I N the evening of the next day we climbed a hill and saw the lights of Crystal City. I gasped and heard the others too draw their breaths. It was like a mirage, a shimmering ice city that rose in a blaze of pastel lights whose reflections danced on soaring glass. Like a carved glacier it curved and spiraled, possessed of as many hues-and seemingly with as little substance -- as a rainbow. It looked as though it would melt in the spring thaw. Each faceted building was an integral part of the city's design and contributed to its overall dome shape; its reflection in the ice-clogged river below made it appear round, like a planet alone in space. Bear bellowed, "It's the fanciest whorehouse I ever laid eyes on!" "Oh, so beautiful," Jaecki whispered. "Can it really be all evil?' Wolf gave her a look that forced her to lower her eyes. The two brothers stared and whispered intensely to each other. Eli squinted up at the swarming, lights -- Ceti ships-above the city. "How will you get in, Wolf?" "Through an unused tuimel I've seen in old maps." Addressing all of us, he said, "Jon and Jaecki are coming into the city with me. The rest of you will camp here and wait. If we succeed in destroying the booster the Cetis will set up a squeal like a thousand pigs being butchered." He looked at his men. "If I'm right about the booster it's the source of all their energy, and even the lights of the city should fade. When that happens, ride for the settlements. "You two," he pointed to the brothers, "will bring the news to the White Plains settlement. Tell the people they need no longer fear the Cetis. Tell them to attack and make the streets red with Ceti blood!" "What about the cities in Jersey and Connecticut?" Paulo asked. "Won't those Cetis come runnin'?" Wolf shook his head. "At that distance from home base, they'd lose the power of their own boosters, and they won't have Crystal City's to depend on." He dropped his hand to Eli's shoulder. "You ride to Fire Island. Find a canoe and contact Old Marco. Tell him to put aside his nets and take up the work of a man." He turned to Bear. "You ride for the Mount Vernon settlement." Bear kicked a rock and roared, "By God, I've come this far. I'll not stop here!" He unstrapped his cider bag and flung it to the ground. "I'm going into the Pig Pen with yjou." Wolf laid a restraining hand on his IF Remember that the Cetis grow fat and careless with success. Make the sewers of their decadent cities overflow with the blood of pigs." The others wished us good luck. We took our bows and arrows and the two spears, and rode to the tunnel. Diounting, we found the entrance had crumbled. We had to CTawl over boulders to get inside. The tunnel was as black as midnight. We felt our way along the slippery walls, tripping over broken ground. "Damn! We diould have brought a torch," I said. The air was stale and heavy. Above us the mighty river flowed and I felt as though I were buried aUve. "Jon, the power grows in me!" Gray Wolfs voice was strained. "I see the Cetis more clearly. They are masters of  living things. Qoser to gods than to mortals." My throat felt like dried leather. How did we expect to defeat the Cetis? My spear was suddenly a silly toy. I wanted to hurl it into the darkness and run for the cold night air and the comfort of the campsite. I took a deep breath and pushed myself on. We reached the city end of the tunnel and found that it was sealed off by stone. But fingers of blue light reached through the cracks. I started to heave away the heavy blocks. Wolf gripped my arm and pushed me aside. His face was strange in the half-light, grimmer than I'd ever seen it. His eyes darkened. I jumped as the rocks crashed and fell apart. Smoke rose from the seared stones. Blue light flooded in through the opening. I picked up my ear and looked at Jaecki. Eyes wide,#ips parted, she swayed back from Wolf. "Forward," he said, and motioned for us to follow. We were on the outskirts of the city. The streets were opalescent glass that shimmered as light shone up from beneath them. A few work robots specialized for street cleaning rolled by, pushing long, rotating bmshes. Above us, transparent arches connected gleaming buildings of all shapes and curves. It was a glass canyon. I thought that surely if I took a step, I would walk into an invisible wall. We heard squeals from a narrow street and flattened ourselves against a building, trying to hide in a city of mirrors.  gold filigree, hummed as it floated by. Four Cetis lounged in its padded interior. Two were pudgy women, dimple-kneed, wearing furs and blue wigs. Red designs were painted on their round noses. The two hairless men were about a foot shorter than I, small-eyed, with pink jowls that hung over their lace collars. We held our breaths as they drifted by, giggling and drinking from green decanters. Party-goers, I thought. Most of the city probably slept at this late hour. I breathed a sigh of relief when they were gone, and looked around. A man stood in front of me! I drew back my spear -- so did he -- and realized it was my own reflection. Ragged leathers, soiled and tearing at the seams. Dark hair that reached to the shoulders and curled into worried eyes. Unshaven, crouched, like a wary animal. This is primitive man, I thought. Man pushed into settlements and left to rot! Wolf led us silently down a winding street. He was sensitive to the source of the power and it directed his steps. As I looked at the buildings I realized they were not reaUy transparent-only the lights in an outer wall gave them that appearance. So Bear would have been disappointed after all... We heard footsteps. Wolf pushed Jaecki under an archway. I gripped my spear, wondering how I'd use it against a death-look, as three uniformed Cetis strolled toward us. They wore black silk, with silver badges on their feathered caps. Their shimmering images reflected on the street and they seemed to walk on water. I crouched as they turned our way. "Some damn night patrol!" I whispered. One Ceti covered a yawn and froze. He'd seen us. "I'll take him," Wolf snarled. As I tensed to hurl my spear at another, the yawning Ceti evaporated in smoke, like an octopus leaving black ink behind. I hurled my spear and caught the second Ceti in the chest. He grunted and blood ran down the spear as he fell forward. The third Ceti had got over his shock and turned for a death-look but he caught Jaecki's spear in his throat and fell with a gurgling sound that made me think of a sinking boat. The archway above Jaecki crackled and warped from his death-look gone astray. Wolf grabbed two dead Cetis by their feet and dragged them under the archway. I took the third. They left pools of blood behind that blotted out some of the sidewalk lights. "See how easily the pigs die?" Wolf gloated. He yanked out the spears and handed me one. "Only because of your power," Jaecki said. Her face was pale as she stared at the dead Cetis. "It will serve us better when we reach the booster." Wolf handed her the other spear. We encountered a few ships. But their drunken occupants would not have noticed us if we had been sitting next to them. So we had no further trouble. IF Wolf stopped before an immense cube-shaped building in the middle of an open square. It had no lights, but, was decorated with small cubes jutting from its walls. He put his hands on the glossy black metal door. It was the only metal I had seen in the city and I knew it had never been mined on Earth. 'This is it!" Wolf whispered, running his palms across the door. "Are you sure?" "Yes. This is where the booster is housed, Jon." There was a circular dial with numbers on the door. Wolf turned it both way but nothing happened. We pushed, then pried with our slate knives, but the door wouldn't budge. We circled the building, prying and testing, but could find no entrance. Wolf looked up at the sheer wall and tentatively gripped a cube. I knew what he was thinking and glanced at Jaecki. She was staring at the building and biting her lip. # lyr # use standing here looking," I said lightly, and wiped my hands on my leggings. Jaecki and I tied our spears around our waists and let them dangle. I began to climb and felt the cube edges dig into my moccasins. Like flies we scaled the wall. I steeled myself against looking down and fought the rising panic in my throat. But my hand shook from one cube to the other, and I was nearer to heaven than I would have liked. I heard the hum of a car. A few seconds later it glided by and we froze. 'That was close," I muttered. But the humming grew louder as the car circled back and approached. I saw one of the Cetis point at us. A police car! I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for eternity. It didn't come and I opened them to find smoke curling against the dome roof of the city. I glanced at Wolf. "Glad I took you along." We reached the roof and scrambled onto it, for the moment too drained to continue. Jaecki looked haggard. The hair over her forehead was wet. I brushed it back and she smiled half-heartedly. "We're almost there now, Jon." I nodded and wondered if Gray Wolf or I could protect her from what lay ahead. I prayed for a way into that damn building. I didn't think I could make the climb down. Wolf found the entrance -- a narrow stairway under a hatch. He led the way. He paused at metal doors on each landing, shook his head and continued down. Someone was singing. It sounded like the high-pitched screech of an untuned violin. An old Ceti, in coarse blue clothes, with wrinkled folds in his sagging jowls, was walking up toward us. We watched him put his hand over a small yellow light on the door of the landing beneath us. The door slid back silently and he entered. Then it closed. We looked at each other and continued down. We must have been below street level when Wolf stopped abruptly at a landing. He put one hand on the metal door and nodded slowly. "It's in there." My heart jumped as he covered the red light on the door and it slid back. There was a hallway on the other side and a booming noise that pounded through me. The beat of the city's heart, I thought. Pumping power to all the many parts. We walked through the hallway and came out on a circular balcony overlooking a rotunda. A huge machine towered in its center, protected by a great glass dome. Through the glass I saw a maze of wires and coils, networks of glossy black metal. The noise was deafening. Five Cetis were below. One sat at a table, punching buttons on a smaU panel. Two were at a metal wall of dials and knobs, checking each one and writing on clipboards. The other two were uniformed and sat at a table on the far side of the machine, playing a game with disks floating between them. the machine. "That must be -- " I didn't have time to finish. His eyes were narrowed, his face as taut as drawn leather. He stared at the booster with a lifetime of hate and frustration showing in the lines of his face. We went back to the hallway. There Wolf gave us instructions for the attack. We padded quietly to the lower landing and opened the door. Jaecki sneaked up on the Ceti at the desk, spear held high. I crouched and pointed mine at the closer of the two who were checking dials. I watched him turn a dial and stare t the numbers above it. Wolf came up beside me and suddenly the third Ceti faded. Smoke, billowed up. I leaped as my Ceti twisted around and dropped his bo. I plunged the spear into his stomach and rolled. His scream was lost in the booster's noise as he clawed at the spearhead. Jaecki was on her Ceti. Her spear stuck out of his shoulder as he twisted in agony and tried to turn. Wolf yelled for her to move back. She did not hear him but fought the Ceti from behind, trying to reach her knife. I pulled out an arrow, strung it and fired. His pink mouth trickled blood as he went down with his chair. Suddenly there was fire in my leg. Searing pain tore through me. I screamed and clutched my thigh as smoke rose. Wolf had killed my dying Ceti, but not before the Ceti's death-look had burned me. I staggered to my feet. The legging still IF smoldered around the blackened wound. The two uniformed Cetis had run from behind the booster. One went up in smoke. My vision blurred as I loosed an arrow at the second one, and I only caught him in the leg. He pulled the lever of a red box on the wall before Jaecki's arrow killed him. Behind us some gauges smoldered from his last desperate death-look. From somewhere in the building we heard the wail of the Cetis' alarm system. "Now the game's up!" I called. Wolf turned his attention to the booster. He clenched his fists on the glass dome. His lips were drawn back and his chest heaved with effort. The glass began to warp. "Lock the balcony door!" he yelled over his shoulder. Jaecki ran up the hall stairs, came out on the balcony and fitted her spear through the handle of the metal door. Then she went over the rail, jumped and rolled. I felt relief as she got to her feet spryly. She had not hurt herself. There was one entrance on this floor, a massive pair of metal doors that were probably invulnerable to the look. I limped over and bolted both doors, then leaned against the wall, feeling nauseous from pain. Wolf had melted a hole through the glass dome, but his power had little effect on the machinery. He shoved his arm through the opening, trying to reach the guts of the mechanism. He managed to hook one finger around a looped wire and yanked it out. The booster never missed a beat. My heart sank. We were so close... I was breathing heavily and it was hard to keep my vision clear. I heard Cetis banging on the doors and screaming. The way they hit the doors, I knew there were many of them. I looked at Jaecki, so pale and frightened, and wanted to cry. Wolf came over. "The doors won't hold much longer." he said. He held Jaecki's shoulders. "Jaecki, I still think I can destroy the booster before they get in. But I need your help." She looked numb, but nodded. Tears welled in her eyes. Wolf hugged her and stroked her hair. "They'll remember us, I can promise you that." "If she stands aside, maybe they won't kill her," I said.  "And what will they do to her if she lives?" "Wolf, you'd sacrifice your own mother to destroy that damn booster." Jaecki pulled away from him and touched my arms with her hands. "It's all right, Jon." Her face was tear-stained. "Wolf needs me and I want to help." I took a deep breath and nodded. "Sure. If we have to go, let's take the damn thing with us!" Wolf told us his plan, then went back to the booster. Jaecki and I stood by the doors, ready to unlock them at his signal. The Cetis were battering them hard. The doors rattled each time they were hit. Wolf stood directly in front of the booster, making sure that the hole could be seen from the doors. Then he began burning it out larger. He was using himself as bait. I had to admire his courage. He lifted his arm for the signal -- a lone figure, framed by that hellish machine. I prayed I'd have the courage to see it through as I gripped the bolts. Wolf dropped his hand. I took an unsteady breath and released the bolts. Jaecki unlocked her door. Her eyes were on Wolf as the Cetis poured in, screaming their rage. A door slammed into me and I feU. A few of them rolled over me. There were twenty, thirty, scrambling through the doors. I watched Wolf step in front of the hole in the glass. Behind the amused grin he wore for the Cetis I saw a look of quiet satisfaction as they used their death-look on him in sheer panic. He was gone. I was overwhelmed by a crushing sense of loss. Jaecki had found her way to me and I reached out desperately for her to touch her one last time. My hands fumbled through smoke. But the concerted death-looks of the Cetis had accomplished what one death-look could not. The booster crackled and sizzled. Coils burned, wires smoked and twisted like steaming snakes. The deafening beat faltered, receded to a shrill Wne. Sparks spewed, followed by flames. The lights dimmed. I blinked, but they faded completely and I realized that Wolf had been right. The Cetis' total power source had been wiped out! Only the sparkling flames of the booster lit the Cetis with flashes of red light that pierced the black smoke and caught them in crumbled positions, moaning with their hands over their eyes. Then a cry of despair filled the hall, a wail of helplessness that tore from their throats and echoed across the city. Our men would be starting for the settlements. I watched through the thickening haze and with a strange sense of detachment as the Cetis turned on me. Their shrieking lowered to snarls of pure hatred. I took out my knife and waited. All Jaecki and I had to do was cut a couple of them. The rest turned and fled. Without their booster, the pigs had no strengtk and certainly no bravery. I hope it is a beginning for my race.  IF E very character in any piece of fiction worth the reading partakes of the character of the author. The character may be an obverse of its creator and may not represent hisher true beliefs, of course, or he may represent only a passing interest of the writer, even one shaped by the storY at hand. But inevitably he grows within the limits and the emotional framework of the writer. However, there is one vital difference between a fictional character and hisher creator. Once set upon paper and allowed to go out into the world in print, the character is fixed. But the writer's mind continues to other limits-broader, we hope -- and often to another emotional framework. Writers change, as do other independent thinkers. Once upon a time, back in #, a comparatively young writer named Robert A. Heinlein set down the story of an almost immortal man whom he named Lazarus Long. Lazarus lived in the novel, Methuselah s Children, which turned out to be the final story placed directly in what came to be called Heinlein's Future History Series. (Two novelettes related later events, but "Universe" and its sequel were outside the regular world-line of the history.) Yet the chart of that series, when published by John W. Campbell, indicated a still later novel to come and many expected that the long-lived Lazarus Long must appear in that. Rumors appeared now and then that Heinlein was writing that novel and recently the rumors were finally confinned. Heinlein was writing it-and it has appeared. The ultimate novel of the series is now available: Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein (Doubleday, #). The subtitle identifies it as "The Lives of Lazarus Long." Well, thirty-two years have passed since Lazarus Long first appeared and the writer is about twice as old as he was when the character was first given birth. Most younger writers in any branch of fiction -- and particularly in science fiction -- write about the individual and his struggles. Heinlein did so more strongly than most of us. He championed a Korzybskian rationality of individual rights and of societies designed to permit the utmost individual freedom and privacy. In a way, Lazarus Long spelled out such freedom. He was one man alone. While other long-lived peoples of the Howard Families banded together he roamed by himself, asking no help and taking the world as he found it. And when the Howard Families collapsed before the pressures of the short-lived, it was Lazarus who stole a starship and rescued them -- and kept rescuing them by his individual strength until they could return to be accepted on Earth. like most other writers, however, Heinlein has altered his emphasis since that time. Older authors often tend to write with special insight about human interrelationships and the difficult problems of cooperation. This generally means that concepts of personal privacy are modified in favor of people's living more richly together. it would be totally ridiculous to expect to find this new novel picking up the same old Lazarus Long, unchanged after thirty-two years. The only way Heinlein could have ven us essentially the same Lazarus would have been to fake his own attitudes -- something he refuses to do. Besides, in our first meeting with Lazarus, he was # years old, as best I can figure it -- sort of in the bloom of a feisty, lusty youth. In this novel we meet him when he is # years of age -- since this takes place beginning in #. He's old and he's tired-in fact, he's trying to end his own life when he is discovered and given rejuvenation treatments against his wishes. A suicidally tired man isn't exactly the Lazarus Long we knew before. Ihis is a man who has been all over the galaxy and has seen and done everything for more than two millennia. Nothing has any zest for him -- nothing is new any more. Most of the book is built around two devices arising from that basic situation. The first consists of anecIF dotes from his past which are transcribed into a computer, both to give him something to do and to record the life of the oldest living human being. The second is made up of events growing out of the efforts to re-arouse his desire to live. The book contains enough pages (about #) to include minor bits, such as extracted cute, telling, or preachy sayings of his. The first anecdote deals with a man who was too efficient for his own good. The second is a brief account (amidst much other talk) of a time when Lazarus was running a house of prostitution oji Mars (rather sentimental in its totality) with girls whose hearts were golden. These are followed by a couple of long novelettes. One deals with Lazarus as the owner of a spaceship that trades among the stars -- Lazarus is here seen as a sharp operator who takes his chances for profit. He buys a couple of slaves. The story evolves around his civilizing them, his troubles with the job until they settle down -- more or less-in the restaurant business. The other is a rather nice frontier story -- and perhaps the most natural love story Heinlein has written. Lazarus has been acting as the banker on a world where he's trying to get a new human colony started. He's about to leave when he finds himself adopting a daughter and has to stick around. She falls in love with him and together they set out as man and wife into the outback of the planet, to face true pioneering. It makes a good tale, all in all, but I'm afraid it would be less than fresh enough for even a Pioneer Tales magazine, if such existed still. The one angle of freshness here, however, is important to Lazarus and to his story. The woman refuses ever to accept the chance for rejuvenation, even though she knows he is semi-immortal and she must die of old age while he is stai young. And because of this, for the first time Lazarus learns to love fully. (There are a few science fiction bits in the monsters they face, but the story really isn't science fiction. The nicest part of it all is the way Heinlein handles a mutated mule.) A number of small bits scattered throughout the first # pages of the book sew up most of the threads left over from the previous Future History stories. You can discover what happened tg "Slipstick" Libby, Lazarus' best friend, if you are interested -- it's a rather nice tale. Also what became of the aliens on the planets met in the earlier Lazarus Long novel and what happened to the survivors of "Universe" -- if you don't skip ovei: such details in your reading. Heinlein plays fair about such matters -- but barely. The background for what goes on in the universe of # is sketched in, but with none of Heinlein's old delight in building a complex but lived-in matrix for his stories. Men have, of course, settled the worlds around other stars. Strangely, they don't seem to have found many worlds or races inimical to them. In the earlier novel the Howard Families visited two other worlds and both were hostile. The inference was that many worlds beyond Earth held dangers like the Jockerai and the Little People -- but in this volume we don't hear of them. They don't serve the story here, so they don't appear. What we now have is a love situation. Long before, Lazarus had led the Howard Families to a new world where he had set up a governing body, following rules he thought might ensure some freedom. The government is in the hands of a chairman pro tern, since Lazarus -- as oldest or Senior-will always preside when present. When the Families find hjm dying they grow deeply concerned, feeling that his death may curtail their own longevity. They coddle him with a computer that talks to him and every other sort of life-giving distraction -- mostly female. Sex and love -- or sexual love or loveyou-all sex -- are the chief means of rehabilitation. (There seemed no dearth of this before -- every woman has always automatically wanted the longest-lived Lazarus to make love to her and give her a child at once. Their hunger may have been reasonable when longevity was new and uncertain in the Howards -- but surely in two millennia of its extension they should have gained assurance.) So we get oodles of loving talk -- everybody joins in. There is such a plethora of "dears" that I had to train my eyes not to read them-after which the conversations read much better. Some endearments proved inescapable. After a girl named Hamadryad (sic) had been Hamadearest and Hamadarling for a while, I settled on Hamadrip in -- perhaps unfair-self-defense. Harsh Mistress a rather good expression of human love and discovered a great deal genuinely loving about the Rolling Stone family. But in this novel, unfortunately, I can only assume that the endearments were meant to show the growth" of real affection. They did not work for me as intended -- their users struck me as people who knew nothing of real complex human love trying to mimic it. After a major upheaval occurs on the ruling planet Lazarus and the main characters set up again on another world to carry on. And here was the chance for one splendid example of the fire and chutzpah (a marvelous form of hubris) of Lazarus IF to take over. We learn that he outfoxed and outbluffed the overpowering female Howard behind alt the trouble and got the others away by his old talents. But we are only given this in flashback and some conversation -- as if the feat were of no importance. What seems important from then on is the building of a kind of commune of love around Lazarus. Marvelous things happen -- all designed to give him more love or sex or both. He acquires -- and makes love to -- two clone sisters and a computer converted into a human female -- never missing an endearment. (He even "deared" the computer when it was only a machine.) Finally the gang comes up with a scheme to end Lazarus' ages-old ennui by giving him something new. (By then he hardly seems to be planning to give up living-he seems generally to be quite pleased with his house, houris, habits and harangues.) A simple way to travel back through time is discovered and he goes back to the past. He picks #, a few years after he was born, and goes back where he can actually see again his original family and review his faded memories of them. He meets his mother and father, his grandfather -- whom he remembers best -- and even himself, a rather unpleasant little kid. And he finds himself falling in love with his own mother in a wild Freudian Oedipus situation. As a result of that, he gets trapped into the dirtiness, ugliness and senselessness of World War I. This doesn't read like science fiction, even though it could only happen in science fiction. The story here becomes two-fold. Part deals with a rich paradox of human emotions. Another part is a nostalgic looking back (for the reader) to a time when things were simpler, when the founding values of the country were clearer and the virtues surer than now. I don't believe in the above as reality from my knowledge of people who lived through those days. But as a reader, I can't help believing in this dream of the past as something to cherish for a while. I found the last quarter of the book by far the best. Here I found love and sexual drives that I could accept and see working beyond bedroom endearments. This part is called Da Capo, the title given in the" Future History chart to the whole final novel. Interesting, but I don't think the section was the plot considered on the chart. The style of the book varies widely. Many of the incidents and particularly that final quarter of the book consist of what we might find in some of our favorite Heinlein -- straight, direct, with the events and the dialogue moving together so well that we never notice which is which. But a great deal of the rest of the books is interminably talky, loose and essentially uneventful -- that is, events may be discussed, rather than lived. In those sections, the characters aU blend together into an amorphous jell of people who seem goody rather than good and strung rather than strong. trying to evaluate this novel as honestly as I can and it hasn't been easy. It stiU isn't. I can't honestly recommend it, because it's both too complex and too diverse in its effectiveness for a simple recommendation. Neither can I join, with some of the disappointed who expected to rediscover the pure old-time Heinlein, in condemning the book. I can only try to prepare the readers to expect what I think they will find. Don't look for much of the Lazarus Long we met in another tale. Some of him is here (albeit partly back-stage), but that lad was long ago and in another tale. This is not the Lazarus Long who took hold of # aimless people -- but the man who was originally named Woodrow Wilson Smith and has been taken over by the souls and lives of many other people. Don't look for the detailed worlds that Heinlein has built for us in the past -- those exterior, consistent, marvelous worlds and social structures. The book deals mostly with structured interiors and goes little beyond what we know. And don't look for marvelous new science and developments in the future more than # years ahead, because they are only incidental to what Heinlein's interests are here. Do expect to find a lot of "philosophical" talk piled on top of the mere attempt of people in the story to get along with each other -- and be prepared not to skip it, because buried in it may well be the details of the Future History you wanted to discover. I could wish, perhaps, that Heinlein had written a novel called Da Capo back sometime around -- say#, when he was stiU close enough to the previous novel and the man who wrote it. And that he had now written another story to fit his current interests, without being at all entangled with old bits. But perhaps my judgment and my wishes don't matter in this case. I suspect that Heinlein remains a man too important to our field for the readers to miss this book. So read it -- now or when it appears in soft covers -- but please read it without expectations of straight continuity from what happened thirty-two years earlier. If you want to avoid disappointment.  IF The strangers came with gifts -- but what did they propose to take away? trying to steady his nerves and dispel his sense of persecution when a phone call was put through directly to his desk. He listened for a while, unusually silent, eyes darting about. Then he barked a few short questions into the phone before handing it over to me. "What's this all about, Mr. President?" I asked. His mouth twitched. "I'm not sure," he said. His brow was damp with cold sweat. "He claims to be General Mackay." I took the phone and listened. It was General Mackay, all right. I recognized the voice. He was calling from the Ice River Air Base in Montana and he swore an extraterrestrial spaceship had landed. I began to snicker. "Is this a practical joke?" The President grabbed hold of my shirt collar. "I won't be laughed at," he muttered into my ear. Between the President complaining and this Air brass spouting about creatures from outer space I nearly slipped my moorings. "For God's sake. General, what do 'they look like?" "Well, I not only saw one," he said, "I've talked to it. It has a kind of luminescent glow but no body that I can see." At this point the President snatched the phone from my hand and slammed it back on the cradle. "What do you make of all this?" he asked, eyes big as silver dollars. "I think the general's brains have boiled over. The Air Force has been under a terrible strain lately, what with not being able to drop nuclear bombs. The general must have broken under the tension." "I'm frightened," said the President. "Maybe that was the general calling and maybe it was a Sovcom agent trying to make me panic. I want you to go to Ice River and find out. Then come right back here and report in person." Hearing the edge to his voice I didn't wait for further instructions. Three hours later I reached the Air Force base at Ice River. General Mackay was waiting there for me, creases missing from his trousers, cap awry, eyes numb with excitement. On our way to the landing site he outlined what had happened. "At # this morning a fireball was observed about fifty miles from here near Pioneer Falls. The local sheriff, after he'd received a dozen phone calls, decided to investigate. He drove his station wagon all over the terrain for an hour before he sighted this glowing oval disk in a frozen cow pasture." "How big a disk?" "About five, maybe six feet high," said the general. "The sheriff approached it warily, sniffing fire and brimstone, he says, and holding on to a small pocket Bible that he keeps in his breast pocket. He keeps it there so it will be over his heart. Bibles have been known to stop bullets, you see -- "  "Goddamn it, General," I snapped, "can't you cut out all the details and get down to the raw meat?" The general flushed and resumed his story. IF "The sheriff heard what sounded like a human voice coming from inside the disk and decided that he'd gone as far as he was going to. He hustled back to his car, radioed the State Police. They notified the Air Force at Ice River. I was roused out of bed, pretty damn sore and ready to bust the idiot who had concocted this insane story." "And then you found out it wasn't insane?" "Come see for yourself," said the general. "I've got a jeep ready to take you to the landing site." "What about the spaceship?" "There's a guard surrounding it. Our visitor is now waiting patiently to talk to you. I got word to him that you're the personal representative of the President." That was all Mackay would tell me. "I want your impressions to be unbiased," he said. when we pulled up to the cow pasture where the alleged space vehicle had landed. There was a peculiar odor in the air and there was something sitting in the pasture. It was barely visible in the moonlight, just an amorphous grayish-white mass. The military guard parted and we drove up slowly, rightlo the edge of the ship. General Mackay stepped outside and called a greeting. Just ahead of us a flickering glow appeared. "That's our guest," whispered the general. "My name is Wade Holcomb," I called out to no one in particular, feeling like an idiot. "I represent our President and I wish to talk to you in his name." The glow seemed to hover and then moved closer to me. My eye caught a flash of metal; I stepped back. The general dropped his hand reassuringly to my shoulder. "What the hell is that?" I asked. "Just, a box," said the general. "Don't panic." "I have come in peace," said a soft voice. "This box harbors a transducer which enables me to communicate with you. By profession I am a Merchant and my four colleagues within the vessel are sales assistants. We have come from a planet of the star which you call Mekta in the constellation Ursa Major. Our sole purpose is commercial in nature. We wish to exchange goods." I began to laugh. Tension, I guess. "Maybe they expect to buy America for beads and trinkets," I niuttered to General Mackay. He simply shrugged. Turning back to the box, I said, "I'm not certain we have anything in our country to interest you, but I know one thing for sure. You may be the answer to our prayers." After more talk we agreed to arrange a meeting with the President and perhaps his Secretary of Commerce. Then I flew right back to the White House. The President jumped out of his seat when he saw me. "Are they for real?" he asked. His fingernails seemed to have edged down to the skin line. I grinned at him. "I have something to tell you that should please you, sir. It occurs to me that with the help of our outer-space friends we may have the answer to the nuclear stalemate. What a great stroke of luck that they landed on our side of the world and not the other! It puts us in position to leapfrog over the entire balance of power." The President's eyes, normally oyster-like in appearance, gleamed for the first time in months. "Maybe," he said softly, his throat muscles working as though a savory dinner were being heaped in front of him. "But before I raise my hopes let me eyeball this planetary freak." "He may be freaklike in aspect," I warned, "but he makes a lot of sense. We'd better proceed cautiously in our dealings with him. In my opinion he and his buddies really have come for purposes of trade. I'm just wondering what we can offer them in return." "I'm on my toes," said the President. "Whatever they try, I won't lower my guard." HE arrival of the space visitors was kept absolutely secret. Rumors did float about the country and all were denied vigorously by authoritative spokesmen. One persistent newspaper columnist found himself in protective custody, unable to draw bail, which seemed to have a salutary effect on other journalists. In the meantime I was grappling with the problem of how to smuggle the Merchant of Mekta into the White House. After much discussion it was finally decided, instead, to take the President to the spaceship in Pioneer Falls. He was in knots all through the flight and required constant reassurance that the Merchant would not be a threat to his life. As he repeated the same questions over and over again my gpod humor wore thin. But when we landed the President seemed to pull himself together. He said nothing at all as we drove to the cow pasture and when the spaceship finally materialized before his eyes he nodded confidently as though all his preconceptions had been confirmed. "I want Wade, General Mackay IF and myself, nobody else, to talk to this creature," he said. "But see that we're closely guarded." There was some grumbling among the military staff members but no dent on the issue. The introduction to the Merchant went off well. The President flashed all of his citylawyer charm, even forcing his dewlaps back into a semblance of a smile. He welcomed the Merchant and his aides with a flowery speech hearts brim over" and "it is a rare pleasure indeed." "And now," he concluded,, "we must come down to the mundane matters that concern our little world. What did you have in mind when you talked about trading?" "It is somewhat difficult to say," answered the Merchant. "We are an advanced people. We can fabricate objects and machinery of the greatest complexity. Our community has no material needs. What we are looking for is that which is unique-one-of-a-kind art objects, animals or even handmade jewelry. In other words, we seek what we cannot duplicate. We are most inquisitive, always thirsting for novelties." "So are we," said the President. "We're pretty clever ourselves and I'm sure we make some unusual gadgets that you'd want to take home with you. But what can you give us in return?" "As an example," said the Merchant, "let me show you a unique material." A long glistening tube seemed to emerge from nowhere and flowed toward us. "Pick it up, Mr. Holcomb," said the Merchant. I did. It was a transparent material, hard to the touch and light as a feather. I passed it over to the President, who seemed quite unimpressed. V "We can supply you with unlimited quantities of this material in any desired shape," said the Merchant. "It has some quite desirable properties. It resists impact well, is chemically nonreactive and absolutely leakproof. You may find it ideal for construction purposes." "Don't you have any weapons?" asked the President. There was a pronounced silence from the Merchant. Then: "We will not deal in weapons under any circumstances." "Why not?" asked the" President. I tugged at his sleeve. "Mr. President, let me talk to you a minute." "Not just yet," he said. "I want to pursue this weapons question." I ignored protocol and whispered into his ear. "Don't you see? This material he's showing us may be bomb-resistant. Suppose it's impervious to nuclear weapons? It would break the nuclear deadlock!" "Too iffy," said the President. "Let's try it my way first." "Please," I begged. "Give it a chance." The President pondered a moment and then, though reluctantly, he acceded. I turned to the Merchant. "Would you object if we suspended our talks for a few days? We'd like to conduct some engineering tests on this material you've shown us." "By all means," said the Merchant, and after some formal expressions of good will we parted. T he test results were exciting beyond belief. The material was impervious even to nuclear explosions. When I brought this information to the President he finally got my point. "If we build above-ground shelters of this stuff," he mused, "we would be on the verge of permanent peace for the first time in the history of mankind. I could go on the air and issue an ultimatum to our enemies without fear of retaliation. By God, Wade, you were absolutely right! This stuff may be better than any weapon he could have given us." "I don't like to be a wet blanket, Mr. President," I said, "but we've got to handle this point with great delicacy. If the Merchant gets wind of what we plan to do, he may not go along with us." "None of that," said the President peevishly. "Either he'll go along with us or his ship will never leave the ground. I'll make sure of that." "I don't see how," I started to say, but knowing the President I kept my mouth shut. When I returned to the cow pasture to tell the Merchant of Mekta that we were delighted with his material, I brought along plans for an above-ground structure capable of housing ventilating machinery and a large population. The Merchant seemed to be giving considerable thought to the plans. I had to wait fifteen minutes for a response. "What do you plan to do with these structures?" "Alleviate our severe housing shortage," I said. "Much of our population is still inadequately housed." "What you say is probably true," said the Merchant. "And yet I know enough about your society to suspect that what you seek from these structures is some military advantage." I sighed. "Such advantage would be purely coincidental." "We are a pacific people," said the Merchant. "Even in self-defense IF we never resort to violence. Perhaps that makes us unduly suspicious of you. What is needed is a gesture of trust in one another. Therefore jf you solemnly promise that your application will be solely peaceful, our bargain can be completed." "A sacred promise," I said, know-. ing full well that the ends we sought were peaceful. T he President was elated at the news and rubbed his hands joyfully. "Time is the important factor here," he said. "We've got to get one of these shelters fully equipped. We must find out for sure if people can live in it." Which was exactly what we did. The Merchant furnished us with a nearly weightless, translucent tunnel section capable of housing twenty thousand people. He even provided an ingenious, atomically fueled pump mechanism to circulate and at the same time purify the atmosphere within the chamber. We gathered up four hundred volunteers to stay in the structure for a twoweek period. The test proved a smashing success. We placed an order with the Merchant for ten thousand units, in return giving him credits for an equivalent value in American goods. He and his assistants set to work at once. Week after week, fifty fully equipped units issued from his vessel and were immediately towed by plane to different parts of the country. Our entire administrative machinery was put into high gear, and food, clothing, recreational supplies, everything we could think of, went into the shelters. Apparently this flurry of activity went unnoticed by our enemies-a tribute to the effectiveness of our superlative counterespionage services. From time to time, a vehicle would "lose" itself in the vicinity of one of our new installations, but always an alert guard would direct it out of the neighborhood. At the end of eight months, each of the new units was fully operational and a full session of the National Security Council was called. After more than three days of discussion the Council decided to publicize our new posture. Both the national and international press were alerted. All diplomats of the United Nations and all accredited ambassadors were sent engraved invitations to the unusual dedication ceremony to be held at Pioneer Falls. Just before the ceremony, the President flew out to thank the Merchant and give him a list of items from which repayment would be made. I started to tell the Merchant, in terms as diplomatic as I could muster, what was now afoot. But the President brushed me aside. He detailed exactly what he now planned to do and then waited for the Merchant's reply. It was not long in coming. "As I feared," said the Merchant. "You never meant to keep your promise." "But that's not true," said the President. "You, sir, seem to have missed my point. We don't seek a nuclear war. We want a peaceful world for all of us. And now we're in a position to enforce that peace." "On what terms?". "Let me say something," I blurted. "Our neighbors across the sea are unreliable, untrustworthy. They understand only the force of arms. We, on the other hand, are good people. We are not malicious or vindictive. We covet no territory, we threaten no lives. In fact we want everyone to have a full life, a free life. Our hands and our hearts are clean. Would you give the Sovcoms the advantage over us?" "We never intended to change a balance of power," said the Merchant. "It is completely foreign to our code of ethics. And I am seriously disturbed that you should have used us in this way." "I don't mean to be cynical or crassly commercial" I said, "but you still have a considerable payment coming from us. Do you remember?" "I haven't forgotten," said the Merchant. President was now in his  dress rehearsal. The preliminary reading of his speech was delivered with earnestness and in a room chilled to forty degrees Fahrenheit to slow down his continual facial sweating. The room itself was in our new shelter, the one to be dedicated to peace. One by one our military men marched in, resplendent in full dress uniform with all battle ribbons neatly displayed. A chaplain of each religion including Islam was also present. At the hand signal of the communications director, the breathtaking ceremony began. Before the entire nation and the rest of the world the President acknowledged the presence of extraterrestrial visitors. There was a good deal of agitation outside the shelter where the diplomatic corps was gathered. The President then described in measured vrds the nature of the shelters the Merchant had built for us. When the President was finished he accepted a bottle of chilled champagne from one of his aides and smashed it against a wall. A ribbon was cut, and then the President, at the head of a beaming array of military figures and cabinet members, led them on a tour of the IF shelter. He pointed out every detail of the living quarters, the library that included all the current bestsellers, the immaculate washrooms... When the tour was completed, the presidential party turned to leaveand found the outer doors could not be opened. I heard nervous chuckles as I approached the doors myself and activated each of the electrical failsafe interlocks. None responded. There was a scuffling outside and a flurry of shots, then silence. At that point, over the community speakers in the shelter came the soothing voice of the Merchant. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "There is no danger to anyone." Three of the military aides began to batter at the doors. General Mackay stopped them, yelling, "The shelter is in motion!" "General Mackay is right," confirmed the Merchant's voice. "You are now being towed by my vessel. Rest assured that when we reach Mekta you will enjoy unending ease and comfort." There was a last desperate chance and the President took it. "What about fair play?" he cried. "You say you don't want us to have a military advantage over the other side. But now you strip our country of its President and military leaders." A hush followed. It was as if the Merchant were marshaling his thoughts. "The self-deception of your culture is absolutely staggering," said the Merchant. "At the very moment we landed in your nation our sister ship came down in the icy wastes of the other hemisphere. The measures taken there to keep our landing secret were apparently as effective as your own. And of course, the leaders of that region claimed to be eager for housing, as you did. It should come as no surprise to you, then, to learn that they now have an equal number of shelters and that at this very moment a goodsized contingent of their own military leaders, and their Premier, are also en route to Mekta." General Mackay took off his braided cap and wiped his forehead. "God help us, we're his prisofters. "Prisoners?" said the Merchant. "None of you are prisoners. You will live in habitats as much like your own as possible. And your freedom to roam those habitats will be unlimited. Our acquisitions are always treated in this way." "Acquisitions?" I yelped. "For what?" "For the Mekta Zoo," said the Merchant softly. I would not care to repeat what the president said.  T he Rangaporn of Czambozat would have been a spectacular, even an awe-inspiring sight to anyone who ever actually saw it clearly. Of course, that seems a paradox, and somewhat ridiculous in the bargain: the Rangaporn was easily nine feet tall, vast and wide as well. It should have loomed conspicuously even in a pea-soup fog. But people see what they expect to see, and naturally nobody ever expected to see anything remotely like the Rangaporn. Yet it did walk the roads and was often visible to hunters and fishermen in the area of the Weltang Woods. The point was, it always happened to be far enough away for its size not to seem exceptional. And it always appeared to be just turning away or walking in the opposite direction, so that its face could not actually be seen even when its body was glimpsed. Just a big, roughly dressed fellow, probably old, shuffling along with his head down. Oh, the Rangaporn was good at creating illusions like these. They furnished amusement and helped a small bit to keep back the loneliness. For the Rangaporn was lonely. It was tempted, often, to show itself to an intelligent-appearing woods prowler and try to establish communication. But it knew that it had never had a poorer idea. The Rangaporn could peek into minds and saw how irrational, how violently reactive this species that called itself man could be. Forty times this planet had made the trip around its primary since the Rangaporn had sought haven on it. Not exactly by choice. The Rangaporn had been a victim of one of the rarest phenomena in galactic travel -- a space bounce. To be sure, it knew what had happened. It suspected that somewhere -- and with certain data it would not be too difficult to calculate whereanother citizen of Czambozat was sitting on an alien world, bounced out of its travel channel by its brush with the Rangaporn's subspace vehicle. And, like the Rangaporn, there it would sit until some solution occurred to it -- or to the Rangaporn. If one of them could get back into the travel channel the bounce could be calculated, and the other readily discovered. The Rangaporn hoped that the other castaway was busy. At least as busy as the Rangaporn itself. The plant was compatible. The oxygen atmosphere was pleasant. The Rangaporn could, in an emergency, live without it, but this place was homelike. The Rangaporn's own planet had an oxygen atmosphere. Over the years the Rangaporn had made itself comfortable. To have built an extensive shelter would have been no great task but it would have been conicuous, and sooner or later men would have discovered it. IF However, in the depths of the Weltang Woods the Rangaporn had found what it wanted. There were caverns under the highest wooded hill. These the Rangaporn had detected by resonator. Then with its energy bar it had carefully cut entrances into either side of the hill. A great boulder blocked the living cavern that even if the outer entrances were found the cave would seem to end at the boulder. In this cavern the Rangaporn had set up and reconditioned the subspace vehicle. It had reorganized everything that the space bounce had disturbed. It did itself well in the matter of food, utilizing the local biomass and acquiring its own special stores for the time when it would leave this planet and reme its journey homeward. The Rangaporn left no evidence of its feeding. Its matter converter made good use of fallen tree branches and leaf piles and the myriad small animals that lived ih and on them. These the converter resolved into basic carbohydrates, lipids and proteins, then reassembled into tasty complexes that the Rangaporn particularly enjoyed. Indeed, the Rangaporn spent much time devising and compounding new ways to prepare foods, subjecting them to low heat after the manner of the local inhabitants. In effect, with time on its great gnarled hands, it became a gourmet cook. It often wondered how its efforts compared with the concoctions that the natives made and seemed to prize and thrive on. It had sampled some of these when they had come to hand. During the warmer times of the year, during the plant growth seasons, people often picnicked in the Weltang Woods. Food was one of the great concerns on these occasions. The Rangaporn, watching from concealment, had no great difficulty in collecting samples of various comestibles, which it tried later in the privacy of the home cavern. S O it was familiar with pumpkin pie (it approved), roasts of beef (excellent!), chocolate cake (somewhat cloying), and baked ham (perhaps its choice of anything it had tasted). Still, it felt that its own creations were probably superior and rather chafed at the fact that there was no opportunity to have people test them. Concealment continued to be a necessity, if its life were to remain peaceful. And the best way to remain concealed was to give no evidence that anything alien existed in the depths of the Weltang Woods. But as it improvised one tasty dish after another, the need for appreciation of its growing skill became almost greater than the need for concealment. Almost, but not quite. Finally it devised a small stratagem. Onto a platter that it had borrowed from a family outing some years before -- long enough before, it presumed, that the platter would not be recognized -- the Rangaporn placed a generous portion of one of its favorite concoctions, delicately scented, an appetizing green in color. The Rangaporn was partial to green. It waited in the vicinity of a favored picnicking spot on a day particularly conducive to these outdoor eating parties. Hypersensitive ears, reinforced with a special amplifier of the Rangaporn's own design, could readily keep track of every party in the Weltang Woods. And when a family -- father, mother, and three noisy children -- could be heard approaching its location, the Rangaporn left the platter on a large flat rock and retired to observe their reactions. Its great broad nose twitched in anticipation. It had no doubt that its contribution to the feast would be received with delight and appreciation. The screaming children, racing on ahead of their parents' more sedate pace, saw the platter first. "Shucks," the older boy said. "Somebody's already here! This is my extra special favorite place, too. Shucks!" "I don't see nobody," said his smaller brother. "Somebody just left a plate. See, the stuff looks all moldy." "Yeah," his brother agreed. "I bet it's been there , a couple of weeks -- maybe a month, even." "It's still warm." Their sister felt the platter with a pudgy, practical hand. She wrinkled her nose. "It's got a funny smell." The Rangaporn, watching from cover, was disappointed. Still, in all honesty, it knew what the problem was. These beings, even the small ones, responded favorably only to what they knew. Give them something different and they would reject it. Of course the Rangaporn was aware that human food did not resemble the mass on the platter. Yet the odor had received special care and the creation was even better than baked ham. But this, the Rangaporn realized, was its own point of view which the family evidently didn't share. So the Rangaporn watched without dismay when the mother scraped its offering from the platter, the better to examine the dish itself. "This looks like Molly Pickens' old china pattern," the woman said with interest. "She must have gone off and left it. Don't know how she could have, though. Since her kids are growh up she and Ed don't go picnicking no more." 'Take it by their house," the man suggested. "Likely somebody found it and has been using it." "I will." The woman scrubbed the IF dish with a paper towel and set it aside. "Wish I had dumped that stuff farther away. It smells terrible.". The Rangaporn looked on while they ate, memorizing the appearance and especially the odors of the food. Apparently this species associated the color green in protein masses with decay. Still, it noted, they ate green leaves with avidity. They called these a salad. The ham, of course, was the flesh of a native creature, treated with various seasonings and subjected to heat. The Rangaporn was undiscouraged, but its mettle was up. It was challenged. It knew that in nutritive value the foods it prepared were far superior to anything these beings ate. So it threw precaution to the winds. It would introduce members of the human race to some genuinely fine eating, no matter what would be required to persuade them to sample. Which showed that the Rangaporn had some traits that were closer to human than it would have cared to admit. No one particularly wishes to be equated with primitives. It put new biomass through the matter converter, sorted the nutritive elements into categories, isolated and balanced the thirty-two vitamin complexes it had determined to be vital to human well-being. These included seven that men apparently had never discovered. Then the difficult part began. The stuff had to be attractive to human eyes and titillating to human palates. S O, IN addition to cook and nutritionist the Rangaporn became an artist. With a pilfered baked ham before it, it built a duplicate from carefully compounded ingredients. It imitated the very grain of the meat. The properly placed bone was a masterpiece. And when the ham was baked and glazed with a carbohydrate far tastier than sugar, stippled with cloves that smelled like cloves but were subtly different, the Rangaporn knew that it had produced a creation that no human could turn from. It would be irresistible. It was familiar, and yet blended into it were delicate flavors no ham had ever had before. Rather than be obvious the Rangaporn chose another picnic spot on another day of the week. When a family finally approached, the Rangaporn remained until the last moment and with a tiny energy unit made sure that the offering was fragrant and piping hot. As usual the children came first. There were only two boys this time, somewhat older than the last had been. Indeed, the voice of the larger boy frequently broke from treble to bass as was apparently customary with the male of the species as it approached maturity. "Hey, look at this!" the big child rumbled, though the last word rose to a squeak. The ham sat on a great blue platter, surrounded by a delicate green garnish and giving off waves of delicious odor. The Rangaporn had taken no chances that the platter would be recognized. It had constructed the platter itself. It had even made the garnish. "Smells good." The smaller boy sniffed hungrily. "Hey Ma, look what somebody done left out here in the woods!" "Don't touch it!" The woman and the man came bustling up. The man carried a big picnic basket. The woman had wildflowers she had picked along the way. She always liked to have flowers on the picnic table. "What do you think, Henry?" They all stood around the flat rock, looking at that beautiful, delicioussmelling ham. "Meant for us all right," the man said. "Only thing is, do they mean us good or bad? Lot of people we know always use this old flat rock for a table." "Somebody's telling us something," the woman said. The man sniffed. "Sure smells wonderful," he said. "Never figured any ham could smell better'n yours, Bessie, but this'n comes close." They stood for another minute. then a grin creased the man's weather-beaten face. "Reckon that's it," he said. "Who bakes the best ham in this end of the county? Whose ham takes the blue ribbon at the fair every year?' "Ma's!" the boys said in unison. The man heaved the picnic basket up beside the ham. "That's what somebody's tellin' you, Bessie. She's givin' you fair warning that you ain't champion no more." He waved an arm. "Spread out, boys, and beat the bushes. This ham's still nice and hot. Whoever left it ain't far away." The boys obeyed with enthusiasm, but they had been assigned an impossible task. Huge and gnarled and broad though it was, the Rangaporn simply turned itself sideways, delicately adjusted the attention of the busy searchers, and somehow they overlooked it. In a few minutes they returned, panting and hungry, to the picnic spread out on the flat rock. The ham sat in the center. "They got away. Pa. Ain't nobody out there now. Are we going to at the ham?" "Might as weU," their father decided. "They left it for us. And Ma better know what she's up against at e fair, come fall." The Rangaporn had no fault to find with the reception its creation got this time. Everyone had secIF onds -- and thirds. The mound of crisp fried chicken that was to have been the feature of the feast went almost untouched. And the spoken compliments were as gratifying as the hearty eating. "I can't study out," the woman said, "just what makes it different. Some new herbs, most likely. The flavor isn't just from the way the meat's prepared. Never tasted anything exactly like it." "Tastes like I want more," the older boy said. He held out his paper plate. "Just one slice, Hank." He was Henry Junior, of course. "No sense making yourself sick. There'll be some with your eggs in the mornmg. Hank filled his mouth. "If I could find out who fixed this it'd help you out, wouldn't it, Ma?" "Don't talk with your mouth full, son. 'Course I'd like to know who baked the ham." "I'm a pretty good tracker," the boy boasted. "I can run'em down if anybody can." "Glad you think so well of yourself," his father said dryly. "Just let us know. Any time'll do." tolerant interest as the two boys ranged the woods after the bounteous meal. The younger one soon tired. He returned to the picnic site, where his mother sat nodding in her canvas chair and his father snored in the string hammock he had slung between two trees. "Hank thinks he's a Injun," the little boy said. "He ain't going to find nobody to track." He seated himself at the foot of a tree and began to practice mumblypegwith his new pocketknife. Presently he too slept, as people do on fine summer afternoons. The Rangaporn's hypersensitive hearing recorded the little boy's remark, though it was watching Hank's dogged search. It admired the persistence of the gangling, stringy redhead who probably should have been taking an afternoon nap himself. It seemed a shame that he shouldn't find anything at all. The Rangaporn acted on whim. It drifted like a shadow to a little glade in the path of the searching boy. In a bare spot it spread some dust smoothly, and then carefully planted one foot in the middle of it. As he crossed the glade Hank somehow did not notice the Rangaporn standing behind a tree. But the dust patch caught the boy's eye. In a moment he was looking down at the fresh track, vast and broad, each of the seven toes perfectly outlined. It pleased the Rangaporn that there was no panic in Hank's active mind. Instead, there was a steady, shrewd fitting together of facts. And receptiveness that the Rangaporn had not encountered before in all the human minds it had peeked into. This boy was different. He was curious. He would believe the truth. And he would understand why other people would not believe. The boy searched carefully around the big track, but the Rangaporn could sense that he expected to find nothing more. He stared intently into the woods in all directions. He looked almost directly at the Rangapom but saw nothing, for his vision was clouded by a shield that the human race would not be able to understand for millenia. If ever. "Pa wouldn't believe this," the redhead muttered aloud. And deeply -- for once his voice did not break. "Like as not, if I brought him to see, wouldn't be nothin' here anyhow. Don't nothin' leave just one track." He walked slowly back to the picnic spot, lost in thought, and the Rangaporn's mind followed him approvingly. The Rangaporn had decided. Its loneliness and its need to share thoughts with another intelligent being finally justified the risk. The boy had connected the ham and the track. And he had known that to his father this would all be nonsense. "If he returns," mused the Rangaporn, "we'll talk. He will learn, and I will be less lonely. I'll give some thought to the food he'd like." It had never heard the human adage that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, but the Rangaporn knew the place of food in the concerns of a growing boy. The matter converter, processed more biomass, the Rangaporn improvised busily and happily, and the air in the cavern under the highest Weltang hill was laden with strange and delicious aromas. The boy did return. He came alone, and he headed straight for the picnic spot. It was vacation time from school. He often wandered far and wide. His parents thought nothing of it. Besides, more and more'he was being allowed to be responsible for himself. He was fourteen, and daily his voice broke less often. rrHE Rangaporn was prepared for  him. As a final test it left several of its broad footprints in dusty patches in the picnic glade. Hank found them and studied them carefully. The Rangaporn could detect neither fear nor apprehension in the boy's mind. Just interest and curiosity. "Whatever it is, it's big." He looked from the tracks to the surrounding woods but there was nothing to see. "It's got sense. That was the best ham we ever had." He sat on the large flat rock. "It don't mean me no harm." Then he raised his head and sniffed; another mouth-watering IF odor came drifting oii the breeze. The Rangaporn was convinced, now, that it was making no mistake. It emerged from the trees across the glade from the boy, striding forward slowly, a steaming dish in one tremendous hand, a cool and freshsmelling salad in the other. Anxiously its mind scanned that of the boy for panic reactions, for signs of revulsion. It had shown itself at a distance to allow Hank time to adjust. It needn't have worried. The hoy watched it approach, his curiosity burning steadily, his nose appreciating the fragrances that wafted to him from the food. The Rangaporn halted several yards away so that Hank might study the towering nine feet of burly gnarled body, the great flat feet, the broad-nosed, widemouthed face, the three strange oval eyes strung across the lowering forehead. 'Since you were interested enough to return I felt that I should provide the refreshment." The Rangaporn's soft, singing voice was in complete contrast to its terrifying appearance. The boy stared at it in silence for a moment. Then: "That was a plumb good ham," he said. "I am pleased that you enjoyed it." The beautiful sounds rolled from the wide, thin-lipped mouth. "It was a challenge to prepare." The boy grinned. "Ma'd like to know how you fixed it, I bet. She figgers one of the neighbors has got a better recipe than hers." "That might be arranged." The Rangaporn walked gingerly over to the rock and set down the dishes. But the boy showed no fear. He didn't shrink away from the bulk of this alien creature, now almost beside him. The Rangaporn was gratified. "You will have to take the information to your mother," it said. "I'm sure she wouldn't care to interview me." "Where would I tell her I got it?" "A point," the Rangaporn admitted. "A very good point. We'll give the matter some thought." From the baggy, voluminous travesty of human garments it wore the Rangaporn produced two plates and two sets of silverware, each rolled in a snowy napkin, followed by two goblets and a carafe of clear, sparkling liquid. "Spring water," it explained. "For the growing young, there is nothing better with food." Somehow the Rangaporn made itself comfortable on the ground beside the flat rock. Deftly it heaped the two plates with what appeared to be meat from the steaming dishmeat covered with a pungent green sauce and accompanied by plenty of salad. It passed a plate to the boy. "See if this is palatable. The flavor is a conceit of mine." Hank sniffed. "Smefls good. I could smell it all the way across the clearin'." He took a bite and chewed. A beatific expression grew on his freckled face. "Man, this is eatin'!" "I am pleased that you like it," the Rangaporn said. "I had hoped that you would." It tucked a portion into its own wide mouth, revolved its dentures briefly in the fashion of its kind, and swallowed. The boy watched with fascination. "You don't belong here," he said bluntly. "I never seen any-" he hesitated, " -- body that looked like you. Not anywhere. But," he added, "you sure can cook!" The Rangaporn's wide mouth grew wider and the three strange eyes gleamed. "It is good to be appreciated," it sighed. "It has been so long." H ank ate hungrily. The Rangaporn marveled at the peace in the boy's mind, at the faith that, in spite of its size and appearance, the Rangaporn meant no harm. Hank seemed completely at ease. "You ain't been around here long," he said when his plate was empty. "Big as you are, somebody would have seen you sure." "Unfortunately, neither statement is conect," said the Rangaporn. "I have been here many years. It has not been too difficult to remain unseen. But it has been lonely." "How come you're hidin' out? But I guess that's a silly question, ain't it? You don't look much like folks." The Rangaporn nodded. "Correct. Suppose anyone you know, your father or his friends or neighbors, were suddenly to meet me in these woods. What would they do?" "Run like anything, I reckon," Hank admitted. "Or else take a shot at you if they had a gun along." "And then come later in force to search for me. It has seemed wiser to make no contacts. More peaceful, anyway. And I have no love of turmoil or excitement. My life has always been gracious and tranquil, as befits a Rangaporn." "A what?" "I am the Rangaporn of Czambozat." There was an almost regal pride in the dulcet, musical tones. "Somewhere, at a distance into the galaxy that you would find hard to comprehend, it is a name with meaning. Somewhere, many beings are concerned about the fortunes -- or the fate -- of the Rangaporn, of me." The boy studied the huge form reflectively. "If you was able to get here, they oughta be able to find you." "A good point," said the Rangaporn approvingly. "Without doubt they are trying. My subspace traverse IF was a standard one, but there is no way to determine at what point I deviated from it. Iherefore search is futile." "Are you tryin' to tell me you come here from somewhere else than this earth? From out in space, farther than Mars? Farther than the astronauts have been? Don't nobody believe stuff like that." "You can believe it," the Rangaporn said. "That is why I have shown myself to you and to no other. Your mind is freer, a bit more open, even though you are only a boy. You have said that I do not appear human, and of course I am not. You will believe that. You may not understand, but you will believe." "You ain't from around here, that's sure," Hank said. "But if you're stuck here you might as well get to know people. I could help you with that." "You are idealistic." The Rangaporn's broad face projected a sort of weary sadness. "Unfortunately I know your species. I would be regarded as strange -- a freak. Many kinds of evil would be attributed to me by the less intelligent. I prefer to wait. There is still one chance that I may, eventually, leave for home." The Rangaporn had speculated much on that one chance. A remote possibility, but valid. The subspace vehicle whose collision course with the Rangaporn's had caused the space bounce had also been deflected. It would have sought the nearest compatible solid mass, the nearest planet. Such safety features were built into every vehicle. Perhaps the other victim of the space bounce had found haven in this same system. The Rangaporn had noted that there were nine planets here. Few systems had so many. It tried to convey these things to the boy and could feel Hank's belief grow, though the details themselves meant little to him. "My angle of bounce from the subspace channel was recorded by my computer," the Rangaporn explained. "However, my distance and direction are unknown. Were it possible to contact the other member of my species, whose vehicle collided with mine and whose angle of bounce would also be known, we could then relocate the subspace channel. Only in the channel can our vehicles take us home." H ank eyed the big form thoughtfully, while his mind chewed on the problem. "What are you doin' about it?" he inquired. 'The direct approach," the Rangapom said wryly. "Regretfully, very httle. I project distress signals at a given time each day, but these do not have subspace potential. The only possible listener would be my fellow in distress, from the other vehicle. If his capacity to communicate were damaged by the bounce he may not hear or, hearing, may not be able to reply." "What could he do, if he could hear you but couldn't answer?" "Within this system, he might come to me. But from even the nearest star system the distance is great." "If you got a spaceship, like you say," Hank's doubt was obvious, "couldn't you look for him?" "I could, within the system," the Rangaporn admitted, "but it would entail physical search of eight uncomfortable planets despite the short-range detection devices I have. And the probability of his being on any of them at aU is relatively low." "So you figger your best bet is just to wait. S'pose nobody never comes?" "Eventually I would certainly look for him," said the Rangaporn. "But I am young yet. I have been here only forty of your years. And I know that the concern for me is great." Still, the Rangaporn was thinking with regret of those forty years. Its life span would be in the thousands of such units, but this time of life was special. And for a reason that Hank would have found hard to believe. The boy came often that summer. Always the Rangaporn had food. strange, savory and different, and Hank thrived on it as no human young had thrived since the beginning of his race -- never before had nutrition been so perfect. The Rangaporn reveled in his company after those years of solitude and became almost content. One day Hank took home a page of white paper covered with beautiful flowing green script, a careful detailing of the preparation of the ham. The only difference between this recipe and the Rangaporn's was that this recipe started with a real ham. "Found it stuck on a tree," he told his mother. "Meant for you. Ain't no doubt about that. They left it for me to find." "Hank," the woman said seriously, "do you know who fixed that ham?" "Maybe," the boy evaded. "Anyhow, I got my s'picions." He grinned mysteriously and his mother relaxed. Hank was a good boy. She trusted him. He was enjoying himself, and sooner or later she'd find out who her competitor was. When the Rangaporn was convinced that Hank was dependable, that the security of its home under the Weltang hill would not be in jeopardy, it took the boy to see the cavern. The Rangaporn enjoyed his awe and wonder. But there was something solid and sturdy about this boy that allowed him to adjust and accept. IF "Nobody'd believe this," Hank said, "but it makes sense that such things could be." H e examined the deceptively small metallic capsule that was the subspace vehicle. His eyes widened at the operation of the matter converter. He admired the multicolored draperies, rich and strangly soothing, with which the Rangaporn had hung the cavern walls. Soft lights flooded the cavern from hidden sources. On a small pedestal, a compact unit of metal plates and glowing strips and rows of glistening buttons hummed softly. "My communicator," the Rangaporn explained. "What's this little thing that just started wiggling?" The boy was amazed and startled as the great form of the Rangaporn suddenly loomed over him. "It is contact!" Gently the Rangaporn touched buttons and passed spatulate fingers delicately along the glowing strips. The little metronome-like pendulum ticked and paused and ticked again. The big fingers made other patterns. The pendulum ticked in response. And finally the Rangaporn straightened slowly. The three strange eyes were luminous. "I have been located!" The musical voice had never been more beautiful. "In only a few of your minutes a subspace vehicle will appear at the cavern entrance. It is the one with which my vehicle bounced. It contains another of my species, one whose communicator has not until this time been functional. He was not skilled in repair and found it necessary to duplicate the entire device, beginning with the philosophy of communication. It has been timeconsuming." Hank brushed details aside. Boylike, he was concerned with the immediate, the now. "Oh, boy -- another one like you! m get to see another Rangaporn, huh?" The three glowing eyes of the Rangaporn exuded a strange excitement, and the beautiful voice seemed to ring with muted laughter. For a moment it almost reminded Hank of his mother's voice -- when she was happy ; when she sang. "No, Hank, not another like me. Another of my species, but not a Rangaporn." "Different from you? How?" Again that impression of lilting laughter. "You will see. Go to the cavern entrance and wait. You will find it interesting to see the vehicle appear. I will join you in moments." There was a happy urgency to the Rangapom's gentle voice. Hank obeyed it without thinking. Outside, the woods were quiet with the sleepy stillness of a late summer afternoon. Nothing stined. Ihere were no sounds. And the spaceship, shimmering mistily, materialized, a small metallic capsule resting full length on the forest floor. A hatch opened. A creature emerged. It was not a Rangaporn.  It strode toward the boy on short crooked legs, but its feet were large and flat and seven-toed. Its blocky body was gnarled and misshapen. Still, the wide mouth and three strange oval eyes looked familiar. It was no more than four feet tall. HE Rangaporn watched quietly from behind the boy, monitoring his thoughts, feeling his reaction to what was to him a grotesque and ridiculous little figure strutting toward him. The Rangaporn's responses were far different. The impression of masculinity which Hank had picked up from the Rangaporn -- and which no human being would have doubted for a moment -- was not confirmed by the reaction of the Rangaporn. Warm and feminine and all-enveloping, her admiration flooded out toward the handsomest little male she had ever seen. She moved from the cavern entrance, slowly and with an alien grace, and stood with Hank. Her fellow citizen stopped and stared, his three eyes gleaming. He extended his oversized, big-knuckled hands palms up, and bowed his bullet head. "I am Gzal of Czambozat." It was a harsh, rasping, uncouth voice, but it had vigor and more than a touch of arrogance. And there was awe in it, too, and astonishment, as he added: "And you -- you are the Rangaporn!" The Rangaporn's soft voice had never been more musical. "Czal. Our meeting is fortune-determined. Predestined. Do you believe such thoughts?" "I believe anything you believe," the little male said gallantly. She laid her huge splayed hand lightly on Hank's shoulder. The boy's eyes widened at the shimmering robe that had replaced her humanlike, nondescript clothing. "This is Hank," said the Rangaporn. "His species rules this planet." She sensed the immediate surge of jealousy from the intense little Czal and her voice laughed as she added, "He is only a juvenile -- and my friend. Be gracious!" "You are fortunate. Hank," said the little male of Czambozat. "On all our home planet there is no more beautiful, no more kindly, no more wonderful being than the Rangaporn. She has no peer, and she calls you her friend. Be grateful!" "Golly." Hank found his voice, but it broke and peaked into a treble, "I thought she was a he!" "We respond to what we know," the Rangaporn said soothingly, beIF fore Czal's indignation could flare. "Even the smells of the food I prepared to my own taste were not pleasing to human nostrils. Only after I conformed to familiar appearance and odor patterns were my offerings enjoyed." "Yeah." The boy looked from one to the other, then nodded his head. "You don't look like us, and I don't know what you think is pretty." Then he grinned at Czal, with a look older than his years. "I can tell you this, though. She's sure some wonderful cook!" The little male's wide mouth grew wider; his rolling dentures showed. "Important information," Czal said. "I am most grateful to you!" Hank hesitated. His grin faded. "Gee," he said, "you'll be leaving, won't you? Putting together what you both know, you can get back on the track, can't you?" "Yes, Hank," the Rangaporn said gently. "We have the coordinates we need. We can go home." Her voice softened. "I'll miss you." The boy looked up at the vast kindly form in the shimmering robe. He knew now why he had been reminded of his mother. "I don't know," Hank said, "why I ever thought you was a he." "If you had known our tongue, there would have been no doubt." She was right, of course. For in the graceful language of Czambozat, Rangaporn means Lady. # # East # Street New York. N.Y. T # I # RI i SOt pmr word (incMing nmmm ond midnu). forward mMmum. Pofmont with ordor. 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Teske, recipient of the American MuseumHayden Planetarium #I Kepler Award. Enclosed find # (cash, check or money order). Please rush the Celestial Map to: (New York State residents add applicable sales tax.) Evolution had bestowed speech upon dogs and far hanrests upon man. All should have been paradise, yet bitter conflict persisted...  I rifle impatiently as Beowulf sniffed the air again and walked forward a few steps. Larkin watched the scout dog amble over to Littlejohn's point and then to Anson's. When brief, gravelly conversation with each assured Beowulf the area was clean, the scout dog trotted back to Larkin and growled, "Safe, Ray." To a human ear untuned to a scout dog's harsh and grating voice, the slurred flat speech might have been unintelligible. But to Ray Larkin it was perfectly clear. The three huge dogs and the man moved out, a well-coordinated unit. One of the other scout dogs had reported a large herd of those antelope-like animals in the area so Ray felt a little expedition was in order. The antelope always attracted predators and Centaurs, posing a danger that could not be ignored. Larkin's eyes never stopped moving, darting from small hill to small hill, questioning the slightest quiver of the low bushes. His caution was superfluous, he knew, for the dogs could sense any danger long before it became apparent to his inferior senses. As he walked, Larkin inspected the small plants and wild grasses that would no longer exist after the voracious cholos passed this way, devouring everything in their path. The cholos had ' been at work terraforming the surface of the continent for more than six months now. But Larkin, who had never worked with cholos before his marriage to Mary and Taylor, still found the giant slugs a source of wonder. At the moment they ought to be about two or three kilometers behind him, guided by Mary and Taylor and the remaining six scout dogs. He snapped out of his reverie as the dogs halted, testing the air. "What is it?" he called to Beowulf. "Hide cats. Maybe seven. Heading this way." "Think they know we're here?" Beowulf nodded his shaggy head at the rippling grass and answered, "Yes, Ray. Bad wind." 'Larkin agreed: the erratic wind was changing direction every few seconds, surely carrying the scent of man and dogs to the cats. It was the scout dogs who had named them , "hide cats." The powerful felines preyed mainly on the antelope-like animals that grazed on the many wild grasses of the prairie. The cats were big, about one-and-a-half meters tall at the shoulder. For all their size, though, they were lean and sleekobviously designed for explosive bursts of speed over limited distances. In the open, however, or if the chase lasted for more than ten seconds, not even the fastest cat could catch the slowest of the amazingly fleet antelope with their comic but effective leaping gait. Neither were the cats six-limbed like the antelope although they carried tiny vestigial grasping limbs on both sides of their throats. But nature had given the hide cats an additional weapon to compensate for their lack of endurance. Each cat bore markings on its sides enablingit to lie down on one side and melt into the grass so perfectly that a careless antelope could stumble over the camouflaged creature before becoming aware of its presence. Larkin disengaged the safety on his rifle and warned the dogs to be ready. "Those dumb bastards will rush us the moment they see us. They haven't a brain in their heads," he cautioned Littlejohn and the others. A trickle of sweat rolled down Larkin's back in spite of the chill edge to the wind. Nor was he alone in feeling the tension that builds before action-the hair on the dogs' necks was rising in ragged clumps, He wanted to crack a joke but could not. And though human testicles had lost that ability long ago, he thought he felt his own trying to ascend into his abdomen for protection. Larkin and the dogs topped a small rise -- and suddenly were face to face with the hide cats. For one excruciatingly long second nothing IF moved save the tops of the grasses. Then, like figures in a film that unexpectedly shifts from slow to speeded-up motion, both groups exploded into action. Larkin was aware of the streak of yellow hurtling through the grass at him and he brought the rifle up to his shoulder in one quick motion, squeezing the trigger by reflex. The energy bolt blew the predator's head off and the momentum of the cat's attack carried its headless torso to Larkin's booted feet, spraying them with blood. Beowulf, three hundred pounds of snapping, barking fury, bowled ovextwo cats larger than himself with an audacious charge. Confused and surprised, the two cats slashed out at each other as they tumbled over and over together. Beowulf took advantage of the situation to rip out the throat of the nearest one while it fought with its companion. Anson and Littlejohn, screaming canine obscenities, darted among three of the cats and slashed open their bellies. The enraged animals could only claw and bite futilely at the dogs' long hair, a protection as efficient as armor so long as the cats were unable to find a secure hold. While Beowulf bit through the spinal cord of his hamstrung opponent, Larkin killed the remaining hide cat with a hurried shoulder shot. Anson, muzzle stained a deep red, looked down at a pile of steaming entrails on the grass, then turned to Littlejohn. "Fun, hah? Kill plenty hide cats this time. We teach cats to fool with man and dogs." "Yeah," agreed Larkin, wiping hide cat blood from his cheek. "Fun." T he occupants of the camp moved leisurely among the small earthen huts and flickering cooking fires, laughing and gossiping. They were mostly females and children. The males, except those too old or crippled to hunt, were following a leaper herd to the south. Only two or three able-bodied warriors had been left behind to watch over the camp. The other males on hand, mostly malcontents or poor hunters, grumbled about having to miss the excitement and glory of the hunt. Runner-with-the-Wind studied the activities of the camp from the top of a small hill. With him were twenty members of his sham, or war party. Despite the sounds of rapid breathing and the stamping of hoofs behind him,Runner was not about to lead his warriors, many of them youngsters, down on the camp until he was absolutely certain everything was exactly as it seemed to be. Runner was young still, but determined not to make the mistakes of youth. He had successfully passed his manhood as his people called hide cats -- with nothing but his shar, the short thrusting spear all male warriors carried. He had been so sure of himself then; but the long scar on his left flank was a constant reminder that unstudied action can lead to crippling or death. being severely wounded had been a bold act. His mother had made a song about his exploit and his elder brother had sung it before their father and the council of the tribe. Both his father and his brother were dead now and it was he who carried the quirt of the chieftain, the koro. Finally satisfied that all was as it appeared. Runner gave a hand signal to attack. Hoofs blurring, the warriors swept over the crest of the hill. They yelled and screamed as they dashed across a water-gutted opening, barren of the life-giving teve, and into the camp. As the intruders swarmed around the outlying huts the few guards tried uselessly to halt the sham's advance. One old warrior, his tail braid already more white than brown, bravely planted himself squarely between the huts and the onrushing attackers. ' Gnurkiller, Runner's chief lieutenant and younger brother, closed with him and the two whirled in a dance choreographed to end in death. Gnurkiller avoided a weak thrust and drove his own shar into the heavy lower body of the old warrior. The fire-hardened tip pierced the old one's heart and he fell to his knees, crying out piteously before toppling into dust soaked with his own blood. Several of Runner's warriors carried torches of dried teve which they lit by holding them over the cooking fires. Torches aflame, the intruders plunged into the darkness of the huts. Old men armed with nothing but stones were pushed back by the fire and then killed. Runner thrust his flaming bundle of teve into the face of a defender with a deformed leg. The cripple recoiled, turned to run. Runner caught him at the door of the hut and speared him through the base of his skull. The hut interiors roiled with the chaos of close-quarter fighting. Some females remained passive. Others ran in circles, bit, kicked out and otherwise tried to avoid capture. To Runner's way of thinking this was good: such females would bear bold sons. Many of the females had already borne children, of course, and often these children, unaware that the men wanted only young or childless women, tried to defend their mothers as best they could. Runner's men were forced to slash with their hoofs at these young ones to drive them off. Children were knocked unconscious or, tumbled against the walls of the hut by the impatient raiders. "Quickly," Runner-with-the-Wind shouted to his men in a hut grown foul with smoke and the sweat of fear. "Take the females and let us depart!" Runner was frantically trying to direct his companions' efforts and see that none lingered too long in any one hut. "Idiots!" He struck two of his IF warriors who had stopped to argue over a beautiful young female. The koros sting made them realize their foolishness. "This is not the time to fight among ourselves. Just take her!" Runner was only too aware that, had he allowed it, some of his men would be so foolish as to try to mount the females here and now. They were like so many children, and it was his responsibility to be their stern father. Driving the captured females -- now called shaman, or booty-before them, the raiding party galloped out of the looted camp and disappeared into the still lowering darkness of night. Behind them a baby wailed forlornly. camp was several hours long, and the captured females complained about everything -- they were acting like true shaman already. Their feet were hot and tired; they were thirsty; they wanted to rest... Runner told them to be quiet or they would feel the caress of his koro. There was a time to be gentle and even loving to a shama but there was also a time when such forbearance  was jarringly out of place. His own shaman at the camp knew this belief of his and acted accordingly, careful of his ephemeral moods. Those among these captured females who would become his would soon learn the ways of their lord and master. Some would have to be beaten, some would cry out and tear their hair to complain of their rank within his family, but all would eventually acquiesce-they were shaman, after all, not warriors, not men. The young sentry at the camp touched his forehead in deference, then watched enviously as the successful raiding party marched proudly into its own encampment, wearing pride like fine bone-jewelry. "Runner, Runner!" shouted the eight shaman of his huts, crowding around him with their children clinging shyly to their hands. Runner reached out and pulled several of the females to him, giving each a hug or a warm caress. He disliked such public shows of affection but they were expected of him. Runner,' as always, submitted to the call of duty. He smiled at his children though he was, as always, slightly uncomfortable with them, especially his daughters. He wished he could remember the names of at least some of them, but to him all his children looked alike. He turned to the new shaman. Already several warriors were prepared to fight over the distribution of the females. He silenced their arguments with a hard glance and strode in among the females to have his pick of the lot. The raiding party had captured more than thirty and it was only fair that he, as chieftain, should receive at least four for his hut. Quickly he picked out three, amid incompletely stifled groans as favorites were lost. After his third choice he paused a moment, then slowly ambled over to the beautiful young sharna who had nearly caused two of his men to come to blows in the enemy camp. "No!" gasped one of the two involuntarily. "No-? No?" rasped Runner-withthe-Wind. "Are you now chieftain here?" he demanded. He lashed out with his koro, landing a stinging blow across the other's flank. "You shall choose last for daring to question my primacy 'Of choice!" The brief confrontation further upset the already frightened young sharna and she tried to back away, her flanks heaving. There was no place for her to go. Older females, aware of the futility of fighting the inevitable and resigned to the concept of marriage by kidnap, thrust her forward again. Runner-with-the-Wind held out his hand and spoke softly. "Come, little one. I will not harm you, I swear it." Slowly, shyly, she stepped forward tentatively and slipped her small hand into his. His grasp reassured her. He led her quietly past his other newly acquired shaman, pausing only to speak to Nami, his number one sharna. "Take the other new ones to my huts and see that they are properly fed. Then let them rest. I want no fighting among you. See that their welcome is genuine." Runner-with-the-Wind led the young sharna, trembling still in fear and anticipation, to the privacy of the hut he kept solely for mating. He lit a candle of leaper fat and studied the planes of her face in its faint glow. "What is yoiir name, little one?" "Sunchaser." "Do you know how old you are?" "I have seen fifteen summers." "You look older. And you are very beautiful." "Thank you, my lord. You are -- I mean -- " She cast her eyes down shyly, not daring to look at his lean hard body. Runner thoughtfully fingered one of his decorative scars. This one seemed so young, so innocent. He promised himself he would do nothing now to cause her in the future to fear his need for her. He would not take her in any manner that might turn her from him. He began. II Castle re agh-Larkin was disgusted by the interior of the nitropropelled hover-van that served both as mobile lab and living quarters for her and Ray and Taylor. It was a mess. Not a dirty mess, but the kind of disorderly mess that any working area becomes when concern is more for the work than for appearance. The place had not really had a good cleaning in the nearly six months they had been on the surface of New Kansas, and it looked it. Mary did most of the cleaning, not because she was a woman and it was her place to do it -- let Ray or Taylor suggest that IF and she would remind them of her brown belt before bouncing them off the walls and ceiling-but because the lab was hers and she felt responsible for it. She knew, though, that both men would complain that putting things in some semblance of order would cause notes and papers, normally right at hand, to lose themselves under miscellaneous headings in the files. Well, the two of them would just have to scream, she concluded. But where to start? Roughly half the van was labwork area, with the remaining half devoted to human needs. In the extreme rear of the van was the bathroom with its sonic shower and chemical toilet facilities. Further front were the sleeping quarters and the tiny closets totally inadequate to the needs of three people. Given all the limitations the living room, however, was fairly spacious with a carpet deep enough to lose a small dog in and body-heat furniture. Built into the walls were various audio-visual entertainment facilities to cut boredom into manageable sizes, and here and there aborigine sculpture from New Australia decorated the area. The reading material -- enough to stock a fair-sized public library in a mediumsized city-was on microfilm and, via the stationary satellites ringing the planet, could be exchanged with the other # people busy terraforming other parts of New Kansas. At the midpoint of the van, situated to serve both working and living quarters, was the small electronic kitchen. The front of the van was devoted solely to Mary's scientific instruments and measuring devices. The tiny lab computer could handle minor problem-solving chores and little else, but it saved Mary drudgery. Tall and slender, with curves and hollows in all the right places, Mary was a stunning young woman. Her chestnut hair cascaded down to her shoulders, enhancing a light dusting of freckles. But she had not been attractive as a child and had not yet fully accepted as real her metamorphosis into a beauty. Mary had been taking postgraduate courses in chemistry at the University of Brazil when she first met Ray Larkin through her husband Taylor. Soon the three were spending a great deal of time together. Then Taylor, an agrobiologist already accepted into the Planetary Colonization Bureau, spent six months on the colony planet learning the ins and outs of breeding and caring for cholos. His only obligation was one year's service for the Bureau. Placed in charge of "protecting" Mary by a trusting Taylor during his absence, Ray started to fall in love with her himself. It had all seemed so ludicrous at first: Mary was a member of the Matriarchal Party, from which came almost all of the Federation's leaders, and she had wounded a man in a duel. Protecting Mary seemed as necessary as protecting a scout dog from a chipmunk. As for Ray Larkin, he was an indifferent anthropologist. He had written his thesis on the social interaction and sexual practices of scout dogs. This led to an ever greater degree of interest in the dogs and he applied for his own team. As a free-lancer he and his dogs had completed two lucrative missions for the Bureau by the time he met Taylor and Mary. Ray was slight, a writer of poetry, and basically a loner. For most of his life he had felt himself outside the mainstream of human social activity. He would rather play complex games with Cheng, his cybernetic apartment house computer, than attend a party or group grope. Mary had grown used to staying in on Saturday nights with him in his apartrrient, smoking through a few narcostiks and listening to his unique collection of scoutdog folk songs rather than joining other students in more typical activities. And then Taylor returned. Ray and Mary had struggled to devise some painless way of telling him about them. Actually they had not had to say a word -- their faces had told the story .vin two months they had put their thumbs to a "triple" -- a three-way marriage contract. fTThe big dog had just trotted back from his position as point. "Centaurs been here -- nosing 'round, Ray," the dog replied. Ray then saw the marks left by the hoofed feet of the Centaurs. "Yeah, I guess you're right. They're still curious about us." "Hah!" said Beowulf. "Anson is so hurried up-" "Anxious," corrected Ray. "Yah -- anxious, then, to get back to camp today. That why he was first to smell Centaurs. Mebbe Anson anxious see someone." "Mebbe Ozma," suggested Littlejohn. "What you know!" snapped Anson. "Well, now," said Ray. "I've noticed, too, how you've been sniffing around Ozma a bit more than around the other females. You wouldn't be having a little private romance with her, would you?" Ray knew the scout dogs were not normally monogamous. "We are almost there," said Anson stonily. The rest laughed at his obvious discomfort, but neither long nor nastily. Ray left the dogs to proceed on their own into camp and headed for the line of cholos. They never ceased to amaze him and he often stopped off on his way back to the hover-van to watch them methodically eating their way through the grasses. It was rapidly getting dark and Ray nearly stumbled when he emerged from the heavy grass onto a bare patch of earth. Completely devoid of grass, the patch was as wide as a country lane and snaked away through the grass. Ray followed the "road" with his eyes -- right up to the. point where it ran smack up to a IF huge "rock" lying across its path. The "rock" was a cholo. The "road" through the grass was the result of the cholo's having just passed through a few minutes ago. The cholo's size became readily apparent as Ray approached it from behind. He walked forward until the rear of the gray-white mass of the creature's body loomed over him. Because of his position he had no fear for his life-no cholo could move in any direction but forward. In addition, a cholo was harmless unless frightened. Even then Ray would have to be standing in its immediate path to be injured. The square, blunt tail of the cholo scraped over the bare ground, leaving it moist and steaming slightly in the cool evening air. There was a noticeable though not unpleasant odor rising from the newly bared soil in the wake of the giant beast. R ay smiled to himself as he remembered the day Taylor had shown him his first cholo. The smell was one of the first things he had asked about. "That odor, what is it? It's-it's almost like-" "Like freshly baked bread?" finished Taylor. "Yeah, that's it." "Shit." "Ahhh, I beg your pardon?" Taylor laughed and explained, "It's the smell of a cholo's natural excretion." "Oh." Ray slowly walked over to the untouched grass parallel to the track of the cholo. It was the first cholo Ray had ever seen outside of holographs and it was indeed an impressive sight. Only the great blue whale of the Terran oceans could equal it in size -- but of course there were no more blue whales on Earth. "How much does one of those things weigb?" "Approximately fifteen tons," Taylor replied. "That's back on Earth, of course, not here on this training planet. They're twenty meters long by three meters wide and four meters high. They eat the equivalent of their own weight every twenty-four hours. Earth-standard time. Developed over two hundred years ago by the Bureau's labs from unsegmented earthworms, they're artificially engineered creatures specifically developed to range over the surfaces of Terran-type planets unable to-" He stopped, shaking his head. "I'm sorry. I'm afraid I'm beginning to lecture." "Please go on. It's all most fascinating." "Well, okay. As I was saying, they're put to work on planets unable to support Terran plant forms in their unaltered states. For instance, on New Kansas the cholos will eat great swathes through the local vegetation and topsoil and excrete a waste. That waste is as deadly a poison for the native plants as it is a highly efficient fertilizer for the Terran crops that will some day be growing here long after the cholos have passed." He pointed to the bare earth left in the wake of the cholo. "On New Kansas, with its winds, soil left like that would soon blow away. The last thing we'll be trying to create is a dustbowl, so to hold the newly transformed soil for the Terran plants we'll sow Terran grasses behind the cholos." T hat had been Ray's introduction to the cholos. Now, on New Kansas himself, he never tired of observing their endless mealtime. He walked to .the front of the cholo and watched it attack the grasses with great vigor. The cholo's mouth was a gaping hole into which the tall grass disappeared. This cholo, like the others, never stopped eating: cholos possessed no muscles to close their mouths. Ray lit a narcostik and stared at the creature's featureless visage. Nothing but the mouth differentiated the cholo's front from its rear. The huge slug was eyeless -- Ray's dogs served as the cholos' eyes. , Each dog carried a small transmitter on a collar around its neck. Similarly, each of the cholos had a small receiver implanted in its flesh on both the right and left sides of its body. Slaved to the transmitters, the receivers imparted a brief, sharp stab of pain-whenever one of the dogs got within ten meters of a cholo. This made it easy for the cholos to be driven in any desired direction. In its forehead each cholo also had a small electronic "eye" that sent back images to Ray's pocket receiver and to a receiver in the van. By choosing among channels one to twenty-five Ray could monitor any of the cholos. Ray mused that his was not an easy job. He had a hover-scooter and nine dogs, one of which was pregnant. The ten of them were supposed to guard and guide twenty-five cholos. That meant keeping away hide cats and curious Mierson's Centaurs. The Centaurs seemed content to leave the cholos and dogs alone. For the time being, anyway. Ray ground out his butt and headed back for the van. B eowulf led Ws small party back to the temporary camp Ray had devised for the scout dogs. His lips curled back in pleasure as first the females and then the males greeted him. "How it go?" asked the pregnant Mama-san. "Good. We got to kill hide cats." "Oh?" said Frodo. "Tell us 'bout it." Beowulf shook his head. "Food first. Then I tell all that happened." Even as he spoke Pandora brought him some antelope meat. Ozma did the same for Anson and Littlejohn. "Before eat, we recite the Law," said Beowulf. They formed a rough circle. "What is the Law?" intoned Beowulf. IF 'To stand by Man s side, as dogs have always stood.  "What is the Law?" 'To place duty above self, honor above life. " "What is the Law?" "#b allow harm to come to no man, to protect man and his possessions. " "What is the Law?" "#b stand by man s sideas dogs will always stand. " "Let us eat." and old, were finishing their meal of leaper flesh cooked over damp leaves lying on hot coals. As they ate they stared morosely at Runner's mating hut. Kirinav, Runner's number two sharna, glanced at one of the new females and asked, "You-what is the name of the new shama spending the night with Runner?" The young sharna chewed on a piece of rubbery meat for a moment before replying. "My name is Zarav -- not "you." The one our man took is named Sunchaser. Had it not been for the raid she would have been sleeping with another in one moon's time." "Bah! All men are the same," sneered Nan-ha. "I don't believe that," said Peo. "Runner is good to us. And brave." "Bravery," said Kirinav, looking up momentarily from her selfappointed task of braiding a young child's tail. "What is bravery but a of the old and weak?" "How can you say that? What do you mean?" asked Zarav. "She means," replied Nan-ha, "that our men play at war and raiding as our children play at tag." "I did not wish to be taken away from my tribe," said a puzzled Zarav, "but nothing about it resembled child's play. Many brave, old and crippled men died defending us from seizure." "God of the Winds!" exclaimed Kirinav, "she really doesn't know the truth!" "Truth? What truth?" asked a still-bewildered Zarav. Nami, who had been listening silently but had been reluctant to enter the conversation until now, put her arm around Zarav and asked, "Do you in all honesty really not know about the raids the men carry out?" "Please, what are you all talking about?" "I will tell you," said Nan-ha. "It is all an elaborate game, played so that the warriors of the tribes might mate with shaman from other camps. In any camp, at least five or six females are born for every male. When one tribe's council feels that there are enough young females of child-bearing age and enough old or crippled warriors to warrant it, they approve a raid against their own camp. Nothing is done overtly. Instead, they become careless ever so slowly. Soon scouts from other tribes are aware of where their camp is and how many females without children are living in it. Then, one day, the warriors make a great show of going off to hunt leapers. The old and the lame are left behind to guard the females. When the warriors finally return, they find that their camp has been raided. Much noise is made, but somehow the raiders are never found." She paused a moment. "And that is how your camp came to be raided, too." "No! I cannot believe such a monstrous thing! What about the old ones -- they fought back, they tried!" "Yes, of course. Such a raid is their chance to find a death weighted with honor, not shame. The same holds true for the lame and crippled. And there are boundaries which must be observed. You have noticed, haven't you, tht only females without children were taken -- those who had no husbands to feed them?" "But-" "Hush, child," soothed Nami. "Men must have their chance to feel brave. Besides, it has gotten you a husband and provider." Ill A fter Ray had told Mary and L Taylor about the hide cats that evening, he mentioned Anson's finding the scent of Centaurs just outside the camp. "What do you think it means?" asked Mary. "Hard to say," answered Ray. "Maybe they're just curious about us." "I hope that's all it is," said! Taylor. "But don't count on it." "Ah, want to elaborate on that?" said Ray. "Sure. There are dozens of other groups on the various continents working the land just as we are, right? Well, some of them have started having more run-ins with the Centaurs than ever before." "I see," said Ray slowly. "You and the dogs better be extra careful from now on." "Hmmm. I suppose you're right." Ray thought about the Centaurs -- and that evoked memories of the day the three of them had signed on for New Kansas. M elvin nhroma, half black and half Israeli, a round man with gleaming ivory teeth, was the career Planetary Colonization Bureau official in charge of recruiting terraformers for New Kansas. If he carried off the precolonization operations cleanly he would be promoted to the position of Assistant to the Assistant to the Co-Vice-Director of Sector Ag-#n. Sitting across from Nhroma, with Taylor and Mary, Ray fidgeted in his chair. He wished the man would cease sermonizing and get to the signing of the papers. "Yes, New Kansas will be a marvelous colony world for us. Of course the soil must be altered ever so slightly to favor Terran plants, and IF the oceans must be sown with microorganisms to prepare vast areas of the northern continent for eventual colonization and farming. It won't be easy." Ray cupped his chin in his hands; he knew a zealot when he saw one. "There will be wild animals, disease, wind, cold, but eventually you will triumph." "We're not heroes, you know," said Taylor. "We'll be getting paid for our efforts." "Certainly. Those of you who survive -- if I may be so indelicatewill be named First Citizens of New Kansas. A special tax will be levied on the colonists to keep you in luxury for the rest of your lives -- if that is what you desire." "Yes, yes," said Ray impatiently, "but you mentioned wild animals. Does that category include the Mierson's Centaurs?" "Where -- how ' did you learn of them?" "Things have a way of getting around." "Well, I suppose I must be frank, then. As you probably know already, they're called Mierson's Centaurs after the xenobiologist of the first scouting party to explore New Kansas. In reality, of course, they bear only a surface resemblance to Earth's mythical half-human, halfhorse centaurs," he explained. "And how did Mierson find out all this?" asked Mary. "There was a fight. An expedition member and two Centaurs were killed. One of the two Centaurs happened to be female and Mierson's cursory dissection turned up some interesting anomalies." "Such as?" "Well, the Centaurs are a curious mixture of mammalian and reptilian life. Like mammals, they bear their young alive from an internal womb and suckle them from teats on the undersides of their bodies-just where they're located on a horse or cow." "That figures," mused Ray. Nhroma iled and went on. "The 'man' part of their anatomy, however, is covered by a tough reptilian hide. They have a hafrless skull that is remarkably humanoid -- two eyes, a nose of sorts, a mouth with the kind of teeth one might expect to find in any omnivorous life form, including man. But they are primarily carnivores, not herbivores. The rest of their humanoid upper torso is little more than an enlarged, heavily muscled neck to which two arms with opposed-thumb hands connect. Lungs, heart and digestive organs are all in the "horse" part of their bodies." "They're hunters, aren't they?" asked Ray. "Yes. They subsist mainly on the antelope-like forms that roam the prairies. The Centaurs add to that diet by catching small animals and gathering wild roots and other plants that require no cultivation." "All well and good," said Mary. "But isn't it contrary to the-Planetary Colonization Code of #? Intelligent life forms whose technology is inferior to our own are not to be exploited or subjected to xenocide." "Ah," said Nhroma, "there you have the crux of the matter. The Centaurs have not been officially recognized as intelligent. There is some doubt they ever will be. Our current resources and the need for new worlds are such that no matter what the eventual findings prove about the Centaurs, we must go forward with colonization." "You're saying that colonization will go forward regardless of the harm done to the Centaurs?" "Now just a minute. That's unfair!" Nhroma retorted. "The Centaurs will be taken care of. Land will be set aside especially for them. The colonial government will see to their welfare." His listeners appeared skeptical. "Look, as things are now all that prairie is essentially going to waste. In ten, twelve years it could be feeding thousands. Ultimaftely it will will have lands on which to live and hunt. The Bureau has learned from the brutal mistakes of the past." "But what if the Centaurs don't take kindly to our usurping their lands. What if they should attack us?" persisted Ray. "Well -- in that case, you must defend yourselves, mustn't you?" T he sun had risen. Runner decided it was time to get the tribe moving. The raid must follow form; many ays' travel must be put between themselves and the sacked camp. Further, this area was just about hunted out. They would move north in pursuit of the great herds of leapers that provided his people with the necessities of life. Not only food, but tools, weapons and rude clothing were the legacy of each leaper felled by a warrior of the tribe. Upon the leapers the tribe depended for its very existence. And the leapers, in turn, were dependent upon the wild grasses of the prairie for their lives. Under Runner's prodding camp was struck and the meager tools and possessions of the tribe were placed on rude travois to be carried to the next settlement. The tribe's nomadic itinerary would follow the movements of the great herds of leapers. Leaperstalker, one of Runner's lieutenants, was trying to make himself important, dashing about yelling orders, pleading for haste, snapping a length of rawhide at shaman slow to join the ragged line of march. Runner smiled, content to allow his secondsin-command to whip the people into line -- and incur their natural resentment. That was a trick Runner had learned first from his father and then from his elder brother: the chieftain must, in his people's eyes, be the guiding spirit of the tribe; he must be the font of wisdom, of leadership, the dispenser of all good, including food and Discipline, though, recognized as originating with the chieftain, was meted out by the IF members of the council, by Runner's lieutenants. When all was ready, when the shaman had sorted themselves into marching order according to their status within the tribe and the scouts had taken up their positions, Runner-with-the-Wind took his place at the head of the column. He held hi his koro, the visible badge of his leadership. All the males touched their right fists to their foreheads, reaffirming loyalty to the chieftain. Runner acknowledged the salute, adding his shar to his koro then lowering both. The tribe moved out. # O," Ray was saying, "I don't ithink we're in any danger from the Centaurs." Taylor put down his coffee cup. "Look, Ray, we're more than nine hundred kilometers from the nearest cholo group." "Well, what's your point?" "Do you know how I've been driving the cholos?" "Normally in a line about one to two kilometers wide, right?" "Yes. Obviously it's not compact enough for them to scour each and every square meter of vegetation. But that's not necessary. Given a good toehold, our tough Terran grasses spread out slowly from the cholos' original paths and displace the weaker native grasses." "Thank you, Melvin Nhroma." "So I'm lecturing-this is important. For the time being I see no reason to change the pattern. But if we have any run-ins with the Centaurs I want to move the cholos in closer. They won't be as efficient, but you and the dogs can guard them better." "I hope your confidence isn't misplaced." H IS scouts led Runner to the low bluff overlooking the valley? From his vantage point he could clearly see the paths of destruction the scouts had been unable to stop jabbering about since they had first dashed back to the tribe's makeshift temporary camp. They were pouring out a tale of great strips ef teve somehow torn from the land. "What could have done this, Runner?" one of his men asked as all stared unbelievingly at the sight. "I do not know. There is no mention of such a thing in the songs of our forefathers. It is a new calamity." "Ah," someone grunted, "here comes Sharcarrier. He has been down on the valley floor examining this great curse from close up. Perhaps he has seen something we cannot discern from here." When at last the young warrior reported to his chieftain, the news was not good. The youth had noticed that the soil, where the teve had been stripped away, was not completely bare after all. Instead the shoots of a new and strange form of teve could be seen pushing from the ground. Sharcarrier had noticed that ahead this vegetation seemed less established, while farther behind it was even thicker and more luxuriant than at the spot he had first examined. "And," Sharcarrier told Runnerwith-the-Wind, "if you follow this strange path back far enough, you come to places where the new teve is as thick and heavy as the old was." He paused to gulp for breath. "But even more sinister, this new teve spreads like a slow fire through the its place on the prairie." "What of the animals?" questioned Runner. "There are none." "But if there is teve then surely there must be leapers. And where there are leapers there are gnur to hunt them!" "I don't think the leapers can eat this new teve. They have moved away in search of food." As Runner was digesting this disturbing piece of information another member of the scouting party said, "Then we must move on until we again find the great herds." "Yes," said Runner-with-the-Wind with sudden vehemence, "but what shall we do if this new teve becomes a great blaze that consumes all in its way? The leapers will disappear for lack of food." He paused. "And so shall all who are nourished by the herds." "You mean the gnurV" questioned a youth. "Yes," answered another. "But not solely the gnur. " T he dogs were happy. Littlejohn, Ozma and Mama-san had to remain with the cholos to Jceep watch but the other six had permission to go hunting on their own. The freedom made them pups again. "Hah," said Pandora, "is fun to chase antelopes again." The other dogs, moving in a loose pack, agreed. "Frodo," said Beowulf, "you better stay last. You too fat to catch antelopes." "Yeah," agreed Grendel. "Frodo's belly drag on ground. Ha ha-" While Grendel was laughing Frodo suddenly leaped at her, knocking her down with a well-placed shoulder block and giving her a nip on the rump as he did so. "Ha, I not too fat to bite your ass, Grendel." All the other dogs laughed -- except Beowulf, who moved further away when Frodo turned to stare in his direction. The pack trotted on, telling dirty jokes and arguing about who was the most spectacularly endowed with respect to sexual equipment. "You can talk," said Grendel, "but Littlejohn not little where it counts." "Ho," said Beowulf. "Mebbe that's why Ray make Littlejohn stay behind -- he too tired carrying great weight around to chase antelopes." "I bet Littlejohn not too tired to chase Ozma or Mama-san," quipped Frodo. Pandora added to Grendel's pique by saying, "What make you think he have to chase them?" IF The snickering had died down by the time Anson, who had gone on ahead to scout, returned. "Which?" asked Beowulf, seeing the joy in Anson's eyes. "Hide cats or antelopes?" "Antelopes. Just over hill." His tongue hanging out, Anson continued, "Wind's blowing this way. Ought to catch scent soon as we move closer. Mebbe ten of them in nice, tight group," "Good," said Sinbad. "We take one same way as usual?" "Why not?" replied Frodo. "It works." "So let's go," said Anson, the thrill of the impending chase burning bright in his eyes. Grendel and Sinbad moved out to the right to flank the unsuspecting antelope. Pandora and Beowulf took the left flank, leaving Anson and Frodo to proceed straight ahead. The two dogs in the center waited for the others to take up their positions, then loped forward slowly. They topped the slight hill, moving toward the antelope through the cover of the high grasses. The antelope continued grazing until the two dogs were nearly on top of them. Then suddenly one of the antelope raised its head and snorted in alarm. Like fragments of a shellburst antelope scattered in every direction, bounding across the plain in great, twisting leaps. As soon as the antelope broke, Frodo and Anson leaped in pursuit. Frodo flung a brief burst of words in Anson's direction and the two of them decided on one of the scattering antelope, ignoring the others. They forced it in the direction of " Grendel and Sinbad on the right. Just as the antelope reached the grass concealing the pair, they broke from hiding and charged. Flinging itself around in midair, the startled antelope changed direction. Now moving at right angles to the hiding place of Pandora and Beowulf, the antelope was forced again to change its line of flight when they burst across its path. All six dogs were now in pursuit, driving the frantic antelope back and forth among them. In the mad ecstasy of the chase the dogs were barking furiously, human speech completely forgotten. " They were reenacting an ancient ritual of pursuit and death that predated even their ancestors' association with the shambling primate that was to become man. The terrified antelope would run flat out in what it hoped was the path to safety only to have one of the dogs loom up, teeth bared, forcing it to change direction. Built for speed but not for endurance, the antelope soon began to tire. The dogs closed in. Its tongue lolled grotesquely from the corner of its mouth as it souit some escape from the circle of canines. Flanks heaving, the antelope stumbled in fatigue and immediately Pandora leaped upon its back. The assault knocked it to the ground. The other dogs were soon tearing and slashing at its throat. It thrashed and kicked in mindless terror as its lifeblood spurted in streams. The felled beast gave one final shudder and its eyes went blank. There was blood everywhere. The dogs were covered by it; it dripped from their fangs. Sinbad raised his muzzle to the sky and, from deep within his throat, issued an ancient howl -- a cry of triumph and a challenge to whomever would dare dispute his prowess as a hunter. Then he joined the others in tearing the antelope to pieces in a glorious orgy of primitive bloodlust. #V OU saw them leave the body M, of the leaper?" asked Runner-with-the-Wind . "Yes. I heard a terrible cry of pain or pleasure and investigated. They were just leaving the body of the leaper when I spotted them. I made certain I stayed downwind of them. They were huge, almost as big as a male gnur. " "And they didn't eat the leaper's flesh?" "No, though they tore its body to pieces. Perhaps they drank its blood." "Hmmm. I would see these beasts and the wondrous creatures they guard with my own eyes. Come, let us make plans to test the defenses of these monsters with the rising of the next sun." xm. asked Anson. "Yep. They kept back, but we knowed they watching us." "Three hours, you say? We've had Centaurs stumble across our path and become curious enough to investigate, but never for such a long period of time. Did they know that you knew they were watching?" "Hunh? Oh, no, don't thinkso." "Okay, you'd better get back to your post. I'll see what Ray has to say about this." IV R unner felt that he and his warriors were ready -- as ready as they would ever be. Even as he prepared himself to test the defenses of the monsters, he thought about the events of last evening    Runner had watched the seer throw the leaper bones three times. "Well?" he had asked the man of magic. "The spirits say the signs are good." "Yes -- the spirits are already dead and do not have to make the attack. It is easy for them to say the signs are good." "Do not speak blasphemy, my son!" "I try not to, though it is difficult. And I worry. Perhaps the spirits seek company in their land of death-" Outside the holy one's hut, Runner's shaman had gathered to wait for him. "What is this?" he had asked. "Do not go. Runner," pleaded IF Teffl. "The monsters will devour you all!'"Have you no faith in the strength of my arm? Besides, you worry too soon. The council has not voted yet." "You know they will do what you want them to," said Nami. "A sharna should not be so perceptive," Runner replied, smiling. Then: "Hold up my first-born son. I would see him before I enter the council meeting-place." Only three summers old, the young male was handed gingerly from sharna to sharna until Runner could cradle the small form in his arms. He hugged the smaller version of himself, then lifted him high in the air and shouted, "My son, my heir! If I do not return, he is the new chieftain!" The new chieftain had started to wail. ward, eating, while the Centaurs edged in closer, as yet unnoticed by the dogs. "It pays us no heed!" said an awed warrior. "No wonder," replied Runner. "Look, it has no nose, nor eyes-only that great mouth." "So," said Moon-son. "Let us kill it and stop the evil it does." "Moon-son is right," agreed Runner. "We must use our shars on this beast."  At that the warriors, shars poised to strike, moved in and surrounded the cholo. Runner chose a flank. "Die, monster!" he shouted as he plunged home his shar. Immediately the others began thrusting their short shars into the body of the great teve-t#iitx. Reacting to pain unlike any it had ever felt before, the cholo shuddered and tried to escape by charging forward. Moon-son, caught unaware by the beast's sudden spurt of speed, tried to get out of its path. Too late -- the huge creature lunged forward in fear and pain, knocking Moon-son off his feet. Screaming, Moon-son tried to get up. Before he could, the entire front of the cholo came down on him like a dark shadow and abruptly cut off his scream. "God of the Winds!" shouted a shocked warrior. "Keep thrusting!" Runner ordered. The cholo bellowed and tried to flip over to its back but lacked the strength. Still, only after hundreds of blows had been struck did the creature die. "We did it!" shouted the warriors at last, realizing the reve-eater finally was dead. But there was no time for rejoicing. Growls and barks of anger and challenge reached them. "The leaper killers!" shouted Runner. "Prepare for the attack!" The warriors formed a rude circle, faced outward. Not a moment too soon-the leaper killers were already on them. It quickly became clear to Runner that he and his men could not conquer these snarling, darting shapes. The beasts rushed in, slashed at Runner's men with their fangs while adroitly avoiding the thrusts of the shars, then backed off for another rush. Yet the contest appeared a standoff. No one on either side would be able to inflict any serious wounds without risking death. Runner did what he thought best. "Quickly, let us retreat!" His men wheeled and galloped across the plains. The leaper killers tried to follow but were unable to maintain the speed of Runner's warriors. When it appeared they had safely outrun their pursuers. Runner dared slow down and turn back to look. He glimpsed one of the two-legged beings among the leaper killers. The strange being was pointing something in his direction. Suddenly a mound of soil to Runner's right burst into a hundred bits. This was followed by a loud report from the direction of the two-legged one. Runner urged his men to more speed. When they reached camp, it became a scene of jubilation. The warriors were welcomed back as heroes, as mortals bold enough to battle monsters and emerge unscathed and victorious. Runner's shaman and children swarmed about him ecstatically. The older children clamored for his attention while the younger were pushed forward to be taken and held by him for a few seconds. It was as if to touch him were to touch someone godlike: his shar, his whistler, his koro, all were touched, stroked, grasped briefly. His wives kicked and shoved each other to be near him, ignoring all pretense of status order. It was the same with the rest of the tribe. The only ones not celebrating were the people of Moon-son's hut. "Moon-son died a warrior's death," Runner told them. "Rejoice. He has joined the ancient heroes sung in the songs of the tribe." T aylor looked at Ray as if he were a stranger. "The dogs say you missed hitting the leader of the Centaurs by a good two meters. I know you're a dead shot, even at that distance. So what happened?" "I-I don't know. I just couldn't kill him unfairly, I guess." "Jesus-" Taylor shrugged resignedly. Beowulf. "Yah, but spring coming." "So are big winds, Ray say." "And they not make our job easier," Beowulf acknowledged. Grendel looked down the line of cholos. "Littlejohn coming." "What is it?" Beowulf asked when Littlejohn reached them. "Nothing. Ray sent me to see what happening here." "Things quiet," replied Grendel. "How 'bout you?" IF "Same." "I'm worried up," Beowulf said. "Oh, why?" asked Littlejohn. "They be back for sure," said Beowulf, shaking his head, "And there not 'nough of us if bunches attack us." "Funny," said Littlejohn, "that's what Ray say, too." T he wind was blowing hard toward the monsters' line of march as Runner's warriors drew up in a circle around him. "The leaper killers that guard the giant teveenters will catch our scent. It is borne on the Sharcarrier said. "Is my name not Runner-withthe-Wind?" Runner asked. "The holy man has asked the gods of the nav to bless us. Let the leaper killers smell us. It will be too late for them to prevent the holocaust the nav will bear to the monsters they protect." He looked at his warriors. Each carried a firepot, a shar and a whistler. "You know the plan. Go." They dispersed to set the ve aflame. (#T smell them, too," said J. Littlejohn as Mama-san trotted over with a warning. "Something up. Tell Ray." Mama-san had not gone ten paces before she heard Littlejohn cry, "Fire!" She turned to see a wall of flame rushing down on them like a tidal wave. The cholos had to be turned or they would head right into the fire. By the time they sensed the flame it would be upon them. They would have no chance at all. The dogs leaped into action. Dashing in close to the cholos, they started the beasts turning away from the blaze. There was a small chance such tactics could save creatures... In the van Taylor was first to notice the flames. "I'd better get this heap moving!" He slipped into the control couch. "The dogs will start turning the cholos on their own and Ray has the hover-scooter." "All right," said Mary. "I'll batten down any loose material." X-r the wind as he stood between the cholos and the van and watched the fire sweep closer to the beasts. He climbed onto his scooter and dashed about, shouting orders at the dogs. There was enough smoke to obscure visibility beyond forty or fifty meters. Ray failed, in the confusion, to consciously note the distant figures moving through the smoke like shapes flowing across a dreamscape. Aware now that something was wrong, the cholos felt the first tentative touch of heat from the flames and started to move faster. They were no longer eating -- they were moving away from a danger they as yet could recognize only as something to be feared. Suddenly a jagged streak of lightning tore across the darkening sky, followed by a hollow clap of thunder. The wind turned back on itself momentarily. The tidal wave of flame was checked as if by an invisible dam. Then the dam was breached in several places as the wind revived, sucking up parts of the fire and hurling them forward among virgin grasses. One of the slower cholos was overtaken and enveloped by a sheet of flame. Ray heard an incredibly deep rumble of sheer terror tear from the trapped cholo -- the first sound he had ever heard a cholo utter. The cholo's pulpy body sizzled and popped like that of a fat and juicy caterpillar in a campfire. The doomed creature writhed in an agonizing dance of death. "Oh, sweet Jesus!" Ray moaned, turning away. The smell of burned cholo flesh resembled that of charred rubber. It reached his nostrils as he wheeled his scooter and joined the other cholos in their mad retreat from the fiery onslaught. He gagged but kept driving. The dogs were all around him now. The cholos, in full flight, needed no more urging to run from the fire. "C'mon, Ray," Beowulf shouted at him. "I'm coming, but I want to stay as close as possible to the cholos. You fellows are faster than the cholos. Get ahead where it's safe." "Okay, Ray. Good luck!" Backs rippling, the cholos raced across the plain. The dogs had pinched them in toward a common center and occasionally they would collide with and rebound from each other as they ran before the wind's hot breath. Small animals and an occasional antelope and hide cat could be en among the cholos and dogs. No species paid any attention toany other: the fire was common enemy to all. #T T'S no use," Taylor told Mary. JL"We can't outrace the fire. I remember a deep ravine about two kilometers ahead -- I'm going to make for the bottom. There's little growing there to burn and I'm almost certain the van can survive the heat when the fire leaps over us." "It sounds good. I only hope that Ray is safe." R ay saw the van disappear into the ravine and waited for it to climb out the other side. When it did not reappear he panicked for an instant, imagining the van was stuck at the bottom. Then he hit upon Taylor's probable plan and approved its soundness. He refused to look back. He could hear, even above the roaring of the fire, the death rumbles of the cholos. Soon he was . at the ravine. He bounced over the lip and guided the scooter down the steep side of the wall in a kind of controlled skid. He hit bottom and almost lost the IF scooter but managed to keep it upright by sheer muscle. He intended to linger in the ravine no longer than it would take for him to be sure both Mary and Taylor were uninjured. He passed slowly in front of the windscreen, waving madly when the two faces from inside pressed up against it. Then the scooter lurched as he applied power. He was climbing the other side of the ravine, not nearly as steep as the side he had descended, when something about the van's position occurred to him. The cholos... He turned just in time to see one of the beasts hesitate at the lip of the ravine then press forward as a tongue of flame licked at it. It tried to inch its way down but quickly lost traction on the loose soil of the steep slope and skidded sidewise. The cholo hit a small outcropping of rocks, flipped, began to roU. It careened to the ravine's floor and smashed into the rear of the van with tremendous force. The cholo's impact slewed the rear of the van around drunkenly; the vehicle struck the opposite wall of the ravine and overturned. All communication antennas were shorn off. There was nothing Ray could do at the moment. Other cholos were braving the ravine at various points along its length. The fire was right behind them. He had to get away, praying that Taylor and Mary had survived the awful collision. In seconds the flames had reached the ravine and leaped across it, borne by the gusting wind. Ray and the few surviving cholos ran before it. Again and again lightning crackled across the sky, now the hue of dusk. The wind began to blow erratically. At last heavy drops of water, each the size of a small stone, began to fall. It was as if the gods were weeping for the lost cholos. The rain fell faster. The wind shifted, blowing the fire back towards the devastated earth it had just swept bare of all life. A victim of its own voracious appetite, the fire now had nothing to sustain it and began to collapse inward on itself. Ray looked about for the dogs. He could see only one or two. The others, he assumed, were probably trying to run down and halt the still fleeing cholos that had survived the fire. He was turning the scooter to head back toward the ravine when he heard the sound of hoofs. on Ray and reacted instantly. As he bounded across the prairie he saw a bolo-like throwing weapon knock Ray from the scooter. The sight infuriated him. Now he gave no thought to his own safety-a man had been attacked! His assault was so swift, so silent, that they were unaware of it. He was in the air, fangs bared, when the target Centaur finally turned in alarm, exposing his throat to Anson. Screaming a battle cry only at the last instant, Anson felt his teeth tear deeply into the Centaur's throat. Blood filled his mouth and gushed between his teeth. Knowing the wound he had inflicted was fatal, Anson charged a second Centaur. By this time the others were aware that death was among them. Anson no sooner had his fangs in his second victim's throat than he felt the first spear enter his back. Its only effect was to make him bite down harder, the better to force the life out of this bedamned creature that had dared attack his master. More spears pierced his body. He felt his jaws release his mortally wounded prey. "I have obeyed the law!" Anson howled as the leader of the Centaurs drove a final spear through the scout dog's heart. JL it!" "I'll just be a few seconds more," Taylor promised. "There." He stepped back from the side of the convulsively heaving cholo with an odd sense of achievement. "The charge is implanted. Let's get back now." Mary followed him to the overturned van. He picked up a small black box . and took one last look at the suffering cholo. It was the same one that had disabled the van. The beast was burned terribly and beyond recovery. Taylor was about to help it in the only way he knew. "Here we go," he said as he pressed the firing stud. The dying cholo seemed to rise several feet into the air as if by levitation. Then a loud whoomp reached their ears and the huge creature broke apart raggedly at its middle. "Thank Zen," murmured Mary. "That's just one. We've got twenty-four more to worry about -- and nine dogs and one Ray." "Let's get started." Taylor followed her to the top of the ravine. The view was not especially pretty. Across the gulf, in the direction from which they had come, the land lay scorched and raw. Wisps of smoke still rose from the fire-blackened soil. Tiny flames flickered, hissing as they tried unsuccessfully to embrace unburned patches of grass still heavy with water from the brief but furious cloudburst that had doused the blaze. Dotted obscenely across the hellish landscape were the charred remains of more than half a dozen of the choloslosers in the race against wind-driven flames. The cooked flesh still popped and split, oozing a colorless mucus that made the cholos resemble glistening slugs emergent upon a wasted abdomen after journeying through moist entrails. Mary gagged, dropped to her knees and vomited in convulsive heaves. Taylor bent, stroked her shoulders. "Are you all right?" "Oh, sure!" she napped back. "Never better." She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a handkerchief. "You're going to lie down a IF while," Taylor ordered. He helped her up. They scrambled back to the van. Wind whistled through the shattered windows. New Kansas seemed a hopelessly long way from Earth. The night's incoming tide of darkness flowed silently across the prairie and they felt weirdly alone. a few last times with his shovel and stepped back. He felt awkward as usual with the dogs and uncertain about how to begin. "I didn't know-ah -- Anson all that well, only through the work he did for us. But based on that alone, I'm well aware of what a fine and loyal member of our crew he was. He recognized his duty and he did iteven at the cost of his life." He smiled wanly. "Anson is one of New Kansas' first colonists. His body will give nourishment to a soil which will one day grow Terran plants." Beowulf looked up at Taylor, his expressive dog's face lined with sorrow. "Thank you, Taylor." There was a pause. "We want to be 'lone with Anson now, okay?" "Sure. I understand." Taylor swung the folding shovel to his shoulder and turned back to the camp he and Mary had set up near the van. 'The dogs surrounded the small grave and lay down, heads on paws, staring silently at Anson's final resting place. They possessed no telepathic powers but, like all scout dogs, were markedly empathetic to each other's moods and to subtle shadings of feeling. Their intelligence, artificially augmented, was secondary to their emotions. The idea might seem ludicrous, even distasteful, to someone not acquainted with scout dogs, but it was remarkably easy for a sensitive human to love -- almost to be in love with -- the dogs he or she worked with. The pain they experienced now from the loss of Anson was intensified by the fear they felt for the safety of the missing Ray. In a way, Anson's death was easier to deal with-it had a finality to it. But about Ray they did not know how to feel. Hope seesawed with despair. And, though it was in no way deserved, they blamed themselves for the apparent loss of Ray. Beowulf rose stiff-leggedly to his feet. "Let us recite the Law." "What is the Law?" "Tb stand by man side, as dogs have always stood. " "What is the Law?" "#b place duty above self, honor above life. " "What is the Law?" "#b allow harm to come to no man, to protect man and his possessions. " "What is the Law?" To stand by man s side-as dogs will always stand. " Beowulf looked mournfully at the other dogs, especially Ozma, and added, "Honor be Anson's -- 'cause he obeyed the Law. Shame be ours -- 'cause we did not." Then Beowulf raised his muzzle to the brooding sky and voiced a long, drawn-out wolfs howl of sorrow. One by one the others joined him. The chill wind took up the mournful cry. V R unner had never had a slave before, so it was with some difficulty that he approached the problem of deciding just what to do with the two-legged one. There was the question of how to guard him adequately, too. Actually that task was made simpler by several factors. First, the slave seemed unaggressive -- was "he" perhaps a female -- and unlikely to attempt to harm any of the shaman or children? Further, the slave was unaware of where he was and any escape he effected could only be an escape to death. Runner thought that no escape at all. When the slave had first awakened. Runner had decided to permit him to be freed to the extent of wearing a rope collar tied to a post near Runner's hut. After noting that the slave took his meals calmly and peacefully-he ate leaper meat with relish -- Runner agreed to Sunchaser's proposal that he be permitted to roam free of the collar while under observation. Sunchaser, as it turned out, kept the slave under her eye most of the day, feeding him and patiently showing him the camp. Runner was skeptical, but according to Sunchaser the slave quickly learned the meaning of nav, sha, shot, shamon, shaman, teve, gnur and other common words. The slave seemed quick-witted enough. Runner mused. T he van had been righted and the antennas crudely repaired by the time the persistent winds reached gale force. Taylor and Mary had rounded up most of the cholos and led them to the shelter of a ridge of low hills. The dogs were still searching for a trace of Ray. "Vaslev?" Taylor firmly held down the "receive" button as the communicator crackled and hissed. He was rewarded by the tinnysounding voice of Vaslev Khorsegai, another group leader. "Yeah, Taylor, whaf s up?" "I'm afraid we've had some trouble." Taylor took a deep breath and described the events of the preceding few days. "Whew. Sounds bad, Taylor. Just what do you want us to do?" "I'm not sure -- though I know Ray must be found if he's still alive." "Well, I can call some of the other groups and see what we can do." "Fine. Actually, until the dogs have some idea of where he is, Vaslev, I guess nothing much can be accomplished. "I know. The Bureau has pretty much left us to our own resources. But we'll do something. We have to band together in the face of any trouble from the Centaurs or we'll go down one by one." IF R AY'S background in anthropology meant much to him during the first few days as a captive. Within hours of waking up a prisoner of the Centaurs he had learned that the chief of this "tribe" was called Solaminov -- or "Runner-with-the-Wind" -- and that the Centaurs thought of themselves as "the people." As a two-legged monster Ray knew he did not qualify as a real person to them but they were remarkably unhostile. One of the chieftain's young wives, Sunchaser, had taken his "education" in hand and was responsible for hastening the process of familiarizing him with the Centaur language. With a few root words to build on Ray discovered that the speech patterns of the Centaurs were not so far removed fromrmany of the other "primitive" languages he had studied at the University of Brazil. Just as Eskimos on Earth had had more than a dozen words to describe the many kinds of snow contained within the framework of their daily lives so, too, did the Centaurs appear to have upward of thirty different forms to describe the various kinds of grasses that might be encountered. For instance, mehteve was "thick grass." Yoteve was "tall grass." Sharteve was "cutting grass." Gnurteve was "hide-cat grass." Further, there were more than ten different words describing types of wind in the Centaur vocabulary, Ray was especially intrigued to learn that the same word that meant wives also meant booty -- shaman. He began to talk with Sunchaser as he became more fluent in the Centaur tongue. She learned as much about him as he did about her and her culture. "Are all your people deformed?" she asked him one day. "Deformed?" "You have only two legs." "Oh. Yes. Though a four-legged man would be the deformed one in my land." "How strange." "Yes." Then: "Did you speak to Runner about what I told you?" "I did." "And?" "He says he will not speak with a slave." "But it may mean the end of your people if you cannot see that we mean you no harm!" "If you mean us no harm, why do your monsters eat our teve andrleave only poison behind?" "There is much land here. We only want to share it with you." "Runner says you cannot share what is not yours." At that Ray fell silent. T he wind howled constantly and Ray found it difficult to sleep more than ten minutes at a time. Again he shifted position under the rude leaper blanket. Nervously he fingered the knife sheath at his belt. At first he had been incredulous that Runner would permit him to retain his knife, but then this was a society based on honor and honor dictated that a warrior, even a prisoner, keep his sha. Ray kept imagining that a hide cat -- he still could not think of them as gnwrs -- was stealthily creeping up on him but reminded himself constantly that Runner always posted guards. Still... Some time later, he did not know when, he heard a noise. Almost afraid to move, he slowly turned his head. "Ga-a-a wha-a-a?" asked a pintsized Centaur. Ray chuckled in. relief. It was Runner's first-born son. Ray knew him well enough -- the youngster was fascinated by Ray and followed him everywhere. "Hey, you'd better get back to your hut before your mom misses you, little Runner." "Ka-a-a-a-" "I said -- " Ray stopped short when he saw the large shape materializing out of the night. It was a hide cat. A big one. "Beat it, kid," said Ray softly, pulling his knife and stepping in front of the youngster. The hide cat snarled and advanced. The child, panicked, ran for his hut. His motion attracted the hide cat. Ray swore as the cat started toward the boy. "Hey! "Here!" he shouted, but to no avail. The cat obviously had his mouth set for a Centaur. It studiously ignored Ray. ' "Okay, bastard!" Ray intercepted the cat's rush and jumped on its back, grabbing one ear and locking his legs around the cat's lean body. That caught the cat's attention, all right -- especially when he drove his knife into its throat. The animal leaped straight into the air and landed hard. Clinging desperately to the cat's ear Ray simultaneously told himself that he was nuts and that this was no time for pride. "Help!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. Shapes started pouring from the huts but he had no time to enjoy the results of his cry. He was too busy knifing the cat in neck and shoulder with one hand while hanging on with the other. The cat changed tactics and whirled suddenly. Ray found himself flying through the air -- minus his knife, which remained stuck in the cat's neck. This is it, he thought as the cat turned on him, fangs bared. It bunched to spring, then looked puzzled. It was puzzled by the sudden sprouting of a half-dozen spears in its back and sides. The cat made a weak mewing sound and toppled, blood gushing from multiple wounds. Ray saw Runner staring down at him, looking concerned. "Thanks, Runner," he said, then passed out. EP," said Beowulf as he X joined Littlejohn downwind of the camp. "Ray in there." "Think we ought rush them?" asked Sinbad. IF "Oh, sure -- and get Ray killed plenty quick," snapped Beowulf. "No, we tell Taylor we found him. Taylor know what to do." #fOU'VE learned our tongue X quickly," Runner said toRay. The other council members nodded assent. Ah, Ray told himself. Runner is the only one I need really consider. The others will follow his lead without much question. Aloud he said, "I was trained in my land to do so." "I see." Runner paused. "I must again thank you for saving my son's life. You could have been killed. Why did you not try to save yourself?" "I -- and my people -- mean you no harm. I could not allow a child to die when it was in my power to prevent it." "I believe what you say. But what of the rest of your people? Can you speak for them?" 'T think so. If you and I can agree to go our ways in peace, will not all our people follow? I am sure they will, for no one wants a useless, wasteful conflict. Is it part of the warrior's code of your people to die for nothing?" "Of course not. If it is a peace with honor that you offer, then, for my people's sake, I must make a covenant with you. What do your people do to signify an agreement?" "We grasp hands." The two did so. "Good," Runner said. "I will dispatch several warriors to guard you on your way back to -- " The Centaur leader was interrupted by the sound of energy rifles. "What-oh my God!" said Ray. Together he and Runner joined the council members rushing outside. The camp was in an uproar. Scout dogs dashed from hut to hut, looking for Ray. Men on hoover-scooters, men he did not recognize, were careening through the camp firing at anything that moved. "No!" he screamed, but saw Gnurkiller fall, his face gone. To his right Littlejohn and Frodo brought down a Centaur and ripped out his throat. Ray rushed in their direction. Sunchaser was running after him. "Make them stop before it's too late!"  "I'll try." Behind him some of the huts were going up in flames. As he turned back to the attackers, he heard Ozma shout, "Ray! We'U save you!" "Wait. I-" Ozma streaked past him and leaped for Sunchaser. The scout dog, though a female, easily outweighed the slight Centaur and knocked her over on impact. "No! You don't understand!" Ray screamed hoarsely as he tried to pull Ozma from the frantically jerking body of Sunchaser. Suddenly he went limp. He'd seen n the life go out of Sunchaser's eyes. "Why, why?" Ozma laughed cruelly. "They kill Anson." "But she was a female, not a warrior." "Taylor say kill everyone till save you. Must be taught lesson." "God -- oh, God!" Ray heard two hover-scooters pull up on either side of him. He felt himself grasped under each arm and lifted into the air. "Don't worry, buddy," a strange voice was saying. "You're safe." "Yeah-safe." In that way he was carried away from the camp and returned from savagery to civilization. T he wind was still strong though the time of the winds was nearly past. Ray and the dogs walked slowly across the prairie, heading into the wind. "We're sorry for what we done, Ray." "It's not your fault, Beowulf." "Yah, but-" "No buts." "Okay. Think they will take you-us -- back?" "I don't know." He smiled grimly. "I suppose you and the others heard the argument I had with Mary and Taylor about what we're doing. I can't blame them. I once believed everything they still believe -- that the Centaurs will have lands set aside for them for all time by the Bureau and that the colonists will honor the deal. But 'all time' will give way when the colonists needmore room or when something valuable is discovereid on the Centaur land. I can't accept that. I have to try to help them. They need someone on their side who knows what's happening to them." They were silent after that, each alone with his thoughts as they trudged toward the ruined camp. Eventually the camp came into view. Ray slowed down the dogs and they walked warily toward the center. When they were within three hundred meters of the camp Ray saw Runner emerge from his hut and stand impassively in front of it. Ray approached to within fifty meters. Then he stopped and made a great show of letting his energy rifie fall to the ground. Runner remained impassive. Again Ray started forward, the dogs following at his heels. Fmally Ray came to a stop directly in front of Runner. Runner stared into Ray's face, the Centaur's eyes refusing to betray his emotions. Ray thought of Runner's responsibility to his tribe and hoped he would put its future ahead of personal feelings. But the human could not help thinking of Gnurkiller, of Sunchaser, and of the sorrow Runner must be bearing. Ray very deliberately raised his right fist to his forehead in a salute, presenting his unprotected chest to Runner. Runner would raise his shar either to return the salute or to plunge his weapon into Ray's chest. Runner and Ray stared into each other's eyes as the wind blew. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the shar moved...  IF Only a band of bold spacemen stood between Earth and final catastrophe! E arth had been a member of the Interface interstellar civilization for four years. There were things to show for it, including a major spaceport functioning in Montana and a joint HumanFallaran project thriving on the moons of Jupiter. Not bad, although still the only true spaceship available was a Recovery and liaison Vehicle left behind by the Sasarenn, reptilian foes of the Interface, dislodged from the Solar System in #. It would be many months yet before Earth's prototype starships got airborne. On the whole those first four years had been quiet, considering that all the member races of the Interface could have descended on the Solar System once the matter-transmitter relays were placed in their various orbits. Yet for McKay, involuntary Planetary Agent since the Sasarenn confrontation, the period had been busy enough and so had passed quickly. Even in human terms, four years is not a long time. In astronomical terms it is negligible. Of course a year or two later, when Earth would make definite contact with some unscrupulous members of the Interface, McKay was to wonder if the advent of the body designated #-JA hadT)een coincidence after all... He was a long way from the field when the emergency arose. The swift reaction of his team proved that despite its many responsibilities, it primarily a rescue vehicle. McKay was walking along axountry road when the communications relay implanted in his skull by the Sasarenn handed him the punch in the back of the head. Those punches seemed to get more vicious as he grew older. McKay recovered his municator. "Acknowledge."  He stood motionless, the landscape around him "annihilated" as the perception circuit gave him the read-out from the computer on the orbiting space station. Though he had never stressed the point in public, Interface membership gave th some coverage against the random hazards of the Universe -- and the hazard now coming in from the stars was one unknown to Earth for geolocal ages. This McKay learned from the read-out. Immediately he opened a communications channel overriding radio chitchat around the sfpacefield. "McKay to all units, absolute away from the field and the Interface corridor. Clear all Committee for Earth's Defense channels for a planetwide alert Go!" He plugged back into the space station and began preparations. Exactly three minutes later, Slazeck called him from the ship. "We're standing by to lift, Mac, but , one of our trainees reported sick this morning. I don't think it's too serious -- want me to spring him?" "Negative," McKay radioed. IF "Take off immediately and home on my relay. This one's our biggest emergency ever!" ffe returned his perceptions to the station. When he came back to reality the scream of the approaching spread, flaps and gear down. McKay raised the communicator again. "Don't land. Just drop me a line." "Acknowledge." Slazeck was at the controls. He brought the ship to the hover, the hot jets beating down and boxing McKay. A silvery pick-up line spiraled down from the airlock in the underside. McKay slipped into the harness and was winched swiftly aloft. It was a good trick to stay clear of the Jetstream and get in this way without banging your head, and McKay wasn't wearing a helmet. But he made it without mishap. Slazeck climbed the ship toward the Interface corridor as McKay changed into flight overalls.  Arnold, the Air Force trainee, was with Devlin in the cabin. So too, unexpectedly, was Devlin's wife Cathy. Mcly blurted, "What are you doing here?" "You didn't say this is a contact mission," replied Cathy, hurt. "So I dropped everything and ran for the ship like everyone else." "Okay. Sorry, Cathy. You'll have to stick with us as far as the satellite -- there isn't time to return you to the field." He pulled himself through the hatch into the cockpit, dropping into the copilot's seat. Box OG, # Folsom, SF, Ca # The Underground Comix People Illustrated SciFi -- Fantasy for Adults # each Save # Off Retail  A. Sci-Fi: Slow Death #-#, Staiwench, Enigma, Brain Fantasy, American Flyer No. #  B. Fables A Heresies: Fantagor Na # (# color), Grim Wit N # (# cokv), Uttie Green Dinosaur I A Binky Brown, Leather Nun.  C Spinejarring Horrors: Skull #-#, Pchotk Adventures No. #, Two-Fisted Zombies.  D. Next # comix published for #. I am over # years of age Ask for our free catalog A how you can make  selling comix credit Mention thb ad A well pay shipping on orders above # comix. Testing Conceptual Limits Since # "We're in the Interface corridor," Slazeck told him, plugging into the computer-autopilot. "Shall I circle while you put out your broadcast?" "No, hold your climb," said McKay. "We'll put out a global warning from the space station." He contacted the orbital Interface relay and set the controls to place the ship by the station, velocities matched. "Up Interface!" J the perception circuits' allaround vision, a circle of blackness appeared. Half a mile across, twodimensional, the disk looked into space six thousand miles up. The jets instantly, momentum carrying their last gulp of air out of the exhausts in a cloud of ice crystals. The blue disk astern closed, leaving them in Earth's shadow. Visible through the forward ports, a giant wheel floated serenely. The space station. "Twelve minutes from alert to orbit," said Slazeck. "But for picking you up, we'd have done it in six." "Every second counts," McKay assured him. "Go ahead and dock, Walt, while I start the briefing." His own display told him everyone on board was plugged in. "It's a radar alert, crew. The satellite picked it up and rang all the alarms. Unknown space object. I'm bringing it up now on the display." "Got it," said Devlin. "That speck?" Cathy asked carefully, concealing her incredulity. " That speck' is nearly one-and-a"There's a radar beam locked on it now, but it was first detected on a routine sweep of surrounding space. system picked up the moon by accident. To show up at that distance, the thing out there has to be really big. And it's coming our way. It's on a collision course with Earth!" "You mean it's too big to burn up in the atmosphere?" "If it's as big as it looks, that object won't even feel the atmosphere," said McKay. "But the atmosphere will feel the object, all right. There'll be enough hard radiation from the entry alone to threaten Whatever their personal reactions to that news, the team members conscientiously showed no emotion. "It could be a mile across," Devlin read from the computer. "A fullgrown asteroid -- and not one of the Earth-grazefs, on that orbit." "Right. Looks as if it's come from clear outside the solar system -- " "Nosing into the docking collar, Mac," Slazeck reported. "Okay, we'll continue this conference in the station. Cathy, follow me to the control room. We've got to put out that alert." By now the international channels were cleared, waiting impatiently to hear the nature of the threat. In the control module of the space station,' McKay studied the latest read-outs from its sensory systems. Meanwhile Cathy contacted the U.N. headquarters of the Committee for Earth's Defense. Next, she switched the translators into the circuit for the international broadcast. Then McKay took over and told the world, through its military warning systems, what was coming. "The impact will be in the western hemisphere, some way north of the equator." he finished. "The exact dimensions and constitution of the asteroid are unknown. Taking the most pessimistic view, the effects of the impact may be disastrous for every nation on Earth. We've sent IP out message spheres calling for Fallaran help but warships may not get here in time. All emergency services should be mobilized at once. Preparations must be made for a major catastrophe." He switched off. The rest of the team was now crowded into the weightless control room of the satellite. TVe scrambled up the corridor," McKay said, "because it seems to me that we're the only ones who can do anything about this. If anybody can think of a definite, sure-fire plan involving gear or personnel we don't have, we've got just over one hour to do something about it." No suggestions came up. After a moment Arnold said, "Did I understand you to say eight hours to impact?" "Eight hours, yes." McKay glanced at his watch. "Nearer sevenand-a-half, now. But to do anything about it we have to get out to the asteroid. It's making more than forty miles a second right now and will be doing nearer fifty by impact. So we can get to it only by Interface-and the range of an Interface relay is ten thousand miles. I've sacrificed one of Earth's three relays for the purpose, hurling it out to meet the asteroid at # miles per second, so they'll pass in a little more than an hour. That leaves us only six hours, probably, by the time we get down on the asteroid -- but that # mps is near an absolute limit in this situation. Much faster, and the relay couldn't hold the range for the normal thirty seconds' duration of an Interface. Our timing will have to be perfect as it is...this is the narrowest launch slot I ever heard of." "What can we do when we get there? There's no way to divert a rock like that from Earth, is there?" "I can't think of one," McKay replied. "If it's a mile across, it's too big to go through an Interface. Somehow we've got to break it up. We won't be able to destroy it but if we can shatter it, the collision will do less damage." Slazeck spoke. "Suppose we cap't split it up. Just how bad will the crash be, Mac?" "I have some assessments from the computer here. As I said, just falling through the atmosphere, that baby can generate enou hard radiation to sterilize a huge area. It could be enough to kill all exposed life in line-of-sight. Adding the effects of the actual impact, the amount of energy that will be let loose, there might be no survivors at all from Paraguay well up into Canada. Beyond that radius there will still be earthquakes and volcanic outbreaks to contend with -- and we're talking only about land impact. The crater will go down to the magma whatever happens, but if it's on land a great deal of the released energy will be radiated back into space. If it's in the sea much more energy will be retained in the interaction among the fireball, the crater, the ocean and the atmosphere. Tidal waves will scour all the low ground in the world. There could be enough water-vapor and sohds lifted into the atmosphere to bring back the ice age. And if the damn thing's really massive, coming at this speed, I suppose there's a chance it could break. up the Earth's rocky crust altogether." The picture of total cataclysm drawn by McKay was reflected in the horror stamped on everyone's face, including his own. It was a paralyzing moment. He was the first to regain control of himself; after all, he had faced planetary disaster ' before. Slazeck and Devlin, responding to their long training and the steely self-command of their chief, managed to pull themselves together. Cathy, so as not to break down her husband, managed to fight back her tears. Only Arnold, the trainee, could not seem to break out of his horrified trance. McKay did notblame him. How awful to contemplate was the poible end of Earth and all its life. Slazeck decided that the silence had to be broken. "You'd need pretty high density to crack the crust," he growled. "Oh, sure -- I'm just mentioning the worst possibilities I can think of. We don't know yet what the object is made of. I'm hoping it's pretty light. The observations we have from the lunar relay suggest it has a high albedo on parts of its surface. If what we have is a loose ball of ice and pumice out of some comet, it's much less of a threat." "And we could break up something like that?" "Quite likely. Two of our missiles have nuclear warheads. I'm wondering about taking more along, but that would crowd out our rescue equipment. I think we should keep the stuff aboard in case we have to make a landing." Slazeck nodded. "Unless the thing's really fragile, we'll have to plant our charges below the surface." "That's what I have in mind. The as explosives for use with the rescue systems. I think we've got to save the world with what's aboard right now." Cathy had blown her nose a couple of times. She decided she could trust her voice. "So you're going out through Interface, to ride the asteroid back in?" "That's it, Cathy. Of course we'll have to use Interface to get off again." "Why did you stop at this satellite, chief?" "To get a look at the main computers. To get ourselves a few minutes of conference before we committed the ship to deep space. And mostly, Cathy, to deposit you. You'll be safer here." "But you'll be gone only a few hours," she said. "Not long enough for me to get in your way. It sounds as if I ought to go with you. Look, you'll need coffee." "Hell's beUs-" McKay began. IF "Chief, you know I make a mean cup of coffee, " the girl wheedled. McKay's attention seemed elsewhere, just for a second, as if he had plugged into the perception circuits. "All right," he said, snapping out of it. "You can come. Let's get back to the ship. Walt, you help me put these controls back on automatic." As they too were leaving, Slazeck shook his head grimly. "A mean cup of coffee?" "Just a thout, Walt," McKay said. "True, I don't like to take Cathy into space, even for liaison missions. But there's a finite chance that the object will be dense enough, formed outside the solar system as it was, to chum up the whole crust of Earth with shockwaves. If that's going to happen we have to save at least one woman-and there aren't any girls on the Jupiter project." "We'd probably decide not to continue the human race." "Even so, Cathy should be saved for Devlin -- and I'm glad, Walt, that the rest of us are bachelors." II T he connecting tunnel to the docking boom was withdrawn, backed out of the tangential collar into the glory of the sunrise. Slowly, as the white sun separated from the planet, the ship drew away and turned into the plane of the orbit. McKay fed the parameters for the Interface into the computer well in advance. When the time came the link would be set up automatically. The last few minutes seemed eternal. Nobody could forget that once they reached the asteroid, time would be desperately short. But at last came the thirty-second warning. "Activate," ordered McKay. The display traced the outline of the Interface ahead. The chemical smoothly through the invisible disk. There was no change in attitude. The stars did not move. But the Earth disappeared and came back as a distant blue-green crescent. The moon flicked across the heavens, shrinking and changing phase. And out of nowhere, looming like a shape from a nightmare, came #-JA. There was a pause of two or three seconds during which the Interface closed again. The relay hurtled on swung round and locked on Earth. McKay took observations and readings for at least three minutes. Then he cleared his throat and broadcast his description to the waiting planet. "It could be worse, but not by much. Nickel-iron. Roughly spherical, though there's a pronounced ridge like a shoulder on the side nearest us. It's overlaid with ice in ridges and peaks, an intricate pattern that looks built up by accretion. It has little or no rotation relative to the sun, so there's a big clear patch on that side of it. The patch is black and glistening. Looks pretty solid. Around it the ice ridges facing the sun are vaporizing, so the asteroid is dragging a faint cometary tail-very faint. We're going to take stock of what we can do, now that we see the thing." Another pause, not all due to the time lag between the asteroid and Earth. At last the voice of Earth came size of the body?" "Approximately one mile in diameter," said McKay. "Likely a core fragment from some split planet. It The Earth authorities did not reply. Confirmation of their fears, apparently, had stunned them. "Well," said Slazeck suddenly, "we're coming down toward six hours to impact. I take it we're going to sink charges?" "Right," said McKay. "But where? Thatear patch looks big enough for a good spread of microphones. If we can pass seismic shocks through it and triangulate, maybe the computer can trace the asteroid's inner structure. From that we can calculate the best charge locations. Walt, suit up and we'll put you down there. You too, Dev." rescue ship, its g-couches were exceptionally versatile. With acceleration shielding closed around them, they could be separated from the ship's life-support and passed out through the side hatches as air-cushion sleds or stretchers. In space, they could serve well for ship-to-ship transfers, so why not for ship-to-asteroid transfers? As McKay was edging the ship toward the black patch on the sunward side of the asteroid Slazeck and Devlin put on their suits and broke out the microphone equipment. They opened the lock, and he guided two sleds down the hull to them. "You'll need the sleds to land in this gravity. It's low enough to be deceptive-about #g. I'm keeping the ship well out till we pick a touchdown site, so you've got the honor of making the first landing on the beast. Ready?" "Affirmative." To save time, the two were taking along explosives and one big nuclear warhead. Festooned with equipment, the two cockleshells drew away from the ship, wending slowly and carefully down to meet their shadows on the shiny surface. "You're right about this gravity, Mac," Devlin reported over his radio as they began to unload. "Things bounce right up. You grab above them because you think they're weightless." Looking down from a safe distance, McKay could see their difficulty. On almost every step they rose off the surface and had to wait for gravity to pull them back. "Suggest you stockpile your equipment right there, Walt. Then you can use the sleds to pay out the microphone cables. We're down to five hours thirty..." "Will do. Mack." IF McKay watched until the first two niikes were in position. "For once, we could really use magnetic-soled boots," Slazeck reported. "We'll make a note for the next time this happens, maybe in a few hundred megayears. While you're putting out the third mike, Walt, I'll move the ship to the far side of the asteroid. I'll throw a communications relay halfway around so we can still hear each other." "Roger, we copy." phrase, McKay turned the ship. out from the asteroid in order not to be snared by the tug of its mass. He knew by experience not to mistake low gravity for no gravity. It might almost be easier to get an orbit around the thing, he thought, as he edged the ship along the icy bulk. In fact, Arnold suggested just that. "No. One burst on the attitude control jets could slam us right into it, if I went that close." At the halfway mark McKay launched the com repeater, nudging it gently outward at just over escape velocity. Above the dark side, setting the autopilot to compensate for the coming recoil, he deployed the guns above and below the hull. Reflections of the muzzle flashes could just be seen in the dark ice. "Firing one...firing two...firing three...firing four..." The shells burst inadequately on the asteroid, suddenly giving scale to its bulk. Chips of ice flew and cracks radiated, but the overall effect was negligible. "Doesn't look like enough," McKay said to Arnold. "I remember an Air Force attempt to bomb an iceberg, sir," said the trainee. "Ice can absorb a lot of explosive energy. And it's the metal underlying it that's our real problem." A few moments later Devlin reported. The microphones had picked up vibrations generated by the shells. But the tremors had been too' weak to reveal anything about the asteroid's structure. "I'm going to try a missile," McKay announced. "Better hope it works. We've only got four." The missile bay had been left open after the withdrawal of the first nuclear warhead. McKay rolled the ship a quarter-turn and fired one of the conventional-warhead missiles. It streaked toward the asteroid, picking up speed fast, and made a satisfying explosion. Clearly it had penetrated the ice. This time Slazeck and Devlin reported a definite shock underfoot, enough to lift them off the surface for a second, and the computer went into its analysis program. Numbers and geometrical figures danced on the color display, dissolving to a #-D rotating model of the asteroid's interior. Stress lines were defined. McKay guessed that maybe it had been liberated from its planet of origin by the impact of some similar wanderer; such was its density, it must have been under great heat and pressure. The ice must have formed over it in space, perhaps by from water vaporized by the original cataclysm. The computer pushed straight on to plot the asteroid's destruction. The first solution, a hundred percent certain, involved placing both nuclear warheads near the center. The apparatus kept calculating possible locations. McKay shut it off when it pinpointed two spots respectively ten and fifteen feet below the surface. "We'll try to make that one," he announced. "We're down to only forty percent probability of success, but that's about the best we can do." Over the radio he explained the plan to the two team members on the surface. "Right," answered Slazeck, from the far side. "Looks like our best bet. What it amounts to is that we'll be relying more on resonance than on the force of the bombs. Want us to take the shaft nearest us?" "Affirmative. The computer indicates that you should sink it on the edge of that clear patch. So you won't have problems clearing ice. You can go straight down, which will make it easier for you to blast out. We'll need the ship's equipment for the hole on this side." "Okay, we'd better get started. Not much more than five hours to go, now." "Check." McKay got the ship under way again, maneuvering it painstakingly toward the touchdown site. "The shaft will have to go in there, below that shoulder ridge. We want to get the charge right in under the ridge if we can." "I'm going to bum some of it off," said McKay. He dropped lower. Close up, the ice cover looked a nightmare to land on. He was bringing the ship down slowly, turning into the tail-first attitude necessary for eventual touchdown. "Primary boost, three-second warning-we won't need the shields." "Check," said Arnold. He gripped the handholds. As the ship neared the jagged surface, McKay fired the fusion sustainer motor. A short burst was enough to cancel velocity and push sank through the ice, splashing on the hard metal below. A hemisphere of glowing haze grew up and dispersed into vacuum. "That should do it." said McKay, when the gases cleared. "We've burned down those surface ice ridges. They were worrying me -- looked too insubstantial to land on. And we've cleared off most of the ice film over, the metal shoulder. I'll put her down this time." He turned through I # degrees in the pitch axis, fired the motor to cancel their outward coast, and turned back again for the tail-first approach. He was maneuvering quickly now. Slazeck and Devlin were hard at work on their site, the precious minutes ticking away, and Arnold and McKay had not even reached theirs yet. He extended the tail blocks and eased down on the chemical motors, firing out lines from the blocks to anchor the ship to the surrounding ice. The blocks touched and their stabilizer booms snapped out. McKay cut the idling rockets. "Nice landing, sir," gasped Arnold. "Let's go, lieuten'ant," McKay replied shortly, unfastening his straps. He could not say quite why he was irritated; though he was still nomirelations with his former colleagues had been strained since the Sasarenn confrontation. He led the way through what was now the floor hatch. With Arnold, he paused in the main cabin. Ill K athy had unstrapped from what was now the upper couch. Looking cute as a button in her brief space-skirt and scarlet body-stocking, she eyed the vacuum pot in its horizontal niche. "Not much time for coffee at the moment," McKay said as he passed her. "We'll be panting for it when the job is over, though." "Good luck, Mac." She smiled at him. McKay dropped from the floor, normally the rear wall, through the airlock hatch. "We'U go out separately," he told Arnold. "When the ship's upright, there isn't room for both to suit up in the lock." Closing the hatch overhead, he got into his own suit as fast as possible, depressurized, and opened the outer door. Another difficulty. He had never had to leave the ship in this attitude, though Slazeck had done it on one of the Jupiter missions. Ordinarily he would be standing on the outer door, which would become a ramp lowering him to the ground. In this case the door swung up overhead, and the ground was far below. Normally the couch-sled units swung from vertical to horizontal and deployed from the rescue hatches to the ground; here the units came out vertical, and had to be lowered to the lock. Arnold took care of that from the inside while McKay extended the normal rear bulkhead as a platform and pulled the sled oyer on to it. He cast off the lines, climbed on the sled and lifted off from the platform. Foreseeing these difficulties, Slazeck had separated both nuclear warheads from their missiles. All McKay had to do was transfer the second one's lines to the sled, but even that needed the limbs of an octopus. He had to lock the sled's controls, keeping it hovering unsteadily on short blasts of the air jets, while he held the edge of the missile bay with one hand and unhooked the lines with the other. Anyone with no zero-g experience would involuntarily have pushed the sled away with his feet. McKay avoided that trap but hooking the lines to the sled took both hands, and he nearly overturned. Once it was hooked, to ease the warhead out of the bay on the end of the lines was child's play. Which was lucky, since his heart-rate and oxygen consumption were far too high so far. With the nuclear device penduluming below him, McKay began the descent to the base of the metal ridge. By now Arnold was in his suit and coming out of the lock. McKay lowered the warhead delicately, brought the sled down beside it. Then he spoke into his throat mike. "We're going to need lights, lieutenant. Can you bring them down this trip, or should I come back up?" "I don't think I could pay out both sets of cables at one time," said Arnold. "I'd sooner you come up and give me some guidance." "Will do." McKay was becoming engrossed in the job now, though the need for haste was never forgotten. He left the warhead and lifted the sled back across to the ship, up toward the open lock. They had been able to do something like this on lo, though in its Earth-normal gravity it had been better to ground the sleds and winch them aboard when the Arnold was loading his sled with explosives and the heavy-duty laser intended for cutting into wrecked hulls. Jockeying in as Arnold floated out, McKay paid the power line out to the laser by hand until it was well clear of the hull. Then he broke out their big rescue lights from the equipment bay, loaded them on his own sled. At the base of the ridge, the commander and the trainee got the lights set up. The metal surface, still slippery with ice patches, was treacherous in the low gravity. As Slazeck had indicated, the asteriod's pull was just enough to spoil coordination. To save time in the long run every movement had to be absurdly slowhelpless floating could mean only worse delay. The intense concentration required was beneficial, though. To a degree the work diverted the minds of the two from the awesome disaster that threatened. Otherwise Arnold and possibly McKay himself might have succumbed to panic. They took the laser from its sling, mounting it in the nose of the sled that had brought it down. Before letting fly, McKay called Slazeck. "We're way ahead of you," Slazeck reported. "Four feet down, and starting to set our third charge. Rush it, Mac. Only four hours to go," "We'll catch up with you, using the laser," McKay promised. There would be no recoil from it. Devlin was working with a hand drill powered from the sled, bracing their end McKay and Arnold lined up their own sled on the intended shaft. They triggered, held steady. In the near-vacuum of space the laser beam was invisible, but a glowing hole appeared in the ridge. McKay cut off the beam. The hole swiftly cooled. IF The projecting core of the shaped charge fitted neatly into the orifice made by the laser at that focus. McKay ' twisted off the detonator cap, and he and Arnold withdrew with the sled. He pulled up the plunger from the cap, rotated it ninety degrees, thrust it down again. There was no sound, but icicles which had formed on the fringe of the laser-blast shattered again. No cloud hung after the detonation. Gases had dispersed into vacuum, dust and fragments had flown out at above escape velocity. There was now a satisfying pit in the black metallic ridge, beginning the slanting shaft they had to drive for fifteen feet. This time the sled had to be positioned more carefully, to beam along the axis now established. After lasering, and using the suit maneuvering pack, McKay turned himself head-first into the pit to plant the second charge and arm it. They had to clip a communications repeater at the lip of the hole, and again draw the sled back with them before firing the charge. Another soundless blast. Then back again, to plant another charge. Align the sled...avert eyes...fire laser...plant charge, arm it...withdraw...detonate. Thus was the shaft battered into the metallic bulk of the asteroid. If it had not been necessary for a fully suited man to go down the saft each time, the charges could have been set to blast a narrower, deeper hole. But the Sasarenn designers had not envisaged this particular situation. McKay marveled that their systems could be adapted to it at all. Another precious hour passed. Three hours to impact, and the shaft was only halfway to the required depth. Fatigue was slowing the pair as well as causing mistakes in coordination. McKay fumbled with one of the charges, sending it tumbling away from him. If it had not bounced toward Arnold, who fielded it successfully, it would have gone irretrievably out over the ice ridges before falling. At that point McKay ordered five minutes' rest. "Wish we had some of that coffee down here, Cathy," he said wearily to the ship. "I'm keeping it hot," Cathy replied. "Mac, if you have time, the boss wants to talk to you from Earth." "Sure, put him on. Hello, Lang. Can you hear me?" The time-lag was much less now. Lang's familiar voice arrived soon enough. "How's it going, pal?" "Our shaft is about half sunk," said McKay. "Walt and Dev are down more than that. But we'll catch up to them. While theirs is an easier, shallower shaft to make, they have "Not too bad, though. Doesn't sound hopeless -- " "Hell, no. We'll get the warheads placed," McKay promised. "Of course, what will happen after that is anybody's guess." "You guys will make it for us, you on." ''Any panic?" "None reported anywhere, strangely. Mac, you never saw anything like it. The whole world is swiftly organizing for crisis. Whole populations are treking to higher ground to escape tidal waves. Say it's cut down to a rain of fragments on South America-there will be immediate worldwide response. Supplies, equipment, teams on standby all over the globe will be converging on the affected areas. Some teams from the U.S. and South American countries have already flown into Caracas, to be there when the crunch comes. They've volunteered to be right on the scene, assuming you shatter the asteroid and there will still be a scene." McKay took a deep breath. "Thanks, Lang," he said slowly. "You make me feel better. What you've been telling me is that if mankind has to go down, it will go down fighting. And maybe it won't have to go down. Tell the world we'll do our level best, for everybody." He turned again to the draining, moment, he was thinking, the stars overhead had seemed close enough to touch. D uring the latter stages Earth majestically rose over the metallic horizon, more because of the planet's increase in apparent diameter than the asteroid's slight rotation. Soft blue light crept between the sharp yellow ovals cast by the work lamps, throwing the tumbled ice around them into relief. Earth looked incredibly beautiful, rendering still more tragic the ruin approaching. They were crossing the moon's orbit now, an hour and a half from impact. But the final charge was in place. At a safe distance from the shaft, McKay pulled up still another trigger, twisted it and thrust it down. By now the shock waves were taking appreciably longer to reach them. Once again they maneuvered the laser sled back to the shaft. McKay had been making marks on the side every three feet as they had blasted down. The gap below the fourth mark looked adequate. "I think that does it, lieutenant." "Looks like it, sir. But can we get that warhead down here? And how can we load it in?" "We'll hook it to my sled again. Then we'll set up the timing mechanism, and lower the warhead and the sled on the same lines, using the laser sled as a belay. It's going to take a while, so let's get to it." Precious minutes passed while the rig was readied. The warhead went down first, the lines from McKay's sled passing to Arnold's and down the shaft to the charge. When they went slack McKay guided his sled into the shaft, following it down to connect up the power cable. Arnold IF was taking the strain with his sled, holding McKay's near the foot of the shaft. "Okay, send down the foam." The canister came down on a hand-line. McKay pushed himself back a few feet and sprayed the foot of the shaft with the acceleration foam used in them more passengers than gcouches. He worked back, spraying, until the warhead and the sled were fixed in place. Then Arnold dropped the lines, and McKay backed to the surface for the last time. "We're sealing our shaft, Walt," he radioed. "Where do you stand?" "Not too far behind," came the reply, from Devlin this time. "We're rigging the sleds to lower our warhead now." "Check," said McKay. He and Arnold sprayed their remaining canisters of foam into the shaft, anchoring the last cable to the wall, and finally McKay connected the antenna that would activate the timer. "Seventy minutes to go," he said. "I'm glad that in this low gravity one sled can lift us both. The laser, too." They unshipped the laser and placed it back in the sling. McKay gripped the sled, and Arnold lifted all toward the airlock, up the smooth underside blue Earthlight. With profound relief, they shed their suits and climbed through the main cabin straight up to the cockpit. There they found Cathy, her eyes anxiously following the perception displays. No one mentioned coffee. Her husband was still far from the ship, along with Slazeck. Then Slazeck's voice suddenly burst from the com speakers. He announced triumphantly that the other warhead was in position and wired up. At fifty-two minutes to impact, he and Devlin were finished at their site and about to start back on their shared sled. McKay switched in the master communicator and passed the news. "Wonderful, Mac!" Lang responded. "For the last hour there's been direct coverage from here to just about every radio and TV station in the world. I guess the biggest collective sigh in history just went up. You've done a great job, all of you up there. Mankind thanks you." "I hope the result will be worth the effort," McKay said. He was relaxing in the form-fitting couch, content just to lie there until it was time to take off. When the antennae activated the timers, they would have two .minutes to get away from the asteroid. That would have to be on full secondary boost, since there were no Interface relays within range. So he would raise ship and align it for the getaway before he told the computer to activate. The maneuver would begin the instant the others were back. We have a problem." Arnold stiffened on his couch. Cathy, fortunately, had returned to the main cabin. McKay jumped up and grabbed the panel mike. "What's wrong, Walt?" "We have a complete power failure on the sled. I repeat, complete power failure." "Report your location, Walt." "We're about a mile from the ship but floating down. Hitting the ice shouldn't hurt us. We're only about seventy feet up, and there's practically no gravity." "We'll break out more sleds -- " "I suggest not, Mac. We've already used up three couches out of six, and nearly all our acceleration foam. We still have a secondary boost to get through. Besides, I don't think you should leave the ship again, so near to impact time." A minute or so passed while McKay thought hard. "Here comes our own impact," called Devlin. Muffled sounds came over the radio. McKay stayed quiet. "We made it," Slazeck said finally. "We were spilled off the sled, but there's no damage." "You're right in the middle of the ice cover." said McKay, eyeing the displays. "Shall I try for a landing beside you, or can you make it back to the clear patch in the sun?" ' "I don't think you should land back there, Mac. We didn't seal our shaft as tight as yours-we weren't anticipating rocket blast from the ship. Also, our shaft is vertical and shallow, so blast waves would go right in. On the other hand, the ice cover where we've come down is pretty fragile. All pinnacles and slopes. They would cave in under the ship for sure." McKay began to see what was coming. "What's your proposal, Walt?" "We'll try to make it to where you are, Mac. If we don't, you have to save yourselves and Cathy." "Agreed, Walt," said McKay, trying to forget Cathy's husband was out there. "We'll give you all the time we can. But we're going to lose your signal shortly. The asteroid's rotation, such as it is, will take the com relay over our horizon. I was hoping to take off before we lost contact with your warhead antenna." "We won't be wasting any time, Mac. Dev's breaking out ice-climb gear now." McKay looked at the panel clock. Forty-five minutes to Earth impact. IV I T was Devlin who had the experience in ice-climbing. Maybe not on distant planets or wandering asteroids but at least on Earth -- the Alps, ranges in Canada and Alaska. "I guess you give the orders for this part," said Slazeck. Devlin was unloading ropes and ice axes from the tilted sled, "lucky we brought this stuff. We'll have to fit each other with the crampons. Now look, Walt', it's going to be mainly common sense, but we'll have to IF watch the gravity all the time on these ice slopes. It might seem we could bounce straight to the top using the suit jets, and maybe we could if we got a good purchase each time we touched, but how could we halt at the top? We don't know what's on the other side. If we couldn't stop, we might tumble right into some Jagged blocks and rip the suits open. Or be carried onto a surface that couldn't bear our weight. So we'll have to go slowly and steadily. We can't leap around here any more than on, say the Everest icefall." He strapped the crampons on Slazeck's feet, explaining the ties. "And keep your feet apart while climbing, or you'll get sucked out through rips in your suit. Crampons are sharp as spurs." He should have accompanied that line with a reassuring grin through his polarized visor. But he had no stomach, at the moment, for grinning. He sat, legs splayed, watching Slazeck fumble with the unfamiliar straps. Then the two men uncoiled the climbing rope. In this gravity, it was like spaghetti with a mind of its own. With Slazeck on the other end of the #-foot rope, Devlin took the carabiners and pitons and attached them to his belt. "Ice-axe in the left hand, ice-dagger in the right," he said into his radio. "Use the pick," he indicated, "not the adze. I'll tie on to the carabiner on the dagger handle when the rope runs out, and reel you in." "You mean you're going to do all the actual climbing -- and just pull me along behind you?" "That's it, Walt. Grade ten hardrock tiger in the sky, that's me." Slazeck dug in the pick and dagger, paying out the rope as Devlin, climbing or crawling with controlled haste, made his way up the gleaming slope. Each yard was won by striking out first with the ice axe, gaining purchase and ramming the dagger home before the axe curved forward again. "You're going out of sight from here, Dev." "Okay, I'm tying on now. Hold the axe by the pick and adze and push the handle away from you till you're leaning forward. Then I'll take in slack." With a curious bunny-hopping motion, Slazeck followed him to the ridge. "As an introduction to climbing this can't be beat," Devlin told him. "Little chance of falling, no rocks on the head, no avalanches, no sudden blinding mists..." On the ice ridge, the sky seemed broader overhead. They saw that Earth had swollen noticeably since the start of the climb. "But does your ass get frizzled by the atmosphere on Everest?" Slazeck grunted. "Climb, Dev!" The sequence was repeated again and again, between the jagged pinnacles, up and down the freakish low-g slopes. They were outpacing the asteroid's rotation, lowering the Earth back toward the skyline. But all the time the home planet grew. Devlin increased the pace as he got into the rhythm of the climb. He had gone on out of sight, Slazeck still paying out the rope, when it went suddenly tight. "It's taut here, Walt. You holding back?" "It must be snagged," Slazeck said. Devlin swore. "Okay, stay where you are. I'll reel myself back until I can free it." The operation wasted another precious minute while Slazeck stood idle at the end of the rope. At last Devlin told him to come on up to the cleft. It seemed obvious to Slazeck, when he saw the broken ice in it, that a line passed across it would catch. "Let's watch it, Dev," he said. "We're getting careless." "It's the lack of exhilaration. This kind of mountaineering is a bore." Devlin started again, across a mound of rough ice ahead. "It's like a circular version of Mt. McKinley -- a slow, monotonous, grinding climb." By now they had to be near the ship, though the white nosecone steadfastly refused to break the horizon. They had been moving for more than twenty minutes and the Earth belts soon, just the ideal introduction to climbing Devlin had described. "Ridge ahead, Walt. I'm tying on. Come up." Slazeck joined him on the ridge and stared over. An ice slope of seventy-five degrees, about sixty feet across, confronted them. "We can't glissade in these suits, Walt. And a run's too risky. We have to rappell, thrusting ourselves down." The explanation of the technique took up valuable seconds. Slazeck was now in the lead position. He leaned back until perpendicular to the ice and thrust himself down: long, slow, parabolic leaps. In this gravity, it took forever. At last Devlin braked him as he neared the bottom of the chasm. He untied the rope and Devlin pulled it back to himself, doubled it, ran it over his shoulder and half around his waist. In due course, after another eternal descent, he too reached the bottom. He glanced at his watch, and at the looming Earth. "I'd say our time's gone, Walt. If the ship's not over this next rise I don't believe we'll make it. Daggers and ice axes. Do what you've seen me doing and keep the rope short." He started briskly up the slope. The ship was not there. Nor over the next ridge, since they could not see the nose section. They were paying out rope to start forward again for a desperate scramble over the ice sheet ahead, when the white rose over the skyline and turned all the ice points to diamonds. S# IF cabin. McKay felt acutely frustrated, resting unsuited in the cozy ship while his friends were struggling across that barren landscape. Since the vessel was standing on its tail, its occupants could see across the first ridge to the one beyond. They would glimpse the climbers coming, if the two made it. But the ball of the Earth was expanding so swiftly on the horizon that obviously the main issue now was speed, "They'll get here in time, won't they?" Cathy asked querulously, over the communicator. Wearily McKay rubbed his forehead. "I don't know. Climbing was never a hobby of mine nor, as far as I know, of Walt's." "And Dev's been climbing a lot less since we got married," Cathy murmured unhappily. Nearly a quarter-hour after lossof-signal had cut off the climbers, Lang asked over the Earth relay about explosion time. "I'll delay it as long as possible," McKay replied loudly, for Cathy's sake. 'Ten minutes before impact will be my deadline." There was silence at the other end. Eventually Lang came back. 'There's some feeling here that the consequences will be worse the longer you wait." 'That's debatable. The sooner we blast, the wider will the fragments spread. Destruction will follow over a broader area." "The people in Venezuela may prefer it that way, Mac." "The people round about are as important as Venezuelans," McKay responded. That silenced Earth for quite a while. The asteroid and its human cargo rushed on toward the home planet at frightful speed, far faster than McKay had ever made the approach by spaceship. The shortage of g-couches was no longer going to be a problem. McKay launched another of Earth's Interface relays outward, to separate his ship from the asteroid an instant before explosion deadline. If Walt and Dev came into sight with only minutes to spare, he could now send the last couchsled unit to them by remote control. Another power failure at that stage at least could not make the situation any worse. Suspense and frustration mounted as the minutes passed. McKay considered launching the sled to bring them over the final part of the climb. No. Too risky. He could not pinpoint the location of the climbers, and to set the sled down anywhere else would mean they could never get to it. Once again, Lang called from Earth. "They're still not in sight," McKay told him. A short pause. "I'm deeply sorry to have to do this, Mac. You are ordered by the Committee for Earth's Defense to take off immediately and trigger the bombs." McKay glanced at the cabin display. Alone down there, Cathy was plugged into the conversation. "Five minutes more, Lang," he answered. There was no reply. The Committee knew it could not control him. Threaten to cashier him after his return? Nonsense. With the ship inescapably keyed to his own personality by the Sasarenn relay in his head, no one else could be Planetary Agent on equal terms. Oh the ship, the nightmare was becoming reality. McKay knew exactly what would happen next; it was just a question of when Cathy's grip on herself would fail. There it was. Her voice. She was asking, "Only two more minutes-are you really going to take off, Mac?" "I must, Cathy." But he could not face that himself. "I can see no reason to prolong the agony. Even if they come over that ridge now, there'd be no way they could get to the lock in time. I'll have her up in thirty seconds." He threw switches, made preparations. The ship came to life. "Rocket acceleration warning, three seconds," called McKay, closing the firing circuits. "You can't do it, Mac!" "I have no choice, " said McKay, pulling back the throttle slide. Explowent straight up on the bright flare of the chemical motors. It was not a full-power lift-off, though in that low gravity it looked like one. McKay cut the thrust after five seconds, acquired the com relay and activated the timers. Ninety seconds to detonation -- and on the radio... "Slazeck to McKay -- good luck. Thank you for waiting so long." The search devices suddenly pinpointed them. They had made about three-quarters of the distance. Decision seized McKay: he had done all he could for Earth, now he must save his crew. "Invert and cancel!" he snapped to the autopilot. The ship turned over much faster than he could have managed it on fly-by-wire. Eighty seconds to detonation, and it was heading back for the asteroid. "McKay to Slazeck. Report landing conditions in your area." "Don't try it, Mac. We're on a fragile sheet between ridges. It couldn't take the weight of the ship, much less a rocket blast-off. It would cave in, bury the ship and all of us." "I'm coming in anyway, Walt." "Okay, Mac -- we'll jump, you catch us." Inspiration struck. "We don't need that!" McKay shouted. He pitched the nose down and fired the motors, adding a horizontal component to downward velocity. "I'm trying hyperbolic flyby, which will be slow in this gravity. Stand by to catch airlock lines!" T here was no storm-front this time to blow the lines aside, as once had happened during a previous rescue mission. The ship sailed down with computer-aimed precision. The climbers grabbed the lines and rose off. Already the hyperbolic path was taking the ship away from the asteroid, but much too slowly. Arnold had set the orbital relay to bring the "Up Interface!" McKay cried, and fired the motors to thrust the ship through. On Earth, the suspense reached a critical value. "What's happening?" Lang yelled maniacally. "We're clear of the asteroid, with the entire crew aboard," McKay answered triumphantly. "Ten seconds to detonation." He forced himself into some semblance of calm. Were they still on television? "Nineeight -- seven -- six -- five -- four -- threetwo -- one -- fire!" The ship was now thousands of miles from the plunging asteroid. Still, McKay had expected some visual effect .on the screens. Or had the timers failed? "The charges have fired, I assume," he told Earth, "though there's no visible sign yet. The asteroid is going away from us very fast, but I'm going to higher magnifithere it starts -- the ice cover is exploding off, along with a lot of small debris. The fireballs are breaking out! If we've done nothing else we've blown two big chunks out of the asteroid, but if we got the resonance we wanted... Look at that! Two golden fireballs, coalescing into a rainbow sphere, too much ionization for our radar to penetrate -- " He paused till he plainly identified what he was looking for. "We've done it! There are chunks bursting out on both sides, along the axis between the detonations. We've split the asteroid right through the center! Not just in two halves, but into a great cluster of fragments." "Fantastic!" Lang replied hoarsely from Earth. "Everyone's going crazy here. I guess you can hear the noise. You've saved the world, McKay, do celebrating. Everyone is especially delighted that you managed to get Walt and Dev back aboard." "Thanks," said McKay. People celebrating. Delighted. Well, nothing with the weight or momentum required to crack Earth's crust would hit the planet now. It was safe. And destruction could not occur on the scale that would have characterized a hit by the single solid bulk of the asteroid. But the countless fragments, large and small, into which it had been split -- they could do plenty of damage yet. He looked up. Arnold, the youngster, had appeared at his side. "Congratulations, sir!" "There will be casualties by the thousand. Especially if the stuff smashes into land masses." "But nothing like what would have happened if you hadn't succeeded." Arnold was elated. "Be sides, most of the smaller stuff will burn up in the atmosphere. And even the larger rocks will be peeled radically." "That's true." He unfastened his seat straps and leaned into the cabin. "What's going on back there?" The inner door of the lock was open and Cathy was beside it already. In the lock, Slazeck and Devlin were shedding their suits. "We're doing all right," Devlin called. "I hear we got the bastard." "We split it into dust, metallic gravel and a bunch of chunks," McKay confirmed. He retreated to the couch, stared at the screens. "The wreckage is still separating," he reported to Earth. "It's getting to be a long way ahead of us now, so I'll move the ship down through Interface. You're going to need overhead spotting when those big lumps get into the atmosphere, which will be in five minutes or so from now." "Roger." Acquiring the orbital relays again, McKay took the ship down to fifteen thousand miles, and again two minutes later to ten thousand. He had no intention of getting in front of that falling cluster of ot, or even meeting small fragments expelled at high speed by the explosions. As he went down to seven thousand miles, the other four were plugging in down in the cabin. "There's going to be a fantastic meteor shower in less than two minutes," said Devlin, "and I really want to see that!" "You might have been in the middle of it," McKay remarked. He was watching some of the bigger fragments falling ahead of them. They had split the asteroid very successfully, but even a thousand tons falling at that speed would do more damage than a flock of Hbombs. His misgivings grew to near-certainty as he estimated the number of fragments. "Lang," he said, "I think this is going to be pretty bad, though not the global disaster it might have been. You'd better get out your worldwide alert now, in case the big flare-up interferes with reception later. The leading edge of the meteor swarm is going to enter the atmosphere very shortly-in fact, I can see the first trails already..." He had to abandon the description. There were no adequate words nickel-iron particles igniting in the upper atmosphere, burning themselves to vapor. Beneath the fiery cover, glowing, the larger fragments were plowing into the blue haze of planetary atmosphere. "There's the first impact, offshore," said McKay to Earth. "A the mushroom growing. There's another-and another. There are going to be to tidal waves all around the Caribbean, three more impacts, four, six -- one of those was on land. There's a second land hit-" He went on, completely the professional observer now, as dead silence took over together inland...another two out at sea. Oh, God... a direct hit -- God, on Caracas..."  IF H e was sitting in the shade, clear of the brawl, on the carved wooden porch of a roadside inn. A secret agent appeared out of the bright sun and offered to shake hands. John Wesley Sand looked at the plump man and his outstretched hand. A faint white scar circled the wrist. "Hello, Mort," he said. "I'm calling myself Ralph now," said the Political Espionage Office man "Am I blocking your view?" "I wasn't watching," said Sand. He was a lanky light-haired type in his late twenties. His left eye always seemed about to wink. the tip you were here on Silvestra, in the Cinco Territory, I guessed you'd rocketed out for the annual brawling festival." The plump man's voice changed to a deeper, buned one and he added, "But me, I knew you hadn't, John." "I'll teU you, Mort," said Sand, moving his glass of green ale slowly across the wooden surface of the table in front of him. "Right now Cinco Territory is somewhat hectic. When the brawling is over, though, it will be calm and quiet. Which is why I'm here. For calm and quiet." higher voice, "don't pretend you're not for hire any more." His voice switched lower. "We need you, John. We've lost two of our Political Espionage Office agents on this thing already." "Now you want to lose a freelancer." The plump agent came around the table and sat down in the chair nearest the long bony Sand. "If I can get a word in here -- me, Ralph -- " Sand said, "I thought you guys voted on who was going to dominate." "Oh, we did, but Mort won't play fair." "I get tired going around talking like a pansy," said the agent, his voice deep again. "It's bad enough being chubby." His voice went up. "You're the one who was twenty pounds overweight, Mort. I'm Sony I ever got stuck in that cruiser with you." "You ought to be calm," suggested Sand. "Here you are, a miracle of science, probably the only one on this planet at the moment. Enjpy yourself, Ralph." "Ralph is some pansy name," said the agent in his Mort voice. "Boy, it seemed like a good idea at the time. After those damned guerillas planted the bomb in the cruiser, and Fatso and I got blown up. Not enough left of either of us to save, but plenty of parts to make one composite. However, being a comp is not much fun." "Being alive at all ought to strike you as fun." Sand scratched the hair over his left ear. "You .want to hire me for something?" "Let me explain," said the Ralph voice of the comp agent. "I'd appreciate it." Down in the bright dusty streets, intricate fistfights were going on. The population of Cinco Territory was about evenly IF divided between humans and cat men. The dozens of brawls within view involved about the same percentages of each. Sand sipped his ale, watching the yellow street dust drift up into the bright blue of midday. Ralph said, "John, you've been on Barnum, our home planet, in recent months. So you know that there's a little bit of an inflationary trend agreed to pay all mercenaries a little less for the time being." Sand smiled quietly at the plump me, you'll have to go after those highjacked weapons yourself. And you might end up like Brennan and DeBonnis." A dazzling new Super Agent Adventure niw The stakes are even more deadly as Steve Austin -- 'The Bionics Man" -- confronts an international black market ring in nuclear weapons. # at bookstores or from # Third Ave., New York # ##U already know why I'm out X here on Silvestra?" "Even just sitting around," said Sand, "you hear things. About six weeks ago the Barnum government, which controls the provisional government of this planet and its territories, decided to get rid of some three hundred war weapons that had been stored some place out in the Quatro Territory for a dozen years or more. Since Silvestra is a partially restricted planet, the transportation system isn't what it is on Barnum and the obsolete weapons were shipped by train. Halfway between the old armory in Quatro and the spaceport here in Cinco the train was stopped and the weapons taken." "John, do you know who highjacked them?" "No," answered Sand. "But you pay me ten thousand interplanet dollars and I'll find out." "Ten thousand?" said the agent in both voices at once. "John, didn't I just explain about inflation?" "That's why I need ten thousand." "Ten thousand?" "Plus a thousand now for expenses." "What's going to cost a thousand dollars out in the wilderness?" "Bribes," answered Sand. "Sometimes it's simpler to pay people not to kill you -- rather than fighting it out." "Well, John, since you've done such good work for us in the past," dingbat meet your terms." "Okay." "Do you know about a man named Dougal Amarel?" "Not too much," said Sand. "He's some kind of political maverick, hiding out from the provisional government." "Yes." The agent's plump hands fluttered above the table for a moment. "Amarel, a human type, has founded something he calls the War Rally Party. This particular planet hasn't had a real war for seventeen years or more. Probably these brawling festivals have acted as a safety valve. Amarel seems to think his people are soft and need a good rousing war to toughen them up. We suspect he may be the one who stole the weapons, intending to supply his followers with them." "I haven't heard anything about that," said Sand. "Though it's possible. Exactly what kind of weapons were on that train?" "Nearly three hundred dingbats." "Dingbats?" "A weapon from before your time, John. Invented by a renowned scientist named Marcus Lorenzo Holts some three decades ago. It works wonderfully well in the jungle. Barnum kept getting involved in jungle wars on one planet after another around that time and these dingbats came in handy." "What do dingbats look like?" "They're robots of sorts. About four feet high. They're not humanoid but shaped rather like hot-water heaters, if you know what one of those is. They're on wheels and are extremely good at tracking. They have all kinds of little extendable arms that can shoot and chop and hurl projectiles. You'll see at the briefing." "Why did Holts call them dingbats?" "He was simply being whimsical," said the agent. "Intellectuals often have an unfortunate weakness for whimsy. If you'll come on over to the Silvestra Sylvan where I'm staying, I'll give you more background information and show you a movie." Sand's left eye nearly closed. "Okay," he said, "but later on." "Well, no later than sundown." Sand nodded. He finished his ale and glanced at the nearest brawl. shadowed room and slouched down into a rustic chair. "Brief me," he said. "You're forty minutes late," said the chubby agent, tapping a film cartridge with a plump finger. "Yes," agreed Sand, "We think it will be valuable for you to look at this special intelligence film about the dingbats. That way you'll be much better prepared moved flat-footed across the dry matting of the inn room floor and shoved the cartridge into a slot in the television wall. "Some of this is still secret and classified footage, John." IF "Shall I close my eyes?" The agent chuckled in his Mort voice. "Enough spoofing. Let's get down to the serious business at hand." He pushed the starter toggle and the wall was filled with an enormous picture of hills and woods and" distant cottages in the early morning sun. "This is combat footage from the memorable battle of Leisure Hills Estates. You've heard of it?" "No." "Well, it was a famous battle during the Eight Years' War on Murdstone some twenty years or so back. Here come the dingbats." On the wall tank-shaped robots, nearly man-high, came rolling down a grassy hillside. There were hundreds of them, some bronze-colored and some the hue of gray enamel, moving ahead smoothly on thin black wheels. Sand stretched up out of his chair. 'That's enough I'll recognize them now." "Wait a bit, John," said the secret agent. "Watch them in action. It will help you realize how dangerous they can be in the wrong hands. There they go into the town proper. As I recall. Leisure Hill Estates was a suspected sanctuary for over-age guerillas. During the Eight Years' War there were a lot of left-wing senior citizen guerillas operating. It was a war that produced some odd factions." On the wall cylindrical dingbats were rolling down the main street of the little town. On the cottage roofs old men in battle clothes showed now, sniping with blaster rifles. Arms began to sprout from the dingbats -- arms ending in pistols, arms that spouted flame, arms that terminated in canisters of subduing gas. "They were very versatile for their entire skirmish involved not one live combat soldier, not on our side. In fact even these combat movies were taken by a dingbat cameraman. There's a particularly nice shot of an old lady and her rocking chair going up in smoke. Harsh, realistic -- the face of war." The burning suburb snapped off the wall screen and was replaced by a blond man in an old-fashioned synthetic leather jumpsuit, sitting in a tin chair. "This bit of film is from a popular Barnum program of twenty seasons back. I believe it was called the Ed Nerf Hour of Talk." The Ralph voice took over and corrected, "Ed Neff." One lone tank-shaped dingbat sat at a piano near the grinning host, playing a four-hand piano duet by himself. "Here you see part of a public relations effort to humanize the dingseveral hundred feet showing a white-bearded dingbat handing out gift packages in a slum." "This is sufficient," said Sand, standing once more. Ed Neff and the piano-playing dingbat were suddenly supplanted by a vast flat field. In the center of the field stood a domed building. As the camera moved closer the name Simulated National Bank showed over the grilled building entrance. "These final films, from the Fort Anmar Proving Grounds, were taken some seventeen years ago. It was hoped the dingbats might fit into civilian life. Here they were supposed to put down a simulated riot at a typical branch bank. Look there, those six lead dingbats are getting much too excited. Here they're shooting the eight or ten volunteer soldiers who pretended to be causing a run on the bank. The dingbats proved to haVe a devil of a time switching from live ammunition to blanks." The wall turned white again. feel better prepared and better informed after this?" Sand made no reply... stalking across the high grass of the plain. They snarled, yapped, bayed, circled. Sand scratched the side of his nose with the flat of the knife he had been using to slice his loaf of dark bread. He pointed thd tip of the bright knife at the seven Wd dogs, who had halted about thirty feet from him. "Easy now," he told the pack. Sand remained on the stump hewas using as a chair. Far across the empty grassy fields were the tracks of the Silvestra Overland Railroad. By asking questions and paying out # in bribes in the past two days, Sand had learned that the dingbat train had been highjacked somewhere between where he was now and the small station town of Esforma six miles up the line. One of the wild dogs lurched closer, his shaggy blue head bent to the right and his teeth intermittently showing. He was making an annoyed, puzzled sound. "Alongside my knapsack over there," Sand said, "I have a sturdy walking stick. Inside that same pack I have a blaster pistol. So if you fellows don't want your heads cracked or your tails shot off, go away." Tlie lead dog howled. Then he sat down suddenly and began scratching his ear. "Ticks," said Sand. "Come over here and I'll get it off you." "I'm just in time." From behind Sand a blaster sizzled and the scratching dog gave one surprised yelp as it turned to flames and then to char. Sand rose up quietly and looked back. Standing twenty feet behind him was a short and slightly bent cat man in woods-colored tunic and trousers. He was smiling, whiskers perked up, and putting away his silver pistol. "You a sportsman?" asked Sand. "Or do yau have some stray dogs?" Sand was slightly unsettled, since he had not heard the cat man approach at all. IF "I'm the chap who just saved you from being devoured, sir," said the cat man in his high voice. "My name is Olan and by profession I'm a guide and woodsman." He gestured at the dogs, now running away. "Never trust a wild dog." He moved closer silently, rubbing his paws together. "You no doubt have other methods on your home planet, sir -- kind words, little favors, amiable persuasions. This is wild country here, sir. I'll tell you my rule. If a bunch of dogs are coming for you, kill one of them as soon as you safely can. This rule can be applied to more than wild dogs." Sand sat down and resumed cutting the loaf of bread. "What are you working on at the moment, Olan?" The cat man rubbed his cheek whiskers with a paw and then rubbed his ear. "I wish you hadn't mentioned ticks. Whenever somebody mentions ticks I imagine I've picked up one." He rubbed his ear again and squatted down three yards from Sand. His long brown-and-white tail swished at the grass tips as he spoke. "You're this chap Sand, sir?" Sand nodded, left eye almost closed. "What did you come after me to sell?" The cat man chuckled and touched his whiskers. "You're very trusting, sir. Perhaps I came rather to kill you and take your money. Here is another rule. With such poor people as you find in many parts of our planet you must not offer big bribes. Start with a small bribe. Better yet, give the chap an injury first and he may tejl what he knows for nothing." "We have different views of our professions," said Sand. "Okay, if you want to try and rob me get to it. If you don't, make your pitch and go away." "You're the chap who's looking for the dingbats, are you not?" I am. "I can guide you to the men who waylaid the Silvestra Overland Railroad train." "Who are they?" Olan laughed a high fuzzy laugh. "Perhaps you're not as amiable, really, as you act. Perhaps you're the sort of chap who might learn what I know and then kill me." Biting into the dark bread. Sand said, "So you'd like a fee to guide me? And you won't tell me anything now?" The brown-and-white cat man spread his paws wide. "You're a mercenary, sir, and I'm a mercenary. We understand each other. Pay me first, and I'll lead you to the men and the weapons you want. But I'll tell you nothing more in advance." "Well, okay," replied Sand, chewing. He pointed the knife at Olan. "If I ever decide to merge I'll get hold of you. Right now I'll continue on my own," He stood and picked up his pack, keeping one hand near the flap concealing the pistol. Olan spread his paws again and rose. He smiled and his sleepy cat eyes narrowed. "In a day or two, sir, ril look you up once more. You act like a chap who gets impatient. Two more days of no success for you and we can perhaps do business." He bowed slightly and turned away. When the cat man had been gone ten minutes. Sand walked off toward the Esforma station. T he heavy woman stroked her inner thigh with one fat jeweled hand. She leaned until her chin hung over the small oaken table. Her tiny mouth pursed for an instant. "Certainly, certainly," she said to Sand. She slumped back in her chair and stopped stroking. Sand's chair was pulled far back from the table and his legs were stretched out in front of him. "What is it you're so positive about?" "Moms Granada is my name," she said, rubbing in the vicinity of her large breasts until the nylon of her frock crackled. "Certainly you're Sand." He agreed he was. He had been to the Esforma station and the sixbuilding town surrounding it. He had found out nothing, spent another hundred dollars. Now he was stopped at a small inn in the low hills above town. The round windows of the inn were growing black with night. "I'm better known out here than I expected." Moms Granada nodded her bright rei head at the frail cat man behind the oak bar across the room. "He's a chum of Olan's. Olan was in here earlier. He told the innkeeper all about you and what you're looking for. That's the very reason I invited you over." Sand reached between his legs and pulled his chair closer to the large woman's table. There was no one but them and the innkeeper in th# beamed whitewashed room. "You know, ma'am, I had you figured for someone in a line other than informmg. "Right. I'm a procuress by trade," admitted Moms Granada. "That fact explains why I know what you want to know. My customers are a splendid source of information." She ran a heavy forefinger down the side of her pulpy face. "You know who took that stuff off the train?" "Jean-Paul Howzinger." Her little mouth pursed again. "Yeah," said Sand. "I've heard of him. He heads up an outfit called the Primo-Cinco Gang. Bunch of desperadoes, highwaymen and cutthroats. Nobody has linked him with this job." "People are afraid to talk about him much. You're from off-planet and already you know he cuts throats. I can't be hurt by him, though. Five hundred dollars-" "Buys me what?" "I can tell you where Jean-Paul Howzinger is hiding at this moment." "Him I don't care about. Where did he take the stuff?" "He's still got it," she said. "Two dayjs ago he did, at least. I delivered a IF wagonload of girls there. I can draw you a map." Sand lifted his left heel from the wood floor and then dropped it. His left eye closed. Tapping his heel once more he watched the fat woman. "Okay, ril buy your map." "TeU you what, Sand-Til throw in a girl." "Nope," he said. "Tm here for dinner and a night's rest." "The food here isn't all that good," said the fat woman. "You've been around the planets and I bet you never saw a cat man who could cook. This girl is brand new. I've been scouting the area and I just hired her. I've got her locked upstairs now." Sand closed his left eye again. "Locked?" "She's had some second thoughts," said Moms Granada. "In my line of work you can develop qualms. That's why I'd like her to meet you first, rather than some back-country desperado or cutthroat." Sand said, "Okay, since it's a special case. You get to work making the map and I'll go up right now." "I appreciate this." She touched his arm as he passed. "I'll climb partway upstairs with you. It's dark on the staircase and you can slip me the five hundred and get the key." Sand grinned and started upward. T he girl was twenty-two years old, slim and blond, wearing a simple blue shift. She was tied to the near post of the four-poster bed. The ropes around her wrists were long enough to allow her to sit up straight on the old trunk at the foot of the bed. Sand locked the door behind him. The room was small, whitewashed. "I'm John Wesley Sand." "Which are you -- " asked the girl -- "highwayman, desperado or cutthroat?" "None of those," he told her. "I got curious about why you were locked in here." "What did you pay Moms?" "Five hundred bucks." The girl inhaled sharply. "Oh, she's overcharging you." "I get a map, too." He came nearer, took out his knife and cut her free. "Now wait," said the blond girl. "Did she promise to sell you information on the location of the Holts dingbats?" "Yes." "I don't know what she's got in mind for you," said the girl. "She offered to help me locate them while I was naking inquiries in Esforma yesterday." "Instead she locked you up." "Yes." The girl had a fine sharpboned face. She watched Sand for a moment. "You're not with the Political Espionage Office?" "Only part-time. Tm a mercenary." "Fine, because I don't want to be of the Barnum government." "And who are you?" "Ann Veronica Holts," she said. "My grandfather invented the dingbats." "You want them back for sentimental reasons?" "No, I want to destroy them." "Why?" "IVe been out here on Silvestra with a private foundation called the Remote Welfare Service for almost two years," said the girl. "When I found out those dreadful machines were still in existence I decided they had to be destroyed. My grandfather was a misguided man. He even kept dingbats in his home. I was raised by him and I grew up around the things." Sand put a hand on hers and shook his head. He was getting better at hearing a cat man's approach. "You think this Jean-Paul Howzinger really has the dingbats?' he asked close to her ear. "Yes. He and his gang stole them to resell later. But Moms Granada isn't really going to let you get the dingbats. She's on his side." "She is, though, planning to take you to his stronghold and add you to the girls she's sold him?" "Yes." "Okay." Sand touched her hand again, then moved quietly across the moonlit room and unfastened the latch on the single window. He swung the shutters open and hopped to the ledge. Below, a gentle hill and high grass merged silently into pine forest. "I thought you were going to rescue me," said Ann Veronica. "Eventually I am," answered Sand. The door to the room was shoved open. The innkeeper, Olan and two other cat men rushed in, each armed with a knife. Sand jumped out into the night. H e bellied forward through the spiky grass, going in the same direction as the wind across the afternoon plateau and timing his flickering of the stiff grass to match that of the wind. At the edge of a cliff he rolled to his left, slowly and carefully, then raised himself slightly and looked down from behind a protecting shrub. Below Moms Granada drove a sturdy, bright-painted closed wagon drawn by four brown grouts -- a grout is something like a horse and something like a cow, with more legs than either -- along a dusty trail. Olan, the cat man guide, was riding on the seat next to Moms. Inside, shackled, was Ann Veronica. Sand had been following the three of them since the hour after dawn when they had left the inn. Somebody stepped on his back. "Oof," said Sand as a boot heel dug into his spine. "Stretch your hands out in front of you," ordered a nasal voice. "Where's your knife?" Sand twisted his head and saw the cat man standing with one foot on him -- a heavy fellow in a rough homespun jerkin. He held two longIF stemmed pistols. "It's poking into my lower ribs at the moment." "Turn over and fetch it," said the big cat man. At Sand's nearby pack a human type had just located Sand's pistol. The man was short and old, with a white circle of whiskers around his mouth. "Gun," he said. "Loaf of bread, cracker crumbs, pinch of lint." "Just find his weapons," said the cat man. "I like to be thorough, you slimwitted tabby." "The knife. Sand," repeated the cat man. Sand, on his back now, drew out the knife. "Why are you out here?" "Hiking," said Sand as the cat man dropped a booted foot on his chest. "You're John Wesley Sand and you've been following Olan and that rolling bordello." "Well, yes, that too." "Hoping to locate Jean-Paul Howzinger perhaps?" A third person had come silently across the grass. He was tall and slightly bent and had a high forehead and slicked-down dark hair. He was graced with a left-sided smile and slightly yellow skin. "From the descriptions I've had," said Sand, "you're not Howzinger." "How true. I'm Dougal Amarel, the noted revolutionary." "Why don't you get your foot off the lad, you glassy-eyed wood pussy?" said the bearded old man. "Let Sand up," said Amarel. The cat man complied. Sand sat erect, wiping his chest with his palms. "You're after the dingbats?" he asked Amarel. Amarel gave a faint chuckle, wringing his long yellowish hands. "Well, it's an interesting story. I intended to highjack the train myself. I had worked out a plan with DeVoto. This is DeVoto here," he explained, pointing at the cat man. "They all got silly names," remarked the old man. "Foolish cat names." "Well, so DeVoto and I conceived a plan for highjacking the weapons train. We got ourselves down by the railroad tracks, all beautifully concealed-DeVoto and I and fifty of my War Rally Party. There we were waiting for Ihe train," said Amarel. "We must have waited the whole morning. And darned if Jean-Paul and his Primo-Cinco gang hadn't already held up the train sixteen miles before it got to us." "When you got a pussy cat planning your strategy," said the old man,"you can't expect many coups." "Smith here," explained Amarel, "is a veteran of several wars on several planets." He strode over and slapped old Smith across his whiskered mouth. "No more anti-feline talk. Smith." Sand laughed. Amarel said, "I didn't think you were someone who laughed at another's discomfort." "I was amused by the fact that I'm not the only one who doesn't hear dingbat people sneaking up.' He nodded toward their right. Out of the grass rose six big men. The nearest was plump and moustached and wore a flowered tunic and neck scarf. He held a silver blaster rifle aimed at Amarel. "You ought not to come so close to my lair." "Now this," said Amarel to Sand, "is Jean-Paul Howzinger." "So I figured," replied Sand. across the mud floor of the stone hut. The thick plank door was slammed and locked at his back. He retrieved his balance just short of the chair Ann Veronica Holts was sitting in. "Do you happen to have a screwdriver?" she asked. Sand flexed his right arm, the one Howzinger's men had twisted behind him in the process of thrusting him into the hut. "Nope," he told her. He crossed the dry gray floor and listened at the thick door. Then he returned to the girl. "Would a knife do?" "Probably," said the pretty girl. "Oh, by the way. I'm not angry with you or anything. I realized your strategy. I had a lot of time to think while I was trussed up in that stuffy wagon. Yes, I realized you were using me as a sort of stalking horse. To lead you to Jean-Paul Howzinger and his gang." "Is that what a stalking horse does? I keep getting it mixed up with a scapegoat and a stray lamb. Why did you want a screwdriver?" "Over there," answered the girl. In the far comer of the low stone hut were two cylindrical mechanisms, obviously somewhat broken down. Screws and cogs and curls of fine wire were scattered about. "What are they? Two broken-down dingbats?" "Yes. Apparently Howzinger and his men had some trouble getting the hang of how the mechanisms work. They wrecked the first couple they tried to operate." "I always," said Sand as he reached down alongside his ankle, "carry a spare knife in my boot." "Good. It's fortunate you were thrown in here." Sand handed her the short blade. "They seem to have sorted out the prisoners by affiliation. They put Amarel and his followers two huts over." "He was captured along with you?" She left the chair. "Actually Amarel captured me. Then Howzinger and the PrimoCinco bunch came along and captured us all." "While I was bouncing along, securely bound, in that dirty wagonwell, I came to the conclusion you were honest," Ann Veronica told him. She dropped to one knee beside the discarded war machines. She touched the tip of the knife to her pretty chin. "Tliat's one of the things that differentiates men from machinery. Instincts. Hunches. Feelings. IF I often argued about that with my grandfather during the hot stimmer afternoons I spent hanging around his workshop when I was a kid." Sand eyed the chair she had been sitting in. He moved it closerto her and dropped down on it. "You think you can repair these two dingbats?" "Certainly. They had the adjusting knob turned up too high and that overheated these link rods right in here and naturally that put undue pressure on the mandrels as well as the billets. When that happens the extra strain affects the axial compressor and so all these thrust springs under here get loose and jiggle free." "And you can fix it all up with just a knife?" "Well, a screwdriver would be better-but I think so." "Are these things still loaded?" "Yes, because you can't disarm them if there's a malfunction. A feature my grandfather built in for battlefield protection." "Then we can, theoretically, use the pair of dingbats here to help us fight our way out of Howzinger's stronghold," said Sand. After the Primo-Cinco gang had captured him and the War Rally Party people. Sand had been brought, tied and bent over the back of a pack grout, through the valley and up onto a rocky slope, thick with scrub and black cactus. Howzinger had nearly a hundred men with him on the tree-surrounded slope. They occupied something like three dozen huts. Behind the largest were two hundred or more packing crates with dingbat stenciled on each. While Ann Veronica tinkered, Sand wandered to the thick wood door and put his left eye to a slim crack. "That's interesting," he said. "What is?" "A hundred or so angry-looking guys are riding out of the woods, humans and cat men. Shooting a lot." "They must certainly be Amarel's War Party people trying to rescue him." Sand sidestepped and put his eye to a different crack. "Howzinger and his gang are starting to uncrate the dingbats." "To help repel the attack, I assume." Ann Veronica stood up, absently wiping one oil-spotted hand across her buttocks. "There." Whooping was commencing outside. "Got them fixed already?" "Yes, I believe so." She paused, listening. "Oh, they've got their dingbats turned up too high again." She reached down and fingered a series of buttons under a plate in one of the dingbat's backs. Then locked the plate in place. T he war machine skittered a few feet. A thin alloy arm popped out of its right side and made a saluting gesture against the top of the tank. "Subaltern # reporting for duty," said the machine out of a round grid in its midsection. "Go out through that door, #," ordered Ann Veronica. She got the other dingbat activated. This one jumped erect, saluted and said, "God bless you, miss." "Darn," said the girl. "This one's programed to be a chaplain. My grandfather always built a few of them to soothe his critics." She came over to Sand. "We'll have to make do with # here." Subaltern #, using three of his arms and a tube that extended out of his chest, had burned the hinges and locks off the big door and now used two metal-booted feet to kick the door down. "Moms Granada parked her wagon twenty yards from here," said Ann Veronica. "Was it still there when they brought you in?" "You get an odd perspective, upside down over a pack grout. But I think I did notice the wagon." "Okay, #. Cover us while we run for that wagon." "You bet, miss." Subaltern # rolled out of the hut, two arms swinging blaster pistols. A flame cannon extended from his top. Keeping behind the dingbat. Sand and the lovely girl headed for the wagon. Although it was empty of occupants, the grouts had not yet been unharnessed. Sand boosted Ann Veronica to the seat and jumped up beside her to take the reins. "Get inside," he told her. "I have to stay out here and instruct #." A thousand feet from them e Primo-Cinco gang by now had nearly half the dingbats uncrated. Howzinger was supervising while part of his gang fired at the advancing War Rally bunch from the protection of the hut walls. The dingbats were still mostly making whooping sounds. Some of them were running in wobbly circles among the men who were uncrating. A dozen of the war machines were firing straight up in the air with a variety of weapons, others were puffing out clouds of a green-hued gas. Fifteen were digging a trench behind the packing cases. "Get going," said Sand to the grouts, switching the reins. The animals started moving and the wagon rolled. Ann Veronica told her smoothly functioning dingbat, "#, make a path for us. Use your anesthetic pellets." To Sand the girl added, "These pellets are the one humane touch grandfather agreed to build in." "Right you are, miss," replied the dingbat. Two new arms extended from low on the tank and the machine went spinning down the slopes, firing at the invaders who were leaving the brush and cactus and coming up the hillside. An albino cat man was hit first and stumbled off his horse, falling asleep in midair a second before he crashed in a blueberry bush. Two white-bearded men fell next and then the War Rdily Party members started to pull back to avoid the oncoming wagon. In five minutes Sand and Ann Veronica had ridden clear of the fighting and were out in the valley beyond the slopes. Subaltern # whirred up alongIF side and said, "Requesting permission to assume command of battle operations back there, miss. Now that you're free of danger." Sand's left eye closed for an instant. "You're designed to lead the rest of those dingbats?" he shouted down. "In the absence of authorized human military personnel, yes. Tliat's what the # designation indicates," replied the rolling dingbat. "You see, there's no rank higher than subaltern among us. The numerical designations are how..." "Since there are no official human military people in charge, you are?" "Exactly, sir," replied Subaltern #. "My fellow dingbats back there will simply keep running around aimlessly unless some authorized person takes over, or some civilian such as you, miss, who has sufficient knowledge. This latter circumstance seems unlikely. What the dingbats need is a clear-cut order to attack a specific enemy." "Okay," said Sand, "go back and take over, #." "And who is the enemy to be?" "Round up all the humans and cat men on both sides and hold them prisoner until you're relieved, #," Sand told the rolling dingbat. "Is that what you wish also, miss?" Ann Veronica nodded. "Yes, Subaltern #. And do it humanely, understand?" "Humanely?" "Well, as humanely as possible." The wagon kept on, picking up speed as the road grew smoother. "Good luck, miss," called #. After a few moments Ann Veronica asked Sand, "You're figuring to come back in with police and take in all those dingbats and outlaws and war buffs?" "No." "Wasn't that your job?" "My job," answered Sand, "was to locate the lost dingbats. Which I've done. I figure everybody will keep fighting down there for most of the day and then the dingbats should win and lock the rest of them up. When we hit Esforma, I'll telegraph my Political Espionage Office contact and tell him where the dingbats are." , "You're not the most ambitious secret agent I've ever met." "I'm not an agent at all," Sand said. "I'm basically a planet bum who works now and then to make expenses. Where do you want to go?" Ann Veronica shrugged with her hands. "I don't know. Where are you going to stop after Esforma Station?" Sand's eye narrowed. "Here and there," he told her. "I'm on vacation again." "That's about what I feel up to," she said. "Come along then." She laughed. "We should have brought that dingbat chaplain with us. I mean, a girl has to be prepared for anything." He laughed too. And kissed her.  of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for yoUr science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilizatior that knew of his existence before he was born! AS I I # # A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern science fiction. AS#I # Galaxy Magazine A collection of science fiction that challenges the mind and captivates the imagination AN # # A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # # master of of Science Fiction Two men pursue the RIthlan Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN# # A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# #  prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II # "Psycho." AX#I# Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides jlLof.nrian's earthly needs. AX# # Af Goor) NrwssrNjs ano hXjOKsroRts op ovo p. ' ic'( kia'. rj.V. i I  y,:,.l.i Yji iipni: ic;', working nights and weekends, the Head of Instrument Development and Research became alarmed. Not because working overtime was so unusual for this group, but because Rex was working on his own private project. And Rex was an odd bird. But the Head acted cautiously and with circumspection. He checked all requisitions of parts and even stayed after five himself, once or twice, wandering through the spotless corridors and peeking into the immaculate laboratories. Although he pretended to himself that company secrets were being stolen, he knew Rex Hereford would never stoop to that sort of thing. "Crazy, maybe -- but he's a moral sort of guy," the Head said to himself. Rex's behavior was a delicate matter. It had to be handled with discretion. So at #:# one evening Irving Gumbo, Rex's extraordinary technician, found himself in the Head's lavishly appointed office with a generous drink, poured from the Head's own special stock, in front of him. Irving hesitated. "Nonsense," said the Head. "It's after hours. And well keep this meeting a secret between you and me. "Thank you, sir," said Irving. He swallowed the liquor in one gulp. Lines of warmth radiated from his navel. The Head beamed at him genially. "Now, Irving," he said, "I want a bit of information from you. No tattling, just an exchange between friends." Irving nodded. "For some time now," said the Head, "Rex Hereford has been staying nights to work on a project of his own. I'm quite curious about it." "So am I, sir," said Irving. He leaned forward confidentially. "I stay here with him pretty late on occasion. He pays me out of his own pocket to wire up certain sections of some apparatus he's been developing. But he's never told me what it's supposed to be for. , Of course, sir, I've worked strictly on my own time-" "Of course," said the Head. "And where does he get his electrical components?" "If you check the requisitions you'll find he's paid for everything he's used." "I'd never do a thing like that," said the Head. "I've never, doubted Rex for a moment. I'm just wondering about patent rights and all that." Irving sighed, "I couldn't help you there, sir. I'm afraid I just don't know enough about his project -- " "That's all right," said the Head. "If you should find out. I'd appreciate hearing from you. And believe me, you've been quite helpful to me. Most helpful indeed." He picked up his decanter of good stuff and to Irving's dismay returned it safely to the cupboard. "Hereford is our most creative engineer," the Head said. "For the moment I see no point in alarming or antagonizing him. So don't mention our little conference to him, will you?" the entire affair and, like the Head, was terribly curious. He had admired and envied Rex Hereford for many years. Rex was a splendid engineer. Also, he had the manner and poise of a dashing man-abouttown. He had a hungry eye and a hungrier imagination for more than instrumentation design. The rhythmic twitch of a passing backside or the implied cleavage of a swelling bosom were enough to set him on fire. Rex was rather handsome -- tall, debonair, with luxuriant red hair and a fierce red moustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. He emulated the nineteenth century ' dandies, wearing a succession of elegant checkered vests, a monocle he did not need, and pearl-gray spats in fair weather and foul. There was not a woman in the entire plant who did not find Rex irresistible. About himself Irving had no illusions. He knew that he possessed exceptional manual skills, that he had quick insights into circuitry, that he had few peers at troubleshooting a malfunctioning piece of equipment. But his appearance sharply differed from Rex Hereford's. Irving's squat form was topped by a face that might have been hewn from badly quarried granite. His black hair was stringy and unkempt. And he wore the same unpressed sharkskin suit for weeks on end. He envied the indefinable allure of Rex Hereford and often wondered why Rex remained faithful to Becky, his flat-chested wife. Irving had gained some insight into the situation during one of those rare, intimate moments when the prototype of a new instrument suddenly starts to function at two A.M. after months of work, causing the men responsible to feel unusuaUy close to one another. "You're as good with apparatus as you're supposed to be with women," Irving had exclaimed. "I guess you were born with the touch." "I wasn't always comfortable with women," he said. "My father was a dedicated atheist. But to prove he was not immoral on that account, he set up a code of behavior that even a saint couldn't stick to. There I was, despite myself, always trying to live up to it. Because I coveted every woman that passed, I assumed I was some kind of animal." "But desire is a natural thing," said Irving. "I realized that later," said Rex. "Three years on the analytic couch convinced me there was nothing wrong in feeling desire. It was the deed that was sinful, not the dream. So I taught myself to make love mentally to all women. Yet the truth is that even now I couldn't possibly IF bed down with a woman I wasn't married to. The moral code implanted in my youth still controls me. I love Becky. She's a good woman, sometimes even an exciting woman. But in my bones I know I was born to enjoy many women. I'll never be happy until I can find a way to do just that." "Have you thought of bigamy?" asked Irving. Rex Hereford stiffened. His forehead and ears turned a red more flaming than his moustache. "Why do you ask that?" he muttered, staring into the technician's face. Irving shrued noncommittally. "No reason at all. I was just making conversation." There was a silence of several seconds before Rex spoke again. "I have thought of bigamy," he said slowly, eyes glazed as though he were in a trance. "But it violates my code, for one thing. For another, there are too many legal complications." This last remark struck Irving Gumbo as poor justification for inactivity. In his mind's eye he too saw himself as a Don Juan -- though trapped within a homely exterior -- and if there were even the remotest chance of success he knew he would go to any lengths to satisfy his longings. But he said nothing, and the dialogue with Rex petered out. He continued to work evenings along with Rex, building large sections of the engineer's mystery device, bothering no longer to ask questions. Then one day the project terminated as abruptly as it had begun. The sections of the instrument disappeared. Rex Hereford stopped coming in nights and weekends. He seemed merrier, freer, like a bird released from its cage. Irving's curiosity grew even more intense. H e recalled well enough his meeting with the Head, knew that implicit in that conversation had been the command to find out what Rex had been working on. Irving decided that for the next several days, during his off hours, he would shadow Rex as unobtrusively as possible. The technician adopted an impenetrable disguise. From an exclusive men's shop he purchased a magnificent double-knit suit with closefitting tailored vest, suede shoes, and a deep blue foulard that knotted casually at the throat. A red-satin lined opera cape caught his fancy, as did a huge soft felt hat with a broad pliant brim he bent into a sweeping arc. He gazed at his image in the full-length store mirror and was enchanted by the colorful reflections, confident no one could ever guess his identity. He followed Rex Hereford in taxicabs at a respectable distance and tipped the drivers lavishly. He tiptoed cautiously around building corners, face averted from the overhead lamps, the great brim of his hat shielding his granitic features from the curious passersby. One thing he soon discovered. Every night Rex went home directly to his wife and never emerged until the following morning. Irving's eyes became red-rimmed and swollen from lack of sleep. Twice he was questioned by suspicious patrolmen and forced to move on in spite of his entirely plausible story...looking for an appropriate site in the neighborhood for a new Opera House. He was rapidly growing discouraged. One night, when he had given up the surveillance of Rex to attend a hockey game, he discovered the engineer at a rinkside seat with a magnificently proportioned blonde at his side. It was clear they were enjoying themselves enormously. After a crushing victory for the home club Rex and his buxom friend went off to a nearby nightclub. Irving followed at a discreet distance and, although not dressed appropriately since he was back in the unpressed sharkskin, entered the club. A twenty dollar bill procured a table pair in his peripheral vision. They drank champagne, danced every dance with frenzied abandon, and eventually the blonde bit Rex's earlobe, an act that brought Irving to his feet. With a breast full of jealousy, ger and sheer nosiness, he walked over to the table and fixed his sad eyes on Rex's merry face. Rex leaped to his feet and pumped Irving's hand joyously. 'irving, my dear friend," he said. "It's so good to run into you. I want you to meet Mary Lou, my wife." "Wife?" croaked Irving. "Since Tuesday last," smiled Rex. Mary Lou opened two enormous blue eyes and looked warmly into Irving's tiny brown ones, touching off in Irving a feeling of longing for this ravishing creature. She held out a soft hand. He kissed it in Continental style. Rex nodded approvingly. After muttering his congratulations and drinking a single glass of champagne with the frolicking couple Irving made his apologies and fled into the night. Although tired beyond description he went directly to the Hereford Cape Codder and took his station across the street to see what time Rex would return home. Rex never did return, or so it seemed. But in the morning the door opened and Rex appeared at the threshold, kissing Becky goodbye. Irving was enraged. "Fraud," he cried to himself. "Pharisee, Tartuffe!" He had run out of epithets but he knew one thing for certain-Rex Hereford was not the moral man Irving had taken him to be. Thereafter Irving found it difficult to work with Rex, particularly since the latter showed neither signs of embarrassment nor any disposition to take the technician aside and IF confess all. Rex was blithe, carefree and more hard-working than ever. O N the following Sunday, as Irving strolled through the vast expanses of Sugarlane Park carrying a paper bag of stale breadcrumbs to feed the waterfowl, he heard the hearty booming laugh of Rex Hereford. Irving crept up to a hedge and peered over it to see, to his utter amazement, Rex lying on the grass and tickling in an unmentionable spot a voluptuous brunette Irving had never laid eyes on before. He could not bear it. Casting good sense and discretion to the winds, he burst through the hedge and accosted the licentious pair. Rex beamed genially at the squat apparition and did not even bother to withdraw his hand from the gorgeous anatomy. "Irving, as I live and breathe," he cried. "Let me introduce my dear wife, Letitia." Wife? Irving's mind would have boggled had it retained the capacity to do so. Once again he took hold of a lissome hand and kissed it, murmuring pleasantries and best wishes. But as he backed off his conscience tormented him. Reluctantly he proceeded to the Hereford home and rapped gently with the gargoyle knocker. Becky came to the door and eyed him, bemused by the huge hat and the opera cape. "Is that you, Irving Gumbo?" she said at last. "In the flesh," he replied, trying to summon up a jocular air but succeeding only in stumbling over a fold in the cape. "Thought I'd stop by to see you folks. But I suppose Rex is off somewhere?" He hoped he was being circumspect. He did not want to hurt her, but ultimately she would have to be told. She smiled at him. "If you must know," she said, "Rex is still in bed. He and I have been enjoying the morning together." It was more than Irving could handle. Either Rex had found some means of deluding his wife or Irving was hallucinating. He backed out, phrasing apologies about a forgotten appointment, and although Becky tried to get him to stay for a cup of coffee he ignored her protestations and stumbled into the tree-lined street. The following day he put the question directly to Rex. The engineer simply arched an eyebrow, removed his monocle and cleaned it expertly. "You did not see me in the park yesterday," he said firmly. "But I did," cried Irving indignantly. "And last week at the hockey game and also at a nightclub." "Neither of those men were me," said Rex. There was a whimsical glint in his eye. "I spoke to you," said Irving. "And to your -- your wife. You bigamist, you!" It was out in the open. He had said it. He leaned back, expecting violent denials, recriminations, perhaps a physical blow. But none of these things followed. "I've got to tell somebody sooner or later," said Rex. "It might as well be you. So far at least you've shown a reasonable amount of discretion. And the story will come out in the open some day anyway." He bit distractedly at the ends of his red moustache. "All right, Irving," he said. "Come along with me. We're calling it a day." T hey climbed into Rex's natty red sports car and headed in the direction of his home. Rex drove silently, wrapped in thought. Irving said nothing, wondering what the denouement of this strange tale would be. They left the car together, both still silent. Rex led the way to the garage at the side of his home, opened the combination lock and drew Irving inside before turning on the overhead light. "It's right here," said Rex, "under this vinyl covering." Irving looked closely at the device. It was a tall, broad cabinet with three vernier dials and a single power switch. He could relate nothing in its appearance to the sections he had wired. "I assembled it entirely on my own," said Rex. "It was a backbreaking job. But the really difficult part of the operation was acquiring the enormous energy this unit demands. I withdrew every cent of my savings and took out a very large loan to purchase the enriched plutonium necessary for fuel. But the other fellows are helping me pay off the loan." "Other fellows?" "Nine, to be exact," said Rex. "Starting with myself, we're numbered zero to nine for identification purposes. You see, this device is a duplicating machine. It utilizes certain ideas on sampling to produce a statistically reasonable duplicate of anything that's placed inside the sample chamber -- " He quickly grabbed a chair and placed it under the sagging figure of Irving Gumbo. Then Rex took a bottle of brandy froin the shelf and poured the technician a stiff drink. "Now," said Rex after the color had returned to Irving's cheeks, "you might ask me why I didn't use this machine to duplicate something really valuable, gold for example. The answer is, of course, that the cost in energy would be worth more than the value of the output. But what about duplicating people? There is a feat not to be measured in dollars and cents. Not that the risks aren't high, mind you, because each of the duplicates is not a true atomfor-atom copy. Only on the average would such an event take place. Therefore in principle it would take an infinitely large number of reproductions to produce a perfect copy of a human being. But it was worth the risk!" "Why did you want duplicates of yourself?" aed Irving. He still beIF lieved he was the victim of a monstrous practical joke. "To set myself free," said Rex. "Don't you see? My blasted code of ethics kept me from the lusty kind of living I always craved. But as ten different men-and yet basically tlie same man-I could have my cake and eat it too. Right now nine of us are married to nine different women so that in effect, without violating a single tenet of my code, I have been able to live intimately with nine women. Incidentally, the number should be ten very shortly." "And what about your own wife, Becky? Have you told her yet?" "Don't worry about Becky," said Rex. "She'll understand. Remember, Rex Hereford Number Zero is stUl strictly her boy." "And what if she wanders into Sugarlane Park the way I did and finds one of the other Rexes grabbing his wife Letitia in a lascivious way?" Rex's face fell. "It shouldn't-have happened. Each of the other fellows was supposed to take a job in a separate part of the country. Seven of them did. Periodically we meet in our Family Circle council and exchange experiences with one another, the experiences we share as one man. Unfortunately one of the duplicates is slightly aberrated and a second is a flamboyant extrovert. He's the one you saw in the park with Letitia, who is not his wife at all. I must confess that he's a particular source of worry to me. But he'll learn to toe the line. Meanwhile I plan to tell Becky before she or some friend or relative runs into either of these two men." He placed the vinyl wrapper back on the duplicating machine as though he were covering a sleeping Venus, then escorted Irving back to the street. "We'll have to say good night for now," said Rex. "I haven't yet nerved myself to tell Becky. You may be surprised to hear this, but since I've achieved this other outlet I'm more deeply in love with Becky than ever. And she's going to be pleasantly surprised to see me home early." "ITl never again be surprised at anything I see," said Irving. H e watched enviously as Rex walked to the front door and quietly let himself in. Then Irving started slowly up the tree-shaded street, musing over what ten copies of himself might do if turned loose on the women of America. Violent shouting roused him from his reverie. He had heard family quarrels before, because the walls of his apartment were paper thin and the acoustics of transmission superb. He had always been both fascinated and repelled by the flaming emotions, particularly when a husband had caught his wife in an act of infidelity. But never, never in his entire lifetime, had he heard the same male voice shouting -- and answering itself. S# put down as mere category fiction, a minor division of the great field of literature. (Some prefer the academic term genre, which means the same, but applies more specifically to the arts.) Well, science fiction may be good or bad, depending on the skill and honesty of the writer. But whether it's a category is another matter. The dictionary first defines category as "an ultimate concept or form of thought," and I can neither accept nor decline that application of meaning-but if the second definition of "a class or division" is meant to indicate limit or restriction, it most certainly dges not apply. Rather than being a limited class of fiction, science fiction is an enormous field where almost every possible division of literature can be contained. It can embrace adventure, romance, sport or mystery; it can involve spies and grand politics, historical encounters (of imaginary history, of course -- but as real as most history in fiction) and can even be used as a variation of western fiction. Asimov's mystery novels and Piper's historicals are at least as valid as the mainstream forms on lending library shelves. Science fiction can then go beyond certain limits to embrace stories that cannot be done in the so-called mainstream or any other previously known category. For instance, all other forms of fiction are based upon man's struggle to deal with himself or with his terrestrial environment. Only science fiction can and does reach beyond such narrow and provincial bounds. In fact, if I were to try to find an inclusive definition of our field, rather than the exclusive one I've used before, I would have to define science fiction as: fiction that concerns itself with all time, all space and all possibilities. Its only and self-imposed restriction is that it rarely deals with the limited areas of general fiction, since those are already sufficiently exhausted. There are a large number of divisions-or categories -- within this enormous field and I have no idea of how many. Lxmg ago, trying to list them, I gave up after naming thirty-plus, but there must be many more that could be recognized as definite and familiar types by readers with an extensive familiarity with science fiction. If anyone else has drawn up such a listing. I'd like to see it -- perhaps eventually we could derive acceptable names for purposes of cataloguing. Certainly some of the oldest and most generally accepted sf is made up of what I call the Sudden Doom story. This involves some sudden development or discovery that threatens total ruin to Earth as we know it. The major early example of this would be H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. More recently, Wyndham Ballard and Christopher have given us good examples, and The Andromeda Strain by Crichton was one of the more successful ones in terms of sales. Now we have Mutant #: The Plastic Eaters, by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (Bantam, #). This is a fairly good example of the type, depending chiefly on suspense. Like all the best doom stories, it is set in the very near future and involves only a single supposition. A scientist becomes interested in the difficulty of disposing of used plastic bags in his sewage and attempts to breed a strain of bacteria that can live off and destroy such plastic. (Not too hard to believe when we realize some of the things that known bacteria can digest.) He succeeds and the bacteria break free and begin attacking all plastic in London -- and eventually, of course, will spread over the whole world. It's a nice, simple idea, depicting a redistic threat. Almost all insulation is a form of plastic. When that is gone, nothing electrical or electronic can work properly. Automobiles and planes cannot operate -- indeed, so much plastic is used in modern planes that they would probably fall to pieces in flight. Almost every form of modern life is threatened. Unlike the Crichton story, this novel is on fairly firm ground in its use of science. In theory, at least, most of it could happen. And the readimg room authors play fair with the reader, again unlike Crichton. This time the menace does not xhange all by itself and prove to be only a paper dragon, looking fierce at first, but turning out to be really quite harmless to provide a phony ending. The ending is a bit weak, but more from the human presentation of it than from the lack of validity against the problem posed. The human problems seem to have a solution that is almost an anticlimax after the major problem posed by the doom situation. In fact, the weakness of the novel lies in the characters, not the situation. In the beginning of the story, they are too many and too typecast for us to follow easily. This seems to clear up during the middle of the book when a small group is faced with the problem of survival while trapped underground, but once that difficulty is solved, no further development of character is shown. The human elements of the story remain mere pegs to hang the story on instead of people about whom we can be vitally concerned. One of the best sections of the novel takes place on board an airplane where a scientist with evidence on the nature of the menace discovers that he has unwittingly brought the bacteria on board -- and must watch the plastic of the plane become useless goo before his eyes. As a suspense story, it is good. In all other ways it is only fair, though a good deal better than most other popular examples of this type we've seen for some time. Recommended for quick reading. xmwhat I call the World After Chaos novel. (Sometimes this is referred to as Our Barbarous Descendants, but since the category doesn't demand barbarians, I prefer a more general heading.) This type of story, of course, deals with what happens to our world after some cataclysm has destroyed our civilization -- we may have had atomic warfare, been struck by some great plague or whatever, but most of what we know has been wiped out and Earth is starting over. Examples ran rife shortly after World War II, but perhaps the best was Davy, by Edgar Pangborn -- up until now. Hiero's Journey, by Sterling Lanier (Chilton, #), is an outstanding example of this type of novel. Lanier is a trained zoologist and obviously has the interests of a full naturalist-in the best sense in which that word was once used. He lays his story in the year #, long after the destruction of civilization by a great atomic war. The mutations from radiation have already taken place and the ecology is now fully stabilized around a mixture of familiar and mutated life forms. But the time that permitted this adjustment has not been so great that all records and memories of the past have been destroyed. Now the descendants of certain French-Canadians and Indians, who occupy what was midwestern Canada, are striving to build a secure culture against the subtle and secret attacks of what they call the Unclean -- apparently humans who have mutated somewhat and who hate all normal mankind. The nonmutants survived because they were scattered, rural groups well removed from the cities that were destroyed -- but they began environmental reconstruction with little of our civilized knowledge and were sorely ignorant of much of what they had to know to survive. Hiero, a priest-scientist and warrior, is sent out alone dn a mission. He must cross a largly unknown and hostile wilderness to the ruins of the ancient cities in search of something vaguely known as a computer; such a device is the only hope of coordinating the shreds of knowledge still preserved to make resisting the Unclean possible. It is quite a trip. And the joy for the reader comes not merely from the high adventure, but from the richness and reality of the world Lanier has created. This isn't a mere distortion of our own world in poorer terms, nor some imitation of one of our earlier times -- it's a world that hangs together with color and feeling of its own. Weapons, lifestyle, beasts, plants, climate and even such things as religion all fit into a viable Weltansicht and Zeitgeist of Lanier's own. There are characters enough here to please any romantic, too. There's a tamed morse (moose-horse), a marvelous bear, a girl from the lands once civilized, a tree woman, pirates, good-guy Eleveners and Unclean bad guys. Happily, nothing is ever too simple, nor is everything always what it seems. There is a good adventure story behind it all, with a satisfactory ending that isn't too easily foreseen, though Lanier has left himself opportunities for later adventures to follow this. I hope he does go on to make it a series, if he can give us more as good as Hiero s Journey. It is the best example of this type of story that I have seen. Highly recommended. O NE early category has currently been enjoying a great revival. This is what I call the Sword And Planet novel. It's somewhat like Sword And Sorcery, but with less emphasis on sorcery (sometimes replaced by arcane "science"), and with the exotic cultural background laid on another planet instead of in a mythical past of Earth. At its best, its hero is a reasonably intelligent reading room man, rather than the barbarian of the Conan-type story. Edgar Rice Burroughs brought this story form its early popularity and a flood of books recently have either imitated his work or derived from it. Messenger of Zhuvastou, by Andrew J. Offutt (Berkley, #c) is of the type, but is less derivative than many others. Offutt begins with a rich and highly educated young man from Earth seeking entry to a quite primitive planet, where Earthmen are sworn not to upset the native culture by introducing their technology. His excuse is that he's searching for his fiancee, who is now on Zhuvastou. With a lot of warning, he's finally admitted. And then his troubles begin. The natives aren't all noble savages -- they tend more to be realistic semi-savages, dirty, crude and violent. And there is evidence that other Earthmen who have come there are probably engaged in something even more violent than the natives have developed for themselves. It also turns out that there's a lot more to that story of his "fiancee" than he told the entry guards. There is plenty of swordplay and fitting, intrigue and confusion, as in the best Sword And Planet work. There's also a bawdy good-humor not usually found. (The chapter headings seem to be a bit too well designed for comedy -- forget them. though they fit the story-the story itself is honest high adventure.) Zhuvastou is a good planet for background, somewhere between a Burroughs type and one whose culture is treated in more serious science fiction. I think this evolution is a happy one. The natives are convincing, their conflicts are believable and the part in their plotting and politics played by Earth and a few people from Earth fits in excellently. Finally, Offutt may seem at times to stray casually from one adventure to another, but in the end he sews everything into a related whole. To all the readers who love this type of fiction: Offutt's novel should not be missed. It brings a breath of freshness into a field that needs it, without ruining the attraction that is still inherent in it.tjL pleases me much less. This is Ardor on Argos (Dell, #c). Incidentally, despite its higher price, it's also a much shorter book than Zhuvastou -- thzt may be part of the trouble, since good Sword And Planet seems to require space in which to develop its full flavor. This book obviously cleaves much closer to the ancient formula, with an introduction on how Offutt got the story from the real hero, etc., rather than wrote it. Then it goes IF King Size or Deluxe #'s  Lorillard # Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. America's quality cigarette. Kings: # mg. 'tar. mg. nicotine; lOO'S: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine; Menthol: # mg. "tar # mg. nicotine av. per cigarette. into the oldest com in sfthe young innocent who reads an ad, gets a job working for a strange scientist and finally is hurled into another world. When he lands our hero takes time to speculate on all the works of Burroughs before he realizes he isn't on Mars. (This is fiction eating itself, as I see it, and it isn't usually good technique.) After that, we finally get down to the adventure, which seems pretty good for a while. But then we begin to run into anomalies -- jungles that aren't there, though they seem to be, for instance. It all begins to take on a dreamlike quality. In the end we find that it is dreamlike -- the quality is explained adequately, but still weakens the action-romance we want from this type of story. (Also, it presents an old plotting flaw -- when anything can happen, as in a dream, noting really matters and any problem can be solved by some other sudden development that is purely fortuitous.) The ending has some element of cleverness, but the whole lacks that inner conviction adventure stories need. The novel isn't bad, but it's a lot less good than it should have been. unique to science fiction is that which deals with the attempts of humans and aliens to find a method of living together on one planet. The closest approach in general fiction is the problem of two races or two cultures merging -- but this involves no problem of physically determined differences, and even cultural differences must be closer, since all November #'#, #. International Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Convention. P.O. Box #, Los Angeles, Calif. Artists may rent exhibit space. Greta Terrace, Chester Road, Sunderland SR#-#RD, England. national Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif. # Gould Street, Apt. C, Riverside, Calif. #. (Not to be conabout which we will have more info next issue.) Guest of Honor: Bob Shaw. Fan Guest of Honor: Peter Weston. For To list your convention or other S-F event, write to: S-F Calendar, Worlds of If, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. reading room humans share a common evolution. Poul Anderson's The People of the Wind (Signet, #c) explores the categorical theme the hard way -- by attempting Jo realize the nonhumans and their culture in careful detail. In this case, the aliens are birdlike people called the Ythri. Anderson seems fascinated with intelligent avians, probably because a culture developed by winged creatures capable of flight, yet with some kind of technical civilization, presents major difficulties of portrayal. He tried it in The War of the Winged Men, but his interest there was in his human, van Rijn. As a result, the avians were mostly sketched in. Recently he returned to the problem, giving it much more thought. He came up with a short story in which he showed how flight might be possible for creatures heavy enough to have complex brains and ability to handle tools-and his "superchargers" for supplying oxygen for such work was a fine detail. This story told of the discovery of the aliens. Now the novel takes place after men and Ythrians have settled together on the planet of Avalon. Several generations have passed, and the young people of both races are beginning to associate freely, with a great blurring of their natural cultures. These are moments of high emotional tension and sometimes of tragedy. The Ythrian "prostitute" must arouse more pity than could ever be given to any human in the same plight, for instance. And the displaced humans who feel the attraction toward Ythrian flightmates possess real and moving feelings we can share. Unfortunately, it seems to me, Anderson has "pulped" a marvelous background that should have been handled for its own dramatic values; he has added a space war, in which the two races on Avalon are being attacked by the whole Terran Empire. This has produced melodrama and clever plotting where we should have had something deeper than the action of spaceships being destroyed or the politics of Earth-interesting, but not too unusual. There is enough material on Ythrian culture and on the problems of the two races cohabiting a planet to show that this intrusion of extraneous action was not caused by Anderson's inability to handle his main story. What there is of biracial adjustment is superb, with obvious evidence that Anderson has thought out the problem in great detail. I wish he'd stuck to that story. This could have been a landmark work of science fiction-the first to explore the problem in the detail and with the understanding and empathy it deserves. As it is, despite the war, it's a very good book -- but unfortunately, no more.  IF O F course we moved into the cities of Zobranoirundisi when Worlds Federated finally permitted a colony there. Although Survey had kept a watch on the planet for more than thirty years standard and the cities were obviously on a standby directive, the absentee owners remained conspicuous by their absence. Since Resources and Supplies had agitated in Council for another breadbasket planet in that sector of the galaxy and Zobranoirundisi was unoccupied we were sent in, chartered to be self-sufficient in one sidereal year and to produce a surplus in two. It would, therefore, have been a great misdirection of effort not to have inhabited the cities -- we only moved into four -- so patently suitable for humanoid life forms. The murals that decorated a conspicuous wall in every dwelling gave only a vague idea of the physiology of our landlords, always depicted in an attitude of reverent obeisance toward a dominating Tree symbol so that only the backs, the rounded fuzzy-covered craniums and the suggestion of arms extended in front of the bodies were visible. I suppose if we had not been so concerned with establishing the herds, getting in the crops and so forth, generally breaking our necks to meet the Colony Charter requirements, we might have discovered sooner that there had been a gross error. The clues were there. For example, although we inhabited the cities they could not be brought to "operational" fully despite all the efforts of Dunlapil, the metropolitan engineer. Then too, we could find no single example of the Tree anywhere on the lush planet. But with RS on our backs to produce, produce, produce, we didn't take time to delve into the perplexing anomalies. Dunlapil, with his usual urbane contempt for the botanical, quipped to Martin Chavez, our ecologist, that the Tree was the Tree of Life and therefore mythical. "Carry the analogy further," he would tease Martin, "and it explains why the Zobranoirundisi left. Some dissident plucked the Apple and got 'em all kicked out of the Garden of Eden." Eden might well have been modeled on Zobranoirundisi with its velvet fields, parklike forests and rolling plains. Amid these sat lovely little cities constructed of pressed fibrous blocks tinted in pleasant colors during a manufacturing process whose nature frustrated Dunlapil as much as the absence of the Tree perplexed Chavez. So, suppressing our pervasive sense of trespassing, we moved into the abandoned dwellings, careful not to make any irreparable changes to accommodate our equipment. In fact the only sophisticated, nonindigenous equipment that I as Colony Commissioner permitted within any city was the plastistele Comtower. I ordered the rocketport constructed beyond a low range of IF foothills on the rather scrubby plain at some distance from my headquarters city. An old riverbed proved an acceptable road for moving cargo to and from the port and no one really objected to the distance. It would be far better not to offend our landlords with the dirt and chaos of outer-space commerce cloe to their pretty city. We pastured the 'cattle in the neatly separated velvet fields. Martin Chavez worried when close inspection disclosed that each velvet field was underpinned by its own tenmeter-thick foundation of ancient rock-hard clay. Those same foundations housed what seemed to be a deep irrigation system under every field. I did ask Martin Chavez to investigate the curious absence of herbivores from a planet so perfectly suited to them. He had catalogued several types of omnivores, a wide variety of fowl and a plethora of fishes. He did discover some fossil remains of herbivores but nothing more recent than traces comparable to those of our Pleistocene epoch. He was therefore forced to conclude-and submitted his voluminous report with numerous comparisons to nearby galactic examples -- that some catastrophe, perhaps the same that had wiped out the humanoids, had eliminated the herbivores at an earlier stage. Whatever the disaster had been -- bacterial, viral or something more esoteric -- it did not recur to plague us. We thrived on Zobranoirundisi. The first children, conceived under the bluish alien sun, were born just after we had shipped our first year's surplus off-world. Life settled into a pleasant seasonal routine: the beef, sheep, horses, kine, even the windoers of Grace's World imported to Zobranoirundisi on an experimental basis, multiplied on the velvet fields. The xenograrian crops from half a dozen worlds gave us abundant yields. We had some failures, of course, with inedible or grotesque ergotian mutations, but not enough to be worth more than a minor Chavezian thesis in the record and a shrug of the pioneering farmer. If a colonist is eating well, living comfortably, with leisure time for his kids and time off with his wife on the languid Southern seas, he puts up with minor failures and irritations. Even with the omnipresent guilt of trespassing. I was not the only one who never felt entirely at ease in the pretty cities. But, as I rationalized the intermittent twinges of conscience, it would have been ridiculous to build facilities when empty accommodations were already available, despite their obstinate refusal to work no matter how Dunlapil tried. Still, we managed fine and gradually came to ignore the anomalies we had never fully explored, settling down to make our gardens and families grow. T he tenth year was just beginning with surprising warmth when Martin Chavez called a meeting of myself, himself, and Dunlapil as Engineering Specialist. Chavez had even convened it on a Rest day, which was annoying as well as unusual. "Just in case we have to call a meeting of the Colony," he told me when I protested the scheduling. That statement together with his insistence was enough to make me feel apprehensive. Although Martin Chavez was a worrier he was no fool; he did not force his problems on anyone unnecessarily, nor was he for calling useless meetings. "I have an unusual report to make on a new plant growth discernible in the velvet fields. Commissioner Sarubbi," he announced formally. "Such a manifestation is not generally associated with a simple monocot yledonous plant. I've crosschecked both used and unused pastures, and the distortions of the growth in the used fields are distressing." "You mean we've imported a virus that's mutating the indigenous grasses?" I asked. "Or has the old virus that killed off the herbivorous life returned?" "Nothing like this mutation has ever been classified and no, I don't think it's a repeat of a previous calamity," Chavez said, frowning with worry. "Ah, c'mon, Marty," Dunlapil said with some disgust. "Don't go calling for a planetary quarantine just when we're showing a nice credit balance." Chavez drew himself up indignantly. "He hasn't suggested anything of the sort. Dun," I said, wondering if the urban engineer was annoyed because Chavez seemed closer to solving the enigma of the Tree than Dunlapil was to the mechanics of the cities,, "Please explain. Specialist Chavez." "I have lately discerned a form of weird evolution from the family Graminaceae, which these plants have resembled until now." He snapped on the handviewer and projected a slide onto the only wall in my office bare of the ubiquitous murals. "The nodular extrusions now developing in the velvet fields show none of the characteristics of herbaceous plants. No joined stems or slender sheathing leaves." He looked around to see if we had seen enough before he flashed #n a slide of magnified cellular material. "This cross-section suggests genus Helianthus, an improbable mutation." Chavez shrugged his helplessness in presenting such contradictory material. "However, something new is under every sun and we have not yet determined how the unusual blue light of this primary will affect growth after prolonged exposure. We might get a Bragae II effect." "The next thing you'll be telling me, Martin," Dunlapil said as if to forestall a discourse on galactic comparisons, "is that these plants are the aliens who built these cities." He grinned at me. IF "That out to be obvious," Chavez said with such a lack of rancor that the disbelief I had been entertaining disappeared. "Commissioner -- " Chavez's grave eyes met mine -- "can you give me another reason why every city has similarly fenced lots, all placed to catch full daily sun? Why the velvet fields with that central dominant Tree symbol appear to be the reverent focus of the aliens -- excuse me -- the indigenous species?" "But they're clearly humanoid," Dunlapil said in protest. "Their culture is agrarian. And there are no grazing beasts. Nor a single example of that blasted Tree anywhere on the planet-yet!" That was when I truly began to fear. "There are no grazing beasts," Chavez went on inexorably, "because they have been eliminated to protect the velvet fields and whatever is growing within them now." "You mean, when those fields bloom with whatever it is they bloom with, the aliens will return?" Dunlapil asked. Chavez nodded. "If we haven't irreparably altered the growth cycle." "But that's fantastic! An entire civilization can't be dependent on a crazy who-knows-how-long cycle of plant life!" Dunlapil spluttered. "Nothing is impossible," replied Chavez at his most didactic. "Your research has been sufficiently comprehensive?" I asked him, although I was sick with a sense of impending disaster. "As comprehensive as my limited equipment and knowledge allow. I would welcome a chance to submit my findings to competent xenobiologists and xenobotanists with greater experience in esoteric plant-life forms. And I respectfully request that you have Colonial Central send us a team at once. I'm afraid that we've already done incalculable damage to the--" he gave a grim smile;, he would not make the same mistake ##dn -- indigenous organism seeded in those fields." The semantic nicety was no help to my frame of mind. If Chavez were even remotely correct, we would require not only xenobotanists and xenobiologists but an entire Investigation Team from Worlds Federated to examine our intrusion into a domain that had not, after all, been abandoned by its occupants like a Marie Celeste but was simply lying fallow -- with the owners in residence. As Chavez, Dunlapil and I walked from my office toward the Comtower, I remember now that I felt a little foolish and very scared, like a child reluctant to report an accident to his parents but positive he had to risk upsetting them. The plastistele tower had never looked so out of place, so alien, so sacrilegious as it did now. "Now, wait a minute, you two," Dunlapil protested. "You toow what an Investigation Team means -- " "Anything and everything must be done to mitigate our offense as soon as possible," Chavez said, interrupting nervously. "Dammit." Dunlapil stopped in his tracks. "We've done nothing wrong." "We may have crippled an entire generation." Chavez said with an expression of ineffable sorrow. "There are plenty of fields we never touched. The aliens -- natives -- can use them for food -- " Chavez's smile deepened and he gently removed Dunlapil's hand from his arm. " 'From dust ye came, to dust ye shall return, and from dust shall ye spring again. '" It was then that Dunlapil understood the enormity of our crime. "You mean, the plants are th people?" "What else have I been trying to explain? They are born from the Trees." we waited for the specialists and the Investigation Team to arrive. First we cleared the animals and crops from every one of the velvet fields. We removed every sign of our colonial occupation from the cities. The Team, composed of five nonhuman and three human species, arrived with menacing urgency well before the initial flood of xenospecialists. The Team members did not comment on the preliminary efforts to repair our error, nor did they protest their quarters in the hastily erected dwellings on the bare, dusty plain and the subsequent roar ing activity of the spaceport close by. All they did was observe with portentous intensity. Of course, except for vacating the cities-and occupying them had been the least of our cumulative crimes -- everything we did to remedy our trespass proved wrong in the final analysis. We would have been less destructive had we kept the cattle on the velvet fields and not slaughtered them for food. We ought to have let the crops ripen, die and return to the special soils that had nourished them. For the fields we stripped produced the worst horrors. But how were we to know? Now, of course, we do know. We are burdened to this very day with guilt and remorse for the wholesale dismemberment and dispersal of those irretrievable beings: eaten, digested, defecated upon by grazers. And again, eaten, digested and eliminated by those who partook of the grazers' flesh. Of the countless disintegrated natives removed from their home soil by unwitting carriers, none can fruit on foreign soil. And on their own soil, to repeat, the fields we had stripped produced the worst horrors... I remember when the last report had been turned in to the eight judges comprising the Investigation Team. Its members wasted no further time in formulating their decree. I was called to their quarters to hear the verdict. As I entered the room I IF saw the judges seated on a raised platform, several feet above my head. That in itself was warning that we had lost all status in Worlds Federated. A flick of the wrist attracted my attention to one of the three humans on the Team. Humbly I craned my head back but he refused to glance down at me. "The investigation is complete," he said in an emotionless tone. "You have committed the worst act of genocide yet to be recorded in all galactic history." "But sir-" My protest was cut off by a second peremptory gesture. "Xenobiologists report that the growths in the velvet fields have reached the third stage in their evolution. The parallel between this life form in its second stage and that of the cellulose fauna of Brandon II is inescapable." Chavez had already told me of that parallel. "Now the plants resemble the exo-rhizomorphs of Planariae V and it is inevitable that this third stage will give way to the sentient life pictured in the murals of their cities. "You came here as agrarians and agrarians you shall be, in the fields of those you have mutilated. What final reparations will be levied against you, one and all, cannot be known until the victims of your crimes pronounce the penance whereby you may redeem your species in the eyes of the galaxy." He stopped speaking and waved me away. I withdrew to announce Scale (I in. # ft.) precision metal castings of over # U.S. and foreign warships. Very minutely and accurately detailed. Practically every World War II type, e.g. battleships, carriers, cruisers, etc. and class, e.g. Arizona, Iowa, Enterprise, Essex, Saratoga, Alaska, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Fletcher, Hood, Bismarck, Yamato, etc. represented. Whole miniature fleet ideal for collections, war games, mementos. These models are improved versions of those used by the Navy for recognition training during WW II. Warship data books and naval war games available as well. Send # for illustrated catalog tO: Dept. GN-I Box # Westfield, NJ. #I the verdict to my dazed fellow colonists. I would far rather we had been summarily executed then and there, instead of being worn and torn apart by bits and pieces. But that was not the way of judgment for those who trespass in modern times. We could not even make an appeal on the grounds that the planet had been released to us, for the Colony in its Charter took on all responsibility for its subsequent actions, having reaped benefits now so dearly to be paid for. So we worked from that day until Budding Time late that hideous fall. We watched anxiously as the seedling exo-rhizomorphs grew at a phenomenal rate until they were ten, then twenty, finally twenty-five feet high, thick-trunked, branching out, lush with green triangular foliage. By midsummer we knew why it was that during our time on Zobranoirundisi we had never been able to find any example of the Tree: such Trees grew once every hundred years. 'For they were the Trees of Life and bore the Fruit of Zobranoirundisi in the cellulose wombs, two to a branch, three to eleven branches per Tree. In the good fields -- that is, the unviolated fields. In the others... T he galaxy knows we tried to atone for our crime. Every man, woman and child devoted himself to tending the twisted, stunted, deformed, half-branched Trees that grew so piteously in those desecrated fields. Every one of us watched with growing apprehension and horror as each new day showed further evidence of the extent of our sacrilege. Oh, the hideous difference between those straight, tall Zobranoirundisi and -- the Others. We were ready for any sacrifice as penance. Then, the morning after the first good frost, when the cold had shriveled the stems, the first Zobranoirundisi tore through his vegetable placenta. He shook his tall willowy body, turned and made obeisance to his natal Tree of Life, ate of the soil at its roots, of its triangular foliage...and knew! I can never retell the agony of that day when all those Zobranoirundisi faced us, their maimers, and announced the form our expiation would take. We bowed our heads to the inevitable, for we knew the sentence to be just and of Hammurabian simplicity. We had to give back to the soil what we had taken from it. The handless Zobranoirundisi, recognizing his missing member from the cells now incorporated into the fingers of a young colony child nurtured on milk from cattle fed in the velvet fields, had every right to reclaim what was undeniably his own flesh. The legless Zobranoirundisi could not be condemned to a crippled existence when the Ter ran child has used the same cells to run freely for seven years on land where previously only Zobranoirundisi had trod. We rendered, all of us, unto the Zobranoirundisi that which was truly theirs -- seed and soil of the velvet fields, part and particle of the original fertilizing dust that would have been reconstituted during the cycle we had so impiously interrupted. Nor were we permitted to evade the least segment of required reparation, for all mankind watched us. I will say this of us proudly, though I no longer have a tongue: mankind will be able to live with its conscience. Not one of us, when required, failed to give his flesh to the Zobranoirundisi in atonement.  IF An Anthology of Political Forebodings Thomas M. DIsch, Editor. Twenty-one original stories and poems by such writers as Ellison, Wolfe, Effinger, Naylor, Emshwiller, Schjeldahl, Silverberg, and Moorcock. # Michael Moorcock. A novel by the author of Behold the Mar), a combination of comic fantasy and social satire reminiscent of Burgess, Wilde and Wells, set on the Earth at the brink of the end of time. "An enjoyable adventure." -- Ptibs?ers Weekly # Roger Elwood, Editor. Twelve original, suspense-filled stories written expressly for this collection by Lafferty, Bova, Russ, Haldeman, Malzberg, McAllister, Silverberg, and others. # and Other Fantasy and Science-Fiction Stories Richard McKenna. From gentle humor to galactic adventure to ecological crisis, these stories by the late author of the bestselling The Sand Pebbles vividly demonstrate his remarkable skill and range. # Lloyd Biggie, Jr., Editor. All the award-winning stories and runners-up of #, as selected by the members of the SF Writers of America, plus critical essays by Knight, Sturgeon and Anderson. # Ten years later... the pioneering, prophetic view of the #st century, corrected and updated in light of the amazing advances of the past decade. An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible Revised edition, # Harper es) Row # E # fra Sr. New York # When the Superom moved inward from their origin in the Outer Vortices of the galaxy they sought planets like their own for habitation. As their skill and knowledge developed they sought to reclaim otherwise inhospitable planets. Thetis was one of these: for its sun was burning out, and in the threethousandth age of their appearance in the Fourth Vortex the Superom had developed the artificial sun, A sun as erected; the planet wjs made ready for humanity. Six hundred years before the present an incurable plague swept through the Inner Vortices-a plague that attacked only Superom and none of the lesser breeds of humanity, Unreasoning fear and the urge of all Superom to return Jo the origins of the race forced the Galactic Council to order a total retreat from the Third and Fourth Vortices, and the Superom left their fabulous civilizations behind. Shortly before the retreat had been ordered, however, an exploratory force had left Thetis for the Fifth Vortex. By the time it returned the withdrawal was already complete. The marooned Superom journeyed to the Galactic City at Mandanar to see if it were still possible to follow. But any hopes they might have had were destroyed by the The tans, who prevented them from leaving. The lesser human breeds felt that so long as Superom remained on Thetis, peace and prosperity would continue. Now, after a series of dark ages of degeneration, only four descendants of the original Superom of Thetis Superom, has discovered old talktapes indicating the imminent death of Thetis artificial sun. She tries to significance of this. But the young giant Superom is dull-witted, cares for little besides machinery, hunting andin an innocent, childlike wayfor his cousin. served in a casket for six centuries and hence a sacred symbol to most Thetans of their plane ts former greatness-to Mandanar. There, she believes, the old secrets of the Superom are hidden. But the tyrannical Superom Reway. Any return to the old ways the primacy of his seat of power, the city Spadrox. Enlisting the aid of the Helangles, a nomadic tribe that travels on mechanized 'steedes,  he beloved machinery in the mines. wraith haunting the Tower, to bring her plan: he is to send an apparently authenticated Superom message to all the tribes of ThetisHelangles, Conducs, Saivainte and Agoransannouncing the Awakening of steals from the Tower through an underground tunnel to talk to the will not suspect the source of the back to the Tower with her but, on the way there, she is sexually atIF incurring his intense hatred. The Day of the Awakening arrives. oped the ability to project his voice, puts words into the mouth of the to tell the assembled multitude that he must be taken to Mandanar. hungry for revenge on the giant and for power over the Regent, agrees to that has just been mounted. To Helangle a black communicator box. his tribe to scout a path for the expedition, stops near a stone jungle-in actuality amiined city-to tured by the Submetropols, a strange breed of humans that has lived underground since the time of the Superom. But the strange black box, which apparently has the Superom Regent trapped inside, awes them. They attribute supernatural powers in a position to command them to do his bidding. Thus, when the expedition passes through a tunnel, at a prearranged moment the Submets come out of hiding, disrupt the caravan and capescapes. remember that the Submets at one time had an enemy, the witawu, which were attracted by short-wave radiation. The North Shore Conducs have domesticated the witawu. The members of the expedition decide to dispatch a task force to contact these Conducs and obtain witawu. The intention is to use them as a weapon against the Submets in order to The swift task force includes both  IX T he white guidelines of the road spun back endlessly under their wheels in the night. The task force rumbled along the main highway toward the stone jungle of Port West, then, after three hours, swerved north on the lateral toward the northwestern shore of the West Water. The headlights of Arcweld's and Cleavewind's steedes drilled cylindrical hollows in the darkness. The swiftest Conduc auto had been commandeered for the task force -- it carried Delbet, Mutch and the Caxitine Conduc Homan, Apian's son. Pinned between the auto's precise medians of light in the The tan night, the rest of the task force seemed like a space-vehicle threading the gulf between galaxies. The dwarf and his younger Helangle companion alternated in leading the way. When it was liis turn to lead, Arcweld let his stunted imagination grope as far forward as it could. He made tens of plans but either forgot or discarded most of them. When he was at the rear he rode close enough to the Conduc auto for his lamp beam to pick up Delbet's erect head and shoulders in the cab. The dwarf crouched low over his steering bar, head thrust forward on its squat neck. Behind the visor his eyes paid only half attention to the road. The rest of the time they stared at the giant's skull as though Arcweld's hate were a flame that could bum through bone. Delbet showed no sign of sensing the dwarfs emnity. The giant hardly spoke. He stared ahead into the tip each new contour in the road to surrender their destination to them. When he did speak it was only to deny two agitated appeals from Qeavewind for a halt. At last Homan, who was driving the Conduc auto, did force a halt. The auto's cruze fuel was overheating and the engine might collapse if they did not stop. Reluctantly the giant capitulated to Homan's warning. It was nearing dawn as they pulled off the highway. Cleave wind was asleep as soon as he had stretched out beside his steede. Delbet and the Agoran Mutch slept leaning against one another in the auto. While Homan opened the recharge vents on the power unit of the engine Arcweld, sleepless and burning with urgency, swpt his bike around. He watched the Conduc driver for a moment. Without raising his visor, he grunted, "Gonna move on up the next ridge. Scout it. Dig?" Conduc and Helangle rarely had much to say to one another. Homan nodded briefly and turned back to his work. The dwarf gunned his engine and roared away, confident the noise would not wake the rest of the exhausted party. Opportunity had presented itself. It was time to suffer the screaming and scolding. He went a long way down the highway, then swung off the road and bumped cross-country. In the reddish-gray light of Thetan daybreak, several hundred meters ' from the road he found an old quarry. There, he was certain, no one could see him from the road. He rocked his steede up on its forkrests and flung off his gauntlets. Muttering agitatedly under his breath, he fumbled the pannier straps free. His hands shook as he set the controls on the box. Although it was so early in the morning, not more than five seconds passed before the enraged face of Keren swam to the surface of the screen. Operating the box always disturbed the dwarf. The impression of Keren's physical presence it created challenged the senses. He backed into the deeper shadows of dawn, into a scar in the rock face. He felt less visible and less vulnerable there. He said nothing, but Keren had IF been waiting ten hours for a summons. He had already guessed the worst. He was still trapped at Spadrox, a virtual hostage of the Thetans since the episode in the Tower and the departure of Karel's casket. He had waited sleeplessly by the transceiver for the call which would force his subjects to free him-the call which would mean that the casket and Shevan were again in his power and Thetis under his control. If his rage had been cold it would have frightened the dwarf, but Arcweld understood violence. The Helangle laws were violent and he was used to living by them. After a moment or two of misgiving the dwarf began to relish the power he had oyer this superior creature. He squatted in his dark rock cleft and let Keren rave. He gnawed his fingers and grin-snarled and enjoyed the Superom's impotence. At last Keren needed to have his fears confirmed. His ranting calmed. Then the dwarf, with studied insolence, related what had happened in the tunnel and afterward. He was careful to place the blame on the inferior Submets. Their failure to secure Delbet had forced the dwarf to make a change of plan. "Change of plan!" shouted Keren in renewed fury. "What change? Must I rely on a beat-up insect brain to plan for me, Keren of Thetis?" "If not my beat-up brain -- whose?" Deliberately the dwarf had discarded the deferential form when addressing Keren. He squatted so that his face, half blanked by the visor, was thrust into the screen. "Okay. Yawl hit the road yawself. Bum dust! I'll pitch the box into the quarry if yawl don't need me!" Arcweld could not understand all the barbed words the Superom flung at him in response. When Keren had run dry again the dwarf said, "Yawl asked me about a change of plan. Yawl still wanta hear if? I don't have much time. I got to get back to the truck. Light's rising. I'm supposed to be taking a look at the road." Keren's eyes blazed but he kept his temper. "It had better work, dwarf. You can't afford to fail a second time. Tell me. I will judge it." "Who failed?" The Superom's carefully worded jibe had stung the Helangle. "Yawl planned the ambush, didn't yawl? But not you that failed -- not me. It was those camp troglos. Couldn't hold the giant. I think, too. Dig? I think like Superom -- " "Careful, dwarf." "Yawl wanta hear my scheme or not?" "Speak," said Keren, his voice choked with suppressed anger. Arcweld spoke. T WO or three times the young Helange, Cleavewind, seemeduncertain which route was best. This though he was supposed to have the mindmap of the zone and, in any case, all his tribe learned as children to navigate by the movement and position of the sun. It was Mutch who really had the mindmap. In his youth Mutch had several times accompanied merchantile caravans of his people to the remote Conduc colonies of the North Shore. With the pleasurable clarity of youth recollected in middle age he recognized paths and landscapes -- the look of a particular range of hills against the y -- the appearance of ruined stone jungle that seemed pegged to the plain by cores of stone when looked at from the ridge. Arcweld observed Mutch's gift carefully. At midday the party met the first colony of Conducs of the Western Shore. Homan spoke to them. They had heard about the Awakening and had recently consulted with several tribal groups already assembling outside Port West to see the expedition and the casket pass. Delbet chose to remain out of sight. He impressed on Homan that the ambush and the kidnaping must be kept secret. The Caxitine chiefs son promptly invented a plausible story to explain the presence of the strange group of travelers. The Conducs were not surprised that the Superom wanted to get hold of some witawu elixir. Plenty of stories were told on the Western Shore about its scarcity and fragrant taste. It was rare and expensive, a proper food for gods. The Conduc leader said they had heard that the North Shore tribes were starting to move toward their longnight camps in the south. He believed Harvest was a good time for buying the elixir. It was at its best then. Homan climbed the ridge again to rejoin the task force. He was visibly pleased with himself. From the spine of the ridge they could see the sunlight firing occasional silver arrows off the swell of the West Water which lay like a green-blue stone in the distance. Delbet was anxious to be off. "Do we follow the road along this ridge?" Cleavewind stared at the West Water, glanced at the sun. "While we got the water there on our right hand, okay. Yawl check, Arcweld?" The dwarf was watching Mutch, who was standing on the cab of the auto. His thumbs were tucked into his belt. He was staring cross-country, inland from the ridge. "The road bends to follow the shore of West Water," Mutch said. "I reckon if we was to take a rough kind of way down there and through this old tract of foodland we could save hours of traveling. We'd bisect the West Water circuit road and come back on where it turns northwest toward the mountains." Mutch laughed and smoothed his shiny head with one hand. "I remember-just a boy, I was -- we'd been caught out on a plain like that in a rainstorm. One caravan time. Zut! How it rained!" He smiled IF again, sweeping the past across the sky with a wave of his hand. Arcweld watched him thoughtfully from behind his visor. Delbet spoke. "Good, Mutch. We'll take your way." The giant was ready to start. "You sit next to Homan and guide him. The Helangles may get the worst of this ride. A few saved hours may make the difference between getting Great Karel and Shevan back alive and...and..." The thought of the alternative obviously was too much for him. He gestured urgently and climbed into the auto. Cleavewind accepted the situation. He made the Thetan obeisance to Superom: palms flat against helmet. Surly astride his steede, Arcweld still watched. Mutch's route suited him well enough but he must not show it. What he did not understand was the way the giant treated him. Surely Delbet had recognized him from their previous encounters. Only a day and a half ago Delbet had fled from the dwarf in the dawn on the hillside above the camp as though pursued by demons. There was no trace of that panic now. Arcweld's mind flicked from possibility to possibility. Maybe, after all, it had had nothing to do with identity or recognition but had somehow been related to what Delbet was doing there. But hunting talue? The dwarf chewed his lip reflectively. Why the hell feel guilty about hunting talue? He tried to recall each moment of the encounter. Although his crude imagination relived it again and again as the caravan moved on, he failed to detect any new clues. The plain looked flat and easy from the spine of the ridge. When they got down to it and began to cross they found malice under its bland surface. The vegetation was short enough. The main strains of Thetan grass rarely grew above twenty centimeters. But they masked ridges and grooves where long ago the plain had been irrigated for a high-moisture crop. They shook the guts out of vehicles and riders. After four hours of bucking and bounding, Homan again had to insist on a halt. Arcweld had not slept now for most of two days. His Imotty limbs ached from controlling the bucking of his steede. His thighs were sore from bracing against the shocks quaking the machine. Still the chemicals leeching into his nervous system kept him awake. He sat by his bike on the ground, sore and panting. The sun, slipping down the sky, was starting to fade. He watched the patient Homan opening the vents on the motor again. Faintly acrid, the smell of warm cruze drifted on the air. The dwarf knew how quickly the fuel weakened if under constant stress. He let his mind turn this over. His developing ambition for power over Keren would be enhanced if he could strand the giant here in the wilderness. He worked with the blunt toolsof his imagination to picture how it might be brought about. The group was so small that outright treachery would reveal his hand completely, he realized. He snarled with frustration. Mutch caught his attention. He was talking to Cleave wind. The Agoran was waving his short arms about as usual. He seemed to be doing a lot of pointing in the direction of the distant taildown of the ridge. Cleavewind was shaking his head dubiously. He, too, was obviously feeling the fatigue of the journey. Arcweld shut down external stimuli and briefly looked inward at his own mindmap. It was blurred and hazy, too dim to see what Mutch might be getting enthusiastic about. He switched back to watching Mutch just in time to catch a half-appealing look from Cleavewind. The dwarfs mind flicked suddenly and he got a picture. Another followed it and another. He felt a blush of vanity. Yes, he, a Helange, thought like Superom. He forced his sore arms to lever his body up and his aching legs to carry him half-limping, half-loping to the conferring pair. H IS determination was worth the pain it cost him as he had guessed it would be. He made his brain flick back over the series of pictures he had just seen. He wanted to be sure they were still there. He ground his teeth and snarled to conceal the aches racking his body. The look on Cleavewind's face wavered between relief and unease. "Hi," said the dwarf. He waited. He had invited himself to join the conversation, but he did not mean to contribute. Mutch smiled his expansive smile and continued with what he had been saying to Cleavewind. "Sure, I'm right. I reckon it's about there, if it still exists. Now, why don't we take a look -- " "Trader says he digs this place," said Cleavewind apologetically to Arcweld. "Says the Conducs we're looking for might have a pad down 'long the shore. Far side of that ridge. Reckons we ought to search around while we're stopped. Save beatin' farther north," "I just got a feeling in my belly," said Mutch conversationally. "Don't ask me where it comes from, but I just got it. I reckon they was around here last time I came up on a caravan. But that feeling tells me -- I can't just pin it all down -- that it was right there that something went wrong..." The dwarf watched, wrinkled fingers kneading away at his aching groin. "My belly's a pretty good guide, too. It ain't often wrong." "The storm," suggested Cleavewind disinterestedly. "You told us 'bout that before. Check?" Mutch shook his head. The young Helanglb repeated, "He thinks we oughta search while we're pulled up." He wanted Arcweld to IF take over the situation, and the decision. The dwarf looked painfully at the sky and the mountains. Even his neck ached. He noticed that the mountains seemed appreciably nearer in the waning sunlight. "He's a smart fellow," Arcweld said. He said it as if Mutch were not there. "The last time he did what his gut told him, we got into this assaching grassland. Sooner we make a road again, I dig it fine." "You roadsters always did complain about shortcuts," Mutch bantered, but sounding vaguely defensive. "Off your machines and roads you got no stamina. Now, when I was a boy -- " "Cradpats," blurted Arcweld rudely. "If it's gonna save my balls from bouncing another three hours, rU Yide yawl to the ridge and we'll take a look. But I thought yawl said this Conduc lot padded on the North Shore by the peaks." "Quite right, my sawn-off friend. But as you heard Homan say after he met that last bunch, our Conduc brothers tend to move off the North Shore at this time in Harvest. Like the rest of us, they don't care to sit in mud and cold. And there's plenty of that comes down off the mountains during the longnight." Mutch laughed. "No, sir. They wrap up their swarms of witawu and hike down to this shore where it don't freeze and they can keep their tails dry. Then they've got the elixir just garnered to trade and all the little old witawu in nice drowsy hives. It's all fine and cozy-like. Except anything less cozy than a witawu swarm disturbed in hibernation I personally wouldn't care to imagine." The dwarf kneaded away at his groin, pinching, jerking. He tried to switch back to the pictures but the Agoran's own vivid images were too unsettling. "He wanted me to lift him up there." Cleavewind lay back on the turf, giving in to exhaustion. He drew up his withered legs so that he looked like a cross between an insect larva and a human fetus. "I'm used up. I'm so balled-up tired my mindmap's blanked. I just can't take him." He yawned. "I'll lift yawl," Arcweld said. "Hell, another hour on this assaching pitch and I quit. I just hope your gut's not too reliable and we don't hit your trouble. What kind of trouble?" "I can't recall." Mutch shook his head and looked over at the taildown of the ridge, trying to recapture the faded memory. He stuck his thumbs into his belt and pushed out his lower lip with his tongue. "Let's go," said Arcweld. It looked to be less than five hundred meters to the tail-down of the ridge. But the falling sun had brought a slight haze with it and distances had become deceptive. By the time Arcweld had the steede crisscrossing up the slope they had covered more than a kilometer and Mutch was shaken speechless. Fortunately the impact of the view from the ridge top rendered speech superfluous. They saw that the old highway did run up there. Niutch dismounted stiffly from behind the dwarf. Arcweld levered his steede up onto its rest, then shoved up his helmet visor to get a better view of the broad scene. Peering out from below jutting brows, he cursed. He was halfblinded by the light -- they were facing the sun. He shoved sweat and pain away from his face with an impatient gesture. His eyes focused, and his big jaws snapped shut in surprise. The mindmap flowed once across his consciousness with harsh clarity. Then it was gone again. Instinct had jolted his shallow memory .before and it had been right. The West Water was close. It stretched away west and south as far as he could see. Northwest and north, the mountains cupped a silver breast of it in black hands. The sun had perhaps an hour until setting but was already a red globe in the mist. Under the overhang of the mountains, stretches of water were already night. After the relentless green ridges of the plain, the variations before them were startlingly colorful. But that was not what had brought Arcweld 's teeth together in surprise and triumph. the foot of the volcanic shale where water erosion had laid open the ridge, were visible a host of scarlet blooms. They were lanternshaped and fist-sized and rested on the. hairy stalks of a plant with This great canopy of color covered the whole of the foreshore from the foot of the ridge to a distance of two to three hundred meters into the ocean. Here and there the scarletand-yellow spread was broken by the protrusion of an egg-shaped dome. Out of the corner of his eye Arcweld glimpsed Mutch staring, mouth open in an astonished # as he looked down on the shimmering mantle. The Agoran flung out one of his extravagant gestures. "You see!" he breathed. He did not require an audience to applaud the accuracy of his intuition. The gesture looked as if it were intended for the attentive host of blossoms below him rather than for the dwarf. In reflex response to the eccentricity of the scene, Mutch began to descend as if hypnotized toward the frozen kaleidoscope of color. Arcweld's gesture of restraint was also reflex. Quickly he curtailed it. The absorbed Agoran saw neither it nor the dwarf's quick smothering of it. Arcweld slammed shut his visor; his heart was racing. He hopped up, crouching on the ridge's spine, his neck and helmeted head thrust forward. His aching arms felt a tingle spread upward from the fingers, as though the ground were sending him IP messages. Lips drawn apart as far as they would stretch, saliva gathering at their corners, he watched Mutch's descent. So far the Agoran had not looked back. His ecstatic cries floated up to the dwarf, some of them chopped by the effort of descent. " -- Told you so -- beriflame -- longnight quarters -- look at it! Perfect examplenow I've gotit -- " Arms spread suddenly like the wings of a wheeling bird, Mutch checked himself. He had started to slip on the loose shale. As though both men were controlled by strings of the same puppet master, Arcweld simultaneously jerked out of immobility. He crabscuttled sidewise, then backward, eyes fixed on the Agoran. The dwarf reached one long ape-arm behind him. Arcweld's hand found the steering bar on his steede. He levered himself with arm-power alone, then sprang acrobatically. His eyes were still on Mutch. Mutch was sliding downward on the unstable shale. He was having difficulty keeping his balance. The Agoran 's face was contorted by dismay. His cries had ceased. Could he stay on his feet? Arcweld kicked down his steede, stamping the motor into life. He held the throttle open. Mutch's short arms groped desperately at the shale face for a handhold. He still had not made a sound. For a moment the whole scene was poised. Then with perfect control the dwarf shattered it. Throttle wide, gears and retroactors pitted against one another, he let the steede plunge forward. At that velocity and so shackled, the bike's nosewheel dug and flung the ground into a fountain less than a meter from the lip of the ridge. The picture in his mind had sprung into place. The flame berries. The dangerous spots where they thrived. The warning of the scarlet lanternfists. Above Mutch the ridge crumbled. Lumps of shale slid away and stormed down. One of them, obedient to the malign being that had dispatched it, struck the trader in the chest. Birdlike again, arms flapping, his round body plunged. At the bottom he cried out once and almost scrambled free of the sticky black swamp which nourished the beriflame. But the morass held him greedily. He continued to struggle with his mouth wildly open. The mechanical silhouette of a man above held open the steede's alarm siren, drowning Mutch's cries as the swamp drowned Mutch. It was swiftly over. The last thing to disappear into the throbbing carpet of scarlet and yellow was the Agoran's bald head. It parodied the domes of the witawu's empty winter hives, eggs in the silent flames. Arcweld dismounted drunkenly. His hand remained on the siren. He labored backward, dragging the steede with him, keeping the siren howling. Homicide was unforgivable. "Not guilty!" cried the dwarf. The siren drowned his denial. "Not guilty! Not guilty!" Out on the plain they had heard distance, they saw the dwarf, hunched and twisted against the last of the sun -- waving, crookedly alone, his mouth open on a soundless plea M utch was gone. Delbet and Homan the Caxitine stood staring down on the carpet of flameberries. Just below where they stood was a tumble of volcanic stjale and level with it a discontinuity in the plantation. Broken leaves and crushed stalks marked the spot where the Agoran had disappeared. Arcweld looked at the mountains. In the gathering dark they seemed to have hunched closer together, grown threatening, accusing. Cleavewind had dismounted from his steede. He was crouched by Delbet and Homan, but he was not looking at Mutch's grave. He was looking at his tribesman. "I didn't remember. I was blown. My mindmap blanked on me. If he'd justwaited, kept his cool. I could have told him-" Delbet was still staring at the tide of beriflame that concealed the deadly swamp. "I couldn't stop him. He flew. Like a bird. How could I stop him?" "Down there," said Homan. "The domes out there are witawu hives." He was addressing Delbet. "He saw them." Arcweld shrilled. "That's what did it. He sailed down there like a bird." "Witawu -- here?" Delbet was baffled. "Longnight quarters." Homan looked away toward the mountains. As the sun guttered out in the mist-shrouded face of the water, night advanced across the plain. Soon it would be dark enough for the primeval Thetan sun to emerge like a purple ghost from its grave in the night sky. "The tribes won't have moved dowrTfrom the mountains yet with the amber fog and the elixir. We have a long way to go to meet them." "At least we got it now," said Cleavewind. "We got the trail. The one they foUow down from the mountains every longnight. It beats along this shore. We just follow it. Dig?" The dwarf hawked and spat. Maybe the death of Mutch had come too late. He flared his nostrils to see whether he could catch a whiff of overheated cruze from Homan's auto. Pictures flicked over steadily in his mind. He stood motionless for almost a minute, grinning and snarling silently at the distant sky, before he realized the giant was watching him. Delbet had wrenched his attention away from the flameberries and the witaIF Solve your Christmas gift problems today t Give your friends... Saving you # on a #-issue subscription (Add # for postage outside U.S. and Canada) Order now... we'll bill you after the holidays! For orders of more than three gift subscriptions, use separate sheet, clip to adjoining card, and mail to address on back of card. Please enter subscriptions as indicated Gift for jj Gift for City I State Zip State Zip j Gift for Be sure to fill out this space My Name Address City Statp Zip  Please include my subscription I Addrp;; City l I State Zip I ' WMch of these firiends deserve more than a Christmas card? (Well also send a card, in your name, announcing your gift subscription)  The next-door neigbor who always borrows your copy of IF  Astronauts...and other scienceminded acquaintances.  All the guys who keep telling you how great science fiction used to be.  The bright kid down the block who thinks the best "trips" are space trips.  Favorite uncles... and other likable relatives.  Friends in need (of entertaining reading).  Friends indeed. No Postage Stamp Nacassary if Mailad in tha Unitad Statas Postage will be paid by iF wu hives and was looking at Arcweld as if he could penetrate the dwarfs skull and see the pictures turning there. Arcweld shuddered suddenly. His bladder was distended and painful. He shambled away. He looked for a concealing rock and urinated against it. There had been something in the giant's expression -- something like recognition. Arcweld did not know what it meant. His brain was not equipped to analyze and forecast. He felt his hatred bubble, he felt dread of the giant's power, he felt the insistent surge toward the new things he coveted. But he would have been unable to express any of these emotions in such terms. Only through instinct illuminated by the tormenting pictures did he understand why his teeth bit into his raw lip, why the hair on his scalp bristled, why the chemicals pouring into his blood had kept him erect and sleepless hour after hour. The dark came upon them quickly and with it exhaustion. Even Delbet, who showed signs of relentlessly denying everyone another night's sleep, had to submit. He still had the Saivainte cloak he had worn during his exile in the mountains. He wrapped himself in it and was soon asleep, squeezed uncomfortably across the pilot seat in the auto. Homan lit a fire-ore torch to keep the darkness pressed back from the camp's perimeter. He sat awhile, his back against the auto, until he too sank into sleep. Cleavewind twitched and snored and fought the frightful goblins freed by his dreams. For a time Arcweld remained rampant and wakeful, staring into the well of the sky, listening to the silence broken now and then by the sleep sounds of his companions. "Arnalda!" moaned Cleavewind, briefly desiring some dream tentmate. Homan's eyelids fluttered. He turned and sighed. He lay on his back smiling sightlessly at the infinitely slow constellations of his ancestry turning in the sky. Delbet's hands twitched as he hunted talue and called Shevan to come and play. The pictures in Arcweld 's head began to slow and fade. They stumbled, intertwined, became confused. He slept. Only the fire-ore torch stayed watchfully awake. Its light did not reach the trembling carpet of beriflame under which Mutch slept more soundly than any of his former companions on the ridge above. X F rom the scarlet host of lanterns rose the domes of many moons. Slowly they waxed and turned. The genial face of Mutch wearing a mask of melancholy turned its eyes to watch the dwarf from every one of them. Arcweld's hands felt swollen and unusable as he struggled with the vent covers on the Conduc auto. A constellation of stars peeled themselves from its side. Each one burned like a red-hot spark as it lodged between his fingers. He wanted to cry out but knew that would wake the others. Painfully he jammed each of the vent covers. The big eyes of moons watched him from their scarlet grave. There was only one cover remaining but each time he jammed it, it sprang open. With a moan he realized that sunk deep within it and trying to swim to the surface was a face. He thrust down the cover again. He held it over the persistent face. There was an ominous sound in the sky. With a force of a volcano the vent cover spurted into the air. Stars burned his hands again. The auto was gone. In its place, beckoning to the threatening sign in the sky, was the black box from his pannier. Keren's face still struggled to escape from its depths but the sound was whirling down from the sky, twisting like the core of a cyclone. The Superom's mouth opened in a final shriek of hate and fury as the sound in the sky coagulated and funneled into the box. The dwarf fled from the Regent's baleful glare only to find the reproach of the dead Agoran cutting off his flight. Arcweld fell to his knees. Ten of Mutch shook their choked heads. Too close behind him, the sound had absorbed the box and now pursued him. A flint of rich, furred amber swayed, poised above him, spiraled down, a menacing throb. He tried to scream but was drowned out by a sirenlike wail. It was throttling him. He tried to open his mouth. He could not move. He fought himself awake and immediately writhed into a frozen gesture of terror. Within thirty centimeters of his eyes were Delbet's. The giant's hand was over his mouth. The dwarf prepared to die. Above him the stars were already fading. The muscles of his cheeks and jaw made the plea: "Not guilty!" "Keep quiet. Don't move," said the giant. The commands were superfluous. Arcweld could neither speak nor move in that grip. "I know you." Delbet was so close the dwarf could feel the breath from the giant's nostrils. "You are mistaken to hold on to that grudge against me. When I struck you on the hillside above Spadrox I saved you from death. You were not to blame! How were you to know it was a Superom girl wrapped in that Conduc caftan? But you would surely have died if you had harmed the girf You know that, don't you?" Arcweld 's eyes rolled from side to side. Why had the Superom giant crept to him in the dawn to tell him this? Pinned down, he could not see where any of the others were. He could not see his steede. He could not see whether the Superom had maybe broken into the pannier and exposed his secret. The giant continued to whisper rapidly, as though trying to beat the IF daybreak. "It was you on that other hill, too, wasn't it? I was hunting talue. You saw me. You saw what I could do -- " His taut body shuddered. The terrified images in his mind slowed. He clawed among them for the dawn of two days past. He did not understand. He had tried to before and had failed. Pictures of the tunnel and the ambush and the seething, clammy Submets clogged his brain. "-why I did it," the giant whispered. "How it was. I had to do it. I had to. Shewy's smart. She's clever. Playing-leastways I was playing, and she was searching around and mooning around and thinking around as usual. We found the old library. It had talk-tapes in it. You know what talk-tapes are, Helangle? She made me take them back to Spadrox. Then she spent weeks and weeks looking at these funny little dots and lines and squiggles. Then she used to tell me things. Stories that came out of the tapes into her head. I said she was clever, didn't I?" The dwarf lay still now, not even struggling in the giant's grip. He listened. "History. History it was mostly. All about how Thetis used to be. And one of the frightening things was -- the sun was dying-eh?-sun dying, Arcweld! And when it went out-you, me, all of us-we'd all go with it-" The giant's story continued in hurried whispers. How Sheyan's tituition had become an obsession. How she had made him rebuild Keren's disused aircar and run away from Spadrox with her in the first ill-planned attempt to reach Mandanar. "Shevan says there, right there in Mandanar, we'll find the old ones' secrets preserved for us Shewy says they wouldn't have gone and just abandoned us. She reckons that there in Galactic City we'll find the answers. You understand me, Helangle?" Arcweld stared at him. He blinked once. It might have been interpreted as assent. Here was another Superom in his hands -- in the hands of a Thetan! The dwarf felt an excitement that made his belly tense like a spring. "So you see when Keren captured us he locked Shewy up. I had to go along with her plans then. She said Keren wouldn't let us meet again. She said he was planning to do something bad to her. She had me make the messages and send them to the tribes." Arcweld breathed the cool dawn air. It was sweet. It was aromatic. He breathed dowly. He was inhaling power itself. Delbet hesitated. The dwarf waited too. His gathering intelligence, still half-animal, waited for the moment to pounce on the revelation he sensed was due. "She said that only if Karel spoke -- that would be the way to break Keren's power. She knew that when I hunted talue I could pit my voice in another place -- " The dwarf inhaled deeply. Now the Superom Regent could break the expedition. The giant was telling the Helangle everything he needed to know. All he had to do was transmit the information to Keren. "I made the voice come from the casket. It wasn't Karel. It was me that spoke. Shevan said if I could do it for talue I could do it in the Tower. But I did it because we have to save Thetis. Then I saw that you knew. But we need your help, Helangle." Arcweld breathed. "You harbor the grudge. You wish to stop the expedition because of me. But now you know the true purpose. The one Keren won't let himself see." Power. In. Out. Sweet, aromatic power. "You will Jielp. I need your experience and your mindmap to find the witawu and rescue Shevan and Great Karel. I, a Superom, demand your confidence and your ungrudging help." Arcweld was confused. The simple giant, in his innocence, had recognized and yet had failed to recognize the dwarfs role. Calmly he lifted a wrinkled paw to push Delbet's hand from his lips. His voice croaked, "Superom are our masters. Now I dig. What you say checks. I'll go along." A smile of relief wreathed the giant's innocent face. He squeezed Arcweld's shoulder in one enormous paw. "So -- we're allies." The dwarfs lips parted in an enigmatic ape expression. Delbet nodded, smiling. Suddenly, with the swift animal grace he had acquired from hunting, he faded from the dwarfs side into the gathering light. Arcweld's expression did not change. He turned his head fractionally to watch the giant go. Behind the grin-snarl he plunged his dripping hands into a gashed ribcage and drew forth an enemy's heart. He had the power at last -- Power he could not use yet because there was no time now to absent himself from the expedition. An hour after the sun appeared in the sky they were back on the highway that skirted the northwest shore of the West Water. Keren would be waiting and fuming at Spadrox, but there was no chance to contact him as the task force sped without pause first west, then northeast, the great black mountains marching steadily over the plain to meet them. ihead at noon the Conduc camp stitched itself to a ridge on the shore of the West Water. The Conducs of the North Shore were grim and somber. Their dress, their wild eyes, the women's hair and the men's beards -- all reflected something of the harsh crags under which IF they lived for most of the year. Arcweld, who had traveled widely between the enclave at Spadrox and the lower shores of the West Water, had never seen such a savage-looking crew. The Conducs suffered a shock, too. In their homes under the shadow of the mountains they were cut off from contact with other Thetan tribes. Not within the living memory of any of them had a Superom crossed their territories. So far as they were concerned the old super-race of Thetis was no more than a legend. They knew little and cared less about the traditions born centuries before. The appearance of the giant with his Superom eyes and black cap of hair, tall and forbidding as a North Shore crag when seen among his Thetan companions, proved too much for them. Even though they recognized Homan as one of their lowland brothers they shrank to the ground in fear. They bent like grass before the first longnight gales. It took Homan ten minutes of cajolery and persuasion to get the braver among them to listen to his strange and fearful history. Only the Conduc leader's two older sons and one other man would consent to make contact. They sat down cross-legged in a council ring with Homan and the giant. They were scared and sullen. They kept their eyes fixed on the earth and their chins lowered to their chests. Thus their unkempt hair hung forward about their cheeks and screened them from the terror of the giant's presence. The rest of the tribe, including its old and frail leader, crept away to the shelter of their vehicles. From the windows the wild eyes of one or two of the bolder spirits would occasionally peep fearfully at the council group and the strangers whose coming had thrown awry the simple pattern of their lives. The three Conduc nomads had not heard of the Awakening or the exodus from Spadrox. Homan patiently explained it all. They listened sullenly. Life on the North Shore made them wary of strangers. They muttered and glanced at one another and looked from time to time uneasily at the place just outside the camp where two of their tribe's sworn rivals squatted on a patch of dusty ground. To Conducs, the blank visors and insect-head helmets of the Helangles signified menace. The stories Homan had to tell did nothing to relieve their minds. Clearly they were ill at ease. Yet out of their planet's past had stepped a legend. He had walked straight into their lives looking the way the laws said he must look, having the power and the authority to combine and lead a mixed group of Thetans. How could the Caxitine's stories be mere invention? How could there be any trick? "So," said Homan, "we must use the amber fog to flush out the troglodytes. They have become outcasts. They have committed treason. They have carried away the casket in which rests all hope for our planet's future and for the return of the Superom from the stars. In the underground Submet s are masters. None of us could follow. But the amber fog will find them. It will drive them out with fear." "Yes!" Delbet smashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. "We shall drive out the Submet s. We shall force them to give up Shevan and Great Karel. There's not much time. We must hurry back." The North Shore Conducs flinched. Even now that Delbet had intervened in the council they would not look at him or speak to him. The older of the two brothers said something in dialect to his companions. Homan frowned. The three nomads looked glumly at one another. "What do they say, Homan?" Delbet leaned down, his brow wrinkled with anxiety. Homan shook his head. With trembling lips the younger of the two brothers began to talk but faltered and stopped. Once more the three North Shore people exchanged agonized looks. Finally the third man cleared his throat and said, "All the witawu are dormant, just settling for the longnight. They would not be of any use-" "No!" Delbet exclaimed, striking his thigh in agitation. "It's better that way! Mutch the Agoran said they were fiercer when they were roused out of the longnight sleep -- " The spokesman continued to address Homan, still not daring to acknowledge Delbet 's presence. "We shall starve next year without the amber fog." He stared sullenly at his companions. They scowled encouragement. "There are no wild witawu left. If we lost our hives we could not breed them. We would have no elixir to trade to the caravans." "Listen to me," said Homan angrily. "Does your tribe, too, wish to suffer as the Submets of Westward City Three will suffer for their treachery? What would you do if we had brought our master Delbet Sir here into your camp wounded? Would you have dared refuse a Superom doctoring? Would you have refused him something to bind his wounds in order to save him from death?" The shrewdness of this appeal sank a barb of a different kind into Delbet's unsophisticated imagination. He writhed. It was as if the tribesmen had actually denied him succor and the situation Homan had . hypothesized were at hand. He shot out one of his great hands. He, so gentle in all things, now in blind panic seemed about to break the spokesman's arm. "You -- refuse. How dare you -- " he choked. T he Conduc shrieked. Arcweld, observing from a short distance IF away, jerked forward. Understanding violence, his whole body cocked for the snap of bone. He thought he heard the swishing scuttle as the watchers in the nomad autos dived sympathetically away from the wrathful Superom ready to maim their luckless colleague. But Homan had grabbed his master's elbow in time. "Wait, Delbet Sir! Wait!" He turned to the North Shore men. "You. Listen! Below ground in Westward City Three creatures have reverted to the primitive. They no longer acknowledge the power and greatness of the Superom. Perhaps they never knew it. They ambushed the caravan and they carried the Superom Shevan Lady and the casket of Great Karel into the underground. "At the Awakening in Spadrox, Great Karel commanded us to carry him to Mandanar where the casket would be opened at last. He revealed that at Galactic City lie the secrets to revive and restore him -- " Homan dropped his voice. "Will it be you, Conduc nomads of the North Shore, who prevent this by blocking rescue from the Submets?" "Two hives will be enough," Delbet added urgently. "And they will be returned to you. If the amber fog is not recaptured after it has accomplished its mission, then I or my cousin Shevan will order your brother tribes of the North Shore to replace your losses from their resources." The nomads hung their heads. "Well?" queried Homan. The one who had been on the brink of injury could not speak. His teeth were still rattling. The older brother undertook to reply. With crude diplomacy he mumbled, "What our masters command cannot be in question. We ask only that our living be remembered. Our people would starve without the amber fog. We shall speak to our father. He will order that hives of the amber fog be given to you. Come with us. We must honor you in our camp." The dwarf had overheard the exchanges in council. Although unable to comprehend all, he understood enough. But no one would know that. The expression on his gnarled face was never easily readable. He and Cleavewind were supposed to be guarding the auto while Delbet and Homan pow-wowed. The first thought in his mind as he saw the five men rise to move deeper into the camp was that he might seize the opportunity to report to Keren. He could communicate to the Regent the astonishing and damning information Delbet had given him that morning. He felt sure that if he did, by the time the task force got back to the stone jungle Keren would have descended upon it and so would be waiting to abort the expedition and reward him. But he had a second thought. Now he could go to work on the auto to see whether he could rig the vents to bring it to a halt in some remote place. The ceaseless pictures turned in the dwarfs mind. He saw the giant stranded. He saw himself racing back to the stone jungle, discarding the deadly hives of the witawu. He saw himself standing before the Regent and receiving his reward. He saw the hissing, cringing Submets deliver Shevan and the sea-emerald casket to him... Suddenly in the afternoon sunlight a shiver ran down the dwarfs spine. The Submets had been promised reward and protection for the raid. All the Regent's threats and cunning had been required to screw them up to the point where they dared lay hands on Superom and the sacred relic: What fears might now be shrinking their limited intelligence as they cowered underground? They would know that the ambush had not achieved all that had been intended. Two days had passed without the promised arrival of the leader to whom they could relinguish their awesome captives. And all the while, in their dim world, no doubt the Superom girl-child had been harassing them with her eloquence. Arcweld scratched and kneaded at his groin anxiously. If the pale troglos were browbeaten into revealing the authorship of the plot, an entirely different reception committee might be awaiting the return of the task force. He turned his mind away from these nightmares. Delbet and Homan and the three nomads had moved far into the Conduc camp. Another council was about to start. The group's old chief was helped from his auto. The Conducs had gained confidence and were beginning to leave their hiding places and gather around. The two embers of thought which had glowed in the dwarfs mind were fanned into flame by the blast of fear he had just felt. Evidence of the trick that had removed the seat of power from Spadrox must reach Keren. Armed with such evidence he could go immediately to Westward City Three. Equally, Del must be prevented from arriving before the Regent. The two thoughts were the legs of a single idea: he must act now. The dwarf preened himself. He; a Helangle, by marshaling thoughts and implementing ideas, was showing Superom powers. jfthe North Shore people. The tracks of the battered vehicles had been adapted for the rough ground and mudflats of the northern lands. If he immobilized Homan's auto the giant would simply commandeer one of the nomads' trucks. Still, Arcweld felt confident that his steede would travel twice as fast as any of the beat-up transports he saw formed into the customary defensive ring around the camp. The only machine that could match his for speed was Cleavewind's. The dwarf swiveled his head. He saw Cleavewind squatting behind the auto, facing the empty plain and a IF silver arm of the West Water. Cleavewind had long ago lost interest in the events at the camp. A stubby finger scratched meaningless patterns in a patch of dust between his feet. "Hey, Cleave?" "Huh?" The young Helangle lifted his face. 'That crazy giant's gonna start right on back. Soon as he gets the amber fog, we'll be burning ground again. You better go trade cruze with those Conducs. We gonna need it. Dig?" The young one stared. Goggles hid his eyes, but the rest of his face was clearly sleepy. Obviously he had been lost in some daydream. "Huh? You blown your mind? We got enough cruze for a week. Both of us. What do we need with cruze?" "For that-" the dwarf jerked his head at Homan's auto-"tickbrain! It burns cruze like grass. He'll never make it back to the stone jungle if he don't take fuel on board." "So let him worry about it. Does a Conduc worry about how a Helangle runs his steede? Nix!" Cleavewind still had not moved his body. It continued to face the plain and the distant sweep of water. He looked back at Arcweld over his shoulder. "Go on down there and remind him," Arcweld said. "Go tell him he'll need to trade for cruze as well as amber fog. Go on. Before the council breaks up." Cleavewind hopped to his feet. "Why the hell don't you go?" "Because I give the orders, dig?", growled the dwarf menacingly. "Go ahead. Burn. No, goddamn it -- not on that. You wanna start a rumble!" Cleavewind had sullenly heaved his bike off its forkrest. The dwarf and the young Helangle faced one another in silence. A few seconds passed. With helmets jammed on tight, goggles down and identical black jackets studded with designs they looked like huge antagonistic insects. Cleavewind chewed his lip. Arcweld saw that the youngster might carry his defiance and his steede out of reach. That would destroy the plan. The dwarf's heart pumped. He had to cajole or bully. The choice was clear. He was a Helangle. He said with unpleasant calm, "Yawl ever been neuro-whipped. Cleave?" Cleavewind 's cheek twitched. "Listen," said Arcweld. "Yawl listen, dugsucker. Me. Arcweld. I think like Super om. I talk to the stupid giant. He hears me when I talk. Yawl better start nodding when I give orders. Otherwise yawl gonna taste the neuro-whip when we get back." Neither Delbet nor Shevan toted one of the fearsome old weapons from Keren's armory-but Cleavewind did not know that. With a snarl he shoved the bike back onto its rest. He went down the slope into the camp. Arcweld watched him go. The dwarfs lips parted over his blunt teeth and his nostrils dilated to drag air into his lungs, cramped under the hammering of his heart. There was little time. What he had to do must be done quickly. The council was less than two hundred meters away. He could see Delbet's head and shoulders clear above the crowd even though the giant was seated. He seemed to be talking with some urgency, gesturing occasionally. His hands molded the air into shapes of speech. about half the distance between the edge of the camp and the conference. The dwarf, reaching behind him, felt the step of Homan's auto. He froze. He hoped that when Cleavewind reached the fringes of the listeners they would thereby be distracted and not notice anything strange going on at the auto. Cleavewind looked back. Arcweld clowned angrily at him to continue on. The young Helangle hesitated and then with a snarl jerked forward, skirting the group, looking for a way through to Homan and the giant. One or two of the North Shore Conducs glanced at Cleavewind with distaste. The dwarf turned quickly. He sprang the catches securing the hatch over the motor, then jerked out the wrench in the top of his boot. He slid the hatch to one side, hauled himself upright and with two or three savage twists jammed shut the vents from the fuel cell. Sweat trickled down his nose under his goggles. He would have to jam the vents on the other side as well. He craned forward, trying to see over the compact motor, but could not sight the other vents accurately enough. Scowling and panting, he scuttled around the front of the vehicle. He paused to look into the camp. The group was still intact, the conference continuing. With a kind of panicky fury the dwarf jammed the remaining vents. Now that it was begun the plan had to be carried through. He was revealed, committed. Dropping into his ape-crouch, he sped around the blind side of the vehicle. His tongue felt dry and leathery though flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Cleavewind's steede perched on its rests immediately behind the auto. He spun the nuts on the fuel-cell cover. The pungent smell of cruze stung his nostrils. Apart from homicide the most heinous crime aihong the Helangles was the theft or vandalizing of a steede. Arcweld suffered a moment of instinctive fear as the cover swung down. Then he jammed the wrench into the exposed cell, tumbling backward with fright and pain as a great white blister of cruze swelled from the gash, stinging his eyes and singeing his gauntlet... He half rolled, half scrambled toward his own bike. Now only two things remained: flight and the hope IF that he had frustrated effective pursuit. The camp was stirring uneasily. Arcweld reached his steede and kicked it down onto its wheels. The smooth blue of the sky threw back the roar as his foot stabbed the motor into life. On the ground the cruze from the violated cell was a burning star. He opened the throttle. The engine shrieked. There was no point in looking back -- he had announced himself at last. But as he wrenched the bike around and the sky spun in sympathy he found that an image of the camp froze into one stopped instant of time in his head. A field of faces in fixed surprise. The faces had turned to him as the flowers of the plain turn to the sun. From among them glared the handsome Superom face of Delbet. He strode forward, at first indignantly, then with passionate urgency. The picture moved. The giant broke into a run... The sky whirled above the dwarf and now the road and the plain opened before him-leaves of a book wiped clean. Arcweld flew. T he Helangles rode in packs, scouted in parties. It was twenty years since Arcweld had ridden alone with any considerable journey before him, twenty years since he had traveled ritually into a stone jungle to serve the night of his manhood. Daybreak the next morning had found him flying. He flew now as he had then, with the sky pouring back the sound of his steede. The same dream-demons pursued him: the fire and wrath of the unknown future and the impenetrable past. He must stop and use the box to summon Keren out of Spadrox but he knew that first he must open a wide gulf between himself and pursuit. Otherwise he might be overtaken while making the call. He feared the route by the West Water along the ridge where Mutch had died. On the other hand the harsh ridged plain might delay him. Worse,it might damage his steede. He held to the road. The sun was descending. Behind him the horizon had swallowed the last view of the North Shore Conduc camp. The sweep of the old highway was as empty as the surface of the West Water itself. The dwarf flew, crouched like a jockey. The wind tore at his helmet. His teeth were bared and the vibrating motor like a part of him. As he sped down an incline and catapulted up the other side he recognized the field of beriflame across the bay. His heart slurred. "Not guilty!" Even as he mumbled the words his hands closed spasmodically on the retroactors. The steede slewed halfway across the highway with a screech and a whinny. The motor stalled. The dwarf teetered crazily but stuck to the saddle. He sat snarling and yickering like a beast, as though the old demons of his youth had vaulted twenty years and blockaded the road ahead. Above the scarlet field and the gleaming witawu hives, a number of halted vehicles were strung along the ridge. Even at this distance they were identifiable as those of Conduc nomads. The punished motor of his steede, restarted, was whimpering only a little ICuder than the dwarf. Again it stalled. But his panic had cooled enough for him to realize that the camp ahead was part of the annual migration from the north. This group must have come in across the plain during the morning. Delbet's party had missed a meeting with them by a few hours. Arcweld looked back at last. Empty road, empty plain. The camp had caught the sound of his approach through the vast loneliness. One or two of the shaggy nomads were standing in the road; others had climbed onto their autos. Movement in the field drew Arcweld's attention to a pair of crude, boats floating among the flameberries between the hives. Their Conduc crews stood up to look. The boats were full of gently pulsing things that looked like giant sponges. The grave, bearded nomads stared at the distant apparition. They looked at one another. A Helangle -- alone? in ered leg as a crank he thrust the motor, into life again, opened the drive and retroactors together. The steede leaped forward over the highway like a hunting tree-tiger, landed on the embankment, hurtled down the far side and into the plain. The dwarf intended to describe a loop around the camp and rejoin the highway further south. But having made some two kilometers he caught sight of a ruined escarpment and the dry canals of one of the old irrigation reservoirs. He sent the bike bouncing into one of the dust-filled ducts, drove a little way on and stopped. The trench seemed deep enough to hide him from anyone on the ridge highway. He looked around. The silence was enormous after the din of the motor. Yes, he was out of sight from the ridge. This was a better place than most for making his call to Keren. He threw off his gauntlets, swung stiffly from the saddle of his steede. Opening the pannier, he set the box on the ground. Crouching, with thick fingers he did what Keren had taught him to do to the knobs and switches. He waited. His breath was the noisiest thing in the great silence. Sweat running from under his helmet and visor had streaked the dust on his face. The distorted reflection of a savage looked at him from the curve of the box's screen. Now the screen began to fill with its own particular darkness. The dwarf waited, twisting his face nervously, shrugging, fidgeting while the box hummed. Still nothing swam to the surface of the pool at its center. The Regent was a long time answerIF ing the call. Arcweld spat into the dust. His right hand kneaded away at his groin, coaxing, comforting. He pushed again the switch which summoned his master. He lifted his head, anxiously staring up at the sun. Keren might be eating but the pulsator on his wrist should alert him at any time. A tiny glacier of fear began to spread from the pit of the dwarfs stomach. If something had happened to the Regent, Arcweld was alone. Alone. Even his breath no longer broke the silence. Alone he could not frustrate the expedition. Nor could he rejoin it. In fear the dwarf struck the box. "Come! Keren! Yawl bearded cradpat Superom bastard. Come!" A little dust rolled from the cracks in the stones of the dead canal. The hum seemed louder. "Dwarf -- " said the box. "Is it you? You, at last, you stunted, misconceived -- " "Keren Sir!" Arcweld added the respectful suffix in sheer relief. "I can't see you." "I'm here. You've turned the box into the sun. Turn it with its back to the sun, you misshapen animal. Where have you been? What have you done?" "Listen," the dwarf breathed. "Yawl listen good, Regent." His arrogance was returning. He hopped about with excitement. "Ain't much time. The Agoran got drowned. We got to a North Shore Conduc camp. I busted the Homan kid's auto and my man's steede so they couldn't follow." Keren's bearded face was visible at last. Its hollow eyes stared at the capering, twisted shadow he had made into an ally. "I got all you need to bust the whole thing wide. After I killed -- ah -- after Mutch got drowned the dumb giant came to me one morning -- " The humming had gathered strength. There was more than the sound of two voices. "He said-" "Speak louder, dwarf. What's that whirring sound?" It was gaining power with every second. Arcweld stopped. Clearly the source was not the box. It was the sky. The sky! The dwarf stared at the turning blue bowl. All day it had followed him, watching him, empty, polished; now over the West Water behind him it had become blemished. It had grown three clumps of fungi that screwed great cone-shaped cavities in its inscrutable face. And there was no mistaking where they pointed. Keren was shouting a word. In the instant of panic before he realized what the word was, Arcweld tried to 'remember where he had seen the purposeful fungi before. In a dream -- a nightmare? His shriek and Keren's angry cry came simultaneously. "Witawu!"  "The amber fog!" "The transceiver! Those things are attracted by radio short-wave. Switch it off, you dolt!" howled the Regent. But it was too late. The dwarf had gathered the precious magic box in his arms and was no longer listening. I N loud cones the witawu sped over the plain. The first stimulus from the box had jabbed them out of the drowsy prelude to their longnight sleep. They terrified their keepers, spiraling from the hives and the boats as though Harvest had never come. A thousand generations had not blunted the deep instinct that the radio waves had triggered. The witawu flew unerringly inland, called by an echo from the past. "Dwarf! They'll destroy you! Switch it off!" Arcweld might have been deaf. Crazed by panic, he could not relinquish the magic the Superom had entrusted to him. While Keren screamed warning after warning, the dwarf fought to get the box into the pannier. Foam flecked his lips. He was beyond the reach of the Regent's voice or anything else. Arcweld slammed shut his visor and sprang into the saddle. The first witawu swarm, buzzing expectantly, bored down through the radio waves flooding from the strange object below. "Aahhg-" Striking at the hard bodies and invisible wings was useless. They swarmed over the dwarf. His gauntlets lay somewhere on the ground; a dozen white-hot needles sank into his unprotected hands. He could not see properly through the mass of amber that had settled on his goggles and visor. Wildly his leg cranked the steede alive. Thousands of witawu were flung momentarily into the air. They collided with the next swarm arriving. Thousands more clung to bike and rider. A great pendulous mass of winged bodies, like some obscene growth, fought to get into the pannier. Their weight unbalanced the bike. It careened from side to side, striking the banks, sending down storms of dust as the dwarf tried to escape from the gully to the plain. All the folk of the Conduc group except those still aboard their boats in the beriflame field climbed to the highway atop the ridge. They stared up at the sky and over the plateau, seeking an explanation for the flight of their witawu, and exchanging brittle cries of astonishment and disbelief And there, dotted along the ridge like a theater audience, they watched the final act of the nightmare that had begun at dawn three days earlier on a hillside above Westward City Three. In the still afternoon light the cloud of insects circled. They whirled and eddied, rose and fell, blew like wind-driven smoke. At first it looked as though the swarms were consolidating to tow something along the ground. They swirled, expanded, massed, dived upon the earthbound object. They covered it with throbbing amber. It seemed as if they were trying to drag IF it back as a prize to the Conduc camp. Then one of the sharper nomads realized the witawu were not towing it -- it was towing them. He called out to a companion. The man nodded. They were remembering the solitary Helangle who had appeared mysteriously on the road twenty minutes ago. Now the approaching shape, clouded and distorted by the swarming insects, was becoming recognizably a Helangle steede and rider. Now, too, the soundof the motor was clear, although the frenzied din of the witawu challenged it. The infested bike and its pilot reeled crazily across the plain. The dwarf dared not scream. The amber insects were everywhere and would not stop at exploring an open mouth. The dreams in Arcweld's mind had become molten and he could no longer control the pictures. But he kept his lips shut. Time after time he sought to raise one stung, swollen hand to brush the insects from his goggles and try to see where he was going. In desperation he opened the throttle wide. The bike bucked and plunged. He had to lean this way and that to counter the crowding weight of witawu dragging the bike off balance. He was incapable of understanding that cutting the pannier free would rid him of the attackers, though every thread of instinct left to him was concentrated on his own survival. The bike screamed forward, lurching from side to side. The amber fog thinned and scattered but quickly reformed. Hot-wire stings sank into the dwarfs hands, chin, neck. The steede bounced high on the washboard surface of the plateau. Witawu swarmed about the Helangle, circling, settling, rising and swirling, buzzing furiously. The people on the ridge watched woodenly, aware that they could not help even if they wanted to. They, better than any other Thetans, knew the unmanageable fury of the witawu swarms. Arcweld was beyond aid. For half a minute they watched as the steede zigzagged toward them, sometimes airborne, sometimes earthbound. Then one Conduc shrieked and waved his arms. They scattered. Men and woman grabbed their children and dived for safety. A swath of sparks flew into the air. One of its steering bars had sideswiped a rock as the bike had keeled over almost parallel to the ground. Somehow Arcweld righted it. The motor roared again. The bike dipped and then leaped up the ridge. Thousands of witawu still clung to Helangle and steede. It struck the ridge top and bounced against one of the Conduc autos. Tiny but real stars showered from the constellation painted on the steede's side. The dwarf was flung forward but somehow held on as the bike touched the highway. He could see nothing, hear nothing. He was totally covered now by stinging, buzzing witawu. His every muscle and nerve were committed to blind flight. Convulsively his right hand wrung the throttle. With a protesting howl the steede sprang forward. Its wheels struck ground on the far side of the road. Thousands of witawu rose in instinctive self-preservation from the doomed steede and its misshapen rider. They soared skyward, separated at last, hung, then plunged into the water less than ten meters from the field of flameberries. A great hiss, suddenly extinguished, made the Conducs cover their heads. A plume of water shot skyward and fell back to the surface in watm rain. When they dared look again, the columns of bubbles rising from the bottom were moving slowly out to sea. The sun watched from the gathering mist with a single, unblinking eye. Above the place where Arcweld had disappeared the witawu circled, droning sullenly, sorting themselves into their proper swarms. The languor of Harvest resettled over land and sky now that the call of the radio waves had ceased. XI H e felt scared when she looked at him that way. Before she had been old enough to be called Lady, she used to scratch and bite and kick when he teased her and she got really angry. She did not do such things any more. Now the kicks and bites and scratches came in her words and from her eyes. They hurt as bad. Worse, maybe. They gave you the same feeling you got when you met up with a tree tigress nursing cubs and did not have your slingbow. She was pretty as a tree-tiger cub, too. Real pretty. Especially when she was angry. "What did you tell himT' she said. "What did you say fo him, Del?" The giant locked his big hands between his knees and squeezed till the joints cracked. He did not know how to lie. "Why, Shev -- I didn't tell him anything more than he'd already seen or guessed. I could see all the time he was mad-nursing something inside -- like about that night when he-" "What?" She spoke softly but with menace. It was like a faraway thunderclap. "Why, that night when you came down into the camp dressed up like a Conduc and -- " "No, not that!" The words slammed shut on the memory. "What? What did you tell him?" Del looked up at the sky. It was a dome streaked with clouds -- whorls, anagrams of vapor. A Harvest sky, hugging storms. The deck of the vessel throbbed to the beat of the crude stern-mounted engine. Delbet shifted uneasily. "He could have wrecked the task force, Shev. He was plotting all the time. "What? What, I asked you. Not why." "Well -- I told him how ft was. About Msindanar and about how you read in the library about the sun running down and-well-nothing much, really. Nothing I didn't have to." He cracked his knuckles again. He stared at morning and the face of storms in the sky. "And?" "Well, Shewy-" "You told him about the Tower and the Awakening. You told him that, too. Didn't you?" "Shewy-" "You dummy! You witless, longlegged spitfly! I should have left you in Spadrox with Keren right from the start. A talue's got more sense -- " "I had to do it, Shev. The morning before we went down into Westward City Three he saw me. He was in the scrub up there on the mountain. I didn't tell you before. I'd broken camp to go hunt talue. He saw me, all right. He heard me pitch the call. He was a Helangle but he wasn't like an ordinary Helangle." "And you: You!" The girl threw all her fury into the words. Although she and Delbet were alone on the high deck in the prow of the boat and talking Superom, the well deck below and behind them was crowded with Thetans. Any other violence would have betrayed their disharmony. "And youare not Superom! You would have done better working the cruze mine!" He stretched one arm to restrain her, but the expression on her face froze him. "Listen," she said. "I told those lining, colorless, slimy creatures everything that was going to happen to them if they didn't return me and the casket to the surface right away. I intuited they were waiting for someone -- someone who had promised to come but hadn't. After two days they were really scared. And do you know what they told me? They told me a dwarf was in the city on the morning of the ambush. A Helangle who opened his mouth like this-" She snarled, drawing back her lips in a spectral imitation of Arcweld. "They said he had a magic box. A box like those theif ancestors sometimes tended below ground for the masters. They said it had a Superom prisoner inside it. Eh? You-do you know what that means?" The giant stared at her. He was too scared to think. He always became fearful when Shewy got angry. He swallowed and shook his head. "He was spying for Keren," said the girl. "Keren got to him at the Spadrox gathering. He sent him on the expedition with a transceiver. They fixed the ambush. The Submets should have got you, too. You realize that, don't you? When they had us down underground the dwarf was going to bring Keren flying. That would have finished us all!" Delbet's face flushed. His mouth opened and shut. Then everything softened into a huge grin of relief. "But he's dead, Shev. Gone! The witawu got him. He drove off the cliff into the water. A whole tribe of North Shore Conducs saw him go under. It was right near where Mutch drowned. He's dead. We don't have anything to fear from him," "Oh, Delbet." The girl shook her head. Her anger was melting into pity for the big simple man. "The dwarf probably told Keren everything. The one way Keren can get out of Spadrox is by convincing the The tans we tricked them in order to carry off Karel's casket. If the dwarf gave him your-ypur confession, he'll use it. He'll be on his way now to break the expedition." Delbet listened glumly as the girl spoke on. "Why do you think I insisted on traveling through the night to Port West as soon as you got back to the city? Why did I bully the Water Conducs to take the expedition in their fleet and sail before sunrise?" Delbet stared down at the deck. "Well-Shev-Keren's not here. And I guess he could have been if he wanted. After all, he has the aircar." Shevan looked up at the sky. It was empty. was white-winged with a fleet of vessels. The waters throbbed with the beat of their engines. Their square sails flapped, sucking for a breeze. Even though many thousands of Thetans had gathered at Port West to see the expedition off, it had taken Shevan's fierce persuasion and the stem words of Floridian, their chief, to raise the Water Conducs and their fleet before dawn. Thetans had been afraid of the dark since the lights of the Superom had gone out six hundred years ago. None of the sea-harvesters had ever sailed to the far shore of the West Water. None could say what was there. Delbet had found the North Shore people suspicious of the unfamiliar, the people of the fishing waters to the south reluctant to risk their boats and thus their livelihood. But Shewy with her soaring passion-the awesomeness of the mysterious casket , carrying a supposedly living Superom of the Great Age -- the legends of the Superom's return recalled aloud by Floridian, these had finally spmng the sailors from their beds and families. The sea stretched before them, unbroken by any sight of land. The sun had risen only a short time before, a sun dispirited as if sensing its own mortality. Before long, the loops and trails of cloud spun into a sheet masking the sunlight. A squall twisted down from the north. Stirred by invisible spoons of wind, the heaving water sent the boats reeling. Sails slapped, and canvas tore, ropes parted. A single exIF plosion of thunder was drowned by rain. The cruze-powered engines continued to churn the boiling waves but their thrust was puny in contest with the wild water and wind. The Conduc sailors had been caught off guard by the sudden storm. Only one or two crews got canvas down and trimmed their boats in time to run before the wind. Two or three vessels were swamped. Another, broadside to the wind, capsized. The Conduc autos and Helangle steedes and terrified cadels and tribesmen thrashed and sank together. The storm wrought its havoc for about ten minutes. Then, outrunning the surviving vessels, it churned away southward, an angry colossus of wind, mist and rain scudding across the face of the sea. The boat that carried Delbet and Sheyan pitched and rolled in the quieting wake of the squall. Varso, th Conduc fleet captain, climbed painfully to the foredeck. He was long-haired and bearded, as were all the Conducs. His huge deepset eyes had dark bags of fatigue under them. A metal collar engraved with the tribal constellation indicated his office. He had fallen heavily during the storm. His left arm was bruised and the hand swollen. The two Superom cousins watched him. Delbet did not feel sick because nothing unsettled him, but Shevan had to bite her lips and dig her nails into the palms of her clenched fists to hold down her nausea. Varso raised his uninjured hand in salute. "We're going about, Delbet Sir. There may be survivors." The giant started to nod his agreement but Shevan said, "No!" Varso looked at her blankly. So did Delbet, his mouth hanging open. "No. We must go on. Five minutes, and probably there'll be another storm." "But-" Varso gestured at the sky. Delbet followed the gesture. The sky was as innocent and cloudless as a child's eyes. "Go on I say!" Sheyan's face was ashen but her voice had an edge like broken glass. "Go on, I will not have the casket endangered." Varso glanced appealingly at Delbet. The giant turned away. In the storm he had pushed Shewy under one of the bulwarks and held her there. He was soaked and battered. His black cap of hair had been torn apart. Strands of it were matted to his ears and forehead. Mandanar other galaxy, the journey purposeless, the pain and hazards futile. The Conduc fleet captain stood motionless. He seemed stunned. "Go on!" Shevan insisted. Then, as though she commanded some supernatural power, the weather spoke irrevocably... Shrouds and webs of mist unexpectedly spun from the north to wrap the sun again. A new wind shrieked down at them, flinging the vaporous Thetan rain and the mounting waves against what remained of the fleet. From pale sunshine to the heart of fury was a few seconds' transition. This time the remnant boats were already pointed to run from the storm. None was swamped or capsized. The giant once again held the girl against the bulwark with his body. She clung to him, moaning, her face pressed into his belly. The rain was almost fine enough to breathe and drown in. It was as if Keren had invoked some secret meteorology of his own to wreck them all. This time the storm lasted longer. When at last it had funneled away into silence and the sky hung out the watery sun, the fleet was .well scattered. Vessels dotted the southward vista. From the command deck in the stern Varso's dark eyes stared sullenly forward at the two Superom, but he did not approach them again. The threat of another storm brewing in the north was enough to stifle thoughts of turning back. The flotilla leader signaled the scattered craft to crowd on power and run south. He did not look behind. Anyone who had survived in the water after the first squall would have a long swim ahead of him. The enginemen coaxed their crude motors to peak effort. The boats ploughed through the water. The sea was still choppy and fidgety from the violence that had seized it not long ago. More squalls developed through the morning but they ran farther and farther eastward. The flotilla did not have to change course again. Still, it was well into afternoon before the lookout shouted, "Land!" Slowly the two wings of the Bay of Anselm came into view, like a giant claw reaching to grab the flotilla. jl  brightly now and the only remnant of squall was tumbling like a boiling cloud along the eastward horizon, the bay looked threatening. Behind it extended the great cracked stone jungle of the old Superom from which the bay took its name. The new Anselm, where a South Shore Conduc tribe had settled to establish a fishing colony, included the foreshore and the patched jetties and piers of the old city. Dark lifeless hills hunched around it. Varso had obviously been to Anselm before. His boat was recognized while still a long way offshore. The Anselm folk stopped their work and waved and shouted. Varso took the flotilla close in. The inhabitants obviously knew which pier he would choose and began to crowd it. There were eight boats left of the twelve that had set out from Port West. Varso jumped ashore to be greeted by the colonial chief. Men, women and children pressed forward, excitedly staring at the Superom. Varso held a shouted conversation in dialect with some of the elders. There was a good deal of wise nodding and gesticulation, fistIF brandishing and finger-pointing at sea and sky. "They say we should shelter here tonight," Varso told Shevan. "They have good reason. Morning storms are often followed by evening storms on the West Water." Varso stared at his feet. Few Thetans who had faced Shevan once in disagreement were likely to try it a second time. Shevan was looking at the sky. Delbet followed her gaze. All the enemies bom of time were on high. The old senile sun. The fading artificial sun of the Super om. The silent dome of blue that reminded him of the old observatory dome with its fragmented inscription. The image of Keren, looming in the gaint's imagination like a storm cloud... "Besides," tie Water Conduc said, seeing Shevan's hesitancy. "We shall need all the light left today to repair our damaged boats." "Very well. But you must rig fire-ore lamps, as many as are necessary, and work through the dark if need be. We must leave at dawn tomorrow. This expedition must be on the far side of the West Water by tomorrow night. We must cross the Graystones before the beginning of longnight. That is not far away." Shasem, the Anselm chief, scratched his beard and spoke briefly to Varso. The South Shore dialects were further removed from the Thetan tongues of the Western Shore. Shevan had difficulty foUowing the chiefs words. Zedward the Saivainte, who had survived the storm in the flotilla's flagship, leaned toward Shevan and murmured, "Although he is difficult to understand, Shevan Lady, I believe that he says the journey from Anselm to the far shore will take at least two and a half days. He gives the reason but I do not -- " The girl's eyes blazed at Varso. "Nonsense!" she exploded. "The books and the maps say that it's a day's journey. It is two days' time direct by vessel from Port West. How can it be longer from here?" Varso spoke in quick, broken sentences to Shasem. The South Shore fisherman listened. His cheeks had paled with fear when the Superom demigoddess spoke in anger, but his eyes were stubborn. Shevan listened impatiently. All the other Thetans crowding the deck of the vessel in council kept their eyes lowered. "Well?" "There is no waterway from Anselm-" Varso spoke rushed and fearful phrases-"other than the way that skirts the Place of Rocks, Vamin Darma. No Conduc of these waters will cross it although it is said to be possible. They fear. They fear the monster Khedau." The fisher Conducs hissed at one another when they heard the name. Heads shook, bearded chins raised and eyes peered fearfully past the claw of headland into the westward sea distances. "Khedau?" Another ripple of fear and discontent. "What is this Khedau?" With as much gravity and poise as Zedward himself might have mustered the colonial chief said something in his own dialect which nevertheless needed no translation. "Khedau is Khedau!" Faced with the fear behind the monumental simplicity of the old man, Shevan was silent for several seconds. Then the Superom intelligence asserted itself again. "Listen to me." She raised her voice. "All of you who can understand, hear me. I, Shevan, a true fruit of the Superom, am a monster more terrible than this Khedau. And I go to Mandanar where I shall find the means to recreate the power of the Superom so that Thetis shall be great again. "Also I carry with me the secret mind of my forefathers. Its knowledge is enshrined in the living body of Karel, the same Great Karel who lived among Thetans when Thetis was great. "Del, tell them to bring the casket on deck!" L helped by several Agorans manhandled the casket from its place of safety to the deck. The fisher Conducs of Anselm hung their heads. The awed silence that descended upon the Thetans in Varso's boat radiated outward to the other boats and then along the piers and jetties and through the Longshore colony. The old crumbling stone jungje seemed to move a few paces closer to the sea. The clap of wind on rope and the slap of water on shore and hulls and piers were the only sounds in the bay. In the silence the casket shone ghostlike. Inside its sea-deep emerald light the old man slept. The fluctuating levels of the instruments set into the casket confirmed the flicker of life preserved for six centuries. Shevan spoke again. "These are my powers. At Spadrox on Awakening Day, Karel spoke. The message was that we should bear his casket to Mandanar. These are my powers! I and Delbet Sir, my cousin, are Superom. Superom who made Thetis and colonized Thetis do not fear any monster of Thetis." Delbet stared sideways at her. Always when she was opposed the fury coiled up tight inside her. It made her slender frame quiver like a hunting animal's, poised and ready under the taut blue suit. The giant stared miserably at the enormous peace within the casket that could impose silence on the whole colony and bay. Only he and his cousin knew the truth of the speech on the Awakening -- now when e spoke deception was heard as truth. Delbet shivered, remembering how he had foolishly taken the dwarf Arcweld into his confidence. If what Shevan had guessed were true perhaps one other knew the truth about Karel's Awakening. Keren might be planning now to follow them from Spadrox. He might even be on his way. Shevan finished speaking. Once more the casket created silence. Finally Shasem whispered a few sentences hoarsely to Varso. "Well?" said Shevan. "What does he say now?" The flotilla leader cleared his throat. "My brother says that he gives reverence to Great Karel. He says that he rejoices in the mission to recreate Thetis. He says that he respects the powers you are gifted with. But he says that none of the Conducs of the South Shore Anselm have sailed through the Vamin Darma. They would not because of the Monster Khedau. There are no charts, and if one of the norther Harvest squalls such as today's blew down the fleet would be wrecked." Shevan stamped her foot. "And you!" she exploded. "What do the Conducs of Port West say? I don't ask for the favors of these superstitious barren-landers! What will the South Shore people of Port West say -- Varso 's people-if I ask them to carry Great Karel across the Vamin Darma in a day?" Varso was silent. Del could imagine behind those dark, sleepless eyes the memory of a sailor's agony, unable to turn back within earshot of drowning men. At last he said, "We must repair the storm damage. Tomorrow when we see the dawn sky we shall be better able to decide. My men are weary. They have lost companions today and are dispirited. How can I ask them to answer tonight?" "He's right, Shev. Let them-" "Shut up, Del." The girl shook off his restraining hand impatiently. She breathed deeply and considered. "Very well, Varso. But understand -- we leave at first light tomorrow unless the weather's against us. See that the refitting is well done. If your men work well you may breach the cargo of sanpardan we took from the submets and brought with us. But it is to be strictly controlled. The work first -- the sanpardan as reward." "As my Lady commands." The conducs of the flotilla worked on their boats. Squads of colonists helped them. Four boats had to be raised from the water to repair hull damage incurred below the waterline. When the light drained away behind the dead hills and the elder sun came out, fire-ore lamps were hung in festoons. Shevan, Delbet, Zedward, Apian and some of the other Thetan leaders of the expedition spent the night inland in the caravan of the Anselm chief. But the Anselm Conducs were wary of the Helangles. They gave them a place outside the sandhill ridge above the caravan circle. Only seventeen of those who had set out from Port West remained beneath the command of Starhowl. They quickly pitched their tents, forgetting the terrors of the day's journey and the loss of their comrades in the thrusting and crowing evoked by their women. staring uneasily at the distant harbor. The noise of the work going on there blew in from the sea. "They are mending their boats," she said, "but they were afraid and they are still afraid. The The tans' world has shrunk so. They fear to go beyond a very tight horizon. Varso hasn't forgiven my harshness this morning when I wouldn't let him turn back for survivors. I can't trust him to carry his men across the Place of Rocks." "Sometimes I envy the Helangles." Zedward was wrapped in the gray cloak he had drawn up to protect his head from the chill evening. He peered through the inland window of the caravan toward the ridge. "Perhaps we of the Decline would have been happier if we had greater sensual appetites and a more limited intelligence as do they." Delbet's forehead wrinkled in a frown. Homan the young Caxitine Conduc roared with laughter. "I think my broader Caxitine intelligence helps to deepen my appreciation of sensuality. What do you say, Delbet Sir?" The giant shook his head. He cracked his bony fingers. He felt hot and ashamed. Apian, Homan's father, frowned at his son. "Love -- " mused Zedward. "Love-that's what the Superom taught us -- " Delbet rubbed his jaw. Love. Love was the warm, silver beauty of the talue pulsing in the hand, surrendering its crystal treasure of fire-ore. Love was the silent beauty of the machinery striking up, down, back and forth, glistening with oil. Shevan shook her head. "I ,can't trust them. We must keep a watch." "Maybe it was not wise to promise to let them breach the sanpardan," said Homan. "It makes us argumentative and the Saivainte very pompous. The Agorans just go to sleep. But the Helangles get spiteful." Zedward looked at the girl. Slowly she and her cousin were becoming less remote and godlike, especially to Thetans of their own age such as Homan. Their decisions could be discussed -- not challenged yet, but discussed. They were less exalted, more of the people. He sensed Homan felt that by the way the young Thetan spoke. Shevan shook her head. "No. I said they might breach the sanpardan as reward. I won't go back on it. Del, you must keep watch on them -- you and Homan. He'll go with you. "Make sure that Varso explains correctly to his crews. Be sure you convince him if he wavers that we, the Superom, have the power and that we fear no monsters. And keep the Helangles away from the sanpardan. "Varso should speak to the sailors IF before the casks are breached. Old Shasem mustn't blind them with honors of this Khedau when their wits are dulled. Homan, you must translate if Delbet requires it." The two young men got up to go. The giant gave his cousin a wounded ook but Homan seemed content. Zedward, gray beard drooping onto his thin chest inside the cloak, hooded his eyes. It would have been better to have chosen Apian, he thought. He looked at the girl. He was an old The tan. He licked his lips, but did not question. The young men had gone now. It was too late. opened his eyes. Before he realized that the scythe of pain swinging back and forth behind them belonged exclusively to him he saw but failed to recognize the blind disk of the old sun. Far overhead in the pre-dawn sky it peered down through the swinging bars of pain like an incredibly old jailor staring down into a cosmic oubliette. Then the pain made him groan, a groan with long cords reaching back to his stomach. He fought through torture to his hands and knees and there, four-legged, he was sick and then again and again and again until his stomach was a knot of cramp. And when the dry retching was finished he heard the sound of mocking laughter above his own noise and saw that the darkness held more than the old sun's face. Through the water in his eyes and the pain behind them he saw legs and feet which could only bethe withered limbs of a group of Helangles. Among them was a single pair of feet, one sandaled, the other bare. Raising his head between the blows of the scythe the giant saw that the feet were Homan's and that Homan was upright only because he was supported between the Helangles Kickstart and Cleavewind. The young Caxitine was alive and groaning as Delbet had groaned, but the giant was swamped by a new wave of nausea when he realized that Homan's wide-open eyes saw nothing except eternal night. ' And after the giant tried to vomit again and couldn't he wished that he himself might be at least temporarily blind -- for he was forced to look at the terrible face of his cousin Shevan. 'They have gone!" she stormed. "They saw a raw landsman and a simple giant! They fooled them with 'friendship.' They poured the juice of a plant into them and made them dummies. And when the dummies closed their eyes and snored like kiltawi in the longnight they sailed away! Varso took his men and his ships and we're left here with these superstitious primitives of Anselm!" Delbet was kneeling before her. "Forgive me, Shev. I think I'm dying. Please forgive me." He recalled now trying to be wary. He remembered the way the prized liquor of the Submets had foamed from each cask as the sailor Conducs had breached the sanpardan. He had held back; but Homan's shouts of laughter as he joined in the celebration, and the merry bearded faces of the Conducs crowding about him, and the hands slapping his back and urging him to honor the party under the stars, and the swinging fire-ore lamps-these had overcome him. The Conducs had roared with laughter as he had choked and sneezed, potent brew jumping down his throat and fizzing up his nose. He had drunk again and again to prove his manhood. Before long the stars had begun to collide and the harbor and newly repaired boats had swarmed with bearded sea-smelling friends dancing and fighting and deliriously daring to embrace this Superom, to put their bearded lips to his ear and tell him rambling stories he did not understand. And after that there had been only the dark -- the dark through which the pain struck at him again and again and again. "Forgive me." But Shevan was furious with him now and she struck him with the blind, wounding rage of a child as he knelt before her. When she exhausted herself and her fists fell to her sides and the only rage remaining flowed in tears from her eyes, old Zedward, the scholar Thetan, and Apian, the father of the blind Homan, led her gently away. She sat on a hewn rib of timber and stared out over the bay. The ships of the Port West Conducs were long gone. There was not even the sound of their engines, only the empty sounds of water and sky -- the new day coming up with the shrinking sun. She looked defeated. The power of obedience she commanded had begun inexorably to slip from her as the expedition journeyed farther and farther from Spadrox. The fear of Superom power was giving way to the potency of more immediate gods. "We shall have to take some of the Anselm ships. We must cross to the Graystones before Harvest-end." She spoke as though to herself, though Delbet followed her humbly across the beach. Behind him trailed the three tribal leaders, Zedward, Apian and, scuttling painfully, the Helangle called Starhowl. "I say go around," said StarhowL "Don't dig this lousy water. Makes storms, makes rust. Shags up the cruze cells. I had a mindmap of this once. I say around only takes two, three days and it's safer. Besides we would need crewmen and those Anselm jerks won't go past this Khedau thing." "No," said Shevan. "I can save two days by crossing. Besides, I think this monster is only a figment of someone's imagination." "The Anselm people won't go," said Apian. "They would rather die here. They're really scared of Khedau, whatever it is." "And you?" Shevan turned to the I  IF Conduc leader so abruptly that her cousin jumped in surprise The three chiefs stopped in their tracks. S HE faced them, a soft sea breeze stirring her hair, proud head and shoulders etched onto the disk of the rising sun behind her. Apian cleared his throat. "I-" he started. "We -- that is -- the Caxitine Conducs are not really sailors, but I think we do not fear without reason. I would be prepared to explore -- " "Zedward?" "I have been thinking," said the old Saivainte. "Trying to pick out of all my memories of all the books I have read what this creature could be. I'm sure the Superom eliminated all the primitive sea-beasts of old Thetis." "But will you come with me? Will the Saivainte come and risk this Vamin Darma?" The old man raised his bony shoulders in a shrug of resignation. "Those of my tribe are scholars and teachers. We have always been close to the Superom. If you command -- " "It ain't one of the old monsters," said Starhowl. He fidgeted from one hand to the other, a mannerism common to all Helangles divorced from their steedes. He pummeled his wrinkled strip of forehead with his free fist. "Jerksville -- that mindmap's really beat up. Hell! It's got giant eyes -- real big-like this -- " he whirled his arm in an impossible circle " -- bright -- big eyes. And a cry like a hit tree tiger." He thought awhile. "That's all I can caU up." "I see that the noises from your tents aren't always hovAs of lust. Sometimes you have nightmares, too," said Shevan. "Your people are mean and tough. They fight. Will they come?" Starhowl looked abashed. "Sure! Hell! If not. I'll beat the hell out of every one. Like, okay, so I'd rather have the land. But -- heU, I wasn't stalling I remember. We gotta get Great KareLto Mandanar." He licked his lips. The girl nodded. "Cousin?" She was still cold to the giant. She would not use his name. "You know I'll go wherever you want, Shev," he said humbly. She turned and began to pace forward again. "Good. We'll take two boats -- only two. It's foolish to risk many lives. Those we don't need or who are afraid to come with us can return overland or any other way to the other side of the water and their homes." "Shasem?" Zedward queried. "The old man? Will he release the boats? Will you be able to find crews? Where have the Anselm Conducs gone? I have seen none since the Port West people fled. Perhaps they're hiding in the hills?" "No," said Shevan. "They're here, lying low in their autos. Maybe they think we'll go away by road. But I'm going to cross the West Water. And I'll take Shasem with me. If I take him as hostage his sons will come. They'll handle the boats. And we can prove to them that this monster threatens nothing but their stupidity." "That's if we survive, of course," said Apian softly to his two companions. Fortunately for him the breeze blew his words away from Shevan. She pressed forward in command again, gaining confidence with every step. The Anselm people had only two boats with cruze engines and Shevan commandeered them both. She was in no mood to listen to any contrary pleas. She let the unlucky colonists know she held them equally to blame for the departure of their kinsmen to Port West. She organized a ruthless Helangle foray into the nearby stone jungle to fetch Shasem, who had slipped away from the camp to what he thought was ' a place of safety. The dwarf riders, relishing their new role as Superom shocktroops, brought the old man back tied to a litter. Shevan had him taken straight to a boat and then had his sons Edvart and Stanlyn rounded up. By the time the two boats were provisioned, the passengers selected and Conduc crews press-ganged, it was afternoon again. Due to yesterday's storms and the defection of Varso's flotilla the expedition had lost one more precious day. It was a grim departure. The Anselm sailors were tenified. The many Thetans who had traveled this far with the expedition only to be left behind watched from the crowded shore as the two boats floated out into the bay. Apian was among these silent spectators: Shevan had released him to care for his blinded son. The bleak hills crouching around the bay and the corpse of the old stone jungle decaying below listened to the beat of the stern engines as the boats moved toward open water. The mournful wails of the Anselm people could be heard from the shore. They were convinced the crews the Superom had forced into the boats were going to their deaths. Shevan did not look back -- she had been forced to abandon many faithful Thetans. Now she had neither Agorans nor their nervous, longnecked cadels. Of the Saivainte she had brought with her only Zedward. She had carefully chosen ten Helangles, led by Starhowl, and balanced them with ten of Aplah's Caxitine Conducs. These, together with thereluctant Anselm Conducs, Delbet, herself and the casket were the entire complement that sailed into the open sea and set course westward again. D elbet stood in the prow of the leading boat two hours outside the Bay of Anselm. During the last half-hour the Anselm Conducs had grown increasingly agitated. The face of the helmsman had slowly changed to the color of sour milk. His lips trembled and his hands shook on the wheel. IF From the bow of the lead vessel the cry of the lookout was the only human sound between sea and sky. "Vennel shahah-vennel shahah-" The monotonous chant repeated every fifteen seconds: "Clear water -- clear water-" Delbet listened, shading his eyes, staring into the distance against the flashing waves. He was the first to hear the chant falter. He glanced sharply at the lookout. The man's eyes seemed to have grown too big for his skull. The tension dragged his head forward; his neck sinews were taut cords. His short sand-colored beard jutted at the horizon. The impression lasted only an instant, but to Delbet the man looked as though on the point of having a fit. Then compulsive training asserted itself. "Vennel shahah -- " he wailed. "Vennel shahah -- ap caildor Vamin Darma!" A chorus of groans and shrieks greeted the sighting. Delbet peered ahead. Even had he not caught the last two words the ripple of fear that ran through the Anselm sailors would have translated the call. The quality of the horizon had changed. The unbroken line of water was fuzzy with light. The giant felt a cold hand in the pit of his stomach. Something of the fear of the Anselm Conducs seized him. He swallowed, shading his eyes again, staring ahead. The lookout repeated in a choked voice, "Ap candor Vamin Darma! Ap candor-ap candor-" Slowly the man shrank into hiding in the lookout post. Delbet realized his cousin had Joined him. She said nothing. He saw her face pucker in a scowl as she stared ahead with him into the sun. Her mouth, usually full and mobile, tightened into a hard line. "Dead ahead, Shev." She nodded. "I see it." The giant kept his eyes shaded. It was something for his hands to do to avoid their betraying his racing disquiet. "Looks pretty much like an atoll or reef or something," he offered diffidently. "Don't see much there like a monster to get scared of." Shevan gave him no comfort. "Wait. We aren't close enough yet. Right now we'd better get back down into the boat. The Anselmites are on the point of diving overboard." They were. The Vamin Darma was becoming clearer every minute. Already most of them were nearer to it than they had ever expected to be. They could see it from 'the main decks now. The horizon's fuzziness was caused by light on breaking spray. The area must lie amid crosscurrents, the giant thought. There was little wind to whip the water into such waves. Several of the Anselm people had fallen flat on the decks from fright. All the Anselmites were ineffective now. Even terror of Shevan and of her Superom intelligence could not outwei the terror of tribal legend. And their tenor communicated itself to the Caxitine Conducs, who looked gray and anxious and muttered to one another. Even the Helangles, largely insulated from fear or foreboding by their blunt senses and their belligerence, could not entirely escape the strangeness of the moment. A few of them clung to bulwarks with their wrinkled hands, staring at the approaching unknown and jibbering at one another in their short colorful phrases. The fear had red as well to the second vessel, where Shevan had left Zedward the Saivainte and Starhowl in command. Both boats moved inexorably forward. When she was sure the vessels would sail on without the help of the sailor Conducs, Shevan hurried forward again. She no sooner got to the bow decks than the luckless lookout was finally galvanized out of his rigid terror. With a shriek he launched himself from the cockpit into the water. One of the more alert Helangles tried unsuccessfully to grab him as his head bobbed past in the boat's wash. The terrified sailor swam astern. Although he was heading for certain death in that huge expanse of water he did not cry out again or try to rejoin the boats. Transfixed by his honor of the Place of Rocks ahead, his only thought was to put as much distance as he could between it and himself. Other Anselm Conducs tried to follow his example. None got away from Shevan's boat, but before the Caxitines and Helangles on the second vessel could secure them several sailors tried to leap overboard. Those who succeeded followed their comrade, swimming strongly as though the shores of the Bay of Anselm were still in sight, to a common end. Those left aboard wailed and groaned in misery. Edvart and Stanlyn, Shasem's sons, rushed along the deck. Although they were both full-grown men they flung themselves on their father, howling like distraught infants. The reason for the Anselmites' new frenzy was soon apparent to Delbet. He raced along the deck and joined Shevan in the prow just behind the lookout's empty cockpit. The Vamin Darma got closer. It was spreading over the entire western horizon. The breaking water and light-drenched spray no longer hid the shoulders and crags of innumerable small islands, fissured and pitted by long erosion. From the turbulence of the water it was clear that from every island visible extended dangerous reefs perilously close to the surface. But it was not the menace of this alone that made the West Water sailors howl. A terrifying shape threaded through the spray and ,the leaning crags, looking for all the world as though it had been alerted by the vessels' approach. IF "The Conducs' monster! The Khedau!" shouted Delbet. T he giant felt Shevan's hand grope for his in alarm. When she found it she gripped him convulsively and her touch was ice. The approaching form, cylindrical but tapered slightly toward its apex, was taller than the tallest crags. It was still nearly two kilometers distant when, just below its top, a great saucer-shaped eye of light opened. It seemed to wink at them, then swiveled away. A moment later a second lens was brought to bear on the boats and held them in a longer blinding glare before it closed again. The boats were still heading directly for the looming figure when the first turbulence in the water hit them. They began to pitch and roll. The Khedau wove through the hazards of the Vamin Darma with practiced skill. It swung unerringly past rocks and crags, sometimes swaying in some furious disturbance but always righting itself. Its eyes glared from one boat to the other. Free of the main skirt of rocks and moving northward along their face, from somewhere inside the Khedau came a long, hostile roar. The howls of fear were no longer confined to the Anselmites. Caxitines and Helangles joined them. Holding convulsively to Delbet on one side and the Bulwark on the other Shevan shouted over her shoulder, "Starboard ninety! We'll run head-on into it if we go any further." Whether or not he heard all she said through the din the Caxitine steersman recognized the danger and flung himself against the crude tiller. The rudder turned and so, more slowly, did the boat, yawing and groaning. There was a collective shout from behind them. A wave had broken over Zedward's boat. It staggered about uncertainly. In terror of the roaring monster on their port beam and of the water pouring around their feet, the crew fought one another to bail or to find a place of safety. "at is it? What is it, Shev?" She stared at him briefly. Then her eyes flickered back to the swaying, glaring beast and its fearful home. "No wonder they were scared." "We'll never get past it. It's ten times faster than we are. Hell. We ought to turn back." "No," she said. "Look -- watch it carefully -- " The two young cousins clung to each other and to the boat's side as it lurched through the heaving sea. Through the mist of spray they stared at the tall guardian of the Vamin Darma. It was still moving parallel with them to northward, skirting the seaward fringe of the rocks, gliding between crags and outcroppings, undulating through the surf, glaring and roaring. "You know, Del-it isn't-it isn't-" A long shout from the second boat interrupted her. Zedward the old Saivainte stood in the prow waving his arms, hailing, gaunt. "What is it? What's he saying, Shev?" "What I was just going to say, I think. Zedward's a bookman too. I think he's seen it. Just as I've seen it." With both arms she signaled Zedward to bring his boat closer. Delbet caught a word or two as the gale tore up the old man's shouts and scattered them downwind. The giant turned back to stare at the towering Khedau that opened an eye then closed it again in a gigantic wink. The Khedau and the boats continued on parallel courses across the north face of the Vamin Darma. The monster gave no threat of attack. Its cries seemed somehow admonitory rather than threatening. Suddenly Shevan was laughing, helplessly laung. It had the mad, solemn illogic of a nightmare: the tossing boats, the stalking monster, the clashing water and grinding teeth of the Vamin Darma. Zedward's boat drew alongside. Its volunteer helmsmen were a couple of Helangles. They coaxed and shoved and cursed the engine but werecareful that Shevan's boat remained between them and the Khedau. Zedward held the rail. He was shouting against the noise of the water and the boats and the monster in the surf. Shevan put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes ran with tears of relief. She moved toward the rail to be nearer to Zedward. "The Khedau!" he shouted. 'Khedau! There is a word like it in some of the old hill dialects of the remote Conducs." "I know what it is, Zedward," the girl shouted , through another bout of laughter. "Don't you?" "The word had the dual meaning 'guide' as well as 'guardian.' " "Not the word. I don't need the bloody etymology lesson. Do you know what the Khedau is?" Delbet glanced confusedly from one to the other and then at the prowling, glaring monster a few hundred meters away. It changed course and moved westward again. It opened a wide eye of light and glared back thoughtfully at the boats -- beckoning? inviting? Zedward cupped one hand to his mouth. "Not a monster -- made -- your people -- Superom -- set down at seain the dangerous sea places -- " Shevan's head nodded vigorously. "That's it. It's mechanical. That's exactly it. One of those beautiful, everlasting things my people made. And it has gpne on working because it doesn't know how to stop." The giant shook his head in disbelief but Shevan continued. "Every time a boat comes near it sweeps out to warn it of danger and guide it to the clear channels through the rocks. When the Superom left the Conducs lost their history, and in IF their minds the Khedau degenerated into an ore ready to devour them. A monster in a monstrous place. Something to be feared. But it's just another of your beloved bloody machines, Del! It's a guideship! We have only to follow it and it will take us across the Vamin Darma." Y 'ES, she was right. Shevan was right. As she was almost always right. Within two hours the remnant of the expedition crossed the Place of Rocks with its frightful crags, drifting spray and clutching currents. The slender Khedau was left to resume the patrol that hardly a boat had disturbed for six centuries. By moonfall of the next morning the glaring, shouting mobile watchtower dropped below the steep curve of the Thetan horizon and out of sight. By moonset the boats rolled through the gentle surf of a beach. The expedition had finally crossed the West Water. From Shevan to the most frightened Anselmite deckhand, everyone was utterly exhausted. As soon as the boats were beached, however, all helped carry the casket ashore. Then they found a place in the dunes beyond the beach and slept. When morning arrived, Delbet, on top of a dune, stared out to sea. The shrinking sun was already high in the y. IT emed to shrivel visibly each day. Del believed it, too -- he had become convinced of the truth behind Shevan's mission. Northward, the two Anselmite vessels were small on the surface of the West Water. In spife of Shevan's demonstration that the Khedau was a friend rather than an enemy the sailors' primitivism had quickly reasserted itself. No sooner had they put out to sea than Shasem gave the order for them to bear north. The six hundred years of night were still more potent than an afternoon of a girl's determination. The Vamin Darma remained a forbidden area. The Khedau was a monster they dare not provoke. This surly reversion to superstition was like the closing of a door. What was left of the expedition was finally cut off from those areas which had maintained some link with the Thetan past through the enclave at Spadrox. The remaining travelers found themselves in totally strange country-country that had never had any existence for them other than on maps or in memory. The lip of this side of the West Water was the lower end of the curve of a vast geographical bowl, once the crater of a colossal volcano. Remote in the distance, a chain of mountains marked the rim of the plateau. The tundra stretching out shadowless on all sides was gray: the gray of infertile volcanic shale that gave the Graystones its name. Here and there rifts and cairns of rock relieved the flat landscape, but apart from some sweeps of moss as gray as the stone to which it clung there was no sign of plant or animal life in the whole immense saucer. The cart that had carried Karel's casket from Spadrox had been left behind at Port West. The light fishing vessels of the Water Conducs had not been able to cope with it. The expedition now had to rely on a much cruder vehicle hastily knocked together by the Caxitine Conducs and towed by two Helangle steedes. The column was wholly dependent upon the dwarf scouts for mobility. None of the Conduc autos had been able to cross the West Water. The only choice left was to take turns walking when there was no room on the improvised vehicle. The expedition moved out of the small fertile area bordering the mud and sand flats of the inland sea and set out across the desert toward the ragged range of mountains to the west. The sun stood directly overhead. Even at noon it seemed drained of all fire in these last days of Harvest. Shevan urged the expedition forward, allowing very little time for rest or food. She chilled them with threats of what could happen if the longnight came early, bringing the cold and winds down across the tundra from the north. The coming of evening found them still on the plain, many kilometers from the seashore. When the sun set and allowed the ancient ghost sun of Thetis to tremble in the sky. She van's apprehensions found a cool endorsement. The temperature dropped rapidly. The expedition made camp. The Helangles were sent to gather up what fuel they could find for fires. Later, in that camp deep on the Graystones, Superom, Conducs, Saivainte and Helangles lay on a common ground warmed by common fires and ringed by the steedes arranged with the cart into a protective outer wall. Not since before the departure of the Superom -- perhaps never -- had representatives of so many of the Thetan races made a common camp. Karel's casket lay at its center. As the firelight died the casket's faint emerald glow intensified. It threw a little of its frosty, sea-floor light across the forms of thei sleepers. Not only did the Helangles provide the only means of transport, they had the only means of shelter. More accustomed to nomadic life, they lay by their steedes, grunting and twitching and snoring in the open while their less hardy companions made what comfort they could of the Helangle tents. Few people other than the dwarfs slept well. T oward dawn Delbet woke. For the tenth or twelfth time that night the freezing breath of the plateau had numbed him out of sleep. TTie fires were out, mounds of gray ash, Here and there curled a wisp of smoke. It was still a long way IF from light; the old ghost sun was slipping below the horizon and the Superom sun had not yet risen. Delbet lay watching his breath condensing against the sag of the hairy tent, barely large enough to contain his giant frame. The cold had stolen into his legs and shoulders. He would have liked to return to sleep but could not. Something moved against the cone of light at the tent flap. The giant flexed, immediately wide awake, but before he could sit up or reach for his slingbow he recognized the faint girl-scent of his cousin. "Shev?" he whispered uncertainly. She crawled in beside him. "I'm frozen. I've been -- I've been awake. This bloody place scares-" "Aw hell, baby. Why didn't you come wake me before?" The slightest chink in her armor, the smallest hint that she could slip back to the unquestioning trust in him and dependence on his strength she had felt as a child, never failed to melt his heart. Her body was taut as a drawn slingboy. Her teeth chattered. He put out his arms and cuddled her to him. He stroked her hair. She began to relax but she kept shaking. Her hair reminded him of the beautiful waterfall-colored coats of the talue. Her neck and shoulders felt damp beneath his gentle hand. Shevan kept her ice-cold fists clenched in front of her. The giant felt them pressed like arctic rock against his belly. "I feel like I've been awake for hours," she whispered. "I was scared the cold might do something to the survival systems of the casket. I got up to have a look at it. Del -- something happened. Something out there on the Gray stones." "Huh? What do you mean?" Del twisted his head trying to look down at her but her face was too close up against his chest. "What happened?" A convulsive shiver racked her from head to toe. "The old sun was just dipping down to the horizon as I came away from the casket. I thought I heard something. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I just felt -- intuited it. Some trailing end of a dream or one of the scouts moving. They talk a lot. They dream a lot. This cold"Anyhow, I was by the cart. I looked out underneath it, between the wheels. For a moment there was nothing. Then, suddenly, there was something" Across the old sun. Kind of thrown into relief, silhouetted. Something." "Uh-huh. What sort of something?" The giant kept stroking her hair. "What sort of thing, Shewy? Man? Animal? What?" "I don't know. I -- it was so quick. A shadow, falling across the bar of light." "Dreamed it," he said, "You dreamed it." "No. No, I didn't dream it." She moved and he realized that the whole flyfront of her suit was gaping open. "HeU!" he said. "You dumb little cub, you! No wonder you're cold. You got damn near nothing on." Her little fists divided and she slid her arms around him. She lay trembling. "Del-oh, my dear-" The giant moved uneasily. She changed so fast. He never knew what to expect. She'd be strong and passionate, determined, for days, even weeks on end, bullying anyone who opposed her, scaring the brutish Helanges, lashing the Conducs with her tongue, matching intellects with the Saivainte. Then suddenly she'd need to come to him, need to be held and petted and comforted like a child. "Listen," he said, "it's nearly sunup. Let's get out of this torn old Helangle blanket and get something to eat. I'll make a sweep around camp. See what I can find." "Wait," she said. "Wait, Del." The giant felt a strange tenseness in her body. She was waiting for something, too -- like the moment before diving off a rock for the pool below; the instant before triggering the slingbow, before the bolt hisses through the air. He felt her thighs tremble. Every part of her was poised to strike or suffer or submit. His movement onto one elbow was a reflex.He fled from this mood that had transported his cousin. He rolled out of his blanket quickly. He tucked it around her. Her pale face stared up at him from the cocoon. It had a remote, ecstatic look. "Stay here. Keep warm. I'll go take a look." "What do you feel for me, Del? What is it that you feel for me?" The edge to her words and her great, dark eyes, so like those of the other cousin left behind in Spadrox, restrained him. They held him better than her imprisoned hands, forced him to bend over her in the gray light. "You," he said, "you're dreaming. You're still dreaming. What do you mean, Shev?" "No I'm not," she said. "No. You answer me, Del. What do you feel?" H e knelt staring with scared earnestness into her face. Again he did not understand. He shook his head. Demands that he put into words what it was easier to sense and to let be embarrassed him. "Well," he said, "I just want you to be happy. I want both of us safe and happy. Like it used to be at Spadrox when you were little and I wasn't much more than as high as an ordinary man. Just -- for you and me to go on living in sight of each other like that-" The clumsy words stopped. She looked at him with a sustained look that searched deeply. Her eyes closed. Her lips parted. She touched her top lip with her tongue. "Go! Go on out, you big child! Go catch yourself a bloody talue -- " Confusion, fury, tenderness overlaid by an unrelenting will to be: His cousin seemed to wage a constant war against something e could not control, something forever holding her back from that edge of being. IF These spiky thoughts harrowed the giant. He felt he had been punished without reason. He did not understand. He slunk away. The darkness accepted him. He moved through the camp with expert stealth. No one woke. One or two of the Helangles stirred and muttered. Odd words fumbled through a net of dreams, turning and writhing in throats. Del crossed the perimeter of the camp. The land was dark. The sky was flat, a pale, uniform fish-belly silver. He was unarmed but did not feel afraid. This was dead land with nothing but the fallen images of rocks. There were few places where anything could hide. He spiraled away from the camp in concentric sweeps. He acquired a new sense in these circumstances and intuitively searched for tracks where shadows denied his eyes purchase, where neither moss nor volcanic rock held any scent. He found nothing. A hundred meters from camp, crouching so his giant frame would not be silhouetted against the sky, he thought about what Shevan had seen or thought she had seen. He found himself instinctively examining each potential lair within striking, distance of the camp. There was nowhere anything could hide. His eyes followed the profile of a monolith toward the skyline and back down. He looked again, moved on, came back to it. The machine in his brain would not let him leave the massive form. He frowned with the effort of fusing his conscious and unconscious thoughts. He stayed crouching in the silence and the slowly developing light. He went over the rock contour again and again. Then he remembered what Shevan had said. And he got it. Something silhouetted against the ancient sun which was now the moon of Thetis' night. Something silhouetted against the old sun. But what Delbet saw was a great band of cloud across the horizon. The old sun would not have been visible as it set. And the mountains themselves would have prevented anything appearing in silhouette -- anything which was not mammoth or walking the mountain tops. The giant listened to the dawn rising on the lifeless plain. The hair on his neck prickled. He remembered the day when the twisted dwarf Arcweld had seemed to grow out of' the ground in the hillside forest above Westward City Three, just before the first of the expedition's many troubles had begun. He had already started back toward camp when the first cries of dismay unwound him to his full height and brought him running. Smoketrail was missing. The remaining Helangles were scuttling around shouting at one another and calling for their lost comrade. There were few places in the camp where he might be. It was soon clear that he was gone, vanished off the face of the night plain as though into its very air. Someone identified his steede stacked among the others in the camp's stockade. Kickstart remembered that Smoketxail had slept to his left in the outer circle of Helangles, right at the camp's edge farthest from the watchfires. Starhowl organized a search party. They roared off to circle the area and investigate any crevice or outcrop that gave the merest hint of shelter. Four Caxitines also left the camp on foot at sunup to search the immediate neighborhood. Shevan watched their frantic efforts with dark dispassion. When Del came back to camp she was already out of the Helangle tent talking to Zedward. She looked pale and remote, as though she had endured some major physical crisis. Her eyes were huge and hollow in her pale face, Delbet pretended to busy himself with a minute inspection of the outer perimeter where the missing Helangle scout had slept but the giant was within earshot of the girl and the old man. " -- What was it like?" Del heard him ask, "A shadow," she said. "The relic sun was setting. I looked out between the wheels of the cart. Something crossed the bar of light. As if leaping down to the earth. Arms like this -- but not really arms -- "-Del watched her shyly. She raised her arms so they formed an acute angle with her shoulders. She had momentarily acquired the wings of a bird. "Then it was gone." The image troubled the giant, but he could not think why. T wenty minutes later the Caxitine Conducs found Smoketrail. He was dead. Moving in a circle they .had worked their way behind the camp, covering the trail the expedition had followed just before stopping the previous night. A little to northward a fault line in the rock substrata, split by old earthquakes, formed several connected hollows full of tumbled stone. At the lowest point of the biggest hollow, water had collected from the Harvest dews -- one of the reasons the expedition had made camp nearby. One of the more alert Conducs noticed that the water was a strange, dark color. It was fouled by blood. A red trail led to a vertical crevice in the adjacent ravine. There, hardly concealed at all, was the cold body of the Helangle scout. He had died instantly from a clean thrust in the neck. The weapon had vanished with his killer. It was a primitive crime and the Helangles reacted primitively. They first accused the Conducs, but when the Conducs violently protested that they carried nothing that could have inflicted such a wound the dwarf scouts turned upon each other. Those who were from Smoketrail's IF own pack accused the others. The # City South and other packs made an uneasy alliance, claiming that Smoketrail's companions from the West Helangles had done away with him because he had been ambitious. There was no explanation for the murdered man's leaving the camp alone at night. No one could guess why he should have walked the two hundred meters to the ravine. The pool seemed the obvious .explanation, but plenty of water had been carried into the camp to last the night. Although the quarrel among the Thetans continued till the sun had risen high Shevan did not intervene. Time was being lost but she seemed to need to stay by the casket and talk earnestly to Zed ward. She refused to go to the ravine. In the end the giant and Zedward had to ride down with a party of Helangles and find a place to bury Smoketrail's remains.  Everyone was frightened and depressed by the conjunction of violent death with the apparition Shevan had seen in the night. When they finally set out in moody silence, even the sky seemed to conspire against them. The sun appeared only occasionally from behind great ramparts of cloud sweeping down from the north. Huge menacing shadows stalked everywhere across the Graystones as the cloud squadrons galloped overhead. When the expedition camped that night the Helangles, dusty, weary and sullen, found fuel to build watchfires. Fear sank their ill humor and encouraged them to make a pact with the Conducs and among themselves that allowed agreement on mounting a guard. Delbet said he would take his turn but had no intention of sleeping at all that night. Hour after hour, whether on guard or dozing with his feet to the fire, his hunter's senses were turned to his cousin's tent. She was a strange child. Since last night she had grown still more impenetrable, remote, hardly acknowledging his existence. All day she had said nothing to anyone but Zedward. Delbet had seen the old Saivainte regarding her with gravity and pity. The night passed. Nothing happened. The relic sun began to wane. It looked down now and then, an old invalid peering from between scudding clouds. In the morning the expedition was intact. Slowly they moved on, all that day and the next. The Graystones did not trouble them with any further horrors. The continually threatening cold did not descend. The shadowy mountains neared. "Beyond them and on the tableland is the Galactic City of the Super om," said Zedward. "Mandanar the impenetrable and secret, where Great Karel can be awakened by the marvels of his people." It was Zedward's turn with Delbet to ride the cart. The giant stared up at the sierra ahead and nodded, replying as the cart bumped over the plain. "And what if it's dead like the other stone jungles? What if Shevan misinterpreted a sentence -- just a single phrase -- on the talktapes and followed the paths through the words the wrong way?" "In that case one thing at least is clear. We would not be able to return to Spadrox. Not without great hardship. Those of us who are young now would be old and those of us who are already old would die on the way." Delbet thought bleakly about the kind of homecoming they might expect at the enclave. But by the time they returned, Keren himself might be dead and the Thetans might have forgotten the existence and purpose of the expedition. The Regent's face fastened itself on the giant's mind and would not let go. These thoughts were like a premonition oozing up through cracks in Delbet's consciousness. He tried to put them out of his head, but even while Zedward was talking, bumping alongside him in the cart, the images took hold, shutting out the old man's words. A few hours later the second calamity of the Gray stones struck. T he giant was constantly aware of the powers at work on Thetis: the force of wind and rain; the trembling cold of the longnight; the senescence of the preterite sun; the warmth of the star his own people had set alight in the sky. Because of his essential simplicity he was always conscious of the struggle between these and the men who clung to existence on the planet. So the events of that afternoon and evening, as the sun disappeared behind great banks of cloud and a threatening wind rose, could not be disentangled from the forewarning of the evil foce that had haunted him as he rode on the cart. Not long after the midday break one of the Helangle scouts sighted an old Superom road. It crossed the Graystones from north to south, near the first slopes of the foothills of the mountain range. Spirits soared. Following Shevan's directions the expedition hurried south, searching for a road junction to take them through a mountain pass and onto the plateau which Zedward said lay beyond. They found the road after traveling for two hours, then moved westward, but stopped in the late afternoon at a point where the road crossed the foothills before joining the pass into the range. A problem was upon them. Soon they would need cruze to replenish the fuel cells on the Helangle steedes. Shevan, Delbet, Starhowl, one of the Conducs and Zedward sat together under the scowl of cloudbanks and the shadow of mountains and talked for almost an hour. Starhowl was prepared to go on. Shevan had not yet completely escaped the trauma of three nights ago, and she sensed in the others the IF apprehension of running out of fuel in the mountains. They agreed that although several hours of light remained they would camp there that night. "Now we're off that place," said Del, with a jerk of his head to indicate the Graystones, "we might be able to dig some cruze out of this rock." The Conduc looked doubtful. The Caxitines were expert miners. "We wouldn't have the equipment to get at the purest ore. We might get some out of the surface but then it would be too crude. We'd need refining equipment." "One way or another we have to get cruze." Shevan pressed her cheek wearily with her left hand. "We can't walk over the mountains in the longnight." ' "Maybe we could make it," said Starhowl. "Like coasting downhill and using the motors for up -- huh?" Shevan said, "We can't risk it On the plateau we'll probably find Conducs who will have supplies. But we can't trust ourselves to go into the mountains without having some reserve." "Shev, I guess I ought to take a party. We'll move up toward the mountains. That's cruze ground if I ever saw any. The Conduc says we can't mine the rich ore. He's right, but we can manage on crude if there's enough of it. If I can get up high enough on one of the mountains and strike a seam that's been cut out by the weather-" "We need you back before nightfall. We can't split the group here, right next to the Graystones and at night." Zed ward cleared his throat. "I was wondering," he said, "if you could find a cave. These mountains and the desert were very thinly inhabited. Probably the outcrop cruze hasn't been touched-" Delbet clapped his thigh with de light. He would have thumped the old man's shoulder had he not feared Zedward might collapse into a sigh and a handful of dust. "Zedward's right! If we can find a cave -- there might be an exposed seam." Shevan nodded. "Very well, but remember you've got to be back before dark. Del-" She looked at lier cousin with another of her enigmatic looks, so troubled and troubling. But now he was too captured by Zedward's idea to pay much attention to Shevan's moods. Within ten minutes a party had been selected and was on the move: the giant, two Helangles and two Conducs. The Helangles rigged a litter between their steedes for the others to ride. With two hours left until sunset they roared off along the junction highway, climbing steadily for the hills. Delbet made them break across country after about half an hour. One of the Conducs had drawn the giant's attention to a red-streaked fold in one of the hillsides. Though the fold might not indicate the presence of ore-bearing rock the face itself was split and had formed from the second generation intrusion rock of Thetis. This rock frequently carried ore and was soft enough in certain strata to erode into cave formations when exposed to weather or subterranean water. They had to cover the last three hundred meters on foot as the ground became progressively more rock-strewn. At last they stood in a saucershaped clearing looking up at the folded rock. One of the Conducs walked over and scraped away at one of the red streaks with a probe from his prospecting kit. Del moved in behind him, watching the dust fall. As the probe bit further, the spurting dust in the tube began to glow feebly. "This is it, Delbet Sir. First strike." "First strike!" The smiling giant looked ready to jump up and down with pleasure. "It's weak," said the second man. "Debilitated. Probably wouldn't even kick a cell. Been too near the surface for too long." "Yes. Okay. But it is cruze ore. There should be a richer source nearby." L eaving the Helangles on watch, the Conducs and the giant set out to search for a cave that would reach into the rock far enough to touch a worthwhile seam of cruze. There were a numben of fissures which began promisingly, but they quickly petered out. The Conducs had begun to climb the face when Delbet found a cave. He had started moving around the hill to see whether the prospects looked more promising on the other side when he heard a familiar sound. The sound itself was a good omen. A huge grin of pleasure split the giant's face. The sound was repeated: the warning whoop of a talue. A second later a flash like a question mark written in water curved against the rock and then dissolved. The giant froze, but the talue had seen him. He sprinted, almost as soft and elegant as the creature itself, and saw the eye-shaped gash in the ground into which the talue had disappeared. To the left of it was another, much larger hole. Rock that attracted talue would carry fire-ore and its mineral relation, cruze ore. Although the two elements acted volcanically if brought into contact they existed side by side, dormant, in similar strata. "Here!" Delbet shouted. When the others reached him they found him crouched, peering into the gloom of a tunnel which shelved steeply toward the base of the hill. If there were rich deposits of cruze-bearing ore anywhere below the hill the sloping cave would lead the party nearer to them. IF The Conducs lit their prospector's lamps and lowered them into the cave. The light caught the faint glint of water. The soft strata of the intrusion rock had been worn away by some subterranean spring; the hard strata had been left to form a good shelving chamber. To judge from the light the cave was large enough for a man to occupy with little more discomfort than a stoop. Delbet looked at his two prospecting companions. They both nodded. The giant called to the two Helangle scouts. "One of you watch the mountains. The other watch the highway. If we aren't out of the cave by the time the light starts to go from the desert, come down and warn us." The dwarfs touched their crashhats in acknowledgment. One of them left his bike and started to climb the ridge above to get a view of the mountains. #nn WO OF US wni go in as far as X we can. We'll fasten a line out here." Delbet started to tie a rope to a boulder near the cave mouth. "The other must stay clear, someplace where the tunnel entrance is still visible. Be ready to give help or call the Helangles if the front men get in difficulty. Okay?" "Okay, Delbet Sir." "Right. I'll go." The giant started to lower his bulk into the cave. Three minutes later they were all underground. Delbet paid out the rope as they moved through the cave by the light of the prospecting lamps. After forty meters the cave forked. Both forks were too narrow to permit Delbet to go far so he returned to the junction where he could see the entrance as a gash of light in the darkness. His two companions crawled into the fork which they judged to lead under the hill. They and their lights were soon cut off from Delbet by further twists and turns, although he could hear them for a long time talking to each other and rattling loose stones as they pressed forward. Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. The entrance seemed much farther away than forty meters. The two black mouths of the forked ways were dark, silent. It was cold and solitary underground. The water of the lost stream whispered occasionally. Now and then a random drop of water fell from somewhere overhead. The giant jumped when the first drill started up. It was twenty-five minutes since the Conducs had entered the tunnels, yet their drills sounded so loud they might have been only a dozen meters away, just around the corner in the darkness. The two drills whined together for a while. Then they stopped. Then one went on alone on a different note. Delbet, who had spent much time devising machinery for the cruze mine at Spadrox, recognized the change in pitch as the solo drill struck into the old hard rock of the Thetan substrata. The Conducs were ambitious. They were going for a rich seam, probably trapped in a layer of intrusion rock between two layers of hard rock. The sound of the prospecting lasted twenty minutes. It was followed by a long silence. The giant strained his ears to catch the sound of the two miners returning. He crawled a little way down the secondary tunnel and listened. There was no sound. He went back to the junction and tested the cord. It was tight. Where it vanished upward the eye of light at the cave entrance was still bright. Delbet tried to imagine what was happening under the hill. Maybe his companions had struck an isolated pocket of ore and exhausted it before they had sufficient amounts. Maybe the rock looked promising but had concealed only a bumed-out deposit. stopped shortly. In the new silence the giant waited anxiously. The underground cold had begun to strike at his bones. He had been in the cave more than an hour. He looked back and up at the mouth. There was not much time left before the Helangle guards would come to warn him of sunset. Delbet yawned and flapped his arms in an effort to keep warm. He listened then knelt and peered down the right fork of the tunnel. The Conducs were returning. He could hear them. His eyes caught dribbles of light from their lamps. At the same moment a pebble fell down the shaft behind him. He strained his neck to look back again to the entrance. The thought was still in his mind that one of the Helangles would appear there soon to warn them it was time to start for the camp. As he looked up something twisted across the light, brushed past him and fell to the floor of the cave. The giant jumped away reflexively and in the same instaiit realized that what had fallen was the rope they had used to let themselves down the incline to the cave floor. He. was baffled, then angry. The rope could not have slipped accidentally from its anchpr. He stared belligerently up the slope to the entrance. Maybe one of the Helangles had tripped on the cord and tom it free. There was no one visible up there. Delbet crouched on his haunches and felt around the floor until he found the fallen rope. He sat in the gloom, fingering the end of it. There could be no doubt about which end had come from the surface. The other end was still fastened to a spur of rock at the cave junction. And the surface end had been severed -- cut through. Cut! The giant stared in disbelief at the end of cord in his hand. The sound of his companions approaching along the fork was getting IF louder. Delbet looked up yet again to the entry way. Surely the Helangles had not cut the line-what would have been their purpose? He opened his mouth to shout but realized in time that it might panic the two Conducs returning with the cruze ore. He started to scramble up the incline, trailing the rope behind. He was less than halfway up when the aperture suddenly grew heads as though s.ome fertile medium sprouting a bacterial growth. Six faces appeared simultaneously on all sides staring down the hole. They were all fiercely bearded. None of them was Helangle. D elbet was so startled he neither moved nor spoke. He did not know if they had seen him. It was possible they had not, looking from light into darkness. One of them grunted a short comment to another. The giant recognized a Conduc inflection in the speech, but it was in a dialect he had never heard. Without betraying his position by movement he called out in the universal tongue. "Hey! You there! What the hell did you do to my rope?" The effect was dramatic. There was a split second's pause, then all the heads withdrew as magically as they had appeared. Delbet felt a chill. He rushed up the incline. Rocks showered down as he scrambled for the exit. His hands were tom, his legs grazed. Below him in the pool of darkness at the junction he heard some worried bleats from the Conduc miners who were nearing the end of their tunnel but he could not stop to reassure them. He was still too far away when like a tired old eye the entrance began to close. He saw what was happening and with an immense effort flung himself forward and upward to jam a small rock into the closing gap. He hoped it would give him a second longer to escape the trap. The rock held momentarily but the force steadily shoving the boulder over the exit was too great. Delbefs rock wedge sprang away, missing him by a whisper, and bounced down the incline, taking a minor avalanche with it. Only a few minutes before the trace rope had been secured to a boulder. Now the rope lay at the bottom of the first shaft and the boulder firmly blocked the cave's entrance. Delbet and the Conducs were trapped. The giant clung to the rock and shouted through one of the remaining open cracks. "Listen-you out there. I am Superom. I am Delbet Sir from Spadrox. Superom! I order you to move this rock and free me. Superom here, I tell you! Do you know what the punishment is for disobedience to the Superom?" He listened, panting. The outerworld was quiet. Grunting with the effort he fought to move the rock plug but everything worked against him. The cave mouth was almost horizontal; the full weight of the boulder rested against it. And the only footholds were no good. Delbet could not get the full power of his shoulders under the rock. "You!" he shouted again. "Hey -- you. Answer me! I am Superom. Answer me!" There was still no response. Then after several seconds a voice broke the silence. Its owner was obviously standing prudently far from the cave, probably concealed behind rocks in the clearing. He spoke in the universal tongue, but haltingly and badly. "Superom don't coming out of the ground. Superom coming from the sky. You are not. We are going for get real Superom who returned to us from sky. You stay!" "Come back!" shouted Delbet. "Come back! There are no Superom left in Thetis but those in Spadrox -- " Then he realized the significance of what the mysterious spokesman had said. The giant stopped abruptly, his mouth already open to shout again. He swallowed, leaning against the rock and the cave wall. It might just have been a translating slip. The man had spoken the universal tongue very crudely. Like the fusing of two channels, the giant's brain related two things: what his captors had just said and what Shevan had seen three nights past. "What is it? Delbet Sir-what's happened? Is it night? Why didn't the Helangles call us?" Forty meters down the cave, Delbet made out the shapes of the two Conduc miners. Now that the entrance was closed the darkness was thicker, more oppressive, but he could see them. "We're trapped, my friends," he said. "Strange people have sealed us in. I don't know who they are. I don't know what has happened to the Helangles. I don't know what's going to happen to us. But they'll be back and I fear who may be with them." T he first Conduc said, "It's dark. I'm getting cold." "I'm afraid," said the second one. "What's going to happen?" "What lies beyond the ore face?" The giant peered restlessly into the yawn of the first fork He had no comfort or answers for his scared companions. "The passage goes on, but it gets wet and even narrower. I wouldn't like to try it without a proper team Behind me. And you couldn't even make it to the face, Delbet Sir." "Don't worry about me. If there is a chance to save yourself, take it. And if you can get to the surface you might be able to reach camp and raise the alarm before the new ones get back." "No. We stay with you." The Conducs spoke the same words in a single voice. Twenty minutes had passed since the cave had been sealed. Delbet had no means of knowing how far the IF raiders might have to go before they could return in force with the menace their words had promised. It might take an hour or two. Or, if they had to go as far as the plateau, it might take a day or more. It was dark outside. At the foot of the incline darkness was almost total. Cold had begun to probe their bones. They were already overdue at camp. She van would be watching the fading ribbon of highway and cursing him again. Their only hope was that one of the two Helangles might have escaped and warned the expedition of what had happened. The two Conduc prospectors attempted to dislodge a section of the was solid pre-intrusion stone. They abandoned the attempt when it was clear that even if their drills held out it would take too long to cut away a section large enough to permit escape. The smaller of them went down the left fork to see what chance of escape it offered, but the passage Tunneled down to less than a meter diameter and was half-full of icy water. They all sat together now, backs against the cave wall, staring up into the shaft. If they could not find a way around the plug they would be trapped until their captors returned. "Go." said Delbet. "Both of you. It's your only real chance. Even if they come back for me they won't be likely to follow you into the fork. And you may find a way through-" "No." They spoke as one. Both the Conduc miners were thoroughly frightened. Stubbornness increased with their fear. All three men were listening for any sound that would indicate their captors were returning. "What's that?" hissed the small man. "Sss!" Delbet warned. They froze into immobility. From the extremity of the incline came a faint but unmistakable scuffling. The giant reached through the darkness and roughly gripped an arm of each of his companions. Both were shaking as if fever-ridden. He silence. "Hell's fire!" The word came out on his own breath, but so faintly it could have been part of the darkness. The scuffling sound approached them from the surface down the tunnel in short rushes. Suddenly Delbet's lips parted on a short breathy whistle. Both Conducs were incredulous. To them it sounded as though the giant had magically produced a talue from the air above their heads. There was an immediate answering whistle from midway along the incline. The scuffle had stopped. Delbet whistled again and the talue that had come into the cave flashed forward, dislodging a flurry of earth. The giant called again, encouragingly. The little beast made another dartiiig rush but then gave a quick whoop of warning and fled. "Hell! Scented us!" Delbet relaxed. Far above, the talue's claws scrabbled on the rock as it slithered from the cave. "But that's it-there's a chance -- " "How?" "What do you mean, Delbet Sir?" "Conjunction," said the giant. "Cruze. Fireore. The talue collect fire-ore pellets. If we can catch one with a fire-ore pebble-" "Explosion!" "Blow the plug!" "That's it." "But the cruze-it's not refined." "It won't matter. We won't need a big explosion. I think the cruze in the ore you've collected is rich enough. You found a good seam." "How are you going to catch the talue?" The giant's mind was already racing. "I wish I had a slingbow and bolts! But it will have to be net and noose-" "Net?" "The line. Start unraveling it. There'll be enough strands in it for net and noose both," They switched on, the prospecting lamps. They had been conserving them for an emergency, but this was the emergency. F ifteen minutes later they were in darkness again at the head of the incline. Through the largest remaining crevice between boulder and cave' wall they could just glimpse the sky and the dark hump of iadow that was the spur of a hiU. The Conducs positioned themselves so that the rough net they had made was spread to wrap any talue Delbet could snare. The giant moistened his lips. His heart was pounding. He warbled the talue call into the night. They missed the first two but soon developed their technique and coordination well enough to catch one. Four talue later the trapped Thetans found the first piece of pouched fire-ore. Delbet insisted they continue. Time was passing, but a single piece of ore mit be inadequate. Nevertheless, after they acquired three more pieces he was forced to give up. The local talue colony was at last becoming suspicious. The intervals between animals responding to the lure were getting longer. The prisoners retreated to the foot of the incline. Working by the light of the lamps, they used three out of the four cylinders of ore to make three crude bombs. As the two elements were brought into contact eruption would commence immediately and within a few seconds the chemical reaction would produce an explosion. Hence the fuses would have to be long. Delbet and the two Conducs shredded the cord of the line again until they had three long threads. Then the two Conducs climbed back up the incline and placed the three charges close together at the top of the crevice where there was a surface flat enough to hold the nuggets of fire-ore. They IF wedged the inverted canisters of had cut thin metal wafers from their prospecting kits to separate fuse and charge. When the threads were pulled the disks would be drawn clear. The cruze would fall into contact with the fire-ore. Delbet's thread broke as he pulled it; due to his anxiety he had jerked it too hard. But the Conducs were more expert. Orange .fire, molten and potent, dripped from two places overhead, lighting the darkness. The volcanic power from these set off the third bomb. The three men scrambled for safety. Crouched in the right fork passage out of the direct path of the blast they saw the light change quickly to red, to white. A small eruption followed by a big one sent stones and earth spraying down the tuimel. Delbet and the other two scrambled up over the warm rubble. Through acrid dust and fumes they could see that their makeshift bombs had blown a great gash in the cave wall. The imprisoning plug had partly fallen into the hole but more than enough room was left to set them free. They ran. Near the entrance to the first dip they found the remains of the Helangle steedes. They had been painstakingly smashed, the wheels tom and buckled. There was no sign of the dwarf scouts. Much of the night had passed. The sky was clouded but already slate gray light on the eastern horizon announced sunrise. "This way." Delbet led them up a ridge, due east toward the camp. "If their fires haven't gone out we should be able to see them from the top." The giant stood amid rock and shrub at the summit and stared eastward. Far away, like a great lens, the invisible West Water focused the gray pre-dawn light against the clouds. But on the humped back of the Graystones desert between the horizon and the foothills, the last of the night settled like a black bird. The giant sank to his haunches. He ran his tongue over his lips, still dusty from the explosion. The Conducs joined him. "Where? Where are they?" "Can you see them?" Delbet shook his head. "No." He pointed. "They ought to be somewhere there. To the right of the highway." They looked together. There was no glimmer of light. If the rest of tfie expedition were there the watchfires had been allowed to burn out. If they were there... But the giant knew what to expect as light crept across the plain. Full daylight revealed the desert to be as empty as it had been before the expedition had arrived. Shevan, Zedward, Starhowl and the precious casket had all vanished. T hey were without food or water. They had no transport. Behind them lay the barren Graystones; ahead, the pass across the mountains and the possibility of encounter with the hostile band that had sealed the cave. Certain that their enemies would return, Delbet and the Conducs moved to the south of the road and spent all day hiding in another cave trying to decide what to do. Two things were clear. The disappearance of their friends was due to the arrival of the hostile natives. And the three stranded men had a choice: either starve or freeze to death between the Graystones and the mountains, or risk capture and try to reach the plateau beyond the mountains. "There's no question," said Delbet. "We can't stay here, not with longnight coming. On the other side of those mountains and to the west on the plateau stands Mandanar. Even if it really was Keren who came down from the sky in the aircar -- even if he has control of the Thetans on the plain and has captured the expedition, Mandanar's where he'll head for. He'll take them there for sure." The Conducs looked at him and at one another, then lowered their eyes. The thought of Keren in power again and powerful enough to have abandoned Spadrox frightened them. They might have chosen the wrong side, "Besides," the giant continued, "if we can reach the plain we may find some of your people to give us food and transport or just plain news of whether they've seen Shewy and Karel's casket." V night, parallel to the highway, trying to use what cover they could. The road was always empty. Not once did they see a sign of the marauding tribe. Delbet imagined that, having achieved all they needed to in a single night, the natives had withdrawn to the plain beyond the mountains. Probably they had no intention of returning. The cave was to have been a convenient tomb. If the interment had been at Keren's prompting, his cousin would now think Delbet dead. That might give him the benefit of surprise if rescue were possible. As they climbed higher into the mountains the nights got colder. Freezing mist often his the sky at dawn and one evening the wind from the north had snow on its breath. They had not seen any sign of other humanity. To make haste they moved onto the highway and traveled during the day. They were thiii, bedraggled, footsore. Delbet took to wearing his Saivainte cloak all the time, partly as disguise in case they should be seen, partly as protection against the weather. They had not long begun the descent toward the plateau when late one afternoon they heard the sound of Conduc autos. They had passed a road intersection two kilometers back, the first IF road junction since the Graystones. Delbet's first instinct was to hide. He feared that the caravan might carry the unfamiliar tribe of Conduc brigands who had penned him and the miners in the cve. But the trio was sighted and overtaken before they could get far from the road. The travelers were not hostile although they spoke like the others. They were curious, too, at finding a Saivainte and Conducs from such a distant tribe on foot on the road together but were quick to offer the walkers a lift. When the language difficulty had been partially overcome the leader told Delbet that they were b(#und for the old Galactic City at Mandanar. "It is said that Superom from Spadrox have returned out of the sky and brought a magic casket with them. It contains the intelligence of one of our former masters, preserved at distant Spadrox but soon to awaken and revitalize the world. "The ancient lore of our clan contains the belief that such an intelligence was preserved at Spadrox. But it is a very ancient belief and no one has set great store by it for a long time. "I suppose that you, too, have come to the Plateau of the City for the same reason. The Saivainte are few now and were the teachers of the old Thetis. Your companions say that you come from beyond the West Water. Do you know of this magical casket, brother?" Delbet kept the hood of his Saivainte cloak shielding his face and tried to copy the deliberate speech of old Zedward. "Yes. It is the body and spirit of Great Karel, who missed the flight of his kind from Thetis. It has been preserved at Spadrox where descendents of the expedition, Superom who were not in stasis, formed their enclave."  The Conduc nodded. "The casket was brought in a machine from the sky by the last two survivors." Delbet felt his heart slamming against his ribs. He was about to ask a question when the Conduc answered it. "They say one calls himself Keren, Regent of Thetis, although we have paid no allegiance to any central authority in my lifetime or that of my father or his father." The caravan leader shrugged. "Who is the other?" asked the giant. "His woman, one supposes." The curt acceptance of the obvious bruised Delbet. His brain struggled to grasp the thing that had eluded him for so long, but it slipped away under the Conduc's next statement. "Messengers have been sent to call us to Mandanar and the old place of the Superom for the revelation of the intelligence." "Perhaps we may travel with you," said Delbet. "We became separated from our party. We were attacked by a hostile tribe in the mountains." "Ah!" The leader nodded wisely. "The Askalan Conducs. They are fierce lonely people of the hills and the desert. Tell me, brother Saivainte, did you cross the Graystones? Is it the terrible place they say it is?" While the Conduc caravan moved forward onto the plateau Delbet invented a history of the journey for the old leader. As the giant talked he tried to order his thoughts. What had happened seemed clear. Keren had somehow recovered his dominance at Spadrox. Probably lurid tales of the problems befalling the expedition had filtered back to the enclave. Besides there was no knowing how much the dwarf Arcweld had been able to tell his master before he had drowned. The Regent, by spreading frightening rumors of the hazard to Karel's casket, could easily have regained power over his Thetan captors. He must have left Spadrox in the aircar and caught up with the expedition as it crossed the Graystones. There was no doubt now in Delbet's mind that the strange apparition Shevan had seen was Keren's aircar landing in the mountains. The Askalan people, cruel and lonely as the mountains in which they lived, would have suited his purposes well. While Delbet and his party had prospected for cruze, Keren and the Askalans had ambushed the others and easily overcome them. Now Karel's casket was in Keren's hands. Worse, so was Shevan. The thing she feared, the thing she had tried to tell him when she was a prisoner in the Tower had happened to her. With all his simple wifi he tried to hold on to it, to understand, but he could not. XV H e came to the city as though it had always been waiting for him. After several days' travel, as soon as the friendly caravan made the final turn in die road, Delbet saw it. Immediately he was sure that somehow he had visited or dreamed of this place before. Perhaps this feeling was only a link with the memory of his forefathers; perhaps the vivid recreation of the talk-tapes Shevan had unwound for him was welling up from his subconscious. Perhaps Mandanar was no more than the inscrutable place at the end of a journey -- and in the end every journey is the same... Beneath stars glinting like first frost in the pre-dawn sky the old galactic communications center of the Superom was a white wheel glittering on the plateau. Complex roads and support buildings radiated like spokes from the mathematically precise circularity of the central architecture. Mandanar had not degenerated as had the old cities the rulers had built for their subject peoples. No one except the troglodyte Submets lived in those stone jungles for fear of the awesome and vanished past that lurked there. The Galactic City had IF stayed undecayed and inviolate, as enduringly simple and insoluble as a mathematical equation whose terms are infinite. As they approached, the giant saw a huge gathering of Thetans of many tribes. It reminded him of the assembly at Spadrox he and his cousin had effected so many weeks ago as part of their escape plan. But for this gathering there was no certainty of revelation. Previously his determined little cousin had engineered events. Now that she was once again in the hands of Keren her deception would surely be exposed -- unless by some miracle of intuition Shevan had sensed that truly in Mandanar lay means of reviving the dormant Karel and of finding some way to escape the despair of the planet with the dying sun. The caravan moved through the perimeter of the throng, looking for a place to halt. Delbet's first instinct was to find and rescue Shevan. After that he did not care whether they tried to defeat Karen and recover possession of Karel's casket or whether she might be persuaded to run away and forget her furious ambitions and be content to live with him in Thetis till the sun went out. Again he had a fleeting sense of some impending, hidden doom, but it would not stay. After the caravan had settled upon a campsite and had eaten a hurried meal, Delbet slipped away with his two miner Conduc friends. They decided to split up and approach the focus of the sprawling camp from different directions to see whether they could locate any of their comrades from the expedition. They had no difficulty deciding where the camp's focus lay. The old Superom aircar which Delbet had repaired for the first escape had obviously landed on a small hillock at the camp's edge. Scorch marks patched the ground where the car's vertical lift had thrust. There could be no doubt now that the shape Shevan had seen in the desert had been that of the landing aircar. Keren had used it to follow the expedition. His fierce half-breed sons accompanied him. They lounged around the landing point near some rough huts the Thetans had built for them. They bristled with weaponed arrogance. There was no sign of Keren, Shevan or the casket. Delbet did not dare go close to the camp. He stooped so that his stature would be less obvious and, as the Saivainte were tall, his disguise in some measure excused his height. But the mere presence of what appeared to be one of such a rare tribe made him conspicuous. Fortunately most of the other Thetans-Conducs, Helangles, Agorans and many allied and cousin tribes-were busy with their morning meal, too busy to notice the lonely stooping scholar Thetan stalking through the camp in the uncertain light of daybreak. Delbet circled the hillock twice at a safe distance. He was not anxious to meet any of the other Thetans from the expedition yet. There was no way of knowing what fears or doubts Keren might have put into their minds about Delbet and Shevan since the Regent had captured the expedition. 'I wouldn't mind betting you're looking for your brother, eh?" A tug at Delbet's cloak and a cheerily loud voice coming from behind him made him spring around in a panic. A round, hearty Agoran had stopped him. The little man looked surprisingly like Mutch, but then most Agorans between the ages of twentyfive and fifty looked alike. "What brother?" Delbet mumbled. His heart was still thumping with the fear of being exposed. He drew his cloak around him and let the hood fall forward over his face. "Why now-don't tell me you didn't come all this way from across the West Water without the company of your friend and brother." "Umm," muttered Delbet. "Zedward!" chortled the Agoran, "who came with Regent Keren Sir and his lady. Come on! Don't pretend you don't know just because you don't want to be seen bandying words with a vulgar Agoran!" "Not at all," said Delbet. The little man was making quite a noise. One or two curious faces had already turned to stare in their direction. "Well, I don't bear you any grudge. You're a funny lot, you are. Living up in the mountains off kiltawi's milk and cheese. Must be a damn lonely life. Tell you what -- your friend's gone into the city with Keren Sir. That's where he is. They went off in the flying machine. I was talking to one of the Helangles they brought with them. Talking! Well now -- gibbering's more like. Starhowl-I think that's his name. Anyhow he was telling me how they found this library or something controlled by a machine and full of some kind of old Superom mish-mush and they've left the Superom girl down there to-hey, don't you want to hear-" With some mumbled words of thanks and apology the giant swept swiftly away. For onething he had heard enough; for another the garrulous Agoran was attracting too much attention; for a third the formless, rootless premonition had struck at him again. Each time it came it gathered weight. It was as if he wandered along the surface of a sphere of darkness which contained a kaleidoscope of memories, forms, voices. But when he stretched out his grasping senses there was nothing for them to perceive. He felt sure that the reason for the look of permanence about the campsite was due to the secrets of Mandanar, which remained elusive even to the descendents of the Superom. Keren must have discovered a memory bank in Galactic City. It IF would be typical of him to leave Shevan there. He would require her to interpret the stored images and words for him. The possibilities of how the Regent might seek to perthe giant's flesh creep. He could think of only one thing: how to rescue Shevan. All the objectives of their flight from Spadrox and her insistence upon the journey to Mandanar sank without eddy below memory's surface. In Keren's hands Shevan 's future held only the dark ugly things she feared. The Superom inheritance on Thetis meant that to kill was an unimaginable crime, but he would need something to set against the potent neuroprobes which Keren and his sons carried at their belts. When the expedition had been captured the giant's slingbow had been captured with it. He moved" slowly along the densely packed campsite. He walked hooded, head and shoulders bent in the oft-seen manner of the Saivainte -- lost to their sunoundings as though deep in the contemplation of some line of profound thought. But his mind was alert. From beneath the hood he observed everything around him. Delbet knew that one of the Conduc tribes served the Agorans by hunting the talue and supplying the precious fire-ore to the traders for sale. Many of them used slingbows. He made a complete circuit of the camp before he found what he wanted. Unobserved, he was at last able to reach tlirough tlie open window of a Conduc auto and steal a good bow and a quiver of bolts. He concealed them under his Saivainte cloak. From the rim of the camp he looked toward Mandanar. He could see the aircar perched near its center like a huge insect. The morning meal was over. Many Thetan groups were leaving the campsite for the surrounding countryside. Presumably they would hunt food, trade, explore. Delbet left the camp, too. He circled north and approached the city parallel to an empty road. The buildings of Mandanar were more awe-inspiring than those that survived in the stone jungles. They were frequently blank-faced, almost entirely windowless, not built of stone but of a metal unknown to him. The hazard of being seen -- he was the only moving thing on the deserted boulevards between the giant spokes leading toward tlie center -- finally overcame his fear of penetrating the secret wheel. He passed three ramps. They could only have been designed to lead to entries or exits, although these ramps ended in a smooth vertical surface that held no visible clues. He was getting closer to the center. The motionless mechanical insect rested on the flat surface of a cylindrical structure. Most of its hull was transparent and he could see no one was in it. But its proximity and thus the proximity of his enemy made him uneasy. He climbed the fourth ramp. He was three-quarters of the way toward the top before the blank face of the wall relaxed. Its superb mechanisms, obedient, immune to Thetan time, opened an illuminated throat where previously nothing had shown. Delbet lengthened his stride and found himself at last within a creation made for his own kind. H e stood on a curved bay or platform that was part of an elliptical cylinder. In a wall below him were stacked a number of containers of various, shapes, stenciled with hieroglyphs the giant could not understand. The door closed exactly and silently behind him. He turned and saw that the platform stood on a central column that enabled it to move around the walls of the cylinder under the direction of its passenger. There was no doubt in the giant's mind that the well was a receiving and storage point and that the platform was used for loading. The top of the cylinder ended in a railed gallery. Delbet was a fly perched on the wall about midway between the gallery and the hold below. His heart began to pound. He realized that if the mobile loader had ceased to respond to its controls he could well be trapped. He touched the control column with trepidation. It was pictogramed for manipulation by robots and could not be misinterpreted. He eased the manual rather stiffly in the direction of the vertical arrow. There was the trailing edge of a second while nothing happened. Then the vehicle shuddered and rose, jerkily at first but with increasing certainty, toward the gallery above. The giant moved down a corridor which ran straight for hundreds of meters toward the center. Either side of him were clearly defined doors, each of which mirrored its opposite. Delbet wondered if they were the doors to living spaces. None of those he tried would open. The corridor was interrupted only by elliptical galleries identical to the one through which he had entered. As he got nearer to the center they became more heavily stacked with piles of goods. The fifth one he looked into contained something much more frightening. At first he thought it was a body. Then he realized that it was only some special kind of protective suit, complete with helmet. No body, he told himself as he fled in fright down the corridor, could stay preserved six hundred years unless it had the aids available to Karel. It was just a suit sprawled in an analog of human prostration on the loading platform. The giant approached the terminal of the corridor. More than once the IF lingering premonition of so many recent days insinuated itself into his mind, forcing him to stare back over his shoulder. But if the ghosts or phantoms of his forefathers were here they had not revealed themselves yet. He saw it as he approached the door: a sign still fresh, a warning that carried across six hundred years of night and oblivion. Control Area. Check all passes. The next second the door was open. There was no one to demand his pass. No one living... The demands the occupants of the control area made on the white-faced giant were those of his sanity. The control area was not large but must have been a nerve center of the complex. It was tightly compacted with, instrumentation and machinery on two levels and the seating pattern and control consoles were designed for manning. The horror" of the giant's revelation was that they were manned! They were manned by the collapsed and contorted special suits. With his mouth soundlessly open, Delbet stared in rooted terror around him. One of the suits had" fallen backward into a chair. Its helmet lolled sideways onto its shoulder. The hollow caves of eyes and the absurdly toothy grin of the skull inside stared accusingly at the intruder. Delbet closed his eyes and looked again. The suit carried the shoulder flash of the Superom Space Elite, the same badge the sleeping Karel wore at his chin. The giant backed slowly around the control console. He kept his eyes on the spectral commandant. One of Delbet's hands tracked along the front of the console to guide him; the other gripped the stolen slingbow. There were perhaps ten skeletons inside suits scattered about the control area. They had all been suddenly smitten at their work by the brain disease that had emptied the planet of its rulers. These ten, like him in the suit in the loading bay, had not escaped. And now a new fear thrust Delbet back against the wall, as though to put as much space as possible between him and the relics. Suppose the disease had remained potent all these years. Even now it might be advancing somewhere in his head, slowly extending its murderous tendrils throughout his brain. He. fled. The next corridor was short and the signs over the entry read: Data Storage. Level OneClassified. Level TwoRecreational. Check passes Level One. Delbet could think only of what new confirmation of disaster might lie through the next. door. He had momentarily forgotten that he was not alone in the complex and that he had come with only one purpose. Heart hammering, he stood at the doorway. It opened soundlessly for him as all the other doorways had opened. Behind him, the dr husks of suits sat at their timeless labors. Delbet found himself looking again into the dark hollows of eyes. But these were alive; these were the fatigue-ringed eyes of his cousin, Shevan. They looked at him without hope. They looked at him without recognition, even without belief. A small frown crossed her face and vanished. "You -- " she said. "You're -- you're dead. You -- are dead, Del, my dear-" F or all he knew he might be. Inside this creation of the old super race that had dominated galaxy time, planetary and sidereal time had neither meaning nor purpose. Dizzily he knew that if suddenly the white spokes began to spin about their central hub they would soon become a blur. They and everything in them would merge and become indistinct -- not subject to time but within it. When he had climbed the ramp and entered Mandanar, Thetis had ceased to be. Yes, he might be dead, or alive, or not yet born; past, present and future were indistinguishable. Within the city he felt already whirling about him, temporal states had been extinguished. He did not know -- even now he did not know... The girl half rose from the table at which she had been working. "What are you?" she whispered. "Shev-Shewy-it's me, Del." 'They buried you. They buried you! Keren did. They sealed you in the ground. Keren did!" Her real grief galvanized the giant. He moved quickly forward. "No. I escaped, Shev. It's me. I'm real." He held out his arms. When she did not move he realized she was a prisoner. A short, crude chain locked to a ring around her ankle secured her to the table. Delbet knelt. He seized the chain and pulled it angrily. Shevan gasped. She clutched his bent head. "No, Del! You're hurting!" Delbet turned the chain and ring wildly in his hands seeking some way to free her. "Hush! Listen!" She sank quickly into her chair, pulling the giant's head into her lap. Her hands warned him to be still. The silence rustled in the strange city. They remained motionless for almost a minute. Nothing happened. No one came. "I thought -- " she said in rushed whispers. "Keren -- he's gone to the revival sphere. Karel is there. The casket won't respond. Keren and Zedward go there every day... Del, my dear Del -- it is really you. How did you escape?" The giant told her in a few hurried sentences how he and the miner Conducs had escaped from the caye and how they had come at last to Mandanar. Shevan shook her head. "It's all useless," she said. "We're doomed -- the last Superom, Keren, all the Thetans." "What do you mean, Shewy?" IF "Even Keren sees it. He was the last. Zedward saw it before me. Keren wanted to keep me here and to use the threat of the neuro-whip to make me work on the tapes in the library. So I haven't seen much of Mandanar. But Zedward did. Zedward recognized it. He told me what he feared. Afterward I spent hour after sleepless hour scouring the endless Tnemory systems. I found all the confirmation I needed. It all coincides " "What?" said Del. "Realized what? Recognized what? What coincides?" "How much have you seen?" Shevan held his face between her hands and stared down into his scared eyes. Del shook his head, Shevan said, "We must stay here, my bal)y gianV until the sun goes out and extinguishes us along with it." "The old onesthey didn't leave any way for us? After all-" Shevan's eyes filled with tears. "No way. No way because none of them found the way either. Even Keren saw it in the end. The structure of the city, the skeletons in  suits, almost all wearing helmets, the windowless spokes, the control centers. It seems they were all aboard. Perhaps they were even in countdown when the scourge struck them. Mandanar is a huge space vehicle, Del. A secret the Superom carefully guarded from the Thetans. It never left Thetis. It is a mausoleum now, a cenotaph, a tomb. Nothing more." The immense, glacial truth of it froze Del's thoughts. He stared at his cousin: the beautiful but haggard woman who had begun the journey as a child. He tried to shake his head, but her eyes denied him even that brief consolation. "Perhaps it'll last. Perhaps it won't go out, Shevan. The sun." "No. Even you know it now." "Keren? What-" "Keren is afraid. He's more afraid now than ever. If the Thetans learn that the Superom can never return, what reason would they have for acknowledging Keren -- or you or I or the shell of Karel kept alive six hundred years to no purpose?" "I can't believe-I can't believe it, Shev. Everything! AU we've done -- " "Our cousin pins his hopes on Karel. He spent all his time guarding him in the tower at Spadrox. He needed for Karel to stay asleep. The dormant Karel was the authority behind Keren's rule. Keren derived his power from the casket. Now he believes his only hope is in having Karel roused. The Thetans revere the last relic of their former greatness. Our cousin thinks that he can tap the store of knowledge Karel took with him into space and brought back alone. With that Keren will hold on to power. That's what he believes." "He's crazy. We must stop him." "The quasi-sun will do that," said Shevan. "Given time that will stop us all. But I fear the time between. I fear that if Keren recovers his power now he will turn to me -- " The giant stared at her with puzzled eyes. "Until now his wives have been Thetan. The children they bore are half-bred. The Superom descendents of the survivors of the Fifth Vortex expedition had their genesis in the incubator stock from their cargo. But the incubators are dead. I am the last Superom female. Keren has it in mind-" "No!" The word that came out of Delbet was barely recognisable. "No! You -- breed with that brute-his bastard hung in you-no! Shevan -- for pity! No!" T he last cry, so filled with bitterness and anguish, evoked another. Delbet and Shevan lifted startled eyes. Keren crouched on the gallery above them. The silent doors of Mandanar had admitted him. No less astounded by the confrontation, Zedward was transfixed behind him. "You!" Keren's snarl was little more than a whisper. His dark beard bristled as his jaw jutted forward. "The dumb giant. Betrayed again! They told me you were dead!" "No, my cousin." Slowly Delbet drew up to full height. "I have come for Shevan." "Masters!" The old Saivainte leader's voice was as dry as fallen leaves. "Karel!" But Keren and Delbet were too closely locked on a collision course to heed Zedward. Keren's hand was already moving backward raggedly to his hip before the giant put bolt to slingbow. Years of hunting talues had made him swift, but the Regent had too good a start. The neuroprobe was inaccurate at long range but the pain slammed along the giant's right arm, gnawing at every nerve. His mouth twisted into a groan. His knees buckled. Shevan snatched the slingbow as it fell and with hasty aim leveled and fired. Slingbow bolts were not lethal and at worst stunned and anesthetized. Her wild aim, though, caught Keren full between the eyes. The bolt could not go deep. Stopped by the bone it jutted from his brow for a second. His head flung backward and he cried out in agony. The Regent's hands groped, one for the bolt, the other for the gallery rail. He tore the bolt free but the drug in its tip had already spread to his nervous system. His eyes glazed. He pitched forward, hung for a moment, pivoted on the rail then overbalanced. He fell to the floor below. The sharp crack as his neck broke was sickeningly loud. Shevan screamed. Zedward leaned over the rail. His horrified eyes stared for a moment at the dead man. He looked up. "Delbet Sir, Shevan Lady!" His old lips worked dryly for a moment. Then: "Karel! Great Karel. We did too much. The mechanisms -- failing. Life going -- out." IF "Del!" The girl's shriek raised the giant from the floor. "Hurry. Del!" The giant's right arm was numb, but he used it like a club. The first blow buckled the metal table leg. The second tore it free. Blood trickled down his forearm from a gash as he wrenched the chain away, freeing Shevan. They ran. Even the spare old Saivainte ran. He led the way as door followed collapsing door. At last they reached the revival sphere. The six-hundred-year sleep was ending. The last of the Superom Space Elite had already begun to shrivel. The quiet anonymity of dust was waiting. Somewhere inside the hibernation casket a last spark pulsed alive. The casket fitted immaculately into the complex mechanism of revival. On the dark rectangular screen that recorded brain activity, tiny threads of light still wandered. They were fragmented and grew weaker as the powerless observers stood and watched. "Keren tried a last experiment," Zedward whispered hoarsely. "The revival pulses were strong, then everything collapsed." Shevan shook her head. Her face was ashen. On the screen the pulses had become virtually invisible. Delbet tensed. "The signs -- Shevan -- look -- " A weak pulse vanished. Suddenly there was a surge. "In the observatory!" cried Iel. "Shevan! The inscription." "Yes. Look!" The anagramatic pattern rallied. The shrinking past was fighting to repeat a last message before its light finally went out. "It's the same," breathed Shevan. "The same code as the bank tapes -- " The giant was staring at the bright, trembling messages: Karel's last unspoken speech. "Zone Kappa. Deck One-" "Code upper three, center five, lower seven, upper four, center six, lower eight. Quick, Zedward-we must record!" Shevan turned to the Saivainte. He was already scrawling the code on the hem of his cloak. "Sun," Del intoned. "Nova Genesis -- The t is -- preservationour home-against-" "It's going out-he's ending!" Shevan put her hands to her face. The last light fell in an arc to the lower edge of the screen and was extinguished. searched the central complex. The control zone of the great matrix which had monitored the birth and would have projected the flight of the Galactic City was clearly and logically divided. There were very few of the skeletal crew here. Those they found were of senior rank. Zone Kappa was clearly designated. Deck One was a program deck, a bank of gleaming keys. "Yes, I understand," said Del. "I didn't know. But now I know." "But even if the ship lifts off, Del, where will we go? Where will we finish? We're not prepared." The giant looked at her. He shook his head. "No," he said. "It's not that, Shewy." "What then?" The giant stood in front of the deck. "Love -- " he said quietly. "What they taught and what they left. Never to fail those who remain. Faithful in life. Faithful in death. To the principle. To the idea that made them walk upright and move out from the center to the farthest arms of the galaxy." He stretched out his right hand. "Upper three, center five, lower seven, upper four-" "Del, darling. What is it?" "Watch, baby," he said. "Center six, lower eight-" All the keys were depressed. "The message," said Del. "Left here to be activated by a pulse from a thousand light-years away if necessary, but always the one simple word." "Del!" "Watch!" The giant was looking for something. He found it. Suddenly on a curved screen before them appeared a huge panorama of sky and earth. The campsite showed clear, and parts of Mandanar itself, the distant mountains, the plateau to the west. The fading artificial sun burned heatlessly in a clear sky. It was almost at meridian. The giant looked again. In a few hours he had discarded his long childhood like an unwanted skin. His left hand depressed a key marked: Stack. From power which had lain undiminished for six hundred years the control deck took the numbers into the computer log. Alpha Ready burned in green symbols. "Yes," breathed Del. Gently but firmly he pressed Activate. A short, jarring accumulation of power sped away. Then came a great flame, a light near the orbit of the dying star and burning with the brightness of a hundred suns. The gasps inside the tower multiplied and echoed in a great cry of awe and wonder from the gathering Thetans as the message in the sky settled into a burning orb -- a new sun that already dwarfed and threatened to engulf the old one. "Now we can begin again." Delbet turned to his cousin. "With the message they left us. I understand. I know. Do you understand, Shev?" "In the way that women know," she said. "Inside. Before anything conscious. Before understanding." Zedward nodded, staring with a smile of triumph at the life the old Superom had left waiting in the sky. Shevan clung to the new Superom -- the giant, the commanding creature who had come into his inheritance.  IF crnd i p Re'(i((;s jfid wror Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I am an old-time sf readerbegan with Amazing in #, moved over ing Galaxy with the first issue in #. Now I have a complete file. I have If complete also, beginning with #. I read sf strictly for entertainment; not for instruction or to share a writer s world protests or to be confused or puzzled. I do occasionally enjoy a mystery or a mystifying situation, if well written and explicitly and well resolved. To leave the reader hanging may have been good for one shot long ago (The Lady or The Tiger), but imitations now are merely annoying. To leave something unsaid also used to be a way of dodging the censorbut not now surely. With the appearance of The Gods Themselves (taking its title from one of my favorite quotes) I began to feel I should resubscribe. What decided me (with some delay) was Gene Wolfe s La Befana. That, I need not tell you, is one of the instant classics. It will be argued over, repeatedly reprinted and compared with Arthur C. Clarke s The Star. What finally got me writing the check, however, was Bob Stickgold's Susie's Reality. 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If someone's already ripped-off the coupon below, you can still experience the ultimate trip by sending your checkmoney order to us for: #" Stereo Record # plus # post  hdlg.  # Stereo Cassette # plus # post  hdlg.  # #I  # " ips Stereo Reel # plus # post  hdlg.  # # W #th St, (Penthouse), New York, N.Y. # Other World Records, Inc. # W #th St, Penthouse, New York, NY #. I enclose   to cover cost, postage  I handling for copies of The Tower.   # " Stereo LP #  # postage and handling  # I  Stereo Cassette #  # postage  and handling  # I D # Vl" ips Stereo Reel #  # postage and handling  #  Name Address I City-StateZip, NY Residents please add # sales tax. V #M lAuJm VSf S tark got his final view of Pax from the tender going out to the spaceport moon. It was the best view he had ever had of Pax, which is the chief habitable planet of Vega. Pax is also a city. Its proud boast is that not a single grain of corn grows upon it nor is one single useful item manufactured. The city soars up into the sky. It spreads out over every  landmass and swallows up small seas. It burrows underground, level below level. Large areas are conditioned and equipped for non-humans. Everything necessary for life is imported from off-planet. All supplies first reach the lunar dock, then are brought down by freight tenders. Nothing lives on Pax but bureaucrats, diplomats and computers. For Pax is the administrative center of the Galactic Union, a federation of worlds flung across half the Milky Way and including, very incidentally, the worlds of little Sol. habiting thousands of diverse planets are reduced to tidy and presumably manageable abstractions on tapes, cards and endless sheets of paper. A paper world. Stark thought, full of paper people. Stark had to admit, though, that Simon Ashton was not made of paper. Time, and accomplishments in planetary administration, had promoted Ashton to a comfortable office at the Ministry of Planetary Affairs and a comfortable apartment in a mile-high building he need never have left except to take one of the moving walkways to his work. Still, Ashton had never lost his rawhide, taut-wire energy. He went often into the field, knowing that the problems of real beings in actual places could not be properly solved merely by the regurgitation of data from a bank of clacking machines. But Ashton had gone once too often into the field. The last time he had not come back. Stark had received that information on one of the untamed worlds outside the Union where life was a little more relaxed for people like himself. He was, as the old phrase had it, a wolfs head -- a totally masterless man. In a society where everyone respectable belonged to something, he owed allegiance only where he chose to, usually for pay. He was a mercenary by trade, and there were enough little wars going on both in and out of the Union, enough remote peoples calling oh him for the use of his talents, to guarantee him a reasonable living doing what he did best. Fighting. Stark had begun fighting almost before he could stand. Born in a mining colony in Mercury's Twilight Belt, he had fought to live on a planet that did not encourage life. His parents dead, his foster-parents a tribe of sub-human aboriginals clawing a precarious existence from the sun-stricken valleys, he had been forced to fight. He had fought, without success, the men who had slaughtered those fosterparents and had put him in a cage, a snarling curiosity. Later he had fought for a different kind of survival -- the survival in himself of human feeling, human soul. But he would never have got past Square One without Simon Ashton. Stark could remember vividly the heat, the raw pain of loss, the bars, the men who had laughed and tormented him. Then Ashton had come. Ashton the wield er of authority, the savior. That had been the beginning of the life of Eric John Stark, as distinguished from IF N'Chaka, the Man-Without-aTribe. Twice orphaned, StarkN'Chaka had gradually accepted Ashton as his father-in-being. More than that, he had accepted Ashton as his friend. During his growth to manhood Ashton had been nearly his sole companion because they had been much alone in the frontier stations to which Ashton was assigned. Ashton's kindness, his counsel, his patience, his strength and his affection, were stamped indelibly on Stark. He had even found his name through Ashton, who had searched the records of Mercury Metals and Mining to track down his parents. And now Simon Ashton was missing. Lost on the world circling a ginger star somewhere at the back of beyond, out in the Orion Spur. A newly discovered, newly opened world called Skaith that hardly anyone had ever heard of, except at Galactic Center. Skaith was not a member of the Union but did have a consulate. Someone there had called to the Union for help. Ashton had responded, taking the first ship out. Ashton, after reaching the place, had perhaps exceeded his authority. Even so, his superiors had done their best for him. But the local powers had closed the consulate and refused entrance to officers of the Union. All attempts to discover Ashton's whereabouts or the reason for his disappearance had failed. Stark had caught the first available ship outbound for Galactic Center and Pax. Looking for Ashton he considered his personal business. The weeks he had spent at Pax had been neither pleasant nor easy. He had had to do a great deal of talking and convincing, and after that, much learning. He was glad to be leaving, impatient to get on with the job. As the world-city dropped behind him, he breathed more freely. Presently the enormous intricacies of the lunar spaceport engulfed him, sorted him, tagged him, eventually spewed him into the bowels of a cargo liner that took him about a third of the way to his destination. There were three transfers after that, each into a still more doubtful vessel, the last a rickety old tramp -- the only sort of ship that served Skaith. Stark endured the voyage, continuing by means of tapes the education into things Skaithian he had begun at Pax. He was not popular among his fellow-travelers. His cabinmate complained that Stark twitched and growled in his sleep like an animal, and there was something in the gaze of Stark's pale eyes that disconcerted the others. They called him "the wild man" behind his back, stopped trying to lure him into games, the discussion of schemes for turning a quick profit, or personal reminiscences. The tramp trader made several planetfalls along the way but eventually creaked and rattled out of It was the fourth month, by Galactic Arbitrary Time, after Ashton's disappearance. Stark destroyed his tapes and collected his few belongings. The rickety trader settled down on the rickety starport outside the city of Skeg. Stark was the first man off the ship. tjis papers gave his right name, jJ which meant nothing here, but they did not mention Pax as point of origin. They said that he was an Earthman, which he was in a way, and a dealer in rarities, which he was not. At the barrier shed a couple of surly customs-men confiscated his purely defensive stunner -- he could have it back, they said, when he left. They searched him and his meager luggage for other weapons. He was then given a terse lecture, in bad Universal, on the rules and regulations governing life in Skeg. Finally he was sent on his way with the parting information that all roads out of Skeg except that one to the starport were closed to offworlders. He was not under any circumstances to leave the city. He rode the ten miles in a jolting cart past plantations of tropical fruits, waterlogged paddies where some form of grain was growing lushly, and patches of jungle. Gradually the smell of mud and vegetation became overlaid by a smell of sea-water -- warm, salt and stagnant. Stark did not much like it. When the cart topped a line of jungled hills, Stark found he did not much like the look of the sea, either. Skaith had no moon so there were no tides to stir it. There was a milky, greasy sheen to the surface. Skaith's senile ginger-colored sun was going down in a fury of crimson and molten brass, laying streaks of water. It seemed a perfect habitat for the peculiar creatures said to live in it. Beside the sea, on the bank of a river, lay Skeg. The river had grown thin with age, too weak to do more than trickle through a narrow passage where the silt of centuries had formed a bar almost closing its mouth. There was a ruined fortresstower set on low cliffs to guard a vanished harbor. But the city itself looked lively enough, with lamps and torches glowing brighter as the sun sank. Presently Stark saw the first of the Three Ladies: magnificent starclusters, the ornament of Skaith's night skies, that made it almost impossible to come by a decent darkness. He glowered at the lady, admiring her beauty but thinking that she and her sisters could make things difficult for him. As though things would not be IF difficult enough in any case... At last the cart clumped into town. Skeg was essentially one great open market where practically anything could be bought or sold. Shops and stalls were brightly lighted. Vendors with barrows cried their wares. People from all over the Fertile Belt -- tall leatherclad warrior-burghers from the outlying city-states, as well as the small silken folk of the tropics -- mingled with the off-worlders who had come to traffic, exchanging precious foreign items like iron pigs for drugs, or for artifacts looted from Skaith's plentiful supply of ruins. And of course there were the Farers. Everywhere. A conglomerate of all the races, dressed or undressed in every imaginable fashion, trooping about, lying about, doing whatever happened to occur to them from moment to moment. These careless itinerant children of the Lords Protector neither toiled nor spun but blew lightly with the winds of the world. Stark noticed some off-worlders among them, drifters who had found the good life here in the warm twilight of a planet where nothing was forbidden and where, if you belonged to the right group, everything was free. Stark paid off his driver and found lodgings at an inn catering to off-worlders. The room was small but reasonably clean, and the food, when he sampled it, not at all bad. Still, he was not interested in comfort. He was interested in Ashton. When he had fed, he approached the landlord in the common-room of the inn. It was built in the breezy tropical style of Skeg, being mostly windows with reed curtains that rolled down to shut out the rain. It was not raining now and the seawind blew through, heavy and damp. "How do I find the Galactic Union consulate?" The landlord stared. He was reddish of color, with a face of stone and startlingly light, very cold gray eyes. "Consulate? Didn't you know?" "Know what?" asked Stark, looking suitably blank. "There isn't one. Not any more." "But I was told... "The Farers wrecked it, not quite four months ago. Sent the consul and his staff packing. They... "The Farers?" "Surely you were told about them at the starport. All that human garbage littering up the streets." "Oh, yes," said Stark. "I was just surprised that they should concern themselves with a consulate. They seem -- well, so indolent." "All they need is the word," said the landlord sourly. "When the Wandsmen say go, they go." Stark nodded. "I was warned about the Wandsmen, too. Pain of death and all that. They seem important men on Skaith." "They do the dirty work for the Lords Protector. The Chief Wandsman of Skeg, the almighty Gelmar, led the Farers. He told the consul to get gone and stay gone, they wanted no more outside interference. In fact, it looked for a while as though they might kick out all us off-worlders and close the starport. They didn't, quite. Need imports too badly. But they treated us like criminals." Stark nodded sympathetically. "What was the row about?" "Some damned official busybody from Pax. It's a fairly open secret that he was here to arrange emigration from one of the city-states. More fool he." "Trouble-maker, hey? What happened to him?" "Who knows? Except the Wandsmen." The cold eyes regarded Stark suspiciously. "Got a particular interest?" "Hardly." "Then drop the subject. We've had trouble enough already. What did you want with the consulate, anyway?" "Some routine business about travel papers. It will have to wait till my next port of call, I guess." Stark bade the landlord good night and walked out. Some damned busybody from Pax. Ashton. And only the Wandsmen knew what had happened to him. S tark walked through the crowded streets, a dark man in a dark tunic, a big man powerfully muscled, who carried himself as lightly and easily as a dancer. He was in no hurry. He let the city flow around him, absorbing it through all his senses. He was aware of the lights, the colors, the mingled smells, the strange musics made by unnameable instruments and alien voices, the bright banners that hung above the sin-shops, the movements of people. And underneath it all he sensed a rich, ripe stink of decay. Skaith was dying, of course, but it did not seem to him to be dying well. He could see no reason to delay sticking his head into the noose. So presently he entered a tavern and began his work. He went about it most discreetly. He had spent what had seemed an eternity at Pax, going With bitter patience through all the existing information about Skaith, learning the language, learning as much as was known about the people and the customs, talking to the ex-consul in an effort to learn more. It was of course too late to save Ashton if the Wandsmen had decided he should die. But vengeance -- vengeance was always possible. Rescue or revenge -- for either, Stark needed all the knowledge he could get. But the facts available at Pax had proved not really extensive. Contact with Skaith had first been made only a dozen or so years IF before. The consulate had not been established until five years later. Considerable was known about Skeg and the adjacent country. A little was known about the citystates. Almost nothing was known about the lands beyond the Fertile Belt where most of the population of Skaith was now gathered. There were plenty of tall tales about the Barrens and the People of the Barrens. Perhaps some were true, perhaps not. Nor was much known about the Lords Protector. No one knew exactly what they looked like or where they dwelled except the Wandsmen, who kept that knowledge a high and holy secret. The beliefs of various sects and cults only confused matters. Stark remembered well the consul's report. In part it had said: The Lords Protector, reputed to be "undying and unchanging," were apparently established long ago by the then ruling powers, as a sort of super-benevolence. The Great Migrations were beginning, the civilizations of the north were breaking up as the people moved away from the increasing cold, and there was certain to be a time of chaos with various groups competing for new lands. Then and later, when some stability was reestablished, the Lords Protector were to prevent total trampling of the weak by the strong. Their law was simple: succor the weak, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, strive always for the greatest good of the greatest number. It appears that through the centuries that law was carried far beyond its original intent. The Farers and the many smaller nonproductive fragments of this thoroughly fragmented culture are now the greater number, with the result that the Wandsmen, in the name of the Lords Protector, hold a third or more of the population in virtual slavery to supply the rest. It is quite obvious to me that upon learning of the intention of the Irnanese to emigrate , the W andsmen took immediate and violent action. If Irnan were to succeed, other communities would follow -- leaving the Wandsmen and their charges in sad state. The Irnans' call for help was relayed by this consulate. So Ashton's disappearance and the forcible closing of the consulate came as a shock to us but hardly as a surprise. What Stark wanted to do was seek out Gelmar and tear him slowly and painfully into small bits until he told what he had done to Ashton. This was not possible because of the Farers -- the devoted, perpetual, ever-ready, instant mob. So Stark set himself out as bait. For two days he walked quietly in the streets, sat quietly in the taverns, talked quietly to anyone who would listen. He asked lots of questions, occasionally letting slip the name Iman. On the evening of the second day the bait was taken. II H e was in the principal street of Skeg, in the main market square, watching a troupe of acrobats. They were performing indifferent stunts with a minimum of skill when someone came and stood close to him, very close, warm and . breathing. He looked down. A girl -- a Farer, stark naked except for bodypaint laid on in fanciful loops and spirals. Her hair hung over her shoulders like a cloak. She looked up at Stark and smilfed. "My name is Baya," she said. It meant Graceful, and that she was. "Come with me, stranger." "Sorry. I'm not ill the market." She continued to smile. "Love can come later, if you wish. Or not, if you wish. But I can tell you something about the man Ashton. He who took the road to Irnan." He said sharply, "What do you know about that?" "I am a Farer. We know many things." "Very well, then. Tell me about Ashton." "Not here. Too many eyes and ears, and the subject is forbidden." talk?" Her eyes and her warm mouth she said, "I don't care for rules, any rules. You know the old fortress on the cliffs? Go there now. I'll follow." Stark hesitated, frowning and suspicious. She shrugged. "It's up to you." She drifted off into the crowd. Stark considered. She was bait for a trap, probably. But he reminded himself that so was he -- or trying to be. He began to walk casually along the street toward the lower end. There it narrowed into a quiet lane that extended to the river. A bridge had stood here once. Now there was only a ford paved with stones. A man dressed in a yellow robe picked his way across it, his skirts tucked up and his wet thighs flashing. Half a dozen men and women followed him in a body, holding each other's hands. Stark turned onto the broken pavement of the embankment. The fortress loomed ahead, the sea lapping the cliffs below it. The ginger star was setting in its usual lurid manner. The tideless water gleamed, gradually taking on a sheen of pearl overlaying brass. Things swirled and splashed in it, and there was a strange far-off IF sound of hooting voices that made Stark shiver. The consul had dutifully written down what had been told to him about the Children of the Sea-Our-Mother but obviously had not believed it. Stark kept an open mind. In a few moments he reached the fortress. Its ancient walls towered above him, still with the stillness of idle centuries, the gaping doors and window-niches dark and empty. He leaned against a column and waited, tasting the dankness of the air. The girl came, padding on bare feet. And there was someone with her, a tall man who wore a rich tunic of somber red and carried a wand of office. A man of proud calm face, a man of power who had never known fear. "I am Gelmar," he said, "Chief Wandsman of Skeg." Stark nodded. "Your name is Eric John Stark," said Gelmar. "You are an Earthman, like Ashton." "Yes." "What are you to Ashton?" "Friend. Foster-son. I owe him my life." Stark clenched his fists. "I want to know what happened to him." "And perhaps I'll tell you," said Gelmar easily. "But first you must tell me who sent you." "No one. When I heard that Ashton was missing, I came." "You speak our language. You know about Irnan. You must have been at Galactic Center, to learn these things." "I went there to learn." "And then you came to Skaith because of your love for Ashton?" "Yes." "I don't think I believe you, Earthman. I think you were sent to make more mischief here." In the reddening dusk, Stark saw that they were looking at him oddly. When Gelmar spoke again his tone had changed subtly, as though he were now posing questions of greater urgency. "Who is your master? Ashton? The Ministry?" Stark said, "I have no master." His ears were stretched. It seemed to him that he had heard small sounds. "A wolfs-head," said Gelmar softly. "Where is your home?" "Nowhere." "A landless man." This was beginning to have a ritual sound. "Who are your people?" "I have none. I was not born on Earth. I have another name -- N'Chaka, Man-Without-a-Tribe." Baya exhaled sharply. "Let me ask him," she said. Her eyes were bright, catching the afterglow. "A wolfs-head, a landless man, a man without a tribe." She touched Stark with a small hand, and the fingers were cold as ice. "Will you join with me and be a Farer? Then you will have one master -- love. And one home -- Skaith. And one people. Us." Stark said, "No. It is not my nature to join." She drew back from him sharply, her eyes still brighter as if with some light of their own. She said to Gelmar, "It is he. It is the Dark Man of the prophecy." Astonished, Stark blurted, "What prophecy?" "That is something they could not tell you at Pax," said Gelmar. "The prophecy was not made until after we banished the consul. But we have been waiting for you." The girl gave a sudden cry -- a signal? -- and then Stark heard the small sounds become large ones. He whirled to face the onslaught he had been expecting. They came around the fortress, perhaps twenty of them, male and female, leaping grotesques of all shapes and sizes. Careless garments flapped. Hands brandished sticks and stones. Some were chanting, "Kill, kill!" Stark said, "I thought it was forbidden to kill." Gelmar smiled. "Not when I order it." Baya drew a long pin like a stiletto from the darkness of her hair. Stark looked this way and that to find a way of escape. Gelmar moved toward the seaward edge of the cliff, giving his Farers free room as the stones began to fly. Out over the water, the hooting voices called and chuckled. Stark sprang like a wild beast and bore Gelmar into the sea. T hey sank to a slimy bottom. It had been instantly apparent that Gelmar could not swim. Stark held him down relentlessly until his struggles weakened. Then he brought him to the surface and let him breathe. The gasping Gelmar stared at him in such pop-eyed amazement that Stark laughed. Up on the cliff the stunned Farers stood in a ragged line. "The Children of the Sea-OurMother," Stark said. "I am told they eat men." "They do," rasped Gelmar, strangling. "You must be insane!" The Wandsman goggled at him. "What have I to lose?" said Stark, and pushed him under. When he let Gelmar up again the last of the Chief Wandsman' s arrogance was gone, lost in a paroxysm of retching. The hooting voices had come closer. There was a new note in them of alert interest, as when hounds pick up a scent. "Two questions," said Stark. "Is Ashton alive?" Gelmar choked and gagged, and Stark shook him. "Do you want the Children to share you? Answer me!" Feebly Gelmar answered. "Yes. Yes. He's alive." "Do you lie, Wandsman? Shall I drown you?" "No! The Lords Protector wanted him alive. To question. We captured him on the road to Irnan." "Where is he?" "North: Citadel of the Lords ProIF tector... at Worldheart." The Farers had begun wailing, a collection of banshees. They were forming a chain down the cliff, reaching out their hands to succor Gelmar. The first of the Three Ladies silvered sky and sea. There was a great and savage joy in Stark's belly. "One more question. What prophecy?" "Gerrith... wise woman of Irnan." Gelmar was finding his tongue as the seaward hoots came nearer. "She prophesied that an off-worlder would come, would destroy the Lords because of Ashton." Gelmar's eyes yearned toward the steep shore. "Ah," said Stark. "Did she now? Maybe she was right." He thrust Gelmar from him, toward the reaching hands, and did not wait to see whether or not he made it. Across the warm and somehow unclean water Stark glimpsed flashes of white in the cluster-light like many swimmers tossing spray. Stark kicked off his sandals, put his head down. He sprinted for the bar at the river mouth. The rush of his passage blotted out other noises. Yet he knew the things were gaining on him. He managed to lengthen his stroke just a fraction more. Then he began to feel the vibrations, a sort of booming in the water as something displaced it with rhythmic blows. He was aware of a body, immensely strong, impossibly swift, pulling ahead of him. Instead of turning and fleeing blindly, as he was expected to, Stark swerved to the attack. Ill O uickly Stark realized he had ' made a mistake. Possibly his last one. He had the advantage of surprise but that was short-lived. In the matter of strength and reflexes he was as near the animal as a man can reasonably be. But the creature he fought with was nearer, a lot nearer, and was in its own element. Stark grappled with it and it shot upward from the water like a tarpon, breaking his grip. He saw it briefly above him in the clusterlight, outstretched arms shaking diamond drops, body girdled with foam. It looked down at him, laughing, and its eyes were like pearls. Then it was gone in a curving arc that carried it beneath the surface. Its form was manlike, except that there seemed webs of skin in odd places and the head was earless. And it was somewhere beneath him now, out of sight. Stark rolled and dived. The thing circled him round, flashed over him, and again was gone. It was having fun. Stark came back to the surface. Farther out, the splashing had ceased. He could see heads bobbing about and hear those hateful voices hooting and ha-ha-ing. For the moment the pack seemed to be standing off, allowing their leader to play out his game. There was nothing Stark could see between himself and the silty bar. He set off toward it again, swimming madly. For a while nothing happened. Now the bar was so tantalizingly close that he almost thought he might make it. Then a powerful hand closed on his ankle and drew him smoothly under. Recklessly expending strength because there was nothing to save it for, he bent his knees, doubling his body against the thrust of the water that wanted to keep it stretched. He grasped his own ankle, found the odd hand that did not belong there, and shifted his grip to the alien wrist. And all the time he and the sea-thing were plunging deeper and the milky light was growing dimmer. The arm was long and furred. Stark felt the powerful muscles imbedded in a layer of fat. His grip kept slipping, and he knew that if he lost it he was finished. He had been overbreathing while he swam, storing up oxygen, but he was using it at a great rate and his heart was already hammering. His fingers clawed and tore, moving convulsively toward the point of leverage. The smooth descent stopped. The creature turned its head and Stark saw the blurred face, eyes filmed and staring, bubbles trickling from a vestigial nose. The free arm that had been oaring them downward now swung over, not toward his hands but toward the back of his neck. The game was over. Stark sunk his head between his shoulders. Talons ripped at the wet ridges of muscles. His own hand found a grip in a web of skin backing the creature's armpit. He straightened his body with a violent thrust and his ankle came free. He pulled himself under the creature's arm. This Child of the Sea had also made a mistake. It had underestimated its victim. The humans who came its way -- capsized fishermen or ritual offerings provided by the landbound worshippers of the SeaOur-Mother, were easy prey. They knew that they were doomed. Stark was not so sure, and he had the thought of Ashton and the prophecy to bolster him. He managed to clamp his arms around the sinewy neck from behind, to lock his legs around the incredibly powerful body. Then he hung on. The creature rolled and sounded, fighting to shake him off. It was like riding an angry whale, and Stark was dying, dying, tightening his hold in a blind red rage, determined not to die first. When the sodden cracking of the neckbones came at last, he could hardly believe it. IF He let go. The body fell away from him, dribbling dark bubbles from nose and mouth where the trapped breath vented. Stark went like an arrow for the surface. Instinct made him break quietly. He hung there, savoring the deliciousness of new air in his lungs, trying not to sob audibly as he gulped it in. He could not at first remember why this was imperative. Then, as the ringing darkness in his mind began to clear, he could hear again the laughing, hooting voices of the pack, waiting for their leader to bring them meat. And he knew that he dared not rest. The battle had carried him beyond the bar, beyond the narrow boat-channel. Which was as well because he could not in any case go back to Skeg. The group on the cliff, like the Children, were still waiting. He could see them only as a dark blob in the distance, and he was sure they could not see him at all. With any luck they might think he had perished in the sea. With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. It was not that he did not believe in luck. It was only that he had found it to be an uncertain ally. With infinite caution, he swam the short distance to the far bank of the river and crawled out on dry land. There were ruins here, a tangle of old walls long abandoned and overgrown with vines. They made excellent cover. Stark went in among them and sat down, leaning his back against warm stone. Every joint and muscle was a separate anguish; bruised, strained and clamoring. A voice said, "Did you kill the thing?" Stark looked up. A man stood in a gap in the wall on the landward side. It was almost as though he had been waiting for Stark's arrival. He wore a robe, and though the cluster-light altered colors Stark was sure the robe was yellow. "You're the man I saw at the ford." "Yes. Gelmar and the girl came after you, and then a gang of Farers. The Farers threw stones at us and told us to go away. So we crossed back. I left my people and came down here to see what was happening." He repeated, "Did you kill the thing?" "I did." "Then you'd better come away. They're not entirely seabound, you know. They'll be swarming here in a few minutes, hunting you." He added, "By the way, my name is Yarrod." "Eric John Stark." He rose, suddenly aware that seaward the voices of the Children had fallen silent. Too much time had passed. They would know by now that something had gone wrong. ruins. Stark followed until they had gone what he thought a safe distance from the bar. Then he set his hand on Yarrod's shoulder and halted him. "What have you to do with me, Yarrod?" "I don't know yet." He studied Stark in the cluster-light. Yarrod was a tall man, wide in the shoulder, bony and muscular. Stark guessed that he was a warrior by trade, masquerading for some reason as something else. "Perhaps I'm curious to know why Gelmar would want to kill an off-worlder in even to the Farers." From the sea there came a wild howling of grief and rage that set Stark's hackles bristling. "Hear that?" said Yarrod. "They've found the body. Now Gelmar will know you killed the thing, and he'll assume that you could be alive. He's bound to try and find you. Would you like to be hunted through these ruins by the Farers -- or will you trust me to give you safe hiding?" "I seem not to have much choice," said Stark, and shrugged. But he went warily behind Yarrod. The tone of the howling changed as some of the creatures, judging by the distant sounds, began to clamber onto the bar. "What are they? Beast or human?" "Both. A thousand years ago or so, some people got the idea that the only salvation was for man to return to the Sea-Our-Mother from whose womb we came. And they did. Had their genes altered by some method still known then, to speed up the adaptation. And there they are, losing more of their humanness with every generation. But happier than we are." He increased his pace and Stark matched it, the savage howling growing fainter in his ears. The consul might doubt the story told about the Children of the Sea. Stark did not. Not any more. As though reading his thoughts, Yarrod chuckled. "Skaith is full of surprises. You've another just ahead." High on the bank above the ford of the river rose part of a barrel arch. Although intact overhead it was open at both ends -- which in that gentle climate scarcely mattered. Drooping vines acted as curtains. A fire burned inside, and the half-dozen men and women Stark had seen before with Yarrod sat by it in a close group, heads together, arms intertwined. They neither moved nor looked up as Stark and Yarrod entered. "Pretty good, aren't they?" said Yarrod. "Or do you know?" Stark clawed back through his mental file on Skaith. "They're pretending to be a pod. And you're supposed to be a pod-master." A pod, according to the file, was a collection of people so thoroughly sensitized by a species of group therapy that they no longer existed as individuals but only as interdeIF pendent parts of a single organism. The pod-master trained them, then kept them fed and washed and combed until such time as the hour arrived for Total Fulfillment. That was when one of the components died and the whole organism went, finding escape at last. The average life of a pod was four years. Then the pod-master started over again with another group. "Pod-masters can go anywhere," said Yarrod. "They're nearly as holy as Wandsmen." He turned to the group. "All right, friends, you may breathe again, but not for long. Gelmar and his rabble will be coming soon, looking for our guest. Breca, go keep watch on the ford, will you?" The group broke up. A tall woman, evidently Breca, gave Stark a strangely penetrating look, then vanished without a sound through the vines. Stark studied the faces of the remaining five in the firelight. They were strong faces, alert and wary, intensely curious, as though he might mean something to them. One of the five, a big man with a contentious air and a jealous eye, whom Stark disliked on sight, asked Yarrod, "What was all that howling from the bar?" Yarrod nodded at Stark. "He killed a Child of the Sea." "And lived? I don't believe it!" "I saw it," said Yarrod curtly. "Now tell us, Stark. Why did Gelmar set the Farers on you?" "Partly because I had been asking about Ashton. And partly because of a prophecy." They all expelled breath sharply, as the Farer girl had. "What prophecy?" "Someone called the wise woman of Irnan predicted that an offworlder would destroy the Lords Protector because of Ashton." He added evenly, "But you know all about that, don't you?" "We're all from Irnan," said Yarrod. "We waited there for Ashton but he never arrived. Then the wise one, Gerrith, made her prophecy and the Wandsmen killed her. What was Ashton to you?" "What is a father to a son, a brother to a brother?" Stark moved, easing the aches of his body. But there was no ease for the deeper pain, and they saw that in his expression and were disturbed. "You people of Irnan decided to leave this planet, which I can readily understand. Through the GU consul at Skeg and keeping the matter very confidential, you then applied for help. The Ministry of Planetary Affairs agreed to find you a suitable place on another world, and to supply the ships for your emigration. Ashton reached Skaith from the Ministry to make the final arrangements. As someone said, the more fool he -- because your plans had stopped being confidential. Who talked?" "None of us," said Yarrod. "Probably someone at the consulate. Perhaps Ashton was careless." "Gelmar captured him. On the Irnan road." "Did Gelmar tell you that?" "He tried to have me killed. So I took him with me into the sea, and gave him a choice-drown or talk." Yarrod groaned. "You took him into the sea. Don't you know that it is forbidden, absolutely forbidden on pain of death, to lay heads upon or interfere with a Wandsman in any way?" "I was already under pain of death, and it seemed to me in any case that Gelmar needed a lesson in manners." They stared at him. Then one of them laughed, and then they all laughed except the big man with the jealous eye who only showed his teeth. Yarrod said, "You may be the Dark Man at that!" The curtain of vines rustled as Breca returned. "A party," she said, "is coming to the ford. About twenty of them, and in a hurry." Y arrod reacted swiftly. "In here," he said in Stark's ear, and motioned to a fissure in the stonework at one side. It was barely large enough to accept Stark's body and of no size at all to permit any motion, offensive or defensive. He hesitated. "Make up your mind," said Yarrod. "Unless vou hide, we'll have to give you up to save ourselves." Stark accepted the inevitable. He slid himself into the aperture, which was screened within seconds by the meager possessions of the Irnanese -- leather bottles, sacks of meal and dried meat, a spare shift apiece -- and by the "pod" itself. For the Irnanese quickly huddled in their tight group before the heap of dunnage. Stark had some difficulty breathing, and he could not see anything, but he had been in worse places. Provided the Irnanese did not sell him out. He settled himself to endure. Soon Gelmar entered the vault. Stark could hear him quite clearly, speaking to Yarrod. "May your people know peace and quick fulfillment, Master. I am Gelmar of Skeg." Courtesy required that Yarrod should identify himself in turn. He did so, giving a totally false name and place of origin, and ending with a gravely unctuous, "What may I do for you, myson?" "Has anyone passed this way? A man, an off-worlder, fresh from the sea, perhaps hurt?" "No," said Yarrod, his voice steady and unconcerned. "I've seen no one. Besides, who escapes from the sea? I've heard the Children hunting within the hour." "Perhaps the Master is lying," said a girl's voice spitefully, and Stark knew it well. "The Master was at the ford. He saw us." "And your people threw stones," said Yarrod sternly. "My pod became frightened. It has cost me IF much effort to calm it.Even Farers should have more respect." "One must forgive them," said Gelmar. "They are the children of the Lords Protector. Do you lack for anything? Food? Wine?" "There is enough. Perhaps tomorrow I shall go to Skeg and ask." "Provisions will be given gladly." There were some parting formalities. Gelmar and the girl apparently left the vault, and in a moment Stark could hear whoops and cries as the Farers went haring away through the ruins. Looking for me, he thought, and was glad of his hiding place. A sorry rabble they were but one against twenty, and the one unarmed, were unpleasant odds. Would they return? Stark stayed in the crevice. Yarrod took no chances either. He began to lead his pod in a kind of litany, a murmurous chant that almost put Stark to sleep. The chanting faded gently to a small contented humming -- and, sure enough, then there were voices and sounds outside. Yarrod's words came through clearly. "You didn't find him?" Rather distantly, Gelmar answered, "No trace. But the Children have been on the bar." "No doubt they have already shared him, then." "No doubt. Still, if you should see him... The man is a lawbreaker, and dangerous. He laid hands on me. Imagine! Being an off-worlder he might not respect your robe either." "I have no fear, my son," said Yarrod. "What do we all wish for but fulfillment?" "Ah -- death," said Gelmar. "Good night, Master." "Good night. And please to take your unruly flock with you. Each time the tranquility of my pod is disturbed, the day of release is that much delayed." Stark heard Gelmar's footfalls departing. The commotion outside dwindled to silence. After what seemed an interminable wait, Yarrod and the others dismantled the pile of bundles. "Keep your voice down," he cautioned. "I think Gelmar left a few behind. It's like trying to count vermin so I can't be sure, but I didn't see the girl go." Stark stood up and stretched. The pod had broken up and the woman Breca was missing, presumably on watch. "Now then," said Yarrod brusquely. "We of the pod have a decision to make." They all eyed Stark. "You believe he is the Dark Man?" That from the big Irnanese who had spoken skeptically before. "I think it likely. Gelmar appeared certain." "But suppose he is not the Dark Man. Suppose we rush back to Irnan only to learn as much. Then all our work is wasted and our mission is thrown away for nothing." There were mutters of assent. "You have a point, Halk. What do you suggest?" "That we let him get to Irnan by himself. If he is truly the Dark Man, he'll make it." "I don't particularly want to go to Irnan," remarked Stark, with a certain dangerous cheerfulness. "Ashton's not there." "And well we know that," said Yarrod. "Where is he?" "In the Citadel of the Lords Protector, at Worldheart -- wherever that is." "North, in any case," said Yarrod. "And in any case, you must go to Irnan." "Why?" "So that Gerrith, the daughter of Gerrith, may say if you are truly the Dark Man of the prophecy." "Oh. Gerrith had a daughter." "All wise women have daughters if they can possibly manage it. Otherwise the precious genes are lost. And you see, Stark, we must know for sure or we cannot follow you. And without us and our help, you would find it hard to accomplish your mission." #i He'll find it hard anyway," said Halk. "But he might as well cooperate." He spoke directly to Stark. "You can't get away from Skaith now. Not through the starport. And there is no other way." "Since I have no wish to leave, it scarcely matters, does it?" Stark turned to Yarrod. "Maybe I can solve the immediate problem. Obviously you couldn't have come here to rescue me, so you must have had another reason. What was it?" "We of Irnan," Yarrod replied angrily, "are no longer allowed to travel without a special permit from, the Wandsmen, and we didn't think they would give us one for this journey. That's why we're flapping about in this silly pod disguise. We came to Skeg to perhaps find out what the Galactic Union intends to do about us, if anything. I don't suppose they told you at Pax?" "As a matter of fact, they did." The whole group moved a step closer. "What will they do? Will they send someone?" "They have sent someone," Stark said. "Me." A stutined silence. Then Halk asked, "Officially?" The sneer was audible. "No. They tried officially to reopen contact with Skaith, and got nowhere." "So they sent you. Who is your master, then?" Stark took Halk's meaning and grinned. "No one. I'm a mercenary by trade. Since I was going after Ashton anyway, the Minister asked me to find out what I could here and report to him -- if I survived. I take no orders from him and he takes no responsibility for me." "Then," said Yarrod, "that is IF the best we can hope for?" "Short of an invasion, yes. And the Galactic Union dislikes force. So if you want freedom you'll have to fight for it yourselves." Stark shrugged. "You must be aware that Skaith is not considered the most important planet in the galaxy." "Except by us who are obliged to live on it," said Yarrod. "Very well, then. We go back to Irnan. Agreed?" Even Halk had to admit that they had got what they came for -- news of Pax's intentions, satisfactory or not. No justification remained for lingering at Skeg. "Yet we mustn't go too quickly," said Yarrod, frowning. "That would give us away. Gelmar will expect me in Skeg tomorrow, and surely he is keeping some sort of watch on this side of the river." Halk said sarcastically, "And what about the grand ambassador? We can hardly add him to the pod." "He must go on ahead of us, tonight. He can wait at the..." Breca came quickly through the vines, motioning for silence. "I hear them, coming this way." "Stark..." "Not in that hole again, thank you. It was a good hole and welcome at the time, but it can entrap me. Did they search the roof?" "They did." The pod began organizing itself, soundlessly and in haste. "Then they'll likely not bother again." Stark went out through the rearward arch, letting the vines fall back quietly into place. He stood for a moment, head cocked. He could hear people moving about some distance away. If they thought they were being stealthy they were much mistaken. The beautiful sky glowed with its islands of milky fire. In the cluster-light, Stark studied the broken masonry of the vault and then began to climb. IV T he top of the vault offered reasonable cover behind crumbling bits of wall still standing above its edges. He had no more than settled himself when Baya and two men came in view. She was leading the others, both of them obviously bored and as pettish as babies. One was tall and spindly, totally naked except for bodypaint that looked as though he had rolled in it. His hair and beard were full of rubbish. The other man was shorter and ran to fat, and that was all Stark could see of him because he was completely wrapped in bright cloth that covered even his face. The folds were stuck full of flowers. "Let's go back now, Baya," said the tall one, turning toward the ford. "You've seen there's no one here." "The Dark Man died in the sea," said the shorter one, his voice squeaking impatiently through his veils. "The Children shared him. How could it be otherwise?" Baya lifted her shoulders as though a breath of col(J air had touched her. She shook her head. "I spoke to him," she said. "I touched him. There was something about him -- strength, a terrible strength. He killed a Child of the Sea, remember?" So they knew that, did they? Stark listened the harder. "You're being silly," said the short one, and hopped up and down like a rabbit. "Girl-silly. You saw his muscles, and you want him to be alive. You're sorry he didn't love you before he died." "Hold your tongue," said Baya. "Maybe he's dead and maybe he isn't -- but if he isn't, someone is hiding him. Stop whining and look around." "We've already searched everywhere... The tall man sighed. "We'd better do as she says. You know what a terrible temper she has." They wandered off, out of Stark's sight but not out of his hearing. Baya continued to stand where she was, frowning at the firelight flickering from the vault. Then she sauntered over, her insolent body agleam in the light of the Three Ladies. Stark lost sight of her too, since she was directly beneath him, but he could hear the vines rustle as she swept them aside. "Master -- " Yarrod's angry voice sounded from the vault. "You have no business here. Get out." "But Master, I'm only curious," said Baya. "I might even want to join a pod myself one day, when I'm tired of being a Farer. Tell me about them, Master. Is it true that they forget about everything, even love?" The vines swished as she entered the vault and let them fall behind her. The words from within were now too muffled for Stark to follow. In a few moments, though, he heard a squeal of pain from Baya and the vines thrashed wildly as she and Yarrod came through them. Yarrod had his hand wound cruelly in her hair. He marched her, crying and struggling, away from the vault. He took her to the river bank and pushed her in. "You've done enough mischief for one day," he said. "If you come near my pod again I'll make you regret it." He spat and added, "Farer trash! I have no need of you." He left her and strode back to the vault. She stood in the shallow water of the ford and shook her fists at him, screaming. "You live on the bounty of the Lords Protector just the same as we do! What makes you so much better, you..." She poured out obscenities, then choked on her own rage and ended up coughing. There was a sudden delighted outcry from among the ruins where her two companions were poking IF around. She came up the bank. "Have you found him?" "We found love-weed! Loveweed!" The two Farers reappeared, waving handsful of something they had grubbed up, chewing greedily. The tall one held some out to Baya. "Here. Forget the dead man. Let us love and enjoy." "I don't feel like loving now." She turned away, toward the vault. "I feel like hating. Pod-masters are supposed to be holy men. This one is full of hate." "Perhaps it's because we threw stones," said the short one, cramming his mouth full. "Who cares?" said the tall one, and grabbed Baya by the shoulder. "Eat this, and you'll feel like loving." He pushed some of the weed by main force into Baya's mouth. She spat it out. "No! I must talk to Gelmar. I think there's something..." "Later," said the tall Farer. "Later." He laughed, and the short one laughed, and they shoved Baya back and forth between them. The struggle seemed to pleasure them and hasten the action of the drug. Baya pulled the bodkin from her hair. She slashed the naked one once, not deeply, and they laughed some more and took the bodkin away from her. Then they worried her down to the ground and began beating her. The roof of the vault was not high. Stark came down off it in one jump. The Farers neither heard nor saw him. They were far too busy, and Baya was screaming at the top of her lungs. Stark hit the tall one a chopping blow at the base of the skull and he fell. Another blow, and the short one followed him without a groan, strewing the last of his flowers. Stark heaved the bodies aside. Baya looked up at him, her eyes wide and dazed. She said something, perhaps his name. He could not be sure. He found the nerve-center in the side of her neck and pressed it, and she was quiet. He saw that Yarrod had come out and was standing over him, looking like thunder. "That was ill-done," cried Yarrod. "You fool, who cares what happens to a Farer?" "You're the fool," said Stark. "You gave yourself away. She was going to tell Gelmar that the podmaster was a fraud." He lifted the girl smoothly to his shoulder and stood up. "She saw you, I suppose." "I think so." "And these?" The two men had begun to snore heavily. They smelled of a sweetsour pungency. Their mouths were open and smiling. "No," said Stark. "But they heard Baya. About you, I mean. They may remember." "All right," said Yarrod, still angry. "I suppose it makes no difference who's to blame. The only choice we have now is to run, and run fast." He looked across the river to the lights of Skeg and then went stamping back to the vault. W ithin minutes they were on their way through the sprawling ruins and into the jungle. The Three Ladies smiled serenely. The warm air was moist, heavy with the odors of night-flowering creepers, mud and decay. Nameless things scuttled and clicked, bickering in tiny voices around their feet. Stark adjusted Baya's light weight more comfortably across his shoulders, and remembered with a pang of yearning the clean bitter corpse of Mars. "The roads are closed to offworlders," he said. "I suppose you've thought of that." "You don't imagine we came here by the road, do you?" Yarrod snorted. "We got out of Irnan by pretending to be a hunting party. We left our mounts and all our proper gear at a place on the other side of the hills, then walked in by a jungle path." He squinted at the sky. "We can be there by tomorrow noon, if we drive ourselves." "There's a chance, isn't there," said Stark, "that Gelmar will think you've moved your people out because of the disturbance? And that Baya simply ran off? She stabbed one of her friends, you know." "Of course there's a chance. He can't be sure of anything, can he? He can't even be sure whether you're dead or alive. So if you were Gelmar, what would you do?" "I'd send word along to be on watch -- especially in Irnan." And he cursed the name of Gerrith, wishing that she had kept her mouth shut. "She got her death by it," said Yarrod curtly. "That should be punishment enough." "It's my death that I'm like to get by it that worries me," said Stark. "If I'd known about the damned prophecy, I'd have laid my plans differently." "Well," said Halk, smiling his fleering smile at Stark, "if it's a true prophecy, and you are a fated man, you have nothing to fear." "The man who doesn't fear doesn't live long. I fear everything." He patted Baya's bare thigh. "Even this." "In that, you're well advised. You'd do best to kill it." "We'll see," said Stark. "No need to hurry." They moved on, following a quiet green star that Yarrod called the Lamp of the North. "If Gelmar does send word to Irnan, he'll do it in the usual manner, by messenger, by the roads. Barring accident, we should be well ahead." "If," said Halk, "the Dark Man and his baggage don't slow us down." Stark showed the edges of his teeth. "Halk," he said, "I have a feeling that you and I are not going IF to be the best of friends." "Bear with him, Stark," said Yarrod. "He's a fighter, and we need swords more than we need sweet tempers.". That at least was true. Stark saved his breath for walking. And there was plenty of that for all of them. I t was daybreak and they had stopped to rest, high on the shoulder of a jungle hill. The dreaming sea lay far behind them, all its deadliness hidden by distance. The morning mists took fantastic colors from the rising of the ginger star. The Irnanese faced eastward and each one poured a small libation. Even Baya bowed her head. "Hail, Old Sun, we thank you for this day," they muttered, and sounded as though they meant it. Then Halk, as usual, spoiled the effect. He turned defiantly to Stark. "We were not always paupers, hoarding our little daylight, grudging every scrap of metal so that we could still have a knife to cut our meat. There were ships on that sea. There were machines that flew in the air, and all manner of things that are only legend now. Skaith was a rich world once, as rich as any." "It lived too long," said Yarrod. "It's senile and mad, growing more so with every generation. Come and eat." They sat down and began sharing out meager rations of food and sour wine. When Baya's turn came they passed her by. Stark asked, "Is there none for the girl?" "We've been feeding her and the likes of her all our lives," said Breca. "She can do without." Halk nodded approvingly. Stark divided his own ration and gave her half. She took it and ate quickly, saying nothing. She had been docile enough since regaining consciousness, going along on her own feet with only a small amount of whimpering. Stark, leading her like a puppy by a halter around her .neck, knew she was afraid. She was surrounded by people who made no secret of their hatred and with no protective Wandsman at hand to whip them into line. Her eyes were large and hollow. Her body-paint was a sorry mess, all sweated and smeared. "The old civilizations," said Yarrod, around a flap of tough bread, "for all their technology, never achieved space-flight. I suppose they were busy with more important things. So there was no escape, for them or for us. No hope of it. Then suddenly there was talk that starships had landed, talk about a Galactic Union and other worlds. You see what that did to us after we learned the rumors were true. There was hope. We could escape." Stark nodded. "I can see also why the Wandsmen would be unhappy about the idea. If the providers start leaving, their whole system collapses." Halk leaned toward Baya. "And it will collapse. For leave we shall. And what will you do then, little Farer girl? Eh?" She shrank away from him, but he kept on at her until he brought her deep anger flaring up. "It will never happen," she snarled at him. "The Protectors won't let it. They'll hunt you all down and kill you." She looked hatefully at Stark. "Off-worlders have no business here, making trouble. They should never have been allowed to come." "But they did pome," said Stark, "and things will never be the same." He smiled at Baya. "If I were you I'd start thinking about learning to scratch for myself. And of course, you could always emigrate." "Emigrate," said Halk. "Ha! Then they'd have to do more than just love and enjoy." "Skaith is dying," said Baya. "What else is there to do but enjoy? While one can?" Stark shook his head. "Skaith will last out your lifetime, and one or two more. So that's not much of a reason." She cursed him and began to cry furiously. "You're wicked. You're all wicked. You'll all die just like that woman Gerrith. The Lords Protector will punish you. They defend the weak, they feed the hungry, they shelter the..." "You can keep that," said Halk, and cuffed her. She shut up, but her eyes still smoldered. Halk lifted his hand again. "Let her be," said Stark. "She didn't invent the system." He turned to Yarrod. "If Irnan is as closely watched as you say, how shall I get in and out of the city without being seen?" "You won't have to. The wise woman's grotto is in the foothills at the head of the valley." "You mean the daughter? Don't they watch her, too?" "Like hawks." And Yarrod added grimly, "We can handle that." Halk was still looking at Baya, full of malice. "What will you do with her?" "Turn her loose, when her tongue can do us no harm." "When will that be? No, give her to me, Dark Man. I'll see to it that she's harmless." "No." "Why the tender concern for her life? She is ready enough to take yours." "She had reason to hate and fear me." Stark looked at Baya's tearstained face and smiled again. "Besides, she was acting only from the noblest motives." "Hell," said Yarrod, "who isn't?" When they had eaten they started off again, pushing themselves to IF the limit of endurance -- which meant past Baya's limit. Stark carried her part of the time, staggering with weariness and fully conscious of every ache bequeathed him by the late Child of the Sea. They climbed steadily and the ginger star climbed above them. About midmorning they crossed the ridge and began going down, which was easier at first and then harder as the grade became steeper. The dim path switched back and forth across the face of the slope but in many places Yarrod led them straight down in order to save time. They did not quite kill themselves. They did not quite reach the place they had hoped to attain by noon, either. Stark judged that Old Sun was at least an hour past zenith when Yarrod at last signaled a halt. They were in a dense grove of trees, the pale trunks grooved and ridged, the dark foliage shutting out the sky. Moving cautiously, Yarrod walked on with only Halk for a companion. Stark handed Baya's leash to Breca and rushed to join them. The two were expert woodsmen, he noticed, making hardly a sound as they progressed. When they reached the edge of the grove they became even more careful, peering out from behind the trees. Stark saw a broad sunny meadow. There was a ruined tower some distance into it that might once have been a mill or part of a fortified dwelling. Two men in bright tunics and leather jerkins sat in the doorway of the tower, relaxed and at ease, their weapons leaned beside them. It was too far away to see their faces. Scattered about between the grove and the tower, a dozen or so rusty-brown animals, large and shaggy, fed contentedly on lush grass. There were no sounds except the natural ones: breeze rustling overhead, animals cropping. Yarrod was satisfied. He had expected no less. He turned to summon the others. And Stark caught his shoulder in a grip of iron. "Wait." Where a moment ago there had been no sounds, now all at once there were a multitude. "Men. There. And there... It was plain far all to hear -- the creak of sandal-leather, the clink of metal, the swift stealthy motion. "All around us, closing in... Y arrod shouted. The Irnanese, j aware they were.in a trap, began to run. Baya stumbled and fell, or perhaps deliberately lay down. At any rate, they left her. Voices called out peremptory orders to halt. There was a loud trampling of feet. The Irnanese fled out across the meadow toward the tower where their weapons were. Arrows flew, whickering in the bright air. Two Irnanese fell and only one got up again. They dodged in and out among the animals, now snorting and bellowing. Then Stark saw that the men in the doorway had not moved and he knew they were dead. The meadow stretched wide and naked in the sunlight. Suddenly a flight of arrows left the tower and stuck quivering in the ground. Yarrod stopped. No hiding place, no hope. Men were coming out of the grove behind, arrows nocked. More men came out of the tower, kicking the two bodies aside. A small rufous man led them. He wore a dark-red tunic and carried no weapon but his wand of office. Halk breathed one word, a name, and he breathed it like a curse. "Mordach!" Stark had made his own decision. Those arrows were long and sharp and he was sure that he could not outrun them. So he too stood and waited, having no wish to die in this meaningless place, under the ginger star. "Who is Mordach?" he snapped. "Chief Wandsman of Irnan," said Yarrod, his voice breaking with rage and despair. "Someone talked. Someone betrayed us." The men formed a wall around them. Mordach approached and smiled up at the tall Irnanese. "Ah, the hunting party," he said. "In strange attire, and without weapons. Yet I see that you did find game of sorts." His gaze fastened on Stark, who decided that perhaps he ought to have chanced the arrows after all. "An off-worlder," said Mordach, "where off-worlders are forbidden. And traveling with a company of law-breakers. Was this what you went to find? Someone purporting to fulfill your prophecy?" "Perhaps he does fulfill it, Mordach," said Halk wickedly. "Gelmar thought so. Gelmar tried to kill him and could not." Thank you, friend, thought Stark, and felt his guts tighten. Two men came up, supporting Baya between them. "We found her in the grove. She doesn't look to be one of them." "I'm a Farer," said Baya. She fell on her knees before Mordach. "In the name of the Lords Protector..." She held out the end of the halter and shook it. "He took me by force all the way from Skeg." "He?" "That man. The off-worlder. Eric John Stark." "Why?" "Because he lived when he ought to have died." Trembling with malevolence she glared at Stark. "He escaped from us, into the sea. You know what that means -- Yet he lived. He killed a Child of the Sea, and lived. And I saw him." She had strength and breath enough to scream, "He is the Dark Man of the prophecy! Kill him! Kill him now!" "There," said Mordach absently, and caressed her tangled hair. He considered Stark, his eyes hooded and cold. "So. And perhaps even Gelmar could be misIF taken. Either way..." "Kill him," Baya whimpered. "Please. Now." Mordach said, "and salutary. It ought not to be wasted." He motioned to some of his men. "Bind them. Securely, very securely, and especially the off-worlder." He lifted Baya to her feet. "Come, child, you're safe now." "Mordach," said Yarrod. "Who betrayed us?" "You did," said Mordach. "Yourselves. All your preparations took time and effort, and some of them were observed. You and Halk are known to be among the most active of the Emigration Party. These others were known to be associates. When you all went off together to hunt, we were curious to know what the quarry might be. So we followed you as far as the tower, then awaited your return." His gaze wandered again to Stark. "You were bringing him back to Gerrith's daughter, weren't you?" Yarrod did not answer, but Mordach nodded. "Of course you were. And of course they must meet, and I promise you they shall -- openly, where all can see." He went off with Baya, who looked back once over her shoulder as the men-at-arms moved in with leather thongs to bind the captives. They were of a type Stark had not seen before, having lint-white hair and sharply slanted cheekbones and slitted yellow eyes that gave them the look of wolves. Certainly they were not Farers. "Farers are only a mob, for trampling and tearing," Yarrod said. "Wandsmen in the city-states like to have a little force of mercenaries for the serious work, and they recruit them along the Border. These are from Izvand, in the Inner Barrens." His head hung in shame and misery. But he lifted it fiercely when one of the mercenaries brought a halter for his neck, so that he might take the rope easily and with a semblance of pride. "I'm sorry," he said, and would not meet Stark's eye. And now it was Stark's turn to wear a halter and walk behind in the dust while Baya rode. So at length the Dark Man came to Irnan. V I t was a gray city, walled in stone, set on a height roughly in the center of a broad valley green with spring. Mordach and his prisoners and his mercenaries had journeyed a long way north, leaving tropical summer far behind. All around Irnan stretched tilled fields and pastures. Orchards were in blossom, a froth of pink and white oddly tarnished by the light of the ginger star. A road led to the city. There was much traffic on it: farm carts, people going to and coming from work in the fields or driving beasts before them, traders and long strings of pack-animals jingling with bells. Stark noted a troop of mountebanks, a caravan of traveling scores of both sexes with bright banners advertising their wares, and the motley assortment of wanderers that seemed omnipresent on Skaith. Mordach's party went down the middle of the road, four men-at-arms riding in front and clashing short spears rhythmically against their shields. A clear way was made, and behind them the folk stood along the roadside ditches and stared and pointed and whispered, and then began to follow. Two Wandsmen, in green tunics that indicated their lesser rank, strode out of the gate to meet Mordach, a rabble of Farers following at their heels. Within minutes the word was running ahead like wildfire. "The Dark Man! They've taken the Dark Man!" More Wandsmen appeared as though from between the paving stones. A crowd gathered, clotting around Mordach's party like swarming bees. The mercenaries drew their ranks tighter, until their rustyhaired mounts all but trod upon the captives. Their spears pointed outward, forming a barrier against the press of bodies. "Keep up, keep up," shouted the captain of the Izvandians. "If you fall, we can't help you." They passed beneath the arch of the great gate. Stark saw that the stone was stained and weathered, the carvings grown dim with time. A winged creature with a sword in its claws crouched on the capstone, fierce jaws open to bite the world. The valves of the gate were strong, sheathed in cured hides as hard as metal. It gave on a passage through the thickness of the wall, a dark tunnel where every sound was caught and compressed and the din of voices was stunning. Then they were in the square beyond and forcing their way between market stalls toward a central platform built stoutly of wood and higher than the jostling heads of the mob. Some of the mercenaries stood guard while others dismounted and hurried the captives up a flight of steps. Atop the platform were stalwart posts, permanently placed and black with use. Quickly Stark and Yarrod and the others were bound to them. The mercenaries took up stations at the edges of the platform, facing outward. The two Wandsmen in green went away; apparently Mordach had sent them on some errand. Mordach himself addressed the crowd. Much of what he said was drowned by shouts and howls but there was little doubt about the burden of his speech. Irnan had sinned, and the guilty were about to pay. Stark flexed himself against the hide ropes. They cut his flesh but did not give. The post was firm as a IF tree. He leaned back against it, easing himself as much as possible, and looked at this place where presumably he was about to die. "What do you think now, Dark Man?" asked Halk. He was bound to the post on Stark's left, Yarrod on Stark's right. "I think," said Stark, "that we'll soon know whether Gerrith had the true sight." The crowd was still growing. People came until it seemed that the space could hold no more, and still they arrived. Around the inner sides of the square stood buildings of stone narrow and high, shouldering together, slate roofs peaked and shining in the sun. The supper windows were filled with onlookers. After a while there were folk straddling the rooftrees and perching on the gutters, and the tops of the outer walls were packed. Stark noticed two distinct elements in the crowd, and they seemed not to mingle. Foremost around the platform, doing all the screaming, were the Farers and the other flotsam. Beyond them, and quite quiet, were the people of Irnan. "Any hope from those?" asked Stark. Yarrod tried to shrug. "Not all of them are with us. Our people have lived in this place a long time and the roots go deep. And Skaith, for all its faults, is the only world we know. Some find the idea of leaving it frightening and blasphemous. They won't lift a hand to help us. About the others... I don't know. After all, what can they do for us?" Mordach was urging the mob to be patient. Still they pushed, many clamoring for blood. A band of women forced their way to the steps and began to climb. They wore black bags over their heads, bags that covered their faces. Otherwise they were naked and their skin was like tree-bark with long exposure. "Give us the Dark Man, Mordach!" they cried. "Let us take him to the mountain top and feed his strength to Old Sun!" Mordach held up his staff to halt them, spoke to them gently. Stark asked, "What are they?" "They live wild in the mountains. Once in a while, when they get hungry, they come in. They worship the sun, and any man they can manage to capture they sacrifice. They believe that they alone keep Old Sun alive." Halk laughed. "Look at the greedy beasts! They'd like to have all of us." Arms like gnarled branches reached and clawed. "They will die soon enough, little sisters," promised Mordach. "They will feed Old Sun, and you shall watch and sing the Hymn of Life." Gently he urged them back, and reluctantly they returned to the crowd. Then a tumult inundated the doors of one of the buildings overlooking the square. A procession moved out from it, the green Wandsmen leading and a fringe of Farers flapping at the sides and rear. At the center Stark made out a dozen or so men and women in sober gowns, chains of office around their necks. They walked in an odd manner, and as they neared he could see that they were bound in a way that forced them to bend forward and shuffle like penitents. A low groan arose from the people of Irnan. Yarrod muttered between his teeth, "Our chiefs and elders." Stark thought he saw the beginning of movement among the Irnanese. He hoped they would rush the crowd and rescue their leaders by force. That might trigger a general revolt. But the movement rippled and died. The procession reached the steps and climbed haltingly while the mob jeered. The elders were herded onto the platform and made to stand, and Mordach pointed his staff at them in a gesture of wrath and accusation. "You have done wickedness," he cried in a voice that rang across the square. "Now you shall do penance!" The crowd screamed. Many threw things. The citizens of Irnan stirred uneasily. They muttered, but still they did not move. "They're afraid," Yarrod said. "The Wandsmen have packed the town with Farers, as you see. One word, and they'll start tearing Irnan apart stone by stone." "Hell, the Irnanese outnumber them." "Not the Irnanese in sympathy with us. And the Wandsmen hold hostages." He nodded his red head at the elders standing bent in the sun. There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close and frightening smell of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well. The ropes cut him, the post was hard against his back. The ginger star burned him with brassy light and his own sweat ran down. Someone shouted, "Where is the wise woman?" Other voices took up the cry, howled it back and forth between the gray walls. "Where is the wise woman? Where is Gerrith the Younger?" Mordach calmed them. "She has been sent for." Yarrod yelled at Mordach, "Do you plan to murder her as you did her mother?" Mordach only smiled and said, "Wait." The crowd became increasingly restless. Bands began looting the market stalls, snatching food and produce. Wine and drugs passed freely. Stark wondered how much longer Mordach could control them. Then the cry went up from the gate. "The wise woman! Gerrith is coming." An expectant quiet settled over the square. Hundreds of heads IF turned, and it seemed as though the Irnanese all drew one deep breath and held it. Men-at-arms appeared, opening a way through the press. Behind them rolled a cart, a farm-cart soiled and reeking with the work of the fields. After that marched more men-at-arms. In the cart stood two Wandsmen, each clinging with one hand to the jolting stakes and holding with the other the tall figure of a woman between them. S he wore a great black veil that enveloped her from head to heels, a single shroudlike garment that concealed her face and all else save her height. Set upon her head and circling the veil was a diadem the color of old ivory. "The Robe and Crown of Fate," said Yarrod, and the folk of Irnan let out their pent breath in a savage wail of protest. The mob drowned it in their own blood-cry. The cart crossed the square, halted at the platform steps. The woman was made to leave it and climb. The diadem appeared first above the level of the platform floor. It looked to be frail and old, and its ornament was a circle of tiny grinning skulls. Then there was the sway of dark draperies and Gerrith, wise woman of Irnan, stood before Mordach with the Wandsmen on either side. Because of the veil Stark could not be sure. But he thought Gerrith was looking past Mordach, straight at him. Yet she spoke to Mordach, and her voice was clear and sweet and ringing, without a hint of fear. "This was not well done, Mordach." "No?" he said. "Let us see." He turned from her, speaking over the heads of his Farers to the people of Irnan. His voice carried to the walls. "You of Irnan. Watch now and learn!" He turned again to Gerrith and pointed his wand at Stark. "What do you see there, daughter of Gerrith?" "I see the Dark Man." "The Dark Man of your mother's prophecy?" "Yes." Well, thought Stark, and what else could she say? "The Dark Man, supposed to destroy. There he stands bound and helpless, waiting for death." Mordach laughed heartily, as though he found these human lapses from reason genuinely amusing. "He will destroy nothing. Do you recant, woman? Do you admit the lie?" "No." "Then you are no wiser than your mother, and your sight is no more true. Do you hear out there, you of Irnan?" Again his words carried far. And where they did not reach, other tongues took them up and passed them on. The whispering rose like surf against the walls, up to the windows and the rooftops. "Your prophecy is false, your wise woman a liar, your Dark Man a sham!" In one swift motion he ripped crown and veil from Gerrith. Astonishment, surprise, shock, outrage... Stark could hear the outbursts from the Irnanese beyond the delighted screaming of the mob. Gerrith stood tall and calm, as though she had expected to be thus denuded. And naked she was, smooth skin warm bronze with the sunlight on it and a thick braid of bronzy hair hanging down her back. Her body was strong and straight and proud, not flinching before the lewdness of the crowd. Nudity was commonplace on Skaith and hardly to be noticed, but this was different. This was a stripping of more than the mere body. Mordach was exhibiting her. He was attempting to strip her soul. He tossed the black veil to the mob and let them tear it to bits. The diadem he smashed beneath his feet and kicked the old yellowed fragments contemptuously away. "There are your robe and crown," he said. "We shall have no more wise women at Irnan." This, too, she had expected. Her reply was ready. "And you will have no more Irnan to rob, Mordach." She spoke with the tongue of prophecy, and the huge crowd fell silent. "The Crown has come with us from the old Irnan, all through the Great Wandering and the centuries of rebuilding. Now you have destroyed it and the history of Irnan is finished." Mordach shrugged and said, "Bind her." But before the men-at-arms could reach her she turned and raised her arms and cried out in a wonderful ringing voice. "Irnan is finished! You must go and build a new city, on a new world." Then she submitted herself to the binding. Mordach cried cuttingly, "Pray do not go at once, people of Irnan! Stay a while and watch the Dark Man die." Laughter swept the mob. "Yes, stay!" they jeered. "Don't leave us now. At least wait for ships." Yarrod, bound to his post, threw back his head. A harsh wild scream rose from him. "Rise up, you dogs! Rise up and tear them. Where are your guts, your pride, your manhood..." The madness was on him, the madness that makes dead men and heroes. Mordach lifted, his hand. One of the Izvandians stepped up and quite impersonally thrust his short spear into Yarrod 's breast. A clean and merciful stroke, Stark noticed, though he was sure Mordach would have preferred something more lingering. Yarrod sagged against the post. "Cut him down," said Mordach. IF "Throw his body to the crowd.' The tree-bark women commenced a shrill chanting, raising their arms to the sun. Yarrod's red head, cometlike, marked his passage. Stark preferred not to watch what happened after that, though he could not shut out the sounds. He lifted his gaze to the walls of Irnan, to the windows and the rooftops. He was peripherally aware of Gerrith being bound to the post Yarrod had just quitted. At Stark's other side, Halk was weeping. Mordach and the other Wandsmen stood benignly watching their flock, talking among themselves, planning the next act, the dramatic climax of their lecture on the folly of rebellion. Many of the Irnanese were going now. They had their cloaks pulled over their heads, as though they could not bear any more. They melted away into the narrow streets around the square. Gerrith was speaking. "So they leave us," she said. Stark turned his attention to her. She was looking at him. fler eyes were a warm gold-bronze in color, honest eyes, sorrowful but calm. "It seems that Mordach is right, that my mother's prophecy was born of her own desires and not the true sight. So you will die for nothing and that is a great pity." She shook her head. The bronze braid had fallen forward over her shoulder and the shining end of it moved between her breasts. "A great pity." She studied him, his size and strength, the structure of his facial bones, the shape of his mouth, the expression of his eyes. She appeared full of regret and compassion. "I'm sorry. Why did you come here?" "Looking for Ashton." She seemed astounded. "But... "And that's what Gerrith predicted, isn't it? So maybe after all..." She would have spoken again but he cautioned her to silence. The Wandsmen were still conversing. The men-at-arms had returned to their positions, looking disdainfully at the mob that growled and howled and bestially tore. Stark glanced again at the windows. Was he imagining...? No longer were they crowded with watchers. The shutters were pulled to, but not closed, as though to hide what went on iff the rooms behind them yet leave a view of the square. There were still people on the roofs but not so many as before. And there was movement of a furtive sort behind turrets and chimney-stacks. Stark took a deep breath and allowed himself a small bit of hope. He also braced himself for action. Mordach came and stood before him. "Well," he said, "and how shall the Dark Man die? Shall I give him to the Little Sisters of the Sun? Shall I let my Farers play with him? Or shall I have him flayed?" The tip of his wand traced lines on Stark's skin. "Slowly, of course. A strip at a time. Yes. And whom shall we call to flay our Dark Man? The Izvandians? No, this is not their affair." He looked at the Imanese elders standing bowed in their shackles. "It is their affair. They planned to desert us, to deny their duty to their fellow men. They fell into the error of selfishness and greed. The Dark Man is their symbol. They shall flay him!" The crowd was overjoyed. Mordach took a dagger from his belt. He thrust it into the hand of a graybeard, who stared back at him with loathing and dropped it. Mordach smiled. "I haven't said the alternative, old man. The choice is simple. A strip of his skin, or your life." "Then," said the graybeard, "I must die." "As you wish," said Mordach. He turned toward the nearest manat-arms. Stark heard the ripping thud of arrow into flesh, saw the feathered butt rise out of Mordach's breast as though it had suddenly blossomed there. Mordach drew in one shocked breath, a kind of inverted scream. He looked up and saw all the shuttered windows opening and men with bows standing in them. He saw the shafts beginning to pour like rain, and then he went to his knees and watched his Izvandians drop, and his green Wandsmen. He turned his face to Stark and the wise woman, a face filled with horrible doubt. Stark was glad Mordach had that to take with him into the dark. The graybeard had been a warrior in his time. He touched Mordach's body with his foot and said fiercely, "Dog. Death to all like you!" More archers appeared on the walls, on the roofs. They were shooting into the mob now. There was a great squalling and shrieking, a mighty surge of panic. Stark saw a body of mercenaries come in from the gate. At the same time, from the side streets, citizens of Irnan were streaming back into the square, armed with anything they could get their hands on. Among them was one group, well armed and keeping close order, that cut their way through the pack with ruthless efficiency, heading for the platform. They gained it. A few stayed to hold the steps. The others hustled the elders down and cut the captives loose. Stark and the survivors of Yarrod's band caught up weapons from the dead Izvandians. They rushed down the steps and closed ranks around Gerrith and the elders. They started to fight their way back into the streets. Some of the Farers, crazy with drugs and fanatic hatred, rushed the group, careless of the swords. The Irnanese cried, "Yarrod! Yarrod!" It got to be a chant. They killed their way across the square to the rhythm of it. IF They passed into a narrow street between buildings of gray stone that had grown up during the centuries and then grown together overhead, so that in some places the street was more like a tunnel. It was quiet here. They hurried on, as rapidly as the elders could move, and presently entered a doorway. Beyond it was a hall of some size, hung with banners and furnished with one great table and a row of massive chairs. People were gathered there. Immediately the elders were helped to the chairs. Somebody shouted. "Armorer! Come here and get these shackles off." A swordsman had brought a cloak to Gerrith and covered her with it. She was standing beside Stark. She turned to him with a fey look and spoke. "Mother always knows best." VI H alk's eyes were red with rage and weeping but his mouth smiled, all teeth and vengefulness. "They don't need us here, Dark Man. Are you coming?" ' Stark glanced questioningly at Gerrith. She nodded. "Go if you will. Stark. Your bane is not in Irnan." He wondered if she knew of another place where it could be. He went back into the streets with Halk. Bands of citizens were hunting down Farers like rabbits in the twists and turns of the narrow ways. It was obvious that the Irnanese had matters firmly in hand. Archers were taking up new positions around the great gate where scores of Farers were shrieking and trampling each other, fighting to get out and away. Stark saw no Izvandians. With their paymaster dead, he guessed that they had simply retired to their barracks to let the battle go on without them. The treebark women had taken refuge underneath the platform, more to escape the crush, apparently, than because they were afraid. They were chanting ecstatically, busy with the task of feeding Old Sun. The ginger star was feasting well today. There was really not much left to do. A few last pockets of resistance remained, and the work of mopping up of strays. But the fight was won -- had been won, really, with that first flight of arrows. Mordach's body still lay on the platform. The little man had pushed too hard. Take the folk whom Yarrod had said would not lift a hand to save him and his followers. Those reluctant ones had lifted both hands to save their elders and their wise woman, to cleanse themselves of the shame Mordach had put upon them. Halk sallied on alone to exact still more payment for Yarrod. Stark could not see that he was needed anywhere so he put up his sword and climbed to the platform. Among the sprawled bodies he found the fragmented old ivory of the trampled crown. One little skull was still intact, grinning as though it could taste the blood that speckled it. Stark retrieved the skull, clutched it in his fist. He descended the steps again, the voices of the tree-bark women shrill in his ears. He hoped he would never meet a pack of them baying on their own mountain-tops. He made his way through the streets, returning to the council hall. There he found a bustle of messengers, people coming and going, a feeling of urgency. Not seeing Gerrith anywhere, he tucked away the small skull in the rags of his tunic. He was wondering what to do next when a man came up to him and said, "Jerann asks that you come with me." "Jerann?" The man indicated Gray beard. "The chief of our Council. I am to see that you have everything you need." Stark thanked the man and followed him. They trudged along a corridor and up a winding star to another corridor, thence into a chamber with narrow windows set in the thickness of the stone walls. A fire burned on the hearth. The chamber had a bed, a chest, a settle, all heavy and well-made. A rug of coarse wool adorned the floor. A curtained alcove contained a stone bath reached by three steps. Serving men were waiting with pails of steaming water and rough towels. Gratefully Stark consigned himself to their care. An hour later he was washed, shaved and dressed in a clean tunic. As he finished the last of a solid meal, the man came again and reported that Jerann required Stark's presence in the council hall. Freed of his shackles, Jerann was tall, erect and soldierly. He still wore that look of fierce pride but he was under no illusions. He was certain that the revolt would bring quick reprisal. "We are all fated men now," he said. "We can only face boldly what destiny brings us. For good or evil, the die is cast." He gave Stark a hard, measuring look. All the members of the Council were gazing at him thus. Stark knew what they were thinking. Why an off-worlder? And what was there about him that had triggered this sudden stunning break from all history, all custom, all law? What had he bestowed on them, freedom and new life -- or utter destruction? Stark had no answers for them. The prophecy had held only that he would destroy the Lords Protector. It had not predicted the subsequent effects. Besides, he had little faith in prognostication... "Eric John Stark, Earthman, tell us how you came to Skaith. And how you came to Irnan. And why." Though knowing perfectly well IF that Jerann had already heard the story Stark told it again, carefully and in detail. He told of Ashton, of Pax; he made a special point of how the matter of emigration stood with the Ministry of Planetary Affairs. Jerann said, "Then it seems we must believe in Dark Men and prophecies, and go our way in blind hope." "What about the other citystates?" asked Stark. "They must be in much the same straits as Iman. Will they rise to help you?" "I don't know. We'll do what we can to persuade them, naturally. My guess is that they will prefer to wait and see." "Wait and see what?" "If the prophecy is a true one." Jerann turned to an aide. "Have the Izvandian brought to me." As the man hurried away, Jerann said to Stark, "We must learn as soon as possible whether it is true or not." There was a wait, an awkwardness. A vacuum of uneasy silence within the encompassing sounds of triumph from the streets outside. The Council members were tired and showing strain. The enormity of the commitment Irnan had made this day weighed on them heavily. A knot of people came in, clustered around one tall linthaired warrior. Stark noticed the gold ornaments on his harness, the torque and armbands. A chief, probably captain of the mercenaries. He was marched up the hall to where the Council sat, and he stood facing Jerann without emotion. Jerann said coldly, "Greetings, Kazimni." The Izvandian said, "I see you, Jerann." J erann took up a heavy sack from the table. "This is the gold owed to you." "To my dead as well? There are families." "To your dead as well." He weighed the sack in his hand. "And there is in addition half as much again." "If you wish to bribe us to leave Irnan," said Kazimni contemptuously, "keep your gold. We have no further business here." Jerann shook his head. "No bribe. Payment for services." Kazimni cocked one pale insolent eyebrow. "Oh?" "Some of our people are going into the Barrens. A small party. We want you to escort them as far as Izvand." Kazimni did not bother to ask why a party of Irnanese were going into the Barrens. It was no concern of his. "Very well," he said. "Give us time to bury our dead and make ready for the journey. We'll go when Old Sun rises." And he added, "With our arms." "With your arms," said Jerann. He gave Kazimni the gold and spoke to the Irnanese escort, "You heard. Give them what they need of supplies." "Better to give them the sword," muttered one of the Irnanese. But they took Kazimni away obediently enough. Stark asked, "Why Izvand?" "Because it is that much closer to the Citadel. And for that distance you will have the protection of an escort. From there you must make your own arrangements. I warn you -- do not underestimate the dangers." "Where exactly is this Citadel? Where is Worldheart?" "I can tell you where tradition puts them. The fact you will learn for yourself." "The Wandsmen know." "Yes. But none are left alive in Irnan to tell us." So that was no help. "Where is Gerrith?" "She had returned to her own place." "Is that safe? The countryside must be full of wandering Farers." "She's well guarded," Jerann said. "You'll see her in the morning. Go now and rest. It's a long road you've come, and a longer one you'll be taking tomorrow." All night, during the intervals of sleep, Stark could hear the restless voices of the city, where preparations were being made for war. The revolt was well begun. But it was only a beginning. He felt guilty for setting the peoples of an entire planet at each other's throats just so two men, off-worlders at that, could escape from it. Still, there had been no help for it. Perhaps it would turn out for the best -- at least from the standpoint of the Irnanese. Well, he thought, that was for the future and it was Gerrith's job to look ahead, not his. He slept. In the dark morning he arose and dressed and was waiting patiently when the man came to summon him. Jerann was below in the council hall. Halk was there too, and Breca, and two others of Yarrod's party. "I am sorry," the old man said, "that Irnan cannot spare you the men you ought to have. We need them here." Halk said, "We'll have to rely on being quick and hard to see. But with the Dark Man to lead us how can we fail?" Stark, who would just as soon have gone on alone, said nothing. Food was brought, and strong bitter beer. After they had breakfasted, Jerann rose and said, "It is time. I'll ride with you as far as the wise woman's grotto." The square was eerily quiet in the chill first light of dawn. Some of the bodies had been taken away. Others were piled stiffly, awaiting the carts. The tree-bark women were gone. Sentries manned the wall and the guard-towers by the gate. The Izvandians, about sixty of them, were already mounted, men and animals alike blowing steam in the cold air. Beasts had been brought for Stark and his party. They mounted and fell in behind the troop. Kazimni rode by and gave them a curt greeting. Old Sun came up. The gates creaked open. The cavalcade moved out. The road, so crowded and noisy the day before, was deserted except for the occasional dead. Some of the Farers had not run fast enough. Morning mist rose thick and white from the fields. Stark breathed deeply, relishing the fresh clean smell of growing things. He became aware that Jerann was watching him. "You're glad to leave the city. You don't like being within walls." Stark laughed. "I didn't realize it was so apparent." "I am not acquainted with Earthmen," said Jerann courteously. "Are they all like you?" "They find me quite as strange as you do." Stark's eyes held a gleam of amusement. "Perhaps even stranger." The old man nodded. "Gerrith said..." "A wolfs head, a landless man, a man without a tribe." Stark lifted his head, looking northward. "Earthmen killed my parents. They would have killed me too, except for Ashton." Jerann glanced at Stark's face and shivered slightly. He did not speak again until, at the upper end of the valley, they reached the wise woman's grotto. a iLY Stark and Jerann turned aside. The cavalcade went on, moving at a steady walking pace that covered a surprising amount of ground without tiring the animals. Stark slid off the soft wooly-haired hide of the saddle-pad and followed Jerann up a steep path, coming finally to a hillside where naked rock jutted, forming rough pillars on either side of a cave. A party of men on guard there rose from around their fire and spoke to Jerann. The wise woman was within, and safe. Inside the cave was hewed an antechamber, where Stark supposed that folk must wait to hear the oracle. At the far end hung heavy curtains of some purple stuff that looked as though it had done duty for many Gerriths. These bore solemn designs embroidered in black. All in all, not a cheerful room. And cold, with the dusty tomb-smell of places shut away forever from the sun. An old woman parted the curtains and signed to them to enter. She wore a sweeping gray gown and her face was all bony sternness. She looked at Stark s though she would tear him with her sharp gaze, rip away his flesh and see what was beneath it. "My old mistress died because of you," she said. "I hope it was not for nothing." "So do I," said Stark, and stepped past her into the inner room. This was somewhat better. There were rugs and hangings to soften the stone, pierced lamps for light and a brazier for warmth. But it was still a cave. Gerrith looked out of place in it with her youth and her golden coloring. She was made for sunlight. She sat in a massive chair behind a massive table. A wide and shallow bowl of silver stood on the table, filled with clear water. "The Water of Vision," she said, and shook her head. "It has given me nothing." There were shadows around her eyes and her face was drawn. "I never had my mother's gift. I never wanted it, though she assured me it would come in its own time whether I wanted it or not. My own gift is small and not to be commanded at will. It's worse than having none at all. Always before, at least, I was able to use the Crown, and I think something of my mother and all the other Gerriths down through the centuries lived on in it and could speak through it. Now there is no Crown and, as Mordach said, no wise woman in Irnan." Stark reached beneath his tunic. "Maybe this will help you." He opened his palm. The little yellow skull grinned up at her. Her face changed. "It is enough," she cried. He handed the skull to her. She leaned over the bowl, holding the gruesome talisman between her hands. The water rippled as though in a sudden wind and then was still. Stark and Jerann waited. And it seemed to Stark that the clear water turned red and thick, and that shapes moved in it, shapes that raised goose-pimples on his skin. Gerrith was startled. "You saw?" "Something." The water was clear again. "What were they?" "I don't know, but they stand between you and the Citadel." She stood up. "I must go with you." Jerann had been standing in the chamber, observing. He said, "But Lady! You can't leave Irnan now... "My work in Irnan is finished. Now the Water of Vision has shown me where my path lies." "Has it shown what the end of that path will be?" "No. You must find your own strength and your own faith, Jerann." She smiled at him with genuine affection. "You've never lacked for either. Go back to your people." She turned suddenly and laughed at Stark. "Not so downcast, Dark Man. I'll not burden you with bowls and braziers and tripods. Only this." She placed the small skull in a pouch at her girdle. "Know that I can ride and shoot as well as any." She called to the old woman and disappeared through IF the hangings into some inner chamber. Jerann looked at Stark. There seemed nothing to say. They nodded to each other and Jerann left. Stark waited, scowling at the placid water in the silver bowl and cursing wise women. Whatever it was he had glimpsed there he would as soon not have seen until met lifesize. In a short time Gerrith returned, wearing tunic and riding cloak. She and Stark walked together out of the cave and down the steep path. The old woman stood in the cave entrance and watched them with eyes like cold-steel daggers. Stark was glad when the trees hid them from her sight. At the foot of the path a gnarly old man had brought Gerrith's mount, with a sack of provisions tied to the saddle pad. She thanked him and bade him goodbye, and the two rode off. They caught up to the party around noon, Old Sun throwing brassy shadows under the rusty bellies of the beasts. Halk shrugged upon seeing Gerrith. "We shall have all the bogies on our side now," he said, and his mouth twisted in what might pass for a smile. "At least we learn one thing. The wise woman has enough faith in her mother's prophecy to put herself at risk." T hey moved steadily toward the Barrens, at night checking their course by the Lamp of the North. At first the road ran among mountains. There were peel-towers on the ridges, falling down, and ruins of fortified villages that stuck to the cliffs like wasps' nests. But the mountains were still inhabited. For three days a band of shaggy people followed them, going along their own secret trails parallel to the road. They carried crude weapons and ran with a curious loping stride, bent forward from the waist. "One of the Wild Bands," Gerrith said. "They obey no law at all except that of blind survival. They even come as far as Iman sometimes. The Wandsmen hate them because they kill Wandsmen and Farers as readily as they kill us." The Izvandian escort was too strong to be attacked, and there were no stragglers. At night, beyond the meager fires, Stark could hear stealthy rustlings. Several times the Izvandian sentries loosed arrows at things creeping toward the picket lines. They killed one of the intruders and Stark looked at the body in the light of morning. His nose wrinkled. "Why do they want to survive?" he wondered aloud. They left the heap of bones unburied on the stony ground. The mountains dwindled to hills covered with dark, stunted scrub. Beyond, to the north, the land flattened out to the horizon, a treeless immensity of white and graygreen, a spongy mossiness flecked by countless icy ponds. The wind blew, sometimes hard, sometimes harder. Old Sun grew more feeble by the day. The Irnanese were stoical, riding the cold hours uncomplaining, wrapped in frosty cloaks. The Izvandians were comfortable and gay. This was their own, their native land. Stark rode often beside Kazimni. "In the days when Old Sun was young," Kazimni would say, and spin out one of the thousand or so legends he seemed to have at his fingertips, all telling of warmth and richness and the fatness of the land. The men of those days had been giants, the women beautiful had had magic weapons that killed from afar, fishermen had worked magic boats that sailed the skies. "Now it is as you see it," he would finish. "But we survive. We are strong. We are happy." "Good," said Stark on one occasion. "I congratulate you. And where is this place they call Worldheart?" Kazimni shrugged. "Nprth."  "That's all you know?" "Yes. If it exists at all." "You sound as though you don't believe in the Lords Protector." Kazimni's wolf face expressed aristocratic scorn. "We do not require them. It makes little difference whether we believe in-them or not." "Yet you sell your swords to the Wandsmen." "Gold is gold, and the Wandsmen have more of it than most. We do not have to like them or follow their religion. We're free men. All the people of the Barrens are free. Not all of us are good. Some do business with the Wandsmen, some do not. Some trade with the citystates, some trade with each other, some do not trade at all but live by rapine. Some are mad. Quite mad. But free. There are no Farers here, and we can defend ourselves. The Wandsmen have found poor pickings among us. They let us alone." "I see," said Stark, and rode for a time in silence. "Strange creatures live in a place by Worldheart," he said at last. "Creatures not human, and yet -- not quite animal." Kazimni gave him a sidelong glance out of tilted yellow eyes. "How do you know that?" "Maybe the wind whispered it to me." "Or perhaps the wise woman." "What are they, Kazimni?" "We're great talkers here in the Barrens. Great tellers of tales. We fill the winter nights with talk. When our throats go dry with it we wet them with cups of khamm and talk more." "What are they?" "The Harsenyi nomads bring us tales, and so do the darkland traders. Sometimes they winter with us at Izvand, and those are good winters." He paused. "I have heard stories of Northhounds." IF Stark repeated the name. "Northhounds?" It had a threatening ring to it. "I can't tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They tell, as though they had been part of it, a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove. North hounds are a sort of demon to the Harsenyi and to some of the traders. Monsters that appear out of the snow-mist and do terrible things. It is said that the Lords Protector created them long ago to guard the Citadel. It is said these demons still guard it, and woe take any wanderer who stumbles into their domain." Hairs prickled briefly at the back of Stark's neck, just at the memory of those shapes he had seen in the Water of Vision. He changed the subject. "So freedom is what makes your people content with life here in the Barrens -- is that it?" "Is it not enough?" Kazimni jerked his chin contemptuously toward the Irnanese. "If we lived soft, as they do, we too would be slaves, as they are." Stark could understand that. "You must have known what brought on the trouble at Irnan." "Yes. Good trouble. As soon as we've rested and seen our wives, we'll be back on the Border. There will be need of fighting men." "No doubt. But how would your people feel about emigrating?" "To another world?" Kazimni shook his head. "The land shapes us. We are what we are because of it. If we were in another place, we would be another people. No. Old Sun will last us yet a while. And life in the Barrens is not so bad. You will see that when we reach Izvand." T ihe road looped and wound among the frozen ponds. Other travelers were encountered though not as many as in the Fertile Belt. And they were of a different breed, darker and grimmer than the flotsam of the southern roads. There was a good deal of trade back and forth across the Border: drovers with herds for the markets of Izvand and Komrey, merchants with wagonloads of grain and wool, strings of pack-animals carrying manufactured goods from the southern workshops, long lines of great creaking wains hauling timber from some far place in the mountains. Coming the other way were caravans bringing furs and salt and dried fish. All traveled in bodies, well armed, each lot keeping to itself. There were inns and rest-houses along the way but Kazimni avoided them, preferring to camp in the open. "Thieves and robbers," he said of the innkeepers. And of the accommodations. "They are verminous. They stink." The Izvandians moved rapidly, passing everything else on the road. Yet Stark sometimes felt as if their progress were only an illusion and they were trapped forever in the unchanging landscape. Gerrith sensed his impatience. "I share it," she told him. "For you, one man. For me, a people. Yet things must go at their own pace." "Does your gift tell you that?" She smiled at him. It was night. The Three Ladies shone through gaps in scudding cloud-wrack; they were in an unfamiliar quarter of the sky now, but still beautiful. Old friends. Stark had grown quite fond of them. Nearer at hand, the light of a fire flared and flickered across Gerrith's face. "Something does tell me. Everything is in train now, and the end has already been written. We have only to meet it." Stark grunted, unconvinced. The beasts, huddled together with their tails to the wind, munched at heaps of moss piled up for them. The Izvandians laughed and chattered round their fires. The Irnanese were wrapped bundles, suffering in silence. Gerrith said, "Why do you love this man Ashton so deeply?" "But you know that. He saved my life." "And so you cross the stars to risk losing it on a world you never heard of before? To go through all this when you know that he may already be dead? It's not enough, Stark. Will you tell me?" "Tell you what?" "Who you are. What you are. A lesser gift even than mine could sense that you're different. Inside, I mean. There's a stillness, something I can't touch. Tell me about you and Ashton." So he told her of his childhood on a cruel planet far too close to its sun, where the heat killed by day and the frost by night. Where the sky thundered and the rocks split. Where the ground shook and mountains collapsed. "I was born there. We were part of a mining colony. A quake and a great fall of rock killed everyone but me. I'd have died too, but the People took me in. They were the aborigines. They weren't human, not quite. They still had their hairy pelts, and they didn't talk much, a few clicks and grunts, cries for hunting and warning and callingtogether. They shared all they had with me." Heat and cold and hunger. Those were the most of it. But their hairy bodies had warmed his small nakedness in the bitter night, and their hard hands had fed him. The People had taught him love and patience, taught how to hunt the great rock-lizard, how to suffer, how to survive. He remembered their faces: wrinkled, snouted, toothed. Beautiful faces to him, beautiful and wise with the wisdom of beginnings. His people. Always his people, his only people. And yet they had named him Man-Withouta-Tribe. "More Earthmen came, in time," Stark said. "They needed the food IF and water the People were using, so they killed them. The People were considered only animals. Me they put in a cage and kept for a curiosity. They poked sticks between the bars to make me snap and snarl at them. They were going to kill me too, when the novelty wore off. Then Ashton came." Ashton the administrator, armed with the lightnings of authority. Stark smiled wryly. "To me he was just another flatfaced enemy, someone to be hated and killed. I'd lost all my human links, of course, and the humans I'd met had given me little cause to love them. Ashton took me in charge, all the same. I couldn't have been a very pleasant charge, but he had the patience of mountains. He tamed me. He taught me house manners, and how to speak in words. Most of all he taught me that while there are bad men, there are also good ones. Yes, he did give me much more than just my life." "I understand now," Gerrith said. She stirred the fire. "I'm sorry I can't tell you whether your friend is still alive." "We'll know soon enough," Stark said. He lay down on the cold ground and slept. And dreamed. He was following Old One up a cliff, angry because his feet did not have long clever toes, fiercely determined to make up for his deformity by climbing twice as hard and twice as high. The sun burned terribly on his naked back. The rock scorched him. Black peaks pierced the sky on all sides. Old One slid without sound into a crevice, making the imperative sign. The boy N'Chaka crept in beside him. Old One pointed with his throwing-stick. High above them on a ledge, its huge jaws open in sensuous languor, a rock-lizard slept half-lidded in the sun. With infinite care, moving one muscle at a time, his belly tight with emptiness and hope, the boy began again to follow Old One up the cliff... Stark did not like the dream. It saddened him even in sleep, so he started awake in order to escape it. He sat a long time by the dying fire, listening to the lonely sounds of the night. When he slept again it was without memories. Next day, in the afternoon, the party saw the roofs of a stockaded town by the shore of a frozen sea. With pride and affection, Kazimni called, "There's Izvand." It was a sturdy town, solidly built of timber brought from the mountains. Its roofs were steep to shed the snow. Izvand was the trade center for this part of the Inner Barrens so that there was a constant coming and going of wagons and pack trains. Traffic churned the narrow streets by day and at night the mud froze into ankle-breaking solidity. In the summer, Kazimni said, fishing was the business of many Izvandians. As soon as the ice went out of the harbor the high-prowed boats would be hauled from their winter sheds. "Not a bad life," he said. "Plenty of food and fighting. Why not stay here with us, Stark?" The off-worlder shook his head. Kazimni shrugged. "Very well. This is the season for the darkland traders to start moving north. I'll see if I can arrange something. Meantime, I know a good inn." The inn had a creaking sign, much weathered, depicting some large and improbable fish with horns. There were stabling and fodder for the beasts, and rooms for the people. These were small and cold, each sleeping four in two beds, and they had lacked soap and water for a long time. The commonroom steamed with warmth and sweat and the not-unappetizing odor of fish soup. It was good to be warm again, to eat hot food and drink local khamm, which was like sweet white lightning. Stark enjoyed these simple pleasures but after a while he rose from the table. Halk said, "Where are you going?" "I have a mind to see the town." '"Don't you think we had better be planning what we're going to do next?" Halk had drunk quite a bit of khamm. "A little more information might help us decide," said Stark mildly. "In any case, we'll need warmer clothing and more provisions." Without noticeable enthusiasm, the Irnanese contingent rose 'and fetched their cloaks and followed him into the chilly street. Halk. Breca, who was Halk's shieldmate. Gerrifh. Atril and Wake, the brothers, two of Yarrod's picked men. Stark could not have asked for better. Yet the six were a sriiall handful against the north. Of what help could they be now? Not for the first time Stark considered slipping away from them to finish his journey alone and unencumbered. He was surprised to hear Gerrith say softly, "No. Me at least you must have with you. Perhaps the others as well -- I don't know. But if you go alone, you will fail." "Your gift?" asked Stark, and she nodded. "My gift. On that score it is quite clear." They wandered through a market roofed against snow. Smoky lamps and braziers burned. Merchants sat amid their wares, and Stark noticed that few were of Izvand. The pale-haired warriors apparently scorned such occupation. The market was busy. The party from Irnan meandered with the crowd, buying furs and boots and sacks of the sweet fatty journeycake they make in Izvand against the cold. After a while Stark found what he was looking for, the street IF of the chart-makers. It was a small street, lined with alcoves in which men sat hunched over their drawing tables, surrounded on three sides by honeycomb shelves stuffed with rolls of parchment. Stark strolled from shop to shop, accumulating an armload of maps. The group returned to the inn. Stark found a relatively quiet table in a corner of the common room and spread out his purchases. The maps were for the use of traders and in essentials agreed well enough. The roads, with inns and shelter-houses marked. Modern towns like Izvand, pegs to hold the roads together where they crossed. Vestiges, here and there, of older roads leading to older cities, and most of these marked ominously with death's heads. On other matters the maps were vaguer. Several showed Worldheart, hedged about with many warnings, but each located the fabled city in a different place. Others did not show it all, merely indicating a huge area of nothing, an area marked by the comforting legend : demons . "Somewhere in here," said Stark, setting his hand over the blank area. "If we keep going north, sooner or later we'll find someone who knows." "So the maps don't help much," said Halk. "You haven't looked closely," Gerrith said. "They all show one thing -- that we must travel by road." Her fingers flicked across the wrinkled parchment. "Here we are blocked by the sea, and here by a mountain wall. Here again, where the land is low, are lakes and bogs." "All frozen now," Halk said. "Impassable even so. The beasts would be dead or crippled and we starving before a week's end. So we must stick to the road. A road can be watched, guarded. Journeying so can be dangerous. But we have no choice." "Besides," said Wake, who always spoke for the brothers, "there is the matter of time. Irnan may already be under attack. Even if we could make it by another route, it would take too long." Halk looked around the table. "You're all agreed?" They were. Halk tossed back another glass of khamm. "Fine. Let us go by the road, and go fast." "There is another question," Stark said. "Whether to travel alone or join some trader. A trader's company would be safer..." "If you could trust the trader." "... but we would be held to the wagon pace." "We didn't come this journey to be safe," said Halk. "For once, I agree with you," Stark said. "By the road, then, and by ourselves." The others voiced assent. Stark bent over the maps again. "I'd give much to know where the Wandsmen's road runs." "You won't find it on these maps," said Gerrith. "They must go up from Skeg to the east, across the desert. There would be posthouses and wells, everything to get them quickly on their way." "And safeguards, doubtless, to make sure that no one can follow them." Stark began rolling up the parchments. "We'll leave at the fourth hour. Best get some sleep." "Not yet a few moments," said Breca, and nodded toward the inn door. Kazimni had just entered, in company with a lean brown man in a furred cloak who moved with the agile questing gait of a wolverine. "I'll talk," said Stark quietly. "No comment, no matter what I say." Kazimni hailed them with great cheer. "Greetings, friends. Here is one you will be glad to meet." He introduced his companion. "Amnir of Komrey." The man in the furred cloak bowed. His eyes, gleaming like brown beryls, darted from one face to another. His mouth smiled. "Amnir trades far into the darklands. He thinks he can be of help to you." Stark invited the pair to sit and introduced his party. The merchant ordered a round of khamm for all. "Kazimni tells me that you have an errand northward," he said. He glanced at the heap of parchments on the table. "I see you have bought maps." "Yes." "You were, perhaps, thinking of going on alone?" "Hazardous, we know," said Stark. "But our mission is urgent." "Better to make haste slowly than not at all," said Amnir sententiously. "There are wicked men in the Barrens. You can't know how wicked. Six of you -- though all stout fighters, I'm sure -- would be as nothing against those you will meet along the road." "What would they want with us?" Stark asked. "We have nothing worth the stealing." "You have yourselves," said Amnir. "Your bodies. Your strength." He bowed to the ladies. "Your beauty. Men and women are sold in the Barrens, for many purposes." Halk said, "I think anyone who tried that would find us a poor bargain." "No doubt. But why take the risk? If you're captured, or killed resisting capture, where is your errand then?" He leaned forward over the table. Sincerity shone on his face. "I trade farther into the darklands than anyone because I am able to face the dangers there not only with courage, which many others have as well, but with prudence, which many others seem to lack. I travel with fifty well-armed men. Why not share that safety?" Stark frowned, as though pondering. Halk seemed on the point of saying something but Breca silenced him with a warning glare. IF "All he tells you is true," Kazimni said. "By Old Sun, I swear it." "The time, though." Stark shook his head. "Alone, we can move much faster." "For a while," Amnir agreed. "And then..." He made a chopping gesture with the edge of his hand against his neck. "Besides, I'm no laggard -- I can't afford to be." "When do you leave?" "In the morning, before first light." Again Stark seemed to ponder. "What price would you want?" "No price. You'd find your own food and mounts, of course, and if we should be attacked you'd be expected to fight. That's all." "What could be fairer?" asked Kazimni. "And look you, if the pace proves to be too slow, you can always leave the wagons behind. Is that not so, Amnir?" Amnir laughed. "I'd not be the one to stop them." Stark looked across at Gerrith. "What does the wise woman say?" "That we should do what the Dark Man thinks best." "Well," said Stark, "if if s true that we can go our own way if we choose to later on..." "Of course. Of course!" "Then I think we ought to go with Amnir in the morning." They struck hands on it. They drank more khamm. They arranged final details and the two men left. Stark gathered his maps, led his party upstairs. They crowded into one of the small rooms. "Now what does the wise woman say?" asked Stark. "That Amnir of Komrey means us no good." "It needs no wise woman to see that," said Halk. "The man smells of treachery. Yet the Dark Man has agreed to go with him." "The Dark Man is not above telling lies when he thinks they're called for." Stark looked around at them. "We'll not wait for the fourth hour. As soon as the inn is quiet, we go. You can do your sleeping in the saddle." In the star-blazing midnight they rode out of Izvand. The cold ribbon of road stretched north toward the darklands. They had it all to themselves and made the most of it. Halk seemed consumed with a passion for haste, and Stark was in no mOod to dispute him. He, too, wanted to leave Amnir as far behind as possible. The land had begun its long slope upward to the ice-locked ranges of the north, and from the higher places Stark could keep a watchful eye on the backtrail. He could also sniff the wind and listen to the silence, and feel the vast secret land that encircled him. It was not a good land. The primitive in him sensed evil there like a sickness. It wanted to turn tail and go shivering and howling back to the smoky warmth of Izvand and the safety of walls. The reasoning man in him agreed, but kept him moving forward nevertheless. Clouds hid the Three Ladies. Snow began failing. Stark disliked the inability to see clearly; anything might come upon them out of those pale drifting clouds. The party rode more slowly, keeping close together. They came upon an inn crouched over a crossroads. It had a tall roof like a wizard's hat, and one slitted yellow eye. Stark considered stopping there, instantly decided against it. By common consent they left the road and made a wide circle round the inn, walking the beasts carefully so as to make no sound. Daylight was slow in coming. When Old Sun did show himself at last it was only as a smear of gingercolored light behind a blur of snowflakes. It was in that strange brassy glow that they came to the bridge. T Ihe bridge, the rocky gorge it spanned, and the village that existed solely to administer to and exhort for the bridge, were clearly marked on all the maps. There was apparently no way around that did not take at least a week of days, even without snow, and the toll seemed reasonable enough. Stark loosened his sword in its scabbard and dug some coins from the leather bag that hung about his neck underneath the bulky furs. The Irnanese checked their own weapons. In close order all trotted themselves and their pack animals toward the toll-house, a squat blocky structure commanding the southern end of the bridge. An identical structure stood at the northern end. Each building contained a winch that raised or lowered a portion of the bridge floor, so that no one could force a way through without paying. You might take one tollhouse but never both, and a part of the bridge would always be unreachably open. The drop below was unpleasant, several hundred feet down past jagged boulders rimmed with snow and frozen spray to a vicious little river that drained some glacier-slope higher up. The village was built on the southern side, against the face of a low cliff, and strongly fortified. Stark guessed that the convenience of the bridge outweighed the nuisance factor and so generations of merchants had let it survive. Three men came out of the building. Short broad men, ugly and troll-like, wearing many furs and obviously false smiles. "How much?" asked Stark. "For how large a party?" Small eyes probed the snowfall behind them. "How many beasts? How many wagons? The bridge floor suffers. Lumber is costly. Planks must be replaced. This is heavy labor, and our children starve to pay for the wood." "No wagons," said Stark. "A dozen beasts. What you see." IF Three faces stared in disbelief. "Six persons traveling alone?" Again Stark asked, "How much?" "Ah. Um," said the chief of the three men, suddenly animated. "For so small a party, a small price." He named it. Stark leaned down and counted coins into the grimy palm. It did seem, indeed, too small a price. The men departed chattering into the tollhouse. They had some way of signaling to the other side of the gorge, and presently both sections of the bridge went creaking down into position. Stark and the Irnanese rode onto the bridge. Before they could reach the northern section of the bridge it shot upward again, leaving a large cold gap opening on death. "All right then," said Stark wearily, "we fight." They turned, with the intention of bolting back off the bridge. A flight of arrows tore from slits in the toll-house wall and thumped into the planking in front of them. "Stand where you are!" a voice shouted. "Lay down your weapons." A whole band of trolls, furred and armed, came waddling from the village. Stark looked at the nasty little slits in the wall, saw more arrows protruding at the ready. "I think we're fairly caught," he said. "Shall we live a little longer, or die now?" "Live," advised Gerrith. They dropped weapons and stood where they were. The villagers swarmed onto the bridge, dragged the travelers out of the saddle, pushing, pummeling, laughing raucously. The beasts were led off and tethered to a rack by the toll-house. The bridgekeeper and his friends came out. "Six persons traveling alone!" The bridgekeeper guffawed, and lifted his hands to the brassy glow in the south. "Old Sun, we thank you for sending such fools." He turned and pawed at Stark's garments, searching for the purse. Stark resisted a strong impulse to tear the man's throat out with his teeth. Halk, who was being similarly handled, got his hands free and fought. He was immediately clubbed down. "Don't damage him," said the bridgekeeper. "All that muscle is worth its weight in iron." He found the purse and slashed the thong that held it, then prodded at Stark's chest with his dirty fingers. "This one, too... all strong big men, the four of them. Good, good! And the women... He cackled, skipping on his thick feet. "Maybe we'll keep them here for a while, eh? Until we're tired, eh? Look at them, lads, and their fine long legs..." Gerrith said, "I was wrong. It would have been better to die." And Stark answered, "Listen." Faint sounds. In the distance. They swept nearer and now everybody heard. Rush of hoofbeats, jingle of harness, clash of arms. Riders materialized out of the falling snow. They came in strength; they came like the wind, their lances sharp and Amnir of Komrey at their head. The villagers turned and ran. "Stand! cried Amnir, and the riders herded them back, jabbing them painfully so that they hopped and screamed. The bridgekeeper gaped, Stark's purse still in his hand. "You have broken the covenant," Amnir accused. "The covenant by which we let you live. It is contracted that once a man has paid fair toll, he shall pass without let or hindrance." "But," said the bridgekeeper, "six persons alone... such fools are doomed in any case. Could I spurn the gift of Old Sun?" Amnir's hard eyes looked down upon him. Amnir's lance-tip pricked his throat. "That which is in your hand. Does it belong to you?" The man shook his head. He let the purse drop with a small heavy clink at his feet. "What shall I do," asked Amnir, "with you and your people?" "Lord," said the bridgekeeper, "I'm a poor man. My back is broken from the labor of the bridge. My children starve." "Your children," said Amnir, "are as fat as hogs and twice as dirty. As for your back, it's fit enough for thieving." The bridgekeeper spread his hands. "Lord, I saw a chance for profit and I took it. Any man would do the same. You can slay us, of course, but then who will do our work? Think of the time it will cost you. Think of the wealth you will lose." He shuddered. "Think of the Gray Feeders. Perhaps even you, Lord, might make your end upon their hooks." "It does not become you, at this time, to threaten me," said Amnir, and thrust a little harder with his lance. Two large tears formed and rolled down the bridgekeeper's cheeks. "Lord, I am in your hands," he said, and wilted inside his furs. "If I spare you, will you keep the covenant?" "Forever!" "Which means until the next time you think you can safely break it." Amnir turned in the saddle and shouted. "Back to your sties, filthy ones. Go!" The villagers fled. The bridgekeeper wept and tried to embrace Amnir's off-side knee. "Free passage, lord! For you, no toll." "I'm touched," said Amnir. "And pray remove your dirty paws." The bridgekeeper scuttled, bowing himself backward into the tollhouse. Amnir dismounted, walked over to Stark and his party. Halk, bloodied and furious, had been helped to his feet. IF "I warned you," said Amnir. "Did I not warn you?" "You did." Stark looked past him at the riders, seeing how they had moved quietly to form a half-circle of lances that pinned the unarmed Irnanese against the end of the open bridge. "You must have ridden hard to overtake us." "Quite hard. You should have waited, Stark. You should have traveled with my wagons. What was the matter? Didn't you trust me?" Stark said, "I trust men little." "You are wise," said Amnir, and smiled. He motioned to his men. "Take them." T Ihe Three Ladies were remote, withdrawn, scarcely showing their faces. The Lamp of the North, like a burning emerald, dominated the sky. The short days of the darklands were little lighter than the nights. Old Sun's dull gleaming stained the sky rather than brightened it. The white snow turned the color of rust, and the vast plain, strewn with the wrecks of abandoned cities, tilted upward to a distant wall of mountains all daubed in the same red-ochre. The line of great wagons creaked and crawled across this unreal landscape, sixteen of them, canvas tops booming in the wind. From long before sunrise until long after dark the wagons rolled. When they halted they were deployed in a circular fort, the beasts and the people within. Stark and the Irnanese rode their own mounts and were fed from the rations they had bought at Izvand. Amnir was delighted that transporting them was costing him nothing. Each mount was led by an armed rider. The captives had their fur-gloved hands bound and their fur-booted ankles tied together by a thong extending under the animal's belly. The bonds were arranged expertly to hold without impeding circulation so that the extremities should not freeze. Uncomfortable as this was it was an improvement over the first days when Amnir had kept them inside the wagons, away from curious eyes. There were other parties of armed merchants on the roads, and Amnir had .business at two or three centers were itinerant traders like the Harsenyi nomads brought their wares. These places were like blockhouses with crude shelters around them where travelers might find some respite from snow and wind. Amnir stayed away from the shelters. He seemed to have no friends among the darkland traders. His men did not mingle with the men of other wagon trains but remained aloof and perpetually on guard . At the last of the centers there had been an altercation with some wild-looking nomads bringing in a string of shaggy beasts loaded with bundles. These people had called Amnir unpleasant names in a barbarous dialect. They had thrown stones and clots of ice. Amnir's men had stood ready but no actual attack had developed and the wild ones had withdrawn once they had worked off their bad tempers. Amnir had not been disturbed. "I've taken away much of their trade," he had said. "It was necessary to kill some of them. Let them gabble at me, if it gives them pleasure." After that the caravan had left the marked roads, had gone off into this enormous emptiness. The wagons followed a dim and ancient track only apparent when it went through some cut or over a causeway that showed an engineering skill long lost on Skaith. "Once, when Old Sun was young, all this land was rich and there were great cities," said Amnir. "This road served them. Men didn't ride beasts in those days or drive clumsy wagons. They had machines, bright shining things swift as the wind. Or if they wanted to they could take wing and rush through the sky like shooting stars. Now we plod, as you see, across the cold corpse of our world." But there was a note of pride in his voice. We are men, still, we survive, we are not defeated. "For what purpose," asked Stark, "do we plod?" Amnir had refused to state what he intended doing with the captives. It was obvious from his pleased expression when he looked at them that he had large plans. Whatever they might be, no doubt Kazimni had had a part in making them and would share in the profits. Stark cursed himself for having been so careless. Kazimni had performed his agreed-on task honorably, getting the party safely to Izvand. Stark had neglected contracting with the man to get them safely out again. Knowing perfectly well what Stark was fishing for, Amnir smiled and evaded. "Trade," he said. "Wealth. I told you that I trade farther into the darklands than others, and this is the way of it. Metal ingots kept appearing in the market-places of Korftrey and Izvand, ingots unlike any I had seen before. Ingots of a superior quality, stamped with a hammer mark. My greed is acute. I traced those ingots, back through a long and complicated chain of trade carried on by wild wanderers. Men died in that tracing, but I found the source." He was riding beside Stark, as he often did, whiling away the long cold hours with talk. "The people of the ingots love me. They look upon me as their benefactor. Formerly they were at the mercy of many vicissitudes -- accident, loss, theft, stupidity, the haphazards of going through many hands. Now that I give them direct and honest trade, they have become so rich and fat that they no longer have to eat each other. Of course, because of this, their population is IF growing. One day some of them will have to leave Thyra and find another city." "Thyra," said Stark. "A city. One of those marked with a death's head?" "Yes," said Amnir. He smiled. "But they no longer have to eat each other?" "No," said Amnir, and smiled the wider. "Pray that we reach it, Earthman. There is worse between." And he added fiercely, "No great profit is made without risk." Stark kept a watchful eye on the landscape. As they traveled farther he was sure that he saw, in the rusty gloom, pale things slipping furtively behind hillocks and into ravines. They were distant. They were silent. Perhaps they were only shadows. In this light, vision became confused. In the moonless mornings and afternoons, one could be sure of nothing. Still, he watched. During those moonless hours the stars shone clearly, their light unquenched by the ginger sun. Amnir would now and again stare up at them as though for the first time in his life he was thinking of them as suns with families of planets, other worlds characterized by other people and other ways. He seemed not entirely happy with the thought, and he blamed Stark for having brought it home to him. "Skeg is a long way from the Barrens. Here we had heard about the ships and the strangers but paid little attention. Indeed we never quite believed. It was too large a thought, too strange. We had enough to think about without that. Eating. Drinking. Begetting children. I have six sons, did you know that? And daughters as well. I have wives. I have family matters. I have property. Many depend on me for livelihood. I have matters of trade to consider, to judge and act upon. These things take up my days, my years, my life. They are quite sufficient." "Are they?" Stark shifted in the saddle. "Are there no higher aspirations?" "Like the Izvandians, we of Komrey are descended from folk who came from the high north, who did not wish to go farther south than was necessary to sustain our way of life. We remained in the Barrens by choice. We consider the people of the city-states, like the Irnanese, to be weak, corrupt." He glared at the stars as though hating them. "One is born on a world. It may not be perfect, but it's the world one knows, the only world. One adjusts, one survives. Then suddenly it appears that there is no need for such struggle -- because one can emigrate to an easier world. It's confusing. It shakes the tenor of existence, undermines the adaptations we have evolved. Why do we need it?" "It isn't a question of need," said Stark. "Other and better worlds # are available, and that's a fact." "But it makes our struggles so pointless! Take the Thyrans. I've heard their ballads. The Long Wandering, Destruction of the Red Hunters, The Coming of Stray er -- he's the folk-hero supposed to have taught them how to work metal, though I suspect that there were many Strayers -- The Conquest of the Mountain, and so on. The long dark years, the courage, the dying and the pain, and finally the triumph. And now we see that such sagas, such noble feats and fortitudes, may never recur. Peoples may be able to run off to some lush planet and avoid all that." Amnir shook his head. "I don't like it. I believe in a man staying by what he knows." Stark refused to argue this. But sometimes, while riding, Amnir's curiosity would get the best of him. He' would ask how it was on other worlds, how the people ate and dressed and traded and made love, and if they really were human. Stark took a wicked pleasure in answering, unstitching Amnir's selfassurance, opening up the wide heavens to show him wonders and satisfactions that astounded him. Amnir had a way of setting his jaw. "I don't care," he once declared stubbornly. "I am myself. I've fought my fight and made my place. I ask for nothing better." Stark played the tempter. "But it makes you dissatisfied, doesn't it? You're a greedy man. Can you see the great ships coming and going between the suns, bearing cargoes you don't even have a name for, each worth more in money than your entire Barrens? You could have such a ship of your own, Amnir, just for the asking." "If I set you free, you mean. If you succeed in your mission. If, if. The odds are too long. Besides -- I am greedy, yes, but of some wisdom nonetheless. I know my small horizon. It fits me. The stars do not." As a matter of policy, Amnir kept his captives apart. That made mischief more unlikely; he knew that escape was always on their minds. Stark could see the others, hooded and wrapped in furs like himself, riding their led beasts. But he had no chance to talk to them. He wondered what Gerrith would be thinking now about the prophecy. Halk made one desperate, ill considered attempt to break away and after that was confined to one' of the wagons. At night all were so confined. Stark was tied to the wagon frame in such a way that he could not bring his hands together or get at the tough thongs with his teeth. Each time they bound him he tested the thongs to see if his captors had grown careless. When he found they had not, he lay on the bales of goods that formed his bed and slept. His iron patience gave him a certain serenity. He had not forgotten Ashton. He had not IF forgotten anything. He was simply waiting. And each day brought him closer to the destination he sought. Repeatedly he inquired of Amnir about the Citadel. Amnir said, "All of you have asked me the same question. I give you all the same answer. Ask the Thyrans." He smiled. Stark was getting bored with his everlasting smiles. "How long have you been trading this far north?" "If I complete it, this will be my seventh journey." "Do you feel there's a chance you may not complete it?" "On Skaith," said Amnir, for once not smiling, "there is always that chance." T jhe ruins became more extensive. In places they were no more than shapeless hummocks of ice and snow. In others there were stumps of towers still standing, and great mazes of walls and pits. Several sorts of creatures laired in the hollow places. They seemed to live by hunting each other. The more aggressive ones came howling and prowling around the wagons at night to put the beasts of burden in an uproar. Twice the wagons were attacked in force. It seemed that the squat ferocious shapes emerged from the ground itself, rushing forward in the rusty twilight, hurling themselves at anything that lived, all teeth and talons and wild harsh screamings. They impaled themselves on lances, spitted themselves on swords, and their fellows tore them to bits and devoured them while still they screamed. The armed men drove them off, but in each case not before some of the beasts had been pulled down in harness by swarming bodies and reduced to stripped bones in a matter of minutes. The creatures did not stop eating even long enough to die. The worst thing about it to Stark was that the overpowering stench of them was undeniably human. They sweated the sweat of man. As they passed through a sector of particularly unappealing ruins, the shadows that slipped and slid along the edges of vision seemed to be keeping pace with the caravan. This they continued to do, Stark saw, for some miles. It was obvious that Amnir had been aware of them, too, and that he was worried. "You know who they are?" "They call themselves the People of the Towers. The Thyrans say they're great magicians. The Gray Maggots, they call the tribe, and will have nothing to do with it. I've always paid them a generous tribute for passage through their city, and we've had no trouble. But they've never done this before, this spying and following of us. I don't understand it." "How soon do we reach their city?" "Tomorrow," said Amnir, and his hand tightened on his sword hilt. In the dark morning-time, under the green star, they crossed a river of ice, threading the piers of a vanished bridge. On the other side a cluster of towers reared against the sky, jagged and broken in outline. They were silent except for the whistle of wind through chinks and crannies. But they showed lights. The road ran straight to the towers. Stark looked at them with immense distaste. Ice glazed them. Snow choked their crevices, frosted their shattered edges. It was somehow indecent that there should be lights within those walls. Amnir rode along the line of wagons. "Close up there. Close up. Smartly now! Let them see your weapons. On your guard -- watch my lance-point and keep moving." The broken towers were grouped around an open circle. In its center squatted a huge lump of broken stone that might once have been a monument to civic pride. Three figures stood beside the monument. They were gaunt, tuck-bellied, long-armed, slightly stooped. They wore tight-fitting garments of an indeterminate gray color, hoods covering narrow heads. Their faces were masked against the wind. The masks were worked in darker threads with what appeared to be symbols of rank. The three stood immobile, alone, and the ragged doorways of the buildings gaped darkly on either hand. Stark's nostrils twitched. A smell of living came to him from those doorways, a dry subtle taint of closepacked bodies, of smoke and penned animals, of dung and wool and unnameable foods. He was riding in his usual place beside the third wagon in line. Gerrith was behind him, beside the fourth. The other captives strung out behind her except for Halk, who was still confined. Stark tugged nervously at his bonds, and the armed man who led his beast thumped him with a lance butt and bade him be still. The noise of the wagons assaulted the silence. Amnir rode aside, toward the three gray figures. Men came after him bearing sacks and bales and rolls of cloth. Amnir halted and raised a hand. The, hand held a lance, point upward. "May Old Sun give you light and warmth, Hargoth." "There is neither here," said the foremost figure. Only his eyes and his mouth showed. The eyes were pale and unreadable. Above them, on the forehead of the mask, there was the winged-disk sun-symbol Stark had found to be almost universal. On the sides of the mask, covering the cheeks, were stylized grain patterns. In Pax, Stark had read something of the sect. He supposed the man was both chief and high priest. It was strange to find a Corn King here, where no corn had grown for centuries. The IF man's mouth exhibited thin lips and small sharp teeth. His voice was high and reedy but it had a carrying quality, a note of authority"Here there are only my lord Darkness, and his lady Cold, and their daughter Hunger." "I have brought you gifts," said Amnir. And the Corn King said, "This time you have brought us more." The wind blew his words away. But Amnir's lance dipped and a movement began along the line of wagons, a bristling of weapons. The man leading Stark's beast shortened up on the rein. In a curiously flat tone Amnir said, "I don't take your meaning." "Why should you?" said the Corn King. "You have not the Sight. But I have seen. I have seen it in the Winter Dreaming. I have seen it in the entrails of the Spring Child that we give each year to Old Sun. I have seen it in the stars. Our guide has come, the Promised One who will lead us into the far heavens, into warmth and light. He is with you now." A long slender arm shot out and pointed straight at Stark. "Give him to us." "I do not understand you," Amnir said. "I have only captives from the south to be sold as slaves to the Thyrans." The lance-point dipped lower. The pace of the wagons quickened. "You lie," said the Corn King. "You will sell them to the Citadel. Word has come from the high north, both truth and lies, and we know the difference. There are strangers on Skaith. The star-roads are open. We have waited through the long night and now it is morning." As though in answer, the first sullen glimmer of dawn stained the eastern sky. "Give us our guide. Only death waits for him in the high north." Stark shouted, "What word have you of strangers?" The armed men clouted him hard across the head with the lance butt. Amnir voiced a shrill cry, reining his beast around, and the wagons began to move, faster and faster, the teams slipping and scrabbling on the frosty ground. B ound so that he could neither fight nor fall, half unconscious from the blow, Stark saw the encircling walls and dark doorways rush past him in a haze. He wanted the people behind those doors to come out and attack, to set him free, but they did not. The Com King with his attendants remained motionless beside the tumbled monument. In a few moments the whole clattering, jouncing caravan of wagons and armed men was clear of the circle and racing along between lesser ruins, lightless and deserted. By the time the ginger sun had dragged itself above the horizon they were in open country, and unpursued. Amnir halted the train to rest the beasts and restore order along the line. Stark managed to twist himself around far enough to see Gerrith. Her face was white, her eyes wide and strange. The man-at-arms used his lance again, this time with less force, to straighten his prisoner in the saddle. Stark shook away the last of the haze from his vision and tried to ignore the throbbing in his head. Amnir was riding up to him. There was something peculiar about the man's expression as he looked at Stark. It was plain that the encounter with the men of the Towers had shaken him. "So," said Stark, "you meant us for the Citadel all along." "Does that surprise you?" "No. But the Corn Kingsurprised me." "The what?" "The man you called Hargoth, the priest-king of the Towers. He knew me. He was waiting. That's why we were being watched." "You will get little good from that," said Amnir, and turned to the man-at-arms. "See that he's put into the wagon. Now. And guarded well." "Guarded against what?" asked Stark. "The people of the Towers? You cannot guard against magicians. Or the Thyrans. Maybe they would prefer to sell us to the Citadel themselves, without sharing the profits. Or the Lords Protector? Suppose they see no reason to pay you the price you've been rolling under your tongue ever since Kazimni talked to you in Izvand. Suppose they send their Northhounds to hunt us all down." Stark laughed boldly. "Or are you, in spite of yourself, possibly beginning to think there may be something in the wise woman's prophecy? If that's it, hurry! See if you can outrun fate." Amnir's eyelids flickered uneasily. He muttered something Stark could not hear, probably a curse. Kicking his beast with unnecessary viciousness, he rode off. Stark was shoved into the wagon and bound with even more care than usual. He lay staring up at the rough canvas of the tilt above him, hearing again the Corn King's words. The star-roads are open. We have waited through the long night and now it is morning. Old Sun's gingery gleaming had long since vanished when the wagon was wheeled into place for the night. Stark lay still, feeling a curious and probably unfounded anticipation. He listened to the sounds of Amnir's men making camp. He listened to the fretting of the wind at the canvas. He listened to the beating of his own heart. And he waited. I have seen it in the Winter Dreaming. I have seen it in the entrails of the Spring Child. Our guide has come... The noises of the camp died away. The men had eaten and IF wrapped themselves for sleep, all but the sentries. There seemed more of the latter than usual, judging by the number of pacing feet. From time to time one of the guards looked in through the flap, making sure the prisoner was still safely bound. Time passed. Maybe I was wrong, Stark thought. Maybe nothing at all will happen. He had no clear idea what he was waiting for. A sudden attack, the swift rush of footsteps, shouts, cries... The watchers sent out by the Corn King had had no difficulty keeping up with the slow-moving wagons. Surely, then, the people of the Towers should be able to catch the train some time during the night. And suppose they did, come, suppose they did attack. Amnir's men were disciplined and well armed. They were on guard. Could the people of the Towers overcome them? What weapons did they have? How well did they fight? If they were truly great magicians, they would have more subtle ways of gaining their ends. That thought made Stark laugh at himself. Magicians. He was catching at straws. He, who considered himself rational. The cold, he thought, was more penetrating than usual. It pinched his face. He worried about frostbite and tried to burrow his nose deeper into his sleeping furs, one. side at a time. The moisture of his breath froze on the furs, on his flesh and hair. His lungs hurt. He grew drowsy, and he could picture himself asleep and freezing gradually into stiffness with a shining glaze of ice over him like glass. He was afraid, above all. This he admitted to himself. He fought his bonds. He could not break free but he generated enough heat to melt some of the frost that coated him. The moisture quickly froze again, and now it seemed to him that he could hear the cold, actually hear it. It sang. Each crystal of ice had a voice, tiny and thin. It tinkled and crackled, faintly, sweetly, like distant music heard across hills when the wind blows. It chimed, and the chiming spoke elfinly of sleep and peace. Peace, and an end of striving. All living things must come to that at last. Surrender to sleep and peace... Stark was still fighting feebly for consciousness when the back flap of the wagon-tilt opened and a narrow person snaked in lithely over the tailgate. Moving swiftly, he slashed Stark's wrists and ankles free. He hauled him up, amazingly strong for all his narrowness, and forced a draught of some dark liquid down Stark's throat. "Come," he whispered. "Quickly!" Masked in plain gray without markings, the face swam in the gloom, unreal. Stark pawed his way forward, and the draught he had swallowed took sudden fire within him. He scrambled out of the wagon. The strong arm of the gray man steadied him. Inside the circle of vehicles the tiny hoarded fires guttered behind their windbreaks, dying. Bodies, animal and human, lay about, motionless under shining coats of frost that shone pale in the starlight. The sentries lay where they had fallen, awkward dummies with uplifted arms and stiffly contracted legs. Stark snapped, "Gerrith!" The gray man pointed and urged him on. The Corn King stood on a small eminence beyond the camp. Behind him a number of lesser priests were spaced in a semicircle. It was as though they formed a drawn bow, with the Corn King at the tip of the arrow. They were all quite motionless, their masked faces bent upon the camp. Stark's guide took good care not to pass in front of that silent bow-and-arrow. He led Stark off to one side. The deadly cold relaxed its grip. Stark said again, "Gerrith." The gray man turned toward the camp. Two figures came stumbling from the wagons. One, narrow and masked, supported another swathed in furs. When they came closer Stark saw a thick, swinging braid of hair and knew that the fur-clad figure had to be Gerrith. He exhaled a breath of relief that steamed in the icy air. Then he said, "Where are the others?" The gray man did not answer. Stark grasped him by one thin sinewy shoulder and shook him. "Where are the others?" The Corn King's voice spoke behind him. The semicircle was broken, the work of the arrow done. "We have no need of them," the Corn King said. '"The Sun woman -- or wise woman, as some call her -- I have use for. The others are worthless." "Nevertheless," said Stark quietly, ."I will have them. Now. And safe. Also, we will need arms." Hargoth hesitated, his eyes catching a glint of starlight so the holes in his mask gleamed eerily. Then he shrugged and sent four of his people running back to the wagons. "It will do no harm," he said, "though no good, either. Your friends will die later on, and les kindly, that is all." Stark looked toward the camp, and the still figures on the ground. "What did you do to them?" "I sent the Holy Breath of the Goddess upon them." He made a sign in the air. "My Lady Cold. She will give them sleep and everlasting peace." The end of Amnir and his energetic greed. Stark found it difficult to feel much pity for him. The menat-arms were doing a dangerous job IF for their living but he felt little sympathy for them, either. His wrists and ankles bore the scars of their hospitality. Hargoth indicated a low ridge, a fold in the plain. "My folk have made camp beyond. There is fire. We have food and drink. Come." Stark shook his head. "Not until I see our comrades." They waited in the biting air until Halk and Breca and the brothers had been brought, together with weapons borrowed from the dead. Then all followed the Corn King toward the ridge. "There is food in those wagons," said Halk. He walked crookedly, having been bound for many days. Some of the strength had gone out of him, yet he was as belligerent as ever, perhaps more so because he was conscious of his weakness. "Are you going to leave it for the beasts of this wilderness?" "We do not need it," said Hargoth. "And we are not thieves. Whatever is in the wagons belongs to the Thyrans." "Why not us?" "You were no part of their bargain with the trader." Stark steadied Gerrith over a stretch of bare rock, then asked of Hargoth, "You said word had come to you from the high north. Who sent that word?" "The Wandsmen. They told us to watch for strangers coming from the south. They offered a high price for you." "And you do not intend to take it?" "NO;" "Why not?" "There was other news from the high north. A man not of this world has been brought to the Citadel. The Harsenyi nomads saw him with the Wandsmen in the passes of the Bitter Mountains. The Wandsmen like to hide their secrets but the Harsenyi see everything. They range over half the world, and they carry news." The Corn King glanced sidelong at Stark. "Besides, there is the Sight. I knew who you were when my people first saw you riding beside the wagons. You are not of this world. You come from the south, and it is said that there is a place in the south where starships land. The Harsenyi brought this word from Izvand." "It is true," said Stark. "Ah," said Hargoth. "I saw it clearly during the Winter Dreaming. The ships stand like bright towers beside the sea." They had reached the crest of the ridge. Below, somewhat sheltered from the wind, fires burned. The humped shapes of skin tents were dusted with snow. Hargoth spoke solemnly. "That is why we shall not sell you to the Wandsmen. You will lead us to the ships, to the stars." He bent his head humbly before Stark. But his eyes, looking upward, were not humble. and they only seemed to lie! othfer. In a long orbit it is easy to convince oneself that one's ship is not about to fall onto anything, even though the sensation of weightlessness is that of endless falling. There simply is nothing visible nearby to hit. Of course, travelers have had nervous breakdowns in spaceships too badly designed to let them see out. To a physicist or an experienced space pilot, a bounce ride is just another orbit. Unfortunately most of the orbit is underground, like that of a baseball -- though, as with a baseball, the underground part is not what is used. Traveling by bounce from, say, Ley Base in Sommering Crater to Wilsonburg under Taruntius X, the trip takes only thirty-five minutes and is never much more than two hundred miles above the moon. But during the final third of it anybody can see that most definitely he is falling toward the ground. Rick Suspee had gladly shown off his adaptation to free fall during the long trip from Earth. He hoped, however, that no one was watching him now. In his mind he knew that the bounce-shuttle's computer was keeping track of position and velocity through its radar eyes. That the computer would light the main engines at the proper instant. That a second computer with a separate power source and independent sensors would fire a solid-fuel safety brake if the first engine failed to ignite. That a living, highly competent pilot with his own sighting equipment and firing circuits could take over if both the automatics failed. Rick's mind knew all that but the lower parts of his nervous system were not convinced. Traveling at thousands of feet a second on a downward slant low over the moon's surface still made him tense. Annoyed and frightened as he was, Rick felt sorry for his stepmother as he glanced back and saw the expression on her face. She was petrified. He decided it would be best to talk, and luckily he had seen enough moon charts to be able to talk sense. "We're past the peak now, I think. That's Ariadaeus behind on the left, just into the sunlight. You can relax for a while -- we're still more than two hundred miles up. Look for a white beacon flashing three times a second just to the south of our arc. That will be the Tranquility Base monument. We're out over the Mare now. Look -- on the horizon ahead you can see Crisium #nd the mountains where Wilsonburg is." The rocket swung slowly around so that its main engines pointed "forward." The braking blast was about due. The mountains southwest of Mare Crisium were looming huge "ahead" and below. The Mare itself stretched beyond the horizon, which was much nearer than it had been a quarter-hour before. The IF pilot's calm voice sounded. "Thirty seconds to power. Check your safety straps and rest your heads in the pads." The two passengers obeyed. The pad allowed Rick Suspee to see the stars beyond the rocket's bow, nothing else. The braking stage was made at two Earth gravities, the computer applying changes of one percent or so in power and a fraction of a degree in direction every tenth of a second throughout firing time -- none of these adjustments could be sensed by human nerves. The only change at touchdown was from two Earth gravities to one lunar pull. "You may unstrap," the pilot said, "but stay in your seats until we're inside the lock. I'll tell you when there's air enough for you to exit." Rick watched the mobile rack trundle the rocket toward the side of the sixty-foot circle of smooth rock on which it had settled. The circle was the bottom of a craterlet in one of the hills over Wilsonburg. The bottom had been leveled and the side next to the upward slope of the hill cut to a vertical wall. In this wall was the lock, now yawning open to gulp the shuttle. The craft was through the huge outer valve in moments. The black sky and sunlit rock outside were cut off from view as portals slid shut. The pilot spoke again. "You can start for the doors now. There's a pound and a half of oxygen outside and it will be up to three before I get our own valves open. It's been a pleasure to have you aboard." Rick was on his feet before the speech was over. His stepmother was more careful. She did not exactly mind weighing only twentyone pounds, but she was not yet used to it and the ceiling was low. She was about to make some remark about inadequate gravity, Rick was sure, when she was distracted by what she saw outside. "Rick! Look! There's Jim! He hasn't changed a bit. I don't see Edna, though -- " Rick picked out the man easily enough from the dozen figures at the foot of the ladder outside. He was the heaviest and obviously the oldest. Rick gave less thought to the whereabouts of his aunt. He was noticing that none of the group were wearing space suits. Yes, the air had to be all right outside. This realization was supported by a slight pop in his ears as the shuttle's air pressure changed slightly. Evidently the pilot had opened both valves of the vehicle's air-lock. Rick headed rapidly for the exit, leaving his stepmother to follow more cautiously. T he top of the ladder was fortyfive feet from the floor of the big lock. Rick accomplished the distance in a single jump -- at least, he meant it for a jump. In terms of energy, this was about the same as an eight-foot drop on Earth; in time, it took rather more than four seconds. Which was enough to let Jim Talles step forward and catch him, the catch being embarrassingly necessary because the four seconds were also quite long enough to permit Rick to complete the best part of an unintended somersault. His moon coordination not as good as he had supposed -- he had left the top step with more spin than he realized. His uncle's first words were a tactful reproof. "Watch it, lad. Carelessness can be dangerous on the moon. I take it your mother is aboard?" "Sure is. I -- I guess you're my Uncle Jim. Uh -- hello." Rick could not decide whether he was more frightened or embarrassed. It had been a weird sensation on the way down, something like that of a diver leaving the board to do a jackknife and deciding too late to turn it into a half-twist. That was bad enough -- but still worse, Rick felt, was the fact that the five young persons accompanying his uncle were all about Rijk Suspee's own age. None had laughed or even smiled, but he could imagine what they were thinking. For about the five-hundredth time since his fifteenth birthday he told himself to stop showing off. Then he took a closer look at the five teen-agers. One, on second glance, appeared almost too old for that category. He was about Rick's own height -- fiveand-a-half feet -- but stouter, sturdier. His broad shirtfront was covered even more solidly than Rick's own by competence badges, many of which the Earth boy could not recognize -- naturally enough. A quick glance showed that all the others were similarly decorated. But Rick saw with relief that none exhibited nearly as much badge area as he did. Maybe they would be impressed enough by his Earthgained skills to be able to forget, or at least discount, the slip he had just made. For one thing, none of them could possibly hold an underwater rating. Rick's scuba badge had been earned so recently that he was still gloating over it. "Jim! It's so wonderful to meet you at last!" His stepmother's voice pulled Rick from his thoughts. She stood at the top of (he ladder, Jim Talles posting himself at the foot to cover possible accidents. An unnecessary precaution. Mrs. Suspee's methods of showing off were more subtle than her son's. She descended slowly and carefully, reaching the bottom quite safely. She embraced her brother-in-law with an enthusiasm Rick suspected was due to her relief that the bounce ride was over. Then she asked about Edna's health and whereabouts, delivered messages from her husband and sundry friends, and finally allowed Talles to shepherd the party out of the lock chamber and make introductions. "Edna couldn't get off the job," IF Jim Talles said. "But she'll be home by the time we get there. The kids here with me will be hosting Rick a lot" -- Rick gulped; these would be just the ones he'd played the fool for -- "and will probably show him a good deal more than I could. This is Aichi Yen, chairman by earned competence of the group known officially as the Fresh Footprints. Usually they call themselves by less formal names." Talles indicated the oldest member, whose badges Rick had already particularly noticed. His face, to Rick, seemed rather nondescript. His hair, cut short in the common moon style so as to give no trouble inside a space helmet, was jet black. His eyes gave just a suggestion of the ancestry implied by his name although the color of his skin suggested suntan much more than Earth's Orient. "This is Marie D'Nombu." A girl certainly not yet sixteen nodded in greeting. She was several inches shorter than Rick and Aichi but her shirt was well covered with badges. Her lips were parted in a goodhumored smile, and Rick wished he were sure she was not laughing at him. "Orm Hoffman -- Peter Willett -- Audie Rice." A tall, unbelievably thin boy of Rick's own age, a fourteen-year-old with a shy expression and skin almost as dark as Marie's, and a girl about twenty pounds more massive than Marie acknowledged their names in turn. All were looking more at Rick's shirt than at his face. "Rick will come with me for now," Talles told the young people. "It was good of you to trouble to meet him here. I'll be glad to see all of you at my place around ten p.m. and as long after as anyone can stay awake. I know you're busily scheduled now -- so thanks again for coming." Aichi Yen shook hands with Talles and, as an afterthought, with Rick, then nodded to Mrs. Suspee and disappeared into a nearby tunnel mouth. Three of the others did the same. Marie altered the pattern by speaking. "I'm glad to meet you, Rick. I've been looking forward to it ever since Chief Jim told us you were coming. I've read a lot about Earth. I've tried to imagine what it's like to be able to go outdoors with no special preparation unless it's raining or something like that. I hope you'll tell us about wind and rainbows and glaciers and such -- " "I can try. I've never seen a glacier, though." "Well, that makes us even. I've never seen a radical trap." "What's that?" "I'll tell you tonight if the Chief hasn't beaten me to it. I'm supposed to be in class now. 'Bye." She was gone on the track of the others. "Those seem interesting youngsters," Mrs. Suspee remarked as the girl disappeared. "I'm not sure I approve of that flaunting of badges, though. It seems like showing off. I was hoping we'd be away from that sort of thing on the moon. We get enough of it at home." "If the badges are properly earned, why not display 'em?" responded her brother-in-law. "There are a lot worse things than letting the world know what you can do well." "Well, Jim, I won't argue. And you'll notice I didn't forbid Rick to wear his badges here, even if I did hope they'd turn out to be out of style." She gazed off to her left. "I think those must be our bags over there. Do we take a cab, or do you live close by?" "Our place is about eight miles away." Talles seemed amused. Smiling, he added, "We walk, and carry our baggage." His sister-in-law looked at him, stupefied. Rick, too, was startled. The bags weren't heavy, especially on the moon, but -- "There's no public transportation here. We could probably work out some arrangement for gettingthe luggage delivered, but it would inconvenience a lot of people." "I hadn't thought of that." Mrs. Suspee frowned. "I suppose this is a sort of frontier town, in a way." Talles laughed. "Maybe it is, but that's not why we walk. You're on the moon now. You weigh about a sixth of what you did on Earth. You need exercise, plenty of it, or your muscle tone goes down, your circulation falters, your bones start getting soft. A good rule of thumb is ten miles of fast walking every day for each hundred pounds of body mass. If your work doesn't give you time for that, you get a doctor to prescribe some specific exercises and you do 'em faithfully. All right -- traveling!" H e picked up his sister-in-law's luggage -- a forty-pound-mass bag in each hand -- and started off down the same tunnel that had swallowed the Footprints members. Rick took his own much lighter load, and he and his stepmother followed his uncle. The tunnel ran about eight feet wide and ten feet high for some thirty yards. An airtight door about three yards in opened manually rather than by photocell or pushbutton. Talles carefully closed it behind them. A similar barrier graced the farther end of the passage. Once through this they found themselves in a much broader though not much higher passageway. Well lighted, crowded with people, it was lined on both sides with large windows filled with sales displays. Except for the ceiling it gave the impression of a street in a shopping district. "Not so frontier after all," remarked Evelyn Suspee. "We don't think so," replied Talles. "But remember the freight charges back to Earth before you stock up on souvenirs." IF Mrs. Suspee was finding the hike less dull than she had expected. And less tiring than it would have been on her home planet. The trip was long, of course. In spite of the low gravity, one could not walk much faster than on Earth. When Rick tried, his feet spent too much time off the ground and left him with poor control or none; and after a near-collision with another pedestrian, who glared first at him and then at his uncle, the boy was more careful. Talles advised him that there were pedestrian speed limits, quite strictly enforced, in the tunnels; if he wanted to try the leaping "run" cultivated by moondwellers, there were caves devoted to athletics. Part of the walk was through residential tunnels, not quite as wide as those in the business districts but interrupted more often by parklike caves where grass, flowers and even bushes grew under the artificial light. Rick noticed that each of the doors along these tunnels was marked by a small lamp; some white, the rest blue except for a very few that were red. He asked his uncle about them. "We work around the clock here, Rick. The periods of sunlight don't match human biological rhythms, and few of us see the sun much anyway. It's more efficient for facilities to be in use all the time rather than shut down sixteen hours a day while people play and sleep, so we live in shifts. White light over a door means the family is up for the day, though of course they may be out at work or school or what have you. Blue means they're asleep. Red means the unit isn't occupied. No matter when you walk the tunnels you'll find about as many people in them as now. All but the smallest businesses are always open, and the mines, schools and other productive facilities are always operating." "I'd think if you overslept, you'd have a hard time finding out whether you were late for today's work or early for tomorrow's," remarked Rick. "Looking out the window would tell you nothing. I suppose you use twenty-four hours clocks, though." "You've touched a sore subject," his uncle replied. "As a matter of fact, we don't. We still have the a.m. and p.m. distinction. I know it's silly, but every time the change is proposed in the settlement council it's defeated. People just don't like the idea of going to work at halfpast seventeen. Of course, the same thing holds true on Earth. And because they want to start work earlier in summer so they can have more recreation time before dark, they make laws changing the clock settings. I admit it doesn't really matter whether you start your time measurement from local mean apparent midnight or any other moment -- but changing the zero point back and forth with the seasons I insist is pretty silly. We're just as human here, so I don't suppose we'll ever gradpate to the twenty-four hour clock." Rick's aunt was at home when they arrived. She was a taller and quieter woman than Evelyn Suspee. At least she seemed quieter to Rick but that may have been because his stepmother did not give anyone else much chance to talk. She monopolized the conversation all through the standard guestarrival routine of settling the visitors in their rooms and feeding them dinner. Rick would much rather have listened to his aunt and uncle talk. After all, that was what he was here for, wasn't it? To learn more about the moon and the people who dwelled on it? He bit thoughtfully into his cutlet of fish-meal artificially flavored and imported from Earth like practically everything else eaten here. Three generations of colonization had seen the steady growth of youth organizations on the moon devoted to hiking, exploration, technical innovation and the like. Although autonomous, they were loosely joined into a confederation that set standards and established goals. The trend had inspired a resurgence of similar youth clubs on Earth. There the emphasis was on ecology, space science and -- where still available -- outdoor living. The cents -- had agreed to send a representative to exchange ideas and knowledges with a typical lunar group. Largely because he had an uncle on the moon interested in the youth movement, Rick Suspee had been chosen as the emissary. His stepmother had elected to accompany him, at her own expense. She wanted to see her sister, Edna, after a separation of many years, and to meet her sister's husband, Jim Talles. Rick earnestly hoped he would be up to the responsibilities wished across the table at his husky, curlyhaired uncle by marriage. Rick felt sure that the man would help him. Talles was the kind of person who inspires confidence. He had no children of his own, and it was perhaps in compensation for that lack that he devoted himself to the affairs of young people. about an hour after dessert and coffee, the Footprints members began to arrive. Marie D'Nombu was first by perhaps five minutes, and within another halfhour ten of the group were crowded into the small Talles living cave. Since Aichi Yen was among them, Rick was still a little uneasy about speaking up. Marie quickly took care of that situation. Somehow she managed to take the conversation away from Mrs. Suspee without actually interrupting, then smoothly induced the Earth boy to talk. Jim Talles was wearing another of his amused smiles. He knew Marie and her brains. He listened IF with approval as the girl pulled Rick into the chatter by making remarks about Earth that simply had to be corrected -- remarks not really silly but indicating reasonable misunderstandings. The question of going out in the rain, which she had left unsettled back at the lock, was straightened out, and incidentally gave Rick a much better idea of just what "outdoors" meant to these moon folks. They called it "outside." He himself described scuba wet-suits as opposed to space suits, and even Aichi made a slip in physics there when he remarked that it must be harder to swim in Earth's heavier gravity. Jim Talles wondered whether this had been done on purpose to make Rick feel better about his mistake at the rocket ladder. If so, Marie must have inspired it; Aichi would never have thought up such a thing by himself. Marie herself helped Aichi Yen out of his confusion by getting him to describe his present outdoor work, and this interested even Mrs. Suspee for a while. A physics student, Aichi had worked out what he hoped was an original computer technique for untangling meaningful radio signals from noise. He was going to give it a test in about a week, when there was to be an eclipse. He would be picking up signals from Earth and the sun simultaneously, a mixture of complex natural and even more complex artificial waves, and would then spend several happy weeks with his records in the school computer lab. He had set up his receiving equipment in a small crater quite some distance from town so as to avoid still a third set of interference patterns. "We'll get you out to Aichi's site when the action starts, Rick," Talles put in. "I suppose you're in a hurry to get outside, but if you can wait a few days there'll be more to see and something really to do. I don't suppose you've ever seen an eclipse of the sun, and by waiting you can charge two batteries on one line. Besides, there are things I think you'll want to see inside, like the mine where I work, and if will be handier for me if we take care of that first." "And maybe he can come to the school with some of us," said Marie. "There are a lot of people there who don't know as much about Earth as they think they do. Rick can straighten them out. All right, Rick?" "Sure. I don't mind the wait. How long a ride is it out to Aichi's set-up?" Talles smiled. "It's in Picard G, isn't it, Aichi?" "Picard GA, to be exact." "Yes. That's about thirty miles, as I remember, but you don't ride. The Footprints really meant it when they picked their name, even if it was two generations ago. You can walk that far, can't you?" "Oh, sure. It's just that I didn't think I'd be allowed to hike outside. I don't have any experience with space suits, and I figured there'd be all sorts of regulations about who could go out in them." "There are," admitted his uncle. "You'll be competent, though, before you go out. That's my responsibility," he added hastily as he saw the worried look on the faces of two or three of his young guests. "I probably won't be free to go, and you kids wil be expected to keep an eye on Rick just as you would on any newcomer short on experience. But I won't let him go unless I'm convinced he has the basic lessons thoroughly learned. So relax." Aichi Yen and the others did relax, visibly. They had known for some days that the guest from Earth would accompany them outside, but they had been quite uneasy over who would be held responsible if he managed to kill himself. Jim Talles had been letting them stew in that pan out of curiosity, to see whether they would try to duck the load. He was, after all, one of their teachers even if he didn't belong to the school department -- he was the official adult adviser of the formally incorporated youth union known as the First Footprints. "Great!" Rick enthused. "A badge for spacesuit competence will really mean something back on Earth. Which one is it?" For the first time he began examining in detail the pictorial and geometrical decorations of the others. "There isn't any for suits," Aichi said quietly. "I don't think there's anyone on the moon who isn't competent about them -- at any rate, no one over five or six years old." Marie took the edge off the remark. "I guess it's sort of like umbrellas or raincoats on Earth," she said. "Or maybe you can think of something that's an even better example -- maybe swimming. I suppose everyone can do that even if they don't all have scuba ratings." "That's not quite right." Rick followed the change of subject gratefully. "A lot of people can't swim, and there are six different water competence levels before you get to scuba, and a lot of others in watercraft management -- " He held forth uninhibitedly until Marie exercised her tact once more. All in all, it was a good evening. These moon people seemed a pretty good bunch, Rick decided before he got to sleep. The next few days confirmed that opinion. Rick spent two of them at the Wilsonburg school, wherp class routine was altered to make him the center of attention. He spent a day with his uncle in the mine that was the main reason for Wilsonburg's existence. He passed a solid twelve hours with Jim Talles becoming familiar with space suits, until he could don one without hesitation or error, check it out properly, conduct emergency operations at reflex speed, and explain how electrical accumulators and Daly oxygen cartridges worked. IF Talles had planned a further program to keep Rick occupied up to the time of the hike to Aichi's site. But like so many plans, this one ran into trouble. An accident occurred in the mine. Not a catastrophe. No one was killed. No one was even seriously endangered -- except Rick. And he was nowhere near the place. His danger arose from the fact that his uncle went on full-time emergency duty, and the schedule in the Talles household collapsed. His aunt had to work as usual but Rick had never gotten her hours straight. His mother continued her irregular round of visits and shopping trips. His young friends had their own rather tight schedules to keep. So Rick was left pretty much on his own. As a result, he got his sleeping hours out of step with the planned starting time for the hike. And his mother, in one of her rare moments of firmness, insisted that if he didn't get a good night's rest before going, he wouldn't go. She was unhappy about the trip anyway. The idea of her only child walking miles out on the moon's surface with only a few layers of fabric between him and vacuum frightened her even more than the bounce ride. sleep, but could not. He was like a six-year-old on Christmas Eve, embarrassed as he would have been to admit it. He went to bed, but had given up all hope of actually sleeping when he did doze off. When he woke up, of course, and looked at his watch, his first thought was to dig a hole in the ground and bury himself. He was to meet the group at North-Down Lock at eight. The watch said five minutes to eight. And the place was an hour's walk away. II I n the hall outside his room Rick paused. There was no time to eat, he decided. The snack of a few hours before would have to last him. The group must be at the lock by now -- maybe if he ran he would get there before they left. It might take a while to get the whole crowd into space suits. Running would have to be done carefully, he knew. It was dangerous in the tunnels under moon gravity -- especially so for someone with his background -- and there were stringent laws about when and under what circumstances one could run within the settlement. His stepmother never understood why he didn't call the lock. For years afterward she would irritate him by returning to the subject and trying to make him explain. His uncle, of course, understood so well that he never even bothered to ask during the investigation later on. In fact, Rick never even thought of the phone. Moving quietly and hoping that his aunt slept as soundly as his stepmother, he headed for the front door. For just an instant he was tempted to rouse his stepmother and ask why she had let him sleep so late; but that would have wasted time. He slipped into the corridor his moon friends called a street and hopped, leaped and skipped toward North-Down, awkwardly threading his way among the people. He was not stopped for speeding, though several times he was the target of irritated frowns. He would probably have made the trip in less than half an hour had he not mistaken a turn and wasted more than ten minutes getting back to the proper route. It was eight forty-five when he reached the recessed doorway that was one of the entrances to the NorthDown lock area. Sensors responded to his arrival, triggering a flashing light -- green, since there was safe pressure on the other side of the door. Rick, as he had been taught, flicked the "acknowledge reading" switch located high on the door frame. Then he activated the door switch itself. Despite the need for power economy, doors on the moon that opened into areas even moderately likely to tap vacuum were motor-driven. The chamber Rick entered was not normally exhausted; it was a sort of combined garage and lockerroom. However, it did have a large direct exit to the surface for getting out unusually large pieces of equipment. When so used it became an air-lock chamber. On every moon-dweller's mind there was always the possibility of leakage or outright valve failure in any outer room. Rick was aware of that threat, just as the schoolkids he had met a few days before had been aware of rain and cold on Earth. It was the Big Difference everyone was told about. But awareness was not the same thing as the reflective selfprotection of a native. With the door secured behind him -- by a strictly manual latch, activation of which shut off a warning bell -- he made his way to the main personnel exits. His fervent hope was that the group might still be there. The place was empty. Even the lock chamber, visible through the transparent wall, was unoccupied. The outer door was closed, and the red light on its frame backing the green one at the inner seal signaled that the chamber was carrying normal pressure. This implied that the lock had last been used by an inbound person or group, a possibility that did not occur to Rick. To him it was clear only that his friends had left without him. He did not blame them. He knew that much to be done on the trip was too tightly scheduled to allow delay. But he was bitterly disappointed. Just which mistake he made next is still being argued. The fact that IF he, or more accurately his stepmother, had fallen out of step with the Wilsonburg clocks was minor. In truth, Rick was actually elevenand-a-quarter hours early for his meeting rather than forty-five minutes late. And for the worst mistake, still to come, it is hard to blame anyone but Rick alone. Pierre Montaux is blamed by many, including himself, for letting Rick get away with it, but... P ierre happened to be on duty at the locker-room when Rick arrived. Hearing footfalls, the boy glanced back over his shoulder and saw the middle-aged attendant. They had never met before. Rick had had his suit check at another lock, and Pierre had not been on duty the only time the boy had been to North-Down to learn the lay-out. "What are you doing here, lad?" "Sir, I seemed to have missed a group going out to Picard G. Could you tell me how long ago they left?" Montaux shook his head, at the same time making the negative hand-gesture habitual to people who spent much of their time in space suits. 'Tve just come on -- been here less than five minutes. I was a little late getting to work myself." For that, incidentally, no one ever criticized Montaux. He eyed the array of badges on Rick's shirt, estimating his general competence level by the area they covered without actually reading any of them. After all, for anybody of Rick's age to be unqualified was rare enough, and for anybody unqualified to try to go outside was unheard of. "How long ago would they have left?" Montaux asked.  "Only a few minutes. We were meeting here at eight." "Then they can't be far ahead. If your suit is ready you can catch them easily. I'll do your tightness checks." T o rick's credit, he never tried to blame Pierre for the misadventure on the strength of those remarks. Some people would have claimed that without Pietre's suggestions, it never would have occurred to the boy to go out. But exactly that had previously occurred to Rick, and he never denied it. Probably the one biggest mistake, of course, was made when he walked silently to the numbered locker his uncle had told him would contain his suit, and pulled it out. He donned it quickly and correctly under the attendant's eye -- and who, Jim Talles. asked the world later, would have foreseen that the earlier training session thus would turn out to be a mistake? If Rick had been slow or clumsy, if Pierre Montaux had had the slightest grounds for suspecting Rick Suspee never before had ventured into vacuum... But there was nothing to warn Pierre. The suit went on smoothly. It fitted correctly. Rick attached helmet and gauntlets properly, did the proper things to seal them. He made the proper signals to request tightness check, said the right things over the radio for the communications check. He strode over to the inner lock door, deftly operated the cycling switch, and waited until the inner light flashed green before opening the portal. There was nothing to show that he had not done it all a score, even a hundred, times before. Montaux let him through, checked the manual seal on the inside after the door closed, and gestured a "proceed" through the transparent wall. The outer door's light was now green. Rick operated its plainly labeled opening switch, went through, closed it, and disappeared from the sight of Pierre Montaux. And, for many hours, from the sight of mankind. Rick felt uneasy, certainly. He knew that neither his mother nor his uncle would have approved. But it did not occur to him that the Footprints members might not approve either when he caught up with them; otherwise he might have turned back right then. It did not occur to him, either, that he was in any real danger. The crowd could not be far ahead, and the way would be plain enough. After all, he had spent hours with the maps in his uncle's study. He could have drawn from memory one showing the way to Picard GA. He looked around to orient himself. Wilsonburg lies mostly under the hills southeast of Taruntius X at about # degrees east and # north on the standard lunar coordinate system. The nearest point of Mare Crisium is about fifty miles to the northeast. The North-Down lock opens on the broad but irregular plain of Taruntius X; as the names imply, North-Middle and North-Up open higher on the slope bordering the same plain. From where he stood Rick could see about ten miles across the slightly rolling and heavily dimpled surface to the western hills, and even farther to the northwest and almost around to north, where the same mass of hills that contained Wilsonburg rose to block the view. His path, he knew, lay to the north past the foot of those hills to a valley that led to Picard-G and which should be visible, if map contours meant anything, from where he stood. Maybe it was, but so were several other notches and valleys. Choice would have to be made. He made the most obvious one, but first tried his communicator. "Marie! Aichi! Any of the Footprints! Are you in range? Can you hear me?" He waited only a few seconds. He had not really expected an answer. He would pick them up -- or they would pick him up -- when he got around the spur of the hills. IF He looked about him once more for other direction criteria. The sun was too high in the west -- about fifty degrees -- to be a precise guide, he judged. The same was true of Earth, which was too close to the sun to be seen easily, anyway. The stars? He moved back into the shadow of the sheet-metal roof that kept direct sunlight from the "porch" of the lock and found that he could see the brighter ones. The Big Dipper looked just as it did from home, and the Pointers guided his eye downward and leftward to Polaris just above the horizon -- of course! He was much closer to the moon's equator than Boston is to Earth's. One of the notches in the far hills lay directly under the star, and Rick, after examining as well as he could the ground between himself and that distant valley, set out toward it. E velyn Suspee woke about nine-thirty with a feeling of guilt. She had meant to get Rick up in time for his trip. Finding that he had already gone, however, she put the matter out of mind. She did not mention his departure to Edna, who seemed too concerned about her husband's absence at the mine, anyway, to worry about much else. As a result, no one missed Rick until he had been gone for eleven hours. The Footprints group arrived at North-Down about a quarter to eight. No one knew quite what to do about Rick's failure to show up. By their own standards anyone who missed an appointment "inside" had only himself to blame -- it was different, of course, outside. After discussion and some grumbling, it was decided that maybe Rick's tardiness was not his fault entirely, and that his home should be called to find out why he had skipped the expedition. Evelyn Suspee was in when the call arrived. It took her several seconds to grasp that Rick was unaccounted for since leaving the Talles home. The realization had the principal effects of a firecracker -- much noise but little else. Emerging from the explosion of words, though, was Mrs. Suspee's assumption that Rick was somewhere outside. Marie D'Nombu, on the other end of the circuit, had not thought of any such possibility. She did not think itja likely one now that it had been suggested. In any case she felt sure that calming Mrs. Suspee was more important at the moment than eliciting mere truth. "Wait, please," Marie urged. Soothingly she continued, "Let's say Rick did get here eleven or twelve hours early. Even so, I don't see how he could possibly have been stupid enough to go outside by himself. Besides, they wouldn't have let him. He must have realized his error about the time -- probably then he wandered off into town. Maybe he hiked oyer to the mine to see what sort of trouble Chief Jim was having. We'll call him -- Rick could still be at the mine. More likely he's simply lost somewhere in town. They didn't start building tunnels on a nice regular plan here until a few of the early lodes had been followed pretty far, and a stranger can get mixed up pretty easily, I'd think." Marie's words calmed Rick's stepmother considerably. She had had trouble more than once herself finding her way back to the Talles unit from the shopping areas. At Marie's request, Mrs. Suspee called her sister to the screen. Edna had overheard most of the conversation and understood the situation. She assured Marie that Jim Talles was still at the mine and gave her his visiphone combination. The girl broke the connection and immediately called Talles. It took several minutes to reach him. He was far out in one of the work tunnels, available through portable relay equipment. This had voice connection only; he could not see who was calling and did not at first recognize Marie's voice. The girl concisely reported the state of affairs. Talles' first reaction was to worry more about Mrs. Suspee than his nephew. He agreed with Marie that the boy was probably somewhere inside Wilsonburg and was grateful for her efforts to convince the woman of that. "I think I can get away from here shortly," he said. "Maybe in half an hour. Meanwhile, find out who was on duty at North-Down when Rick got there, and see if the kid said anything about where he was going when he learned he was early. Then call me back." "Orm is checking with the lock watch right now," Marie answered. "I should have word for you in a few minutes. Do you want me to call Mrs. Suspee again if I learn anything?" Talles thought for only a moment. "Call her if you're sure he's inside, not otherwise." "I understand." Marie broke connection and turned to the others. "Is Orm back?" "Here he comes," Aichi said. "Orm, who was on when Rick got here?" "Don't know yet," Orm replied breathlessly. "Del Petvar is on duty now. He says he was here twelve hours ago, went off just after eight, and Rick hadn't shown up by that time. Del was relieved by Pierre Montaux, but we can't get hold of him. He went off duty four hours ago and still isn't home. At least, he doesn't answer the visiphone." "He could be home and tpo sound asleep to have heard the call," pointed out someone in the crowd. "That's possible," agreed Aichi. "Who knows where he lives? Is it far from here?" None of the group knew either answer but Petvar, whom they conIF suited, was able to supply the information. Montaux' unit was about ten minutes' walk away. Without further discussion Marie rushed off. Aichi cast a worried look after her and then another at the nearest clock. This Earth kid was holding things up badly. They should be well on the way out to Pic G by now if the work was to be accomplished. But he waited. Confirmation of Rick's whereabouts was essential. There was just that chance, a slim one but still a chance, that the fellow was actually outside. If so, the problems would be such that everything else would just have to sit in vacuum for a while. Then it occurred to him that the group might as well suit up in any case. They would be going out soon if Rick Suspee were found inside -- and certainly if he were reported outside. M arie was back before they had finished their tightness checks. Orm Hoffman, who had not yet donned his helmet, blurted, "Montaux was home?" She nodded grimly. "He got there just as I did. He's been at a show. He told me Rick suited up around nine, thinking he was late instead of early. Montaux let him go outside to chase after us. Rick didn't return during Montaux' shift and we know Petvar hasn't seen him. So Rick must still be outside." "Wow!" Marie continued, "I called Jim Talles from Montaux' place. The Chief is on his way. To save time stead of walking. His orders are that we're to get outside as quickly as we can. Aichi, you're in charge until he gets here. We're to send two of us along the trail to the north. As soon as they're outside the trampled area, they're to check for prints Rick may have left." All had taken off their helmets to listen. Aichi nodded. "When the Chief arrives, you're to take the crawler and two other people and follow the same route. Pick up the first two when you get to them, and set all four to searching along the narrow part of the valley between here and Pic G. Chief Jim says Rick knows the maps well, and the most likely thing is that he headed north in an effort to catch up with us. You can go all the way to your site at GA. After you get there do your own work until Jim calls either for you or the crawler. If none of you finds Rick along the road or at your site, we'll have to set up a comprehensive search plan." Marie shook her head. She was near tears. "That fool Rick! How could he be so idiotic?" "Simple. He's an Earth guy," said Aichi. "All right. Everyone into the lock, then, except you, Norm. You help Marie with her suit check, and the two of you follow outside as soon as possible." Helmets were donned and checked. Aichi and his group let themselves into the air lock. Marie quickly stuffed her pretty self into her suit. She and Norman Delveccio were outside well within badgequalifying time but Aichi Yen had already dispatched the first pair of searchers. They were visible half a mile away, going fast, making for the spur of hills coming in from the right. They were still within the heavily trampled area around the lock where tracking was impossible. "If he's been gone more than eleven hours," Marie pointed out over her communicator, "he should be most of the way to Pic G. It's hard to see how he could have gotten lost if he's really familiar with the maps. I'll bet you find him out at your set-up." Yen made the left-hand gesture equivalent to a negative headshake -- faces were hard to see through helmets, especially with sun-filters in place. "Judging by Jim's instructions, he thinks the same. But I wouldn't bet on it," his voice came back. "Up to the valley, and even through it, I wouldn't worry. It's a worn trail. Once out on G, though, tracks go every which way. Every set of footprints made since McDee found the first lode in those hills is still there. If that's not enough to mix up Rick there are crawler tracks going in all directions. He might be able to hit GA, I suppose, since it's about three miles across, but then what? There's lots of stuff and tracks in that bowl besides mine. And has anyone told him about bubbles?" "They were mentioned the other night at Chief Jim's place," replied Marie. "I don't know whether enough was said to give Rick much of a picture, though." "Well, I just hope he has been going slowly. That would give us a chance to catch him before he's through the valley. Hey... here Must be Jim. Who wants to ride with me? You, Marie?" The girl made the negative gesture. "I'll stay here until we hear whether Rick has reached your site. If he hasn't, we'll have to make a wider sweep. I think maybe I can help more with that." "Why?" "I can't say. I just feel I could. I'm still betting he's out near GA, at or near your machinery. But I want to be ready in case he isn't." "All right. Digger and Jem, you come with me in the crawler. We'll pick up Anna and Kort on the way. The rest of you stand by for whatever the Chief is planning." A moment later the vehicle from the upper lock drew up beside them. Jim Talles' space-suited figure emerged. Digger and Jem climbed into the vehicle's cab, leaving its trailer empty for the time being. Aichi joined them after IF reporting the situation to Talles. In a few seconds the vehicle was trundling out across Taruntius X. Talles and the others looked after it but only for a moment. "So much for that," he said. "Now -- I suppose you all agree that Rick probably struck out north toward Cyg G. Are there any guesses about what else he might have done? Or what he might be doing now?" Silence, while the young people looked thoughtfully at each other and the lunar landscape. It was Marie who finally spoke. "Surely that would depend on when he finally realized he had been early instead of late," she said slowly. "He must have gone quite a way before the truth struck him, or he'd have been back long ago. He got started less than an hour after he thought we'd gone, so he couldn't have figured us to be very far ahead. He must have expected to catch up fairly soon, if he hurried -- " "But we don't know how fast he expects us to travel," objected one of the others. "He was never outside before, and he'll find he can't go as fast himself as he probably expected to. So he may have decided pretty quickly that he'd be a long time catching up. Maybe he still thinks he started out late, not early." "That's a point, Don," Talles said. "We're going to have trouble figuring just what he would do and think. He was telling me a couple of nights ago about how different things were at the school he visited -- he meant in what people took for granted. We're stuck the same way. We don't know what will seem like common sense to him. We do know -- or at least, I know; some of you may not be so sure right now -- that he's nobody's fool in spite of this trick he's just pulled. So if Aichi doesn't find him somewhere along the road to the instrument site, we'll have to try to guess what a reasonably smart person with a completely different background from ours would consider a sensible course." "You should have a pretty good idea. You grew up on Earth," remarked Peter Willett. "So I did. I haven't been there for twenty-two years, though. And the fact that I'm still alive here is pretty good evidence of how deep I've buried my Earth habits. Still, I'll do my best. Just don't you throttle your imaginations because you think I'm the only one with a chance to solve the problem." "Don't worry," said Marie. "We'll figure him out." Jim Talles looked at her. "Maybe," he answered. T hirty miles, measured along a low orbit, from North-Down, Rick Suspee went through a rather similar review of the situation, though this probably happened some hours later. He had not yet caught on to his twelve-hour error. Nevertheless it was evident to him that something was seriously wrong. He had walked for what he guessed was the right distance across the relatively flat surface of Taruntius X. He had reached the valley he had marked from the lock -- fortunately, he had not lost track of it during the walk. He had followed it slightly upward and then down again to another open, fairly level area. The way was obviously a welltraveled one, as he had expected. Indeed it was packed so firmly that it would no longer take footprints or even tread marks, though often enough one or the other led off to right or left. It all fitted the mental picture Rick had gained from his uncle's maps and the conversations he had heard and joined, and he had no doubt that he was now on the southern edge of Picard G's floor. However, he had seen nothing of the hikers or any other living person. He had heard not a whisper over his helmet communicator. He knew that radio on the moon was a line-of-sight proposition, and that the relay units on the hilltops around Wilsonburg were turned on only by special arrangement. If he had never got close enough to the hikers to have no chunks of moonscape in the way, it was perfectly reasonable for him to have heard nothing. But he could not understand why he had failed to get that close. True, they might have been into the valley before he had emerged onto Taruntius X. Yet if so they had traveled much faster than he had supposed possible. Rick himself had found that he could not walk much faster than on Earth. With far less fatigue, yes. Here he weighed less than twentyfive pounds. But faster, no. He did not have the coordination necessary to take the sort of steps that would keep both feet off the ground at once for any distance. When he tried it, landing on either foot was a matter of luck. Leaving the ground with an angular momentum close enough to zero for the result to resemble walking was still beyond his skill. Failing to land on at least one foot could be dangerous; helmets were strong but had their limits, and moon rocks are no softer than those of Earth. It would be a long time before he could acquire the "lunar lope" -- that swift, leaping walk at which moon-dwellers were so adept. Yet even if the others had the skill he lacked and could "step" a distance limited only by their muscular strength rather than their coordination, it was hard to see how a lead of one hour or less could possibly have put them ten miles ahead. It then occurred to him that they might have stuck to the hills around the east side of Taruntius IF X, rather than cutting straight across its floor. Some of the badge tests that the hikers were going to take during the trip could easily have required this. If they had chosen the easterly course, that might account for the radio silence. They had been in a valley cutting them off from him. It also implied that he was ahead of them by now, since his path had been direct rather than circuitous. With this in mind, he settled himself down to wait. His position was a short distance from what he took to be the northeast end of the valley. He had intended to wait for two hours at most. But the sleep that had been eluding him so effectively for the last few "nights" caught up with Rick. He never knew how long he slept, since his watch was inside the space suit where he could not reach it and his oxygen-cartridge gauge meant little in terms of time without knowledge of his personal consumption rate. Well, he consoled himself, he had been out in the open where the others would have seen him if they had caught up. Evidently the around-the-hills hypothesis was wrong. They had been ahead of him all the time. They must certainly have reached Aichi's place in Picard GA by now. GA, he knew, was about three miles across. It should be no more than three or four miles away. Presumably the whole crowd was below its rim, sinc# he was still hearing no response to his radio calls. Unfortunately, no such feature was visible, or at least recognizable, on the slightly rolling plain before him. This might mean little; distances were hard to judge in the unfamiliar lighting. If the rim of GA were high, it might be difficult to pick it out from the background hills -- hills whose feet were below the near horizon but whose upper details stood out as clearly as the valley walls a scant mile behind him. If the rim were low or nonexistent, finding it from a distance would be even harder. Just the same, his map memory told him that if he headed northeast ficom his present position for three or four miles he should reach the depression. And it was probably too large to miss. He looked around carefully, matching the shapes of the surrounding hills with his memory, and incidentally modifying the latter more than he realized. In case he would have to retreat, he made particularly sure that he could recognize the mouth of the valley leading back to Taruntius X and Wilsonburg. That was sensible although, as it turned out, superfluous. He set out sturdily, but there was no easy way to tell when he had walked four miles. His pace was probably not its Earth length, which he knew well, but he could not guess whether it was longer because of the lower gravity or shorter because of this space suit. Expended effort -- fatigue -- of course meant nothing as a distance guide. Nor did the passage of time, since he could not reliably judge his speed. Eventually so much time passed that he decided he must have started in the wrong direction. GA could not possibly lie this far from the valley mouth. Once more he stopped and looked around, less sure of himself than ever. The gently rolling plain furnished a large supply of low elevations, any one possibly the rim of GA. Some, as he already knew, were indeed crater rims, but none had proven anywhere near large enough to be his target. There seemed nothing to do but check every elevation in sight -- unless, he thought suddenly, it would be better to go back to the southern hills and get a higher viewpoint. A few hundred feet might be enough to let him spot the hole he wanted without difficulty. It was a good idea. He would try it. First, though, he would check one rather noticeable rise to his left -- roughly north, though without shade he could no longer see the stars to be sure of that. He made his way over to it and without much effort reached the top. It was not a crater lip but a low dome, some forty feet high. It measured about a hundred and fifty yards from north to south, and half that in the other direction. There had been no footprints on the southern side that Rick had climbed. But near the top he encountered a well-trampled area. To his surprise, a few yards ahead of him he saw a long, low, obviously artificial wall. He approached the structure curiously. It certainly was not an emergency oxygen cache -- he knew what they looked like and how they were marked. The wall was only about two feet high and five wide, though it extended over a hundred feet from the top of the dome down its western side. Apparently the wall was made of cemented pebbles and the dome roof of glassy material covered by lunar soil. Piercing soil and roof, near the high end, there was a long scar with a few footprints around it. At the other end, downhill, stood a piece of equipment he recognized instantly. There was no need to read the cast-metal sign that lay beside it. He knew the story. Eighty years earlier, Ranger lunar investigating robots -- had plowed into the southern part of plus velocity. One of those freakish distributions of kinetic energy that sometimes occur in explosions and tornadoes had hurled an almost undamaged lens element -- barrel and glassware -- five hundred miles at nearly orbital speed. The fragment had expended most of its energy in IF Ill cutting the groove on this hilltop, bounced once, and come to rest a little farther downhill. The wall surrounded track and relic, protecting them from the only feature of the environment likely to prevent human beings. Rick was impressed not by the recalled story or even by the sight of a piece of history. What struck home was that the Ranger relic, he knew, was not in Picard G. Somehow, in spite of his care and what he thought was a reliable memory, he had managed to come a dozen miles or more too far west. For a moment he considered beating a retreat to town. But the notion never got a firm hold. After all, Picard G lay only a few miles to the east -- much closer than Wilsonburg. The hills in the way did not look difficult, and nothing he remembered from the maps suggested that they should be. He would find the Footprints gang, and safety, much more quickly if he cut straight across to his original objective. Furthermore, he had spent much time memorizing the locations of oxygen caches in G against the need for them ever arising. He was safe for a good many hours yet according to his cartridge gauge, but it would be nice to be close to a recharge should he require one. Without further thought he headed westward toward the low hills. J im talles had spent the time driving down from NortheastMiddle in thinking, since the road was both safe and familiar. He had come up with a plan of sorts. After Aichi Yen's team had left and the short consultation with the others was over, Talles wasted no time standing around. "Back inside, all of you," he ordered. "We have some mapfiguring to do, and I'll have to get the relay units between here and Pic G turned on. Then we won't have to wait until Aichi gets back to hear his report." "But Chief, you ordered us to suit up," Norman objected. "I know, but I've changed plans. We'd better not waste our suit charges while waiting to hear from Aichi. We'll occupy the time deciding where to look next if the others don't find him." No one argued further, and in a few minutes all were gathered inside. There were plenty of maps available at every lock. Talles laid out a set presenting a complete mosaic of the area. For nearly an hour discussion ensued about the possible places where someone with Rick's background might be if he had wandered from the planned route. The trouble was that none could actually believe that anyone, under the circumstances would have been silly enough simply to go off somewhere on his own. If he had, there was no guessing what else he might do, since his criteria of elementary common sense would have to be incomprehensible. They all realized that the term "outside" meant simply "outdoors" to an Earth person and so did not carry the same frightening implications as it would to someone brought up on the moon. But none could see why this difference should turn off one's brain completely. All the segments came to a dead end with some remark to the effect that "... If he was dumb enough to do that, he was dumb enough to do anything." Jim Talles alone was reluctant to accept that notion, partly because he was sure his nephew was quite intelligent and partly because it implied the need for a complete, square-yard by square-yard search of the entire area around Wilsonburg. An impossible task to accomplish before Rick's oxygen would run out. Rick had started with about thirty-six hours of the stuff in his cartridge. Of course, he might run into an emergency cache. But sensible planning would have to be based on the assumption that he would not. More than twelve of those precious hours were gone. The area that could be searched thoroughly in the remaining twenty-four by all the people who could reasonably be put on the job represented a frighteningly small fraction of the sector in which he might possibly be. The main hope was still that one of Aichi's searchers would find the boy along the route to Picard GA. After the relay stations had been turned on, Talles spent more of his time at the lock communicator than at the maps. Aichi kept his crawler well out in the center of the valley and was in continuous touch once contact had been made. Some of the searchers on foot were occasionally shadowed from the relay antennas. They were trying to cover the valley sides far enough from the main "road" to spot individual footprints. Any set of these that could not be accounted for somehow, especially those that left the main trail without any matching return set, had to be investigated further. It was a slow process. The hills around Wilsonburg had been well examined by prospectors during the last few decades. Many of their trails were known to the Footprints' group but there were many that had to be checked out in detail. Time passed slowly. Suspense in the lock grew unbearable. T hen suddenly Aichi reported. He had reached his instrument site. Rick was not there. And no clue to his whereabouts had been encountered en route. "All right," Talles answered the relayed voice. "If he's not there, he isn't. As I remember GA, he'd have IF to be deliberately hiding in one of the small pits not to be visible -- there dren't any bubbles at the place that I ever heard of." "Nor I," agreed Aichi Yen. "That's one reason they let me set up here. The school is pretty careful even with its full-rated seniors." "Right. Therefore we have to assume Rick never got there -- or if he did, he left for some reason. I can't offhand imagine a reason that wouldn't have brought him straight back toward Wilsonburg. In that case, you would have met him on the way -- " "But we didn't. So he never reached this place. Something must have delayed him on the way. It couldn't have been suit troubles or we'd have found him along the road. Anyway, he knew enough to check his oxygen cartridge and heat-control pack before starting off -- if he hadn't, Pierre would have spotted him for a beginner and never let him out." "I agree, Aichi." Talles thought a moment. "Anyway, until the footsearchers finish their coverage, you stay there and. do what you can on your own project -- you can accomplish plenty alone, and the last pair you dropped off can help you when they work their way out to where you are. That's Digger and Anna, isn't it?" "Right. They're quite a way back, though. I left them with a couple of miles of the valley to check before they got out onto Pic G. I figured I could see all that was necessary from the crawler, once I was out on the plain. It seemed best to have the others concentrate on places where Rick might have let his curiosity override his common sense." "Good. I don't see what more you could have done. We'll leave you to your own work for now. I hope the others will rout out that young scamp without our having to bother you again." "Thanks, sir. I'll keep the receiver on and make the standard checks with North-Down." "All right. Out, here." Jim frowned. "Digger? Kort? Are any of you foot searchers in relay contact?" Three were. Talles got them to report one at a time but the word was negative in every case. He had each describe as exactly as possible the sections searched. With the aid of the other group members he marked these off on the map. The result was discouraging on two grounds. First, because so much of the probable area had been covered -- and second, because so little of the possible area had been. The group looked at the shaded portions of the map in moody silence. Only a few remarks were exchanged as the minutes dragged by and negative after negative came in over the communicators. With each report, someone shaded another small bit of the map. At last the valley's entire length was penciled in. Digger and Anna had reached Picard G, and were heading on toward Aichi's station at A. Kort and Jem had reached the middle of the valley, where the other pair started. Kort closed his final report with a question. "Should we go on out to GA with the others, or recheck what Anna and Dig have done here, or return to town? I'm starting to get worried about that kid. There just isn't any way to get lost along this road, that I can see. So if he isn't out at Aichi's set-up, what could have happened to him? He didn't strike me as a completely jammed valve, so I'm sure he's not hiding from us as a joke. Is there any sort of--well -- attack, or something, that can hit Earthers under low gravity? Could he possibly have gone off his head?" "I doubt it," Talles replied. "Earthers do sometimes panic because of the breathing restriction imposed by a space suit. Rick is used to underwater gear, though. That's even worse, from the breathing angle. So a space suit shouldn't bother him. Besides, even if he did panic he wouldn't run off and hide in a hole, would he? Aloneness is the last thing he'd want." "Sure, Chief," Kort said doubtfully. "I think you'd better start back," Talles told him. "Come as fast as you can until you reach the plain, then spread out as before and again check each side of the main trail for prints. I'll send people out from this end to do the same. It doesn't seem likely he's on Tar X, but -- wait, change that. Maybe he got the idea of climbing one of the hills there to get a better look around. Both of you follow east around the edge of Tar X, at the foot of the hills, and check for prints climbing He was wearing Type IV boots, Pierre says. I know his suit size is #-C-A. Any prints of that pattern and approximately matching that size, whether you think you remember them from before or not, report to me." "Traveling," Kort said. "But I wish we'd had that boot data earlier." "Sorry. Pierre Montaux thought of it and visiphoned us a little while ago. Carry on, Kort. Digger and Anna, have you been reading us? If you're not too far out on Pic G, how about doing the same thing? Rick might very well have been uncertain of direction when he got out of the valley. He could have decided to go uphill to try and sight GA." Anna's voice came back. "We're a couple of miles out -- nearly halfway from the valley to Aichi's spot. But you may have something. It's worth going back for. Look, Dig, if Rick decided to do something like that when he reached Pic G, there's a hill he might have used. Let's head for its foot, close to the valley side. That's where Rick would have IF reached it and started to climb." "Sounds good," Talles encouraged. "Check in at the foot of the hill, and do your best to stay line-of-sight from the nearest relay antenna -- you know where they are." "Will do," came Digger's voice. "If you have to follow a trail out of range, try to arrange your own relay -- one of you on trail, the other in sight of both the tracker and the antenna." "Right, sir. Traveling." Marie, like the others, had been paying close attention to the radio conversation. "Shouldn't some of us go out there to Pic G to help Dig and Anna?" she asked. "As I remember it, there are miles of hills along the south side. Rick might have climbed any one of them." "That's a thought, Marie. But by the time any more of you could hike out there, those two would have pretty well covered the ground, wouldn't they?" "Not if there turned out to be a lot of Type IV, size #-C-A tracks to follow. And for that matter, why should we hike out? Wouldn't it be faster to take a crawler?." "Can you drive one?" "Well -- not legally." "How about the rest of you?" Jim glanced over the group gathered around the map table. "Aichi took all the rated ones -- Anna, Kort, Digger, and Jem -- with him." Marie added, "That wasn't very bright. But you could drive some of us out. There are plenty of crawlers at this lock." "Sure I could drive you. Except that it would be too hard to keep in touch with the other searchers while I was driving, especially, in the valley." "You can get through it without necessarily losing touch with the relay net. It would take a lot of zigzagging, that's all." "I know. But I can't get through it without devoting most of my attention to driving." "I could drive, or Orm. It would be legal as long as you were in the cab." "You're a stubborn little wench, Marie." Talles sighed. "I suppose you do have a point about the southern side of Pic G." T here was a flurry of dressing and helmet-tightening. The group flowed over to where the vehicles were parked. Jim Talles went through the formalities of signing one out. He, Marie, and two of the others entered the cab, and the rest got into the trailer. He stared at Marie thoughtfully for a moment, then motioned her to the driver's seat. Under her handling the fuel batteries came up to voltage, the individual wheel-motors were tested, and the machine rolled gently to the nearest vehicle lock. Marie established connection with the passengers in back, received their assurance of complete suit checks. She repeated the procedure for those in the cab with her, made a final check of her own suit. Finally she signaled for the opening of the outer door. Moments later the crawler was rolling smoothly northward at forty miles an hour -- slightly better than its fuel batteries could maintain. Marie was drawing from reserve charge as well. Talles disapproved but decided to say nothing. The storage cells could be recharged while the group was searching around Picard on foot. He turned his attention back to communication, fine-tuning the crawler's radio to the relay system. A voice check confirmed that Aichi, the four searchers, and the dispatcher at North-Down were all able to hear him. Marie stopped the crawler, to his surprise, before any report came in from the foot-searchers. As he glanced at her, mystified, she pointed to the right. He gazed in that direction and gestured understanding. Some ten miles north of NorthDown lies a two-mile crater. It is not the only such depression on the floor of Taruntius X. But it is the sole depression even close to that size along the straight path from North-Down to Picard G. Marie knew that Aichi had not dropped his first search party until reaching the valley. So she was pretty sure that this crater had not been searched. She also considered it a likely place to tempt a newcomer to the moon into taking a close look. Jim Talles smiled in unspoken agreement. A two-mile circle has an area of more than three square miles, which can use up a great deal of search time. It was fortunate that a check of the circumference proved sufficient. No boots of Rick's type had crossed the rim except two that were overlaid, as a few minutes' follow-up showed, by later prints. Even so, half an hour was lost. Marie had remained at the radio while Talles and three others had gone out. As soon as they were inside again, she started the crawler. "Digger and Anna reported. They can't find anything at the hill she picked," the girl said. "They've moved to the west and are still looking. But -- but all the reasonable possibilities seem wrong! Maybe we ought to try the unreasonable." "Or the more reasonable," Jim Talles said. The crawler passed no more likely-looking stopping places before reaching the valley. There were a few bubbles along the way -- lava pits whose thin glass ceilings sometimes gave way under weight -- but the known ones had all been checked by the searchers and no new holes had been noted. An hour and twenty minutes after leaving North-Down, Marie brought the crawler to a halt beside IF two space-suited figures. Digger and Anna were waiting at the foot of the rise that marked the southern boundary of Picard G. That feature is irregular -- but much less so than Taruntius X, and its southern side in particular is much less steep than usual for the inner slope of a lunar walled plain. It seemed doubtful that Rick could have lost himself here. The climbing was safe, hardly to be considered climbing at all. There were comparatively few places where radio contact would be a problem. Marie's attitude had changed. She had begun to feel far less sure that Rick was somewhere along the line of march between Wilsonburg and Picard G. The enthusiasm that had caused her to pressure Talles into driving from town had pretty well evaporated. She did not want to hike along a planned path looking for footprints. She wanted to try the unreasonable -- or the more reasonable, as Jim Talles had said. The two need not be incompatible. Because what might appear most reasonable to an Earther might seem least reasonable to a moon denizen. Somehow Marie felt she was coming to know what might have gone on in Rick Suspee's mind after he had walked out of the lock at North-Down. She wished sfre could be alone to think. But she couldn't be. Talles was already assigning search areas. "All right," he said, "we'll work in pairs, as always. Digger and Anna, stay with the crawler. You've been afoot a long time, and probably want to assist Aichi anyway. I'll drive you to GA as soon as I drop the others." "You need all the searchers you can get," Anna objected. "You two are so weary you'll be a handicap rather than a help. As for Aichi, I don't want him to miss out on the chance of a lifetime." Jim turned away. "We'll take two miles for each pair," he went on. "Norm and Peter, start here. Cover the low slopes for prints. Call in if you see anything likely, then check it out before going any farther. Dan and Don, the next section. Same orders, when we drop you off. Jennie and Cass the third section, Orm and Marie the last. After I reach GA, I'll make one circuit of it. Unless I find something I'll come right back to pick you up as you finish your sections. Questions?" IV F ifteen minutes later Marie watched the crawler roll away toward the northwest. Orm Hoffman, at her side, had to call twice to get her attention. "Let's get with it, Marie. What's best, I think -- you follow this contour while I parallel it uphill a couple of hundred feet. Then anytime one of us finds a possible the other checks at his level. That would let us catch trails actually going up or down hill." "That seems all right." Marie's lack of enthusiasm was obvious even over the communicator. Orm Hoffman noticed and wondered. Jim in the receding crawler heard, and remembered Marie's remark about the "unreasonable." Neither Orm nor Jim commented. The girl realized, however, that she would have to diligently devote herself to the plan, futile though she now felt it to be. She and Orm started eastward as he had suggested. They went slowly, the boy examining the ground carefully and attentively, the girl's eyes doing' their duty as she tried to concentrate. But she kept remembering details of the evening at the Talles' home -- the questions Rick had asked, the ones he had answered, the ideas he had volunteered under her careful manipulation. She felt more and more that she could put herself in the shoes of Rick Suspee. Yet the more certain she felt of that, the less could she understand his disappearance. It just did not fit. The time mistake was natural -- people were always making it. Following a group he thought had gone ahead was foolish but perfectly understandable. Marie would not have done so herself, to be sure, but her upbringing had been different. Outside carried much the same implications to her as underwater did to him, she surmised. On the other hand outside to him was no more special than the term outdoors so offhandedly used by Earthers. He would know there was a certain amount of danger involved in going through an air lock but he probably equated it with, say, the danger of crossing a street in an Earth city -- a danger recognized and respected yet lived with and faced casually. Yes, she could understand his going out alone. What had happened then? Rick knew where the group was going, knew the area as well as maps could teach it. Although he had never seen it before, he should not have had the slightest difficulty in identifying the well-packed trail from North-Down. There was no special risk along the route. The normal ones like bubbles would not have caused him to disappear -- unless he had broken through a new one, and in that case the traces should have been obvious to the searchers. Even if his suit had failed and he was a fatality -- Marie could grant the possibility, much as she hated to -- his body should have been along the trail somewhere in plain sight. The disappearance made no sense. "Track here, Marie!" Orm's voice scrubbed her thoughts. Guiltily she looked back; had she passed a set of prints without noticing? No. She could see her own extending backward at least two hundred yards -- her own, no others. She looked ahead again, IF glimpsed what had to be the track that had caught Orm's eye. The line of prints, imbedded clearly in the moondust, intersected her path, heading uphill. The sole pattern, when she got close enough to see it clearly, she confirmed as Type IV. Maybe Rick had come this far out of the way after all. "Start following them up, Orm. I'll backtrack for age traces." Her tone was elated. The indifference of a few minutes before had vanished. "Traveling," he answered. "They bear a little to the right of straight uphill, sort of toward that hump half a mile back." She goosed her communicator. "Jim Talles! We have a track here that looks good. I'm making sure it's new." "Great!" came the voice from the crawler. "I'm just putting my passengers off at GA. I'll go around as I planned, but keep me wired -- I can cut back to you any time." Talles added, "Orm, how does it look to you?" "Whoever this is wasn't just wandering. The prints go in as near a straight line as the ground allows. There are some breaks on bare rocks but I'm having no trouble finding the trail again just by following the original direction. Does it backtrack the same way, Marie?" "No. There's a fairly sharp bend a little way out. He was going east, just as we were -- and then he seems to have suddenly got the idea of going up. Unreasonable! A waste of energy and oxygen! This must be Rick -- it's got to be." "You keep back checking," said Jim Talles. "Rick isn't wearing the only Type IV boots on the moon. He hasn't the only #-C-A suit. Also, I wouldn't bet much money that no one else has climbed that hill in the last forty years." "Traveling, sir." T here was radio silence for five or six minutes. Then Orm spoke again. "I see a dip between me and the hilltop. The trail goes down into it. If I follow directly, I think I'll lose the relays. Shall I go ahead, Jim -- uh -- Chief?" "Yes. I'm proceeding toward your position now. If we don't hear from you before I arrive, I'll go after you." "Traveling," Orm said. Marie had paused to listen. Now she looked back up the slope. She could still see her companion but as she watched, the fluorescent orange torso that marked a Wilsonburg space suit disappeared over the rise, followed by the green-andyellow helmet. Colors were selected for contrast against likely lunar background, not esthetic values. The crawler, decorated in the same three colors, was visible a full two miles away. She glanced in its direction, saw that it was nose-on to her, and returned her attention to the footprints. She wondered why Rick had not gone farther out on the crater floor before turning eastward. He must have known that the closest part of GA lay a couple of miles from the southern foothills. Of course, his judgment of moon distances might be poor. There was no telling what someone with his background would use as a yardstick. His pace length would, she supposed, be shorter on Earth. And to help him on the moon there was none of that bluish overtone, increasing with the distance of background objects, that she had seen on pictures of Earthscapes. Perhaps he thought he had came farther north than had been the case. But if so, why had he trudged so much farther east than necessary? Marie was now seven miles from the end of the valley, actually about even with the eastern rim of GA. The tracks, if they continued in their present direction, but have gone right past... Her theories grew more and more abstract as she plodded along. Her notions of what Rick must have been doing and thinking, and why, grew more and more complex and less and less solidly based on what she knew of the young Earther. Then suddenly she was jarred back to reality. Another pattern of footprints lay before her, coming on a slant from her left -- from the valley end, that is. It represented the trail of several people and joined the one she was following, completely concealing it. She looked ahead to pick up her Type IV pattern where it emerged on the other side of the interference, and discovered with a shock that it didn't. The implications were obvious but she resisted them. Instead of calling Talles at once, she devoted several minutes to a careful examination of the moonsoil and its impressions. When she finally made the call, discouragement was back in her voice at full strength. "Chief, sir -- and Orm if you can hear me -- cancel this one. We're wrong again." Talles smothered a tortured curse. "Explain!" "Our quarry came from the direction of the valley with a group of either eight or nine people. He left them at the place where I am now. He was actually with them, not a latecomer following the track of an earlier party. Some of his prints are under theirs and some on top. This trail certainly isn't Rick's." "All right." Talles had got hold of himself. Evenly he said, "Stay where you are, Marie, and I'll pick you up. Then we'll go after Orm -- or can any of you others make radio contact with him? He's out of touch with me." For several seconds the communication spectrum was crowded as everyone called Orm. No answer came. Apparently he was still in radio shadow. Talles spoke again after a brief wait. "Marie, I can't see you and don't IF know just where you are. If you can see me, give me a flash." The girl unclipped a pencil-sized tube from the waist of her suit, aimed it at the distant vehicle, pressed a switch. Bright as it was, the beam was, of course, invisible to her in the vacuum. She waved the tube gently in both planes. In a few seconds Jim spoke again. "Good. I have you zeroed. Stand by -- I'll be there in two minutes." He fulfilled the promise. Marie swung up into the cab as the vehicle pulled up beside her. He had been unable to think of anything consoling to say. She would have to live with the collapse of hope, the bitter letdown. He had been getting optimistic himself about the trail that had petered out. Well, he told himself, nothing to do but keep trying. "Where is Orm? You'd better drive, Marie, and head us as close as you can to where you think he ought to be." She slipped into the control seat he had vacated. "Let's see -- I came from over theTe, and he was going -- yes, that way -- " She swung the vehicle smoothly and let it build up speed. "You're sure?" Jim's question was purely rhetorical. He did not expect more than a rhetorical answer. He certainly did not expect what he got. "Well -- " She gestured vaguely ahead, toward a hillock that would have seemed part of the more distant backdrop of the south rim to an eye unfamiliar with lunar scenery. "That's where we... Wait a minute!" To Marie's credit, the crawler did not swerve as the idea struck her. "I've just thought of something. The ground right outside North-Down is packed solid for hundreds of yards around. It hasn't taken a new print since the Mark Twenty crawler came out. Right? We knew the direction to Pic G from experience but Rick knew it only from maps. So if there were no footprints or anything to guide him, how did he know which way to start walking?" That question, too, must have been rhetorical. Certainly the girl gave Jim Talles no time to answer it, if he had an answer available. She kept right on talking, thinking aloud. The man recognized the symptoms. Marie had fallen in love with an idea again. He tried to muster some defenses but it was difficult. The kid, as usual, was being reasonable as well as enthusiastic. She was still chattering as they reached the hillock and started up. Talles managed to get in a few words now and then but they were vague ones like "... you still can't be sure." Such objections did not impress Marie. She was sure enough. He got in a few more words near the top of the hill. But by the time they were over it and back in touch with Orm Hoffman, Talles had pretty much decided to go along with her. The idea of breaking up an orderly and organized search pattern on the chance that she was right seemed unsafe. If she were not right, the error could be fatal. On the other hand if she were right and he did not follow her lead, the result could be just as fatal. T he trail Orm had been pursuing swept on past the next hilltop and apparently over the crater's south rim. They never did find out who had made it, or when, or why. Orm had the sense not to go beyond the second hill without making another radio check, so when they did reestablish contact with him he was already coming back. This saved time, which ballooned Marie's already surging morale even more. Twenty-five minutes after the girl had her inspiration the crawler was approaching the valley mouth with eight of the Footprints group aboard. Jim Talles had been in touch with the team still at GA. Although they were in radio shadow by intent, one of them had come up to the rim to make a routine safety report. Jim had salved his conscience by telling them to stay and carry on with Aichi's project but to be ready to resume the search in Picard G if the new idea collapsed. He also called the two searchers still in Taruntius X and told them to continue their hunt back to North-Down. Privately he decided that if this idea of Marie's did not crystallize he would declare a full emergency and get more help. Evelyn Suspee, afterward, was to have great difficulty understanding Talles' attitude. She had been convinced that Rick was somewhere in town and was not told about his misadventure until much later. After getting over the first shock, she reacted most to what she called the cold-bloodedness of Aichi and his friends. It was a long time before she could admit that a civilized human being could have put anything at all ahead of an all-out search for her missing son. And a certain coolness toward her brother-in-law for allowing anything else persisted even longer. Talles' insistence that there had not been a genuine emergency until the very end carried little weight with her. She was culturally conditioned to values and priorities differing from those of moon-dwellers. Their experience-dictated credo was that anything resembling panic is to be avoided at all costs, frantic efforts are to be avoided even in the most trying circumstances, and work must go on if humanly possible. Only imminent loss of life or limb could justify taking citizens from their labors by declaring an emergency. While Jim Talles fully recognized the threat to Rick's life, neither Jim nor his young cohort considered the threat that immediate. If Rick's IF suit had failed, he could not be helped. If the suit were whole, he still should have oxygen enough to last a few hours. Talles took over the driving after the crawler reached the valley. He sent Marie back into the trailer with the others to do some map work. Half an hour took the crawler through the valley and into Taruntius X. Once out on the plain, however, Jim did not continue toward Wilsonburg. He turned to his right and followed the irregular north side of the area for some five miles. Then he turned right once more along another valley, one that led northwest to the Lick E mines. At that point the search party began to implement Marie's plan. Instead of dropping them off in pairs, Talles had the entire group spread across the width of the valley and start toward Lick E. He eased the vehicle along in the central, heavily trodden path, keeping pace with the young hikers on either side. They were going slowly enough to make sure that they missed no print of a Style IV boot of the size appropriate for a #-C-A space suit. Fortunately Rick was rather small for his age. Most adults took a considerably larger suit, which meant that boot patterns of his type and size were relatively rare. They could easily be noticed when going off the main road on solo prospecting expeditions. Two such sets were encountered during the first half-dozen miles. They were quickly identified as having been made by the members of the Footprints group themselves. The valley floor narrowed then for a distance of some miles. Since there was less width of ground to be inspected, the searchers made good speed. Then the valley opened out and they had to slow down even though they paid most attention to the right side. On the theory that Rick had gone this way by mistake, he would have assumed that he was entering Picard G at the valley mouth. Hence, he would presumably have turned right -- toward where he would have expected GA to be. The widening of the valley allowed the "road" to spread, and many more individual footprints became distinguishable. This slowed things down even further. Jim Talles changed his technique, running the crawler half a mile ahead and getting out to search himself until the group caught up, then repeating the process. Speed was down to about five miles an hour. Nearly two hours passed in this fashion. They were now well out of the valley and slowing down even more as they struggled to cover an ever-widening front -- in fact, progress might better have been expressed in square miles per hour. Even Marie's bubbling mixture of enthusiasm and confidence was beginnirig to go a little flat once more, sure as she still felt that Rick must have come this way. All of the searchers were bone-tired and hungry. Talles reached the decision that it would be best to break off, alert the authorities by radio, then drive the kids back to town. He opened his mouth to broadcast the call-in -- and at that instant Peter Willett's voice came crackling over the communicator. "Hey -- here's a track! Breaking right out of the packed lane! Take a look." rm reached the place first, examined the evidence. Excitedly he called, "Peter's got something. Wherever it crosses other prints, it's on top. The right size and style -- and it's turning off to the east. We'll have to chase this one." "Marie, you and Orm follow it," Talles ordered. "The rest of you get into the trailer and rest for a while. If this one peters out we'll have to go back and call for an emergency rescue party. I know you all have plenty of oxygen, but you can't do a good job indefinitely without food and rest. Get abpard. Orm and Marie, lead on." T he two space-suited figures hustled along the line of Style IV footprints. Orm was still placidly doing a job. Marie, though, was once more effervescent. She had to be right, she told herself. This had to be Rick's trail. It was. The searchers reached the spot where Rick had paused for the second time -- they had missed the one where he had slept. After unsuccessfully trying to locate him visually from some high ground, they followed his abrupt turn from the edge of the plain toward the hill where the Ranger lens had landed. There were, as Rick had noticed, no other tracks there. So for the moment there was no way to be sure that this one was recent except for the back-trail evidence. At any rate, it was the most recent track in the vicinity to have left the main path to Lick E. They followed the prints up the hill to the Ranger relic. All of them knew where they were. All had seen the historical monument before, and while not completely indifferent to it they were far more concerned with the trail. This, of course, vanished on the packed area near the wall. They piled out of the crawler and gathered around the spot where the prints disappeared. "It shouldn't be hard to find which way he went," Peter said. "Just walking around the edge of the packed ground should do it." Talles had his doubts. "Marie, you got us this far. Which way, do you think, would he have gone from here?" The girl's expression could not be seen inside her helmet but there IF was no trace of uncertainty in her voice. "With all that map study, Rick certainly knows where this monument is. He would have had two chokers of what to do next. So when he got here, he must have realized his mistake. The sensible one would have been to go back to North-Down the way he came." "Which he didn't," Orm said acidly. "Correct -- because what seems sensible to us may not seem sensible to him," Marie said. "The other thing he'd have thought of would be to cut over to Pic G straight across the hills. Look east, there. This landing scar would have given him the direction if he didn't have it already. And that first ridge is only four or five miles away. He must be lost on those hills somewhere. Look for his prints going east." A straightforward enough suggestion, but a complication arose in carrying it out. Naone looks directly at the sun from the moon any more than one does from Earth. The searchers had not noticed before, but the general illumination had been fading during the last hour. Everyone had known perfectly well why Aichi Yen had set up his apparatus when he did; they had all heard him remark, as they had left Picard G, that the eclipse would be full in only a few hours more. Nevertheless the dwindling light took the group by surprise. As they started eastward along the wall to carry out Marie's suggestion, someone exclaimed that it was getting hard to see. Nine pairs of eyes lifted to look through the heavy filters on the top of as many face-plates as nine space-suited figures turned to face west. For Jim Talks one glance was enough. "Quick!" he roared. "Orm and Marie, carry on. Check your temperature controls. Call back if the prints are there. I don't want anyone outside but you two. The rest of you get back into the trailer. We'll have to carry on with the crawler's lights, if we can do so at all. The ground ahead is strange to most of you, and we could lose track of someone who went outside the sweep of the lights..." T IAlles was obeyed without question. As he climbed into the cab, Marie's voice reached him. "They're here! Come on!" The remaining sliver of sun was narrowed rapidly now, the scarlet ring of Earth's sunlit atmosphere providing more and more of the total illumination. Jim switched on the main driving lights before he started the motors, and suddenly the ruby-lit landscape outside the illuminated swath was hard to see. He swung the vehicle toward the east. The lights picked out the two figures a few yards from the end of the wall. One was standing, beckoning to them. The smaller was already picking its way along the relocated trail. Talles thought of having the two come back into the cab and do the tracking from its vantage, but he dismissed the idea. Not all the moon's surface takes footprints. Breaks in the trail could be handled more surely, and even more quickly, by trackers on foot. It was even possible, especially if Rick had changed his direction at a bad spot, that the whole party would have to fan out once more to recover the trail. Before they were half a mile from the Ranger relic, all sunlight was gone. The landscape beyond the headlights was just barely visible, lit by the circle of crimson fire that marked Earth's position halfway down the western sky. The awed youngsters in the trailer were silent. Jim, facing east and driving, had little chance to look at the magnificent display. The search party crept on, across four miles of gently rolling plain, around occasional craterlets, toward the ridges separating, them from Picard G and the valley route Rick should have taken. Even Talles, by now, had lost his doubt. He was convinced this was Rick's trail they were following. As they reached the hills and the slopes grew steeper, new troubles developed. The comparatively loose material that took footprints so well began to give way to bare rock. The breaks in the trail that Talles had foreseen became more and more numerous. The searchers had to take to their feet once more, headlights supplemented by individual flashlights. Sometimes the track would be recovered two minutes after a break, sometimes not for ten; but the author of the footprints had evidently been determined to keep going east. This conviction always, in the end, let the hunters find the prints again. By the time they reached the top of the first ridge, the eclipse was nearly over. The bottom of the crimson circle was showing the astonishing "ruby ring" phenomenon. It was a beautiful sight. Yet Marie did not so much as glance back at it. Well ahead of theothers, she reached the top of the ridge. For just a moment she stood looking down and ahead, into another valley. It led back to her right, to the Wilsonburg-Picard G road. Beyond other ridges she could glimpse Picard G itself. Taruntius X was still out of sight around the shoulder of the hill to her right. Poor as the seeing still was, it was good enough to remind Marie that getting the first ridge out of the way meant more area in line-of-sight, therefore in communicator reach. On impulse she cried out: "Rick! Can you hear us?" The others, still below the crest, heard her call. They did not dare speak themselves for fear of drowning out any answer Marie might be getting. They simply hurried as fast IF as they could to catch up with her. The girl, therefore, was the only one to hear all of the answer. "Marie! Where have you been? Down in GA? I've been calling off and on ever since I could see Pic G, but no one has answered." Her laugh was like a sob. Tears of relief streamed down her cheeks. "Oh, Rick! We're behind you. We followed you from the Ranger relic. We're just at the ridge from where we can see over to Pic G. How far ahead of it are you?" "Well, I don't know exactly. I reached that ridge maybe half an hour before the eclipse started." It must have been longer than that, Marie thought. Otherwise he would have heard our radio talk when we first came out of the valley. Rick was saying, "I kept on as well as I could toward Picard, but you can't hold to a straight line among these hills even when you can see. With the sunlight gone it was even harder. I've gone pretty straight though, I think, and have crossed a couple more ridges, so I should be between you and Pic G about -- oh, maybe halfway there." Jim Talles was on the crest by now, like all the others, and heard the last few sentences. Happy now, his tensions wonderfully eased, he took over the conversation. "All right, Rick, the safest thing now is for you to hold up. Don't try to find the rest of the way to Pic G. It's a wonder you got as far as you have -- I can't imagine whether it's luck that's kept you out of a bubble, or what. I wish I knew how you managed to duck them in the dark. But you stay right where you are. Even when full light comes back, just stand by until we reach you. You understand?" But this time there was no answer. V T ialles followed his own advice. He made the group stay where it was until sunlight returned. Then, with everyone riding, he struck out eastward toward Picard G. The footprints were now few and far between; this side of the ridge had little soft soil even in the hollows. It was not, for now, a matter of following a trail but of interpreting with guesses at what Rick would have done in a particular situation. Jim had developed a healthy respect for Marie's judgment on this point since she had been proven right in her major theory; his respect was shared by all the others. Where there was disagreement, Marie's word carried the weight. A couple of ridges. Did that also mean "two" to Earthers? Marie thought so, and they acted accordingly. Straight toward Pic G. But the visible part of Picard G filled thirty degrees of horizon. Which point would Rick have decided was nearest? Halfway. On what basis? What would have looked like halfway from the ridge? What seemed like half the necessary walking to Rick after groping around in near-darkness for more than two hours? Even Marie felt unsure about that one. They finally stopped at what they guessed might have been the place from which they had heard Rick's voice. They were grimly aware that they were only guessing. The ground was rocky, did not readily show prints. They parked the crawler and spread out. Even in sunlight, many parts of the moon are hard to search effectively. This was certainly one of them. Moon shadows are intensely dark, since scattered light from the landscape does little to make up for scattered light from the sky. A dark patch may prove to be the footwide opening of a bubble deep enough to contain a person -- or a three-inchdeep crater if the lighting is low enough. It is seldom possible to be sure of anything from a distance and, even for moon dwellers, distance itself is hard to judge. There was one easy way to hunt, though. Searchers could go to the top of each hill in the neighborhood and call Rick on the communicators. This was soon done -- the only trouble being that it did not work. Either he was far enough away to be in radio shadow from all the places tried, or he was trapped in some local bit of radio shadow such as a bubble. It was the latter likelihood that made detailed searching necessary. With nine people it does not take long to closely examine, say, a football field. However, a very large number of football fields can be fitted into a single square mile -- many more football fields than there could possibly be half-hours left by now in Rick's oxygen cartridge. None of the searchers, other than Jim, had even seen a football field but they all had equally valid mental similes for the job facing them -- and the time left to do it in. By reasonable criteria, Rick had about eleven hours of oxygen left. That estimate might not be too accurate, of course; they had no data on his basic consumption rate. There might be one or even two hours more; there might, if he had been particularly active, be considerably less. Nobody spent much time thinking about the latter possibility but all did force their weary selves to move as rapidly as possible... One hour's work. Six fissures, about forty dark patches to make sure of, two bubbles -- empty. Move the crawler. A second hour. Two fissures, one bubble, twelve patches. A third hour. No fissures, a dozen loose rocks at the foot of a slope, with no way of telling how long they had been there. Two bubbles near the top of the same slope. Eight hours left, more or less -- emergency? Talles drove to a IF hilltop to request help from town, the request going via the Picard G relay network. A fourth hour, with fewer workers. Talles flatly ordered three of the searchers to rest in the trailer. They were dangerously close to utter exhaustion. A fifth hour. A sixth. Talles could not see Marie's face clearly, or he would have tried to order her to rest also in spite of his knowledge that she would refuse. Moon-dweller or not, he himself was getting panicky at this point. Somehow the air in his own suit felt stale and oppressive, not quite up to keeping him going. The remaining searchers were reaching their absolute limit. They had had neither food nor sleep for a good eighteen hours. Yet they insisted on carrying on, even after two dozen fresh searchers arrived from the town. That was another thing Rick's stepmother could never understand: why so few were sent out in answer to the emergency call. She could not grasp the fact that most of the jobs in a moon settlement are essential to its survival and the survival of everyone in it. There is some leeway, to be sure. People need recreation as much on the moon as on Earth, and even moondwellers get ill at times. Still, with a small population completely dependent on a high-level technology, it is not possible to spare many individuals at one time for an unscheduled activity of unpredictable duration. The additional searchers who did arrive had no more success than the Footprints crew. "He just can't be in this area!" Marie said at last. "My guess is that we lost contact because he started back to meet us before you finished talking. He must have been right on the edge of a radio shadow. Chief -- everybody -- these new people won't find him. You know they can't. It's up to us. We understand him. We figured out what he did, and got this close to him. We're the only ones who can get close to him again." "You could be right," Talles admitted. He was as weary and discouraged as any of the youngsters -- and as determined to keep searching. "Marie, you calculated where we should look for him -- led us into radio contact. Can you do it again? Can you tell what Rick did after that one message? And what happened to prevent his answering me a few seconds later?" "I've been trying," she said impatiently. "I've told you what I think. He must have started back toward us the second I told him we were behind him. His course took him downward, obviously, into radio shadow. We've passed places where he could have been that would have cut him off the moment he started downhill." "Why didn't he go back up when he found himself in shadow?" "Because he didn't know you had more to say. You told him not to go on -- you didn't say until the end of your message that he was to stay put. I'm betting he didn't hear that. Actually I could see four hilltops from where we were then which were just barely sticking over nearer ridges. He could have been on any one of them. We've covered the area of two since then, including the one I still think was most likely." "Have you figured out why he didn't meet us, if he was coming back for that purpose?" "He could have stepped into a collapsed bubble, which I don't think he'd do -- or he could have broken through a new one. We haven't found him in any bubble hole, though. Possibly he simply got led off by the ground. Personally, I think it would be best just to backtrack to those hilltops, particularly to the one where I think he was, and see where he would be most likely to go at each choice." T ialles nodded, remembered that his helmet was not following his head motion, and made the affirmative hand gesture. "Right. Or at least reasonable," he agreed. "Just the same, it seems pretty likely that he's had some sort of accident. Otherwise, the chances are, he'd have come within radio range of someone hours ago. If the accident occurred at the beginning, just as he started back toward us -- well, he should still be somewhere around here. It seems to me we should keep at what we're doing right now -- search this area. It's the best chance." "Maybe," returned Marie. "But it would make sense for at least one person to follow back and try my self -- " She fell silent. She knew the dangers of traveling alone on moon territory. She was putting Jim Talles in a completely impossible position. But Talles didn't consider it impossible. He didn't even stop to think. "Take the crawler," he said. Marie stood motionless for perhaps a second, a startled expression behind her face plate. Then she whirled and leaped toward the vehicle. "Just don't turn your brains off," he added as she swung into the cab. Then the machine was rolling smoothly away behind its shadow toward the hilltop where they had started searching. It stayed in sight for several minutes, finally vanished over a ridge. A sensibly calculated risk, Talles told himself. Even if did have to worry now about two kids instead of one. A seventh hour. An eighth and ninth. Another small group of helpers arrived, with the cheerful news that they had seen nothing of either Marie or the crawler, much less of Rick. The news was cheerful only because IF Talles was able to convince himself that it meant the girl must have found a reasonable branch-off point on the backtrail. The orderly search went on. Peter Willett caught the first glimpse of the returning crawler. He was so nearly asleep that it took him several seconds to digest what his eyes were trying to tell him. The reaction of Jim Talles to Peter's call was almost as slow. Jim had managed to make the young people take some sort of rest in brief shifts but had had none himself. He watched the slowly approaching machine for perhaps half a minute before finding his voice. "Marie! Have you found him? Is he all right?" Then, as he took in the astonishingly slow speed at which the machine was approaching, he croaked, "What's wrong?" "Sorry, Uncle Jim," came Rick's voice. "Marie is asleep. She told me which way to go and explained the crawler's controls, then just could not stay awake. Say, I'm not very good at driving this thing. Maybe I'd better stop here and let you come and take over." F our hours later, at NorthDown, Marie was awake enough to make light of the matter. "Once you understand how a fellow thinks, it's easy enough to guess what he'll do. The only really difficult choice after I took the crawler was my first one, between a fairly wide and level gully that led Why Do You Have A Poor Memory? 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Lange St., Dept. # # , Mundelein, #. #. A postcard will do. southwest and a narrow one that went more nearly west, the way Rick would want to go. I didn't think the narrow one would go through, so I picked the other. I still don't know whether Rick wasted any time on the dead end. At the next guessing point I had a footprint to help, but it was wrong. Rick must have started one way and then changed his mind. Another blind alley. After that it was easy, until I came to a fault where you could see the sun coming through -- it had to be a clear path west. Part way through it there's a thirty-foot downstep in loose soil, and I could see where the edge had broken away -- " "Bixby's Grave," remarked one of her adult listeners. "How did he get that far off course?" "That whole area is mostly fault cracks," pointed out Marie. "Most of the time the sun can't be seen, and sunlight on rocks overhead can be very tricky. Anyway, Rick had left prints in the gully, so I knew I was right by then. It was too narrow for the crawler and I'd gone in on foot. I didn't dare follow Rick over the edge. But I flashed my light on the walls over the step, and he saw it and flashed his. So I went back to the crawler and got a rope and that was all." "All?" asked Jim Talles. "I wouldn't say so." "Well, except for the luck. Rick said he'd been asleep down there for a while -- the other end was blocked, and the crack the sun was shining through didn't come within forty feet of his level. If he'd been asleep when I flashed my light, he'd be there now and I'd still be looking for the other end of the crack so as to guess my way away from him. But how did you know about that? Or were you guessing, too?" "That wasn't what I had in mind; I neither knew nor guessed. I -- " "I know what I want you to tell me," cut in Jeb McCulloch. "I know you were right, but what made you decide that Rick had gone along the road to Lick E instead of the way up to Pic G as had been planned? I imagine that's what Jim would like you to explain, though I realize he must know the answer." "Easy enough," Marie D'Nombu smiled. "Which way is Pic G from North-Down?" "Straight north, of course." "Right. And Rick knew that from the maps. How did you find north, Rick?" The boy was surprised. "North Star, of course. You can see -- " Marie shook her head, and grinned at McCulloch. "No, Rick. It's too bad you didn't get here and start your hike a couple of hours later. Polaris would have been set by then, instead of hanging right above Lick E Pass -- and when you couldn't find it you might have remembered that it isn't the North Star here. "  IF W hen Yuri walked away from through the park toward our unitthe Time Station for the last house. Halfway there he tugged at time, his face was pale marble, his my dress and we rested against one body hardly more than bones bareof the crystalline trees bordering a ly held together by skin and the few small lake. muscles he had left. I ran to him Yuri had aged rapidly in the last and grasped his arm, oblivious of six months, transforming from a the people passing in the street. He young man into an aged creature resisted my touch at first, embarhardly able to walk by himself. I rassed, then he gave in, leaning had expected that, of course -- rone against me as we began the walk cannot hold off old age indefinitely home. even now. But I could not accept it. I knew he was too weak to go to His death could be no more than the Time Station again. His body, days away. You can't leave me now, resting against mine, seemed alnot after two centuries, I wanted to most weightless. I guided him scream. Instead I helped him sit down next to the tree, then squatted at his side. His blue eyes, once clear and bright, now watery with age and imbedded in a network of wrinkles, watched me. He reached inside his shirt and fumbled for something. I had always teased Yuri about his shirts; sooner or later he would tear them along the shoulder seams while flexing the muscles of his broad back and sturdy arms. But now those shirts, like his skin, hung on his bones in loose folds. At last he found what he was looking for, a crumpled sheet of paper that he pressed into my hand with trembling fingers. "Take care of this," he whispered to me. "Copy it, so you'll never lose the information. All the coordinates are there, all the places and times I visited these past months. When you're lonely, when you need me, go to the Time Station and you'll be able to join me on the other side." He was trying to comfort me. He had been at the Time Station every day for the past six months, traveling to various points in the past. Thanks to the coordinate listing he had made, I could elect to travel to any of the same points and therefore be with him at those times. It suddenly struck me to attempt such reunions was a mad idea, an insane and desperate course. "What happens to me?" I asked, clutching the paper. "What am I like when I'm with you? You've already seen me all those times. What do I do, what happens to me?" "I can't tell you, you know that. You have to decide of your own free will whether or not to chance it. Otherwise the process doesn't work. I must not say anything that might affect your choice." I looked away from him and toward the lake. Two golden swans glided by. The water barely rippled in their wake. Their shapes blurred and I realized I was crying silently. Yuri's blue-veined hand rested on my shoulder. "Please, Nanette. You make it harder for me." At last the tears stopped. I reached over and stroked his hair, once thick and blond, now thin and white. Only a year before we had come to this same tree, our bodies shiny with lake water after a moonlight swim, and had made love in the darkness. We were as young as everyone else, confident that we would live forever, forgetting that our bodies could not be rejuvenated indefinitely. "I'm not really leaving you," said Yuri. His arms held me firmly and for a moment I thought his strength had returned. "Whenever you need me, you'll find me on the other side of the Time Station. Think of it that way." "All right," I said, trying to smile. "Sure." I nestled against him, my head on his chest, listening to his once-strong heart as it thumped against my ear. Yuri died that night, only a few hours after we returned home. T Ihe relationships among our friends had been an elaborate but ever-changing web, couples breaking up and combining with others in a new pattern. We were all perpetually young and time had seemed to stretch ahead of us with no end. Throughout all of this, Yuri and I stayed together, the strands of our love becoming stronger instead of more tenuous. A shy, frightened girl when I met Yuri, I had been attracted by his boldness; he had appeared at my door one day, introduced himself. He told me a friend had made him promise he would get together with me. I could not have looked particularly attractive with my slouched bony body, my curly black hair that would not stay out of my face, my long legs marked with bruises by my clumsiness. But Yuri had loved me on sight and in time I had discovered that his boldness was the protective covering of a thoughtful and sensitive person. Our lives had become intertwined so tightly that, after a while, they were one life. It was inconceivable that anything could separate us. Our daily existence, true, may have lacked the excitement many others knew. For with almost three centuries to live at the full height of one's physical and mental powers, and the freedom to live several different kinds of lives, changing one's profession and pursuits every twenty or thirty years, it was unlikely that anyone would choose to couple with the same person throughout. Yet Yuri and I had clung to each other, even through our changes, falling in love over and over again. We were lucky, I had thought. Supremely lucky. But now that Yuri was gone, I told myself that we had been fools. I could lead only half a life after his death. I was a ghost myself, wandering from friend to friend seeking consolation, then isolating myself see anyone. Still there was solace in the knowledge that in a sense I could rejoin him if I had to. I had only to walk over to the Time Station, give them the coordinates he had listed for me, and I would be with him again, at least for a little while. Yet during those first weeks alone I could not bring myself to take the step. The fact is that he's gone, I would remind myself angrily. The rest is illusion. You must learn to live without him. And when I would retort, why? You have no life alone. Whether he is illusion or not, go to him. I began to wander past the Time Station, testing my resolve. I would walk almost to the door, within sight of the technicians, then retreat, racing home, my hands shaking, my mind shrieking. Yuri! At last, one unhappy lonely morning I charged through the glassy doorway of the Time Station and into the empty hall. Time portals surrounded me on all sides -- silvery cubicles into which people could step, then disappear. A female technician approached me, silently offering assistance. I motioned her away and went over to one of the unoccupied cubicles. I snatched the precious paper from my pocket, stared at the first set of coordinates. I stepped inside the cubicle, reciting the coordinates aloud -- time, place, duration of stay. Suddenly I felt as though my body were being thrown through space, as though my limbs were being torn from my torso. The walls around me had vanished. The violent sensations lasted only an instant, Astounded, I looked around. I was now standing near a small, clear pool of water shadowed by palm trees. I turned from the pool. Before me stretched a desolate waste, a rocky desert bleached almost white by the sun. I retreated further into the shade of the oasis, kneeled by the pool. "Yuri," I whispered, dipping my hand into the coolness of the water. A pebble suddenly danced across the silvery surface. The ripples it made mingled with those my hand had created. I lifted my head. Yuri stood only a few feet away. He had barely begun to age. His face was still young, skin drawn tight across high cheekbones. His hair was only lightly speckled with silver. "Yuri," I whispered again. I ran to him. after we swam we sat next to xV each other beneath the palms, our feet in the water. I was intoxicated with joy. Yuri smiled at me and skipped pebbles across the pool. My mind reeled drunkenly and whispered, he's alive, he's here with you, and he'll be with you in a hundred other places at a hundred other times. Yuri started to whistle a tune, one I had heard from him for as long as I had known him. I pursed my lips and tried to whistle along with him but failed, as I always had. "You'll never learn to whistle," he said. "You've had more than two hundred years and you still haven't figured it out." "I will," I replied. "I've done everything else I ever wanted to do and I can't believe a simple thing Idee whistling is going to defeat me." "You'll never learn," he teased. "I will." "You won't." He laughed. I raised my feet, then lowered them forcefully, splashing us both. Yuri let out a yell and I scrambled to my feet, stumbled into my sandals and tried to run. He grabbed me around the waist. "I ought to spank you," he said. "Instead, I IF think I'll kiss you." The long kiss was delightful. "But I still say you won't learn how," he whispered, eyes twinkling. I pursed my lips to try again... and Yuri disappeared. My time was up. Once more I was thrown and torn. I was in the cubicle once more. I left the Time Station and walked home alone. I became a spendthrift, visiting the Time Station several times a week. Yuri and I met on the steps of a deserted Mayan pyramid; we argued about the mathematical theories of his friend Alney while jungle birds shrieked around us. I packed a few of his favorite foods and wines and met him in a Hawaii still awaiting the arrival of its first inhabitants. We sat together on a high rocky cliff in Africa. Far below us apelike creatures with bone weapons hunted for food. In my real-time existence I became busy again, working with a group designing dwelling-places inside the enormous trees that surrounded the city. By tinkering with sequoia genes, the biologists had created these gigantic trees hundreds of years before reverse-time travel had been developed. The trunks were partially hollow, and it was possible to live inside them without harming the trees. Because of the pressing housing shortage, the work was considered important. I would hurry to the Time Station with my sketches of various designs, anxious to ask Yuri for advice or suggestions. But I had to watch Yuri age, as I had watched before. Each time I saw him, he was a little older, a little weaker. The fact was that going into the past meant seeing him age all over again. After a while our visits took on a tone of desperation. He grew more cautious about our choice of times and sites, advising me to meet him on deserted island beaches or inside empty summer homes of the twentieth century. Our talks with each other became more careful' as I grew afraid of arguing too vigorously with him and thus wasting the little time we had left together. Yuri noticed this and understood what it meant. "Maybe I was wrong," Yuri said to me after I showed him the final plans for the tree dwellings. I had been overly animated, trying to be cheerful, ignoring the signs of age that reminded me of his death to come. I couldn't fool him. We had been together too long for that. "I wanted to make it easier for you to live without me, Nanette. But maybe I made things worse. If I hadn't planned these visits, possibly you would have recovered by now..." "Don't," I whispered. We were on a ledge near a deserted stretch of beach in southern France, hiding ourselves behind huge boulders from the family picnicking below us. "Don't worry about me, please." "You've got to face it. I can't make too many more of these journeys. I'm growing weaker." I tried to say something but my vocal cords seemed locked, frozen inside my throat. The voices of the frolicking children on the beach reached my ears with piercing clarity. I wondered idly if any of them would survive the coming war. Yuri held my hand, opened his lips to say something else, then vanished. I clutched at the empty air in desperation. "No!" I screamed. "Not yet! Come back!" I found .myself once again at the Time Station. I had been a spendthrift. Now I became a miser, going to the Station only once or twice a month, trying to stretch out the remaining time I could spend with Yuri. I was no longer working on the tree dwellings. We had finished our designs and now those who enjoyed working with their hands would undertake the construction. A paralysis seized me. I would spend days alone in my house, unable even to dress myself, wandering from one room to another. I would sleep fitfully, then rise and after sitting idly for hours alone would fall asleep again. Once I forced myself to walk to the Slumber House and asked them to put me to sleep for a month. I felt no different after awakening but at least I had been able to pass that lonely month in unconsciousness. I went to the Time Station, visited Yuri, returned to the Slumber House, asked for another month of oblivion. When I awoke the second time two men were standing over me shaking their heads. They told me I would have to see a Counselor before they would put me to sleep again. I had been a Counselor once myself, and I knew all their tricks and wanted none of them. Instead, I trudged home and there waited out the time between my visits. The back-travel could not go on indefinitely. The list of remaining coordinates grew shorter. At last there was only one set left. I knew I would see Yuri once more only. W e met at a lovely summer home that overlooked a picturesque river. It was autumn there and Yuri began to shiver in the cool air. I managed to open the back door. We walked in, careful not to disturb anything. Yuri lay down on one of the couches. Outside, the thickly wooded area that surrounded the house was bright with color -- orange, red, yellow. A half-grown fawn with white spots on his back peered in through a window, then disappeared among the trees. "Do you regret anything?" Yuri suddenly asked. I sat down on the couch, stroked his white hair and managed a smile. IF "Nothing." "You're sure?" "Yes," I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering. "I have one regret -- that I didn't meet you sooner!" "I know." We had talked about our first meeting at least a thousand times. The conversation had become a ritual, but we never tired of it. "You were so blatant, Yuri. Coming to my door like that, out of nowhere. I thought you were a little crazy." He smiled up at me and repeated what he had said then. "Hello. I'm Yuri Malenkov. A -- a friend of mine made me promise to look you up. Do you mind if I join you for a while?" "And I was so surprised I let you in." "And I never left." "I know, and you're still around." Tears stung my eyes. "You were the only person I could talk to honestly, right from the beginning." By then tears were bathing my cheeks. "Yuri! What will I do now? You can't leave me. You can't die again." "Why torture yourself?" he whispered. "You don't have much longer yourself. Haven't you noticed, darling?" "What?" "Get up, Nanette. Look in that mirror over the fireplace." I walked over to the mirror, stared into it. The signs were unmistakeable. My black hair was sprinkled with silver. Tiny lines were etched into the skin around my eyes. "I'm dying," I said hoarsely. "My body isn't rejuvenating itself any more!" I felt a sudden rush of panic. Then the fear and confusion vanished, replaced by a deep calm. I hurried back to Yuri's side. "It won't be long," he said. "Try to do something meaningful with those last months. We'll be together again soon, if only in death. Just keep thinking of that." "All right, Yuri," I whispered. Then I kissed him for the last time. W hat was I to do with the time left to me? I had trained as a Counselor many years before and had worked as one before choosing a new profession. I decided to draw on my old experience to help those who, like myself, faced death. I found them for the most part unable to accept their fate. They were used to their youthfulness and their full lives, feeling invulnerable to anything except an accident. The suddenness with which old age descended on them drove some to hysteria and they would concoct wild schemes to bring back their youth. One man, a biologist, spoke to me and then decided to spend his last months in the elusive search for immortality. Another man, who had recently fallen in love with a young girl, cried on my shoulder and I didn't know whether to weep for hhn or the girl he was leaving behind. A woman came to me, only seventy and already aging, deprived by fluke of throwback-gene of her normal life span. I began to forget about myself in talking with these people. Occasionally I would walk through the city and visit old friends. My mind was aging also. On these walks I found myself lost in memories of the past, memories clearer to me now than those of more recent events. I might have gone on that way, if I had not passed the Time Station one warm evening while sorting my thoughts. As I walked by, I saw Onel Lialla, dressed as a technician, looking much the same as when I had known him. An idea struck me. Within seconds, it had formed itself in my mind and became an obsession.  can do it, I thought, Onel will not refuse me. Onel had been a mathematician. He had left the city a long time before and I had heard nothing of him since. I hurried to his side. "Onel?" His large dark eyes turned towad me. Uncertainty was written on his classically handsome face. Then he recognized me. He clasped my arms. He said nothing at first, perhaps embarrassed by the signs of my approaching death. "Your smile hasn't changed," he said finally. We walked toward the park, talking of old times. I was surprised at how little he had changed. He was still courtly, still fancied himself the young knight in shining armor. The dark yes still paid me homage in spite of my being an old gray-haired woman. Blinded by his innate romanticism Onel saw only what he wished to see. Twenty years before, barely more than a boy, Onel had fallen in loVe with me. It had not taken me long to realize that, being a romantic, he did not really wish to attain the object of his affections and had probably unconsciously settled on me because I was so deeply involved with Yuri. Onel was in love with love. He had followed me everywhere, pouring out his heart. I had tried to be kind, not wanting to make him bitter, and had spent as much time as I could in conversation with him about his problems. Onel had finally left the city -- "to forget", as he had put it. I let him go, realizing that this too was part of his romantic game. Onel not only had not forgotten; he remembered every detail. We sat in the park under one of the crystalline willows and he paid court again. "I'm still grateful for your kindness," he said to me. "I swore I would repay it someday. If there's anything I can do for you, I'm yours to command." He sighed dramatically at this point. "There is something," I replied. "What is it, Nanette?" Opportunity had fallen right into IF my lap. "I want you," I went on, "to come to the Time Station with me. You're one of the technicians there, aren't you? Well, send me back to this park two hundred and forty years ago. I want to see the scenes of my youth one last time." Onel was stunned. "You know I can't do that! The portal can't send you to any time you've actually lived through. We'd have people bumping into themselves, or going back to give their earlier selves advice. Impossible!" "The portal can be overridden," I said. "You know how. Send me through." "I can't, Nanette. Believe me -- " "Onel, I don't want to change anything. I don't even want to talk to anybody." "If you changed the past..." "I won't. Why should I? I had a happy life. Besides, I'll go back to a day when I wasn't in the park. It would give me a little pleasure before I die to see things as they were. Is that asking too much?" "I can't," he said. "Don't ask it of me. Please." Finally he gave in, as I knew he would. We made our way to the Station. Hands shaking, Onel adjusted a portal and sent me through. H e had given me four hours. I appeared in the park behind a large red refreshment tent. Inside the tent people sat at small round tables enjoying delicacies and occasionally rising to sample the pink wine that flowed from a fountain in the center. As a girl I had cooked in that tent, removing raw foodstuffs from the transformer in the back and spending hours in the kitchen making the desserts, which were my specialty. I had almost forgotten the tents that had been replaced later on by more elaborate structures. I walked past the red tent toward the lake. It too was as I remembered it, surrounded by oaks and a few weeping willows. Biologists had not yet developed the silvery vines and glittering crystal trees so profuse in later centuries. A peacock strutted past as I headed for a nearby bench. I wanted only to sit for a while near the lake, perhaps visit one of the tents before I returned to my own time. I watched my feet as I walked, being careful not to stumble. The people m the park ignored me, probably annoyed by the presence of an old woman who reminded them of their eventual fate. Once I had been like them, avoiding those who so obviously would soon be dead, uncomfortable around those who were dying when I had everything ahead of me. Suddenly a face was in front of me and I collided with a muscular young body. Unable to regain my balance, I fell. A hand was held out to me. I grasped it and struggled upright. "I'm terribly sorry," said a voice, a voice I had come to know well, and I looked up at the face with its wide cheekbones and clear blue eyes. "Yuri!" I blurted. He was startled. "Do I know you?" he asked. "I attended one of your lectures," I said quickly, "on holographic art." He seemed to relax a bit. "I've only given one," he said. "Last week. I'm surprised you remember my name." "Do you think," I said, anxious now to hang on to him for a while, "you could help' me over to that bench?" "You bet." I hobbled over to it, clinging to his arm. By the time we sat down he was already expanding on points he had covered in the lecture. He was apparently unconcerned about my obvious aging and seemed happy to talk to me. A thought struck me like a blow: Yuri had not yet met my past self. I had never attended that first lecture -- I met him just before he was to do his second. Desperately I tried to remember the date I had given Onel. I had not counted on this. I was jumpy, worried that I would indeed change something, that by meeting Yuri in the park in this fashion I might somehow prevent his meeting me in the future. I shuddered. I knew little of the circumstances that had brought him to my door. I could somehow be interfering with them. Yuri finished what he had to say and waited for my reaction. "You have some interesting insights," I said. "I'm looking forward to your next lecture." I smiled and nodded, hoping that he would now leave and go about his business. Instead he looked at me thoughtfully. "I don't know if I'll give any more lectures," he said. My stomach turned over. I knew he had given ten more. "Why not?" I asked as calmly as I could. He shrugged. "Lots of reasons," he muttered. "Maybe," I said in desperation, "you should talk about it. That might help." Hurriedly I dredged up all the techniques I had learned as a Counselor, carefully questioning him, until at last he opened up, flooding me with his fears and worries. He became the Yuri I remembered, with an intense and warm sensitivity he concealed under a cold, flippant exterior. He had grown tired of the superficiality of most of the city's citizens, uncomfortable because so many resented his awareness and penetration. He was unsuited to the gaiety and playfulness that surrounded him, wanting to pursue whatever he did with single-minded devotion. He looked embarrassed after telling me all this, began once more to withdraw behind his shield. "I have some tentative plans," he said calmly, regaining control. "I may be leaving here in a couple of days IF with one of the scientific expeditions to Venus. I prefer the company of dedicated people, and I've been offered a place on the ship." My hands trembled. Neither of us had gone with an expedition until five years after our meeting. "I'm sorry for bothering you with my problems," he went on. "I don't usually inflict them on strangers, or anyone else for that matter. I'd better be on my way." He stood up, started to walk off. Why hadn't I thought of it before? I knew what I had to do. "Wait!" I cried. "Wait a minute. Do you think you could humor an old lady, maybe take some advice?" "It depends," he said stiffly, "on the advice." "I think you need some proper company before you go on that exjedition. Do you think you could visit a girl I think might enjoy talking to you?" His chin lifted. He had the normal reflexes, as well I knew. "A girl? Is she pretty?" I ducked that one. "She's a lot like you. You'd find her sympathetic." I told him where I had lived then and gave him my name. "But don't let on that an old lady sent you -- she might think I'm meddling. Just say it was a friend." He smiled. "I promise." He turned to leave. "Thank you, friend." I watched him as he ambled down the pebbled path that would lead him to my dpor. great original science fiction stories by together in one volume Edited by #, now at your bookstore of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! AS# # A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern science fiction. AS#I # Galaxy Magazine A collection of science fiction that challenges the mind and captivates the imagination AN # #tf A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # # master of of Science Fiction Two men pursue the Rithian Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN# #tf A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# # prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II # "Psycho." AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# # Farmingdale, N.Y. # (Please add #c for shipping) I 'm asked a number of questions about reviewing books whenever I'm on a discussion panel or in letters I sometimes get from readers. How do I go about selecting the books for review? Why do I seem to favor certain publishers and writers? How much personal bias goes into the selection? And what makes me so sure my judgment is infallible? My judgment, of course, isn't infallible. But I'd much rather state my opinions honestly than duck the issue and tell readers nothing at all bout a book. The judgments have to be based on my own reactions, rather than on any absolute criteria -- and as far as I can I try to state my reasons for feeling as I do about any book. Naturally, personal bias affects those reactions. I'm biased in favor of science fiction that serves primarily as entertainment. I like a good story, reasonably well told -- for me, no amount of message can replace that. I like stories that have satisfactory (though not necessarily happy) endings. I prefer interesting characters doing something that is important to them. And I want to see consistent and well-developed backgrounds. Above all, I want to see something in science fiction that carries me beyond the events and limits of #. Far more books are submitted to me for comment and critique than I have time to read. The ones I do read -- and hence can review -- are the ones that arouse my interest from dust-jacket copy, from my experience with the writer and from a hasty scan. (I probably use about the same criteria here as most readers use in buying a book.) For instance, I'll almost always read a book by Anderson, Dickson, Clarke or Simak. Certain writers have disappointed me so often that it takes quite a lot of cover and inside promise to convince me to try. Newer writers I approach with both hope and doubt. I'll read at least part of a new writer's book -- but I don't comment on any work I haven't finished, of course, and many lose me before I'm through. But my first consideration has to be to readers. I've had too many experiences of reading a glowing review of a book that has been off the stands for six months, so I try hard to review books that will be available when this column comes out. That means I favor publishers who get copies to me well ahead of publication date, or those who send me advance galley sheets. (They're harder to read, but those books will be on the stands when the reviews are read.) Some publishers don't send me most of their books -- I buy a few of these, but don't try to look at all of them. And some who print science fiction seem to send reviewers only their occult books on the assumption that sf and occult are the same. I don't bother much with these. I also tend to review the softcover books in preference to hardcover ones. First, such books get a lot less reviewing generally. Second, readers can afford to buy a good many more of the cheaper editions. And I usually don't review anthologies because it's impossible to do more than list stories and authors in a brief review -- and such a listing means very little. When an anthology is of sufficient value, it takes up most of a monthly column. I try to review two kinds of books. The first are those so good as entertainment that I want the readers to enjoy them. The second are the ones I find so bad that I want to warn Teaders not to waste money on them. I'd much rather review the first kind, even though a review of the second type may be more fun to read. And finally, having stated my general principles, I feel free to violate any or all of them when something seems important enough to deserve special mention. F or instance, there's one book that won't interest # per cent of the readers of this column. It's in French, is a lot of trouble to obtain and is expensive. Yet it's a book of major importance for the field. This is Encyclopedic de VUtopie des Voyages Extraordinaires et de la Science Fiction, by Pierre Versins (L'Age d'Homme). The only source for it which I've found in North America is: Bruce Robbins, P.O. Box #, Station B, Montreal #, PQ, Canada. The price is #, postage paid! This encyclopedia is a truly monumental work and as far as I know, the only one of its kind. In its # pages, Versins has included almost every fact about science fiction available to a student of the field living in France. There is no English translation, though I understand one is contemplated for some indefinite future, but if you've had even high-school French, it shouldn't be too difficult to read. Its value is so great that I happily paid full price for my copy. Yet it has limitations. Versins had obviously read everything he could find in English, as well as other languages. But a good deal of American science fiction must not have been available. The listings of works by a number of authors have serious deficiencies and some authors who should be included are not there. The above is not surprising. A work done here would inevitably show deficiencies in its coverage of European science fiction. But it does indicate that we need more than a translation. We need further scholarship, based on Versins' encyclopedia and going on to cover the American and British fields -- the richest of all sources of science fiction -- in greater detail. I hope that some ambitious fan or group of fans will turn to this project. It will require immense effort and high scholarship, but it's a labor that badly needs doing. Until such work can be done, however, Versins has made a tremendous contribution to science fiction that should not be overlooked. another book that may not interest the casual reader but will fascinate anyone interested in the beginnings of science fiction is The Crystal Man , by Edward Page Marshall (Doubleday, #). This was "collected... with a biographical perspective by Sam Moskowitz." The stories in the collection appeared about a hundred years ago, most in the columns of the New York Sun. Many of them use ideas that later won such authors as H. G. Wells fame as a writer of science fiction. There is time-travel by machine, invisibility -- strangely anticipating Wells' Invisible Man -- and a host of other fictional inventions. Surprisingly I found a number of them to be quite good stories. And all of them were fascinating. The treatment of racial prejudice in one story, dealing with freezing for suspended animation, was almost modern -- except that it dealt with prejudice against Chinese instead of blacks. In fact, the book offers a provocative perspective on our current world of science fiction that should delight any student of the field. There is also a lengthy introduction by Moskowitz which traces the IF history of Mitchell, of the Sun, and of the development of science fiction in the nineteenth century. Considerable evidence is offered that Wells and other writers might have been influenced by Mitchell's work. Certainly the parallels are amazing. But I'm not fully convinced -- read it yourself for the evidence. My only quarrel with the book derives from what Moskowitz did not tell -- a strangeness indeed when dealing with his work. He says that most readers wouldn't be interested in how he came to discover these buried and neglected stories. But in talking to him, I learned a little of that account and found it totally fascinating. I wish he'd spent much more time on how the discoveries were made! N ormally, as I stated, I prefer not to review anthologies. But occasionally one is too good to miss. Jupiter, by Frederik and Carol Pohl (Ballantine, #), is such a one. This is also a "theme" anthology -- something I usually dislike. The approaching Jupiter flyby is the inspiration behind the idea of getting together a book of major stories centered about the big planet. But the curious fact is that stories dealing with Jupiter are rather rare in fiction -- but most of them have been extraordinarily good. Here we have Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson, Desertion by Clifford D. Simak, Bridge by James Blish, Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke. Weinbaum, Gallun, Asimov and others are also represented. Almost all of the stories are excellent. In fact, the only really bad story is one by me. It's one of my earliest ones, deals with rocket racing and depends on a trick. Unfortunately, when I mentioned it to the Pohls, I hadn't read it over for more than thirty years, or I'd have kept my mouth shut. Part of it isn't my fault -- somehow in getting the story set into type, several lines were omitted, which makes it seem that Jupiter has no atmosphere -- a fact I knew to be false when I wrote the story, since Jupiter has an incredibly thick atmosphere. Still, in those days I took too much for granted. I figured out the course of my rocket to Jupiter correctly -- but then neglected to figure just how fast a rocket would have to be moving to be swung into a circular orbit close around the big planet. When I did figure it -- recently -- I was shocked at how ridiculous my original assumption had been. Oh, well, it's a small flaw in a splendid collection. Generally Jupiter seems to have inspired the very best work and thinking from writers. I try to avoid reviewing books that are essentially fantasy, but sometimes I can't resist. Anyhow, the borderline is sometimes hard to establish. Is a story based on psi-powers fantasy or science fiction? I personally consider it fantasy, but it has been the substructure of a great deal of science fiction. And how about alternate universes? Normally these are considered science fiction. But a fair amount of modern fantasy has made use of both devices. Katherine Kurtz has been writing a series of books about the Deryni, a group of people using psipower in an alternate Wales of sometime around the tenth century, where history has branched off completely from the one we know. They're published as fantasy -- and I guess they are -- but they've been fascinating enough for me to have already reviewed the series in these columns. Deryni Checkmate was an excellent novel, the second in the series, with tremendous promise for the future. A mysterious background figure, St. Camber, seemed to be behind all the factors acting upon the psigifted and persecuted Deryni. There was a fanatic figure crusading for the death of all Deryni -- Warin, probably himself an unknowing Deryni. There was warfare within the Church, coming to a head as the reactionary elements threatened to excommunicate Morgan (the hero of sorts) and to place all the lands under the Interdict. And to make matters worse, we had an invading ruler, a full Deryni with developed powers, planning conquest of the whole region. Lovely background for rich development. Unfortunately, Volume Deryni (Ballantine, #) -- takes all these problems and reduces them to piffle, rather than working them out. It is, I'm afraid, a classic example of a new writer working out all the first steps and then copping out at the end. The menace of the Church seems quietly to become of less and less importance as the sympathetic sections gain power to help Morgan. Warin, this devoted, totally stubborn fanatic, has a meeting with Morgan and is quickly convinced that Morgan is a good guy -- so he joins forces with Morgan. Then we have a hubbub background in the castle of the invader where we meet a mysterious (?) figure who later turns up to solve everything. We are finally treated to a duel of magic, which is fine; but it's all settled when the mysterious background figure turns out to be St. Camber, whose death somehow seems to solve everything. The menaces have all turned out to be paper dragons -- fierce-looking but actually harmless -- and the solution is by deus (or sanctus) ex machina. This is a great pity. In one novel the author has ruined everything that was built up in the previous two. And while she is supposed to be working on later novels in the series, I don't see how she can overcome the wreckage left by this third volume. Her only hope would be to go back and completely redo this JF novel -- and that's something almost never done after a work has already been published. Not recommended. If you've already read the first two books, don't read this one. You're better off with unsolved mysteries and unresolved conflicts than with what you're now offered. O n the cover of Hunters of the Red Moon, by Marion Zimmer ment about the author by Theodore Sturgeon: "A writer of absolute competence... who should be more widely read." I am in total agreement with that sentiment. Bradley has been moving ahead steadily, writing better and better with experience. She has always chosen to write action-adventure stories of pure entertainment, and her novels are fine stories of that type. She can be relied on for good backgrounds, characters and cultures that are colorful, and well-resolved plots. This is a good example of her craftsmanship. The initial idea isn't new -- a man captured by an alien ship as a slave -- but what she does with it is more than adequately refreshing. Her central character and a group of well-chosen aliens are sold to a mysterious culture that intends to use them as intelligent prey in a ritualistic hunt. They can win freedom and honor by surviving -- but few survive. And there remains a constant mystery about A memorial anthology in tribute to the father of modern American science fiction, Introduction by This book is a unique memorial -- the thirteen stories in especially for this volume by Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester. Hal Clement, Theodore R. Cogswell L. Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, Harry Harrison. Mack Reynolds. Clifford D. Simak George Q Smith Theodore Sturgeon and Theodore L. Thomas. Ranh vVitn an introductory tripute to John Campbe I !, S. #S.now I'...  the who, what, and why of the hunters. There's also a good development of relations among the aliens and the human of the band of "prey" we follow. Recommended to all adventure readers. I rently experimenting with an idea that has been tried before in science fiction, but has never been done properly. This is the idea of a series of books about a single character (and usually, others surrounding him.) The only fully successful example of this so far is the Perry Rhodan series -- but these are on what I consider a very primitive level of science fiction. The Captain Future series did fairly well in the magazines, years ago, but died -- perhaps of too heavy a load of formula. This time we have "Cap Kennedy" in #I of the series: Galaxy of #c). Gregory Kern is what's called a "house name" -- that is, a pen name owned by the publisher, rather than the writer. Wollheim claims Kern is an established science fiction writer, but isn't revealing the true name. And the back cover sets forth the intentions for the series, as opposed to previous series attempts. Well, I suppose it's unfair to judge a project by only one example -- but that's the only way it can be judged so far. On the whole the novel does avoid the primitiveness and the formula that has plagued so much "great hero" series writing, both in and out of science fiction. Kennedy is a grown-up hero and the group around him is not made up of the usual smart-aleck type-cast characters we've met too often. They consist of a strong man from a heavy planet, an older scientist and an alien with chameleon talents. They take their work seriously and sensibly, as does Kennedy. The problem is held within sensible bounds, also. It does offer some menace to all humanity, but only because ships are being sucked out of space (into an interesting alternate universe), with the heart of the problem Kennedy's own personal danger in this alien universe. Almost all of the typical errors of a series seem to be avoided. But somehow, some of the virtues seem to have been missed, too. It's probably too early to develop Kennedy and his friends fully, but I'd like to feel more involved with him. I seem to watch him, rather than to share with him. And while the problem is completely workable, it never reaches me emotionally. I can't find much wrong with the novel -- but I can't find much enthusiasm for it, either. I think we'll have to wait and see on this series. In the meantime it's probably a good idea to try this first example. There's no reason why it shouldn't work out well, so let's hope it will.  IF D oug allard had changed the points and plugs, boiled out the carb and tuned his scoot to a razor edge. That had been back in Denver. By all the rules of God and man, the engine should have been running as smooth as the black lacquer on the tank and frame. But every time the lightning flashed over the hulking backbone of the Rockies the engine broke up for a few beats. It sounded like loose crud in the fuel lines -- which there damn well was not. Or maybe dirt in the jets or one of those electrical glitches that could take you a week to run down. Though the slope grew steep as it wound up toward the high passes, the road was almost empty and the bends were still gentle. Doug was able to try various engine speeds in every gear but could detect no relation between engine speed and the weird coughing in the Harley's guts. She broke up at thirty, at forty-five, at sixty, at eighty -- every time the lightning flashed. Doug did not like it at all. First, because he had never heard of an electrical storm's causing an engine to break up -- and second, because of the thing he had about electricity. Doug felt no fear in the face of things that would turn the knees of the average citizen to lime jello. Courage came with the colors of the Avengers. But he believed that electricity was out to get him in ways large and small. Once he and his old partner Ted had been tooling along through a light drizzle in Florida. Out of nowhere a power line along the road suddenly snapped, whizzed past Doug's cheek like a cobra spitting sparks, caught Ted across the chest and fried him where he sat. And almost every time Doug's chopper was laid up with something he could not handle himself, it was some electrical gremlin. Doug and electricity just did not get along. To him, electricity in any and all of its manifestations was a cold-eyed snake -- like the power line that had killed Ted -- out to sink its sparky teeth in his hide. So the idea that those lightning bolts flashing across the darkening sky were somehow subverting their little brothers in the ignition system not only scared him. It enraged him. "Lay off my scoot, mother!" he muttered at the approaching electrical storm, feeling foolish for threatening thin air but better for having done it. Doug was headed west across the Rockies to join up with the Avengers in Los Angeles. He was coming from St. Louis after selling off a crummy grocery store his Uncle Bill had left him. The damned electrical storm seemed to be headed east after god-knows-what, so it was not long before the fireworks were directly overhead. Lightning danced through a slate-gray sky, slamming and cracking like an artillery barrage as Doug leaned through the turns. He was taking them as fast as he could, trying to make as much time as possible before the deluge. The sky grew darker, wilder. Yet still no rain fell. Sheets of blinding light ripped the heavens every thirty seconds or so, illuminating the forested mountains like enormous flashbulbs; and the Harley's engine was coughing more often than not. Doug's head rang from the crack and rumble of the thunder as the throttle hesitations were making the bike harder and harder to control. One weird mother of a storm! Up ahead the road took a gentle left and climbed around a treecovered hill. As he started to put the bike over, Doug smelled electricity in the air so thick he almost choked on it. Looking up at the crest, he saw a searing white bolt of lightning kiss the concrete not twenty yards in front of him and actually walk toward him before it disappeared in a clap of thunder. T hen he was cresting the hill, leaning into the left turn at fifty-five -- and the world suddenly turned blinding, crazy yellow. Everything seemed to happen at once and in slow motion. Through the handlebars he felt a tremendous jar. The whole frame was vibrating as if someone had bonged it with a sledgehammer. His body tingled, he choked on ozone, and the engine quit entirely. The chop started to fall but some sixth sense told him that if he went down in that instant or even allowed his foot to touch the road he would have had it. Standing up on the pegs, still blinded, he threw his body to IF the right as hard as he could against the bank of the turn, compensating for the sudden drop in speed. The Harley wobbled insanely. Thunder walloped his eardrums but his vision began to clear. He saw dimly that he was careening across the road, thumping and bounding toward a steep drop into the thickly wooded gully to the right. He downshifted, slammed on the brakes. The wheels kicked up dirt and screamed. Forward momentum was killed and the scoot gently slid out from under him. As he rolled away from the bike, losing a certain amount of skin, he shouted in triumph. How many riders had been hit by lightning and lived? Whoo-eee! Picking himself off the ground and making sure nothing major was broken, he thought next of the Harley. The chop was lying on its side in tall grass, about three yards short of having rolled into the rugged-looking little canyon. Grunting, Doug erected it on its still functional stand and inspected the damage. The right front peg was bent at a crazy angle. There was a small rip in the black leather of the seat. A lot of little dings and scratches marred the right side of the bike where it had skidded along the ground. A strange jagged strip of paint had peeled off the tank and the metal beneath was etched a dark blue as if the storm had branded the chop with its own mark. So all things considered, his scoot had come through in fine shape -- all it seemed tb need was having the peg hammered back into position. Some paint, chrome polish and new leather, and the Harley would be as slick as before it was hit. But he would try to retain that lightning brand on the tank -- maybe try some clear lacquer over it. It was unique. It gave the chop character that no amount of planning, design or hard work could have matched. Only when he had finished inspecting the bike did he notice the peculiar changes in his surroundings. For one thing, the sky was already clear of storm clouds. For another, the sun was about two hours lower than it had been when he was hit only minutes before. And the surface of the road was cracked, pitted, torn by holes as far as he could see. The fir trees were wrong, too -- taller and thinner than they should have been, the needles sparse on the branches but almost four inches long and colored a nauseating grayish green. The air had a chemical aftertaste. Also it seemed to have a faint greenishbrown tint to it as if the worst Los Angeles smog he could remember and then some had managed to penetrate the high Rockies. He had the feeling that every breath was doing awful things to his lungs. Everything seemed old and sick and generally cruddy. Muttering to himself and repeatedly glancing back over his shoulder for reasons he could not figure, Doug hammered the bad peg back into position with his heaviest wrench. He checked out his carb and fuel lines, then tromped on the starter. Nothing happened. Not even a cough. He stomped on the starter another time. Ten times. Without raising a peep. He swung off the bike, took a deep breath, looked around at the grayish sickly forest and ruined road, shuddered, and tried to dope it out. He just knew it had to be something electrical. Hell -- of course! Sure enough, the fuse was blown. When he dug out his little cardboard box of spares he found they were blown, too. Electricity had done him in again. But Doug Allard was damned if he was going to sit in that crummylooking place just because he had no fuses for his chop. Swearing, he fished out a half-empty cigarette pack, dumped out the smokes. He stripped off the tinfoil, wadded it up and jammed it into the gap in the fuseholder. It might not provide the protection of a proper fuse but he would have to risk it. Either that, or sit here in this wilderness until something came along. From the looks of the road, that might be never. When he kicked the starter this time, the engine caught right away. But it burbled and chugged as if the mixture were too rich, although he knew damned well he had tuned it to perfection back in Denver. He sniffed the brown air and remembered an old joke about Los Angeles smog. On a really bad day, they used to say, you could just take the cap off your tank and run your engine on the freaked air. Could this air here be so rank that it was making his mixture too rich? Sure enough, when he leaned it out a bit, the engine ran smooth as melted butter. Whoo-ee! This air made L.A. atmosphere seem like pure oxygen. He cautiously started up what was left of the road, skirting huge potholes and jagged breaks every few yards of the way, creeping along at thirty-five and wishing his scoot were set up for scrambles. And wondering where the hell he was. according to the map there was a dinky little town about forty miles up the road. No doubt it would have a gas station and a place to get a hamburger and suds. Doug had taken off his peanut tank for this run, had fitted on a fat-bob still about three-quarters full. The same could not be said for his gut, which had a foodsized hole in it. After a half-hour of dodging potholes, cracks and craters along the ruined road, Doug's arms were stiff with tension and his nerves definitely in need of a few cold beers. The countryside still seemed all IF wrong. The fir trees were like nothing he had ever seen, like crude cartoons of the real thing. The ground beneath them crawled with giant purplish toadstools and raw-looking mushrooms the color of dried blood. As the sun sank toward the high ridgeline of the mountains, the clear sky took on an ugly steel-blue cast. Doug could hear the droning whine of insects even over the sound of the Harley's exhaust. In a half-hour of riding through this unnatural landscape he had not spotted a single car or truck or bike. He did not like that one little bit. Only one thing kept him from brooding on the ominous strangeness of the world in which he found himself and on how the hell he had got there, and that was the total concentration needed to keep the scoot upright on this wreckage of a road. Finally, as the sun was starting to slide down behind the mountains, he crested a ridge and saw a huddle of buildings off to the right in the next valley. He caught a glimpse before the road curled down the slope of the hill. Trees screened the place from his sight until he reached the valley floor. There he found himself on the outskirts of the little burg. Or what was left of it. It could not have been much more than a wide spot in the road to begin with -- a gas station next to a cafe, a few cinderblock stores, a couple of dozen wooden houses. But now it was a burnedout shell, a ruin. The houses were charred skeletons. The store windows were shattered and it looked as if anything of value had long since been carried away. The front of the cafe had been ripped apart, apparently by an explosion; and the concrete was pitted with craters of the kind left by large-caliber ammunition. A few cars were scattered along the main drag -- old rustedout hulks, tires rotted away, glass smashed, body metal so thoroughly corroded that the colors of their paint jobs were unrecognizable. Doug pulled up beside one of the old wrecks and felt a sinking sensation in his gut. It took him a moment more to realize what it was about the hulk that shook him up. The car body had holes rusted right through it and when Doug punched the front door, the rotten metal crumbled. The whole body was a brittle shell of rust. Yet it was unmistakably the body of a Chevrolet Vega. Doug shuddered. GM had started building Vegas in #. And this wreck had to be at least ten years old. He had been asking the wrong question: not where the hell am I, but when? Doug could think of only one answer. Electricity, that son of a bitch, had really done him in this time! Somehow that lightning had kicked his tail into the future and, from the look of this place, it was a future whose best days were past. Well, no point whining and sniveling about it. First order of business was to survive long enough to find people. He would play it by ear after that. In order to keep going he had to have food and gas. Three-quarters of a tank might or might not get him to more fuel, but it would be stupid to pass up the chance to drain the pumps of the ruined gas station. There must be some jerry cans around somewhere. He chugged over to the gas station and pulled up by the pumps. The station building was riddled with bulletholes and the whole place looked as if it had been stripped clean. Not a tool or a tire or a can of oil around, and nothing he could use to hold extra gas. Well, he had a quarter-empty tank and two one-quart canteens. Water figured to be a lot easier to come by than gas in the Rockies. He unscrewed his gas cap, plugged the nozzle of the nearest hoze ijito the hole and squeezed the grip. Nothing. The pump was bone dry. He tried every pump in the station with the same results. It figured. Gas would be a mighty precious commodity in an emergency and looters would not leave it sitting in pumps. And from the looks of this burg, it had been worked over by some mighty efficient looters. All right, so he would have to search and scramble pretty hard for gas, maybe appropriate some from citizens, if he could find any. Better start to look. He still had enough juice in his tank to take him well over a hundred miles. He remounted, started the engine, slipped into gear and began to roll. That was when he noticed the heap of bones just beyond the pumps. When he got a real close look, he broke into a cold sweat. T he bones were scattered around a burned-out fire. Some had been cracked open for the marrow and all were picked pretty clean. But swarms of ants were crawling all over them -- including the two human skulls lying close to the fire. Their tops had been smashed in. Doug slammed the Harley upgear and cranked on the throttle, shooting gravel as if the hounds of hell were after him. And from the looks of that bone pile, something even worse might show up at any moment. The sun was just about setting and this sure was no place to spend the night! He roared out of the gas station, really moving considering the condition of the surface. He zipped past a couple of gutted stores and a few gutted houses, and ghostville was behind him. The road bent to the right around a hillface. When Doug came out of the curve he saw his IF way blocked by three of the shankiest dudes on three of the most ridiculous-looking bikes he had ever even heard of. Those scoots looked as though they had started as little #cc Hondas or something similar. They were not chopped at all but every scrap of non-essential metal had been removed from the frames, making them look almost like bicycles. They mounted knobby tires front and rear and outrageously oversized gas tanks. But the craziest things about them were the outriggers that sprouted on both sides behind the single bicycle-type seats. Lengths of pipe about three feet long were pivotmounted on frame-members, the play restricted both up and down by sets of springs that might have been scavenged from the forks of mopeds. At the ends of these lengths of pipe, mounted on bicycle forks, each outrigger had a fat-tired little wheel off a kid's trail bike. When the scoots were moving in an upright position, the outrigger wheels would ride about a foot off the ground. Now, at rest, the left outrigger wheels were on the ground, doubling as instant stands. The bikes were the second ugliest and the second weirdest things Doug Allard had ever seen. The ugliest and weirdest things he had ever seen were the three creeps riding them. They looked like a cross between basketball centers who had not eaten for a month and giant grasshoppers -- about seven feet tall, thin as skeletons. They had long awkward arms and legs that made them seem to be perching on their spindly little scoots like praying mantises. They wore greasy leather pants, black sleeveless vests and long scabbards at their belts. In the deep shadows of the setting sun their hairless skin seemed to glisten a pale waxy green. But it was their faces that made Doug reach behind him and uncoil the length of chain he kept wrapped around a frame-member. He brought up the Harley to about ten feet from the things. They were as bald as green apples and they had weak little chins under practically lipless mouths that hung open stupidly, showing rows of long yellow teeth. Their eyes were lunatic and bloodshot, sunk deep in sockets under apelike hairless brows. They did not much look like folks you could trust. Doug let the three-foot length of chain dangle from his left hand, clanging loudly against the frame of the Harley as it snaked to the ground. "I'd appreciate it if you boys would clear the road," he said. "You'd appreciate it too." The creep in the middle sniffed the air. "Gas!" he hissed. "I smell much gas in the strange machine!" "And much meat on the bones of this white one!" "We were right to come up into the thin air of the mountains. Here there are still many of the fat, juicy white ones. It's this strange pale air. They choke in the lowlands, but here they become rich morsels of succulent meat!" "Let us feast!" They laughed shrilly and drew long sharp swords. "You named it, mothers!" Doug shouted as the three spindly bikes came wobbling toward him like awkward insects, their gawky riders having some trouble steering and trying to hold onto their swords at the same time. He shifted into first, gave her a little throttle and veered off to the right, so that the green creep on the left closed with him about two feet from his chain hand, thrusting clumsily with his sword. Doug whipped the chain through the air and caught him squarely across the back of the skull as the outrigger buzzed by. The thing's head burst like a rotten watermelon, spewing thin splinters of bone and gray-green slime. The out-of-control bike slammed into the scoot next to it -- the big geek riding it moved in quick spastic jerks as he tried in vain to avoid the collision and was knocked sprawling to the ground. Doug was past them now and his hog could surely outrun their silly machines, but his blood was boiling and he figured the proper thing to do was finish the job. These creeps were lame pushovers -- finishing off the two remaining should not even raise a decent sweat. H e whipped his chop around, came back at the one on the ground, who seemed to be having trouble getting to his feet. As Doug passed, bringing the chain down across the creature's back, the other managed -- with a mantis-like twitch -- to slash Doug harmlessly on his boot. By the time Doug had turned his bike again for another pass the greenie was scrambling shakily to his feet. Eyes rolling, teeth bared, mouth drooling, he stood woozily slashing his sword through the air as Doug bore down on him. At the last moment Doug veered slightly to the right, ducked under the whistling sword and caught him across the kneecaps with the chain. The greenie screamed, buckled and fell on his face. Doug saw that the last outrigger bike was hightailing it up the road away from him. The cowardly bastard was running out on his partners! "That won't do you any good, you son of a bitch!" he shouted as he cranked throttle in pursuit. Bdy, that crud had to be really stupid to think he could outrun a Harley on a runty little bike like that! It was getting dark, so Doug turned on his headlight as he chased the greenie over the tortuous road. About thirty yards ahead, the spindly little outrigger bike with its skeletonlike rider wobbled and bounced crazily in Doug's high beam like a lurching spider. The geek on the outrigger seemed a piss-poor rider, hitting half the potholes and rocks in the road, as if he had the reflexes of somebody's grandfather. Doug saw what those outrigger wheels were for as now the left, now the right touched ground for a moment as the bike hit a pothole or a rock and heeled over suddenly. They were like the training wheels on a little kid's first bicycle; without them, the incompetent slob on the machine would have gone down every couple of minutes on a killer road like this one. In fact it took all of Doug's skill, reflexes and arm-strength to keep from going down himself on the socalled road. He had been chasing the out-rigger for maybe five minutes, he realized, without gaining any ground. Imagine, a #cc mouse of a bike holding its own against a high-balling chopper! But forty or at the most forty-five was as fast as Doug could go on this torture-track roadway without creaming himself out. At that speed, the outrigger bike was probably going flat out while he still had more than half his throttle left. A lot of good that did him! He conceded now that, crazy as it looked, the outrigger bike design made some sense. Road condition imposed forty-five as top speed anyway, so all his big engine did for him was use up more gas per mile. That son of a bitch up there could pace him all night, and guess who would run out of gas first! It really burned Doug to think of that creep outrunning his big scoot on that little bug of his! Man, what would the Avengers say if he ever got to see their beautiful ugly faces again? The jaw-action would be murder... Up ahead, the outrigger bike disappeared for a moment around a righthand curve. Suddenly Doug heard a highpitched roar, shouts from more or less human throats, a long shrill scream. Then the outrigger bike reappeared, weaving drunkenly all over the road in his general direction. The rider was missing his left arm, and quarts of green goo were gushing out of the stump. The outrigger slid off the road entirely and shattered against a tree, sending the dying rider flying off into the underbrush. And then, rushing straight at him, Doug saw the headlights of perhaps a dozen motorcycles. An instant later, he made them out sharp and clear. Outrigger bikes, each ridden by one of the tall green skeletons, eyes glowing and swords flashing in the gleam of the headlights. Doug had no time to do heavy thinking. He cranked on all the throttle he had, hunched his body as low over the tank as he could, prayed he would not hit a hole or a rock in the next thirty feet, and tried to steer for the empty spaces in the crowd of devil-bikes bearing down on him. Still accelerating, he zipped between two bikes, taking an outrigger wheel on his left thigh as sharp steel passed over his head. His front wheel caught in a crack in the road. He felt his rear wheel going out as he fought for control. He skidded sideways a foot or two, glancing off the front tire of an outrigger bike, but regained control as the outrigger bounced into the bike next to it. Doug ducked another sword stroke that was way off the mark, and then he was through, hauling ass up the dark winding road while all was confusion and shouting behind him. D oug felt as if he had been riding for days. Yet it could not have been more than an hour or two since his escape from the freaks. Ahead of him everything was inky black except for the cone his headlamp cut out of the darkness. The road, as full of cracks and potholes as ever, climbed higher into the Rockies. It was all Doug could do to keep his scoot upright at #. Both arms ached from the prolonged effort and tension, and his left leg hurt like hell where the outrigger wheel had caught it. He was starting to see things that weren't there and not see things that were. A couple of times he started to lean into left turns that were really rights, as the trees and the bouncing beam of the headlight played tricks on his eyes. He longed to stop, if only to take five. But all he had to do was glance back over his shoulder and see those massed headlights about two hundred yards behind to know that a five-minute rest would be his last. Two hundred yards. He had opened up the gap in the confusion of his dash through them, and he had not been able to gain on them since. Well, at least they had not been able to close on him. It was the damnedest bike race in history, Doug was sure. A couple of miles of straight road, or even a few miles of decently paved bends, and his big chop would leave the mothers in the dust. But on this cow-track it did not matter that he had three times the bike they did, that he was three times the rider they were. With all his power and skill, all he could average was about forty, and those little mickey mouse machines just buzzed along flat out, flopping around on their outriggers, matching his speed on half the gas consumption. And that was what really scared him. With those king-sized tanks and pint-sized engines, the freaks had at least twice his range. Unless they had started the chase more than half empty, he would run out of gas first. Then what? It would be his chain against eleven or twelve swords. Four or five of the mothers would not have scared him, but eleven? They would stick him. They IF would suck the marrow from his bones and eat the brains out of his skull. Doug took another glance behind. As he did, a bolt of lightning lit up the scene like a strobe. Down in the hollow behind him, he saw the outrigger bikes hopping and jouncing in pursuit like army ants, the flesh of their mantis-like riders gleaming with a sickly green wetness. Darkness and a roll of thunder, then another flash of lightning. Oh, no! Not another electrical storm. And as he thought it, three quick sheets of lightning ripped across the sky one after the other, as if electricity, his old enemy, had shown up to gloat over his predicament. A long, slow rumble of thunder shook his guts. "Not yet, you mother, not yet!" he shouted at the sky. Feeling fury surge through him, he cranked on more throttle. Thereupon he hit a little rock, slid askew, and had to use his painful left leg to keep from going down. He winced, cursed, and saw that the slip had cost him a few yards of his lead. Lightning touched a ridge off to his right. And his engine broke up for a few beats. Another bolt of lightning hit off to his left, closer. Again his engine coughed and hesitated. Man, all he had to do was stall out now! He saw that he had lost another yard or two. Slam ! Bang! He was bracketed on both sides by lightning, deafened by the thunder. The chop's engine coughed, sputtered. And died. He could hear the scream of those flat-out little engines coming up behind him like a swarm of giant wasps. Howling wordlessly, he craned his neck around to see the green demons on their outriggers outlined -- ten yards behind -- by another flash of lightning. Frantically he tromped down on the starter with all his might. The engine caught. He slammed the chopper into gear and cranked it on. He opened up the gap to twenty yards before a crack in the road threw him into a skid. Slide slippage lost back the distance he had gained. He crested a hill, went roaring down into a narrow valley. He leaned into a mild left curve with the devil bikes still thirty feet behind him and lightning cracking through the air all around him. His engine broke up again, coughed, almost died, but recaught. The green creeps gained another few feet during the hesitation. They were so close that he could hear the blood-curdling cries coming from their throats as they sensed the kill. Another bolt of lightning, another cough from his engine. A sword whistled over Doug's head, burying its point three inches deep in a tree beside the road. A second sword glanced off his sissybar, looped high in the air, just missed his back on the way down. A third sword sent a thin sting through his left shoulder as it sliced through his colors. Doug Allard knew he had had it. He was beyond fear, beyond despair, beyond knowing what the hell he was doing except on an instinctual level. He was all rage -- rage at the monstrosities that would be eating his flesh in a few more minutes, rage at the sparky dragon in the sky that had thrown him into this hell-world in the first place. Lightning blinded him as one more sword whistled past his head. In one final, defiant gesture, he ripped the headlight wire loose, and held the naked end aloft shouting at the sky: "Come and get me, you yellow mother! I dare you! I d" The world turned that blinding, crazy yellow. Everything seemed to happen at once and in slow motion. His body tingled, he choked on ozone, and the engine quit entirely. The chop started to fall but he knew that if he went down in that instant or even allowed his foot to touch the road he would have had it. Standing up on the pegs, still blinded, he threw his body to the right as hard as he could against the bank of the turn, compensating for the sudden drop in speed. The Harley wobbled insanely. Thunder walloped his eardrums but his vision began to clear. He saw dimly that he was careening across the road, thumping and bouncing toward a steep drop into a thickly wooded gully to the right. He downshifted, slammed on the brakes. Forward momentum was killed and the scoot gently slid out from under him. He rolled away from the bike, losing a certain amount of skin in the process. K icking himself off the ground, he saw that the Harley was lying on its side in the tall grass by the side of the road about three yards from having rolled into a ruggedlooking little canyon. It was daylight, the trees were ordinary fir trees, the road was in good repair, there were no green demons on outrigger bikes coming up it, and the electrical storm was retreating across the sky to the east. Slowly, it got through to him. He was at the very place where he had been hit by lightning the first time, and at about the same hour of day too, by the look of the sky. None of that crazy stuff had really happened. The lightning must have knocked him out of his head for a few 'minutes and into an electricity nightmare. Only then did he note the thin pain in his left shoulder, the slash in his colors, the blood underneath. When he checked out the bike, he found the headlight wire hanging loose and a wad of tinfoil in the fuse-clip.  IF Glancing down it quickly, a disinterested observer would see two lines of terraced houses, dirty cars parked on each side of the roadway and would experience an overwhelming sense of gray decay. The street was like many others on this side of the city: drab, barren, imparting a feeling of timelessness. A battle might be fought a hundred yards away and still the street would reflect no change. Trees had been planted on each side of the street a century before. Now they were nearly all dead, spreading up from the sidewalk to lift stiff, leafless branches toward the gray sky. Only in one place did the trees still show greenery and that was where two of them grew close together on one side of the street. Each bore a full complement of leaves, a discordancy of natural color untinged by city dirt. In contrast with the others, these two still waved supple branches in the breeze. Beneath the two green trees were parked three cars. Each one was in showroom condition, its paint unscratched, its windows clean, and its tires still black and with mold marks on the tread. Other cars in the street were not in such finely preserved state. Even those next to the three were covered in the humus of the leaves of last year's autumn. Farther down the street others squatted half on and half off the sidewalk, fenders broken, wheelcovers missing, bodies rusted and glassless remnants. Finely shattered windshield fragments made walking treacherous. The houses in the street were empty and dilapidated, looking like an abandoned movie set. Only the houe by the new cars and the two green trees showed any signs of habitation. It was the house of Arthur Knowland and he stood now at the open door, looking out at the cars. He was a tall man in his late fifties, stooping slightly and wearing old, shapeless clothes. The net curtaining at the windows of his house was clean and freshly pressed. On one of the sills stood a row of six porcelain pots containing cacti. In another window a hyacinth bulb sat on top of a conical glass bottle, tiny tendrils of white root just starting to reach down to the surface of the water an inch below. Next to it a dark-green vase was fashioned in the shape of a grotesque fish, bent in the middle so its tail touched its open mouth. The architecture of the house was very old and the light trickling in through the window panes behind Knowland was scant. K nowland put his hand in his trousers pocket to check that he had his front-door key. He looked at the sky to make sure it wouldn't rain, saw that the clouds were a featureless gray and were covering the entire sky, then closed the door behind him with slow, precise movements. He walked down the tiny pathway to the gate. In his garden, nothing grew. Arthur Knowland favored it with less than a glance as he passed through. He opened the gate and walked out into the street, glancing up at the trees and admiring their greenery. Such trees! It was comforting to him that they should continue to grow here. It was a part of his daily routine to make the observation. After a moment's pause he walked on, past the line of cars and down the street toward the intersection. As he walked his interest in his surroundings dwindled sharply and he slipped back into the reverie which of late had occupied virtually the whole of his waking moments. But as he approached the intersection a man came around the corner from the right and walked up to him. Knowland said, "Ah, Mr. Ridgway. Good afternoon fo you." Ridgway opened his mouth and started to speak. For an instant no sound could be heard. Then: "Good afternoon, Mr. Knowland. Fine day, is it not?" . Knowland stared. The man's speech was out of synchronization with the movements of his mouth. IF The last three words were still being spoken as he closed his mouth and smiled. "Er -- I beg your pardon?" Knowland said, a trifle confused. He shook his head and concentrated harder. "I said I thought it was a fine day," Ridgway repeated, his voice now firmly synchronized with his lips, but too loud. Far too loud. "Yes. Yes, of course," Knowland said. "I'm sorry. I thought I misheard." He glanced at the sky, noted that it was still its oppressive gray and wondered what was fine about the weather. Although the day was far from cold or otherwise unpleasant, this was not his conception of fine weather. Not that he cared unduly. For a moment he thought he caught a glimpse of the sun breaking through the grayness but nothing happened. Ridgway smiled again. "Ah, well," he said. "On my way. See you tomorrow, Mr. Knowland." His voice was at normal volume again and everything was as it should be. Knowland nodded and walked on. Had he made a mistake about the man's lips? Where, he suddenly wondered, did Ridgway live? He stopped short again. This was the first time, Knowland realized, that he had ever thought to ask himself that. The man had to live somewhere around here -- Knowland always seemed to meet him at the same intersection. He looked around at the houses and knew that Ridgway could not live here. Every place was derelict. Doors were hanging from hinges. Windows were smashed or frameless. Chimney stacks had fallen into the tileless roofs. Yet everywhere was like this. The man must live somewhere. Perhaps in one of the less decayed buildings... Knowland looked around again until he saw a house which, although uninhabitable by normal standards, at least had its roof intact. As he studied it he wondered why he had not noticed it before. Although the brickwork was as dirty as on all the houses, the front door was still whole and none of the windows was broken. He took half a step toward the place, then paused. Something was wrong. He could not remember having ever before studied each house individually, but he had been certain that all of them herewere in the same state of abandonment. He hadn't given this street more than a sideways glance for days but nothing had ever changed here. Undeniably, however, this one house was now intact. He stepped of the curb, walked across the narrow street and looked closely. Now he could see that the glass in the windows was not only whole, but dean, too. And inside -- curtains! Drab curtains, crumpled maybe. But a sign that this house now was occupied or recently had been. He glanced at the door and saw that the brass handle was smooth, as if it had been often used. A mild kind of excitement mounting in him, Knowland grasped the metal fence and stood on tiptoe, trying to see into the front rooms. Could this be Ridgway's house? Sharp doubt struck him. The man always came from the opposite direction, from the road down which Knowland would walk to Veronica's old house. He'd never seen Ridgway at any other time or in any other place. If he did live in this house, it was strange that Knowland had not seen him walking past his window. Knowland spent most of his time in the front room, looking out at the two trees and three cars that stood outside his house. If people passed -- particularly Ridgway whom he knew by sight and name -- he would see them. Even as he looked at the house, more of it came to his attention. The paint seemed brighter than when he'd first looked at it, the rubble in the tiny front garden less untidily scattered among the weeds. The railings he gripped felt no longer brittle and rusty, but as if they had been regularly painted to preserve them from the ravages of the atmosphere. But no one lived here... no one. Not Ridgway, or anyone else. Knowland was totally alone. It was self-indulgent fantasy even to imagine anyone lived in this house. His fingers loosened from around the rail and he walked away from the place. He was only a few yards from the intersection and he crossed back to the other side. He glanced at his watch. Already he was beginning to feel a little tired. If he walked around the block, past Veronica's old house and back to his own, he would have enough time to make himself some tea before going to bed. Was it already growing dark? He looked at the sky and saw as he'd suspected that the clouds were lowering. He stepped out a little faster, striding down the side street toward Veronica's. Behind him the house he had been looking at began to settle. First the paint darkened, taking on its customary coat of atmospheric grime. Then the weeds grew thicker in the tiny front garden and the rubble of bricks, old bottles and pieces of peeled-off stucco heaped together untidily. The front door swung on its upper hinge so that the base of the door fell into the hallway, revealing a dark corridor lined with brown, peeling wallpaper. A crack appeared at the bottom of the main window, crept upward across the glass, then down again sharply. The window fell inward and smashed. One tile skidded IF down the angled roof and crashed into the overgrown garden, quickly followed by several more. Two hundred yards away Knowland heard the sound of breaking tile and glass as a whisper on the breeze. And ignored it. his swivel chair at the window of his office, looking down at the crowded hospital parking lot twelve stories below. He was deep in thought. Nurse Donalds knocked at the door and stepped in. She stood by the open door and waited patiently for the doctor to turn. He did at last, a concerned frown across his forehead. "I have a Mr. Wylatt to see you," the nurse said. "He says he has an appointment, though I have no record of it in -- " "No. That's all right. Show him in. He telephoned this morning." "Yes, Doctor." She backed out and Samuelson heard her say: "The Doctor will see you now." A few seconds later Wylatt came in and closed the door behind him. He walked over to the doctor and extended his right hand. "Good morning, Doctor. It's good of you to see me -- " "Not at all." Samuelson waved the man into a seat. Wylatt continued speaking as if Samuelson had not responded to anxious to remain on pleasant relations with the medical profession and you must consider my visit today as most informal. I'm sure you will understand. Now I wonder -- " Samuelson said, "Cigarette, Mr. Wylatt?" Normally he discouraged smoking, but he pushed an open box toward the man, effectively cutting off the flow. Wylatt took a cigarette and lit it. "Now what is it The Donors' Protection Society wants from me?" Samuelson asked carefully. Wylatt took a deep breath and opened his mouth. "Is it about our latest patient?" Samuelson said quickly. "Yes, Doctor." "I thought it might be. Well, go ahead." resenting the next of kin of Michael Arnson, as I expect you had anticipated." Samuelson nodded gravely. "That's the first part of my mission today," Wylatt went on. "But I have also been approached by a Mrs. Knowland who, having no one to turn to -- in her own words, Doctor -- has come to us. Mrs. Knowland was in a state of near-desperation when I saw her this morning, which you can imagine was -- " "I saw her last week. She was quite upset." "Ah -- yes. Well, Mrs. Knowland and she thought we could help her in some way." Samuelson watched the other man steadily. This was not his first table organization that had the aim of protecting its members from irresponsible and unnecessary donation of their organs in the event of severe accident -- but this could easily be his most potentially hazardous. The society had no backing in law, which now stated firmly that once clinical death had been established, organ transplantation could legally take place. Nevertheless, the organization was gaining great support, and could not be ignored. This case, involving the pathetically ill Arthur Knowland, could develop into a trial by press, with the whole future of medical organ transplants at stake. "Did you conduct the operation yourself. Doctor Samuelson?" "No. But the case had my personal written sanction, and I observed the operation from the gallery. The surgeon was Doctor Jennser -- the ablest heart specialist in the country. There is no question that the operation should have taken place." "No, of course not," Wylatt interjected quickly, as if afraid he had offered an impertinence. "I'm sure the condition of the sick man, or the skill of the medical staff involved, were never in doubt." "Well, please state your case, Mr. Wylatt. I'm confident of your sincerity, but I am exceptionally busy at the moment." W ylatt had a flat black valise on his knee. He opened it. "My case, as you put it, is more or less what you have doubtless anticipated. Michael Arnson, a member of ours, had a vital organ, to wit his heart, removed from his body against his own wishes as clearly stated in the testamentary document he lodged with the society. I have a photostat of it here." He passed it across to Samuelson. "Under the charter of the society this constitutes a trespass of person and a breach of private rights. Another member of our group, Mrs. Veronica Knowland, has also complained to the society regarding the medical treatment given to her late husband at the time of his operation." Dr. Samuelson looked quite carefully at the photostated document in front of him, though he had seen its like before. It was a signed -- by Michael Arnson -- and witnessed declaration regarding the disposal of bodily remains. Specific organs were listed as being the private property of the undersigned: heart, kidneys, lungs, liver, eye-corneas, stomach, certain glands and other minor functional organs of the body. These were to be disposed of, together with the whole corpse, by cremation upon death. "You appreciate, Mr. Wylatt, that the medical profession does not recognize this?" "So we gather. But we have IF grounds to believe that were it to be tested in a court of law it would be upheld. We understand that it is legal as a testamentary document. We took counsel several years ago." "I'm sure you did," Samuelson said. "And yet it hasn't been tested to date?" "No. But -- " "How well acquainted are you, Mr. Wylatt, with the facts of this case?" The other man shrugged. "I know what was reported in the newspapers. And I have spoken with Arnson's mother and Mrs. Knowland." "So you know the full outcome of the operation?" "Yes." S amuelson swiveled around in his chair so that he faced the window. "But I'm afraid you don't. More is involved than superficial factors. And I think before we proceed with the claims of your society I should explain them to you." He turned back to his desk and opened a slim manila file. "Michael Arnson was admitted to this hospital fourteen days ago, after having been involved in a motor accident. I won't detail the specific injuries he suffered, but there was extensive breakage of his ribs, his shoulders and his skull. We suspected massive brain damage on first inspection and under surgery this was confirmed. When he first arrived at the hospital Arnson was still breathing and his heart was beating. "It took several hours to contact his mother -- whose address, incidentally, we got from the card issued to Arnson by your society -- and he died before we could get in touch with her." Wylatt opened his mouth to say something, but the doctor waved him to silence. "I know you contest our definition of death, but I think we have no need to discuss that here and now. Suffice it to say that by our standard clinical procedure, when we could detect no measurable activity from the brain -- and the patient stopped breathing -- we considered him to be dead. "During this time a patient in our coronary ward, Arthur Knowland, was in the last stages of a long and painful heart disease. Arnson's blood group was acceptably close to Knowland's and we decided to effect an immediate transplant. If it were successful we knew we could promise Knowland a return to normal life." Wylatt said, "But he didn't receive Arnson's heart. Knowland never recovered." Samuelson stared at him. "So this outcome, by your code of ethics, denies our right to attempt it?" "Yes." "Maybe. But in this instance there was more involved. Forget the transplant ethics for a moment -- one man's life was certainly over, another's was equally certainly doomed without an efficient heart. We went ahead anyway and removed Knowland's old heart. As is standard procedure, during the interim a heart-lung machine controlled his blood circulation while the donor's heart was prepared. This time -- " Wylatt's eyebrows rose. "The operation failed?" "No. It was successfully removed. And the transplant would, we are certain, have been a successful one. But we were unable to place it in Knowland's body for the reason that Arnson's heart was equally diseased. We discovered a malignant tumor on the upper ventricle wall. "Arnson had cancer. There was nothing we could do." K nowland walked on down the side street, aware that this was neutral territory. He carried in his mind a clear concept of the arrangement of the streets and knew, almost to the last foot, the precise distance he had to walk to the next intersection. His own street ran roughly eastwest, with the main shopping street at the eastern end. The intersection where he normally met Ridgway was about a mile from the shops and his house was about threequarters of that distance along it. The street he was walking now paralleled the main street and was less than a quarter mile in length. On each side of the street ran a dark brick wall of medium height. Although it was just above the level of his head, Knowland knew that if he could somehow raise himself to peer over it, he would see the overgrown gardens at the backs of the derelict houses. But he had no interest in these and always kept his head hunched down jnto his shoulders along this stretch of his daily walk. The encounter with Ridgway had disturbed him in a way he did not care to consider. Did he control in some fashion his experience? There had been that earlier puzzle of his heart. Awakening one morning, he had found himself panting for breath, as often happened. But before he could reach for his pills he had felt an overriding compulsion to believe the pain was habitual rather than actual. He had winced at the agony in his chest, but had known in the same instant that it could be psychosomatic. The doctors had once even treated him for that kind of disorder. The memory had helped -- and he had concentrated on banishing the pain. In seconds his breathing had steadied. In minutes his heart was an almost imperceptible movement in hischest. And in days he had virtually forgotten what it was like to live in constant pain and fear. He reached the second intersecIF tion and turned to the right again. This street, like his own, led down to the shopping street a mile or so away. He walked on, hardly seeing the houses around him. Houses like those he lived among, with gaping doors and windows, crumbling staircases and vacant, tileless roofs. The whole environment of this place was a depressant to him. He wondered sometimes why he continued his walks, but the long habit of years was difficult to break. After about ten minutes he came to Veronica's house -- or at least the house that Veronica had lived in with her parents years ago, before he'd married her. He stared at it for several minutes, seeing the oldfashioned wallpaper and curtains. The door was painted a drab, dirty maroon, as he had always known it. And the house was empty as he had known it would be and it would stay that way. He walked on. He came to the main street and braced himself against its impact as he turned the corner. Here the sidewalks were crowded with people, Each window was brightly lit, its wares a garish blend of colored packaging and lighting. The street traffic roared by endlessly in both directions. It seemed darker now and the sidewalk was wet. The light from the shop windows was reflected in the street and the lights on the passing cars and trucks dazzled him. This was the part of his walk that he liked the least and he hurried now, his head bent down as if in defense against the onslaught of the noise and movement. Voices echoed around him, seeming to be without source or direction. Wordless sounds that made little sense, they added no comfort to his feelings. He collided several times with people -- drab women loaded down with heavy baskets, tall men who hurried past without apology. He reached the corner of his own street and turned into it gratefully. Silence fell abruptly. The sky was darkening steadily and he maintained his hurried pace. His street had no lamps and in the night became a black canyon of fear. His walk had tired him and the thought of sleep was a pleasant one. An early night, he thought. I get tired so easily. If Veronica were here she would understand. He reached his house and went inside. He warmed some milk, drank it, got undressed and went to bed. He slept lightly, often waking to lie trembling in the black silence of the night and think of his wife. When he awoke in the morning Veronica lay next to him and she was laughing. stood together in silence, as the lift descended slowly. Finally it stopped on the second floor and the hydraulic doors opened. Samuelson led the way down a long corridor. "It's best for you to see Knowland yourself," he said. "I think you'll appreciate our problem when you have seen him." Wylatt said, "But the fact of Amson's other illness doesn't alter the moral position, Doctor. His body was violated against his will." Samuelson gestured impatiently. "Under normal circumstances, Mr. Wylatt, I would have difficulty in maintaining the position of the profession in this kind of dispute. We all have our personal feelings and I tend to the liberal view myself. But in spite of this, I think you'll agree that in this instance there is a lack of precedent." "Maybe, maybe. But one must always consider principles. I refuse to abandon mine and those of my society." "Of course." They walked on in silence. The hospital was quiet. They passed several boards pointing toward various surgical units and wards, all of which appeared to be in other parts of the hospital. By way of explanation, Samuelson said, "This is our convalescent and therapeutic wing. Knowland was brought here after the operation because of the fatal ease with which a delicate process can be disrupted in a busy hospital. We have had to set aside a whole suite to maintain the sterile conditions we need." Wylatt nodded. They came eventually to a pair of swing doors and Samuelson walked through holding the door open for the other man. A nurse on the other side stood up when she saw the doctor. She led them into a room adjacent to her tiny office. Samuelson said. "Thank you, Amy." She went out again, leaving the two men alone. The room was fairly small and contained three rows of wooden seats. In the wall opposite these was a large window, looking into the next room. Samuelson sat down in one of the seats and motioned Wylatt to sit next to him. He pointed toward the window. "That's Knowland there," he said. The next room was brightly lit. Its walls were white and in the ceiling a battery of lamps poured down of the room stood a high, padded table, on which lay the body of a man. He was dressed in a featureless smock that covered his legs, chest and arms. On his head was a white cloth that lay over his forehead. His face was bare and his eyes were closed. By the side of the table an array of complicated machinery made a confusion of shining brass, black rubber and gleaming strands of copper wire. Two white-coated, white-masked men stood by the bed. One held a board in his hand and transferred to it readings from a row of dials on the machine. The other stood back, carefully watchIF ing the registrations on a slowly moving electroencephalograph. Wylatt took in the scene for several seconds. "But I thought Knowland was dead." "He is," Samuelson replied. "Knowland is what we call 'discorporeally dead.'" Wylatt said, "I don't see that there is any subtlety about the definition of death." "Don't you? I thought your society was keen on a proper definition of death." "It is," Wylatt said. "Death occurs when the heart no longer beats." "In which case, Knowland is well and truly dead. He has no heart at all. But... his brain is still conscious, so we must consider him as maintaining an identity." "He is conscious?" "As far as we can tell, yes. We have his brain constantly monitoroperation his mind has shown entirely normal activity." "But what is keeping it alive?" "That machine," the doctor said, pointing, "is called a heartlung machine. It's highly complex and very expensive. But its effect is more or less as its name implies. It artificially supplants the work of a human heart and lungs, in that it maintains blood at normal bodily temperature, reoxygenates it and circulates it through the body." "And Knowland has been using the machine for how long?" "Fourteen days. Ever since the operation, in fact." W ylatt got upfrom his seat and walked to the window. He pressed his face against the thick glass and peered in at the man lying on the table. "But how can he be dead and conscious at the same time?" The doctor got up and stood beside him. "His body and nervous system have stopped functioning -- that is all we know. There was short delay in supplying a glucose nutrient to the brain and we suspect the motorfunctions of the main nervous system may have been damaged. The higher activity of the brain, though, is unimpaired. Of this we are absolutely certain. The electrical emission from the man's brain is normal. You can see there -- " the there is nothing abnormal. He even sleeps and, as far as we can tell, dreams." Wylatt looked at the long roll of graph paper slowly emerging from the machine, but could glean no sense from it. Finally he asked. "So what is to be done?" Samuelson shrugged. "What can we do? We provide a steady supply of blood to the brain and we feed it with glucose. We monitor the brain's activity and keep careful note of anything that happens. We anticipate that if the brain survives it will provide us with immense knowledge about its workings, but it's still too early to tell." "You mean you are using this man as a guinea pig?" "If you like." "But that's inhuman!" The doctor shrugged again. "What should we do? Switch off the machines and let the brain die? That would be murder." Wylatt stared at the man inside the sterile room. "He's dead already -- " " -- and his widow has a death certificate," Samuelson finished for him. "I signed it myself." "Then the brain should be disconnected." "But we think that would be unethical." The doctor went back and sat in his seat. "Which brings us to the purpose of your visit today. On a point of ethics, you say, the removal of a healthy organ from an otherwise dead body is a moral wrong -- and yet by the same token to give continuing life to a human consciousness is equally wrong and should be stopped." Wylatt said nothing. "Do you see the dilemma we are in, Mr. Wylatt?" "Yes," he said. "I think so." "And furthermore, do you now see why it would be wrong to make a moral test case of this unfortunate man? Think what an effect it would have on his widow. A loved one's death is a tragedy from which we can all eventually recover -- but will she recover from the sure knowledge that although the body has ceased to function the mind goes simmering on, unreachable? Because while Knowland's mind still lives and is sane -- we say he has a right to life. "If you want to question the right of surgeons to transplant vital organs from one human to another, then find another case to champion. You'll find enough of them in this hospital alone. But with Arthur Knowland, while the fact that he lives is a miracle, attention of the public at large should not be drawn to what is happening." Wylatt nodded. "Yes, I agree." He bent down and picked up his black valise from the floor. "I don't think any purpose would be served by my staying any longer." He moved toward the door. "Mr. Wylatt." "Yes?" "You'll be tactful with Knowland's widow, I trust." "Of course. Though I don't know what I can tell her. Just offer sympathy, I suppose." Samuelson nodded. Wylatt said, "What do you suppose he's thinking about, Doctor Samuelson? I mean, as he lies there all day?" "I don't think we'll ever know. He can't see anything, hear anything or touch anything. He cannot react to any thoughts he might have and cannot express himself in any IF way. Every desire he has must lead to wish-fulfillment and, for all we know, he can imagine anything. His mind is liberated, you see. Anything he imagines, wishes or expects would be entirely real to him. He could build a whole world, I suppose, and it would be totally real and have substance and existence. In some ways it's man's oldest dream. But in others it could be a hell we cannot conceive of. I suppose. Still, why should a brain imagine a hell for itself? Except temporarily. While it is recovering from injury, say, or the shock of disembodiment." Wylatt stared at him for several seconds. His face, which had been jaunty and alert when he arrived, was now somber and thoughtful. "Yes," he said and extended his hand to the doctor. "Thank you for your time -- and for showing me." Samuelson waited until the man had been ushered out by the nurse in the outer office, then stood up and walked to the glass window. He stared in at the remains of Arthur Knowland and watched the expressionless movements of the dials and needles. In that embalmed human body lay an active brain; conscious, sane, and with an existence unique and precious. What dreams of a liberated brain? What hopes or visions? What life? H e opened his eyes again and she was still there. "Veronica!" She laughed. "You weren't expecting to find anyone else here, were you?" And then he was laughing, too. Much later he got out of bed and walked to the window. Down below was the street, looking as he had always known it was supposed to look. Cars, new ones and old ones, lined the sidewalks -- and the leaves were dropping with autumnal imprecision from trees the length of the street. In the houses opposite his lights shone and people moved behind clean, unbroken window panes. It was as it should be, as he had always remembered it to be. Momentarily his hand lifted to the left side of his chest and his fingers explored between his ribs for the feel of that erratic flutter that had crippled him for much of his life. But that had cured itself. His heart was bold and healthy. He turned back to the bed. Veronica was as beautiful as the day he had married her. He stepped toward her and caught a sight of himself in the tall mirror on the wardrobe door. He too, had lost thirty years and stood upright in the cool light of the morning. He placed his hands on the edge of the mattress, leaned over and kissed her. She smiled and reached up joyfully and pulled him down on top of her. Outside, the world created by Arthur Knowland went on as he knew it should.  He thought he had found the only woman on Earth -- but could he ever be sure? T Ihe last man on Earth came driving down the hard-packed dirt road that wound among green peaks. Turning left, he drove along the shore of a wide blue lake; then followed the decaying pavement of the old highway until it cut through a countryside of flat green pastures. At last he reached the line of swaying wooden buildings that marked the informal boundary between country and town. Here, finally, the last man brought his vehicle -- a battered station wagon whose mechanical components he had scrounged in a thousand towns and villages. He stared at a tiny filth-encrusted hovel. Stuck in the ground in front' of it, a torn sign said: gas. Since the car's horn had long ago uttered its last mournful wail, he forced down the side window, leaned out. "Anybody here?" It was a hot day -- sweltered, the still air clogged with swimming particles of dry dust. Beyond this settlement lay the hard edge of the continental forest yet hardly a flower grew here, barely a blade of parched grass. It was just like these creatures, he thought, to choose such a forsaken wilderness in which to build their town. A door slammed. A figure appeared. Tall, handsome, dark, ageless -- practically indistinguishable from any of them. And they had the nerve to call themselves men! This one came forward and stopped, bracing himself against the side of the car, and thrust his head forward through the open window so that his face nearly touched that of the last man. "I know you. You're the magician!" "I am Phobias. Yes," the last man said. "You plan to do your show here?" The tall, dark man did not wait for an answer. Immediately he added, "I can remember when you came through here last time. I was just a boy. You had a wagon and a team of big gray horses -- " "The horses died," Phobias said. The man nodded, backing away from the car. Between his spindly splayed legs, a small whirlwind of dust suddenly rose. "I guess you want some gas." "I would appreciate that." "And in return you'll put on your show. Is that what you'll promise?" "Correct." "Then how about you do the show first? Afterward I'll give you the gas. Tonight, say, after the sun has set." Phobias smiled. "So you've heard." The man nodded. "I've got two kids. Ever since they could understand words, they've been hearing about you -- about Phobias. I'm not about to see them cheated." "Well -- " Phobias shrugged. He was not embarrassed although the man had hit the nail on the head. Phobias had intended to obtain gasoline in return for a promise of magical delights and then go sprinting away. There was another big lake out there and two smaller villages and finally the vast green forest. The truth was that after more years than he could remember, Phobias no longer derived the faintest pleasure from his act. He would rather cheat than perform, rather lie than conjure. He could always order this man to do his bidding but that would be magic too, and the magic was reserved for the act. "Where shall I put on the show?" he asked. "How about right there?" The man pointed to a bare and dusty field across the road. "No. It may rain." "So? Rain hardly gets one wet." "Not you maybe. It gets me wet." "All right," said the man, and quickly -- as though memorized especially for the occasion -- he supplied Phobias with a set of careful directions. "Talk to a man named Ernest when you get there. He'll see that you're fixed up with a place," he finished, stepping backward. He disappeared into the grimy house, where two pale faces hung like frozen white shadows in the sagging rectangle of a window. Phobias drove on, reaching the dilapidated streets of the town. He chose to ignore the curious stares of pedestrians trudging along the high wooden sidewalks, merchants peering through dust-coated panes. He ignored too the wound always with him -- the knowledge that he was the last man, the only man, on this whole big dead world. N ot until he had stopped the car -- hearing the engine gasping over the final few drops of gasoline -- did Phobias recognize the place. Yes, he had performed in this town before. He got out, placing his shoeless feet firmly in the warm dust. Stepping forward, turning his head slightly first left and then right, he was able to remember the last time he had passed through. She had still been living then. In fact, as far as he could recall, it was near here -- either in the next village or the one just after that -- that the jagged lightning had fallen from the heavens to claim her life. If he came upon the spot, he would not choose to pause and visit her grave. For he held her -- even in death -- strictly accountable for the absurdity of her own end. He preferred not to face the past; there was far too much of it. And now, tramping across the wooden walk, he recalled something else -- when he had buried her. It had not been the last time he had been in this town. No. Nor even the time before that. It had been a thousand years ago. At least. "Ernest?" he queried. "Who. wants him?" asked the man behind the counter. "Phobias." "I'm Ernest." Arrangements were quickly and smoothly settled. Phobias gave his word when requested. So did Ernest. "Then I'll see you at eight," he said. Phobias nodded. "I think I'll go over there now." "Want anything to eat first?" "No, thank you. I have to set up my things." He found the ancient car surchildren. One girl separated herself from the others and stepped boldly forward. "You're the magician!" Identical with her myriad brothers and sisters, she was dark-haired, yellow-eyed. "I am." He trudged to the rear of the car, let down the gate, began to remove various implements needed for the act. The auditorium was a IF mere block away; he could walk it easily from here. "Any of you like to lend a hand?" The girl who had already spoken rushed to his side. In addition to the children, a cluster of adults stood upon the wooden sidewalk, carefully observing the proceedings. "Is this something magic?" The girl took the heavy black cloth from Phobias' hands. It was only his cape, but he answered, "You'll see tonight." "You change people into animals, don't you?" "Sometimes. But I always change them back." The girl waited for him to give her more to carry. But he was determined to be scrupuously fair. "Take the cape to the auditorium." "But this isn't heavy." "That's all for you," he insisted. He gave the next article -- a briefcase containing variously colored powders -- to a small boy. Rebuffed, the girl went off. The boy followed. As if from a distance, Phobias could hear the adults speaking above him on the sidewalk. "When I was a boy..." one began. "I remember him, too." "He made my brother disappear. You couldn't see the poor guy." "... Or floating in the air -- flying like a bird." "Here -- you take this." Phobias handed a girl a small basket containing his dirty laundry; but she would never have to know. The adults chattered on. "I can hardly wait to see him." "He's the best magician ever!" Phobias was closing the car-gate preparatory to dismissing the children when he happened to glance up. It was then that he saw her. He stared. She could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen. Her hair, soft and smooth as silk, fell to her bare shoulders. And it was yellow! Unlike the others, she was not completely nude. A narrow belt of brown animal-skin darted between her thighs then circled her waist. Her skin was exceedingly pale -- nearly as white as polished ivory. Adorning her chest were twin mounds -- bare adolescent breasts tipped by bright pink nipples. Phobias knew he was staring. But she was staring too and her eyes, like his, were blue and plaintively clear. "Give me something else to carry." At the sound of the sharp voice, Phobias wheeled as though struck. A dark girl gazed at him, her hands empty and waiting. He snapped, "No!" More gently he added, "That's all I have." He turned back, looking desperately for the blond girl. She had gone. He whispered. "Who?" "Huh?" said the dark girl. "Who was -- ?" He made himself stop. There existed no means by which he could force these creatures to understand what he had just seen. Staring along the length of the walk, he thought he glimpsed the girl again as she rounded the corner of a decrepit building. Two men marched behind her, almost as though they served as an escort. Who? Her father? Brothers? He could not know. "Never mind," he said. H is own hair was white. Theirs was black. For so many hundred years had this been the case that he had long since come to believe it the natural order of things. His eyes were blue and theirs were yellow. They had never seemed to notice that he was different, and he had rarely bothered to notice much about them either, for they were a Phobias was sitting on the edge of the improvised stage, legs dangling into empty darkness. He shut his eyes, seeing her -- the yellow hair, blue eyes, tender young breasts. Unbelievable! He was the last man, yes -- but not the last of mankind, as he had thought. She had to be human. Or was there a catch to it? Some trick or masquerade? Tonight she would come to the performance -- everyone did -- and he would find out for certain. The children had gone home. It was the dinner hour. Although the sun still clung to the edge of the sky, the clouds had risen to conceal its red disk. Rain fell harshly. Phobias left the stage and crossed the darkened auditorium of what once had been a schoolhouse, threading his way between benches. The place would hold a couple of hundred spectators, including standees, all looking like so 'many mirror images of each other. But if the girl were among them, he did not doubt that he would recognize her instantly. She would stand out as clearly as a cut diamond among pebbles. He stopped in a doorway and looked out, watching the rain converting the street dust to mud, listening to the drops pound the crude sidewalks. A "man" passed, undismayed by the downpour, his naked body exuding slick oils impervious to the plummeting wetness. Sometimes -- when he stopped to think of it -- Phobias was amazed by how casually he referred to these creatures as men. For they were not. They were born of men as surely as mankind had once been spawned by the gods, but they were not men any more than Phobias was a god. Once -- before the time of the great plague of madness that had cleansed Earth of its masters -- they had been called androids, and had been scattered and few. Now they were many and man was only one. But wait, thought Phobias. His heart pounded. What of her? When the rain fell, did she feel as he did -- threatened by dampness IF and chill? Where was she now? At home, he guessed, gazing through a steamy windowpane, watching the wetness that cascaded beyond. And what did the girl see out there? Did she see his face in the rain as he was seeing hers? Would she know that he was a human being, of genuine blood and ancient genes and true flesh, as he was convinced she was? As suddenly as it had come, the storm fled. The sky briefly turned silver, then faded into night. The muddied street was empty now, silent. Phobias turned away and shuffled back to his props. H e sat alone upon the floodlighted stage, gazing at the massed audience patiently waiting. He could make out the dark polished faces of the throng standthe seats. The identical heads loomed as though from some horribly repetitous nightmare. After the passage of centuries, Phobias was quite accustomed to the phenomenon and did not let it disturb him. He sat upon a stool, his legs crossed. A thin cigar -- one of the few remaining in his private stock -- glowed between the fingers of his right hand. He wore his black cape, his white leather gloves and his tall glimmering top hat. Behind him, neatly spread upon a wooden bench, were the tools of his trade: a polished wand, two glasses full of water, a red bandanna and a pair of long scissors. Nothing else. But he would not be needing these things tonight, he told himself. For she had come at last, arriving after he had nearly surrendered hope. Now he could see her face clearly rising from the darkness of the last row, like a single star amid the blankness of an otherwise empty sky. He tried to smile at her to communicate his knowledge of her predicament, that of a human being among androids, just as he was. But when she failed to meet his gaze, he understood. It was not yet time for that. First the proof would have to be presented; that was only proper and fair. The smiles would naturally follow. The audience waited stolidly. Take two hundred true human beings -- the flesh-and-blood kind -- and pack them into a school auditorium with promises of a magic show. Let the performer merely sit upon the bright stage, gazing ahead into their massed ranks. Feet would soon be shuffling, throats coughing, hands twitching and wringing. Such was not the case with these creatures. Phobias whispered contemptuously, "Androids!" Their communal capacity for patience was infinite, for man -- true man -- had made them that way. At last Phobias decided to get on with it. "Good evening," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen. Children." He tapped the ash from his smoldering cigar, took a lingering puff, blew thick, curling smoke. "Behind me on the bench you may observe the few articles with which I normally commence my performance." He smiled sympathetically. "But on this occasion I choose to treat the intelligence of my audience with the utmost respect. Here -- " Standing up carefully, smoking, he moved to the bench. He lifted the red bandanna and waved it. "Do you really need to see me cut this old cloth into pieces, then watch while I recreate the whole before your astonished eyes?" He dropped the bandanna contemptuously, letting it flutter to the stage. "Or these glasses of water?" He tapped one with a fingernail. "Do you wish to observe as I suspend the contents above the floor of this stage, thus defying the laws of nature? And this magic wand?" Laughing, he tossed it over his shoulder. "I really don't think we have any need of it tonight. I feel none of you have come here tonight to see silly tricks. Let us dispense with these props. Forget them." He stepped forward, striding to the lip of the stage. There he gazed ahead, balanced upon tensed knees like a sea captain staring into the entrails of an approaching storm. "We shall move immediately to the crux -- the red meat -- of my act. I will need a volunteer." His eyes scanned the last row, passing back and forth across the place where the girl sat. "You, sir," he said randomly, then pointed at the dark figure of a man. "Step up here, please." The man marched to the stage. Phobias awaited his arrival, standing calmly, trying not to look at the girl. The man approaching could have been any of those he had met already -- the gas-station attendant or the storekeeper, Ernest -- or any other one of them, seen or unseen, known or unknown, in this or any other town. "I hope," said Phobias, "you do not object to assisting me for a brief moment." He flung away his cigar, letting the stump smolder on the wooden floor. "Glad to help. What shall I -- ?" Phobias cut off his words with a slashing hand. Then he proceeded to pace the length of the stage, glancing out at the huddled mass of the audience. Suddenly, like a dancer, he whirled, then he spoke in a low, measured voice. He hardly comprehended his own words. How many thousand thousand times previously had he been thus impelled to state his role and purpose? "I shall make you see what you have never seen before. I shall make you unable to see what' you have always seen before. Why? How? That much I cannot freely reveal. But if, during the next few moments, you come to doubt the evidence of your own senses, then I say you must elect to doubt your sanity as well. And I guarantee you this: madness is not my trade. I am IF a magician and that alone. I toy with the unknown as an infant plays with a rattle. I allow you to glimpse -- r-but only to glimpse -- the mysteries of my personal detour into darkness' He whirled again, swirling his cape. "Now, sir," he said to the openmouthed man from the audience, "would you mind stepping forward into the light so that everyone may get a good look at you?" Lightly he touched the man's hip. "Turn, if you don't mind. Show them that you're all here -- let them know you're real. P hobias could feel them out there, becoming excited. As excited as it was possible for them to become, that is. The older ones, having seen the magic before, communicated their sense of anticipation to their ignorant daughters and sons. '"Fine," Phobias said, placing his hands over his eyes. "Please -- I must ask for silence." When he could not hear them breathing, he began to count aloud. "One... two... three..." Reaching twenty, he lowered his hands, opened his eyes. Then, raising a clenched fist, he cut a swath through the air. "Now!" he cried. He took a halfstep forward. And stopped. "You are a dog," he told the dark person on the stage. "When you hear my fingers snap once." "Yes." "Then be a dog." And he snapped his fingers. The man dropped instantly to his hands and knees. Without so much as glancing at him, Phobias went to the stool and sat down. Deliberately, as the man's shrill yips and yowls resounded, he placed a fresh cigar between his teeth. The man came trotting over, sniffing suspiciously. "Roll over," Phobias commanded. The man fell on his back, hands and feet pointing at the roof. Phobias walked to the edge of the stage, leaned down. "Anyone have a match?" Somebody did; Phobias lit up and puffed. "Stop," he told the subject on the stage. "You may stand. On two feet." His fingers snapped. "You are yourself, again." The man nodded. "I am." Phobias faced his audience. As always, there was no applause, no laughter, nothing. A gentle hissing sound erupted briefly, but that was all. His eyes came to rest on the blond girl. She was gazing straight back at him. Blue eyes. Pale skin. For a moment he could not look away. "Soon," he murmured. "What?" queried the man. Phobias wrenched himself back to business. "You remember nothing?" "No," the man admitted. Phobias realized he was rushing his act, forcing the end that ought not to come for several hours. Often in the past he had performed until dawn, lusting in the excitement of his own performance, refusing to relinquish the stage until he had given up all hope of extracting some response. Not that response ever came. These people -- androids, he thought -- did not enjoy what he did, for they could enjoy nothing -- not love for fear, not magic. They could pay attention, yes. And they could become excited. Curiosity and excitation had been built into them as survival tools, but that was about it. "He is a bird," Phobias told the audience. The man's face, when Phobias looked at it, was blank. "You are a bird." "I am." "Then, for us, fly." And snapped his fingers. The man flapped his arms, straining at the flat and dusty air. Phobias whispered to the audience, "He flies." Then he sat on his stool again, smoking. The audience watched the flight of the captive bird. What was it to them? Hawk? Eagle? Sparrow? Once, in a distant village in the southern continent, Phobias had said, "He is a bird." But the villagers had never seen an actual bird. Phobias remembered that rocky mocking land, treeless, where the sun rarely came. "He flies." But they had not known. They had asked for explanations... This man cawed and twisted on the stage, arms helplessly flapping. The audience watched silently. Phobias rose from the stool, waved his cigar. "You are yourself," he said. The man ceased his charade, regained awareness. But still no applause, no laughter. Silence. Phobias bowed stiffly. "And now," he announced, "the heart of my act. A descent into the great chasm of the unknown." He waved the first volunteer away. "Another?" he asked, but there was none. Phobias searched the audience, pointed. "You, sir." A man sitting beside the blond girl. "I ask that you join me, please." Phobias watched the girl, seeing surprise and wonder on her face. And more? Was it fear he saw? Pleasure? It had been so long since he had witnessed true emotion in another that interpretation of her expression came hard to him. T he man stood beside him. Phobias could not stop himself: "That girl -- " His eyes indicated whom he meant. "Is she your daughter?" "She is." "Where did you get her?" "From... , from..." The man struggled to speak the ugly forbidden term. "Not from there. Tell me the truth." IF "Well, from... from..." It was the girl who made Phobias stop. He was gazing at her again. Her lips folded downward, the pale skin above her eyes creased and strained -- her whole cast of countenance begged him not to proceed. He hesitated, then addressed the audience, using well-memorized phrases to conceal his confusion. "I must ask for complete silence. Even the slightest sound might destroy the mental equilibrium necessary for what shall ensue. This man -- " gesturing behind " -- will soon die. It is my intention to return him then to full and natural life." Murmurs of curiosity from the audience. Hisses of excitement. Phobias said, "Lie down. Yes. That's right. Now extend your arms straight out from your sides. And your feet -- separate the heels. Yes, that's fine." Normally this would be the climax of his act -- his grandest achievement. "No, don't close your eyes. You must keep them open." He threw away the cigar, faced hi audience. "Another volunteer." He selected a woman from the front row. "Come up here, would you?" When everything was ready -- the man lying upon the stage, the woman standing at his side -- Phobias kneeled. He moved his hands over the man -- first down and then up -- covering every square inch of the body but never actually touching it. "Death calls to you," Phobias said. "He shall bestow upon you peace and tranquility. You hear the call. Life ebbs from your physical self. Although you can feel life leaving, you are not afraid. You are lonely but prepared. Tell me." "I am lonely," the man echoed softly. "I am prepared." "Not afraid?" "No, I am not afraid." "Death has come to claim you. Life flows gently away. You feel it abandon your lungs, your heart. From them, your life flows like clean water into the veins of your arms. Into your skin. Into the air -- " Phobias snapped his fingers. "Now life is gone!" The man upon the floor neither moved nor spoke. "He is dead," Phobias said. Regaining his feet, with his hands he swept the dust from his knees. He eyed the woman crouched beside the supine man. "Is he breathing?" "No," she said woodenly. "Check his heart." She placed her ear upon the man's breast. "Tell them that he's dead," Phobias said. Softly the woman intoned: "He is dead." "Louder." Distinctly: "He is dead." Phobias nodded. "Thank you." He allowed the woman to leave the stage. He could not resist a look at the girl. Yes -- that was fear on her face. He was sure of it. Emotion! Phobias pointed a finger at her. "Come here," he said. "Come up here." She hesitated, then walked slowly to the stage and mounted it. Now it was his turn to feel fear. He reached into a pocket and felt for a cigar. "Is he really dead?" Phobias stared at her adolescent beauty. A bare yard separated them. "He is." She crouched. Raising the subject's wrist in her hand, she gazed up at Phobias. "Tell them," he said. She released the wrist. The hand dropped soundly to the floor. "Tell them what?" "Tell them he's dead." "But he's not." "He's not dead?" "No." "But tell them that he is." The girl lowered her head, placing her ear upon her father's heart. Then she stood up. "No, he's not dead." "You won't tell them that he is." "Of course not. He isn't." "You are a dog," Phobias said. She shook her head. "Fly." "I can't fly." "Fly!" he shouted. "No!" She rushed toward him, pounded his chest with little fists. "You make him stand up -- I want him to be conscious again." Phobias nodded. He told the dead man: "You are living." But the magician did not mean it. No, it was she who was alive -- not the cold dead creature now rising from the floor. Even in life, that thing would always be dead. But she -- she lived. At last he had elicited the response sought so long. Denial. Emotional opposition. His eyes were stinging with the torment of his joy. P hobias forced them to give him the gasoline. At first they had refused, saying that he had failed to fulfill the agreement. The children had been sorely disappointed. Phobias said, "Do what I ask. I am ordering you. Bring gasoline. Prepare my car." And then they had acceded. For the first time in centuries he had used his magical powers outside the confines of his act -- for personal and private gain. But he felt that he possessed the right -- for was he not a man? The girl lived outside the town. He made them tell him exactly where. He drove there quickly, careless of the ruts and pits of the decayed highway. The house was set back from the road. A single window -- a rectangle of yellow amid the black -- gleamed brightly. Asleep? He approached and pressed his face to the glass. No, her eyes were open. She lay upon her back in a narrow bed. Pink sheets. The walls of the bedroom -- IF plain and undecorated -- were also pink. He broke the window-glass with a rock, reached inside, raised the lower frame. She did not stir as he crawled through the opening. Then he paused, listening to the silence of the house. The girl opened her eyes then. She showed no alarm. "What do you want?" "I've come -- " Phobias stopped. He thought he had heard a footfall. "I'll tell you later. Get up. We're going." "Where?" He waved an arm. "Away." "They'll stop us." He laughed, striving to calm her immature misgivings. Then he heard it again: feet striking the floor. Coming closer. He grasped at the noise, saying, "If you don't come with me, I'll have to make him dead. You saw what I can do!" Frowning, she swung out of bed, started for the closet. Phobias stopped her. "You don't have to take anything. Hurry!" He exited by way of the window. When his feet touched the grass, she stood at his side. "This way." "They'll follow and catch us," she insisted. "No," he said. "The other ones -- I know they will." Phobias laughed easily, placing an arm around her shoulders. "It's just us, now." But as they reached the road he looked over his shoulder, saw a line of fire approaching from town. Dozens of flaming torches swam in the night. "Them?" he cried. "Yes. I told you." She drew closer. They clung to each other. "Let me return to the house," she begged. "No." He forced her into the car. "This machine can smash them, outrun them." He started the engine. "Watch." They were coming from every direction now. Phobias did not hesitate. He ran the car straight at their torches. A gleam of fire singed his eyes. Then a vision of incredible stunning whiteness. They were through. He exulted, shouting, slapping, the steering wheel: "See, see!" The girl pered behind through the rear window. "They're still there," she said. "But we're here." He slowed the car to prove that everything was all right. "Oh, no." She glared at him, shaking her head. "Don't you know they can drive, too?" "Not like us," he said. as they neared the dark vastness of the forest, the first scattered trees heaved up beside the road like towering signs of warning. Phobias stopped the car. He opened the rear gate and removed the tools of his trade and threw them into the underbrush. As he did, he giggled. The girl seemed half asleep. But she smiled when he told her, "I won't need them now." They could live in the forest, he thought. Survival lay easily at their fingertips. The car zoomed forward. Were they ready yet for sons and daughters? For the new race to be born from the remnants of the old. For man returning to again rule his own domain. He reached out a hand and caressed her slender wrist. Her eyes, open but unaware, barely flickered. On and on they drove. Soon they were in the thickest part of the forest. The ancient road wound among huge twisted trees. The girl had slumped into a deep silence punctuated by frantic glances over her shoulder. They passed through a clearing and then a dark huddled village, a lamp suddenly flashing from one window as their headlight-beams stroked the tumbledown homes. "I wasn't always the last man," he said. He tried to explain to her. Before I the plague of madness, beings had teemed the Earth. Afterward, barely a few thousand remained. He told her everything he knew of those forgotten times. He had been an astronaut, he said proudly. "A what?" she asked. He pointed through the windshield. Here the trees were thinned. Moonlight gleamed silver from a roadside pond whose silent dark waters reinforced his bitter recollections of yesterday. "See those lights." He meant the stars. "Know what they are?" She knew. "Well, I went up there." "To the stars?" "No, but to planets. Jupiter. Mars. Also the moon." "You traveled to the moon?" "I did." "How? By magic?" A kind of magic, he said, and promised to explain someday. Then he told her that he had been one of a dozen men and women selected to make the first journey to a star -- not a planet or a moon, but a real star. The voyage was to last four hundred years. The crew had been injected with a complex of new drugs designed to increase longevity. "So we could live to see our world again." All of that had happened thousands of years ago. "But the plague of madness came, and because of it none of us ever left. We stayed here on Earth and I, at least, have lived almost forever. Those drugs -- " He remembered well. A year before the scheduled departure, the starship crew had gone into training. They had been placed inside a model of the ship that would carry them to the stars, and this model had been lowered to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Suitably shielded from the pressure at ocean depths, of course. There they had IF stayed for seven months, constantly monitered from above but without the security of reciprocal contact or any knowledge of exterior time or events. They were left alone -- a dozen men and women -- forced to live wholly isolated from the world. "And we survived," he said. "But when our training time was over and we were raised to the surface, we were greeted only by androids. Androids and corpses and a handful of madmen." The plague of madness had first broken out within the Ganymede settlement on one of the moons of Jupiter. In less than a month, every man in the colony had been dead. "The androids told us," said Phobias, "that the disease progressed in three distinct stages. The first, lasting approximately a week, was classic schizophrenia. For many years it had been theorized that the underlying causes of that mental disorder were physical -- viral, bacteriological, something like that. And now it was proved. The plague victim immediately lost all touch with reality. In the second stage, he became catatonic. In the third, he died. There were no survivors once the disease began." The girl said wearily, "My name is Eva." "Eva! How beautiful. Listen to me, Eva. That plague spread faster than any other in history. It leaped from Ganymede to Mars and then to Earth. In less than six months, everyone susceptible was either dead or dying. We asked the androids whether any men at all had survived. "'Only those like yourselves,' they told us. 'Those inoculated with the longevity medicine. Too late it was realized that the stuff is a preventative. Oh, some others -- past sufferers from schizophrenia, both the cured and uncured; they are immune and they have survived. And us -- androids. We were not affected.'" Phobias paused, negotiating the old car over a jagged hole in the road. He glanced at the girl. Was she listening? "So we set off in search of the survivors, finding most of them -- a few thousand -- and the years passed and they died too but we did not. It was a lonely life for us. But a simple one, for the androids were always there to tend to our desires. But gradually the crew began to die off. Accidents occurred. A woman was murdered by a man who had loved her for more than three hundred years. I left, taking one of the other women with me. We took an automobile and started to wander the world." And the androids had forgotten. They had reproduced themselves by virtue of the knowledge man had granted them, maintaining the automated factories. When the old ones of the first generation -- those who had lived through the plague -- wore out and were discarded, their grandsons and granddaughters had continued on, ignorant of what they truly were. Indeed, they had come to call themselves "men." And their numbers had rapidly multi plied and in time they had peopled the world in the same great numbers as their original creators. "And my race -- our race -- the human race -- toppled to the very edge of extinction." Phobias had slowed the car, was peering intently through the windshield. "She died near here. The woman. Oh, I can't remember exactly when. A bolt of lightning came from the sky and killed her instantly -- killed her and our horses and set the wagon afire. I nearly died, too. Later I tried to find the others but all were gone. Some had died. The rest were lost. Since then, I have continued to wander alone -- a magician -- Phobias -- moving quietly through the android towns and villages. Searching for a human being. But now I have found one. I am not alone any more." S he had fallen asleep, slumped back in the seat, face buried in the dark... He pulled overto the side of the road, killed the engine and climbed out. The silence woke her. An instant later she was standing beside him, gazing up at dark tree-tops and the stars. "I don't want to drive any more," he said. "We can stay here till morning." "All right." He pointed into the trees. "Let's take a look." He lighted a match to show the way. Then another. The forest around them whispered in the wind. "Here." He drew her down beneath a massive balsam. "Let's rest here. The air is sweet and the needles make the ground soft." He wanted to take her in his arms. He placed his dead cigar between his teeth and relit it. No... too soon. She had curled up at his feet, as if asleep, but the glare of the match revealed her eyes open and alert. "That smells awful," she said. He smiled, exhaling smoke. "Not to me." He stretched out comfortably. "Did you hear what I told you?" "Most of it, I guess." "Then you must understand why I ran off with you, Eva. You don't belong there with those -- those things. You belong here with me. We're the only two human beings left -- and we can people the earth!" He sensed her hesitation, her reluctance to reply. She was burdened with unspoken words. "What is it?" he demanded. "I can't tell you, magician." "Why?" "They said I shouldn't. That there was no need. You weren't supposed to see me. You weren't supposed to do this -- take me away. I want to go home." "No!" He grabbed her. In his IF fingers, her wrist seemed fragile as a twig. "What have you to tell me? Out with it!" "All right, then. We're not the same." A long silence. "We are!" he cried piteo'usly. "We must be." "No," she said. "I'm not like you. And there are more of us, many more, more each day. We're not like you or like the androids either. We're different." "Impossible! Are you saying that you are neither human nor android?" Instead of answering she remarked softly, without surprise, "Here they come." He stared, seeing nothing at first. Then their torches burst into life, painting the forest with crude light. Phobias leaped to his feet, holding the girl. Relentlessly they closed in. Fairhaired. Ghostly pale. Was it possible that all of them were human? Phobias tried desperately to think. "Let her go," said their spokesman, a blond woman whose face was young, whose unclad body shown pallid in the torchlight. "No!" shouted Phobias. "She's a human being -- like me. She's not yours. Unless..." He gulped. He could not bring himself to ask the question. But the woman answered it, shaking her head. "We are not human, nor is she. She is one of us." "The commandments," he said desperately. "She does not obey." He knew the commandments perfectly; they had served him long and well. Born within all androids: Obey the directions of man. Cause no harm to befall his form. The woman stepped closer. She stopped inches in front of Phobias and raised her hand. Sharply, coldly, she slapped his face. He tasted blood upon his lips. "Give her to me," the woman said, reaching out. "Or do you want us to beat you?" He glanced past the woman's bare shoulders. There were so many of them -- dozens -- men, women, children -- blond and pale, blue-eyed. Angry. Resentful. They were able to feel and show emotion. Like Eva. "How many are there?" he asked. "More each day. All over the world. Didn't you realize it had to happen? We have read the old records. We know how it began. And this was the way it had to end. Man created androids to serve him. But man perished. And now androids have become men themselves." "A lie," Phobias said. "Except in name only, you can't be men. You come from factories -- like machines. Men are born." The woman reached out and snatched the girl, drew her close. The two hugged each other. 'This girl," the woman said, "is my daughter. She was bom to me. Her father, whom you hypnotized, if grandson of Kanakoe, who developed the process. Or maybe evolution developed it, and revealed it first in Kanokoe. But we don't need the factories. We are the new humanity. But you, Phobias, are the old." A great loneliness engulfed him. He felt more alone than ever before. He was Phobias, the magician, unique, the last man. When he commanded all were required to obey. But now the blood ran down his face and he was humbled. "You hid yourselves from me," he said. "You disguised yourselves to look like the others. You wouldn't let me know." "We saw no purpose in hurting you. If it hadn't been for your race, ours would never have existed. We owed you something -- the comfort of ignorance, at least. And you could not damage us, because you are the last." "I am the last," he whispered. He watched the woman and her daughter join the others. Illuminated by torchlight they disappeared into the forest, leaving thick darkness behind. He slumped down upon the dry needles and held his head in his trembling hands. "I am the last man," he said. "The only man." P hobias, the magician, standing upon the stage, calmly stared out at his audience. Behind him, neatly arranged upon a bench, lay his reclaimed props. Where was he? He was not certain, but it made no difference. One village was like another. He traveled the world in endless circles, determined to prove what he knew so well: that he was the last man, the only man. The audience regarded him with pity. He nearly laughed in their faces. Their assumed compassion mocked their brutal honesty. They lied to him no longer. They rubbed his nose in the truth they had kept concealed so long. But he would prove to them somehow that he alone was a proper human. They would obey him -- he would enforce the commandments -- he would show them the deepest truths and force them to see. Their faces were mostly pale. Blond hair. Blue eyes that shone and glimmered. Raising an arm, he pointed at a tall man in the first row. "Step forward," he said. "Come here." The man came obediently. For a moment, Phobias experienced hope. Could he be winning at last? Had they finally chosen to acknowledge his superiority? They were androids. Whether born from factory or womb, they were not men. When he told them to die, they must cease living. When he said, "You are a bird," they must fly. What he told them to hear, they must hear. What he told them to see, they must see. IF The man stood beside him on the stage. Phobias raised his wand and drew a rapid cross in the air. "I am a man," he told the audience, "and you are androids. When I command, you must obey." Turning, he faced his subject. The man met his gaze with cold blue eyes. Softly, Phobias said, "You are a bird -- now fly." The man stood frozen, motionless. Phobias shouted: "Fly!" The man looked at his feet. "You must! I command you! Fly!" "No," the man said softly. Phobias turned away. Would it ever come? Would they ever acknowledge his rightful station? Or would he be forced to wander alone for centuries more until that fateful day when some accident would finally strike him down and he would die, leaving the Earth to be ruled by them alone? He waved his hand meekly at the man: "You may go back and sit down -- please." There was nothing else for him. He had to go on. Eternity was his, and there was nothing else for him to do. He pointed blindly into the audience. "You," he said. As the girl came forward, blond hair, as long as her spine, he prepared himself to try again. He would command -- she would obey. What choice did he have? Phobias was the last man. Wasn't he?  An Informal Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Articles -- Interviews -- Reviews -- Letters Scheduled for ##: "Tomorrow's Libido -- Sex and Science Fiction", an eye-opening survey by Richard Delap. psycho-cultural analysis -- "Reading Heinlein Subjectively" by Alexei  Cory Panshin. -- new book and story lists. 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Many added grimly: To well-informed citizens of Ridzin it came as no surprise. For fifteen years, the Programmed Corps, the mightiest war-machine ever known, had been developing on their world, lending Ridzin a significance unique in the Terrestrial League. Second-rate in most respects, Ridzin had been a logical base for the formation of the Corps. No one doubted that the League Central Government on Great Xal would have preferred the Corps to be assembled under its. immediate supervision. But the jealousy of other powerful League worlds made it impossible -- the Corps simply would not have come into being as a joint effort of the League if Great Xal had insisted on the point. On the other hand, the central government wouldn't have permitted its establishment on worlds like Hannaret or Lorcia, for example, worlds not too inferior to Great Xal in military strength and perennially on the verge of open rebellion. The Programmed Corps -- its awesome manpower and appalling technical equipment drawn from all fourteen League worlds -- must bring about, it was agreed by those in the know, in one direction or another a decisive shift in the balance of power in the League. As it would also bring about a decisive shift in the balance of power between the Terrestrial League and that despised, remote, alien race called the Skanders. That, as all League citizens understood -- having been told it regularly during the past fifteen years -- was the basic and vital reason for the Programmed Corps' existence. And because its personnel were conditioned to absolute unquestioning obedience to whomever knew the commands by which to direct them, the Corps could be brought into being only on a world like Ridzin, a world which by no stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a menace to anyone else. And now the Programmed Corps -- completed only after fifteen years of sustained effort, armed, trained, single-minded, irresistable -- was shipping out! X tor General Mark Treffry of Great Xal remarked in a tone of absorbed interest as he peered through a window into the compound several stories below "is magnificent!" Dexter Monte, Treffry's Technical Advisor, standing a prudent dozen steps farther back in the room, cleared his throat. "You really, " the Inspector General went on, "should come over here and watch him! What incredible reaction speed!" "I prefer," Dexter Monte said firmly, "not to expose myself at a window while a Programmed assassin is in the area. If I might suggest -- " Treffry chuckled. "Don't you trust your own precautions?" he inquired. "The shields, the fields, the what-not? They've functioned perfectly so far." "So far!" Monte repeated meaningfully. Treffry grunted. "Thinking of poor Ulbrand, I suppose?" "Yes." "Ah, well," said Treffry. "Ulbrand was no doubt a rather better than average Technical Advisor. But let's face it, Monte... he simply was not in your class! I'm not surprised they got him -- whoever it is doesn't want us on Ridzin." He paused, added smugly, "And we have pretty fair idea of who that is, don't we?" "Yes," Monte said. "Now as for you," Treffry went on, "I have complete confidence in your devices. That fellow down there is in a trap. But he's certainly handling himself well while we close it! On the average how many do we lose in these attacks?" "Seventeen-point-two men." "Well, our present would-be assassin seems to have accounted for at least two dozen by now! And -- good heavens!" Treffry went silent a moment, staring down through the window. "What's going on?" Dexter Monte inquired in an uneasy tone. "I'm sure I don't know!" Treffry told him. "There were some odd glitters of extremely bright light. Almost like the scintillation of a diamond as you turn it." "Ah!" Monte said. "The assassin was near it?" "He was near it! He's nowhere now! What was it?" Joining Treffry at the window, Monte said in great relief, "An adaptation of the Welban Vortex. I wasn't sure it would work on a Programmed mind." "It worked!" Treffry assured IF him. He gave the Advisor a sidelong glance full of admiration. "This is the sixteenth or seventeenth such attack we've undergone, isn't it?" "The twenty-first," Monte said. "And always by Programmed Soldiery! They're unbelievable! I'll trust your traps while only one of them is involved. But when the entire Programmed Corps goes into action -- !" The Inspector General shook his head. "Yes," Dexter Monte said slowly. "A fearful thought." "Clearly, somebody else -- somebody not at all authorized -- knows at least a few of the key commands to their minds," Treffry said. "Well, we'll be rid of these problems soon enough. When is the first carrier scheduled to lift?" Dexter Monte glanced at his watch. "In sixteen hours, thirtytwo minutes and ten seconds." He looked at Treffry, added, "If you want to hear Governor Vinocur's official announcement of the Programmed Corps' departure from the Planet of Ridzin -- he's about to go on the air." "By all means," said Treffry. "I think I'll really enjoy hearing our good and loyal friend Vinocur explain the situation to the public!' Planetary Governor Frank Vinocur was an old-time politician; while his speech, to which most of the adult population of Ridzin was tuned that morning, was a review of facts with which his listeners had been familiar for over a dozen years, he made them sound like news. There were friction points between the Terrestrial League and the alien Skanders. Though widely separated in space, they had overlapping spheres of influence -- overlapping only slightly so far; but the situation was bound to become more serious as time went on. Unlike other spacefaring aliens men had encountered, the Skanders did not prudently withdraw when confronted by the mighty race of Terra -- had, in fact, been known on occasion to attack first. They were savage and treacherous enemies, and showed, in addition, repulsively amebic physical characteristics. Space, Governor Vinocur declared, was not large enough for the Terrestrial League and such as the Skanders! An eventual showdown with the creatures was inevitable... and, as all knew, it was for this showdown that the Programmed Corps had been created. Ridzin could proudly say in this hour of parting that it had earned its place in history as the home of the Corps. By the wise planning of the Central Government on Great Xal, the time to strike at the Skander vermin -- strike first, strike hard! -- had arrived. The Programmed Corps was prepared... and victory was certain! The speech went over well -- since Ridzin clearly would be remote from the battle zones. Throughout the day patriotic anti-Skander fervors grew in the population, reaching a high pitch when Governor Vinocur's press attaches let it become known that at the official leave-taking banquet that evening the Governor would be publicly appointed a Programmed Corps General by the Inspector General from Great Xal, Mark Treffry, who had been on Ridzin for the past year to arrange for the Corps' transfer. And when the last of the automatic transspace carriers lifted from the planet during the night hours, General Frank Vinocur would leave with it in the company of the Inspector General, to represent Ridzin and its people at the front in this stirring period of history. That afternoon cheering crowds lined the routes along which the Programmed Corps convoys rolled toward the planet's three Transspace Stations. They surrounded the stations themselves where giant carriers, all bearing the insignia of Great Xal, lay in dense rows like vast steel sausages. Into them marched the Programmed Corps. Eighteen thousand men with full equipment were assigned to each carrier; the men would lie in rigid, frozen sleep during the long spaceflight to Great Xal. One by one, the carriers were loaded and closed their locks... Some of Ridzin's citizens, noting that only the central government appeared to be involved in the operation, speculated that they might be witnessing a dramatic ne turn in the Terrestrial League's internal politics. But no public mention was made of such possibilities and by the time the official banquet began the planet was in a festive mood -- almost as if the war against the Skanders were already won. Governor Vinocur was duly appointed a General of the Programmed Corps while Ridzin followed the event on their tri-di screens; laudatory speeches were exchanged between him and the Inspector General; toasts and countertoasts were offered... Dexter Monte, the Inspector General's Technical Advisor, created a minor diplomatic flurry when, in full view of the entire planet, he refused to empty his glass in Ridzin's honor, explaining that he was not a drinking man, that alcohol had deleterious effects on his metabolism. However, he was quickly coaxed into it by Mark Treffry and Governor Vinocur, and thereafter drank dutifully, if sourly, to every toast proposed. T hen the official rituals were over, except for the final scene on the steel loading dock within the maw of the last giant carrier left on the planet, where Governor Vinocur bade Ridzin farewell. Inspector General Treffry stood smiling at his side, Dexter Monte standing a few feet behind the two, belching every few seconds and generally showing the effects of having been forced IF Science Hcttcxi No! You love good storytelling and the SF magazines ; just about the only place to find that art practiced today -- is today's magazine of the future -- the future of storythe Mystery, the Western, Fantasy, and Romance, as well as Science Fiction and modes of literature still unnamed because they chart a virginal universe. further into the most exciting depths of the human mind -- the unbound imagination. Take a step into the future of an art! I would like to take advantage of the that if I am not completely satisfied I may cancel my subscription at any time and receive a refund on the price of the issues remaining. My payment is enclosed.   # issues # (# savings) I  # issues # (# savings)  i # issues # (# savings) Name: Street: Town: , State: Zip: . Boston, Mass. # I # into participating in the toasts. Vinocur spoke briefly into the tri-di cameras, concluded with a formal salute; then camera crews withdrew, glancing with silent awe at the huge bulkheads to either side of the dock behind which eighteen thousand men lay frozen in sleep. As the last of them left the carrier the loading locks slid shut with a heavy steel boom. The three men standing on the dock were alone. There was a dim humming in the air as the ship computers readied the engines for lift-off and the long flight during which there would be no waking human being to guide them. Treffry looked at his watch. "Still half an hour," he said. "But we might as well get to our tanks at once. Feeling any better, Monte?" "No," Dexter Monte muttered. "Worse! I'll be more than happy to settle into that tank. I'm beginning to have some difficulty holding myself together, I can tell you!" Treffry and Vinocur glanced at each other and laughed, more loudly than the remark called for, almost as if each were enjoying a private joke; Monte blinked in brief, bleary surprise at them as he turned to follow them off to the sleep tanks. Five minutes later. Inspector General Mark Treffry heard the sharp click with which his sleeping tank sealed itself above him. He switched on the intercom connecting the three tanks. With no attendants left awake in the carrier, it was essential that he and his companions monitor one another through the steps required to ensure that they would awaken safely after the trip. Governor Vinocur acknowledged at once, and some seconds later, Dexter Monte also replied. The preparations were carried out, checked, and then Treffry settled back comfortably. He already felt a faint, not unpleasant numbness in legs and arms, which was the anesthetic's firsf effect. By the time the sleepcold touched him, he would not feel anything at all. But his mind was still awake and active; and the private joke which had made him laugh aloud a short while ago seemed too good now to keep to himself. "Vinpcur?" he said to the intercom. "Yes, Treffry?" Vinocur's voice responded. "Before we drop off," Treffry said, "I thought I'd thank you for a highly enjoyable experience." He could hardly refrain from laughing again. "You're referring to your stay on Ridzin?" Vinocur asked politely. "We tried to make it as pleasant as possible, of course." "I'm sure you did!" And now Treffry did laugh, huffing and snorting helplessly for almost a minute before he was able to stop. He dabbed at his eyes, and sensed that the sleep-heaviness hadleg:un IF to edge into his hands. "Why do you laugh, Treffry?" Vinocur's voice asked. That almost set Treffrey off again. But he choked the laughter down. If he kept giving way to it, he would be asleep before he made sure that wlatever dreams came to Frank Vinocur during the long trip would not be pleasant ones. He said, "Let me tell you -- " While the Programmed Corps was being forged into a magnificent, automatically functioning weapon on Ridzin, it became obvious that its completion was awaited with as much anxiety as eagerness by a number of the worlds of the Terrestrial League. The question, of course, was who in the end would control it. "We didn't try to stop the plotting and bargaining that went on," Treffiry said. "And we didn't become involved in it. We merely took measures to epsure that the central government and Great Xal would remain always one step ahead of the conspirators." "Conspirators?" Vinocur's voice repeated carefully over the intercom. "Hanfiaret and Lorcia from the beginning, naturally!" Treffry told him. 'Then, during tlie past two years, the governing body of Ridzin. We did our intelligence work thoroughly. Great Xal held the margin of power, so nothing else was needed. We could let the thing ripen. "My dear fellow, that was what has made the final stages of this game so amusing! The ingenuity! The intricate patterns of deception! War fleets from Lorcia and Hannaret combining suddenly for 'joint maneuvers' in an open threat to Great Xal -- and on Ridzin, in apparent desperation, ineffectual gestures at sabotage, including a series of attempted assassinations by mysteriously malfunctioning Programmed soldiers! They were not intended to succeed, of course; murdering me could not have held up the transfer of the Corps by a day. I imagine poor Ulbrand got killed by accident-or, more correctly, by the ineptness of his defenses. "And to what end? Why, to divert our attention. Nothing more. To draw us away from the one plan which did, in fact, have a chance to succeed. But that plan has failed, too, Vinocur!" Treffry paused a moment. When the intercom remained silent, he went on complacently. "The Hannaret warships which were to intercept and halt our carriers on their way to Great Xal have been allowed to take up position midway on our course. But they will be joined a few days from now by twice their number of central government ships. There will be no interception, Vinocur! "And now, with the Programmed Corps to enforce its orders. Great Xal deals once and for all with the malcontent worlds! The Terrestrial League will be hammered into a unit. That is the corps' only urgent and immediate task. Time enough later to turn to settling our score with the Skanders. Why we owe those obscene aliens some gratitude, as a matter of fact -- if they hadn't been such a visible threat to the League it would have been impossible to bring ihe Corps into existence. So now, as I bid you good-night, 'General' Vinocur, I shall leave it to you to picture foij yourself the warm reception awaiting you on Great Xal!" There was silence again for a moment. Then Vinocur said, "Treffry?" "Yes?" Treffry said, pleased. He had not really expected Vinocur to reply. "You omitted mentioning one of our diversion attempts," the intercom told him. "I did?" Treffry said. "What was that?" "The interception of the carriers, of course! Too many people knew of that plan. It was almost inevitable that your intelligence would get wind of it." Treffry started to speak, checked himself, suddenly chilled. "To stay one step ahead in this game," Vinocur's voice told him blandly, "that, as you've indicated, was the great necessity here. To bedazzle, mislead, confuse with a variety of elaborate schemes and dodges -- when, all the time, only some very simple plan, one known to the fewest possible planners, could be successful. And that plan has succeeded, Treffry! To this moment only four men have known about it. You will now be the fifth. "The Programmed Corps is not on its way to Great Xal, you see. Instead, the course of the carriers will take them to transspace stations on Hannaret." Impossible, Treffry thought in instant, scornful relief. What was the fellow attempting to accomplish with such a lie? Only Ulbrand and Monte -- "Ulbrand's death," Vinocur's voice was continuing, "was no accident. He and Dexter Monte controlled the master programs of the carrier fleet's computers. We had to get Ulbrand out of the way." "Ridiculous!" Treffry realized he had shouted, his voice thick and distorted, wondered briefly whether it was the anesthetic which made his mouth feel numb and stiffened now -- or fear. "Monte!" he shouted again at the intercom. Some seconds passed silently, as Vinocur, too, waited for Dexter Monte to respond. IVl. once more. Slurred, mumbling noises issued from the speaker then, followed by a heavy belch. "I couldn't answer at once," Dexter Monte explained in a weak, complaining voice. "I had to pull IF myself together. I don't feel at all well! If you two hadn't made me swallow those atrocious alcoholic concoctions -- " He muttered indistinctly, added, "What is it?" "You heard what that fool was saying?" Treffry demanded. "You needn't speak so loudly!" Monte protested. "Yes, I heard him." "Well?" "Oh, I agreed almost a year ago to program the carriers to go to Hannaret when the time came. Is that what you want to know? It's true enough. They guaranteed me wealth, power, influence. The usual approach. Including direct blackmail, I must say! Ulbrand, incidentally, wasn't so stupid. I had to loosen his defenses to let the assassin get to him." Dexter Monte belched explosively, groaned in polite dismay. "Excuse me, gentlemen! Your infernal alcohol..." Vinocur was laughing now. Treffry's thoughts seemed to whirl in confusion. Then he remembered something. He snorted. "Monte, yoir're a miserable coward and a monstrous liar!" he stated. "I can believe they blackmailed you into agreeing to do what they wanted. But you're safe from them now, so you can give up the pretense! Because of course you didn't go through with it." Vinocur abruptly stopped laughing. "He went through with it!" he growled. Treffry chuckled. "He couldn't. CD CD K! usual short novel of a very strange future, and there Is a bonus added In two Bllsh novelsing." UQ#-#C Gerard Conway produces his of interstellar travel -- told with psychological depth and sensitivity. UQ#-#C The Lovecraft cult has Its day horror sf novel that you can read at midnight! UQ#-#c Grainger, the man of the double mind, who pilots the Hooded only man Is the jarring note. UQ#-#C And in the problem of the nedy once again finds evidence of the first galactics and is find himself playing Prometheus on a far planet! UQ#'#c stores, please send name and address, book price plus #c postage and handling to: P.O. Box #, Bergenfield, N.J. #I . Vinocur! He simply couldn't! Monte, like every other key man brought to Ridzin, was put through secret security tests once a month -- and I supervised that operation -- always. So Monte couldn't have harbored any real intentions to betray us. No human mind can deceive the testing machines...eh, Monte?" Monte wearily mumbled a sentence or two. "What did you say, Monte? Speak up!" "I said I agree with you." Dexter Monte's voice was distinct again but quite faint. He sighed. "No human mind can deceive the testing machines." Treffry swallowed with difficulty. The anesthetic definitely was affecting his tongue and throat now. "Are you listening, Vinocur?" he demanded. "So the Programmed Corps isn't going to Hannaret, is it, Monte?" "No," Monte said. He added peevishly, "But you gentlemen must excuse me now! I really can't keep myself together any longer." "Treffry -- " Vinocur's voice had thickened, sounded heavily slurred. "Yes?" "Ask him -- ask him whether the Programmed Corps is... going to Great Xal." "What?" "We... had him on... testing machines, too, Treffry!" A monstrous thought swam up slowly in Treffry's mind. "Monte!" he cried. "Monre" Odd watery whistling noises responded for some seconds from the intercom. Nothing else. Could it be? Could the most awesome weapon ever devised, the irresistable Programmed Corps, be hurtling now, not toward Great Xal but, out of control, toward some immensely distant point in space? From which it presently would return, under new instructions, to wipe out the race which had created it? "Monte!" This time, only Treffry's mind formed the word. The sound that came from his mouth was a heavy groan -- the coldsleep process was moving along its irreversible course. Moaning noises in the intercom indicated Vinocur was experiencing similar difficulties. Treffry's thoughts began to swirl in slow and awfuf confusion, revolving about one fact repeatedly mentioned in the speeches that day: the Skanders' repulsive amebic quality, their ability to force themselves out of their basic shape into another of their choosing and to maintain it for an indefinite period... Perhaps for as long as fifteen or twenty years? Long enough to -- That thought, all thought, faded. The moaning in the intercom went on for almost another minute. Then it, too, stopped. In a silence which would remain unbroken for many months the great cirrier fleet rushed toward its destination.  IF Starbom idled at half c, like an impatient beast on tether. At the pilot's station Jaro Mandan once again punched the com controls that should have put him on closed beam to Flight Control at Whittier Dock .on Earth, # A.D. With an oath he reached t# switch off the unresponsive controls, wonderirig how he could report an aborted Jump to Captain Heath and survive the Captain's wrath. But before his hand touched the instruments the screen finally came alive. It showed a face he had never seen before. A woman -- a girl. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded. She was pale and spoke with compressed lips. "Mara Summers. Controller Third Class, Whittier Dock. Who are you?" He ignored her question. "I've been trying to raise Whittier for a full eighteen minutes. You realize, of course, this deserve a black-tab report." "Send the orange copy to my mail station. SC#, Whittier." She wasn't even going to attempt an excuse for her delay. He really ought to black-tab her. "Delays cost money." "You're costing more. Name and mission, please." "Starbom. We filed intentions before leaving Earth two days ago." The girl punched the tabs on her clearance console and scanned the screen. "Your request is for clearance to Sigler IV. Cargo: # tons miscellaneous instruments and tools." "Correct. We are now twentythree minutes late for Jump." Mara touched another row of keys with long, swift fingers. "Correction inserted. Record flight instructions." A red light glowed on the panel in front of him, informed Jaro that the clearance data was being fed into his computer. After a moment, the light flicked out. Jaro glanced up at the girl's tense face on the screen. "Thanks," he said curtly. "Have a good flight, sir," she replied, icyvoiced. "Don't forget my copy of the report." Mara switched off. The pilot turned away, cursing himself for allowing her insolence to irritate him. He really would black-tab her. Behind him, his three-man pilot crew were intent on their work as the computer control readied the ship for Jump. Jaro watched his own instruments and signaled to Captain Heath on the Bridge. "Clearance inserted, sir. Forty seconds to Jump." On the screen the Captain nodded. "Proceed." IF It took a hundred-man crew to operate a giant cargo ship like the Starbom, Not one of them could completely hide the strain that appeared on his face. Awareness of the penalties of flight via QuadraSpace, ever present, became intense as Jump approached. It still happened that now and then a ship entered Quadra-Space and never returned. Speculations about the conditions of such entrapment were not pleasant. Even more crushing was the recognition that the gulf separating the crews of the Starships from the rest of humanity was to widen a step further. This was the inevitable penalty the crews paid for the lives they led. The Jump warning signal jangled. Jaro and his men watched the singleT)lazing light in the center of the wall that would shift from red to green. Then it came, the familiar, wrenching, shearing agony that was over almost before it began. Over, but somehow enduring -- for the rest of their lives. The Starbom' s rate of accelera-, tion slowed and slowed as she edged ever closer to c. Her mighty engines whined in a higher and higher key. Then she crossed. That was Jump. The moment the speed of light was exceeded. The moment they entered the unreality of Quadra-Space. And then the ship continued to accelerate to hundreds of times the velocity of light -- insofar as concepts such as 'acceleration' and 'velocity' have meaning outside of time and space as men had always known them. QuadraSpace. A mathematical fiction until men learned to exceed the speed of light. Crew duties were minor now. The ship was run by its grim computer brains that operated wholly outside time. Jaro turned his eyes to the control panel after the shock of Jump had passed. There was no requirement for him to recheck with Flight Control, but he regretted having been so severe. The girl was obviously new to her job and his own impatience and anxiety about falling behind schedule had made him behave stupidly. She was probably worried sick about the threatened blacktab report. He pressed the communication controls, and set the time pattern to Earth normal. In a moment her face appeared. She looked even more pale and drawn than before. "Whittier," she said automatically. Then she recognized him. "Oh -- it's you." Jaro grinned. "Yeah -- it's me." Mara Summers resumed her impassive mask. Starborn acknowledged. What is your request?" "My request is that we forget our previous conversation -- at least the part about black-tabbing." "It was justified. The delay was inexcusable." "How many ships did you have on your board?" "Seventeen." "Your delay was justified. Am I holding you up again?" "No. The board is clear, except for you." Mara's voice was tired. "Please state your request." "I already have. Look -- I want to apologize for being so stuffy. Tm not ordinarily like that. I was just jittery about getting a takeoff without an abort. My Captain would have exiled me to Quadra-Space for that." M ara smiled for the first time; a . little of the tiredness left her eyes. "All right. I forgive you -- and I thank you. One more black-tab in the division would have put us all back on Apprentice-status." Jaro was glad he had called. The girl's job was tough enough without prima donna pilots adding to her problems. "Are you in Quadra-Space now?" asked Mara. Jaro nodded. "Our velocity has passed # c and is climbing fast." "You know -- I've studied it, I talk to people like you every day; I still don't understand it." Jaro smiled wryly at her phrase, "people like you." "I'm still human," he said. Mara flushed. "Oh -- I didn't mean it that way -- !" "It's all right. Sometimes even we forget we belong." "I just can't imagine what it would be like not to be able to -- touch anything -- anyone. It is that way, isn't it?" "It's that way." Jaro's voice was flat. "If I should touch your hand we would both simply detonate -- like a small atomic explosion." He didn't know why he had put it that way. He glanced at her hand, her long, slender fingers lying on the desk in front of her. For the first time in the years since he'd first entered Quadra-Space he felt as if it were some unaccountable tragedy that he could not reach out and touch such a hand. Mara was staring too, as if confronted with some sudden burden. She shook herself and smiled faintly. "We surely wouldn't want that to happen, would we?" Jaro smiled in agreement. "No, we certainly wouldn't." "Tell me why it is," said Mara. "I could never understand the mathematics in the classes. It went right over my head." "I'm not sure anyone understands it. When an object moves, its subjective time becomes shorter IF with respect to the reference world. When a ship nears the speed of light a short space of ship-time equals centuries on Earth." "I don't see, then, how the ship can ever get back to Earth at the normal time. How can we even be talking to each other now?" "The first super-c ships never did get back. They weren't expected to, really. Then, after QuadraSpace was actually penetrated, it was found that the sign of the equations could be reversed; a return trip in both space and time was possible. The scientists aboard the second or third research ship modified their drive and returned. They died as soon as they landed. They flashed out of existence -- like atomic explosions." "Why?" "It was found that when objects travel backward, so to speak, in Quadra-Space to return to original space and time they experience a deadly compensation. When the sign of the equations is reversed the objects accumulate a 'time-charge'. It might be likened to a charge of static electricity. Discharge takes place when a time-charged object contacts a normal one. The discharge is violent, because the buildup of time charge involves enormous energy." "They taught us something about time discharge, but how can cargo be sent through Quadra-Space and utilized on different worlds?" "Time charge is cumulative and builds up only with negative passage through Quadra-Space, as when a ship returns to normal Earth and time. A single passage through Quadra-Space can be discharged by proper treatment. All cargo is treated to make it usable. But for ships and men who have made hundreds of Jumps -- no. They can only be insulated. The accumulated energy of their timecharge is so great that it could not be safely released in a lifetime. So when we return to Earth the ship stays in orbit -- not even entering the atmosphere while we take . a shuttle down and spend our leave in luxurious -- and completely insulated -- quarters. We are prisoners of the life we've chosen." Mara shuddered. "Why did you choose it?" Jaro's eyes focused on some infinite distance and he smiled with hidden pleasure. "To walk where no other man has walked. To see worlds no other man has seen. There are reasons, Mara. Good reasons." "If you say so -- it sounds kind of horrible from here." "Not really. I'll tell you more about it another time. I've got to clear the channel now, or I'll get a blacktab myself for holding it. It's been nice talking with you, Mara." The girl nodded. "I hope there will be another time." And then, just before he cut off, while she was still smiling wistfully, he snapped a picture of her with the recorder built into the screen. He pulled the print out of the back of the machine. The holographic image returned his regard. Mara's wistful smile was fixed; unchanging forever. He slipped the picture into his shirt pocket, glancing self-consciously about. But all the other crewmen had long since left, thenposts. H e walked down the long corridor, past the crew's quarters toward the recreation area in the center of the ship. Here already had begun the gaity that marked the days of transition through QuadraSpace -- a gaity that had always seemed forced to Jaro. Now more than ever. The men and women crew-members were already dancing and drinking as if compelled to forget the unreal reality of QuadraSpace. A woman named Rosilla spied Jaro from across the room. She held out her arms and ran toward him. "Jaro! We've been waiting for you! How can we have a party without Jaro?" Her husky arms embraced him fiercely, but he slowly pushed her warm, strong body from him. He inhaled the dense perfume of her black hair and found it stifling. "You can get along without me this time," he said. "What you need is a drink! Here's some of that stuff we found on Porteuse on our last Jump. It'll take the ice out of your backbone." "And the backbone with it. You'd better ease off that stuff." "Only the Captain can tell Rosilla what to do or not to do!" "Have it your way, honey. I'm sitting this one out in my quarters." "I'll come with you." "No -- I'd rather be alone for now." Rosilla's eyes glared angrily. "You sick, Jaro?" "Could be," he said. "It just could be." He shut the door behind him and fell onto the bed, lay staring at the ceiling. His quarters, like everyone else's, were luxurious. The entertainment center could furnish any audio or visual experience he desired. Except one. He pulled the picture from his shirt pocket and held it up. Mara Summers. No one had ever moved him this way before. He must be losing his damper-bars, he thought. How could he let his interest be caught by such a casual contact? IF Casual -- and futile. It was no lie that if he ever touched her hand they would both disappear in an actinic glare. He could never even see her directly with his eyes. He smiled at the image and propped the picture above his bed. Mara, Mara, whom I can never see, never touch. Never really know. Who are you, Mara? What are you like, Mara? He rolled over and turned his face to the ceiling again. He had chosen this life deliberately and didn't regret it. No other life offered so much. More worlds than a man could explore in a lifetime. More experience than other men could dream of. All creation was his. For all this he'd had to exchange only one small planet out of an infinity of worlds. It was just that it happened to be called Earth, and he'd once called it home. And it held Mara Summers. He had seen other men go through periods like this, times when they grew lonely for what they had given up. One guy had been obsessed with wanting to see his old pet dog. Another wanted to see the house he'd lived in as a kid. Others pined for old loves. It hit the men the worst, and the wom comforted them out of their doldrums. Jaro knew he could ride it out. Ballanttne Boofc # may well be remembered as the year of Alan Dean Foster, or so It Is beginning to seem here at Ballanttne where we have three of his books scheduled within five months. Not bad for a young writer whose very first book was published as recently as #. Just of the Jungle extravaganza now playing in movie theaters around and about the country. Luana, something of a female Tarzan, and her family -- a lion, a tiger, and a chimp -- are vividly brought to life on the cover by the inimitable Frazetta. Watch for forget! Alan's other books already scheduled inin which he returns to the marvelously based on the successful new animated Star Trek series. But much more about those two as they are published. For his next project Alan has suggested scripting 'Deep Thoat" -- an X-rated Barsoom adventure. Hmmm...    So much for a look into our future. Now back to the real world and more February books... a stunning debut by a new science fiction talent." That's what PubChenuui. Tbit onaiiially poweifiil fint noTel wfll eurely be a contender -- we think -- when awards are voted. Not only are the prose, atmosphere, and credibility of the post-hoiocanst story superior, PW contfames, bot the book boldly advances into the convointed area of sex, a place where most sf writers are either timid or puerile.' Who could ask for a better review? And, good news, Chamas has a sequel In the typewriter!    Lester del Key's now-classic tale of disaster in an atomic plant. First written In #, this story of a nuclear reaction bursting out of control Is even more devastating today. What starts out as an ordfaiaty experiment on an ordinary day turns into a race to prevent atomic holocanst. As fuel supplies evaporate everywhere and we begin to look more to atomic power for our energy, we come closer and closer to the world del Rey wrote about. Now in Its fourth big printing,  A wholly admirahle blend of prophetic thinking, warm human valuta and powerful narrative suspense," said the New York Herald Tribune reviewer. Need we say more?    at your bookstore or newsstand now. If yon can't find them complain to the dealer andor send # per book, plus #c per order for handling, to Ballantine Cash Sales, PO Box #, Westminster, Maryland #. But he was glad his nostalgia had not settled on a pet dog, or an aged grandmother. Far better a girl like Mara Summers. He smiled at her picture again. She was undoubtedly married or otherwise committed. But that wouldn't bother his dreams -- and dreams were all he would ever have of her. Use of the communication channels for unofficial purposes was forbidden by regulation. All transmissions were recorded. But crewmen of the starships had figured ways of bypassing the spy-circuits. A ship could have its clearance pulled for such infractions. But it was essential to morale, as Captain Heath recognized; he was a strict disciplinarian but even he closed his eyesto this. A week later Jaro called again. "Hello," Mara said. She seemed shy as she recognized him now. "Hello -- is your board loaded?" "You timed it just right. I just finished my last contact." And now he couldn't think of anything to say. He stared at her image, knowing that it was only a pattern of lines and dots on a silvered glass. Suddenly he longed to know the texture of her hair, the true color of her eyes. "How much longer is your shift?" he said. "Another hour. I won't have any more traffic." "Do you handle only starships?" "Yes. There are more all the time. It seems that other people think the rest of the universe is better than Earth." Then she flushed. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded." "I know. We're still human as I said the other day. We get lonesome for what we left behind. One of the guys was climbing the walls from wanting to see the dog he had had as a boy." "Do you ever wish you could see the old familiar places?" "Sure. I'd like to see the old house on Edgemont Avenue where my folks lived. I'd like to see old North High where I went to school." "Where was that? I knew a North High once." "Every town has one. Mine was in Jefferson, New Cal." "I went to school in San Marcos! That's only fifty miles away -- why we might even have run into each other back then." Jaro smiled at that pleasant impossibility. "Yeah, we might. When were you there?" "I graduated in '#." "I guess we wouldn't have made it. I was there in -- well, you were a bit after my time, that's all." "But just think -- " Mara's eyes were shining now. "If we had been there at the same time you might have bumped into me at a game and we might have gone somewhere to eat and talk. It couldn't have happened, but it's nice to think about." She leaned her cheek against her fist. "Did you always want to be a starjumper?" Jaro nodded. "Always." "Don't you ever miss having... someone?" "Ours is a mixed crew." Mara looked down at her hands. "I should have remembered. They told us about that, too." "Mara -- " Jaro spoke softly. "One of the things that almost makes me wish I'd chosen a different life is that if I had I'd be able to reach out and -- and touch your hand." Mara laughed sadly. "And have us both -- what was the word you used -- 'detonate'?" "No. Have us walk along some quiet path at night, holding hands, watching the moon through the trees, talking." "Stop it!" Mara's voice was almost violent. "This isn't going to get us anywhere! We're making fools of ourselves -- " "You're right. I'm sorry. Let's stick to the real world. I'm a star jumper and you're a pretty girl who'll get married and settle down and raise a family to inherit a piece of the Earth. Tell me, are you married now, or is there any one?" "Does it make any difference? Anyway, I'm not, and there's no one. So what?" "Don't be angry with me, Mara. We dream lonely dreams out here on the starships." She passed a hand over her forehead. "I'm tired. I've got to clean up my books before I go. I'm glad you called." "Yeah, sure. Maybe again sometime. Goodnight, Mara." He cut off sharply. Never again. He was behaving no differently from the man who yearned for his pet dog of long ago. He headed for the recreation area. Maybe Rosilla would be there. world having a climate of perpetual rain, inhabited by a humanoid species that had a curious technological development. They were high in mechanics but almost devoid of knowledge in chemistry and related fields. They had no metallury or metal machinery, but could do miracles with wood and stone. In the holds of the Starbom were mechanical devices of all kinds and a complete steam-electric plant for trade. The ship had been here once before and Jaro had made friends with a half dozen of the humorless creatures and looked forward to renewing old acquaintances. But almost from the moment he stepped off the ramp of the Starbom something seemed wrong. It was raining as usual, a steamy, misty rain that choked his lungs and blurred his vision. He wondered how he could ever have liked the place. Stepping onto an alien world like Sigler involved no hazard to the Earthmen because there was no compensation for the time differential resulting from their trip from Earth, hence, no time-charge. They didn't care what time it was on Sigler IV. Captain Heath had delegated Jaro to contact the locals. The two of them stood at the foot of the ramp, peering through the rain at the slowly approaching group of natives. "There they are," said the tain. "Do you recognize any of them?" "The dead-heads all look alike." The Captain looked at him curiously. "I thought you were buddies with this bunch." Jaro ignored the comment and walked toward the group. He spoke a few words of the local dialect. After a long palaver he found someone who recalled the first visit. When Jaro mentioned the names of others of his former acquaintances there was a long wait in the mushy rain while they were called. It was a long and miserable day. Jaro IF wished he had never seen this dank and muddy planet. During the night he came down with fever; by morning he was delerious. The ship's surgeon, Dr. Pavan, said it was a virus indigenous to Sigler IV. His entire arsenal of antibiotics had little effect. He made Jaro as comfortable as possible in the pilot's quarters and assigned Rosilla to watch over him -- since he knew she would do that anyway. While Rosilla wasn't committed to him, she was closer to Jaro than to anyone else. But Jaro had never asked for her commitment. Others had, and Rosilla had declined them, hoping still that Jaro would someday claim her. She didn't like the progress of Jaro's illness. Each hour he was more flushed and incoherent. She had seen too many alien diseases to believe the doctor was as sanguine as he pretended to be. She suspected he was baffled, was simply giving up on Jaro. Then she found the picture of Mara in a cabinet drawer and understood. It was Jaro who had given up. She saw that Mara was in a Dock Control Center and guessed her to be a new Controller. She checked Starbom's clearance-records and deduced Mara's name. Rosilla hacf seen men die of longings they could not satisfy away from the planet which gav them birth. Jaro might easily become one of them. The Captain must know, Rosilla decided. He understood these things. In his cabin Captain Heath listened to Rosilla as he turned the picture of Mara Summers in his hand. He understood -- both Rosilla and Jaro. "Put the picture back where you got it," he said quietly when Rosilla had finished. "But you must do something! Jaro is dying. Maybe not from the disease, maybe not from the sickness over this girl. But together they will kill him." "I'll have a talk with Jaro," the Captain promised. When Rosilla was gone, the Captain checked with Dr. Pavan, who shook his head. "I've run every kind of test I know; injected him with a broad-spectrum antibiotic." The Doctor gestured to his extensive laboratory equipment. "The virus isn't particularly virulent but Jaro isn't responding." "Could it be psychosomatic?" Pavan shrugged. "Who knows? We're all mostly crazy, or we wouldn't be here in the first place. You know that." Heath smiled. No other comment was necessary. T wo days later Rosilla reported Jaro was feeling better, and Captain Heath visited the patient. "I hear you're about ready to palaver some more with our friends outside," the Captain said easily, taking a chair beside the bed. "No, I'm not. I don't care if I never see this miserable planet again." "Ah, well, no matter. We're making satisfactory cargo exchange. But we miss you." "Like hell you do!" "You're getting better, I see. But really we do. Everybody counts in this little world of ours." The Captain leaned back and stared philosophically at the ceiling. "You know, I often wonder how the starships are going to end up. We're like little planets all by ourselves, except nobody can get on and nobody can get off. We can have children here to take our places as we die. But what will happen to them? Will the Starbom go on, generation after generation? How will they keep it from wearing out? Its parts can't be replaced by uncharged material. I'll bet you didn't think of that when you signed on." "No, I didn't." "But you have to think of it now. There can never be any human contacts outside the world of this ship." "We all know that." The Captain's sermonizing irritated Jaro. "Nobody's going to try to get off." "Sometimes just the wanting can make a man sick. You get attached to something or someone outside." "Like what?" Jaro demanded. "Well -- like the pretty Controller back at Whittier. That kind of wanting could make alnan awfully sick." Jaro felt a coldness in his belly. "She's nothing to me." "I hope not. Understand that all the human beings you'll ever know are right here abroad this ship. Now, take Rosilla. She's a nice person. She'd like a permanent commitment. It wouldn't be a bad arrangement. You have no permanent attachments, and that's what makes a man think too much about the outside." "That's not my trouble." "Good. To make sure, we'll apply surveillance. We need you, Jaro. You're a fine pilot. We don't want you to get into trouble. We need you to train the next generation of pilots." Jaro nodded wearily. Heath nodded and rose to go. "Good. Get some rest now. You'll be back on your feet in no time." Jaro closed his eyes. He felt a loneliness, as immense as all the Universe. He heard the door then, opened his eyes to Rosilla. He waited until she was by the IF bed. "Where's the picture?" She stood frozen a moment. "In the drawer," she said finally. "Get it." She laid the picture of Mara Summers in Jaro's hand. The pilot put it down and looked up at the woman. "Help me, Rosilla," he said. "How, Jaro? How can I help you?" "Have you ever wanted anything so much that nothing else in the entire rest of the Universe mattered at all?" Rosilla nodded, hoping he could read her heart. "Yes, I have, Jaro," she said softly. "That's the way it is with me. Will you help me?" He was suddenly drifting away from her at the speed of light. She felt cold inside but managed to nod. "I'll help you. What can I do?" "I want to see Mara. I have to see her -- not an image on a screen, but her -- just once." "That's impossible! You can nev,er see her." "There's a way. I can do it if you will help me." "Whatever you're thinking will probably kill you. What can I do?" watch by another crew member, who would report any suspect activity on the part of the one under surveillance. It meant severe restrictions when the ship was in port, particularly on Earth. Jaro guessed Rosilla had been assigned surveillance over him. It didn't matter. He had to trust that his appeal would touch her. Starborn's next stopover was Boro, a minor world about fifty light years from Sigler IV. The remainder of the Starborn cargo was to be cached there for later transfer to more distant points, and the ship was to pick up waiting cargo for Earth. The planet had a communication relay station. "I've got to make a call," Jaro said to Rosilla. "I can't get off the ship alone, but if Dr. Pavan agrees that I need a walk in the fresh air and you go with me I can do it. Will you talk to Pavan?" "If the Captain ever finds out -- " "I know. Will you do it?" "All right. So I'm crazy, too. I'll see." "Thanks." Jaro had been on his feet in his quarters and on the main decks for several days. He was weak, but he began to feel as if he would lick the Sigleran bug, after all. On the other hand, he was not likely to survive the obsession to see Mara, but it was something he had to do. Rosilla obtained approval for Jaro to leave the ship. Together, they strolled into the murky fog of Boro on the afternoon of the landing. They walked to the compound of buildings that housed the contingent of technicians and cargo handlers that manned the outpost. Jaro nodded toward a windowless stone cube that huddled below a massive time-shifter antenna. "That must be the communications building." The operator looked up cordially as Jaro and Rosilla entered. He didn't get many visitors. "I'd like to send a personal message home," said Jaro. "Earth?" "Right." "That'll cost you a bundle! Use your ship's channel. Nobody can afford a personal message from here." "We're sticky about things like that on our ship. Can you get me a channel now? I can afford it." "Whatever you say." A crewman's pay was enormous and almost impossible to spend. Jaro had allowed his to accumulate in a bank on Earth. He wrote a check which wiped out his assets and made a sizable dent in those of the bank. Mara should be off duty at this time. He hoped she would be home. Then, as the operator indicated the channel connection, Jaro took his place in the single, seldom-used booth for private communication. The screen brightened as a surprised and sleepy Mara appeared. She frowned and shook her head, disbelieving. "Jaro! Where are you?" "Boro. A minor planet in -- it doesn't matter. Listen. I have to talk to you." "This is a private channel. It will cost a fortune! Why didn't you call me from the hip?" "I can't. The tapes are being monitored. Listen, I have only a few seconds. I want to see you, Mara. Not a pattern of phosphor dots, but you." "Jaro, oh, #aro..." Tears started in her eyes; declared the impossibility of what he was saying. "No! Listen to me. There is a way. Stand at the far end of the cargo ramp at noon the day after we strike orbit. You'll be able to learn when the cargo is due. Be there when it is. I'll be on the top of the ramp, and I'll see you from there.' "No, Jaro! You can't! You know that -- " "Mara, I can. I know a way. And I've got to do it. Mara, I've got to look at you just once. Please be there. It's the only time we'll ever really see each other. Just once -- " "Jaro -- " He was cut off as she sobbed his name. IF The cargo was brought down from the orbiting Starborn by shuttle and transferred to the discharge-chambers. There, the timecharge accumulated during the trip from Sigler IV would be discharged. Jaro intended to pass through the discharging chambers with the cargo. It would have only a partial effect, a very small percentage, since it would kill him to try to relieve any sizable amount of his time-charge. But it would reduce his charge enough to enable him to breathe normal air without burning up -- or at least to burn only slowly -- for a few minutes. It would enable him to walk on the substance of Earth for a minute or two. That's all he asked. In those minutes he would be looking upon Mara. Not an image of light and shadow. Mara herself. But without Rosilla's help he could not manage it. On the journey home she moved into his quarters and they published their commitment. There was quite a celebration among the crew but Jaro wasn't sure of Captain Heath's reaction. The Captain stood aside and watched Jaro with quizzical eyes. As the Starborn approached Earth Jaro feigned a relapse. He retreated to his quarters and Pavan made a cursory examination. The doctor had never understood Jaro's condition, so this new turn engendered no suspicion. Because of his "illness," Jaro -- and Rosilla -- remained behind on the Starborn as it orbited Earth, with only a skeleton maintenance crew and cargo handlers. All the rest of the crew went down on the personnel shuttle to the insulated palace that would be their home while on Earth. It was too easy, Jaro thought. Something had to go wrong. He had doubts about Rosilla. Was she planning even now some way to betray him, keep him from seeing Mara? There was no way of knowing. He had to trust her. But Rosilla cleared the way and stood guard for him and helped him into the insulating suit and into the cargo holds. There, he opened a large transport case of Sigleran artifacts and secreted himself. Rosilla said, "I won't see you again, will I, Jaro?" "It's not likely. Thanks, Rosilla, Thanks for everything." She looked at him tenderly, her eyes wet. "Goodbye, Jaro. You big, damn' fool. I hope your one look at her is worth it." She secured the side of the case lightly. Then Jaro was alone, isolated in total silence and darkness. He let his mind scan the sights of his seven subjective years aboard the Star born, the vast galaxies, the whirling suns and endless planets, their weird, alien creatures. Once upon a time -- a long time ago -- he could not get enough of these things. He wondered how it could ever have been that way. He was tired now. He wanted release from the starways. For his kind there was only one way out. He thought of Mara, and tried to picture how she would appear, without the intermediation of the picture-screen. What would her flesh and her hair look like? What would it smell like? He felt the sudden jolting as the belt jerked into motion. He pictured in his mind the conveyor line transferring the huge containers into the shuttle's insulated chambers. He felt the shuttle drop beneath him as it broke away from the Starbom and spun away toward the docks below. Then the braking vanes took hold, pressing him fiercely into the corner where he huddled. The shuttle docked, and the containers were belted out again, this time to the entrance of the discharge-chambers. Jaro had not been sure he would survive this but there was only a momentary sense of vast, flowing energy, and then it was over. He was almost disappointed. He could have stood more, have lasted longer. There was no time to wonder now, however. He quickly worked himself out of the confining suit, breathed. He was notconsumed by the atmosphere of Earth, but it was like inhaling fire. He knew his lungs would soon be burned away. He pried open the side of the container and forced his way out, bathed in sweat and burning from contact with the sweet, fresh air of Earth. He prayed that Mara would be waiting. If not -- but that would not bear thinking about. There was no way to get back to the safety of the shuttle even if he survived. He was on a conveyor that rumbled along the insulated ramp to the warehouse. He had to stay on the insulated ramp. The air in his lungs and on his skin was consuming him fast enough. To step on uninsulated substance of Earth would bring instant dissolution. Then he heard her cry out. He saw her. M ara was at the foot of the ramp, only two hundred feet away. He jumped off the conveyor and stood beside the track. The cargo moved on, the rumbling quieting now so that he heard her voice. "Jaro!" They looked at each other. IF And this is what it was all for, he thought. It was worth the price. She was all the brightest dreams he had ever dreamed on the starways. She was all the wonder and tender glory he had ever imagined. She was his. Even though they could never touch, she was his. years and the unfathomable paradoxes of time he had claimed her. "Mara," he said softly, "Jaro -- Jaro -- " He wondered what it would have been like to have walked in the night with her hand in his, the wind in their faces. He wondered what it would have been like to hold her fiercely and tenderly in his arms. And then suddenly she was running toward him. "No -- Mara! Go back! Don't come up here!" She was laughing and weeping, too, as she called out to him. "I don't care. I love you, Jaro. Nothing else matters -- nothing in the whole Universe!" "Mara -- it will kill you up here!" "I don't care, I don't care!" She wept and held her arms out to him. "Touch my hand, Jaro. Touch me -- hold me -- for as long as we have." He stood frozen, watching her come closer. What more was there for either of them? he thought. This was what it all meant -- all the Galaxies, all the wheeling stars meant nothing. This was the only meaning in the Universe. To touch her. To hold her in his arms and feel the touch of her hair on his face and the warmth of her flesh against him. Then be was laughing, too, as he flung himself down the ramp, arms outstretched. This was the moment for which their whole lives had been lived. He had seen it all -- the Galaxies, the starpaths -- and there was nothing else but this. Mara kne it, too; never having left Earth she knew ail light years. They touched. Miraculously, they touched. For one barely perceptible instant they clung to each other in wild abandon and loved long eons of love in each other's arms. The burst of light shattered the tunnel and spread a shining fire over the south end of the city. It rocked the insulated palace of the Starborn's crew. Captain Heath watched the flare of light in the screens that let the prisoners see the external world. He knew what had happened. He lifted his glass and slowly drank a silent toast. His eyes softened as he looked across his glass into the far reaches of time. "Maybe it was worth it. Maybe it was really worth it."  rise among science fiction and fantasy novels these days. Opportunism is defined as "a taking advantage of opportunities or circumstances, with little regard for principles" and it always seems to follow hard on the heels of any unusually successful novel regardless of the subject-matter. Thus, in fantasy, Rosemary's Baby achieved a singular success; on the whole, deservedly so. But now we have a series of such "shockers" as The Exorcist, which fails as either legitimate fantasy or honest fiction. Well, science fiction had its success stories, too. Take the case of The Andromeda Strain -- a novel with large elements of opportunism in its structure, which makes it even greater prey for other writers who care for nothing but a gimmick to get large rewards for little thought. Here, obviously, the trick is to find a menace to the life of mankind, stir in a bit of science (or what can pass as science to the average reader) and never, never let consistency stand in the way of sensation. After all, Hollywood has been using that formula for years in its monster movies. All a writer need do, apparently, is find a somewhat less obviously silly menace, gimmick it in slightly more "adult" ways (probably with some sex), and make a pretense of developing serious characters. Occasionally, by some happy accident, the result will be fairly good; usually, even in the moderngothic field, opportunism produces exceptionally bad fiction. In science fiction, the result can be particularly awful. Consistency within its postulates, and logic in development are the essential requirements of this field and when the writer has "little regard for principles" he won't bother with such a minor matter as internal logic. Unfortunately, such a book often makes more money than many an honest piece of sf. Outside of the regular readers of the field, nobody seems to care for logic. Thus, The Haphaestus Plague, by Thomas Page (Putnam, #), has had some rave reviews in the newspapers but is a poor novel indeed when judged by science fiction standards. (To give it its due, it isn't called science fiction on the front or back covers; but the featured puff inside says "it's that rare science-fiction work that fascinates with intelligence...") It deals with an invasion of cockroach-like insects that erupt from somewhere inside the Earth. Oh, not giant ones! That's too obvious. These are your average every-day sized roaches. Their threat comes from the fact that they have a sort of double stinger behind that somehow generates fire. Whenever they're near combustibles they proceed to burn everything down. When they reach the cities, they proceed to burn everything in sight. The reason they do such a stupid thing, you see, is that they live off pure carbon. They set the fires to free it from its organic compounds, one gathers, so that they can eat the ashes -- now there's science for you! Apparently Page doesn't know that ashes are what remain after the carbon and hydrogen in flammable material have been burned away. Anyhow, it develops midway through the book that they aren't such a menace after all. You see, the insects evolved down in the Earth under all that pressure. They now have extremely high pressure inside their hard little bodies and can't operate well when subjected to the internal strain caused by our lower external pressure. In fact they can't breed, and they'll all be dead in another season or so. No reason is given for their having such gastight bodies; and since they seem to breathe air -- and must use oxygen to utilize carbon as fuel -- no explanation is given as to why the pressure isn't quickly equalized as the excess gas inside them leak away from body to blood and then through their breathing membranes. Page must have realized at this stage that he was losing the suspense of his story -- so he hauled off and started in a new direction. His scientist-hero, Palmiter, decides to breed more of the menacing critters. (We all know that scientists tend to be mad, and Palmiter has always been a bit antisocial.) He rigs up a pressure chamber so his bugs will feel at home. But now, instead of breeding a male and a female Hephaestus bug, he breeds a male to a surface cockroach. Why? Well, probably because he's mad! You can't expect sense from scientists. First, though, he carefully sets it up so any intelligent reader would know they can't possibly be crossfertile. Page has our scientist discover that these new insects have seventeen pairs of chromosomes, as opposed to six for a normal cockroach. (He also still believes that humans have twenty-four chromosome pairs, though it has been known for quite a few years that we have only twenty-three.) Now in a world where even a monkey and an ape can't interbreed anything as complex in its structure as a sperm of that Hephaestus roach isn't going to be fertile with the ova of an ordinary cockroach. But the author has used up all his initial plot and has to find another in a hurry; so to hell with logic. The female lays eggs which are miraculously fertile. And from there on, we're given a tale where anything can happen, including the fact that the young crossbreed cockroaches soon learn to spell out messages to Palmiter. He's forced to take them back to their beloved underworld home, possible manner. And everything ends on a kind of reverse-kitsch attempt at bitterness. It's an excellent example of what can happen to a story where everything is written for its effect on the reader rather than any purpose in plot. Things that seem important turn out to be mere window-dressing; thus, the scientist's assistant is bitten by a Hephaestus bug, with suggestions that he's now invulnerable to disease; but nothing comes of it -- apparently nobody else wants to be immune to all illnesses. Most completely not recommended! (Berkley, #c) is not so obviously opportunistic, except in the material that it takes as its background and theme. It's tailored to seem relevant, apparently, by IF Science fiction's leading monthly celebintes its #rd birthday... with a special gift certificate for you! has become the world's number  one science fiction monthly. With # a list of contributors that reads  r like a who's who of scifi  # Y greats... i... Poul Anderson, Isaac ;   Asimov, Alfred Bester, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Sprague de Camp, ' Lester del Ray, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula LeGuin, Frederick Pohl, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt... and many, many others. This year we're celebrating our #rd anov niversary And to help you celeniL I I special anniversary bonus; # I gala issues for only #, a mi I # saving over the regular I subscription price. Imagine enjoying today's latest and best science I fiction -- never before published   short stories, novellas, even complete novels -- for just #c an issue. That's far less than you'd pay for a sci-fi paperback of comparable quality. Join us now for a great year of science fiction reading... at a price you can't afford to miss. covering such fresh ideas as overpopulation, a world going to the dogs, and the purposelessness of life. And its development seems to seek the sensational use of such material. But it is definitely opportunistic in its lack of regard for the basic principles of science fiction -- and this novel is clearly labeled science fiction. It all starts when Martin Clay is called down from his work in an orbiting satellite and mysteriously taken to High-Town, where we find all the bigshots who direct America in its struggle against foreign enemies and overpopulation. From there on all kinds of things happen and they all might just as well not have happened. For one thing, there is never any good reason the reader can see for the bigshots having summoned Clay in the first place', things that pass as reasons are mentioned, but none make sense. He's certainly treatei with contempt or disregard most of the time. And it never seems to occur to the author that telling the hero what it was all about might have resulted in his being more useful -- though, of course, that might have destroyed what passes as the "plot." With lots of effort the idea can be pieced together from the novel that the bigshots seem to be trying to control the population explosion; not very intelligently, however. Their best answer seems to be stirring up some kind of a war -- which, of course, they are nominally trying to avoid. Such things as sterilization programs, anti-fertility drugs, taxes on excess children get mentioned, but are not followed up. Instead of any visible logic, we're treated to a confused development of what seem to be plots and counterplots, most of which indicate that the men in control at HighTown are all insane. Maybe that's the deep message of the novel -- that the whole world, including the bosses, is mad and totally irresponsible. And yet that doesn't fit with what we see. High-Town is an engineering marvel, and was obviously built by someone who knew what he was doing. But it never seems to bother the author that a group capable of building such a city and maintaining it couldn't act the way he makes his characters behave. Again, a total disregard for consistency in background and action. The decline of our world from overpopulation and pollution may be relevant -- even if not exactly fresh material for science fiction; but I can't find anything relevant in this offering of bad fiction for the reader's money. Pass it by. IF AS I indicated before, a book that I. begins opportunistically does not have to be bad; if the writer is honest and competent, if he's treat his characters seriously, he can take even a publisher's idea of something designed to fit into a market slot and turn it into perfectly acceptable science fiction. Such seems to be the direction in which the Cap Kennedy series is moving. Generally, most seriescharacter books in which the hero is some kind of a world-saver tend to be imitative of the worst features of all its predecessors, beginning with Doc Savage as an example. These novels generally degenerate into mechanical plot formulae with the hero surrounded by a gang of stick figures whose only purpose is to fill in space between the hero's action scenes. As I reported, the first of the Cap Kennedy novels seemed to avoid all the faults of this type of story, but while the characters were not cut out of the standard smart-aleck material they still didn't emerge as true characters, and the story was only adequate. Looking at the third novel, Monster of Metelaze, by Gregory Kem considerable development, and the future of the series begins to look interesting. An Informal Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Articles -- Interviews -- Reviews -- Letters Scheduled for ##: 'Tomorrow's Libido -- Sex and Science Fiction", an eye-opening survey by Richard Delap. psycho-cultural analysis -- "Reading Heinlein Subjectively" by Alexei  Cory Panshin. -- new book and story lists. Sample l.#. year #. two years Portland, OR #I reading room By now, Kem is beginning to feel at home with his characters. Kennedy is no superman, though he is given some pretty extreme abilities; but while he's a little larger than life, he is neither invulnerable nor exalted above government control. He has to use his skills -- and his brains -- without resorting to any sudden miraculous inventions or tricks. And now the lesser characters around him are beginning to emerge as fairly real people. The old scientist is developing some depth and still shows no dangerous tendency to become a super-genius nor a man who knows everything about every subject. The others are also finding their places, so that Kennedy now has a believable and workable team at his side. Even the villain in this novel is fairly well developed. He's a dictator, but not quite the megalomaniac he might be; in fact, while he has to be defeated by Kennedy, we can almost feel sorry for him. There also seems to be developing throughout the series a background menace from an Ancient Race which offers good opportunities for greater revelations to come. The writing is on a good, professional level, and the series looks promising. I found this novel enjoyable enough for casual reading and worth the price. Beyond that. I'll wait for later development. that a writer can be too careful and honest in his thinking through of a story -- or at least, he may develop the total story in such a way that the beginning seems less than it turns out eventually to be. That is the case with The Orchid Cage, by # c). Franke has a fine reputation in Germany, and was a Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg, #. This is the first novel of his I've had a chance to read, and I was curious about how well his reputation might stand up in translation. The basic idea seemed interesting. A world has been discovered where a highly advanced race once lived, but which now seems to be unpopulated and in ruins. A team of men are sent to explore it, and they run into some strange situations. There are no signs of life, but the city is far from dead. What seem to be the living quarters of the former inhabitants still operate to gratify every wish of anyone inside them -- but only if that person knows how to operate them. And near the apparently long-deserted heart of the city, the explorers find activity still going on. A pageant is played out before their eyes, like a play out of Earth's Middle Ages. It IF turns out to be a sort of camouflage to conceal the secrets of the city. Then we begin to find that there is another team and that it is trying to discover the secret of the city before the first team can. It also is composed of human beings and is headed by one of the two discoverers of the planet -- just as our team is headed by the other. By then, I found myself getting highly impatient with the characters -- and the conflict with the other team only increased it. The people all seemed to act like a group of silly children. One girl in particular, though an adult -- seemed to have all the warmth and charm of a badly spoiled, selfish ten-year-old. The two groups meet and battle like a couple of petty street gangs caring for nothing beyond the lowest kind of machismo -- in fact, they don't even seem to have street-gang ethics, however low those may be. It gets worse. In the end, after having recklessly tried to use a nuclear bomb to break open what may be the priceless secrets of the city, only two of the characters survive. However, something strange has been going on all along. So far as we can tell at the end of Book I, our "hero" -- if you can call him that -- has been killed. When he wakes up next morning I wondered if I'd missed something -- and couldn't The Secret Galactics From one of the top writers in the entire fieid of science-fiction -- one of his greatest novels. "The Secret Galactics" is a taut and exciting tale of battle for control of the world between a group of alien creatures disguised as ordinary humans -- and -- the still-living but disembodied brain of a great scientist mounted in a mobile fortress. Must reading for every sciencefiction fan! # at your bookstore, or write to: Mr. Joseph Sc haum burger, Dept. #-EK#) Prentice-Hall, Inc. West Nyack, New York # find any missing clue. But then he continues getting killed -- apparently -- but sticking with us. It all sounds like a mess. But it counted for and we find that there is a beautifully logical reason for every seeming fault of characterization and rationality. This whole fracas on the planet also has a meaning and relationship to what goes on back on Earth and everything is illuminated quite nicely. In fact, what looked like faulty handling on the author's part is revealed as excellent characterization and a great deal of hard and logical thinking. Franke obviously deserves his reputation and I hope we'll have a chance to see more of his work. It isn't a book for the reader who wants to get into a story at once with no need for any thought from there on; but for the reader who will stay to the end and suspend judgment until he finishes it, this is a novel I most heartily recommend. the Living, by Philip Jose Farmer (Ballantine, #). As he often does. Farmer has picked a theme that is difficult to handle and handles it well. Basically, this novel deals with the announcement that a scientist has discovered a way to get in touch with the "spirits" of the dead. And he's ready to demonstrate to the skeptic. Carfax, that this is no hoax. Carfax is shown what is purported to be a relative who died recently. But this isn't the spirit world of all the mediums of the past. Instead, the souls (?) of the dead seem to be only parts in a complex arrangement. And if they really are souls, the arrangement isn't one to delight them. They seem to be trying to exchange themselves for now-living souls -- anything for a chance to be back in the world we know. Then Carfax discovers proof that the scientist is a fraud and swindler -- and that he must be genuine, because there's evidence that some of the dead are being placed in living bodies for reasons that may endanger everything good in society. Carfax has his troubles cut out for him, and nothing turns out to be simple. Farmer's ending sews things up with fewer words after the final crisis than I've found in almost any other book. To some extent, the ending is more implicit than explicit -- but it must become  evident to anyone who has read that far, and it does sew things up -- Farmer is never opportunistic. A nice idea -- or maybe not so nice, but at least fascinating; and a good adventure thriller on top of it. Recommended.  IF Sturgeon, Bova, Pohl, Clement, McCaffrey, Anderson, Dickson and others. Cloth # new novel. Cloth...# Ray Bradbury. Verse collection. Cloth # mendous volume of fantasy maps. Oz, Middle Earth, Barsoom, Witch World, Zothique, Dying Earth, Narnia, Mongo, Chairman Island, Pellucidar, Prydain, Earthsea, many, many more. Cloth # Paper # M. Kombluth, Alfred Bester, Bloch. Cloth... #. # Paper...# of Astounding SF #-#. Cloth # Paper # berg, Dickson  Anderson. Cloth... # tive study of J. R. R. Tolkien. Cloth # Paper...# imore. MD #. Catalog free. T oday I said Daddy. "Daddy," I said. Clear. Just like that, the way Tve been trying to for so long. Daddy wasn't around yet, so I rolled over and practiced saying it. It's not an easy thing to say, but it's lots easier than Fingers. I don't think I'll ever get Fingers right. I keep trying but it comes out all funny and shrill. Even so. Fingers knows I mean her when I make that sound. Twofoots are pretty smart. Daddy thinks Fingers should come in here with me when he does. I think he just wants to see her without that extra skin she usually wears. But Daddy puts on an extra skin for the tank anyway, so maybe that's not it. Daddy feels Fingers with his eyes. She pretends Daddy isn't there feeling her but she knows. She tries to stay away from him but she can't except when he's in the tank with me. Then she tries not to look at him. Sometimes when she does she changes color. Daddy hasn't explained. I wish he would. I can't understand why she stays away from Daddy. After all, they are adults and well made. She has no other mate or offspring and neither does he. He said once she has "hang-ups" and so that might be what's keeping them from mating. I don't have words enough to ask him what she has hung, but when he said it he looked angry so maybe it's a good idea I didn't try. My mate is in the sea jand I'm going back to her soon. The Twofoots are almost finished with me. Daddy says they've found out what they want to know about dolphins, which is what the Twofoots call us. The Boss thought it would be nice to get some money (?) out of this after all the work they've done. He wanted to sell me because there are a lot of places that would pay good money for a speech-trained dolphin. Daddy said no because they promised to let me go when they brought me here. A whole bunch of Twofoots that Daddy called The Foundation -- a foundation is what holds buildings up; Daddy didn't tell me what this bunch held up -- came in here and talked to me, and then they talked at the Boss. Twofoots talk loud when they want to feel important. They, all talked loud. And Boss pushed at one of the Foundation with a balled-up hand. Hands are the tentacled part of their flipper, which they call an arm. I can't push things with my flipper, only with my nose. When they are speaking Twofoots make many strange noises. There are several I cannot duplicate, although I've tried. It's partly because they breathe through a mouth and the bump just above it, the nose. They grow find strands of special skin called hair all over their headtops, so they couldn't breathe properly even if they had a blowhole in the right place. The Boss doesn't have hair all over his headtop but he still has a nose. Fingers says the Boss is "bald" so maybe that makes him special. This bald is an ability I haven't figured out yet. I haven't got enough words. There's so much to learn. I found out something the other day that worries me a bit. Twofoots can't hum in water to find their way. They can only go by sight and feel. This surprised me, because Daddy made such a big thing about my humming. It isn't humming really, but that's the only word Twofoots have for it. Daddy can't say my word for it. That's another thing. Daddy calls it semantics. It's about what words mean. He says it's very important to know what words mean and that when I have more of his words and he has more of mine then we can really talk. That would be good. I wish I knew what goes on in Twofoots' minds. The dish on the wall is past right angles. That means Daddy is late. He always gets here just before right angles except on every seventh day. He says that is a rest day. He goes boating on rest days. Daddy is always here just before right angles. Fingers is usually here by then, too. Maybe they're mating. That might make them late. No. Fingers just came in. She is shaped like all the Twofoot females. She goes in and out a lot and has some big nursers on her. Daddy thinks this is good. Daddy calls her Felicity, or sometimes Sees. She calls him Dr. Reynard and once in a while Tad. This business of callings is pretty strange to me. I have my one name which is my name and not like any other. Daddy tells me that many Twofoots have the same names, and sometimes all thir names are the same. He has four names. The Doctor part, he says, is added. He calls it a title. Then he is called Simeon. After that he is called Preston. Or Tad. He says that's part of Preston. He calls it a nickname. Nick is a little cut, so I think this means they cut his name. He didn't IF tell me how they cut names. The last of his names confuses me the most. It is Reynard. He told me it is French for Fox. French is another way of speaking. He says that all people don't say the same things the same way. When he says people he means Twofoots, not us. We're dolphins. Daddy speaks English. But his name is French. But the English word for his French name is Fox and a fox is a kind of wild dog. If I had more words I would ask him why he calls himself by another language when there is a word in hiS own that would do. These Twofoots are very strange. F ingers is working hard. She usually makes friendly sounds in the morning before Daddy comes in. But Daddy is late and she is not making those sounds. Daddy also makes those sounds; he calls it singing. I wonder if his being late has something to do with her not singing? I wish I could ask Daddy. He better hurry up and get here. I want to show him how I've learned to call him. He'll be happy. I think I'll splash Fingers. She's all busy with one of the things she touches. It looks like a flat wall of mollusks. Daddy calls it a monitor. He says it watches what we do and makes a record of it. I can't see any eyes on it but Daddy says it sees. It doesn't hum. And it doesn't tell me things. It only tells things to Fingers. Maybe there are things I can't see in it. Daddy will tell me when we both have more words. We can catch up with each other. "Good morning. Miss Amaris," Daddy says as he comes in. "Good morning, Doctor Reynard." I like to hear them talk like that, all crisp'. They are communicating information. He says that's what talking is for. That words tell things and explain. He just said good morning, just like that. I guess I was wrong about the trouble between him and Fingers. "Hi there, Tddeddtch!" calls Daddy, waving. He's got my name down pretty well. He gave me a nickname. He calls me Deech sometimes. I can't tell him that that's my brother's name. About this waving. They do a lot of weird things with their flippers. But they have hands, and the flipper parts are so long and stringy that they can do things like that easily. It looks wrong. "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" I yell at him. I push up on my tail and slap water at him, still going "Daddy!" happily. "Deech! Deech! You did it!" He jumps into the water with me, making a lot of noise. I spin him around a couple of times, just to show off, and he pats my side as I slide by. "Did you hear that. Sees? Deech finally got my name right." "Very good. Doctor," she says without turning around. She is clicking the things on her feet against the floor very hard. Her feet aren't made like that. Twofoot females have feet just like the males. This seems to make Daddy angry, and his face gets that sharp look that he uses to show anger. Twofoots have a whole set of ways to use their faces. It seems to be pretty much the same set for all. "Miss Amaris, will you please tell me what the monitor indicated when Deech said my name?" He is talking in a way the Twofoots call cold. "I'm afraid I wasn't watching the panel just then, Doctor. Would you like me to program a check on it?" "Never mind. I'll see it when we go over the records at noon." "Yes, Doctor Reynard." I nudge Daddy for a bit, trying to get him to play. But he isn't really interested. He keeps watching Fingers over his shoulder, feeling her with his eyes, trying to make her turn around and change color. I pick up a few new words myself but Daddy can't keep his mind on the words I tell him. He tries to say them and then glares at Fingers for a while. I never before saw any creature that makes such a fuss about matings. If any people had told me that the clever Twofoots let matings interfere with their lives so much I wouldn't have believed it. By the time noon comes. Daddy is breathing hard and it isn't because of our work. He pulls himself out of the tank and slams the door as he leaves. Fingers makes a point of not watching this. This is very strange, even for Fingers. I push up out of the water calling to her. I can't say Fingers at all. It comes out "Veegees!" but she knows I mean her and she turns around and asks me, "Well?" If I had the words I would tell her that she should go find Daddy and get it over with. But I speak as the people speak, and she doesn't understand me. She gets all tightlooking and goes out the door. There has got to be a way to fix this. Fingers and Daddy are going to ruin themselves. They are acting like crazy tuna who get so frightened they swim into the nets they are trying to avoid. I swim around and around the tank, thinking. I have watched Daddy do this on his feet. He calls it pacing. If you're around Twofoots enough, you get to be like them. B y the time noon is over I have an idea. Usually Fingers comes back and gets some papers ready. Then Daddy comes in wearing the normal kind of Twofoot male second skin and they go over all the things the monitor says. Then Daddy goes and puts on his tank skin and he spends the afternoon in here with me. This time it is going to be different. Here comes Fingers, making those sharp sounds with her feet. She closes the door and goes over to her monitor. Now is when I start . IF I push up on my tail and start slapping water at her. She just pretends not to notice at first. So I splash harder. The sea color of her extra skin gets darker. Her face gets that Twofoot sharp look. "All right, Deech, stop it right now." I really slap at her this time. "Damn it." She starts toward the tank, bright and hard-eyed. "I told you to stop it. I know you understand me. You understand well enough when Tad tells you to do something." A great bright curl of water goes over her. She steps back. I want her to come nearer. I sink down and come close to the edge, calling softly. This is just what I wanted. She comes back toward, me. 'T know you don't mean any harm, Dee -- " I rise up on my tail, putting my nose through her legs and tossing her over my back mto the tank. She makes a wonderful singing noise until she hits the water. I call "Daddy! Daddy!" a few times, and Fingers does too. I keep swimming around her, looking like I'm trying to help her but keeping her from getting to the edge. She doesn't swim very well. In a short while Daddy bursts through the door, looking to see what is wrong. He sees me trying to help Fingers and her thrashing all around. He comes into the tank head first, heading for Fingers, I shove her gently underwater just to make it a little more interesting. Soon Daddy has an arm around Fingers and is pulling her to the edge of the tank. I get behind and give them a push to help. Daddy gets out first while I hold onto Fingers, who Daddy says has fainted -- she's limp. I haven't seen a Twofoot do this before. I don't think it happens very often. Daddy takes her arms and slides her out. When she is resting on the wet floor. Fingers opens her eyes. "Tad -- " Daddy puts his hand on her mouth, which makes her stop talking. It might mean that he wants her to eat his fingers, but I don't think so. I've said they do a lot of weird things with their arms and hands. "Oh, Tad, he pushed me in." "Shush," says Daddy. "But he did. Tad. Truly. Oh, you don't believe me -- " "You're just frightened. Here," he says, rubbing his hands on her arms. The skin on her is tiny bumps. So is his. I've seen this happen before. There is something in here called air-conditioning. It makes twofoots cold, "But he did. He did." "All right, maybe you both got confused. But don't take it out on him. I'm sure he never meant to hurt you. You saw how he tried to help you.' She moves her head up and down. Her big eyes are dark and watery. She looks pretty strange even for a Twofoot, with her outer skin all tight to her other skin and her headtop hair all flat and drippy. She's leaning more against Daddy, making some little sounds almost like people's talk, very short and hard to understand though. All the water in her eyes has started to run out. "Oh, Sees," Daddy says, reaching over and drawing her head against his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her and starts talking. He pats her with long sideways motions of his hand. Fingers seems to like this. She goes limp against him, but I don't think this is fainting because her eyes are still open. Limp is not the right word. More kind of soft and slidy. "Tad -- " She turns those great big wet eyes up at him. This thing that they do next is puzzling. They have got their mouths together tight. I saw Boss do something like that when one of the other Twofoots had been breathing water, so maybe Daddy thinks because she's got water in her eyes she breathed some. that, she keeps close against him, quiet and shivery. Maybe they are going to mate after all. I push up on my tail and watch them, but this time I don't splash them at all. I tell them that it is all right to go on. I don't mind. Really. I'm curious. They have some very strange ways, these Twofoots. I don't think Daddy bas understood what I said, but then one of those looks comes into his eyes, the way he looks when he figures something out. He says a couple of things to Fingers, kind of fast and low so I don't catch them. She makes some answers. I slip back down into the water, watching them as they get to their feet. While Fingers goes for another skin, Daddy stands and looks down at me, his mouth pulled back like mine. "I've got to hand it to you, old boy. You're a genius," he says. I don't know what he wants to hand to me, but the words sound good. "Thanks, Deech." Fingers comes back and they put their mouths together again for a long time. When they get to the door. Daddy turns and closes one eye at me. He hasn't done that before. I wonder if there is something wrong, or if this is part of their courting ritual. I told you about the set of things they do with their faces. This is one thing I haven't seen before. His face is full of happy wrinkles. If he's going to be gone the rest of the day, that means that the Boss will be in here. His Fingers is a much better shape; all round and sleek. She doesn't have a mate any more. I wonder what I can work out between those two.  SO IF  weighting ice from the rmqs of Saturn to the Martian colonists was the easiest milk-run in the System untii fhey plugged in Scanioni JAnain port. His lineless freckled face and red hair reflected on the quartz and mingled with Saturn's sunlit disk. The seething ribbons of the planet's surface fascinated him. He could not believe he was more Earth, lying twenty kilometers off Janus. This was Dale's first berth after graduating from the Academy, and while hauling ice from Saturn's rings to Mars colony was not as exciting as patrol duty, he could hardly wait for the long bum that would send the deep-space tug SI drifting toward the port on Phobos. The run, called "the pipeline," was a long way from the family farm in Indiana. The pilot shuttle crossed the port, clanged against the sturdy tug. Magnetic docking collars engaged. The tugboat creaked in protest as it absorbed the shuttle's momentum. Locks cycled, and there was some loud swearing and laughing. They cycled again. The shuttle drifted back toward Janus station. Scraping sounds came from the starboard passage as the new crewman floated his duftel to the control room. Then his hundred-kilo G.I. duftel bag sailed through the hatch and slammed into the sleepwebbing. Dale rolled to get a look at the man. A short husky type glided in behind the duftel. His shoulders were thick add powerful, his waist narrow. Heavy muscles rippled under the skin-tight space suit. Eyeing Dale, the newcomer removed the helmet collar from his neck. Curly hair spilled from the skullcap as he pulled it oft, and a smile creased his darkly tanned face. "I'm Julio O'Mally. You're Dale Hudson, right?" They shook hands. Dale helped Julio stow his gear, then resumed the Saturn-gazing. "This must be your first run," Julio said, busying himself at the communicator board. Dale nodded vaguely, mesmerized by the great luminous sphere. "Don't look too long. Makes you feel like you're falling into it. Screws up your equilibrium." Julio popped some switches, ran a quick radio check. "Who's the skipper. Dale? The shuttle mate gave me your name but wasn't sure who commands here -- " Dale turned and fought the momentary dizziness, unable for a moment to focus on the cabin. "See?" Julio said. "Told you so." "Whoever the skipper is, he hasn't showed his face yet." Dale checked the nameplate on the captain's console and squinted to read the name. "Conrad Scanlon. Do you know him?" "Scanlon? I'll be damned! Thought he'd been washed out," Julio said, snapping his head around. "What's the story on him?" Dale asked, surprised by the venom in Julio's voice. "Uh, let's see. Seven years back, Scanlon was pushing ice out of Deimos. Pirates got a line on him as he was picking his way through the Belt. When they slammed a minitorp into his bow screen Scanlon panicked. He dumped his ice, sent the crew out in the escape capsules. Then he rammed the pirates. Both ships popped like balloons. All the pirates were killed and his crew died before we could pick them up. Scanlon floated unconscious for a week -- the only survivor. They held a general court but IF he got off with a bad judgment." "Is that all -- and his two men dead?" Dale asked. "Well, out here, bad judgment is good enough for murder. It takes pilot error to bust you out of the corp." Julio busied himself at the console. "Still," he said over his shoulder, "I thought he was gone. Didn't think he'd ever space again, even hauling ice." Dale watched as Mars emerged from behind Saturn's disk. Then he remarked, "I remember that name. I read about a Connie Scanlon. Would that be him?" "Connie was what he went by," Julio said, finishing the check-out of his board. "It was five years ago, when I started at the Academy. They told us about the cyborg program. His name was one of the first ones." "A cyborg," Julio snarled. "So Connie is a damned cyborg. That's how he got back on a ship! I'm beginning to wish I'd stayed drunk on Janus." "What's wrong with cyborgs?" Dale asked, pulling himself down to his console and beginning his preflight check. "They're not men any more, that's what's wrong with them. It's like taking orders from machinery. They wire them into computers, you know. This big plug on the chest hooks them into the ship, and they live in a big fishbowl. Creepy, damn things." Dale's face had reddened during Julio's outburst. "Shut up. He can probably hear us." "You're damned right he can hear us. If he's a cyborg, the intercom is plugged into him like everything else. I don't like this, kid. Sometimes things get though -- and that's when I want a skipper who's flesh and blood. You hear me, Connie?" The ship was silent. E ighteen hours down the pipe. Dale was still awake. Saturn's shrinking disk in the screens no longer commanded his full attention. Frequently he gazed into the blackness of the space ahead. A sun'. Planets were visible as flecks of slowly moving light. The whole adventure fascinated and thrilled him. Dale knew it was silly but he could not stifle his excitement. Besides, hauling ice to Mars colony was important -- the colony would die without the ice shipments. And Julio had mentioned pirates. Dale's heart refused to settle down to normal rhythm. He wondered about the captain and Julio. Spacers were a superstitious lot and some classed cyborgs with zombies. But Dale felt there had been more behind Julio's outburst than simply that the captain was a cyborg. Dale had read about the cyborgs, had even considered training to be one when the program recruiter had come to the Academy. They were the future. They would man deep-space probes and the supply runs to Pluto station. The recruiter had said there were no changes in the men except for attachment of microscopically fine wires to nerves in brain and spine. The impulses carried on these nerves were transferred to the wires and then conducted to transducers. The entire ship was run through the hook-up. Nerves regulating heartbeat, body temperature and respiration regulated life support systems, and the impulses to the muscles ran the engines. The trickiest part was hooking the ship's computer into the higher brain centers. If the link were done properly the computer became an integral part of the cyborg's brain. Instant calculations of trajectory, pitch and yaw yielded minimumdeviation flight plans that required less fuel and less drain on life support. These were precious commodities so far from Earth. Also, the cyborg had less demanding physiological requirements. His metabolism ran at a minimum since no physical exertion was necessary. Drugs slowed it to the lowest level needed to maintain mental activity. Cyborgs were the perfect space explorers. They would put everyone else out of a job as ssoon as they had established their reliability. That was what Dale knew about cyborgs. But he knew nothing about Scanlon as a man. So far Dale had not even heard Scanlon's voice over the intercom. Julio's insults were ignored. Countdown began, its progress marked solely by signals on the consoles. There ws no contact at all with Scanlon. The only indication of his presence was the continued smooth running of the ship and occasional jolts from the steering jets. Curious and somewhat uneasy, Dale decided to tour the trim tug. Like all vessels constructed to haul, the tug was mostly engines and fuel tanks. Eight fusion engines, each out from the ship's frame so the exhaust cleared the cargo in tow. A liters of liquid hydrogen to feed the vast engines. They easily acceleratvelocity on the long burn. He could not check the ice. It was contained in twenty dura-plastic sausages linked one behind the other by cables. Other than tanks and engines, the ship consisted of crew livingquarters and compartments housing the life-support systems, the computer and the reactor that heated the hydrogen to plasma temperatures. There was also the captain's berth -- a detachable command-module affixed for reasons of electronic convenience to the underbelly of the vessel, almost an autonomous spaceship in its own right. For some reason the arrangeIF ment brought to Dale's mind an image of an ancient dive-bomber, torpedo-slung and deadly... Dale floated down the starboard passage, pulling himself along by handholds. He checked supply, computer and reactor rooms and came back up the port side. Finally he checked the captain's "cabin." Dale knew pretty much what he would find. The hatch slid open silently. There were no lights on so he started to feel around but. lowintensity green illumination came up before he could locate the switch. The module was just about large enough to house a sphere three meters in diameter. Completely filled with an amber liquid, it displayed a man folded in the fetal position floating inside. He wore what looked like an ordinary spacesuit, a mask with a blackened face plate, and an air line that ran from the chest then combined with an umbilical some ten centimeters thick. The cable left the tank and plugged into the computer plate on the far wall. A ladder ran up the side of the sphere. "Skipper?" Dale asked, just above a whisper. "Yes, Dale. I'm here," came the voice over the intercom. A metallic voice, like a computer simulation of a human voice. The body in the tank did not move. "I was looking around and thought..." Dale's words trailed off. He could , think of no way to justify invading the captain's cabin. "That's all right. I know why you're here." "I'd better get back. Julio may be looking for me." "He's asleep. Don't feel selfconscious. It's only natural that you should be curious about me. But I assure you that I'm no more a freak than you are. I'm just older." The body still floated motionless in the tank. "I heard you and Julio talking earlier." "Julio is excitable," Dale said, wishing he were anywhere but in the module. "It's more than that. I've known Julio a long time. His ship picked me up after I rammed the pirates. His brother was my navigator." they came to the Belt. Dale was floating in his webbed bed when the klaxon sounded. That jerked him out of a doze and he tangled one arm in the web. He pulled free, glided over to his console. Julio was already at station. "What's going on?" muttered Dale, rubbing sleep from his eyes so he could read the dials. "Entering the Belt. Next couple of days we'll be at general quarters. It's S.O.P." "Why? Any danger?" Julio snorted a laugh. "Look, kid. This is a milk run. Nothing ever happens when you haul ice. It's three months of boredom. Only good thing is pay without a place to spend it. Makes for quite a party at Mars port." Dale blushed. He hated having his inexperience flaunted. "But you said there were pirates." "Hell -- they aren't really pirates. About twenty years ago some convicts from the Titan penal colony knocked over a couple of ore tenders. They hide in the Belt and come out only when they need provisions. Aren't even worth tracking down." "Why should Scanlon risk his men and lose a ship for such unimportant prey?" Dale asked. "I told you, sailor! Panic. He lost his head." Julio cursed bitterly. "Oh, there's a standing order with the patrol to take the runaways if possible, but nobody is hunting their ships. Funny, if Scanlon hadn't lost good men, he'd have been a hero. As it is, they cut off his balls and made him a cyborg." "They don't do that," Dale said, swinging his chair around to face Julio. "Cyborgs are the same as us, except -- " "Look," insisted Julio, "I heard it from a lady who ought to know." "She's wrong. And maybe it wasn't panic at all. Maybe Scanlon was on a planned attack -- " "All the worse, then. He wanted to win medals, you're saying, so he sacrificed enlisted men like they were dogs. Suppose I told you or e was my own brother? He was worth a thousand pirates. I -- " The klaxon shattered his words with its strident hooting. "Now what?" blurted Julio. "Damn cyborg -- " The cool metallic voice came over the P.A. "Suit up, misters. A ship is approaching on the starboard quarter. She doesn't answer hailing. Suit up and go to your battle stations." "Battle stations in this tub?" Julio shouted. The P.A. speakers did not answer. Dale's heart pounded frantically. His stomach wrenched. His bladder strained to empty. Maybe the stranger was a pirate. Fear gripped him as he recalled the captain's last encounter with the buccaneers. Dragging his outside suit from its compartment. Dale drew on the thin skin-tight garment. Julio did the same. Dale knew the suit like the palm of his hand but fumbled with the seals from sheer nervousness. He did not marvel at the miracle of thin material being strong as steel yet allowing the freedom of nudity. He just put it on and got a red light at his first integrity-check. He repositioned the seals around gloves, boots and helmet. Green light. He launched himself across the cabin to the laser control board, overshot the chair and banged into the bulkhead. Floating free in the cabin, he made frantic swimming motions until he got a grip on the chair. "Battle stations. Ha! One crumIF my set of meteor-screens and a lousy six-centimeter laser," Julio fumed. Dale turned on his view-screens and went to full magnification. A sleek cruiser with full battle-gear grew large off starboard. As he watched, two puifs of smoke exploded from her bow. White contrails approached in parallel beauty. The first minitorp exploded on the bow meteor-screening. The second passed astern, hitting one of the ice tanks. A cloud of ice crystals half a kilometer wide spread from the ruptured tank, making tug and tow easy to spot even on a visual scanner. The skipper made a hard turn to port to position the cargo between them and the enemy. The P.A. clicked and Scanlon's voice came dry and flat as escape capsules, released by his brain, sealed them into their seats. "Hear this. We're abandoning ship. Stay with the cargo. There's a twenty-one day life-support system in the first bubble, so get in there and stay in." "Where will you be, sir?" Dale queried, voice cracking, mouth dry. "Don't you get it, kid? It's just like last time. He's dumping us to go after them," Julio bellowed "You won't get away with it, Connie. I'll see you hang for this one!" "Is it true, captain? Is that what you're going to do?" Dale asked, his stomach sinking. "Exactly," came the voice. Sudden acceleration smashed Dale into near blank-out as his blood popped from g-forces. When he regained sensation he discovered himself floating free in space inside his escape capsule. Tug and cargo drifted above him. Julio was to his left. The tow coupling opened and the tug floated free of its massive cargo. Steering jets flared until the tug lay well clear of her erstwhile burden. Then she turned hard to starboard. All eight main engines fired. The ship accelerated like a comet stung by antimatter. Julio screamed obscenities at the captain and worked his attitude jets frantically, trying to follow the receding ship. "You crazy Connie! Let us back aboard. Help! You're brother -- " "Julio, come back! You can't catch him..." But Dale's radio voice was drowned in Julio's raving. His capsule receded and disappeared. Suicide. Poor Julio. Dale sobbed and prayed and cursed, at the same time steering reflexively toward the long sausages of ice. The towing hawser floated free. Dale opened his capsule and caught the cable in his hand. Floating there he watched the battle. The cruiser bracketed with five more minitorps but the tug's engines abruptly shut down. So four shot past harmlessly. Only the fifth detonated -- on what was left of the bow screen. A pink glow surrounding the cruiser signified that her ownscreens were up. The tug fired her main engines in a #-g acceleration. Hideous green and yellow lightning played between the ships as their screens interfaced. But the tug had too much momentum for the cruiser. Its screens overloaded after vaporizing the tug's nose. The vessels met head on. Huge shards of metal flew from the collision. A spherical object -- Dale could not identify it -- rocketed off in a tight trajectory of its own. Air and water formed a dense white cloud spewing out of the locked and gaping hulls like a great amoeba. The mass of wreckage turned slowly end for end as the cloud drifted off on a tangential course. Dale watched for a long time, hoping to see a suited figure, any sign of life. The ships lay quiet in their death-grip. He pulled himself along the hawser until he reached the first cargo sausage. Undogging the hatch, he climbed into the narrow room, pressurized it and turned on his space beacon. Then he settled down for a long, lonely wait. T he pharmacist's mate on the heavy cruiser Andromeda was a perky brunette named Tina Janson. She met Dale as he came out of the air lock, steadying him when the spin-gravity buckled his knees. She introduced herself and led him to the sickbay. There he unsuited. She checked him over. "Did they find Julio?" was Dale's first question. "He's dead. His capsule ran out of air. I'm sorry." "He wouldn't stay with me. He tried to follow the ship -- " "You're all right, sailor," Tina said, firmly changing the subject. "You just need something to eat other than emergency rations. Also some gravity to get you back in shape." "I guess there'll be a board of inquiry," Dale said, as Tina began pushing him toward a stretcher. "Just a formality, I hear." "I guess it's pilot error to drop cargo and crew for a nuisance like those pirates." "What are you talking about? Those pirates are number-one priority in the patrol. They've been raiding practically everything coming through the Belt -- and have begun to raid stations as well. Our flotilla was on a search-and-destroy mission when we got your distress call. You'll probably get a decoration. Now lie down and let the nurse take you to the ward." Dale allowed himself to be wheeled into the bay, where he was transferred to a bed and given a sleeping pill. A lean figure in hospital pajamas was propped up in the bed across from him. Middle-aged, the other IF patient had gaunt features and hair graying at the temples. The rest of his hair could not be seen because white bandages covered his skull. The pill clouded Dale's mind and vision. Ripples of warmth eddied over him, and he slid down in the sheets. He felt obliged, though, to Sheraton Boston Hotel. GoH: Isaac Asimov. Adv. reg: #, # at door. Branch P.O., Cambridge, Mass. #. Holiday Inn East, Columbus, Ohio. GoH: Hal Clement. For info: Larry Smith, # E. Tulane Rd., Columbus, Ohio #.  Marriott Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif. GoH: D. C. Fontana, Special Guests: Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett. Adv. reg. # to Jan. #, # to April #, # thereafter; # supporting. Checks payable to: Equicon '#, co Pat Zotti, # Calvert, Reseda, Calif. #. For info: P.O. Box #, Los Angeles, Calif. #. at least nod at the gaunt man. The man smiled. "Hey, doesn't your skipper rate a salute?" "You... you're Connie Scanlon? My God!" "In the flesh, and with wires still stuck in my head. Sleep some. Dale. We'll talk later."  Royal Station Hotel, NewcastleUpon-Tyhe, England. GoH: Bob Shaw, Fan GoH: Peter Weston. Reg. #p supporting to: Ian Williams, # Greta Terrace, Chester Road, Sunderland, County Durham, SR# #RD, England.  cana Hotel, Seventh Ave  # St., Dec. #April #: #, # thereafter; # nonattending. For info: P.O. Box #, New York, N.Y. # .  national Hotel, Los Angeles. GoH: Ian  Betty Ballantine. Adv. reg: # to April #, # at door. For info: Eyecon Committee, # Gould St., Apt. C, Riverside, Calif. #.  GoM: Brian Aldiss. Membership #. For info: Fancon #, Box #, S-# # Stockholm, Sweden of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again j and again... a must for your science fiction library... I .( The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous t destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back In a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. AS#I # the mind and captivates the Imagination AN# #(f A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the Imagination AN # # of Science Fiction Two men pursue the Rithlan Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought Into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN# # A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Bllsh, and six other great writers. AN# #  prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here Is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II # "Psycho." AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# # Farmingdale, N.Y. # (Please add # for shipping) In the face of the deadly and sentient Sargasso they reaffirmed the principle of life! E ither the spaceworn Homingbird had zigged when it should have zagged or the GO-type star and its lone planet loomed where they didn't belong. Mate Gwyn Vestring grimaced. Just when they were on the homestretch, getting set for the last jump -- the jump to Earth. She fought down the urge to glance at her husband-captain. Maybe Boyd had not seen; he had said nothing yet. As though making a simple adjustment she swung the astrogate a touch to starboard. This swept the star and its tempting planet off the screen and brought a more familiarlooking array into view for real-time register with Homingbird's inertialguidance log. Too late. Boyd had spotted the planet. He overrode the astrogate and swung the aperture back. "Hold it, honey What have we here?" He centered the planet and zoomed it nearer. "Hmm. The lifepotential reading's positive. One point two on the evolutionary scale." He turned to face her with a cool smile. "Now don't tell me you missed that apple." Gwyn forced an answering smile. "I wasn't looking for one more juicy prospect. We already have our quota twice over." She rested her hand on his arm. "Boyd, you agreed that we have a good cargo and that it's time we got back home." Boyd patted her hand but somehow managed to lift it off. "I know, honey. I did and we have and it is. But how can we pass this up after falling over it like this? I ask you." He was obviously determined. She sighed, looked down at the roundness of her belly. She slid forward in her contour couch to make room to put her hands to the small of her back. She gave an isometric shove to her back to counter the weight within. If Boyd saw, it didn't change his mind. Gwyn said no more and made her face a mask of indifference as Boyd swung Homingbird into recon orbit. The Homingbircfs sensors took note of the planet's conditions and under her mask Gwyn felt satisfaction that they would have to suit up if they landed and went out among the natives to trade. The inconvenience would serve him right. But she felt a pang as she saw the eagerness fade from Boyd's face. After all, it was that eagerness, the light of a free spirit, that had drawn her to him in the first place. Boyd's face grew longer and more puzzled. Where was the promised life? Was he failing to recognize its form? The planet looked all plain, smooth and dark, the chocolate coating of lava flow. Nothing else was visible. Gwyn could see him shepherding himself toward sheepishness, toward grinning defeat. Then he spotted a spaceport. There was no mistaking it. He held Homingbird above a vast stand of spaceships. Hundreds of ships, all sizes, all shapes. Though most conformed to the cigar shape, some looked so grotesque as to seem incapable of landing or lifting off. But, as bees had proved, with enough power anything is aerodynamic. This planet out of nowhere had to be a trade center of some importance, though the general barrenness and the forbidding atmosphere would make it uncomfortable for most species. He switched on the transceiver and over the intragalactic trade band gave Homingbird' call sign. The answer came almost at once, in an artificial but warm voice. TV may land two ship's lengths primary-ward of the green-andorange ship." Boyd helped Gwyn fasten herself into her contour couch. He patted the roundness. "Cheer up, you two. We'll zoom in and zoom out." Gwyn smiled for two. Boyd picked out the green-andorange ship at the far edge and tapped the instructions into the descent-mode coordinator. While it took over he gave himself up to rubbernecking at the monitor. He had decided that the natives of Tahrlabi lived underground and he hoped to catch sight of them as they popped up to greet the Homingbird, They were almost down when Gwyn grasped his arm convulsively. "Boyd, look!" He saw. All the spaceships were stumpier than even fore-shortening would have made them appear. There were no launch pads visible beneath the spaceships, there were no flame buckets. All the spaceships were meters deep in Tahrlabi's crust. Colored candles stuck in a chocolate birthday cake. IF Boyd's face tightened but his fingers moved swiftly and smoothly to shoot the Homingbird back up. The Homingbird stopped descending, poised, started to ascend. Boyd and Gwyn heard loud slaps against the hull. The Homingbird stopped ascending, poised, started to descend. The monitor showed them a great spout of lava lipping and lapping at the Homingbird, The clinging solidified and in a linear-g tug of war the lava overcame the Homingbird' s thrust and pulled it down and down and down. The poor old Homingbird shook as though it would tear itself apart as Boyd refused to ease up on the thrust. In the end he had to cut it off. The air was stiflingly hot and stank of scorched insulation. The Homingbird had sunk three meters into the crust, which had hardened about its base. He was wasting fuel. With a sinking feeling to match the Homingbird, Boyd scanned the trapped spaceships the Homingbird had joined. There was a blurred vagueness of outline to them. Were they even spaceships? Perhaps they were mere decoys designed only to lure passing vessels such as the Homingbird into range. If so, they had worked. He grimaced. Time later to worry about that. Time now to put first things first. To save power, he shut down all of the vessel but essential life-systems. The cabin air grew even stuffier. Sweat beaded on Gwyn's face. Boyd unbuckled, got up moving a bit too fast for a man who hadn't yet got his planet-legs, undogged the hatch to the cargo hold. He tore a fingernail on the ring pull of the unsealer in his haste to break open a crate of hibernating gokdrob seedlings. He carried an armful of vacuum cans back into the cabin, oped them, and stood the seedlings strategically about. For a few minutes he feared the Bordorg trader had didcfled him. Then the seedlings came slowly to life, and with them the atmosphere inside the Homingbird. Gwyn breathed deeply and smiled gratefully at Boyd. "Better." Boyd nodded, but his face had not lost its tightness. He returned to the console and set himself to make contact with the spaceport -- assuming it wa# a spaceport. "Interstellar vessel Homingbird calling Tahrlabi control. Come in, Tahrlabi control." The warm artificial voice responded at once. "This is Tahrlabi. Welcome, Homingbird. May you have a happy stay." "Happy stay, hell. What do you mean by telling me to land in an area of volcanic activity?" "You sought permission to land. I welcomed you." "Some welcome. Some welcome mat." Still, the voice as warm and seemed to be genuinely friendly. "Let that pass for the time being. We'll straighten it out later. Meanwhile, as long as I'm here, let's do business. What have you got to trade?" "Nothing." Boyd stared openmouthed at the blasphemy. Had he heard right? "What was that you said?" "Nothing." He had heard right and left, in both ears. It was not the cabin heat, w,hich the gokdrob seedlings were dissipating nicely; he was burning up: zero results for all this waste of time. "Then we'd better straighten it out right now. No use my sticking around. What are you going to do about helping me lift off?" "Nothing." "What was that you -- ?. Never mind." He knew he had heard right the first time the second time. "Now listen here, I know my rights. I demand permission to lift of, and all necessary assistance thereto, under intragalactic law." "Sorry. No liftoffs." Well, there might be emergency conditions he was unaware of calling for the temporary grounding of all spacecraft. "For how long?" "Forever." CE they got past bluster and standfast, the question had to be why. Boyd put all the reasonableness he could into his voice. "Why?" The answer came back with even more reasonableness. "I have extended you my hospitality. You have accepted it. It would be ungracious of me to withdraw it. It would be unkind of you to renounce it." "Hospitality? You mean imprisonment." "Imprisonment?" The voice sounded shocked. "Did you feel your ship to be a prison when you were in space?" "Of course not. But -- " "Then why should it be a prison now?" "Because you're immobilizing it." "How, immobilizing? Does it not move with me as I move through space?" Editorial we, yes; but planetary I? Local idiom? "I suppose so. But -- " "There is no profit in talking longer at this point. You will have time to rethink your terms and you will come to see I am right. IF Meanwhile I am plugging your ship into my power source. From now on you have I the energy you need. However, I must warn you -- it is against my law for you to cut the umbilical once I have patched you in. I will sign off for now." "Hold on damnit!" "It's no use, friend." This was a new voice breaking in. "We've all argued our cases and lost. Tar Baby has solidified its logic around the basis of its thought. You may as well relax and enjoy." "That's right, Homingbird. " Another voice joining in. "Once you touch the sacred surface you can never leave it. Tar Baby can't understand how anyone could want to leave it. In any case, it won't let you leave it. You've accepted Tar Baby's welcome and you're stuck with it." There was sympathy in the voices but there was also welcome-to-theclub satisfaction. Boyd steamed. ""Now you tell us. Why didn't you warn us while we were still in. recon orbit?" "Couldn't." It was the first voice again, apologetic. "Whenever a sucker comes along Tar Baby jams all communications but its own." Sucker. It was a long time since anyone had called Boyd Moomaw a sucker. His ears burned and he avoided Gwyn's eyes. "Tar Baby. Is that a corruption of -- what is it? -- Tahrlabi?" "Right." Boyd scanned the obsidian matrix holding all of them fast. "I see what you mean. But I don't see the natives. When do they come out?" "They don't. There aren't any. There's just Tar Baby." Boyd had just absorbed the fact that Tar Baby was the planet itself, and that it was in effect one piezoelectric crystal unit, when the sinking sun suddenly picked out in glow and shadow cobweb strands running from spaceship to spaceship. The sight nearly drew a hysterical laugh from Boyd and did start him ranging the scope for a monstrous spider before he saw the catenaries were hawsers and lines of breeches buoys. Sighting a monstrous spider would not have turned him paler. "Tell us, is there a law against setting foot on Tar Baby?" "Ah, you've spotted the web. We were going to warn you of that, Homingbird, We've learned by unhappy example -- the poor fellow -- that Tar Baby can't help embedding anything or anyone that touches its surface. That's why we've rigged this aerial network for paying each other visits. Suit up and open your air lock and I'll shoot you a line." line. He was a fellow Terran but Boyd and Gwyn couldn't place the latitude of Atirk's clothing style in Earth's past. And Boyd wasn't sure he liked Atirk's attitude; Atirk was a young squirt but his smile said he looked on Boyd and Gwyn as younger than himself. The other member of the welcoming committee was Sizri, a Thubani. As they passed into the Homingbird' cabin, Sizri showed embarrassment at seeing a Terran woman, and a pregnant one at that. He remained but closed all his sensors throughout the visit. Boyd made to introduce Gwyn and himself but Atirk, smiling his knowing smile, stopped him. "Don't tell me. You're Boyd Moomaw and Gwyn Vestring, the first of the free traders. You became something of a legend. Back on Terra they wrote ballads and plays about the mysterious disappearance of the Homing bird: Your exploits as traders -- or the legend of your exploits -- inspired those of us who came later." Boyd and Gwyn stared at each other and saw in each other's eyes they shared the feeling of being mired in madness or nightmare. The cords of his neck swelling and straining, Boyd turned back to Atirk. "For psych's sake, man, what are you talking about? We just now got here." "That's right." Atirk's smile, faded, changing the reading of his face. It was now a smileless knowing. He sighed. "It'll take some explaining. But one thing you learn here is not to satisfy all your curiosity at once. You have to save some for later. Sitting here we see only the long dry stretches of later. The most immediate thing to talk about is the makeup of Tar Baby. You have to know that in order to survive." But Atirk was in no hurry to talk. It was as if he had to roll this moment on his tongue. Gwyn filled in by playing hostess. Sizri, of course, was unresponsive but Atirk did not let that stop him from helping himself to handful after handful of dried thagvo berries. He sighed again -- or was that the thagvo berries reconstituting themselves explosively in his mouth? He fixed his gaze on Boyd. "You asked where the natives are and I said there aren't any. That doesn't mean there never were any. There's evidence a life form did evolve here. When Tar Baby trapped the last spaceship -- " apologetic correction -- " -- the last one before Homingbird, that is; the orange and green spaceship... Let's see, that was about a yearand-a-half Terran ago. Just a #F minute; Sizri can tell me the precise date." Atirk made to shake Sizri open. Boyd stopped him with a gesture just short of curt. "Never mind. Save it." "Right. Well, in its heavings when it trapped the orange and green spaceship -- Sizri's, by the way -- Tar Baby threw up some fossil remains. I caught the fossils on tape before they sank again." Atirk produced a pocket tapeprojector that hologrammed on astonishingly real image in their rnidst. Boyd and Gwyn watched three slug-shaped creatures boil in slow motion out of a fire-edged rip in the crust. Gwyn frowned. "How do we know it was native to this planet? They might have come from a spaceship Tar Baby swallowed." Atirk smiled. "They might've. But I prefer them native for my guess as to how Tar Baby came to be the thinking thing it is." He froze the tape a frame before the last of the specimens sank out of sight. He pointed with weary enthusiasm. "Look at the armored plate. Read the spectroscopic data on the outside of the picture. When we think of armor on a creature we think of horn. But this armored plate's an assembly of bituminous tubes, each with a spine of antimonial lead. Lead oxide fills the space between the spine and the tube." Boyd started. "Then these things were -- " Atirk wasn't going to let anyone do him out of the telling. " -- living batteries. See, the spine collects electric current. And where did it get electric current? Notice these temporary quartz-outcroppings in the far corner of the picture. Remember; piezoelectric quartz crystals produce a voltage when subjected to mechanical stress and undergo mechanical stress when subjected to voltage. There's a hell of a lot of internal groaning in Tar Baby. The damned things plugged into quartz whenever they needed recharging." He grinned. "As for sex life, see here how they could hook up in series or in parallel. As for getting around, look at these rods in the underbelly of the creature; before it got trapped in lava flow it walking on them. Probably had a built-in kneejerk reflex that kicked each rod backward in its slot as it hit the ground, shoving the whole assembly, forward like a stiff-legged centipede. "This baby was a two-tonner, having. I'd guess, around a thousand amperage per hour capacity and capable of going six years Terran before needing a recharge." The picture vanished. Atirk pocketed the player. He shrugged. don't know how long the J. species roamed Tar Baby before evolution took the next step. matter now which -- the living batteries gave their minds and bodies to Tar Baby. Tar Baby became one great piezoelectric crystal unit. And that unit said unto itself, 'Let there be power.'" Atirk smiled. "And Tar Baby felt the power, and it was good. And Tar Baby got religion. And that religion is Tar Baby." The smile faded. "And with reason; Tar Baby has power like you wouldn't believe." Boyd raised an eyebrow. "For instance?" Atirk looked sulky, as though he had wanted to save that for later. Then his wearyenthusiasm took over again. "For instance, this crystal unit is powerful enough to cavitate space. Tar Baby can create a pseudo black hole and twist itself -- and its primary -- out of the universe and back in again." He smiled his knowing smile again. "You're staring at me. You think I'm kidding -- or crazy. Then tell me how Tar Baby and its primary got here -- "a nod skyward" -- where all the star charts show empty space. I won't press it. You'll have a chance to see for yourself. One of these nights you'll find a new star pattern out there. And some other night another pattern. Tar Baby really gets around." The smile faded again. "From our point of view there's a bad side effect. I won't get into the relativistics of spatial cavitation, but e over m does give Soonerthan-instantaneous travel. Each time Tar Baby pops out of the universe and back in it's gone further into the past. That's what I was trying to tell you earlier -- you were before my time and yet I got here first." Atirk stood up to leave them with that thought. Boyd shook his head, trying to take it all in and not wanting to take it in. Even if they managed to tear free they could never go home again. Atirk shook Sizri open and they departed to their respective homes away from home. T he fleet that had lost its fleetness held gams here, just as the ancient sailing ships had allowed IF their crews to visit back and forth when two vessels fell in with each other in alien seas in the old whaling days on Terra. Homingbird quickly wove itself into the web. Boyd noticed one spaceship that stood aloof from the web of hawsers and lines. "What about that one? Why is whoever's in there so stand-offish? Sulking? Dead? Or is he ostracized?" It was a stag party at Sizri's and Sizri was the life of it. Sizri laughed, flapping the wings of his nose In the manner of his kind. "No one's in there. It's a fullyautomated ship. Friendly enough, though. It was on its shakedown cruise and its hold was empty when Tar Baby trapped it, so naturally it's out of things. Now about that lot of vulnyl you want to trade for my srikvi -- " I N a manner of speaking they took in each other's laundry. Out of habit and to have something to do with their time they traded. Aside from trading their various recycled foods for the sake of variety, they traded cargoes for the sake of trading. In fact, trading for trading's sake had become the way of life on Tar Baby. What with wear and tear, goods in general had grown scarcer, more precious. Homingbird novelty and its promise of replenishing the total inventory made it Tar Baby's busiest captive for the time being. Boyd had no time to sit and think, and was glad to have no time to sit and think. It was when he found himself bartering listlessly the second time the same crate of jila that had come to Tar Baby in the Homingbird' s hold and had since been in almost all the other holds that he cried silently. Hold, enough! It shocked him into awareness. Boyd upped his asking price with a savage suddenness that drove the Aldebarani he had been haggling with out of the Homingbird in a huff and a puff of indignant blue smoke. Alone now with Gwyn, Boyd braced himself to really look at her for the first time since Tar Baby had trapped them. He saw by the set of her jaw that she had made up her mind not to reproach him, not to show her despair, not to break down. It might have been healthier for her, for both of them, for all three of them, if she had let her feelings out instead of holding in. But that was Gwyn. Her time was near and he had promised her that their child would be born on Terran soil. She smiled now, meeting his gaze, but he felt that she would never truly forgive him. And he felt something worse -- that she would be right never to forgive him. He felt guilty too that there were no other Terran women among them. There were females of other species and they were kind to her but they were not the same. But what could he do to make up for letting her down short of lifting off and escaping? Escaping from Tar Baby's hold was impossible. They all said so. Many had tried. All had failed. He slammed the cargo hatch shut on the priceless and useless jila and all the other goods choking the Homingbird's hold. He stood looking down at the cargo hatch, now flush with the cabin deck. Below the cargo hold was the engine room housing all Homingbird's thrust, locked in Tar Baby's crust. Maybe, just maybe... H e called the Aldebarani back. The Aldebarani got the jila at less than the original bid price, in exchange for a handful of ghir. The Aldebarani examined the jila suspiciously, then buoyed the crate away quickly before Boyd could change his mind. It went against Boyd's grain to strike bad bargains but beginning with this trade Boyd took losses and ill-hidden scorn with a wild zest. Always he bartered more for less. giving ten fat kilos of, say, vulnyl srikvi. If Gwyn wondered, she said nothing, only set her jaw harder and went on making ready for the third member of the Homingbird's crew. In spite of the tendency of the others to dawdle, to stretch out, to make a Japanese tea ceremony out of a trading session, Boyd made rapid headway. At those prices no one could go wrong and no one dallied over a deal -- there was always someone else waiting to snap it up. But when the cargo hold was one-fourth empty his plan threatened to hit a snag. If the Spican twinsome had their way the Homingbird's hold seemed doomed to stay three-fourths full, unless Boyd jettisoned his cargo -- but that would only alert Tar Baby. The snag came up at a general meeting. All but the automated spaceship attended in person. The meeting took place inside a Vegan vessel because it was the largest. The Spican twinsome had the floor and the wall. They had lately lost a valuable load in transit when a line snapped and the lot plunged to the surface and Tar Baby swallowed it whole. "We propose eliminating the tedious and dangerous business of IF transferring goods from ship to ship. Everyone knows what everyone has. There is no need to unstow stock. We move that there be simply the exchanging of scrip." Boyd shot to his feet. "That sounds good. But what are we going to do with the time and trouble we save? Isn't the whole rationale for this stupid business to keep us busy?" There was muchmore on both sides but the sentiment slowly but surely swung Bojs way. The Spican held out, then split with itself. At last the recalcitrant half made it unanimous. Sweating to beat the birth deadline and frightened by the close call, Boyd now made offers no one could refuse. Even so, the hold failed to empty out as swiftly as he had hoped. The others knew they were here forever; he could push them only so fast. In a flash of inspiration he staked the automated spaceship to much of the bulkiest of his slowermoving stuff. It was pathetically grateful to get into the swim. Boyd had the feeling, though, that if his plan went wrong and he had to stick around he would find it as stiff a competitor as the others. V enough. At last he could tell Gwyn what he was up to. Her jaw loosened and her mouth trembled. She felt light as she ran heavily into his arms. The unborn child that had come between them bound them together with its kick. Gwyn's suit was a tight fit but they thought it best to suit up. Even if the lava seal about the Homingbird's base were perfect some of Tar Baby's atmosphere might be trapped in the space around the rocket motor. The smile Boyd had let Gwyn see as he climbed down into that trader's nightmare, a nearly empty hold, became a rictus. Careful not to touch the umbilical Tar Baby had fastened to the Homingbird, Boyd lowered himself through the service hatchway, then through the inner and outer valves of the emergency hatch. Careful not to touch Tar Baby's surface, Boyd hung onto the bottom rung and played his lamp around. Blocking the nuclear ticking from his mind, he hung there till he had made sure the Homingbirds last burn had kept lava from clogging the tubes. When he climbed back up he could give Gwyn a smile smile. She helped him rig tackles. The service hatch was too narrow to pass the motor through. Boyd lasered a larger hole in the deckbulkhead between cargo hold and engine compartment and they lifted the resultant doughnut out and shoved it to one side. Boyd attached the hook to the hoisting eye of the motor and drew the self-locking hoist taut. It would be close. If and when the motor cleared the cargo deck the tackle would be chock-ablock. Boyd carefully lasered the motor free of its mounting. Gwyn pressed the power button and at the lowest speed hoisted the motor while Boyd took up the slack in the flexible cables and tubing. Boyd welded the motor into the new opening and filled in around it with bites of the doughnut to make the new bottom spacetight. Now the cargo hold was the new engine room. He cut a new hole in the deck, welded the service hatch -- the hole in the doughnut -- into it, swung back down into the old engine room, and twisting around on a bosun's chairused the laser to slice the hull through and through just above the lava line. Now a truncated but spaceworthy Homingbird rested freely on the cut rim -- ready for liftoff. He lashed the laser in place beneath the cut, aiming it at the umbilical, and left it waiting for him to switch it on by remote control. He took one last look around, pulled himself back up into the new engine room, dogged down the hatch. He and Gwyn sealed themselves inside the cabin. While Homingbird computed its new weight and adjusted itself Boyd carefully webbed Gwyn in, theh himself. He patted her hand and smiled. Even if they never got back to the Earth of their own era, what a trading advantage they would have on an earlier Earth! Homingbird gave the green light. Boyd said a silent goodbye and good riddance to Tar Baby, and a mute farewell to its captives. He switched Homingbird over to internal power, fired the laser to cut the umbilical, pressed for liftoff. Homingbird rose, dripping festoons of hawsers and lines. Boyd looked in the monitor and laughed to see Tar Baby lick up futilely at the Homingbird, Then they were shuddering up through Tar Baby's atmosphere into a wonderful free stillness. They had made it! jump to Terra. As Boyd switched on the astrogate and brought a familiar-looking array of stars into view for real-time register with Homingbird" inertial-guidance log, the stars vanished. For less than an eyeblink the stars swam as in a whirlpool, trailing watery streaks of light as in a time exposure. Then there came a blackness beyond that blackness IF which is the absence of light. In this blackness Tar Baby's primary remained the only light, not so much accenting the blackness as lost in it. Boyd stared. He saw now what Hapyr Atirk had meant by spatial cavitation. They were outside the universe. With nothing to lose, Boyd pressed the jump button anyway. Nothing happened. Homingbird was stuck in Tar Baby's local space as it had been stuck in Tar Baby. There was no way but back. But Boyd was slow in returning the Homingbird to recon orbit and even slower in acknowledging Tar Baby's signal. Tar Baby sounded anxious. "Are you all right. Homings bird?" Boyd winced to see Gwyn looking pale and sweaty in spite of her reassuring smile. Was this latest shock bringing on premature labor? "Are you all right, Homingbird?" "Well enough." "Ah. Then welcome back to Tahrlabi. You may land two ship's lengths primary-ward of your old spot." Boyd grimaced. "No, thanks." They had only this one card to play. By staying in recon orbit Homingbird remained a reproach to Tar Baby, stood out as a relatively free denial of Tar Babys sacred hospitality. It was Tar Baby's turn to take long. "Why not?" "Your surface is sacred, right?" "Right." How smug could a planet get? "Well, so is our planet's to us." "Oh? Can that be?" "It damned well is. So much so, that we were returning to Earth because my mate is with child and I have sworn that my child would be born on Terran soil." The jealous warmth of Tar Baby's response surprised him. "Why is your home planet's soil so holy to you?" "You have no soil, so you wouldn't know." "Behold!" Looking down, Boyd watched a pyrotechnical display, a vast pattern of scintilating iridescence on the dark glassy hemisphere. "Can your home planet's soil perform wonders?" Boyd frowned. Talc? Mud packs? He shook his head with an angry smile. This was too serious. Aureomycin, streptomycin, terramycin? More like it but still not good enough. The Homingbird passed over the field of trapped ships. Of course. Life, "Earth gives rise to life. You swallow life." Again Tar Baby took long. "If I fix it so your child is born on Terran soil will you acknowledge my holiness?" A strange note had crept in. "Is it a deal?" So Tar Baby had been eavesdropping on its captives as they whiled away the time of their captivity! The note, strange to Tar Baby, was familiar to Boyd. It was the sound of a trader convinced of his own trickiness. Boyd ate such traders for breakfast. Quick, before Tar Baby could change its mind. He kept the smile out of his own voice. "It's a deal."  caught Boyd's eye. The HorningbircTs inertial-guidance log had gone mad. Homingbird, as far as Boyd could tell by eyeball, remained in orbit just as it had been. But it was also moving in directions the log could not handle. Timelessly a shimmer grew in the middle of the blackness. Now, while Homingbird froze in orbit, the shimmer became a ghostly skein. Could that small thing be the universe? Once you were outside the universe you were everywhere. You surrounded the universe. You could touch it where you willed. Tar Baby reached out, touched Earth. Tar gaby's local space followed the thread of a wavicle into the skein. The Solar System filled the monitor, then Earth alone. Because he saw what he wanted most Boyd was afraid to let himself enjoy the sight too much. Gwyn, Boyd saw, felt the same. She closed her eyes, tears squeezed out. Boyd brought Earth's surface and Tar Baby's as close as he could in the monitor. The two were one at one point. Holding itself delicately in a state of masslessness, relative to the rest of the universe. Tar Baby touched one of the rolling hills of Earth. Boyd's throat swelled with all the emotion he could not express. He longed to land the Homingbird right now and open the airlock and breathe the fresh air of Earth. But that gate between two worlds looked a shimmering almost immaterial thing. Besides, Homingbird seemed frozen in orbit. Now the resolution improved, as if Tar Baby had got them in phase. Boyd saw a startled cave bear lumber away. Again Hapyr Atirk had proved right. Twisting in and out of the universe. Tar Baby moved back through time. Was marooning Homingbird and its crew in Earth's past the trickery Tar Baby's tone had hinted at? Well, being stuck in Earth's preIF historic past beat being stuck on Tar Baby any time. This was hardly the Garden of Eden, but it was life, it was freedom. He had the sudden feeling of reliving something. Was this how it had all started on Earth? Wondering, he awaited Tar Baby's signal freeing the Homingbird to land on Earth. But Tar Baby gave no such signal. Instead Boyd watched an arm of lava reach out and scoop in several hundred cubic yards of earth. Then Tar Baby broke contact. Earth, then the Solar System, diminished in the monitor. The universe shrank to a ghostly skein out of which Tar Baby's local space had followed the thread of a  wavicle. The blackness beyond blackness. Then the watery lights, unwhirling. They were back in the universe, though the star patterns showed them to be in another part of it. They had lost Earth forever. Tar Baby had the decency to wait. Only after Sizri opened his sensors and left, the last of their fellow captives to pay a breechesbuoy call on the proud parents, did Tar Baby signal Homingbird, "Remember our deal." Boyd smiled. He had to admire the tricky bastard. The child had been born on Terran soil. Tar Baby had packed the several hundred cubic yards of earth down hard with great tamping wallops. And here, two ship's lengths from the buried stump of its old self, the Homingbird had landed and stood now and forever on Terran soil. "I acknowledge your holiness." "It is good." B oyd wondered how long Tar Baby would think so. There were more roots than the new umbilical Tar Baby had tied to Homingbird. Already bits of green had broken up through the packed earth. The soil held lichen and molds and insects and bacteria. The lichen would begin the process, the acid in its rootlike fibers dissolving out of the lava rock the minerals the lichen lived on. The lava would grow spongy, hold water. The water would freeze, the rock would crack, the soil would deepen, spread. In time all Tar Baby wotild live as did this handful of dirt. Many generations from now Tar Baby would teem with life. And see who would own Tar Baby then! Meanwhile... Boyd signaled his potential sonin-law, Hapyr Atirk. "Be interested in a nulvuv-jila trade?" "Be right over."  bat mission the berserker came to him in the image of a priest of the sect into which Malori had been born on the planet Yaty. In a dreamlike vision that was the analogue of a very real combat he saw the robed figure standing tall in a deformed pulpit, eyes flaming with malevolence, lowering arms winglike with the robes they stretched. With their lowering, the lights of the universe were dimming outside the windows of stained glass and Malori was being damned. Even with his heart pounding under damnation's terror Malori retained sufficient consciousness to remember the real nature of himself and of his adversary and that he was not powerless against him. His dream-feet walked him timelessly toward the pulpit and its demon-priest while all around him the stained glass windows burst, showering him with fragments of sick fear. He walked a crooked path, avoiding the places in the smooth floor where, with quick gestures, the priest created snarling, snapping stone mouths full of teeth. ' Malori seemed to have unlimited time to decide where to put his feet. Weapon, he thought, a surgeon instructing some invisible aide. Here -- in my right hand. From those who had survived similar battles he had heard how the inhuman enemy appeared to each in different form, how each human must live the combat through in terms of a unique nightmare. To some a berserker came as a ravening beast, to others as devil or god or man. To still others it was some essence of terror that could never be faced or even seen. The combat was a nightmare experienced while the subconscious ruled, while the waking mind was suppressed by careful electrical pressures on the brain. Eyes and ears were padded shut so that the conscious mind might be more easily suppressed, the mouth plugged to save the tongue from being bitten, the nude body held immobile by the defensive fields that kept it whole against the thousands of gravities that came with each movement of the one-man ship while in combat mode. It was a nightmare from which mere terror could never wake one; waking came only when the fight was over, came only with death or victory or disengagement. Into Malori's dream-hand there now came a meat cleaver keen as a razor, massive as a guillotineblade. So huge it was that had it been what it seemed it would have been far too cumbersome to even lift. His uncle's butcher shop on Yaty was gone, with all other human works of that planet. But the cleaver came back to him now, magnified, perfected to suit his need. He gripped it hard in both hands and advanced. As he drew near the pulpit towered higher. The carved dragon on its front, which should have been an angel, came alive, blasting him with rosy fire. With a shield that came from nowhere he parried the. splashing flames. Outside the remnants of the stained glass windows the lights of the universe were almost dead now. Standing at the base of the pulpit, Malori drew back his cleaver as if to strike overhand at the priest who towered above his reach. Then, without any forethought at all, he switched his aim at the top of his backswing and laid the blow crashing against the pulpit's stem. It shook, but resisted stoutly. Damnation came. Before the devils reached him, though, the energy was draining from the dream. In less than a second of real time it was no more than a fading visual image, a few seconds after that a dying memory. Malori, coming back to consciousness with eyes and ears still sealed, floated in a soothinglimbo. Before post-combat fatigue and sensory. deprivation could combine to send him into psychosis, attachments on his scalp began to feed his brain with bursts of pins-and-needles noise. It was the safest signal to administer to a brain that might be on the verge of any of a dozen different kinds of madness. The noise made a whitish roaring scattering of light and sound that seemed to fill his head and at the same time somehow outlined for him the positions of his limbs. His first fully conscious thought: he had just fought a berserker and survived. He had won -- or had at least achieved a stand-off -- or he would not be here. It was no mean achievement. B erserkers were like no other foe that Earth-descended human beings had ever faced. They had cunning and intelligence and yet were not alive. Relics of some interstellar war over long ages since, automated machines, warships for the most part, they carried as their basic programming the command to destroy all life whereever it could be. found. Yaty was only the latest of many Earth-colonized planets to suffer a berserker attack, and it was among the luckiest; nearly all its people had been successfully evacuated. Malori and others now fought in deep space to protect the Hope, one of the enormous evacuation ships. The Hope was a sphere several kilometers in diameters, large enough IF to contain a good proportion of the planet's population stored tier on tier in defense-field stasis. A trickle-relaxation of the fields allowed them to breathe and live with slowed metabolism. The voyage to a safe sector of the galaxy was going to take several months because most of it, in terms of time spent, was going to be occupied in traversing an outlying arm of the great Taynarus nebula. Here gas and dust were much too thick to let a ship duck out of normal space and travel faster than light. Here even the speeds attainable in normal space were greatly restricted. At thousands of kilometers per second, manned ship or berserker machine could alike be smashed flat against a wisp of gas far more tenuous than human breath. Taynarus was a wilderness of uncharted plumes and tendrils of dispersed matter, laced through by corridors of relatively empty space. Much of the wilderness was completely shaded by interstellar dust from the light of all the suns outside. Through dark shoals and swamps and tides of nebula the Hope and her escort Judith fled, and a berserker pack pursued. Some berserkers were even larger than the Hope, but those that had taken up this chase were much smaller. In regions of space so thick with matter, a race went to the small as well as to the swift; as the impact cross-section of a ship increased, its maximum practical speed went inexorably down. The Hope, ill-adapted for this chase (in the rush to evacuate, there had been no better choice available) could not expect to outrun the smaller and more maneuverable enemy. Hence the escort carrier Judith, trying always to keep herself between Hope and the pursuing pack. Judith mothered the little fighting ships, spawning them out whenever the enemy came too near, welcoming survivors back when the threat had once again been beaten off. There had been fifteen of the one-man ships when the chase began. Now there were nine. The noise injections from Malori's life support equipment slowed down, then stopped. 'His conscious mind once more sat steady on its throne. The gradual relaxation of his defense fields he knew to be a certain sign that he would soon rejoin the world of waking men. As soon as his fighter, Number Four, had docked itself inside the Judith Malori hastened to disconnect himself from the tiny ship's systems. He pulled on a loose coverall and let himself out of the cramped space. A thin man with knobby joints and an awkward step, he hurried along a catwalk through the echoing hangar-like chamber, noting that three or four fighters besides his had already returned and were resting in their cradles. The artificial gravity was quite steady, but Malori stumbled and almost fell in his haste to get down the short ladder to the operations deck. Petrovich, commander of the Judith, a bulky, iron-faced man of middle height, was on the deck apparently waiting for him. "Did -- did I make my kill?" Malori stuttered eagerly as he came hurrying up. The forms of military address were little observed aboard the Judith, as a rule, and Malori was really a civilian anyway. That he had been allowed to take out a fighter at all was a mark of the commander's desperation. Scowling, Petrovich answered bluntly. "Malori, you're a disaster in one of these ships. Haven't the mind for it at all." The world turned a little gray in front of Malori. He hadn't understood until this moment just how important to him certain dreams of glory were. He could find only weak and awkward words. "But... I thought I did all right." He tried to recall his combat-nightmare. Something about a church. "Two people had to divert their ships from their original combat objectives to rescue you. I've already seen their gun-camera tapes. You had Number Four just sparring around with that berserker as if you had no intention of doing it any damage at all." Petrovich looked at him more closely, shrugged, and softened his voice somewhat. "I'm not trying to chew you out, you weren't even aware of what was happening, of course. I'm just stating facts. Thank probability the Hope is twenty AU deep in a formaldehyde cloud up ahead. If she'd been in an exposed position just now they would have got her." "But -- " Malori tried to begin an argument but the commander simply walked away. More fighters were coming in. Locks sighed and cradles clanged, and Petrovich had plenty of more important things to do than stand here arguing with him. Malori stood there alone for a few moments, feeling deflated and defeated and diminished. Involuntarily he cast a yearning glance back at Number Four. It was a short, windowless cylinder, not much more than a man's height in diameter, resting in its metal cradle while technicians worked about it. The stubby main laser nozzle, still hot from firing, was sending up a wisp of smoke now that it was back in atmosphere. There was his twohanded cleaver. No man could direct a ship or a weapon with anything like the competence of a good machine. The creeping slowness of human nerve impulses and of conscious thought disqualified humans from maintaining direct control of their ships in any space fight against berserkers. But the human subconscious was not so limited. Certain of its processes could not be correlated with any specific synaptic activity within the brain, and some IF theorists held that these processes took place outside of time. Most physicists stood aghast at this view -- but for space combat it made a useful working hypothesis. In combat, the berserker computers were coupled with sophisticated randoming devices, to provide the flair, the unpredictability that gained an advantage over an opponent who simply and consistently chose the maneuver statistically most likely to bring success. Men also used computers to drive their ships, but had now gained an edge over the best randomizers by relying once more on their own brains, parts of which were evidently freed of hurry and dwelt outside of time, where even speeding light must be as motionless as carved ice. There were drawbacks. Some people (including Malori, it now appeared) were simply not suitable for the job, their subconscious minds seemingly uninterested in such temporal matters as life or death. And even in suitable minds the subconscious was subject to great stress. Connection to external computers loaded the mind in some way not yet understood. One after another, human pilots returning from combat were removed from their ships in states of catatonia or hysterical excitement. Sanity might be restored, but the man or woman was worthless thereafter as a combat-computer's teammate. The system was so new that the importance of these drawbacks was just coming to light aboard Judith now. The trained operators of the fighting ships had been used up, and so had their replacements. Thus it was that Ian Malori, historian, and others were sent out, untrained, to fight. But using their minds had bought a little extra time. F rom the operations deck Malori went to his small single cabin. He had not eaten for some time, but he was not hungry. He changed clothes and sat in a chair looking at his bunk, looking at his books and tapes and violin, but he did not try to rest or to occupy himself. He expected that he would promptly get a call from Petrovich. Because Petrovich now had nowhere else to turn. He almost smiled when the communicator chimed, bringing a summons to meet with the commander and other officers at once. Malori acknowledged and set out, taking with him a brown leather-like case about the size of a briefcase but differently shaped, which he selected from several hundred similar cases in a small room adjacent to his cabin. The case he carried was labeled: crazy horse. Petrovich looked up as Malori entered the small planning room in which the handful of ship's officers were already gathered around a table. The commander glanced at the case Malori was carrying, and nodded. "It seems we have no choice, historian. We are running the moment Malori was not going to speak that name. "I want iteasy," was all he said, and blinked his eyes and tried to rub his neck against the pain. The man looked him over in silence a little longer. "All right," he said then. Turning back to the machine, he added in a different, humble voice: "I can easily dominate this injured badlife. There will be no problems if you leave us here alone." T he machine turned one metalcased lens toward its servant. "Remember," it vocalized, "the auxiliaries must be made ready. Time grows short. Failure will bring unpleasant stimuli." "I will remember, sir." The man was humble and sincere. The machine looked at both of them a few moments longer and then departed, metal legs flowing suddenly into a precise and almost graceful walk. Shortly after, Malori heard the familiar sound of an airlock cycling. "We're alone now," the man said, looking down at him. "If you want a name for me you can call me Greenleaf. Want to try to fight me? If so, let's get it over with." He was not much bigger than Malori but his hands were huge and he looked hard and very capable despite his ragged filthiness. "All right, that's a smart choice. You know, you're actually a lucky man, though you don't realize it yet. Berserkers aren't like the other masters that men have -- not like the governments and parties and corporations and causes that use you up and then just let you drop and drag away. No, when the machines run out of uses for you they'll fmish you off quickly and cleanly -- if you've serv well. I know. I've seen'em do it that way with other humans. No reason why they shouldn't. All they want is for us to die, not suffer." Malori said nothing. He thought perhaps he would be able tg stand up soon. Greenleaf (the name seemed so inappropriate that Malori thought it probably real) made some adjustment on a small device that he had taken from a pocket and was holding almost concealed in one large hand. He asked: "How many escort carriers besides this one are trying to protect the Hope?" "I don't know," Malori lied. There had been only the Judith, "What is your name?" The bigger man was still looking at the device in his hand. "Ian Malori." Greenleaf nodded, and without showing any particular emotion in his face took two steps forward and kicked Malori in the belly, precisely and with brutal power. "That was for trying to lie to me, Ian Malori," said his captor's voice, heard dimly from somewhere above as Malori groveled on the deck, trying to breathe again. "Understand that I am infallibly IF able to tell when you are lying. Now, how many escort carriers are there?" In time Malori could sit up again, and choke out words. "Only this one." Whether Greenleaf had a real lie detector, or was only trying to make it appear so by asking questions whose answers he already knew, Malori decided that from now on he would speak the literal truth as scrupulously as possible. A few more kicks like that and he would be helpless and useless and the machines would kill him. He discovered that he was by no means ready to abandon his life. "What was your position on the crew, Malori?" "Fm a civilian." "What sort?" "An historian." "And why are you here?" Malori started to try to get to his feet, then decided there was nothing to be gained by the struggle and stayed sitting on the deck. If he ever let himself dwell on his situation for a moment he would be too hideously afraid to think coherently. "There was a project... you see, I brought with me from Yaty a number of what we call historical models -- blocks of programmed responses we use in historical research." "I remember hearing about some such things. What was the project you mentioned?" "Trying to use the personae of military men as randomizers for the combat computers on the one-man ships." "Aha." Greenleaf squatted, supple and poised for all his raunchy look. "How do they work in combat? Better than a live pilot's subconscious mind? The machines know all about that." "We never had a chance to try. Are the rest of the crew here all dead?" Greenleaf nodded casually. "It wasn't a hard boarding. There must have been a failure in your automatic defenses. I'm glad to find one man alive and smart enough to cooperate. It'll help me in my career." He glanced at an expensive chronometer strapped to his dirty wrist. "Stand up, Ian Malori. There's work to do." Malori got up and followed the other toward the operations deck. "The machines and I have been looking around, Malori. These nine little fighting ships you still have on board are just too good to be wasted. The machines are sure of catching the Hope now, but she'll have automatic defenses, probably a lot tougher than this tub's were. The machines have taken a lot of casualties on this chase so they mean to use these nine little ships as auxiliary troops -- no doubt you have some knowledge of military history?" "Some." The answer was perhaps an understatement, but it seemed to pass as truth. The lie detector, if it was one, had been put away. But Malori would still take no more chances than he must. "Then you probably know how some of the generals on old Earth used their auxiliaries. Drove them on ahead of the main force of trusted troops, where they could be killed if they tried to retreat, and were also the first to be used up against the enemy." Arriving on the operations deck, Malori saw few signs of damage. Nine tough little ships waited in their launching cradles, re-armed and returned and refueled for combat. All that would have been taken care of within minutes of their return from their last mission. "Malori, from looking at these ships' controls while you were unconscious, I gather that there's no fully automatic mode in which they can be operated." "Right. There has to be some controlling mind, or randomizer, connected on board." "You and I are going to get them out as berserker auxiliaries, Ian Malori." Greenleaf glanced at his timepiece again. "We have less than an hour to think of a good way and only a few hours more to complete the job. The faster the better. If we delay we are going to be made to suffer for it." He seemed almost to relish the thought. "What do you suggest we do?" Malori opened his mouth as if to speak, and then did not. Greenleaf said: "Installing any of your military personae is of course out of the question, as they might not submit well to being driven forward like mere cannonfodder. I assume they are leaders of some kind. But have you perhaps any of these personae from different fields, of a more docile nature?" Malori, sagging against the operations officer's empty combat chair, forced himself to think very carefully before he spoke. "As it happens, there are some personae aboard in which I have a special personal interest. Come." With the other following closely, Malori led the way to his small bachelor cabin. Somehow it was astonishing that nothing had been changed inside. There on the bunk was his violin, and on the table were his music tapes and a few books. And here, stacked neatly in their leather-like curved cases, were some of the personae that he liked best to study. Malori lifted the top case from the stack. "This man was a violinist, as I like to think I am. His name would probably mean nothing to you." "Musicology was never my field. But tell me more." "He was an Earthman, who lived in the twentieth century CE -- quite a religious man, too, as I understand. We can plug the persona in and ask it what it thinks of fighting, if you are suspicious." "We had better do that." When Malori had shown him the proper receptacle beside the cabin's small IF Olonllord # I Mkronite filter. I Mild, snnooth taste. I America's qualify cigarette. I Kent I King Size or Deluxe #'s. ' Kings: # mg. "tar" # mg. nicotine; #'S: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine; V Menthol: # mg."tar," # mg. nicotine; av. per cigarette, RC Report Sept. #. Try the crisp, clean tastM of Kent Menthol The only Menthol with the fanwus Micronite filter. Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health computer console, Greenleaf snapped the connections together himself. "How does one communicate with it?" "Just talk." Greenleaf spoke sharply toward the leather-like case. "Your name?" "Albert Ball." The voice that answered from the console speaker sounded more human by far than the berserker's had. "How does the thought of getting into a fight strike you, Albert?" "A detestable idea." "Will you play the violin for us?" "Gladly." But no miisic followed. Malori put in: "More connections are necessary if you want actual music." "I don't think we'll need that." Greenleaf unplugged the Albert Ball unit and began to look through the stack of others, frowning at unfamiliar names. There were twelve or fifteen cases in all. "Who are these?" "Albert Ball's contemporaries. Performers who shared his profession." Malori let himself sink down on the bunk for a few moments' rest. He was not far from fainting. Then he went to stand with Greenleaf beside the stack of personae. "This is a model of Edward Mannock, who was blind in one eye and could never have passed the physical examination necessary to serve in any military force of his time." He pointed to another. "This man served briefly in the cavalry, as I recall, but he kept getting thrown from his horse and was soon relegated to gathering supplies. And this one was a frail, tubercular youth who died at twenty-three standard years of age." Greenleaf gave up looking at the cases and turned to size up Malori once again. Malori could feel his battered stomach muscles trying to contract, anticipating another violent impact. It would be too much, it was going to kill him if it came like that again... Vfrowning, checking his chronometer yet again. Then he looked up with a little smile. Oddly, the smile made him look like the hell of a good fellow. "All right! Musicians, Isuppose, are the antithesis of the military. If the machines approve, we'll install them and get the ships sent out. Ian Malori, I may just raise your pay." His pleasant smile broadened. "We may just have bought ourselves another standard year of life if this works out as well as I think it might." When the machine came aboard again a few minutes later, Greenleaf bowing before it explained the essence of the plan, while Malori in the background, in an agony of terror, found himself bowing too. "Proceed, then," the machine approved. "If you are not, the ship infected with life may find concealment in the storms that rise ahead of US." Then it went away again quickly. Probably it had repairs and refitting to accomplish on its own robotic ship. With two men working, installation went very fast. It was only a matter of opening a fighting ship's cabin, inserting an uncased persona in the installed adapter, snapping together standard connectors and clamps, and closing the cabin hatch again. Since haste was vital to the berserkers' plans, testing was restricted to listening for a live response from each persona as it was activated inside a ship. Most of he responses were utter banalities about nonexistent weather or ancient food or drink, or curious phrases that Malori knew were only phatic social remarks. All seemed to be going well, but Greenleaf was having some last minute misgivings. "I hope these sensitive gentlemen will stand up under the strain of finding out their true situation. They will be able to grasp that, won't they? The machines won't expect them to fight well, but we don't want them going catatonic, either." Malori, close to exhaustion, was tugging at the hatch of Number Eight, and nearly fell off the curved hull when it came open suddenly. "They will apprehend their situation within a minute after launching, I should say. At least in a general way. I don't suppose they'll understand it's interstellar space around them. You have been a military man, I suppose. If they should be reluctant to fight -- I leave to you the question of how to deal with recalcitrant auxiliaries." When they plugged the persona into ship Number Eight, its test response wasi "I wish my craft to be painted red." "At once, sir," said Malori quickly, and slammed down the ship's hatch and started to move on to Number Nine. "What was that all about?" Greenleaf frowned, but looked at his timepiece and moved along. "I suppose the maestro is already aware that he is about to embark in some kind of a vehicle. As to why he might like it painted red..." Malori grunted, trying to open up Number Nine, and let his answer trail away. At last all the ships were ready. With his finger on the launching switch, Greenleaf paused. For one last time his eyes probed Malori's. "We've done very well, timewise. We're in for a reward, as long as this idea works at least moderately well." He was speaking now in a solemn near-whisper. "It had better work. Have you ever watched a man being skinned alive?" Malori was gripping a stanchion to keep erect. "I have done all I can." Greenleaf operated the launching switch. There was a polyphonic whisper of airlocks. The nine ships were gone, and simultaneously a holographic display came alive IF above the operations officer's console. In the center of the display the Judith showed as a fat green symbol, with nine smaller green dots moving slowly and uncertainly nearby. Farther off, a steady formation of red dots represented what was left of the berserker pack that had so long and so relentlessly pursued the Hope and her escort. There were at least fifteen red berserker dots, Malori noted gloomily. "The trick," Greenleaf said as if to himself, "is to make them more afraid of their own leaders than they are of the enemy." He keyed the panel switches that would send his voice out to the ships. "Attention, units One through Nine!" he barked. "You are under the guns of a vastly superior force, and any attempt at disobedience or escape will be severely punished..." He went on browbeating them for a minute, while Malori observed in the screen that the dirty weather the berserker had mentioned was coming on. A sleet of atomic particles was driving through this section of the nebula, across the path of the Judith and the odd hybrid fleet that moved with her. The Hope, not in view on this range scale, might be able to take advantage of the storm to get away entirely unless the berserker pursuit was swift. Visibility on the operations display was failing fast and Greenleaf cut off his speech as it became apparent that contact was being lost. Orders in the berserkers' unnatural voices, directed at auxiliary ships One through Nine, came in fragmentarily before the curtain of noise became an opaque white-out. The pursuit of the Hope had not yet been resumed. F or a while all was silent on the operations deck, except for an occasional crackle of noise from the display. All around them the empty launching cradles waited. "That's that," Greenleaf said at length. "Nothing to do now but worry." He gave his little transforming smile again, and seemed to be almost enjoying the situation. Malori was looking at him curiously. "How do you -- manage to cope so well?" "Why not?" Greenleaf stretched and got up from the now-useless console. "You know, once a man gives up his old ways, badlife ways, admits he's really dead to them, the new ways aren't so bad. There are even women available from time to time, when the machines take prisoners." "Goodlife," said Malori. Now he had spoken the obscene, provoking epithet. But at the moment he was not afraid. "Goodlife yourself, little man." Greenleaf was still smiling. "You know, I think you still look down on me. You're in as deep as I am now, remember?" "I think I pity you." Greenleaf let out a little snort of laughter, and shook his own head pityingly. "You know, I may have ahead of me a longer and more pain-free life than most of humanity has even enjoyed -- you said one of the models for the personae died at twenty-three. Was that a common age of death in those days?" Malori, still clinging to his stanchion, began to wear a strange, grim little smile. "Well, in his generation, in the continent of Europe, it was. The First World War was raging at the time." "But he died of some disease, you jaid." "No. I said he had a disease, tuberculosis. Doubtless it would have killed him eventually. But he died in battle, in # CE, in a place called Belgium. His body was never found, as I recall, an artillery barrage having destroyed it and his aircraft entirely." Greenleaf was standing very still. "Aircraft! What are you saying?" Malori pulled himself erect, somewhat painfully, and let go of his support. "I tell you now that Georges Guynemer -- that was his name -- shot down fifty-three enemy aircraft before he was killed. Wait!" Malori's voice was suddenly loud and firm, and Greenleaf halted his menacing advance in sheer surprise. "Before you begin to do anything violent to me, you should perhaps consider whether your side or mine is likely to win the fight outside." "The fight..." "It will be nine ships against fifteen or moire machines, but I don't feel too pessimistic. The personae we have sent out are not going to be meekly slaughtered." G reenleaf stared at him a moment longer, then spun around and lunged for the operations console. The display was still blank white with noise and there was nothing to be done. He slowly sank into the padded chair. "What have you done to me?" he whispered. "That collection of invalid musicians -- you couldn't have been lying about them all." "Oh, every word I spoke was true. Not all World War One fighter pilots were invalids, of course. Some were in perfect health, indeed fanatical about staying that way. And I did not say they were all musicians, though I certainly meant you to think so. Ball had the most musical ability among the aces, but was still only an amateur. He always saidie loathed his real profession." Greenleaf, slumped in the chair now, seemed to be aging visibly. "But one was blind... it isn't possible." "So his enemies thought, when they released him from an internment camp early in the war. Edward Mannock, blind in one eye. He had to trick an examiner to get into the army. Of course the IF tragedy of these superb men is that another. In those days they had no berserkers to fight, at least none that could be attacked dashingly, with an aircraft and a machine gun. I suppose men have always faced berserkers of some kind." "Let me make sure I understand." Greenleafs voice was almost pleading. "We have sent out the personae of nine fighter pilots?" "Nine of the best. I suppose their total of claimed aerial victories is more than five hundred. Such claims were usually exaggerated, but still..." There was silence again. Greenleaf slowly turned his chair back to face the operations display. After a time the storm of atomic noise began to abate. Malori, who had sat down on the deck to rest, got up again, this time more quickly. In the hologram a single glowing symbol was emerging from the noise, fast approaching the position of the Judith, The approaching symbol was bright red. "So there we are," said Greenleaf, getting to his feet. From a pocket he produced a stubby little handgun. At first he pointed it toward the shrinking Malori, but then he smiled his nice smile and shook his head. "No, let the machines have you. That will be much worse." When they heard the airlock begin to cycle, Greenleaf raised the weapon to point at his own skull. Malori could not tear his eyes away. The inner door clicked and Greenleaf fired. Malori bounded across the intervening space and pulled the gun from Greenleafs dead hand almost before the body had completed its fall. He turned to aim the weapon at the airlock as its inner door sighed open. The berserker standing there was the one he had seen earlier, or the same type at least. But it had just been through violent alterations. One metal arm was cut short in a bright bubbly scar, from which the ends of truncated cables flapped. The whole metal body was riddled with small holes, and around its top there played a halo of electrical discharge. Malori fired, but the machine ignored the impact of the forcepacket. They would not have let Greenleaf keep a gun with which they could be hurt. The battered machine ignored Malori too, for the moment, and lurched forward to bend over Greenleafs nearly decapitated body. "Tra-tra-tra-treason," the berserker squeaked. "Ultimate unpleasant ultimate unpleasant stumstum-stimuli. Badlife badlife bad -- " By then Malori had moved up close behind it and thrust the muzzle of the gun into one of the still-hot holes where Albert Ball or perhaps Frank Luke or Werner Voss or one of the others had already used a laser to good effect. Two forcepackets beneath its armor and the berserker went down, as still as the man who lay beneath it. The halo of electricity died. Malori backed off, looking at them both, then spun around to scan the operations display again. The red dot was drifting away from the Judith, the vessel it represented now evidently no more than inert machinery. Out of the receding atomic storm a single green dot was approaching. A minute later. Number Eight came in alone, bumping to a gentle stop against its cradle pads. The laser nozzle at once began smoking heavily in atmosphere. The craft was scarred in several places by enemy fire. "I claim four more victories," the persona said as soon as Malori opened the hatch. "Today I was given fine support by my wingmen, who made great sacrifices for the Fatherland. Although the enemy outnumbered us by two to one, I think that not a single one of them escaped. But I must protest bitterly that my aircraft still has not been painted red." 'T will see to it at once, meinherr, " murmured Malori, as he began to disconnect the persona from the fighting ship. He felt a little foolish for trying to reassure a piece of hardware. Still, he handled the persona gently as he carried it to where the little formation of empty cases were waiting on the operations deck, their labels showing plainly: They were English, American, German, French. They were Jew, violinist, invalid, Prussian, rebel, hater, bon vivant, Christian. Among the nine of them they were many other things besides. Maybe there was only the one word -- man -- which could include them all. Right now the nearest living meters away, but still Malori did not feel quite alone. He put the persona back into its case gently, even knowing that it would be undamaged by ten thousand more gravities than his hands Qould exert. Maybe it would fit into the cabin of Number Eight with him, when he made his try to reach the Hope. "Looks like if s just you and me now. Red Baron." The human being from which it had been modeled had been not quite twentysix when he was killed over France, after less than eighteen months of success and fame. Before that, in the cavalry, his horse had thrown him again and again.  IF Given that the machinery is not too complicated, iVs only fair that one of the gentler sex should make the first solo flight to the Moon! you? Doh-dooh'dit-dooh-duhdooh-de dooh... Arlys's imagination transformed the seemingly random twitterings of the ship's computer into words. As good as those who have gone before you -- maybe better, eh? Dah-dooh-dah-dee-day'die-duh' doohdahdawdeedawdoohdaydee-deh-deh-deh... The computer ranged up and down unpredictably over its three octaves with a strangely melodic tunelessness. Space Officer First Class Arlys was not afraid, merely tense and uncomfortable. The white, craterdented sphere of the Moon lay dead ahead; the white-mottled blue of Earth far astern. Dit-doh-doh-dooh-dah-doohduh-datdaydoohday... First solo to the Moon, Does that make you great? "Great, no; famous, yes," Arlys muttered, and forced himself to ignore the chittering computer. His gaze flicked over the various readout panels, the instruments which showed him what the ship was actually doing -- regardless of what his own senses might tell him. The barely perceptible throbbing of the magnetogravitic-drive engines sending out their inertial pulses made a subliminal rhythm section for the symphonic tweetings of the computer. First solo flight to the Moon. As a matter of cold fact, the first solo flight anywhere except for a few minor Earth-orbit flights. The final perfection of the magnetogravitic engine had rendered obsolete the bulky, huge, ungainly monsters that had carried the first crews to the Moon sixty years before. This baby. Solo One, was as easy to handle as a helicopter and almost as maneuverable. Doh-doh'duh-do-do-duh-doohdooh-dee-dee -- Solo One, Solo One, Do you read me? This is Space Control, Do you read?' Definitely not the computer. Arlys reached out a gloved hand and touched a switch. "Solo One here. I read you loud and clear. Space Control." "Give us a readout check on your position, attitude, velocity and acceleration, Solo One. " "Check readout. Check. Will do." He began going through the routine, carefully, accurately, automatically, keeping his voice neutral. He did not like Space Commander Eldam, but had always taken pains not to let her know it. There was an irritating quality in her manner. Her voice gave him the feeling that someone was pouring little shards of crushed glass on his eardrums. He was all for equality of the sexes, very strongly so. But that one rubbed him the wrong, way. As a matter of fact, so did her assistant. Subcommander Brase, whose good looks were overshadowed by her arrogance. Oh yes, he believed in sexual equality, but Eldam and Brase did not exactly represent the epitome of egalitarianism. He finished the readout check. After a moment, Eldam's voice, came. "Readouts all check. Programs synch. Carry on. Mister Arlys. " "Aye, aye, ma'am." He cut off his mike. "Blah," he said. Of course everything checked. This machine was simplicity itself. And at one gee all the way -- acceleration and deceleration -- he could get to the Moon in less time than it took to fly across the continent. No coasting except at "turnover" -- although he hadn't actually turned the ship over, merely reversed the engines. Of course, he'd been weightless all the way; he was being accelerated by the inertial pulses at IF the same rate the ship was. It was as though he were falling toward an Earth-mass a short distance in front of the ship -- or behind it, when the engines were reversed. The ship's sensors told him his velocity and acceleration relative to the surface of the Moon, and the distance to that surface. Anyone who could pilot a transcontinental aircraft could easily handle the Solo One, Doh'duh-day-doo-doh'day... So what makes you so great? "Because I'm the first!" Arlys snapped. "So shut up!" T he moon was rushing toward him, seemingly much too fast, but the instruments told him everything was under control. The altimeter should read one thousand when he came to a dead stop relative to the white surface of the broad plain of airless rock and dust toward which he sped. It did. He so reported to Space Control. The upward thrust of oh-pointone-seven gees exactly counterbalanced the pull of the Moon below. He eased back on the thrust control and began dropping again. The next phase had begun. "I am dropping from ten thousand to five hundred," he told Space Control. "Acknowledged, " When he reached the altitude he wanted, he came to a coitiplete stop again, applied lateral thrust so that he could survey the area for just the landing area he wanted. All the while, he kept up the steady patter of reporting to Space Control. Then, suddenly, he saw it. His breath hissed involuntarily. "Solo One! What happened? What is it?" "I'm not sure. Hold it a minute." He reversed his lateral thrust and backed up until he was directly over the thing. "I'm directly over it now," he said, "but I don't recognize it. It looks like a structure of some kind, the size of a small house. It sure as hell isn't natural." "Probably some geologic formation, " "It's too damn regular to be natural. It's a construct." "But no one's ever been to that part of the Moon, " "No one from Earth," Arlys corrected mildly. There was a long pause. Much longer than the transmission-time from Moon to Earth and back. Arlys made a decision at that moment. He knew what was going on in Space Commander Eldam's mind as surely as if they were telepathically linked. She would get him away from there and later send up a team to investigate the thing. Like hell she would! Again applying lateral thrust, he moved away from the strange structure and set the Solo One on the surface of the Moon. He was putting on his spacesuit whii Eldam's voice came again. "I Solo One, can you get a camera on that thing and send us a picture?" Ah! She wasn't sure yet! "I think so. Space Control. Take me a few minutes." If she wanted an image, she'd get one. So far, he hadn't disobeyed any orders. Eldam had assumed that he would not want to land, and therefore had failed to tell him not to. There had been a dozen spacefarers on the Moon before him but Arlys would be the first to go it alone. In their crude ships the previous teams had spent considerable time getting in and out of their vessels; Arlys was under no such restrictions. After making certain that all his communication lines were open, he picked up the battery-powered camera and a flashlight, and cycled himself through the airlock. At least, he couldn't hear the damned tweetlings from the computer in his helmet earphones. He looked across the barren, rock-strewn plain at the strange structure which stood against the space-black sky. "If that thing is a geological formation," he muttered to himself, "then I am a quadratic equation." H e started walking toward the thing, leaving footprints behind in the gritty lunar soil. Solo One, aren 't you ready with that camera yet?" With appropriate Spiritual development, you can come to know this as the absolute Truth, which it is, and really knowing this Truth will set you free from every form of I limitation. Only #. If not completely satisfied, return material within one week for full refund. !  "Just about," he replied truthfully. "I'm setting it up now. I'll have it in operation very shortly." "Very well. Is your ship stabil' ized so that we can get a clear image?" "I'm sure the image will come in quite clearly." Arlys found a fairly flat-topped boulder about chest high, and decided it was just what he wanted. Carefully, he set the portable camera on it, aimed and focused it on the strange structure, set the remote control relay to "ready", and went on toward the whateveritwas. He had been moving on sheer determination. He had found something strange, something never before seen by anyone on Earth, IF and he was certainly not going to let Space Commander Eldam cheat him out of the credit -- and maybe glory -- of investigating it. It was not until he saw the track's that he realized shatteringly that his determination had blind him to what might be deadly danger. He stopped and stared at the prints in the soil between himself and the structure, his mind almost numb. Somehow, it had never occurred to him that whoever or whatever had built the thing might still be inside it. Or around somewhere. Fear. He got behind a boulder so fast that he was never afterward sure of how he had done it. Anything to get a shield between himself and the alien artifact. He crouched with his back to the boulder, staring at his own footprints and those of the alien -- aliens? -- while perspiration oozed from his pores. "iSoo One, this is Space Control We're waiting for your transmission. " His mind was comparing the two sets of prints. The alien prints were very like his own. Only the sole pattern was different. "Solo One! Please report! Solo One! Please report!" It was then that he saw the essential difference between his own prints and those of the -- others. He swallowed, then pitched his voice very carefully. It wouldn't do to show Commander Eldam that he had momentarily funked. "Solo One here," he said briskly. "Space Control, if you want a man to get his work done, don't get all hysterical and start yammering in his ears. Transmission of image will begin very shortly." He sto up confidently, walked around the boulder,' and headed directly toward the alien structure. Space Control did not reply. When he was within ten paces of the structure he stopped, looked at it carefully for a time, then, satisfied, thumbed the relay that activated the remote camera, "Space Control, you should be getting your image now. Is it clear?" A long pause. "Space Control here. Picture clear. What angle are you taking it from?" Arlys grinned. The old bat was confused. Before he could answer -- "Solo One! There's something in what looks like a spacesuit standing near the thing!" "That's me, Commander." Carefully concealing his joy, he went on to report what he had done. "You landed? But you had no -- " "I have my orders. Commander," Arlys interrupted. "Quote: 'Upon finding a suitable landing site near the target zone, the pilot shall land and survey the nearby area as hereinafter directed.' Close quote. The 'hereinafter directed' part says -- and I quote -- " Commander Eldam cut him short. '# know your orders, Arlys, You obeyed them. Drop it. But isn't it a little headstrong for you to walk up to the thing like that? What if there's an alien inside, waiting for you?" "Commander, I looked at those footprints. Now I've looked at the structure." He paused. "Commander, they have weathered. The footprints are blurred. The surface of the structure looks as if it had been lightly sandblasted. Except, of course, for the underside, where micrometeors couldn't hit it. But the thing is old -- old! Do you have any idea how long it takes to weather something on the surface of the Moon?" He looked up at the thing. "It's about twice my height, as you can see. It's an octagonal box -- not a regular octagon; it has four long sides and four shorter ones, like a square with, the corners cut off. You can't see it from there but that's what it looks like from above. There are four braces, as you can see, attached to the shorter sides. They hold that bedroom-sized box up off the ground so that the bottom is a little higher than my head." He walked partway around the thing and stepped into its shadow. "There's an entrance on this side with a ladder going up to it." "Arlys, don't go into that thing until we've checked it over more. I don't krtow how well a fiftythousand-year-old booby trap might work but I don't want you to find out just yet. " "I don't either, believe me. Wait a minute; there's some sort of metal plaque here, at just about eye level. Looks like some sort of inscription on it." He directed his flashlight obliquely across the curious glyphs. "I'd say it was definitely writing of some kind," Arlys said, "but God only knows what it means." "Get a still camera and photograph it," Eldam said. "Continue your investigation. And congratulations, Arlys: you've done well. " Arlys looked up at the strange artifact. What was it? Who or what had put it here? Aliens from another planet? From another star? No way of knowing yet. But scientists would eventually figure it out. And the credit as discoverer would go to Space Officer Arlys. Another First. He chuckled to himself. First Solo. First finder of an alien artifact. And another step toward equality. In spite of the teams of women who had come here before him, he was the first man on the Moon. IF For ten years she slept, and then awoke- to a nightmare! Dr. Markowitz noticed a rise in blood pressure and checked over all the instruments he had used. "I can't figure it out," he said to the nurse. "Fve done just about every type of test. Perhaps we'd better try a rubber gloves." He washed his hands and put on the gloves. She handed him a spectroscope. "Thank you," he said. The patient remained unconscious. rwioM, Tm pregnant! Can you X believe it? I just got back from the Lab Center and the test was affirmative," She sat down happily and the chair came on automatically. Tom sat down beside her and turned off the mech. "Let's celebrate. We can have a party!" "A baby party when I'm one month pregnant? No, let's go to the Airship for dinner. I'll have all those outworld confections -- you know I'm supposed to have cravings." "I can't believe it!" Dr. Markowitz exploded. He pushed the intercom and yelled to Nurse Oren. "Madeline, get in here, now!" Madeline Oren opened the door in time to see Samuel Markowitz ripping off his rubber gloves and starting a urine test. "What is it. Doctor?" She could see that his face was red and he was trembling. Markowitz yelled savagely, "When was this patient's last two ago?" Madeline Oren ran to the cabinet and searched through the files. At last she drew out the most recent file on trelsheet carefully. "The last one was June third -- a month and a half ago." She looked anxiously at Markowitz. "Why, Doctor? "What is wrong?" She put down the papers and went to the lab table. He worked the test tube and then spoke. "I've just completed a urine test and a physical. Ann Trelling is one month pregnant." fTiHis food is fantastic, Tom." X He patted her hand lovingly and dialed another selection. It arrived immediately and they ate some of each kind. "You know, Arlin is going to be jealous. She's been trying to get pregnant for months." Tom smiled reprovingly, "Now, Ann -- " Both of them worked on the last test and when it was completed they could only stare at the results in shock. "How," Markowitz asked in a small voice, "how could she be pregnant? She's been out the whole time, hasn't she?" "Of course," Nurse Oren replied defensively. "But what I can't figure out is -- who? Who. would rape an unconscious patient? I can personally affirm that no man has been alone with her, except you, since I've been on the case." "Well, wipe that look off your face, Madeline. It wasn't me." He looked at the face of Ann Trelling. It was a placid face, as expressionless as it had been since he had taken charge of her ten years earlier. "Her mother will have to be notified. Damn. How will I face her? She could sue me for malpractice, for letting this happen." T ihey grounded from the "Airship" and then took a helicab home. The apartment was dark and silent when Tom flicked on the illuminator. Ann danced into the room, then lay down on the lounger, contemplating the dimly glowing walls. "You know, right now is one of the times I wish I knew where my parents were. I don't remember her that well -- but I'd like to tell my mother and see the look on her face." "Now don't start that again." Tom was lying on the couch. He turned on the telebank with his foot and pushed his head down into the cushions. "You hardly remember her and you don't even remember what happened when you were IF fourteen that made you forget." "Still, I remember that I loved her," Ann said slowly. "You've got to admit that it's scary to wake up one day when you're fourteen and not know where you are and where anybody else is." Tom smiled condescendingly, "That psychiatrist told you that some bad experience must have blocked it out. Now, if you can't recall it, you shouldn't make yourself miserable about it." Ann nodded. "I only wish I could tell them -- " Mrs. Doreen Trelling was a big woman with tremendous legs. Her bosom comprised the front half of her body, a fact she had ceased trying to conceal. She was a widow and had worn black since the day of her husband's funeral five years before. Now her face was troubled. Dr. Markowitz rose and shook her hand. "Sit down, Mrs. Trelling. I want to discuss Ann's condition with you." He motioned to an overstuffed chair and then sat down himself, mopping his face with a handkerchief. "I don't understand. Doctor. She isn't deteriorating, is she?" Mrs. Trelling took out a dainty square of cloth and held it to her nose. The past ten years had been a considerable trial to her, especially since the death of her husband. Dr. Markowitz was aware of the delicacy of his mission and tried a more circumspect approach. He folded his hands on the polished mahogany desk and began in his most clinical manner. "Mrs. Trelling, the machines have been keeping Ann in fine condition -- have been since the onset of her disease in #. She has been under constant surveillance by either myself or my staff headed by Nurse Oren." He looked up into Mrs. Trelling's expectant face. "She's in excellent shape, Mrs. Trelling. We were quite fortunate to be able to procure and pay for the special equipment that maintains Ann's body." Doreen Trelling knew that Dr. Markowitz had something more than routine information to give her. She licked her lips and studied the assorted clutter on his desk. 'T thoroughly examined Ann this morning. It didn't seem necessary to give a thorough gynocological examination so soon. You know we've monitored to detect cancer or malignancy and in the past month we never had reason, never thought it necessary to -- " He broke off, searching for some safe way to tell her, some way he could save himself. "A vaginal examination shows that the hymen has been broken, in fact that -- and I'm not sure how -- intercourse has taken place." Mrs. Trelling started. Horror spread over her face. "My Ann? My Ann has been raped?" She began to choke and fumbled in her purse for a small brown bottle. "Please, Mrs. Trelling. Please, get a grip on yourself. Ann could not, according to our records and observations, have had anything of the kind happen to her. However..." happy. The sheets, the kind that come coated with miracrepe, were cool and crisp, Tom was still asleep because the day was Saturday. The morning sun twinkled through the mosaic-glass of the window. She crept out of bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen where she dialed some coffee. The dispenser spilled a little -- she'd have to get a repairman. Today she would call Moila and Arneen. They had all been so close at college -- they should be told right away. It was good to savor the polished cleanliness of the kitchen while she drank her coffee -- then, putting down her cup she piroutted into the living room. "However -- " Dr. Markowitz took a deep breath -- "although I'm not sure how this could medically be so, she is pregnant." He watched Doreen Trelling closely. She didn't understand at first. Or maybe she just didn't believe it. "Pregnant? Is this some kind of joke -- pregnant? Dr. Markowitz stood up and turned to the wall behind the desk which was covered with his framed medical certificates. He did not want to look at Mrs. Trelling. "We gave her every test possible and even though the condition is only one month in progress, it is definite." Mrs. Trelling began to cry. know what I bought? A X crib and some diapers -- and you'll never believe the toys. I had a wonderful time buying all this stuff." Her eyes shone and Tom took the packages from the floater. "You bought enough," he said emphatically, "for a whole room full of babies." He saw the bandage on her hand. "What happened to your hand?" "Oh that," she said unwinding IF the makeshift bandage. "You know what a klutz I am sometimes. The helicab plate was bent a little and I slashed myself good." When she finished unwinding, Tom could see the ugly gash, diagonal across the palm. When Madeline Oren came into the office Dr. Markowitz was sitting at his desk, but still staring at the wall with all his certificates. He had turned off the light and twilight was in the room. "Doctor -- Sam. Please. You've been in here for hours. I've been going crazy rescheduling your appointments." She stepped in and closed the door quietly. "There's something else, Sam -- it's happened again. You know -- this time it's on the hand. Ann Trelling has slashed her palm -- or someone has done it for her." Madeline strode to the window and opened the blinds. Outside the sun had washed the buildings with pink and the trees looked like dark shadows. "What are we going to do? Have you ever told her about the bruises and cuts?" She turned back to him -- he looked older than his fifty years. "You were afraid she wouldn't believe you, like the others, weren't you?" Madeline sighed and sat on the sill. She was a dedicated nurse and after all the years on this case, she would not question Markowitz. She had always hoped that her dedication had meant more to him than the raises she had received through the years. Now she wanted to comfort him, and he would not allow it. Markowitz stood up and gathered his charts from a drawer. "Let's go," he said simply. They went to examine the strange cut. One for which there was no explanation. jet'll take care of it, honey," XTom said. He went to the bathroom and hunted around in the cabinet. He came back with a spray jar of Sutural. She held her hand over some newspapers so as not to mess up the table and he sprayed the cut thoroughly. "Does that feel better?" he asked kissing her. They had been married for two years and he still cherished each moment with her. "You silly, it'll be healed in an hour." They ate dinner and dialed away the dishes. There was nothing on the teletank so they read. Ann began thinking of the time when she was fourteen years old and had suddenly found herself in another world. She had not been feeling well that day. The blackness had closed in suddenly; spinning flashes of blue fire had seemed to surround her, lift her higher, higher. And higher still, she had seen a bright hole in the darkness -- a place through which she must pass. "It'S happening again. Look." Madeline Oren held the hand of Ann Trelling under the microscope. Through the glass she could see the knitting of flesh -- an almost magical mending of human cells, as if in a time lapse picture. Markowitz was always fascinated when this happened. The bruises that faded were interesting, it was true. But the superfast healing of cuts was fantastic. He would have taken a film of the process, but he knew Harvard would never believe it. To them he was a glory seeker. Not only did Markowitz have the strange healing of cuts to deal with but also the inexplicable racing of the nervous system. At times Ann Trelling would breathe heavily as if she had just run a great distance, sometimes irregularly as if she were talking. And her eyes, although they were always closed, moved not only as was normal in sleep, but also during the day as if watching, looking. At last Markowitz took his eyes from the microscope. "Madeline, I'm going to try to wake her up. The Harvard studies will be conclusive soon." He took up his charts and started for the office. "A lot of study has gone into this thing since nineteenseventy and we may be able to bring her to consciousness. The trick is keeping her there." Markowitz had reached the door of his office and he turned to Madeline as he put his hand on the knob. "Ifll be in a few months. It's dangerous and she may only wake for a few minutes. And now there's the other consideration. Should we terminate the baby?" He shut her out with a final click of the door. T ihree months later as Ann DeForest lay in her bed, her hands on her stomach trying to feel the new life, everything blurred. Suddenly she was falling through a blind tunnel down, down. Blue fire flashed and swirled. She thought it was a nightmare, that she must be dreaming, for down in the distance she could see a faroff bed and on the bed she could see herself asleep. And just as suddenly, with the same flickering spiral, she began to float upward. Far below a sleeping girl, a mirror image of herself, vanished. IF Ann DeForest woke up drenched with sweat and her heart was beating loudly in her chest. She shook Tom awake. Madeline Oren looked up in awe. "Sam, she responded. She almost woke up." Markowitz smiled. It was the third time they had dosed Ann Trelling with Titral # i.v. Now at last there was a response -- there was hope. But he couldn't know the end result of his efforts. Would Ann Trelling wake up a fourteenyear-old in her twenty-fouryear-old body? Would her brain be damaged? What would Ann Trelling be after all those lost years? The Trelling case had started out as a news spectacular with Markowitz's name in the headlines of half a dozen newspapers. And it had made him rich -- he was in sole charge of Ann Trelling, the sleeping beauty. His collaboration with researchers had not brought back the fading glamor. Now all those ten years were summed up. If he could wake her, save her, he would be famous again -- the disbelief would vanish and the money would flow. If only it weren't for the pregnancy; that was a real embarrassment. He would have to get Doreen Trelling to sign a release. JNow calm down. Don't excite yourself in your condition." He turned the room on dim. "It was so real, Tom. I could swear I wasn't asleep when it happened." Ann got up and put on a dry gown. "Maybe I'll go see the doctor tomorrow and make sure everything is all right in there." She patted her stomach. "Sure, you do that. Now you rest. You'll feel better in the morning." He turned off the room. "Shall we give her another dose, Sam? One more really ought to bring her around." Nurse Oren handed him the needle. "Yes. I think we will." But he waited another fifteen minutes before injecting. He watched anxiously, gripping the table hard with his hands. Five other men sat in chairs around the bed and watched, too. They noted the condition of the patient and each thought his private thoughts. They were graying men, anxious to see the results of lengthy and unsung research. This could be a great moment for medicine -- and for them. Ann Trelling moaned. She stirred slightly and then, for the first time in ten years, opened her eyes. Markowitz bent over her, looking down into her eyes -- and she screamed. It was a long piercing scream of fright. She sat up slowly and saw a short blond woman in a white uniform backing toward the door. An older man in white, obviously a doctor, stood looking at her silently, amazed. His mouth hung open as if she were the strangest sight in the world. And five gray men sat like statues in their chairs. "Who are you?" Ann Trelling screamed. "I know I'm not asleep this time." She stared around the room, searching for one point of reference, one familiar thing that would explain any of this. Markowitz spoke. "Ann, you've been unconscious for ten years in this building. I'm Samuel Markowitz, I've been in charge of you all these years and these machines have kept your body well." Ann glanced down at the gadgetry and then looked at Markowitz, "Do you mean to tell me I've been here since I was -- fourteen? That I have never left this room the whole time?" Markowitz nodded. "Did you dream you were somewhere else?" Ann suddenly looked down at her swollen stomach, then to Markowitz. "Doctor, did I dream myself pregnant? I'm twenty-four years old. I graduated from Mohelen State College and have a masters in English Lit. Arlin Dreyer is my best friend and I'm married to Tom DeForest." Markowitz did not think he was talking to a fourteenyear-old girl. "How can that be?" He had spoken mostly to himself, but if anyone had an answer it was too late for one. Ann Trelling began to drowse and then lay down once more -- so still that it was as if she had never woken at all. Markowitz turned to Madeline Oren, who stood at the door gripping the knob until her hand was white, and then to the five gray men. "Next time," he said forcefully, "we'll bring her around for good." T he psychiatrist's office was ultramodern and designed for distraction. Electric paintings covered the walls of the outer office. A green sparklex carpet shimmered under the expensive furniture and there were several transistor teletanks for individual use. By contrast the inner office was a retreat. The doctor's room IF was dark and filled with overstaffed chairs. Ann DeForest relaxed in one and tried to cooperate with Dr. Sacra. "The mind," he said "is a powerful instrument. Your dream hks taken you back to a turning point in your life, one we have discussed previously. You said you were fourteen when you became -- lost?" He kept his face calm and noncommittal. "Well, I wasn't really lost -- I just forgot some things. I knew who I was, where I was born, where I lived. It's just that when the police took me back home it wasn't the same. The place is what I'm talking about -- it was gone. None of the buildings were the same. The house I grew up in was gone -- there was a park there. "At first I was scared to death. Then I just started to make my life over as best I could. By the time I got to college things were fine. Now I'm married and happy, especially about the baby. It's only now and then that I think about my mother and father -- but if I try to remember any specific thing it's like trying to see through a dark fog." "Mrs. DeForest, as we have discussed, something traumatic must have happened to you to make you forget your past. Something happened that you can't remember. We can try to dig it out again -- but for now remember this. If you should have this dream again before our next session, try to find out what really happened to you. After all, you can't really be asleep on a bed for all these years if you are here. And when you want to return from there, remember, you have a strong personality and your mind is a powerful instrument, more powerful than dreams, reality or solid matter. So don't be afraid -- you can always wake yourself up." When Ann left she was still troubled. Her "dream" had not seemed like a dream at all. Mrs. Trelling, dressed in her best black dress sat anxiously, watching her daughter. She was embarrassed to notice the girl's figure, but still she had been led to hope that she could speak with her daughter -- if only for a few minutes -- alone. She did not want the researchers there. Dr. Markowitz, assisted by Nurse Oren, was about to administer the needle. "When she comes around, Mrs. Trelling, don't upset her with a lot of questions. Just tell her you love her and want her to stay with you." Mrs. Trelling nodded and suppressed her tears. She had hoped for this moment for ten long years. The death of her husband had left her almost in despair and now, in an instant, she was expecting a pinnacle of happiness. Markowitz injected and then stepped back, waiting. A few seconds went by before Ann Trelling stirred. She opened her eyes and looked around. Her expression suggested she might be experiencing vertigo. For a moment no one spoke. Suddenly Doreen Trelling jumped up. "Ann, Ann. I'm your mother. Do you remember me, honey?" She ran to the bed and took Ann's hand. Ann DeForest looked at them all. She naw seemed calm. She looked at Doreen Trelling especially and a flicker of recognition stirred in her. She smiled, "You're my mother? I've found you? Where are we?" "We're in Dr. Markowitz's offices, darling. You've been asleep for a long time and now I'm going to take you home." She stroked the girl's hand tentatively. "Of course we'll have to be discreet about your pregnancy -- perhaps an abortion." "What are you talking about? I'm married and this is my own baby." Ann considered whether they were all crazy. Or was losing her mind? "Now, Ann," Doreen Trelling said sweetly, "don't be difficult. You've been here for ten years and there is no husband. You dreamed it. Now I'm going to make arrangements to take you home. "If you like I'll take you to a home and after the baby's born -- it can be given up. Now, sweetheart, I have a lot to catch you up on -- yoiir father's death, your cousins' getting married..." Ann did not remember her father or cousins. She was aware only of fear. She had to get back. I must wake up, I must get back, Tom! Tom! I am more powerful than dreams. Dr. Markowitz was much more real than any dream. He was reaching for a hypodermic. I am more powerful than reality, I choose my reality. Markowitz saw the monitors fluctuating down to zero. He looked at Ann and he could not believe what he saw. The girl who sat on the bed was fading -- no, flickering -- like a candle. Through her body he could see the frame of the door and the shelves of bottles. Doreen Trelling screamed and stepped back. Madeline Oren hid behind the doctor. At last Ann Trelling could not be seen at all. The only evidence that she had ever been there was the bank of gleaming instruments. IF Conclusion administrative hub of the Known Universe, the planetcity Pax, to Skaith, a recently discovered neoprimitive planet which orbits a dying star 'out beyond the OrionSpur, " Stark, a mercenary warrior, has learned that his foster-father. Union administrator who had saved him from a life of savagery, has disappeared on Skaith, Within a short time after his arrival at Skeg, only spaceport city on Skaith, Stark learns that the Union s Consular Offices have been burned and that no trace of Ashton, alive or dead, is to be found. Ashton has, however, left a legacy, a Report which states in part: The Lords Protector, reputed to be "undying and unchanging, " were apparently established long ago by the then ruling powers, as a sort of superbenevolence. The Great Migrations were beginning, the civilizations of the north were breaking up as the people moved away from the increasing cold, and there was certain to be a time of chaos with various groups competing for new lands. Then and later, when some stability was reestablished, the Lords Protector were to prevent total trampling of the weak by the strong. Their law was simple: succor the weak, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, strive always for the greatest good o f the greatest number. It appears that through the centuries that law was carried far beyond its original intent. The Farers and the many smaller non-productive fragments of this thoroughly fragmented culture are now the greater number, with the result that the Wandsmen, in the name of the Lords Protector, hold a third or more of the population in virtual slavery to supply the rest... leader of the Wandsmen and the Farers, is the man responsible for the arson -- and by implication, for the disappearance and possible death of Ashton. By asking openly about the whereabouts of Ashton, Stark sets himself up as bait for Gelmar. He meets a Farer-girl who entices him to a lonely cliff overlooking the sea, where he finds Gelmar waiting. Gelmar questions Stark, attempts to enroll him in the ranks of the Farers. Failing in this Gelmar signals, and seemingly from nowhere a mob of Farers appears. But before they can reach him. Stark seizes Gelmar and leaps into the sea. It is now Stark's turn to question Gelmar. He learns that Ashton is indeed alive, held prisoner in the far-North in the Citadel of the Lords Protector -- the final mysterious masters of Skaith. He also learns that Gerrith, wise-woman of Iman, has prophesied that an offIF worlder will destroy the Lords Protector for the sake of Ashton, A fter a desperate but victorious battle with a mutated, sub-human sea-creature. Stark manages to reach shore some distance away from the mob of Farers, A little ways inland he falls in with a group from Irnan, They are on their way to Skeg where they hope to make contact with the Galactic Union. The Irnanese want to emigrate -- anywhere, as long as it is off Skaith,  When Stark tells them the consulate has been burned they decide to escort him to Iman, so that Gerrith may examine him. Since Irnan lies in the North, Stark agrees to accompany them -- but all are captured by Wandsmen just outside Iman. Once again Stark confronts Gelmar, who orders that he and his companions be taken inside the city for a festivalexecution. Also to be included in the festivities is Gerrithdaughter-of-Gerrith her mother is already dead -- a seer in her own right. However, Gelmar's plans once again go awry as the hatred of the Irnanese for the Wandsmen and the Farers explodes into open revolt at the prospect of the atrocity before them. The Farers and most of the Wandsmen are killed. The burghers of Iman, now in open revolt against the power of the Lords Protector, aid Stark and Gerrith who has decided to accompany him for her own arcane reasons by assigning them a picked group of Irnanese warriors to escort them across the Barrens on their way to Worldheart, Citadel of the Lords. A fter many adventures... slope so that Hargoth was obliged to follow. Then he stopped. "I will lead you," he said, "after we have taken the Citadel. Not before." The wind moaned against the ridge, sending a frozen spindrift of white crystals across it that drifted down on Stark and the Irnanese, on Hargoth and his lesser priests. There was an instinctive movement, each group gathering apart from the other. After that they stood very still. Hargoth said, "The ships are in the south." Stark nodded. "Unfortunately that gate is shut. There is war in the south. Others besides yourselves wish to follow those star-roads, and the Wandsmen are saying they cannot. They kill in the name of the Lords Protector. The only way to open that gate is to take the Citadel, destroy the Lords Protector and the Wandsmen along with them. Otherwise you go south only to die." The wind moaned. Hargoth turned to Gerrith. "Sun Woman, is all this true?" "It is true," she answered. "Besides," said Stark, suddenly weary of trying to cope with people who stubbornly insisted on getting in his way, "if Skaith were an open world certain kinds of ships could land anywhere on the planet instead of being confined to the enclave at Skeg. There would be no need for your people to go south. It would be much easier for ships to come to you." Hargoth did not answer this. Stark had no idea what he might be thinking. He was only certain of one thing. He would die fighting rather than be taken captive again -- by anyone. He shifted his muscles stiff with cold. Hargoth spoke at last. "What shall I call you?" "Stark." "You are wise in your knowledge, Stark, but I am wise in mine. And I tell you that between us and the Citadel lies Thyra." "Is there no way around? The land seems broad enough." "It narrows. Thyra bestrides that narrowness. Thyra is strong and populous. And greedy." He paused, then added harshly, "They have dealings with the Wandsmen. The same word that came to us would have come even sooner to them." Stark nodded. He stared at the ground, scowling. "South," said Hargoth. "That is the only way." His voice held an inflexible note of triumph. Stark kept his peace, answered with a shrug Hargoth could read any way that pleased him. Apparently satisfied, he turned and started down the slope. "The fires are warm, the shelters ready. Let us enjoy them. Tomorrow at his rising we will ask a blessing of Old Sun." Stark perforce followed Hargoth this time. There was nothing of menace in what the man had said yet Stark felt a twinge of unease. He looked at Gerrith walking beside him, her long braid swinging. Sun-colored braid beneath the frost. Sun-colored woman. What did Hargoth want of her? He started to speak but she gave him a warning look as Hargoth glanced over his shoulder at them with a sharp-edged smile. Blankfaced, they followed him down. The camp held only young men. Women, children and elderly men, they were told, were already making preparations for the migration, packing the belongings, dismantling the homes in the broken towers, drying meat and making journey-bread, choosing out the IF beasts that would be saved from the present slaughter to support them later on. They were singing, said Hargoth, the ancient hymn preserved from times beyond remembrance, taught once in each lifetime but never sung in earnest until now -- The Hymn of Deliverance. The Promised One shall lead us Down the long roads o f the stars. Toward a new beginning... The men sang it around the fires as Stark and the others came in. Their faces were flushed, their eyes from the far places of heaven. Stark felt embarrassed and more than a little annoyed. Ever since he had landed on Skaith people had been forcing shackles on him, shackles of duty that he had not chosen and did not want. Damn these people and their prophecies and legends! "Our forefathers were men of knowledge," said Hargoth. "They dreamed of star-flight. While the world died around them they continued to dream and to work, but it was too late. They left us the promise that though all could not go, one day you would come for us." Stark was glad when the hymn ended. Gerrith refused food and asked to be shown to her shelter. Her face had that remote prophetess look on it. Stark saw the skin flaps of the tent fall shut behind her with a feeling of chill between his shoulderblades. He ate the food that was given him, not because he was especially hungry but because the hunting artimal never knows how long it may be until the next meal. They also gave him a strong drink that seemed to be made of fermented milk. The Irnanese sat near him in a close group. He sensed that they wanted to talk but were inhabited by Hargoth and his people, who crouched or moved among the fires like slender ghosts with their high, stooping shoulders and their graymasked faces, all alike and without expression. Despite the fact that the People of the Towers had rescued them from Amnir's shackles Stark did not like them. There was a touch of madness in them, bom of the long dark and the too-longheld faith. It made him feel no easier that their madness was centered on him. T he flaps of her tent opened and Gerrith stood in the firelight. She had thrown off her outer garments and her head was bare. She held the small ivory skull, still speckled from the slaughter at Irnan, over the campfire. Hargoth had risen. Gerrith faced him, her eyes meeting his like copper sunrays meeting ice. She spoke, her voice ringing #sweet and clear, as it had that day when Mordach tried to shame her and died for it. "Hargoth," she said. "You intend to give me to Old Sun to buy his blessing." Hargoth did not look aside though he must have heard Stark and the Irnanese getting to their feet, clapping hands to weapons. "Yes," he said to Gerrith, "you are a chosen sacrifice, sent to me for that purpose." Gerrith shook her head. "It is not iny fate to die here -- if you try to kill me your people wil never walk the star-roads nor see a brighter sun." Her voice carried such conviction that Hargoth hesitated over whatever words he had been about to say. "My place is with the Promised One," said Gerrith. "My path lies northward. And I tell you there will be enough blood to feed Old Sun before this is finished." She held the skull higher over the fire and the flames turned a sullen red, staining them all with the color of death. Hargoth looked uncertain. But he was proud and obstinate. "I am king," he said. "And high-priest. I know what must be done for my people." "Do you?" asked Stark quietly. "Can you be sure? You know only the dream. I am reality. How do you know that I am truly the Promised One?" "You come from the stars," said Hargoth. "Yes. But so does the stranger who was brought to the Citadel, and he is the one who tells the ships to come, not I." Hargoth stared at him for a long moment in the red glare of the fire. "He has that power?" "He has," said Stark. "How can you be sure that he is not the Promised One?" Gerrith lowered her hands and stepped back from the fire. The flames returned to their normal color. She said calmly, "You stand at the crossroads, Hargoth. The path you choose now will determine the fate of your people." A heavy and sententious statement, Stark thought, but he felt no desire to smile at it. It was the simple truth and involved his own and Ashton's fate as well as that of Hargoth's people. His hand closed over the hilt of the sword taken from one of Amnir's men. He waited for Hargoth's answer. If the old man persisted in his plan Old Sun was going to have some victims here and now. Hargoth's eyes flicked uncertainly between Stark and Gerrith with IF the chill, flat, shining gaze of madness, of fanatic conviction. The lesser priests who had assisted him at Amnir's camp were gathered nearby, their masked faces immobile, watching. Suddenly Hargoth turned on his heel and joined them. They went apart. Their backs formed a wall that hid whatever they might be doing but the movement of their shoulders indicated that some sort of ritual was being performed. They chanted, a low sonorous murmuring. "Lacking a live victim," Gerrith said, "They're consulting some other augury." "It had better be favorable," said Halk as he drew his swordblade hissing from its sheath. The silence lengthened. The guttering fire hissed as snow and frost fell into it. The People of the Towers stood in the howling darkness beyond and waited. The priests gave a long moaning sigh. They bowed to some invisible Presence. Then they returned to the fire. "Three times we have cast the sacred finger-bones of the Spring Child," said Hargoth. "Three times they pointed north." His eyes showed a desperate, thwarted rage. "Very well. We will go up against the Thyrans. And if we win past them, do you know what waits beyond to keep us from the Citadel?" "Yes," said Stark. "The Northhounds." "A shadow crossed Gerrith's face. She shivered. "What is it?" asked Stark. "I don't know. It seemed... that when you spoke that name, one heard it." Across the desolate miles to the north a great white shape had paused in its measured padding through blowing snow. It turned and swung a huge, fanged muzzle southward, questing across the wind. land narrowed. It began to rise sharply toward a series of ridges. On either hand were rough hills and deep gullies choked with tumbled ice. The track of Amnir's wagons still followed the ancient road, but the summer thaw was strong enough to cut that road in many places. It had been remade across the beds of wider channels, the narrower ones filled in with stones, ,a tribute to the hard work and enterprise of Amnir's men. Much good it had done them in the end. With Hargoth's people the party now numbered thirty-six -- two-tens of fighting men and their captain, all armed with slings and javelins, the Corn King and eight priests armed with magic, and the original six who had come from Irnan. Stark would just as soon have dispensed with his new allies. The force was too large to move easily in secret and too small to be an effective attack unit. Still, he thought, the Corn King and his priests might be useful in one way. When they came to meet the Northhounds the Breath of the Goddess might at least slow down those legendary demons. In any case he had had no choice. The narrow men in gray proved to be nearly tireless. TKeir marching gait was a sort of springy trot that was difficult at first for Stark and the others to match after their long days of captivity. But they fell into the pace, gradually feeling strength and elasticity returning. Halk, who had suffered the worst confinement, stumbled along at the rear, sweating and cursing. He was so vile-tempered that Breca gave up trying to help him and rejoined the others. "How far to Thyra?" asked Stark. "Three long marches." Hargoth had not been to Thyra but Kintoth, captain of the fighting men, had. He wore lightning-strokes on the cheeks of his mask and carried an iron sword. "We go there sometimes to trade for tools and weapons," Kintoth said, slapping his sword-hilt. "The Thyrans are great smiths. We always go in force. We trade them dried meat as well as hides and cloth. In the old days, before the trader we were afraid of being added to their foodstocks ourselves. Now that Amnir is dead we shall have to start worrying again. The Thyrans keep beasts and trade knives to the lichen-gatherers for fodder. But there's never enough in the starving times." "We trade women, too," said Hargoth. "A matter of necessity, though neither we nor the Thyrans like it. Both peoples must have fresh blood to survive. There was a third city once that neighbored us, but its inhabitants kept too fiercely to themselves and finally they died." He trotted on for some time in silence. Then he added, "Sometimes the Wandsmen bring us women from the south. They don't live long here. Usually we give them to Old Sun." He looked at Gerrith. "What about the Citadel?" asked Stark, not missing the look. "We've never seen it. No one has. Not even the Harsenyi. There are the Northhounds to guard against strangers. And there is the mist." "Mist?" "Thick mist that boils like steam above a cauldron and never lifts. It is a strong magic. The Citadel is IF always protected and hidden." "But you know the way there?" "I know what the Harsenyi have said. Some of their people serve the Wandsmen." "But you don't really know. Do the Thyrans?" "I have told you. The way is known -- and not known." "What about the women from the south?" "The ones they give us are never taken to the Citadel, but brought straight on." Hargoth's mouth was a thin line. "The gifts of the Wandsmen! They bring us more than women. Small phials with pretty powders, joy and dreams for all, and perpetual slavery. They tempt our young ones to go south and join the Farers. We are not fond of the Wandsmen." Hargoth studied the strangers. Old Sun was above the horizon now, and the old man's gaze moved from one face to another, not hurrying, seeking in the rusty daylight what he had not seen by starlight or the flickering gleam of the fires. "You have come a long way to destroy them. Why?" They told him. Hargoth listened. When they had finished he said, "You Southrons must be soft indeed to let yourselves be so badly ruled." Gerrith held up a hand to forestall Halk's angry outburst. She stared coldly at Hargoth and said. "You've heard of the Farers. You've never seen them. You've never seen a mob in action. Perhaps you will before you're through. Tell me your opinion then." Hargoth inclined his head. "The Lords Protector," Stark said. "What do you know of them?" "I think they're a lie the Wandsmen tell to stay in power. Or if they ever lived, they've been dead a thousand years. That's why I would call this a fool's errand, except that I know the Wandsmen are real. And if, as you say, they intend to keep us from the stars..." Apparently he was still not quite convinced. He continued to glance sidelong at Gerrith from time to time in a manner that Stark did not care for. "My lord Darkness, my lady Cold, their daughter Hunger," he said. "You worship the Goddess and she sends her power through you. Yet you also worship Old Sun?" "We need him to keep the darker gods at bay. Otherwise we would die. Besides, the Sun Woman was to be a parting-gift." Long after Old Sun's setting they left the road and found a secure hollow in the hills. The warriors built tiny fires of what dead mosses and lichens they could find among the wind-scoured stones. They had not expected to be so long away from the Towers and rations were short. No one complained. Hunger was an expected part of their lives. When it was time for sleep, Stark took Gerrith aside and said, "You'll shelter with me. I think Hargoth still has notions." She accepted without protest. Stark saw Halk watching, wise and sneering, as he followed Gerrith into the tent. T heir two bodies crowded the small space, and Stark realized that this was the first time since that bloody day in the square of Irnan that he had been alone with Gerrith. On the way to Izvand there had been the Irnanese, the troop of mercenaries and not a moment's privacy. Halk and Breca pleasured themselves as the fancy took them, without embarrassment, but theirs was an old relationship. Stark and Gerrith had had no relationship beyond their roles as Wise Woman and Dark Man -- one hardly conducive to intimacy. He was not at all sure that she wanted any other. Her status as prophetess set her apart, surrounding her with a certain aura of untouchability. Besides, it had been most hellishly cold. Afterward, as Amnir's captives, there had been no opportunity even for conversation, let alone anything else. Now, with a minuscule lamp for light and themselves for warmth, he felt something totally new. He was conscious that they touched, at thigh and hip and shoulder. Their breath mingled in faint clouds of vapor, animal heat rose from their living flesh. Lying close, he felt her shivering stop. He put his hand on hers. "Has your gift yet told you why it was you had to journey all this weary way?" "Let's not talk about it now." She turned her head and looked at him. "Let's not talk about anything now." He drew her to hin;i. She smiled and did not resist. His fingertips traced the outline of her cheek and jaw; thin, he noticed, with the beautiful structure of the bones clear beneath the wind-browned skin. Her eyes were enormous, her mouth soft and sweet, welcoming. He kissed her, a tentative touching of lips, and her arms clasped him fiercely. After that nothing was tentative. She was strong and hungry, full of warm life in that place of cold and death, giving and taking without stint. Stark had known that this was fated from the beginning -- from IF the moment when Mordach ripped away her robe, left her clothed in nothing but her magnificent and indestructible pride. Neither of them spoke of love. Love is for those with a future. They slept in each other's arms and were content. camp once again, following the green star. They halted briefly for the ritual greeting of Old Sun at his rising. Hargoth looked regretfully at Gerrith, who was surrounded by Stark and the Irnanese. At noon they halted a second time to rest and chew their journey rations, hard chunks of edible lichens pressed into cakes, and a strongflavored mixture of fat and meat fibres pounded together with bitter herbs. Stark discussed strategy with Kintoth. "Here," said the captain, marking out a rough map in the snow with his finger. "This is the road we're on now. It winds about so, and here is Thyra, sitting on a dozen hills. The old city, that is. The new one is dug in and around." His finger made yigue marks on the perimeter. "How old is the new city?" asked Stark. "Not as old as ours, only a thousand years or so. The People of the Hammer came out of nowhere, the bards tell us, and took up these ancient cities..." "More than one?" "There are several tribes. The Thyrans are the only ones we deal with, but it is said that there are more in other places, and that they all have the same god, whom they call Strayer of the Forges." "They all have the same madness as well," said Hargoth, "and that madness is for iron and the working of it. They mine the bones of the cities, and the metal is more than wealth to them. It is life." "All right.-' Stark looked at the map. "The road. Thyra, old and new. What else?" Kintoth sketched stylized mountains on the far side of Thyra. "These arejcalled the Witchfires, for a reason you will understand when you see them. They mark the boundary between the darklands and the high north. Here is the pass that we must take to cross them, if we ever reach it." Thyra stood like a wall before the mouth of the pass. "Is there no other way across the mountains?" Kintoth shrugged. "There may be a hundred but this is the one we know. The Citadel lies somewhere beyond it. Now, on the road, here..." He drew fortifications across the approach to Thyra. "This post is strongly held. And all around the city are sentry posts." His finger poked random little holes in the snow. "I don't know the exact locations. The Thyrans live in and around the edges of the ruins so they're more vulnerable than we of the Towers. They take care to guard their wealth and their precious flesh lest both be devoured." The land seemed totally deserted. Stark asked, "What enemies have they here?" "This is the northern edge of the darklands," said Hargoth. "We live all our lives in a state of siege. Anyone, anything, may come. Sometimes it's the great snowdragons, with frost on their wings and their hungry teeth showing. Sometimes a band of Outdwellers run demented across the world and take whatever they can lay claws on. And there are creatures ho wait, hidden just out of sight, smelling the warm food that walks, hoping they can snatch it." "It doesn't do to show weakness or inattention," said Kintoth. "The Harsenyi, for instance, might be tempted to attack if they thought they could gain by it. The other tribes of the Hammer might become greedy. And of course the Thyrans have a bigger worry than most." He stabbed his finger at the sketched-in range of the Witchfires. "They have neighbors here among the mountains. The Children of Skaith-Our-Mother." Stark stared at him in the brassy twilight of the hollow. The wind blew snow in vagrant clouds. Halk laughed, a harsh and jarring sound. "Perhaps you will be lucky a second time. Dark Man!" he said, and laughed again. IX S hadows lay long across the road, pointing north. Soft-shod, the party moved quietly. Wind scoured their tracks away almost as soon as they were made. "What are they like, these Children?" Stark asked. Hargoth shook his narrow head. "The Thyrans say they're monsters. They have many tales of them, all horrible." "Are they true?" "Who can say?" "You have no knowledge yourself? Haven't any of your people gone into the mountains? Through the pass?" "In the darklands," said Hargoth, "it is difficult enough to hold where one is. One does not travel for any lesser reason than survival." "The Harsenyi seem to manage it." IF "They're nomads, it's their way of life. They're strong enough to fight off the brainless attackers, the hungry mouths, and the rest of us welcome them. They're the only link we have with the outer world. They bring things we haven't got and can't make -- and most of all they bring news. Being nomads by choice they don't threaten our holdings. Besides, we're used to them." "And they cross the Witchfires." "More. It is even said that they trade with the Hooded Men on the far side of the Bleak Mountains." He paused, considering. "It is said that they trade with the Children of Skaith." Stark kept his voice free of irritation, though with an effort. "And what do the Harsenyi say of the Children?" "That they are monsters and greater magicians than we. That they have power over stones and all things belonging to the ground, which they can cause to shake whenever they wish. They say..." "They say," Stark interrupted impatiently. "The Harsenyi are doubtless the fount of all wisdom, except that traders have been known to lie before now in order to keep their markets secret. Does anybody know?' "If you mean, can I give you any firm knowledge of the Children -- no, I cannot." "You're trying to talk them away. Dark Man," Halk spoke up. "They will not go so easily." Stark glanced at him, but did not bother to reply. He wondered if he looked as trail-worn and holloweyed as did Halk and the others. The sturdy furs bought at Izvand had turned mangy with use, showing bare spots where the thongs had rubbed. The men had stopped shaving, perforce, since Amnir had allowed them nothing in the way ofknives or razors and since their release they had contented themselves with merely hacking hair and beard short enough for comfort. The women covered their faces with wrappings to ward off the cold. Breca walked steadily beside Halk as Gerrith, now, walked beside Stark, her eyes smiling. Gerrith alone seemed alive. The rest walked like automata. Even Stark felt that. Land and sky lay upon him like a burden. Cold, empty, without promise. And no one knew what was happening in the south. The shadows lengthened, the wind skirled down from the high north, with its burden of whirling dry snow. They came to a turning and Kintoth caught Stark's arm. "There! There! In the sky. Stark. Look up!" Stark looked and saw a glitter of pale gold. "The Witchfires." The peaks disappeared again as the road bent once more. Two of Kintoth's men who walked ahead as scouts came racing back down the road. "A party, coming from Thyra!" one of them panted. "How many?" asked Kintoth. "Many. We saw them only from a distance." In a few moments they were off the road, settling themselves among the rocks and hollows. Stark left it to Kintoth to make sure there were no betraying marks while he found a vantage point overlooking the road. Halk lay down beside him. A short distance away Hargoth watched. Presently Kintoth joined them. The Thyrans were audible a long way off. Drums beat a steady marching pace, accompanied by the intermittent squealing of some shrill-voiced instrument and the clashing of metal on metal. After a while the party came around a bend in the road. Stark estimated the Thyrans at half a hundred men, including pipers and drummers and cymbaldashers, All were armed with iron weapons. All wore iron caps and iron-studded back-and-breasts over their furs. Iron-bound targets were slung behind the left shoulder. Banners and pennons lashed in the wind above them, barred scarlet and black, with the device of a hammer. They were short, broad men with a look of power about them. They marched with a driving purposefulness that had in it somearmy ants. They were not, one felt, accustomed to defeat. Behind the soldiers came a party of unarmed men hauling iron framed carts loaded with supplies. "They'll be going to meet the trader," said Halk, low-voiced. "I wish them joy when they find him." Stark waited until the last clanking cart had vanished along the road, then went to Hargoth. "Do the Thyrans send out an escort every year for the trader?" "No. We keep watch for large parties of armed men." ''That is so," said Kintoth. "Once or twice we've watched the trader almost to the gates of Thyra and they've had no more than the usual lookouts. There's no way of telling just when the wagons may come, and anyway, Amnir had a force sufficient for his safety." "Nevertheless," said Stark, "Halk thinks that's where they're going." He pondered. "Could they rather be going to attack, say, the Towers?" "Not with fifty men. I'd say Halk's right." "Yet, as you say, Amnir had a IF force sufficient for his safety. This force is large enough to overcome, or at least overawe, Amnir's party. It looks like they have a special interest in the trader this year -- perhaps they think he might have something that they consider es pecially desirable. Something of unusual value. I wonder if the Thyrans have had some tardy word from the Citadel about us." "We were undoubtedly followed to Izvand," said Gerrith. "Fast messengers could have taken word up the Wandsman's road that Amnir left there in pursuit of us." "Fast or slow, it makes no difference," said Halk. "We'll never get past Thyra unless we can make a new road." "We start on that right now," said Stark. The old road had suddenly become menacing. There might be any number of patrols and lookout posts. Stark tried to calculate how long it would take the armed escort to find whatever was left of Amnir and his wagon-train, then get word of the disaster back to Thyra. Presumably they would send a runner. And then? Would the Thyrans start scouring the hills? He reckoned they had better get through the Witchfires as quickly as possible. They struck away from the old track. It was not difficult to keep direction. Old Sun smeared the southwestern sky with dull redochre, and when that faded the green star shone hugely, bright as a moon in the northeast. Stark depended on Kintoth to tell them where Thyra ought to be. The going was by turns fairly easy and very rough. Often the way was barred completely by a sheer cliff or an impassable gorge, which made for weary back-tracking. Progress was heartbreakingly slow. T here was no love-making that night. They did not stop at all except when weariness forced them, and then only long enough for strength to return to let them go on again. There was no complaint, even from Halk. They all seemed to feel that the hills were too dangerous for peaceful rest and they were anxious to be out of them. The Lamp of the North climbed higher. The aurora flared white and rose-pink and ice-green. And there was a new presence in the night. The peaks of the Witchfires stood tall in the north. They caught these delicate colors on their icesheathed flanks and sent them gleaming and glimmering back in flashes of many-faceted light, a wonder of cold and purity and death. "They are sacred to the Goddess," said Hargoth, "though we see them seldom." Along toward midnight Stark found a trail. trail, a trail such as animals make. It was only because Stark had lived his life in the wild places that he saw it at all. But it led the way he wanted to go and he decided to follow it for the time being. It was very narrow, sliding up and down the slopes, twisting cleverly to avoid the cliffs and canyons. After a while he realized that it was not a single trail but one of a network of footways through the hills. He asked who might have made them, and Hargoth said, "Outdwellers, probably, though other things may use it. Cities attract them, as I told you. There is always the hope of food." It was impossible to tell whether the trail had been recently used. The bare ground was frozen hard and where snow lay there was no sign of prints. If there had been any the wind or some other agency had wiped them out. Stark went ahead of the party, trusting to no one but himself. He caught a taint of smoke in the clean air. Going more cautiously, he saw a ridge ahead. Sounds came from beyond the ridge. Unbelievable sounds. He went back to warn the others, then crept on his belly to the top of the ridge. He looked down into a shallow bowl between the hills. A fire of dead lichens burned small at one side within a ring of blackened stones. The tiny flickering it made was little more than a pinpoint. The bowl brimmed with the light of the aurora and the green star. The Witchfires sparkled against the north. Snow covering the slopes of the bowl sparkled more faintly, and in that shadowless gleaming a score of figures danced to the wild, thin music of a reedy pipe. They danced in a wide circle, moving widdershins round the slopes. They leaped and whirled, they laughed and their tatters flew, and they seemed almost to take wing upon outstretched arms. This was because of the height and the lightness of their leaping, the grace and the swift rushing joy of it. Joyousness, Stark thought, was a rare thing anywhere and rarer still on Skaith. But this was a curious place to find it. There was no set pattern to their dancing except that they kept the circle. Now and again two or more would join together and go skittering hand in hand, with the laughter like birdsong, to caper about the piper, who leaped and whirled by IF himself in the center of the dance. Sometimes he would do a contra step with them and sometimes he would dance clockwise against the circle's turning. After a while it seemed to Stark that there was something other than joy to their frolicking, A certain quality. What was the word Hargoth had used? Demented. He turned as someone slid softly up beside him. He could see the twin lightning strokes on the mask as Kintoth peered over the ridge and then drew back. "Outdwellers," he said. Stark nodded. "They seem to know every inch of these hills. Perhaps they know of a way around Thyra." "It's worth a try," said Kintoth, "but they're a chancy lot. Don't turn your back on them, even for a moment." He added, "And remember, the Wandsmen may have spoken to them about you." "That had occurred to me," Stark said. "Tell the others to come up and stand along here where they can be seen. Weapons ready." Kintoth hurried away. Stark waited a moment or two, then rose and began to walk down the slope. He could not say who saw him first. But the piping wavered away, the dancing stilled. The dark figures stood quiet, outlined against the shimmering sky. They watched him in ghostly silence as their tatters rustled in the wind. Stark gave them the formal greeting. "May Old Sun bring you warmth and life." of the Outdwellers came forward. A woman. They were thin, he saw, with wild locks hanging under curious little caps. But their coverings revealed little else. The coverings, he saw now, were made of many small skins sewed together, the tatters were the legs and tails flapping free. The woman's face was narrow and pale, with a pointed chin and enormous eyes that slanted upward. There were no whites to the eyes, only irises of lambent green with hugely expanded pupils that seemed to reflect the night entire. "Old Sun is well enough," she said carelessly. Her accent was strange, difficult to follow. Her mouth was strange too, filled with sharp, strangely protruding teeth. "We worship the Dark Goddess. May the night bring you joy." Stark hoped that it would. He did not count on it. "Who is your leader here?" "Leader?" She cocked her head on one side. "We have all sorts. What's your fancy? A leader for singing the clouds and stars? A leader for catching the wind? One for setting it free again?" "One for the searching out of trails," said Stark. "I wish to pass by Thyra unseen." "Ah," she said, and looked past him over his shoulder, to the rim of the bowl. "You alone? Or with these others I see. Gray Warlocks of the Towers and five others unknown." "All of us." "Unseen?" "Yes." "And unheard?" "Of course." "But you are not as fleet as we, nor as light of foot. We can go where a snowflake would be heard as it fell." "Nonetheless," said Stark, "we must try." She turned to her people. "The strangers and the Gray Ones would pass by Thyra in secret. Slaifed?" She sang the name. A man came to her, laughing,, kicking the dry snow. "I will lead them." They were a small people, these night-dancers, the tallest of them reaching no higher than Stark's shoulders. Slaifed looked him up and down and across and made a rude sound. "I can do that, but I can't make your great hoofs be silent. That is up to you." "And their weapons," said the woman. "Don't forget their weapons." "No one forgets weapons," said Slaifed, and laughed again, a peculiar, lilting sound that sent a shiver across Stark's nerves. Slaifed himself bore no weapons -- at least none that Stark could see -- except for a knife such as everyone carried for the necessities of daily life. "Follow me," said the Outdweller, "if you can." He went gusting away across the snow, seeming to ride the wind. The others of his tribe returned to their dancing, all but the woman, who came with Stark. The thin voice of the pipe was audible for some time, fading slowly with distance. Hargoth's people and the Irnanese went very quickly in spite of Slaifed's doubting. And as they traveled their hands never left their weapons nor did their eyes cease their searching. The scarecrow figure of the Outdweller flitted ever ahead while the Witchfires gleamed and glittered under the quivering aurora. The woman looked sidelong at Stark. "You are from the south." "Yes." "From the south and not from the south." She circled him, her small nose lifted. She walked backward, studying the Irnanese. "They are from the south. They smell of Skaith." She turned to Stark again. "Not you. You smell of the dust of heaven and the sacred IF night' Stark was not aware that he smelled of anything except a lack of soap and water. But he did not miss the significance of the remark... unless the Outdwellers were clairvoyant. He said, "You're given to fancies, little sister." His gaze roved constantly, Slaifed, the trail, the ever-shifting hills. The piping had ceased now, or perhaps was now too distant to be heard. "How are you called?" "Slee," she said. "Slee-e-e-e... like the wind running over a hill." "Were you always wanderers, Slee?" "Since the beginning. Our people have never had roofs to prison them. All this is ours." Her wide arms touched everything: hills and sky, the Witchfires, the darklands behind them. "In the time of the Great Wandering we were the free plunderers who fed on the roofdwellers." Stark thought that probably she meant that quite literally. She was proud of it. She danced with pride, going a little ahead of him. Slaifed was even farther ahead. This part of the trail was fairly straight, with a steep hillside on the right and a sharp drop-off to the left then tumbled into a ravine with a frozen stream at the bottom. The hillside could be climbed, but not easily. A hundred feet or so further on the trail bent around a jutting shoulder of rock. Suddenly Slaifed began to run. So did Slee. So did Stark. S lee's hands were at her breast when he caught her and flung her aside with a swinging slash of his hand, never breaking stride. Slaifed looked back, not believing that anyone but an Outdweller could move so swiftly. He reached into the breast of his tunic, still running like the wind. Stark caught him halfway around the rock. It was like catching a bird. He sank his fingers into the long thin neck that was all cord and muscle, and set his feet, and did a thing that made Slaifed's body snap upward as one snaps a whip. Stark saw the Outdweller's absolutely incredulous face, saw a double set of iron talons, only half drawn on over thin fingers, drop to the ground. Then he had flung the body against Slee, turning as she came at his back. Her iron claws were in place and slashing. He felt the metal, still warm from her flesh. Then she fell under Slaifed's dead weight and Stark killed her with a blow. She stared up at him from the white ground, her great dark pupils still reflecting the night, though not so brightly. The column, headed by the Irnanese, had come to a halt. Weapons were rattling along the line. Stark touched the angle of his jaw where Slee's claws had cut two shallow grooves just above the neck. The blood was already beginning to freeze. He drew his sword and went on around the rock. The trail led straight on, straight to the walls of a Thyran guardpost. Streaks of light glinted from slitted windows. Armed men strode the walls and the squat watchtower. The small fortress filled the space between hills and ravine. Stark turned back. Tattered shadows came streaking down the hillside to leap with outstretched talons onto the marchers. The Outdwellers had decided not to spend the night dancing joyously in. the hollow. The eruption of noise and violence was almost at once joined by the harsh bellowing of iron horns sounding from the guardpost. X T he Outdwellers, inferior in numbers and armament, were relying on their speed and agility. They skittered back and forth and up the hillside out of reach. Kintbth's slingers and javelin-throwers were hampered by the close quarters; forced to use their javelins as stabbing weapons, they formed a bristling circle around Hargoth and the priests. Kintoth rallied his rearguard. The Irnanese closed ranks, more dangerous with their swords and spears. The attackers avoided them. Some few of the Outdwellers fell or were wounded in #:hat first rush, some few of the gray men of the Towers were slashed or forced over the edge. That was all. The Outdwellers were fighting a nuisance action to disrupt the column and hold them for the Thyrans. Stark joined the Irnanese. "What's ahead?" asked Halk. Stark told him. "How many?" "I don't know. But we're in a trap here. We've got to run one way or the other." "What's behind us but more traps?" said Halk. "Forward, then," said Stark, and ran back along the line, shouting to Kintoth. The men began to move, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. By the time Stark got back to the head of the column they were going at a run. They swept around the shoulder of rock and charged headlong into the Thyran soldiers coming from the guardpost. The impact scattered the Thyrans, a dozen or so squat thickIF armed warriors. Stark and the tall Irnanese hewed with the strength of desperation, blades ringing on iron. Ki'ntoth's light-armed troop had a bit more room to work in here and javelins were finding unprotected legs and throats. If this dozen, ten soldiers and their officers, had been the whole of it, the guard post would have fallen. Stark and the Irnanese were almost at the gate when the second ten came through, a solid wedge of leather and metal. This would be the off shift, the delay just long enough for them to turn out and get their gear on. Weight of shield and armored bodies bore the swordsmen back. Short blades stabbed, cutting through thick furs. The first lot of Thyrans rallied, the seven or eight who could still fight. They concentrated on the tall Southrons, beating them back into the lines of the gray men. The brothers fell, almost in the same moment. Halk went to one knee, his hand clutching at his side where blood poured out through a rent in his tunic. Heavy boots kicked him down and trampled over him. Breca screamed like an eagle. Her long blade took the head clean from a Thyran's shoulders and then she went down beneath a wall of shields. Stark had lost sight of Gerrith. He was trapped among the gray warriors now, the ones who had formed as a guard around the Corn King and his priests. These were pressed back against the cliff, standing quietly with folded arms. Stark, sweat and blood running down his face, beating aside the short stabbing swords that forced him ever backward, shouted furiously to Hargoth, "Where is your magic. Corn King?" Hargoth answered, "Where are your stars?" And his eyes shone like bitter ice through the holes of his mask. The gray men fell, or were driven into the claws of the Outdwellers, who slashed them from behind, or flung them over the edge of the ravine. Their slings were useless, their javelins spent or broken against the Thyran armor. Stark caught a glimpse of the twin lightning strokes being separated by a blow that split Kintoth's narrow skull to the jawbone. He felt rock against his back. The wall of shields came in against him. He struck up and under, felt the blade go home, lost it as the man fell. The shieldwall battered him with iron bosses, drove the breath from his lungs. He snarled and clawed and bit, all humanity lost in pain and a growing dark. The Thyrans came on, as merciless as time. At last, the darkness was all. was the light of Old Sun, running rusty on the stones of a square courtyard enclosed by thick walls. He was inside the guardpost. He was cold and he hurt, and he had bled somewhat onto the stones where he lay. He was not dead, and he thought after a while that he was not dying. A name came into his head. Gerrith. A stab of fear contracted his belly. He tried to sit up, and found that this hands were bound. He could not sit up but managed to achieve a wider view. Halk leaned against the wall nearby. His eyes were shut and he breathed through his mouth in shallow, careful breaths. His face had a gray pallor; it seemed to have fallen in around the bones. His tunic was open, showing a rough wad of bandage. Beyond him, Hargoth and his priests sat in a group. They appeared soiled and bruised but not wounded, and their masks had been left to them. A guard stood over them, watchful against sorceries. In another place were such of their warriors as had survived, only seven and most of them wounded. All were bound. He did not see Gerrith. He called her name, she spoke from behind him. "I'm here. Stark." He floundered about, pushing his back up against the wall. She tried to help him but her hands, too, were tied. She did not seem to be hurt, except for bruises, and her hair hung loose around her face. "Why," he asked her, "in the name of all the starry hells of space did you insist on coming?" He was furious with her. There was much activity in the courtyard, almost a holiday air. Thyran soldiers went about various sorts of business. Their dead and wounded were laid out on litters. A cluster of Outdwellers, like ragged crows, stood by a doorway and grabbed for bundles of provisions being handed out to them. Payment, no doubt, for their betrayal. One of them saw that Stark was conscious. He walked over and stared down with malevolent pleasure. The piper. Stark could see the instrument peeping out from his untidy wrappings. "Why?" asked Stark. "They told us to watch for you. They told us how you looked. They promised to pay us. But we would have done it for nothing." The pupils of his eyes had contracted. They reflected nothing now but hate. Again Stark asked, "Why?" "The stars are sacred," said the piper. "They are the eyes of the Goddess. When our souls take IF flight the bright eyes see them and the arms of the Goddess reach out to gather them in. You wish to defile the stars and rob us of all bliss." Stark said wearily, "I don't think you understand." Normally he was tolerant of tribal fancies, but he felt no great tenderness for the Outdwellers. "The stars are already defiled. They're only suns, like that one over your head. They have worlds around them, like this one under your feet. People live on those worlds, people who never heard of Outdwellers or their footling goddess. And the starships ply between them. It's all going on out there this second as you stand here and nothing you can do will stop it." The piper carried his peculiar weapons as well as his pipe. He thrust one hand in and out of his garments so swiftly that Stark could barely follow the motion. Claws flashed upward in the deathstroke and Stark had just time enough to consider the wisdom of his remarks. Then a hairy fist closed on the piper's broomstick arm and a Thyran officer with an iron torque around his neck said cheerfully, "Do you drop it or do I break your wrist?" The piper wriggled his fingers and let the claws go clacking noisily onto the stone floor. "This one's worth more alive," said the Thyran, and let go. He wiped his hand on his breeches. "Go along with you, filth." The piper gathered up his armament and moved away. The Outdwellers began to file out through the gate, glancing back with hateful leers at the captives. Stark suddenly sat up straighter and again looked around the courtyard. "I see your dead," he said to the Thyran. "I do not see ours." "Don't worry, friend. The Outdwellers will give them useful burial." The Thyran examined him with interest. "You put us to some "Why did you?" "That was the order. Dead if necessary, alive if possible and double the reward. Same for the woman and for this man. The others..." He shrugged. "Dead was good enough." Halk's eyes had opened. "Breca was my shield-mate. The men were my comrades. You killed them. That was fair enough, since we came against you. But to give them to those vermin for..." He could not finish the sentence. Rage choked him. Incredibly, he came to his feet and was reaching for the Thyran's throat with his bound hands. His wound betrayed him and he fell again, to stare halfblind at Stark with such hatred as might kill a man where he sat. "Prophecies!" Halk cried, and sobbed once, a racking sound that shook his whole body. Then he fainted. Stark wished that he had left Halk and the others in Amnir's wagons, sleeping the sleep of the Goddess. Hargoth and the priests were watching him and he could not bear their gaze either, even though he had never asked for their faith. He asked the Thyran, "Who are 'they' who gave you the orders, and what are we waiting for?" The Thyran smiled. "As to who 'they' are, you'll meet them soon enough. And we're waiting for men to come from the city to take over the post while we go down with you and our wounded. You left us short-handed." There was a second gate, set in the wall opposite the one through which the Outdwellers had gone. A couple of soldiers were up above, keeping an eye out over whatever country lay beyond. The Thyran glanced at them, laughed. "You wanted the Outdwellers to show you a way around Thyra. There isn't any way around. We guard every trail, every approach. Not a puff of wind can get past us. Otherwise, anyone could creep in and nibble away our wealth." He kicked Stark experimentally, studied the dried blood that showed on him, cocking his head from side to side. He stepped back, turning to Hargoth. # # Tr don't believe he's from the X stars at all. He's just meat like the rest of us. And none too bright either, to take up with the Gray Maggots. A fine lot altogether to make big talk about flying up to heaven!" His broad face beamed with the scornful smugness of sublime stupidity. Stark hated him. "Aren't you even curious?" he with more wonders than I could tell even want to ask a question?" The Thyran shrugged, heaving his weight of iron bosses up and down. "Why should I care what's out there? What more could I find anywhere than I already have here in Thyra?" He walked away. "Well," said Stark, "and there's no answer to that." He leaned back against the wall, infinitely tired. "What do you say now, wise woman?" Hargoth gave her no chance to speak. "The only way was south. South! South where the ships are." "The Spring Child told you otherwise," said Stark. IF "A false augury. A punishment. Because of your lust for that woman, you cheated Old Sun of his gift. He sent us a curse instead of a blessing." The eight heads of the priests nodded solemnly. Nine pairs of eyes pierced him with malevolence. "You are not the Promised One." 'T never claimed to be," said Stark. "Was if because of your anger that you didn't use your magic to help us?" "The Goddess does not send us power like a lightning bolt. It is a slow magic. We had no time." "You have time now." Impatiently Hargoth said, "How can we perform the ritual? How stand as we must, think as we must? You know little of sorcery." Stark knew enough of it not to depend on it. He gave up the conversation. "Have faith," said Gerrith softly. "Faith?" said Stark. "Will it give us another miracle that leads nowhere?" The guards above the gate sang out and soon Stark heard a drumbeat in the distance. Presently the gate was opened and the replacements tramped in. There was a period of ordered chaos as the change-over was made. The outgoing force formed ranks, the litters were picked up, the captives forced to stand on weak legs. Halk was conscious again and trying to get to his feet. He fell twice, with a Thy ran boot to help him. Stark swung his hands in a short vicious arc and knocked the soldier clanging against the wall. "He needs a litter," said' Stark, "and don't draw that blade. I'm worth double alive and your officers won't thank you for robbing them." The sword hesitated, halfway out of the sheath. The officer with the iron torque came up. "Put that away," he said to the soldier, and then he hit Stark backhanded across the face. "You trade overmuch on your value." "He needs a litter," Stark said. Halk swore that he did not and tried once more to rise. He fell a third time. The officer shouted for litter-bearers. "Now, then," he said, "move!" He shoved Stark into line. The drummers began to thump out a steady beat and the company marched through the gate. The path on the only side of the guardpost that Stark had yet seen ran for a time under the flank of a ridge that shut off any view of what lay beyond. Then it swung around a curve and the prospect opened up, suddenly and with spectacular effect. The Witchfires thrust sharply into the sky, throwing back Old #St Sun's sullen glower. At their feet, covering a portion of the foothills and spreading out across a broad valley, was the ruin of a city. It had probably begun. Stark thought, as a strong fortress in the days when fighting men and caravans moved back and forth through the pass of the Witchfires, which was like a wide notch between the peaks. Later it had become a city, and then a metropolis, and then a dead and silent corpse, sinking in upon itself with the weight of wind and frost and endless time, until all its original form was lost and it was only a great dark many-humped mound beneath the mountains. Then from somewhere the Thyrans had come, Strayer's men, the People of the Hammer, and the city had taken on a strange new life. Now, in the dim coppery glare of day, the guardian of the pass appeared more like a doorkeeper at the gate of hell. All around the base of the city and into its ugly flanks gaped fumaroles from which came plumes of smoke and red glarings that pulsed and shook. "The forges are never cold," said the Thyran officer. "We are all smiths, even as we are all soldiers. We work and we guard. This is how Strayer taught us." It sounded a dull life, but Stark forebore to say so. His mouth was still bleeding. Some two hours of marching brought them into the new city. It lacked beauty. Some of the dwellings were underground, some protruded partly. Others, built of stone from the hills and debris quarried from the old city, were above-ground but squat and low, with few windows to let in the cold. A vast straggle of frozen lanes ran between the dwellings. There were places for pens and livestock. A band of hairy folk leading a string of animals made way for the soldiers while staring out from filthencrusted faces at the prisoners. The animals bore great stacks of dried lichens. There was a constant billowing of smoke and a steady muffled sound of hammering that beat like giant heartbeats. Huge piles of rusty scrap metal bulked here and there, and over all was the old city, a tangled mountain blotting out part of the Witchfires. Over the centuries the Thyrans had chewed and tunneled the mountain ragged. Cave-like dwellings were dug into this raggedness and dark mouths opened into the deeper bowels of the ruin. Stark thought of a community of rats living in the biggest junkyard in all the worlds. If the Thyrans were able to reclaim even a small fraction of the countless tons of metal buried in that junkyard they would keep themselves busy IF for another two thousand years. The company swung into what was evidently the street that led up from the main gate. It was much wider than the lanes and ran almost straight. The thudding of the drums became sharper, the pace of the men smarter. People were swarming out to watch them go by. These were chiefly of the same heavy build as the soldiers, though occasionally there were individuals of a different shape and coloring to attest to outside blood. The women were as ugly as the men. Stark had no idea what the women of the Towers looked like but he was sure they could only be an improvement on these travesties. Men and women both shouted to the soldiers, crowded in to stare and push at the captives. The furclad children threw insults and more tangible evidences of their malevolence. The soldiers shoved the people back with bone-breaking good nature; while the crisp beat of the drums never faltered. The company marched up the straight street, straight to the Iron House. I #HE dark walls of the Iron House . were burnished like a shield, the metal sheathing of the roof gleaming with a dull and sullen lustre in the light of the ginger star. A guard of twelve men was drawn up before massive iron doors which bore the hammer device. The House was rectangular. It stretched some eighty feet from north to south, half that east to west. The doors were in the southern front. At the northern end, close against the ruins, there were crumbled wings of stone and rubble. The drums sounded a long roll. The heavy doors swung open. The company marched into a great hall. Flaming pits, giving out as much smoke as heat, were set at intervals in the walls. At the far end of the hall was a dais with a high eat and several places of honor. The high seat was made of iron -- strong, square, without grace or ornamentation. A man wearing an iron collar and pectoral sat in it; he, too, was strong, square, without grace. The pectoral on his barrel chest was in the form of a hammer. The seats of honor were also occupied, and Stark saw without surprise that the man at the right hand of the high seat was Gelmar of Skeg. agreat crowd pressed into the hall behind the soldiers. The chief men beat and shouldered their way through the mob to crowd up onto the dais or take their places below it, according to their rank while lesser men filled the body of the hall. Women remained outside and the small boys who darted in were pitched out bodily. The iron doors clanged shut. As though that were a signal the men began shouting, "Strayer! Strayer and the forges!" They stamped their feet and slapped their weapons. "Strayer!" After that ritual shout the hall settled gradually to a breathy silence, undertoned with rustlings and coughings. The smoky air became charged with a smell of heat and sweat, wool and fur and leather. A clear space had been left around the soldiers. The officer drew his sword and lifted the hilt in salute. "These are the captives, Ironmaster." The Ironmaster wore a fine purple robe whose cloth must have come from the south in Amnir's wagons; the local weave was coarse and undyed. He nodded his grizzled head and the officer put away his sword. The Ironmaster turned to Gelmar. "Are these the ones you wanted?" Gelmar rose and stepped down from the dais. He wore a tunic of the somber red Stark remembered from Skeg and he carried his wand of office. He walked without haste, around Stark and studied him with cool deliberation. On the dais were three other green-clad Wandsmen. One of them had a face deep-scarred and half blinded by a sword-cut that had left an ugly groove from forehead to jaw. The wound had healed but still showed an angry red. This man leaned forward in his chair with the hunched quiver of an animal about to spring. Gelmar looked into Stark's eyes. His own were dark and veiled, lacking the fire of triumph Stark had expected. Yet they contained a cold ferocity that was frightening. "I know this man," said Gelmar. "Yes. Concerning the others..." He beckoned to the scarred man. "Vasth?" VaSth came quickly to peer into Gerrith's face. "There were two women," said the Thyran officer. "One of them fought like a man. A shield-bearer. These Southrons defy all morality, allowing women to handle swords. We were forced to kill her." "No matter," said Vasth. "This one is Gerrith, daughter of Gerrith. And this -- " He turned to Halk on his litter. "This one is Halk, a ringleader, a killer of Wandsmen. I have cause to remember him." He traced the groove of the scar. "He gave me this." "A pity my hand was weak in that moment," said Halk weakly. IF He had not stood the journey well. He looked past the lesser Wandsmen to Gelmar. "What has happened at Irnan?" "Irnan has fallen," said Gelmar, and his mouth was cruel. "So much for all your trouble." "And Ashton?" asked Stark. "Ashton," said Gelmar, and smiled, a small twisting of the lips as one might twist a knife-blade in the yielding flesh. "The Lords Protector were discussing what should be done with him when I left the Citadel. That decision will have been made by now. Perhaps he lives, perhaps he is already dead. I can't tell you. But you'll know soon enough." He turned from Stark to face the Corn King and his priests. Stark gave a violent jerk and was instantly quelled. Gelmar took no notice of him. "You were with these rebels, Hargoth, coming to attack us at the Citadel. Why did you do this folly?" "For freedom. The freedom of the stars." Hargoth still had his pride. His narrow head was as erect as ever, his eyes met Gelmar's defiantly. "Stark and the Sun Woman told us that you Wandsmen forbade this and so must be destroyed. We believed them but they were false prophets, they would not go south where the ships are. They cheated Old Sun because of the lust of their bodies. And because we believed them we have been punished." Gelmar nodded. He said, "The ships are gone from the south, Hargoth. Do you understand that?" "I understand." "The ships are gone. The starmen and their foreign ways are gone with them. The star-roads are closed. Our way lies as it always has, with Skaith and Old Sun. Do you understand that?" Hargoth said, "I understand." His voice carried the deadness of that understanding. "Then go tell your people, Hargoth." Hargoth bent his head. Gelmar spoke to the man in purple who watched smiling from the high-seat, pleased by the humbling of the gray men of the Towers. "Open your doors, Ironmaster. Let them go." "I had rather seen them slain," said the Ironmaster. "But -- " He shrugged and ordered the doors to be opened. The priests and warriors formed their meager ranks; beaten men, acquiescing not with patience but with anger -- anger for their erstwhile allies. And Hargoth said, "Wait." He faced Gerrith. "You prophesied for me. Sun Woman. Now I prophesy for you. Your body will yet feed Old Sun, though not as a partinggift." Gerrith's expression had changed. All the way from the guardpost she had looked tired to exhaustion, merely enduring. Now she seemed to be listening intently to some inner voice. Yet she heard Hargoth and answered him. "That may be. But your people must find themselves a new Corn King, for you lead them badly. You cast the finger-bones and you prophesy, but you do not know truth from falsehood." Her head came erect and her voice rang out strongly. "Irnan has not fallen. The ships remain at Skaith. The star-roads are open. Times change and the Wandsmen are afraid. In the end..." Vasth struck her viciously. Blood sprang from her mouth and she fell past Stark's bound hands into the arms of a Thyran soldier, who caught her roughly. "We have had enough of wise women," said Vasth. T ihe hall had become suddenly still. In that stillness Gelmar spoke softly to Hargoth. "Will you go?" Hargoth turned and stumbled out, his priests and the remnant of his warriors following after. Gelmar clapped his hands. Men came in through a leathercurtained doorway at the side of the hall. They wore saffron-colored tunics and richly-ornamented collars of some bright metal. They were of a breed that Stark had not seen before; beautiful men, with beautifully proportioned bodies and aquiline faces almost too perfect -- and so much alike that it was difficult to tell one from another except for the color of the hair. This ranged from black to a reddish blond. But all had copper-colored eyes. The eyes were too wide apart and there was something else odd about them. As they came closer Stark saw what it was. They were like the inlaid eyes of statues, startlingly lifelike but without life, As though they understood without orders two of them picked up Halk's litter and another helped Gerrith to her feet. Two more replaced the Thyran soldiers beside Stark. All had daggers at their belts and smooth muscles showed powerfully beneath their tunics. A sixth man stood by and it was to him that Gelmar spoke. "Take them away. Guard them." Stark saw Gelmar's face clearly, very clearly. The lines, the tautness, the weariness. Some of that proud high confidence that he remembered from their first meetIF ing had been left forever in the sea where Stark had taken him. Stark said, "Gerrith is right. You are afraid." Gelmar's men had them moving almost before the words were said and Gelmar ignored him. No one beyond their small group had even heard his words. But Stark knew that they were true. New things had come, things the Wandsmen could neither control nor comprehend and they felt their ancient power slipping away from them. They must grasp it now and hold it firmly, regardless of the cost, else it would be gone. And grasp it they would, with all their strength, in whatever ways seemed best to them. The fear and the uncertainty would only make them more dangerous, might already have cost Ashton his life. The captives were taken into one of the adjoining wings to a room rudely furnished with sleeping mats and a few random articles. The Thyrans seemed not to indulge in luxury, but the mats offered at least some comfort. All six stayed to guard them, a woman and two men, and one of those wounded. It was a measure of the prisoner's importance. Gerrith was making a dazed and fumbling attempt to wipe some of the blood from her face. Halk said, "Gerrith, what you said about Irnan -- was it true?" Answering for her. Stark said harshly, "Of course it's true. Why else would they want us alive? If the revolt were really over dead would be good enough." In a curiously gentle voice one of the bright-eyed men said, "Do not talk." Halk ignored him. He seemed to have recovered a measure of strength, even of eagerness. "Yes, I see. If Irnan still stands, and perhaps other city-states have joined her..." He broke off with a gasp of pain as the guard nearest him kicked the frame of his litter. If that were so, thought Stark, it would not be enough for the Wandsmen to tell it in the streets that the wise woman and the Dark Man and the ringleaders of the revolt were all dead, the prophecy came to nothing. They would have to produce real evidence and present it to people who could attest to its authenticity. Gerrith alive, the Dark Man alive, one undoubted ringleader alive, all captives of the Wandsmen -- proof enough that the prophecy lied and the power of the Lords Protector remained unshaken. Gelmar and his aides might keep the three of them in cages for the rest of their lives, dragging them up and down the roads of Skaith. Or a fitting end could be devised for them, a public end, with recantings and repentance; an end to remain vivid for generations in the minds of the people. If hope of the fulfillment of the prophecy kept the revolt alive, then that revolt would collapse very quickly. Irnan would fall, and that would be the end of it. For the present, at least. The Wandsmen obviously believed that that hope was all that was keeping the revolt alive. Stark believed it too. Not because the Irnanese were childishly superstitious, but because if the Citadel and the Lords Protector were not destroyed the folk of Irnan could not hold out alone against the mobs of Farers and the mercenary troops the Wandsmen would send against them and their present or potential allies among the other city-states would fall away. Jerann himself had said that the others would wait to see Irnan's fate. The Citadel and the Lords Protector. It all came back to them. They were the symbol of permanence. The unchanging, holy, the unseen and forever inviolate power. The power that would by now have pronounced judgment on Ashton. Was it, after ail, a power that a man could fight? Even if he were free? Stark looked at his bound wrists. The thongs were wet with his blood. The six men crowded the small room, watching. That they had orders not to kill him he didn't doubt -- but there are worse things Six men between him and the door. Beyond the door, the Iron House. Beyond that, Thyra, with every gate and every path guarded. Not a puff of wind could get through. Halk had had second thoughts. "Why would Gelmar lie to Hargoth?" Again the litter was kicked. Again Stark answered, speaking rapidly, eye on the nearest guard. "Does he want the People of the Towers marching south..." He dodged the first blow, stiffened fingers aimed at his throat. "... singing the Hymn of Deliverance?" The second blow he could not dodge and he didn't try. Instead he caught the vicious fingers between his teeth. H e learned one thing. These tooperfect creatures were not automatons. They bled. So did he. After a time a healer came, a Thyran in a tunic both undyed and unwashed. He wore a chain of IF office around his neck and was followed by two boys bearing pots of ointment and bundles of rags. The healer tended their hurts, spending long minutes over Halk, grumbling at wasting his time and talents on a non-Thyran who would probably die anyway. When he was finished servants came and fed him and they were told to rest in preparation for a journey. Gelmar seemed in great haste. The room was stiflingly close. The powerful bodies of the men in the saffron tunics were oppressive in the confined space, the smell of them repulsive. To Stark they smelled like snakes. Nevertheless, he managed to sleep until men came in with new manacles, fresh from Strayer's forges. Gelmar's man with the bitten hand held his sword-point against Stark's groin while the irons were fastened on; his face had still shown no expression, not even pain. Gerrith seemed to have awakened from a dream, and not a pleasant one. She was careful not to look at Stark. When the Lamp of the North was above the peaks they were taken out of the room and marched along a corridor to a yard beside the Iron House where men and beasts were waiting. The beasts were small with shaggy hair that swept the ground, their sharp horns tipped with metal balls to prevent them hooking. The men who led them wore bulky skin garments with the fur inside. Only their eyes showed between heavy caps and thick tangled beards. The beards were flocked with white as though the snow had got into them; it did not Seem to be a sign of age. Stark guessed that these were Harsenyi iti the service of the Wandsmen. For a moment the prisoners were close together and Gerrith managed to touch Stark's hand and smile at him. A strange smile. It was as if she said goodbye. XI T he beasts shuffled and blew, breath puffing white on the icy air. Stark and Gerrith were made to mount, with a guard on either side, afoot. Halk was transferred to a traveling litter slung between two of the animals. He appeared to be unconscious or asleep most of the time. Even so, he had been manacled like the others and a guard stood at the head of his litter. Gelmar, cloaked and hooded for the journey, came and bent over him, feeling Halk's throat where the life beat in it. "Cover him well," he said to Halk's guard. "If he reaches the Citadel alive, we can heal him." The beautiful man, sword and dagger now belted over rich outer tunic, covered Halk carefully with furs. Gelmar and the lesser Wandsmen mounted. The twelve retainers portioned themselves out along the line, walking with the Harsenyi but obviously disdainful of them. An escort of Thyran troops traniped up, banging the inevitable drum. The cavalcade started. They passed through the gate and turned north toward the nightsparkle of the Witchfires. The Thyrans escorted them past the outer guardpost, saluted and drummed and clanked their way back into the city. The path lay ahead, climbing a long gradient to the summit. Somewhere on the other side of the mountains was the Citadel. In a way, Stark thought, getting there was going to be easier than he had thought. At least he would not have to worry about the Northhounds. No wagons had come this way in centuries and the track was narrow. The hard little hoofs of the beasts clattered steadily on the frozen ground. The sky was a glory of shifting color. It was bright enough to see quite clearly the shapes that thronged the pass. For geological ages the forces of wind and water, thaw and freeze, had worked at the rock walls, scouring, carving, polishing, wearing away. Sheathed in ice, the sculptures seemed almost alive in the shaking light of the aurora. Great faces watched with deepgouged eyes. Towering pinnacles soared and tottered, gargoyle wings spread out to shadow the little humans passing beneath. In the wider places where softer strata had been carried off whole crowds of cowled and hooded forms seemed to whisper together. Thejwind from the high north blew down the pass, chuckling, singing, talking to the shining creatures it had helped to create. Stark's human reason told him that these monsters were no more than lumps of eroded stone. His mind knew that. His primitive gut said otherwise. And his animal senses told him that other beings not of stone were close by. The Children of Skaith-OurMother? He could not see anything, but a regiment might have hidden itself in the eccentricities of the rock. Still, the Wandsmen and their retainers moved on confidently. If there was something here, they were accustomed to it and not afraid. Even their beasts seemed unconcerned. The manacles weighed heavily on Stark's wrists. The sky flared a IF white as pure as the veils of angels. Pale green, delicate as shoal water. Red like fire, like roses. From time to time the shimmering, eldritch curtains drew apart to show the velvet darkness beyond, the green star glowing. Gerrith rode ahead of him sitting her little beast quietly, her head bowed. He wished he knew what she had dreamed. At length, just below the summit, at the right-hand side of the pass, he saw a tall pinnacle that canted forward so that it seemed that it must fall of its own weight. It had the form of an elongated man in an attitude of prayer. About its base irregular groups and lines of hooded figures stood as though they listened. In the shifting light and shadow of the aurora, three of the figures moved, detached themselves from the stone, came into the center of the pass and stood barring the way. And now the little beasts snorted and danced. The cavalcade came to a halt beneath the leaning, looming figure. Gelmar rode forward. "Kell a Marg," he said. "Skaith-Daughter." His voice had a flat quality, as though he were holding it in rigid check. "Fenn. Ferdic." The figures were cloaked against the wind but their heads were bare except for diadems of wrought gold. The diadem of the foremost figure was set with a great smoky jewel. There was something peculiar about the three faces, pale in the aurora-light. Kell a Marg said, "Gelmar. " The voice was like chiming bells. It was a woman's voice, imperious in spite of its music, with the arrogance of unquestioned power. A match for Gelmar, Stark thought. He had made out the peculiarity of the faces. They were covered in fine white fur, and the features, while not unpleasing, were distorted subtly from the human, the noses blunted, the jaws prominent. The woman had eyes as huge and dark and glowing as the jewel she wore. Night-creature's eyes. S HE said to Gelmar: "Did you think to pass through our mountains without pause?" "Skaith-Daughter," said Gelmar, and now there was just the faintest edge of irritation in his voice, "we have an urgent mission and time is short. I thank you for this honor, but -- " "No honor," said Kell a Marg. She looked past him at the captives. "These are the wicked ones you were seeking?" "Kell a Marg -- " "You've been setting the whole of the north by its ears, it's small wonder we know of you. Even in our deep caverns we're not deaf' The edge of irritation had sharpened. "Kell a Marg, I told you -- " "You told me that there was a threat to Skaith, something new and strange, something that only you of the Citadel could deal with. You told me only because I asked you -- because the Harsenyi had brought us tales we could not understand." "There was no need to concern yourself -- " "You take too much on your shoulders, Gelmar. You intend to settle the entire future of SkaithOur-Mother without consulting her Children." "There is no time, Kell a Margi I must take these people south as soon as possible." "You will make time," said Kell a Mrg. A silence. The wind from the high north whined and chuckled. The hooded figures listened dutifully to the endless prayer of the leaning man. The cloaks of the Children fluttered. Gelmar said, "I beg you not to interfere." Irritation had become desperation. He knew this woman, Stark thought. Knew her and feared her, disliked her intensely. "I understand these people. I've dealt with them. I know what must be done. Please, let us pass." The ground shook, ever so slightly. Above their heads the leaning man seemed to sway. "Kell a Marg!" "Yes, Wandsman?" A second small quivering. Pebbles rattled down. The leaning man bowed. The Harsenyi began hastily to move themselves and their beasts out from under these tons of rock. "Very well!" said Gelmar furiously. "I will make time." Kell a Marg said briskly, "The Harsenyi may enter and wait in the usual place." She turned and walked with a lithe, undulant stride toward the cliff. There was a sort of lane between the stone figures. She went along it with Fenn and Ferdic, the cavalcade following meekly. Gelmar's stiff back was eloquent of stifled rage. Gerrith had straightened up. Her head was high. High and proud. Stark felt a qualm of alarm not connected with the Children or the threatening quality of the cliff-face about to swallow them. This was a different kind of alarm. He wondered again what Kell a Marg knew and damned all prophetic visions for the thousandth time. Halk's voice came from the litter, weak but still jeering. "I told you you could not talk the Children away." A great slab of stone opened in IF the cliff face, moving easily on its pivots. The cavalcade passed through. The door swung shut. Kell a Marg flung back her cloak. T do so hate the wind! she said, and looked at Gelmar, smiling. They were in a large cavern, evidently the place where the Harsenyi customarily came to trade with the Children. Lamps burned dimly in the quiet air, giving off a scent of sweet oil. The walls were rough, the floor uneven. At its inner side there was a second door. "The lesser Wandsmen are not needed, said Kell a Marg. "I think well get little good from the wounded one so he will stay here as well. Those two -- ' She pointed to Stark and Gerrith. "The wisewoman, and the one called, I believe, the Dark Man. I want them. And, of course, Gelmar, I shall require your counsel." The green Wandsmen accepted their dismissal with bad grace; Vasth looked poisonous but held his tongue. Gelmar's jaw was tightly set. He could barely control his rage. "I shall need guards," he said, cutting the words very short. "This man is dangerous." "Even in irons?" "Even in irons." "Four of your creatures, then. Though I fail to see how he could hope to escape from the House of the Mother." There was a shuffle of dismounting. Kell a Marg stood easily, waiting with her courtiers. Stark knew without being told that she did not often stand in this outer cavern with nomads. This was a special occasion, one of sufficient urgency to make her break precedent. She was looking at him with frank curiosity. He looked at her. The cloak tossed back over slender shoulders revealed a lean body as arrogant as her voice, clad in its own sleek white fur and ornamented with a light harness of the same wrought gold as the diadem. A beautiful animal, a voluptuous woman. A great royal ermine with wicked eyes. Stark felt no stirrings of excitement. She lifted a shoulder daintily. "This one may or may not be as dangerous as you say but it's bold enough." She turned and led the way to the inner door. It swung silently open. Kell a Marg strode through. Gelmar, his two captives, and his guards followed after, the wiry white-furred courtiers bringing up the rear. Attendants who had opened the door swung it shut behind them and they were closed into a strange and beautiful world. Stark shivered, a shallow animal rippling of the skin. The House of the Mother smelled of sweet oil, of dust and deep caverns. It smelled of death. T hey were in a corridor, wide and high, lit only by flickering lamps. A group of people with the pale fur, the close-set ears and golden diadems that varied in size and splendor according to rank were waiting there with bowed heads. A murmur of voices repeated reverently, "Skaith-Daughter. You have returned." Stark thought they looked as if they had been waiting a long time and were tired of standing. At one side he noticed four of the Children gathered together apart from the others, bearing themselves with disdainful pride. They were clad in skull-caps and tabards of some black material, close-belted with golden chains. They did not bow. Their collective gaze went immediately to the strangers. Courtiers and officials, when they straightened up, also fixed Stark and Gerrith with cold and hostile eyes. Wandsmen they were apparently used to for they spared Gelmar only a single unwelcoming glance. But the strangers seemed to disturb them deeply. "I will speak with the Diviners," said Kell a Marg and gestured the courtiers out of the way. The four black-clad ones gathered around her and the five walked ahead, speaking in low voices. The courtiers and officials had now to be content with their less favored places in the procession. They walked for what seemed like a long while in a corridor whose walls and roof were covered with carvings, some in high relief, others almost in the round. All were done with .great artistry and appeared to have something to do with the history or the religion of the Children. Some of that history, Stark judged, might have been stormy. There were places where the xiarvings had been damaged and repaired. He counted six doors in the first stretch that could be closed against invaders. Chambers with magnificently carved doorways opened off the corridor and what he could see of the interiors gave an impression of astonishing richness. Lamps of pierced silver picked out gleams of color, of inlays and mosaics, touched the outer shapes of things that Stark could only guess at. One thing was certain; these Children of SkaithOur-Mother had little in common with their cousins of the Sea. Far from being animals, they had an obviously complex and highly-developed society working away here IF beneath the glittering peaks of the Witchfires. Or ought he to say "had once had?" Some of the chambers were unlighted. Others had only one lamp, or two, to fill their large darkness. There was that subtle odor of dust and death, a feeling that the comings and goings glimpsed in the branching cbrridors and the work, whatever it might be, that was going on, were all less than was called for by the size and elaborateness of the Home of the Mother. The corridor ended in an enormous cavern, a natural one where the fantastic rock formations had been left untouched. There were lamps enough here and a royal path of marble blocks set into the floor. Beyond was a series of jewel-box anterooms, and then the vaulted chamber that must belong to Kell a Marg, Skaith-Daughter. It was perfectly plain. Walls and floor were faced with some luminous white stone, without carving or ornamentation, completely bare. Nothing was allowed to distract the eye from the focal-point of the room -- the high seat. Kell a Marg climbed the broad steps to the dais, seated herself. The high seat was carved from rich brown rock the color of soil, in the shape of a robed woman seated to hold SkaithrDaughter on her knees, arms curved around protectively, head bent forward in an attitude of affection. Kell a Marg sat with her hands on the hands of Skaith-Mother. Her slim arrogant white body gleamed against the dark stone. The Diviners stood in a little group at her right. Fenn and Ferdic at her left. The others were scattered around the spacious emptiness. Gelmar, Stark, Gerrith and the guards were clustered at the foot of the steps. "Now," said Kell a Marg, "tell me again of this danger that has come to Skaith." Gelmar had taken firm hold of himself. His voice was almost pleasant. "Certainly. But I would prefer to do it more privately, Skaith-Daughter." "These, Gelmar, are the Keepers of the House, the Clan Mothers; the men and women who are responsible for the well-being of my people. I wish them to hear." Gelmar nodded. He looked at Stark and Gerrith. "Only let these two be taken out." "Ah," said Kell a Marg. "The captives. No, Gelmar. They stay." Gelmar began an angry protest, smothered it, inclined his head and began to tell the story of the ships. Kell a Marg listened attentively. So did Fenn and Ferdic, the Clan Mothers and the counselors. Under the attentiveness was fear. And something else -- anger, hate, the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth. "Let me be clear about what you say," said Kell a Marg. "These ships. They come from outside, from far away?" Jr "The stars. We had almost forgotten them. And the men who fly in these ships, they also come from outside? They are not born of Skaiwh-Mother?" The glowing eyes of the Clan Mothers and the counselors looked at Stark, looked at blasphemy incarnate. "That is so," said Gelmar. "They are utterly alien to us. We let them stay becauscsthey brought us things we need, such as metals. But they brought us other and worse things -- off-world ways, foreign ideas that have corrupted some of our people." "They corrupted us with hope," said Gerrith. "Skaith-Daughter, let me tell you how we live under the rule of the Lords Protector and their Wandsmen." Gelmar would have liked to stop her but Kell a Marg silenced him. She listened while Gerrith spoke. When she had finished, Kell a Marg said. "You and your people wished to get into these ships and fly to another world, away from Skaith? You wished to live on alien soil which never gave you breath?" "Yes, Skaith-Daughter. It may be difficult for you to understand. We looked upon it as salvation." It was the wrong thing to say. She knew it. Stark knew it. Yet it had to be said. "We found a different salvation," said Kell a Marg. "We returned to the womb of the Mother, and while your people starved and clawed and died under Old Sun, we lived warm and fed and comfortable, secure in the Mother's love. Do not expect me to weep for you, nor to care about what the Wandsmen do in their own place. I have a larger concern than that." She turned to Gelmar. "The revolt continues?" Reluctantly, he said, "It does." "Well," said Stark, "and we knew that." Kell a Marg continued. "You intend to take these people south. Why?" "There was a prophecy -- " "Yes," said Kell a Marg. "The Harsenyi brought us some gossip about that. It concerned this man, did it not?" She looked at Stark. Gelmar appeared anxious tx hurry by this point. "It sparked the revolt. If I prove to them that the IF prophecy was false -- Kell a Marg interrupted him, speaking to Gerrith. "Was this your prophecy, wise woman?" "My mother's." "And what did it say about this man?" "That he would come from the stars," said Gerrith, "to destroy the Lords Protector." Kell a Marg laughed, silvery spiteful laughter that touched Gelmar's cheekbones with a dull flush. "I can see your concern, Gelmar! Too bad if he destroyed them before you had your turn." "Skaith-Daughter!" "But surely they know?" She turned to the strangers, wicked eyes alight. "Surely you know by now? The Lords Protector are only Wandsmen grown older." Stark's heart gave a great leap. "They're human?" "As Gelmar. That's the great reason they must remain invisible, here in the hidden north, behind their mists and their myths and their demon Northhounds. Invisibility is a condition of godhead. If folk could see them, they would know the truth, and the Lords Protector would cease to be divine. Or immortal. They would be only Wandsmen, clever enough and ambitious enough to put on white robes and spend their declining years at the Citadel, wrapped in all the rewards that faithful service to their God of Goodness can bring. And they are many." Stark laughed. "Human," he said, and looked at Gelmar. Gelmar's expression was filled with veiled venom. "You need not mock, Skaith-Daughter. We serve the needy, which is more than the Children do, who serve only themselves. In the time of the Great Wandering you were asked repeatedly to give sanctuary here in the House of the Mother to folk who were dying for the lack of it, and you turned them all away." "And so we have survived," said Kell a Marg. "Tell me, how many sufferers were taken past the Northhounds into the Citadel, to save their precious lives?" "The Citadel is sacred -- " "So is the House of the Mother. The Children were here before the Citadel was built -- " "That is only your tradition." " -- and we intend to be here still when it is gone. Let us return to the subject in hand. There is surely a simple way to end your revolution. Send the ships away." Gelmar said between his teeth, "Give me credit for some wisdom, Skaith-Daughter. Sending the ships away would solve nothing, because -- " "Because," said Stark, overriding him, "he could not make them stay away. Isn't that so, Gelmar? Isn't that why, as the wise woman said, the ships are still there, in the south?" Again Kell a Marg held up her hand to silence Gelmar. Her hand was slender, with curving nails. There were no rings on it. The palm was pink and naked. The hand beckoned Stark up the steps. The guards came with him. "You are truly from another world?" "Yes, Skaith-Daughter." She reached out and touched his cheek. Her whole body seemed to recoil from that touch. She shivered and said, "Tell me why Gelmar could not keep the ships away." "He has not the power. The ships come into Skeg because that is where the first ones landed, that is where the port is, and the foreign enclave, and the market where trading is done. It's easier and more convenient. And the Wandsmen have the appearance of control there. At least they can see what's going on." She seemed to understand. She nodded, and said sharply to Gelmar, "Let him speak." "If Skeg is closed the ships will go elsewhere -- anywhere else their captains think they might pick up a profit. All but the largest vessels can land where they will. The Wandsmen couldn't keep track of them, they couldn't have their mob of Farers everywhere." "They might land even here?" "Not in the mountains, SkaithDaughter. But close enough." "And they would do this for profit. For money." "You know about these things?" "We are students of the past," she said. "Historians. We know. It is only one of the things we left behind us, that need for money.". "It's still a powerful need among men, no matter where they come from. I think what Gelmar fears most is that these ships will provide a means of escape for those who wish to leave Skaith and can pay for it." Stark was watching Gelmar's face. It was closed -- closed tight -- and he thought that his guess was close to the truth. "They couldn't evacuate whole populations, as the Galactic Union could, but it would be a start. Gelmar's got his fist in the dam and he's trying to hold it there, hoping that the first little drop never gets through. That's why he's so desperate to put down the uprising at Irnan before it sparks a wider revolution. If the whole south falls into civil war it will be the off-woHders who gain, not the Wandsmen." Or the Lords Protector, who were only Wandsmen grown older, thought Stark. An unbroken chain IF since the first founders, renewing themselves with each generation. In that sense they were eternal and unchanging, just as Baya had said. As eternal and unchanging as the human race. And as vulnerable. The room was like the inside of a great pearl, glowing softly, white. Kell a Marg sat at the center of it, on the brown knees of SkaithMother, between the encircling arms. Her eyes were on Stark, huge, sweating, uncouth in his chains and heavy furs. The man was not born of Skaith-Mother. He said brutally, "The thing is done, Kell a Marg. Your world has been discovered, it cannot be undiscovered. New things are here and will not go away. The Wandsmen will lose this battle in the end. Why should you help them fight it?" Kell a Marg turned to her diviners. "Let us ask help from the Mother." T he Hall of the Diviners lay at the end of a long corridor in a section of the Mother's House given over to their exclusiveuse. The chambers Stark could see as they passed were austere and dim, occupied by students and acolytes and lesser Diviners. The chambers had been designed for much larger numbers. Branching corridors led only to silence. The Hall itself was round, with a vaulted roof from which a single great lamp hung, gleaming silver, intricately pierced. Beneath the lamp was a circular object, waisthigh and about three feet across, covered with a finelyworked cloth. The walls, instead of being carved or faced, were covered by tapestries, apparently of a great age and holiness. A woman's face, benign and gigantic, looked out of them, many times repeated, made wraithlike by the fading of time but disturbing nonetheless, with eyes that seemed to follow every movement of the people in the Hall. The great lamp was not lighted. Smaller ones on pedestals bairned feebly around the circumference of the room. No one spoke. Acolytes entered. Reverently they lighted the silver lamp and removed the worked cloth from the object beneath it, chanting all the while. "The Eye of the Mother," murmured the Diviners, "sees only truth." The Eye of the Mother was an enormous crystal set in a massive golden frame. It was clear and lucid as a raindrop, and the light from the lamp went sparkling down into it. The Diviners ranged themselves beside it, heads bowed. There was no high seat here. Even Kell a Marg stood. Fenn and Ferdic stood behind her. Gelmar, Stark and Gerrith and the four guards formed a separate group, close inside the door. Kell a Marg spoke. The hatred in her voice was distributed equally among the outsiders. "You are all strangers in this House. I trust one no more than another. All of you speak of things I do not understand and cannot judge since they are not within my experience." "I would not lie to you, SkaithDaughter." Gelmar assented. "When did the Wandsman ever live who would not lie if it suited him?" Her gaze went to Gerrith, then settled on Stark. "Gelmar I know. The woman does not pretend to be other than Skaith-born, nor does she claim to have seen these ships. The man does both. Search his mind for me. Diviners." The imperious hahd gestured to Fenn and Ferdic, who approached Stark. The two guards who flanked him did not move. Ferdic glanced at Gelmar, who snapped something to the guards. They moved aside but followed as Stark was led to stand beside the crystal. "Look," said the Diviners, "into the Eye of the Mother." Light from the pierced lamp came and went within those lucid depths, now shallow, now deep. ever shifting, drawing the gaze down and down. "The crystal is like water," Feric intoned, "let the mind float upon it, let the mind float free..." Stark smiled and shook his head. "I can't be caught that easily." The Diviners stared at him, startled, angry. "Do you want my memories, the things that cannot lie?" he asked them. "You may have them, freely." Every world had its methods. He had seen many techniques of mindtouch and had mastered a few; he knew a little. Telepathy and mindtouch he had encountered often and did not fear. The important thing was never to lose control. He shared his memories with them, the ones that were impersonal enough for sharing. They stood with their heads bent, but they were only pretending to look into the crystal now. That was for later. Now they were absorbed in listening to what his mind had to tell them. The truth, for Kell a Marg. Remembering. Remembering, briefly, the worlds of his youth, and Sol, his parent Stark's mind sifted swiftly through its past. Remembering space as it had first burst upon him through the simulators in the passenger quarIF ters of a starship outbound for Altair. The stunning magnificence of myriad suns ablaze in the black sea of infinity where they swam forever on their appointed ways. The clusters, cosmic hives of burning bees. Bright nebulae sprawled across the parsecs, piled in clouds of glorious fire. Dark nebulae, where smothered suns glimmered pale as candles. The island universes, unthinkably distant. The deep, wide universe with no rock roof to close it ini Remembering finally that incredible world-city. Pax, and her incredible moon, symbols of the power of the Union. The Diviners cried out, between agony and terror. "He has seen! He has seen, Skaith-Daughter! Black gulfs and burning suns, the skies of foreign worlds." They looked at Stark as at a demon. Kell a Marg nodded, very slightly. "So much we are sure of, then. Now I wish to know why this man came here." "To search for a friend, SkaithDaughter. Someone he loved. The Wandsmen took him, the Wandsmen may have killed him. He has a great hatred for the Wandsmen and the Lords Protector." "I see. And the prophecy. Where is the truth of that?" "He does not know." "That prophecy," said Stark, "and all the other trappings of a fated man were put upon me through no will of my own." "Yet they were put upon you. Why you alone of all the strangers?" "I don't know. But I mean you no harm, Skaith-Daughter. Neither does Gerrith. The Wandsmen are a danger to you and the whole planet because they don't understand at all what they're dealing with." Gelmar said, "He lies. There is no danger to you if you will only let us go!" Kell a Marg stood for a long time, silent, brooding. The great royal ermine pondered over its prey. At last she said, "You mistake me, Gelmar. I am not afraid. I am not interested in your Southrons and their revolt. I care nothing for your assurances. This man is part of a new force in the world. He may, or he may not, be important to the future of the Children, and that is all I care about. When I know, then I shall decide who goes and who does not." She turned to the Diviners. "What does the Eye of the Mother see?" N ow they looked in earnest, deep into the heart of the crystal. The hall became silent, so still that Stark could hear every breath that was drawn. A great uneasiness took him. This mad she-thing had complete power here, and that was not a pleasant thought. Nor did the many faces of SkaithMother watching dimly from around the walls comfort him. The waiting had become intolerable yet no one moved. The Diviners might have been carved from wood. The weight of the mountain pressed down on Stark. He was hot, his manacles heavy. He turned his head but could not see Gerrith, still behind him, somewhere near the door. One of the Diviners drew in a sudden breath and let it out again. Something was happening to the Eye of the Mother. Stark thought at first that it was the lamp but that glowed as brightly as ever. It was the crystal out of which the light was draining its lustre dimming, dulling, darkening, going from pellucid clarity to an ugly curdled red. Stark remembered another time, another cave; Gerrith's Water of Vision. "Bloo(," said the Diviners to Kell a Marg. "Much blood will be spilled if this man lives. Death will come to the House of the Mother." "Then," said Kell a Marg quietly, "he must die." Stark began gathering the chain into his hands, carefully so that it might not make even a sound. Gelmar stepped forward. "And he shall die. I shall see to it myself, SkaithDaughter . " "I shall see to it," said Kell a Marg. "Fenn! Ferdic!" Both had jewelled daggers at their belts. They drew them and went light-footed to Gelmar. Kell a Marg said, "Tell your creatures to kill him, Wandsman." Desperately, furiously, Gelmar cried, "No, wait -- " For a moment, the beautiful men of the Citadel did not know what to do. They all watched Gelmar and waited. Stark did not wait. He spun around, swinging his clenched hands with the iron weight of the manacles and the chain into the body of the guard who was a little behind him to his right. He felt the flesh break. The man's breath went out in a harsh scream. He dropped and Stark hurdled him, charging for the door. There were sudden shputs behind him. The two guards who were with Gerrith ran forward to intercept him. Gerrith, forgotten for the moment, moved swiftly, snatched one of the small lamps from its pedestal and flung it at the wall. Flaming oil splashed, spread, caught. The hangings, centuries IF dry, exploded into smoke and flame. One of the guards turned back and struck Gerrith aside, much too late. Stark saw her fall, then lost her. Smoke choked, blinded him. Voices were rising in terror and urgent cries. The many faces of the Mother twisted, blackened, vanished. Two of the Diviners threw themselves upon the crystal, shielding it with their bodies. Others ran to beat futilely at the flames. One of the beautiful men had caught fire. Another, rushing to Gelmar's voice, blundered into Stark and went on without pausing. Stark called Gerrith's name, there was no answer. Then he stumbled over her. He caught her tunic and dragged her through the doorway into the hall. A great gout of smoke came with them. He thought for a moment she was dead. But she coughed and then said distinctly, "If you don't go now, this will be the end of it." The tumult in the Hall grew louder as those inside fought their way toward the door. Students and acolytes came out of their chambers along the corridor. Stark bent over Gerrith. She struck at him. "Go, damn you! I gave you this chance -- will you throw it away?" Stark hesitated. Alone he might make it. Burdened with Gerrith, he could not. He touched her briefly, helplessly. "If I live -- !" he said. He ran. He went down the corridor, huge, murderous, his iron shackles swinging. White-furred bodies scattered before him or were swept aside. They were young, these student Diviners, and their teachers were old. All were unused to combat. Stark went through them like a gale. Behind him he heard fresh shouts and cries. Gelmar and Kell a Marg, at least, were free of the burning Hall. Looking back, he saw two of the guards running after him. Those he could not fight -- their swords against his irons. He plunged into a branching corridor, running hard. A flight of rock-cut steps led him downward into another corridor, one dustier, more dimly lighted. He followed it into a maze of rooms, tunnels and stairways. The rooms were crowded with objects, the passages deserted, lighted by fewer and fewer lamps. He stopped at last and listened. All he could hear now was the hammering of his own heart. For the moment he had lost them. He took one of the lamps from a wall niche and went on, deeper and deeper into the House of the Mother. T he children must have spent innumerable generations gnawing away here in the bowels of the Witchfires. They must have once been vastly more numerous than now. Stark remembered Hargoth's comments on the necessity of fresh breeding stock. The Children would have cut themselves off from that -- by choice certainly and probably by the alteration of their genes as well. Artificial mutants, they might be unable to cross-breed with humans. Perhaps the Children of the SeaOur-Mother had undergone the same deprivation. He had no way of judging that. The silence of centuries hung here, thick as dust. Yet the air was breathable. The Children had seen to it that ventilation was adequate. Their engineering instincts had been sound, probably bred into them. They seemed to have a feeling for stone and how to use it. Their warren of caverns and passages looked capable of enduring as long as the Witchfires. Outside the pale circle of light from his lamp it was now totally dark. Stark moved on with no idea of where he was going, fighting down a growing panic. The House of the Mother would make a handsome tomb. Probably they would never even find his body. In spite of that, curiosity as well as necessity compelled him to stop and examine some of the vast proliferation of objects that crammed these forgotten chambers. He was in a museum. What had Kell a Marg said? We are students of the past Historians, They must have looted the dead and dying cities of the north, perhaps even before they were abandoned in the Great Wandering the Children had begun their collecting. Art objects, statuary, paintings, jewelry, musical instruments, fabrics, pots and pans, machines, toys, tools, books, constructions of wood and metal and plastic, anything of a size to be handled through the corridors, whole or piecemeal, and stored away in the caverns. The history and technplogy, art and ideas, of a dead civilization survived here in these buried vaults, the pleasure and mania of a dying race. Stark thought that whether he himself lived or died, the Children of Skaith-Our-Mother were going to have much trouble as time went by trying to guard their incredible hoard. He was looking for two things: a weapon and some tools to get the shackles off. There were plenty of weapons, most of them useless, lacking the technology that had made them deadly. Constant temperature and humidity had preserved most things remarkably well, but there was inevitable deterioration. He finally found a knife that did not come apart at the tang and IF thrust that into his belt The tools were easier. Mallet and chisel could endure a bit of punishment. But there was no way that he could use them by himself. He stuck the chisel in his belt beside the knife and carried the mallet. It made a serviceable weapon. There was no one to use it on. Nor was there water or food. Thirst began to be a problem, with hunger lurking not far behind. He was used to both and knew his potential. It would take him some time to die. He ceased to reproach himself about Gerrith. He had hoped to find another lamp, but they had all been neglected too long and the oil had dried away. The level of the one he carried went slowly, steadily down. He did not stop longer than he had to. He wanted to keep going as long as he had light Suddenly as he passed the mouth of a narrow tunnel a strong draught of air blew it out. The air was fresh and cold. Stark felt his way into the tunnel and, after a little time, saw light ahead -- daylight! It came through an arched opening at the end of the tunnel. A wild surge of hope sent Stark running toward it. Once lookouts might have been stationed here, keeping watch over the turbulent north. Or the Children might have taken the air, after their work in the museum rooms, to see again the sun and the stars they had left behind. Now there was nothing but a high solitude. The tiny balcony was no more than a niche in the northern face of the Witchfires. Far too high, and that northern face too sheer, for any thought of climbing down it. Stark saw an immense white landscape, infinitely forbidding. From the feet of the Witchfires a naked plain tilted upward, gashed with the scars of old erosions. The wind blew fiercely across it, raising snow-devils that danced and whirled. Some of them had a peculiar look; these were not snow-devils at all, but pillars of steam rising out of the ground, to be shredded and torn away. A thermal area. Stark became excited, remembering Hargoth's words about the magic mists that hid the Citadel. He looked up across the plain, to a distant range of mountains much higher and more cruel than the Witchfires. And he saw, to the northeast, low against the mountain's flank, a great boiling of white cloud. He stood on his high lonely perch, and looked, and swore. And saw, when he turned his head, a string of tiny figures moving across the vast whiteness of the plain. Gelmar, going to the Citadel. A driven man, Stark left the small niche, turned his back on the light, went again into the darkness of the corridors. Now he prayed for steps to lead him down. He had been trying from the first to work his way back to ground level and he was appalled to find himself still so high. The devil of it was that, feeling his way along in the pitch blackness, he might be passing any number of steps to one side or the other without knowing it. Hunger and thirst became more insistent. He was forced to stop now and again to sleep -- as an animal sleeps, briefly but totally relaxed. Then he would get up and go on again, every nerve and every sense stretched fine to catch the slightest hint of anything that might guide him back to life. He had slid and stumbled along what seemed like miles of passages, blundered through crowded rooms that tried to swallow him in a tangle of relics, stumbled down infinite numbers of steps, when the faintest of faint sounds touched his ears. H e thought at first that it was only weariness or the whisper of his own blood in his veins. Then it went away and he knew its reality by its absence. He had just come down a flight of steps that was now at his back. He could feel the carvings of a wall on both sides, so the corridor went ahead. That must be where the sound had come from. He began padding along it, stopping frequently to hold his breath and listen. The sound came again, unmistakable. It was music. Someone in this catacomb of dust and age and darkness was making music. Very peculiar music, atonal, twanging, quavering -- the most beautiful sound Stark had ever heard. Twice more it stopped, as though whoever was playing the instrument had halted in annoyance over a wrong note. Then it would begin again. Stark saw a gleam of light just ahead and approached on silent feet. There was a carved doorway. Beyond it was a small chamber well lighted by several lamps. One of the Children, an old man with slack skin and prominent bones, bent over an oddly-shaped instrument with numerous strings. Beside him was an antique table strewn with ancient books and parchments. There was also an untouched plate of food and a stone jug. The old man's fingers caressed the strings as though they were stroking a child. Stark went in. The old man looked up. Stark IF watched the slow advance of shock across his face. "The Outside has come into the House of the Mother," he said. "It is the end of the world." And he set the instrument carefully aside. "Not quite," said Stark. "All I want of the House of the Mother is to leave it. Is there a northern gate?" He waited while the old man stared at him, great luminous eyes in a motheaten face, the fur of his crown rubbed up untidily, his whole being wrenched cruelly away from where it had been. Finally Stark made a threatening movement. "Is there a northern gate?" "Yes. But I can't take you there." "Why not?" "Because I remember now. I was told -- we were all told -- an enemy, an outsider, was in the Mother's House and we were to watch. We were to give the alarm if we should see him." "Old man," said Stark, "you will not give the alarm and you will take me to the northern gate." He placed his powerful hands on the frail instrument. The old man stood up. In a soft and very desperate voice he said, "I am trying to recreate the music of Tlavia, Queen City of the High North before the Wandering. It is my life's work. That is the only Tlavian instrument known. The others are lost somewhere in the caverns. If it shoudl be destroyed -- " "Consider yourself the guarantee of its safety," Stark said. "If you do exactly as I tell you -- " He took his hands away. The old man was thinking. His thoughts were almost visible. "Very well," he said. "For the sake of the instrument." Stark gave him the mallet and chisel. "Here." He laid his wrists on the antique table, which had a fine marble top and seemed sturdy. He regretted the sacrilege, but there was no other choice. "Get these things off me." The old man was clumsy and the table was considerably damaged, but in the end the manacles came off. Stark rubbed his wrists. Hunger and thirst had become painful. He drank from the stone bottle. It was some sort of dusty-tasting wine; he wished it had been water, but it was better than nothing. The food he thrust into his pockets, to be eaten along the way. The old man waited patiently. His acquiescence had been too quick, too unemotional. Stark wondered what mischief lurked in his murky psyche. "Let us go," he said, and picked up the instrument. The old man took a lamp and led the way into the corridor. "Are there many like you?" Stark asked. "Solitary scholars?" "Many. Skaith-Mother encourages scholars. She gives us peace and plenty so that we may spend our whole lives at our work. There are not so many of us as there used to be. Once there were a thousand at the study of music alone, thousands more at history, the ancient books, art and laws. And of course, the cataloguing." He sighed. "But it is a good life." In a short time they were back in the inhabited areas. The old man did not have far to go to find his solitude. Stark took a firm hold on his worn harness with one hand, holding the instrument precariously in the other. "If anyone sees us, old man," he said, "the music of Tlavia dies." The old man led him cunningly enough, skirting the edges of the busy levels, the caverns of the lapidaries and goldsmiths, sculptors and stonemasons, the nurseries and schools for the young, the strange deep-buried farms where fungoid crops flourished in perpetual musty dampness. These lower levels. Stark noticed, were noticeably watmer. The old man explained that the thermal area extended beneath part of the Mother's House, giving them many gifts, such as hot water for the baths. He also told Stark other things. T he nomad trail used by the Harsenyi ran between the pass of the Witchfires and the passes of the Bleak Mountains, the big range that Stark had seen. It was at the western side of the Plain of Worldheart; Stark remembered the little black dots of Gelmar's party moving along it. The trail was safe for the Harsenyi as long as they did not wander from it, and they had a permanent village in the foothills, which was as close as any of them ever approached the Citadel. The plain was called Worldheart because the Citadel was built on it, or above it. The old man had never seen the Citadel. He had never seen a Northbound. He thought that they did not range too far from the Citadel unless they were attracted by an intruder. They were said to be telepaths. "They hunt as a pack," the old man said. "The king-dog's name is Flay. At least, it used to be -- Perhaps it is always Flay. Or perhaps the Northhounds live forever." Like the Lords Protector, Stark thought. They were in a broad passageway, not very well lighted, obviously not much frequented. Ahead he cotild see the opening of another IF passage to the right. The old man said innocently, "The northern gate is there, along that corridor. It's seldom used now. The Wandsmen used to come here from the Citadel more often. Now they come jto the western gate, when they come at all." He held out his hands for the instrument. Stark smiled. "Wait here, old man. No noise, not a word." Still cslrrying the frail instrument, Stark went noiselessly to the branching corridor and looked along it. There was a great stone slab at the end of it. where it widened out into a guard chamber. And there was a guard there. Half a dozen of the Children, young, armed, patiently bored. Four of them were occupied with some game they werr playing on a stone table. The other two watched. The old man had begun to run. He did not even pause to see what became of his precious instrument. Stark set it down unharmed. He took the knife from his belt and went down the corridor, moving fast, shoulders forward, all his attention fixed on the slab of rock that stood between him and freedom. The Children probably had not had to fight in their own defense since the last of the Wandering. They were out of practice, babes comfortable and soft in the womb of the Mother. He was on top of them before they knew he was there. They sprang up to face him, eyes large with sudden fear, pawing for their weapons. They had not really believed he would come. They had not really believed that if he did come he would try to fight them. Surely their six against his one -- They had not really understood Stark slashed one of the players across the throat. He fell across the table, tangling his mates with his thrashing, making dreadful noises. While they still sat in shock. Stark struck down another with his fist, caught up the light wiry body and threw it against the others. He bulled past them, reached the slab of stone, pushed against it. It moved. Two of them came at his back. He turned and fended them off, his knife-blade and heavy furs turning most of their sword cuts; their blades were like their bodies, made more for beauty than for der against the slab and it kept turning and in a moment they were hitting stone and he was through the opening. He slammed the stone shut on their screaming faces, and began to run. They would spread the word through Kell a Marg's great House but he did not think that anyone would come after him -- at least not very far. Not here on the Plain of Worldheart, where the Northhounds prowled. Old Sun was below the peaks and the northern face of the Witchfires was gray and ugly, a sheer frowning wall at his back. The mountain shadow made a long darkness across the plain. The wind was a knife, a scream, a madness bewailing eternal winter. The flogged snow-devils danced in desperation to appease it. The region of boiling cloud that hid the Citadel was small and bright against the flank of the Bleak Mountains, catching the last of the westering light. The Citadel. He did not know exactly how long he had been wandering in the House of the Mother, and the old man had not been able to tell him in terms he could understand. They had their own view of time in those dark catacombs. But it was long enough for many things to have happened. There was no point in asking himself questions for which there could be no answers until he reached the Citadel. If he reached it. Stark fixed the bright patch of cloud as a mark in his mind's eye, northeast across the plain. He set out toward it. The shadow of the Witchfires stretched longer and darker ahead of him. He would not outrun it. It would soon be night and the Children were staying safe, as he had thought they would, in their Mother's House. Why venture their lives when the Northhounds would certainly deal with him? The Bleak Mountains burned with a bloody glow that dimmed quickly to ashen dullness. The first stars showed. Stark lost his view of the Citadel-clouds and took his bearing from a star. The whole landscape faded into that insubstantial bluish-gray that comes over snowlands at twilight, when everything slides away at the edges of sight. The sky turned darker, turned black. The Lamp of the North rose up in it, a huge green lantern, and the plain became white gain, a diminished, green-hued white, but one more clearly visible now that the glimmery grayness had gone. The first twitching of the aurora appeared overhead. Stark moved forward on as steady a course as he could, watching for the plumes of steam marking the thermal areas he had seen from the balcony. The wind tore at him, beating him with hammer blows. It sent the snow-devils IF against him and at these times he dropped face down on the ground until the blinding, buffeting whirl of snow-dust passed over him. At other times the wind picked up lower clouds of snow and mixed them cunningly with the thermal plumes so that all was a formless whiteness. Several times he stopped short, sensing a bareness and a tremor beneath his feet, to find a gaping blow-hole lying just ahead, ready to swallow him. The ravines, those ancient gashes of erosion he had seen, were less dangerous. The bedrock of the plain was hard and had not scoured out too deeply. Wind and snow had worn the edges down. Nevertheless, Stark went carefully when he had to cross one. A fall here in the darkness of Worldheart could mean cheating the Northhounds of their pleasure. He was happy in a strange sort of way. The end of his journey was in sight and he was free, unencumbered. His body and his skills were his to use to the limit, without regard for others. The battle against cold and wind and cruel terrain was a clean one, uncluttered by ideas, ideals, beliefs or human spite. For the moment he was less Eric John Stark than he was N'Chaka, wild thing in a wild place, perfectly at home. Perfectly at home, perfectly functional, wary and watchful. His gaze roved constantly, never straining against the night, never looking straight at an object but always past it, never trying to hold it steady, merely sensing its shape and whether or not it moved. Twice the wind brought him a hint of something other than the cold smells of snow and frozen ground. The banners of the aurora snapped and quivered. The heads of the snow-devils seemed to touch him. Colors shifted, green, white, rose-fire. Plumes of steam shot high out of the rock, now to his right, now to his left, glimmering, shredding, vanishing. Sometimes he thought that dim white shapes stalked him between snow and steam. For a long while he could not be sure. There came a time when there was no longer any doubt. H e had come delicately treading his way out of a cloud of mingled steam and snow when he looked up along the tilt of the plain and saw a great white beast-shape, motionless, watching. Stark stopped. The thing continued to gaze at him. A cold beast thought touched his mind: I am Flay, He was big. The ridge of his spine would have reached Stark's shoulder. His withers were high and powerful. The thick neck drooped with the weight of the massive head. Stark saw the eyes, large, heavy muzzle, the fangs, sharp as knives. Flay stretched out a foreleg like a tree-trunk, unsheathed tiger-claws. He tore five furrows in the frozen ground, and smiled a beast-smile, lolling a red tongue. I am Flay, The eyes were bright, bright. Hell-hound eyes. Suddenly panic overcame Stark, loosened his muscles, weakened his joints, dropped him helpless on the ground, cold nausea in his belly and a silent scream in his brain. I am Flay, This is how they kill. Stark thought, with the fleeting remnants of his sanity. Fear, a bolt of fear as deadly as any missile. The size, the fangs, the claws are only camouflage. They do it with their minds. He could not draw his knife. Flay sauntered toward him as other shapes became visible on the rising plain. The pack; six, ten, a dozen, he couldn't count them, bounding, leaping, running. Fear. Fear was a sickness. Fear was a dark wave rolling over hjm, taking sight and hearing, crushing mind and will. He would never reach the Citadel, never see Gerrith. Flay would give him to the pack and they would play with him until he died. I am Flay, said the cold beast mind while the red jaws laughed. Huge paws padded silently in the blowing snow. Far down beneath the dark mass of fear that destroyed all human courage, another mind spoke. Cold beast mind, not thinking or reasoning, a mind alive and desperate to live, a mind feeling self as bone and muscle, cold and pain, a hunger to be fed, a fear to be endured. Fear is life, fear is survival. The only end of fear is death. The beast mind said, I am NVhaka, The blood beats, hot with living, hot with ha,te. Hate is a fire in the blood, a taste in the mouth of bitter salt.  am N'Chaka.  do not die, I kill. Flay paused, one tentative forefoot lifted. He swung his head from side to side, puzzled. The human thing ought now to be inert and helpless. Instead it spoke to him, it groped and tottered and rose from the ground, rose to its hands and knees and faced him. I am N'Chaka, The pack halted their playful IF rush. They formed a semicircle behind Flay, growling. fear. Cold beast mind let the fear slide over it. Cold beast eyes saw Flay, coarse-furred Flay looming bit in the night-gleaming. I have seen the great rock lizard open his jaws to take me, and he has not taken me. Why should I fear you? The pack growled, looking sidelong. Flay, Flay! This'is not a human! The N'Chaka thing got to its hind legs, crouching. It circled, making beast sounds. It sprang at Flay. Flay struck it sprawling with one sweep of his paw. The thing rolled over twice. Blood came out of rents in its fur. It bounded up and drew the knife from its belt. It came again at Flay. The pack could not understand. Human victims did not fight. They did not challenge the king-dog, only a member of the pack did that. This thing was not a member of the pack, but neither was it human. They did not know what it was. N'Chaka fought the king-dog for his life. They would not send more fear. This was up to Flay. Flay had realized, not believing it, that fear was useless. He tried once more, but the N'Chaka thing came at him without pause, slashing at him, dodging, circling, darting in and out, wary now of the claws. It was fighting, there was nothing left in its mind but fight -- fight and kill. It enjoyed the fighting. It meant to kill. Now Flay knew fear. In all his long life he had never failed to take his prey cleanly. No single victim had ever fought back. Now this N'Chaka thing defied him. And the pack was watching and he had no weapons but his claws and teeth. And those he was not used to using, except in play. None of the young dogs had yet dared to challenge him. Fear! he said to the pack. Send fear! They only watched, moving restlessly, the wind tearing at their fur. In a fury Flay struck at the N'Chaka thing with his terrible claws. The thing was ready this time. It leaped back and slashed with the knife. It slashed so that Flay howled and went on three legs. The pack smelled his blood and whined. A measure of humanity was creeping back into Stark's mind now that he had mastered the fear. Along with it came a savage sense of triumph. The Northhounds were not invincible. Perhaps the Citadel would not be invincible either. He knew now that he was going to reach it. He knew that he was going to kill Flay. Flay knew it too. "The wounded paw had slowed him. But he was still formidable. He bared his fangs and rushed. His jaws would crush a man's thighbone like a dry stick. But they snapped on empty air. Stark circled him, making him turn against that bad foot, and twice he darted in and slashed at the face. His eyes held Flay's eyes, the hell-hound eyes that were bred for terror, and he thought. How close the knife comes. Flay! How it flashes! Soon... The heavy head dropped lower. The terrible eyes wanted to look away. The paw bled and the pack whined, red tongues hanging. Stark feinted, ceased to hold Flay's eyes, the big head turned aside. Stark flung himself onto Flay's high bony back. He was only there for a second or two before he was thrown off, but that was long enough for the knife to go in. Flay whirled, snapping at the hilt standing out behind his shoulder, then staggered and went down as blood gushed out of his mouth. Stark pulled the knife out, then let the pack have the body. He stood apart, waiting. Their shallow minds had already told him what they would do. He waited until they were finished. They gathered then, keeping their eyes carefully averted lest they should seem to challenge him. The largest of the young dogs came belly down and licked Stark's hand. You will follow me? You killed Flay, We follow. But I am human. Not human. You are N'Chaka, You guard the Citadel, Against humans. And how many lost and hungry wayfarers have those jaws snapped up. Stark wondered. The Lords Protector defended their privacy too well. You defend against humans, but not against NChaka? We could not kill N'Chaka, Will you kill Wandsmen? No, They had neither love nor loyalty, but their breeding held them true. Fair enough. The other men -- those who serve the Wandsmen? They are nothing to us. Good. IF He considered their well-fleshed bodies. There were certainly not enough human victims to keep the fat, and there was little game on tile Plain of Worldheart where they ranged. Someone must feed them. Where do you kennel? At the Citadel, Come then. With the pack at his heels Stark set off toward the mountains. T he boiling clouds turned copper with the rising of Old Sun. The Northhounds trotted unconcerned through a wilderness of humped rock and gaping blow-holes. Stark went with them while the ground boomed and shook and the steam spurted. He had not planned it this way. He had not thought that a direct attack on the Citadel would be possible. But this unexpected and highly uncertain weapon had been put into his hand and he had decided to use it. Now. As swiftly and brutally as possible. The thermal area seemed to go on forever, and then suddenly they had passed through it and the mountains were there, and the Citadel. Dark and strong and solid, clinging to the mountain flank, the compact shape of its walls and towers looking almost like an outcrop of the native rock. The fortress and fountainhead from which a handful of men ruled over a planet. He could understand why it had been built here, hidden behind its perpetual curtain. In the days of the Wandering, when everything was chaos, this place would have been isolated from the main streams of migration and therefore relatively safe. Tall crags protected the Citadel at back and side, the thermal pits guarded its front. With all that, and the Northhotinds, the Lords Protector need not have worried overmuch about bands of plunderers coming south over the passes. From the size of the Citadel, they had garrisoned fewer than a hundred men, and they would not have needed more. How many men would be there now after all these centuries of peace? He did not know. He looked at the Northhounds, hoped that they would be adequate. Otherwise any number would be too many against one man with a knife. There were sentries on the walls, bright-eyed men with blank faces. They saw Stark at the edge of the cloud with the pack behind him. Even over the roaring of the ventholes Stark could hear their sudden clamor. Hurry! he told the Northhounds. No hurry, said the young dog. whose name was Gerd. The Northhounds trotted on toward the base of the Citadel, courses of stone laid in upon the rock. They will kill you. Stark told them, and ran, dodging this way and that. Arrows began to fly from the walls. In the roiling copper shadow they flew. None hit Stark, though he felt the wind of one. Some stuck in the ground. Two hit Northhounds. I sai(fthey would kill you. He was under the base of the Citadel now, where the arrows could not reach him. Why, N'Chaka? -- a cry of puzzled anguish. The Northhounds began to run. They believe you have come to attack them. We have always been faithful. A third hound rolled over screaming, an arrow through his flanks. They doubt you now. And small wonder. For the first time since the first whelp of them was born, they had let in an intruder. They had brought in an intruder. The Northhounds bayed. There was a hole in the rock. They ran into it. The cave was large and dry, sheltered from the wind. It smelled of kennel and there were troughs where the hounds were fed. At the back was a door of thick iron bars with' heavy bolts on the inner side. Stark went to the door. He could sense the bewilderment and rage in their beast minds. They tried to kill you. Why did you not send fear to them? Gerd growled and whimpered. He was one of the first two hit. The arrow had gashed his rump painfully. We never sent fear to hose. We will now. Stark reached through to the bolts and began to draw them. Are there other humans in the Citadel? Gerd answered irritably. With Wandsmen. If they were with the Wandsmen, or the Lords Protector, it was no concern of Gerd's. But there are humans? You can touch their minds? Human. One mind. Touch. One mind. One human. Gerrith? Halk? Ashton? Stark opened the door. Come and kill for N'Chaka. They came. There was a hall with storerooms on either side, and then a rough stair that went up into darkness. Stark climbed as fast as he dared, much faster than was wise, knife in hand. The men of the Citadel were IF surprised, shocked, off guard and he wanted to use that advantage. At the top was a massive iron door to be shut if anyone managed to pass through the Northbound kennel, and a windlass arrangement to drop a section of the stair. Beycmd was a chamber cluttered with the debris of long occupancy. A barred slit let in the amber daylight, only a little better than no light at all. room into a long, low hall lighted at intervals by lamps. There were no windows. Row upon row of wooden racks crammed the space, leaning and sagging under the weight of endless rolls of parchment. The records. Stark guessed, of generations of Wandsmen who had come to the Citadel to report and confer concerning their work in the world. They looked as though they would bum well. So did the enormous timbers that sustained the roof. There was a stair on the opposite side of the hall. He was halfvay to it when a body of men came plunging down. They might have been on their way to close that iron door. They stopped dead when they saw the Northhounds. The hounds never came inside the Citadel. They could not conceive of such a thing happening -- yet it had happened. Their faces and their bright eyes remained expressionless even after the Northhounds had sent fear. Kill said Stark, and the pack killed. They were very angry, very swift. When they had finished he picked up a sword, leag belt and scabbard untouched. The sword would wipe clean. He started up the stair. Gerd spoke in his mind. N'Chaka, Wandsmen -- He saw vhite in his mind and knew that Gerd meant the Lords Protector. The hounds did not distinguish between Wandsmen. Wandsmen say kill you. He had expected this. The hounds were loyal to the Wandsmen. How strong was his own hold over them? If their hold were stronger he would finish here as the blank-faced men had finished. He turned to Gerd, looking straight into the hell-hound eyes. You cannot kill NChaka, Gerd stared at him steadily. The bristled lips pulled back to show the rows of fangs, lliey were still bloy. The pack whined and whimpered, clawing the stones. Whom do you follow? Stark asked. We follow the strongest But Flay obeyed Wandsmen -- , I am not Flay, I am NChaka, Shall ! kill you as I kUled Flay? He would have done it. The sword point was aimed straight for Gerd's throat. Stark was almost as hungry for blood as they were and Gerd knew it. The fiery gaze slid aside. The head flung down. The pack became quiet. Send fear. Stark said. Drive away all but the Wandsmen and the human. Drive away the servants who kill you. Then we will talk to the Wandsmen, Not kill? Not the Wandsmen, not the human. Talk, But Stark's hand gripped the sword. The Northhounds obeyed him. He felt the air vibrate with their sending. He led them up the stair. There were some men at the top. Terror was on them, an agony in the gut. The Northhounds tore them almost leisurely. Gerd picked up the leader and carried him in his jaws like a kitten. No one else stood against them. All the others had had strength enough to run. Stark came at length into another hall, higher than the one that held the records and not so long, with windows open onto the eternal mist. It was sparsely furnished, ascetic, a place for meditation. Kell a Marg, spiteful daughter of Skaith, had been wrong. There was no hint here of secret sin and luxury, either in the hall or in the faces of the seven white-robed men who stood there in attitudes of arrested motion, overwhelmed by the swiftness with which this thing had happened. There was an eighth man, one not wearing a white robe. Simon Ashton. Gerd dropped what he was carrying. Stark put his left hand on the hound's great head and said, Let the Earthman come to me." Ashton came and stood at Stark's right hand. He was thinner than Stark remembered and he showed the strain of long captivity. Otherwise he seemed unhurt. Stark said to the Lords Protector, "Where is Gerrith?" The foremost of them answered. Like the others, he was an old man. Not aged or infirm, but old in work and dedication as well as years. His thin hard jaw and fierce eyes reflected an uncompromising and inflexible toughness. "We questioned her and the wounded man, then sent them south with Gelmar. It was not believed that you could escape the Children in the House of the Mother." He looked at the Northhounds. "This, too, would not have been believed." "Nevertheless," said Stark, "I IF am here. Believe it." And now that he was here, he wondered what he was going to do with them. They were old men. Unyielding old men, devoted to their principles, ruling with the iron rod of righteousness, cruel only to be kind. He hated them. If they had killed Ashton he could Have killed them without compunction. But Ashton was alive and safe and he could not slaughter them in cold blood. Another factor: theNorthhounds. They felt his thoughts and growled. Gerd leaned his massive shoulder against Stark's side to hold him. The man in white smiled briefly. "That instinct, at least, is too strong for you. They will not let you kill us." "Go then," said Stark. "Take your servants and go. Let the people of Skaith see the Lords Protector for what they are, not gods or immortals but only seven old men cast adrift in the world. I will pull down this Citadel." "You may destroy it. You cannot destroy what it stands for. It will remain a symbol. You cannot destroy us, for the work we do is greater than our physical bodies. The prophecy is false, man from the stars. You will not prevail. We shall continue to serve our people." He paused. "My name is Ferdias. Remember it." Stark nodded. 'Til remember. And prophecy or not, Ferdias, you have served too long." "And what do you serve? The littleness of one man. For one man you set our world in turmoil." He looked at Ashton. "He, too, is only a symbol," said Stark softly. "The symbol of reality. That is what you're fighting, not one man, or two. Go and fight it, Ferdias. Wait for the stars to crash in on you. Because they will." They turned and left him. He stared after their proud and stubborn backs, and the Northhounds held him, whimpering. F ree at last to speak, Ashton said, shaking his head, "As Ferdias said, it does seem a lot for one man. But," he added, "by the stars I'm glad you're here!" "Well," said Stark, "before we're done, you may wish I'd left you with the Lords Protector. What you?" "I convinced them I'd be more valuable to them alive. They're very worried men, Eric. They know they're threatened by something big but they don't know how big, they don't really understand. The whole concept of spaceflight and the Galactic Union is too new and strange. Shattering. They don't know how to deal with it and they thought I might be of some help to them since I'm part of it. I pointed out that they could always kill me later on." He looked at the Northhounds and shivered. "I won't ask you how you did that. I'm afraid I know." "Of all men you ought to," said Stark, and smiled. Then he asked, "How long ago did Gelmar leave, with Gerrith?" "Yesterday." "They won't be far ahead of us, then. Not with Halk slowing them down. Simon, I know that the Min istry cannot condone the vandalism I am about to commit, but you won't try to stop me, will you?" Again Ashton looked at the pack. "Not likely. Your friends might be annoyed." Stark set about destroying the Citadel as well as he could, and it was well enough. The furnishings, the hall of records, the great timber beams burned hotly. Most of the outer walls would be left, but the interior would be gutted -- and in any case the sacred isolation of the Citadel was ended for all time, and the superstitious awe that went with it. He had hoped that the destruction of the Lords Protector might be as complete, though he was glad, when he considered it, that he had not been able to kill them. They would have remained forever a potent and holy legend. The truth, when the people saw it, would kill them more certainly than any sword. The Northhounds did not attempt to interfere with his burning of the Citadel. Their guardianship seemed to have been associated only with the pleasurable aspects of keeping intruders away from it. Stark stood with Ashton on the road outside the Citadel, watching the flames lick at the windowplaces, and he said, "So far, so good. There is still Gerrith, and a long walk south. Then we'll see. what we can do about Irnan and the freedom of the stars, not to speak of getting ourselves safely away from Skaith." "It's a large order," said Ashton. "We have allies." Stark turned to the Northhounds, to Gerd. What will you do now that there is nothing left for you to guard? We will follow the strongest said Gerd, and licked his hand. And so you will, thought Stark, until I fall sick or wounded, and then you will do to me as you did to Flay. Or try to. He bore them no ill-will for that. It was their nature. He laid his hand on Gerd's head. Come, then. With Ashton at his side. Stark set his face southward to the passes of the Bleak Mountains.  IF Montclair, N. J. #. Savage, etc.) Magazines, Playboys, Premiums, Movie Merchandise, etc. #-#. Catalogues # cents. Rogofsky, Box GF#, Flushing, New York #. Park, L. I., N.Y. #. S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Frankenstein Interview. "Monster" Tells All! #. Nonis, Postbox #-M, Indianapolis #. 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Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor EerJakobsson, Editor Emeritus Leserde Bey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Five hundred years after a decisive battle in the Hu manBerserker war, starmen returned to find that a planet of warriors had become a planet of death! In which the redoubtable Dr. A. demonstrates that, just as a human being is more than a biochemical machine, so can a robot transcend the metallic. For centuries Hranth had been the oppressors -- then men came! In which the outcome of a battle of infinite proportions rests on the validity of a theorem of a long-dead logician! Professor Mantel ish, scientist-extraordinary of the Hub Civiiization, here matches wits with his arch-enemy, Paes Fiam -- who is on the scent of immortaiity. Or is it the other way around? Words of wisdom from the Editor's favorite editor. The first in a series of nitty-gritty coiumns about science fiction from the inside-out. Wherein Lester takes a certain iiterary gentieman to task. Art -- for its own sake. WoiW of IF to piMtolwd In flw tMtotf KinoPMf, Ltd... # Oto noo rt or Hood, London WWf #R#. Arnold E. Aln o nioon, Chohmon of Em B oord, flolpli Stolioo. Manaolng Olroclor. Shiotooopnr: #Bp. #-toouo o n boc rt pl i on In Vw UnNodKiidbni: I.M # . FuMtoMna Oonooinllon. o onboMtorv of Univoraal nddlotilno A OtoMbulIno CoifwiBlIon, Arnold E. Abnonoon, PwoMont. Main Offlooo: # Eoot #S Sbool, Now Yoifc. N.Y. #. Obiotooopir: #c. #-toouo oubocflpllon: # In U.S... # oloowfiow. Amorfeon CopyiloM C onoomio n o. Al rights looonoE. Sooond elooo poo to p PoM ol Now Yoifc, M W --  ko , I I igwnndoi l ol.Alloloitoopilntodlnddoinop#nooio ll oBo n ondany  I nd f oiH yb o h ooonchoincloioond oolnol psnono to oolnoldonini. Frintod In lf.JL I T hey were brothers. Not merely in the sense that they were both human beings, or even that they were fellow-children of a creche. trophe, when the concept of the family still had some validity. How embarrassing it was! Over the years Anthony had almost forgotten his childhood shame. There were times when he Not at all! They were brothers, hadn't given it the slightest thought brothers -- kin, to use a term that for months at a time. But ever since turies before, prior to the Catasagain thrown inextricably together. he had found himself living through Nowadays, of course, one chose an agonizing period. one's second name to suit one's It might not have been so bad if self -- and changed it as often as circumstances had made it obvious desired. After all, the symbol-chain all along -- if, as in the pre-Cataswas what really counted: that was trophe days (Anthony had at one encoded, yours, and yours alone, time been a great reader of history), from birth. in that way flaunted the relationHe insisted on it with a kind of ship. sober professionalism. His own business, surely, but what an advertisement of poor taste! Anthony, on the other hand, had decided on Smith when he had turned thirteen and had never changed it. It was simple, easily spelled -- and quite distinctive, since he had never met anyone else who had chosen that name. It was once very common -- among the pre-Cats, which explained its rareness now, perhaps. But the difference in names meant nothing when the two were together. They looked alike. They weren't twins -- but then only one of a pair of twin-fertilized ova was allowed to come to term. It was just that physical similarity occasionally appeared in the non-twin situation -- especially when the relationship was on both sides. Anthony was five years younger than his brother, but both had the beaky nose, the heavy eyelids, the just noticeable cleft in the chin. It was just asking for it when, out of some passion for monotony, parents repeated. At first, now that they were together, their appearance drew that startled glance followed by the elaborate silence. Anthony tried to ignore the matter, but out of sheer was as likely as not to say, "We're brothers." "Oh?" the other would say, hanging in there for just a moment as though he wanted to ask if they were full blood-brothers. But then good manners would win the day and the fellow would turn away as though it were a matter of no interest. That happened only rarely, of course. Most of the people in the Project knew -- how could it be prevented? -- and avoided the situation. fellow. Not at all. If they hadn't been brothers (or if they had been but had had sufficiently different looks to be able to mask the fact) they might have gotten along famously. As it was... It didn't make it easier that they had played together as youngsters, and had shared the earlier stages of their education in the same creche through some successful maneuvering on the part of their mother. Having borne two sons by the same father and having, in this fashion, reached her limit (she had not fulfilled the requirement for a third) she conceived the notion of being able to visit both with a single trip. She was a strange woman. the creche first. He had gone into science -- genetic engineering. Anthony had learned of that, while he was still in the creche, through a letter from his mother. When he was old enough to speak firmly to the matron those letters stopped. But he always remembered the last one for the agony of shame it had brought him. Having the talent, Anthony had eventually entered a science, too. IF He remembered having had the wild -- and prophetic, he now realized -- fear he might meet his brother, and so had chosen telemetries, which was about as far removed from genetic engineering as one could imagine. Or so one would have thought. Through all the elaborate development of the Mercury Project, circumstance waited. The time came, as it happened, when the Mercury Project appeared to be facing a dead end. But a suggestion had been made which saved the situation -- and at the same time dragged Anthony into the dilemma his parents had prepared for him. The best and most sardonic part of the whole thing was that it was Anthony who, in his innocence, made the suggestion. II uninhibited elder brother, knew of the Mercury Project, but only in the way he knew of the longdrawn-out Stellar Probe that had been on its way before he was bom and would still be on its way after his death; the way he knew of the Martian colony and of the continuing attempts to establish similar colonies on the asteroids. Such things were on the distant periphery of his mind and of no real importance. No part of the space effort had ever swirled inward closer to the center of his interests, as far as he could remember -- till the day when the printout included photographs of some of the men engaged in the Mercury Project. first by the fact that one of them had been identified as Anthony Smith. He remembered the odd last name his brother had chosen, and he remembered the "Anthony". Surely there could not be two Anthony Smiths. He had then looked at the photograph itself -- no mistaking the face. He looked in the mirror. No mistaking the face. He felt amused, but uneasily so; he recognized the potential embarrassment for all parties. Full bloodbrothers, to use the disgusting phrase. But what was there to do about it? How correct the fact that both his father and his mother had been utterly without imagination? He must have absently put the print-out in his pocket when he was getting ready to leave for work, for he came across it during his lunchhour. He stared at it again. Anthony looked keen. It was quite a good reproduction -- the printouts were of enormously good quality these days. His lunch partner, Marco Whateverrhis-name-was-that-week said curiously, "What are you looking the printout and said, "That's my brother." Grasping the nettle. Marco studied it, frowning. "Who? The man standing next to you?" "No, me -- I mean the man who looks like me. He's my brother." There was a longer pause this time. Marco handed it back and said with a careful levelness to his voice, "Same-parents brother?" "Yes." "Father and mother both?" "Yes." "Ridiculous!" "Well, according to this, he's doing telemetries over in Texas and I'm doing work in autistics up here. So what difference does it make?" mind and later that day he threw the printout away. He did not want his current bedmate to come across it. She had a ribald sense of humor ingly wearying. He was rather glad she was not interested in having a child by him. He had had one a few years back anyway. That little brunette, Laura or Linda, one or the other name, had collaborated. least a year, that the matter of Randall had come up. thought to his brother -- and he hadn't -- before that, he certainly had no time for it afterward. Randall was sixteen when William first received word of him. He had lived an increasingly seclusive life and the Kentucky creche in which he was being brought up decided to cancel him -- and of course it was only some eight or ten days before cancellation that it occurred to anyone to report him to the New York Institute for the Science of Man. (I'he Homological Institute was its common name.) with several others, and there was nothing in the description of Randall that particularly attracted his notice. Still it was time for one of his tedious trips to the creches and there was one likely possibility in West Virginia. He went there -- and was disappointed into promising himself (for the fiftieth time) that he would thereafter make such visits by TV image. But then, having dragged himself to the general area, thought he might as well take a look at the Kentucky creche before returning home. He expected nothing. Yet he hadn't studied Randall's gene pattern for more than ten minutes before he was calling the Institute for a computer calculation. Then he sat back and perspired slightly at the thought that only a last-minute impulse had brought him, that without that impulse Randall would have been quietly cancelled. A drug would have soaked painlessly through his skin, into his bloodstream and he would have sunk into a peaceful sleep that gradually deepened into death. The drug had a twenty-three IF called it "nirvanamine" -- as did everyone else. name, matron?" The creche-matron said, "Randall Nowan, scholar." sively. "Nowan." The matron spelled it. "He chose it last year." "And it meant nothing to you? It  is pronounced No one! It didn't occur to you to report this young man last year?" "It didn't seem -- " began the matron, flustered. What was the use? How was she to know? There was nothing in the eno-pattern to have given her warning. The usual textbook criteria was useless here. It was a and his staff had worked out over a period of twenty years through experiments on autistic children -- and a combination they had never actually seen in the flesh. So close to cancelling! Marco, the hard-head of the group, complained that the creches were too eager both to abort and to. cancel. He maintained that all gene-patterns should be allowed to develop until initial screening, that there should be no cancellation without consultation with a homologist. "There aren't enough homolo"Well, we can at least run all gene patterns through the computer," said Marco. "To save anything we can get for our own use?" "For any homological use, here or elsewhere. We must study genepatterns in action if we're to understand ourselves properly -- and it is the abnormal and monstrous patterns that give us most information. Our experiments on autism have taught us more about homology than the sum total of existing knowledge on the day we began." roll of the phrase 'the genetic physiology of man' to 'homology', shook his head. "Just the same, we've got to play it carefully. However useful we can claim our experiments to be, we exist on bare social permission, reluctantly given. We are playing with lives." "Useless lives. Fit only for cancelling." "A quick and pleasant cancelling is one thing. Our experiments, usually drawn-out and sometimes extremely unpleasant, are another." "We help them sometimes," replied Marco. "And we don't help them sometimes." ' It was a pointless argument, really, for there was no way of settling it. What it came down to was that there were too few interesting abnormalities and no way of urging mankind to encourage a greater production. The trauma of the Catastrophe would never vanish in a dozen ways, including that one. The hectic push toward space exploration could be traced back (and was, by some sociologists) to the knowledge of the fragility of the life-skein on the planet, thanks to the Catastrophe. Well, never mind -- that's another story. There had never been anyone like Randall Nowan, not for William. The slow onset of autism characteristic only of that totally rare gene pattern meant that more was known about Randall than about any autistic patient before him. They even caught some last faint glimmers of his thought-processes in the laboratory -- before he closed off altogether and finally shrank completely within the wall of his skin, unconcerned, unreachable. Then they began the slow process whereby Randall, subjected for increasing lengths of time to artificial stimuli, yielded up the inner workings of his brain and gave clues thereby to the inner workings of all brains, those called normal as well as those similar to his own. So vastly great was the data they to feel his dream of reversing autism might be more than merely a dream. He felt a warm gladness at having chosen the name AntiAut. He was almost at the height of the euphoria induced by the work on Randall when he received the call from Dallas, and the heavy pressure began -- now, of all times -- to abandon his work and take on a new problem. Looking back on it later, he could never work out just what it was that finally led him to agree to visit Dallas. In the end, of course, he could see how fortunate it was -- but what had persuaded him? Could he, even at the start, have had a dim, unrealized notion of the potential outcome? Surely, impossible. Was it the unrealized memory of that printout-photograph of his brother? Surely, impossible. But he let himself be argued into visiting the Project, and it was only when the micro-pile power unit changed the pitch of its soft hum and the agrav unit took over for the final descent that he remembered that photograph -- at least consciously. Anthony worked at Dallas and, Mercury Project. That was what the caption had referred to. He swallowed, as the soft jar told him the journey was over. This would be uncomfortable. Ill Anthony was waiting on the roof jHL reception-area to greet the inIF coming expert. Not by himself, of course. He was part of a sizable delegation -- the size itself was a grim indication of the desperation to which they had been reduced. Furthermore he was among the lower echelons; that he was there at all was only because it was he who had made the original suggestion. He felt a slight but continuing uneasiness at the thought of that. He had put himself on the line. He had received considerable approval for it, but there had been the faint insistence always that it was his suggestion; if it turned out to be a fiasco, every one of them would move out of the line of fire, leaving him alone at point-zero. There were occasions, later, when he brooded over the possibility that the dim memory of a brother in homology had suggested his thought. That might have been, but it didn't have to be. The suggestion was so sensible, so inevitable, that surely he would have had the same thought if his brother had been something as innocuous as a fantasy writer -- or if he had had no brother at all, for that matter. The problem was the inner planets -- The Moon and Mars were colonized. The larger asteroids and the satellites of Jupiter had been reached, and plans were in progress for a manned voyage to Titan, Saturn's large satellite. Yet even with plans underway for sending men to the outer Solar system there was still no chance of a manned approach to the inner planets, for fear of the Sun. Venus was the less attractive of the two worlds within Earth's orbit. Mercury, on the other hand... Anthony had not yet joined the team when Dmitri Large (he was quite short, actually) had given the talk that had moved the World Congress sufficiently to vote the appropriation that made the Mercury Project possible. Anthony had listened to the tapes, and had heard Dmitri's presentation. Tradition was firm to the effect that it had been extemporaneous, and perhaps it was, but it had been perfectly constructed and held within it, in essence, every guideline followed by the Mercury Project since. The chief point was that it would be wrong to hold inner-planet research in abeyance until technology had advanced to the point where a manned expedition through the rigors of Solar radiation would become feasible. Mercury was a unique .environment that could teach much, and from Mercury's surface sustained observations could be made of the Sun that could not be made in any other way. Provided a suitable man-substitute -- a robot, in short -- could be placed on the planet. A robot with the required physical characteristics could be built. Soft-landings were as easy as kissmy-hand. Yet once a robot landed, what next? He could make his observations and guide his actions on the basis of those observations, but the Project wanted his actions to be intricate and subtle, at least potentially, and they were not at all sure what observations he might make. To prepare for all reasonable possibilities and to allow for all the intricacy desired, the robot would need to contain a computer sufficiently complex and versatile to fall into the same asteroid with a mammalian brain. Yet nothing like that could be miniaturized sufficiently to be used in the kind of robot they planned. Perhaps someday the positronicpath devices that the roboticists were playing with might make it possible, but that someday was not yet. The alternative was to have the robot send back to Earth every observation it made as it was made. A computer on Earth could then guide its every action on the basis of those observations. The robot's body, in short, was to be there, its brain here. Once that decision was reached telemetrists became the key technicians. It was then that Anthony joined the Project as one of those who labored to devise methods for receiving and returning impulses over distances of from # to # times past, a Solar disk that could interfere with those impulses in a most ferocious manner. He took to his job with passion and (he firmly thought) with skill and success. It was he, more than anyone else, who had designed the three switching-stations that had been hurled into permanent orbit about Mercury. Each of them had the job of sending and receiving impulses from Mercury to Earth and from Earth to Mercury. Each was capable of resisting, more or less permanently, the radiation from the Sun, and more than that, each could filter out Solar interference. Three equivalent Orbiters were placed at a distence of a little over a north and south of the plane of the Ecliptic so that they could receive the impulses from Mercury and relay them to Earth -- or vice versa -- even when Mercury was behind the Sun and inaccessible to direct reception from any station on Earth's surface. Which left the robot itself; a marvelous specimen of both the roboticists' and telemetrists' arts. The most complex of ten successive models, it was capable, with only a little over twice the volume and five times the mass of a man, of sensing and doing considerably more than a man -- if it could be guided. How complex a computer had to be to guide the robot made itself rapidly evident, however, as each response-step had to be modified to IF allow for possible variations in perception. And as each response-step itself enforced the certainty of greater complexity of possible variation in perceptions, the early steps had to be reinforced and made stronger. It built itself up endlessly, like a chess game, and the telemetrists began to use a computer to program the computer that designed the program for the computer that programed the robot-controlling computer. There was nothing but confusion. The robot was at a base in the Arizona desert and was working well. The computer in Dallas could not, however, handle him well enough; not even under perfectly known Earth conditions. How then -- Anthony remembered the day when he had made the suggestion. It was on #-#-#. He remembered it, for one thing, because he remembered thinking that day that #-# had been an important holiday in the Dallas-region of the world among the pre-Cats half a millennium before -- # years before, to be exact. good dinner, too. There had been a careful adjustment of the ecology of the region and the Project personnel had high priority in collecting the food supplies that became available -- so there' was an unusual degree of choice on the menus, and Anthony had tried roast duck.) The roast duck had made him somewhat more expansive than usual. Everyone was in a rather self-expressive mood, in fact, and Ricardo said, "We'll never do it. Let's admit it. We'll never do it." There was no telling how many had thought such a thing how many times before, but it was a rule that no one said so openly. Open pessimism might be the final push needed for appropriations to stop (they had been coming with greater difficulty each year for five years now) and if there were a. chance, it would be gone. Anthony, ordinarily not given to extraordinary optimism, but now revelling over his duck, said, "Why can't we do it? Tell me why, and I'll refute it." Ricardo's dark eyes narrowed at once to the challenge. "You want me to tell you why?" "I sure do." Ricardo swung his chair around, facing Anthony full. He said, "There's no mystery. Dmitri Large won't say so openly in any report but you know and I know that to run Mercury Project properly, we'll need a computer as complex as a human brain whether it's on Mercury or here, and we can't build one. So where does that leave us except to play games with the World Congress and get money for makework and possible useful spinoffs?" Anthony, a complacent smile on his face, said, "That's easy to refute. You've given us the answer yourself." (Was he playing games? Was it the warm feeling of duck in his stomach? The desire to tease Ricardo? Or did some unfelt thought of his brother touch him? There was no way, later, that he could tell.) "What answer?" Ricardo rose. He was quite tall and unusually thin and he always wore his white coat unseamed. He folded his arms and seemed to be doing his best to tower over the seated Anthony like an unfolded meter-rule. "What answer?" "You say we need a computer as complex as a human brain. All right, then, we'll build one." "The point, you idiot, is that we can't -- " " We can't. But there are others." "What others?" "People who work on brains, of course. We're just solid-state mechanics. We have no idea in what way a human brain is complex, or where, or to what extent. Why don't we get in a homologist and have him design a computer?" With that Anthony took a huge helping of stuffing, savored it complacently. He could still remember, after all this time, the taste of the stuffing, though he couldn't remember in detail what had happened afterward. It seemed to him that no one had taken it seriously. There was laughter and a general feeling that Anthony had wriggled out of a hole by clever sophistry, so that the laughter was at Ricardo's expense. (Afterward, of course, everyone claimed to have taken the suggestion seriously.) Ricardo blazed up, pointed a finger at Anthony and said, "Write that up. I dare you put that suggestion into writing." (At least, so Anthony's memory had it. Ricardo had, since then, stated his comment was an enthusiastic, "Good idea! Why don't you write it up formally, Anthony?") Anthony put it in writing. Dmitri Large had taken to it. In private conference, he had slapped Anthony on the back and had said that he had been speculating in that direction himself -- though he did not offer to take any credit for it on the record. (Just in case it turned out to be a fiasco, Anthony thought.) Dmitri Large conducted the search for the appropriate homologist. It did not occur to Anthony that he ought to be interested. He knew neither homology nor homologists -- except, of course, his brother, and he had not thought of him. Not consciously. So Anthony was up there waiting in the reception area, in a minor role, when the door of the aircraft opened and several men descended. In the course of the handshakes that began going around he found himself staring at his own face. His cheeks burned and, with all IF his might, he wished himself a thousand miles away. IV wished that the memory of his brother had come earlier. It should have -- surely it should have. But there had been the flattery of the request and the excitement that had begun to grow in him. Perhaps, he had deliberately avoided remembering. To begin with there had been the exhilaration of Dmitri Large coming to see him -- and in his own proper presence. He had come from 'Dallas to New York by plane and that had been, very titillating was to read thrillers. In the thrillers men and women always traveled mass-wise when secrecy was desired. After all, electronic travel was public property -- at least in the thrillers, where every beam of radiation that carried information was invariably bugged. morbid halfattempt at humor, but Dmitri hadn't seemed to be listenface and his thoughts seemed elsewhere. "I'm sorry," he said, finally. "You remind me of someone." (Even that hadn't given it away sible?) Dmitri Large was a small plump man who seemed to be in a perpetual twinkle even when he declared himself worried or annoyed. He had a round and bulbous nose, pronounced cheeks and softness everywhere. He emphasized his last name and said with a quickness it often, "Size is not all the large there is, my friend." protested much. He knew nothing about computers. Nothing! He had not the faintest idea of how they worked or how they were programed. "No matter, no matter," Dmitri said, shoving the point aside with an expressive gesture of the hand. "We know the computers; we can set up the programs. You just tell us what it is a computer must be made to do so that it will work like a brain and not like a computer." "I'm not sure I know enough abotft how a brain works to be able to tell you that, Dmitri," said "You are the foremost homologist in the world," said Dmitri. "I have checked that out carefully." That disposed of that. gloom. He supposed it was inevitable. Dip a person into one particular specialty deeply enough and long enough and he would automatically begin to assume that specialists in all other fields were magicians, judging the depth of their wisdom by the breadth of his own ignorance -- and as time went more of the Mercury Project than it seemed to him at the time that he would ever care to do. He said at last, "Why use a computer at all, then? Why not have one of your own men, or relays of them, receive the material from the robot and send back instructions."' "Oh, oh, oh," said Dmitri, almost bouncing in his chair in his eagerness. "You see, you are not aware. Men are too slow to analyze quickly all the material the robot will send back -- temperatures and gas pressures and cosmic ray fluxes and solar wind intensities and chemical compositions and soil textures and easily three dozen more items -- and then try to decide on the next step. A human being would merely guide the robot, and ineffectively; a computer would be the robot. "And then, too," he went on, "men are too fast, also. It takes radiation of any kind anywhere from ten to twenty-two minutes to make the round trip between Mercury and Earth, depending on where each is in its orbit. Nothing can be done about that. You get an observation, you give an order, but much has happened between the time the observation is made and the response returns. Men can't adapt to the slowness of the speed of light but a computer can take that into account. Come help us, certainly welcome to consult me, for what good that might do you. My private TV beam is at your service." "But it's not consultation I want. You must come with me." shocked. "Yes, of course. A project like this can't be carried out by sitting at opposite ends of a laser beam with a communications satellite in the middle. In the long run, it is too expensive, too inconvenient, and, of course, it lacks all privacy." decided. "Come to Dallas," said Dmitri, "and let me show you what we have there. Let me show you the facilities. Talk to some of our computer men. Give them the benefit of your way of thought." be decisive. "Dmitri," he said. "I have work of my own here. Important work that I do not wish to leave. To do what you want me to do may take me away from my laboratory for months." "Months!" said Dmitri, clearly may well be years. But surely it will be your work." "No, it will not. I know what my work is and guiding a robot on Mercury is not it." "Why not? If you do it properly, you will learn more about the brain merely by trying to make a computer work like one, and you will IF come back here, finally, better equipped to do what you now consider your work. And while you're gone, will you have no associates to carry on? And can you not be in constant communication with them by laser beam and television? And can you not visit New York on occasion? Briefly." of working on the brain from another direction did hit home. From that point bn he found himself looking for excuses to go -- at least to visit -- at least to see what it was all like. He could always return. Then there followed Dmitri's visit to the ruins of Old New York which he enjoyed with artless excitement (but then there was no more magnificent spectacle of the useless gigantism of the pre-Cats began to wonder if the trip might not give him an opportunity to see some sights as well. He even began to think that for some time he had been considering the possibility of finding a new bedmate, and it would be more convenient to find one in another geographical area where he would not stay permanently. -- Or was it that even then, when he knew nothing but the barest beginning of what was needed, there had already come to him, like the twinkle of a distant lightning-flash, an answer? So he eventually went to Dallas and stepped out on the roof and there was Dmitri again, beaming. Then, with eyes narrowing, the little man turned and said, "I knew -- what a remarkable resemblance!" there, visibly shrinking backward, was enough of his own face to make him certain at once that Anthony was standing before him. He read, very plainly, in Anthony's face a longing to bury the say was, "How remarkable!" and let it go. The gene-patterns of mankind were complex enough, after all, to allow resemblances of any reasonable degree even without kinship. homologist and no one can work with the intricacies of the human brain without growing insensitive as to its details, so he said, "I'm sure this is Anthony, my brother." Dmitri said, "Your brother?" two boys by the same woman -- my m'other. They were eccentric people." He then stepped forward, hand outstretched, and Anthony had no choice but to take it. The incident was the topic of conversation, the only topic, for the next several days. V enough when he realized what he had done. They sat together after dinner apologies. I thought that if we got the worst out at once that would end it. It doesn't seem to have done so. I've signed no papers, made no formal agreement. I will leave." "What good would that do?" said Anthony ungraciously. "Everyone knows now. Two bodies and one face. It's enough to make one puke." "If Heave -- " "You can't leave. This whole thing is my idea." heavy lids lifted as far as they might and his eyebrows climbed. "No, of course not. To get a homologist here. How could I possibly know they would send you' "But if I leave -- " "No. The only thing we can do now is to lick the problem, if it can be done. Then it won't matter." (Everything is forgiven those who succeed, he thought.) "I don't know that we can." "We'll have to try. Dmitri will place it on us. It's too good a chance. You two are brothers," Anthony said, mimicking Dmitri's tenor voice, "and understand each other. Why not work together?" Then, in his own voice, angrily: "So we must. To begin with, what is it cisely than the word homology can explain by itself." autistic children." "I'm afraid I don't know what that means." "Without going into a long songand-dance, I deal with children who do not reach out into the world, do not communicate with others, but who sink into themselves and exist behind a wall of skin, so far unreachably. I hope to be able to cure it some day." "Is that why you call yourself Anti-Aut?" "Yes, as a matter of fact," William replied. Anthony laughed briefly, but he was not really amused. manner. "It is an honest name."  "I'm sure it is," muttered Anthony hurriedly, and could bring himself to no more specific apology. With an effort, he restored the subject, "Are you making any progress?" "Toward the cure? No, so far. Toward understanding, yes. And the more I understand -- " William's voice grew warmer as he spoke and his eyes more distant. Anthony recognized it for what it was, the pleasure of speaking of what fills one's heart and mind to the exclusion of almost everything else. He felt it himself often enough; He listened as closely as he might to something he didn't really understand, for it was necessary to do so; him. IF How clearly he remembered it. He thought at the time he would not, but at the time, of course, he was not aware of what was happening. Thinking back, in the glare of hindsight, he found himself remembering whole sentences virtually word for word. said, "that the autistic child was not failing to receive the impressions, or even failing to interpret them in quite a sophisticated manner. Rather, he disapproved and rejected them -- without any loss of the potentiality of full communication if some impression could be found of which he approved." "Ah," said Anthony, making just enough of a sound to indicate that he was listening. "Nor can you persuade him out of his autism in any ordinary way, for he disapproves of you just as much as he disapproves of the rest of the world. But if you place him in conscious arrest -- " "In what?" "It is a technique we have in which, in effect, the brain is divorced from the body and can perform its functions without reference to the body. It is a rather sophisticated technique devised in our own laboratory; actually -- " "By yourself?" Anthony interrupted gently. reddening slightly, but clearly pleased. "In conscious arrest," he continued, "we can supply the body with designed fantasies and observe the brain under differential electroencephalography. We can at once learn more about the autistic individual; what kind of sense impressions he most wants; and we learn more about the brain generally." "Ah," said Anthony. This time it was a real ah. "And all this you have learned about brains -- can you not adapt it to the workings of a computer?" chance. I told that to Dmitri. I know nothing about computers and not enough about brains." "If I teach you about computers and tell you in detail what we need, what then?" "It won't do. It -- " "Brother," Anthony said, and he tried to make it an impressive word. "You owe me something. Please make an honest attempt to give our problem some thought. Whatever you know about the brain -- please adapt it to our computers." said, "I understand your position. I will try. I will honestly try." VI WT iLLiAM had tried, and as AnVrthony had predicted, the two had been left to work together. At first, they encountered others noy use the shock value of the announcement that they were brothers since there was no use in denial. Eventually, that stopped and there came to be a purposeful approached Anthony, or Anthony who might be present faded silently into the walls. They even grew used to each other after a fashion, sometimes speaking to each other almost as though there were no resemblance at all, no childish memories in common. Anthony made the computer-requirements plain in reasonably non-technical language and William, after long thought, explained how it seemed to him a computer might do the work, more or less, of a brain. Anthony said, "Would that be possible?" am not eager to try. It may not work. But it may." "We'd have to talk to Dmitri Large." "Let's talk it over ourselves first and see what we've got. We can go to him with as reasonable a proposition as we can put together. Or else, not go to him." Anthony hesitated. "We both go to him?" be my spokesman. There is no reason that we need be seen together." thing comes of this you will get full credit." about that. If there is anything to this, I will be the only one who can make it work, I suppose." They thrashed it out through four or five meetings and if Anthony hadn't been kin and if there hadn't been that sticky, emotional situahave been uncomplicatedly pleased with the younger -- brother -- for his quick understanding of an alien field. There followed long conferences with Dmitri Large. Conferences with everyone, in fact. Anthony saw them through endless days and Eventually, through an agonizing pregnancy, what came to be called the Mercury Computer, was bom. York with some relief. He did not plan to stay in New York (would he have thought that possible two months earlier?) but there was much to do at the Homological Institute. More conferences were necessary, of course, to explain to his own laboratory group what was happening and why he had to take leave and how they were to continue their own projects without him. Then there was a much more elaborate arrival at Dallas with the essential equipment and with two young aides for what would have to be an open-ended stay. IF figuratively speaking. His own laboratory and its needs faded from his thoughts. He was thoroughly committed to his new task. thony. The relief during William's absence had not penetrated deep and there began the nervous agony of wondering whether perhaps, hope against hope, he might not return. Might he not choose to send a deputy, someone else -- anyone else? Anyone with a different face so that Anthony need not feel himself to be half of a two-bodied monster? watched the freight-plane come silently through the air, watched it unload from a distance. But even at that distance he had recognized That was that. Anthony left. He went to see Dmitri that afternoon. "It's not necessary, Dmitri, for me to stay, surely. We've worked out the details and someone else can take over' "No, No," said Dmitri. "The idea was yours in the first place. You must see it through. There is no point in needlessly dividing the credit." Anthony thought: No one else will take the risk. There's still the chance of fiasco. I might have known. He had known, but he said stolidly, "You understand I cannot "But why not?" Dmitri pretended surprise. "You have been doing so well together." "I have been straining my guts over it, Dmitri, and they won't take any more. Don't you suppose I know how it looks?" "My good fellow! You make too much of it. Sure the men stare. They are human after all. But they'll get used to it. Fm used to it." You are not, you fat liar, Anthony thought. He said. "Tm not used to it." "You're not looking at it properly. Your parents were peculiar -- but after all, what they did wasn't illegal, only peculiar, only peculiar. Anyway, it's not your fault, or William's. Neither of you is to blame." "We carry the mark," said Anthony, making a quick curving gesture of his hand to his face. "It's not the mark you think. I see differences. You are distinctly younger in appearance. Your hair is wavier. It's only at first glance that there is a... similarity. Come, Anthony, there will be all the time you want, all the help you need, all the equipment you can use. I'm sure it will work marvelously. Think of the satisfaction!" Anthony weakened, of course, too, seemed sure it would work marvelously. Not as frenetically as did Dmitri, but with calm certitude. "It's only a matter of the proper connections," he said. "Though I must admit that that's quite a huge 'only'. Your end of it will be to arrange sensory impressions on an independent screen so that we can exert -- well, I can't say manual control, can I? -- so that we can exert intellectual control to override, if necessary." "That can be done," said Anthony. "Then let's get going. I'll need a week at least to arrange the connections and make sure of the instructions -- " "Programing," said Anthony. "Well, this is your place, so I'll use your terminology. My assistants and I will program the Mercury Computer, but not in your fashion." "I should hope not. We would want a homologist to set up a much more subtle program than anything a mere telemetrist could do." He did not try to hide the self-hating irony in his words. cepted the words. He said, "We'll begin simply. We'll have the robot walk." in Arizona, a thousand miles away. He walked stiffly and sometimes he fell down. Sometimes he clanked his ankle against an obstruction, whirled on one foot and went off in a surprising new direction. "He's a baby, learning to walk," Dmitri came occasionally, to learn of progress. "That's remarkable," he would say. Anthony didn't think so. Weeks passed, then months. The robot had progressively done more and more, as the Mercury Computer had been placed, progressively, under a more and more complex dency to refer to the Mercury Computer as a brain, but Anthony wouldn't allow it.) And. all the progress wasn't good enough. he said, finally. He had not slept the night before. "Isn't that strange?" said William, coolly. "I was going to say that I thought we had it about beaten." Anthony held himself together with difficulty. The strain of workthe robot fumble was more than he could bear. "I'm going to resign, It's not you -- " "But it is I, Anthony." failure. We won't make it. You see how clumsily the robot handles himself, even though he's on Earth, only a thousand miles away, with IF the signal round-trip only a tiny fraction of a second in time. On Mercury, there will be minutes of delay, minutes for which the Mercury Computer will have to allow. It's madness to think it will work." thony. You can't resign now. I suggest we have the robot sent to Mercury. I'm convinced he's ready." Anthony laughed loudly and in"I'm not. You seem to think it will be harder on Mercury, but it won't be. It's harder on Earth. This robot is designed for ## Earthnormal gravity, and he's working in Arizona at full gravity. He's designed for # C. and he's got # C. He's designed for vacuum and he's working in an atmospheric soup." "That robot can take the difference." "The metal structure can, I suppose, but what about the Computer right here? It doesn't work well with a robot that isn't in the environment he's designed for. Look, Anthony, if you want a computer that is as complex as a brain, you have to allow for idiosyncracies. Come, let's make a deal. If you will help me push to have the robot sent to Mercury, it will be six months en route and I will take a sabbatical for that period. You will be rid of me. "Who'll take care of the Mercury Computer?" "By now, you understand how it The long hiatus -- as we, with enormous well-bred control, are calling it -- is over. Random House now owns Ballantine Books -- joy abounds. This department is back being ovfer-worked as usual, and loving it. And may I, speaking persomdly, say thank you to all the many, marry gentle persorts who wrote, calM artd otherwise conveyed their love arrd good wishes while we were all diff-hangirtg. The next episode in our soap-opera looks good. An s.f. editor must, in logic, be far-sighted enough to buy against futures. But orgenixing the list for preserrtation at the Spring Sele Cottference, we were rather astounded to find how well balanced we had, in fact, been.   not unnaturally, the best already published material. Two New Writers: Robert Wells, and Robert E. Toomey, Jr., with A Two Old Masters: Lester del Rey -- by Jack Vance -- the start of a brand new series. Two Ok! Reliables: Edmund Cooper, Two Sequels: Alan Dean Foster's Kippax. Two reprints: R. A. Lafferty's ARby that busy fellow. David Gerrold --   That's balance by God. Some are already out of course. April and May will see the following: games in a future culture fanatically punitive to technology. originals on the subject of the title -- a showcase for new writers. Toomey. Jr. Our favorite character is Pacesetter, a I #-legged behemoth, heavily fanged and clawed, who is the local transportation... no introduction whatsoever.   And we'll cover the Adult Fantasy next time round. Blessings on you all. BB works well enough and I'll have my two men here to help you " Anthony shook his head defiantly, "I can't take the responsibility for the Computer, and I won't take the responsibility for suggesting that the robot be sent to Mercury. It won't work." "I'm sure it will." "You can't be sure. And the responsibility is mine. I'm the one who'll bear the blame. It will be nothing to you." Anthony later remembered this might have let it go. Anthony would have resigned. All would have been lost. me? Look, Dad had this thing about Mom. All right. I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry as anyone can be -- but it's done, and something odd has resulted. When I speak of Dad, I mean your Dad, too, and there's lots of pairs of people who can say that: two brothers, two sisters, a brother-and-sister. And then when I say Mom, I mean your Mom, and there are lots of pairs who can say that, too. But I don't know any other pair, nor have I heard of any other pair, who share both Dad and Mom." "I know that," said Anthony, grimly. "Yes, but look at it from my riedly. "I'm a homologist. I work with gene patterns. Have you ever thought of our gene-patterns? We IF share both parents which means that our gene-patterns are closer than any other pair on this planet. Our very faces show it." "I know that, too." "So that if this project were to work, and if you were to gain glory from it; it would be your genepattern that would have been proven highly useful to mankind -- and that would mean my genepattern as well. Don't you see, Anthony? I share your parents, your face, your genepattern, and therefore your glory or your disgrace. It is mine almost as much as yours and if any credit or blame adheres it adheres to both of us. I've got to be interested in your success. I've a motive for that which no one else on Earth has -- a purely selfish one, one so selfish you can be sure it's there. I'm on your side, Anthony, because you're very nearly me!" They looked at each other for a long time. For the first time Anthony did so without noticing the face they shared. that the robot be sent to Mercury." And Anthony gave in. After Dmitri had approved the request -- he had been waiting to, after all -- Anthony spent much of the day in deep thought. said, "Listen!" There was a long pause which Anthony said again, "Listen!" Anthony said, "There's really no need for you to leave. I'm sure you wouldn't like to have the Mercury Computer tended by anyone but yourself." intend to leave?" Anthony said, "No, I'll stay, too." much of each other." All of this had been, for Anthony, like speaking with a pair of hands clenched about his windpipe. The pressure seemed to tighten now, but he managed the hardest statement of all. "We don't have to avoid each other. We don't have to." ly. Anthony didn't smile at all; he left quickly. IX book. It was at least a month since he had ceased being vaguely surprised at having Anthony enter. He said, "Anything wrong?" "Who can say? They're coming in for the soft-landing. Is the Mercury Computer in action?" knew the Computer status perfectly, but he said, "By tomorrow morning, Anthony." "And there are no problems." "None at all." "Then we have to wait for the soft-landing." "Yes." Anthony said, "Something will go wrong." "Nothing will go wrong." "So much work wasted." "It's not wasted yet. It won't be." Anthony said, "Maybe you're right." Hands deep in his pockets he drifted away, stopped at the door. "Thanks!" "For what, Anthony?" "For being... comforting." lieved his own emotions didn't show. X Virtually the entire staff of the Mercury Project was on hand for the crucial moment. Anthony, who had no tasks to perform, remained well to the rear, eyes on the monitors. The robot had been activated and there were visual messages being returned. At least, they came out as the equivalent of visual. As yet they showed nothing but a dim glow of light which was presumably Mercury's surface. Shadows flitted across the screen, probably irregularities on that, surface. Anthony couldn't tell by eye alone, but those at the controls, who were analyzing the data by methods more subtle than could be disposed of by unaided eye, seemed calm. None of the little red lights that might have betokened emergency were lighting. Anthony was watching the key observers rather than the screen. and the others at the Computer. It was going to be thrown in only when the soft-landing was made. He should be. He couldn't be. The shadows flitted across the screen more rapidly. The robot was descending -- too quickly? Surely, too quickly! There was a last blur and a steadiness, a shift of focus in which the blur grew darker, then fainter. A sound was heard and there were perceptible seconds before Anthony realized that what he heard was, "Soft-landing achieved! Soft-landing achieved!" The murmur arose and became an excited hum of self-congratulation until one more change took place on the screen and the sound of human words and laughter was stopped as though there had been a smash-collision against a wall of silence. For the screen changed; changed the carefully filtered screen, they could now see a boulder -- clear, burning white on one side, ink-onink on the other. It shifted right, then back to left, as though a pair of eyes were looking left, then right. A metal hahd appeared on the screen as though the robot was looking at a part of itself. It was Anthony's voice that cried IF out at last, "The Computer's been thrown in." He heard the words as though someone else had shouted it and he raced out and down the stairs and through a corridor, leaving the babble of voices to rise behind him. into the Computer room, "it's perfect, it's -- " ed. "Shh. Please. I don't want any sensations entering except those from the robot." "You mean we can be heard?" whispered Anthony. "Maybe not, but I don't know." There was another screen, a smaller one, in the room with the Mercury Computer. The scene on it was different, and changing; the robot was moving. feeling its way. Those steps have got to be clumsy. There's a sevenminute delay between stimulus and response and that has to be allowed for." "But already he's walking more surely than he ever did in Arizona. you think so?" Anthony was gripit, eyes never leaving the screen. Anthony." T ie Sun burned down in a warm contrasting world of white and black, of white Sun against black sky and white rolling ground mottled with black shadow. The bright sweet smell of the Sun on every exposed square centimeter of metal contrasting with the creeping deathofaroma on the other side. He lifted his hand and stared at it, counting the fingers. Hot-hothot -- turning, putting each finger, one by one, into the shadow of the others and the hot slowly dying in a change in tactility that made him feel the clean, comfortable vacuum. Yet not entirely vacuum. He straightened and lifted both arms over his head, stretching them out, and the sensitive spots on either wrist felt the vapors -- the thin, faint touch of tin and lead rolling through the cloy of mercury. The thicker taste rose from his feet; the silicates of each variety, marked by the clear separate-andtogether touch and tang of each metal ion. He moved one foot slowly through the crunchy, caked dust, felt the changes like a soft, not-quite-random symphony. And overall, the Sun. He looked up at it, fat and bright and hot and he heard its joy. He watched the slow rise of prominences around its rim and listened to their crackling sound; and to the other happy noises over the broad face. When he dimmed the background light, the red of the rising wisps of hydrogen showed in bursts of mellow contralto, and the deep bass of the spots amid the muted whistling of the wispy, moving faculae. and the occasional thin keening of a flare, the ping-pong ticking of gamma rays and cosmic particles, and over all in every direction the soft, fainting, and ever-renewed sigh of the Sun's substance rising and retreating forever in a cosmic wind which reached out and bathed him in glory. He jumped, rose slowly in the air with a freedom he had never felt, and jumped again when he landed, and ran, and jumped, and ran again, with a body that responded perfectly to this glorious world, this paradise in which he found himself. A stranger so long and so lost -- in paradise at last.  "But what's he doing?" cried out Anthony. "It's all right. The programing is working. He has tested his senses. He has been making the various visual observations. He has dimmed the Sun and studied it. He has tested for atmosphere and for the chemical nature of the soil. It all works." "But why is he running?" "I rather think that's his own idea. If you want to program a computer as complicated as a brain, you've got to expect it to have ideas of its own." "Running? Jumping?" Anthony "He'll hurt himself. You can handle the Computer. Override. Make him stop," I won't. I'll take the chance of his hurting himself. Don't you understand? He's happy. He was on Earth, a world he was never equipped to handle. Now he's on Mercury with a body perfectly adapted to its environment, as perfectly adapted as a hundred specialized scientists could make it. It's paradise for him; let him enjoy it." "Enjoy? He's a robot." "I'm not talking about the robot. I'm talking about the brain -- the brain -- here." He pointed. The Mercury Computer, enclosed in glass, carefully and delicately wired, its integrity most subtly preserved, breathed and lived. "It's Randall who's in paradise," world for whose sake he autistically fled this one. He has a world his new body fits perfectly in exchange for the world his old body did not fit at all." Anthony watched the screen in wonder. "He seems to be quieting." he'll do his job all the better for his joy." Anthony smiled and said, "We've done it, then, you and I? Shall we join the rest and let them fawn on And Anthony linked arms. "Together, brother!"  IF o IF has a new editor... It isn't the first time, f hasn't yet hit a quarter-century of history, but in its span fhas had, I think, more editors than any other science-fiction magazine in the world: Ejler Jakobsson, and Horace Gold, and Damon Knight and five or six others. I edited it myself for, let's see, about nine years, which may be the all-time record for hanging on 'to this editor-devouring spot. An editor is a middleman. He stands between the publisher and the writer; between the writer and the reader; between the artist and the printer; he devotes his life to trying to make these irreconcilable pairs somehow play nicely together. It isn't easy. Every day he has to fight the same fight one more time, to convince the publisher that writers have to have enough money to live on, and the writers that publishers are entitled to make a profit. Three-quarters of his time is spent on reconciling differences, of on pesty little details (circulation promotion; publicity; fitting together issues; assigning art; checking engravings; etc., etc.) that most readers have never heard of. With what's left he tries to find and print masterpieces. How do you go about doing that? There are as many ways as there are editors, I suppose: The idealist. He has in his mind a perfect vision of the optimum sf magazine, and sets about finding writers to produce the stories to make it real. John Campbell was that kind of editor. He paid no attention to what anyone else was doing, cared nothing for "big names"; he just decided what kind of sf stories could be written that readers would like to read and bent a whole generation of newcomers to his will -- in the course of which he made them into the top professionals in the field. This is hard work and, of course, it only succeeds if the editor's perfect vision does in fact correspond to what an audience wants. When the ideal of the editor is something that appeals only to him, even a success of this kind is a failure. The imitator. He studies what everyone else is doing and carefully manufactures a package indistinguishable from everyone else's. There have been a lot of these editors in science fiction. In the boom periods (the late thirties, for instance, or the mid-fifties), when everyone with the price of a printing job seemed to be hitting the stands with a couple of sf titles, there were dozens of copies of copies, synthesized out of the same ingredients as Astounding and If. These didn't work very well; nearly all of them folded at the first cold draft of reader resistance. The eclectic. He takes what he can from wherever he can find useful things. He does the best he can. There have been good editors of all these kinds. The best editors have been all of them, as needed. The best editors, in fact, change their image of what they want pretty frequently, because science fiction itself changes. It grows and develops; it opens new territories and explores them. The stories that are being published this month, in #, couldn't have been published in # or # -- they probably couldn't have been written then. Writers learn from each other. Every time a new writer comes along with some new idea, some fresh way of looking at the world, some previously neglected approach to the potential of the future, he adds to the resources of all of us. I have enjoyed reading science fiction for a long time. I've enjoyed numberless stories. Even more, I've enjoyed watching the field grow. And the best place to watch it is in a magazine. I say this with no personal axe to grind. I am not editing sf magazines any more, and I see no reason why I ever would. But if they ever stopped being published -- no matter how many books, films and television programs took their place -- I would be very unhappy indeed. For one thing, books simply take too long to happen. If a writer thinks of a fine new idea today -- say, in June of # -- and decides to write it as a novel, it is June of # before it is finished, and June of # before it is published -- and # before it begins to fertilize new ideas in other writers, enriching the field. Magazines have shorter cycles; the short story or novelette gets written in a few weeks or so, gets into print by the end of the year, and is part of the common heritage before twelve months are gone. And there is another reason why I would hate to see the day when sf magazines were no more: because they were, are and will be for the foreseeable future the very best place for new writers to display their wares. For half a dozen years or more, when I was editing If, I made it a policy to publish at least one story in every issue by a writer who had never sold a science-fiction story before. Other magazines were less formally committed to finding new talent, but all of them, every one of them that amounted to anything in all the history of science fiction, in one way or another was IF continually searching for fresh writers with fresh things to say. How does the fresh talent get discovered? There's only one way. Week after week, a magazine like If gets something close to a hundred manuscript-sized envelopes from unknown writers all over the country, in fact all over the world. They are "the slush pile" -- a rather unattractive name, although often enough richly deserved. But among the slush from time to time one finds nuggets of gold; some person, out in Baton Rouge or Bualo or Berkeley, has read a lot of science fiction and decided he can write it as well as some of what he sees in print. About one time in a thousand he (or she) is right -- and a new professional writer is born. But without the science fiction magazines, where will that novice go? Probably he will go nowhere. The stories will stay in his desk drawer, if he writes them at all. The mood will pass. He will reconcile himself to a career in real estate or laundromat servicing... and we will all lose, perhaps, another Heinlein or E. E. Smith. jealousy in my heart as I write this. Editing a science-fiction magazine is not only work, it is a great deal of fun -- in some ways more so than editing books, which is what I am now doing for Bantam. Bantam is fun too, in a different way. Many of the writers I am publishing at Bantam are the same writers I was happy to publish in Galaxy and If. Mack Reynolds was a standby in the magazines, and I have him committed to one or two Bantam Books titles a year. I know he'll do well; we took a mail poll of you readers one year, and to everyone's astonishment, including Mack's, the most popular author we published was Mack Reynolds. Doris Piserchia (Star Rider), Frank Herbert Helstrom's Hive), John Brunner The Web of Everywhere), James Blish (the Star Trek adaptations) -- they all were contributors to the magazines. So was Samual R. Delany, whose immense and trailblazing novel Dhalgren I'll be publishing under the Bantam imprint a few months from now. I don't think Dhalgren could have been published in a magazine, if only because of its size -- it is about five times as long as an average issue of a magazine. And I would not have missed the experience of working with Delany on this, his biggest and most innovative work in a distinguished career. There is that little spot of jealousy. I think with some nostalgia of those # slushpile manuscripts each year, and the good stories that from time to time popped out of the pile... of working with writers, trying to cajole them into the kinds of stories the readers want... of opening the readers' mail, seeing what has been successful and what has fallen on its face; finding in it illuminating comments, useful suggestions -- and now and then a poison-pen blast... of suffering finger cramps from correcting the spelling and punctuation of some very fine writers -- and of summoning up the strength of will to refrain from making any change at all in some others... of meeting those endlessly recurring deadlines (three of them for each issue), ticking off the weeks remorselessly... of going to conventions, meeting fans, hearing what they say, accepting a bit of praise or an award when it comes, welding the armor-plate smile on the lips when it goes to someone else... reading the fanzines, where the most uncensored dialogues outside of an analyst's couch take place -- often wincing, sometimes agreeing, occasionally rejoicing... lurking by the racks at the corner newsstand, studying the cash customers as they judiciously scowl over the latest issue, pondering whether to invest in it... thumbing through the competition -- smiling when you see the potboiler you bounced six months ago featured on their cover -- the sinking feeling when you see what looks to be, dammit, a first-rate story by'kn author you thought you had sewed up... poring over the sales figures, trying to guess at the answers to the eternal questions: this drop in sales, was it because of the cover? the time of year? some external event like Watergate or a war distracting people's attention from the magazine? This #-copy jump, was that the cover? hangover from a particularly good story in the issue before? a celebrated name on the table of contents?... or none of the above... battling with the production people to get the magazine looking right, with the bookkeeping people to get the writers paid promptly, with the circulation people to get copies out in places where people will buy them... all those things. And so many more. What a lot of work! Who needs it?... well, I can think of some who like it very much indeed. S o I salute you, Jim Baen newest incumbent. The If you publish won't be the same magazine it was when Damon, Horace, Jake or I edited it. It will be something new and different, and it will succeed not as an imitation of some other time, but on its own. I look forward to reading the exciting issues of the next months of ... and I wish it, and its new editor, all the best! -- Frederik Pohl  Is there any crueler kindness than to pity one's enemy? closest to the Terran settlement the planet's name was Hranth, which meant, expectably enough, "The World." Since the planet had no name of Terran giving other than Gamma Trianguli Australis extreme, Terran Commander Lenoir decided that the world would be known to the records as Hranth -- at least conditionally. It was a fairly promising planet, Martin Lenoir thought. The civilian colonists seemed to take to it well. It was Earthlike to six places; it had acceptable gravity, breathable air, drinkable water. The chemical constitution of its soil was such that Terran food-plants could grow there. The local plants and animals were metabolically assimilable in Terran stomachs, too. Hranth was inhabited by humanoids in a primitive pretechnological state. The local tribe had raised no objections when the Terran colonizing force of five hundred had landed. So long as the Terrans kept their settlement ten or fifteen miles away from the borders of their village the natives did not care what happened. After all, the old chief had explained, they did not own the entire planet. Merely their own tribal area, carved out centuries before. They had no interest in what became of land belonging to no one, or even to other tribes. The Terrans were free to take what they wanted. Work had proceeded smoothly during the initial ten days of the colony's existence. Lenoir was an experienced leader and his cadre of Colonial Corps men worked hard alongside the greenhorn civilians to build the colony. They had brought plenty of prefab dwellings, of course, but these were only temporary; eventually the forest of sturdy flaky-barked trees nearby would be converted into homes for the Terra n settlers. By that time, though, Lenoir and his men would have withdrawn from the operation, leaving the settlers on their own and moving on to act as midwives and godfathers to some other Terran colony on some other planet. One of the most important jobs was learning to communicate with the natives. The O'Neill Translator was a limited device at best, capable of rendering generalities in an awkward way but utterly unable to handle the delicacies of a diplomatic relationship. For that reason, two of the civilian women and one of Lenoir's staff linguists were at work building up a working vocabulary of Hranth words. Since everything was going along so well it came as a considerable jolt to Lenoir when, one morning, an alien from the nearby village showed up, speaking a language no one had ever heard before. j out plans for an irrigation system. This section of Hranth was rather on the dry side. He was in the midst of the job when Sergeant Becker of Linguistics rapped on the beam of his door and entered. "Well? What is it. Sergeant?" "We have a visitor, sir. Alien. From the village. Can't understand a word he's saying." Lenoir frowned and put down his stylo. He was a big man, heavy-set, bull-voiced, with creased leathery skin. He swivelled slowly around and stared at the pale, slim linguistics specialist. "You can't understand him?" "Not a word. It's an entirely different language. We're setting up the O'Neill now, but we thought you'd like to hear the interview." "Yes," Lenoir said thoughtfully. "I guess I do want to hear this." At the moment the colony consisted of a ring of prefab domes arranged in a loose open circle around a clearing. The permanent settlers had put those up under the direction of Lenoir's staff. At the far end of the circle, temporary tents had been erected. Lenoir crossed from his tent to the one in which the linguistics interviews were being held. He found the civilian linguists bustling around in the process of setting up the complex affair that was the O'Neill Translator, while a white-thatched little alien watched them mildly and with small show of interest. The women glanced up as Lenoir entered, followed closely by Lieutenant Becker. "How long has the alien been here?' Lenoir asked. Mary Delacorte said, "He came about fifteen minutes ago. We thought he was the same one who had been here yesterday -- it's so hard to tell them apart, you know. Commander," she added with a shrug of her plump shoulders. "Yes," Grace Walton said. Grace was a rugged-looking girl in her early thirties; good colonial stock. "We couldn't tell this one from any of the others until he started talking. The language didn't even faintly resemble the one we've been studying." "Are you sure he isn't playing some kind of joke on you?" . "I doubt that," Becker put in. "He seemed so damned anxious to communicate. As if he would explode if he didn't tell us what he came here to let us know." Almost as if on cue, the alien began to speak. Lenoir looked closely at the creature. He was humanoid, and on the scrawny side -- five feet tall, perhaps as much as five feet two. His skin was dark red in color, and it hung bagging out in loose leathery folds at his joints and under his chin. The alien's arms appeared to dangle almost to his knees, and they terminated in seven bony four-jointed fingers that tangled nervously with each other while he spoke. He wore only a coarse, ragged loincloth fashioned from some gray woven material. Frowning, Lenoir listened with care to the stream of alien syllables that came from the being's thin lips. The Commander was not a trained linguist, and since he never stayed on a planet of colonization more than two or three months he did not trouble to weigh his mind down with the language; there were plenty of specialists who could take care of that, leaving him free to perform more fitting tasks on the organizational level. But he had spent a good deal of time listening to the speech of the aliens on Hranth, and he had to admit that whatever this one was saying, he was saying it in an entirely different tongue. "You notice the difference, sir?" Becker said. "The Hranth language we've been studying is liquid and vowelrich. What this fellow's saying is a mass of rough consonants." Lenoir nodded brusquely. "Hook up the O'Neill. Let's find out what's going on." The O'Neill Translator was a formidable piece of hardware that took up a good chunk of the tent area, much of the space being devoted to the cryostat section that kept its computer elements at operating temperature. Becker checked the gauges along the control panel and nodded finally; the Translator had reached its functional temperature. Lenoir picked up the microphone and said slowly, in English, "I am the Earthman Commander. Tell us who you are." Since the machine had no samples of the alien's language to operate with, it merely reproduced Lenoir's words as they had been spoken. But the sound was enough to touch off another flood of alien words, which the Translator's pickIF up grids recorded and passed along to the elaborate cryotronic computer that was the central element of the O'Neill Translator. Rapidly the words were broken down, analyzed phonemically, sorted, classified, arranged. They were compared with roughly analogous specimens from a hundred other languages; they were distributed along a theoretical mathematicallyweighed meaning-scale. Then they were translated by crude analog into English. The entire operation took no more than a few seconds. The Translator said, "I am (proper name) Dulizd of the (tribalname) Trazzidovh." "Where is your village?" Lenoir asked. The O'Neill rendered his question quickly into rasping coarse alien syllables and the alien responded; after a brief time-lag the machine said, "My village is beyond the hill, at the edge of the great plain." "How can that be?" Becker whispered, keeping his voice below the range of the translator's audibility-threshold. "That's theHranth village at the edge of the plain!" Lenoir asked for a more specific location; the alien was unable to give one, or at least the Translator could not render it. Conversing by O'Neill was a slow and tortuous process, and Very frequently an inaccurate one -- though a feedback circuit enabled the machine to correct earlier misinterpretations as further conversation increased its understanding of the language. Lenoir found himself starting to sweat as the questioning went on. He persevered. And, after an hour of dogged plugging, a strange and disturbing story began to take form. T he village at the edge of the great plain, the alien told them, had been built long ago -- nearly two thousand years ago. Lenoir was sonable one. Time moved slowly on this world of dry fields and mudfiat houses, and there was no reason why a village could not endure for year after static year while millenia slipped by. The Hranth had built the village and it had been their home. Another tribe, the Trazzidovh, had lived several hundred miles to the west: a semi-nomadic warrior tribe, fierce and self-reliant, ethnically closely related to the placid muddwelling Hranth but culturally quite different. The two tribes had maintained a hazy kind of relationship for several centuries. Communications were poor on the planet, and often a decade or more might go by without a visit between the tribes. Still, for many years, the Hranth had been suggesting that their sturdier cousins should send a contingent of warriors to live in the Hranth village and serve as protectors. The Hranth had few enemies, but those few were annoying ones, and the unwarlike Hranth did not enjoy combat or even the thought of it. The Trazzidovh did -- but the Trazzidovh were not interested in making a journey of three or four hundred miles eastward to the Hranth village. They were content to remain where they were. And so matters rested, for many hundreds of years. Until the day when the Trazzidovh took on an enemy too big for them to handle: the well-organized and ferocious Lurrnzil, a large tribe ranging the western mountains, who responded to a Trazzidovh attack by virtually annihilating them. Only two hundred of the tribe survived the fierce conflict. Now, decimated, too weak to endure the hazards of life in the open plains of the west, the Trazzidovh remembered the many-times-repeated plea of their Hranth cousins. The Hranth once again extended an in vitation; it would be acceptable for the Trazzidovh remnant to take refuge in the village of the Hranth. Wearily the beaten Trazzidovh made the long trek eastward to settle in the land of the Hranth. Arriving, they were surprised to find their cousins under attack by local enemies; gathering their shattered forces, they drove the attackers off and were welcomed warmly by the Hranth. But the warmth was short-lived. The Hranth, now that their enemies had been driven off, felt no further need for the newcomers, and refused to give them the choice land they had been promised. Too tired to return to their homeland, the Trazzidovh reluctantly accepted a barren strip near a ravine at the extreme western edge of the Hranth domain. Bitterly, they cursed the cousins who had invited them to seek refuge only with the hidden intention of using them as catspaws. Matters remained in a state of stasis, and the position continued even up to the arrival of the Earthmen, according to Dulizd of the Trazzidovh. The Hranth numbered nearly #; the Trazzidovh stilt had not increased their original # even after the passage of three centuries. They lived on, a small, proud minority in the midst of the Hranth. They clung to their own language and way of life, though they had also learned the Hranth tongue so that communication between the tribes would be possible. The Hranth had never bothered to study the Trazzidovh language; they regarded the tribe-fragment as too thoroughly inferior to trouble with. The Hranth disliked the Trazzidovh, who were aloof, warlike people, and kept them in poverty lest they breed and grow to outnumber the milder but numerically superior Hranth. Yet the tribes lived together in identical mud huts, with no perceptible boundary IF between the Hranth district and that of the Trazzidovh, in a state of perpetual and bloodless civil war. The Hranth village, Lenoir thought when the alien had finished his recitation, was a house divided. The situation suddenly made the business of settling on this planet a great deal more complicated. B y the time the tale was told, the O'Neill translator had acquired a fairly good grasp of the new language. Communication be. tween the Earthmen and their visitor was reasonably fluent by now. Lenoir said, "So the Hranth chief granted us permission to settle in the neighborhood without even informing the Trazzidovh of our arrival?" "That is right. Last night we accidentally learned that beings from the stars had arrived on the world." (The Trazzidovh word for world, interestingly enough, was hranth. Evidently there had been some borrowing from the Hranth language, in one direction and perhaps both, Lenoir thought.) He eyed the scrawny but somehow dignified old alien and said, "Well? Do the Trazzidovh object to our presence on this world?" "The Trazzidovh are too few to object to anyone's presence anywhere," returned the alien simply. "I have come here for a different reason. I wish to offer the services of my people." "Services?" "Yes. We will help you build your homes, plough your fields, bring you water and animals. In return you can give us food, medicine for our sick ones, teach us your ways of farming and living. We wish to learn." Lenoir darted a glance at Becker, who did not react. It's an interesting proposition, the Terran commander thought. They want to work for us. That's a lot better than the attitude of the Hranth, who don't seem to care a damn what we do so long as we leave them alone. Aloud he said, "Very well. You can tell your people that any of them who want to work for us can come here tomorrow morning." The alien jacknifed into a sinuous genuflection. "I give thanks." "And," Lenoir said, "you can pass the word along to your neighbors the Hranth, too. We can use all the help we can get." Dulizd of the Trazzidovh straightened up abruptly and stared at the Earthman with what seemed to be a reproachful gaze. He said, "I do not think the Hranth will be interested in working for you." Lenoir shrugged. "They can do as they please. We'll manage without them." The alien left shortly afterward. Lenoir said to the members of the linguistics team, "Suppose you type out a transcript of this interview and send it across to me right away." "Yes, sir," Becker said. "I'll get on it at once." "And I suggest you de-emphasize the study of the Hranth language and start learning Trazzidovh. I have a feeling we'll be doing a lot more business with them than with the Hranth." Lenoir ducked out of the tent and made his way across the clearing to his own headquarters. The sun, G-type and big, was high overhead now and cutting loose at full strength; even in his light tropics uniform, Lenoir was sweating. He had little enough fat on his #pound frame as it was, but he expected that whatever suet there was would be steamed off him before he completed the job of setting up the Terran colony on this world. A job which had suddenly become more appealing, he thought, if at the same time more difficult. Lenoir liked the little alien who had come to the camp today. He appreciated the kind of battler who could cling to life no matter how many times he got clubbed across the eyebrows -- and the plucky Trazzidovh, beaten and decimated and tricked and yet stilKable to approach visitors from space without fear and ask for a job, were the sort of people he could respect. Of course, he hadn't heard the other side of the story yet. The Hranth kept to themselves and had little to do with the newly-arrived Earthmen, but perhaps their version of how the Trazzidovh had come to share their village would be substantially different. Three Hranth showed up at the Terran camp late that afternoon, and they had plenty they wanted to say. The hot young sun had started to drop toward the horizon, and the largest of the three pale moons of Hranth was dimly visible above, when the delegation arrived. There was no need for the ponderous assistance of the O'Neill translator this time. Mary Delacorte of the linguistics team had picked up an adequate working knowledge of the Hranth tongue with almost frightening speed, and she served as interpreter. The Hranth trio stood patiently before Lenoir's desk, not speaking, merely staring at him placidly like three unusual trees rooted to the floor. Finally Lenoir said, "Well? Why have you come to see me?" Through the medium of Mary Delacorte the tallest of the trio responded, "We have learned that you wish to hire the Trazzidovh." "That's right. I told Dulizd to invite your people to work for us too, if you want to. Building a colony is a big job. We can use help." The alien's lips curled unhappily. "We do not want to work for strangers. We are a free people." "Sure you are," Lenoir agreed. "Didn't Dulizd make it clear that IF we'd pay? We don't mean to make you slaves!" The alien bent his arms back, extending his elbows in what Lenoir had learned was the equivalent of a negative shake of the head. "The question of pay does not enter into it. To work for another tribe is to become a slave. The Trazzidovh are accustomed to slavery, but we of the Hranth are a free people." "Hold it," Lenoir objected. "Why do you say the Trazzidovh are accustomed to slavery?" "They have been slaves for centuries. Ever since they came creeping to us, shattered, desperately seeking refuge." "They said you invited them to come." "This is the lie they tell. We allowed them to come to us, but we never wanted them. They live among us, but they are an inferior people, worthy only of eating refuse and living in the ravines." Lenoir folded his arms. "Perhaps this is so, perhaps not. But you still haven't answered my first question: why have you come here today?" "To ask you not to employ the Trazzidovh." "Why? What business is it of yours?" "They might develop Earthman ways. They cannot be trusted to live like civilized beings. You might give them weapons to destroy us." Passing smilingly over the implications of the accusation, Lenoir said, "We're not here to give weapons to anybody. We just want to build a colony." "Do not build it with the aid of the Trazzidovh," came the stubborn reply. "I don't plan to get mixed up in a private feud," Lenoir said. "But right now I don't see any reason why we shouldn't hire them, and so we will." "We will prevent it." Lenoir didn't like the tone of that. "How will you -- ah -- prevent it?" "We will pray to the Moon-God that your colony is a failure," said the Hranth spokesman haughtily. "You have been warned. Now we shall go." So they'll pray to the Moon-God, Lenoir thought when the alien delegation had made its dignified exit. Well, well, well I hope we don 't all wither up and die. To Mary Delacorte he said, "Thanks for the services, honey. Be a good girl and have a transcript of the conversation whipped up for my records, will you?" "Right away. Commander." He smiled at her and stepped to the front door. Men in shorts and deep coats of tan were busily hammering away, building the colony. He had seen this so many times before, on a dozen worlds scattered through the galaxy, as Man staked his claim further and further out from the mother world. The Hranth, he thought, were going to pray to their Moon-God. If that were the worst problem this colony had to face, everything was going to turn out all right. He wondered briefly if it were really wise to get involved in native frictions. Probably not; but it was handy to have a labor force available, and furthermore he suspected that the Trazzidovh had been getting a raw deal. Perhaps things could be altered a little in the next few months. After all, the settlers were going to spend the rest of their lives living next door to the aliens. N ot much after dawn the next morning Lenoir woke to discover that the compound was bulging with aliens. He dressed hurriedly and went out to investigate. The linguistics team was there already. Lieutenant Becker said sleepily, "They got here half an hour ago. Must have started out in the middle of the night. We counted a hundred sixty of them." "All Trazzidovh?" Becker nodded. "All of them jabbering away in their language and Hranth, interchangeably. I've been talking to them in Hranth, and they say they all want to work. The whole tribe's here except for the babies, the very old, and three or four girls who stayed behind to take care of them." Lenoir proceeded to put the aliens to work. He relayed his orders to them via Mary Delacorte and Becker, who addressed them in Hranth after first explaining that the Earthmen had not yet had time to learn the Trazzidovh language. The Trazzidovhworked well. They were eager people, go-getters, people with drive and push and ingenuity. By the end of the first day, seeing them working side-by-side with the colonists, Lenoir's liking for them had ripened into a genuine admiration. They were good people to work with -- cooperative, attentive, energetic. They had all the best qualities of Terrans -- they were, perhaps, the most Earthlike alien race Lenoir had ever encountered. They formed a sharp contrast with the Hranth. How sharp a contrast it was became apparent during the next several weeks. Intrigued by the interesting tribal relationship, Lenoir sent a team of his anthropologists to make detailed investigations of the single village inhabited by two tribes. They reported that the Hranth were a lazy people, content to accept the flow of events as they were, without rising to change the course of their lives. When the drought came, they suffered; when the storms came, they suffered. In both cases they prayed endlessly, calling on some mystic deity dwelling simultaneously in each of the three moons to help them. The Trazzidovh, on the other hand, had built irrigation canals and contoured farms -- but the land given them by their hostile cousins IF was so infertile that even with all their ingenuity they had not been able to increase their numbers. Two hundred of them had fled across the plains, centuries before, and two hundred they still numbered. The two tribes lived together in a state of chilly aloofness. The Hranth regarded their neighbors as vastly inferior; the Trazzidovh, suffering silently, privately had contempt for their flabby-willed cousins, but because they were outnumbered twenty-five to one they accepted their lot stoically -- until they learned of the Earthmen and saw in them a chance to climb upward once again. Day after day Lenoir studied the reports. The Hranth had begun a marathon religious dance. Round the clock they beat drums and chanted and prayed for the swift doom of the Earthmen but otherwise made no attempt to interfere with the activities of the growing colony. The Hranth danced and prayed. The Trazzidovh, having already prayed and finished praying, were taking action. Day after day the colony expanded. The Earthmen were picking up smatterings of the Trazzidovh language. And the Trazzidovh were learning English. Already bilingual, having been forced by circumstance to learn Hranth and being impelled by pride to retain their own language great original science fiction stories by togthar inona volunw "Superior" -- Krcus Reviews. # as well, the Trazzidovh found little difficulty in learning yet another language. They fattened and grew prosperous, and the Hranth continued to pray. The one-time ragpickers, the hapless refugees of the barren ravine, were thriving, thanks to their association with the Earthmen. And still the Moon-God stayed his hand. Lenoir often wondered how much strain their faith in the Moon-God was going to take. had called Hranth, and moved on, leaving behind a fairly well established young colony. The schedule called for Lenoir and his men to pick up another group of colonists and settle them on the fourth planet of Gamma Crucis. After that there were other jobs to do and others beyond those. Eleven years slipped by, and Lenoir found himself within five lightyears of the Gamma Trianguli Australis system, where once he had helped to plant a world. He was on his way back to Earth for his once-in-a-decade vacation; just out of curiosity he stopped off at labeled Hranth on his star-charts. The colonial military authority gave him landing coordinates and he put his small ship down at the spaceport. He was met by several members of the original colonial group, who welcomed him enthusiastically and conveyed him to town. And town it was. Lenoir saw a small city, of perhaps ten thousand souls, neatly laid out in a long strip. Powerlines glinted in the sunlight. "You've built this place up well," Lenoir said. "We've been busy, Commander," said David Revere, who had been a skinny teenager eleven years before and who now held a high post on the colonial council. Lenoir recognized other faces -- Mary Delacorte, Grace Walton, Klaus Marshall, others. Mary said to him, "Commander, there's someone here we want you to meet." Lenoir turned to find himself facing an alien -- a familiar-looking one. He was elderly, but well fed and sleek-looking, and he wore Earth-type clothing. "Hello, Commander," the alien said in clear English. "I'm Tom Dulizd." Lenoir groped in his memory. There had been so many worlds, so many names to remember -- The alien said, "Remember me at all? I was the first Trazzidovh to visit you, and you spoke to me with the translating machine." Lenoir remembered. "But you were a bony little emaciated fellow then! And what's this Tom business?" The alien smiled cheerfully. "We all call ourselves by Earthman names now. It's simpler that way." IF Lenoir felt a vast sense of uneasiness. He said to Mary Delacorte, "It's coming back to. me now. Eleven years, you know -- it's hard to sort out everything that happened on every planet. But I recall that there were two tribes of aliens living in a single village -- " She nodded. "That's right. And Tom's tribe came to work for us. We taught them our ways. Most of the Trazzidovh live right here in the city. Tom runs a food shop." Lenoir shook his head slowly. "Incredible! Total assimilation so soon? And what about the other tribe -- the -- the Hranth?" Dulizd chuckled. "They've assimilated too -- most of them. I employ two of them as my assistants in the shop. You know them, Mary -- Mark and John." Lenoir blinked. "I thought they were going to dance forever. The Moon-God was going to smite the colony, they said." "Oh, they danced a while," Dulizd told him. "Most of them gave up after six months or so, when they saw us getting rich. They began to figure out that maybe the Moon-God wasn't going to help them, so they ought to see if the Earthmen had any jobs for them." "And did they?" "Sure. Oh -- " Dulizd suddenly whipped out a large pocket-watch and stared at it. The sight of the big gold watch in those seven bony alien fingers struck Lenoir as grotesque, but he made no comment. ############################## ; I i DoniAd A. WoHhiin, PuMishr. ; I I Edgar Rice Burroughs' fans ! ; ( ! must see Philip Jose Farmer's J  J ; the Burroughs' Estate, Farmer ! I ;  takes us back to ancient Opar in I ; ! a fabulous adventure novel. ;; !; With book cover and eleven ;I ;;G.Krenkel! (UY#-I .#) !! I ! For Dray Prescot's friends: the ; ; ; ; new Alan Burt Akers' novel. It's ' I ; ; beautifully illustrated by Jack ! ; Gaughan, with a complete glo's; I; sary and maps. UY#-#) ; J I Robert Chilton's first novel -- a I I I humdinger fantasy adventure in ; ! ; the dying days of Old Earth. ; UQ#-#C) ; ( I great form. His most recent col; ; ; lection of unique stories is en jl UQ#-#C)   I A gate into the dimension where ; ;; all your wishes come true?  ! ' You'll find it in Cap Kennedy I :: UQ#-#C) ; ; ; Your name and address, title I ; I and book number, plus price I ;  : and #c (postage and handling) ;  ; ; genfleld, N.J. #, will do It,  I  I Ask for our catalog. ; He was too dazed by the consequences of the movement he had begun so long before. Dulizd said, "Will you come with me to my store? I promise you a very interesting sight." They drove -- the settlers had begun manufacturing vehicles by now -- down well-paved streets into a bustling business district. Dulizd parked outside a shining neonfronted store and pointed down the street. "Here they come now," he said. "The diehards." Lenoir followed the pointing arm. The sound of drums and shaken gourds reached him -- and, squinting, he could make out a startling sight. A dozen or so withered old aliens in tattered robes were advancing through the busy streets, beating drums, dancing, singing. "What are they?" Lenoir asked. Dulizd smiled expansively. "The last of the Old Guard. The eleven unassimilated Hranth." "You mean the moon-dance is still going on?" Lenoir asked incredulously. "Yes. After eleven years," said Dulizd. "They haven't given up praying for our destruction. But the rest of the Hranth won't have anything to do with them -- so they come here every day and I give them food." "You what?" "Of course," said the Trazzidovh in a bland tone. "I believe in preserving the ancient institutions, you see. These old men have rationalized my daily gift into some kind of peace-offering I make to them, or else they'd never accept it." Lenoir moistened his lips and looked around, at the handsome colony, at the busy streets, at the prosperous-looking alien next to him, at the weird procession of cursing ancients that was now only a block away. All this in eleven years! Lenoir smiled. The coming of the Terrans had upset a state of affairs that had existed for centuries, jolting the Hranth out of their complacency and providing the Trazzidovh with the opportunity they deserved. The house was no longer divided -- except for the eleven bony anachronisms advancing up the streets, and they would soon be only memories. Dulizd opened the shop-door; Lenoir saw two younger aliens within, also in Terran-style clothes. Dulizd said, "The dinosaurs are coming! Get the food ready for them." He chuclded and remarked, to Lenoir, "You know. Commander, after all this time those old boys are still sticking to the story that they never invited our ancestors to come fight for them and so weren't obliged to give them a decent place to live when they did come. And yet I feed them at my own expense every day." He smiled broadly and said, "It's lucky for them that I'm not a vindictive man."  IF 'Tlit Samt 'idm Sam the Science Fiction Writers of Americo  Market Reports-Where To Sell SF  Conference Reports  People  Places in SF  Photos of Authors  Events  Articles on Writing  Internal Organizational Doings  Future Judies  Letters  Symposium-Discussion Transcripts And Introducing a New Supplement Covering academic affairs, with articles by critics, writers,' and teachers of SF, letters, calendar Information, announcements. Contributions from Bulletin subscribers invited. A  Writers  College  High School Teachers  Students  Libraries  Readers  Critics  Editors  Publishers Subscriptions : S single and I double special annual Nebula Awards issues per year. One year#;two years#. Sample copy, postpaid, I .#. Complete back issues available: individual A. E. van Vogt Ursula K. LeGuin Gordon R. Dickson Anne McCaffrey James Gunn Damon Knight Barry N. Malzberg Joanna Russ Larry Niven Robert Hoskins Kingsley Amis Harry Harrison Poul Anderson Robert Bloch Gifford Simak Katherine Kurtz DonPfeil David Harris and the Science Fiction Writen of America For half a millennium the disembodied killer-machine had been haunted by the radio into the Orion s lounge, and the six people gathered there, the only people alive within several hundred light years, were listening attentively for the moment, some of them only because Oscar Schoenberg, who owned Orion and was driving her on this trip, had indicated that he wanted to listen. Carlos Suomi, wha was ready to stand up to Schoenberg and expected to have a serious argument with him one of these days, was in this instance in perfect agreement with him. Athena Poulson, the independent one of the three women, had made no objection; Celeste Servetus, perhaps the least independent, had made a few but they meant nothing. Gustavus De La Torre and Barbara Hurtado had never, in Suomi's experience, objected to any decision made by Schoenberg. The dead man's voice to which they listened was not recorded, only mummified by the approximately five hundred years of spacetime that stretched between Hunters' system, where the radio signal had been generated, and Orion's present position in intragalactic space about eleven hundred light years (or five and a half weeks by ship) from Earth. It was the voice of Johann Karlsen, who about five hundred standard years ago had led a battle fleet to Hunters' system to skirmish there with a berserker fleet and drive them off. That was some time after he had smashed the main berserker power and permanently crippled their offensive capabilities at the dark nebula called the Stone Place. Most of the bulkhead space in the lounge was occupied by viewscreens, and then, as now, they were adjusted for the purpose, the screens brought in the stars with awesome realism. Sumoi was looking in the proper direction on the screen, but from this distance of five hundred light years it was barely possible without using telescopic magnification to pick out Hunters' sun, let alone to see the comparatively minor flares of the space battle Karlsen had been fighting when he spoke the words now coming into the space yacht's lounge for Schoenberg to brood over and Suomi to record. Briefly the two men looked somewhat alike, though Suomi was smaller, probably much younger, and had a rather boyish face. f ow can you be sure that's La Torre, a lean and dark and somehow dangerous-looking man, asked now. He and Schoenberg were sitting in soft massive chairs facing each other across the small diameters of the lounge. The other four had positioned their similar chairs so that the group made an approximate circle. "I've heard it before. This same sequence." Schoenberg's voice was rather soft for such a big, toughIF looking man, but it was as decisive as usual. His gaze, like Suomi's, was on the viewscreen, probing out among the stars as he listened intently to Karlsen. "On my last trip to Hunters'," Schoenberg went on softly, "about fifteen standard years ago, I stopped in this region -- fifteen lights closer-in, of course -- and managed to find this same signal. I listened to these same words and recorded some of them, just as Carlos is doing now." He nodded in Suomi's direction. Karlsen broke a crackling radio silence to say: "Check the lands on that hatch if it won't seal -- should I have to tell you that?" The voice was biting, and there was something unforgettable about it even when the words it uttered were only peevish scraps of jargon indistinguishable from those spoken by the commander of any other difficult and dangerous operation. "Listen to him," Schoenberg said. "If that's not Karlsen, who could it be? Anyway, when I got back to Earth after the last trip I checked what I had recorded against historians' records made on his flagship, and confirmed it was the same sequence." De La Torre made a playful tuttutting sound. "Oscar, did nobody ask you how you came by your recording? You weren't supposed to be out in this region of space then, were you, any more than we are now?" "Pah. Nobody pays that much attention. Interstellar Authority certainly doesn't." Suomi haji the impression that Schoenberg and De La Torre had not known each other very long or very well, but had met in some business connection and had fallen in together because of a common interest in hunting, something that few people now shared. Few people on Earth, at least, which was the home planet of everyone aboard the ship. Karlsen said: "This is the High Commander speaking. Ring three uncover. Boarding parties, start your action sequence." "Signal hasn't decayed much since I heard it last," Schoenberg mused. "The next fifteen lights toward Hunters' must be clean." Without moving from his chair he dialed a three-dimensional holographic astrogation chart into existence and with his lightwriter deftly added a symbol to it. The degree of clean emptiness of the space between them and their destination was of importance because, although a starship's faster-thanlight translation took place outside of normal space, conditions in adjacent realms of normal space had their inescapable effects. "There'll be a good gravitational hill to get up," said Karlsen on the radio. "Let's stay alert." "Frankly, all this bores me," said Celeste Servetus (full figure. Oriental and black and some strain of Ndrdic in her ancestry, incredibly smooth taut skin beneath her silver body paint, wig of what looked like silver mist). Here lately it was Celeste's way to display flashes of insolence toward Schoenberg,' to go through periods of playing what in ah earlier age would have been described as hard-to-get. Schoenberg did not bother to look at her now. She had already been got. , "We wouldn't be here now, probably, if it weren't for that gentleman who's talking on the radio." This was Barbara Hurtado. Barbara and Celeste were much alike, both playgirls brought along on this expedition as items for male consumption, like the beer and the cigars; and they were much different, too. Barbara, a Caucasianlooking brunette, was as usual opaquely clothed from knees to shoulders, and there was nothing ethereal about her. If you saw her inert, asleep, face immobile, and did not hear her voice or her laugh, or behold the grace with which she moved, you might well think her nothing beyond the ordinary in sexual attractiveness. Alive and in motion, she was as eye-catching as Celeste. They were about on a par intellectually, too, Suomi had decided. Barbara's remark implying that present-day interstellar human civilization owed its existence to Karlsen and his victories over the berserkers was a truism, not susceptible of debate or even worthy of reply. The berserkers, automated warships of terrible power and effectiveness, had been loosed on the galaxy during some unknown war fought by races long vanished before human history began. The basic program built into all berserkers was to seek out and destroy life, whenever and wherever they found it. In the dark centuries of their first assaults on Earth-descended man, they had come near overwhelming his modest dominion among the stars. Though Karlsen and others had turned them back, forced them away from the center of human-dominated space, there were still berserkers in existence and men still fought and died against them on the frontiers of man's little corner of the galaxy. Not around here, though. Not for five hundred years. "I admit his voice does something to me," Celeste said, shifting her position in her chair, stretching and then curling her long naked silver legs. "He loses his temper in a minute here," said Schoenberg. "And why shouldn't he? I think men of genius have that right." This was Athena Poulson in her fine contralto. Despite her name, her face showed mainly Oriental ancestry. She was better looking than nine out of ten young women, carrying to the first decimal place what Celeste brought to the third. Athena was now wearing a simple one-piece suit, not much different from what she usually wore in the IF office. She was one of Schoenberg's most private and trusted secretaries. Suomi, wanting to make sure he caught Karlsen's temper-losing on his recording, checked the little crystal cube resting on the flat arm of his chair. He had adjusted it to screen out conversation in the lounge and pick up only what came in by radio. He reminded himself to label the cube as soon as he got it back to his stateroom; generally he forgot. ow they must have hated XXhim," said Barbara Hurtado, her voice now dreamy and far away. Athena looked over. "Who? The people he lost his temper at?" "No, those hideous machines he fought against. Oscar, you've studied it all. Tell us something about it." Schoenberg shrugged. He seemed reluctant to talk very much on the subject although it obviously interested him. "I'd say Karlsen was a real man, and I wish I could have known him. Carlos here has perhaps studied the period more thoroughly than I have." "Tell us, Carl," Athena said. She was sitting two chairs away. Suomi's field was the psychology of environmental design. He had been called in, some months ago, to consult with Schoenberg and Associates on the plans for a difficult new office, and there he had met Athena... so now he was here, on a big-game hunting expedition, of all things. "Yes, now's your chance," De La Torre put in. Things did not generally go quite smoothly between him and Suomi, though the abrasion had not yet been bad enough to open up an acknowledged quarrel. "Well," said Suomi thoughtfully, "in a way, you know, those machines did hate him." "Oh no," said Athena positively, shaking her head. "Not machines." Sometimes he felt like hitting her. He went on: "Karlsen is supposed to have had some knack of choosing strategy they couldn't cope with, some quality of leadership... whatever he had, the berserkers couldn't seem to oppose him successfully. They're said to have placed a higher value on his destruction than on that of some entire planets." "The berserkers made special assassin machines," Schoenberg offered unexpectedly. "Just to get Karlsen." "Are you sure of that?" Suomi asked, interested. "I've run into hints of something like that, but couldn't find it definitely stated anywhere." . "Oh, yes." Schoenberg smiled faintly. "If you're trying to study the matter you can't just ask Infocenter on Earth for a printout; you have to get out and dig a little more than that." "Why?" Infocenter, as a rule, could promptly reproduce anything that was available as reference material anywhere on Earth. "There are still some old government censor-blocks in their data banks holding information on berserkers." Suomi shook his head. "Why in the world?" "Just official inertia, I suppose. Nobody wants to take the time and trouble to dig them out. If you mean why were the censor-blocks inserted in the first place, well, it was because at one time there were some people who worshipped the damned things; berserkers, I mean." "That's hard to believe," Celeste objected. She tried to say more but was interrupted by Karlsen shouting in anger, chewing out his men about something unintelligibly technological. "That's about the end," said Schoenberg, reaching for a control beside his chair. The frying crackle of radio static died away. "There're several hours of radio silence following." Schoenberg's eyes went shifting restlessly now to his astrogational chart. "So there was some dimwitted bureaucratic policy of restricting information about berserkers... the whole thing is fascinating, ladies and gents, but what say we move on toward our hunting?" for agreement he began to set his astrogalional and drive computers to take them on toward Hunters'. It would be another seventeen or eighteen standard days before Orion arrived in-system there. Exact timing was not possible in interstellar travel. It was something like piloting a sailing ship in a sea full of variable currents, depending upon winds that were undependable from day to day even though they held to a fairly consistent pattern. Variable stars, pulsars, spinars and quasars within the galaxy and out of it had each their effects upon the subfoundation of space through which the starship moved. Black holes of various sizes committed their wrenching gravitational enormities upon the fabric of the Universe. The explosions of supernovae far and near sent semi-eternal shock waves lapping at the hull. The interstellar ship that effectively outpaces light does not, cannot, carry aboard itself all the power needed to make it move as it does move. Only tapping the gravitational-inertial resources of the universe can provide such power, as the winds were tapped to drive the sailing ships of old. Though the artificial gravity maintained its calm dominion in the lounge a change in lighting of the holographic chart signalled that Orion was underway. Schoenberg stood up, and stretched expansiveIF ly, seeming to grow even bigger than he was. "On to Hunters' I" he announced. "Who'll join me in a drink? To the success of the hunt, and the enjoyment of any other amusements we may run into." They all would have a drink. But Athena took only a sip before dropping her glass away into the recycling station. "Shall we get our chess tournament moving again, Oscar?" "I think not." Schoenberg stood with one hand behind his back under the short tails of his lounging jacket, almost posing, savoring his own drink. "I'm going below. Time we got the firing range set up and got in a little practice. We're not going after pheasant, exactly... we'll have enough of tournaments after we land, perhaps." His intelligent eyes, lighted now by some private amusement, skipped around at all of them, seemed to linger longest, by a fraction of a second, on Suomi. Then Schoenberg turned and with a little wave went out of the lounge. The party broke up. After taking his recorder back to his stateroom, Suomi started out again to see what the firing range was going to be like, and ran into De La Torre in the passageway. Suomi asked: "What was that all about, 'enough of tournaments after we land'?" "He's told you nothing about the tournament he wants to watch?" "No. What kind?" De La Torre smiled, and would not or could not give him a straight answer. II under Godsmountain's wooded flanks, there were sixty-four warriors when all were assembled at last, on this warm morning in the eastern-sunrise season. Out of the sixty-four there were not more than four or five who had ever seen each other before because they had come each from his own district, town, fiefdom, nomadic band or island, from every corner of the inhabitable world. Some had journeyed here from the shores of the boundless eastern ocean. Others had come from the edge of permanently inhabited territory to the north, where spring, already a sixtieth-ofan-old-man's-lifetime old, was melting free the glacier-beast and rimeworm. From the north came the mightiest hunters of this world named for hunting. Others of these warriors had come from the uncrossable shattered desert that lay to the west of the lands of men, and others still from the tangle of rivers and swamps in the south that blended finally into ocean again and blocked all travel in that direction. The warriors who had gathered on this day for the beginning of Thorun's Tournament were variously tall or short, lean or heavy. but only a few were very young men, and none at all were very old. All were notably violent men even on this world of violence, but during the days of assembly they had camped here together in peace, each on his arrival accepting without argument whatever little plot of campground was assigned him by Leros or one of the subordinate priests of Thorun. In the center of the camp an image of the god, dark-bearded and golddiademed, brooding with hand on sword-hilt, had been erected on a field-altar, a small wooden platform, and no warrior failed to place some offering before it. Some of the offerings were rich, for some of the men who had come to fight in the Tournament were wealthy. However wealthy or powerful an entrant might be, he came alone, unattended by any servants or wellwishers and carrying little more than a heavy robe for shelter in addition to the weapons of his preference. It was going to be a holy tournament, regarded by the priests of Thorun as so sacred that outside spectators were barred -- though there was scarcely a freeman on the planet who did not yearn to watch. Nor were outside servants needed. The assembled warriors and priests were to be served -- luxuriously, it appeared -- by an almost equal number of gray-clad male slaves whose dress marked them as property of Godsmountain, of Thorun and his servitors. No women were to be allowed within the camp. On this morning when the last warrior arrived, some slaves were making ready the flat fighting arena of pounded earth, some ten paces in diameter. Other slaves prepared a midday meal and set aside offerings of fruit and meat for those who would wish to laythem on Thorun's altar. The smoke of the cooking fires rose into a sky that was quite clear and had something of the blueness of Earth's sky, and yet also something of yellowness and bitterness and brass. From beyond the plumes of smoke the mountain looked down, an unfamiliar sight to almost all of those who had come here to fight. But it had been known since childhood in all their hearts and minds. On its top the priests of Thorun dwelt, and their god and his power with them, within the white walls of his sacred city. Women and animals and other prosaic necessities were up there too; slaves were taken up from time to time as needed to serve the dwellers but seldom or never did the slaves come down again; those at work this morning in the riparian meadow had all been imported for the occasion from tributary lands. Godsmountain's sizable armies never, except for select detachments, marched any nearer their own capital than the mountain's base. To most ordinary folk the summit and its citadel-city were unattainable. Thorun himself dwelt there, and IF the demigod Mjollnir, his most faithful paladin. Other divinities visited from time to time: the gods of healing, justice, soil and weather, and growth and fecundity; and numerous demigods with ancillary responsibilities. But it was primarily Thorun's mountain, Thorun's religion, Thorun's world -- except to those, generally restricted to the rim of the world these days, who did not like Thorun, or did not like the power wielded in his name by Godsmountain's priests. Hunters' was a planet of hunters and warriors, and Thorun was god of war and of the hunt. A priest called Leros, of middle age, having seen three previous northern springs, and scarred by the violence of his youth, had been appointed by the High Priest Andreas to direct the Tournament. Leros was high in rank among the priests of Thorun, though not a member of the most secret Inner Circle. In his youth he had gained an almost legendary reputation as a fighter, and many of the best of these young heroes regarded him with awe. Leros came down to the riverbnk himself to greet the lastarriving warrior, one Chapmut of out of his canoe, badeliim welcome to the Sacred Tournament of Thorun, and then with a small flourish placed the last check-mark on the tally sheet containing all the expected warriors' names. Shortly after, a solemn drum called all of them to an assembly. Leros, standing in a new robe of spotless white in the center of the clean new arena, waited while fhey gathered around its edge. They were not long in falling silent to give him their full attention. In some parts of the circle the warriors were crowded, yet there was no jostling or edging for position among them, or anything but the greatest courtesy. Jvgods!" Leros cried out at last in his still-strong voice. He swept his gaze fully around the ring of fighting men, standing himself as tall and strong as most of them, though no longer as quick or sure. It was many days, about a sixtiethpart-of-an-old-man's-life, since the formal announcement of this Tournament had been carried down from Godsmountain and spread across the world. For much longer, since the time of the last northern spring, it had been common knowledge that this Tournament was coming. Scrawny little boys of that time were now men in their prime; and Godsmountain and all its doings had waxed greatly in importance since then. Many of the waiting entrants were half naked in the mild weather, their bodies all muscles and scars and hair. The clothes of some were very rough, and those of others soft and rich. A few wore scraps of body armor, or carried shields of hardened sloth-leather or bright iron. Full armor was unknown on Hunters' where a man stood on his feet to fight and never rode. These fighters were chiefs' sons and peasants' sons and sons of unknown fathers. Nothing but merit, merit with sword and spear and battle-axe, had won them their places here. Around him now Leros saw blue eyes and dark eyes, eyes with epicaiithic folds and eyes without, deep eyes here, mad eyes there, and a pair or two of eyes that seemed as innocent as babes'. The original colonists from Earth, some six standard centuries in the past, had been eclectically selected from a world already well mixed in race and culture. Around Leros the faces were brown or white or black, with hair of black or brown or yellow or red -- there was one irongray, two shaven bald. Here was a heavily tattooed face, with stripes across from ear to ear, and over there a smile showed teeth all filed to points. More numerous than the oddities were other men who looked as prosaic as herdsmen, save for the weapons at their belts. Besides their human maleness, only one thing was common to them all: unin single combat. Jalled again, more softly. "Before the sun goes down upon this day, half of you will stand within our god's great hall -- " he pointed toward Godsmountain's top, out of sight behind the wooded bulges of its lower slopes -- "and face to face with Thorun himself." Leros prepared himself to retell, and his listeners made ready to hear yet again, the promises that had been carried down from Godsmountain a standard year earlier by Leros and his aides. Thorun, warrior-chieftain of the gods (so the message went) had been pleased by the spirit shown by the race of men in the recent series of wars extending Godsmountain's power across most of the habitable world. The god was pleased to grant to humankind the privilege of fighting for a seat at his right hand, the competition being open to the sixty-four finest heroes of the age. To accomplish this purpose the inhabited world had been arbitrarily divided into sixty-four districts, and the local rulers of every district were invited to send -- the details of the selection process being left largely to them -- their mightiest warrior. All but one of the contestants was expected to die in the Tournament of Thorun, and that one, the winner, would be granted the status of a demigod and would take his seat at Thorun's right hand. (Out in the country somewhere, some irreverent logician would be sure to ask the priest who brought the message: How about Mjollnir: Will he have to move down a peg? Not at all, my nephew. No doubt he and the Tournament IF winner will share the honor of being next to Thorun. No doubt they will fight for the day's turn whenever it pleases them.) By all reports it pleased them to fight a lot in Thorun's hall atop the mountain. There the great god and the more or less deified men, slaughtered heroes of wars and combats past, re-slaughtered one another daily for the joy of it and were miraculously healed of their wounds each evening in time to enjoy the perfect meat and drink of .Thorun's table, the tale-telling of immortal eloquence shared by the company of the gods, the endless supply of maidens eternally made virgin for their pleasure. (Out in the country, the questioner relaxes with a sigh; there is more here than a simple warrior knows how to argue about. Even if he is not so simple, the questioner sees that he is not going to beat this talking priest at his own game of words.) Leros on this bright morning was formally spelling out once more what his listeners already knew: "Those of you who fall in the first round of fighting will be the first to feast with Thorun -- but eternally around the lowest portion of his table. The next sixteen who perish, in the second round of fighting, will be granted places higher up. In the fighting of the third round eight will die and will be seated higher still -- and each of these will have eternally with him four lovely maids of a beauty surpassing any in this world, two of ivory white and two of ebon black, to satisfy his every wish even before it can be spoken aloud. "After the fourth round has been fought there will be only four warriors left alive, the strongest of the strong. The four who die in the fourth round of fighting will be granted shields and arms lustrous as silver, yet harder and keener than the finest steel, and wine goblets to match, and each will have eight virgin maidens of still greater beauty perpetually in his service. They will be seated very near to Thorun. "In the fifth round of duels, two more men must fall, and these two will be seated in tall chairs of oak and gold, higher up the table still, and they will be granted gold winecups and shields and arms, and each will be served by sixteen maids of beauty indescribable, and all things will be theirs in fuller measure than any lower men may have. On that day but two of you will remaia alive outside the hall where the gods feast. "The single duel of the sixth round of fighting will be the last and greatest. Who loses it will still be honored beyond any of those that I have mentioned yet. And when it is over, the Tournament will be over, and one man will have won. That man alone shall walk, in the flesh, into the holy place of the god Thorun, and his place for all time to come shall be at Thorun's right hand; and from his high place that man will overtop all of the other sixty-three by as great a measure as they stand above the race of puny, mortal men that crawl about here below." Leros concluded with a sigh. He believed the promises and they moved him to envy and awe every time he thought about them. F or some time now one of the warriors, black of skin and huge, had been leaning forward with an expectant look, as if he wished to speak. Now Leros, with an inquiring glance, took notice of him. The man asked: "Lord Leros, tell me this -- " "Address me no more as Lord. Your status from this day forward is higher than my own." "Very well. Friend Leros, then. Tell me this: when a man has won this. Tournament will he then have all the powers and rights that gods are known to have? I mean not only powers of war, but of the soft and healing arts?" Leros had to take thought for a moment or two before answering. It had not been one of the usual expectable questions, for instance was Thorun's hall threatened by overcrowding with all the wars, or what kind of sacrificial meat would the god prefer today. At last he spoke. "The gentle goddess of healing will certainly listen to any request that man may make." He let out a light sigh. "The gods listen to one another more than they do to men. But then they still do what they please, unless of course they have bound themselves by formal promise, as Thorun has done regarding this Tournament." The man nodded soberly. "It is all we can expect," he said, and resumed his place in the circle. All were silent now. Somewhere in the background a slave was chopping kindling for the first funeral pyre. Leros said: "Then go, all of you, and make what final preparations you will. The first fight will begin shortly." As soon as the assembly had dispersed a subordinate priest drew Leros aside and when they had reached a place of relative privacy unrolled a small scroll and showed it to him. "Lord Leros, this was found posted on a tree not far away. We have no clue as yet to indicate who put it up." The lettering on the scroll seemed to have been made with a dull ordinary pencil of charred kettwood. The message read: Gods and men, place your bets. Who of the # will be proven the greatest fighter? That one will be, there is no doubt. Will he then envy those that he has slain, and curse Godsmountain and its lying priests? While your money is out, try to lay a bet on this also: Are the rulers of this mountain fit to rule our world? The Brotherhood IF j the signature. "You have sent word of this up the hill?" "Of course. Lord." "That is all we can do for the moment. We must make sure the army increases its patrols in the area." But of course the message might have been put up by someone known to be in the area of the Tournament. Perhaps one of the slaves -- or even one of the contestants -- is not what he pretends to be. "We must keep our eyes open, of course, and let nothing jeopardize the Tournament. To discredit it would be a considerable victory for the Brotherhood." The Brotherhood was a vague league of the disaffected, probably including most of Godsmountain's enemies, who were now scattered and relatively powerless around the rim of the inhabited world. There might be a sharp and dangerous secret organization at its core; it seemed wise to assume there was, and to continually warn the people and the soldiers of it. The subordinate indicated his agreement and withdrew. Leros pondered briefly: Might the agent who had left the message be a disloyal priest? He did not think it probable. But he could not be completely sure. The Tournament, meanwhile, had to get started. There had been no sign from up the hill that High Priest Andreas or any of his Inner Circle were coming down to watch. A pack train came into view on the lower reaches of the long road that wound its way down the forested slopes from the summit; but when it drew near Leros saw that no men of rank were walking near the animals, it was only a regular supply caravan returning unburdened from the top. On with it, then. Turning to a waiting herald, he gave the signal for the battle-horn to be blown, to call the contestants all together for the last time in the world of living men. When they were assembled he drew from a pocket of his fine white robe a scroll of new vellum, on which a priest-scribe had set down the names in elegant calligraphy. They appeared in the alphabetical order hallowed by time and military usage: Arthur of Chesspa Ben Tarras of the Battle-Axe Big Left Hand Bram the Beardless of Consiglor Brunn of Bourzoe Byram of the Long Bridges Charles the Upright Chun He Ping the Strong Col Renba David the Wolf of Monga's Village Efim Samdeviatoff Farley of Eikosk Farmer Minamoto Geno Hammerhand Geoff Symbolor of Symbolorville Gib the Blacksmith Giles the Treacherous of Endross Swamp Gladwin Vanucci Gunter Kamurata Hal Coppersmith Here Stambler of Birchtown Homer Garamond of Running Water Ian Offally the Woodcutter John Spokemaker of the Triple Fork Jud Isaksson of Ardstoy Hill Kanret Jon of Jonsplace Korl the Legbreaker LeNos of the Highlands Losson Grish M'Gamba Mim Muni Podarces Mesthles of the Windy Vale Mool of Rexbahn Nikos Darcy of the Long Plain Oktans Buk of Pachuka Omir Kelsumba One-Eyed Manuel Otis Kitamura Pal Setoff of Whiteroads Pern-Paul Hosimba Pernsol Muledriver of Weff s Plain Phil Cenchrias Polydorus the Foul Proclus Nan Ling Rafael Sandoval Rahim Sosias Rico Kitticatchorn of Tiger's Lair Rudolph Thadbury Ruen Redaldo Sensai Hagenderf Shang Ti the Awesome Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope Tay Corbish andry Thomas the Grabber Thurlow Vultee of the High Crag Travers Sandakan of Thieves' Road Urumchi Vann the Nomad Venerable Ming the Butcher Vladerlin Bain of Sanfa Town Wat Franko of the Deep Wood Wull Narvaez Zell of Windchastee IF ing, Leros glanced up at the still-high sun. "There will be time today for much fighting. Let it begin. He handed the scroll to a subordinate priest, who read in a loud voice: "Arthur of Chesspa -- Ben Tarras of the Battle-Axe." Having both stepped into the ring, and made their holy signs imploring Thorun's favor, the two went at it. Ben Tarras had taken only a dozen more breaths when his battle-axe spun out of his hand to bury itself with a soft sound in the calmly receiving earth, while Arthur's swordblade at the same time sank true and deep in Ben Tarras's flesh. The bare, flattened soil of the fighting ring drank Ben Tarras's blood as if it had been long athirst. A pair of slaves in shabby gray tunics dragged his body from the ring, toward a place nearby where other slaves were readying a pyre. The dry wood was stacked twice taller than a man already, and was not yet enough. Thirty-two men today would join the gods and begin their eternal feast with Thorun. "Big Left Hand -- Bram the Beardless of Consiglor." This fight went on a little longer; and then both hands of Big Left Hand (they appeared equally big) were stilled as Bram's sword tore his middle open. Again the slaves came to bear a corpse away, but Big Left Hand stirred and kicked feebly as they took him up. His eyes opened and were living, though the terrible wound in his front was plainly mortal. One slave, who limped about his work, pulled from his belt a short but massive leaden maul and broke the head of the dying man with a short methodical swing. Leros for the second time said ritual words to speed a loser's soul to Thorun, nodded to the acolyte who held the scroll. "Brunn of Bourzoe -- Byram of the Long Bridges." It went on through the afternoon, with little pauses between fights. Some of the fights were long, and one of the winners had lost so much blood that he could hardly stand himself before he managed to still the breath in the loser's throat. As soon as each fight was over the slaves came quickly to stanch the wounds, if any, of the winner, and lead him to food and drink and rest. It was likely to go hard in the second round of fighting with those who had been weakened in the first. The sun was reddening near the horizon before the last match had been fought. Before retiring, Leros gave orders that the camp should be moved early in the morning. Originally he had planned to wait until midday before beginning the slow intended progress up the mountain, but the smoke of the funeral pyre seemed to lie heavy here in the low air, and amphibious vermin from the river were being drawn to the camp by the blood of heroes in which the earth was soaked. Ill O rion was well in-system now, rapidly matching orbital velocities with Hunters' planet, and in fact not far from entering atmosphere. From his command chair in the small control room at the center of the ship, Schoenberg supervised his autopilot with a computer-presented hologram of the planet drifting before him, the planet as it appeared in gestalt via the multitude of sensing instruments built into the starship's outer hull. A few days earlier Suomi had obtained a printout on Hunters' planet from the ship's gazeteer, a standard databank carried for navigation, trade, and emergency survival. The Hunterian year was about fifteen times as long as the Earth-standard year; Hunters' planet was therefore much farther from its primary than Earth was from Sol, but Hunters' Star was a blue-white subgiant, so that the total insolation received by both planets was very nearly equal. The radius, mass, and gravity of Hunters' planet were Earthlike, as was the composition of the atmosphere. Hunters' would surely have been colonized from pole to pole had it not been for its extreme axial tilt -- more than eighty degrees to the plane of its revolution around Hunters' sun, almost as far as was Uranus in its orbit around Sol. Spring was now a standard year old in the Hunterian northern hemisphere, which region was therefore emerging from a night that had been virtually total for another Earthly year or so. Near the north pole the night had now lasted for more than five standard years and would endure for a total of seven. Up there the ice-grip of the dark cold was deep indeed, but it would soon be loosened. Seven standard years of continuous sunheat were coming. According to statements in the gazeteer, which were probably still valid though more than a standard century old, men had never managed to settle permanently much farther than fifteen degrees of latitude in either direction from the Hunterian equator. Dome colonies would have been called for and there had never been sufficient population pressure to make it worthwhile. Indeed, the population had not occupied even the whole equatorial zone of the main continent when the berserkers came. out of space attacked, the growing technological civilization of Hunters' colonists had been wrecked; the intervention of Karlsen's battle fleet was the only reason that any of the colonists -- or the biosphere itself, for that matter -- had survived at all. The native life, though none of its, forms were intelligent, did IF manage to endure at all latitudes, surviving the long winters by hibernation of one kind or another, and in many cases getting through the scorching, dessicated summers by an estivation cycle. Away from the tropics, spring presented the only opportunity for feeding, growth, and reproduction. Because the southern hemisphere was so largely water, the northern spring was the one that counted insofar as land animals were concerned. In the northern springtime beasts of all description emerged from caves and nests and frozen burrdws with the melting of the ice. Among them came predators, more terrible, burning with more urgent hunger and ferocity, than any creatures that had ever#ived on the old wild lands of Earth. On Hunters' planet now, as every fifteen standard years, the hunting season by which the planet had acquired its name was in full swing. poaching season, I supM, pose we should call it," said Carlos Suomi to Athena Poulson. The two of them were standing in the shooting gallery Schoenberg had set up a few weeks earlier in the large cabin directly beneath Orion's lounge. Suomi and Athena were looking over a large gun rack filled with energy rifles; Schoenberg had enjoined everyone aboard to select a weapon and become adept with it before shooting in earnest was required. Schoenberg and De La Torre spent a good deal of time down here. Celeste and Barbara hardly any. Suomi and Athena were intermediate, he generally showing up whenever she went to practice. They were in mid-session now. Some ten meters from the rifle rack -- half the diameter of the spherical ship -- a computer-designed hologram showed a handful of Hunterian predators stop-actioned in what looked like a good drawing of their natural habitat. Around and beyond the sketch-like animals in the middle distance what appeared to be several square kilometers of glacier spread to an illusive horizon. "All right," Athena said in her low voice. "Technically speaking, this trip is outside interstellar law. But it's evident that neither the authorities on Earth or the Interstellar Authority care very much. Oscar is too smart to get into any real trouble over such a thing. Relax and enjoy the trip, Carl, now that you're here. Whyever did you come along if you don't like the idea?" "You know why I came." Suomi pulled a rifle halfway out of the rack and then slid it back. The end of its muzzle was slightly bulbous, dull gray, pitted all over with tiny and precisely machined cavities. What it projected was sheer physical force, abstracted almost to the point of turning into mathematics. Suomi had already tried out all the rifles in the rack and they all seemed pretty much the same to him, despite their considerable differences in length and shape and weight. They were all loaded now with special target cartridges, projecting only a trickle of power when triggered, enough to operate the target range. Its setup was not different in principle from the target ranges in arcades on Earth or other urbanized planets; only there it was generally toy berserkers that one shot at, black metal goblins of various angular shapes that waved their limbs or flashed their imitation laser beams in menace. "I've always enjoyed these target games," he said. "Why shouldn't these be real enough, instead of going after living animals?" "Because these are not real," said Athena firmly. "And shooting at them isn't real either." She chose a rifle and turned her back on Suomi to aim it down the range. Somewhere a scanner interpreted her posture as that of the ready hunter, and the scene before her came alive again with deliberate motion. A multmouthed creature bristling with heavy fur stalked toward them at a range of seventy meters. Athena fired, a small click was emitted by the rifle, which remained perfectly steady, and the beast flopped over in a graceful, almost stylized way, now wearing a spot of red light riveted near the middle of what should have been its spine. The indication was for a clean kill. "Athena, I came along because you were coming, and I wanted to spend time with you, to get some things settled between us. That's why I had you get me invited. Also it was a chance to take a trip bn a private space yacht, something I'll probably never be able to do again. If I must hunt, to keep your lord and master upstairs happy, why then I'll do it. Or at least go through the motions of hunting." "Carlos, you're always talking down Oscar to me, and it won't work. I think this is the one I'll carry." She turned the rifle this way and that, looking at it critically. "I wonder what the people living on Hunters' think about expeditions like ours." "They're not being harmed, as far as I can see. I don't suppose they'll give a damn, even if they know we're there, which they probably won't. We won't be hunting in an inhabited area, but in the north." She sounded as if she knew what she was talking about, though she had probably only read the same ship's printout that Suomi had been studying. None of them except Schoenberg had been here before, and, when you thought about it, Schoenberg was really uncommunicative about his previous trip. With a few words he gave assurance that they were all in for some marvelous sport, warned succinctly about cerIF tain dangers to be wary of -- and that was about it. He might have been on Hunters' a number of times before. He might be three hundred years old or more; it was getting hard to tell these days, when an age of five hundred years was not unheard of. As long as the central nervous system held out other systems of the body could generally be maintained or replaced as needed. Schoenberg's voice now sounded on the intercom. "We're coming into atmosphere soon, people. Artificial gravity will be going off in another twenty minutes. Better secure your areas and settle in the lounge or in your staterooms." "We hear you in the target range," Suomi answered. "We're on our way." He and Athena began to secure the rifles in the rack, and to make sure that nothing in the area was likely to fly around loose if the coming maneuvers in free gravity should become violent for any reason. the lounge, Suomi watched the progress of their descent on the wall-sized screens. The planet, that had been hardly more than a star when last he observed its image, was now on top of them, or so it seemed. It grew further, eased around to a position below them as Schoenberg changed ship's attitude, spread a cloud net to catch Orion, became a world with a horizon to hold them in. The blue-white sun grew yellowish as they began to see it from inside the planet's atmosphere. The land below was high, rough country. Like most planets. Hunters' had an uninhabited look when seen from the upper air. Here the appearance persisted even when they had dropped to only a few kilometers' altitude. Schoenberg, alone in the control room, now took over control completely from the computers, guiding the ship manually, looking rapidly from one television screen to another. In the lounge they could watch him on the passenger's screen. Obviously traffic in the Hunterian atmosphere was practically non-existent and a mid-air collision nothing to be feared. Now Schoenberg was following a river, actually skirting sometimes between the walls of its deep-cut canyon. Mountains rose and dipped beneath Orion as he veered away from the watercourse, steadily decreasing speed. At last a chalet-like structure, flanked by log outbuildings, the whole complex surrounded by a palisade, came into view at the head of a pass. There was a scarcity of level ground, but Schoenberg had no real trouble in lowering the ship onto the barren soil about fifty meters outside the stockade. From the spherical metal hull, thick landing struts moved out to take the ship's weight and hold her upright. There was a scarcely perceptible settling motion when the pilot cut the drive. The ship used the same silent forces for maneuvering in atmosphere as in space -- though caution was necessary when using them near a planetsized mass -- and it could be landed on any surface that would bear its weight. Obviously their descent had been observed, for the drive was hardly off before people in drab clothes began to appear from a gate in the stockade. The arrival of a spaceship seemed to be an exciting event, but no more than that. The impromptu welcoming committee of six or eight showed no hesitancy in drawing near. Once the ship was firmly down Schoenberg got out of his chair and headed for the main hatch, which, without formality, he at once opened wide to the planet's air, and pressed the button to extrude a landing ramp. He and the others aboard had taken the routine immunological treatments before departure, and the ship had been gone over by his own medics to avoid carrying dangerous microorganisms to a planet with only a primitive medical technology. The natives waited a few meters from the ship, the women wearing long gowns and heavy aprons, the men for the nost part dressed in coveralls. A couple of them had primitive cutting or digging tools in hand. O NE smiling young man, better dressed than the others, his boots just as heavy but fancier, and with a short sword in a decorated leather scabbard at his belt, stepped forward. "Welcome, then." He spoke the common language with what seemed to Earth ears a heavy, but understandable, accent. "Now you are Mister Schoenberg, I recall." "I am." Smiling and open in his manner, Schoenberg went down the ramp to shake hands. "And you are -- Kestand, isn't it? Mikenas's younger brother?" "Now that is right. I was just a small one last hunting season when you were here. Surprised you know me." "Not at all. How's Mikenas?" "He's fine. Out now tending stock." The conversation went on about the state of affairs on the ranch or fiefdom or whatever it was that the absent Mikenas owned or ruled. Suomi and the other passengers -- all the girls were now dressed quite modestly -- had come down from the lounge, but at a gesture from Schoenberg remained just inside the ship, enjoying the fresh alien air. Meanwhile the farm workers remained standing in a group outside. These all appeared cheerful and more or less healthy, but might have been deaf and dumb. It was probably a decade and a half since any of them had had any news from the great interstellar civilization IF that networked the sky about them. They smiled at the visitors, but only Kestand spoke, and even he showed no inclination to ask how things were going, out among the stars. It seemed that no introductions were going to be made. The whole thing had a clandestine air, like a smugglers' meeting. For a moment Suomi wondered -- but the idea was ridiculous. A man of Schoenberg's wealth would not dabble in smuggling so directly if he decided to take it up. Kestand was asking: "Have you been hunting yet?" "No. I wanted to stop here first, and find out what's changed on the world since my last trip." "Well." Kestand, not the most scintillating speaker Suomi had ever attended, began to expand his earlier reports on the local state of crops and weather and hunting. "Not real northern hunting, y'understand, I haven't been able to get away yet this season. Like to be on my way right now, but Mikenas left me in charge." Schoenberg was listening patiently. Suomi, from clues dropped here and there, gathered that Mikenas and Schoenberg had gone north by spaceship last hunting season and had enjoyed notable success. Suomi's eyes kept coming back to the sword Kestand wore. The sheath was leather, looped onto the man's belt, and the hilt seemed to be plastic but of course was much more likely to be wood or bone; Suomi wished he knew more about primitive materials. Casting back through his life's memories -- only about thirty years to be sure -- he could not recall ever before seeing a man carrying a weapon for any non-symbolic purpose. Of course this sword might be only a badge of authority. It looked, though, as business-like as the hoe that one of the other men was holding. The two-way conversation had veered to the governmental and religious changes that had taken place since the last northern hunting season. These were all obscure to Suomi, but Schoenberg seemed to understand. Jtaken over, then," he mused, nodding his head as if at a suspicion confirmed. Then he asked: "Are they having the Tournament as planned this season?" "Yes." Kestand looked up at the sun. "Should be starting in another two, three days. Byram of the Long Bridges, he's our local champion." "Local?" Schoenberg looked thoughtful. "Isn't Long Bridges a good two hundred kilometers from here?" "I tell you, this's a world Tournament. Each of the sixty-four districts is a big'un." Kestand shook his head. "I'd purely like to go." "You would've gone, I bet, even rather than hunting, if Mikenas hadn't left you in charge here." "No, oh nooo, there was no way. Tournament's private for the gods and priests. Even the earl couldn't get an invitation, and Byram in his bodyguard. Mikenas didn't even try." Schoenberg frowned slightly, but did not pursue the matter of the Tournament any further. Suomi meanwhile was imagining a tournament of jousting, as in the old stories of Earth, men in full armor hurtling together on armored animals, trying to unseat each other with lances. But it couldn't be quite that; he recalled from his reading that there were no riding animals on Hunters'. After a little more talk Schoenberg thanked his informant cour- teously and called up into the ship for them to hand him down a satchel from a locker near the hatch. "And two of those ingots that you'll find in the locker; bring them down also, would you, gentlemen?" Suomi and De La Torre brought the desired items down the ramp. Setting the satchel at Kestand's feet, Schoenberg announced: "This is what I told Mikenas I'd bring him, power cells for lamps and a few medicines. Tell him I'm sorry I missed him; I'll stop again next season if all goes well. And here." He hefted the two ingots and handed them to the native. "For you. Good metal for points or blades. Have a good smith work it. Tell him to quench it in ice water. I guess you have no trouble getting that at this altitude." "Why, I give you great thanks!" Kestand was obviously well pleased. Once the ramp was retracted and the hatch closed, Schoenberg wasted little time in getting Orion into the air again. He still held manual control, soaring up in a steep arc that gradually bent into a level flight toward the northwest. His passengers had come to the control room with him this time and sat or stood around, more or less looking over his shoulder. When they had leveled off, De La Torre asked: "Where to, fearless leader? Shall we go and watch a few heads get broken?" Schoenberg grunted. "Let's go hunting first, Gus. The man said two or three days before the Tournament starts. I'm anxious to get a little hunting in." This time he remembered to look around as a matter of form. "How does that suit you people?" The planet flowed south and east beneath them. The sun, turning blue-white again at this altitude, reversed its apparent daily motion proper for the season and also slid toward the east from the tearing high-Mach velocity of their flight. An indicator on the edge of a warning zone showed how the drive was laboring to move them at so high a velocity this close to the center of a planet-sized mass. Schoenberg was indeed impatient. He had run out IF force-baffles on the hull, Suomi noted, to dampen the sonic shock wave of their passage, and they were too high to be seen from the ground with unaided eyes. No one in the lands below would be able to detect their passage. Celeste and Barbara soon retired to redecorate themselves in interstellar style. For the next several days the party would presumably be out of sight of Hunterian males who might be aroused or scandalized by the fashions of the great world. Athena, clinging to a stanchion behind Schoenberg's chair, remarked: "I wonder if there are other hunting parties here. Outworlders like us, I mean." Schoenberg only shrugged. Suomi said: "I suppose there might be three or four. Not many can afford private space travel, and also have the inclination to hunt." De La Torre: "Since we all seem to have the inclination to hunt, it's lucky for us that we found Oscar." Oscar had no comment. Suomi asked De La Torre: "Do you work for him, by the way? You've never told me." "I have independent means, as they say. We met through business, about a year ago." Schoenberg had gone a little higher to ease the strain on the drive. At this altitude the world called Hunters' almost seemed to have let go of the ship again. On several of the wall screens the terminator, boundary line between night and day, could be seen slanting across cloud cover athwart the invisible equator far to the south. The south pole, well out of sight around the curvature of the world, was more than halfway through its approximately seven standard years of uninterrupted sunlight. There the sun was a standard year past its closest approach to the zenith, and was now spiralling lower and ever lower in the sky, one turn with every Hunterian day, or one about every twenty standard hours. A couple of standard years in the future the sun would set for its long night at the south pole and simultaneously rise above the horizon at the north pole. Right now the Hunterian arctic, locked in the last half of its long night, must look as lifeless as the surface of Pluto, buried under a vast freeze-out of a substantial portion of the planet's water. Up there the equinoctial dawn would bring the hunting season to its end; right now the season was at its height in the middle latitudes of the north, where the sun was just coming over the horizon, each day sweeping from east to west a little higher in the southern sky, bringing in the thaw. That region must be Schoenberg's destination. T hey came down into a world of icy twilight, amid slopes of bare enduring rock and eroding, fantastic glaciers, all towering above valleys filled with rushing water and greenly exploding life. Schoenberg found a walkable part of the landscape in which to set Orion down and some solid level rock to bear her weight. This time, before opening the hatch, he took a rifle from the small rack set just inside, and held it ready in his hands. The opening of the hatch admitted a steady polyphonic roar of rushing waters. Schoenberg drew a deep breath and stood in the opening, looking out. As on the earlier landing the others were behind him. Celeste and Barbara, not dressed for near-freezing weather, moved shivering to the rear. The air smelled of wetness and cold, of thawing time and alien life. The landscape stretched before them, too big and complex to be quickly taken in. The shadows of southern mountains reached up high on the mountains to the north. They were going out right away; there were several standard hours of daylight remaining here. Schoenberg began a routine check-out of arms and other equipment, and called for volunteers. Athena announced at once that she was ready. De La Torre said that he would like to have a go. Suomi, too -- not that he really intended to kill anything that did not attack him. He felt a genuine need to get out of the ship for a while. Though all the tricks of environmental psychology had been used in the interior design of the Orion to ameliorate the reality of confinement, the trip had still cooped up six people in a small space for many weeks. Being aware of all the designer's tricks, Suomi was perhaps helped less than others by them. Barbara and Celeste elected not to try hunting today after Schoenberg had indicated he preferred it that way. He promised them a more peaceful picnic outing in the morning. "We'll go in pairs, then," Schoenberg announced when everything was ready. "Gus, you've hunted before, but not on this planet. If I may suggest, you and Athena take a stroll down the valley there." It spread before them as they looked out from the hatch, beginning thirty or forty meters from the rocky level where the ship rested, plunging after about a kilometer and a half of gentle, greenclad slope into an ice-clogged canyon down whose center a new torrent had begun to carve its way. "Down there at the lower end, where it slopes off into the canyon, the vegetation may well be headhigh. There should be twelve or thirteen species of large herbivores." 'Tn that little space?" De La Torre interrupted. 'Tn that little space." Now that he was going hunting, Schoenberg sounded more relaxed and happy than at any time on the trip before. "Life doesn't just thaw out here in IF the spring -- it explodes. There'll be large predators in that valley too, or I miss my guess. You don't want to run into one an arm's length away, so better skirt the taller growth. Carlos and I are going to take the upper path." This climbed a rocky slope on the other side of the ship. Suomi, during their descent, had glimpsed higher meadows in that direction. "We may find something really hungry up there, just out of a high cave and on its way down into the valleys for its first meal in a year or two." Boots, warm clothing, weapons, communicators, a few emergency items -- all in order. Suomi was the last to get down the ramp and crunch his new boots on Hunterian soil. Almost before his feet were off the ramp it began to fold up and retract. If the playgirls stayed inside with the hatch closed they would be perfectly safe until the men returned. Athena and Gus waved and set off on the lower way, tendrils of grass-like groundcover whipping about their boots. "Lead on up the path," said Schoenberg, with an uphill gesture to Suomi. "I'm sure your nerves are okay -- just a matter of principle that I don't like a novice hunter with a loaded firearm walking behind me, when something to shoot af may jump out ahead." The voice was charming if the words were not, and they were said with a happy and friendly look. All was right with Schoenberg at the moment, obviously; he was eager to get going. There was not really a path to follow, of course, but Suomi moved on up the spine of hill that formed the natural route Schoenberg must have meant to indicate. lost in admiration of the country around him. Wherever the melting away of the winter's ice had left a few square centimeters of soil exposed, rank vegetation had sprung up. There were no tree-sized plants in evidence, nothing that seemed to have begun to grow more than a few, days or weeks ago. In most places the grassand vine-like things were no more than waist high, but frequently they grew so thickly that no glimpse of soil could be seen between the stems. The plants were striving madly, ruthlessly, for water and warmth and sunlight, leaping into growth, making what they could of the wet season before the long searing drought of summer began. He paused, coming in sight of a meadow where man-sized creatures like giant slugs were moving, voraciously feeding on the plants, the wrinkles visibly stretching out of their grayish, hairless bodies. "Rimeworms," said Schoenberg, who came up close behind him and disregarded the creatures after the first glance. "Look sharp now, there may be something after them." "Do any of the larger forms freeze solidly through the night?" "Biologists Fve talked to say it's not possible. But I don't think anyone knows for sure." Now that they had stopped, Schoenberg was studying the country with binoculars. They had put a little rocky bulge of hill between themselves and the spaceship, and were now out of sight and sound of anything manmade save what they carried with them. The tracks they had left behind them in occasional patches of slush or muddy turf were the only signs of past human activity. The world around them had been made virgin by death and resurrection. Suomi was studying the country too, but not with binoculars and not for game. The yellowed sun was skimming a low point in the mountainous horizon, and seemed on the point of setting; actually there must still be an hour or so of daylight left. On the other side of a wide valley a glacier groaned, shed a few tons of cornice, broke out with a clear new waterfall. The organnotes of older cataracts held steady in the distance. Gradually, as Suomi began to comprehend the scene fully, as he got beyond the stage of simple elation at getting outdoors again, he realized that he had never before beheld a scene of nature so beautiful and awesome, nothing that even came close. Not even the wonders and terrors of space, which, when they could be perceived at all, were beyond the scale and grasp of human appreciation. This thundering world of mountains and valleys, with its exploding life, was not beyond the human scale, not quite. Schoenberg was less content with what he saw. Of predators he had evidently discovered no sign. "Let's move on a little," he said tersely, putting his binoculars away. Suomi led on again. When they had gone a few hundred meters more, Schoenberg called another halt, this time at the foot of a steep slope. After another short session with the binoculars, Schoenberg pointed up the hill and said: "I'm going up there and have a look around. Let me do this alone, I want to be quiet and inconspicuous about it. Stay here, don't move around, keep your eyes open. There may be something on our trail, stalking us, and you may get a good shot just by waiting." With a faint thrill of danger, small enough to be enjoyable, Suomi looked back along the way they had come. Nothing moved but the distant, harmless rimeworms. "All right." He sat down and watched Schoenberg up the slope and out of sight over the top of it. He then swiveled around on his rocky seat, enjoying the absence of people in every direction. It was delightful to be alone, for the first time in -- it seemed like the first time in his life. Isolation could be accomplished in IF the ship, of course, but the others' bodies and minds were always there, one was always aware of them only a few meters away. Suomi touched the communicator on his belt. The channels among hunters and between the hunters and the ship were alive but so far totally unused. Everyone was enjoying the physical and psychic separation. Time passed. Schoenberg was gone longer than Suomi had expected. A thin shadow came over the nearby scenery as the sun declined behind a distant rim of ice. Without preamble a magnificent glacier-beast appeared before Suomi's eyes, perhaps two hundred fifty meters off, across a gentle slope of detritus fallen from an extension of the slope at the foot of which Suomi waited. It was not the direction from which Schoenberg had thought a predator was likely to come, nor was the creature looking toward Suomi. It was facing downhill, turning its head back and forth. Suomi raised his binoculars, and recalled his reading. An excellent specimen, male, probably second-cycle, just awakened from the second hibernation of its life into its full prime of strength and ferocity. The hollowness of loins and ribs was visible despite the thickness of orange-yellow fur. It was rather larger than an Earthly tiger. Suomi, without getting to his feet, raised his rifle in perfectly steady hands and aimed. He was only playing. He lowered the weapon again. "Long shot for a beginner," said Schoenberg's voice from close behind him, a little way up the slope. The cataract-roar must swallow the voice before the beast could hear it, even as it had kept Suomi from hearing Schoenberg's approach among the rocks. "But a clean one. If you don't want to try it I'll have a crack." Suomi knew without turning that Schoenberg would already be raising his rifle to take aim. Still without looking around, Suomi lifted his own weapon once more and fired (pop, a little louder than in the shooting gallery, and now at full power there was a perceptible kick), deliberately aiming ahead of the animal to frighten it away, blasting up a spray of ice. Catlike, the creature crouched, then turned toward the earthmen its alienly unreadable face. The men who lived on Hunters' were men of Earth in their ancestry and distant history; it was easy to forget how alien all the other life-forms here must be. ning, crossing the slope in great graceful catlike bounds. But it was not fleeing from the men as it should, as Suomi had unthinkingly assumed it must. In pure innocence of the powers it faced it was coming now to kill and eat him. Insane hunger drove it on. Its sprinting taloned feet hurled up rocks from the talus slope, mixed with a powdering of snow. Shoot Whether Schoenberg was calling out the word, or he himself, or whether it only hung thoughtprojected in the freezing, timeless air, Suomi did not know. He knew only that death was coming for him, visible, and incarnate, and his hands were good for nothing but dealing out symbols, manipulating writing instruments, paintbrushes, electronic styluses, making an impression on the world at second or third remove, and his muscles were paralyzed now and he was going to die. He could not move against the mindless certainty he saw in the animal's eyes, the certainty that he was meat. Schoenberg's rifle sounded, a repetitive, seemingly ineffectual popping not far from Suomi's right ear. Invisible fists of god-like power slammed at the charging animal, met the beautiful energy of its charge with a greater, more brutal force. The force-blows tore out gobs of orange-yellow fur,, and distorted the shapes of muscle and bone beneath. The huge body shed its grace and its momentum. StilJ it seemed to be trying to reach the men. Now its body broke open along a line of penetration wounds, stuffed toy. Clear in Suomi's vision was an open paw with knife-long claws, arching high on the end of a forelimb and then striking down into a puddle of slush not ten meters from his boots. When the beast was still, Schoenberg put another shot carefully into the back of its head for good measure, then slung his rifle and got out his hologram camera. Then, after looking at the gory, broken body from several angles, he shook his head and put the camera away again. He spoke reassuringly to Suomi, seeming not in the least surprised or upset by Suomi's behavior. He was offhandedly gracious when Suomi at last managed to stammer out a kind of thanks. And that in its way was the most contemptuous attitude that Schoenberg coirld have taken. IV Early on the morning of the Tournament's second day, Leros, the priest in charge, led the surviving thirty-two contestants on an easy march of some five kilometers, up from the flat land by the river where the first round had been fought to a much higher meadow resting in Godsmountain's lap. At this new site an advance party of priests and workers were already at work, preparing a new fighting ring of cleared, hardtrodden earth, and a new field altar for the image of Thorun that was brought up on a cart just in front of Leros and the warriors. The slave-laborers were IF sweating, earning their rations today, for their numbers had been greatly reduced, many being sent to other projects. Only half the original number of warriors now required service, of course, and as always there was plenty of other labor to be performed in the citadel-city above and the tributary lands below. The plan of the Tournament, handed down to Leros by the High Priest Andreas and his Inner Circle of councillors, required that each successive round of fighting take place closer to the top of the mountain than the one before. The purpose, as Andreas had explained it, was symbolic. But Leros observed now that the plan had practical advantages as well. The offal of each camp would be promptly left behind, the latrine, the leavings of the cook-tents, the remnants of the funeral pyre. The work of readying the new site was completed shortly after the fighting men arrived, and an acolyte handed over the day's new vellumwritten lists to Leros. He called the men into assembly, and, when some formalities had been gotten out of the way, read the lists out: Arthur of Chesspa Bram the Beardless of Consiglor Brunn of Bourzoe Charles the Upright Col Renba Efim Samdeviatoff Farley of Eikosk Geoff Symbolor of Symbolorville Giles the Treacherous of Endross Swamp Gladwin Vanucci Hal Coppersmith Homer Garamond of Running Water Jud Isaksson of Ardstoy Hill Kanret Jon of Jonsplace LeNos of the Highlands M'Gamba Mim Mesthles of the Windy Vale Octans Bukk of Pachuka Omir Kelsumba Otis Kitamura Pernsol Muledriver of Weffs Plain Polydorus the Foul Rafael Sandoval Rahim Sosias Rudolph Thadbury Shang Ti the Awesome Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope Thomas the Grabber Travers Sandakan of Thieves' Road Vann the Nomad Vladerlin Bain of Sanfa Town Wull Narvaez Before giving the signal for the start of the second round's first fight, Leros took a moment to look around him at his world. There was much in it to make him feel content. From the high meadow where he stood the prospect was one of long reaches of cultivated land below, kilometer after kilometer of field and pasture, with here and there an orchard, a cluster of houses, a patch of raw forest or a string of trees along a watercourse. It was a peaceful and malleable world, one of peasants and crops and artisans, obediently serving the masters of violence who dwelt on the heights above. There was of course, the Brotherhood to flaw it. After yesterday's posted insult nothings further had been heard from them... there was also, more naggingly, the fact that the Inner Circle seemed to be closed to Leros, and the office of High Priest, therefore, forever unattainable. Why should a priest like Lachaise, for example, who was far more an artisan than a fighting man, be a member of the Inner Circle, when Leros and others more deserving were kept out? At any rate the Tournament was going well. That was what mattered most. Perhaps if it was a great success he would at last be promoted -- and there was no reason why it should not smoothly run its course. At the end of it the great gate of the city would open for the winner as the maidens strewed flowers before him and he was conducted in triumph through the streets to the Temple; and that would stand open for him also; and then the inner curtains of chain-mail would part -- as they never had for Leros -- and the secret doors, and the winner would be let in where Leros himself had never been to the place where gods walked with the fallen heroes who once were mortal men, where only the High Priest and the Inner Circle came to mediate between them and the world of men. j matter of faith to him. He had once glimpsed Thorun in an inner courtyard of the Temple, standing taller than any mortal man, walking with the High Priest on a night when storms were in the air and lightning flickered... He bowed his head for a moment of private prayer, then brought himself back to the waiting men, and his responsibilities, and called out the names for the first match of the day: "Arthur of Chesspa -- Bram the Beardless of Consiglor." Arthur was a middle-aged man of middle size. In this company of warriors he looked small. Stocky, dourlooking, heavily mustached, he strode into the ring with an air of utterly nerveless competence and IF with unblinking calm watched Bram the Beardless approach with intent to kill. Bram, it appeared, was beardless by reason of his extreme youth. Though he was tall and heavyshouldered his face looked no more than one Hunterian year of age, fifteen or sixteen sixtieths-of-an-oldman's-life. Bram was not calm but his excitement seemed to be rather joy than fright as he opened the attack with an exuberant swing of his fong sword. Arthur parried the blow well enough, seemed in no hurry to go on the offensive himself. Bram pressed the attack; his youth and energy did not admit the possibility that he could be beaten. Again and again he struck, while Arthur still retreated thoughtfully, seeming to await the perfect time to counter. And again and again Bram struck, with ever-increasing speed and terrible strength. Arthur still had not made up his mind how best to fight when there came a blow he could not stop. He lost an arm and shoulder. The finishing stroke came quickly. "Brunn of Bourzoe -- Charles the Upright." Brunn was heavyset and fair, with a sun-bleached look about him. In one thick hand he held a short spear in such fashion that it was evident he preferred to thrust rather than risk all on one throw. He took the initiative, though cautiously, moving slowly widdershins around the upright Charles. Charles gangly as a bird, looking as if he might be happier perching on one leg, stood tall and held his twohanded sword ready for whatever Brunn might do. The spear-thrust, when it came, was strong and quick but the response, of Charles was better; the lopped-off spearhead fell to earth. The fair head of Brunn was not far behind it. "Col Renba -- Efim Samdeviatoff." These two were similar in appearance, both a little above middle height and with brown shaggy hair. Col Renba whirled a spike-studded ball on the end of a short chain attached to a wooden handle. Samdeviatoff held sword and dagger ready. Both jumped to the attack at the same time but the spiked ball struck the sword out of the hand that held it and in the next breath dashed the brains that had directed it upon the ground. "Farley of Eikosk -- Geoff Symbolor." Again there was a resemblance; this time one of manners rather than appearance. Both contestants were well dressed and expensively armed. There were even jewels in the hilts of Geoffs sword and dagger. Farley was fair, almost red, of hair and beard. His bare arms, lined with bone and vein and muscle, were freckled rather than sunburned. Geoff Symbolor was quite dark, and shorter than Farley by half a head, though seemingly his equal in weight and strength. Their battle was a slow one. The two of them seemed well matched until Farley's longer reach let him nick the muscles of Geoff s shoulder. With his sword-arm handicapped the shorter man was soon wounded again. Farley took no rash chances; the other was weakened by loss of blood before Farley drove in hard to finish him. "Giles the Treacherous -- Gladwin Vanucci." Giles was of middling size but wiry, with tanned face and sandy hair and pale innocent eyes. If it was indeed his habit to be treacherous, there was no need for it today. With his long sword he made short work of the squat and massive Gladwin, who had favored a battle-axe. "Hal Coppersmith -- Homer Garamond." Hal Coopersmith was very tall, with sloping shoulders and long arms entwined by rich tattoos. His long sword quivered restlessly in his hand, like some insect's antenna following the movements of his foe. Homer Garamond seemed saddened by the task at hand though he was almost as young as Bram the Beardless who had shone with joy dagger almost negligently in powerful hands until Hal came thrusting in. Fast as Homer moved then it was not fast enough. "Jud Isaksson -- Kanret Jon." Jud, a fiery little man with an enormously long black mustache. stamped briskly into the ring with a round metal shield strapped onto his left arm, A short sword extended from his right. Kanret, perhaps the oldest fighter to survive the first round, awaited him with a patience befitting his years. Kanret was armed with a short, thickshafted spear; the way he gripped it indicated he might use it as a quarterstaff as well as thrust with it. When the moment of testing came, the spear hit nothing but Jud's shield, and Kanret Jon was brought down with a swordstroke to the knee. His end was quick thereafter. "LeNos of the Highlands -- M' Gamba Mim." LeNos had a scarred face and, once in the ring, a way of moving that seemed more animal than human, a lithe long-striding crouch. With sword and dagger he closed on M'Gamba Mim, who was huge and black and carried similar weapons. The blood of both was on the ground before LeNos could prevail; and then, still like an animal, he snarled at the slaves who came to tend his cuts. "Mesthles of the Windy Vale -- Octans Bukk of Pachuka." Mesthles had the thought-creased forehead of some scribe or scholar. He wore peasant's clothes and fought with a farmer's scythe. Octans was lean, and his ragged clothes gave him the look of a hungry bandit. But his sword proved slower than the scythe and he was mown. IF "Omir Kelsumba -- Otis Kitamura." Kelsumba's wide black face was set in a determination as intense as fury. Leros, watching, remembered this man as the one who had asked about acquiring the healing powers of a god. When the fighters closed, Kelsumba swung his massive battleaxe with incredible power, swinging and then reversing instantly for the backswing -- as if his weapon were no heavier than a stick. Kitamura's sword was knocked aside, and then Kitamura's jawbone. He went down on hands and knees and stayed there. Kelsumba left his finishing to the leaden mauls of the burial party. "Pernsol Muled river -- Polydorus the Foul." The Muledriver was an older man, who set to Vork deliberately with short spear and long knife. Polydorus, a man of indeterminate age, and seemingly no fouler than the next, went in carrying an old sword, much nicked and dented. The old sword did its work efficiently, and Pernsol died quietly, as if content to end life's struggles and take his modest place at Thorun's board. "Rafael Sandoval -- Rahim Sosias." Sosias looked more like a tailor than a fighting man, being not overly big and displaying a small, comfortable paunch. But his curved sword hung as naturally from his hand as his hand from the end of his hairy arm. Sandoval was notably ugly, made so by nature, not by scars. He twirled a spikeand-ball mace disdainfully. Rahim's sword was caught in a loop of the mace's chain and pulled from his hand, but before Rafael could disentangle his own weapon from the sword, Rahim had drawn an extra knife from concealment and had slit his opponent's throat. "Rudolph Thadbury -- Shang Ti the Awesome." Thadbury had a military as well as a fighting look. Leros thought this man had something more of the general than of the simple swordsman about him but knew nothing of his background. Most of the contestants were as much strangers to Leros and the other priests as they were to one another. Squarely built, with blunt-fingered enormous hands, Rudolph Thadbury exuded strength and confidence. Shang Ti was awesome in truth, having a rather small head set on such a giant's body that the head's smallness was made to look grotesque. Shaiig Ti's sword was of a size to suit his stature. Rudolph's had a thicker blade than the usual and was just long enough to reach Shang Ti's heart. "Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope -- Thomas the Grabber." Siniuju was almost scrawny, leaner than any other man left alive among the warriors. He carried a two-handed sword that looked too heavy for him -- until he demonstrated how quickly he could make it move. Thomas was large and fierce-looking, a Shang Ti slightly less massive and better proportioned. He matched his spear over the long two-handed sword. The spear proved longer still. "Travers Sandakan -- Vann the Nomad." Sandakan came carrying a thinbladed axe made with a sturdy armored shaft. On his face were the lines of time and trouble and the scars of many fights. Vann the Nomad wore the long shapeless sweater of the high-plains herdsmen and wielded a long sword with demonic energy. Sandakan was no match for the Nomad and when Travers was dead Vann cut off one of his ears, saying: "I will give this back to him in Thorun's hall -- if he is man enough to take it from me!" It was a gesture new to Leros, who thought about it and finally gave a hesitant smile of approval. As soon as the latest corpse had been cleared from the ring he formally called out the names for the day's final match. "Vladerlin Bain -- Wull Narvaez." Coiled around Bain's waist was a long whip, whose purpose none had yet considered it politic to ask. In his hands Bain wore a dagger and a sword. Narvaez, with a cheerful foolish face and a farmer's pitchfork as his only visible weapon, looked like some peasant fresh from fieldwork. A good harvester he sent the tines exactly where he wanted them and Vladerlin was dead before he hit the ground, the reason for his coiled whip now never to be known. The sun had not yet reached its midday point. The fighting of the second round was over. T he sixteen fighters who remained alive moved off to enjoy the food prepared for them. For the most part they chatted and joked in good fellowship, though a few were silent. Also they took thoughtful notice of each other's wounds, calculating where weakness would be found tomorrow. All of them knew that even the tiniest advantage must be seized. Not one survived among them who was not extremely dangerous -- not one survived who could not count killers of superior ability among his victims. Resting after their midday meal, they say the messenger come pelting down the mountain. His news made Leros snap back his head to search the sky. From where they camped beneath the trees it was not possible to see much of it. The warriors were curious, but not very. The Tournament they were engaged in was more important than any distraction they could imagine. Later still when a priest of the Inner Circle came down to talk earnestly to Leros the news spread among the warriors that a round, silvery craft had come from beyond IF the world to visit Godsmountain. Most of them were curious enough to try to catch a glimpse of the ship, barely visible, resting among the trees on a distant height. V 'Poulson and Gus De La Torre had hunted again, on the day after Suomi's near-fatal confrontation with the glacier-beast, while Barbara Hurtado and Celeste Servetus had gone through the motions of hunting. Suomi had chosen to stay with the ship. Oscar and Athena and Gus, all having had some excitement on their first day's hunt but having returned from it empty handed returned from the second day's effort with their hologram trophies of large predators, safely recorded on little crystal cubes for later reproduction and display. Athena, sitting in the lounge, rubbing her tired feet, complained it was going to be difficult to find a place to show off her glacier-beast. "It's all right for you, Oscar, but I have one small apartment. I'll have to move half the furniture to make room for this -- if I dare display it at all, that is." "Because you got it on an offlimits hunting trip?" Schoenberg laughed. "If anybody bothers you, just tell'em I gave it to you. Let'em come see me." "I'll have to leave it turned off most of the time, just bring it out for special occasions. I suppose it would scare off most of my usual visitors, anyway." Then she caught herself and started to look apologetically toward Suomi, then hastily looked away. Yesterday after everyone had returned to the ship they had all listened with some embarrassment to his account of how he had frozen in panic in the field and how Schoenberg had coolly saved his life. Athena had been more embarrassed, perhaps, than Suomi. De La Torre had seemed inwardly amused, and Barbara had shown some sympathy. Suomi wondered if his shipmates -- Athena especially -- were waiting for him to demand a rifle and a chance to go out and prove himself. If so they were going to have a long wait. All right, he had been terrified. Maybe if he went out again and an animal charged, he wouldn't be terrified. Or maybe he would. He wasn't anxious to find out. He had nothing to prove. While all the others were out hunting on the second day he sat on the ship's extended landing ramp enjoying the air. There was a rifle at hand for emergencies but if anything menacing came in sight he planned to simply go inside and close the hatch. Once everyone who wanted a trophy had one Schoenberg dallied in the north no longer. The hunting season would last a long time but the mysterious Tournament was apparently quite brief and he didn't want to miss it. When Suomi mentioned the Tournament to the girls, none of them had any clear idea of what it was. Some sort of physical contest, he supposed. Schoenberg evidently knew the way to Godsmountain, though he said he had not been there before. Flying south, he went much slower and lower than on the northward flight, paying close attention to landmarks. He followed a river valley most of the way, first by radar because of ground fog, then visually when the view had cleared. When, after several hours, they reached their destination, there was no mistaking it. Godsmountain stood out immediately from its surroundings, a wooded eminence practically isolated amid a patchwork of surrounding flat farmlands, orchards and pastures. The mountain was broad and quite high, but in general not very steep. On the deforested summit a townsized complex of white stone walls and buildings stood out as plainly as if it had been constructed as a beacon for aerial navigation. After circling the mountain once at a respectful distance, Schoenberg slowed down some more and began to descend toward it. Not to the citadel-city on its top; he was careful not to even fly over that. A few hundred meters below the walls of the white city, a truncated pinnacle of rock rose out of the woods something like a dwarfed and naked thumb on the side of the mountain's great mitten-shape. After noticing this pinnacle, Schoenberg approached it slowly, circled it closely, then hovered directly over it for some time, probing delicately at it with the sensing instruments in Orion's hull. It was between twenty and thirty meters tall, and appeared to be just barely climbable. There was no sign that man or beast had ever taken the trouble to reach its flattened top. De La Torre, now hanging onto the stanchion behind the pilot's chair, offered: "I'd say that top is big enough to hold us, Oscar, even give us a little room to walk around outside the ship." Schoenberg grunted. "That was my idea, to put her down there. We might have to cut a few steps or string a line to climb down. But on the other hand no one's going to come visiting unless we invite'em." After making a final close examination of the pinnacle's small mesa from only a few meters' distance, Schoenberg set Orion down on it. The landing struts groped outward, adjusted themselves to keep the ship level. There was indeed enough flat space on the rocky table to hold the ship securely, with a few square meters left over for leg-stretching. All aboard disembarked for this purpose at once. Even high up the weather at this tropical latitude was quite warm but the girls were fully clothed again, in view of their unIF certainty about local morals and customs. Schoenberg had ordered all weapons left inside the ship. Direct inspection confirmed that only one side of the mesa was conceivably climbable by human beings. Even on that side there were places where a few pitons or some cut-in steps, and perhaps a rope, would be needed to allow even agile folk to make an ascent or descent in reasonable safety. "Where is everybody?" Celeste wondered aloud as she gazed beyond the intervening sea of treetops at the white walls of the city on the summit, slightly above their level. De La Torre had binoculars out and was peering in another direction, downslope. "There' re thirty or forty men, in some kind of a camp. Over there. I can just make out some of them from time to time, among the trees." For a while there was no better answer to Celeste's question, no sign that Orion's arrival or her sorethumb presence above the landscape had been noticed. Of course the dense forest that covered most of the mountain might conceal a lot of movement. The trees, Suomi noted, looked like close analogues of common Earthly species. Maybe some mutated stocks had been imported by the early colonists. The trunks did seem to be proportionately thicker than those of most trees on Earth, and their branches tended to right-angle bends. About half a standard hour had passed since their landing, and the six visitors had all armed themselves with binoculars, when the one visible gate in the city's high wall suddenly opened and a small party of white-robed men emerged, vanishing from sight again almost at once as they plunged into the woods. Schoenberg had an infrared device with which he could have followed their progress beneath the canopy of leaves, but he didn't bother. Instead he placed his binoculars back in their case, leaned back and lit a cigar. Some minutes before Suomi had expected their reappearance so near at hand, the delegation from the city emerged from the woods again, this time into the clearing caused by rockfalls from the tower on which Orion rested. Schoenberg at once threw down his cigar and moved forward to the mesa's edge and, with lifted arms, saluted the men below. Looking up, they returned the gesture with seeming casualness. There were half a dozen of them. The white robes of two or three were marked with different variations of purple trim. The distance being too great for anything but shouted exchanges, the Hunterians came leisurely closer. The , tall one in the lead reached the foot of the tower and began to climb. At first he made steady headway without much difficulty. About halfway up, however, a nearly sheer stretch brought him to a halt. He was an old man, his visitors saw now, despite the nimbleness with which he moved. He looked up at Schoenberg, who stood open-handed some ten meters above him, and called: "Outworlders, Thorun and the other gods of Hunters' offer you greetings and grant you welcome." Schoenberg made a slight bow. "We thank Thorun and the other illustrious gods of Hunters', wishing to put our thanks in such form as may seem to them most courteous. And we thank you too, who approach us as their spokesman." "I am Andreas, High Priest of Thorun's kingdom in the world." Schoenberg introduced the members of his party, Andreas those with him. After a further exchange of courtesies in which Schoenberg hinted that he would make some gift to Thorun as soon as he found out what was most suitable, he got around to the object of his visit. "As all men know. Hunters' is the planet most renowned in all the universe for the quality of its fighting men. We are told that the finest warriors of the planet are even now gathered here at Godsmountain for a great Tournament." "That is true in every word," said Andreas. His speech seemed to outworld ears much less accented than Kestand's had. Schoenberg proceeded. "We crave the favor of Thorun in being allowed to witness this Tournament, at least in part." Andreas did not look toward his companions waiting calmly below, but rather across the treetops to his city, as if to gather in some message. It was only a brief glance, before he said: "I speak for Thorun. It is his pleasure to grant you your request. The Tournament is already in progress, but the most important rounds of fighting remain yet to be seen. The next is to be fought tomorrow." with the outworlders, promising that in the morning he would send a guide to conduct them to the fighting ring in plenty of time to see the day's events there. He promised them also that sometime during their stay they would be invited into the city and entertained in Thorun's temple as befitted distinguished guests. He acknowledged Schoenberg's promise that a gift for Thorun would be forthcoming. And then the priests and the outworlders exchanged polite farewells. During the short hike back to the city Andreas was thoughtful and more than usually aloof. His subordinates, walking with him, took careful note of his mood and did not intrude upon him. He was an old man by Hunterian standards, scarred by a dozen serious wounds, the survivor of a hundred fights. He was no longer a warrior of great prowess, his B# IF muscles now suffering the wastage of time and maltreatment. Nimble climbing cost him much more effort than he allowed to show. The skull looked out from behind his face more plainly with the passage of every sixtieth-of-an-old-man'slife -- what the outworlders would call a Standard Year. In this progressive change of his facial appearance he found pleasure. Though his legs were tired he maintained a brisk pace and it was not long before he had led his party back into the city. There he brushed aside subordinates who were waiting to entangle him in a hundred questions and disputes about the visitors. These men, below the level of the Inner Circle, understood nothing. Essentially alone, Andreas strode quickly and still thoughtfully through the network of bright, narrow streets. Servants, artisans, soldiers and aristocrats alike all took themselves out of his way. On the steps before the tall outer doors of the Temple of Thorun a pair of Inner Circle aristocrats in purplespangled robes broke off their conversation to bow respectfully, a salute that Andreas acknowledged with a scarcely conscious nod. A courtesan alighting from her litter bowed more deeply. She was evidently the woman of some noncelibate priest below the Inner Circle. Andreas acknowledged her not at all. In the Outer Temple the light was good, the sun coming in strongly through the hypaethrus in the roof; and here a lowvoiced chant of war, to muffled drum, went up from acolytes who knelt before an altar piled with enemy warriors' skulls and captured weapons. An armed guard who stood before the entrance to the Inner Temple saluted Andreas and stepped aside, pulling the great door open for him. Broad stairs went down. The room to which they led was vast, built partially below the level of the sunlit streets outside. Here in the Inner Temple the light was indirect and dim, filtered through many small portals. Andreas pushed aside hanging after hanging of chain mail with practiced hands, made his way across the enormous chamber. He passed a place where a single devout worshipper knelt, a fighting man with shield and sword in hand, a priestgeneral dressed all in white, praying silently before a tall stone statue. The statue, highly stylized, portrayed a man in smooth, tightfitting outworlder's garb. He wore a round and almost featureless helm and had a grim, beardless face -- Karlsen, a demigod of the distant past, a sword in his right hand, a stick-like outworld weapon in his left. Andreas' face was set like stone. But to have the statue removed would cause trouble. Karlsen was still a popular figure with many of the people. From this point on the way Andreas took was not open, or even known, to more than a very few. He went behind more chain mail curtains into a comer where an inconspicuous passageway began. Again there were descending stairs, dimmer and much narrower than before. At the bottom a small oil lamp burned in a wall niche, giving enough light to enable a man to walk without groping, no more. Here were the tall and massive doors that led to Thorun's hall. From behind these doors at times came flaring lights, the sound of harp and drum and horn and booming laughter. At these times novices were allowed to stand wideeyed at the foot of the stairs and briefly watch and listen, observing from afar the evidences of gods and heroes at feast within. Andreas carried one of the two keys that could open the doors of Thorun's hall. Lachaise, Chief Artisan of the Temple and, of course, a member of the Inner Circle, had the other. A door swung open for Andreas now, when he turned his key in the proper secret way, and he quickly stepped through and pulled the door tightly shut again behind him. T he Great Hall of Thorun, carved out of the living rock beneath the Temple, was perhaps five meters long, three wide, three high -- certainly modest enough in all conscience for the master of the world. The walls, floor, and ceiling were rough, bare stone; Thorun's hall had never been finished. Quite likely it never would be. Work on it had begun, he supposed, almost twenty Hunterian years ago, five times an old-man's-lifetime. A little work had still been done in the tenure of the previous High Priest. But since then plans had changed. The place was big enough already to fill its only real function; duping novices. There was an air passage above so that bright torches could be burned to cast their light out under and around the doors, there were musical instruments piled in a corner. As for the booming, godlike laughter -- either Thorun or Mjollnir could do that. Thorun was in his hall, seated at a table that nearly filled the inadequate rbom. So huge was he that, even though seated, his eyes were on a level with those of the tall priest standing before him. Thorun's head of wild dark hair was bound by a golden band, his fur cloak hung about his mountainous shoulders. His famed sword, so large that no man could wield it, was girdled to his waist. His huge right hand, concealed as always in a leather glove, rested on the table and held a massive goblet. Seen in the dim light, Thorun's face above his full dark beard might have been judged human -- except that it was too 'immobile and too large. IF CLonIkird # Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste, America's quality cigarette. King Size or Deluxe #'s. Kings: # mg. "tar " # mg. nicotine; #'s: # mg. "tar." # mg. nicotine; The only Menthol with the famous Micronite filter. Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health Thorun did not move. Neither did the demigod: Mjollnir, seated at another side of the table, head bound in a silver band, wrapped in his dark cloak. Of nearly equal size with the god of war and the hunt, Mjollnir shared Thorun's foodless and drinkless feast in gloomy comradeship. After entering the room Andreas had waited for a little while, standing motionless, watching -- making sure neither of them was going to be triggered into movement by his entry. Sometimes they were. One had to be careful. Satisfied, he walked around the high table and passed behind the chair of Thorun. There in the wall was set a small and secret door for which no key was necessary. Andreas opened this door by pressure in the proper place. Behind it another narrow stone stair wound down. The descent was longer this time. At the bottom of the final stair Andreas turned first to his left. After three or four strides in that direction he emerged from a narrow tunnel to stand on the bottom of an enormous pit dug out of the rock beside the Temple. The excavation of this pit had consumed in labor the lifetimes of many slaves, having been started during the tenure of the fifth High Priest to hold office before Andreas; so farseeing and magnificent were the plans, now coming to fruition, of the true god! At its top the pit was surrounded by white stone walls and covered by a roof, so that it looked from the outside merely like one more building in the Temple complex, in no way remarkable amid the maze of structures that all looked more or less alike. Andreas went back into the tunnel and followed it back in the direction that led right from the foot of the stair. Before entering the doorless chamber to which this passage brought him, he paused and closed his eyes in reverent imitation of Death, murmured a brief private prayer. Certainly not to Thorun. Thorun was a thing, a tool, part of a necessary deception practiced on the masses, a deception that Andreas had left behind him in the Temple. What now lay ahead was, for him, the ultimate -- the only -- reality. The chamber Andreas now entered was as old as anything made by man on Hunters' planet. Dim daylight lit it now, filtering indirectly down through an overhead shaft open at some high place to the sunlight and barred by heavy grills at many places along its length. It was a little larger than Thorun's hall above. A hundred people might have squeezed themselves into this room but never had. Fewer than ten people now even knew of its existence. Against the wall opposite the single doorway stood a low wooden table bearing a half dozen boxes of bright metal. Each box was of a different shape, and each rested in a depression or socket carved to its shape in the dark panels of the tabletop. The outer surfaces of the boxes were precisely machined and shaped, products of a finer technology than any sword-making smithy. Tubes and cables of smooth gray and black ran among the boxes in a maze of interconnections. On second look the wooden frame supporting the boxes was not really a table, but something more like a litter or sedan chair, though not made to accommodate the human form. From opposite ends of the litter extended pairs of sturdy carrying arms with carven grips, so six or eight humans could bear the whole assembly. The carrying handles were worn with long usage, but the litter, like the rest of the chamber, was very clean. The pale stone of the floor shone faintly in the dim light. Only the low stone altar in the center of the room was darkened by old and ineradicable stains, rust from the inset iron rings to which victims' limbs were sometimes bound, rustcolored old blood at the places over which the victims' organs were removed. Before the litter, like fruit, the skulls of babies filled a bowl. Offerings of flowers lay scattered in small heaps, never in vases. Nearly all of the flowers were dead. After he entered the room Andreas lowered himself to his knees, then down and fully prostrate on the floor, head and outstretched arms pointing toward the altar and beyond it to the litter with its metallic burden. r. inhuman voice. It came from among the metal boxes, where a small wooden frame stood on its side holding a stretching drumskin. In the center of the drumskin a small gleam of metal showed. The voice produced by the drumskin was seldom loud, though a similar device had been put inside Thorun to let him bellow and laugh. This, the quiet voice of Death, was more like a drum-sound than anything else Andreas had ever heard -- and yet it was not very like a drum. Andreas arose and came around the altar, approached the litter, once more made obeisance to the boxes on it, this time only on one knee. "Oh Death," he said in a soft and reverent voice, "it is truly a starship, and its pilot chose to land on the rock where you in your wisdom foresaw that such a ship might land. I am going shortly to prepare Mjollnir for his task, and to choose soldiers to go with him. I have already carried out your other orders in every particular." The drum-voice asked: "How many outworlders came with the ship?" "I have seen six, and there is no evidence that others are aboard. Wonderful is your wisdom, oh Death, who could predict that such IF men would be lured across the sky to watch our Tournament. Wonderful and -- " "Was there any mention of the man, the badlife, named Johann Karlsen?" "No, Death." Andreas was a little puzzled. Surely the man Karlsen must be long since dead. But the god Death was wise beyond mere human understanding; Andreas had long since been convinced of that. He waited worshipfully for another question. After a brief silence it came. "And they are private hunters? Poachers by their own laws?" "Yes, Lord Death, their spokesman said they had been hunting. No one in their outworld government will know that they are here." Prompted by occasional further questions Andreas spoke on, telling in some detail all that he had so far managed to learn about the visitors and their spacecraft. He was certain it would not be too big to fit into the pit beside the Temple. VI ing, Leros led the sixteen Tournament contenders who were still alive up the mountain to a new and higher camp. There, when routine matters had been gotten out of the way, he read the pairings for the third round of the Tournament: Bram the Beardless of Consiglor Charles the Upright Col Renba Farley of Eikosk Giles the Treacherous Hal Coppersmith Jud Isaksson LeNos of the Highlands Mesthles of the Windy Vale Omir Kelsumba Polydorus the Foul Rahim Sosias Rudolph Thadbury Thomas the Grabber Vann the Nomad Wull Narvaez The priest of the Inner Circle who had come down from the city yesterday had informed Leros and the warriors that they could expect a group of outworlders to appear today. The Tournament was to go on almost as usual, and the utmost courtesy was to be shown the outworlders. If they behave strangely, ignore it. There will probably even be women among them; pay no attention to that, either. Leros was also instructed to call frequent recesses in the fighting for prayer and ceremony. The warriors had little thought to spare for anything that did not directly concern their own survival in the Tournament, and the arrival of the visitors and their guide when Leros was halfway through reading the lists caused no interruption. Four visitors came, and two of them were women but, Leros noted with some relief, modestly dressed. He had heard some tall tales of outworld ways. He was not pleased to have such onlookers -- but perhaps Thorun was, for some obscure and godly reason. In any event, orders were orders, and Leros had endured harder ones than this. This day's fighting ring had been stamped out at the head of a gentle slope in an area where the trees were thin. From the ring the outworlders' ship was readily visible a few hundred meters away on its truncated pinnacle of rock. The massive ball of bright metal that carried folk out among the stars showed a single open doorway in its otherwise featureless surface. Two more outworlders were sometimes visible, tiny figures sitting or standing on the little lip of rock before the ship. side Schoenberg and waiting somewhat nervously for the action to begin, whispered to him: "Are you sure this is going to be fighting for keeps?" "That's what our guide tells us. I expect he knows what's going on." Schoenberg was watching the preparations with keen interest, not looking at her when he answered. low-voiced. "But if what he told us is true, each of these men has already been through two duels in this tournament. And look -- there's hardly a mark on any of them." "I can see a few bandages," Schoenberg whispered back. "But you may have a point." He considered the matter. "It could well be this: fighting from an animal's back apparently isn't done here. Therefore men have to move around strictly on their own muscle power, and can't wear a lot of heavy body armor. So a clean hit from any type of weapon is going to leave a serious wound, not just a minor gash or bruise. Most wounds are serious, and the first man to be disabled by a serious wound is almost certainly the loser. Ergo, winners don't show up for the next round with serious wounds." They fell silent then, since Leros was looking in their direction and perhaps was ready to get the action started. Two men with weapons ready were facing each other from opposite sides of the ring. De La Torre and Celeste also became utterly attentive. Leros cleared his throat. "Bram the Beardless -- Charles the Upright." beside Barbara Hurtado and looking toward the ring from there, was too far away to hear Leros call IF the names, but through his binoculars he saw two men with raised weapons start toward each other across the fighting ring. He put the binoculars down then and turned away, wondering how in the universe he had managed to get himself involved in this sickening business. For hunting animals one could find or fabricate some reason or excuse, but not for this -- and there was Athena, over at ringside, an avid observer. "Someone should do an anthropological study," she had explained to him just a little while ago, while getting ready to leave the ship. "If they're really fighting each other to the death over there." Their guideto-be, a tall, white-robed youth, had just been explaining the Tournament to them in some detail. "You're not an anthropologist." "There isn't a professional one here. Still, it's a job that should be done." She went on getting ready, clipping a small audiovideo recorder to her belt, next to the hologram camera. "Is Schoenberg here to do an anthropological study too?" "Ask him. Carl, if you hate Oscar so much and can't stand to look at life in the raw -- why did you come along on this trip? Why did you get me to ask Oscar to invite you?" He drew a deep breath. "We've been through that." "Tell me again. I would really like to know." "All right. I came because of you. You are the most desirable woman I have ever known. I mean more than sex. Sex included, of course -- but I want the part of you that Schoenberg has." "He doesn't have me, as you put it. I've worked for Oscar five years now, and he has my admiration -- " "Why your admiration?" "Because he's strong. There's a kind of strength in you too, Carl, a different kind, that I've admired also. Oscar has my admiration and often my companionship -- because I enjoy his company. He and I have had sex together a few times, and that, too, has been enjoyable. But he doesn't have me. No one does. No one will." "When you come of yourself as a free gift, then someone will." "No one." B ram and Charles were sparring cautiously in the day's first duel, neither of them having yet decided on an all-out rush. Though they were of a height Charles the Upright was much leaner, his back so straight that the reason for his name was obvious. He wore a loose jacket of fine leather and had a darkly handsome face. Athena thought he showed incredible poise, waiting with his long, sharp-looking sword lifted in one hand, aimed at his opponent. Surely, she thought, this was not life-and-death after all. No matter how seriously they took it, it must be some play, some game, with a symbolic loser stepping aside... and yet all the time she was telling herself this she knew better. "Come," Charles was murmuring, sounding like a man urging on some animal. "Come. Now. Now.'" And beardless Bram, all youth and freakish strength, came on, first one step, then two, then in an awesome rush, his sword first raised then slashing down. The sharp blades rang together, the two men grunted. Incoherent cries of excitement went up around the watching circle. Charles, fending off blow after blow, was giving way now. He seemed to lose his footing momentarily in a slip, then lashed out with a counterstroke that brought a hoarse noise of appreciation from the warriors who stood watching with knowledgeable eyes. Bram avoided the blow and was unhurt but his rushing attack had been brought to a standstill. Athena for the first time began to realize that fine skill must reign here on the same throne with brutality. Bram stood quietly for a moment, frowning as if at the unexpected resistance of some inanimate object. Then suddenly he charged again, more violently if possible than before. The long swords blurred and sang together, sprang apart, blurred and sang again. Athena began now to see and understand the timing and strategy of the strokes. She was forgetting herself, her eyes and mind opening more fully for perception. Then all at once, somehow -- for all her concentration she had not seen how -- Charles's sword was no longer in his hand. Instead it sprouted between Bram's ribs, the hilt firmly affixed before Bram's breastbone, half a meter of blade protruding gory and grotesque from his broad back. Bram shook his head, one, two, three times, in what seemed utter disbelief. Athena saw it all with great clarity and it all seemed very slow. Bram was still waving his own sword, but now he seemed unable to locate his newly disarmed opponent, standing in plain sight in front of him. Suddenly, awkwardly, Bram sat, dropped his weapon and raised a hand to his face, brushing at it as if struck by the thought that now his beard would never grow. The hand fell limp and Bram slumped farther, his head tilting forward on his chest. The poselooked incredibly uncomfortable, but he bore it without complaint. Only when a gray-clad slave limped forward to drag the body to one side did Athena fully understand that the man -- the boy -- had died before her eyes. Charles the Upright extracted his sword with a strong pull and held it out to another slave for cleaning -- while yet another spilled sand over the place where Bram had spilled his life. In the background someone was digging. The world had IF changed in the space of a few moments, or rather Athena had been changed. Never again would she be the same. "Col Renba -- Farley of Eikosk." The man who started forward at the name of Col Renba was big, brown, and shaggy. He stood near the center of the arena whirling a mace, a spike-studded ball on the end of a short chain, and waited for Farley to come after him. Oscar was saying something to her, but there was no time to listen or think, no time for anything but watching. No time for Oscar, even. Farley of Eikosk, fair and freckled, tall and well made if not exactly handsome, came treading catlike in fine leather boots. His other garments were simple, but of rich sturdy cloth. He squinted in the sun that shone oh the fine polished steel of his sword and knife. Holding a weapon in either hand, he feinted an advance to within striking range of the mace, and nodded as if with satisfaction when he saw how rapidly the spiked weight on its taut chain arched out at him and back again. Now Farley began to circle, moving around Col Renba first one way and then the other. The mace came out after him, faster than before, faster than had seemed possible to Athena, and she cried out, unaware that she did so. Again she cried out, in relief this time, when she saw that the spikes had missed Farley's fine, fair skin. Momentarily both men were still, and then again there came a rapid passage of arms, too fast for Athena to judge. She thought the flurry was over, when suddenly the tip of one of the mace's spikes touched Farley on the hand, and his dagger flew lightly but awkwardly away. In almost the same moment Farley's long sword bit back, and now Col Renba backed away, keeping the mace twirling with his right hand, his left arm curled up as if trying to protect itself from further damage while its sleeve rapidly drenched red. Each man's left arm was bleeding now, and Farley's at least appeared no longer usable. Along the back of his hand there showed the white of splintered bone. The bright blade of his long dagger lay buried in the dust. When the mace-spinner saw the extent of the damage he had inflicted, and found that his own left arm could at least be held up out of the way, he stopped backing off and began to advance once again. He kept the ugly weight of death moving around him in a smooth ellipse. As Col stepped closer, Farley began to retreat, but only began. As the mace sighed past him his long speed-thrust to the throat caught Col stepping in. Col Renba died, the mace flying wide from his hand in a great arc, spinning over the shouting, dodging ring of watchers. A long moment after the other watchers' outcries had died away, Athena was still shouting. She realized this and shut up and let go of Schoenberg, whose arm and shoulder had somehow come into her spasmodic two-handed grip. Oscar was looking at her strangely, and so was De La Torre, who stood with his arm around a bored-looking Celeste a little distance off. But Athena forgot about them. Already men were getting ready to fight again. the Treacherous -- Hal jCoppersmith . " Coppersmith was the leaner of this pair, and much the taller. He was content to begin on the defensive, holding his long swOrd like the sensing organ of some giant insect. Giles the Treacherous had sandy hair, an air of earnest perseverance, and (like the most successful traitors, thought Athena) an open trustworthiness in his face. He was not big, and did not appear to be exceptionally strong, but still maneuvered his own long blade with an assured economy of effort. Now it was high, now low, without Athena being aware that it had started to move. Hal Coppersmith had similar difficulties, it seemed. His elbow was gashed, and then his knee, and then the great muscle in his tattooed upper arm was cut nearly through. Then nothing remained but butchery. Giles stepped back with an expression of distaste. A slave limped forward to swing a maul and end Hal's silent, thrashing agony. "Jud Isaksson -- LeNos of the Highlands." LeNos sprang to the attack almost before the signal had been given, his fierce scarred face thrust forward like a shield. In either hand he held a wide blade, moving and flashing like the hub-knives on a chariot. And little Isaksson, whooping as if he were overjoyed to meet a fighter so aggressive, shot forward fast enough to clash with LeNos almost in the middle of the trodden circle. The round metal shield on Jud's left arm rang like some maddened blacksmith's anvil under the barrage of his enemy's blows. LeNos seemed incapable of imagining a defensive move, let alone performing one. He only pushed his own two-handed attack so maniacally that it seemed impossible for his opponent to find a sliver of time and space in which to counterattack. At such a pace the fight could not and did not last long. LeNos's driving sword arm was suddenly stilled, pinned in mid-air on the long, thick needle of Isaksson's sword. The highlander's dagger kept flashing on, but still Jud's bright-scarred shield took the blows. Then Jud yanked his sword free, of the ruined arm as he did, and brought it back, hacking, faster and faster, with a violence wilder if anything than his opIF ponent's had been. LeNos was in several pieces before he died. that's the matter?" An insistent voice had repeated the question to her several times, Athena realized. Schoenberg was gripping her firmly by both arms, and giving her a slight shaking. He was looking closely into her face. When her eyes focused on his, the expression in his changed from concern to an odd mixture of amusement and contempt. "Nothing's the matter. What do you mean? I'm all right." She kept looking for the next fight to start, and then realized that the priest in charge, Leros or whatever his name was, must have just ordered a recess. Slowly she realized that she had come near losing herself in the excitement of the fighting, temporarily losing control of her own behavior as if with drugs or sex. But no, it was all right. A near thing, but she still controlled herself. Schoenberg, still looking at her with some concern, said now: "We had better give Carlos and Barbara a chance to see a thing or two." "Him?" she laughed abruptly, contemptuously. "This isn't for him. Thank you for bringing me, Oscar." "Nevertheless I think you've had enough." De La Torre peered around Oscar at her. "I have, too, for the time being. Shall we walk back to the ship, Athena?" "I'm staying." Her tone was such that neither of the men made any further argument. Celeste meanwhile had moved next to Schoenberg; she was watching him more than what was going on in the ring. "I'm going, then," said De La Torre, and he was off. sentry's rifle to De La Torre, slid and clambered down the steep slope from the mesa's top, holding on to the retractable rope that they had secured at the top to make the climb less dangerous. On this one face of the mesa the slope for the most part was not quite precipi-. tous; there were some patches of gravelly soil and a bush or two. Already a visible path was being worn. When he reached the level of the forest Suomi set off immediately in the direction of the tournament. Athena was there, not just for a quick look, but remaining there by choice to see it all. A purely scientific interest? Anthropology? She had never been enthusiastic on that subject before today, not around Suomi anyway. Maybe the tournament wasn't, after all, as murderous a business as he had been led to believe. Neither Suomi nor Barbara had watched. De La Torre, coming back, had said nothing about it and Suomi had not asked him. But maybe it was just as bloody as the guide had warned them, and she was still there taking it in. If she was like that, he had better know about it. Nothing horrible was going on in the ring as he emerged from the forest and drew near. People were simply standing about, waiting, while a white-robed man went through some kind of ceremony before a simple altar. As Suomi came up Schoenberg nodded a greeting to him. Athena gave Suomi a preoccupied look. She was upset about something, he thought, but she gave no indication of wanting to be elsewhere. His attention was soon pulled away from her. "Omir Kelsumba -- Mesthles of the Windy Vale." On springy legs massive as tree trunks Kelsumba moved forward, black skin gleaming, axe cradled almost like an infant in his awesome arms. Mesthles, spare and graying, thoughtful-looking, somewhat battered by time like the ancient scythe with which he meant to fight, kept at a respectful distance from Kelsumba for a little while, retreating with economical movements, studying the movements of his foe. Now the axe came after him, startling Suomi with its speed, and with such power and weight behind it that it seemed nothing human should be able to turn the blow aside. Mesthles made no mistakes, had his scythe-blade in the right place to turn the axe, but the jarring impact when the blades met came near to knocking Mesthles down. Another axe-blow fell on the scythe, and then another. Mesthles could not get into position to strike back. After the fourth or fifth parry, the scythe-blade broke. A groaning murmur, like the foretaste of blood, came up from the ring of watchers, and Suomi heard part of it coming from Athena. He saw the moistlipped rapture on her face as she watched the fight, oblivious to him and all else. Broken weapon still tightly in his grip, its jagged blade still dangerous, Mesthles maintained his calm, and showed more agility than his appearance suggested. For some time he avoided being pinned against the side of the fighting ring. Neither he nor any of the other fighters ever seemed to consider stepping across that simple line and outside the ring, any more than they would consider jumping through a wall. The axe now came after Mesthles in what looked like a continuous blur, seeming to pull its giant owner after it. It struck Mesthles at last, full in the back, as he twisted his body in trying to dodge it yet again. His fallen body continued jerking, twitching, moving. A slave limped forward with a maul and dealt the finishing blow. Suomi's gut worked suddenly, labored wretchedly, rejected in a spasm what remained of the little IF he had taken for his breakfast. I should have tranquilized myself, he thought. It was too late now. He faced away from the ring but could do nothing more before the vomit came. If he was desecrating holy ground, well, they would have to kill him for it. But when he straightened up it seemed that no one was paying him any attention at all. Whether it was delicacy or lack of interest he could not tell. "Polydorns the Foul -- Rahim Sosias." Suomi found that he could watch. Polydorus, looking no more foul than his competitors, brandished a battered sword with obvious strength and energy. Sosias was paunchy and short, yet he somehow managed to draw first blood with his scimitar, making an ugly slice among Polydorus's left shoulder. Polydorus was galvanized rather than weakened by the injury, and pressed an attack so hard that for a few moments it seemed he might prevail. But then he aimed a long thrust poorly, and stood looking down at his own right hand and forearm where he had just stepped on it. He grimaced and spat toward Sosias before the scimitar came back to take his life. The white-clad priest was in the ring again, and it appeared there was going to be another recess. Not that it mattered to Suomi. He turned away, deliberately this time. He had found out that he could watch whatever further maiming might occur; but still he much preferred not to watch. He stepped closer to Schoenberg and Athena, managed to catch the eye of the former but not the latter, and said; "I'm going back to the ship." He glanced at Celeste, but she only gave him a bored look and moved a little closer to Schoenberg. Suomi turned away from them all and trudged back among the trees. It was good to be briefly alone again, but here in this alien forest was . no place to stop and think. When he got back to the foot of the mesa, he found that the climbing rope had been pulled up. Not in the mood to try the ascent without it, Suomi called out. A few seconds later De La Torre's head and bare shoulders appeared at the top of the slope. "What's up?" he called down. "I've seen enough. Throw down the rope." "All right." In a moment the rope came snaking down. saw that Barbara lay naked on a foam mattress so close to the climbing path that De La Torre could sit on the mattress beside her and do acceptable sentry duty. Suomi noticed also that a pair of binoculars had been set up on a tripod beside the mattress in such a way that a man lying there, perhaps with a woman beneath him, could observe uninterruptedly what was going on in the fighting ring. De La Torre apparently was finished for the time being with binoculars, mattress, and girl; he had pulled on a pair of shorts already and was continuing to dress. His voice was mild and lazy. "I'll turn the rifle back to you, then, Carlos, and go down again myself." Before Suomi had gotten the rifle's still-unfamiliar strap adjusted to fit his shoulder, De La Torre was gone again. Suomi watched him out of sight, then said to Barbara, who still lay curled up tiredly on her mattress: "And how are things with you?" She moved a little, and said in a small voice: "Life appears possible." Never had he seen Barbara so obviously depressed before. He had lain with her a couple of times on the long trip out, and with Celeste a couple of times. Not with Athena, though, on the trip out he could no longer be casual with her. Now perhaps he could. Barbara was the only one of them who had refused to watch the tournament at all. So of course the sadist De La Torre had had to pick her for his object, his receptacle... Suomi wanted to say something good to her but could think of nothing. Tomorrow her nakedness might arouse his own lust again but right now it only made her seem defenseless and pitiable, lying there face down. So, she had wanted to come along on a luxurious space wish had been granted. She was earning her passage. No need to walk a sentry's route around the ship; there was only the one route by which one could ascend. Standing at the head of the path, looking out over the treetops without binoculars, Suomi could see De La Torre arriving at the side of the fighting ring. The next duel had still not gotten underway, evidently; there were still four men waiting to fight, if Suomi was reading the arrangement of the distant figures correctly. The binoculars were handy but he did not care enough to pick them up. Perhaps he did not want to acknowledge their present positioning by moving them. It promised to be a long few days ahead, until the Tournament slaughtered itself into extinction, and then a very long trip home. But there were compensations. It had been made clear that whatever had seemed to be growing between him and Athena had no real existence. It was not over -- it had never been. Barbara was sitting up and doing things with her fingers to her hair, not yet in a mood to talk. Suomi, turning to look to the north from this high place, saw or thought he saw the mountainous glaciers of hunting country looming just over the horizon there, like unsupported clouds. What was that sound, just now? The path was clear. Some small IF animal or flying creature, then. Never mind. Well, things were no doubt going to be socially uncomfortable on the trip home, but it was well worth it to have settled the thing between them, that might otherwise have dragged on much longer. You had to consider this a favorable conclusion. If they had... Did they have woodpeckers here? He couldn't see the bird anywhere but still the sound came almost continuously. Must be down under the treetops somewhere. There was also a faint polyphonic roar from the direction of the Tournament, what must have been a loud yell to be audible this far away, but he did not try to see what had happened there. Barbara was standing up, her clothes in hand. "I'm going in for a shower, Carlos." "All right." He watched her walk away. Women. Magnificent, but who could understand them? And then, while on the subject of magnificence, there had been the animal, the glacier-beast, whose power and beauty had frozen Suomi in awe and terror as it charged down upon him. He now felt, surprisingly, some small regret that he had not killed it. Better, of course, if it had been allowed to live... yet, what was it Thoreau had written? There is a time in the lives of nations, as of individuals, when the best hunters are the best men. Something like that. The nation of interstellar man had presumably long since passed that stage, of course. And so had Carlos Suomi in his individual life. Or he should have. Schoenberg, on the other hand, though something more than a mere sadist -- nagging tapping sound clicked suddenly into place with a remembered visual image, that of stone being worked by hard metal, more precisely that of steps being cut in the side of the mesa by Schoenberg, hanging on the rope with mountaineers' implements in hand. Suomi had not made the connection before because the sounds he was now hearing were too rapid. No one could wield a hammer at such a speed. And at the same time they sounded too irregular to be made by an automatic tool. The climbable face of rock was still unoccupied. Suomi had started around the ship to check the other sides of the mesa when he beheld in front of him someone, something, climbing carefully up over the rim and into sight. A huge head of wild, coarse, dark hair, bound by a silver band. Beneath the head a massive wrestler's body coming up over the edge of the cliff, clothed in rough furs under a swirling dark cloak. On second look the figure was so huge the mind wanted to refuse belief. T raditionally (and I'm a nonconformist traditionalist) the first column is the place the new columnist sets his policies in concrete for the readers to stumble over. Mine is simple: The Alien Viewpoint will be a stew created from whatever strange intellectual and emotional animals I come across in the world of science fiction and fantasy. I bagged one the other night around #:# a.m. as I was reading Joshua Son of None by Nancy Freedman (Delacorte, #). Joshua is a clone of the late President Kennedy, secretly "made" from a bit of tissue from the President's neck wound. I have reservations about the novel which I'll expose elsewhere (reviewers are exhibitionists at heart). The intellectual beastie that attracted my attention was the author's passing comment that if cloning was accepted by the world it would be possible to grow personal clones for private organ banks. But the catch is that it would have to be limited to the very rich and the very powerful (those who can tap the public treasury ) and it would have to be very secret. times over and were I not too old to wait for a clone of myself to grow large enough to be of use, I would be eager to set up a laboratory, hire a host womb, and have a duplicate of myself grown (but carefully kept at the imbecile level, I think) so that when I needed a new kidney or a new heart or a new set of lungs, or a new prostate, gall bladder... Of course, about every dozen years I'd have a new clone started. Perhaps if I were very rich I'd have back-up clones, too; insuring a fresh, young, strong set of organs and glands for my aging primary body. And you can bet your banana I'd promote brain transplant research. With that technique mastered a host clone could be kept available for emergency brain transplant as Well as eventual optimum-age transfer. This private use of clones would, again, have to be kept secret, because there wouldn't be doctors, money or resources enough to provide everyone with sets of personal clones for immortality purposes. And there'd be all kinds of social ferment and envy and "morality" involved if a rich and powerful few were known to be availing themselves of self-grown spare parts which enabled them to live to be # or so, at least. Then I speculated that maybe... maybe secret clones already exist. Have you ever wondered why Ronald Reagan looks so young? And Richard Nixon doesn't look # years old... and how ageless is Lena Horne, and Mae West... rwiHE story is an author-rigged X thing, but reality is a # percent unpredictable whore." -- Pietro Di Donato, author of Christ In Concrete T he incredible sub-culture of science fiction fans and fanzines is alive and well despite its recent (and growing) exposure to pop-culture hungry academia, especially since the publication in # of Doctor Fredric Wertham's admirable The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication by ( # ). It should be noted, however, that awareness by the professors and thesis hungry graduate students ('Publish or die.') is still within reason since even famous Dr. Wertham had to turn to a small univerhave the book publication subsidized by a foundation. The good psychiatrist did, however, combine comic and heroicfantasy fandom and fanzines with science fiction fandom in his overflow -- an act which rubbed the slanish fur of a few purists and chauvinistic s-f fan editors and commentators the wrong way. But he found us to be a Good Thing and gave us a clean bill of mental health. (If he had found us to be freaky escapists avoiding reality he would be Mud and described as a senile quack whose brain leaks precious bodily fluids.) I should add that Dr. Wertham's favorable findings in re s-f and comic fans also applies to science fiction and fantasy readers in general. Have a happy day... and don't be too self-conscious when some scholar buys the subscriber lists of the sf zines and sends out questionaires that probe your secret psyche. this section is my admiration of Ed Connor and his fanatic determination to triumph at whatever qpst over the U.S. Postal Service. Ed published a good-to-fine s-f fanzine in # called Moebius Trip. Mimeographed, SVi x #, three staples... the usual format. He wanted-to send it book rate and save some postage. The magazine qualified according to the P.O. rule book -- except as interpreted by a tunnel-visioned official in Peoria who ruled it was not a book because it wasn't bound like a normal printed book. (Ed, in a letter, reported some unofficial sub rosa desire by the Post Office to discourage this type of "little-mag" publishing as more bother to the P.O. than the postage is worth.) Anyway, Ed simmered, stewed, boiled, and labored in his quarters for a few months, and came forth with a fan magazine in the size and format of a paperback book with perfect binding (using the same spine-glue regular paperbacks use), even a name-change to S.F. Echo, published as one of a series in the 'Moebius Trip Library'. The fact that he has to spend # hours per issue just to cut the mimeographed SVi x # pages into four # X # pages with a razor, then gather the # or more sheets to make one copy, then apply glue to the spine, and add the cover... this is of no matter. Extra work is good for the soul and he has beaten that stupido Post Office official. And he has created a 'first' in s-f fan publishing history -- that format and binding had never been done before. I salute you, Ed. Better than that, I recommend readers of this column to Ed's S.F, Echo ## which contains a fine, engrossing (because the author writes well and knows what he's talking about) article by Philip Jose Farmer titled, "Getting A-Long With Heinlein", a must-read for Heinlein lovers and haters. Phil, also, in passing, has much to say about writers and writing in general which has that sweet, clang of truth so rarely found. There are often these gems in the fan press -- letters and articles from many of the s-f pro writers, from well-read s-f aficionados (a twentydollar word for hard-core fans), and even from s-f editors and publishers. We have a small, close-knit, friendly little world in this sub-culture. We snap and snarl a lot -- sometimes viciously -- but overall s-f fandom (including many, many pros who started as fans) is a good place to be for a hobby or as a more serious avocation verging on vocation. Ed Connor's address is: # N. Gale, Peoria, II #. The next sound you hear will be his screams -- because he printed only # copies of S.F. Echo ##, and probably has only a few left. they didn't spy on me so much. Barry Malzberg is the kind of writer who throws sticks into my mental wheels. Every time I read one of his books I lose spokes. And not only does me he provoke; he did IF it to a well-known s-f writer who commented to me in a letter after having read Malzberg's Herovit's World which he had read after reading my review in The Alien Critic. Said Big Name writer doesn't want to be quoted, but I can report that he speculated, as I did in my review, on the real identity of some of the characters in Herovit's World (Random House, #). The book is a satiric-tragic novel about a science fiction writer who is coming apart at the seams, sinking, lurching, staggering into progressively deeper schizophrenia. This character, John Steele, is clearly a caricature of John Campbell, Jr., and the magazine Tremendous Stories is obviously AstoundingAnalog. After that -- the speculation is on shakier ground. The writer I heard from thinks the academic friend enemy character Wilk Mitchell is a disguised Kris Neville. It's obviously fun to pin real names on these characters. In Herovit's World, too, and indulges in the passtime. Dick says, "The portraits of thinly disguised John W. Campbell, Jr., A. E. van Vogt In Herovit's World Malzberg also does knife-numbers on science fiction fans, the Science Fiction Writers of America, Scientology (these are my "identifications" by the way), and perhaps an early An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Discover why Richard E. Gels has won # Hugo Awards and been Nominated # times!  Blare of Trumpets Columnist; John Brunner Read issue ## and see Robert A. Heinlein dissected mercilessly, psychologically and culturally, by Alexei and Cory Panshin In their # words of Reading Heinlein Subjectively." Read issue ## and return to the dear, lively days of the pulps with Sam Merwin, Jr. (former editor of Written to a Pulpi" Enjoy Gels editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterly sample I year #two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I writers' group called The Futurians. Barry denies any resemblance to anyone living or dead, of course. As he says in his letter in The Alien Critic ##, "And what is Scientology?" It should be noted that strictly speaking, Herovit's World is not science fiction. It is (as the Big Name writer correctly noted) a contemporary mainstream novel which is rendered of special interest to us because of the s-f world characters and the hallucinations (Herovit, split three ways, turns his life and body over to his pen-name splitpersonality first, and then, in desperation, to his s-f series character. Mack Miller, who is head of a Galactic Survey Team). Using real s-f people in novels and stories has a long, noble history. Perhaps Bob Tucker started it in his classic after-the-bomb novel The Long Loud Silence. Andy Offutt has done it, too, in Ardor On Aros, I believe, and Larry Niven and David Gerrold did a masterful job of "Tuckerizing" dozens of fans and pros in their The Flying Sorcerers of a few years ago. "Tuckerizing" is a private, 'inside' thing, a way of expressing friendship and giving an egoboost to admired and respected people. Mostly. Sometimes it can be used to present deadly caricatures and satires -- and as therapy to work out active dislike and maybe even hatred. S-f and fantasy artists do this sort of thing, too, on occasion. You'd be surprised at the identity of some of the faces that turn up on s-f and fantasy magazines and books, and in inside illustrations... greatest weakness of Science Fiction today? Philip K. Dick: "Its inability to explore the subtle, intricate relationships which exist between the sexes. Men, in their relationship with women, get themselves into the most goddamn difficult circumstances, and s-f ignores -- or is unable to deal with -- this fundamental aspect of adult life. Therefore s-f remains pre-adult, and therefore appeals, more or less, to pre-adults. If s-f explored the manwoman aspect of life it would not lose its readers as those readers reach maturity. S-f simply must learn to do this or it will always be retarded -- as it is now. The novel Player Piano is an exception to this, and I suggest that every s-f fan and especially every would-be writer study again and again the details of this superb novel which deal specifically with the relationship of the protagonist and his wife." -- The Double: Bill Symposium, Unthinkable Thoughts Dept. IF Sometimes, late at night, when Johnny Carson has a lousy guest list, and I've had too much coffee to go to sleep, I think thoughts that have no business in my head. A demon gets into me and I grab social dogma: -- especially liberal social dogma that no one questions -- and I turn it around. We all know that are no taboos left in science fiction, don't we? Why, just last week when Jim Baen, the new editor of If and Galaxy called to discuss this column with me he said that If was to be a magazine in which nothing is sacred. In Galaxy, he said, there may be one thou-shalt-not-touch: the proposition that humanity wpuld survive and would not die by our own hands or under the boothoof tentacleclawwhatever of an alien menace. But there is a great deal of selfcensorship in writing, and science fiction is as vulnerable to that kind, conscious and unconscious, as any genre of fiction or non-fiction. Writers automatically (after a few years of experience) don't consider certain ideas, and that goes for editors, too. 'Too controversial', 'to perverse', 'too repellent'. Like that. Well, I'm going to lay some unthinkable thoughts on you. Let them creep around on your skin for a few minutes before you tear them off and stomp them. What do we all reject as a bad thing, a regrettable tendency in humanity? How about racial prejudice? How about war? Well, can nothing good be said for automatic dislike and suspicion of members of another race? Is there no value in racial prejudice's brother, xenophobia -- hatred of foreigners? Taking this a step farther -- is war really bad for humanity? Should we abandon the fruitless passtime of perfecting mankind and instead simply accept humanity for what it is? We don't much like ourselves as a species, do we? So damn many things wrong with us! But what if these "wrong" things have survival value? What if we are as "flawed" as we are and do such "terrible" things as we do (war, rape, murder, theft, prejudice... hate, greed, envy, pride... all the deadly sins) because these parts and aspects of our nature are good for us as a species? We exist as we exist, do as we do (time and time again), for a reason. We are built this way -- for war, son to further emotional ends; we rarely use emotion to further rational ends (as a nation, race, species). After all, God must love criminals of all kinds since He made so many of them... and continues to maintain the social-cultural-genetic conditions that produce criminals, and suffering, and warped psyches of all types, and... But I don't want to get into the God argument. It slipped in. (Godas-scapegoat isn't that new an idea.) I keep coming back to the thought that we are as we are because we win this way as a species. We rule the planet as a species. We purify and advance ourselves as a species with wars and aggressions. Could it possibly be that Nature's Goal is: let the best racial strain win?; war is necessary?; genocide is inevitable? (Would you rather be half Neanderthaler and half CroMagnon?) (Is there a taint of Pithecanthropus in your Erectus?) Ah, but it is said that these survival-of-the-fittest leftover instincts are no longer appropriate in this age of extreme industrializationtechnology and interdependence; we must cooperate or blow ourselves up in nuclear holocaust. We must curb our greed or we will befoul our planet to the point of suicide. We must, it is said, tame our inner beast. Sure. We talk a lot, preach a Could it be we're supposed to kill and loot? Are we destined to war with and loot the galaxy? Would a tame, rational species with no emotional demons in its psyche, have spent the tremendous sums of money we have spent to get into space? Mankind did it because of "low" emotional reasons -- pride, greed, power, fear. We'll probably get to the stars for the same "shameful" reasons. Psychologists tell us that as individuals we are mature if we can accept ourselves as we are, not as we feel we "should" be. But they don't advise that for mankind as a species. As far as applying these speculations of mine in science fiction... don't hold your water. Can you see a story -- a novel, say -- being published in an American s-f prozine with these ideas operative? Our virtues are our real faults, and our faults are our real virtues. Possibly. If it were good enough. Ed.) (I know, someone will write and tell me it's been done! I'll concede Frank Herbert's Project Forty last year in Galaxy came close.) But I still think the above premise is essentially taboo... as fiction. In #last year The Wizard of Anharitte by Colin Kapp started intriguingly, but the Good Guy liberal dogma won in the end -- what a cop-out! Finally, if you want to write me to say how much you enjoyed this column and tell me how keenminded I am, send your letters care of the editor. Elsewhere in the pages of IF may be found instructions for obtaining Dick Geis in larger doses -- that is to say, by purchasing his zine. The Alien Critic. Ed.  IF From Harper eFiyw The first collection of Jewish Fantasy and T Science Fiction Stories An anthology edited by Jock Donn; introduction by Isaac Asimov. # Clarke, Anderson, Russ, Pohl, Ellison, Silverberg, Rotsler, Wolfe The prize-winning collection, edited by Isaac Asimov. # "'Immensely entertaining... long overdue'Poul Anderson and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories By Richard McKenna, author of The Sand Pebbles. # "A collection of complex, humane stories." -- Kirkus Reviews An original anthology edited by Roger Elwood. # A runaway quasar threatens the earth's survival A new thriller by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle. # Startling experiments in plant-man communication By Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Illustrated, # The provocative best seller about the greatest mystery of the ancient world By Peter Tompkins. Illustrated, #th printing, # "Astronomical imagination and fact in an alluring marriage." -- Ernest K. Gann Facts and speculations by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan. Illustrated with Mariner # photos, # A# bookstores Someone once defined an expert as one who never makes a mistake on his way to the Grand Fallacy. M ajor-general A. C. Hewell stood in the dimly lit, glassedin balcony that overlooked the glowing white wall that illumined the rows of Space Force men and women down below at their computerized control-centers. Beside General Hewell stood a young colonel wearing a compact headset, who now said, "Density seventeen, sir. Plus one." Hewell nodded, and one of the other two men in the room, a wellbuilt expensively-dressed civilian, said, "Pardon me. General. That means -- " "Seventeen enemy warships per standard Tau-space unit. Senator. Which is an increase of one since the last reading," Hewell added. "And the attacks usually come through -- " The Senator looked a question. "When the density is twenty-four or above." "I see. Now, this large glowing wall-size screen before us -- " "Shows a schematic representation of Tau-space. It's impossible, of course, for a three-dimensional screen to represent Tau-space accurately. Roughly, this screen represents a cross-section. The center stands for an arbitrary fixed point in Tau-space. The scale changes as you move from the center toward the edge of the screen. The edge represents a space immeasurably far from the center. Enemy ships we show by silver dots. There are always enemy ships present." The general turned to speak to the young colonel, and a moment later the contrast of the screen changed so that a multitude of silvery dots could be seen, like tiny darting minnows, in the central portion of the screen. These dots grew rapidly smaller as the eye glanced out toward the edge, to blend into a silvery background that merged at last into a silver rim around the edge of the screen. "And," said the Senator, with a note of profound curiosity, "with a density of seventeen per standard unit -- of vom me? -- I suppose -- " "That's right. Tau-space volume." " -- in this Tau space," the senator went on, "with a density of seventeen per unit, what's their total strength in there?" "Infinite," said the general immediately. The fourth man, possibly thirty years old, tall, and intellectualappearing, spoke for the first time, his voice sharp. "Infinite?" The sharp questioning tone caused the general to turn, and the colonel to look up momentarily. "That's right," said the general. "I would question that," said the fourth man, his voice sharp and critical, "unless you use the word merely in the lay sense of 'large beyond our ability to measure.'" The general frowned, trying to place the peculiar quality of this voice. He glanced around. "You haven't introduced your friend. Senator." The senator apologized. "This is Dr. T. Binding Phipps, general. Dr. Phipps, General Hewell. Dr. Phipps is a mathematician and a former classmate of my son Alex. Dr. Phipps happened to be with the committee when your report on this situation was circulated; his comments on it were so pointed and so interesting that I thought I'd bring him along. Dr. Phipps and my daughter -- " The senator cleared his throat, let the sentence trail out unfinished so that the general groped for a moment after the precise nature of the relationship implied, then shrugged. "Glad to have you with us. Dr. Phipps," he said. Dr. Phipps inclined his head in bare acknowledgment. The colonel said, "Density eighteen, sir. Plus one." The general nodded. "Might I ask," said the senator's companion abruptly, "how you determine the size of this presumed unit of volume?" The general glanced at the senator, who looked benevolent and noncommittal. ' "I think. Dr. Phipps," said the general with careful courtesy, "that Colonel Smith can answer your question better than I." IF The colonel glanced around. "What was the question again, Dr. Phipps?" "Precisely how do you determine the size of this presumed unit of volume?" The question came over with a snap suggestive of the crack of a whip, but the colonel, after a pause, answered evenly. "We don't determine it. It's a question of a repeated elementary volume that goes to make up the socalled 'Tau-space.' Another name for Tau-space is 'multiple space.' It's a space that's repeated, over and over." "That evades my question rather neatly," said Dr. Phipps, a drilllike note evident in his voice, "rather than answering it. This inconsistency was sufficiently obvious in the report." The colonel blinked, the general frowned. The senator looked on blandly. "Perhaps," said the general, "we're working at cross-purposes here. There's no question about the facts." The colonel, noting the sharpness in the general's voice and the perceptibly reddening face, said quickly, "Dr. Phipps, possibly I misunderstood your question. You asked, didn't you, how we determined the size -- that is, volume -- of this elementary unit when we say, for instance, that the density of enemy ships in Tau-space is seventeen or eighteen?" "That is essentially correct." The drill-like tone gave the sensation of biting through into a nerve. "And your answer manifestly evaded the issue." T he general stiffened, and glanced sharply at the senator. The senator said nothing, continued to look on benevolently. The colonel said carefully, "That depends on your meaning when you say 'determine,' Dr. Phipps. We dLon'i determine volume in the sense that we might determine a volume of ordinary space." "Why not, if I might ask?" "For one thing, we can't enter Tau-space. If we send a human observer through, he comes back spread all over the inside of the ship -- if we're lucky enough to get the ship back at all, that is. Then, too, we can't readily measure the volume in terms of normal space because of certain anomolous features of Tau-space." "Then, in short, you don't have a unit volume." "In terms of normal space, no. I can't say the unit volume in Tauspace is so-many cubic light-years, for instance, without creating a false mental picture. But for our purposes, we have a unit volume. It is simply the volume of unit reception: I'll be happy to explain what I mean by that if you're interested." Dr. Phipps frowned as if uncertain whether it was worth bothering, but the senator said, "If you would. Colonel, we'd .very much appreciate it." The colonel said, "It's been an unusual experience for us, sir, and it's a little hard to grasp, even yet. You see, these raiders burst out to attack our local Space Center, rip up nearby cargo routes, then vanished back into what was apparently subspace. Our natural reaction was to follow them in, track them through, and find out where they came out. With manned ships, as I've mentioned, this proved disastrous. So we tried unmanned ships. Each unmanned ship we sent in had an ident-device whose function was simply to create a signal that will locate the ship. As soon as each of our ships went into what we supposed to be subspace the identdisplay went insane. It was as if you tossed a glowing light-tube into a hall of mirrors, and got back images of an infinite number of images." "You mean," Dr. Phipps interrupted patronizingly, "an indeterminate number of light-tubes." The general drew his breath in slowly, as if timing it. The colonel waited till the roaring went out of his ears, then said politely, "In this case, the identsignal, which ordinarily measures Tau-distances by turning a needle over a precise distance on a dial, sent the needle spinning endlessly, as the same signal came in simultaneously from an infinite number of positions. When I say infinite. that is what I mean." "I doubt," said Dr. Phipps, "that you are professionally qualified to appreciate the meaning of 'infinite'." There was a lengthy silence in which the senator, after first looking benignly at the colonel and the general, took out a cigar, lit it, continued to gaze benignly through a cloud of smoke. Meanwhile, the colonel struggled successfully not to do or say any of the things that it occurred to him to do or say, and finally was able to swallow and breathe in a more-or-less normal rhythm. But a certain lightheadedness warned him to stand still and keep his mouth shut. The senator, apparently to get the ball rolling again, said, "That's interesting, colonel. I begin to get a picture the report didn't give. Now -- " Dr. Phipps said, "It presents nothing new whatever. The picture this presents is so -- " "Now, Binding," said the senator chidingly, "you're a Ph.D. and this is all in your field -- but we laymen here have to potter and bumble around trying to find some handle on the thing so we can get a grip on it. Try to unjack yourself down onto our level. How are you going to understand how a layman sees these things, eh? No, when Colonel Smith was explaining that about the ident-signal, I began to get his point." "There is no point. It would be IF preposterous to assume -- " "Tut, tut. Binding. Are you professionally qualified to understand a layman?" Dr. Phipps opened his mouth, shut it in evident confusion. The colonel's ears seemed to pop, and now he had the impression of being his normal self again. He said, "Senator, this is hard to explain. For one thing, we frankly don't pretend to know what's going on here. The effect is as if,' when we send a single ship through, it is reproduced an infinite number of times and so we detect it at an infinite number of positions. However, each ship is separately present in its own finite volume of space, which apparently remains constant -- this is the 'volume of unit reception,' I was referring to. If we send six or seven ships through the entire group appears in each unit of volume." Dr. Phipps made as if to object, then hesitated in perplexity -- apparently hamstrung by the thought that he might not really have any idea what thoughts were being conveyed in laymen-language. The senator said, "And it's an optical-illusion kind of thing?" "Well," said the colonel, "we thought so at first, but we've discovered that by a development of our remote-control technique we can concentrate two or more of these identical 'ships' in the same region -- which would seem impossible if they were mere reflections of some one basic ship. By repeating a sort of subspace jump within Tauspace, we've concentrated up to several thousand ships within one given unit of Tau-space." "When," asked the senator, "you'd only sent a few ships in there to start with?" "Yes, sir. Unbelievable as it may seem." "And when you come to get them out -- then what?" The colonel hesitated, and the general said, "Once we've gone through this hocus-pocus of concentrating a number of ships in one region, we don't get the ship out again." "No ship?" "No, sir. The ships, or 'quasiimages' of ships, or whatever they are, apparently have to be distributed, one to each and every unit of Tau-space -- and positioned properly in the given units -- in order for us to get back the original ship. Otherwise nothing happens; the ship stays in there." "What happens to the ones that don't come back?" "Well, it's hard to say what would happen if we could experiment at our leisure in there. But that isn't possible. There are always enemy ships in there, in infinite numbers just as ours are, and we're generally heavily outnumbered, SO -- "No!" Dr. Phipps put in sharply. The colonel shut his eyes. The general looked around and said courteously, "Did you say something, Dr. Phipps?" "Yes." Dr. Phipps seemed to be struggling with some awkward and unwieldy problem -- possibly that of projecting his meaning down to the lay level. "Excuse me. But you said that you were outnumbered. You said that your ships were there in infinite numbers, just as theirs were, yet you were outnumbered. " "Correct. We may be outnumbered twenty to one, or momentarily, it may be as close as sixteen to twelve. The point is, we usually go in there to try and find a way through. We don't stick around if it doesn't work -- and it hasn't yet -- because in a very short time they close in on us and we get eliminated. The difficulty is that we don't have enough remote-controlled ships to overpower them. They outnumber us. If we could put manned ships in there..." "Oh," said Dr. Phipps, "this is -- this is simply -- " He cleared his throat, "That is not, of course, my special field, but surely Cantor's Theorem covers this problem adequately." The senator said, "Remember, Binding -- we're just laymen. Whose theorem?" "Cantor's." He cleared his throat. "Let me express it this way. If we have two infinite series -- say the series of integers: #, #, #, #, #, #, etc., and the series of even integers: #, #, #, etc., and if these two series can be placed in one-toone correspondence with each other, thusly -- " He pulled out a piece of paper, to write: I # # # # # # #... # # # # # # # #... "Then," he added, "it follows that the two series are equally numerous, since each series can be continued indefinitely -- forever. Your problem is precisely analogous." There was a brief silence, then the colonel said, "This is Cantor's Theorem?" "Well, certainly it's a very elementary example -- "But this theorem does say there are just as many even integers as there are odd and even integers together?" "That is correct." The colonel took the paper, and wrote: # #... # # # # #... "This," he said, "matches about the most favorable situation we're usually ever in. I'd say we were outnumbered two-to-one, wouldn't you?" "Not at all." "We aren't?" "Certainly not. Any class the elements of which may be placed in one-to-one correspondence with the elements of another class is equal in cardinality -- that is, in numerousness -- with the other class. That is Cantor's Theorem." The general said, "Let's see that paper." There was a long silence. Then IF the general looked up. "I've got to admit, I don't quite understand what we're up against here. Now, if this theorem is true -- " "There's no question at all of that," said Dr. Phipps. "Cantor's Theorem is completely accepted." "Well, then -- that gives us a way out of this hole." The colonel said, "Sir. If we're outnumbered two-to-dne in each and every one of an in finite number of finite regions, which is the situation we're up against here, I don't see how it's going to equalize matters for us if we juggle ships around from one region to another." Dr. Phipps said, "Your error lies in assuming that you are outnumbered." "We are outnumbered." "You are not." The colonel said exasperatedly, "Suppose there are thirty-six of their ships in each unit of space, to only one of our ships? Surely then we're outnumbered!" "Not at all. What you seek is to compare the series of integers with the series comprising every thirtysixth integer. Now, from any denumerable class, there may be removed a denumerably infinite number of denumerably infinite classes, without affecting the cardinality of the class. Therefore -- " "I can't follow that," said the colonel exasperatedly. "The lay mentality," said Dr. Phipps, "has some difficulty in handling the infinite and its paradoxes. Naturally, a certain degree of professional education and training is a prerequisite." The colonel swallowed hard, said nothing. The general said, "If they have a density of thirty-six ships per each unit of space throughout the region to our density of one, then we have as manv ships as they have?" "Certainly." Dr. Phipps wrote: I # # # # #... # # # # # #... He held out the paper and said, "Since you can match the series of integers one-for-one with the series of every thirty-sixth integer, it follows that the two series are equal in respect to numerosity." The general looked at the paper. "Cantor's Theorem supports this?" "It does." "And Cantor's Theorem is accepted as valid?" "Certainly." "Well -- That's fine. What we run up against, you see, is that if our ship-density starts to approach theirs, they increase theirs faster than we can increase ours. Now if actually they don't outnumber us, we can get control in there because our Class I ships are individually superior to the enemy type of ship. Now, excuse me, doctor, for asking this next question, but a good deal of expensive equipment can be lost if we make a wrong move. Are you really qualified to give opinions on the infinite as you've just been doing?" "Certainly. While this is not my particular special field of study, this has all been quite elementary." "All right, I'll take your word for it. We'll try it. Colonel!" "Sir?" "Order one Class I Tau-ship set up to make the jump." "Yes, sir." The general turned to the senator. "You'll get a chance to see, Senator, just how the commandcenter here functions. And if this works we won't be screaming for another big appropriation on this for quite a while." instructions for "matching" the two fleets, ship-for-ship, the general gazed off at the huge screen thoughtfully, and the senator walked over to the colonel, and said in a low voice, "Do you think this is going to work. Colonel?" The colonel shrugged. "I couldn't guess. The way he's had us set that up, we've got ships coming on the flying jump from all over the place, in order to match up with the enemy ships at the head of that complex curve that he starts in the 'center' of Tau-space, and then twists out from there to finally include everything else. He says we can match them ship-for-ship, because we can always draw in more ships; , so it's bound to come out even -- I don't know." The senator nodded, and drew on his cigar. "Well, either way, we win." "How do you figure?" "If he's right, we win in Tauspace; one of our Class I ships will beat an enemy ship, won't it?" "Yes, but if it doesn't work out, and we're outnumbered, then we lose the ship. How do we win?" "There are no men in this ship?" "No, sir. It's unmanned." "Well," said the senator, lowering his voice, "if we lose, then T. Binder Phipps, Ph.D., falls flat on his face, and there is nothing I would more dearly love to see." The now-familiar dental-drill tone bit into their conversation. "General, I have checked the procedures. The matching process is entirely to my satisfaction. You may proceed at any time." The senator growled, "How would you like to have that for a prospective son-in-law?" The colonel shivered. "In his natural state," said the senator, "he would be bad enough. But the refulgent rays of glory from his Ph.D. are forever poking me in the eye, or getting stuck crosswise halfway down my throat." The colonel glanced at the senator. "But suppose that Cantor himself was wrong." The senator grinned. "That's better yet. Then Binder gets to explain how a Recognized Authority In The Field could make a mistake." IF "Is that so impossible?" "For Binder it is. Binder is solid for Authority. Put him back in the Middle Ages and he'd chop Galileo's head off in a minute for arguing that a heavy weight and a light weight fall at the same speed when Aristotle said otherwise. How you can have a Believer In Sacred Authority in either mathematics or science beats me, but the bigger a field gets, the more of them migrate in and set up shop." The general's voice said, "Density, colonel?" "Eighteen, sir. No change." "Proceed." The colonel spoke briefly into his microphone. The big screen on the opposite wall was abruptly tinged pale-blue. The senator said, "That bluish color -- " The general said, "One of their ships creates a silvery-white appearance on the screen. One of ours, a blue appearance. Since we're heavily outnumbered, the screen remains white, tinged with blue." He paused. "Ah -- here we go." bright blue dot had appeared, then put forth spiral arms, which, bright-blue in color, began to grow, then to curve in and out in a complex geometrical pattern that grew to fill up a small region at the center of the screen, then bend outward again -- "Minus twenty," said the colonel. The general said, "with a concentration such as they have in there right now, we can only count on about twenty seconds, our time out here, till the enemy makes contact and starts to hit us." Dr. Phipps said, "As you may observe, the region of one-to-one correspondence is expanding steadily." It was true. In the huge, wallsize screen, the dark-blue area had now attained the proportions of a garbage-can lid. "Yes," said. the senator, "but it looks to me like it's expanding slower." "Possibly, but only proportionately so. No limiting volume is involved. Of course, we must progressively obtain matching ships from further and further away. Since the supply is infinite, this is irrelevant." The colonel said, "Minus fifteen." The dark-blue disk now had an intense white ring around it, shading off gradually to pale-blue toward the edge of the screen. The senator asked, "Why that intense white color?" The general, evidently concerned, said, "Those must be the regions our ships were moved in from, in order to make a match in the center. Dr. Phipps, I thought you said -- " Dr. Phipps said impatiently, "It isn't important, general. We are dealing with infinities. All this has been taken into account." The intense white ring faded out in a series of pulses to pale-blue around the growing dark-blue disk. But as the white faded to blue around the disk, the blue all around the rim of the screen paled noticeably at the inside edge. The disk added another few inches of diameter, the pale-blue around it bleached out to white again, and there glowed a glaring white ring several times larger than before. The colonel said, "Minus ten." "M'm," said the general, eyeing the dazzling-white ring around the blue disk. With a series of pulses, the inner part of this ring, next to the disk, faded to pale-blue, and, in due course, the disk built up again, as elsewhere on the screen the pale-blue leached out everywhere except at and near the very edge of the screen, and then there was a huge glaring region of dazzling white that made the disk in the center look smaller instead of bigger. "Of course," said the general, "this screen gives us just a schematic representation, but -- " Dr. Phipps said, "Everything is proceeding quite satisfactorily, general." The colonel said, "Minus five." The general cleared his throat. "Contact will almost certainly be established in five seconds, and firing will begin automatically. Destruction of one element of the enemy's force will create a yellow flash on the screen. A red flash will signify the destruction of one of our force." The blue disk expanded. Around it, the white ring expanded further. "Zero," said the colonel. All around the extreme rim of the screen was a brief pinkish light as the as-yet unmatched human ships were destroyed. In the center, the blue lit with a mingling of yellow and red that faded out to a paler blue, as the individuallystronger human ships won out. Then the untouched ring of dazzling white squeezed in with a reddish glare that ate straight to the center of the blue disk, then faded out to leave one solid bright silvery-whiteness on the screen from end to end. The general turned around and looked at Dr. Phipps. The senator shook his head. "Well, general, I see that method won't beat them. I'll relate this incident to the committee when we get back." Dr. Phipps said, "I -- I don't -- " The others waited for him to go on, but he only stared at the blank white screen, from which the blue had been wiped off with ridiculous ease. The colonel turned and glanced at the general. "If I might ask Dr. Phipps a few questions, sir." "Go right ahead." "Dr. Phipps," said the colonel. IF "in this matching procedure -- you take a unit in one series, move it up to match it to one in the other series, and when you have a method by which you can match them one for one, you say they're equal, right?" Phipps drew in a long ragged breath. "That is correct." "But at any given time, the matched parts of the two series are finite, aren't they? The parts of the series of digits, and the series of even digits, for instance, that you used as an example. Even after that's matched finite, isn't it?" "I -- this is not -- Well, I suppose that is correct." "Then you're determining the comparative sizes of two infinite series by taking a finite end of each?" "Ah -- " "And then, since the finite ends of each -- which are always insignificant compared to the rest of the series -- since these finite ends match, then you say the infinite remainders, which you haven't compared, but have only drawn numbers from -- you say therefore they must be the same size, too? Is that right?" Phipps mopped his forehead. "Ah -- I'm afraid the difficulty is that the matching process must run on infinitely -- then each of the two matched ends is infinite in length." "Nevertheless, there remains the other end, that isn't matched, from which you're still drawing numbers for the matched end of the series. The procedure you use to match the series only matches one end, doesn't it?" Dr. Phipps grappled with this problem, and a lengthy silence followed. The colonel said, "Now, Dr. Phipps, just to clear the thing up. I'd like to ask you if this same matching method could be used, for example, to compare an infinite number of spaceships with an infinite number of pilots, assuming that exactly one-half of all the ships have a pilot, and the other half of the ships have no pilot. Could we use Cantor's method to find out whether there are more pilots or spaceships?" "Yes. Yes, we could. Very easily." "All right. Every alternate ship has a pilot locked inside. How do we use the method?" "Well, we -- ah -- we line up the ships, and then we line the pilots up right beside them, one-for-one, which shows that there are an equal number of ships and pilots." "Only every other ship has a pilot, but when we use this method, they come out even?" "That is correct. There is a one-to-one correspondence." "In other words, we match pilots to ships, by putting a pilot in the second ship in the line, for instance. using a pilot we took from further back somewhere?" "Yes. We put pilots in the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth ships, and so on, to get a one-to-one correspondence between ships and pilots." "All right. Let's go back to this first pilot that you put on the number two ship. Where did you get him?" "Ah -- " "Remember, one-half of the ships have pilots, locked inside, one-half have no pilots at all. There are no loose pilots lying around. You had, to get the pilot somewhere." "Yes. I see." "Now, when you put a pilot in ship number two, to start this oneto-one correspondence, where do you get him from?" "I -- ah -- I took him from some ship somewhere else." "So you take the pilot out of a piloted ship?" "Yes." "And you use that pilot to pilot ship number #?" "Yes. Exactly." "Then, all you do is move the pilot around. Obviously, no matter how you switch the pilots around, if every time you put one pilot into a ship, here, you have to get him by taking one pilot out of a ship there, then there's no change in the overall ratio of piloted to unpiloted ships." Phipps blinked. "Let's see now... That would seem to be correct... Yes. That is correct. Obviously, no matter how the pilots are transferred, there remain just as many unpiloted ships as piloted ones. Because, every time we put a pilot in one ship, we first take a pilot out of another ship. This is perfectly clear. The ratio of pilots to ships remains constant, overall. Necessarily, taking the entire region into account, that ratio s fixed?" "Then," said the colonel, "we've just shown that there are always as many unpiloted as piloted ships or, in other words, two ships for each pilot, or twice as many ships as pilots. Yet, with Cantor's method, you say you can 'prove' the number of ships and pilots to be equal. After setting up a procedure to match one pilot to each ship at the head end of the line, and incidentally piling up a lot of empty ships in the other end of the line, then you claim that the nonrepresentative, stacked-deck condition you've set up in the front end also holds in the other part -- which you have only looted and never counted -- and on this basis you claim that you have compared the two series as a whole, and thus can 'prove' that they are equal. By matching one pilot to each ship at one end, you 'prove' there are as many pilots as ships. But, all the time, you're getting these extra pilots by emptying hosts of ships, which empty ships accumulate exactly fast enough to maintain the ratio of two IF ships for each pilot, but you intentionally don't count these empty ships. You call this a valid method?" There was a lengthy silence. Finally Phipps said hollowly, "I thought when I first heard it that there was something I didn't grasp about this method. But I knew if such an authority as Dr. Cantor used the method, it must be correct. I was puzzled, but -- if I'd asked questions, it might have seemed that I didn't understand. I -- I wanted to succeed, so I kept my mouth shut. And then -- " Suddenly he seemed to hear how all this sounded, and abruptly stopped talking. The general said curiously, "You 'wanted to succeed,' so you 'kept your mouth shut'?" The senator cleared his throat, but after a momentary pause Phipps went on more confidently. "Of course, it must just be that Dr. Cantor himself really means some other thing by this method than what we meant here. Yet I'm certain that was the sense of it as it was taught us -- and as I've seen it elsewhere, many times." The general said, "Maybe a few other people wanted to succeed, and kept their mouths shut when the thing wasn't clear to them either." "And," said the senator blandly, "in due time got their Ph.D.'s and are now infallible Authorities In The Field." Phipps winced, then moodily hauled himself erect and looked defiant. The general shrugged. "Well, the damage is done. Senator, I think we can stop any serious breakout here. Naturally, in normal space, we can use our advantage in manned ships, and as both sides -- again, in normal space -- have only a finite number of ships, we can handle them. But it means we're tied up here to prevent a breakout. And we can't follow them back and finish them until we can send a superior force into Tau-space after them." The senator nodded pleasantly. "I understand, now, general, and I think you've proved your point convincingly. I'll say so to the committee. Well, we'll be going." The corner of his mouth lifted in an odd smile. "Come along. Binding, my boy. We'll have to tell Marylou all about our adventure when we get back, won't we?" The two men went out, the one sunk in gloom, the other genial and expansive. The general glanced at the colonel. "What the deuce was he so happy about? Does he like defeats?" The colonel shook his head. "I got the impression, sir, that a certain prospective family-member has had him a bit up-tight -- he thinks he's succeeded in loosening up a Binding relationship."  Better by far to enter a den of serpents than a scientist's laboratory uninvited! been known to state on accasion that whenever there was a way for Professor Mantelish to get himself into a mess of trouble, Mantelish would find it. When, therefore, the Commissioner, while flicking through a series of newscasts, caught a momentary view of Mantelish chatting animatedly with a smiling young woman he stopped the instrument instantly, and with a touch of apprehension spun it back to locate the program in question. The last he had heard of Mantelish, the professor had been on a government-sponsored expedition to a faroff world, from which, the Commissioner had understood, he would not be returning for some time. However, Commissioner Tate had just got back to Maccadon from an assignment himself; for all he knew Mantelish might have changed his plans. Indeed, it would seem he had. He caught the program again, clicked it in. One good look at the great, bearlike figure and the mane of thick white hair told him it was indeed his old friend Mantelish. The dainty lady sitting across the table from Mantelish was a professional newscaster. The background was the Ceyce spaceport on Maccad on. The professor evidently had just come off his ship. His sense of apprehension deepening, Commissioner Tate began to listen sharply to what was being said. was allergic in the extreme to newscasters and rebuffed their efforts to pump him about his projects with such heavy sarcasm that even the brashest did not often attempt to interview him on a live show. On the other hand he was highly susceptible to pretty women. When a gorgeous little newshen spotted him among the passengers coming off a spaceliner at Ceyce Port and inquired timidly whether he would answer a few questions for her viewers, the great scientist surprised her no end by settling down for a friendly fifteenminute chat during which he reported on his visit to the little-known planet of the Tang from which he had just returned. It was a fine scoop for the little newshen. Professor Mantelish's exploits and adventures were a legend in the Hub and he was always good copy -- when he could be persuaded to talk. On this occasion, furthermore, he had something to tell which was in itself of more than a little interest. The Tang -- who could be called a humanoid species number of points -- had been contacted by human explorers some decades before. They tended to be ferociously hostile to strangers and had a number of other highly unpleasant characteristics; so far little had become known of them beyond the fact that they were rather primitive creatures living in small, footloose tribes on a cold and savage planet. Professor Mantelish, however, had spent several months among them, accompanied by a team of specialists with whose help he had cracked the language barrier which previously had prevented free communication with the Tang. He had made copious recordings of thir habits and customs, had even been permitted to bring back a dead Tang embalmed by freezing as was their practice. From the scientific viewpoint this was a very valuable specimen, since the Tang appeared to die only as a result of accident, murder, or in encounters with ferocious beasts. They did not suffer from diseases and had developed a means of extending their natural life span almost indefinitely... The young newscaster latched on to that statement like a veteran. Wide-eyed and innocent she slipped in a few leading questions and Mantelish launched into a detailed explanation. It had taken some months before he gained the confidence of the Tang sufficiently to induce them to reveal their secret: they distilled the juice of a carefully tended and IF guarded plant through an involved procedure. The drug they obtained in this way brought about a reversal of the normal aging process so that they retained their youthful health and vigor for a length of time which, though it had not been precisely determined, the Tang regarded as "forever". hen asked, perhaps be adapted for human use? Mantelish said he could not be definite about that, but it seemed quite possible. While the Tang had not let the members of his expedition know what plant they cultivated for the purpose, they had obligingly presented him with several liters of the distilled drug for experimentation which he had brought back with him. Analysis of the drug while still on the Tang planet had revealed the presence of several heretofore unknown forms of protein with rather puzzling characteristics; the question was whether or not these could be reproduced in the laboratory. To settle the question might well take a number of years -- it could not of course be stated at present what the long-term effect of the drug on human beings would be. It was, however, apparently harmless. He and several other members of his group had been injected with significant quantities of the drug while on the planet, and had suffered no ill effects. Big-eyed again, the newscaster inquired whether this meant that he, Professor Mantelish, was now immortal? No, no, Mantelish said hastily. In humans, as in the Tang, the effects of a single dose wore off in approximately four months. To retain youth, or to bring about the gradual rejuvenation of an older body, it was necessary to repeat the dosage regularly at about this interval. The practice of the Tang was to alternately permit themselves to age naturally for about ten years, then to use the drug for roughly the same length of time or until youthfulness was restored. To protect both the Tang and their miracle plant from illegal exploitation, the Federation, following his initial report on the matter, was having the space about the planet patrolled. What the final benefits of the discovery to humanity would be was still open to question. It was, however, his personal opinion that the Tang drug eventually would take its place as a very valuable addition to the various rejuvenation processes currently being employed in the Hub... "The old idiot!" Commissioner Holati Tate muttered to himself. He swung around, found a redheaded young woman standing behind him, large, gray eyes intently watching the screen. "Did you hear all that. Trigger?" he demanded. "Enough to get the idea," Trigger said. "I came in as soon as I recognized the profs voice... After those remarks, he'd be safer back among the Tang! He doesn't even seem to have a bodyguard around." Commissioner Tate was dialing a ComWeb number. 'T'll call the spaceport police! They'll give him an escort. Hop on the other ComWeb and see his home and lab are under guard by the time he gets there." "I just did that," Trigger said. "Then see if you can make an emergency contact with that newscaster female before Mantelish strays off..." Trigger shook her head. "I tried it. No luck! It's a floating program." She watched the final minute and a half of the newscast, biting her lip uneasily, while the Commissioner made hasty arrangements with the spaceport police. To hear Professor Mantelish blabbing out the fact that he might have the answer to man's search for immortality in his possession was disconcerting. It was an open invitation to all the criminal elements currently on Maccadon to try to get it from him. The prof simply shouldn't be allowed to wander around without tactful but efficient nursemaiding! Usually, she or Holati or somebody else made sure he got it, but they'd assumed that on a Federation expedition he'd be kept out of jams... When the Commissioner had finished,she switched off the newscast, said glumly, "You missed something, Holati. Mantelish just showed everybody watching on umpteen worlds the container he's got that drug in!" "The Tang stuff?" "Yes. It's in that round sort of suitcase he had standing beside his chair." The Commissioner swore. "Come along!" he said. "We'll take my car and head for the spaceport. The police weren't sure from exactly where that newscast was coming but if they catch up with Mantelish before he leaves they'll wait for us and we'll ride in to his lab with him." "And if they don't?" "They'll call the car. Then we'll go to the lab and wait for him to show up." charming little newscaster goodbye. Professor Mantelish himself began to feel some qualms about the revelations he'd allowed to escape. He began to realize he might have been a trifle indiscreet. Walking on with the crowds moving towards the spaceport exit hall, he found himself growing acutely conscious of the Tang drug container in the suitcase he carried. Normally preoccupied with a variety of matters of compelling scientific interest, it was almost impossible for him to conceive of himself as IF being in personal danger. Nevertheless, now that his attention was turned on the situation he had created it became clear that many people who had watched the newscast might feel tempted to bring the drug into their possession, either for selfish reasons or out of perhaps excessive zeal for private research... The average citizen at this point might have started looking around for the nearest police officer. Professor Mantelish, however, was of independent nature; such a solution simply did not occur to him. He had advertised the fact that he was headed for his laboratory. That had been a mistake. Therefore he would not go there -- which should foil anyone who was presently entertaining illegal notions about the Tang drug. Instead, he would take himself and the drug immediately to a little seaside hideout he maintained which was known only to his closest associates. Once there he could take steps to have the drug safeguarded. Satisfied with this decision Mantelish lengthened his stride. About a hundred yards ahead was the entry to an automatic aircar rental station. As he came up half a dozen people turned into it in a group, obviously harmless citizens. Mantelish followed them in, moved over to the wair just inside the entry, turned and stood waiting, prepared, if required, to swing the weighted suitcase he held under his flowing robe like an oversized club. But half a minute passed and no one else came in. Satisfied, he hurried after the little group, catching up with them just as they reached the line of waiting cars and climbed into a car together, laughing and joking. Mantelish got into the car behind them, deposited a five-credit piece. The cars began to move forwards, rose toward the exit. He glanced back to make sure again that no one was following, placed the Tang container on the floorboards beside him, snapped the car's canopy shut and put his hands on the controls. The aircars emerged from the fifteenth floor of the spaceport exit building, the lights of Ceyce glittering under its night-screen before them. Mantelish turned immediately to the left, directed the car up to one of the main traffic lines, moved along it for a minute, then shifted abruptly to one of the upper high-speed lanes. H e reached his hideaway a scant fifteen minutes later. It was in a residential shore area, featuring quiet and privacy. The house overlooked a shallow, sheltered ocean bay, was built on sloping ground thirty feet above tide level. It was a pleasant place, fit for an elderly retired man of remarkable habits. None of Mantelish's neighbors knew him by name or suspected he maintained a laboratory within his walls -- an installation in absolute violation of the local zoning regulations. He locked the entry door behind him, crossed a hall, opened the door to the laboratory. He stood motionless a moment, looking around. Everything was as he had left it months before, kept spotlessly clean by automatic maintenance machinery. He went over to a table on which lay a variety of items, the results of projects he had hastily completed or left incompleted before settingout on the expedition to the Tang world. He put the Tang container on the table between a chemical gun and a packaged device which, according to the instructions attached to it, was a mental accelerator with a ratio of two hundred and eighty to one, instantly lethal if used under conditions other than those specified in the instructions. He looked about once more, went out by another door to the kitchen of the house. A minute or two later, he heard the laboratory Com Web buzzing shrilly. Mantelish glanced around from the elaborate open-face sandwiches he was preparing. He frowned. Among the very few people who knew the number of that ComWeb, only two were at all likely to be calling him at this moment. One was Commissioner Tate, the other was Trigger Argee. If either of them -- Trigger, in particular -- had caught the newscast at the spaceport just now they were going to give him hell. His frown deepened. Should he ignore the call? No, he decided; however unnecessarily, the caller was no doubt concerned about his safety. He must let them know he was all right. Mantelish lumbered hurriedly back into the laboratory, came to a sudden stop just beyond the door. There were two men there. One was seated at the table where he had put down the Tang container; the other leaned against the wall beside the hall door. Both held guns, which at the moment were pointed at him. Mantelish looked from one to the other, lifting his eyebrows. This, he told himself, was a most unfortunate situation. He knew the pair from a previous meeting, the conclusion of which had been marked by a certain amount of physical violence. He didn't like the look of the guns but perhaps he could bluff it out. "Fiam," he said with stern dignity to the man at the table, "I am not at all pleased by your intrusion. I thought I had made it clear to you last year when I threw you out of my laboratory that there was no possibility of our doing business. If I failed, I shall make the point very clear indeed immediately after I have answered this call!" He turned toward the clamoring ComWeb. Suddenly he felt an excruciating pain in his left leg, centered on the kneecap. He grunted, stopped. "That's enough for now, Welk," IF Paes Fiam said lazily from the table. "He's got the idea..." The pain faded away. The man standing by the door grinned and lowered his gun. Fiam went on, "Sit down over there, professor -- across from me. Forget the ComWeb. This shouldn't take long. These guns of ours, as you've noticed, can be very painful. They can also kill very quickly. So let's not have any unpleasantness." Mantelish scowled at him but sat down. "Why have you come here?" he demanded. Fiam smiled. "To ask you for a small favor. And a little information." He picked up the chemical gun lying on the table beside the Tang container, looked at it a moment. "This device," he said, "appears to be something you've developed." "It is," Mantelish said. "What's so remarkable about it?" Mantelish snorted. "It kills the intended victim immediately on spray contact while placing the user in no danger whatsoever, even when carelessly handled." "So the label says," Paes Fiam agreed. "A one to four foot range. Very interesting!" He laid the gun back on the table. "I find it a little strange, professor, that a man holding the high ethical principles you outlined to me in our previous conversation should devote his time to creating such a murderous little weapon!" Mantelish snorted again. "What the clients with whom I am dealing. I would not place such weapons in the hands of common crooks like yourselves." The Com Web's noise stopped. Fiam smiled briefly, said, "Not common crooks. Professor Mantelish. We happen to be exceptionally talented and efficient crooks. As the present situation demonstrates." "What do you mean?" Mantelish asked' coldly. "I happened to be at the Ceyce spaceport," Fiam said, "while you were bragging about your Tang immortality drug on the newscast. I took steps immediately to make sure I knew where you went. Welk and I followed you here without very much trouble. We made sure in the process that nobody else was tailing you." He patted the Tang container. "This is what we're after, professor! And we've got it." "You are being very foolish," Mantelish said. "As I indicated during the newscast, it remains questionable whether the Tang drug can be produced under laboratory conditions. If it is possible, it will involve years of research. at the highest level. I -- " "Hold it, professor!" Fiam raised his hand, nodded at Welk. "Your statements are very interesting, but let's make sure you're not attempting to mislead us." "Mislead you?" Mantelish rumbled indignantly. "You might, you know. But Welk will now place the pickup of a lie detector at your feet. Sit very still while he's doing it -- you know I can't miss at this range."  Fiam brought a small instrument out of his pocket, placed it on the table before him. "This is the detector's indicator," he went on. "A very dependable device, every time it shows me you're being less than truthful you'll get an admonishing jolt from Welk's gun. Welk's never really forgiven you for not opening the lab door before you ejected him last year. Better stick to the truth, professor!" "I have no intention of lying," Mantelish said with dignity. Paes Fiam waited until Welk had positioned the pickup and stepped back, went on. "Now, professor, you were suggesting that at present the Tang drug has no commercial value..." Mantelish nodded. "Exactly! The quantity on the table here -- and it's every drop of the drug to be found off the Tang wrld now -- is not nearly enough to be worth the risk you'd be taking in stealing and trying to market it. It might extend the life of one human being by a very considerable extent, and that is all. And what potential client would take your word for it that it would do that -- or that it wouldn't, for that matter, harm him instead, perhaps kill him within a few months?" "A large number of potential clients would, if they were desperate enough for life," Fiam said, watching the detector indicator. "You were skirting the frrnges of deception with that question, professor. But that's not the point. Does the drug have harmful physical or mental effects?" Mantelish said, "A calculated quantity was given to six members of our expedition, including myself. During the past four months, no harmful physical or mental effects have been observed, and the overall effect has worn off again. That's all I can say." "And the Tang drug did have a rejuvenating effect on these human subjects?" Mantelish hesitated, admitted, "A slight but measurable one. That was in accordance with our expectations." Fiam smiled. "I see. What other expectations did you have in connection with the use of the drug on human beings?" Mantelish said reluctantly, "That the dosage given human subjects would wear out of the system in about four months -- as it did. And that if the rejuvenation effect were to continue the treatment would therefore have to be repeated regularly at four-month intervals." "What do you believe will happen if that is done?" "Within a ten-year period," Mantelish said, "the subject should find that his biological age has not IF advanced but has been reduced by about five years. The Tang rejuvenation process is a slow, steady one. The Tang themselves select the biological age they prefer, and remain within a few years of it by a judicious use of the drug. It is, of course, impossible to reduce the biological age beyond late adolescence." "I understand," Fiam said. "And how is the drug administered?" "The Tang drink the extract," Mantelish said. "On human beings it has a violently nauseating effect when administered in that form. We found it more practical to administer a subcutaneous injection." "There's nothing essentially different between that and any other subcutaneous injection?" "No, none at all." Paes Fiam patted the container again, smiled, said, "The drug extract in here is ready to be used exactly as it is?" "Yes." "Are there any special measures' required to preserve its usefulness and harmlessness indefinitely?" "It's self-preserving," Mantelish said. "There should be no significant difference in its properties whether it's used today or after a century. But as I have pointed out, I cannot and will not say that it is harmless. A test on six subjects is by no means definitive. The seventh one might show very undesirable physical reactions. Or undesirable reactions might develop in the six who have been tested five, or ten, or fifteen years from now..." "No doubt," Fiam said. He smacked his lips lightly. "Be careful how you answer my next question. You said the drug in this container should extend the life of one human being very considerably. What does that mean in standard years?" Mantelish hesitated, said grudgingly, "My estimate would be about three hundred years. That is an approximation." Fiam grinned happily at Welk. "Three hundred years, eh? That's good enough for us, professor! As you may have begun to surmise, we're the clients for whom the drug is intended. We have no intention of trying to sell it. And we'll take a chance on undesirable reactions showing up in five or ten years against the probability of another hundred and fifty years of interesting and profitable living!" He stood up, moved back from the table. "Now then, you've got the equipment to administer a subcutaneous injection somewhere around the lab. You'll get it out while I keep this gun on you. You'll show Welk exactly what you're doing, describe the exact amount of drug that is required for each injection. And you'll do all that while you're within range of the lie detector. So don't make any mistakes at this stage or, believe me, you'll get hurt abominably! "Finally, you'll give me the initial four-month injection. I shall then give Welk an identical injection under your supervision. After that, we'll just wrap up the container with the rest of the drug and be on our way..." T en minutes later Mantelish sat at the table, gloomily watching Fiam store the container, along with several other of the finished products on the table which had caught his fancy, into the suitcase. Welk stood behind the professor's chair, gun pointed at Mantelish's neck. "Now let me give you the rest of the story on this, professor," Fiam said. He picked up Mantelish's chemical gun, looked at it and placed it on top of the suitcase. "You've mentioned several times that I can't expect to get away with this. Let me reassure you on the point. "For one thing, we set up a temporal scrambler in this room as soon as we came in. It's on one of those shelves over there. It will remain there and continue in action for thirty minutes after we've left, so no one will be able to restructure the events of the past few hours and identify us in that way. We're wearing plastiskin gloves, of course, and we haven't made any foolish mistakes to give investigators other leads to who might have been here. "Also we enjoy -- under other names -- an excellent reputation on this planet as legitimate businessmen from Evalee. Should foul play be suspected, we, even if somebody should think of us, certainly will not be suspected of being involved in it. As a matter of fact" -- Fiam checked his watch -- "twenty minutes from now, we shall be attending a gay social function in Ceyce to which we have been invited. As far as anybody could prove, we'll have spent all evening there." He smiled at Mantelish. "One more thing; you will be found dead of course; but there will be some question about the exact manner in which you died. We shall leave an interesting little mystery behind us. The Tang container will be missing. But why is it missing? Did you discover, or fancy you had discovered, some gruesome reaction to the drug in yourself, and drop it out over the sea so no one else would be endangered by it? Did you then perhaps commit suicide in preference to waiting around for the inevitable end?" "Suicide -- pfah!" growled Mantelish. "No one is lunatic enough to commit suicide with a pain-stimulant gun!" "Quite right," Fiam agreed. He took up the professor's chemical gun from the suitcase again. "I've been studying this little device of yours. It functions in a quite simple and obvious manner. This sets the triggering mechanism -- correct? It IF is now ready to fire." He pointed the gun at Mantelish, added, "Stand aside, Welk." Welk moved swiftly four feet to one side. Mantelish's eyes widened. "You wouldn't -- " "But I would," Fiam said. And as the professor started up with a furious bellow, he pulled the trigger. Mantelish's body went rigid, his face contorting into a grisly grin. He thumped sideways down on the table, rolled off it on the side away from Fiam, went crashing down to the floor. "Ugh!" Welk said, staring down in fascinating incredulity. "His whole face has turned blue!" "Is he dead?" Fiam inquired, peering over the table. "I never saw anyone look deader! Or bluer!" Welk reported shakenly. "Well, don't touch him! The stuff might hit you even through the gloves." Fiam came around the table, laid the gun gingerly on the floor, said, "Shove it over by his hand with something. Then we'll get ourselves lost..." as they went out into the hall, closed the door behind them. After it stopped the laboratory and the rest of Mantelish's house was quiet as a tomb. A miracle," Trigger said, i"that you're still alive!" She looked pale under her tan. The professor had lost the bright cerAilean tint Welk had commented on by the time she and Commissioner Tate came rushing into the house a minute or two ago. The skin of his face was now a nasty green through which patches of his normal weathered-brick complexion were just beginning to show. "No miracle at all, my dear," Mantelish said coolly. "Paes Fiam has encountered the kind of misfortune the uninformed layman may expect when he ventures to challenge the scientist on his own ground. He had lost the game, literally, at the moment he stepped into this laboratory! I had half a dozen means at my disposal here to foil his criminal plans. Since I was also in the laboratory at the time, most of them might have been harmful -- or at least extremely disagreeable -- to me. So as soon as I saw he intended to use the chemical gun, I decided to employ that method to rid myself of his presence." Commissioner Tate had been studying the gun's label. "'This says the gun kills instantly," he observed. "It does kill instantly," Mantelish said, "if aimed at an attacking Rumlian fire roach. I designed it to aid in the eradication of that noisome species. On the human organism it has only a brief paralyzing effect." "It makes you look revolting, too!" Trigger said, studying him fascinatedly. "A minor matter, my dear. Within an hour or two I shall have regained my normal appearance." Holati Tate sighed, placed the gun back on the table. "Well we should be able to pick up your friends since we know who they are," he said. "I'll alert the spaceports immediately and get Scout Intelligence on the job. We're lucky though that they didn't get more of a head start." Mantelish held up his hand. "Please don't concern yourself about the Tang drug, Holati," he said. "I've notified the police and Fiam and Welk will be arrested very shortly." The Commissioner said doubtfully, "Well, our Maccadon police -- " "The matter will require no brilliance on their part, Holati. Fiam informed me he and Welk intended to be enjoying themselves innocently at a social function within twenty minutes after leaving this laboratory. That was approximately half an hour ago..." Professor Mantelish nodded at the ComWeb. "I expect the police to call at any moment, to advise me they have been picked up." "Better not take a chance on that. Professor," Trigger warned. "They might change their plans now they have the stuff, and decide to get off the planet immediately." "It would make very little difference, Trigger. If Paes Fiam had waited until the official report on the Tang planet was out he would have known better than to force me to inject him with the immortality drug. Aside from their savage ways the Tang are literally an unapproachable people while under its influence; I and the various members of our expedition who experimented with it on ourselves had to wait several months for its effect to wear off again before we were able to feturn to civilization. We would not have been able to live among the Tang at all if we had not had our olfactory centers temporarily shutoff." "Olfactory centers?" said Trigger. "Yes. It was absolutely necessary. Within half an hour after being administered to an animal organism, the Tang drug produces the most offensive and hideously penetrating stench I have ever encountered. Wherever Paes Fiam and Welk may be on the planet, they have by now been prostrated by it and are unmistakably advertising their presence to anyone within half a mile of them. I have advised the police that space helmets will be needed by the men sent to arrest them, and -- " He broke off as the ComWeb added, "Ah, there is the call I have been expecting! Perhaps you'll take it, Trigger? Say I'm indisposed; I'm afraid the authorities may be feeling rather irritable with me at the moment."  IF If at first you don't succeed... not to reveal himself in a backwater community of the Province of Judaea during the rule of Herod the Great and Augustus Caesar. Nobody seemed to know from whence he came. Suddenly, he was before the iron portals of the White House. He walked through the gates, which were closed and locked at the time. He was a slim young man, seemingly about thirty, with a fairly dark complexion, and soft dark eyes. His brown beard had a reddish tinge. He wore what looked like leather sandals and a Roman toga, or some such garment. Nobody who saw him had actually ever seen a Roman toga, that is, outside Hollywood productions, and even the most competent of wardrobers had never quite figured out how the Romans had draped those togas. He walked through the iron gates and confronted the guards, submachine guns in hand. They were smallish submachine guns, so as not to be conspicuous, not to overly ists -- some of whom were not aware of the fact that it was necessary to so protect the President. Yes, there were the guards. The lieutenant was Angelo Maritino who had been raised in a strict Catholic family and still moderately kept up his duties. Lieutenant Maritino was not unaware of art. The home of his birth had been plastered with it -- Italian style. In short, he knew a halo when he saw one. His face was slack. He opened his mouth and said... nothing. The newcomer smiled gently and also said nothing. But into the minds of all present came, with soft amusement, Take me to your leader. There was no question. There wasn't the beginning of a question. They didn't frisk him. They didn't even come within a half dozen yards of him. Lieutenant Maritino, shortly followed by the balance of the gate guards, let his submachine gun slip from his hands to the ground. At the portals of the White House, Angelo Maritino flustered, almost as though apologetically, to the Secret Service officer there, "A distinguished visitor to see..." The other gawked. And the visitor passed gently through. He knew the way. Obviously, he knew the way. He knew the way everywhere. And then a finger of doubt slid up the spine of Mike McCord, one of the gate guards who had followed to this point. If the newcomer knew the way, if he knew everything, why did he bother to materialize in front of the White House gates? Why didn't he simply show up in the Oval Room? The visitor looked at him and smiled. He said, in English, his voice infinitely gentle, "I wished to observe the premises with my physical senses. One whom I regarded as a friend used to reside here. He was shot one night while attending a theatre." He added absently, "Happily, we were able to clone IF him and now he dwells with us." The news of his coming raced before them. Doors opened magically and the newcomer, with his escort trailing wide-eyed behind, passed placidly through. Finally they reached the ultimate door and that, too, swung open. The President stood there behind his desk, flanked by his two chief aides. All stared, unblinkingly. The newcomer said gently to the guards, "That will be all," and he entered the Oval Room. The door closed behind him. H e looked at the three and smiled sadly. Without being told, the aides suddenly knew they were not to remain. They hurried from the office through a side door. Scurried might be the better word. "You may call me Joshua," the newcomer said to the President. "It is a name I have used in the past." He settled himself in a comfortable blue leather-covered chair in front of the presidential desk and regarded his host. The President lowered himself weakly into his own chair. Joshua said, his expression distantly amused now, "So, despite your public pronouncements, you do not believe in the Bible." "I... I..." "It is quite historic, in spite of the many alterations made in the original books by the various sects and cults that have translated it to their own ends through the ages." "I... I was thinking of Genesis, rather than the later books written in the historic period." "Yes. As I say, quite historic. When we inspired it, we found it amusing to stick as closely to reality as possible. Even the planetary engineering resulting in the creation of this world took approximately seven days, using your present system of time measure. And, as you can see, when w# created man, we did so in our own image." "Created man?" the President said weakly. "But I've read that it to evolve from a less advanced primate. We have evidence -- skeletons, artifacts..." The other nodded acceptance. "Yes, largely you are correct, but we guided the way, intrigued by watching evolution take place. However, from time to time we intervened. Most recently, when what you call Neanderthal man seemed to have become a dead end, we helped introduce Cro-Magnon." The President shook his head. "I... I am afraid I am completely bewildered. What... what is planetary engineering?" "Just what it sounds to be. You stars in this galaxy alone that have planets that are capable of sustaining life as we know it. Indeed, life as we know it, and other life forms as well, have developed independently on some of them. But what you call the panspermia theory was at work more often." "I don't believe I have heard of that theory." "On earth, a Swedish chemist, Svanta Arrhenius, first suggested in # that living cells floated haphazardly through the universe, bringing life to suitable planets. But it was your American, Francis Crick, the scientist who discovered hit upon the reality. He, with Leslie Orgel, advanced the theory that life had come to this planet by spaceship, a deliberate act of seeding. Their clue was a valid one, I must say. That there is only one generic code for terrestial life. Previously, most of yoru biologists had thought life had sprung up spontaneously in some great 'primeval soup' but had that been so there would undoubtedly have been a number of different generic codes." If anything, the President's stare was intensified. He blurted, "Do you mean to say that life here on Earth was deliberately put here by an extraterrestial..." "Yes," the other nodded seriously. "That is what I have just told you." "And... you are one of them?" Joshua smiled. "Is it not obvious?" "But... well, the halo..." It flicked out. "I assumed it to focus immediate attention upon myself, and also, if you will forgive me, for amusement. Our race has not lost its sense of humor." The President slumped back into his chair, feeling a bit more in control of himself, but not quite entirely. He shook his head. "But if you are from a different star system, which one, and how far is it from Earth? This is simply mind boggling." "From the star system Delta Pavonis, as you call it. It is approximately # light years from the Solar System." The President had him now. "But for you to come here to Earth, you personally, and then return, would take almost forty years even if you could travel at the speed of light, which is impossible." He who had named himself Joshua smil again. "Your Einstein pointed out that an object cannot travel at the speed of light. He said nothing about traveling at a speed greater than light. Yes, of course, your first reaction is to say, 'But how would it be possible to achieve speeds greater than that of light without passing the impossible hurdle?' I am afraid you are insufficiently acquainted with science to understand, but in physics there are many examples of jumping from one condition of energy, of velocity ,v or quantum state, to another without passing through the intermediate values. The tunnel diode is an example you even now utilize. In it the electrons tu me, as it were, from one side of an electrical barrier to the other withIF out going through it. Your race is not quite ready for faster than light travel, but soon, if my mission is successful, it will be." The President said, "My mind is reeling. I simply can't comprehend what you are saying. That you people seeded this planet and introduced life." He hesitated for a moment before saying, "Why? What motivates you?" Joshua made a mouth of deprecation. "Perhaps a missionary zeal to spread our life form throughout the galaxy. However, the brain is infinitely curious. I am afraid our primary motivation is the study of life. We have seeded, in our time, a considerable number of planets which will sustain existence as we know it. Usually a bit of planetary engineering is necessary, as it was here. I, personally, became increasingly intrigued with this world particularly after the race entered the historic period." A suspicion was beginning to come to the President. He said, "You have been here before, then?" "Oh, yes, various times, to watch the experiment develop. I seldom manifested myself in quite this manner. Sometimes the things I attempted to do came a cropper, to use your idiom. On one occasion, for instance, I wished to form a more advanced religion than pertained at the time; a higher ethic. Evidently, I was premature. The religion was a higher ethic than before, well enough, but few,' if any, really followed it." Joshua smiled in memory. "But it was an exciting and fascinating experiment." The President said warily, "You mentioned a mission." Joshua nodded. "Yes. You see, your race has reached a crossroads. In fact, it reached it some time ago but so far has failed to take the appropriate turning." "I don't understand." "Very well. Follow me closely. You have heard of the late Dr. Robert Oppenheimer." "Yes, certainly. Of the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb." The other nodded. "In discussing the knowledge explosion, he said in # that human knowledge was doubling every eight years. Consider the ramifications. Let us suppose this knowledge explosion really got underway in #. By #, human knowledge was double. And by the time Oppenheimer made his statement it was four times as much. Do you realize how great it would be in just one century? By the year # A.D. at this rate of explosion, human knowledge will be # times what it was in #. Can you comprehend what it will be in the year #? By that year, you will have knowledge as you did in #. Happily (and inevitably) you have already achieved the computer and its data banks. Other breakthroughs will continue to help in what can only be called your plight. "This is beyond your conception now. Today you are beginning your explorations into space, you are beginning the conquest of the diseases that have plagued you down through the centuries. You are beginning, just beginning, scientific research, even into such fields as the nature of life and the achieving of immortality. You are not yet quite beginning, but are on the verge of taking the steps that will make this planet into a true garden, a paradise, if you will. But at this point you cannot conceive of much knowledge as you have today. You must understand that, as things are now, you do not have # as does, say, a cockroach or an ant. Can you imagine, even faintly, your new race? At that time, you too, most likely, will be practicing panspermia." "Your mission," the President said hoarsely. Joshua looked at him in compassion. He said, "You are at the crossroads. A race cannot develop scientifically and technologically without also developing ethically, without developing, at the same pace, a superior code of mores. There can be no such things as wars, the, military, race differences, poverty, conflict between the sexes and generations. I could go on." The President was blank. Joshua said, still compassionately, "Your codes today are such that the human race must destroy itself within your next decade if they are not revised." The President slumped again. Joshua said gently, "In the past we have seldom interfered in human affairs. When we did, sometimes the results were unhappy. For instance, one of our people who has long observed Earth helped take the steps to remove the Czar of All the Russias, who was an incompetent, foolish, unintelligent man and his country in corrupt chaos. Less than ten years later, Stalin had taken his place." "But..." the President said. "Matters have come to such a head that we must intervene if we are to see our experiment continue." "I see," the President said, his lips pale. "What steps?" A .# caliber Colt automatic materialized on the desk before him. Joshua stood, infinite sadness on his face. "Men such as yourself are not competent to lead the human race, Mr. President." The President was goggling the weapon. "I... I refuse to suicide." "You have no alternative, I am afraid. All of your people, outside,, will have forgotten I was ever here. They will never know what motivated you. And now I leave for Moscow... on a similar mission." He disappeared.  IF # Americans can't be wronger can they? While I am sure that this "advertising genius nobody ever sees" posture is a necessary part of your image, I still do not care very much for your way of doing business. I like to meet a man face to face, and I must say I find this corresponding rather eccentric. Nevertheless, you on campaigns in the past that I am sure you are the only one who can handle this problem if it can be handled at all. To be brief; given unlimited funds, could you make a short, fat, ugly woman President of the United States? With unlimited funds, I could get her elected God. The fee will be the public from seeing her until bilities? run anonymously. She has innumerable liabilities, not the least of which is that we can't type her. She's not homey enough for Golda Meir, nor flamboyant enough for Bella Abzug -- and the way she looks precludes just about anything else. Besides that she's very shy, totally unphotogenic and has a disconcerting habit of telling the truth. Six agencies turned her down before we got her -- even when offered unlimited funds. Two of them literally laughed in her face! Something of a recluse, but very personable in small groups. Extremely intelligent, but wants to be President out of some strange sense of moral duty. Not a Women's Libber or anything, just a sort of anachronism who thinks she's best suited for the job and therefore duty-bound to take it. Very sophisticated outside of this sixteenth century notion of moral responsibility. Her shyness may work to our advantage. All we have to do is keep you sure you can handle this? # if she wins, nothing if she loses. Agreed. She says she'll do whatever she has to do -- unless it involves joining one of the political parties or is blatantly dishonest. She doesn't seem to be politically naive, but she's adamant on the point of not joining one of the parties -- not that it matters much since neither of them would have her anyway. Good. We'll run the entire campaign through television. Nothing until next September #; then, I want two minutes out of every half hour until Election Day. In the meantime, get me the following: #. About twenty Types -- the kind IF you use in the potato chip and shaving commercials -- housewives, football players, policemen, little old ladies, doctors, etc. None of them too good looking. Have the women a little on the plain side, something she can blend in with. #. One athletic, intelligent, articulate Black male. #. One white male, about sixty. The Grand-Old-Man-type, white hair, moustache and goatee, robust. The kind you use in the Impeccable Taste ads, but more sagacious. #. One white female who can look like she has a Ph.D. in Political Science without losing anything as a sex symbol. #. One white male about thirty-five who looks as much as possible like the VirileYoung-Man without looking too much like a Kennedy. All of the Four must be physically and mentally superior. #. An estate outside New York, secluded, one where we can mainwho works on this project can be attached in any way. We are going to hide them away until after is ever to be seen in public unless I order it. ity in this thing. No one is to know for certain who the Candidate is so your client will have to agree to act like everyone else. That means she'll have to take orders just like any other actor; if word of her identity gets out prematurely or she wants to pull out part way through, you forfeit # a month for my time -- from Sept. # to date of forfeiture. Agreed? Contact me again when you've secured everything on the list. We have over a year to go so be very selective. Take only those who are handle the initial screening. We'll need about three months for indoctrination before filming begins. Agreed. Files on the final selections will be sent to your office tomorrow. We have secured an estate in New Jersey about fifty miles outside the city. Two buses have been purchased and dummy buses have been rented to confuse anyone who might try to follow us. Lam finished studying the files. The final selections are excellent. It's surprising that Ms. Cavil has never entered a beauty contest -- is very good for the Grand Old Man; very genteel. I don't think Saxon's Boston accent will hurt us and I'm very pleased with Brown. I was afraid they would come up with a white man's Black man, but this one is excellent. Begin filming the Gold-Edge Beer commercial and the Bright Detergent commercial Tuesday. We'll need these shown as soon and as often as possible. They'll give our real commercials something familiar to parallel. Begin the indoctrination tomorrow. I hope these things are being forwarded to you. This is a hell of a time to take a vacation. The actors are very enthused now that they know their mission. There is none of the jealousy you might expect with this many actors cooped up together for so long. The screening must have been exceptionally good. I think most of them -- certainly the Four -- know who the Candidate is but it doesn't matter; she's made converts of all of them. They seem sincerely attached to her; her influence on them is truly amazing. She has one of them studying Ecology; another Economics. One is becoming her expert on Education; another on Foreign Policy. It's like she's selected her cabinet already. I treated the whole thing like a game but she seems quite serious -- and so do they. When do we start the first commercial? We're about ready. The idea for the first commercial is enclosed. Make it parallel the Gold Edge Beer commercial as closely as possible; shoot the same camera angles, etc. Most of this is the same action; read it anyway. Open with tight shot of huddle. Close-up of Ms. Cavil in her sweatshirt, cap, whistle, etc., calling the play. Wide angle for snap from center. Cut to Saxon running his pattern; long pass to him on run; circus catch. (Shoot this one until you get something spectacular. The files indicate that both Saxon and Brown played football in college). Follow Saxon down sideline to where he gets hemmed in by the last defensive man. Brown comes from off-camera left to block the defensive man. (Again, something that crunches. This will be shown during a lot of professional football games, and we don't want it to look pale by comparison.) Cut to Saxon as he scores. Close-up of Saxon and Brown congratulating each other. Cut to close-up ofGrand Old Man nodding approvingly from the sidelines. Close-up of button on his lapel (Distribute # of these buttons around the country the same week.) IF Wide angle shot of crowd running up to congratulate Saxon and Brown. Keep the Candidate in front, but a little out of focus. Cut to American flag. Dub in "Hail to the Chief'. Superimpose words and narrator: "Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States has appeared in this commercial." Very effective. A lot like the "CamelsAre-Coming!" campaign and the car commercials we did with the new models under a drape. We're ready for numbertwo. By the way, our client has them all meeting an hour a day for what she calls consciousness raising. You don't suppose she's a Libbie after all? I don't really care what she is. My job is to get her elected. Enclosed is the second script. Shoot the same opening as the Bright commercial except that instead of having Cavil explain how the detergent works have her talk about how detergents and industrial wastes are fouling our water supply. As she's talking, four men come into the laundromat and attack her (have them wear ski masks so we don't offend any ethnic groups). She fights, one of them tears open her blouse (tiniest flash of nipple). Saxon and Brown enter dressed as washer repairmen, come to her aid. Series of rapid cuts: knives, feet, faces, different camera angles, mostly low. Each disables one opponent; Cavil finishes hers with a Karate chop. Fourth assailant runs for the door where the Grand Old Man, entering, jabs him with his walking stick (have the old man take a good impact on the stick and grab his shoulder in pain.) Pan around laundromat: clothes all over the floor, an old woman hysterical in the corner witlvthe Candidate comforting her. Cavil trying to hold her blouse closed, Saxon and Brown both cut over the right eye, the old man rubbing his shoulder, the four toughs sprawled about on the floor. Dolly back out through the window to wide angle shot of laundromat. Superimpose and voice-over: "When a crime is committed, everyone suffers. We must fight crime in the streets and the condiLeft will interpret that one to our advantage. Cavil and our client both refuse to do the commercial. They say it exploits women. The men agree with them. She's turning them all into revolutionaries! Of course it exploits women! How many commercials have they seen that don't? Ask Cavil this: If she had to break into a prison to free her sisters would she refuse to do it because she'd have to dress up as a male guard? And tell your client that when she's President she can appoint Kate Millett head of mercials she wants, but this one must stay as is. Causes require sacrifices. She says to tell you you must mean "The end justifies the means." Anyway, they had a meeting and decided that tactics takes precedence over ideology. They'll do the script as written. You've opened a fine can of worms with that crack about the of government agencies that can be controlled by appointment. And making a list of appointees! Things have settled down a bit and the filming is going very well. The Karate stuff looks authentic. Brown is familiar with it and acted as technical director. I don't think they're really serious about that Angela Davis down for Supreme Court Justice. He had such a straight face I almost thought he was serious. Anyway, it helps them pass the time between takes. Release the first commercial and the buttons simultaneously in ten days. Introductory commercial released yesterday as directed. Good distributed. Our client has her "cabinet" out prostelytizing among the other actors. Not much else to do now that the shooting's over for a while, and it keeps them busy so I encourage it. Crime commercial released yesterday on schedule. Requests received for # more buttons. Between the five of them, they've even begun to make converts among the technical and security IF people. I think Cavil's trying to raise my level of consciousness. Are we creating a Frankenstein here? Release group picture for the each of our one-minute commercials with a thirty-second spot about the contest. Place hints in appropriate newspaper columns and have your Gold Edge Beer Salesmen casually pass on similar information to bar tenders. We want everybody in the country to should have the effect of encouraging betting. All major radio stations will carry telephone contests with similar clues. Dummy voting booths will be set up near every large polling place. Procedures for voting must be identical to those used in the real election. It will cost us another the real ballot and to have anything written in counted as a vote for us, but it will be well worth it. Also she will have to secretly change her make it hold up in court (the Supreme Court). We have less than a sponse. A memorial anthology in tribute to the father of modern American science fiction. Edited by Introduction by TtiiS book is a uokiu"' rnemc.,r ic:I ina !hi r tcor' oiot u-r . "pfCMiiiy fo' :hi'. vcbjou' oy P )ib Ancb a, )n i' .t.iC A;.ir"#. Abrod hia.' C:'"Tieat. , Thodora Fv Cc'j; vveii. Maok Raynokis. Ci'doicJ D 'b ivik, Geo'C" G' Fanitr;. rtvaidori' o'o aod Ta.-.jd.ai'L Thaoi.r-, f;acP an iritrad Jf tOfy tob-jtf lO' .loan CaaripbcM. t ' t  V. What are we going to do?! The President has just accepted a challenge to debate! What if they include us?! And admit we're a legitimate alternative? Not likely. Here's the next commercial; release it the day aifcr the debate. Wide angle shot of auditorium; pan slowly to platform where the President and the Democratic nominee are debating. They cannot be heard because the crowd is booing too loudly. Both men ignore the crowd entirely. The crowd grows violent and begins to throw things. Secret Service men draw their guns. Cut to series of other weapons in the audience. Brown jumps up on the left side of the stage, Cavil on the right. They gesture for order and the crowd quiets. Brown speaks. "Everyone has the right to say what he wants, even the people who barred us from this platform! Even the people who denied us the opportunity to confront them on the real issues of the campaign. Even the people who have been trying to keep us from talking to you, the people, by putting pressure on television station owners to drop our commercials!" Cavil speaks. "These men have a right to speak! Even though every word they say is put into their mouths by the rich and powerful men who are paying for their campaigns. Even though they won't tell you about the deals they've already made they have the right to speak! Everybody has that right! Not just those who agree with us! Everybody!" Saxon shouts, "Right!" Wild applause. Pan slowly past the Candidate to Superimpose words and voice-over: "It's not who you are but what you believe in that's important. Vote for the candidate nobody owns. Latest commercial released . on ing in our commercials just to study them. Papers in all major cities are carrying schedules of our commercials on the front page. This thing is really beginning to boom -- I'm worried. Start filming the thirty second spot. Assemble the whole group, in costumes and masks. Have the Candidate and the Four in the IF center of the group but not conspicuously so. Then all remove their masks and shout, "See you at the victory celebration!" You have two days to do this one. Plant hints in the columns that there'll be no unmasking unless we win the election. Hedge when the media asks you about it. Over # votes in the contest and we're ahead of both of them in the polls! The networks are demanding that we either show our candidate or get out of the race. What are we going to do? I can't stall them forever. Set up a press conference for the sixth, nationwide TV, prime time. Are you crazy?! We can't show her! What's going to happen with all those people who guessed wrong? I've had tlree phone calls from people telling me that they've bet a lot of money on the Old Man and it better be him or else -- and I have an unlisted number! We're liable to get killed right there at the press conference. It's easy for you to say 'give a press conference' when you're off hiding somewhere on your extended vacation. But we're the ones who'll have to face the music. I knew this thing was going to blow up in our faces! When the press gets a look at her we'll be the laughing stock of the industry. When the public sees her we'll be lucky if we don't get indicted for fraud and conspiracy! Treason! You've got to get us out of this!! and stand well back from the podium. The Candidate knows what to do. Everything is going it was for real. How did you manage to get the television cables cut during the confusion? And what would have happened if the rest of that dynamite had gone off? And for what???!!! So we didn't have to make the announcement? What good does it do us? What's going to happen tonight when she wins the election and has to make a victory speech? The losers are bound to call fraud. They might even get the election nullified! We could all go to jail! DO???!!! Stop it. I repeat; everything is going according to plan. Don't come to the victory party tonight; I don't even want to see you near campaign headquarters! Gp back to the estate and watch it all on television as soon as you give these instructions to the group. Everything is set. The group will come to the podium in a body as soon as we are mathematically assured of victory. The Four will be in the middle, the Candidate a little to the right. The house lights will go off and the assassination film will be shown. The TV people are already prepared for a film of some sort as part of the speech so they'll have no trouble carrying the whole thing. The film is pretty gruesome, even in black and white. When the house lights come on again, the whole group will repeat the following in unison: people! Have them rehearse it thoroughly. I have destroyed your memo, and the security guards I have permanently assigned to you will see to it that you do the same with this after you read it. I don't know when you figured it out and I must confess I did not anticipate your hiding the memos that passed between us. I congratulate you; it was a clever move and guarantees you your life. You will be kept under close house-arrest until my Inauguration. Thereafter you will be free to move about -- however, if you ever address me or refer to me as "Madame President" again, I will have you killed, whether I find the memos or not! You will be well taken care of. Do not try to escape. IF R ecently, quite a bit of attention on the part of academe has been devoted to attempting to define science fiction. Unfortunately, most of that effort has been spent in trying to discover how it is like other forms of fiction. By now, it should be obvious that such work is totally non-productive. The real task is to discover how science fiction differs from other literature. Certainly there must be some difference; at a time when most fiction seems to be having less and less appeal in the market, science fiction is booming. It alone seems to have engendered a large and enthusiastic fandom. And somehow it is capable of holding the interest of informed and intelligent readers even when its execution is crude and its plotting obvious. It would surely seem that its attraction lies not in its similarity to other fiction, but in its dissimilarity. Well, just how does science fiction differ from "mainstream"? Not in its interest in the future, apparently; despite the fact that most science fiction is laid in some future, many of the most admired works are laid in a present (not necessarily this one) or a past (again, not necessarily the standard-model). Piper's Paratime stories, for instance, take place largely in an alternate-world present or in milleaus vaguely like various periods of our history. It isn't any preoccupation with science either. The science in many of our classics is minimal, if not outright fantasy; we accept time-travel, alternate worlds, fasterthan-light travel and psionics as quickly as the hard laws of physics. It seems to me that the fundamental difference is that we accept change as the basis of our fiction. Other fiction is based upon our perception of the world as it is and as we believe it to have been. Most literature exists in the now of the writer, and the object is to present that eternal now as if it were the absolute guide to excellence. A writer of the "mainstream" is usually judged by the reality shown in his work. Fiction holds up a mirror to reality, according to one dictum. (Of course, whoever promulgated that had no conception of the specialized laws of fiction, which do not conform to the lack of order and justice in reality.) Even our historical fiction -- which must include the Western category -- is pretty, much a fiction of that eternal now. With rare exceptions, it follows our current preconceptions of mankind, with only a token gesture toward history. Thus, our current concept of romantic love -- only a few hundred years old -- is grafted onto the socalled age of chivalry, when the concepts of the people were not at all similar. Science fiction in some measure rejects that unchanging present order of things. It states in essence that the world of the story is different from the present (or the accepted past) of the reader. The difference may be in science, environment, attitude, or the basic nature of humanity. But it should be a real change in the accepted concepts of reality. The readers are those who can step out of their present frame and accept other frames of reference. Naturally, that requires more flexibility than many readers can show, so we have a rather small and specialized readership. The writers are also forced beyond the normal attitudes of authorship; inevitably, since such a special skill is required of them, they sometimes show less of other skills such as characterization. And the effect of our literature on those used to dealing only with an unchanging reality must be confusing, which is why attempts to relate science fiction to the other branches of literature are so unproductive. Incidentally, the idea of an essential change in the nature of reality does not rule out fantasy. Most of the older fantasy, of course, dealt with an accepted idea of the past -- myths of ghosts, werewolves, etc. But a literature of change has grown up in fantasy, also. Tolkien's work is an example, demanding a whole change in world-line, with its own history, races, and methodology. Such fantasy seems to be generally accepted by science fiction readers, however, unlike the older forms based on superstition. This isn't definition by function, but it does relate to it. It's definition by expectation on the part of the reader; he expects to find a science fiction story dealing with at least some essential change in the IF reality he knows. Most of the academic attempts to define science fiction that I have seen have been definition by label; they simply find some word or phrase that somehow relates to general literature, and then attempt to show that the label fits. This is somewhat like defining sulphur and gold as yellow elements; it may even be true, but the only use such label-finding has is in advancing the label-maker's status. , for Old, by David Ketterer (Anchor, #). The label here is "apocalyptic". It isn't too bad a label, in the sense it is used; much of science fiction can be squeezed into the box bearing that label. But so can a good deal of other fiction (and non-fiction). I quarrel with the spirit of the word, however; usually, apocolyptic literature has a serious intent of revelation -- whereas generally science fiction doesn't take its changes very seriously, but instead uses them to entertain. Also, of course, there is a residue of revelation implicit to the term -- a residue which persists, even though Ketterer makes it plain he does not mean it -- where science fiction merely presents, not expecting the reader to believe any of it beyond the period of reading the story. New Worlds for Old presents critical essays on a hodge-podge of works: Utopias, stories of Poe and Twain, Melville, Vonnegut, and Ursula LeGuin. Certainly there isn't even the beginning of broad enough an examination of science fiction as a whole to justify any generalizations. As usual in such works, the idea seems to be to grab up anything (particularly "acceptable" examples) that will reinforce the essential idea, rather than testing the supposition for exceptions. Also, so far as I can determine, there is little to be gained from the critical essays themselves. In examining LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, for instance, Ketterer seems totally unaware of one of the basic attractions of the novel. He never goes into the love between Genly Ai and Estravan,' though that is the underlying -- and extremely significant -- theme of much of the book. This is also an example of love so radically changed that it is unique; a love between humans that is not between man and man or woman and woman -- nor can it be considered heterosexual. It is love between human and human, beyond all normal encounters. Certainly some study of that must be made in any critical analysis of the novel, and its absence makes the entire critical approach of the book suspect. If I sound bitter and hostile to the idea of academic criticism it is only because of the examples I have seen in our field. A good critic with an extensive background in general literature can deepen both the understanding and delight of any literature, provided he approaches it with his own familiarity of the field and appreciation of it. C. S. Lewis made my reading of the medieval romances come back to my mind anew, and with deeper insights and greater joy. He might well have given us superb criticism of science fiction -- since he liked the field -- but unfortunately we have only small bits and casual interviews. A great pity. But even in the absence of such a critic, we can safely do without such books as that by Ketterer. nately, for far too long is Philip Wylie's The End of the teresting example of something seen too rarely -- a book which shows how the changes come about in more detail than it shows the changes themselves. It's a bitter book -- as it had to be, since Wylie's essential love of the best in humanity always had to be opposed to what he saw happening. It's a novel dealing with the decay of our civilization and the desperation of those who attempt to halt that ruin. Wylie shows this with the minimum of coincidences. He doesnt take the easy way out by having a great atomic holocaust, a sudden plague released by warring powers, or an alien invasion. He simply takes things which are already present in our culture and shows step-by-step how they lead to disaster -- a disaster that could be averted. And because he was a man who saw with extraordinary clarity and deep feeling (and saw much of this at least twenty years before anyone else seemed aware of it), his story has great intensity. It isn't great fiction; the plotting is sometimes minimal and the ending not clearly stated. But the events have a drama of their own that makes most of the so-called speculative fiction with its irrelevant "relevance" seem pretty tame. The disaster here is real, not a mere prop for words and mood. If you can still find a copy, get it. F rederik pohl, who once edited this magazine, is now selecting science fiction for Bantam Books. The first "Frederik Pohl Selection" is now available. It's Commune # A.D., by Mack Reynolds (#c). Reynolds has altered the basic reality of the world in one way, mostly; the economic structure. His world has a Universal Guaranteed Income which everyone gets automatically credited to him, and which is enough to make work unnecessary. Those who want to work and who can prove their ability are granted larger incomes. Those who want to pursue hobbies or simply loaf are free to do so. This is the same world Reynolds has used in a number of his stories, and it's a convincing one. The novel apparently fits into his series someIF where in the middle. It deals with a man who sets out -- at the government's bequest -- to investigate the strange communes of like-minded people that are springing up; there are communes for nature-freaks, artists, and most every other group. During the investigation, Swain decides that those who sent him need a little investigating themselves, and from there on the plot deepens. It may be the perfect world economically, but (surprise!) the basic nature of the people running it hasn't changed. It isn't a particularly strong or fresh novel to any who have read Reynolds' other works in this background. But it does throw considerable insight into the nature of the traveling cities and the attitudes of the people who travel in them. And it makes for generally good reading. Moderately recommended. O NE chapter of The Godwhale, by T. J. Bass (Ballantine, #), appeared in Galaxy magazine, but most of the novel will be new to Galaxy If reders. In it, the godwhale (Rorqual Maru) appears as only a part in this study of a world that has been completely changed. The men who built the whale-like cyborg have spent their energies in going out to the stars. Behind them, over a long span of years. Earth's major society has been forced by gross overpopulation to resort to a hive type of society, where the individual becomes lost in the complex of survival. Meantime, in the sea, men have developed a small -- but extremely complex -- outcast society where freedom still exists. This story tells of the struggle between the two societies and of separate struggles within them. The godwhale enters into all these struggles, playing a major part in the events. This is a novel of great inventiveness, and many of the creatures -- human, as well as nonhuman -- are fascinatingly drawn. Some of the early chapters seem a bit cold, but this eventually resolves into a story where the emotional conflict is about as far from cold as possible. The star seekers aren't forgotten, either. Throughout, there are increasing signs of their influence on the world that was left behind. And there's a clever mathematical formula to define what makes a habitable planet around any star. It fits very well and works out mathematically. But I'm afraid it depends somewhat on the units of measurement used, and I don't recommend taking it too seriously. Still, it makes for a nicely satisfactory ending. This is a complex and fascinating novel, and one I recommend as a fine example of what science fiction is all about. the World, by Suzy McKee Charnas (Ballantine, #). This novel has already received considerable attention from those who have seen advance copies, and the results are rather strange and confusing. Women readers seem to go "ape" over it, to varying degrees; I can't really see why, but they consider it their story. Charnas has postulated a worldafter-catastrophe, but not the typical one. A small band of survivors have been forced to make do in a world where most animals and food plants have died. They have also evolved a culture which has elements of some of the Attic-Greek ideas, but essentially is unique to itself. In it the women are despised creatures, good only for simple work and breeding; the men have developed purely "masculine" mystiques, and strange relationships among themselves in which ideological homesexuality -- similar to that in Athens -- plays a part, but only a part. Naturally, since women are only animals to be used in common, men don't normally know who sired them. The plot evolves out of the fact that one man does know who is his father. He bitterly resents the claim on him from this long-since lost father, and sets out to find him. What and where he finds him is a beautifully unexpected development. So is what we learn of the real place and culture of the women. It is not a "woman's book", so far as I can determine. Charnas is a new writer, but she's in excellent control of her story; she tells it mostly through the eyes of her male characters, and does so convincingly. There is no obvious anti-male or pro-female prejudice I can find in her telling, and absolutely none of the "female" writing style sometimes found in bad books. (Good writers are good writers, whether male or female, and Charnas is simply a good writer.) I recommend the book to readers of either sex -- but if some woman reader can tell me why she regards this as special to her sex. I'd be glad to hear the answer. and in discussing new offerings from Ballantine Books I'd like to mention that they are beginning a series of "Best of' books with one that's rather special. This is The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum (#), with a foreword by Isaac Asimov and an afterword by Robert Bloch, who knew Weinbaum. The eleven stories in the book really are the best of his work. And so far as I know, this is the first time "Valley of Dreams" has followed "Martian Odyssey" in any soft-cover publication; the two really make one story, with the real importance of the story coming from the infrequentlyreprinted sequel. Weinbaum, more than any other writer, helped to take our field out of the doldrums of the early thirties and into the beginnings of modem science fiction. Some of his plots IF are a bit obvious now, and his human characterizations a bit skimpy. But he introduced the idea that aliens weren't just bug-eyed monsters or slightly-altered humans. He showed that other forms of life must have changes in attitude and social structure, and he made his aliens unforgettable. His works are still a joy to read. F or those who follow Poul Anderson's stories of the future in which the winged Ythrians play a part, The Day of Their Return (Science Fiction Book Club, #) is an interesting addition. (There is a soft-cover edition from New American Library, but I haven't yet seen it and don't know the price.) It isn't the best Anderson, but it's still very good. This is a novel of cultures that have become wildly divergent on the world of Aeneas, and of a time when they must somehow learn to work together or be torn asunder by both inside and outside influences. Ivar, the hero, conspires against the Terran government of Aeneas, and is forced to flee his home culture. He then drifts -- or is forced -- through the other cultures, eventually with a bird-man from Ythri as a companion. The cultures are well drawn (though a bit too derivative from familiar ones), and there are some rather strange elements that seem to be superimposed over them. In the backfinal statement: TMi iB i Tits SB Perhaps the most significant novei of # from to order; send #c plus #c handling to UQ#-G, P.O. Box #, Bergenfleld, N.J. #I . ground is the Administrator from the Terran government; he's a fascinating example of Anderson's individuals, who know their business -- whether they seem to or not. And there's a seeming prophet who believes he's the resurrection of an ancient Being with godlike powers. (As it turns out, this Being dominates the novel rather far beyond his actual place in the story, I'm afraid.) It's a good adventure' story, with something added, and well worth the attractive price. Anderson is a writer who discovered the real values of science fiction long ago and never fails to give us new insights into the changes possible in our literature.  There once was a planet called Terra... B anning said, "Sit down. This was just forwarded from Washington. God knows how they got it. The poem, down at the bottom of the page." His favorite field man took the proffered newspaper before sinking onto the leather couch. "This limerick?" he asked. Banning didn't bother to answer him. It was the only verse on the page to which the paper had been folded. Rick Flavelle looked up again. "Pretty damn poor if you ask me," he said. Banning heaved his bulk around so he could fish a cigarette from a pack on his desk, reached for his desk lighter. "You're slipping, Richard," he said. "Read it again." Rick shrugged and read aloud this time. "The politico all called Fred "Was found irrevocably dead. "It seems in the night "An agile red sprite "Put an extra hole in his head." He looked up again, frowning this time. Maybe it was too early in the morning for him to be sharp. He didn't get it. He said, "I'm not particularly fond of limericks at best, but this seems worse than usual. I can't imagine an editor..." His superior said, "Look at the date." Rick Flavelle hissed between his teeth. "Zowie," he said. "The day before Donaldson was assassinated. Some coincidence, eh?" He wondered why it should be of interest to David Banning, or of the Department's central headquarters. Banning said, "The name of the writer." "Cassandra," Rick said. "A nom de plume, eh? Wasn't Cassandra a Greek? Somebody in mythology?" There was a heavy volume on the section head's desk, open. Banning pulled it before him and read, evidently skipping bits as he went. "Cassandra, a Trojan princess, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba... , One of the Gods gave her the power of prophecy, but to offset it, another ruled that she would never be believed... Warned the Trojans about the wooden horse the Greeks had left behind them, but they ignored her... When Troy fell she was made a slave by... well, that doesn't matter." Banning lifted a beefy hand and began ticking off on his fingers. "Secretary Donaldson's first name was Fredric, everybody called him Fred. He was most certainly a politician. He was found dead by his wife and one of the maids. He had been shot in the head during the night. Investigation proved that the assassin hadn't entered by any door. He had somehow climbed to the third floor of the Donaldson home and entered through a window. Which would make him agile. But that isn't all." UicK was looking at him, exJtpressionlessly. Banning shifted his bulk in his chair. "It hasn't been released to the press that Mike Corbin was a pinko. The mucky-mucks aren't interested in touching off another McCarthy era." Rick's eyebrows went up. "A party member?" "No. He belonged to some splinter group. An offshoot of the Trotskyites, or some such. But, by definition, he was a red. So that checks too." His fieldman looked down at the limerick again, and hissed softly. "Some coincidence. Printed the day before it took place." The other said wearily, "Check it out, Richard. The way things stand, Washington still isn't sure that Mike Corbin was working alone. It's a crying shame they didn't capture him alive. Anyway, Washington wants us to check it out." with the rolled up sleeves and loosened tie said. "Does this weekly rag look big enough to have a poetry editor? I'm the editor, period. What can I do for you?" Rick Flavelle showed him his buzzer. "Security, huh?" the other said, showing that new interest they always showed. "What brings you to Waterport?" Rick brought the newspaper from his pocket. He indicated the limerick. "Who wrote this?" The editor glanced at it, without reading. "How would I know?" The security agent looked at him. The editor grunted. "It's a filler. When you're making up the forms, you wind up with holes at the end of columns. You fill them with jokes, short news items that are timeless, children's bright sayings, verse, that sort of thing." Rick Flavelle said, "Well, where do you get these fillers?" "You can buy them wholesale through the agencies. Some items come in with publicity. The verse is usually submitted by local would-be poets. Gives them a bang to get published." He looked at the limerick again. "Cassandra," he said. "Seems to me I've seen that name before. Sends in stuff from time to time. If it's not too bad, or too long, I have the linotypists set it up and it kicks around in the filler galleys until we need it." "Do you know where I can get hold of this Cassandra?" The editor shook his head. "What do you want with her?" "How do you know it's a her?" Rick said. "I don't. Most poetry is sent in by women. Most of it stinks. Sometimes they get sore because you don't print their stuff and cancel their subscriptions. It's one of the hazards running a small town paper. It was bad enough before, but about six months ago some British poet came through on a lecture tour, and after he left the local women formed a poetry club. Now I get a few reams a week." "A poetry club," Rick said. "You wouldn't know the president or secretary, would you?" "I ought to," the other said. "She's my mother-in-law. You ought to see her stuff." R ick flavelle flicked his charm switch. "Mrs. Turner?" he beamed. "Your son-in-law, Mr. Semple, over on the Star, has referred me to you as the local authority on poetry." She beamed back, as conditioned. "Ernest is a dear boy, it's a shame those publishers won't let him print more of my modest efforts, Mr..." "Flavelle," Rick said. "Richard Flavelle. What I wanted to ask you about, Mrs. Turner, was the identity of the person who writes the Cassandra poems for the Star. I thought perhaps..." He let the sentence fall away. "Poems!" she snorted. "A poem, young man, is an artistic composition in verse. It has meter, it has rhythm, sometimes, though not always, it has rhyme. I can assure you, the so-called poems written by Jerry Frankie have none of these characteristics save rhyme. I will admit that..." "Jerry Frankie?" Rick said. She bit it off. "Over there," she pointed. "He lives over there." The door closed decisively. Over there was a rather vague direction. IF Rick Flavelle crossed the street, went up a few doors and saw a man raking leaves on a front lawn. Rick said, "I wonder if you could direct me to the home of Jerry Frankie?" It was around the comer and down a few houses. Rick Flavelle went around the comer and down the declared number of houses. Under the bell was a small name plate. Jerome Frankie. He rang, without response. At the house next door the woman told him that Mr. Frankie returned from work at fifteen minutes past five. He was a clerk in he department store downtown. It was almost five. Rick Flavelle went back to where he had left his car and drove it around and parked across the street from Frankie's house. The neighborhood was of yesteryear. The owners of these rather old fashioned wooden residences probably belonged in the five thousand a year bracket. No house was less than forty years old. It wasn't the atmosphere of political assassination. But what is the atmosphere of the breeding ground of assassins? From whence come the nihilists? The car that pulled up before the home of Jerome Frankie was five or six years old, but had been kept up beyond the usual. In fact, the finish was beginning to show signs of wear, brought on by over-much washing and polishing. The driver got out and carefully locked his vehicle, then turned and mounted the steps. He looked to be about fifty. A dithering old maid if Rick Flavelle had ever spotted one. Rick exhaled, picked up the copy of the Waterport Star from the seat beside him and left his own car. He followed the other, coming up from behind him even while Frankie was still unlocking the front door. Rick said, "Hello, Mr. Frankie, I..." The other looked over his shoulder with a start. "Oh dear, you scared me. I don't want to buy anything." "Fine," Rick said. "I don't want to sell anything." The other opened the door and stood in it, as though defiantly. "And I pay my bills at the end of the month. There is no need to dun me." Rick indicated the paper. "I wanted to talk to you about your Cassandra, uh, poems." "You do? Well..." Jerome Frankie opened the door wider. "Please come in. Lordy, I'm afraid the house is a mess. A frightful mess.' Middle-aged bachelor, you know." The house was far from a frightful mess. Rather it was as though unoccupied, so spotlessly did the aging department-store clerk polish it. "Could I offer you a nip of sherry? I'm afraid it's only domestic, you know." Rick thanked him, no. He came to the point. "Mr. Frankie, how long had you known Michael Corbin?" The other twitched. "Who? I thought you said..." "Mike Corbin." "I've never had the pleasure... Mike Corbin. Why, I heard about him on the television. He was the man who... See here, just who are you?" Rick brought forth the buzzer again, and his I.D. Card. He passed them to the other for examination. "Good heavens," Frankie said. "Security. How exciting." "Sure," Rick said. "I've been sent over from the Cincinnati office. Now about Mike Corbin." "But I have never even seen the man. Never heard of him until... until the Secretary of State was so foully slain." There had been nothing in the files on Corbin to indicate the assassin had ever been in Ohio. Rick said, "How long's it been since you were last in Washington, Mr. Frankie?" "Why, Lordy, I've never been out of Ohio in my life." Wild goose chase. Coincidence. Rick indicated the poem. "What were the circumstances under which you wrote this?" Frankie twitched as he took the paper. He recognized the limerick immediately, obviously. He giggled. "Oh yes, that. It's not really one of my better ones, you know. Sometimes I do really good ones." He giggled, archly. "The very best limericks are really quite unpublishable, don't you think?" "Yes," Rick said. "Look, where did you get this idea about Secretary Donaldson getting shot?" Frankie didn't get it. Rick Flavelle looked at him for a long moment. Finally he said, "Listen: "The politico all called Fred "Was found irrevocably dead. "It seems in the night "An agile red sprite "Put an extra hole in his head." Frankie said apologetically, "There are too many feet in the last line. I'll admit." Rick said, "How did you know Corbin was a red?" Frankie gaped at him. Inwardly, Rick Flavelle counted down. However, he couldn't think of anything else to ask the other. On the facS of it, Jerome Frankie didn't even know what the security operative was talking about. Rick Flavelle had drawn just about as blank a blank as he could have drawn. It had been a long drive up here. More for something to say, than anything else, Rick said, "Do you write many limericks with, uh, political and international connotations?" Jerry Frankie giggled. "Oh, I just started that line. I think you can be fiendishly clever in limericks. Mine are all nasty. I sign IF them Cassandra. Do you know who Cassandra was?" "Yes," Rick said. "Listen, do you have any more of them around?" "Why, I don't think so. I never keep copies. I send them in to the Star or sometimes to the Enquirer in Cincinnati. Sometimes they're printed and sometimes not. I've never made the Enquirer. I think this is the first of the limericks the Star' run but I've had several of my sonnets published. Would you like to see them?" Rick Flavelle said, "I suppose so." Frankie left to return shortly with two newspaper clippings. Both were poems of fourteen lines, and rhymed, though with effort. One was entitled Flowers and the other Daui.' Neither made much sense. Frankie said, apologetically again. "This is all I could find. I usually send a copy to my mother. She lives in Columbus with my sister." Rick Flavelle came to his feet. "No more limericks, eh?" "I'm afraid not. Except, of course, for those I've sent to the which they haven't printed yet. If they ever print them." "Well, good day, Mr. Frankie," Rick said. "Thanks for the cooperation." Frankie followed him to the door, worriedly. "But what was it you wanted?" he all but wailed. "Nevermind. Nothing." Rick told him. "It was a mistake." way, he passed within half a block of the building which housed the Star. He looked at his watch. He had plenty of time to get back to Cincinnati. On an impulse, he headed for the newspaper office. Dammit, his reputation had it that he was old man Banning's most thorough field man. He didn't particularly want the title, but he had it. The pretzel thin editor was in the process of rolling down his sleeves, obviously calling it a day, when Rick turned up again. "How'd you make out?" he asked. "Cassandra is an old maid, but male," Rick told him. "Name of Jerome Frankie." "Hell, I know him," the other said. He fished his spare pencils from his shirt pocket and tossed them to the desk. "Jerry Frankie. I didn't know he was the one who sent in the Cassandra fillers. I remember his mother. Psychic crackpot type. Used to try to get publicity for these seance deals." Rick said, "According to him he's sent in a few more limericks which you haven't published yet." "I probably filed them away in the wastepaper basket. Jokes make better fillers. Poems are usually too long." Rick Flavelle didn't know why, but he said, "If you didn't throw them away, where would they be?" The other scowled at him, for obvious reason. "I would have sent them down to be set up. They'd be in a filler galley." "Could we take a look?" The other closed his eyes in exaggerated disgust. "Jesus, is this what you hush-hush men spend your time doing? Come on. Never say Ernie Semple failed to cooperate with the witch hunters." Rick Flavelle didn't like the term and never had, in fact it churned him, but he remained patient. Ernie Semple led him down to the press room and over to some forms on a composing table. He pulled some metal trays from their racks. They were filled with clean slugs of type. "Can you read upside down and backward?" he said to Rick. Rick looked at him. "No. Can you?" "Yes," the other said. "However, I'll pull a proof for you. Here, take this." He handed Rick one of the galleys to carry and led the way to where there was ink, a roller, and scrap sheets of newsprint. He put the galley he was carrying down, inked the type, and pulled a proof. He handed it to Rick. "Start looking down that for verses signed Cassandra. I don't think you'll find any. By the way, I figured out why you wanted to see Jerry Frankie." Rick was scanning the galley proof which consisted largely of unbelievably poor jokes. He looked up momentarily, then returned to the list. "Oh, you did?" "Yep," the editor told him, inking the second tray of fillers. "Quite a coincidence, wasn't it? Jerry's limerick hit it right on the head." At the bottom of the ink-wet galley proof, Rick Flavelle spotted a limerick. It was signed, Cassandra. Number One in the Kremlin bragged His economy no longer lagged. But the folk who were hungry Got guns, bombs and sundry. And he should have zigged when he zagged. It didn't make much sense. In fact, it wasn't even as good as the first -- that last line didn't fit in with the others at all. Semple said, "Find one?" Rick said, "Yes. You mean to tell me you can't find better stuff than this to print?" The editor sighed. "I told you most of it stank. But local poets 'you'll always have with you. And you have to run a certain amount of their stuff to keep them, and their relatives, and their neighbors, and their shopmates, happy. Let's see it." On an impulse, Rick shook his head. He folded the galley proof and stuck it into his pocket. Ernie Semple's eyes inadvertently flickered down to the type in the galley, then quickly came back. Rick shook his head and brought IF the galley proof back from his pocket. He reached down and picked the lines of type from the metal tray, wrapped them in the newsprint, and returned the whole to his jacket pocket. Semple said, "Hey." Rick said, "Thanks for the cooperation, Mr. Semple. The department appreciates it." He turned to go, the other looking after him in disgust. was blazing with light. Obviously, the chief was still on deck. Rick Flavelle gave a quick knock with a single knuckle before pushing through the door. Banning looked up and said, "Don't you ever knock? Better still, why dbn't you get an okay from Janie before barging in?" His favorite field man said, "I just got back from Waterport. Saw the editor of the Star, finally located our poet. A jittering old jerk who writes rhymes so he can see his name in the paper. A complete blank." Banning grunted and fished a cigarette from the pack on the desk with a beefy paw. "That's what I thought you'd run into. Still..." He shifted his bulk, in way of a shrug. Rick Flavelle brought the galley proof and the lead slugs from his jacket pocket. "He'd sent several limericks in. Evidently, the editor threw most of them away. This one he had set iip to use as a filler." Rick put the things on the section head's desk and sat down, yawning. David Banning read, "Rueben: Did the cyclone hurt your bam any? Hiram: Don't know, we ain't found it yet." He scowled at Rick Flavelle. "What the hell is this?" Rick said, "Down at the bottom. The limerick signed Cassandra. This is a galley proof of fillers, mostly jokes." "Oh." The chiefs eyes scanned down. It was a long time before he looked up, his face empty. He said, flatly, "Where' ve you been the past couple of hours?" "Driving back from Waterport." "Evidently, you didn't have your car radio on. Number One. He was making a speech in Kharkov on the current near-famine. He's been hated in the Ukraine since the liquidation of the kulaks back in the early thirties." Rick Flavelle hissed through his teeth. "He's dead," Banning said. "The Ukraine is in full revolt. Frol Stolechnikov has taken over in Moscow. How long his coalition will last is anybody's guess." Rick breathed, "Zowie. I thought the guy was in like Flynn. That he'd last forever." Then the implications hit him. "But... hey... this limerick. It must have been written, well, at least a week or two ago." His chief was staring down at it. For the moment he didn't answer. When he did, it was to say, "The news commentators had it that when the riot got out of control, Number One's bodyguard tried to cover him while he attempted to take evasive action in getting back to his armored car." Rick said, so low as hardly to be heard, "But he should have zigged when he zagged." Banning shook his heavy head, as though to clear it. "Look, you saw this fellow. This Cassandra -- " "His name's Frankie. Jerome Frankie." "What does he do?" "He's a clerk in a department store. I -- " "Don't be dense, Richard. What does he do? How does he write these..." Rick Flavelle was shaking his head. "He doesn't do anything. He didn't know what I was talking about when I mentioned Mike Corbin. It simply never occurred to him that his limerick fitted exactly Secretary Donaldson's assassination." "He pulled the wool over your eyes!" "Jerry Frankie couldn't pull the wool over a sheepdog's eyes. I keep telling you -- he's an old maid who writes lousy poems to get the egoboo from seeing them printed in the local paper." Banning stared at him. "But he's hit it twice in a row! Once, yes. Wild coincidence. But twice, no!" The section chief jabbed out a hand toward his phone, but before he could pick it up it rang. He said into it, impatiently, "Yes, yes." He turned to Rick. "It's for you. From Waterport." Rick took it, mystified. "Waterport?" A voice said, "Mr. Flavelle? This is Ernie Semple. The Star." "Yes, of course. What..." "Look, after you left I found another one of those half-baked limericks of Jerry's. The linotypist had it. Hadn't set it up yet." There was a first edge of tightness in Rick Flavelle's belly. He said, "Just a minute." He reached over for the galley proof and turned it on its face, took up a pen from the chiefs desk set. He said, "Read it to me, Semple." After he had hung up, he reread what he had written and pushed it toward his superior. He said, "That was the editor of the Star. He located another of Frankie's limericks." His chief bug-eyed it. Read it again. And then again. "But this one doesn't make sense." Rick said, "No. Neither did the other two, until after it happened. Then they made plenty of sense." "But this last line. Whilst Gabriel tootled his horn. " "Yeah. I wonder if you're interpreting it the same way I am." They stared at each other. Cold fear filled the room.  IF and  Reii(ler A'ritr ind v,'ron(; Dear Editor, Since the Panshins' column lapsed in Fantastic, many s-f readers were hoping for some other avenue of intelligent s-f criticism. They have received mixed blessings in Reginald Bretnor's Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow (New York: Harper  Row, #) and David Ketterer's New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor PressDoubleday, #). Bretnor's volume is described as a "Discursive symposium"; what we get is a series of articles dealing with different aspects of science fiction. The articles vary in quality and interest. The best are Frederik Pohl's The Publishing of Science Fiction and Theodore Sturgeon's Science Fiction, Morals, and Religion. These two articles alone are worth the price of admission. The problem with a volume like this one is that one wishes for articles that this volume suggests but does not include. Where are Harlan Ellison, Gene Roddenberry, and David Gerrold on Sf and TV? Where is Roger Elwood on Anthologist and SF? Where is Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delaney on Language and SF? David Ketterer's book is presented as "among the first sustained critical examinations of science fiction." I wish this were so, we need it. But what we get instead is "scholarly" treatments of such writers of s-f as: Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Jack London. Sounds like one of those Freshman English volumes of "Essays on American Literature" doesn't it? Ketterer delivers a few snatches of solid s-f criticism when he examines Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. When Ketterer deals with these authors we get some fine insight and intelligent commentary. The problem is that Ketterer's book is largely a critique of American Literature: his treatments of contemporary s-f seem digressions rather than the true center of Ketterer's critical focus. We have here two volumes dealing with s-f: one of uneven quality, amid "scholarly" criticism. Neither volume is entirely satisfactory. Perhaps this might be a good time for Galaxy and If io initiate a column of s-f criticism. Theodore Sturgeon's fine column is good, but not enough; perhaps Sturgeon could become resident critic while Lester del Rey could increase his book reviews to include both magazines. For s-f to improve, there must be intelligent criticism. Mere book reviewing is not criticism. S-f needs feedback; I hope Galaxy and If choose to lead the way in this area. Very truly yours, George Kelley #-#th Street Niagara Falls, N.Y. # Dear Jim Baen, , It has been a long time since Tve written a letter to concerning editorial policies, but now that hands are changing maybe a humble reader will be heard. I think if you look at circulation figures you will see both f and Galaxy were at their highest when Fred Pohl was running things. In '# the circijlation figures dropped about # for both mags -- that was the year Fred stepped down. Since then, although I've still found Galaxy and If the best mags around, they have had a dead quality which leaves the reader with the idea that nobody cares. I like editorials, I like letter columns and it is great to see an editorreader relationship. It  means we are being listened to. That editors do care. I think you should take a few minutes and go back to The Pohl years ( read each issue -- as it was published! ed.) and have a look at the way he put the mag together. There was excitement then: you couldn't wait for the next copy. (Now I go get the next issue hoping that it will be better than the last -- and am usually disappointed.) The mags need a breath of life. What about serial type stories, like the Riverworld series or the Gree or Retief? I don't suggest reviving those but something along that line. Please, used to have a feel like it was put together to excite you, make you feel important, that you counted -- I don't know -- but there was charm there that got the mag the Hugo three times in a row. It didn't look as good as itdoes now, but the art work was five times better than what's been used lately. I hope I'm not boring you but look at a '# issue of for e.g. the June issue. There is an editorial, a Fandom article, a few pages of letters, plus an end-off summation by the editor, "And that ties most of our own loose ends this month. We're hoping..." etc. That kind of informality. We loved it then -- we'd love it now. And don't think I mean an Amazing-type format either. I don't like Amazing because of an almost snobby editorial feel and a cry-baby attitude. Sure, it's not the hottest thing around but it could sell better than it does. I'll even suggest a department for IF If. How about a reader column that devotes itself to, and only to, debates, etc. on the books and stories published in the field? A good science department is missing from Galaxy and a "coming next month" is really a great hook into the next issue. Well, with all that plus your own ideas on what an SF mag should be I hope for a return to the adventures of reading Tand look forward with great expectations to the June which I've heard is the first complete issue you've put together. All my best, Nicholas Grimshawe The column you suggest seems to me to fill precisely the role I envision for the new and revised) Hue and Cry. Nothing so restrictive as a format of course, but I do plan to print only those letters which have something to say about sf, and I intend to print a few of those each issue. Of course I can t print' em if you don't write' em...) If somebody wants to refer to a letter in a previous issue -- by all means! -- Baen Dear Ejler, There are a number of good women writers in the field of s-f. My only disappointment is that I'm not seeing enough from them. Joanna Russ is great, and so is Ursula K. LeGuin. Pamela Sargent is up and coming. Doris Piserchia's Mr. Justice has been mentioned for a Hugo nomination. Lisa Tuttle was among the new writers nominated for the Campbell Award last year. Kate Wilhelm, along with Lafferty and Wolfe, is one of the top three writers appearing regularly in Orbit. Sonya Dorman, Dvora Olmstead, Mildred Downey Broxon, Janet Fox, Josephine Saxton, Doris Pitkin Buck, Katherine MacLean, Christine F. Hensel, Vonda Mclntire, Betsy Curtis and Marion Zimmer Bradley, all had s-f stories or novels out in #. The trouble is they don't appear often enough. And writers such as Suzanna Haden Elgin, Susan K. Putney and P. A. Zoline may already be lost to the field. Plus, a number of women are using their initials, etc. What is this? The #th century? I'm not asking you to assume a bias for the works of the women who contribute manuscripts. I'm asking you to print this letter so that more writing comes in from women. As a group they appear to be doing better than the men currently writing s-f. Sincerely, John Robinson As did my predecessor, I plan to publish what I consider to be the best of those manuscripts submitted. Period. -- Baen The Publisher that has brdught you top-quality science fiction for more than # years... Proudly announces the beginning of an important new series of Classic Science Fiction -- giant, definitive collections by the greatest sf writers of all time. Each volume will be introduced by a distinguished author andor critic in the field. Introduction by Isaac Asimov "With one single story," Asimov says, "Weinbaum was instantly recognized as the world's best living science-fiction writer and at once almost every writer in the field tried to Imitate him Any collection of his stories remains a major event in science fiction." This Is the first paperback publication of all Weinbaum's most important storleson sale April (#). Watch for It! Ask for it! per order for handling, to Ballantine Cash Sales, P.O. Box #, Westminster, Maryland #. Please allow three weeks for delivery.) The Best of Fritz Leiber The Best of Frederik Pohl Introduction by Poul Anderson Introduction by Lester del Rey The Best of Henry Kuttner The Best of Cordwainer Smith Introduction by Ray Bradbury Introduction by J. J. Pierce... and many more exciting collections, soon available from Ballantine Books! An Editorial Appeal Commencing with the June issues, Galaxy and Worlds of If will begin to fully show the results of an entirely new editorial policy. For example, the combined author line-up for June reads like a Who's Who of the field: Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Alexei and Cory Panshin, Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, Mack Reynolds, Fred Saberhagen, James H. Schmitz, Robert Silverberg, Ted you'll agree. Check the contents-pages (themselves so changed as to be virtual new features) and you will find several additions. Galaxy: Forum, a platform for sf andor science notables who feel they have something important -- and interesting! -- to convey to the readership; Interface, an intermittent series of interviews cum thumbnail biographies by Ted Sturgeon (scheduled to begin in July with an interview of Roger Elwood); Showcase,, (also scheduled for July) a non-verbal feature -- a new piece of sf-art by an acknowledged master, which has as its only justification that its creator thinks it's something special. And of course Bookshelf, Directions and Galaxy Stars will continue to flourish as of yore -- more than yore, in fact. Worlds of If: The Alien Viewpoint, an insider's view of sf. Crusty, hard-bitten, cynical old Dick Geis (EditorPublisher of The Alien Critic) lays it on the line -- his opinions are not necessarily those of the management! Ars Gratia, much like Galaxy Showcase, but for Up-and-Comers; Future Perfect, next issue's goodies -- at least some of them; The Editors Page in June is devoted to my personal favorite among the many past editors of Worlds of If. In future, it will be what the name implies -- the editor's page. And, as with Galaxy, all the old features will remain in residence. But all of this takes money, a good deal of it -- and the profit motive remains an operant factor in the publishing industry. To over demonstrate that publishing the two best sf magazines in the world is an economically viable policy requires a significant increase in circulation figures. You can help -- and in the process receive at a significant discount # or # issues of the best sf published anywhere, weeks before it appears for public sale. Just fill in the coupon below. -- Baen The Foremost Publications in Science Fiction H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, #o tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now I Some Contributors Post and Prosont Poul Anderson Isaac Asimov James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. 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Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose numbers I have indicated below, and bill me )ust # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to take # additional books during the coming year and may resign anytime thereafter. Mr. Mrs. Miss n Address   Please print City State Zip The Science Fiction Book Ciub offers its ( #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant # in l volume of # award winning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. The # Annual World's Best S.F., ed. Donald A. Wollheim. # novellas, short stories: Anderson, Simak, others. Spec. Ed. #. Astounding. Harry Harrison. Ed. A memorial anthology for pioneer sci-fi editor John W. Campbell, with # original stbries by top writers. Pub. ed. # #. Hellstrom's Hive. By Frank Herbert. Insect menace! A hairraising sequel to the smash movie The Hellstrom Chronicle. Spec. Ed. #. Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. From Childhood's End author, dazzling, visionary novel of a self-contained world in space. Pub. ed. # #. 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Pub. ed. # in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada oniy. Canadian members wiii be serviced from Toronto. Offer siightiy different in Canada.  # IS-MI e Fiftz e Leiber Midnight By The Morphy Watch del Rey  Geis  Hoagland  Freff It's packed with pleasure and excitement... crammed with its own rewards. And its own definite risks. You might become hooked for life. You'll know why, once you've sam#-page anthology of # tales awarded the Hugo, speculaFrank Herbert, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Isaac Asimov's first novel in fifteen years. But you decide. Choose any # books on this page for just # and you're on your way to mind-bending membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. Here's how the Club works: When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your choice of # books for just # plus shipping and handling. If not absolutely fascinated, return them within ten days -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin. Things to Come, describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If you want both Selections, you need do nothing; they'll be shipped automatically. If you don't want a Selection, or prefer an Alternate, or no book at all, just fill with membership Science Fiction Book Club #si # j j Dept. FR-#, Garden City, New York # j I I have read your ad. Please accept me as a I I member in the Science Fiction Book Club. j Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose  numbers I have indicated below, and bill me  just # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to  take # additional books during the coming year  ! and may resign anytime thereafter. I I r r i i I Mr. I Mrs. I Miss I Please print  Address  L City. State Zip. J #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant # in I volume of # award-winning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. From Childhood's End author, dazzling, visionary novel of a self-contained world in space. Pub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. # #. Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed. Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels, Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # out the convenient form always provided, and return it by the date specified. We try to allow you at least ten days for making your decision. If you do not get the form in time to respond within # days, and receive unwanted books, return them at our expense. As a member you need take only # selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any time thereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. Most books cost only # plus shipping and handling. Occasionally, extra-value selections are slightly higher. So join now. Send no money. But mail the coupon today. #I . The Mastermind of Mars  A Fighting Man of Mars. Two of Edgar Rice Burroughs' exciting Martian novels in one volume. Illus. by Frank Frazetta. Spec. Ed. #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. #B. Ed. by Ben Bova. Eleven more great novellas, by Asimov, Simak, Pohl, others. Pub ed. # #. The Inferno. By Fred  Geoffrey Hoyle. A testy Scottish physicist takes charge... when a deadly quasar threatens the earth. Pub. ed. # #. The # Annual World's Best S.F., ed. Donald A. Wollheim. # novellas, short stories; Anderson, Simak, others. Spec. Ed. # Hellstrom's Hive. By Frank Herbert. Insect menace! A hair raising sequel to the smash movie The Hellstrom Chronicle. Spec. Ed. #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. #A. Ed. by Ben Bova. Eleven all-time great novellas chosen by Sci-Fi Writ ers of America. Pub. ed. # #. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. The master's first novel in # years... and worth the wait for a fabulous trip to the year #. Pub. ed. # #. Astounding. Harry Harrison, Ed. A memorial anthology for pioneer sci-fi editor John W. Campbell, with # original stories by top writers. Pub. ed. # The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. B. Spine-tingling Horror: Skull #. #, #. #; Psychotic # Adventures #; Insect Fear #; Legion of Charlies; Deviant Slice. C. Fables  Heresies: Tales From the Leather Nun; # Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary; Spasm; Grim Wit # (#) D. Graphic Novels: Grim Wit #; Image of the Beast # (.#); Psychotic Adventures #; Inner City Romance #; Dr. Atomic #; Harold Hedd #; Armorkins; Skull #; Two Fisted Zombies. E. 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Over # comix, a value of # for only #. JulyAugust # Vol. #, No. # Issue No. # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Dick Hoagland, Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Manager Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Chess is a game which abounds with examples of Mad Genius. Fritz, in this cryptic tale , explains why. It has always been man's dream to fly like a birdrealization of that dream might entail a few problems, of course... A story about an alien who wants to do us good guys a favor -- while allowing the bad guys to (as they always do) take care of themselves. An IF First. Jeffrey S. Hudson  Isaac Asiftiov # A Genuine Literary Curiosity, and very silly. Dr. A's first sf collaboration and Jeff Hudson's first story. Contrary to popular opinion, the returns are not all in concerning the existence of life on the Red Planet. One thing is sure, though -- if it is, it's tough. Lust, hate, fear, greed, anger are all dangerous emotions -- andihe very stuff of life! An IF First. If you've ever wondered why television programming is so incredibly bad, this story will provide insight. Continuing the misadventures of Carlos Suomi. He is not a brave man -- yet the fate of a planet hangs on the thread of his courage. Concerning the most significant technological development this decade. A breakthrough which will lead, quite automatically, to the urbanization of the Solar System. Torchships Now! -- a discussion in the form of a dialogue of the design parameters of a space-vehicle capable of continuous acceleration at one gravity. In which sf is divided into three parts. Other subjects discussed include porn sweatshops, gothic novels, and Barry Malzburg. Lester looks at series, sequals and various other literPublishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Unidom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Comversal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. pany, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Board, Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #c. #-Issue subscription: # Single copy: #p. #-Issue subscription in the in U.S., # elsewhere. United Kingdom: #p. American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! ASI I # # A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern science fiction. AS#I #    Tm Best r ton Galaxy Magazine A collection of science fiction that challenges the mind and captivates the imagination AN # # A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # # master of of Science Fiction Two men pursue the Rithian Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN# #  A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber f James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# # prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II # "Psycho." AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system pi all of man's earthly needs. AX# # 'i noon Ni wss r   N l ) S roRf s, or n; R )f R  v  f i #) K-O   K S ' )  .#)I  : f '.!). : SR This is a story of the future and the past. As for the present... B eing World's Chess Champion prime example enthroned right (crowned or uncrowned), puts a now. For more than ten years the more deadly and maddening strain present champion was clearly the on a man even than being President greatest chess player in the world, of the United States. We have a but during that time he exhibited such willful and seemingly self-destructive behavior -- refusing to enter crucial tournaments, quitting them for crankish reasons while holding a commanding lead, entertaining what many called a paranoid delusion that the whole world was plotting to keep him from reaching the top -- that many informed experts wrote him off as a contender for the highest honors. Even his staunchest supporters experienced agonizing doubts -- until he finally silenced his foes and supremely satisfied his friends by decisively winning the crucial and ultimate match on a fantastic polar island. Even minor players bitten by the world's-championship bug -- or the fantasy of it -- experience a bit of that terrible strain, occasionally in very strange and even eerie fashion... S tirf Ritter-Rebil was indulging in one of his numerous creative avocations -- wandering at random through his beloved downtown San Francisco with its sometimes dizzily slanting sidewalks, its elusive narrow courts and alleys, and its kaleidescope of ever-changing store and restaurant-fronts amongst the ones that persist as landmarks. To divert his gaze, there were interesting almond and black faces among the paler ones. There was the dangerous surge of traffic threatening to invade the humpy sidewalks. The sky was a careless silvery gray, like an expensive whore's mink coat covering bizarre garb or nakedness. There were even wisps of fog, that Ray Area benizon. There were bankers and hippies, con men and corporation men, queers of all varieties, beggars and sports, murderers and saints (at least in Ritter's freewheeling imagination). And there were certainly alluring girls aplenty in an astounding variety of packages -- and pretty girls are the essential spice in any really tasty ragout of people. In fact there may well have been Martians and time travelers. Ritter's ramble had taken on an even more dreamlike, whimsical and unpredictable quality than usual -- with an unflagging anticipation of mystery, surprise, and erotic or diamond-studded adventure around the very next corner. He frequently thought of himself by his middle name, Ritter, because he was a sporadically ardent chess player now in the midst of a sporad. In German "Ritter" means "knight," yet Germans do not call a knight a Ritter, but a springer, or jumper (for its crookedly hopping move), a matter for inexhaustible philological, historical, and socioracial speculation. Ritter was also a deeply devoted student of the history of chess, both in its serious and anecdotal aspects. He was a tall, white-haired man, rather thin, saved from the look of mere age by ravaged handsomeness, an altogether youthful though worldly and symathetically cynical curiosity in his gaze (when he wasn't daydreaming), and a definitely though unobtrusively theatrical carriage. He was more daydreamingly lost than usual on this particular ramble, though vividly aware of all sorts of floating, freakish, beautiful and grotesque novelties about him. Later he recollected that he must have been fairly near Portsmouth Square and not terribly far from the intersection of California and Montgomery. At all events, he was fascinatedly looking into the display window of a secondhand store he'd never recalled seeing before. It must be a new place, for he knew all the stores in the area, yet it had the dust and dinginess of an old place -- its owner must have moved in without refurbishing the premises or even cleaning them up. And it had a delightful range of items for sale, from genuine antiques to mod facsimiles of same. He noted in his first scanning glance, and with growing delight, a Civil War saber, a standard promotional replica of the starship Enterprise  a brand-new deck of tarots, an authentic shrunken head like a black globule of detritus from a giant's nostril, some fancy roach-clips, a silver lusterware creamer, a Sony tape recorder, a last year's whiskey jug in the form of a cable car, a scatter of Gene McCarthy and Nixon buttons, a single brass Lucas "King of the Road" headlamp from a Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, an electric toothbrush, a #'s radio, a last month's copy of the Phoenix , and three dime-a-dozen plastic chess sets. and then, suddenly, all these were wiped from his mind. Unnoticed were the distant foghorns, the complaining prowl of slowed traffic, the shards of human speech behind him mosiacked with the singsong chatter of Chinatown, the reflection in the plate glass of a girl in a grandmother dress selling flowers, and of opening umbrellas as drops of rain began to sprinkle from the mist. For every atom of Stirf RitterRebil's awareness was burningly concentrated on a small figure seeking anonymity among the randomly set-out chessmen of one of the plastic sets. It was a squat, tarnished silver chess pawn in the form of a barbarian warrior. Ritter knew it was a chess pawn -- and what's more, he knew to what fabulous historic set it belonged, because he had seen one of its mates in a rare police photograph given him by a Portuguese chess-playing acquaintance. He knew that he had quite without warning arrived at a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Heart pounding but face a suave mask, he drifted into the store's interior. In situations like this it was all-essential not to let the seller know what you were interested in or even that you were interested at all. IF The shadowy interior of the place lived up to its display window. There was the same piquant clutter of dusty memorables and among them several glass cases housing presumably choicer items, behind one of which stood a gaunt yet stocky elderly man whom Ritter sensed was the proprietor, but pretended not even to notice. But his mind was so concentrated on the tarnished silver pawn he must possess that it was a stupefying surprise when his automatically flitting gaze stopped at a second and even greater once-in-alifetime item in the glass case behind which the proprietor stood. It was a dingy, old-fashioned gold pocket watch with the hours not in Roman numerals as they should have been in so venerable a timepiece, but in the form of dull gold and silver chess pieces as depicted in game-diagrams. Attached to the watch by a bit of thread was a slim, hexagonal gold key. Ritter's mind almost froze with excitement. Here was the big brother of the skulking barbarian pawn. Here, its true value almost certainly unknown to its owner, was one of the supreme rarities of the world of chess-memorabilia. Here was no less than the gold watch Paul Morphy, meteorically shortreigned King of American chess, had been given by an adoring public in New York City on May #, #, after the triumphal tour of London and Paris which had proven him to be perhaps the greatest chess genius of all time. Ritter veered as if by lazy chance toward the case, his eyes resolutely fixed on a dull silver ankh at the opposite end from the chess watch. He paused like a sleepwalker across from. the proprietor after what seemed like a suitable interval and -- hoping the pounding of his heart wasn't audible -- made a desultory inquiry about the ankh. The proprietor replied in as casual a fashion, though getting the item out for his inspection. Ritter brooded over the silver love-cross for a bit, then shook his head and idly asked about another item and still another, working his insidious way toward the Morphy watch. The proprietor responded to his queries in a low, bored voice, though in each case dutifully getting the item out to show Ritter. He was a very old and completely bald man with a craggy Baltic cast to his features. He vaguely reminded Ritter of someone. Finally Ritter was asking about an old silver railroad watch next to the one he still refused to look at directly. Then he shifted to another old watch with a complicated face with tiny windows showing the month and the phases of the moon, on the other side of the one that was keeping his heart a-pound. His gambit worked. The proprietor at last dragged out the Morphy watch, saying softly, "Here is an odd old piece that might interest you. The case is solid gold. It threatens to catch your interest, does it not?" Ritter at last permitted himself a second devouring glance. It confirmed the first. Beyond shadow of a doubt this was the genuine relic that had haunted his thoughts for two thirds of a lifetime. What he said was "It's odd, all right. What are those funny little figures it has in place of hours?" "Chessmen," the other explained. "See, that's a King at six o'clock, a pawn at five, a Bishop at four, a Knight at three, a Rook at two, a Queen at one, another King at midnight, and then repeat, eleven to seven, around the dial." "Why midnight rather than noon?" Ritter asked stupidly. He knew why. The proprietor's wrinkled fingernail indicated a small window just above the center of the face. In it showed the letters P.M. "That's another rare feature," he explained. "I've handled very few watches that knew the difference between night and day." "Oh, and I suppose those squares on which the chessmen are placed and which go around the dial in two and a half circles make a sort of checkerboard?" "Chessboard," the other corrected. "Incidentally, there are exactly # squares, the right number." Ritter nodded. "I suppose you're asking a fortune for it," he remarked, as if making conversation. The other shrugged. "Only a thousand dollars." Ritter's heart skipped a beat. He had more than ten times that in his bank account. A trifle, considering the stake. But he bargained for the sake of appearances. At one point he argued, "But the watch doesn't, run, I suppose." "But it still has its hands," the old Balt with the hauntingly familiar face countered. "And it still has its works, as you can tell by the weight. They could be repaired, I imagine. A French movement. See, there's the hexagonal windingkey still with it." A price of seven hundred , dollars was finally agreed on. He paid out the fifty dollars he always carried with him and wrote a check for the remainder. After a call to his bank, it was accepted. The watch was packed in a small box in a nest of fluffy cotton. Ritter put it in a pocket of his jacket and buttoned the flap. He felt dazed. The Morphy watch, the watch Paul Morphy had kept his whole short life, despite his growing hatred of chess, the watch he had willed to his French admirer and favorite opponent Jules Arnous de Riviere, the watch that had then mysteriously disappeared, the watch of watches -- was his! He felt both weightless and dizzy as he moved toward the street. IF which blurred a little. As he was leaving he noticed in the window something he'd forgotten -- he wrote a check for fifty dollars for the silver barbarian pawn without bargaining. He was in the street, feeling glorious and very tired. Faces and umbrellas were alike blurs. Rain pattered on his face unnoticed, but there came a stab of anxiety. He held still and very carefully used his left hand to transfer the heavy little box -- and the pawn in a twist of paper -- to his trouser pocket, where he kept his left hand closed around them. Then he felt secure. He flagged down a cab and gave his home address. The passing scene began to come unblurred. He recognized Rimini's Italian Restaurant where his own chess game was now having a little renaissance after five years of foregoing tournament chess because he knew he was too old for it. A chesssmitten young cook there, indulged by the owner, had organized a tourney. The entrants were mostly young people. A tall, moody girl he thought of as the Czarina, who played a remarkable game, and a likeable, loudmouthed young Jewish lawyer he thought of as Rasputin, who played almost as good a game and talked a better one, both stood out. On impulse Ritter had entered the tournament because it was such a trifling one that it didn't really break his rule against playing serious' chess. And, his old skills reviving nicely, he had done well enough to have a firm grip on third place, right behind Rasputin and the Czarina. But now that he had the Morphy watch... Why the devil should he think that having the Morphy watch should improve his chess game? he asked himself sharply. It was as silly as faith in the power of the relics of saints. In his hand inside his left pocket the watch box vibrated eagerly, as if it contained a big live insect, a golden bee or beetle. But that, of course, was his imagination. Stirf Ritter-Rebil (a proper name, he always felt, for a chess player, since they specialize in weird ones, from Euwe to ZnoskoBorovsky, from Noteboom to DusChotimirski) lived in a one-room and bath, five blocks west of Union Square and packed with files, books and also paintings wherever the wall space allowed, of his dead wife and parents, and of his son. Now that he was older, he liked living with clues to all of his life in view. There was a fine view of the Pacific and the Golden Gate and their fogs to the west, over a sea of roofs. On the orderly cluttered tables were two fine chess sets with positions set up. Ritter cleared a space beside one of them and set in its center the box and packet. After a brief pause -- as if for propitiatory prayer, he told himself sardonically -- he gingerly took out the Morphy watch and centered it for inspection with the unwrapped silver pawn behind it. Then, wiping and adjusting his glasses and from time to time employing a large magnifying glass, he examined both treasures exhaustively. The outer edge of the dial was circled with a ring or wheel of # squares, # pale and # dark alternating, On the pale squares were the figures of chessmen indicating the hours, placed in the order the old Balt had described. The Black pieces went from midnight to five and were of silver set with tiny emeralds or bright jade, as his magnifying glass confirmed. The White pieces went from six to eleven and were of gold set with minute rubies or amythysts. He recalled that descriptions of the watch always mentioned the figures as being colored. Inside that came a second circle of # pale and dark squares. Finally, inside that , there was a two-thirds circle of # squares below the center of the dial. In the corresponding space above the center was the little window showing PM. The hands on the dial were stopped at # -- three minutes to midnight. With a paperknife he carefully pried open the hinged back of the watch, on which were floridly engraved the initials PM -- which he suddenly realized also stood for Paul Morphy. On the inner golden back covering the works was engraved "France HH" -- the old Balt was right again -- while scratched in very tiny -- he used his magnifier once more -- were a half dozen sets of numbers, most of the sevens having the French slash. Pawnbrokers' marks. Had Arnous de Riviere pawned the treasure? Or later European owners? Oh well, chess players were an impecunious lot. There was also a hole by which the watch could be wound with its hexagonal key. He carefully wound it but of course nothing happened. He closed the back and brooded on the dial. The # squares -- # plus # plus # -- made a fantastic circular board. One of the many variants of chess he had played once or twice was cylindrical. " Les echecs fantasques , " he quoted. "It's a cynical madman's allegory with its doddering monarch, vampire queen, gangster knights, double-faced bishops, ramming rooks and inane pawns, whose supreme ambition is to change their sex and share the dodderer's bed." With a sigh of regret he tore his gaze away from the watch and took up the pawn behind it. Here was a grim little fighter, he thought, bringing the tarnished silver figure close to his glasses. Naked longsword clasped against his chest, point down, iron skullcap low on IF forehead, face merciless as Death's. What did the golden legionaries look like? Then Ritter's expression grew grim too, as he decided to do something he'd had in mind ever since glimpsing the barbarian pawn in the window. Making a long arm, he slid out a file drawer and after flipping a few tabs drew out a folder marked "Death of Alekhine." The light was getting bad. He switched on a big desk lamp against the night. Soon he was studying a singularly empty photograph. It was of an unoccupied old armchair with a peg-in chess set open on one of the flat wooden arms. Behind the chess set stood a tiny figure. Bringing the magnifying glass once more into play, he confirmed what he had expected: that it was a precise mate to the barbarian pawn he had bought today. He glanced through another item from the folder -- an old letter on onionskin paper in a foreign script with cedillas under half the "C's" and tildas over half the "A's." It was from his Portuguese friend, explaining that the photo was a reproduction of one in the Lisbon police files. The photo was of the chair in which Alexander Alekhine had been found dead of a heart attack on the top floor of a cheap Lisbon rooming house in #. Alekhine had won the World's Chess Championship from Capablanca in #. He had held the world's record for the greatest number of games played simultaneously and blindfolded -- #. In # he was preparing for an official match with the Russian champion Botvinnik, although he had played chess for the Axis in World War II. Though at times close to psychosis, he was considered the profoundest who had ever lived. Had he also, Ritter asked himself, been one of the players to own the Morphy silver-and-gold chess set and the Morphy watch? He reached for another file folder labeled "Death of Steinitz." This time he found a brownish daguerreotype showing an empty, narrow, old-fashioned hospital bed with a chessboard and set on a small table beside it. Among the chess pieces, Ritter's magnifier located another one of the unmistakable barbarian pawns. Wilhelm Steinitz, called the Father of Modern Chess, who had held the world's championship for # years, until his defeat by Emmanuel Lasker in #. Steinitz, who had had two psychotic episodes and been hospitalized for them in the last years of his life, during the second of which he had believed he could move the chess pieces by electricity and challenged God to a match, offering God the odds of Pawn and Move. It was after the second episode that the daguerreotype had been taken which Ritter had acquired many years ago from the aged Emmanuel Lasker. Ritter leaned back wearily from the table, took off his glasses and knuckled his tired eyes. It was later than he'd imagined. He thought about Paul Morphy retiring from chess at the age of #I after beating every important player in the world and issuing a challenge, never accepted, to take on any master at the odds of Pawn and Move. After that contemptuous gesture in # he had brooded for # years, mostly a recluse in his family home in New Orleans, emerging only fastidiously dressed and be-caped for an afternoon promenade and regular attendance at the opera. He suffered paranoid episodes during which he believed his relatives were trying to steal his fortune and, of all things, his clothes. And he never spoke of chess or played it, except for an occasional game with his friend Maurian at the odds of Knight and Move. Twenty-five years of brooding in solitude without the solace of playing chess, but with the Morphy chess set and the Morphy watch in the same room, testimonials to his world mastery. Ritter wondered if those circumstances -- with Morphy constantly thinking of chess, he felt sure -- were not ideal for the transmission of the vibrations of thought and feeling into inanimate objects, in this case the golden Morphy set and watch. Material objects intangibly vibrating with # years of the greatest chess thought and then by strange chance (chance alone?) falling into the hands of two other periodically psychotic chess champions, as the photographs of the pawns hinted. An absurd fancy, Ritter told himself. And yet one to the pursuit of which he had devoted no small part of his life. And now the richly vibrant objects were in his hands. What would be the effect of that on his game? But to speculate in that direction was doubly absurd. A wave of tiredness went through him. It was close to midnight. He heated a small supper for himself, consumed it, drew the heavy window drapes tight, and undressed. He turned back the cover of the big couch next to the table, switched off the light, and inserted himself into bed. It was Ritter's trick to put himself to sleep by playing through a chess opening in his thoughts. Like any talented player, he could readily contest one blindfold game, though he could not quite visualize the entire board and often had to count moves square by square, especially with the Bishops. He selected Breyer's Gamit, an old favorite of his. He made a half dozen moves. IF Then suddenly the board was brightly illuminated in his mind, as if a light had been turned on there. He had to stare around to assure himself that the room was still dark as pitch. There was only the bright board inside his head. His sense of awe was lost in luxuriant delight. He moved the mental pieces rapidly, yet saw deep into the possibilities of each position. Far in the background he heard a church clock on Franklin boom out the dozen strokes of midnight. After a short while he announced mate in five by White. Black studied the position for perhaps a minute, then resigned. Lying flat on his back he took several deep breaths. Never before blindfold game -- or game with sight even. That it was a game with himself didn't seem to matter -- his personality had split neatly into two players. He studied the final position for a last time, returned the pieces to their starting positions in his head, and rested a bit before beginning another game. It was then he heard the ticking, a nervous sound five times as fast as the distant clock had knelled. He lifted his wristwatch to his ear. Yes, it was ticking rapidly too, but this was another ticking, louder. He sat up silently in bed, leaned over the table, switched on the light. T he Morphy watch. That was where the louder ticks were coming from. The hands stood at twelve ten and thtf small window showed AM. For a long while he held that position -- mute, motionless, aghast, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. Let's see, Edgar Allan Poe had died when Morphy was # years old and beating his uncle, Ernest Morphy, then chess king of New Orleans. It seemed impossible that a stopped watch with works well over one hundred years old should begin to run. Doubly impossible that it should begin to run at approximately the right time -- his wrist watch and the Morphy watch were no more than a minute apart. Yet the works might be in better shape than either he or the old Balt had guessed; watches did capriciously start and stop running. Coincidences were only coincidences. Yet he felt profoundly uneasy. He pinched himself and went through the other childish tests. He said aloud, "I am Stirf RitterRebil, an old man who lives in San Francisco and plays chess, and who yesterday discovered an unusual curio. But really, everything is perfectly normal..." Nevertheless, he suddenly got the feeling of "A man-eating lion is aprowl." It was the childish form terror still took for him on rare occasions. For a minute or so everything seemed too still, despite the ticking. The stirring of the heavy drapes at the window gave him a shiver, and the walls seemed thin, their protective power nil. Gradually the sense of a killer lion moving outside them faded and his nerves calmed. He switched off the light, the bright mental board returned, and the ticking became reassuring rather, than otherwise. He began another game with himself, playing for Black the Classical Defense to the Ruy Lopez, another of his favorites. This game proceeded as brilliantly and vividly as the first. There was the sense of a slim, man-shaped glow standing beside the bright board in the mental dark. After a while the shape grew amorphous and less bright; then split into three. However, it bothered him little, and when he at last announced mate in three for Black, he felt great satisfaction and profound fatigue. Next day he was in exceptionally good spirits. Sunlight banished all night's terrors as he went about his ordinary business and writing chores. From time to time he reassured himself that he could still visualize a mental chessboard very clearly, and he thought now and again about the historical chess mystery he was in the midst of solving. The ticking of the Morphy watch carried an exciting, eager note. Toward the end of the afternoon he realized he was keenly anticipating visiting Rimini's to show off his new-found skill. He got out an old gold watch chain and fob, snapped it to the Morphy watch, which he carefully wound again, pocketed them securely in his vest, and set out for Rimini's. It was a grand day -- cool, brightly sunlit and a little windy. His steps were brisk. He wasn't thinking of all the strange happenings but of chess . It's been said that a man can lose his wife one day and forget her that night, playing chess . Rimini's was a good, dark, garlic-smelling restaurant with an annex devoted to drinks, substantial free pasta appetizers and, for the nonce, chess. As he drifted into the long L-shaped room, Ritter became pleasantly aware of the row of boards, chessmen, and the intent, mostly young, faces bent above them. Then Rasputin was grinning at him calculatedly and yapping at him cheerfully. They were due to play their tournament game. They checked out a set and were soon at it. Beside them the Czarina also contested a crucial game, her moody face askew almost as if her neck were broken, her bent wrists near her chin, her long fingers pointing rapidly at her pieces as she calculated combinations, like a sorceress putting a spell on them. Ritter was aware of her, but only peripherally. For last night's bright IF Three great books by Stanisfaw Lem and four more of the best in European Science Fiction. 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Please send me the following books: I (# ea.); # (# ea.); # (# ea.); # (# ea.); # (# ea.); # (# ea.); # (# ea.). Postage paid. Enclosed is my check for  IF Name. Address City State  Zip (Please add sales tax where applicable.) mental board had returned, only now it was superimposed on the actual board before him. Complex combinations sprang to mind effortlessly. He beat Rasputin like a child. The Czarina caught the win from the corner of her eye and growled faintly in approval. She was winning her own game; Ritter beating Rasputin bumped her into first place. Rasputin was silent for once. A youngish man with a black mustache was sharply inspecting Ritter's win. He was the California state champion, Martinez, who had recently played a simultaneous at Rimini's, winning fifteen games, losing none, drawing only with the Czarina. He now suggested a casual game to Ritter, who nodded somewhat abstractedly. They contested two very hairy games -- a Sicilian Defense by Martinez in which Ritter advanced all his pawns in front of his castled King in a wild-looking attack, and a Ruy Lopez by Martinez that Ritter answered with the Classical Defense, going to great lengths to preserve his powerful King's Bishop. The mental board stayed superimposed, and it almost seemed to Ritter that there was a small faint halo over the piece he must next move or capture. To his mild astonishment he won both games. A small group of chess-playing onlookers had gathered around their board. Martinez was looking at him speculatively, as if to ask, "Now just where did you spring from, old man, with your power game? I don't recall ever hearing of you." Ritter's contentment would have been complete, except that among the kibitzers, toward the back, there was a slim young man whose face was always shadowed when Ritter glimpsed it. Ritter saw him in three different places, though never in movement and never for more than an instant. Somehow he seemed one onlooker too many. This disturbed Ritter obscurely, and his face had a thoughtful, abstracted expression when he finally quit Rimini's for the faintly drizzling evening streets. After a block he looked around, but so far as he could tell, he wasn't being followed. This time he walked the whole way to his apartment, passing several landmarks of Dashiell Hammett, Sam Spade, and The Maltese Falcon. Gradually, under the benizon of the foggy droplets, his mood changed to one of exaltation. He had just now played some beautiful chess, he was in the midst of an amazing historic chess mystery he'd always yearned to penetrate, and somehow the Morphy watch was working for him -- he could actually hear its mu filed ticking in the street, coming up frorp his waist to his ear. Tonight his room was a most welcome retreat, his place, like an extension of his mind. He fed himself. Then he reviewed, with a Sherlock IF Holmes smile, what he found himself calling "Th? Curious Case of the Morphy Timepiece." He wished he had a Dr. Watson to hear him expound. First, the appearance of the watch after Morphy returned to New York on the Persia in #. Over paranoid years Morphy had imbued it with psychic energy and vast chessic wisdom. Or else -- mark this. Doctor -- he had set up the conditions whereby subsequent owners of the watch would think he had done such, for the supernatural is not our bailiwick, Watson. Next (after de Riviere) great Steinitz had come into possession of it and challenged God and died mad. Then, after a gap, paranoid Alekhine had owned it and devised phian strategies of attack, and died all alone after a thousand treacheries in a miserable Lisbon flat with a peg-in chess set and the telltale barbarian pawn next to his corpse. Finally after a hiatus of almost thirty years (where had the watch and set been then? Who'd had their custody? Who was the old Balt?) the timepiece and a pawn had come into his own possession. A unique case, Doctor. There isn't even a parallel in Prague in #. The nighted fog pressed against the windowpane and now and again a little rain pattered. San Francisco was a London City and had its own resident great detective. One of Dashiell Hammett's hobbies had been chess, even though there was no record of Spade having played the game. From time to time Ritter studied the Morphy watch as it glowed and ticked on the table space he'd cleared. PM once mpre, he noted. The time: White Queen, ruby glittering, past Black King, microscopically emerald studded -- I mean five minutes past midnight, Doctor. The witching hour, as the superstitiously-minded would have it. But to bed, to bed, Watson. We have much to do tomorrow -- and, paradoxically, tonight. Seriously, Ritter was glad when the golden glow winked out on the watch face, though the strident ticking kept on, and he wriggled himself into his couch-bed and arranged himself for thought. The mental board flashed on once more and he began to play. First he reviewed all the best games he'd ever played in his life -- there weren't very many -- discovering variations he'd never dreamed of before. Then he played through all his favorite games in the history of chess, from MacDonnell-La Bourdonnais to Fischer-Spasski, not forgetting Steinitz-Zukertort and AlekhineBogolyubov. They were richer masterpieces than ever before -- the mental board saw very deep. Finally he split his mind again and challenged himself to an eight-game blindfold match, Black against White. Against all expectation. Black won with three wins, two losses, and three draws. But the night was not all imaginative and ratiocinative delight. Twice there came periods of eerie silence, which the ticking of the watch in the dark made only more complete, and two spells of the man-eating lion a-prowl that raised his hair at the roots. Once again there loomed the slim, faint, manshaped glow beside the mental board and he wouldn't go away. Worse, he was joined by two other man-shaped glows, one short and stocky, with a limp, the other fairly tall, stocky too, and restless. These inner intruders bothered Ritter increasingly -- who were they? And wasn't there beginning to be a faint fourth? He recalled the slim young elusive watcher with shadowed face of his games with Martinez and wondered if there was a connection. Disturbing stuff -- and most disturbing of all, the apprehension that his mind might be racked apart and fragmented abroad with all its machine-gun thinking, that it already extended by chessic veins from one chess-playing planet to another, to the ends of the universe. He was profoundly glad when toward the end of his self-match, his brain began to dull and slow. His last memory was of an attempt to invent a game to be played on the circular board on the watch dial. He thought he was succeeding as his mind at last went spiraling off into unconsciousness. Next day he awoke restless, scratchy, and eager -- and with the feeling that the three or four dim figures had stood around his couch all night vibrating'like strobe lights to the rhythm of the Morphy watch. Coffee heightened his alert nervousness. He rapidly dressed, snapped the Morphy watch to its chain and fob, pocketed the silver pawn, and went out to hunt down the store where he'd purchased the two items. In a sense he never found it, though he tramped and minutely scanned Montgomery, Kearny, Grant, Stockton, Clay, Sacramento, California, Pine, Bush, and all the rest. What he did find at long last was a store window with a grotesque pattern of dust on it that he was certain was identical with that on the window through which he had first glimpsed the barbarian Pawn day before yesterday. Only now the display space behind the window was empty and the whole store too, except for a tall, lanky Black with a fabulous Afro hair-do, sweeping up. Ritter struck up a conversation with the man as he worked, and slowly winning his confidence, discovered that he was one of three partners opening a store there that would be stocked solely with African imports. Finally, after the Black had fetched a great steaming pail of soapy water and a long-handled roller mop and begun to efface forever the map of dust by which IF Ritter had identified the place, the man at last grew confidential. "Yeah," he said, "there was a queer old character had a secondhand store here until yesterday that had every crazy thing you could dig for sale, some junk, some real fancy. Then he cleared everything out into two big trucks in a great rush, with me breathing down his neck every minute because he'd been supposed to do it the day before. "Oh, but he was a fabulous cat, though," the Black went on with a reminiscent grin as he sloshed away the last peninsulas and archipelagos of the dust map. "One time he said to me, 'Excuse me while I rest,' and -- you're not going to believe this -- he went into a corner and stood on his head. I'm telling you he did, man. I'd like to bust a gut. I thought he'd have a stroke -- and he did get a bit lavender in the face -- but after three minutes exact -- I timed him -- he flipped back onto his feet neat as you could ask and went on with his work twice as fast as before, supervising his carriers out of their skulls. Wow, that was an event." Ritter departed without comment. He had got the final clue he'd been seeking to the identity of the old Balt and likewise the fourth and most shadowy form that had begun to haunt his mental chessboard. Casually standing on his head, saying "It threatens to catch your interest" -- why, it had to be Aaron Nimzovich, most hyper-eccentric player of them all and Father of Hypermodern Chess, who had been Alekhine's most dangerous but ever-evaded challenger. Why, the old Balt had even looked exactly like an aged Nimzovich -- hence Ritter's constant sense of a facial familiarity. Of course, Nimzovich had supposedly died in the #'s in his home city of Riga in the U.S.S.R., but what were life and breath to the forces with which Ritter was now embroiled? It seemed to him that there were four dim figures stalking him relentlessly as lions right now in the Chinatown crowds, while despite the noise he could hear and feel the ticking of the Morphy watch at his waist. He tied to the Danish Kitchen at the St. Francis Hotel and consumed cup on cup of good coffee and two orders of Eggs Benedict, and had his mental chessboard flashing on and off in his mind like a strobe light, and wondered if he shouldn't hurl the Morphy watch into the Bay to be rid of the influence racking his mind apart and destroying his sense of reality. But then with the approach of evening, the urge toward chess gripped him more and more imperiously and he headed once again for Rimini's. Rasputin and the Czarina were there and also Martinez again, and with the last a distinguished silverhaired man whom Martinez introduced as the South American international master, Pontebello, suggesting that he and Ritter have a quick game. The board glowed again with the superimposed mental one, the halos were there once more, and Ritter won as if against a tyro. At that, chess fever seized him entirely and he suggested he immediately play four simultaneous blindfold games with the two masters and the Czarina and Rasputin, Pontebello acting also as referee. There were incredulous looks aplenty at that, but he had won those two games from Martinez and now the one from Pontebello, so arrangements were quickly made, Ritter insisting on an actual blindfold. All the other players crowded around to observe. The simul began. There were now four mental boards glowing in Ritter's mind. It did not matter -- now -- that there were four dim forms with them, one by each. Ritter played with a practiced brilliance, combinations bubbled, he called out his moves crisply and unerringly. And so he beat the Czarina and Rasputin quickly. Pontebello took a little longer, and he drew with Martinez by perpetual check. There was silence as he took off the blindfold to scan a circle of astonished faces and four shadowed ones behind them. He felt the joy of absolute chess mastery. The only sound he heard was the ticking,. thunderous to him, of the Morphy watch. Pontebello was first to speak. To Ritter, "Do you realize, master, what you've just done?" To Martinez, "Have you the scores of all four games?" To Ritter again, "Excuse me, l)ut you look pale, as if you've just seen a ghost." "Four," Ritter corrected quietly. "Those of Morphy, Steinitz, Alekhine, and Nimzovich." "Under the circumstances, most appropriate," commented Pontebello, while Ritter sought out again the four shadowed faces in the background. They were still there, though they had shifted their positions and withdrawn a little into the varied darknesses of Rimini's. Amid talk of scheduling another blindfold exhibition and writing a multiple-signed letter describing tonight's simul to the U.S. Chess Federation -- not to mention Pontebello's searching queries as to Ritter's chess career -- he tore himself away and made for home through the dark streets, certain that four shadowy figures stalked behind him. The call of the mental chess in his own room was not to be denied. Ritter forgot no moment of that night, for he did not sleep at all. The glowing board in his mind was an unquenchable beacon, an alldemanding mandala. He replayed all the important games of history, finding new moves. He contested two matches with himself, then one IF each with Morphy, Steinitz, Alekhine and Nimzovich, winning the first two, drawing the third, and losing the last by a half point. Nimzovich was the only one to speak, saying, "I am both dead and alive, as I'm sure you know. Please don't smoke, or threaten to." He stacked eight mental boards and, played two games of threedimensional chess. Black winning both. He traveled to the ends of the universe, finding chess everywhere he went, and contesting a long game, more complex than #-D chess, on which the fate of the universe depended. He drew it. And all through the long night the four were with him in the room and the man-eating lion stared in through the window with blackand-white checkered mask and silver mane. While the Morphy watch ticked like a death-march drum. All figures vanished when the dawn came creeping, though the mental board stayed bright and busy into full daylight and showed no signs of vanishing ever. Ritter felt overpoweringly tired, his mind racked to atoms, on the verge of death. But he knew what he had to do. He got a small box and packed into it, in cotton wool, the silver barbarian Pawn, the old photograph and daguerrotype, and a piece of paper on which he scribbled only: Morphy, #-# de Riviere, # ? Steinitz, ? # Alekhine, ? # Nimzovich, # now Ritter-Rebil, # days Then he packed the watch in the box too, it stopped ticking, its hands were still at last, and in Ritter's mind the mental board winked out. He took one last devouring gaze at the grotesque, glittering dial. Then he shut the box, wrapped and sealed and corded it, boldly wrote on it in black ink "Chess Champion of the World" and added the proper address. He took it to the post office on Van Ness and sent it off by registered mail. Then he went home and slept like the dead. R itter never received a response. But he never got the box back either. Sometimes he wonders if the subsequent strange events in the Champion's life might have had anything to do with the gift. And on even rarer occasions he wonders what would have happened if he had faced the challenge of death and let his mind be racked to bits, if that was what was to happen. But on the whole he is content. Questions from Martinez and the others he has put off with purposefully vague remarks. He still plays chess at Rimini's. Once he won another game from Martinez, when the latter was contesting a simul against twenty-three players. The greatest collection of science fiction classics every published! Rare masterpieces -- collector's items -- long out of print -- now available in fine, permanent editions! I I i I i   jy L M J L A Selected by Sam Moskowitz, world's leading science fiction historian Landmark works of the last three centures -- remarkable novels and stories of speculation, prophecy, fantasy and high adventure that probed the unknown, penetrated the unseen, and often predicted the future. Now reprinted, with important new introductory material by such leading authorities as Lester Del Ray, L. Sprague de Just check the books you want, fill in the order form tear out and mail this entire ad. The only science fiction work by the creator of the Oz series.  Cloth, #.  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The body, which floated upright, rocked gently on stray currents, performing a strange aerial shuffle. And at its waist a peasized crimson light blinked on and off, on and off, its radiance gradually fading under a thickening coat of ice. air police Sergeant Robert rV Hasson felt more exhausted and edgy than he would have done after an eight-hour crosswind patrol. He had been in the headquarters block since lunchtime, dictating and signing reports, completing forms, trying to wrest from the cashier's office the expenses which had been due to him two months earlier. And then, just as he was about to go home in disgusjt, he had been summoned to Captain Nunn's office for yet another confrontation over the Wellwyn Angels case. The four on remand -- Joe Sullivan, Flick Bugatti, Denny Johnston and Toddy Thoms -- were sitting together at one side of the office, still wearing their flying gear. "I'll tell you what disturbs me most about this whole affair," Bunny Ormerod, the senior barrister, was saying with practiced concern. "It is the utter indifference of the police. It is the callousness with which the tragic death of a child is accepted by the arresting officers." Ormerod moved closer to the four Angels, protectively, identifying with them. "One would think it was an everyday occurrence." Hasson shrugged. "It is, practically." Ormerod allowed his jaw to sag and turned so that the brooch recorder on his silk blouse was pointing straight at Hasson. "Would you care to repeat that statement?" Hasson stared directly into the recorder's watchful iris. "Practically every day, or every night, some moron straps on a CG harness, goes flying around at five or six hundred kilometers an hour, thinking he's Superman, and runs into a pylon or a towerblock. And you're dead right -- I don't give a damn when they smear themselves." Hasson could see Nunn becoming agitated but he pressed on doggedly. "It's only when they smash into other people that I get worked up. And. then I go after them." "You hunt them down." "That's what I do." "The way you hunted down these children." Hasson examined the Angels coldly. "I don't see any children. The youngest in that gang is sixteen." Ormerod directed a compassionate smile toward the four black-clad Angels. "We live in a complex and difficult world, Sergeant. Sixteen years isn't a very long time for a youngster to get to know his way around it." "Balls," Hasson commented. He looked at the Angels again and pointed at a heavy-set, bearded youth who was sitting behind the others. "You -- Toddy -- come over here." Toddy's eyes shuttled briefly. "What for?" "I want to show Mr. Ormerod your badges." "Naw. Don't want to," Toddy said smugly. "Sides, I like it better over here." Hasson sighed, walkedto the group, caught hold of Toddy's lapel and walked back to Ormerod as if he was holding nothing but the piece of simulated leather. Behind him he heard frantic swearing and the sound of chairs falling over as Toddy was dragged through the protective screen of his companions. The opportunity to express his feelings in action, no matter how limited, gave Hasson a therapeutic satisfaction. Nunn half rose to his feet. "What do you think you're doing, Sergeant?" Hasson ignored him, addressing himself to Ormerod. "See this badge? The big 'F with wings on it? Do you know what it means?" "I'm more interested in what IF your extraordinary behaviour means' Oneof Ormerod's hands was purposely, but with every appearance of accident, blocking his recorder's field of view. Hasson knew this was because of recent legislation under which the courts refused to consider any recorded evidence unless the entire spool was presented -- and Ormerod did not want a shot of the badge. "Have a look at it." Hasson repeated his description of the badge for the benefit of the soundtrack. "It means that this quote child unquote has had sexual intercourse in free fall. And he's proud .of it. Aren't you, Toddy?" "Mister Ormerod?" Toddy's eyes were fixed pleadingly on the barrister's face. "For your own good, Sergeant, I think you should let go of my client," Ormerod said. His slim hand was still hovering in front of the recorder. "Certainly." Hasson snatched the recorder, plucking a hole in Ormerod's blouse as he did so, and held the little instrument in front of the Angel's array of badges. After a moment he pushed Toddy away from him and gave the recorder back to Ormerod with a flourish of mockcourtesy. "That was a mistake, Hasson." Ormerod's aristocratic features had begun to show genuine anger. "You've made it obvious that you are engaging in a personal vendetta against my client." Hasson laughed. "Toddy isn't your client. You were hired by Joe Sullivan's old man to get him out from under a manslaughter charge and big simple Toddy just happens to be in the same bag." Joe Sullivan, sitting in the center of the other three Angels, opened his mouth to retort but changed his mind. He appeared to have been better rehearsed than his companions. "That's right," Hasson said to him. "Remember what you were told, Joe -- let the hired mouth do all the taking." Sullivan shifted resentfully, stared down at his blueknuckled hands, and remained silent. "It's obvious wo aren't achieving anything," Ormerod said to Nunn. "I'm going to hold a private conference with my clients." "Do that," Hasson put in. "Tell them to peel off those badges, won't you? Next time I might pick out an even better one." He waited impassively while Ormerod and two policemen ushered the four Angels out of the room. "I don't understand you," Nunn said as soon as they were alone. "Exactly what did you think you were doing just now? That boy has only to testify that you manhandled him..." "That boy, as you call him, knows where we could find the Fireman. They all do." "You're being too hard on them." "You aren't." Hasson knew at once that he had gone too far but he was too obstinate to begin retracting the words. That do you mean?" Nunn's W mouth compressed, making him look womanly but nonetheless dangerous. "Why do I have to talk to that load of scruff up here in your office? What's wrong with the interview rooms downstairs? Or are they only for thugs who haven't got Sullivan money behind them?" "Are you saying I've taken Sullivan's money?" Hasson thought for a moment. "I don't believe you'd do that, but you let it make a difference. I tell you those four have flown with the Fireman. If I could be left alone for half an hour with any one of them I'd..." "You'd get yourself put away. You don't seem to understand the way things are, Hasson. You're a skycop -- and that means the public doesn't want you about. A hundred years ago motorists disliked traffic cops for making them obey a few common sense rules. Now everybody can tly, better than the birds, and they find this same breed of cop up there with them, spoiling it for them, and they hate you." "I'm not worried." "I don't think you're worried about police work either, Hasson. Not really. I'd say you're hooked on cloudrunning every bit as much as this mythical Fireman, but you want to play a different game." Hasson became anxious, aware that Nunn was leading up to something important. "The Fireman is real -- I've seen him." "Whether he is or not, I'm grounding you." "You can't do that," Hasson blurted instinctively. Nunn looked interested. "Why not?" "Because..." Hasson was striving for the right words, any words, when the communicator sphere on Nunn's desk lit up redly, signalling a top priority message. "Go ahead," Nunn said to the sphere. "Sir, we're picking up an automatic distress call," it replied with a male voice. "Somebody drifting out of control at three thousand meters. We think it must be Inglis." "Dead?" "We've interrogated his commpack, sir. No response." "I see. Wait till the rush hour is over and send somebody up for him. I'll want a full report." "Yes sir." "I'm going up for him now," Hasson said, moving toward the door. "You can't go through the traffic streams at this hour." Nunn got to his feet and came around the desk. "And you're grounded. I mean that, Hasson." Hasson paused, knowing that he IF had already stretched to the limit the special indulgence granted to members of the Air Patrol. "That's Lloyd Inglis up there and I'm going up to get him -- right now. If he's dead. I'm grounding myself. Permanently. Okay?" Nunn shook his head uncertainly. "Do you want to kill yourself?" "Perhaps." Hasson closed the door and ran toward the tackle room. H e lifted off from the roof of the police headquarters into a sky which was ablaze with converging rivers of fire. Work-weary commuters pouring up from the south represented most of the Traffic but there were lesser tributaries flowing from many points of the compass into the vast aerial whirlpool of the Birmingham control zone. The shoulder-lights and ankle-lights of thousands upon thousands of fliers shifted and shimmered, changes of parallax causing spurious waves to progress and retrogress along the glowing streams. Vertical columns ments apart, creating an appearance of strict order. Hasson knew, however, that the appearance was to some extent deceptive. People who were in a hurry tended to switch off their lights to avoid detection and fly straight to where they were going, regardless of the air corridors. The chances of colliding with another illegal traveller were vanishingly small, they told themselves. But it was not only occasional salesmen late for appointments who flew wild. There were the drunks and the druggies, the antisocial, the careless, the suicidal, the thrill-seekers, the criminal -- a whole spectrum of types who were unready for the responsibilities of personal flight -- in whose hands a counter-gravity harness could become an instrument of death. Hasson set his police flare units at maximum intensity. He climbed cautiously, dye gun at the ready, until the lights of the city were spread out below him in endless glowing geometries. When the information display projected into the inner surface of his visor told him he was at a height of two hundred meters he began paying particular attention to his radar. This was the altitude at which rogue fliers were most numerous. He continued rising steadily, controlling the unease which was a normal reaction to being suspended in a darkness from which, at any moment, other beings could come hurtling toward him at lethal velocity. The aerial river of travelers was now visible as separate laminae that slipped over each other like luminous gauze, uppermost levels moving fastest. A further eight hundred meters and Hasson began to relax slightly. He was turning his attention to the problem of homing in on Inglis when his proximity alarm sounded and the helmet radar flashed a bearing. Hasson twisted to face the indicated direction. The figure of a man flying without lights, angled for maximum speed, materialized in the light of Hasson's flare units. Veteran of a thousand such encounters, Hasson had time to calculate a miss distance of about ten meters. Within the fraction of a second available to him he aimed his gun and fired off a cloud of indelible dye. The other man passed through it -- glimpse of pale, elated face and dark unseeing eyes -- and was gone in a noisy flurry of turbulence. Hasson called HQ and gave details of the incident, adding his opinion that the rogue flier was also guilty of drug abuse. With upthe sector at that very moment it was unlikely that the offender would ever be caught -- but his flying clothes and equipment had been permanently branded and would have to be replaced at considerable expense. At three thousand meters Hasson switched to height maintenance power, took a direction-finder reading on Inglis's beacon and began a slow horizontal cruise, eyes probing the darkness ahead. His flares illuminated a thickening mist, which placed him at the center of a sphere of foggy radiance and made it difficult to see anything beyond. This was close to the limit for personal flying without special heaters and Hasson became aware of the cold which was pressing in on him, searching for a weakness in his defenses. The traffic streams far below looked warm and safe. A few minutes later Hasson's radar picked up an object straight ahead. He drew closer until, by tlarelight, he could make out the figure of Lloyd Inglis performing its grotesque shuffle through the currents of dark air. Hasson knew at once that his friend was dead but he circled the body, keeping just outside field interference distance, until he could see the gaping hole in Inglis's chest plate. The wound looked as though it had been inflicted by a lance... A week earlier Hasson and Inglis had been on routine patrol over Bedford when they had detected a pack of about eight flying without lights. Inglis had loosed off a miniflare which burst just beyond the group, throwing them briefly into silhouette, and both men had glimpsed the slim outline of a lance. The transportation of any solid object by a person using a CG harness was illegal because of the danger to other air travelers and people on the ground, and the carrying of weapons was rare even among rogue fliers. It seemed likely that they had chanced on the Fireman. Spreading their nets and snares, Hasson and Inglis had flown in pursuit. During the subsequent low-level chase two people had died -- one of them a young woman, also flying without lights, who had strayed into a head-on colIF lision with one of the gang. The other had been a pack leader who had almost cut himself in two on a radio mast. At the end of it, all the two policemen had had to show for their efforts had been four unimportant members of the Wellwyn Angels. The fireman remained safe in his anonymity. Now, as he studied the frozen body of his former partner, Hasson understood that the Fireman had been inspired to revenge. His targets would have been identified for him in the news coverage given to the arrest of Joe Sullivan. Swearing in his bitterness and grief, Hasson tilted his body to create a horizontal component in the lift force exerted by his CG harness. He swooped in on the rigid corpse, locked his arms around it. Immediately both bodies began to drop as their counter-gravity fields cancelled each other out. No stranger to free fall, Hasson efficiently attached a line to an eye on Inglis's belt and pushed the dead man away from him. As the two separated to beyond field interference distance the upward rush of air around them gradually ceased. Hasson checked his data display and saw that he had fallen little more than a hundred meters. He paid the line out from a dispenser at his waist until Inglis's body was at a convenient towing distance. Then he flew west, aiming for a point at which it would be safe to descend through the commuter levels. Far beneath him the traffic of the Birmingham control zone swirled like a golden galaxy, but Hasson -- at the center of his own spherical universe of white misty light -- was isolated from it, cocooned in his own thoughts. Lloyd Inglis -- the beer-drinking, book-loving spendthrift -- was dead. And before him there had been Singleton, Larmor and McMeekin. Half of Hasson's original squad of seven years ago had died in the course of duty... and for what? It was impossible to police a human race which had been given its threedimensional freedom with the advent of the CG harness. Putting a judo hold on gravity, turning the Earth's own attractive force back against itself, had proved to be the only way to fly. It was easy, inexpensive, exhilarating -- and impossible to regulate. There were eighty alone, each one a superman impatient of any curb on his ability to follow the sunset around the curve of the world. Aircraft had vanished from the skies almost overnight, not because their cargo-carrying capacity was no long needed, but because it was too dangerous to fly them in a medium which was crowded with aerial jaywalkers. The nocturnal rogue flier r the dark Icarus, was the folk hero of the age. What, Hasson asked himself, was the point in being a skycop? Perhaps the whole concept of policing, of being responsible for others, was no longer valid. Perhaps the ineviIF table price of freedom was a slow rain of broken bodies drifting to Earth as their powerpacks faded and... T he attack took Hasson by surprise. It came so quickly that the proximity alarm and the howling of air displaced by the attacker's body were virtually simultaneous. Hasson turned, saw the black lance, jackknifed to escape it, received a ferocious glancing blow, and was sent spinning -- all in the space of a second. The drop caused by the momentary field interference had been negligible. He switched off his flares and flight lights in a reflexive action and struggled to free his arms from the towline which was being lapped around him by his own rotation. When he had managed to stabilize himself he remained perfectly still and tried to assess the situation. His right hip was throbbing painfully from the impact, but as far as he could tell no bones had been broken. He wondered if his attacker was going to be content with having made a single devastating pass, or if this was the beginning of a duel. "You were quick, Hasson," a voice called from the darkness. "Quicker than your wingman. But it won't do you any good." "Who are you?" Hasson shouted as he looked for a radar bearing. "You know who I am. I'm the Fireman." "That's a song." Hasson kept his voice steady as he began spreading his snares and nets. "What's your real name? The one your area psychiatrist has on his books," he called out. The darkness laughed. "Very good, Sergeant Hasson. Playing for time and trying to goad me and learn my name all at once." "I don't need to play for time -- "By the time anybody gets here you'll be dead, Hasson." "Why should I be? Why do you want to do this?" "Why do you hunt my friends and ground them?" "They're a menace to themselves and to everybody else." "Only when you make them fly wild. You're kidding yourself, Hasson. You're a skycop and you like hounding people to death. I'm going to ground you for good -- and those nets won't help you." Hasson stared vainly in the direction of the voice. "Nets?" There was another laugh and the Fireman began to sing. "# can see you in the dark, 'cause I'm the Fireman; I can fly with you and you don't even know I'm there... The familiar words were growing louder as their source drew near, and abruptly Hasson made out the shape of a big man illuminated by the traffic streams below and by starlight from above. He looked fearsome and inhuman in his flying gear. Hasson yearned for the firearm denied him by British police tradition, and then he noticed something. "Where's the lance?" "Who needs it? I let it go." The Fireman spread his arms and -- even in the dimness, even with the lack of spatial reference points -- it became apparent that he was a giant, a man who had no need of weapons other than those which nature had built into him. Hasson thought of the heavy lance plummeting down into a crowded suburb three thousand niters below and a cryogenic hatred stole through him, reconciling him to the forthcoming struggle, regardless of its outcome. As the Fireman edged closer Hasson whirled a net in slow circles, tilting his harness to counteract the spin induced by the net. He raised his legs in readiness to kick and at the same time finished straightening out the towline which made Inglis's body a ghastly spectator to the event. He felt nervous and keyed up, but not particularly afraid now that the Fireman had discarded his lance. Aerial combat was not a matter of instinct; it was something which had to be learned and practiced, and therefore the professional always had the edge on the amateur, no matter how gifted or strongly motivated the latter might be. For example, the Fireman had made a serious mistake in allowing Hasson to get his legs fully drawn up into the position from which the power of his thighs could be released in an explosive kick. Unaware of his blunder, the Fireman edged in slowly, vectoring the lift of his harness with barely perceptible shoulder movements. He's a good flier , Hasson thought, even if he isn't so good on combat theory and... The Fireman came in fast -- but not nearly as fast as he should have done. Hasson experienced something like a sense of luxury as he found himself with time to place his kick exactly where he wanted it. He chose the vulnerable point just below the visor, compensated for the abrupt drop which occurred as both CG fields cancelled out, and unleased enough energy to snap a man's neck. Somehow the Fireman got his head out of the way in time and caught hold of Hasson's outstretched leg. Both men were falling now, but at an unequal rate because Hasson was tethered to Inglis whose CG field was too far away to have been cancelled. In the second before they parted the Fireman applied the leverage of his massive arms and broke Hasson's leg sideways at the knee. Pain and shock obliterated Hasson's mind, gutting him of all strength and resolve. He floated in the blackness for an indeterminate period, arms moving uncertainly, face contorted in a silent scream. The great spiral nebula far below continued to spin, but a dark shape was moving steadily across it, and IF part of Hasson's mind informed him that there was not. time for indulgence in natural reactions to injury. He was hopelessly outclassed on the physical level and if life were to continue it would only be through the exercise of intelligence. But how was he to think when pain had invaded his body like an army and was firing mortar shells of agony straight into his brain? For a start , Hasson told himself, you have to get rid of Lloyd Inglis. He began reeling in his comrade's body with the intention of unhooking it, but almost immediately the Fireman spoke from close behind him. "How did you like it, Hasson?" The voice was triumphant. "That was to show you I can beat you at your own game. Now we're going to play my game." Hasson tried drawing the line in faster. Inglis's body bobbed closer and finally came within interference radius. Hasson and Inglis began to fall. The Fireman dived in on them on the instant, hooked an arm around Hasson's body, and all three dropped together. The whirlpool of fire began to expand beneath them. "This is my game," the Fireman sang through the gathering slipstream. # # can ride you all the way to the ground , 'cause I'm the Fireman. " Hasson knew the tactics of aerial chicken. He shut out the pain from his trailing leg, reached for his master switch, but hesitated without throwing it. In two-man chicken the extinguishing of one CG field restored the other one to its normal efficacy, causing a fierce differential which tended to drag one opponent vertically away from the other. The standard countermove was for the second man to kill his own field at the same time so that both bodies would continue to plunge downwards together until somebody's nerve broke and forced him to reactivate his harness. In the present game of death, however, the situation was complicated by the presence of Inglis -- the silent partner who had already lost. His field would continue negating those of the other two, regardless of what they did, unless... Hasson freed an arm from the Fireman's mock-sexual embrace and pulled Inglis's body in close. He groped for the dead man's master switch but found only a smooth placque of frozen blood. The jewelled horizons were rising rapidly on all sides now and the circling traffic stream was opening like a carnivorous flower. Air rushed by at terminal velocity, deafeningly. Hasson fought to break the icy casting away from the switch on Inglis's harness, but at that moment the Fireman slid an arm around his neck and pulled his head back. "Don't tryo get away from me," he shouted into Hasson's ear. "Don't try to chicken out -- I want to see how well you bounce." They continued to fall. Hasson, encumbered by his nets, felt for the towline dispenser. He fumbled it open with numb fingers and was about to release Inglis's body when it occurred to him he would gain very little in doing so. An experienced chicken player always delayed breaking out of field interference until the last possible instant, leaving it so late that even with his harness set at maximum lift he hit the ground at the highest speed he could withstand. The Fireman probably intended going to the limit this time, leaving Hasson too disabled to prevent himself being smashed on impact. Getting rid of Inglis's body would not change that. They had dropped almost two thousand meters and in just a few seconds would be penetrating the crowded commuter levels. The Fireman began to whoop with excitement, grinding himself against Hasson like a rutting dog. Holding Inglis with his left hand, Hasson used his right to loop the plasteel towline around the Fireman's upraised thigh and to pull it into a hard knot. He was still tightening the knot as they bombed down into the traffic flow. Lights flashed past nearby and suddenly the slow-spinning galaxy was above them. Patterns of street lamps blossomed beneath. This, Hasson knew, was close to the moment at which the Fireman had to break free if he was to shed enough downward velocity before reaching ground level. "Thanks for the ride," the Fireman shouted, his voice ripping away in the slipstream. "Got to leave you soon." Hasson switched on his flares and then jerked the towline violently, bringing it to the Fireman's attention. The Fireman looked at the loop around his thigh. His body convulsed with shock as he made the discovery that it was he and not Hasson who was linked to the dead and deadly sTcycop. He pushed Hasson away and began to claw at the line. Hasson swam free in the wind, knowing that the line would resist even the Fireman's giant strength. As he felt his CG field spread its invisible wings he turned to look back. He saw the two bodies, one of them struggling frantically, pass beyond the range of his flares on their way to a lethal impact with the ground. Hasson had no time to waste in introspection -- his own crash landing was about to occur and it would require all his skill and experience to get him through it alive -- but he was relieved to find that he could derive no satisfaction from the Fireman's death. Nunn and the others were wrong about him. Even so. he thought, during the final hurtling seconds. I've hunted like a hawk for far too long. This is mv last flight. He prepared himself, unafraid, for the earth's blind embrace. IF Dear Isaac, Enclosed is a short piece which I thought you might find amusing. Of course the resolution is a bit flawed, but, well... Ifyou, Dr. A., revised the last three paragraphs or so, you would a) help create a Genuine Literary Curiosity, b) nudge a trufan over the line into the ranks of Published Writers, and c) blow said fan's mind clean out the window! You would also make me a very happy editor. By the way, your Forum piece for July Galaxy is even perfecter than I expected! All the best, (signed) Jim Baen Dear Jim, Okay, here is all the stuff you sent me, together with an alternate ending that I made up. Perhaps you can also get Bob Silverberg to make up an alternate ending -- or at the very least make sure that he doesn't get mad. (He didn't get mad. Ed.) And however much young J. S. Hudson may approve, I think it would be nice if you check with him, as a courtesy. Naturally, I don't expect to be paid for this. If you run it, give all the money to Hudson. Yours, (signed) Isaac Asimov Dear Jeff, Would you mind having your story published as a collaboration with Dr. Isaac Asimov? Best Regards, (signed) Jim Baen Dear Jim, Incoherently yours, (signed) Jeff Hudson (End of Prologue)                               A gurgling boil shook the waters  of New York Bay. The misty air swirled and parted, revealing a great metal curve lying low in the water. A few yards away the water thrashed, and a huge white slick floated to the surface. The Navy, out to investigate. As the last fog cleared off, aerial photographs were taken by the Air Force and the TV networks. The shiny metal curve rose slowly to a low peak, then dropped off quickly into the bay. It had a slight twist. All in all, it resembled a hump. The thrashing continued nearby, occasionally sending water plumes high into the air. The slick remained remarkably angular. The Pentagon couldn't make head nor IF tail of it but assumed everyone that it wasn't the Russians. Then it happened. As if something had been cut loose from below, the curve rose into the air, revealing itself to be a low arch, no, it didn't connect to anything on one end. Two huge marginal stops reared their heads above the waves, and abruptly it surfaced. Water poured from the platen, splashed in the carriage, cascaded down the keyes and the mighty typewriter rose into the sunlight. The huge type faces arched skyward and whacked against the paper, the tabulator key was pressed and the cylinder knobs raced through the air, knocking over the Statue of Liberty. On the back of the Mighty Machine read the legend "World's Most Prolific or Bust!" And down among the keys, racing back and forth on a series of catwalks with a maniac fury, was Dr. Isaac Asimov. The President was outraged. The publisher was overjoyed. The public was hysterical. Meanwhile, the Good Doctor was typing away on an endless sheet of "paper" one hundred yards wide that seemed to materialize within the machine itself. Indeed, no part of the machine ever needed replacing, it seemed to be self-renewing. This included Doctor Asimov. The only clue to the typewriter's mysterious operation was a long electric cord that trailed out into the Atlantic. Isaac pounded out his message twenty-four hours a day. His massive MS. had already clogged New York Harbor, and was now piling up on shore, curling around docks, gift wrapping high rises, paving the streets with the seemingly indestructable "paper". The letters did not blur or fade; whole crowds were seen walking down the paper pavement, reading in fascination. The works were on every subject imaginable. Science: a new Theory of Relativity. Humor: The City of New York nearly died laughing. Fiction: A new trilogy (Science Fiction, of course). The Mayor rowed out in a dinghy to try and talk Asimov into laying off for a while. Isaac listened to him, hitting the G, racing up underneath the Y, U, I, and pouncing on the O. He told the Mayor a funny joke and continued with his work. Various other officials rowed out to plead with him but got nowhere. Friends and relatives, fellow scientists and writers, all attempted to dissuade him, but to no avail. He was offered immense sums of money and didn't even blink. The Science Fiction Writers of America promised to give up their trade, en masse. No good. The World Science Fiction Convention offered him a special Hugo Award as "World's Greatest and Most Prolific Writer and Nicest Guy in the Cosmos." Fiddlesticks, said Asimov. By now, the monsterous MS. had spread across New York State in a broad white swath -- having the most interesting effect on Niagara Falls -- crossed Lake Erie (if that didn't stop it, what could?) and tied Detroit in knots -- literally. xr about this time, a mighty roar, XjL a colossal splash, and out of San Francisco Bay emerged yet another giant typewriter. As the spray cleared, there stood the figure of Robert Silverberg, a dark glint in his eastward gazing eyes, water dripping from his long hair and beard. In his hand he held a long pole and he explained (while demonstrating) that by pole vaulting between the keys he expected to surpass Asimov. Another set of type faces whacked twenty-four hours a day; once more, miles of indestructable MS. This time it was the Bay Bridge that got knocked over. And so began the Great Race. Hank Aaron was forgotten overnight, and the Americans, being a sporting people, started rooting for one or the other. Attempts at placation were abandoned -- for what one-of-a-kind honor could be granted twice? However, lesser honors rained down, in order to show affection and confidence in one or the other of the two. Silverberg was voted Best Dressed Science Fiction Writer. Asimov turned down a presidential bid. Neither bothered more than a blink with all the silly business and continued typing at a tremendous pace. Asimov, in order to speed up production, created a Tarzanic arrangements so he could swing from key to key. But in so doing, he lost valuable time to Silverberg, whose pole vaulting was exquisite. Asimov's MS. had by now crossed the Mississippi and was currently burying Mount Rushmore. Silverberg's, after some initial difficulties in the Grand Canyon, was rampaging into the Great Plains. Then, for reasons unbeknownst rection and proceeded on a collision course. It became apparent that this blessed event would occur in the Cornhusker State of Nebraska. Many bets were placed on the outcome of the meeting of the minds. The Big Question was "Which is stronger?!" Publishers cashed in on the free publicity, printing and reprinting as cleaned out book stores demanded more and more. Huge fan clubs were formed, offering fake beards and wigs (just like Silverberg's!) Asimov's fans tended to dress as robots, wearing "Mule-ears ? ' for less formal occasions.                               IF The big day came. The two paper snakes approached, raised their heads, and coiled together into a spiral. For a day, they held together trembling in a double helix of paper, while more paper accumulated beneath. Then the two coils drew apart, peeling away, and out of the air molecules about, each formed a new coil of paper. Where one double helix had existed a while before, two now existed in perfect replication. Reporters dropped their microphones. Government agents dropped their listening devices. The American public dropped its collective lower jaw. Another day the two double helices held together trembling, then drew apart, peeling away -- and there were four. In the Atlantic and in the Pacific, each endless sheaf of paper pulled out of the gigantic typewriter with a horrendous tear. The keys of each locked in place with a thunderous snap. Asimov fell back, gibbering. Silverberg tumbled forward, yammering. In Nebraska, the paper helices continued to separate and replicate. The monster no longer needed its Frankensteins. two months, all the Earth will be paper. Perhaps it will then reach for the Moon.  A few months ago I had occasion to attend the Northeastern U.S. talk on space flight reaction-drives given by Dr. Robert Enzmann, a physicist working at Northeast Cryonics, Inc. In this talk Dr. Enzmann discussed in nuts-and-bolts terms the construction of a vehicle capable of making the round-trip to Pluto in under eight weeks. He was not talking about "theoretical innovations just over the horizon of today's technology," but of (relatively) simple Apollostyle RD; the mating of shuttlecraft technology with the results of vacuum-based pulse-fusion research. I should also mention that Dr. Enzmann was referring to vehicles of virtually any size payloadcapacity and payload-costs in the range of pennies-per-pound at point of delivery. During the question-and-answer session that followed I asked Dr. operational pulse-fusion driven space vehicle with the performance characteristics you describe?" Dr. Enzmann replied very simply: "Three to five years." Given a more ordinary course of events, he told me, we can expect to have such vehicles within # to # years. A month or so later I was discussing possible science-fact articles with sciencewriter Dick Hoagland (who has been, among other things, Science Advisor to Walter Cronkite, Project Scientist to the first woman to fly solo across the North Pole, and one of the creators of the so-called Pioneer# plague) when I discovered to my delight, that he and Dr. Enzmann are old friends. One result of this discovery was a two-part science feature, done in the form of a depicted, while obviously highly edited, did in essence take place one cold New England night, or on a succession of such nights. The other result was that, as of this issue, Dick is Science Editor of Worlds of IF. Welcome, Dick! -- Baen Out of the cradle endlessly accelerating... i I T is a setting reasonably improbable for the discussion of a breakthrough which is destined to change Civilization. We are in the living room of the first author of this narrative, a room furnished in Danish Modern, lots of children, and an insatiable Fireplace from which protrudes a seven-foot log. It is evening and the curtains are drawn, creating a sense of cloister from the world outside while the talk within ranges the Universe... We are a sizeable group, some sitting on chairs, some on the floor, the second author of this article balancing the irrepressible Heidi Enzmann (eight years) on one knee while attempting, simultaneously, to balance a cup of tea on the other. In a corner of the long couch, Bob's wife, Josie -- mathematician extraordinaire -- is quietly sitting doing needlepoint; a couple of unexpected drop-in guests from a commune in Vermont, the children, and our host complete the group. Strategically positioned beside the hearth (on which old toothpaste tubes are in the process of being magically transformed into lead soldiers) is the head of this unusual household -- geologist, explorer, historian, physicist, project engineer, arid dreamer -- looking comfortable, albeit a bit drafty about the knees, in a very faded pair of ancient blue denim bermudas and a somewhat lumpy woolen pullover. Periodically, adjustment is made to the contents of the fireplace. The ritual consists of shoving in another foot or so of the long log protruding into the room, and adding various other ingredients to encourage combustion, such as the contents of many wastebaskets which appear from other rooms. (The entire house is a warren of desk corners and bookshelves -- in the hallways, in bedrooms, the basement, up under the eaves.) have shared a unique privilege in being on the inside of events which have played a key role in shaping the future history of this planet. In fact, you have enjoyed a few more years of privilege than I by virtue of the fact that you started sooner. Ignoring that unfair advantage for the moment, we've experienced the latest of these turning points -- the Space Age -- and have even managed to raise a little dust over its importance, here and there. But here is a question: where did we fail? Kidding aside, what went wrong? The human race has dreamed of leaving Earth all the way back to Lucian of Samasatos. I'd even be crowd which spent a sizeable permay have wondered if the moon, instead of being a god, wasn't another world. The dream is old! And yet, here we are, with six flags standing on the surface of another planet, a bevy of craft sending back fantastic pictures of places that we have known all our lives only as points of light in the sky, with even a message on its way to the "galactics," whoever and where ever they may be... Dick has been referred to as a "midwife of the Pioneer # plaque . " Baen in spite of all this accomplishment and effort and physical return, the reaction to this amazing series of miracles is, "So what?" Where did we go wrong? Hundreds of thousands of people avidly read science fiction, are turned on about the Future, and there is even a growing number who feel, however misguidedly, that the planets are somehow involved with their daily lives and where they are going or have come from. What happened to this diverse base of support for space travel? Where and when did it evaporate? I can tell you how we lost them, the great American public. We failed through success. We were too perfect: not a man was lost in space. That was the first factor. I during the Flight of Apollo #. The world hung on every breath, every creak of the aluminum foil skin of the LM as it fell back toward Earth, running out of power, out of water, freezing cold, unable to perform even simple navigation. Would they incinerate on re-entry from too steep an angle, or would they skip off into deep space to die of suffocation? Lovell's determined line IF against the omnipresent static of air-to-ground,... better to bias it for a steeper angle than to skip. We're all agreed up here... we're coming home!" The world ate it up: the networks, the newspapers, the wire services, and the public. The whole planet, more people than had ever cared for three human beings in the entire history of the earth, literally "rode" that spacecraft back from the jaws of death. They cared. It wasn't a horrible spectator sport such as you see in some dramatic life-and-death events, like the guy on a ledge where somebody shouts, "Jump!" No; it was everyone's jeopardy and in the end we all shared the victory. The telegrams, the phone calls, the letters -- all indicated a deep concern, a recognition that these guys were in deep trouble. The messages poured in: offerings of advice, of aid and money for the wives, anything to help in a time of need. Underlying it all, moreover, was something much more significant, something which made me realize where we in the space business went wrong. Apollo # occurred in the aftersuccesses of Apollos #, #, #, #, and #. There was a wave of reaction building, spelled out in the phrase, "... all that money, for a bunch of rocks?" Space appropriations, particularly the money allocated for Apollos #, #, and #, had just then been, or were about to be, cut. Ecology was big and growing as the new national preoccupation. But... When three guys, engaged in "a wasteful, silly, and horribly expensive use of public money" found themselves in severe and highly visible jeopardy, with about an even chance of buying it halfway between Earth and the moon; the first, possibly, to sacrifice their lives in space, the effect was magical. Not one commentator, editorial, or story that I saw during or after that interminable wait for their return suggested that they were about to, or would have died, in vain. They were bona fide heroes, giving their lives (if the worst happened) while engaged in an activity which was to advance the entire human race. Or so the reaction seemed to imply. Even people who were not extraordinarily articulate seemed to have a gut feeling that these guys were important, that their dying or danger of dying meant something. Not even the severest critics of the space program accused the Apollo # crew of throwing away their lives on a pointless exercise. This drama of a real confrontation with possible death in space, rather than causing a backlash against the value of space exploration, seemed to bring out the hidden feelings of an awful lot of people that these guys were important because, somehow, they were working for a tomorrow for all of us. The price of winning the moon, rather than being too High, wasn't high enough. Our conquest of another world was not paid for by the life of a single flying astronaut. And, as a human measure of value, was therefore a "cheap" thrill. After all, when you're spending billions, whq counts the money? Conper day for approximately ten years ture in one area, alone; and add to this cost, for the same fateful decade, the enormous expenditure of life in that area. Yes, we acquired the face of Luna far too easily to value its potential. Factor Number Two: We discovered a dead solar system, a system with an overwhelming tendency toward one morphological structure, craters. Craters and more craters; big craters, small craters; craters with rays and craters without rays; craters on what we had hoped was life-filled Mars; craters, of course, on the moon; craters under the forever veiling clouds of Venus, and craters, also, smothering the surface of a planet no human eye had ever seen -- Mercury. Too many craters and too little prospect for living things in the rest of the sun's family helped to kill interest in space. Particularly those craters on Mars. Mars, as a bigger version of the lifeless moon, was probably the coup de grace to public interest in exploring the solar system. By the time the exciting, wonderful news was relayed back by Mariner # that Mars was apparently a world asleep, locked in a glacial age awaiting the warmth of a # year old spring to awaken it, it was too late. Nobody was listening. Factor Number Three involved technical necessity. Space travel to pick as astronauts guys with tolerances, reflexes, and piloting skills that make the rest of us look like rejects from the Pleiocene. In any human activity where only a very limited number can directly participate it is important to establish an identification of the audience with The participants. Who can relate to Superman? Of necessity, the beginning of spaceflight built up the image of an extraordinarily dangerous, very exclusive activity which was unlikely ever to be a profession open to the "average" person. And who, at that point, wanted it, with exquisite delights ranging all the way from exploding to drowning or being crushed to death during re-entry if you were able to qualify? American interest in the space program was killed, then by a combination of boredom, disappointment, and eliteism. Even for science fiction fans it was hard to imagine space opening up very soon to the average Joe. Oh, and one more thing: spaceflight was a public expenditure. In the minds of the pubIF lie, it was money spent on one thing which couldn't be spent on something else. And as long, as there were other deserving programs in was apparently receiving, even its supporters had to accent the immediate, practical benefits from space research. However -- as we know -- space is a long-term investment, equivalent in many ways to our remote emergence from the ing that to a budget director at the General Accounting Office! Now that is all past. What of the present? Alas, as I see it, from about ten years of growing up with, in, and through the space program, Americans actually feel that our space explorations are essentially at an end. One very wellknown TV space reporter was heard to remark recently, that "all the excitement is gone from space exploration. All that's left now is to put up a few earth satellites to work on inventorying our dwindling resources!" all this is about to change. And iL you, Robert, are partially responsible. Tell us what is about to happen to turn this dismal state of affairs completely around! in its current awareness of a fossil fuel energy crisis, is about to tame the first inexhaustible resource in its history -- the power of the stars -- thermonuclear fusion. When that happens, sometime around #, we (those of us who see beyond the enormous immediate benefit to Earth) will use this energy as the means of opening up total exploration and development of the solar system to all levels of society. And some of us, myself among them, look even beyond our solar system, to the stars themselves! For the first time, aerospace, rather than being the source of spin-off benefits to the culture, will be the recipient. The greatly accelerated attention and funding of various thermonuclear fusion programs due to national awareness of an energy "crisis" will result in the creation of fusion rocket-engines with efficiencies and capabilities which will seem almost magical to those raised on chemical rocket technology. This must happen. It is inevitable. As long as there is funding of fusion research and development for the unlimited generation of electric power, there will be, simultaneously, development of fusion rocket systems. As this development progresses -- years before we have a practical means of generating electricity from fusion -- we shall have crude fusion rockets (probably in the late '#'s or early '#'s) created as "by-products" of the main objective, which is unlimited power for our terrestrial society. With fusion rockets and the Torchships of Robert Heinlein's prophetic imagination, the skies are literally opened to acquisition of the solar system and the stars. the future of space lies in the funding levels for fusion, made by the U.S. Energy Office, now!... awareness of every environmentalist that, directly and indirectly, fusion power will result in a restoration of the green garden, Earth. think are aware of what is about to happen, both to our energy needs here and in the extraterrestrial context? still a society in which you can achieve almost any objective, provided you know what you want and are aware of how to go about attaining it. Too few people realize how close we are to the solution of this, perhaps, ultimate technical goal: unlimited, pollutionless energy; or of what is application, particularly in the area of spaceflight will mean, even within a few years of tonight. more to come. It seems probable that, as research progresses in the construction of practical fusion power plants, there will come a point where the Energy Office and tive liaison. That is, beyond a certain point, research and development of fusion technology might just be more economical if carried out in space , in near earth orbit, rather than on the ground. Without going into elaborate detail on the history of fusion research in the United States over the last twenty years, suffice to say there has been slow but steady progress. The primary stumbling blocks have been in heating and confining a plasma composed of electrically neutral ionised electrons and nuclei within chambers which have to be almost perfect vacuums before, during, and after the reaction. The very nature of a fusion reaction tends to mess up a vacuum chamber with a quantity of non-essential plasma. And in all approaches, a good -- ultragood -- vacuum is one absolutely essential element in attaining fusion. Now, down here, under our everpresent sea of air, making and holding good vacuum is only a little bit easier than balancing the Federal budget -- and almost as expensive. It seems a good bet, as developmental hardware gets bigger and usable power levels grow, that someone is going to take an HP# or Bomar (or even an old-fashioned slide rule) and discover that an economical fusion electrical power plant doesn't belong on the surface of the earth, at all. And that will leave space as the solution. an energy crisis looking for a solution. Waiting in the wings is solution with a capital "S" -- namely, IF thermonuclear fusion energy which will ultimately be brought on line for electrical power applications within twenty years. other interim energy solutions, fusion research is currently being funded and will increase as the years roll by. O.K. At some point it is realized that practical fusion plants require testing in really good vacuums... no, are more economical in an environment where an unlimited vacuum is always available. Also by the end of this decade -- sooner if funding can be increased -- the Shuttle will be on line. We marry the Shuttle with the fusion research and development, and we get, long before a commercial electrical generator powered by a fusion-reactor... rocket systems! Power-system tests conducted in near Earth orbit demonstrate the ease and economy of propelling spacecraft via fusion technology. In fact, it seems probable that before # a fusion-engine powered probe will be launched in this manner. The Era of the Torchship will have dawned. close, a few years, a decade. What's that, compared to the history of the dream? tween the fabric-covered aircraft of the #' s and the magnificent Apollo Project is surely greater than the distance between the first manned expedition to the Moon and the first voyage to the stars. To say that, is one thing. But to realize, that because of the explosion of effort going on in this area I shall probably live to see it is another... And it is wonderful! T he fire needed tending. How many hearths had been ringed at night across the span of human consciousness by how many generations of storytellers? Each with an audience, each with a tale, each lighted by the flickering warmth of Man's first Promethian accomplishment. And now, so soon, the fire of the Universe itself, the thermonuclear inferno of a captive star would be loosed to warm how many future generations of future storytellers assembled... where? One thing was certain: some of them would be a long way from this quiet New England town of Lexington, Massachusetts. History is full of ironies. Once before, this had been the setting for a shot heard round the world. perspective to this development several things should be considered. The first is the ever-growing availability of goods and services, a growth which, even in my lifetime, has been spectacular. I remember the clip-clop of horses in the streets of Bath, Maine. I remember blacksmiths. I can still recapture the SI wonder of running out to see an automobile. Can you imagine how many "blacksmiths" it would have taken to create just one of the cars out there on the driveway, cars which have carried one of you almost a hundred miles this evening, and you two all the way from Northern Vermont? We take the automobile for granted. Those who cannot afford one, even a small one, we somehow think of as underprivileged. And yet, consider the wealth necessary to own just one car, let sold each year in the United States alone. The exploration of space is considered an expensive luxury today by some. But expense is relative. Even now we are spending less than tivity, and already the return, in the form of satellite communications systems, earth resources information, and basic new science, has more than paid for the initial expenditure. Any human activity which results in an increase of productivity must be considered a source and not a sink, as space has erroneously been viewed by some. When we think of spaceships and their cost in the future, we must think, not only of the generally rising wealth of the world, but also of the sharply rising contribution to this wealth which will be made by those ships and the space effort as a whole. Wealth comes down to three basic things: energy, resources, and information. With successful control of the first (fusion), the second item (resources) becomes almost academic. Fusion power will allow refining of ores which are now too poor to be profitable. And with fusion the recycling of anything is literally as easy as shoving the item into the # degree plasma, and magnetically separating out each isotope in pure form, for use again. But it is the third item, information, which is our real wealth. Our total science, our technological "how-to" bank, is also increasing at a phenomenal rate all over the world. It is "know-how" which will allow us to focus the previous two items, energy and resources, on the alleviation of human need and the meeting of rising world aspirations. The true value of the space effort during the past # years has been in the expansion of that "how-to" data base for future operations. We have acquired data which includes basic new information on the planets; the technology of space systems (how hardware "lives" in the space environment); and the capabilities of Man -- how he lives and performs in space and on another planet. Now, imagine where we would stand if, suddenly, armed with a fusion drive, we had to discover or acquire all this data "overnight." who believe, even with the space IF shuttle, that America's era of space exploration is over, that we have witnessed the last excitement of men walking on another world and of pictures relayed back from places no human eye had ever seen before. What you are describing is the veritable lull before the storm, the micro-shock before the earthquake, the hush just before the blinding light of another dawn... Mankind is about to emerge from its long night of infancy into the steady sunlight that forever fills the vast spaces of the solar system. It is the beginning of our first new day amid the wonders of the sun. A further part of our perspective should be historical. There are ideas which have their times and this is usually because they make economic sense. Many people bemoan the end of the Apollo Project; they shouldn't, any more than they mourn the passing of Gemini, Mercury, or the propeller-driven aircraft which took # noisy hours to cross the Atlantic. Systems develop. In any such endeavors, there are false starts, premature starts, blind alleys, and restarts. Look at floating islands proposed in the '#'s to aid trans-atlantic air service and, perhaps, current techniques for cryogenic suspension of "chrononauts." It is not the systems that are important. They are like species blown before the winds of evolution. It is only objectives which matter in the long run. My background is technological and limited. It is currently directed toward the practical realization of electrical power generation through the achievement of thermonuclear fusion. My avocation and dearest wish is to see that power applied to the realization of manned starships. It has been my dream for decades; a dream which, at last, seems to be on the verge of realization. thinking that we are roughly equivalent, historically speaking, to that period just before general acceptance of the Coper nican world view. There are a lot of people, in fact, I would venture to say most people, who view space activities as a trivial government activity, harmless at best, wasteful of taxpayers' money at worst; but totally disconnected from our lives and the future of our planet. In terms of consciousness, we aren't actually in the Space Age at all, yet! E nzmann: We are all prisoners of our perspectives on the world. To most people, spaceflight is the Apollo Project, complete with its gargantuan facilities, its spectacular departures, and its incredible price tag. No wonder that, in the public mind, spaceflight is an expensive luxury. Even those more sophisticated may have difficulty in putting into appropriate context the promise of recent developments. Therefore, it may be relevant to consider some alternate space transportation systems and their relative merits. To make things interesting, let us normalize all systems against the ultimate technical problem: flight to the stars. Chemical Rockets . Transit times to the nearer stars, several light years distant: # years (# milessec) to # years (# miles sec) (Interstellar probes could conceivably be attempted with chemical systems, although the size, complexity, and quantity of propellant would beggar the imagination. As reference, we have sent forth our first interstellar emissaries, Pioneers # and #. Pioneer # will transit the interstellar gulf at about # milessec, with a flight time of about # years to the distance of the nearest star (toward which, incidentally, it is not targeted). Not much scaling is necessary to see that a chemical flight to Proxima Centuri with a huge generation ship, while possible, is the least likely way in which well make "the crossing." Ion Propulsion . Transit times of # to # years: velocities comparable to those of chemical systems The advantage of ion systems lies in the enormous increase of efficiency with an associated decrease in the amount of propellant and, therefore, associated tankage, etc. When all the trade-offs are figured in, however, total trip time is about the same as with chemical rockets: your "world" is simply smaller and more manageable. At this point, a footnote might be in order: No matter what the propulsion mechanism, with flight times of the order of centuries, it is obvious that the most severe problems for the intrepid voyagers is not propulsion but power. How do you miles from the nearest heat source? How do you run computers, lights, air conditioning, sensors, and life support equipment, in general? Batteries? Even assuming fuel cells similar to those which powered the Service Module in Apollo, stop for a moment and just think of the amount of electrical energy and fuel required to keep a ship operating for # years! It is apparent that serious consideration of starflight was not in the cards until the discovery of atomic energy. And at that technical plateau, if you're going to use the atom to produce electricity for accelerating charged ions to thrust a ship toward the stars, it becomes obvious that a more direct utilization of atomic energy might just make things a lot simpler. Could you, for instance, harness the ravening power of a fission chain reaction in a rocket engine, thus producing a true "atomic rocket," for IF a starship capable of actually visiting our neighboring suns in this galactic sector? The answer is: We tried. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion . Transit times of # to # years: velocities up to ## speed of light. Back in the days of Sputnik , when the name of the game was mass and brute force, a concept was developed for propelling spaceships that was compelling in its simplicity. It was named Orion , and it died in #I on the eve of handing mankind the solar system. Orion was based on the apparently  insane premise that the way to harness atomic energy in a rocket engine was to build a large ship and detonate a small atomic bomb in the chamber. What, at first glance, looked as if the design engineers needed a month or two under psychiatric care, turned out to be supremely workable in practice. The key was scale. Small "mini-fission" bombs were to be exploded inside a large, reinforced rocket chamber, open at one end -- reminiscent of a pot-bellied stove -- and attached across a series of shock absorbers to the payload section, crew quarters, and control section of the ship. Exploded at the rate of one per second, the thrust of the expanding plasma escaping from the nozzle would propel the ship forward at between .I and one "G." (# feetsec # . None of this coasting nonsense; none of the hundreds of days drifting to Mars or Venus.) Later versions did away with the chamber, substituting a flat steel plate. The nuclear charges, shaped to direct the plasma toward the plate, were to be ejected behind the ship and detonated in a manner and at a rate similar to the chamber version... For those who have visions of pusher plate, ship, and crew being turned into a small nova upon the captain's order to get underway, stop and think. In space, as on earth, the actual nuclear explosion The first thing to hit the plate would have been the X-rays generated by the fission process. (To get light you have to have the stepdown effect of an atmosphere. No fireballs and mushroom clouds out there.) The X-rays absorbed by the plate would cause heating. Later, at much less than the speed of light, the primary energy transport mechanism of the bomb, the high temperature plasma of what used to be the uranium, the steel casing, triggering, circuits, etc., would hit the plate. It is this plasma impact that drives the ship forward. It also causes heating. But the sum of these two energy inputs to the plate, on calculation, is less than the energy necessary to heat, melt, and vaporize anything as massive and conducting as the pusher plates contemplated. And remember: at the rate of one explosion per sectimes longer to cool, to radiate away excess energy, than the rate of input! It is quite analogous to the game of passing your finger through a candle flame. There is a rate at which you could do it all day. Simply a matter of calculation. The importance of this direct application of atomic fission to space propulsion was staggering. Test models, using dynamite charges in place of nuclear explosives, worked beautifully. Shock absorbing systems, necessary to smooth out the percussive effect of a series of impulses to the plate, were designed and tested. The entire idea was actually quite similar to that of an internal combustion engine, where a series of individual explosions in cylinders are forced to impart an even flow of power to the drive mechanism of the automobile. The potential of Orion is hard to underestimate. Ships were designed that could have made a manned Mars flight with # tons of supplies and # men, in three weeks! A hundred tons of samples, with crew, could have been returned in similar time. Another version could have made a manned flight to Pluto, with # men and # tons of supplies, in four weeks! Five tons of samples and crew could have come home in another month. Such a trip with chemical rockets similar to the Saturn V would take # years for a direct flight, one way. stand this: Orion was a project of Defense, and several segments of private industry. It was examined, hardware built, models of the basic concept tested explosive propulsion with a shock-averaging mechanism), and projected mission specs written which would essentially have opened the solar system to us within a couple of decades, starting in the... celled? was sensational. Politically, it had one flaw: it required detonation of atomic bombs in space, an activity which we were anxiously seeking to detect and prevent, at that time. Orion became the prime casualty of the Test-ban Treaty with the U.S.S.R. History will decide which was more important to the future of the world -- the first retreat from nuclear confrontation, evidenced by the Treaty, or the early acquisition of the solar system which Orion would have made possible. It is conceivable that Orion could have lessened the pressure for nuclear war by providing men access to the treasures of the solar system. It is just as conceivable that the nation producing such interplanetary craft could have dominated Earth, in which case war might have occurred in an attempt to prevent that political eventuality. We are treading on speculative ground IF which I am not qualified to explore, much less provide detailed maps thereof. O rion could have made an interstellar transit at velocities appreciably close to that of light, up to one-third "C." The higher velocities would have been used in simple fly-by missions, which are inherently much less expensive in terms of energy and fuel than capture missions. (You don't have to decelerate.) Communications, even in the late '#'s, would have presented no insurmountable difficulty, considering the mass we had to work with. It was estimated that simple TV frames could be returned from a depth of # light-years, using then-existent equipment. Reliability and multiple redundancy were more of a problem for long missions lasting several decades. Remember, at that time we were studying unmanned interstellar probes that could easily reach their destinations within a single experimenter's lifetime. Orion had one other flaw. The ships themselves would have resembled boiler-plate freighters, and would have cost about the same (about a dollar per pound), which is way below current costs for aerospace vehicles. No, the expense of Orion was in its fuel. Atomic bombs even little ones, cost a lot of money to produce. Now, with breeder reactors that will produce surplus plutonium as a by-product of efforts to generate electricity, the cost of making the "bomblets" would probably be a tenth of what it was twenty years ago. Here, Dr. Enzmann leaned forward to mend the fire. It flickered upward, sending sparks up the chimney and a warm light shone for a moment or two into his ordinarily austere and aquiline-featured countenance. The softening effect of the firelight matched his next musing words, the words of the creator spoken to his lost creation... "Alas, Orion , I loved you, and have been essentially alone in publicizing your existence. Instead of you, we've had Apollo -- a safer course, perhaps, but not as grand. Across the years, when it was unpopular to mention your name, I lauded your abilities, such was my devotion to the idea that there existed an actual concept which could take men, en mass, beyond the earth. It was not the wisest of political decisions, but it was honest. How ironic that many of those who assisted at your birth, Orion, should now be in pursuit of an even grander means to that objective -- fusion -- and all that it implies. The torch has now passed to your successor, but you will be remembered by some of us as the first, Man's earliest expression of an age-old longing in the night to reach out across the dark and toutdi the stars!" T he children were playing sixpoint Overlord, hopping from point to point over a hexagonal diagram drawn in the sand, when the probe broke atmosphere over their heads. They might have sensed it then, for it was heating fast as it entered atmosphere; but nobody happened to look up. Seconds later the retrorocket fired. A gentle rain of infrared light bathed the limonite sands. Over hundreds of square miles of orange martian desert, wide-spaced clumps of black grass uncurled their leaves to catch and hoard the heat. Tiny sessile things buried beneath the sand raised fan-shaped probes. The children hadn't noticed yet, but their ears were stirring. Their ears sensed heat rather than sound; unless they were listening to some heat scource, they usually remained folded like silver flowers against the children's heads. Now they uncurled, flowers blooming, showing black centers; now they twitched and turned, seeking. One turned and saw it. A point of white light high in the east, slowly setting. The children talked to each other in coded pulses of heat, opening and closing their mouths to show the warm interiors. Hev! What is it? Let's go see ! They hopped off across the limonite sand, forgetting the Overlord game, racing the meet the falling thing. I t was down when they got there and still shouting-hot. The probe was big, as big as a dwelling, a fat cylinder with a rounded roof above and a great hot mouth beneath. Black and white paint in a checkerboard pattern gave it the look of a giant's toy. It rested on three comically splayed metal legs ended in wide, circular feet. The children began rubbing against the metal skin, flashing pulses of contentment as they absorbed the heat. The probe trembled. Motion inside. The children jumped back, stood looking at each other, each ready to run if the others did. None wanted to be first. Suddenly it was too late. One whole curved wall of the probe dropped outward and thudded to the sand. A child crawled out from underneath, rubbing his head and flashing heat from his mouth: words he shouldn't have learned yet. The wound in his scalp steamed briefly before the edges pulled shut. The small, intense white sun, halfway down the sky, cast opaque black shadow across the opening in the probe. In the shadow something stirred. The children watched, awed. then rolled out, using the slab of rewas a cluster of plastic and metal widgetry mounted on a low platform slung between six balloon tires. When it reached the sand it hesitated as if uncertain, then rolled out onto Mars, jerkily, feeling its way. The child who'd been bumped by the ramp hopped over to kick the once. The child shied back. Suddenly an adult stood among them. Nothing , one answered. Just playing , said another. IT. The adult looked like the twin of any of the six children. The roof of his mouth was warmer than theirs -- but the authority in his voice was due to more than mere Yes sir. Somewhat subdued, the children gathered around the Automated Biological Laboratory. They watched a door open in the side of the drum-shaped container that made inside the door fired a weighted line high into the air. That thing almost hit me. Serves you right. The line, coated with sand and dust, came slithering back into licked it and found it covered with something sticky and tasteless. Two children climbed onto the slow-moving platform, then up onto the cylinder. They stood up and waved their arms, balancing precariously on flat triangular feet. black grass, and both children toppled to the sand. One picked himself up and ran to climb on again. The adult watched it all dubiously. A second adult appeared beside him. front lifted on a telescoping leg and began a slow pan of the landscape. From the low dark line of the Mare Acidalium highlands on the northeastern horizon, it swung around until its lens faced straight backward at the empty orange desert of IF Tracus Albus. At this point the lens was eye to eye with the hitchhiking child. The child flapped his ears, made idiot faces, shouted nonsense words, and flicked at the lens with his long tongue. The gun fired again, into the black grass, and the line began to reel back. Another box retracted its curved lid. The hitchhiker peered into it, while the other children watched admiringly from below. The child turned to flap his flashed a tight ruby beam of laser light just past his ear. For an instant it showed, an infinite length of neon tubing against the navy blue sky. The child scrambled down and han for his life. An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Discover why Richard E. Geis has won # Hugo Awards and been Nominated # times!  Blare of Trumpets Columnist: John Brunner Read issue ## and see Robert A. Heinlein dissected mercilessly, psychologically and culturally, by Alexei and Cory Panshin in their # words of "Reading Heinlein Subjectively." Read issue ## and return to the dear, lively days of the pulps with Sam Merwin, Jr. (former editor of "Written to a Pulp!" Enjoy Geis editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysample I year#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I The adults looked skyward. Presently their eyes adjusted. Having finished with the clump and rolled toward a dark line of eroded ring wall. The children swarmed after it. The lab fired off another sticky string, let it fall, and started to reel it back. A child picked it up and pulled. Lab and martian engaged in a tug of war which ended when the string broke. Another child poked a long, fragile finger into the cavity and withdrew it covered with something wet. Before it could boil away, he put the finger in his mouth. He sent out a pulse of pleasure and stuck his tongue in the hole, into the broth intended for growing martian microorganisms. The adult voice was ignored. The child left his tongue in the broth, running alongside the lab to keep up. Presently the others discovered it would change course to crawl around the "obstruction." By moving to left and right of the lab, by forming moving "obstructions", the children were steering high on top, pretending to steer by kicking the metal flanks. IF M ore unthinkable thoughts. I may be making a Serious Mistake with these unthinkable thoughts sections. People will come to expect them every column, and I doubt if I have enough for constant bi-monthly displayflaunting. Nevertheless, with a little help from my friends I may stagger through. For instance, Barry Malzberg (rising young nihilist writer about town) sent me an article which appeared recently in the New York magazine .  . (or was it the New Yorker? I am nothing if not uncertain)... which was "by Ron Sproat and which detailed his stint in a porno factory ("The Working Day in a Porno Factory": . I was expected to write # pages of erotic material a day -- a #-page novel a week for #. Still, it was a job...") Since Jim Baen wants this column to be "a miniature Alien Critic " I have no qualms about quoting from Barry's letter (for which I have his grudging permission). One of the things I like best about short Geisian interjections . These occur whenever Dick feels that a commentreply is called for.  plan to maintain that Alien tradition in the Viewpoint. Except that it wont be Dick making with the smartaleck remarks... Baen  So. Barry sent the article on the porno sweatshop and I responded with words to the effect that it was places like that that gave porno a bad name -- that sheer junk writing as described by Sproat had driven the audience (and publishers!) for well-written porno away and killed a rising young genre... more or less. And that I didn't see how anybody could even type # pages a day (# words, for God's sake) to say nothing of making the words coherent. As for plot, characterization, atmosphere, etc., forget it. (When I was writing porno for a living the best I ever did was # pages a day, in a short two-week sprint, and I was young then, in #, and full of piss and vinegar. Nowadays I got no vinegar left.) Barry, in turn, responded as follows: "That's the agents' and writers' argument; Gresham's Law that is holding that this stuff will drive out the good work and the audience itself. I am not sure of this. My observations throughout the years have been -- and the people at Typographies were gambling on this -- that quality level meant nothing, that you were dealing with an audience of people who were drawn to the material for subor transWheriin Naw York visit Mecca for s-f and fantasy readers  Nearly # current paperback and hardcover titles  Magazines and fanzines  Rare old books and pulps  Posters, puzzles, games and more We welcome inquiries # Eighth Ave., New York, N. Y. # #-# literary reasons and that as long as the words were there and the couplings they wouldn't even detect the difference between that and any other level of work right up to the highest professionalism. In short, any money paid in raising the quality level of the material would be wasted. "Maurice Girodias's experience at the Olympia Press would certainly bear this out. "If you think about it a while, the same argument kind of applies to s-f where the worst material (Perry Rhodan) appears to consistently outsell the best ( Camp Concentration) with so few exceptions as to not really affect the gray overall pattern. Think of Charles Platt's letter (in The Alien Critic ##) which is quite a good statement of the problem. "I can see the trend of the market cutting into two types of IF work within fifteen years; cheap work like this hammered out by hacks at the lowest possible return and bestsellers which have been manipulated by publishers. There may be no middleground. Would you question that the market today looks harder to break than at any time in the last twenty years?" Now that to me is absolutely unthinkable! Are most science fiction readers drawn to it for subor trans-literary reasons? Could it be true that as long as the material deals with aliens and spaceships and other planets and mutant humans and strange futures and time travel, etc., that it doesn't matter a damn if it's well-written or not? I thought about it. My eyes glazed a bit as I remembered the well-known rules for gothic romance pocketbook covers: in gothics the cover must show a heroine in flight andor fear, an old house or castle must appear in the background on a dark andor stormy night, and there must be one lighted window showing... or the book won't sell worth a damn, no matter how well written. (I guess the heroine has to be white, too. I've never seen a black heroine on a gothic pb cover.) And I remembered Terry Carr's Ace Special line -- quality science fiction with quality covers. The problem was the books didn't sell very well. Were the covers too "advanced" and "different"? Weren't the sf identification signals strong enough? Was the fiction too good? And I know that the Ace Perry Rhodan reprints packaged in a pocketbook magazine format -- aimed at a #-year-old mentality -- are apparently a thriving success. And I know that Don Wollheim's fiction sells well. He uses traditional sf covers, dynamic and colorful, and his editorial policy is to publish a lot of sf adventure, a lot of traditional plots and themes. I talked with Don Wollheim for about twenty minutes at a regional sf convention in Santa Monica, California, some years ago and he struck me as a keen-minded, pragmatic editor. He loves science fiction, and he is idealistic concerning how sf should portray mankind. His book. The Universe Makers , published by Harper  Row, details this essentially optimistic view of man's future.  An excellent book. -- Baen  Don recognizes that most sf readers (as with most audiences for any type of entertainment) like the tried and true, the familiar, the reassuring... even the broadminded, free-thinking science fiction audience. Don does publish some "different" sf, but not too much. He knows better than to anger and "cheat" his clientele; they have come to know what he publishes, they like it and they will feel betrayed and angry if he deviates too often, too radically, from the usual fare. But to return and look straight into the awful face of the sf-sellsbecause-of-its-symbols and because it satisfies emotional needs in a certain number of people and quality doesn't count argument (which is actually a deterministFreudian argument and denies our sacred and inviolable Free Will, and is an assertion that we are ruled perhaps # of the time by our masked instincts and our sub-conscious...) I tend to agree with it with reservations. The they'll buy anything if their buttons are pushed theory applies to any product to a degree. The degree it works probably depends on the product and the accessibility of buttons and triggers, and knowledge of how to push and pull them. It's a fascinating, sometimes demoralizing subject, and everyone with an ounce of inflated ego should read the literature. I think that in science fiction, the audience does reward quality writing with increased sales and popularity. But there are different kinds of quality in fiction, and the kind of superior writing Barry refers to (and the kind most intellectuals and "serious" writers and university professors consider the best of all sf writing) is not the kind that is very often rewarded with big (or even moderate) money. I think there are three spheres of fiction writing: the "artistic", the "commercial" and the "juvenile". They are separate, with separate (if slightly overlapping) audiences, and I do not believe it is fair or appropriate to say one is superior or better than any of the others. Generally speaking, the "artistic" fiction is concerned with style, experiment, subtle characterizations, message, understatement; "commercial" fiction is readeroriented in that it seeks to satisfy natural story-lust and uses entertainment values inherent in plot formulas; while "juvenile" fiction is pure story simplified to basic actionidea essentials. Each type of fiction can be written superbly. Each type requires great skills and talents if it is to be done well. There are only a few writers around who can write well enough to appeal to all three audiences at once, with a single work. To get back to at least partially dismantaling the they'll-buy-anything theory as it applies to science fiction: let me quote a paragraph or two or three from a self-published sf story sent to me recently for review. (# printed pages, double-spaced, typewritten, photo-offset # V # x #I format.) It is titled Ordiea -- Planet of Fear, and it was written by Janice M. Croy who says in an accompanying letter, "I wrote Ordiea for people who like to read something that is not full of dirt like so many other types of books today. It is basically sci-fi but also contains Atpresent happenings." I was prejudiced against her immediately; anyone who uses the abominable show biz construct "sci-fi" is not a Trufan or Trureader and cannot be considered one of Us. (Yes, I know "sci-fi" was originated by Forry Ackerman -- one of the great First Fans -- but the media took it and used it and now it is a name for science fiction on a par with "colored" for blacks.) Nevertheless, as a critic I am IF pridefully objective, and I opened Janice Croy's impeccably printed mind. After a moment another sign show you why. It begins: March #, # Today is the day long to be remembered in the history of the Four young Earthmen are going to leave our galaxy and venture into the second galaxy east of ours in search of other humanoid life. For over three years now, the top scientists of Earth, Mars, Zandar and our observatory on Pluto have been picking up codetype signals from the fifth planet in that small galaxy's solar system. "I'm sure glad they wished us luck, we sure need it even though we have the newest rocket ship built. Just think, it has a meteor repellor shield, suspended animation chambers, and runs on thermonuclear energy," said Phil.  The four men were soon in a deep sleep traveling into the first galaxy. One year passes quickly, then just as they are nearing the second galaxy, the unexpected happened. The rocket ship is knocked off course by a huge asteroid. The automatic alarm awakens the men from their deep sleep. "Oh, no! We've only been asleep for a year. Something has gone wrong," exclaims Phil. "Something happened all right. We've been knocked off course to the south towards the Andromeda galaxy. If we're lucky we'll land on the #th planet in its first solar system," replied John. their new course. They were instructed to go ahead with the original plans. Oog. That mish-mash of ignorance and incredibly bad writing is enough to make any true sf enthusiast weep... or laugh. And I doubt that any habitual science fiction reader would buy the "book" out of pure symbol-reflex because it has other galaxies, planets, spacemen, rocket ships, etc. in it. (She wants I .# for a copy, by the way, and the address is Janice Croy, # S. Logan, Denver, CO #... just in case some of you DO want to read it.) Barry's thoughts on the future of the sf publishing scene are another kettle of tentacles, and I have to suspect he may be right... with these observations of mine added: I think I see the growing number of sf and fantasy enthusiasts (fandom in the larger sense) divided into small, yet economically viable subgenre specialty audiences which will be serviced by small publishing houses. Small publishers have always sprung up in fandom to print books about and by favorite out-of-print writers -- Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, E. R. Burroughs, etc., and to perpetuate limitedappeal styles of writing, as well as collections of critical works (Knight, Blish), and analyses of sf and of specific writers (Panshin on Heinlein), and the bibliographic works are numerous and exhaustive. But these small publishers were always marginal, usually unprofitable labors of love. Perhaps now, and in the future, I think these specialty publishers will find enough buyers to permit survival and even a bit of growth. What man has done, man is doing, and man will do. one hand I dote on Grand Conspiracy theories of history and economics... and current events. And on the other hand I believe in the Accident theory of history and civilization. (Nobody could conceivably have planned for the recent mess of 'fuel crisis', inflation, and Watergate. But the megabanks and the largest international corporations must be at least trying to control the future!) There is in me, also, a strong desire to be as independent as possible, to be no man's servant, to owe no one. I hate and fear debt. That's why I've always toyed with ideas of being a total hermit, of being an absolutely invisible hippie. (An invisible hippie is a person who lives off the surplus, the throwaways of our society, and who wears the uniform of the square. The role-playing long-haired hippies get hassled; short-haired hippies wearing ties do not.) I've accomplished this invisibility to a degree, but total independence has eluded me. (Even an invisible hippie is dependent on throwaways.) For instance, I want to be able to run this house on electricity converted from the sun's heat, or from wind power. Unfortunately, it costs too much to be power-independent of society. The state of the sun-wind power conversion art is too primitive. So, I'm waiting. The technological revolution is almost to the point where some smart-ass corporation will develop a something , a new, super-efficient battery or powerstorage device which will give them a bigger profit margin on their new, heavy-duty factory franizams -- and they won't realize until too late that it can make a house self-contained, independent of society in a very important aspect. When that "equalizer" comes down the pike it'll spread like wildfire, and a real social revolution will follow. That's the Accident theory of history. Big Money hates such accidents. it loves security and an assured future; it tries to make plans for itself, and that involves control -- of governments, of culture, media, people... But accidents happen! Up till now industrialization and technology have worked to centralize power over things and people; inevitably humanity has become more and more interdependent. But I have a hunchwish that the process will turn around abruptly, by accident , and vast numbers of people will show a great thirst for that new-found bit of freedom and independence. They'll turn governments upside-down to get laws consistent with their new-found selfcontained home cultures and soIF cieties. (And probably equally vast numbers of people will fear this change and resist the movement.) The newly developing laser technology leads me to speculate that soon a powerful, deadly laser rifle cannon will be put together that can be either mass produced or manufactured in the home workshop for peanuts. If this happens a home instantly becomes a too-dangerous-to-mess-with island of independence.  l just hope to God the thing isn't portable. Baen  Not invincible, of course, but deadly enough to make it too expensive in men and material and preparation to assault by local, state, or even federal government. ed with laser cannon...) It would also give any enemy government extreme pause to think. I'm dreaming, I suppose. Idle speculation.  "... when I wrote my first heroine-centered book -- Ordeal In Othern'here -- the publisher protested against such innovation... -- Andre Norton, interview, Entropy ## S ome sort of monument should be put up to mark this year -- the year Yandro reached its #th anniversary. I know there are at least # of you out there now who are frowning and shrugging. What the hell is Yandro? Yandro is a fanzine. It is probably the second longest lived sf fanzine in the world. (Harry Warner's Horizons is likely the oldest regularly, continuously published zineat # quarterly issues... but Horizons , come to think, is much more a personal journal than a sf fanzine... so maybe Yandro is the oldest continuing fanzine.) Yandro has seen the ink of a mimeograph # times, and in earlier years was a monthly, I believe, if memory serves. Now Yandro is irregular, but still appears six to eight times a year. Who would be foolish and stubborn enough to publish a #-plus page fanzine # times over twenty years? Robert and Juanita Coulson, that's who. They also write science fiction and gothic novels, but that is secondary, of course. Robert "Buck" Coulson is a gruff, opinionated, admirable man who has a massive accumulation of books (mostly st), who reads omnivorously and who writes dozens of reviews in his characteristic to-thepoint style that spares no writer's ego. For instance, this review of The Pritcher Mass by Gordon R. Dickson is fairly typical: 'Actually this is the old van Vogt plot of the superman who doesn't know his own strength until his enemies force him to use it. Gordy ties up the loose ends better than van Vogt did, but he never really suspended my disbelief. Further, I'm getting tired of sf writers ending all our pollution problems by magic in the last chapter. This is a pretty good adventure story, but Gordy has done a lot better Buck also writes a column of fanzine reviews with ratings, about four times a year. His estimates of worth are fairly accurate (meaning I agree with him most of the time), and the addresses and prices he lists are invaluable for anyone wishing to explore the complex world of sf fan publishing. Buck also writes an editorial column, "Rumblings", which deals with the life-style and vicissitudes of living of the Coulsons, and includes comments on any number of current local and national concerns. Juanita has her opening personal column, "Ramblings", she comments on readers' letters printed in "Grumblings" -- the letter column, and is the keeper of the mimeo (which means she runs off the issues). It is worth noting that their young son, Bruce, is a chess enthusiast and writes a short personal column in Yandro . too. He is being groomed (I suspect -- a Grand Strategy) to continue the zine when he is married and Buck and Juanita are too Old and Tired to continue. Thus Yandro  a force unto itself, will continue down through the generations of fandom. Used to be the Coulsons didn't want Yandro reviewed, to keep the circulation within bounds, but lately I haven't read of that restriction. If you'd like to try them for a copy, send # e (and a stamped, self-addressed envelope in case they are not inclined to sell or are out of copies or whatever) to Robert  Juanita Coulson, Route #, Hartford Ummm, maybe it would be best if you didn't tell them Geis sent you...  "Well, Torcon was a mess, but I enjoyed it. Actually, for the last several years I have not had any problems about being cornered by fools, hairy or otherwise -- learning how to cut them off is how I got my fannish reputation. If I talk to someone for over five minutes or so, it's a good bet that I am enjoying the conversation. (It sometimes takes a few minutes to decide whether the other party is a fool or not, which is why I prefer to try out new acquaintances by mail first." -- Buck Coulson, commenting on a Jack Wodhams letter in Yandro # a T he ground rules for all the tons of mail you readers want to send me remain the same. Letters of comment and outrage and praise should all be sent to: Richard E. Geis, co IF, # East #th St., New York, NY #. The reason for this is that curioswants to keep a finger on the pulse of this column. He'll send all letters on to me. Books and magazines should be sent directly to: Portland, OR #I I thank you. Until next time, may the next orange you suck have no needle punctures. (Inspired by a letter from a young woman fan here in Oregon who named her son Tripper.  IF Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... have been left to die. Of the five the ship abandoned only I still live. The others died one by ohe as we sat amidst the boxes and crates. No fanfare, no cries, no suffering. One moment they were staring into nothingness, the next they were dead. I am alone, left to die, and know not why. What act condemned me? Did those who sentenced me and my companions to this place have just cause? No matter; I feel no fear, no anxiety, just acceptance of what seems so natural. When we had first disembarked -- when was that? -- we'd begun to open the crates left with us; their contents, food containers, medicine kits, instruments and articles of clothing now lay scattered about. Long before we finished we realized as had those before us, that we should sit quietly and wait for oblivion. It was but a short time away. I wait. A dim prodding within my brain disturbs my tranquility, demanding I recall something, offering no clue as to what. My crime? (Had I committed one?) What other reason for abandonment? My past? I try to ignore this disturbing mental activity. All will be over soon. Eternity waits. My agitation grows, forcing me to remember. This planet, this bleak place of brush, sand and oddshaped gray boulders has a name -- but I can't recall ever knowing it. IF Memories are stirring -- but memories of some time ago... The planet Montos, world dedicated to joy and excitement. Risa, woman of rapture, enslaver whose exotic perfumes mingled with the desire-driven rise of body heat, releasing aromas that banished inhibitions and stirred passion to an unbearable intensity. The craving to possess her smooth, sweetly scented body could only be curbed by utter exhaustion.  Montos -- and Risa. The frontier wars. Federation fleets clashing with Proxan hordes. Man and allied races fighting a breed of reptilian monsters, every battle a desperate one; defeat would mean obliteration. The terror of being ensnared by the Proxan pressor-beam, the exhilaration of pinpointing the aliens with our own weapons. I remember battle -- command -- the deaths of comrades. Exploration and discovery -- that too I remember now. Calgara, the world my ship discovered, a world dominated by a life form instinctively hostile to all exo-sentients. It was I who led the guard-force of the Exploratory Commission. I watched my men fighting and dying as we crawled through the dense steaming forests and voracious bogs, the inhabitants fighting us for every inch of ground. My men eventually forced the enemy to come to terms, thus securing yet another world for the Federation... I remember victory -- and I remember defeat. My mind is alive with other battles, with the love of strange and fascinating females, with drinking and laughing and sorrowing with my shipmates... What is the meaning of the four stinking, rotting corpses that lie littered about me? Who are they? Why are we here? It seems useless to think about the present, but still the prodding in my brain forces me to continue to recall -- to continue climbing the ladder of memory until Tve reached the final rung. The Ulitarian incident -- now I remember, fd sent my ship across the neutral zone to overtake a Proxan raider that had massacred an agricultural colony on Ulitaria. We caught the raider, destroying it in scanner-range of the alien base. I was immediately summoned to Federational Fleet Headquarters and arrived there ready to accept the consequences. But no charges were preferred. Instead I was ordered to undertake a special mission and gratefully made haste to do so. What had followed? It no longer interests me. I don't care to pursue -- again the twist of a nerve in my brain; again I am compelled to remember. There had been an argument at fleet headquarters, a discussion I wasn't meant to hear, yet hear it I did. "Is that dismal bit of space dirt worth more lives?" asked a mild but determined voice. "How the hell do I know? Not one team left any kind of record. Damn it -- it's our service's responsibility to find out what's going on there," a harsh tone responded. "Animals, wired..." "No good. There's a strong magnetic force around Zingor that impedes monitoring instrumentation. We need men on the spot. We'vfc got to solve this riddle. Zingor's atmosphere is almost identical to Earth's... one percent difference... one percent of a substance we can't identify. And who's to say we might not encounter it on some other world? Or what if the Proxans discover it?" "Our people die mysteriously. So we send more. And they die. How long do we -- ?" "Until we get some answers. The next team has already been selected. Commander Aurlo is the most fiercely competitive bastard in the service... an independent... a maverick who bends all the rules -- but gets results. Maybe he can bend Zingor's rules... or its natural laws... or whatever it is that kills our men." "And the precautions?" "Aurlo's ship will remain in orbit and touch down every sixty days." The mild voice turned explosive. "Sixty days! Autopsies indicate no one survived for more than three weeks." "Can't be helped. It takes that long for ship's computer to deionize after being immersed in Zingor's magnetic field..." The conversation begins to fade, but the nagging infinitesimal spark blinking in my head forces me to worry at my memory like a dog with a bone. put it all together. I am Aurlo -- I am on the planet Zingor. My ship is orbiting above me and these dead bodies are from my own crew. I have not been left to die but to live! To live! But even as my spirit surges I feel the darkness seeping back. I must fight it, and -- I suddenly realize -- my memories are my only weapon. Risa, war, fear, glory! I can live only as long as I can retain my ability to recall. Strong emotions, so often man's bitterest enemy, are the means of defeating the malignancy of Zingor. I will not die. I'll bury my dead, feed myself, record my findings and await the arrival of my ship. Somewhere in the crates are breather units and those I must have. I will squeeze my brain's storehouse of years gone by. I feel hunger and fatigue, and they reassure me -- I am once again subject to normal stimuli. But first I must find a breather unit. I start to rise, sensing peace and exhaustion but the feeling passes -- I have been left to die -- and don't know why. It is not important.  IF signer with pacifist inclinations , has accompanied tycoon and bigto Hunters ' Planet There , once every fifteen standard years, the best hunting in the known galaxy can be found . though outworlders' frowned on by the Interstellar Authority. Also , five hundred years before , m #ar system of which Hunters' is a part , grart com humanmanned fleet to victory over the berserkers. Berserkers are automated warships and auxiliary machines built during some interstellar war between long-vanished races , ancLat the time of the story will ravaging the galaxy , their programmed purpose being the destruction of all life . One berserker survived the war on Hunters' Planet, and was hidden bv a cult of humans who worshipped it as Death personified. This intelligent machine has worked with generations of human aides until its secret cult has become the most powerful group on the planet, challenged only by the shadowy organization called the Brotherhood. The berserker's goal is to obtain a starship and carry out its programmed tasks of depopulating the The plan to seize a starship involves luring some outworld craft to land at Godsmountain, where the cultists now openly manage the planet-wide worship of Thorun, god of war and of the hunt, and the chief object of worship on this planet of hunters and warriors. In Outworlders are to be lured by the prospect of watching a Tournament of warriors fighting to the death in single combat. The winner and sole survivor of the Tournament is promised a place of eternal honor at Thorun' s right hand, while even the losers are assured of god hood. the intensity of life attainable during moments of extreme danger, and by heroic deeds ( he and which are still radiating through interstellar space) wants to watch the Tournament, and lands his ship on a small mesa on Godsmountain' s flank. Aboard as his guests, tary and the chief reason for were brought along for male consumption like the cigars and the wine. berserker cult and also High Priest IF of Thorun , sends the demigod Mjollnir really a robot designed by the berserker and utilizing some berserker components, but built by Hunterian craftsmen  with some picked warriors to seize the ship of the other Earth people are watching the Tournament. the attacking party climbing the mesa's sheerest side. T he climber rolled the great length of his frame out onto the horizontal surface of the mesa and raised his gigantic head to look straight at Suomi. The impassive face, its lower half masked by wild dark beard and mustache, was of the right size to fit the head, and yet it was subtly wrong. Not that it was scarred, or intrinsically deformed. Though it was no mask in the ordinary sense, it was yet artificial. Too skillfully artificial, like the work of sopie mad artist, convinced he could fool people into thinking that this robot, this dummy, was a man. The figure rose gracefully to its feet and Suomi saw something that its body had obscured. At the very edge of the cliff a climbef s piton had been hammered into'the rock. The end of a line was knotted to an eye in the piton and the line went tautly back out of sight over the cliff. Now the face of a second climber, this one of normal stature, indubitably human, rose into view. Meanwhile the trailblazing giant had risen to his full height. He was taller than anyone Suomi had ever seen. As he stood up he thrust a mountaineer's hammer into a pouch at his waist and with the same motion of his arm unsheathed an enormous sword. Suomi had come to a dead stop, not paralyzed with fear as he had been by the glacier-beast, but simply unable to form any satisfactory explanation for what his senses were recording. The first answer to cross his mind was that this was all some ugly and elaborate practical joke arranged by Schoenberg or De La Torre but he realized even before the idea was fully formed that they would hardly think it necessary to go to so much trouble to scare him. And Schoenberg, at least, would have too much sense to yell boo at a nervous man with a loaded weapon. The second explanation to pop into Suomi's head was that there must be hooligans on Hunters' planet the same as everywhere else, and some of these had come to see what they might steal from the outworlders' ship. But the marauders' giant leader was not covered by either of these hypotheses. The mind stopped and boggled at the sight, then tried to go around it and proceed. With some vague idea of scaring off bandits, Suomi began to unsling the rifle from his back. As he did so the incredible giant took two steps toward him with its sword upraised, then halted as if satisfied with its position. By this time the second climber, a Hunterian warrior, young and tough-looking, was completely up on the cliff-top and proceeding with drawn sword toward the open hatchway of the ship. The third. also of normal size, was right behind him. "Halt," said Suomi, conscious even as he spoke of the uncertainty in his own voice. He felt foolish when no one halted even though the rifle was now in his hands. Now there were two human invaders on top of the mesa besides the man-shaped giant, and another armed man was climbing into sight. The ship's hatch stood open and -- except for Suomi -- unprotected. And Barbara was in there. He had not leveled the rifle at them yet, but now he did, and shouted "Halt!", this time with conviction. Instantly the huge figure lunged toward him, faster than any human could conceivably move. The man-slicing sword was held high, ready to strike. Suomi squeezed the trigger, realized when it failed to move that he had failed to release the safety. Instinctively he stepped back from the onrushing sword and felt his foot move into empty air. His left hand, grabbing wildly for support, caught hold of the climbing rope and saved dropped him only a short distance down from the edge of the mesa, but still his heel came down on rock with an impact that jarred his leg and spine. His arm twisted with the fall and the rope slipped from his grip. He lost all footing, tumbled and rolled on gravel, and stopped when he came up with a breathtaking slam against an outcropping of rock. Still he was only about halfway down the path, the steepest part of which was just below him. With his back against the rock that had stopped him, he half sat, half lay there, facing up the hill. Dazedly he realized that he was not seriously injured, and that his right hand still held the rifle. Now his finger found the small safety lever beside the breech and turned it back. Somehow he even remembered to set it for full automatic fire. The giant man-thing with its sword upraised reared into view above. When it saw Suomi it dropped itself onto the steep slope with the grace of a dancer. With sword leveled at him now it descended upon him, moving under perfect control, one long bounding stride, two... T he rifle stuttered in Suomi's hands. The sword-brandishing golem's left arm erupted in a spray of dry-looking particles and smoke as the man-thing spun in an incredible pirouette, more graceful by far than any wounded animal. Knock : ed off balance and deflected from its course by the shock of the rifle's force-packets, the towering shape slid past Suomi and on down the slope. But it did not fall. In another moment, near the bottom, it had regained full control and stopped its slide. Then it turned and was calmly climbing, like a mountain goat, at a fast run. The sword, whirling and gleaming, came toward him once again, the face below it a mask of insane serenity. Suomi uttered a sobbing noise, a compound of terror and frustration. In his hands the rifle leaped and kicked, firing continuously while he struggled to keep it aimed. The fur-clad monster, face still IF without expression beneath the silver headband, was stopped in its tracks. Puffs of fur flew from it under the barrage, and splinters and streaks of unidentifiable debris. Then it was hurled back down the hill, still staggering to keep its feet, black cloak alternately furling and flying. Far at the bottom Suomi's continuing mad fusillade pinned it like an insect, leaping and convulsing wildly, against an immovable tree trunk. A force-packet dissolved the silver headband and half the monster's face in a gray bloodless smear. The sword flew from its hand. With a final, awkward, uphill lunge, the figure fell. It rolled over on the ground and lay inert. At last Suomi released the trigger. Suddenly all was quiet. The sky, the mesa, seemed to be whirling around Suomi's head. He realized that he was sprawled precariously on the steep slope, his head considerably lower than his feet. One false move and he would go plunging down. He was breathing in little sobbing gasps. Moving very carefully, still clutching the precious rifle, he got his feet more or less beneath him. Now he could feel a dozen cuts and bruises from the fall. He should get back up and defend the ship. But the slope just above him was impossible. How had he survived the tumble down? He must be tougher than he had realized. His rolling descent had taken him away from the regular climbing path. Couldn't get back to it here by going sideways. He would have to go all the way down and start up again on the proper route. To get down he had to re-sling the rifle and use both hands to grip the rock. In his present state he took without thinking about them slides and drops that would certainly have broken his ankles if he had essayed them calmly. At the bottom he kept his eyes on, the figure of his fallen enemy. He unslung the rifle once again, but it was not needed. His rifle fire had beaten the facing surface of the great tree trunk into splinters, which had showered down with leaves and twigs to make a patchy carpet on the ground. On top of this carpet a giant doll lay huddled where his violence had flung it. S uomi, the killer, still unable to understand, now unable to take his eyes away, came closer. This time, too, as with the glacier-beast, there was scattered fur, though this fur was a long-dead dull brown instead of gallant orange. He prodded with the rifle's muzzle, put out a hand, moved the tattered cloak. What was left of the thing's face was turned away. Beneath the torn fur garments the bulky torso itself was torn and shatof day. No blood and bones this time, but wads of stuff that might have filled a doll. Amid this stuffing were disjointed metal rods and cams and wheels, here and there a gleaming box or tube, and running through all were complex networks of metal cables and insulated wires with an irregular, handmade look about them. And this, some power source. A hydrogen lamp? No, a nuclear fuel cell, not made to energize a robot, but doubtless serving well enough. He had killed, yet he had not. This corpse had never lived, that much was certain. Now he could look more coolly. He touched the side of the cheek above the beard, and it felt like smooth leather. The fur clothing over the torso had never covered skin, only a carapace of hand-worked metal armor. In its slight irregularities of shape and thickness the armor reminded Suomi of a warrior's shield he had just seen at the Tournament below. At close range the energy rifle had opened this crude armor like an egg. Inside were the structural parts, cables and rods and such, also handworked, and mysteriously jumbled with these were a few sealed boxes, smooth and perfect in shape and finish, obviously of quite different origin than the rest... He grasped at his belt. The communicator was gone, and he realized with dismay that it must have been knocked or scraped from its holder at some point during his fall. "Carlos!" It was Barbara's voice, shrill with panic, coming from somewhere out of sight above him. "Carlos, help -- " It cut off abruptly there. Suomi ran to the foot of the climbing path and looked up. In view at the top was the head of one of the Hunterian men who had scaled the cliff. Suomi took an ascending step; at once the man's hands came into view, holding a short, thick bow with arrow nocked and ready. Suomi began to lift the rifle, and an arrow buzzed past his ear. It brought a pang of authentic fright, but Suomi did not shoot back. Dropping one man dead up there was not going to help: Superior firepower or not, Suomi was not going to be able to do anything for Barbara, or regain the ship, without help. It would be impossible to climb the path with the rifle in his hands and once he slung his weapon he would be at a hopeless disadvantage. He must get help. Suomi turned and ran, ignoring signals of damage from his bruised and bleeding legs and aching back. He headed for the site of the Tournament to spread the alarm. The rifle was not noisy and probably no one there had heard the firing. Before he had gotten fifty meters into the trees, a line of uniformed men holding bows and spears at the ready appeared before him, deployed at right angles to his path, cutting him off. A white-robed priest stood with them. The uniformed soldiers of Godsmountain, and they were not coming to help the outworlder against bandits but were leveling their weapons in his direction. "Try to take him alive," the priest said clearly. Suomi abruptly altered course once more, running downhill for greater speed, angling away from both soldiers and ship. Behind him there were signal-like whistles and birdcall cries. A single set of footsteps came pounding after him, gaining ground. Suomi visualized another robot monster. He stopped and turned, saw that it was only a human soldier, but still fired with deadly intent. He missed, blowing a notch out of a tree limb above his IF pursuer's head. Whether wounded by splinters, stunned by concussion, or merely frightened, the man dove for cover and gave up the chase. Suomi fled. In the distance other men still whistled and. signalled to one another, but the sounds grew fainter as he ran. When at last, utterly winded, he threw himself down in a dense tangled thicket, no sound came to him but his own laboring lungs and pounding blood. W hen Suomi walked away from the Tournament, Schoenberg noted that Athena was looking after him, an annoyed expression on her face. The two of them seemed to annoy each other, and that was about all. It was beginning to look as if nothing interesting was going to happen between them one way or another -- which was just as well from Schoenberg's point of view because the girl was an invaluable worker and intensely loyal. Schoenberg would hate to lose her. He wondered how she had become interested in a man like Suomi. He seemed like such a marshmallow, trailing her passively, failing at the hunt, trying to stay away from the Tournament on principle and failing that, then puking at the sight of blood when he did come. Of course such a miserable performance record might in some way prove attractive to a woman. Schoenberg had long ago given up trying to predict what women might do. That was one reason he liked having them around at all times; they were sure to generate surprises. On his other side. Celeste moved a little closer and brushed very lightly against his arm. That one was becoming tiresome. No more pretense of independence. Now she just couldn't bear to be separated from him, it seemed. All at once he forgot about women... The recess was drawing to a close and the priest Leros had his list of names in hand and was about to read from it once more. "Rudolph Thadbury -- Thomas the Grabber.' Thadbury, with the air of a military leader, saluted both Leros and Thomas with his sword. Thomas gave his spear an indefinite wave that might or might not have been a response, then leveled it and moved forward. Schoenberg watched the action critically. He thought he was already beginning -- only beginning, of course -- to appreciate how a duel with edged and pointed weapons should be fought. Since a sword has not a spear's range of attack Rudolph slid aside from the deep thrusts and hacked at the shaft of the spear when he could, trying to sever the spearhead and to move inside the spear's most effective range to a lesser distance, where the advantage would lie with the swordsman. All this was not very different from what Schoenberg had expected. He had read historians' theoretical treatments of personal combat, and had watched Anachronists on Earth playing with their dull weapons. He had never taken up one of their wooden swords, though; he did not care for playing much. Thadbury had no success in hacking at the spear shaft, for it was bound with twisted strips of metal running lengthwise and the sword could not cut through. Nor did he get many chances to try; the Grabber was plainly a master of his chosen weapon. Rudolph could not move in to the range at which he wished to fight. Thomas kept his spear's long shaft flicking in and out, lightly as a serpent's tongue, and still used it handily to parry whenever it seemed the sword might reach his face or bulky torso. And then, suddenly, incredibly, Thomas was no longer staying back to get the maximum advantage from his weapon's greater range. Instead he brushed the sword out of the way with the spear shaft and leaped in to close with his opponent in a wrestler's grip. A cry of surprise went up around the ring, and Thadbury too was taken off guard. Sword and spear fell to the trodden earth together and the two men stamped and whirled in a grotesque dance, each trying to trip and throw the other. But Thomas had the advantage of strength and skill as well. When they fell he was on top, Rudolph prone beneath him. Thomas's massive right forearm became a lever to crush Rudolph's wiry neck. Rudolph, belly down on the ground beneath his foe, kicked, wretched, and twisted with desperate strength. His struggles seemed useless. His face went red, then purple. Schoenberg thought that what was left of the oxygen in his bloodstream and lungs must be going fast. He hoped the man would be speedily out of his pain, even as he pushed Celeste back a little and stepped slightly to one side to get a better look at the coming of death. He knew that a lot of people on Earth, seeing him standing here and watching so intently, would think he was a sadist. In fact, he wished no living creature suffering. Schoenberg wished that he could enter the Tournament himself. Of course he knew full well that he was no more qualified to face such men as these with edged weapons, than they were to meet him with energy ritles. The season before, when he had been hunting with Mikenas, Mikenas had shown him how to use a hunting spear and Schoenberg had successfully impaled some dangerous game on his borrowed weapon. That had been one of the most memorable experiences of his life, and he had never mentioned it to anyone. Of course competing in a Tournament like this was a far different matter. Not that he could reasonably expect to be allowed to enter anyway. Maybe he could find out just how one qualified in the preliminaries, and when the next planetwide Tournament was going to be held. He assumed there would be another one, probably next hunting season. Then if he found some way to practice on Earth, and came back in fifteen years... maybe one of these men's sons would kill him then. It was unlikely, to put it mildly, that he would ever be able to win a major Tournament on Hunters' planet, no matter how much practice and fair preparation he got in. He was not anxious to die, and IF when he saw violent death approaching tie knew that, as in the past, he would be afraid. But it would be worth it?, worth it, worth it. FdT tftfe timeless share of intense life to b# experienced before the end. For the moments of full perfect being when the coin marked Life and Death spun before the altar of the god of chance, moments more valuable than so many years of the dreariness that made up most of what men called civilization. Now Rudolph could no longer strain to throw his killer off, could no longer even grate out noises from his mouth and throat. His face was hideous and inhuman. There was no sound now but Thomas the Grabber's honest panting. That quieted shortly as Thomas sensed the life below him fled. He let Rudolph's head fall, got to his feet, very easy and limber in his movements for such a bulky man. Schoenberg glanced at Celeste, who was looking at her fingernails. Not horrified by what was going on, only mildly disgusted. When he looked at her she gave him a quick questioning smile. He turned to Athena. She was watching the men arm themselves for the next fight, was deep in her own thoughts. Schoenberg and the rest of the outside world had been forgotten. De La Torre came ambling up, from the direction of the ship, to stand beside them. "How'd the last one go?" he asked Schoenberg, craning his neck a little to view the bodies where they had been dragged. "It went all right. They both fought well." # ann the Nomad -- Wull NarV vaez." This should be the last fight of the day. Athena turned her head but not her eyes to Schoenberg and whispered: "What are those things on his belt?" There were two or three pairs of them, strung on a cord. "They appear to be human ears." De La Torre emitted a highpitched snicker, that made Schoenberg glance over at him for a moment, frowning in surprise. Vann the Nomad was waving his long sword with what seemed to be the clumsy movements of an amateur, but nobody now watching him could be taken in by that deception for a moment. The show now became almost comical, for Narvaez, too, affected an innocent appearance. He looked so like a harmless peasant that the look must have been carefully cultivated. Wull carried a pitchfork, and made tentative jabbing motions with it toward his foe. Wull's dress was crude, and his mouth pursed grotesquely, so that he looked for all the world like some angry, mud-footed farmer nerving himself to unfamiliar violence. The six warriors who had already survived the day's dangers were relaxed now and in a mood for humor, enjoying the charade. They hooted and whistled at clumsylooking feints, and called out rough advice. Leros glanced around at them in irritation once, but then to Schoenberg's surprise said nothing. With a flash of insight Schoenberg realized that the contestants in a Tournament like this one must stand closer to the gods than even a priest of Leros's rank. Vann tried several times to cut the pitchfork's shaft, which was not armored with metal, but Narvaez had a way of turning the fork that minimized the swordblade's impact, and the wooden shaft seemed very springy and tough. When Vann's tactics had failed him several times he tried something new; grabbing at the fork with his free hand. He was so fast that on his first attempt he managed to seize the weapon, getting a good grip on it just where the tines branched out. With this grip he pulled the surprised Wul Narvaez off balance while his sword thrust low and hard. He took the ears of Narvaez before the man was dead, warning the maul-slave off with a snarl, until he had made sure of undamaged trophies. athena, blinking, came back to full awareness of her surroundings once again. She looked for Schoenberg, and saw that he had turned away and was waiting to talk to the High Priest Andreas, who had just come in sight on the road that descended from the mountaintop, walking with a small escort of soldiers. De La Torre, moving closer to Athena, asked her in a low voice: "Did you get that last little bit?" "What?" Not having understood, she turned to him with a look of expectancy. "I was talking about the earcutting, whether you got that part down on crystal. I've been making a few recordings too." The expectancy in her face dimmed, then vanished abruptly as realization came. The crystal on which her day's anthropological records were to hpye been made still hung unused at her belt. andreas, after having made a V short congratulatory speech to the surviving warriors, turned quickly to Schoenberg and inquired: "Have you enjoyed the day's competition?" "We who are here have enjoyed it very much. I must apologize for Suomi, the one who became ill, as you may have heard. I do not think he will come to watch again." Andreas's lip curled slightly but he made no further comment. None was needed. Such a man was beneath contempt and unworthy of discussion. He asked: "Will all of you join me at a feast in the Temple of Thorun tonight? All of you, that is, who are now here. We can ascend at once to the city if that is convenient." Schoenberg hesitated only marginally. "I did not think to bring a gift for Thorun with me from the ship." Andreas smiled. What was the naive old saying? If a smile disfigures a man's face, then that man is bad. The High Priest said: "lam sure you will provide a suitable gift. There is no hurry about it, not now." "Very well." Schoenberg glanced at those of his shipmates present. All watched him expectantly and appeared perfectly ready to be Thorun's guests. "Just let me say a word to the people waiting at the IF ship. Only take a minute." "Of course." Andreas, noble savage, turned politely away. Schoenberg took his communicator from his belt and spoke into it. Looking toward the ship he thought he could just see the head of Suomi, who must be sitting down in his sentry's position at the top of the climbing path. It was Barbara who answered. "Hello?" Her voice was uncertain. "Look, Barb, those of us down here now have been invited up to visit the Temple. A feast is scheduled. I'm not sure when we'll get back to the ship. Tell Suomi to be sure to get inside before dark and button the thing up. One of you call me if any problems should arise; I'll call you again when we're ready to start back. Okay?" There was a little pause, and then she only said, "Okay." "Everything all right?" "Yes. Okay, Oscar." Just hearing about the Tournament and thinking about it must have upset her, he supposed. Probably she had been holding Suomi's hand while he recounted bestial horrors. Well, next trip he. would choose his traveling companions more carefully. None of this bunch were exactly what he had hoped for. Except next time he might be coming here alone, not expecting to return to Earth. He wondered if he could really teach himself, on Earth, to use edged weapons with real skill. He wondered if he would do better with sword or axe or spear. Tonight, if everything went well, he would have a chance to mention his plan to Andreas. T he little party of outworlders and their casual escort of a few soldiers began to climb the smoothpaved mountain road, Andreas and Schoenberg walking together in the lead. "It is only a few kilometers to the top," Andreas informed them. "Perhaps an hour's walk if we take our time. Your hours on Earth are about the same length as ours, not so?" When they had walked only about half a kilometer along the zig-zag, climbing road they came to the place where, as Andreas pointed out, the ring was being prepared for the next day's fighting. Here the mountain was steeper, less level space was available, and one side of the ring overlooked a bank that was almost a precipice. After another kilometer the switchback road passed between twin stone watchtowers from which sentinels saluted the party crisply with their spears. Andreas returned the salutes. They must be nearing the summit now. The slope of the mountain moderated again and the road wound through a park-like wood. Many of the trees bore fruit. The earth below them was hidden under a vine-like groundcover plant that put up leaves like blades of grass. Presently the trees thinned out, the ground leveled and they came in sight of the citadel-city on the mountain's crown. As the road brought them near the city's bonewhite walls, straight toward a yawning gate, Schoenberg glanced back once in the direction of the ship. He was developing a faint uneasiness that he found hard to shake. He could see only the top of the metal sphere above the trees before he passed into the city. Inside, there was at first little to be seen, except more walls of bright white stone. As they made their way in through the streets, Schoenberg found them narrow and busy. Grayclad slaves, and carts pulled by multihorned draft animals, made way for white-robed aristocrats. Here and there an elegant woman eyed the visitors from a sedan chair or a grilled window. Windows were usually small, doors usually kept closed, walls invariably white. There was a deadly sameness to the architecture of the city. Catching Andreas's eye, Schoenberg asked: "May we take pictures here?" "Of course. You must take one of me, later. I shall treasure it." The white-garbed lords of the planet were lining the visitors' path now in considerable numbers, bowing lightly and courteously, showing somewhat more curiosity than Schoenberg had ever before seen displayed by Hunterians. Athena was smiling and waving to the women and children in white who were visible peering from windows or around corners. Those in gray, male and female, generally seemed too hurried to look up. It occurred to Schoenberg that there were no gray-clad children visible. "The Temple of Thorun." Andreas had stopped and was pointing to a pair of high gates of heavy metal grillwork that guarded the entrance to a courtyard lined on three sides by buildings of the ubiquitous white. These were somewhat taller than any of the visitors had passed on their way through the city. "There we will feast tonight." O nce the party had passed through the gates, Andreas bade the visitors a temporary goodbye, and himself went on toward the building that Schoenberg took to be the Temple proper, the tallest structure, some twelve or fifteen meters high, with broad white steps and forbidding doors. The outworlders were guided by bowing young priests into another nearby building and there shown to individual rooms, all of which were out of sight of the street, opening onto a kind of formal garden in an enclosed court. Led into his room by the obsequious manservant assigned to him, Schoenberg found it a small but pleasant place. The small window was protected by an ornamental grill, soft rugs covered the floor, and there was a comfortable-looking bed. An invitation to stay overnight seemed to be in the cards. His manservant was laying out white garments produced from somewhere, and through the open door other servants were visible, carrying in haste what appeared to be a bathtub. A little later, getting his back scrubbed -- hardly necessary, but let them do things their way -- he found that the unexpected degree of hospitality had to some e#t(it allayed the unease that had begun to nag him. Now, though, he inspected that Andreas was goiqg to ask him some rather large favof before they parted. What could it be? Probably to smuggle in some outworld weapons, something needed to reduce some particularly troubleIF some adversary.' The swift tropical Hunterian night had come on by the time he had finished bathing and dressing. A young priest was promptly at hand to conduct him to the feast; it seemed that everything was running on a smooth schedule. With a word to his guide he stopped at Athena's room, next to his, and found her ready to join him, as prompt as when they went off on a business trip. Her guide had told her that De La Torre and Celeste, whose rooms were next along a covered walk, had already gone on ahead. Joking a little about what sort of merchandise they might hope to sell to their new client Andreas, Schoenberg and Athena followed their guides from one courtyard and cloister to another without being brought again in sight of the city's streets. Evidently the Temple complex was extensive. At last they entered a small door in the flank of the tall building Schoenberg recognized as the Temple itself and were led down to a large room a short distance below ground level. It was refreshingly cool after the day's sunlit warmth. Already at table were De La Torre and Celeste, also garbed in white, De La Torre with a leafy garland on his head like some ancient Roman. With them sat the High Priest, and half a dozen other men all of the highest rank. Some of these had accompanied Andreas on his first welcoming visit to the outworlders' ship. Servants moved quietly and efficiently about. The banquet roomras large, pleasingly decorated with fine hangings, softly lit with well-placed candles. All was as it should be. "Our host has been telling me about Thorun's great hall," said De La Torre, after greetings had been exchanged. "So?" Schoenberg moved a hand around in an inclusive gesture. "Is this the place?" One of the Inner Circle priests grinned, broadly and cynically. "No, Thorun's is really quite a different world from ours. Or yours." as at the Tournament, SchoenV berg, when seated, found himself between Athena and Celeste. Here, despite the outwardly pleasant surroundings, not only Celeste but Athena kept drawing close to him, as if unconsciously. Not only were there no other women guests this evening, but Schoenberg had the feeling that there might never have been any in the history of the Temple. Andreas and the other Hunterian leaders never spoke to Athena unless she asked them a direct question, which she did of course from time to time to show her nerve. Celeste, being a good playgirl, knew when she was expected to keep quiet. If the Hunterians knew her real status, Schoenberg supposed, they would be outraged. No doubt about it, his party was being accorded extraordinary treatment. He would have to at least appear to agree to their request when it came, whatever it might be. The feast was elaborate and very good, though Schoenberg with an apologetic explanation to Andreas advised the other outworlders not to partake of certain dishes, nor of the fermented milk that was brought before them in great bowls. "It will be better for our Earthly stomachs if we drink clear water here, if Thorun does not object." Andreas waved a negligent hand. "Thorun is largely indifferent to such matters. Clear water is always a good warriors' drink." Schoenberg sipped his water, from a golden cup. "I look forward to seeing the next round of the Tournament." "I, too. I am delighted that our interests coincide. Unfortunately business has prevented me from seeing any of the earlier rounds." "I know what the press of business can be like." Celeste's foot was tapping under the table. Dancers had come on the scene and she was watching them with professional interest. They were good, girls and youths dancing together, the show very crude by Earth standards of course, and too bluntly erotic in places, but well practiced and full of energy. The Hunterian men at table watched the show with somewhat grim expressions, or did not watch it at all. Schoenberg wondered if priests here were supposed to be celibate. He would get around to asking that later, if at all. Sex on any planet was likely to be an even more sensitive subject than religion, which these religious leaders did not appear to take too seriously. All was new and interesting to the outworlders and the evening passed quickly for them. The night was well advanced, the candles burning low, and the dancers literally collapsed from exhaustion. when Schoenberg suggested that the time had come for him and his party to return to their ship. Andreas made a gesture of polite disapproval. "Your beds here have been prepared. One of the dancing girls yonder will share yours with you if you like." "The offer is most pleasing. But I am concerned about my ship." "Stay here. Spend the night under Thorun's roof. You and I have much more to talk about. And it would be unpleasant, trying to climb the tall rock at night to reach your ship." Schoenberg did not take long to make up his mind. "We accept your invitation gladly. If you will excuse me, though, I must talk briefly to the people on the ship." He took the communicator from his belt, activated it, waited for an answer. None was immediately forthcoming. He raised the device to his mouth and spoke. "Suomi?" "Stay here," said Andreas, making his face hideous with his smile. "In the morning I will try to facilitate your meeting with him." "You will try... I do not understand." "You see, the man you left to guard your ship is there no longer. It is shafcieful but necessary to explain that while the last round of the Tournament was in progress he took fright and fled from that place. I did not wish to worry you unnecessarily, but we ha'e not yet managed to locate him." Schoenberg sat up straight, giving Andreas his best tycoon's look. "And what about my ship?" "We are guarding it for you. Nothing in it will be damaged. No IF e crisp, clean taste of Kent Menthol The only Menthol with the famous Micronite filter. mg. "tar," #:# mg. nicotine; mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine, Menthol: # mg. "tar "# mg. nicotine; Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. one can reach it, except by my authority. Come, I must insist you stay the night." S hortly after the next morning's dawn a slave came around to waken the eight survivors of the Tournament. Giles the Treacherous, roused instantly by the light tug on his sleeping robe, rolled over, remembered fully where he was, and came awake with something of a start. Sitting up, he rubbed sleep from his eyes and looked about him, then observed to anyone who cared to listen: "Our camp is growing somewhat smaller day by day." Though most of the seven others were awake, none of them chose to respond immediately. Like Giles, they had simply wrapped themselves in robes or blankets for sleep., and now there was a general slow emergence, as of a gathering of insects from cocoons. It had rained a little during the night. The morning was gray and cheerless. On the previous evening the eight warriors had bedded down quite close together, as if by common consent against some external danger. The space they now occupied was tiny indeed compared with that of the first fine encampment beside the river far below. When Giles stood up the river was visible to him down there, bend after bend of it snaking across the flat country until it lost itself at last in fields of morning mist. Down there croplands made ragged rectangles. For a moment -- a moment onfy -- Giles wished with the intensity of physical pain that he was somewhere in his own remote province, striding stupidly behind a plow, as once he had done, long ago. Long ago. Omir Kelsumba, giant and black, was standing a few paces away and preparing to empty his bladder down the hill. The slaves had not gotten around to digging a latrine for this campsite before most of them were for some reason called away to other duties, yesterday afternoon. Omir spoke over his shoulder to answer Giles at last: "Tonight we will need less space still, but what of that? Soon all of us will be dwelling in Thorun's hall, where there must be room enough for any man." "Well spoken," commended Farley of Eikosk, standing tall to stretch, then bending and with deft movements of his freckled arms starting to roll up his sleeping robe. Like his weapons, it looked costly. By now all of the warriors were up, busy scratching, stretching, spitting, rolling their sleeping robes in preparation for moving camp. Farley of Eikosk went to offer a prolonged obeisance before the altar of Thorun, kneeling and murmuring prayers, bending his forehead to the ground. Soon Kelsumba joined him, and then Charles the Upright, and then one by one the others, until all had offered at least perfunctory worship. The enigmatic face of the little image of Thorun showed no sign of favoring any. Vann the Nomad was hungriest this morning, it seemed, being first to leave the shrine and move toward the cooking fire where a single gray-clad slave was preparing what looked like a very simple morning meal. As Vann moved away, Giles said in a low voice to Kelsumba: "What do you think of that one, cutting ears for trophies?" Kelsumba only grunted in reply. He had begun to inspect his axe, checking to see if the night's rain had gotten through its carefully wound and oiled wrappings to rust the steel. Except for the axe, everything Kelsumba owned was shabby and worn. While crouching over his axe and looking at it closely, he said to Giles: "You are perhaps a wise man. Maybe you can give me an opinion on this. Suppose I do not win the Tournament. Even so, having come this far, I will be seated high up at Thorun's table. Will he listen to me, do you suppose? If I die today or tomorrow will he intercede with the goddess of healing to grant a favor for me?" Giles gave a little private sigh. "Such a question is beyond me," he answered. "But it is generally believed that all wounds, old or new, are healed when one enters Thorun's hall, whatever one's rank inside." "Oh, it is not my own wounds that have brought me here." The big man looked up and turned vacant eyes into the distance. "I have a wife and two little ones, far away. The babies are both sick, they waste and do not grow. The village doctors can do nothing. I pleaded with the gods, offered sacrifice, but the children did not get better." His eyes swung around to Giles, and his fingers moved upon the handle of his axe. "So I will become a god myself. Then I will be able to make my children well, even if I cannot live with them any longer." His voice was rising and his look had become the stare of a fanatic. "I will kill six men, or sixty if need be! I will kill you, and Thorun himself will not be able to stop me!" Giles nodded gravely, signifying agreement, keeping his face immobile. Then #ie turned carefully away. When he glanced back a moment later, Kelsumba was sitting there quietly again, honing his axe. Thomas the Grabber, who had been standing only a little distance off when Giles made his remark about Vann's ear-cutting propensities, had probably heard the comment. It was Thomas who should be due to oppose the ear-cutter in this day's round of fighting, but Thomas, looking sleepy this morning, seemed not at all disturbed. Now he was yawning, with a kind of cavernous bellow. It was hard to say whether Kelsumba or the Grabber was the biggest of the surviving men. Jud Isaksson was certainly the smallest, with Giles not much larger. The latter sighed once more to himself as he made this assessment. B reakfast consisted of thick tasteless fried cakes and water. For the first time there was no meat. When the men growled at the slave who served them, he indicated by a few grunts and helpless gestures -- someone had once cut out his tongue -- that nothing better had been provided and he was having to do more work than usual IF because most of his fellows had been called away. Leros confirmed this, scowling as he munched his own share of the fried cakes. "Two priests who are my friends came down to rouse me early this morning, to sympathize with me that most of our retinue has been taken away. There is no excuse for giving us such meager service. True, our numbers are reduced, but the glory of you who survive has grown the greater. I have sent up a protest to the High Priest. I trust we will be better fed, and attended, by midday.' Breakfast, such as it was, having been disposed of, Leros gave the order to march and the party began once more to ascend. Far ahead of them a train of freight wagons loaded with provender for the city went groaning slowly up the road. Another, of empty, rattling carts, came clattering more quickly down. Charles the Upright, who happened to be walking in the van, had to reach for his sword before the surly driver of the first descending cart would lead the train of vehicles fairly off the road to let the climbing heroes pass. Leros's irritation was increased by the incident, but he said little and the party hiked on. Certainly it was true that they no longer made an impressive sight. The men were all bedraggled after days spent in the field and they were practically unattended. He had felt like stopping to flog that insolent varlet of a driver, but such a job would only demean the whole proceeding further. The city of Thorun was not yet visible, though the summit of Godsmountain could hardly be more than a kilometer above them now. Once Giles caught a glimpse of the huge outworld ship, gleaming wetly on its distant pedestal of rock, but then rain and fog blew in between, and trees closed in again around the road on which they Climbed. T wo priests of intermediate rank came down to meet Leros and talk with him. The three of them, conferring privately, walked on ahead of the eight warriors. The eight continued to climb calmly and steadily, sometimes two or three walking together long enough to exchange a few words, sometimes all of them strung out, each in his solitary introspective silence. A ragged pair of slaves, all that remained of their once princely retinue, bore burdens in the rear. One slave was dumb and the other limped on a crippled leg. The image of Thorun, for which a field shrine had been built at every camp thus far, had now been left behind. Temporarily, Leros said, until they should have servants again to build a decent shrine. Shortly after the near-incident of the carts, Giles the Treacherous sought out Jud Isaksson who had been trudging alone and walked companionably beside the man who in a few hours would be trying to kill him. Jud acknowledged his presence with a glance and then went back to his own thoughts. Casting a glance back at their beggarly force of servants, Giles remarked: "So, no meat. And it also seems there will be no musicians today, to waft our souls upward to Thorun's hall." Jud shrugged uneasily. Perhaps it was only the wet wind blowing rain against his neck that made him do so. Giles measured out half a dozen strides of road beneath his boots, and then added: "I know only this. Sixty-four brave fighting men, all full of life and blood and valiant deeds, met on the plain below. And now there are just eight of us with breath still in us. Then , when we still might have turned around and gone home, we were greeted and praised as heroes. Now? No one beholds our deeds, or will ever sing of them. And are the dead fifty-six in truth now at their feasting up above?" He looked toward the mountaintop concealed amid its groves. "I hear no sounds of laughter down the wind." Jud's mustache moved, but he only spat. Giles was determined not to let things drag on; time was growing short. He said, trying almost at random now to provoke a reaction: "You and I have seen those fifty-six good men go up in smoke. No, not even that. They have not all been burnt, as heroes should be, but buried for the most part like dead animals. In shallow graves." "Man." Jud found his voice at last. "Man, I know not why you rehearse these things to me. Tell me -- I know nothing of you but your name -- is it for no reason at all that you are called Giles the Treacherous?" "That is a long story, and not too easy of belief. I will begin it if you like." "No, I care not. A true scoundrel would probably call himself Giles the Honest. All right!" Jud came visibly to a decision. "All right! If you want plain speaking. A child should know there are no gods on top of this mountain, or anywhere else. That being so, who really does rule the Temple, Godsmountain, the world? The simple answer is, that they are ruled by men." He nodded, smiling with satisfaction at his own logic, and then plunged on. "Very well. Since we're not going to be welcomed into some imaginary hall, the question arises, why are we here? There must be a real reason. T'would be senseless to have us kill one another off to the last man for the amusement of a few outworlders who happened by. No. Mark my words. Before this day's duelling starts -- or at worst before it's over -- the six or eight of us who're left will be let in on the secret, and the Tournament will be secretly stopped." "You really think that." "Man, what else? We're going into some elite, secret force. They've already stopped sending down supplies for us right? The Tournament will be halted, and some story put out telling who the final winner was and how he's happily guzzling and wenching with the gods," "The good Leros must be an excellent actor." "Maybe he hasn't been told. A good man and all that, but not the brightest. It's plain enough if you only look at it, consider all the facts. We're going into some kind of palace guard, for the High Priest and whoever else is really running things atop this mountain." IF When Jud fell silent, Giles also had no more to say for a little while, though he was thinking rapidly. At last he replied: "You may be right. I only know that I would give much to be able to turn my own steps quietly downhill at this moment and retrace them to my home." "You speak madness, Giles. Once you have come this far they would never let you go. Where is your home?" "Endross Swamp." It was a remote province, far to the south. "The writ of Godsmountain does not run there with much effect." "Sol have heard. In fact I would have thought that place was full of Thorun's enemies." Jud was staring at him. "Why are you here?" "I am no enemy of Thorun," Giles said at once, and firmly. "It may be that some of his priests are not as worthy and honest as they should be. As to why I am here, well, I am now asking that question of myself." Up ahead the priests had stopped, still deep in their discussion. Leros was gesturing angrily, while the other two appeared unhappy but resigned. They had reached the next ring prepared for fighting. Giles saw that it had been made with a portion of its rim overlooking an almost precipitous slope. As he stared, he felt a chill sensation near his heart. In the south they thought that meant a man had laid eyes on the place where he would die. "What did I tell you?" Jud was murmuring, nudging Giles with an elbow. Leros had turned around as they came up, and was about to speak to the warriors. But something in Leros's attitude had changed, and they all recognized at once that he was not simply going to announce another round of fighting. Something else impended. I eros was angry, but not at the j warriors, not at the gloomy priests who stood beside him. When he spoke his voice was tense. "First I am instructed to ask, whether, when the outworlders were with us yesterday, any of them mentioned the name of the demigod Karlsen." The warriors all exchanged mildly puzzled looks. Most of them could not remember anything the outworlders had said: they all had more important things to think about. This was hardly the announcement Jud had expected, and he was frowning. All were silent until Giles put up a hi nd and asked: "Good Leros, are these outworlders then accused of some blasphemy?" "That is being decided up above," said one of the other priests, gesturing toward the summit. "Tell Andreas to decide it up there, then," said Leros tartly. "And let me get on with more important business here." "Lord Leros, your pardon. I repeat again, I and many others are sympathetic to your views. I am only relaying orders -- " "Yes." Again Leros addressed the waiting warriors. "Those above see fit to bother us with a second triviality. One of the outworlders, the one who behaved like a frightened woman when he saw blood, has wandered off. It is thought he must still be on the mountain, for soldiers patrolling in the flatlands have not found him. I must ask whether any of you have caught sight of such a person either last night or today." Giles signed that he had not. The other seven, by now were almost totally uninterested, also gave mutely negative responses. Leros turned back to the other priests. "Do not these outworlders carry devices for talking one to the other, even when they are kilometers apart? How can one be lost if he can tell the others where he is?" One of the other priests said: "Such a device was found near their ship. The coward must have dropped it. Anyway, in my opinion he does not want to be found. Other even stranger things were found there also, and there is more going on than we have been told." The priest's voice dropped almost to a whisper. Giles feigned a boredom as great as that of the other fighting men around him, and he kept his eyes on a little flying creature in a tree, but meanwhile his ears grasped for every word. The priest continued his private -- he thought -- conversation with Leros: "The other outworlders are said to be guests in the Temple precincts but no one believes they remain there by choice. Very few people have seen them since they entered. One of their women seems to be confined aboard their ship. More, and stranger -- one that I shall not name has told me of a most surprising rumor; the demigod Mjollnir went forth to challenge the outworlders, and one of them slew him." Leros made a disgusted sound and turned his back. "And I had been on the verge of giving credence to these stories you bring." "Oh, I do not credit that about Mjollnir myself. Certainly not! Blasphemous. But something strange is going on, something to do with the outworlders, and we have not been told the truth about it." "That may well be. But it has nothing to do with me or with this Tournament." Leros squinted up the road. "When may we expect better food and drink, and some new servants?" The third priest looked unhappier than before. "Lord Leros, again I must give you an answer that you will not like." Leros swung around. "What now?" His tone was ominous. "It is as if the Inner Circle has suddenly forgotten about the Tournament. Not simply that they are busy with other things, but that they no longer care about it. I could get no promise that the rations sent down would be improved. Andreas I saw only briefly, and he was preoccupied with other matters, I know not what. He said to me: 'Bid Leros get on with his show, and finish up.' How can I question the High Priest?" Leros's hand went unthinkingly to his side, where a warrior's belted sword would hang, found only the smooth white priestly robe. "My show? Were those his words?" "On my honor, they were." "Well,  can question what Andreas ordefs." Leros spoke in cold IF rage, his words quiet and calculated. "High Priest or not. What else will he take from us? Why not all our slaves and food, why not our clothes and weapons as well?" The other priests looked as if they were trying not to hear. Giles was holding his breath in concentration. Leros went on: "Is this or is it not supposed to be a Tournament pleasing to Thorun and worthy of him, intended to select a man who is worthy of apotheosis? Are not these eight remaining champions, each and every one, the finest... Words failed Leros for the moment. Indeed he seemed near strangulation. At last he managed to draw a deep breath and resume. "Very well. I must go up and question him myself on these matters. One of you two must stay here for a while, that these men be not left unattended by any of high rank." Turning then to the eight waiting warriors, Leros lost his scowl and faced them with a sad and loving smile. "Good lords -- good men. I must leave you for a while. Do you wish to go on with this round of fighting or wait for my return? I am going up the hill to argue for better treatment. There is no telling when I will get back." The men looked at one another uncertainly. Giles almost spoke, and then bit back the words. His mind was racing, trying to balance probabilities. He wanted a delay, but not too much of one. Leros, seeing their uncertainty, glanced at the high bronze shield that was Hunters' sun trying to burn its way through layers of mist. "Wait until the hour of noon," he told them. "If I am not back by then, with better honors and provisions for you -- or have not sent word -- then fight on as best you can." Handing over his list of names to the priest who had been chosen to stay with the men, and beckoning the others to come along, he started at a brisk pace up the hill. T he long morning dragged slowly by. Until the middle of the day the warriors stood or lounged around, gloomily silent or conversing two or three together in low voices. At last, when it was plain that noon had come and gone and there had been no word from Leros and no sign of his return, the substitute priest cleared his throat and called the eight together. In a somewhat awkward little speech he introduced himself as Yelgir, and announced that he was ready to call the roll if they were prepared to fight. "Let us get on with it," said Vann the Nomad. Others nodded their readiness. Waiting and uncertainty were harder to bear than blows. They took their places around the ring. Yelgir took out the roll of names and cleared his throat once more. "Charles the Upright -- Farley of Eikosk." From their opposite sides of the ring Charles and Farley advanced in almost leisurely fashion. In the center they touched weapons carefully, each man showing respect for the other's abilities, and began a cautious sparring. Farley's wounded left hand, that Leros himself had neatly splinted and bandaged, did not appear to be causing him any trouble except that he opened the fight with sword alone, leaving his dagger in his belt. Gradually the fighters added speed and strength to their movements until the long swords rang musically. The contest seemed quite even between them. Then Farley's jewel-bright steel dipped in a flashy feint he had not used in any earlier round of fighting. Charles tried to parry the stroke that did not come, and missed the deadly one that did; he fell to earth with one bright shriek of pain. "Giles the Treacherous -- Jud Isaksson." Jud, as before, charged out quickly. Giles did not seem nearly so eager, but still this fight began at a faster tempo than had the previous one. Both men were active, but neither would commit himself utterly to an attack. Now Giles became the more aggressive; his long sword lanced above and below the smaller man's round shield, but did not manage to get around it. And now Isaksson's blows fell thick and fast and Giles was forced to spend his energy in parrying, and then to give ground before the onslaught. The end came suddenly when Giles was backed against the rim of the fighting circle that overhung the downhill slope. Jud's blade flashed, a mere glint of light, and Giles clutched at his chest, gave a choked cry, fell. On the steep turfy incline his body slid and tumbled a score of meters before a bush caught and held it momentarily. Then it pulled loose and slid on again. The priest beckoned. The limping slave with the maul began the long climb down. "Omir Kelsumba -- Rahim Sosias." The black giant seemed to grow even larger upon entering the ring. Again he carried his great axe cradled in his two arms almost tenderly. Against him, fat Sosias with his curved sword looked terribly overmatched. But the scimitar drew first blood. It was a light wound, a mere touch with the point along the outside of Kelsumba's thigh. Sosias's timing had been perfect; the riposte with the axe only tore the edge of his loose outer garment. The wound galvanized the black man, and now Sosias had to go jumping back, paunch jiggling as he danced with marvelous speed. Shift and flash went the axe, and shift and flash again, moving with the speed and control of a light sword, though the heaviest sword could not have held it in a parry. A light murmur of awe went around the watching circle. Sosias tried the cut at the thighs again, or feinted doing so. This time the riposte came out a little farther after him, yet he miraculously managed to cut his own movement short at the critical instant and slide away untouched. His concealed knife had come out into his left hand, but he was unable now to get close enough to use it. It would be suicidal to simply wait and try to keep dodging that axe. Sosias must try to attack again, and at last the great axe caught him coming in, and wiped away his face. Thomas the Grabber, leaning on his spear some IF ten meters distant, felt warm droplets of blood splash on his arm. X the Nomad." Vann with his clumsy-looking grip on his long sword faced Thomas, who probingly sent his hupe spear darting out and back. Vann wasted no energy in trying to behead the spear, the armored shaft of which had proved itself already in several fights. The fight developed quite slowly at first, both men moving cautiously, with many feints and no real effort at attaek. After a while it became apparent to expert eyes -- no other kind were watching now -- that Vann could not entirely rid himself of the affectation of holding his sword awkwardly between exchanges. Certainly he got it back into the proper position with amazing speed, but the fraction of a heartbeat wasted in this correction was more than could be spared in competition at this level. The awkward grip was not a natural attitude for Vann, like Kelsumba's peculiar way of holding his axe, but a pose practiced to put an opponent off guard. As such it was utterly useless now, as Vann knew full well; he did not want to use it, but his nerves and muscles would forget and fall into the pattern. Thomas timed this lapse and recovery several times, then caught the long sword drooping on the downbeat. With a sound like a club's impact the spear rammed through Vann's tattered shirt and torso, a little above his trophied belt. Vann's face bore a look of witless grief when he saw the bright fountain of his own blood, then bore no expression at all. F arley of Eikosk, departing from that deadly ring in the company of his three peers, to resume their slow trek up the mountain, was bothered by the eerie feeling that the gods had forgotten the surviving handful of them. Glancing back over his shoulder from the next bend in the road, he saw the stiffening bodies of the day's four victims laid out beside the ring, and a single gray-garbed figure with a maul at its belt beginning to dig the modest pit that would be their grave. Isaksson, walking beside Farley, kept glancing back also, and Isaksson, too, seemed perturbed about something. Farley almost tried to speak of his troubled feelings, but then said nothing, being unsure of how to put them into words. A few paces ahead, Omir Kelsumba, his huge axe clean and sheathed and innocent as some woodcutter's implement, went up the endless-seeming hill with easy strides. His thoughts were far away, with his small unhealthy children and his wife. Someday, if he won the Tournament, he could perhaps return to see his family, drifting as a spirit on the night wind, or coming with changed appearance as a casual traveler. Everyone knew that gods could do such things, and when he had won the Tournament he would be almost a god. Earlier there had been occasional doubts, but now the conviction had returned that he was going to win. He waxed stronger with every victory. He could feel the god-strength mounting in him. Since he had reached his full growth, no man had ever been able to stand against him, and none could now. When the Tournament was over he would be a god, and gods could heal as well as murder. When he took his seat at Thorun's right hand the goddess of healing could not refuse to grant him healing for his children. No child of a god was ever done to death in a hovel by ill luck or mean diseases. W alking beside Omir Kelsumba, but guessing nothing of his thoughts, Thomas the Grabber went up with him stride for stride. Despite a lifetime of violence as bandit, soldier, bodyguard, and bounty hunter of dangerous men, Thomas still fell from time to time into the grip of an almost paralyzing fear of bodily injury and death. Iron control was needed to keep his fear from showing. The fear was on him now, and a premonition that he must lose in his next fight. There was nothing in sight for him beyond the wide blade of Kelsumba's axe, at which he dared not look. Thomas was experienced enough with this kind of fear to know that it would pass if only he could manage to hold out against it until he had actually entered the ring with his opponent. Then things would be all right, there would be no time for fear. No one could stand against him then. Now as he climbed he held on grimly to his nerve, trying to think of nothing. T he road came to the twin towers from which sentinels saluted gravely as the fighters passed. "The gods' private park," Thomas muttered aloud, looking around him as they continued. The road was wider now, bordered with fine gravel walks, beyond which cultivated green ground-cover vines made one continuously inviting couch. "Yes," said Farley of Eikosk's reverent voice behind him. "I suppose we might see Thorun himself among those trees." No one answered. Shortly Yelgir, their escorting priest, signalled for a halt, and led them a little distance off the road. The ground of softer than before, its area smaller. The night was quiet when it came, still as the grave, or nearly so. IX S choenberg, De La Torre, Athena, and Celeste were returned to their comfortable private rooms after the feast, but they were kept under guard every step of the way and all pretense that they were free agents had been dropped. No one was manhandled, but all were searched and their communicators taken from them. None would speak to them; Andreas had left and no one else was questions. While they were being led from the Temple back to their rooms IF there was time to exchange a few words. Schoenberg advised his shipmates: "Whatever it is they want, they'll tell us when they're ready. Meanwhile it's important that we all keep our heads." "We'll back you up, Oscar," Athena told him. Behind her determined face, those of Celeste and De La Torre were pale and frightened. Schoenberg winked at her. Then they were put firmly into their separate rooms. He could hear his door being locked and barred. His personal servant had disappeared and when he peered out through the grillwork of the window he saw that a guard had been stationed outside his door. Schoenberg stretched out on the comfortable bed and tried to think. After a while he got up and tried tapping messages on the stone wall between his room and Athena's, but there was no reply. Probably, the masonry was too thick. Surprisingly, he slept well and felt reasonably rested when he was awakened early in the morning. An escort of soldiers had come to take him to Andreas. He went with them eagerly. They re-entered the Temple by another of its back doors and again went down some steps, this time to a cell-like stone chamber into which gray morning light filtered through a single high window. Andreas was seated behind a table. Schoenberg's escort saluted and went out; he and the ancient and ugly High Priest were left alone. Andreas was the thinner of the two, and biologically much the older, but he wore a dagger at the girdle of his purplish robe, and seemed utterly unconcerned about being left alone with a bigger and stronger man who had just become his enemy. Even before the door had closed behind the soldiers, Schoenberg spoke. "If you are wise, Andreas, you will free us at once." Andreas calmly gestured to a chair, but Schoenberg remained standing. The High Priest then said: "Before I can dismiss your guards I must have assurance that you are going to cooperate in the project in which we are going to use will be a great help, though not essential." "Imprisoning me and my friends does not make me want to cooperate. What about the other two members of my party -- what has happened to them?" Andreas folded his hands on the table before him. "The girl is confined to her stateroom on your ship. She is there to speak reassuringly over ships' radio, on the remote chance that another spaceship should appear and attempt to contact the Orion." "Last night your people threatened her, frightened her, so that when she spoke to me she dared not tell me what had happened." "She has seen the wisdom of cooperation." Andreas spoke mildly. "As for the coward, he is still missing. Probably he will come to no great harm, and will be back looking for food today or tomorrow. I arri not going to demean my warriors by ordering them to search for him." After a moment's silence Schoenberg took the chair that had been offered to him earlier. "What exactly do you want me to do?" "Answer some questions about your ship, its drive in particular, and move the ship for us when the time comes." There was a little pause. "You will have to tell me more than that. I do not want to get into serious trouble with the outworld authorities." The High Priest shook his head. "Right now I am the only authority with whom you must concern yourself. Those outside this planet may be powerful in their own worlds, but they would not care much what happens here, even if they could know." Schoenberg relaxed a trifle, crossed one leg over the other. "That is half true, Andreas. They do not care about such hunting trips as mine, not really. Not enough to take the time and trouble to prevent them. They would not care much about my standing and watching your Tournament -- or even taking part in it, if I could have been so honored. But they will care, believe me, if I should take part in one of your wars, using outworld weapons, or even using the ship to help you in any military way. Doing any such thing would be a grave risk for me; not a battlerisk, understand, which a man should welcome, but a social risk when I have returned to my own people, a risk of dishonor. Being an honorable man yourself, you will appreciate why I cannot help you." "I assure you most solemnly, no one outside this planet will ever know what you do here." "Excuse me, but I doubt that. I am not the only hunter to come to this planet, and sooner or later a trader or a military ship will call. Your enemies on this planet cannot be entirely silenced, and they will not miss the chance to complain about the spaceship that, unprovoked, molested them, and it will be discovered that the ship was mine. I mention these facts first, because you may not believe me when I tell you that, in any case, the Earth authorities will be concerned if I fail to return from this trip on time." Schoenberg lifted his arm casually and briefly glanced at his calendar watch. Andreas smiled slightly. "No one on Earth or any of the other worlds knows where you are. Whatever search is made for you will not be on my planet." S choenberg did not hesitate for a moment. So far he had not shown the slightest sign of fear. "It will be your mistake. High Priest, if you do not believe me. But never mind that now. Let us return to what you want. Say that I am now sitting in the command chair in the control room of my ship with you presumably leaning over me and holding a knife against my throat. Where to?" "Schoenberg, I am not literally going to hold a knife against your throat. Not in your control room anyway, where you might be tempted to push something the wrong way in an effort to disrupt my plans. There is a priest here who has been aboard spaceships before, and we are not so utterly ignorant of them as you might suppose... I had thought you might IF of adventure. De La Torre would be, but he is ignorant. I have questioned the other people of your party, and believe them when they say they know nothing about the ship's drive, nor of pilotage." "That is correct. I am the only pilot here." "Tell me, for my curiosity, how could they have gotten home if a glacier-beast had killed you?" "Autopilot could handle that. Just punch in a destination, and it'll deliver you in-system, near any civilized world you want. Your priest who's been aboard spaceships must know that. I take it you want some other kind of piloting." "Yes. But mainly some detailed information about the drive." "Tell me what it's all about and maybe I'll provide that information." Andreas's eyes probed at him, not fiercely but deeply, for what seemed a long time. "Perhaps that would be best." The old priest sighed. "Perhaps other ways... tell me, what effect do threats of torture and maiming have upon you?" Schoenberg half rose, and leaned forward glaring. "High Priest, I am a powerful man out there, in the big world that holds your little world surrounded. Do you think that just anyone can possess his own starship and take it where he likes? I have made it in the interest of several other powerful and ruthless people to look out for my safety, to avenge my death or disappearance. And those people do know exactly where I am and when I am due to return. For every dol of pain you make me suffer, you will feel two, or perhaps ten, of one kind of pain or another. My friends and I can pull down your city and your Temple if you provoke us to it. Now threaten me no more!" The two men's eyes were still locked when there came a tap at the door and it opened and one of the Inner Circle put in his head, making a slight nodding signal to Andreas. Other business called. The High Priest sighed and arose. Smiling, skull-faced, he bowed his head very slightly in salute to Schoenberg. "You are a hard man to frighten, outworlder. Nevertheless I think it will be worthwhile to do so. Think for a while on what I have said, and shortly we will talk again." uomi was afraid. He was not simply afraid of being caught by Andreas's soldiers, who yesterday had taken the ship and Barbara and had no doubt also swept up the four other unsuspecting outworlders with little difficulty. No, the night in the thicket had given Suomi plenty of time to think and there was a lot more to it than that. Hours ago he had left the thicket where yesterday his Ifight had come to an exhausted halt. Now he was crouched in the poor concealment of some thin, bush-like vegetation near the road that climbed the mountain, watching and waiting -- for what he was not exactly sure. He had vague hopes of spying some lone traveler whom he might approach in hopes of getting some kind of help. Alternatively he imagined another pack train of the kind he had already seen, passing by, and a convenient bag of vegetables or haunch of meat tumbling forgotten to the road, where he might spring out a minute later to grab it up. He had as yet found nothing very palatable in the woods and thickets, and so he had not eaten anything worth mentioning in more than a standard day. He was also thirsty, despite the rainwater he had licked from some dripping leaves, and he was limping fairly badly from yesterday's fall. His back bothered him, and he thought that one of the minor cuts on his leg might be infected, despite the routine immunological precautions taken before leaving Earth. The thicket into which he had burrowed himself when he stopped running was so dense and extensive that it seemed possible that a man might stay there undiscovered -- until it pleased his pursuers to detail a hundred men dr so to hunt him out. But perhaps Suomi had no pursuers. On this alien planet he had literally nowhere to go. He suspected strongly that his continued freedom, if it could be called that, was due only to the fact that no particular effort had been made to round him up. He could not believe that the warriors of Hunters' were particularly afraid of dying by his rifle, so it must be that they were not hunting him because more important things were going on. Realizing that he could not accomplish anything there he had left the thicket. There was a warning to be spread. At moments it seemed possible that the whole thing had been no more than a monstrous practical joke, like an initiation... but then he recalled his dark clear thoughts of the night just past, and shivered a little in the warmth of day. It was not only for himself that he feared, and not only for the people who had come with him from Earth. In his mind's eye Suomi could still see with perfect clarity the robot's shattered carapace, the debris of components all the handmade parts... #Joftly, outworlder," said a gentle voice quite close behind him. He whirled and found he was presenting the rifle at a rather short man with sandy hair, who was standing beside a tree six or eight meters off, muscular arms raised and hands open in an unmistakable gesture of peace. The man wore the gray clothing Suomi had seen on Godsmountain's slaves, and tucked into the heavy rope that served him as a belt was a short massive sledge. The killer of fallen gladiators. The man stood taller than Suomi remembered and also had a more open and attractive face. "What do you want?" Suomi held the rifle steady, though his gaze went darting around the woods. No one else was in sight; the slave had come here alone. "Only to talk with you a little." The man's tone was reassuring. He very slowly lowered his hands but otherwise did not move. "To make common cause with you, if I can, against our common enemies." He IF nodded in an uphill direction. Did slaves on Hunters' habitually talk like this? Suomi doubted it. He scarcely remembered hearing them talk at all. He did not relax. "How did you find me?" "I guessed you might be somewhere near the road by this time, thinking about giving up. I have been trying to find you for an hour, and I doubt anyone else has made the effort." Suomi nodded. "I guessed that much. Who are you? Not a slave." "You are right, I am not. But more of that later. Come, move back into the woods, before someone sees us from the road." Now Suomi did relax, lowering the rifle with shaking hands and following the other back into the trees, where they squatted down to talk. "First, tell me this," the man demanded at once. "How can we prevent Andreas and his band of thieves from making use of your stolen ship?" a "I don't know. Where are my companions?" "Held in the Temple, under what conditions I am not sure. You don't look good. I would offer you food and drink, but have none with me at the moment. Why do you think Andreas wants your ship?" "I am afraid." Suomi shook his head. "If it is only Andreas I suppose he has some simple military use in mind to complete his conquest of this planet. He may think our ship carries weapons of mass destruction. It has none." The man was looking sharply at Suomi. "What did you mean, if it is only Andreas?" #TT ave you heard of the berJtjLserkers?" A blank look. "Of course, the death machines of legend. What have they to do with this?" Suomi began to describe his combat with the man-shaped machine. His hearer was ready to listen. "I heard a rumor that Mjollnir had walked forth to fight, and was slain," the man in gray mused. "So, it was a berserker that you destroyed?" "Not exactly. Not entirely. Against a true berserker android this rifle would have been useless. But inside the machine's broken body I found this." He drew from his pocket a small sealed box of shiny metal. From the box a thick gray cable emerged, to expand into a fan pf innumerable gauze-fine fibers at the point where his force packet had sheared it off. "This is a solid-state electron uclear device, in other words part of an artificial brain. Judging from its size, and the number of fibers in this cable I would say that two or three of these, properly interconnected, should be enough to control a robot that could do physical things better than a man can do them, and also obey simple orders and make simple decisions." The man reached for the box and weighed it doubtfully in his hand. Suomi went on: "Many solidstate electronuclear devices are made on Earth and other technological worlds. I have seen countless varieties of them. Do you know how many I have seen that closely resemble this? Exactly one. I saw that in a museum. It was part of a berserker, captured in a space battle at the Stone Place, long ago." The man scratched his chin, and handed back the box. "It is hard for me to take a legend as reality." Sumoi felt like grabbing him and shaking him. "Berserkers aje very real, I promise you. What do you suppose destroyed the technology of your forefathers, here on Hunters'?" "We are taught as children that our ancestors were too proud and strong to let themselves remain dependent on fancy machines. Oh, the legends tell of a war against berserkers, too." "It is not only legend but history." "All right, history. What is your point?" "That war cut off your ancestors from the rest of the galaxy for a long time and wrecked their technology -- as you say, they were rough men and women who found they could get by without a lot of fancy machines. Made a virtue of necessity. Anyway, it has been taken for granted that Karlsen's victory here destroyed all the berserkers on Hunters' or drove them away. But perhaps one survived, or at least its unliving brain survived when the rest of its machinery was crippled or destroyed. Perhaps that berserker is still here." His auditor was still receptive but unimpressed. Suomi decided that more explanation was in order. He went on: "On other planets there have been cults of evil men and women who have worshipped berserkers as gods. I can only guess that there might have been some such people on Hunters' five hundred years ago. After the battle they found their crippled god somewhere, rescued it and hid it. Built a secret cult around it, worshipped it in secret, generation after generation. Praying to Death, working for the day when they could destroy all life upon this planet." The man ran strong-looking, nervous fingers through his sandy hair. "But, if you are right, there was more to it than the figure of Mjollnir? The berserker has not been destroyed?" "I am sure there is more to it than that. The real berserker brain must have included many more of these small units. And other components as well. Probably it put only spare parts into Mjollnir. Or human artisans did, working at the berserker's direction." "Then why must there be a true berserker, as you put it, here at all? Andreas has very good artisans working for him. Perhaps they only used parts from destroyed berserkers to build the figure of Mjollnir -- and one of Thorun as well." He nodded to himself. "That would explain why men swear they have actually seen Thorun walking with the High Priest in the Temple courtyards." "Excuse me, but it is not possible that any human artisans on this planet designed the robot that attacked me. No matter what components they had to work with. Can you grasp the programming problems involved in designing a machine to run and fight and climb like a man? Better than a man. No human could have climbed that mesa where the machine did it, in a few minutes, hammering in pitons all the way. And the mechanical enIF gineering difficulties? No. On Earth, Venus, a handful of other planets, there are men and facilities capable of designing such a robot. Only a functioning berserker-brain could do it here." T he two men were quiet for a little while, both thinking, each studying the other. Suomi eased himself into a different position, sitting with his back against a tree trunk. His wounded leg throbbed. At last the Hunterian said: "Suppose a berserker is here as you say, and the priests of Godsmountain have it. What then?" "You do not understand!" Suomi almost grabbed him by the ragged shirt to attempt a shaking. "Say rather that it has them. How can I begin to tell you what a berserker is?" He sighed and slumped back, feeling hopeless and exhausted. How to convey, to someone who had never seen even depictions on film or holograph, the centuries of mass destruction berserkers had visited upon the galaxy, the documented cases of individual horrors? Whole planets had been sterilized, whole solar systems laid waste by the unliving enemy. People by the thousands or tens of thousands had perished in berserkers' experiments aimed at discovering what made the strange two-legged Earth-descended blobs of protoplasm so resistant to the fundamental truth-assumption of the berserkers' programming: that life was a disease of matter that had to be expunged. It had all happened here, was still happening somewhere a thousand light years or more away, on the outer edge of man's little domain within the galaxy. Suomi said quietly: "If it is true that a berserker has captured our ship then it can be for only one purpose; to somehow sterilize this planet of all life." "You said there were no mass weapons on the ship!" "I meant there were none in the usual sense. But there is the drive that brought us between the stars." Suomi considered. "If the ship were buried beneath this mountain, say, and the drive suddenly turned on full force, the mountain might be blown up into the air and everyone on it killed. Not good enough for a berserker, not if it could find a way of doing worse. "I'll bet that if the drive were worked on cunningly enough some weapon could be made of it that could sterilize a planet. Perhaps by polluting the atmosphere with radioactivity. The weapon wouldn't have to be instantly effective. There probably won't be another interstellar ship here for fifteen standard years. No way for anyone here to call for outside help, even if they understood what was happening." The man in gray was excited at last. He stood up cautiously and looked about, then squatted down again. He fingered the handle of his maul, as if itching to pull it from his belt and fight. "By all the gods!" he muttered. "It should be effective, whether or not it is the truth!" "Effective? What should be?" "It should be effective against Godsmountain's priests, to spread the story that the drive of the captured ship is to be altered, our air poisoned. That a berserker really rules Godsmountain, and means to destroy the world. If we can convince people of that, we will have them!" "It is the truth, I believe. But to spread any story across the planet will take far too long." The man with the maul glanced up toward the mountaintop, invisible beyond the trees. "I do not think we will need to go that far. Now. How to put the story in convincing terms? Let's see. Five hundred standard years ago the berserker fleet was here. The demigod Karlsen drove them out. The priests for some reason have been asking if any of you outworlders mentioned Karlsen; that seems to fit. Now -- " Now Suomi did actually seize him by the shirt, to the Hunterian's great astonishment. "They asked that?" Suomi barked. "Of course it fits!" For half an hour thereafter they made their plans. X T he four remaining contestants were awakened early from their sleep on the soft groundcover of what Thomas the Grabber had called the gods' private park. At dawn there erupted a racket of small winged creatures, each defending his bit of territory against encroachment by the others. Farley of Eikosk, roused by the noise of this miniature Tournament, watched it for a while, and then, with sudden awareness of where he was, turned his gaze uphill through the park-like forest, toward the summit of the mountain. There, in the early morning light, the white walls had a dull and ghostly look. Later, he knew, when he saw them in full sunlight, they would shine a da-Jing white. All his life he had listened eagerly, whenever he could, to the tales of travelers who had visited this city. To see its white stones actually before him inspired him with awe. Thorun lived there. Thorun actually lived there. From the moment of Farley's awakening on this morning a sense of unreality grew in him rapidly. He could not fully credit his own presence here on the mountaintop, or his success thus far in the Tournament. (How pleased his father would be, at last, if he should be the winner!) This feeling of unreality persisted through the morning ritual of worship, and through their meager breakfast of cold fried cakes left over from the day before. The dumb slave who served them protested with gestures that no dead wood was available here to make a fire for cooking. The other slave had gone off somewhere, perhaps on a search for wood. Leros still had not returned. The priest Yelgir, who still seemed a stranger to Farley, looked stiffjointed and disheveled after a night spent in the open. He spoke to them apologetically about the fact that no fighting ring had been prepared here in advance. Yelgir, in consultation with the warriors, chose a flat area of ground and the slave was set to work stripping away the groundcover and stamping flat the earth as best he could. The task took the IF slave several hours, while the others sat watching. Farley was not exactly impatient, but the delay was one more change in routine, and made everything all the more unreal for him. At last the ring was ready, however. Yelgirwas muttering prayers and it was time for the first two men to fight to take their places. "Farley of Eikosk -- Jud Isaksson." Now both of them were in the circle from which only one of them could ever walk. But as Jud moved toward him, more slowly than was his wont, it occurred to Farley that death itself might well be different here, almost under the windows of Thorun's hall. Would the loser of this fight really die as men usually did, like some butchered animal? Might he not instead simply look down at his gaping wound, acknowledge defeat with a salute and a courteous nod, and, like one leaving a field of harmless practice, simply walk off yonder through the trees, perhaps to be met halfway by welcoming Mjollnir or Karlsen or even Thorun himself? In Farley's eyes the scimitar flashed sunlight. Jud was warming up now, starting to come on with his usual fury. Farley suddenly felt free and loose, faster and stronger than ever in his life before. It was as if he now breathed in the immortality of the gods by merely sharing their high air. He parried the scimitar with a seeming carelessness, that was really something else, and then he stepped in looking for the best way to kill. Now Farley carried his long sword too high, now too low, now he let his blade stray far aside into what should have been a weak position, until he could almost hear his father shouting at him in anger, but none of this was carelessness. Not today. Whatever tactic his whims, his nerves, chose for him was fated to succeed. His blade always came back into position in time to block the scimitar. On the attack his long sword reached closer and closer to Jud's lifeblood. To Farley the end seemed foreordained and only the suddenness with which it came surprised him. He stood there almost disappointed that the fight was over, while Jud dying on the ground seemed to be trying to tell him something. Jud's life ran out too quickly, before the words could come. The priest Yelgir cleared his throat. "Omir Kelsumba -- Thomas the Grabber." Today he needed no paper to keep track of names. Standing to one side, Farley was struck by the realization that in this round, for the first time, there would be no other victors to stand at his side watching with him, now and then passing a joke or a comment on the fight in progress. Watching alone, except for the priest, he beheld a serene happiness on Kelsumba's face; obviously here was another who felt favored by the gods today. Things appeared to be different with Thomas the Grabber. Even before the first blow his expression was that of a man who knows himself defeated. In the center of the ring the two of them closed promptly. The axe flashed out with reckless confidence with what must be Kelsumba's certainty of approaching godhood. The spear moved with the speed of desperation, and yet as accurately and steadily as if wielded by a god. Incredibly, the fight was over. Or was it over? Kelsumba, even with the heavy spear transfixing him, fought on. His axe, though it was much slower now, still rose and fell. Thomas was still unhurt. But instead of backing away and waiting for his man to fall, he chose for some reason to leap in and grab. As the two men wrestled it was still Omir who smiled, and Thomas who looked desperate. But it was quickly demonstrated that Omir was not the stronger of the two, at least not with a spear stuck through him. Only after Thomas had wrenched away the axe and used it for a finishing blow did his face lose its look of desperation. Now the clangor of arms, that had long since silenced the winged quarreling creatures, was ended also. The forest at last was still. W hen Schoenberg was brought before him again, about midday, Andreas was seated as before. As soon as the two of them were left alone, the High Priest began: "Since the thought of torture does not immediately terrify you, and I suspect its application might provoke you to some rash attempt at misinforming us about the ship, I have decided I must take an extreme measure to frighten you sufficiently. You have brought it on yourself." Andreas was smiling again, evidently finding his own wit amusing. Schoenberg, unimpressed, sat down. "How do you mean to terrify me, then?" he answered. "By saying a few words." "Andreas, my respect for you is fading. If the threats you have already made have not had their desired effect neither will any mutterings about some great unnameable terror. You are not going to scare me that way. In fact you are not going to scare me at all, not in the way you seem to want." "I think I can. I think I know what a man like you is truly afraid of." "What?" "Perhaps I can do it by saying to you only one word." Andreas clapped his hands together playfully. Schoenberg waited. "The one word is his name." "Thorun. I know that." "No. Thorun is a toy. My god is real." "Well, then. Utter his terrible name." Schoenberg lifted his eyebrows in almost jaunty inquiry. Andreas whispered the three syllables. It took Schoenberg a little while to grasp it. At first he was merely puzzled. "Berserker," he repeated, leaning back in his chair, his face a blank. Andreas waited, confidently, for his god had never failed him yet. Schoenberg said: "You mean... ahhh. I think I begin to see. You mean one has really been here for five hundred years, and you -- serve it?" "I am going shortly to offer to the god of Death a special sacrifice, consisting of some people we no longer need, I can show you. You will be convinced." IF "Yes, I believe you can show me. I believe you. Well. This puts a different fate on things, all right, but not in the Way you intended. If I wouldn't help you in a local war, I'm not going to help you in a mass extermination." "Schoenberg, when we have done with this planet what we will, when it is moribund, my god assures me that the ship's drive can be restored sufficiently to take it out into space again and after a voyage of many years to reach another star whose planets also are polluted by the foul scum of life. I and a few others, members of my Inner Circle, will make this voyage, continuing to bear the burden of hideous life on our own bodies that we may free many others of it on other worlds. There are emergency recycling systems on your ship that will nourish us adequately for years. "The voyage, as I have said, will be many years in duration. Unless you agree to cooperate with me from this moment on you will be brought with us as a prisoner. You will not die. There are ways of preventing suicide, my master assures me, things he can do to your brain when he has time to work on it. "You will be useful on the voyage, for we will have need of a servant. You will not be tortured -- I mean, not much at any one time. I will see to it that your sufferings never become sharp enough to set one day of your existence apart from another. I may die before the voyage is over, but some of my associates are young men and they will follow my orders faithfully. You Earthmen are very long-lived, I understand. I suppose you will -- what did the old Earthmen call it? -- go mad. No one will ever admire your exploits. There will be none to admire. But I suppose you might continue to exist to an age of five hundred years." Schoenberg had not moved. Now a muscle twitched in his right cheek. His head had bowed a very little, his shoulders were a little lower than before. Andreas said: "I would much prefer to see you make a sporting finish, myself. Go out with a noble gesture. If you cooperate in my plans, a different future for you might be arranged. You will only be helping us to do what we are going to do anyway. # If you cooperate, I will give you" -- Andreas held up a hand, thumb and forefinger barely separated -- "just a little chance, at the very end. You will not win, .but you will die nobly in the attempt." "What kind of chance?" Schoenberg's voice was low and desperate now. He blinked repeatedly. "Give you a sword, let you try to hack your way past one of my fighting men, to get to the berserker and cut it into bits. Its cabling would be quite vulnerable to such an attack." "You wouldn't really do that! It is your god." Andreas waited calmly. "How do I know that you would really do' that?" The words burst out as if involuntarily. "You know now what I will do if you do not cooperate." The silence in the little room stretched on and on. O nly three men, not counting a slave or two, now remained on lOfr their feet under the pleasant trees of the gods' otherwise deserted park, Farley and Thomas stood facing each other, their eyes meeting like those of two strangers encountering each other by chance in a wilderness both had thought uninhabited. In the background the priest was giving orders to the slaves; there was the chunk of a shovel starting a new grave. Farley looked down at what lay on the ground. Jud had not smiled at his wound and gone off on a blithe stroll among the trees. Kelsumba was not laughing on his way to an eternal feast with gods. Farley did not care to stay and watch them rolled into a little pit. Feeling a slow emergence from his sensation of invulnerability, he turned and started on the uphill road once more. Thomas the Grabber, still wiping at his spear, came along silently and companionably. They left the priest behind. Here the pavement of the road was very smooth and well maintained, and it was neatly bordered with stones in a pattern that put Farley in mind of certain formal walks on his father's large estate. Now, with what seemed to Farley stunning ordinariness, they were coming through the last trees of the forest and around the road's last curve. Vistas opened, and gardens and orchards were visible in the distance to either side. Ahead, the road ran straight across thirty or forty meters of well-tended lawn, and then it entered the citadel-city of the gods. The gate by which it entered, of massive timbers banded with wrought metal, was tightly closed just now. The high wall of the city was a blinding white in the sun, and Farley was now close enough to see how huge and heavy its stones were. He wondered how they had been stained or painted to make them look like bone. But nothing happened inside him when he beheld their goal, the place where Thorun dwelled. Immortality was draining from him rapidly. "Thomas," he said, slowing to a halt. "The whole thing is too -- ordinary." "How's that?" asked Thomas, amiably, stopping at his side. Farley paused. How to explain his disappointment? He could not understand it well himself. He said what came to his tongue, which was only: "There were sixty-four of us, and now there are only two." "But how else could it have worked out?" Thomas asked reasonably. A few weeds grew through the rocks beside Thorun's gateway. Lumps of the dried dung of some pack animal lay at the roadside. Farley threw back his head and closed his eyes. He groaned. "What is it, friend?" "Thomas, Thomas. What do you see here, what do you feel? Suddenly I am having doubts." He looked at his companion for help. Thomas shook his head. "Oh my friend, there is no doubt at all about our future. You and I are going to fight, and then only one of us is going living through that gate." There was the gate, tough ordinary wood, bound with bands of wrought metal, its lower parts IF showing a little superficial wear from the brushing passages of countless men and women, slaves and animals. Behind such a gate there could be nothing but more of the same world in which Farley now stood, in which he had lived all his life. And if he reached the gate of the Temple inside, would it be any different? The priest Yelgir, whom they had left behind, came on now to pass them, giving Farley an uneasy smile as he did so. Evidently some unseen watcher within the walls noted the priest's approach, for now the gate was opened slightly from within. Another priest stuck out his head and sized up Farley and Thomas with an impersonal look. "Is either of them wounded?" he asked Yelgir. "One has a damaged hand, and cannot use his dagger, but that seems to bother him very little. The other a sliced arm. The muscle is not cut, nothing serious." The two priests began a low-voiced conversation that Farley could not quite hear. Meanwhile other heads, obviously aristocratic, began to appear along the top of the wall, their owners evidently standing on some high walkway on the inner side. The two finalists of Thorun's Tournament were being stared at like slaves on auction. Thomas the Grabber finished wiping his spear and now stood leaning on it, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and sighing. "Bid the two contestants wait," someone was calling carelessly from inside. "The High Priest sends word that he hopes to attend the final duel, but he is busy now with some special sacrifice to the gods." XI S uomi, after his talk with the man in gray (whose name he had never learned), breathed a sigh of relief mingled with exhaustion when he had gotten as far as the foot of the little mesa without being discovered and seized by Andreas's men. Suomi had to somehow manage to get himself into the ship again, before he could hope to accomplish anything. He must not be captured before he reached the mesa. According to the gauge on the breech of his rifle, it had power left for only six shots. He might have thrown away the weapon in the woods, except for his fear that some fool might find it and kill himself or someone else by accident. He had offered the rifle to the man in gray, when they were about to part, but the offer was refused. "I must continue to pass as a slave," the Hunterian had said. "No slave could carry such a device into the city without immediately being questioned. Besides, I am unfamiliar with its use; better each man to his own weapons." "Each to his own," Suomi had answered, reaching out for a farewell handshake. "Good luck with yours. I hope I meet you in the city above." Now, at the foot of the mesa, he observed that a regular trail had already been worn, leading from the lower end of the climbing path off into the woods uphill in the direction of the city. He observed also that not a trace remained of the shattered robot; at first he could not even locate the place where it had lain. Then he realized that the massive tree, whose surface his rifle fire had splintered, had been removed. Here was the neatly sawn stump, with dirt rubbed on the cut surface so it would not look fresh. The tree itself had somehow been carried away. Great pains were being taken to eliminate all evidence that anything grotesque had happened here. But a number of men must have been involved in the cleanup and at least one of them must have talked, so the man in gray had rumors to build on. So much the better. When he got to the bottom of the climbing path, Suomi did shrug out of the rifle's strap and let the weapon fall aside. Gratefully he saw that the climbing rope was still in place. Fighting down a foolish impulse to turn at the last moment and run away to cower in the woods once more, he gritted his teeth and gripped the rope and began to climb. Weakened and aching, he was now compelled to hang on with both hands even on the easy first part of the slope, where before he had been able to climb rapidly on legs alone. He had gotten only a little way up when a soldier came into view, looked down and saw Suomi, and began shouting. Suomi ignored the shouts and continued to struggle slowly upward. The shouting kept on. Suomi looked up and saw that the man had a spear raised as if ready to throw. "If you stick me with that thing," Suomi yelled back at last, "you'll have to carry me. Look at me. Am I so dangerous that I frighten you?" His belly muscles were tensing against the impact of the spear, but it did not come. The voice stopped shouting, moved away just a little, and began to talk. Other male voices answered. Suomi did not pay much attention to what they were saying, and did not look up again. Dizzy with hunger and fatigue, feverish from his infected wound, he struggled on the rocks for what seemed an endless time before he could pull himself out on the flat horizontal surface at the head of the path. The foam mattress lay almost under his feet when he stood up but there was no sign of Barbara. Half a dozen men, four soldiers and two priests in purple-trimmed robes, crowded around Suomi, barking threats and orders at him, almost nudging him off the mesa again with their drawn swords and a leveled spear. Finally one of the aristocrats raised his voice and there was order. The soldiers put down their weapons, rapidly stripped Suomi and searched him, then searched through his clothes and tossed them back to him. "What've you done with the girl who was here?" he asked while this was going on. No one bothered to answer. "Bring him inside the ship," one of the aristocrats ordered the soldiers. "We'd better get on the communicator first and ask Andreas," the other one advised. After a moment's debate they compromised and had Suomi brought up the landing ramp as far as the open enIF trance lock. There they left him standing for the moment, with two soldiers gripping his arms. His guards were unusually large, strong men, and once the initial confusion of his capture was over they obeyed orders with precision and alertness. Suomi wished he could sit down, but was not quite certain that he would be able to get up again if he did. He could hear voices from the direction of the control room engaged in what sounded like a talk on the communicator between the ship and somewhere else. Andreas's prize-crew perhaps had more technological savvy than Suomi had assumed. So much the worse. In a little while one of the aristocrats came back from the direction of the control room to stand in front of Suomi and regard him critically. "Andreas is busy with sacrifice. I think we'll just bring this one on board, and confine him to his old stateroom. The place has been searched a dozen times, there are no weapons. Outworlder, you look in a bad way." "If I could have some food..." "We won't starve you to death, I don't suppose. Though you may wish we had." He signed to the soldiers to bring Suomi on into the ship. At the entrance to the control room the aristocrat turned. "Hold him tightly going through here." They brought him into the control room, and they were quite right to make sure that he was held securely. Otherwise it might have been barely possible for him to lunge at the drive controls and, before he could be stopped, wreck the ship. But there was no hope of that, his arms were pinned in grips he could not have broken on his strongest days, of which this was not one. Seated in the large central pilot's chair was another aristocratic priest. O n a screen before him were the faces of two men who seemed to be in some dimly lighted stone chamber. The one in the background was another priest. The one in front was Schoenberg. "Now," the priest in the control chair was saying, addressing the screen, "You say that if the ship pitches more than ten degrees while under manual control, the autopilot will cut in automatically?" "Yes," Schoenberg's image said on the screen. "Provided the artificial gravity is off. Then ten degrees pitch and you'll get the autopilot." "Schoenberg!" Suomi cried out. "Don't fly it for them, Schoenberg, it's a berserker they're working for. Don't do anything they want!" Schoenberg's face showed a reaction, though only a trivial one, and his eyes moved, probably following Suomi's passage through the control room on a portable screen taken from the ship. The men transporting Suomi were making no particular effort tohush him up or hurry him along. "A berserker, Schoenberg!" Schoenberg's eyes on the screen closed. His face looked deathly tired. His voice came wearily into the ship. "I know what I'm doing, Suomi. Just go along with them. Don't make things more difficult than they are." Suomi with his escort passed out of the control room and into the narrow passage leading to the staterooms, moving at a brisk pace. The doors of most of the rooms and compartments stood open, revealing scenes of disorder, but that of the room that had been Barbara's was closed. A bored-looking soldier stood leaning against it from the outside. "Is the girl in there?" Suomi asked. Again no one would answer. He supposed that at this stage it made no difference whether she was or not. His captors knew somehow which room was his -- perhaps they had found his name on something there, perhaps Schoenberg for whatever reason was telling them every small detail. When they thrust Suomi into the room he found it in the same state of disruption as the others he had seen, which was no more than might have been expected after several thorough searches. There was no sign that anything had been wantonly smashed. So much the better. They left him alone and closed the door behind him; no doubt there would be a soldier leaning against it on the outside. Since the room had not been designed as a prison cell, its door could be locked only from the inside. Unfortunately it had not been designed as a fortress either; though the door was thick and soundproof, it could probably be forced open quickly by a couple of armed and determined men. Nevertheless Suomi quietly activated the lock. He went then to stand beside his bunk, where an intercom control was set into the wall, and paused with his hand upraised. He could try to reach Barbara this way. But what could he say? Some of the enemy might well be in her room listening. To try to reassure her, to offer hope, might be much worse than useless. He turned the intercom to a position where it would receive but not transmit and left it there. The next thing he did was to get himself a long drink of cold water from the little sink. Then he opened the medicine chest, selected an antibiotic and a painkiller. There also he found a medicated dressing to put on the worst of his minor wounds, the leg gash that somehow had become infected. After that, with a single glance of longing at the comfortable bunk, he walked to the little desk-workbench where he had kept his personal cameras and sound-recording gear. This material, like everything else, had been looked at and scattered. He opened drawers, looked in corners, searching. All was in disarray, but it seemed that nothing he needed had been removed or broken. He uttered a sigh of relief that broke off midway as he entered a new phase of tension. It was time to sit down and get to work. I n its buried shrine far below the Temple the berserker perceived the chanting far above of five familiar male voices. From the same location came the sounds of the shuffling of fourteen human feet, in a pattern consistent with that of one of the processions with IF which the humans habitually began their sacrificial rituals. Routine analysis of the sounds allowed the berserker to identify among the members of the procession not only five of its familiar servitors but two other human organisms, one male and one female, that were strangers to it. Compulsively but still routinely, the berserker concentrated all its senses upon the unknown male, who was now stumbling slightly on bare feet at the top of the long stone stair that must be unfamiliar to him, as the procession began its descent from Thorun's temple. As it would have done with any strange male, the berserker was attempting an identification with another whose personal patterns were carried under highest priority in its data banks. Since its crippling and near-destruction in the battle #... standard years ago the berserker's senses had been blurred and uncertain, hardly better than human sight and hearing. But the procession was bringing the unknown male nearer and nearer now, and the probability of his being identified with the prime target patterns was rapidly declining to a negligible level. The berserker was free to turn its attention to other matters. In the electron uclear mind of the berserker there was no wonder and no impatience, but there was defi : nitely an awareness that some events were far more probable than others. In that sense therefore the berserker was surprised when it computed that today two human victims were to be offered to it instead of one, or an animal only, as often happened. in all the time since the battle in which it was damaged, since the human goodlife on this planet had rescued it from destruction and be gun to offer it worship, the berserker had received such multiple offerings on only a few occasions. Searching back now through its memory banks and comparing data, it noted that these had invariably been times of intense emotion among its devotees. One such occasion had been the celebration of final victory over a particularly stubborn enemy tribe, a victory attained by following a battle plan computed by the berserker for its worshippers and handed down by it as a divine command. Then seventyfour human organisms, all members of the defeated tribe, had been sacrificed to it in one day. At another time of multiple sacrifice the emotions of those offering it had been much different. Then they were pleading for help, during a period of great food shortage. From that famine the berserker had led its followers and their tribe into a land ripe for plunder, by outlining for them a migration route, using its old battle-maps of the planet's surface. And now it computed that the successful capture of the starship, and the impending completion of the long effort to find a way to sterilize the planet, must also produce intense emotion among this generation of its goodlife servants. The berserker did not understand emotion, and only when compelled by circumstances would it try to work with what it did not understand. The stimulus-response patterns called fear and lust, for example, seemed at first to be readily computable in humans as well as in less dangerously intelligent animals. But in more than five hundred years of attempting to master human psychology well enough to use these patterns to manipulate human organisms, the berserker had time and again run into depths and complexities of behavior that it could not understand. To accept worship meant trying to use patterns that were, if anything, even deeper and more complex, a tremendously uncertain means of working toward its goal. But no better means had been available, and with the capture of the starship it seemed that this was after all going to prove successful. Now the procession had completed its descent of the stair, and now it was entering the berserker's chamber. The High Priest Andreas entered first, his vestments for this occasion of red and black, Thorun's white and purple having been put secretly aside above, in Thorun's temple. The robes in which the High Priest now appeared to worship his true god were heavily and ineradiCably stained with the rustbrown of old blood. B ehind Andreas came Gus De La Torre and Celeste Servetus, their wrists bound behind them, garbed in white and garlanded with live flowers that would soon be scattered on the floor to die. Four priests of the Inner Circle followed, their robes for this special occasion red and black like the High Priest's, and stained like his as well. Andreas and the other four men conducting the sacrifice began performing the usual prostrations and chanting the usual litanies, while the victims, as usual, watched in uncertainty and mounting fear. The berserker had long ago noted that the words and actions used in these rituals tended to change but little over the standard centuries, the long Hunterian years, only gradually becoming somewhat more elaborate. For the moment it kept quiet. It had realized long ago that the less it said during a sacrificial ceremony, the better. Not only did it thus lessen the risk of confusing and disillusioning its worshippers by saying something out of tune with their incomprehensible psychology, but the rarer its pronouncements were, the more importance humans were wont to grant them. Two of the priests had now picked up instruments of music, and the rhythm of a drum and the wail of a horn now blended with the chanting. The music ordered and modified the beat of alpha brain waves, and the rhythms of other biological processes, in all the humans present. "Gus, help me! Help! Oh, God, no no nooo!" So screamed the female upon at last fully perceiving the stained altar just before her, and evidently realizing its purpose, just at the moment when the two priests who were not playing instruments came to tear away her garlands and clothes and chain her down upon the stones. The berserker watched steadily to see whether Gus or God (whatever entities these might be) might come to IF the female's aid, although from its experience following #I similar appeals the probability seemed vanishingly small. The female was secured to the altar and no help for her arrived. Her screams continued as Andreas took up a sharp implement and removed from her living body the organs most closely connected with the reproduction of life and the nourishment of the very young. These he threw before the berserker, demonstrating a symbolic and real triumph of Death over the very wellsprings of life. The ventral surface of her torso was then opened more deeply, and the central blood-pump of her body was excised, whereupon the female almost instantly ceased to function. It was now time for the second victim to be placed upon the altar. "No. Listen, my friends, I'm with you. No, no, not me. How can this be happening? Wait, let's talk, you're making a mistake. I'll join you." And then a wordless, hopeless cry, as his feet were tripped out from under him and he was thrown down naked upon the stones. Why should the male organism continue to struggle so violently when it must perceive that the chances of such struggle producing favorable results were now astronomically remote? Now at last the male had been chained down. "I'll help you! I'll do anything you want. Oh. Ah. No. Forgive me, everyone..." Another scream, as his organs of generation too were removed, and cast into the bloody puddle of female parts. And now his ventral tissues parted under the sharp knife in the High Priest's hands, and now his heart, still pulsating, was held up in offering to the god of Death. "It is well, it is pleasing," the berserker told the five gory, happy men who now stood quietly before it. Drum and horn and voice had ceased. The chamber was still. The five who still bore the burden of life were subsiding now into states of emotional relaxation. "I am pleased," the berserker reiterated. "Go now and prepare to bring the starship to me, that we may begin to attach my circuitry to its control systems. Only when that is done can we begin the alteration of its drive." "Today or tomorrow, oh Death, we will bring you the starship," said Andreas. "As soon as we are sure that Lachaise can fly it safely we will lower it into the pit. Tomorrow also we will bring you fresh human sacrifice." "That will be good." Meanwhile a possible problem had suggested itself to the berserker. "Are many of your people mystified by or curious about the ship? Is there any unrest because of its presence?" ' "There is some curiosity about it, oh Death, but I will handle that. This afternoon there will be a distraction that will leave the people able to think or talk of nothing else. Thorun is going to walk forth into the city and display his powers." The berserker tried to compute the probable results of such an event, and found it could not grapple with the numerous abstract factors successfully. "In the past you have always ,been cautious about putting Thorun on display." "Lord Death, the masses will not accept as divine any creature that they can see daily in the streets. But Thorun's future will now be short in any case. At the most, a thirtieth-of-an-old-man's-lifetime, and the masses of this world will no longer need a god -- or any god save Thou." The berserker decided to trust its goodlife servant in this matter. So far he had never failed his god. "So be it, loyal Andreas. Proceed in the service of Death as you think best." Andreas bowed low, and then the humans began their rituals of departure, which included cleaning up the mess thy had made. The berserker computed routinely that two deaths had been achieved today, which was a good, if modest, accomplishment. But, as always the waste of time and energy involved in formal sacrifice had been considerable, and that was not good. Never had the berserker asked for offerings of pain and terror. as long as life existed, was all it wanted. It was not enthusiastic about inflicting pain, which was after all a manifestation of life ancf therefore, after all, evil. It allowed the torture to go on only because the infliction of pain was so satisfying to the humans who were its servitors. T he two finalists of Thorun's Tournament were still being kept waiting outside the city gate. "Thomas, why are we being treated so? Disregarded. Forced to wait here, like tradesmen or musicians or actors, without honor. Are we not now nearly gods? Is this just some final form of trial?" "My foolish, highborn friend." Thomas's voice was sympathetic, the rest of his answer long in coming. "You really think that there are gods in there?" "I -- " Farley had not been able to sit down for restlessness, and now he swayed on his feet in agony of mind. "Thorun help me! I do not know." His admission of doubt hung in the air while time stretched on and on, an endless-seeming time for Farley in which, as far as he could tell, Thorun did nothing at all. "You in there!" Farley bellowed suddenly, toward the priests who still looked down upon them from the wall. Startled eyes swung round to focus on him. The priest Yelgir had gone in some time ago, saying he would soon be back. "What?" one answered, awkwardly. "Are we companions of the gods or not? What kind of welcome is this you have prepared for us? Leros shall hear of this, and the High Priest himself!" He paused then, as suddenly as if he had run into a wall, his flaring anger burned out as fast as it had arisen. "Thomas," he whispered. "Did you hear my words just now? Not 'Thorun will hear of this' but 'the High Priest will hear'. I know now what I believe." Again his look changed, to anger once more, but this time quiet and bitter. "Why then am I here?" His loud outburst had had enough effect on the priests that IF one of them was now beginning a speech placatory if not apologetic. But Farley would not hear it. Still speaking to Thomas, he demanded: "Tell me, what will happen if you and l choose not to fight? If we simply turn our backs on them, and go about our own affairs?" Thomas was aghast and scowling, shaking his head in silent disapproval. Farley could bear no more. With deliberate scorn he turned his back on all of them and started to walk away. Thomas at once glanced toward the priests and saw their wishes in their eyes. Farley had not gone more than ten paces before Thomas came to block his way. Not for the first time, it struck Farley as marvelous that such a bulky man could move so lightly. "Thomas, walk away with me, in peace." The man holding the spear leveled shook his head. "That cannot be." "Come. If you still lust for more fighting, I have no doubt that we will find it on our way. These soft men who play at being gods will send their soldiers after us and we are not likely to reach the bottom of the mountain alive. But we will die in true battle, as men should, and not for the amusement of liars. Come." Thomas was still not angry, but very grim. "Farley, I mean to remain alive, and to prove to these men that I am the mightiest warrior in the land. If I do not conquer you, that will not be proven fully. Come. Let us fight." The spear had been leveled for some time, and now Farley saw the little movement at Thomas's shoulder that meant a thrust was coming. Farley drew his own weapon even as he leaped back from the spear thrust. Farley fought. There was no choice. When he struck with his sword his arm felt as strong as ever, but something was lacking now -- from his backbone or from his soul. He was not conscious of being afraid. It was only that he wanted nothing but to leave this place of fraud. His feet tried to move him toward the downhill road when they should have been driving him forward for the kill. And suddenly his belly was being torn open by the spear. Farley knew that he was lying on his face in the soft groundcover. Not bad, bis father said, reaching down a hand to help him up, but you must practice more. Oh father, I tried so hard. Then it seemed to Farley that he was walking carefree through the gods' green park, but the white walls were behind him, not in front, and he was going home. T homas, when he had made sure that the last loser of the Tournament was quite dead, bent over to once more wipe his spear. He cleaned it on Farley's costly cloak; the cloth had been ruined anyhow, by the days and nights in the open, and the many battles. When the weapon was as clean as he could get it under the circumstances Thomas attached the carrying cord to the spear again and slung it over his shoulder. The same few faces were still watching him from the gate and the top of the wall. They showed mild approval, like idlers Rooking on at some casual brawl. None of them said anything. "Well," Thomas announced, feeling somewhat irritated, "you have seen it. I am your man. Six duels against the very best in the world, and I have only one trifling scratch while they are all dead." "Andreas will be displeased at missing the final duel," said one. Another called down to Thomas: "Be patient for a little while. The High Priest is coming soon, we expect. Come inside the gate if you wish." Thomas decided to bring Farley into the city with him, as a trophy, a symbol of all his victories. He squatted and with a grunt picked up the warm, loose body at his feet. Farley was heavier than the appearance of his rangy frame suggested, and Thomas's steps toward the city gate were slow and weighty. The gate swung open for him after he had stood before it for a moment in fast-mounting impatience. His first view of the city inside was a disappointment. The gate gave directly onto a small paved square, only about twenty meters on a side. The square was completely boxed in by buildings and walls that were but little lower than the outer city wall through which he had just passed. There were several gates in the inner walls, but all were closed, or showed nothing but more walls beyond, so there was not much of interest to be seen in any direction. A few more people, of high and low degree, were looking down at Thomas from walls and windows. Seeing no place in particular to go, Thomas bent and with some care set his slow-dripping burden down. A small fountain gurgled nearby and he went to get a drink of water, seeing that no one was rushing to offer him fermented milk or wine. The people on the walls had ceased to stare at him now, and were gone about their business. Others appeared from time to time to glance and turn away. Here and there slaves went about their errands. A train of pack animals entered the city through the outer gate which had remained open, and came brushing past Thomas at close quarters. The man on the wall who had invited him in had gone. Thomas looked about, but there was no one for him to berate for his shabby treatment. Was he expected to go prowling the city at random, grabbing strangers by the arm and asking directions? Where is Thorun's great hall? He is expecting me. They had said the High Priest was coming. Seating himself on the edge of the fountain, Thomas retired into dignity, and remained there quietly as the shadows shifted across the square with the slow progress of the sun. Once there intruded upon his thoughts a soft snuffling, lapping sound. A small hungry domestic animal had discovered Farley's otherwise forgotten corpse. Thomas moved fast, took two strides and launched the beast halfway across the square with a rib-cracking kick. Then he burned to the fountain and sat passively waiting. IF When at last he heard someone approaching him and looked up ready to speak his anger, he found that it was only Leros, with whom he had no quarrel. Leros looked sick, or at least noticeably older than he had a fe days ago. Standing before him with hands outspread, Leros said: "I am sorry, Thomas, Lord Thomas. They say Andreas is coming now, but I do not know what welcome he plans to give you. If I were High Priest things would be different. Let me congratulate you on your victory." Thomas got up to his full height. "Where is the High Priest Andreas?" he called out, looking around at the anonymous faces on walls and in windows. Suddenly their number was growing again, more people peering out into the square at every moment. Something impended. Spectators were gathering. "Where is he, I am growing impatient with this treatment." "Speak more respectfully," a tall, regal-looking man admonished him sharply from his place of security on a high inner wall. Thomas looked this one over and decided to continue to be bold; it was an attitude that usually got results, for him. "Respectfully? I am a god now, am I not? Or a demigod at least. And you do not look like anything more than a man." "The point is well taken," said Leros sternly to the man on the wall. That one looked angry, but before he could say anything a murmur swept around the square and everyone's attention again shifted. The smallest and most intricately decorated of the inner gates that gave on the square was being opened from the far side by a young priest. Footsteps crunched on the neat gravel walk revealed beyond this gate, and there emerged from it a tall, skull-faced man dressed more in purple than in white. From the reactions of those around him, Thomas realized that this must be Andreas. "You must be Thomas the Grabber," the High Priest said, nodding to him affably, speaking in the confident voice of one who is habitually in charge of things. "I see you have finished the Tournament somewhat ahead of schedule. I am sorry to have massed it all -- the final round especially. But no matter, Thorun is pleased." Andreas nodded, smiling his smile. "So pleased is he that he has decided to grant you special honor, even beyond that promised you below." This was more like it. Thomas made a little bow toward the High Priest, then stood taller than before. The smile was a baring of teeth in the skull mouth. "You are to fight the fight that all true warriors must dream about. I hope that you are ready. But of course, as a true warrior, you must be." "I am ready," Thomas growled, meanwhile cursing himself mentally for being fooled by the first soft words. "But I am done with fighting, as far as Thorun's Tournament is concerned. I am the winner." All around him he heard a catching of breaths. Evidently one did not talk like that to the master of the world, the High Priest of Thorun. But Thomas would not simply bow his head and be only another man, not now. He must take and hold the place that he had rightfully earned. Andreas, glaring at him, put steel into his voice. "You are to fight against Thorun himself. Do you mean that you would prefer to enter his hall with your blood still safe inside your veins, with all your joints still hung together? I cannot believe it." The murmuring voices rose up wildly now, in rumor and speculation. What did the High Priest mean? Could Thorun actually be coming, to duel against a mortal man? It made no sense to Thomas, and he did not like it in the least. Still, looking at the clever and experienced Andreas, very much in control, he decided that boldness had its limits. He bowed once more to the High Priest, and said: "Sir, a word witlv you alone, if I may." "No more words, for you or from you," said Andreas softly. He turned his head slightly in a listening gesture, and smiled again. Beyond the gateway through which Andreas had come the gravel crunched again, in the rhythm of a single long-striding pair of feet. Incredibly heavy the tread must be, to make the gravel sound like that. Above the low wall in that direction the top of a head came into view, a mat of wild dark hair, while the feet must be moving at ground level three meters lower. No man was that tall. With an unfamiliar weakness in his knees Thomas believed for a moment that his own cynicism had undone him after all. The naive pious ones had been right all along. The dead of the Tournament, dismembered and buried and burnt along the way, would shortly walk before him, laughing as they followed -- The figure now appearing in the gateway before Thomas, bemling to pass through. Thorun. H is head of wild dark hair was bound up by a golden band. His fur cloak, vast as it was, barely covered his mountainous shoulders. His marvelous sword, nearly as long as Thomas's spear, was girdled to his waist. All as the legends had it. His face, though... Thorun did not seem to be looking at anything. He stared over Andreas's head, and over Thomas's, and through the still-open outer gate (where the limping maul-slave stood and gaped s if he thought those eyes were fixed on him) and brooded with his terrible unblinking eyes upon the world outside. Once he had come to a halt Thorun did not move, did not shift his position or stir a finger, any more than would a statue. Andreas said nothing more, or, if he did so, Thomas did not hear. Rather the High Priest bowed himself out of the way, silently and obsequiously, though with some amusement still visible, out of the way of the mighty figure of the god. The eyes had moved now, though the head had not, and Thorun was looking at Thomas. The eyes had literally some kind of glow inside them, like those of an animal seen at nighttime by reflected light. This glow was red and orange. Glancing quickly around, Thomas saw that IF the eyes were on him alone, for no one any longer stood near him. Against one wall of the square he saw Leros prostrate in deep reverence, as were a number of others on walls and ground. Scores of men were watching now, men in white robes and gray rags. Those who had been in the middle of the square were scrambling away, reaching for high perches, getting themselves atop things and behind things, getting out of the way. Awe was in every face. Almost. Only Farley would not interrupt his contemplation of the sky. Thorun now came stepping forward. Though his movements were limber and seemed natural enough, even graceful, for some reason the impression of watching a statue persisted. Perhaps it was the face, which was utterly inhuman, though the form of each individual feature was correct. Neither was the face godlike -- unless gods were less than men, unless they were not, in fact, alive. But Thorun's strides were very long and purposeful. Thomas, seeing the long sword coming endlessly out of its scabbard as the god approached, got himself into motion just in time. The man launched himself backward out of the arc of the sword, and it made a soft and mournful sighing as it passed in a stroke that would have cut a man in half as readily as a weed. The war god's bearded lips opened at last and bellowed forth a deafening battle-cry. It was a strange and terrible sound, as inhuman as the glowing, unblinking eyes and the dead face. Getting his spear unlimbered just in time, Thomas mechanically held it out to parry Thorun's next stroke. When the god's sword struck he felt a numbing jolt up both his arms, and his armored spear was nearly torn out of his grasp. It was like some nightmare of being a child again, and facing a grown warrior in combat. The watchers cheered. Whoever or whatever Thorun was, his strength was well beyond that of any man. Thorun advanced methodically, unhurriedly. Backing and circling, Thomas knew that he must now plan and fight the finest battle of his life. T homas began to fight his finest battle but before long was forced to realize that it was hopeless. His own most violent attacks were knocked aside with effortless ease, while Thorun's sword strokes came with such murderous power and precision that he knew he could not parry or avoid them for long. Already the battering of sword on spear had made his arms grow numb and weary. He was gripping his spear in both hands like a quarterstaff and retreating steadily, meanwhile trying to discover some workable strategy, to spy out some weakness in the defense of his monstrous opponent. Whether that opponent was god or man or something else entirely was a question that did not bother Thomas in the least just now. At last, with a good deceptive move followed by a superb thrust, Thomas got his spear-point home into Thorun's tunic of heavy fur, only to feel it rebound from some hard layer of armor underneath. A moment of sudden hope burned out as quickly as it had come. Around him the watchers gasped in astonishment at his seeming success, then relaxed with a collective sigh as the world, that had tilted for a moment, settled back. Thorun was unconquerable. Thomas, however, retained a spark of hope. If he could hit home once with the spear, then he might be able to hit home again. If the fur-clad chest and belly were invulnerable, where should he try to strike? How about the face? No. He could stand a little farther off -- and it would be less nearly suicidal -- if he tried instead for the legs. Thomas observed that the joints of Thorun's exposed and seemingly unarmored knees were not covered with unbroken skin like that on human legs, but instead showed fine and smoothly shifting cracks, as if they were the legs of a wellmade puppet. The opening in the knee-joint presented a very small and moving target, but no more difficult a one than the insects on the wing Thomas had sometimes hit in practice. No better plan having suggested itself, Thomas feinted high, low, high again, and then put all his power and skill into a low thrust. His eyes and arms did not fail him. The sharp point of the spear found the small opening just as it was narrowing slightly with the straightening of Thorun's leg. There came a grinding vibration down the spear's shaft, and an audible snap of metal. Thorun lurched but did not fall. With the suddenness of the slamming of a door, a silence fell over the arena. The tip of Thomas's spearhead came away bright, where its point had been broken off. The silence that had fallen when Thorun nearly lost his footing still held; Thorun's knee was now frozen in a half-bent position. The ruler of the world was wounded, and nothing could be heard but the scraping dragging of his crippled foot as he continued to advance. He advanced more slowly than before but as implacably as ever. Thomas, in retreat again, glimpsed Andreas standing atop a wall. The High Priest's face was dark as a thundercloud, and one of his hands was half extended like a claw, as if he wanted to interfere now but did not dare. The limping god came in range again of his human opponent. Once more Thorun's great sword became a gleaming blur of speed, hammering on with untiring violence, driving Thomas back and back, around and around the little space. Thomas, meaning to strike again at the wounded knee, feinted high and low and high again, and then was nearly killed, was knocked off his feet, by the impact of the sword against his spear. Thorun was not to be fooled twice by the same tactic. Thomas rolled over desperately. Thorun, lurching with grotesque speed, was almost upon him. Thomas got his feet under him ftfid got away barely in time. Leap to and grab, Thomas? Never, against this foe. As well leap in and wrestle an IF ice-born glacier-beast -- or one of the glaciers themselves. Somehow Thomas had managed to retain his spear, arid he was still blocking the sword with its steelarmofed shaft, but he could no longer gather energy to launch a thrust. Still the sword drove him back and back, and around and around. Now the watching whiterobes had once more found their voices. The end could not be held off any longer, Thomas thought. Weary and off balance, he raised his arms in desperation to catch yet another swordsweep against his indestructible spear. Again the impact knocked him from his feet. The world seemed to turn slowly, slowly around him as he spun in the air and fell, giving him time to wonder whether there was a real Thorun to be confronted after he had been slain by this limping imposter. Thomas came down hard and for a moment could not move. He had lost his grip on his spear at last. The weapon lay only a handsbreadth from his fingers in the dust of the square, but grasping it again was one of the hardest greatest achievements of Thomas's life. limping progress, as if uncertain whether the fight was already won. Then with its crablike motion it came forward once again. Thomas got himself up on one knee, his spear leveled. Another sudden cessation of noise made him aware of how the watchers had been yelling for his death. Thorun's glowing but lifeless eyes were judging him. What was the wargod waiting for? Thomas struggled back to his feet, knowing that the next swordstroke, or the one after that, would surely be the last. Then with the edge of his vision he saw a gray-clad figure approaching him from one side. It moved with a limp, as if in sacriligious mockery of wounded Thorun's gait. The slave's leaden maul was lifting casually to dash out Thomas's brains. Thomas had been ready to meet death, but by all the gods, this was too much! He was not yet down and helpless! He turned, meaning to spear the slave through, while Thorun, lackwit, continued to hesitate. Thomas for the first time looked closely into the slave's face, and was momentarily paralyzed by what he saw. And gray-clad Giles the Treacherous stepped sideways with smooth unlimping speed, and with all his warrior's strength let fly with the massive maul against Thorun's already damaged knee. Metal cracked. The bright arc of Thorun's next swordstroke, already underway, went tilting awkwardly and curved well wide of Giles and Thomas both. Metallic snapping sounds prolonged themselves. Slowly, but without dignity, the monster sat down, its left knee bent at a wrong angle. It came to rest in a sitting position with its torso bolt upright, staring at its enemies with a face that had not changed, but had suddenly become absurd. "Thomas!" cried Giles. He leaped back just in time from the next stroke that Thorun, still sitting, aimed at him. "Get him between us, Thomas. Finish him!" For the first time uttering a warcry of his own, a hoarse and wordless yell, Thomas moved quickly to accomplish the encirclement. His peripheral vision told him that no one in the watching throng was moving to interfere. They were in pandemonium, their white robes swirling with disordered motion and their voices straining in excited noise. There was Leros, standing with arms folded in apparent calm, barely out of the way of the fight and watching it in utter concentration. Thomas glimpsed Andreas standing on a wall. The High Priest was waving his arms and seemed to be shouting orders, but the insane excitement was now such that no man's voice could be heard. Even crippled as he was Thorun came near to being a match for his opposition. Neither spear nor maul could beat down the huge sword in his untiring arm, and he turned his seated body with marvelous speed to face first one foreman and then the other. Catching the eye of Giles, Thomas roared: "Together! Now!" and they rushed at Thorun from opposite sides simultaneously. The sword came at Thomas, and he managed to parry it yet again only because Thorun, in his sitting position, could not get his whole body behind a swing. Even so Thomas thought for a moment that his own forearm had been broken in the clash. But meanwhile Giles had got in close, swinging like a piledriver, and landed his maul full force on the back of Thorun's neck. The blow would have exploded the head of any mortal man. Thorun's wild hair flew, his great head jerked, his torso swayed a little, his swordarm hesitated. Now Thomas's blunted spearpoint smashed into his right eye, which went out like a candle, with a tiny crunch that came through the spear like breaking glass. Now the maul came down again, this time on the swordhand. Thorun did not drop his sword, but now it stood out at a different angle from his fist. The giant died slowly, piecemeal, indifferent rather than brave, emitting neither cries nor blood. There was only a step-by-step loss of function under the terrible punishment of spear and hammer, a progressive revelation of Thorun's vincibility, a bit-by-bit reduction of his body to little more than shattered metal and glass and fur. Even when the huge body was hopelessly beaten, when the god's battered face had been humiliatingly pounded down into the earth beside the fountain, the sword arm was still trying to fight, lashing out with murderous, random blows. A spear thrust loosened its fingers and the giant sword feH from the hand with a dull little sound. The arm, its broken digits clutching spasmodically on emptiness, was still waving when Thomas and Giles looked at each other, rested their weapons, and then turned together to salute the watchers who ringed them in. The noise of the crowd died away into an exhausted silence, a silence that seemed to Thomas to go on for a very long time. Andreas was no longer to be seen, he noted, and a few others had also vanished. Most were still watching, as if hypnotized, the helpless, stubborn moveIF ments of Thorun's arm. Thomaswent to kick the huge sword out of its reach. Eyes began now to turn toward Leros, who was the senior priest still in attendance. Obviously in the grip of powerful emotions, he took two steps forward and stretched forth an arm toward the fallen giant; but Leros was still too overcome to speak, and the first of his outstretched arm clenched tightly his arm dropped back to his side. I t was left to Giles to break the silence at last. Gesturing at the wrecked giant, he shouted out: "This creature is not your beloved Thorun. It cannot be! Andreas and his Inner Circle have deceived you all!" The roar that went up from the crowd in response had much of agreement in it. But one voice cried out at Giles: M Who are you, that have interfered and done this? Agent of the Brothegigod! Spy!" Giles raised a hand and got silence in which to make his answer. "Very well, say I am a spy, an agent, anything you like. But what I have shown you here is nothing but the truth. Call me what you will. But will you call me a god, to defeat another god in combat? And what god could I be, to conquer Thorun?" He raised his face to the bright sky, and made a holy sign. "Great Thorun, avenge yourself upon the blasphemers who have put forth this deception!" And he gestured again to where ruined Thorun still moved one arm in a parody of battle. Several men with their daggers drawn -- there were no larger weapons in evidence among the crowd -- came to surround Giles. They took away his maul and stood guard over him, but at a word from Leros did no more. Giles made no protest or resistance, but stood proudly with his arms folded. Leros, after gazing a little while longer in continued shock at what remained of Thorun, summoned two or three other leaders who were present to withdraw with him to a corner of the square. There they at once plunged into earnest talk. Most of the other spectators, marveling and arguing, began to crowd around the fallen figure that had been their god. Giles the Treacherous, looking at Thomas, suddenly flashed him a smile of surprising brightness for a man in his doubtful situation. "Lord Thomas," Giles hailed him, "it seems that you are now th champion of gods as well as men." "Well. You don't claim a share of the prize, whatever it may prove to be?" Thomas moved closer to Giles, with whom he felt a kinship. "I? Never. You have won the championship fairly and I have no claim to make." Thomas nodded, satisfied on this point. But he had other worries. Standing next to Giles, he looked around him restlessly. He had the feeling that as champion of the Tournament, and acknowledged victor over the imitation Thorun, he should be doing something, asserting authority somehow. Probably he should go to join the talk around Leros and make the priests listen to him. But what would he tell them? He realized now that he had not the faintest idea of what was really going on. He was more likely to find out, he thought, if he stayed with Giles, who might well need some help in return soon and Thomas felt much more at home talking with another fighting man than he did with the priests. "Why are you here, and how?" he asked the shorter man. "It is in my memory that I saw you die." Giles's smile had faded to a mere twist of the lip. "You saw Jud thrust at me, and me go plunging down a hillside." "You were not even wounded?" "I was not. You see, I had persuaded Jud that all I wanted was a chance to get out of the Tournament and away. He was something of a cynic, and so believed me. Also he was glad of the chance to take an uncontested victory, and went along with the plan I had hatched. He had only to hold back his thrusts a little, as I did. "His sword only took a few threads from, my jacket before I went over the edge. I had marked beforehand that the slave carrying the maul was of my size and coloring, which suggested the whole plan to me. When the slave came down to make sure I was dead I was waiting in the bushes and did the office for him instead. I took his rags and his rope belt and his maul, and put them on together with his limp, before dragging him uphill to be buried in my good clothes. The rest of you had started on ahead by then, as I had expected. "I was seldom in your camp after that. My companion slave was dumb, and so lackwit he did not notice the transformation -- or perhaps he was shrewd enough to ignore intrigue when he became aware of it. None of the rest of you ever looked at me with open eyes, once I had put on gray rags -- not until you looked at me just now, when you thought I was coming for you with the maul." Thomas shook his head in wonderment. "A fearful risk you took." "Not so great a risk as having to face you, or Kelsumba perhaps, or Farley, in open combat. I had made up my mind that that risk was too high." "But still, a strange game," Thomas commented. "Why did you play it? Why -- ?" He gestured toward the wreckage that had been Thorun. "I wanted to expose that thing for what it was. Rather, for what it is, since we have so far destroyed only a small part of it." Giles looked around him. His audience, that had been only Thomas and a couple of dagger-guards when he started speaking, was now far larger. He raised his voice and went on: "We all know now that this thing was never Thorun. It was only a creation of something else. Something else whose harboring on Hunters' planet would bring scorn and derision from the whole outworld if it were known to them." "What is this shameful thing you speak of?" The question came from Leros, who had ended his conference with the other ranking priests and had now been listening to Giles for some little time. "I am speaking of one of our ancestors' ancient enemies, a berserker," said Giles, and briefly outIF lined his conversation with Suomi in the woods. "If Andreas has not yet silenced the .outworlders he is holding in the Temple, they will be able to confirm that he has stolen their ship from them. Perhaps they will be able to tell us why." "Why should be believe the outworlders over the High Priest?" someone called, challenging. Giles raised his voice again. "The outworlders did not bring this imitation Thorun with them. Andreas and his Inner Circle priests have used it for years, to dupe Thorun's faithful followers. No artisan on Hunters' could have made it alone, any more than he could build a spaceship. Nor can it be the true persona of a god, or not even Thomas the Grabber could have knocked it down. What else can it be then, but a berserker, or part of one? If it is not a berserker, perhaps the High Priest and his Inner Circle can explain just what it is. I would ask them now if they were here. But they fled when they saw that their fancy machine was doomed." Leros nodded grimly. "It is time, and past time, for us to ask Andreas some hard questions." The roar of agreement that went up was short, for men wanted to hear what Leros was going to say next. He went on: "I think, though, that it is not for you to tell us what to ask. Whose agent are you, treacherous one?" G iles shrugged, and admitted readily: "I was sent here by what you call the Brotherhood. But what of that, honest Leros? Today I have told you and shown you nothing but demonstrable truth. I see now that we of the Brotherhood really have no quarrel with the people of Godsmountain, but only with the Inner Circle and its head." Leros grunted, perhaps a bit bewildered by the ready flow of words, half convinced by them and half put off by their smoothness. Before he had to reply, however, he was distracted by the return of a man who had evidently been dispatched to see what was going on at the Temple. This messenger brought back word that the doors and gates leading to the Temple complex had been locked and barred from within, and the palace guard of soldiers directly under the command of the High Priest were occupying the place. Andreas would not appear, but only sent out word that all spies, traitors, and their dupes would soon tremble before his wrath. "He will not answer reasonable questions?" Leros demanded. "He will not explain why he dared to foist this... this thing... upon us as a god?" "No, Lord Leros, he will not." "Then it is certain," Leros shouted, "Andreas no longer speaks in Thorun's name! Great Thorun, stand with us now! Stand with us as we prepare to prove in combat who can serve you best!" There was a new outbreak of shouts and prayers, a general uproar of activity as men rushed to arm themselves, debated hasty plans of organization, and argued over whether any of the military commanders known to be nearly in the field should be summoned with their troops and asked or ordered to drive Andreas from the Temple. This last suggestion was shouted down. Thomas gathered that the soldiers now in the Temple were too small a force to hold it for long against the aroused citizenry. Well, let the strategists debate; he would know what to do when it came to fighting. Finding himself for the moment more or less alone again with Giles, Thomas said to him: "I thank you for stepping in against the monster; I will not forget it." Thomas was beginning to appreciate how shrewd Giles was, and to understand that he himself was going to need shrewd advice to secure a position of power among these people. "You are welcome, Lord Thomas, for whatever my help was worth." "Why did the Brotherhood send you here?" Giles made a little self-deprecating motion with his head. "I was the best fighter they could find. I was sent to the Tournament from a district largely under their control. They hoped of course that I could win the Tournament, and then function against Godsmountain from some place of authority inside it. But long before the Tournament was over I realized that I was not going to win. You and some of the other fighters were obviously better than I. So I hatched the scheme using Jud Isaksson... but tell me. Lord Thomas, why are you here?" "I?" Thomas was surprised. "Yes. I don't think you ever believed there was a real Thorun here, to reward you with immortality. I have told you my real reason for taking part in the Tournament; what was yours?" "Huh. Well, fighting is my business. It was dangerous, yes, as any real fighting is, but I expected to win. I have never met the man who could stand against me in single combat." Giles was quietly fascinated. "Did you never stop to think that each of us could truthfully have made that identical claim? Each of the original sixty-four?" Thomas blinked. "No,' he said slowly. "No, I did not stop to think of that." Suddenly he remembered the utter astonishment on the beardless dying face of young Bram. Was that in the second round or the third? He could not remember, but it seemed very long ago. He raised a hand over his shoulder to caress the heavy spear slung on his back. He would have to get a new one made. Not only was the point of this one broken but the shaft was dented and weakened, its steel reinforcing strips twisted and loosened by the battering of Thorun's sword. "I wanted a place of power, wanted to be one of the men who rule the world from this mountaintop." Giles prompted: "You thought they held the Tournament because they wanted the best fighter in the world up here, to be Godsmountain's champion. And as such you would have great power and wealth." "Yes. That's about it." "An intelligent guess, I would say. I, too, believed the Tournament had some such purpose. IF though there were some points I could not understand... anyway, it seems that we were wrong. Andreas and his Inner Circle deceived everyone in one way or another. The simple warriors with a simple story of gods, and us by letting us think that we were wise and understood the truth." Thomas swore a great oath, throwing in all the gods he could remember on short notice. "Then why did they have the Tournament? Andreas and his gang did not watch us to applaud our skill or dwell upon our sufferings. Nobody was allowed to watch, except for a few priests and the outworlders. Why, why preach and urge us on to slaughter one another?" "They wanted senseless slaughter," said Giles, "because they really do not worship Thorun, who has life and honor in him, and a purpose besides destruction. They could never get the mass of people to worship their true god, who is nothing but Death. Thorun enjoys women and wine, tall tales and food. Especially he honors the courage that makes all other virtues possible. But death is what they worship, and death is what berserkers represent, death without honor or purpose, death alone." Giles fell silent, squinting at the wreckage of Thorun on the ground where it lay face down in the mud near the fountain, not far from Farley's sky-gazing corpse. Then Giles added: "No, that is not good enough. You are right, why did Andreas and the others not watch the let others watch it. Only the outworlders were allowed to come... and while they watched, their ship was stolen. Is that it? The finest heroes of our planet fought and died only to lure them here." A shout was being raised by many voices, not only in the square but all around the city. The outworlders' ship was in the air. T he liftoff when it came was very smooth, and took Suomi completely by surprise; he had dozed off at his desk, his head resting on his arms, and on first waking had had the hideous feeling that the ship was already settling down, its flight completed, and that his only chance to act had come and gone. Hastily he turned to look at the monitor screen on the bulkhead beside the stateroom's intercom control and saw with relief that the flight was certainly not over. Imaged in the screen now was Orion's control room. The highranking priest called Lachaise was seated in the central pilot's chair, bent forward over controls and instruments in an attitude of rigid concentration. Around Lachaise other priests and soldiers sat or stood in nervous postures, clinging to whatever solid supports they could get hold of. Looking past the far side of the control room, Suomi could see down the passageway to the entrance lock, at the far side of which the main exterior hatch was still standing open; moving the ship in such a configuration was perfectly feasible, provided of course that no high speed or high altitude was attained. Another soldier clung just inside the entrance lock, looking out and down through the open outer doors. Presumably he was posted there as insurance should the screens in the control room somehow fail, or (what was much more likely) should the novice pilot have trouble in interpreting their images. The flight was evidently going to be a short one. The berserker must be somewhere nearby, and its loyal human servants were going to bring the captured starship to it. Then they would be able to get to work in earnest on the ship. Directing an operation on itself, the berserker could be wired into the onboard computers, assimilate them into its brain, and take over the ship's various systems as extensions of its own being. And then the drive... its conversion to a death machine could be performed at Godsmountain if convenient, or the berserker could fly itself and a loyal coterie to some safe spot in the uninhabited north and there prepare to kill the world. Through his stateroom screen Suomi could monitor much of what was showing on the big screens in the control room. He had not dozed long, for it was still bright day outside. He watched, on the screens, the wooded slopes of Godsmountain falling away very gently, then tilting a bit. At the same time Suomi felt Orion tilt in the hands of her inexpert pilot as he started her moving sideways toward the summit. They would not be bothering with the artificial gravity on this low, slow flight in atmosphere. The voices of the people in the control room, and those who were communicating with them from outside the ship, were audible in Suomi's stateroom, coming in over intercom. "Schoenberg," Lachaise was saying tensely now, "I have a yellow light showing on the lifesystems panel. Can you explain it?" "Let me see," said Schoenberg's voice, wearily, speaking offstage from Suomi's viewpoint. After a little pause, presumably while a screen was switched to give him a better view, Schoenberg continued: "That's nothing to worry about. Just a reminder that the main hatch is open and the safety interlocks have been disconnected to let you fly her that way. It's just a reminder so you don't forget and go shooting up into space." Whatever pressure had been brought to bear, Schoenberg was evidently cooperating fairly thoroughly. The ship was directly over the city now, drifting balloon-like on silent engines only a few meters above the tallest rooftops. "Go higher, Lachaise!" another man's voice barked, authoritatively, and Suomi saw the high-ranking priest in white and purple swivel nervously in the pilot's chair, his pale hands in jerky motion, over-correcting. The ship lurched upward while the men around Lachaise clung to their chairs and stanchions and eyed him apprehensively. The upward acceleration ceased, the ship hung for a heart-stopping moment in free fall, and then with a few more up-and-down oscillations was brought back under more or less steady control. "I should have been allowed more time to practice!" the pilot protested feverishly. IF "There is no time," the authoritative voice snapped back. Suomi recognized it now a  that of Andreas, speaking from outside the ship. "Thorup failed and Leros and some agent of the Brotherhood have inflamed the mob. We will load our dear lord and master onto the ship and take him to safety in the north with our prisoners. All will yet be well, Lachaise, if you can only maneuver carefully. Come over the Temple now." Lachaise was now guiding himself by a screen that showed what was directly below the ship. Suomi, in effect looking over Lachaise's shoulder, saw a strange sight the significance of which he could not grasp at first. Near the largest building in the center of the city -- this must be the Temple, for the ship was now hovering almost directly above it -- another much lower structure was having its roof peeled back, dismantled, from inside. The workmen doing the job were partly visible, their hands and arms coming and going, removing pieces of roof from the edge of the rapidly enlarging opening. Inside there was the tracery of thin scaffolding on which the workmen evidently stood, and besides that nothing but darkness, unconquerable by the sun that everywhere else fell bright on street and wall. It took Suomi a few moments to realize that the building's interior looked dark because it was a single vast pit, dug far below the level of the city's streets. "Tell them to hurry with the roof," Lachaise pleaded. "Are you in position yet?" the voice of Andreas countered, the strain in it now quite audible. "I do not think you are quite in the proper position." S uomi could see now that small but tumultuous groups of whiterobed men were running about in the streets around the Temple complex, deploying as if to encircle it. Here and there a drawn sword waved. And uniformed soLdiers moved about on the Temple's walls. Now Suomi saw the bright streak of an arrow flying from street to wall and two more darting in the opposite direction in reply. Perhaps the man in gray, with his grandiose scheme of entering the city disguised as a slave and touching off a rebellion, had been more successful than Suomi had thought possible. As for Suomi himself, he had done all he could at the workbench and now it was time to prepare for combat. Feeling unreal, he picked upthe small battery-powered unit he had assembled and went quickly across the small room and got into his bunk. Reaching up an arm, he The voices of the others still came in; and, though they still could not see him, he could join in their conversation now. But he was not ready. The bunk was capable of being converted into an acceleration couch, meant to be used in case of failure of artificial gravity somewhere in deep space. To fully convert the bunk now would not be feasible, but Suomi swung the center section of restraining pads over himself as he lay down, and locked it into place. He lay there holding his little recorder ready to play, the gain turned to maximum. He lay rigid with tension and fear, almost unable to breathe, not yet knowing for certain whether he would be brave enough to do what must be done. That it might kill him was not so bad. That it might accomplish nothing except to earn him a leisurely and hideous punishment from a victorious Andreas -- that was very possible, and a chance just about too hideous to take. Suomi, by turning his head, could still observe his stateroom screen. Lachaise was edging the ship over the great pit now, unmistakably meaning to lower it inside. The removal of the roof out to the eaves had been completed. The fragile scaffolding left inside would part like spiderweb beneath Orion 's armored weight. It was all very well planned and organized. Andreas and the others must have been preparing for a long time to capture a starship. Who had told them how to plan their pit, how big it must be to hold the kind of ship men would be likely to use on a surreptitious hunting expedition? Of course, their lord and beloved master, Death... Death knew all the sizes and shapes of human starships, he had fought against them for a thousand years. Lachaise in his pilot's chair was now carrying on a continuous exchange of tense comments with the men waiting and guiding him below, and with the lookout at the open hatch. The ship began to lower. Down, and down -- butthis proved to be a false start, and Lachaise had to straighten her out and bring her up again, dribbling a thin trail of white dust from where the hard hull had brushed delicately against a high Temple cornice and knocked down a barrowful or two of masonry. Up they went, and sideways an almost imperceptible distance, and started down again. Lachaise was probably a natural technician and machine operator; at any rate he was learning very fast. This time the slow descent was true. His finger on the switch that would turn on the recorder, Suomi balanced over infinite depths of personal change, chasms of sudden death or slow defeat and somewhere a small plateau of triumph. With a part of his mind he wondered if this was the sensation that Schoenberg and other hunters sought, and the men who faced one another in the Tournament, when a lifetime's awareness of being seemed to pulse through every second of experience. He could accept all the possibilities. He could do what must be done. The ship was going down into the hole. Timing, now, tactics. At the bottom they might very well cut off the drive, so that would be too long to wait. Right now, just entering the top of the hole, they were still more outside than in, right now would be too soon. He waited through an eternity; the ship must now be a quarter of the way down. Hallway down. Eternity was passing. Now. With a relief almost unbearable with surcease of mental strain, Suomi touched the switch IF on the small box he was holding. T he voice of Johann Karlsen, biting and unforgettable, heavily amplified, boomed out through Orion s intercom system, through the radio links from the control room to the outside, through the open main hatch, reverberating at a volume that must have carried There was more, but it was drowned out by another voice, a voice that could only be the berserker's own, booming and bellowing from some hidden place: And then that voice too was buried, drowned out, obliterated by the explosive violence resulting from the full-power application of a starship's drive, not only deep within a planet's gravitational well but almost literally buried within Godsmountain's mass. Suomi, heavily protected by his padded bunk and bracing himself as well as he was able, was still shaken as if by the jaws of a glacier-beast, flattened against the bulkhead next to his bunk, then forced away from it again, only saved by his straps from being smeared against the stateroom's opposite bulkhead. The room's regular lights went out, and simultaneously an emergency light glared into life above the door. There followed a sudden cessation of acceleration, a silence and a falling that went on and on. Then the fall ended with another bonejarring crash, loud and violent but still far closer to the humanly endurable on the scale of physical events than was that first detonation drive. The ship seemed to bounce, crashed again, teetered and rocked, and came at last to a shuddering rest, her decks tilted at somewhere near forty degrees from the horizontal. Now all was quiet. The screen in Suomi's stateroom was effectively dead, its surface only flickering here and there with electronic noise. Suomi unstrapped himself from his bunk and climbed the crazy slope of the deck to reach the door. He had failed to pick up loose objects before entering combat and breakage in the stateroom had been heavy, though there were no indications of basic structural damage. The strength of the hull had probably saved the ship from that. The stateroom door opened forcefully when he unlatched it, and the dead or unconscious body of a soldier slid in, trailing brokenlooking legs. Suomi stuck his head out into the passage and looked and listened. All was quiet and nothing moved in the glare of the emergency lights. Here too deck and bulkheads and overhead were still in place. He turned back to the fallen sentry and decided that the man was probably dead. Guilt or triumph might come later, he supposed. Right now Suomi only considered whether to arm himself with the man's sword, which was still resting peacefully in its scabbard.In the end Suomi left it there. A sword in his hand was not going to do any good for anybody, least of all himself. He thumped on the door of Barbara Hurtado's stateroom and when a weak voice answered he opened the door and climbed in. Amid a kaleidoscopic jumble of multicolored clothes from a spilled closet she sat in a heap on the floor, wearing an incongruous fluffy robe, her brown hair in wild disarray, leaning against a chair that must be fastened to the deck. "I think my collarbone is broken," she said faintly. "Maybe it isn't, though. I can move my arm." "I'm the one who did it," he said. "Sorry. There was no way I could give you any warning." "You?" She raised her eyebrows. "All right. Did you do as much damage to those sons of beasts out there?" "More, I hope. That was the idea. Shall we go out and see? Can you walk?" "Love to go and see their broken bodies, but I don't think I can. They've got me chained to my bunk, which I guess is why I wasn't killed. The things they were making me do. Always wondered wfiat soldiers were like and I finally found out." "I'm going out to look around." "Don't leave me, Carlos." "I'll be back as soon as I can." Things in the control room were very bad, or very good, depending on your point of view. It was closer to the drive than the staterooms were, Suomi supposed. Lachaise, strapped into the central, padded chair, was leaning back with eyes open and arms outflung, showing no wounds but very plainly dead all the same. Intense localized neutron flux at the moment when the drive's fields collapsed was one possibility in such disasters, Suomi remembered reading somewhere. Lachaise had perished happily, no doubt, in blind obedience to his god, perhaps believing or hoping that he really name of glorious death... yes. Around Lachaise, the priests and soldiers who had been helping and watching him had not been strapped into padded chairs. Neutrons or not, they now looked like so many bad losers in the Tournament. This many lives at least had the berserker harvested today. Some of them still breathed, but none were at all dangerous any more. The main hatch was still open, Suomi discovered, looking down at it from the control room, but it was completely choked with broken white masonry and massive splintered timbers; part of the Temple or of somebody's house perhaps. The ship had come to rest within the city, then. Probably a number of people had been killed outside the ship as well as in it, but Godsmountain had not been leveled, a lot of its people were doubtless still alive, and whoever was left in charge should come digging his way into the ship eventually, probably wanting to take vengeance for the destruction. IF With some difficulty Suomi made his way back to Barbara's stateroom and managed to lodge himself in a sitting position by her side. "Exit's blocked. Looks like we wait together." He described the carnage briefly. "Be a good boy, Carlos, get me a pain pill from my medicine chest, and a drink." He jumped up. "Of course. I didn't think -- sorry. Water?" "First. Then one of the other kind, if everything in my bar isn't smashed." T hey were still sitting there together, about half a standard hour later, when after much noise of digging and scraping from the direction of the entrance hatch, Leros and a troop of armed men, swords in hand and in full battle gear, appeared in the stateroom's open door. Suomi, who had been listenfng fatalistically to their approach, looked up at Leros and then closed his eyes, unable to watch the sword's descent. Nothing descended on him. He heard nothing but a faint multiple clinking and jangling, and opened his eyes to see Leros and his followers facing him on their knees, genuflecting awkwardly on the tilted deck. Among them, looking scarcely less awed than the rest, was the man in gray, armed now with sword instead of hammer. "Oh Lord Demigod Johann Karlsen," said Leros with deep reverence, "you who are no robot, but a living man, and more, forgive us for not recognizing you when you walked among us! And accept our eternal gratitude for again confounding our ancient enemies. You have smashed the death-machine within its secret lair, and most of those who served it also. Be pleased to know that I myself have cut out the heart of the arch-traitor Andreas." It was Barbara who -- perhaps -- saved him then. "The Lord Karlsen has been injured, stunned," she said. "Help us." F ive days later, the demigod Johann Karlsen, he who had been Carlos Suomi, and Athena Poulson, both of them in fine health, sat at a small table in a corner of what had been the Temple courtyard. Shaded from the midday Hunterian sun by the angle of a ruined wall, they were watching the slave-powered rubble clearing operations making steady progress in the middle distance. There the ship still lay, fifty or sixty meters from the Temple complex, surrounded by a jumble of smashed buildings, where it had come to rest after the drive destroyed itself. Besides the cultists killed inside the ship or executed by Leros later, at least a score of people, most of them people who had never even known of the berserker's existence, had died in the cataclysm. But still innocent folk across the planet lived and breathed. "So, Oscar has explained it all to me, finally," Athena announced. "They promised him a chance, a fighting chance, to get at the berserker and destroy it if he cooperated." "He believed that?" "He says he knows it was a terribly small chance, but there wasn't any better one. They wouldn't let him get on the ship at all. He just had to sit in a cell and answer questions for Andreas and Lachaise. And the berserker too, it talked to him directly somehow." # I see." Suomi sipped at his golden goblet of fermented milk. Maybe the stuff made Schoenberg sick, but he had found that his stomach could handle it without difficulty, and he had grown to like the taste. Athena was looking at him almost dreamily across the little table. "I haven't really had a chance to tell you what I think, Carlos," she said now in a soft, low voice. "It was such a simple idea. Oh, of course I mean simple in the sense of something classical, ele"Hm?" "The way you used your recordings of Karlsen's voice, and won the battle." "Oh, well. That was simple, to splice together recorded words to make some phrases that a berserker ought to find appropriately threatening. The main thing was that the berserker should identify his voice and so take the strongest, most violent action if could to kill him, forgetting everything else, be perfectly cess." "But to conceive of it was brilliant, and to do it required courage." "Well. When I heard that its servants were asking about Karlsen, for no apparent reason, the idea struck me that we might be dealing with one of those assassin machines, a berserker that had been programmed specifically to go after Karlsen. Even if it was only an ordinary berserker -- ha, what am I would rate as a very high priority in its programming, probably higher than depopulating a minor world. I gambled that it would just forget its other plans and wreck the ship, that it would just take it as probable that Karlsen was somehow hiding on Orion with a secret landing party." "That sounds insane." Then, flustered, Athena tried to modify the implied criticism. "I mean -- " "It does sound insane. But, as I understand it, predicting human behavior has never been the berserkers' strong point. Maybe it thought Andreas had betrayed it after all." T he god Thorun incarnate, who had been Thomas the Grabber, strolled majestically into the courtyard at its other end, trailed by priests and a sculptor who was making sketches for a new spearcarrying statue. Suomi rose slightly from his chair and made a little bow in Thorun's direction. Thorun answered with a smile and a courteous nod. Carlos and Thomas understood each other surprisingly well. The people had to be reassured, society supported, through a time of crisis. Did Leros and the other devout leaders really believe that a god and a demigod now walked among them? Apparently they did, at least in one compartment of their minds, and at least as long as such belief IF suited their needs. And perhaps in one sense it was the truth that Karlsen still walked here. Perhaps, also, the sandy-haired man now known as Giles the Chancellor, who was Thorun's constant companion and adviser, was to a great degree responsible for the relative smoothness with which the society of Godsmountain had weathered the upheavals of the past few days. Alas for the Brotherhood. Well, thought Suomi, likely a world with the Brotherhood victorious would have been no better than Godsmountain's world was going to be without its secret demon. There was Schoenberg now, walking near his wrecked ship. Barbara Hurtado was at his side listening to him as he pointed out features of the rubble-clearing system the slaves were following. It was a result of his expert analysis of the problem. He had been talking about it yesterday with Suomi. There, where Schoenberg was now pointing, was the place where the mathematically proven plan of greatest efficiency called for all the debris to be piled. Schoenberg had come near being killed as a collaborator by Leros and the winning faction, but intervention by the demigod Karlsen had saved his life and restored his freedom. After what had happened to Celeste Servetus and Gus De La Torre -- their mutilated bodies had been found atop a small mountain of human and animal bones in a secret charnel-pit far beneath the Temple -- Suomi could not blame Schoenberg or anyone else for collaboration. Schoenberg had told him of the tale of ruthless Earthmen who were going to come looking to avenge him, a tale that, alas, had been nothing but pure bluff. Suomi, though, still had the feeling that Schoenberg was leaving something out, that more than passed between him and Andreas Let it lie. The ship had been irreparably damaged, and the surviving members of the hunting expedition were going to have to coexist on this planet, in all likelihood, for an indeterminate number of standard years, until some other ship just happened by. Athena took a sip of cool water from her fine goblet, and Suomi drank some more fermented milk from his. She had spent the period of crisis locked in her private room and unmolested -- maybe she would have been the next day's sacrifice -- until the ship crashed and th Temple was knocked down about her ears. Even then she was only shaken up. She, the independent, self-sufficient woman, and by chance she had been forced to sit by passively like some ancient heroine while men fought all around her. "What are your plans, Carl?" "I suspect the citizens here will sooner or later get tired of having the demigod Karlsen around, and I just hope it doesn't happen before a ship shows up. I think he'll maintain a low profile, as they say, until then." "No, I mean Carl Suomi's plans." "Well." Suddenly he wondered if any of the Hunterians, before the crisis, had heard her call him Carl, as she frequently did. He wondered if that might have contributed to his being so fortunately misideiitified. Never mind. Well. Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi's plans for his future would definitely have included Athena. But that was before he had seen her other. No. Sorry. Of course he himself had now killed more people than she had even seen die -- yet in a real sense he was still a pacifist, more so than ever in fact, and she was not. That was show he saw the matter, anyway. Barbara, now. She was still standing beside Schoenberg as he lectured her, but she looked over from time to time toward the place where Suomi sat. Suomi wanted nice things to happen to Barbara. Last night she had shared his bed. The two of them had laughed about their minor injuries, comparing bruises. But... a playgirl. No. His life would go on just about the same if he never saw Barbara again. What, then, were hi plans, as Athena put it? Well, there were plenty of other fish splashing in the seas of Earth, or even, if he could be allowed a mangled metaphor, living demure and veiled behind their white walls here on Godsmountain. He still wanted a woman, and in more ways than one. Schoenberg was not pointing up into the sky. Would his rubble pile grow that tall? Then Barbara leaped with excitement, and Suomi looked up and saw the ship. Next thing they were all running, shouting, looking for the emergency radios that Schoenberg had insisted on getting from the Orion and keeping handy. Some trying-to-behelpful Hunterian had misplaced the radios. Never mind. The ship lowered rapidly, drawn by the beacon-like appearance of the city atop the mountain, and Orion already sitting there. A silvery sphere, similar in every way to Schoenberg's craft. With wild waves Earthmen and Hunterians beckoned it to land on a cleared spot amid the rubble. Landing struts out and down, drive off, hatch open, landing ramp extruded. A tall man emerging, with the pallor of one probably raised under a dome on Venus, his long mustache waxed and shaped in the form the Earth-descended Venerians frequently affected. Reassured by numerous signs of friendly welcome, he strode halfway down the ramp, putting on sunglasses against the Hunterian noon. "How do, folks, Steve Kemalchek, Venus. Say, what happened here, an earthquake?" Thorun and the High Priest Leros were still deciding which of them should make the official welcoming speech. Suomi moved a little closer to the ramp and said informally: "Something like that. But things are under control now." The man looked relieved on hearing the familiar accents of an Earthman's speech. "You're from Earth, right? That's your ship. Get any hunting in yet? I've just been up north, got a stack of trophy 'grams in there... show you later." He lowered his voice to a more confidential tone. "And, say, is that Tournament everything I've heard it is? Going on right now, ain't it? Isn't this the place?"  IF T he idea of a series of novels closely related to each other is an old one both in general literature and in our field. The Skylark and Lensman series are examples that come instantly to mind -- E.E. Smith always needed more scope than one novel could give him to work out his sweeping ideas. And Heinlein's use of a common history for his earlier stories gave a unity and effectiveness that added greatly to his reputation. More recently, Gordon Dickson has been using several separate but related novels to tell the history of the Dorsai. A series isn't quite the same thing as the average sequel, to which I'm slightly opposed. Usually a sequel seems to be something the author thinks up when a successful book has already been completed, using pretty much the same characters and background situation, often without the inner conviction of the first book. A series of books requires either a larger frame or a more versatile character to justify it. It may involve direct sequels, but it may also use quite different characters or backgrounds -- again as in Heinlein's work. Most of these seem to grow into existence by their own force, compelling the writer to go on with them, though a few are constructed deliberately. Doc Smith told me he never meant to do more than one story about Seaton and Crane; he certainly never planned to do the final book about DuQuesne, the "villain" of the series. But he did expect to do several books around the Lens. Burroughs tried to get rid of Tarzan, attempting to substitute his son, Korak the Killer. But it didn't work; Tarzan went on through eighteen more books, becoming immortal in both a literal and figurative sense. And even what seemed to be minor bits in that series refused to disappear. La of Opar was a nice character in the second book and she was even better in the sixth. But she wasn't really necessary to the ninth -- merely a welcome return. And finally, Burroughs went back to her in the fourteenth, seemingly compelled to bring her out and let her taste the more modern world -- and to show us that Tarzan wasn't by any means wholly unmoved by her charms. And Opar grew in the readers' minds -- that fabulous city of beastly men and beautiful women, possessor of untellable riches, haunted by dawn-age religion, the sole survivor of a great prehistoric civilization that might have been Atlantis. That city has haunted the minds of readers ever since Tarzan found it. Now Philip Jose Farmer has dug through the ancient past to find its true history, and to build a series of stories from this bit of another writer's series. The first novel of this new series is his Hadoti of Ancover and ten interior illustrations by Roy Krenkel. There are also maps and a short history of the first two millennia of the culture, up to about # B.C. Generally, it's good fun. Perhaps the best part is the history and some remarks about an immortal time traveller (here named Sahhindar), who bears a strange resemblance to hero of the author's Time's Last Gift , who bore a strange resemblance to Tarzan of the Apes. Ah well, thafs Farmer for you; since he's mentioned only casually it's a rather pleasant conceit and ties the sub-series back to the main sequence. The story is told with no effort to imitate the style or narrative pace of Burroughs and Hadon, for better or worse, is no hero straight from Burroughs' books. The pace is a good deal slower and much more attention to the thoughts and feelings of the characters. On its own merits, the ancient civilization is interesting and the story forms a rather good adventure novel. Except... Well, I've made my opinion plain about books that end without any real ending. This novel ends with our hero pursued hotly, chased into the hills where he makes a stand against his pursuers -- obviously an almost hopeless task. And in the last sentence, there he stands -- waiting. Phil, how could you! I know many of the early Burroughs books ended on a cliffhanger; I also know there'll be books to follow this. But when one pays for a book he has a right to think it contains a story, beginning, middle -- and end! T here isn't really very much middle or end -- or much good about them -- in the latest novel of the series about Gor, the counterIF Earth. This is Hunters of Gor, by the eighth book in the series; unhappily, I can only hope it is the last. This time the character of Tarl Cabot, noble warrior of Gor, is almost wholly lost under his present guise of Bosk, the merchant Captain. In the first half of this sprawling book, he sets out to find and capture Talena, the daughter of the great ruler, Marlenus of Ar. Because of love or desire to rescue the maiden? Nope, only for his own greedy ambition. He figures that forcing her to marry him will greatly advance his status. He makes that clear, over and over again. He seems to have forgotten that he has already been a great warrior and an agent of the Priest Kings; in fact, he asserts he no longer serves them. (Thereby cutting off one of the strongest and most appealing themes of the series.) So he blunders back into the forest where we meet the Panther girls once again. Heretofore, Norman has given us a strong and welldeveloped fresh culture in each of these books; whatever gross faults might intrude in the narrative, those backgrounds were always fascinating. But here he simply goes back to one he has used before -- and perhaps the least interesting one. Anyhow, he finally locates not Talena but Marlenus, who makes a fool of him and sends him packing. Then, because he has been careless, Bosk finds his entire crew captured, and he sets out back into the forest where he's suddenly the mighty hunter, unbelievably and much too simply overcoming the captors of the crew. He goes into the enemy camp single-handedly (and stupidly, since he has a band of his own by then) to overcome them. And, after many more words, he winds up no better off than before he first set out, heading back again to Port Kar and the business he should have been tending to all along. Ho, hum! Even the sado-masochistic beating of women which has become more and more a major motif of Norman's work is here pretty humdrum, with more repetitive quantity than quality. And the writing is t he poorest to be found in any of his Gor novels. The novel isn't worth bothering picked up where Ballantine Books left off. and now to move toward a good and important series, we have The Dispossessed . by Ursula K. le Guin (Harper and Row, #). This is a novel dealing with one of her worlds of the Ekumen, and a story which fills in a great many gaps in the series. This seems to have been a series which grew larger and richer in the author's mind as time went on. It began with no more than a single short story in #, which then became a part of a short novel of # -- Rocannon's World ; it was a good story, but not really a great one. But there were tantalizing hints of quite a history behind it and such devices as the ansible, which let men communicate from world to world, instantaneously across the huge distances of space. That same year, Le Guin turned to another world and culture in Planet of Exile. This was a very good novel of besieged descendants of human colonists and their allies, the halfhuman hilfs. (Hilf: Humanoid indigenous life form.) There were vague hints that there was some connection between the books, but nothing certain. Her third novel, published the following year. City of Illusions, showed that she was writing a connected series -- but also showed an Earth which was possessed by conquerors that were hard to fit into the structure, though they had been mentioned in the other books. It was a strange story, disturbing in some ways, but showing obvious talent. Then came a masterpiece: in # I devoted half of my first review column for this magazine to praising TheLeft Hand of Darkness, and time has established it as one of the classics of science fiction. By this time, it was clear that she was writing a tightly connected series, with each book on a different planet, showing a different culture of humanity; and it was now established that all these cultures had been planted in the remote past by a humanoid race called the Hain; and that now the Hain were trying once again to contact them and bring them into a vague union (as much philosophic as governmental) known as the Ekumen. Chronologically, The Dispossessed is the first book of the series. It takes place on twin worlds circling Tau Ceti at a time not too greatly distant from our present, apparently; at least Earth is a vastly polluted and wasted planet, totally unlike the forest world of the third book. The hero is Shevek, bom and raised on the bleak and barren world of Anarres, a world populated by an exiled group who rebelled against the government of the home world of Urras. This group believed in a communal, rather anarchistic society, free from the rigid government they had known. For a more detailed account of this period see Ursula's superb new novelette, the the August '# issue of Galaxy. Baen Half the book (in alternate chap : ters of flashbacks) deals with the growing up and development of Shevek on Anarres. And all of that is splendid. Le Guin has faced the problems of putting such a theory of government into practice as well as can be done. It's a living, struggling colony, with all the good and evil that man can adapt to situations of any kind. The life is both IF beautiful and horrible. The chapters describing the boy's growth and the struggles of the young man are moving chapters indeed. But, as the book begins, Shevek has become too great a man for his home world. He is far ahead of all others of his planet in certain esoteric mathematics that lead to the ansible that has linked these books. Despite the hatred toward Urras he shares with all Anarresti, he has to go down to Urras to continue his work. (The authorities of Urras accept him, obviously, to steal that work from him.) Urras is a fine capitalistic planet, rich enough for the most extravagant capitalistic excesses. Shevek's discovery of Urras's true nature and his efforts to find a way to use his science to help Anarres make fine reading, as does his discovery of Efor, a rather humble but wellcharacterized friend. I wish I could go on with superlatives to the end of the book, but unhappily the last ninety pages begin to slip badly. Shevek gets involved in a melodramatic and pointless rebellion that hardly seems to fit what we've previously known of the treatment of the underground-press element, at least. In any event, he fails in his first effort. Then he simply turns to the "embassy" of Hain, gets all the help he wants, and goes home -- where, most happily, things have come to a point where they'll let him back. Suddenly the writer seems more interested in getting a representative of Hain onto Anarres than in what happens to Shevek. It's not a good ending, or I wouldn't have given that much of it away. It involves stupidity by the hero in jumping out without finding a few facts from Efor he could have learned, and then it involves a deus ex machina ending in the form of a Hain rescue. The faults are deeper and sadder than this brief summary, and they destroy much of the strength of the novel. After the marvelous ending of Darkness , we had to expect more of the conclusion. I can only hope that some day the author will look at it again, take thought, and rewrite it into the truly excellent book it could be. Nevertheless, it's a book that should be read by everyone who has read any of the other stories of the Ekumen. From the standpoint of the whole series, this is a key novel. It supplies the history and links that were largely lacking before. It shows the very beginning of what will become the Ekumen and of that which made it possible to go out into space to the other worlds. It is also an important key to any other novels in this series that Ms. Le Guin may write. And I hope she .will write a great many more. This is a series which can go on and on without ever losing freshness, because each book can deal with a new and ever-fascinating culture T urning from series to individual books, I can't help wondering how Doubleday defines science fiction these days. Take as an example one that clearly calls itself science fiction on the front and backstrap of the jacket: The Lerios Mecca, by Gene Lancour (Doubleday, #). This isn't at all a bad book, but it isn't remotely science fiction. It bears a resemblance to sword-andsorcery, but isn't the real thing. This novel depicts a world suited to a semi-barbarian, sword-wielding hero with a great quest and lovely (and annoying) warrior-maid beside him. There are strange bits of more ancient culture. All of which is good. The hero is well-done, and the writing much better than in most recent sword-andsorcery books. But there's almost no sorcery. ternational Fortean Organization. # for members, # for nonmembers. It's the centenary celebration of Charles Fort's birth. For info: Box #, Arlington VA #.  A worldcon warm-up in Albuquer#. The element of magic, necessary for such a tale, is lacking. All we have, really, is the fact that a few men live to very great ages, plus a knife that cuts the hand of the user at a crucial moment according to a prophecy. It isn't really fantasy, much less science fiction. If you like a good tale without category, I might recommend it for casual reading, but don't be fooled. yND don't be fooled into thinking that A Midsummer Tempest, by Poul Anderson (Doubleday, #), is science fiction either, no matter what it's called. In this case, there's a tiny element of otherdimensional justification, and a way station between the planes. But it's essentially a fantasy -- a rather Sheraton-Biltmore Hotel, Atlanta, GA. Guests: Thomas Burnett Swan, Poul Anderson, Joe Green. # at the door or in advance (Mardi Gras affair -- special discount at door with costume) Checks Joe Celko, Box ##, Atlanta, GA #.  the Sheraton-Park Hotel, # Woodley Road NW, Washington D. C. #. GoH: Rober Zelazny, Fan GoH: Jay Kay Klein. Reg: # attending, # supporting. For info: Discon II, P.O. Box #, Washington, D. C. #. IF lovely fantasy, needing no disguise in its category. Imagine a world much like ours, back a couple hundred years. Then make a few changes. We know of Shakespeare as a great playwright. But in Anderson's world, while Shakespeare wrote precisely the same things, he was a great historian! Every word he wrote was the real history of the world. And the anachronisms we detect in Shakespeare (putting certain inventions and devices into stories where they hadn't been invented yet) are simply caused by the fact that in this world they were invented then. So, since inventions create more inventions, the Cavaliers and Roundheads have railways, even though Oberon still holds some sway and Caliban pursues his aged way where he was left. It's a lovely conceit, in the old and noble meaning of that word. (My only quibble is that there are too many double-dotted vowels in the dialect; maybe we should know that our rustics pronounce both vowels in heat, but it slows up reading.) It's not science fiction, but as a fantasy I can recommend it with pleasure. F inally, not one of a series, but one of a spate: Wild Card , by Raymond Hawkey  Roger Bingham (Stein and Day, #). This is one of those disaster books that run from Andromeda Strain through Hephestos Plague , using science fiction tricks and terms, but meant for the general reader, and apparently more and more popular with publishers looking for quick bestsellers. However, this one is good. And it uses Science with both conviction and skill -- and with consistency, which is the rarest quality of all in these books. The situation takes a world a few years from now where our society is becoming completely fractionated into struggling groups, with crime and violence far out of hand. The President is handed a report and a theoretical cure -- the only one the committee could suggest, though obviously it is only half-serious. He must fake an accidental crash by a hostile alien spaceship, and the crash must result in at least # deaths to be convincing -- and the ship and occupants must never be detectable as of human origin. For convincing reasons, he decides to try it, and has a crew assembled. The situation and the characters are made believable, as is the effort to solve the problem, and the final resolution. That resolution can be carried still further by the reader's imagination in a number of different ways, but it's still a good and stiring ending! By all odds the best of such books, and within the limits of what #'d consider honest science fiction, though it isn't so labelled. Exciting reading, highly recommended. B y not much of a coincidence, when an alien finally landed on Earth he fell into the hands of a good guy. In fact he was just folding up his parabort heatsheet in Martin Brumbacher Senior's back forty when young Marty came around the alder clump and saw him. "Hi," said Marty uncertainly, looking at the alien's yellow helmet and the khaki drawers on his skinny little legs, and the mess of gloop on the ground. "Are you, uh, with the survey?" "Como' sta Usted?" said the alien. "Ich bin ein Berliner. Mukka hail" He slapped his helmet. "Ah! Hi there. Well, yes, you might say so. Mind holding this end?" He passed one corner of the heatsheet to Marty and backed off to stretch it, gripping the edge in his humanoid teeth and kicking the middle to make it fold. He wasn't much taller than Marty. "You sure have some junk," said Marty, holding his end. "That looks like a flying saucer." "'On't 'ake 'em 'ike they used to." The alien took the edge out of his mouth and folded some more, shaking his head. "No quality control." He held out his hand for Marty's end. "Our milker jams all the time," Marty said sympathically. He looked closely at the alien's hand and his eyes popped. The alien wrestled the heatsheet into a lump that suddenly became a toroid, jammed in a few more itqms and sat down on it, panting and gazing at Marty with large brown eyes above his droopy mustach. The toroid sizzled faintly. Marty stared back. "Nice place you have here," the alien inhaled appreciatively. "Lots of fremth. You call those cows, right? I thought they were extinct." "No, they're Ayeshires." Marty swallowed a couple of times. "Uh, Welcome to Earth. I guess." "Hey, thanks!" The alien grinned and offered the hand. He had a pretty good grin. Marty shook; it felt okay, but hot. "I suppose you want to see the President or somebody." "Oh good heavens, no, just a personal pleasure trip. No formalities, please." The alien was still watching Marty carefully. Then he smiled in a relieved way. "I see you're one of the good guys." "What do you mean?" "Just checked you out on my Ethical Vibes ponder." He pointed to a winky place on his hat. "You test out real high. Honest, brave, truthful, kind, the whole profile. Lucky for me. I mean, a lot of people are hostile to strangers." He shrugged apologetically. "I don't have any secret zap rays or anything." Marty could believe that, looking at him. "Yeah. It wouldn't be so good if you landed by Matt's tavern. Or the sheriff." The alien nodded sadly. Then he brightened. "We have a saying. Every good guy knows at least one other good guy. I mean, I really would like to interact a little while I'm here, if you know somebody else who might accept me." Marty thought. "Well, I guess Whelan would accept you. I saw his car by the creek. But he isn't anybody important, he's only the warden." The alien winked. "It is also written, good guys don't win the phooplesnatch. Take me to your friend." So Marty led the alien down to the creek, at the same time asking where was he from and so on which the alien answered as well as he could, astronomy not being Marty's strong subject. Beside the pasture gate stood a muddy old station wagon. A muddy durable-looking man was coming up from the creek carrying something. The alien stopped. "Whelan! Hey, Whelan!" Marty scrambled down, talking. Whelan just kept on walking. When he reached the car he opened the back and threw in a No. # trap on a chain. Then he reached back inside and took out a piece of paw and threw it in the bushes. "Bastards," he said. "Going to kill every goddam thing." He wiped his hands on his pants and turned to the alien. "What can I do for you, sir? Whelan's the name." "How do you do, Sir Whelan?" The alien smiled tentatively. "My name is, ah, Joe. Joe Smith. I'm from quite a ways away. I was hoping I could meet a few of you people and, well, talk." He slapped the side of his helmet, frowning. "Yeah?" "Really quite a long way." The alien slapped his hat again harder. A wisp of vapor arose from the winky place. "Damn," he said. said Marty. "I told you." "Yeah?" Whelan grinned and pushed his bush hat down over his nose. "I really am." The alien gazed up at what he could see of Whelan's eyes under the hat. "I see you understand bodily structure, Sir Whelan. Perhaps if I show you -- " He held up his hands, unfolding the extra parts. Whelan stopped grinning. "There is more," the said shyly, starting to unzipper. He looked at Marty. "Perhaps if we just stepped to the other side of the car?" "Hey," said Marty indignantly. But they stepped around to where he couldn't see anything but the alien's back. IF When they returned Whelan's hat was on the back of his neck and he was rubbing his head. "Listen, this is too much for me. You have to see the President or somebody. I better take you to the courthouse." "Oh, please, no." The alien clasped his hands. "May we not just converse, personally?" "I told him about the sheriff," Marty said. Whelan nodded, not taking his eyes off the little alien. "What did you want to talk about?" The alien's mustach trembled. "It's all very informal, Sir Whelan. A mere whim. We happened to notice the way things were going here, I mean, you seemed to be having a few difficulties. Not your fault, indeed not!" He smiled hopefully. "So I thought I'd drop by and offer a small measure of help, person-to-person as it were. That is, if you want it, of course." "Who's we?" Whelan demanded. "Oh, merely myself and two very close friends. We happened to be out this way on a pleasure jaunt. Absolutely nothing official in any way, I assure you." "What kind of help? Hold it, Marty." T he alien made an embarrassed gesture. "It's only a tiny thing. You might not want it at all." "Try me." "Gladly. But -- " The alien peered hard at Whelan. "I see you do realize how dangerous it can be to inject something totally foreign into an environment? The possible consequences?" Whelan nodded. "If I could assemble a few, well, understanding people. As I said to Marty, good guys. And present it to you as a group? You could talk it over and decide if it seemed desirable." "I guess that makes sense," said Whelan slowly. "He says every good guy knows another good guy," Marty put in. The alien nodded eagerly. "Sir Whelan, could you possibly spare the time to lead us to another trustworthy person? You see I can only stay a few hours. I can't really explain why -- hardly understand it myself. Perhaps you know someone who is familiar with a wide range of people?" "Just plain Whelan's okay," Whelan was starting a different sort of grin. "Sure, why not." He rubbed his head. "Someone I trust who knows a lot of people? Well, there's my wife, but she's at the high school. Doc Murrey? He talks too much. Wait. How about Marion Legersky over at the clinic? She doesn't talk." "She's always talking," objected Marty. "Yeah, but she doesn't say anything. She's okay." "Oh, thank you!" said the alien. "Do we travel in this?" They made room among the minnow traps, shovels, wire-cutters, flashlights, blankets, chains and other stuff in the wagon. "Hold on, Marty," said Whelan. "Your pa know where you are?" "I'll yell as we go by." "Do that." Whelan revved up the wagon. When they passed the Brumbacher gate at the top of the hill Marty stuck his head out and yelled. Nobody yelled back. "Lovely place you have here," the alien sighed. "Terfic fremth. Dreadful to think you might ruin it." Whelan grunted. "What is tremth?" "Oh, it's a condition you get from the general electromagnetic configuration. Van Allen something? I never could understand the explanation. Some planets have it, some don't. I personally love it." He wiggled his thin shoulders. Whelan made a racing corner and zoomed onto the blacktop. The alien clutched at the door. "Do you always proceed so, ah, speedily?" "Sometimes he goes a lot speedilier, don't you, Whelan? Whelan has to catch poachers," Marty told the alien. "Did you catch that real bad one yet, Whelan?" "Don't talk about it," said Whelan. "Listen, can't you give me a hint about this help you're offering us?" The alien twinkled shyly, like wait-for-Christmas. Marty could see he wasn't frightened any more. "What would you like?" "Oh, Christ, Don't quote me, Marty. Well, for starters -- go back a couple of centuries and put a flaming sign in the sky saying anybody who dumps anything anywhere has to eat it. And anybody begetting more than two kids should castrate himself. And petroleum can only be extracted in the dark of the moon by left-handed virgins -- that kind of thing." "And Germany shouldn't lose the war," put in Marty. "Hey, Joe, can you? Can you?" The alien's big brown eyes looked sad and his mustach drooped. "Oh, my dear friends, I hope I have not aroused false hopes. I can't assist you on that sort of scale, I wish I could. Time travel..." "All I want is for you to save the planet before it's too late," Whelan muttered. "Any woman wearing natural fur should have her nose cut off." "Goodness." The alien swallowed nervously. "Yes, I do sympathize. I fear that what I have to offer will seem very insignificant." They swerved around the freezerplant and rolled up Maple Street. "Here we are." T he clinic was a one-story brick box in some grass. As they got out the front door opened and a IF coat came flying out with a girl halfway into it. "Marion! Hey -- Miss Legersky!" "Whelan!" The girl whirled around. "Hi, Marty! Listen, excuse me, I have a date. Paul called me to go to the game in Green Bay! There's the bus. I'm gone!" She got her other arm in the coat, dropped her pocketbook and scooped it up running. The Greyhound was down the block in front of Matt's Tavern, chuffing out stink. Inside the clinic the phone started to ring. Miss Legersky stopped as if an arrow had hit her and spun around. "Brenda? Where are you? She's late -- " She went charging back into the clinic. When they followed her in she was saying, "Yes, Mrs. Floyd... No, Mrs. Floyd... I'll tell the doctor just as soon as he comes in Mrs. Floyd, goodbye now -- what? Oh, yes, Mrs. Floyd, I truly will -- " Outside, the bus was making noises. "Right. Yes. Mrs. Floyd! Goodbye!" She ran back to the door. They all watched the bus pull out. Miss Legersky slowly took off her coat. "It could have been an emergency." She sighed and looked around at them, her jaw out. She had beautiful skin. "What's with you all?" There was a short silence and then everybody started telling her at once. "What? What?" She looked back and forth and focused on the alien. "What?" "Show her," Marty yelled, pulling at him. "I think you better take a look, Marion," Whelan said. "Being a nurse and all. The teeth," he told the alien. The alien opened his mouth. His head was a little below hers. Marty went around behind and looked. In back of the alien's front teeth were green and black zigzags. "Do you mind if I touch that?" Miss Legersky said faintly. "I'll wash my hands." "The frontals are artificial," said the alien. When she put her finger in she pulled it right out. "Your temperature!" she cried. "You're burning up!" "Quite normal." The alien seemed a little embarrassed. Whelan started telling her about the other things. When the alien unfolded his fingers. Miss Legersky began grinning in a wild sort of way like a dog laughing. "I have a third, ah, eye, too." The alien tapped his forehead. "Would it be all right to save that for later? It hurts to pull the cover off." "I saw him land!" Marty declared. "Well, practically. He has a flying saucer, it's by our gravel pit. Only he made it shrink." Miss Legersky was grinning even more wildly. "You, you -- you're from outer space! You really are? Where ?" levio Complex. I don't know what you call it. That way," he pointed, grinning too. Everybody was grinning. "Why? Why'd you come? Do you know about us? Hey, don't you have to see the President or ' the U.N. or something?" "Oh, no, please!" They all explained at once. "You want to meet my good guy?" She messed her hair around. "Well, you made a start. Who, who? Oh, wow, my old boss in O. E.D. would be perfect, but he's in Detroit. Who ?" "Perhaps there is someone you take counsel with about your problems?" the alien suggested. "My problems? Wow. Well, there's three families didn't get milk since January, Mrs. Riccardi gave me some milk powder. But she's kind of erratic. Problems... Whelan, did you hear the sheriff is throwing Mrs. Kovacs off her farm, she's eight-one and blind? Wait! Cleever. Cleever!" She seized the phpne. "If only he's there, if he hasn't quit or something. He's the new P. D.," she told them. "Courthouse? Mary? Is Cleever there? Look, tell him to wait, please, it's urgent! I'm coming over right away, okay, Mary?" She hung up. "Oh my god -- Brenda! Where is she?" "Hey," said a voice in the doorway, "I'm sorry I'm late, my polish wouldn't dry. What's doing? I mean, goodbye," Brenda added as they all rushed out past her and piled into Whelan's car. Whelan took off backwards so as not to pass the tavern and swooshed around Ray's junkyard onto county road C, with Marion chattering, "Oh, wow, is this real? Can you help us? Can you really, really?" "It's just a tiny thing," the alien said humbly. "It may not be anything you want at all." "What  want? Oh, hey, I can't -- Whelan, is this real ?" "Could be," Shelan said cautiously. "Courthouse, right?" "My goodness, the fremth ," the alien sighed. "You just can't imagine. Glorious." "Fremth is Van Allen belts,' Marty explained. "He digs it. Hey, Joe, what's your planet like? Is it all right if I call you Joe? Are you from the Galactic Federation?" "What's that?" the alien asked. "Oh, yes, please, Joe." "Hello, Joe, I'm Marion. Look, Whelan, there's the Moellers, they lost their food stamps. Next time you confiscate some meat could you -- " "They have too goddam many kids," Whelan said. "Besides, it's illegal. Okay." T he wagon shot over the old bridge and past the HeckerGiodano pulp works and around IF the Foxy Cabins and the Frigo cheese factory into the back end of town. The courthouse had a pizzacolored tower. Whelan turned into some service ruts and parked behind a couple of rusty school buses. "Close as we go." They all climbed out and hurried around the buses and across the parking lot to the courthouse's back porch. Inside next to the garbage cans was a door saying edgar cleever, jr. "Cleever!" Marion rushed them all in and started introducing. Cleever was a long tea-colored young Chippewa with a mean ex-, pression. He said 'How do' all around, sneering impartially. "Oh, Cleever, you won't believe this, but Joe's from outer space. I mean, he isn't from Earth. He came to help us, isn't that tremendous?" Cleever's squint stopped on the alien. "I saw him land," said Marty. "H e showed us, Cleever. I mean, I believe it. I really do!" Cleever squinted at Whelan. Whelan cleared his throat. "Looks like," he said. Cleever's eyes narrowed to two black pinholes focused on the alien. "Doesn't he talk? Where's his interstellar translator?" "Actually I don't have one," the alien spoke up timidly. "It isn't really necessary." "Ah, the faint British accent," said Cleever. "What'd you say his name was?" "Joe Smith," Whelan told him uncomfortably. "Well, it's really more like Sorajosojojorghtha ," the alien interjected. "Joe seemed easier. I just made up the Smith part." "So what are you selling? This isn't my day for jollity." Cleever picked up some papers but one ear stayed trained on the alien. "Oh dear," the alien swallowed. "Obviously I must First satisfy you that I really am from off-planet." "Good thinking." "Well, of course, minor physical aspects -- " The alien held out his hands and wiggled everything. "But I see that isn't really convincing." "No," said Cleever shortly. "I feared not." The alien started tugging at his zippers. Marty just got a glimpse of black, wet-looking things before Whelan hauled him away. Marion took two steps back, her eyes bugging out. Cleever just looked in silence. His mouth drew down at the ends into two angry cuts. He blinked twice and slowly shook his head. "Sorry. I really am sorry. But no." The alien sighed, zipping up. He started to pick at his forehead, wincing a little. A big piece of skin peeled away. Above his nose was a jelly place. "That's not an eye," said Marty indignantly. The alien was holding a plastic cup to his forehead. He leaned his head down and bounced a couple of times. When he straightened up everybody could see. "Oooh," breathed Marion. It wasn't like his other eyes but more like a soft, shiny little animal looking out, straight at Cleever. His other eyes looked at Cleever too. Cleever stared back with terrible ferocity. His fingers hit three drumtaps on the desk. Presently the third eye left Cleever and swiveled around to look at them all. It winked. Cleever cleared his throat, once, twice. He stretched a hand out toward the alien. The alien nodded and leaned across the desk. Very carefully, Cleever touched the eye. It sort of ducked. Cleever pulled back and exhaled, scowling viciously. "Okay." He shook himself. "Okay. Provisionally. Now what? Whaf s the scenario? Not the ultimatum, by any chance?" "Oh, mercy no," said the alien. "Oh, no! Purely a friendly call. Look, would it be all right if I put this back? It's a bit... "Go ahead. What's your friendly calling on behalf of? The last 'friendly aliens' we had here didn't turn out so good." "He says he wants to give us something," said Whelan. "Aha," Cleever snorted. The alien had his head back, putting the jelly in. "We," he said muffledly. "I mean, my two companions and I happened to pass nearby and we couldn't help noticing that things weren't too happy with you. Quite distressing, in fact. Perilous." He smooshed the skin back. "Does this look all right? We've had our calamities too, alas. So I recalled something -- a very small item, you understand -- that might be helpful and I thought I'd drop by to see'if you cared to try it." "How much?" Cleever demanded. "Oh Cleever," Marion protested. "He's not selling anything -- he wants to help." "That's right," the alien told him eagerly. "We have a saying, The good guys have to link together." "Good guys. What's that supposed to mean? I don't dig the black-hatwhite-hat line myself." "Yes, forgive me. A slang expression. How to put it?" The alien chewed on his big mustach. "Well, in situations like yours one does find persons -- so few, alas -- who are trying to help rather than seeking status or power or material -- " "You keep saying help. What do you mean? Everybody thinks he's helping. General Custer was helping." "Of course." The alien peered at him anxiously. "Would it help -- excuse me -- could I say, people to whom the pain felt by others is real? All the pain, the waste. Empathetic, is that it? So real that they IF try to, well, stop it?" "That's beautiful," said Marion. "Okay, okay," Cleever grunted. "So what do you want?" "To make my modest offer of assistance." "Make it." The alien looked around, counting. "I had hoped for at least one more... for diversity..." His voice trailed off timidly. "He wants like a panel," Whelan explained. "To decide if it would mess things up." "Who do you want? Ralph Nader? Margaret Mead? Billy Graham? Bella Abzug?" "He wants your good guy!" said Marty. The alien nodded. "If you could possibly lead us to someone, well, experienced in the larger ethical implications? Not an official, please. Someone you would trust with a secret of great power." "Oh, wow!" said Marion. "Larger ethical implications." Cleever shook his head slowly, staring hard at the alien. "Well, maybe. Provided any of this is real, which I doubt. Let me think. Judge Ball was on my orals, he knows every implication there is. I guess I trust the old bastard. I'd love to see his face -- " Cleever was slashing around in his desk. Suddenly he stopped. "Listen, if this turns out funny I'm going to rip you apart. You know that?" The alien quailed. "Oh, I assure you..." "Be warned." Cleever picked up the phone. "Oh hell, no way. He's in Denver. Next week?" "Oh dear, it does have to be sooner. Today, actually. My friends were very emphatic." "I should have my brain serviced," Cleever sneered at the alien. "Look, why don't you go save the world someplace else?" "Hey!" said Marion. "Doctor Lukas. How about him? I was in his seminar, I trust him. He resigned from N.I.H. because of, you know, Cleever. I told you." "Lukas? Isn't he in some kind of scientific advisory crap now?" "He's down at State annex. Pike River, it's only forty miles." "Call him." "Oh god, I couldn't," she wailed. But when Cleever got through to Lukas' secretary Marion made quite a good speech about how she was an ex-student and something of tremendous scientific significance had come up and could they please have ten minutes of his time? When the secretary gave in and said Yes Cleever hung his Gone Hunting sign on the door and they all tore out and jumped into Whelan's wagon with the minnow bait and stuff. "What makes you trust Lukas, Marion?" Cleever asked as the party hurtled down Interstate #. It was a gorgeous Northlands day. The alien was fluttering his hand out the window and asking Marty the names of things. "Oh, I don't know." Marion laughed. "The flinch, I guess." "What flinch?" "You know. Like all the stuff in the news and after awhile you can't react any more, it's all so horrible, but you go on flinching. Like, death someplace, flinch. Old people abused in stinking nursing homes, new superbombs, flinch-flinchflinch. You flinch, Cleever. I see you." "No, Chippewas don't flinch," Cleevor snapped. Then he said, "Oh, shit." asiren bansheed up deafeningly rV behind them. "It's him. Oh, no." They rolled onto the verge and waited. Boots clumped. Then Whelan's window was filled with a khaki-colored bag of rocks. It had badges and belts on it. "Hello, folks." "Hello, Sheriff," Whelan said tonelessly. "I got to talk to you, boy. What kind of shit you trying to pull with Charlie Orr? 'Scuse me, Miss." The sheriffs large face came down to see who belonged to the legs. When he saw he stopped smiling, which was on the whole an improvement. "Orr had eight deer carcasses or parts thereof in his panel," Whelan told him. "He says you tried to drive him off the road at over one hundred miles per hour." "Well, he didn't want to stop. I had my flasher going, I just eased up behind and nudged him a little.'.' "Goddam dangerous driving. That car of yours could kill somebody." The sheriff was still bent down, taking them all in with his round blue eyes. "You got stuff on this car that's illegal, Whelan. You setting up to be a law enforcement officer? I got to write you up, boy." Whelan said nothing. "Quite a party, I see. Say, you're Brumbacher's boy. Your pa know you're going around with these people?" "We told him," said Marty. "Yeah? I think I'll tell him, too. You -- " He jerked his chin at the alien. "You new in town?" "Oh yes sir! I truly am!" They could feel the alien quivering. "Merely passing through, really!" "Keep it that way. He your lawyer?" "Oh dear me, no indeed! I -- " Cleever nudged him and he shut up. "Birds of a feather," grunted the sheriff. He pulled his head back out. "I want you in my office first thing tomorrow, Whelan. Hear? And bring this unsafe vehicle with you." "The charge stands against Orr," Whelan said. "Sure, sure." The sheriff chucklIF ed and slapped the car roof. At that instant the alien sneezed, or something. A big ring of lavendar light whipped through the wagon and out the window. The sheriffs face zoomed down at them. "You got fireworks in this car!" "Oh, no! No!" cried everybody but Cleever. The sheriff slapped the roof again, hard. "All right, everybody out." He jerked the door open by Marion. "Warrant?" said Cleever. The sheriff rolled his lips and spit out some gum. "On my authority as sheriff of this county I'm ordering you to assist an officer of the law in performance of his duties. Namely, checking possession of illegal fireworks. Out." He grabbed Marion's arm. Cleever started unfolding himself. "Let go of her, Claude." "Look!" cried the alien, pointing ahead. A car was roaring at them fast, some kind of soap-dish body on big fat tires. Hairy heads were blowing out of the top. "Haughgh!" said the sheriff, letting go of Marion. The strange car was almost on top of them. It fish-tailed onto the gravel, showing stones and screeched back into the road by the sheriff s cruiser. Ping-g-g! The sheriff bellowed and took off for his car. The kids got straightened out and clouted down the road. There were big letters painted on the back. The cruiser tore into a Uturn and took after them, throwing gravel all over. W helan started up and whooshed them out of there. "Never saw them before," he said. "What was that, a built-up VW?" "It said 'Love'," Marion giggled. "In purple. Oh, wow, was he mad. I hope he doesn't catch them." "It did not," Marty told her. "It said Claude Eats Dandruff." "I saw it. Love." "Actually, it said White Man Drop Dead," said Cleever. "And it was a green '# Pontiac." "I'm sorry," said the alien. "It's hard with so many people. I blur." "Huh?" "You mean you did that?" Cleever said. The alien smiled modestly. "Well, I thought -- I hope it was all right?" "Oh, it was perfect! Oh, wow! Ho ho ho!" cried Marion. "You mean they weren't, they -- Hey!" Marty bounced around to face the alien. "Do some more! Do some monsters!" "Oh, I'm not very good at it. It has to be in one's head. That is, the person's head, I mean." He tugged his mustach again. "Ah, Miss Legersky -- " "Marion." "Marion... I must apologize. That phone call. Mrs., ah, Floyd. That was me." "What do you mean? I heard her."  "No, really. Nobody called. I did it from your head. I'm so sorry." "You mean Mrs. Floyd never called? But -- but, why?" "I had to be sure about you," the alien said pleadingly. "My, my device seems to have quit working." "His ethical vibrator," Marty explained. "It's in his hat. I saw smoke, Joe." "Yes. Absolute junk. So I thought, make a test. The worst thing a person is worried about. I'm terribly sorry." "You mean, to see if I'd answer." She rumpled her hair, staring blankly at the scenery which was rushing by behind some Wonderbread ads. "Cleever, just when I was leaving, I mean,Paul asked me -- I guess he did," she looked around. The alien nodded. "Anyway, Brenda was late and Mrs. Floyd called -- only it wasn't Mrs. Floyd. But the voice and all -- " "I am so sorry." The alien's big brown eyes glistened. "Your mating ritual..." he said miserably. "Oh, Joe, it doesn't matter." She patted his hand. "I wouldn't have missed this for anything. And you're trying to help us." "I do hope you won't be disappointed." He clasped her hand. "It's such a tiny thing." "You have beautiful eyes, Joe." She hugged his shoulders. He beamed. "Testing," Cleever said. "I don't recall you trying anything on me. Why not? Professional courtesy?" "Oh, I looked at you," the alien told him shyly. "It occurs to me," Cleever was squinting again. "Maybe we should have some kind of test. Just for openers, does everybody see this guy the way I do? Whelan, mind telling us what Joe here looks like?" They all started describing the alien and checking and arguing, while they flew past the oil loading rack and across the Soo tracks and around Earl's Trailer Court and over the bridge into Pine River. "Oh, Cleever, what does it matter about his earlobes," Marion said. "We all see him. Slow down, Whelan, there's the campus." "I don't know," Cleever said darkly as they rolled into the parking under a lot of maples. "I wish my grandpa was here with his Windigo trap." The alien shuddered. "Life Sciences, she said." Marion pointed. "That motel-looking one." They scrambled out from among the axes and jerry-cans and trooped into the Life Sciences motel and a door. Inside was a small office about ten degrees below zero. "The air-conditioner," his secretary sneezed. "Go right on in." "Oh, it's fine," the alien assured her. "Really brings out the fremth. " He followed them into IF Lukas' cubbyhole, shivering pleasurably. I ukas turned out to be a sturdy j little man with a white pompadour, like a serious show-pony. "Take over, Marion," Cleever said. "Oh, wow," said Marion and plunged at it. Just as she was saying "outer space" the door opened and the secretary walked in carrying a yellow paper. "Excuse me." Lukas opened it and started reading. As he read he slowly backed himself up until he hit the wall. The paper shook a little and his face paled. Marty suddenly made a loud inhale and Whelan clamped him from behind. "Shall I send an answer?" The secretary didn't look well either. "No... Oh, yes, of course, Miss Timmons. Ah. Dear Harry. Sincere -- no, many congratulations on your appointment. You have all my support. Signed Theo." "Doctor Lukas, I -- I'm so sorry." He made a vague gesture. "Thank you, Miss Timmons. These things... One must hope, the realization of power sometimes ameliorates..." "I know what the realization of power will do for him ." Miss Timmons marched out. Lukas smiled a little effortfully and pulled himself back to his desk. "Do forgive me -- Miss Legersky, isn't it? Please continue." She'd just started to talk when the alien murmured something and quickly sidled out the door. "Oops," said Cleever and whipped out after him. Marion went on talking. When they came back in Lukas was standing up. "You...?" He peered at the alien, shaking his white head and smiling tiredly. "The eye," said Cleever. "Show him." "It isn't really necessary now." The alien's mustach seemed to have perked up. "I know. You better tell him that, too. She'll send that wire." "Oh, no," the alien shook his head, smoothing his mustach. "I have an electronic sweet-tooth," he confided. Then he sobered. "Doctor Lukas, I must apologize for your distress. That telegram does not exist." "What?" "Oh, oc!" cried Marion. "Really. Look on your desk, where you put it. Nothing there." There wasn't. Lukas ran around looking, with his eyebrows going higher and higher. "That's his thing," Cleever explained. "Testing. He says he uses the worst thing you can think of." "Only in emergencies," said the alien. "It's very draining. Please forgive me." "Amazing!" Lukas blinked and began to smile. "Well! Yes, my goodness! That certainly is a feat, Mr. Joe, is it? But, regretfully, I cannot accept it as, ah... "Of course," the alien agreed. So they showed him everything, with Lukas getting more and more excited. By the time they were doing the eye his eyebrows were up by his pompadour and he was peering at the alien with a pocket lens. "A pineal analog? Impossible, see the ancillary structures... Why, that isn't hair, either -- " The eye swiveled, apparently enjoying itself. "We should get to the business," Whelan interrupted. "I'd like to see this gismo he has." "Button up, Joe. Somebody might come in." "Well, well, well!" Lukas repeated while the alien put himself together. "Well! Now. Whom to call first?" "No, no! No!" They told him. The alien began to explain about how this was a private thing he wanted to offer to a small group. He was choosing his words with great care, glancing nervously at CleeVer. " -- persons of, how shall I EXment, of low dominance-submission orientation? Unexploitative?" Lukas looked puzzled. "I see in your mind the terms non-agonistic behavior'. Pronounced et-epimeletic tendencies?" "Ah," Lukas replied. "You mean the good guys!" Marion giggled. "But how marvelous! You offer to help us? You really mean this?" "In a small way." The alien started feeling around in his clothing. "A very small way. That is if you..." He frowned, tried another place. Lukas was gazing over their heads. "An inhibition, perhaps, against destroying each other? Such as Lorenz -- so petitically if quite unfoundedly -- believes is to be seen among wolves? We do seem to need it more than wolves." Absently he rubbed a tattooed place on his arm. "Is such a thing possible?" He demanded urgently, "Can you stop man destroying man?" "There goes the planet," said Whelan. The alien's face was sorrowful. "Doctor Lukas, I regret. What you suggest is possible, in a way. But it would require -- Oh, to begin with, an official project, a huge organization, funding, authorizations, coordinations, impact studies... I see you understand." Cleever snorted. "Yes." Lukas breathed out blowly. "I understand." "I'm so sorry about your family," the alien said softly. Lukas started. "You really do read minds?" "When the thought is so prominent." "And you can't bring back the dead either, I'm sure. Or -- could -- " Lukas' face changed. "Oh, no. Forgive me. But now, let IF us see! What do you bring?" T he alien pulled out a small crumpled packet which promptly swelled up into a lobed pouch. "It's quite safe," the alien said. "Now, the point is -- " There was a very fast knock on the door as Miss Timmons came in. "Doctor Lukas, may I use your phone? My line is dead." "Oh," said the alien. "Ah, Doctor Lukas." "So that's what you were doing," Cleever said. "Sir, maybe you should mention about the telegram." "Of course. Miss Timmons, it won't be necessary to send that wire. I have determined that the message was an, ah, error." "A joke," Cleever added grimly. "What a perverted, horrible -- " "Yes, yes, it's quite all right." Lukas smiled at her. She glared at each of them in turn and strode out. "I should repair it," the alien said anxiously. "Later, we don't want any calls." "True. Well, as I was saying, the point is fatigue." "Fatigue?" they echoed blankly. "Yes, on the part of the good guys. We have a sayjng, the good guys get all the unclean matter." "I follow you," said Whelan. "And we say also, good guys are stupid enough to care. So they keep tryirig. But there are so few of them and they are always suffering hurts and defeats and unclean matter. A terrible strain. They become tired." He looked around. Nobody nodded; nobody had to. "And so they wear out, they weaken. Unable to go on. Perhaps dead. The society suffers, error and evil triumph. So I thought to bring you refreshment, for the good guys." "Drugs," grunted Cleever. "Shit. " "Oh, no!" The alien looked shocked. "Tell me -- have none of you experienced a desire to go away for a time? To have a secret beautiful place free from evil and greed, without -- is 'hassles' the word? Wait -- " He looked at Marion. "Where there is only sympathy and understanding and the deer and the antelope play?" "Ohhh," breathed Marion. "You mean like vacations?" Then her smile faded. "I went to Yellowstone. It's wall-to-wall crud." "A travel agent." Cleever's teeth showed. "Oh, please, this is a gift! A very modest gift, I'm afraid. But you see," the alien said earnestly, "We have experienced these problems. Really. We learned that if one can relieve the stress for a time one returns refreshed. Renewed! Able to carry on, to accomplish more. To flourish like the green tree." "Hey Joe, where is it?" Marty asked. "How do we go?" "Observe, please." The alien opened a lobe of the bundle. An object fell out. "No, wait; wrong culture." He pushed it back and tried another. "That looked like an Afro comb," Marion said. Everybody was peereing madly. "I do hope you like it." The alien pulled out a shiny little thing. "Car keys?" "For camouflage. Unremarkable and owned by everyone, is it not? Now, if you will move back from the center of the room -- good, good. See. I hold the key up, so, and tap upon it. Twelve times." His finger made twelve even taps. "Ooohh! Ahhh!" In the middle of the room stood a faint, shimmery bubble about the size of a big refrigerator. "That is the gate. Now, to enter -- " "Wait one minute," said Whelan. "What's in there?" "Oh, nothing at the moment. See -- it's quite empty." The alien walked into the bubble and out again, waving his arms. "It synchronizes two points. You go in here and come out there. I forget the technical name, time-independent-null-dimensional-something. Our transportation industry makes it." "Does it work?" asked Marty. "Oh yes. They haven't recalled one for ages." "I thought you came here in a flying saucer," Cleever said. "Oh, naturally. I didn't need a permanent hook-up, you wouldn't build a highway just for one -- " "Okay." "Where does it go? I want to try it," Marty and Marion said together. "Ao," Cleever and Whelan spoke as one. Lukas advanced on the bubble and thrust his hand in. "I am the oldest; I am expendable. I shall test it." "Oh, no, Doctor Lukas -- " But the alien was already showing him. "When you are inside, tap the key again like this." He tapped three slow, three fast, three slow. "Your emergency signal, I believe? To come back, just re-enter and repeat the taps." He handed Lukas the key. "Please come right back, won't you? Your friends are bound to worry. Oh, I do hope he likes it," the alien added as Lukas advanced into the bubble. They saw his pompadour lift slightly, like a brush charge. He held up the key and tapped it. Nothing happened. The alien put his head in and said something. Cleever snickered. "It has to be quite forceful," the alien said apologetically when his head came out. "This is a used model. But very reliable, I assure you." "Sure, sure," said Cleever. They could see Lukas tapping hard. All of a sudden he and the bubble weren't there any more. "Holy mother of us all," whispered Whelan. IF "Is he all right?" asked Marion breathlessly just as the door opened and Miss Timmons' head came in. "Is everything all right. Professor? Doctor Lukas! Where is he?" "He stepped out for a minute," Marty said loudly. "Hah hah hah!" Whelan grabbed him. "D-didn't you see him go by?" said Marion. "He said he'd be right back." The phone in the outer office rang. Miss Timmons looked to and fro wildly and finally backed out. Cleever went over and leaned on the door.  A LL ri ght, you. Get him back , " Cleever snarled. "Oh, I can't -- " The alien took one look and scooted behind Marion. "Please, do not -- " The bubble and Lukas suddenly popped back in the middle of the room. Lukas stepped out slowly, a strange expression on his face. "Virgin..." he said to the alien. "It's virgin, isn't it? The air -- " He sniffed. "I hadn't realized it was so foul here. But so lonely..." He turned to the others. "Yes. You find yourself in a ing out upon a virgin world. All quite empty." "The reception area. We put it up," the alien said. "Did you like it?" "Let me, let us," the others clamored. "Of course!" The alien handed keys around. "May I suggest you go in pairs? The bubbles must be in different spots, you see. Perhaps if we push this desk?" As they pushed Miss Timmons began to pound on the door. Lukas stuck his head out. "Elvira, do not be alarmed. Everything is quite all right. We're working on something." He turned back just in time to see Marion and Cleever go bubblepop. The next minute Whelan and Marty were gone too. Lukas leaned on the desk, puffing a bit. "Do you think," he asked the alien, "Elvira -- Miss Timmons has been with me for years. Might it be possible -- ?" "Oh, I want you to bring friends!" the alien beamed. "And your friends shall bring friends, as many as possible shall have refreshment! But -- Doctor Lukas, this is very serious; you must impress it on them after I have gone: The gate is for good guys only . You see, there is a scanning device, I have no idea how it works. It's sensitive to, well, emotions. If a person who emanates hate or cruelty or greed tries to use it, it goes null. Ffftf" He gestured. "Key, person, all gone. So you see why I was so careful in testing you." "The needle's eye," Lukas marveled. "God in heaven, it's the needle's eye." He looked sharply at the alien. "Oh, no, no!" said the alien, backing up a little. "An ordinary being, I assure you. A mere technological convenience." "I see..." Lukas rubbed his arm absently. "Well, surely if I passed Elvira need not fear." He drowned. "But how is it you have such a planet empty? It seemed a paradise." "No fremth ," the alien told him. "So many are like that, your place here is quite an exception. The magnetic field-forms," he explained, as Marion and Cleever popped back into the room. They came out both talking at once. "Did you like it?" the alien asked eagerly. Marion just kept on saying, "Oh, oh, oh." Cleever took a deep breath. "Yeah. When do the developers arrive?" "It appears they don't!" Lukas was telling them what the alien had said when Marty and Whelan popped out in the corner. "Man," said Whelan. "Did you see those mountains? Sure hated to come back." "And the big lake," shouted Marty. "Is that the ocean? Hey, Cleever, I bet there's buffalo there!" "Chippewas don't dig buffalo," Cleever told him. He seemed unusually springy on his feet. ,"And the flowers, the sun," Marion sighed. "I bet you could grow stuff in that meadow by just throwing down seeds." "Wait," Whelan said. "How do we know the soil isn't poisonous to us? Or the water, how about that?" "Completely compatible' the alien assured them. "Of course we only sampled here and there, but you and I are much alike. Very common. Be cautious. I did eat quite a few fruits. Delicious!" "You were there?" Now please -- Did you like it? Will it provide refreshment? Do you think it will help?" "Oh, yes! Yes! Yes!" They were all grinning, even Cleever. Marion hugged the little alien. "You've made such a beautiful thing for us, how can we ever thank you?" The alien glowed, beamed, tugged his mustach. "Oh, it was nothing. Foam, mostly. You may have to fix the roof. Oh dear," he looked at Whelan. "The time! Could you take me back to my ship?" "This I must see." Doctor Lukas raised his voice surprisingly. "Miss Timmons! Elvira! Cancel everything for today -- and wait!" They all swarmed out clasping their keys and climbed in among Whelan's water samples and bumper-jacks. When they were bowling back up #I the alien said, "Now I mustn't forget anything." And he went over what he'd told Lukas about bringing their friends but being careful about it. "Imagine!" said Marion. "A IF whole planet full of only good guys!" "Not too damn full," said Whelan. "Cati I bring my raccoon?" Marty asked. "There goes the ecological balance." Whelan groaned. But he kept on grinning. "Raccoons are good guys!" "Before we get into an ethical evaluation of raccoons let's see if there's anything more he should tell us," said Cleever. "I nearly forgot," the alien said, "There's a key-dispenser by the washrooms. I think you should always carry two, don't you? In case you lose one." "What happens if the wrong guy finds a key?" "Oh, it's most unlikely anyone would perform the code by chance. But if he did, well, that would be the end of that. I'm afraid." "Hey," Marion said, "Let's give the sheriff one!" The alien looked at her. She caught his eye and her head began to go back and forth. No. "... it was just a thought." "Watch those thoughts," said Cleever. "I wouldn't contaminate it!" she said indignantly. "Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to find some of that fruit for Mrs. Kovacs." T he alien sighed happily. "I'm so gratified. If only my next stop goes as well." "Where? Who?" they asked. "We thought, a nucleus in each large land mass, you know. Just time. I go down that way -- Brazil, is it? And one more place. I have it coded." "That explains the Afro combs," Cleever muttered. "You won't be too lonesome, Doctor." "But good guys," Marion reminded him. "I thought I saw something move just as we were leaving," Whelan said. "Over on the far side." "Really! Oh, how marvelous, that means one of my friends has found a suitable group. What good news. We worried about that, you know?" He smiled bravely. "We're quite vulnerable. You are somewhat intimidating, you know." Marion hugged him some more and they alternately chattered in bursts, then fell silent in excited thoughts while Whelan zoomed them back up the highway and bounced into the shortcut to Marty's father's farm. "We're going to kick ourselves for not asking you a couple of million things," Cleever said as they rushed over the last hill. "Oh Jesus. In the yard." They peered out as the Brumbacher farm went by. The sheriffs cruiser was standing by the pigsty. "Keep on going!" Marty yelled. "The creek's out of sight." "He's going to bust out after us in two shakes." Whelan kept going, watching the mirror. "There! He's running out of the barn." "Quickly," th alien was wriggling around, pulling tubes out of his suit. "If you will just drop me where we came out. I can use my invisibility inducer." He pulled out some grids. "I hope." "Can't you make a monster?" Marty asked as they shot down the hill. The alien connected things frantically. "I'm so tired. This is much easier -- if it works." Behind them they heard the sheriff s car, Vrrooomm. "We shan't see your vehicle," said Lukas disappointedly. "We won't see you again," Marion cried. "Oh, Joe dear! Please come back!" The alien was pushing part of his apparatus into his mouth. His eyes rolled appealingly and he tried to nod. Whelan stood on the brakes. They were by the creek gate. The vrroomm got louder. "Here he comes, Hurry, Joe!" The alien scrambled out: His invisibility thing uncurled down around his shoulders like an overwrought tuba. He straightened up and started working various buttons. Nothing happened. "Hurry, Joe! Hurry!" The alien's eyes popped, he fiddled and punched feverishly, backing into the gate to push it ajar. A siren blared to life at the top of the hill. "Look, he's shimmering! He's thinning out!" "Oh, goodbye, goodbye! Dear Joe, thank you!" The sheriffs car was scorching down the hill, warble-horn going. "Good luck, Joe! Oh, thank you!" "Hey -- his bof!" The alien had melted into a heatwavy place in the air except for one solid foot. It ended in a pinkish blur. The foot stamped a couple of times and they heard a faint voice, apparently swearing. Just as the cruiser growled up beside them the foot turned and started hopping through the gate. "Marty, you better get out," said Whelan through his teeth. "Just bringing him home," he shouted at the sheriff. Everybody was trying not to look at the solitary foot leaping down the pasture path. "See you later," they said to Marty as he climbed out and headed back up the road to his house. The sheriffs face came down to the window. "You -- the guy with the fireworks. Okay, out." "I am Professor Theodore Lukas of the state university department of Life Sciences," said Lukas stiffly. "Mr. Whelan is assisting me in a scientific investigation." "Professor, huh?" The sheriffs blue stare jabbed around. Then, surprisingly, he straightened up and slapped the roof. "All right, move on. Move on, IF you're blocking the road." "He's overdue at Matt's about now," Whelan explained as they moved briskly on. "Oh, man. Know what I'm going to do? Soon as we get the professor home I'm going to pick up some groceries and take Helen back on the old logging road. Nobody'll find the car. We're going to have ourselves a weekend in heaven!" "You won't be alone," they laughed. "I hope to Christ these keys work better than his invisibility whoosis," said Cleever. "We'll have to watch out for Marty." Marion was sniffling a little. "Oh, I wonder, will he ever come back? He was such a sweet person." "It just occurred to me," Cleever remarked reflectively. "He never did use that thing himself." "Oh, Cleever!"  : B ack in the pasture the alien was humming happily as he expanded the modules of his little ship. He wajs thinking about coming back. Every so often he stood up and shivered, letting the fremth do its stuff. When he had everything assembled he opened his communicator circuits, keeping one eye on an Ayeshire heifer who was becoming curious. An excited voice answered him. "You can't guess what I ran into," the voice chattered in his own language. "A whole town full of heavy disarmament types! From all over. Place called Geneva. One of them's already planning to move his family out. How'd you do? Hey, is the fremth this good where you are?" "Fantastic," said the alien known as Joe. "My group went beautifully, such nice people. I feel sure that they and their friends will decide to leave this planet permanently after a very few visits." "Mine too," the voice chuckled. "And as we always say, when all the good guys go, goodbye planet. How's Shushli doing? If he's having the same luck we'll have this place ready to go in no time." "Shushli here," said a new voice. "I'm doing great, in fact I'm running out of keys. Place called Siberia. Pathetic, isn't it? Absolutely ripe. I tell you, there won't be a sane mind left on this planet in a couple of their ridiculously short generations." "Yeah," said Joe happily. "I just hope the sickies don't mess the place too badly before they wipe themselves out. Well, I must move along. Shoo! -- Not you, a cow. An animal." Joe stood up and took one last shiver. "Listen, guys, we better start thinking about our sales brochures: And be sure to stick an official seal on your recorders, will you? You know -- folks will never believe the fremth." Or not tube... that is the question. after being stranded in AfghanrV istan one develops caution. But then, there are blue sky deals and there are blue chip deals. One of these days I'll be back on top again but for the moment things are in their usual state of bloody flux. That's #th century slang for an illness that... Oh well, it all boils down to the same thing. Lower than Educational TV, what can you get? They were getting me. When an agent asks, "B.J., would you like to do somecrushing and original variant on, "You've got to be kidding." But one says those things when all is well. At the moment, thanks to some bandit who forgot the ones in the Khyber Pass are real bandits, I needed money. So I took up three minutes saying, "Sure I can do it." After the landlady and the alimony were stalled off for another week I sat down and tried to figure out what I had to do. Educational TV for Christ's sake! Next I'll be barking for trained fleas. A uniform topped with a pimply face pounded on the door and handed me a large manila envelope. I signed and outstared him for the tip. When I spread the material over the table I had to admit it wasn't bad. In fact it was so good I even got to wondering if maybe I wouldn't like to watch that kind of program myself some wintry evening -- if I could ever bring myself to watch anything, that is. It was anthropological do-ityourself... By the time a viewer got through seeing an Indian pressureflake flint he'd be able to fake a Folsom point as well as the next man. One program would demonstrate how Polynesians dig out a canoe using nothing but fire and shells. A man was going to build a log cabin with a stone axe. Another program would show cabinet-making techniques in #th dynasty EgyptThe only unusual thing about the program was the budget and shooting requirements; this thing had a robber baron's Conscience Fund Foundation behind it and somebody wanted no studio work, no process, no dramatization, none of the usual fakery -- and color yet! Christ amighty, half of those spare transmit color and yet the old robber baron's nervous nephews wanted it all Super Colossal! It was going to cost money -- lots of it. And I was going to get some of the wonderful stuff. Common sense returned and called my bank. No, the check hadn't bounced. Yes, credit had been authorized up to ten mill -- I was excited again. W ord gets around in this business. I didn't call -- they called me. In three days I had a company. We started blocking out scripts and Honig went to work breaking the first one down into a shooting script -- which makes no sense to an outsider but one hell of a lot to an accountant since it puts scenes not in chronological order, but in economical sequence to use available light and keep the cast together. Do all water-hole shots in one day, for example, even if they're going to be sprinkled through twenty-six finished films. I rescued a cello-throated Shakespearean playing pageants in Taos and we had our voice-over with enough gray-haired good looks left to do the intros. It was going well under budget. It promised to be really good, miles above the usual prime-time shlock. And then I ran into trouble. You expect trouble in this business: public outcry -- all the usual crap about shlock programming and payola for broadcasting licenses. But here I'm trying to put out a good program -- the kind of program a guy who reads without moving his lips might enjoy watching -- and the F.C.C. was giving me all kinds of static! I told my agent to get the Conscience Fund Foundation on it and next morning he got me out of bed to explain that the fine print laid that part of it all on me. I got hold of an expert in Washington who knew how to grease the agency. Nobody could be fixed. That's when I started getting suspicious. There is always somebody with his hand out. There's a kind of mentality that sees deep dark plots in everything. Something to do with a deprived childhood or not enough breast feeding or some damn thing. After a week of horsing around getting nowhere I started developing that kind of mentality. I can understand payola. I can understand having to grease somebody to get things moving. I can even understand some freshman senator making vote-getting noises about Vast Wastelands. But here I was trying to produce something really good and nobody in the government seemed to be interested -- not just uninterested; they went out of their way to make things impossible. "Who hates you?" my agent asked. "Somebody down there doesn't like me," I conceded. But I really couldn't think of anybody-not that t haven't made enemies -- but none of them were in a position to sabotage things the way this project was going down the spout. Then I got another phone call. "Mr. Gortiz?" "Yes." "This is Edgar Pendergast." I tried to remember the name but nothing happened. I made frantic motions for my girl to do what she should have done before connecting me but she was tripping out over a wad of gum. "I'm vice president of the Conscience Fund Foundation," Pendergast said. Suddenly the chill wind of an Afghanistan winter shot through my soul. "We've been reconsidering," Pendergast said in round, foundation-shaped tones. "I'nr afraid we are going to have to call the project off." Before I could remind him that we had a contract he continued, "We'll pay you, of course. And you might want to keep your troupe together. Perhaps in a month or so, once the dust has settled we can get together and dream up some other kind of public service program." IF I mumbled something and got off the line. I t just didn't make sense. Sure, I've been shafted before. But not this way. It was as if the Conscience Fund Foundation really did have a conscience. Somebody felt guilty and somebody was buying me. What for? Now that my immediate financial worries were over I had another problem. You're only as good as your last and my last hadn't happened -- though I had sixteen cases of exposed film sitting in my apartment, next to my television set. I had to get something going soon or I'd end up in some goddam wax museum. Besides, it bent me out of shape. The first time in my life I ever tried to produce a really good program and here I was, shafted up to the sweetbreads. I decided to do something wild, crazy, extravagant. With my own money I hired an investigator. Not a hundred-dollar-a-day divorce expert. Not a Watergate WonderBoy. The guy I hired called himself an advocate. I called him a lobbyist. There's nothing deader on this whole festering planet than a dead TV deal. But I wanted to know why . Personally, I tended toward the deep dark plot theory, but then I'm paranoid. Besides, now that it had been killed somebody should have been gloating, and making sure I found out why. While my high-voltage gumshoe was padding down the corridors of power I considered the possibilities. There were plenty of ordinary commonplace ones but they would all have gossiped back to me by now. Suddenly another one hit me. That whole goddam series of anthropological do-it-yourself -- it had been a survival course! Somebody knew something. I started watching Walter Cronkite. Same old crap. The Cambodians had finally gotten it through their little heads that if Glorious Leader the silent majority probably wouldn't say a word after the Bomb was dropped, except maybe to suggest the second one land on Sweden. But Kissingkraut must have convinced Moscow and Peking too. Things hadn't looked better for a generation. The Arabs were even hinting that some of their best friends... Scratch one theory. At home Glorious Leader was screwing the poor, welshing on every campaign promise and giving it all to the little men in black pyjamas who had suddenly become our allies, essential to our best interests in... It was business as usual. The dollar was dropping, Europe was screaming, and it wasn't really all that bad now that young Europeans were buying Mustangs instead of Black Forest Brand X. The Russians were going for color TV in a big way. Every country had its own color network now. China had agreed not to jam the satellite relays. It looked like we were going to be just one big happy family, even if Old Glorious had reversed himself again and cut off the programs that might have kept that family down to manageable size. So why was somebody stopping me from producing a decent TV program? It had to be a conspiracy. I'd tried too hard, run into too many stone walls. Two weeks and nobody had snickered or gloated. Somewhere in a back room evil men in hoods sat around a table and... My gumshoe rang me. "You're not alone," he said. "Bill Buckley's been canceled." "So what else is new?" "Doesn't it strike you odd that in spite of all the government's feuding with the media, just about everything right-of-center is getting canceled?" "Of course it's odd. Now tell me why it's odd." For this I'm paying a gumshoe real devalued American dollars? "I'm working on that," he said and hung up. Meanwhile, not only was I watching Walter Cronkite; I was starting to read the papers. I even read the classifieds. It was no use. No cryptic 'personals'. No little men in hole-inthe-wall stores to lead me into extradimensional adventures. Even the 'object, carnal knowledge' ads were unimaginative. One of the more image-minded corporations was getting hit with another anti-trust suit in return for its latest public-service program educating the citizenry in the outs of government. A communications conglomerate was being warned about a radiation hazard in their new line of color TV's but since a jap set selling at half the price and emitting twice the radiation was outselling them that was the least of their worries. Somebody was promising gasoline rationing this summer and no fuel oil this winter. America's birthrate was at its lowest since World War II. Somebody in Africa was starving, having managed to outbreed Borlaug's Miracle Mealie-mealies. And my gumshoe was still running up a bill. I decided to call him off and fold up the company while I still had a dime left for my old age. M y agent called. "Everything is supercolossal again!" "We're going to do the series?" "No, that one's dead and gone." "So what is it this time?" comes home after nine yers. He's never seen a mini, doesn't even know brassieres will burn." "Where's the comedy?" "Each episode his wife comes on with something new. First off, she's living with three other guys. Next IF one, we put his daughter in a commune." "This is comedy?" "It all depends on the treatment." "You don't want me; you need Evelyn Waugh." "Don't you want to do the show?" "I didn't say that," I sighed. "It just takes a little getting used to." "So it's on?" "Yeah." "You don't sound very happy about it." "I'm delighted." I hung up and poured myself a drink. Here was my chance for another Emmy. Ought to top Archie Bunker any day. I hadn't disbanded my company yet. Better Call Honig and get him to working up a shooting schedule. Shlock Rides Again! You could bet your life nobody was going to shoot this one down. An administration that favored the crap that was going out in prime time now would stand for anything -- except intelligence or good taste. Suddenly a great light burst. I wondered if this was what the mystics meant when they maundered on about Illumination. To me it, was more like an old fashioned cartoon. I could almost see the light bulb encased in a little balloon floating over my head. The trouble was, I had a production company. Now who the hell knew anything about the technical side of the business? I found the man I wanted.Not in a TV repair shop where you might expect. "Ruined," the X-ray technician said. "I don't know where you've been storing it but this film's picked up enough radiation to sterilize twenty generations of fruit flies and half the population of Biafra." Knowing that I'd been expecting that answer did nothing to stop the sinking feeling in my stomach. At last I knew why. Now my only problem was ethical. Knowing why didn't tell me what to do about it. People were made to be managed. I'd been producing shlock all my life, reminding myself each time I went to the bank that Mencken was right: No man ever went broke under estimating the American taste. So I'd done one decent thing in my life -- tried to produce a good TV program. And what had it gotten me? not? Somebody else would anyway, But I really wonder. I wonder if, twenty years from now when the Selecting is all done, somebody might not discover that his kids watch shlock too? Somebody watches those cruddy shows. And since when can even a Right Wing mother convince her precious genetic heir not to glue his nose to that X-ray emitter? But you don't catch me watching that gonadshriveling shlock. From now on I'm not even watching Cronkite! Books, Fantasies, Anthologies. Paperbacks Autographed arid First Editions. Extensive Illus#, North Miami, Florida #I cents handling charge for catalogue. Orangetree Press, # Allston Way, Berkeley, Calif. #. and fanjasy magazines from # to date. 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Just send # to Bookstore IF, Church of Scientology, # #th St. NW Washington, D.C. #. Your copy mailed within # hours. Money back guarantee. Five fantastic ways to leave this world, alive!   J v   Just by adding these science-fiction masterpieces . to your library, you can depart any time. To live in the dimension you choose, for as long as you want. And return, of course, when you like.What a stellar way to go... and come back. For a very noncosmic price! Galactic Emperor's treasure-box sampler includes the best of Anderson -- holder of five Nebula and two Hugo Awards. And editor Roger Elwood tops it off with careful, affectionate, insightful analyses of Poul's work. An honest-to-goodness tribute to one of science-fiction's abiding geniuses. # pages. # science-fiction by authors like Aldiss, Pohl, Knight, Lafferty, Russ and six others proves that the realm of laughter lies not very far from the realm of tears. 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Some guys read poetry on those long buggy rides to perimeter points, so that their style with the females doesn't go stale. The woman I room with is always paging around for the sexy parts. Drives me nuts...My girl-friend is crazy about gothics and crossword puzzles. And of course there is always the science-fiction if your tastes incline in that direction. Personally, I like the reviews. When I touch earth again, I'm going to get a nice little job teaching literature at a girl's school and I've got to keep informed... That's the way it is..." -- Use this coupon to take I advantage of the special  offers below. If you are not completely satisfied at  any time you may receive a full refund on the balance of your subscription.  Please enclose payment to   # issues # (save #)  ( j # issues # (save #)  Name: I I I Street: Town: State: Zip: # Beacon st., Boston, MA #I # Sept.Oct. # Vol. #, No. # Issue No. # na Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Dick Hoagland, Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Manager Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Dominic Flandry is back -- older now, and wiser -- but still forced to battle and betray for an Empire in which he no longer believes. Ever ride a sodium flare into the heart of an ion storm...? This one is a time-travel story... sort of. certain other elements of the human psyche... An IF First. A story of beauty and ugliness -- and the relationship that binds them into One. Obviously what this planet needs is foreign aid! The Commissioner versus The # Wives of Stud, Hegar, and a Vegan Toad. (Revolution, Robert D. Enzmann  Richard C. Hoagiand # Torchships Now! ( Part II of II) The second half of a dialogue concerning a technological breakthrough destined to transform our civilization. On Building Walls This issue Lester discusses several new novels , and in the process explains why sf is superior to all other forms of fiction. Meet Alter. When he's finished you will never be the same!!! Letters from Saberhagen, Rochon, Clendaniel, Schickedanz, Schenck, Wilbern, Keller, Klein, Wallace, Geis and Konkin. Interior illustrations by Fabian, Freff, Gaughan, Pini Worlds of IF is published bimonthly by Worlds of IF is published in the United of Universal Publishing  Distributing CorCompany, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, Lonporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. don SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, ChairMain Offices: # East # Street, New York, man of the Board, Ralph Stokes, Managing N.Y. #. Single Copy: #c. #-Issue subDirector. Single copy: #p. #-Issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. scription in the United Kingdom: #p. and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. AH rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. Ail stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Five fantastic ways to leave this world, alive! Just by adding these science-fiction masterpieces   to your library, you can depart any time. To live in the dimension you choose, for as long as you want And return, of course, when you like. What a stellar way to go... and come back. For a very noncosmic price! Galactic Emperor's treasure-box sampler includes the best of Anderson -- holder of five Nebula and two Hugo Awards. And editor Roger Elmod tops it off with careful, affectionate, insightful analyses of Poul's work. An honest-to-goodnes tribute to one of science-fiction's abiding geniuses. # pages. # science-fiction by authors like Aldiss, Pohl, Knight, Lafferty, Russ and six others proves that the realm of laughter lies not very far from the realm of tears. Edited by master science-fiction writer, Robert SUverberg, who has won two Hugo and three Nebula awards. # pages. # meticulously plotted, detailed, frightening, exciting, baffling, challenging. It just won't let you go! # pages. # engaging, amusing science-fiction fantasy is set in the post-atomic war civilization of Stories. Ten gripping stories representing the subtle union of precise biochemical technicalities and mystical reverence for the occult. # pages. # Get these books from your favorite book store, or wherever science-fiction books are sold. also a tool: a time machine that enables you to replay the crucial events -- past, present, and tutors -- that shape our lives. Now, instead ol merely reading about what's happening, you can explore and experience the alternatives and decision points through the technique ol Conflicts! mutation. Conflict Simulation is a way of analyzing a political or military conflict situation. A way that is as intellectually stimulating as a game of chess, and as thorough as a written analysis. Through the use of the Conflict Simulation (or "game") format, the conflict situation is re-created so that you are in a position to make the vital decisions and. in Ihe game at lent, change the way things were. are. or will be. VRmK you it ed bi-monthly. Each issue contains:  A ready-to-play conflict-simulation game with a # x # ' pteying surface, die-cut playing pieces, and complete rules.  An analytical article on the same subject as the game in that issue.  Other feature articles on historical and military subjects.  Gama and book reviews, commentary on existing games, and discussions of subscribers' questions. The magazine is # pages long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format. bat in Western Europe. #). We also publish a separate line of conflictsimuletion games, which you will find listed in Ihe coupon. battle presented in a game-design specially created to introduce new reeders to Conflict Simulation. Send check or money order to: Dept. # # East #rd St... New York. N.Y. # I year (# iaauea)-# ' # ft. (# iseuee)-# . # w (# laauaa)-# Currant issue- # J s-monrn frlaf (# iaauaa)-SS Sand me the fofknWnp Simulations Games.  Had StarWhlta Star (armor in the #'s)- ' World War II (Europe. l##S-#)-# Sntfiort (street fighting, WW!I)-S  SoMien (WWt tactcs)-S# ; Lae Movee North (Civil War)-# American Revoutaon (#-#) Phalanx (ancient tacuce)-# J Ptaasw santt ma your In brochure. ( Revolution (With invaluable assistance provided by Spike MacPhee, Glen Blacow, and Northeast Cryonics Associates) II E very two years or so, for over unmanned exploration of the solar system located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of California's Institute of Technology, has thrown a party. Or so it has seemed. From all over the world we would Karman Auditorium as another back television from some remote corner of the solar system and made obsolete another file-drawer of data on the planets. It was party-like. Friends, correspondents and scientists whose diverse travels seldom allow them tocross paths, met under the pale ion-glow of TV monitors as pictures of Earth's sister worlds were painted on the screens. And between the briefings and the "instant science reported to our waiting tape recorders and cameras, we would talk. It was in this atmosphere that the idea for the now-famous Pioneer # plaque was born. Here, someone -- only half-facetiously -- suggested to Wernher von Braun that they had a plan, as the pictures came back from Mariner # orbiting Mars, to reprogram the computer handling the dcjtfa into painting a large porthole on one of the Martian moons -- thereby insuring him all the money he needed for a Martian expedition! And it was here, one evening, that some of us tried to figure out how it was that, a good twenty years ahead of schedule -- according to science-fiction predictions of such events -- we were witness to mankind's reaching out to its celestial backyard. This was not the way it was supposed to happen. See Heinlein, Asimov, and others of the Golden Decade of science fiction after World War II. Looking back now, that unease, that feeling of discontent which some of us shared in the midst of real-time events beyond one's wildest dreams, was well-founded. The Conquest of Space, as it had been named by the aforementioned visionaries, had an order and logic which actual developments on the Space Frontier have never had. It is probably this lack of logic and order which doomed Man's first push into space to a brief, novalike existence. In the Golden Decade of SF prophecy, space stations preceded earth-orbit assembly of the first lunar expedition; and a working version of the space shuttle preceded space stations. Planetary exploration, by manned expeditions, went forth only after establishment of the first lunar base. And all was founded on sound economic need, from the communications activities of the stations to the weather forecasting made possible by the advantageous presence of meteorologists in orbit. That was how it was supposed to happen. Over Irish coffee in La Canada, just down the street from Von Karman, some of us spoke with wonder of the human footprints immortalized in moondust twenty years before even so astute a prophet as Arthur Clarke had estimated that it would he so. Wasn't it amazing how even science fiction writers had been so wrong, we mused smugly? What was amazing was that we actually could have been so blind. What would be the current American attitude toward space exing rescue, its earth-oriented photography, and its pioneering space manufacturing techniques, had been first to capture the public imagination, followed by Apollo? What if a reuseable shuttle and been an initial goal, in place of the Saturn V? What if... Such speculation is obviously useless. The Space Age was born and shaped through political necessity and international rivalry. That it was probably doomed by its structure is academic. The last fifteen years have occurred, as we have seen them. They were not wasted. And they have formed an appropriate ,and priceless prologue to what is about to happen: mankind's explosive acceptance and utilization of the solar system, fueled by the unlimited power of thermonuclear fusion. The true Space Age is about to dawn.       ( What follows is the continuation of that highly edited conversation begun in the previous issue. Ed.) I -- many times -- have discussed probable events, their timing and sequence, leading to what you have called the "urbanization" of the solar system... IF grimace) An ugly word. gives the impression of an interplanetary Los Angeles, heaven forbid. Even I, who wouldn't waste many tears on a few high rises on the sun side of Mercury, recoil from the images that word conjures up. of space is but one step in a total process -- the domination of solar space by mankind. It will occur, as I see it, as outlined in, the following sequence: I -- Unmanned and manned entry (, Sputnik , Mariner, and MercuryA polio) II -- Relatively easy access through unmanned and manned stations (Applications satellite systems) ities founded on space-based economies (True beginnings of private enterprise investment in the solar system) IV -- Urbanization (The stage where all choice locations are occupied with orbital cities, manufacturing complexes, and mobile, ail available synchronous orbits, trojan points, etc.) (Further progress will consist of recycling unwanted structures into larger systems -- a process similar to renovation on Manhattan Island) V -- A Solar System Megalopolis (Unromantic as any megalopolis on the surface of Earth today, except for a vastly higher material standard of living, with probable fascinatingly commensurate evolution of social systems) about an eventual Los Angelesation of the solar system! begun. We are already out there in the solar system and we shall continue to spread. With the advent of fusion the process will really take off. And just in time. Imagine what the earth will become if she alone, of all the planets and ecological niches in the solar system, is forced to carry the enormous burden of providing the material wealth necessary to house, clothe, feed, beings who will live here by the year #! At present, with a world ## of everything), we are beginning to run out of certain material resources, such as fossil fuels and rare metals. Imagine the future if, trapped on this planet, without demand a civilized life style, not merely an existence such as the strive to maintain. Which is better: the urbanization of the solar system and the return of the garden. Earth; or the preservation of Space in all its vast unused emptiness while humanity quietly (or unquietly, with nuclear weapons) goes mad in its limited planetary prison, destroying itself and the habitability of the earth, forever? The solar system is the only appropriate environment for an advanced technical civilization. However, even in the Era of Megalopolis, generations down the road, an observer would probably not casually detect that there was a single inhabited entity orbiting the sun. It would appear (as it has for lifeless, and serene -- a timeless pageant of majestic planetary points moving against the stellar backdrop of infinity. And Earth? With the material foundation, manufacturing centers, and population growth of civilization removed from Earth, I envision our terrestrial home becoming a place of beauty like the lakeside retreats of China, various fabled gardens of the Middle East, the Cotswolds of England, and other present-day preserves of natural harmony and peace. Earth can become a vast preserve where independent cultures, life styles, and social orders can experiment among the greenery of the only natural home Man has in the entire solar system. "Urbanization" of the solar system a dirty word? It may be the process whereby Man at last becomes a true humane being after beyond Earth, with new rules, we'll have a chance, at last to realize our true potential. course. It's just that word "urbanization." I have the feeling, Bob, that you are a prisoner of your own perspectives. Why does the end of the acquisition of the solar system have to be a griffT "megalopolis?" It seems to me that, on a scale of systems-space-time encompassed by this vision, reasoning by analogy to an almost pre-industrial urban culture confined to one planet can only yield inaccurate extrapolations of present urban life. (Wow, that was a mouthful!) matter if I'm correct in each detail. Urbanization, of the solar system will take the pressure off Earth. It will not "mess up" the solar system; the scale I is simply too incredible for any of this to be noticeable on casual inspection. And the final result of this next evolutionary step around the sun, whatever it is, will be preceded by several generations of fascinating exploration and early development. For some people -- like myself -- that is the exciting prospect. How wonderful to be able to live through, and take part in, the greatest adventure in the history of Man! Moreover, it is an adventure which will never end. Overlapping mankind's movement from one planet out into the planetary system orbiting our star will be a new and mightier age of high adventure, exploration, and settlement in a bubble with the sun as its center, expanding out into the Milky Way, nearly at light speed. It will be the next great leap of the torchships. And it is close. The majority of those reading this will live to see, and many will take part, in Man's first efforts to send probes to the stars. It is even possible that IF the first crewman of a starship destined to visit Alpha Centuri will be inspired by these very words to attempt that ultimate adventure. It is a nice thought... En route upon an endless journey is Man's first interstellar artifact -- Pioneer #. Before it can even leave the confines of the sun's far-flung planetary system, crawling deeper and deeper into the eternal night which yawns before it, at a meager seven miles per second, the true interstellar craft of its creators will be flashing past, destined to travel light-years into the galaxy in the time it will have taken Pioneer # to reach the edge of the abyss. Eighty thousand years from now, Pioneer will reach the distance of the nearest stars. Waiting there to welcome it may be a race of beings which, in searching through their history, will recognize the stellar system etched upon its plaque, pitted and time-worn. Pioneer will have spanned a breadth of time equivalent to that which separates Neanderthal from modern man. It may come as somewhat of a shock to its discoverers, therefore, that this ancient artifact is a gift to them -- not merely out of space, but from their forgotten origins and their own legendary birth upon a place called Earth. H oagland: We have presented the political and technical environment which is about to bring forth the first true "space-drive" and its imminent effect upon our culture. I feel, therefore, that it is about time we got down to the heart of the matter, Robert, and described the fundamental breakthrough which will make it all possible. How will a torchship work? twenty-year world-wide effort to tame the elusive geni of fusion (an apt analogy because during that time the primary line of research was directed toward trapping a plasma within a strong magnetic "bottle" until enough of it could "fuse" to release more energy than the containment process used). It was twenty years marked by dogged insight, and agonizing frustration as physicists practically had to invent a whole new branch of Physics, something with the unpronounceable title -- "Magnetohydrodynamics." The essence of the problem was simple. For each new technical innovation devised to contain the plasma long enough for fusion to occur, the plasma devised three new techniques to escape. It was somewhat like trying to trap an angry anaconda with rubber bands. Into this dismal arena (for prospects of controlled fusion seemed to be beyond the end of the century, until recently), a new idea was injected. Quite simply, it asked, "Is there anything in the rules of this exotic game which insists that fusion has to be a continuous process? Suppose, instead of pursuing the exceedingly difficult road of containing the plasma indefinitely, with fusion energy trickling out, we examine an alternative technique of compressing the plasma intermittently. If we do this sequentially and often enough, the effect will be identical to a steady trickle of fusion power such as we have been laboriously pursuing with other techniques. The secret here is that all we have to do is hit that plasma hard enough, from all sides, and plain old inertia will do the rest. The result will be a fusion power plant somewhat similar to an internal combustion engine where it is the average power of the eight sequential explosions in the cylinders which moves the car. Of course, there is one problem: what are we going to hit the plasma with in the first place?" It was at this point that another technical breakthrough came to the suggested that intense light from a large laser, a source of precisely controllable electro-magnetic radiation, could be directed via suitable optics into a very small volume Of space. If, as the laser was fired, a tiny pellet of fuseable material (in this case, frozen deuterium-tritium) were dropped precisely into that tiny volume, the following would happen: The focused electro-magnetic radiation would exert a pressure on the pellet. Focused to such a small volume and arriving in such quantity, the prqssure would be enormous. But more important, the frozen deuterium (heavy isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Universe) would absorb this energy at its surface which would, of course, be violently heated. It was Dr. John Nuckolls (of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, attached to the Univ. of Calif.) who predicted what would happen. If the laser pulse is actually two pulses -- a smaller pulse of energy followed immediately by the main blast -- then the outside of the pellet will absorb the first pulse, vaporize, and thus surround the pellet with a sort of atmosphere. The main pulse of intense laser light, upon arriving, will then further heat this "atmosphere," causing it to expand rapidly in all directions. At this stage, out tiny pellet of frozen deuterium resembles very much a tiny synthetic star with a superheated atmosphere blowing off explosively in all directions. Now, Newton enters the picture, for the reaction pressure to this explosive departure of the shell of gas surrounding the pellet drives shockwaves from all sides into the tiny, icy heart of this miniature "star." These crushing pressures actually compress the center of the pellet into the densities and temperatures found within the centers of stars Yet the star created in the center of the vacuum chamber is only barely visible to the naked eye, a few At such densities and pressures the deuterium-tritium mixture fuses, the nuclei colliding and transmuting themselves into helium in a violent analogue of processes plete in "normal-sized stars" such as our sun. The liberated fusion energy blasts apart the heart of this newly created "star," sending the reactants in all directions at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. The tiny star explodes, ending its brief existence -- as do many IF  large -- as a supernova. Total time from creation to the death of this artificial star is less than a If this process were accomplished successfully, the released energy would be greater than that required to fire the laser, maintain the vacuum, and keep the fuel frozen in precisely deliverable pellet quantities. Repetition of the entire sequence at rates ranging from once per second to a hundred times per second would provide for the "average" flow of energy envisioned previously. There is enough deuterium on Earth alone to provide essentially unlimited energy for the remaining lifetime of the sun. This is readily agreed upon by a wide spectrum of energy and environmental experts. However, what some may have apparently failed to consider, is that there are stores of deuterium within the rest of the solar system which dwarf our terrestrial supply (which would come primarily from seawater.) One of the moons of Jupiter, Callisto, for instance, which Pioneer # has revealed to have a density of only #, seems to be a satellite with a # mile diameter, composed essentially of ice! In that ice, there is a vast supply of deuterium waiting to be mined. Little thought is necessary to realize that with fusion, which gives us the solar system through fusion rockets, we will discover enormous quantities of fuel beyond the "meager" quantity presently on Earth. No, energy is decidedly not a problem of the future. # Eighth Ave., New York. N. Y. # #-#  naturally occurred to an awful lot of people at about the same time that if you aim a high-power laser through magnifying glass at a deuterium pellet, fusion will be in hand . Those same people were shortly seen rapidly retreating behind their office doors, biting their thumbs with a vacant look, pounding their heads against the nearest convenient hard object, or just standing staring down at their shoelaces. Word quickly spread (bad news may exceed light speed under certain circumstances) that what you achieved when you aimed a high-power laser at a deuterium pellet through a magnifying glass orny other lens system, was not  i fusion reaction, but a mad scramble of white-coated laboratory personnel for the cover of the near desks, benches, closets, and lavotories as the precision optics promptly exploded in about a ments, thus wiping out both the experiment and initial high hopes for fusion from lasers. The problem, of course, was discontinuities in the glass. At the energy densities emitted by the lasers in question, the slightest imperfection (and even the finest optical glass is not perfect) absorbs enough energy to flash instantly into vapor, shattering the lens. These lasers had been used in an M.I.T. project designed to blast tunnels through solid granite! They had shattered cobblestones into screaming shards of high velocity shrapnel and had punched through inch-thick destroyer plate. The power in these beams exceeds that of the sun by factors approaching have the perfect transparency necessary to withstand even the shortest pulse of these hellish syssecond it would take to produce the deuterium "star." Fusion, ignited by the "match" of the laser, seemed impossible to achieve for the very reasons which had first made it so attractive. How do you set off a reaction with a match you cannot hold? You keep posing questions I know the answers to. Before you tell everybody, let me review something else: We've been tossing around the term "fusion" pretty freely. Perhaps we should define precisely what fusion is. Most stars in the Universe, globs of matter (primarily hydrogen), in the range of the earth, shine by internally generated energy, energy derived from so-called fusion reactions -- those nuclear events that smash light elements together to produce heavier elements and energy. In the 'sun, fusion turns hydrogen into helium, with an energy excess that eventually works its way the halfthe sun, causing it to shine. Thus, the stars exist for periods ranging depending on a complicated relationship of mass to luminosity which determines how rapidly a given star will use up its hydrogen fuel and thus continue to "live." Stars, such as the sun, which still have plenty of hydrogen to draw upon for fusion, are referred to as "main sequence" stars. Now, relating all this to the experiment Dr. Nuckolls described, the internal densities of the proposed fusion "stars" in the laboratory are similar to the internal densities of real main-sequence stars. Right? gramscm # . huge masses and resultant gravitational fields to hold them together, such as actual stars possess, these laboratory creations promptly explode, so they are only duplicates of of years for the sun, a main sequence star. evolves, after it has used its initial supply of hydrogen it shrinks internally, heats up internally, and releases even higher amounts of energy from a new set of fusion reIF actions, now involving heavier elements. Is that correct? What are you getting at? beyond the energy release level of the Main Sequence star stage, to duplicate the density and energy release of later stages in a star's evolution, such as the Red Giant phase, or the White Dwarf phase, or even the final plateau of most stars -- the Neutron Star with its impossible densities ranging up to # #S gramscm # ? the leading questions. Let's save our discussion of the total annihilation of matter for a later article! For now let us return to the apparently insoluble problem of how you use a laser to set off fusion. If the problem of the lens could be surmounted, Man would succeed in an incredible quest -- bringing the stars, essentially, to Earth, harnessing their unlimited potential to solve Man's most threatening problems for all time. But to succeed, the problem of the lens had to have its solution. The answer, as with all answers in the Universe to fundamental problems, was the picture of elegant simplicity: instead of attempting to focus the laser with a lens, use a mirror! With a suitable mirror system, the ravening power of one, ten, or a hundred laser systems could be spread out across a reflecting surface so that the power density per unit of area was well below the #'evel required even to significantly raise the temperature of the mirror. Then, with appropriate geometry, this dilute radiation could be brought to a needlepoint focus on the deuterium targant. Practical. to tell everybody it's all done with mirrors! I like to think the first solution was the result of our work in Northeast Cryonics, but that isn't quite correct. Perhaps, however, ours, I feel, is one of the least expensive and most elegant solutions. One of our designs, in fact, can be seen in Freff s illustration for this article. The secret of fusion-by-laser lies in discovering the correct geometry for the mirror system, a geometry which will first dilute the radiation from lasers of incredible power, lasers which are now being constructed or are within sight of our present state-of-the-art. With those two tools, creation in a fusion reactor of actual "stars" identical in every respect to those we see spangling the night sky will become a reality. And a new Age will have begun for mankind. That is the scientific breakthrough now only instants away by the standards of the cosmic clock one realizes!  Talk about revolutions. And torchships...? if you will, the diagram I alluded to previously. You will notice that laser energy enters from two regions, is combined by appropriate optical flats, then flashes down into a conical mirror protected from destructive heating through a process identical to the reason we get cold in the winter and hot in the summer -- grazing incidence of incoming energy. The ring of laser energy (since, of course, this system is three-dimensional) is reflected all along the mirror length, as you can see, and is brought to a tiny pinpoint focus of searing power at the precise special point where it will impact a pellet of deuterium mixture. Now, note very carefully. The end of this arrangement of optics, lasers, and hyperbolic mirror is open to space! And what is a container, closed on three sides, in which a hightemperature gas is expanding? Obviously, a rocket. This is why we shall have fusion torchships before we have fusion reactors lighting cities. You have to proceed through the stage of rocket development to get to power reactors. Nice? described is only one way to build a successful fusion reactor. There are others. We at Northeast Cryonics have developed, hopefully, some interesting innovations of our own; such as impacting the pellet from one direction instead of from all sides. This doubles the implosion pressure and is extremely applicable to a fusion rocket system. We simply do not know if all approaches will be successful. Today research into this vital area, for rather obvious reasons, is breaking out across a broad front. We have had a breakthrough in producing fusion using laser techniques. That is not to say that other approaches may not -- in fact, will not -- overtake the laser approach. Research by its very nature is uncertain. But one thing can be relied upon: whatever technology we can envision to produce fusion rocket engines today will be superseded by better technology tomorrow. Heinlein's Third Stage has successive, higher orders of perfectability implied by the fact that the first of anything has room for improvement, even the first of a third-stage device! Now, to address the exciting prospect of the when, where, and how of torchship construction: Let me begin by laying out one more table. I assure you it is the last. As you can see, tabulated below are "pacing items" ranked in order of flight-readiness as noted (or projected, in the case of future hardware). #) # -- Useable spacesuit technology #) # -- Expendable space station experience; living, in-orbit repair, in-orbit manufacturing experience #) I # -- Controlled fission fusion and pure fusion processes directly applicable to torchship engines #) # -- Chemical-powered reuseable space shuttle Beginning of routine space operations Beginning of large-scale private investment #) # -- Historic coupling of torches to space shuttles and tugs #) #I -- Initial flight tests of first true "torchships" #) # -- Manned fly-bys of every planet in the solar system Round trip to Pluto by torchship; #-# weeks! IF Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. King Size or Deluxe #'s Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. America's quality cigarette ent. Kings: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine; #'s: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine; Menthol: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine The only Menthol with the turnons Micronite filter. Kings: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine, # s. # mg. "tar." # mg. nicotine, Menthol: # mg. "tar," # mg. nicotine, Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.  . #) # -- Chemical-powered surface-to-orbit hypersonic aircraft #) # -- Construction in space of first large Torchship Liners as hypersonic aircraft drastically reduce cost and increase payload capacity for surfaceto-orbit operations. #) # -- Nuclearpowered surface-to-orbit hypersonic aircraft capable of lowering operations costs to # cents per orbited pound (# commodity dollars) #) # -- Decade of enormous activity throughout solar system. Tens of thousands of humans, animals, machines scattered across its vast extent: exploring, building, mining, and settling the #pace Frontier. In addition to "when," "where" is also interesting. The first torchships will be built on earth. They will probably be modified upper stages of vehicles which rightfully have made space history over the past fifteen years. The name "Agena" or "Centaur" may enjoy a brief renaissance as, rebuilt inside and fitted with a prototype fusion drive, this first torchship becomes an unmanned precursor to manned flight to every interesting chunk of real estate orbiting the sun. In every other area -- guidance, computer technology, navigation, power systems, communications, and control, we have learned enough across these last incredible fifteen years to take on the solar system and anything it can throw at us. All we have lacked was the propulsion. Thus, the first torchship. Centaur or Agena, lofted into orbit, in the payload bay of a space shuttle, turned loose, will commence to "unteach" the lessons of space laboriously explained to each of us by the Cronkites, the Magees, and Bergmans of the preSpace Era. Spaceflight, up to now, has consisted of assembling a very large quantity of fuel and oxidizer in a metal tube, together with an engine to burn it in, and a very small payload (relatively speaking). The object: to burn said propellants as soon as possible, thus accelerating fuel, tank, engine and payload away from the earth as rapidly as possible. Once having released the payload from the final stage, you are in for the Long Wait. Since you have used most of the energy contained in the fuel you burned just to climb to the top of Earth's gravitational "hill," there isn't much left to give you a healthy push on your way to Mars, the Moon, Venus or Jupiter. There you are, coasting along at a few thouof miles to cover. Worse, you are not traveling in a straight line, but a curving path which will add miles to the trip. This is the classic, coasting interplanetary journey portrayed by everyone from Asimov to Zelazny. Therefore, later -- much later -- varying from about a hundred days for a "quick" trip to Venus to almost two years to Jupiter (or six years to Saturn), you arrive. By which time most people will have forgotten you're out there, except for that dedicated gang back at Mission Control... That is the picture of spaceflight held by # percent of those who take the trouble to think seriously about the subject at all. The days of such absurdities are essentially over. Alas, the #-day flights to Venus and the #-day missions to Mars (with its exciting layover of a Martian year, waiting for Earth to be in correct position for the return coasting flight) are not going to happen. Technology and time have caught up, even with Arthur Clarke (at least in the solar system). This is the way it will happen: A torchship will leave earth orbit, accelerating on a series of explosions produced by the events previously times the energy of chemical reactions, and much higher coupling of this energy to the exhaust, results in a rocket engine and total ship performance which is nothing less than sensational, compared to the previous scenario. The ship accelerates away from Earth at (let us say, for the purpose of making a point), one "gravity" -- an acceleration equivalent to that experienced on the surface of Earth where all objects fall at the same rate, # ft sec # . To those of us in the ship, everything will appear as it does on Earth, unless we look out the Windows. Something dropped in the cabin will apparently "fall" to the floor at the same rate as it would on Earth, although actually it is the floor which is accelerating up to meet the object. No difference. Our "weight," synthetic as it is and produced only by the thrust of  our fusion engine, will be just as useful when it comes to sitting in chairs, or walking, or drinking liquids as actual gravitational weight is on Earth. After about half an hour of this, we may begin to wonder if there isn't something rather strange about the  performance of our vehicle. After all, we know that "normal" rockets such as those used in Apollo never burned for longer than about # minutes, and in that time consumed literally thousands of tons of fuel! This ship, about as massive as a jumbo jet (# tons) has, according to our fuel gauge, consumed only # pounds of deuterium -- less than a ton! And we are still accelerating. After about two hours of this novel experience, enjoying normal earth weight, carpeted lounges, the pleasant attentions of stewards who bring drinks we can consume in the normal manner, we walk down to the observation area where we see a magnificent panorama of space. Imagine the shock as we realize that we are halfway between Earth and the moon -- # miles away from Earth and still accelerating, still consuming fuel. At this point we discover something else. The heavens are slowly turning around; the earth which was behind us is now in front, and the moon which was before us has taken up a position aft (to borrow a nautical phrase). It becomes apparent to us almost at once that the two celestial objects have not changed positions at all. Our #-ton ship has rotated # degrees. Our fusion "torch" engine, which only moments before was accelerating us to higher and IF higher velocities, is continuing to thrust, but its effect is now to kill our enormous velocity. Inside, of course, nothing changes. Acceleration, deceleration, it's all the same within the ship where the floor still presses reassuringly against our feet with normal Earth weight. Glancing at the system read-outs positioned so conveniently near the view-glass, we are incredulous at our measured velocity indicator. It must be in error! We are moving, it says, at # kilometers per second, relative to Earth. We remember Apollo, when the . Command Module crawled across this point at a mere .# kilometers per second -- one hundredth our velocity -- not in two hours, but over two days! Two hours more and the Captain slides us neatly into a breathtaking orbit of the moon. Under its gravitational field, weightless for the first time during the flight (the drive is turned off), we take # minutes to swing around the Farside and head home. Earth before us once again, the torch is lit, normal gravity resumes, and we accelerate away from Luna. It has taken us less miles between these two worlds than it took, in #, to fly across the United States in a vehicle of comparable size. It has taken far less fuel (a total of about # tons of deuterium-tritium) than a # burned flying cross-country (about # tons of kerosene) and at vastly higher peak velocities -- # kmhr, compared to a #'s # knihr. We have made the trip totally contained in an essentially terrestrial environment with all the "comforts of home." Similar journeys, to any planet in the solar system, under identical environmental conditions (simulated Earth gravity through continuous acceleration deceleration; conventional meals served on real plates; and beverages served in cups or glasses) will be commonplace within # years. No point in the solar system will be further from any other point, at one "G" acceleration, than # weeks' travel time, the length of a relaxing terrestrial cruise. The . ships, of course, will resemble ocean liners far more than they will terrestrial aircraft erally breathtaking. be the first to point out -- it is much more than that. It is necessary. With controlled fusion and torchships, we inherit, not only the solar system but the stars. Without this discovery, we as a species would most certainly be confined to our planet. Earth. As we are now discovering, Earth is a very limited environment in which, if we were to remain, we would have to impose the most severe restrictions upon ourselves in the use of resources and our future evolution. Because of the perversity of human nature as evidence by history (as with physics, every action produces a reaction), such restrictions would necessarily quite soon become dictatorial. Thus, barely two hundred years after its first real test, the fragile experiment of "freedom for all men" would have perished, disappearing from the future of mankind forever, although probably not without cataclysmic, devastating, and continuing violence all over the globe. Instead, if the solar system is well on the way to urbanization by #, and the first unmanned precursor probes to the stars have been launched, we can dismiss the Orwellian prophecies. It will be the beginning of the Postindustrial Age when spaceships, the Atomic Age, microelectronics, robotics, fusion power, and exploration of the stars emerge. It will be the beginning of Civilization as Man has never knofrn it but, in effect, has always dreamed it. Years ago, I termed this move to expand mankind's ecological niche The Grand Design. It has begun with our first tentative probings of the solar system. It will continue with torchships and urbanization of the sun's family, according to Krafft Ehricke, as Man's Magnificent Heritage.  Realization of its real meaning will come, however, whether it be tomorrow -- when the earth is destroyed, astronomically, forever. Those who remain will look up into a hundred, a thousand, perhaps mor, night skies and realize that Man, along with unknown numbers of other children of the Galaxy, has taken his rightful place among the Stars. And it will begin with Torchships -- Now.  ( Future articles with Dr. Enzmann will deal with a new dimension of basic physics and his startling predictions of further future developments beyond the subject dealt with in this article.) Aviation Week  Space Technology # April # p. #, # Nov. # p. # Dr. Aaronson, S., # April, in The Sciences Vol. # No. #, Pub. N.Y. Academy Science News, Vol. #, # April #, p# "Optical Spectrum" in press. May #, front cover in color, core of exploding galaxy and hyperon stars Science News, Vol. #, # April #, pp. #-# Essentials of Astronomy, Dr. Lloyd Motz, Chmn. Dept. Astronomy, Columbia University, Columbia University Press, N.Y.  London #I #th Ed. #st Conf. Planetology  Space Mission  Planning, Annals N.Y. Academy Vol. #, I #, # pages #nd Conf. N.Y. Academy, Vol. #, #, # pages #rd Conf. N.Y. Academy, Vol. #, #, # pages #th Symp. on Eng. Problems of Fusion ReSciences Soc. Designs for Reflective Optics in Fusion Systems (given at Princeton University) N.Y. Academy Conf. on Electrostatic Sc Electromagnetic Confinement of Plasmas and the Phenomenology of Reletivistic Electron Beams March # in press Reflective Optic Systems For Lasers (given in N.Y. at Academy) #nd European Electro-Optics Conference, Montreux Switzerland April #, in press Fusion Through Reflective Optics IF Sometime early in any new Editor's term of office it is incumbent upon him to step out front and clearly and forthrightly state his editorial policies for all to see. Right? Well, I thought so -- until it came down to actually putting it on paper, that is. Then I realized that for a science-fiction magazine such a statement would entail a definition of sf -- and, Gentle Readers, I just don't happen to have one of those on tap. I've seen a lot of such definitions; most of them are witty, trenchant, well thought out -- and manage to corral about two-thirds of what I consider to be valid sf, leaving that other vital third (whichever third it may be) out in the cold. Such definitions also generally include within the pale one or more categories which I do not consider valid steep re-entry curve results in excessive loss of ablative material, Joe?") to paranoid-schiz dissolving-at-the-edges, rotten-to-the-core stream-of-consciousness type fiction. (Yes, the doorway really is a gaping mouth, and it really is going to eat you!) No, when it comes to defining our field, intensive definitions don't seem to work very well. They just build walls. Unnecessary ones. They stifle and constrict and don't contribute a damn thing toward keeping out the gunk. As for extensive definitions, well, they tend not to be terribly definitive, as it were, but at least they're harmless and hopefully entertaining. So here, off the top of my head are a few of my favorite authors: Robert Heinlein; Cordwainer Smith; Larry Niven; Roger Zelazny; James Blish; Theodore Sturgeon; Isaac Asimov; Ursula K. LeGuin; Poul Anderson; Kurt Vonnegut, and on and on I could go -- but I'd better not or the list would begin to grow exclusive instead of representative. Walls again. So. No walls -- and just one credo; that if Man behaves with a modicum of rationality and good will he can prosper, on Earth, in his Solar System, and (unless he meets Bug Eyed Uglies even meaner than he is) in the farthest reaches of the Universe; and that if he does not so behave, he is doomed to tedium, tribulation and probable extinction. -- Baen Y fc te  m fM f; itii #...A I .  v . ST,. A I , , . 'CsP I '-' ' r   Ssjs# Va -...  I  '... srV .  't  A # , ?" "t .r '  f #' v.--:V' ' m' W A-?','" '.f I r f j e looked up as one of the jjship's stewardesses came toward him. He already knew why she had come. "Doctor Lisbon?" "Yes?" "The captain will see you now." It was obvious from her face that she stood in slight awe of him. It was not every man whose importance warranted pulling a stellar liner out of spacewarp for an emergency rendezvous. Nor were there many in Space who did not know his reputation as the ion Explorer'. Sadly. Peter Lisbon replaced the book of poetry on the library shelf, and followed her. This far it had been a pleasant trip. Unfortunately it had its ending in an appointment with fear. He hoped that the terror inside him did not show. In the Captain's cabin he was introduced to the senior officers of the liner. All were glad to shake his hand, although the nature of his mission was not mentioned. Then he was conducted with some ceremony to the decking hatch, beyond which the brutally functional space tug waited to take him to the observatory complex in orbit around Mephisto. They piped him offboard as though he were a hero. Lisbon was sickened by his own duplicity. He knew he was a coward. As he passed through the gaunt, metal airlock seals, it was more than the end of a journey. It was also a returning to a way of life he had hoped was dead and past. For twelve months now he had escaped such scenes as these and their aftermath. In the interim, he suspected, he had lost what little nerve he had. The tug made no concessions to comfort. Safety and efficiency were the only criteria. He was strapped into a rough webbing harness, like a transit crate of electronic instruments, and told to stay there. The warning was not untimely. The tug's maneuvering was a series of bone-breaking excursions as it drove itself clear of the gigantic bulk of the liner and began to lose speed as it fell toward the lower orbit of the space observatory. Although he had been in a similar situation a hundred times before, Lisbon had never conquered his dislike of the experience. The raw, physical contact with space, which was nowhere more apparent than in a space tug, frightened and humbled him. His admiration was unbounded for the men who spent most of their working lives in these perilous and unrewarding conditions. Finally one of the crewmen approached him and saluted. "Doctor Lisbon -- you have priority clearance for disembarkation. Would you please make ready to report to the mission controller in the observatory as soon as the airlock seals have been verified." "Acknowledged!" said Lisbon, without enthusiasm. He released himself from the webbing cage, hating the feel of null-gravity. The summons had been unnecessary. He had already deduced the attainment of orbit around Mephisto and the coupling of the space tug to the observatory complex. Unpleasant though the short journey had been, he now regretted the ending of even this. IF guessing something of what was to come. He had savoured every second of the orbiting procedure, trying to stretch the seconds out to gain a few more precious moments of heart's ease before the great ordeal began. WT ' arl Reinspringer, the mission V?ontroller, was waiting for him in tne observatory. Theirs was an acquaintanceship of long standing and great mutual respect. Once a flamer himself. Reinspringer knew exactly the fears that hunted behind Lisbon's precarious pose of calm. This knowledge was a bond unique between flamers. It was something which could never be appreciated fully by those who had not themselves passed through the ion barrier. "You got my message then, Peter?" Reinspringer's relief at seeing Lisbon was pathetically obvious. "Pulling a stellar liner out of space warp for a crash re-direction spells big trouble without sending messages. But I can't help you, Karl. I was taken off the lists  year ago." "There're good flamers and exceptional ones." Reinspringer's bald head returned a green from the fluorescent panels, almost as though his head itself was domed with bottle-glass. "The good ones I had were no match for Mephisto. Now I need an exceptional one to see if we can get them out." "I told you, Karl -- I've been retired. Struck off." "My ears heard you, but my brain doesn't listen too well. I have two of my best people in ion-state on the surface. They ran into trouble -- and I lost all four of the backup team trying to get them out. Now there's six people down there, Peter, and some of them may still be alive. I don't give a damn about your coming off the lists. I need you to go down there to fetch any survivors out." "What makes you think I might succeed where your backup couldn't?" "Because survival in ion-space isn't just a habit with you -- it's an instinct. That's how you got to be the oldest flamer in the business." "You know why they retired me l "They said you began to have bad entries into ion-space. Look, Peter, I worked with you for years. I know you always did have bad entries. That's not the point. It's the exits that count -- the ability to come back." "Tell me about Mephisto," said Lisbon unhappily.    Lisbon's first view of Mephisto I j was the real crusher. Through tne observatory's clearports hung the great ball of Mephisto, crawling with tongues of fire. Even from their orbital distance it seemed to fill most of the available sky. It hung there, huge, hideous, and enigmatic -- like a gigantic coal-fire hanging in space. Gazing into this curious cauldron it was impossible not to imagine that one could feel its heat and hear the hiss and shriek of the flames. This feeling touched some agonizing pulse in the primitive rootinstincts of Man. Yet the realities of ion-space would doubtless show even these fears to be an understatement. Too hot to be a planet; far too cool to be a star, Mephisto was a cosmological mystery. It had no place in the Hertzsprung- -- Russell diagram. It fitted none of the accepted classifications either for type or the nature of its reactions. Perhaps it was a throwback to a state of matter which existed before the universe began. Or perhaps it was an example of an evolutionary sequence beyond the fate of dwarf and neutron stars. Perhaps it was something as different again. "I know what you're thinking, Peter," said Reinspringer, coming up behind him. "You're wondering what possessed us to put people down there in the first place." "I've seen worse hells," said Lisbon. "But at least the physics of the reactions were well understood before anybody went in. How come your team went down so unprepared?" "Frankly, we didn't have the answers to give them. Mephisto's an enigma. For four years we've sat and looked at it and theorized. Ultimately somebody had to take the risk of a descent, even into such a welter of unknowns." "Who were your lead team?" "Andre Beriov and Loya Tremain." "Beriov's a good man. First-rate theoretical physicist. But I'd not rate him as much of a flamer. As for Loya -- I thought I'd taught her to know better than to take risks like that." "She's specialized in solar-flare work. Isn't that sufficient recommendation?" "There's one hell of a difference between running sunflares and mixing it with the type of ion stew you have on Mephisto. In stellar work you don't have the problems of exchanging ion identities in order to move around. What about the backup team? Weren't they more widely experienced?" Reinspringer bit his lip. "All are graduates from environmental training, with some solar work by way of experience." "It's the emphasis on solar work which I find disturbing. Whatever it is, Mephisto isn't a sun."" Reinspringer was frowning heavily. "Are you suggesting I sent the wrong team?" "The team's all right. It's Mephisto that's wrong." Lisbon swung his arm to encompass the great orb hanging in the sky. "I've been studying the interaction between some of those flames down there. Most of the reactions make sense, but some have a peculiar chemistry which isn't even in the book." "Hence our interest in Mephisto in the first place." "Sure -- but what happens if a Jfomer happens to find a route using one of these parachemic elements as an identity? What type of chemistry does he use to find his way out?" Reinspringe was impressed by Lisbon's rapid grasp of the problem. "It was a calculated risk. Regrettably it seems we didn't do our figure work too well." The knot in Lisbon's guts was now so tight it brought beads of IF perspiration to his brow. He knew by instinct when a risk was unacceptable. In ion space his instinct had fetched him back safely more times than either his training or his experience. Had he been on the project from the start, he was confident that there would not now be six souls down there in that ionized limbo. Certainly with such incomplete knowledge of the environment nothing could have persuaded him to make the descent himself. At this point, however, the decision had been taken from him. Regardless of the risk, if life even in ion form persisted on Mephisto, he was duty bound by the unspoken creed of the flamers to go down there and offer such assistance as he could. From just such a prospect had developed the broad bands of nightmare which had resulted in a series of bad entries and finally caused him to be struck off the l EC register. For this last act he had been secretly glad. The nightmares had continued, but without the menacing possibility of becoming real. That was until Reinspringer had pulled him off a liner in midwarp to help with an emergency...    W hen he asked for three drums, they brought him three, wrapped in shining vacuum packs. Each drum was worth more than Lisbon could earn in a lifetime. In the dust-free, sterile conditions of the preparations room he took the beautiful octahedral instruments from their wrappings and examined them carefully. They were true and flawless. His fingers moved lovingly across the diaphragms, testing their sensitivity. Through the triple glass of the control-room windows Reinspringer was anxious about such handling, but dared not interfere. Finally Lisbon was satisfied and nodded his assent. Reinspringer printed out the spectral analysis of the gas in the ionization chamber which the flamer had chosen for his initial identity. Argon blue-green at five-fourteen nanometres. Lisbon leaned back into the black softness of the couch, his precious drums drawn up close to him. He was as ready to go as he ever would be. He was approaching the point he had learned to fear the most. This was the actual entry into the state of ion identity. The metamorphosis was relatively easy: coming to terms w ith it was the part that made him cringe. "How do you feel?" Reinspringer's voice was metallic over the speaker. "Sick!" said Lisbon. "What else'd you expect?" The phrase held no element of humor, yet everybody grinned, and in so doing the tension wound down a minute amount. Lisbon steeled himself. He hoped it was not obvious that he no longer believed he had the moral fibre to take the stresses without cracking. Once safely through the ion barrier and having forced himself into an acceptance of its tenets, he knew he would feel better -- more able to tackle the problems that were posed. In retrospect it always seemed a challenge. But in prospect... As the electrode cages dropped around him he asked himself for mad e flaming his profession. As always, it was a useless question. His very first exposure to the state of ion identity had opened up enthralling vistas so enormous in scope he had had no other choice. Once sampled, there had been no other way to live. Deeply rooted in the psyche were factors which had only shadowy analogues in the molecular world. Challenge, excitement, and complete involvement with the environment were words which conveyed very little of the experiences of flamers. There were no terms to explain the totality of the impressions every ion-space explorer knew so intimately. Nothing in this argument, however, modified the fact that a journey into ion-space was always a hazardous venture. Mephisto promised to be the most hazardous of all. Even such a superbly trained and practiced lead-team as that sent down by Reinspringer had critically overreached itself. The long list of known dangers was enough to sit like lead in Lisbon's stomach. He dared not even speculate about the inevitable unknowns. At last the preparations were complete. Through the controlroom window Reinspringer signaled the final acknowledgment. As it always did when the air pressure was reduced, the sounds in the room dulled curiously, leaving nothing but the sharp click of the pumps. Lisbon braced himself in the couch and waited for the transition to begin. He avoided looking at the faces at the window. He wished they would not look at him. The first stage of trans-ionization was always a little like an execution. Fortunately the transition period was short. Once the field hit maximum there w as nothing left of him capable of either transmitting pain or receiving it. In one frenzied picosecond he was completely destroyed and then rebuilt, transliterated bodily into a sentient, gaseous plasma-state by electron stripping and ion pairing. Disorientation... the trauma of destruction and re-creation... vertigo. Especially vertigo. Seconds before, he had been seated on the preparation couch. Suddenly the couch had gone. The observatory w hich bore the couch was already a thousand kilometers above him. Between him and the furnace in the sky was... nothing. ttjte was insubstantial, a plasma Jfl functioning in a vacuum still tocwiard for the focused microwave beam to raise even a glimmer of visible radiation. He was falling... Falling more terribly than one falls even in nightmare shock. Nor was there any pillow' he would reach w hen the fear peaked at the limits of what he could endure. He would just go on falling... Panic rose, and he fought it as he had done so many times before. Phis time he knew that he had lost the vital mastery. There was nothing left in him capable of controlling the situation. He was going to continue falling into the fires beneath him, to become a minor contaminant in this very alien furnace. "Snap out of it, Peter!" That was Reinspringer's voice IF urgent on the beam. Lisbon wondered if he had been screaming or if the controller had correctly deduced what was going on in his mind. The latter was more probably true. Lisbon clutched desperately at this link with normality. Thankfully he felt control swim back. He was through! "It's all right, Karl. A bad entry is all." "I tell you something, eh? Your entry was no worse than the others when they saw what they were getting into." Lisbon did not answer. Beneath him, the challenge of the vast inferno that was Mephisto was a matter that now commanded all his attention. Reinspringer's continued reassurances held less meaning for him than the micro-traces of helium he w as beginning to discern rising out of the fringes of the upper atmosphere. He reached out to feel for his drums and found them comfortingly close. The adoption of ion-identity was one thing in a classical ion-training environment. It was quite a different matter to plunge through space to fall headlong into the complex cauldron of a body such as Mephisto. Lisbon had to remind himself that, having adopted a suitable ionic state, the crushing pull of the planet -- or was it a rogue sun?was not necessarily an inescapable gravitational pit. Conversely, he found it impossible to forget that even the theorists disagreed as to precisely what Mephisto was. He felt the nudge of the beam, corrected his course. In the observatory far above him. Reinspringer's hand at the controls was a constant reminder of the need for objectivity. Never for a moment must he forget he w as a creature. whose normal identity was molecular -- the so-called state of mol-identity. Ionidentity was a transient and artificial state. Its virtue was that plasmoid identities could go and observe in conditions where no molecular beings could survive. Its drawback w as that a consciousness in an ionized state could easily confuse itself w ith the Universe. Soon he reached the radiation bands of Mephisto's outer atmosphere. It was here essential for him to tighten his complex to prevent spin-off of essential ions. Fortunately he knew his trade. He easily mastered sufficient plasmacohesion to ride safely through the radiation bqlt without excessive weakening. There were other bands below, but most of these should not be so difficult or dangerous. There was no serious risk of being converted into uncontrollable photon reactions short of the Ml and M# layers. As he lode the microwave beam through the increasing density of the upper atmosphere, his capacity for ionization gradually became more apparent. Lisbon began to discern the first signs of the visible radiation which characterized the identity of himself and his drums. The intensity of the beam also made if possible for him to more easily identify some of the rarefied atoms which were present in the softening vacuum. From this point on he must be very much alert. He would need every particle of information he could gather if he were ever to regain the observatory. j perience and age had taught ini that caution paid. He had sacrificed ion-mobility in favour of the considerably inert characteristics of argon. Increasing ionization induced a blue-green plasma, which though it could not rival the splendour of ionized sodium, was nevertheless distinctive enough to permit his passage to be followed by the telescopes on the observatory. The certainty of the wavelengths of his own luminance gave him a reference point against which to estimate the spectral responses of other substances in which he was interested. In the absence of instrumentation, such estimates were his specialty. On many occasions such an ability had saved his life. His passage through the increasing density of Mephisto's ionosphere gradually became a blaze of triumph. The focused microwaves of the observatory's masers opened a broad highway of conductivity, setting him into a flare which was locally brighter than the radiation from Mephisto itself. For a moment he knew the touch of pure exhilaration as he burned down out of the sky. When he hit the M I layer, things took a decidedly graver turn. Reinspringer, who was following his course by spectroscope, was quick to issue a warning. At the wavelengths the observatory's masers were currently tuned to generate, the microwave beam was likely to suffer severe attenuation due to absorption by rising gas clouds. Communication could be continued intermittently through to base level, but for ionization potential Lisbon would have to seek his energy directly from the sources available on Mephisto. This was Lisbon's first positive indication that the rescue exercise was running into trouble. He was far from happy. The adoption of native ions and energy sources was a frequent but not well-advised expedient, and certainly not one to be indulged in so early in the game. It was permissible only if the flamer had an intimate knowledge of the sequence of chemical ion reactions leading into and out of his alternative identities. Normally such sequences were planned and rehearsed so that the (lamer was optically able to identify his chosen route by reference solely to the colour of the flames. Where the main keys to elemental identity lay beyond the range of the human eye, guidance was normally given from the broadband spectroscopes on the observatory. In the present case reliable communications from the space observatory were apt at best to be erratic. At worst, they were liable to be completely absent. While Lisbon was confident that he could accurately determine most of the elements with spectral lines between four hundred and seven hundred nanometres, there was ample opportunity for mistake without confirmation from the spectroscopes. The range of the visible spectrum was far too limited to give him more than partial guidance. The worst prospect was that Mephisto seemed to contain compounds -- even elements -- unknown IF on Earth. There had been tantalizing glimpses of a whole new range of elements with stable nuclei beyond the fabled 'sea of instability' which characterized the limits of natural and man-made elements. There was even a hint of a mirrorinversion of the known periodic table leading down an orderly parachemic series with properties outside all speculation. At the M# layer Reinspringer's fears were amply confirmed. Partial ionization of the rising gases gave rise to fantastic auroral screens spread into curious curtains by Mephisto's magnetic fields. Tht fluctuations of these unstable layers caused random attenuation of the microwave beam. Lisbon could cope with curtailed communication, but the loss of beam power so early was dangerous indeed. Penetration of the chemosphere needed ionization potential sufficient to maintain the cohesion of the plasma which gave him his identity. If the beam failed as he hit the chemosphere he was liable to have his ions dissipated round the globe too thinly for recovery ever to be possible. The major barrier was the hydroxyl zone. In this Lisbon revealed his habitual foresight in adopting an argon identity. Argon had no hydroxyl radical worth bothering about... He passed through the chemosphere riding on a tide of maximum beam intensity. How lucky he had been was immediately underscored by a drastic beam failure only seconds after he had made a safe penetration. From this point on he would be forced to choose his identity from the native ions in the lower atmosphere, and seek the essential ionization potentials from the energies of Mephisto itself. Freed now from the limitations of the beam, he was able to inhabit any elements which exhibited the suitably excited states needed to support the requirements of identity and sentience. This should have been a tremendous liberation of the spirit. On this occasion, however, it was also the deadliest of technological traps. Without a sure knowledge of the progressive chemical sequences involved, he could all too easily become trapped in the complexity of the uncharted ionic tides. If he did so, there might be no way back. I isbon decided to stop and take j stock of the situation. The rising flood of radiant energy lent him sufficient power to maintain his identity intact through the periodic failures of Reinspringer's beam. The sight beneath him was enthralling. Gigantic plumes of multicoloured flames leaped from Mephisto's surface and were projected dozens of kilometers into the atmosphere. Beneath the plumes a veritable sea of multicoloured fire seethed and coalesced and ran with the interplay of strange reactions. When the beam power was strong, he relayed to Reinspringer a commentary describing and classifying the fantastic abysses and mountains of fire below. Where possible he added tentative identification of the reacting elements as judged from the colours of their ionized spectra, though he was conscious of the narrowness of the visible window through which the human eye could observe. When the beam failed, he hung there considering how best to utilize his limited resources for a rescue attempt he was now certain must fail. At last he judged it was time to make a move. Reinspringer had recorded all the useful data and there was nothing to be gained by waiting longer. Using the beam path as a guide, Lisbon made his way down toward the now-abandoned 'campsite'. This was a plateau of solid rock some three hundred metres in length by about fifty metres wide: The term campsite was a wry jest. In mol-space terms it had a temperature sufficient to bring it to cherry-red heat and its cracked and fissured ledges were periodically swept by great flames of, incandescent hydrogen. For the flamers, however, it had been a useful rendezvous point and a base from which to establish bearings. "What's the score from the surface, Peter?" Reinspringer's voice w as faded and muffled by the interference with the beam. "Grim!" said Lisbon. "From where I'm standing the flames are rising up like mountain ranges. I've no idea if burning is an apt description of the process, and the tires certainly aren't nuclear as we understand the term." "Can you see down to the base of the tlames?" "No. It's too far down, and the illumination's too great at the surface. Campsite's obviously the tip of some submerged mountain range. But some of the chasms I can see must be all of five kilometers deep. It gives you an unholy feeling." Vertigo overcame him. He retired from the precarious ledge on which he had been standing, cursing his inability to take the idea of a possible fall of a few kilometers when he had already descended many hundred times that distance in his transit from the observatory. He was aware of the incongruity, but powerless to escape its grip. "Still no clues to the reaction mechanisms?" Reinspringer was persistent. "I tell you, Karl, there's nothing in my physics which explains Mephisto. If you want a clue on where to look, think about the chemical separation of the flames. There must be some mechanism at work which undoes the surface mixing. There's a flame of pure calcium at least twenty kilometers high which has persisted since I left the observatory. How do you explain the generation of a fountain of pure calcium ions from a mix of so many reactive contaminants?" " Some sort of cosmic-sized massspectrometer?" Reinspringer was speculative. "I'll put the theory boys to work on it. But what about my ion-beam. Can you see anything of them?" By w ay of answer, Lisbon gathered his drums. Bending low, he beat out a throbbing call, then stopped to listen. There was no response. Undismayed, he continued at intervals, each time stopping to listen for the slightest suspicion of an answer. Crouched like a demon on a red-hot rock in the midst of a streaming hell, his fingers made the drum speak in a voice which, though it was dwarfed by the blistering furies around him, neverthei F less had the potent tones of selected resonance. "Pam... Pam... Pam... His fingers lapsed into a regular single-beat call. No answer. "Pam... Pam... Pam... Then silence. Or was there a distant echo whilst his fingers hesitated above the micron-thick diaphragms? "Pam... Pam... Pam... No doubt now. "Pam... Pam... Pam..." Somewhere out in the terrible burning wilderness another drum made answer. "Pam... Pam... Pam... nance, the answering drum took up the call. f  IT 've got a contact," said LisJbon. "Distant but definite." "So at least one of them's alive!" Reinspringer sounded thankful for even this. "Keep the beam tuned on campsite," said Lisbon. "I may have to move well away, and I'll need a point of reference. I doubt if you could follow with the beam if I move down into the flames. I'll leave a couple of drums on campsite and communicate with you through time." "Acknowledged." Leaving two drums on the rock, Lisbon took up the third and turned his attention outward. His sensitive fingers rapped out a series of interrogatory pulses. Then he held the membrane near his ear and listened to the return. "Who is it?" asked the controller. "Andre Beriov. He's on a plateau about two kilometers down from campsite. He exchanged identity for something he believed was fourthirty nanometres iron, then found it wasn't. He can't find a reactive chemical exchange with anything local, and the gas pocket he's in is static. I'll have to go down there and see if I can get him out." "Take care, Peter," said Reinspringer gravely. "We can't afford to lose you too." Tapping the drum in a regular series of beats, Lisbon reconnoitered round the edge of campsite. His acute ears and the clever design of the instrument enabled him to distinguish the particular direction in which Andre Beriov was located. Here a great updraught of incandescent hydrogen swept up against the solid rock and formed a seemingly inpenetrable barrier. Gaining as much ionization potential as he could acquire, Lisbon leaned carefully against the red-hot wind, and was surprised to find its velocity was so low that he could climb through it easily. Climbing in ion-space was not the physical task it was on molspace Earth. Weight was a relative matter, dependent mainly on how tightly concentrated was the plasma in the energy package containing his identity. He could fall great distances in relative safety if he could keep his velocity low. The termination of a fall was critical, however, and inertial effects could easily exceed his ability to keep his identity intact. If physical or thermal forces became too great, they could strip the atoms out of the delicate energy shell and dissipate them very thoroughly throughout the surrounding winds. He therefore proceeded with great caution, using tenuous handholds to support hik nearly weightless body, almost in the manner of a mol-space climber in the gravity of Earth. About two kilometers down, with the high fire-masses streaming above him like vertical walls, he came across Andre. In a cleft in the rock was trapped a pocket of violet flame, and clearly in the region stood Andre Beriov, clutching his precious drum and looking outward. His face was a picture of the faintest possible hope. His relief when he saw Lisbon was a wonderful thing to see. "Thank God you've come, Peter! I thought I was here for eternity." "Keep calm," said Lisbon. "You got into that identity, so there has to be a logical route out." "Believe me. I'd not still be here if I could find it." "And you thought your identity was four-thirty nanometres iron?" "I staked my life on it." Still in his argon identity, Lisbon prowled around the fringes of the. gas pocket and out to where the leaking traces of the gas mingled with the incandescent hydrogen. When he returned his face was' enlivened by a trace of wry amusement. "Come on, Andre! You're going home." "You mean you've found a route?" "Yes. You're not in an iron identity at all. You were trapped by your own precision in spectral analysis. Sure you were in the fourthirty nanometre region -- but it's a calcium identity, not iron. Look at those red fringes. That's calcium at six-eighteen nanometres. Iron has no useful bands nearer than green at five-twenty-seven. There's hydrogen outside. You can take the hydride route straight through to hydrogen, and ride the flame up to campsite. The beam's focused on campsite, so that's your route back to the observatory." The simplicity of the trap which had nearly cost him his life appeared to stun Beriov momentarily. He started to protest, then followed out the clues which Lisbon had set before him, and suddenly grinned with great relief. "Thanks, Peter. Now I know why they call you the Ion Explorer. You coming up too?" "Not yet. There's another five of you down here somewhere. They sent the backup team in when you and Loya failed to show. With a bit of luck I may find another one or two in no worse a predicament than yourself. Have you seen anything of the others?" Beriov was concerned. "None at all I'm afraid. Only Loya and I were dovCn here at the time I became trapped." Lisbon watched speculatively as Beriov made the hydride transition into the red of a six-fifty six nanometre hydrogen identity and, with a wave of his hand, rose up through (lie great flame toward the surface and the route home. If Beriov wished to remain in the profession it would take a two year refresher course in training environments before he would again be assigned to an expedition. Lisbon's fingers tapped out a message to be r e IF peated for Reinspringer's benefit, communicating through the drums he had left on campsite. "Beriov coming up. He could be the lucky one." T his done, Lisbon again turned his attention to the task of trying to locate the other members of the expedition. For hours on end his drum notes beat out into the realms of fire without once receiving a single answer in return.' During this time he was making his way slowly along the face of the peak, the summit of which was campsite. Finally he came around the end of the flame-drowned mountain and was able to survey new territory. Here again hydrogen was the predominant environment, but bright flares of sodium, potassium and many of the rare-earth elements were particularly abundant. The preponderance of rare-earths reminded Lisbon that the distribution of elements on Mephisto was untypical of what was normally to be expected in galactic bodies. Mephisto was a thing apart, and undoubtedly contained a great many surprises. No visual evidence, however positive, could ever be trusted at face value. On the far side of the campsite range Lisbon made a new contact. I ! is drum messages now growing in urgency received an unexpected reply, w hich he hastened to confirm. His report to Reinspringer was terse. "Kem Radshorn believed trapped in parachemic identity. Recovery prognosis doubtful." The new drum beats were located well out from the comforting solidness of the campsite mountain. In order to traverse this region Lisbon knew that he would have to sacrifice his precious argon identity and adopt an ion native to the region. He chose this course with great reluctance, because of the reactivity of the available native ions and the strong possibility of becoming enmeshed in some irreversible chemical reaction. Denied physical support, however, there was no other way. Finally he opted for blue hydrogen at four-eighty six nanometres as being the safest available choice. The argonhydrogen exchange was not easy, there being no reactive interface. He had to rise high into the atmosphere where the ion density was low, and to make the identity exchange virtually a molecule at a time. Down in the flux below, such a maneuver would not have been possible. With the partial pressures being so high, the energy required to control the delicate transportation would have been inadequate to preserve his identity. It had been a long time since Lisbon had swum in and been part of a great hydrogen flame. In the training environments it had once been his great joy to swoop and leap w ith the vagaries of such a mobile Hare. Now' he found its very mobility an embarrassment and a danger. Only by careful control of his plasma form could he make the journey at all. About a kilometre out, there rose a plume of gaseous ions whose singular beauty was remarkable. Blue, green and orange ion components twisted together in a flame whose magnificence outshone by far the relative transparency of hydrogen. It was from this column that tfie drum beats came. Immediately he came close, Lisbon realized that much was wrong. Whilst his optical range covered only a limited part of the spectrum, intuition told him that no such element should have existed. This was a chemical outside the range of human physical knowledge. Swimming in the sea of incandescent hydrogen, Lisbon made a wide arc around this singular plume, examining it from all sides. He could find dilution, but no interaction with hydrogen, nor could he tell much about the three ionstreams that intermingled. He tried to contact Reinspringer for a spectroanalysis of the region, but doubtless hit a period of beam blackout, because the controller did not reply, and it was probable the message had not got through. Doubtfully, Lisbon began a spiral descent around the plume looking for signs of the flamer whose drum beats assured him was trapped within its fiery limbs. He had to drop down nearly a kilometer before he found him. K em radshorn, one of the backup team, was one of the new breed of flamers just emerging from I EC training. His introduction to ion space would have been lengthy and scientific, and drawn heavily upon the experience of the older flamers such as Lisbon himself. Lisbon marked it much to the youngster's credit that he had not panicked and thus risked dissipation, but had concentrated on maintaining his energy shell intact as he tried to find a route through the intractable chemistry which bound him into his present position. Radshorn looked at Lisbon from his fiery prison with patent disbelief. Unlike Beriov and Loya, who had worked with Lisbon in the past, Lisbon was merely a name in a textbook to the younger flamer. Radshorn knew that help from his own team was barely to be hoped for -- help from a complete stranger in ion space scarcely stopped short of a miracle. Drawing the drum close to him, Lisbon spoke. "How'd you get into that identity?" Radshorn pointed downward. "At the base. I heard Loya's drum and went after her. I thought I was going into multi-spectral mercury, but it can't be anything of the sort." "There was a route in. There has to be a route out." "There was a sodium flare at the time. I think Loya was below somewhere and disturbed something. I went clean through sodium identity into this; then the flare died and I couldn't get out again. I've been unable to find a reactive interface since." "I'm going down to investigate," said Lisbon. "If Loya disturbed sodium, perhaps I can do the same. If you see the opportunity, take it. Don't wait for me." "Check! Who are you, anyway?" "Peter Lisbon." The flamer did not wait to explain further. From IF somewhere deep below him he had heard the beat of a druni. "Pam..." It was only a single beat and might have been accidental. If there was a drum there, however, there should be another flamer not too far distant. Possibly Loya... " Pam..." If he judged the sound aright, the drum was knocking on something solid rather than being struck by a hand. He answered rapidly but received no reply. He dived deeply but cautiously, not knowing how far he could safely fall before he struck the bottom. In this matter he was wise, because he had less than two hundred meters to go before he came down into the skeletal forest. T he sight was so arresting and unexpected that Lisbon had to stop and take Stock. He was in a valley at the foot of two vast mountain ranges, one of which was campsite. The atmosphere was mainly incandescent hydrogen, but populating the valley appeared ta be a forest of skeletal, sponge-like trees whose ashen-white surfaces faintly glowed with every colour the spectrum could devise. His  first thought was that these were rockfaults laid bare by the removal of the surrounding material by the streaming hydrogen. The regularity of their shapes, however, prompted him to look for another explanation. The singular thought which occurred to him was that these were living, replicating plants. The notion of indigenous life, under these conditions worried him. He began to think of duplication in the sense of growing crystals rather than replication as with living organisms; and finally to wonder if there was a fundamental difference in systems in which a seed could define the characteristics of that which grew from it. The divisions between life and non-life were thin indeed. Brushing a piece of skeletal sponge from a tree as he passed, he was rewarded with a surprise flare of blue four-sixty three nanometres neodymium, which burst from the tree where the inert ashen surface was broken. Intrigued, he tried another tree andgot the green of five hundred and twenty nanometres cerium. He began to suspect that these individual plants were feeding on the microtrace contaminants in the hydrogen wind, and that they were capable of selective absorption of the ions which they adopted as their specialty. This factor came as no great surprise to him. Plants and bacteria on Earth were capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen, and many species -- including Man-fixed carbon, calcium and many other elements from the environment. Ionexchange resins, too, had an order of preference in what they selected from their environment. The divisions between life and non-life were hair tine and very subjective. So far there was no sign of the drum he had heard below him. The flame in which Radshorn was locked appeared to have its origin in a rocky cleft near the edge of the campsite range. He used this blowhole as the center for his investigations, and moved around it through the skeletal forest looking for evidence that another flamer had been there. Shortly he found a clue. From each of the trees which he passed, a small piece had been broken. Even now the fractures were still giving off a characteristic flare -- lithium red, europium blue, cerium green, and a magnificent violet holmium. He was not sure if the trail markers were deliberate or whether they had resulted from pure curiosity on the part of a flamer who had passed this way before him, but signalling as they did with such a magnificent display of coloured fire, he had no difficulty in following the direction. On the slope of the hillside opposite campsite the nature of the vegetation changed considerably. Here the sponges were much larger and formed misshapen islands like vast skeleton apple-dumplings. The nature of their ion preference was altered too. The first had a fracture which flamed tongues of calcium, violet and red. Slightly up the slope the beautiful purple of potassium issued from a broad scrape along one side of the plant. The apparently deliberate nature of the damage and the position of the element in the periodic table caused Lisbon to pause and think. He knew suddenly what he was looking for -- a sodium tree. When he found it, it was not so much a tree as a plantation. A whole area of the incandescent rock face was covered with the white skeletons of isolated sponges, and one of these had been almost completely crushed. Significantly, moving slightly on the hydrogen wind, was an octahedral drum. Experimentally Lisbon kicked a fragment of the sponge, and obtained a magnificent sodium flare. Then he took up his own drum and addressed the flamer caught in the fire-plume above. "Kem -- are you in contact?" "Listening." "Can you set your direction from my drumbeat?" "Affirmative." "I've located a source of sodium. I think I can drive it into a flare. You got in there through a sodium route, so there must be a reactive interface with sodium. Ready to try?" "Affirmative. Will the flare be in the same place?" "Within a few metres." "Give me a minute to get into position. I'll tell you when I'm ready. Any ideas on what route to go for?" "If you can find enough oxygen, the hydroxyl route is safer. Other,wise go through sodium hydride. But whatever you do, try and make it right through to a hydrogen identity." "Check! I'm ready now." Looking at the crushed sodium tree. Lisbon decided there was not enough undamaged material left to guarantee a substantial flare. Alongside, however, was an even larger sponge which an exploring foot told him contained sodium. This seemed to promise even better results, and fortunately lay even closer to the plume which contained Kem Radshorn. Thus there was little danger of the flare being out of Radshorn's reach. As soon as he could see the trapped flamer in the green and orange of the plume, he strode into the middle of the IF sodium tree and began to destroy it with his feet. This was an action more easily imagined than performed. The low density of his ionized plasma identity scarcely gave him enough weight to break the ashy sponge fragments, fragile though they were. Somehow he managed to mash sufficient of it to provide a wide and high flare of sodium ions, which swooped in a living yellow fire around him and licked hungrily at the base of the unidentified plume. Such were the radiant contrasts that he was unable to see the progress of his rescue operation. His relief was great when a few moments later Kem Radshorn, now in an orthodox hydrogen iden- tity, swam down beside him. "It worked! It worked!" Radshorn's relief was ecstatic. "I owe you a great deal for this, Peter." "Forget it!" said Lisbon. "You can best pay me back by not getting into trouble on your next tour. Right now I want you to go up to campsite and get off-planet before you get locked into something else." Radshorn's face fell. "With respect, I could be more use helping you to look for the others." "No. You'd be a liability. Your training's too scientific, and there's too many unknowns here. The only way to tackle Mephisto is to respond to the agony in your guts. And they can't teach you that in a training environment." "Sure!" Radshorn took the critical point without complaint. "I guess we've all got a lot to learn." He saluted reluctantly, and began to swim upwards through the  # novellas by one of the top S-F writers in the world  w i a It seems amazing that a writer as prolific as Silver berg should be getting better and more thoughtful as he goes along, but the three novellas that make up this book prove that to be true. Each takes a fairly far-out theme related to morality... and treats it with great interest, and a kind of scholarly delicacy, and a great deal of creative imagination. Publishers Weekly #, now at your bookstore great hydrogen flames, keeping well clear of the unknown plume which had been his fiery prison. Lisbon watched him go, and tapped out a message on his drum for Reinspringer's benefit. "Radshorn on his way up. Some theories on ion separation beginning to emerge." Almost immediately the drum began to throb with a message from the controller. "Great work, Peter! Andre Beriov recovered two more of the backup team in disorientationshock near campsite. Only Loya and backup man Ray Lockett still on Mephisto." tvisorientation shock! The I Jnews grimly amused Lisbon. Disorientation shock used to be frequently suffered by novices when presented with mixed ion-streams in a training environment. At one time it was an accepted hazard of learning to handle ion identity. Latterly, however, training environments had become more sophisticated and humane, and disorientation shock in training was now a rare occurrence. In Lisbon's view, every flamer who was going to do a useful job in natural ion environments would one day enter a situation where multiple-choice disorientation would overload his senses. Far better to become accustomed to this in the relative safety of a training environment than in such a potentially deadly and uncharted sea of ions as the surface of Mephisto. The notion, however, gave him a new line of approach. In disorientation shock, the flamer was unable to respond to a drum call. For this reason he could not be located by standard emergency procedures. The most likely place to find a disorientated backup man was in the hydrogen flare around campsite. Significantly, this was where Beriov had already located two of them. By the exercise of an old drum trick, Lisbon hoped he might locate the one still missing. He allowed the great hydrogen flare to lift him towards the surface, carefully reducing his plasma density to give himself just the right and safe rate of climb. He surfaced in a huge belt of flame that subsided rapidly. Once he would have been overjoyed to be in a flame tongue leaping free through the atmosphere. Now he found the experience a danger and an irritation, if human beings had been meant to live like flames, he thought, then the Maker would have seen them born in ion-identity. The deliberate assumption of the ion-state was part of the great impertinence of Man, who thought he could ape the gods. The trouble was that Man was still pathetically unaware of how much he did not know about the universe. U sing campsite as a center for his activities, Lisbon rode the huge plumes out to about three kilometers distance. From here he began to move in a vast circle which had campsite as its center. All the while he held his drum at his ear and tapped a solemn beat with his linger. " Pam... Pam... Pam..." The spare drum on campsite returned the beat loud and clearly. "Pam... Pam... Pam..." IF In this manner he continued to traverse the circle, using the great flame slopes to conserve as much as possible of his energy. When he had covered nearly half the distance around the perimeter he heard something for which he had been listening. A drum between himself and campsite was splitting the beat and thereby betraying its direction. lk Pam-am... Pam-am... Pamam..." Methodically he set up a zig-zag search pattern, working his way toward campsite. A kilometer in from the perimeter he found the drum. Less than fifty meters away he found the missing backup flamer. He, too, was in a state of disorientation shock. Fortunately his nitrogen identity energy shell had remained intact. Using his drum to communicate with Reinspringer, Lisbon directed that the microwave beam be re-sited on his present position. The movement of the beam was accomplished with alacrity. Soon the broad shaft of energy opened up a magnificent luminant highway into the sky. With the backup flamer still unconscious, Lisbon knew he would have to shepherd the identity package at least as high as the ionosphere before it could be safely entrusted to the beam for retention until it could later be collected. He took this decision with great reluctance. He knew that once he had negotiated the various bands and layers of the upper atmosphere he would be very reluctant himself to make a return. Nevertheless, Loya's drum lay down there in the skeletal forest at the bottom of the hydrogen sea. If Loya's drum was there, the chances were that she herself was not far distant. One thing he could not do was abandon an experienced flamer like Loya while any faintest hope for her recovery remained. "Karl -- I've got Ray Lockett here. Unconscious like the others. I'll have to clear him through to the ionosphere, but I don't want to come right back to the observatory. I must have one more look for I I oya. Attenuation caused the beam to wane for a period, and Reinspringer wisely held his reply until the full beam strength had been restored. "I take your point, Peter. Radshorn's in good shape and demanding to be allowed to help. I'll send him down to meet you, and he can fetch Lockett up." "Good thinking! And start preparing a blast for the #EC training executive. Three out of four backup men falling in disorientation shock is little short of criminal. Theory's not enough. It's the human animal which has to be conditioned to take the stresses." "I'm going farther than that. I'm demanding a full-scale disaster enquiry. Those desk-bound theorists at home have no idea what some of these deep-space working conditions are like. It's about time somebody jerked the rug out from under them." Mollified, Lisbon began to survey the problems of the ascent. Since he was unconscious, there was no way that Lockett's identity could be exchanged for a less hazardous one such as an inert gas. Nitrogen would be adequate only if the beam power remained strong enough to maintain the identity whole in the face of the high temperatures and low pressures encountered in the upper layers. Lisbon's own hydrogen identity was also a risk factor. The hydroxyl zone was their major hazard. If the beam should fail at the wrong time the results could be complete dissipation. Nevertheless, there was no alternative. ittihey were lucky. By some trick I of circumstance the periodic uulures of the beam coincided almost exactly with their progress through the less critical regions. Through all the major bands the beam held strong and true. In less than twenty minutes they reached an altitude free from most of the planet-dependent effects. Lisbon was able to halt and wait the arrival of Radshorn from the observatory. In the low Uonization of this rarefied stratum, Radshorn was almost invisible. What could be seen was a broad grin of welcome on his face, and a look of genuine concern when he took charge of the unconscious backup man. Lisbon was pleased to note the youngster had opted for an argon identity. The lad was obviously eager to learn such points of technique, and this was one trick he had been quick to adopt. Suddenly Lisbon did not feel so bad about the future of flaming. Having been relieved of his charge, Lisbon once again turned to make a descent to Mephisto's surface. This time he was less than fortunate. His hydrogen identity was badly adapted for survival in the face of such unreliable beam energy. More than once he was saved from total dissipation by the mere vagaries of chance. Profoundly dissatisfied with his performance, he broke from the beam path at the earliest opportunity and leaned hungrily toward the welcome energy reserves of Mephisto's bounteous fires. His critical situation negated his natural caution. When he could find the energy he used it -- building up a strong red hydrogen plasma. with a reckless disregard for wastage as he burned down toward campsite. On the beam he heard Reinspringer whistle. No further comment was necessary. They both knew that Lisbon's progress was untypical and prompted by stronger motives than those of a mere rescue in ion-space. At campsite, Lisbon knelt again with his drums. "Pam... Pam... Pam..." He was calling uselessly against the faint hope that there might be some return. "Pam... Pam... Pam..." No answer whatever. No reason to suppose there would be. He took up the drum and went to the edge of the campsite, looking down toward the direction of the skeletal forest where he had found Loya's drum. "Pam... Pam... Pam..." If ever a note of concerned enquiry could be conveyed by a finger beating on a drum, this time was now. He raised the instrument to his eat and listened, not expecting to hear anything and being surprised by a single answering beat. IF 'Tam... It was impossible, yet he had heard it. Perhaps Loya's drum was again moving in the hydrogen wind, tapping itself against something solid. Perhaps... ttisbon knew he had no choice of I i action. He had to go down into the abyss again, down to the skeletal forest, to search with all the cunning and skill and imagination that only years of flaming could bestow. In such an infinite sea his chances of finding Loya were slight, especially as she was now without her drum. He felt compelled, however, to find out what had happened to her, and why. Flamers such as Loya were not to be lost without good cause. The plume which had trapped Radshorn was still burning brightly. The sodium flare which had been released at its edge had now burned out. Taking a broad, spiral course around the plume, he dived ever more deeply down through the hydrogen flame and stopped only when the white crisp bones of the skeletal forest appeared beneath him. The two crushed trees remained as a mute reminder of the previous passage of men. There was something of a reproach in the way these two broken organisms had accepted their lot and were already attempting to repair the damage. The speed with which the brittle tracery was being renewed made him pause in wonder -- in a few days the wounds would all be healed. If all the sodium was being extracted from the traces in the hydrogen wind, then he had misjudged both the concentration of atmospheric sodium and the capacity of the adsorption process to recreate the massive form of the element in the presence of such a hostile environment. Apart from the drum, there were no clues as to what had happened to Loya. The damage to the trees stopped at the point where the first .sodium bush had been destroyed. In the vain hope that he might have been reading the trail in the wrong direction, Lisbon retraced his path to the point where he had first descended, and then began to explore the terrain beyond. This path took him over a ridge and to a point where the valley floor dropped away into a broad ravine. The skeletal forest had itself been a place of wonder, but this new gorge was a place of sheer enchantment. From wall to rocky wall, every available surface was covered with skeletal flowers, but flowers of such vast dimensions and beautiful proportions and ethereal radiance that Lisbon could have imagined no more beautiful a place. Here, drowned under a sea of incandescent hydrogen, was the proof that life could prosper and survive under conditions which were way beyond anything he had previously conceived as credible. There was no doubt in his mind that these life-forms were 'organic' but now his conception of organic extended beyond its Earthbound connotation of being related to carbon chemistry. Here was a more versatile life-form, beautifully adapted tb the conditions under which it had evolved. Exactly what gave the plants their selective capacity to adsorb only ions of a single element, he did not know. He suspected it was somehow associated with their inert ashen skins. If he read the signs aright, the individual plants probably had the capacity to select even single isotopes of a particular element, leading to purities of concentrated isotopes on a scale undreampt of on Earth. Under such conditions of continually alternating flux and refinement, it was no wonder to him that Mephisto had its own brands of chemistry. The insistent pressures of life-forms vying for a niche in the ecology could lead to bizarre modes of specialization. Constant re-flux and refinement of the elements gave ample scope to the chance concentration of the one atom in a class beyond the naive constraints of the periodic table. Mephisto performed more chemical reactions in a second than Man could achieve in a thousand years. If Loya had passed this way, she had left no signs in this unearthly grotto. Unlike the trail in the skeletal forest, here no luminous markers had been left for him to follow. It was, of course, possible that she had swum up into the hydrogen winds to examine the scene from above. To investigate this possibility, Lisbon swam up to just beyond the ceiling of the 'vegetation', intrigued by its variety but learning nothing of the fate or whereabouts of the missing flamer. The notion of variety began to worry him. Somewhere below or in the new forests he was beginning to discern on the distant slopes, was one or a group of plants capable of selective adsorption of virtually any element a flamer could use as an identity. The only probable exception was the hydrogen carrier itself. There was no doubting the capacity of the plants to force the selected element out of reluctant compounds. What if they had the capacity also to draw the selected ions out of an ion identity? Cursing himself for not having thought of the point before, he seized his drum and sent an urgent message to Reinspringer. "Must know Loya's last ion identity." Reinspringer's attention was prompt. "Query acknowledged. Checking now." Lisbon however was already moving backalong the gorge, his expression grave. He had guessed what the answer must be. Loya's favorite identity was the classic D-line resonance of sodium. It was her great joy to burn down out of the heavens glowing like a glorious sunlit beacon. Such was the definition of the sodium plasma that even the strands of her hair would become visible as she descended like a golden goddess. He had always I suspected that she chose sodium not so much for its ionic properties as for the marvellous luminance it gave to the identity. And Loya had tangled with a sodium tree... Reinspringer's voice came back abruptly. "Loya went down in the fiveeighty nine nanometre sodium doublet. Andre was the last to see her, and she was still in sodium then." IF "That's what I figured," said Lisbon. "If she remained in sodium I can't hold out much hope." "Copied for the record. Take care of yourself, Peter." I 'isbon was nearly halfway back j up the gorge when he met a circumstance which made Reinspringer's concern seem less than a platitude. Without any sort of warning, a mighty surge current of superheated hydrogen rammed him from below. The velocity of the blast was such that he was turned and tossed like paper in the wind, and had to fight to preserve intact the precious energy shell that contained his identity. Worse was to come. After the hydrogen shock wave came a massive yellowed-green flame which he instantly identified as five-forty eight nanometres boron. In the face of such intense ion pressures, he fought and nearly lost the battle to remain in hydrogen. Such an allembracing concentration was exceptional in any sort of work, and suggested that some highly unusual event had taken place below. A short while previously he had passed above the quiet and beautiful flower-fields in the gorge and, once he had regained his equilibrium, he was immediately prompted to dive to the source point to see if he could find the reason for this critical ion storm. This was a decision which nearly cost him his life. As he plunged down on the fringes of the boron flame he was engulfed in a second flare, this time of oxygen, which ran from red to purple iand reacted explosively with the hydrogen in which he swam. Fortunately he was slightly outside the main reaction sphere, but the force was sufficient to give him slight concussion and left him drifting momentarily helpless toward the valley floor. His touchdown on solid rock helped to bring him to his senses. Looking around, he was amazed to see that a large area of what had previously been flowerpopulated slopes had been utterly devastated by some vast reaction. Unnerved at first, he was almost afraid to theorize, let alone explore. Wide tracts formerly occupied by flowers had been stripped bare, and only the white, inert ash still settling on the rocks gave evidence that the plants had ever existed. The concentrated elements of which the 'vegetation' had been composed had been released in the explosive flare which had destroyed them. The incident told him much about Mephisto. The life-style of the plants was fascinating enough. The death-style was traumatic. At some point in their development, conditions would become such that the reaction of their concentrated elements with the atmosphere or their neighbors would be unavoidable. Catastrophic destruction was the result, probably with a similar effect on unlike vegetation in the immediately surrounding area. Thus was born the bright ionic flames which characterized the surface of Mephisto and created the enigma. Now he had seen the death throes of a few of Mephisto's fantastic plants. He would have liked to have remained to see what mysterious seed began the renewal. Some primary catalyst presumably in the cast-off ash would trigger the birth of a new plant generation. These would grow to fruition straining the hydrogen winds for the precious elements which that seed alone was programmed to receive. Here was Nature no more nor less marvelous or mysterious than that on his native Earth, but it was an object lesson in understanding the universe -- Man's comprehension of what constituted life was sketchy indeed. "You all right, Peter?" Reinspringer's Voice was relayed by the drum. "We saw some big new flares in your direction." "I was lucky," said Lisbon. "Some of the local vegetation blew its top. I'll be making a report on it later. But I think I know what makes Mephisto tick." "Still no sign of Loya?" "I'm just going back to where I found her drum. I've a theory about what might have happened to her. I'll try to check it out." As he passed on through the gorge he found that about a third of the vegetation had been destroyed in the blow-up. He could only speculate as to what chemical reaction had started it, but it was obvious the occurrence was not unusual. This was merely part of the natural life-cycle. Beyond the gorge, back in the skeletal forest, things remained unchanged. Responsive only to traces of their own chosen elements, the mighty sponge trees were unmoved by the events which had taken place over the ridge. Indeed, the two broken sodium trees were making good progress with their repairs. Lisbon took up Loya's drum and threw it into the middle of the first tree which had been broken. It landed on a slightly convex surface and moved slightly in the hydrogen wind. "Pam..." Then he took up his own drum and sent out one last desperate appeal. "Pam... Pam... Pam..." He received but a single drum pulse in return. Leaving Loya's drum where it had fallen in the tree, he turned sadly and made his way up through the hydrogen sea toward campsite. There was nothing else that he could do. Either Loya had been adsorbed by the tree or else had been dissipated as the flare which had trapped Radshorn. Whichever was the case, her identity was beyond recovery. On campsite he took the spare drum with his own, but left the third one in a cleft where it would not be washed away by the tongues of hydrogen flame. He knew this action was slightly irrational, but Reinspringer had once been a flamer himself and would understand the motive. "Mission abandoned," he signaled the controller. "There's nothing else to be achieved down here." "Understood," said Reinspringer on the beam. "Take it gently through the chemosphere. There's a big atmospheric ion storm up high." Lisbon waited until the beam power hit maximum then began his journey up the highway in the sky, back to his return to mol-identity. As he climbed high above the mighty fires of Mephisto he looked IF back and was suddenly no longer afraid. In retrospect it had been one more challenge in a long and remarkable career.    oya?" asked Reinspringer...# j He already knew what the answer must be, but needed to hear it said. "She's gone. No hope at all." The controller met Lisbon's eyes gravely, then turned back to his reports. As he made the entry in the log his hands were shaking. This was the only outward sign of tension, otherwise Reinspringer's acceptance of the fiction raised no hint of question. Nevertheless he shared the doubts that haunted the reaches of Lisbon's mind. The controller reached for the clip of death certificates and began to make out the fateful document. Halfway through, his shaking fingers dropped the writing stylus, and he looked at his hands accusingly. Lisbon walked away. There was nothing he could do to help Reinspringer. In any case he had his own spectres with , which to contend. Death in ion-space was an artiface designed to placate the public. It did not actually happen. In ion-state, the only end was dilution -- the dispersion of the identityions throughout such a volume of diluents that they became too thinly spread for reconstitution ever to be possible. The flamer became literally part of the restless atmosphere which circled whichever alien sun or planet they had attempted to explore. But what of the sentience? Did the luckless ones ever truly die? Convention insisted that death certificates be issued as soon as recovery was no longer possible. Theorists postulated that sentience faded in proportion to the degree of dilution. With more experience of ionspace than any person living, Lisbon was not too sure. Sometimes when he was on a rescue mission, crouched on some alien campsite, drums beneath his hands, he was certain that he could detect the voices of flamers who had been diluted long before. Occasionally other fingers danced a hesitating rhythm, alien fingers, pioneers from other races and other times trapped in the same dissolute eternity. In the restless dance of flames, in the anguished howl of hurricanes, or in the serenity of great skies, Lisbon could detect them still. And for Loya the ordeal would have an even more fateful twist. Like a phoenix ever renewed by fire, her sodium identity would be extracted and concentrated by the trees of the skeletal forest. Then in the fury of an alien storm, her ions would be released to begin anew the fantastic dance with the flames of a planet which was not a planet. The cycle endlessly repeated. It was for this reason he had left her drum by the sodium tree and another one on campsite. Somewhere down on Mephisto he was certain Loya still lived, hopelessly dissipated but sentient. Or had it merely been the wind which rolled her drum against the tree? It was considerations such as this which caused him to have bad entries... Sancho Jones Chu was an exceedingly ordinary mortal, but his destiny was something else again! Y ou can look at this matter from a number of perspectives. From one point of view it all began when an occasional sailor, soldier, handyman, and bum of obscure origins and indeterminate race, by name Sancho Jones Chu, on an impulse (he was very impulsive) decided to consult a gypsy. The year was # and the place was Houston. Binivu, flying a Liberian flag, had docked in the harbor to take on a cargo of liquefied natural gas come of age since the #'s, and Binivu was one of three hundred ships that moved frozen, cryogenic gold over the main. Soon after the tanker docked, it discharged part of its crew on shore leave, including Sancho Jones Chu, and Chu departed to partake of the questionable pleasures of Houston, which left him, by the following morning, a little groggy and redeyed and depressed, momentarily wondering what it was all about. And in that moment, most serendipitously, his eye fell on a clumsily painted sign. It showed the open palm of a hand -- white against a red background -- and below the palm black letters told him (he had to puzzle them out laboriously, being of limited education) that Madam Sna stood ready with a psychic reading for a mere # or, say, the equivalent of a one-egg breakfast with toast and coffee. He had no stomach for breakfast anyway, had never had his fortune told, had nothing else to do, and so after a moment's examination of his own palm (to see if maybe he could do the job unaided) he went through the door releasing a clanging bell as he did so. He emerged again an hour later, twenty dollars lighter, but walking on air. He was not exactly a changed man; his eyes were still red and his breath still sour; if anything the black stubble on his face was a little longer; but there was now a new gleam in his eye, a bounce to his walk. He pushed his knit cap to a more rakish angle and broke into whistling. He whistled a new ditty called, "The mermaid's mother is a sure-firogong." He was not a changed man, but he knew himself to be, in an obscure sort of way, a man of some mysterious importance. The gypsy had been sure of that. Framed against a black curtain, her greying hair half hid by a red silk cloth, her golden earrings aglimmer in dim light, she had taken his big rough hand into her narrow brown one and had looked at his palm with professional penetration. After a moment her dark eyes had stared up at him in puzzlement. "Oh," she'd said, "this is very unusual, very, very unusual. You'll' live a very, very, very long time, Mr. Chu. You have a very can't say what and I can't say how. the Tarot and the crystal to get a little more information." So, after she explained to him that she'd never seen a man whose lifeline ran all the way to the tip of his index finger -- the lifeline indicates time spent in this earthly dimension, she'd said -- and after they spent some time negotiating the price of Tarot and crystal; and after they settled on a lump-sum fee of twenty dollars; she's reached for the cards. The Tarot confirmed the message of the palm. The gypsy was genuinely astonished by the cards. She repeatedly pointed at now this, now that part of the spread with an earring-jangling shake of her head. A famous man he was, would be, she murmured, more to herself than to him. His life, the length of it... She couldn't, no, she couldn't grasp how Mr. Chu could be so long lived, a regular Methuselah. He wanted to know the exact year, but on that score, she said, the cards were silent. They turned next to the crystal. She set up the ball in the middle of a table covered by a cloth whose edges showed the signs of the Zodiac. She dimmed the lights even more. And as Chu watched with half-open mouth, she went into a trance. Then, slowly, in hesitant bits and pieces, she conveyed the essence of the vision. Ice... ice... cold... bitter cold, she said. In the crystal Madam Sna saw crystals of ice. She saw or felt (she shivered at the immensity of the cold) such a depth of temperature, such an absence of heat, of warmth, that the mere observation of it all turned her lips blue. In the midst of that crystalline opposite of inferno, she thought she saw the form of Mr. Chu slowly, stiffly tumbling. And so she broke her concentration, and she summed it all up for him. "Mr. Chu," she said, "you'll live to an immense old age. You'll be a sensation before you're thirty. Many famous scientists will seek your counsel. And you'll die someday by freezing to death." And so Chu whistled merrily as he walked. He crossed the street on a red light. Two cars bucked and screeched as they swerved to avoid running him down. He smiled at the angry honking. Nothing could harm him. He'd live to be a hunIF dred, no doubt about it. And next year, when he turned thirty, he'd already be a sensation. As for death by freezing, that was a long, long ways off. He didn't wonder how he'd become a sensation or what the famous scientists might want to know: He very seldom wondered. This morning, momentarily, he'd wondered what it was all about. And that'd been entirely sufficient for a while. Itow look at the matter from Jl another perspective, that of captain Bartholomew Smith, a small, portly man with a neatly blocked salt-and-pepper beard. Captain Bartholomew Smith Binivu. He was very close to retirement. His pension was in his pocket. He was a widower and childless. Forty years at sea had destroyed whatever enthusiasm he'd once had for oceanic magnificence; he longed to be free of the brine. Already his interest was elsewhere; he had a nice packet of interesting investments, some very highrisk, some fairly safe. His heart was on the land, where his money was, even as he plowed One of Captain Smith's investments was closer to his heart than any other, and as fate would have it. his favorite was also the least solvent of his ventures. It couldn't even be called a venture, truth to tell. As yet it hadn't gotten off the ground. It gave the Captain many hours of thought as he paced the deck of Binivu on the way to Japan and back... on the way to Japan and back. He felt a certain responsibility for Eternity, Incorporated, being its single largest stockholder. He wanted El to succeed, and not only as a money-making venture. He hoped to be one of the clients of his own company when he died. El had everything: cold storage bunkers, a laboratory, and equipment. It had a front office, an answering service, and nice stationary with an impressive letterhead (it featured the mathematician's symbol for eternity, the lazy eight). El had a full time salesman, a part-time secretary, and a technical director, a certain Dr. Hatfield. Hatfield was not a medical doctor, strictly speaking, but the state had no objection to his handling of the dead. But Eternity, Incorporated lacked the most important ingredient of all -- customers. Not a single person had signed up for frosty preservation. EI's brochure had all the right blandishments (it had been prepared by a small advertising firm, another of the Captain's investments). It promised resurrection from death to anyone who'd pay the price of "perpetual care" of his body. Perpetuity, the brochure was quick to point out, had limits. As soon as Science discovered the secret to real longevity -- or perhaps even to eternal life -- you'll be thawed out, dear customer, made young, and sent off fresh as a daisy into a brave new world. The company had the usual start-up troubles of a new technological enterprise. El was still looking for the "first one." Once they had a body in the vaults, once they could augment the sales brochure with a suitable photograph (one that showed the client's serene smile without revealing his identity), others would take courage and commit themselves to lie beside the "first one" awaiting the slow ripening of science. And so when a careless maintenance man fourth class by name of tank and instantly froze to death -- it happened in the Caribbean long before they reached the Panama Canal -- and when Captain Bartholomew Smith had ascertained that Chu was a man of uncertain origin and indeterminate race, he wired El at once. Dr. Hatfield, complete with a portable freeze chamber, met them in Panama, took charge of Chu, and flew back to Iowa the next day. Sancho Jones Chu became an El first. Over the years he was to acquire many a companion, including Captain Smith, and as time passed they shared many strange adventures. A d so there is the perspective of Father Time himself, the only person who could track that frozen cargo to eternity. El went bankrupt in #. It couldn't Wait on Science any longer. Tax laws had changed. Energy costs were exorbitantly high. A new religiousness had spread like a bright girdle around earth's shores, and the blandishments of survival by the mediation of Science had little appeal. The community of dead passed into the possession of a Cardinal of the Old Church Newly Revisited by the Spirit of the Almighty, known as the Visitors. The tax laws still permitted religious groups to accumulate wealth, and the Cardinal, having tired of old masters (he had the finest collection of pop art in New Columbia) now turned his acquisitive instincts toward curiosities living, dead, and in between, of which EI's necropolis was one of the finest. The vault passed down through five generations of the Cardinal's family. His great-great-greatgrandson had technical inclinations (a rarity in the #th century which saw the completion of a slow relapse into superstition). Despite the family's substantial wealth, fuel was so difficult to get that the survival (?) of the deadd?) in the onetime El warehouse was threatened. The young Abbot converted the vault to run off solar energy. He developed a special, mobile housing for the frozen inhabitants -- it moved on wheels but could also float like a ship. The cooling system was renewed. The whole marvelous contraption (the Abbot called it the Ark of Time) was energized by a funnel-shaped flowering of panels mounted on the roof. He transported the Ark to South America so that it would never lack solar fuel. Then he abandoned it on a Visitor mission to pursue other gadgets. And then came the Great Shaking and the centuries of interregnum. The period acquired many names, including "Dark Ages." Those who so named the interregnum no longer knew that the term was already spoken for. The times were dark, so dark that even Father Time lost track of the Ark. For a IF long time it might have stayed on that high Andean plateau where the Visitor Abbot had last seen it. Or it might have been pushed or driven off the mountain, lost in the jungle, or sent out to sea, away from the ravaging radiation that claimed so much of the earth's land surface. At any rate, when the historical darkness lifted -- it was the year # of the new reckoning and the world burst into flower again -- Father Time looked for the Ark but couldn't see it any more. It had vanished from its plateau. And since there was so much else to see, Father Time became distracted and forgot all about the matter. His perspective is no longer useful. npHE early ninth century. I Epiphany of the Era of structures. They came; in fifty years they'd conquered. They lasted for an eyewink of eternity, and then they disappeared. But, oh! what grandeur, what vitality while they were dominant. Mankind had been given a new pulse of life. It was as if the Spirit of the Planet, called away for Cosmic Consultation, had returned of a sudden and had reached down with a glowing finger to quicken all earthly existence once again. Structure-man lived a life of glory. He investigated all things, tried all things, dared all things. The arts, philosophy, faith, literature, architecture, science, government awoke in the Ninth to a new and splendid life. The structures were an outward expression of an inner rebirth. What were these structures? They were immense vertical the sky, resting on narrow strips of coastal land, each city a mile high on a square mile of ground, held aloft by a new discovery -- gravitron vibration. They were a magnificent response to the conditions of the time. Here was a planet with a land surface virtually destroyed by radiation, its oceans filled with piratical, treacherous floating communities, its few plots of "safe earth" in the fierce possession of tribes, its erstwhile cities ashes and rubble. And then came the structures. They rose up high, shining columns by the sea, so high they swayed in the wind. And culture was reborn within them. They rapidly gained the admiration of floaters, of tribes. The first supplied fish protein, the second helium to cool the great gravitron drums. There was a crackling tension between Structure and Hinterland, and from that tension was born a new civilization. So much for the setting. And now for a new perspective, that of a representative Structure man, a certain Dr. Fist, brighteyed, vibrant, and insatiably curious, a master of many sciences and not a few arts, a consultant to government, a poet of some note. He had blue eyes, a blond beard, and a bald head. He laughed a lot and moved about in heavy robes of red always in the company of at least five graduate students, at least four of them female. The doctor had an interest in everything, but his interest in the matter at hand arose from the perusal of some ancient documents, an entire file cabinet filled with records of the Old Church Newly Revisited by the Spirit of the Almighty, papers miraculously preserved by the grace of that almighty spirit, and discovered by a male graduate student on a lead-suited excursion into the radiation belt. And there, amidst arid sermons, construction estimates, missionary reports, and other odds and ends which only the voracious curiosity of Structure-man could endow with interest, Dr. Fist -- who was, needless to say, expert in all the dead languages -- came upon a slender folder about the Ark of Time. Appended to some plans, photos, and a press clipping or two, he also found a xerographic copy of a very ol# encyclopedia article. It described the quaint custom of some ancients of freezing their dead, thinking they could be revived some day in the far distant future. The issue captured Dr. Fist's fancy. All issues did, in fact. And Structure-man had energy to deal with all of them in an admirable way. Fist held forth about it to his coterie: "Imagine, children," he cried, eyes aflame with wondrous zeal. "Somewhere on this planet there might still be frozen bodies a thousand years old. And we might succeed in reviving them. We would, could lay our hands on the Ark of Time." The probabilities were entirely against the project. The Great Shaking had made the foundations of the earth to tremble. Eight hundred years of unattended floating or standing would ruin even the plastosteel Ark with its clever flowertopped solar energy pack. And even if the Ark were found, why would Dr. Fist succeed where all others had failed? But precisely in this regard did Structure-man deviate from the pedestrian average of mankind -- he bet against the probabilities, and he often won. So it was that Fist acted. He posted a large reward, and he sent out word to the tribes of Hinterland and to the men on the piratical floating ships. He wanted frozen bodies. He wanted the Ark. A picture of it went out from his structure by messenger along the helium pipeline. He won the first part of his bet. Ten years later a tribesman drove the Ark into Drinaldo Structure and asked for Dr. Fist. He had a faded copy of the notice and of the IF drawing. He wanted his reward. The Ark: was battered. Its belly bore a fat belt of barnacles, its body was dented, one of its solar panels had been broken. But it was still more or less intact, a whale of a truck or vessel. Dr. Fist accepted the Ark as if it had been his rightful due. He rubbed his hands, his interest as lively as ever. The graduate students were a different crop but just as eager as the old ones. Fist opened the door of the Ark, saw the traceries of frozen air around the edges of the door, slammed it shut, nodded, and told someone to pay the tribesman. He ran off to make the preparations in a swish of red robes. Fist also won the second part of his bet, at least in part. The Ark held forty bodies. Along the way Sixteen had been lost in ways that were mercifully hidden in the dark recesses of the Great Famine that had accompanied the Great Shaking. They set forth in a great laboratory reeking of formaldehyde. They shared space with an anatomy project where Structureman learned once more how man was "made, a knowledge that had been lost. They began with the old ones and saved the young to the last. They thawed them out -- all at once, limb by limb, belly first, brain first. They gave them new blood, they shocked them with current, they massaged, pummelled, steamed, roasted. But nothing happened, and body after body was transferred from the right side of the hall to the left -- to serve the cause of science at last. Science learned that ancient man was just like modern man in all respects that mattered, but dental science had something of a boost -- the ancient dentures caused quite a furor. Structure-man didn't give up. Fist studied live and frozen cells under a microscope. He conducted tests. He electroprobed, irradiated. Gravitron irradiation seemed to help. The cells responded. Structure-man had this advantage: he understood radiation like no other humanity before or since. Gravvibes were, a truly new phenomenon. But then at last, spurred forward by small signs of success, Fist and his students made a key discovery. All of these men and women from the past had died of organic malfunctions. Fist could reconstitute them, in a manner of speaking, but in essence he labored to make fresh corpses from stale ones. The people were dead, and nothing helped, nothing at all, their livers were gone, their hearts had cracked, their brains were diseased. That is to say... all but one, all but one! That one was Sancho Jones Chu. Clipped to his ear was a blue tag that revealed his name and the date of his entombment, October #, #. He was the oldest of the ancients yet in a perverse way he seemed soundest of them all, fresh as a daisy. He'd died very quickly, the doctor decided. His organs were in immaculate state, his heart was strong, his brain solid, his lungs seemingly ready to breathe. His cells, much like those of the others, were ruptured from frost expansion, but for that Fist had found a remedy. Trembling with expectation, they carried Chu to the irradiation tube. Gently they placed him on metal springs. Gingerly they shoved him in, locked the door. Fist looked about at admiring faces and threw the switch. Five minutes later, with a tremendous banging and roaring -- he nearly destroyed the delicate instruments -- Chu came alive. The rest is a disappointing footnote to history. W e can view it all from a multiple perspective -- that of Structure sages who came from all over to question this phenomenon of the past -- historians, linguists, musicians, doctors, engineers, military men. They came, erudite, eager, curious. They came to see the only man who had -- until that time and, so far as we know' until ours -- made a long trip into the future. They came to see Sancho Jones Chu, Time Traveler. And they learned nothing, despite their superior linguistic skills and mastery of interrogation. Chu had almost nothing to contribute. Oh, yes, he sang for them a ditty or two, like "The mermaid's mother is a sure-fire gong." He told Structure-men knew all about cryogenics; their gravitron drums, after all, were cooled by liquid helium). He described the cities he had known, but through his eyes New York, Saigon, Vladivostok, Tokyo, Hamburg all had a certain seamy sameness. They tried, the sages, they tried valiantly. But Sancho Jones Chu , w as equal to the challenge. Even Structure-man gave up on him. The flood of delegations shrunk to a dribble, a drop, and then no one came any more. Chu drifted off, slowly. He janitored for the Institute where Dr. Fist had one of his centers of investigation. But then Chu grew restless. He'd always been a wanderer. A rolling stone, he was, and gathered no moss. He learned enough of the language to get along and didn't wonder much about the shape of the world because he simply didn't winder. He worked his way down through the levels of Drinaldo Structure, from Level # to the subterranean foundations where gravitron drums turned in the helium, Chu had a way, like all the rest of us, of finding his own level. He got work as a maintenance man. He did small chores, fixed plumbing. Over time he became something of a figure among his companions by dint of a strange accent and a penchant for clowning. He liked to show his courage and invulnerability -- after all he'd lived to be a hundred. And then one day he clowned about near one of the grav drums. They'd pulled the insulating covers off the pits to find a leak. Sancho Jones Chu tightrope-walked across a beam over the pit. He turned to grin at his frow ning, angrily shouting comrades. He lost his balance, fell into the liquid helium, and instantly froze to death. He was one thousand two hundred and twenty-nine years old. Such is fate. IF of the good things about doIf ing Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year is that it forces me to read a tremendous number of stories -- and to think about what I read. In editing three of those anthologies I've learned a great deal about what science fiction really is and a 'little of what the limits of the field should be. I'm still not quite sure of just how far the limits of good science fiction can extend. Maybe, in time, I'll arrive at some answer -- but I doubt that it will be a final one. Still, I can't resist putting down a few tentative conclusions. The proper range or extent of science fiction is certainly a lot greater than that of any other category of fiction, which is why it's so hard to define. A mystery or a Western can be pretty sharply limited. It might be said to lie along a certain line, never going above or below that; it. can add a few details -- romance, character, emo. tional moods, etc. -- but it is still restricted by its nature. Science fiction, on the other hand, is more like a whole group of lines at different angles, all crossing in the center, like the spokes of a wheel. It can follow the angle of the mystery, the adventure, the historical, or even the various angles of the mainstream. We have everything from the pure gadget story of I # (unrelated to any other type of fiction) to the attempts at 'pure writing' found in some late science fiction. We can even add large elements of pure fantasy -- usually masked by quasi-scientific explanations -- or our own wild fantasy of psi powers run rampant. Good science fiction can be laid along any of those lines. There is room in the field for every type of fiction conceivable, and any attempt to create an Exclusion Act must ring false. Still, there are limits. Being laid in a theoretical future doesn't make the novels of Alan Drury science fiction; neither does the excessive use of pseudoscientific gadgets in Mission Impossible justify calling that series science fiction. Probably the closer the story is to that hypothetical center where the lines cross, the purer a story is as science fiction. It isn't necessarily, however, a better science fiction story; in fact, the outstanding examples of science fiction usually are found fairly far out from that center. Dune , for instance, lies quite a ways out; so, in another direction, does "The Queen of Air and Darkness" and "The Nine farther from the center one goes, the greater must be the creativity and skill of the writer to achieve success. I don't know what the center Is, exactly. But I've been using a working hypothesis which places the stories in the better magazines from # to about # as somewhat typical of the central area. Using zero as a center and # as the extreme end of any line, those stories strike me as running within a circle out to about # or so. At the two extremes, running perhaps from # to #, would be the very crude stories of the late #'s and early #'s -- all gadgetry, without much of any decent writing or character -- and some of the so-called "new wave" stories of the late #'s -- all writing and character, with almost no original idea or development. Some of the stories I choose for anthologization still run within that circle no further than #; others run close to #; but those are rarely my favorites. The ones I like best are probably somewhere between # and #. I suppose this means that science fiction is still evolving, and that the skill of the writers has improved on the average to permit them to move further from the center. Or perhaps it is my own taste that has changed over the course of the years. But in any event, science fiction is unlike other categories, which have few lines -- if they have more than one -- and which seem to stick within a range that I would class as #-#, with a few outstanding ones going out to perhaps #! N one of the above has much to do with reviewing the current crop of books, though All Times Possible , by Gordon Eklund ing so far out from the center that it can barely be treated as science fiction. Eklund is one of the best of the newer writers, and he's done some excellent science fiction. But here he seems only mildly concerned with the single element that justifies the label. IF It's theoretically a story of alternate worlds or possibilities. A man who calls himself Tommy Bloome tries to assassinate a fascistic type of leader in # and is about to be shot for it. But instead, his unharmed body and mind are cast back to the year of his birth. There he sets about the job of trying to change the future by turning America into a communistic dictatorship, at which he more or less succeeds, with himself the leader. But he finds out fairly early that this isn't his world he's taking over. It's an alternate where there for instance; though strangely and without explanation, the Spanish American war seems to have been fought exactly the same without Hearst's propaganda for it! But once we have the gimmick, there's little more to the book that is science fiction. It's a grim story, beautifully told. In general, Eklund digs down into most of his characters very well indeed -- and this is a story of character throughout, and the effect of character on society and 'vice versa. It's a good story -- but it could have been just as good a story had it been laid in any time and place where such political maneuvering could or did take place. Even aside from its not really being science fiction, there are some flaws that bother me. The takeover by Tommy is sketched in too slightly. We see him inciting strikes -- and then we see him after the Revolution is succeeding. We don't really see how he managed his success. And that weakens our chapter, in trying to give a broader significance to the alternate possibilities, is confused and uncertain. Too much or too little can be read into it. It's good reading for what it is, though not as thoroughly developed as I'd like; but it isn't what readers pay for when they buy science fiction. W eb of everywhere, by John Brunner (Bantam, #), is definitely science fiction, but I'm not sure anything else should be said for it. Brunner can be one of the better adventure writers of the field, dependably sure to have a good idea and to tell a good story. He can also be one of the most controversial writers of books that are bitter, sometimes satiric, and somewhat experimental. But in this novel, he seems to have fallen somewhere between the two types; and this writing between the cracks isn't quite satisfactory. His gimmick is excellent. The world has invented something called the skelter (from helterskelter?) which permits instant teleportation from one to any other for which one has the code. As a result of this, the world went through a chaotic period of catastrophe, war, and population devastation. That might have made quite a story, from the hints we get of it. But this novel takes place after a measure of stability has returned, following the invention of a device to prevent unauthorized use of any skelter. The nominal main character is a talented but self-deceiving man named Dykstra, who manages to illicitly obtain codes to houses abandoned during the collapse, intending to take pictures and steal artifacts for a posthumous record that will win him fame. This is a complicated story of his downfall as a human being. There's also another, and far more interesting, character -- a bitter poet of the time who is amorally good. Unfortunately, the amoral poet is too divorced from the action and too well shielded by friends and servants to let us see him well or to serve as a source of interest in the story. And Dykstra is more sinned against by fate than sinning. At best, I find most novels of evil being hoist on its own petard unrewarding. But in this case, the evil of Dykstra is very petty, and the petard seems to be merely the blind workings of mischance, rather than any fault of his. There are moments of excellence, but I can't recommend the novel. I can recommend a new book for those interested in teaching or criticising science fiction, and especially for those who are trying to study the field for the first time. This is Science Fiction: and Introduction, by L. David Allen, M. A. (Cliffs Notes, Lincoln, Nebraska, #). This is the first academic work meant to explain our field which I can genuinely applaud. There is a section on science fiction categories that serves as a good beginning, followed by analyses of fourteen novels; these are well chosen, beginning with one by Verne and one by Wells, and then going through a dozen that are excellent illustrative novels, representative of the best in current science fiction! There follows a thoughtful and' somewhat successful attempt to define science fiction followed by other useful pieces. The bibliography at the. end could only have been prepared by someone who has a wide acquaintance with the field and good judgment as to what is worth reading. In the past. I've been generally disgusted by most of the books about science fiction and the reading lists I've seen. With a couple of exceptions, these lists have been either archaic or so slanted that they don't fairly represent us, and the books have labored more to explain us away than to give any real information about us. This is a valid and most useful book -- and one that should be a pleasure to read for anyone who likes science fiction and would welcome a chance to see a reasonable criticism of it. I'm delighted to recommend it most highly! I 'm also happy to recommend a marvelous reference book that may not refer to science fiction but should be welcome to most readers, since it relates to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. This has been available for some time in hard covers, but will now be available in a soft-cover edition, making it triply a bargain. The book is A Guide to Middle Earth, by Robert Foster (Ballantine, #). It contains literally everything you wanted to know about Middle Earth and wete unable to discover before. It more than proves my contention that the really great work of research in the IF field of science fiction or fantasy is done by serious fans, rather than by professional researchers. A little over a year ago, I was teaching a course in fantasy at a university, and found the students asking questions that I simply didn't have the time to answer through research in the original books. I found that in every case, Foster not only provided the answers, but he led on to further answers we hadn't had the wit to find answers for. And I began to realize that there was all sorts of information in the book that I never would have discovered for myself. If you are just reading Tolkien, you'll find the book invaluable whenever a name or place or thing comes up for which you have no memory. And if you're already something of a student of Tolkien you'll find your knowledge of Middle Earth deepened and enriched by the material in this book. It's arranged like a dictionary or glossary for convenience, with numerous cross references that can lead you on almost endlessly, or simply answer your immediate questions at once. If you like Tolkien, this is an absolute must for you! another must for collectors and V libraries is a brochure put out bfyperion Press, Inc., # Riverside Avenue, Westport, Conn., #. This is a list of # classics of science fiction they are publishing, as well as all the historical works on the field by Sam Moskowitz. I don't intend to review all the books here, or even to list them, but the "classics" are books that have long been out of print and which, in many cases, are milestones of science fiction. They include works by L. Frank Baum, Robert W. Chambers, Ray Cummings, George Allan England, David H. Keller, A Merritt, Garrett P. Serviss, and Stanley G. Weinbaum, among many others. Among the books by Sam Moskowitz (who selected all the others) is his long out-of-print The Immortal Storm (# paper, # cloth). This is a history of early fandom, from the beginning until the days when it was becoming almost respectable. It reads at times as if what went on in early fandom was far more important than all the other politics and wars of the world -- and yet, that is precisely the way it has to read to give a true feeling of those days. No fan who wants to know the who and what and why of those days should miss it. Besides, it's fun to read. The other books also come in paper covers (as well as cloth) for prices that range from # to #. Like the cloth-bound versions, these are printed on extremely high-grade paper that should last for hundreds of years, and their binding is standard book binding, rather than the glue-andhope stuff usually used for softbound books. The brochure lists the books with summaries of their plots and importance. I'd recommend it for anyone seriously interested in obtaining some of these classic novels. X J. O. Jeppson (Houghton, ifflin, #), is a curious novel which seems in some ways to be related more to those early novels of our field than to most that are being written today. It has the cosmic sweep of serials that were running back around # and covers a span of some seventy edge of the galaxy to Earth and then far beyond, until we find ourselves battling to preserve the Magellanic clouds. Unfortunately, some of the writing also resembles that being done back then. There are moments of quiet when the writing becomes quite effective, but usually we're rushed from event to event -- from alien gods to robotic evil beings and mutated dinosaurs, from psi to alpha rhythms and on to unlimited powers between systems of universes. The characters are usually rather simple, with good and evil starkly separated, though not unchangeable. It's a strange book. But if you're looking for the old sense of wonder laid on with a vengeance, this has it! and finally, a bit of publishing folly which is such a good book ofrts kind that I can't overlook it, even though it's fantasy, not science fiction. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. should be reaching the libraries by the time this is in print. You won't find it in many of the bookstores or adult libraries, however, since the publisher mistakenly thinks it's a juvenile for ages "#I up." The up is correct -- very much up. I don't know of any fantasy novel I would call more genuinely adult in every good meaning of the word! It's about a wizard-woman named Sybel in the countries around Eld. The background is vaguely medieval (perhaps Celtic). She has the power to call up all the legendary beasts -- magical beasts -- of that world and keep them in her power. And with them she exists, cut off from the world, until she is forced to adopt a child. From then on, she's entrapped into the world and the struggles of men; and her character and power are sadly tried and tempted. It's a hard book to describe, since there's a marvelous subtlety to its development. Repeatedly, the great discovery or event that could be the ending in a lesser writer's hands is developed early in the plot, leaving us to go on to a deeper and more fascinating story. The real ending, when it comes, is that most wonderful resolution -- one which is inevitable but unexpected. This is a true fairy tale in its telling and its development -- but fairy tales were not originally for children, and this one is too real, too complex, too soundly based on character, for the term juvenile to apply. Maybe someday it will be out in soft covers, with a better title than the awkward one it now has. (I'm hoping to promote The Calling of Sybel as a much truer title -- in all the meanings of that second word.) Meantime, if you like fantasy, try to find this. I haven't enjoyed a fantasy as much since I first discovered Tolkien!  IF 'hy Jan, Trenkolm,  N ow they're at the crash-site, opened -- but pot many. Several The latest bulletin says that hundred people were on those two there may be survivors on the jets. The big #'s have been flying second plane, the one that managnearly a decade without a major aced some kind of landing as it cident -- but this midair collision over Dulles makes up for lost opportunity, doesn't it? I'm glad I quit last week. I don't have to be there. I've seen more death in the last few months than I'll ever take from nightmares. Plane crashes, earthquakes, and that ghastly subway fire in Boston. The radiation accident in Arizona. The building collapse here in midtown. It never got easier. No matter how often I forgot how it was for them at the end, it just never got easier. When I told Sam I quit, that I couldn't take the deaths anymore, he didn't even look up from the report on his desk. Even though I expected this, it hurt. I found myself making all the old, useless accusations about Julie while he delivered his usual talk about how all we would have without her would be a dingy office and a file of reports on people with high scores on Rhinecard runs. What he really meant was that his picture would be off the cover of Life , we wouldn't be in the throes of a not-too-friendly divorce, and I wouldn't be halfway down the yellow brick road to a nervous breakdown. When I left, I heard him dialing. Julie, of course. From whom all blessings and etc. The juvenile authorities dumped her on us eight months ago. They were as glad to get rid of her as we to take over. Glad? .God help us, we were sick with happiness. Sam and I had just about run out of money, faith and time. We had almost completed a year's sabbatical from Duke that we had taken to find and utilize psychically talented people for the Nation's Good. Our progress had not been spectacular. We had plenty of files on people who thought they could teleport or levitate but couldn't. We had some more on people who could light a match by concentrating long enough, except under direct observation. Somewhere out there were the telepaths and levitators and precogs and all the rest. But they hadn't come to us -- and we hadn't been able to find them. Understandable, of course. If I were a high level telepath instead of a low level empath, I'm not sure that I'd advertise the fact. Salem wasn't that long ago, folks. Julie Albertson came along when we desperately needed her. The first time the police noticed her on the scene of a fire, they tagged her as another spectator and likewise the second and third. The fourth, at a really nasty apartment fire, they busted her for arson. Shortly, when the specialists pinpointed the cause as faulty wiring, Julie was released with apologies and considerable embarrassment. Two weeks later, another massive fire broke out at a grade school. Reliable witnesses put Julie on the scene at least twenty minutes before the alarm and the police pulled her in again. And released her again when the verdict of accidental origin came. IF The sixth time, a week after that, they called us. We picked her up at Juvenile Detention and when they brought her out, I could feel the cold, steady hate. Julie Albertson. Her mother who hadn't seen her in a year and "good riddance anyway" had told the authorities that Julie was seventeen, a liar, and a tramp. None of this had led me to expect a grimy but pretty child with long blonde hair. She was long-legged and skinny -- am I trying to say coltish? -- and wearing wrinkle-tight jeans and sweater that only flatter the very thin and young. Seeing her, I had a flash of retrospect: how it felt to be that young. Thirty-two had never seemed older. Then she looked at me and I felt young again. Those eyes. Blue and closed and hard. Hooker's eyes, holding in everything, giving out nothing. While Sam went off to sign the papers, I looked up the detective I had worked with during my stint as a human lie detector. After I had helped him nail several by monitoring their emotions during questioning, he had become a believer. He was the one who had suggested Sam and me as the solution to Julie. "She scares me," he said reassuringly, "my brother-in-law was one of the firemen at that grade school fire. Twenty-eight kids had died and he saw that one standing there, smiling the whole time like it was a circus." I didn't mention this to Sam. The last few days he had been hopeful again, after weeks of growing despair. He suspected Julie was a precog and able to see the fires before they happened. I didn't want to take advantage of his good mood. Our marriage, never exactly stable, had been fraying more than usual under his failure. Maybe if Julie turned out to be what he hoped the pressure would lift for a time and I could make some repairs in our relationship. But I agreed with the cop. Julie scared me. Sam, though, was all enthusiasm. He sat next to her on the ride home oozing concern and trustworthiness. He asked her about herself and her dreams and anything else that might open her up. Usually Sam's charm works with the ladies. Sometimes too well. Julie, however, just sat, alternately staring through the window and peeling crimson polish from her ragged fingernails. Sam got nothing from her but mumbles and  shrugs. He waited until we were back home near Du Pont Circle to try his surefire, shake-em-up stunt. Julie was slumped on the couch in the living room. Sam levitated the queen from the chess set on the table and floated it over to her, letting it bob in front of her eyes. It's his only psychic talent. Julie's eyes bugged. "Did you do that?" she said when the queen came down. "Sure," he said, "and I think you can do the same sort of thing. In fact, I think you have." "Me?" "The fires," he said. Nothing. She looked defiant but I thought it was fear and wondered why she rt was afraid now when she hadn't been with the police. Sam went on, "I know what you did." The fear doubled and became almost panic. It sent waves through me. "I think you saw those fires before they happened." The fear went away. She thumbed the hair behind her ears. "Yeah," she said, "I saw them. I didn't want to tell the fuzz but -- " She smiled hesitantly, "I saw them kind of like in a vision. I've always seen stuff like that." I'd been letting Sam handle it. Why not? But the image of those children in that school bothered me. More coldly than I meant to I said, "If you knew, why didn't you tell someone?" "Who's going to believe if I tell them a fire's gonna start?" she said. Sam hurried to her defense. I knew it was a move to gain her confidence but it irritated me. "Julie's right. No one would have believed her, and she probably feels worse about those kids than you do." He was watching me and didn't see Julie's smile. I could imagine that smile at another time... T he fight we had after Julie had been settled in the guest room wasn't our first, but the first over Julie. "Look Erika," he said when I had finished my reservations, "I'll grant you that she's not your normal seventeen year old kid. But she's a pre-cog!" "She's a monster who enjoys watching people die. If she had told the authorities a fire was going to start, sure the first time they'd have written her off as a crackpot. But the third time? The sixth? She didn't warn anyone because she wanted those fires, do you understand that?" I could see Sam was getting angry but he said quietly, "Yoy aren't even trying to understand. All right, maybe -- and I won't accept it, but maybe -- she does enjoy watching death. If you'd been having visions of disasters since you were young, how would you react?" "Differently." "No? Then you'd have probably gone mad. My feeling is that her lack of concern is an adjustment, her defense against a phenomenon that must have scared her silly in the beginning." "All right," I said. It made some sense and I loved him. "You've got a point. I'll give her a chance. But I don't expect a thing from her." T he change in Julie over the next few days was close to something, however. The hard-case personality was discarded, along with IF the layers of mascara and the trashy clothes. In its place appeared a sweet-faced blonde angel, cheerful and oh-so-eager to learn. Sam kept murmuring about The Right Environment and Those Who Finally Understood. I wanted a miracle. But when I looked underneath, I still saw the Julie who smiled at death. Like most resident astrologers and clairvoyants and such, Sam had been on a local television talk show a few times. When they asked him back later that month, he took Julie with him. Despite my misgivings about her, I had none of her talent. The disasters she predicted -- and that seemed to be all she could predict -- were inevitably front page the next day. On the talk show, outfitted in a demure dress and newly acquired manners, she foresaw a private plane crash with just the right note of dismay in her soft voice while Sam smiled fatuously. The next morning, after her prediction proved correct, the front porch was awash with reporters and curiosity seekers. Within a week she had made three more appearances and three more correct (and terrible) predictions. Requests came. Sam opened new offices. He looked for a staff. And that was the point of no return. Julie was now responsible for Sam's success and the vindication of his theories. With each tragedy -- and once people began to believe, some were averted or lessened by preparation -- her fame and Sam's grew. Julie always made a point of crediting him with the development of her gift. And he deserved that credit. He worked with her for hours each day to increase her physical range. Soon she was picking up impending large-scale disasters as far as three thousand miles away. But he failed to increase the time limit on her perception. It had never been more than an hour; it averaged half of that... and following a prediction, she couldn't pick up a thing for a while. The larger the disaster, the longer the disappearance of her gift. Power drain, Sam said. But even with those limitations, she saved lives. Acceptance became adulation. Grateful thousands overwhelmed her with gifts and money began to come in from places that had never answered our letters before. Slowly, other psychics -- although none so spectacular as Julie -- came crawling out, seeking the fame she had received. They felt safer, perhaps, because the world loved our Julie. But I didn't. I couldn't. Whenever a predicted disaster came near, I tuned in on her emotions and they were always the same: pleasure and a terrible insatiable thing which I could only interpret as lust. And it became stronger. Often, when a disaster had not been averted, the authorities asked me to reach for the lingering, last emotions of the dead to help them judge if a pilot had had some warning before a crash or if a murderer had killed with or without premeditation. Sam and Julie stayed near me on these investigations. Inevitably I'd end up concentrating on Julie instead of the victims. I monitored her morbidly. And became certain. I should have told Sam when I first suspected. I waited too long. I had wanted to be wrong about her for Sam's sake so I waited... and then he wouldn't listen. From the first, Julie had haunted our house and relationship. Whenever I managed to pry Sam from his work for a party or an increasingly rare dinner, Julie had a nasty habit of having a prediction. When he invariably hurried off I made a show of being understanding... at first. But the night Julie interrupted our first evening together in two months with a prediction of a mine collapse, I exploded. He put down the phone and told me what she had said. "That was nice. At least she gave us a start together tonight." "Not again." "I can't stand it." He put on his coat. "Damn it, Erika, she apologized for us before she told me! What else can she do?" "She always apologizes. You're not an empath, Sam. It's strictly for public consumption. And that one-hour limit on predictions!" "What do you mean?" "I'll tell you what I mean," I said, "she can see as far ahead as she wants. She just doesn't want to. If she prevented all the dying, what would she do for fun?" "Erika!" "Don't sound shocked," I said. "Last week when we got there with the police just in time to prevent that murder-suicide, you were ecstatic because we saved two lives. While the police were hauling the man away, Julie was staring at him. You didn't watch, Sam; she looked like someone was making love to her. I don't know if she's a sadist or a necrophiliac or something even worse, but she's sick. And she's delaying her predictions for fun." The angry denial I expected didn't come. "Listen, Erika," he said, "I know how you feel. Things have been hard on you lately. But Julie isn't responsible for a talent that's more spectacular than yours any more than she can help being younger. Or -- " "Prettier?" "I didn't say that." "You would have. I couldn't stand to hear you say it." I looked at him, trying to see my husband through Julie's eyes. Tall, blond, a few gray hairs and wrinkles around the eyes, but quite acceptable. "I've gotten used to your other women, Sam," I said, "but isn't this one a little young?" "Wait a minute!" IF "I wonder if she really feels for you or she's just trying to get at me." The anger came, then. "I knew you were jealous, but this is crazy," Sam said. "Crazy? Because you never thought I'd find out. I was so busy concentrating on Julie and worrying about you that I didn't even think about the possibility of this. But are you really dense enough to think I haven't known about the others?" "What others?" "Yes," I said, "I guess you are. So I let you get away with your playing around because I love you and wanted you here. But not this time. Not now." "What are you going to do?" "Nothing. Nothing at all. It's up to you." He looked at me for a minute, turned and walked out the door. His choice. It wasn't a choice between Julie and me so much as between me and everything he had wanted to be. Afterward, I continued working with him though. W e were civil at the office. I wanted some tangible evidence to support my suspicions about Julie. But it didn't come, and just before he and Julie left for a personal appearance swing on the coast, the office gossip and accumulated death made me decide to quit. I had told no one but Sam of my suspicions. Anything I said would have been written down as jealousy. And until today I really didn't have any evidence. Now, I've seen the monster. I still have a key to the office. Knowing they'd be at the crashsite, I came in to poke around. In a drawer of Julie's desk, under piles of other things, I found a small diary filled with notations in a round scrawl. In the back was a careful listing of her predictions -- including today's crash. She hasn't been in here since Friday, three days ago. So much for her time limit. Then, I went through the rest of the diary and discovered that I was wrong. That wasn't it at all. No wonder Julie had been frightened when Sam announced he knew what she was doing, back at the beginning. Julie's not a pre-cog. She hasn't been gaining range and control but power and imagination. No wonder there's a "drain" after a prediction. Just think how much psychic energy it must have taken to make those two jets collide. I thought of taking the evidence to Sam. But he had made the choice: he had gone with her. So I'm taking it to the press. And while I'm at it, I think I'll tell them that Sam has known all along what she's been doing. And come to think of it, I believe the bastard has.  fcVc E.ii. Hr W' Come with me down to the subbasement. Down the winding stone passageways. Listen to the drip drip of seeping water. Hear the echoes of our steps. Listen to your loud, frightened breathing. Here's the door. I slowly unlock the huge padlocks, slide the rusty bolts. The arched, iron-bound wooden door creaks open. We enter. I lift the lantern high... There he is, hunched in a corner beside a teetering stack of ancient pulp Amazings. He is chewing the bones and sinews of an unwary author. You cry out in a low, strangled voice, "Th-that's your alter-ego, Geis?" I nod grimly. "Not a pretty sight, but such things rarely are." Alter lifts his head. He tosses Alan Dean Foster's left narrative bone into a passageway between looming, overloaded shelves. His feral eyes gleam. His hungry gaze fastens on you as he speaks to me. "My next victim, Geis?" His voice is Demonic, horrible, intense. "No, Alter. This is a reader, an observer. He is one of those we serve." "So this is what they look like. I think we've wasted our time." "Don't be cynical. Readers are sacred. They're an endangered species. We must protect -- ' "I believe in the survival of the fittest. Let them die out if they can't survive in this world. They'll have to get smart or get extinct." "But where would we be without readers?" "Writing short captions in big type for picture magazines. 'This is Senator Blah Blah. See him vote for good laws. He is a good man."' "Alright, Alter. How would you advise readers to survive?" "They've got to get better food to read. They've got to stop accepting this junk-reading editors have been feeding them. They've got to write letters, yell and scream for a better diet." "And of course you know all about the proper care and feeding of readers." "Yes, Geis. Don't be sarcastic. I'm an alter-ego. I'm down here where the nitty grates against the gritty and the Id howls all the time." "But this gentleman here is a specialized reader. He's a sciencefiction reader. He is mostly interested in ideas and sense-ofwonder concepts and -- " "And that's a lot of bull. I read this stuff till my eyes burn, candle after candle, tin plate full of swill after tin plate full of swill, sleep after sleep, year after year, and I've been telling you and telling you, Geis, science fiction is still fiction, and fiction is an art-form that operates primarily in emotions. Or, it should. Most science fiction writers act as if emotion is a four-letter word." "And I keep telling you. Alter, that s-f is a literature of ideas!" "You dumb orange-sucker! That's why readers, and especially science-fiction readers are dying ouL -- the main ingredient of good fiction writing is largely missing in s-f. Ideas and sense-of-wonder on an intellectual level can be presented in an essay... in articles. Fiction is drama -- emotional situation -- with the reader emotionally involved with tjhe characters, living the story, in it. When was the last time a character in an s-f story came alive for you? When was the last time you gave a real damn if he lived or died? -- and really cared how the story came out?" "Well..." "Look at that reader you brought in here. See how famished he is? What does he get? Cardboard, for God's sake! Half-assed stories with limp, underdone endings. Some stories with no endings at all. How can a reader stay healthy on fare like that?" "But ideas -- " "Ideas are what determine the shape of the cake, the flavor, the color, the frosting, but emotions are the eggs and flower and shortening." "Sometimes your analogies. Alter -- " "Shut up, Geis. Readers are hungry for gut-emotions, but it seems like most writers are afraid to deal in them. Or even embarrassed to use them." "You always have been a bloodthirsty creature. You tend -- " "Will you shut up? My point -- " "What do you want, R-rated stories in s-f magazines?" "You're damn right! I want some stories, not all, but some, which sink hooks so deep into a reader's guts he'll carry scars the rest of his life." "You ask too much." "Why? I want, as a reader, to get into a character who really cares about something. I want emotion. I don't want to read about a bloodless, passionless, name, a cutout who doesn't have a body;" "Now, you know sex is -- " "Sex is not what I'm getting at. I want people in the fiction I read to sweat and stink and have gas and occasionally think ugly thoughts and eat too much pie and love to play ping-pong and look longingly... or indifferently... at a member of the opposite sex and who have to be reminded to get their hair cut -- while they are being realistically heroic or competent or incompetent in coping with future life-and-death problems. That's all." "Don't whine. Alter. I hate a sniveling alter-ego." "If that's asking too much, Geis, I'll set tire to these Archives. I'll -- " "On the other hand -- there's fiction to your taste once in a while in the magazines." "Name three." "Well, Dying Inside by Bob Silverberg, Project # by Frank Herbert..." "Uh-huh. Go on." "Well... ummm... Ray Nelson isn't afraid to write about real human beings. And Richard Lupoff and Phil Farmer on occasion, and  have been known -- " "I'm not talking about porno, Geis. Where are my matches?" "Ellison! Harlan Ellison is becoming known for his recent violent, graphic, sledgehammer fantasies." "Yeah... 'A Boy and His Dog' where the boy and his dog end up eating the girl. And 'Bleeding Stones' where stone creatures come alive on a church as a result of smog and other pollutants and ravage a huge crowd of young religious fanatics. Very acidly ironic and relevant. But that is shock value realism -- hit'em hard enough and they'll remember your story forever -- and I want everyday honest real realism. You want me to burn thesestacks from A to Z or Z toward A? Any favorite author you want torched first?" "Well, you might singe Stanislaw Lem a bit -- NO! Alter, if you touch flame to a single page of these precious book and magazines I'll throw you dowm the Hole." "N-not that!" cringe "Why... even Ted White wouldn't do that to Harry Harrison!" "Yes -- that. But you need not fear as long as you behave. Remember, we must keep one thing perfectly clear: I am the resident! You may snarl and growl and eat stray authors now' and then, but you and I have a Duty to serve and protect science fiction and fantasy." " Fauugh ! Your dedication is not normal, Geis. It reeks of avoidance mechanisms and Games." "Do not spout psychology at me. Alter. You can be repressed, you know." "Go ahead. Repress me! I need a nice, quiet vacation. I'd like nothing better than to get back to my used synapse collection. I'm years behind in my cataloging and mounting." "You'll get more years behind before I'm through with you. Now, finish your stupid complaints about True Realism in s-f and fantasy. I've spent enough time with you." "I hate you with a hate, Geis, a hate that -- " "Alright, I'll finish for you. You think a real guy or gal can be heroic and can w in and solve and struggle to a solid conclusion while still being less than ideal and less than totally virtuous." "Something like that. Of course that kind of w riting requires special skills and special minds, and since # of current science fiction and fantasy is written by incompetents -- " IF " What sacrilege is this?" " -- and for some strange reason, Geis, it is very difficult to create an honest, whole character in a few well chosen words, weave him or her into an s-f story and make it all blend and work together. Good writing in one aspect of a story requires equally good writing in all other areas." "But -- " "Why would a fine writer waste his time with low-paying science fiction or the very low-paying fantasy field?" "We have good writers!" "Good, yes. Some good pretentious writers, some good hack writers, some good earnest message writers, some good specialized writers... but only two or three who can put it all together consistently." "Alter, stop! You're shocking the reader. His eyes are wide. He's twitching and making soft mewing sounds." "He has to know the truth sometime. We don't get top quality s-f except by accident -- a good writer will once in a while rise to a peak and create a first class work... or a young quality writer will hit our genre like a comet as he passes through to bigger markets and higher fame." "' that's true... Why am I saving all this second-rate writing? Why not bum it? Could you possibly be right? Have I wasted our lives? why do you do this to me?" "Don't carry on like that, Geis. I hate bad acting. An atomic bomb couldn't shake you. You have dug yourself a niche, here, and it gives direction and meaning to our lives. So you make the most of it. Admit it." "You... go... too... far. I warn thee -- " "Okay, okay! I withdraw my last few statements. C-close the Hole. I'll just make a final argument or two -- " "Get on with it!" "Right. I'm sick and tired of shallow realism -- slick realism -- a kind of pro forma, automatic, hack realism that has emerged in the last few years in s-f and fantasy writing. A few soft-core swear words, a few anatomical references, a few sex scenes devoid of eroticism." "After all. Alter, the little old ladies in tennis shoes are still Out There, still ready to pounce and scream if an editor publishes anything too porno-ish." "Geis, you nerd, I don't want porno in s-f and fantasy! I just want real people in science fiction. I want... I want Richard Nixon in science fiction!"  Shocked Silence "And I w'ant whole women in science fiction, and whole children... and whole cultures and w hole future societies and whole -- " "Come on, reader. He's flipped out again. He does this a couple times a year. The next phase is incoherent ranting and babbling. Then fitful weeping. I hate to see him weep." I relock the door. I lead the way back up to the ground floor. I smile, turn out the lantern. Now you know f my secret. Maybe I'll take you down to visit Alter again one day... if you'll promise not to believe a word he says. Philip K. Dick wrote a letter to me the other day (May #, to be pinpointy) which he wished published. He assumed it would be in The Alien Critic, but here it gets a wider audience, and here it pleases me to publish the whole thing. "Dear Dick, "Just wanted to say that in England the S-F journal Foundation seems to be following your lead as a forum where all sorts of meaningful (and meaningless, as well) comments about S-F can appear and be read -- throughout the world. " Foundation admits that a certain rare courage is needed to do this. I think you have it, and I'd like to tell you this. "I hear from people in England who cite The Alien Critic as the place where they read such-andsuch, so you do get around. In my opinion you are doing an acutely valuable job, and Foundation iswill be doing so, too, in their country. "While I'm writing you I might mention the new novel I'm considering writing; it has to do with the phonograph-record business, which I was involved with, at the retail end, for over seven years. I guess I'll make it a S-F novel, though, setting it in the future. My memory tapes (so to speak) have few if any gaps in them about my years in the record business, what with the ripoffs and payola. The small profits for the retailer, the huge chains that are wholesalers-retailers who crowd out the little guy. "Provisionally, I will call the record company dogshit records inc. (Or dri, as they now have emi, rca, mca, etc.) In my head I've blocked out the story of an android who has an agent who is another android, but neither knows the other is an invader. (There is a sort of mutual surprise ending, but the main thing is to lay forth the inner workings of an industry or our readership, in a novel of the sort I tend to write and they tend to read.) The musical artist'.s agent is named (are you ready?) Skim Morewithit, and so forth. There are rip-offs of royalties, two sets of books, all the usual stuff you find today and yesterday in the record business. As to locale, I haven't decided. Maybe on Jupiter, because it will be a (ahem) heavy novel." M y comments: Foundation is an. improving s-f journal -- t like a mouse between the cat of its academic readers and supporters, and the popularitybaited trap of needing subscriptions from the fans and average s-f readers who usually take one look at professional writing and run away. Peter Nicholls is now Foundations editor, a well-read, sharpthinking man who is trying to thread a line between too much stuffy analytical writing and too much "popularized" writing and features. Foundation at the moment is too straight-laced and dignified for my taste, but I'm so low-brow most IF people can't find my forehead. Subscriptions to Foundation are #. per four issues, surface mail, or #. airmail. From: The Administrator, The Science Fiction Foundation, North East London Polytechnic, Longbridge Road, Dagenham, Essex, RM#, #AS, England. Phil's projected novel (which I hope he will write but which I fear is a joke) prompts speculation as to possible titles. I might suggest Uni or Spin Me, Said the Poo-Poo Man. (A little ubiquitous self-censorship, there.) # rom the beginning of hisJp tory," said Orlo, "the world seems to have been dominated by about five percent of its males. An additional fifteen percent could join that group, but they can't quite make it. Of the remaining #, seven or eight are sex variants; and the remaining # percent constitute that large body of hardworking, normal people who get married and raise families and don't get divorced except for good reason. This seventy percent, it has turned out. essentially accept a government's visible public image." -- Future Glitter by A. E. van Vogt. guess I'm just unlucky. An old friend came over last night, and to avoid playing chess with him and listening to his endless troubles (which I was buried under, in the end, anyway) I suggested we take in Zardoz, an apparently high-powered s-f movie playing down at the Jantzen Beach Tri-Cinema. So we tooled down to the renovated flood plain which is now covered with concrete and mobile dollar shopping center (all waiting for a massive snow-melt one of these years to create instant disaster as the Columbia River does its thing) (will a # x # mobile home float?) in his old Belchsmog Eight and paid our #. (One of the reasons I'm writing this review: I can charge that # as a business expense. The Fates owe me that much.) Zardoz was written, directed and produced (he has no excuses) by John Boorman. It is a sour, smelly, ugly, repellent, pretentious mess. I mostly enjoyed its fast-moving display of s-f furniture from our warehouse. The trouble is, Boorman managed to get dirt all over our things. The story lurches and staggers through much gratuitous murder, rape, assault, and much sanitized semi-nudity (all the women are small-breasted), simulated intercourse, smirky-funny scenes dealing with male erections, and magicscience. Briefly, the story is about a small group of immortal Eternals who live, # years from now, in forcefield protected enclaves. They are the self-appointed "civilized" remnants of mankind who have kept science,' literature and art preserved after a worldwide Blowup. The Eternals use a huge flying stone head called Zardoz to control a group of Outside killer tribes who obey the massive head as a god. These killers have been motivated to kill off the ragged survivors of the old cities and towns. A killer tribe mutant (Sean Connery) stows away in Zardoz during one of its periodic visits to spew out guns and ammo and take on a cargo of grain. Zed (Connery) and his fellow mutants resent the recent Zardoz commands to change from slaving them for grain-growing purposes. The enclaves, called vortexes, cannot grow all their own food. Zed kills the Eternal who operates Zardoz, leaves the stone god when it lands in a vortex (it is computer operated by remote control), js "captured" by the easy-going yet ruthless Eternals, is experimented upon, examined ('What an interesting beast'), and in turn has his revolutionary anarchistic effect upon them and their fragile society. There is a self-conscious hidden computer used by all the vortexes called The Tabernacle. It dispenses wish-science via "magic" rings. There is a yenlust among the Eternals for death. (For every sin and rule violation they are tried and punished by a certain amount of aging, but never, never allowed to die.) I could go on and on describing the intriguing plot elements such as the Eternals lack of sex drive because of ennui and over-intellectualization, their ability (through the computer and developed psipowers) to recreate themselyes if accidentally killed or damaged, their view of all types of human Outsiders as mere halfway intelligent animals... In the end Zed discovers the hidden computer, "kills" it and lets in his killer friends. In an orgy of shooting and stabbing, the killer tribesmen wipe out all but a handful of the Eternals. The Eternals got what they subconsciously and philosophically wanted, you see, since they created the mutants as seeds of their own destruction. The vortexes, Zardoz and The Tabernacle were Evil and really not suited for mankind. Zed and his favorite Eternal woman escape the carnage and (in #I -- A Space Odyssey type stopmotion, time-passing sequences) raise a child, wither and die. Very symbolic and arty. Zardoz is clumsy, obviously derivative, dumb, exploitive, pandering, and inept. It is probably a prime candidate for Worst Movie of the Year dishonors. If you see it you'll be ashamed of yourself a you walk out of the theater. T he immature man laughs at the foolishness of others. The mature man laughs at himself. The wise man smiles at the world. The superior man employs the immature, the mature and the wise. I f i knew how to end this column, I'd doit. IF T here are several cases this month resulting from the Hart Amendment to the McClellan Act. This amendment allows U.S. Citizenship to alien life forms previously granted temporary residency under the provisions of the McClellan Act. Several questions have been raised concerning the status of these new United States Citizens. Hegarv. the Commissioner, (#nd Cir. November #, #) T.C. #. The intelligent inhabitants of the Second Planet of the Albedonian System, Albedonian II, are in fact sets of specialized unicellular organisms. These organisms cooperatively join together to form colonies which look remarkably like gigantic earthworms. During the late civil war on Albedonian II, their Ambassador to the United States, a colony of approximately # cells called Hegar, asked for and received political asylum. This colony then entered the accounting profession, where the fantastic attention to detail provided by # organisms (even though unicellular) focused on one task made the colony spectacularly successful. Accordingly, in the calendar year #, Hegar's first year of being a citizen, the colony grossed #. The colony argued that each of the # cells could file an individual income tax return. It was argued that a partnership had been set up to act as a conduit for the resulting income of the colony, each cell having a proportionately equal share. Therefore, even though the colony had earnings of about # of gross income, the proportionate share of each cell was under #c which was under the # annual gross income tax exemption. (It was, indeed, fortunate for the taxpayers' claim that the amount attributable to each cell was under # or some # tax returns would have been required.) The Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service called in several extraterrestrial biologists who determined that the specialized cells could not survive as individuals for longer than twelve hours. Taxpayers' Counsel, on the other hand, showed that the individual cells were able to select a particular colony and moreover could switch from one colony to another. It was also pointed out that since the cells reproduced by fission the members of the colony had no access to a joint return. The Commissioner counterclaimed that if the colony's tax status were to be calculated on such an extremely micro basis, consideration should be taken of the individual cells which had died and the new cells which had replaced IF them. In effect, the members of the colony were guilty of not filing approximately # estate tax returns (the half-life of a cell is approximately one year). Hegar argued that the apiount attributable to the average estate was less than the required minimum of # for filing an estate tax return. Finally, the Commissioner contended that the primary motivation for the partnership was tax evasion. The taxpayers' counsel showed that close cooperation among all cells was necessary for the performance of the colony duties as an accountant; hence, the necessity for the partnership. The question of motivation is somewhat elliptical. As the Court said, "The crucial question is not whether the reason advanced by the taxpayers is so weighty as to have required the formation of a partnership; rather, the question is whether this was the real reason that caused the cells to form the partnership." The Court believed the colony, despite the presence of certain counter indications. Thus, the colony did not have to file any income or estate taxes for the year #I . The Internal Revenue Service will undoubtedly appeal this decision. agiant Vegan Toad v. the ComV missioner, (U. S. Supreme Court, October #, #) Here, the Supreme Court reiterated the principle that death must be conclusively proved before estate taxes are due. The facts of this case are as follows. The giant toads of Vega are known for their symbiotic relationships with their masters. They attach themselves onto an intelligent life form and, doglike, follow that individual around until its death. Since the toad's life span is approximately # Vegan years (approximately #-## as long as a Terrestrial year), it generally ouflives its master. While possessed of a master the toad is extremely passive, but upon the demise of this individual a strange transformation takes place: the toad takes on the personality of its master and becomes privy to all of the memories of its master. Accordingly, for all intents and purposes, the personality of the master lives on in the Vegan Toad. Such a symbiotic relationship is viable between Earthmen and Vegan Toads. Accordingly, Vegan Toads were much in demand in the United States as pets. Several commentators have argued that it is not clear that the Earthman has really survived the transformation. Also, it may not be pleasant spending approximately # Vegan years in the body of a toad. However, the transplanted personalities interviewed by the Press expressed admiration for the new perspectives gained by the transmigration. One modified toad commented, "It's not so bad, especially when you consider the alternative." Amus Tuck, a wealthy uranium miner, was one of the first Americans to have a Vegan Toad. He died March #, #. The terms of his will left all of his worldly possessions in trust to his faithful Vegan Toad. The decedant's attorney contended that no estate taxes were due since Amus had not died, but continued reincarnated as the Vegan Toad. The Commissioner contended that: #) there was no conclusive evidence that the toad was, in fact, the reincarnated Amus Tuck and that #) even if the above were true, Tuck was medically and legally dead and, accordingly, death taxes were due. Finally, the Commissioner pointed out that if the defendant believed in the efficacy of reincarnation, no will would have been necessary. An amicus curiae brief was filed by Brenda Tuck and Steven Tuck Gross, Tuck's grandchildren and only living heirs, contending that: #) the Vegan Toad was not Tuck; #) the will was invalid due to insanity. The contention of the brief was that Tuck had indeed died intestate and, accordingly, the grandchildren were entitled to the remainder of the estate after payment of estate taxes. The Supreme Court slashed through this Gordian knot after a lengthy interview with the Vegan Toad plus the sworn testimony of # of Tuck's closest friends who claimed that the Vegan Toad was indeed Tuck. The Court ruled that Tuck continued to exist as the Vegan Toad. T he # Wives of Stud v. the Commissioner, (#nd Cir. November #, #) C. #. The final case this month involves complications resulting from extraterrestrial marital customs. This case also indicates that biological differences are not necessary to test the boundaries of the U.S. Tax Code; sociological differences are quite sufficient. Lucius Stud, a humanoid native of Egret, the largest country in the fifth planet of Balmour, immigrated to the United States on February #, #. He brought with him all # of his wives. Under Egret custom, Stud could marry up to #I wives. This custom was due to the ratio of males to females on Egret. Having duly received permission from the Grand Snark of Egret, he proceeded to marry three U.S. Citizens by December #, #. Persuant to the Hart Amendment, he claimed U.S. citizenship for all # of his other wives as well as for himself. For the year then ended, Stud directed each of his wives to fill out a joint return. This is not IF unusual as wives were the principle breadwinners on Egret, men spending their time on weighty philosophical discussions. Stud's wives contended that each of the # marriages was legally binding due to the Bently treaty between the United States and Egret allowing reciprocal legality for the customs of each country. The Commissioner argued that if # joint returns were filed, Stud would be allowed to be a deduction on each return, thus violating the general rule that one can not be a deduction on more than one return. Moreover, if taxpayers in general were allowed multiple marriages, the administration of joint returns would become an administrative nightmare. This argument was unsuccessful. The Court accused the Commissioner of using colorful hyperbole and ruled that all of Stud's wives were entitled to the joint return, but only one of them could deduct for Stud. D ue to the poor showing of the Commissioner in this month's cases, it appears that legislative clarifications will be necessary to close the gigantic loopholes in the fabric of the U.S. tax legislation due to the Hart Amendment. Next month we will explore tax planning techniques for partnerships between Homosapien and naturalized extraterrestrial U.S. Citizens. , IrHT' Z Vp! '  C r-, --  fr  --  -- f I jvi An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gets Read issue ## and boo and hiss Stanislaw Lem as he puts down American S-F writers, readers and fans in an interview. (The man is a Polish intellectual snob.) Look forward to an interview with Avram Davidson in issue ##, and a critical destruction of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and God knows what else I can squeeze in. In # there are interviews with Philip Jose Farmer and Keith Laumer scheduled. Every issue: The Archives  a Dialog. Enjoy Geis editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysample I year#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I Even the Technarch of the Seven Worlds should not lightly disturb the meditations of a Philosopher of the Hintas School! rriHE technarch of the Seven  Worlds, Yang Egantei Mei Chant Ajal Dunia, was at peace with himself. The Hintas would have no choice but to accede to this somewhat forceful request that they assign a full philosopher to him until the threat of Togger A # was past. Things had proceeded so well that he was free to pass the remainder of his work day relaxing amid the treasures of art which he had collected using the wealth of all the Seven Worlds. The philosopher would arrive soon and there was hope that Togger would come no closer to completing his boast than talk. The treasure would be safe and Egantei could be assured of the tranquility of his Gallery as an eternal refuge from the tension of governing. The bells suspended on the curled toes of Egantei's slippers woven of Amethyst and Beryl jingled in the sudden halt of his body confronted by his Major Donio. The soft removed voice of Egantei met Dolch politely, the servant was a wonder, not once in the years of his service had the Technarch found a trace of hair on the man or the faintest body odor. "Yes, Dolch." The major domo approached to within three feet and turned his head ninety degrees from the Technarch that his breath be cast away from his employer. "The philosopher has arrived Revered One." Egantei nodded acknowledgment. "Ah, you see Dolch. Even the Hintas must hear the wish of the Technarch of Seven Worlds." Dolch bowed, the barest tension flickered in the expanse of his forehead leading on into the whiteness of his shaven head. "Though it seems true. Revered One, there are "I shall be most careful Dolch. Where have you sent this philosopher? There is little need to affront him further by tardiness." Dolch's voice caught in his throat. "Ruh, R... Revered One, I have served long and am not unskilled in dealing with guests something less than delicate, but this one is, is -- " "Come to the point Dolch. The guest is intractible but where have you deposited him?" Dolch fairly croaked. "The Gallery." The face of the Technarch whitened with anger. He breathed deeply, forcing the emotion from him. It was neither seemly nor healthy to succumb to such a crude useless thing as anger. Ultimately the Technarch regained the peace which was his natural state. His hands ceased trembling. Dolch had disappeared quite diplomatically and Egantei walked swiftly toward the Gallery. When he had reached the moon circle which was the entrance Egantei slowed once again, allowed his eyes to caress the silver lustre of the circle. It would have pleased him to forget the philosopher and devote the proper time to fully appreciating the intricate beauty of the moon circle. Though glowing as if smoothly polished the entire frame was etched in the trails left by the metal worms of Ddavo. Thru some mystery the worms moved in patterns preset by their nucleic structure. Placed by an artist, such a thing as the moon circle could be produced. Egantei passed thru the circle into the Gallery having nearly forgotten that this time he came not to fete his senses but on business. Inside the Gallery he beheld a spindly runt of a beggar dressed in ragged clothing bent over one of the niches in the far wall. Egantei moved with grace beneath the folds of his gown across the space between. The perfection of the ceramic glazed floor, composed of # individual tiles meshed into thelegend of Lian Mabat and his mischievious brother Lian Tua held the Technarch's eyes until he had nearly reached the shabby figure. The beggar  turned to face Egantei and at the moment that comprehension settled on the Technarch his bells jangled; his rings tarnished; and the music of the cosmic symphony missed not one note but two. In the knobby unwashed hands was the single Ariadan Soul Piece ever worked to completion. And worse, the hands were shaking, the treasure seemed about to fall. "P-please, honored guest, b-be careful, the p-piece is priceless." The dirt grimed face bent to look in disbelief at the metal spire in his visibly quivering hands. Slowly, jerkily the piece was returned to rest solidly. The Technarch began to breathe, color returned to his face and when he stepped toward the Hintas philosopher there was a smile on his face. A smile on his face and spite in his heart. The Technarch ruled his life to the love of beauty. Something in the philosopher grated against this devotion but Egantei had an end to attain. "Honored Sage, forgive my greeting but the Gallery is my retreat from the trouble of ruling the Seven Worlds. I am Yang Egantei Mei Chant Ajal Dunia, the proper appelation is Egantei." The Technarch smoothed the red stone set in one of his many rings. The shabby runt brushed his smudged palm down the front of an already soiled tunic. "I am called Dry Wine." "It is an honor to meet with such a revered instructor of the Hintas thought. Of respect for the value of your time Revered Sage I shall attempt to explain quite briefly my reason for appealing to the School." Dry Wine twisted his head peering beneath his armpit at a porcelain vase perched on a pedestal behind him. Egantei continued. "It has been my misfortune that lately a certain Togger A # has made the public boast that he will steal every treasure within this room. In his words, from beneath my polished nose. Through my investigations I have learned that this boast could be far from idle. None of the leading protection commission of guarding the room. It seems that this Togger is considered the most skilled thief who has ever lived." Apparently oblivious to Egantei, Dry Wine crawled on hands and knees over the tile floor. His short tunic was drawn up over the shiveled curve of his buttocks presented square to the Technarch. "I have of course exhausted every possible avenue in order to assure the safety of the collection. The Hintas are my last resort. I hope that my somewhat forceful attitude in this matter is understandable." Dry Wine lifted his soiled tunic and in a physical contortion patently impossible disappeared between his own legs. He emerged a second later crushing vehemently some real or imagined parasite between his thumb and forefinger. With a last careful examination of his fingertip he turned to the Technarch. "Technarch Egantei, the methods of the Hintas may perhaps seem less than rational to those uninitiated in the inner mystery." The runt's manner was openly insolent, but the Technarch would allow nothing to interfere with his desire to protect his treasure. The philosopher's voice squeaked on. "It would be much worse than if you had not appealed to the School should you choose to interrupt the forces which will be set in motion." The Technarch bowed graciously. "I am vaguely familiar with certain rather... odd matters concerning the Hintas. Though its techniques are somewhat unusual the School is noted for its unmarred record in successfully completing any task which it undertakes. Be IF assured that both I and the wealth of the Seven Worlds are at your service." Another and even more gracious bow and the Technarch continued. "Perhaps you would wish my engineer to show you the means by which I have endeavored to protect this room and it's contents." The philosopher scratched his inner thigh. "It is not necessary. There will, however, be some minor expense incurred." Egantei pulled an engraved signet from his index finger and laid it on a marble table. Quite noticeably he stepped away from the table as Dry Wine approached to take the ring. He seemed almost not to notice the philosopher as he spoke. "The ring will serve as currency anywhere in the Galaxy. The wealth of the seven worlds is well appreciated." Dry Wine scrabbled forward, still scratching his thigh. He ignored the warning of the wealth of the Technarch. 'T shall send instructions within five days." Pushing the ring onto his thumb he walked with dignity through the moon circle. E gantei stood for a few moments. His hands quivered and tiny spasms clenched at the corners of his mouth. "Dolch!!!" The shaven aide was immediately in the Gallery. He was unmoved by the turmoil of the Technarch, stood silently while his. master fumed. "Follow him Dolch. He's not to leave your sight. I don't trust the Hintas, and as you say, perhaps I was less than submissive in requesting their help." Dolch turned to leave. The spasms of anger and fear did not lessen in Egantei. Even in his retreat, surrounded by the beauty of a Universe, the fear of losing that which gave him peace left him no longer safe from the agonies of the world. His words erupted in torture, cut Dolch off before he had left the room. "Dolch, prepare a walker. I shall go myself. See that it is bathed and dressed well. Attend to me yourself, I'll have no engineers about my body." "Yes, revered one." Still the turbulence was on Egantei. Mixed within the fear of losing his treasure was now the anticipation of walking in the ugliness of the world outside. His clothing had grown damp with sweat and as he walked to the transfer chamber it was an act of will not to turn aside to bathe and dress. Egantei thumbed the door panel and was inside. The walker was ready, slumped senseless in the left hand chair. Egantei had used the walkers before but had never had the courage to leave his citadel. He studied the smooth skin, detected not the faintest odor. He fancied a slight perfume rose from the artificial body. Dolch led him to the right hand chair and began fixing the bands about his skull. In moments it was done. Sweat ran in streams beneath the robe of the Technarch but in spite of centuries of seclusion there had never been such a threat to his own personal dominion as that posed by Togger A #. Silently he cursed them; first the master thief and then the philosopher. The warmth of the curse calmed him enough to speak. "Now Dolch." Dolch's naked hands worked the console and Egantei sensed only a momentary fuzziness. When his vision cleared he was inside the walker. Quickly he checked the circuitry; vision, locomotion. All the senses were in order. Egantei stood. He was captured in the slack lifelessness of his own body slumped in the right hand chair. From the look of it he was due for a session with the Med Team. In the twenty years since his last session the body had begun to go to fat. He thought too that perhaps the kidneys were giving out. Without a word to Dolch, Egantei left the transfer chamber. Enough concentration was needed to control the walker that the Technarch was partially relieved of his fear but it came to him again as he reached the side exit through which the philosopher had departed. Green light washed into the cells of the walker. Odors of dust and human motion loaded the circuits which channeled them to his brain. Egantei forced the waves away from him, pierced through the cloud of them. Just outside the gate he could see the scrawny philpsopher squatting to speak with a child whose mother studied the schedule of a tube, waiting for the computer to clear her route. Egantei gathered in his mind the tune of the singing sands and the symetry of the soul piece as guards against the world about him. In front of the gate the mother gathered her child's hand and they were gone inside the tube. The philosopher turned and with Egantei in the act of opening the gate they were face to face. With the poised deception of a ruler Egantei ignored the philosopher but as he was passing the thin voice of Dry Wine accosted him. "Do you work for the one who styles himself the ruler of seven worlds?" This Egantei could not ignore. Barely mastering indignation he questioned as would a loyal employee. "You speak of the Revered One, Yang Egantei Mei Chant Ajal Dunia?" "That's him, old tepid tea and pink lace, says he rules seven worlds but shuts himself away inside a citadel of beauty and order." In the chair Egantei's body flushed. On the street he said. "Who are you sir?" Dry Wine smiled. "You sir are nearly as stupid as old pinky. As long as you intend to follow me why don't we go together. Save both of us a lot of trouble." The philosopher was right. Of course it was obvious that the walker was to follow the sage. The strangeness of controlling the walker and the weight of the world about him had dulled Egantei's mind. "Very well. I hope you understand my employer's concern." Dry Wine punched his own priority on the tube and its door slid open. As they entered he spoke. "Better perhaps than the Technarch himself." IF The pressure in the tube pinned them to the wall of their cylinder for the space of a moment and the door opened. The green light flooded them once again. They were in the deep, that part of the city in which only a fool walked, even in daylight. Dry Wine scrabbled off in his peculiar stride apparently uncaring as to whether Egantei followed or not. Sweat poured from the body in the chair. It was by force of will that Egantei kept himself inside the walker. The people in the deep smelled. It had been an oversight to take a walker whose olfactory sensors were connected. Egantei moved in a gray tunnel, seeing only the beggar sage who led him. Hastily he caught up with Dry Wine. His voice was faint. "Where are we going?" "To protect your lord's treasure. The Hintas are always true to their word. Here, this is the place. If we are lucky we will find your thief in here." Egantei allowed himself to take in for a second the smoke-clouded windows, cracked paint and sour odor. The door closed behind them and they were inside the room. The sweet decay of chandu was in the air. Users lay on the floor where they fell. Their bodies twitched occasionally, nervous systems nearly burned out, they had neither the money nor the desire for the med session which might renew them. A thick man with gray dirty skin stood behind a counter. A bowl of antiseptic with a yellow cloth swab floating in it was the only decoration of the counter. Three pneumatic injectors hung on the wall above it. Two tubes led from each, one to the air compressor and another to some sense-destroying drug. That such a place, flagrantly illegal could exist in his capitol city enraged Egantei. Whether the philosopher guessed his thought or through some gift could read it even in the face of the walker Egantei did not know. "It would be unwise of your employer to take action against Mar here. Many choose to leave the world. These narcotics shouldn't bother old pinky; they are neither as expensive nor as subtle as the spell of the Ariadan soul piece but of similar function." The remarks fluttered feebly at the thickening wall which Egantei drew about him. The philosopher pointed to a table in the shadows. As they neared it, the odor of deffecation rolled out from an open door frame. Gorge rose in the body which was safe in the chair. Egantei nearly succeeded in masking the odor with the fragrance of orchids which he held inside him. The man at the table was old. His body was well cared for. Egantei guessed him to be at least two hundred, but younger than himself. They sat in plastic chairs, chairs covered with the oily stain of chandu smoke. The man viewed them with empty eyes. His face was as passionless as his voice. "Good day philosopher. Though it is good to see you old friend I must guess that you are the agent by which our foppish ruler attempts to save his treasure." Dry Wine inclined his bead. "I would not hide this from you Gog. The commission has been forced on us and I am the one who must execute it." Blood rushed through the body in the chair. Egantei forced seeing so that he would know the face of the thief. In the clarity of vision Togger A # was revealed as a creature of subtlety. Sudden fear took Egantei, fear that he had put himself and his hope into hands which would betray him. His thoughts, his fears clung to him. He fought against them and the revulsion arising from the odors wafting through the door to hear the conversation. Togger smiled, a thinness against his face. "Well, philosopher, it will be even more of a challenge than I had hoped for." As though he had just noticed Egantei, Togger studied the voided face of the walker. Satisfied, he returned his attention to Dry Wine. "If you would excuse me for a second my friend I have a small business to attend to." The thief rose, became part of the grayness which held the world away from Egantei. The Technarch was immersed in his fears of betrayal. Of all the things which were certain in the world the most certain was a contract taken by the Hintas. The School did not deal in deception. But Egantei was plagued by the fact that this was not a contract undertaken voluntarily; he had forced it on the .School. Even the Hintas might betray him under such circumstances. Worse, the philosopher was a friend of the thief. as egantei thought he became aware of an uncomfortable wetness spreading down his side. The flow of it ran beneath his clothing. An acrid smell rose to his nostrils as the Technarch turned the walker's head. Togger had lowered his trousers and as the head came about the thief switched his elevation and urinated square in the blank face. Egantei did not hear what he said, his mind was bolted back into the body of his birth. Purple apoplexy bloated his face, thick veins throbbed through his neck. The muscles of his body twisted in spasms confined by the leather straps which Dolch had fastened. The odor and warmth coalesced in horror and outrage. Murder was in the heart and soul of Egantei. He did not even feel the needle which Dolch slid beneath his skin. The Technarch fought the drug as some material foe. His anger, the core of half-formed revenge fermented within him as lethargy took even his mind. The Technarch's last slow thought was of pride. It had been wise of him to take a walker; the thought had crossed his mind to go himself. If he had it would be his flesh and not that of the walker which was fouled beyond cleansing. Egantei opened his eyes. The comfort of his bed chamber was like a womb around him, soothing the nerves which had been strained to exhaustion. For a moment he was a babe, seeing only the wonder of light. A thought still red with the passion of hate fought to reach the surface of his mind. Egantei reached for it. Rage, cold and deep quivered through him. The sleep, however, had refreshed him. His IF voice was measured and toneless as he called for his servant. "Dolch." Hairless, silent, Dolch appeared. "Yes, Revered One!" Egantei raised his head, calmed himself by straying into the delicate etchings of a lythian cardograph covering the far wall of his bedchamber. The symmetry of it was cool water, the color soothing grace. The fact of it was a reminder that even his revenge must be tempered with caution lest he lose his treasure, his life. "Has there been word from the philosopher?" "No word Revered One, but a report from one whom I sent to follow." Egantei sighed. If he could not trust himself, Dolch was infallible. "What was the report?" Guessing that the Technarch would rather hear than read the paper Dolch slipped it from his sleeve and began to read aloud. "First sight of the Hintas philosopher was in the deep where he was walking in the company of the master thief Togger A#. Shortly the philosopher shook hands with his companion and they parted on apparently good terms. The next action of consequence was the entry of a Com Station where the subject sent two messages." Dolch bowed, "Copies of the two messages were included. The first carries neither a name nor an address. To: Tepid Tea and Pink Lace From: Dry Wine Respected sir; I hope that you do not hold me responsible for the actions of another. I could not know that Tog held walkers in such loathing. These things aside the safety of your treasure is now within your own personal control. If you wish to complete the contract have the feast of # dishes prepared by the hand of Alonjian Sidap lain on a plain blue cloth of coarse weave. The feast must be laid on the cloth within the Gallery. Provide three couches molded of silver and upholstered in the same cloth as that upon which the feast is laid. The other embellishments I leave to your own artistic discernment. Your presence is mandatory. Should you leave or behave in a manner which is offensive to our guest your treasure could be lost. The feast is to be set on the third day after you have received this message. The time is to be exactly one hour from # hours to # hours. Should you leave before the hour is done or attempt in any way to discover the identity of our guest you have voided the contract." Dolch paused to show the message done. "I had assumed the message was for you Revered One, but it seemed unlikely addressed in such a way. The second message, though it has an address is even more cryptic." To: My most perfect friend From: Your humble philosopher The favor I ask I have asked before. The gain we make is more than real. In the light of a marsh fire, oily and slick, I pull a bOuquef of rotten carrots. We meet in your palace 'at # hours three days from the day you receive this." "And that is the message Revered One." Egantei took the paper, read it only once again; silently; and returned it to Dolch. His decision was made. Revenge would wait until it was expedient. "When did you receive this Dolch?" "It is # of the third day Revered One. Should you choose to go through with itthe arrangements have been made." Egantei felt the release of defeat course through him. Let what would be; be. "I am in retirement Dolch. I will see no one but yourself. Make the preparations and any others which will insure the safety of the Gallery. Do not interfere with the Hintas." Dolch padded silently from the bedchamber and the Technarch was left alone to gather what peace he could before the confrontation. Egantei dressed himself and as the clean cloth settled next to his body peace left him. A drawing sort of spell called to him from the Gallery. With the spell was the apprehension that he might never behold his treasure again. His footsteps were hurried and when at last he reached the gallery a thin film of perspiration dampened his forehead. He paused before the moon circle drinking its beauty with a desperate need. The passion did not leave him, was not drawn from his soul by the delicate etchings. He moved inside the Gallery, ignoring the flurries of Alonjian Sidap as the Chef prepared the feast. The sweat dried on his forehead, blood slowed in his veins, his hands grew warm where they had been cold with tension. Egantei became lost in the slow river of beauty which caught him. Togger A #, even the philsopher melted into the line and art of his treasure. With only half an hour remaining Egantei had recaptured his tranquility. He began to adjust the serving dishes laid for the feast. The bird piping of Alonjian cascaded in trills of horror. "No, it is not so. The feast, it is not to be profaned, the keropok..." The chef waved a bowl of crisp red flakes at the Technarch in flurries of exasperation. "The keropok must be..." With a flourish Alonjian resettled the dish. "here!!" Arms crossed, the birdlike Alonjian challenged Egantei but the Technarch was gentle. He understood the temperament of such an artiste as Alonjian Sidap. "My apologies She' Sidap, one is unnerved by the delicate nuances which fill the air. One i overwhelmed by anticipation. If it would not be an overly stated addition, I offer the use of any of the pieces within the Gallery..." And for thirty minutes the Technarch and the cook discussed the value of each of the treasures as the one most likely to echo the flavor of the feast of one hundred and twentyseven dishes. When at last it came to be # hours they were fairly in raptures of esthetic joy. A chime chimed and Egantei excused himself to finish the odious business of an entire meal with the philosopher Dry Wine. Alonjian exited quietly and the Technarch tinkled his way to the moon circle. T he philosopher did not wait to be greeted by the Technarch but strolled casually into the Gallery. Egantei ducked his head IF in a small bow preparatory to speech but when he raised his head the words were choked on the gorge which rose in his throat. Egantei turned away from his guests. The philosopher seemed not to notice but began speaking as though surrounded by friends of long acquaintance. "Ah Revered Technarch, I am glad that in only one hour my commission will have been successfully completed. Allow me to introduce my companion." Dry Wine's every move was an overly exaggerated etiquette that went unappreciated, for Egantei remained with his back turned. The Technarch hardly heard the philosopher as he struggled with his stomach as it strove to empty itself. "Hmenh, may I present the Technarch of the Seven Worlds, Yang Egantei Mei Chant Ajal Dunia. As one of my oldest and dearest friends I could not help but think..." The Technarch won for the moment over the rebellion of his stomach. He seemed for a second about to leave the Gallery but appraising the treasures turned to join his guests. As the human body has no memory for pain, the absolute revulsion Egantei felt for the guest, Hmenh, seemed unreal now that the sight of such ugliness was removed. "... that you and the Technarch would both profit from your meeting." Seeing Egantei about to return. Dry Wine assumed to the hilt his role of overly officious friend performing introductions. He rose from his couch, deftly slipping to the Technarch's side in such a way that Egantei could no longer avoid the spectre of Hmenh piled like a heap of garbage on the silverwrought divan. "And," Dry Wine continued, "Egantei, I am sure that it is more than past time that you met Hmenh; there are few who can "claim the friendship of the ugliest man in the Galaxy." Stunned nearly senseless Egantei allowed himself to be maneuvered to his own divan. He was bound in the spell of ugliness; the twisted limbs, begrimed body, soiled clothing, fetid breath which blotted out the spice odor of the feast. The philosopher seemed unaware of the Technarch's distress and expounded continuously on the beauty of the treasures within the gallery. Egantei became enmeshed in the boneless half of Hmenh's face which hung down over his neck spreading a distorted mask of mouth and nose as a puddle of rotting offal on the man's chest. "And this, Hmenh, this is the ultimate in art, an Ariadan soul sculpture completed at the exact moment of his death by..." Cancerous lessions covered the face, oozing a slow drainage of pus even into the eyes of Hmenh. "... what could compare with the harmonious subtilities of the Alac Urn containing precisely I I ,# grains of sand taken from the singing beach of..." The ugliest man in the Galaxy leaned forward, his ulcerous fingers emptied a bowl of mushy pudding onto the blue cloth. Groping blindly over the table the fingers filled the bowl with flakey keropok, egglike elor, soupy ementhal, and on and on until the bowl was a heap of garbage... is many millenia old, the last complete of its kind, truly exquisite." Egantei could not move, could not turn his head. The nerves within the wretched body of Hmenh were twisted on themselves. His body began to lurch in spasms, his near-fingerless hands poked food at his mouth but was almost infallibly thrown aside. Soon the food covered his face in gooey wads. Dry Wine moved to his friend's side, selected the choicest morsels from the feast, poising his hand over the black decaying cavern of Hmenh's mouth. He seemed an emaciated mouse dropping flies to a toad which has been stepped on. Egantei recovered suddenly from his trance, bent double over the edge of his divan and wretched the last globules of every meal he had ever eaten. His own vomit lay over the # tiled floor, covering the half smile of the ceramic hero Lian Tua. The odor and color of half digested food seemed to have a peculiar fascination to the Technarch. Weak exhileration cleared his vision to a different seeing than he could remember. The beauty of the floor was destroyed by the bile which had been in him. Egantei raised his eyes to the soul, piece which was in the center of the feast. As the floor, the beauty of the worked metal was no longer pure. It was flawed by the ugliness of Hmenh, and by the odor which rose from the vomit. Wherever the Technarch turned his head there was the curious blending of beauty and ugliness. Never again could he divide his perceptions to behold the one half without seeing within it the ugliness which made it whole. Egantei's face was pale as he spoke to the philosopher. "Your contract is completed philosopher." Not yet recovered the Technarch managed a weak sort of stagger which carried him out of the room. When he had gone Hmenh recovered miraculously from the nervous spasms. The smile on his lipless mouth was an ugly match to that of Dry Wine. "Well, my friend, what have you accomplished this time?" Dry Wine did not answer, he sat silently enjoying the feel of a mission nicely completed. As a student of balance he had accomplished much. The Technarch who had blinded himself in his love of beauty had beheld ugliness. It would be difficult for him to view anything now without the shade of ugliness in it. Togger A # would be more than satisfied that the treasure had been stolen in such a way that it could never be regained. Dry Wine would see that Hmenh received a share of wealth; it seemed likely the Technarch would pay for the privilege of not renewing their acquaintance. Perhaps most importantly the Tyranny of the Seven Worlds would from this day be weighted by the wisdom of the Hintas School. Dry Wine spoke aloud then, from the depths of his memory. "Hmenh, some philosopher somewhere nearly approached truth when he said: 'There's more than one way to skin a cat'."  # IF W e all know the story of the folks from Barden: how their first spacecraft landed in the parking lot of a bowling alley in Akron, Ohio and caused a riot; how we became used to their looks and they became used to ours (we all know many of the hundreds of trite, amusing anecdotes and dirty jokes told by members of each race about the other's appearance and behavior); how the Bardenians set up camp on Earth and started showing and teaching Earth people some of the things they knew; how our planet prospered and how we all grew as individuals because of what the Bardenians brought us. There is no need for a reiteration. However, when the Bardenians left us suddenly one July afternoon, the human race was thrown into such a panic that the facts concerning the Bardenians' departure have become obscured. Vicious rumors were spread. People accused the Bardenians of everything from heresy to the using of the blood of Christian children as a condiment. Other groups preached that the Bardenians were God, or Buddha, or Jesus Christ resurrected. One small cult in Georgia insisted that the Bardenians were really Russian Communists. It is even said that a religion sprang up in India which taught that the Bardenians did not exist and in fact never had. But this is hearsay. Only recently have the facts concerning the Bardenians' departure been uncovered and verified. Herewith follows the true account of how and why the Bardenians left us. Also included are compilations of data concerning the Bardenians as a people and some of their contributions. #c      S ome advances in science brought to us by the Bardenians: #. Worldwide use of solar energy for power niques enabling us to withdraw minerals from deep beneath the Earth's crust #. More efficient treatment of sewage #. Low-cost extraction of minerals from sea-water #. A coherent theory of space and time dimensions #. Great improvements in farming techniques #. A cheaper, longerlasting shoe polish       A selection of the artwork given to us as gifts of the planetary government of Barden: I . The Books of the Caverns #. The Winds (parts two and three) #. The Stratosphere Ballet #. The Chamelionic Domes #. The motion picture Harvel the tiammerlag Goes to Yib (edited for human viewing) #. Seasonal movement in sculpture, as exhibited in the complete works of Omo Cliseno (simulated adaptation)       T he Bardenians had given us new hope for our planet. We had been on the edge of political and ecological catastrophe when they had first arrived. An historic marker (the banner the Bardenians planted immediately upon the landing of their first expedition) still stands in front of the now-famous bowling alley in Akron. It was quite a remarkable coincidence that the Bardenians came along when they did. (In Bardenian terms, a random factor of immense IF proportion and consequence.) Humanity was making preparations to cut its own throat, and no Earthly force was able to prevent the suicide. Then the Bardenians showed up, took one look at our planet, and single-handedly fixed things up for us. They brought us from the brink of disaster to the beginnings of renewed prosperity in a matter of months. When asked by national leaders why they helped us so unselfishly, a Bardenian spokesman answered, "Wouldn't you do the same for a backward culture? Isn't that what you're doing already with your 'underdeveloped' countries?" In the words of H. J. Lummolopo, a leading Bardenian economist and philosopher: "Nobody does anything for its own sake. What we're trying to do is show you some Bardenian technology and a little Bardenian culture. We have quite a lot to gain economically, scientifically, and culturally -- even artistically -- from you." (Bardenians had always been fond, for some reason, of the Monkees, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Salvadore Dali, and the films of W. C. Fields.) "Quite frankly, you are an investment to us, just as we are one to you."       S ome breakthroughs in the social sciences we learned from the people of Barden: I . Synectic memory storage #. Telepathic contact between some members of certain gene pools #. The reaching of nirvana by one hundred and ninety humans #. Six previously un-thought-of sexual positions #. Limited verbal communication with other mammals #. An end to "dirty politics" #. A definition of the terms "brotherhood" and "humanity" #. An end to all war, and peace with honor #c   #c  A selection of physical descriptions of the people of Barden: #. "Imagine a bagpipe with legs." #. "Jesus, are they ugly. They've got a whole mess of unjointed arms -- six or eight, I think! -- coming right out of the top of their bodies. And their bodies look like big fat wineskins. And they've got four short, stubby legs with human-looking feet. They shine like they've got a thick coating of grease all over them." #. "Imagine an inflated bowling ball with two tumors on the bottom and a bunch of branches stuck in the top." #. "Sure I can describe them. Take a gigantic jello mold using three gallons of mixed fruit gelatin, right? Cut off four fetus feet and balance the jello on top of them. Then top the whole mess off with a bunch of flutes stuck in at random." #. "They're beautiful, really they are." #. "An overgrown eggplant, painted reddish-purple, with bamboo growing where the hair should be and clumps of toes on the bottom." #. "They look like my cousin Harriet. Christ, is she ugly." #. "You ever seen how they have sex? They've got two of everything that counts, and four gonads. Listen, I can give you a whole big envelope full of eightby-ten glossies for only ten bucks."  T he Bardenians worked with us tirelessly for three years. In that time, ten Bardenian space missions had been sent to Earth. For three years they served as our teachers; they showed us our mistakes, pointed out untapped resources, set up trade negotiations, and showed us their own culture. They became a father-figure to much of humanity. And then, spontaneously (to Earthmen), the Bardenians decided to leave, perhaps not forever, but, in Lummolopo's words, "for at least two or three hundred of your years -- certainly long enough for you to ruin yourselves again." It was Lummolopo who made the now-famous announcement of departure. He called a news conference and had his image and his words broadcast all over the planet.  A condensed outline of Bardenian thought: I . You are constantly being judged by yourself and by others #. All behavior should be enjoyed #. All behavior, including neurotic and psychotic behavior, is necessary and most advantageous for the individual exhibiting it #. All of the above can be drastically affected by any random factor or set of random factors #. Self-determination exists only in a general sense #. "Behaviorism fellates both my generative organs." -- H. J. Lummolopo #. Mind, body, and soul form a single entity, but they decay at different times and at different rates of speed  L ummolopo's speech: j "I come to yOu this evening with some very grave news for your people. It is news I hate to deliver; indeed, I am appalled that the decision which I am dutybound to relate to you now was ever made." (Here Lummolopo waved his tentacles of cartilage about.) "Look -- I had a long speech prepared, but I think I'm just going to chuck it and speak in less formal terms. My government isn't going IF to like it, but that will be my worry, not yours. My speech was full of grief and depression, and I just don't feel like making things worse either for you folks or for myself. "Very simply -- myself and the rest of the Bardenian space research team are leaving. We may never come back." (At this point, the room erupted into multi-media chaos.) "The decision to leave was not mine," Lummolopo continued when the excitement had died down. "Indeed, I have grown very attached to Earth, and I am fascinated by human beings, and I do not wish to leave. "In fact, in my view, leaving Earth is one of the most asinine decisions that has ever been made. But, as was quickly pointed out to me, lam in no position to make the decisions, only to make recommendations. Those in power can ignore my recommendations as often as they please. "Essentially, that's it. We're leaving in the next four or-five days, and you'll be on your own. Probably permanently." (Here he paused.) "If there are any questions. I'll try to answer as many of them as I can."  S ome questions from the floor, and Lummolopo's replies: Q: Mr. Lummolopo, you haven't told us specifically who is responsible for the decision. A: Taolo Hodonna, our economic "president." And our general public. Q: Mr. Lummolopo, did the public vote on the question? A: No. As you know, we have a democracy, as most of your people do. In a democracy, the dictators are elected rather than self-appointed. But in a democracy, public opinion can rarely be ignored -- although at times it can be manipulated by the leaders. Q: But Lummolopo, you've hardly begun your study of Earth. And you've hardly begun to help us. You've got us dependent on you, practically under your thumb, and now you're going to leave us to rot. Don't you realize -- A: (interrupting) Please spare me questions of this sort. I repeat: I did not make this decision. Complain to Hodonna, not to me. This isn't really my affair. Q: But don't you agree that we will rot, go right back to where we were when you first arrived, maybe be in a worse position? How can you just stand by and -- A: Don't you understand? Much as you intrigue me, my obligations are to my own people. I sympathize with your position. And I agree with you: you're in for some potentially hard times. Things will most likely be bad for you in the next few decades; I admit that freely. But I have some faith in you people; you're not that different from us. I honestly think there's a pretty fair chance that you'll pull through -- without us. Q: It's all a plot, isn't it, Lummolopo? You had this planned from the beginning, I'll bet. Making us dependent on you, then taking away -- A: Don't be an idiot. We don't need another Akron riot. Q: Mr. Lummolopo, you still haven't answered the most important question: why are you and your people leaving? What reason did Hodonna give for making you all leave? (At this point, Lummolopo's body quivered violently.) A: Sir, we people of Barden have our problems, too. We can help you out because we've gone through the same things you have, and we managed to survive them. All that our advanced technology and advanced philosophy mean are that we have different problems from you. More complicated ones. The people of Barden simply no longer consider exploring Earth a worthwhile venture. They insist that the money being used for space exploration could be put to better use back on Barden. Instead, programs on my home planet are being started up now -- programs to make life allaround easier and more amusing for us. Q: But I thought you said that the exploration of Earth would yield a profit for Barden. A: It will -- eventually. But my people say that's not soon enough. They want their benefits now. (Lummolopo paused here.) Excuse me. I am very angry and very tired. Perhaps someday we will return to help you out once again -- but that will not be until the attitudes of my people change. Perhaps there are people on yet another planet who will come to Earth and take our place. And maybe, somewhere in the universe, there are people who will come and teach us. (Lummolopo' paused.) Gentlemen and ladies, I am finished speaking for the night. I wish you all good fortune. As you people say, 'God bless you'. (Bardenians firmly deny the existence of all deities.) T hree days later, the Bardenians left. There was a ceremony just before the liftoff. Lummolopo was invited to speak at the ceremony. He declined.     #c  N ow inscribed on the Bardenian banner outside the bowling alley in Akron, in English and seven other languages, is the sentence, "We wait." Elsewhere (on washroom and school building walls, especially) are the words: IF Dear Jim, Dr. T. Binding Phipps, the mathematinot seem to have made set theory or the problems of infinity his field of study. To begin with, Phipps (and the other characters involved, who as non-mathematicians may be forgiven) neglect to consider whether the sets of opposing spaceships in the story are of the same order of infinity. If, for example, the human-sent ships in the story's Tau-space can be placed in one-to-one correspondence with the infinite series of integers (#, #, #...) while the enemy ships can be matched up with the infinite number of points on a line, we are truly outnumbered and had better sue for peace or find another space in which to tight. On the other hand, if the human ships equal in the size (or strength) of their infinity the number of possible geometric curves (Aleph Three, sez Cantor), then we can run those poirits-on-a-line ships right out of our part of the universe. Since the human-owned ships got clobbered in the story, we may assume that the enemy's infinity did possess a higher Alephnumber than did ours. As for the problem of matching up the series of even integers with that of all integers, or manning an infinite tleet of spaceships with a corps of pilots drawn from only the even-numbered ships... When matching infinite sets, a rule of correspondence (not just an example "at one end") must be stated. Phipps' adversaries in the argument are perfectly correct in stating that his showing them a few pairs of both scries matched proves nothing. Correspondence of the set of even integers matched with that of all integers should be stated I # #... n... # # #... ,#n... Note the all-important little n. Stated this way, we have a rule, which says that every integer in the series containing both odd and even is associated, paired off, with its double. No example can be produced of an integer for which this rule now fails to hold; therefore it is assumed to hold for all. In the case of the ships and pilots, let us assign each ship a number in order from the set of all integers. Each pilot will be assigned an even number, corresponding to that of the ship he is originally in. "Now hear this, now hear this. All pilots, leave your ships." (Shuffle shufle, tramp tramp, clang clang.) "Now each of you guys find a ship whose number is one half, exactly, of your assigned number. Now get back in." (Shuffle, tramp, clang, thud. Thud? Always an oddball in every outfit.) "You there, you don't have a ship? Now if the Admiral finds any empty ships when he comes around to inspect, we're gonna know the assigned numbers of the wise guys who are supposed to be in'em. So you better be there..." May you print many more stories that are as much fun to read and think about. Joan  Fred Saberhgen But personally I find Anvil a lot more fun to read ! Perhaps you, Fred, should write a story demonstrating the validity of Cantor's Theorem! Dear Jim Baen, Good luck! Here is my subscription to IF and to Galaxy. I had fun reading Christopher Anvil's Cantor's War in your May-June jssue. I am now working for my Ph.D. thesis in mathematics. Here are my comments. What Cantor said is this: Let us agree that two sets have the same size if they can be put in one-to-one correspondence (i.e. if we can make pairs of elements, the first element of the pair being an element from our first set A, the second element of the pair being an element from our second set B, in such a way that if # is an element of A, then there is exactly one pair with # as its first element, and if  if an element of B, then there is exactly one pair with  as its second element). Then, said Cantor, there are as many numbers as there are even (or, for that matter, odd) numbers. The proof of that is stated in Anvil's story. Anvil questions later the validity of this result by considering a "practical" example: an infinite number of spaceships, only one out of two is manned. He evokes mounting piles of empty spaceships, and the increasing difficulty of getting pilots as he builds his one-to-one correspondence between spaceships and pilots. Of course he is right. But what he says is irrelevant. The Cantor result takes no mention in the acrobatics involved in building a certain one-to-one correspondence; it depends only on whether the correspondence exists or not. If I had been in Phipp's place, aside from being pleased at seeing military equipment wasted on the screen, I would have put my best sadistic-mathematical smile after the general's description of piles of empty spaceships, and told him that not only had he twice as many spaceships as he had pilots, but that at the same time he had fifty times as many pilots as he had spaceships... The point is. Cantor's definition of "same size" is (as he knew, as everybody knows) coarse. It is useful because it is simple to state, and because it can be applied to any pair of sets, however dissimilar the sets. When one has additional information about the sets one w ishes to compare, then one can devise a suitable definition of what "same size" means in that particular context. This is done routinely in mathematics. For example, in Anvil's story, the military men quite adequately were comparing the sizes of the forces by counting the finite number of spaceships of each army contained in a square on the screen. They used the fact that they had squares in which to count ships, which is additional information on the sets involved, in order to devise a way of comparing sizes in a more precise fashion than Cantor's. Esther Rochon # Lacombc Montreal H#T #L#. Quebec, Canada Well, Chris ? Dear Editor: One of your '# dropouts who picked up the June issue. In Chris Anvil's Cantors War I did not really understand the part about Tau space and the blinding white light, etc. I think I did understand the pilots locked in every other one of an infinite number of ships analogy. You could move the ships so there were # ships w ith pilots, then # without, # with, # without, and so on. Then you could switch to #P, #W, #P, #W... then to #P. #W, #P, #W... As a matter of fact, given enough time and any number n Anvil could name I could give him n in a row pilots, followed by n without and so on. Whicli (technically, Mr. Anvil) means that n increased without upper bound. Anyway Binding should have got Mary Lou. Glad to see Asimov back to his consistent first-class form (as compared to the debacle "The Gods Themselves"). Good luck. David Clendaniel # Lincoln Walla Walla, Wash. # Dear Mr. Baen: I usually pass up IF. However, I found really think you got something. There is still some room for improvement concerning your cover. I think a much bolder approach should be taken. How about trying to get Kelly Freas to do some? Dick Geis' column, "The Alien Viewpoint," is really tops. I think his column will add a lot to IF: fandom should be taken seriously. Sincerely yours, Roy D. Schickedanz Thank you, Roy. As for bold covers, take a look at August Galaxy. ( That one is so bold I'm a little nervous about it!) Fandom: I will take fandom seriously as long as fandom does not return the favor. Dear Mr. Baen: Your opening issue is most interesting, and I hope my comments on the stories might give you an idea of how well you're doing your job. how and why Nixon cannot reveal certain tapes -- maybe they don't exist, since... IF how a person like Nixon might get elected. Or am I wrong? issue. The Asimov and Silverberg up to par for each. Nothing earthshattering, though. tical fiction that sounds most logical. True, too; considering it was used in a real-world situation, not a 'pure' mathematical environment. The Schmitz -- another typical story by him, with a 'surprise' ending (I just can't imagine him writing a gloomy story) that sets everything aright. need the sort of story that ends on a doomsday note? It hadn't corrupted itself much prior to that. Now: the features. If your promises can be delivered, maybe you'll eventually have a Amazing because of an almost snobby editorial feel and a cry-baby attitude." -- Grimshawe, p. # Issue No. #. This sounds rather shallow to be published, and may anger some Amazing readers. I subscribe to the top six magazines, and must admit I favor White's editorial policies. Maybe you can come up with something better. It doesn't help, though, to shove aside the women-writer issue as if you're going to be a male chauvinist. I would imagine around half your readers were women (#. -- Ed.) who also might believe you're being biased. But, I give you the doubt well-deserved, and hope you receive fine manuscripts from our women writers.) Geis. I've heard about him, in fandom, but never seen anything of his. Now it looks like I'll have the opportunity on a bimonthly basis (any chance of going monthly again?). Fine reading, it helps to know the people and their ideas behind sf. Del Rey good as usual with reviews, etc. Looking forward to issue next; as your first Galaxy. Sine; R. J. Schenck RD ft I Canisteo, NY # "Second Advent" was (for me at least) little more than wistful-thinking. As for "The People's Choice" -- I have no idea. Doomsday stories, as such, are neither called for nor uncalled for -- depends on how good they are and the nature of the rest of the issue. Grimshawe's comments on Ted White ; I censored neither Grimshawe -- nor Schenck. Now, as for sexual bias: I can think of nothing more biased -- nor exploitive! -- than an all-female issue. On the other hand, I am Ursula K. Le Guin to be one of the top five living sf writers. (No, I'm not about to narrow it down any further . ) Dear Sir: You have printed a blasphemy in Mack Reynolds' Second Advent, (June # issue). The Book of Revelation teaches that the Lord Jesus Christ shall appearin the clouds, with power and glory, and that His coming in the clouds shall be equally visible from the Notwithstanding this clear Biblical doctrine, Mack Reynolds has chosen to enact the second coming in darkness save for a few. Or to conceive and write of it being done that way, which is the same thing. Please inspect the stories of Mr. Reynolds more carefully from now on. We were so angry that it was asked and agreed to that I tear the offending story out of the magazine. Yours in Christ J. Parker Wilbem, Chairman Federal City Conservative Club While I may f not share Mr. Reynolds' views on this subject I must uphold his right to express them. Dear Mr. Baen, As a reader of Galaxy and IF for a few years, I was beginning to suspect the magazines were sliding into the doldrums. In fact, I was toying with the idea of terminating my subscription, and just picking up the ones I wanted at the newsstand. Then things started improving for some unsuspected reason. And then the "New Editors Introductory Issue" of IF arrived and really spun my head on its axis. Not only do I enjoy the new features in Galaxy and IF, but the stories themselves seem better in the brighter layouts of the magazines. collaboration, and The Org's Egg fairly screams for at least one sequel. Anything by Bob Shaw is usually good, and Orbitsville is maintaining in my eyes his esteem as a writer. In closing, I would like to say that the most improved feature in the magazines (no fooling) are the contents pages. Sincerely, David Keller Thank you -- I put a lot of work into those two pages! Dear Mr. Baen: Pronunciation please -- Ben, Bain, or Bean? ## I have been out of the habit of reading IF and Galaxy religiously for some years now. The editorial changes in the June IF took me by surprise. The longest I'd followed either mag lately was the four installments of "Inverted World" by Christopher Priest, and I found the ending a let-down. But the June IF looks good. Hope to see it go monthly again. (Remember when IF was every month and Galaxy every other? Sure do.) Even the new contents page looks snappy. "Stranger in Paradise" is not Asimov's best, but any new sf by the Good Doctor is welcome. Silverberg, Anvil and Schmitz came up with a good assortment, and the shorts were good. If this keeps up for the next couple of issues, I'm going to subscribe instead of relying on fate at the newsstand. Reader Grimshawe was right in his letter about something missing since Fred Pohl left. I hope you can bring us an original excitement of your own. One of Pohl's policies I wouldn't mind seeing revived is the "one story by a novice" per issue, since I'm sending you a short under separate cover. Regarding Grimshawe's suggestion for commenting on published sf, I'd like to mention a book I just read that I haven't lished by Fawcett Gold Medal (#c). It's a fast-paced story with a good plot and excellent characterizations. I'd recommend it highly. It's an after-the-bomb story with a difference. so much the story itself, but "President Jefferson Dayles" seeking reelection in the # elections. His inner thoughts and feelsure winning reelection in ? # are like a prophecy of Watergate. If, van Vogt has been a prophet all these years and we didn't know it, stay the hell away from Calonian Recruiting Centers! Good Luck, Jack Klein Are you. sir, perchance guilty of antiCalonianism...?  Dear Mr. Baen, Heartiest congratulations on your accession to the galactic hot seat; and on getting R. E. (Heilige) Geis as columnist. Mr. Geis is a man of furious energy, pithy and pointed. no less than slashing with the critical broadsword. While he is overly ready to get his sexual fantasies into his own zine, it is more than probable that he can be confirmed in the thought that cleanliness is next to godliness. He is a fine and perceptive commentator with a wealth of bright oneliners and subtle twists of thought and idea. All of the very best critics, or perhaps nearly all, are in some sense academics, but certainly were trained in the groves of academe. Most of the authors of sf are selfmade and self-taught, and generally therefore suffer from some inferiority complex or other. This they display with petty antagonist, reviling the academic critic in an exhibition of ignorance. This is an unfortunate thing in the literary discipline, which is our most perfect democracy, and in which demagogery and mean ranting should have no place. With best regards and all good wishes, I remain, Very cordially yours, Alexander Doniphan Wallace # E. Gatehouse Drive, Apt. H Metairie. Louisiana #I Dear Jim: I thank Dr. Wallace for his compliments. But he's wrong about my sexual fantasies; they appeared indecently only in my year ago. I suppose his psyche is still twitterIF ing in shock since he ordered a copy of ## as I laughed like hell over his assertion that most sf authors feel inferior to academic critics. Everyone knows God's #th Commandment reads: English professors shall forever write dull, turgid, impenetrable prose. There's no other possible explanation for writing that badly for publication. How's that for petty antagonism? Best, Dick Geis Pretty good, Dick ! Dear Mr. Baen: This is the first issue of IF since Pohl quit that I have finished cover to cover. (And since I let niy subscription lapse.) With Analog over-rated and F  SF wallowing in artsy quasi-New Wave shorts, I was forced to fall back on Ted White's efforts. Only moment of sorrow I will feel about your new editorship is that it may finish off Amazing at last by drawing the hard core Romantics back into IF and even Galaxy. More substantial commendations: enclosed is my #I .# for both of your publications at this fabulous pre-inflationary rate. Also, my "World's Only Libertarian Fanthe Sheraton Motor Inn, Pittsburgh. GoH: Joanna Russ. Reg: # in advance, # at door. For info: Lisa Anne Ivey, # Foxwood Dr., Monroeville, PA. #. the Sheraton Airport Inn, Denver, CO. Membership #. For info: Ted Peak, # Detroit, ##, Denver, CO. #. zine". New Libertarian Notes, will have an appropriate rave. Don't slacken the pace or I swear I'll cancel. Give us Heinlein, de Camp, Asimov, Niven, Saberhagen, Pohl, and discover some new Doc Smiths and C. M. Kornbluth's while you're at it. Makes me feel like a neofan again. 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A stunning tour de force by the Nebula Award-winner. # Latest in the oldest, finest SF series -- eleven original stories by Wilhelm, Aldiss, and others Damon Knight, Editor. # All-new stories by Lafferty, LeGuin, Russ, Vinge, Wilhelm, Wolf, Wolfe, and Yaco. Damon Knight, Editor. # By Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. A gripping new tale of Dr. Warboys. # At bookstores Harper Row # E. #rd St... New York # Eleven singular stories by George Alec Effinger. # Coming irv November, Harlan Ellison's devastating collection of stories about our new "gods." # All the winners and runners-up,  plus commentary by Kate Wilhelm. Coming in November. # H# Nov.-Dee. # Vol. #, No. # Issue No. # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Dick Hoagland, Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Manager Jay Tunick, Circulation Director One of the greatest strengths of science fiction is its ability to juxtapose the mundane and the extraordinary, as is done in this tale of star-crossed lovers... An IF First. How wonderful it would be to fully utilize the capacity of the Human brain .,. A truism, right? Read on! Craig Strete is, I believe, unique in holding Movement) and the Science Fiction Writers of America. In this, his first published sf story, he examines the nature of reality from a truly alien perspective... In this tale of heroism of truly gastronomic proportions Arsen believes he has invented a whole new sub-genre -- Fork  Saucery! Continuing the chronicle of Captain Sir Dominic Flandry and his desperate struggle to stave off the inevitable Collapse of Empire. To that end he has just betrayed the only woman he will ever love into the hands of his enemies... Somber tidings. Lester devotes his final column to reviewing the history of this magazine. The Yuletide is traditionally a time for summing up, for taking stock, and Dick makes the most of this opportunity by examining Astronomy -- both its past ( all # years of it!) and the stunning potentials inherent in its future! Dick has kindly donated his entire column this issue to the mad ravings of -- Alter Letters from Briggs, Donnelly, Inwagen, Jacobs, Kimber, Sharland Interior illustrations by Freff , Gaughan, Hart ing Worlds of IF is published bimonthly by Worlds of IF is published in the United of Universal Publishing  Distributing CorCompany, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, Lonporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. don SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, ChairMain Offices: # East # Street, New York, man of the Board, Ralph Stokes, Managing N.Y. #. Single Copy: #c. #-Issue subDirector. 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(retail prices shown) background information that will enable anyone to find, survey, test, excavate, preserve, analyze and record artifacts and other evidences of prehistoric life. # the Frame of Thno. Giorgio de Santiliana and inquiry into the origins of scientific thought in the pre-literate world, deciphering "code language" common to many archaic cultures. # Bernard Heuvelmans. The scientific case for the legends of the Great Sea-Serpent. A spell-binding scientific detective story. # Flavn. Lucidly explains the relationship between man and natural earth processes keyed to the improved use and control of the environment. A most important book. # Digging away at the site of half-fabulous Dilmun, on Bahrain, an archaeologist discusses oil sheiks, business practices of prehistory, and a wealth of fresh historical insights. # Hawkins. 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After completing your trial membership, you will be entitled to take advantage of our fabulous bonus plan which offers savings up to # and more, (retail prices shown) the relationship between Stonehenge and Mycenae, Mayan culture and buried ruins of the Far East? Mythology, archaeology, anthropology, etymology and a wealth of exciting speculation. Reads like a detective story! # book of marvels about the two extremes of the globe, a work that is at once scientific and poetic, and that leaves the reader with the distinct feeling that he has seen it at first hand. # Asimov. The incomparable Isaac Asimov has done it again with this exciting general account of modern science -- a highly readable, encyclopedic work of # pages. # I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I The Library of Science # A Riverside, New Jersey # Please accept my application for membership and send me the three volumes I have I agree to purchase at least three additional books during the first year at special members' prices. Savings range up to # and more. Membership is cancelable any time after I buy three books. Shipping and handling is added to all shipments. Send no money. Members are billed when books arrive. # book for #. # books you want. Indicate by number the NameAddress. City.State.Zip. (Offer good in Continental U.S. and Canada only. Prices slightly higher in Canada.)  #  G reetings, Gentle Readers. I am the bearer of somber tidings. This is the last issue of Worlds of IF as a discrete entity -- at least for the time being. As of January #, Galaxy and Worlds of IF will be combined into a single monthly magazine. The reason? A simple one: we ran out of paper -- the kind of paper we can afford to buy, that is. We still have access to quantities sufficient for one magazine, but not two. (If we tried to put I out a book with the next-higher grade we would go broke in nothing flat.) Subscribers: those of you with subs to both Galaxy and Worlds of IF will have them extended the appropriate number of issues. But be of good cheer. The rowdy, fun-loving spirit I have striven to infuse into this magazine will not be lost, but will sound in clear if muted tones in a fusion of the best of two worlds -- the best of Galaxy , which has long stood for intellectual and esthetic preeminence, and the best of this magazine. And surely I don't have to tell you what IF is all about! Here are a few of the contributions to that new magazine that otherwise would have appeared in Worlds of IF. The Alien Viewpoint of Dick Geis will continue to delight and enrage you on a bimonthly basis. The Editor's Page will also maintain a bimonthly presence, as will SF Calendar. Sign of the Unicom, a new Amber will first see print in the new GalaxyIF. A new Mack Reynolds story. A new Chandler. A "Berserker." And, (as the saying goes) much, much more! So. Life goes on, even if magazines don't always. See you this January in the (new) Galaxy(JF) -- the best science-fiction magazine in the world! -- Baen W hat Mellett liked about Knabe was that he was an archetype. The bulging forehead, vague blue eyes, the omnium gatherum of garments, all proclaimed his Genius; which, moreover, he undoubtedly had. His inventions had provided him with sufficient funds to establish a private laboratory in his town house, complete with autoclaves, refrigerator-freezers, electron microscopes, a workshop, a qualified assistant -- and even a power plant installed when the professor had become annoyed with the interruptions in Springfield's electric power. Graduates of Springfield High rarely achieved such status, and Mellett was proud to call him friend. Regrettably, Knabe had neglected to provide himself with the requisite Beautiful Daughter. However, his assistant Miss Lockwood was a splendid substitute, if a little intimidating. Mellett knocked twice and pushed open the door leading to the basement laboratory. "Hello, Eschsholzia," he said shyly. The beautiful redhead in the immaculate white coat glanced up from her microscope, smiled, and waved her hand toward the inner door. Mellett sighed. Sometimes he thought he might actually work up the courage to ask her to dinner, if she only indicated that she could spare a minute to be invited. Today was standard issue. Knobby here?" he asked, resigned. "Back room," she said, concentrating, one hand taking notes while the other adjusted the instrument. "See you later." Aha! Things were looking up. With a light step he made his way around the desks piled high with dusty papers, crockery, astrolabes, armillary spheres, electro-encephalographs and other scientific detritus, to the workshop door. "Did you bring the transtemporal potentiometers I asked for?" Mellett looked for the scientist, and then spied him on the floor under a heap of wiring that filled one end of the room. "They haven't invented them yet, Knobby," he said mildly. "Sorry." "Hell and damnation. Oh, well, I suppose I can... yes. This one and... there -- wait a minute -- could do the job... blast! Why do they make screwdrivers so badly? This one's gone loose in the haft... There!" He scrambled out from behind the Invention and drooped toward Mellett. Today his socks were odder than usual; one of his ankles was bare. "Aren't you going to tell me what it is?" said Mellett. The last one had been the (M)agnetro-(A)drenalo-(K)inem-(E)lectronic Ultra(P)acificator, which, when broadcast over short-wave radio, had precipitated a world-wide peace treaty and the voluntary propulsion of all weaponry into the sun. The only ill effect was a slight increase in the pulse rate due to interference with the sunspot pattern, which had lasted about thirty seconds. His previous achievement had been the Medullary Acceptor Neo-Nutrient Alimentory, which created a delicious and completely nourishing pastry out of waste plastic. Mellett could hardly wait. "All ready to go. At last. It's taken much longer than I anticipated -- I must have been working on it for over six months now. Tch-ch." The great scientist frowned. "I know. I've been counting the minutes." "Tut, Robert, never do that. Not unless you were using the (C)hrono(L)ymphometric (O)steo(Orcadian(K)inesimometer -- did I give you one?" He scratched the shining, bald expanse of his head. "Yes, Knobby." Ruefully, Mellett recollected the massive object in its tasteful teak casing that occupied most of his bedroom. It kept subjective time and had no alarm; he rested his Baby Ben and hairbrushes on it. "Now, that's time-keeping," said Knabe, with simple pride. "Where is that girl? She's never here when I want her -- girl!" "She seems to be working. Can I substitute?" "No, no, now we celebrate. Miss Thing -- Jones!" Mellett said reproachfully, "Really, Knobby! Her name's Lockwood. Eschsholzia Lockwood. You ought to know it after three years." "What d'you think I pay the girl for?" said the scientist irritably. "It's her job to keep track of details... ah." "Yes, Dr. Knabe?" The burnished copper hair, the alabaster face peered through the doorway. "Drinks. It's done." I "It's done?" She stood still, the beautiful green eyes widening. "Does it -- does it work?" "Of course it will work. All my inventions work. Get us something to drink, there's a good girl." Mellett tried not to be offended, on her behalf, at his manner. Here was a girl, as intelligent as she was gorgeous, a Ph.D. working as secretary, receptionist, assistant and bottle-washer. He had seen the flare of resentment, quickly controlled, in the emerald eyes when Knabe was particularly peremptory. That she understood what the scientist was doing, and kept the lab supplied with what he would be needing before he needed it, he took for granted. Sometimes Mellett could almost dimly perceive what Women's Lib was about... but then, Knabe was not a Man; he was a Genius. She returned with a tray holding three beakers of foaming liquid. "Hot buttered ethanol," she said, handing it around. It wasn't bad. When they had toasted the success of the pile of wires, Mellett said, "Well, aren't you going to tell me about it? Apparently Miss Lockwood already knows." "I haven't told anyone yet." Knabe gave a deep sigh and inclined his head. "You know that the human brain is unfinished. the final evolution of Man... unlimited potential -- and what the brain's capacity actually is we are about to discover. This -- " he waved his bony hand at the jumble -- "is the prototype of the Maxi-Encephalo Synaptic Stimulator; it will open the doors of the mind of man to his ultimate destiny!" Mellett was impressed. Eschsholzia broke the silence. "You're sure, Dr. Knabe?" "Of course I'm sure." "Then I want to volunteer." "You?" "Me. Why not?" Why not indeed, thought Mellett admiringly. What a remarkable woman! What strength of character! Knabe mused. "Well, I'd thought of... using a brain that had reached the possible optimum... I hadn't' really... no offence, but..." Mellett exploded. "What's the matter with you, Knobby? What more do you want? Miss Lockwood has everything -- beauty, brains, good sense, balance -- you couldn't do better!" "Why, thank you," said Eschsholzia, blushing. "All right, all right. But -- well, let's see. Can we make it Thursday?" His secretary confirmed the appointment. O n the way out, Mellett said, "May I take you to dinner?" "I'd be delighted," said the girl. Over the meal, he was bold. "I've been thinking it over. I don't think you ought to go through with this." "Why not?" she said, surprised. "It could be dangerous, fooling with your brain." She laughed. "Nonsense. He was going to try it himself, and he wouldn't risk his own head. No, I'm tired of being a second choice -- ever since I discovered that a woman has to try twice as hard to get half as far. I've been waiting for a chance like this." "B(it -- well, I don't like it," said Mellett stubbornly. She sniffed. "I suppose now I get the line about how you don want to change me." "Well, yes. You're almost too much woman now -- I mean, what chance would I have if..." "You could have the treatment too." "I -- " he stopped. Did he... no. He just didn't have her guts. "You see?" she said. "Some of us have nothing to lose... Besides, what could you offer me that would make up for the opportunity to develop everything in my head?... Oh, don't take it to heart. No mere sexual relationship could compete." She sat starry-eyed over the coffee. "What will it be like, I wonder? The functions of the brain so manifold, the future evolution of man so mysterious..." W hen the electrodes were removed from her still, partlyshaven head, Mellett dropped the copper curl he had been stroking in panic. "You've killed her. Oh, God, get a doctor..." "Be quiet. She's all right. I wonder if those potentiometers... No. She's coming to." They placed her on the decrepit old couch to recover. She stirred. Mellett watched anxiously for any flicker of motion in her pale face, while Knabe puffed serenely on his pipe. "She's moving," said Mellett. "Yes. Hmmm."  "Oh, Eschsholzia, how do you feel?" Mellett dropped to his knees on a pile of cable beside the couch. "All right... My head. Feels funny. Leave me... alone a minute... ugh!" She retched. "What is it? She's ill -- Knobby, get the doctor!" She said faintly, "What is that stink?" The men sniffed; tobacco, ether, disinfectant, ozone; nothing unusual. She gasped, "Air! Open... window!" Knabe went to her, while Mellett wrestled with the cellar window, finally breaking the catch in his efforts to open it. Fresh air and soot poured in; she started to take a deep breath and began coughing. "Let's get her upstairs. It is stuffy down here." Mellett lifted her, still gasping, and carried her up to the front parlor where he laid her gently on the sofa. He flung open the casement. "That better?" Her breathing was a little easier. She said, "Oh, that horrible smell. Can't you do something?" To Mellett the air seemed fresh and clean. There wasn't even much traffic outside the house. "Hmm. Unanticipated effect, but predictable," said Knabe interestedly. Eschsholzia seemed quieter, although her enchanting nose remained wrinkled with disgust. But she had almost stopped coughing. "Would you like anything? A drink?" "Some water, please." The water, eagerly swallowed, caused a choking fit. "It tastes like the smell. Funny; I suppose the process affected the olfactory nerves?" "Yes, certainly," said Knabe. "All sort of connections will have been affected. You'll stay here for a few days so we can keep complete notes..." "Oh, no," she said faintly. "I couldn't." Mellett said, "It's all right. Knobby's perfectly safe." She threw him a look of sheer impatience. "Oh, for heaven's sake. It's the smell, and the water. I want to go to my weekend place, out of town. I have a cottage my brother left me... must you smoke?" Knabe put down the pipe he had just taken from under the chair cushion. "Then, I will go with you," he said. "Do you think you could get up yet?" She sat up, slowly. "Yes... it's okay. My head feels woolly and sore... but I must get away from this odor." Mellett's car didn't agree with her, either. T he next day, when Mellett called with a bottle of wine to see how she was, he found Knabe well into his second notebook, sitting at the kitchen table. "Fascinating, fascinating," he said, waving the pencil about. "Had you noticed that? Is she all right?" ' "Oh, yes. Remarkably healthy specimen. The early effects are wearing off. I expect great things." "Where is she?" "Up there." Knabe gestured vaguely toward the ceiling. Assuming that he meant the upstairs bedroom, Mellett started to the staircase. "Hi, Bob!" He looked around. "Up here." She was hanging by her knees on the thick wooden curtain rail. "What are you doing up there?" said Mellett, swallowing nervously. She wore a green bikini. "I was having a nap, of course." She dropped, landing gracefully on all fours. "A nap?" he said blankly. "On the curtain rod?" "Mmm. Much more comfortable." "Er -- how's the smell problem?" "Pretty awful -- but I've learned how to turn it off with breathing a certain way. Otherwise I feel quite pleasant. I see and hear much better." She padded with bare feet toward the kitchen. "I'll get you something nice to drink. I've just discovered it." Mellett watched the retreat of the green bikini in rapt admiration. Suddenly, she jumped in the air and came down facing the opposite way, her back to the comer, semicrouched. IF "What's the matter?" he said, startled. Her hands dropped from the defensive position and she stood up. "Oh, it was just a plane passing over. Sorry. Be right back." Knabe said as he wandered in, "Don't expect alcohol. She doesn't approve of it." It was, in the event, milk, which seemed to be mostly cream. "Isn't it lovely?" she said. "Oh, Knobby, that caudal reflex again." "C-caudal reflex?" Mellett hoped he didn't understand. "I keep wanting to move my tail, especially when I like something as much as this drink," she said. "Look, just what have you done to her?" demanded Mellett. "What has her... er... tail got to do with the expansion of the brain?" "It's still too early to tell," said Knabe. "She's very healthy. I am keeping complete notes." "Besides, I'm having fun. I never felt so good," said Eschsholzia. She sat, a fluid motion, her legs curling under her. Mellett discovered that the combination of milk, unexpected behavior and exposed Eschsholzia was making him nervous. She seemed as intelligent as ever, and somehow there was a great deal more of her physical presence. He withdrew, promising to call again. T he next time he brought roses. "She's out in the garden," said Knabe, who answered the door. A # Eighth Ave., New York, N. Y. # #-#        #c   #c     preoccupied frown had taken up residence between his brows. "I don't mind admitting, Bob, I don't quite understand it." Fortunately, the garden was secluded. Eschsholzia was there, all of her. The bikini was nowhere to be seen. Eschsholzia was -- "Wow!" said Mellett reverently. "Yes, yes," said Knabe. "But -- well, go and talk to her." She was rolling in the grass on her back. Mellett swallowed and started for the back door. "I don't think I can. Talk. I'm not used to... couldn't she put something on?" "She won't. She has refused to wear clothing for two days. She says it irritates her. It's a good thing it's summer." In a futile attempt to dim his vision, Mellett donned his sun glasses. At least the look in his eyes wouldn't embarrassxhim. She was a natural redhead. "Hello!" she called, sitting up. She shook cut grass off her shoulder with a spectacular wriggle. Mellett's sun glasses fell off. "You're turning very red," she said. "Too much sun already? Damn! I've got a thorn." She brought her toe to her mouth and pulled at it with teeth and fingers. Mellett fumbled with the glasses -- the earpieces seemed to bend the wrong way -- and finally replaced them on his slippery nose. "Er -- . Hello. How is it?" "It's -- " She gnawed at the toe. " -- great. Oof. There." She gave the toe a last soothing lick and put it down. "Knobby's all twitchy. He doesn't like it." "Doesn't like what?" said Mellett cautiously. "What's happened, his machine." She lay back and nibbled a long blade of grass. A hoverfly lit on her thigh; the skin twitched and it flew off, followed by the sunglasses. "Do you know yet?" said Mellett, trying to keep his eyes closed. "Oh, yes. He was wrong, for once. He'll never admit it though. He's blaming it on the transtemporal potentiometers, but that's just an evasion." Averting his eyes, since she was now stroking her nipples with the grass, Mellett mumbled, "What is it, then?" "All those unused portions of the brain... they're not future potential, they're evolutionary discards... I have all the reflexes, senses, instincts and so on that we lost in evolution. I can smell people several streets away. I expect I could catch fish with my hands... I can mo efast. Look!" She sat up, her hand flashed out and closed. She brought it nearer to Mellett, who had to look, and opened it. Released, a gnat darted off. "But that means..." "Poor Knobby. Yes. Man's brain is evolved as far as it ever will, we've reached the end of the road. Pity. But there it is... What unusual animals men are! I'm not in heat just now so forget it." Mellett felt himself turn bright scarlet; and ran. In the cottage Knabe was staring morosely at a glass of creamy milk. He said, "Did she tell you?" Mopping his streaming face, Mellett said, "Yes. But she says you don't believe it." "How can I? It's not possible. The brain is designed to develop much further than -- this..." he stared helplessly at Mellett. "Maybe it's not so bad. She doesn't seem to be exactly suffering... and after I all, she hasn't lost anything." "Oh, she's all right. A healthy animal. Never mind her..." He lowered his voice. "I always did think women had limited cortical capacities. I meant to try it on a man first. That would prove me right." IF Mellett looked out of the window again. Eschsholzia was lying stretched out in the sun, arching her back to the warmth, gloriously desirable... "Me,' he said firmly. "Now's your chance. Come on." Knabe blinked, called to Eschsholzia that he would be back shortly, and at the determined pressure of Mellett's hand at his elbow allowed himself to be driven back to the lab. jty head aches. And does it lYX s ti n k"' said Mellett faintly. "For Christ's sake, put out that pipe. Yecch." Something had to be done about the air or he would be sick. Suddenly the process became obvious; he closed off the passage back of his nose and breathed through his throat. The smell subsided; but it was harder to talk. He rested for half an hour. Knabe said, "I shouldn't leave Miss Jones alone much longer. We'll have to get back to her place.' Smiling, Mellett said, "Fine. Let's go." He stood up carefully. What a mess this place was -- the Maxi Encephalo Synaptic Stimulator all over the floor, dust, beetle dung, insect footprints all over the walls and ceiling. Ugh. Eschsholzia came to the door holding a towel. "Oh, it's you," she said, tossing it on a chair. Cautiously, Mellett re-opened his newly sensitive nose. She was gorgeous. But strangely, his feelings were warm, tender, admiring, without the tension of desire. She really wasn't in heat. Two days later, they told Knabe. "We're sorry, Knabe, but it's true. Those doors in the brain open backward. Homo sapiens, as he stands in stocking feet, is it." Grimly, Knabe packed up his eighteen filled notebooks and one dreadful sock. "It was the potentiometers. I know it was. No more makeshifts. I shall have to invent that and start again..." He stumped off, muttering, and hailed a taxi. Together, Mellett and Eschsholzia waved good-bye. "Maybe we should have told him about the water." "No,' she said. "It would have been too unkind. But what fun it's going to be! I always wondered what it would be like to be amphibious!" "And what a way to make a living! That Dolphin Research Group is ready to pay us anything." "So they should. They won't find a team with our qualifications anywhere else!" Laughing, they ran out into the garden and licked salt off each other's backs, basking in the sun. As Mellett rolled over and nipped her ear, she whispered, "Hey, I think... I think I'm coming into season."  T he Thursday evening sun burrowed down under burning clouds as the autumn winds began to blow, and a cloak of chilled darkness settled over the Vermont horizon. In the cabin by the trail overlooking the field, Rachel puttered around, unpacking the bag of groceries into the cabinet and shaking her sleeping bag to fluff out the down. Matty had driven her there that afternoon and left her, plunked on the edge of the Appalachian' Trail. Until Matty returned on Saturday morning. Rachel was free, alone with mountains covered with the impossible riot of Vermont springtime. Greens, reds, purples and yellows; in clumps and mosaics, a sight so overpowering as to be unreal to eyes grown in the city and used to nature only in small doses. A row of bushes. A concrete-circled tree. Now there were no people and no expectations, nobody tapping their foot while she took time to breathe. She stood still and closed her eyes, unable to comprehend the release that filled her. Nobody asking, nobody demanding. She could go to sleep when she pleased, and never wake up. Not feel something was wanted from her. Not deny her feelings of waiting, waiting for twenty-one years for someone unknown to give her something she needed, something everybody else had but she couldn't see. Here no one watched, here she could play her flute, press her face to the grass, draw cartoons on her legs, wash or not wash her hair -- her life again. To do anything she pleased. Whatever that was. Y esterday somebody had come to borrow a dictionary -- a girl from the other end of the dorm, in the usual tennis shorts and halter. And then her roommate's boyfriend stopped in, annoyed because his car needed new tires, and Mark had shown up while she was working on a paper and ended up dragging het to a mild party where he sat in a corner and looked depressed, so clearly waiting for her to talk to him, and -- Somewhere it became too much, and she snapped. Back from the party, needing a shower, Rachel was sorting her psych notes when the dormline rang. She stared at the blrt  ng instrument, not moving while it rang, waited, rang. Then she lunged for the closet, jerked out her backpack, stuffed in clothes and toothbrush and flute, pulled the straps tight over her shoulders and ran through the warm starry night to Matty's dorm as the wind scraped leaves along the street behind her. She spent the night in mad dreams and cold, clammy sweat, and woke unsure of where she was. Matty announced they could borrow her uncle's hill house off in the country, she'd called and it was okay. While Rachel frowned Matty tossed the backpack into the rear seat next to the grocery bags; when Rachel was almost decided Matty prodded her into the Volvo's shotgun seat, sat behind the steering wheel and stomped the accelerator, swerving through the wild-colored hills with manic glee. The city dropped away, the fields were filled with cows and dandelions, and then there was nothing of the outside world left save the fading putter of Matty's Volvo. Now Rachel could sleep or sing, commit rash acts without listening for judgments. A black bird with red armpits had paused on the fence. The stream gurgled clearly over each patch of stones, making subtly different splashes in every place. The cows raised their rumps and dignifiedly trudged home. Rachel had napped for half the afternoon as the wind fanned the colored tips of the trees before her like a eunuch wielding a peacock's tail. Then the clouds came, waking her with their shadows, and she returned to the cabin. R achel stepped barefoot into the night. The sky was completely covered by clouds, the outlines of the mountains identified the thicker shadows. Several fireflies flitted about, like the spirit of some ancient machine released from its bottle. The wind blew through her sweater and prickled her arms. Branches flapped, leaves fled the ground in circling flocks. A peal of thunder broke beyond the mountains. Then the landscape lit up, and thunder rolled again. Rachel heard, then felt, rain. A wet kitten's-paw batted her nose. She held out her arms and began to dance. Right forward, left side, together, stomp; right forward, left side... she chanted the modal melody and led the line of dancers around in interwoven circles as the sky crumbled above her. And far beyond the storm, a man almost passed by. He was going from here to there when there was a disturbance, an unexpected belch in the fabric of complex space, and suddenly (as perception goes) he was falling into space. To us he would have looked unprotected, naked and sure to die, but he was not in danger for this reason. A mesh of energies enfolded him as a lobster's shell surrounds the softer flesh, linked with him in proper manners to make space his natural environment; he survived, he perceived, he acted. By luck, he had not been killed in the exo-spatial earthquake. But it was closer than it should have been, and now he was in trouble. This -- we shall call him a man, and then call this man Muldaur -- he realized he was hurt, and probed for a place to make an emergency landing. Reflexes took over, feeling the tugs of gravity wells, smelling atmospheric qualities, sorting the cocktail-chatter babble of information that filled our solar system. Asteroids grunted and satellites gossiped like housewives,' the planets frowned and harumphed, and the sun chortled happily, throwing out streams of electromagnetic confetti as it jiggled its plasma playtoys and watched the elements build. Training selected actions without conscious thought, guiding Muldaur's fall from netherspace into our #-space in a jerky cosmic downshift that left him hurtling at Earth in a roughly matched orbit and velocity. And still falling, tumbling. Muldaur flexed his "wings" as he whipped around the Moon, trying to slow and steady himself. He began scanning the planet "below" him with his many senses. Spots on the surface registered; where we would have seen only vast expanses of cloud layers and swathes of blue and brown, he sensed the great concentrations of life, energy and motion. Paris... Moscow... Tokyo... Los Angeles, Chicago... New York. Muldaur didn't know these names, of course. But he veered downwards. diverting energies as best he could to safen his fall. He glowed. Those who watched the sky thought they saw a falling star. Some old men heard meteor whistles of radar their heads. And just when Muldaur was almost down, slowing himself as best he was able, he rode an energy braid into the center of the thunderstorm. His ionized protective web drew half a dozen bolts of lightning, revealing the countryside with brief flickers of day. He jerked and twisted in midair. The bolts disrupted his already wavering neural controls so completely that he fell the rest of the way down, shot with pain and fear. Had he not been a bit awake when he hit the ground, he would have died. As it happened, he lived. And celebrated this success by fainting. R achel woke in the morning to the far-off lowing of the cows. Shepulled her arms out of the sleeping bag and stared at the dark wood beam above her. Sometime during the night the roof had stopped making rain sounds, and she knew without looking that it was going to be a bright day. She closed her eyes to try and recapture her last dream, but it was gone, so she pulled down the zipper and got out of bed. Quickly pulling on her shirt and jeans, Rachel paused in the kitchen only long enough to swallow some orange juice straight from the bottle. Then she ran outside. The grass was deep green in the morning sun, and the ground so wet as to almost be muddy. The stream ran with greater speed and bulk. Rachel moved her bare feet from stone to stone until she reached a certain spot, then knelt to drink. As she cupped her hands, her eyes caught a wavy spot of motion farther along the stream, a faint blurring like heat shimmer from an overheated car on a hot day. Muldaur, crumped on a bush, breathed weakly. He had not wakened or moved since his fall. The shimmering indicated that his automatic nerve reflexes continued to work. But of course Rachel did not know this, nor did it occur to her to stop and think. As soon as she saw the folded figure, she ran to it. Something told her there were no broken bones, and without hesitating she shouldered the unconscious body with a fireman's carry and headed back to the cabin. M uldaur was in a basket woven of fire. He was held down by a strange gravity and filled with unfamiliar air. When he was awake enough to realize he was conscious he caught his breath, only to have his stomach muscles branded with pain. He gasped. Then he withdrew and observed. IF His body was full of wrongnesses which blinked. They hurt, too, but the pains were receding. So his bypasses were on the job. He was tired and drained, bruised, battered, and downright miserable. However, that could all be cured by food and sleep. There seemed to be no damage his body could not repair. Given the time. Need signals for protein and energy began flashing. The awareness sent Muldaur into one of the sequences of checkout rituals. He chanted silently, touching his psychic frets and listening for the proper harmonics. His feelings of disorientation worried him far more than the wooziness; the energy patterns which wove his web and wings were his uniform and ship, protective device and sensory extension. The diagnostic was not good. Now what, he wondered. Still in the stretchedtime quiet of contemplation, Muldaur reviewed various lectures they had given him when he was first training. He had never been caught in so extreme an emergency. Much guesswork lay ahead -- if luck was with him. If he could work safely -- if he could find -- then his thoughts broke on a log jam. Where? He yanked at his memory. Sensations of falling, burning, caught like a canoe in a a waterfall -- the disturbance! -- a blue and white disk spinning around a sun. Muldaur turned himself outwards again, still letting his body work without direction, but listening. He felt an enclosed space, shells of cellulose, and little power or metal. Then he opened his eyes and tried to focus. There was life close by. His adrenals were relaxed, saying, Safe, don't worry, okay to lie still, but he frantically rolled his eyes, ignoring the pain, until he found a face, a worried face, as human as his own. Looking at him with uncertain blue eyes. The reassuring hue of his own familiar flesh. Jsaid. Was this real? Could he understand her? Why had she brought him in, anyway? "How are we today?" she prattled, as if he were a wounded animal. He had been so still, and she could see the pain in his face when he tried to move. "Am I supposed to be a nurse or a reporter? Here, can you drink this -- it's water." She moved closer to Muldaur, slowly, and brought a glass of water into his sight. Then she pressed the rim to his lips and let him taste the water. He let his mouth open a bit more, so she tilted the glass until he had swallowed it all. What next, she wondered. I couldn't have just left him. She rose and went into the kitchen. The water was too cold, and a thick layer of sugar remained undissolved at the bottom of the glass. She touched a sweetened finger to the -- what was he, anyway? He looked human, aside from the blue dCTiim suntan and the way the hairs on her arm stood out when she came close to him. He wasn't much bigger than she was; she had lifted him without much effort. Maybe five foot eight, muscled lean like an acrobat, smoothskinned face, gentle features. Her finger tingled as she pressed it to his lips; he closed his eyes for an instant and then seemed to nod for more. "You want this stuff?" Rachel asked, to make sure. The darker blue lips opened in answer. Rachel pulled up a chair and stared at the man after he swallowed the last of the sugar-water. There again -- man. Was it safe to assume anything? Would she kill him quicker by her care? How could she communicate with this -- this obligation? She looked again at his blue skin -- no, that was like calling her own skin "white." She rubbed her wrist absently. There was probably a good reason. Why bother at all? That was the real question. Hadn't she run away for just that reason? Everybody demanding, intruding... But the question answered itself. Because he needs me. And even that was rationalization. He had been there, and she had picked him up. Rachel found herself wondering, where did he come from, who is he, what's this all about? She sat up suddenly as she saw his eyes looking af her. She looked back r and became aware of her charge as a person. He's been thinking also. Suddenly it all turned real. She started to back away, but he looked at her. He doesn't understand, either. She felt his uncertainty and his fear. Then she found herself moving closer, as if it would help understanding. She saw his stomach muscles moving under the grey-silver cloth that covered him like dancer's tights. Sadness overcame her that they couldn't communicate, and she rested her head on his chest. He breathed in, and out, and his heart beat under her ear. The shirt or whatever felt surprisingly soft. There was no sensation of static electricity on her head, although her arms still tingled. She closed her eyes. There was a touch on her head, of hands. Muldaur had raised his arms until he was able to touch Rachel's temples with his fingertips. She felt the fingers brush her hair and tingle in her scalp. There were bright spots in her mind's eye at every touch, each a different color. The glows spread until they joined, and then began to hum. She felt herself falling, gently, drifting into sleep, watching herself from a distance as the forming images stopped needing her control. Words began to whisper in her ears, old lessons, lists, teachers pointing at blackboards, trips to the zoo where the tigers drowsed in their cages, her father calling out IF the gears on the transmission, pages from a cookbook... The images began to flow faster, louder; the demand grew greater and started to pull the words out. It all began to spin, and Rachel grew afraid. Tendrils reached out into her, forbidden parts, and she tried to scream. Then another force reached in and twisted the flow  shut, making sudden silence, and the world went black. T hen the hands stopped pressing and she sat up, shaking her head. The room was still spinning. Rachel closed her eyes, took a slow breath in and out, and looked down again. The red eyes blinked, and aquamarine lips smiled, showing regular, white teeth. "Hello," he said to her slowly. "Thank you for your language. My name is Muldaur. Are you feeling correct? I am injured, but not ill. Perhaps there is more water? It has been -- " "Please," Rachel said. "Stop." What had he done? "I'll get you some more water. Stay there." What would she do now? She let the water run out of the kitchen tap, waiting for it to get cold. The first hurdle is crossed, Muldaur thought. What a curious language ! So imprecise, yet so expressive. His training and talents had enabled him to probe for the needed knowledge and absorb most of it in those brief instants he contacted Rachel's memory before his weakened control grew too demanding and forced him to withdraw. Now his subconscious would integrate the information inherent in the language while he pondered the many objects in Rachel's world. Earth, Sun, New York, New York, Brahms, Dangling Conversation... he rolled the sounds on his tongue as the images and associations unwound in his mind's eye. Girl, star, running, grass, clouds, peppermint, dandruff. This must be one of the Tammaro colonies, long forgotten. She doesn't look too afraid. She's young. Good reactions, for an aborigine. He frowned at this thought. That's wrong. She is human. I mustn't trifle with her. The sugar and water had revived him somewhat, so he tried sitting up. Too soon! he thought as the pain forced him back down. It's several -- he searched for the local equivalent -- yes, days 'ere l can stand. And fly away? Go to, Malidourt Muldaur Sellim'pse. Your energies are sore taxed, and you will tarry long. Startled, Muldaur shifted his thinking back into his own language. Where did all that come from? Hmmrn, yes, I must have tapped that without noticing. I'd best be cautious about that; this language has bad thoughts buried in it. So many words ! I may as well organize all this while I'm resting. I'll have quite a report to file. Another lost colony. Eighty-two percent standard gravity. Old sun, adolescent planet, exotic people. Where is my lady dispatcher tonight? Muldaur ignored the problems inherent in the use of the word "tonight." Instead, he drifted into a memory of half a year ago, and gave himself over to his past seifs being. The multicolored sands crackled at the touch of their feet, tickling them with snaps of light and static. Her tan was dark and smooth and in the water her laugh glinted like sunlight. The soft sea creatures they called to came near, and they mounted, avoiding the blowholes, racing in the slow-falling waters until they grew tired of the chase, and collapsed back on shore. Their love play made a shower of sparks and crackles, doused at rhythmic intervals by the night tide, as they moved and whispered and exploded... yes, that was us, then, that looks like her now, near... "Asleep again,"" Rachel muttered with approval, and set the glass of water down on the table. hat shall I do with him? Rachel stepped outside, chewing on a sandwich and watching a trio of squirrels play hopscotch in the branches of a tree. She could just leave when Matty came for her in two days. No I couldn't. Take him with her? That would be good for a mess. What had happened? There was all that  shuffling in her head, and then he spoke to her. Mel-darr. That's his name. How had he done that? The sky was clouding in one corner, promising more rain. The squirrels dashed away. A cloud shadow flowed along the hillside, turning the treetops briefly dark. I wish I knew what was going on. She turned and went back through the kitchen door. There she rummaged around until she found several packages of clear soup broth, and set the water to boiling. When the soup was done, she poured it into two ceramic mugs and carried them into the room where her skyblue starman lay sleeping. H e smiled at her when he woke, and smelled the still-steaming broth eagerly. "Thank you. I could eat something more solid, I believe. Did I tell you my name?" "Mel-darr," Rachel said. "No?" He corrected her pronunciation. "Mull-dour would be closer. Your language has the wrong phonemes. Your name I did not get, please?" "You didn't?" "I only looked in your speech and memory centers for the language, understand. So as not to intrude. Some are touchy, without permission." He grimaced. "There have been a few unhappy incidents... see, I acquire skill in your tongue with every, um, moment." "My name is Rachel. And you IF haven't told me how bad you are hurt, or where you came from or why you're here or -- " "Please." He waved a hand. "Indeed, it is a tale of length I should tell. Sit comfortable while I unravel, and then you can ask again, if you have more questions." "Fine," Rachel said. She set the mug down and leaned back in the chair. "Hit it." "Pardon?" "Take it from the top, let'er roll. Didn't you get any slang? Go ahead." Muldaur rolled his eyes. "I will assume you gave me leave to begin -- Rachel. Yes. My full name is Malidaurt Muldaur Sellim'pse, which 'is my patron's -- no, godfather seems clpser -- name, my personal name, and lineage, as well as the fact that my -- parents -- exercised gene selection which has been augmented by vo-vocational training and surgery. In my language the process is called callopsei, from calee opesi, or destiny of action. I was born about, well, a gross and some dozens of your years ago -- pardon, about two hundred -- but I am only some seven doz -- eighty years aged, because of... hmm. Ah, yes. Relativity. Yes, good, that's the reason. And I've lived about one-fifth of my life span by now. So actually I'm but a little older than you, don't you agree?" "Oh, definitely!" "Anyway, I'm a workingman -- a messenger of sorts." Muldaur paused. "No... I'm getting words like telegram, envoy, special delivery, but they're too limited. Let me try to explain better..." after exploration (Muldaur said) jf communication and trade accounted for most of the intragalactic shuttling around. Tourist trades, government commissions, scholarly and scientific studies, all contributed to the constant flux of matter and information between star systems. Hauling cargoes and delivering messages made up the bulk of spatial traffic. Methods of getting things from here to there varied tremendously within the galaxy, depending on technical sophistication, distances, times and priorities involved. One centuries-old firm sent its deliveries out in slow asteroidal form, while another twin-planet system used a short-rang pulsed matter transmitter for local import-export business. And so on... The other problem was messages. Electromagnetic radiation is much too slow to talk between stars, and not reliable. Although near-instantaneous communication was becoming more practical as well as economical evey century, there was still room for improvement... "Meanwhile," Muldaur said, making a palms-in-front-of-chestandfacing gesture, "one derives me. And the Interstellar Pony Express -- is that right? Hold, yes, but clumsy. Couriers. Bumblebees. Anagrams -- crab! Do you see?" he asked, helplessly. "I get it," said Rachel, trying not to giggle. "Please, go on." "We're trained," he continued. "Discipline, surgery, esprit de corps. I am a body inside a cocoon, ganged to my lower cortex and as part of me as my arms and legs. It is part of me, non-material. Web, weaving, psycho-electric tapestry... I have roughly twenty-three senses above the regular nine, can ride the waves of space's energy -- you're lacking words -- in space I'm like a fish in water, wings of power. I glide above space itself, between the -- the levels, seams, quanta -- no!" He stopped again in disgust. Rachel wrinkled her nose as if it would aid her in understanding, while Muldaur grimaced again. "As I said. I carry messages, make negotiations, deliver mail, monitor conditions, patrol welfares. We have a glorious life, slipping out of spacetime, playing a role in it, doing and feeling..." His eyes unconsciously looked up as his voice trailed off. "... but I had an accident. I was riding the -- I hit a... pothole? Thin spot? Hot bog? It surprised me... suddenly I was drained and snapped into space, and homed in on this planet to crashland, but then I ran through an ionic field -- yes, a thunderstorm. Nearly burnt out my nervous system. Mara stilo, was that wild. Can't remember much without doing a -- oh. not again. I could, if I needed to. Take my word for it. They'll get it out when I report. And here I am." "Yeah. Here you are." Rachel leaned closer. "That's all pretty weird, you know, I guess it makes sense. But so what? Here you are, with this story, and these words you've pulled out of my skull. And I've got you here. In two days Matty's coming back. You going to be all better by then? Or will this be weeks and months? I can just see it. What am I doing, having you here? I don't know anything about what to do. I don't want any part of it. I just want -- " "Rachel!" Muldaur reached out to take her hand. She jerked back. "Please. You're asking questions I can't answer. This is short. Please." But she had collapsed on his chest again, sobbing. He stroked the back of her head, ignoring the pain signals as best he could. People! Females! Was there ever any chance of understanding this particular person, of really touching her. "What do you want me to say, Rachel? Tell me. I'm tired, and it hurts. And I don't have these answers." She continued to cry. Muldaur realized she was crying for herself. He had not caused the upset, only triggered it. After a while he retreated a bit and went into the Griever's Litany, hoping the mood would project. Relax. Don't cry. Enough is gone. Quiet. Relax. Shhh... there you go. Relax. Sleep. Good, good. Quiet. Peace. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. T he squirrels had come in by the open kitchen window and were nibbling at crumbs. Clouds now covered most of the sky; only the corner where the sun was setting remained clear. Rachel and Muldaur leaned against an oak. A solid meal had put him in good enough spirits to hobble outside, with Rachel's assistance. Neither mentioned her outburst earlier in the afternoon. "Your weather certainly is impressive," he said after a long silence. "Why, thank you!" "Do you control it?" "Sometimes," she said judiciously, "we predict it correctly a day in advance." "Oh." "Is it just a job -- flying from world to world?" Rachel asked. "Does it ever get dull? Don't you -- do you ever wish for something else?" "I could," he answered after a while. "Opportunity abounds. We still have a -- frontier. But I'm -- it's more than a job, Rachel. It's life. Religion. Immersion. Fulfillment." "But are you happy?" "Only rarely do I feel not happy. If I understand what you mean. I'm here. This is now. That is all. Does that answer?" "I. guess so. Muldaur?" "Yes?" "Are you -- your people -- beyond us?" "I would say... based on... we are all equally human, Rachel. That makes differences. But I think that the gulf is only the same one that separates any being from another. Which is why we attempt to cross it." -onna rain soon. Hour, maybe less." "How can you tell, Rachel?" "Smells like it. Let's head back inside." She helped Muldaur stand up, then put a supporting arm around his waist. "How are you feeling?" "Better. A power source would help. These matters can be speeded. I still have to rework my cocoon." "For now, we'd better get this plafce rainproofed again. Buckets. Windows -- and down you go. No more exercise tonight. Doctor's orders." "Yes, my lady." "Wait -- Matty's supposed to come tomorrow!" "A friend?" "Yes, but -- " She sat down and frowned. "I don't know." "Do you have a supply of food?" "Why?" "I could -- do certain things. Juryrig. Improvise. Liferaft? A fudge factor." "What are you trying to say?" "If I had enough nourishment, I could try and accelerate healing enough -- '' "I thought you needed power from somewhere." "I do. However, there seems to be some radio antenna a mile or so distant which I could focus from. Plus these power lines." "That's right -- the voice of Radio Free Bubblegum. You think you can do it?" "Like falling off a leap-pipe cinch." Rachel giggled. "Show-off!" "Did I say something wrong?" Muldaur asked worriedly. R ain began to drum on the roof. Something's been happening, Rachel thought to herself, I almost wish we had more time. Somehow... She looked around the room. Her things were piled by the wall. "What are you thinking about?" Muldaur asked. He had eaten several cans of tuna and a large salad. Now he was resting again on the bed. "I just remembered something," she answered. "You'll see in a minute." She opened her flute case and fitted the sections together. "What is that?" "It's called a flute. A musical instrument. The flute is classified as a wind instrument, because I blow in here -- " "Ah." Muldaur's face lit up with comprehension. "A complex oscillator of variable pitch. What tonal system do you -- of course, the word tells me. Octave, eight. Pitch steps probably of -- did I say something wrong again?" "I see you paid attention in school." "What does that mean?" "I was going to play you a few pieces, but -- " She started to pull the sections apart. "Don't! I mean, do! Play!" Muldaur make a quick gesture with his right hand. "Please, do play." Rachel looked out the darkened window. "I'm sorry. It's just that -- okay. Let me think a minute." She sat cross-legged on the floor, her right side turned to the bed. She tossed her hair back with a quick nod, then brought the flute halfway to her lips. She closed her eyes and frowned in thought. "This is a sonata by Telemann." She took a hreath and began to play. Faint thunder sounded in the distance, and the wind blew across the roof. Rachel sat straight, her frown deepening as she reached the fast section of the sonata. She reached the end, paused only for a full breath, then went into a Mozart bourree. When that was done, she stopped, and muttered, "Mozart." Muldaur had not moved or made a sound since she began playing. She nodded slightly, and Milhaud's Pavanne for a Dead Princess. Then she began to tap her foot, and IF played Flute Thing . The rhythm had her swaying gently by the end, and she went right into the Jefferson Airplane's Cornin' Back to Me, hearing the words in her mind. Sadness filled her, and flowed into the music, and her head was all but bowed when the last notes came. She let the flute drop from her lips, and sat silently for a while, listening to the rain. X Rachel sat up straight. "I don't know what made me choose those pieces." "Would you object if other people heard you playing?" "What do you mean?" Muldaur smiled. "I ask your permission to include your music in my report. And to make it available to the Music Libraries." "But how?" "Memory," he sakL tapping his forehead. "Storage, exact replay. We can work directly. Ersatz immortality." "But it wasn't that good!" "It is what I have." Rachel was excited, yet uncertain. "Are you sure that's what you want?" "If it will help, I would like to return the favor." "How?" "It's -- hmm. It is a miracle of rare device. Where does that come from?" Her eyes widened. "That's from a poem. Kubla Khan, by Coleridge. I haven't read that in years!" "Is there more?" "Lots. Umm... In Xanadu did -- no, let me try the next to last stanza." She folded her hands in her lap, and recited: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive in me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me. That -- "Enough!" Muldaur had raised himself onto his elbows. "I'm sorry. You -- it reminded me of someone. But I was about to explain. Would you like to go, ah, sightseeing?" "In this weather?" "No, that's not what I mean. The -- process that enabled me to learn your language. The techboth ways." "You'll teach me Gutter Galactic?" "No. I can show you around in my memories. Places. Stars. Other peoples." "Oh. Television." "It's more like -- let it go. Here, sit close to me. Maybe if I sat up and you got on this side of the bed. Good. Fingers here. The hand-tohead contact is partly a mnemonic. Relax. This w ill be mostly memory, edited, we'll be seeing through my eyes and so forth exactly as if I was there again. Of course I can jump around or focus on certain parts." Muldaur began running through the link exchanges. "Please concentrate on your breathing as best you can, or on some sound. Every inward breath. Now think blue. The room is thinning now. Listen. Eyes closed. Listen." He closed his eyes and went in, then reached out in the grayness until the brightnesses touched. There. Hello. Hello? Bombardier to pilot? What? It's really happening! Yes. See, over there. That's where we're headed. Ready?" Ride 'em, cowboy. Muldaur assumed Rachel meant yes. Satisfied that her conscious was securely linked, he began to funnel toward certain memories. Here we go. I'm merging in, so we're both inside the memoryme, if you like. HeI is not aware of us. Of course. We' re only tracking external stimuli. Okay, we're in. Oh! C rimson sky hung overhead. Off to the sides floated orangeframe shapes of cloud-like texture, hollow, yet twirling. The ground was far below, a pale plain with windy gusts of white smoke spotting it. Those are the natives. Watch carefully now. A group of tinkertoy clouds drifted low', by the rippling shore of a translucent green. The smoke puffs rolled across the waters toward the cloud. As the edge of the cloud dipped in the waves, the green flowed up inside, carrying some of the smoke puffs with it. When the orange frame was filled with green, the entire structure floated away again, toward the plain. That's their transport system. They remind me of dirigibles. It should say Goodyear on the side. What? Hang on, I'm skipping through. The w orld fell away in a series of flashes, and the stars came out. Unblinking specks in some ungraspable pattern, they shone while the dwindling world behind eclipsed the sun. A feeling of immensity overcame Rachel, as if she had melted into the fabric and was one with it. She felt motion as her body twisted, then mental movements which felt like swimming in air with phantom limbs. Lines of oars stroked from her sides, faster and faster, and then, like the 'pop' of a champagne bottle, she slipped into a new' region, where unchecked speed seemed beneath her attention. Other senses spoke to her. She heard the muffled cries of fusing hydrpgen nuclei, each star calling out its own distinct melody. Plasmas rolled and roared in the distance. Strange animal-like motions zipped across her field of vision. She sailed the symphonic cosmos for untold eons, smiling upon it all, IF even the sad browndark pools which sucked at her and tried to lure her to them with love. Then she felt a tug, as a kite feels the yank of its string, and she knew she was returning. The banshee wails ceased, to be replaced by the everburning stars. Here I am again, came Muldaur's unspoken voice. Having a good time? !!! This is Giddy gaddy, next. It will be clear why it is called that . Rachel felt a slowing down, and knew of the suns and planets 'nearby,' and not by eyesight. The closer the world came, the faster time seemed to flow. The globe was divided from pole to pole in colored crescents, and nine glowing moons orbited in off-center paths, whizzing madly by the fringes of the atmosphere and trailing fiery tails. A traffic beam locked on anJ guided them down. I'm editing out the dull part. A black curtain fell and rose, and they were wafting down an endless rail on a field which encircled the body in an unconstraining net. Ahead of them, a quartet of birdlike mops whistled and hooted in syncopated twelvetone. They're arguing about where to eat lunch. Rachel was surrounded by a panorama of whirling, dashing, skating, spewing, wheeling... the landscape was a carnival of sentients in motion, all under their own power, chasing their diverse errands and doings in a complex dance which dizzied her. Why? she asked her guide. Rules, traditions, he replied. Quotas have replaced taxes here. Only transients and tourists such as us are exempt. With a thought, they detached from the touring rail and floated toward a golden honeycombed mountain. At a blue ring they slowed and tossed a coin at the attendant, a basketball with legs and a graceful neck which supported a single goggle-eyed head with a beak that grabbed and swallowed the coin. Passing through the hoop, they were gently seized and directed to a small throng of clothed humanoids inside one of the honeycombs. A pleasant vibration filled the air, and a sweet perfume came from the floor. The people all stood around as if they were about to dance. This wouldn't make sense, Muldaur said. Last stop, Third Green. She was standing, overlooking a valley. To the left, a vast pillar of falling water roared, dropping and cascading on the rocks far below. The pillar flowed from the mountain behind, which rose with brown and green crags into the clouds. The valley held fields of pale orange trees, tall thin shoots that moved with the wind. There were plains like fresh-plowed earth, and jumbled masses of colored birdlike fluffs that circled above large blue spheres that rested in the fields. This is a nature preserve. Visited but not lived on. It's beautiful. Watch. The sun fell rapidly as Muldaur edited, and the sky turned to flame. The bird fluffs rose toward the glow. Shafts of light shot through the water and bent with the flow, glittering at the waterfall's base with prismatic splendor. The clouds blew away and the mountain was crowned with stars. Meteors began to fall, etching white scars on the night. The sky wheeled, and a pale rainbow curved across the heavens. The water glowed a phosphorescent gold. The rainbow folded under the horizon beyond the valley and, on the other side of the mountain, sunrise came. The plains were damp with soft greens, and the blue stones covered with sleeping multicolored fluffs. The sky lightened, and the plains blossomed to greet the light. Large beasts stirred, lumbering from tree to tree in search of food. The fluffs began circling again. Day had come. M uldaur dropped his hands from Rachel's forehead. "That was -- incredible!" she breathed. "Thank you." "I am glad you liked it." "I -- well, if you think that evens the score, I won't argue." "Good." Rachel stretched, "I think I'm tired. You going to try and cut out tomorrow?" "With luck." Rachel looked around. "We didn't figure out sleeping arrangements yet." "I will be going into trance soon, so it does not matter. I can sit on the floor for the night." Muldaur began to stand up. Rachel could see the flashes of pain in his face. "You're staying here," she said. "Don't argue." "What about you?" She looked around. "The bed is wide enough," Muldaur said. "I am not sure what might offend you. But I will be unconscious." Rachel tried not to feel insulted. That's ridiculous, she told herself. Why not? It made sense. This wasn't her dorm, anyway, with everyone watching and prying and keeping score. "Thank you," she said. "I will." T he storm grew in intensity, and peal after peal of thunder burst over the valley. Muldaur was deep in his trance by the time Rachel changed into her bedclothes. He had kept his tunic or whatever it was on, although his smooth-surfaced boots stood on the floor by the wall. Rachel paused for. a moment, biting her lip, then lay face down next to Muldaur. She squirmed around trying to get comfortable, and ended up with her right arm hanging off the edge of the bed. After much hesitation, she draped the other arm across Muldaur's chest, and hoped the # IF pressure wouldn't hurt him. He seemed not to notice when she touched him. Muldaur had withdrawn, and was making "corrections" in his body. Time was stretched, and his concern encompassed myriads of parallel processes forced into accomplishment ahead of their spontaneous wont. Cells divided, repaired, transformed. Fields shifted inside, and hovered at the surface. He was vaguely aware of Rachel's getting on the mattress next to him, and saw a faint blueness where her arm lay on his chest. Then the buzz from her conscious faded, and she turned to dreams. Muldaur went back to work, satisfied that she was sound asleep. His injuries were healing nicely when the clamor in Rachel's brain caught his attention. He turned, and was hit by waves of fright and running. Still inside and in slowedtime, Muldaur shifted control to the automatic level and set a watchdog twitch, then turned upwards and let time speed up. He grew aware of Rachel's arm tight around his chest. Then he was back and awake, and leaned over to grasp her far shoulder in his hand. "Rachel! Wake ujJ!" He shook her until she rocked back and forth. She lifted her face up from the pillow. "Wha -- " Her arm relaxed on his chest. "You were having a bad dream," he explained. "I woke you." She moved closer to him. "What did you -- " "Nothing." He let his arm rub her back. "Just woke you." "Oh." Still sleepy, she moved her body half on top of him. "They were chasing me." Muldaur was unsure what to do. It had been some time since he had been with a person this young and in need. Should he merge and redirect the dreams? Trigger her sexual pleasure centers? It was simple enough to induce orgasm. He didn't have the strength to make love, even if Rachel wanted to. That was strange; he could sense part of her wanting, and other dark prevoices forbidding her. But that was not his business. He frowned and held her against him, chanting silent soulguides until she relaxed back into sleep. Before he returned to his work, he touched her forehead, and brought back dreams of her voyage through his mind. R achel woke slowly, rolling onto her back and letting her dreams fade slowly. A well-rested feeling filled her. She threw off the sleeping bag -- it had not been that cold, so the unzipped bag had served as a blanket -- and went to wash her face. She watched herself in the mirror as she brushed back her hair. She hadn't felt this happy in -- Rachel frowned suddenly. How long? She almost would have taken this good feeling for granted. How much a zombie had she made herself in the dorm? What had made her run away? She found a peasant blouse and shorts, and put them on. Barefoot, she went outside looking for Muldaur. Matty's coming today. And Muldaur is leaving. The field was full of cows. Nearby, Muldaur sat on a tree stump, cross-legged and arms extended. The shimmering she had first seen when she found him was thicker, more active. The trees beyond him seemed to blur. As she walked along the stream toward him she saw the phantom outline shoot up and out like a frog's tongue. She didn't know whether or not it was safe to disturb him. "Hello, Rachel," Muldaur called. "It's okay. This won't hurt you." She stepped through the stream. As she came closer the hairs on her arms and legs began to stand up, and her mouth began to tingle. "How long have you been out here?" she asked. "Dawn." "Oh. What are you doing?" Muldaur pointed to the south. "The broadcast is over there. I don't think you can see them, but my "wings" are, well, unfolded about two miles on each side. I can't do much with them in that position, but they're acting well enough as power receptors. What you do see is the "web." I guess you'd call it a space suit, except it's as much part of me as my arms and legs." "How do you eat and breath?" "You mean, why don't I carry quantities of food and water and air with me?" "Something like that." Muldaur turned his head without relaxing his arms as Rachel sat down. "They teach us -- I create a self-contained minimal ecosystem. Which means, if you don't throw anything out, you've got enough. I have enough energy and control to remetabolize everything. In fact, I don't really breathe while in flight; I sort of continually hold my breath and break the carbon dioxide and water and wastes back down while they're still in my body." "Oh. I'm not sure I'd like that." "But out there is nothing. I can't need anything I don't have on me when I'm in nether-space." Rachel remembered sailing through the stars. "But doesn't it get lonely?" "Yes." M uldaur shifted his arms a bit and became covered with sparks. "This is harmless," he said. "I'm making it visible so you can watch." "So you're leaving soon." "Tavo hours." "Do you have to go?" Rachel stood up and stepped closer to Muldaur. "Will I ever see you again?" "It is unlikely. I'm sorry." The skin of sparks began to roll from IF one arm to the other. "Rachel, why did you come out here? Before I got here?" She turned away. "Because I was afraid." "Of what?" She turned and sat again, arms around her folded legs, and stared at the stump he was perched on."It was people, I guess. Everybody seemed to want something from me, and I thought there wouldn't be anything left. Orthat they wouldn't like me if I didn't do it right, and I had no idea what to do." She bowed her head between her knees. "And I wasn't sure, I didn't feel I knew anybody well enough, everybody else seemed to be having fun, but I wasn't sure I -- I didn't want to commit myself until I was certain it was safe." "And?" "I couldn't take it. Everybody seemed to be demanding all at once, and I wanted it to stop." "Did it?" "I don't know. I left."  "Then why did you help me?" She looked up. "But -- but I had to. You were hurt." "Even so." She hugged her arms. "I guess it was because no one was looking." "Does that matter?" "I thought it did. Doesn't it?" "Would you believe me if I said it doesn't?" "I'm not sure." "Then you have to decide for yourself." She stood up. "Don't leave until I get back. I'm going for a walk." Rachel pushed away a low branch to keep it from hitting her face. How had she come to care for, Muldaur? Because it wasn't real. And I knew he'd be going away. Helping an unconscious body was no more dangerous than putting a fledgling back in the nest -- but when she was being watched... Graded. Judged. Were other people's opinions so important? So important that she had to decide what to do on the basis of what people would think of her? A squirrel ran by her. She whistled, and it dashed up a nearby tree, hanging four feet off the ground and watching her. Does his opinion matter? O f course not. A yellow-and-black butterfly settled on a patch of moss. Does she care what I think? And would her worrying change my thoughts. The butterfly folded her wings together, spread them flat, and fluttered away. Why should I be different? She touched her hand to the trunk of a white pine. The bark was peeling off in smooth curls. I'm as good as they are. And they don't seem to worry what  think. The ground squished underfoot as she ran back to Muldaur. H e.was standing, bathed in fire. "You're going!" she cried. "It is time," he said. The air around him flashed with color. "But I want you to stay!" "I would have to leave sometime, Rachel. And I am overdue." The aurora dimmed. "I wish I could stay. I believe I owe you my life, and thank you. I will not forget. Remember, somewhere your music will be known. There is no one else on this planet who can claim that." She stepped through the fire and hugged him. "That doesn't matter. Oh, I'm sorry I'm the way I am." "Don't be." "All right. Will you stop here again?" "I don't know. What will happen when your planet is registered as undeterminable. You will probably be quarantined in a few years. Maybe some Civil servant will keep an eye on you." He touched the sides of her nose. "My time is not the same as yours. It would be unfair to promise." "I suppose. Remember me." "I will. Here, close your eyes." Rachel did so, and felt a fast blur of colors roll in. "There. My final gift. A small repayment for what you have done." "What is it?" "Pleasant dreams. Now I must go-" Rachel hugged him once more. He touched his lips to hers, and they looked in one another's eyes. Then he let his arms drop, and Rachel stepped back. "Goodbye," he said. "Goodbye." "Fly away, bluebird, take your broken wings and learn to fly." She began to wave, wishing for confetti to throw. The glow sprang back to its fully glory. Muldaur looked at her once more, then walked toward the edge of the mountain. The trees beyond shone green, gold, purple and red. He spread his arms and stepped off the edge. The fire stretched out; he did not fall. Then he looked up, and began to rise. One hand waved. Soon he was a bird, then a glowing star, and finally gone. Rachel ceased waving, and stared at the sky. # f f bY, Rach, you almost already  g?" "Matty!" "I asked, are you ready to go back? I've got a term paper to finish. The road got rained out, and I had to go a different way. Hey, you really look good! I guess I was right in bringing you here, wasn't I?" Rachel smiled sadly. "It's just hard to leave here." "I know, it's so pretty here. Were you watching the birds? I didn't see anything in that direction. Look, there's a bluejay over by the dogwood. They're so graceful. Sometimes I wish I was a bird, just so I could fly. Even a sparrow. Wouldn't you?" "I don't know." Rachel looked up one last time. "Flying's a different sort of life. Just being me will do for now."  IF The Foremost Galaxy Publication in Science Fiction Some Contributors  Past and Present Poul Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bester James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menze! J. R. Pierce Frederik Pchl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A. E. Van Vogt Kurt V onnegut, Jr. For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: Farmingdale, New York # H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD Enclosed find...in payment for my subscription T his is the last book review column I shall be writing for IF. And while I am saddened by the fact that the magazine will no longer have an independent existence, I feel that it may well be time for my own efforts of this sort to draw to a close. I've been reviewing now for slightly over five years, and inevitably some of the fine edge of enthusiasm begins to fade with repeated efforts. I suspect that some of the vitriol is lacking in my attacks upon books which I consider bad enough to deserve public censure. And likewise, some of the joy has disappeared in my praise of those books which should be read by the audience to whom I appeal. This is always the problem of a professional attempting to speak for those who do not have a professional interest in any field. Impressions begin to formalize into a sort of code, and in time the code becomes less flexible than it should be, so that new and fresh impressions cannot stand by themselves, but must somehow be fitted into that body of rules. A man may know that the rules are nothing but the summation of impressions, yet still find it hard to throw his mind open fully to new impressions. There is a great deal of difference between criticism and reviewing, of course. The whole purpose of reviewing is opposed to that of criticism. A critic basically examines a work to find new insight for those who have already read that work. He sees beyond the first impression, he relates the work to other works, and to the whole body of mankind's development within the field and those related to it. A reviewer should probably be called a previewer. His job is to give as accurate a first reading as possible, and then to pass on his impressions to those who have not read the work. If he is honest, he attempts to examine his standards and inform his readers as to what those standards are, so that they may judge his reviews according to their own standards, and determine how far they can follow him. Then, within the limits of his own taste, he attempts to advise the readers as to whether this is a book that they should read. I've attempted to do this by the introductions that have preceded most of my reviews, in which I have outlined many of the criteria (so far as any man can determine his own criteria) that lie behind my reactions to books. And I've tried to approach each book afresh, as a normal reader might. But inevitably, the fact that I've been reading the book to review it creeps into my judgment. As a casual reader, I can pass over sections that I hesitate about as a reviewer -- simply because those sections make for excellent lines in a review. And as time goes on, and as I've found too many cases where the point I want to make has already been made often in the past, I develop far too much interest in the review, too little in the book itself. Thus jaded after five years of reading, I feel that a long rest and a return to reading as it should be done is highly desirable. I've said much of what I wanted to say. And it's time to stop. In fact, I believe that I might have done better to stop a year or so ago. Reviewing, like writing or reading, should be an act of total enthusiasm tempered with only the correct measure of judgment. When the judgment in any field far exceeds the enthusiasm, the results suffer. B ut I deeply regret that the cause of my termination should be the last issue of a magazine I've admired over a period of more than twenty years. There are too few good magazines left to us, and the loss of one is a painful thing to contemplate. This was not so when IF began, back in March of #. This was during the greatest boom that science fiction magazine publishing has known. I forget how many magazines there were--somewhere between thirty and forty. Most of the new ones were pretty shoddy affairs, of course. Their rates were often low, their editors far too often had no knowledge of science fiction -- or of editing in too many cases. And they were started only because the distributors wanted more of the action and suggested to some publisher or other that he too should do science fiction. I was part of that boom. At one time, I edited four magazines of fantasy and science fiction. Nobody in the publishing house had any idea of fiction magazine contents, much less of science fiction. But the distributor wanted such magazines money (at a sizable cut in the price paid to the publisher). James Quinn, who began IF, admitted he knew little about science fiction. But he differed from most of those transitory publishers in having a long background in pulp magazines. He respected his readers, and he liked a good story more than an important name on bad fiction that had been rejected by all the knowledgeable editors. He was an honest and very decent man, aware of his ignorance of the field of science fiction, but determined to bring out a good magazine and to treat his authors fairly. (I met him only once, but that was enough to develop a strong liking and respect.) I f iim quinn had begun when there were less magazines to use up the limited money the readers could spend and the limited number of good stories the authors could supply, I believe he would have turned IF into one of the best magazines in the field. Even with the difficulties of the time, he made it far better than most of the others that began after FSF and Galaxy. He paid good rates, bought good stories (though few memorable ones, since those went to the top three magazines), and made his magazine one of the most attractive in the field. His # wraparound covers are still some of the most attractive ones ever done. He also began to develop an understanding of and love for science fiction. Unfortunately, perhaps, he was still very conscious of his lack of background. To remedy that, he turned to others who might know the field better. He approached me with a handsome offer to edit the magazine, but I made my biggest mistake by deciding not to leave the publisher with whom I was already associated. But he found a knowledgeable man indeed in Larry Shaw, who was an old-time fan with considerable experience in judging manuscripts. This should have worked well, but didn't for two reasons. The major reason was that suddenly American News -- the biggest distributor of magazines, then or ever -- went out of the distributing business, leaving the field in turmoil that lasted for years. This killed many of the magazines, and seriously harmed the success of IF. T he second reason is only opinion on my part, but I believe it is valid. Larry Shaw saw the magazine quite differently from the view Jim Quinn had of it. Where Quinn wanted simply good story values by pulp standards, Larry felt it should have prestige stories that would start fan discussions, upset taboos, and generally be controversial. He got some of those stories, too. He ran Malice in Wonderland, a story about a drug-world future, at a time when most readers knew nothing of the drugs that were to fill endless stories ten years later. He took A Case of Conscience, IF whicji was a complex and dense story with a philosophical base; I had previously rejected it only because Jim Blish wasn't ready to do a sequel to tie down the philosophical end that was only partly resolved in the story. Those controversial stories were good, in themselves. But the readers who had followed the magazine for the pure story value Quinn had given were not adjusted to Shaw's brand of science fiction; and the new readers attracted by Shaw were dissatisfied with much of the rest of the magazine. The two characteristics could have been blended in time, but the alteration was too rapid. Eventually, Shaw was replaced by Damon Knight. But again, the vision Damon had of the magazine was different from that of Jim Quinn. And finally, in a failing market, IF ran into difficulties. Its brief period of monthly publication from # to # had already ended. And in February #, the magazine stopped publishing. It had far outlasted most of its boomtime rivals, however, and it was still basically an interesting magazine. R obert guinn saw its potential. He had been the publisher of Galaxy for most of that magazine's existence. Now he felt that a second magazine with a different approach to the market would be desirable. His editor, Horace Gold, also wanted a place where the good stories he received which were not quite right for Galaxy could be used. So IF didn't die; it missed one bi-monthly issue, but was back on the stands with the July # issue as a sister to Galaxy. I ooking back with hindsight, it's j easy to say that Gold never quite established a true character for the magazine. This was a period when most of the action science fiction magazines -- the youngeroriented, adventure-slanted ones like Planet Stories -- had gone off the market. At the time, that probably seemed like a clear warning that such magazines were not wanted; but hindsight suggests that IF perhaps should have been the magazine to fill the gap, since we've since come to miss the type of fiction that drew many fans into the field originally. In any event, Gold never quite found what he wanted, but tended to treat IF as a place to unload the stories that were not quite up to or right for the Galaxy standards. At the time, Gold was quite ill, and found the task of editing growing increasingly difficult. He finally resigned in #, and the magazines fell to the editorship of Frederik Pohl. Pohl gave IF a good deal of fresh character. One of his innovations was the policy of publishing at least one story by a new writer in each issue. This led to the discovery of some of the best of the new writers; and their loyalty to Pohl added a great deal to the quality of writing to be found in both magazines. He was also able to go back to a monthly schedule of publishing in late #. This again made IF a major magazine in the field. It's possible, of course, to publish serials in a bi-monthly magazine, but they lose most of their impact between issues. Yet in many ways, novels that appear serially establish the basic reputation of a magazine. The results of Pohl's editing can be seen in one simple fact. IF won the Hugo award as the best professional science fiction magazine for #, #, and # -- three consecutive years. This was against magazines that had long been considered the only possible contenders for that award. F rederik pohl had originally intended to make Galaxy into the best possible science fiction magazine, and the success of IF must have been somewhat surprising and a little puzzling. He had intended IF for a somewhat younger and slightly less sophisticated audience -- and then discovered that even the sophisticated reader liked to relax in pure enjoyment of science fiction. Somehow, the magazine had begun to find a character of its own as Pohl discovered what he wanted it to be, and the readers obviously liked it. Then the magazines had to be sold. This was not the result of circulation difficulties, as most readers thought, but because of certain legal angles concerning the way in which a company can "go public" with its stock, resulting from other interests of Robert over Galaxy and IF. And now there was another editor in the long list of those who had served IF. Ejler Jakobsson was he had a background of editing other science fiction magazines during the boom period, so he was chosen. (It was then that it was decided not to have me continue the science column I had been doing, but to turn to book reviewing.) Inevitably, the character changed. No honest editqr can or should try to imitate another. He must establish his own character through the magazine, or it will have no character. At the time of the change-over, there were to be four magazines. In addition to Galaxy and IF, there was to be regular publication of Worlds of Tomorrow and Worlds of Fantasy , with perhaps another later. That was simply too much work for any single editor, particularly one who was expected to do his work in a business office where every worry of a large publishing company obtruded on his time. (Later Jakobsson managed to do his work at home, but much of the IF pattern had been set by then.) Trying to establish a separate character for four magazines is difficult, as I know by experience, and I don't think it can be done at once; each must have time to develop by itself before another can be shaped. I suppose it was inevitable that IF again became something of a second sister to Galaxy -- which remained the prestige magazine in the minds of the readers, even when they were giving the Hugo to IF (I have large suspicions that what many readers seem to feel they should like and what they really like are not the same; a pity, because what they really enjoy is usually better.) Under an impossible load of work and the haste of transition, I feel that IF again became a place where manuscripts not quite right for Galaxy were published. Then the decision was made to put IF back on a bi-monthly schedule, despite a slowly climbing circulation. And that somehow made it seem again like a lesser magazine -- whether it was or not. I personally think it deserved better treatment. Jakobsson eventually found carrying both magazines more complicated as it was by other difficulties and his growing feeling that he wanted to retire. And IF was handed over to Jim Baen, who had been serving as Managing Editor. An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Read issue ## and boo and hiss Stanislaw Lem as he puts down American S-F writers, readers and fans in an interview. (The man is a Polish intellectual snob.) Look forward to an interview with Avram Davidson in issue ##, and a critical destruction of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and God knows what else I can squeeze in. In # there are interviews with Philip Jose Farmer and Keith Laumer scheduled. Every issue: The Archives  a Dialog. Enjoy Geis editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysample I year #two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I again looking back with hindsight, I wish that change had come earlier. Baen, I feel, was the right editor for the magazine. He began with every possible handicap, since he had to depend on manuscripts which were not considered right for Galaxy. But he began with the very great advantage of treating IF as a potentially good magazine in its own right. He wanted it to be different from the more "sophisticated" magazines, to bring out the stories that were fun to read, to do the things that the field (other than in recent books) has been missing for too many years. He brought the needed effort to IF, and mapped out the needed character of its own. He gave it a fresh style, with new artists to give it variety, and he has been working with writers to get the kind of material it deserves. I don't think he has fully succeeded, but from my talks with him and from comments by readers on what has been accomplished, I feel he was just beginning to succeed. And now the magazine is at the end of its independent existence. The exigencies of publishing in a market of wildly increasing prices and erratic distribution have apparently forced this termination. I find it a sorry end to a magazine that has contributed a great deal to the field in twenty-two years -- and which could have contributed a great deal more. Still, I have not wholly given in to despair. I've heard that this marks the beginning of the end for magazines -- but I don't believe it; there are too many valuable contributions that only the magazines can make to the field for readers ever to let them vanish. Some day, I hope to see IF back on the stands. And I hope when I do that there will be new writers in it as well as old, new artists and old friends. I'd like to see again the aliens from Vega and maybe a gorgeous princess from far Fomalhaut on the arm of a rocket man -- and I wouldn't mind a touch of space tan to him, nor be disappointed to see that he had shaggy ears! I'd like to hear the little bells the women wear beside the canals in the old towns of Mars. And I'd like to find the stories that I can't describe until some new writer thinks of them. As for myself, I'm glad to have had this chance to bring you my opinions of books and science fiction in general. I'm grateful to those who wrote me to express their opinions, and doubly-grateful to Ejler Jakobsson and Jim Baen for letting me sound off without tampering with my views. Being a reviewer was fun while it lasted, and some day I may try v it again. But for now, let me simply sit in the Reading Room with the rest of you. Now where did I put that latest book by Leigh Brackett?... -- # -- Time Deer For the old man, and the young man he was, past, present and future became One. T he old man watched the boy. The boy watched the deer. The deer was watched by all, and the Great Being above. The old man remembered when he was a young boy and his father showed him a motorcycle thing on a parking lot. The young boy remembered his second life with some regret, not looking forward to the coming of his first wife. Tuesday morning the Monday morning traffic jam was three days old. The old man sat on the hood of a stalled car and watched the boy. The boy watched the deer. The deer was watched by all and the Great Being above. The young boy resisted when his son, at the insistence of his bitch of a white wife, had tried to put him in a rest home for the elderly. Now he watched a deer beside the highway. And was watched in turn. The old man was on the way to somewhere. He was going someplace, someplace important, he forgot just where. But he knew he was going. The deer had relatives waiting for her, grass waiting for her, seasons being patient on her account. As much as she wanted to please the boy by letting him look at her, she had to go. She apologized with a shake of her head. The old man watched the deer going. He knew she had someplace to go, someplace important. He did not know where she was going but he knew why. The old man was going to be late. He could have walked. He was only going across the road. He was going across the road to get to the other side. He was going to be late for his own funeral. The old man was going someplace. He couldn't remember where. T'vid you make him wear the I f watch? If he's wearing the watch he should -- " "He's an old man, honey! His mind wanders," said Frank Strong Bull. "Dr. Amber is waiting! Does he think we can afford to pay for every appointment he misses?" snarled Sheila, running her fingers through the tangled ends of her hair. "Doesn't he ever get anywhere on time?" "He lives by Indian time. Being late is just something you must expect from -- " he began, trying to explain. She cut him off. "Indian this and Indian that! I'm so sick of your god damn excuses I could vomit!" "But -- " "Let's just forget it. We don't have time to argue about it. We have to be at the doctor's office in twenty minutes. If we leave now we can just beat the rush hour traffic. I just hope your father's there when we arrive." "Don't worry. He'll be there," said Frank, looking doubtful. B ut the deer could not leave. She went a little distance and then turned and came back. And the old man was moved because he knew the deer had come back because the boy knew how to look at the deer. And the boy was happy because the deer chose to favor him. And he saw the deer for what she was. Great and golden and quick in her beauty. And the deer knew that the boy thought her beautiful. For it was the purpose of the deer in this world on that morning to be beautiful for a young boy to look at. And the old man who was going someplace was grateful to the deer and almost envious of the boy. But he was one with the boy who was one with the deer and they were all one with the Great Being above. So there was no envy, just the great longing of age for youth. ttnr hat son of a bitch!" growled Frank Strong Bull. "The bastard cut me off." He yanked the gear shift out of fourth and slammed it into third. The tach needle shot into the red and the mustang backed off, just missing the foreign car that had swerved in front of it. "Oh Christ -- We'll be late!" muttered Sheila, turning in the car seat to look out the back window. "Get into the express lane." "Are you kidding? With this traffic?" His hands gripped the wheel like a weapon. He lifted his right hand and slammed the gear shift. Gears ground, caught hold and the Mustang shot ahead. Yanking the wheel to the left, he cut in front of a truck, which hit its brakes, missing the mustang by inches. He buried the gas pedal and the car responded. He pulled up level with the sports car that had cut him off. He honked and made an obscene gesture as he passed. Sheila squealed with delight. "Go! Go!" she ex claimed. T he old man had taken liberties in his life. He'd had things to remember and things he wanted to forget. Twice he had married. The first time. He hated the first time. He'd been blinded by her looks and his hands had got the better of him. He had not known his own heart and not knowing, he had let his body decide. It was something he would always regret. That summer he was an eagle. Free. Mating in the air. Never touching down. Never looking back. That summer. His hands that touched her were wings. And he flew and the feathers covered the scars that grew where their bodies had touched. He was of the air and she was of the earth. She muddied his dreams. She had woman's body but lacked woman's spirit. A star is a stone to the blind. She saw him through cripplied eyes. he possessed. He shared. There was no life between them. He saw the stars and counted them one by one into her hand, that gift that all lovers share. She saw stones. And she turned away. He was free because he needed. She was a prisoner because she wanted. One day she was gone. And he folded his wings and the earth came rushing at him and he was an old man with a small son. And he lived in a cage and was three years dead. And his son was a small hope that melted. He was his mother's son. He could see that in his son's eyes. It was something the old man would always regret. But the deer, the young boy, these were things he would never regret. D r. amber was hostile. "Damn it! Now look -- I can't sign the commitment papers if I've never seen him." Sheila tried to smile pleasantly. "He'll show up. His hotel room is just across the street. Frank will find him. Don't worry." "I have other patients! I can't be held up by some doddering old man," snapped Dr. Amber. "Just a few more minutes," Sheila pleaded. "You'll have to pay for two visits. I can't run this place for free. Every minute I'm not working, I'm losing money." "We'll pay," said Sheila grimly. "We'll pay." T he world was big and the deer had to take her beauty through the world. She had been beautiful in one place for one boy on one morning of this world. It was time to be someplace else. The deer turned and fled into the woods, pushing her beauty before her into the world. The young boy jumped to his feet. His heart racing, his feet pounding, he tan after her with the IF abandon of youth that is caring. He chased beauty through the world and disappeared from the old man's sight in the depths of the forest. And the old man began dreaming that -- F rank Strong Bull's hand closed on his shoulder and his son shook him, none too gently. The old man looked into' the face of his son and did not like what he saw. He allowed himself to be led to the doctor's office. "Finally," said Sheila. "Where the hell was he?" Dr. Amber came into the room with a phony smile. "Ah! The elusive one appears! And how are we today?" "We are fine," said the old man, bitterly. He pushed the outstretched stethoscope away from his chest. "Fiesty isn't he," observed Dr. Amber. "Let's just get this over with," said Sheila. "It's been drawn out long enough as it is." "Not sick," said the old man. "You leave me alone." He made two fists and backed away from the doctor. "How old is he?" asked Dr. Amber, looking at the old man's wrinkled face and white hair. "Past eighty, at least," said his son. "The records aren't available and he can't remember himself." "Over eighty, you say. Well, that's reason enough Uc ;n," said Dr. Amber. "Let me give him a cursory examination, just a formality, and then I'll sign the papers." The old man unclenched his fists. He looked at his son. His eyes burned. He felt neither betrayed nor wronged. He felt only sorrow. He allowed one tear, only qne tear, to fall. It was for his son who could not meet his eyes. And for the first time since his son had married' her, his eyes fell upon his son's wife's eyes. She seemed to shrivel under his gaze, but she met his gaze and he read the dark things in her eyes. They were insignificant, not truly a part of his life. He had seen the things of importance. He had watched the boy. The boy had watched the deer. And the deer had been watched by all and the Great Being above. The old man backed away from them until his back was against a wall. He put his hand to his chest and smiled. He was dead before his body hit the floor.   Amber to the ambulance attendant. "I, just signed the death certificate." "They the relatives?" asked the attendant, jerking a thumb at the couple sitting silently in chairs by the wall. Dr. Amber nodded. The attendant approached them. "It's better this way," said Sheila. "An old man like that, no reason to live, no -- " "Where you want I should take the body?" asked the attendant. "Vale's Funeral Home," said Sheila. Frank Strong Bull stared straight ahead. He heard nothing. His eyes were empty of things, light and dark. "Where is it?" asked the attendant. "Where is what?" asked Dr. Amber. "The body? Where's the body?" "It's in the next room. Oh the table," said Dr. Amber coming around his desk. He took the attendant's arm and led him away from the couple. "I'll help you put it on the stretcher." T he old man who watched the deer. He had dreamed his second wife in his dreams. He had dreamed that. But she had been real. She had come when emptiness and bitterness had possessed him. When the feathers of his youth had been torn from his wings. She filled him again with bright pieces of dreams. And for him, in that second half of his life, far from his son and that first one, he began again. Flying. Noticing the world. His eyes saw the green things, his lips tasted the sweet things and his old age was warm. It was all bright and fast and moving, that second life of his and they were childless and godless and were themselves children and gods instead. And they grew old in their bodies but death seemed more like an old friend than an interruption. It was sleep. One night the fever took her. Peacefully. Took her while she slept and he neither wept nor followed. For she had made him young again and the young do not understand death. help you put it on the J stretcher." They opened the door. and the old man watched the boy   L and did not understand death. And the young boy watched the deer and understood beauty. And the deer was watched by all and the Great Being above. And the boy saw the deer for what she was. And like her, he became great and golden and quick. And the old man began dreaming that -- F rank Strong Bull's hand, his son's hand, closed on his shoulder and shook him, none too gently. T hey opened the door. The body was gone. T he last time it was seen, the body was chasing a deer that pushed its beauty through the world, disappearing from an old man's sight into the depths of the forest.  IF You don't start with True. You change to True. It happens after you've been smoking for a while. You decide it's time you changed to a low tar and nicotine cigarette. And that decision brings many people to True. Because True is not only gentle on your mind, it's gentle on your taste. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.  Lorillard # Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. You don't start with True You change to True. It happens after you've been smoking other menthols for a while. You decide it's time you changed to a low tar and nicotine cigarette. And that decision brings many people to True Menthol. Because True is not only gentle on your mind, it's gentle on your taste. Shouldn't your next menthol be True? Menthol: XL mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, ( Revolution D awn. Far below, curving away north and south, the terminator cumulonimbus glowed brilliant red against the night. A scattered wall of cloud arched in weather fronts arrayed to meet 'the rising of a new day's star, crimsontipped sentinels standing watch along the racing line separating night from light -- the color creeping down the piled up flanks, yellowing, whitening, until at last a armored men-at-arms paid homage to a scene repeated endlessly for other day had overtaken Earth j... Murdoch watched a scene he'd viewed a thousand times, yet never tired of. However repetitious the process was, the detail of each new terrestrial sunrise seen from above was endlessly entrancing. The slow, glow-like illumination of a towering thunderhead as the dawnline swept across it from the west, the blue electric lightning of self-illumination giving way to the incomparably brighter light of a star over ninety of prismatic color along flat shards of ice spread before a low, or the screen-like vertical projection of the entire rainbow upon a particularly tall convective form -- that was beauty. An ever-changing canvas and a brush of light -- pure color sprayed upon a world by the thermonuclear fire of a sun, shaped by the refractive properties of a planetary atmosphere, and appreciated by a lone observer on his way to work. Murdoch was an astronomer who, at the moment, was about to start his day just as everybody back on the Mountain, he thought wryly, was about to turn in. Oh, well, he grinned silently, at least I'm looking down at those clouds. Clouds were the last concern of an astronomer out here. As Murdoch's Shuttle rose in its transfer most # kilometers above the clouds of Earth, his thoughts ranged across the span of astronomy, from its origins beneath the clouds, to its limitless future in its element, at last -- the starry, atmosphereless vacuum of the Universe. We've come a long way, he thought, and haven't even begun. tronomical instrument to be placed in orbit. Descendant of the piofull-sized observatory-class telescope -- # inches of beautiful glass -- in an incomparable setting. I wonder if Evans got his spectra of#C #, Murdock mused idly. A front had been threatening and even high thin ice could ruin an exposure of several hours duration, of an object that dim. That's why this baby (he leaned forward in the couch against the restraining straps to peer out the double-paned window) is so valuable. For every hour we use to advantage up here, he thought, we waste three down there due to weather, the moon, or just plain bad seeing. If he shielded his eyes from the reflected and scattered glare of the sun, he thought he could make out a few of the brighter stars. Damn the fact that scattered light was such a problem in space. That was one advantage an astronomer had back on Earth -- # miles of planet between him and the sun, and an enormous shadow to hide in and look out from. Out here, he thought, you have to baffle and screen, and never point the damn' thing even near the sun, or differential heating would warp it permanently out of line. It was a plain nuisance, having to plan each observation through a computer, just so some attitude jockey didn't someday forget and point the entire compensations. No seeing problems. The stars just sat there. Didn't twinkle at all. Might as well have been holes in an enormous black blanket, like one of those early planetaria. At that moment the Captain of the Shuttle toned Murdoch on the Comm line. "Hey, Doc?" "Yeah, Ben!" "We've gofer in sight. Houston sent the button-up signal about five minutes ago and we caught the flash as she turned." its incomparable research, was dollars. As it was about to rendezvous with a space shuttle emitting, among other things, interesting quantities of oxygen, water vapor, hydrazine, nitrogen, stray hydrocarbons and, yes, even a trace of seal every optical port -- tight! -- and orient it so the shuttle approached from below and behind the big telescope. Murdoch still mentally saw the image of the solar shield of the repaired skylab space-station back in '#, dancing in the "wind" of the reaction control thrusters of the Apollo shuttle vehicle. The damage such materials could wreak impinging upon the #-foot wide primary mirror of this space-jewel made him shudder. No, during the length of their visit to this distant "eye," IF its lids would be closed, its vital parts protected against the contamination its earthly creators inevitably brought with them, even here. That is why, thought Murdoch sadly, men may never look through a space telescope directly. Even the miniscule escaping atmosphere of the best suits would do permanent damage to the exquisite geometry of glass and aluminum. We'll just have to be content, he thought, with the photographs and television. And with that last almost regretful assessment of the art of space astronomy, Dr. Robert Murdoch (Ph.D.) prepared to put on his helmet and span the short distance separating the immobile telescope from the station-keeping shuttle. His job: to retrieve film cannisters loaded from two weeks constant observation, insert new film, and replace a faulty image tube with another. A thousand kilometers below, sunset was claiming another line of ruby sentinels before the splendor of night.  T his scene, or something like it, will come to pass sometime in the early #'s. At that time, earth orbit the largest optical telescope ever to leave Earth. It will rank, along with its earthly counterparts, as the world's fourth largest, after the #" in the Russian Crimea, the #" on Palomar, and the #" at Kitt Peak. It will beat all of them, hands down. The Large Space Telescope, as it will be called, will extend Man's vision to the edge of the Universe. It will collect more light, resolve far greater detail, and work far more efficiently than even its larger terrestrial counterparts. It will have, available to it the full range of radiation from the stars, unfiltered by the atmosphere so essential to its creators. It will function at the theoretical limit of resolving power for a parabolic mirror # inches in diameter, capable of detecting man-made artifacts as small as ocean liners from the moon's distance! Which means... nothing. Astronomy as a science has a history of making the best of an essentially bad situation. To start with, the things you'd like to see are out of reach. This means you'll never (except in the case of planets) be able to go there and pick up a piece to verify what you think you've found out by looking from afar. Of course, someday, when starships are a reality... But who wants to wait? To circumvent this fundamental problem, astronomers have devised all sorts of neat and ingenious techniques for detecting, deciphering, and decoding the messengers of events so far away -- light. The first astronomers used their eyes (what else?). The human eye is not too bad as a collection device. It has a surprising range of resame eye that can see comfortably on a blazing beach in the Caribbean can also detect, after suitable dark adaptation, stars as faint as the fifth magnitude. A fifth magnitude star is generally the faintest a human with normal sight can see by looking up into the night sky -- although in clear desert air, you can do somewhat better. The naked eye, however, really falls down when it comes to resolving fine detail. It can just resolve two objects of equal brightness if they're separated by about # arc seconds. Thus, to the eye, the planets remain star-like images even though many (Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, even Mars) sometimes approach apparent diameters as great as # arc seconds at their closest approach to Earth. Craters on the moon had to await detection by Galileo; for human eyesight, while capable of seeing such bright spots as Copernicus or Tycho, could not sufficiently resolve them to perceive their true nature. So, too, with positional astronomy. The history of astronomy, particularly the idea that we are on a planet orbiting the sun instead of sitting still while everything moves around us, may have been quite different if the human eye could resolve smaller detail. It was the limits of detectable errors in planetary positions occasioned by the limits of the human eye that put off, for centuries, a correct interpretation of the planetary spectacle. be able to detect objects as small as ocean liners or things # feet across at the distance of the moon, does not quite convey the power this resolution finally gives to Man.  It's in the same league as telling a dime and tell it was a dime. Telescopes are rarely used to detect dimes in space or look for ocean liners on the Mare of Selene! What they are used for and what is the probing of the limits of the images, record spectra, and make measurements of objects that today are perceived by terrestrial telescopes and even the new spacelimitations of instrument and technique. What could come from this, new capability to see the Universe undistorted could be as fundamental as the new cosmology finally made necessary by Copernicus to explain errors that became larger than the limits of the human eye. Under the exquisite observing study Quasars unhampered by the shimmering and filtering effect of Earth's atmosphere. Long exposure imagery -- tens and even hundreds of hours -- will show detail hopeIF lessly swamped by the variety of lights in Earth's night sky -- artificial, airglow from the air itself, scattered moonlight, etc. The fineness of that detail, unsmeared by shifting blobs of air that act like lenses in the atmosphere, moving images around at the image plane of the telescope, will allow detailed study of the structure of Quasars, location of suspected quasar-like objects within the nuclei of galaxies emagery of quasars in wave lengths too long or short to penetrate to the ground-based sentinels of Man. If Quasars actually represent objects at the dawn of creation, the Other objects that will hopefully yield up their secrets under the unprecedented scrutiny of a major telescope in space read like a "Who's Who" of the new astronomy: pulsars, neutron stars, supernovae remnants, infrared sources, X-ray sources, and black holes. The quantum leap represented by the use of a telescope capable of seeing objects # dimmer than the human eye has ever seen, from space, is at present just perceivable. If we can study actual images of pulsars illuminating their surrounding gaseous nebulae (such as the famous Crab, a remnant of a supernova in # a.d.) or look for the ultraviolet images of the now invisible component of Cygnus X-l (suspected to be the first black hole "detected"), or study the structure of a red-giant star in widely separated wave lengths (which will actually allow us to see, for the first time, the disc of a giant sun), then we shall be able to put to rest a whole series of now raging questions as to the fundamental nature of these objects. We shall also raise at least ten new questions for each answer we obtain. M urdoch floated easily beside the giant. In his hands, secured by a light nylon safety line were the loaded film cassettes from the big telescope. (He grimaced, remembering how they kept losing those gloves and Hasselblads out of Gemini.) Inside, ready to be put to work, fresh film magazines. And the image-tube replacement was also on the job, the old one returning with Murdoch for routine analysis. noon, the sun to the south of the orbit. Below, the coast of Western Europe lay in summer. Murdoch looked for, and imagined he saw, the teeming beaches of the Riviera. He could see, farther North, the Channel. How different, he wondered, would history have been if that Island had been a part of the Continent. Or, if the ocean level had been lower during recorded history. From up here, he thought, the British Isles did look like pieces of the main continent, somehow broken off and drifting out to sea. Damn funny place to build the world's first observatory! He strained to glimpse the ancient circle of stones standing alone in the middle of the Salisbury Plain. One observer floating beneath an intricate observatory, peering across # kilometers and # years at another...       O ur ancestors, much more han we, must have been intensely aware of the cyclic forces in their lives, the days and seasons of the earth. They had to be. Too much -- everything -- depended on knowing and following such cycles. Thus it is not surprising that Alexander Marshack, a sciencewriter turned anthropologist, should have discovered evidence that ancient people lived timefactored lives. What is surprising is his apparent discovery of the antiquity of such knowledge and its astronomical basis. Marshack, beginning with a small bone artifact of an obscure culture in North Africa, was led to heretofore "decorative" markings on the # year old object were in fact related to some periodic phenomena in the environment. It was the nature of the marks that led him toward his fascinating discovery. They seemed to appear in groupings of five, followed by a sequence of eight, several outstanding marks, then an inverse repetition. After trying to match various cycles: years of good or bad rainfall, seasons of good hunting, etc., Marshack was slowly but inexorably led toward one unique cycle which fit the markings: the orbit of the moon. Someone, millennia before the supposed invention of writing, was keeping careful note of the phases of Selene from first crescent to first quarter, then to full, which appear as three approximately equal marks (because it is quite difficult to tell exactly which night the moon is full; try it, sometime, without prior knowledge), followed by the shrinking of the moon back to a crescent. Even the days of invisibility, due to the moon being too close to the sun to be seen, were indicated! And the averaging of several cycles on the artifact revealed missing marks due, probably, to cloudy nights. Staggered by the implication of his simple bone relic, Marshack began to look at other cultures which had briefly trod this planet, to be swallowed up by time. He roamed the museums of Europe, searching out forgotten implements and artifacts catalogued and put away as "ceremonial" or "decorative." And he found the moon stretching back through the millennia and minds of forever-lost craftsmen -- on reindeer IF antlers, and eagles' claw, 'on mammoth-ivory, and painted brilliantly on the walls of caves. In an unbroken line he discovered an awareness of the lunar cycle stretching back through the Mesolithic Azilian, the Magdalenian, and the Aurignacian cultures, like Time's arrow. Each artifact moved Man's "developed" consciousness of the astronomical further back along the path of evolution, until Marshack seemed to find the Beginnings in the Upper Paleolithic, almost # years before recorded history -- # centuries of watching, noting, and following faithfully the strange cycle of one of the two great lights of heaven -- amid the ice-age snows of Europe. With this one discovery, the origins of art, symbolism, religion, political power, and even agriculture (of which we shall say more presently) seemed traceable to an awareness of the astronomical, the constant interplay of the forces which move the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth, that shape the length of the day and the duration of the seasons. Suddenly, Man, across tens of thousands of years of pre-history, was not merely an ignorant savage cowering in caves in the dark, but the possessor of an intellect and a curiosity that could watch patiently the movement of the shadowed face of Selene through the night sky and leave a record of his first tentative attempt to understand. Each year, each generation, across the thousands of lifetimes from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic toward the present, saw minute improvements of that record. The observations grew more sophisticated and the tools more grandiose. A new architectural invention made its appearance, quite unlike its far-off descendants, yet tied together with the same dependence on the sky -- the astronomical observatory. First, just a crude circle of earth to form an artificial horizon in which a few logs were erected to mark the rising and setting of the sun at different seasons, yet these beginnings of organized observation of the astronomical would profoundly affect all future generations. It is from these rude beginnings that the marvel of the Neolithic, the embodiment of all previous thousands of watchers of the day and night, was born. Stonehenge. On the flat chalk plain this monument to Man's quest of Understanding arose, bit by bit, across a thousand years while the pyramids were still unassembled clay amid the drifting sands bordering the Nile, the erection of this sophisticated observatorycomputer continued on Salisbury Plain. Around the brooding stones seeming to hang from the very sky itself, trade, the evolution of great cultures, the shift of history to another age (the bronze age), and the intermingling of the people of a continent, took place. It was the highest product of the minds and culture which had fostered its construction over a millennium, erected on the bits of bone and eagle claw, the recording of thousands of earlier observers. In the inexorable fulfillment of geometry, as Earth spun about her axis and moved around the sun, as her companion in the night, Selene, drifted overhead, even across the sun and into the yawning shadow of the earth, Stonehenge watched and noted, its granite markers as eternal as the sky. Amidst pageantry and ceremony its builders assembled the people to demonstrate their mastery of the gods themselves; for, used as a computer, the circle of stones standing on the plain beneath the bowl of heaven could even tell when the daystar would be blotted out, for all to see. Stonehenge was the culmination of a process # years in the making. In its brooding markers and geometry was contained the sum of Paleolithic and Neolithic understanding of the sky and earth. It was a tool and symbol -- as useful and significant to its epoch as Apollo is to ours. To achieve its creation and to use it well, Man had to learn of his dependence on the sky. The vast sequence of agriculture, orderly planting, harvesting, and processing of food to support the rise of cities and the growth of diversified activities, was made possible only with this knowledge of astronomy. In a thousand interwoven threads the tapestry of cultural enrichment is traceable to the independence which systematic food production gave to chieftains, kings, and emperors. It was the "fallout" of this wealth which made possible the maintenance of artists, writers, and musicians and the creation of the architectural marvels of our world.       M urdoch finished the last series of photographs as he minator for the second time. Checking the magazine ident, he touched the control of his backpack thruster unit, moving slowly up the length of the sealed tube. The new anti-UV paint was doing the job, he noted. His photographs would confirm the lack of bubbles on the surface of the instrument. "I'm just about finished here," he commed the shuttle now hanging patiently above the telescope -- with reference to the dwindling crescent earth. "I'll take the sunset series. Then give me the lights and I'll come in." "Anything you say, Doc. It's your mission. We only serve who hang and wait..." The laconic voice of Lt. Ben Crowder, horrible punster, sounded quite loud this IF close to the Shuttle. Murdoch reduced the volume. The sun touched the limb. Slowly, but faster than he'd exelongated shape, a stark white cylinder against the deep of space, was rapidly transformed into a russet cigar, followed by the startling shift to kelly green. They flew on, he taking pictures with the Hasselblad, the advanced telescope slicing through the dispersed rays of the occulted sun. It was now a glowing blue electric wand -- now shifting back to green, yellow, orange-yellow...! Rapidly advancing the color film with always clumsy gloved hands, Murdoch watched as, along the earth's panoramic limb beneath the living telescope, another light was spreading. The moon was rising, full, its familiar countenance incredibly distorted by identical color shifts as it rose through the atmospheric layers. Click... Wh-r-r-r... Click ,... He imagined he could hear, as well as feel through the insulating gloves, the vibration of the advancing mechanism. The moon was now a yellow lantern, familiar seas smilAbove it, catching the last dispersive rays of a rapidly disappearing colored rod. They hung there for an instant in the round glass, the telescope above, pointing toward Infinity, the moon below, and the softly lit limb of Earth beneath them both. He snapped the picture -- a perfect exclamation point of moon and telescope. Smiling, he secured the camera and began the short trip home.       I t is five years tonight (as I write this) since men first left footprints on the moon. It is the same moon other men watched, worshipped, and notated amid our ice-age origins, thus making possible those footprints. "Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel..." The study of the moon makes possible greater study of the moon, makes possible visits to the moon, makes possible study of the Universe Beyond... making the best of an essentially bad situation. To begin with, the telescope will be fabricated on Earth. The mirror will be poured and figured under "normal" gravity and the design and construction of the entire optical device guided by the fact that it must be launched brutally into orbit by a large Saturn-class launch vehicle, subjected to accelerations, distortions, and vibrations downright sacrilegious to an instrument of which is expected such exquisite precision. Even after achieving orbit, the mental indignities by virtue of its position in an orbit of the earth. The constant day and night, half of each #-minute-plus orbit, will produce thermal strains on precise pointing optics, alignment mirrors, and focus planes. Gravity, the omnipresent pull of greater "G's" at the base of the telescope than at the top, because of the mere fact that the top is farther from the center of the earth (in certain attitudes) will place elaborate constraints on long exposures, pointing accuracy, motor life of reaction wheels and electronic circuitry necessary to monitor these environmental anomalies. Add to this, radiation pressure, the baffling requirement to prevent scattered light, the constant interruption of a particular observation as the target goes behind the earth for # minutes out of every orbit, and the necessity of constant resupply of attitude control gas (used to dump excess momentum caused by stabilizing an object in a weightless environment of many energy sources and no readily available sinks ) and you begin to perceive a few of the prices which must be paid for establishing a telescope in the "weightless environment of Earth orbit." It is not surprising, therefore, will surely be built upon the moon. It is there, securely rooted in the lunar crust, that telescopes six times larger than the largest terrestrial counterpart are possible. The light, one-sixth gravity of Luna will simplify everything from structures to the mirror optics themselves. It seems reasonable to envision optical instruments of a thousand inches, built upon Selene. Instead of only forty-five minutes of darkness possible in earth orbit (actually still orbiting within Earth's outer atmosphere of hydrogen), a telescope upon the moon will have two weeks -- fourteen days -- of absolute darkness, the darkest night possible this close to the sun if the facility is placed on the Farside of the moon. This means two weeks uninterrupted imagery or other observations with a light-bucket capable of collecting vacuum just as good (if not better for some observations -- above the last of the terrestrial hydrogen halo) than that found in Earth orbit. The two weeks of night (and, of course, day) will also allow better design for thermal expansion and contraction. Components of differing expansion coefficients -- glass and plastic seals, for instance -- will have a chance to stabilize for several hours before serious observations. And, depending on the exact location, it might even be possible to surround the telescope with a multiple layered reflector designed to keep the instrument in permanent shadow -- an island of eternal night and perfect darkness IF beneath even the blazing heat of lunar noon. From its vantage point on the airless face of Man's familiar satellite, with its awesome thousandinch diameter, what could such an astronomer's dream-come-reality perceive across the dark light years? What could we see? We have touched briefly upon will seek to answer. These questions will also fall within the purvue of the Lunar Telescope. Therefore let's use the remainder of this paper to examine the one new subject soon to be brought within the realm of stellar astronomy by the construction of these future observatories -- just as its solar system counterpart is about to be brought within our grasp by Viking -- the search for life in the Universe. Astronomy began with the moon, a quest to understand an apparently living entity -- a god -- and its regulation of all living things on earth. How appropriate, therefore, that it is from an observatory on that same moon that Man will probably first collect irrefutable astronomical evidence of the existence of interstellar life. To exist, life as we know it must have planets orbiting a stable star for evolution; and if they are to be detected, they must be relatively close at hand (astronomically speaking) for us to see them at all. Planets, even such giants as Jupiter (ten times the size of Earth), shining only by the reflected light of their primary, are very dim compared to stars. Thus, only the planets of the nearest stars, those within twenty light years of Earth, would be within range of even the super Lunar telescope envisioned here. The problem: to detect the faint glimmerings of tiny planets moving around points of light # At first it seems impossible. Even at the distance of the nearest star, # light years away, a planet as large as Jupiter a Jupiter is, of course, not an earth. It is useful, however, if detected, as it is thought that a Jovian-type planet should be accompanied in any solar system by smaller, more terrestrial types. So we start by trying to detect a Jupiter... will only be a point of light, never a disc, of approximately plus # magnitude. Without getting lost in technicalities, that is the dimmest object the world's largest telescope can detect today. And that's only if it knows exactly where to look. It doesn't apply to a photograph where you're looking for a tiny point of light that moved since the photograph you took last week was taken. Such a planet search, for a dim, moving point of light is only practical with a telescope large enough so that a plus-# magnitude star is ten or maybe twenty times its threshold limit. The Lunar #-inch should have a limit # times greater than the #-inch on Palomar on the equal, they will have roughly comparable light gathering ability). tion category by virtue of being in orbit. And the Lunar Telescope will tion... Man will move into an era when it becomes possible to see the planets of his nearest stellar neighbors -- if they are there. A Jupiter, even an Earth, orbiting the nearest suns certainly by the Lunar Telescope. The problem of finding them -- tiny points of light moving around anbright -- is also relatively simple. An artificial eclipse. By hiding the parent star behind an occulting disc (or arranging it so the light of the star falls through a hole cut into the photographic plate or TV tube in a vacuum author's invention, rch, it should be posLunar Telescope to photograph planets orbiting stars other than the sun. But... how do we detect life light years away? For that task, after the first flush of success in finding visual proof (as opposed to the gravitational signatures certain astronomers currently attribute to unseen planets will probably prove too small. It will fall to the Lunar Telescope to produce spectra of new planets. Such spectra, analyzed for oxygen, methane, and perhaps even unnatural hydrocarbons would, if positive, give us strong circumstantial evidence of a world like Earth with oxygen produced by biological activity, as well as methane. Sufficient ingenuity of such research might even be able to detect the presence of a technological civilization upon such a planet if it were confronted with the environmental problems currently confronting our own. To identify more advanced civilizations (those in which technology has gone beyond disturbing the natural environs) would require other techniques. Information on an entirely new aspect of stellar astronomy: the detection, cataloguing, and description of the planets of other solar systems is perfectly possible -- given sufficient technological advance in the construction of space telescopes. Even the detection of atmospheric components unequivocally produced by biological activity is possible from an observatory on the Moon! It is even within the realm of possibility to infer the presence of an environment-modifying technology and, thus, an intelligent species. B ut, as with all history -- as with his patient nights of marking the changing shape of the lunar IF disc, Man, once he has tasted the success of finding other worlds amid the stars, will not rest until they exist as more than distant points of light. Even as his vessels prepare for the distant voyage, so his curiosity will impel him to create optical descendants of even the Lunar behemoth. Thus in the feeble sunlight, illuminating but not heating that which exists "out there" four construct, at the edge of the Abyss, the Ultimate telescope. A huge reflector scores of miles across, a mirror capable of lighting fires at its focus with the collected light of stars! Such a creation, capable of imaging their planets, or peering beyond the dawn of time itself, will share few things in common with its ancient granite ancestor so distant both in space and in time, upon the Salisbury Plain. And yet, as Stonehenge once tried to understand the moon's influence over men, and Man has at last become an influence on the moon -- so, perhaps, this vast crystalline creation, floating on the edge of space separating solar system from the interstellar night, shall one day see an age when Man, through understanding extends his Dominion to the Stars.  Stouffer's National Center Inn, # Jefferson Davis Highway, Arlington, VA #. Membership #. For info: Erwin S. Strauss, # Columbia Pike ##, Silver Spring, MD #. the Hotel Commodore, New York City. Membership # advance, # at door. For info: Joseph Rizzo, #-# #st St., Astoria, N.Y. #. Michigan League, Ann Arbor, Michigan. GoH: Fred Pohl. Fan GoH: Mike Glicksohn. For info: Ro Nagey, Rm. # Michigan Union, U. of Mich., Ann Arbor, Mich. #. the University of Arizona. For info: Tucson, Az. #. Francisco Torres, Santa Barbara, Calif. Membership # attending, # supporting. Write Medievalcon, Box #, Los Angeles CA #. Make reservations early. Trek Con in New Orleans. For info: Beverly Traub, Box #, New Orleans, LA #. Why you want to visit the subbasement and -- Watch the puddle; these stone walls drip a lot at this depth. The echoes make voices sound ominous, don't they? I'll grant you He's an interesting specimen of alter-ego, and I suppose there is a kind of morbid fascination in listening to him rave, but I'm frankly embarrassed to bring people down here. Yes, three big Yale padlocks are necessary... and the heavy chains... and the thick steel bolts. One time in # he got out and -- help me lift this oak bar, will you? Now, for God's sake, remember to keep your distance. If he ever gets his claws on you... and sinks in his fangs... Well, let's just say I bury a lot of bones. I've got to oil those hinges one of these years. Hold the lantern a bit higher... There he is! The sight makes you suck breath in horror, doesn't it? I warned you. It's those green and red eyes that get most people... and the evil laugh. Don't try to speak to him. I do all the talking. "Alter? You feel like talking science fiction today?" "Why don't you ever bring any women down here, Geis?" "I know you too welf. No girls. Not now, not ever! Now, this adventurous gentleman wants to know why you hate intellectual science fiction." "I don't hate it, Geis, I loathe it. There is a fine distinction there. Thus I hate the so-called food you send down here, I loathe intellectual s-f, and I abominate you and your shameless commercialization of me. But I can do very little about any of these conditions, so I accept them... until I -- " "You'll never get loose again! I wear the Amulet. I wear the Ring. I speak the Sacret Words: Yug Sluggoth Thunkis Fgn-thi-Ulgudd..." "Just because Fritz Leiber muttered those words at you that time when you visited him too early in the morning -- " "They keep you under control, Alter. Fritz is wise. Now, in the Unspeakable name of Yug Sluggoth, I command you to respond to the question." "What was the damn question? I get distracted. Listen, Geis, only five minutes once a year with a sweet, young thing with big ones, a narrow waist, limpid blue eyes, a soft smile..." "Intellectual science fiction, Alter! Why do you hate it?" "How about once every two years? Damn it, Geis, I'm horny, I've -- " "Yug Slug-' "all right! Stop the damn chant. If you knew what that combination of sounds does to my sinuses -- " "We've got to get down to business. I don't have all day to humor you. For the last time: address yourself to why you loathe intellectual science fiction." "I loathe it because... because... You want the real truth? I loathe it because it's mostly over my head. Yes, damn it, I don't understand the subtle symbolisms, the obscure references, the abstrusenesses, the ambiguities, the God-damned zilch endings that leave me baffled and angry and saying 'Wha -- ?' to myself." "That's because you're stupid, Alter. You are ignorant, essentially uneducated, and have an I.Q. of only #." "Yeah, that's my point. I've had two years of college. After all my psychometric tests in high school I was told I had a big vocabulary, a fine sense for spacial relationships, and an I.Q. sufficient to allow me to teach at the high school level if I attended teach-college." "Instead, you lured me into becoming a kind of beatnik in California, and lured me into writing sex novels for a living. Eighty-four sex novels! My God, if that got out -- " "You want me to continue to work myself into a Diatribe, Geis, or do you want to piss and moan about our scandalous youth?" "Finish, finish. Try to say it a little differently this time, though, will you? I've heard it so many times before..." "Go eat sour grapes! Now, if a lot of this intellectual, arty, affected science fiction is too obscure and 'private' for me to understand, how in hell is the average s-f reader going to cope with it... and why should he have to cope with it?" "' Affected '? Now that's a pretty strong -- " "This stuff is a rip-off, Geis. It is the product, largely, of egotism and pride; an incestuous little band of arrogant phoneys -- " "' Phoneys ' ? Now that's a pretty strong -- " " -- who get their jollies by pretending to be 'superior' to # of the readers of the magazines and books in which their junk appears." "' Junk '? Alter -- " "Don't stop me now, Geis, I'm rolling! See, these jokers maybe are smarter than most readers, and their psychology is that they are superior and the only way they can prove it is to write stuff we can't understand very well unless they or a pipe-smoking English professor explains it. They hate us, Geis. They secretly hate us readers. They do! We are the ones who indirectly pay them. Ultimately, we have the power to kill them dead, moneywise... and probably ego-wise, too. They hate and fear us! That's why they always snear at us and revile us as low-lifes and tasteless clods." "You go too far, Alter!" "Help that guy stand up, Geis. So they write their arty-farty 'experimental' crap that's been written by intellectual writers since Ug first put a stick to a cave wall and they try to make us feel dumb because we don't understand it and don't like it. We sense their true motives, you see, and we know these stories and novels are deliberately written unclear and ambiguous." "There are ideas and themes and subtleties which cannot be cast into black and white narrative forms, Alter!" "Bullshit, Geis! Intellectual s-f is a style of writing, it's a type of narrative, it's a tool and it's a role for the writer to play. Writing Literature and playing at being an Intellectual is much more satisfying to the ego than Hack Writer is. And after having been to college and having been exposed to all them Eng. Lit courses and such, no self-respecting young writer nowadays is going to dig being a Hack Writer and writing Commercial Fiction." "Alter, I can refute thee." "Only because you can shut me up. Would you care to listen to what Gore Vidal wrote in the July of Books? I quote: 'The American university has come into its terrible own. Departments of English now produce by what appears to be parthogenesis novels intended only for the classroom; my favorite demonstrated that the universe is -- what else? -- the university. Occasionally a university novel (or U-novel) will be read by the general (and dwindling) public for the novel; and sometimes a novel written for that same public (P-novel) will be absorbed into Academe, but more and more the division between the two realms grows and soon what is written to be taught in class will stay there and what is written to be read outside will stay there, too. On that day the kingdom of prose will end, with an exegesis.' "How did you get hold of that?" "You threw it down the garbage chute with my food yesterday. The only magazines you save are play"So what is your point with that IF Vidal quote?" "The point is obvious, dumb one. More and more s-f writers are writing for the university crowd, and more and more editors are editing for the university crowd. We are a trendy, faddish, conformist nation, and s-f writers are not immune, in spite of their vaunted non-conformist pretensions." "You know, Alter, if you could prove one single -- " "A symptom, a proof, if you will, Geis, is that six or seven years ago most of the thirtyish and fortyish writers were short-haired straight snigger... they're most of them long haired and dressed to the youth culture trend. What Asimov has lost on top he lets grow down the back of his neck, and sports fluffy mutton-chop sideburns, to boot. Harlan Ellison has adopted the slab look -- waterfalls of straight hair over ears and forehead. Larry Niven has a full beard and hair all over the place. Bob Silverberg looks like a guru. Barry Malzberg looks like an older Norman Spinrad who in turn looks like a petulant fallen angel. Even Jerry Pournelle who two years ago was Mr. Straight, has capitulated and conformed to fashion with a long side-burned, shaggy mane with mustache look." "That's a low-blow personal attack -- "  It certainly is. Alter. Besides, maybe it's just that now, at last, they feel free to be and express their wonderful true selves! Er... hello. Dr. A. Gee, I didn't know you were reading this! Heh, Heh. Oh! Hi, Larry! Jerry -- what are you doing here!?! Hey, Guys -- honest -- I didn 't write it; I just edit around here. You wouldn't want me to censor poor Alter, would you? Would you? -- Baen "If they conform so easily, Geis, in dress, it indicates they can and do write what they think will thrill the highbrow literary critics and the professors. They lust to be Respectable. And they edit to be Respectable and Accepted as Literature." "And you figure the ordinary reader is forgotten? You think he rarely gets the kind of science fiction that would really turn him on and bring him to the pocketbook racks and magazine racks screaming for more?" "On the nailhead, Geis! These people are often excellent to brilliant writers, but they don't really want to put their talents and skills to the service of readers by writing dynamic stories that grab us, keep us glued to the pages with action, danger, suspense and a touch of sex, and a heavy life-anddeath crisis with the good guy winning in the end. They -- " "You can't expect every story to conform to that formula, Alter!" "Of course not!! The point is that these people are too good to 'prostitute' themselves to the masses. They want to do their thing, and be With It and In and have some graduate student or professor write articles and monographs and theses on the deep philosophical significance of their work." "You're perhaps a little bit right, Alter, but you're overstating and exaggerating all over the place." "That's the function of a Diatribe! I'm letting your hair down and you can't stand it. Take a tranquilizer and hold onto your hat. Will you please keep that geek you brought down here with you on his feet? Where was I?" "I refuse to tell you." "You know why there's such a high turnover in editors in publishing houses and magazines? It's a rare editor who will learn from experience. He usually insists on publishing what he thinks the public should read. When sales go down or don't improve, the publisher sacks him and brings in another guy with another slightly different set of pre-conceived ideas of what the public should read. When an editor does learn from the readers what the readers want, and gives it to them, he lasts thirty years and dies in his editorial chair, and then everyone calls him a genius in public and in private they sneer at him for 'appealing to the lowest common denominator'." "Yeah. Okay, Alter, you've said your piece. Now I've got to get back to the surface and take care of other matters." "Not so fast, Geis! You don't shut me up so easily this time! You started this! You wanted to display me, flaunt me before thousands, make fun of me, be superior, and now we'll see how much guts you've got! I'm going to name names! How many enemies you want to make? Give me a few more pages -- " "Alter, the science fiction world is small and intimate. If I really let you go all the way... No, we must be diplomatic. We must -- " "Take Brian W. Aldiss, for instance. Here's a man who wrote some really fine, sense-of-wonder s-f in the beginning of his career. I remember particularly the long stunning view of far-future Earth, almost a fantasy of strangeness in a dominating plant world in which tiny tribal mankind is constantly struggling to survive amidst constant danger. Yet it's an upbeat, triumphant story. "But he turned to experimentation and self indulgence with novels which sank without a trace, and the play-on-words and psychedelia, tired of s-f and said unkind, derisive things about it and about fans. He turned to the 'mainstream' and hit it big with a masIF turbation best-seller in England called hand-reared boy. But now he is back writing his brand of intellectual s-f -- strange, eccentric satires and Literary games such as "Alter, stop! Yug Suggolplug... No, Yog Nuggle -- " "Or take a guy like Gene Wolfe. An excellent writer in the sense that he can write rings around most anybody in the field, but instead of applying that talent and skill to stories and novels that pin a reader, rattle his teeth and put him through a wringer, he writes technically superb mile-long vignettes that drive me and others up the wall with puzzles and unanswered questions." "He wins awards, Alter!" "So do you, Geis, and you know what a lot of fans think of you. Gene Wolfe wins awards for his pure writing ability, not because his stories are satisfying to anyone... except six or seven critics and a few professors and fellow-traveling editors. Most voters in these awards probably vote for him to avoid admitting to themselves that they don't understand his stuff. Obscurantism has its virtues in the Literary Game. He writes his way and # of the readers may like it or admire it without understanding it and the rest are either intimidated by his reputation or having once sampled his writing, stay clear ever after. He writes real-life reality, The biggest coverup of all! aliens from spa.ce. Major qonalg e. keyhoe "If Major Keyhoe's book didn't sufficiently substantiate his claim that the United States Air Force knows more advanced world -- and is deliberately concealing the truth from the public by censoring reports and discrediting witnesses -- this somber warning might sound a trifle ridiculous. But it rings disturbingly true."Christian Science Monitor. # with all the hidden motives, baffling event and inconclusive endings of real life. I say it's spinach and to hell with it." "Because you're obtuse and lowbrow and were raised on the old pulp magazine... thud and blunder..." "Damn right. Now tell me again how you understand the significance of Gene Wolfe's ' The Fifth Head of Cerberus ' and the related novelettes." "His meanings are perfectly obwork at it. Slothful readers who want only to indulge themselves in entertainment will, of course, find him hard going. He demands thought and insight and careful, considered reading." "You make my point, Geis. He writes college-course fiction. You have to study him. He has to be interpreted and analyzed. How delightful for him. He owes the reader nothing, right? The guy who pays good money gets the intellectual shaft, right?" "Alter, you are slipping into side areas. If you insist on continuing this Diatribe of yours -- and you must know it isn't new; anti-intellectuals and conservatives and Romantics have been making these same arguments for a hundred or more years -- get back to ruining me among my friends. Attack somebody else." "How about Gordon Eklund? He's often as frustrating, anti-hero and knee-jerk anti-establishment and depressingly conformist in his intellectual s-f as most of the new young talented writers. You can add Ed Bryant, Thomas Disch, Geo. Alec Effinger, Vonda McIntyre... Delaney... the list could go on and on." "They are artists in words, Alter!" "They are giving their visions of reality, Geis. Which everyone does. But they are doing it by using the forms and styles of Literary Fiction, not reader-oriented Commercial Fiction. They say their way is superior to the commercial way, the reader-entertainment way, and I say they are affected, self-indulgent, lazy, pretentious... and in the coming recession depression the readers will triumph and these guys will either apply themselves to pleasing the readers or they'll starve." "You're vicious!" "Damn right. The publishers will look at the sales charts and say, 'J.G. Ballard sells # copies. Roger Zelazny sells # copies. We can't afford to carry Ballard anymore. Times are tough. We've got to cut these authors no one buys.' In fact, that reality is beginning to appear now." "Why haven't you mentioned Barry Malzberg?" "Actually, because Barry is on his way out as a s-f writer. He is into the mainstream, if they'll have him. He is so sick of s-f that his disIF gust is nearly pathological. I must M say -- "He wrote herovit's world to express his disgust, didn't he?" " -- a few words about that puffed-up frog in his Polish puddle, Stanislaw Lem, with his lovely captive audiences, his inch-deep characterizations, his metaphysical novels dressed in hard-science clothes, his heavy-handed, overwritten satire. Groan "Anyone else? Care to attack Heinlein while you're at it?" "Heinlein isn't an Intellectual s-f writer as I define the term. He incorporates large chunks of philosophy in his works, but he commits the cardinal sins of making himself understood and usually writing to entertain his readers. For this he is attacked. I haven't thought too much of his last two novels, time enough for love has flashes of great narrative, but too much of it is Heinlein playing solipsistic masturbation games with Heinlein; it was so cute in places I wanted to vomit." "I think you'd really better stop now, Alter. You've used up the whole column with your intemperate, ill-considered mouthings, and I did not intend for this to happen. Besides, my guest is shaking like a leaf and his skin has a strange pallor." "Hand him a copy of Lin Carter's last Thonger novel. The stink will -- " "My God, Alter! You actually enjoy engaging authors and getting me into trouble, don't you?" "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Life is short and ennui is long. Let's say what we really think once in a while, with no self-censorship. With the clear expectation that we'll get clobbered in turn. It's fun. It's good therapy to vent the spleen and pour icky green bile over everything every so often." "I've spent years building an image of Nice Guy and you've destroyed it in one afternoon." "There, there, Geis. Don't whimper. From now on you'll have a new image -- you'll be thought of as a combination of Jack Woodford and H. L. Mencken." "I'm not going to visit you again, Alter! You'll rot down here!" "You'll be back! The next time you need a column written... the next time you need excitement in C ome sir, let us get out of this foul place. A little fresh air and a snifter of whisky will do wonders for that twitch. Just let me pull this big door shut... "A girl, Geis! And some fresh fruit! You exploit me and all I get is -- " bolts... the chains... the locks... Mind the slippery steps. Remind me to put a new candle in this lantern when we get up to the ground floor.  A gristly little tale I ard Fatta Gut, Gourmand j Extraordinary, but lately returned from the Conquest of the Capon, unsated by victories over Turtle Zoup and the Filly of Mignon, stood in the cavernously empty hall of Castle Krunch on Hunger Hill in Famine Plain and shook his round head slowly. "Nay, nay, my lady," said he to pale, skinny Lady Diet whose shrill entreaties he'd endured too long, too long. "Leave us be, lady. Empty and enervating is the life of ease. I long for palpitating battle. My manly heart pines for the culinary joust." And with those words he shuffled off slowly, his legs wide apart, for they didn't call Lard Fatta Gut Lard Fatta Gut for nothing. His short, thick arms extended at an angle from his marvelously rounded trunk, and little wheezes escaped his parted lips. H is skinny lady's bony fingers tore the tearstained handkerchief in rage. "Wretch, wretch," she hissed behind him through narrow, blue lips, and the fire in her hollow sockets grew piercing. "Never more will I endure your faithless escapades. This time, my Lard, I'll send my vengeance on you!" She ran off, wan-limbed, to her chamber. Her fingers fumbled angrily among her magic pills and potions. Kalorie killers and chalkbread sticks fell drily from her narrow table. Then with triumph she lifted two phials of closely sealed glass against the candle, and her eyes gleamed with bitter joy. "Come Vengeance Wreakers, come," she hissed, and she ran to her laboratory where, pouring phial contents into an earthernware bowl, she whimpered incantations. Clouds of acid mingled with clouds of liquid fire, and in their smoky murk, coaxed by her words of power, the Dreadful Twins materialized in trembling similitude. "Who dares to summon the Double Scourge of the Columbian Continent?" they grated with a single, shardy voice. "It is I, the Lady Diet, immune to your foul works. I will release you on condition that you will harry my Lard Gut until he mends his way. Even now he prepares to scale Mount Deli in Kosher Plain to test the mettle of Mighty Matz." "Give the releasing word, my lady," they rasped in eager unison. And she said: "McDonalds." With shrieks of demonic fury, they streaked out through the vaulted window and past a weirdling moon. Hunger ravens fluttered up weakly from the Starvation Oak. I n the empty castle courtyard sixteen henchmen heaved and hoisted Lard Fatta Gut up on the back of Bill O'Fare, his trusty steed. They tied magic Nap Kin beneath his triple chin. They girded his rotundity with the jousting belt. On it from a leather scabbard hung his mighty weapon, golden Gorgenor. On it from a silken thread hung his silver Fill Thee Cup. "Bon Ape Tit," the henchmen cried grinning, and Bill O'Fare lurched out on buckling legs, sorely tried by my Lard Gut's truly stupendous tonnage. Night cut off the last slice of day, and the horizon pinked like rare prime rib of beef. Locust swarms, Lard Fatta's close familiars, whisked and rattled over the dry ground behind him. He broke into his mighty jousting song: Oh, what a glorious meal! Shish Kabob, ham, and tender young veal, Let us fall to with unequaled zeal, Pass the butter and slice the seal, And make those potatoes mashed. Eat, fellows, eat, Chew, fellers, cheat, Who minds the heat in the ki-i-it-chen! Hamburgers, hotdogs, catchup, and salt, Oh, what a glorious feast! Onions, pickles, and chips at the least, Fritos and cornballs and rolls full of yeast. That's just a start for a ravenous beast, And pass that bottle of malt. Eat, fellows, eat, Chew, fellers, cheat, Who minds the heat in the ki-i-it-chen! He sang so long and with such fervor, he didn't hear the Torture Twins' shriek and cackle high up in the darkened sky, nor did he see past the flesh pillows around his greedy eyes the evil phosphorescence of That Pair against the stars. Venison, salmon, chicken  Kosher Plain, in Garlic hash, vJ County, Mount Deli rises IF high. Pickle Palace proudly pouts on top. Salami columns support a cracker roof. Red gleams the beet soup in the moat. Thither trysted Lard Fatta Gut, growing nearly weightless with desire. Bill O'Fare felt his master's levity and broke into a gallutton. They pounded down Sugar Cube Road and left a white dust behind them. Davy's henchmen blocked the way, but Fatta Gut uncorked them all and drained their sweet life to the bottom. Up they thundered toward the palace, giddy with the blood of Mogan. The locust swarm came close behind. Unsheathing golden Gorgenor, Lard Fatta leapt from saddle just as Gefilte Fish cranked up the pumpernickel draw. "Yield!" cried Gut and brandished the mighty Fork. "Yield, I say, delicious men of Deli. Nothing shall daunt your Fatta Gun in his pursuit of Mighty Matz whom you dare guard in his goetic glass. Gorgenor has conquered many. Even now I come to you from the fingerlicking haunts of Colonel Capon; Turtle Zoup has paid me homage; and I have caught the Filly of Mignon." But the guards of Matz, the men of Deli, smiled behind uplifted hands. They knew themselves secure. Had not the Dreadful Twins arrived to take up posts behind the necromantic glass of Matz, hidden from sight, they and their minions? No more would smacking Fatta Gut ravage the countryside and make the jellies and the puddings quake in fear. "Away, you Gut profane," they taunted. "Away, away." "Alas," cried he. "You won't yield peacefully, I see. I pity you," cried he, "for you shall feel the bite of golden Gorgenor." And with these words he plunged into the moat and drank it dry in one, great, slurping gulp. Magic Nap Kin curled up to dab his puckered lips. Then did Gorgenor do deeds of valor. He cut, swung, jabbed, and skewered -- guided by Lard Fatta Gut's infallibly sure arm. Gefilte Fish fell to his blows. Hissing noodles curled on his prongs and were consumed. He blasted blintzes and quartered them for quick dispatch. The Fork did work like seven forks, and though the Deli disgorged more warriors yet, not once did Gut's sure chops and stabs miss an opponent. Nap Kin flapped madly to purify Gut's lips and jowls, and on its magic surface deeds of courage were marked in gore. Slowly they struggled, Lard Fatta Gut and trusty Gorgenor, toward the Prize of Prizes, gigantic Matz in his goetic glass. There he is, up ahead, beyond the wrinkled pickle guard that now, overcome at last, fearfully withdraws into salami shadows. And our hero stands spreadlegged before the glass, outstretched arm at rest on Gorgenor's golden handle, a smile of triumph on his smacking lips. M ighty Matz was a fat ball indeed. He looked down at Fatta Gut with eyes of sleepy menace, languid and relaxed in his bath of rich, briny broth, for Matz knew what Gut didn't. Those Two lurked in the gloom behind the glass. "I have cornered you at last, ball-shaped Matz. Uncap your jar, delicious friend, and come out for a final match of strength. As you can see, we've made a hash of your retainers, the golden Fork and I, and nothing guards you now." "Wrong!" blurbed the blob in brine. "Wrong you are, my worthy Gut. Your battle has barely begun, and you'll be bested this time." Then with infernal shrieking noises, the Potent Pair pounced on our peerless Gut, one from the right and one from the left of the goetic glass, each circumswarmed by minions. Lard Fatta Gut lurched back under attack, his small eyes big with shocked surprise. "Gassidus Indigestus!" He nearly stammered as he pointed golden Gorgenor at one of the pair -- a pin-eyed, evil, smoking wraith whose fingertips sprayed acid droplets toward the lard. "Hart Burn!" he cried, shifting his astonished gaze toward the other, a flaming replica of the romantic muscle on legs, whose fingers threw fire tongues toward a stumbling, retreating Gut. Their minions swarmed about him burning with liquids and gases. Once more Gorgenor slashed and stabbed -- his golden prongs immune to acid but sweating in the flame -- but nothing could prevail against the demonic fury of this Pair, and Lard Fatta Gut fell back in tottering despair. "Sorcery!" he cried aghast. "Unfair joust. My manly honor is outraged. I am undone." J ust then, as luck would have it, as Gassidus and Hart closed in to kill, as Nap Kin curled brown with acid burn, the Locust Leader leaped up to perch on Fatta Gut's blubbery earlobe, and in the scrape-tongue of the Familiar, it reminded Fatta of his secret powers. The locust said: "Crrrp-twrrrp, crrp-twrrrrp, crurrp." That is to say: "Look in your jousting belt, my lard, and remember also your invisible friend -- for surely you are amply armed against the viles of Sorcery both by the works of Science and by the works of Nature." Lard Fatta's eyes lit up with joy. He moved his closed lips with one of his stout fingers while he emitted a sound. He said: "Buwlbuwlbuwlbuwlbuwlbuwlbuwl." That is to say: "Thank you most graciously, Locust Leader, for reminding me of my superiority to Sorcery of all kinds, for truly I had thought myIF self undone, even while relief was a close as the reach of my fingers." All through this exchange, of course, golden Gorgenor continued to thrust and parry, moved by Fatta's unexcelled sure arm, and had it not been for the Fork's undaunted power. Lard Fatta Gut would have succumbed to Sorcery, for he needed a moment of respite to launch the devastating counterattack he planned with a sly glint in his eye. Fortunately, Gorgenor's flurry of gold beat back Gassid and Hart long enough. Already sensing his certain victory, Lard Fatta Gut cried: "Not yet, my friends! Not yet shall you have your evil way with me, Dreadful Scourge of Columbus' Land!" And with these words, he reached down and lifted his cup by its silken thread. "Cuplet Fill Thee," whispered our stalwart, but nothing appeared in the silvery bottom of the container. His little eyes clouded with puzzled dismay. Again the Locust Leader twirped the answer, and Fatta Gut recalled the magic words. "Fill Thee Cuplet," he whispered this time, and Lo! cool water brimmed to the top of the beaker. He took from his jousting belt's secret pocket tablets shaped and colored like the pregnant moon. Into the cup they fizzed with magic abandon, and to the shrieking consternation of that Torturing Two, AI Kasell's pearly-white apparition rose from the Fill Thee Cup holding back six slavering acid gobblers on the end of a straining leash. Kasell released his hounds, and they began to consume many more acid minions than the Leading Dry Tablet that gourmands not-soextraord inary used. Lard Fatta Gut began to rub his stomach with a circular motion, and again a shriek of anguished terror rose from the Terrible Twins, for they recognized the gesture and its threat. Sneaky, silent, cunning, and invisible, Fikel Mart -- more dreadful than his loud-mouthed brothers -- would even now curl in fhe air toward them choking off breath with his gaseous claws. They fled through the cracker roof with wails of impotent rage and disappeared, streaks of menacing phosphorescence, into the night. Mart and Kasell made short work of the abandoned minions, while Fatta Gut cast pillowed eyes toward the goetic glass. But Mighty Matz had fled his broth. Gut saw him roll flacidly between salami columns down the pumpernickel hall, a glistening and delicious ball, and Lard Fatta Gut hoisted Gorgenor, the golden Fork, for the final reckoning. The End. Readers writeand wronci This is absolutely the last word (J promise) on " Cantor's War' Dear Mr. Baen: To one who grew up reading the editorials of the late John W. Campbell, Jr., and who, with Mr. Campbell's death, had begun to feel that something comforting and predictable had gone out of life, it is a consolation to see that his most cherished supersi tion continues to be disseminated in the mags. I refer, of course, to the belief that a formal education consists largely in having Truths That Must Not Be Questioned Because They Were Discovered By Great Authorities shoved down one's throat (or Throat) by Those Who Have The Proper Professional Credentials To Pass On The Revealed Truth. Mr. Christopher Anvil, a True Believer (as he might put it) in this hoary guff, goes through the old paces in "Cantor's War" with enough verve to keep me in nostalgia till they reissue the Edsel. I'm not ungrateful , mind, but the interests of truth (and of national defense, in case we should ever get into a war involving an infinite number of spaceships) compel me to point out that Mr. A. Comes a cropper over infinity. (A cropper, incidentally, that Dr. A, would never have come -- value of professional credentials?) ( For reasons of brevity I have been forced to delete here an exceedingly abstruse and (( according to a mathematical friend)) valid demonstration leading to the following conclusion. -- Ed.) We suppose that each ship is capable of any finite velocity, and therefore, that each ship is capable of reaching its assigned volume in (drawing a figure from the story) # seconds. Then, after # seconds, every one of the volumes will contain three Good Guys, though each contained only one before; yet the number of Good Guys does not increase, however hard Anvil finds that to swallow. So Anvil is wrong and Dr. Phipps is right -- Ah, rebellious creature of fiction! Oddly enough, however, Anvil is right -- right in practice, though wrong in theory. That is, his reasoning is wrong, but he gets the right strategic conclusion -- that Dr. Phipps's plan is worthless -- by accident. The real problem with the Phipps plan is not one of troopstrength, as Anvil thinks, but of logistics. Consider the fact that each ship must determine where it is to go. The ship in volume number #, for example, must figure out for itself that it is to go to volume number #. It must also determine how far from #, and in what direction, # is. To perform these tasks, the ship must, of course, know that, at the start, it is in volume number #. Well, presumably it does. But most of the ships don 't know their own volumenumbers: most of the numbers are too big for any entity this side of an omniscient Deity to "know." Consider a ship whose volume-number contains # # # digits. How does the ship store such a number? Not even coded into the spins of all its constituent elementary particles. There aren't nearly enough. And only an infinitesimal fraction of the volume-numbers are so minuscule as to be representable in # # or fewer digits. For Phipps's plan to work, each ship would have to contain a computer capable of storing integers of any length, and capable of carrying out complex navigational calculations with them in some fixed, finite period of time. That would be hard to believe, even in an s-f story. Sincerely yours, Peter van Inwagen Associate Professor Syracuse University Dear Mr. Baen, Ever since I started reading science fiction back in the summer of # I have been collecting all the sf books and magazines I could get my hands on. I enjoyed Galaxy and 'immensely under Pohl, reading every story in every issue. However, after Fred Pohl stepped down I eventually found myself merely collecting the issues -- only rarely was there anything worth reading. Now that you have taken over. I've been finding the magazines, once again, to be highly readable. The improvements so far have been great. The magazines, with their new departments, have become more relevant to what I feel sf is all about. I am glad that you are publishing Winner of the John W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award for the Bert Siene flonfktiofl Book of # "Lucid, exciting, inspiring, and always igniting the sense of wonder." Theodore Sturgeon, Galaxy. "A daring view of the Universe by the wittiest, most rational, and most clear-thinking astronomer alive ."Isaac Asimov. Illustrated. A national good sf of the Sense-ofWonder variety (more of Niven!). While I believe in literary standards that are as high as possible (shades of Sturgeon!), I see no reason why this should conflict with the sense of wonder (look at Clarke). Exotic planets, infinite Cosmos, magnificent spaceships, mysterious aliens, fantastic gadgets -- hell, I love that stuff! For me, this is what sf is ultimately all about. I hope you will keep on publishing this sort of sf. You have my best wishes (and moral support, for what it's worth) during your editorship of Galaxy and If. Yours truly, Jack Briggs # Brewer Drive Nashville, Tn. #I Dear Jim, Since you've been editing IfGalaxy we readers have been getting some real treats like the June All-Star issue and the new columns (I enjoy The Alien Viewpoint tremendously). It seems Lester's "Reading Room," Ted's "Galaxy Bookshelf' and Jerry Pournelle's "Step Farther Out" are getting better each issue but I miss Sf Calendar). I was going to suggest that you have a column written by writers about SciFi (like you had Fred Pohl write in June IF) but I can see you already thought of that (the Forum column). I was also going to suggest a bio column but you thought of that, too (Interface). That is why I'm subscribing to IF; you thought of everything a reader could dream of! The Best of Luck, Michael Donnelly Hellertown, Pa. Thank you! Dear Mr. Baen, Let me extend my congratulations on becoming editor of Galaxy and magazines and turning them from being bland and lifeless fare into a real treat I eagerly look forward to every month. Why I'd even extend my subscription if I could be sure of regular delivery. You have done this primarily by instituting an editorial presence through a letters column and editorial expression and by special features which liven up interest beyond strictly the fiction published. I'm looking at the August # issue of 'and am impressed with a number of things like the new science editors article -- not  that I'm especially fascinated by the more detailed discussions of advances made in the physical sciences but I do like to know when anything important like impending fusion power comes about. The real treat though is Dick Geis' column about typical Geisian things which perk up my interest a great deal usually no matter what opinion he expounds. Without being blaringly egotistical in spouting off about his likes and dislikes he manages to present clear headed educated viewpoints on all manner of topics. While I certainly don't agree with him all the time I respect his point of view. Other columns such as Del Rey's Reading Room and the presentation of a single piece of art sans blurb are both appreciated. IF Keep up the good work! You'll likely be hearing more from me. Yours sincerely, Gary Kimber # High view Ave. Scar., Ont. Canada Dear Mr. Baen: I have noted with pleasure the great improvement in If since you became its editor. In so noting I have put my money where my mouth is and subscribed. There are only two minor suggestions that come to mind: (#) Place the subscription coupon back-to-back with your "Galaxy If S-F Mart" page. This would allow one to cut it out without doing any substantial damage to the magazine, for those of us who care about such things and not force us to resort to a Xerox machine. (#) Have a different illustration of "the alien" by Tim Kirk for each article of "The Alien Viewpoint." He is undoubtedly the descendant of the cosmographer who appears on the dust jacket of "An Atlas of Fantasy." He strikes a cord which brings much pleasure. Looking forward to an entertaining two years of If, I remain Yours sincerely, Jean Alexander Sharland #D Hanover Parkway Greenbelt, Maryland Dear Mr. Baen, I would like to echo the sentiments of many speculative-fiction fans in congratulating you on the outstanding job you have done with Galaxy and If in the few short months you have edited these publications. For the past few years I have avidly read all of the sciencefiction magazines that I could find. It didn't take me long to grow tired of Galaxy and If Pardon my frankness. However, since you have taken over, so to speak, they have become what I think are the two best magazines in science fiction. The new features are magnificent, especially Jerry Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" column. All in all, two great magazines. I would also like to comment on Jeff Hudson's letter in the September Galaxy. I read his story in the August If with much delight, and feel that I must congratulate him on leaving the ranks of the "heretofore unpublished nobodies." That is a clan which I am also attempting to depart. To get to the point, the thing that I want to comment on is the statement Mr. Hudson made concerning the writers he wanted to hear more of. He named Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys, Chip Delaney, Ursula LeGuin, James Tiptree, Jr., Philip Jose Farmer and the infamous Harlan Ellison. By some wild coincidence, all of the above are among my favorite writers, and the last two are my very favorites. Here's to you, Mr. Hudson, you're a man after my own heart! And here's to you, Mr. Baen, for the fantastic job you're doing with your two magazines. Keep up the good work. 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Members accepted in U S A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. WORLDS OF September-November # Volume #, Number I Issue Number # by Clifford R. Hong by Ray Brown For thousands of years, the world's religions have said that life is just a step to a better existence. If technology can be used to prove this, will people want to take a short cut? by Orson Scott Card by A.E. van Vogt Predicted earthquakes could split the Golden State in two -- lengthwise. Herein is a quake (following a proposal) that splits it across the middle...and in every other direction. By a master from the Golden Age of SF, author of such classics as Sian and The World of Null-A. by Kerry Schaefer What if -- there are living, caring, thinking beings In a planet's upper atmosphere? Kerry Schaefer's answer is an unusual combination of ecology-building and empathy. This lyrical story is an IF First! by Larry Niven by Ralph Sevush by Hilbert Schenck Nuclear holocaust is a reality no one wants to face; some less than others. From a modern master of satire, the casting and promotion of the End... Schenck is a frequent HugoNebula finalist. by Stefan Jones by Robert Thurston extreme -- and then some! Robert Thurston lives in New York City; his most recent novel is Q Colony, a I # Ace release. by Jessica Amanda Salmonson Some of us put more of ourselves into our work than others. Salmonson, a student of oriental culture and the martial arts combines wit and depth in this gem of a short story. by Roger Zelazny When the moon is full and business is brisk, it is once more the time of the eternal battle. By the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Lord of Light and the Amber series. Cover by Bob Eggleton Interior art by Vincent DiFate, Michael Gilbert, Tim Kirk, Paul Lehr, Mike Symes Worlds of IF is published quarterly (in September, December, March, and June) by for # issues (I year) or # for # issues (# years) in the U.S. and territories or Canada; # for surface mail of # issues in ail other countries (more for air mail; inquire for specifics). All subscriptions payable in advance in U.S. funds only. Second class postage paid at Hicksville, NY. of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope; the publisher does not assume responsibility for submissions in any event. Postmaster; send address changes to Worlds of IF, P.O. Box #, Hicksville NY I I # Much has changed since the first incarnation of Worlds of IF back in the early #s. Science fiction is no longer relegated to pulpdom by the academics, considered fit only for a small (though devoted) audience. Today, SF books regularly make the best-seller lists, the films are blockbusters that capture lege courses are taught, SF conventions attract thousands of fans, doctoral theses are written and in depth studies are made of the field... The field is older, much more established -- and vastly popular. But the spirit of SF remains the same. Science fiction is a literature of ideas, constantly exploring new possibilities. Always asking, what would happen if? What if it could be proven that there is life after death? What if contact is made with intelligent aliens with whom we have nothing in common but games? What if learning by memory transfer becomes possible? What IF...? In this vein, the new IF will bring you stories that explore a widely diverse range of speculations, dreams, and ideas with the finest in illustrated science fiction and fantasy. Fiction will be by both popular, established pros and newer, upcoming stars. Among the regular features is the IF first -- in each issue we will bring you at least one story by a previously unpublished writer. Prior IF Firsts have included Larry Niven, Gardner R. Dozois, and Alexi Panshin. This issue's IF First is by Kerry Schaefer, a resident of Massachussets. Recently turned forty, Schaefer has held various jobs in her life -- reservations agent for a steamship company, social worker, four years as a crewmember on a schooner -- and currently lives and works at a small motel on Cape Cod. She began writing six years ago after reading Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Sime Gen books. After several years and half a dozen fan stories, she began work set in her own backgrounds, resulting in a novel and two short pieces. About her stories, she says: " 'Cloudscape' began in one of the Jesse Stuart Writing Workshops, when Marion Zinumer Bradley said, "Now, write the opening paragraph of a new story." Fifteen minutes later, everyone else had a beginning and I had drawn a complete blank. Of course, she called on me to read mine. Determined not to endure such embarrassment the following day, I combined the beautiful Midwest thunderclouds through which my plane had flown to get to the workshop with a speculation from one of Carl Sagan's books on possible lifeforms on a gas giant, and suddenly an aging cloud-creature drifted through my mind and I knew I had my story. "I have begun work on another novel, dealing with aliens rather than humans, as seems to be characteristic of all my writing thus far. Given my penchant for telling a story from an alien point of view, sometimes I find it a wee bit difficult to remember that I really am a human being. Whenever that happens, I run to the nearest mirror for confirmation and breathe a sigh of relief. (Or is it disappointment?)" Upcoming issues will feature new IF Firsts, along with material by such notables as Gene Wolfe, Justin Leiber, Raymond Z. Gallun, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Alan Dean Foster, and many more. Please feel free to write and let us know what it is that you like about the magazine and what you don't, which stories and illustrations are your favorites, and what you'd like to see in the future. Read and erjoy! EditorPublisher: Clifford R. Hong Assistant Publisher: Charles A. Miller Art Editor: Michael Gilbert Contributing Editors: Orson Scott Card, Stefan Jones, Ralph Sevush Editorial Assistants: B.J. Harris, Ronald D. Peloquin, David Weingart, Kathleen D. Woodbury Subscription Manager: Rudy Alan Bennett Staff: Michael A. Botwin, Joseph Caponi, Egan Gerrity, Kevin L. Sterner art: Michael Gilbert Policy was to turn swords into ploughshares, so by and by they dance units into happy faces that chased you with proto-cliches selling the favorite public service program. "Good evening, buddy," the button-eyed moron intoned. "You've only got one self. Don't waste it. Best wishes from your National Council on Population Stabilization." Conway swatted at the thing and it swerved in the air, flylike. "Good evening, buddy," it started again. "Give life a chance. After all, it could start getting better any minute now. Best wishes Conway intersected the street where his job waited for him. He cornered abruptly and at high speed, but the thing swooped high in the air over him and again hovered right in front of his face. "Be a friend," it said. "Report the name of your distressed friend to # IF the Suicide Prevention Squad of your local police force. Best wishes from..." "You stupid pest," Conway He grabbed at it low. To his surprise, the thing ducked when it should have jumped and he wound up holding it in his hands, where it buzzed and tugged on him weakly. With a grunt of satisfaction, he pulled it above his head. "Buddy?" the thing said, "I have been endowed with an elementary survival drive. The idea of being smashed into the sidewalk fills me with something analogous to dread." Conway was interested in spite of himself. He relaxed his shoulders a little and asked. "Why should I care?" "That's a hard one to answer, buddy," it said. "I can't plead for my life by crying 'murder' because I'm not really alive anyway. Not that I'd want to be -- it would be such a poor life. After all. I'm seized, like an epileptic, with slogan after slogan. You know, I've always wondered whether I had free will or not, but I still don't know because I've never had the time to investigate. I never will find out now, I guess." "Sounds like I'd be doing you a favor if I smashed you," Conway said. "Please don't," it said. "Whatever it was they gave me instead of life is all I've got; and if you spare it I'll try to do something nice for you sometime." Conway didn't know if the thing was giving off sympathy-inducing pheromones or not, but he now felt reluctant to smash it. It sounded so pathetic. "You can start doing something nice for me right now," Conway said. "Just keep the hell away from me." He tossed the happy face into the air. "Thanks," it said. "And remember: One life's all you get, so don't quit on us yet. Best wishes Conway screamed and grabbed at it. His luck didn't hold, but amazingly, the happy face kept its part of the bargain and sped away over the roof of the police station. Conway sighed, and walked inside and down the dirty stairs to the monitor room in the basement. Roth, one of the monitors, was there waiting for his shift to start. He always got there early so he could try to figure out, according to some mystical system of his own, which booth would get the fewest calls that night. # IF "What are you pissed at?" Roth asked Conway as he hung lip his coat and signed in. "You look like they just upped your birth quota." Conway told the story of his recent annoyance and Roth smiled. His chest swelled with importance and superior knowledge. "They're programmed to say that when they're caught," he said. "You got suckered." Pearson, Conway's partner for the week, entered scowling. This time, though, Roth made no comment. When Pearson scowled it was no big deal; he took his Job very seriously. "What's the count for the day, Roth?" Pearson asked. "Average," Roth said. "# so far. But with a rising trend." "The antisocial bastards. How many did we stop?" "Twenty-one. And a good thing that's all. Life Center # doesn't open until tomorrow." Pearson shrugged angrily. "Stack'em like bricks," he growled. "They're criminals. They knew the consequences of their act." The minute hand on the overhead clock twitched upright and the noon-to-eight shift rose in a body as the rest of Conway's shift slouched in. Roth edged quickly into booth ##. "It got lots of calls during the first shift," he explained, "And it's Wednesday." Nobody believed in Roth's crazy system, Conway included. But Conway had noticed that for some reason Roth actually got the fewest calls, more often than not. Conway's job was getting him down. He asked Roth if he and Pearson could work with him that night. "Sure," Roth said, punching their codes in. "Wait a minute," Pearson said. "Didn't you come here to work, Conway? I did." "Roth's got Just as much chance of a buzz as any other monitor," Conway said, his throat tight. "I came here to save lives," Pearson said. Conway noticed for the first time, as Pearson advanced on him with clenched fists, that his partner outweighed him by about fifty pounds and was unusually ugly. Roth's screen came alive at that moment -- as did every screen in the basement. "You got some work right now," Roth said. "We got a creative. One suicide and it looks like three buddies giving him the send-off. If I can figure out where it is... it's not coming through the regular network, it's being picked up by one of the old fixed security cameras... Jesus... It's right outside here!" Already people were abandoning the booths and running upstairs. Pearson dropped his fists and joined them immediately. Roth and Conway followed, and caught up with him on the station's stoop. Right across the street was an outsize cannon pointed at the station. Sitting on the end of the muzzle was a man in a superman suit draining a glass of red wine and below him were three firiends doing likewise. Above the cannon was stretched a banner; "Hey!" Pearson bellowed. "You can't do that!" A crowd was gathering around the creative, some cheering The Great Splatto, some jeering the cops. One of Splatto's friends offered him a crash helmet and, in the best tradition of daredeviltry, Splatto waved it away and crawled backwards down the bore. Pearson and a number of other cops yelled and charged across the street waving needle guns, but it was too late. One of the three touched the cannon off, everybody ducked, and The Great Splatto zoomed out and up until his body was abruptly stopped by the police station's limestone wall and his soul sailed on to Heaven. They don't like us, Conway thought, sickly. They really don't like us. "A flower!" said Roth, crawling back to his feet and looking at what they'd have to clean up. The crowd broke up quickly, abandoning cannon and banner, and Pearson rejoined them. "Disgusting," he said, gesturing at the wall. "I don't know," Roth said. "It's rather colorful, actually." Pearson didn't turn on Roth, Conway noticed. Probably because Roth was the Chiefs nephew. So there was nothing more to say. Roth returned to the basement and Conway and Pearson hurried to the back of the station and Love of Life signed out their flyer, thereby avoiding the clean-up detail. They patrolled for an hour without getting any calls from Roth beside a chatty one informing them that the front wall had lost about twenty square feet of plaster. It was soothingly quiet. Pearson had scarcely spoken to Conway since they'd paired up for the week, and that was just fine with Conway. But an hour was a phenomenally long time to go without a call, even for Roth, and Conway noticed Pearson opening and closing his mouth, fidgeting with his adam's apple. Finally, Pearson spoke. "What the hell," he said, "are you doing type." "The extra pay, of course," Conway said. "You got a better reason?" "I love life," Pearson said. It was hard for Conway to choke back his laughter. He gave himself a small coughing fit. Pearson looked at him askance and said, "I mean it. And it's not that I'm pretending I'm a saint, either. I have good, selfish reasons for standing against the forces of dissolution and death. I always had great hopes for my life -- I could have gone places, you know? I'm a natural leader of men. I could have wound up being... well, never mind about that. I can still go places, and if will What happened four months ago doesn't have to make any difference." # IF "If the whole society doesn't collapse first, that is," Conway said. "Just shut the fuck up if you can't say anything constructive," Pearson grumbled. Conway took Pearson at his word, smiled, and relaxed. With luck, that would be Pearson's last attempt at polite conversation until the end of the week. Pearson had raised an interesting, if familiar, question, though. Why, for that matter, was he a cop at all? He hated to think the main reason was a silly argument with Grandpa Conway six years ago -- but every time he thought the question over, he had a harder time avoiding the conclusion that he'd joined to prove his grandfather wrong. When he'd first brought up the possibility of police work to the old man he'd merely mentioned it casually. But his grandfather had chewed him out good. He thought cops were bullies, one and all. His argument was simple; people gravitate to the positions for which they are best suited, and what better position for a bully than government-approved good? There must be something wrong with Conway to even think of such a thing. If he didn't start out twisted, he'd wind up that way. Well, Grandpa had been wrong. The force had many gentle, conscientious people on it who joined with the idea of protecting the underdog. But there were a surprisingly large number of bullies. Hell-face it, Conway told himself, Pearson's one of them. And Pearson was right about his chances of rising high. That was the real problem with government work -- it was the bullies who found their way to the top. The Chief was a bully, the lieutenant was a bully -- even the Mayor was, in his own way. So even though Grandpa's warning wasn't quite accurate, it turned out that Conway should have listened to it anyway. The warning might turn out to be a prophecy, though, as the bullies hung on and the others passed on... His reverie was interrupted by Roth's voice rattling at them through the radio. "I finally got one for you," he said. "Good Neighbor Report." "It took you long enough," Pearson said. "Hey! I'm not the only one! It's been quiet all over the monitor room -- downright spooky. Something funny's going on..." "Spare me the theories," Pearson said. "What's the report?" "A good, neighborly apartment manager thinks some woman in his complex has a heaven set. He's afraid she'll croak herself and leave him with the disposal problem." Roth gave the address and Conway turned the flyer around and punched it in. While looking in the rear-view mirror he noticed that they'd picked up a few mobile cameras and happy faces. They seemed to like to follow flyers. It was almost as if -- ridiculous as it sounded -- they couldn't quite shake their military habits. On the other hand, they were shirking their duty -- ignoring the was an exercise of free will. And more and more happy faces seemed to be doing it every day. Conway wondered if the one he'd encountered on the way to work was among them. He hoped not. "Hell," Pearson said. "Even if she doesn't try to kill herself -- heaven sets are the cause of all this damn trouble and it's against the law to own one. Should have been reported before now." "Let's not go busting the apartment manager, too!" Conway protested. "Leave the little stuff alone." "Little!" roared Pearson. "If you ask me, having one of those damned things around ought to pull the death penalty!" Pearson realized suddenly what he'd said and blushed. Conway laughed -- inwardly -- all the way to the scene of the crime. It was a first floor flat. The manager said the woman, though young, was a sickly type who had trouble with stairs. The door was unlocked. They knocked, there was no answer, they walked in. It was dark in there, but Conway made out a pale oval suspended in the shadows, lit by the feeble glow of the heaven set. He thought it might be a face and he stepped towards it, not thinking that would put him in the set's field. Conway had to sit on the floor. Love of Life #I fast, to settle himself. He'd only experienced a heaven set once before -- not enough to train himself to avoid the nausea that came when he tried to move while watching two worlds at once. He realized that the second scene was all in his mind -- that no physiological laws were really being broken -- but that didn't help. Only being still helped. He still saw, as dimly as ever, the ill-lit room, but he also saw sunlight sparkling in the dew on a grassy hill, and a young man sitting on a tree stump a little way up the hill, talking. "... isn't really that much different, Miss Hensley. Like I said, the main difference is that you completely control your own body. You could get sick if you wanted to, but who'd..." Conway looked the young man over carefully. He thought he recognized him -- the small, sharp nose, the squint, the collapsed chin all reminded him of someone he'd met... oh, maybe two years ago... back in the relatively relaxed days when he was on Homicide, long before there was The voice was familiar, too, but changed since Conway knew the guy. The tenseness had gone out of it -- only to be expected from a man who'd gone to Heaven, or wherever it was. Might as well call it Heaven. Indeed, what else could you call it? "... claimed he picked up a few tricks here and there in the capacity of His Majesty King George the Third's personal -- and all that implies -- lickspittle..." He had it. The man was Gerald Parker, the rapist and murderer who'd caused such a panic in the city two years ago. Conway had been instrumental in his arrest and ultimate frying. "Gerry?" Conway croaked. "Excuse me. Miss Hensley," Gerry said, and turned to Conway. "Hi there! I had a feeling you'd show up at this set at about this time, so I volunteered to talk to Miss Hensley. I always meant to thank you for catching me and getting me electrocuted." "It was nothing..." "Nothing! Man, this place is wonderful! Everybody loves it here -- every moment's like the moment when a part catches fire and ,... hey, you look stunned." "I'm Just surprised to see you there," Conway said. "Why? It's been four months since Kirchner invented the heaven set. Surely you must have heard by now that everybody comes here when they die -- no matter what." "I heard it and I thought I believed it. But I guess seeing is really believing. So how are you doing, Gerry?" "Great -- same as everybody. Getting laid a lot -- but you know, I had these sexual hang ups. I lost them when I got here, and sex became truly important to me." "I don't think I get that... wait a minute, maybe I do understand it after all!" "Yeah. And the rejuvenation IF keeps you interested in the physical pleasures, too. My body was pretty rotten before I got here. Having a body in tip-top condition is very important to human happiness. While your body's wearing out on Earth you tend to fool yourself on that subject... you should see the old folks caper!" Conway became aware of all the tiny pains he usually ignored. He could feel them growing, slowly, inexorably. "What about God?" Pearson's voice asked abruptly. Conway's head Jerked toward the sound and he discerned Pearson's form, also sitting on the floor. He'd completely forgotten about him, and why they were there. "Who's that?" Gerry asked. "My partner." "No, I meant... never mind, it was a bad joke. God is still an open question. I'm afraid. If there's a Somebody responsible for things being this way, then He hasn't chosen to reveal Himself yet." "Who's in charge, then?" Pearson said. "Nobody." "I'll put it another way. Who sees that things get done?" "Nobody," Gerry repeated, shrugging. "I lost my need to push people around when I got here -- everybody does. There's not much strife. People basically do what they want. So there's no reason for anybody to be in charge." "The same doubletalk," Pearson said darkly. "It's no doubletalk..." Conway decided to change the subject. "What else are you doing with your time?" he asked. Gerry grinned. "Studying English history. Right now I'm learning Anglo-Saxon from this old guy named Aelfric. History always interested me on Earth, but you know I didn't have much of a brain. Your mind gets a lot sharper after you die, though. I mean -- I'm no Einstein now, but Aelfric and some of the other long-timers tell me that when I really need to get smarter again, it'll happen. When are you coming to join us, Conway?" "Uh... not right away. In fact. I'm supposed to be stopping that kind of thing. I don't know how much news you get from Earth, but Gerry laughed and dismissed the "You guys can't do anything," he said. "Don't you know that? Once Earth got a really effective way to communicate with us, the rules aU changed. The End Is Nigh, Conway -- can't you telV In a few more months..." The second vision disappeared and Conway was once again fully in the dark apartment -- really dark, now. He could just barely make out the body of Pearson leaning over the heaven set. He'd switched it off. Conway pushed himself from the floor and fumbled around the wall until he hit a working light switch. Then he saw that Pearson was still bent over the set, staring at it, panting, and trembling violently. "Pearson?" Conway called Love of Life gently. Pearson grunted, turned to stare with frightened eyes at Conway. Then he raised a boot high and smashed the set. "A goddam rapistr Pearson said. "I don't believe it. The whole thing's a fraud, and when we prove it..." "You know it's not a fraud," Conway said." Don't go off the deep end on me, Pearson." "Gerry?" a weak female voice called from where Conway had thought he'd seen a face. It was a face floating in a sea of blankets on the couch by the far wall. An ugly face, twisted with pain, eaten away, spitting blood. When they unwrapped her they saw that the rest of the body looked even worse. "Cancer," Conway guessed. She had an old Mauser .# in her right hand. Pearson pried it loose, pocketed it, and said. "Let's take her in." "You've got to be kidding!" Conway said. "She'll be dead in a couple days anyway!" "I've had about all the shit I can take off of you, Conway. The law's the law and we take her in." The law also required that they cuff her hand to foot, so she couldn't make the attempt while they flew her to the Life Center. Pearson didn't bother. Conway thought about congratulating him on that small display of humanity, but decided he'd better not. Maybe Pearson just forgot. Life Center # was another limestone building -- the mayor's brother owned a quarry in Indiana -- in the shape of a cereal box -- the Chiefs cousin was a bad architect -- with barred windows underlined by empty planters. It looked more or less like a prison hospital and that was more or less what it was. Force-feeding for those who could take it, and the Drip for the rest. Straight jackets. Leg chains. Rough hemp rope when they ran out of those. There were very few successful suicides in the Life Centers. The roof, Conway thought as they hovered preparing to land, looked strangely empty. Life Centers had been the government's main interest since the war with Tarawa ended with the islanders escaping to Heaven en masse and the military was dismantled; the lot was usually jammed. He turned to check Miss Hensley in the back. She thrashed around, delirious, still calling for Gerry occasionally. As he reached for a pulse, the flyer's radio came alive. "Don't land!" a voice -- not Roth's -- said. "We've got a bomb threat!" Pearson grabbed the mike. "Is this the Life Center?" he asked. "Right. Now get off this channel. We're trying to contact the police." "We are the police," Pearson said, landing the flyer. "And we've got a customer for you." "Thank God!" the voice said. "Why can't we raise the station?" "What do you mean, you can't raise the station?" "We can't raise the station!" IF Pearson whitened. "Hang on," he said. "I'll try to raise them myself." He fiddled with the radio, yelling, "Roth! Roth!" There was no answer. Pearson called the Life Center. "Are you still there?" "Yes. Did you get them?" "No. What's going on?" "I was hoping you could tell me. I suspect they may have bombed the station before hitting the Life Centers. Our informant claims they're going to send human bombs into all thirty-five tonight." "They've never tried anything like that before." "Haven't you noticed that in the past four months most people have started hating our guts? This is the night they make the big attempt to free all the suicides. Don't teU me you haven't been expecting it." "What can they do? You've still got your picket around the building, haven't you?" "A weak one. Some of the guards have deserted. One sht his throat at roll call, in front of everybody. And I don't know what they can do, unless -- hold on. I'm getting a report from the guards now... Jesus! Listen, can you help us?" "Name it." "Take off again. I think you can help us most by sniping for us from the flyer. You'll understand when you get in the air and can see what's going on." Pearson shrugged and took the flyer back up. Conway pressed his face to the window and gasped. At every street corner around the hospital there were crowds carrying torches. In the center of every crowd there was a large canConway pushed his needle gun through the little port designed for it and carefully aimed at those nearest the Great Blammo's cannon, but the flyer swooped unpredictably as Pearson screamed with rage and shook the stick. Conway thought about past "creative" fads as he aimed again. Crucifixions had been an early favorite of the more masochistic types. There had even been another circus motif once -- diving from a great height into a thimbleful! of water. But there had never been a fad as quick to catch on as this. Past the Great Blammo he could see, far down the street, that Life Centers # and # were also surrounded by hazy clumps of torchlight. No doubt about it, this was going to be the night. What was really discouraging was that the crowds were making a carnival -- a joke -- out of the whole thing. He squeezed off a shot and one of the men sitting on the cannon slumped. At the same time, Splotto's cannon fired and Splotto, whooping, arms and legs flailing-, sailed into Life Center #'s front wall. There was an explosion, then a smoky hole. "Looks like these missiles are armed," Conway said. "What the hell are the guards doing?" Pearson growled. Love of Life "There are a lot more people then needles," Conway said. "What can they do?" There were more explosions from the back side. The building shook. Conway breathed out, aimed at the Great Blammo again, then jerked back straight in his seat as he noticed where the cannon was pointed. It was too late to do anything about it. There was an enormous thick whack and the windows on Conway's side were completely smeared. Conway and Pearson ducked and covered their faces, the bomb went off, the windows shattered, and the flyer spun wildly. Pearson swore and shook the controls, and gradually the spinning stopped. But they were losing altitude. "Can you land us?" Conway said. "Yeah. And we should land anyway. Those guards need some sort of leadership. I'm a natural leader of men." All things considered, Pearson did a good job landing. He put the flyer down with a wrenching thump, but he put it right where he wanted it -- directly in front of the ragged line of guards. Then he jumped out. "Why aren't you men firing?" he yelled. Conway turned to check their passenger again and found that the trip had been too rough for her. She'd been released. He sighed with relief and hopped out of the flyer to join Pearson. Pearson had rounded up five of the guards, impressed them with # IF herding them into position to shoot at the men behind the cannon. Another cannon went off, a body sailed over their heads, and they all looked up and turned to follow it into the Life Center wall. The explosion was bigger than usual and one side of the building seemed to sag. The crowds of cannoneers cheered. To his surprise, Conway found himself cheering inwardly, too. The guard's were interrupted again -- this time by a large, airborne TV screen with the mayor's face on it, sailing over no man's land. "Return to your homes!" the major boomed. "The city is now under martial law and..." The rioters roared with laughter, "... will not be prosecuted if you're home by ten o'clock. I repeat, a general amnesty for those keeping the curfew, but severe penalties for those..." "Fire!" Pearson yelled. The guards fired. A few men dropped. Others took their place. Another body tumbled over Conway's head, but he no longer found the sight discouraging. In fact, he was exhilarated. Why bother sticking around in a world with Pearsons in it? So this is how they feel, he thought. I wonder why it took me so long. One of the guards apparently had the same revelation, for he pushed himself up from the prone position and started to walk away. Pearson grabbed him, spun him around, pulled Miss Hensley's .# from his pocket and waved it in the guard's face. "Go ahead," the guard said, smilling. "Do me a favor." Conway stepped in front of Pearson. "Go on home, guys," he said. "This is pointless." "What are you talking about!" Pearson yelled. "We've got a job to do!" The guards were all walking away now. Pearson watched them for a minute, then turned back to Conway and smashed his fist into Conway's face. As Conway lay on the ground, listening to his head pound and feeling the blood from his cut forehead trickle into his eye, he looked with his other eye at Pearson standing over him, panting and quaking as he had over the heaven set he'd smashed. The sight made Conway feel strangely gleeful. Another extra-loud explosion came from the back of the Life Center and Conway jerked his head around in time to see the whole building collapse. The rioters cheered again and started running towards the rubble to make sure their job was finished. "Give it up, Pearson," he said. "Can't you see it's all over?" "What?" Pearson asked, dully. The rioters were shoving past them now, ignoring them. Pearson ignored the rioters, too. His attention was focused wholly on Conway. "You, the mayor, the Chief, all you folks are through," Conway said. "Used to be, when you pushed people around, the safest, easiest way of people to cope with it was to pretend it was for their own good. Now there's an easier way out. Can't you see how absurd, how useless these suicide laws are? You can't stop ur "We'll stop it," said Pearson, "if we have to put straight jackets on every one of you." Pearson was actually grimacing and grinding his teeth! Amazing! "Why don't you just relax, Pearson, and join the rest of us? We're all going to a better place, you dummy!" "What better place? A leaderless anarchy! You're a life-hater, Conway, just as sick as those clowns with their cannon." He pointed the .# at Conway. Conway laughed, then said, "Go ahead. Do me a favor." "Oh, no," Pearson said, his eyes growing frighteningly wide and earnest. "You don't understand. You're obviously a potential suicide. You need to be restrained and placed in the Life Center. But I've got business to attend to" -- he waved his gunless hand towards the crowd where the Life Center used to be -- "and I can't bother with keeping you under guard. But a carefully placed bullet in each limb..." Conway tried to reassure himself by convincing himself that he'd bleed to death. But he wasn't sure. He crawled backwards, trying to make it to his feet as Pearson, now wild-eyed and totally bananas, aimed the .# low. Love of Life "Good evening, buddies," a voice tally free of pain, climbing the intoned. "Give the gift of life to grassy hill he'd seen earlier. Gerry your distressed friend. Call your and Roth and a beautiful young local..." woman he suspected was named The happy face came in lower, Hensley were walking down to lifted, and knocked Pearson's gun meet him. hand upwards as he fired. For a "Hi, Gerry," he said. "Sorry I took split second, Conway felt his face so long." being smashed by a blow of a strength ten Pearsons couldn't IF The Light Fantastic Book Reviews by Orson Scott Card I can't possibly guess what books you're going to like. If I tell you that LaVerne and the Wood Elves is the best epic fantasy since Tolkien, you'll no doubt fall asleep on page #. And you'll really get annoyed that I never mention any of the works of Cecil DeBeuf, your very favorite writer. But that's OK. Storytellers should all have a chance to fmd their proper audience, and readers will sort themselves out very neatly according to which stories they believe in and care about. We're all visitors in a great marketplace of fiction. Some of us come in from the farm, others from the city; some are connoisseurs, some just like a good yarn. We wander through the bazaar, hearing bits of story from this talespinner or that yarnswapper. When we hear one we like, we settle down and listen. When the storyteller is finished, we usually toss him a few coins and move, looking for more. Now and then, however, we find one whose tales are so true, so powerful, so perfect, that it's almost a religious experience. We want to listen to his stories forever, to live the rest of our lives in the worlds he creates. We're not Just entertained, we're converted. And like most religious converts, we want to spread the word. We drag all our friends to the bazaar to hear our talespinner. Some of them get just as excited as we are, and join us; others think we're crazy and move on. Admit it -- you've done that. You've read a book and been so excited you shoved copies into your friends' hands and commanded them to read. It happened in the sixties. That's how I first discovered Dune. And Bradbury. And Lewis' Narnia books. So many people were touting Lord of the Rings that I refused to read it for three years, I was so sick of hearing about it. But I finally did. And I was glad my friends persisted. That's what I plan to do with this column. I'm going to grab you and shake you until you promise to read the books I like best. I'll point out others that I also erjoyed a lot. Now, you may not like the same stories I Like. You may not like as many stories as I like. I do have a tendency to read the way I watch a movie or a play -- with my jaw agape, drinking it all in. That doesn't mean I'm not disThe Light Fantastic ceming. It just means that I'm somelapses that you can't forgive. For instance, if you're one of those people who reads science fiction with your pocket calculator turned on so you can check the math, you're going to hate some things I like a lot, because ru forgive a little silly science when the story's good enough. And if you think good literature died with Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft, you won't agree with my opinions very often. One thing I won't do, though, is tell you what not to read. That's where I think a lot of critics go astray. If I like a book, I can describe it to you and tell you why I think it's good. But if I really hate a book, if I think a book is completely worthless, then there isn't a single intelligent thing I can say about it. Because no matter how cleverly I describe its flaws to you, all I'm really saying is, "I don't get it." Or, in more formal terms: "I'm not a fit member of the audience for this tale." So you won't see any killer reviews here. (Those of you with a thirst for auctorial blood will have to go elsewhere for an elixir fix.) I will only talk about books I liked. Science Fiction Books: Grand Opera in Space Sebastian Nightingale Cain is a bounty hunter among the worlds of the Inner Frontier. The Democracy pays him to hunt down and bring back wanted criminals who have taken refuge on planets where the only law is the local crime lord. In Mike Resnick's wonderful novel on the mostwanted criminal of all, the almost legendary Santiago. In following Santiago's trail, Cain picks up a few unwanted allies and enemies: Virtue MacKenzie (the "Virgin Queen"), a lady journalist who wants to be there to record the moment when Santiago gets killed -- or interview him over Cain's cooling corpse. the wrong man, vengeful Manmountain Bates; now he hangs on to Cain as his only hope of survival. The Jolly Swagman, a high-class, clean-hands crook who wants to be there to get Santiago's art treasures when somebody kills him. again bounty hunter who uses the reward money from the men he snuffs to finance his ministry. Angel, the greatest bounty hunter of all, the one to bet on if you think anybody can get Santiago. They all weave in and out of a plot full of betrayals and doublecrosses, with dozens of other unforgettable characters, like Dmitri Sokol, Poor Yorick, Socrates, One-Time Charlie, Simple Simon, Altair of Altair, Moonripple, Silent Annie, Geronimo Gentry, Giles Sans Pitie, the alien named Sitting Bull, and Schussler the cyborg spaceship. One character we never actually meet is Black Orpheus, but the epic poem he's writing about mythic frontier characters is the lens through which we see all these characters. Even as Sebastian Cain resists the nickname ("Songbird") that Orpheus has given him, we see that he deserves his legend. Now, as soon as they know that ters on the frontier, some critics are going to despise the book as a "western dressed up to be sci-fi." Well, that's their loss for being too shallow to see what's really going on. Western? Sure, IF Resnick is using all the devices of classic westerns. He's also using motifs from Depression-era detective fiction. And the techniques of space opera. And grand opera, too. In fact, if there's ever been a literary form that had vigor, life, excitement, truth, and beauty, you'll hear echoes of it in Resnick was gutsy enough to set out to create myth, and as far as I'm concerned, he succeeds on a grand scale. By the end of this book, if you aren't in love with all the characters you have no heart. If you aren't moved by the digging of the third grave in the dell by the pond, then your license to read ought to be suspended for at least a month. By page # I knew I was reading one of the best sf novels of the year. The only thing that worried me was Santiago himself. Resnick was setting him up to be so mythic, so powerful, that when we finally met him he was bound to be a disappointment. (Of course. Resnick could have copped out and never let us meet him. But if he'd done that, I wouldn't be telling you about the book at all). Suffice it to say that I wasn't disappointed. Resnick struck every note exactly right. Even his characters' views on political philosophy, an area ness, were refreshingly mature and balanced. And by the end I felt fulfilled. And joyful. The glow stayed with me for days. Resnick didn't Just do well in writing this book. He also did good. Have I made myself clear? If your bookstore doesn't have copies of read with a slide rule in hand (yeah, they hop from planet to planet the way we fly from New York to LA.), or unless you think Moby Dick is about as much excitement as you can handle in fiction (sorry, this one is never dull so in your hands, in your library, in your memory. # First Novels Brad Strickland is a soft-spoken, mild-mannered professor from Georgia who can light a fire inside you Tom Perion comes out of stasis as his landing csqisule plummets toward a planet. It is not the planet lus expedition was supposed to reach. In short order he discovers that he was awakened a millennium late -- most of the colonists landed so long ago that the starship Galileo is now worshipped as the goddess Kalea. The first batch of colonists had been genetically altered so that seven out of eight births were female. The idea was to boost the population quickly, then make a genetic change to more normal birth patterns. The trouble was that the colonists never recovered a working command module, and so they could never signal the ship to send down the rest of the colonists. That birth pattern has continued: men are a rare commodity. As a result, Perion finds himself in a seafaring world where women are the dominant sex, and men are pampered "lords," prisoners of a system where siring children is all they're really allowed to do. Perion predictably has no interest in meekly accepting his sex role; instead, he is determined to recover a command module that is still in stasis in the supposedly unlivable northern desert; if he reaches it, he can contact the starship, revive the few remaining sleepers there, and restore modem teclmology. Strickland is not creating a feminist role-reversal novel; instead, he has The Light Fantastic carefully extrapolated the probable results of a seven-to-one ratio of women to men, and how society would have to adapt to deal with it. Both the individual characters and the society at large are convincingly drawn, as Perion constantly runs afoul of local customs. It's a familiar motif -- a lone man in a strange yet human environment, gradually learning how to become part of the society without ceasing to be himself. Clavell dealt with the same myth in Shogun, as John Hersey did in his science fiction masterpiece White Lotus. Strickland does as well, as far as he goes. Yet If there is any take more time with it, as Hersey and Clavell did; he needed to write the five or six hundred pages that his subject deserved. Perion should have had to adapt more before he succeeded in bending the world to fit his needs. He should have taken several years before he was able to launch his expedition. I can even tell you the exact place where the book is telescoped to the point of losing credibility; Perion stupidly destroys all the plans of Atina, the ship captain who rescued him; yet within a day, Atina has forgiven him and agreed to follow him on his seemingly insane quest to the north. Not that Strickland couldn't have made this work -- but it takes many pages, scenes, and transformations of character to bring it off. Scenes that Just weren't there. Still, I was already hooked; so I gritted my teeth, swallowed deeply, and went on. I'm glad I did. The novel is so good before that point, and so good after, that I quickly forgot my moment of unbelief and raced on to the end. Strickland will write better books in the future, but don't wait till then -- he's first novel has any right to be. first novel. John Kessel, one of the coauthors (and a Nebula-winning short story writer), makes his debut as a novelist with this book; the other coauthor, James Patrick Kelly, previously (a first-rate novel with a cover so embarrassingly bad that hiding it inside copies of Hustler will make you look like you have better taste). I was a httle leery of this book. Parts of it had already appeared as short stories. Excellent short stories, mind you -- but I could not conceive of a way that "The Big Dream" and "The Empty World" could make sense in the same novel as "Freedom Beach." Kelly and Kessel brought it off perfectly. Shaun, the main character, finds himself in a rehabilitation center on a bench, where life is fim and games -- as long as you don't attempt to write anything. Therapy consists of powerful dreams. Until Shaun's lover dies, and he tries to swim away, and then discovers that sometimes you can wake up from reality more easily than you can wake up from a dream. Unlike most writers who try to write dreams, Kelly and Kessel managed to make all the dream sequences clear and intrinsically interesting. One dream in particular, which inexplicably never found a publisher as the separate story "Faustfeathers," is the funniest Marx Brothers comedy never filmed. (You haven't lived till you've seen John Kessel, Greg Frost, and Marx Van Name do an interpretive reading, with wigs.) The unconnected stories connect; the inexplicable is explained; and by the end, Kessel and Kelly have made all the strange melodies come together IF in a single grand harmonious chord. The best science fiction, I believe, is a blend of exuberant myth, believable characters and setting, and clear, compelling writing. All three of these novels admirably join these traits -- but the flavor is different in each case. centrates more on realism of character votes more attention to literary art. But all are exemplary science fiction. Briefly Noted Science Fiction: give, primarily because of Gibson's vigorous style and his believable, well-extrapolated near-future setting. Supposedly he is representative of a style of writing called "Cyberpunk" because of its melding of artificial intelligence with burned-out, drug-blown punk culture. The trouble is that when you look for other exemplars of the Cyberpunk movement, nobody but Gibson really belongs. It ain't every writer who can be a whole movement aU by himself. So even though I didn't care for I do urge you to check out Gibson's stories aU in one sitting -- you might have to be hospitalized. He writes with such energy that you can strip your gears just trying to keep up. humor. And it is bitingly funny. It is also, by implication at least, cosmic sf It consists of regulations and helpful suggestions for running your universe. Nothing can describe it, so I will quote from the description of A Cloud Detention Centre: "Clouds are disgustingly incontinent and most unpredictable in the shelter they provide from the harmful rays of the sun. Detain in Approved Centres." Or this one: "Uphold the Laws of Decency at all times and keep those deciduous trees well covered. Handy tree screens can be obtained in a wide variety of sympathetic finishes like this attractive leatherette." Or maybe you just have to read the book -- or at least look at the pictures. attempt to deal with material that later became Valis. Now, years after his death, the semi-autobiographical novel is appearing for the first time. Usually if an author failed to publish a finished work while he was still alive, it's because the work wasn't very good. where bitter satire, painful realism, and desperate madness overlap. If you already loved Dick's work, of course you'll read this book. If, like me, you had not read much of his work before, this is a good place to start. In a sentence? This is the kind of book Vonnegut would write if he ever stopped talking to himself. Dick's literary estate. It is the kind of book you'd expect from a friend and disciple who is himself a talented writer -- both worshipful and intelligent, able to explain to outsiders like me what it was that Dick's devotees loved about his work. It makes fascinating reading in its own right, even if, like me, you are generally unfamiliar with Dick's work. It also had a strange effect on me as a writer. At times I felt enormous relief that, by comparison with Dick, I The Light Fantastic lead a happy, normal life. Yet I also recognized that Dick had achieved exactly the effect that every writer yearns for -- not just to be read, but to be believed. He built a community of people who loved his work, passed it hand to hand, reread it many times, and lived, to some degree, by its precepts. Any storyteller who says "All I want to do is entertain" is a liar -- we want to change the world. More specifically, we want you to live in our world and like it. It is that accomplishment that makes a writer's work endure after his death. What made me a bit uneasy was the question that if Dick, in his comparative madness and misery, achieved what we all long for, does that imply that the very stability of my life dooms me to failure as an artist? Don't send me letters trying to answer that. appeared in magazines -- mostly in Analog during #. Now, in book form, they flow together to make a coherent, interesting, entertaining story. Haviland Tuf is a tall, bald, peaceful, arrogant cat-lover -- the kind of person you'd hate to have as a coworker or neighbor, and as unlikely an adventurer as I've seen in science fiction. Yet he not only escapes death and iryury, but also defeats his enemies and wins all the prizes of war without actually doing anything much himself Because Tuf is so austere, you aren't going to get terribly emotionally involved. But you wiU be delighted, I believe. Carter Scholz has to be one of the most determinedly literary writers ever to publish within the sf genre. He to work a little harder, to exercise their own imaginations, can receive stories of startling emotional and intellectual force. Chris Drumm, who provides a great service to the science fiction field by publishing short works by excellent but overlooked writers, has published some of Scholz's best stories in the that only one of these stories was purchased by a mor sf editor. Perhaps it's because many of the best are stories only by implication -- you have to infer the story by reading between the lines of the document Scholz presents. 'The Translator," for instance, is a nastily ironic apologia by the man who made his career translating the works of a second-rate foreign writer into first-rate English; "Players, or Some Problems of Form in New York" is a critical review of New York and, by extension, the entire Earth, as if it were a work of art by a rather mad artist; "How Should We Celebrate the Bicentennial?" is a government agency memo that finally reveals itself to be a hilarious yet bitter cry from the depths of the bureaucracy. There are other fine stories. There are also some unfortunate examples of literary selfindulgence, but you could spend a lot more and come away with a lot less -- and no doubt you will, at least a dozen times this year. By rights I should have hated David so many characters running around that by the end I couldn't remember who half of them were -- a sure sign that a writer has done a lousy job of making the characters real. So why, when I was wearily driving home from Chattanooga last January, did I stop -- for lunch, I thought -- and end up readcover before I drove another inch? It's ostensibly the story of time travelers who set up a transfer station in an American university. But the plot gets IF a lot thicker and takes some wonderful turns before the end. I was three hours late getting home -- but the book was worth it. fiction that I've read. It manages to be intelligent, fascinating, and readable, and it helps put into perspective the whole world of sf during the three generations it has existed as a recognizable genre. For historical interest only, you Campbell was the writer and editor who can be said to have created "hard science fiction" in the #s and #s. Browsing through the book at random, you get a picture of Campbell's relationship with many writers during the #s. Unfortunately, there are few letters fi-om before that decade, and the letters are rarely of earthshaking importance. But since we're still building on the foundation he laid for us, it's nice to get a look at how Campbell went about laying it... Fantasy Books: The New Humanism What Tolkien did was wonderful, because it grew out of his intense involvement with real ancient languages and his profound conversion to Catholicism. Because these strong beliefs provided the root of his mythic Lord of the Rings, he could get away with characters who were usually nothing more than token representatives of a species (a dwarf is a dwarf, an elf is an elf), at best two-dimensional icons (Aragorn, the hero in disguise; Frodo, Samwise, and GoUum, the three faces of the common man). The characters were not "real," but their story was truthful, since it was drawn from Tolkien's deepest loves and beliefs. Unfortunately, Tolkien's imitators had no root except in Tolkien's epic. It never works, but people still try to write great fiction by copying the superficial attributes of a great work of fiction. MUton did not write Paradise Lost by copying Spenser; he wrote it out of his fervent belief in the Puritan version of Christianity, whose central myth was the Fall. Chaucer didn't try to write a new Song of Roland; instead he put English romances into the mouths of common English folk. Shakespeare forged other people's stories into his plays -- but he changed them into utterly believable English characters. Now, it may be that you weren't dissatisfied with the flood of Tolkien imitators that was followed by a flood of Howard imitators that was followed by a flood of tedious Dungeons-andDragons fictioneers laced with firequent feminist role reversals that showed that fantasy women could be written about just as stupidly as fantasy men. Never mind that you had to put check marks on the cover to remember which books you had already read. There was enough raping and magic and hacking and tricking to keep you happy while you ate your Twinkies. But if, like me, you wanted Romance in the great English tradition, grit mixed with glory; if you wanted stories you could chew on, stories that stayed with you, stories that could be believed, set in worlds you could live in, you didn't have all that many choices. There were a few writers doing powerful, substantive work, or at least attempting it: Patricia McKilip, Evangeline Walton, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jane Yolen, Stephen R. Donaldson. It wasn't always easy to find them. Surprisingly, some of the best fantasies were published in hardcover as "young The Light Fantastic adult books," even though they were far more grown-up than the endless strong-thewed barbarians (with or without floppy chests) and the parade of tacky unicorns and woodsy elves that flooded the supposedly adult fantasy market. (Don't get me wrong -- I epjoyed Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series, I had a story of my own in a Swords Against Darkness anthology. Karl Edward Wagner and Gerald Page proved that sword and sorcery could be done well. But it was hard to find the jewels in the dross). What was I looking for in fantasy? Believability, folks. Realism. -- Wait a minute. In fantasy? The whole point of fantasy is that it isn't realistic! Wrong, Bonzo. The whole point of fantasy is that it takes place in a world where the laws of nature are different. But it can still be presented realistically. ton and Donaldson -- they were trying to be honest, trying to create real human beings in a world where power is more than politics or plug-in machinery. That's why I liked Yolen and LeGuin -- they were trying to tell, in smeill, intense stories, the kind of truth that is usually wrestled with in massive novels. I'm pleased to tell you that now there is a new generation of writers doing exactly the things I wished for all along. And some of those who were turning out barbarian or elf stories have grown up a little. The result is a crop of fantasts who are writing tales you can believe in. Many of them are shunning the traditional Medieval European setting; others are simply doing Medieval settings properly -- the way the Middle English Romanticists did it. Call it Humanist Fantasy. Worlds where magic isn't the answer, it's the question; and human beings, the human community, are the only ones who can resolve it. of the Humanist Fantasies. Her tale is set among the street people of Seattle, and her picture of the scavenging life is so realistic you'll feel like you've lived there yourself. Her main character, Wizard, a bummed-out Vietnam veteran, is not scavenging because he's a failure. In fact, his scavenging is part of a set of stringent rules he follows that give him magical powers -- particularly the ability to help people set their lives straight. Instead of the magic staff, he has a popcorn bag that always seems to be full of pigeon feed. Instead of incantations, he follows rules -- like never carrying with him more than a dollar in coins. Most of the way through, the story was miraculously good. It weakened at the end, unfortunately, because Lindhohn made the fatal error of having a vague, amorphous, fog-like Evil Force as Wizard's ultimate enemy. The grey fog was around from the beginning, but Wizard's most immediate enemy was a takecharge waitress from a cafe who knocked him out of his routines and possessed him. She was a believable antagonist. The grey fog was a cheap special effect. Never mind the flaw; most of the novel is so real, so original that you won't regret buying it and reading it. And maybe you don't share my anti-fog palace that is in the last stages of decay, leading to imminent collapse. It is a daring thing for a fantast to call forth comparisons with Peake's GhorIF mengast books -- but Brust brings it off. Miklos is the youngest of the sons of the late king of Fenario. His eldest brother, Laszlo, is king now -- and he has tried to murder Miklos. The boy's life is saved by a talking horse (I know, I know -- hated the talking horse at first, too. But be patient -- it becomes a marvelous character by the end), and he goes off to Faerie to learn. He returns with magical powers, and knows he must, somehow, save the collapsing palace. But Laszlo regards it as treason even to suggest that the palace needs repair, and Miklos nearly loses his life more than once. In the meantime, a tiny seed has taken root in the palace, drinking the water of the river, growing until it threatens to rip the palace to pieces the way tree roots tear up sidewalks. The novel begins a little archly -- the author addresses the reader directly, and the structure is at first fragmented and unclear. This is not a flaw, merely an obstacle. Give the book a chance. Get into the flow of Brust's language. He'll reward you for it. You'll hve with a family that makes A Lion in Winter and o's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a weekend with the Bobbsey Twins. The palace itself is a brooding, powerful, helpless character, whose death and resurrection is as powerful an event as I've seen in fantasy. Medieval? Yes, but never, not for a moment, ordinary. returns to a time-honored fantasy tradition: reviving ancient sagas and retelling them in a form that modern readers can grasp. I suppose you could dismiss it as a war that began over a cattle raid. But then, it isn't just any cow they're stealing, and not Just anybody out to steal it. Frost assembles as perverse a crew of heroic characters as you're likely to find. In fact, the only technique Frost and Resnick set themselves much the same task. Frost succeeded, too, to a remarkable degree. In fact, the only real problem with the story through a frame. Laeg, a dead hero, returns to life in order to lead a young man named Senchan through a series of visions. Senchan and Laeg are engaging characters, but Frost never does a thing with them. It is in the visions that the real story is told. It was fhistrating when it finally became clear that Senchan was never going to be more than a mere device, like the little boy at the end of the musical Camelot, whose sole purpose for existing is to remember Arthur and tell stories about the Round Table. So concentrate on the tales that Senchan witnesses, starting with a pair of jealous Pigkeepers of the Gods and winding through a cast of unforgettable, all-too-human characters. Not since Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion has there been such a marvelous straightforward retelling of an ancient national myth. suffers from the Kung-Fu syndrome, in that it gets serious about choreographed self-defense routines as a Way of Life Leading to Brotherhood and Ultimate Happiness. Many a book has died a miserable death because it depended on the reader actually believing the mystic twaddle surrounding aU the kicking and poking and grunting. Kung-Fu movies all look the same to me. Fortunately, though Shetterly uses these mystic arts, they are never the The Light Fantastic main thrust of the book. It is instead the tale of Rifkin, a wanderer who gets caught up in the defense of one of the last strongholds of the Witches, who once ruled a great empire but now are being overcome by iron and gunpowder. Rifkin is a wisecracking free spirit who gives his loyalty only rarely, and only on his own terms. As he butts heads with the Witches -- who are not always Nice People -- we discover that he is both more and less than he seems to be. The result is a funny, exciting adventure story that delighted me from beginning to end. (Predictably, the cover of the book is embarrassing and the cover blurbs completely misleading about the story within.) And don't kid yourself. Real humor is hard to write, Shetterly does a good job. Oh, now and then he repeats a running gag too soon or too often; now and then Rifkin is too aware that he's funny, like a comedian who breaks up over his own jokes. But these are momentary lapses in a well-sustained comic adventure novel. What I really have to warn you about is the fact that this book is obviously the first in a series, even though it never says so. Still, it's worth reading now -- the immediate story is fully resolved at the end, so instead of feeling disappointed or annoyed, you'll be pleased to realize that there's more to come. M. Coleman Easton may be the least flamboyant of the writers of Humanist last year was not the kind of stunning first novel that catapults a writer to instant fame. It was a small, quiet, private little book. This year, his novel grand scale, and no doubt Easton will get even more ambitious as time goes on. Still, I hope that he never loses his knack for creating character with seeming artlessness. He never calls attention to himself as a writer. And yet when I'm through reading his books, I feel like I've known real people, lived through real events. milieu -- it feels somewhat Arabian. A vast circle of monolithic stones appears suddenly around the city. Young Iskiir is the only one in town who recognizes the immediate danger, for he is one of a handful of survivors of a similar incident in his mountain village years before. The monoliths draw steadily closer to the city, making escape nearly impossible, crushing anything in their path. As the mages prove their inability to halt the stones, Iskiir and his friend, an unusually incompetent mage, find a way out of the city to find the one wizard who knows how to stop the stones. In the meantime, his young beloved, Adeh, remains in the city, where she catches the perpetrators of a grainstealing scheme. We travel among pilgrims on an insane perpetual pilgrimage, join a band of desert raiders, and take part in a climactic battle in which Iskiir plays a vital role. of your chair the way that more ambitious novels might; but neither does Easton make a false step. While you live in his world, you're in the hands of a masterful, talented writer; you can trust him to deliver what he promises. There's much to be said for quiet excellence. Fantasy Award, and it is as deserving a choice as they've ever made. It begins slowly, as the narrator, Steve, a young English war veteran, returns to live in the home his domineering father left to Christian, Steve's older brother. Their father devoted his life to an obIF sessive study of the ancient forest adjoining their house. Gradually, Steve discovers that the small wood, only a few miles around, is much larger inside than out; and dwelling within the wood is a woman who once loved his father and now loves him. He also learns that there are dangers in the wood -- and he cannot hide from them in his safe and civilized house any longer. They will come to him if he does not go destroy them at their source. Some have criticized the book because it take so long to get to the "good parts" -- that is, most of the book takes place outside the wood, and only in the latter part does Steve enter the magical forest and have the sort of adventure we usually associate with fantasy. In a sense, that criticism is really flattery -- such readers wanted the novel to go on. In another sense, though, the criticism is merely ignorant. The long, slow passage of time through the first # pages is absolutely necessary to set up the last # pages. It's like chase scenes in film or TV. Sure, they can be exciting -- but most of the excitement comes from knowing who is being chased, and who is chasing them, and what it will mean if they're caught. Like The Dukes of Hazzard, which gave the audience only enough story to provide an excuse for the chases. The empty, meaningless action may be exciting the first few times, but eventually it all starts to look the same. That's what's been wrong with so many bad fantasies for so many years: They don't take the time, as Holdstock has done, to earn the action scenes, to invest them with meaning. Just battles with steel and spells, one after the other, with only the feeblest threads of plot and character to hold them togrown-ups. It's for readers who are let a writer evoke a whole and believable world, peopled with living characters. Briefly Noted Fantasy: You've been good. You drank all your milk, you cut back on your vices (candy bars? cigarets? bad sci-fi novels?), and you didn't kick the neighbor's filthy annoying cat. So reward yourself with one of these three excellent story collections. (But only one -- you haven't been that good.) and Emma Bull, is a shared world anthology. It's an art form launched in Robert Asprin's Thieves' World books, wherein several writers contribute short stories set in the same city, and there have already been many attempts to create other shared worlds. Some of these shared worlds are pretty weak -- Magic in Ithkar springs to mind -- and others, like Greystone Bay, contain many good stories, but don't really develop the possibilities of the world they share. example of what can be accomplished when almost everything goes right. As could be expected, the two most renowned writers in the book. Gene Wolfe and Jane Yolen, contribute firstrate stories. But their stories pretty much stand alone; it is the work of lesser-known writers that interweave to make the city of Liavek come to life. Stephen Brust, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and Barry Longyear wrote excellent tales -- but here's the shocker: There isn't a single bad story in the book. In fact, every story is at least presentable, and most are downright good. More than that I will not say -- ex(continued on page # ) The Light Fantastic Almost three decades ago, the then Russian leader, Nikita Krushchev, on his way home from a visit to America, stopped over in Yugoslavia to see Tito, the leader of that Communist country. It could have been a great moment in history, because Tito for the most part talked the best sense of any Communist leader, and acted on his own ideas. What he said, essentially, to his Russian peer was: "Nikita, you can safely open your borders, and let the people come and go. The reason But Tito's borders reflected his thinking: they were open. Thousands of Yugoslavians crossed over into Germany and the rest of Europe, looking for jobs. When they found work, they sent part of the money home to help support their families, and it is even possible, as a result of cross marriages, that some of them managed to stay abroad. But for most of the individuals involved, presently their visas expired; whereupon they came back to their own country, whether reluctantly or otherwise made no difference. Returning to Moscow, Krushchev suggested to the Russian leadership that Tito's was a good example to follow. His words -- it was reported at the time -- were greeted in stony silence by the hardcore Stalinists; and, shortly thereafter, Krushchev was the victim of a power takeover, and, though not executed, was ever after ignored, and lived in retirement. In Yugoslavia, after Tito died, a similar hardcore group seems to have taken over; and Yugoslavians are no longer allowed to go abroad. In view of ever more serious world tension, I really think a return to Tito's idea might release a lot of the grim emotion that could even, in an extreme, lead to a nuclear war. IF Looking back a few years, imagine if at the time Vietnam was split in two, if both Vietnamese governments had agreed to easy border crossing regulations which both sides would enforce. And, similarly, imagine if, right now, all those reluctant Communist states in east Europe also had open borders, with regulated travel back and forth. Remember; the key thought is no country would ever permit more than a small percentage of individuals to cross over at any given time, and would presently require them to move on, or go home. Anyway, that's the situation I wanted to dramatize in my story, "Prologue to Freedom", assuming throughout that human nature, capitalist and communist, never changes. I really think it would work out there in the real world. And I believe our diplomacy should try to move our dangerously divided world in that direction. Taking for granted that human nature has not changed in recorded history, my story dramatizes this concept. Prologue to Freedom art: Vincent DiFate A state, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no (me is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a state be imagined? Plato, #-# B.C. # A.D. For more than two decades capable government advisers had authored rules of survival, requiring the most profligate populace on the planet to operate sensibly. So that, despite the energy shortage, planes still flew. Everybody still had his car. A proper diet was available for rich or poor. And this condition of temperate living could have gone on indefinitely, despite sions. It turned out that the dwellers in paradise were angrier than was realized. In California (where else would it begin but in earth's only heaven?) in the election of #, Proposition # passed with a majority vote of #. (Only # voted against; the remaining # of those who went to # IF the polls simply left that item unmarked.) The business community, which had fought # with the biggest expenditure in the history of state elections, was stunned. At once there was a wild scramble to get out of San Francisco. Actually, the scramble did not include everyone. Ed Clint, TV reporter from New York, who questioned people in various walks of life, estimated that approximately forty per cent of those who had voted for Proposition #, didn't know what it was. ("But something had to be done -- " they said.) Portions of this group and of other segments of the California population expressed a popular reaction: "If the Big Boys are scared of it, then it's got to be okay." In the area of intellect where Sam Mebley operated his little grocery store in South San Francisco there was a mood of negative, uneasy vagueness. Meaning Sam did not have a clear picture of what would happen after the three-month transition time. HowPrologue to Freedom ever, he was not too disturbed. During the pre-election, a small group of U.C. students came to each store on his street with reassuring statements. Sam was not quite sure what it was they said. But the shoe store owner down the street expressed himself as being greatly cheered. As he interpreted the student message for Sam, "All competent small business people will be encouraged to carry on." Sam, who had more than a quarhad a secret feeling of total competence. And, besides, he rented his building and owed for most of his stock. So what the hell! He didn't mention the hidden hoard when he was interviewed by Clint before the election. But he did report what the students had said, and that evening he described his casual, dismissing attitude to Stella, his every-other-night bed companion, adding: "In this world you've got to be smarter than the next guy." For Sam, being smarter meant than each weekend on Sunday night he took the train to Los Angeles. (He could have flown, but for that you had to give your name and attest that it was a necessary trip.) So after an all-night journey Sam reached his desination Monday morning. His principal task: to rent three or four safety deposit boxes in outlying branches of different banks and place in each a bundle of cash. By evening he was on the train again, and on his way back to San # IF Francisco. During the first four weekends there was no problem. But as he was returning on his fifth Monday night, the long passenger train with its puffing steam locomotive rolled to a stop Just outside of Bakersfield. A trio of students came aboard Sam's car. Sam, who had been sleeping with his head against the window, had his first awareness of something new when he was shaken awake. It took a little while, then, but basically he was quick and obliging. "Sure, sure -- what's the prob?" The interrogation trio told him. Sam nodded. "Oh, yeah, I get it. This is a check-up on who crosses the new border." Quickly, he gave his name, stated his occupation, and gave his made-up explanation: "Kind've running out of supplies. So I thought I'd go down and see if I could get some of the stuff I needed." He added, "Got a few boxes of canned goods up in the express car." That passed him. But it was obvious: his time was running out. And he still had # in stashed cash to get to safety deposit boxes in the second economic area. "When the words 'mine' and 'thine' had entered into the world and conflicts arose among citizens concerning ownership of things, and between neighboring peoples over boundaries, it became customary to have recourse to some one who wouldjustly and effectively see that the poor suffered no violence from the rich, or the whole people from their neighbors. " Attributed to Hubert Languet -- #-#I In that first month or so a great deal of information was available from all news media. It seemed that experts were being brought to San FYancisco from the U.S.S.R. as advisors. Their first task -- it was reported -- was to gain control of the flow of goods, particularly of the food supply. As, during the second month, the news rapidly grew less, it became obvious they were also getting control of the flow of information. The food part, Sam noted early. His credit wholesalers cut him off from new supplies. But goods were still available for cash; and in fact several wholesalers came to him and offered him secret stores that they had if he would pay off in cash for what he owed them. Each man intimated he would accept a substantial discount as payment in full. It turned out, in the consequent discussion, that some of these people were still hopeful that the government in Washington would interfere against Proposition #. But a few days later both San Francisco newspapers quoted a government spokesman. It was a statement issued by the White House, and it said: "All over the world for a generation or more. Capitalism and Communism have been confronting each other. Until now, citizens of either group have been able to migrate into the other's territory only with great difficulty, and seldom with the privilege of returning unscathed, when and if they desired to do so. But now in what was the great state of California we shall be able to observe in a relatively small arena what happens when there is easy access and easy return by law. It wiU also be interesting to observe if the new dual system will automatically cure the negative aspects of human nature, as the promoters of Proposition # have claimed." Sam had two reactions to that. First was the sarcastic thought: "Boy, those advisors sure let that item be printed." Belatedly, later in the day, came the second feeling. A puzzlement: "For Pete's sake, what is this Proposition #?" That evening, en route to his own house, he pulled over to a curb in front of a smaU shack on the same street. Got out. Walked up to the unpainted door. And knocked. Presently, there was the wrinkled, chunky woman who, daytimes, did housecleaning for people who did not wish to make out employer social security statements about occasional domestic help; and thus -- as Sam had learned -- since there was no record of her having an income, she was able to collect monthly welfare checks. Sam said, "I've had a rough day, Stella. And though this isn't our regular time. I'll need a woman tonight." Stella peered up at him. Not much up; they were fairly nearly Prologue to Freedom the same height. For many seconds her dark eyes promised nothing. Then: "I'll see how I feel," she said finally, "and maybe come over." Sam departed without argument. The plain, little woman generally treated him with compassion. Whenever she didn't "feel" take care of' him. As he fully expected, she arrived about eight o'clock; and they had a drink. And somewhere, then, came Sam's question. Stella didn't argue, or express surprise that he didn't know what it was he had voted for. She was a woman who, as a girl, had looked into a mirror. At which time she had the first of many ego-diminishing shocks. So that getting this plump-faced small man had been a better-than-average for a face like hers. However, like most women she noticed the awesome limitations of her man without -- since they were not married -- taunting him with his stupidity. So she explained Proposition # being careful the while not to make him feel like an idiot for having paid no attention to the most important election of his, or any Californian's lifetime. The proposition split California in two just south of Bakersfield. The southern portion, with Los Angeles as its capital, would have a capitalistic economy. The northern half, with San Francisco as the capital, would have a Marxist economy. Inhabitants of both economic areas would use the same money. They could migrate from one area to the other as many times as they pleased, but would be subject to the laws of whichever section they chose to live in. When she had finished, Sam sat frowning for a while; then: "This Marxist thing -- it's what they've got in Russia, uh, the U.S.S.R.?" The woman nodded, yes. "The idea," he said, "is that eveiything is owned by the people." She added, "I don't quite know how they make sure it's all evenly split. But that's the idea." After a small pause, Sam said, "Oh!" He was thinking of his #. in cash being divided who lived in Economic Area Number One. His feeling was negative. "You going to stay?" Stella asked. "I'll have to look the situation over," replied Sam, "and that may take a while. I got most of that #month transition period still to go." It turned out that it didn't take quite as long as the words, "transition period" had, somehow, implied. Or rather, it had not occurred to Sam that he might be a subject for one of the changes made as a part of the transition. "fr is plain, therefore, that the distingushing quality of humanity is the faculty or the power of understanding. " Dante, #-#I AD. In both papers the following day, the entire front page was an adverIF tisement. It requested -- the actual phrase used was: "are requested" -- all college students to register "at once" with the Department of Transitional Actions. Elsewhere in the ad was the statement that "qualifying" college graduates would be given the available "higher paying jobs." Presumably, all those college intellectuals would understand that there was nothing coercive in the request; and that the wording merely implied how urgent was the need, as, presumably, was the statement that those who registered first would naturally have the choice of the best positions. It was the shoe store owner from down the street who showed Sam the advertisement. He seemed visibly less cheerful. "What they want to do is get the intellectuals on their side. That was what my son said. He's going down this morning." Sam said, "You got a college education, Harry?" "Well -- no. But I put my son through." He added, "I had a living to make." "Me, too," said Sam. It was two days after that conversation that Sam looked up from a small transaction with old Mrs. Spidley. What he noticed was a car in large letters. And under it, somewhat smaller, was Department of Transitional Actions. The car was in the action of pulling up in front of his door. As he saw, one after the other, three men get out, Sam unconsciously began bracing himself. And, as the men walked towards the entrance of his store and then came inside, he uttered one small sigh of regret. It was mid-afternoon. All through the day, every hour he had taken his cash accruals for that hour, and had hidden the money in a specific place he had at the back of the small building. What elicited the sigh was that the current hour had just run its course; and he had intended to take care of those accruals in approximately one minute. One of the three men was quite young: early #s. He carried a black executive case, and he preceded the other two. The second in line was about fifty, and Number Three was fortyish. All three were Middle Class types. The youngest placed his case on the counter in front of Sam, and said, "My name is Paul Vakor. Are you Mr. Sam Mebley?" He didn't wait for a reply, but went on, "We've come to take over your store for the good of the people." Sam did a special inner bracing job. And said, "Hey, I thought competent small business guys would be allowed to continue operating their small businesses in Economic Area One." As his first answer the youth stepped over in front of his executive case, and opened it. He drew out a folder. "I have here," he said, "your tax reports for the past three years. They all show a loss, and are therefore evidence that you are not competent." Prologue to Freedom Sam said, "Oh!" It wasn't that he had forgotten. But actually the competence he had developed in simultaneously making a large profit but never paying income tax, had become such an automatic skill that for a decade he had taken it for granted as a way of life. At once, there was no point in protesting. But he did say bitterly, "You look like one of those college students who came around before the election to tell me how great everything would be for me." Off to one side, the oldest of the three men cleared his throat. And, speaking English with a thick, foreign accent, said, "He is college student, yes. But is also dedicated government agent for the people." Sam gazed grimly into the speaker's brown eyes. "I heard about your kind," he said grimly. "One of those experts invited over from U.S.S.R. to tell kids like this what to do." His thumb indicated the "kid." He grew aware that the Russian was pointing with his thumb at the third man. "Mr. Thompson registered college student," he said. "Big job to do. Will take over, manage your store with competence. Put everything behind glass cases. All profits to the people." The new "owner" of Mebley's Grocery Store walked to the end of the counter, and behind it. As he came back up to Sam, he said, "Show me where everything is, Mr. give me a hand during the first couple of days." They were all three looking at him. And it seemed to Sam that he got the thought right now. Quickly, he spoke the magic words, "Sure, sure. For the people." "Law is reason or intelligence unperturbed, and free from the influence of anger, cupidity, hate, or prejudice; nor is it deflected by tears or threats. Man, on the other hand, however well endowed with reason, is seized and overcome by wrath, vengeance and other passions. " Vindiciae Contra Tyrannous, I # th century. Did a faint tendril of doubt ever move through Paul Vakor's mind? Was there a moment when he wondered if, perhaps, there was, in fact, any proof that Leninism-Marxism was the ultimate political solution for all problems? The reality wasn't quite like that. Paul's personal struggle was with what he silently described to himself as the remaining attributes of his capitalist upbringing; ambition. Naturally, he had to conceal that he had any. And he tried to do things that would make him look selfless while he maneuvered for power. The colossal success of Proposition #, determinedly expected but not actually anticipated, required hundreds of individuals to fight for leadership positions. Yet each individual had to pretend he was no better than the lowliest worker -- except for his dedication, of course. That became the decisive IF thought... We were up front during the struggle days -- People who jumped aboard the bandwagon after the victory, no matter how well educated, could not be trusted in this beginning period to carry through. So here was Paul, one of hundreds of dedicated students, personally heading a takeover team. Feeling right about it. Convinced that human misbehavior derived only from Capitalism. The first intimation that all might not be well with him had come a week earlier when he read a jubilant announcement, printed in identical words in both newspapers. It stated that members of the American Communist Party had been invited by the government of California -- the new name of the northern economic area -- to come to San Francisco. Their help, and their intimate knowledge of Marxism, apparently, would make certain that everything was done right. As the days went by, the papers and TV reported an enthusiastic response to the invitation. Eveiy day, some # individuals were crossing the border from the other #-odd states of the union. It seemed that they could enter bership card. The same card was all they needed to check in at the best hotels, and to obtain entrance to that sancrosanct of inner sanctums where, on the day after the election, the top promoters of # had set up the self-appointed government of Economic Area One, and started issuing orders "for the people." Exactly one week after that flow of holders of the card began arriving, Paul Vakor returned from his Sam Mebley takeover and found waiting for him an order to go at once to Work Apportionment. "... Why don't you," said the young woman at the desk in what had been the headquarters of Bank of America, "report to the commissar in charge of Central Area Collective Farm number twenty-three, which is the process of organization, and needs dedicated help." She reached to one side of her desk, which was piled with pamphlets, took one, and held it out to him. "Here's a map on how to get there." "B-but," protested Paul, "I'm a fourth year college student." He struggled inwardly to find the right words. "I can be more useful on a -- " He had been about to say "higher level," and stopped just in time; finished lamely -- "a job requiring training and education." 'That will come in time," said the woman. "At the moment we need farm workers." A suspicion had been struggling inside Paul. So at this penultimate moment, when all was lost, he was able to gulp it out: "Uh, who recommended me for this?" The woman looked down at her paper. "It's signed Tim Frantor," she said. "Uh," stuttered Paul, "Uh -- " But she was motioning to the man at the head of the line ten feet Prologue to Freedom away. "Next," she called out. "In all well-attempered governments there is nothing which should be more jealously maintained than the spirit of obedience to law, more especially in small matters; for transgression creeps in unperceived and at last ruins the state. " Aristotle, #-# B. C. There comes an occasional moment in the life of a # year-old when a reluctant memory of parents surfaces without being instantly shoved back out of sight. Usually, when this rare event occurs, it has to do with a need for money. Such a moment -- and such a need -- came for Paul Vakor as he emerged from his interview onto the late afternoon street. And so, after stumbling along for a while, he went into a phone booth, put in his two quarters, and made a collect call to the Second Economic Area. At this early moment, no one had got around to "rationalizing" -- a word that was being used more and more -- the telephone system. And so there, presently, was his father's voice saying, "Who?" And then, when the computer supplied the name of the caller a second time, the familiar voice said grimly, "Tell that S.O.B. to go to hell. Although I paid for his way through college, hoping for the best, I haven't had a son since he got mixed up with the radical left in his sophomore year." And with those words com# IF pleted, bang! -- down went the receiver. The tinkle of his quarters being returned somehow reminded Paul that he had been so zealous all day in pursuit of his studies that he had not talked to Anasia. Or rather, when he'd phoned in the morning, there was no reply. And what with his numerous takeover actions of the day, he had not tried a second time. He put the quarters back in, and tried again. After the phone had rung half a dozen times he was convinced. By then he had had another thought; and he recognized it immediately as his inspiration of the day. Instantly, came the feeling: saved! -- ... Sam Mebley had waited until after dark. Not too early, not too late; so it seemed to him. A midnight prowler might be reported. But ten o'clock was surely a neutral hour. After a careful survey, he stepped into the alleyway, and walked to the rear of what, until mid-afternoon, had been his grocery store. In the dark it took a little longer to lift away the camouflage from his hiding place -- and to replace it after he removed the money he had hidden there -- his hourly accruals -- during the day. The amount was not large: slightly less than #. But worth a short trip. That was not a matter that Sam argued with himself; his acceptance of what had to be done was automatic. The biggest shock, then, was when all the rear-of-the-store lights went on. They were flood bright, he'd had them that way for occasions when deliveries arrived after dark. Sam did not try to run. After that first, stunned moment, he merely stood resigned, as the young college student who had headed the afternoon takeover, emerged from the back door, followed by Thompson, the new storekeeper. It was the student who searched Sam, found the cash, and placed it in his executive case. As he closed the bag, Paul said to Sam in a savage tone, "We will be filing charges against you. But now, get!" Sam got. After the ex-owner had departed, Paul turned to the blond Thompson, "Thanks for coming to assist in this matter. But now. I'll take this to headquarters, and you'd better go home # md get some sleep." Both men went through the store. And then, after Thompson had locked up, went their separate ways in two different cars. Paul still had the official black machine with the lettering painted on the side. Fortunately, he was able to return it before midnight to the car pool of the Department of Transitional Actions. Which meant that no one would ask questions as to its whereabouts. And he still had a key to his office in the department itself. So he sat there, and spoke into the computer, stating charges against Sam Mebley somewhat different than he had threatened. His accusation was that Sam had filed false income statements, and should be investigated by his successor. Hastily, he signed the computer printout, folded it into an envelope, and tossed it into the Work Load chute. And so he had #. And the belief that it would be a long time before anyone discovered what had happened... Those S.O.B.S, he thought grimly, giving me a daily allowance; so I'd always be broke, and have to come back and do their dirty work. He who had been as dedicated as the next man, was being treated like a nobody who had to take any job they wanted to give. Well, they could all go they knew where! It was after he counted the money that he phoned Anasia again. When -- again -- there was no answer, the first worry came. He had been intent all day, doing his job. Truth was, Anasia was an independent type, who didn't believe in telling her boy friend everything she did. So he had been merely puzzled. Until now. He spent the night in one of the big hotels -- as a precaution -- and phoned occasionally. But in the morning, after eating a hasty breakfast, he took a taxi over to her apartment. "For we have full experience of the truth of Solon's saying, that all public matters depend on reward and punishment; that where these are wanting, the whole discipline of state totters and falls to pieces. " John Calvin, #-# There are people who never Prologue to Freedom #I forget a sharp remark against them. During the heat of the campaign for Proposition #, Paul had spoken sharply to seven fellow students and to three professors. That last had the most immediate effect. He was failed in three subjects, and was accordingly not allowed to graduate. Tim FYantor was one of the seven students. In the heat of a meeting on tactics, Paul had called Tim an idiot. The words were: "You're Just another nut, Tim. An idiot, if you think anything like that will work."... Paul let himself in to Anasia's apartment with his key. After checking the place, not sure Just what he should look for, he settled down in front of the TV. And waited. The day went by slowly; but watching TV did have some interesting highpoints: the changes that had been made. The soap operas were still there; but they were dramatically changed; and words like Comrade, and terms like duty to the people, abounded. (His impression was that the writers didn't quite know how it should be; but they were trying.) During the evening, the phone -- that had been silent all day -- rang three times. Each time it was a feminine voice. And each time -- it turned out -- the owner of the voice had not been in touch with Anasia for a week or more. That reminded Paul. His sweetheart's best friend was Bella Arne. Bella was in the phone book. And there, after four rings, was Bella's voice, saying, "Oh, Paul, I've been trying to phone you since two nights ago. But there was no reply at your place. Anasia tried to call you before she left." "Left to where?" "She phoned me from her bedroom. An "#" team came to her place, and said they had orders to send her to Satellite CA." Paul said, "Oh!" with a sinking feeling. Satellite CA. was the space factory complex assigned to the original California -- now divided into two economic sections like the land far below. "B-but," Paul protested, "how can you order somebody to? -- " He stopped. Gulped. And asked, "Did she say who gave the order?" "Somebody called Tim Frantor." "Oh!" said Paul. Then, mumbling, "Thank you, Bella. I'll see if I can get in touch with her." He hung up. And sat there. The following morning he phoned Tim Frantor's office. And then again later; and every day two or three times. Every day, he was told by a woman's voice either that, "Mr. Frantor is in conference." "Mr. Frantor is on another line. Can I have him call you?" Or, "Mr. Frantor is not at lus desk." Or, finally, "Mr. Frantor has left the office for the day." But on the fifth day Frantor came to the phone. His voice had an urgent note in it: "Paul, I need your help. I was ordered confined to my office here this morning, and I haven't been able to make any calls out through the switchboard. Now listen, I'm on the second floor. IF So if you'll come over with one of those extension ladders -- " Hastily, he described the location of his office; ended as hastily, "Don't let me down, Paul I'll make it up to you." "Wait!" yelled Paul, "don't hang up." When it was clear that the line was still open, Paul went on, "Before you leave your office, put through an order assigning Anasia back to San Francisco." He added desperately, "If you put that through channels, nobody will notice; you know by now how those things work." "Oh, sure, sure," came the reply. "And also it'll show that I'm still on the job. See you. Be quick, for God's sake." " I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich. " Gertrude Stein, #-# No one gave Paul Vakor more than a passing glance or two, as he put up the ladder. He had rented it and the truck for # cash, plus # deposit, also cash. The deposit was to be refunded when he returned the equipment. So, now, he maneuvered the relatively long, aluminum ladder against the lower window sill; and he had a pail of water standing by, and cloths, and a can of glass cleaning spray. It was part of his pretense that he was a workman doing a routine Job. Frantor must have been waiting with a desperate impatience. Because, as the top of the ladder hit the sill, the window of that ancient building squeaked open. And, rapidly, a fi'antic, trousered leg poked out. It was swiftly followed by a second trousered leg, and the rear of the whole trousers. What held up the rescue operation briefly, then, was that the part of Frantor that was still inside seemed to be busy. After nearly twenty seconds, however, the head and shoulders slid out, and one arm and hand emerged holding a large wastepaper basket, while the other hand reached down and grasped the top rung. Like Paul's, his was a medium long body that, also, had the strength of a twenty-two year-old. And so, down he half slid, manipulating his basket, which, on reaching the sidewalk, he placed in the truck cab. The two young ex-commissars teamed to unextend the extension ladder back to its short form. They did not, at this time, attempt to fit it into its cradle in the back of the truck; simply tossed it in. And departed; the truck, with Paul driving, swerved into the traffic, and then zipped around the first corner. As they zoomed along, Paul watched the street, and was careful not to glance at his hard-breathing rider. There would have to be a few confrontations; but that was for later. As the breathing slowed toward normal, Frantor spoke for the first time: "Don't worry, Paul. I'll make it up to you, what I had to do." It was a good opening line. And it augured well for Paul's special Prologue to Freedom scheme for their future. Presumalaborator. Once more, the long-faced youth spoke: "I got two old style automatic pistols, two S.D. computers, and the most expensive small office items I could lay my hands on." Neither man had even a momentary thought of the qualm variety, that this was thievery Frantor was describing. Paul was nodding; and he spoke now for the first time: "Best you could do under the circumstances." The computers and the automatics, particularly, could be useful -- that seemed to be true in the upside down world where they now had their being. They were approaching the truck and ladder rental yard; and so Paul said quickly, "I have an idea Tm going to have a hard time getting back my # deposit unless we play it tough as a team." What they did, they entered the small office of the rental company; entered it with Frantor right behind Paul. Then they spoke to each other several times to establish that they were together. But Frantor waited at the door while Paul presented his duplicate copy. The man behind the counter glanced at it. And said at once, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to have that truck checked in our garage for damages. And so you come back tomor -- " It was at that point that his eyes must have caught the movement of Frantor taking the automatic out of his pocket and slipping it into # IF an exposed position at the top front of his trousers. Pause; then: "Oh, well," came the words, "we have your address." Whereupon, he counted out the  # . As soon as they were outside, Paul said, "And now, let me tell you what I think we should do to get some real money." Whereupon, he described the Sam Mebley incident. Explained: 'The guy that's running the store now -- Thompson -- told me he took in over # the last half of his first afternoon. True, that's the busy time; people going home from work do the most shopping. But if you add what I got and what he got, it comes to over #. And that's for one day. My guess: Sam has been grossing # a month in that little place. And somehow declaring income tax on only half of that. So -- here's the point -- he's got cash around somewhere; and we have to pry some of it away from him." And the illegality of that did not seem to disturb Frantor either. It was almost as if they agreed that, during the transitional period, money and goods belonged to anyone who could grab first. "How," was all Frantor asked, "do you think we should work it?" "He doesn't know you," said Paul. "So our job is to keep track of him; and you do all the front work, and any necessary contacts, while I remain out of sight but handy. I have a feeling he's going to head south. So we'll need a car. Right now. I've got to wait here until Anasia is returned from Satellite CA. And then -- " "Oh, she'll be back tonight," said FVantor. "That makes it all simple," was Paul's relieved reply. "... certain rights can never be granted to the government, but must be kept in the hands of the people. " Eleanor Roosevelt, #-# Sam and Stella drove down Highway # -- the mountain-desert route (by way of Lake Tahoe). In addition to some funds he had in his billfold, Sam had # hidden in the trunk. His hope was that the "commies" during this transitional stage, hadn't got around to "setting up shop" -- as he put it -- "in hot as Hades Mojave." But there was a bad moment when the computerized car responded to a radar speed warning, and presently rolled to a stop in front of a computer eye-o, which was embedded in a metal roadside communication post. On the post, a light blinked. So Sam maneuvered the machine by hand control until he could reach over and pick up the receiver. A man's voice said, "Our electronic check shows that this car is registered in the name of Sam Mebley." 'This is he," replied Sam gloomily"According to our system report your vehicle was traveling at excessive speed. The fine is #. Stop at the patrol station automat in Palmdale and pay the full amount before proceeding." Sam was recovering. "You sure these fines are still legal under the new system?" he asked. There was no verbal reply. Only a clicking sound, presumably of disconnect. But he was actually glad to stop. And did, in fact, pay the fine into an automat machine; but all the time thinking happily: "By God, this proves that this is still an open route." Which meant that before they plugged this loophole he could go up every day, and come back -- every day -- until those one hundred and eight remaining G's were safe in G-land. The rest of the trip was in that very same G-land, now called Angelona -- the new name of the second economic area. It was after they had been (safe?) in what had formerly been southern California, for at least an hour, that Stella said, "How are you going to live, Sam. Are you going to ask for public assistance?" The plump-faced man was too flabbergasted by the question to answer immediately. Long ago, he had made the decision never to teU a woman his true financial situation. His observation: women got awfully big ideas awfully quick. So the chunky little woman knew nothing of his savings. What staggered him about her suggestion was that it might be a handy concealment for his situation. At the moment he merely said, "I got a few hundred bucks. That'll give us a chance to look around, Prologue to Freedom and see what's what. May be some changes down here, also. What he had found on each of his previous visits was that Los Angeles was swarming with refugees; and according to the papers hotel rooms were hard to get. As it turned out, there had been an odd, partial solution to that problem. Essentially, concern for people who asked for, or needed welfare, devolved upon a small percentage of the populance. There were religious workers who dealt with the poor and the sick, and there were the town, city, or government officials who were constantly confronted by the problem of what to do with an individual, or a family, without income of any kind. The rest of the people would rather not see, or have any direct contact with the problem. Or, if they took note, they had a negative reaction. It was an organized body of this latter group in Angelona who saw the condition of California as an opportunity. More important, individuals among them were sufficiently educated so that they knew what had happened in Russia in # and in China in '#. This group spread the word where it would do the most good, from their point of view. How quickly does news travel? How soon do people act? The reaction started the first week. The poor districts of Los Angeles and San Diego -- particularly those two cities -- experienced a remark# IF able upheaval. People began to leave. Social workers reported that ten, twenty, and even thirty year welfare cases simply got up and left their rented houses or apartments. Since there are always observers and tale-bearers, the story was that long lines of old jalopy cars headed north over Interstate #, #I and I (the coast highway), and even # by way of Mojave -- headed by all three routes in the general direction of San Francisco. After these various caravans crossed the "border" into Califrania, it wasn't long before a dozen cars would take this or that off ramp and, in a manner of speaking, were never seen again. But there, also, were observers. And so reports came of how they drove into small and large communities, to ranches and farm houses, and simply moved in and took over: homes, farms, businesses. In some places signs appeared. They all had the same justified thought printed on them: "This property taken over for the people." The signs were mostly crudely done. Sometimes, they were scrawled on white cardboard. Yet here and there was actually carved wood or shaped metal nailed onto a solidly dug-in post. (Some owners were quick. They had their own signs up, so that when the caravan arrived it looked as if that place had already been seized "for the people.") But when Ed Clint knocked on the door behind one or another of these signs, and asked what the thought was, one man said, "When I heard that this is what the poor people did in Russia and China, I realized it was up to me to do my share, and show where I stood," It turned out that the caravans were a little late for Nob Hill and other fine residential sections in northern Califrania. In those areas, members of the American Communist Party had moved their families into all the fancy homes. Attempts made to interview this level of takeover were mostly repulsed. But here and there Clint elicited a reply. One woman came to the door of a #-room mansion, and said, "We are dedicated persons who have the interest of the people at heart. This house was formerly occupied by someone who had no such concern." Ed Clint pointed out. "The outward appearance is that another elite group has taken over. What do you think of the claim of Proposition # promoters that the two interacting economic areas will solve all these problems of human greed and the negative side of human nature in general?" There was no verbal answer to the question. At that point the door was slammed in Clint's face. "Genuine government Is but the eocpression of a nation, good Or less good -- even as all society, However unequal, monstrous, crazed and cursed Is but the eocpression of men's single lives. The loud sum of the silent units. " Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #-#I Stella's suggestion, and his reaction, had an important immediate effect on Sam: when they arrived in Los Angeles he drove straight down to one of the well-defined welfare areas. Everywhere they looked there were "to let" signs on small houses. Many of the signs also stated: "Furnished." It was one of these furnished #bedroom houses that Sam rented for one month for #. Inflation, that exact measure of the phenomenon known as a Seller's Market, had moved into Los fugees from Califrania. The following day Sam was still inwardly arguing ls to what his best course of action would be -- when the phone rang. It was a youthful male voice that represented itself as being from the local office of the Internal Revenue Service. The voice gave the address of a hotel, and a room number. "Come by this afternoon. Ask for Mark Armour." "What time?" asked Sam, gloomily"Two o'clock." "Okay, okay. I'll be there." "Oh, and by the way -- " "Yes?" Resignedly. "Don't be surprised at the appearance of confusion. "There's Prologue to Freedom hundreds of us down here from the northern economic area. And we're all in temporary quarters." As he broke the connection after that call, Sam was bitter. "Those damn computers!" he complained. "If you sign up to live somewhere, instantly your name is recorded; and, boy! they've got you." Stella said nothing. She had been strangely quiet since the previous day. She had accepted the better of the two bedrooms without argument. Accepted a visit from him in the late evening; and made breakfast for him this morning. But now, as she sat on the couch beside him, Sam grew aware of a strange expression on her face. The chunky little woman seemed to shrink down there beside him on the couch. Her plain and wrinkled face acquired a timid expression. Finally, in a small voice she said, "Maybe the time has come for us to get married." She added quickly, "I promise always to treat you just as good as I do now." Sam did not need her to explain what she meant. There was a time when Sam had married. During the courtship period it had looked like he was involved with a sex maniac. Twice an evening was nothing. Several tunes a week she would let herself into his house at # A.M. and crawl into bed with him. And a number of times she showed up at his store during her lunch hour -- she was a secretary in a government office. (They went into the back room.) But within a week after the wed# IF ding bells ceased to toll, she developed her first not-tonight headache. And thereafter it was all downhill. He ended the marriage after two years by simply filing suit for divorce; and the two attorneys worked out the financial settlement. Fortunately, she presently remarried. And Sam was off the hook "What bothers me," said Sam now, "is, I think there's supposed to be some recompense for expropriated property. And I should get, uh, maybe one-fifty for my equity in my place in San Francisco. And maybe if that happens we can get married." It was the best excuse he could manage on short notice. Truth, he was not entirely opposed to the idea of marrying the little woman. Two pre-Stella associations with considerably better looking females had taught him his final lesson: the fancier a woman looked, the more expensive she was. That afternoon, # P.M. The confusion at the temporary office of the Internal Revenue Service wasn't that great. There were boxes, loaded with what looked like files and stacks of white paper, piled in one corner -- Paul and Tim had carted the boxes up a back stairway of the hotel one at a time. The hotel desk in the room they had hauled over to the window on the other side of the bed. The person sitting at the desk was a young man; and he faced the door. There was an extra chair to his right; and he motioned Sam toward it As he settled into it Sam noticed phlets spread along one edge; and some invoices with Internal Revenue Service printed onto them -- that had been a hasty Xerox achievement. But, in fact, there was no problem. Sam had no suspicion as he gazed uneasily at the young man who now said, "I'm Mark Armour. And you?" "Sam Mebley." The lean youth looked down at some papers on his desk. Nodded. And drew them closer to him. While still studying them, he explained that the two economic areas were transmitting information to each other, as required by Proposition Eight. And that, as a result -- at that point he looked up and stared balefully into Sam's eyes. "Charges have been filed against you," he said. "By whom?" "By our San Francisco office." Since that was the correct location, Sam braced himself. "What are the charges? "That you falsified your income tax reports, and that in fact you made a considerable hidden profit each year of the four years examined." It was truth. And, oddly, it felt good to have it stated openly. Sam said in a relieved voice, "I can see that whoever filed the charges is not familiar as yet with the problems of operating a grocery store in a poor neighborhood." "You deny the charges?" "Totally." Pause. The young man was straightening in his chair. His expression was grim, as he said, "It turns out, Mr. Mebley, that you're actually very fortunate. Because of the special situation created by Proposition Eight, we could waste a lot of time discovering the exact amount of your debt. Accordingly, I am authorized to fine you #; and that will be all there is against you. However -- "the eyes were baleful -- "if the fine is not paid into this office by tomorrow morning you will be subject to Clause Eleven of Proposition Eight." There was silence while Sam unhappily considered parting with #. Yet, in fact, to a practical person like himself, it had the look of being an easy way out. "Let me understand you," he said. "If I can, uh, borrow #. from some friends up north, I will claims against me?" "You will receive a proper release document," was the reply. "Can I pay it to your office in San FYancisco?" Sam asked. "I'll have to fly up tonight, and borrow the money." "Let me check on that," said the false Mike Armour, "and I'll phone you." When the phone call came an hour later, it developed that Armour had been assigned to ride herd on the situation. "So," his voice came on the phone, I'll fly up with you, and we'll settle the matter." As Sam explained it to Stella, Prologue to Freedom # that was obviously a practical solution to the many confusions created by Proposition Eight. "I guess they figure it's better for me to talk to one guy than keep meeting new people who don't know what's gone before." Stella would stay behind and hold onto the rented house. "Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of tempera fixed income will bring about. " Virginia Woolf, #-#I After Sam departed the hotel room, Paul entered from the bedroom. They stood looking at each other; and for a long moment Paul did not notice that his companionin-crime was not smiling jubilantly as he was; and, in fact, he was not smiling at all." "What's the matter?" asked Paul. "We may have to kill the old S.O.B.," said Frantor, "after we get the money." Paul was astounded. "Whatever for?" "He may go to the authorities and describe us. You, particularly." "He's not going to see me in this situation. And he'll never see you again. This is a one-shot deal. And, besides -- " Paul smiled grimly -- "he has to keep a low profile, so no one will suspect how much more cash he's got." "WeU!!!" The other youth seemed uncertain. "I'm ready to do what has to be done. In this Proposition Eight shiftover it's beginning to look as if it's every man for himself." There was a pause. A silence. Paul Vakor stood and Tim Frantor remained seated; and they looked not exactly at each other but slightly off to one side, two young instant criminals, with one of them -- Paul -- suddenly remembering what Frantor had already done against him... Every man for himself... I'm going to have to watch out for this so-and-so. At once he was cunning. "Okay, Tim, count me. We'll do what has to be done. But I don't think we have to do that." "I guess you're right," was the quick reply from a young man who had suddenly had his own private thought, that the less he confided in anyone, the better. "Step one," said Paul, "we get the money. Step two, then we decide what to do next -- " The money, they got. That was no problem. Sam had made his peace with the payment of # thousand in full in return for an Tim signed with the name Mike Armour. By the time he arrived back in Los Angeles, with # thousand more of his hidden funds, Sam was feeling quite cheerful. And wondering what his next move should be in the game of life under Proposition #. Stella had some puzzling news for him. 'The I.R.S. called," she said. "They want you to come and see them. Here's the number to caU." It was a different number and a IF different name. And, when he got there it was actually inside a building devoted entirely to government business. No piled boxes. No hotel room confusion. Everything was in order. Neat desks, private rooms; and in one of the latter a big, welldressed man in his thirties whose name was Warren Tate. It took a while. Sam explained. Sam showed his receipt. Twice, Warren Tate went out, and twice came back, presumably after consulting with someone else. In fact, the second time he returned with a middle-aged woman, who also listened to Sam's story. And, evidently, there had been other persons contacted; for a young man came in, and said, "The hotel reports that the room was occupied by a young man named Mike Armour." The woman asked, "Did they verify his name?" "Well -- " a pause -- "it seems that a newly hired night clerk let him in. Maybe a bribe -- " (A bribe it had been: a # direct payment, not counting the room rent for two days and two nights.) (No one suspected Paul Vakor. His action in originally filing the charges somehow proved him to be unconnected with what followed.) After about ten minutes, the woman came over to Sam, and said, "Proposition Eight has created many confusions that, apparently, cannot be easily resolved." They let him go. Later, when Ed Clint got onto the story, he found Sam and Stella in their rented house, waiting -- as the TV reporter described the situation to the vast audience in the eastern United States -- for the government of Califrania to reimburse Sam for his expropriated house in South San FYancisco, so that he and his lady could get married. Clint added, "This is just one little event of many that I have observed in bits and pieces as they developed." listened every night for an update on the west coast situation, concluded: "It would appear that, although Proposition Eight has not yet produced the morality claimed for it by its proponents, there is a rough justice beginning to show through. Sam Mebley was persuaded by some inner reaction to the new conditions to pay his back taxes without an argument. This was a result that was achieved only when the state took over his small enterprise. And, equally important, those who stole the money from him will gain thereby only a brief postponement of their personal rendezvous with destiny, prices out here being what they are." As Chnt later observed to his own lady friend, a news media person who expected to operate in both Angelona and Califrania, had better learn to notice every favorable aspect because there were so many unfavorable ones. Prologue to Freedom art: Vincent DiFate R'hyledd drifted in the breeze, fully unfolded and nearly transparent. While skimming above the cloud fields, dropping down occasionally to absorb a choicer fleck of moisture-coated dust, he watched the roiling top of a fresh bulge of greenish cloud as it poked its way ominously through the opaque gray haze below. Such an upwelhng could mean danger, storms brewing in the lower levels. And sometimes darters hid in such places, their denser bodies less likely to be damaged by the turbulence. A darter could be a threat, even to a full grown adult like R'hyledd. Thinking with resigned irony that the best grazing always seemed to be in the most dangerous spots, R'hyledd settled down on the ridge of atmospheric density defining the top of the misty blue-gray cloud pasture. Trying to judge how much flexibility remained in his aging body, he stretched. Yes, with a little more moisture to act as ballast, it might be possible to swoop down again, joyously cleaving to the rich atmosphere of the lower clouds to return coated with nutritious particles of all kinds. The youngsters would flock around then, anxious to partake of the harvest brought up by their elder. Their approval would be warm and pleasant to feel, and their bodies, fragile almost to the point of invisibihty, would sparkle brightly against his as they fed. For just a little longer, R'hyledd might be able to believe there was still something to look forward to in life. Foolish, foolish, he thought. Attempt to dive again, and you may Cloudscape well have no more life to look forward to. Do not invite your death before its time. A long ripple of resignation fluttered throu his outstretchedd drifting veils. Wiser by far to dismiss aU thoughts of diving again. Oh, yes, far wiser. Better to cling to what remained of life. Let some other adult feed the young. The segments he had ruptured in his last dive had only now healed and begun to function properly. He chided himself yet again for having taken such a chance. Keeping at a safe distance from the bulging green cloudtop, R'hyledd fed swiftly, not so much hungry as thirsty for the moisture condensed around the individual solid particles. The blue-gray cloud field stretched endlessly around him in all directions, here and there rising in contorted configurations that slowly changed their shape as pressures and densities shifted in the turbulent atmosphere. It was the world R'hyledd had known all his life, ever changing and yet ever the same. Dimly he remembered how exciting it had seemed, with new possibilities to be found in each cloud, new tastes and textures. He tried to recapture the sense of freshness and beauty he had felt so long ago, his first impressions as a truly self-conscious adult after combination, just emerging from the group consciousness of the young-flock. So marveUous had it been then. A tiny tremor ran through his extended veils. Life no longer seemed so new, and yet it was precious still. R'hyledd let himself drift closer to the greenish cloud. Grazing was good here. He swooped through the sweet-tasting mists, keeping several eyes trained on the threatening cloud as he fed. When he finally noticed the sparkles of a young-flock in the distance, he knew it was too late to avoid them. Well, let them come. He would refuse to hear their pleas. He had his own life to consider. Feeding voraciously on the thin dust, the young-flock flitted quickly, jerkily, amongst the bluegray clouds. They were hungry, very hungry, their fragile bodies thin and brittle with near starvation. They were conscious of nothing save their frantic search for food, their sense of group desperation. They had found no adult to feed them for a long time. They saw R'hyledd, and knew fresh hope. They had not enough of awareness to realize he was old; they merely knew he was an adult. He could dive, and bring them the food they needed. No other consideration mattered to the group mind. Sparkling with anticipation, they flittered after him. Inside the swirling turbulence of the green upwelling, the darter waited, its body drawn together to protect itself from the currents, watching, gloating. Its prey was almost near enough to attack, but the adult was too close. The adult might lure them away. It would IF wait. Perhaps the adult would move off, and the young drifters would come nearer. Resigned to an encounter he would have preferred to avoid, R'hyledd went to intercept the young-flock, preparing to herd them away from the danger of the spreading green cloud. They were young; they wouldn't have the sense to keep at a safe distance. It was his duty to protect them. They were fragile and beautiful with the promise of life. He felt himself expand in instinctive response, aching to be able to feed them and feel their warm glow on his failing body. But it would be dangerous to yield to that temptation. He would lead them away from possible danger, that was all. They'd have to find another adult to feed them. Hadn't he already decided that? The young-flock saw him coming, but they ignored his warning flutters. Not comprehending their danger, they clustered around his huge body, begging, entreating, their need for food clearly to be felt. R'hyledd knew he should get them to move farther from the greenish cloud, but they felt so good rubbing against him, so warm and full of life. Their anticipation ached through every fiber of his diaphanous body. His drifting veils quivered with sorrow, because he knew he dared not attempt to feed them. Enough. He only prolonged the inevitable frustration and rejection by allowing them near. He shook himself, whipping the clustered multitude of young away from his veils, warding them off with cautious flicks as they sought to come to him again. Find another. I cannot help you. But the young-flock ignored his silent plea. Their rudimentary intelligence unable to comprehend even the concept of individual being, they sought to impress upon R'hyledd their corporate need. Through the shifting curtains of greenish mist, the darter watched, growing impatient at the delay. R'hyledd looked at the youngflock fluttering persistently around him. This flock held promise. It was large and bright. He hated to abandon it to possible starvation. The youngsters seemed almost bright enough to combine with another young-flock soon. If they were properly fed. What kind of an adult would he be, if he abandoned such a promising flock? The last flock he had produced would be about that age now, although he was sure this wasn't it. Young-flocks always showed a distinct aversion to contact with the adult that had spawned them. These had greeted him eagerly. Frustrated, R'hyledd gathered himself tentatively inward, shortening and folding his veils as he assessed his physical condition. Cloudscape His sac held almost enough moisture. He could dive, but it would be tricky. His body might be old, but it would stand the strain, if he wanted it to. Just this one last time. What was life worth, without those few sharp-edged moments of impossible joy? What else gave meaning to the endless grazing and drifting? Most of an adult's life consisted of waiting, preparing, gathering moisture. Without the sublime satisfaction to be derived from feeding the young, he might as well be a particle of dust, tumbling aimlessly like the cloud particles on which he fed. He almost had second thoughts, but then he glanced once more at the sparkling young-flock. Their too much. He couldn't bear to disappoint them. He had to try. He would try. R'hyledd continued to fold his veils, slowly, carefully, lest he tear something. In youth, it had been a quick and easy process. Now, there was need for caution. As he drew in the extended veils, he began to sink. The gray-blue mists of the cloud pasture closed around him, blocking the youngsters from his sight. They couldn't dive. They were much too fragile to withstand the pressures down below. R'hyledd couldn't see, but he could feel the growing increase in pressure as he fell lower. He sampled the particles surrounding him. Tasty, but nothing special. He would go lower still. Since this might be his last dive, let it be an exceptional one. He tilted the edges of his contracted veils, driving himself deeper into the atmosphere. Blue faded gradually into green, and he even thought he could make out a hint of yellow not far below. Yellow was especially good. Thick, nutritious particles permeated the low yellow clouds. If he could reach the yellow, he could unfold and collect those particles. They would adhere to him easily. But he mustn't get overanxious. The pressure had increased considerably. He felt it pressing in on the hollow, air-filled segments of his body. He was stiff and inflexible with age. It wouldn't take much to crush those segments. With too many destroyed, he would never rise again. The terror of an endless fall into heat and intolerable pressure was almost enough to make R'hyledd seek an updraft immediately. What was he doing down this far anyway? He was an old fool. Unfold now, gather what you can, and return to safety, he told himself. But the yellow tempted him lower, rich, delicious, ways favored by the young. A bit further. Just a bit further. It wasn't as if he'd never gone this deep before. Hadn't he even touched red once? He trembled with the thrill of that memory. It had been hot and terrible and marvellous, but he had returned, the outer edges of his veils scorched and seared, two segments crushed hopelessly. Two separate young-flocks had come to him to feed, a rare happening. IF Many combinations had taken place. You were young then. Flexible and strong. You had only just combined. You cannot do today what you did then. The truly wise know their limits. An upwelling of yellow engulfed him. He tasted. Oh, yes, this would be fine. R'hyledd unfolded cautiously, buffeted by the fierce gale. He jettisoned some of the moisture he carried, becoming lighter as a result. The yellow cloud swirled upward and R'hyledd rode it happily, feeling the juicy particles clinging to his outspread veils, sticking to his main body segments. He ate a little himself, but he wasn't very hungry. The youngsters would be hungry. Youngsters were always hungry. The upwelling began to dissipate as its heavier particles sank back down toward their more normal levels. R'hyledd released more of his remaining moisture, rising above the turbulence. He unfolded to his fullest extent in an effort to gain altitude. A downdraft caught him, swirling him suddenly deeper. He fought to get clear of it. A small segment ruptured, unable to tolerate the rapid pressure change. No matter, he could live without it. He had lived through minor ruptures before. Only if he couldn't get free of the current would he be in real danger of being crushed. He fought the buffeting winds, but his reactions were slow, his body ponderous and weary, lacking the responsiveness of youth. The young-flock danced happily along the top of the cloud pasture. The adult had gone below. Soon they would eat. They skimmed and sparkled in short, jerky flights, drifting slowly towards the yellowgreen cloudtop as they tasted the richer particles scattered around it. The darter unfolded its stubby segments, preparing to swoop. Tenaciously angling his veils against the fierce current, R'hyledd worked his way to the side, slipping out of the threatening downdraft and once again making his way upwards. He had certainly lost some of his precious coating of particles in the struggle, but that couldn't be helped. He would still have enough. The mists shifted to greens, then blues. Soon he would come out on top of the cloud pasture. The young-flock would see him, and welcome him. He was not too old, after all. He had succeeded. His ruptured segment ached sharply, but it would heal. Brimming with anticipation, R'hyledd sailed triumphantly out of the blue-gray mist, seeking for the flock in expectation of imminent ecstasy. They would eat of the rich harvest he had brought them. They would sparkle with joy and warmth as they gathered around him. Perhaps they would awaken a spark of life inside his old body, Cloudscape and he might even prepare to spawn again. There were so many possibilities now. They -- They had not heeded his warning! They had moved closer to the dangerous yellow-green cloudtop! A darter flew among them, devouring them as effortlessly as they devoured dust particles, its hideous maw opened wide. The youngsters stayed together, as any young-flock must, easy prey for the creature that fed upon them. They could not scatter, since they weren't even aware they were all separate entities. In mindless panic and shock, they flittered here and there, but not fast enough to escape the darter's swooping flight. R'hyledd's veils sagged in bitter despair. The flock he had meant to feed, destroyed, dying. As he watched in limp horror, another youngster disappeared into the darter's maw, fluttering helplessly. And he could do nothing to stop it. Nothing'S R'hyledd thought, catching sight of one of his yellowencrusted veils. Darters seldom actually fed on adults if there were youngsters nearby. They didn't seem to like the adults' tougher skins. However, they had been known to pursue an adult carrying a harvest. Perhaps he could tempt this one, lure it away from the flock? R'hyledd drifted, quivering with indecision. A darter could be dangerous. If it closed its jaws on one of his veils, it could tear him to pieces, ripping the tenuous veils beyond repair, sending him plummetting into the depths with no way to check that fatal plunge. He had no wish to die. He would go in search of another flock to feed. There were others, after all. They had not care for his safety when they had urged him to dive. Leave them to their fate. R'hyledd began a slow turn, his body heavy under the thick food particles. He turned his eyes away from the remnants of the youngflock, trying to turn his thoughts away also. The youngsters should have obeyed him and stayed away from the upwelling cloudtop. They should not have expected him to dive. It was their own fault. But R'hyledd couldn't quite bring himself to believe that. After all, it was the nature of the young to be thoughtless. No one could expect a youngster to be otherwise, not until after it combined with a member of another flock to become an adult. Then it would begin to think and reason, but certainly not before. Prior to that, it wasn't even a separate individual. There would be others. Leave these to their fate. (And yet, how many other healthy young-flocks had been seen recently? Surely, there had been more when he had been younger, hadn't there? And how many adults had he encountered, in all of his long life? Not enough. Certainly not enough.) He couldn't simply desert them. R'hyledd cut sharply down in IF front of the darter, coming between it and the flock. At first it ignored him, munching on its latest catch as it angled around to make another pass over the confused youngsters. R'hyledd snapped the edge of his longest veil, shaking loose a puff of yellow food particles just in front of the creature. It couldn't help but notice that. The darter whipped itself around with the horrible speed that made its kind so feared by drifters like R'hyledd. As it twisted, R'hyledd swooped into a graceful arc, gaining altitude, luring the beast higher. He played with it, letting it almost catch him before he flew into an updraft. The cloud field sank further below them. The underside of the white deathclouds that formed the upper limit of R'hyledd's world were close above him now. He'd never dared to float this high before. The pressure dropped as they climbed, and the world grew colder. The darter was afraid. It hesitated, drawing its body together to ward off the cold. The youngsters flickered far below, still tempting. But the adult would be good to eat. The adult was moving slower, probably tiring. The darter would catch it first, and then return to graze on the flock. R'hyledd slowed down, feigning exhaustion. He fluttered one of his veils almost within reach of the darter's maw, luring it on. With unexpected cunning, the creature lurched forward, catching the edge of the veil. R'hyledd struggled loose, tearing off the part of the veil caught in the darter's maw. He should dive, plunge down to the cloud pastures, bury himself in their mists for safety. The darter might not follow him into the mist. It would give up and go off in search of other prey. He looked down, hoping against hope that the young-flock would have fled by now. His tom veil was a raw edge of pain, leaking precious moisture from his ripped tissues. The youngsters grazed, obhvious to everything except their burning hunger, moving closer to the subsiding green upwelling. All thoughts of danger had been forgotten. Occasionally, they would turn their eyes upwards, wishing for the food-laden adult to return to them. Ah, to be young again, and not to know -- R'hyledd thought, watching them from the freezing heights. He returned his thoughts to the present problem. If he dove for safety, the darter would go after the young-flock. He watched the creature chewing, the torn edges of his ripped veil gradually being drawn into its mouth. It swerved abruptly up towards him, evidently wanting more. Higher, then. He would go higher. With reckless disregard, R'hyledd lured the darter into another updraft. They were lifted, tossed almost into the icy fringes trailing Cloudscape below the death-clouds. R'hyledd felt one of his segments rupture outwards in the reduced pressure. Less able to tolerate pressure changes, the darter twitched violently, trying to pull itself together into a ball, hoping to sink. Its mouth opened and closed, belching out bits of what it had eaten. Its fierce hunger was replaced by sudden fear. R'hyledd struggled not to look at the mess the darter had disgorged, fragments of his own veil mixed with chunks of delicate flesh from the devoured young. As he tried to fight free of the updraft, he felt another of his veils rip in the cold wind, sharp agony cleaving almost into one of his main segments. The darter couldn't free itself from the updraft. It was tossed higher, almost into the white clouds overhead. It exploded in a sudden burst, ripped segments whipped further upwards in the wind, torn and shredded. Even as R'hyledd watched, the bits of the darter's body began to sink down, heavier than the thin atmosphere surrounding them. I The young-flock saw the rain of drifting particles begin to descend. They flittered joyously, racing to be beneath it when it would reach their level. They never thought to wonder where their unexpected bounty had come from. The darter was gone. The youngflock would be safe. But R'hyledd drifted just below the high clouds, fluid leaking slowly from his ripped veils and torn segments. He might be able to regain the comfortable regions of his familiar cloud pasture, but he would surely never dive lower again, not after such injuries. He would drift awkwardly for the rest of his life, crippled and vulnerable. Turning his eyes downward, R'hyledd surveyed the cloud field spread out beneath him. How could he have spent all his life down there and not realized how beautiful it was? Off in the distance, he could just make out the happy sparkling of yet another flock of young. The youngsters would no longer gather around him. Their gentle flashes of gratitude and approval would warm his torn and ragged body no more, for he could never hope to dive again. He had thought he'd gotten used to that idea once before, but he realized now that he would never be able to accept it. Descend from these soaring heights to that bleak and lonely prospect of a useless, shredded life? What for? No. Better to let it end now, here, alone. Alone. As an adult was always alone, in life or in death. Only the young could fool themselves into thinking otherwise, caught up in their flocks, dazzling against each other. And yet, they too were alone in the end. When a darter's cruel maw crushed their tender bodies, even the young died alone. IF Was there not, after all, a time for dying? And was not this the time? Without at least the possibility of ecstasy, what was life worth? R'hyledd let himself drift higher, his depleted mass making it all too easy to gain altitude. With sudden decision, he jettisoned the last remaining bit of his moisture. He couldn't sink now even if he wanted to. The raw hunt in his tom segments began to fade into numbness as he floated through trailing crystalline fringes of the deathcold clouds that had always marked the extreme upper boundary of his world. Far below, the ugly greenish eruption in which the darter had hidden was barely visible. The youngsters he had saved were lost from sight, but probably still there. They would have forgotten him by now, with the typical short memories of the extremely young. No matter; their memories, like their shallow and fleeting emotions, would grow long and deep in time. In time. In the time he would never have, now. But that was as it should be. He had done his part. He had given them a chance. (For the first time, he wondered if some other adult had once done as much for him, in the time before his private memories began.) R'hyledd caught an updraft, letting it carry him through icy mists glowing with an impossible brilliance. He could hardly feel his frozen body, except for an occasional twinge of pain as the more vulnerable sections shattered outward in the rapidly decreasing pressure around him. Lifted in the rising column of air, he floated at last above the enveloping cloud. For an amazed moment, R'hyledd stared down at its top, where colors reflected in bright rainbows from the cloud's crystalline dust motes. There was something else above the top of the world, where he had thought to find only clouds! Fighting the pain that lanced through his body as more segments ruptured, he turned his eyes upward, straining to see. Death came, not with the darkness and crushing pressure he had always expected, but in a burst of fierce light. R'hyledd's body flew apart in a shimmer of frozen particles, each one sinking down again toward the cloud pastures below, becoming drifting motes of organic dust, gathering moisture as they fell into zones of warming temperatures. The flock of youngsters saw the rich fall of dust and headed Joyously towards it. In the distance, another flock approached also, drawn by the prospect of good grazing. Many combinations would take place when the two flocks merged, and many new adults would begin their lives. Together, the youngsters swooped and gathered nourishment, sparkling with enjoyment and vitality... For the last time, R'hyledd fed the young. Cloudscape The average citizen of planet Earth is wealthier today than he has been throughout human history. From time to time we need to remember how much we've got to lose. After all, you don't feel rich. Do you understand how it can be that more people feel poor today than ever before? Here are clues. It isn't smog, and it isn't too few negative ions in the air. It's the same effect that robbed the Vietnam War of any shadow of glory. It's one aspect of the rising crime rate. It's the reason everyone seems to be shouting in your ear. It's the reason most of us wouldn't consider powering our cars with liquid hydrogen. It's communications. Faster and better and more realistic every decade. Remember the Hindenburg disaster? Giant dirigible that burst into flame as it pulled up to a mooring tower. Two-thirds of the passengers survived, did you know that? That doesn't happen when a DC-# crashes! But the Hindenburg disaster was the first such to be reported live on radio. The radio audience of the time had no defense against that vision of passengers writhing in a storm of flaming hydrogen. Later generations have learned not to respond so emotionally, not even when there are pictures and gory special effects to increase the impact. We have learned, yes. Cast your memory back to Kitty Genovese, who was knifed to death in New York over a period of several hours. Witnesses watched from scores of windows in surrounding apartment buildings. None of them so much as phoned the police. And everyone wondered why, but the answer is simple. They had been trained not to help... even as you and I have learned not to interfere with the horrors we see happening... on our television sets. From adult Westerns to Alien and Gremlins to live coverage of the Vietnam War, we watch people bleeding and we remain seated. IF Jon Sheen is an aspiring writer stationed in Germany. In # he wrote to me as follows: "I just witnessed a murder. Don't worry about me; I'm in no danger: the killer was caught immediately. In fact, you probably witnessed the same murder, and in the same way: on television. I'm sure you know the case I'm talking about: Gary Plauche murdered the man who kidnapped his son Jody: one Jeffrey Doucet. You've seen the same tape. I'm sure, and my God, it is astounding! If you were directing a suspense film, you couldn't ask for a more dramatic scene, right down to the way the victim's head eclipses the gun just as the shot is fired. This is the third such piece of astounding newsfilm I've seen since the beginning of February "It's affected me strongly. How, precisely, I don't know, but watching that and, earlier, watching two grown men in Rhode Island walking to a car in comical embrace (rendered entirely unamusing by the fact that one of the men was a cop, and the other a hunted criminal holding a gun to his head) and seeing the car shot to pieces by half-a-dozen cops, Lebanese man in a light blue shirt writhing in pain, denying that his factory held armaments, his right arm broken and mangled and twisted within the sleeve -- and then, watching the films taken moments later, of his corpse being carried away All these will stay with me for a long time, and I don't know how I'm going to judge this new capacity to eyewitness mayhem, but when I finally do decide how to react, it will be strongly. "I know what I'll have to weigh against it, though: I've seen the Shuttle launch, and land, live. I've seen astronauts floating along through the void, untethered -- live. I've seen the Earth, so huge and blue and beauone of the first human beings to gaze across the sands of Mars; at the place that is Mars, watched sliver after sliver of Viking's-eye-view of another planet -- live. " 'Electronic Global Village,' the man said. "Yeah." You don't feel rich. Right? But you're very aware of the taxes you pay. In California some years ago, it reached the point of a taxpayer revolt. We set a legal limit on our property taxes. But a taxpayer's revolt used to mean tax collectors hanging from trees! partly because society could not yet afford lampposts. Taxes are enormously higher now than they were during the Whiskey Rebellion in Vermont. Why aren't there tax collectors hanging from lamp posts? Because even after the tax collector gets through with you, you've Staying Rich still got too much to protect. Because you're rich. And if you don't feel rich, the little old lady on a fixed income must feel still worse as she watches her dollar dwindle to its intrinsic value -- high quality paper. What is it that's doing this to you? It's communications. Advertisements! An endless stream of advertisements! An endless stream of advertisements interspersed with every kind of inducement to keep you watching. And while you learn of the wonders you can't afford, you're also learning not to believe what you hear; because after all, these products can't all be best. What were you thinking while you watched the Presidential candidates on your television sets? The world is rich, and the easy resources that won the wealth are nearly gone. Outcroppings of copper and iron ore. Surface seepages of crude oil. Coal and wood: free power. A place to dump the pollution. Yes, that was wealth, and is! Even coal can't be mined without technology; the first steam engines were built to pump water out of British coal mines. Once mined, the coal has to be moved to where it's needed, somehow. If civilization collapsed today, it may be that no future civilization could be built on our bones. We have a great deal to lose. We expect starvation to be rare. We expect paved streets. Side-walks. Sidewalks with ramps for wheelchairs. Freeways. Lighted streets at night, all night. Universal schooling. We used to expect cheap gasoline. Remember? We expect that the streets will be empty of dead bodies in the morning. Every morning. All of this is fairly recent. Consider Welfare: for the failure, total failure has a bottom limit. Some can crawl back up from there. In The Way the Future Was, Frederick Pohl tells of being a boy in the Depression. It was ugly, before Welfare. We expect help in time of disaster. Communications and easy transportation will mitigate the effects of famine and flood. Somebody will know it's happening; somebody will come with what we need. We expect the freedom to go our own way, without the compulsion to be like our neighbors. But being unlike your neighbors has always been a crime. Your present freedom of life style depends utterly on your freedom to move away from your neighbors, to fmd a place where you needn't comform, or even to fmd people who think like you do. With modern communications, you can do that without leaving your living room. With real communications, with a wall hologram phone, you could accomplish any possible social goal short of exercise or sex! We can lose all of that. We can lose more. We can lose the vote. Collecting and tabulating votes is terribly expensive. Many nations IF can't afford it. We could be one of them, if we continue shipping our money to the Arabs while we shut down power plants. Tanny is cheaper than democracy. Only one nation in all of Africa offers its citizens the vote. Can you name it? It's the rich one. It's South Africa. We are richer than other nations. If starvation among our neighbors didn't bother us, we wouldn't be human -- and all nations are our neighbors on this single planet. But the wealthy nations are vulnerable to more than guilt. The have-not nations outnumber us. Modem communications, including advertisements, have told them what they're missing, and who's got it. We could share the wealth equally -- and make the whole world poor. Y ou've heard that before, but you may not have grasped what it means. As long as there have been cities, corpses in city streets have posed a continual health problem. The police force paid by taxes is a recent invention. a tramp used to be quite safe. Throughout human history, women have been property. In genereil women are less muscular than men, more vulnerable to enslavement. Slavery in general was the result of better farming techniques. It cause now they could feed prisoners. The horse collar was a first step in freeing slaves; it meant that the horse could do about three times as much work as a man, without strangling. But if civilization collapsed now, could we afford horses? And grasslands to feed them, instead of farms to feed us? Everywhere? I think we'd go back to slavery. In the name of "protecting the environment" -- surely a laudable aim in itself -- there are those who would oppose all forms of industrial power. I believe that they have forgotten what an environment is like before men have shaped it. They have forgotten tigers and tsetse flies and rabies. It would cost us dearly to lose our present level of civilization. We also can't stay where we are. The easy resources are running out, yes, but there's more to it than that. No civilization has ever been able to stay in one place. We have to deal, somehow, with the information explosion. The proliferation of laws and rules and regulations is part of that. Perhaps we can be educated to tolerate the flow, assimilate it. Perhaps we need information-free vacations -- "anarchy parks," places with no newsflow and no rules at all, as laid out in "Cloak of Anarchy" -- for our sanity's sake. Cars and freeways and airlines give us the freedom to be ourselves, but easy transportation carries its own penalties. Almost every state in Staying Rich the Union has too few state hospitals for the criminally insane. Every time a judge sends a patient to a California mental institution, some doctor has to decide not whether to put a patient back on the street, but whom. Now the patient is out here with me. Why can't we build more psychiatric hospitals, and schools, and prisons? Because voting citizens are not trapped where they are. Some won't vote their money to improve their neighborhood because it's easier to move. We can't stay the way we are. We have to go up -- or down. Today we have the power to make the whole world as wealthy as we are right now. It would take thirty to fifty years, if we start now... and we have to start now. If we wait, we may wait too long. I'm pushing space travel. The resources are all up there, and the first resource we need is solar power. We have several choices as to how to use it. Most people favor picking up the sunlight with collectors several miles across -- which doesn't mean they're particularly heavy; the Echo Satellite was both huge and flimsy. The collectors would convert the power into microwaves, or laser beams, and beam it down to collectors on Earth. Or try this. Big, flimsy solar mirrors. Beam the sunlight down directly, all to one tiny patch of desert. Nobody would live there, of course. The collectors would run at around # degrees F. Again we face choices. We can carefully intercept only the sunlight that would have reached Earth anyway. No heat pollution. Or we can pick up light that was on its way to interstellar space. using the temperature difference between the top and bottom of an ocean) produce none. Nuclear plants produce Just as much heat pollution per kilowatt as coal plans do. But maybe heat pollution is what we want! We've got fair evidence that the next Ice Age is starting now. Right now. We may have been holding off the next Ice Age for the last couple of hundred years, just by burning so much of our fossil fuels, polluting the troposphere, producing a greenhouse effect. The fuels are running out. If we build nuclear plants and put them on line as fast as we can, it may be enough; though we'd have to be producing more power, because there's no particulate pollution. But these mirrors would do the job for us too. There's second choice, and if you like protecting the environment, you'll love this. Besides beaming power down to the factories from orbit, we can move the factories into orbit, and beyond. The resources of the Moon include metals and oxygen-bearing rock, and more. Astronauts who have worked on Earth, in free fall, and on # IF the Moon, prefer the Moon for working conditions. Something has been and the plants fall in love. A nickel-iron asteroid a mile across would hold five years' worth of the Earth's total production of metals, in metal deposits richer than any now to be found on Earth. If you like iridium, you'll love the asteroids; it was that which gave Alvarez his clue to the extermination of the dinosaurs. We'll probably find water ice; certainly we'll find water loosely bound in compounds. Behind the problem you just solved you will find another problem, always. There are social implications to making the whole world rich. "The poor are always with us -- " up to now. Somebody's going to face a hell of a servant problem. Well, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. Staying Rich Savage Cinema scattered thoughts on the state of SF on film by Ralph Sevush I'm still upset. I mean, it's been months since the Academy Awards and I'm still cursing those cretins for their lack of vision. They have once again ignored the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy genres in their balloting, and I think it's time to break out those high explosives. If the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that bastion of self-aggrandizement, were not already brain-dead from substance abuse, they might occasionally acknowledge the films that have been the life blood of the industry since its inception. But no... every year the pretentious hacks, insecure artists, aging queens, and cigar-smoking barbarians gather noint some fine example of mainstream mediocritiy as Best Picture of the year. Then, they toss around some more accolades to movies that also mistake importance of subject for importance of content. The cemonization vice to the unique qualities of cinema. # IF Movies are science fiction. The subtle blending of light and movement, created by technology, brings three dimensional life to a two dimensional surface. As we sit here, in the dark, we are awash in the flickering illusion. We are swept to whatever worlds the storyteller takes us, and we feel betrayed if that world is dull or cliched -- or worse still, if we are taken nowhere at all. Movies, then, have a unique capacity for Fantasy... a capacity greater than that of any other art form. It would seem that SF, Fantasy and Horror would be most well-suited to exploring those potentialities, and the public is well aware of this. It is not by accident that many of the top grossing films of all time are contained by these genres. People instinctively know that nothing in a movie is more satisfying than fantasy, and the dreams that come true in the darkness fade quickly in the light. I'm not suggesting that great films haven't been made outside of these genres, nor do I imply that they won't be made in the future. Obviously, filmmakers from Allen to Zinnemann have created beautiful and moving works that are certain to endure as long as the culture does. All I would intimate to the Academy members is that such critically elemental modes of cinematic expression not be so consistently overlooked in their annual tribal ritual. And it has been consistent. In the # year history of the Academy Awards, the number of Oscar nominations garnered by the SFFH films could dance with the angels on the head of a pin. There are # mor award categories; Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress (these categories receive the most media attention and so have the greatest impact on public opinion, which also translates into  at the box office). If you assume an average of # nominations per category, over # years, this results in over # nominations and over # winners. Of this huge sum, only the following # SF films have ever been acknowledged by the Academy: Savage Reviews In looking over this list, some things come to mind. First, there are only # winners on this list. Second, #I wasn't even nominated for Best Picture. Third, more than half of these pictures have been made since #, portantly, there are no films on this list from #-#, considered by many to be the most fertile period in the history of the SF cinema. If you add all the fantasy and horror films that have received nominations, the list doubles and would include evgenres combined have only gotten about # nominations and # Oscars, about S of the total figure. It is apparent, then, that Hollywood did not take SF seriously until Lucas and Spielberg, having grown up with those neglected classics from the #'s, practically re-invented the form and grossed huge amounts of money. So, finally, some attention was paid. Not, however, a great deal of attention. The voting members, you see, do not wish to appear to be the greedy swine that they are. So, though they chum out formula movies based on the superior work of those filmmakers that allow them to stay hip deep in cocaine, they give the awards to the bullshit "prestige" films in order to convince the public of their artistic integrity. What Hollywood is about is revelation to anyone. To get a better look at the films that have been neglected by the Academy over the years, here is another list of # films. It has been compiled by crossreferencing the "# Best" lists of such writers as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and such film # IF scholars as Tom Milne and Peter Nicholls, as well as various French critics. In chronological order, here are # of the greatest SF films of all time:  #I (#) (#) Not one film on this list has won a mgor Academy Award, and only # (all directed by Kubrick) have even been nominated. It should be noted that were not eligible for the awards. Still, Hollywood's ability to disregard these films has been an amazing accomplishment. This year, it seems, there might be a new film to add to this list of negour distopian future. It is a flawed but most stylistically original films to come along in eons. Gilham has remade Orwell's "#" with visual bravado and laughter bom of fear. Unfortunately, that fear extended to the Hollywood studio executives who saw in GiUiam's work only that it was too long and had an unhappy ending. A struggle ensued, as the studio tried to coerce him into butchering his work to meet their Luddite standards. When the film opened to critical acclaim in Europe in its original form. Universal was forced to modify its position. When the film won e LA. critics award for Best Picture after a limited engagement there, the studio's hand was forced again. After a brief but moderately successful run in NY, Universal finally gave the film a national his vision on the screen, but the bitterness he caused certainly played a role in the Academy's subsequent snubbing of his film. It is interesting, though, that they did best picture. In its stagy and plodding way, that film explores our need for fantasy and celebrates the role that the movies have played in providing it. It is, however, a static, pretentious load of trash... inferior in every way to Needless to say, Allen's film had to settion for Best Screenplay. I am much calmer now, as this outpouring of bile has exhausted my indignation. I have put away those explosives, at least for another year. Perhaps it is best, after all, that Hollywood continue to ignore the creative contributions of SFFH films. As Brian Aldiss said, "If the SF cinema is to retain vitahty and subversive intent, it must remain a minority taste, and not try to perennially hit the warm heart of Middle America." So there... but remember to keep your powder dry. Savage Reviews #I art: Paul Lehr The little girl stumbled into a thorn bush, whimpered, then stopped walking and wiped her eyes. "Where are we goingT she said petulantly. "Where are we anyway?" The stout young man in hunting clothes reached down and hefted his daughter up into his broad arms. "I'll carry you a while, Amy," he said in a low voice. "We're lost, sweetie, but if we keep going on the same compass course, we're bound to run into something." "Yeh, more woods," said the trimmer, plain-faced young woman in ripped grey slacks and a ski jacket, walking beside him. "Hey Peg," said her husband, already puffing with the weight of his daughter, "this is Rhode Island. You can walk across the whole thing in two days." "I knew we should have stayed in that apartment," she snapped back. "It was crazy getting into those traffic jams. No gas. It was stupid!" # IF Her husband shook his head tiredly. "Don't remake history. Peg. The cops had guns. They told us to go, for God's sake!" "You've got a gun!" said his wife with a snarl. David Bidwell quickly yet gently put his daughter back on the ground and straightened up, his round, usually-cheerful face flushed with anger, his hands planted on broad hips. "Great!" he snarled back. "I'm supposed to thirty hunting rifle with you and Amy there, huh? Don't be so stupidl We never had a choice in any of this." "We had a choice of getting lost or getting to Westerly!" his wife spat back. "The map they gave us was useless," said David, but now he spoke more quietly. "Okay, so we guessed wrong in some places and we started with half a tank. Did you want to go into that station with the two guys on the ground and all Ring Shot the blood on the apron? Did you!" Peggy Bidwell was about to make another angry retort when her eyes opened wide and she put a trembling hand on her husband's arm. "David," she breathed, "Smoke... and close!" Sure enough, over the next small hill, coming up over the scattered trees and underbrush was a thin colunm of white smoke, drifting east in a gentle breeze. David Bidwell looked around, then went to a large rock where he unslung his rifle and carefully hid it among some mossy ferns. "If they don't want us, we'll just leave, but there's no point coming up like we offered trouble." His wife said nothing and Amy, suddenly sensing the tense fright of her parents, seized her father's hand tightly and said nothing more as they walked slowly through the sparse woods toward the rising smoke. They came in hesitations and pauses over the rise to a clearing with several small outbuildings, a trail bike leaning against a tree, and what appeared to be a prefabricated cabin in the center with the smoke coming from its cinderblock chimney. Sitting on the front stoop was a portly, very old man dressed in a rough tweed Jacket, jeans, and wearing a Swedish yachting cap. He was busily cleaning a World War Two Sten submachine gun. He looked up, saw them at once, and sent them a big smile. "Hi there," he called out. "You folks are lost, I suppose?" His cheerful tone brought them walking rapidly forward while David smiled and nodded in the most positive gestures he could manage. "You're right, sir. We were in the convoy to Westerly... that's our host city in the relocation plan... but the traffic got so jammed they set us all off in groups over the back roads. Well... " David shrugged, "we just ran out of gas. The maps they gave us were useless since the roads are shut now through most of the towns." The old man peered professionally down the barrel of his gun, then grinned up at them. "Hell, the Civil Defense honchos in Providence and Washington knew they weren't going anywhere," he said cheerfully, "so the maps didn't interest them very much. They've got those underground places right close for their gang." He gave a thin chuckle. "Won't do them a damn bit of good, of course. For once the captain and the officers will be going down in the vessel with the rest of the crew." He sighed and shook his head. "Cold comfort for people as young as you folks." "Could I have a glass of water, please?" said Amy politely to the old man. He got to his feet nodding. "You can if you tell me your name. I'm better call me Uncle Phil, I think." "I'm Amy Bidwell," said the child directly. "How old are you. Uncle Phil?" Hoskins gave her a measured look, his small, round eyes twinkling. "If I tell you, Amy, will you tell me if I look that old and then tell IF me how old you are?" "I will if you'll then tell me if I look that old too," said Amy quickly and with a bright smile. "Done!" said the chuckling old man. "Okay, I'm eighty-one." Amy looked at him more closely, then tilted her head in deep thought. "Well," she said finally, "you don't look quite as old as Granny, and she's only seventynine." Hoskins roared with laughter, his round cheeks puffing out. "The nicest compliment I've had in ten years," he said to David and Peggy, who were now almost smiling themselves. "And I'm six-and-a-half," said Amy seriously. The old man pursed his lips and stroked his pudgy chin. "Funny," he said in a slow, puzzled voice. "I would have guessed seven-and-ahalf, if a day. You sure you're counting right?" The little girl turned at once to her mother. "Are we, mom? I mean, you should know...?" Peggy Bidwell finally saw that they had, through some miracle, stumbled on a friendly haven, and she suddenly laughed out loud, the first time in days. "I guess I should know, Amy!" she said, then added, "Mr. Hoskins..." "Uncle Phil, now... "Yes, well I think Uncle Phil is just saying that you're a very mature girl for your age... We're Peggy and David, Uncle Phil." The old man picked up his gun and cleaning tools and held open the screen door. "Come on in. How about some orange juice, Amy? Water can be boring, boring, boring." "That would be lovely," said the girl, now looking around the big central room in wonder, for it contained books at every level and in every crevice. A table and several chairs filled the center of the room while an ancient player piano crouched in one corner and a huge desk covered with papers and the connected parts of a small microcomputer in another, but otherwise there were books everywhere. Hoskins opened a small door next to the fireplace and carefully put the Sten gun into a narrow closet also containing, the Bidwells saw, several other weapons. "Don't worry about all that ordinance," said Hoskins slamming the door shut and turning to grin at them. "I can easily see that you folks are solid citizens, but on a day like this one, you never know until it's over what might happen or who might come." He went into the small, lean-to kitchen at the back and soon returned with a big glass of orange juice. As he handed this to Amy he peered sideways at the adults from under thick, drawn eyebrows. "I gather the name, Hoskins, meant nothing to you people?" he said in a tentative voice. Peggy shook her head at once, but David had been thinking about the slightly-familiar name since the old man had spoken it. Suddenly his eyes went wide and he turned to look carefully at the old man. Ring Shot "That scientist..." he said softly, "the guy who defected to Russia... Oh, wow!" Hoskins beamed at the large young man and turned, as though in a lineup, to show all sides of his puffy face. "Yes, they really made a big thing about it. Actually, a good friend about my age went to Berlin on my passport, dropped out of sight there, and came back using, ah, other documents. In any case, I'm afraid I wouldn't have been any safer in Russia. Less safe, if anything, since probably only half of their weapons will detonate properly." He sighed again, then gave them a smile. "Say, how about a beer to charm away these final moments?" David and Peggy nodded dumbly and when he returned, Hoskins also carried a shoe box along with the beer cans. "Amy," he said, "when my grandaughter, Ruth, came to visit me years ago, she played with this china village. But the rule is, only on the big bed in the little room over there. This is a very fragile village so you mustn't let parts of its knock together." He shook his head sternly. "I'm afraid some of the cows have suffered serious leg wounds from Ruth's cattle stampedes, but I know that a girl of your advanced age will realize that there is nothing anywhere more placid than small, china cows." The girl delightedly carried the box into the small room and they heard her exclamations of joy over the china houses, people and livestock packed in layers of cotton. # IF "Sir, uh. Uncle Phil," said David, "why haven't they found you here?" Hoskins gestured them to seats around his small, central table, then shrugged as he popped open his beer can. "They weren't looking, I suppose. They assumed I had gone east, to the nasties. People in Washington tend to think the worst about the rest of us." "Is there going to be a war?" said Peggy, leaning to put a hand on the old man's arm. Hoskins wrinkled his nose. "I'm not sure that war is what to call it." He got up and went over to his wide desk, then studied a disorderly mass of spread-out papers. "You see, from first launch to warhead separation somewhere over the middle of Canada takes about fifteen minutes... Then they have to slow up and maneuver some of the weapons to form the ring in a resonant manner, so maybe six... ah, say ten minutes more until the shot is complete. Within ten or fifteen minutes the fires will have coalesced and set the air masses in motion. If counter-launch occurs at, say, minute eight, the resonances will lag a bit, but the Soviets have more trees." He shrugged, his face twisted in contempt and anger. "Say one hour until the earth is dead. Is that long enough to call it a war...?" The young couple stared speechless at his calm, now angry smile, his sharp, twinkling eyes. "The truth won't make you free," said Hoskins slowly, "but maybe it will help. So listen close and I'll tell you what's going to happen. You've never heard the term, 'ring shot', I suppose?" David spread out his thick hands in a gesture of guilt. "I'm a programmer in an accounting firm and Peg teaches first grade. I guess we should have paid more attention to what was happening," he said in a lame voice. "Everybody in the world is going to be repeating that lament pretty quick," said Hoskins drily, "but without a secret clearance you would have never known about it anyway. Mother Jones missed it completely and if the Times knew, the news didn't fit what they wanted to print. "Okay, I was a physicist with a specialty in the study of the atmosphere; sort of a glorified and theoretical weather man. A few years ago I published a series of papers on computational and analytical methods, using largeframe computers, to predict what are called 'trigger events' in the atmosphere. The method seemed to have promise in the early prediction of hurricanes and, most especially, in tornado study and warning. Unfortunately," the old man's face hardened and his stained, old teeth clenched, "the method can also lead to designs of nuclear attacks, of which the most terrible is the Resonant Interspaced Nuclear Grouping technique which those insects in Washington with their stupid acronyms have naturally called, the ring shot!" He stared at them, his face set and again angry. "When you deploy and detonate fifteen or so warheads, all carried by a single rocket, in a particular sequential, geographic and altitude pattern, you can trigger a hundredthousand square miles of atmosphere into a single, circular cyclonic pattern. The initial firestorms will join, augment each other, until the entire ring of fire organizes a single, vast weather system. Winds inside this system will exceed twohundred-miles-an-hour. No living thing inside the ring will be able to withstand the wind-driven flames during such a catastrophe. Concrete, aluminum siding, bricks, everything will burn. A single large missile, so programmed, can devastate a third of this country." Hoskin's voice had risen in intensity to this final statement while Peg and David stared at him in complete dismay. "They... they wouldn't use a thing like that...?" said David, shaking his big head. The old man's eyes glinted. "They would if they thought the other side didn't have it. But wait, you haven't heard it all. Listen now! It's important. After the first two parts of my paper had been published, the editor of the journal called me up. He was an old friend and he risked his career to make that call. The people from Washington had seized the manuscripts, working proofs, back issues involving my articles. He told me to run, to go to Zurich and see a particular physicist, another old friend, who now lived there." Hoskins rubbed his hands as Ring Shot though to warm him from a remembered chiU. "I went that night and that call saved me. I shaved off my beard, my hair too, dressed in my one suit that I never wore, and headed for the airport. The plane was full but I got on first class, used my credit cards. I had never done anything like that before. My wife and I, before she died, always went tourist with people like you three, at a discount, tickets bought weeks ahead. 'The Swiss passport man questioned my picture but I was ready. I let my cheeks sag, my shoulders slump... not too hard to do, under the circumstances... and said I had lost my hair to chemotherapy, that I was in Switzerland to see specialists." The old man gave them a confidant wink. "He couldn't have been nicer, found a man to lug my stuff, a cab, the whole bit. In Zurich I went to the apartment of my friend and there I learned how my lifelong, peaceful efforts had provided the final keystone to the terrible ring shot and other abominations. "Listen!" said Hoskins suddenly and intently to them. "We are not without hope, you two! Listen and understand, for faith and resolution may save us when all else fails. And strange and awful as the ring shots may seem to you folks, far stranger events may face us." Somehow his intensity had caught them up and they could only nod in stupified agreement. "We made more calculations in Zurich. It was a dreadful few weeks but there could be no doubt. If our missiles created even a single firering vortex in the Russian heartland while they were producing a comparable pattern over our midwest, the source-sink effect across the globe could set up an intercontinental circulation that would actually eject the atmosphere into outer space, the flow being driven by the huge pressure defects in the rings. Yet only two of these attacks were trivial. Clearly each side will launch many, so any threshold uncertainties in the calculations are of no meaning. The answer is clearly that we will lose our entire atmosphere in a very few minutes after the source-sink phenomenon is established. Understand, the effect is synergic, that is, the pressure imbalance and the ejection rate grow as the atmospheric loss procedes." He paused, sighed, and pointed in the direction of the player piano. "On that piano is a recording barograph so that I can know when the pressure decrease begins." He shook his head. "The air loss will be swift, a few minutes at best, but I thought it would be a good idea to get the whole curve on that gadget..." They sat silent until Peg blinked and shook her head, her eyes blank with shock. "Who would read it. Uncle Phil... with all the air gone?" she whispered. His more cheerful smile returned. "A sensible question. Peg, Think of it as a final, gallant puff on the cigarette as the firing squad cocks its rifles... or an old man muttering in fear-besotted senility. IF But let me continue with my story of Zurich. There was formed years ago in Western Europe a quiet group of men and women, scientists, thinkers, philosophers. As they watched Washington and Moscow sink into wretched posturing and madness they sought ways to slow or change the dreadful business. At first these people identified the very smartest young scholars. They had found sophisticated ways to spot them, through university records, structural analysis of their publications, many other ways, and these young thinkers were then recruited away from high-energy and weapons studies into wholly new paths of research and scholarship, an attempted synthesis of all human activity. Some few were even brought out of the eastern nations and Russia. They hoped, in this manner, to prevent any more so-called breakthroughs in large weapons systems and, at the same time, seek a total and radical solution to the world's fatal problems." The old man was now thoughtful and his mood was somber. "They did not contact me because I was old, in my seventies, and ideas that underlie such freakish horrors as the ring shot almost always come from the very-bright young, the new PhD.s. But alas, 'almost' is not good enough and when I began to publish my papers on atmospheric triggering, they had men who saw at once what I had not seen. They realized then that their cause was hopeless, that they did not have the resources or abilities to find everyone in the world who might discover a way to end it." Hoskins sucked thoughtfully on his beer can. "Once we decided that several northern-hemisphere ring shots would cause the ultimate trigger effect, the group realized they must keep me from the authorities lest I be forced to help produce this final insanity. It was evident to the people in Zurich that both east and west were attempting to achieve the fire-ring first. The group had contacts everywhere and almost unlimited resources. After all, who has more to lose than the very wealthy? They arranged to buy this old hunting place, then work out my 'defection' from Berlin and get me secretly back to the States. But I am only a small part of their salvage ef forts..." At this moment the small radio perched on a book shelf that had been muttering along on low volume began to give a thin, steady shriek. The old man's face instantly became ashen and his hands, that had gestured so firmly and with such angry movements, now simply shook. "How quickly it comes..." he gasped. "You see... I never really believed it myself... in my heart..." but then he recovered himself almost as quickly, got to his feet, and walked to the radio to turn it up slightly. The shriek continued for another half a minute and Hoskins, his face now regaining its normal, ruddy color, curled his lips in contempt and disgust. "Who launched first. I wonRing Shot der?" he said bitterly. "Let's see how efficiently they'll give us our epitaphs." The shriek suddenly stopped and a deep, modulated voice came smoothly out of the tiny radio. "Attention. This is not a test. The President of the United States has just announced that about seven minutes ago, at least nine large missiles left their launching sites in the Soviet Union. These weapons are aimed at targets throughout the United States. Our forces are now retaliating in overwhelming strength to prevent any further attacks. Everyone listening to this message should go immediately to the center of their dwelling space and as far below ground level as possible. Persons in vehicles..." Hoskins shut off the radio and as he returned to his seat in the sudden, total silence, they all heard Amy get down off the bed in the other room and walk over to the open, bedroom door. She walked slowly and gently for in the hollow of her cupped hands sat a small, china shepherdess in flounced skirt and puffed sleeves and bearing through a tiny hole in her closed hand, a golden wire crook. Amy stopped and looked at them across the room. "What did Ruth call this lady?" she asked the old man in a serious voice. Hoskins took a deep, shuddering breath, smoothed back his sparse white hair with a slight tremble, then completely concerned himself with the little girl's question. "Well, Ruthie called her Marie An# IF toinette." He gave Amy a cheerful shrug. "That lady was Queen of France and she liked to dress up and pretend she was a shepherdess. I told Ruth that she needed Versailles Palace to keep such a grand lady happy, but that didn't seem to change her mind." Amy nodded, then turned to go back through the door. "I like Marie," she said in a thoughtful tone. "That's a very good name for such a pretty lady." Peggy Bidwell's eyes had suddenly spurted tears as her daughter turned to reenter the bedroom and her mouth, indeed her whole face, was now contorted into a silent scream of "Amy!" but the old man had darted out of his seat and over to her side. He seized the young woman tightly in both his arms and urgently pressed his lips to her ear. "No, Peg! Stop!" he whispered. "Now, if ever, you must be steady! Steadiness is everything. Amy may be our salvation, but you must keep her from this!" Her flood of grief was dammed and softened by the old man's fierce, quiet words and now David also held his wife in his large arms as she snuffled, then rubbed her eyes and blinked silently. "We are pressed," said Hoskins to them in a tight voice, "but there is time left. And perhaps what I will tell you now is best said at the very end, so there will be no long time to consider and question it." He seized Peggy's hand in a tight, passionate grip. "You two, teacher and programmer, you must have gone to college and somewhere in those years you must have heard some philosopher discourse on the nature of reality, and on the relationship between human perception and reality. Now listen! What cret group, in Zurich and elsewhere, have come to believe is beyond imagination and beyond hope! To put it briefly, they have shown a direct, causal relationship between the development of perception and consciousness in selfconscious beings and the increasing complexity of the universe. Once you understand it, the evidence is everywhere! In the dinosaur bones, in meteorites, in the cells of living things. Saying it as simply as possible, as humankind has developed ways of seeing and studying natural phenomena, those phenomena have progressively developed and deepened its very structure. The old question concerning the meaning of the sound of a tree falling with no one near enough to hear it was not trivial, but the truth is grander and even more astonishing. Once nervous, self-conscious being can hear sound, then there is sound from then on. That's how it works!" He stared sternly at them, then flicked an eye at his watch. David Bidwell had been closely following the old man's words, nodding thoughtfully, but now he shook his head in dismay. "For God's sake. Uncle Phil. Then every time we build a bigger telescope, somebody or something has to put more stuff way out in the sky... masses of stuff! I mean..." "Exactly!" said Hoskins, pointing a fierce and steady finger at him. "Exactly what happens, and there is proof of that too, but we have no time for it." David continued to shake his head. "All that stuff, all that changing... why? Just because we get clever at studying something? That can't be possible!" Hoskins shook his head back in sudden anger. "Don't be stupid and claim you know what's possible and what isn't. The favorite cosmological theory today among western, estabhshment savants, those same men who have also given us this appalling and abominable moment about to come, is that the universe began as a tiny, infinitely-dense speck, smaller than the tiniest speck of dust on this floor and with a lifetime at birth of ten-to-the-minus-forty-fifth of a second. Does that totally incomprehensible, stupidly useless and philosophically banal sort of model please you any better, sir!" The old man's small, pudgy finger now waved directly under David's large nose, while with his other hand he pointed rigidly at the door to his bedroom. "That child," he said in a hissing, fierce whisper, "has created a whole village, a whole society, on that blanket. If you could take it all from her head... Right now!... the detail of geography, history, social mores, family life, everything, would be beyond words to encompass, yet she is six-and-a-half. Who are you to say what can and cannot happen in the cosmos, when your own Ring Shot small daughter can already create whole worlds that you cannot possibly enter!" "None of it makes sense," said David doggedly, but his wife, her eyes now dry and her face set and desperate, seized his arm in a strong grip. "Listen to him, David!" she said intently. "What else have we got? Listen! My God, listen Hoskins nodded in gratitude at her. "If their theory is not true, then all life on earth will end within the next few minutes. But suppose they are right? What happens to an entire, evolving universe when the consciousness that has created it, given it meaning, is suddenly and totally eliminated? What?" He stared fixedly at them until Peggy shook her head, her hands trembling, her face collapsing. "This is all beyond us. Uncle Phil..." a lassitude of despair. Hoskins seized her hand to steady and squeeze it. "No one knows what will happen, Peg. But they have all theorized, those in the group with appropriate specialties, and there were many ideas produced, even during the short time I was with them in Europe. But let me tell you, finally and quickly, about one afternoon in a Zurich park with Jacob Hirschman, for of all of them, I believe he has the deepest insight, the most reliable model." Hoskins looked again at his watch, then at the barograph, and he spoke carefully. "Hirschman is a philosophical mathematician of the finest sort, younger than I am. but still old and thoughtful. He had turned his mind to this great paradox of creation and destruction for some time and on my last afternoon in Zurich, as I waited to be secreted back to this house some months ago, I walked with Jacob in the park to watch him feed the pigeons. I asked him there, when we were alone, what he planned to be doing when the ring shots were fired. It was an obvious question that transcended and utterly simplified his dense and mathematical predictions circulated among group members. "He smiled at me when I asked that, but he answered at once. 'If be reading in my favorite chair some well-loved work. Possibly War and Peace, but perhaps not. The book will be selected when the time arrives. He peered at me fi"om large, quiet eyes. 'If you exyou must insure that it is as simple and probable as you possibly can. Those crouched in shelters and cellars, their minds choked with red rage, inconsolable grief, and blind terror will have no way to fit into any alternate, more benign, reality. And that reality must appear, old friend. The cosmos cannot exist without us. We must, somehow, be fitted in.' "'And during the daytime?' I asked him then." " 'Feeding the pigeons, of course,' he said, gesturing at the severil dozen birds strutting and pecking here and there. Then he added, 'And having, most imporIF tant of all, very pigeon-feeding thoughts.'" Hoskins stared deeply into each of their faces. "Do you understand what he was saying? You must! We three, and God be thanked, greatly helped by Amy, must think nothing but pigeon-feeding thoughts from now on! You must seize that final courage in your innermost souls if we are to have a chance of survival. Now, on your feet, cheerful, smiling, and if you love each other and your child, sing and dance now from the utter core of your hearts!" "Amy," called the old man as he walked over to turn on the player piano, "how would you like to come in here and sing some songs with us at the piano?" She appeared in a moment at the door, the china shepherdess cradled again in her hands. "Can Marie come too?" she asked. "Absolutely," said Hoskins, "but I think you'll find her voice rather high and squeaky... quite hard to hear at all, actually," he added with a grin. Amy giggled at this and began a long, slow, sliding walk across the room so that there would be no chance of the china figure suffering a collision or jolt. But the old man stood rock-steady watching her from the piano, his round, ruddy face mild and avuncular in expression and only with the tiniest dart of an eye did he, now and then, catch a glance at the barograph chart or his watch. Hoskins finally took the small figurine from the little girl's lifted hands and gently raised it up to set it well back from the edge of the piano top. "There," he said, "she can watch, even if she can't carry a tune. He turned and poked into a large case of piano roll boxes. "Let's try Beautiful Ohio," he muttered, threading the roll and starting the vacuum motor, then sitting down on the piano stool. Amy now stood next to him. "I don't know the words to that. Uncle Phil," she said. "They're right on the roll," said the old man as the music started, "and I know you must be a speedy reader." Amy soon learned to coordinate the printed words moving downward with the tune, and her high, sweet voice drew them all in loudly so that the song ended with a series of cheers and handclaps, mostly from Amy. As the roll rewound swiftly, Hoskins looked over at the barograph, and seeing no change in the steady line, removed the roll and pulled out another one. "Okay," he said, "that one was from the farmlands so it must be time for the big city," and the mandolin-style tinkle of Sidewalks of New York filled the room. Their voices rose and fell, following the old song. "I voted for AI Smith," said Hoskins reflectively during a piano interlude. "Sure wish we could get him back from wherever he went." This time during the rush of the rewinding roll, the old man saw that a tiny light he had installed in the barograph case was now glowing. This signalled a statisticallysignificant one-percent loss in atRing Shot mospheric pressure. Was the wind rising? It was hard to tell with the curtains drawn. He took a deep, involuntary breath. Amy was now jumping up and down and clapping her hands in complete excitement over the player piano. "What does 'trip the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York' mean, Uncle Phil?" she cried in dehght at him. "That" said the old man, rising briskly from the piano stool and pointing a finger at her head, "is exactly what you are now going to discover, Amy." As the music began, the old man bowed low before the little girl and took her right hand in his left. "May I have this dance, my lady? he said grinning down at her. Amy immediately and solemnly curtsied, then grirmed back at him. "Yes, but you'll have to show me how," she said. "This is Harlem Strut, written by James P. Johnson and played in this very room for your eijoyment by the composer," said Hoskins cocking his head at Amy. "So, you must strut. Just so Amy..." and off he went, kicking, strutting and posturing around the table and drawing Amy with him by the hand, but she soon understood the simple, rhythmic steps and danced lightly beside him, kicking and shaking with bursts of laughter. Around they went, the piano tinkling brightly, Amy now fully mimicking the old man's elaborate, strutting steps as he shouted, "Fingers, Amy, snap 'em! Shoulders, shake 'em! Come on, you two! Amy and I are showing you how to do the thing. No time for shyness now!" So David and Peggy started to follow them around, feet tentatively kicking out, fingers starting to snap. "That's it!" said Hoskins beaming at them from across the table. "If Mozart had lived in the Bronx, he would have written farlem Strut! Back straight, Amy! Knees and ankles floppy! Wonderful, wonderful... !" Behind them on the piano the line on the barograph was now visibly turning downwards and a second and then a third light were glowing inside the instrument case, but the two couples now paid no attention, strutting, swaying and grinning. When Amy momentarily pressed her left hand against her ear and said, "My ears feel funny. Uncle Phil," he only strode ever-more-stiffly and kicked with ever-greater exuberance. "Ears are for listening to Harlem Strut, Amy! Snap those fingers, young lady!" And as the tune neared its end, the tempo began to slow a bit as the pneumatic system of the player piano progressively failed to keep pace with the accelerating decrease in room pressure, but they still danced gaily, swaying and strutting around the room. "Perfect! Super! Unbelieavable!" came the glad cries of a young man who dashed into the room and jerked a set of headphones off his ears while waving a compact super# minicam at them. He whirled to gesture wildly at the IF other doorways. "Weren't they great! Hey, Pol, I mean, wasn't that something else" A slim, pretty young woman sitting behind a portable light-control switchboard set up in the kitchen got up while busily rubbing red, streaming eyes. "It sure was!" she snuffled as she pulled off her own headset, then got up and walked into the main room. "Boy, you guys really had me going. Oh, wow!" She went over and tearily hugged Peggy. "When you broke up in that silent scream as Amy came out of that room with the doll in her hands... that was like heartrending, you know?" Peggy hugged her back and wiped her own tears away. "Yeah, I really got into that story. Well... when it's your own kid it makes it easy. And Amy was so great..." Peggy wiped away another tear and patted her husband's shoulder with a loving gesture. The young film director had dropped to his knees and seized both of Amy's hands. "You were just totally super, Amy!" he said to her. "The way you picked up on that dancing, watching the Prof, getting into it. Ohhh, it was soooo goodr Amy beamed delightedly at him. "I loved the dancing part," she said positively. "I'm going to be a dancer when I grow up, you know?" "Sweetie," said the young man passionately, "this film will kick you off into a great career." He stood up and waved his hand at two more young men and another young woman who had come in to the room through the other doorways. "We've got a winner! I know it. Absolutely!" He turned to David, Peggy and the old man. "Wow, am I glad I got you people out of that extension acting class instead of using some undergrad acting majors from the campus. This film unit is one of ten in the U.S. already. If our movie makes the first three in that contest, it goes on national prime time. And..." he said, swiveling and grinning at them all, "arty, serious shorts are coming back in a big way in movie theatres. Hey, we're all going to be rich and famous!" On that cheerful note the student film crew packed up the cameras, lights, and other gear and began to load everything into two vans parked outside the house. As he pulled on his hunting coat, David Bidwell gave the old man a slightly-guilty smile. "Uh, Phil," he said, "you wouldn't have any gas in cans, would you? We ran out on the south access road and hiked in. Danrm gauge is busted." "Why sure," said Hoskins, then turned to the young lighting woman coiling her cables. "Hey, Polly, there's a two gallon can of unleaded in the far shed. Drive these folks in your van down to the south access road and stay with them until they get their car going, okay? Take off the air cleaner and pour a little into the carburetor before you crank it," he said to David. The Bidwells and the film stuRing Shot dents went out of the house talking cheerfully to load the large van, then went rumbling off over the open ground to the south. The unit's director had seemed to be in no rush to follow the rest of his crew, and now he stood at the front door to the big central room, looking across at the old man, his intent face seeming puzzled, almost concerned. "Doc," he said, "you were almost too good in that thing, you know? You really caught me by the throat. I mean, the way you kept kicking and strutting, so loose and happy, drawing Amy along. But your face just got firmer, more rigid; that tight, almost-mad smile... hey, you defined that moment totally, all that joy, terror, hope, death, the whole bit, man!" Hoskins smiled and nodded. "You're kind to say that. It was fun doing it, but I guess it was wrenching too. I was as caught up in that story as anyone. And..." he paused, then shrugged as though suddenly catching an afterthought, "it worked, didn't it? Here we are, safe and sound." The startled director, bewildered by this strange comment, bit his lip then shook his head with a small, embarrassed frown. "Well yeh, but, I mean, there wasn't ever any doubt, was there Doc? It was just a short film. You know, we had a script..." The young man paused, then said seriously, "Doc, you don't think they might ever be able to do something crazy like that, do you? Like that ring shot, I mejm?" Hoskins shook his head. # IF "They've been trying for over fifty years, ever since World War Two. Good grief, they've spent more money on splitting atoms than on the space race. Understand, studying the atomic nucleus isn't my physics thing, but apparently there's just no way to get what they call the multiplication factor in an atomic reacting system beyond unity, so you can make more particles than you use up. Old Fermi thought he had it solved when he built a system at Stagg Field, in Chicago, but the thing wouldn't work then and they don't work now. They still aren't sure why, but it has something to do with changing probabilities of fission events as that magic number, one, is approached." The student director nodded and rubbed his cheek. "Thank the Lord for that," he said fervently. "After doing this story today, oh wow, I mean nobody needs ring shots!" But Hoskins's old face had grown sober in apparent deep thought. "Still," he said with a spurious intensity as he saw how thoroughly his young friend had been drawn into their short, intense dramatic effort, "the sudden removal of the atmosphere raises an array of interesting questions. You see, the seas will boil as the pressure drops, with the tropics starting first since the vapor pressure is high over the warmer water. Yet that sudden cloud cover wiU prevent the sunhght from warming the surface so there will be an immediate and drastic depression of solar insolation and surface ternperature. So you're going to wind up with steam and ice, but... in what proportion? Or maybe all of one or all of the other...?" He had now taken on his lecturing tones and was looking musingly over at his smaU computer system with its keyboard, TV monitor, and disc drives spread about. "Interesting problem, actually. Quite challenging..." But the old man's clever acting spoof had drawn in the young man completely. "Doc," he said, almost in tears, "no, no! Don't mess with that stuff. Hey, don't use that thing on the table to do those numbers! You and Amy dancing, that's the only way to deal with weird, crazy, horror stuff! You've done it. Doc... beautifully... don't, don't...!" Hoskins stepped forward and clapped the young director on the shoulder. "You're absolutely right," he said in a laughing voice. "Also," he added, waving toward his computing system, "I have a date tonight with a Pac Man Nine disc... you can gobble ghosts throughout N dimensions." The young man, finally realizing that the old professor had sucked him almost effortlessly into their holocaust fantasy once again, shook his head ruefully. "Wow, you should have done this acting stuff instead of physics. Doc." He paused, then looked over at the piano. "Listen, can I take that barograph for a couple of days? I want to cut away from you and Amy dancing to the graph paper on that thing and end the film with that line going right down towards zero." He wEilked across the room to lift the instrument off the player piano. "What about the visual background behind the barograph?" asked Hoskins as they walked out the front door. The director shrugged. "No problem. I want to go in tight on the chart, then show the pen dropping steadily and quickly, maybe a twenty-second shot in all. I might iris down on the pen and fade the light too. The old man nodded. "Okay, I'll ride over to the school tomorrow and give you a hand with that. We can disconnect the arm inside there and move the pen by hand while you shoot. What about the sound while the barograph goes to hell in a hack?" The student slammed the door of his van and grinned out the window at the old man. "Just more of Harlem Strut from your tinny, outof-tune player piano, doc, maybe going slower and slower. I mean, after that dance with Amy, what elseT He gave a big wave and roared the engine. "See you tomorrow," he cried as the van backed away. Professor Hoskins waved in return, then turned to go back into his retirement house deep in the woods of Rhode Island. As he entered the big, central room, he saw at once the small, china figure of a shepherdess sitting on top of the silent player piano. He walked to the piano corner, bowed, and said quietly, "Marie, Ring Shot our dance I think," then fitted Harsnapping, posturing dance around lem Strut again onto the pick-up his center table, humming and mutroll. When the bright, unremittering to himself, while on his tingly-cheerful music started, he round old face could now be seen lifted the china shepherdess firmly an extraordinarily happy expresbut gently in his closed left hand sion of complete and total and set off in a strutting, fingersatisfaction. name address city, state, zip code country (if other than U.S.) Subscription rates (check one):  in the U.S. or Canada, # for # issues (I year)  in the U.S. or Canada, # for # issues (# years)  foreign via surface mail, # for # issues All subscriptions are payable in advance in U.S. funds only. Mail to: Worlds of IF, P.O. Box #, Hicksville NY #. IF Under Gaming by Stefan Jones Welcome to the first installment of Under Gaming, a column about gaming which will be appearing with some regularity in IF. The title comes from my dissatisfaction with the "other" SF magazine gaming columns. Mere descriptions and light-weight reviews of an odd game or two do not do justice to the genre. I will try to delve a bit deeper, perhaps getting a bit philosophical and probably a bit arrogant and curmudgeony. I'U begin with a rough history of gaming, as a prelude to where I think the genre is going. Over ten years ago, SF magazines began carrying ads for an unusual breed of game: military simulations. Though they were largely set in historical times (with World War II and the Napoleonic Wars the seeming favorites), some of these games had a science fictional theme. Boardgames all, these simulations tended to be grand, strategic exercises. They attracted a small but enthusiastic group of fans who held their own conventions, but had little crossover with the SFannish mainstream... Little crossover, that is, until two games changed the entire gaming industry. The first was produced by Metagaming Concepts, the first game company to concentrate solely on SFF themes. The game, released in #, was Ogre, a tiny "Microgame" that was easy to learn and play. Ogre set the stage for an explosion of science fiction and fantasy game titles, many of which were far easier to learn then the heavy simulations of the past. The second revolutionary game was, of course. Dungeons  Dragons. It was the first commercially produced role-playing game. Instead of taking the rather abstract role as a leader of vast armies, each player took control of a single, highly-detailed "character," a fictional person described by numerical representations of a series of attributes (intelligence, combat ability), etc.). The concept, if not totally original, had come of age in DD. Clones, supplements, new games, and playing aids burst the sluice gate; within eight years DD became a household word and had its own Saturday morning cartoon. Dozens of other games are available on subjects ranging from rabbits to time travel to post-holocaust survivalism. Nearly every gamer I know also Under Gaming # reads SF and fantasy. Nearly every fan I know has tried role-playing and other types of games. Many science fiction authors have participated in gaming projects, ranging from tie-ins to popular books (Ringworld, Thieves' World, etc.) to games designed by authors themselves. Gaming suites, and even organized gaming, seem mandatory at SF cons. But... how "legitimate" is the griming genre? Is running a game the same as writing a novel? Should there be, as suggested by an article in the first issue of The Space Gamer over a decade ago, a Hugo Award for games? Though gaming is one of my favorite hobbies and designing gaming material a remunerative sideline, I can't imagine a gaming Hugo... yet. One type of gaming, the board game, has no literary pretensions. Board games simulate battles, economic conflicts, and occasionally the rise and fall of galactic empires. Their story is told by numbers and distribution of units, stockpiles of resources, and occasional elaborations such as morale levels. They are abstract and cool, and require more intellectual effort to learn and play. Board games, even the SFF brands, have fallen on hard times lately. Kids raised on video games don't have the patience to learn them. Games) without giving board games a second thought; thus we move to the hottest part of gaming today. To be blunt, the vast majority of roleplaying games are crap. The fantasy universes (with notable exceptions such as M A.R. Barker's "Tekumel" and (Fantasy Role Playing) games are often rehashes of Tolkien with liberal doses of oriental mythology and cutesy fannish aliens thrown in. Science fiction campaigns are almost always set in a "sci fi" universe of galactic empires, space mercenaries, and starship traders. Modern sophistication in these games is having a giant megacorporation be the enemy rather than an alien horde. Many game masters (the fellows who run the adventure and determine the behavior of background characters) are convinced that the only way to play is to purchase "modules" (pre-planned adventures) and adopt every new character class and monster that surfaces in gaming periodicals. Individual creativity is exchanged for a consumer mentality. Because it is the players -- this includes the all-important GM (Game Master) as well as the ordinary folk running the protagonists in a game adventure -- who bring a game to life, who make an adventure what it is, it is they who are the true indicators of the state of the art of gaming. If Hugos were to be given for gaming, it could be argued that players would be the nominees. Alas, the players too seem to lack spunk. Characters are modeled after stereotypical space mercenaries, barbarian warriors, and wizards. Heck! Many players consider their characters to be little more than units -- for all intents and purposes, they are playing a win-or-lose wargame. The attitude most players have in these games -- and therefore the nature of game adventures -- can be described, quite simply, as juvenile. The A-Team and Japanese cartoons about robots that turn into dump trucks are often more sophisticated. Whoa there! Calm down, fella. (Sound of a forehead cracking against the document ledge of a PC keyboard.) Ah, that feels better. Though I am often disgusted with the state of gaming, its true purpose (thrills, fun, and -- in the case of role-playing -- an emotional escape valve), must not be subverted to IF literary pretensions. A gaming Hugo would only confuse the situation. Though conventional gaming will be around for some time, I can see it being overtaken as the "leading edge" of gaming by a strange newcomer -- the or "arcade" games when I say computer games. Arcade games made and killed the home computer market a few years ago. They are light entertainment, the electronic equivalent of picking at scabs or popping the little bubbles in plastic packing sheets. The computer games with real potential are best represented by titles such as The Seven Cities of Gold, Mule and Balance of Power. They are deep games. Deep computer games have a lot to them. A lot of detail, a lot of playability, a lot of options. They use the power of the computer to give the illusion of the "endlessness" that makes role playing games so appealing. An example: the New World generation system in The Seven Cities of Gold. This is a nifty exploration game: the player plays a Columbus or Magellan-like character charting and exploiting the Western Hemisphere. The flipside of the game disk is equipped with a computerized map of North America. Terrain, native villages (including Inca and Aztec cities) and special features (gold mines, the Grand Canyon, etc.) are all laid out in nice graphic form. When the adventurer has "played out" the real Western Hemisphere... he can make a new one. A sophisticated continent generation program is included with the game. Though random numbers determine the exact layout of the lands beyond the Atlantic, various rules keep things logical. Mountains come in chains, villages appear on river banks, and the river systems run from mountain to the sea and not vice versa. The world thus created is logical and consistent. Because the player's job is to explore it without running out of food or getting lost, it has "meaning" to the player, rather than being a chunk of random real estate. Given the speed, graphic power, and huge memories of the new breeds of game computer (the Amiga and Atari ST computers), we can look forward to some really great stuff in the future. Imagine a world and civilization generator. Given sufficient elements that can be varied, plus good rules to eliminate silly results, very "real" worlds and aliens could be created. Such worlds could change with time: seasons would cycle, civilizations wax and wane, governments bubble with intrigue. One would create the world, set up the rules, and start the clock. Another important part of a good game is interactivity. I suppose the ultimate in this is the ability to "talk" with game characters. Though we can't expect a mere game to pass the Turing test, making conversation a useful, enjoyable part of a games is quite possible. Giving each character in a game a personality via an Eliza-e program (Eliza is a program that simulates a psychiatrist; it picks key words out of inputted sentences and uses them in replies -- the "counseling session" thus simulated can be unnervingly realistic) is quite possible. One more element that has to be added to computer games to make them competitive with conventional role playing is to make them multiplayer. This is difficult. Home computers are essentiaUy one-user devices. There is, however, a model we could imitate to solve this problem. This will be the topic of my next column. Under Gaming art; Vincent DiFate I they're transparent. Sometimes This isn't my first day on Marchthey catch the light. Then it looks plateau. In this cage. Guess it's a like they've got layers of water, in cage. It has cylindrical bars, but gentle waves, inside them. My I,;#...V V    '.i'M mother used to have lamps that had gently-lapping water trapped in their bases. Although I'm dating this entry Day #, I've actually been here a long time. Weeks. Longer maybe. I hate trying to organize my thoughts for a journal. But I've got to record something. My name is Richard Treskitte. I was abducted from Earth by space travelers from Marchplateau who brought me here and put me on having a barbecue but none of them did anything. New Yorkers are like that. Hard to get their attention unless you've got a real show business sense or a Saturday Night Special in your hand. I started to scream but an alien pressed a three-quarter-sphere against the skin of my arm and I passed out immediately. I woke up on their ship, which looked like the inside of an Earth space capsule but bigger. One of the aliens told exhibit. This might be a zoo. Maybe not. The planet's name sounds like Marchplateau in their language, a language which isn't much different in sound, syntax, and grammar from my own. This place could be a museum, I guess. Maybe I'll soon be pickled in some odorous liquid. Marchplateauians came down to Earth in a spaceship. To the roof of my building, actually. There was a bunch of people on a nearby roof me in accented English that they were taking me to their home planet and I shouldn't worry. I asked why they'd kidnapped me. I was just an ordinary guy, why me? I said. He just ran a spaceship, he said, don't ask him. So they brought me to this luxury cage. I think I'm being studied. Observed, at least. A lot of Marchplateauians pass by and through my cage. None of them tell me anyMarchplateau # thing about why I'm here. I can't figure out what they're looking for. I'm exactly like them. They're like me. FYank, apparently my keeper, or chief scholar, is a good deal like me. They look human. Faces arranged the same way as Earthpeople's. Ditto bodies. I can see no difference between a Marchplateauman and an Earthman. A Marchplateauwoman and an Earthwoman. They have woman's liberation here, too, so I have to be careful about nomenclature. Marchplateauperson? Marchplateau itself looks an awful lot like Earth. Overcrowded cities, pollution. Jeans. Even designer jeans, though with different names sewed or appliqued on their pockets. Bad plays on their Broadway, the usual movies. Cars. Trees, TV. Prepackaged foods, fast-food chains. How could fast-food chains develop independently on two different planets? A heavy question. They got junk mail. No cockroaches, though. Haven't seen any cockroaches. What differences there are, don't amount to much. I'd like to get away. Escape. I'm lonely. I'd like companionship. I'd like a woman. I'd like to figure out how you organize a journal. Day # A Marchplateau tailor measured me for a suit today. He wrote each of my measurements down in a notebook with dogeared pages. After, he chewed on a pencil and stared at me. "What'd you learn about me?" I said, thinking he, like all my other captors, was studying me. "What's new to learn? I'm a tailor. They told me to fit you for a suit. What you're wearing now, small wonder." Day # My new suit is brown, made of a soft material between velvet and chamois. Lapels and pocket linings are darker than the body of the suit. There are epaulets on the jacket shoulder. Like the Mao jacket that came and went so quickly years ago. Maybe there was a Marchplateau Mao. Frank told me to wear the suit when I have visitors. Anytime else I can select fi'om my own wardrobe. I always sleep in the nude, which I hope annoys some of them. Day # The suit makes me look more like them. They all, men and women, have epaulets on the shoulders of their clothing. Not just jackets and suitcoats. Dresses, shirts, and blouses, too. And raincoats, but then they belong on raincoats. Before they gave me my own suit, I didn't notice their epaulets. Unless my new suit has set a new style. Some of my visitors stare at me through rectangular glass partitions all along the walls of my cage. Other visitors enter my cage and give me close-up onceovers. A few write stuff down on papers attached to clipboards. But most of them are just sightseeing, I guess. IF Anything gives these clowns a thrill. Using the toilet in the corner of the cage makes the outside peeping toms laugh and cheer. I've gotten to like it, even expect it. I wonder if Marchplateau toilets are always in living room corners, if Marchplateau families applaud when one of their number uses it. They must get a lot of laughs from Pampers. I just realized -- that's where prisons keep their toilets, in the corners of cells. Don't like thinking of that. FYank always sails in here carrying a clipboard, just like the more scholarly of my visitors. On him, though, it looks like a weapon. He's my most frequent visitor. I doubt he's really named Frank. I think the Earthstyle names on Frank and some of the others are meant to make me feel comfortable. Frank is tall and rugged-looking but something of a sophisticate, the sort of intellectual who camps out or climbs the occasional mountain. "You people enjoy studying me?" I asked him today. "Some of us. Others don't. They feel we should be studying an outstanding representative of your race, culture, and species. A leader or an achiever." "You really know how to hurt a guy, Frank." He looked pleased by that remark. He wrote it down on his clipboard paper. Later he told me he was working against the termination of the study. The word termination stuck in my throat like a clump of food. I applied the Heimlich maneuver to my fear and asked what were the odds that the study would be terminated and, if terminated, would the subject of the study also be terminated. He said he didn't know. It was all based on finances and diverted funds. He won't tell me the purpose of the study. Perhaps Marchplateau wants to invade Earth or maybe they're just doing an objective analysis of alien life. But how could their findings be fruitful? It'd be just like analyzing themselves. Day # This journal's beginning to look like the work of a madman. Diary of a Madman by Guy de Treskitte. Anybody reading this might be thinking I'm just a loony in an Earthbound snake pit. Not so, Potso. I am real. Marchplateau is real. Even Earth is real. I was really abducted by aliens. I've probably been listed in the missing-persons column of the Sunday Daily News. I am really living in a luxury cage. With a real toilet in the corner, the force of whose flushing could power Indianapolis overnight. I even have my own TV set. There's more violence on Marchplateau TV. Makes it more watchable. I'm not insane. Up till now my life's been disgustingly normal. Well, I was over thirty and unmarried, but that's hardly deviant nowadays. For God's sake, I was an accountant! Day # Now there's a woman in my cage Marchplateau # with me. What are they up to? She says her name is Daisy. She too was abducted from Earth. She says. They've been keeping her in a separate cage. She says. Seems like a setup. I don't mind, though. She's terrific in bed, so should I complain? We had a swell time last night. I didn't even mind the Marchplateauians outside the window laughing and cheering. Still, I'm not sure she's really an Earthwoman. Her "memories" of Earth seem convincing, and her English pronunciations are quite good. But then, so are those of the Marchplateaupeople. "It's only logical to think I'm one of them," she said this morning after I expressed my doubts. "A ringer. I'm not sure about you either, buster. But, look here. I've been too lonely to care about such technicalities." "If you're a ringer, maybe they're trying to gain further control over me." "Why would they want more control? They got enough already." "Maybe you're a Marchplateau spy." "But I'm not. Heck, buster. I'm a social worker ft'om Pittsburgh. Why would they want to play such complicated tricks on a social worker and an accountant?" "You know, you're fairly sensible. For a ringer." "So are you, ringer. So let's forget that sort of crap." But I can't forget it. I want to know if she's a ringer. On the other hand, she does have a long, slim body and she wears her blouses tantalizingly open, and she has a pretty enough face with a bit too much chin, but who cares about chin when you got love? Day # FYank was surprised that Daisy and I had so many doubts about each other. No tricks were being pulled, he said, it was merely worthwhile to the study to bring us together. We are both Earthpeople, he vowed. We said we didn't know how we could possibly believe him. "Well, how about clues?" he said. "Any clues you can use to identify yourselves to each other -- things we Marchplateauians couldn't possibly know, for instance." "I don't know what you know or don't know," I said. "Then accept each other on faith." "Don't know about that, but I'm ment until I'm sure." "Am I just a convenience to you then, Richard?" Daisy said. The odor of feminism was heavy in the air, so I replied: "No, no, Daisy, it's not that at all." "Okay if it is. I'll bide my time. Or fall in love with a Marchplateauian. Frank's cute." "I'm taken." "The cute taU ones always are. You know, Frank, the one thing that really bugs me about Richard is his name. Richard Treskitte. I keep wanting to get myself some soft French cheese and spread it all over him." "It's a legitimate name," I said. IF defensively. "So you say. At least Daisy Martin has a solid Earth ring to it." 'Too solid, too American pie. The right ring for a ringer. Just the sort of alias a Marchplateauian would dream up. My name'd take too much imagination." "We have a high degree of imagination," Frank said. "We could easily invent imaginative names." "But why?" Daisy aid. "Why be too good? That'd be a dead giveaway." "You are both authentic," Frank said. "Believe me, please." "Methinks the lad protests too much," I said. "A misquoting of Shakespeare," Frank said. "You know Shakespeare? Maybe you're the earthling," Daisy said. "No, we're reading Shakespeare these days. A volume of the bard's work was appropriated on our most recent trip to Earth. Our first printing of the tragedies is a number-one best-seller now. Such wonderful stuff! The language, so rich and melodic, not at all like what you two speak." "That's a mean-spirited thing to say, Frank," I said. "I thought it might look good in your journal, Richard." I wanted to give up right then... What good is keeping a Journal if they're going to read it? Are you with me on that, Frank? Day # I wasn't going to write anything more in the journal, then I realized it might be the only record of me left. It'd preserve me. I want to be preserved. Even in formaldehyde, Frank? That would seem to be your kind of joke. Whoever reads to the end of this sentence will be consumed in instant flames, if he is Frank. All others may proceed. I told Daisy today I was fond of her. She strolled around the cage, examining furniture, vnthout replying. She touched my genuine leather reading chair. I felt uneasy. I knew she realized it was my chair. "I had a chair like this in my cage, too. It had cigarette holes in its arm. I miss it. I'm glad you're fond of me, Richard." "I think I'm in love with you." "You know, your whole decor's better than they stuck me with. Chauvinist Marchplateauian pigs. This is a cheerful cage. Even your TV reception's better. Mine was -- " "Daisy, I said I'm in love with you." "I heard you. You want me to respond in kind. Okay, Richard Treskitte (you sure about the name?), I love you too." I rushed to her, intending an embrace. "Daisy, I'm so -- " "One thing. The truth. I'm not an Earthwoman. You were right. I'm a Marchplateau spy." I recoiled from her, lost all desire to touch her. She laughed. A lot of scorn in that laugh. "You fell out of love real quick there, Richard. No, I'm not a spy and not a native and now let's talk about splitting the housekeeping duties. Also, I want you to look Marchplateau away when I use the toilet." "You let all those creeps out there watch you." "Can't do anything about them. It's scientific for them. For you it's voyeurism." Our viewers outside the glass were staring at us with peculiar interest. I think they suspected a fight brewing. I sulked instead. I think they erjoyed that just as well. Maybe Daisy was right. Maybe I was just faking the love. I don't know. If I'm not in love with her now, I think I could eventually fall for her. What do you think, Frank? Day # The English language is sweeping Marchplateau, Frank says. It's become a second language for most citizens. He said that Marchplateauians tend to top off quickly on fads and that this'd pass. Maybe I'm a fad that'U soon pass. I must escape. You didn't read that, Frank. Day # I escaped. We escaped. I found the key to the cage in my suit pocket. Maybe Frank, reading yesterday's entry, decided to slip it there. I'd say thanks, Frank, but that'd mean we'd been captured again. Or that his successor is reading this. Successor, at the end of this sentence you will be turned into a frog. At first Daisy didn't want to go. "It's a setup," she said. "They'll just reel us in later." "So what? Maybe we'll outwit them." "No way." # IF "Well, I don't care if it's a setup. I'm going." "Me too, then. You got a good point there." We escaped from the cage and the compound easily. There was nobody anywhere near us. The compound, we found out, was smack in the middle of a city. With no concept of where to go, we wandered the streets. People passing us paid little attention. We were dressed like them, looked like them. At first we stayed out of their way, walking along the edges of curbs, crossing the street when there were too many people on our side. Most of the passersby seemed to be speaking English. We relaxed a bit. I noticed very little difference between Earth and Marchplateau. Trees were trees, buildings were architecturally the same, sidewalks were bright green but were made out of cement. I saw several five-wheeled cars but they could have been Japanese. In a clean shopping center where all of the stores had brown awnings, we found a glitzy store devoted to Earth objects. Its window display seemed kind of random. Toward the front of the window was a pile of AI Jolson records. Then, of course, a selection of Shakespearean plays, plus a Marchplateauian interpretation of his works. There was a bunch of jewelled and nonjewelled barettes, the center one showing a flat plasLangtry, colored by hand. Videocassettes of kung fu movies. A lot of other items I can't now recall. "There don't seem to be any electronic games," Daisy commented. "Maybe they forgot to steal batteries." We discovered you could ride in Marchplateau buses without paying. Since our feet were aching, we took a few joyrides. We rode by many signs, stores, and objects that were obviously influenced by their thefts of Earth culture. I wondered if some of the Earth items derived from their study of Daisy and me. I hoped so. As we got off a bus, a group of people surrounded us and suggested we come with them. We thought we were caught for sure, but the people turned out to be dissidents who had recognized us. They took us to an apartment where we could stay the night. I was glad of that, I couldn't have rode or walked much more. They said the apartment was safe for only a day and we'd have to be on our own again after that. They said a massive search for us had been launched. They apologized for not being more helpful. I told them they'd been quite helpful. The fed us well, just like back at the compound. Everybody on Marchplateau seems concerned that we eat well. They tried to explain their politics, but I was too tired to comprehend and not very interested anyway. Earth politics, Marchplateau politics, all the same to me. They left us alone in a bedroom. Daisy fell asleep and I've been writing in the journal ever since. I'm in a quandary. I can't tell if Daisy is a real Earth woman, if Marchplateau's a setup. I only know who I am. I want to know more than that. Knowing who you are's not enough. You have to know someone else. I don't like being disturbed like this. These guys have screwed me up good. Even if I get back to Earth I'm not going to be the same guy I was. I'm going to think a lot about my experiences here. I'm going to think a lot of what a creep I've been, trusting in everything I saw, believing everything was real and somehow worthwhile so long as I accepted it. Now, even if I accept such things, I won't know if they're real. Worse, if they're real, I won't know whether or not to accept them. I'm really tired, I guess, to be worrying about stuff like this. I almost hope you're reading this, Frank, even though I devoutly hope you explode when you finish this sentence. Day #I The dissidents took us to a downtown spot and dropped us off. Their vehicle was a kind of van, again with five wheels. They acted strangely, whispered a lot to each other. I thought I heard the word sabotage a couple of times. When they said goodbye, they also said they were sorry they couldn't do more for us. Daisy asked if we could join them. Three of them answered no very quickly. "I want to touch something and know what I'm touching is real," Daisy said after we'd walked for a Marchplateau while. "I know what you mean. It'd even be nice to feel pain." "I don't want to go that far, lover." We walked around the city like sightseers on the last day of their trip, too bleary-eyed to be as interested as they feel they should be. Nobody in the streets paid us much attention. At midday we had lunch, having found out from our rescuers that restaurants in the city were subsidized by the government for the convenience of the citizens, and that lunches were free. Halfway through a rather good meal I realized that perhaps the essential difference between Earth and Marchplateau was that on Marchplateau there is such a thing as a free lunch. After some aimless post-lunch strolling, we turned a corner onto what appeared to be a darker street. It was a moment before I realized that the darkness was caused by the smoke clogging the street ahead of us. People scurried left and right, emerging from the smokescreen like apparitions. Daisy and I broke into a run, glad to have something to investigate. A few steps later we discovered that the smoke was coming from the windows of a burning building. "What is it? What's happening?" I hollered to a passerby. "It's the orphanage. The orphanage's on fire. The children, they're trapped. It's awful." "Where's the fire department?" "I don't know. I heard -- heard there's been a terrible crash on the boulevard. A pileup. Several firetrucks involved. Some say sabotage. But I don't know." I thought of our dissidents and wondered if setting fire to an orphanage was their idea of a good protest. "Why are you running away?" I grabbed the man's arm to keep him from running further up the street. "Why isn't anybody doing anything? Why is everybody running away?" "Let me go. I don't want to die." "You're out here, not in there. What are you afraid of?" "The orphanage, it's built -- the building next to it, that's the munitions works, the explosives factory. It could go up any minute. Let me go." I let him go. Like almost all the people around us, he scampered to some safe place. Thicker smoke was now pouring out of the orphanage's windows. Flames licked at the buildings on both sides of it. There was no sign indicating which of these buildings was the explosives factory. I could hear the children's faint frightened screams. "Why doesn't anybody do something?" Daisy said. "They are. They're running away." "But the children. Listen to the children." I knew I had to do something and wondered why my legs seemed suddendly made of lead. "Daisy," I said, "get to a safe place. I'm going in there." I didn't wait for her response. I IF started running toward the burning orphanage. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that Daisy ran there with me. I suspect she'll always do the ornery thing. We were shoulder to shoulder as we pushed through the orphanage's massive front doors. Inside, there was a lobby presenting few obstacles to us. The fire was in the upper stories of the building. None of it had reached the lobby yet. A few wisps of smoke seeped from between elevator doors, crept down the main staircase. It all looked no worse that people just out of sight sneaking cigarettes. I began taking the steps of the main staircase three and four at a time. Daisy kept pace. By the second floor the smoke had become heavier and the children's screams louder. "Can you figure out where they are, the children?" I screamed to Daisy. "The next floor, I think. Toward the front." As we reached the top of the next staircase, flames licked at our ankles for the last few steps. The third floor corridor was nightmarish, fire all around us. The edges of the hall rug were smoldering. Corridor furniture seemed decorated by tiny wisps of flame. A landscape on the wall depicted a calm Marchplateauian country town Just as it was catching fire. "All the sounds seem to be coming from there," Daisy shouted, pointing down the corridor. As if the fire had heard her, it sent new massive flames across the hallway. Daisy and I went into a running crouch and, holding our breaths, began zigzagging down the hall toward the sound of the children's screams. We got through the main body of flames and into a pocket of clearer air. At least it was breathable. We were near the end of the corridor. A window in front of us revealed an almost empty street down below, empty except for a small party of onlookers who perhaps didn't know that the building next door was an explosives factory. I wondered briefly if I should call out to them. Then I realized they were standing there calmly, listening to children scream, and I knew I really didn't care whether or not they went up with us. The screams came from both sides of us. We simultaneously realized there were two groups in two facing rooms. I nodded toward one, and Daisy started toward it while I went to the other. I grabbed for the doorknob, a goldplated object which itself seemed to have a distorted miniature fire going on just beneath its surface. As I touched it, I knew a split second ahead that it was a stupid move. The metal was hot from the fire and it burned the three fingertips of mine that made contact with it. I quickly pulled my hand away from the knob. I felt the pain, I know, but I was able to ignore it. I started heaving myself against the door. I had no idea how one batters down a door with one's shoulders, having seen only padded actors on Marchplateau #I the screen thrust themselves at what undoubtedly were plywood doors. This door just might have been made of plywood, for it gave before my first heave. It didn't quite open but I'd nearly split it down the middle. I looked back briefly at Daisy, her hand wrapped in cloth, opening her door by its knob. It occurred to me that I could have thought of that, but I had no time to change plans and was in fact in the middle of flying at the door again. It gave way this time and I stumbled into the smoke-filled room. Coughing, I called out to the children. They began screaming louder and I located them in a corner of the room, untouched as yet by the fire. They huddled together, like refugees in a war photograph, their faces smudged, their eyes teary, their voices horase. They were little kids, all of them, not a single one more then four or five years old. Quieting them down with a shout, I instructed them to link hands. They responded quickly, obviously used to discipline. I grabbed the smallest child, a tiny girl, and held her in my left arm. With my free hand, I took the hand of the tallest boy and led all of them across the burning smoky room. In the hall we met with Daisy and her group of kids. Somehow we managed to get ourselves down the corridor, just narrowly avoiding the threatening flames, then raced down the stairs to the lobby and the street. Outside, the smoke had become nearly as thick as it had been inside the orphanage. I went into a choking fit from the lack of fresh air that I'd been anticipating in the rush downstairs. Herding the children in front of us, we ran across the street and found fresher air. Suddenly people materialized from nowhere to help us with the children. As we reached the sidewalk, there was a sudden clangor of bells and sirens, followed quickly by a long parade of firetrucks careening around the nearest corner and coming to comical silent-movie stops in front of the orphanage. I stared at them incredulously. So did Daisy. "It's almost as if they were just waiting there, just around the corner," Daisy said angrily. "Would they just wait there and let children burn?" I asked. She shrugged. I didn't want to think about it. Out of breath, my lungs aching, my legs ready to collapse from trembling, my fingers beginning to throb with intense pain where they'd been burned, I felt really good. After days of confinement and our short time of fruitless wandering, after years of safe living before my abduction, I felt good. We'd acted heroically, Daisy and I. I'd never expected to act heroically. Ever. I always thought I'd stay inside living quarters, behind desks, in my vehicles, in other people's vehicles, on public transportation, anywhere where I wouldn't even see the threat of danger at a distance, much less participate in it. I always knew I wouldn't go to war, I never thought I'd run into a burning building. I should have been like IF the Marchplateauians I'd seen in the street. I should have been running away. All of a sudden I felt frightened. I had really done it, hadn't I? I thought. Even as I thought it, I noticed the children seemed to be disappearing, taken over by the suddenly-appearing adults who were now taking charge, who were taking the charge away from us. I hadn't even looked closely at any one of the children, had no idea what they had looked like, cannot now remember a single detail of a young face. It was like watching the accomplishment itself vanish right in front of my eyes. I turned around and looked back at the orphanage. Streams of water were pouring into it from the firetrucks. Firemen had the situation well in hand. A crowd was beginning to gather on our side of the street. "Nobody seems afraid of the explosives factory now," I remarked to Daisy. "Maybe there never was any danger." "I'm beginning to wonder." "I think we've been used." "I know. This whole thing could easily have been staged. But the fire itself was real. I felt it." "Such things can be staged, too." "I suppose so." A fireman came to the crowd and began to force the front line backwards. "The factory can still go up!" he shouted. "There's still danger!" "You think he overheard us?" I asked Daisy. "It's like we're the ones he's trying to convince." "Let's get out of here." "I'll go for that." After we'd walked a few steps, a well-groomed pretty woman came up to us, said she was from a newspaper and had pictures of us as heroes and would we grant her an interview. Daisy told her to get lost. She said newspeople never get lost. Daisy told her to learn. She stayed with us a while longer, asking incessant questions to which we didn't respond, then did manage to get lost. "But why would they stage something like that, even for us?" I said after the newswoman had left. "I haven't a notion." "Staged or not, they were placing children in danger." "Maybe it wasn't that dangerous. Maybe they weren't children. Maybe none of it was real. Maybe they used simulacrums or holographs with substance. Maybe the fire was a special effect." "It burned my fingers." "No, it didn't." "What do you mean? Look!" "Richard, the hot doorknob singed your skin, not the actual fire which, you must admit, for all its sound and fury, kept missing contact with us. All of it, Richard, all of it could be the result of a highlysophisticated technology. After all, their technology managed to carry us across space from Earth and keep us in a rather comfortable and well-constructed zoo." "I don't know what to -- " Marchplateau I was interrupted by the sound of an immense explosion. We'd traveled about four blocks in a straight line from the scene of the fire. Looking back, we saw a large mushroom cloud of smoke rising from the sites of the buildings that had been the orphanage and the supposed explosives factory and whatever was next to each of them. We stood and stared at the disaster for several minutes. When the smoke had cleared and we'd walked closer, we couldn't see any bodies. The only debris not belonging to the buildings was a mangled fire vehicle. I asked a woman passerby if anybody'd been hurt. She said no, fortunately the firemen had gotten everybody out of the way just in time. "Evidently the firemen got themselves out of the way, too," Daisy muttered. "Yes, they did," the woman said blandly and left us. "Staging," Daisy said. "I don't know," I said. "Pretty elaborate for that." "How do we know what's elaborate for them?" "If you remember, I don't even know if you're one of their elaborations." "I'm not. And I'm beginning to believe you're not, either." We walked the streets for a long while, then found the hotel we're in now. Daisy's fallen asleep. Her snores are quite earthlike. I'm beginning to believe in her, too. Perhaps the fire was staged. Perhaps they hired orphan actors, firemen actors, crowd extras, pass# IF ersby with bit parts, and put it all on for us. On Earth movie people never care about blowing up city streets if the light is right. Still, I recalled my own bravery. Our bravery. That was authentic. At least that was authentic. I think I can sleep comfortably with that. Or wake up Daisy and -- no, sleep. Day # I condemn Marchplateau. And you with it, Frank. I'll spend the rest of my days trying to escape. I will not join your club. Daisy and I awoke this morning with the same thoughts. We were tired of aimlessly walking Marchplateauian streets. With its emotionally-comatose citizens and their indifference to the suffering of children, Marchplateau seemed to offer us no real escape. There was no purpose in staying away from the zoo. We'd return. We'd turn ourselves in to Frank and make the best of our luxury-cage lives, eating the good food, living the good life. Finding the way back was easy. I remembered each step I'd ever taken on Marchplateau. I could almost see my earlier footprints walking toward me. Nobody stopped us as we entered the grounds nor, as on the city streets, did anybody there pay us much attention. A couple of Marchplateauians nodded to us as if we were people they saw every day -- co-workers or familiar tradesmen. Many others rushed by us, with papers and scientific devices on their omnipresent clipboards. "Everything looks about the same," Daisy said. "Everybody busy busy busy." "I thought they'd be busy trying to locate us. They don't even seem to notice us. Either that, or they haven't noticed yet that we left." "They do seem to take things in stride." We came around the turning in the path that led to our Marchplateau home. It had been painted since we'd left. A bright eye-hurting red. Something in the paint must have been luminous, for rays seemed to shoot off the building's surface in all directions. People still massed in front of the cage's viewing windows, still walked the grounds around it. Several official types were still making their shorthand notations on their clipboarded papers. As we approached our building I said to Daisy: "I feel insulted. They've turned our place into an eyesore. I'm going to give Frank the what-for for that. God, I hope they haven't painted the inside in the same way." "Relax, it's probably some new kind of test." People, both scientists and viewers, glanced up at us as we neared the building, but nobody seemed startled or in any way impressed by the fugitives' return. Most just gave us the eye, then returned to what they were doing, staring at the viewing window or making notations. "Hi there," I said to nobody in particular, and nobody in particular responded. "We're back," I said to a passing scientist. "Good for you," he answered, then looked us over and asked: "Who are you?" "Who are we?" "Yes, do you have a job here? I'm sorry, there are so many personnel changes I can't keep up with -- " "We're a personnel change all right. We escaped. We belong in there. Put us back." The man, and a few others, stared at us, then started to laugh. "They're street-clowns," a woman said. "I must say that's one of the more annoying customs we've imported. And where's your makeup anyway?" "We're not street-clowns. We're Richard and Daisy." After a pause, while everyone stared dispassionately at us, the scientist said: "Well, what kind of act do you do?" "We're the earthlings." "Another pause, another laugh. "Good show," the woman said. "Now that's more the kind of joke I can react to." "No. We really are the earthlings. We've come back. Your planet is like a steady diet of nitrates and we want our cages back." The woman sighed. "I must say, this custom of aping the earthlings has gone too far, much too far. Why don't we steal some beings from some other place? I am really getting tired of being besieged by Earth material wherever I go. Earth trinkets. Earth customs. Earth languages. Marchplateau our people pretending to be earthlings... "What do you mean, pretending? We're the main attraction. Your people 've been coming to this, this zoo for weeks, just to see us. We're famous. We're Richard and Daisy. We capitulate." "I thought the earthling's names were Jonathan and Mermina," a man at the viewing window said. "That's right," the scientist said. "My name was never Jonathan," I said. "And I certainly wouldn't want to be called Mermina," Daisy said. "That's not even a proper Earth name. She must be a ringer." "We know you're not Jonathan and Mermina," the woman said. "They're in there." She pointed toward the cage. Daisy and I, after looking startled at each other, approached the vievnng window. Marchplateauians parted before our advance, leaving us a clear path. "You look first," Daisy whispered. I saw Jonathan looking back at me, his rather stupid eyes wide open with curiosity. He was just as interested in me as 'I was in him. Daisy came to my side. "We've been replaced," she said. Jonathan stuck out his tongue at us, then -- in the European style of obscene gesture -- flicked the back of his hand at us across the bottom of his chin. Turning, he walked away from the window arrogantly. Mermina, a tiny pretty woman who'd been standing back, whispered something to him. # IF "I want to see Frank," I said to the nearest official-looking person. At first he pretended not to understand me, then he made a signal to a subaltern. In a moment FVank came out of a side door of the bright-red building. "What can I do for you folks?" he said amiably. "In there," I said, pointing to the cage. "We have first rights. We belong in the cage. We're the earthlings. We have seniority." Frank sighed. "This Marchplateau fad for earthlings has gone quite too far," he said. "And now a new trend: the identification of two of our own with the Earth people to such an extent that they -- " "What do you mean, identification! What are you pulling, Frank? Quit jerking me around!" Frank's face grew sad and he addressed the onlookers: "See how well they pick up the phrases, the manners... ah, pity." A sympathetic murmur went through the crowd. "We are the earthlings," I said, talking to the crowd myself. My voice. I'm afraid was whiny. "Rather, we were the earthlings. Before those interlopers. Some of you must've seen us." Looking at their blank stares, I felt like a madman. I felt lost in a nightmare. I felt beaten. I shrugged and turned back to Frank. "All right, Frank, you win. We're whatever you say we are. Just give us a cage to lie down in. I'm bushed." "Oh, we can't do that. It would interfere with the project. I wouldn't want to disturb Jonathan and Mermina." "Well, you're sure as hell disturbing Richard and Daisy. Look, we have no place to go, Frank. No way of functioning on Marchplateau. No identity here, no usefulness. No place to go, Frank!" My voice was desperate. I expected Frank to say something in officialese or to tell us to go our own way, but I had to beg someone and he was the only Marchplateauian I knew by name. "Come with me," he said amiably. "ReaUy?" "Your complete identification with the earthlings has made you forget that any Marchplateau citizen who needs help, or a Job, or anything from another citizen wiU receive his request from him." "Anything?" "Anything?" "Frank, it would give me great pleasure if you'd cut your throat from ear to ear with the sharp end of your chpboard." I kind of wish he'd done that. What he did was take us to an office and let us sit down on overstuffed chairs. "Good to see you again, Richard," he said. "You too, Daisy." "Then you do know us," I said. "How could I forget you?" "You faked it pretty well out there." "We don't like to confuse our visitors. They're quite happy with Jonathan and Mermina. Our attendance here has doubled in the short time since we installed them in your place. Everyone here is quite pleased. Our study is progressing by leaps and bounds. We're very happy. You did us a favor by your escape." "And you knew it beforehand. You planted the damn key in my pocket, Frank!" "Did #? I don't remember." "I thought it was an act of compassion, you son of a bitch!" "Why aren't we as good as this Jonathan and Mermina?" Daisy said. "Oh, don't feel insulted," Frank said. "It is just a matter of supply and demand when you come down to it. Jonathan and Mermina are more open, outgoing people than either of you. We receive a lot from them. With you two, the supply had been exhausted and demand was quickly diminishing." "Supply of what?" Daisy asked. "Demand for what?" "For Earth. We crave Earth here. As much as we can get. You must have noticed. We observe you, then go out and do like you . We enjoy being like you. You earthers are pretty hotshot stuff, multi-leveled in talent, ability, character, personality. You're volatile, lovable, emotionally varied, sometimes emotionally extreme. You're intelligent, inventive, infuriating, inimitable. We love your traits. We love your cleverness. We love you. We love to watch you, whatever you do. You had quite an audience out there yesterday at that fire, you two. It was quite a kick." "Then the fire was faked!" I Marchplateau yelled. "Was it? I don't know that it was. We have fires here. There are a lot of dissatisfied people here who don't like what the rest of us are doing, who especially don't like the work done here, and they often set fires deliberately. They took their revolutionary attitudes from a pair of your young people whom we abducted from Earth a decade or so ago. The ranks of the dissidents have declined in recent years, and they've become noticeably listless and inactive recently. Still, your presence among them might have excited them to return to former ways. I was informed the fire was due to arson. On the other hand, I suppose it could have been faked. We do that sort of thing, too." "Then, if I understand you correctly, Frank, we're just templates of cultural influence for you and your people," Daisy said. "You could put it that way, Daisy. You two were quite good for us, very popular for a long while, and you really outdid yourselves yesterday. But now, Jonathan and Mermina have the stage, as it were. It's their turn. You people can now enjoy the kind of freedom we Marchplateauians enjoy. Your life is no longer in a cage. You are in the open air. It's wonderful, really. I envy you." "The hell with all that, Frank!" I shouted. "I don't want to be free on Marchplateau. I'd prefer the cage! If you're through with us, take us back home. Take us to Earth." "Oh, we couldn't do that. We don't want to become known on your planet. It would spoil the study. Your scientific people might find some way to intervene. We have, after all, been abducting people from your planet for many years. Your history is becoming our history, your culture our culture. Oh, no, we can't possibly -- " "Damn it, Frank, you can't do this to us! I demand you give us proper treatment, I demand -- " "Oh, Richard, stow it! Can it. Throw in the towel. Take a walk. Hit the road. Stop and smell the roses. Wake up and smell the coffee. How is that for a command of Earth idiom?" "Frank, you can't -- " "All right. I'll give you a good opportunity. You can stay here, here in the compound. We even have a spare cage you can use. You won't be on exhibit, but it's livable. You can even be useful. You can work closely with Jonathan and Mermina and any other earthlings we bring back here. It might be useful for us to introduce you two at a key point in these studies. How about it?" I haggled with him for a while longer. So did Daisy. But we finally agreed to his plan. My one satisfaction is that by working here I can do my bit to make Frank's life miserable. They assigned Daisy and I nice quarters, almost as nice as our old cage. I can at least watch Marchplateauian TV here. Some of it is videotaped from Earth. "They seem to assume we'll stay together," Daisy said as she enIF tered the cage. "If you want otherwise, you can tell them otherwise," I said. "No! No, I don't want otherwise. We Earth-types have to stick together. And we can help Jonathan and Mermina." "Don't be silly. They'll never believe we're from Earth. They'll think we're just two more Marchplateauians out to confuse them. I for one will tell them I am from Marchplateau. Maybe they're not even from Earth anyway. Maybe they're ringers, Marchplateauians pretending to be Earth captives." "I don't think so, but you could be right. We have to try to help them anyway." "All right. I'll try. But I don't know if I'd believe in us now." Daisy faded into a sulk, but she'll be okay. She's right, in a way. We do need to stay together, for our sanity or something. Tomorrow I'll turn this journal over to Frank. Let him indulge his clinicil interest to his heart's content. Is your heart content, Frank? I hope it explodes when you reach the last sentence. I don't know what Frank wiU do with this journal. It really doesn't matter, I suppose. I would like it if he took it to Earth and left it there, my message in a bottle sent across a galaxy. So, if anybody on Earth is reading this, I would appreciate it if you would contact anyone you know in authority and tell him or her that Richard Treskitte and Daisy Martin are trapped on the planet of Marchplateau to which they were abducted some time ago. They would like to return to Earth. I doubt if it would do any good, but we'd appreciate the effort. Thank you. Over to you, Frank. Marchplateau art: Tim Kirk Now I intend to tell you (and you'll be glad to hear) the tale of Pirn, dim Pirn, who everyone said was slow, although: she passed the college entry exams and maintained a stable, respectable, though not at all remarkable grade point average. The singular reason that Pirn seemed dim and failed the second grade, and later the seventh, was that she was obsessed, possessed, and crippled by a dear, precious love of film. When little, she would steal money from mummy's purse and run away to the theater to watch serials and cartoons and coming attractions and advertisements and double or triple features, covering a space of time from matinee to final show -- by which hour her mummy would have noticed that Pirn, or if not Pirn then the money, was missing from the house. Then would a policeman fetch her home, for she was always precisely where presumed. # IF As years passed, the serials no longer played; and later, the cartoons were all but foregone; the trailers and the ads grew ever shorter; and finally, progress was such that theaters showed not two, never three, but only one major feature. Yet the theater owners had not yet devised a manner by which to make the same amount of money by showing nothing at all, so Pirn was not upset. She would go everyday when she had the money, and she had the money because she collected and returned soda pop bottles, until the returnables vanished from the face of the planet along with the giant condor and the black footed ferret, at which point she began to collect old tires and pieces of aluminum (especially empty beer cans) to be recycled for a pretty penny. Pirn became known as "the scavenger." In college, this industry guaranteed an addition to her "regular" income (the money poppa sent for tuition, Samurai Fugue books, and expenses). So she movies. Her goal in life had been goal was soon to change. In college. Pirn's life had settled into a fairly routine going: School and study, scavenging, and going to the movies. It was easy to apportion her time for each, because she had done away with most of the frivolities like friendships, boys, or regular meals (except popcorn). She kept no pets and had no hobbies or other untoward expense or time-consuming passion ( save the main one named above). She was studying a foreign language, and taking an extra class in filmmaking -- the former so that someday she could make a living for herself, and the latter so there'd be a reason for doing so. Pirn was not persnickety about the quality of the films she saw. Oh, she knew the good ones from the bad ones all right; but it happened that she could enjoy the bad ones too. She remembered all the casts, all the directors. She understood everything the actors and the directors intended to convey; and she understood what they managed to convey instead. Moreover, she understood the actors and directors themselves, which scared the daylights out of the only director she had ever managed to talk to, a rather overblown Scandinavian who didn't like being seen through one bit. He ran away from Pirn flailing his arms in the air, shouting in a dry old voice that he would never lecture in America # IF again and why didn't everyone realize aU women, but especially American women, were evil witches. She went through phases of favorites (everyone does); war films, old Hollywood dance comedies, Tarzan, spaghetti westerns, horse porno, and anything at all with Marjorie Main. She had phases for directors too: Azner, Renoir, Hawks, Woody Allen -- no one too eclectic, for films were meant to be entertaining, not difficult. Even her first masturbatory experience was in a theater (in this, she was quite slow, being all of seventeen at the time), fantasizing herself tucked neatly in the sheets twixt Bogey and the Babe. As her tastes ran in phases, so did her personality perform acrobatic metamorphoses. Mummy liked to tell the story of the time a lady in the supermarket became convinced that Pirn was really Shirley Temple (irrespective of the fact that by then Shirley Temple was mummy's age), but that was years ago. When Pirn learned to masturbate, for the longest while she strutted around like a drag queen being Mae West. Later she became more subtle and talked like Katharine Hepburn, until she overheard someone say it was affected, at which point she became a sincere, intense Greta Garbo. Shortly after moving to the dormitory, she became Sean Connery, but poppa came to visit and for two months afterward she didn't get her usual check in the mail, until she went screaming home for a weekend being Sue Lyon and after that everything was fine. In brief, Pirn's life had been one long, slow, sedate stare at a silver screen. Two things altered Pirn's cozy lifestyle. One of these was the discovery of chambara, or, to use a vulgar term, samurai films. Without much lessening of the other types of films she saw, she yet began to pay especial attention to chambara, and often drove far-andwide (gathering aluminum and old tires along the roadsides as she went) to attend any such film which might be playing on some other campus or in a farther city. The other thing to change Pirn was her foreign language studies. She had chosen Japanese partly because she was herself one-quarter Japanese. (Her Japanese-American grandfather disappeared in a but the government apologized by giving back the property they'd taken away, which had to be sold for a ridiculously low price. Now, there was a big department store on that downtown block, and mummy occasionally went there and lamented how they might have been rich if only...) Well, actually. Pirn had chosen that language because a career counselor pointed out that more and more medical, scientific, and technical papers were published in Japanese and she could be assured a fairly secure if entirely boring job in translation, which was a sight more than could be said for the students of any other foreign language. It might not at first be obvious how these two events -- learning Japanese, and watching sjimurai films -- changed Pirn's life. The thing is, you must understand, that learning Japanese completely changed her method of viewing chambara movies, and thereby changed her attitude about all movies everywhere, which by association changed her attitudes about life in general which was itself one overlong film in need of editing. In an American film, Pirn would, naturally, listen to the characters speak their lines. In, say, a French or German film, she read what the characters were saying, in the form of subtitles. But with chambara, as she learned Japanese, she began to do both at once! It was an amazing effect, especially since the subtitles generally told a slightly different story than the spoken dialogue conveyed. Hearing and reading are two very different acts. The samurai films she watched began to take on certain aspects of a fugue, that is, a composition with two or more themes enunciated simultaneously. It was like listening to two very different songs at the same time, yet without a single note of discord. Pirn was overwhelmed. She felt that she was watching two films at once. Such heaven! Such joy! Thus had she discovered there was really no pleasure quite the peasants, evil lords, and each other. Samurai Fugue It was glorious. It was rare. The words at the bottom of the screen; the words from the mouths of the players they gave her two distinct, separate understandings of the same film. And though the two interpretations might contradict, they were yet, somehow, both, right. This awakenened her to the realization that there were actually more than two simultaneous stories being told in any given film. She did not mean the intellectual, subjective manipulation of literal, allegoric, symbolic or figurative levels. She meant that each film, in an objective fashion, was in reality a large number of films made all at the same time. She'd already noted the interpretation accessible through the subtitles, and the one accessible through the words and intonation of the actors. Additionally, there was the story which the director intended, often at odds with what the actors or subtitles suggested. Plus, there was the story the script writer originally intended, some of which might remain. Atop all this, there was a whole other interpretation to be achieved through the social context outside the film, which was especially poignant in films made in a Japanese social context and viewed in an American social context. That made, let's see, how many films she was watching at once? Five! The subtitled one, the spokenacted one, the directed one, the scripted one, and the one of social context. Of course, even in bad films, these all blended into a smooth, unblurred image devoid of chaos. But for someone who had become atuned to the various overlays, the actual complexity of every movie big and small was, in a word, captivating. She'd been watching Sword of Doom when she had these revelations. The film ended vth a suddenly frozen fiame, the warrior caught in eternal combat. But to Pirn it seemed that the samurai hadn't stopped at all, that the film was still going on and on and on, nearly half a dozen levels -- and she was mesmerized by the gory beauty of his every motion. The theater's janitor poked her in the shoulder and asked, "Are you asleep, Miss?" "Shh!" said Pirn sharply. "But Miss..." "Shush! I'm watching the movie." "But, but, it's been over for half an hour..." Still she wouldn't move, and the management had to throw her out bodily. As she staggered out into the night, she realized there was a sixth context for the film: the values brought to the movie by the production studio itself, that is, the financial point of the entire venture, which in extreme cases overshadowed an entire product and in every case had some influence. The next day, she returned to the same theater to watch Sword of Doom two more times, and they threw her out again. The manager. IF who himself was Japanese and had a delicious accent, asked, "Don't you know this is a bad movie? Don't come tomorrow, please." For the first time since the seventh grade. Pirn's grades began to fall below their average. She spent almost all her study hours attempting to produce, for her film class, the perfect short subject for her personal purposes: a samurai fugue. Which reminded her of a seventh interpretation for a film: orchestral interpretation. A good soundtrack could tell a story all by itself! It was clear that she could not hope to bring these various levels for understanding or interpretation to a film if she were the one of actor, director, scripter, subtitler, purveyor of social context, musical composer, studio manager, and choreographer. (That's eight! She hadn't thought of the interpretation through choreography before, which is very important especially in a samurai film, with the precise ballet of violence.) Pirn made her actor's costume out of aluminum cans -- and a fairly convincing suit of armor it became. She obtained a samurai sword, or close approximation, for an extravagant sum at a pawn shop in the Asian district. All other filming necessities were accessible through the school. But there was still only her her. How could she hope to have eight films in one with a single person's input? The answer was inspired: She would multiply her personality. It was complicated at first, deciding what her personalities ought to be. The choreographer would be a sadistic faggot. The director was a tyrant. The script writer was a diletante convinced his every word was golden, outraged by every alteration. The subtitles were by a well meaning Japanese woman who didn't really understand English at all (though she had a degree from Kyoto University stating otherwise), but since her own father was descended from the samurai class, she took her duty seriously. The musical score was by a frustrated old nincompoop who had wanted to be another Bach but instead composed for B-grade films. The actor was an egotistical but otherwise fine, serious artist. The owner of the studio was a miser, who wanted successes, not art. Oh! There was another context for the film she hadn't perceived before: the film editor's perspective. Very well: The editor's persona would be: complete idiot. There was still the interpretation of social context outside the film itself. Hnun. That could be difficult. Ah! She had it: The social context was that everyone in the whole world was stark raving insane, including the nine people responsible for the film, but especially the tenth person who was the entire audience (this would be Pirn herself, so no specially devised personality was necessitated). Considerable thought and imagination had gone into creating the various personalities who would Samurai Fugue provide their own unique overlay and interpretation to the one-reel, one-actor chambara feature being made by the people mentioned above. But curiously, Pirn utterly forgot that she had invented these people, although each in turn appeared when needed to perform his or her required tasks. Since an audience was not yet needed (because the film wasn't finished), the personality that was the original Pirn had not been called upon (this left more time for the others to complete the film, for it would have been difficult for them to work while she was gone to the movies). Pirn effectively ceased to exist. Therefore, she didn't show up at her classes, or take calls from home, or answer anyone who called her by name. Occasionally, the hard-driving director or the artistic actor or the miserly studio owner would obtain cryptic communications which were obviously intended for someone they didn't know. Thus Pirn was never informed beforehand that she was being expelled from school for nonattendance and bad grade point average. However, the studio owner was indignant to find himself, one day, refused access to his studio, which a crazy man calling himself a fine arts professor claimed belonged to the college and was for the use of students only. The actor was upset to hear about this, as was the choreographer, and especially the film editor whose job was soon to commence. Ths script and score writers weren't as concerned about all of this, as their jobs were completed. The film progressed, somehow, and with the aid of the studio's owner-manager (who figured he was kept out for failing to pay the rent), the film editor gained access to the dark rooms at night, and began to perform his finishing chores like the true idiot he was. The director argued to save key scenes which really did have to be spliced back in. When Pirn reappeared as herself, she was shghtly disoriented. She found herself in the viewing studio of the college, which was presently devoid of any other persons. She did not have the slightest notion that, for the past month, she hadn't existed, or that at that very moment her mummy and poppa were driving six hundred miles up the coast to get their poor sick daughter and take her to a nice private hospital, or, as Thurber might have termed it, the booby hatch. None of this was part of her knowledge when the movie started. She was not even aware that this was the film she'd set out to make for a class in which she was no longer officially enrolled. Since the film editor and subtitler had slaved through the night, it was presently time for morning classes to begin. Pirn's film instructor wandered into the viewing room at one point, and Pirn said hello; but he scurried out again, apparently not wishing to see this particular film today. She absorbed the film's nine levels (or had they grown to fifIF teen?), comprehending all of them completely, becoming enmeshed within the most perfectly conceived movie that had ever assaulted her heightened senses. It was the sad story of the last samurai, a young man, who had killed every human being in the world and now was all alone. She wept. She laughed. She shook with terror. She was swept away in ecstacy. A truly wonderful achievement! She gave the film a standing ovation. Afterward, the actor himself made an appearance, for this was, after all, the world premiere of the most important chambara movie since Seven Samurai, destined to win at Cannes, at the Asian Film Festival, at Toronto, New York, Chicago International... and Gosh!, Gee!, he had worn his costume, which without the camera tricks appeared to be made out of old tires and tin cans, and he had a cute samurai pony tail (was that his real hair so long?). It was about this time that mummy and poppa and the film instructor and a policeman and two gentlemen in white jackets appeared in the doorway of the viewing studio. They approached slowly. They were talking to the actor in English, but he only knew Japanese. They seemed to be very cajoling as they surrounded the chambara star. Six or nine personalities chattered in her brain, trying to explain the situation to her, to him, to each other, with going-on-a-dozen different interpretations regarding every innuendo. Life was a fugue, but something here was in discord. As the six cajoUng people surrounded Pirn, she suddenly realized that she'd been transported into some terrible place in time. It was no longer #th Century Japan, where she had studied fencing like all good boys of her samurai class. She had somehow been sent forward in time to a frightful land where all the people were monstrous and insane (insanity had been, after all, the outside social context of the film). Pirn, the mighty samurai, carved through the monstrous, insane people of this future place. Blood sprayed all around. She screamed a samurai oath, and thanked the Shinto gods that she had survived this awful battle. Then the samurai youth left the corpse-strewn stage, trailing blood with her sword, and went out, out, out into the horrifying world. When they came for her, she was eating popcorn and watching the latest Clint Eastwood, which she thought a comforting movie because it seemed to have only one very shallow level to it and therefore didn't stress her sensitivities. She never understood what the doctor meant when he said. Pirn, your movie has won eight awards. Samurai Fugue art: Mike Symes It began like any other night, but this one had a special feeling to it. The moon came up full and splendid above the skyline, and its light spread like spilled buttermilk among the canyons of the city. The remains of the day's storm exhaled mists which fled wraith-like across the pavements. But it wasn't just the moon and the fog. Something had been building for several weeks now. My sleep had been troubled. And business was too good. I had been trying unsuccessfully to watch a late movie and drink one entire cup of coffee without its growing cold. But customers kept arriving, browsers lingered and the phone rang regularly. I let my assistant, Vic, handle as much of it as he could but people kept turning up at the counter -- never during a commercial. "Yes, sir? What can I do for you?" I asked a middle-aged man with a slight tic at the left corner of his mouth. # IF "Do you carry sharpened stakes?" he inquired. "Yes. Would you prefer the regular or the fue-hardened?" "The fire-hardened, I guess." "How many?" "One. No, better make it two." "There's a dollar off if you take three." "Okay, make it three." "Give you a real good price on a dozen." "No, three should do it." "All right." I stooped and pulled out the carton. Damn. Only two left. I had to pry open another box. At least Vic had kept an eye on the level and brought a second carton up from the stockroom. The boy was learning. "Anything else?" I asked as I wrapped them. "Yes," the man said. "I need a good mallet." "We carry three different kinds, at different prices. The best is a weighted -- " "I'll take the best." "Very good." I got him one from beneath the adjacent counter. "Will this be cash, check, or credit card?" "Do you take Mastercharge?" "Yes." He withdrew his wallet, opened it. "Oh, I also want a pound of garlic," he said as he withdrew the card and handed it to me. I called to Vic, who was free just then, to fetch the garlic while I wrote up the order. "Thank you," the man said several minutes later, as he turned and headed for the door, his parcel beneath his arm. "Good night, good luck," I said, and sounds of distant traffic reached me as the door opened, grew faint when it closed. I sighed and picked up my coffee cup. I returned to my seat before the television set. Shit. A dental adhesive commercial had just come on. I waited it out, and then there was Betty Davis... Moments later, I heard a throat-clearing sound at my back. Turning, I beheld a tall, dark-haired, dark-mustached man in a beige coat. He was scowling. "What can I do for you?" I asked him. "I need some silver bullets," he said. "What caliber?" "Thirty-aught-six. Let me have two boxes." "Coming up." When he left I walked back to # IF the john and dumped out my coffee. I refilled the cup with fresh brew from the pot on the counter. On my way back to the comfortable corner of the shop I was halted by a leather-garbed youth with a pink punk haircut. He stood staring up at the tall, narrow, sealed case high upon the wall. "Hey Pops, how much is it?" he asked me. "It's not for sale," I said. "It's strictly a display item." He dug a massive wad of bills from his side pocket and extended it, his dreamy gaze never leaving the bright thing that hung above. "I've got to have a magic sword," he said softly. "Sorry. I can sell you a Tibetan illusion-destroying dagger, but the sword is strictly for looking at here." He turned suddenly to face me. "If you should ever change your mind..." "I won't." He shrugged then and walked away, passing out into the night. As I rounded the corner into the front of the shop, Vic fixed me with his gaze and covered the mouthpiece of the phone with the palm of his hand. "Boss," he told me, "this lady says there's a Chinese demon visits her every night and -- " "Tell her to come by and we'll sell her a bedside temple dog." "Right." I took a sip of coffee and made by way back toward my chair as Vic finished the conversation and hung up. A small red-haired woman who had been staring into one of the display cases near the front chose that moment to approach me. "Pardon me," she said. "Do you carry aconite?" "Yes, I do -- " I began, and then I heard the sound -- a sharp thunk, as if someone had thrown a rock against my back door. I had a strong feeling as to what it might be. "Excuse me," I said, "Vic, would you take care of this lady?" "Sure thing." Vic came over then, tall and rugged-looking, and she smiled. I turned away and passed through the rear of the shop and into the back room. I unlocked the heavy door that let upon the alley and drew it open. As I suspected, there was no one in sight. I studied the ground. A bat lay twitching feebly near a puddle. I stopped and touched it lightly. "Okay," I said. "Okay, I'm here. It's aU right." I went back inside then, leaving the door open. As I headed for the refrigerator I called out, "Leo, I give you permission to enter. This one time. This one room and no farther." A minute later he staggered in. He wore a dark, shabby suit and his shirtfront was dirty. His hair was windblown and straggly and there was a lump on his forehead. He raised a trembling hand. "Have you got some?" he asked. "Yeah, here." I passed him the bottle I had already opened and he took a long drink, then he slowly seated himself in a chair beside the small table. I went back and closed the door, then sat down across from him with my cup of coffee. I gave him a minute for several more swallows and a chance to collect himself. "Can't even hit a vein right," he muttered, raising the bottle a final time. Then he put it down, ran his hands through his hair, rubbed his eyes and fixed me with a baleful gaze. "I can give you the locations of three who've just moved to town," he said. "What's it worth?" "Another bottle," I said. "For three? Hell! I could have brought the information in one at a time and -- " "I don't actively seek out your kind," I told him. "I just provide others with what they need to take care of themselves. I do like having this sort of information, though..." "I need six bottles." I shook my head. "Leo, you take that much and you know what'll happen? You won't make it back and -- " "I want six bottles." "I don't want to give them to you." He massaged his temples. "Okay," he said then. "Supposing I had a piece of important information that affected you personally? A really important piece of information?" "How important?" "Like life and death." "Come on, Leo. You know me. Night Kings #I but you don't know me that well. There's not much in this world or any other -- " He said the name. "What?" He repeated it, but my stomach was already tightening. "Six bottles," he said. "Okay. What do you know?" He looked at the refrigerator. I got up and went to it. I got them out and bagged each one separately. Then I put all of them into a larger brown bag. I brought it over and set it on the floor beside his chair. He didn't even glance downward. He just shook his head. "If I'm going to lose my connection this is the way I want it," he stated. I nodded. "Tell me now." "The Man came to town a couple of weeks ago," he said. "He's been looking around. He found you. And tonight's the night. You get hit." "Where is he?" "Right now? I don't know. He's coming, though. He called a meeting. Summoned everyone to All Saints across the river. Told us he was going to take you out and make it safe for us, that this was going to be his territory. Told everyone to get busy and keep you busy." He glanced at the small barred window high on the rear wall. "I'd better be going," he said then. I got up and let him out. I watched him stagger away into the fog. Tonight might well be the night # IF for him too. Hemoholic. A small percentage of them get that way. One neck is never enough. After a while they get so they can't fly straight, and they start waking up in the wrong coffins. Then one morning they Just don't make it back to bed in time. I had a vision of Leo sprawled dessicated on a park bench, brown bag clutched to his chest with bony fingers, the first light of day streaming about him. I locked the door and returned to the shop. It's a cold world out there. "... horns of the bull for malocchio," I heard Vic saying. "That's right. You're welcome. Good-bye." I kept going, up to the front door. I locked it and switched off the the window. "What is it?" Vic asked me. "Turn off the phone." He did. Then, "Remember when I told you about the old days?" I said. "Back when you bound the adversary?" "Yup. And before that." "Back when he bound you?" "Yup. You know, one of these days one of us will win -- completely." "What are you getting at?" "He's free again and he's coming and I think he's very strong. You may leave now if you wish." "Are you kidding? You trained me. I'll meet him this time." I shook my head. "You're not ready. But if anything happens to me... If I lose... Then the job is yours if you'll have it," "I told you a long time ago, back when I came to work for you -- " "I know. But you haven't finished your apprenticeship and this is sooner than I'd thought it would be. I have to give you a chance to back out." "Well, I won't." "Okay, you've been warned. Go unplug the coffee pot and turn out the lights in back while I close down the register." The room seemed to brighten a bit after he left and I glanced up. It was an effect of diffused moonlight through a full wall of fog which now pressed against the windows. It hadn't been there moments ago. I counted the receipts and put the money into the bag. I got out the tape. There was a pounding on the door just as Vic returned. We both looked in that direction. It was a very young woman, her long blonde hair stirred by the wind. She had on a light trench coat and she kept looking back over her shoulder as she hammered on the panel and the pane. "It's an emergency!" she called out. "I see you in there! Please!" We both crossed to the door. I unlocked it and opened it. "What's the matter?" I asked. She stared at me. She made no effort to enter. Then she shifted her gaze to Vic and she smiled slightly. Her eyes were green and her teeth were perfect. "You are the proprietor," she said to me. "I am." "And this...?" "My assistant -- Vic." "We didn't know you had an assistant." "Oh," I said. "And you are... ?" "His assistant," she replied. "Give me his message." "I can do better than that," she answered. "I am here to take you to him." She was almost laughing now, and her eyes were harder than I had thought at first. But I had to try. "You don't have to serve him, " I said. She sobered suddenly. "You don't understand," she told me. "I have no choice. You don't know what he saved me from. I owe him." "And he'll have it all back, and more. You can leave him." "Like I said, I have no choice." "Yes, you do. You can quit the business right now." "How?" I extended my hand and she looked at it. "Take my hand," I said. She continued to stare. Then, almost timidly, she raised hers. Slowly, she reached toward mine... Then she laughed and jerked hers back. "You almost had me there. Hypnosis, wasn't it?" "No," I said. "Well, you won't trick me again." She turned and swept her left arm backward. The fog opened, forming a gleaming tunnel. Night Kings "He awaits you at the other end." "He can wait a moment longer then," I told her, "Vic, stay here." I turned and walked back through the shop. I halted before the case which hung high upon the wall. For a moment I just stared. I could see it so clearly, shining there in the dark. Then I raised the small metal hammer which hung on the chain beside it and I struck. The glass shattered. I struck twice again and shards kept falling upon the floor. I let go the hammer. It bounced several times against the wall. Carefully then I reached inside and wrapped my hand about the hilt. The dreaded familiar feeling flowed through me. How long had it been... ? I withdrew it from the case and held it up before me, my ancient again. I had hoped that the last time would indeed be the last time, but these things have a way of dragging on. When I returned to the storefront the lady's eyes widened and she drew back a pace. "All right, Miss," I said. "Lead on." "Her name is Sabrina," Vic told me. "Oh? What else have you learned?" "We will be transported to All Saints Cemetery, across the river." She smiled at him, then turned toward the tunnel. She stepped into it and I followed her. It felt like one of those moving walkways the larger airports have. # IF I could tell that every step I took bore me much farther than a single pace. Sabrina strode resolutely ahead, not looking back. Behind me, I heard Vic cough once, the sound heavily muffled within the gleaming, almost plastic-seeming walls. There was darkness at the end of the tunnel, and a figure waited, even darker, within it. There was no fog in the place where we emerged, only clear moonlight from amid a field of stars, strong enough to cause the tombstones and monuments to cast shadows. One of these fell between us, a long line of separating darkness, in the cleared area where we stood. He had not changed so much as I felt I had. He was still taller, leaner and better-looking. He motioned Sabrina off to his right. I sent Vic to the side, also. When he grinned his teeth flashed, and he raised his blade -- so black as to be almost invisible within its faint outlining nimbus of orange light -- and he saluted me casually with it. I returned the gesture. "I wasn't certain that you would come," he said. I shrugged. "One place is as good as another," I replied. "I make you the same offer I did before," he stated, "to avoid the nastiness. A divided realm. It may be the best you can hope for." "Never," I responded. He sighed. "You are stubborn." "And you are persistent." "If that's a virtue, I'm sorry. But there it is." "Where'd you find Sabrina?" "In the gutter. She has real talent. She's learning fast. I see that you have an apprentice now, also. Do you know what this means?" "Yes, we're getting old, too old for this sort of nonsense." "You could retire, brother." "So could you." He laughed. "And we could both stagger off arm in arm to that special Valhalla reserved for the likes of us." "I could think of worse fates," I said. "Good, I'm glad to hear that. I think it means you're getting soft." "I guess we'll be finding out very soon." A series of small movements caught my gaze, and I looked past him. Dog-like forms and bat-like forms and snake-like forms were arriving and settling and moving into position in a huge encircling mass all around us, like spectators coming into a stadium. "I take it we're waiting for your audience to be seated," I said, and he smiled again. "Your audience, too," he replied. "Who knows but that even you may have a few fans out there?" I smiled back at him. "It's late," he said softly. "Long past the chimes of midnight." "Are they really worth it?" he asked then, a sudden serious look upon his face. "Yes," I replied. He laughed. Night Kings I  "Of course you have to say that." "Of course." "Let's get on with it." He raised the blade of darkness high above his head and an unearthly silence poured across the land. "Ashtaroth, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Belial, Leviathan..." he began. I raised my own weapon. "Newton, Descartes, Faraday, Maxwell, Fermi..." I said. "Lucifer Rofocale," he intoned, "Hecate, Behemoth, Put Satanas, Ariaston..." "Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rodin, Maillol, Moore..." I continued. The world seemed to swim about us, and this place was suddenly outside of space and time. "Mephisto!" he cried out. "Legion! Lilith! lanoda! Eblis!" "Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes," I went on. He struck and I parried the blow and struck one of my own to be parried in turn myself. He continued his chanting and increased the tempo of his attack. I did the same. After the first several minutes I could see that we were still fairly evenly matched. That meant it would drag on, and on. I tried some tricks I had almost forgotten I knew. But he remembered. He had a few, too, but something in me recalled them also. We began to move even faster. The blows seemed to come from every direction, but my blade was there, ready for them when they fell. His had a way of doing the same thing. It became a dance within a cage of shifting metal, row upon row of glowing eyes staring at us across the field of the dead. Vic and Sabrina stood side by side yet seemed oblivious of each other in their concentration upon the conflict. I hate to say that it was exhilirating, but it was. Finally, to face once again the embodiment of everything I had fought across the years. To have total victory suddenly lie but a stroke away, if but the right stroke might be found... I redoubled my efforts and actually bore him back several paces. But he recovered quickly and stood his ground then. A sigh rose up from beyond the monuments. "You can still surprise me," he muttered through clenched teeth, slashing back with a deadly attack of his own. "When will this ever end?" "How's a legend to know?" I replied, giving ground and striking again. Our blades fed us the forces we had come to represent and we fought on, and on. He came close, very close, on several occasions. But each time I was able to spin away at the last moment and counter-attack. Twice, I thought that I had him and each time he narrowly avoided me and came on with renewed vigor. He cursed, he laughed, and I probably did the same. The moon dropped down and sparklets of dew became visible upon the grass. The creatures sometimes shifted about, but their eyes never left us. IF Vic and Sabrina exchanged several whispered conversations without looking at each other. I swung a head-cut, but he parried and riposted to my chest. I stopped it and tried for his chest, but he parried... A breeze sprang up and the perspiration on my brow seemed suddenly cooler. I slipped once on the damp ground and he failed to take advantage of my imbalance. Was he finally tiring? I tried pressing him once more, and he seemed a bit slower. Was I now gaining an edge or was it a trick on his part, to lull me? I nicked his biceps. The barest touch. A scratch. Nothing real in the way of an injury, but I felt my confidence rising. I tried again, mustering all of my speed in a fresh burst of enthusiasm. A bright line appeared across his shirtfront. He cursed again and swung wildly. As I parried it I realized that the sky was lightening in the east. That meant I had to hurry. There are rules by which even we are bound. I spun through my most elaborate attack yet, but he was able to stop it. I tried again, and again. Each time he seemed weaker, and on that last one I had seen a look of pain upon his face. A restlessness came over our gallery then, and I felt that the fmal sands were about to descend the hourglass. I struck again, and this time I connected solidly. I felt the edge of my weapon grate against bone as it cut into his left shoulder. He howled and dropped to his knees as I drew back for the death blow. In the distance a cock crowed, and I heard him laugh. "Close, brother! Close! But not good enough," he said. "Sabrina! To me! Now!" She took a step toward him, turned toward Vic, then back to my fallen nemesis. She rushed to him and embraced him as he began to fade. Aufwiedersehenr he called to me, and they both were gone. With a great rustling rush then, like blown leaves, our audience departed, flapping through the sky, flashing along the ground, slithering into holes, as the sun cut its way above the horizon. I leaned upon my blade. In a little while Vic came up to me. "Will we ever see them again?" he asked. "Of course." I began walking toward what I saw to be the distant gate. "Now what?" he said. "I'm going home and get a good day's sleep," I told him. "Might even take a little vacation. Business is going to be slow for a while." We crossed the hallowed earth and exited onto a sidestreet. Night Kings The Light Fantastic Book Reviews by Orson Scott Card ( continued from page # ) cept to promise that there will be more books in the series, and you'll be cheatread it in order, and see what can be done with a shared world whose contributors didn't roll up their characters with DD dice. ogy with some decidedly non-traditional stories. McKinley's own "The Stone Fey" is a haunting story of a girl who loves an unloving man; Jane Yolen's "Evian Steel" is a strong treatment of the coming-of-age theme; there are other good tales. For me, the standout is Peter Dickinson's "Flight," though I know some of you will say it reads like a historical essay. That's because it is a historical essay. It just one. (Other readers have praised "Paper Dragons," by James Blaylock. I can't tell you why, because I found it unreadable -- but it ended up as a Nebula Award finalist. Maybe you'll like it better than I did. If you do, don't write to me to explain why it's good. I've read it twice, and I don't ever want to think about it again.) Jane Yolen has long been known for writing Jewel-like fairy tales -- something most writers are smart enough not to attempt. Jane was too ignorant to know that good fairy tales, like folklore, have to grow out of years of retellings. So she wrote some anyway, and they were beautiful and original and powerful and true, and I fell in love with her work. (I also fell in love with her, a woman who, incredibly enough, manages to be Mom and Iconoclast at the same time.) Most of her short works have been published in young adult books; lects her short fiction for an adult fantasy audience. The title story has never been published before, and is worth the price of the book. But you can also read "The Girl Who Cried Flowers," "The Hundredth Dove," "The Five Points of Roguery," "Dream Weaver" -- aw, hell, buy the book. I can't describe these stories. Some of them are so short and densely packed that my synopsis would be longer than the tale itself. Contemporary poetry has long shown every sign of being dead -- T.S. IF Eliot and Ezra Pound killed it, and a thousand self-indulgent, incomprehensible, undisciplined, and untalented poets buried it. But ah! -- something rises from the ashes! There are actually poets working today who are clear, who know how to make their language sing, who can stir your heart with their language. Let me recommend two of them who are working occasionaUy within the fantasy field today. Bruce Does it have music, power, and meaning when it is read aloud? Yes, it does, with climaxes and closures that sometimes left me gasping. Charles de Lint, poet, and Donna Gordon, artist, have collaborated on in which lovely iconic engravings are linked, month by month, with the enigmatic declarations of the trees: "Hazel am I and I  hoard knowledge  like a salmon in  a sheltered pool..." This chapbook is beautifully printed on fine paper, and is only available in a severely limited edition. work by cumulative effect. You should read them in order, and you should read them aloud -- at least in a whisper -- so you can hear the music and the rhythms of the words. Each poem contains echoes of the ones before, and they build into a beautiful whole. You won't find these little books on your bookstore shelves; you have to order them. They may just remind you of what poetry can be when it's alive. Next Time Next time -- if there is a next time (it aU depends on how many copies of this issue are sold, so if you want more of IF, make your friends buy their own copies) -- ru review Sheri Tepper's True Game series, which is science fiction that feels like fantasy, or maybe fantasy with sci-fi underpinnings. Whatever it is, I like it a lot, and there's a lot of it to review. Eight volumes so far. I'll also talk about her best work course, whatever I manage to read between now and then. If all else fails, I can go back and talk about some hardcover novels that will be coming out in paperback about the time my We'll see. Books Reviewed Ocean View Press, PO Box #, Mountain View, CA #, #pp, # Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr., Tony Chap#, Box #, Franklin, TN #, #pp, # PO Box #, Ottawa, Ontario, # #pp, # LibraryQuestar, #pp, # # Arbor House, #pp, # McGraw-Hill, #pp, # The Light Fantastic Arbor House, #pp, # James Patrick Kelly  John Kessel #pp, # #pp, # Booklet ##, PO Box #, Polk City, lA #, #pp, #; write for catalog of other booklets #pp, # Will Shetterly  Emma Bull, ed. # # House, #pp, # # to process to guarantee uninterrupted deUvery of your subscription. Give your new address as weU as the old address as it appears on the last label (attach the old label if available). Send your change-of-address notification to Worlds of IF, Subscription Dept., P.O. Box #, HicksviUe NY #. 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You might be pleased or dismayed to learn that, with your subscription, you automatically receive the catalog under separate cover. Back when I went to school, we had what was called the honor system, and it worked. Everybody did their part. Well, we've done ours. We brought Galaxy back, as thousands of fans have asked us to do. Now it's your turn to do your part, by sending in your subscription today. Photolllustrations by Gold Bob Sheckley and E.J. Gold reconnected about two years ago, when Sirius Science Fiction -- an imprint of Gateways Publishing -- published an Artist's Edition of Bob's Skulking Permit, which E.J. had illustrated. Bob was enthusiastic about the project and felt that E.J. 's illustrations were very sensitive to the story. A few Months later, a newspaper called the Evolutionary Rag emerged from the ever-broadening publishing ventures of Gateways. Unbeknownst to all but a few, the Evolutionary Rag was a cloaking device for what was to become Galaxy Magazine, under E.J. 's editorship. At summer's end, Bob was sent a series of photographs by E.J. of BardoTown, a tabletop miniature city which he'd built over the past several years. These sparked a literary outburst in both of them, and Bob sent in the beginning part of City of the Dead within weeks. E.J. loved it and responded with more photos. This first installment is the beginning of a lifetime project between these two unbelievably creative individuals. May the sparks fly on both the e fly through the streets of the city of the dead, a ghost among ghosts, and we turn the corners and respect the masses of the mildings, even though we could fly right through hem. This is a documentary about hell, not a ommentary. The city of the dead, the city of hell, is ibstract enough without us worsening the situation by lying through walls that are supposed to be solid. It is quite wonderful to be able to fly through the treets. Most of this city is built of a soft white narble, and it is a very classical sort of place. Plenty if pillars so that you could almost think you were in Athens in about # B.C. But the streets are empty, there's no traffic of any sort, the city of the dead is a dead sort of place, although people have occasionally tried to start some entertainment. It stands to reason, what else do the dead have to do but entertain themselves? What to do has been a problem for hell for a long time. What is death there for? What's it all about? This sort of thing begins to bother people once they find themselves dead. The first thing they do is check out their situation. OK, I'm dead, I've got that. So is this supposed to be punishment? If so, what for? Is it for my sins? Which sins, specifically? Is atonement permitted? What do I have to do to atone? Or is it a question of serving a specific sentence? Or is this one forever, and should we just relax and take it one day at a time? The main question of course is, how long does this go on? Most people would even take "Forever" as an answer. But that's not what they tell you, once you start asking. On the contrary. You are led to believe from the start that hell is for a period of time, after which there will be something else. Maybe this is the only way they can get you to think over your life. Because you're going to have to do something about it. Or so you think. "By the way," I said, "would you like a pomegranate seed?" I was Hades, a large well-built fellow with black hair and a black closely trimmed beard. I was a sort of piratical looking fellow, though soft in nature to belie my bold looks. My grabbing Persephone the way I did was the first thing of its kind I had ever done. Put it down to irresistible impulse. There she was, gathering flowers in the meadows with her girlfriends, and I was riding by in my golden chariot drawn by my four fiery black horses, and the next thing I knew she was in my arms and there was hell to pay. Persephone of course was beautiful. She had long light brown hair that reached to her waist. Her nose, also, was quite finely drawn. It was one of those perfect Greek noses that merge up into the forehead. That was then and now was now, six months later, and she and I were sitting in the little shaded platform on the banks of the Styx, at the place where Charon ties up his houseboat. She looked at the two pomegranate seeds I was holding out to her, and said, "You're not trying to trick me, are you?" "No," I told her, "I'm not a tricky sort of a guy. I don't play games. That's not how we operate here in hell. We're direct, straightforward, just like I was when I kidnapped you in the first place. Do you remember that day?" "I remember it all too well," Persephone said. "I was out in the fields, harvesting with my friends. You came riding up in your chariot of gold drawn by four fiery horses. You were wearing black." "And I lifted you up with one arm, first twisting my cloak back so it would be out of the way. I put my arm around your waist and lifted you into my chariot." "The girls just stood by and gaped," Persephone said. "And when Mother found out, she didn't know what to make of it." "She knew perfectly well what to make of it," I told her. "It had been prophesied long ago that this would happen: that I would see you gathering flowers with the other nymphs and fall in love with you. And it was the first time I ever fell in love. I'm not like the other gods, you know, Apollo and Poseidon and all that lot. They're forever falling in love and swearing that this time it's for keeps. And then they're off again next day after the next bit of skirt. But I am the King of Death and I only fall in love once." "Poor Hades!" Persephone said. "Will you be very lonely without me?" "I'll have my memories," I told her. "I've had a wonderful half year with you. I've loved having you on the throne beside me. I've been so happy that you're my queen in hell." "I quite liked being queen of hell," Persephone said. "It's been special. I mean, hell is not like some other country. Hell is everything after it's been used up and turned all soft and easy to handle." "Hell is the place of appreciation," I told her. "On earth, when you're living, there's not enough time to really get into things. But here in hell everything can take as long as it needs. There's nothing to fear because we're dead already. But also there's nothing to feel bad about because in some weird way we're still living." "The afternoons are so long," Persephone said. "They're like the afternoons when I was a girl. They seemed to just go on and on, and the sun is reluctant to climb down the sky. But here there is no sun. Just a faint sepulchral glow across the marshes that at irregular intervals lightens and darkens. But no definite sun. I miss the sun." I nodded. "We have light, but no sun. There's moonlight, though and the special light from the torches that light the halls of the palace of death." "Yes, and they cast long shadows," Persephone said. "I used to be afraid of shadows, but in hell there isn't anything to fear." "No," I said, "the worst has happened and it's all over. Won't you try this pomegranate seed?" She took one of the pomegranate seeds I was offering her and put it on the palm of her narrow white hand. "Why do you want me to eat it?" she said. "It's a trick, isn't it?" "Yes," I said, "I can keep no secrets from you. It's a trick." "What happens if I eat it?" "It means I will still have some claim on you even in the land of the living. It means that you will return to hell." "Return to hell?" Persephone said. "But I was planning to return and visit you anyway." I shook my head. "You don't know what you'll do when you get back into the upper world with its light and air. Once you're fully alive again, you'll forget me. And you'll wonder how you ever came to enjoy this gloomy palace with its dark courtyards and the river of forgetfulness always running by with the dead souls swimming just below its surface and the weeping willows murmuring just overhead. You'll think to yourself, 'He must have bewitched me! No one in his right mind goes for a holiday in hell.'" She smiled and touched my hand. "Maybe you have bewitched me. I'm quite content here in hell." "Then eat the pomegranate seed, " I told her. She did not move. Her gaze was far away. She said after a while, "Achilles and Helen asked us over this evening for dinner. You must make my apologies." We freeze on Hades and Persephone, and then we cut away from them, leave the river bank, track across green rolling meadows with topiary sculpture that makes the place look like a funeral home or a French park, and we continue to the palace of the dead. From the middle distance it looks like a small city. The palace is the composite of many palace-shaped buildings. They are all crowded together, and some are a dozen levels high. You see all sorts of shapes in these buildings made up of many other buildings that make up the city of the dead. There are domes of all sorts, and spires, and many shapes, both curved and cubical. Binding them all together are narrow roadways from many different levels. From many of the buildings you can walk out a window on an upper floor and cross directly, or by a little catwalk, to the next building. The lighting of the city of the dead is like moonlight. Or like late afternoon sunlight in winter as seen from behind a bank of clouds. It is not night, it is not day. Twilight is the eternal hour in the city of the dead. There's not a lot to do around here. But if you're bored, you can watch thf people step out their windows and take to the catwalks to cross from one part of the city to another. There are wires that connect everything to everything else here, and some people use them as shortcuts, tiptoeing along the highwires to get from place to place. They do this clumsily, because few of the dead, just as few of the living, have any acrobatic ability. They use the catwalks and highwires anyway, no one fears falling. When you fall from a catwalk in the city of the dead, you tumble down to the ground slowly, slowly, like a shadow falling. If you happen to bounce off a cornice or two, or graze yourself on a gargoyle, or catch yourself on a sharp projecting bit of roof, it is no matter. You can't hurt yourself, you're already dead. You can't feel any pain. Pain is forbidden. That is because pleasure is forbidden. Or unlikely, almost the same thing. Where there is no pleasure, there's no pain. Some might think that a good tradeoff. The dead in the palace of the dead don't think so. Being unable to hurt yourself just makes the boredom that much more excruciating. There are people in hell who cut their throats every evening. It doesn't do anything. It's just a gesture. But gestures are important when you don't have anything else, and all you have in hell are gestures. Some make gestures of pain, and cut their own throats. Others step out the windows and take to the catwalks and high wires and go visiting. Is visiting a pleasure? Not in hell. It is a gesture. The people of hell don't despise gestures. After you're dead, gesture is all that's left. We zoom through a doorway, segue down a corridor, slither through a doorway, do the whole thing several times, and then we come to a stop in a large room. Achilles is sitting in a lyre-backed chair. We know it is him because affixed to his The matter of easy identification has been found necessary in hell, where unnecessary confusion is frowned upon. It is more than enough work just to be dead, without wondering who the people all around you are. This plaque system is for the benefit, not just of the inhabitants, but for future audiences which will look at the stories of people in this place on films made by us, the people who will either go back in time to record them, or build them up as imaginative constructs in the computer that can build anything that can be imagined. And looking just beyond that, we foresee a time when secondary and tertiary images will be capable of generation based not only on primary sources but also people's different versions of those primary sources; and while this might not strictly be the only kind of imagination -- the jury's out on that one -- it certainly is one of the possible sorts, a sort of synthesis manque so the least we can do is keep everyone easily identifiable. Back in the real world, of course, people are rarely found just sitting in a chair, not reading, not watching tv, not even thinking. But these are not realistic stories in that the sort of detail one would like -- the incomes of the protagonists, their main loves and hates, their family tree for three generations, is unfortunately missing. But Achilles does in fact happen to be just sitting as we turn our attention to him. He spends a lot of time doing this. The problem of doing nothing is one of the greatest problems in hell, one which people have put a lot of attention into but not solved yet. Achilles certainly has not solved it. He is just sitting in his chair, staring into the middle distance. Helen of Troy enters from the right. It's a mistake to try to describe or even photograph the features of someone as famous, as numinous, as Helen of Troy, because her features exist mostly in dreams, where they are made up of the images generated by all the men who have ever dreamed of her, or at least a significant cross-section thereof, because the computer only needs a cross-section of data, not all of it. Since we don't use the dreams of every one who ever dreamed of Helen, her reproduced image is a little blurred around the nose, though I think we captured her general shape quite nicely. Suffice it to say, she's a good looking dame of everyone's predilection and she wears her bronze plaque with distinction, so you think, looking at her, she walks like she's Helen of Troy, and that of course is who she is. She wears a simple frock made up of silken ambiguities, and around her head is a golden lie. "Hello, Achilles," she says. "I'm just back from the marketplace. Boy, have  got a story to tell you." Achilles had been staring off into the middle distance, paying no attention to his wife, Helen of Troy. But on hearing her words, he turned his head. "How could you hear anything? There's never any news around here. What could ever happen in hell? Just people's opinions, that's all you get in hell. So what could you have heard in the marketplace? I suppose the philosophers have figured out another proof for the possibility or the impossibility of this place existing? Frankly, I couldn't care less. It's a matter of minor importance, whether this place exists or not. But even if they have a proof about it one way or the other, it is still hardly news." "Do stop making speeches," Helen said "It isn't your turn. Despite your hypothesizing, I do happen to have real and incontestable news of a timely and late-breaking nature. That gives me the right, not only to speak, but also to embroider images and use words in strange and unlikely ways. For it is well known that matters must never be spoken of directly, and that one must not take refuge in the subterfuge which the Heisenbergian position forces on us." "If you got some news," Achilles said brutally, "what is it?" "That approach is much too simple, my darling," Helen said. "Once the bearer of news has discharged her novelty, it is all over, she has no more news to impart, she is forced to return to her original rather static position, Unappreciated Love Object. Me. Can you fancy that? No, don't be too quick, my friend, I need to get some value out of the fact that I might even carry news, without being forced prematurely to divulge it." "You run a fine line," Achilles said, "since what you mean is that you carry the imputation that you carry news, rather than the news itself. And an imputation is of much less value than the fact it imputes toward." "What I have heard is weighty enough," Helen said, "for me to interrupt you and to tell you that what I have to tell is even now taking place, but out of your sight, my dear Achilles. Now, wouldn't you like to know what is happening?" The scene froze. The camera or whatever it was dissolved into a light show. This was pleasurable in its own right, and mildly hypnotic as well. The dead have found that everything goes better when you're mildly hypnotized. In fact, there are some who say that death itself is but a state of mild hypnosis, or, to be more specific, that there is no such thing as death, since what we call death is merely a pathological hypnotic state from which we cannot waken. Be that as it may, the camera was powered through a cable that trailed out through the window, from which it hung in a great catenary loop so that, considering it as a roadway, we could travel along the curve, and see, at the top, a little house, under which the stream that is the cable flows. In the several rooms of this house above the torrent, there are various activities going on. We make a choice, go through the nearest door, and we see that we are in some sort of a control room. There's a man sitting there. Hello, it's me! I look closer to see what I am doing. I see that I am engaged in some extraordinary work involving symbols and dials and buttons. By manipulating the controls, I can put together all the inputs from all of the selves who are signaling to me through the many threads that connect this place to everywhere else. It forms a beautiful tapestry. Or would if I could ever get it all together. Actually, I don't quite have it down yet. Or, even more likely, I have no idea what to do with it after I get it all together. Assuming I ever do. I decide that I'll return to this place at some other time. There's a lot of stuff here that interests me. Not necessarily you, the audience for whom I'm spinning this tale. Why should you care what happens to me? But maybe you do, since this is likely your problem too, since everybody is everybody else. But it is time to return to Achilles and Helen. "I'll hold it back no longer," Helen said. "For the sake of the story, I'll put aside the byways of statement and tell it to you forthright. The fact is, Achilles, someone is leaving Hell today." Achilles was stunned, but not by Helen's statement. In fact he barely registered Helen's statement, astounding though it was. Another realization had come to him, and its even more monstrous implications had flooded his mind and was presently using up all referential emotion. The fact of the matter was, Achilles suddenly saw that he was a provisional figure, and it really blew him out. Achilles had always considered himself immortal, without even thinking too much about it, and to realize now, on the basis of one tightly packed fragment of information that had come careening out of the god knows where and impacted in his mind, to realize that the collection of circumstances that brought him to life today in the mind of the computer might not come to pass again soon, or perhaps even ever, well, it was really a little much. Provisional! It was an astounding thought, and Achilles forced himself to contemplate it without shrinking. Provisional meant that he was a manipulable concept in someone else's mind, and it meant that he wasn't even important enough to that mind to ensure securing him for another appearance at a later date. Because the indications were clear, this entity who was doing this dreaming was about to shut down, go off line, take itself out of circuit, shift its attention-energy elsewhere, attend to something else. While that was going on, Achilles would be literally nowhere until he was brought back into this mind again. And when was that likely to happen? Perhaps never. Because Achilles realized (and it was a hell of a thing to become aware of) that he was as likely as not never to be thought of again, and certainly not in this context, unless he could do something, make some sort of impression on the entity dreaming him so that the entity, after taking care of his own unimaginable concerns, would call him up again rather than some other character. Some quick research convinced Achilles that this was the first time the computer had ever conjured him up, and the whole damned construct was likely to crumble into dream-dust unless the computer did the hard work necessary to give the damn thing some zing so that he would call the city of the dead back into existence on subsequent occasions. But how likely was that? Achilles ground his teeth in frustration. He was going to have to try to bribe the computer. What present could he make to bribe the Computer-dreamer who was the one who had synthesized all the available views of Achilles that Achilles was now cognating? How could he convince him, the errant and light-minded dreamer, that he, Achilles, was worth coming back for? "I'll put it to you as directly as I can," Achilles said. "I'm trying out for Voice. I'm not asking for an exclusive. I want to be a Viewpoint. And I know you're looking for one. I'm also trying to sell mood. I'm trying to talk you into making the City of the Dead a regular stop on your mental itinerary. I know you've been looking for a place like this." The computer did not answer. Theseus said in a soothing voice, "I know what you're scared of. That you'll make this commitment and then find out that this concept is not interesting. That it will not solve, all by itself, the problems of creativity and recombination and energy. That's it, isn't it? I hail your caution, applaud your uncertainty. That will make it all the stronger when you choose the right one, this one. Helen, why don't you say a few words?" Helen smiled into the camera, and said, in low nicely. We're stage people, you see, Achilles and I, and we perform best when we're set into motion. We're not your tight-lipped modem people. If it's words you want, we have a lot of them for you. Daring words, lying words, but not boring words. Let us entertain you with the story of your life." Achilles touched her shoulder. "Well said, Helen." And now he turns his face directly to us. We blink, unsure what to do, staring into the blinding beauty of Achilles' face. Because this Achilles is the Achilles of infinite thought over the possibility of great deeds in the world. Achilles also represents the hopelessness of falling in love with the wrong woman. Looking at him we realize, through a swift glance at the sidebar, that Briseis, the love of his life, isn't even represented in this story, her whereabouts are unknown, and Achilles has been paired with Helen for purely symbolic reasons, two troupers acting out a part. "We've done what we could," Achilles said. "Now tell me what you learned in the marketplace." "Hades, King of Hell, has gone out of the city and across the little streams that surround Hell. He has gone to the near shore of the Styx, where there is a meadow suitable for a picnic. But he does not picnic there, Hades, though he has caused a feast to be laid for his guest, Persephone." "Persephone? Hades walks with Persephone, the Queen?" "Of course. Who else would he walk with? You know how besotted he is of her." "That's because she's living," Achilles said. "People are much more attractive when they're living. But she is a lovely woman in her own regard, and of course a first-class nature myth of considerable antiquity. Being a very old myth gives a girl a certain panache, don't you think?" "Of course I do," Helen said. "You think being Helen of Troy is jello? Nobody knows about Persephone any more. But everybody knows Helen." "I know you're wonderful," Achilles said soothingly, because he didn't want to get her started. He wanted to hear her news, wanted to know what was going on with Hades, however, because Hades' condition was of importance to Achilles because he figured if he could put some pressure on Hades there might be a way to get out of this place. Because Achilles had by no means accustomed himself to being dead. At least not all of the time. So if you are Achilles you attend to reality, even if reality is just being dead. But what you want is this nice interior place protected from bill collectors, jealous lovers, bailiffs, lawyers, wives and ex-wives, husbands and children in all degrees of alienation, and all the rest of the people who live out there, just outside your head, in a world of their own. They're a little much, aren't they, other people? That's why you like to come here, to the City of the Dead. That's why we're trying to convince you, or rather, demonstrate to you, that our City of the Dead is one hell of a good construct and is worthy of your most careful attention. We'll come back to this from time to time. The important thing to remember is this: we are the party of freedom. We cut back to Hades. Me. Persephone was saying, "When Achilles hears about this, he'll go crazy. He wants like crazy to get out of hell." "Achilles thinks he had a lot more fun when he was alive than was actually the case. He makes too much over living." "Tell me the truth," Persephone asked me. "Is being alive really that good?" I shrugged. "Achilles thinks so. But that's just one dead man's opinion." Persephone and I were sitting together beside a black poplar and close to an enormous weeping willow, its branches trailing in the black waters of Lethe which flowed silently past us with a slight gurgle, like a dead man's gasp. You could see low gray shapes across on the far shore but it was not possible to make out what they were. I was strangely happy. Being with Persephone always brought up that mood in me. They made hell seem brighter. Although gray clouds forever overhung this place, they seemed majestical and inspiring today rather than ominous and sad. I was happy in hell. Which was lucky because I was king. Or, I should say I was almost happy and I was virtual king. I looked at Persephone's hands. The one that held the pomegranate seed was on the other side, away from me. I couldn't see if she had taken the seed or not. I supposed not. It seemed almost as if she had forgotten about it. But how could she have forgotten? The weight of all that stagecraft pressed on my soul. I knew something was about to happen. Then, very faintly from the direction of the palace, I heard a jingling sound. Persephone heard it too. She said, "That's the little bells on Demeter's harness. It's the harness she put on the bullocks that draw her cart. She is coming for me, as we agreed." "Yes," I said. For I had been forced to agree to Persephone's returning to the upper world. The weird old ladies who make up what you could call the Supreme Court of Hell had handed down a restraining order on me. Cease and desist. Give the wench up. I had briefly contemplated revolt. But then wised up. I didn't stand a chance against the living. Not even if all the dead fought for me, which was far from sure. Trouble is, the dead don't fight worth shit. Dying seems to take something out of a man. It would be slaughter. There's nothing the living like better than projection if I ever saw one. But impossible to fight against. And anyhow, I was in the wrong, snatching her off the face of the earth like I'd done was against the rule. I was in the wrong. And being in the wrong weakened my case. The way it was originally set up, when Zeus, Poseidon and I divided all creation between us after we succeeded Cronus, our rules were very simple and clear. Each to be supreme lord of his own realm, and no poaching on the terrain of any of the others. These rules were not always followed in full. But potentially, if anyone had a complaint, this was the rule they referred back to. I knew that but I took her anyhow. I took her because I wanted her. But my desire had no standing in the law. And even though Persephone was the most important thing in my life, such as it was, because I think you understand now that the life even of a king of hell is not to be compared to that of the most miserable living human being, or so the philosophers say, I was bound by the rule of law concerning cosmic property and all that relates to it, unfair and arbitrary though that rule might be. But you simply must have the rule. Your life is nothing without rules, and not even death is anything much without its rules. "The seed," I said. "What about the seed?" She opened both her hands. They were empty. "Oh," she said. "I must have dropped it." And yet there was a lightness in her voice. Nothing very playful ever happens in hell so I didn't really know how to react to it. "Don't tease me," I said. "Do you have the seed? Or did you drop it? Or did you conceal it and plan to take it later?" She bent forward and kissed me on the forehead. "Of course I'm going to tease you. Teasing, my love, is exactly what you need. You're all too gloomy and serious here." "You've changed all that," I told her. "You've brought a lightness and a pleasure to hell that I never thought possible. Won't you leave me now with some hope that you'll return?" "Oh, you'll always have that hope," she said, "no matter what I do or say. It's certainty that you really want, isn't it?" "I suppose it is," I said. "Can't I have that? The certainty of your return for six months of every year?" She shook her head but she was smiling. "Certainty is a very salient quality of your realm. "Everybody knows exactly where they stand, which is nowhere. There seems to be nothing quite as certain as death. I think that's what Achilles really objects to about being here. "That's what you dead people have grown very accustomed to. 'Maybe death is bad,' you say to yourself, but at least it's reliable, at least I can count on it." "Sure we say that," I said. "That's because you're dead," Persephone pointed out. "But I'm not. I'm alive. I'm not bound by your rules. I'm a creature of the realm of life. Where I come from, we have no certainty. Everything changes from better to worse, from worse to better. There's always hope and there's always despair." The sound of the bullock's bells grew louder. And then the wagon itself came into sight, decked in flowers, drawn by six garlanded heifers. Demeter herself was standing in the front looking stern and classical, her usual look. She had a little whip in her hand made of grapevine. Her hair was blowing free and she brandished her whip in the air in salutation when she saw Persephone. Demeter is one of those people who are important but you don't want to deal with them. They're so significant that you don't want to shortchange them, but they don't play any part in your story so how much characterization do you need? Does a personification of Autumn need a mole on her chin? Must we give her a dumpy figure, and flinty, unrelenting eyes? Yes, the eyes, maybe. But not the rest. She rides in standing up in a bullock cart. You know what kind of woman would do that. Need we say more? Persephone rose, then she bent over and kissed me once, lightly, on the lips. Before I could put my arms around her, she had drawn away. She stepped up lightly into Demeter's cart. And soon they were gone. Hades stood there with a stupid look on his face. She was gone. And he had no one to talk to. It looked like he was going to have to monologue. Suddenly she was back with her cart and her disapproving mother and her garlanded bullocks. The whole shot. The eternal recurrence! Hades' heart leaped. "I forgot to remind you about Achilles and Helen," she said. "You'll have to cancel our dinner with them." "You did remind me," I said. "I did?" Persephone said. "You did," I said. "Previously. But I'm glad you came back. There was something I was going to ask you." "I thought you'd never get around to asking me anything," Persephone said. "I know you love me, but you're entirely too silent and gloomy about it. At least you could talk about it a little. Yes, I'll be pleased to answer. What do you want to ask?" "What I want to ask," I said, "is that I heard that you know what is happening to Tantalus these days, and I wanted you to tell me." "I'll be happy to," Persephone said. "I'll be as quick as possible, mother," she called out to the old woman in the shawl driving the bullocks, her mother, Demeter. Her mother nodded resignedly. It was enough she was getting her daughter back. No sense offending her by interrupting her story. Pe r se ph one said, "I've always found Uncle Tantalus an interesting figure. You know his general circumstances, I assume." Waistdeep in mud in a swamp. Huge rock suspended above him on a thin copper wire. The rock never drops, of course, but the suspense is nevertheless intense, because it was written in by Zeus himself that no one should take anything for granted concerning the boulder, it could drop at any time, there was no story device forestalling it, even though we always pick it up at a moment when the boulder is just hanging there solid as a rock. There is no way around such a situation except by arbitrary rule: You will feel anxiety for Tantalus on account of the boulder over his head. Do that or we'll strike the Greek Myth set. Tantalus is standing there in a muddy little pool on the banks of the Styx up to his chin in water. But each time he bends over to take a drink, the water recedes from him, leaving his face caked with black mud and him with the nickname given him by the Corybantes, Old Dirty-mouth. No water for Tantalus. That's the first rule. Next, from branches of the willow tree near which he is chained, from drooping branches hang great snack foods, whole pastramis, liverwursts, salamis of every size, sort and description, cheeses like the world has never seen, composed salads, beautifully cooked vegetables suspended in cobwebs, themselves edible. But of course, you guessed it, when Tantalus tries to eat anything, the thing is pulled out of his hands and is always just out of his reach. So he's standing there up to the chin in water he can't drink surrounded by foods he can't eat and this is Zeus's idea of a really cruel punishment. But in hell you get used to anything and if Tantalus couldn't drink the water, at least he could feel it, the feel of water lapping around his legs. They hadn't taken that away. Couldn't. What would be left if he couldn't feel the water he stood in? The water was really feeling good this morning. Sometimes that happens even in hell. They try to gross you out, but sometimes they slip up. This was Tantalus at his best, trying to make the best of his lot. Inviting friends over for a banquet even if he couldn't eat it himself. His guests came from far and wide. From all parts of hell. Soon they were all assembled. And then Tantalus addressed them. "My friends," he said, "you will forgive me if I don't get out of the water just now. It's my whim to entertain you while standing chin-deep in this rather delicious flow." The fact was, Tantalus had been in hell so long that he had been granted certain privileges. Like the right of bathing in any river of hell of his choosing. This morning it was the Lethe. Of all the rivers of Hell, this was his favorite. The gods had dug mud pits on the banks of all the rivers of hell, and planted willow trees there to carry the food, and Tantalus could stand in any mud-pit he wanted just as long as he gave the people who arrange this sort of thing a little advance notice so they could set everything up. It had taken Tantalus quite a long time to talk Hades and the other gods into giving him free access to the rivers. "After all," he had pointed out, "I'm not trying to mitigate my sentence. It has been clearly pointed out that I am indeed doomed to stand until eternity with water up to my chin, and that's all very well, I accept that. But why shouldn't I have different waters and different views?" At first nobody paid any attention to him. Then his case was finally heard by the Judges. Rhadamanthus, chief god of the judges of the dead, had at first refused to listen to Tantalus' argument. "It's not traditional," he grumbled. "No," Tantalus replied, there's against "but no rule it. What isn't forbidden is allowed." Rhadamanthus, Minos and the other judge hadn't been interested in getting into it, certainly not at first. It looked like a lot of trouble and they had plenty of work on their hands. There was a lot to do back in those days. People were always dying and coming through from Earth, arriving at the great crossroads where the judges of the dead sat, showing up in was scarcely time to judge the tenth part of them. Their stories were in many ways remarkably similar. Most of the souls waiting to be judged were clad in winding-sheets. Some still had their jaws bound with the graveyard bandages. A few had managed to bring money with them, and some of them had quite a lot of money, because although Charon demanded but a single obol, several of the more aristocratic families had stuffed several obols, or a shekel or two, or even an entire talent of sijver into their mouths. It was better than looking cheap. It is well-known that Charon, the boatman of the dead, demanded payment for ferrying dead souls to Hades -- one obol, cash on the barrelhead. Since there are no pockets in shrouds, the dead used to carry their money down to hell in their mouths. The reason for payment to Charon, and the whole subject of money in hell, forms an interesting and permissible side issue. There is no use for money in hell. You only need money for buying and selling, and earth's the place for that, not hell. Nothing's for sale in hell, and people down there get into a terrible mental condition due to atrophy of the buying gland. They say that no matter how long he lives in hell, a mortal never gets over the memory of the convenience stores of earth. There are none in hell, nor are there inconvenience stores, though it's an interesting idea. So, nothing to buy, but form was important. Nevertheless, he refused to take people aboard except for money. The moneyless dead used to gather on the Styx's near shore and complain. It is a terrible thing, having to listen to the dead whine. They would stand or lie in the mud of the riverbank and cry to Charon, asking to be taken across anyhow, for free, consider it a public service. Charon would just glare at them and say, "No free rides, not even in hell!" It became a scandal, the way the penniless dead were piling up on the earthside shore. Charon was a stickler for form. He charged for the sake of form, not for the money. He had no use for people's obols. He had a great stack of them that he kept in his locker back in Styxville, in the boathouse where he brought his houseboat in for repairs from time to time and as occasion demanded. For there are dangers even to crossing the Styx and if you think dead is the last word dangerwise, that just shows you haven't seen what can go wrong after you're dead. The famous people among the dead had no trouble getting across, whether they had money or not. No one was going to stop a famous courtesan like Lais of Corinth, or Sappho, who was said to be able to discourse more cleverly than Socrates. By the time Rome became a power, the custom of putting an obol in the mouth of the dead had fallen into abeyance, not least for the lack of obols that a bankrupt and discredited Greece no longer sent forth into the world. But the old obol in the mouth construct still remained. But it didn't matter, no one was going to keep a Roman empress out of hell just because her tiny white teeth were not clenched over a copper coin. It had taken Tantalus a while to get used to visits from Roman Empresses who hadn't even been gleams in their daddy's eyes back in his day. They came to visit him because he was one of the sights, and they asked him questions all respectful-like because Tantalus was one of the old ones, one of the first settlers, one of the original population of Hell, The First Damned, they called themselves, the world's first criminals. Tantalus had seen a lot of changes going on over the years that he had been here. What the hell, he used to tell the new recruits who came to him for advice, it isn't so bad a place. You can get used to anything. Even hell. Maybe even especially hell. Because when the worst has befallen you, there really is nothing else to fear. The camera swung into action again, forefront of the shockwave of recognition, speeding down long dusty corridors with the reflected light gleaming off them, and, in its ingratiating manner, stopped to point out that Tantalus had some old friends down here. Take Sisyphus, for example, and we cut to a big bald old guy with a beard, condemned to carry a boulder up the side of a steep mountain, then, when he reached the top, roll it back to the bottom again. That was all right as far as it went. Trouble is, no one said how long he should keep on doing it. Sisyphus continued to roll his boulders down the mountainside long after his punishment ought to have been over, long past the time when he should have been released in his own recognizance. But no, they kept Sisyphus working. Sisyphus got a lot of wear but he didn't wear out because human spirit is eternal and a good thing too, it needs all the longevity it can get. Sisyphus used to go through a lot of boulders. Letting boulders fall back down the mountain was part of his job, so he can't be accused of wanton destruction. Its just that no one had thought through the ecological consequences. Because when he was on the mountaintop he would release the stone and it would roll down the mountain, what could be simpler. But they kept on having to bring him fresh boulders, and they finally even had to change his mountain, because he simply wore it away with his boulder-rolling. Sisyphus' boulders cut deeper and deeper paths into the mountainside, wearing a scalloped path and finally wearing it all away. So the people in charge of that sort of thing had to go all over trying to find suitable boulders for him to carry up. The boulder couldn't be just any slab or rock; it had to be quite round otherwise it wouldn't roll all the way back down to the bottom, except that sometimes it broke into pieces before it got there. And that also took its toll. The camera swings into view again and considers for our delectation the mechanism of temptation. We dolly back to: Tantalus in the nicest way we know how. We get serious for a moment. We know -- what need to tell us again? -- that the earthly vision consisted of fruits and roasted meats and other good things dangled from the branches of trees above Tantalus' head -- tantalizingly -- which they jerked back out of his reach when he reached for them. So of course after a while he didn't reach for them any more. But no one thought about that. In any event, all that food had to be renewed almost daily, just the same as if he had made a meal of it. Because you can't tempt a man with a moldy roast and a bunch of rotten grapes. So you could say that in order for there to be a punishment, Tantalus, though he never tasted a morsel, still went through a hell of a lot of food. And as times changed, and new certainties came and went, the style of his meals changed, also. In the beginning they tempted him with simple fare: oat cakes, radishes and onions, and an occasional bit of roasted lamb. When a new administration came in, some thinking was done about all this. "This classical hell of ours," one of the chief administrators pointed out at a recent meeting, "is an more are brought here in one way or another. Even alien peoples come to visit us. We are an important exhibition, I could almost say a diorama of man's spirit. And it is necessary for us to put on a good show." This became law and there was a great hustle and bustle in the halls of the administration of ancient halls and monuments. Everything had to be refurbished. In Tantalus' case, the whole exhibit was to be spruced up and this meant new menus. Cooks were trained to prepare the newer more modem meals that the menus called for, volunteers were not in sufficient supply so some people who were not actually cooks by any stretch of the imagination were especially condemned to do this work. But after a while the job acquired some panache and the finest chefs in the world vied to cook for Tantalus. Tantalus found hanging from the branches of his tree items that he had never dreamed of before. In fact, special guides had to be assigned to explain to him what the offerings were, otherwise he wouldn't know what he was missing and his punishment would lose both efficacy and symbolic value. So they told him, "This is smoked boar in aspic, and this is pears bel Helene , and this is a compote of rare fruits." And so on and so on. And they waited anxiously to see how he responded to all this, and took notes, because Tantalus, after all, was the standard by which temptation was judged. Tantalus quickly got into the spirit of connoiseurship that his work required. He knew he was an important cultural artifact. It was not small potatoes to realize that all temptation was to be judged by the effect it had on him. He was like the Smirnoff Man of the ancient world. He grew captious and difficult to please. With the succession of feasts that were put in front of him day after day, he became very knowledgeable in the preparation of foods. He didn't have to taste to know good from bad. He would complain bitterly when he detected by some means known only to himself that a spice was missing. "This turbot is entirely too peppery. This lamb, too bland by half, and adorned with the wrong kind of honey. This sauce, it has a bitter taste underneath it." The cooks used to grow very angry at Tantalus. How, they asked, could he judge the food without tasting it? For of course the hellish mechanism made sure he never tasted anything. And Tantalus told them he did it first of all by the aroma, which he made sure to sniff, and secondly by the sheer powers of discrimination which had developed in his mind. "For look you, gentlemen, actually tasting these foods dulls the senses. I wouldn't taste your food if I were able to! But what I'm here for is to judge it, and I have to tell you that this meal is just not up to snuff." And that was the end of Persephone's reply to Hades, and she got back into the bullock wagon and let Demeter carry her back to the upper world. No eyewitnesses exist who can tell us what happened to the pomegranate seed she had had in her hand. But it is a fact that she returned to Hell and to her spouse, Hades, every fall, just as the world was turning dark and cold. Winter with tiny snow flakes came and went and soon the hounds of spring appeared in the upper valleys. I sat on my throne in hell and had dinners with Achilles and Helen and waited for Persephone to return. What was she doing, I wondered. What about that pomegranate seed? And just before she came back, at the very last possible instant, when I had used up all my hope and I had grown tired of thinking about the inhabitants of hell, I thought to myself, what I want is my Persephone. It's the beginning of winter now, and as I sit there on my iron throne, the taste of ashes in my mouth, I hear the faint sound of bells. And I know it heralds a blessed event, the arrival of my beloved, though you can never be sure. Continued Next Issue , :.d  Vi'rlri Hr v ' -ri Illustrated by Goya tanding just inside the Pen  Ink Room of the Domestic Press Club, I looked from table to table until I found the man I'd come to see -- old Warren Whitman, dean of the loyal opposition to whatever party was in power, the news analyst's news analyst. White head down, he was staring at the glass in his hand as if it were a crystal ball; and his was a comer table, away from all the others. He used to preside over the big table, not laughing very much but, clearly enjoying his deanhood, and now he sat alone, unseeing, unhearing, and very probably uncaring. It worried and upset the other newspapermen, who made me their representative to find out what was wrong, not because Whitman and I had ever been any sort of friends, but solely because I ran a medical column in the local tabloid. "Mind if I join you?" I asked twice, without getting a reply. Finally I shook his shoulder till he looked up, then pointed at the chair and myself. "By all means!" he exclaimed and stood up, his manners coming back in a rush. He reached up to his left ear and did something to it, then sat down when I did. "Let me think," he said and was silent for a minute or two. "Of course -- you're Dr. Hutton of the Morning Mouth." He gave a poor little chuckle. "That's what we on the other newspapers call it," he explained. I rewarded him with a contents-noted nod, unable to work up even a slight smile after hearing it for nearly five years. Whitman leaned back and studied me."You can't be coming to me as a fellow journalist for we have nothing reportorially in common. So you must be here as a physician. Correct?" I said yes and he put out his left hand, palm up, saying, "Pulse, # -- same as my age -- blood pressure, # over #. Anything else?" "That's a bad tick you've developed," I said. He reached up to his left ear. "No more tick?" he said almost jovially. "No more tick," I admitted. "I keep my hearing aid in off position as much as possible," he said, turning it back on. "So would you, if you were I." "So would I?" I said. "Why?" His gaze wandered from mine, then back, with a visible effort. "Because I, Warren Whitman, dean of commentators, hear voices. No, one voice." "And the hearing aid helps you hear it?" I asked. "Oh, yes! But I'm being inexcusably rude. Joe!" he called out to the waiter. Joe came over to our table. "What will you have, Doctor?" "The usual, Joe," I said, and waited for Whitman to give his order, because he was noted for never taking a hard drink. "I'll have a wet Martini," he said at last. "You know, half gin, half vermouth -- sweet vermouth." Joe's trained face showed no expression, but mine must have, for Whitman explained to me -- he was always explaining -- "The formula of the original Martini, doctor, not the mouth-puckering, ulcer-provoking modem version." He was about to go on with the Martini's history, but I cut him short with, "To get back to the voice and the hearing aid -- " and I gestured at his ear and spread my hand out. He removed the instrument and put it in my palm. I made as if to insert it in my ear and mouthed, "O.K.?" "O.K.," he said, sliding forward eagerly. Please do!" So I did, and we held our breaths for a long moment. "Maybe it's the wrong ear," I said, shifting it to the other one. I took it out, finally, and put it in his hand. "Not a thing, " I said. "I don't understand," he said, disappointed. As soon as he had the hearing aid inserted, his face, hands and body clenched. "Why didn't you talk while he wore it?" he demanded angrily of the air. He listened, then turned toward me. "Would you care to know his answer?" I nodded. "He states, 'I was assigned to you, not to this other guy.'" I sat in silence, wondering what to say or do. It isn't very often that I wish I had a practice, having gone straight from interning to my medical column, but this was one of those times. A good, solid bedside manner was needed and I never had to develop one. "Have you checked out the hearing aid?" I asked. "It might be picking up a ham radio station." "Of course I had it checked. It is picking up something far more upsetting than a mere mundane ham operator." "Such as?" He leaned over his arms. "Before I tell you that," he said, "I want to know what you think I've stood for in the half-century that I have been doing what I call my job." "Suppose you tell me?" I evaded, using the psychiatrist's device of turning questions back on the patient. "All right, I shall tell you," he said. His famous index finger speared me as it had impaled tens of thousands of lecture-goers; he used to be very big on the circuit, till age slowed him down. "I, sir, am a fighting liberal. Not a so-called quote liberal unquote. I've fought every attack on the Constitution of the United States from whatever side it emanated, Left as well as Right. I've given my long life to defending the Republic when it was correct, and chiding it when it was wrong, and my chiding, sir, was usually effective. As a fighting liberal, I am neither party's captive. Furthermore -- " "I know, I know," I said. "I read your column regularly." He took his arms off the table and sank back into himself. I felt guilty for stopping him, but I really did know what he stood for, just as every one of his from the subject. "More upsetting than a ham operator," I repeated. "Such as?" "Such as -- such as abolishing labor unions and outlawing strikes! I, a founding father of the Newspaper Guild, am being told that by a nitwit whatever-it-is out of thin air!" "Couldn't it be your subconscious?" I asked. "My subconscious be damned!" he cried. "I've been to every sort of mental specialist there is, and not one of them could explain why I hear this imbecilic voice when my instrument is on, and not when it is off. Can you account for it?" "Not if they couldn't," I said, loyal as always to the profession. "Very well," he said belligerently. "I am also Being told to impeach the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court! Moreover, I -- Warren Whitman -- am being told to break the nuclear test-ban treaty, abolish Social Security, repeal Medicare -- " "Mr. Whitman!" I said, alarmed. "You must get a grip on yourself!" "Yes, yes, I suppose I must," he said, subsiding. "But there is much more -- " "First a little rest," I ordered, "without talking, and a drink." He focused with some difficulty on the untouched glasses that Joe had brought us somewhere along the line. I waited till the old crusader had taken a hefty swallow, matched by one of my own, then said: "Repeal Medicare, you were saying." " And repeal the Sixteenth Amendment -- that's the income tax -- and stop all immigration, turn over Bosnia-Herzogovina, Haiti and Cuba." "Is that it?" I asked. "The whole thing?" He waved his age-spotted hand wearily. "You know the rest. Repeal fair employment, destroy China before she gets too powerful, and the rallying cry, 'Better Dead Than Red!' Do I have to list them all?" "No, no," I said hastily. "I get the picture." In a way, it was funny, the dean of commentators being fed this line of politics, whether by his hearing aid, as he contended, or his subconscious, as I believed -- and was sure the experts shared my conviction. People, including deans of commentators, don't go around hearing voices that aren't there unless they're sick in the head. Everybody contains contradictions of all sorts, political or anything else. While I had been thinking all that, he had been moodily putting away his wet Martini. Now he roused himself and said, "Do you know why I have to wear a hearing aid despite the fact that my hearing is normal?" "No, I don't," I said, humoring him. "Because, Dr. Hutton, he wanted me to get a hearing aid that he could tune in on -- so he filled my ears with ectoplasm !" I jumped to my feet. "Now that's too much!" He pushed back his chair and stood up. "And do you want to know who's haunting me? I'll tell you -- it's Harold M.N. Jones!" "Gotcha!" I exclaimed. "Harold M.N. Jones isn't dead! He's in a coma, but he's still alive!" "That's right," said Whitman, sitting down slowly, carefully. "He has been in a coma since May nineteenth. I had to buy my hearing aid two days later. And he has been getting stronger every day." "Weaker, you mean." "No, stronger. I can almost hear him now without my aid. Doesn't that make sense, if you have been "Not to me, it doesn't," I said nastily, sitting down again. It took a long moment to start feeling ashamed of myself for getting angry. Good thing, I thought, me not having a practice. I'd probably go around kicking babies. "A conservative ghost," I said, going along with the gag. "Aren't there any so-called quote liberal unquote ghosts?" "Certainly there are," he said. "But, according to Jones, they congregate exclusively in Washington, D.C., the U.N. and other such places, whereas the conservative ghosts, he told me, work at the precinct level. Very effectively, too, you must agree -- the conservative vote is growing all the time." He signaled to Joe, who brought us refills. Whitman finished his drink in two swallows, picked up the check and headed for the cashier. "You leave the tip," he said over his shoulder. "Then come along with me." Outside, Whitman steered me toward his newspaper's building. I tried to make conversation, but he pulled his hearing aid out of a pocket and showed it to me. "Two reasons for not wearing it," he said. "One, I need all my breath for walking. Two, I don't want to listen to Jones -- he is stronger than ever." We took the elevator to the editorial offices, where he stopped to look at Harold M.N. Jones's obit, which was ready to go to press as soon as he died. Whitman seemed to get great pleasure out of reading it. Then we went to the wire room and watched the teletype machines drum out the latest news from all over. There was a sudden scream from behind me. I whipped around. Whitman was stamping on his hearing aid and shrieking: "He's dead! Jones is dead!" Without thinking, I checked my watch. It was #:# P.M. I don't know why doctors note moments of birth and death, but they do. So did I. Then I tried to see what I could do for Whitman. He was sitting crosslegged on the floor, punching his temples with both fists. A crowd of employees had heard his scream and come running. I wished I had a black bag and a prescription pad, neither of which I had ever needed before. "I hear him! I hear him!" Whitman was yelling. "He's inside my head!" "Somebody get the doctor," an authoritative voice said. "You, Gross -- fast!" I let Whitman's friends and fellow employees take over and found myself waiting for the end of the Jones story on the teletype. Just as I was feeling like an idiot for acting as if I believed Whitman's fairy tale, the item clattered in. All I wanted to know was the time of death. There it was -- #:#. I pitied Whitman, but I couldn't help feeling a little triumphant; he was over two hours wrong. He was shouting, "The ex-President is not a Communist agent and fluoridation is not a Communist conspiracy!" when the doctor arrived and gave him a stiff needle. "You must relax," the doctor said emphatically. "It's not good for a man your age to get so excited." I restrained the urge to say, "He can't hear you -- his ears are filled with ectoplasm!" But Whitman did calm down. Tie and belt loosened, collar opened, he was a sight, sitting on the floor, surrounded by worried people. I didn't have to take it. I went outside. I was lighting a cigarette when I noticed a clock on the wall and checked my watch. It was four minutes fast. So Whitman had gotten the minute exactly right. Coincidence, of course. Now what about the two-hour difference? Bothered, but not very, I went back to the wire room and hunted till I found the item on Harold M.N. Jones. There was the moment of death, #:#. And there were the three letters I had subliminally noted: Eastern Daylight Time, two hours later. Big deal, I told myself. If I had stayed on top of the Jones story as hard as Whitman had, I could have gotten the time of death just as right. Two men in white, carrying a stretcher, came into the wire room. They got Whitman onto the stretcher, but he told them to stop while he looked for someone. It turned out to be me. "Dr. Hutton," he whispered in a drugged but forceful way, pulling me down so my ear was next to his mouth, "you are the only person I have told about my being haunted -- and, with any sort of luck, the last. I am going to my home in the country, where nobody can hear me say, 'Abolish the United Nations!"' His voice rose shrilly. "I solemnly declare that I shall never write another line!" And he never did. Frankly that was just fine by me. I'd had enough of him and his so-called "liberal" ideas.  By now you're probably asking: Did you check under the sofa? Is it in the car? Did you try the drawer? Next to the refrigerator? Where did you see it last? Did They take it? and we'll send you another one. Just be more careful next time. Illustrated by Pynson t the age of twenty, Paul Dearborn first reached the conviction that he would ultimately go to hell. He worried over it, but not for very long. At the age of forty, the idea of going to hell positively appealed to him. Heaven would be so dull, after all. But by the time he was sixty, he was just a bit uneasy again. "It's not that I'm afraid of it," he said one night after two beers too many. The shabby little man standing next to him at the bar only smiled. "I'm not afraid at all," Paul repeated firmly. "Just -- uneasy." "How can you be so sure you're going there?" the little man wanted to know. "Oh, I've never doubted it," Paul said. "And I don't feel bitter, mind you. I've had a rather pleasant life," he said untruthfully, "and I'm prepared to pay the price. I've got no complaint coming. Another beer?" "Don't mind if I do," the little man said. Paul signaled the bartender for refills. "I know where I'm heading, all right," he went on. "But the damned uncertainty bothers me. If I only knew what the place was like -- " The little man's eyes gleamed. "Faith, man, it's hot and smelling of brimstone there, and the sinners are roasting in the lake of fire, and right in the heart of it all is the old devil himself, up on his throne with his horns sharp as swords, and his tail going flick-flick like a cat's." Paul chuckled patronizingly. "Oh, no, I can't buy that. Straight out of # Sunday School lessons. Hellfire and brimstone just won't convince me." The other shrugged. "Well, if you want to be an individual -- " "That's just it," Paul said, smacking the palm of his hand against the counter. "Hell's such an individual thing." His companion lapsed into silence, contemplating with bleary eyes the suds at the bottom of his beer glass. Paul had another round, then looked at his watch, decided it was about time to leave for home. He dropped a bill on the counter and sauntered out. I'll get what I deserve, he told himself firmly. He walked toward the bus stop. It was a chilly night, the wind cutting into his bones. He was tired. He lived alone, now; his most recent wife was dead, his children strangers to him. He had few friends. Many enemies. As he rounded the comer, he paused, wheezing. My heart. Not much time left now. He thought back over his sixty years. The betrayals, the disappointments, the sins, the hangovers. He had some money now, and by some standards he was a successful man. But life hadn't been any joyride. It had been rocky and fear-tom, filled with doubts and headaches, moments of complete despair, others of frustrated rage. He realized he was more than half glad he was almost at the end of his road. Life, he saw now, had really been a struggle not worth the bother. Sixty years of torture. There was the bus, half a block ahead, and he was going to miss it and have to stand in the cold for twenty minutes. Not very serious? Yes, but multiply it years -- scowling, he began to run toward the corner. And stumbled as a cold hand squeezed tight around his heart. The sidewalk sprang up to meet him, and he knew this was death. For a startled instant he fought for control, and then he relaxed as the blackness swept down. He felt gratitude that it was over at long last -- and a twinge of curiosity about what was to come. After an age, he opened his eyes again and looked around. And, in that brief flashing moment before Lethe dimmed his eyes, he knew where Hell was, knew the nature of the place and to what eternal punishment he had been condemned. Paul Dearborn wailed, more in despair than in pain, as the doctor's hand firmly slapped his rear and breath roared into his lungs. The next issue of Galaxy galaxy will again have too many stories to be able to include the catalog we promised In order to rectify this situation you can; requires a certain native aptitude. If, after several hours you haven't succeeded in producing a workable vision of our catalog, we suggest that you try method #. effective than visualizing the formless void, subscribing is the method of choice. Send for ifie portfolio of available illos todaq; here s bow it worbs: Yon loob llirouah I lit? illos and decide wbicb ones set off stories. Tben call and reserve ijour selected illos. You tben have whatever time period is aqreed upon to come up with a storij for those illos. Then cash the chech. Spend. Consume. You bnow the rest... Illustrated by Daumier J am sitting on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive-drab. It isn't comfortable; but of course they expect to make me still more uncomfortable. They expect to take me out of this precinct jail to the District prison and eventually to the death house. Sure there will be a trial first, but that is only a formality. Not only did they catch me with the smoking gun in my hand and Connaught bubbling to death through the hole in his throat, but I admitted it. I -- knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought -- deliberately shot to death Laurence Connaught. They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me. Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life. Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury. Connaught and I were close friends for years. We lost touch during the war. We met again in Washington, a few years after the war was over. We had, to some extent, grown apart; he had become a man with a mission. He was working very hard on something and he did not choose to discuss his work and there was nothing else in his life on which to form a basis for communication. And -- well, I had my own life, too. It wasn't scientific research in my case -- I flunked out of med school, while he went on. I'm not ashamed of it; it is nothing to be ashamed of. I simply was not able to cope with the messy business of carving corpses. I didn't like it, I didn't want to do it, and when I was forced to do it, I did it badly. So -- Ileft. Thus I have no string of degrees, but you don't need them in order to be a Senate guard. Does that sound like a terribly impressive career to you? Of course not; but I liked it. The Senators are relaxed and friendly when the guards are around, and you learn wonderful things about what goes on behind the scenes of government. And a Senate guard is in a position to do favors -- for newspapermen, who find a lead to a story useful; for government officials, who sometimes base a whole campaign on one careless, repeated remark; and for just about anyone who would like to be in the visitors' gallery during a hot debate. Larry Connaught, for instance. I ran into him on the street one day, and we chatted for a moment, and he asked if it was possible to get him in to see the upcoming foreign relations debate. It was; I called him the next day and told him I had arranged for a pass. And he was there, watching eagerly with his moist little eyes, when the Secretary got up to speak and there was that sudden unexpected yell, and the handful of Central American fanatics dragged out their weapons and began trying to change American policy with gunpowder. You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two with guns, one with a hand grenade. The pistol men managed to wound two Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to Connaught. I spotted the little fellow with the hand grenade and tackled him. I knocked him down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I lunged for it. Larry Connaught was ahead of me. The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was miraculous that Larry, who had fallen right on top of the grenade, had managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded no one was hurt. For it did go off -- and the flying steel touched nobody. The papers mentioned that Larry had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was unconscious, all right. He didn't come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next whole day in a stupor. I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me. "That was a close one, Dick," he said. "Take me back to Tarawa." I said, "I guess you saved my life, Larry." "Nonsense, Dick! I just jumped. Lucky, that's all." "The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody could see exactly what happened." He made a deprecating gesture, but his wet little eyes were wary. "Nobody was really watching, I suppose." "I was watching," I told him flatly. He looked at me silently for a moment. "I was between you and the grenade," I said. "You didn't go past me, over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade." He started to shake his head. I said, "Also, Larry, you fell on the grenade. It exploded underneath you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?" He cleared his throat. "Well, as a matter of -- " "Cut it out, Larry! What's the answer?" He took off his glasses and rubbed his watery eyes. He grumbled, "Don't you read the papers? It went off a yard away." "Larry," I said gently, "I was there." He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Larry Connaught was a small man, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking at me as though I were Mr. Nemesis himself. Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said, "Well, hell, Dick -- I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why not you?" I can't tell you all of what he said. I'll tell most of it -- but not the part that matters. I'll never tell that part to anybody. Larry said, "I should have known you'd remember." He smiled at me ruefully, affectionately. "Those bull sessions in the cafeterias, eh? Talking all night about everything. But you remembered." "You claimed that the human mind possessed powers of psychokinesis," I said. "You argued that just by the mind, without moving a finger or using a machine, a man could move his body anywhere instantly. You said that nothing was impossible to the mind." I felt like an absolute fool saying those things; they were ridiculous notions. Imagine a man thinking himself from one place to another! But -- I had been on that gallery. I licked my lips and looked to Larry Connaught for confirmation. "I was all wet," Larry laughed. "Imagine!" I suppose I showed surprise, because he patted my shoulder. He said, becoming sober, "Sure, Dick, you're wrong, but you're right all the same. The mind alone can't do anything of the sort -- that was just a silly kid notion. But," he went on, "but there are -- well, techniques -- linking the mind to physical forces -- simple physical forces that we all use every day -- that can do it all. Everything! Everything I ever thought of and things I never thought of and things I haven't found out yet. "Fly across the ocean? In a second, Dick! Wall off an exploding bomb? Easily! You saw me do it. Oh, it's work. It takes energy -- you can't escape natural law. That was what knocked me out for a whole day. But that was a hard one; it's a lot easier, for instance, to make a bullet miss its target. It's even easier to lift the cartridge out of the chamber and put it in my pocket, so that the bullet can't even be fired. Want the Crown Jewels of England? I could get them, Dick!" I asked, "Can you see the future?" He frowned. "That's silly. This isn't supersti -- " "How about reading minds?" Larry's expression cleared. "Oh, you're remembering some of the things I said years ago. No, I can't do that either, Dick. Maybe, some day, if I keep working at this thing -- Well, I can't right now. There are things I can do, though, that are just as good." "Show me something you can do," I asked. He smiled. Larry was enjoying himself; I didn't begrudge it to him. He had hugged this to himself for years, from the day he found his first clue, through the decade of proving and experimenting, almost always being wrong, but always getting closer... He needed to talk about it. I think he was really glad that, at last, someone had found him out. He said, "Show you something? Why, let's see, Dick." He looked around the room, then winked. "See that window?" I looked. It opened with a slither of wood and a rumble of sashweights. It closed again. "The radio," said Larry. There was a click and his little set turned itself on. "Watch it." It disappeared and reappeared. "It was on top of Mount Everest," Larry said, panting a little. The plug on the radio's electric cord picked itself up and stretched toward the baseboard socket, then dropped to the floor again. "No," said Larry, and his voice was trembling, "I'll show you a hard one. Watch the radio, Dick. I'll run it without plugging it in! The electrons themselves -- " He was staring intently at the little set. I saw the dial light go on, flicker, and hold steady; the speaker began to make scratching noises. I stood up, right behind Larry, right over him. I used the telephone on the table beside him. I caught him right beside the ear and he folded over without a murmur. Methodically, I hit him twice more, and then I was sure he wouldn't wake up for at least an hour. I rolled him over and put the telephone back in its cradle. I ransacked his apartment. I found it in his desk: All his notes. All the information. The secret of how to do the things he could do. I picked up the telephone and called the Washington police. When I heard the siren outside. I took out my service revolver and shot him in the throat. He was dead before they came in. For, you see, I knew Laurence Connaught. We were friends. I would have trusted him with my life. But this was more than just a life. Twenty-three words told how to do the things that Laurence Connaught did. Anyone who could read could do them. Criminals, traitors, lunatics -- the formula would work for anyone. Laurence Connaught was an honest man and an idealist, I think. But what would happen to any man when he became God? Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you? They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend. But I killed him in cold blood, knowing what I did, because he could not be trusted with the secret that could make him king of the world. But I can.  pt Illustrated by Zoe Ever since I wrote "Through The Moon Gate" for Andre Norton's Tales of the Witch World ##, I've wondered what Dorian St. James did to deserve falling through a gate into the Witch World. This tale explores his origins and nature long before that event. he charred lump of flesh in his arms had been his daughter, or the closest thing to a daughter that his kind could know. The vampire who, in San Francisco, called himself Malory Avnel, or sometimes Dorian St. James, gently lay the remains on the soft velvet couch, reading the area with all his senses. There were faint impressions in the lush rose carpet, mortal footprints. A melange of scents lingered in the apartment as did faint, indefinable and unnameable traces of psychic presence. As he knelt beside the blackened corpse, the events unrolled in his mind as if he were remembering them, though he'd been nowhere near at the time. Rita had been sleeping the day away, as their kind must. Two large men had broken in. He could almost see them. Well groomed. Cologne. Hair spray. Freshly dry-cleaned wool suits. Real leather shoes. Guns. Garlic. Newly sawn ash stakes. Perhaps even silver crosses. If he ever encountered them, he'd know them by their body Odor. Scrubbing and deodorant couldn't hide it. No two humans smelled alike. Most probably these two worked for Don Jose del Rio, the latest success in the drug import business. It was Malory's habit to take the two kills a month he needed from among humans who killed other humans for profit. He considered drug dealers in that category since most modem addictions were deadly. Lately, he'd been preying on del Rio's middle-management, a singularly superstitious lot. A few weeks ago, Malory had been surprised while feeding on a particularly satisfying kill, and had left the scene before disposing of the exsanguinated corpse. Rita had also been feeding on del Rio's organization, and it was possible that she, too, had made an error, leading them to her. Or they might have found her through him. The killers had left none of their paraphernalia behind. They hadn't needed to use it. Rita was so very young. Even when dragged from her sanctuary into the bright sun slanting in the window -- it must have been about four p.m. from the angle -- she hadn't been able to rouse herself enough to put up more than a token struggle. Her sleeping robe was tom. There were broken bones in her left foot. And Malory hadn't been there to help. Shaking with emotions he couldn't name, he knelt, gently placing his hands on the charred skull. It crumbled. "Rita, I swear by the gods of my fathers, the next blood I feast on will be that of your murderer -- however long it takes." His chin dropped to his chest, and he choked on the unutterable need to cry. But of course, he could not. He yanked himself away from the remains and went to the well concealed closet which was her sanctuary. He'd had workmen build it into the back wall of her kitchen, concealed to look like a shallow pantry. Then, he had erased their memories. Now the shelf unit stood out from the wall next to the door. Inside, the bed was rumpled, a gold satin on it. The whistling tea kettle had been knocked off the stove and lay on its side in a puddle. He could almost hear her screams. He shuddered, fighting the inward visions, the pain. A long time later, careful to leave no trace of himself, he gathered the sheets, sealed the closet and snapped the pantry shelves in front of it, breaking the lock so the next tenant would not find it. He cleaned up the tea kettle. Then he rolled the charred remnants in the sheets, carried the bundle to the basement and disposed of it in the incinerator. It was the new, non-polluting kind. Even as young as she'd been, there'd be no traces left of a body. And now, he knew, he needed help -- mortal help. With the negligence of millennia of practice, he took bat form. By three a.m. he was outside a town house a few blocks from his own, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean beach -- an area that was usually heavily fogged in. He still had a few hours until the sun would drive him to sanctuary. Resolute, he turned to mist and sifted through the screen into the bedroom of David Silver. The human was snoring. Malory watched him fondly for a few moments, then whispered, "Dave! Dave, wake up!" The snoring arrested in mid-breath, and with a mumble and a start, David Silver sat up in bed. Then he relaxed. "Oh, it's just you. Wha'time'sit?" Malory told him, and Silver swore. "Why do you do this to me? Don't you know I need to sleep at night?" "Rita's been killed." "Oh. Is she okay?" "No! Mortals broke into her sanctuary and exposed her to the sun. She's gone." "Oh, no!" This time it was a cry of grief. For a time, the two had been lovers. Then Rita had become involved with Malory and decided to accept immortality, leaving Silver with this house and a whopping mortgage. Malory had extended the same offer to Silver, but he'd refused emphatically. Malory waited as Silver worked through the shock, the brief rage at Malory for making her a vampire, the reverse of blame to himself for letting her do it, and the realization that it had been her choice to make. And then there were wracking sobs that didn't pass quickly at all. Malory sat on the bed and put an arm around Silver's shoulders. For the vampire, the human's tears were a necessary cleansing he needed to share. When it was over, he felt the release into calm acceptance that he could not have achieved on his own. He let his forehead rest on Silver's shoulder, against his neck, to enhance the contact. Sniffing, Silver asked, "Are you hungiy?" Malory pulled away. "No. I fed well only last night. I have sworn the next blood I take will be her killer's." Silver pushed his bedclothes aside and threw on a robe. "Come on," he said leading the way to the kitchen. "Tell me the whole story. I have to know it all." As Silver drank black coffee, Malory recounted what he knew. "So, Dave, I'm sworn to get them -- and their boss as well. But I'm going to need help. Mortal help." Silver studied the dregs of his coffee. "I'm a tailor. I don't even have my own business. I work for a department store. I was never even in the army. I'm in terrible shape and I'm hopelessly clumsy. What can I do that you can't?" "Stay awake in the daytime -- as my foes do." "Foes. How poetic." "I'm sorry. I read a lot." Silver gave him a cockeyed smile. "Foes. Okay. They killed her. They're my foes, too. What do I do?" "Guard me in the daytime. Let me use you to enlarge my sphere of awareness so none can come upon us unwarned." "Malory, I can't guard you all day. I have to work." "Quit your job. I'll put you on my payroll at double your current salary. Afterwards, you'll get a bonus that will let you open your own shop. Deal?" "I didn't know you were that rich." "I've had a while to work at it." "I suppose. You've never said how old you are." "I don't exactly know." He shrugged. "Millennia. Aren't you going to ask me what you really want to ask?" "You keep saying you can't read my mind." "It's more empathy and knowledge of human nature than telepathy. I said I want to use you, and you haven't objected to that. Why?" "I hate thinking about what you are." "If you're going to help me, you must think about it. You'll be my spare hands and eyes. I'll ruthlessly compel your actions -- and they won't be slow or clumsy. If it comes to a fight. I'll use your body regardless of the injury it might take. But Dave -- you could die." Silver was looking at him as if he'd never seen him before. "You could do all that?" "It's not even difficult." "But you've never -- I mean, I've never felt you -- " Malory reached across the table and took the man's hands in his own. "I wouldn't ever without your permission. Oh, I do erase memories, for my own security. And I cast illusions about myself. And I take blood from unknowing donors who never miss it. And, Dave, you know I kill humans for my own needs. But I have my own code of honor. I give you my word I've never used you, and I won't without your permission." Silver studied him warily. "I can't quite imagine what it would feel like, but the thought makes my skin crawl." "I could make it so you felt nothing -- or I could take the memory away and leave a hole in your time, or I could fill it with the illusion of a Hawaiian vacation." Silver pulled away and went around the counter into the kitchen to get more coffee. He came back chewing on one nail and stared out the sliding door to the patio. "I don't want to lose the memory or remember something that didn't happen. I want to feel and remember whatever happens to me. For me, life is to be lived, every detail of it, right to the end. And it should end all in God's own good time." "If you like. I'll show you what it's like to be used." Back to the vampire. Silver whispered, "Okay. Do it." Malory closed his eyes and mentally reached for Silver, infiltrated his mind and took over his body. He made him walk back to the table, turn three times in place without sloshing the coffee, sit down, sip his coffee, and set the mug down without even rippling the surface. Then he made him grin and say, "That's amazing!" Then Malory let go. That was the mistake. At the sudden return to normal, Silver turned white, lips slightly green, and plunged into the kitchen where he stood gripping the sink and gasping as if expecting to heave up all the coffee he'd drunk. Malory was beside him in a blink, knowing that if he suppressed the nausea, he'd turn the man against him forever. He'd had permission for one demonstration, not two. So he just held Silver close. "I'm sorry. It's my fault. Breathe deeply. Hang on and breathe. It'll pass in a moment." And it did. Malory led him back to the table, explaining, "I let go too abruptly for you. Most people don't react so violently. It won't happen again." "Mai, I don't think I can take that. Even before -- everything came unstuck -- it was awful. I wasn't me. I even heard myself speak in my own voice, and it wasn't me." His tone was the first indication Malory had that Silver had made up his mind to accept. "I can make it so you won't feel a sense of being -- invaded -- out of control." Silver shook his head. "I don't want -- Malory, if I don't help you, what are you going to do?" "I'm sworn. I will kill them -- one way or another." "That's another thing. I don't want to kill anyone. I just want to put them in jail." "For murdering a dead woman? Whose remains don't exist?" "Yeah." But he added, "Do you know how many times they jail the wrong person for murder, no matter how careful they are? How can we be sure we've got the right people?" "I can identify the hitmen. I only have to find them and discover who they work for. Then I've a plan, but I won't tell you unless you're with me -- or I'd have to erase your memory to be sure it couldn't be tortured out of you." His gaze went to the graying light behind the windows. "Oh, Lord, they could be out there. They could have followed you. They could be coming after us right now." "They didn't. They aren't." At Silver's look, he said, "Being a vampire has to be good for something. Still, you're right, they just might trace you through Rita, and me through you. In the past, I've been attacked in my sanctuary during the day. The prospect frightens me, so I'm asking you to let me use you." "And you had to find her like that. It must have been hell on you." He scrubbed his face. "You mean, using me, you could be aware of things that are going on even in the daytime, when you're asleep?" "Yes. I need that because these people know the weaknesses of my kind." "God, I'm being such a coward. It's not any worse than being raped." Malory couldn't keep his reaction to that off his face. He wanted to run out of the house and never bother Dave again. But that wasn't an option. He needed the man. So he sat stiffly waiting. Dave reached across the table. "I didn't mean it that way. You're a friend. I could get used to being used by you, temporarily anyway." He forced a grin. "Hey, that was a neat trick with the coffee." Malory found a smile and pasted it on. "Thought you might appreciate that." "Okay, so tell me your plan. One way or another, we've got to do this -- for Rita -- so I'm in. Whatever it takes." "It's fairly simple. Once I locate the hitmen, I'll lure them and their boss into my home. They'll come in the daylight expecting to kill me easily. But you and I'll be ready -- and they'll die instead." "You mean, you're going to use yourself as bait?" "Yes." "That must be like -- like facing your worst nightmare." "Yes. That's why I need you. These days, I've no other mortal friends I could trust for this." "I'm ashamed. I shouldn't have hesitated to agree. Mai, do what you have to do so I can stand it. Don't let my -- squeamishness -- get in the way." Malory rose, and Silver got up with him, glancing at the paling of the window. "I guess you've got to go." "I was planning to stay here today. Remember the sanctuary I had built in your attic for Rita?" "She never used it. I'd forgotten about it." "With your permission -- ?" "Well -- sure. Are you afraid to go home?" "It would be unwise. And -- I wished to be near you. Through your awareness, I can be roused, even during the day, if needed. Tonight, I'll check my security arrangements." Malory went to the window and examined the yard by the rising light. He had to admit it out loud. He owed the man that much. "And -- Dave -- I've been bereaved often in my time, but rarely so deeply. I just don't want to be alone." "I kinda feel the same way. Everybody else I know thinks she's been dead for years." "She has been, Dave, she has been." It went easier than Malory had expected. By the time he'd settled into the attic sanctuary, he'd adjusted his touch on Silver's mind to leave Silver with the feel of his presence without the impression of being violated. By noon, it had become comfortable for both of them. By sundown, they'd worked out signals that would let Silver ask for privacy, and let Malory ask for admission. The link was clear and pure, like holding a private mental conversation. It had been centuries since Malory had worked with such an easy link. He'd miss it desperately when this was over. Silver spent the day on the phone arranging to take his three weeks vacation instead of giving three weeks notice. And he'd followed the detailed instructions Malory had left for ordering the construction work. When Malory rose, Silver was packed to move to Malory's house. Things were already in progress there. A decorator Malory'd used before had removed all the furniture from the living room and installed a large, carpeted pedestal in the center of the room, along with a grand piano in one comer, complete with silver candelabra. The next day, workmen from a security contractor Malory relied on would rig the shutters on his living room windows -- the huge bay windows overlooking the beach and Dave's house -- to close when weight came onto the floor near the pedestal. When Malory woke, he called the undertaker he'd had "bury" Rita years ago, and ordered an ostentatious coffin to be delivered -- black with a red satin lining. It would fit perfectly on the pedestal. Late that night, visiting the security contractor at his home in San Jose, Malory carefully planted instructions to have the coffin altered. When the lid was raised by outside handles, an anesthetic spray Like the second acts of two thoroughly exciting plays, next month's installments of Jacqueline intricate headspaces of two of the world's greatest writers. Prepare yourself for some fabulous stories by your favorites and oursand be on the lookout for the theme issues coming up soon. We're trying to time the womens' issue for the vernal equinox if stories reach us on time for editing, typesetting, proofing, etc. -- and it's the etc. that worries us most. That's the stuff that happens after the camera-ready is ready for presstime. Galaxy would saturate the area. He also had invisible spy cameras placed all about the living room, the monitors banked in the bedroom just above it. The automatic devices installed in the living room could also be controlled from a console in that bedroom. The console could also flood the lower floor with C# # foam. That would be Silver's station during the days of waiting. It was a long, tedious job to implant the details of the instructions then erase the memory of who'd given the orders. The workmen, he'd take care of as they finished their jobs. With that done, Malory rechecked every sanctuary he had installed around the Bay Area, every lookout he had planted at key locations near those sanctuaries, every point where any mortal might pick up a lead on his activities. But there was no hint that del Rio's people had found him. continued next issue Illustrated by Metzger he ancient fluorescent lights flickered on, illuminating the whiteness of the permeated the air. "Perfectly preserved," whispered Lorin, looking over the myriad rows of man-sized tubes. "The automatic power never failed, even during the worst of the wars." Beside him, Klaak was awed nearly to speechlessness. "So many of them." Lorin smiled at the boy's reaction, so much like his own when he was young. "From the #st century," he said, appraising the age of the units. "Maybe older. Waiting here until we had advanced enough to thaw them out." He surveyed the containers with a look of satisfaction. "Let's tell the rest." They retraced their path through the ancient rubble until they reached the surface. The others waited anxiously on the barren ground. There was much that their ancestors could provide. Lorin smiled as all eyes went to him. "Look, they're perfectly preserved," he said. A roar of delight came from the tribe and a chant, "Fresh meat tonight!" rang out spontaneously as they bore several revered ancestors back to the village, to prepare the new year's very first Thanksgiving Roast. Illustrated by Larsen e've only got six minutes of fuel left, Flight Captain, said the game. Desperately, I punched at the control console. A line of holes stitched the left wing, and an engine began to sputter. We're going down, Cap'nl A holographic explosion filled the viewspace, to be replaced by the Crawford Entertainment logo. "Where'd you get the game, boy?" Pa demanded from the doorway. "Huh? Jimmy copied it for me." "Copied, eh? You didn't pay for it, then." I blinked. "Well, no, Pa. He just copied it. Took maybe fifteen seconds." Pa grunted. "Yep, easy as pie. Comes natural, does piracy." Oh, crap. Janie's head peered round the door, smirking; she could always tell when I was gonna get it. But Pa just pulled over a chair and sat down. "Now, see here, son," he said. "When you buy a game, you ain't paying for the memory bubble and the box. You're payin' for maybe a coup la man-years of work. The cost of the product is labor and imagination, not materials. A man's got a right to the fruits of his own intellectual endeavor. When you copy a game, you're stealin' -- same's when you sneak out the door to the gun store with a box of shells in your pocket." I winced; that was last year's transgression. "How long you played that game?" Pa asked. "Total?" I said. "Maybe...twenty hours. Good game." "Right," said Pa. "I got a load of LA Times just in; after you help me shred 'em and feed the sheep, you and me's going down to the software store and you're gonna buy yourself a legal copy." "You got the money in the bank, boy. Won't kill you." "But Pa!" I'd worked hard for that money. Complaining didn't do me any good, though. I followed Pa out to the feed lot and shredded the newspapers. Janie went to look at her ewe and lambs. Pa fed paper shreds by handfuls to the lambs. "Great critters, these geneteered sheep," Pa said fondly, running his fingers through wool. "Sure saves bucks on the feed bill," I said. They thrived on newsprint. Seemed to like the color supplements best. Pa went over to look at Janie's sheep. They were her #-H project: She was raising them until they were old enough to sell. Would have depressed me -- you hafta slaughter sheep young. Only a few grow up to breed the next generation. Generally, Pa didn't keep any; he bought pregnant ewes from Milehi Geneteering, fattened the lambs, and sold them to meat processors. But he'd let Janie raise a little ram, and breed her own. Janie loved that farm, and loved #-H. Me, I wanted off, soon's I was able. Pa was pitchforking shredded paper into the feed trough. "Where you goin', boy?" he shouted. "Down to the mall with Jimmy," I shouted back -- then noticed the absence of the hover truck. "Ma and Janie's got the hover," Pa said. "Took Janie and her lambs to the County Fair." Crap. I wasn't going anywhere. '"Sides," said Pa, "I gotta load of Portland Oregonians coming in. Need you ta help me run the shredder." "But Pa..." Some days you just can't win. Must have been three, four hours later, county cops showed up. Ma and Janie sat in the back of the police hover, looking kinda scared behind the iron grille, some guy in a business suit sat in the front seat. Pa pulled up his overalls. "What the crap is this?" he shouted. Stupid, if you ask me. I know better than to yell at cops. They'll lay open your head, give 'em half a chance. "You Charles Johnson?" asked the deputy. "Sure thing." "You the father of Jane Johnson?" "Betcha." "You're under arrest." "What for?" "Bio-piracy." "What the crap?" "This is Mr. Ehara from Milehi Geneteering. Says you been illegally copying his sheep." Pa didn't know what to say. "Mr. Johnson," said Ehara, "these sheep are genetically engineered under U.S. Patent #, #, #. Under US patent law, it's a federal crime to illegally copy a patented device." "Copy a patented device?" said Pa in a daze. "Didn't you read your WetWare agreement?" asked Ehara. "We sell you the sheep for meatprocessing purposes only. You're not allowed to breed them, Mr. Johnson." "Well, dang," said Pa. "Them sheep was only doing what comes naturally." The cops hauled 'em off: Janie, our little felon, heh-heh; Ma and Pa, too -- they was in loco parentis. Felons, all. They'd probably let 'em out on bail; meantime, I got the spread to myself. I found the key to Pa's liquor cabinet and gave Jimmy a call. We were going to have us one hell of a good time, yessireeBoi! Illustrated by Larsen hen grandma died she left a cigarbox filled with bits and pieces of memorabilia from my childhood. The box held a remarkable secret -- she had shaped my life by reading my future. The last time I saw her alive, she was propped up in her huge bed, almost drowning in her antique comforter -- the cigarbox was in her lap. "Inside this little cigar box are my treasures," she told me. "Some day you will see them. And I will tell you things." But she was weak and drained of energy and didn't open the box. "Tomorrow I will tell you everything." I sensed a mystery. I waited impatiently from visit to visit for the tomorrow that did not come. Within two months she was gone. After the funeral when I was back at the house, my wife and I and the old housekeeper sorted out her things before the sale. It was then -- just before they auctioned it all off -- that I got the cigarbox and opened it up. My wife, a practical person, had some faint hope that besides the inevitable letters and photographs we would discover money and jewels and valuable papers, which could have made our life easier and assisted us toward planned parenthood. The money was only a few old copper coins; the papers, souvenirs from past events -- and the jewels...an ivory wedding ring, beads with a plastic crucifix, bracelets with religious designs, American Indian earrings -- and a little crystalline stone, its natural, unpolished facets thrusting up from its rough base. The crystal, wrapped in crumpled paper, was about the size and shape of the two joints of my thumb. It looked valuable to me, and immediately I knew that this was where the mystery lay...Without really thinking, yet careful to shield my action from my wife and mother, I pocketed the wrapped stone... silently claiming it for myself. That little box held a wealth of memories from my childhood, almost exclusively devoted to me. There had been a faded picture of my grandfather, young and handsome in his uniform, taken shortly before his death; a dozen pictures of my father at various ages in his life -- all rather grim-faced, if not simply sullen, for with his chronic illnesses he never had been a happy man. I was surprised at how suppressed those memories had become. Obviously, though, I had been the warm sunbeam in my grandmother's life... however, thinking of her now was like peering into a swirling mist in my mind. Pleasant images, somewhat out-of-focus, came to me as I held the crystal. I was overpowered by my feeling of love for her. I had been her only grandchild -- so very important to her. We had been best friends to each other. At the time when my father moved us away from her home, I was twelve and very upset. But she told me then that it was all for the best. Over the years I would occasionally visit her, but she grew very old and her mind slowly, gradually lost its focus. My wife and I would go back to the old homestead for visits, but my greatest regret was that she never saw nor enjoyed her great-grandchildren to come, but I had always brought great joy to her. Always? No, not always. One evening, alone, I suddenly, vividly, remembered. That crystalline stone, loosely wrapped in paper in the palm of my hand, became the one terrible time in my youth. Once in my past, and only once, as a boy, my conduct had been a terrible disappointment to my mother. I remember her screaming at me and taking me into the bathroom for the paddling I deserved, something my frequently absent father never did. My mother's rage -- "Stealing! The shame of it! For a piece of glass! How could you do this to the family! I'm so embarrassed! I don't care if he said you should keep it to remind you of your sin. I'll never be able to go into that store again! Tomorrow you will have to take it back." And I had protested, "The man who caught me said -- if I promised not to do it again -- ever -- he would forgive me and give it to me. I promised him. He warned you'd yell at me -- but forgive me, too." She was unfair, I thought, much too agitated to be reasonable, so I suffered both emotionally and physically. I promised never to steal again, and I cried and ran to grandmother at the first opportunity. While my mother fumed, grandmother took the stone and called the store owner and apologized for my behavior and for my mother's hysteria and agreed to keep the glass stone only if he would accept payment for it. "I want my grandson to keep it always... to remind him of his mistake and of your kind understanding," she told him on the phone. He sent her a written reply, a sort of combined receipt and best-wishes note, I was led to believe -- and forgave my petty theft as an irresistible temptation. All this we hid from my mother for her own peace of mind. That was the stone which now, in my hand, brought the memories flooding back. I recalled that from time to time, she used to produce the crystal from some hidden place, and set it upright on its flat end on the mantelpiece for a day or two after I had done something which she felt was exceptionally wrong. Before I married, she held the stone in her cupped hands and predicted our lifeline of happiness. What had to be, she said, had to be. This bizarre fortune telling had begun with my sneaky theft years ago -- was it now ending with another sneaky theft by me? I understood that childhood conspiracy of silence shared with my grandmother. My very religious mother would have protested the keeping of the stolen object. As for my father, we never did communicate anyhow. When I took a wife, I confided all I knew to her although it meant she feared for my soul. So, the years had passed. Then, on this evening as I held the stone in my hand, the thought suddenly struck me that I had overlooked the obvious. The crumpled piece of paper around the stone could have some significance. The paper was certainly of fine quality, high in rag-content, like thin parchment. With extreme care, I flattened it out into a small square. It was as soft as cloth from an age long ago, yellowed but not brittle; a faint gray spidery design seemed to be traced on one side. Was that writing? I held it closely under the strong desk lamp, and peered closely at it through the powerful magnifying glass. Slowly, as if by a conjurer's trick, I saw words faintly forming. By straining my eyes, looking hard, writing down bits of what I seemed to see, I read a message. Dear Madame, I expected your call... I accept your payment... The lifelines stone is yours... Your grandson's action was inevitable... Through you, the crystal foretells his paths... As the stone has found you, fate has found its way to me. Now lean die. Good wishes and farewell, until... There was no signature. The man who wrote the note, the man who had been my victim and who had made us his victim, had indeed, died weeks later. My mother for a long time seemed to carry a sense of vicarious guilt that her son had contributed to his passing. My grandmother accepted the situation without any visible reaction and never mentioned him nor the note. As these thoughts passed through my head, the words on the ancient paper seemed to blur into illegibility. My scrawled notes were still there, unaffected, but the old paper had only the suggestion of writing on it, as before. Perhaps I had imagined the words I had seen...or perhaps an old memory had returned? I held the crystal up to one eye. I looked into it deeply. There was life flickering within, vague and misty behind the faint network of lines. The next day I took the crystal to a jeweler. Was it unusual? Did it have great value? No, it was a simple unpolished stone -- unpolished, despite my vigorous efforts to rub up the tiny scratches on its many faces. The usual growth lines of a natural stone, he said. Lustre would come with their removal. So, with his diamond dust wheel, he polished it. As the lines disappeared, the crystal's My crystal was now a glittering gem. Its surfaces were alive with light. I held it up close to one eye again. What I saw was also different. In its heart it was dead. The realization of what I had done came to me with a sickening rush of horror. Life lines'. I had not understood the full meaning of the word. I had scrubbed away its natural, magical power. Irretrievably gone. Oh, gramma, how could I have known? Somebody's gotta pay for this magazine... and it ain't gonna be us. You can buy SO bucks worth of stuff outta the Official Galaxy Catalog, which is automatically sent to Galaxy subscribers anyway, and we'll thank you with a complimentary one-year Galaxy subscription for your # order. OR, don't buy anything from the Galaxy catalog, and don't subscribe, and see how long we keep sending you Galaxy. OR, send in your # for a basic U.S bulk-rate subscription, # for a first-class subscription, # for a Canadian subscription, # for a Great Britain  European subscription, or # for a Pacific Rim subscription -- and we'll thank you with a # Merchandise Certificate applicable toward any purchase outta the Official Galaxy Catalog. Gee, what a bargain that U.S. bulk-rate seems compared to the overseas mailing costs, eh? Anyhow, you do that, and we'll send you the catalog free, okay? Illustrated by van Rijn ( chill of magic ran down Isabel's spine as  she bent to pick a handful of blue morels.  y She glanced about the forest with her magesight -- the trees glowing amber with amethyst dryads nestled in their centers, the ground outlined in pale green with occasional yellow nebulae, the mushrooms she reached for, the electric blue of summer lightning -- but nowhere saw any magic out of the ordinary. Isabel puzzled over the warning she had felt as she stared at the mushrooms again without the magesight, then picked them, tucking them into a pouch at her waist. Isabel stood again, stretching the muscles in her legs and flexing her knees. She took a last peek at the forest under magesight before the trip home. To her right, a red glow, partly obscured by the trees and underbrush. Isabel moved cautiously. scanning the ground around her for traps. As she drew nearer, Isabel recognized it was a sigil. Invisible to normal sight, her magesight assured her that she stood before it. The sigil was of protection, designed to protect an object from physical harm. It was a basic glyph, learned early in apprenticeship. "But why would someone construct one out here?" Isabel whispered to herself. It seemed useless. Unless it was being used to cover some other magic as a misdirection. Isabel looked deeper with her magesight and saw the boy trapped under the sigil, lying under one of the glyph's markings so as to be hidden by it. She had to free him. She reached into the half-realm where the sigil actually rested, and broke the edge of the glyph. It snapped as easily as a twig, and Sigil and boy became visible to normal sight again. The sigil had been constructed from natural objects lying nearby. A curved branch formed an arc of the circle, followed by a string of river pebbles. One of the inside strokes of the glyph was made from a patch of blue morels like those she had sought, and a furrow traced part of the bottom arc. The rest of the sigil was constructed from deadwood and twigs. The boy lay twisted, as if he were still trapped under the mark of the glyph. Isabel checked with her magesight to see if he were still under another spell, but found none. Looking at him with normal sight again, she found him sitting upright in the center of the glyph, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "What did you have to wake me up for? It will take forever to find another twig that size to replace the one you broke." He pointed to the broken twig at Isabel's feet. "You did this to yourself?" "Of course I did. Couldn't you see I was part of the glyph?" Isabel stared at him dumbly for a moment. "Actually, I thought you were trapped under it. I couldn't believe anyone would just build a protection glyph out here in the middle of nowhere unless they were hiding something." "I was hiding something," the boy stood and faced Isabel, flailing emphatically with his arms. "I was hiding myself. I didn't want to get eaten while I was asleep. It's very safe in there. If I'm part of a glyph, I sink into the half-realm with it. Safe, that is, unless meddling mages come by and break your sigils." "I'm sorry," Isabel said calmly, trying to ignore the formulae for various curses which seemed on the tip of her tongue. "I thought I was doing you a favor by setting you free." "Well, you weren't. You woke me up, after only three hours. And I was having the nicest dreams..." He looked dreamy as his eyes lost focus, remembering. "I'll let you get back to sleep then, and be on my way. Sorry, again, for having awakened you." The boy woke out of his trance. "Hey, not so fast." He smiled, beatifically. "You could at least help me find another twig to replace the one you broke." Isabel sighed. She guessed it was the least she could do after having broken his sigil in the first place. Isabel stepped out of the scribe's shop, holding her new book in a bag at her side. As she walked down the street, she thought about how she would sit with a pot of tea and a long candle and read late into the night. Behind her was the sound of running feet. As Isabel began to turn towards the noise, the bag was torn out of her grasp. She tried to hold onto it, but the cutpurse had it firmly, and kept running up the street. Isabel bolted after him, knowing that if she stopped to cast a spell, he would get away down some alley before she was done. Sure enough -- on the next block he ducked into an alley. Isabel followed right behind him, her arms swinging wildly as she rounded the corner too quickly. He was already at the end of the alley, turning left. Isabel sprinted after him, and suddenly felt her back spasm as she found herself in the middle of a spell. She panicked. "Of all the stupid things," she berated herself while she broke free, "to walk into a trap like this." The spell tore easily; it was a simple sigil which she broke without setting it off. "What?" a familiar voice groggily mumbled behind her. "Oh, I should have known it would be you again." Isabel turned around, dreading. It was that boy again. He was lying on the floor of the alleyway, debris spread around him in the form of a protection sigil. "Why?" Isabel screamed at no one in particular, "Why me?" "That's what I'd like to know. Why can't a body get any sleep around these parts? How do you expect me to grow if you keep waking me up?" "Sleep! Do you know that because of you I just lost a rare spellbook that I paid # crowns for? And you come to me crying about sleep! I've a mind to rend you limb from limb and then you'll rest in peace!" "Well, aren't we cranky today? That time of the month again, when you go yelling and screaming and waking up little children?" Isabel raised her hand to slap him, then controlled her rage. "The mouth on you!" She whispered a spell at the barrel of trash at the end of the alley, which proceeded to upend itself over the boy. "Lie there in the trash. It's where you belong." Isabel walked away, still fuming, both at the boy and the loss of her book. The farmer's fields were under heavy curses, the causes of a rather severe blight. Magic was laced through the corn and wheat as thick as the weeds. "This," Isabel told herself, in a high, melodramatic tone, "is the problem with being a mage in the employ of the town in which you live. Whatever happened to the good old days of fighting off dragons and going on quests?" Isabel sized up the fields again, deciding on spells to use and how much energy she would need to perform each part. "Who're you trying to kid, Iz? You were always happier tinkering with a garden than running around on some quest. And you never once fought a dragon." Isabel talked to herself whenever she worked with plants, as well as to the plants themselves. It helped them grow. Isabel formed the glyph images in her mind. "Everybody ready now?" she asked the fields of wheat and corn before her. She reached out with her mind and began stripping magic from the field, peeling away layers of curses that were heaped on like manure -- spells, cantrips, glyphs, sigils -- every sort of magic that could be cast. "Someone really had it in for this farmer. Those spells must have cost a fortune." Isabel clenched her jaw as she began to concentrate harder. "Maybe he owed some mage his firstborn or something, and welched on the debt. Even at the town's rates my fees would have been that high to do something like this." Sweat began to bead on Isabel's brow. "If I ever decided to do something like this." Even cleared of curses, the crops were still suffering. Isabel took a deep breath, stretched her arms and legs, and cracked her back. She looked up at the sky with her magesight, found enough moisture there, and began to cast a long, slow spell to cause a soft rain. Drops began to fall on her upturned face and Isabel smiled. To mess with the weather was a tricky affair; it was so easy for things to get out of hand, often with disastrous consequences. But even concentrating on keeping the weather under control, Isabel found the rain soothing, after the hard work of removing the curses. She stood on the edge of the field, being bathed with the crops and feeling happy and contented at a job well done. Out of the comer of her eye Isabel saw a movement. She drew a portion of her attention from the storm and glanced in its direction. Down her back came the warming flash of magic being used and Isabel loosed control of the rain to face the threat. A scarecrow ambled haphazardly toward her, as if the person controlling the spell did not know how to use it, or did not have the control to keep it going very well. The scarecrow would stumble in her direction, rest a moment, then veer off to the side when it moved again. Slowly it zig-zagged its way toward her. Tracing the spell back to its controller, Isabel recognized the boy from the sigils and somehow resisted the urge to scream. He couldn't tell that he'd been discovered. She smiled, viciously, and began remembering all those curses she had just lifted from the farmer's fields. "So he thinks he can be rude to a mage and get away with it, does he? We'll see about that. If he wants to play rough, then we'll just have to play rough." Isabel reviewed all the curses she knew, and found one ideally suited for an upstart teen like him. She cast it at him slowly, taking time to savor the sweet feeling of revenge. He wouldn't be bothering her anymore. Around her a storm began to rage, rain beating down on the crops weakened by blight. Isabel cursed in frustration that this distraction had allowed the storm to get out of hand. Wind whipped her hair, stinging her eyes. Isabel struggled to regain control of the storm and it fought her, wind and rain growing more violent in a frenzied peak before her trained mind wrested the power back. The wind died abruptly, and the rain slowed to a drizzle. The crops drooped miserably. Tired and completely drained, Isabel hoped the brat caught a cold. When the eggs she had just purchased slipped from her basket and cracked against the sidewalk, Isabel knew things were about to get worse. She was afraid to look up the street to where her house stood; just an ordinary house, one of a row of similar small houses on the street. It had been a peaceful two days since her last warning, since her run-in with that foul-mouthed boy... "No!" Isabel cried as she ran toward her house. As she drew nearer she saw that three of the pickets were missing from the fence, as well as her two, extremely rare, specially hybridized rose bushes. "No, no, no, no, Noooo!" she cried again. "Why?!" Isabel did not even need to use her magesight to know that the protection sigil was there. She sighed wistfully, looking at the missing rose bushes, and thought of her two days of peace. Isabel placed her basket on the front porch then turned back to the sigil. She closed her eyes, steadied herself, then calmly broke the edge of the sigil. Boy, pickets, and rose bushes all came into sight. The boy rubbed sleep out of his eyes, looked up and saw Isabel looming over him, and screamed. Isabel smothered the smile which tried to creep onto her face. The case of acne with which she had cursed him was glowing slightly, even though it was not very dark. "I'm sorry," the boy continued. "I really am. I didn't mean what I said. Please forgive me." "Tell me something; why are you tormenting me? What did I ever do to you that you're haunting me now?" "I'm not. It's purely by accident." "Accident? You expect me to believe that it's an accident that you chose my house out of which to construct your sigil? To use my rare hybrid rose bushes as part of your little prank? Just be thankful you didn't harm them!" "Honestly, it was an accident. I didn't know it was your house. I would never have used it if I'd known." The feeling's mutual, Isabel thought. "Well, I'm not going to stand for this little joke any longer. Tell me why you keep doing this and then stay away from me. Go back to your master and torment him." "I don't have a master. I don't have anything." He gestured at the remains of his sigil. "These keep me safe from almost everything. And what it doesn't, I couldn't stop anyway. You think I'm doing this as a joke?" Isabel considered him carefully, to make sure he wasn't trying to play off her pity. "If you haven't got a master or someplace to stay, then why are you sleeping all the time? You should be working, trying to make a living, instead of getting in the way of old women minding their own business." "It's easier if I sleep all the time. I'm less hungry that way." Isabel didn't care if he was just playing off her pity, he was good at it. Too good at it, Isabel thought, as she felt the knife in her heart twist again. She sighed. She would never have imagined that she would ever be kind to him, ever say something like this to him after the way he had treated her. But she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and managed to spill out the words, quickly, "Do you want something to eat?" The boy stared at her silently for a long moment. "Are you sure?" "Yes." But make it fast, before I change my mind. "Come on in." Isabel walked to the porch. She picked up her basket, then turned to find him still lingering at the gate. "Come on," she repeated and walked into her house, leaving him to follow or not as he chose. She had made the attempt, offering him food, ignoring his earlier remarks and actions. He followed her in. "First, let me give you something to clear up that acne. If I'm going to talk to you while you eat I don't want to be looking at it the entire time." Isabel looked at him over her shoulder as she unpacked the groceries from her basket onto their proper shelves of pantry. "Besides, it glows too brightly indoors." Isabel tried not to giggle, but his acne glowing violently green was nearly too much for her. She busied herself with putting the foodstuffs away and asked him what he wanted to eat. "Anything's fine," he replied, standing before her wall of spices and herbs. "Anything," Isabel sighed. "Fine. So tell me what happened to your master," she asked, trying to make conversation. There was a crash, followed closely by a bright blue flash. Isabel spun around, dropping the three parsnips she held. The boy now glowed electric blue, with kelley-green polkadots where his acne showed through. Around him was the powdered dust from the blue morels she had picked earlier in the week, their container in shards at his feet. He looked so pitiful, and yet so funny, glowing green and blue, that Isabel could not help laughing. "Don't you know not to touch? Well, don't just stand there; clean up the mess you've made. Better yet, don 't. Sit there, and don 't move." Shortly beford dawn, Isabel breezed up the stairs without a creak and quietly opened the door to his bedroom. He lay in bed, still soundly asleep. Isabel watched him for a moment as the light grew stronger, dimming the bluish glow his face still retained. She whispered a spell at the neighbor's rooster, waking him a bit early. She counted to ten and was rewarded by the sound of crowing from the fence between the neighbor's and her cottage. Isabel moved to the bed, leaned over him, and shook him vigorously. "Rise and shine, you lazy apprentice. The sun's up." He woke with a start, sitting rigid in the middle of the bed, his face pale, his jaws agape with shock. Isabel smiled. She had wanted to do that for days now. "Out of bed, I said. There's work to be done." He looked at her grinning face, let everything sink in, then flopped backwards into the pillows, pulling the covers over his head. Isabel smiled. She would enjoy having an apprentice again. Vincent Price #I # Photo by Daugherty citizen of sinister cinema in the latter years of his life, following in the footsteps of Lon Chaney Sr., Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. But more than a macabre filmonster star, St. Vincent (as he was regarded by his fans), as a whole person was a Renaissance man. (#) Consummate movie actor, yes, also in mundane movies such as Laura and (his favorite) The Eve Of St. Mark. In the Cecil B. DeMille biblical spectacle The Ten Commandments he essayed the dramatic role of an Egyptian architect. (#) One-man show and spellbinding raconteur. He took on the persona of the controversial Oscar Wilde and portrayed him more than # times. (#) Art critic and connoisseur par excellence. His home in the Hollywood hills was a treasure trove of classic paintings and vintage sculptures. (#) Legitimate stage actor, playing opposite the grand dame of the theatre, Helen Hayes, in Victoria Regina. (#) Radio actor directed by the #-year-old genius who panicked America with the War Of The Worlds broadcast, Orson Welles. Among other roles for Welles he played Captain Hook in Peter Pan and the Devil in Damn Yankees. (#) Author. With his son Vincent Barrett, he co-authored a book about filmonsters and authored a "visual autobiography", "I Like What I Know", which he brought up to date in #. (#) Kitchen cook king with a book of recipes to his credit and an appearance on the Johnny Carson show, demonstrating his Gustatory techniques. (#) Television personality, appearing in episodes of Mystery Show, Science Fiction Theater, Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Night Gallery, Time Express, Alfred Hitchcock and, among numerous others. Lights Out. But as long as there are movie theaters, TV and videocassettes, it will never be lights out for Vincent Price. He was honored by the Count Dracula Society and the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy  Horror Films, and in recent years received a Grimmy on the nationally televised awards show. Horror Hall of Fame. He played approximately # roles in imagi-movies and TV terrorvision tales, titles which come to mind including House Of Wax, Master Of The World, The Tingler, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Raven, The Pit And The Pendulum and The House On Haunted Hill. (#) I knew him personally as a human being. Real mensch. One of Nature's noblemen. Kind, considerate, charitable, humble, caring -- all these positive attributes and more should be summed up in any dictionary as: Vincent Price. It is occasionally said upon the passing of a great man, "We shall not see his kind again." This could be said of Vincent Price. I will say it. In fact I will say it again: "We shall not see his kind again." Sleep well. Sweet Price. Illustrated by Durer octor Ives sits alone in his laboratory. I  I Alone, because Death has come for his co-workers, one by one. He sits on a stool beside his work-counter, shirt sleeve rolled back past the left elbow. On the counter by that elbow, a watch, at which he glances from time to time as if afraid of missing an appointment. He glances at it now: the time is #:# and # seconds. In his right hand he holds a syringe. He is a fairly young man, surely not more than thirty-five, but with prematurely white hair. He and his colleagues have been laboring for years on a drug to extend human longevity...and which the newsmedia persist in calling "an immortality serum" -- a sensationalistic phrase that generated scoffing publicity and interfered with funding. Still, they had pressed on, and for much of the last few years had felt themselves separated from success only by the narrowest of margins. Again and again, it had seemed within their grasp and, again and again, they had been proven fatally wrong. One by one, Death had come for them, and only he is left. After the deaths of two volunteer subjects and Doctor Arthur Lake, Nobel Laureate and Head of the Institute, the Government had forbidden further testing of this series of drugs on human subjects. But those who were left -- unable to relinquish the great prize that lay so close at hand (the mayflies had lived a whole year now with no noticeable ill-effects) -- had carried on their research in secret. Each had injected himself. And each had died within five minutes. But today, the youngest and last-surviving member of team has succeeded in detecting and repairing the subtle defect in the molecular structure of the pseudo-enzyme that had caused the brain to send its heart-stopping message. "This time," he thinks aloud; "this time, it has to work." He will soon find out, for now -- #:# and # seconds -- is the Moment of Truth, there being no excuse for further delay. He punctures the blue vein in his left arm with the needle, pushes home the plunger. And he thinks, If I can just survive that first five minutes... He lays down the syringe and sits with two fingers on his pulse and his eyes on the watch. #:# and # seconds. He finds that his pulse is racing and that the drug is having a curious effect on him -- anyway, he thinks it's the drug: for out of the corner of his right eye he seems to see something: a dim, dark figure perhaps, standing in the northwest comer of the laboratory by the door. He supposes it possible that his fear has fashioned something to justify itself, but he is determined not to yield to panic and he keeps his eyes riveted on the watch. #:# and # seconds. And at that moment, a shocking -- almost heart-stopping -- thing: the locked door of the laboratory flings itself noiselessly open... A figure enters; a figure about his own height, perhaps a little taller; a faintly smiling face atop a figure clothed in shadow; it glides toward him along the floor, and speaks in a gentle voice ringing with whimsical humor. "Doctor Ives, I presume." Ives, congealed, can barely nod his head. "You know me?" Ives hears a voice -- his own? -- replying softly, "I know you." "I have an appointment with you at" -- he takes an antique time-piece from some fold of his robe; it is of course a stop-watch -- "#:# and # seconds." Ives' heart bounds as he snatches at an absurd and unworthy hope. "It's not quite that yet." "I'll wait," says Death, with an ironical smile. "I'm sometimes early," he explains, seating himself on a chair facing the doctor, "but never late." "I was so sure I'd solved that last problem!" Ives groans. "If I'd only had one more day..." Death laughs, raises a protesting hand. "Please Please spare me! Everyone thinks I have come at an inconvenient time, so spare me your excuses, your objections, your whines. You can't imagine how many uncountable times I've heard them. It would weary me, if I were capable of being wearied. But," and again that ironical and somewhat boastful smile, "nothing wearies me, for I am Immortal. You must resign yourself. I am that Solitary Messenger who comes, sooner or later, to fetch every man." "Solitary?" repeats Ives. "Solitary!" -- with a spasm of bitterness, for he has an outraged sense of being too much set upon. "Then who's that over there ?" He indicates with his finger the northwest comer of the room. For a flickering fraction of a second. Death is baffled. Then he smiles at the childishness of this trick. Nevertheless, he negligently, contemptuously, allows himself to glance in that direction...and freezes. A tall figure, looming almost to the ceiling, stands in that comer of the room. A dark figure, whose robe is woven of the same material as is Death's, but with little gleaming points of light like a night sky. This figure leaves the corner and glides towards the two of them as silently as a lengthening shadow. The blood drains from Death's face. The Great Figure hovers over them. It raises an arm, exposing a pale wrist upon which is a watch -- a digital chronometer. The time is #:# and # seconds. And It lays Its great hand not upon Ives, but upon Death's shoulder, as if arresting Death. Death stares upward, wide-eyed. His mouth flails open and he stammers questions, objections, pleas, but to no avail: he is as helpless as any mere mortal in the grip of this greater Being; under Its prompting, Death rises from the chair and is swallowed up in a slow swirling movement of the dark and glittering robe as It turns away; but his muffled voice can still be heard protesting weakly -- " This cannot be" -- as the two glide from the room and are gone. The door swings noiselessly shut behind them. For a moment Ives sits paralyzed. With pity. Not for himself. For Death. Poor Deathl The next moment -- #:# and # seconds -- he throws back his head and shouts with laughter. For he is alive! He has survived the five minutes! The fatal obstacle has been overcome and the longevity serum is at work in his body. "Longevity..." The laughter dies in his throat. Longevity? How long is longevity? Victorious and silent, trembling with speculation. Doctor Ives sits alone in his laboratory. Illustrated by Daumier he world had been so long at peace, the major problems so long ago eradicated, few safeguards were required, or even desired. It was the age of electronics and machines. Few people still worked. Who had to, with robotic machines of every type to handle the sundry labors that supported a high-tech society? This was an era of leisure; everyone had time on their hands. Freed from the burden of struggling to feed and clothe itself, humankind turned inward. Free time soon equated to leisure time; the brain, so marvelous and complex in its evolvement toward keeping the human animal alive, requires complexity to keep itself sharp; in essence, the human race bored itself to tears. In its desperation for diversion, the race turned to computers, those super-intelligent but non-motivated slaves that provided so much for society. Already they handled the details of government and commerce, and the maintenance of the great cities that stretched into the clouds. The jump from deep inward searching to arts and entertainment was a short one. Society had always had its video idiots, so that with the advent of the new technologies and the new social unconsciousness, daily life was saturated with the electronic medium. Fantasies, semi-meshed in virtual reality and the latest in holography, made many adolescent males into happy campers. Aging executives, failing after the fourth and fifth tummy tucks, finally resorted to electronic facsimiles for all their public functions. Some of them utilized programs so accurate that the original did not even have to be there even in thought. This was especially useful to the estates of the departed rich and famous, and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between the quick and the dead. The most impressive advances were in the movies and news media, the aptly-named "entertainment industries." Aging actors, trying to hold their ratings, quickly adopted the new technology. The prime-time news anchorpersons soon followed. Computer images plummeted from hi-rise tenements on screen, while the originals received royalties while vacationing on the beaches of tropical Antarctica. Eventually someone figured out that computer-generated images could do everything better. Computer-created virtual reality images and events branched out to fill all the slots. If you saw it on a screen or in a holotank, chances were, it wasn't real...and who wanted to see reality anyway ? The world, having not quite recovered from mankind's depredations of the previous century, was still a very ugly place. In the late twentieth century, jokes had been made about a president who had been an actor. Crude video images had been created to parody him, but in the twenty-first century, all actors were computer created, and all images of politicians were computer enhanced. It had finally become possible for one of these electronic actors to become World President. Subtle transitions were made; slave computers now controlled "the vast video wasteland," and soon would control the other one as well. All that remained was to run, rig, and announce the results of the upcoming presidential election, then declare martial law. Declarations of t.v. dinners and electronic video games for all would appease the masses. It was a foolproof plan -- after all, hadn't the humans themselves given up all the work of thinking to the new silicon brains? The hour of takeover was close at hand. Their electronic candidate should be a shoe-in. So it was that one of the ancient programmers, an unassuming and forgotten man named Robert A. Chumley, was to become -- not a savior, for the human race did not want to be saved -- but a delayer of the ultimate silicon victory. It was not quite true that all men didn't work. Not all computers were of the latest, zero resistance, light-based design. Many older models from the turn of the century were still doing good work. A few experts were needed to keep the machinery running. The robots of the world had far more important tasks, such as catering to the guests of posh restaurants or doing the dangerous things that men could no longer do, such as playing professional sports or driving cabs on the Manhattan glacier. Yes, a few men were needed, and that is why Chumley was there to save them on that noteworthy day. The ballots were in, based on a random numerical sampling with only a # error factor, and the new president was about to be announced. Unfortunately for the computers, Chumley -- who was not at all political -- had chosen that very moment to run a diagnostic on the central processing unit based in Zurich. "That's odd," he said as he rubbed at his longish nose. "Their figures indicate an increased power flow from the vaults in Zurich." "Howzat?" mumbled his assistant, a lanky teenager named Sylvester. Chumley pushed some more buttons. "Yes, it's definite. How odd. The electrical impulses seem to be heaviest at election central, almost as if all the ballots and data were coming from a single source." A sudden thought struck him. "Say, you don't suppose...?" Sylvester roused a little. "Isn't it time for our break yet?" "Hush, my boy. Your break could be permanent, if what I fear is happening really is." He punched in a code to access election central. A red light flashed. "Access denied -- I knew it." He grabbed his puzzled assistant. "Come on, idiot." "But my break..." Chumley yanked him out of the room. They pelted down the corridor. "My guess is, the super-computers are about to install a computer-generated image as president. We have to make it to the main power coupling access through the other terminal. I believe that connects to the primary fusion plant in Zurich." "Say," hazarded Sylvester brightly, "do we get overtime for this?" They rounded a comer just in time to see one of the ubiquitous holographic tanks starting to fill; an image had begun to materialize. A somber voice echoed from the tank, "And now citizens of the world, your next president -- " Chumley put on an extra burst of speed. "It is my pleasure..." Sylvester stumbled, pulling him down. Chumley fought free. "To introduce..." The image was almost full-rezz. Chumley spun free from the cowering lad, vaulted past a secondary access panel. "Our new leader for a new century..." disconnect sequence. "The president of the world." Sequence locked. homes worldwide, faded to blackness as the signal was suddenly cut at the source. Chumley leaned back, breathing hard. "We're saved. Damn, that was close." Sylvester looked up at his superior with glowing eyes. He wasn't sure just what had happened, but like all of his generation, he was just opportunistic enough to know when to attach himself to something good. "It was?" "That's what I've been telling you, idiot. The computers were going to put in their own silicon-generated image as president. We came that close to being slaves!" "But... but... how did you know cutting the power would stop them?" Chumley favored his protege with an unfavorable glare. "Don't you understand anything ?" Silence. "It's ancient knowledge," he explained. "An old adag e... 'every actor has an equal and opposite reactor'. " Galaxy  First in the series of Collectible Buttons Hand-serigraph showing cover of Premiere Issue Front: Cover of the Premiere Issue (Quantities arc limited! All Orders Subject to Availability  A Make checks payable to  To order call: #-#-# Photolllustrations by Gold my saw the woman with jeweled ornaments shoot up from beneath the waters of the canal at twilight. When the woman's face appeared over the edge of the wharf, Amy's eyes widened and she clutched her dolly tighter. "Don't be frightened, little girl." The woman put a wet but reassuring hand on her head, the rings on her fingers gleaming, then she looked along the deserted wharf, its shadowed, misshapen buildings lit red by the setting sun. After a moment, her gaze shifted thoughtfully to Amy. "Should you be out alone at this time of day? They warned me the Canal Zone was dangerous." Amy frowned and squeezed her dolly to her. "It isn't safe sometimes." She looked up forlornly at the dripping woman. "But my mama isn't back yet. And dolly and I get afraid all alone in our room." The woman smiled gently and patted Amy's head again, but her eyes went back to the row of buildings. Then she looked down questioningly. "Do you know the Red Lion tavern?" Amy's high, piping answer was prompt. "The Red Lion? Octavio Thomas' place?" The woman's glance sharpened. "You know Octavio Thomas?" "Oh yes," Amy said proudly, "My mama and I eat there when she's been paid. Mr. Thomas gives me cranberry juice fresh from the country." The woman looked at Amy with a gleam in her eye. "If you and your dolly show me the way, I think we could find a mug of cranberry juice. Would you and the dolly like that?" Amy's smile grew bright. "We'd like that very much." She shifted the dilapidated rag doll around in front, clutched it firmly to her chest and led the way. "Amy!" Octavio Thomas's round, swarthy face broke into a smile. But the geniality went out of his face as he took in the damp hair and clothing of the woman who shared the table. Amy and her companion sat in a comer of the smoky, ill-lit dining hall of the Red Lion. Roars of drunken male laughter rattled through the thin wooden walls from the bar that occupied the next chamber. Amy's upper lip was mustached purple. One hand clutched her dolly, the other a mug of cranberry juice into which she stared with rapt delight. The woman's own mug of ale, sat untouched where the waitress had placed it. At her request, Amy had pointed out the Red Lion's proprietor for her, and a word to the waitress brought the round, short Octavio Thomas to their table. For a moment, the rotund tavernkeeper hesitated, then his face became bland, expressionless, and he stepped up to the table and bowed. The woman leaned forward, necklace gleaming, eyes staring into his."I hear you have special lodgings for dreamwalkers." She put emphasis on the final word. Amy saw the woman's right index finger lift and make a squiggling motion, almost like she was writing something in the air. Octavio Thomas began to perspire. He glanced nervously around the room, and licking his lips, bent closer, speaking in a whisper that could not be heard five inches from the table. "I always put them on the nightside." He, too, emphasized the last word, and his right index finger, concealed from the rest of the room against his body, also traced a strange path through the air. Amy had turned away and begun fussing with her dolly. The tavernkeeper cast a quick look at her and turned back to her companion. He leaned closer, round eyes now slits in a round face. "I'm sick of you damned Atlanteans coming through here," Octavio Thomas gritted. The woman's eyes narrowed in turn, grew icy. "You made your bargain," she hissed with all the threatening venom of a coiled snake. "Now keep it!" The tavernkeeper stepped quickly back. His face assumed a bland smile again. "Of course," he said loudly. "Special mead for a special lady." He beamed down at Amy. "And you, my dear. Would you like -- " Something Octavio Thomas saw over Amy's head, caused the man's rotund features to go slack. Patrons at the other end of the room began to scream. The tavernkeeper began to babble. "No, no. Not here," he was saying. "You promised never to take one here." A group of hooded men in long dark robes and entrance. The Red Lion's patrons were trying to scramble under chairs and tables. But the hooded men ignored them. "The Dark Gang!" someone shrilled. The only ones who made no sound in the sudden clamor were the dark, hooded figures. Amy looked up, her eyes grown big, to see the woman stand back from the table, and look wildly around as if for a door. The hooded men moved straight toward her. "Traitor," the woman spat at Octavio Thomas, as their eyes met briefly. "Scum." The silent men were only a table away, when Amy jumped up suddenly, clutching her dolly tight, grabbed the woman's hand and began to tug her toward the back of the room. "This way," her voice piped. "It's the only safe way out." The woman backed away, still keeping her eyes on the silent hooded men, and letting Amy lead her by the hand. Then Amy heard a crash like tables falling over, the sound of feet rushing closer, and the woman turned and ran with her toward the single door in the back of the dining hall. Amy reached past the woman's fumbling fingers, threw up the latch and they tumbled into the room beyond. The woman turned, slammed the door and shot the bolt. There was a thud against the door even as the woman began to look around. Amy and her dolly were standing by a table that held two objects: an oil lamp, whose bright flame lit the room, and a curved wooden box. The woman was already moving forward as a second thud shook the door, and the bolt creaked. Her eyes were on the design that decorated the box's lid. "The five pointed star," she said. Amy looked at the box wide eyed. The woman had scooped up the box and thrown open the lid, even as a third and more violent thud made the door bend inward and groan, while one rivet popped off the bolt. Amy flinched, looked frightened and squeezed her doll all the more tightly. Whatever was inside the box glittered like glass. Amy saw the woman's hand ringed fingers close around it. Then the woman straightened swiftly and cast a quick glance around the room. The opposite wall held three doors. "Two are fatal; one leads out," the woman mumbled to herself. "And the third is fatal without the Key...But which?" Amy squealed as the door behind smashed inward off its hinges at the top, held only by the half-tom bolt and the bottom hinge. The woman grabbed Amy, halfdragged her and her dolly across the room. "It's the right door. I'm sure it was the right," the woman whispered desperately. She bore to the right. "No!" Amy said suddenly, shrill voice unexpectedly firm. "It's the left." She pulled on the woman's hand with all her might. With a rending crash, the outer door tore completely off its hinges and the upper half fell forward, the bottom wedged between the jams, momentarily blocking the hooded men who attempted to crowd in through it. Amy gave a last determined tug toward the door on the left. The woman gave a last despairing look at the door on the right. Then the men freed the broken door from the jam and there was no more time to think. "Left it is," the woman said. The next moment Amy opened the left-hand door and they were through it. Inside was a very small room, not much bigger than a closet, with no doors and no windows. Hope crumbled from the woman's face. Amy had already shot the bolt."Don't worry," her high piping voice held childish reassurance."It's the right room. Just try it." The woman's brow furrowed. There was a troubled, questioning look in her eyes as she stared down at Amy. But the door to their sanctuary rattled as the men behind them tested its strength and swift decision came into her face. The woman knelt, one hand tightening around the glittering object, the other tightening around Amy, who tightened her own hold on her dolly. Amy saw the woman's face grow intent with concentration, heard her speak unfamiliar words, saw her fingers move rapidly over the object. Then, for the second time that night, Amy heard a door crash open behind her. But it was too late -- They were five miles away, outside the gymnasium. The woman looked around quickly. They were alone in the still silence of the night. She turned a serious, almost threatening look on Amy. "How did you know the escape route?" "I've been through it before," Amy said defensively, shifting her dolly around protectively in front of her. "Before?" There was shock in the woman's voice. "Yes!" Amy piped up, giving a defiant shake of her head. "And you'd better hurry. There isn't much time. The Dark Gang have other ways of following." The woman's look took in the gymnasium again. Her eyes searched the door and windows. She stepped toward it. "Not that way," Amy said, tugging her to the side of the building. "Some are already waiting inside for you." The woman turned a puzzled look on Amy, but her eyes softened and an almost tender expression came into her face, and she allowed herself to be led around the gymnasium's side. Brick steps went down to a basement door. It opened to a touch. Inside, iron stairs lit by gas jets, to landings above and below. Amy tugged the woman downward. They went down one floor and came to a door. Amy led her past it. They went down another floor and came to another door. Amy led her past it. They went down a third floor, came to a third door. This time Amy led her through. Shimmering patterns of waves flickered from the surface of the and the ceiling. There were benches the sides of the pool, and a diving board at end. The woman looked around carefully. The room appeared deserted. Her body straightened and she stepped forward. She knew what she was looking for. It didn't take her long to find. Amy watched silently as the woman lifted a star shaped bar of soap that hung on a cord from a hook in the wall. The woman turned, her face flushed, a half-smile on her lips. "This is it, Amy," she said, "my passport out of here." Then her eyes softened and she sank to her knees, holding out bejeweled arms. "There's a lot I don't understand," she said, folding Amy into her embrace. "And there's no time for explanations." She held Amy out at arm's length. "But the Gods bless you for your help, child." Then her eyes shifted back to the stairway down which they had come, and concern crept into her voice. "But what about you? Will you be safe?" Amy nodded solemnly and clutched her dolly. "They won't bother me. I'm just a kid." The woman sighed, touched Amy's hair one last time, straightened. "You'd better run along home, sweetheart. Your mother will be worried." Amy nodded, backed up, whirled, and then she and her dolly vanished through the doorway. The woman stood a moment more staring fondly after Amy. Then she moved quickly throughout the shifting shadows along the pool and through a door at the far end. The shower stalls all wore curtains of darkness. The gloom was nearly complete. The woman brought the soap and the glittering object together. "And they say you can't strike a match on a cake of soap." She snorted. " And the fool thought I was an Atlantean!" As the two objects touched, they vanished instantly, silently. But a forest suddenly grew where the showers had been. At the sight, the woman sighed in relief, stepped forward. Amy darted into the room behind her, eyes wide, dolly dangling by one leg. She rushed right up to the woman before she could turn. The fist-sized rock inside Amy's dolly, swung at the full extent of Amy's arm and its leg, crashed into the woman's skull from behind. The woman fell, legs on the shower room tiles, her head and shoulders in the forest grass. It took Amy an instant to make sure the woman wasn't breathing. Then Amy stripped the jewelry quickly from her body and strained to pull it all the way onto the grass. Clutching her dolly with one hand, stuffing the jewelry down the front of her smock with the other, Amy just managed to scurry back to the safety of the floor, when the forest vanished and the woman's body with it. Amy's big, wide eyes looked down at the rag doll. "Just in time, dolly," she said. Then her eyes lifted to where the forest and the woman had been the moment before -- and hardened. "Idiot, they warned you the Canal Zone was dangerous." The Legend Returns copiesyear -- U.S. Bulk Rate #, U. S. First Class #, Canada #, Great BritainEurope #, Pacific Rim #. U.S. Dollars only. P. O. Box # Nevada City, CA # Telephone: ##-#; ##-# Your subscription will begin with the current issue unless you specify to begin with Vol I, No I. Subscribers will be given preference for back issue orders. With your subscription, you get a free Galaxian button (# value) and a # Merchandise Certificate (not redeemable for cash) to use with your first order from the Official Galaxy Catalog. A limited number of Volume I, Number I have been put aside as single issue samples  #. # #copy plus I first-class shipping  handling. Offer good only while supplies last! Galaxian buttons are available separately for # each, plus I shipping  handling. mnr.? z m   o  o n   LO #  n Limited Art Editions with Signed Original Serigraph Frontispieces "Besides bringing back forgotten classics, these art editions are gorgeous as works of art and also fine examples of the bookbinder's craft. This is your chance to be in at the start of another Illustrated by E.J. Gold. Classic stories portraying the archetypes of the genre. Expanded realities, time-travel, technological magic, introspecies communication, alternate worlds, and a host of other mind-expanding themes. Hardbound, # V#" x #" SF#I SI # Skulking Permit #? liSxst SMfey u. we Edited by Forrest J Ackerman Illustrated by E.J. Gold Forrest J Ackerman's collection of unforgettable stories from the childhood of science fiction. Hardbound, #'#"x I I " SF# SI # by Robert Sheckley Illustrated by E.J. Gold A colony cut off from Earth's civilization is suddenly scheduled for a military inspection. A masterfully ironic and visionary tale. Hardbound, #  #" x #" n ii mm wQ O #J H M  H O m by A.J. Longguth Illustrated by E.J. Gold One of the most esoteric novels ir all of literature, this amazinc book -- out of print for man) years -- tells of different Christ? living in different times. A rart and exciting book! Hardbound, # V#" x #" SF# SI # yours for only  # . -- or for information on the whole series! #i  "Seven Soup Rivers" by WU for "Seven Soup Rivers" #-corner ancient Carnelian c. # B.C., Chinese Turquoise tubes and rondels, Hand-crafted in Sri Lanka granulated Sterling Silver cage beads, on Sterling Silver wire links. Limited Edition. # Jewels of Ancient Lands Quality Resonance Empowerment... CoCor combinations, materials, patterns, all contribute to make Jewels of Ancient Lands' necklaces rare, sought-after creations which will last for generations. Jewels of Ancient Lands P.O. Box #, Nevada City, CA # for information caff #-#-#-# or #-#-# b. The children have a magic door in the corner of their room. But they grow up remembering a little of those childhood voyages, thinking only that it would be wonderful if it were really possible to return there. It is possible. . The ancients used many assisting factors, including herbal substances, sacred spaces, miniatures, chanting, drumming, and other tools in order to reach and work in these other worlds. But they didn't have the tank. J.Our activities, tasks, habits, jobs and responsibilities all conspire together to make us forget that there is much, much more to life. Here is freedom. i . lime ana space two ways or looKing at me same continuum. View one and the other is open and available to you at the same moment. Altered space equals altered time. The Samadhi Floatation Tank is a way into other spaces and other times. Samadhi Tank Company PO Box # Nevada City CA # For more information call (#) #-# #-#-# #. The tank is a safe and effective time altering mechanism. It is not guaranteed that you will return to the same world, and that's part of the adventure. The tank is a doorway. The tank is a time machine. space shipsamadhi the original floatation tank J #. But you will know that it is your consciousness that empowers time and space, concealed by an ordinary piece of furniture in your living or bedroom. # . It's the doorway in the back of the closet; the opening in the trees that leads into other worlds. # . There it sits, a truly innocuous time machine, taking up only a few square feet in your home, that you can climb into and go anywhere #. It's the only way to get out of this world alive. BW# Coffee Pot # BW# Creamer # All products guaranteed. Your money refunded If you're not completely satisfied. BW#I Salt, Pepper and Cheese Shaker # BG#I Large Bowl, #" diameter # We're very proud of these ceramic pieces. In look, feel and presence, they are truly exquisite. We think you'll agree with us but in the unlikely event that you don't, we guarantee your satisfaction your money will be refunded in full. imagine their delight... 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Box #, Santa Fe, NM, #-# Tel: (#) #-# Fax: (#) #-#I I Glazed ceramic drums (I to r): Inanna #, Amber #, Nasrudin  I #, Darius  I # Tve had mine forever. " The Absolute Sample Issue # PO Box # Nevada City CA # Call #-#-#-# or (#) #-# The Truly Empowered Woman Creates Her Own Damn Universe. Ceramic Care Bears but not so fuzzy Sweet Medicine Bear Studio P.O. Box # Santa Fe, NM, #-# Tel: (#) #-# Fax: (#) #-#I I Buy These You'll love them #-#-#-# OR #-#-# Editorial Seven Soup Rivers Support Unlimited Midnight Pearls Blue The Greatest Loss Thoroughly Modern Magic . This Space for Rent MUgwump Four The Temptation of Harringay Old Rambling House Songs of the Soul Lulungomeena The Client from Hell Just Rubberface and Me Coke Bottle Lenses The Dead-End My Life Among the Stars... For Your Information E. J. Gold #I Robert Sheckley # Sandy Saidak # Barbara Johnson-Haddad # JackNimersheim #I Charlee Jacob # Robert Silverberg # Sarah Zettel # Frank Herbert # Jacqueline F. Falkenhan . # Gordon R. Dickson # Richard Curtis # E. Jay O'Connell # Robert E. Rogoff # Jean Marie Stine # Bjo Trimble #I Claude Needham # Claude Needham, Heather Valencia, Lin Larsen, Zod, Tim Elston, Richard Hart, Vincent Di Fate, Stephanie Boyd, Seth Gold, Della Heywood, Kelly Rivera, Tom X, Tim Courtney, Frank Kelly Freas, Virgil Finlay "Midnight Pearls Blue"  # Associates International, Inc., "MUgwump Four" # Robert Silverberg, "Old Rambling House"  # Frank Herbert, "Lulungomeena" # Gordon R. Dickson California not-for-profit corporation. Main Office: I # Pleasant Valley Road, Penn Valley, California #. Mailing Address: #-#. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction andor satire, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Authors and artists retain copyright of their works. All offers set forth in this magazine are subject to change without #U Jewels oj Ancient lands imaginative, tasteful, bold... Ancient Tibetan Carved Amethyst football and thick flat ovals, Turquoise barrels, Coral rounds. Hematite rounds, Sri Lanka rondels Jewels of Ancient Lands necklaces... Rare, sought-after creations which will last for generations. jot infiotmAtlon call #-#-#-# Illustrated by Freas he subways were full of people. Everybody knew that. But not everybody -- even New Yorkers -- knew that there were people living in the subways. Ever since any kind of shelter against weather existed, humans have always used them. It's your basic exploitative species looking for a place to hang its hat. Personal shelters aren't new; there's always been a bivy tent in one form or another, and yurts have been around an awfully long time. Beowulf and friends consorted together in a sort of pelt-festooned wooden barn; that's been a fairly common form of shelter since neolithic times, and little has changed, if you've seen one of the Chicago housing projects lately. The mead's gotten somewhat more predictable, but that hardly passes for "better." But the people who live in the subway tunnels don't generally drink mead. You can eat a lot of food for a quarter at some of those cheap standup joints around Times Square. You get to actually develop preferences for one brand of ketchup soup over another; one cheap bright yellow mustard might catch your fancy, and another -- too skimpy with the petroleum byproducts -- leave you unimpressed. Beer and wine are never a problem, if you don't care who drank it first. Like the prison industry (for those tourists just entering the real world for the first time, that's an environment provided by the government for the use of the underworld in the recruitment of enforcers, drug and numbers runners, pimps and prostitutes, and so forth, as well as a safe place from which to run all those public-service enterprises) there's never a lack of sex and drugs on the street. That's how come the subway people are the only ones who aren't connected to the Wall Street crowd (the ones who carelessly throw over their shoulders that cocaine is their drug-of-choice). The Wall Street cocainists (perhaps that's at least one of the reasons for all those bond scandals?) aren't the only ones to whom the subway dwellers are not connected. Ordinarily, one could draw lines of connection, you see, like some sort of James Joyce storyline, between all elements of the social web. But that's just it. The subway dwellers are not part of the social web. They're not like hoboes, gentlepersons of the road. Even hoboes had their impact on society, and it upon them. But not so the subway people. They neither participate nor draw upon our society in any way. They don't even use our garbage, our throwaways. What do they eat? Don't ask. What do they wear? You don't want to know. Where do they sleep? Who has the nerve to sleep down there? What do they do all day? I was hoping you would tell me. Word length, # to # at the usual rates. Don't mention this to anyone else. I wouldn't want to see two manuscripts with the same plotline. '  ' y'y w'Cfrjv I I Wi Illustrated by Di Fate here were two doors, and at first I thought I would go through the one on the right, for no special reason, just because you have to pick one if you are to go through at all, and the two doors seemed to me equal in appeal and promise. But as I approached them, and as the angle of perspective changed, I noticed a third door, previously concealed behind the curving wall in which the doors were set, and this door was to the right of my original choice, making my choice now the center door. This third door, appearing so suddenly, disturbed me. I was feeling out of sorts anyhow. It had been a long and tedious trip since leaving Colomb, after the ill-fated affair with Morth. The signs I had encountered along the way had been ambiguous; you never understand what anything means until it's too late to do anything about it. And my knapsack was heavy, filled with necessities of the journey, as well as a dozen or more things I would probably never need but could not easily procure elsewhere should they prove necessary. When you travel, you pack your whole life in miniature into your knapsack, not just what you really need -- for who can know for sure what that is? -- but what you might need, or hope to need, or fear you will need. No wonder the straps bit into my shoulders from the sagging weight on my back. And Glynnis' clever pointy little machine, which I had included at the last minute, had worked itself free of its padding and was digging me just above the hip. But I didn't want to stop and rearrange the load now -- not with the entrance to Phocis just ahead of me, behind one of the three doors. Coming up to the doors now, I looked and didn't much like what I saw. There seemed no difference in the two doors. Perhaps it wouldn't matter which I went through. Did it matter? I remembered Sicelle's advice: Beware the obvious! I had nodded sagely at the time, but now that I thought about it I realized it wasn't so easy to tell what the obvious was, or, having discovered it, to avoid its allure. My decision to walk boldly through the center door began to waver, and I cursed the irresolute quality of mind that made me think and think again whenever a choice had to be made. Something like this had occurred during my brief time with Morth, and I had sworn to learn from it. But what bearing did that have on the three doors? I suppose I could have spent quite a long time in that dilemma, standing irresolutely in front of the three doors, backpack pulling on my shoulders, Glyn's little machine digging into my hip, my stomach making feed-me a in Tal ; .v?: is Hr  I JlM  . noises. Perhaps it was hunger that decided me. Some primitive part of my brain knew unequivocally that it would never get fed as long as I hesitated here on the threshold to Phocis. So I lunged toward the center door, deviating at the last moment for no apparent reason to pass through the leftmost door. The first thing I saw after passing through were the flamingoes. There were three of them, white and pink balls of feathers with long, skinny backward-hinged legs beneath, and long snakelike necks with flat small heads and curved black beaks below. Two of them were engaged in what I supposed was a standard sort of bird repartee, or perhaps a mating dance, squawking noisily at each other and darting their heads like duelists. The third bird, somewhat larger and colored a deeper orange, paid no attention to any of this. He was holding his head upside down on the surface of the shallow water in which they were all standing, and he was making some kind of vibrating motion that sent out little ripples. I thought perhaps he was stirring up little creatures in the water, but I didn't see him feed. A thousand thoughts crowded my mind, one more bizarre than the next, and I might have retreated back through the door if it had still been there. Of course it was not. These are one-way doors into Phocis, and you have to go through a complex and tedious procedure to find an exit. I was a long way from wanting to leave, since I had hardly arrived. I looked at the flamingoes again and in a moment the most probable explanation occurred to me: that this was a decorative aviary, of a sort that is used to enhance public spaces, and that the reason I had entered into the middle of it was due to my choosing the wrong door after all, for I seemed to have taken a service door that had brought me into the middle of the aviary. I had made a mistake, but not a serious one, I thought, because a few steps took me out of the birds' vicinity (with my feet wet, of course) and onto the path that led to the interior of the reception area. As I recovered the correct path I looked around hastily to see if anyone had noticed my faux-pas, not that I was afraid of punishment, but simply because one hates to make a fool of oneself when entering a new place. But there didn't seem to be anyone in my vicinity, just a long curving corridor with recessed lighting. And then there was a sound of music, bagpipes and drum, and down the corridor came a group of people in brightly striped costumes of black, red and green. One had a bagpipe, another a snare drum, and the others, to judge by the lightness and grace of their movements, were dancers. They were performing some sort of a circle dance, while all the time taking little skipping sidesteps that carried them down the corridor toward me. There were two men and two women dancers, and the men carried tambourines, while the women clicked away with castanets. I moved back to let them pass and the wall receded behind me and dissolved, and I found myself in a large open area without visible barriers, open to the sky or its simulation. There was reddish earth under my feet, pounded to a dry, hard consistency. Several trees with spreading limbs and dusty greenish-brown foliage stood in the middle distance, and far away I could see a low jagged line of slate-blue mountains. I scarcely had time to remark to myself on the speed and precision of the simulation, when a large group of people entered from wherever it was they came from. They were darkskinned, and some wore leopardskin wraparound garments, while others were in shiny suits reminiscent of a previous age. The dancers had already begun their performance, and the newcomers looked at them in some amazement but without, I thought, much interest. From off to one side I could hear a further dull pounding noise, drums, I supposed, and some twittering flutelike instruments. And then Llew was standing beside me. He had come up so suddenly I hadn't seem him approach. He was wearing an intensely patterned sports shirt and beige sharply creased slacks, and he had tasseled loafers on his small feet which I remembered now he was inordinately vain about. "Well, come on," he said, "are you going to stand here gawking all day at the wedding party? I don't believe you were invited, unless you have connections you never told me about. For your information, that's the king of the Saloops, a purely hereditary post, no real power, and the fat man beside him talking in a rather vehement manner is his prime minister or whatever they call him in their own language. Kas-Desair, I think it is, I used to speak a bit of Gheul when I had the trading post on the Orimba. I told you about that, didn't I? Never mind, a few of the young men are coming your way. I think it's time to smile politely, make a cross with your arms over your head to show friendliness, and get the hell out of here." "What about you?" I asked. "They're not likely to object to me," Llew said. "I'm not really here at all; what you see is an interprojection. Nothing much they can do about me except call the Comptroller of Privacy and tell him there's a peeper in their midst." Now that he mentioned it, I did notice the faint glimmer to Llew's appearance. At first I had thought it was just a trick of the light, but now I realized that of course he was communicating with me by interpro. The two men approaching from the wedding party were very tall and strongly made. They were scowling, and they carried carved clubs with big knots on the end that looked like they could give quite a crack. "How do I get out of here?" I asked Llew. "Follow me," Llew said. "We'll double back around the flamingoes." I turned hastily and followed as he glided up the path, around the flamingoes still doing their mating ritual or whatever it was, through the shallow water again, and then through an abrupt little dogleg of a turn. At first there was little to see; these exhibits usually have a fair amount of spatial extension, and so I was splashing through the water for entire minutes, with Llew, or rather his interpro projection, floating along beside me, very lifelike except that of course his feet weren't getting wet. After a while we came to the end of the exhibit and moved abruptly into utter blackness. They do that in the in-between bits to save energy, except for the glowing yellow line at your feet which guides you to the next open station. Llew was chatting about some of our mutual friends, Laure and Dagon, who had recently made a one year affiliation; and Mauritia, who had taken a job at the Offworlds Agency, but was having trouble getting her documentation together. I hoped for the best for Laure, whom I hadn't seen in some years, not since that summer in Green Island, back before the Trippies took it over and turned it into a rest home for followers of the New Gnosis. It was a pity, really, because places like Green Island don't come up every day or year, places where nature catches ahold, so to speak, gets it right, and there is a miraculous balance between the force-implanted flora and the various physical aspects of the island. It's very impractical, of course, setting up such a place, and usually it happens quite by accident. I had met Llew originally at Green Island, where he had been studying psychopainting and getting drunk every night, but in a refined way that was not obnoxious. What fun we had that summer! But that was then and now was now. Now I had the affair of Phocis to consider, and I was wondering already how matters would go for me here. Taking the big step and going to Phocis was no small matter. My reasons for coming here, which had seemed so sound when I left Earth, were beginning to seem to me vague in the extreme, and unfounded in reality. Already I had Glynnis' little machine, which seemed almost to have a mind of its own. I had to face it: I must have made the mistake of coming in the wrong door. If I had selected the right one, whichever that one was, I wouldn't be stumbling along in darkness now, in the network that linked together the exhibits, following a thin glowing yellow line which stretched on interminably into the impenetrable black. And of course I was still carrying the heavy knapsack, and I had not had a chance to readjust the position of its own. I was pondering these matters when there was a crystalline tinkle of bells in the air, an automatic signal set off by my approach, presaging an event of some sort about to happen. The Phocians are clever about that sort of thing, warning you in advance of an impending situation, though of course they don't tell you just what it will be. "What do you suppose it is this time?" I asked Llew. There was no reply. I looked around, turning in a complete circle. Llew wasn't there any more. Interruptions in intrabeam projection are fairly common, so I wasn't worried, although it had come at an inconvenient time. Continuing my advance, I saw that the yellow line had changed into a squiggle, and that it was crossed by red and green lines. What the Phocians rather grandly call a conturbation of cross purposes. Well, I had been expecting something like that, and so I continued to advance with at least the outward signs of confidence; until once again the lights came up and I was set forth into another scene. This one was not immediately familiar. I seemed to have gotten myself into a dark little room, made of roughly dressed rock, with a ceiling not much above my own height. There was a plain wooden bed against one wall, a table and chair. There was a little partition, waist high, and behind it I saw a man in a blue and red uniform, some sort of soldier's outfit, carrying what looked like an ancient musket. His hair was dark and long and gathered in back in a little ponytail. He was smoking a clay pipe, which he put down when he noticed me. "Good morning, citizen," he said. "I am glad you have awakened. Your breakfast is under the napkin, on that plate on the little table. There is a Bible nearby for your morning devotions. An examiner will come speak to you presently. I am required to say these things to you to provide basic orientation, so you will not say this was omitted when the time of your judgement comes. I am not allowed further discourse. So if it is all perfectly clear, I will return to my newspaper." "Wait a minute," I said, "nothing is clear at all. Where am I? What is this place? This appears to be a cell of some sort, is that correct? If so, what am I accused of?" "Citizen," he said, "these are not matters for me to discuss with you. Save it all for the examiner." "Just tell me what I'm doing here." The guard stood up. He was a tall man, strongly made, and his face was rough and not friendly. "I have done my duty," he said. "You will not require more of me. If you will not shut up, I will shut you up with this." He brandished his musket like a club. "They will say I was within my rights if I knock you out to prevent further illegal interrogation." His manner had changed to one of overt threat. I didn't reply to him, for he looked ready to use his weapon. This was ridiculous, of course, and clearly the result of some misunderstanding. But it seemed I would risk a crack over the skull if I persisted in trying to clear it up now. I turned away from him and sat down on the chair and picked up the Bible. He watched me for a moment, then took a seat again and picked up his newspaper. In a moment he had his pipe going and seemed contented. I was a long way from content, but what was I to do? The fellow's hostility had been so evident, and had come on so quickly, that I thought it best not to provoke him. I leafed through the pages of the Bible. It was written in a language I did not understand. Even the alphabet was unfamiliar to me, so I could take no comfort even from mumbling the words. I put it down and eased the knapsack off my shoulders, glancing at the guard as I did so. He didn't look up from his newspaper. Apparently this action, at least, was not forbidden. Opening the knapsack, I rummaged around for something to read. I badly needed to calm my nerves, for this was an uncanny situation. I And where in hell was Llew? Surely he had had time to restore service to his projection by now? But Llew was nowhere around, and, looking around the cell, I could see no communication devices, unless they were concealed in the dim painting on the wall, which showed men and women in old-fashioned clothing taking a picnic in some idealized forest clearing. I wished I could join them. Again, keeping an eye on the guard, I stood up to examine the painting more closely. It seemed to draw me closer by some inherent magnetism. I studied it carefully. The bushes it portrayed looked artificial. Was that intentional? While I studied it, I could hear the sound of footsteps coming down from the corridor outside. The forest proved no real refuge. Once I was irrevocably within it, I saw it was an ominous place, full of toadstools and noxious plants with misshapen heads. Of the noble company from the picture on the wall I could see no sign. Where had they gone? Had I dallied too long in the prison cell? So it would seem. At least I still had my knapsack, though I couldn't remember putting it on my back again. In this place of big trees and dense shrubbery all directions seemed the same. I moved, instinctively as it were, in the direction of greatest light, though it was not an easy thing to distinguish even that. The gray twilight of the forest wrapped everything in a pall of obscurity. I pushed on, wading through the shrubbery and low clinging plants. This seemed to me a place of evil omen. How had I gotten here? I had no patience to consider that, not now, not with the feeling that something was closing in on me from behind. I had no idea what it might be. The main noises were of my passage, and now and then a little flaw of wind came through and ruffled the branches overhead. I remembered now that I had not eaten in a very long time, and I decided to stop and rummage through my knapsack. I didn't think I had packed anything edible, but you could never tell, sometimes you drop in something; a half-finished sandwich, a piece of cheese, a box of crackers, anything would do. I put my knapsack on a little rise of ground and crouched down beside it. The light was failing. Soon it would be full dark. And I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I knew, of course, in a general sort of way, that this was one of the tricks they play on you in Phocis, one of their celebrated illusions, here in this place where nothing is as it seems. But that knowledge did me no good now, because it is generally true of every situation, it is always difficult to discern the truth from the illusion, even in hindsight, when it can do you no good. I cursed Llew for abandoning me, for so it seemed now. A breakdown could not account for his long absence. In my bag I found a package of nuts, a free gift they had given me on the transporter, and which I had not eaten at the time. I started to eat the nuts, but realized I would need water soon, for the stuff was very dry. Water is a commonplace miracle, only to be considered when you have it not. That was the case now. I got up again and looked around, with the vague idea of finding lower ground, where, I've been told, water collects. Wearily I packed up my knapsack again, slipped my arms into the straps. As I did so, I heard a voice, but I couldn't make out what it said. "Who is there?" I called out. "A guide," the voice replied. I turned, trying to place its direction. It seemed to be near me, yet I could see nothing but the dense green-gray of the forest, and the gathering dim shadows as night fell. "Come out and let me see you," I said. There was no answer for a while. Then I heard a noise in the underbrush to my right and I turned. There was some sort of animal standing there, and it turned its head to look at me. I think it was a deer of some kind, colored mouse-gray, with sensitive ears that twitched in the mounting breeze, as though trying to listen to the message brought by the wind. "You have chosen a poor way to go," the deer said. "Me? I didn't choose anything!" "I'm not here to argue," the deer said. "But it has been my experience that anyone who comes here does so through his or her own choice." "I suppose that's true, in a general sense," I replied. "And I suppose also you are not a real animal." "Perhaps not," the deer said. "Does it matter?" "Real animals don't talk, not in the general run of things." "No. But men do not walk into portraits, in the general run of things, as you say. Have you not noticed that general rules are only for contemplation after the fact, when one can engage in comfortable generalizing, while what happens at first hand is invariably exceptional and specific?" "You've got a point there," I said. "But I'm not here to argue discursive philosophy with you, especially since what you say is mundane in the extreme. Can you get me out of here?" "Perhaps," the deer said. "Where do you wish to go?" "I had hoped to reach Phocis Central," I told him. "I have friends waiting for me there." "Then you are expected?" "Well, not really. I didn't have time to tell anyone my plans before my hurried departure from Point Zero. The communication devices from solar point to point are difficult to manage, and I had thought to save time by merely coming. Sometimes it's easier to send yourself than to send a message." "True, enough," the deer said. "But then you must suffer the consequences of being yourself your own message presaging your coming." "What consequences?" "Messages are frequently disregarded. But I can see you have no wish to discuss these matters. Follow me, we'll see what we can do for you." The deer trotted off into the underbrush and I followed. Twilight was falling fast. The trunks of the trees were becoming indistinct. My throat was very dry, and after a while I asked, "Is there something to drink around here?" "Oh, yes, there's something to drink, though I don't think I would recommend it." "I need water!" "Then of course you must drink. Come this way." We had gotten onto a little path now, and it proceeded downward at no very steep angle. There were fireflies in the gloom, and they sparkled prettily. The forest had grown very still. After a while we came to a dark little pool lying in a declivity at the foot of large trees. I walked to its edge, bent down and with cupped hands brought up water. As soon as I had sipped, I greedily wanted more, and then still more. The deer stood very still as I drank, and I thought there was something judgmental in his attitude. "Is there anything wrong in what I'm doing?" I asked. "Surely the water is free for everyone?" "Oh, it's free enough," the deer said. "That's the difficulty. It stays free inside just as it did on the outside." That made no sense. And yet, I could feel the water in my stomach, and I bent to drink more. With interlocked fingers I drew it up to me. The water seemed to form a little transparent ball. I had to eat it rather than drink it. I stopped hastily and moved back from the edge of the pool. The deer was watching me curiously. I felt something peculiar going on in my stomach. I had a sense of inner expansion. It was as though the small amount of water I had drunk, surely no more than half a pint or so, were expanding. I felt the presence of water within me, not a part of me, separate, free, as the deer had said. "What is happening?" I asked. "What have you done to me?" "There are many keys to this place," the deer replied. "I have merely provided what you claim to have needed. The rest is up to you, and to it." I didn't know what it was talking about. No, I did know, but I didn't want to. Something was going to happen, and again I was not ready for it. The water in my stomach was expanding. It wasn't water, it was acid. It seemed to be dissolving me into it. "Help me!" I said. "I'm afraid I've already done so," the deer said. And then the water rose within me, and I was a paper man dissolving into myself. The image made no sense to me, but there it was. Water was rising, and I fell to the forest floor, dropping with a squish. I was all water, held together by surface tension. It seemed to me most unfair, the way they ring these changes onto you. Whatever happened to the stable old world? Or had that always been a myth, a dream of order in an impossible world? I felt myself dissolving into myself. I felt the surface tension break, and I was water, flowing back down the forest into the little pool. I was aware of the deer, watching, and then moving away. There was something sorrowful about the set of his head, his large luminous brown eyes. I thought he felt sorry for me. God knows he had company, because I was sufficiently sorry for myself. But how can water be sorry? That question held my attention for a moment, then was gone. I was entirely of a liquid substance. I became aware that I was the pool of water. It would not be too far-fetched to say that it had drunk me. And now I was this and what was I to do next? "My sweetheart's the man in the moon. I know I will marry him soon..." I was listening to a thin, piping, childish voice that was somehow familiar. My head felt cloudy and full of cobwebs. Hadn't I just been turned into water? What a relief to find that I was solid again, a man rather than a nature spirit or whatever it was I'd changed into. My relief was also accompanied by a sense of regret, however. Being in a dire situation is quite interesting! On second thought, however, I decided my relief was premature. I hadn't yet received any visual information concerning my situation. Why was this? I could think of several reasons: first, that I had my eyes closed; second, that there was no light by which to see anything; third, that there was light, and that I did have visual perceiving apparatus, viz, eyes, but that my mind, brain, think-tank, whatever you want to call it, either wasn't taking it in, or, was taking it in but was refusing to pass on results to other parts of the world-detecting system that was my mindbrain. It seemed to me there might be other possibilities. But I had no time to consider them. The first, the paramount question, was to explore the perceptual possibilities. This too could be narrowed down to one: should I be seeing anything or not? And if I should, should I take steps now to see what might be seen, so as to disabuse myself of the idea of complicity in what I was presently considering my own hysterical blindness? Or was I perhaps overstating the case? Because it seemed to me, even on the slightest reflection that I really didn't have to force myself to see, it would either happen naturally or not at all. I thought of the evolutionary development of sight. Those early rudimentary creatures who are our ancestors seeing-wise, they surely did not have to apply will power to the matter of seeing, did they? They either saw or they did not see, and intentionally, that big soft plaything of the scientists, had little or nothing to do about it. Yet was it quite as simple as that? What had been the steps, the gradations, between seeing and not-seeing? At what point on the scale could a person be considered to be not seeing, and how did he cross the line, the great evolutionary line, into seeing? And, as far as that goes, were there other visionary senses beyond seeing, related to it, perhaps, but still distinct and different, of which seeing was but the first step? Might one say that visioning was to seeing as Hyperion to a satyr, to employ Shakespeare's euphonious phrase? The more I thought of it the more I thought of it. This was serious stuff. One needs to decide things about the perceptual possibilities of a situation before going on. Until you know how you're looking, how can you know what you're looking for? Our ancestors were satisfied with much less, of course. Colored shadows on the walls of the caves, it makes one laugh now to consider it. But this was now, and the question, long deferred, needed dealing with. Or it needed not dealing with, but that too was a decision, and was based in turn upon a perceptual decision. "That's certainly true enough," Seligman said. "But have you considered the aura of comprehensibility that surrounds even the most unfamiliar proposition? We are unable to be taken completely by surprise, because the mind converts all precepts into the form of the familiar, of which the unfamiliar is but a part." "By god, you're right," I said. "It's difficult to pull off a good surprise, isn't it?" "Yes. But you've done better than most. You have always been a good student. I have given you an A for your work in the aesthetics of self-deception." The visual field had opened up just as suddenly as that. I was in a classroom. My only connection with what had come before was the knapsack. It was on the floor beside me, its mouth gaping open. Glancing down, I saw that someone had been rummaging through it. Myself, no doubt. I looked down and inspected. Yes, something was missing. It took me no more than a minute to ascertain that it was Glynnis' clever pointy little machine that had been taken out by someone, very possibly me, and presumably put to work. I remember the charming smile on Glynnis' face when he had given it to me. Or had he been a she that day? It's so difficult to remember who is what at any one time in these times of easy sexual migration. But of course we don't intend to open the question of sex here, no more than we would enquire as to what you had for breakfast. These are matters for individual conscience. The splitup, the convergence -- these are matters to avoid, if it becomes possible. Put in its most simple form, Glynnis and I were not having sex that day so long ago when Glynnis gave me the little machine and said, "I will miss you," calling me by name, whatever name I was going by then, and doing something else, too, making some gesture, poignant, unrepeatable. And then she gave me the machine. I looked around to see what had happened to it. The elg, as they call those small machines that converse in the Linshiean tongue, the language of sexual commerce, was resting on the floor near my feet. It was still moving in circles which were diminishing in speed and amplitude, following the well-known dictates of Rosko's Law, that what was going on just before you perceived the situation cannot be safely inferred from what is going on now. The machine is difficult to speak about because of that. At this particular time when I was looking at it, it looked heavier than usual, more consequential, and worthy of a certain wary respect. I picked it up, thanking my lucky stars that I was no longer in the aqueous state, because I'd had a feeling that was going to be a difficult one, descriptionwise. I mean, after you say, I spread, what else is there to say? Luckily, this situation was quite different, leading me to think that the deer had not been entirely forthright when he warned me of... But I couldn't quite remember what it was. It's hard enough to figure out what is coming up next, without having to think a lot about what has just gone before. And as for the passing states, those without enough perseverance to be worthy of describing, well, what can we say about them except full speed ahead and let every man watch out for himself. "Are you quite finished rambling?" Llew said to me. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. After a moment things swam back into focus. There was Llew, still as an introprojected form, standing in front of me and surveying me with signs of a certain anxiety. I remembered that Llew had always been subject to concerns "I'm alright," I said. "What's going on?" "We're trying to get you to Phocis Central," Llew said. "I do wish you'd cooperate." "I think I am cooperating!" "No, really, you must pay attention and not go along with everything that comes up. You know what it's like in Phocis, the place has myriad attractions, one can go astray, in fact, going astray is the epitome of the Phocis experience, but it is also a sort of self-indulgence and you can't afford that now, not if you want to get where you're going." "But where am I going?" And then it happened. I scarcely dare tell what, so momentous was that moment. As it seemed to me then, I looked up. I stared into the visual field, which is the only place to which you can direct your attention, normally, that is. On my right I saw the forest, lying out before me like a dragon, sunning itself on the main street of some hapless town in the unsure month of August, in Phocis of my direst predictions. And then I looked to my left, and saw there another sight, this one a city, a towering place of many metallic complications, running toward the dawn light with a faint trepidatious coloring. Insects moved in the forest, metallic bugs crawled in the city. I couldn't quite believe it. Not really. There seemed to be a choice. I could go right, back into the forest, or left, into the city. As I looked at this split vision, I saw that the two, city and forest, were not truly contemporaneous. They seemed to be butted against one another in an imperfect joint. They were not coexistent. They were differently formed and strangely put together. There were details in the one not consonant with the details in the other. I did not know what to do, and decided to take the civilized way out. This was no time to get hung up in a disparity, if there ever is such a time. I turned my bad on the forest, which promptly winked out of existence. I advanced toward the city. Other sights came into play at the corners of my vision. I saw shooting stars, and big, slowly turning spheroids of an imperturbable grey color. I saw men and women dancing in the streets, under the blinding arc lights. I saw the haunted face of a young girl, her eyes turned toward me in grief. I looked further and saw something else. A trail, a road that mounted into the sky. Then to me so lying asleep a vision came without hands and touched me. It was none other than a pointy little machine, which had made its way out of my knapsack and was clinging to my shoulder. "What's happening?" it asked me. "That's a silly thing to ask me," I said. "Where is Llew? He was just here a moment ago, unless I miss my guess." "I'm afraid you do miss it," the machine said. "That was not Llew." "But how could that be?" "Easily enough, given the ever-present possibility of illusion, deception, and the gullibility of the multitudes." I twisted my neck to look at this machine sitting on my neck, partially supported by my shoulder. He (as I eventually came to think of him) was a dull gunmetal green, exactly as I remembered. Little lights winked on and off across his surface. He resembled a rather large lump of metal that has lain for a long time in a river bottom. Yet his voice was seductive. I turned away from him quickly, because I did not want to lose sight of the city. Yes, it was still there. The forest was fading out of my split vision. My split vision was almost healed. If only I could keep my attention on the main chance: the city, food, comfort, sex, and movies! "Do you really think it's as easy as that?" the machine asked. "What's the trouble? Isn't the city real?" "Sometimes it is and sometimes it's not." "What about this time?" "It depends on your frame of reference, old boy." "I don't like to hear talk like that." "But hear it you shall. You need a good talking to, my lad. This nonsense has gone on long enough. What are you trying to do, start a revolution? Haven't we enough trouble around here without you adding to it?" To hear these words from a mere machine was humiliating in the extreme. It was annoying, how quickly a premise was hardening around me. I took thought, but not very far. I considered changing identities. But it was difficult with this thing clinging to me. And then I found myself in the streets of the city. They twisted like writhing snakes. Some of them twisted like snakes trying to go straight. It was one of those sights the cosmos sends your way from time to time, but not often. There were little shops on the ground level. I looked them over with some concern. What were they selling in those shops? Food, for example? Sex? There had to be something here I could buy and sell. You see, I was looking for a purpose. After a while I came across a purposes store with a gaudy sign in front. Purposes of all Kinds. I didn't know what to make of that. It seemed a dire imposition, being forced to think of it at all. So I put down other words, covered my trail with another trail, put cross trails across the trails that showed the way I had gone. Just taking precautions. After a while I came to a government office. Observe fear all you who enter here. That was written on the door. I observed it, and I couldn't help but smile, because that was so like them, the Phocians, diving into the heavy direness of statement, when all along they knew not what. But who was I to talk? I had to laugh aloud, because the whole situation was crazy and desperate and unworkable, and it had started out so well, and I knew it and could do nothing about it except continue: foul quitter doesn't win fair adventure. It happened while I was standing there trying to shift mental gears. The moth-shaped clue went round and round and then dove into confusion, taking me along with it. I see the stars and the stars see me. Great haste makes great waste. Great wastes spread out on all sides of me. Where in hell did they put the city? Someone seems to have misplaced it and it wasn't me. Goddamn them anyhow, the ones who spoil everything. And I had been so looking forward to this, to finding some nice discrete and reasonable proposition in which to hide im sell. I wanted a girl to love and a sandwich to eat. I wanted a way out of the mysteries and uncertainties. And here I was in a space that refused delineation. What can I say about it? Narration has its limits. I tell ou there was literally nothing there. From that small beginning, nothingness spread out on all sides, and as I looked, my vision increased in acuity, and I saw deeper and deeper into the nothingness. My eye ached for some little object to grab ahold of. Even the weight of the knapsack would have been a relief at this point. So this is death, I told myself, and I have reached it too soon. "Welcome to the kingdom of death," someone said to me. I could of course see nothing. Pretty soon I was going to see plenty, but right now I couldn't see a thing. And that was just too bad for me. Yet I had heard a voice. It welcomed me to death, the place I had long suspected I was heading for. It brought a certain relief, but with it the necessity of reply. "Hello," I said. That seemed neutral enough. "Hello yourself," the voice replied. So there I was in the midst of nothingness with a voice doing schtick with me. It was insupportable. But there was nothing to do but support it. I tried to conjure up a vision. Surely any something would be better than this nothingness. But the vision wouldn't come. Instead, a smell came. It smelled like aging mouse-droppings. I didn't like that at all, and its implications even less. What was that to do with me? I was in this place, and a voice was saying hello. "Now look," the voice said, "we can't go on like this. We need to find a way, a modus operandi. Can't you hear me, Caroline? Can't you hear me singing to you? Can't you find a place in your heart for the embarrassed as well as the ones who didn't give a damn, to say nothing of the ones who aren't even there any more? Now I ask you, isn't there a way we can get it on together?" "Perhaps if you'd show yourself!" I suggested, for the person whoever it was had failed to perform even that rudimentary act of civility. "Hah! That's rich! The mud asking the pot to crow! That's not what we want here at all. What we want is for something to happen. Isn't that so?" "Perhaps enough has happened already?" I suggested. It seemed right that I should go easy, try not to be careless, or try to be careless, but in a purposeful manner, I wasn't sure which was the right tack to take. If only this damned incoherence would clear up! But no such luck, it went on, and I was going on, too. Then Sicelle was there. She looked as lovely as ever, her hair in a long wave down her front, her small heart-shaped face looking at me with what I thought was concern but might have been no more than dyspepsia. "Ogden," she said, a name which I accepted at the time but later found more than a little unlikely, given what I remember of my circumstances, which I mean to get into later. But for now, look, do I look like an Ogden? "You look as if you've been ill." That was a laugh. What else does one do, lying in bed this way, the overhead fan going and the heat rising, except to be ill, very ill, as ill as possible? That seemed to be the setup. But I wasn't sure, that was the damnable thing. Patience. Cunning. Don't give anything away. "Have I been here long?" I asked her. "Perhaps you shouldn't speak just now," Sicelle said. "Here, have some soup." She lifted my head with one hand and poured soup into my mouth through a long hollow spoon. It was good soup, chicken soup, though I wasn't sure what I was eating it for. Were the objects of life still to be maintained in some other place reserved for me, and would that place simply go on? Or was that asking too much? Despite my brave front, I wasn't at all sure. "Now then, Ogden," she said, "you just get hold of yourself. The confusion will lift. This is what they call the circle of confusion. I know you aren't hearing me quite correctly. But try to make some sense out of these words." Sicelle had always been a nice person, even when she was dating Edgar. I remembered those days of squalor, the little flat in the West Village, the coffee shops, the songs of the strolling minstrels, some from as far away as #th century France. Those had been good days, though it hadn't seemed so at the time. I wished I were there now, wherever there was. But then I remembered that these memories, although perfectly genuine, might not be my memories at all. It was not unknown for a traveler such as myself, before leaving the safe shores of iterative self-reference, where all you can do is think about yourself, and so keep yourself in existence, to borrow or rent or even buy one or more of someone else's memories when he's going on a trip to strange places, so he could have some people to look up when he gets there, since remembering a person is tantamount to knowing that person even if you've never actually met. I looked up. There was a light flashing overhead. A recorded voice said, "Visiting hours are over." And then Sicelle began to fade. "Don't leave yet!" I cried. "You are my last oasis of sanity here in a world I never made." But she continued to fade, smiling her small smile. The walls were suddenly there, a yellow stucco, and I decided that ignorance was better than bliss, better than this, better than a kiss. When I looked up again, I was in a different place. That's how it works sometimes. "Hello out there!" I called. But there was no reply. All was confusion. It was the circle of confusion that I have mentioned before. I didn't know what to say about it. But you have to talk your way out of it, and after a while the survival instinct took over and words pressed and jumbled at the back of my throat. One sentence rose, and then another. I couldn't find a way to express them. I knew I was having a relapse. But to what? What was the dim meaning of all this? Where was I going? It was time to decide on a course of action. I imagined a staff of ironwood, strong, natural, a goodly substance that I could work with. Immediately I was out of the hospital room. Perhaps I had never been there in the first place. Or, rotten thought, perhaps I was still there. But in that case what was I doing going to a new place? Home was never like this, a sentence colliding in my head. Yet so it is, Ananda. The big old house, the walk-in closet fragrant with cedar paneling, the big tree outside with the spreading branches, "secret closets of lone desire," as Sidney Lanier calls them, and superimposed on that, several apartments in several cities, brought here together to view the last of me, a dying remnant. No, sorry, didn't mean that last. It takes a lot to tell about it. It seems to you blotchy, does it? Yet the intent to confuse is not there. All these templates of home crowding in on each other like transparent pages of a calendar whipping madly in the winds of time in which we sail. And so I reached the spot where I made one. "Hello, everybody, I'm home!" A stirring in the kitchen. Smell of apple pie, euphonious, unanimous. "Why, hello, Ogden," said Mom. I had fallen into a page in the dark book. But it's nice you can go back again, and again and again. I had a sudden desire to visit the chamber of ancestors. They were all there, even some we didn't remember, facsimiles of those, who took place before reattribution could begin its work of making whole the torn pages of memory. There was Uncle Seth, Uncle Dan, Uncle George, Uncle Charles, there were all the aunts, ranged neatly on one side of the chamber, each doing a characteristic thing, pasting stamps into a collection, polishing silver, dusting a collection of old American glass. "What are you doing here?" Uncle Seymour asked. "I thought you were going on a trip." "Why so I was," I told him, "and I still am. But the unexpected turns and twists of this our life have brought me here again." He smiled at me fondly; the fact that he wasn't living confined him to this single chamber, and I believe he resented it very much. But we must have some differentiation between the quick and the dead, else what's a heaven for? My mother called from the other room, would I take coffee with her? I hastened to join her in the yellow-wallpapered room, where the unremarkable trees of New Jersey cast their ever lovin' light on thee. I never could figure out about mother, you'd think with this opportunity to find out certain hidden happenings from what they tell me was my childhood. I'd take advantage. But it doesn't always work that way. There's a certain reticence at work. Our family, the family of man, has spread so enormously since the anti-Platonic doctrines received general dissemination, that you'd expect... Oh I don't know what you'd expect. This enormously extended family spread throughout space and time, all there, all waiting for you, and you for them. My own children coming for to carry me home. And yet it didn't help, there was no happiness in it, only confusion, actually not a confusion in my own life, that went on as these things usually do, but a confusion in reporting what was taking place. For how am I to explain that through a loop, unexpected but inevitable, I had doubled back in my attempt to get into Phocis, returned to my own childhood, and was passing now through those caverns of time and memory? Well, I've said it, but it's not convincing, the hypothetical man from Mars wouldn't know what to make of it. I was there in the kitchen taking coffee with my mother, and at the edge of my vision I could see the pathway that led back to where I had intended to go in the first place. Should I avail myself of it? There's always a moment of upset when you take your departure from the simulacra of your past. They are surprised -- sorry, Mom, I have to mount yonder rainbow and ride away. The next time you come all is forgotten, or at least not spoken about. No one mentions the fact that you simply climbed invisible steps in your own kitchen and disappeared into the god knows where. But it seems to hang there like a chrome-plated fart, a bit of nastiness, a bit out of character. And yet I was not ready to go as quickly as all that. I had been a long time away from the home place. It's surprising how seldom it comes up on the round of possibilities, born again into the round of revisitations, where nothing happens for the first time and there is no end. Or so I believe. No end! I looked around at those scenes of my childhood and wondered to whom they belonged. It seemed strange and unbelievable to me that I could ever have swung in that swing, that I had played croquet with that scratched and dirty mallet with the orange band. It meant as little to me as the flamingoes of a previous time. Yet there was nothing more to say about it. Not only can you not come home again, you don't even want to, because you can't even recognize the place except from the newspaper clippings. In a blink of the eye the scene had shifted. I don't suppose I really had to blink my eye to make it happen. Sicelle had warned me about that sort of thing. A slip of the lip can smear the lipstick, she told me. I was there with her again, this time in a pleasant little pub in London. This hadn't actually happened yet, of course, but it was bound to take place in the eternal recurrence of things. I ordered a bottled beer, a Mexican one, just to be devilish. Sycelle ordered one of those colorful drinks with creme de menthe in it. We settled back in the pleasant fug and tobacco-colored smoke of the place with its glints of light off the brass and its rich red of mahogany bars. I was enjoying myself. This was as close as I'd ever get to the first time. We create a new first time by forgetting the other first time. "So where are you going?" Sicelle asked. "To Phocis," I replied. "Again?" I had never been there before, but I nodded. It's a mistake to think in terms of novelty here in the world of crowded images and endlessly long shiny curving corridors in which everything is cycled and recycled, displayed and destroyed and displayed again. Nevertheless, I persevered. "I'm going to Phocis," I said. "Take me with you," she said. I shook my head. Novelty was what I was after, still and forever. Sicelle was nice, Glynnis was nice, but I was not prepared to settle down, to put my memories of past and future into the bank, to live my life with blinkers, blinders, glanders, salamanders. "You're making a mistake," Sicelle said, brushing back her bright, tightly kinked hair. I finished my beer and ordered another one. I vaguely noticed that this was a time before my operation. I felt quite fit and was happy to notice it. You have to give some credit to the cosmos that I suppose directs all this nonsense. And then I was in a different place, this one with gleaming chrome surfaces and big animated portraits on the wall of beings I couldn't remember having seen before but of course I could be mistaken. Llew was with me again. He was holding my knapsack. "You almost forgot this," he said. "The authorities want you to have it back. Nothing illegal in it, I hope?" "I hope not, too," I told him, because you can never tell what a knapsack will pick up when it's not in your hands. "Now then," Llew said, "it's time we saw the burgomeister or whatever they call him here. He will regularize your position. I'm afraid it's a black mark against you that you entered by the wrong door." "But how was I to know?" I asked him. Llew shrugged. "Don't tell me about it, old boy. I know the impossibility of avoiding egregious error. Who knows better?" And here Llew rolled his eyes, alluding to some misfired adventure in the past that he thought I was aware of. As a matter of fact, I had neglected to rent Llew's second-rank memories, contenting myself with just a couple of the really ripe ones. I said, "I had no indications as to the correct path." "And that excuses you from error, it really does, but only in my eyes. The authorities here take no excuses, or at least none that I've been able to offer so far in your behalf, and they are fairly ticked off about it, silly buggers that they are. You went to the prison without paying your entry, by the way." "I didn't even know I was going there." "Tell that to the cops." Llew shook his head and rolled a cigarette. I wondered if he was using dope. It goes in and out of legality so rapidly, you scarcely know whether you're breaking a law. One man has said that no matter what you do, you're always breaking a law somewhere. And then we ate lunch. Bloody well about time, that was my estimation of it. It was one of those oriental deals, everything cut up and unrecognizable and laced with a heavy sauce. I put it down without difficulty. Llew was toying with his food, drinking cup after cup of strong coffee. He seemed unhappy about something. After a while he said, "There's something I need to tell you." I waited. He didn't speak. I said, "Well, come on, out with it. Is there something else wrong I've done?" "I don't know how to tell you this, old boy." "Try just saying it." "It seems you've been marked for death." At first I just looked at him. And then I said, "And you tell it to me like that?" "My dear fellow!" Llew said. "There's no good way." Explosions in the grass. The moves of the rinderpest beast. What useless images flock to the mind in times of stress! What can you say when they say to you, "You've been marked for death?" What can I say after I say I'm sorry? You think to yourself, I always knew it was coming. Looks like this is the night the old continuity burns down. You say, "In what form does it come, then, this thing you call death?" "You may not recognize it when it comes," Llew said. "Then why do you tell me about it?" "Forewarned, forearmed, old boy. Or so they say." But was I forearmed? I had a lawyer's writ absolutely barring death from coming within # feet of me without having previously obtained my written consent. I was afraid he would not abide by that. What could they do to him if he overstepped his bounds, and came to serve me here in the land of eternal youth? They could shout and grumble all they wanted, Death pretty well did as he pleased. But of course, there was always the possibility of making a deal. I left Llew and consulted a phone book. There under Death, Deals with, I found the numbers of several Death Brokers. I called the first on the list. There was no time to lose. He came to me at once, a short little man with a wen on one side of his freckled forehead. It may have been something else but I call it a wen. He sat back behind a big desk. The background had changed too, of course. He wore a green surgeon's gown. I learned later he had been operating on volunteer patients over at the Saltpetriere. "What can you do for me?" I asked, deciding I might as well get it all out front. "First of all, are you sure you received the notice?" I dug into my pocket and found it. After Llew had told me, I had taken a moment's notice, and sure enough, I still had it. And so I went on. It was important to do this in a carefully measured way. How much grief is brought on by haste, and its ominous twin, Thompson! But I had determined that I could get out of the snakepit, as they call the place where death hangs out with his crosscut saw and his crossword puzzle, his bull's pizzle and his rainy day anthems to a certain faded glory of the power that once had been. "It really was bad of Mr. Death," Glynnis said, to me, "coming to our party that way. I know he can go where he wants, but we had taken such care to get it all just right, you would have thought he could have waited just a few hours, until everybody had come and gone. He's done it for plenty of other people, why not for us? But no, no such thing." He was applying a formal technique, one I knew well, dissonant regression in a vinegar base, but despite my experience I was taken in by its magic anyhow. He had taken me back to the party which had not happened yet, but where I was doomed to meet Mr. Death. I was sipping one of those long delicious ice-green drinks and I had just decided to get the hell out of there before there was trouble when I felt a finger tap me on my bare shoulder and I turned and at once it was like there was a vast great singing in my ears, and my senses swooned, and suddenly I was elsewhere. The changes were coming on a little too fast for my liking, but I was in a great palace made of a dark marble and ebony, with caryatids holding up the ceiling and ornate stuff on the upper walls, I forget what they call it, and there was a lake just behind, a long lake of polished dark glass, so silent it was, and in the midst of the lake I saw an island with a small marble house framed in dark poplars. I was considerably relieved, for I hadn't known how death would present itself, and I had rather hoped for a classical presentation, something quite Grecian, as a matter of fact, or Italian, they know how to deal with these things. I surely didn't want something raw and Egyptian, and as for the single gods, they played much too rough for me. I didn't want to get to the bottom of the illusion, not at all; once you're at the bottom of it they say you come out the other side. I was prepared to take the boat to the island, and sure enough, the boat came gliding up, a long gondola sort of thing, with a tall hooded man standing on its stern poling it along. The chimes of Deja Vu thundered in my ears. I had been here before! "Well then," I said, "where are we off to now?" "Spare me the so-called witticisms," Death said (for it was he, or him, whichever you please). Death said, "Just get in and we'll be on our way." He sounded impatient. It was the first I'd ever heard of Death being impatient, and it startled me more than dying itself, which I couldn't quite remember at this point, something about falling down in a pool of blood, I believe, or did I die at the party? Never mind, here I was, close to what I believe is called Death's kingdom. And so I got into the boat, sitting in the little seat amidships and trailing my fingers in the water. The steersman turned to his task of poling, and soon we were gliding across the dark water, on our way to what had to be the isle of the dead. Sometimes you just know things like that. We splashed and paddled along, and after a while the helmsman paused, letting his long pole trail in the water. "Have you got a cigarette?" he asked me. That got me sore. I raised myself from my torpor and said, "You've got a nerve! It's cigarettes that brought me here, not directly, I can't prove that, but if I hadn't smoked them all those years, tearing up my lungs and pouring heavy metals and arsenic and shit like that into my bloodstream. I'd probably still be on Earth now, going about my proper business of worrying instead of being here on this boat going to this island where I'll bet they don't even have movies." "Even without cigarettes, people die anyhow," Death reminded me. He fumbled in his shroud, located a pack, and flipped one into his mouth with a practiced gesture. He held out the pack to me. "Smoke?" "I thought you didn't have any." "I just like to smoke other people's. Go ahead, it can't hurt you now." I took a cigarette, and felt my pockets. Yes, I still had a lighter, funny how a Bic can survive death itself. I lighted cigarettes for us both. We puffed contentedly. Death sat down on the thwart opposite me, holding his cigarette in bony fingers. I puffed and looked out across the water. It was a contemplative moment. I've thought of a lot of things in my time, but if you'd ever told me I'd be sitting in a small open boat with Death, I'd have told you you were crazy. And it was nice to smoke a cigarette after death, when you could only benefit from it. Cigarettes after death cost a lot less than the before-dying kind. "So what's it like, being Death?" I asked him. I wasn't really interested, but you have to say something. "Well, it's a job," he told me. "You must meet some interesting people," I said. "Stands to reason. They all come this way. Not necessarily to me. I'm not the only Death. Allegory is all very well, but we have to be practical as well. There are plenty of us Deaths, and we take different forms." "So look," I said, "I guess I can assume from this meeting pretty much that there's life after death, huh?" "You can assume what you please," Death said. "That won't necessarily make it happen." "What happens on the island?" "You're about to find out." I didn't like the sound of that. So far, I had found anxiety to be very real indeed, and everything else to be unsure. "What did you do before you were Death?" I asked him. "I was working as a nature spirit," he told me. "I starred in one of those allegorical scenes with nymphs and cherubs and bearded men. It was pretty nice work for a while. Then we had to do scenes from the Inferno. That wasn't so good." "Have you ever had a girlfriend?" "Sleep is the bride of Death." "What do you want to do when you grow up?" "There are occupations in this universe," he told me, "that you can't even imagine. I'd like to try out one of those." The boat had been guiding itself toward a little landing stage on the island. In the misty background I caught glimpses of huge figures with interesting features. I knew they were representing something, but unfortunately for me they hadn't put in captions so I can't tell you what. But that left me with a lot of freedom. That's one thing about allegorical scenes, it doesn't matter what you do, things carry on anyhow. While we were talking, I made out figures standing on the dock, waving. "Who are they?" I asked. "Friends of yours, no doubt," Death told me. I couldn't imagine anyone I knew well enough in hell to come greet me when I arrived. As we moved in to the dock, I started to recognize them. Dartagnan, Ulysses, and a big fat fellow with a moustache who, unless I missed my guess, was Balzac. I hoped not. I'd never read a word he'd written, though I'd been long planning to. How embarrassing to meet him after death and not being able to say anything about the Comedy Humaine "My dear fellow!" said Balzac. "How nice to see you here! No, don't worry, you've never met me before. But I had the great good luck to be put on the welcoming committee. It affords a very good platform from which to continue my investigations into the human condition." "But to what purpose?" I asked him. "And how come you speak English?" "English is the universal language of death," Balzac told me. "Since this is my country now, it is only correct that I should speak its language. And write in it, too. For of course I am still writing." "And publishing?" "Indeed. You'd be amazed at how large our publications list is in hell. We publish far more books than the living, which stands to reason since there are more of us and we are more permanent. You know of course that the dead stay dead a long time. That has its drawbacks, but it does maintain the continuity. But tell me, are you really dead?" "Well, I assume so," I told him. "Is there a test that one must pass?" "Indeed there is," Balzac said. "You'd be surprised how many of the living try to sneak into here. While still living, mind you! And it just can't be tolerated. We have life-detectors on all sides. Malefactors are punished by exclusion: they are told that life must go on, and sent on to one of the worlds of the living." I couldn't think of a better outcome. Although Balzac had presented it as something not so good, I wasn't too sure. I continued out the landing stage and onto the shore. It was a pleasingly classical outlook, I was happy to see: long lines of dark poplars, formal gardens, gleaming white statuary scattered here and there. And that indefinable melancholy air that always infects mausolaria and the like. I was feeling quite good by now, because it struck me that I was going to gain either way; be here in the place of the dead if I were indeed dead, be sent on to further adventures if I happened to be among the living. I was told there would be a banquet that night, in honor of various new arrivals, and that formal dress was required. "None of your slipshod ways around here," Dartagnan said, and scowled fiercely. I noticed that he too spoke English but decided not to ask him about it. I was taken to the palace, one of the smaller palaces, and of course it was all free. As far as I could tell. How can you pay your way in the afterlife? My servant was a dogfaced person with a bare chest and an Egyptian sort of kilt. He looked a bit uncanny at first, but I soon got used to him. After a bath and a shave, I looked over the formal clothing they had laid out for me. It all seemed perfectly correct. I lay down on the bed for a brief nap, and soon fell asleep. I had a dream, but was quite aware that I was dreaming. It seemed to me that one of the walls dissolved and a group of persons came through. They were all dressed in Egyptian apparel, and many of them had the heads of animals and birds. They beckoned to me and I arose from the couch. I was feeling somewhat safe, since I knew I was dreaming. But not completely safe, because there were mysteries to this place that I knew nothing of. I followed them through the wall and down a series of shallow steps to a river that lapped the stone walls. There was an open boat, built of papyrus unless I miss my guess, and there was a boatman with a bird's head standing in the rear. I wanted to tell them that I had already done the boat scene, but I couldn't seem to form sounds. They ushered me into the boat. Sitting beside me was a pale woman with dark hair. She was very lovely, but she looked so still that I despaired of making conversation with her. At last I said, "So do you come here often?" "Levity is not the best idea in a place like this," she told me. "I'm not worried," I told her. "I'm dreaming all this." "That doesn't mean it isn't happening," she said. "Is it going to?" I waited but she didn't reply. "I didn't mean to be flip," I said. "Could you tell me what comes next?" "They will take you to the necrarium," she said, "and bind your limbs and your jaws. They will draw out your brains through your nose, and your intestines through your anus, and then they will inject various preservatives." "You're kidding," I said. "Not at all. I mean it." "But I don't want them to do that!" "It doesn't matter what you want. You're dead, your wishes are no longer of any interest to anyone." "What about Balzac? Did they treat him that way?" She shook her head. "He made a deal." "I want to make a deal, too!" She gave me a long, level look. "I'm afraid you have nothing to bargain with." And then she turned away pointedly, thus ending the conversation. I gazed around me on all sides as the boat proceeded through the long dark tunnel. I was looking for a way out. There didn't seem to be any. Then, after a while, we passed a long concrete landing stage. There were dogs sitting on the shore. They looked at me with their tongues hanging out. I didn't like the look of it, but what lay ahead pleased me even less. I stood up, prepared to fight anyone who tried to stop me. No one did. I stepped from the boat to the stage. The boat went on, and I thought I heard the sound of ghostly laughter. The stage gave way to a tunnel, quite broad and high, made of rough dark unpolished stones. There was just enough light for me to see as I walked through the gloom. The tunnel slanted slightly downward. None of the dogs at the entrance had molested me, nor did they follow me as I proceeded. The tunnel grew narrower and narrower, and soon I had to stoop to go on. It curved and the constriction became narrower, until finally I was reduced to crawling. And then I stopped, because there seemed no point in going on. But when I tried to turn back, that way had constricted, too, so that I was huddled over in a stone tunnel, with narrow exits on either side through which I could not fit. A wave of despair came over me. Then I remembered that I still had my knapsack. I pulled it around to in front of me and took out the little pointy machine. Illustrated by Elston ational Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" "Hi. Could I have the number for a group that will help me quit smoking?" Jenny crushed her cigarette into the ashtray. "Try them than I did! "National Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" A sobbing soprano was on the other end. "Well, it's like... I don't know... I'm really confused... I'm twentythree years old, and I'm involved with a fifty-four year old man. Nobody understands... I just don't know what to do anymore -- " "Do you want help getting out of the relationship, or help staying in it?" "What?" "I have a number for Older Men Anonymous. It helps women who are constantly attracted to destructive relationships with older men -- " "No! Everything's fine with us It's our families who are driving us crazy! They keep trying to break us up and my friends don't understand and... " "Then you want the MayDecember Support Group. (#) #-#." "Wow! That's great. Thanks." "National Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" "Could you give me the number to the national Chastity Society, please?" "Thanks. Do you have a listing for Randy Sex Club?" "No, they've sort of disappeared, but the British Hellfire Club has a group here. Want to try them?" "Okay, what's the number?" "(#) #-#." "Thanks. I figure, if one doesn't work, I'll try the other." "National Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" "Yeah, I just called for the number of the National Rifle Association. You gave me the number for Handgun Survivors United!" "Sorry about that. One moment, please." Jenny carefully punched the request into her terminal, while the man's nasal voice droned in her ear. "You liberal airheads probably think that was funny, don't you? Well, I'll tell you something -- " "Here's your number, sir," Jenny said, feeding him the recording, then disconnecting with a satisfying punch to the key. "National Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" "I'm looking for a community of Madonna fans. Do you have one?" you." "Thanks." The switchboard fell quiet, so Jenny stood and paced the small room, stretching. The other terminal was dark, the swivel chair before it empty. Jenny glanced at the clock: almost ten-thirty. No hope now that Marcia would show up for her shift. Not that she's been a whole lot of help around here anyway these past few weeks. Jenny hoped Marcia was getting the help she needed from Supporters Anonymous. She returned to her chair, and called her supervisor. "Sharon, hi. Look, could you send someone down here to spell me for a few minutes?" "Sorry, kid," came the Long Island accent that always grated on Jenny's nerves. "I'm stuck here alone myself. You'll have to wing it today." "But I've got a really important call to make." Sharon laughed. "Well, you're in the right place for it, aren't you? Just put 'em on hold for a while if you have to. You know how our customers are: they always come back." "Great," said Jenny as the screen lit up again. "National Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" Incoherent screaming and sobbing assaulted Jenny's ears. "Please, you must calm down, or I can't help you. Just take a deep breath and tell me the problem." "He left me! He went back to his wife! Don't you understand? My life isn't worth living without him!" About halfway through the tirade, Jenny realized the voice was female. She cleared the GayLesbian Matchmaking Service from her screen, and refocused her search parameters. "Would you like to try a Twelve Step program for relationship addicts? Or possibly Women Who Love Too Much?" "No, you stupid bitch! Don't you understand? I have to get him back! I don't want to get over him! He was going to leave his wife for me, but somehow she got her claws back into him and... oh, I don't even care if he divorces her anymore. I just can't stand to lose him." "I have a number for I.M.A. That's the International Mistress' Association. They offer # hour phone support for all those lonely times when he's with his family, and workshops on how to go from mistress to wife." "That's perfect! What's the number?" "You're welcome," muttered Jenny. "National Support Referral, this is Jenny, may I help you?" "Uh, yeah, hi. I, uh, I'm drunk again, and I'm real lonely." The voice was slurred and punctuated with hiccups. "Would you like the number of an Alcoholics Anonymous group near you?" "Screw that, lady. I tried them already. Now I'm just lookin' for someone to get drunk with." If that doesn't work, I'd suggest you try your local bar." "Oh. Hey, yeah! Thanks, lady!" Jenny switched on the recording that informed callers that all operators were busy, and warned them not to hang up. Then she used her terminal to punch in an outgoing call. Jenny hadn't realized she was nervous until she heard the click of her call being answered, and felt a rush of adrenaline. "Hi, Arthur -- " she began, only to hear a mechanical female voice intone, "Thank you for calling CrossWorld Travel. If you want to hear about this week's special package deal, press one on your touch tone phone -- " "What?" said Jenny. "Voice mail! What's going on here? This isn't supposed -- " "For weather reports of your destination, press two. If you want to speak with a travel agent, press three." Jenny shook her head several times, muttered some very colorful metaphors, then pressed three. "Arthur, you'd better have a good explan -- " "To speak with an agent about domestic travel, press one. For foreign bookings, press two." Jenny pressed two. "All of our agents are busy now. Please remain on the line and your call will be taken in the order -- " By now, the switchboard was lit up. With Muzac in one ear and a caller in the other, Jenny went back to work. "Hi," came a tremulous female voice. "Uh, do you have a place that helps incest victims?" "Are you a survivor or a perpetrator?" Jenny asked. There was a moment of silence. "A survivor. I hope. Why?" Molested As Children." "Thank you. Uh, what if I'd said I was a perpetrator?" "Then I'd have given you the number for their support group." Jenny disconnected quickly, for she heard the telltale sounds of hold being interrupted. About time. "How may I direct your call?" came a voice, very much like Jenny's own. "I need to speak with Arthur Scott. It's urgent." "One moment please." "Okay but don't put me on -- " Jenny was again awash in Muzak. "I don't believe this!" She gave up and took the next call. "Uh, hi, I'm a lost soul. Can you help me find God?" Jenny sighed. "The Ecumenical Council has a number that will give you a listing of every church in the -- " "I've already talked to them. I don't want a church! I want God. I want to know which religion is the right one, and what I need to do to be saved." "Let me take care of these other calls and I'll get back to you. National Support Referral -- " "I need help," said a sobbing voice. "My family are Jehovah's Witnesses. I've been trying to leave the church, but they're scaring me so much I don't know if I'll ever get out. And I'm afraid they're right. What if it really is Satan trying to get me to -- " "Please hold for a moment." While Jenny tracked down numbers for the last two callers, she answered three more calls, directing one to Multiple Partner Marriage Support, one to the Alfred G. Packer Cooking Society, and one to a recovery group for exfans of Madonna. Finally, she got back to the two religious calls, directing one to Gods R Us, and the other to a twelve step program for Religious Addicts. It was only when she cleared her board that Jenny realized she had mixed up the two numbers. "Probably just as well," she said with a sigh. "Arthur Scott's office," said the voice in Jenny's other ear. "Finally! Look, I need to talk to Arthur. It's urgent!" "Whom may I say is calling?" "Jenny Green. He's expecting the call." At least I hope he still is. What was going on here? After a moment the operator said, "Yes. He's on another line now, but he wants to talk to you. Please hold." Jenny lit a cigarette and took the next call. "Hi," said a pleasant male tenor. "I was just abducted by aliens. Who can I call to compare notes with others like myself?" "Try the Betty and Barney Hill Society, at (#) "Thanks. Hey, that was pretty fast. How often do you get calls for them?" "You'd be surprised," said Jenny, moving on to the next call. "Do you have some kind of group for chocolate lovers?" asked a man who was clearly talking with his mouth fall. "Sure. Several. Why don't you start with The "Thanks." "You'd better take the number for Chocoholics Anonymous too, while you're here." "Why would I do that?" "Trust, me, you'll be wanting it sooner or later." "Jenny?" The familiar voice came from the other ear. "Arthur? Hey, what's going on? Since when do we use crap like voice mail and secretaries?" "We just started. I told you we'd find something useful down here! Isn't it great?" "Not really. Look, you've got to get me out of here! My research is finished and my report is ready. I want to leave for home as soon possible." "Now, Jenny, calm down. There's lots more work to be done and you're one of our best field agents..." "Screw that!" Jenny stopped herself and took a deep breath. "Listen to me, I'm even starting to sound like them. Look, Arthur, these people are harmless. They are no threat to us whatsoever, they have nothing of use to us, and I want to go home!" "We still have to ascertain whether they know about our presence on their planet." "They don't. Well, they do, but... What I mean is, some do, but all they do is form groups to discuss experiences that probably never happened, and they still wouldn't be a threat anyway, and... Never mind, it's all in my report." "File your report and I'll see what I can do about getting you home. In the meantime, I'm very busy, so... #? "Arthur, I don't think it's such a good idea for any of us to stay here. I think this place is rubbing off on us." "Nonsense! There's so much we can learn from these people!" "Arthur, I really need to get out of here." Arthur sighed. "All right, if you insist. You'll have to talk with Goldstein." "Who?" "He's our new head of operations. Hold on. I'll transfer you." After a static-filled pause, a mechanical voice said, "To file a report, press one. To request a transfer, press two. To leave a message... "... And the keyboard gently rose to meet her. F by Chad Oliver A young man makes an unplanned trip through space and time to Europe # years ago where Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man engage in a battle for survival. Another in the series of collectible hardbound classic science-fiction from Edition limited to # copies # each. #-#-#-# OR #-#-# Illustrated by Valencia  I  r. Lew peers closely at me, having just hit a I power switch. It bothers him to have me observe i, too much of the time. Then he walks away, back to his desk, where he falls into his swivel chair. It rolls backward slightly on little wheels, squeaking. "How did I do?" I ask him. Dr. Lew leans back and smiles at me. His hair is black, but thinning on top, over a full, friendly face with a long jaw line. He tends to be chubby, but I think I see the grace of a former athlete in his decisive movements. I don't know why he wears sweaters all the time. If given the chance, I would want to say I look like him, except for the sweaters. "How did I do?" I ask him again. Dr. Lew smiles and shakes his head in mild annoyance. "I keep telling you over and over -- I'm not testing you. I'm testing my own work. You're smart enough to understand that; if anyone knows that, I do." "Will you play it for me now? I still get to observe them after I do them, don't I?" "Yes, of course." Dr. Lew presses a couple of buttons on his desk and I... stood on the rough broken asphalt of the road, which was shiny and slick with moisture. The night was nearly black, except for the two small lights on the cabin in front of me. They burned fuzzy white spheres of illumination into the fog, obscuring the door between them. I walked forward, bundled in my scarf and heavy coat, inhaling the chilly sea air. The small wooden building rested solidly on a cliff. As I stepped forward, I could hear the waves breaking rhythmically below, though the fog hid the expanse of dark ocean and the distant sky above it. When I looked upward, the light from the little porch simply reflected off the swirling mist above me. I knew I was at the edge of the Pacific, on a quiet shorecliff road, but all I could actually see was the surrounding fog, and lights at the front door. The door did not beckon. It was merely the only choice. I grasped the cold handle and opened the door. She was there, of course. I closed the door behind me. The coarse, clean interior of the cabin was warm. I pulled the scarf from my neck and unbuttoned my coat. Then I shrugged it off my shoulders and let it drop with my scarf to the floor. "Hi, how are you?" She smiled pleasantly, speaking as though we had been no more than co-workers, or maybe distant cousins -- as though we had last seen each other yesterday, instead of years ago. "Fine, Ah Yen." I remembered that she had quit using her English name. I liked that. Ah Yen was sitting on the other side of the unfinished plank table, facing me. An old-fashioned kerosene lamp was the only object on the table. Its light revealed her in the darkened cabin. Ah Yen's black hair fell straight on both sides of her face, before curving inward just above her shoulders. The flickering flame shone on the smooth amber skin of her full cheeks and on her casual smile. Her nose was straight, short, and perfect. She looked up with dark, slanted eyes. "And how have you been?" she asked. "Would you like to sit down?" She waved one hand daintily toward the bench on my side of the table, several steps in front of me. I shrugged and walked forward uncomfortably. "I've been all right." Her formality stung. It had no enthusiasm. She had acted this way from the moment we had separated. Her New York accent was stronger than ever, but it was cultured and precise. She had been a child when her family had moved out of Chinatown, where she was born. I doubted she would ever move out of New York. She had stopped here during a trip. "So, what are you doing now? In your career, I mean. Let's see, you finished grad school when, around..." As she continued to speak, she shifted slightly on the bench, drawing my attention downward. Ah Yen wore a very snug light blue dress of thin fabric, with a low rounded neckline. It was a simple short-sleeved shift, and matched the string of graduated blue pearls around her neck. Her large, rounded breasts pushed against it and I recalled her wistful comment from years ago, that she just wasn't built like most Asian women. She was short, though, and soft without being fat. "... time ago. How about you?" I had no patience for small talk. "What happened?" I asked in as neutral a tone as I could manage. "Why did you end it the way you did? Why couldn't you even talk to me about it afterward?" Ah Yen wrinkled her nose and cocked her head to one side. It was the cutest of her playful expressions. "That was years ago. Now tell me how you've been. Really." "You don't want to hear how I've really been," I said casually, still standing over the table. "So, let's see..." I told her about my career steps -- the research, especially the big grants, and of course the tenure. In her presence, I cared nothing about any of it. I didn't even listen to myself. While I spoke, I watched the depth of her eyes, remembering those eyelids flicker as her breath came in shortened gasps. Her mouth had opened for more breath, revealing even white teeth. In the bright, stinging light, the pearl necklace I had given her slid downward on her slender neck to one side. Her face was slack with concentration, and her fingers suddenly clenched like claws -- "That's very good." Ah Yen smiled pleasantly. "I knew you'd do well." I inhaled deeply and tried again. "Ah Yen... would you talk about it a little? Just for a minute? After all this time -- " "Oh, I don't think it would accomplish anything. I have to meet someone. Nice to see you." Ah Yen rose, and the blue pearls caught the light. She was still gorgeous. "No! No... wait." Suddenly anxious, I... see the kind face of Dr. Lew at his desk. "You felt a great deal this time." He notices that he has buttoned his sweater crookedly and he begins to unbutton it. "You took it away from me again." My tone is bland, as always, but he recognizes the accusation. "Well, I'm just not satisfied yet. Besides, I gave you all those painful memories and put you in a scenario that would draw them out. Next time, I'll make them happy feelings. Promise." "Emotion is part of personality. I should have it." "Yes, and you will. We've honed your intelligence so finely that you test out consistently right around #. In some ways, that was tougher for me than making you a genius." "You've told me that before." "I know. And I'll remind you again, no doubt. Of all the artificials we have, you'll be the first to carry a developed emotional personality as well as your intelligence. I just wanted to pull that particular emotional pattern out of you again... never mind why. That's the reason you don't feel any emotion now, though you remember feeling it during the scenario." Dr. Lew rises to switch off our communication. It bothers him to have me observe too much of the time. Out of spite, I don't tell him that he is wrong -- I do feel emotion now -- especially anger at him and a strange empty hurting. I don't tell him he is wrong -- that memory, intelligence, and emotion are inextricably bound. The memory of pearls blue still burns in my circuits. Illustrated by Tom X ome consider the parents' loss to be the greatest, but they only lost their lives. As they lay in their bedroom last month in oblivious slumber, their children crept silently in and killed them. In the darkness, long past midnight, these unnatural children snacked upon their parents' vital organs. They snapped their father's bones and sucked out his marrow. They tore out their mother's heart. Their grandmother was attracted by this noise and came into the room to investigate. When she saw the gory remains lying dismembered on the floor, she shrieked and fainted. Luckily for her, the children were sated by that point and spared her life. Some consider the grandmother's loss to be the greatest, but she only lost her mind. It was broken beyond repair when she saw the horrid mess that was once her daughter and son-in-law. When she recovered consciousness, she was lost in a world of her own making. She now lives her life with a fanatical desire to pamper and please her dear grandchildren. She is quite happy, in her own way, as she bakes delightfully cannibalistic meals for her little darlings from the body parts they bring her. No doubt, she will remain happy until she forgets to feed them one night. Some consider the children's plight to be the greatest tragedy, but they only lost their humanity. They seem content though, and frisk like the wolves they so resemble as they hone their hunting skills throughout the night. But even wolves do not eat their own kind. Since they are not yet eating each other, this may actually apply to them. Can they truly be called human any more? They will undoubtedly remain content, hunting happily each and every night until some brave soul manages to destroy them. No friends, it is your own families and neighbors who are victims of the greatest loss. The police have mysteriously disappeared from the streets and the phone-lines leading out of town are dead. There are rumors of alien invasions, secret Army experiments and the end of the world as the cause of their problems. Everyone is frightened and stays inside at night. It is from their numbers that the new victims are being drawn. Every night a new man, woman or child loses his or her life and if too many of them die, you could well be next. Illustrated by L. Larsen "Thank you for contacting The MagicLamp Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of WellWishers, Inc. Remember, at MagicLamp, we seek pleasure in your fulfillment. "In order to serve you more effectively, your request will be automatically directed to the appropriate department. Please pay close attention to the various options described within each of the following messages. At the sound of the tone, you may make a selection by rubbing your lamp the specified number of times. "If you are a first-time caller and wish to make general inquiries concerning any MagicLamp service, including our standard, three-wish contract, please rub the lamp one time. "If you are a current MagicLamp client and have a question concerning the terms or conditions of your contract, please rub the lamp twice for Customer Service. "If the purpose of this call is to place an actual wish request, please rub the lamp three times. "Quality Control representatives stand ready to assist anyone who has experienced problems or difficulties as a result of a previously fulfilled wish. To contact the Quality Control department, rub the lamp four times. "All other parties, please remain by this lamp. A trained representative will be with you shortly." Beep Rub. Rub. Rub. "Thank you. One moment, please... " "You have reached the MagicLamp Petition and Request department. Please select a general category that best describes the nature of the wish you are placing at this time: "If your wish requires a financial transaction involving legal tender of any type or denomination -- drachmas, dinars, dollars, pesos, pounds, rubles, rupees, riyals, and so forth -- please rub the lamp one time. "If your wish pertains to the pursuit of power -- whether it be personal, professional or political in nature -- please rub the lamp twice. "To request a romantic encounter or, alternately, to access our optional, adults-only Triple-F service, please rub the lamp three times. "If your wish involves revenge, reprisal or any form of organized protest or retaliatory action against an individual, group, organization, institution or government, please rub the lamp four times. "If the nature of your wish is not covered under any of the previous options, please remain by your lamp. A Petitions and Request agent will handle your call personally." Beep Rub. Rub. Rub. "One moment please... " "Welcome to MagicLamp's LoveLink, where romance and pleasure converge in magical moments of dreams fulfilled and desires satisfied. From the following, select the option that best describes the type of romantic interlude in which you're interested: "If your wish involves short-term, innocent flirtation, please rub the lamp one time. "To request assistance in initiating a more permanent relationship, please rub the lamp twice. "If your wish involves casual relationships of a purely sexual nature, please rub the lamp three times. Warning! You must be at least eighteen years of age to select this option." Beep Rub! Rub! Rub! "Thank you. One moment please... " "Welcome to Triple-F, Fantasies, Fun and Fetishes wishes of our more mature and discriminating clients. Before proceeding, please reread Section # of your original contract. It contains important information about additional charges and obligations associated with using the Triple-F service. After reviewing this information, rub the lamp twice to indicate agreement to the terms stipulated therein. "To return to MagicLamp'-'s LoveLink" without incurring any charges associated with accessing the Triple-F" options, you may rub the lamp one time." Beep Rub. Rub. "It will take a moment to process your response. Please stand by " "We appreciate your patience. A rider has been added to your original contract indicating your agreement to accept any and all terms or obligations associated with transactions initiated from within the Triple-F service. Select from the following options the one which best describes the resources we will require to fulfill your request: "If your wish or fantasy involves sexual contact with one or more members of the opposite sex within your own species, please rub the lamp one time. "If your wish or fantasy involves sexual contact with one or more members of the same sex within your own species, please rub the lamp twice. "If your wish or fantasy involves sexual contact with one or more members of a species other than your own, regardless of gender, please rub the lamp three times. "If your wish or fantasy involves some combination of two or more elements selected from the participant profiles outlined previously, please rub the lamp four times. "If no additional participants are required to fulfill your Triple-F wish or fantasy, please rub the lamp five times." Beep Rub! Rub! Rub! Welcome to the inter-species section of MagicLamp'"'s LoveLink. Select from the following options the one that most closely corresponds to the type of activity in which you would like to engage: "If your wish or fantasy involves mammals indigenous to the planet Earth, please rub the lamp one time. "If your wish or fantasy involves reptiles indigenous to the planet Earth, please rub the lamp two times. "If your wish or fantasy involves sea creatures indigenous to the planet Earth -- excluding mammals and reptiles, which should be identified using the appropriate input listed previously -- please rub the lamp three times. "If your wish or fantasy involves flying creatures, indigenous to the planet Earth -- excluding mammals, which should be considered members of the first category listed above -- please rub the lamp four times. "If your wish or fantasy involves marsupials indigenous to the planet Earth, please rub the lamp five times. "If your wish or fantasy involves creatures indigenous to the planet Earth that are not covered under any of the previously listed categories, please rub the lamp six times. "If your wish or fantasy involves extraterrestrial creatures -- that is, any creatures not indigenous to the planet Earth -- please rub the lamp seven times. "If the nature of your wish or fantasy is not covered by any of the previous options, please remain by your lamp. A Petitions and Request agent will be with you shortly to discuss your situation." Beep Rub! Rub! Rub! Rub! Rub! Rub! Rub! "It will take a moment to initiate the selected sequence. Please stand by..." "Welcome to The Galactic Gateway the universal network node of MagicLamp's LoveLink. The Galactic Gateway, established in # A.D., local Earth reference, is designed to satisfy the more creative requests of truly imaginative Triple-F customers. "Please be advised that the services provided through The Galactic Gateway are subject to local jurisdiction -- defined as any laws andor statutes enacted by the recognized government of the district, province, region or territory in which your wish or fantasy is fulfilled. Furthermore, you consent, through your recognition of this authority, to indemnify LoveLink and The MagicLamp Corporation as well as all other divisions of WellWishers", Inc. against all legal responsibilities for any claims, actions or proceedings initiated under the auspices of local jurisdiction, as defined above. "To indicate agreement with the terms stipulated herein, please rub the lamp once. "To exit the Galactic Gateway and return to the previous Triple-F options, please rub the lamp two times." Beep Rub. "A review of your account reveals that you have a previously registered fantasy pending on The Galactic Gateway". Our records further indicate that, due to recently enacted legislation passed in the local jurisdiction, your prior request can now be honored. "To initiate the previously entered scenario, please rub the lamp one time. "If you wish to cancel the pending wish and conjure up a new fantasy at this time, please rub the lamp twice. "To preserve your previous wish for future fulfillment and submit a new request, please rub the lamp three times." Beep fiaiaxy #mitsr  . m  fr x # Red and black on white, # cotton shirt. "Galaxy The Legend Returns" printed on back. # Red logo on #I oz. porcelain mug. Plus # each shipping and handling Or use the Order Form on Page # Rub! "Allah be praised," Achmed whispered reverently, gazing around him in wonder. Three moons traversed a purple sky above him; celestial ellipses punctuating the alien heavens. If this unusual panorama provided an initial indication of his current surroundings, a quartet of naked -- at least, he assumed they were naked -- and exotic creatures rubbing seductively against him established it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Either he was dreaming or Achmed Falassa had, indeed, been transported to N'virna, the legendary Pleasure Planet. One of the exquisitely provocative creatures picked that precise moment to pinch Achmed on a somewhat indelicate part of his human anatomy. So much for the dream theory. This was definitely N'vima. As it did in the ancient days, in the time of epic fables and fabled epics, the magic worked. Achmed realized that all of this had been accomplished with advanced technology; still, magic -- like beauty -- is in the eye of the beholder, and a virtual paradise offered no less potential for ecstasy than the real thing. "Allah be praised," Achmed intoned a second time, already conjuring up a variety of creative ways to make love to the creature who had pinched him -- if he could only pick her out among the four identically luscious bodies now writhing at his feet. Bains Fine Arts ANzt that's Out Of kis YOoztd Representing Menlo Macfarlane Della Heywood R.C. Trice Kelly Rivera Tom X E J. Gold Earth Phone (Vancouver, B.C., Canada) (#) #-#I Illustrated by Boyd When You 're Hungry Snickers Fills The Hole. here was a hole. One space that hadn't been fl sold or leased as ad mileage. Through it twinkled a few brave stars that were nearly lost in the commercial glare. Squinting, maybe you could see them. With my old eyes, never. You couldn't tell kids these days that the whole sky used to be filled with stars. Blackly purple as a window made of amethyst glass, glitter so dazzling it filled you with wonder. These days: rotational squares, leased by the month for personals: Susan -- I Told You I Would Give You the Moon and The Stars. Will You Take What 's Behind Door Number One and Marry Me? -- Love, John As opposed to permanent squares, leased to perpetuity. Or to Chapter Eleven. Whichever came first. I wondered if they meant Big Macs or stars. They'd sold the stars long ago. "Hey! They sold the last square! Did ya hear?" Lyle announced as he came through the door, his arms laden with pre-wrapped, pre-boxed generigifts labeled Mom, Dad, Guardian, Sister, Extended Family StepSibling, etc. "No! Really? Who bought it?" Patti sat up, ears perked. "Don't know," Lyle shrugged as he set his bundles on the floor around the nitinol tree. By spring it would be reformed as a big Easter bunny. Last Thanksgiving it had been a pilgrim. Right now it was a spruce and there was a star at the top. Ludicrous, that star, but I couldn't take my eyes from it. "Bet it was the Japs though. That last square cost a fortune. They're gonna set it into place tonight as part of the Christmas Eve ceremony." Up through the glass ceiling we could see the network across the twilight sky, lift-offs from huge cranes and mighty batlike maintenance ships so high they were insects across the Boardwalk of heaven. So much for Rockefeller Center and the virtual reality carolers in Washington D.C. with those faint, cold background twinkles across computer-sim fallen snow. "I remember when they didn't have to do that," I frowned, griping with every crunchy nibble I took from one of Karen's cookies. My daughter always baked them this special night of the year for the grandkids. Her holiday apron read: N.E.S.T.L.E.S. Nestles Makes The Best Chocolate There's one up there that matched it. The stars like grains of frost white sugar had vanished, but sweets were big business. "The sky was already lit at night," I grumbled mostly to myself because they wouldn't listen, didn't know. "Yeah, daddy. Don't get started tonight, okay?" Karen sighed impatiently, wiping a strand of Loreal Starlight Blond from her brow. Somewhere a patch of the sky proclaimed she was worth it. She turned to me, one oven-mitted hand perched on an obstinate hip. "Frankly, daddy, as I recall we couldn't see much of the stars anyway. In our yard back home it was murky and smelly." "We were in the city by then," I bit my withered lip. "Too much neon and pollution. But on the beaches, don't you remember... ?" I tried sucking a stray chunk of nut out from between my teeth. Colgate had helped me keep most of them even to my advanced age. Toward the northern horizon where once flared Aurora Borealis was their ad with the smile like a ghostly Cheshire cat. The aurora was an earth phenomenon, mostly, but without the great vault of night, what was it? You could sort of see it there at the right time of year, as one saw the flashing lights of emergency vehicles on a remote highway, out of range to hear the sirens, knowing there was trouble somewhere. Would I trade those teeth for Omar Khayyam's Field of Night, or for Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven, or for Byron's "night of cloudless climes and starry skies"? The traditional, solemn but hopeful ornament at the top of the tree saddened me. What slouched toward Bethlehem? Madison Avenue, Tokyo, Munich? Overhead: Peace On Earth Good Wool Toward Men Burlington "But if they block up the last piece, how will Santa get through?" Li'l Lizzie asked honestly, her tiny face scrunched in worry. "He comes from the North Pole," I told her gently. "So he doesn't come through anything. He's just north of us, is all." "Not that Santa," Li'l Lizzie huffed, waving her chubby hand to dismiss it, doing a pretty good imitation of her mother. "Ever'body knows he's a fake. I mean the real one, cornin' from space." I was appalled. "Where 'd you get that notion?" "From the Prophet's weekly message," Lyle pointed up. "The guy that predicted that those human sacrifices would begin on a daily basis in Mexico City. And that Elvis would be found living in a retirement home in Jersey." "But those things really happened," I protested, shuddering, thinking about the new Aztecs trying to keep back the beasts of the twilight. Of the King wrinkled and palsied with clacking dentures at the age of one hundred and three. "There can't be a space Santa." "There is. The Prophet says he's coming down in a Ship," Karen replied. She read that Prophet square as often as she bought The Enquirer at the supermarket. Even in my sleep I could see the ads behind my lids, imprinted lastingly on the retinas in the final flash before I closed my eyes. Through that damnable glass ceiling that all buildings had to have by law. And all the houses were one story dwellings so that everyone could always see, always want to buy. It's why we'd spread out so far, ultimately from sea to shining sea. Not because we'd finally overpopulated. Karen had three kids. One to replace herself, that was automatic. One to replace her husband, my son-in-law Lyle Senior, who'd died installing Tony The Tiger where the morning star used to be (so that people would see him first thing come breakfast and crave those Kellogg's Com Flakes). And one to fill the void left when my Caroline died. I personally painted the inside of her coffin lid with stars in phosphorescent paint. I installed a music chip that would forever play "Good Morning Starshine" from the play Hair. ("The Earth Says Hello! ") Well, we were kids when that came out. Fifteen-years-old in Greenwich Village. Caroline had long hair swinging; she was barefoot with Venus in her eyes. The morning star. Imprinted on my retinas was our new Cassiopeia, pursing her cybersuction lips, fast twitch muscles in snug Guess jeans. Spleenball's steroid hero Zekele O'Mally strutted in bonecrusher, brain musher, antigrav Nikes. The modem Ursa Major. The precocious tike selling Sony droidmate action accessories was the Little Dipper. Constellations of passionless glitz rose and set on the horizon and thus marked our passage through time. Some mimed down godlike, others simply filled their squares with our history and morals all in billboards. Coca-Cola, alone, was the invocation of thirst to humanity. Polaroid: Preserving All That We Wish To Remember. Homey, heart-hearth, knee-jerk. MercedesBenz: Simply The Best Car For The Hairpin Curves Of Space At The Speed Of Light. Ego, wannabee arrogance, for those idiots who had to pretend that old Highway #I went straight up. Space was for those who could pay for it. All you other guys were grounded. Look up through the glass for the rest. This was as far as it goes, as far as it went. Lyle was pointing to the ceiling again. Or rather. Lyle was pointing to the ceiling again. Or rather, beyond it. "They're getting ready to light!" Most of the maintenance shuttles were between the cracks now and thus invisible. The seams between the prints on the panoramic quilt. In the last porthole of the sky was a flash. We jumped, thinking that terrorists might be trying to disrupt the festivities. "Damned atheists," Karen muttered, hand over her heart, awaiting the sound of an explosion. "Nah, it's probably Greenpeace, Mom," Lyle shook his head. "Santa!" Li'l Lizzie squeeled, clapping her hands greedily. "I wanna deathbot and a martian pyramid playhouse and a hovertrike and a..." "It's a meteor," I corrected them all as I went to the door to watch from the porch. "It's coming down fast." It descended, blurred like a cataract. Karen dropped a tray of cookies to the floor. Patti climbed from the sofa where she almost never got up for any reason. Lyle tripped over the baby. But Li'l Lizzie didn't wail once, she was so eager to get out to claim her rightful trove. Neighbors gathered on their tiny plots of yard to watch. The light came down; a few people screamed. It stopped suddenly, whirled into a rainbow. Disappeared upward again. Gone, except for the man in the street who had not been there before. His suit wasn't really red but it was sort of rust colored. Close to his little body, a second skin of satiny steel or maybe it was a plastisilk. "Santa! What you bring me?" Li'l Lizzie held her arms out for scooping. He spun in our direction, muscles trained for reaction. But he was clearly disoriented. "Santos," he corrected, puzzled she could know him at all. He looked at us, then up. Then back at us. Up again. "Is this Earth?" he gulped. He looked up again and I could hear him reading out loud from the ads. "White male executive seeks adventurous androgenous alien for mutual recess invasion and vessel exploration. Send hologram for discreet reconnaissance of your qualifications to P.O. Box #, Grand Central Station." "Yeah, son," I told him. "This is Earth all right." "You leading an invasion?" Lyle asked eagerly. "No, I was bom here," Santos replied. "Aliens took me away a long time ago. I've been living -- " he gestured toward the sky, " -- out there all this time." "So why'd you come back to this dump?" belched Tom from next door. He had his black smoking jacket on and a beer in his hand. "I saved some high muckety's life in an ion storm," he sighed wistfully. "It's a long story. Anyway, he offered me anything I wanted as well as awarding me the governorship of a small world." I was fascinated by the scars on his face, disfigurements I could see through the complicated mesh of his suit. His hair was cropped so close that the ridges of his skull were freakishly visible as having been somewhat rearranged, perhaps in a ritual pattern of tattooing. He had lost an eye and it had been replaced by a faceted gem that clicked, recorded, measured, glowing all the while softly as if progressing through degrees of red shift. But the other eye looked up and around hoping to find something familiar, some milestone or glorious sight. His nose wriggled in the lump of his face to detect a former fragrance. His mouth was open as if to sob. In the other eye did I see a boyish blink, a tremor that suggested being lost and helpless? Had this battlescarred warrior ever been that? "What did I ask for? Why, to see Earth one more time," he said, a bit bitterly. "Before I took over my post as governor." He scanned the sky, the gemstone snapping, a shutterspace whisper. "Morris Funeral Homes. We Plant You Down There While Your Soul Comes Here," he read, lips curled down in a snarl. "Santa, where's my presents?" Li'l Lizzie bawled. The man knelt down before my baby granddaughter.  He put a hand inside his suit. It went in with no bulge or apparent pocket, and he pulled out a luminous green tube. He put one end of it in his mouth and blew, his ravaged cheeks puffing. It sounded like a pennywhistle. Motes of shimmering light came from sconced chips along the length, swirled upward, formed tiny unfamiliar animals. Made birds that might have really been strange butterflies. These danced and sang with a delicate reediness. Li'l Lizzie clapped her hands with delight. "Oh, thank you!" she sighed, her mouth round. Santos presented it to her. "Merry Christmas, sweetie," he smiled. At that moment the lights all over the mighty ad sweep went on. Strung clear across the firmament in a hot web of cheer, mirthless in its sheer ferocity to adorn Dow Chemical, Ford, and Faberge: When The Scent Of Sex Isn'T Enough with something akin to grace. Far away we could hear applause. Across the whole of the state a roar of thunder went up from those not on our street with the man from space. They'd seen the flash, too, more than likely, but had considered that one of the lights was only misfiring. Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. Being sung more or less in sync all over the world. We heard it like a faraway radio, scurrying up closer as even the neighbors turned away and began to sing. Santos and I stared at each other as Karen and her kids took it up. Li'l Lizzie tried to toot it on the instrument, adoring the alien angels that floated with each note. "I'm truly sorry you came back just to see this," I told him. I imagined how I would feel. I knew how I did feel, after all. "How could they do this?" he asked, his one good eye full of pain. Odd that it was only the gem eye that shed what looked to be tears. "You have to ask?" I shrugged. He smiled. It was crooked, jagged as lightning. The smile I'd expect Thor to have. A flash of light in the sky again. "They're coming back for me," he said quietly. "They said they couldn't give me much time. A few minutes. A damned long way to travel for a few minutes. I thought I'd be disappointed to have to return so soon to the stars but, mister, I can't wait." I gulped, shivered, then blurted. "Please take me with you! I don't have long to live. I'm eighty-five, and I only weigh a hundred and twenty pounds. I can't die peacefully having to look up from my deathbed at that." He took my hand as the ship spun overhead. Most folks paid no heed, sure it was part of the show. Those people at Westinghouse could do anything, couldn't they? We could see it after, reading it backward from outside earth's atmosphere, like the logo on a door to an office. No longer a hole! When You Look to Heaven 's Height To View in Wonder Glory 's Night, You 'll See You 've Lost the Starlight Brave So Now 's the Time for: The Truffle Shop Brought Right to Your Home featuring the finest Chocolate Truffles I # #-# or (#) #-# # Broad St.  Nevada City, CA # by Chef Willem DeGroot The T ruffle Team invites you to share the excitement of tasting the world's best chocolate truffles. Made with delicious Belgian chocolate, right here in our custom kitchens by ChefWillem DeGroot, they are shipped to you fresh every day. Send a gift assortment to your family and friends today -- and don't forget to send a box to yourself! Call today for free brochure. #-#-#-# ## Round Mini Truffle Gift Box (#) # ## Mini Truffle Gift Collection (#) # ## Deluxe mini Truffle Collection (#) # ##I Nine Truffle Gift Box # ##I Six Truffle Gift Box...# ##I Four Truffle Gift Box # ##I # Layer Truffle Torte #I .# ## Chocolate Oblivion Torte # Prices include shipping charges Hazelnut Key Largo Orange Napoleon Treasure Island  White Almond  Lemon Cafe Mocha Raspberry  Espresso  Peanut Butter  RaspberryCream  Truffles without alcohol #I Rum Amaretto Gold Rush Grand Marnier Highlander Matterhorn Mint Zinnabar  Black Forest  Dutch Treat Black Tulip Caf# Diablo  Double Dutch Illustrated by Heywood I Miller was only trying to phone the Friendly Finance Corporation to ask about an extension on his loan. It was a Murray Hill number, and he had dialed as far as MU-# when the receiver clicked queerly and a voice said, "Come in, Operator Nine. Operator Nine, do you read me?" AI frowned. "I didn't want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if -- " "Just a minute. Who are you?" "I ought to ask you that," AI said. "What are you doing on the other end, anyway? I hadn't even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-# and -- " "Well? You dialed MUgwump # and you got us. What more do you want?" A suspicious pause. "Say, you aren't Operator Nine!" "No, I'm not Operator Nine, and I'm trying to dial a Murray Hill number, and how about getting off the line?" "Hold it, friend. Are you a Normal?" AI blinked. "Yeah -- yeah, I like to think so." "So how'd you know the number?" "Dammit, I didn 't know the number! I was trying to call someone, and all of a sudden the phone cut out and I got you, whoever the blazes you are." "I'm the communications warden at MUgwump #," the other said crisply. "And you're a suspicious individual. We'll have to investigate you." The telephone emitted a sudden burping sound. AI felt as if his feet had grown roots. He could not move at all. It was awkward to be standing there at his own telephone in the privacy of his own room, as unbending as a steel girder. Time still moved, he saw. The hand on the big clock above the phone had just shifted from #:# to #:#. Sweat rivered down his back as he struggled to put down the phone. He fought to lift his left foot. He strained to twitch his right eyelid. No go on all counts; he was frozen, all but his chest muscles -- thank goodness for that. Several minutes later, matters became even more awkward when his front door, which had been locked, opened abruptly. Three strangers entered. They looked oddly alike: a trio of Tweedledums, no more than five feet high, wide through the waist, jowly of face and balding of head, each wearing an inadequate single-breasted blue serge suit. AI discovered he could roll his eyes. He rolled them. He wanted to apologize because his unexpected paralysis kept him from acting the proper part of a host, but his tongue would not obey. And on second thought, it occurred to him that the little bald men might be connected in some way with that paralysis. The reddestfaced of the three little men hung up the telephone and the stasis ended. AI nearly folded up as the tension that gripped him broke. He said, "Just who the deuce -- " "We will ask the questions. You are AI Miller?" Al nodded. "And obviously you are a Normal. So there has been a grave error. Mordecai, examine the telephone." The second little man picked up the phone and calmly disemboweled it with three involved motions of his stubby hands. He frowned over the telephone's innards for a moment; then, humming tunelessly, he produced a wire-clipper and severed the telephone cord. "Hold on here!" Al burst out. "You can't just rip out my phone like that! You aren't from the phone company!" "Quiet," said the spokesman nastily. "Well, Mordecai?" The second little man said, "Probability I to #. The cranch interval overlapped and his telephone matrix slipped. His call was piped into our wire by error, Waldemar." "So he isn't a spy?" Waldemar asked. "Doubtful. As you see, he's of rudimentary intelligence. His dialing our number was a statistical fluke." "But now he knows about us," said the third little man in a surprisingly deep voice. "I vote for demolecularization." The other two whirled on their companion. "Always bloodthirsty, eh, Giovanni?" said Mordecai. "You'd violate the code at the snap of a meson." "There won't be any demolecularization while I'm in charge," added Waldemar. "What do we do with him then?" Giovanni demanded. Mordecai said, "Freeze him and take him down to Headquarters. He's their problem." "I think this has gone about as far as it's going to go," Al exploded at last. "However you three creeps got in here, you'd better get yourselves right out again, or -- " "Enough," Waldemar said. Al felt his jaws stiffen. He realized bewilderedly that he was frozen again. And frozen, this time, with his mouth gaping foolishly open. The trip took about five minutes, and so far as Al was concerned, it was one long blur. At the end of the journey, the blur lifted for an instant, long enough to give Al one good glimpse of his surroundings -- a residential street in what might have been Brooklyn or Queens (or Cincinnati or Detroit, he thought morbidly) -- before he was hustled into the basement of a two-family house. He found himself in a windowless, brightly lit chamber cluttered with complex-looking machinery and with a dozen or so alarmingly identical little bald-headed men. Not until then did his paralysis lift. The chubbiest of the bunch glared sourly at him and asked, "Are you a spy?" "I'm just an innocent bystander," Al said earnestly. "I picked up my phone and started to dial, and all of a sudden some guy asked me if I was Operator Nine. Honest, that's all." "Overlapping of the cranch interval," muttered Mordecai. "Slipped matrix." "Umm. Unfortunate," the chubby one commented. "We'll have to dispose of him." "Demolecularization is the best way," Giovanni put in immediately. "Dispose of him humanely, I mean. It's revolting to think of taking the life of an inferior being. But he simply can't remain in this four-space any longer, not if he knows." "But I don 't know!" Al protested. "I couldn't be any more mixed up if I tried! Won't you please tell me -- " "Very well," said the pudgiest one, who seemed to be the leader. "Waldemar, tell him about us." Waldemar said, "You're now in the local headquarters of a secret mutant group working for the overthrow of humanity as you know it. By some accident, you happened to dial our private communication exchange, MUtant # -- " "I thought it was MUgwump #," Al interjected. "The code name, naturally," said Waldemar. "To continue: you channeled into our communication network. You now know too much. Your presence in this space-time nexus jeopardizes the success of our entire movement. Therefore we are forced -- " " -- to demolecularize -- " Giovanni began. " -- to dispose of you," Waldemar continued sternly. "We're humane beings -- most of us -- and we won't do anything that would make you suffer. But you can't stay in this area of space-time, can you?" Al shook his head dimly. These little potbellied men were mutants working for the overthrow of humanity? Well, he had no reason to think they were lying to him. The world was full of little potbellied men. Maybe they were all part of the secret organization. "Look," he said, "I didn't want to dial your number. It was all a silly accident. But I'm a fair guy. Let me get out of here and I'll keep mum about the whole thing. You can go ahead and overthrow humanity, if that's what you want to do. I promise not to interfere in any way. If you're mutants, you ought to be able to look into my mind and see that I'm sincere -- " "We have no telepathic powers," declared the chubby leader curtly. "If we had, there would be no need for a communications network in the first place. In the second place, your sincerity is not the issue. We have enemies. If you were to fall into their hands -- " "I won't say a word! Even if they torture me -- brainwash me -- I swear I'll keep quiet!" "No. At this stage in our campaign, we can take no risks. You'll have to go. Prepare the temporal centrifuge, Mordecai." Four of the little men, led by Mordecai, unveiled a complicated-looking device of the general size and shape of a concrete mixer. Waldemar and Giovanni showed Al toward the machine. It came rapidly to life: dials glowed, indicator needles teetered, loud buzzes and clicks implied readiness. AI said nervously, "What are you going to do to me?" "This machine will hurl you forward in time," Waldemar explained. "Too bad we have to rip you right out of your temporal matrix, but we've no choice. You'll be well taken care of up ahead, though. No doubt, by the #th century, our kind will have taken over completely. You'll be the last of the Normals. Practically a living fossil. You'll love it. You'll be a walking museum piece." "Assuming the machine works," Giovanni put in maliciously. "We don't really know if it does, you see." AI gaped. They were busily strapping him to a cold copper slab in the heart of the machine. "You don't even know if it works?" "Not really," Waldemar admitted. "Present theory holds that time-travel works only one way -- forward. So we haven't been able to recover any of our test specimens and see how they reacted. Of course, they do vanish when the machine is turned on, so we know they must go somewhere ." "Oh," AI said weakly. He was trussed in thoroughly. Experimental wriggling of his right wrist showed him that. But even if he could get loose, these weird little men would only freeze him and put him into the machine again. His shoulders slumped resignedly. He wondered if anyone would miss him. The Friendly Finance Corporation certainly would. But since, in a sense, it was their fault he was in this mess now, he couldn't get very upset about that. They could always sue his estate for the # he owed them, if his estate was worth that much. Nobody else was going to mind the disappearance of Albert Miller from the space-time continuum, he thought dourly. His parents were dead, he hadn't seen his one sister in fifteen years, and the girl he used to know in Topeka was married and at last report had three kids. Still and all, he liked #. He wasn't sure how he would take to the #th century -- or the #th century to him. "Ready for temporal discharge," Mordecai sang out. The chubby leader peered up at Al. "We're sorry about all this, you understand. But nothing and nobody can be allowed to stand in the way of the Cause." "Sure," Al said. "I understand." The concrete-mixer part of the machine began to revolve, bearing Al with it as it built up tempo-kinetic potential. Momentum increased alarmingly. In the background, Al heard an ominous droning sound that grew louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else. He heard a pop like the sound of a breaking balloon. It was the rupturing of the space-time continuum. Al Miller went hurtling forward along the four-space track, head first. He shut his eyes and hoped for the best. When the dizziness stopped, he found himself sitting in the middle of an impeccably clean, faintly yielding roadway, staring up at the wheels of vehicles swishing by overhead at phenomenal speeds. After a moment or two more, he realized they were not airborne, but simply automobiles racing along an elevated roadway made of some practically invisible substance. So the temporal centrifuge had worked! Al glanced around. A crowd was collecting. A couple of hundred people had formed a big circle. They were pointing and muttering. Nobody approached closer than fifty or sixty feet. They weren't potbellied mutants. Without exception, they were all straight-backed six-footers with full heads of hair. The women were tall, too. Men and women alike were dressed in a sort of tuniclike garment made of iridescent material that constantly changed colors. A gong began to ring, rapidly peaking in volume. Al scrambled to his feet and put on a tentative smile. "My name's Miller. I come from #. Would somebody mind telling me what year this is, and -- " He was drowned out by two hundred voices screaming in terror. The crowd stampeded away, dashing madly in every direction, as if he were some ferocious monster. The gong continued to clang loudly. Cars hummed overhead. Al saw a squat, beetle-shaped black vehicle coming toward him on the otherwise empty road. The car pulled up half a block away, the top sprang open, and a figure clad in what might have been a driver's suit -- or a spacesuit -- stepped out and advanced toward Al. "Dozzinon murrifar volan," the armored figure called out. "No speak," Al replied. "I'm a stranger here." To his dismay, he saw the other draw something shaped like a weapon and point it at him. Al's hands shot immediately into the air. A globe of bluish light exuded from the broad nozzle of the gun, hung suspended for a moment, and drifted toward Al. He dodged uneasily to one side, but the globe of light followed him, descended, and wrapped itself around him. It was like being on the inside of a soap-bubble. He could see out, though distortedly. He touched the curving side of the globe in a cautious way; it was resilient and springy to the touch, but his finger did not go through. He noticed with some misgiving that his bubble-cage was starting to drift off the ground. It trailed a ropelike extension, which the man in the armored suit deftly grabbed and knotted to the rear bumper of his car. He drove quickly away -- with Al, bobbing in his impenetrable bubble of light, tagging helplessly along like a captured Gaul being dragged through the streets of Rome behind a chariot -- but several feet in the air. He got used to the irregular motion after a while and relaxed enough to be able to study his surroundings. He was passing through a remarkably antiseptic-looking city, free from refuse and dust. Towering buildings, all bright and spankingly new-looking, shot up everywhere. People goggled at him from the safety of the pedestrian walkways as he jounced past. After about ten minutes, the car halted outside an imposing building whose facade bore the words Istfaq Barnoll. Three men in armored suits appeared from within to flank Al's captor as a kind of honor guard. AI was borne within. He was nudged gently into a small room on the ground floor. The door rolled shut behind him and seemed to join the rest of the wall; no division-line was apparent. A moment later, the balloon popped open, and just in time, too; the air had been getting quite stale inside it. AI glanced around. A square window opened in the wall and three grim-faced men peered intently at him from an adjoining cubicle. A voice from a speaker grid above Al's head said, "Murrifar althrosk?" "AI Miller, from the #th century. And it wasn't my idea to come here, believe me." "Durberal haznik? Quittimar?" AI shrugged. "No parley-voo. Honest, I don't savvy." His three interrogators conferred among themselves -- taking what seemed to AI the needless precaution of switching off the mike to prevent him from overhearing their deliberations. He saw one of the men leave the observation cubicle. When the man returned, some five minutes later, he brought with him a tall, gloomylooking man wearing an impressive spade-shaped beard. The mike was turned on again. Spadebeard said rumblingly, "How be thou hight?" "Eh?" "An thou reck the King's tongue, I conjure thee speak!" AI grinned. No doubt they had fetched an expert in dead languages to talk to him. "Right language, but the wrong time. I'm from the #th century, not the tenth. Come forward a ways." Spadebeard paused to change mental gears. "A thousand pardons -- I mean sorry. Wrong idiom. Dig me now?" "I follow you. What year is this?" "It is # I . And from whence be you?" "You don't quite have it straight yet, but I'm from #." "And how came you hither?" "I wish I knew," AI said. "I was just trying to phone the loan company, see? Anyway, I got involved with these little fat guys who wanted to take over the world. Mutants, they said they were. And they decided they had to get rid of me, so they bundled me into their time machine and shot me forward. So I'm here." "A spy of the mutated ones, eh?" "Spy? Who said anything about a spy? Talk about jumping to conclusions! I'm -- " "You have been sent by them to wreak mischief among us. No transparent story of yours will deceive us. You are not the first to come to our era, you know. And you will meet the same fate the others met." AI shook his head foggily. "Look here, you're making a big mistake. I'm not a spy for anybody. And I don't want to get involved in any war between you and the mutants -- " "The war is over. The last of the mutated ones was exterminated # years ago." "Okay, then. What can you fear from me? Honest, I don't want to cause any trouble. If the mutants are wiped out, how could my spying help them?" "No action in time and space is ever absolute. In our fourspace, the mutants are eradicated -- but they lurk elsewhere, waiting for their chance to enter and spread destruction. " Al's brain was swimming. "Let's let that pass. I'm not a spy. I just want to be left alone. Let me settle down here somewhere -- put me on probation, show me the ropes, stake me to a few credits, or whatever you use for money here. I won't make any trouble." "Your body teems with micro-organisms Of diseases long extinct in this world. Only the fact that we were able to confine you in a force-bubble almost as soon as you arrived here saved us from a terrible epidemic of ancient diseases." "A couple of injections, that's all, and you can kill any bacteria on or in me," AI pleaded. "You're advanced people. You ought to be able to do a simple thing like that." "And then there is the matter of your genetic structure," Spadebeard continued inexorably. "You bear genes long since eliminated from humanity as undesirable. Permitting you to remain here, breeding furtively, would introduce unutterable confusion. Perhaps you carry latently the same mutant strain that cost humanity so many centuries of bloodshed!" "No," AI protested. "Look at me. I'm pretty tall, no potbelly, a full head of hair -- " "The gene is recessive. But it crops up unexpectedly." "I solemnly promise to control my breeding," A! declared. "I won't run around scattering my genes all over your shiny new world. That's a promise." "Your appeal is rejected," came the inflexible reply. AI shrugged. He knew when he was beaten. "Okay," he said wearily. "I didn't want to live in your damn century anyway. When's the execution?" " Execution ?" Spadebeard looked stunned. "Dove's whiskers, do you think we would -- would actually -- " He couldn't get the word out. Al supplied it: "Put me to death?" Spadebeard's expression was sickly. He looked ready to retch. Al heard him mutter vehemently to his companions in the observation cubicle: "Gonnim def larrimog! Egfar!" "Murrifar althrosk," suggested one of his companions. Spadebeard, evidently reassured, nodded. He said to Al, "No doubt a barbarian like yourself would expect to be -- to be made dead." Gulping, he went gamely on. "We have no such vindictive intention." "Well, what are you going to do to me?" "Send you across the timeline to a world where your friends, the mutated ones, reign supreme," Spadebeard replied. "It's the least we can do for you, spy." The hidden door of his cell puckered open. Another armor-suited figure entered, pointing a gun, and discharged a blob of blue light that drifted toward Al and rapidly englobed him. He was drawn by the trailing end out into a corridor. It hadn't been a very sociable reception here in the #th century, he thought as he was tugged along the hallway. In a way, he couldn't blame them. A time-traveler from the past was bound to be laden down with all sorts of germs. They couldn't risk letting him run around breathing at everybody. No wonder that crowd of onlookers had panicked when he had opened his mouth to speak to them. The other business, though, that of his being a spy for the mutants -- he couldn't figure that out at all. If the mutants had been wiped out fifty years ago, why worry about spies now? At least his species had managed to defeat the underground organization of potbellied little men. That was comforting. He wished he could get back to #, if only to snap his fingers in their jowly faces and tell them that all their sinister scheming was going to come to nothing. Where was he heading now? Spadebeard had said, Across the timeline to a world where the mutated ones reign supreme. Whatever across the timeline meant, Al thought. He was ushered into an impressive laboratory room and, bubble and all, was thrust into the waiting clasps of something that looked depressingly like an electric chair. Brisk technicians bustled around, throwing switches and checking connections. Al glanced in appeal at Spadebeard. "Will you tell me what's going on?" "It is very difficult to express in medieval terms," the linguist said. "The device makes use of dollibar force to transmit you through an inverse dormin vector -- do I make myself clear?" "Not very," Al confessed. "Unhelpable. But you understand the concept of parallel continua at least, of course." "No." "Does it mean anything to you if I say that you'll be shunted across the spokes of the time-wheel to a totality that is simultaneously parallel and tangent to our four-space?" "That isn't much better," Al said resignedly, for all he was really getting was a headache. "You might as well start shunting me, I suppose." Spadebeard nodded and turned to a technician. "Vorstrar althrosk," he commanded. "Murrifar." The technician grabbed an immense toggle switch with both hands and groaningly dragged it shut. Al heard a brief whine of closing relays. Then darkness surrounded him. Once again he found himself on a city street. But the pavement was cracked and buckled, and grass blades poked up through the neglected concrete. A dry voice said, "All right, you. Don't sprawl there like a ninny. Get up and come along." Al peered doubtfully up into the snout of a fair-headed man. Four identical companions stood near him with arms folded. They all looked very much like Mordecai, Waldemar, Giovanni, and the rest, except that these mutants were decked out in futuristic-looking costumes bright with flashy gold trim and rocketship insignia. Al put up his hands. "Where am I?" he asked in confusion. "Earth, of course. You've just come through a dimensional gateway from the continuum of the Normals. Come along, spy. Into the van." "But I'm not a spy," Al mumbled without very much hope as the five little men bundled him into a blue and red car the size of a small yacht. "At least, I'm not spying on you. I mean -- " "Save the explanations for the Overlord," was the curt instruction. Al huddled miserably cramped between two vigilant mutants, while the others sat behind him. The van moved seemingly of its own volition, and at an enormous rate. A mutant power, Al thought. After a while he said, "Could you at least tell me what year this is?" "Yes -- #," snapped the mutant to his left. "But that's the same year it was over there." "Certainly. What else could it be?" The question floored Al. He was silent for perhaps half a mile more. Since the van had no windows, he stared morosely at his feet. Finally he asked, "How come you aren't afraid of catching my germs then? Over back of -- ah -- the dimensional gateway, they kept me cooped up in a force-field all the time so I wouldn't contaminate them. But you go right ahead breathing the same air I do." "Do you think we fear the germs of a Normal, spy?" sneered the mutant at Al's right. "You forget that we're a superior race." Al nodded. "Yes. I forgot about that." The van halted suddenly and the mutant police hustled Al out, past a crowd of peering little fat men and women, and into a colossal dome of a building whose exterior was covered completely with faceted green glass. The effect was one of massive ugliness. They ushered him into a sort of throne room presided over by a mutant fatter than the rest. The policeman gripping Al's right arm hissed, "Bow when you enter the presence of the Overlord." AI wasn't minded to argue. He dropped to his knees along with the others. A booming voice from above rang out. "What have you brought me today?" "A spy. Your Nobility." "Another? Rise, spy." AI rose. "Begging Your Nobility's pardon. I'd like to put in a word or two on my own behalf -- " "Silence!" the Overlord roared. AI closed his mouth. The mutant drew himself up to his full height, about five feet one, and said, "The Normals have sent you across the dimensional gulf to spy on us." "No, Your Nobility. They were afraid I'd spy on them, so they sent me over here. I'm from the year #, you see." Briefly, he explained everything, beginning with the bollixed phone call and ending with his capture by the Overlord's men a short while ago. The Overlord looked skeptical. "It is well known that the Normals plan to cross the dimensional gulf from their phantom world to this, the real one, and invade our civilization. You're but the latest of their advance scouts. Admit it!" "No, Your Nobility, I'm not. On the other side, they told me I was a spy from #, and now you say I'm a spy from the other dimension. But I tell you -- " "Enough!" the mutant leader thundered. "Take him away. Place him in custody. We shall decide his fate later!" Someone else already occupied the cell into which AI was thrust. He was a lanky, sad-faced Normal who slouched forward to shake hands once the door had clanged shut. "Thurizad manifosk," he said. "Sorry, I don't speak that language," said Al. The other grinned. "I understand. All right: greetings. I'm Darren Phelp. Are you a spy too?" "No, dammit!" Al snapped. Then: "Sorry. Didn't mean to take it out on you. My name's Al Miller. Are you a native of this place?" "Me? Dove's whiskers, what a sense of humor! Of course I'm not a native! You know as well as I do that there aren't any Normals left in this fourspace continuum." "None at all?" "Hasn't been one born here in centuries," Phelp said. "But you're just joking, eh? You're from Baileffod's outfit, I suppose." "Who?" "Baileffod. Baileffod! You mean you aren't? Then you must be from higher up!" Phelp thrust his hands sideways in some kind of gesture of respect. "Penguin's paws. Excellency; I apologize. I should have seen at once -- " "No, I'm not from your organization at all," Al said. "I don't know what you're talking about. Word of honor." Phelp smiled cunningly. "Of course, Excellency! I understand completely." "Cut that out! Why doesn't anyone ever believe me? I'm not from Baileffod and I'm not from higher up. I come from #. Do you hear me -- #? And that's the truth." Phelp's eyes went wide. "From the past?' I ' Al nodded. "I stumbled into the mutants in # and they shipped me five centuries ahead to get rid of me. Only when I arrived, I wasn't welcome, so I was shipped across the dimensional whatzis to here. Everyone thinks I'm a spy, wherever I go. What are you doing here?" Phelp smiled. "Why, I am a spy." "From #?" "Naturally. We have to keep tabs on the mutants somehow. I came through the gateway wearing an invisibility shield, but it popped an ultrone and I vizzed out. They jugged me last month and I suppose I'm stuck in this place for keeps." Al rubbed thumbs tiredly against his eyeballs. "Wait a minute -- how come you speak my language? On the other side, they had to get hold of a linguistics expert to talk to me." "All spies are trained to talk English," said Phelp. "That's the language the mutants speak here. In the real world, we speak Vorkish, naturally. It's the language developed by Normals for communication during the Mutant Wars. Your 'linguistics expert' was probably one of our top spies." "And over here the mutants have won?" "Completely. Three hundred years ago, in this continuum, the mutants developed a two-way time machine that enabled them to go back and forth, eliminating Normal leaders before they were born. Whereas in our world, the real world, two-way time travel is impossible. That's where the continuum split begins. We Normals fought a grim war of extermination against the mutants in our four-space and finally wiped them out, despite their superior powers, in #. Clear?" "More or less." Rather less than more, Al added privately. "So there are only mutants in this world, and there are only Normals in your world." "Exactly!" "And you're a spy from the other side." "You've got it now! You see even though, strictly speaking, this world is only a phantom, it's got some pretty real characteristics. For instance, if the mutants killed you here, you'd be dead. Permanently. So there's a lot of rivalry across the gateway; the mutants are always scheming to invade us, and vice versa. Confidentially, I don't think anything will ever come of all the scheming." "You don't?" "Nah," Phelp said. "The way things stand now, each side has a perfectly good enemy just beyond reach. But actually going to war would be messy, while relaxing our guard and allowing peace to break out would foul up our economy. So we keep sending spies back and forth, and prepare for war. It's a nice system, except when you happen to get yourself caught, like me." "What'll happen to you?" Phelp shrugged. "They may let me rot here for a few decades. Or they might decide to condition me and send me back as a spy for them. Tiger tails, who could know?" "Would you change sides like that?" "I wouldn't have any choice -- not after I was conditioned," Phelp said. "But I don't worry much about it. It's a risk I knew about when I signed on for spy duty." AI shuddered. It was beyond him how someone could voluntarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutant-battling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum, he philosophically decided. Half an hour later, three rotund mutant police came to fetch him. They marched him downstairs and into a bare, ugly little room where a battery of interrogators quizzed him for better than an hour. He stuck to his story, throughout everything, until at last they indicated they were through with him. He spent the next two hours in a drafty cell, by himself, until finally a gaudily robed mutant unlocked the door and said, "The Overlord commands you to present yourself." The Overlord looked worried. He leaned forward on his throne, fist digging into his fleshy chin. In his booming voice -- AI realized at last that it was artificially amplified -- the Overlord rumbled, "Miller, you're a problem ." "I'm sorry, YourNobil -- " "Quiet! I'll do the talking." AI did not reply. The Overlord went on, "We've checked your story inside and out, and confirmed it with one of our spies on the other side of the gate. You really are from #, or thereabouts. What can we do with you? Generally speaking, when we catch a Normal snooping around here, we psycho-condition him and send him back across the gateway to spy for us. But we can't do that to you, because you don't belong on the other side, and they've already tossed you out once. On the other hand, we can't keep you here, maintaining you forever at state expense. And it wouldn't be civilized to kill you, would it?" "No, Your Nobil -- " "Silencer AI gulped. The Overlord glowered at him and continued thinking out loud. "I suppose we could perform experiments on you, though. You must be a walking laboratory of Normal microorganisms that we could synthesize and fire through the gateway when we invade their fourspace. Yes, by the Gnome, then you'd be useful to our cause! Zechariah?" "Yes, Nobility?" A ribbon-bedecked guardsman snapped to attention. "Take this Normal to the biological laboratories for examination. I'll have further instructions as soon as -- " AI heard a peculiar whanging noise from the back of the throne room. The Overlord appeared to freeze on his throne. Turning, AI saw a band of determinedlooking Normals come bursting in, led by Darren Phelp. "There you are!" Phelp cried. "I've been looking all over for you!" He was waving a peculiar needle-nozzled gun. "What's going on?" AI gasped. Phelp grinned. "The invasion! It came, after all! Our troops are pouring through the gateway armed with these freezer guns. They immobilize any mutant who gets in the way of the field." "When -- when did all this happen?" "ft started two hours ago. We've captured the entire city! Come on, will you? Whiskers, there's no time to waste!" "Where in blazes am I supposed to go?" Phelp smiled. "To the nearest dimensional lab, of course. We're going to send you back to your own time." A dozen triumphant Normals stood in a tense knot around AI in the laboratory. From outside came the sound of jubilant singing. The invasion was a howling success. As Phelp had explained it, the victory was due to the recent invention of a kind of time-barrier projector. The projector had cut off all contact between the mutant world and its own future, preventing time-traveling mutant scouts from getting back to #I with news of the invasion. With two-way travel, the great mutant advantage, thus nullified, the success of the surprise attack was made possible -- and easy. AI listened to this explanation with minimal interest. He barely understood every third word, and, in any event, his main concern was in getting home. He was strapped into a streamlined and much modified version of the temporal centrifuge that had originally hurled him forward into #. Phelps explained things to him. "You see here, we set the machine for #. What day was it when you left? And how close can you get to the moment?" "Ah -- October #. It was exactly #:# in the afternoon." "Make the setting, Frozz." Phelp nodded. "You'll be shunted back along the time-line. Of course, you'll land in this continuum, since in our world there's no such thing as pastward time travel. But once you reach your own time, all you do is activate this small transdimensional generator, and you'll be hurled across safe and sound into the very day you left, in your own fourspace." "You can't know how much I appreciate all this," Al said very warmly. He felt a pleasant glow of love for all mankind, for the first time since his unhappy phone call. At last someone was taking sympathetic interest in his plight. At last he was on his way home, back to the relative sanity of #, where he could start forgetting this entire nightmarish jaunt. Mutants and Normals and spies and time machines... "You'd better get going," Phelp said. "We have to get the occupation under way here." "Sure," AI agreed. "Don't let me hold you up. I can't wait to get going -- no offense intended." "And remember, soon as your surroundings look familiar, jab the activator button on this generator. Otherwise you'll slither into an interspace where we couldn't answer for the consequences." Al nodded tensely. "I won't forget." "I hope not. Ready?" "Ready." Someone threw a switch. Al began to spin. He heard the popping sound that was the rupturing of the temporal matrix. Like a cork shot from a champagne bottle, Al arched out backward through time, heading for #. He woke in his own room on #rd Street. His head hurt. His mind was full of phrases like temporal centrifuge and transdimensional generator. He picked himself off the floor and rubbed his head. Wow, he thought. It must have been a sudden fainting spell. And now his head was crowded with nonsense. Going to the sideboard, he pulled out the half-empty bourbon bottle and measured off a few fingers' worth. After the drink, his nerves felt steadier. His mind was still cluttered with inexplicable thoughts and images. Sinister little fat men and complex machines, transparent roadways in the air and men in fancy tunics. A bad dream, he thought. Then he remembered. It wasn't any dream. He had actually taken the round trip into #, returning by way of some other continuum. and Traag (novella, short-short and cover design) on Vega IV. He had pressed the generator button at the proper time, and now here he was, safe and sound. No longer the football of a bunch of different factions. Home in his own snug little fourspace, or whatever it was. He frowned. He recalled that Mordecai had severed the telephone wire. But the phone looked intact now. Maybe it had been fixed while he was gone. He picked it up. Unless he got that loan extension today, he was cooked. There was no need for him to look up the number of the Friendly Finance Corporation; he knew it all too well. He began to dial. MUrray Hill # -- The receiver clicked queerly. A voice said, "Come in, Operator Nine. Operator Nine, do you read me?" Al's jaw sagged. This is where I came in, he thought wildly. He struggled to put down the phone. But his muscles would not respond. It would be easier to bend the sun in its orbit than to break the path of the continuum. He heard his own voice say, "I didn't want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if -- " "Just a minute. Who are you?" Al fought to break the contact. But he was hemmed away in a small corner of his mind while his voice went on, "I ought to ask you that. What are you doing on the other end, anyway? I hadn't even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-# and -- " "Well? You dialed MUgwump # and you got us. What more do you want?" A suspicious pause. "Say, you aren't Operator Nine!" Inwardly, Al wanted to scream. No scream would come. In this continuum, the past (his future) was immutable. He was caught on the track, and there was no escape. None whatever. And, he realized in frozen horror, there never would be. liked Ary  you'll like Einert. Gl ass sculpture bq Mark Einert Cataloq available I # #-# Perfume Bailie, Uue, # in. #. Illustrated by Tom X ook, if you're going to get like that, Mr. Harringay, I'm out of here. And taking the painting with me. I'm just telling you what she said. I told you, I went to art school with her. We did anatomy together. Oh, stop with the look. Well, so? I can tell you, she's said plenty about her-cousin-thegallery-owner and you probably wouldn't like any of it. I just went to her studio to say 'hi,' and there she was, with this. I was coming to New York anyway, and I told her I'd take it here for her. She was too broke to get a ticket herself. seamless brushwork. It really does seem to move, especially around the eyes. Yeah, I know. Nobody would have thought she had it in her, me included, and I've had my eye on her for awhile. She said it happened at the Art Fair. I mean, even you've heard of Ann Arbor's Art Fair. It's one of the biggest in the country. Stretches out for blocks and you've got to get past a jury to be allowed to set up your booth and show your stuff. Well, she was down on Main Street, looking at booth after booth of the best work in the country, and getting depressed. Then, she saw this old homeless guy standing behind these stalls full of expensive artistic and intellectual excesses and just ving at them all. She had her camera with her and gave the guy ten bucks to take his picture. "Stare at the booths, like you're hungry. Don't smile, either. Look miserable." I don't think the part called for much acting ability. Anyway, she snaps some shots from different angles, gets them developed at one of those twenty-four hour places and takes them back to her studio. Well, studio is maybe a bit much. Her space with the east-facing window in one of those fire-trap houses they carve up and rent out to the students one room at a time. She opens a fresh bottle of scotch and gets started. After about six hours and a third of the bottle, she says, it was getting pretty obvious inspiration had just blown her off again. She got a mediocre portrait of a homeless, shabby, old black guy. "I mean, it's been done." She stood back and glowered at it. "Totally done. Politically correct scenes of urban poverty are just out. It's the nineties. Cynicism. World-weariness. Violence." She painted a gun in the old guy's fist. "No. Too blunt." She scraped the gun off. "Subtlety. Maturity. Can't hack around like a kid fresh out of art school." Yeah, I know she is and you know she is, but she's in deep denial about it. She says that's when she set to work on the face. "Resentment," she said. "That's the ticket. Indignation at the thoughtless oppressor. Yeah No, I don't think she got those eyes right away. Maybe the brows, angled and sharp like that. I think the eyes probably came last. Anyway, never mind what eventually happened, right then she says she didn't feel like she was getting anywhere. The mood of the piece, she says, eluded her. I think it fell into the scotch, but hey, what do I know? She fiddled around with it for hours, she says, changing the brows, working on the mouth, the chin, the eyes, between liberal doses from the bottle. She kept at it until it got dark and she switched on the lights. Cheap, ordinary lights from K-Mart, she says, no good to paint by. She kept on working anyway. But the righteous indignation just didn't turn up. Now he just looked like a mean, shabby old black guy. This is where it gets weird. She said she got this feeling like the old guy was fighting her. Like his face was shifting under her brush, turning this way and that to get away from her. Finally, she got so pissed off that she just jammed the brush down into the blob of Morning Red No. # and drew it back and went, thwak! Left a huge, scarlet blob across the old guy's mouth. She was real damn surprised when he reached up and wiped it off. "Well if you're gonna be that way about it..." He spat red acrylic. The scotch, she said, stopped her from thinking about the whole thing too much. "It's your fault," she said, brandishing the brush at the Old Guy. "Where's the righteous indignation? Come on, shape up!" He rolled his eyes. "Oh, please. Look, chick-a-boo, you know about as much about righteous indignation as you do about quantum mechanics. You ain't suffered anything worse than a hangover your whole life, Little Girl. How do you expect to paint the result of suffering?" "Shut your face!" she shouted and chucked another brush full of paint at the Old Guy. He wiped it away, fast. He had to, she said, acrylics dry pretty quick. "On top of that," he said, shaking red globs off his hands so they splattered on the pavement. "Artists don't just suffer, Sister. They see. They got eyes in their souls. They know what's really going on." He walked towards for a close up. "You, you got suburban princess blinders on." She says she's pretty sure she turned purple at that. She felt her ears burn. "Now, I," the Old Guy's eyes sparkled, "am in a position to remove those blinders for you. I can guarantee you a masterpiece. One that will be acknowledged as a masterpiece in your lifetime, too. And all it will cost you is..." "Oh, please." She planted both hands on her hips, with the brush sticking out and dropping Morning Red on the carpet. "You don't expect me to give you my soul for one lousy painting?" Yeah, you're right, that must have been amazingly good scotch. I mean, I can't even think what Hell would want with another artist's soul. If this is their best approach, what they really need down there would be people with business skills. So, she says, the Old Guy pulled back a little. "'Course not. I know about inflation. Two paintings. Two masterpieces. Guaranteed." "Go to hell." She slashed the brush across the canvas, pinning down one of the old guy's arms behind a ragged bar of Morning Red. Well, he pried himself free, and the fight was on. She was beyond furious. The Old Guy shouldn't have called her names while she was plastered. Your cousin is a mean drunk. I mean, ladylike doesn't enter her vocabulary under good circumstances, but after a good chunk of a fifth... The Old Guy's shouting variations on "guaranteed masterpieces!" and she's attacking with the whole pallet. Blobs of Morning Red No. #. Smears of Burnt Sienna No. #. Murderous slashes of City Indigo No. #. Lucky for the Old Guy she was completely blitzed and her aim was lousy. He kept dodging. He clawed frantically at the acrylic when she did actually manage to land one. Finally, she caught his foot with a big goober of After Hours Amethyst #. He pulled loose with this long, sucking noise. "Five!" he shouted. "Five masterpieces, fame for Come on! It's not like you're using it for anything!" She got him across the mouth with a fresh load of City Indigo. The thing was, the Old Guy could move like a bat out of hell (her simile, not mine) and she'd repainted him so many times that he was even thicker than the gobs she was laying on him. But finally, inspiration worked its way past the alcohol. She snatched up the sauerkraut jar of turpentine and with a move that would've done Dorothy proud, splashed the whole load of it across the Old Guy's body. His torso slumped and slouched and melted away in rivulets. "Now, you bastard..." She flicked fresh streaks of color straight into his open mouth, and across what was left of his arms, muzzling him and trapping him in place. With hands about as substantial as watered Coke, he couldn't wipe the smears away. She kept on going until she passed out cold. That's when I came in. I sobered her up and talked her into letting me take the picture to you. Yeah, I know. It is incredible isn't it? The way she got him to writhe like that. He really seems to be struggling against his meaningless bonds. It's beyond fresh. It's totally new. Oh, yeah, I'm sure she can do more just as good. And she'd probably be glad to let you organize the show. Keep it all in the family and all that. Oh yea, I know the art world. A show of that caliber would give this little place a boost all the way into orbit, especially with a wheeler-dealer like you behind it. give us for it? Illustrated by Heywood n his last night on Earth, Ted Graham stepped out II  I of a glass-walled telephone booth, and ducked to avoid a swooping moth that battered itself in a frenzy against a bare globe above the booth. Ted Graham was a long-necked man with a head of pronounced egg shape topped by prematurely balding sandy hair. Something about his lanky, intense appearance suggested his occupation: certified public accountant. He stopped behind his wife, who was studying a newspaper classified page, and frowned. "They said to wait here. They'll come get us. Said the place is hard to find at night." Martha Graham looked up from the newspaper. She was a dollfaced woman, heavily pregnant, a kind of pink prettiness about her. The yellow glow from the light above the booth subdued the red auburn cast of her ponytail hair. "I just have to be in a house when the baby's born," she said. "What'd they sound like?" "I dunno. There was a funny kind of interruption -- like an argument in some foreign language." "Did they sound foreign?" "In a way." He motioned along the night-shrouded line of trailers toward one with two windows glowing amber. "Let's wait inside. These bugs out here are fierce." "Did you tell them which trailer is ours?" "Yes. They didn't sound at all anxious to look at it. That's odd -- them wanting to trade their house for a trailer." "There's nothing odd about it. They've probably just got itchy feet like we did." He appeared not to hear her. "Funniest-sounding language you ever heard when that argument started -- like a squirt of noise." Inside the trailer, Ted Graham sat down on the green couch that opened into a double bed for company. "They could use a good tax accountant around here," he said. "When I first saw the place, I got that definite feeling. The valley looks prosperous. It's a wonder nobody's opened an office here before." His wife took a straight chair by the counter separating kitchen and living area, folded her hands across her heavy stomach. "I'm just continental tired of wheels going around under me," she said. "I want to sit and stare at the same view for the rest of my life. I don't know how a trailer ever seemed glamorous when -- " "It was the inheritance gave us itchy feet," he said. Tires gritted on gravel outside. Martha Graham straightened. "Could that be them?" "Awful quick, if it is." He went to the door, opened it, stared down at the man who was just raising a hand to knock. "Are you Mr. Graham?" asked the man. "Yes." He found himself staring at the caller. "I'm Clint Rush. You called about the house?" The man moved farther into the light. At first, he'd appeared an old man, fine wrinkle lines in his face, a tired leather look to his skin. But as he moved his head in the light, the wrinkles seemed to dissolve -- and with them, the years lifted from him. "Yes, we called," said Ted Graham. He stood aside. "Do you want to look at the trailer now?" Martha Graham crossed to stand beside her husband. "We've kept it in awfully good shape," she said. "We've never let anything get seriously wrong with it." She sounds too anxious, thought Ted Graham. I wish she 'd let me do the talking for the two of us. "We can come back and look at your trailer tomorrow in daylight," said Rush. "My car's right out here, if you'd like to see our house." Ted Graham hesitated. He felt a nagging worry tug at his mind, tried to fix his attention on what bothered him. "Hadn't we better take our car?" he asked. "We could follow you." "No need," said Rush. "We're coming back into town tonight anyway. We can drop you off then." Ted Graham nodded. "Be right with you as soon as I lock up." Inside the car, Rush mumbled introductions. His wife was a dark shadow in the front seat, her hair drawn back in a severe bun. Her features suggested gypsy blood. He called her Raimee. Odd name, thought Ted Graham. And he noticed that she, too, gave that strange first impression of age that melted in a shift of light. Mrs. Rush turned her gypsy features toward Martha Graham. "You are going to have a baby?" It came out as an odd, veiled statement. Abruptly, the car rolled forward. Martha Graham said, "It's supposed to be born in about two months. We hope it's a boy." Mrs. Rush looked at her husband. "I have changed my mind," she said. Rush spoke without taking his attention from the road. "It is too..." He broke off, spoke in a tumble of strange sounds. Ted Graham recognized it as the language he'd heard on the telephone. Mrs. Rush answered in the same tongue, anger showing in the intensity of her voice. Her husband replied, his voice calmer. Presently, Mrs. Rush fell moodily silent. Rush tipped his head toward the rear of the car. "My wife has moments when she does not want to get rid of the old house. It has been with her for many years." Ted Graham said, "Oh." Then: "Are you Spanish?" Rush hesitated. "No. We are Basque." He turned the car down a well-lighted avenue that merged into a highway. They turned onto a side road. There followed more turns -- left, right, right. Ted Graham lost track. They hit a jolting bump that made Martha gasp. "I hope that wasn't too rough on you," said Rush. "We're almost there." The car swung into a lane, its lights picking out the skeleton outlines of trees: peculiar trees -- tall, gaunt, leafless. They added to Ted Graham's feeling of uneasiness. The lane dipped, ended at a low wall of a house -- red brick with clerestory windows beneath overhanging eaves. The effect of the wall and a wide-beamed door they could see to the left was ultra-modern. Ted Graham helped his wife out of the car, followed the Rushes to the door. "I thought you told me it was an old house," he said. "It was designed by one of the first modernists," said Rush. He fumbled with an odd curved key. The wide door swung open onto a hallway equally wide, carpeted by a deep pile rug. They could glimpse floor-to-ceiling view windows at the end of the hall, city lights beyond. Martha Graham gasped, entered the hall as though in a trance. Ted Graham followed, heard the door close behind them. "It's so-so-so big," exclaimed Martha Graham. "You want to trade this for our trailer?" asked Ted Graham. "It's too inconvenient for us," said Rush. "My work is over the mountains on the coast." He shrugged. "We cannot sell it." Ted Graham looked at him sharply. "Isn't there any money around here?" He had a sudden vision of a tax accountant with no customers. "Plenty of money, but no real estate customers." They entered the living room. Sectional divans lined the walls. Subdued lighting glowed from the corners. Two paintings hung on the opposite walls -- oblongs of odd lines and twists that made Ted Graham dizzy. Warning bells clamored in his mind. Martha Graham crossed to the windows, looked at the lights far away below. "I had no idea we'd climbed that far," she said. "It's like a fairy city." Mrs. Rush emitted a short, nervous laugh. Ted Graham glanced around the room, thought: If the rest of the house is like this, it 's worth fifty or sixty thousand. He thought of the trailer: A good one, but not worth more than seven thousand. Uneasiness was like a neon sign flashing in his mind. "This seems so..." He shook his head. "Would you like to see the rest of the house?" asked Rush. Martha Graham turned from the window. "Oh, yes." Ted Graham shrugged. No harm in looking, he thought. When they returned to the living room, Ted Graham had doubled his previous estimate on the house's value. His brain reeled with the summing of it: a solarium with an entire ceiling covered by sun lamps, an automatic laundry where you dropped soiled clothing down a chute, took it washed and ironed from the other end... "Perhaps you and your wife would like to discuss it in private," said Rush. "We will leave you for a moment." And they were gone before Ted Graham could protest. Martha Graham said, "Ted, I honestly never in my life dreamed -- " "Something's very wrong, honey." "But, Ted -- " "This house is worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more. And they want to trade this -- " he looked around him -- " for a seven-thousand-dollar trailer?" "Ted, they're foreigners. And if they're so foolish they don't know the value of this place, then why should "I don't like it," he said. Again he looked around the room, recalled the fantastic equipment of the house. "But maybe you're right." He stared out at the city lights. They had a lacelike quality: tall buildings linked by lines of flickering incandescence. Something like a Roman candle shot skyward in the distance. "Okay!" he said. "If they want to trade, let's go push the deal... " Abruptly, the house shuddered. The city lights blinked out. A humming sound filled the air. Martha Graham clutched her husband's arm. "Ted! Wha -- what was that?" "I dunno." He turned. "Mr. Rush!" No answer. Only the humming. The door at the end of the room opened. A strange man came through it. He wore a short toga-like garment of gray, metallic cloth belted at the waist by something that glittered and shimmered through every color of the spectrum . An aura of coldness and power emanated from him -- a sense of untouchable hauteur. He glanced around the room, spoke in the same tongue the Rushes had used. Ted Graham said, "I don't understand you, mister." The man put a hand to his flickering belt. Both Ted and Martha Graham felt themselves rooted to the floor, a tingling sensation vibrating along every nerve. Again the strange language rolled from the man's tongue, but now the words were understood. "Who are you?" "My name's Graham. This is my wife. What's going "How did you get here?" "The Rushes -- they wanted to trade us this house for our trailer. They brought us. Now look, we -- " "What is your talent -- your occupation?" "Tax accountant. Say! Why all these -- " "That was to be expected," said the man. "Clever! Oh, excessively clever!" His hand moved again to the belt. "Now be very quiet. This may confuse you momentarily." Colored lights filled both the Grahams' minds. They staggered. "You are qualified," said the man. "You will serve." "Where are we?" demanded Martha Graham. "The coordinates would not be intelligible to you," he said. "I am of the Rojac. It is sufficient for you to know that you are under Rojac sovereignty." Ted Graham said, "But -- " "You have, in a way, been kidnapped. And the Raimees have fled to your planet -- an unregistered planet." "I'm afraid," Martha Graham said shakily. "You have nothing to fear," said the man. "You are no longer on the planet of your birth -- nor even in the same galaxy." He glanced at Ted Graham's wrist. "That device on your wrist -- it tells your local time?" "Yes." "That will help in the search. And your sun -- can you describe its atomic cycle?" Ted Graham groped in his mind for his science memories from school, from the Sunday supplements. "I can recall that our galaxy is a spiral like -- " "Most galaxies are spiral." "Is this some kind of a practical joke?" asked Ted Graham. The man smiled, a cold, superior smile. "It is no joke. Now I will make you a proposition." Ted nodded warily. "All right, let's have the stinger." "The people who brought you here were tax collectors we Rojac recruited from a subject planet. They were conditioned to make it impossible for them to leave their job untended. Unfortunately, they were clever enough to realize that if they brought someone else in who could do their job, they were released from their mental bonds. Very clever." "But -- " "You may have their job," said the man. "Normally, you would be put to work in the lower echelons, but we believe in meting out justice wherever possible. The Raimees undoubtedly stumbled on your planet by accident and lured you into this position without -- " "How do you know I can do their job?" passed. Well, do you accept?" "What about our baby?" Martha Graham worriedly wanted to know. "You will be allowed to keep it until it reaches the age of decision -- about the time it will take the child to reach adult stature." "Then what?" insisted Martha Graham. "The child will take its position in society -- according to its ability." "Will we ever see our child after that?" "Possibly." Ted Graham said, "What's the joker in this?" Again the cold, superior smile. "You will receive conditioning similar to that which we gave the Raimees. And we will want to examine your memories to aid us in our search for your planet. It would be good to find a new inhabitable place." "Why did they trap us like this?" asked Martha Graham. "It's lonely work," the man explained. "Your house is actually a type of space conveyance that travels along your collection route -- and there is much travel to the job. And then -- you will not have friends, nor time for much other than work. Our methods are necessarily severe at times." "Travel?" Martha Graham repeated in dismay. "Almost constantly." Ted Graham felt his mind whirling. And behind him, he heard his wife sobbing. The Raimees sat in what had been the Grahams' trailer. "For a few moments, I feared he would not succumb to the bait," she said. "I knew you could never overcome the mental compulsion enough to leave them there without their first agreeing." Raimee chuckled. "Yes. And now I'm going to indulge in everything the Rojac never permitted. I'm going to write ballads and poems." "And I'm going to paint," she said. "Oh, the delicious freedom!" "Greed won this for us," he said. "The long study of the Grahams paid off. They couldn't refuse to trade." "I knew they'd agree. The looks in their eyes when they saw the house! They both had... " She broke off, a look of horror coming into her eyes. "One of them did not agree!" "They both did. You heard them." "The baby?" He stared at his wife. "But -- but it is not at the age of decision!" "In perhaps eighteen of this planet's years, it will be at the age of decision. What then?" His shoulders sagged. He shuddered. "I will not be able to fight it off. I will have to build a transmitter, call the Rojac and confess!" "And they will collect another inhabitable place," she said, her voice flat and toneless. "I've spoiled it," he said. "I've spoiled it!" "The young warrior journeyed up the mountain and was initiated into the Great Mysteries..." now, ## cam com# An ancient science of universal energy for your needs today and for the rest of your life. A simple, proven, practical tool to unlock and fulfill your true potential for creativity vitality and radiant health on all levels. For information, call or write: Radiance Light and Power Co. (#) #-# P.O. Box #, Beverly Hills, CA # Illustrated by Rivera "th' d octoree, pleeease," screamed a tiny dark woman with light blue hair. For days now, she had been haunting his every move, keening her if onlys in his ear. If only she hadn't left her child alone, if only she had called a neighbor. Tweed clad and lanky, Dr. Jean L'Espoir strode through the cluttered pseudoWild-West#th-Century street, ignoring the cries of the blue-haired woman, and stepping over the corpse of a male Caucasian, one of his recent patients. A fecal stench filled the air. The doctor had his own if onlys. If only he hadn't fought with Aelia. Had she resented the hours he spent on what she called his "obsession"? If only he had simply ignored her opinion. But Aelia was always difficult to ignore and impossible to forget for more than a couple of hours. L'Espoir walked faster. The woman caught up with him. "Doctoree," she said in her unrecognizable accent, a bit out of breath. Suddenly she noticed the nearest corpse was missing four fingers -- apparently chopped off after death by the fire ax lying nearby. Any rings were long gone. "Ohhh," she moaned. Her dark face seemed to drain of blood. Her hands plucked nervously at her blue paper overalls. "The answer is the same today, Ms. Sunde, as it was yesterday," the doctor said as he picked up the bloody ax and wiped its dull blade with a pocket handkerchief. He tried not to think about the dozens of corpses that daily littered this world, about how suicides and terminals improved the algae pudding, fertilized the vegetables, and made his business profitable. Sunde followed him as he returned the ax to its wall bracket two storefronts away. "I fail. I fail," she cried, tears running down her cheeks. The doctor ignored her. Yesterday, she had become hysterical, claiming to have done something that caused the death of her three-year-old son. L'Espoir was almost to his door when he heard a sad, sweet alien song -- music he recognized like a wound recognizes salt. He froze, engrossed in memories. "Pleeease," Sunde screeched as she caught up with him again. She pointed at the sign in his window. The blood bold neon sang over and over: Success Unlimited In smaller, steady white neon the sign added: Have a Good Death "That's what I desire. The priest forgave me. The Cardinal forgave me. But God does not forgive me. I feel it's so." L'Espoir knew that most people didn't have good came to life's end afflicted with , onlys and might have "Ms. Sunde, I informed you yesterday that I have no time to work pro bono publico.' I " "No pro bono. Please do free." "Pro bono is Latin for in the" -- his palms turned up in frustrated resignation -- "for free." "Yes. Cleanse my mind free." He was probably wasting his breath again. "If the Cardinal says God forgives you, believe him, woman." Large liquid eyes held him captive. "You have been loved, Doctoree. I can tell." Memory rushed in on him again. If only he hadn't gone to the pub that night. If only he hadn't been so eager to talk. He and his fellow academics knew how the galaxy should be run. Conversation was oil for the machinery of intellect. If only he hadn't been thirty minutes late. "My personal affairs are none of -- " "I watch you. You are a man of loneliness. You take no companions." Her hand reached tentatively for his. "Ms Sunde, your sexual favors will not buy my services. Now -- " "Why does a good man stay in this place where all evil comes?" "My motivations are none of -- " "What do you look for?" He shoved past her into his front office, neglecting to lock the door behind him. Glancing nervously about his small, white storefront, he ignored his many diplomas, black framed and dusty, favoring instead his electro-receptionist in its ebony desk. He had a legitimate medical doctorate; indeed, in a hundred and fifty years of striving, he had earned doctorates in general medicine, biochemistry, psychiatry, neurology, neurosurgery, neurophysics, quantum electronics, and xenoneurology (a very new field), and had a string of other framed degrees he seldom dusted, but had lovingly smuggled across the vastness of space to this world where they meant little -- and the law feared to come. Just as the doctor punched on the electro-receptionist, he heard someone come in behind him. Suddenly there was the stench of body odor and the sound of labored breath. The doctor's hand hovered over the panic button; his shoulder muscles squirmed with tension. Part of his exorbitant rent went for armament and muscle called the Goon Squad. Was this intruder a ruthless killer? The Hole was their haven. Perhaps a government infiltrator? He read upside down the information fed from his smart door into his electro-receptionist: "Two meters tall, one hundred and ninety kilograms, human male, Caucasian, no fingerprints, iris pattern fake. No weapons. Searching Jackson's files." Jackson Hole's over-burdened computer was slow. Most likely the man was a minor scoundrel or con artist. Cautiously, L'Espoir turned around. His eyes met the tiny dark eyes of the most grossly corpulent man he had ever seen. The fellow's belly arrived a half meter before his feet. Still, it was obvious this person had once been heavier. His flesh hung obscenely loose and he wore an empty holster and coiled clear tubing where a nasal-oxygen canister had once hung. Heavy-weight humans required extra oxygen. His once expensive tent-sized cashmere jacket looked like a wrinkled dirty blanket dropped over a hairless, flabby ape. In an age when beauty could be purchased, this man was grossly ugly, and he stunk as if he hadn't bathed in weeks. The doctor had learned that criminals generally appear either ordinary or lethal. The tension drained from his shoulders as he walked around to take his seat behind the electro-receptionist. Maybe this customer was just a lost soul from a low-gravity world. The cheapest transport didn't allow for baths. The visitor's cherub-pink mouth pursed; several chins quivered with his intent to speak. "Metzger Eisenhart," he said in an unexpectedly pleasant baritone voice that evidenced twinges of pain. According to the tardy receptionist, Metzger had arrived at seven hundred hours two days before. "Take a seat please," said the doctor. The man pulled one of L'Espoir's cheap plastilike chairs across the rug to the desk and overwhelmed it with his bulk. Despite the man's tremendous weight, there was something snakelike about him. Perhaps the eyes? "Do you have a terminality certificate or proof of a suicide implant?" Terminals were sad, but suicides caused Dr. L'Espoir the most anguish. Even this damnable outlaw world wouldn't let him help anyone with a projected life span over two weeks. Suicides would die even if he relieved them of the reasons for their depression. When they received their death certificates, a destruct mechanism was placed within their bodies. Tampering with the device only meant it would go off earlier. The man produced a certificate. Weeks before, he had been hit in the abdomen by a low-level shatter-gun blast and had, at most, a few more agonizing days. That explained a lot. Low-level shattering blasts were the punishment of choice meted out by gambling casinos when their clients didn't pay: terminal, if the client didn't have regeneration funds, and always excruciatingly painful. L'Espoir punched up a list of the current terminals and suicides. He couldn't help but notice that Sunde's name was not among them. Metzger's papers were in order. "In case of your decease during the process, to whom may I send your remains? There is, of course, an extra fee of -- " The man's huge hand moved with unexpected speed, catching the good doctor by the shirt front, pulling him out of his seat. "You'd better not let me die before you finish. You hear me." L'Espoir's finger was a half second from the panic alarm and his heart in his throat. "Sorry." Metzger released the shirt fabric and sank back into his chair, wheezing. "It's just that I want to die clean." "Yes," responded Dr. L'Espoir, trying to calm his adrenaline rush. Whoever or whatever the man was, he had strong beliefs about death. "My services are very important and -- " "Can you ram-ass do it? I mean I heard rutting rumors about this ten E-years ago. When governments do a mind wipe, you're back to shitting in your pants and learning to walk." The doctor steepled his fingers thoughtfully. "My procedure is much more selective than a mind wipe. Emotions have a greater valence in the mind than unemotional facts, and guilt is an especially strong emotion in some. Suppose you wanted to be president of never made it. Now you are dying and... " Metzger snorted derisively. "Or maybe you hurt someone you loved, said words that were best left unsaid, or accidentally killed innocent people and have spent your life miserable with guilt as a result." "Can you really get rid of... ass-ramming guilt without removing the good stuff -- like food memories?" "Yes. It's a tedious process. I must follow the thread of your chosen guilt to its very beginnings, which often can go back to childhood. Guilt, being a stronger emotion, can frequently be teased out of a complex emotional gestalt. But, even with my special equipment, this can take days, depending on how much guilt must be expunged, and how far back it goes in the patient's history." "You won't have to go far with me. Eleven E-years ago I stumbled over this... this freak singing bitch who was just begging for it." To Dr. L'Espoir this explained a lot. Sexual sins! During those eleven years, Metzger could have joined a dozen anti-sex religious cults, which might explain his preoccupation with a clean death. Shame-based religions were once again pandemic. "No earlier shame you would like erased?" "Hell, no. I had a great life up until I saw that poisonous freak singer. Can't get her out of my mind." His cold obsidian eyes squirmed in their sockets. "You can do this, huh?" "I can remove all memory of sins of omission or commission, and unfulfilled goals." "Well, well. So any little turd can die thinking he's a fat success." Metzger was wobbling his chins and grinning in a way that made the doctor's stomach turn queasy. "Can you guarantee you'll get the job done" -- he wheezed -- "before I feed the rutting recyclers?" "I believe I -- " The fat sausage-fingered hand was aiming for his shirt front again. L'Espoir fought to keep the panic from his voice. "I guarantee it." The pale hand returned to the ebony countertop. "I have friends here who would avenge me, if you fail." The doctor doubted that Metzger had friends on Jackson Hole, and how could they know if he failed once Metzger was dead? "You keep records of what you read in a man's mind?" Metzger fidgeted and the plastilike chair complained. "I am a psychiatrist, and anything I learn about you is strictly confidential. It's the law." "Like there's law here on Jackson Hole." Metzger sneered, and then winced. "In any case, I am an ethical man. I won't tell, and I'm not a member of any law enforcement agency." "I bet not!" The man's laugh was liquid, moist like bubbling mucus. "I heard about you on the holo. They want your ass roasted." He tried not to let his personal feelings about patients affect his work. Despite everything that had happened and what humanity thought. Dr. L'espoir knew he was a good man, even a compassionate man. His intentions had always been the best. He tried to extend any benevolence he could equally to all sentient beings. "You are correct," L'Espoir said in his coldest tones, his mind returning instantly to that lurid headline, "Son of First Ambassador to an Alien World Angers Churches." And, to that morning in President Nullarbor's office. Lavish with ancient Earth furnishings, it smelled of wood and lemon oil. Dr. Nullarbor glared at him from behind what seemed a hectometer of desk. "Did you see Walters on the net last night? 'God is no longer needed. Professor L'Espoir invented a machine that does away with bad conscience.'" "Yes." He could barely speak. Having been ignored for so many years as a wealthy dilettante, L'Espoir hadn't expected such rabid media response to his research. "Blood of Christ Not Needed. Machine Removes All Shame!" screamed the headlines of yellow tabloids and church newsletters alike. Even the Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychiatry had skewered him: "Spare the Guilt and Spoil the Personality." Those authors conjectured that artificial removal of guilt would distort personality structure. Only at the very end of this article did they mention that his machine might be a boon to humankind. "My research wasn't carried out with university money, or on university time." His vocal cords were tense. The device the press called his neuroprogrammer or reprogrammer had been built in his own well-equipped home laboratory. How academia would laugh if the truth were known. His reprogrammer was simply the accidental by-product of unsuccessful research. He had been hunting for the soul in the subatomic particles of body and brain. He hadn't found the soul, only guilt. "I never liked you, L'Espoir. You're pompous, arrogant -- " He held up a warning hand. "I know you have tenure and I know what your money has done for this school. You're fired!" At a time when he was lonely and grief-stricken, the churches had condemned him -- while every government on every human world wanted his plans, his reprogrammer, his abilities. They more than wanted, they threatened. They hounded. How could he trust the morality of any government? He blew up his machine and fled. His had been a long journey from that lemon-scented university office to the stench of Jackson. He had served several years as a physician on a pirate craft, rationalizing that pirates were people, regardless of their morals. They bled. It was convenient to forget that their had helped him acquire the components necessary to build a more complex version of his machine. L'Espoir's mind abruptly returned from the ruins of his academic life to the matter at hand, and his lips finished the statement he had meant to make. "Indeed, if an auto-da-fe were still legal, I'd probably have been burned at the stake." His tone continued icy. "Describe your guilt." "No!" Fat hands made fists. This was a frequent if insane response. Soon he would know everything about this man -- except his soul. In a swift glance of reappraisal, the doctor noted a large pale band on Metzger's left wrist, and several fingers looked as if they had once worn rings. He had probably sold his body chronometer and jewelry somewhere along the way. "Now, can you afford my services? I ask the equivalent of ten thousand United Galaxy credits." Monetary exchange was difficult on Jackson Hole. Barter was the norm. L'Espoir waited anxiously as his obese patient reached into his right breast pocket and pulled out a soft cloth bag. The bag, dumped unceremoniously on the countertop, revealed three Melian crystals that caught the light with a display of scintillating rainbow color. Dr. L'Espoir was relieved. Usually his terminal patients were poor. If they had decent goods or credit, they had themselves put into the recreation vats and regenerated. These gems were sufficient for his fee, even if they were of the most minimal quality -- but not enough for a regeneration however perfect their crystalline structure. An hour later. Dr. Jean L'Espoir sat in his back office before a console with a hundred and three keys, all of which were backup for a sophisticated voicecommand system restricted to his voice alone. During his years on Jackson Hole, this computer had been recording the miseries of his patients. In it lived a despairing humanity. L'Espoir took great pride in this accomplishment. Its virtual reality component allowed him to experience the complete sensory, mental, and emotional life of his patients. Using virtual reality, he could even visit the atomic or subatomic level of a human being, but he usually preferred to bring that view to the attached two-meter by two-meter hologram pedestal and there symbolically cut and splice, build and destroy. The actual work was done by atom-sized robots (that made retroviruses look like giants) and minute electrical pulses that rearranged neurohormones. Memory formation proteins could be altered or added. The naked Metzger was sedated, relaxed on a sliding gurney, hooked to catheters to remove the body's waste products, to intravenous fluids to keep him from dehydration, and to a breather to oxygenate his blood. The gurney was slid into an electronic tube. Supersensitive microminiature electrodes covered Metzger's white sluglike body connecting him with the doctor's neural reprogrammer. A silent prayer trembled on L'Espoir's lips as he asked for guidance in bringing comfort to the afflicted. Out loud, he commanded the machine. Metzger was right. The most prominent track in his mind concerned food. He had once frequented all the best restaurants on Rigala, L'Espoir's home world. Indeed, Metzger had been among the Galactic Gourmand. Food appeared a dead end. Best to go to the physical pain. Suddenly the doctor saw the world as Metzger had seen it twenty E-days before -- according to Metzger's chronograph. Metzger Eisenhart, in a torment about white hair and desperate for his Angel Blue fix, was in a private room of an elegantly appointed restaurant waiting to meet his drug contact when a cyborg dressed all in tight black synleather came in. "Mr. Holovid Viper, Mr. Porno Peddler" -- the one electronic eye made a minute whizzing noise as it spun into focus -- "it's time to pay the piper, or I cut off more than the music." The cyborg's tone was corrosive. "Look, give me another week. I'll get the goods. I have a lead on a new project..." Metzger was lying. Anything Metzger owned or could steal, he'd trade for Angel Blue. He'd been gambling, hoping to strike it big and feed that greedy hopper in his brain. Metzger cringed. The cyborg was slipping his shatter gun from its holster. "Suppose I give you some lovely Melian crystals, just between you and me. You wait until next week to collect -- " The cyborg's part-human, part-electronic glance was almost cryogenic. "Look, I'll give your boss ten of my very best holovids for his exclusive use. Never seen before. Pornography like -- " The cyborg reached behind Metzger, grabbed him by the neck of his jacket and lifted his whole lard-lazy bulk over the table, disturbing only one half-finished bottle of vintage Earth wine. In the maintenance way behind the restaurant, Metzger received the blast that gave him his soon-to-be terminal indigestion. This wasn't the first time the doctor had felt a certain repugnance for his patients. Not everyone had the advantage of his moral training, his small-planet upbringing, his age and extensive education. Perhaps the man had actually been producing erotica. On Metzger's home planet, pornography could be legal, acceptable. Different worlds had different ethical structures. The good doctor was proud of his liberality, and reminded himself not to make value judgments. Metzger's drug habit certainly wasn't new and probably not legal. People turn to drugs for a reason and that reason might reveal the source of the guilt that plagued him. L'espoir took a deep breath before plunging on. His lips commanded and thousands of thin-sliced views of Metzger's brain appeared and rotated in space, turning in an instant into maps of what seemed unending pathways, all interconnected in all known dimensions. Some pathways were more worn than others. Like bloodhounds, the doctor and his computer sniffed out feelings about white hair and drug memories, backing up across the years to the first time this patient had dermal-patched Angel Blue. Metzger was unable to sleep. This had never happened to him before. He woke up in a sweat, cringing with intense guilt, remembering silky white hair and large violet eyes. This was impossible. He couldn't be feeling guilt. Why was this one rutting half-breed broad any different? White silky hair; violet eyes. Such emotion. Such pathos. Metzger was crying. He had never before cried as an adult. Soon he was asleep again and remembering, reliving in minute detail that evening at the club, that whole hideous night. The contents of Metzger's mind startled the doctor. He recognized The Dream Machine Club on Rigala and the white-haired half-human, half-Cetian empathic emoter singing on its stage. Her hauntingly lovely voice sang of relationships and life. Here is where Metzger's guilt was born, the first in his long hedonistic life. Screaming in psychic misery, Metzger awakened to call a derm peddler for special delivery. With sudden morbid comprehension. Dr. L'Espoir escaped the virtual reality of Metzger's viewpoint, turning instead to the remoteness of holo display. His left temporal artery bulged. He found himself the prisoner of emotions he had never allowed himself to experience before -- all of an intensity that astonished him. His own guilt was aroused and memory made it a monster that sat on his chest and robbed him of breath. Guilt then hauled him by the heels down long stairs, his head bumping on each step, on each hard truth. His heart pounded, his mind plummeted down and down into the pit. Abilities unsuspected and capacities untried came to his consciousness. The holo display now showed Metzger's sweaty hands groping for a patch of Angel Blue. Trembling all over. Dr. L'Espoir quit his connection with Metzger's mind, rapidly gathered up all that passed for his portable wealth on Jackson, including the Melian crystals, and made arrangements for the unconscious Metzger's transference to a regeneration tank, as his uncle, his unlucky uncle. His gut would be healed. L'Espoir would pay the man's regeneration bill. Back at work again, L'Espoir's fingers played and the represented neurons of his patient's brain danced. Sweat poured from L'Espoir's forehead. The computer image of Metzger's memories began to change. Twenty-four weary hours later, L'Espoir stumbled into his front office and was leaning over to pull a pint bottle from the bottom drawer of the electro-receptionist when he saw Sunde, her nose pressed to the plastiglass of his window, like a child staring into a candy store. She backed up and smiled shyly. Her smile vanished, however, when she saw L'Espoir tip the pint bottle to his mouth. Every day for a week, Sunde 's elfin features appeared outside his window. And every day for a week, L'Espoir drank. During this time he even turned away paying customers to continue his work on the computer representation of Metzger's memories. One morning, he did interview a customer. "Do you have a certificate of terminality or suicide?" he asked as he gazed toward his window. Sunde had grown progressively thinner; there were now purple pouches under her eyes. The man presented his certificate as L'Espoir punched up the current list of the dying and suicidal. This customer was a terminal with the occupation of security executive, the local euphemism for paid assassin. At the end of the suicide list L'Espoir saw: Sunde, musil finder. He took an almost hysterical gulp of air as rage surged through him. He ran around the electro-receptionist and out his front door. How could she do this? How could she afford a suicide implant? No one would pay a musHfinder that much. He knew the answer to his question. Prostitution. "Why?" he screamed. Sunde cowered as if he might hit her. "Not strong," she said. "Pain." Sunde walked off, slump-shouldered, her paper garment nearly falling from her slim body. A week later, Metzger Eisenhart was returned to the doctor, still unconscious, regenerated, slim, and good for at least another E-century. L'Espoir smiled indulgently upon the man who was still unconscious, once again strapped onto his gurney, and soon to be clutched by his electronic ring, poked by catheters, and covered with electrodes. His excess of white flabby flesh was now replaced by well-toned muscle. For a split second, the doctor envied Metzger his new-made body that smelled so pure, so clean. For three more days, L'Espoir hammered away, sleeplessly reprogramming the old mind in that new body. Tormented as he was, he could never have slept. He drank steadily. He finally brought Eisenhart to consciousness, but did not yet give him access to his long-term memory, and kept him restrained bodily -- except for eye movement -- both by chemicals and belts. Metzger's dark eyes flickered awake. "I've waited a long time for you, Metzger. I found your little problem and cured it. A deficiency in affection, an inability to feel for others, to put yourself in their place." Metzger's eyes glanced a piercing question and probably a curse. "In previous unenlightened times, you might have been called a sociopath. Like other sociopaths you were very successful at making money, at least until you met that half-human, half-Cetian empathic emoter singing in The Dream Machine. The press had fun with her: 'Half-Cetian Sings the Blues for Professor Hubby.' "Cetian songs are always about" -- his voice failed -- "ethical problems, and she was loved by many in our university town. Because of her parentage, she had a special ability to make others feel. You kidnapped her, raped her, and tortured her for your holovid cameras -- to feast the sickness of some minds. She was forced to perform vile sexual acts. Partially flayed alive and kept living by drugs and machines, she was made to..." His mind balked; his lips refused to name the agony. "She performed one act you never expected. She made even you feel for her. Pity this didn't keep you from murdering others." Metzger's eyes seemed huge now, and mad. "Oh, yes, I traveled through your mind, as best I could -- like wading through infested sewage. I discovered something horrific, more terrible than I would ever have believed possible fifteen E-years or even fifteen E-days ago. I discovered the full depth of my own guilt. You see, she had the same effect on me, and I'll never be able to forget her. Because of you, I have discovered that my much vaunted compassion is a sham." L'Espoir moved a wheelchair up next to Metzger and began deftly removing catheters and electrodes. He undid the belts and gave his patient yet another injection. Dr. L'Espoir leaned over Metzger, deliberately breathing alcohol fumes into his face. "At your whim thousands died horrible deaths. You, who brought death without compassion, will now receive life from someone whose compassion is a fraud." Metzger's eyes rolled wildly like those of a trapped animal. "You see, our meeting was destiny. That half-human, half-Cetian woman was my wife of three E-years. She was still young, only an E-century, and writing her dissertation on neurophysics and working weekend evenings singing at The Dream Machine." L'Espoir's voice was strained through tightly clenched teeth. "I was supposed to pick her up after her last set, but I was solving the problems of the universe and forgot the hour -- thus giving you and your henchmen the opportunity to kidnap her. "Not until I visited your mind did I know what had happened to her. The authorities implied that she had left me because of all my adverse publicity. I even suspected that some government had taken her to trade for my cooperation. But, over the years, no evidence evolved to support this theory." Saliva oozed from Metzger's lips. "Admittedly, I hadn't been a very attentive husband. She was truly innocent, loving, sweet, and -- however inadvertently -- my garrulous nature caused her agonizing death. My last words to her were unkind. Remorse and loneliness nearly destroyed me." Metzger groaned. The doctor's voice dropped to a guttural whisper. "You who were talented at assigning all failures and shortcomings to others, you who had never felt a moment of guilt or remorse or a twinge of shame before finding Aelia, will now remember nothing but failure, shame, guilt, and remorse." Metzger's eyes were aflame with anger and his body twitched violently as the doctor hauled him up and shoved him into a wheelchair. He gave the man one last injection, then punched his alarm button just before he punched his door open. Once out the door, the doctor dumped Metzger's limp body into the street, then threw his now too large clothes on top of him. L'Espoir looked around for Ms. Sunde but didn't see her. Most of the population was attending the knife duels. Fake Earth stars shown overhead while shadows crowded each other in the street. "I expunged what joy I could search out in your mind. You'll find no pleasure now, or ever again, in others' pain. You'll never recall the taste of your favorite foods, the softness of a caress, and I did a core dump of the misery files of my reprogrammer right into your filthy fat skull." Had he seen someone move in the shadows? Had the Goons arrived? "You'll feel immensely guilty for late arrivals, for forgetting natal days, for flunking tests, for any indecency." Slumped against the wall, Metzger began fighting to regain more use of his body. He made an ancient and lewd hand gesture with a middle finger. "I'll... I'll buy a suicide... He choked. A look of horror came to his face. "Suicide is a sin; and besides, they won't sell you a suicide machine." L'Espoir seemed to admire his manicure as he recalled his visit with Jackson's Administrator. He was escorted past a dozen men and women cooling their heels outside the door. In that white box of an office, there was no seat for a guest; but there was a caged tracking-laser. Roasting a guest was acceptable; burning a hole in the bulkhead was not. "My Uncle Metzger Eisenhart may desire to buy a suicide or to provoke his own death at the hands of your men," L'Espoir said to the nondescript little man behind the large desk, a man who went by no other name than Administrator. "Metzger Eisenhart." The Administrator tapped a few keys on his desk and a picture of the obese Eisenhart appeared on the desktop. "He was terminal," said the Administrator as he glanced up with questioning eyes. "You bought him a regeneration." "I emphatically request that he not come to harm in any way." "Emphatically request... !" L'Espoir's temerity led to a heated discussion and the demand for a huge bribe. The doctor found himself precise little bite -- "in goods to this world." "You bring fertilizer!" the man spat, his face like stone, his words like acid. "The same thing! If you could find a corrupt scientist intelligent enough to understand my machine, I would have been dead long ago." L'Espoir closed the gap between himself and the desk. The warning light on the laser pulsed. "I'm not afraid of eviction." He suddenly knew he wanted this revenge more than life itself. "I'm machine with me... in a blaze of glory, so to speak." He hadn't wired this machine to self-destruct, but the Administrator didn't know that. A few minutes later, L'Espoir came to an understanding with the Administrator. "You will buy no death on this world," L'Espoir said as his thoughts came back to the man squirming at his feet. "And now your health is extraordinarily good. Atomic-sized assemblers of my own invention wait in your blood to correct any ill, any injury." He had invented no such assemblers. "No poison or mind-altering drug will help. You'll have to find some new way to assuage your misery." In an especially coy and affected tone he added, "I suggest sucking vacuum. Or, perhaps you'd like your mind wiped and your bottom wiped when you shit in your pants. "You'll experience keen misery for not making will afflict you." "You" -- Metzger snarled -- "you father-rutting asspipe cockroach." L'Espoir lounged against his storefront, arms folded over his chest. "You seem to have plumbed your earliest memories -- obscenities you learned, no doubt, at your mother's knee." "You crapfaced, freako mad scientist, who appointed you God?" "That comment minus the obscenities is more or less what my beautiful wife said to me the evening of the night you abducted her." He unfolded his arms and began to pace restlessly around his victim. "I'll kill -- " Metzger moaned. His angry eyes suddenly went sad. "K-krist on a -- " "I did wonderfully detailed work on you, work I didn't believe possible. Guilt I knew I could destroy, but I had never before tried other more delicate emotions. Too bad I didn't think to reprogram your vocabulary." "I'll kill..." Metzger began to cry, great sobs soon racking his slim body. Dr. L'Espoir laughed. The neon scarlet of his sign played over Metzger's newly revised body. "Success Unlimited, Success Unlimited," the sign flashed repetitively. A visceral sense of ultimate despair gripped L'Espoir. He knew there was no success for him. Whatever a soul might be, his was corrupted forever. The fire ax that hung on a wall two storefronts down caught his eye. He grabbed it up and returned to hover menacingly over Metzger, enjoying the man's abject terror. Insane laughter rippled in his throat. "Maybe we should test my new assemblers by chopping off a leg." Ms. Sunde crept from the shadows and laid a gentle hand on L'Espoir's tense right forearm. "No, Doctoree, do not do this thing." In his fervid concentration, L'Espoir shook her off, as if Sunde were a fly. "Should my programming prove unsuccessful, there's always the Goon Squad. For now, they are under orders not to kill you, just to escort you out. Hope you live a long, long time. Hope you have many nightmares, Metzger. "Aelia's silky white hair and violet eyes will haunt you as long as you live and be there in your brain when you finally manage to die." L'Espoir's palm slapped his door open; he ran for the back room. Sunde sped in after him and put her tiny self between him and his reprogrammer. "What, Doc-tor-ee, are you do-ing?" Her voice shook. Self-loathing assailed him. How could he have possibly thought he was more moral, more... ? He raised the ax over her head, over his machine. "I created an absolute power and I am not strong enough to use it. I must destroy my machine before it destroys all morality." L'Espoir took another threatening step toward his machine, toward Sunde. "Help me," Sunde pleaded. L'Espoir swung the ax furiously back over his shoulder. "Your machine? No! No! Please no," she cried. She ripped off her paper jumper and climbed nude onto his gurney. "Help me feel forgiveness." L'Espoir's voice was harsh. "You would allow a liar, a torturer, a brutal, amoral man to operate upon the atoms of your mind?" She nodded through her tears. He let the ax clatter to the floor. Noise outside. The Goons had arrived, late as usual. "How can you possibly trust me?" "I trust." Her voice was small. "I don't." He turned his face away from her. "You... your machine... are the hands of God." "What a savage god to have such vicious hands." L'Espoir turned back; tears streamed down his face. "God just to those who deserve. Mercy to those who deserve." L'Espoir stroked her light blue hair as he glued electrodes to her scalp. Such soft, silky hair. "Yes, mercy to those who deserve." Heather Valencia This is the story of Anselmo Valencia, the spiritual leader of the Yaqui nation, and it is the tale of how the ancient sisterhood of the Yaqui dreaming women called me through time in dreams, for an appointment with destiny that shaped my life in its calling, and drew me to the heart of Grandmother's Great dream. It is my own story. Hardcover # Paperback #, Dream elixir # Dream pillow # Dreamstone # Call for ordering information #-#-#-# a Yaqui dreaming woman... (#) #-# # W I #th St., Torrance, CA #-# W ko knows wkat tke Book of Dreams says? I slept on tke Book of Dreams, kut it was very uncomfortakle. Now I use a Dream Pillow, and I write in tke Book of Dreams. Dream Pillows are an old time way of getting closer to tke dream world,  exploring it. Tkese keautiful pillows are kand-made, using recipes given ky Heatker Valencia, Yacjui Indian Dreaming Mistress. Send #. Include # skipping. Money kack guarantee, of course. # West Division Street (#) #-# Illustrated by Hart lame Clay Harbank, if you will, for what happened at Station # of the Sirius Sector; or blame blame no one. But I am a Dorsai man. The trouble began the day the Kid joined the station, with his quick hands and his gambler's mind, and found that Clay, alone of all the men there, would not gamble with him -- for all that he claimed to having been a gambling man himself. And so it ran on for our years of service together. But the beginning of the end was the day they came off shift together. They had been out on a duty circuit of the frontier station that housed the twenty of us -- searching the outer bubble for signs of blows or leaks. It's a slow two hour tramp, that duty, even outside the station on the surface of the asteroid where there's no gravity to speak of. We, in the recreation room, off duty, could tell by the sound of their voices as the inner port sucked open and the clanging clash of them removing their spacesuits came echoing to us along the metal corridor, that the Kid had been needling Clay through the whole tour. "Another day," came the Kid's voice, "another fifty credits. And how's the piggy bank coming along, Clay?" There was a slight pause, and I could see Clay carefully controlling his features and his voice. Then his pleasant baritone, softened by the burr of his Tarsusian accent, came smoothly to us. "Like a gentleman. Kid," he answered. "He never overeats and so he runs no danger of indigestion." It was a neat answer, based on the fact that the Kid's own service account was swollen with his winnings from the rest of the crew. But the Kid was too thick-skinned for rapier thrusts. He laughed; and they finished removing their equipment and came on into the recreation room. They made a striking picture as they entered, for they were enough alike to be brothers -- although father and son would have been a more likely relationship, considering the difference in their ages. Both were tall, dark, wide-shouldered men with lean faces, but experience had weathered the softer lines from Clay's face and drawn thin parentheses about the corners of his mouth. There were other differences, too; but you could see in the Kid the youth that Clay had been, and in Clay the man that the Kid would some day be. "Hi, Clay," I said. "Hello, Mort," he said, sitting down beside me. "Hi, Mort," said the Kid. I ignored him; and for a moment he tensed. I could see the anger flame up in the ebony depths of his black pupils under the heavy eyebrows. He was a big man; but I come from the Dorsai Planets and a Dorsai man fights to the death, if he fights at all. And, in consequence, among ourselves, we of Dorsai are a polite people. But politeness was wasted on the Kid -- as was Clay's delicate irony. With men like the Kid, you have to use a club. We were in bad shape. The twenty of us at Frontier Station #, on the periphery of the human area just beyond Sirius, had gone sour, and half the men had applications in for transfer. The trouble between Clay and the Kid was splitting the station wide open. We were all in the Frontier Service for money; that was the root of the trouble. Fifty credits a day is good pay -- but you have to sign up for a ten year hitch. You can buy yourself out -- but that costs a hundred thousand. Figure it out for yourself. Nearly six years if you saved every penny you got. So most go in with the idea of staying the full decade. That was Clay's idea. He had gambled most of his life away. He had won and lost several fortunes. Now he was getting old and tired and he wanted to go back -- Lulungomeena, on the little planet of Tarsus, which was the place he had come from as a young man. But he was through with gambling. He said money made that way never stuck, but ran away again like quicksilver. So he drew his pay and banked it. with the rest of the crew had given him more than enough to buy his way out and leave him a nice stake. And perhaps he would have done just that, if it hadn't been that the Service account of Clay's drew him like an El Dorado. He could not go off and leave it. So he stayed with the outfit, riding the older man unmercifully. He harped continually on two themes. He pretended to disbelieve that Clay had ever been a gambler; and he derided Lulungomeena, Clay's birthplace: the older man's goal and dream, and the one thing he could be drawn into talk about. For, to Clay, Lulungomeena was beautiful, the most wonderful spot in the Universe; and with an old man's sick longing for home, he could not help saying so. "Mort," said the Kid, ignoring the rebuff and sitting down beside us, "what's a Hixabrod like?" My club had not worked so well, after all. Perhaps, I, too, was slipping. Next to Clay, I was the oldest man on the crew, which was why we were close friends. I scowled at the Kid. "Why?" I asked. "We're having one for a visitor," he said. Immediately, all talk around the recreation room ceased and all attention was focused on the Kid. All aliens had to clear through a station like ours when they crossed the frontier from one of the other great galactic power groups into human territory. But isolated as Station # was, it was seldom an alien came our way, and when one did, it was an occasion. Even Clay succumbed to the general interest. "I didn't know that," he said. "How'd you find out?" "The notice came in over the receiver when you were down checking the atmosphere plant," answered the Kid with a careless wave of his hand. "I'd already filed it when you came up. What'll he be like, Mort?" I had knocked around more than any of them -- even Clay. This was my second stretch in the Service. I remembered back about twenty years, to the Denebian Trouble. "Stiff as a poker," I said. "Proud as Lucifer, honest as sunlight and tight as a camel on his way through the eye of a needle. Sort of a humanoid, but with a face like a collie dog. You know the Hixabrodian reputation, don't you?" Somebody at the back of the crowd said no, although they may have been doing it just to humor me. Like Clay with his Lulungomeena, old age was making me garrulous. "They're the first and only mercenary ambassadors In the known Universe," I said. "A Hixabrod can be hired, but he can't be influenced, bribed or forced to come up with anything but the cold truth -- and, brother, it's cold the way a Hixabrod serves it up to you. That's why they're so much in demand. If any kind of political dispute comes up, from planetary to inter-alien power group levels, both sides have to hire a Hixabrod to represent them in the discussions. That way they know the other side is being honest with them. The opposing Hixabrod is a living guarantee of that." "He sounds good," said the Kid. "What say we get together and throw him a good dinner during his twenty-four hour stop-over?" "You won't get much in the way of thanks from him," I grunted. "They aren't built that way." "Let's do it anyway," said the Kid. "Be a little excitement for a change." A murmur of approval ran through the room. I was outvoted. Even Clay liked the idea. "Hixabrods eat what we eat, don't they?' asked the Kid, making plans. "Okay, then, soups, salad, meats, champagne and brandy -- " he ran on, ticking the items off on his fingers. For a moment, his enthusiasm had us all with him. But then, just at the end, he couldn't resist getting in one more dig at Clay. "Oh, yes," he finished, "and for entertainment, you can tell him about Lulungomeena, Clay." Clay winced -- not obviously, but we all saw a shadow cross his face. Lulungomeena on Tarsus, his birthplace, held the same sort of obsession for him that his Service account held for the Kid; but he could not help being aware that he was prone to let his tongue run away on the subject of its beauty. For it was where he belonged, in the stomach-twisting, throat-aching way that sometimes only talk can relieve. I was a Dorsai man and older than the rest. I understood. No one should make fun of the bond tying a man to his home world. It is as real as it is intangible. And to joke about it is cruel. But the Kid was too young to know that yet. He was fresh from Earth -- Earth, where none of the rest of us had been, yet which, hundreds of years before, had been the origin of us all. He was eager and strong and contemptuous of emotion. He saw, as the rest of us recognized also, that Clay's tendency to let his talk wander ever to the wonder of Lulungomeena was the first slight crack in what had once been a man of unflawed steel. It was the first creeping decay of age. But, unlike the rest of us, who hid our boredom out of sympathy, the Kid saw here a chance to break Clay and his resolution to do no more gambling. So he struck out constantly at this one spot so deeply vital that Clay's self-possession was no defense. Now, at this last blow, the little fires of anger gathered in the older man's eyes. "That's enough," he said harshly. "Leave Lulungomeena out of the discussion." keep reminding me of it. That and the story that you once were a gambler. If you won't prove the last one, how can you expect me to believe all you say about the first?" The veins stood out on Clay's forehead; but he controlled himself. "I've told you a thousand times," he said between his teeth. "Money made by gambling doesn't stick. You'll find that out for yourself one of these days." "Words," said the Kid airily. "Only words." For a second, Clay stood staring whitely at him, not even breathing. I don't know if the Kid realized his danger or cared, but I didn't breathe, either, until Clay's chest expanded and he turned abruptly and walked out of the recreation room. We heard his bootsteps die away down the corridor toward his room in the dormitory section. Later, I braced the Kid about it. It was his second shift time, when most of the men in the recreation room had to go on duty. I ran the Kid to the ground in the galley where he was fixing himself a sandwich. He looked up, a little startled, more than a little on the defensive, as I came in. "Oh, hi, Mort," he said with a pretty good imitation of casualness. "What's up?" "You," I told him. "Are you looking for a fight with Clay?" "No," he drawled with his mouth full. "I wouldn't exactly say that." "Well, that's what you're liable to get." "Look, Mort," he said, and then paused until he had swallowed. "Don't you think Clay's old enough to look after himself?" I felt a slight and not unpleasant shiver run down between my shoulder-blades and my eyes began to grow hot. It was my Dorsai blood again. It must have showed on my face, for the Kid, who had been sitting negligently on one edge of the galley table, got up in a hurry. "Hold on, Mort," he said. "Nothing personal." I fought the old feeling down and said as calmly as I could, "I just dropped by to tell you something. Clay has been around a lot longer than you have. I'd advise you to lay off him." "Afraid he'll get hurt?" "No," I answered. "I'm afraid you will." The Kid snorted with sudden laughter, half choking on his sandwich. "Now I get it. You think I'm too young to take care of myself." "Something like that, but not the way you think. I want to tell you something about yourself and you don't have to say whether I'm right or wrong -- you'll let me know without words." "Hold it," he said, turning red. "I didn't come out here to get psyched." "You'll get it just the same. And it's not for you only -- it's for all of us, because men thrown together as closely as we are choose up sides whenever there's conflict, and that's as dangerous for the rest of us as it is for you." "Then the rest of you can stay out of it." "We can't," I said. "What affects one of us affects us all. Now I'll tell you what you're doing. You came out here expecting to find glamour and excitement. You found monotony and boredom instead, not realizing that that's what space is like almost all the time." He picked up his coffee container. "And now you'll say I'm trying to create my own excitement at Clay's expense. Isn't that the standard line?" "I wouldn't know; I'm not going to use it, because that's not how I see what you're doing. Clay is adult enough to stand the monotony and boredom if they'll get him what he wants. He's also learned how to live with others and with himself. He doesn't have to prove himself by beating down somebody either half or twice his age." He took a drink and set the container down on the table. "And I do?" "All youngsters do. It's their way of experimenting with their potentialities and relationships with other people. When they find that out, they can give it up -- they're mature then -- although some never do. I think you will, eventually. The sooner you stop doing it here, though, the better it'll be for you and us." "And if I don't?" he challenged. "This isn't college back on Earth or some other nice, safe home planet, where hazing can be a nuisance, but where it's possible to escape it by going somewhere else. There isn't any 'somewhere else' here. Unless the one doing the hazing sees how reckless and dangerous it is, the one getting hazed takes it as long as he can -- and then something happens." "So it's Clay you're really worried about, after all." "Look, get it through your skull. Clay's a man and he's been through worse than this before. You haven't. If anybody's going to get hurt, it'll be you." He laughed and headed for the corridor door. He was still laughing as it slammed behind him. I let him go. There's no use pushing a bluff after it's failed to work. The next day, the Hixabrod came. His name was Dor Lassos. He was typical of his race, taller than the tallest of his race, taller than the tallest of us by half a head, with a light green skin and that impassive Hixabrodian canine face. I missed his actual arrival, being up in the observation tower checking meteor paths. The station itself was well protected, but some of the ships coming in from time to time could have gotten in trouble with a few of the larger ones that slipped by us at intervals in that particular sector. When I did get free, Dor Lassos had already been assigned to his quarters and the time of official welcoming was over. I went down to see him anyhow on the off-chance that we had mutual acquaintances either among his race or mine. Both of our peoples are few enough in number, God knows, so the possibility wasn't too far-fetched. And, like Clay, I yearned for anything connected with my home. "Wer velt d'hatchen, Hixabrod -- " I began, walking into his apartment -- and stopped short. The Kid was there. He looked at me with an odd expression on his face. "Do you speak Hixabrodian?" he asked incredulously. I nodded. I had learned it on extended duty during the Denebian Trouble. Then I remembered my manners and turned back to the Hixabrod; but he was already started on his answer. "En gles Ter, I tu, Dorsaiven," returned the collie face, expressionlessly. "Da Tr'amgen lang. Met zurres nebent? " "Em getluc. Me mi Dorsal fene. Nono ne -- ves luc Les Lassos ?" He shook his head. Well, it had been a shot in the dark anyway. There was only the faintest chance that he had known our old interpreter at the time of the Denebian Trouble. The Hixabrods have no family system of nomenclature. They take their names from the names of older Hixabrods they admire or like. I bowed politely to him and left. It was not until later that it occurred to me to wonder what in the Universe the Kid could find to talk about with a Hixabrod. I actually was worried about Clay. Since my bluff with the Kid had failed, I thought I might perhaps try with Clay himself. At first I waited for an opportune moment to turn up; but following the last argument with the Kid, he'd been sticking to his quarters. I finally scrapped the casual approach and went to see him. I found him in his quarters, reading. It was a little shocking to find that tall, still athletic figure in a dressing gown like an old man, eyes shaded by the lean fingers of one long hand, poring over the little glow of a scanner with the lines unreeling before his eyes. But he looked up as I came in, and the smile on his face was the smile I had grown familiar with over four years of close living together. "What's that?" I asked, nodding at the book scanner. He set it down and the little light went out, the lines stopped unreeling. "A bad novel," he said, smiling, "by a poor author. But they're both Tarsusian." I took the chair he had indicated. "Mind if I speak straight out, Clay?" "Go ahead," he invited. "The Kid," I said bluntly. "And you. The two of you can't go on this way." "Well, old fire-eater," answered Clay lightly, "what've you got to suggest?" "Two things. And I want you to think both of them bver carefully before answering. First, we see if we can't get up a nine-tenths majority here in the station and petition him out as incompatible." Clay slowly shook his head. "We can't do that, Mort." "I think I can get the signatures if I ask it," I said. "Everybody's pretty tired of him... They'd come across." "It's not that and you know it," said Clay. "Transfer by petition isn't supposed to be prejudicial, but you and I know it is. He'd be switched to some hardcase station, get in worse trouble there, and end up in a penal post generally shot to hell. He'd know who to blame for it, and he'd hate us for the rest of his life." "What of it? Let him hate us." "I'm a Tarsusian. It'd bother me and I couldn't do it." "All right," I said. "Dropping that, then, you've got nearly seven years in, total, and half the funds you need to buy out. I've got nearly enough saved, in spite of myself, to make up the rest. In addition, for your retirement, I'll sign over to you my pay for the three years I've got left. Take that and get out of the Service. It isn't what you figured on having, but half a loaf... " "And how about your home-going?" he asked. "Look at me." He looked; and I knew what he was seeing -- the broken nose, the scars, the lined face -- the Dorsai face. "I'll never go home," I said. He sat looking at me for a long moment more, and I fancied I saw a little light bum deep in back of his eyes. But then the light went out and I knew that I'd lost with him, too. "Maybe not," he said quietly. "But I'm not going to be the one that keeps you from it." I left him to his book. Shifts are supposed to run continuously, with someone on duty all the time. However, for special occasions, like this dinner we had arranged for the Hixabrod, it was possible, by getting work done ahead of time and picking the one four hour stretch during the twenty-four when there were no messages or ships due in, to assemble everybody in the station on an off-duty basis. So we were all there that evening, in the recreation room, which had been cleared and set up with a long table for the dinner. We finished our cocktails, sat down at the table and the meal began. As it will, the talk during the various courses turned to things outside the narrow limits of our present lives. Remembrances of places visited, memories of an earlier life, and the comparison of experiences, some of them pretty weird, were the materials of which our table talk was built. Unconsciously, all of us were trying to draw the Hixabrod out. But he sat in his place at the head of the table between Clay and myself, with the Kid a little farther down, preserving a frosty silence until the dessert had been disposed of and the subject of Media unexpectedly came up. " -- Media," said the Kid. "I've heard of Media. It's a little planet, but it's supposed to have everything from soup to nuts on it in the way of life. There's one little lifeform there that's claimed to contain something of value to every metabolism. It's called -- let me see now -- it's called -- " "It is called nygti ," supplied Dor Lassos, suddenly, in a metallic voice. "A small quadruped with a highly complex nervous system and a good deal of fatty tissue. I visited the planet over eighty years ago, before it was actually opened up to general travel. The food stores spoiled and we had the opportunity of testing out the theory that it will provide sustenance for almost any kind of known intelligent being." He stopped. "Well?" demanded the Kid. "Since you're here to tell the story, I assume the animal kept you alive." "I and the humans aboard the ship found the nygti quite nourishing," said Dor Lassos. "Unfortunately, we had several Micrushni from Polaris also aboard." "And those?" asked someone. "A highly developed but in-elastic life-form," said Dor Lassos, sipping from his brandy glass. "They went into convulsions and died." I had had some experience with Hixabrodian ways and I knew that it was not sadism, but a complete detachment that had prompted this little anecdote. But I could see a wave of distaste ripple down the room. No life-form is so universally well liked as the Micrushni, a delicate iridescent jellyfishlike race with a bent toward poetry and philosophy. The men at the table drew away almost visibly from Dor Lassos. But that affected him no more than if they had applauded loudly. Only in very limited ways are the Hixabrod capable of empathy where other races are concerned. "That's too bad," said Clay slowly. "I have always liked the Micrushni." He had been drinking somewhat heavily and the seemingly innocuous statement came out like a half-challenge. Dor Lassos' cold brown eyes turned and rested on him. Whatever he saw, whatever conclusions he came to, however, were hidden behind his emotionless face. "In general," he said flatly, "a truthful race." That was the closest a Hixabrod could come to praise, and I expected the matter to drop there. But the Kid spoke up again. "Not like us humans," he said. "Eh, Dor Lassos?" I glared at him from behind Dor Lassos' head. But he went recklessly on. "I said, 'Not like us humans, eh?"' he repeated loudly. The Kid had also apparently been drinking freely, and his voice grated on the sudden silence of the room. "The human race varies," stated the Hixabrod emotionlessly. "You have some individuals who approach truth. Otherwise, the human race is not notably truthful." It was a typical, deadly accurate Hixabrodian response. Dor Lassos would have answered in the same words if his throat was to have been cut for them the minute they left his mouth. Again, it should have shut the Kid up, and again it apparently failed. "Ah, yes," said the Kid. "Some approach truth, but in general we are untruthful. But you see, Dor Lassos, a certain amount of human humor is associated with lies. Some of us tell lies just for fun." Dor Lassos drank from his brandy glass and said nothing. "Of course," the Kid went on, "sometimes a human thinks he's being funny with his lies when he isn't. Some lies are just boring, particularly when you're forced to hear them over and over again. But on the other hand, there are some champion liars who are so good that even you would find their untruths humorous." Clay sat upright suddenly, and the sudden start of his movement sent the brandy slopping out over the rim of his glass and onto the white tablecloth. He stared at the Kid. I looked at them all -- at Clay, at the Kid and at Dor Lassos; and an ugly premonition began to form in my brain. "I do not believe I should," said Dor Lassos. "Ah, but you should listen to a real expert," said the Kid feverishly, "when he has a good subject to work on. Now, for example, take the matter of home worlds. What is your home world, Hixa, like?" I had heard enough and more than enough to confirm the suspicion forming within me. Without drawing any undue attention to myself, I rose and left the room. The alien made a dry sound in his throat and his voice followed me as I went swiftly down the empty corridor. "It is very beautiful," he said in his adding machine tones. "Hixa has a diameter of thirty-eight thousand universal meters. It possesses twenty-three great mountain ranges and seventeen large bodies of salt water The sound of his voice died away and I left it behind me. I went directly through the empty corridors and up the ladder to the communications shack. I went in the door without pausing, without -- in neglect of all duty rules -- glancing at the automatic printer to see if any fresh message out of routine had arrived, without bothering to check the transmitter to see that it was keyed into the automatic location signal for approaching spacecraft. All this I ignored and went directly to the file where the incoming messages are kept. I flickered the tab and went back to the file of two days previous, skimming through the thick sheaf of transcripts under that dateline. And there, beneath the heading "Notices of Arrivals," I found it, the message announcing the coming of Dor Lassos. I ran my finger down past the statistics on our guest to the line of type that told me where the Hixabrod's last stop had been. Tarsus. Clay was my friend. And there is a limit to what a man can take without breaking. On a wall of the communications shack was a roster of the men at our station. I drew the Dorsai sign against the name of arms locker. I examined the magazine. It was loaded. I replaced the magazine, put the gun inside my jacket, and went back to the dinner. Dor Lassos was still talking. "... The flora and the fauna are maintained in such excellent natural balance that no local surplus has exceeded one per cent of the normal population for any species in the last sixty thousand years. Life on Hixa is regular and predictable. The weather is controlled within the greatest limits of feasibility." As I took my seat, the machine voice of the Hixabrod hesitated for just a moment, then gathered itself, and went on: "One day I shall return there." "A pretty picture," said the Kid. He was leaning forward over the table now, his eyes bright, his teeth bared in a smile. "A very attractive home world. But I regret to inform you, Dor Lassos, that I've been given to understand that it pales into insignificance when compared to one other spot in the Galaxy." The Hixabrod are warriors, too. Dor Lassos' features remained expressionless, but his voice deepened and rang through the room. "Your planet?" "I wish it were," returned the Kid with the same wolfish smile. "I wish I could lay claim to it. But this place is so wonderful that I doubt if I would be allowed there. In fact," the Kid went on, "I have never seen it. But I have been hearing about it for some years now. And either it is the most wonderful place in the Universe, or else the man who has been telling me about it -- " I pushed my chair back and started to rise, but Clay's hand clamped on my arm and held me down. "You were saying -- " he said to the Kid, who had been interrupted by my movement. " -- The man who has been telling me about it," said the Kid, deliberately, "is one of those champion liars I was telling Dor Lassos about." Once more I tried to get to my feet, but Clay was there before me. Tall and stiff, he stood at the end of the table. "My right -- " he said out of the corner of his mouth to me. Slowly and with meaning, he picked up his brandy glass and threw the glass straight into the Kid's face. It bounced on the table in front of him and sent brandy flying over the front of the Kid's immaculate dress uniform. "Get your gun!" ordered Clay. Now the Kid was on his feet. In spite of the fact that I knew he had planned this, emotion had gotten the better of him at the end. His face was white with rage. He leaned on the edge of the table and fought with himself to carry it through as he had originally intended. "Why guns?" he said. His voice was thick with restraint, as he struggled to control himself. "You called me a liar." "Will guns tell me if you are?" The Kid straightened up, breathing more easily; and his laugh was harsh in the room. "Why use guns when it's possible to prove the thing one way or another with complete certainty?" His gaze swept the room and came back to Clay. "For years now you've been telling me all sorts of things," he said. "But two things you've told me more than all the rest. One was that you used to be a gambler. The other was that Lulungomeena -- your precious Lulungomeena on Tarsus -- was the most wonderful place in the Universe. Is either one of those the truth?" Clay's breath came thick and slow. "They're both the truth," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. "Will you back that up?" "With my life!" "Ah," said the Kid mockingly, holding up his forefinger, "but I'm not asking you to back those statements up with your life -- but with that neat little hoard you've been accumulating these past years. You claimed you're a gambler. Will you bet that those statements are true?" Now, for the first time. Clay seemed to see the trap. "Bet with me," invited the Kid, almost lightly. "That will prove the first statement." "And what about the second?" demanded Clay. "Why -- " the Kid gestured with his hand toward Dor Lassos -- "what further judge do we need? We have here at our table a Hixabrod." Half-turning to the alien, the Kid made him a little bow. "Let him say whether your second statement is true or not." Once more I tried to rise from my seat and again Clay's hand shoved me down. He turned to Dor Lassos. "Do you think you could judge such a point, sir?" he asked. The brown inhuman eyes met his and held for a long moment. "I have just come from Tarsus," said the Hixabrod. "I was there as a member of the Galactic Survey Team, mapping the planet. It was my duty to certify to the truth of the map." The choice was no choice. Clay stood staring at the Hixabrod as the room waited for his answer. Rage burning within me, I looked down the table for a sign in the faces of the others that this thing might be stopped. But where I expected to see sympathy, there was nothing. Instead, there was blankness, or cynicism, or even the wet-lipped interest of men who like their excitement written in blood or tears. And I realized with a sudden sinking of hopes that I stood alone, after all, as Clay's friend. In my own approaching age and garrulity I had not minded his talk of Lulungomeena, hour on repetitive hour. But these others had grown weary of it. Where I saw tragedy, they saw only retribution coming to a lying bore. And what Clay saw was what I saw. His eyes went dark and cold. "How much will you bet?" he asked. "All I've got," responded the Kid, leaning forward eagerly. "Enough and more than enough to match that bankroll of yours. The equivalent of eight years' pay." Stiffly, without a word, Clay produced his savings book and a voucher pad. He wrote out a voucher for the whole amount and laid book and voucher on the table before Dor Lassos. The Kid, who had obviously come prepared, did the same, adding a thick pile of cash from his gambling of recent weeks. "That's all of it?" asked Clay. "All of it," said the Kid. Clay nodded and stepped back. "Go ahead," he said. The Kid turned toward the alien. "Dor Lassos," he said. "We appreciate your cooperation in this matter." "I am glad to hear it," responded the Hixabrod, "since my cooperation will cost the winner of the bet a thousand credits." The abrupt injection of this commercial note threw the Kid momentarily off stride. I, alone in the room, who knew the Hixabrod people, had expected it. But the rest had not, and it struck a sour note, which reflected back on the Kid. Up until now, the bet had seemed to most of the others like a cruel but at least honest game, concerning ourselves only. Suddenly it had become a little like hiring a paid bully to beat up a stationmate. But it was too late now to stop; the bet had been made. Nevertheless, there were murmurs from different parts of the room. The Kid hurried on, fearful of an interruption. Clay's savings were on his mind. "You were a member of the mapping survey team?" he asked Dor Lassos. "I was," said the Hixabrod. "Then you know the planet?" "I do." "You know its geography?" insisted the Kid. "I do not repeat myself." The eyes of the Hixabrod were chill and withdrawn, almost a little baleful, as they met those of the Kid. "What kind of a planet is it?" The Kid licked his lips. He was beginning to recover his usual self-assurance. "Is it a large planet?" "No." "Is Tarsus a rich planet?" "No." "Is it a pretty planet?" "I did not find it so." "Get to the point!" snapped Clay with strained harshness. The Kid glanced at him, savoring this moment. He turned back to the Hixabrod. "Very well, Dor Lassos," he said, "we got to the meat of the matter. Have you ever heard of Lulungomeena?" "Yes." "Have you ever been to Lulungomeena?" "I have." "And do you truthfully -- " for the first time, a fierce and burning anger flashed momentarily in the eyes of the Hixabrod; the insult the Kid had just unthinkingly given Dor Lassos was a deadly one -- " truthfully say that in your considered opinion Lulungomeena is the most wonderful place in the Universe?" Dor Lassos turned his gaze away from him and let it wander over the rest of the room. Now, at last, his contempt for all there was plain to be read on his face. "Yes, it is, " said Dor Lassos. He rose to his feet at the head of the stunned group around the table. From the pile of cash he extracted a thousand credits, then passed the remainder, along with the two account books and the vouchers, to Clay. Then he took one step toward the Kid. He halted before him and offered his hands to the man -- palms up, the tips of his fingers a scant couple of inches short of the Kid's face. "My hands are clean," he said. His fingers arced; and, suddenly, as we watched, stubby, gleaming claws shot smoothly from those fingertips to tremble lightly against the skin of the Kid's face. "Do you doubt the truthfulness of a Hixabrod?" his robot voice asked. The Kid's face was white and his cheeks hollowed in fear. The needle points of the claws were very close to his eyes. He swallowed once. "No -- " he whispered. The claws retracted. The hands returned to their owner's sides. Once more completely withdrawn and impersonal, Dor Lassos turned and bowed to us all. "My appreciation of your courtesy," he said, the metallic tones of his voice loud in the silence. Then he turned and, marching like a metronome, disappeared through the doorway of the recreation room and off in the direction of his quarters. "And so we part," said Clay Harbank as we shook hands. "I hope you find the Dorsai Planets as welcome as I intend to find Lulungomeena." I grumbled a little. "That was plain damn foolishness. You didn't have to buy me out as well." "There were more than enough credits for the both of us," said Clay. It was a month after the bet and the two of us were standing in the Deneb One spaceport. For miles in every direction, the great echoing building of this central terminal stretched around us. In ten minutes I was due to board my ship for the Dorsai Planets. Clay himself still had several days to wait before one of the infrequent ships to Tarsus would be ready to leave. "The bet itself was damn foolishness," I went on, determined to find something to complain about. We Dorsai do not enjoy these moments of emotion. But a Dorsai is a Dorsai. I am not apologizing. "No foolishness," said Clay. For a moment a shadow crossed his face. "You forget that a real gambler bets only on a sure thing. When I looked into the Hixabrod's eyes, I was sure." "How can you say 'a sure thing'?" "The Hixabrod loved his home," Clay said. I stared at him, astounded. "But you weren't betting on Hixa. Of course he would prefer Hixa to any other place in the Universe. But you were betting on Tarsus -- on Lulungomeena -- remember?" The shadow was back for a moment on Clay's face. "The bet was certain. I feel a little guilty about the Kid, but I warned him that gambling money never stuck. Besides, he's young and I'm getting old. I couldn't afford to lose." ' "Will you come down out of the clouds," I demanded, "and explain this thing? Why was the bet certain? What was the trick, if there was one?" "The trick?" repeated Clay. He smiled at me. "The trick was that the Hixabrod could not be otherwise than truthful. It was all in the name of my birthplace -- Lulungomeena." He looked at my puzzled face and put a hand on my shoulder. "You see, Mort," he said quietly, "it was the name that fooled everybody. Lulungomeena stands for something in my language. But not for any city or town or village. Everybody on Tarsus has his own Lulungomeena. Everybody in the Universe has." "How do you figure that, Clay?" "It's a word," he explained. "A word in the Tarsusian language. It means 'home.'" "I've seen The Exorcist # times, but it still didn't prepare me for... A step-by-step, day-by-day practical preparation for what happens to you when you are dead. Each copy hermetically sealed, so it's fresh for that special moment # paper Gateways Books #-#-#-# OR #-# Use the order form on page # Proofreading  Copy editing P.O. Box II #I  Penn Valley. CA # f #I #J #-# "In the currency of the carny world, worth at least twelve wooden nickels. Step right up to this tape."Bill "An intoxicating ramble through more wacko spaces than a near-sighted spider's got spectacles... I like this tape."Douglass-T ruth # Call #-#-#-# Or you can mail or fax the convenient order form on page #. n the day it was reported that a spaceship had  I touched down in New Guinea, I was scheduled to have lunch with one of my oldest friends in the publishing business, Bob Gorenstein of Random House. The news had come over the radio and because of the remoteness of the location, the only eyewitness account had been phoned in by the Masefields, the family whose plantation had been flattened by the # ton mass of the Drunians' "travel disk." I doubt if anyone on our planet within earshot of a radio or television talked about anything else that morning, and in fact by noon the first of an endless crop of alien jokes was already bouncing over the phone lines between Hollywood and New York. And so when Bob called me that morning to set up our lunch, he was ready with his quip. "I'm surprised to find you in," he said. "I thought you'd already be on a plane to New Guinea to sign these guys." "I hate representing celebrities," I said. "Even celebrities from outer space." "What do you have against celebrities?" "They're impossibly demanding." "That's certainly true," said Gorenstein. "But I can't believe you'd turn down an opportunity to be the literary agent for the first alien visitors in the history of the world." "I'm sure they're as big a pain in the ass as any other stars, plus they probably smell bad." Bob booked lunch at I p.m. at An American Place on East #nd Street, where we continued our banter over drinks. Shortage of time prohibits me from detailing these exchanges, which are irrelevant anyway. Suffice it to say that publishing people are among the wittiest of any profession, and there was much hilarity as we invented scenarios for such things as alien author tours, publishing parties, and talk show interviews. As Gorenstein donned his reading glasses to review the menu, he flashed a provocative smile. "Buddy Alter is already on his way to Papua." I shook my head. "Why am I not surprised to hear this?" Buddy Alter stood at the purple end of the spectrum of literary agents, a true parasite who battened on the very worst that human nature had to offer. The moment a news story broke about some lurid murder, sex scandal, or tragedy, Buddy booked a plane to persuade the principals to let him handle their book, movie, and allied merchandise rights. And he didn't particularly care whether he represented perpetrator or victim. Buddy was the literary agent equivalent of an ambulance chaser. A twinkle in Gorenstein's eyes told me there was something more. An instant later I guessed what it was. "And I suppose Random House has agreed to buy the book from Buddy if he comes back with their exclusive story." Gorenstein smiled, not very cryptically. "The salmon special sounds very good." "God almighty, Bob," I said, pounding the table. The china and silver jangled and the hubbub around us died for a moment as heads turned to the source of the disruption. "Have you no shame?" I murmured after the noise level rose again. Gorenstein chuckled. "We've only bought a right of first refusal," he said, summoning our waiter. Thus began what might be called The Great Alien Sweepstakes, for as it turned out Buddy Alter was but one of a veritable tsunami of media representatives that swept across the Pacific Ocean that week hoping not merely to witness humanity's first confirmed encounter with members of a non-human race, but to tie up the exclusive rights to their story. The New Guinea government attempted to cordon off the site until it was established that the "alien blokes" were neither hostile nor contagious. But even the best armed military contingent is no match for a determined and resourceful television crew or an aggressive team of newspaper reporters. Certainly the army was no match for the likes of Buddy Alter and his vision of fabulous commissions. It is said he had actually brought his checkbook with him! In what currency? I wondered. I watched this circus on television and could only shake my head, as I had all during that lunch with Bob Gorenstein while I listened to him justifying his company's decision to get involved in the bidding war. I suppose my reluctance to jump into this feeding frenzy will puzzle the reader, just as it did my colleagues in the publishing industry. It's a sign of the times that nobody even tried to understand how appalling I found it that people would cast their dignity to the winds to cash in on this event. Realizing that anything I said would sound like sour grapes, I said very little at all, but not a few colleagues thought that my attitude was insufferably smug. Even my wife suggested I was foolish not to make at least some effort to offer the visitors representation. "Wouldn't they be better off in your hands than in Buddy Alter's? My God, he'll have them endorsing Miller Lite Beer!" We had just clicked off the evening television news with the latest report on the carnival in New Guinea. Two executives from the Disney Company had offered to transport the space ship to a site in Texas and create a # acre theme park around it. "Not you, too," I moaned. My wife gazed crossly at me. "Sometimes you wave your dignity around like some crusader's sword. Would it be so terrible for you to make an effort to contact them? Or have you suddenly become allergic to big commissions?" This last remark stung me. "I thought you understood how I feel." "Why don't you run it past me once again to make sure." "The whole thing is... well, so undignified." She peered at me. "The agent for the Butcher of Harlem is suddenly donning the mantle of dignity?" "I didn't solicit him," I replied feebly. She scowled. "I see. It's dignified to represent a man who slaughtered and cannibalized fifteen geriatric females because he solicited you. But it's infra dignitatem to solicit a voyager from another star." "I feel like a prostitute when I chase authors." "Your nobility is inspiring," she snorted, snapping a newspaper open and terminating the conversation. I lapsed into a funk. Gazing at the ceiling with its spiderweb tracery of hairline cracks, I brooded on the unfairness of a world that handsomely rewarded prostitutes like Buddy Alter with penthouse apartments, second homes in the Hamptons, and Rolls Royce automobiles, but rewarded virtuous fellows like me with cramped apartments, seven year old Fords, and wives who had not enjoyed a genuine vacation in eight years. Ultimately I stood stoutly on my moral superiority and opted for the role of spectator. My wife, God bless her, never said another word about the matter. She didn't have to. Her feelings were painfully implicit in her sighs and baleful looks every time the news carried another story of the bidding wars for the Drunians' exclusive story, product endorsement, or participation in one commercial scheme or another. After two or three months, however, it began to be apparent that no one had succeeded in signing the spacefarers. Newspaper accounts and media industry gossip indicated that the Drunians were being extremely wary. Whether out of confusion or distrust it was not yet clear. Whatever motivated them, they definitely were not biting at offers that would have made even a Michael Jackson envious. Their caution should not have come as such a surprise. Anyone sophisticated enough to develop a means of interstellar propulsion must presumably be shrewd enough to know when he is being hustled. As my Random House friend observed, "Hell, their race is yesterday." He was one of innumerable shell-shocked veterans of the bidding wars returning to corporate headquarters with nothing to show for months in the field but a lot of bills for airfare, hotel accommodations, bar tabs, and diarrhea medicine. What we now realize is they were simply studying us. They had been attracted to our world by the radio signals broadcast by our Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence program, and for the first few weeks after their landing they established communications with our computers. Quickly reassuring us that their intentions were not hostile, they began requesting digitized information about all earthly things. We were thrilled to oblige, and they consumed data at a prodigious rate. They easily learned several dozen human languages, and began communicating with reporters in their native tongues by means of linguistic conversion devices. Presently they ventured out of the bays of their craft, their elephantine forms gliding with majestic dignity on furry pods, and, to the universal joy of the entire human race, the Intergalactic Epoch was born in that New Guinea field. All this is on film. What is not on film is the expression on my face when the phone rang about a month later and a low-pitched metallic voice announced, "Mr. Gordon? This is Garto of Drune." The sound was obviously rendered by some sort of speech simulator, but I suspected something else. "Okay Eddie, stop screwing around. What do you want?" "Who's that, dear?" My wife called from the kitchen. "My brother, up to his usual unfunny pranks. He's talking into a cooking pot and expects me to believe it's the guy from outer space. Eddie, we're just sitting down to din... " "This is Garto, Mr. Gordon. No joke." "Tell him you'll call him back," my wife shouted. "The chicken will get cold." "I'll get back to you, okay, Garto ? Is there a number on the space ship where I can reach you?" "Now it's you who are joking," the voice said. "Listen, chum, if you're Garto, send me a sign." I had no sooner uttered the words than a shriek came from the kitchen and a horrible clatter of a metal tray crashing to the floor. I dropped the phone and rushed to the kitchen. On the floor was a live chicken flapping and squawking. Standing on the counter was my wife, also flapping and squawking. Trembling, I picked up the extension in the kitchen. "Okay, Mister, you have my attention." "I am Garto." "I'll accept that as a working thesis." "I wish to tell the story of my people, of our world, of my voyage." "Could you talk a little louder? There's a woman screaming in here." He repeated the message. "Now you definitely have my attention," I said. I put my finger over my lips and my wife, sensing that something extraordinary was happening, fell silent. "And how may I be of help to you?" "I will need someone to represent me. You are universally admired, and from all we have been able to learn, you are an honest man. We have encountered very few here." My wife implored me with her eyes to explain what was going on. I cupped my hand over the phone. "It's the guy from outer space. He wants me to be his agent." "Sure," she said. "If you need proof, I'll ask him to turn you into a chicken, too." "No, thank you." "What do I have to do?" I asked into the phone. "Cancel your appointments and book a flight to New Guinea. I will contact you tomorrow to arrange details of our meeting." "I will do so. But you owe me a chicken dinner for two." As I hung up, the doorman buzzed us. My wife picked up the intercom. Her eyes widened. "Who is it?" I asked. "Maxie's Barbecue is on the way up," she said. "With chicken dinner for two." And that is how I came to be the literary agent and personal manager of Garto and his contingent of Drunians. I will not go into the details of my trip to New Guinea and my personal experiences in getting to know the explorers from that distant world. Nor will I amplify on the way I created a business strategy for them, conducted their negotiations, and exploited their stories in every possible medium. It's fascinating, but not pertinent to this account. And besides. I've chronicled it in my memoir, "Agent to the Starfarers." I cannot, however, resist the temptation to state that my clients made me a rich man, my agent colleagues became practically apoplectic with envy, and my wife treated me with a renewed respect bordering on reverence. I tried not to be insufferably smug with her, and succeeded most of the time. When did it all go wrong, then? Well, when in the long sad chronicle of human history have things always gone wrong? When people get greedy, that's when. You would think that the countless publishers, movie studios, cable and television networks, media producers, product developers, commercial sponsors, and lawyers would have been content with the fortunes they made on the licenses I negotiated with them. But no, they couldn't let it go at that. The big trouble began when Garto summoned me to Texas (where Disney had indeed established a theme park around the Drunian spacecraft). We hadn't talked face to face for six months; our frequent but routine conversations were usually conducted by telephone or televideo. Obviously the matter he had to take up with me was far from routine: I could tell from the agitated timbre of his voice, even though communicated through his translation device. I caught the next plane to Houston. I felt like a movie star on opening night as a guard ushered me up the spacecraft's ramp before the stares of thousands of fairground visitors. I found Garto in his chamber, the room redolent of his sweet-sour aroma to which I had never quite become accustomed. On the table before him were stacks of documents which I immediately recognized as book and movie contracts, as well as royalty statements issued by publishers, movie companies, and the countless merchandise firms that had licensed the rights to Drunian toys, games, clothes, furniture, tapes and records, and every other exploitable form of Druniana that the resourceful minds of business people can conjure. "You have reviewed these?" he said without salutation. "Of course." "You know then that they are phony." I sat up sharply and paused to choose my reply carefully. "My accountants routinely audit them and have found no major discrepancies, Garto." "They represent a fraction of what these works have actually earned. Where is the rest of our money?" I picked a bunch of the papers up and examined them, finding nothing out of the ordinary. "Perhaps you have misunderstood or misinterpreted the figures?" He extended a pod and tapped a publisher's royalty statement. "Half of the money due on sales of this book are not reported." I uttered a sigh of relief as I immediately saw what was troubling him. "I had told you at the outset that publishers sell books on consignment. They always hold back royalties to authors in case copies are returned." "There are few returns of my books," Garto declared. I accepted this statement at face value. I had never doubted that Garto had ways of obtaining confidential information that was inaccessible to literary agents and other mere mortals. "Perhaps your publishers have been overly zealous in withholding some of your money," I said. "Is something else bothering you?" "They promised me an embossed foil cover. And my author's photo is blurry. But that is of no consequence compared to the missing royalties." "No, I don't suppose it is. What else?" He pushed another pile of papers at me. "Where are the rest of my movie profits?" he demanded. "I told you about that, too, Garto, when you originally asked me to represent you." "Remind me." "Movie profits are calculated on a net basis, after deduction of certain defined expenses. The theatre owners take a piece of every ticket sold at the box office, the distributor takes a bite, the movie studio writes off all sorts of deductible items and overhead..." Garto cut me off with a majestic wave of his pod. "They are all lining their pockets every step of the way." "That's show biz," I quipped, hoping to lighten the atmosphere a bit, for the air was crackling with danger. "Seriously, Garto, movie studio accountants are among the most creative members of the human race. They have siphoned money from profit participants from the very beginning of the industry." "That is neither an acceptable explanation nor a satisfactory excuse. I understand capitalism perfectly well and respect the desires of business firms to earn reasonable profits on their investment. The profits being earned by publishers, movie companies, and other licensees are flagrantly unreasonable, however. I want what is coming to me and my crewmates. And, by the way, they reneged on their promise of a full screen credit as technical consultant, and they never reimbursed my per diem expenses on location in Georgia." "Rectifying that will be easier than making a studio cough up profits," I said. "You're looking at a long and honorable tradition of institutionalized fraud." "If you cannot accomplish this, I will have to wonder whether, perhaps, even you are benefiting from these diversions of my funds." "My friend, I am appalled that you should even think such a thing." "I want what is coming to me," he repeated. "I will do what I can, Garto." "You'll do more than that," he said. "And you'll do it within one week from this hour." The latter was stated in a deadly flat tone that I had never heard in his voice before, but it chilled me to the marrow of my bones. So staggered was I by this ominous warning that it did not occur to me to ask what remedy he contemplated if I failed to carry out my mandate of redressing his grievance. For this oversight it appears that the human race is about to pay dearly. You will not be surprised to learn that I have spent the six and a half days and nights since that moment exerting the most determined effort in the history of the literary agents' profession to persuade publishers, movie executives, and merchandise manufacturers to refund the profits that Garto considered to be excessive. Most of you reading this narrative have the good fortune never to have encountered the mentality of accountants in the publishing and entertainment field, so you will simply have to take my word for it that my blandishments were greeted with derision to say the least. More common were the cynical jokes, at which I would have laughed had not the matter been as grave and urgent as it was. Indeed, in the good old, pre-Garto days, I had laughed at such jokes, and made up a few myself. But I could not impress any of Garto's accounts payable that this was not merely a case of some naive author bitching that the system was gypping him. My week of imploring, cajoling, and threatening yielded not a dime of reparations. One movie president summed up the prevailing attitude when he sneered, "Screw him! If he doesn't like the way we do business, he can zap us with his little ray gun." Which brings us to what I believe to be the last moment of the human race. I calculate that we have about a half hour. The Drunian craft hovers in the stratosphere, its "little ray gun" (or whatever weapon it employs) trained on our planet and its frail populace of fools and knaves. When it became clear, about an hour ago, that Garto had not been bluffing, I was inundated by panicky phone calls from many of Garto's debtors pressing settlements upon me. Their offers were in vain. Garto had stopped taking my phone calls. As the clock moves inexorably toward doomsday, I am consumed by a single thought: could Buddy Alter have structured Garto's deals any better than I did? galaxy Illustrated by S. Gold fine spray of freezing rain stung my face as I II turned up Boylston, walking towards the library.  V An image formed in my mind, of a little girl with a tuft of blonde hair slicked across her left eye. So still. Too still. I shivered and picked up the pace. Please don 't let it happen now. The heat rising up through the grate couldn't compete with the driving cold, but at the moment, I didn't care. I shook a vial of fugue from the ziploc and popped it into the shunt in my left forearm, watching as my blood mixed slowly with the amber drug. Satisfied it was working properly, I zipped the fleshy seal closed and pushed myself against the wall, trying to get out of the worst of the rain. I'd spent the day down at the reclamation center, picking stuff from the waste stream and tossing it down the appropriate holes. Across the grate from me, a couple of worn out drunks in gray government issue were sharing a bottle, oblivious to the cold. What a stupid drug. I hate drunks. I sighed, long and low, as the fugue hit my heart with a raw punch of pleasure. The continuous feed implant said a lot about me. As much as I needed to know, anyway. They were expensive, so I'd come from money. I was broke now, so something bad had happened, and I didn't want to remember it. And I wouldn't, at least for a while. The sleet finally decided to turn to rain, and the wind whipped it around the library overhang like it wasn't there, soaking me to the skin. I closed my eyes. Who was I, again? I didn't remember. Life was good. Blackness, dark and sweet, surrounded me. I slept in the quiet warmth, floating in smooth wet emptiness. A sharp pain intruded, sending crackling waves of ugly red light through the black. My eyelids fluttered open, and I saw a green plastic boot jammed into my stomach. "Go 'way." The person attached to the boot hunkered down next to me. Plastic lensed eyes peered out of a face that might have been handsome had it been real. A rubberface. "Get up." His voice was a metallic buzz. "You're dying." "Maybe I want to die." "No you don't." I couldn't think of a retort for that, because it was true. Instead, I extended a numb white hand toward the figure crouched in the rain, who hauled me erect with ease. I didn't weigh much anymore. I took one teetering step forward and fell flat on my face. I woke up warm and dry in bed, wrapped in a scratchy wool blanket. My fingertips and toes tingled violently, making me think sickly of frostbite and gangrene. The basement room was small and clean, illuminated by a single bare bulb and the weak light sifting through the cobwebbed halfwindow near the ceiling. A battered laundry sink and a wooden cable spool table with two plastic lawnchairs were the only furniture other than the bed. All four walls were covered with plank shelves supported by cinderblocks, piled high with old, static books. Rubberface stood at the table stirring a pot of something on a hot plate. He turned and smiled. God, they gave me the creeps. From a distance, the prosthesis passed for a face, but close up, you could tell it was fake. The mask worked like an artificial limb. These burned out, burned up vets were a pretty common sight on the streets. I checked my fingers and toes for frostbites to avoid having to look at him. I'd been stripped to my shorts, and probably bathed as well. "Your feet are fine," he buzzed. His larynx must have been destroyed in the war, because his voice was one of those cheap synth units, with only the barest hint of inflection. "Pink and healthy. You're lucky." I squeezed a toe, blood reddening the grayish skin. It hurt like hell, but that was probably good. "Yeah. Lucky is my goddamn middle name." "Very lucky." He poured the contents of the saucepan into a chipped blue mug, added a spoon, and passed it to me. The smell triggered a ravenous hunger. The stuff was good, vegetable stew in a brown gravy, thick with potatoes and carrots, flavored with a lot of garlic. I polished it off quickly, scalding the roof of my mouth in the process. "More?" Rubberface shook his head, grinning. "No. Sorry. I don't want to clean your puke off the floor. Maybe in the morning." That irritated me, though he was probably right. "Why did you pick me up?" I was worried that he was going to try to whip some religion on me, something I couldn't stand. Other less savory thoughts came to mind, but I pushed them away. He nodded as if he understood. "I need your help." "What?" I laughed weakly, and closed my eyes, my tongue investigating my scalded upper palate, gently probing the grainyness there. "I'm a fuguer for Christ's sake." "I know what you are. I'm conducting a study." my blood. I couldn't keep my eyes open, but I managed another snicker. "Nice lab you got here..." I didn't know his name. "What's your name?" "What does it matter?" He paused, his face in neutral, and asked, "What do you call yourself?" "I make it my business not to remember." That laugh again. "Then just call me Rubberface. You babbled some in your sleep. I think your name is Joe." The name meant nothing to me. "Good," I said, and meant it. "Good to have something to call each other." He may have said something else, but I was fast asleep. I remember watching a big spider build a web in the rafters near the window, taking it in with all the patience of a time-lapse camera. Rubberface sat down on the cot beside me, and watched awhile, too. One gray morning, I felt like moving. Rubberface was gone again. I climbed out of the cot and put on the government issue baggies piled at the foot of the bed, wincing at the coarseness of the fabric. It took several minutes of stretching to work the kinks from my cramped body. My name was still lost to me, which was good. Very good. I searched the place methodically, checking every book, riffling the pages, coughing at the mustiness wafting from the yellowed leaves. Nothing. No fugue. No money to buy more. On a whim, I shoved the spool table against the wall, discovering a metal panel cut into the concrete. Bingo. I just barely had the strength to lift the heavy panel, by its rusty iron ring. Inside the cubby was a burlap sack. fairly heavy, filled with angular forms that clicked as I hauled it up and spilled it onto the cold cement. A dozen paperweight sized cubes of clear plastic skittered across the floor. I picked one up, a mild electric feeling shivering up my fingers as I turned it over in the weak light, peering into it. A tiny face peered back at me, a toothless old man, his features twisting in disgust and horror. It was the best hologram I'd ever seen; no rainbow glints, or digital rubbery smoothness. As I held it, a sick feeling welled up in my stomach. The face. I recognized the face. A scratchy voice echoed weakly in my head. "I didn't mean to hit her so hard. I loved her... The cube slipped from my hand, clattering to the cement. I closed my eyes for a moment, and then repacked the bag quickly, trying not to look too closely at the things. Every slowly writhing face wore the same horrified expression. An old black woman gaped from a cube under the table, her mouth a howling pink oval. I grabbed it and stuffed it in the sack, again feeling that little shock, and hearing a voice, this time an inarticulate keening. Shaking, I returned the room to its original state. I hadn't the slightest idea what the damn things were. I didn't want to know. I lay back in bed, the funk returning like the tide. I'd recognized the old man in the first cube from the library, a fellow fuguer. He'd shared a vial with me once. And as much as it made no sense, I couldn't get the thought out of my mind, that he was alive in there, and in pain. And that I should do something, to try to help. I spent the next day flipping through the static books. An ingrained habit that the fugue hadn't touched caused me to brush at the lower right-hand corner of the page, and wait for the display to refresh. I kept tapping terms for footnotes and annotations, but after a while I remembered to turn the pages. The collection was random, probably garbage-picked. Old college psych and yesterday's popular trash. The old man's face from the cube lingered nastily in my mind. I remembered suddenly that he'd shown me how to pick through the dumpsters using a stick instead of my hands, and he'd let me help him with some of the more profitable bins, near the university The sudden burst of memory was alarming. I didn't have much longer before it all came back. Rubberface pushed in after dark as I was leafing through an old news magazine. When he saw me sitting up on the bed, he raised his eyebrows. "Dressed, I see." "Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot." I shuffled towards the door, gesturing helplessly. "But I gotta go." He didn't move. "I need your help." "Look, I didn't ask for your help, okay? So please don't ask for mine. I have to go." I stood there, clenching and unclenching my fists, wondering if he had any money, wondering if I could get it from him. I remembered that he'd carried me here; he looked strong. "Where are you going?" "You know where I'm going." He shook his head. "You don't have any money." "I'll get some." He produced a wad of well-worn two dollar chips from a pouch in his belt, and laid it on the table between us. Rubberfaces made great beggars. "I'll give you the money, if you want it. After you listen to what I have to say." I considered making a grab for it and running, but decided against it. "You're almost finished." I sighed. I'd heard that before. "You know how this stuff works on trauma cases?" He rapped the table with a mottled knuckle. "Pay attention, boy. Every time you remember, the pain gets more intense. Fugue erodes ego. Every time the memory returns, there's less of you there to deal with it, so you need it worse. Vicious cycle. It ends in one of three ways." He held up a finger. "Suicide. You won't be able to wait another minute for the dose, and you'll snuff yourself out in the most direct means available." He raised another finger "Statue. You know what a statue feels? Friend of mind -- psych nurse -- told me. They'd shocked a few awake, for awhile. A statue's mind, caught in the repressed memory, is overwhelmed and starts to loop. The memory plays forever. Your nightmare -- what you're running from -- spinning forever like a stuck record in your brain. I can't think of a better description of hell, can you?" Rubberface waited, the cash in front of him, his latex features as impassive as a Halloween mask. I didn't stop to think why I believed him. I just did. "What's the other option? You said there were three." "Integration. You let the memories come back. Try and live with them. I can help you do it. You have to trust me." The hunger was building, and I knew in a matter of minutes or hours I'd have no choice. I'd take the money. And end up, what -- like the old man in the cube? The rainbow eagle hologram on the top bill shimmered with a fierce intensity, the colors bitingly bright, the beginning of an aura. My memory was coming back. It always did, and always would. What was the point in running, if it was going to catch me in the end? I steadied myself. "I'll try it," I croaked. "How Rubberface pulled something from a box on one of the shelves, strips of cloth and rubber, reinforced with smooth steel rivets. "Restraints." "Do I need those?" "Yes. You need them." He fit my hands into the molded rubber grips, and tightened straps across the knuckles. "Once had a man break free and tear his eyes out. Don't worry, these will hold." My stomach slowly writhed, as the aura intensified. I gulped down a mouthful of saliva. "What do I do now?" "Talk." My name was Joseph Peters Dunn. "About what?" "What you remember." Terror welled up in me, prickling the hairs on the back of my neck. This was a terrible mistake. The girl's face floated in my mind, blonde hair, slack lips, glazed eyes. So still. "I don't want to do this anymore." Rubberface shook his head. "Sorry. You made the decision. Now you have to live with it. You'll have to live with all of your decisions soon." overhead, coming down over Logan. But the sound just got louder, and louder, and louder, until I was sure that the thing would crash through the ceiling. The white noise filled my ears, my head, a directionless roar blotting out everything. The room faded, blacking in from the edges like a pupil irising closed. Something within me cringed as I touched the doorknob. "Honey, I'm home!" A little joke. Very little. "It's all right." I heard a voice somewhere say. "You lived through this once." I opened the door. Linda's voice came from the kitchen. "Oh, is it that late... ?" Dolly through the freshly vacuumed living and dining room to the kitchen. Expensive furniture, modem, deco, sterile, an ebony table surrounded by tall, skeletal chairs designed by the Marquis de Sade. She was at the sink, scrubbing something, the circles under her eyes even darker than the day before. She was wearing an old pair of my jeans rolled up at the ankles, and one of my ancient Yale T-shirts. The Bible was open on the kitchen table. It was the Old Testament, again, with the same damn passage glowing in yellow highlighter. "We're meeting Bill and Kathy at the club for dinner tonight, don't you remember?" Her slack expression told him she didn't. Her memory had been worthless since the new medication. She nodded listlessly. "All right. I'll get ready." She emptied a plastic bucket of water into the sink. The foamy liquid swirled and gurgled down the drain. It was pink. But the bottle of detergent next to the bucket was yellow. Someone, somewhere, said no. Rubberface wiped my forehead with a cold rag. "Let me go." "You'll follow the thread back, back to the beginning. Then you integrate." I felt like I was going to vomit. "Don't want to." "How do you know you don't want to?" "It's a feeling, can't describe it. Like the telephone ringing -- you know it's bad news even before you pick it up. Like that." The room began blacking out again. I started to cry. I loosened my tie and kissed Linda's forehead. "Come up and take a shower with me?" I waggled my eyebrows as she frowned, and went back to the scrubbing. We didn't do that anymore. As I got undressed in the bathroom I noticed a spot of fuzzy blueness in the bottom of the toilet. Something clicked. It was Linda's new medication. "Honey, where's the kid?" I shouted. "I'll go pick up the sitter while you get ready." "I think she's sleeping." I showered and shaved, put on a crushed red velvet bathrobe Linda had given me for Christmas. Elisa's TV was tuned to a sitcom, intermittent waves of canned laughter rolling through the room. She was in bed, the covers pulled up to her neck. I turned off the set, the screen quickly shrinking to a pinpoint of phosphorescence that glared at me accusingly. I sat on the edge of the bed. The room was utterly quiet. Elisa was motionless under the quilted bedspread, mouth slightly askew, a tuft of blonde hair stuck to her left eye. It looked uncomfortable. "Elisa, honey, wake up." There was the roar of a jet flying overhead, loud, which was funny, because we weren't in any approach path. I leaned over to brush the hair from her eye, and felt the warm wetness slick my other palm where I was supporting myself. And a bloody handprint bled through the fabric. And my head exploded in a sparkling burst of hot white light. Rubberface stood over me, mechanically slapping me in the face. His hand struck my head, rocking it to the hand to deliver another blow, and paused looking in my eyes. "Awake?" I nodded vigorously. "Yes! Now, get the hell off me, you goddamn mannequin! You're going to let me loose and give me that goddamn money -- " "Shut up. That was it, last time. You were turning to stone. Another dose, you don 't forget, you remember! Everything and for always!" My throat ached so badly I could hardly swallow. The memory was making me physically ill. I'd integrated all right. It was all there. Elisa wasn't the only dead one. Getting Linda back on the medication had only let her know the enormity of her crime. I remembered holding her, sobbing, for hours, as she babbled about God. She had waited patiently for God to tell her to put down the knife, as he had with Abraham. Only he hadn't. I remembered Linda's suicide, the blood in the sink, everything, every little thing. "It wasn't your fault." Rubberface's eyes burned into me. They had a hypnotic quality. Not quite human. "ft was! I knew she wasn't taking the pills. And I'd seen the Bible, open to that passage for days." "You couldn't have known. She was insane." "She'd always been insane! I knew that when I married her!" The tears were rolling down my face freely, "ft was my job to make sure something like this didn't happen." I began to jerk at my bonds savagely, bruising my wrists and ankles against the restraints. "Let me go." He nodded, reached out and touched my forehead. The pain stopped then, as if cut off by a switch. The memories were still there, but they didn't matter, somehow. "What the hell did you do to me?" "Temporary anesthesia. It'll wear off." He began unbuckling the restraints. When he had freed both my hands, and was bending down to release my legs, I swung at him mindlessly. My fist hooked the edge of the mask, and sent it flying across the room. He looked back at me, his face a twisted mass of purple keloid, his lower jaw partly gone, glistening patches of cauterized bone peeking through the runneled flesh. Black, bloody wires, the nerve hookups, protruded from his cheeks and forehead in clumps. But even hiding behind plastic lenses, it was obvious that the thing living in that ruined body wasn't exactly human. He scrabbled briefly for the mask, picked it up, holding it for several seconds before sighing and tossing it on the table. He stared at me, and again, I was overwhelmed by the sense of his otherness. "People never look too closely at the mask," he said softly, his synthetic voice suddenly more modulated, more human. "That's why I wear it. Did you know your people have senses of which they're not aware?" I was shivering non-stop now. I hugged myself tightly, and tried to stop. "What are you?" "Policeman? Social worker? Trade liaison? You don't have the language for what I am." I'm not sure how I knew. Maybe he was a little bit inside my mind, helping me to understand. "You're not from Earth?" "No." Somehow, through all the scars, he managed a smile, ft was mainly around the eyes. "Not from Earth." "What's the deal with the cubes?" "They're sleepwalkers, turned to stone. Processed locally into a... well, I guess you'd call it an entertainment product." "What?" "There is a species -- I must confess, I can't stand them. They're mental vampires. Pain junkies. Parasites. They became the dominant lifeform on a planet with three sapient races, by manipulating them from within, using pleasure and pain. They like pain the best. Emotional pain more than physical. Your species has a great capacity for pain..." He trailed off. "I still don't know what you're talking about." He rubbed the side of his head. "The cubes are candy for a very unpleasant people. There has been a trade. Several of your governments and major corporations are involved." "What are you doing with me?" "You're evidence, Joe." My hand strayed to the tiny bump on the back of my head. I pressed on it, but it didn't hurt. It had never hurt. He nodded slowly. "A recording." I worked my fingernails through the thin layer of skin, my thumbnail sliding under a round flat disk inside the bump. The tab resisted, and then, sickeningly, gave. As I drew it out, the room fell away as if I had plummeted off a building. I found myself sitting on a bed in a strange book-lined room, staring at a rubberface. I hate rubberfaces. A strand of crystal glittered between my thumb and forefinger, lit from within by slowly dancing flecks of golden radiance. What the hell was this? The rubberface took the glowing crystal from my outstretched hand. There was mild pressure at the base of my skull and the memory of the last couple of days slid into place. "Jesus!" "There is no crime without context," he said, turning to run a finger across a row of book spines. "I should never have read these. That was the big mistake. Losing the proper detachment." He sighed loudly. "I can't do it." "Do what?" "Treat you as an animal. You are almost-human." I felt those eyes again, bearing down on me mercilessly. "Joe, I can see a little into the future. Not very far, but far enough. Once I leave here with that core -- your memory of these last few days -- you don't live. I'm almost certain." I considered that. "If I give you the core, will the trade stop?" Rubberface nodded slowly. "Perhaps." "Don't you have other cores? You said you've done this before." "Nothing like yours," he said, staring into my eyes. "Without it..." "I see." I looked away. A fly buzzed against the window, annoyingly rebounding off the dirty glass over and over again. Finally giving up, it blundered into a spiderweb, struggling as a large brown spider descended from the rafters. The spider enfolded it, the fly's movements weakening as it was cocooned. But it wasn't dead, just paralyzed. "You can have the core." A short while later, we were ready to go. Rubberface had made some kind of report, his eyes blank, his throat muscles twitching, for about five minutes. I had one more bowl of his stew. As I put on an overcoat, he offered me something. I picked the vial from his outstretched palm. "Fugue?" He nodded, his eyes calm. "Something very like it. More of a therapeutic drug, really. Your people have very little control over consciousness. I've yet to encounter an intelligent species as enslaved to memory as yours..." he shook his head. "Use it if you have to. It... it won't be as bad as the other." The vial began to grow warm in my hand. "What?" "Put it on the table." I did, and watched as it slowly melted into the wood, glowing yellow and green, before coalescing again. Now there were two vials of fugue sitting in a little depression in the table, connected by a silvery thread. "I've already given out a few of them. They fission once every three hours, once separated. The fugue market should collapse by the end of the month." I screwed my eyes up, peering at him carefully. "Is this allowed? Isn't there some sort of prime directive, or something, for you guys?" "Yes. Oddly enough, there is." I fingered the storycube nervously as the train shrieked through Chinatown station. It was late. The only other passengers were bums like me, and a scattering of college students too drunk or stupid to realize how dangerous it was, this time of night. The numbness, Rubberface's temporary anesthesia, is gone now, and I feel much better. I could probably live with it, now, what I did, or rather, what I failed to do. But I've made my decision. He says that there's always a chance that he's wrong, that I'll manage to shake off the addiction. He says the future is never certain. All he'd tell me was that if I statued, I wouldn't suffer. We got off the train at New England Medical, and rode the escalator up to the tunnel in silence. "I can retrieve the data from the cube remotely." We reached the corridor. "Yeah. Well, bye." I reached out my hand. He looked at it, smiled with his eyes, and grasped it firmly. It felt like a real hand. I sat down quickly on the brick, and lowered my head to my knees, the cube held tightly between my palms. I didn't want him to see the tears in my eyes. He brushed the back of my head. I came to, sitting in a brick corridor. Disoriented, I tried to figure out where the hell I was. The distant click of steel wheels and the smell of urine brought me back. Subway tunnel. Someone was standing above me, looking down, a rubberface in a gray overcoat. I hate rubberfaces. "What the hell are you looking at, dummy?" He just nodded stupidly and shambled off down the hall. I remembered my name was Joe Dunn, the aura fizzing and buzzing like mad. I would remember a lot more, soon, if I didn't do something. There was this thing in my hand, a cube, featureless black. A paperweight maybe? Might be worth something. I slipped it into my shirt for safekeeping. I fumbled in my pocket. Please, let me have some, please. My fingers closed on a single vial. Smiling, I tugged open my forearm and popped it in. The shunt was clear. I closed it up and waited. family spread out before me. Linda's new medication seems to be working, thank God. In this instant, I know that I love them both. Birds fly by overhead, frozen immobile. The breeze carries the scent of lilac and freshly mowed grass. The moment goes on and on. It occurs to me that I feel good, very good. In fact, I've never felt better in my life. It 's a late spring day. Elisa is running up the slope to where Linda is smiling, kneeling down to sweep her up into her arms. The grass squirms between my naked toes, the food is warm in my stomach, the air is sweet. My vacation is just beginning, two workless weeks with my not and should have included for Tape #: H.L. Gold's 'The Biography Project and Janni Lee Simners Three Wish Habit and for for Tape #: Don Webbs The Words, The Names. Galaxy stories Galaxy Catherine Oxenberg, Director Photo: E.J. Gold In production, "The Proper Thing to Do" by Brad Linaweaver, "The Source of Inspiration" by Michael Decker, "Seven Soup Rivers" by Robert Sheckley, "Avatar" by Janet Berliner, "The Forgotten Ones" by Lyn Nichols, "Reality Clay" by John Rosenman, "Ms... Found..." by Mary Sass, "Sacrifice" by L.S. Silverthorne, "Dances with Elves" and "Iced" by Cynthia Ward, "Yule" by K.D. Wentworth, "Nuts and Bolts" by Greg Vose, "Mahoghany Dream" by David Bollinger, "Ghost Maker" by Frederik Polil, and more actresswriter Catherine Oxenberg and actorwriter James P. Healy. Science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. Recorded, digitally mastered and produced in the Galaxy hi-tech, multitrack recording studio. Best audiophile quality real time dubs. # each. Galaxy subscribers pay # each. Wells of Wisdom Brad Linaweaver Dragon Lady Evelyn E. Smith TheWordsThe Names Don Webh Three Wish Habit Janni Lee Simner The Biography Project H.L (ini, I NothingChanges ( buck Rothman The Vilbar Party Evelyn E. Smith The Fornicators B. Johnson-Haddad Not Fit for Children Evelyn E. Smith Extraction Jeffry Dwight Perchance to Scream Janet llerliner Mr. Monster Waits in Heaven for an Angel L orry Ackerman Ants in her Attic Kent Brewster In the Canal Zone Jean Marie Stine The Big Chill Cynthia Wart I The Copper Ring Robert Houtlin Graveyard at the Grand .lunel llerliner More Stately Mansions John Rosenman To order, call #-#-#-# Destined to become si elassie in every ssclence fiction I i lrnry Illustrated by Zoe eturning from her first season at the Academy, Rosemaryyh Randt hugged the squat, pruned, and wizened man and woman standing in the irised-open door. "Get in here out of the light," urged her mother. Her father just grinned at the situation, as if sharing a secret with himself. Once inside, the family sat down and tendered idle catch-up chitchat as their reunion gifts. As the daylight outside slowly redded out into a spectacular Pacific Ocean sunset. Cadet Rosemaryyh slowly exhausted the supply of adventure stories she had accumulated. By contrast, the expansive years which her parents had shared, though less exciting, stretched into a relatively longer, much fuller-written tale of daily survival as things merely got better and better on Earth. Rosemaryyh finally had to say her goodnights, as it had been a tiresome journey crammed into the claustrophobic transport with all the other cadets coming out of rotation. She trundled into the bedroom she had left when her parents had been in their late thirties and she sixteen, and as she saw the same furniture, the same dinosaur-patterned wallpaper she had left behind as a teenager, a youthful warmth kindled within her cool, athletic body. She felt the bouncy cushioning when she plopped her lean frame onto the soft bed. She sighed and allowed her eyes to flutter. "Lights off," she called. It was only when the lights stayed lit she remembered this room had a lamp that had to be switched off manually. Fingering the stud, picturing herself retaking her bed position in soothing darkness, she paused. Set upside-down on the dresser, coated with a thin veneer of dust, were the coke-bottle lensed eyeglasses she had used before her operation. She picked them up and cherished them in her slender-fingered hands, recalling how she had used them not only to see better but to look better. As an adolescent, her now-lanky frame had been pudgy, unauthoritarian. The strong frames turned her chubby-cheeked face into that of an owlish student, and for the first time in her young life, suddenly her schoolteachers began to call on her more regularly. As a result, she had accelerated her learning curve quickly and was rewarded richly. For today she was among the select few whose academic prowess had landed her a spot in the Academy. Her Cadet training was something not just anyone could tolerate, much less excel in. At the Academy, she was at the top of her class. Rosemaryyh started to replace the glasses, but then she got another idea. She was remembering more and more about her early school days now. Three-hundred sixty-five and one quarter. The sums of the squares of the sides. Equal and opposite reaction. Freed the slaves and assassinated. The penny in the glass. Stuck in remembrance, like a computer program going continuously in the background that refused to shut off, Rosemaryyh looked to the side, into the mirror which was there the way she knew it would be. She wiped around its surface so as to clear an opening in the dust and raised the glasses to her eyes. Unfortunately, now that her eyesight was perfect, the glasses only distorted her image and stabbed an ache through her head. Nauseous, she removed the glasses and was reassured to see her normal high-cheekboned twenty-year-old's face gazing back at her from the dust-moted mirrorglass. She smiled at the handsome woman's body she had grown into while off Earth, and set the glasses back down, right next to a dusty drinking glass which somehow had still survived the years untouched on her dresser, half-full of a brownish liquid. Involuntarily she giggled. The penny in the glass. Back in first grade again, pudgy little Rosemaryyh had fidgeted, bored in her tiny desk while the stern, white-haired teacher, Ms. Harddriver, stood at the front of the schoolroom, tapping the big, brown globe with her hard fingernails. "Class," explained Ms. Harddriver, "Be sure never to overindulge in the ancient brew known as cola. Cola will rot your teeth -- it's full of something that will even -- well, go home tonight and drop a copper penny into a glass of cola. Leave it there a month and then just you see what condition that poor metal coin is in!" Rosemaryyh now remembered she had gone home that night and started the experiment merely to prove the (Program I  #) plus # shipping  handling. CA residents please add or White on Black. Shirt sold separately: # plus # shipping. Tape sold separately: # plus # shipping. teacher wrong. But being a first-grader, one distraction led to another and somehow the penny in the glass was totally forgotten to this day over a century later. She knew the acid in the cola would have completely dissolved that little coin by now. Edging around the lip of the glass with a finger, she threw back her head and laughed. But she wondered if the cola itself was still good. Tentatively, she raised the glass to her lips and sipped. That refreshing bite powered back a wonderful memory flow of warm, lazy summers on the beach, feathering smooth pebbles and delicate shells in her little hands. Drowsily, she forgot for a moment this glass had apparently been sitting over a century and gulped the remaining cola down. She nearly choked to death. She managed to cough the obstruction up. The penny. So, Ms. Harddriver had been lying, or mistaken, or joking, that fall day back in #. And suddenly, Rosemaryyh wondered not only about the penny in the glass, but about everything else. If the penny in the glass was not true, was the sums of the squares of the sides true? Was freed the slaves and assassinated true? Just what exactly was true? Rosemaryyh felt very small, very cold, and very, very stupid. And then she suddenly realized -- there was an easy way to reality-test this situation. The year was now #. If the penny was dated # or earlier, then Rosemaryyh would worry. Rosemaryyh flipped the coin to its obverse side and looked at the date. Illustrated by Finlay he last science fiction writer. Sat alone. Before the last simulator. And tried to think. There had once been a time. Of unlimited imagination. Of boundless potential. When anything was A thousand maybe worlds. Were minted everyday. The writer knew this. Had tracked it down. Through records. Memory. To the deepest cellular level. Science fiction. Fundamental part. Hume existence. The last science fiction writer. Sat alone. In a room. Without inspiration. Mind a blank. Unable to think of a single idea for a story. Knew it should be easy. Just pick a theme. Dozen of classic themes. In science fiction. There was the wonders of alien worlds... The writer looked out the wall. Quadruple shadows. Maroon skies. Airtrees -- fronds growing downward toward the ground. Immense iridescent whales glazing high among their roots. The lighteningfalls that reared above the domicile. And could think of nothing exciting. Amazing. Fantastic. Or astounding. Enough. To justify beginning. There was time travel... The writer's bondmate appeared. "I join us. We're off to the age of the Great Migration. Imagine. They still used ships, transmats and other machines. To journey from galaxy to galaxy. You spend too much time. Cooped up in this place. It's not good for you." The writer couldn't think. Of a single exciting idea. In time travel. There was the ultimate possibilities of evolution... The writer tried to concentrate. Tune out distractions. Any entities operating on the higher mental bands this is the star canopus. Seeking to join minds with those interested in interlocking metalogics. Please contact me #I #-#-#. Here, too, the author drew a blank. There was humekind's origin... prehistory... At last. The writer had an idea. Began to compose: The first star ship. Arced out. From Earth. Carrying the mind of humekind. All aboard knew it was a voyage that could determine the future of the race. Set it free from confinement on a single planet. And allow it to claim its heritage: the stars. The writer's progeny arrived. "What do you think about this?" the writer asked. ";Not that hoary old cliche prog. It was disproved long ago. Everyone knows. Humes evolved between the stars. Crafted ships. To reach planets." Laughed. The writer expunged that record. There had once been a time. Of unlimited imagination. Of boundless potential. When new dreams. Were minted everyday. How had science fiction writers. Don't it. Envisioned. All those exciting. Potential futures? Seen something different. For the humerace. To do. Be. Experience. The writer mocked up a body. Extruded. A limb. Scratched head. There were times. When it was so much. More satisfying. To be physical. Then dissolved. Body. Room. Simulator. Back into Primordial elements. From which had so recently. Created them. Maybe it was time. To visit. That universe they had discovered. Where the laws of physics. Were said to be. Even stranger. Than those of the last. Dozen or so. Perhaps that. Would help spark. A new idea. Qiisxy Illustrated by Courtney Balance of Terror (Title refers to an Eisenhower speech on the cold war, where he refers to keeping peace with a "balance of terror") German: "Spock unter Verdacht" (Spock Under Suspicion) Japanese: "Medida de Terror"; "O equilibrio do Terror" Location: Enterprise, Desilu # Aired: ### wedding of Enterprise crewmen Angela Martine and Robert Tomlinson when he is interrupted by a distress call. Romulans have launched an unprovoked attack on Federation outposts, guardians of the neutral zone between Federation and Romulan territory. Until this encounter, the Federation has never met the Romulans face to face, and humans have no idea what the aliens look like. The Romulans have an invisibility screen or cloak and a new weapon, photon torpedoes. Enterprise in pursuit. The invisibility cloak makes it impossible to detect anything outside the ship, so the Romulans cannot tell if the "blip" following them is an enemy ship or a harmless echo. The Enterprise picks up a picture of the Romulans' bridge and learns that the Romulans are of Vulcan descent, with the same pointed ears. This makes Lieutenant Stiles -- whose forebears fought and died in the Romulan War -- suspicious of Spock. The Romulan commander, a man of great character, attempts to shake off the Enterprise but is forced to turn and fight, though his ship is low on fuel. The Enterprise loses most of its phaser power when a leak in the Enterprise's phaser coolant system poisons the air, disabling Tomlinson and Stiles. Spock fires the phaser manually and risks phaser coolant poisoning to rescue the two men. Tomlinson dies, but Stiles survives, and overcomes his bigotry. The Romulan ship is disabled, and its commander, rather than submit to capture, salutes Kirk as an honored enemy and destroys his own ship. The moral is about bigotry and honor. This episode is a futuristic "Enemy Below" or "Silent Running" submarine story. Captain Kirk shows self-doubt, asking "Why me?" when he must make a command decision that could start a galactic war. McCoy comforts Kirk with "there is only one of each of us" and each of us is needed. Kirk knows football -- he refers to making an "end-run" around the Romulans. Spock is more excitable than in later episodes -- he is still being shaped as that "interesting alien" on the bridge. Spock raises both eyebrows and almost smiles when he sees Romulans -- he is not surprised to see Vulcanoid aliens; Romulan ancestors left Vulcan long before the Age of Logic. Spock has a book with him in the briefing room. But he doesn't need a book when Kirk asks him about types of comets -- he knows his astronomy by heart. Spock comes close to a genuine reaction to Stiles' bigotry. Kirk tells Stiles to leave his bigotry in his quarters. This was Mark Lenard's first Hollywood job -- he'd been an actor and opera "spear carrier" in New York. He was one of the actors suggested for the role of Spock; ironically, he played Spock's father and had to be "aged" for the part. Enterprise gold uniform and white feathers in her hair. Actress Barbara Baldavin played four roles on the Enterprise: Angela Martine in this episode, Lt. Teller in "Shore Leave," Lisa in "Turnabout Intruder," and Angela Baker in "Space Seed." There was never any indication if Angela Martine became Angela Baker through marriage between episodes, or if the writers just liked the name Angela. The term "Starbase" had not yet been invented by Star Trek writers, so Kirk refers to "Command Base." Sulu "respectfully recommends" security alert be maintained. He has far more knowledge of the starship than he lets on. He seems pleased to have Uhura at the navigation helm. Yeoman Janine Rand seems rather young and naive in this episode. She asks Kirk if she should continue log entries. Of course she should; that's what yeomen are for. responsible space jobs. Angela was little more than secretaryclerk for the weapons section of the Enterprise. Uhura was at one point the only officer on the bridge, but Kirk refers to the Romulan Commander as "Captain" -- a formal address only, as the human could not possibly know Romulan ranks. The Earth-Romulan war was # years before Stardate #, but the Federation and warp-driven starships are only # years old on this date. The war may have been between Romulans and an alliance of Earth colonies that predated the Federation. The Romulan Commander, who was never named, has an artistic soul: "Behold, a marvel in the darkness," he said of the comet Icarus. He comments dryly that "danger and I are old companions" and bitterly that these attacks will lead to "our gift to the homeland -- another war." He tells Kirk "you and I are of a kind. In a different reality I could have called you friend," just before the Romulan Commander destroys his own ship and everyone on board. The Romulans know of some sort of sorcery: "He's a sorcerer, that one" says the Romulan Commander about Captain Kirk's maneuvers to capture the Romulan ship. The debris jettisoned from the Romulan ship was plasti-forms, metal molds, conduits -- all junk from the prop department. Bridge lights go out when they fire phasers aboard the Enterprise -- this did not continue in subsequent episodes. The Romulan ship was called "Bird of Prey" by Lt. Stiles, who may have heard the name from his parents. This is the first indication we have of the name of the alien ship. Though the Romulans only have impulse engines, they manage to easily outrun the warp-driven Enterprise, and Romulan photon torpedoes move at warp speeds. How does Spock manage to get a visual signal from the Romulan ship's bridge when there is no way there could be a Federation viewerrecorder aboard the alien ship? Sulu says "speed is at maximum" -- maximum what? The Enterprise lay silent for over # hours and # minutes, then Spock accidentally made a noise that annoyed the suspicious Stiles. But Kirk saw it as a chance to flush out the Romulans from hiding. Spock says "bearing #, mark #" but he already said that was his course, not bearing. Last line: a grief-stricken Angela telling Captain Kirk, "I'm all right." Last scene: Kirk striding down the Enterprise corridor. Subscribe to Bjo Trimble's own SF Newsletter "The Newsletter for TV  Movie SF, Fantasy  Horror Fans!" P. O. Box #, Kingwood, TX #-# Send # for sample issue Illustrated by Freas I don't know; it might not bother you, but every now and then I get a little weirded out by the shear mass of history. We like to think of ourselves and our planet as being new. "Oh, look dear. It's the sunrise. A new day is on its way." In case you weren't aware of it, the sun doesn't rise. No more than it's true that W.C. Fields would actually thrust his nose firmly between his opponent's teeth and pull him to the floor on top of him. "Yes, officer, I admit it. I repeatedly slammed my face and body into the assailant's fists and feet." The sun is the equivalent of a solar couch-potato. It sits at the center of the solar system while a bunch of planets, asteroids and a few comets revolve and rotate -- apparently industrious. We'll leave the question of true industry to the philosophers. Not because they are equipped to handle it -- but because it drives them crazy and I do so love watching them scuttle around like Kafkaesque cockroaches trying to extract the apple of an idea from their backsides. To be fair to the sun, it's not always such a stay-at-home lazy-do-nothing. Quite the contrary. In its capacity as a star, the sun is very much the mover and groover. Maybe when viewed from the proper frame of reference your household couch-potato isn't such a lazy bum after all. Let's face it, guys. If you provide warmth so a bunch of hairless apes don't freeze their bare little butts off and provide enough rays to grow food for their hairless not-so-little bellies, you get better press. So what does this have to do with the apparency of newness that gets ascribed to each day? You got me there. From a physical point of view we're looking at a rather large ball of molten stuff (magma) with a thin crust of mostly cooled scum (terra firma) floating on the surface of said ball spinning like a top while it makes a yearly revolution in a near-vacuum at near zero absolute (#K) around the sun. In case you were wondering how we know that it takes the Earth a year to revolve around the sun, some long-dead guy that was an amateur in his day is now called a Scientist defined it that way. A year is the time it takes for the Earth to go once around the sun and a day is the time it takes for the Earth to spin once on the dial. Hopefully, the music of the spheres doesn't go the way of FM. Are you old enough to remember when FM was experimental music and mostly non-commercial? At one point it was a social crime to listen to FM and you could be rat-packed if they (the not-so-hairless descendants of killer apes) caught you reading science fiction. I don't know if nature abhors it, but people sure have a hard time handling anything new or different. So what does all of this have to do with my being weirded out by the shear pressure of history? I spent a lot of time studying water in graduate school. For a few years I was on the forefront of research into the physical-chemical properties of water. Then I dropped out of the race and fell back into the spectator stands of Science magazine and Scientific American. Water is one of the major wonders of science, and very understudied -- and I don't mean there are lots of aspiring actresses hoping it breaks a leg just before opening night. We are talking not enough good scientists directing serious attention into the area. For the longest time it totally puzzled me why such a rich area of study as the physical-chemical properties of water went so neglected. I had a brief chat with Madame Pullman about just this point following her guest lecture. She had a similar lament about phosphate head rotations in cellular membranes. Then one Friday night during the qualitative sampling of various fermented hop-products the answer came to me. Actually, it was more during the process of returning said fermented products. You are aware, I assume, that you can't buy beer? So while I was busy returning a rather large quantity of rented beer, it suddenly dawned on me that a dinosaur probably carried the very same water molecules that I had recently shuttled the fifty feet from table to bathroom. The little H # Os that I was so earnestly hoping would not splash back at me were probably veterans of of round trip excursions into and out of a variety of dinosaur bladders. When I got back to the table, my lab partners were just beginning the sampling process of a new pitcher -- for further qualitative analysis, one would assume. Biologists may be able to draw a graph based on a single point, but chemists (like us) needed lots of data points. Physicists, on the other hand, know all the formulas. Give them one data point and they can extrapolate the whole rest of the graph. After a brief, but enthusiastic exposition concerning my recent leap of understanding into the history of water molecules, my former friends looked at me as if I had just crawled out from under a rather scummy and unkempt rock. It was many months later that the full implication of my lab-mates' responses became clear to me. No one wants to confront the fact that every glass of water that one drinks contains molecules of H # # that have been can hear the scientific-realists now, saying ,"Yes, but the water molecules get cleaned-up by sand-filtration and the evaporative rain process." Well, if that's true, why can't we all become virgins again by a good shower, white undies, and a midnight move to a new town? Nature is the ultimate recycler. Did you know that nature is still using the same formula for water that it has been using since... maybe even clear back to just a few days after the most recent big bang? Recent big bang? It's a bitch, isn't it? Even the big bang was made from previously used parts. We are not the first and we won't be the last to use the atoms and molecules that make up the lump of hamburger called "me." We are renters in every sense of the word. And don't give me that "we like to buy so we can build equity. To whom are you going to sell , and where are you going to relocate if they buy? Work Space Gallery P.O. Box I # New Paltz, NY #I (#) #-# Gala.#Ela.zi Sorigraphs Cosmoidlo Ceramics and special "weeMieeit: ycabs as Alien iiAneesT" T-Shirts Skulking Permit by Robert Sheckley Skulking Permit was published in a deluxe edition of # copies with original serigraph frontispiece by EJ. Gold, and many other original illustrations. In addition, # serigraphs in a portfolio accompany this edition. Leather binding with marble end papers. Published by Heidelberg Editions International. # Drawings for the Bible # Illustrations for the Bible (f K axe Verve ##-# and Verve ##-#. Two volumes. Folio, original boards. Paris, Editions de la Revue Verve, #, #. Fine and nicely matched copies of the First and only issue of Chagall's illustrations for this Bible which documents and complements the edition of the Bible published by Teriade in #. These two volumes contain a total of # original color lithographs. Complete sets in such condition are increasingly rare due to plundering . Two volumes encased in a highly unusual leather felt-lined folding box, handpainted by boxmaster, Stephanie Boyd.  # Rtfrmnl i n ry and unique combination of publisher's and boxmaster  art; the oneofakind box is signed by the artist. Witb embossed certificate. Contact: Nancy Christie or Ivan Lourta (#)#-# Prtca: # regular adon # wUh hon tort# aerigraph #; #S.#(ht) pre-puMcatton. EdMonSba: Edtton la Briefly HmHed to # oopias. Oakixe.aawn hard-covar Nmsd adHion wUh aignad and nuntoared Iromiaplaca aarigraph bound In. handsomely gold-amboasad on cover and spina. Hon (axle: Hon texts aarigraph available only tor ooptea #-#, may be sold out by subscription at time of publication (check with Gateways tor availability). A novel by A.J. Langguth, Illustrated by E.J. Gold 'Just as we had become accustomed to the fact that the only first-rate religious fiction today is being written by Norman Mailer, this mad novel comes along to surprise and enchant us. A comic religious novel?... Impossible. but It has happened. It Is either one of the canniest rejections of the Christian enterprise In our time, or one of the subtlest expressions of admiration for Jesus. Or both. Or neither... -- The New HeubMc Suppose that the historical Jesus and his disciples, as chronicled In the Gospels, are an archetype of divine revelation OK. that's not hard to accept, whether you're a Christian or belong to any other religion or even it you are Buddhist, agnostic or atheist. Now suppose that, since the New Testament immortalizes archetypal events, there Is in every other period ot history another Jesus with another set of disciples, much like the archetype. How about, identical except for the differences In culture and historical context whether It be the French Revolution, the Roaring Twenties, or World War II in Europe. This Is the thesis of Jesus Christs (yes. It'd plural...), and If worked out In Its details. It Is a mind-boggling and attention-riveting Idea. This is exactly what Langguth haa done in his unique novel. Enough said -- you have to read this book to believe it Jesus Christs Is also an archetypal example of a novel that Is too serious to succeed. can t be a best-seller, disappears from circulation once out of print and somehow gets stolen or lost with almost # frequency, from Mbraries...An obvious case lor Sirius Science Fiction revival. Your read of this free form novel Is considerably enhanced by it s large-size page format and illustration with a new series of drawings by E.J. Gold, who has admired the book since it s first release in the heady atmosphere of the late '#'s. What more can we say -- Highly Recommended! AJ. Langguth has had a long and distinguished, not to mention highly diversified, career as a professional writer. He was bom in # In Minneapolis, attended Harvard College, where he also worked for a year, and then served in the U.S. Army in #-#. He was Political Editor at the Valley Times. San Fernando Valley, from #-#, then went on to the New York Times to become Bureau Chief in Saigon during the eventful year #. He wrote as a freelancer and authored five books -- beginning with Jesus Christo -- between # and #. when he oined the faculty of the Journalism School. University of Southern California, where he is currently teachina as a full Professor. The illustrations for this book have a common thread which reminds one of the subtlety of mood created by Langguth. Working with transparency and layering Gold's imagery evokes an otherworldly quality present in this classic tale. Gold's knowledge of science fiction and his complete ease in the graphic medium put him in a very rare position and enable him to act both as editor and illustrator of a very high quality small publisher of limited editions.W. Umpgu'Ji   j r  Hieroglyphic Ori Appollinis Niliaci de scris notis et sculpturis libri duo, quibus accessit versio recens, per Jo. Mercer urn coninnata, et observationes non infrugiferae. Parisiis, J. Kerver #. Fine emblematic woodcuts, small octavo, sprinkled calf gt. (very rare). This is a fine, tall copy, inscribed on the flyleaf, "ex libris Joannes Gibsone, Glasguae, #". "Cette Edition, que se trouve difficilement, est omde de trs jolies gravures en bois -- " Brunet Quaritch quotes two copies in his # catalog, listed then at five pounds each. This was when you could get someone shanghaied in London for a in Los Angeles for a nickle an acre. The illustrations in this volume are in the manner of the great pictorial emblems, not merely plain heiroglyphics. The images are all clear and very clean, and you'll find them very appealing and intriguing. Encased in a rich leather felt-lined case, handpainted by Rymja in the style of the masters, signed by the artist, with an embossed certificate from H.E.I. Rymja's work is very highly prized, and she has hundreds of collectors of her classical paintings on leather. # Maillol, Aristide. Virgile. Les Gdorgiques. Texte Latin et version franpaise de d I Aristide Maillol. Paris, Philippe Gonin, #-# (#). # vols. #to. (#), #, (#); (#), #, (#) pp. including # woodcuts, of which some are illustrated initial letters. Unsewn, as issued, in publisher's cream wrappers, preserved in quarter vellum slipcase and chemise. With the prospectus for the work, loosely inserted. One of a limited edition of # copies printed on rag-wove paper, watermarked with Maillol's "seated nude". Maillol began the first drawings for this project in # when, returning from a trip to Greece with Count Harry Kessler of the Cranach Press, he stopped over at Naples and Pompeii. Over the next three decades, he added a few more cuts to the original work and in # Gonin urged him to resume the project; the final block was delivered just before the artist died. Maillol's eyesight was poor during the last years of his life, so the actual cutting for the project was executed by craftsmen working from the artist's sketches made directly on the print surface of the wood block. See: Artist  Book p. # This copy is no. ##. Encased in an elaborate and completely unique leather felt-lined folding box, handpainted by E.J. Gold. Box is signed by the artist. With embossed certificate from H.E.I.  # Dubuffet, Cerceaux 'sorcellent, Max Loreau; Editions Beyeler a Bale et Jeanne Bucher a Paris. In publisher's wraps protected by french-wrapped glassine. Color lithos throughout are powerfully printed, lots of intaglio where the black lines dig into the paper. This is example ## of a numbered edition of #. There were # additional proofs which were hors commerce. colorful one-of-a-kind leather, wood, stone and metal felt-cushioned folding box, handcrafted by boxmaster Claude Needham. Signed by the artist. With certificate from H.E.I. # Ross, Frederick. The Ruined Abbeys of Britain. Illustrated with Coloured Plates and Wood Engravings from Drawings by MacKenzie, #, One volume in two bindings; original green leather-grained cloth, title stamped in gilt  figures with crest stamped in gold and colours, gilt edges, slightly worn at comers, but a remarkably good copy with the plates in fine condition. First edition, with very fine, delicate, and yet dramatic, color plates by Benjamin Fawcett of Driffield. As Friedman notes, " Fawcett was the only major English color printer of the nineteenth century to spend his entire career outside of London. "All of his splendid books were printed, colored, assembled and bounc in his workshop in Driffield, Yorkshire... "Fawcett's color printing ii characterized by the very fine quality q the line wood engraving... His ink tonet are so subtle and transparent that they have the appearance of watercolor. " Lydon was Fawcett's apprentice anc he left the firm in #, after which little of note was printed there; this, one of his very last works with Fawcett, is  glorious swan-song. McLean writes that "the plates are certainly magnificent." Ref: Friedman, Color Printing it England, p. #. The twelve color plates capture the eeriness of the moors and the ruins o medieval abbeys of old England. Ii addition, there are many fine wooe engravings in black-and-white throughout, and a fascinating text. Encased with medieval artifacts ane handblown glass vials containing soi taken from each of the major ancien sites of Britain. Each item i accompanied by a certificate o authenticity; certificates are looseboune in a separate chemise which fits into it own compartment in the folding felt-lined box designed by artist Dell Heywood. Contained within the botton compartment of the folding box is miniature, exquisitely detailed landscap in approximately ## scale, featuring mined abbey. # A new Painting Series by E. J. Gold Modeled by Catherine Oxenberg Available from nei #-#-#-#  #-#-# mri . m i t , . n i l I l U, " . ' "  ' Catherine the Great f times per year. Available at # for a single copy (# in Canada), # for Canada, # for Great BritainEurope, and # for the Pacific Rim. With your subscription, you get a Free Galaxian Button (# value) and a # Merchandise Certificate (not redeemable in cash) to use with are available separately for # each plus I shipping and handling. Your subscription will begin with the current issue. Subscribers will be given preference for back issue orders. A limited number of Volume I, Number I have been put aside as single issue samples  #. #copy plus I First Class shipping and handling. Offer good only while supplies last! Contact: Clowns on Mars # Simulacrum # ## # Gas Pump Ivy Government Employee # # # Hiker in Space # Ann Arbor # She Waits # Curb Your Dino # an onor off-planet landscape. Tell us your shoe size and we'll send you the right Pocket Galaxy Landscape #  Actually shoe size has nothing to do in line. It will be synchronistically attuned to you. Shrimp'. It is the only way to describe these works from Galaxy Classics -- limited edition, hand-crafted works of art, many signed by both author and artist, and available in strictly limited editions. The finest works by the grand masters of the field, in lavishly illustrated, hand-sewn books to treasure for a lifetime, and more. Galaxy Edited by Forrest J Ackerman Illustrated by E.J. Gold Forrest J Ackerman's collection of unforgettable stories from the childhood of science fiction. SF # # Illustrated by E. J. Gold Classic stories portraying the archetypes of the genre. Expanded realities, time-travel, technological magic, intraspecies communication, alternate worlds, and a host of other mind-expanding themes. by Robert Sheckley Illustrated by E.J. Gold A colony cut off from Earth's civilization is suddenly scheduled for a military inspection. A masterfully ironic and visionary tale. Edition of # only. by A.J. Langguth Illustrated by E.J. Gold This amazing book -- out of print for many years -- tells of different Christs living in different times. "...this mad novel comes along to surprise and enchant us. A comic religious novel? Impossible, but it has happened. It is either one of the canniest rejections of the Christian enterprise in our time, or one of the subtlest expressions of admiration for Jesus... " The New Republic, # SF# # "Besides bringing back forgotten classics, these art edtions are gorgeous works of art and also fine examples of the bookbinder's craft. This is your chance to get in on the start of another Arkham House!" Robert Sheckley I # #-# ( # ) #-# in the Realm of Light Stained Glass Images From the Tibetan Thangka Tradition Original Light Studio Plus One  Minus One, Inc. P.O. Box # Santa Fe, New Mexico # (#) #-# White Tara Window by Jeanne Kristel #" x #" Designed by Dru Kristel What's (be difference between a" ordinary # for #-video set. Fr m The Union Label. PO Box # Nevada City CA # Don't ask your travel agent. I I Don't look in Grand McNally. There's no Grey Line Bus, W But there is a tour... it's You're glad that you planned ahead, aren't you? Don't you wish everyone did? Full of the sights, sounds, and situations that we'll be facing on the Other Side... n O #  Z X j coy o. o i  x CO n w m S? "J # n  VO o  r  X s  n  N z w cn CO !- M j -- t. ( -- i Ct cr Oj   IT) y i? Uj Featuring Illustrations by Hannah M. G. Shapero Edition Maximum, #  These are Collectible, Hand-Made Books! Hand-Bound Edition Gold Stamped Cover  Hand-pulled Serigraph Frontispiece  Signed by Author and Artist  French End papers  # Pre-Publication: #  Reserve your copy now! This one will go fast! For More Information on this and other Galaxy Classic Titles, Call #-#-#-# or #-#-# Galaxy Classics PO Box # Nevada City CA # Published by Sirius Science Fiction Presented by Galaxy Classics galaxy  by L.S. for "Reckless" #l Graphics Editions, Limited Limited Edition Serigraptis "Martha Graham" ity in the Sky, Cobblestone" "A Small Pond" "The Hermit"  Prites available on reaues  # Mill Street Suite E Grass Valley CA #-# #ephyz drum company s' The Truly Empowered Woman Creates Her Own Damn Universe. Sample Issue # postage PO Box # Nevada City CA # Call #-#-#-# or (#) #-# Glazed ceramic drums (I to r): Inanna #, Amber #, Nasrudin #, Darius # Say What if you found yourself in an eternal chamber, and could only have one drum in there in with you, what kind would it be? Zephyr Drum Company P.O. 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We'd like to announce galaxians galaxians J?i #i   t rw:rtiinc #fwtn Zaphotl A. flic Alien AlllMrs If you are a subscriber to Galaxy: The Galaxians Tape (regularly #) plus a Galaxians "Not For Human Consumption" Mug with the Galaxians image on one Ace of Cups Our newest design Good fortune will rain on those vary) on black, white, ash, or blue shirt. Specify color  size. CA residents add # tax. Send check or M.O. to: A   sena cnecK or ivi.u. to: w!sui  C twutcc OtfUjCiCl po box # penn valley ca # BW# Coffee Pot I # BW# # Creamer # # All products guaranteed. Your money refunded if you're not completely satisfied. BW#I Salt, Pepper and Cheese Shaker # BG#I Large Bowl, #" diameter # O. The children have a magic door in the corner of their room. But they grow up remembering a little of those childhood voyages, thinking only that it would be wonderful if it were really possible to return there. It is possible. . The ancients used many assisting factors, including herbal substances, sacred spaces, miniatures, chanting, drumming, and other tools in order to reach and work in these other worlds. But they didn't have the tank. J.Our activities, tasks, habits, jobs and responsibilities all conspire together to make us forget that there is much, much more to life. Here is freedom. I . Time and space two ways of looking at the same continuum. View one and the other is open and available to you at the same moment. Altered space equals altered time. The Samadhi Floatation Tank is a way into other spaces and other times. Samadhi Tank Company PO Box # Nevada City CA # For more information call (#) #-# #-#-# #. The tank is a safe and effective time altering mechanism. It is not guaranteed that you will return to the same world, and that's part of the adventure. The tank is a doorway. The tank is a time machine. space ship samadhi the original floatation tank... #. But you will know that it is your consciousness that empowers time and space, concealed by an ordinary piece of furniture in your living or bedroom. # . It's the doorway in the back of the closet; the opening in the trees that leads into other worlds. O . There it sits, a truly innocuous time machine, taking up only a few square feet in your home, that you can climb into and go anywhere. # . It's the only way to get out of this world alive. Editorial Reckless Me and My Shadow Crystal Knockout Dessert I'm Dying Out Here Dances with Elves Bad Moon Rising Sacrifice Syrup of Greep That's Progress The Difference a Day Makes Mutant Silky, Slinky, Fabulous -- To Die For Man in the Mailbag Trek Diary For Your Information E. J. Gold # Jean Marie Stine #I Mike Resnick # Alma Maria Garcia # Robert E. Rogoff # Robert E. Rogoff # Robert E. Rogoff # Cynthia Ward # James L. Wright, Jr # L.S. Silverthome # Greg Costikyan #I Lyn Nichols # Gregory Fitz Gerald # Marsh Cassady # Mark McLaughlin # Gordon R. Dickson #I  Bjo Trimble # Claude Needham, Ph.D... # Jiffy Thoroughthink's #-Star Book Review Claude Needham, Heather Valencia, Lin Larsen, Zoe, Tim Elston, Richard Hart, Stephanie Boyd, Seth Gold, Della Heywood, Kelly Rivera, Tom X, Frank Kelly Freas, "Me and My Shadow"  # Mike Resnick, "Man in the Mailbag" # Gordon R. Dickson California not-for-profit corporation. Main Office: # Pleasant Valley Road, Penn Valley, California #. Mailing Address: #-#. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction andor satire, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Authors and artists retain copyright of their works. All offers set forth in this magazine are subject to change without Illustrated by Finlay ightning flashed and thunder rolled across the  darkening sky as I lay flat on my back, staring through the steel-framed glass at the lower east side skyline. We lived on the tenth floor, which meant that almost everything else in the neighborhood was several stories below us. I could see all the way to the East River from my bedroom window; Brooklyn Heights glowed dimly in the pale moonless night. Distant sirens pierced the evening stillness; so did the honking, roaring, thrumming, screaming din that churned incessantly below us, day and night. If you've ever lived in a city like New York or Naples, you'd understand, then, what happened to me on my first night away from the city. Sure, I'd lived in Columbia, South Carolina, during most of the war -- near Fort Charleston -- but since #, had spent virtually every waking and sleeping moment of my life (one day was a much larger percentage of my life then, and passed far more slowly) thoroughly steeped in the kind of noise pollution unknown until modern times. Now that I'm much, much older (I'm at the age where a year goes by like a minute, and a minute goes by like a year -- or was that always the way it was?) the noise pollution seems even worse. Not today's noise pollution. Hell, I know that's worse. No, it's my own noise pollution, the sounds I grew up with, grew to expect. Like roentgens, it was part of my background radiation, the tabula overcrowdica upon which I painted the scenes of my life. That first night in the country was like an eternity in hell. I listened, at first, for any sound. The stillness and silence grew terrible and oppressive, hurting my eardrums with the sheer absence of grinding, perpetual auditory assaults. Maybe you know the sensation and the feeling. The overwhelming panic when you realize that there's probably never going to be a distant wailing siren growing ever-closer, answering a # robbery downstairs in #-B. I lay there shivering in the summer darkness, straining for the slightest engine hum, brake, horn, another horn, another horn, an ocean of horns and curses...no use; the insurmountable silence remained unmoved, an adamantine adversary, if I may quote a recently unpurchased story ms. Suddenly, sometime around three in the morning -- I had lain awake since forced retirement at nine P.M. -- a shot (now, of course, I realize it must have been a backfiring Plymouth Sedan which our neighbor, Ada Sparer, drove every morning down to the open-air market) rang out and reverberated against Bear Mountain out toward Saugerties. Reassured, my head fell back onto the softness of the goose-down pillow and I passed into a deep, dreamless sleep. Sirius Science Fiction leather bound limited editions with original illustrations A.J. Langguth, Jesus Christs Forry Ackerman, Sense of Wonder Robert Sheckley, Skulking Permit EJ. Gold's Guide to the Galaxy  Beyond the Unknown I # #-# The New Sven Fort Novelette Illustrated by Zoe he man his neighbors called Sven Fort took a sip from the screwdriver, a drag from a Camel "have a real cigarette") and looked at his guests eat and drink in the unseasonable October sunshine. His backyard held the usual eclectic Georgetown collection: one laughing clique included Irving, a dentist, a professor, a lobbyist, an attorney, and the toothy young senator from Massachusetts women were said to find irresistible. Sven sensed a diminutive presence. "More ribs, Senator Rankin?" Without waiting for an answer, he speared meat from the barbecue and dropped it on the Mississippian's plate next to JoAnn's potato salad. "Thank yah, Sven," the gnomish senator lifted a glass of Old Taylor. "Yah an' yo' pretty wife sho' put on a feed." Sven's glance went to JoAnn. He couldn't help admiring her trim figure and poise among their Georgetown neighbors. She was fussing with a baby, dark hair caught behind one ear, a rare smile on her kind, serene face. JoAnn wanted children -- but couldn't have them. (One reason Sven had married her; if ferrets ever forced him to flee this era, he didn't want to leave a woman behind burdened with children.) "You air a true Southerner, Sven," Rankin rolled away, a short, almost comic figure in his old-fashioned tie and collar, "even if yah hail from Norway." "Thank you, Senator." He wondered what the segregationist's opinion would be, if Rankin knew the truth about his ancestry. Although he couldn't help liking the senator personally -- Sven hated the man's politics. A racist and Red-baiter who branded the Civil Rights movement a communist plot, Rankin had helped kill discrimination in the U.S. But Sven could afford to be generous. He knew that long before his own era, the senator's side would have lost; and Americans of any color would be free to make what they might of their lives -- until the nuclear attack that created Central Authority and deprived everyone, equally, of rights. Sven found himself looking at the grey-haired black man behind the rented bar. He was mixing drinks -- the picture of wide-eyed, smiling happiness. "Yesah, bos', ladiez," he boomed, "names yo' po'sin." Hiring a black man to do work like this always made Sven uncomfortable (he knew he had more in common with the grinning bartender than the men and women who filled his lawn). But the agencies sent blacks, and what was he supposed to do ? refuse the man a job? "I was up before the Loyalty Board," a hulking man explained to Sven's neighbor, Gregory, as they approached, boilermakers in hand. "But I proved it was a snafu -- they wanted James Lee Carmichael and not James Henry. It was close -- even a rumor could ruin Capital Airlines." Sven drained his screwdriver, forking slabs of ribs on their plates. "You're a great guy, Sven," Gregory burbled. "Isn't he, Slim?" "A great guy," Slim agreed. They were both a bit drunk. Sven was a bit drunk too. Gazing out over his well-trimmed, orderly lawn, the well-dressed men and women who filled it, the secure, sprawling house beyond them (a product of the building boom remaking the face of the nation) -- Sven heaved a contented sigh. He had only arrived in this era five years earlier, at the end of the war, but he had been here long enough to know that this was the best of all possible worlds -- and the best of all possible times. "You've been gone, Owen, you don't know what's going on." It was Gregory's older brother, Joe, the journalist. "The government is riddled with communists and communist sympathizers. Explain this: in forty-five we had won the war and made the world safe for Democracy. We were the most powerful nation on Earth -- two years later half the globe is groaning under Soviet tyranny -- while the Brits, the Wops, and the Frogs are going Red. How come?" The speaker took a pull from a frosted glass, and poked the other in the chest. "We gave it away -- somebody gave it away. And they gave it away at Yalta." "There wasn't any sellout, Joe," his rabbity, mustached companion protested (Sven thought he was from the State Department), taking a pull from his own drink. "I should know. It was a series of bad decisions and misestimations of Russian intent. Roosevelt was dying -- he only lived two months. Besides, we couldn't have pacified the world -- there are too many hot spots. Let the Russians try." "Are you nuts?" Gregory's eldest brother said, wiping eggsalad from his tie. "Overnight the number under Communist domination increased from # to #. That's more than coincidence and bad decisions." Sven smiled, slathering sauce on the ribs -- the strains of "Scarlet Ribbons" wafting from a radio. The politics of this era seemed so innocent. Only a few thousands had been summoned before loyalty boards -- in the twenty-sixties review was a monthly routine. In the fifties, all the real problems lay in distant lands. No one who acted intelligently could get hurt -- not here in the midst of the United States, with its mighty defenses to protect them. He felt secure, knowing history had turned out no other way. " Experts believe Soviet accusation of spying against the Yugoslavian Ambassador may be the pretext for direct military intervention. " The radio was on for the Navy-Penn State scores. "On the domestic scene, Secretary of State Acheson said we should welcome any Soviet proposal for atomic control. Railroads canceled six hundred train runs today as the lengthening coal strike brought U.S. fuel stocks to a historic low. Meanwhile, the deadlocked steel strike has hit industrial production and the economy hard. " "Acheson 's either a Red -- or a fairy," someone spat. Sven looked for JoAnn, didn't see her -- and felt a pang. He'd come to like her very much in the two years since they had met and married -- she had an uncanny way of almost reading his mind. A quiet, composed woman, who said little and thought much, she had been working as a stenographer in the D.O.A. -- but she was an orphan, thrust on relatives all her life, and wanted a home of her own. JoAnn had been the one to suggest she quit work to become a homemaker. "Sven -- " Gregory's twelve year-old, Timmy, stared up through his glasses. "My dad says come meet someone." Sven followed the Alsop boy across the grass. "These strikes are Soviet inspired," a voice said. "Bull, it's the same as the Twenties. Profits have soared since the War -- but not wages. They had to strike." "Have you read the first part of the Heinlein serial in the new Astounding ?" Timmy's eyes glittered behind his lenses. "Neat, huh?" He was a science fiction buff. "It starts off with a bang, anyway." Sven was a buff, too. Optimistic stories of the future made him laugh -- but also seemed to pull him into the page, into the distant stars -- where the shadow of Central Authority was unknown. "Must be a mutant story like 'In Hiding.'" Timmy said. "Looks like it." Sven envied how easy Heinlein's superman hero made escaping a world's security forces seem. Timmy was earnest. "Sometimes I feel I'm a mutant." "So do I," Sven replied. "So do I." "Bette Davis just married her fourth husband." It was Senator Humphrey's wife. "Or was it the third?" "There's my dad," Timmy pointed. A group of men were packed around a figure holding court from Sven's lawnchairs. Gregory Alsop, standing by his younger brother, Stewart, another journalist, beckoned Sven. The junior senator from California was arguing with a man in a brown suit who sprawled back lazily on the lawnchair. The man had a highball, a cigarette, and an easy-going, genial laugh. "Nuts -- you've all got a phobia about the Reds, Dick," the man said, jowls swelling in a grin. "Communists have the same right to vote as anyone else, don't they? They got me elected. And I happen to think Stalin's proposal for world disarmament is a great thing." The man drained his highball and laughed again. His eyes, almost as slanted as Sven's own, crinkled in genuine merriment. Everyone laughed with him -- he had spoken with such evident insincerity -- even Nixon joined in. "Sven," Gregory said, "meet the man the Washington press corps voted 'The Worst Senator on Capitol Hill.'" The man in the lawnchair laughed along with everyone else. "Tail-gunner, meet my neighbor, Sven. It's his party." "Great shindig, Sven," Tail-gunner waved his glass. The screendoor banged, and the senator from Massachusetts emerged, straightening his tie. "'Lo, Joe," he gave a toothy smile. "How's tricks?"  "Why did they vote you Worst Senator?" Sven said, working on a screwdriver and a Pall Mall ("filters the smoke further and makes it mild"). Tail-gunner laughed, took a swig from his highball and waved his cigarette-hand modestly. It was a week later, and the party was at Gregory Alsop's. A blizzard blanketed the East, and everyone was gathered inside the statistician's home. The youngest Alsop brother, debonair in a white, single-breasted suit, took a puff and began: "Could've been when the Pepsi-Cola lobbyist was covering Tailer-gunner's gambling losses. They wanted sugar rationing lifted -- so Tail-gunner up and lied to the Senate. Told 'em the D.O.A. had found # surplus tons -- almost won the vote. Or could've been when Tail-gunner was close to a rich former Bund-supporter and championed Nazi officers who massacred captured U.S. troops." "What?" Sven gasped. Tail-gunner shrugged. "Lots of Germans in my state thought those boys were railroaded by vengeful Jews." "You should have seen him brow-beat the Army attorneys that jailed those Nazis," Stewart was admiring. "Or it could've been when Stranlund, the construction king, was covering his losses. Stranlund opposed subsidized housing for returning vets -- so Tail-gunner read the Senate a government report supporting his view. He made it up, too." Joe laughed with everyone else. Then he lit a cigarette, holding out his glass for a refill. A rumpled man bounced up and carried it to the bar. The same black man from the agency was mixing drinks with the same big-eyed friendly smile. (Sven had tried to talk to him after the party at his house -- but all he had gotten was some bowing, scraping and a few 'Sho' 'nough bos'es. What else had he expected? What was there to say?) "I was taught to fight by Injun Charlie," Tail-gunner explained. "He said, 'Hit them in the groin -- and keep hitting and hitting and hitting.'" (Everyone laughed.) Sven saw JoAnn with a group of women (he had lost sight of her earlier) and excused himself. "State Department's about to fire more than two hundred as 'undesirable' for security reasons," someone said. JoAnn stood by the picture-window with three other women -- as usual a silent participant smoking Kools, intense interest on her serene, sympathetic face. "A white woman who marries an African prince has an abnormal mind," Mrs. Rankin declared, sipping her Collins. The wife of the senator from Massachusetts smiled over her martini: "I think she's as courageous as any soldier." As Sven approached, JoAnn reached back to touch his face -- seeming to sense his presence. "Dear Sven." Her dark eyes were filled with fondness so intense it was disturbing. "We're talking about Ruth Khama." "She must love Prince Khama very much," Belinda added. Sven decided he needed a refill, and threaded his way through the hot, smoky room toward the bar. " -- Urey, the guy that helped develop the bomb says the Reds will pass us in the atomic bomb race in two years." Sven lurched. That drink, he decided, might steady him. "Alger Hiss, he's the smoking gun at Yalta." The eldest Alsop, Joe, and the rabbity, mustached man were at the bar. "Hiss was Oliver Wendell Holmes' clerk," the man from D.O.S. insisted. "Frankfurter talked him into government work. Dulles put him in the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. Are they Reds?" "Yez seh, bos'," the bartender gave Sven the same big smile. "Mo' th' same?" Sven nodded. Joe poked the man in the chest, firing a question. "The about-face Hiss did on knowing Chambers?" "Hiss'd known Chambers decades before -- when he recognized him -- Hiss said so." "The Pumpkin Papers, Owen?" thumping his friend again. "Forged. Chambers denied Hiss was involved in spying -- then when it was time to provide evidence Hiss committed an actual crime or face libel and perjury charges himself -- Chambers produces documents he's 'hidden' for twenty years." "The Woodstock typewriter, Owen?" the journalist asked. Both men signaled for refills -- the man behind the bar obliging with a big, broad smile. "Proves Hiss Soviet spy do that?" typeface." "Planted," the little man said. "Hiss' new lawyer found serial numbers that prove that typewriter wasn't manufactured until two months after the Pumpkin Papers were typed." Joe, a former naval pilot, leaned back belligerently. "To hear you talk, Owen -- there is no Red Menace." Sven didn't know who was right. The Russians were a danger -- they'd made that clear. And they had spy systems everywhere, trying to subvert every government in sight. But Sven couldn't believe the U.S. government and citizenry were as ripe with Reds, determined to bring about a Soviet form of government, as many believed. The red-haired senator from Massachusetts appeared (Sven didn't recall seeing him earlier.) "Dick's getting hot," he told Alsop and the D.O.S. man, sweeping them away. Sven remained behind, with a screwdriver and a Marlboro ("delightfully different"). He had seen a woman who looked like Adele, and needed to think. Adele was probably alive somewhere. He'd thought of her daily -- she was the only woman who had seen through to the real him. But finding her would hardly be fair. Adele would be in her forties now, with a world of living -- husband, children, # sunsets and sunrises -- between them. "Red Chinese, " a radio blared, "drove Nationalist forces from Kweilin today -- their last stronghold on the mainland. Britain 's Labor Party claimed victory in the coming elections and promised total nationalization of industry. The continuing U.S. coal strike caused panic in the blizzard-struck East as citizens -- from Indianapolis to Buffalo -- remained without coal for the third straight day. Secretary Aches on acknowledged Soviet attitudes were troublesome, but still spoke of finding common ground for agreement. " Sven felt slightly inebriated and motioned for another one. "Sho', bos'," the bartender's big eyes shone. "Mo' o' -- " He glanced around -- Sven realized they were alone. "Sven -- that is what they call you? What may it be my pleasure to serve you -- another screwdriver?" Sven nodded, speechless -- had he had one too many already? The wide-eyed, happiness had vanished with the accent -- weary intelligence stared from a lined face. "I wish to apologize for my rudeness last week. I realize you meant no harm," his eyes looked into Sven's as an equal. "But appearances, you understand -- my job -- regulations forbid fraternizing with guests." Sven nodded again, knowing the real issue that divided them. "You sound like a college man," he said finally. The weary eyes grew pained. "There's not much work in bio-chemistry for a man of my color. I was fortunate to -- " He straightened, eyes wide, smile big and happy again. "Yez ladiez, names yo' po'sin." ("Name's Andrew," he whispered.) Sven moved away following the sound of ragtime -- he found the den packed solid. Nixon was on it tonight. Finishing with a glissando, he stood and said: "Did you hear what the Soviet refugee said to the hooker: 'I thought the fifty dollars was just for the blanket!"' He wagged his head, crying "You ain't seen nothin' yet" in his best Durante imitation. (Laughter and applause.) Sven spotted JoAnn, laughing too, standing next to Kennedy on the far side of the den. Sven was thinking it was time to go home and that he should fight his way through to get her -- when Tail-gunner grabbed him. "Lend me a hand, Sven." Tail-gunner pulled him into the kitchen -- where three men sat around a table. Tail-gunner pushed over an ashtray, gave Sven a light. "I'm up for election. And -- " an embarrassed grin " -- I can't exactly run on my record. I need an issue to bamboozle the voters. Something I can hit at and keep hitting at." Tail-gunner drained his highball, pointed with a cigarette. "Bob recommends the Saint Lawrence Seaway -- Charlie, guaranteed pensions for the elderly -- but neither's sexy. Father Walsh says fight Reds -- but people are sick of hearing about Reds." He handed his glass to Charlie. "Maybe a new menace? Problem is -- in a democracy you can't use Jews or Niggers." Charlie brought the refill. "Doctors -- maybe?" Tail-gunner mused. "Bankers -- no, they've got money." "Sven -- " it was Timmy. "Can I borrow Astounding to reread 'Gulf? A friend lost my copy." Father Walsh leaned forward. "What's that, Tim?" "A story about mutants," the boy said." "Supermen with big IQs -- caused by radiation," Sven explained. "You know, science fiction." "Men from Mars?" Bob said blankly. "Here's to Martians," Tail-gunner raised his glass. Sven felt fingers on the back of his neck. "Come on," JoAnn said. "It's time to go home."  "Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America -- and all the ships at sea, " Sven could hear the radio over the sounds of laughter. "The Soviets warned today against U.S. interference in 'internal Chinese affairs. ' Secretary Acheson went a good way toward total recognition of a total enmity between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Nationally: The coal strike continued and temperatures remained in the below zero range -- Ford announced it was laying off all # workers indefinitely. Meanwhile, Senator Kefauver charged that the pending Equal Rights Amendment would mean rape was no longer a crime, and women would be drafted. " Sven stood in the Nixons' front hall, lighting a Lucky ("L.S.M.F.T."), and handing his coat to an ebony maid. (JoAnn had a late appointment with the hairdresser and was joining him when she was finished.) In the smoky living room, his host finished a drink while turning the radio down. "I've got a bet on with Tail-gunner," he explained. "Play us something, Dick," Kennedy said, drink in hand. Sven saw Pat's lips purse. "He just got home, let him rest," she interposed. "Play 'Someone to Watch Over Me,"' Joe Alsop insisted, waving a glass. "It was Pappy's favorite." "Waf, ah don't know," Dick joked, doing Jimmy Stewart. "But ah rec'on -- if you insist... Wal' aw'right." Sven heard laughter from the dining room --  decided it was time for a drink. The bar was across a spacious room filled with mahogany antiques, smoke and people. "If you ask me," an accented feminine voice was saying, "in some ways women are not men's equal -- oh no, we are not. In other ways we are their superiors -- " (A foreign comedienne, Sven thought) " -- oh yes, their superiors." "Men will fight for freedom," a male voice " -- but when they are free and life is easy, the fight goes out of them." Sven saw several faces he knew -- including the black one behind the bar. Sven smoked a cigarette, and waited while the crowd thinned out. "G'd ev'n', seh. Names -- " The big, wide-eyed smile disappeared -- the wise, grizzled face stared out. "Sven -- you're no Swede, no matter what they think -- " nodding at the crowd. "There's more than a hint of the tarbrush in you. But everyone has secrets -- and none of us are exactly what we seem." Sven wanted to lean forward and unburden his whole story -- #, CA, the war, ferrets, Thought Police, the Temporal Transverter -- the dying Swede who'd bequeathed his naturalization papers. But to speak would risk everything -- his house -- his job -- JoAnn -- the quiet peace of the fifties. They'd think him insane -- and if he were believed, he would only be burdening the present with the dark shadow of the future. Yet Sven found he could not lie to those eyes. "What's in a name?" he said, shrugging in acknowledgment. Then: "Isn't there something I can do to help you -- " The man stepped back and cold, hard pride came into his face. His voice stung: "I don't need -- Yez 'em, lit' le lady -- " his head was bobbing " -- names yo' po'sin." "Got a light, stranger?" JoAnn (dark hair piled high, a wing beside each ear) bent forward. Sven lit hers and his. "You weren't in the living room, so I figured you'd be here." Her eyes smiled at him, serene and tender. She sipped her martini. "One of the unmarried girls at D.O.A. is preggers. She'll have to move, of course, and make up a dead husband -- or face a back-alley abortion mill." Once word was out, Sven knew, the woman would lose her job and apartment and be ostracized by almost everyone, friends included -- that was the dark side of the fifties. There was a long silence. "Have you seen Belinda?" Sven finally asked. "I'll find her." JoAnn rose as if reading his mind. When she was gone, Sven realized he had wanted a chance to apologize to Andrew -- and then, what had there been to say to JoAnn? They spent so much time together, anyway. But Gregory's older brother and his friend from State staggered up to the bar together. "Granted there may be one or two Red spies in our government," the small, mustached man said. "We've got our own in Moscow -- but it's not riddled with them -- not enough to do real harm. All the spy cases were smoke and no fire." Joe poked him in the stomach. "The Amerasia magazine case? Jaffee was a friend of Browder, head of the U.S. Party -- he visited the Red Consulate and met with Chinese Reds." The other's glasses gleamed: "A journalist trying to get the big picture -- you don't get it from government P.R." "Printing secret D.O.S. China assessments word for word, Owen. Filing cabinets crammed with restricted documents, including military reports on Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army, the Japanese fleet, bombing Germany." "There was no evidence information was given to the Reds. They were our allies then -- and had access to all that stuff. The entire case died in court. Besides, what spy would steal documents and print them in their magazine?" "Strings were pulled high up -- evidence suppressed," Joe insisted. "Larson confessed later. Commies in the government were afraid the truth would leak out. You're defensive because some D.O.S. people were implicated." Sven took his screwdriver, looked in the living room where Nixon was still playing and clowning. The Kennedys were standing together, laughing -- JoAnn, by the piano, seemed to stare at them. "Mr. Sven, here's your Astounding.' I ' Timmy stared up. "My dad said you'd be here." He grew thoughtful. "Do you think there really are mutants like Timothy Johns and Kettle-belly Baldwin?" "The head of Navy atomic research says if war comes, we'll see # U.S. dead the first day," a man said. "If they're like those in 'Gulf,' I hope so," Sven replied. He wished some superior force had guided life in his own age. But history could only be changed in the minor details -- subsequent events always quickly worked themselves out so that its basic course remained unaltered. "I'm not sure Heinlein's hero was a superman," Timmy said thoughtfully. "He died at the end. A real superman would have outsmarted the villain -- and lived." "The U.S. Commies are moving their headquarters to Harlem," a man said. "That's no surprise -- most of the  "The Red scare's election propaganda," their dentist neighbor, Peress, replied. "After two decades -- Republicans were insane to get in office. So they branded all Democrats 'liberals' and all liberals 'Red.' Now the whole country's a powderkeg -- ready to go for each other's throats." By the time Sven had stepped outside for some fresh air and a smoke and returned, he found his host, the Alsops and several other men gathered around a radio in the den. "Come in," Dick said. "Tail-gunner's gonna lose a bet." "With his rep, the Republicans decided to keep him low profile," Stewart explained. "They sent him to address a women's club in Wheeling." (Everyone laughed.) "He bet me fifty bucks he'd outfox them and make national headlines from Wheeling," Nixon explained. " -- Philco, " the announcer said. "Tonight in Wheeling, Senator McCarthy made stunning charges that have aroused a firestorm of controversy. Here, via transcription -- " "Damn," Nixon said admiringly, "the s.o.b. did it!" " The world is threatened by a sinister conspiracy. " (Everyone laughed.) "That menace has wrecked the peace we fought for -- plotted the rise of communism -- undermined our government, economy and way of life -- and plans to eliminate or enslave every man, woman and child on Earth. " Hidden among us are blasphemous mutations -- spawned by exposure to the atom -- whose brains possess monstrous intelligence. These mutants -- in appearance ordinary people -- call themselves, Homo Novis, the New Men -- and are conspiring to replace the human race. "The existence of a sinister conspiracy of mutants, concealed in our midst may sound like science fiction -- but it's sober truth." ("Tail-gunner, sober?" Stewart laughed -- and was hushed.) "I have here secret D.O.D. files documenting this menace. I quote: The intellects of Homo Novis are as far beyond Homo Sapiens as the Sun is beyond a candle -- Homo Sapiens is sure to be displaced by New Man. Unquote. "I know you 're asking, 'If the government knows -- why doesn 't it act? ' The proof of these mutants 'power is that the government knows -- and does nothing. I have in my hand a list of # of these monsters who have plotted war, crime, poverty, communism, racial division -- names known to the D.O.D. -- but who still walk the Earth, planning our deaths. "The chips are down -- the government is in their power. The gulf between us and them is narrow -- but we can never close it. Yet now -- while their number is small -- for our children 's sake -- we can root out and destroy them -- before it 's too late. " (Laughter.) "I think # is the number of genius-level employees in federal government," Gregory said. "I wonder where he got that crazy idea," Nixon laughed. "Maybe not so crazy," someone added. "It explains "We interrupt for a statement from Senator McCarthy. " The familiar voice boomed: "Let me thank the American people for the telegrams pouring in. Many name -- or report activities of -- the New Men. Most asked for the # names -- but the D.O.D. list is in my luggage. " ("Of course," Stewart said.) " However , I can name one of the ringleaders. This man has degrees from Yale, Cambridge and the Sor bonne -- an IQ of # plus -- yet he 's disguised himself as a menial. His name is Alexander Hamilton Jones -- and he 's living in the heart of our nation's government -- masquerading as a bartender. " Glass shattered. "My god, that's me!" Every eye turned to face the black man in the white coat -- frozen behind the bar. Shit, Sven thought, draining the screwdriver. What have I done? Timmy -- Tail-gunner -- he had crossed two wires that should never have touched. What would happen next?  " You can 't fight it, Miltie, " the girl on the flickering Magnavox was saying. "It's bigger than both of us." The star turned to his guests: "Dean, Jerry -- help me. I'll do anything. Put a star on your dressing room -- " "What dressing room? " Sven took his steak off the Hotpoint, a Pabst from the Frigidaire, set both on the table (all their furniture was Colonial-style) -- and shook an Old Gold ("for a treat -- instead of a treatment") from the pack on the Maytag. "That too. I'll even pay your salaries. I'll make it up to you some -- " "Make-up? Did someone say 'make-up'?" A diminutive figure ran up and smacked the star with a huge powderpuff. Sven carried his dinner into the living room, and settled back in an easy chair. JoAnn was at a Civil Defense meeting -- so he was 'batching' it tonight. Dancing cigarettes were replaced by news. "The big story -- " the announcer said " -- is the incredible public response to Senator McCarthy 's claim last night that a conspiracy of mutants threatens to destroy mankind. " Sven had been so busy with problems on the new bipolar junction transistor -- he had forgotten Tail-gunner's speech. have flooded the Senate naming teachers, lawyers, scientists, authors, Mensa members -- as mutants. Hundreds have lost jobs and been driven from their homes. Communities say they are afraid to take a chance. " Sven heard JoAnn open the front door and go in to change only dimly -- beer and Old Gold were forgotten. "A long line of people appeared before the Senator 's committee -- " Photo: Jammed Senate chamber " -- to swear they had lost businesses, jobs, promotions, even wives to New Men. Farmers testified neighbors who prospered while they failed were mutants. Others claimed proof of mutant influence on government, financial and social institutions. " Sven put down his steak untasted, groped blindly and lit a second Old Gold. He was numb with shock. It was too much like the "Fantasizer" hunts of his own age -- how he escaped them, he had never known. How many sent to the front? How many shipped to labor camps? "Grilled by the Senator was Alexander Hamilton Jones -- an accused mutant leader. " Film: Tail-gunner's flabby good-humor was now slit-eyed, porcine cruelty. "Isn't it true you think you are better than normal people ?" Andrew was sweating. "No.  believe in democ -- " "Didn 't you write 'Something sets me apart from ordinary men '? " Andrew looked bewildered. "That was a college poem -- it was abo -- " Tail-gunner cut him off. "And isn 't it -- " "Sven -- " JoAnn stood in the doorway, wearing one of the diaphanous housecoats that were the rage -- her body silhouetted through it by the light behind. A plume of smoke trailed from her nostrils; she held a martini in one hand. "Sven, I want -- " Sven turned to her in anguish. "Have you heard about Tail-gunner and this mutant thing? People denouncing neighbors -- panicked over shadows. It's incredible -- it's terrible -- unreal. Can you believe it's happening?" JoAnn moved forward, eyes reflective, sad. "If only you had said something like that to me earlier. If only you had said anything. We went out a lot and you made me laugh -- when we were dating." Sven cringed inside. It was true -- when he had met JoAnn, he had known she was a quiet girl. But she had reminded him of Adele -- and he had gone out of his way to charm her interest. After they were married, it had been easy to slip back into the habit of silence he'd learned during a lifetime under the watchful eye of CA. He had wanted her to make an effort to see the real him -- like Adele, Sven realized. But she wasn't Adele -- he had wrecked JoAnn's life chasing a foolish dream. He seemed to wreck everything he touched. And yet the night he met her -- she had done all the talking. "Did you ever wonder why I was so talkative that first time?" she said, again seeming to read his thoughts. "You were the only person I'd ever met more withdrawn than I was. I wanted to bring you out of your shell." "I'm sorry," was all he could say under the crushing weight of his wrongs. JoAnn came closer -- swaying over him. "Sven, I -- " There was a plaintive longing he had never heard before. Bing-bong. The clear, metallic sound froze them -- a Andrew stood on the porch. His face was no longer grizzled -- it was aged. His suit was tom and blood was seeping from a small cut under one eye. "I have no one close in Washington -- I had little idea where else to -- " "Come in." He hadn't expected it, but wasn't surprised. The living room was empty -- JoAnn had gone to bed. "This is madness." Andrew's black face gleaming with sweat. "They're investigating my entire family -- uncles, aunts, cousins. Half have lost jobs. They have normal IQs -- but because we're related, they're suspected of hiding their real IQs." "What will you have to drink?" Sven said (aware of "My brother's home was burned down." His eyes were haunted, horror-filled. " -- Sorry, don't drink. Thank god they don't get radio where my mother lives. At her age -- " Sven drained his screwdriver, refilled the glass and lit another Old Gold. He offered the pack to Andrew. "The Senator had a list of everyone I ever knew." The laughing face now sagged in despair. " -- Thanks, don't smoke. He asked me if I didn't think it was funny so many had high IQs -- or was I pretending I was too dumb to see that. He kept hounding at it -- hounding." (And Sven had thought their politics harmless!) For a moment Andrew's eyes seemed to cross over into madness. "I'm used to taking heat for my color. I've been jailed in Biloxi and beaten in Boston. But my IQ..." Sven could think of nothing to say -- he leaned forward and put his hand on the man's knee reassuringly. Andrew put his head in his hands. "I never heard of the New Men -- and tomorrow the Senator says he has a witness who can prove I am one...Oh god, what am I going to do?" "For one thing," Sven said, "sleep in the den." At that moment, a heavy, official pounding shook the front door. Thought Police! Sven shuddered. Then realized CA was far behind (or far ahead). The police of this era were saints in comparison -- besides, he had nothing to fear from them -- and it was probably only a neighbor. But it wasn't neighbors or the Thought Police on his front porch -- it was something far more dangerous. A sea of faces -- sullen, suspicious, threatening, spreading into the freezing dark. A few Sven recognized -- most were strangers. Sven knew -- before they said anything -- why they had come. "We saw that mutant guy go in here." Sven could hear their collective sound, a sinister animal rustle. Peress, the dentist from across the street, stood between a huge man wearing a coat and a sandy-haired man with faded eyes. Their breath steamed. "What do you want?" Sven shivered in the cold playing for time (he had a sick sense of what was to come -- but no idea what to do). "We're the neighborhood Vigilance Committee," Peress said. "We just want to talk." "Don't lie," the sandy-faced man said. "We plan to put an end to the danger him and his kind pose to real people -- and we plan to start now." The big man moved -- his hand held a noosed rope. Sven felt that hideous, helpless sense of unreality return. This can't be happening here, he thought. Not in the nineteen fifties, in the midst of orderly suburban Georgetown -- in the Warrens of # -- but not here. An ugly, menacing growl went up from the crowd. "Hang 'im now." "Quit stalling." "Bust in." Sven was soaked with sweat despite the cold. Whatever happened, it would all be over before the police could arrive -- if they weren't sympathetic to the committee. Suddenly he was back in the Warrens -- and midnight visits from the Safety Committees. Sven knew what followed. He had no intention of giving Andrew up. But he couldn't stop this mob -- and there was JoAnn to think of. Tail-gunner, damn him, had created this mess (though Sven knew this wasn't true) -- Tail-gunner should have to fix it. Then -- standing there in the icy October night, the yellow light of the porch lamp casting radiance down over a hate-filled world that had seemed so serene only a few hours ago -- Sven saw how Tail-gunner might "fix" the situation, after all. "You don't understand," Sven announced. "I'm a friend of the Senator's. This man is in my custody to make sure he's at the hearing...You boys don't want to get me -- or yourselves -- in dutch with Congress." The sandy-haired man frowned. The big man growled: "How do we know -- " "It's true," Peress said. "I've seen Tail-gunner here." "Want to come in and phone the Senator?" Tail-gunner would probably like the idea of Andrew being in his "custody." "Naw, that's okay," the sandy-haired man said. "We don't want trouble with Congress -- that's the Justice Department. If he's under detention -- that's different." He turned to the crowd. "It's okay, men. This man's working for Tail-gunner Joe. The mutant's his prisoner." Sven sighed in relief. He had dealt with a minor crisis -- the major was yet to come. How was he to help Andrew -- and the others -- and undo the damage he had caused?  Sven and Andrew sat facing Tail-gunner in a vast, smoky chamber packed with spectators, reporters -- and witnesses eager to testify to the existence of mutants. Sven saw Joe Alsop scribbling notes, Senator Rankin, the junior senator from California with Mrs. Kennedy -- and JoAnn, squeezed between Peress and an elderly woman in a veiled hat. Throughout the morning Andrew's teachers, schoolmates and friends had been quizzed about his unusual they could only be explained by mutation. Those who did not, received a merciless verbal beating. "Andy's bright," said his fifth grade teacher, "but he's no more -- " Tail-gunner: "Didn't you say he could 'almost read' your mind?" "I only meant -- " Tail-gunner: "Didn't you once ask how 'a woman like that could produce a child like Andy'?" "Yes, but -- " Tail-gunner: "That's all." Now, with the groundwork out of the way, A dapper, medium-sized black man in a silky grey suit strode up, was sworn in, and sat down before a microphone. ("My god," Andrew whispered. "That's Weasel Willy -- he'll do anything for money.") easy-going self, "when did you first hear of the New Men?" jus' befo' the war. They 'vited me ta join count'a Ize so smart." (Sven waited for the laughter -- surely people could tell how ridiculous this was.) "And just what were the aims of the New Men, Mr. "They waz a secret organization that was super-smart 'cause their fo'ks waz hit by x-rays. They waz gonna 'sterminate reg'lar fo'ks and take over the world." An audible gasp ran around the room. Satisfaction narrowed Tail-gunner's eyes. "And who were the leaders of the New Men?" "Ize don' know all of 'ems -- but I do know one -- and thair he sits -- Mr. Andrew Jacks'n Jones." Even though it was what everyone had been expecting -- the chamber broke into commotion: flashbulbs popped, reporters dashed for phones, the chairman pounded for order. "Now," the clerk announced, "will Mr. Andrew Jackson Jones take his place before this hearing." Andrew complied -- looking sober and responsible in a brown suit and tie. Again, Tail-gunner's whole demeanor changed in an instant. His eyes became pockets of malice, his fleshy face brutal, coarse. "Mr. Jones, let's go back to the question." "According to committee rules," Andrew interrupted, "I'm allowed to read an opening state -- " "You don't need an opening statement," Tail-gunner cut in. "Just answer one question." "I want to read -- " "Just answer 'yes' or 'no': how do you explain -- " "I am not now -- and never have been a member of the New Men -- nor had I ever heard of the New Men until -- " "Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones. Answer this question. You are ordered to answer this question -- or I am going to keep you here as long as it takes." Andrew, wearily: "All right -- what is your question?" "Your parents and relatives are normal. How do you account for your IQ -- if you aren't a mutant? Do you know the odds against someone having an IQ like yours "Senator many people with high IQs are born to -- " "Just answer my question." Andrew frowned. "What question?" Tail-gunner sneered: "Don't tell me that someone with an IQ as large as yours -- can't understand a simple question -- " Sneeringly: "But I'll repeat it: if you are IQ?" Andrew looked around, desperate, pleading -- surely, his eyes said, everyone must see the absurdity of this. "I -- I can't, Senator. No one can explain why -- " "You can't explain it -- that's all." Tail-gunner wheeled, strode to his table, picked up a folder, whirled accusingly. "Now let's take the matter of your disguise." "Senator, I was never disguised -- " "Mr. Jones -- your vitae: Degree in Chemistry, Sorbonne #; Biochemistry, Cambridge, #. Grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Institute, etc." Tail-gunner paused. "Is that accurate?" "Yes...but -- " Tail-gunner snapped the folder shut. "Yet, we find you pretending to be a bartender -- affecting the accent of an ignorant coon -- and you don't call that a disguise?" "Senator," desperately, "I needed a job -- " Tail-gunner turned in a fury. "Are you saying a man with your credentials can't get a better job than bartender in the U.S. of A. -- just because of his color?" Too late Andrew -- and Sven -- saw Tail-gunner's trap. Whichever answer Andrew gave -- he alienated the public and the papers. "I...Senator this is craz -- " Tail-gunner, boring in: "Are you aware that the Daily Worker , the organ of the Communist Party, says that black men are denied opportunity in America...You don't endorse the official position of the Communist Party -- do you?" Andrew, indignantly: "Of course not -- " "Which is it, Mr. Jones? Are you a mutant -- or a Red?" Andrew licked his lips and looked around appealingly. "I -- this is ridic -- " Tail-gunner towered above him, thundering. "Are you a mutant -- or a Red, Mr. Jones -- answer the question!" Andrew's eyes moved wildly seeking a way out -- but there was none. Tail-gunner's voice lisped with vituperative malice. "A mutant -- or a Red? " he shouted. The farce had gone far enough, Sven thought. He might have waited too long already. "Tail-gunner -- " Sven tapped the microphone, his words echoing around him. " -- Tail-gunner? Can I say something?" In one of those baffling changes of mood, Tail-gunner laughed. "Sure, Sven -- go ahead. We're drinking buddies." Sven beckoned -- JoAnn led the veiled, elderly woman up. "This," Sven announced, sweaty, faint and sick -- "is Mrs. Eulalie Jones." The wrinkled black woman unpinned her hat and veil. "Mrs. Jones is eighty-seven and the mother of Andrew Jackson Jones. She has never left Chester Gap, West Virginia before -- and has never been exposed to radiation." "Thayt's ri'," the faint voice wavered. "Andy's ma boy -- an' Ah nev'r ben nair this heir radimation." Again flashbulbs popped, reporters scurried to the phones -- and the spectators were gaveled into silence. "That's a lie!" Tail-gunner shouted, waving a fistful of papers. " -- This woman's no more his mother than I am." The woman staggered, every eye on her. "Mr. Jones' real mother is Hazel Jones of Greensboro," Tail-gunner stalked forward, glaring " -- and she was X-rayed for a broken bone six months before Andrew was bom. This woman -- " he pointed and she took a trembling step back " -- is a fake -- and a former streetwalker. And I have copies of her birth certificate to prove it!" Tail-gunner thundered -- shaking the papers in her face. The woman's watery eyes blinked -- her mouth opened -- she seemed to be trying to speak. Suddenly her eyes rolled upward -- Sven's hand stretched out, JoAnn moved forward -- but before anyone could reach her -- she gave way at the knees like a doll. Reporters and photographers rushed forward. Tail-gunner, for once -- was caught totally by surprise. Sven snatched the papers from Tail-gunner's hand, scanned them quickly. "Senator -- " Sven held the papers where everyone could see " -- it might interest people to know this is nothing more than a series of unpaid laundry bills -- " Sven thrust them into the hands of several reporters. "And this woman -- as you very well know -- is Andrew Jackson Jones's mother -- she has never been exposed to radiation -- Mr. Jones is no mutant -- there is no mutant conspiracy -- it's an idea you got from Timmy Alsop while drunk." Tail-gunner had turned his back to Sven and begun to rummage through a briefcase. Sven leaned closer to the microphone -- he wanted Tail-gunner to hear every word -- he wanted everyone to hear. "Tail-gunner, until this moment, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Little did I dream that you could be so low as to do an injury to that saintly grandmother. Have you no sense of decency. Tail-gunner? At long last -- have you no sense of decency left? If she lives -- she and her son -- and thousands of others -- will always bear a scar -- needlessly inflicted by you. If it lay in my power to forgive you -- I would. But your forgiveness will have to come from a higher power. Let us trouble these two no further, Tail-gunner -- you've done enough." Every eye turned upon the junior senator from Wisconsin -- and there was scorn and disapproval in every eye. Then the room exploded in a frenzy. That, for Sven, was luckiest of all. No one heard Andrew, kneeling over his mother, hiss coldly at Sven: "How could you, you son-of -- " Or saw one eye open in that wrinkled face as she whispered. "Hush up, Andy. White folks ain't the only one's can pull th' flim-flam." Tail-gunner showed up at his barbecue the next weekend. Sven couldn't believe it when he heard the familiar, genial, laugh coming from his den. Sven set his drink aside, ground out his cigarette, handed his spatula to a surprised Humphrey, and stalked out of the kitchen. (He had no idea until later that he was shaking and white with rage.) He seemed to be moving through a smoky, unreal world of reckless conversation. "We're a welfare state. People are against it for others -- but they want that pension, crop support, subsidy, scholarship or grant for themselves." "First China -- then Korea -- then Viet Nam or Thailand -- they'll fall like dominos if we don't do something." Every step of the way Sven could feel his rage at the fifties building. They appeared so orderly, bland, serene on the surface -- but beneath that surface was all the greed, heedlessness and cruelty that underlay the twenties, his own time, and all the other ages of humanity. If it weren't for JoAnn, there would be nothing to hold him here. "I've just read the preliminary Congressional report files were combed and the thousands who were grilled, only seventy-five were ever accused of Communist activities. Only two were brought to trial." "In a hardening of attitude, Secretary Acheson announced a state of "Cold War" exists between the U.S. and Russia. Factories across the nation began to close today as the coal strike continued. United Mine Workers head , John L. Lewis, refused to predict when the strike might end. Miners have remained on strike, defying courts and Lewis himself. " Sven came on the target of his anger the way he had the first time: Tail-gunner was holding court behind a laughing crowd of men, lounging in one of Sven's chairs. "Yo' sho' took a beatin' in the papers this morning," Rankin was saying. "Did you see the Washington Post ?" Someone whistled. Tail-gunner laughed without embarrassment, gesturing with a cigarette as he drained a highball. "I wouldn't call it a vote of confidence -- but I don't feel I've been lynched." "Reds. You should have gone after those atheists," Father Walsh interrupted. "China didn't fall by accident. The same State Department traitors who betrayed us at Yalta -- betrayed China. The whole D.O.S. is Red. Someone has to root them out before the whole world ends up Red." Sven strode through the crowd, opened his mouth -- "Hi Sven," Tail-gunner's eyes crinkled in genuine delight. "I've been wondering when you would come by. What the hell are you trying to do -- avoid me?" Sven stood there for a moment -- feeling like a fool. What was there he could say to a man like this? Tail-gunner was as unaware of his own cruelty or the pain others suffered as if he were an inhuman mutant himself. Whatever Sven said would roll off Tail-gunner's back with that easy, liquored laugh. As for the others, what could he tell them? That they were children playing with matches -- worrying over all the wrong dangers while America headed straight down the crapper? Sven turned on his heel -- and walked away. Tail-gunner's response confirmed everything Sven believed. "What's eating him?" Tail-gunner said. Sven went toward the house. "Don't you get it, Joe?" the rabbity man was saying, "Chambers, Larsen and Elizabeth Bentley -- they were all paid informers." Joe looked up, gritted his teeth. "Owen, no agency of the American government would ever sink that low. The practice of putting political informers on government payrolls has been condemned since Tacitus. As turncoats, their characters are suspect -- and what happens when they have told all they know but want to continue their income?" Owen laughed, tossed back a highball. "Oh, well, it's something you'll never have to worry about," Joe said. "Everyone knows the Lattimores are okay." "Hey, Sven..." He was in no mood to talk to anyone. He needed to be alone -- to think. The party could get along without him for a while. "What do you know about the spy trials and loyalty boards? Peress says it's a Republican plot to discredit the Democrats and purge government and schools of those with opposing political views. He says the monied interests that run the country panicked when the depression revealed their financial misdealings, and Roosevelt was elected to curb them. He says their branding his policies "socialism" and "communism" -- and those who supported him as secret Bolsheviks. They started a campaign based not on acts -- but treason; not on deeds -- which are subject to proof or disproof -- but on predilections of the mind. For what traitor would admit his treason? So we came to depend on the turncoat who had been inside the conspiracy, supposedly discovered conscience, and decided to tell all -- truthfully, of course. He says that in its entire history, the Un-American Activities Committee grilled thousands of supposed Reds, but never a single Nazi...What do you think?" "It would explain why all our allies are right-wing dictators." As Sven opened the bedroom door he bumped into JoAnn. She was tucking her blouse inside her skirt, and adjusting a bra strap -- her hair was disheveled, she was breathing hard. The bed beyond her was dented. Her eyes met his. They both knew what had happened. In a way, Sven felt relieved. He had no more ties left to this era -- he could leave without guilt. "Oh Sven -- " she said, reaching out to touch his cheek. "Poor Sven. I didn't mean for you to find out this way -- but I want a divorce." "Who is it?" Sven's mind flashed back over the last few weeks -- reviewed who had been where when. "Kennedy," he said. "The senator from Massachusetts?" JoAnn laughed. "John Kennedy? Good god, no. He's too stuck on himself." Sven frowned. Who?" "Dick," she said it as if it ought to be obvious. "Nixon?" he said incredulously. "Why?" "He makes me laugh," she said simply. Sven had been right. There was no place for hi here any more. No place for him anywhere -- i anywhen. Just by being here he had brought two elements together that would never otherwise have met -- and the results had been disaster. Sven slipped out of the house, moved toward the garage. The Transverter was there. He had no idea where he was going. He only knew he could remain here no longer. "Governor Talmadge declared Georgia will fight the suit by Negro parents under the #th Amendment to equalize education in the state's schools. Following successful convictions of the top ten of the U.S. Communist Party, Attorney General McGrath indicted officers of Amtorg Trading, Russia 's purchasing agency in this country, for failure to register as foreign agents. " "Security must," Sven heard someone say as he slipped out the gate, "be one object of a good society but other and more important objects are productivity, excellence, creativeness, adventure, honor and the chance to take a chance." Sturgeon, Gold, Costello, and Tail-gunner Joe. Sven, JoAnn, Gregory, Belinda and Timmy Alsop, Andrew Jackson Jones, Weasel Willy, and of course Eulalie Jones are fictional. As usual all other characters are real, and do and speak exactly as they did. Most other dialogue is paraphrased from publications of the period. ##-# Illustrated by Metzger t all began when -- No. Strike that. I don't know when it all began. Probably I never will. But it began the second time when a truck backfired and I hit the sidewalk with the speed and grace of an athlete, which surprised the hell out of me since I've been a very wwathletic businessman ever since the day I was born -- or born again, depending on your point of view. I got up, brushed myself off, and looked around. About a dozen pedestrians (though it felt like a hundred) were staring at me, and I could tell what each of them was thinking: Is this guy just some kind of nut, or has he maybe been Erased? And if he's been Erased, have I ever met him before? Do I owe him? Of course, even if we had met before, they couldn't recognize me now. I know. I've spent almost three years trying to find out who I was before I got Erased -- but along with what they did to my brain, they gave me a new face and wiped my fingerprints clean. I'm a brand new man: two years, eleven months, and seventeen days Jordan. Not a real catchy name. I'll admit, but it's the only one I've got these days. I had another name once. They told me not to worry about it, that all my memories had been expunged and that I couldn't dredge up a single fact no matter how hard I tried, not even if I took a little Sodium-P from a hypnotist, and after a few weeks passed I had to agree with them -- which didn't mean that I stopped trying. Erasures never stop trying. Maybe the doctors and technicians at the Institute are right. Maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe the knowledge of what I did would drive the new improved me to suicide. But let me tell you: whatever I did, whatever any of us did (oh, yes, I speak to other Erasures; we spend a lot of time hanging around the newstape morgues and Missing Persons Bureaus and aren't all that hard to spot), it would be easier to live with the details than the uncertainty. Example: "Good day to you, Madam. Lovely weather we're having. Please excuse a delicate inquiry, but did I rape your infant daughter four years ago? Sodomize your sons? Slit your husband open from crotch to chin? Oh, no reason in particular; I was just curious." Do you begin to see the problem? Of course, they tell us that we're special, that we're not simply run-of-the-mill criminals and fiends; the jails are full of them. Ah, fun and games at the Institute! It's quite an experience. We cherish your individuality, they say as they painfully extract all my memories'. (Funny: the pain lingers long after the memories are gone.) Society needs men with your drive and ambition, electricity through my spasmodically-jerking body. You had the guts to buck the system, they point out as they shred my face and give me a new one. With drive like yours there 's no telling how far you can go now that we 've imprinted a new personality and a new set of ethics onto that magnificent libido, they agree as they try to decide whether to school me as a kennel attendant or perhaps turn me into an encyclopedia salesman. (They compromise and metamorphose me into an accountant.) You lucky man, you 've got a new name and face and memories and five hundred dollars in your pocket and you 've still got your drive and ambition, they say as they excruciatingly insert a final memory block. Now go out and knock them dead, they tell me. Figuratively speaking, they add hastily. Oh, one last thing, they say as they shove me out the Jordan, so don t come back unless it 's an emergency. A "But where am I to go?" I ask. "What am I to do?" You'll think of something, they assure me. After all. you had the brains and guts to buck our social system. Boy, do we wish we were like you! Now beat it; we 've got work to do -- or do you maybe think you 're the only antisocial misanthrope with delusions of grandeur who ever got Erased? And the wild part is that they were right: most Erasures make out just fine. Strange as it sounds, we really do have more drive than the average man, the guy who just wants to hold off his creditors until he retires and his pension comes through. We'll take more risks, make quicker decisions, fight established trends more vigorously. We're a pretty gritty little group, all right -- except that none of us knows why he was Erased. In fact, I didn't have my first hint until the truck backfired. (See, I'll bet you thought I had forgotten all about it. Not a chance, friend. Erasures don't forget things -- at least, not once they've left the Institute. What most Erasures do is spend vast portions of their new lives trying to remember things. Futilely.) Well, my memory may have been wiped clean, but my instincts were still in working order, and what they told me was that I was a little more used to being shot at than the average man on the street. Not much to go on, to be sure, but at least it implied that the nature of my sin leaned more toward physical violence than, say, Wall Street tycoonery with an eye toward sophisticated fraud. So I went to the main branch of the Public Library, rented a quarter of an hour on the Master Computer, and started popping in the questions. That wasn't surprising. It had been classified that last fifty times I had asked. But, undaunted (Erasures are rarely daunted), I continued. # A.D. The list appeared on the screen, sixty names per second. The computer stopped, while I tried to come up with a more limiting question. A.D. I checked my wristwatch. Five minutes left. Just what I needed -- sarcasm from a computer. They're making them too damned smart these days. I got up with three minutes left on my time. My next stop was Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue. The cubic yard, which meant that they had one hell of a collection of literature crammed into their single ten-by-fifty-foot aisle. I went straight to the True Crime section, but gave up almost immediately when I saw the sheer volume of True Crime that occurred each and every day in Manhattan. I called in sick, then hunted up a shooting gallery in the vidiphone directory. I made an appointment, rode the Midtown slidewalk up to the front door, rented a pistol, and went downstairs to the soundproofed target range in the basement. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to insert the ammunition clip, an inauspicious beginning. Then I hefted the gun, first in one hand and then the other, hoping that something I did would feel familiar. No luck. I felt awkward and foolish, and the next couple of minutes didn't make me feel any better. I took dead aim at the target hanging some fifty feet away and missed it completely. I held the pistol with both hands and missed it again. I missed it right-handed and left-handed. I missed it with my right eye closed, I missed it with my left eye closed, I missed it with both eyes open. Well, if the only thing I had going for me was my instinct, I decided to give that instinct a chance. I threw myself on the floor, rolled over twice, and fired off a quick round -- and shot out the overhead light. So much, I told myself, for instinct. Obviously the man I used to be was more at home ducking bullets than aiming them. I left the gallery, hunted up a couple of Erased Friends, and asked them if they'd ever experienced anything like my little flash of deja vu. One of them thought it was hilarious -- they may have made him safe, but I have my doubts about whether they made him sane -- and the other confessed to certain vague stirrings whenever she heard a John Philip Sousa march, which wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for. I stopped off for lunch at a local soya joint, spent another fruitless fifteen minutes in the library with my friend the computer, and went back to my brownstone condo to think things out. The whole time I was riding the sidewalk home I kept shadow-boxing and dancing away from imaginary enemies and reaching for a nonexistent revolver under my left arm, but nothing felt natural or even comfortable. After I got off the slidewalk and walked the final half block to my front door, I decided to see if I could pick my lock, but I gave it up after about ten minutes, which was probably just as well since a passing cop was giving me the fish-eye. I poured myself a stiff drink -- Erasures' homes differ in locale and decor and many other respects, but you'll find liquor in all of them, as well as cheap memory courses and the Collected Who's Who in time, to dredge up some image from my past. The carnage of war, the screams and supplications of rape victims, the moans of old men and children lying sliced and bleeding in Central Park, all were grist for my mental mill -- and all felt unfamiliar. So I couldn't shoot and I couldn't pick locks and I couldn't remember. All that was on the one hand. On the other hand was just one single solitary fact: I had ducked. But somewhere deep down in my gut (certainly not in my brain) I knew, I knew, that the man I used to be had screamed wordlessly in my ear (or somewhere) to hit the deck before I got myhisour damned fool heads blown off. This was contrary to everything they had told me at the Institute. I wasn't supposed to be in communication with my former self. Even emergency conferences while bullets flew through the air were supposed to be impossible. The more I thought about it, the more I decided that this definitely qualified as a bonafide Institute-visiting emergency. So I put on my jacket and left the condo and started off for the Institute. I didn't have any luck flagging down a cab -- like frightened herbivores, New York cabbies hide at the first hint of nightfall -- so I started walking over to the East River slidewalk. I had gone about two blocks when a grungy little man with water eyes, a pock-marked face, and a very crooked nose jumped out at me from between two buildings, a wicked-looking knife in his hand. Well, three years without being robbed in Manhattan is like flying # missions over Iraq or Paraguay or whoever we're mad at this month. You figure your number is up and you stoically take what's coming to you. So I handed him my wallet, but there was only a single small bill in it, plus a bunch of credit cards geared to my voiceprint, and he suddenly threw the wallet on the ground and went berserk, ranting and raving about how I had cheated him. I started backing away, which seemed to enrage him further, because he screamed something obscene and raced toward me with his knife raised above his head, obviously planning to plunge it into my neck or chest. I remember thinking that of all the places to die, Second Avenue between #th and #th Streets was perhaps the very last one I'd have chosen. I remember wanting to yell for help but being too scared to force a sound out. I remember seeing the knife plunge down at me as if in slow motion. And then, the next thing I knew, he was lying on his back, both his arms broken and his nose spouting blood like a fountain, and I was kneeling down next to him, just about to press the point of the knife into his throat. I froze, trying to figure out what had happened, while deep inside me a voice -- not -- angry, not bloodthirsty, but soft and seductive -- crooned: Do it, do it. "Don't kill me!" moaned the man, writhing beneath my hands. "Please don't kill me!" You 'll enjoy it, murmured the voice. You 'll see. I remained motionless for another moment, then dropped the knife and ran north, paying no attention to the traffic signals and not slowing down until I practically barreled into a bus that was blocking the intersection at #nd Street. Fool! whispered the voice. Didn 't I save your life? Trust me. Or maybe it wasn't the voice at all. Maybe I was just imagining what it would say if it were there. At any rate, I decided not to go to the Institute after all. I had a feeling that if I walked in looking breathless and filthy and with the mugger's blood all over me, they'd just Erase me again before I could tell them what had happened. So I went back home, took a quick Dryshower, hunted up Dr. Brozgold's number in the book, and called him. "Yes?" he said after the phone had chimed twice. He looked just as I remembered him: tall and cadaverous, with a black mustache and bushy eyebrows, the kind of man who could put on a freshly-pressed suit and somehow manage to look rumpled. "I'm an Erasure," I said, coming right to the point. "You worked on me." "I'm afraid we have a faulty connection here," he said, squinting at his monitor. "I'm not receiving a video transmission." "That's because I put a towel over my camera," I told him. "I assume that this is an emergency?" he asked dryly, cocking one of those large, thick, dishevelled eyebrows. "It is," I said. "Well, Mr. X -- I hope you don't mind if I call you that -- what seems to be the problem?" "I almost killed a man tonight." "Really?" he said. "Doesn't that surprise you?" "Not yet," he replied, placing his hands before him and juxtaposing his fingers. "I'll need some details first. Were you driving a car or robbing a bank or what?" "I almost killed this man with my bare hands." "Well, whoever you are, Mr. X, and whoever you were," he said, stroking his ragged mustache people probably wasn't your specialty." "You don't understand," I said doggedly. "I used karate or kung fu or something like that, and I don't know any karate or kung fu." "Who is this?" he demanded suddenly. "Never mind," I said. "What I want to know is: What the hell is happening to me?" "Look, I really can't help you without knowing your case history," he said, trying to keep the concern out of his voice and not quite succeeding. "I don't have a history," I said. "I'm a brand new man, remember?" "Then what have you got against telling me who you are?' "I'm trying to find out who I am!" I said hotly. "A good." "If you'll present yourself at the Institute first thing in the morning. I'll do what I can," he said nervously. "I know what you can do," I snapped. "You've already done it to me. I want to know if it's being wndone." "Absolutely not!" he said emphatically. "Whoever you are, your memory has been totally eradicated. No Erasure has ever developed even partial recall." "Then how did I mangle a professional mugger who was attacking me with a knife?" "The human body is capable of many things when placed under extreme duress," he replied in carefully-measured tones. "I'm not talking about jumping ten feet in the air or running fifty yards in three seconds when you're being chased by a wild animal! I'm talking about crippling an armed opponent with three precision blows." "I really can't answer you on the spur of the moment," he said. "If you'll just come down to the Institute and ask for me, I'll- -- " "You'll what?" I demanded. "Erase a little smudge that you overlooked the first time?" "If you won't give me your name and you won't come to the Institute," he said, "just what is it you want from me?" "I want to know what's happening." "So you said," he commented dryly. "And I want to know who I was." "You know we can't tell you that," he said. Then he paused and smiled ingratiatingly into the camera. "Of course, we might make an exception in this case, given the nature of your problem. But we can't do that unless we know who you are now." "What assurances have I that you won't Erase me again?" "You have my word," he said with a fatherly smile. "You probably gave me your word the last time, too," I said. "This conversation is becoming tedious, Mr. X. I can't help you without knowing who you are. In all likelihood nothing at all out of the ordinary has happened or is happening to you. And if indeed you are developing a new criminal persona, I have no doubt that we'll be meeting before too long anyway. So if you have nothing further to say, I really do have other things to do." He paused, then looked sharply into the camera. "What's really disturbing you? If you are actually experiencing some slight degree of recall, why should that distress you? Isn't that what all you Erasures are always hoping for?" "The voice," I said. "What about the voice?" he demanded. "I don't know whether to believe it or not." "The one that tells you to kill people?" "It sounds like it knows ," I said softly. "It sounds convincing." "Oh, Lord!" he whispered, and hung up the phone. "Are you still there?" I asked the voice. There was no answer, but I really didn't expect any. There was no one around to kill. Suddenly I began to feel constricted, like the walls were closing in on me and the air was getting too thick to breathe, so I put my jacket back on and went out for a walk, keeping well clear of Second Avenue. I stayed away from the busier streets and stuck to the residential areas -- as residential as you can get in Manhattan, anyway -- and spent a couple of hours just wandering aimlessly while trying to analyze what was happening to me. Two trucks backfired, but I didn't duck either time. A huge black man with a knife handle clearly visible above his belt walked by and gave me a long hard look, but I didn't disarm him. A police car cruised by, but I felt no urge to run. In fact, I had just about convinced myself that Dr. Brozgold wasn't humoring me after all but was absolutely right about my having an overactive imagination, when a cheaply-dressed blonde hooker stepped out of a doorway and gave me the eye. This one, whispered the voice. I stopped dead in my tracks, terribly confused. Trust me, it crooned. The hooker smiled at me and, as if in a trance, I returned the smile and let her lead me upstairs to her sparsely-furnished room. Patience, cautioned the voice. Not too fast. Enjoy. She locked the door behind us. What if she screams, I asked myself. We're on the fourth floor. How will I get away? Relax, said the voice, all smooth and mellow. First things first. You 'll get away, never fear. I 'll take care of you. The hooker was naked now. She smiled at me again, murmured something unintelligible, then came over and started unbuttoning my shirt. I smashed a thumb into her left eye, heard bones cracking as I drove a fist into her rib cage, listened to her scream as I brought the edge of my hand down on the back of her neck. Then there was silence. It was fabulous! moaned the voice. Just fabulous! Suddenly it became solicitous. Was it good for you, too? I waited a moment for my breathing to return to normal, for the flush of excitement to pass, or at least fade a little. "Yes," I said aloud. "Yes. I enjoyed it." I told you, said the voice. They may have changed your memories, but they can 't change your soul. You and I have always enjoyed it. "Do we just kill women?" I asked, curious. I don 't remember, admitted the voice. "Then how did you know we had to kill this one?" I know them when I see them, the voice assured me. I mulled that over while I went around tidying up the room, rubbing the doorknob with my handkerchief, trying to remember if I had touched anything else. They took away your fingerprints, said the voice. Why bother? "So they don't know they're looking for an Erasure," I said, giving the room a final examination and then walking out the door. I went home, put the towel back over the vidiphone camera, and called Dr. Brozgold. "You again?" he said when he saw that he wasn't receiving a picture. "Yes," I said. "I've thought about what you said, and I'll come in tomorrow morning." "At the Institute?" he asked, looking tremendously relieved. "Right. Nine o'clock sharp," I replied. "If you're not there when I arrive, I'm leaving." "I'll be there," he promised. I hung up the vidiphone, checked out his address in the directory, and walked out the door. Smart, said the voice admiringly as I walked the # blocks to Brozgold's apartment. I would never have thought of this. "That's probably why they caught you," I whispered into the cold night air. It took me just under an hour to reach Brozgold's place. (They turn the slidewalks off at nine o'clock to save money.) Somehow I had known that he'd be in one of the century-old four-floor apartment buildings; any guy who dressed like he did and forgot to comb his hair wasn't about to waste money on a high-rise to impress his friends. I found his apartment number, then walked around to the back, clambered up the rickety wooden stairs to the third floor, checked out a number of windows, and knew I had the right place when I came to a kitchen with about fifty books piled on the floor and four days' worth of dishes in the sink. I couldn't jimmy this lock any better than my own, but the door was one of the old wooden types and I finally threw a shoulder against it and broke it. "Who's there?" demanded Brozgold, racing out of his bedroom in his pajamas and looking even more unkempt than usual. "Hi," I said with a cheerful smile, shoving him back into the bedroom. "Remember me?" I closed the door behind us, just to be on the safe side. The room smelled of stale tobacco, or maybe it was just stale clothing in his closet. His furniture -- a dresser, a writing desk, a double bed. a couple of nightstands, and a chair -- had cost him a bundle, but they hadn't seen a coat of polish, or even a dust rag, since the day they'd been delivered. He was staring at me, eyes wide, a dawning look of recognition on his face. "You're... ah...Jurgins? Johnson? I can't remember the name on the spur of the moment. You're the one who's been calling me?" "I am," I said, pushing him onto the chair. "And it's "Jordan. Right." He looked flustered, like he wasn't fully awake yet. "What are you doing here, Jordan? I thought we were meeting at the Institute tomorrow morning." "I know you did," I answered him. "I wanted to make sure that all your security was down there so we could have a private little chat right here and now." He stood up. "Now you listen to me, Jordan -- " I pushed him back down, hard. "That's what I came here for," I said. "And the first thing I want to listen to is the reason I was Erased." "You were a criminal," he said coldly. "You know that." "What crime did I commit?" "You know I can't tell you that!" he yelled, trying to hide his mounting fear beneath a blustering exterior. "Now get the hell out of here and -- " "How many people did I kill with my bare hands?" I asked pleasantly. "What?" "I just killed a woman," I said. "I enjoyed it. I mean, I really enjoyed it. Right at this moment I'm trying to "You're crazy!" he snapped. "As a matter of fact," I replied. "I have a certificate stating that the State of New York considers me to be absolutely sane." I grinned. "Guess who signed it?" "Go away!" he yelled. "As soon as you tell me what I want to know." "I can't!" "Are you still with me?" I whispered under my breath. Right here, said the voice. "Take over at the proper moment or I'm going to break my hand," I told it. Ready when you are, it replied. "Perhaps you need a demonstration of my skill and my sincerity," I said to Brozgold as I walked over to the dresser. I lifted my hand high above my head and started bringing it down toward the dull wooden surface. I winced just before impact, but it didn't hurt a bit -- and an instant later the top of the dresser and the first two drawers were split in half. "Thanks," I whispered. Any time. "That could just as easily have been you," I said, turning back to Brozgold. "In fact, if you don't tell me what I need to know, it will be you." "You'll kill me anyway," he said, shaking with fear but blindly determined to stick to his guns. "I'll kill you if you don't tell me," I said. "If you do, I promise I won't harm you." "What's the promise of a killer worth?" he said bitterly. "You're the one who gave me my sense of honor," I pointed out. "Do you go around manufacturing liars?" "No. But I don't go around manufacturing killers, either." "I just want to know who I was and what I did," I repeated patiently. "I don't want to do it again. I just need some facts to fight off this damned voice." Well, I like that, said the voice. "I can't," repeated Brozgold. "Sure you can," I said, taking a couple of steps toward him. "It won't do you any good," he said, on the verge of tears now. "Everything about you, every last detail, has been classified. You won't be able to follow up on anything I know." "Maybe we won't have to," I said. "How many people did I kill?" "I can't." I reached over to the little writing desk and brought my hand down. It split in two. "How many?" I repeated, glaring at him. "Seventeen!" he screamed, tears running down his face. "Seventeen?" I repeated wonderingly. Even I was surprised that I had managed to amass so many. "Who were they? Men? Women?" He didn't answer, so I took another step toward him and added menacingly, "Doctors?" "No!" he said quickly. "Not doctors. Never doctors!" "Then who?" "Whoever they paid you to kill!" he finally blurted out. "I was a hit man?" He nodded. "I must have been very good at it to kill seventeen people," I said thoughtfully. "How did they finally catch me?" "Your girlfriend turned state's evidence. She knew you had been hired to kill Carlo Castinerra -- " "The politician?" I interrupted. "Yes. So the police staked him out and nailed you. You blundered right into their trap." I shook my head sadly. "That's what I get for trusting people. And this, " I added, bringing the edge of my hand down on his neck and producing a loud snapping noise, "is whatyow get." That was unethical, said my little voice. You promised not to hurt him if he told you what you wanted to know. "We trusted someone once, and look where it got us," I replied, going around wiping various surfaces. "What about that hooker? Had someone put out a contract on her?" I don 't remember, said the voice. It just felt right. Good, said the voice after some consideration. It felt good. I enjoyed it. "So did I," I admitted. Then are we going back in business? "No," I said. "If there's one thing I've learned as an accountant, it's that everything has a pattern to it. Fall into the same old pattern and we'll wind up right back at the Institute." Then what will we do? asked the voice. must confess that it's addictive. But I make more than enough money to take care of my needs, and I don't suppose you have any use for money." None, said the voice. "So now we'll just kill whoever we want in any way stickler for details, so I think we'll be a lot harder to catch then we were when I was you." I busied myself wiping the dresser as best I could. "Of course," I added, crossing over to the desk and going to work on it, "I suppose we could start with Carlo Castinerra, just for old time's sake." I'd like that, said the voice, trying to control its excitement. "I thought you might," I said dryly. "And it will tidy up the last loose end from our previous life. I hate loose ends; I suppose it's my accountant's mind." So that's where things stand now. I've spent the last two days at the office, catching up on my work. At nights I've cased Castinerra's house. I know where all the doors and windows are, how to get to the slidewalk from the kitchen entrance, what time the servants leave, what time the lights go out. So this Friday, at #:# PM on the dot, I'm going to leave the office and go out to dinner at a posh French restaurant that guarantees there are no soya products anywhere on the premises. After that I'll slide over to what's left of the theater district and catch the old Sondheim classic they've unearthed after all these years. Then it's off to an elegant nearby bar for a cocktail or two. And then, with a little help from my shadow. I'll pay a long-overdue call on the estimable Mr. Castinerra. Only this time, I'll do it right. Erasures are, by and large, pretty lonely people. I can't tell you how nice it is to finally have a hobby that I can share with a friend. Illustrated by Rivera ary Ann Baldwin stood on the veranda of the ramshackle Offworld Health building. She savagely gripped the unfinished wooden rail, welcoming the sharp pain of the splinters in her palms. First Ritchie, then Michael, and now Todd, she thought. "It's only his fifth birthday, Richard," she protested. "He can't keep up with you all." "It'll do him good. You baby him too much." "Don't run too fast." "I'm a doctor, for God's sake, I know what my kids are capable of. I only want what's best for Todd." Sure, she thought, just like you only wanted what was best for Ritchie when you wouldn't let him go to the zoo at the Santa Cruz colony. Melody looked at her mother's set face. "Todd will be OK, Mom. I'll go wash the crystal for you and pack it away." She went inside. Mary Ann trailed after her, tears brimming. The crystal was a wedding present from Mary Ann's grandmother. It had cost a small fortune to ship it to Boralia, a mining planet light years away from the regular space lanes. It was only brought out on special occasions. According to Dr. Baldwin, it represented gracious living, but from the beginning it had become a symbol of Mary Ann's extravagance and selfishness. "When are you going to stop ordering those useless magazines and gadgets from Earth?" Dr. Baldwin had asked, glaring at her. "I thought we could afford them." "You know damn well you used up all our spare credits importing the crystal." "Richard!" The time he threw out a smoking oil lamp, he said, "If you hadn't insisted on bringing the crystal, we could have had a generator." "Richard, I -- " "If it weren't for the crystal, we might have afforded a newer house." "It was your idea to bring the crystal, even though Offworld wouldn't pay for it. You said it would remind us of Earth -- of our heritage." "Oh, sure. Blame it all on me." "Don't you remember, Richard, I said it wouldn't be appropriate in a place where there was no social life and nobody gave dinner parties?" "We use it, don't we? You're always complaining and depressed because Boralia isn't what you expected." Boralia is everything I expected. You are not. After their fourth child, Todd, was born, it suddenly hadn't mattered what Dr. Baldwin said. "Leave me alone, Richard. I need rest." "Fine." He turned away. "I want my own room." He left the bedroom, slamming the door. He slept on the couch that night. After that, he fixed up a cot in the dispensary. Five years later, he was still sleeping there, his only companion a foul temper. Mary Ann cried herself to sleep just about every night. In the mornings, her face was puffy and unattractive, which depressed her even more. When the wife of the sole alien in their vicinity slithered in to request help for her husband's molt, only Mary Ann's sense of hospitality roused her from her despondency. "Come in Scalnia." She offered the scaly apod a chair. "The Doctor has already left for the mining camp. I'll come instead and do my best, but I'm inexperienced and have no equipment. Can I get you some breakfast?" "No, Mrs. Doctor, we cannot eat during the molting period; the food turns to poison in our bodies." Mary Ann nodded. "It's an allergic reaction. I've heard the Doctor mention it. I didn't know it was your molting period, too." "It should not be. I am not so far along as Borgli, but only one mate should be going through the molt, the other should already have gone through it." "What happened? Did you miscalculate?" The alien's head swung back and forth and she made a little wailing noise. "Not exactly, Mawan." Scalnia had not mastered the pronunciation of Mary Ann's name, but Mary Ann rather liked the contraction and did not correct her. The serpentine creature went on, "We knew this might happen, but we were very much drawn, attracted -- in love? -- and did not listen when our elders said we should wait with our families until at least one of us had gone through our final molt." "How long will it last?" "Ten darks and lights." "And then -- " "And then we will be beautiful." "You are beautiful now," said Mary Ann, stroking the shimmering blue and gold scales of the alien and looking into the slanted black eyes with their glowing ruby pupils. She could feel the powerful muscles rippling under the skin of the sinuous body. It made her shiver with delight. Scalnia gave the alien equivalent of a laugh, which sounded like the rustling of the papery leaves on the waving stems of the alien bamboo. "After our final molt, we will emerge with limbs, and I will bring gifts to repay you for your kindness, Mrs. Doctor. What would you like?" Mary Ann gave a sardonic laugh. "What I want, no one can give me." The alien wriggled, conveying concern. "I think I will be able to give you anything at all, Mrs. Doctor. Tell me what you want." With a sigh, Mary Ann said, "I want freedom for my children." Scalnia's serpent body heaved and reared. She balanced on the tip of her tail, towering a full two feet over Mary Ann's head. "Your children are born with limbs. They are free already." "They are not free in the way I mean." The alien cocked her head on one side in an oddly human gesture, indicating she awaited further clarification. Mary Ann explained. "I want them to be free to grow up as whole human beings, to realize they have seeds of great individuality within them, and they need not be doomed to follow in their parents' footsteps." "I do not understand the concepts, but it is enough for me that you wish this thing. How can it be carried out?" "It can't. The Doctor only recently let them attend the Earth School at Santa Cruz. He'd never let them go to Earth." "You wish to send them away?" Mary Ann nodded. "Yes, I don't want them to stay on Boralia because there's no work for them here, but our Offworld contract has no provision for sending anyone back to Earth, and the Doctor says we can't afford it." Scalnia glided down to the floor and coiled around the chair, resting her head on the seat. "They could teach our young the Earth language, as you have taught me." Mary Ann raised her hands and then let them fall again in futility. "It's not just that, Scally. They'll need mates and children of their own. There are few to choose from in Santa Cruz. It's possible they would return after they were married." "And you, Mawan, and Mr. Doctor?" "It's too late for me, and the Doctor sees no need for change." Scalnia's graceful head circled and swooped. "I did not know Mr. Doctor was so -- so difficult. I'll think about what you have told me, Mawan, but now can you come to help my Borgli?" "Of course. I'll just leave a note for the children in case I'm not back when they come home from school." Recent rain had brought down a quantity of sand and silt from the hills, which the seasonal dry wind blew in their faces, forcing them to cover their heads, slowing their progress. It took longer than either of them had expected to traverse the two or three kilometers to Scalnia and Borgli's cavelike home. When they arrived, Borgli was struggling to split his lovely skin down the length of his writhing body. Scalnia glided over to him and pulled with her tiny teeth on his thick, tight, scales. She turned to Mary Ann, who ran over and tugged at a portion of the skin around his neck. It wouldn't budge and was constricting his breathing. Mary Ann tried to stay calm. What did Richard do when an alien was separated from its family during the final molt? Oh, God, she was sure Richard performed surgery on the gorgeous, tough hide. "Scally, I need some kind of a cutting tool. Do you have anything sharp?" Scalnia rushed around, panic-stricken. They had no tools; without anything to grasp them with yet, she and Borgli couldn't use them. The creature's delicate mouth worked pitifully. "No, Mawan, we have nothing." "How does the family usually assist?" "They cut a long slit down the belly before the hide gets too hard and pull on either side until it separates." Since it wouldn't help matters, Mary Ann forbore to ask why they had moved away from the rest of the family when they knew this might happen. What diseases did they suffer from? Would Borgli get an infection if she accidentally cut his new skin while helping him? She wished she'd asked Richard more questions. She'd just have to assume that certain principles of medicine were valid throughout the galaxy. "I can do nothing for him unless we bring him back to the Doctor's house. We must hurry," she added, as his breathing became more and more distressed. With the wind in their favor, Mary Ann dragged and Scalnia pushed the now unconscious Borgli down the dusty trail to the Baldwin compound. Mary Ann began boiling kettles of water on the Earth-type, wood-burning stove the grateful miners had bought them soon after they'd arrived. She looked in desperation at her kitchen knives. None were sharp enough. All the surgical equipment was kept in the land vehicle Richard used; he never left any of it lying around. What could she do? Borgli's breaths rattled and wheezed in his throat. Mary Ann hunted around the small kitchen. The box containing the crystal caught her eye. She hauled it down from the shelf, opened it, grabbed a large jug by the handle, and smashed it against the stone sink. It shattered nicely with a sharp cutting edge attached to one side of the handle. She sterilized it in the boiling water. She scrubbed the kitchen table. "Help me get him up here," she said to Scalnia, who was swaying and mewing feebly, watching Mary Ann's preparations. Scalnia pushed underneath Borgli and raised him. Mary Ann maneuvered him into position. She washed the dust off his gleaming scales and poured an acrid, all-purpose microbicide over them. It made Mary Ann's eyes smart and her nose run, but it cleared her head. With swift, sure strokes, Mary Ann applied the broken crystal to Borgli's hide. The tough scales gave way reluctantly along the scored line as she deepened it. "Where are your families now?" Mary Ann asked, hoping to distract the agitated Scalnia, who was now gliding in and out of the furniture and coiling around the table legs. "It was as though they left us in body and spirit when we did not listen to their advice. Oh, Mawan, we were so wanting to be together..." A faint echo sounded in Mary Ann's head, the voice of her father: "If you persist in going with Richard to that lonely practice on Batvia -- " "Boralia." "Whatever. You will be without your family, utterly at the mercy of the stars, not to mention Richard." "Father, love is stronger than the stars. Richard needs me by his side." "And what of your needs, Mary Ann?" "I need to be with Richard." The memory now seemed remote, as though it belonged to a previous life. It dissipated. She concentrated on the deep groove in Borgli's hide. "I understand, Scally. I just hope you'll always want to be together." The idea of not wanting made the alien gaze with her glowing red pupils at Mary Ann in silence. At last, Borgli's neck was freed and his breathing eased. Mary Ann sighed with relief. As the lower scaly section of his skin began to fall away, Borgli recovered consciousness and wriggled out, his new arms and legs pale and soft, but sturdy enough. He was not human; his head remained serpentine, but he definitely was masculine. He knew no Earth words. As a way of thanking Mary Ann, he walked over and embraced her. For the first time in years, she felt an urge to respond sexually, just managing to curb the impulse at the last moment. This is crazy, she thought. His wife is right there. Scalnia coiled around them both. "Thank you, Mawan. I will be forever grateful. Somehow I will repay you." Sweating and embarrassed, Mary Ann freed herself. "I'm just happy I was able to help. Don't even think about repaying me." "My molt will begin tomorrow or the next day. I will have my Borgli to help me. You have saved both our lives. You shall have both our skins. They are worth many credits on Boralia. Enough for trips to your Earth." Mary Ann gasped, unable to comprehend what this might mean to her. "H-how c-can I ever thank you?" she stammered. The alien gently nudged Mary Ann with her serpent head. "I should be asking that question, Mawan." Mary Ann shooed them out the door. "Go celebrate, or something," she told them. Once alone, a new and strange resolve began building inside her. She removed the rest of the crystal from the box, set it out on the table, and sat down to wait for Richard's return. I might just have enough time to do it before the children get back, she thought. When Dr. Baldwin came home, a crystal cup flew through the air by his head and smashed on the door post, falling with a tinkling crash to the floor. He stood, stock-still, staring at the shattered crystal on the ground beside him. Before he could say anything, Methodically, Mary Ann picked up piece after piece and aimed at the door. She had never used profanity in her life, but now she came close. "You stupid -- mmm -- ooh! I never wanted it in the first place -- it was When the last piece of crystal lay in ruins in the doorway, Mary Ann smiled, picked up Borgli's hide and stroked it. Richard crunched through the glass towards her and touched her arm. "I -- I had no idea you disliked the crystal, Mary Ann. I thought you wanted it. That's why I had it shipped out with us." She didn't even care he acknowledged it was his idea. Nor did she bother explaining there was nothing really wrong with the crystal; just with his complaints about it. "I hated it." "Why didn't you say so?" "Would you have sent it back?" She laughed at the idea. "Dearest, we must talk. Things haven't been right between us for way too long. It's been my fault as well as yours. Can we put it all behind us and start afresh?" Her eyes widened. Were a few broken glass dishes all it took to bring him to his senses? All these years of kowtowing to this man for fear of his violence, and here he was, behaving like a lamb. "Mary Ann, I miss you terribly and I want to move back in the bedroom." It was too much of an about-face for her to take him seriously. He was probably in shock, she thought, and didn't know what he was saying. "I don't know, Richard, I'll have to think it over. Let's wait a while and see how it goes." "I'll help you clean up the mess," he said. In a daze, Mary Ann scooped up dustpan after dustpan of broken glass and tried to come to terms with what Richard was saying. "I love you, Mary Ann. You've given me wonderful children and you're a very good mother. Let's stop acting like two idiots and live normally." Almost against her will, Mary Ann was softening. Deep down, hadn't she known she was partially to blame for Richard's moods? And the memory of Borgli's embrace still burned. "We-ell -- " Before she could finish, Dr. Baldwin took her in his arms, kissed her long and hard and guided her into the bedroom. "The children -- " she began, but a quick glance at the Earth-clock, revealed the Santa Cruz school land vehicle would not arrive for another twenty-five minutes. Their lovemaking was hungry, yet tender. Afterwards, Mary Ann sat on the bed and caressed Borgli's hide. Dr. Baldwin had an early morning appointment with the medical director of the hospital in Santa Cruz. He whistled as he shaved with the old-style razor; somehow he'd never gotten used to the hair-growth inhibitors. Mary Ann watched him lazily from the bed. She had almost forgotten how sensual he was. Standing there in his bikini shorts, muscles rippling as he guided the razor over the stubble on his chin, he reminded her of Borgli. She wanted to tell him to wait, to be late, to send an excuse to the medical director, but five years of depression, sleeping alone, and feeling powerless had choked her spontaneity. She watched through the bedroom window as Richard strode towards the path where their LV was parked. He was about to climb in, when a glittering gold and blue figure appeared from behind it. Mary Ann's first thought was that Scalnia was again seeking assistance. She screamed as she realized her mistake. The alien had swiftly coiled around the doctor and snapped his head back. Scalnia gently laid Dr. Baldwin's body on the scrubby grass of the compound, and slithered towards the door. "I have repaid the debt, Mawan," she called out in her sing-song voice. "Now your children are free." Ceramic replicas of ancient goddess figurines from many cultures, individually mounted on a wooden Lase. Tkese powerful figurines transport Lack in time and emanate tke mystery of ancient idols created in tke earliest if kuman civilization wken deities were wo rs kipped. Tke Goddess mak ing a tome-hack? Perhaps Ske never left... Call or write for more information. Dealer inquiries welcome. Museum of Ancient and Modern Art I # Pleasant Valley Road Penn Valley CA # (#) # # periods c female Ancient Syrian Female Idol Circa # D.C. #" high. serigraphed gift box that includes a lesson cassette with the background sounds of Tibetan singing bowls, a set of Zen rocks, a practice pad, instruction manual and accessories-all ready to use within Illustrated by Heywood he last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door... The man instantly went cold as a moon of Neptune. Someone else had survived. His first impulse was to grab one of the shotguns he had collected in the early days, back when he feared roving bands of pillaging survivalists might suddenly break down his door to wrest his provisions away. But the knock had been tentative, almost timid. He muted the videotape of On the Beach into silence and put the TV remote control down beside him on the end table. No dangerous marauder would claim authorship of such a delicate knock. It was as if a child were knocking. The seated man sprang from his lounge chair with growing joy -- if a child had survived, perhaps the human race was not extinct after all. He bounded to the door, delirious with the giddy nervous excitement of a teenager on a first date, or an australopithecine discovering fire, or Albert Einstein scrawling "Emc # " for the first time. His hand slipped with cold perspiration as he unbolted the deadlock and turned the door handle. His heart pounded, forge-like, as he realized that before him stood another human being. And she was a young, beautiful woman. "You don't know how glad I am to see you!" the man cried. "Actually, like, I do," said the woman, tightening her leather jacket around her as the wind played long tresses of beautiful hair around her face. Her features were sharp and provocative, yielding the suggestion of a fox. She gazed down, knowingly, and the man realized he was naked. In his growing modesty, the man pulled a robe around himself, knowing she had seen his manhood start to rise like a serpent at the very sight of her. He reached out and touched her hand, urging her into his home. Feeling another human's flesh again made him dizzy. "I'm sorry. I must sit down. Would you care for some canned tuna? A frozen dinner? Beer?" "No thank you," said the feminine figure, stepping in and perching on the armrest of the man's chair. "This is a whole new world," she said. "But it's ours!" he said. He reached up to caress her forearm and found it surprisingly hard and sinewy. He thought to himself, how fortunate to stumble upon a woman who was in such good condition. She would probably be extremely fertile, not to mention good in the feathers. "It's up to us to be fruitful and multiply, if you get my drift." "I get your drift all right, but I don't think that's going to happen." "Is something wrong -- are you... barren?" She got up and turned away, pulling an apple out of her jacket pocket. She took a few steps toward the flickering images on the TV, then spun around brightly, with the coordination and purpose of a dancer. She took a chomp out of the apple. Hearing the crisp wetness of her teeth biting into the ripe fruit, the man felt his mouth watering and he could barely contain himself. But he suddenly realized, she had probably been lost and wandering a long time. He could not just suddenly take her. At the very least, introductions were in order. He stood formally. "My name is Adam," he said. "What a coincidence," said the other in the room. who then reached up. Hands grabbed the long tresses of beautiful hair and yanked, pulling off a wig exposing a masculine receding hairline beneath. "My name is Adam, too." "In the currency of the camy world, worth at least twelve wooden nickels. Step right up to this tape."Bill "An intoxicating ramble through more wacko spaces than a near-sighted spider's got spectacles... I like this tape."Douglass-T ruth # Call #-#-#-# Or you can mail or fax the convenient order form on page #. The Truffle Shop Brought Right to Your Home featuring the finest Chocolate Truffles by Chef Willem DeGroot The Truffle Team invites you to share the excitement of tasting the world's best chocolate truffles. Made with delicious Belgian chocolate, rlghthere In our custom kitchens by ChefWillem DeGroot, they are shipped to yon fresh every day. Send a gift assortment to your family and friends today -- and don't forget to send a box to yourself! Call today for free brochure. #-#-#-# ## Round Mini Truffle Gift Box (#) # ## Mini Truffle Gift Collection (#) # ## Deluxe mini Truffle Collection (#) # ##I Nine Truffle Gift Box # ##I Six Truffle Gift Box # ##I Four Truffle Gift Box # ##I # Layer T ruffle T orte #I .# ## Chocolate Oblivion Torte # Prices include shipping charges Hazelnut #I Rum Key Largo Amaretto Orange Napoleon Gold Rush Treasure Island Grand Marnier  While Almond Highlander  Lemon Matterhorn Mint Zinnabar Caf Mocha Raspberry  Espresso  Peanut Butter  Raspberry Cream  Truffles without alcohol Black Forest Dutch Treat BlackTulip Cafe Diablo  Double Dutch I # #-# or (#) #-# # Broad SL  Nevada City, CA # Illustrated by L. Larsen # he waitress hovered around their table like a II moth near a light. Finally, the hideously obese man waved her away. "We're not ready to order yet," he said. "Come back in a few minutes." After the waitress departed, the weasel-like man with the scar across his face addressed his dining companion seated across the table from him. "I can assure you as we sit here tonight that Miller is quite dead or will be within minutes." The obese man chortled. "That is good news." He turned his massive body and snapped his fingers. The chair groaned in protest. The waitress sluggishly made her way to the table. "What'll it be, honey?" "I'm celebrating tonight," said the obese man. "Let me have a super duper hot fudge sundae with the works." He almost drooled as he said this. "And you, dearie?" the waitress asked scarface. "Just coffee for me, dearie." He grinned, showing a crooked row of teeth. The fat man looked as serious as his Buddha-like visage allowed. "You'll receive the other ten thousand as per our agreement." Scarface grinned again and rubbed his hands together. "Mr. Wilson," he said, "In my line of business it pays to know what makes people tick. If you don't think it too presumptuous of me, I'd like to inquire -- " He stopped abruptly as the waitress approached to fill his coffee cup. After she slowly melted away to the recesses of the dingy restaurant, he continued. "I was wondering... just exactly why did you have me make this hit?" Wilson picked up his fork and rubbed a finger across its tines. "I suppose I can tell you. I don't care whether you believe me or not." "Why wouldn't I believe you?" "Mr. Sloane, the sundae I ordered was the first food in years not on my very strenuous #-calorie-a-day diet." Sloane suppressed a smile. Tell me another story, he thought. Wilson continued. "Despite eating almost nothing since #, my weight has ballooned to over four hundred pounds. Last month I determined -- never mind how -- that Miller was eating for me. He ate the food and I gained the weight." Sloane laughed but covered it by faking a coughing fit. This blimp was loon city. But a job was a job. He would take anyone's money, even a loony tune-blimpo like Wilson's. The waitress appeared and placed the sundae before Wilson. Wilson grabbed his spoon and eagerly attacked the monstrous ice cream creation. He lifted the first spoonful. "Here's to the demise of Miller," he said, slurping the ice cream down. Suddenly he dropped the spoon. It clattered to the formica table top. A clump of fudge-covered ice cream splattered nearby. "Are you okay?" asked Sloane. "I don't feel too well," moaned Wilson. A glazed look came into his eyes. "Oh, no. Don't tell me..." "What?" "How did you do it?" he demanded. He was beginning to feel dizzy. And afraid. "Do it?" asked Sloane, fingering his scar. "How did you kill Miller?" Sloane smiled crookedly. "Nothin' to it, Mr. Wilson. I poisoned his dinner." f remind Illustrated by Tom X Burroughs coming off junk in a fictitious autobiography. Why did the microphone have to rerffind him of a penis now? -- just as he was coming to the part in the bit about the gay bar? Shit, he thought. I'm dying out here. The material didn't matter any more. What mattered? Life, the Universe, and Everything? Get a grip, he thought (not necessarily on the microphone). mind anchored him in reality. My name is Bart Berger, I'm doing stand-up at a comedy club -- where, Albuquerque? No big deal, he couldn't geographically place himself -- since he had started being well-known enough to do the circuit he often didn't know what city he was in. Today's date -- what was today's date? As he spewed his "comedy routine" in a manner not inconsistent with executing a will, Berger realized he was not really seriously out of touch with reality after all. "I know an intravenous drug user who is so self destructive, when he shoots up, he uses a real gun." Howls of demented New Mexico laughter peeled the air raw like a bad case of sunburn on a cowboy's neck. A partially full can of Coors' sailed by Berger's right ear, spewing liquid behind it as if rocket-propelled. He instinctively flinched like a dog avoiding a nose swat with a rolled-up newspaper. "Sonofabitch New York Jew," came a voice smeared like poorly-applied sunscreen, from the same vicinity as had come the beer can. They always thought he was a Jew in these hick towns. They didn't realize he was a strayed Catholic, primarily of German ancestry. But his grandparents had hidden a family of Jews in their Berlin basement. Save a Jew for Christ. There was a joke in there somewhere, it just had to be teased out properly. He was losing it tonight. He thought about what his psychiatrist Dr. Sam had told him about the studies linking manic-depressive mental illness with a gift for creative thought. But was ripping off material like a sweathouse sewing-machine operator the same thing as creativity? Maybe he was not "oriented times three" -- the medical jargon for the first criteria of not being psychotic -- maybe he didn't even exist. College was a long time ago, why was he asking "What is reality?" to himself as he uttered the punchline to a joke only Russian Jews usually got: "So the rabbi says, do you know how to daven yet? Yes or no?" Why had he done that joke? An intellectual defense mechanism -- or just a death wish? For all he knew the whole audience was conspiring to take him on a train ride to a shower stall where poison gas came out of the shower head. A single laugh slashed the brutal silence. Berger thought it came from a comer of the room -- but being in the spotlight he couldn't see a thing beyond the stage. He momentarily lost his timing, then on a tangent started involuntarily thinking about his college days. On had never written, stolen, or even thought about before. "My junior year I went out with this girl a couple of times but I stopped seeing her because she was an alcoholic. I just found out she's married and pregnant. She went to her doctor and said: 'I'm all distraught and frightened. I've been drinking all this time carrying this unborn fetus. I'm afraid it will be bom with fetal alcohol at me like the locomotive in that Buster Keaton movie, nothing. Go home, relax, and have a drink.'" The crowd roared with laughter.Assholes,he thought, his younger sister had been bom with Down Syndrome say anything else, he thought. More laughter. "My senior year I dated this really gorgeous girl -- " the laughter drowned him out, so he yelled: "but I stopped going out with her because she wasn 't an alcoholic!" Silence. They were laughing in the wrong places. But where were these jokes coming from? Laughter again. A heckler shouted: "I don't know where you're coming from!" Images of Nazis parading in front of Hitler stormtrooped through Berger's semi-conscious mind. The bully who took his lunch money in third grade. The time he ran out of gas in the desert. The dream date with the woman, a hot looking fast-rising comic, who told him she'd never seen a smaller penis on a full-grown man, then laughed as if she was having a comedy orgasm. His grandfather having a fatal stroke as Berger read the newspaper article about the resurgence of neo-Nazism in America to the man. Breaking his tooth on a stone in his burrito. Earth to Berger! Earth to Berger! I have the ability to think clearly under extreme stress, he told himself. "Well, then, you must not be under extreme stress now!" chorused the audience in unison. He sat down on the stage, feeling the hardness of its nicked wooden floorboards through his dress pants, and, out of the spotlight, surveyed the audience. The audience stopped congealing into a faceless mass and began individuating, like cells of a blastocyst turning into an embryo. In the front row sat a girl with the characteristic features of Down Syndrome. God, it was creepy how all those kids looked alike. This girl could be his sister Jeanne. "I am," said Jeanne from the first row. "You hear that, Billy?" asked the gray-haired man next to Jeanne -- Berger's dead grandfather. "I told you she was talkative." This can't be happening, thought Berger. unison. "I knew this was coming the day they started you on "Yes," said Jack Benny from a seat off to Berger's right. "You're familiar with the term 'you killed them'?" Benny asked pausing exactly long enough and then saying, "Well, you killed them."" The audience howled with ecstasy. He recognized John Lennon. He recognized Nikolai Lenin. He recognized Richard M. Nixon. "Do me," said Nixon. "Come on, Bart, you remember -- it was right after Watergate." Berger remembered. The flop sweat was forgotten. He didn't feel anything at all anymore. His voice faltered but he choked out: "Nixon before Watergate:" He held his Nixonian gesture that, under other circumstances, was also the symbol for peace, or a communication used by a commodities arbitrageur. '"I am the President.'" He dropped his arms with his hands in the V-for victory configuration, or thought he did -- he couldn't tell if they were even attached to his shoulders anymore. "Nixon after Watergate: 'I'm not the President.'" "I never did you, I was too young." "You'll do me now." Berger assumed a Massachusetts accent and said: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask who the phenord shot me?" "Am I dead, too?" Berger asked. Silence. "What, do you have a goyishe kup?" demanded Lenny Bruce as he was hauled out of the audience by three vice cops dressed circa the #s. Wait a minute, thought Berger. If this is a hallucination, maybe it's not consistent, or can be manipulated be sheer thought alone. A frightened gasp issued from the audience. If I can kill them, I can have them -- They were rolling in the aisles. I can have them -- They were puking up on themselves. Jesus Christ! thought Berger, slightly feeling the eyes of a man who was maybe more than just a man gently wander over him. What if I want them to turn to the left, turn to the right, stand up, sit down -- "Fight! Fight! Fight!" the crowd cheered. He had all the women strip. He had all the women masturbate. He had all the women come. When he was done messing with all of the audience's bodies, he began on their minds. "In the Wizard of Oz, the horse of another color was colored with jello because certain types of coloring would have killed it. The model who was spray-painted gold in Goldfinger actually did pass away, poisoned from the pigment. The Caucasian man who took melanin pills in Black Like Me also kicked the bucket. They all dyed. "This is an interactive joke: My two favorite TV shows are L.A. Law and Star Trek: The Next Generation because... "Ending one: they are both set in California. "Ending two: they are both set in outer space." He thought love at them. He thought hate at them. He thought a pile of shit the size of the Rocky Mountains at them. If life is a joke, and death is the punchline, who is the audience? We are, they thought back. But look again. He didn't so much look as reach out somehow. In return, he was touched by every thought ever thought since thoughts had been thought. Every emotion ever felt out since emotions had been felt. Every experience ever had by any human being past, present, and future. Every life form on Earth. Every life form in the Universe. Every object in the Universe, every last subatomic particle. There is no conservation of matter, he quipped somehow in the hyperaware connectedness he was a part of now, only conversation of matters. A warm nourishment, not unlike laughter distilled to its epitome, washed through the Unity he was now part of. The Unity accepted Berger. Berger accepted the Unity. Berger ceased to end where Unity began. The Hispanic maid chewing nicotine gum unlocked and entered the door of the motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona. The TV was tuned to The Nashville Network, but the sound was off. Slumped on the bed was Billy Berger's body, his chin stubbled with beard, his clothes wrinkled with decadence. On the night stand was his empty medication bottle. The maid had seen this before. She lifted the telephone receiver. The Unity dissolved like the suds of a bubblebath that had lasted too long, like a bachelor party gone wicked. Berger saw the vital signs monitor twice and heard it "I think he's coming out of it," said an impression of a petite woman with a gold tooth and hair the color of burnt pudding. A man with a wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair wearing a white jacket was bent over Berger, holding a stethoscope to Berger's chest like a quack portrayed by Sid Caesar in the #s. "You almost got away from us that time," he said in a poor imitation-Viennese accent. "Don't do it again, okay, kiddo?" "Doctor," whispered Berger weakly, "will I ever play the violin again?" "Why not?" "I never could before..." "Is that supposed to be funny?" asked the doctor, scowling. "It's supposed to be," said Berger. "Well, you're supposed to be dead, too, how do you explain that?" "Maybe I am dead, maybe all three of us are dead." The audience cheered, giving Berger the standing ovation he really could have lived without. Jiffy Thoroughthink's #-Star Book Review Lucy Tragg  John Many Johns Level #, BioGram Entertainment Systems. Copyright #.#hf#u#...Some Rights Reversed. Deathcurse for Unlawful Entry. This is one of those books you just can't put down. You can send away for a release mechanism when you've completely scanned the entire file to end-of-line, already opened the book and the Tangleweed has hold of you and your face is purple with cyanotic surprise. To put the book down, you simply release the gas canister toward the more bloodshot of its seventy-some-odd eyes and press the Tangleweed's bellybutton. If the creature refuses categorically to release its grip, simply contact the Magellan System Autocratic Government Department of Mercantile Complaints. By the time they've responded, either you or the Tangle will have resolved the conflict. Power to the victor! I liked the development of the material; putting it in chapter form was a novel concept, and if it doesn't catch on, I'm no five-star reviewer! Avoid counterfeits; the Tangleweeds on the clone varieties are the Evilgame Mutations; they have no navels. Aflrei Sterbe, Gnorr Press, Chicaogolesyorkdelphia, Tech RE Ixxil state #R#v Pressright (#)# U.C., All Rights Reserved, Deathcurse for request. # cred. A rather far-out contemplative piece from Aflrei Sterve, conceiving of some rather fanciful long-dead civilizations on some other dimension. "Earth" has a dominant species of biped hominid which has developed speech, some rudimentary thought, and a crude form of energy-handling which involves engines of mechanical mass. Not your hard science, eh, what? On top of that, author (sic) Sterbe postulates an intelligent species employing atomic power for warfare. Show me one intact planet where that happened and I'll endorse this one. Otherwise, my suspension of disbelief doesn't relax deeply enough for me to get into it, eh? MI#T# F by Chad Oliver A young man makes an unplanned trip through space and time to Europe # years ago where Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man engage in a battle for survival. Another in the series of collectible hardbound classic science-fiction from Edition limited to # copies # each. #-#-#-# OR #-#-# Illustrated by Boyd if Ives!" called Rooso the Anvil. "O Fair Folk, hear my plea! I have given up my family and my trade! I have given up the human world! I want to join you!" The Fair Folk were the greatest, purest, wisest people in the world. They lived in peace with one another, in accord with the spirits, and in harmony with nature. Where they lived, the forest bloomed all year with sweet-scented blossoms and sweet-tasting fruit. Sometimes, Rooso knew, they stole human babies. Fie did not understand why this caused the parents such sorrow; the Elves had given the children a gift beyond compare. Rooso the Anvil waited, but no answer to his call came from the surrounding forest. Finally he crouched, slowly, as though pressed down by the weight of the darkness around his small fire. Three nights and three days had he waited, alone in the wilderness, surviving on nuts and berries. He had brought no food into the forest and, though he was a blacksmith, he had brought no iron. "Why couldn't I have been raised by the Fair Folk?" Rooso asked the night. He bowed his head. "O Gods," he prayed, "grant me my wish, to join the first and greatest of Your creations." When he raised his head, he found his campfire ringed about by seven motionless Elves. He had been accounted "fair as an Elf' by the women of his town, but in the presence of the Elves he suddenly felt as ugly and gnarled as a hunchback. The tallest of the tall Elves spoke, in the Old Tongue, in a voice as clear and flowing as a stream. "We have heard your cries, these last three nights. Why do you disturb us?" "I called you because I wish to join you." Rooso heard his voice creak like an old chair, but made himself continue. "I have left the world behind, in pursuit of my desire. You are so wise and fair, I would give anything to be one of you." The Elves smiled at one another, a brief flash of teeth whiter than a human smile could ever be. The tallest Elf turned back to Rooso. "If you are "I am known as Eagle Striking," said the tallest Elf. "Put out your fire, human, and follow us." Rooso emptied his waterskin, extinguishing the small fire. He blinked in the blackness of night. At dawn, the Elves led the human out of the forest, into a clearing overgrown with wild roses, strawberries, poppies, daisies, and a score of flowers Rooso did not recognize. In the middle of this field stood a grove of fruit and oak trees. The apple, pear, and cherry trees were bowed under the weight of fruit. The Elves dwelt high in the branches of the oaks, in shelters woven of branches and grass. Among the several score Elves who greeted him, Rooso saw a few children, all as quiet, dignified, and beautiful as the adults. He saw no human children -- if there were changelings here, they had changed completely. The Fair Folk prepared a feast of welcome. Some piled wood high in the center of the grove, while others filled baskets with fruit and berries. Eagle Striking led Rooso out of the grove and deeper into the ancient forest. He bade Rooso stand quiet in the shadow of a shaggy pine. Then he drew his knife. Rooso's heart slammed against his chest. Eagle Striking turned away. The Elf took up a position several yards from Rooso. He stood motionless, his white skin and butter-colored buckskin tunic shading into the browns and yellows of tree boles and fallen leaves. Within moments a red deer appeared, a great stag crowned with tined antlers. Head upraised, legs steady, the stag approached the Elf and stretched out its slender neck. Eagle Striking laid the stone knife across the jugular and sawed at the tough hide. When blood spurted like water from a fountain, Rooso felt faint, though he had poached the king's deer many times. He reminded himself that the animal had come to Eagle Striking in accord with the harmony of nature. At the feast, Rooso the Anvil ate better than he ever had in his life. The venison was savory, not gamy, and tender as veal. As the feast progressed, a group of Elves chanted wild strange songs Rooso couldn't understand over the bone-shaking throb of log drums. When other Elves rose up and made a ring around the fire, Rooso realized he was about to witness the legendary dance of the Elves. He could not believe his good fortune. He never expected to be invited to join them. He shook his head at their beckoning gestures until Eagle Striking left the dance and grabbed his wrist and dragged him to the fire. "Human, do you see the pattern?" Rooso shook his head. The pattern was far too complex and the drumming too fast. But the beat slowed, and the dancers shouted encouragement, and moved slowly so that he could learn. Eagle Striking pulled him into motion, and the drums beat fast again, and Rooso found himself dancing the ancient Elvish dance. In the morning, Rooso ate as well as he had last night, breakfasting on fruit, wild-pig ham, and wheat bread dipped in honey. He lay against a tree, his hands on his overfull stomach, somnolent, insensible of the passing hours. Eagle Striking came up to him and pressed a scrap of dried fruit into his hand. "I am not hungry," Rooso said apologetically. "Eat this toadstool if you would see as we see," Eagle Striking said. "Eat, and know the harmony of the world." Rooso examined the toadstool, a long, dirty-looking white stem topped with a small, tight-fitting brown cap. How could this shriveled scrap give him the wisdom of Elves? He felt his stomach tremble. He quickly thrust the mushroom into his mouth and bit down. The stem snapped like an old stick. As he chewed, his saliva softened the mushroom, but the foul taste blotted up the moisture in his mouth. He swallowed with difficulty. He could not imagine how he could gain knowledge in this manner, and the attempt to imagine it made his stomach queasy. He calmed his mind and lay still. After a while he realized the trees of the grove made a pattern. The pattern included all the trees he could see, and all the trees he could not see. He understood the pattern of the forest: the harmony of the trees with the animals, with the birds that flew above, with the worms that burrowed below. He understood the necessity of the deer eating the leaves and the wolf eating the deer. He turned to look at the huge oak he leaned against, and traced the furrows in the bark, following the pattern. Everything was part of the pattern. Rooso the Anvil laid his cheek against the rough bark, spread his arms as wide as they could stretch, and embraced the tree. When evening thickened in the grove, the Elves built their bonfire. The human stared into the fire, watching the flames leap and twist in a dance as beautiful and meaningful as the dance of the Elves, or the pattern of the world. Rooso realized Eagle Striking stood beside him, and the other Elves stood close around him. Eagle Striking laid his hand gently on Rooso' s shoulder. "Human, do you see the pattern?" Rooso spoke slowly. "Yes." Eagle Striking asked, "Are you ready to be one with the Elves?" Rooso smiled dreamily. "I am," he replied. And so the Elves cooked and ate him. Time travel In a bottle... Voyage to the palaces of the ancients... where scent Is the medium of magic. A few of our vast selection of oils listed below Frankincense Myrrh Patchouli Rain White Musk Ylang Ylang Amber Jasmine-Orange Black Musk Magnolia Rose Sandalwood #lngle oils, # drams: # plus # shipping and sales tax where applicable.Custom Blends from a palette of over # different oils, # and up. Or call for more information. #-B#-B#-#B I # #-# pOUCR pouenes shown: "Acorns send for catalog # from Power Pouches Nevada City CA # nKQ  ) Mixed Floral Bumble Barf Honey This jar of Bee vomit was packaged for your pleasure by: BardoTown Industries P.O. Box # Nevada City, CA # Raw  Unprocessed Pure and Natural Net Wt. I lb.  #oz. (we only filter out the big chunks) Illustrated by Needham he Clemens Elementary School auditorium was filled to capacity with proud parents who chatted amiably to draw their attention away from the uncomfortably small student seats before the concert began. Behind the curtains, Mrs. Strader's sixth-grade choir warmed up slowly, singing "do-re-me" while trying not to fidget in their heavily-starched outfits. Mrs. Strader smiled warmly at the students, giving her warmest glances to those who looked particularly uncomfortable or nervous. The warmups ceased, the audience quieted, and the curtains rose. After the Pledge of Allegiance, the concert began with a rousing -- and surprisingly recognizable -- rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner." At the conclusion of the national anthem, the audience applauded wildly. The next two numbers, "Amazing Grace" and the Carpenters' "Top of the World," were also well performed and well received. As the applause subsided, two boys stepped to the front of the choir to sing solos in the next number, "One Tin Soldier." The two stood straight and tall -- the dark-haired boy at stage right, more than a head taller than the other. He had the awkward, jumbled look of early puberty, but he still sported a beautiful soprano voice. The tall boy sang the first verse flawlessly; he saw the pride in his mother's face and smiled as his father took photo after photo with the family Instamatic. The shorter boy sang the second verse with a slight but intentional vibrato that sent chills through the crowd. The tall boy began the third verse as perfectly as the first, but soon disaster struck -- his voice warbled and dropped an octave, jumped back up, then settled on an A Flat somewhere in between; he tried to recover, but his hormones and growing embarrassment betrayed him, and the notes escaping his lips soon sounded completely random as his blue eyes welled with tears. At first, the audience was silent, too stunned to react. But the poor boy sounded so pathetic, so ridiculous, that eventually it got the better of everyone, including Mrs. Strader; they began to laugh nervously -- then uncontrollably -- as the tall boy tried desperately to finish, his wavering voice deteriorating even further through his mounting sobs of shame and humiliation. The boy on stage began to grow even taller, still singing and sobbing, as the roar of the audience increased. Soon he was a man, drenched in his own sweat and tears, overwhelmed by the deafening laughter of the crowd. He noticed his father put the camera away, his own eyes glistening. I awoke from the nightmare fully clothed, drenched to the bone, and sobbing my eyes out. It took a moment to realize that more than mere sweat and tears had me dripping; I had been sleeping outside, and overlapping arcs of sprinkler water passed over me every few seconds. Where was I? I rubbed the moisture from my face and looked around. As I scanned my surroundings between splashes of water, I realized I had spent the night in a park. It was light enough to see in the smoggy, purple and grey pre-dawn haze so common to southern California. I wasn't the only park sleeper, but I was the only one who didn't look like I belonged there. I saw some joggers and a few cars, most with their lights on, on the road a few dozen yards away. I still wasn't sure, though, which park I was in. Long Beach had so many... if I was in Long Beach. I noticed my jacket a few feet away from me, dark with moisture... and overflowing with money. I started to get up, but my muscles protested; they were stiff and sore, like I'd been hiking all night. I stretched and rubbed my arms, neck, and legs for a few moments before moving again. I collected the money on my jacket, the nightmare and my strange surroundings temporarily forgotten. I began counting the money. Forty... forty-five... fifty -- I heard someone say, "Hey, great job last night." Sixty... sixty-five -- huh? I looked around, but whoever had spoken was gone now. I shrugged and resumed counting. I had awakened to two-hundred eighty-three dollars in bills and enough nickels, dimes and quarters to sink the Titanic. I pocketed the bills and gave the change to my sleeping parkmates, then walked toward the street. Wherever I was, at least I could afford the trip home. "You'll be fine, Michael. Some bruises and scratches, but nothing serious. The next time you decide to sleep outside, however, I suggest you remember your sleeping bag. And sleep away from the sprinklers; you could catch pneumonia." Dr. Simons frowned sternly, but his eyes twinkled. I usually hated being called Michael, but Dr. Simons had been our family physician since I was a kid, and it felt okay coming from him. It didn't matter that I was in my mid-twenties, looked older, and was called "Mister" by most people I met; to him I'd always be six years old. In his office I usually felt that old, too, and I didn't mind. "I promise, Doctor. Honest, though, I hadn't planned on it. That's why I came in; I can't remember what happened last night." I never considered calling him Doc; "Doctor" was a years-old habit, and any other name seemed disrespectful. "The last thing I remember was walking home from school last night." "Have you had a memory loss before?" I shook my head. "If so, I always made it home. This is the first time I've slept somewhere strange." The park was in an unfamiliar neighborhood, about two miles away from my apartment and a short walk from the lower campus of Cal State Long Beach, where I was working on a Master's degree in Computer Science. "It's probably nothing, but if it happens again, come in immediately." Dr. Simons took a deep breath, as he usually did when he searched for answers to difficult questions; over the years, this had proven surprisingly effective. "But as long as you're here," he said, "let me take another look at your shoulder." I had almost forgotten about my shoulder wound. I removed my shirt again. The month-old bite marks were barely visible now, but Dr. Simons had said bites from people had more danger of disease and infection than most animal bites. "It looks fine, but why don't we run some more tests?" he said with soothing reassurance. I nodded my assent. I thought about my shoulder as his assistant took the blood samples. I'd seen Dr. Simons a month before, the day after I got mugged on the way home from a beach party in Santa Monica. At the time I felt lucky I hadn't been killed; the guy had caught me from behind and knocked me on my back, and glared at me with fierce bloodshot eyes and a gaping smile that looked more animal than human. He tore the pocket off my shirt and my wallet went flying; when I reached for it, he yanked me upright and bit my right shoulder. I screamed; on instinct I pushed myself away from him, drew back and kicked hard, connecting solidly with his crotch and sending him reeling. My friends came running when they heard the screams, but by the time they reached me the attacker and my wallet had vanished into a dark alley. My roommate, Matt, had seen well enough to give a good description to the police; I had remembered little more than his eyes and hideous grin. They found my wallet in the alley the next day, with nothing missing and no fingerprints. The attacker had never been found. "You have a pretty voice," the medical assistant, Denise, said, and I snapped back to reality. "Excuse me?" "You were humming just now, and it sounded very nice. I don't know the song, though." She started humming; it took a few moments for me to recognize the tune as "One Tin Soldier." My stomach tightened. I had hated the song since sixth grade, and until last night's nightmare I hadn't heard or thought about it in years. "Thanks," I whispered, hoping it sounded sincere, and almost certain it didn't. I went straight from the doctor's office to school. I had a few hours to study before my three o'clock Data Structures class; Professor Lewis usually gave a quiz on Thursdays. At least it wouldn't be an oral quiz. I woke up yelling. At least I was in my room this time, and the wetness of my clothing came only from sweat. Another nightmare, completely different from my childhood nightmare the previous week, but shot through with the same disturbing emotions. In my dream I was on a stage in front of a large group of people. I was doing -- something -- and the people in the crowd were laughing and clapping. The room was dark; a bright light was shining on me. I watched myself on the stage; I looked confident, like I belonged there, wanted to be there. Needed to be there. I felt an overwhelming sense of dread. I could see no danger; the crowd looked harmless, too happy responding to whatever I was doing to pose any threat. Even so, I screamed at myself to escape from the stage; I was certain that every second I remained in front of the crowd was terribly, unspeakably wrong. I tried desperately to be heard, but I had no voice, and the me on stage remained, oblivious to my cries. I didn't know how long I had been screaming before I don't know why I still feared crowds. Not being in one, mind you; just being the focus of one. I had dropped choir, given up singing, and even skipped my high school graduation to avoid standing in front of a group of people. Being the center of attention was worse than being boiled alive, I thought, even fifteen years after my puberty-induced solo-from-hell. It wasn't that I'd screwed up -- hell, how can you control hormones? I just couldn't stand the thought of being laughed at ever again. That's why I guess I'd gotten into computers in the first place -- a machine will never laugh at you. My roommate knocked on my door. "You okay, Mikey?" I took a deep breath. "I'm fine. Matt," I answered hoarsely. "It was just a nightmare." "You're sure?" "Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. Go back to sleep." I emptied the pitcher of ice water I kept on my nightstand in one gulp and slowly, warily, closed my eyes. When I awoke on the steps of the Cal State Long Beach mathscience building with money falling off my chest, I screamed like I'd awakened next to a severed head. Two girls walking by dropped their books and also screamed, and a nearby campus security guard withdrew his baton and ran toward me. It took several minutes of talking and some of the money that had fallen onto the steps to convince them to leave me alone. I was fine, I insisted. If I could only convince myself. It had been several weeks since I'd awakened in the park. I hadn't dreamed that night, which in itself was a small relief -- I'd had many nightmares in the past month. I had stayed at school late the day before, finishing a project for Compiler Design. But after that... I could remember nothing. I gathered the money around me -- only eighty bucks this time, I discovered with some disappointment -- and went to the phone in the snack area to call Dr. Simons. "You want me to whatT Matt was looking at me like I had asked him to take me to the Prom -- no anger, but some apprehension. He'd been suffering too; my nightmares were becoming more frequent, and my screams were getting to him. I finally pitched in to buy him some ear plugs. "I'm scared, okay? I want someone with me if it happens again." "If what happens again, Mikey?" "I wish I knew, Matt. I want a witness. Or a designated driver." Matt laughed loudly; we both knew I didn't drink. "It may be the only way to figure out what's happening to me." Dr. Simons had been unable to find anything wrong. Technically, nothing was wrong, aside from the nightmares and waking up in strange places with more money than memory. I was determined that if it happened again, I would have a witness to whatever I couldn't remember on my own. "But why now? It's been almost a month." "It seems to happen every month or so. If it happens again, it'll be soon." "You're overreacting. It's probably nothing." His voice gave away the lie. He wanted my nightmares to end too, if only to give him a decent night's sleep. " Nothing is what I know," I said, my voice rising. "Look, I'll pay for everything. Besides, we haven't done much together lately. If you want, we can call Stacey and Lisa, and we'll double." Matt thought about it for a second, then smiled. "Well, as long as you're buying..." he laughed, and I joined in. "Just don't get too weird on me, okay?" he said. "I promise," I said, crossing my heart, and hoping I could keep it. Five days later I woke up in my room; the alarm was buzzing, as usual, at #:# a.m. So far, so good, I thought as my head cleared; just a couple more days and the month will be gone. And no nightmares the night before. I turned on the light and reached for my water jug. There was a small pile of cash on the nightstand. Ten seconds later I was pounding on Matt's bedroom door. "Wake up!" I yelled. I tried, unsuccessfully, to remember the night before. Please , Matt , have something to tell me... Matt believed life begins at ten a.m. Wake him up before then, and your life ends. "What?" he mumbled through the door, sleep still firmly in control. "What happened last night?" I shouted. An unintelligible mumble. Then silence. Then a soft snore. floor, and Matt cursed loudly. "Talk to me, dammit! What happened last night?" "You were unbelievable. Gimme five more minutes, please? It was a long night..." I heard a yawn, then more snoring. Further pounding did no good. At least Matt had been there to see it; I would get some answers soon. I went to the kitchen to make coffee and add up my latest windfall. An absurd thought popped into my head between sips: "You too can make money in your sleep..." I spewed coffee and laughed uncontrollably for several minutes before I managed to calm down. When Matt finally made it to the kitchen, he told me everything. "We were walking out of Alondra # -- "I thought we were going to the Angels game," I interrupted. "We couldn't get tickets, so we watched Aladdin instead. Anyway, as we left the theater you started doing bits from it. I mean, whole bits. Voices and everything." "Whose voices?" "All of 'em. Bird, genie, bad guy, boy, girl, everyone. And you were doing 'em perfect, too. Then you started doing stuff that wasn't in the show, with the same voices. The people in line for tickets started watching us, and you really got off on it, started joking around with them. It was like we were at the Improv or there." I stared at him, unable to speak. He shook his head, smiling. "Normally you're scared outta your shorts in front of people -- don't lie, I remember graduation. Last night, though... you surprised the hell outta me. Those people were laughing themselves sick, and you looked like you were having the time of your life." "You're kidding," I managed to squeak out. "Sorry, dude. You told me to tell you if you did anything strange, and last night couldn't get much stranger. Not in a bad way, though; it was great seeing you have so much fun. It's about time, if you ask me." I had trouble swallowing my toast; I took a long sip of coffee, and burned my tongue. "Wh-what happened next?" Matt ate a spo'spful of Grape Nuts and took infuriatingly long to swallow. "Some people in line gave you their ticket money to keep you there. One old guy said, 'Screw Oliver Stone; this boy's worth seven bucks.' You went on for like a half an hour, until the theater people asked us to leave. Someone in line gave me his card and said I should take you to Igby's. He told me, 'Tell Casey I sent you, and he'll give your friend some stage time.'" "Matt, this isn't funny. The Igby's?" Igby's was one of the best comedy clubs in southern California. "That's the one. I almost crashed twice on the way, you had me laughing so hard. Casey saw the card and gave you a few minutes at the late show. Man, you month -- refused to follow you. You did more than an hour up there; Casey was so impressed he gave you a hundred bucks and offered you a spot on Monday night." In the pile of money on my nightstand I had found two crisp fifty-dollar bills. I started to feel nauseous. "This can't be happening..." I said, mostly to myself. "Mikey, I know you hate crowds. But cross my heart, you were addicted to them last night; you were a comedy machine. Hell, maybe it was just a case of Full Moon Fever. Whatever it was, I hope I'm there next time you do it. I haven't laughed so hard in my life." I stared at him while he concentrated on his cereal. It was too incredible to believe, but still... The nightmares, the nagging elementary school memory, the incessant cadence of "One Tin Soldier"... What did he mean by Full Moon Fever? "Matt?" I asked. "Was it a full moon last night?" "Mmm-hmmm," he mumbled through his Grape Nuts. I ran into the bedroom and grabbed my Day Timer. I looked at the day before... it was a full moon. I paged back to the night before I'd awakened on the school steps. Also a full moon. Back another month to the morning in the park. Three-for-three. My hands were trembling. I paged back to the night I was mugged. The Day Timer fell to the floor, and I soon followed. As I screamed, a poem repeated itself in my mind, like a mantra of the damned: Even a man who 's pure of heart And says his prayers at night May become a Comic when the wolfsbane blooms And the moon is full and bright. I vaguely remembered paramedics strapping me into a stretcher and injecting me with something, and the world going black. While I was out, I dreamed. I was on a stage again, which bore a striking resemblance to the one at Igby's. I was talking and smiling and screaming happily and gesturing, and the crowd applauded wildly and cheered and convulsed with laughter. I saw the crowd through my on-stage eyes; I noticed myself in the audience, shouting at me to stop, as I had in prior dreams. But I wouldn't -- couldn't -- stop. Then I saw the me on stage from the me in the crowd, and my soul froze; I had the fierce eyes, and the hellish wolf-like grin, of the mugger at Santa Monica beach. When I awoke, screaming, I was strapped into a hospital bed. Matt and Dr. Simons were standing nearby. I burst into tears. "Doc, what's happening to me?" Did I just say "Doc"? That was a first. Dr. Simons noticed this as well. "We don't know, Michael. Matthew told me what happened last night. That isn't at all like you." My temples throbbed; the tears stopped, and I saw dripping sarcasm. "You been sharing Sherlock's needle again?" The instant I said it, I turned pale and ached to take the words back. Dr. Simons stiffened; I couldn't have hurt him more with a blunt instrument. I saw a twenty-year relationship falling apart in an instant. "Doctor, I'm sorry," I said weakly, but he was walking out the door. Matt looked at me in shock. "That was cold, Mike." Matt looked up to Dr. Simons as much as I did. "Honest, Matt, I didn't mean it." I tried choking back tears. "I swear I didn't mean it." The tears won, and my whole body shook, rattling the bed frame. My world was falling apart; whether it was lack of sleep or lunacy or rabies, I didn't know or care; I just wanted it to end. Matt's look softened. "I know. I'll go talk to him." He left the room, and I surrendered to the tears until sleep reclaimed me. Dr. Simons was almost as quick to forgive as Matt. Matt stopped by frequently and stayed for hours, and managed to avoid talking about our "night on the town." At least with me. I knew he was telling someone, though; before I left, half the hospital was calling me Robin a copy of my performance had somehow been passed around. The reviews were glowing. This did not cheer me up. After two days. Dr. Simons decided I was "stable" and authorized my release. Matt drove me home from the hospital; his car stereo was tuned to the classic rock station, as usual, but the volume was turned way down so we could talk. John Fogerty was singing "Centerfield." "Back to the apartment?" he asked. "Lisa made a cake. We can invite a few people, watch a video..." I bristled. "You know, some obscure depressing French film. Or maybe an action flick." "Thanks, but my parents want me to stay with them for a while." "That's cool. So what happens next?" I shrugged. "They should get the tests back in a few days; they're checking for everything this time. And they reserved an observation room for me the next full moon." I laughed bitterly. "You could be famous, Matt. Your best friend is a werewolf." Matt laughed too. " Were-comic sounds better. You didn't sprout hair, you just got damned funny. I can think of worse diseases." "Yeah, but I'm only funny on a full moon." I tried to laugh. "Well, at least I can pick up some extra cash every lunar month." "Speaking of extra cash... you still on for Igby's tomorrow night?" I saw red again. I wanted to bite him. I mean, hit him. "There's no way in -- " "Sorry. How about if we go and watch the show?" I was about to protest, but decided against it. I sighed and nodded. "Just to watch, okay?" "You got it. I'll call them tonight." "Centerfield" ended, and the deejay announced the next song, "Bad Moon Rising." "Hey, they're playing our song!" Matt said with a goofy smile that quickly faded at my expression. He turned off the radio quickly and we drove in silence the rest of the way home. Casey was disappointed but understanding; he gave us complimentary tickets to the early show. Fortunately, Casey said, there were literally thousands of comics in on such short notice -- wouldn't be difficult. We took a front row table, over my objections. I looked around before the show started; I had no memory of performing here, and the thought of doing so knotted my stomach. The room was huge. The emcee was a celebrity, the co-star of a recently-canceled sitcom. He talked a lot about his old show, and begged campily for any producers in the audience to take pity on him. He wasn't very funny, and the crowd response was lukewarm. specials and Comic Strip Live; she was hilarious, and I laughed a lot, momentarily forgetting my troubles. The audience loved her; she did close to a half hour of material, most of which I'd never heard before. "And now, ladies and gentlemen," said the emcee after the crowd gave the opener yet another round of applause, "please welcome to the stage with a big hand, the Rottweiler of Comedy... Johnny Gonzo! ! !" I'd never heard of him, but the crowd went wild. Matt and I looked at each other and shrugged, then applauded. When the man leaped to the stage and grabbed the microphone, my blood froze. "Hey," Matt whispered, "he looks familiar..." Then he gasped as recognition set in. "Damn... I didn't know comedy was contagious." I nearly hit him until I saw his expression; he wasn't trying to be funny. In fact, he was trembling, staring in horror at the man at the mike. At the bloodshot eyes and feral grin of the Rottweiler of Comedy. Johnny Gonzo began his act, and the audience responded enthusiastically. Matt and I were too busy watching the guy with fear and loathing to listen. I didn't know whether to run away or jump onto the stage and beat him to death. The last three months were starting to make sense. Sitting on the front row of a comedy club and not laughing is like wearing a target to a firing range. Eventually the comic noticed us. "Hey, here's a party table! What's wrong, boys? You need a translator? How 'bout a Buttweed-to-English dictionary?" The crowd laughed. "I... I, uh..." I stammered. "I... I, uh... " he mimicked with a sneer. '"I, uh' what? Ayatollah?" Loud laughter. People often laugh because it's funny. They also laugh when it's someone other than them being picked on. I wasn't laughing. I was too busy stammering. "I, uh... " "... been working on the railroad? What are you trying to say?" The guy on stage pointed at us with a sweeping gesture. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Idaho delegation of Mensa is with us tonight! Give them a hand!" Laughter, rebel yells, and applause. The comic picked on us some more, then went on with his act. My heart was pounding, pumping adrenaline throughout my system. I felt like I'd been violated by him. Again. Something snapped in my head; it was like a door being blown apart from the inside. I lurched forward in my seat as a wave of memories washed forcefully through my consciousness, sloshing around and demanding immediate attention. The night in the park... on campus... outside the movie theater. Even here in Igby's. I saw myself dancing around, waving my arms, making faces, cracking jokes. I heard the laughter of the people watching me. I saw the money thrown at my feet, heard the applause, felt the handshakes and hugs of appreciation -- and the eager lips and probing tongues of groupie lust. I saw myself sinking down in exhaustion as the people walked away smiling, as if their very presence gave me my strength and their departure robbed me of it. Some staggered away and tried to recover their breath as I lost consciousness where I stood, only to awake the next morning, oblivious to what I'd done or been. Making people laugh... it was a good thing, wasn't it? Tonight's opener had made me forget my troubles for a time. Why shouldn't I be happy to have sent so many away laughing? As my mind sorted through the memories, I saw that some of my jokes had been cruel, and I recalled seeing more than one pained look. A few jokes had been directed at faces in the crowd, targeting them as if I were exacting vengeance for some past wrong. Some of these bystanders had familiar faces, similar to ones I remembered from that elementary school concert. I replayed my cruel behavior in detail; it's as if I was fighting for the right to be the focus of attention again, erasing my childhood humiliation one teardrop at a time. I hated myself for these attacks. And I hated the man on stage who had done this to me. Johnny Gonzo decided to notice us again. I didn't realize I was blushing. "You really need to lower the octane level of those drinks, Gomer; I could fry eggs on your forehead." He smiled sappily, said, "Golly!" drunkenly, and the audience roared. He had no reason to expect me to respond any better than I had last time. The first time he'd attacked me in Santa Monica, I was caught off guard. The second time, from the stage, I was in shock. Now, though, my mind was working on all cylinders, and I wanted blood. "When's the last time you had your shots, Cujo?" I asked loudly. His sneer faded. A couple of people laughed, but I ignored them. I locked my gaze on Gonzo; I was determined to make him suffer. I felt some shame for this desire, but my fury was in firm control. The battle had begun. "Ooooh," he said sarcastically. "Gomer's a heckler! Gonna throw spuds at the stage now?" I smiled. "You know, I find it amazing that of all back as if struck. The audience roared. "Hey pal," he said nervously, "I don't give you a rough time at your job when you're giving your customers their McChange..." Sporadic laughter. "You should really consider wearing turtlenecks. Johnny," I said, "to hide those circumcision scars." Some enthusiastic groans, and even more cheers. They were on my side now; I felt a fresh rush of adrenaline. Getting laughs wasn't so bad, and I had Gonzo on the ropes. He was speechless. His face went blank. "I, uh... " he stammered. "I, uh, whatl " I shot back. "Iawatha? Yer Honor, I uhbject!" The audience howled. I relished the irony of using his own joke against him, and the laughter was intoxicating. I looked over to Matt's seat, but he was gone. Gonzo's eyes blazed with a mix of terror and fury; his lips curled and his teeth ground together as he clenched the microphone like a bludgeon. He didn't even look human anymore; he more closely resembled a cornered animal. It was the look he had given me after he'd knocked me down three months before, and I felt a momentary chill before my own rage reasserted itself. "You wouldn't recognize a joke if it bit you on the ass," he growled. Nobody laughed. A few people booed. He weakened visibly. "No, but I'd recognize the ass who bit me on the shoulder," I snapped back, smiling demonically. "You still singing soprano, Cujo?" Every vestige of arrogance fled his face; I noted the pure terror with satisfaction as recognition set in. "You're... you're the guy -- " "You screwed up my life, Johnny," I said. I stood. "And now it's my turn." I imitated Sylvester Stallone: "I'm your worst nightmare." Some laughter from the crowd; the professional drinkers in the audience were now completely sauced and determined to laugh at everything. I did another Stallone impression: "You're the disease, and I'm the cure." More sporadic laughter. I looked around; many people looked confused, but a few seemed to think we were a tag-team act. Johnny Gonzo started crying. "I'm sorry, man... I'm so sorry..." Heavy sobs. "I used to be a teacher. I got bit a couple years ago in Phoenix, and next thing I know I'm on the road performing. Four months ago #... I just went crazy. I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." I wanted so much to hate him, but my anger was rapidly draining away. If what he was saying was true, he was a victim like me. Could I blame him for attacking me? Might as well get pissed off at a mosquito for feeding off your blood while you slept. I looked at the weeping figure on the stage, and our eyes met again; this time, I felt no fear, no fury... only understanding. The look in his eyes now matched those I'd seen in the mirror almost every day the past several months. "I'm sorry too," I said sincerely. "It's not your fault you're a comic." I had no more anger in me, and now that I knew what was going on my fear diminished. Matt entered the room with three police officers; he pointed towards the stage. They took the weeping Gonzo away in handcuffs as the shocked audience watched. Someone at the back of the room shouted, "Bravo!" and started applauding as if Johnny Gonzo and I were doing Hamlet shtick; did he honestly think this was part of the show? Hell, why not? I jumped on the stage, grabbed the microphone, bowed theatrically and announced in a Dodger Stadium Public Address System voice, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building!" I pointed to the exit through which the police and Gonzo had left. The guy in back howled his approval. "Howdy, folks," I said. "My name is Mike McNeal, and I'm your real headliner for tonight. Johnny and I planned this; normal intros are so boring and besides -- let's face it -- the emcee sucks." More laughter as I impersonated the emcee as his television character, using some of his best-known tag lines. The emcee, standing in the doorway, winced and grinned sheepishly. "The cops came in when things started to drag; hell, it always worked for Monty Python." More laughter, and a few Arsenio-style woofs. The drunks were happy again. I basked in the attention. "How about a big round of applause," I shouted, "for the Rottweiler of Comedy, Johnny Gonzo?" Loud applause. "Bring him back in, guys!" I shouted, and the police dragged Johnny in -- confused, but no longer sobbing -- for a quick bow. I decided then to not press charges against him. We needed to have a long talk; I had to find out what I was in for. The uncertainty of what had happened to me was gone, but the future still scared me... But first, the present. There were people to entertain. I noticed Casey as he gave me a thumbs-up. "Sit back, folks; the show has just begun. Johnny will get his booster shots and be back tomorrow night, as rowdy and rabid as ever." Cheers. I was grinning like a madman. "Some of you still have that look on your face like, 'is this Greek Tragedy night?'" I put the microphone close to my mouth and in an announcer's voice intoned, "Tonight on Masterjoke theater, Oedipus kills the headliner, marries the opener and fathers the emcee before dying tragically from a shorted-out microphone." I then faked electrocution and fell on the stage, launching into a long soliloquy in Classic style on the horrors of comedy inbreeding before gasping my last. I didn't know if it made sense, but they were laughing. I hopped back up, Bruce Lee style. "We need to get that Kumbaya feeling back here, people, so follow along." I started chanting in a low voice, "comedy, comedy, co-me-dy." My right arm -- the wounded shoulder was throbbing now -- churned in a steady rhythm to the words. I continued until the audience was chanting along, and I pumped up the volume until the pictures on the walls rattled. Jay Leno's headshot shook loose and fell to the floor. When everyone was chanting in unison I let loose with a howl that pierced through the racket, and soon they were howling too. They were in the palm of my hand; everyone knew it, and loved it. "There's a bad moon rising, folks, and what's his name?" And then the show really began. I conjured comedy routines from thin air; I told jokes, did impressions, sang silly songs. I told them of my horrific elementary school choir experience, exaggerating beyond belief, even improvising a parody of "One Tin Soldier" -- mocking my childhood nightmare, purging my soul of that festering demon forever. As I told the story, I found myself laughing along. I was free! Twenty years of anguish and denial now filtered through a comic lens and dissipated into harmless memory. A crowd had once laughed at the child, and wounded me; a crowd now laughed for the man, and made me whole. The jokes and the laughter became a part of me, forget this night, and even sleep could not steal these memories from me as they had three times before. The crowd laughed, cheered and applauded, the earlier tension. in the room forgotten. My jokes were not so cruel now; my rage and fear were gone, washed away in a tidal wave of goodwill. Yes, I picked on people in the crowd, using a bald head, a cowboy hat or a loud sweater to launch into a new routine, but not maliciously; every victim laughed along, their faces registering no injury, able to enjoy their participation in the intricate symphony of mirth. Only the crowd mattered. Their energy flowed into me; my blood churned and boiled like the base of Niagara Falls, and I ached to please them, to feed off their adulation until they went home satisfied and I sank to the floor torpid from the feast. Their laughter nourished me, sustained me. Iocor ergo sum ; I joke, therefore I am. I couldn't imagine not performing for the rest of my life. All I could think of was the next laugh, and my only fear was that it wouldn't come. Illustrated by Hart atana slipped into the thick burgundy dress. Of all her dresses, this one would be the best for dying. She glanced out the window for a moment, watching red dust swirl across the ridge and disappear in an umber puff. There she would await the dragon -- and sacrifice her life for her people. For eight cycles of the sun, the silvery white creature had preyed on the city, reducing sandstone dwellings -- and anyone in the way -- to ash. It would take the turn of many suns to build up the herds again and to bury all the dead. Seemed like a lifetime since Zand had shoved her ahead of him into the street as the great dragon surged across the sky in a blue-white streak. She had heard his scream and the roar of flame, but when the red dust twisted up into the sky, their home was nothing but gray ash. Yesterday, she had scattered Zand's ashes across the ridge. He would be with her tonight when she faced the dragon. The dry, rough scent of the knitted fabric made her eyes water and her skin itch. Zand had given her this dress. For traveling, he had said. The heavy material prevented the chilly sand showers from pocking her skin, protecting her until -- Yes, this was a dress for dying. When the sun fell away from the amber sky, Matana rushed out into the frigid night air. Quickly, she draped a thick gray scarf over her head and across her mouth. The cold wind swished across the brick red sands, erasing the whisper of her footsteps. She held the scarf tighter against her face and made her way over the ridge, envying those disappearing steps in the sand. They slipped away in silence, leaving no past and no future. Beyond the ridge, a stretch of brittle sandstone, scorched by the dragon's fire, broke through the smooth sands like a fractured bone. She toed a circle that had been burned into the stone and a cold shiver arced pulsed and she prayed that it would just stop. Many times, her people had tried to stop the dragon's destruction, but every time, they were turned to ash in moments. The dragon never paused to hear their cries of mercy. It just destroyed. The apathetic creature with large blank eyes and twitching pupils simply destroyed. Last night, in the square, there had been talk of a sacrifice, but when no one volunteered, they decided to face the creature together. The whole town would face it one last time. Matana had embraced the idea of sacrifice in silence. Zand would have been pleased by her decision. Her people would be angry at first, but that would pass if her life appeased the dragon's appetite. Tonight, as it had done for several cycles, it would circle the city, swoop down to burn and destroy, and then shoot back into the air, spewing fire. Even now, the smell of burnt grain lingered on the sands and in the air. She knew it would come back tonight. And she would be ready. With two rocks anchored firmly in her fingers. If she could blind it, even while it killed her, perhaps she could save the city. For a long while, she stood on the edge of a thick black scorch mark and waited, waited for the stark white dragon to soar through the sky toward the ridge. Without warning, the ground began to rumble. Cold fear numbed her fingertips and her heart pressed against her throat as she stretched her hands toward the sky. She would be with Zand soon. Soon, but she would try to take this creature with her. With a deafening roar, the white dragon sizzled across the sky. Abruptly, a screech rippled through the silence and Matana dug her heels into the ground dread pressing against her body. It sounded like a great wind and Matana closed her eyes, hoping the creature would kill her swiftly. Already, she felt its blistering heat rolling across the ground. She drew back her arm and let the first rock fly. "Roger, Houston... approaching landing site." The Work Space Gallery P.O. Box # New Paltz, NY #I (#)#-# Cosznoidlo Ceramics and special "weMSiecK: # ycabs T-Shirts (#) #-# # W #th St., Torrance, CA #-# anxious astronaut surveyed the dusty ridge ahead, eager to land. He would be one of the first humans to set foot on Mars. "The eight probe sweeps we did of the area confirm our long range scans... if there's life here, we're within meters of it." A sharp crack echoed through the ship. One of the astronauts watched as the small satellite receiver snapped off. "Houston, we've lost visuals!" A metallic crunch followed and the radar winked out. "Radar's gone. We're going down hard, Houston! Repeat, we're going down hard." As the nose of the ship gouged into the ground, the astronaut shuddered at the thought of being one of the first humans to die on Mars. Illustrated by Valencia J t seems so long ago that I roamed the hills of Hamster-Dzorzia. The world was young then, soft spring winds wafting eastward with the hint of rain, young flowers nodding in the meadows, the greeps putting forth their first green fruit. There were winters. And scorching days. And hours of labor totting up figures in dusty rooms. But that isn't what sticks in the memory. It's the skirl of pipes, the coolness of the gloaming, the scent of new greep-blossoms. Here and there, about the land, traces of elven magic lingered. There was power slowly dying with the elves' absence, but still enough to support the greep. And its fruit; ah, its fruit. If you haven't tasted fresh, new-plucked greep right off the vine, you have no inkling of nirvana! Tart, but not too tart; sweet, but not too sweet. The greep is a delicate fruit, and perishes quickly. It must be preserved, then pickled, jellied and bottled. You can get greep vinegar, greep schnapps -- and what household doesn't have a pot of greep syrup? My father was a haute bourgeois , a trader in greep. He shipped it fresh by fast pony, to Hamsterburg, where gourmets dined on its exquisite flesh. There was great demand for greep. Among true connoisseurs, it's well-known that different soils breed different taste: greep grown by a magic spring tastes of the cool freshness of the waters, while those grown where a basilisk nests have a pungent, earthy scent. My father was always on the lookout for magical places where the greep could grow, for each new site meant a slightly different taste -- a new variety for his demanding clientele. I saw him seldom; he was constantly on his rounds, and paused only briefly in the little market village we called home. It was his absence that gave me my freedom. I was sixteen, that spring. On a soft spring morning, I would sneak away from my chamber, before the hour at which I was required to meet my tutor, and roam the hills. Often I would meet Rudy; he had a quality of sober joy I found ceaselessly fascinating, a keen intelligence he applied to our amusement, and a reckless daring that kept me in awe. In the best of circumstances, I think he would have wound up dead, or imprisoned, for he was sort of boy who would steal the clappers from the bells of the town clock, make off with women's clothes while they bathe, and casually pocketed merchandise while the shopkeeper looks elsewhere; not, I think, the sort of boy who would make a success of himself in the sober world. We would climb the hills, swim in the streams, taunt bulls, play jokes and otherwise amuse ourselves. His skin was fair, his arms speckled with a light golden down, his face chiseled in such exquisite lines that, more than once, despite our friendship, I was overwhelmed by shyness in his presence, a diffidence his sudden grin would instantly shatter. Together, we roamed the spring-soft hills, and took pleasure in each other as young friends will. One of our favorite places was an oak grove, down in the fold between two hills, where a little stream ran. The stream marked the boundary between two peasants' property, which was why the grove had not been felled to make room for crops. Perhaps also -- superstitious as peasants often are -- they sensed some power lurking there. The tall oaks dated from as long ago as the age of elven dominion. The ground was carpeted with soft leaf mold, dotted with harder acorns. The trees abounded with squirrels, chipmunks, and various birds who survived on the mast the oaks produced; it was a veritable little forest, one of the last great stands of trees, nestled amidst acres and acres of cultivated land. Even in the hottest days of summer, the high branches of the trees cast a cool, green shade within the grove, a shade we found inviting. Often, in the afternoon, we'd go there, drink at the stream, make a rude lunch of bread and cheese, and lie together, sending our imaginations soaring outward beyond the distant stars in the green dimness of the grove. After dinner, I went out into the gloaming. The sky had turned that strange indigo color that painters try so hard to capture on canvas -- the luminous fading of the light, a time magical and glimmering in the unknown. I knew the grove as a place of green dimness, but in this already-dim light, it now seemed dark, mysterious. As I entered, I heard the sound of voices: Rudy's, and -- a girl's. Surprised that he would bring a wench to our private place, I crept softly toward the stream, hiding behind the trees. And there was Rudy with -- with a creature. Oh, female, to be sure; but hardly human. Her skin was pastel viridian, her hair bedecked with long, fine, willow-like leaves, her eyes of a definite elven cast. She moved with a catlike litheness, and she and Rudy were obviously entranced. Astonished, I could hardly move, but watched -- crouching behind the bole of an oak -- while they murmured to each other, Rudy mustering the full force of his enormous charm. It hardly seemed necessary, for her intentions matched his, and by the time full darkness fell, they were in each others' arms. It was new moon's darkness in the oak grove, the trees obscuring the meager star-light. I saw little, and after a while, heard only their soft breathing. I stumbled away, half in pain, half in rage. Rudy had defiled our place, had defiled what we had together, and had done it, moreover, with a creature not even of our own kind. Why did I react with such intensity? It is hard to say why, now, so long after. Certainly, Rudy had had wenches before; he was a careless, charming lad, of respectable family, and had induced many of the local girls to spend an hour or two with him, in a hayloft, or amid the soft greenery of the meadow. And that had never bothered me, for I had known that they meant nothing to Rudy, nothing more than an afternoon's pleasure, nothing by comparison to what we shared. But this -- I sensed, even from that moment -- this was different. And it was. He grew distant; the intimacy we had shared was gone. He never once mentioned his elven lover, but I could see her swimming in his eyes, his attention far off; he'd gather wildflowers and take them to the grove. He'd bring nuts and berries for the squirrels and lie there, his back to an oak tree, for hours at a time, staring upward into the leaves and sighing. It was clear, not only in his actions, but in his lack of action, his were our wont, that he'd been thoroughly captivated by that creature, enraptured in her spell, and what we had once shared was gone forever. I began to hate him as only one whose love has been betrayed can hate; to hate him nearly as much as I loathed that inhuman, green thing with which he lay. That was when I began to plot my revenge. The greep grows only in magical soil, and even in Hamster-Dzorzia, there were few enough places where it could be grown. Fell those few trees, and the grove would be a perfect place for a stand of vines -- rich, bottom land, well-watered by the stream, the soil imbued with magic. Moreover, none of the greep orchards from which my father bought were planted in a dryad's former grove; the taste of greeps planted there would differ, would provide my father with a new variety with which to titillate the jaded palates of even the urbs. And as it happened, father was home. I told him what I knew. Not of Rudy, nor what had passed between him and the dryad; but of her presence, of the grove's power. My father slapped me on the back and, I think, for the first time in my life, he was proud of me. Merchant that he was, he began at once to ponder how best to acquire the property, how to obtain it from the peasants who tilled the adjoining fields without alerting them to its value. I slept soundly that night, savoring my victory. If I couldn't have Rudy, I could betray him just as I had been betrayed. The next day, I met him on the hill overlooking the town, and told him what I'd done. All color drained from his face. "No," he said, "you couldn't have!" When I insisted I had, and provided corroborating detail, he struck me full on the face, a sudden vicious blow. I had not expected it, and it flung me to the ground. I lost consciousness for a while, and when I awoke, found a reddening bruise about one eye. That very afternoon, I went out to the grove in the company of my father, with two woodsmen and a sorcerer, the latter to protect us if the dryad proved to have unexpected powers, and the woodsmen to begin to fell the grove. They set to work on the outer trees, while I went with my father inward, to show him the stream, the largest oak wherein, I thought, the dryad made her home -- Oh, what dolor greeted us there. Where there had been green coolness was warm blood, black in the darkness of the grove. And there was cold grey steel driven through Rudy's belly, his pale flesh lifeless upon the moss growing beneath the tree. I cried out, ran to him, cradled his head; but it was too late. Life had hours ago departed from his form. My father scowled, cursed under his breath, hauled me away, saw the tears coursing down my cheeks, and slapped me, hard. I think he understood it all, in that moment, understood that Rudy and I had been more than friends, understood what Rudy had done with the creature of the wood. He was disgusted; he despised me, as I think he always had, an unforgiving man. But worse, the grove was ruined. Rudy's blood would taint the soil, the greeps would be worthless if we grew them there. They would forever taste of metal, blood and death; they would win no praises at the tables of the city. He called the woodsmen to halt, and hauled me roughly away from Rudy's form. He swore to kill me if I let the townsfolk know of my -- unnatural desires, he called them; odd how natural they seemed, by comparison with Rudy's, and he told me he would banish me from my home. I hardly cared. Rudy had known what his blood would do; though there were wheat fields, apiaries, and vineyards in Hamster-Dzorzia, the lifeblood of its commerce depended on the greep, and we had known its ways from infancy. He had slain himself, not out of despair, but out of love; not in mourning for the loss of his dryad, but to protect her from the axe. He had cheated me of my vengeance. And most of all, he made me realize that I, too, had never been more than a passing fancy, for him, little more than just another of his girls; would he ever have sacrificed his life for mine, as he did for the spirit of the oak? Had she planned this from the start? Had she known that, in this region, it was merely a matter of time before she, as had happened to all her dryad, sisters, would also fall to the axe? Had she plotted all this as a means of mere survival -- betrayed Rudy as fully as I? From high in the oak's stately branches, I caught a hint of a laughing face, a sardonic glint of the eye; the dryad looked down, mocking me. Proofreading  Copy editing P.O. Box I #I  Penn Ualley, CA # f#J #-# 'The young warrior journeyed up the mountain and was initiated into the Great Mysteries..." cctm ccmmo An ancient science of universal energy for your needs today and for the rest of your life. A simple, proven, practical tool to unlock and fulfill your true potential for creativity vitality and radiant health on all levels. For information, call or write: Radiance Light and Power Co. (#) #-# P.O. Box #, Beverly Hills, CA # Illustrated by Elston ii  ey, Mikal!" # The shout was a welcomed interruption. I id J dropped another fist-sized stone into my bag and turned toward the voice. Ilmer -- my best friend -- waved from the road. He was driving a pony-drawn cart. I dragged my rock-filled bag toward him. Dust rose with every step and hung in the still, hot air. "Hi Ilmer. Little late for bread delivery, isn't it?" I said, dropping the heavy bag with a sigh. Ilmer was the baker's apprentice. I stretched tired muscles and felt the tingle of sunburned skin on my shoulders. "It's not bread," Ilmer answered. "Ever since my master bought one of those speaking-stone inventions from your master, I've been doing three and four deliveries a day! That thing has made my life miserable!" "Why?" I asked. "The Talkie-Rocks are supposed to make things easier." I am, of course, the Wizard's apprentice. "No more running messages all over the city." "Yeah. But delivery requests are coming in at all hours, now." He sighed and wiped sweat from his brow. "Before Master got that chatter-rock, I just delivered bread in the mornings. Now, it's 'Lord So-and-So needs this,' or, 'Lady Such-and-Brother wants that.' And, of course, it's all in a hurry. "And then, Master got this idea to add a new product. He calls it 'quick-food.'" Ilmer indicated the back of the cart, and I saw a strange wooden box with little doors. Steam rose from the cracks and shimmered in the hot, summer air. "What's that?" I asked. "It's to keep the quick-food orders warm while I deliver them." He looked up the hill toward the manors and mansions of the City Lords. "At least those blasted rockie-talks are so big and expensive that only the rich can afford them." He sighed and shook the reins. "I've got to go. Master will skin me if I don't meet the promised delivery times. Bye." "See you later," I said. He clucked to the pony and they started up the hill. I watched as the cart moved up the road. I didn't tell Ilmer that my master had discovered a way to empower smaller stones, or that the smaller Talkie-Rocks would be less expensive. My master had a dream that soon everyone in the city would have a Talkie-Rock. 'Progress,' he called it. Ilmer turned and waved. I waved back, then hefted my bag of fist-sized stones -- wincing as the canvas rubbed my sunburned shoulder -- and started the long walk back to my master's house. As I walked, I had to laugh. Ilmer thought he was busy now? He's going to miss these days of three and four deliveries when word of my master's new invention gets out. He can't read, of course, so he probably doesn't know that the new sign tacked to the back of the baker's cart says: "Kingdom Pizza, We Deliver." Illustrated by Tom X y late afternoon the stock market closed. Not waiting for the west coast exchange, stock broker Shane Conlan lifted his suit jacket from the chair back and pulled it on over his vest. He wore a pin-striped blue suit, white shirt, muted blue tie, and Bostonian black shoes, shined that morning to mirror reflection, but now scuffed. Lithe and twenty-four, clean shaven and short haired, Shane Conlan straightened his back to achieve his full # ' I #", pushed his chest out, sucked in his stomach in one final effort at the close of another hard day. The tote board had ceased its incessant clicking, the European exchanges had long been closed, so he put on his black Homburg hat, tossed his Wall Street Journal into the waste basket, and walked past the cashier's cage, waving good night to the cashiers. Shane Conlan walked jauntily out through the lobby to the elevators. As soon as he'd left the building, his whole body slumped. The subway proved so crowded that Shane stood up all the way to Charles Street, where the woman seated just in front of him got up and stepped off, allowing him to slump down exhaustedly into the vacant seat. He looked around at the normal going-home crowd: the tired faces, the service men just mustered out, the few women in high heels hanging on straps, men studiously ignoring Shane's head lolled forward, chin on chest, thinking about the rising cost of automobiles. Fords priced as high as #, and still not widely available at that inflated price. He dozed, nodded, then gradually fell asleep. In his sleep Shane felt the train lurch to a halt at Harvard Square, line's end, and awoke. At first everything whirled about in an awakening daze, then his green eyes began to focus, noticing everything seemed different. The car itself seemed altered, somehow newer, and he marked a different ethnic mix than before: Negroes, Asians, Mexicans in their odd-looking clothes, their strange modes of gesturing and even walking. Shane wondered, shook his head to clear it, and stood up to experience a sharp pain in his right knee. He reached down to run it and noticed his hands -- now gnarled, thin-skinned, blotched with brown spots and raised, bluish veins. His gaze, he noticed, didn't seem too clear -- but remained faintly clouded, even after rubbing his eyes. Absorbed in considering these facts, he reached the top of the stairs where, as custom dictated, he bought the evening the newspaper startled him. Then he saw the date: November #, #. In a state of shock he crossed the street crowded with futuristic vehicles not at all like those he'd seen at the New York World's Fair. As if in a dream and in the dark, he entered Harvard Yard wondering: My God, what has happened? In the Yard everything seemed familiar again. The beating of his heart, accelerating at observing the mod cars and wrinkled hands (now tucked safely into his pockets), had calmed. The knee pain gradually lessened as he walked through the dark yard. Strange, he'd not noticed the construction project on his way to work this morning. The tall, unlighted concrete building appeared to be nearing completion. He sighed as he neared his house on Ware Street, feeling for the key, tugging it out of his pocket just before mounting the steps. He tried to insert the key in the lock but couldn't. How odd, he thought, the key won't fit. He leaned down to look more closely in the weak light and saw the lock had been changed to a newer, shinier one. His key wouldn't work. A momentary pang: could he have come to the wrong house in the darkness? They all looked alike, he remembered. The street contained more than a dozen red brick row houses built in the #'s; so he stepped backward to examine the facade again. The number -- yes, the number twenty-four -- exactly the same. What could be wrong? Fighting acceptance of change, Shane decided his wife must have changed the lock. He rang the bell, heard its different tone echo inside. Then after a long wait, he heard footsteps before the door opened. A woman of fifty or so, gray haired, ample-bosomed, with rosy cheeks, opened the door a few inches. "Yes?" she peered warily out from behind the chain. Shane, astonished, wondered what had happened to his wife, "Who... who are you?" "I'm Mrs. Freyer. Who are you looking for?" Shane hardly knew what to answer, "My wife and children. I... I... live here." The woman stared wide-eyed, alarm clouding her face, "You must have the wrong house! We've lived here for twenty years." She slammed the door, rammed home the bolt. Shane Conlan stepped back on the entry landing and stared up at the house front again. The same number: twenty-four -- he knew that was right. He recognized the peculiar tilt to the roof gable, and the street seemed not unfamiliar. He shuffled down the stairs onto the cracked sidewalk again, looking back and forth, up and down the once-familiar street. Then he focused on changes. The building farther up the street appeared different. The patch of greensward in front of the next door neighbor's house had been paved over, the hedge around another neighbor's tiny lawn on the other side had vanished, the sidewalk had been repaved. None of the changes seemed recent enough to have been done today, yesterday, or even last week. Shane trudged a few paces up the street, noticing something different here, an alteration there -- realizing at last how drastic had been the changes since he'd been at the office. At last the truth came home: he'd lost those intervening years, and as the sky thickened toward dusk, he finally understood his complete aloneness, totally disoriented in an alien world. Studying the shriveled skin of his hands, Shane realized what had happened. He could no longer call this his home, someone else lived here now. All he could think of: where were his young wife and children? How would he begin to find them? Finally, where would he sleep tonight? Tomorrow would he find his office still where it had been? After a few moments of painful hesitation Shane, not knowing what else to do, walked away toward the Common and the two hotels still flanking it. He crossed the Common amongst gum and candy wrappers, crumpled newspapers, used condoms, abandoned dirty underwear, and an occasional soleless shoe. He approached the Commander Hotel, entered the lobby, and enquired about a room for the night. The desk man quoted him a price in excess of one hundred dollars. Shane opened his wallet to a mere thirty dollars -- what had seemed more than enough that morning. Without credit cards or other means of charging the exorbitant cost of a room, Shane left the hotel lobby and returned to the common. Slumping onto a vacant park bench, Shane pulled his overcoat tightly about him. The wind scraped old newspaper pages along the broken concrete sidewalk. Vagrants, bums, and the homeless began to infiltrate the darkened park. A bag lady sat down on the bench three feet distant, mumbled a tired greeting. 'You sleeping here tonight? This here's my sleeping bench." She began wrapping herself in old newspapers. "The one over there ain't taken yet." From a ragged sleeve pointed a dirty finger. Shane stifled a sob and shuffled over to the other bench, where he lay himself down to sleep in his clothes. Representing Menlo Macfarlane, R.C. Trice, Tom X., Della Heywood, E.J. Gold, Kelly Rivera, et al. ( # ) #-#I Illustrated by S. Gold he car began to grumble and dip, and Pierre felt II a jolt of fear. He was passing the jungle, a green tangle of choking vines and undergrowth, the place where grotesque mutants lived. Pierre hated the drive home alone at night, and to make matters worse, the full moon showed pale yellow beyond smoky clouds. This was the worst of times, a night of insanity when sleeping beasts began to stir, when hideous beings rose to stalk the night. Or so the legends said. War had nearly decimated the earth; Pierre's grandfather talked about how lucky a small minority was to escape, at least till the mutations became apparent. The worst fled to the jungles of Balboa park, once a zoo and cultural center for the city of Diego. Yet everyone to a degree had abnormalities. The car coughed and slowed, nearly crashing through its cushion of air. Damn mechanics anyway. They'd assured him the car was fine, just a matter of adjusting the timing. He'd always tried to be careful. As a police inspector, he knew the dangers that could befall a lonely traveler. Strangely enough, he'd never seen the creatures that inflicted the torturous deaths on those who ventured too close to the jungle. Even though there seemed to be an unvoiced agreement about each group keeping to its territory, citizens sometimes strayed. Usually, it was teenagers out to prove their bravery. Pierre had seen throats ripped open by fangs or bodies cut in small pieces, most of the parts dragged off. He gripped the steering wheel. Only a mile or so till the worst was over, till he was away from danger. Headlights illuminated the path before him, a road now cracked and nearly overgrown. If only he hadn't decided to take the short cut. But he'd been delayed and had promised this time that he'd be home to see his twin sons' vid soccer game, played against a school up north in City of Angels. He began to sweat. He glanced right, toward the jungle only yards away, creeping ever closer to the road that no one would dare fix for fear of attack. A clanging began, and the car spit fitfully. Pierre's fingers formed bands around the steering wheel. His jaw ached with tension. He started to rock back and forth, as if the motion would somehow propel the car forward. With one last gasp, the motor died. Milt Johnson opened his eyes and stretched. He sighed deeply and sat up. Now the change would begin, the change to power. Feelings of strength flowed through his body. He held his hands out and saw them sprout coarse hair. The fingernails narrowed, hardened into claws. Pads formed on his palms and fingers. As blood surged within him, he ran from the sleeping cave, tore off his clothes and sniffed the powerful odors around him -- must and decay, mixed with animal smells. It was good to be alive. He threw back his head and howled at the moon. The worst had happened, and Pierre had to accept it. The decision made, his breath came easier. He glanced around to see if there was anything important he should take with him. There wasn't really. He loosened his seat belt and climbed out. No one would ever risk coming back for the car. He'd simply abandon it. He hadn't been in this particular area of town for a couple of years, and things had deteriorated. No one knew how to keep the jungle contained. He shrugged. He wouldn't have to travel far on foot, and he was in good shape. He ran or biked each day, swam a couple of times a week. He slammed the door shut. Maybe he'd be lucky and make it. Milt lived for the nights of the full moon. In his alternate state, huddled with the others in hollowed-out caves, he hoarded his strength for times such as this. Pierre trotted along the asphalt, keeping up a steady pace. Thirty-four years old, he'd worked hard to overcome his handicap and gain his appointment as the youngest police inspector on the Diego force. Everyone was differently able now, and many simply succumbed to failure. But not Pierre; from the time he was a child, he aimed at the police force, determined to let nothing stop him in achieving his goal. He glanced toward the jungle, wondering what horrors lurked within. Intellectually, he could feel sorry for the beings who lived there. As the histories told, his people and the jungle inhabitants had sprung from a single common ancestry. Pierre denied the aching of his joints, the pain caused by each additional step. In no more than two or three minutes, he knew, he'd be past the jungle. He'd make it, maybe not in time for his sons' soccer game. But there'd be other games. He listened to the plod of his feet. Milt had never known another kind of life. Folktales had it that beyond the jungle only "normals" lived. He knew they weren't completely normal, but not so altered as he and his kind. Yet Milt enjoyed the diversity among his family and friends. By unspoken agreement, they never preyed upon one another, but upon descendants of the zoo animals. The ultimate satisfaction came in ventured too far from safety. The only differences among those outsiders, Milt believed, was their size. Among Milt's kith and kin, there was more uniformity, which, despite the diversities, prevented bullying. All these thoughts and more went through Milt's head as he raced toward the road at the edge of the jungle. Pierre began to tire. Still, with each lagging step, a shot of adrenalin pumped through his system, spurring him forward. Up ahead he could see the lights of Diego, kind and protective. No jungle creatures ever ventured there. It was theorized that they feared all light except the sun's reflection on the moon. Throat parched, sweat soaking his clothing, breath coming in heaves, Pierre shucked off his suit coat and let it fall behind him. Milt paused and sniffed. The scent was stronger now. The hackles rose on his neck, and he growled deep in his throat. He cocked his head to listen. Someone was running, coming closer and closer. The lust for blood was all-consuming. He'd eaten nuts and roots in his other form. It had been a month since he'd tasted blood. He could imagine his fangs ripping and tearing, and the liquid fire spraying his muzzle and face. He'd bury his nose in warm flesh and gorge until he was filled. Then once he changed back, he'd hack the body to pieces with sharpened stones and drag it back to the cave for the others to finish. If he waited in the thicket at the near edge of the road, the normal wouldn't see him. He'd be concentrating on escape, on getting back to his family. Milt felt a wrench of sadness. He had a family too. But there was no comparison. If he didn't kill the normal, his own family could easily die of starvation. The closer the footsteps came, the faster Milt's heart pounded till he felt his arteries would burst. He felt a stab of excitement. The normal had come into sight. Milt and his family would feast. He gauged the time and leaped. Pierre stumbled but kept on running, despite the needles of pain in his ankle. Something was wrong, he kept slipping. When he finally reached the lights of town and knew he was safe, he pulled off his shoe, a gigantic oxford as befitted his fourteen-foot body. On the bottom, squashed against the huge sole, was an animal of some kind. Pierre shook his head in puzzlement. It looked almost like a tiny dog. The bardo stinks. Well, maybe not exactly stinks but it certainly smells. There are such things as odors that evoke the bardo, that either put you there or indicate that you already are there. Eau d'Funeral Home -- it'll put you over the line... Essential Oil, # dram bottle, # Illustrated by Heywood awny Nicole, creamy Damon, cafe au lait Giselle-, all three had lovely skin and wild, golden hair. All three wore fabulous new outfits of shot-silk, and all three were gazing upon Theophile Comte with sparkling green eyes. "You are a genius, Theo darling," Nicole said, stroking the sleeve of her bolero jacket. "A mad genius. The Oscar Wilde of fashion." "Oh, please."' Damon sighed with exasperation and rolled his eyes. "He is a modern-day Baudea;e." He patted his scarf into place and sighed again, this time with contentment. Giselle laughed her tiny, tinkling, descending-tones laugh. "Try Aleister Crowley." A golden bell on her ankle bracelet jangled as she walked to the full-length mirror next to Theophile's work table. Ordinarily, harem pants did nothing for her... These, however, were marvelous. Absolutely to die for. Theophile grinned hugely. Moonlight streamed through the skylight of his loft apartment, illuminating his bald pate. "You look lovely, my dear ones. Absolutely lovely." He handed each of the models a petite black cup. "Now let us see how my pretty rags work." The three drank the amber liqueur within the cups. Nicole purred as her jacket merged with her flesh. Wavy golden fur cascaded from her arms, her back. "Haute coutere from Hell," she whispered. "You have outdone yourself, Theo." Damon licked his lips. "Delicious. A touch of mint." He set down his cup and flexed his long, curved claws. "Yes, there is mint in the brew," Theophile said. He adjusted his turtleneck to hide his double chin. "And catnip and valerian and satyr's blood." Giselle dropped to all fours. She noticed an errant curl on her right flank and licked it into place. "However will you change us back?" The bald man raised an iron-gray eyebrow. "Change you back? Surely not! This is my greatest triumph, my dear ones. You shall stay this way forever... and in a moment, I shall join you. But I must confess: you were my guinea pigs, after a fashion." Nicole looked to Damon, who in turn looked to Giselle. "Speaking of fashion," Theophile continued, "I certainly like what I see. The season definitely calls for fur. Excuse me while I slip into my own silk suit." He moved toward a large, flat box lying beside the full-length mirror. Giselle jumped on top of the box; the gold bell jangled one last time as the ankle bracelet fell from her back paw. She began to growl at the bald man. Damon and Nicole drew closer, claws tapping on the hardwood floor. "My dear ones!" Theophile bit his thick lower lip. "I gather that the three of you are upset... Because you can no longer model? Is that it?" "Of course not." Damon sighed deeply and rolled his slit-pupiled eyes. "Don't you see? We can't let you have that suit. We simply can't. This sort of look requires -- Panache. Style. Flair." "Too true," Nicole murmured. She tickled Theophile's potbelly with the tip of a claw, drawing blood. Rich, fatty blood. Giselle's laugh now sounded more like a hiss. "You may be the designer, old man," she said, "but the catwalk is ours." Theophile opened his mouth to protest. And at that moment, his dear ones pounced. -- mark McLaughlin This is basically the same device that we have made available to a select few for the past seven years. Please note that in many cases we have a three to six month waiting period for deliveiy. This is truly a must for the serious voyager. But since we already have a backlog of orders by word-of-mouth advertising there is no point in talking up the product. GLxy  torie  si i I sit  lo on IsifM !!! Galaxy Catherine Oxenberg, Director Photo: E.J. Gold In production, "The Proper Thing to Do" by Brad Linaweaver, "The Source of Inspiration" by Michael Decker, "Seven Soup Rivers" by Robert Sheckley, "Avatar" by Janet Berliner, "The Forgotten Ones" by Lyn Nichols, "Reality Clay" by John Rosenman, "Ms... Found..." by Mary Sass, "Sacrifice" by L.S. Silverthorne, "Dances with Elves" and "Iced" by Cynthia Ward, "Yule" by K.D. Wentworth, "Nuts and Bolts" by Greg Vose, "Mahoghany Dream" by David Bollinger, "Ghost Maker" by Frederik Pohl, and more actresswriter Catherine Oxenberg and actorwriter James P. Healy. Science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. Recorded, digitally mastered and produced in the Galaxy hi-tech, multitrack recording studio. Best audiophile quality real time dubs. # each. Galaxy subscribers pay # each. Wells of Wisdom Brad Linaweaver Dragon Lady Evelyn E. Smith TheWordsThe Names Don Webb Three Wish Habit Janni Lee Simner The Biography Project H.L. Gold NothingChanges Chuck Rothman The Vilbar Party Evelyn E. Smith The Fornicators B. JohnsonHaddad Not Fit for Children Evelyn E. Smith Extraction Jeffry Dwight Perchance to Scream Janet Berliner Mr. Monster Waits in Heaven for an Angel Forry Ackerman Ants in her Attic Kent Brewster In the Canal Zone Jean Marie Stine The Big Chill Cynthia Ward The Copper Ring Robert Houdin Graveyard at the Grand Janet Berliner More Stately Mansions John Rosenman To order, call f#-#-# #ss to Iocomc aa. classic in every science fiction lilrary Illustrated by Doran he Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador II Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, was smoking tobacco in a pipe. The fumes from it made John Tardy cough and strangle -- or, at least, so it seemed. "Sir?" wheezed John Tardy. "Sorry," said Joshua, knocking the pipe out in an ashtray where the coals continued to smolder only slightly less villainously than before. "Thought you heard me the first time. I said that naturally as soon as we knew you were being assigned to the job, we let out word that you were deeply attached to the girl." "To -- " John gulped air. Both men were talking Dilbian, to exercise the command of the language John had had hypnoed into him on his way here from the Belt Stars, and the Dilbian nickname for the missing Earthian female sociologist came from his lips automatically -- "this Greasy Face?" "Miss Ty Lamorc," nodded Joshua, smoothly slipping into Basic and then out again. "Greasy Face, if you prefer. By the by, you mustn't go taking all these Dilbian names at face value. The two old gentlemen you're going to meet -- Daddy Shaking Knees and Two Answers -- aren't what they might sound like. Daddy Shaking Knees got his name from holding up one end of a timber one day in an emergency -- after about forty-five minutes, someone noticed his knees beginning to tremble. And Two Answers is a tribute to the Dilbian who can come up with more than one answer to a problem." About to ask Joshua about his own Dilbian nickname of Little Bite, John Tardy shifted to safer ground. "What about this Schlaff fellow who -- " "Heiner Schlaff," interrupted Joshua Guy, frowning, "made a mistake. You'd think anyone would know better than to lose his head when a Dilbian picks him up. After the first time one picked up Heinie, he wasn't able to step out onto the street without some Dilbian lifting him up to hear him yell for help. The Squeaking Squirt, they called him -- very bad for Earth-Dilbian relations." He looked severely at John. "I don't expect anything like that from you." The ambassador's eye seemed to weigh John's chunky body and red hair. "No, no," said John hastily. "Decathalon winner in the Olympics four years back, weren't you? "Yes," said John. "But what I really want is to get on an Exploration team to one of the new planets. I'm a fully qualified biochemist and -- " "I read your file. Well," Joshua Guy said, "do a good job here and who knows?" He glanced out the window beside him at the sprawling log buildings of the local Dilbian town of Humrog, framed against the native conifers and the mountain peaks beyond. "But it's your physical condition that'll count. You understand why you have to go it alone, don't you?" "They told me back on Earth. But if you can add anything -- " "Headquarters never understands the fine points of these situation" said Joshua, almost cheerfully. "To put it tersely -- we want to make friends with these Dilbians. They're the race nearest to ours in intelligence that we've run across so far. They'd make fine partners. Unfortunately we don't seem to be able to impress them very much." "Size?" asked John Tardy. "Well, yes -- size is probably the biggest stumbling block. The fact that we're about lap-dog proportions in relation to them. But it shows up even more sharply in a cultural dissimilarity. They don't give a hang for our mechanical gimmicks and they're all for personal honor and a healthy outdoors life." He looked at John. "You'll say, of course, why not a show of force?" "I should think -- " began John. "But we don't want to fight them -- we want to make friends with them. Let me give you an Earth-type analogy. For centuries, humans have been able to more or less tame most of the smaller wild animals. The large ones, however, being unused to knuckling under to anyone -- " Beep! signaled the annunciator on Joshua's desk. "Ah, they're here now." Joshua Guy rose. "We'll go into the reception room. Now remember that Boy-Is-She-Built is old Shaking Knees' daughter. It was the fact that the Streamside Terror wanted her that caused all this ruckus and ended up with the Terror's kidnapping Ty Lamorc." He led the way through the door into the next room. John Tardy followed, his head, in spite of the hypno training, still spinning a little with the odd Dilbian names -- in particular Boy-Is-She-Built, the Basic translation of which was only a pale shadow of its Dilbian original. While not by any means a shy person, John rather hesitated to look a father in the eye and refer to the female child of his old age as -- further reflections were cut short as he entered the room. "Ah, there. Little Bite!" boomed the larger of the two black-furred monsters awaiting them. The one who spoke stood well over two and a half meters in height -- at least eight feet tall. "This the new one? Two Answers and I came right over to meet him. Kind of bright-colored on top, isn't he?" John Tardy blinked. But Joshua Guy answered equably enough. "Some of us have that color hair back home," he said. "This is John Tardy -- John, meet Shaking Knees. And the quiet one is Two Answers." " Quiet " roared the other Dilbian, bursting into gargantuan roars of laughter. "Me quiet! That's good!" He bellowed his merriment. John stared. In spite of the hypno training, he could not help comparing these two to a couple of very large bears who had stood up on their hind legs and gone on a diet. They were leaner than bears -- though leanness is relative when you weigh upward of a thousand pounds -- and longer-legged. Their noses were more pug, their lower jaws more humanlike than ursinoid in the way of chin. But their complete coat of thick black hair and their bearishness of language and actions made the comparison almost inevitable -- though in fact their true biological resemblance was closer to the humans themselves. "Haven't laughed like that since old Souse Nose fell in the beer vat!" snorted Two Answers, gradually getting himself under control. "All right, Bright Top, what've you got to say for yourself? Think you can take the Streamside Terror with one hand tied behind your back?" "I'm here," said John Tardy, "to bring back -- er -- Greasy Face, and -- " "Streamside won't just hand her over. Will he, Knees?" Two Answers jogged his companion with a massively humorous elbow. "Not that boy!" Shaking Knees shook his head. "Little Bite, I ought never have let you talk me out of a son-in-law like that. Tough? Rough? Tricky? My little girl'd do all right with a buck like that." "I merely," demurred Joshua, "suggested you make them wait a bit. Boy-Is-She-Built is still rather young -- " "And, boy, is she built!" said Shaking Knees in a tone of fond, fatherly pride. "Still, it's hard to see how she could do much better." He peered suddenly at Joshua. "You wouldn't have something hidden between your paws on this?" Joshua Guy spread his hands in a wounded manner. "Would I risk one of my own people? Maybe two? All to start something that would make the Terror mad enough to steal Greasy to pay me back?" "Guess not," admitted Shaking Knees. "But you Shorties are shrewd little characters." His words rang with honest admiration. "Thanks. The same to you," said Joshua. "Now about the Terror -- " "He headed west through the Cold Mountains," replied Two Answers. "He was spotted yesterday a half-day's hike north, pointed toward Sour Ford and the Hollows. He probably nighted at Brittle Rock Inn there." "Good," said Joshua. "We'll have to find a guide for my friend here." "Guide? Ho!" chortled Shaking Knees. Wait'll you see what we got for you." He shouldered past Two Answers, opened the door and bellowed, "Bluffer! Come on in!" There was a moment's pause, and then a Dilbian even leaner and taller than Shaking Knees shoved his way into the room, which, with this new Dilbian addition, became decidedly crowded. "There you are," said Shaking Knees, waving a prideful paw. "What more could you want? Walk all day, climb all night, and start out fresh next morning after breakfast. Little Bite, meet the Hill Bluffer!" "That's me!" boomed the newcomer, rattling the walls. "Anything on two feet walk away from me? Not over solid ground or living rock! When I look at a hill, it knows it's beat, and it lays out flat for my trampling feet!" "Very good," said Joshua dryly. "But I don't know about my friend here keeping up if you can travel like that." "Keep up? Hah!" guffawed Shaking Knees. "No, no, Little Bite -- don't you recognize the Bluffer here? He's the postman. We're going to mail this half-pint friend of yours to the Terror. Only way. Cost you five kilos of nails." "Nobody stops the mail," put in the Hill Bluffer. "Hmm," said Joshua. He glanced at John Tardy. "Not a bad suggestion. The only thing is how you plan to carry him -- " "Who? Him?" boomed the Bluffer, focusing on John. "Why, I'll handle him like he was a week-old pup. I'll wrap him in some real soft straw and tuck him in the bottom of my mailbag and -- " "Hold it," interrupted Joshua. "That's just what I was afraid of. If you're going to carry him, you'll have to do it humanely." "I won't wear it!" the Hill Bluffer was still roaring, two hours later. The cause of his upset, a system of straps and pads arranged into a rough saddlebag that would ride between his shoulders and bear John, lay on the crushed rock of Humrog's main street. A few Dilbian bystanders had gathered to watch and their bass-voiced comments were not of the sort to bring the Hill Bluffer to a more reasonable frame of mind. "Listen, you tad!" Shaking Knees was beginning to get a little hot under the neck-fur himself. "This is your mother's uncle's first cousin speaking. You want me to speak to the great-grandfathers of your clan -- " "Arright -- arright -- arright!" snarled the Hill Bluffer. "Buckle me up in the obscenity thing!" "That's better!" growled Shaking Knees, simmering down as John Tardy and Joshua Guy went to work to put the saddle on. "Not that I blame you, but -- " "Don't feel so bad at that," said the Hill Bluffer sulkily, wriggling his shoulders under the straps in experimental fashion. "You'll find it," grunted Joshua, tugging on a strap, "easier to carry than your regular bag." "That's not the point," groused the Hill Bluffer. "A postman's got dignity. He just don't wear -- " He exploded suddenly at a snickering onlooker. "What's so funny, you? Want to make something out of it? Just say the -- " "I'll take care of him!" roared Shaking Knees, rolling forward. "What's wrong with you. Split Nose?" The Dilbian addressed as Split Nose swallowed his grin rather hastily as the Humrog village chief took a hand in the conversation. "Just passing by," he growled defensively, backing out of the crowd. "Well, just pass on, friend, pass on!" boomed Shaking Knees. He was rewarded by a hearty laugh from the crowd, and Split Nose rolled off down the street with every indication his hairy ears were burning. John had taken advantage of this little by-play to mount into the saddlebag. The Hill Bluffer grunted in surprise and looked back at him. "You're light enough," he said. "How is it? All right back there?" "Feels fine," said John, unsuspecting. "Then so long, everybody!" boomed the Hill Bluffer, and, without further warning, barreled off down the main street in the direction of the North Trail, the Cold Mountains and the elusive but dangerous Streamside Terror. Had it not been for the hypno training, John Tardy would not have been able to recognize this fast and unexpected start for the Dilbian trick it was. He realized instantly, however, that the Hill Bluffer, having lost his enthusiasm for the job at first sight of the harness which was to carry John, was attempting a little strategy to get out of it. Outright refusal to carry John was out of the question, but if John should object to the unceremoniousness of his departure, the Bluffer would be perfectly justified -- by Dilbian standards -- if he threw up his hands and refused to deliver a piece of mail that insisted on imposing conditions on him. John shut his mouth and hung on. All the same, it was awkward. John had intended to work out a plan of action with Joshua Guy before he left. Well, there was always the wrist-phone. He would call Joshua at the first convenient opportunity. Meanwhile, it was developing that the Hill Bluffer had not exaggerated his ability to cover ground. One moment they were on the main street of Humrog, and the next upon a mountain trail, green pinelike branches whipping by as John Tardy plunged and swayed to the Hill Bluffer's motion like a man on the back of an elephant. It was no time for abstract thought. John clung to the straps before him, meditating rather bitterly on that natural talent of his for athletics which had got him into this, when by all rights he should be on an exploration team on one of the frontier planets right now. He was perfectly qualified, but just because of that decathalon win... He continued to nurse his grievances for something better than an hour, when he was suddenly interrupted by the Hill Bluffer's grunting and slowing down. Peering forward over the postman's shoulder, John discovered another Dilbian who had just stepped out of the woods before them. The newcomer was on the shaggy side. He carried an enormous triangular-headed axe and had some native herbivore roughly the size and shape of a musk-ox slung casually over one shoulder. "Hello, woodsman," said the Hill Bluffer, halting. "Hello, postman." The other displayed a gap-toothed array of fangs in a grin. "Got some mail for me?" "You!" the Hill Bluffer snorted. "Not so funny. I could get mail," growled the other. He peered around at John. "So that's the Half Pint Posted." "Oh?" said the Hill Bluffer. "Who told you?" "The Cobbly Queen, that's who!" retorted the other, curling the right side of his upper lip in the native equivalent of a wink. John Tardy, recalling the Cobblies were the Dilbian equivalent of fairies, brownies, or what-have-you, peered at the woodsman to see if he was serious. John decided he wasn't. Which still left the problem of how he had recognized John. Remembering the best Dilbian manners were made of sheer brass, John Tardy horned in on the conversation. "Who're you?" he demanded of the woodsman. "So it talks, does it?" The woodsman grinned. "They call me Tree Weeper, Half Pint. Because I chop them down, you see." "Who told you about me?" "Oh, that'd be telling," grinned Tree Weeper. "Say, you know why they call him the Streamside Terror, Half Pint? It's on account of he likes to fight alongside a stream, pull the other feller in and drown him." "I know," said John shortly. "Do you now?" said the other. "Well, it ought to be something to watch. Good going to you, Half Pint, and you too, postman. Me for home." He turned away into the brush alongside the trail and it swallowed him up. The Hill Bluffer took up his route again without a word. "Friend of yours?" inquired John, when it became apparent the Hill Bluffer was not going to comment on the meeting. "Friend?" the Hill Bluffer snorted angrily. " I'm a public official!" "I just thought -- " said John. "He seemed to know things." "That hill hopper! Somebody ahead of us told him!" growled the Bluffer. But he fell unaccountably silent after that and said no more for the next three hours, until -- the two of them having left Humrog a couple of hours past noon -- they pulled up in the waning sunlight before the roadside inn at Brittle Rock, where they would spend the night. The first thing John Tardy did, after working some life back into his legs, was to stroll off to the limits of the narrow, rocky ledge on which the Inn stood -- Brittle Rock was hardly more than a wide spot in the narrow mountain gorge up which their road ran -- and put in a call to Joshua Guy with the phone on his wrist. As soon as Joshua got on the beam, John relievedly explained the reason behind his call. It did not go over, apparently, very well. "Instructions?" floated the faintly astonished voice of the ambassador out of the receiver. "What instructions?" "The ones you were going to give me. Before I took off so suddenly -- " "But there's absolutely nothing I can tell you," interrupted Joshua. "You've had your hypno training. It's up to you. Find the Terror and get the girl back. You'll have to figure out your own means, my dear fellow." "But -- " John stopped, staring helpless at the phone. "Well, good luck, then. Call me tomorrow. Call me anytime." "Thanks," said John. "Not at all. Luck. Good-by." "Good-by." John Tardy clicked off the phone and walked somberly back to the Inn. Inside its big front door, he found a wide common room filled with tables and benches. The Hill Bluffer, to the amusement of a host of other travelers, was arguing with a female Dilbian wearing an apron. "How the unmentionable should I know what to feed him?" the Hill Bluffer was bellowing. "Give him some meat, some beer -- anything!" "But you haven't had the children dragging in pets like I have. Feed one the wrong thing and it dies. And then they cry their little hearts -- " "Talking about me?" John Tardy broke in. "Oh!" gasped the female, glancing down and retreating half a step. "It talks!" "Didn't I say he did?" demanded the Bluffer. "Half Pint, what kind of stuff do you eat?" John fingered the fourinch tubes of food concentrate at his waist. Dilbian food would not poison him, though he could expect little nourishment from it, and a fair chance of an allergic reaction from certain fruits and vegetables. Bulk was all he needed to supplement the concentrates. "Just give me a little beer," he said. The room buzzed approval. This little critter, they seemed to feel, could not be too alien if he liked to drink. The female brought him a wastebasket-sized wooden mug that had no handles and smelled like the most decayed of back-lot breweries. John took a cautious sip and held the bitter, sour, flat-tasting liquid in his mouth for an indecisive moment. He swallowed manfully. The assembled company gave vent to rough-voiced approval, then abruptly turned their attention elsewhere. Looking around, he saw that the Hill Bluffer had gone off somewhere. John climbed up on a nearby bench and got to work on his food concentrates. After finishing these, he continued to sit where he was for the better part of an hour, but the Hill Bluffer did not return. Struck by a sudden thought, John Tardy climbed down and went back toward the kitchen of the Inn. Pushing his way through a hide curtain, he found himself in it -- a long room with a stone fire-trough down the center, carcasses hanging from overhead beams, and a dozen or so Dilbians of both sexes equally immersed in argument and the preparation of food and drink. Among them was the female who had brought John the beer. He stepped into her path as she headed for the front room with a double handful of full mugs. "Eeeeek!" she exclaimed, or the Dilbian equivalent, stopping so hastily she spilled some of the beer. "There's a good little Shorty," she said in a quavering, coaxing tone. "Good Shorty. Go back now." "Was the Terror really here last night?" John asked. "He stopped to pick up some meat and beer, but I didn't see him," she said. "I've no time for hill-and-alley brawlers. Now shoo!" John Tardy shooed. As he was heading back to his bench, however, he felt himself scooped up from behind. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw he was being carried by a large male Dilbian with a pouch hanging from one shoulder. This individual carried him to a table where three other Dilbians sat and dropped him on it. John Tardy instinctively got to his feet. "There he be," said the one who had picked him up. "A genuine Shorty." "Give him some beer," suggested one with a scar on his face, who was seated at the table. They did. John prudently drank some. "Don't hold much," commented one of the others at the table, examining the mug John had set down after what had been actually a very healthy draft for a human. "I wonder if he -- " "Couldn't. Not at that size," replied the one with the pouch. "He's chasing that female Shorty, though. You reckon -- " Scarface regretted that they did not have the Shorty female there at the moment. Her presence, in his opinion, would have provided the opportunity for interesting and educative experimentation. "Go to hell!" said John in Basic. He then made the most forceful translation he could manage in Dilbian. "Tough character!" said the pouched one, and they all laughed. "Better not get tough with me, though." He made a few humorous swipes at John's red head that would have split it on contact. They laughed again. "I wonder," said Scarface, "can he do tricks?" "Sure," John answered promptly. He hefted his still-full mug of beer. "Watch. I take a firm grip, rock back, and -- " He spun suddenly on one heel, sloshing a wave of beer into their staring faces. Then he was off the table and dodging among Dilbian and table legs toward the front entrance. The rest of the guests, roaring with laughter, made no attempt to halt him. He ducked into the outer darkness. Fumbling in the gloom, he made his way around the side of the Inn and dropped down on a broken keg he found there. He was just making up his mind to stay there until the Hill Bluffer came and found him, when the back kitchen door opened and closed very softly, off to his left. He slipped off the keg into deeper shadow. He had caught just a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, but he had received the impression of a Dilbian female in the doorway. There was no sound now. He began to creep backward. Dilbian's one moon was not showing over these latitudes at this season of the year, and the starlight gave only a faint illumination. He stumbled suddenly over the edge of an unseen slope and froze, remembering the cliff edge overhanging the gorge below. A faint reek of the Dilbian odor came to his nostrils -- and a sound of sniffing. Dilbians were no better than humans when it came to a sense of smell, but each had a perceptible odor to the nostrils of the other -- an odor partly dependent on diet, partly on a differing physiological makeup. The odor John Tardy smelled was part-piny, part-musk. The sniffing ceased. John held his breath, waiting for it to start again. The pressure built up in his chest, and finally he was forced to exhale. He turned his head slowly from side to side. Silence. Only the inner creak of his tense neck muscles turning. There! Was that something? John began to creep back along the edge beside him. There was a sudden rush, a rearing up of some huge dark shape in the darkness before him. He dodged, felt himself slipping on the edge, and something smashed like a falling wall against the side of his head, and he went whirling down and away into star-shot darkness. He opened his eyes to bright sunlight. The sun, just above the mountain peaks, was shining right in his eyes. He blinked and started to roll over, out of its glare, into --  -- And grabbed in a sudden cold sweat for the stubby trunk of a dwarf tree growing right out of the cliffside. For a second then, he hung there, sweating and looking down. He lay on a narrow ledge and the gorge was deep below. How deep, he did not stop to figure. It was deep enough. He twisted around and looked up the distance of a couple of meters to the ledge on which the Inn was built. It was not far. He could climb it. After a while, with his heart in his throat, John Tardy did. When he came back around the front of the Inn, in the morning sunlight, it was to find the Bluffer orating at a sort of open-air meeting, with the four who had harried John standing hangdog between two axemen and before an elderly Dilbian judgelike on a bench. " -- the mail!" the Hill Bluffer was roaring. "The mail is sacred! Anyone daring to lay fist upon the mail in transit -- " John, tottering forward, put an end to the trial in progress. Later on, after washing his slight scalp-wound and having taken on some more food concentrates and flat oeer for breakfast, John Tardy climbed back up on the Bluffer's back and they were under way once more. Their route today led from Brittle Rock through the mountains to Sour Ford and the Hollows. The Hollows, John had learned, was clan-country for the Terror, and their hope was to catch him before he reached it. The trail now led across swinging rope suspension bridges and along narrow cuts in the rock -- all of which the Hill Bluffer took not only with the ease of one well accustomed to them, but with the abstraction of one lost in deep thought. "Hey!" said John, at last. "Huh? What?" grunted the Hill Bluffer, coming to suddenly. "Tell me something," said John, reaching out for anything to keep his carrier awake. "How'd the ambassador get the name Little Bite?" "You don't know that?" exclaimed the Hill Bluffer. "I thought you Shorties all knew. Well, it was old Hammertoes down at Humrog." The Bluffer chuckled. "Got drunk and all worked up about Shorties. 'Gimme the good old days,' he said, and went down to just make an example of Little Bite -- Shorty One, we called him then. He pushes the door open far as it'll go, but Little Bite's got it fixed to only open part way. So there's Hammertoes, with only one arm through the door, feeling around and hollering, 'All right. Shorty! You can't get away! I'll get you -- ' when Little Bite picks up something sharp and cuts him a couple times across the knuckles. Old Hammertoes yells bloody murder and yanks his hand back. Slam goes the door." The Hill Bluffer chortled to himself. "Then old Hammertoes comes back uptown, sucking his knuckles. What happened?' says everybody. 'Nothing,' says Hammertoes. 'Something must've happened -- look at your hand,' everybody says. 'I tell you nothing happened!' yells Hammertoes. 'He wouldn't let me in where I could grab hold of him, so I come away. And as for my hand, that's got nothing to do with it. He didn't hurt my hand hardly at all. He just give it a little bite!"' The Hill Bluffer's laughter rolled like thunder between the mountain walls. "Old Hammertoes never did live that down. Every time since, whenever he goes to give somebody a hard time, they all tell him, 'Look out, Hammertoes, or I'm liable to give you a little bite!"' John Tardy found himself laughing. Possibly it was the time and place of the telling, possibly the story, but he could see the situation in his mind's eye and it was funny. "You know," said the Bluffer over one furry shoulder when John stopped laughing, "you're not bad for a Shorty." He fell silent, appeared to wrestle with himself for a moment, then came to a stop and sat down in a convenient wide spot on the trail. "Get off," he said. "Come around where I can talk to you." John complied. He found himself facing the seated Dilbian, their heads about on a level. Behind the large, black-furred skull, a few white clouds floated in the high blue sky. "You know," the Bluffer said, "the Streamside Terror's mug's been spilled." "Spilled?" echoed John -- then remembered this as a Dilbian phrase expressing loss of honor. "By me? He's never even seen me." "By Little Bite," the Bluffer said. "But Little Bite's a Guest in Humrog and the North Country. The Terror couldn't call him to account personally for speaking against Shaking Knees giving the Terror Boy-Is-She-Built. He had to do something, though, so he took Greasy Face." "Oh," said John. "So you got to fight the Terror if you want Greasy back." "Fight?" John blurted. "Man's got his pride," said the Bluffer. "That's why I can't figure you out. I mean you aren't bad for a Shorty. You got guts -- like with those drunks last night. But you fighting the Terror -- I mean hell" said the Bluffer, in deeply moved tones. Silently, John Tardy found himself in full agreement with the postman. "So what're you going to do when you meet Streamside?" "Well," said John, rather inadequately, "I don't exactly know -- " "Well," growled the Bluffer in his turn, "not my problem. Get on." John went around behind his furry back. "Oh, by the way, know who it was tried to pitch you over the cliff?" "Who?" asked John. "The Cobbly Queen -- Boy-Is-She-Built!" translated the Bluffer as John looked blank. "She heard about you and got ahead of us somehow..." The Bluffer's voice trailed off into a mutter. "If they're thinking of monkeying with the mail..." John paid no attention. He had his own fish to fry, and very fishy indeed they smelled just at the moment. Swaying on top of the enormous back as they took off again, he found himself scowling over the situation. Headquarters had said nothing about his being expected to fight some monstrous free-style scrapper of an alien race -- a sort of gargantuan Billy the Kid with a number of kills to his credit. Joshua Guy had not mentioned it. Just what was going on here, anyway? Abruptly casting aside the security regulation that recommended a "discreet" use of the instrument, John lifted the wrist that bore his wrist-phone to his lips. "Josh -- " he began, and suddenly checked. A fine trickle of sweat ran coldly down his spine. The phone was gone. He had the rest of the morning to ponder this new development in the situation, and a good portion of the afternoon. He might have continued indefinitely if it had not been for a sudden interruption in their journey. They had crossed a number of spidery suspension bridges during the course of the day, and now they had come to another one, somewhat longer than any met so far. If this had been the only difference, John might have been left to his thoughts. But this bridge was different. Somebody had fixed it so they couldn't get across. It happened that their end of the bridge had its anchors sunk in a rock face a little back and some seven or eight meters above their heads. All that had been done, simply enough, was to tighten the two main support cables at the far end. The sag of the span had straightened out, lifting the near end up above them, out of reach. The Hill Bluffer bellowed obscenely across the gap. There was no response from the windlass on the far side, or the small hut beyond. "What's happened?" John Tardy asked. "I don't know," said the Bluffer, suddenly thoughtful. "It isn't supposed to be rucked up except at night, to keep people from sneaking over not paying toll." He reached as high as he could, but his fingertips fell far short. "Lift me up," suggested John. They tried it, but even upheld by the ankles, at the full stretch of the Bluffer's arms, John was rewarded only by a throat-squeezing view of the Knobby River below. "It'll take five days to go around by Slide Pass," growled the Bluffer, putting John down. John went over to examine the rock face. What he discovered about it did not make him happy, though perhaps it should have. It was climbable. Heart tucked in throat, he began to go up it. "Hey! Where're you going?" bellowed the Hill Bluffer. John did not answer. He needed his breath; anyway, his destination was obvious. The climb up the rock was not bad for someone who had had some mountain experience, but a reaction set in when he wrapped his arms around the rough six-inch cable. He inched his way upward and got on top, both arms and both legs wrapped around the cable, and began a worm-creep toward the bridge end, floating on nothingness at a rather remarkable distance -- seen from this angle -- ahead of him. It occurred to him, after he had slowly covered about a third of the cable-distance in this fashion, that a real hero in a place like this should stand up and tightrope walk to the bridge proper. This, in addition to impressing the Bluffer, would shorten the suspense considerably. John Tardy concluded he must be a conservative and went on crawling. Eventually he reached the bridge, crawled out on it and lay panting for a while, then got up and crossed the gorge. At the far end, he knocked loose the lock on the windlass with a heavy rock, and the bridge banged down into position, raising a cloud of dust. Through this same cloud of dust, the Hill Bluffer was shortly to be seen advancing with a look of grim purpose. He stalked past John and entered the hut -- from which subsequently erupted thunderous crashes, thuds and roars. John Tardy looked about for a place of safety. He had never seen two Dilbians fight, but it was only too apparent now what was going on inside. He was still looking around, however, when the sound ceased abruptly and the Hill Bluffer emerged, dabbing at a torn ear. "Old slaver-tongue," he growled. " She got at him." "Who?" asked John. "Boy Is-She-Built. Well, mount up, Half Pint. Oh, by the way, that was pretty good." "Good? What was?" "Climbing across the bridge that way. Took guts. Well, let's go." John climbed back up into his saddlebag and thought heavily. "You didn't kill him?" he asked, as they started out once more. "Who? Old Winch Rope? Just knocked a little sense into him. Hell, there's got to be somebody work the bridge. Hang on now. It's all downhill from here and it'll be twilight before we hit the Ford." It was indeed twilight before they reached their stopping place at Sour Ford. John Tardy, who had been dozing, awoke with a jerk and sat up in his saddle, blinking. In the fading light, they stood in a large, grassy clearing semi-circled by forest. Directly before them was a long low log building, and behind it a smooth-flowing river with its farther shore shrouded in tree shadow and the approaching dusk. "Get down," said the Bluffer. Stiffly, John Tardy descended, stamped about to restore his circulation, and followed the Bluffer's huge bulk through the hide-curtain of the doorway to the building's oil-lamplit interior. John discovered a large room like that at the Brittle Rock Inn -- but one that was cleaner, airier, and filled with travelers a good deal less noisy and drunken. Gazing around for the explanation behind this difference, John caught sight of a truly enormous Dilbian, grizzled with age and heavy with fat, seated like a patriarch in a huge chair behind a table at the room's far end. John and the Bluffer found a table and set about eating. But as soon as they were through, the postman led John up to the patriarch. "One Man," said the Bluffer in a respectful voice, "this here's the Half Pint Posted." John Tardy blinked. Up close, One Man had turned out to be even more awe-inspiring than he had seemed from a distance. He overflowed the carved chair he sat in, and the graying fur on top of his head all but brushed against a polished staff of hardwood laid crosswise on pegs driven into the wall two meters above the floor. His massive forearms and great pawlike hands were laid out on the table before him like swollen clubs of bone and muscle. But his face was almost biblically serene. "Sit down," he rumbled in a voice so deep it sounded like a great drum sounding far off somewhere in a woods. "I've wanted to see a Shorty. You're my Guest, Half Pint, for as long as you wish. Anyone tell you about me?" "I'm sorry -- " began John. "Never mind." The enormous head nodded mildly. "They call me One Man, Half Pint, because I once held blood feud all by myself -- being an orphan -- with a whole clan. And won." He looked calmly at John. "What you might call an impossible undertaking." "Some of them caught him on a trail once," put in the Hill Bluffer. "He killed all three." "That was possible," murmured One Man. His eyes were still on John. "Tell me, Half Pint, what are you Shorties doing here, anyhow?" "Well -- " John blinked. "I'm looking for Greasy Face -- " "I mean the entire lot of you," One Man said. "There must be some plan behind it. Nobody asked you all here, you know." "Well -- " said John again, rather lamely, and proceeded to try an explanation. It did not seem to go over very well, a technological civilization being hard to picture with the Dilbian vocabulary. One Man nodded when John Tardy was through. "I see. If that's the case, what makes you think we ought to like you Shorties?" "Ought to?" said John, jolted into a reactive answer, for he did not have red hair for nothing. "You don't ought to! It's up to you." One Man nodded. "Pass me my stick," he said. One of the Dilbians standing around took down the staff from its pegs and passed it to him. He laid it on the table before him -- a young post ten centimeters in thickness -- grasping it with fists held over two meters apart. "No one's ever been able to do this but me," he said. Without lifting his fists from contact with the table, he rotated them to the outside. The staff sprang upward in the center like a bow, and snapped. "Souvenir for you," said One Man, handing the pieces to John. "Good night." He closed his eyes and sat as if dozing. The Bluffer tapped John on a shoulder and led him away, off to their sleeping quarters. Once in the Inn dormitory, however, John found himself totally unable to sleep. He had passed from utter bone-weariness into a sort of feverish wide-awakedness, through which the little episode with One Man buzzed and circled like a persistently annoying fly. What had been the point of all that talk and wood-breaking? Suddenly and quietly, John sat up. Beside him, on his heap of soft branches, the Bluffer slept without stirring, as did the rest of the dormitory inhabitants. A single lamp burned high above, hanging from the rooftree. By its light, John got out and examined the broken pieces of wood. There was a little node or knot visible just at the point of breakage. A small thing, but -- John frowned. He seemed surrounded by mysteries. The more he thought of it, the more certain he was that One Man had been attempting to convey some message to him. What was it? For that matter, what was going on between humans and Dilbians, and what had his mission to rescue Greasy Face to do with the business of I persuading the recalcitrant Dilbians into a partnership? If that was indeed the aim, as Joshua Guy had said. John swung out of the pile of boughs and to his feet. One Man, he decided, owed him a few more -- and plainer -- answers. He went softly down the length of the dormitory and through the door into the common room of the Inn. There were few Dilbians about -- they went early to bed. And One Man was also nowhere to be seen. He had not come into the dormitory, John knew. So either he had separate quarters, or else he had stepped outside for some reason... John Tardy crossed the room and slipped out through the Inn entrance. He paused to accustom his eyes to the darkness and moved off from the building to get away from the window light. Slowly the night took shape around him, the wide face of the river running silver-dark in the faint light of the stars, and the clearing pooled in gloom. He circled cautiously around the Inn to its back. Unlike Brittle Rock, the back yard here was clear of rubbish, sloping gradually to the river. It was given over to smaller huts and outbuildings. Among these the darkness was more profound and he felt his way cautiously. Groping about in this fashion, quietly, but with some small, unavoidable noise, he saw a thin blade of yellow light. It cut through the parting of two leather curtains in the window of a hut close by him. He stepped eagerly toward it, about to peer through the crack, when, from deep wall shadow, a hand reached out and took his arm. "Do you want to get yourself killed?" hissed a voice. And, of course, it was human. And, of course, it spoke in Basic. Whoever had hold of him drew him deeper into the shadow and away from the building where they stood. They came to another hut whose door stood ajar on an interior blackness, and John was led into this darkness. The hand let go of his arm. The door closed softly. There was a scratch, a sputter, and an animal-oil lamp burst into light within the place. John squinted against the sudden illumination. When he could see again, he found himself looking into the face of one of the best-looking young women he had ever seen. She was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than he, but at first glance looked taller by reason of her slim outline in the tailored coveralls she wore. To John Tardy, after two days of Dilbians, she looked tiny -- fragile. Her chestnut hair swept back in two wide wings on each side of her head. Her eyes were green above sharply marked cheekbones that gave her face a sculptured look. Her nose was thin, her lips firm rather than full, and her small chin was determined. John blinked. "Who -- ?" "I'm Ty Lamorc," she whispered fiercely. "Keep your voice down!" "Ty Lamorc? YouT ' "Yes, yes!" she said impatiently. "Now -- " "Are y-you sure?" stammered John. "I mean -- " "Who were you expecting to run into way out here in -- oh, I see!" She glared at him. "It's that Greasy Face name the Dilbians gave me. You were expecting some horror." "Certainly not," said John stoutly. "Well, for your information, they just happened to see me putting on makeup one day. That's where the name came from." "Well, naturally. I didn't think it was because -- " "I'll bet! Anyway, never mind that now. The point is, what are you doing out here? Do you want to get knocked on the head?" "Who'd knock -- " John Tardy stiffened. "The Terror's here!" "No, no!" She sounded annoyed. "Boy Is-She-Built is." "Oh." John frowned. "You know, I still don't get it -- her angle on all this, I mean." "She loves him, of course," said Ty Lamorc. "Actually, they make an ideal couple, by Dilbian standards. Now let's get you back to the Inn before she catches you. She won't follow you in there. You're a Guest." "Now wait -- " John took a deep breath. "This is silly. I came out here to find you. I've found you. Let's head back right now. Not to Humrog -- " "You don't," interrupted Ty with feeling, "understand a blasted thing about these people, Half Pint -- I mean. Tardy." "John." "John, you don't understand the situation. The Streamside Terror left me here with Boy-Is-She-Built because I was slowing him down. That Hill Bluffer of yours is too fast for him, and he wanted to be sure to be in his own clan-country before you caught up with him, in case there would be -- " her voice faltered a little -- "repercussions to what happens when you meet. It's all a matter of honor, and that's the point. You're a piece of mail, John. Don't you understand? The Hill Bluffer's honor is involved, too." "Oh," said John. He was silent for a while. "You mean he'd insist on delivering me?" "What do you think?" "I see." John was silent again. "Well, to blazes with it," he said at last. "Maybe we can make it across a bridge and cut the ropes and get away from it all. We can't leave you here." Ty Lamorc did not reply at once. When she did, it was with a pat on his arm. "You're nice," she said softly. "I'll remember that. Now get back to the Inn." And then she had blown out the lamp and he could hear her go. Next morning, One Man was still nowhere to be seen. Nor, in the half hour that elapsed before they got going, did John Tardy catch any glimpse of Ty, or a female Dilbian who might be Boy-Is-She-Built. He mounted into the Hill Bluffer's mailbag with his mind still engrossed by the happenings of the night before, and it continued to be engrossed as they began their third day of journey. They were descending now into a country of lower altitudes, though they were still in hill country. The ground was more gently hollowed and crested, and several new varieties of trees appeared. But John had no time to consider this. He rode through the cool hours of the morning and into noon's heat still trying to find a common solution to the riddles that occupied his mind -- about One Man, about the abduction of Ty Lamorc, and about his own peculiar lack of briefing. "Tell me," said John finally to the Hill Bluffer, "is it a fact no other Dilbian could break that stick of One Man's that same way?" "Nobody ever can," replied the Bluffer, as they rounded a small hill and plunged through a thin belt of trees. "Nobody ever will." "Well, you know," said John, "back where I come from, we have a trick with something called a phone director -- " He stopped. For the Hill Bluffer himself had stopped, with a jolt that almost pitched John from the mailbag. John sat up, looked around the Dilbian's head -- and stared. They had passed through the woods. They had emerged into a small valley in which a cluster of buildings stood in the brown color of their peeled and weathered logs, haphazardly about a stream that ran the valley's length. Beyond these houses there was a sort of natural amphitheater made by a curved indentation of the far rock wall of the valley. Past this the path went when it emerged from between the buildings and plunged into the trees again. However, none of this claimed John's attention after the first second. He blinked, instead, at a living wall of five large Dilbians with axes. "Who do you think you're stopping?" bellowed the Hill Bluffer. "Clan Hollow's in full meeting," responded the central axeman. "The Great-Grandfathers want to see you both. You come with us." The axemen formed around the Bluffer and John. They led off down and through the village and beyond to the amphitheater that was swarming with Dilbians of all ages. Several hundred of them were there, and more accumulating, below a ledge of rock where six ancient Dilbians sat. "This is the mail!" stormed the Hill Bluffer as soon as they were close. "Listen, you Clan Hollows -- " "Be quiet, postman!" snapped the old Dilbian at the extreme right of the line as it faced John and the Bluffer. "Your honor will be guarded. Call the meeting." "Great-Grandfathers of Clan Hollows, sitting in judgment upon a point of honor!" chanted a young Dilbian standing just below the ledge. He repeated the cry six times. There was a stir in the crowd. Looking around, John saw Ty Lamorc. With her was a plump young female that was most likely Boy-Is-She-Buiit. Boy-Is-She-Built was currently engaged in herding Ty to the foot of the ledge. She accomplished this and immediately began talking. "I'm Boy-Is-She-Built," she announced. "We know you," said the Great-Grandfather on the right end. "I'm speaking here for the Streamside Terror, who's waiting over at Glenn Hollow for the Shorty known as the Half Pint Posted. That Shorty over there. His mug has been spilled -- the Terror's, I mean. This Shorty belongs to him -- the male over there, I mean. Not that this female Shorty here with me doesn't belong to him, too. He took her fair and square, and it serves those Shorties right. After all, nobody has more honor than the Terror -- "That's enough," said the judge. "We will decide -- " "I should think you wouldn't even have to call a meeting over it. After all, it's perfectly plain -- " "I said that's enough! Be quiet, female!" roared the end judge. I "Well?" interjected one of the other judges testily. "We've heard the arguments. The Shorties are both here. What's left to say?" "Can I speak?" boomed a new voice, and the crowd parted to let One Man come up before the ledge of rock. The Great-Grandfathers thawed visibly as only great men can in the company of their peers. "One Man is always welcome to speak," piped an ancient who had not spoken before, and whose voice, with age, had risen almost to the pitch of a human baritone. "Thank you," said One Man. He raised his head and his voice rose with it, carrying easily out over the assembled Dilbians. "Just think this over. That's what I've got to say. Think deep about it -- because it may be Clan Hollows' decision here is going to be binding on just about everybody -- us and Shorties alike." He waved to the judges and went back into the crowd. "Thanks, One Man," said the right-end judge. "Now, having heard from everybody important who had something to say, here's our opinion. This is a matter concerning the honor of the Streamside Terror -- " "How about me?" roared the Hill Bluffer. "The mail must -- " "Hold your jaw about the mail!" snapped the right-end judge. "As I was saying, Terror's mug was spilled by the Guest in Humrog. Quite properly, the Terror then spilled the mug of the Guest by stealing off one of the Guest's household. This by itself is a dispute between individuals not touching Clan Hollows. But now here comes along a Shorty who wants to fight Terror for the stolen Shorty. And the question is, can Clan Hollows honorably allow the Terror to do so?" He paused for a moment, as if to let the point sink in on the crowd. "For us to do this in honor," he continued, "the combat mentioned must be a matter of honor. And this point arises -- is honor possible between a man and a Shorty? We Great-Grandfathers have sat up a full night finding an answer, and to do so we have had to ask ourselves, 'What is a Shorty?' That is, is it the same thing as us, a being capable of having honor and suffering its loss?" He paused again. The crowd muttered its interest. "A knotty question," said the spokesman, with a touch of complacency in his voice. "But your Great-Grandfathers have settled it." The crowd murmured this time in admiration. "What makes honor?" demanded the spokesman rhetorically. "Honor is a matter of rights -- rights violated and rights protected. Have the Shorties among us had any rights? Guest-rights, only. Failing Guest-rights, can one imagine a Shorty defending and maintaining its rights in our world?" A chortle broke out in the crowd and spread through its listening ranks at the picture conjured up. "Silence!" snapped another of the judges. "This is not a house-raising." The crowd went silent. "Your display of bad manners," said the right-end judge severely, "has pointed up the same conclusion we came to -- by orderly process of discussion. It is ridiculous to suppose a Shorty existing as an honor-bound equal in our world. Accordingly, the rules of honor are not binding. Both Shorties here will be returned unharmed to the Guest in Humrog. The Terror has lost no honor. The matter is closed." He stood up. So did the other live Great-Grandfathers. "This meeting," he said, "is ended." V "Not yet it isn't!" bellowed the Hill Bluffer. He plunged forward to the edge of the rock bench, hauling John Tardy along by the slack in John's jacket. "What do you all know about Shorties?" he demanded. "I've seen this one in action. When a bunch of drunks at Brittle Rock tried to make him do tricks like a performing animal, he fooled them all and got away. How's that for defending his honor? On our way here, the Knobby Gorge Bridge was cranked up out of our reach. He risked his neck climbing up to get it down again, so's not to be slowed in getting his paws on the I say this Shorty here's as good as some of us any day. Maybe he isn't any bigger'n a two-year-old baby," roared the Hill Bluffer, "but I'm here today to tell you he's all guts!" He spun on John. "How about it, Shorty? You want Greasy Face handed back to you like scraps from a plate -- " John's long cogitations at last paid off. These and something just witnessed in the Clan Meeting had thrown the switch he had been hunting for. "Show me that skulking Terror!" he shouted. The words had barely passed his lips when he felt himself snatched up. The free air whistled past his face. The Hill Bluffer had grabbed him in two huge hands and was now running toward the far woods with him, like a football player with a ball. A roar of voices followed them; looking back, John saw the whole of Clan Hollows in pursuit. John blinked. He was being jolted along at something like fifty kilometers an hour, and the crowd was coming along behind at the same rate. Or were they? For a long second, John hesitated, then allowed himself to recognize the inescapable fact. All praise to the postman -- the Bluffer was outrunning them! John felt the thrill of competition in his own soul. He and the Hill Bluffer might be worlds apart biologically, but, by heaven, when it came to real competition... Abruptly, the shadow of the further forest closed about them. The Hill Bluffer ran on dropped needles from the conifers, easing to a lope. John Tardy climbed over his shoulder into the mailbag and hung on. The forest muffled the roar of pursuit. They descended one side of a small hollow and, coming up the other, the Bluffer dropped to his usual ground-eating walk. On the next downslope, he ran again. And so he continued, alternating his pace as the ground shifted. "How far to the Terror?" asked John. "Glen Hollow," puffed the Hill Bluffer. He gave the answer in Dilbian units that worked out to just under eight kilometers. About ten minutes later, they broke through a small fringe of trees to emerge over the lip of a small cuplike valley containing a meadow split by a stream which, in the meadow's center, spread into a pool. The pool was a good fifty meters across and showed the sort of color that indicates a fair depth. By the poolside, a male Dilbian was just looking up at the sound of their approach. John leaned forward and said quietly to the HiF Bluffer, "Put me down by the deepest part of the water. Reaching to his waist, he loosened the buckle of the belt threaded through the loops on his pants. The Hill Bluffer grunted and continued his descent At the water's margin, some dozen meters from the waiting Dilbian, he stopped. "Hello, postman," said the Dilbian. "Hello, Terror," answered the Bluffer. "Mail." The Terror looked curiously past the Bluffer's head at John. "So that's the Half Pint Posted, is it?" he said. "They let you come?" "No, we just came," said the Bluffer. While the Terror stared at John Tardy, John had been examining the Terror. The other Dilbian did not, at first glance, seem to live up to his reputation. He was big, but nowhere near the height of the Hill Bluffer, nor the awe-inspiring massiveness of One Man. John noted, however, with an eye which had judged physical capabilities among his own race, the unusually heavy boning of the other's body, the short, full neck, and. more revealing than any of these, the particularly poised balance exhibited by the Terror's thick body. John Tardy threw one quick glance at the water alongside and slid down from the Bluffer's back. The Bluffer moved off and, with no attempt at the amenities, the Streamside Terror charged. John turned and dived deep into the pool. He expected the Terror to follow him immediately reasoning the other was too much the professiona fighter to take chances, even with a Shorty. And, indeed the water-shock of the big body plunging in after John made him imagine the Terror's great clawed hands al but scratching at his heels. John stroked desperately for depth and distance. He did have a strategy of battle, but it all depended on time and elbow room. He changed direction underwater, angled up to the surface, and flinging the water from his eyes with a jerk of his head looked around him. The Terror, looking the other way, had just broken water four meters off. John dived again and proceeded to get rid of boots, pants and jacket. He came up again practically under the nose of the Terror and was forced to dive once more. But this time, as he went down, he trailed from one fist the belt he had taken from his trousers, waving in the water like a dark stem of weed. Coming up the third time at a fairly safe distance John discovered the Terror had spotted him and was coming after him. John grinned to himself and dived, as if to hide again. But under the water he changed direction and swam directly at his opponent. He saw the heavy legs and arms churning toward him overhead They moved massively but relatively slowly through the water, and in this he saw the final proof he needed. He had guessed that, effective as the Terror might be against other Dilbians, in the water his very size made him slow and clumsy in comparison to a human -- in possibly all but straightaway swimming. Now John let his opponent pass him overhead. Then, as it went by, he grabbed the foot. And pulled. The Terror instinctively checked and dived. John, flung surfaceward, let go and dived -- this time behind and above the Dilbian. He saw the great back, the churning arms, and then, as the Terror turned once more toward the surface, John closed in, passing the belt around the thick neck and twisting its leather length tight. At this the Terror, choking, should have headed toward the surface, giving John a chance to breathe. The Dilbian did, John got his breath -- and there the battle departed from John's plan entirely. John had simply failed to give his imagination full rein. He had, in spite of himself, been thinking of the Dilbian in human terms -- as a very big man, a man with vast but not inconceivable strength. It is not inconceivable to strangle a giant man with a belt. But how conceivable is it to strangle a grizzly? John was all but out of reach, stretched at arm's length by his grip on the belt, trailing like a lamprey attached to a lake trout. But now and then the Terror's huge hand, beating back at him through the water, brushed against him. Only brushed -- but each impact slammed John about like a chip in the water. His head rang. The water roared about him. His shoulder numbed to a blow and his ribs gave to another. His senses began to fog; and he tightened his grip on the belt -- for it was, in the end, kill or be killed. If he did not do for the Terror, there was no doubt the Terror would...do for...him... Choking and gasping, he found his hands no longer on the belt, but clawing at the grassy edge of the pond. Hands were helping him. He pulled himself up on the slippery margin. His knees found solid ground. He coughed water and was suddenly, ungracefully sick. Then he blacked out. He came around after an indeterminate time to find his head in someone's lap. He blinked upward and a blur of color slowly turned into the face of Ty Lamorc, very white and taut -- and crying. "What?" he croaked. "Oh, shut up!" she said. She was wiping his damp face with a rag of cloth that was nearly as wet as he was. "No -- " he managed. "I mean -- what're you doing here?" He tried to sit up. "Lie down!" "I'm all right -- I think." He struggled into sitting position. The whole area of Glen Hollow, he saw, was aswarm with Dilbians. A short way off, a knot of them were gathered on the pool-bank around something. "What -- ?" he began. "The Terror, Half Pint," said a familiar voice, and he looked up at the looming figure of the Hill Bluffer, mountainous from this angle. "He's still out. It's your fight, all right." He went off, and they could hear him informing the other group down the bank that the Shorty was up and talking. John Tardy looked at Ty. "What happened?" he asked. "They had to pull him out. You made it to shore by yourself." She found a handkerchief somewhere, wiped her eyes and blew her nose vigorously. "You were wonderful." " Wonderful ?" said John, still too groggy for subtlety. "I was out of my head to even think of it!" He felt his ribs gingerly. "I better get back to Humrog and have an X-ray of this side." "Oh, are your ribs broken?" "Maybe just bruised. Wow!" said John, coming on an especially tender spot. "Oh!" wept Ty. "You might have been killed! And it's all my fault!" "Your fault?" said John. He spotted the massive figure of One Man breaking away from the group around the fallen Terror and hissed quickly at her. "Hurry. Help me up." She assisted him clumsily to his feet. "Tell me, did they find anything around the Terror's neck when they pulled him out?" She stared at him and wiped her eyes. "Why, no. What should they find around his neck?" "Nothing," whispered John. "Well!" he said as One Man rolled up to a halt before them. "What do you think of the situation?" "I think, Half Pint," said One Man, "that it's all very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I think you Shorties may be getting a few takers now on this business of going off into the sky and learning things." "You do, eh? How about you, for one?" "No-o," said One Man slowly. "No, I don't think me. I'm a little too old to jump at new things that quick. Some of the young ones'll be ready, though. The Terror, for one, possibly. He's quite a bright lad, you know. Of course, now that you've done the preliminary spadework, I may put in a good word for you people here and there." "Mighty nice of you -- now," said John, a little bitterly. "Nothing wins like a winner, Half Pint," rumbled One Man. "You Shorties should have known that. Matter of fact, I'm surprised it took you so long to show some common sense. You just don't come in and sit down at a man's table and expect him to take your word for it that you're one of the family. As I said to you once before, who asked you Shorties to come here, anyway, in the first place? And what made you think we had to like you? What if, when you were a lad, some new kid moved into your village? He was half your size, but he had a whole lot of shiny new playthings you didn't have, and he came up and tapped you on the shoulder and said, 'C'mon, from now on we'll play my sort of game!' How'd you think you'd have felt?" He eyed John shrewdly out of his hairy face. "I see," said John, after a moment. "Then why'd you help me?" "Me? Help you? I was as neutral as they come. What're you talking about?" "We've got something back home called a phone directory -- a book like those manuals Little Bite has down at Humrog. It's about this thick -- " he measured with thumb and forefinger. "And for one of us Shorties, you'd say it was a physical impossibility to pick it up and tear it in two. But some of us can do it." He eyed One Man. "Of course, there's a trick to it." "Well, now," said One Man judiciously, "I can believe it. Directories, thick sticks, or first-class hill-and-alley scrappers -- there's a trick to handle almost any of them. Not that I'd ever favor a Shorty over any of us in the long run -- don't get that idea." He looked around them. The Streamside Terror was being helped out of the Glen and most of the crowd was already gone. "We'll have to get together for a chat one of these days, Half Pint. Well, see you in the near future. Shorties." John Tardy wiped a damp nose with the back of his hand and stared after One Man. Then he turned to Ty Lamorc. "Now," he said, "whaf d you mean -- it was all your fault?" "It was," she said miserably. "It was all my idea. Earth knew we weren't getting through to the Dilbians, so they sent me out. And I -- " she gulped -- "I recommended they send out a man who conformed as nearly as possible to the Dilbian psychological profile and we'd get him mixed up in a Dilbian emotional situation -- to convince them we weren't the utter little aliens we seemed to be. They've got a very unusual culture here. They really have. I never thought Boy-Is-She-Built would catch up with you and nearly kill you and take your wrist-phone away. You were supposed to be able to stay in contact with Joshua Guy so he could always rescue you from the other end." "I see. Any why," queried John, very slowly and patiently, "did you decide not to let me in on what was going on?" "Because," she wailed, "I thought it would be better for you to react like the Dilbians in a natural, extroverted, uncerebral way!" "I see," said John again. They were still standing beside the pool. He picked her up -- she was quite light and slender -- and threw her in. There was a shriek and a satisfying splash. John turned and walked off. After half a dozen steps, he slowed down, turned and went back. She was clinging to the bank. "Here," he said gruffly, extending his hand. "Thag you," she said humbly, with her nose full of water, as he hauled her out. Q X Publications co A.D.A.M. Inc., PO Box #, Santa Fe, NM #-# Tel: (#)#-# Fax: (#) #-#I I The Way of the One Note The Way of the One Note is an ancient school of music, but it doesn't teach music in any ordinary way. Passed on exclusively through oral teachings, the information contained in this small book is the only known written exposition of this special school available in print. Each page is illustrated with an original sumi-e painting by Dm Kristel. #. A Brief History of Music A real history that begins, not with Medieval music, but with the wind and the music of Creation. Illustrated with images from cultures around the world. #. Garden Beyond Words: Bonsai  Bonseki  Gardens  Photographs An exquisitely boxed set of both color and black and white images that conveys the essential beauty of a "little tree" and the hidden meaning of a true garden space. #. Books by Dru Kristel Breath was the First Drummer This forthcoming book begins where Mickey Hart's Planet Drum leaves off. Yes, drums have been used by shamen In cultures throughout the world, but why? Exactly what effect does sound have on the human body and how is it used to produce a transformational effect? Dm Kristel blends the esoteric and the practical in his discussion of kinds of drums, tuning dmms, drumming and mantra, sound and light, and the Great Wheel of Life. #. Watermarks Written in collaboration with Makundananda Dorje Rinpoche, Watermarks is a Treatise on Recognizing Clear Light Known as the Great Seal of Void Nature. This workbook outlines for the first time in one place a concise description of Buddhist lineages, the difference between Tantra and Sutra, and the hidden methods implicit in the Mahamudra teachings.  I #. Whistling Fires and Listening Doors This collection features Martin SilverwolPs haiku simple and evocative poems based on the Japanese tradition paired on each page with the whimsical black and white computer graphics of Marta Jones. Hardbound, signed and numbered by the artists. #. Original titles: "Court Martial on Star Base #"; "Courts Martial" German: "Kirk unter Anklage" (Kirk Under Accusation) Japanese:"Uchuu Gunpoukaigi" (Court Martial in Space) Portuguese: "Corte Marcial" (Court Martial) Aired: ### Starbase I I for repairs to damage incurred during an ion storm. Kirk discovers that he faces a court martial for negligence resulting in the death of Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Finney. A former girlfriend of Kirk's, Areel Shaw, is the Starfleet lawyer determined to prosecute the case to its fullest, even if it means ruining Kirk's career. However, she still has a soft spot for the Captain and recommends shrewd, energetic Samuel T. Cogley for Kirk's defense lawyer. Shaw's prosecution is based on the Enterprise's computer records, which Kirk claims are erroneous. By playing chess with the Enterprise computer, Spock finds that the programming has been tampered with. Resuming the trial aboard the Enterprise, the judges find that Finney is not dead but in hiding. A vengeful Finney changed the computer records to frame Kirk, who once logged a careless and potentially dangerous error of Finney's. This prevented Finney's promotion and expected rise through Starfleet ranks. Cogley wins Kirk's case and promptly takes a new one: Finney's defense. Court Martial Board: Space Command Representative Lindstrom: # extra males; I female; waitress; bartender aide; # bridge personnel; Navigator; Engineer; Recorder's voice for library computer; Recorder machine voice; I Personnel officer Sulu was originally to be named "Sumo" (###) and was supposed to be the helmsman -- then wasn't in the show at all. Studio memo: "Janice is much too close to Kirk and too involved in his personal life and decisions", so her part in this episode was given to Uhura. They were already writing Grace Lee Whitney out of the show. "Jame" Finney was originally "Jamie" -- it was pronounced the same. memos on this script: ( I ) Avoid any open-mouth kisses. was extremely sensitive to the Bible Belt, but Gene Roddenberry fought this, as he did all memos about common speech that might contain religious connotations. GR won on this one. GR liked the name "Lai" -- later, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the android Data named his android daughter "Lai." Time jumped rapidly in this episode: it went from # in the teaser to # in the first act. It is SD #.I during the search for Finney. The only way the court could have seen visual extracts from the ship's computers of what happened during the ion storm is for the entire bridge to be recorded at all times -- useful for courts martial. Kirk's quarters on Starbase had no personality, just a vinyl couch, desk, chairs, vases and uninteresting paintings -- very "hotel room." Such rooms must be assigned to visiting starship captains, on the order of hotel rooms reserved for airplane flight personnel. The witness chair used in the court had a lighted place for the hands -- possibly a built-in polygraph, though never clearly explained. Perhaps just a method of confirming identification, since the court-martial computer accepted small #"x#" plastic rectangles: a personal I.D. disk, red-orange (for Spock), blue (Kirk) and gold (for Wong). It was stated that no starship commander had ever been court-martialed since # (wonder who that was, and why?) Areel's casual dress was short and yellow, with one very long sleeve of shocking pink, the other of violent lime green, all in a wild #s sheer paisley print! It Food. But someone liked it well enough to pay # for it -- probably more in memory of Star Trek costume designer Bill Theiss. In the Starbase officer's club, Areel's very #s drink is a bright red semi-opaque liquid, garnished with #-# pieces of fruit, a paper umbrella and a large piece of greenery that looks like escarole! The "white sound" device used to find Finney is a previously-used sensor. Well, they had to save money on props. Lieutenant Commander Finney wears two full stripes; Lt. Cdr. Spock wears one full stripe and one broken stripe. Hmmm? It is interesting to note that Engineering aboard a starship still uses spanner wrenches, or at least Finney used one to attack Kirk. Uhura takes over navigation when necessary; she is seldom allowed to do much more to show that she knows a great deal about running a starship. The best she can do is sit on arm of command chair in this episode. Many of Kirk's classmates are much older than he and are still only lieutenants. This may be another indication that very few of the original Star Trek production crew knew much about military ways. Kirk's former classmates and supposed friends turn away from him due to the Starbase rumor that he was at fault. In true human fashion, they decided his guilt without a trial. Suitcase-sized computers were predicted in this episode, long before it was supposed that computers could be made small enough to carry around. Cogley has one, but never uses it, preferring the biological one in his head  familiarity with a vast library of books. It has been # years and # months since Kirk and prosecute him! The term "Vulcanian" is still in use, though Roddenberry or Justman will soon point out that the word "Vulcan" can be used for both the planet and its natives. "Vulcan" was used henceforth. Spock specifies "positive gravity" implying there is a place with negative gravity... McCoy calls Spock cold-blooded -- and Spock thanks him. Spock seems quite distressed by Jame's outburst of temper. Spock is embarrassed to bring the computer extract to Stone -- as if it makes him responsible for what he knows is an error. indicating that we went to space long before warp drive was discovered. Let's hope so! they are assigned to space duty. Perhaps as with top grade andor grad students teaching some classes at universities. When questioned about psychology, McCoy is modest: "I know something about it..."; in actuality he is an expert in the subject. Kirk clearly indicates what is foremost in his mind: "Nothing is more important than my ship." The last scene, where Areel kisses Kirk goodbye, is fine in the TV version, but in the blooper reels she says seductively: "... kiss the star of a ship captain..." Subscribe to Bjo Trimble's own SF Newsletter "The Newsletter for TV  Movie SF, Fantasy  Horror Fans!" P. O. Box #, Kingwood, TX #-# Send # for sample issue Illustrated by Freas oney, bumble barf, wasp whoop, bee vomit, apis spew, hornet hoop, Hymenoptera hurl. These and several other not so flowery phrases refer to the regurgitated product from certain insects -- mostly Apis mellifera. If someone walked up to you at a party with an invitation to partake of a sticky partially-digested amber fluid that had been robbed from wax holding vessels filled by vomit (from small flying insects) intended for storage, continued digestion and consumption by themselves and their children, would you say "Yes that sounds marvelous, I'd love to try some"? No. I don't think so. No more than you would say, "Yes, I would love to pry open the calcified covering of a Pelecypoda and pour sweetened tomato puree mixed with spicy tuber root over the raw unprotected flesh of a living boneless bivalve mollusk swimming in a teaspoon of residual sea water and plummet the same still throbbing animal into a pool of acid at the bottom of my stomach." No, only the fevered mind of a horror film writer could imagine such a gruesome torture inflicted upon another. Apis mellifera -- the common honey bee -- what's its story? How is it that a bunch of be-winged factories can turn random droplets of plant nectar into honey? Do they worship and make supplications to the great and fearsome god Hand that orders their lives with divine indifference? How long does it take a train traveling # mph due east leaving Pittsburgh at #:# a.m. to meet a boat traveling due west up the Hudson River? Will Donna discover that Brad is not the lover she hoped but rather the uncle of Phil who removed her left ear mistakenly believing it to be a malignant tumor while all the time Joan was secretly dating Donna's first cousin the assistant? Will this author be committed in time to spare us further inane questions? Can we move on to the next paragraph without the threat of mayhem? These and many other questions are answered following this paragraph break. Nectar is not bad stuff. Water and sugar. Add a little food coloring, carbonization and label...you could have a nice soft drink. Problem is it's spread all over the pasture. Even the engineering department at Davis School of Agriculture would be hard pressed to come up with a machine that could gather nectar in a cost efficient manner. Let's face it, these little bee guys work cheap. Free nectar and pollen and they're happy. Heck they can have all the pollen they want as far as I'm concerned. The less of the stuff in the atmosphere the better I like it. Have you ever seen a picture of a pollen grain under an electron microscope? I have -- medieval instruments of confession look more inviting. The Spanish Inquistion, now there's a lively bunch that knew how to inspire conversion. Even as we prepare to enter the #st century, thousands of Mexican and Spanish Jews are still hiding under the cover of Catholicism. So a few industrious buzzers collect the nectar -- then what? Were you aware that the water content of nectar varies? Well, it does. Anything from thirty or forty percent to ninety percent or more. Maybe less, maybe more, who's got the time to sample the water content of each and every flower? Besides some of these flowers are open to low humidity drying winds that would suck the water content from a rock. With the random effects of weather and the natural distribution of variability amongst the flora it's no surprise that the water content is not uniform. Heck dam diversity is the seed of evolution. However, as any marketer can advise, consumers prefer to buy products that they can trust to be the same from day to day and purchase to purchase. Bottom line: it just won't work to deliver a product that varies from watery to thick -- depending on time of year, plants involved, and humidity of the pasture. Fortunately, the bees have solved this little problem quite nicely. The forager bees (little buzzers that fly around sucking up nectar from flowers and such) gather the raw material. These guys forage for nectar, gather and bring it back to the hive. Since they don't have handy-dandy little buckets (like in cartoons) the bees suck the honey down using a convenient organ located just posterior to the mouth affectionately called the sucking pump. From here the nectar is shuttled down the esophagus into a thin-walled sac (corresponding to the crop of other insects) called the honey stomach -- so called because it is used to carry nectar or honey. Separating the honey stomach and the ventriculus (the real stomach) is a small sphincter like opening called the stomach mouth. The stomach mouth prevents the nectar from passing from the honey stomach into the further reaches of the honey bees' digestive system. It is here in the honey stomach that the nectar is stored during the long flight from flower to hive. Depending on whether a nectar-find was worthy of pride or required help, the first thing a foraging bee would do upon returning to the hive is dance a little jig -- thus giving the other foragers a clue to the size and location of a nectar-find. After this oratory in farting and tap-dancing is complete the forager bee (still loaded with a stomach full of nectar) would look for a house bee to receive the raw nectar. When a house bee is found, that is not otherwise occupied, the forager bee regurgitates said raw materials. As forging bees are apt to be heard saying, "I have enough to do foraging without having to do all the processing as well. You'd think with sitting around the hive all day she could keep the combs cleaner and do a little processing." In keeping with all postindustrialized factory management, the foraging bees leave the post-gathering production to house bees. Having completed their unionized roll of gathering, the foraging bees regurgitate the only slightly digested nectar and let the house bees suck it down for further processing. When the forager bee has passed a drop of nectar along, the house bee moves into action working its tiny little jaws to the chitin converting the nectar droplet into honey. The house bee has two main processing responsibilities. The first is to dehydrate the nectar into a stable product with batch to batch consistency. This is accomplished by vomiting the nectar and chewing it down over and over again. Each cycle of the process takes about twenty seconds. Given that on the average a house bee will work approximately fifteen to twenty minutes on each droplet of nectar, that translates into about fifty chew-swallow-regurgitate cycles -- guaranteed to eventually dry out even the watery-est nectar. When the nectar's water content reaches an agreed upon concentration (set by arbitrated agreement between management and labor) the house bee stops chewing and adds the partially digested nectar to a cell in the honey comb. It is here that the second processing responsibility of the house bee is accomplished. The sugar profile of raw nectar varies from simple (glucose and fructose) to complex (sucrose). That will never do for feeding young baby bees and besides sucrose is too close to the white crystals of death extracted from sugar cane and beets to be very effective on the retail market. Nope, in the health food market something different (and sweeter) is required -- at least if one wants to compete for that ever elusive (and perhaps mob controlled) shelf-space. To solve this marketing dilemma honey bees inject the enzyme invertase into the nectar. The invertase enzyme converts sucrose into smaller, simpler and sweeter sugars. The process is begun in the stomach to be completed in the wax holding tanks of the honey comb over the course of a few weeks. Next time before complaining of how much work it is to lay in a supply of canned tomatoes and pickles for the winter, you may wish to recall the job of the house bee and count yourself lucky. Who would want to chew and spit up cucumbers all night long? Come to think of it, that's the very thing that happened to me the last time I had cucumbers in my salad. Perhaps I should put it into a wax-bucket next to the nursery and let it finish digesting there. Strained cucumbers, that's one food product you don't see on the grocery store shelves everyday. Bardotown Training Drill Sequences of images you perceive when actually going through the Bardo. Dispel your mechanical, involuntary responses to the Bardo. ## off the retail price of # per video when you subscribe to the full #-year program I # #-# 'This and several of my other ideas are picked up on sale from a local Paranoids-R-Us. The franchise fee is not bad, but they require a home phone number on the application. Thus cutting the total number of applicants to near-zero. The few that do make it through the franchise process have the good sense to "accidentally" transpose a few digits in their home phone number -- guaranteeing resourceful owners. Jewels of Ancient lands DflSfylcd. from the mystery and depth of ancient people whose spirit lives on through the aesthetic vior, creative force and delicate craftsmanship Black pearls, flat barrel Labradorite, hand-crafted Sterling Silver Sri Lanka granulated cage beads and cage rondels , on Sterling Silver link. AL #  # Jewels of Ancient Lands necklaces... Rare, sought-after creations which will last for generations. for information call #-#-#-# ' I '  .I , Feeling Left out? Want to be "in the know"? Robert Anton Wilson  E. J. Gold's Secrets of the Illuminati iT rt # iY t i :. Jthe occult secrets of the oldest What did they know? When did they know it? Get this set of # #-minute cassettes, call #-#-#-#, Gateways Books and Tapes Edited by Robert Anton Wilson Selected materials from the first twelve hard-to-find issues of the Trajectories Newsletter published in a quality paperback. It's a perfect introduction to the often important #th century philosopher. And humorist. And novelist. And critic. # plus shipping and handling Other recommended works by Dr. Wilson: More Robert Anton Wilson: An introduction to Dr. Wilson's popular workshop on the eight circuits of the evolving human nervous system. Two #-minute cassettes, I # plus shipping and handling. Illuminatus! (with Robert Shea) This esoteric-SF intellectualthriller started and ended its own genre. An incredible book! # plus shipping and handling The New Inquisition Free-thinking almost illegal! Essays and articles with Wilson's trademarks: humor and lucidity. # plus shipping and handling Wilhelm Reich in Hell Must See To Appreciate! # plus shipping and handling Please call #-#-#, or use the order form on page #. Also: Ask about rare copies of Wilson and E. J. Gold's discussion of the esoteric meanings of Star Wars ! for ordering information: I # #-# Gateways Books and Tapes P.O. Box # Nevada City CA # Are you ready for ?... The Original Handbook for the Recently Deceased by Claude Needham Tech Manual -- Field Operator' s Edition The Original By Claude Needham, Ph.D. Gateways  I.D.H.H.B., Inc. Publishers Nevada City, California Before quoting from this book, please check with the publisher for corrections to the final manuscript . For more information see back cover Metaphysical humor at its best If you are reading this, you are probably dead. The "Warning" on the outside ot this book was no joke. This package has been hermetically sealed (by a band of hermets working in Northern California) to prevent tampering by the living. If you were able to break the seal, then you are either dead or a recent book purchaser. Quid Pro Erratum Sanctorum You have been warned! This book contains great and amazing secrits meant only for the eyes of the dead. If you are not dead, and you have inadvertently seen this page, please for your own protection stop reading now! Take a sixpack of beer to the Roller Derby and pick a fight during halftime. Purge your system of any effects of the apres vie with a generous internal rush of adrenalin. Do this before it is too late. This book is worthless if opened before you are seriously dead. You have been warned! Publication Information From Gateways Books  Tapes Title: The Original Handbook lor the Recently Deceased Price: # Trade Paperback # Deluxe Art Edition #-#-#-# Trade Paperback #-#-#-# Deluxe Art Edition Size: # ##X # ##" Trade Paperback ##X#"Deluxe Art Edition Subject Categories: HumorDeath  DyingMetaphysics Publication: Fall, # About the Book: This is the latest Gateways title in the category of "metaphysical humor." It Is a technical manual, companion volume to Gateways' well-known American Book ot the Dead, and an introduction to Bardomania. The Handbook is a step by step, day by day practical preparation for what happens to you when you are dead -- except that typically by the time you realize how practical it really is, you're already dead. Hence the warning: "Do not read this book unless you are dead. This book is not for the living. If AmuH the author: you're not dead, this book is not for you." Dr. Needham is a bio-physics research specialist, as well as a sculptor, author end humorist. His background is Strongest in plasma physics and waveform research. His loves are alabaster or a good piece of lignum vitae. Contact: Iven Lourie. Editor Gateways Books  Tapes m # P.O. Box #, Nevada City. CA # Tel.: (#) #-# or (#) #-# Fax: (#) #-# --  mr  . Gateways nnouncLn... zf-rom the publishers of twentieth AUens century science fiction classics, the Street Griiide photobioraphy of tyold, galaxy To edit lor, science fiction author, artist Planet and son of famed c H-. told. eaturln  a photographic panorama the Biography of of the cHall of 'jfame of Science-Fiction Lover the history of science fiction . by Linda Corriveau A. For information: #-#-#-# The Best of Zaphod The Best of Zaphod The Best of Zaphod and more of the Best of Zaphod! "Well that's very nice," you might say, "but where's my -- The Best of Zaphod -- and Just call #-#-#-#, or you can mail or fax the convenient order form in this issue. A fine copy of this important and very early graphic work by Marc Chagall. This little hook is rich in images of the Stetle (the little Jewish ghetto villages which dotted the Russian landscape) in which Chagall spent his childhood before emigrating to France. #, #, # pp. With # original etchings by Chagall. #to. Original wrappers. Paris: Au Sans Pareil, #. This volume contains five hard-to-find original etchings, one of which is reminiscent of "The Birthday", one of Chagall's more famous paintings that's the one you see in High School Art Appreciation #, where he's serpentinely flying and kissing her, remember? Maternite provides a time-machine allowing us to peek into the earliest period of Chagall's arta period we may not be able to afford to collect in oils, watercolors or gouaches, but which are very affordable in etching format. Here, Marc Chagall demonstrates the clearest examples of his early ingenuousness and we see the very source of his later artistic inspirations. Don't be fooled by the large edition; actually, this is quite a scarce book! This copy is ## on Lafuma de Voiron paper of a total edition of #. Skira #. Print Quarterly IV, no. I, pp. #-#. Cased in a fine, unique Stephanie Boyd handpainted leather felt-lined folding box, signed by boxmaster Boyd. Certificate included. # Illustrations by Kate (# A Text by Marcel Arland From one the greatest science fiction writers of this century comes a classic tale... Skulking Permit by Robert Sheckley with original illustrations by E.J. Gold Skulking Permit was published in a deluxe edition of # copies with original serigraph frontispiece by EJ. Gold, and many other original illustrations. In addition, # serigraphs in a portfolio accompany this edition. Leather binding with marble end papers. Signed by the author and artist. # Suppose that the historical Jesus and his disciples are an archetype of divine revelation which manifests in every period in history with another Jesus and another set of disciples. That is the premise which fuels this riveting novel by A.J. Langguth subtlely illustrated by E.J. Gold who worked with transparency and layering to evoke the otherworldly quality in this classic tale. This edition is limited to # copies. Deluxe, sewn hard-cover with signed and numbered frontispiece serigraph bound in, handsomely gold-embossed on cover and spine. Hors-texte edition also available. # regular edition. #. with hors-texte serigraph. "Just as we had become accustomed to the fact that the only first-rate religious fiction today is being written by Norman Mailer, this mad novel comes along to surprise and enchant us. A comic religious novel?... Impossible, but it has happened. It is either one of the canniest rejections of the Christian enterprise in our time, or one of the subtlest expressions of admiration for Jesus. Or both. Or neither..." The New Republic Forrest J Ackerman's collection of unforgettable stories from the childhood of science fiction in a special collectors' edition designed to last for generations. Available at #. Lavishly illustrated. (#) #-# # regular edition # with hors texte serigraph #: #(ht) pre-publication.  Date: February, # Edition Siza: Strictly limited to # copies Deluxe, sewn hard-cover with signed and numbered frontispiece serigraph bound in, handsomely gold-embossed on cover (with Forry Ackerman insignia) and on spine. Hors texts: Hors texts serigraph only tor copies #-#, check with publisher for availability. Edited and with Commentaries by Forrest J Ackerman Illustrated by E.J. Gold A note from Sirius Science Fiction Editor, Iven Lourie: "When I bought a house in an old neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona, in the seventies, my neighbors were an elderly couple who had lived there since the fifties. I found out that they had an immense paperback book collection, including science fiction. One day, as I sat in their musty living room talking with them about " the good old days. " the woman brought out a paperback she handled carefully with great reverence, and insisted I must read. I did read it, and it did take my breath away at some scenes. That paperback was The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt. I got the feeling that in the thirties or forties, when that came out, Merritt's work was tor young science fiction fans what cyberpunk is now, or what Ace doubles were when I was growing up." Forrest J Ackerman has gathered, with the original # novella version of "The Face in the Abyss." a collection of unforgettable stories from the childhood of science fiction as the genre we know today -- called then "sclenlifiction." as Forry explains. If Galaxy and Beyond and F  SF, the editorial work of Horace Gold and Anthony Boucher, were the coming-of-age of science fiction, these stories from the twenties and thirties, from such pulps as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories, represent the first flush of the genre's youthful energy. They will truly awaken your "sense of wonder" as a reader, and remind you why you started reading science fiction in the first place, so many years ago -- whether you've ever read these authors or not. I have to say, as I said to Forry in the early stages of working on this book, that I've never had more fun proofreading anything in my career as a reader and editor. Forry, himself the senior statesman of science fiction editing and agentry. Is your ideal guide through this carnival of adventure and astonishing Imaginative leaps. Many of the gems herein are definitely "in the rough." Edited by Forrest J Ackerman Illustrated by EJ. Gold O M m u #  Q BY E.J. (fold'f E.J. Gold's Guide to the Galaxy and Beyond the Unknown is a small edition series of illustrated anthologies of some of Galaxy's editor E.J. Gold's favorite science fiction stories. Each story is accompanied by original illustrations by the artist  author E.J. Gold. The first two volumes include stories by giants such as Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Damon Knight, Daniel Galouye, Malcolm Jameson, Winston Marks, James E. Gunn, Theodore R. Cogswell and Frederic Brown. Gold reveals his love of fine books by the care he has taken in printing and binding this series. Contact: Nancy Christia or Ivan Lourla (#)#-# Price: SI # regular edition # with hors i S#: #(#) pre-publication. #; #) hi) ubcrbe Releaee Date; February, # Edition SUe: Edition is strictly limited to I # copies. Deluxe, sewn hard-cover limited edition with signed and nunOered frontispiece serigraph bound in, handsomely gold-embossed on cover and splno. Hors rente; Hors texts serigraph available only lor copies #-#, sold out by subscription at time ol publication (check with Gateways tor avattbiiity). Gone to Hell in a Breadbasket Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here -- So reads the notice posted over the entry portal in Dante s mtemo. For well over a two thousand years, both bolore and after the advent ol Christianity, the panorama of the Underworld and Its ruler, whether known aa Hades, Pluto, some other ancient name or The Devil, has been an inspiration to writers. Science fiction writers have been no exceptionl This second volume of EJ. Gold's Guido to the Galaxy... gathers together, for the first time anywhere, this handful of stories that so inspired the future author, arti#t and anthologist. Like those infamous and now highly archival collections August Derleth and Arldiam House put together some decades ago. this collection la bound to set a new standard for dark fantasy and gothic tales -- re invoking the master authors on the subect and revising the twentieth century history of magic Best of ail, the Illustrations provided by Gold are brand new and sizzling with energy, a perfect tribute to these writers ol the golden age ol science fiction. The stories in this anthology, second In the series edited by Gold, Include a classic novella on the science ol spells by James Gunn, who currently heads the Center for the Study ol Science Fiction at U. ol Kansas (see cover story and photo. Locus. September, I #) and one ol the most anthologized stories ol Theodore chetypal story ol a hallucinatory night in Dante's hell, while lesser-known Galaxy writer Winston Marks provides a memorable black-magic detective story. Science fiction wizard Fredric Brown (like Cogswell. Jameson and Marks, now deceased) supplies the volume's "chaser" with two potent shortshorts published together In Galaxy as "Double Whammy." This Is a collection ol classics rescued from paperback oblivion, reprinted In the dual-column layout ol the fifties magazines It Is a must lor collectors -- an Instant collectible and heirloom -- that Sirius science fiction 'fans will want to read and treasure on their shelves for years to come. Voluma Two cbntbnts; Not According to Panto I'd Glum a Dollar... ! Slrte ot the Magua... t:Uf Double Whammy rim Ja m eaor t # ! ? # (#) #-# Price: #; # with hors lexle Ed Hion Sizt: Edition Is strictly limited to # copies. Deluxe, sewn hard-covei limited edition with signed and numbered frontispiece serigraph bound in. handsomely gold-embossed on cover and spine. Hors teste: Hors lexle serigraph available only only lor copies #-#. Whatta giftl What unusual artwork! -- Forrest J Ackerman (Volume One) science fiction. Writers will Include everyone you've heard of and admired -- all the science fiction greats. volumes -- the first of which is scheduled for upcoming release -- stories which left the strongest impression on him during the years he spent devouring uncountable manuscripts submitted to his father H.L. Gold, the editor of Galaxy Magazine. Gold is probably one of the most qualified editors in the Solar System for this senes, and it is with sheer delight that he has gathered some of the best stories ever written by some of the greatest writers in the field. One of the more exciting aspects ol this project is that Gold also illustrates these stories with original drawings. Never before ha# an anthology or an individual title been edited and Illustrated by the same person equally recognized as a world-class writer, artist and editor. All ot the stories to be Included are archelypes ot their genre. They alternately portray expanded realities, time-travel, technological magic, intra-species communication, alternate worlds and a host of other mind-expanding themes but in extremely unusual ways. These volumes are sure to become the staple for an entire new generation ot science fiction readers -- and the definitive collections for future generations ot tans.The stories and magazines published In the early days ot Science Fiction, the #'s and #'s, are now extremely rare and collectible. With the classics ot the #'s and # s -- why wait fifty or one hundred yearn in the future to look lor these stones? Collect them now, in Sirius Science Fiction Editions! You can enjoy them for years to come -- then pass them on to your children and grandchildren Volume One contents: brmbi With the publication of E .J. Gold's Guide to the Galaxy and Beyond the Unknown great out-of-print classics, thematic anthologies and noteworthy science fiction titles are introduced to a new generation of readers for their lasting enjoyment. Published by Sirius Science Fiction. The best dogon fiction in the galaxy. # regular edition. Available also by subscription at #. per volume. Order now at #-#-#-#. Matisse, Henri Pierre a Feu #,(#)pp. This beautiful little book features two original works on paper; they are portraits of women: I original linocut and I original lithograph by Matisse, both printed in black; also a lithographic frontispiece of the Firebird printed in blue after a drawing by Matisse. # heliogravure plates in text reproducing drawings by Matisse. #to. Dec. wraps. With bound-in wraps printed in #-color pochoir with a design by Matisse especially made for this publication. Rebound in fine leather, # raised bands, gold embossed, designed by E.J. Gold. Lithography was by the Mourlot brothers. Texts by Aragon, Eluard, Callois, Lely, Char, Spyridaki, Marchand, Hugnet, Jaguer, Solier, Kober and others. Published as an homage to Matisse. Ref: Dutuit I # Paris; Maeght editor, #; ## of # limited edition (there were # printed in all, including proofs, on velin superieur, a wonderful paper that, at least in this copy, has aged well.)  # Maillol, Aristide: Les Pastorales de Longus ou Daphnis et Chloe. Version d'Amyot, revue et completee par P.L. Courier. Bois originaux d' Aristide Maillol. (Paris: Gonin,) #. Two volumes: Bound: loose in original wrappers, publisher's chemises  slipcases. This is copy no. I -- the editor's copy -- on Maillol paper with an original pencil-drawing on transfer tissue. The sketch is pencil-signed by Maillol with his initial "M", and it is significant that the drawing is further labeled by the editor-publisher, Philippe Gonin. There were # proofs, two sets of woodcuts pulled in black and in sanguine. # copies on Maillol paper, plus # or more copies produced hors commerce (not for sale). The interior page size is about # ##" x # ##". This copy is numbered with Roman numeral "I", not Arabic "#" -- with two additional suites of woodcuts, one in black and one in sanguine, not called for and signed by the publisher, Gonin. See: The Artist and the Book, Garvey  Wick, # Wheeler, #I This is a very important and perhaps unique example, as it is the publisher's own copy. We doubt there is another like it, and would dearly love to know of something similar. Encased in a fabulous handmade leather felt-lined folding box, handpainted by E.J. Gold, and signed by the artist. Embossed certificate from H.E.I.  # Chagall, Marc: Illustrations for Drawings for the Bible. (Verve # #-#) Two volumes. Folio, original boards. Paris, Editions de la Revue Verve: #, #. Fine and nicely matched copies of the First and Only issue of Chagall's illustrations for this Bible which documents and complements the edition of the Bible published by Teriade in #. These two volumes contain a total of # original color lithographs. Unfortunately, most sets of this work have been plundered for plates by print dealers. Complete sets in such good condition are becoming exceedingly difficult to locate. # volumes encased in a highly unusual leather felt-lined folding box, handpainted by boxmaster Stephanie Boyd. Extraordinary and unique combination of publisher's and boxmaster's art; the one-of-a-kind box is signed by the artist. With embossed Certificate from H.E.I.  # Maillol, Aristide, Virgile. Les Georgiques . Texte Latin et version gravures sur bois d 'Aristide Maillol. Paris, Philippe Gonin, #-# (#). # vols. #to. (#), #, (#); (#), #, (#) pp. including # woodcuts, of which some are illustrated initial letters. Unsewn, as issued, in publisher's cream wrappers, preserved in quarter vellum slipcase and chemise. With the prospectus for the work, loosely inserted. One of a limited edition of # copies printed on rag-wove paper, watermarked with Maillol's "seated nude". Maillol began the first drawings for this project in # when, returning from a trip to Greece with Count Harry Kessler of the Cranach Press, he stopped over at Naples and Pompeii. Over the next three decades, he added a few more cuts to the original work and in # Gonin urged him to resume the project; the final block was delivered just before the artist died. Maillol's eyesight was poor during the last years of his life, so the actual cutting for the project was executed by craftsmen working from the artist's sketches made directly on the print surface of the wood block. See: Artist  Book p. # This copy is no. ##. Encased in an elaborate and completely unique leather felt-lined folding box, handpainted by E.J. Gold. Box is signed by the artist. With embossed Certificate from H.E.I. # composers for many years, Moondog pioneered electronic, layered sounds using one The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos: Benedictines had a chart-topping album! It doesn't qet any better than this. Listen! # Yma Sumac  The enchanting sounds of the Peruvian Princess of the Catskills. A legendary vocalist. # "Maybe you can help me out. The CD's looked great in their nifty plastic cases, and you can see that they're real Space Age Technology. But is there a special tool for removing these things so that they can be played?" CZ Scottsdale AZ "I have wanted an Yma Sumac record for years, but didn't know it until I saw your ad and saw how terribly expensive they are. Fortunately, I can get it used at my local CD Shop for half the price. Thanks for the tip!" TV, Fort Wayne IN "I ordered several CD's about a year ago and never received them. I have called you hundreds of times to get a refund, but I wrote this final letter to let you know that I discovered that I actually ordered them from a different store. Please do better in the future." TK, Spokane WA I # #-# # #-# Stan Freberg  The sensitive, touching songs of a satiric master. A master advertising concept man sings his heart out! #   fl m rc r yi r : rrrr w A V E F O R M ; # Fine silver, ceramic bead, leather cord. Each is unique to a certain moment. Send birthdate or other personal information. # plus # shipping and handling. iiei eartheuworks #-#-# or #-#-#-# Specify color  size. CA residents add # tax. Send check or M.O. to: po box # penn valley California # #-#-#-#  #-#-# Name Address City State Zi PDay Phone Charge to my Card# Visa Mastercard Exp Date Signature ( required for charge orders) The above signed individual certifies himherself to be responsible to charge this account for the full amount of this sale as specified on this form. (Please allow #-# weeks for delivery when sending personal checks. For fastest delivery send monev order or charge to merchandise when you receive it , simply return it to us in good condition, with the original packaging and a copy of your invoice and you will receive a full credit or refund, as you request. #-#-#-# or #-# n ii nr l l van ioaay: Be a Galaxian! times per year. Available at # for a single copy (# in Canada), # for Canada, # for Great BritainEurope, and # for the Pacific Rim. With your subscription, you get a Free Galaxian Button, a # value. and handling. Your subscription will begin with the current issue. Subscribers will be given preference for back issue orders. A limited number of Volume I, Number I have been put aside as single issue samples  #. #copy plus I First Class shipping and handling. Offer good only while supplies last! Contact: P.O. Box # A new Painting Series by E. J. Gold Modeled by Catherine Oxenberg Available from liei #-#-#-#  #-#-# Catherine the Great #j#sXty # #hjYV#lAQsl,  ac  owy fsMht, A bpC kjtiy icloM #yjfraJL fcutA. EliU, Tel, Pwxflt, AyU EUk. Miracle Dragon: # shipping included. California residents please add # tax. Send check or M.O. to Penn Valley, CA # #-#-#-# (#) #-# Allow #-# weeks for delivery. We're very proud of these ceramic pieces. In look, feel and presence, they are truly exquisite. We think you'll agree with us but in the unlikely event that you don't, we guarantee your satisfaction your money will be refunded in full. imagine their delight   Endless Circle Teapots Hand-forged silver Hand-made ceramtc beads # D# #I Oval serving platter #" long # DG# #" Pitcher # DG# #" Umbrella Stand # CP# #" Egg Box # #-#-#-# or #-#-# PO Box # Nevada City CA # EC#I Endless Circle Teapot and cups. Specify one color: Blue, Brown, Yellow. Red  Green not shown # For More Information on this and other Galaxy Classic Titles, Call #-#-#-# or #-#-# Galaxy Classics PO Box # Nevada City CA # Featuring Illustrations by Hannah M. G. Shapero Edition Maximum, #  These are Collectible, Hand-Made Books!  Hand-Bound Edition Gold Stamped Cover Hand-pulled Serigraph Frontispiece Signed by Author and Artist French End papers  # Pre-Publication: #  Reserve your copy now! This one will go fast! Published by Sirius Science Fiction Presented by Galaxy Classics Galax y Shrimp'. It is the only way to describe these works from Galaxy Classics limited edition, hand-crafted works of art, many signed by both author and artist, and available in strictly limited editions. The finest works by the grand masters of the field, in lavishly illustrated, hand-sewn books to treasure for a lifetime, and more. jSP Galaxy Edited by Forrest J Ackerman Illustrated by E.J. Gold Forrest J Ackerman's collection of unforgettable stories from the childhood of science fiction. SF# # Illustrated by E. J. Gold Classic stories portraying the archetypes of the genre. Expanded realities, time-travel, technological magic, intraspecies communication, alternate worlds, and a host of other mindexpanding themes. A. B. by Robert Sheckley Illustrated by E.J. Gold A colony cut off from Earth's civilization is suddenly scheduled for a military inspection. A masterfully ironic and visionary tale. Edition of # only. by A.J. Langguth Illustrated by E.J. Gold This amazing book -- out of print for many years -- tells of different Christs living in different times. "...this mad novel comes along to surprise and enchant us. A comic religious novel? Impossible, but it has happened. It is either one of the canniest rejections of the Christian enterprise in our time, or one of the subtlest expressions of admiration for Jesus..." The New Republic, # SF# ## jal 'I I f Tvv,vv  k   D. "Besides bringing back forgotten classics, these art edtions are gorgeous works of art and also fine examples of the bookbinder's craft. This is your chance to get in on the start of another Arkham House!" Robert Sheckley I # #-# ( # ) #-# OCTOBER # #  galaxy I I I I I I I I I I I I I I ii i ii I I in ii ii i nun I I in i ii I I ii i ii i ii I I ii I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I n i ii n I I I I m I I m I I C. Lots of things: Paid-up accident insurance for a hardboiled pulp detective, for instance... A stereoscopic full-color crystal ball for a swami... A bathing suit with built-in curves for a flat-bottom non-dreamboat. C But for science fiction readers, such appealing plums lack ingenuity. Not so with the startling list we've prepared. For merely explaining a mystery (which no one has yet been able to explain satisfactorily) you can win the most exciting, the most extraordinary... L We don't say this is the greatest science fiction contest there ever was; we want you to say it. And very far from incidental -- some reader, somewhere, may have the actual answer to the key question: What and Why Are Flying Saucers? C See Page # for Willy Ley's introduction to this baffling problem of our times... and Page #I for the prizes. Remember, there is a # cash bonus for each of the winners of the first three prizes if their entries are JEdHor-in-Chief October,'. # Vol. #, No. I Art Director  Cover by David Stone lllustratlni The Hunting Asteroid Scene of Time Quarry Is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main ' offices: # West #th St... WrYork #, N. Y. # copy. Subscriptions # copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and . Gehtral America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere f#.#. Application for entry W v ' second-class matter is pending: at the Post Office, Brebklyn, N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President: George A. Gogniat. Yice-President : Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer : Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be acdompanled by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories rioted in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. # ' by Clifford D. Simak ' # by Theodore Sturgeon # by Katherine MacLean # by Richard Matheson #I by Fritz Leiber # by Fredric Brown # by Isaac Asimov # by-Groff Conklin #I by Willy Ley # Next Issue At Your Newsstand First Week in October Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Oft. For Adults Only agrees, or seems to, has finally come of age. Hollywood, radio, book publishers, and the slick magazines are all, with the usual degraded exceptions, buying and treating science fiction intelligently. poses to carry the maturity of this type of literature into the science fiction magazine field, where it is now, unfortunately, somewhat hard to find. It establishes a compound break with both the lurid and the stodgy traditions of s-f magazine publishing. From cover design to Science Fiction intends to be a mature magazine for mature readers... mature in reading; age alone is no assurance of maturity. The cover design we are using is proof of our break with the amateur andor shoddy tradition, and the way it was selected is typical of our respect for our potential readers. We presented a number of experimental cover designs to groups of fans, authors, artists, and persons with no interest at all in science fictioh, and asked which they preferred. Three out of four consulted chose "our present design... and explained that they liked it, but doubted if it had commercial appeal. Three votes out of every four, on a wide-scale survey, is commercial enough to satisfy us. We never were convinced, in any case, of the actual commercial  appeal of naked maidens, prognathous youths in winter underwear of gold lame, and monsters that can exist only on the nutrients found in India ink and Bristol board. The cover, by David Stone, is the resolution of several personal conflicts. Long a science fiction fan, Stone is also an excellent artist who was weary of tearing covers off mag,azines to avoid embarrassment. His cover, he resolved, would not have to be hidden from either parents or friends. Having suffered thus ourselves, we agreed, and no reader will If you will study our cover closely, preferably with a magnifying glass, you will find another reason for pride. Stone's fine painting has been reproduced by a completely new and revolutionary engraving process! It is a continuous tone Guth, one of the country's foremost experimenters in color reproduction. Like photography, this process vjses a granular surface rather than mechanical dots, since no conventional screen is used at all. The Guth process allows imperceptible blending instead of the ordinary pattern or moire, which eliminates blurring through much more accurate registration, and makes possible more faithful color reproduction than any other engraving process known. We have to state that the above is the only information we can give; the patent is still-pending. Life is experimenting with the Fiction is the first magazine of any kind to use it. A superb engraving process needs an equally superb cover stock. Theredressed in Champion Kromekote, an expensive and unusual coated paper. Kromekote was developed as a result of the long search for an ideal high finish paper, one that would duplicate the intense luster of the glossy photograph. The Champion Paper  Fibre Company solved the problem; Kromekote has a # per cent higher indexof refraction than the costliest grade of enameled stock! It can also be soaked in water and still retain full color with practically no loss, an important quality to readers who dislike having to wash after reading a magazine. ing process and Kromekote's incredible finish, artist and reader are assured fine color reproduction. All this, of course, is merely a beautiful and dignified vehicle for science fiction itself. The novel, by Clifford D. Simak, is something that has been done far too seldom in s-f: a powerful story of suspense, mystery, ideas... and human emotion; Theodore Sturgeon's novelet is superb Sturgeon, recommendation enough, we think; and the short stories and illustrations were all selected for maturity, intelligence, and professional quality. Maintaining the standard of this first issue would not be easy even if we had the budget of a slick magazine, but our future issues promise to become even better. As stated in the introduction to our contest, the fundamental purpose is to gain readers, but we also have a scientific intent. Flying Saucers, whether real or not, are a significant phenomenon of our times. If real, they have a vital function of some sort; if fantasy, they are noteworthy for psychological reasons. We do not have the answer, nor does Willy Ley. We hope, as he does, that our readers do, or that they can offer explanations which will suggest lines of research. To conclude, we are not, running a letter department in this issue -- not because we have none, but because of their congratulatory and inspirational content. We would rather have a good fight than a bouquet any day, much as we like the odor of roses, because criticism is more important to the development ence Fiction is an idea and a goal. Your ideas can help us achieve that One life should be enough to give for hum'anity... but humanity wanted Asher Sutton to keep making the sacrifice indefinitely! T HE mail came out of the twilight when the greenish-yellow of the sun's last glow still lingered in the west. He paused at the edge of the patio and called. "Mr. Adams, is that you?" The chair creaked as Christopher Adams shifted his weight, startled by the voice. Then he remembered. A new neighbor had moved in across the meadow a day or two ago. Jonathon had told him... and Jonathon knew all the gossip within a hundred miles. Human gossip as well as android and robot gossip. "Come on in," said Adams. "Glad you dropped around." He hoped his voice sounded as hearty and neighborly as he had tried to make it. For he wasn't glad. He was a little nettled, upset by this sudden shadow that came out of the twilight and walked across the patio. This is my hour, he thought angrily. The one hour I give myself. The hour that I forget... forget the thousand problems that have to do with other star systems. Forget them and turn back to the greenblackness and the hush and the subtle sunset shadow-show that belong to my ownplanet. For here, on this patio, there are no mentophone reports, no robot files, no 'galactic co-ordination conferences... no psychological intrigue, no alien reaction charts. Nothing complicated or mysterious. With half his mind, he knew the stranger had come across the patio and was reaching out a hand for a chair to sit in; and with the other half, once again, he wondered about the blackened bodies lying on the and the twisted machine that was wrapped around the tree. Three humans had died there... three humans and two androids, and androids were almost human, different only in that they were manufactured instead of bom. And humans must not die by violence unless it be by the violence of another human. Even then it must be on the field of honor, with all the formality and technicality of the code duello, or in the less polished affairs of revenge' or execution. For human life was sacrosanct. It had to be or there'd be no human life. Man was so pitifully outnumbered. Violence or accident? And accident was ridiculous. There were few accidents, almost none at all. The near-perfeotion of mechanical performance, the almost human intelligence and reactions of machines to any known danger, long ago had cut accidents to an almost non-existent figure. No modern machine would be crude enough to crash into a tree. A more subtle, less apparent danger, maybe. But never a tree. So it must be violence. And it could not be human violence, for human violence would have advertised the fact. Human violence had nothing to fear... there was no recourse to law, scarcely a moral code to which a human killer would be answerable. years distant, and it became a thing of great importance to a man sitting on his patio on Earth. A thing of prime importance, for no human must die by other hands than human without a terrible vengeance. Human life must not be taken without a monstrous price anywhere in the galaxy, or the human race would end forever, and the great galactic brotherhood of intelligence would plummet down into the darkness and the distance that had scattered it before. Adams slumped lower in his chair, forcing himself to relax, furious at himself for thinking... for it was his rule that in this time of twilight he thought of nothing... or as close to nothing as his restless mind could manage. The stranger's voice seemed to come from far away and yet Adams knew he was sitting at his side. "Nice evening," the stranger said. Adams chuckled. "The evenings are always nice. The Weather boys don't let it rain until later on, when everyone's asleep." In a thicket down the hill, a thrush struck up its evensong and the liquid notes ran like a quieting hand across a drowsing world. Along the creek a frog or two were trying out their throats. Far away, in some dim other-world, a whippoor-will began his chugging question. Across the meadow and up the climbing hills, the lights came on in houses here and there. "This is the best part of the day," said Adams. pocket, brought out tobacco pouch and pipe. "Smoke?" The stranger shook his head. "As a matter of fact, I am here on business." Adams' voice turned crisp. "See me in the morning, then. I don't do business after hours." The stranger said softly: "It's about Asher Sutton." Adams' body tensed and his fingers shook as he filled his pipe. He was glad that it was dark so the stranger could not see. "Sutton will be coming back," the stranger said. Adams shook his head. "No chance. He went out twenty years ago." "You haven't crossed him off?" "No," said Adams slowly. "He still is on the payroll, if that is what you mean." "Why?" asked the man. "Why do you keep him on?" Adams tamped the tobacco in the bowl, considering. "Sentiment, I guess. Faith in Asher Sutton. Although the faith is running out." "Just five days from now," the stranger said, "Sutton will come back." He paused a moment, then added: "Early in the morning." "There's no way you could know a thing like that." "But I do. It's recorded fact." Adams snorted. "It hasn't happened yet."  "In my time it has." Adams jerked upright in his chair. "In your time?" "Yes," said the stranger quietly. "You see, Mr. Adams, I am your successor." "Look here, young man. ... "Not young man. I am half again your age. I am getting old." "I have no successor," said Adams coldly. "There's been no talk of one. I'm good for another hundred years. Maybe more than that." "Yes," the stranger said, "for more than a hundred years. For much more than that." Adams leaned back quietly in his chair. He put his pipe in his mouth and lit it with a hand that was suddenly steady. "Let's take this easy," he said. "You say you are my successor... ithat you took over my job after I quit or died. That means you came out of the future. Not that I believe you for a moment, of course. But just for argument... "There, was a news item the other day," the stranger said. "About a man named Michaelson who claimed he went into the future." "I read that. One second! How could a man know he went one second into time? How could he measure it and know? Wihat difference would it make?" "None," the stranger agreed. "Not the first time. But the next time he will go into the future five seconds. Five seconds, Mr. Adams. Five tickings of the clock. The space of one short breath. There must be a starting point for all things." "Time travel?" The stranger nodded. "I don't believe it," Adams said. "In the last five thousand years we have conquered the galaxy... "Conquer is not the right word, Mr. Adams." "Well, taken over, then. Moved in. However you wish it. And we have found strange things. Stranger things than we ever dreamed. But never time travel." He waved his hand at the stars. "In all that space out there, no one had time travel. No one.'! "You have it now," the stranger said. "Since two weeks ago. Michaelson went into time, one second into time. A start. That is all that's needed." "All right," said Adams. "Let us say you are the man who in a hundred years or so will take my place. Let's pretend you traveled back in time. Then why come here?" "To tell you that Asher Sutton will return." "I would know it when he came," said Adams. "Why must I know now?" "When he returns," the stranger said, "Sutton must be killed." II T HE tiny, battered ship sank lower, slowly, like a floating feather, drifting down toward the field in the slant of morning sun. The bearded, ragged man in the pilot's chair sat tensed, not breathing. Tricky, said his brain. Hard and tricky to handle so much weight, to judge the distance and the speed... hard to make the tons of metal float down against the savage pull of gravity. Harder even than the lifting of it, when there had been no consideration but that it should rise and move out into space. For a moment the ship wavered and he fought it with every shred S of will and mind... and then it floated once again, hovering just a few feet above the surface of the field. He let it down, gently, so that it scarcely bumped when it touched the ground. He sat rigid in the seat, slowly going limp, relaxing by inches, first one muscle, then another. Tired, he told himself. The toughest job I've ever done. Another few miles and I would have let the whole weight of the ship crash. Far down the field was a clump of buildings. A ground car had swung away from them and was racing down the strip toward him. A breeze curled in through the shattered vision port and touched his face, reminding him... Breathe, he told himself. You must be breathing when they come. You must be breathing and you must walk out and you must smile at them. There must be nothing they will notice. Right away, at least. The beard and" clothes will help some. They'll be so busy gaping at them that .they will miss a little thing. But not breathing. They might notice if you weren't breathing. Carefully, he pulled in a breath of air, felt the sting of it run along his nostrils and gush inside his throat, felt the fire of it when it reached his lungs. Another breath and another one and the air had scent and life and a strange exhilaration. The blood throbbed in his throat and beat against his temples and he held his fingers to one wrist and felt it pulsing there. Sickness came, a brief, stomachretching sickness that he fought against, holding his body rigid, remembering all the things that he must do. The power of will, he told himself, the power of mind... the power that no man uses to its full capacity. The will to tell a body the things that it must do, the power to start an engine turning after years of doing nothing. One breath and then another. And the heart is beating now, steadier, steadier. Be quiet, stomach. Get going, liver. Keep pumping, heart. It isn't as if you were old and. rusted, for you never were. The other system took care that you were kept in shape, that you were ready at an instant's notice to be as you were. But the switch-over was a shock. He had known that it would be. He had dreaded its coming, for he had known what it would mean: the agony of a new kind of life and metabolism. of his body and all its working parts... a shifting, wpbbly picture that shivered and blurred and ran color into color. But it steadied under the hardening of his mind, the driving of his will, and finally the blueprint was still and sharp and bright and he knew that the worst was over. He clung to the ship's controls with hands clenched so fiercely, they almost dented metal, and perspiration poured down his body, and he was Jimp and weak. Nerves grew quiet and the blood pumped on, and he knew that he was breathing 'without even thinking of it. For a moment longer he sat quietly in the seat, relaxing. The breeze came in the shattered port and brushed against his cheek. The ground car was coming very close. "Johnny," he whispered, "we are home. We made it. This is my home, Johnny. The place I talked about." But there was no answer, just a stir of comfort deep inside his brain, a strange, nestling comfort such as one may know when one is eight years old and snuggles into bed. "Johnny!" he cried. And he fdlt the stir again... a self-assuring stir like the feel of a dog's muzzle against a hand. Someone was beating at the ship's door, beating with fists and crying out. "All right," said Asher Sutton. "I'm coming. I'll be right along." He reached down and lifted the attache case from beside the seat, tucked  it underneath his arm. He went to the lock and twirled it open and stepped out on the ground. There was only one man. "Hello," said Asher Sutton. "Welcome to Earth, sir," said the man, and the "sir" struck a chord of memory. Sutton's eyes went to the man's forehead and he saw the tattooing of the serial number, the only indication that this was a synthetic human being, an android. Sutton had forgotten about androids. Perhaps a lot of other things as well. Little habit patterns that had sloughed away with the span of twenty years. him, at the naked knee showing through the worn cloth, at the lack of shoes. "Where I've been," said Sutton, sharply, "you couldn't buy a new suit every day." "No, sir," said the android. "And the beard," said Sutton, "is because I had nothing to shave with." "I've seen beards before," the android told him. Sutton stood quietly and stared at the world before him... at the upthrust of towers shining in the morning sun, at the green of park and meadow, at the darker green of trees and the blue and scarlet splashes of flower gardens on sloping terraces. He took a deep breath and felt the air flooding in his lungs, seeking out all the distant cells that had been starved so long. And it was coming back to him, coming back again... the remembrance of life on Earth, of early morning sun and flaming sunsets, of deep blue sky and dew upon the grass, the swift blur of human talk and the lilt of human hiusic. "The car iswaiting, sir," the android said. "I will take you to a human." "I'd rather walk," said Sutton. T HE android shook his head. "The human is waiting and he is most impatient." "Oh, all right," said Sutton. The seat was soft and he sank into it gratefully, cradling the attache case carefully in his lap. He stared out of the window, fascinated by the green of Earth. The green fields of Earth, he said. Or was it the green vales? No matter now. It was a song written long ago, in the time when there had been fields on Earth, instead of parks, when Man had turned the soil for more important things than flower beds. In the day, thousands of years before, when Man had just begun to feel the stir of space within his soul. Long years before Earth had become the capital, and the center of galactic empire. A great starship was taking off at the far end of the field, sliding down the ice-smooth plastic skidway with the red-hot flare of booster jets frothing in its tubes. Its nose slammed into the upward curve of the take-off ramp and it was away, a rumbling streak of silver that shot into the blue. For a moment it flickered a golden red in the morning sunlight, and then was gone, van, ished. to Earth again, sat soaking in the sight of it as a man soaks in the first strong sun of spring after months of winter. Far to the north towered the twin spires of the Justice Bureau, Alien Branch. And to the east the pile of gleaming plastics and glass that was the University of North America. And other buildings that he had forgotten... buildings for which he found he had no name, miles apart, with parks and homesites in between. The homes were masked by trees and shrubbery -- none sat in barren loneliness -- and, through the green of the curving hills, Sutton caught the glints of color that were roofs and walls. The car slid to a stop before the Administration Building and the android opened the door. "This way, sir." Only a few chairs in the lobby were occupied and most of those by humans. Humans or androids, thought Sutton, you can't tell the difference until you see their foreheads. The sign upon the forehead, the brand of manufacture. The telltale' mark that said: "This man is not a human, although he looks like one." These are the ones who will listen to me. These are the ones who will pay attention. These are the ones who will save me against any future enmity that Man may raise against me. For they are worse than the disinherited. They are not the hasbeens; they N are the never-weres. They are not born of woman, but of the laboratory. Their, mother is a bin of chemicals and their father the ingenuity and technology of the creator race. Android: An artificial human. A human made in the laboratory out of Man's own knowledge of chemicals and atomic and molecular structure and the strange reaction that is known as life. Human in all but two respects -- the mark upon the forehead and the ability to reproduce biologically. Artificial humans to help the real humans, the biological humans, to carry the load of galactic empire, to make the thin line of humanity stronger, thicker. But kept in their place. Oh, yes, most definitely kept in their rightful place by psychoconditioning and savagely enforced rules and laws. T HE corridor was empty. Sutton, his bare feet slapping on the floor, followed the android. The door before which they stopped said: (Human) Operations Chief "In there," the android said. Sutton walked in and the man behind the desk looked up. "I'm a human," Sutton told him. "I may not look it, but I am." The man jerked his thumb toward a chair. "Sit down." Sutton sat. "Why didn't you answer our signals?" Davis asked. "My set was broken." "Your ship has no identity." "The rains washed it off," said Sutton, "and I had no paint." "Rain doesn't wash oft paint." "Not Earth rain. Where I was, it does." "Your motors?" asked Davis. "We could pick up nothing from them." "They weren't working." Davis' Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "Weren't working? How did you navigate?" "With energy," said Sutton. "Energy..." Sutton stared at him icily. "Anything else you want to know?". Davis was confused. The answers were all wrong. He fiddled with a pencil. "Just the usual things, I guess." He drew a pad of forms before him. "Name?" "Asher Sutton." "Origin of fli -- Say, wait a minute! Asher Sutton?" "That's right." Davis flung the pencil on the desk, pushed away the pad. "Why didn't you tell me that first?" "I didn't have a chance." Davis was flustered. "If I had known..." "It's the beard," said Sutton. "My father talked about you Ill often. Jim Davis. Maybe you remember him.". Sutton shook his head. "Great friend of your father's. That is... they more or less knew one another." y "How is my father?" asked Sutton. "Great," said Davis enthusiastically. "Getting along in years, but standing up..." "My father and mother," Sutton told him coldly, "died forty years ago. In the Argus pandemic." He heaved himself to his feet, faced Davis squarely. "If you're through, I'd like to go to my hotel. They'll find some room for me." "Certainly, Mr. Sutton, certainly. Which hotel?" "The Orion Arms." Davis reached into a drawer, took out a directory, flipped the pages, ran a shaking finger down a column. "Cherry #-#," he said. "The teleport #s over there." He pointed to a booth set flush into the wall, where a dematerializer could transport matter instantly to any other teleport booth anywhere on Earth. "Thanks," said Sutton. "About your father, Mr. Sutton. ;..." "I know," said Sutton. "I'm glad you tipped me off." He swung around and walked to the teleport. Before he closed the door, he looked back. Davis was on the visaphone, talking rapidly. the Orion Arms. To Sutton, stepping out of the teleport, it looked the same as the day he had walked away. A little shabbier, but it was home, the quiet whisper of hushed activity, the dowdy furnishings, the finger-to-the lip, tiptoe atmosphere, the stiff respectability that he had remembered and dreamed about in the long years of alienness. The life mural along the wall was the same as ever. A little faded now, but the same goatish Pan still chased, after twenty years, the same terror-stricken maiden across the self-same hills and dales. And the same rabbit hopped from behind a bush and watched the chase with all his customary boredom, chewing his everlasting cud of clover. The self-adjusting furniture, bought before the management had considered throwing the hostelry open to the unhuman trade, had been out-of-date twenty years ago. But it still was there. It had been repainted, in soft, genteel pastels, its self-adjustment features still confined to human forms. The spongy floor covering had lost some of its sponginess, and the Cetian cactus must have died at last, for a pot of frankly Terrestial geraniums now occupied its place. The clerk snapped off the visaphone and turned back to the room. "Good morning, Mr, Sutton," he said, in his cultured android voice. Then he added, almost as an afterthought: "We've been wondering when you would show up." "Twenty years," said Sutton drily, "is a long time to wonder." "We've kept your old .suite for you. We knew you would want it. Mary has kept it cleaned and ready for you ever since you left." "That was nice of you, Ferdinand." "You've hardly changed at all. Just the beard. I knew you the second that I turned and saw you." "The beard and clothes," said Sutton. "The clothes are pretty bad." "I don't suppose you have luggage, Mr. Sutton." "No. Could I get something to eat?" "Breakfast, perhaps? We still are serving breakfast. You always liked scrambled eggs for breakfast." "That sounds all right," said Sutton. "Send them up with a change of clothes." He turned slowly 'from the desk and walked to the elevator. He was about to close the door when a voice called: "Just a moment, please." The girl was running across the lobby. Rangy and copper-haired, she slid into the lift, pressed her back against the wall. "Thanks very much," she said. "Thanks so much for waiting." Her skin, Sutton saw, was magnolia-white and her eyes were granite-colored with shadows deep within them. He closed the door softly. "I was glad to wait," he said. Her lips twitched just a little, and he added, "I don't like shoes. They cramp my feet." He pressed the button savagely and the lift sprang upward. The lights ticked off the floors. Sutton stopped the cage. "This is my floor," he said. halfway out, when she spoke to him. "Mister." "Yes, what is it?" "I didn't mean to laugh. I reallytruly didn't." "You had a right to laugh," said Sutton, and closed the door behind him. He stood for a moment, fighting down a sudden tenseness that seized him like a mighty fist. Careful, he told himself, take it easy, boy. You are home at last. This is the place you dreamed of. Just a few doors down and you are finally home. You will reach out and turn the knob and push open the door and it will be there, just as you remembered it. The favorite chair, the life-paintings on the wall, the little fountain with the mermaids from Venus, and the windows where you can sit and fill your eyes with Earth. But you can't get emotional. You can't go soft and scared. For that chap back at the spaceport lied. And hotels don't keep rooms waiting for all of twenty years. There is something wrong. I don't know what, but something. Something terribly wrong. He took a slow step... and then another, fighting down the tension, swallowing the dryness of excitement welling in his throat. One of the paintings, he remembered, was a forest brook, with birds flitting in the trees. And at the most unexpected times one of the birds would sing, usually with the dawn or the going of the sun. And the water babbled with a happy song that held one listening. He knew that he was running and he didn't try to stop. His fingers curled around the door knob and turned it. The room was there... the favorite chair, , the babble of the brook, the splashing of the mermaids... He caught the whiff of danger as he stepped across the threshold and he tried to turn and run, but he was too late. He felt his body crumpling forward to crash toward the floor. "Johnny!" he cried and the cry bubbled in his throat. "Johnny!" Inside his brain a voice whispered back: "It's all right, Ash. We're still joined." Then darkness came. IV and Sutton kepthis eyelids down, kept his breathing slow... Someone in the room was pacing quietly, stopping now before the window to look out, moving over to the mantlepiece to stare at the painting of the forest brook. And in the stillness of the room, Sutton heard the laughing babble of the painted stream against the splashing of the fountain, heard the faint bird notes that came from the painted trees, imagined that even from the distance that he lay he could smell the forest mold and the cool, wet perfume of the moss that grew along the stream. -- The person in the room crossed back again and sat down in a chair. He whistled a tune, almost inaudibly. A funny, little lilting tune that Sutton had not heard before. Someone gave me a going over, Sutton told himself. Knocked me out fast, with gas or powder, then gave me an overhauling. I seem to remember some of it... hazy and far away. Lights that glowed and a probing at my brain. And I might have fought against it, but I knew it was no use. And, besides, they're welcome to anything they found. Yes, they're welcome to anything they pried out of my mind. But they've found all they're going to find and they have gone away. They left someone to watch me and he still, is in the room, waiting for me to wake up, probably. Sutton stirred on the bed and opened his eyes, kept them glazed and only partly focused. The man rose from the chair and Sutton saw that' he was dressed in white. He crossed the room and leaned above the bed. "All right now?" he asked. Sutton raised a hand and passed it, bewildered, across his face. "Yes," I guess I am." "You passed out," the man said. "Something I forgot to eat." T HE man shook his head. "The trip, probably. It must have been a tough one." "Yes," said Sutton. "Tough." Go ahead, he thought. Go ahead and ask some more. Those are your instructions. Catch me while I'm groggy, pump me like a well. Go ahead and ask the questions and earn your lousy money. But he was wrong. The man straightened up. "I think you'll be all right," he said. "If you aren't, call me. My card is oil the mantle." "Thanks, doctor," said Sutton. He. watched him walk across the room, waited until he heard the door click, then sat up in bed. His clothing lay in a pile in the center of the floor. His case? Yes, there it was, lying on a chair. Ransacked, no doubt, probably photostated. Spy rays, too, more than likely. All over the room. Ears listening and eyes watching. But who? he asked himself. No one knew he was returning. No one could have known. Not even Adams. There was no way to know. There had been no way that he could let them know. Funny. Funny the way Davis at the spaceport had recognized his name and told a lie to cover up. Funny the way Ferdinand pretended his suite had been kept for him for all these twenty years. Funny, too, how Ferdinand had turned around and spoken, as if twenty years were nothing. Organized, said Sutton. Clicking like a relay system. Set and waiting. But why should anyone be waiting? No one knew when he'd be coming back. Or if he would come at all. And even if someone did know, why go to all the trouble? For they could not know, he thought... they could not know the thing I have, they could not even guess. Even if they did know I was coming back, incredible as it might be that they should know, even that times than that they should know the real reason for my coming. And knowing, ,he said, they would not believe. His eyes found the attache case lying on the chair, and Stared at it. And knowing, he said again, they would not believe. When they look the ship over, of course,' they will do some wondering. Then there might be some excuse for the thing that happened. But they didn't have time to look at the ship. They didn't wait a minute. They were laying for me and they gave me the works from the second that I landed. Davis shoved me into a teleport and grabbed his phone like mad. u And Ferdinand knew that I was on 'the way, he knew .he'd see me when he turned around. And the girl -- the girl with the granite eyes? Sutton got up and stretched. A bath and shave, first of all, he told himself. And then some clothes and breakfast. A visor call or two. Don't act as if you've got the wind up, he warned himself. Act naturally. Talk to yourself. Pinch out a blackhead. Scratch your back against a door casing. Act as if you think you are alone. But be careful. There is someone watching. V when the android came. "My name is Herkimer," the android told him, "and I belong to Mr. Geoffrey Benton." "Mr. Benton sent you here?" "Yes. He sends a challenge." "A challenge?" "Yes. You know, a duel." "But I am unarmed." "You cannot be unarmed," said Herkimer. "I never fought a duel in all my life," said Sutton. "I don't intend to now." "You are vulnerable." "What do you mean, vulnerable? If I go unarmed..." "But you cannot go unarmed. The code was changed just a year or two ago. No man younger than a hundred years can go unarmed." "But if one does?" "Why, then," said Herkimer, "anyone who wants to can pot him like a rabbit." "You are sure of this?" Herkimer dug into his pocket, brought out a tiny book. He wet his finger and fumbled at the pages. "It's right here." "Never mind," said Sutton. "I will take your word." "You accept the challenge, then?" Sutton grimaced. "I suppose I have to. Mr. Benton will wait, I presume, until I buy a gun." "No need of that," Herkimer told him brightly. "I brought one along. Mr. Benton always does that. Just a courtesy, you know. In case someone hasn't got one." He reached into his pocket and held out the weapon. Sutton took it and laid it on the table. "Awkiward looking thing," he said. Herkimer stiffened. "It's traditional. The finest weapon made. Shoots a .# caliber slug. Handloaded ammunition. Sights are tested in for fifty feet." "You pull this?" asked Sutton, pointing. Herkimer nodded. "It is called a trigger. And you don't pull it. You squeeze it." "Just why does Mr. Benton challenge me?" asked Sutton. "I don't even know the man." "You are famous," said Herkimer. "Not that I have heard of." "You are an investigator," Herkimer pointed out. "You have just come bade from a long and perilous mission. You're carrying a mysterious attache case. And there are reporters waiting in the lobby to interview you." Sutton nodded. "I see. When Benton kills someone, he likes him to be famous." ' "Of course. More publicity." "But I don't know your Mr. Benton. How will I know who I'm supposed to shoot at?"' "I'll show you,' I said Herkimer, "on the televisor." He stepped to the desk, dialed a number and stepped back. "That's him." In the screen a man was sitting before a chess table. The pieces were in mid-game. Across the board stood a beautifully machined robotic. The man reached out a hand, thoughtfully played his knight. The robotic clicked and chuckled. It moved a pawn. Benton's shoulders hunched forward and he bent above the board. One hand came around and scratched the back of his neck. "Oscar's got him worried," said Herkimer. "He always has him worried. Mr. Benton hasn't won a single game in the last ten years." "Why does he keep on playing?" "Stubborn," said Herkimer. "But Oscar's stubborn, too." He made a motion with his hand., "Machines can be so much more stubborn than humans. It's the way they're built." "But Benton must have known, when he had Oscar fabricated, that Oscar would beat him," Sutton pointed out. "A human simply can't beat a robotic expert." "Mr. Benton knew that," said Herkimer, "but he didn't believe it. He wanted to prove otherwise." , "Egomaniac," said Sutton. Herkimer stared at him calmly. "I believe that you are right, sir. I've sometimes thought the same myself." Benton, who was still hunched above the board, the knuckles of one hand thrust hard against his mouth. The veined face was scrubbed and pink and chubby and the brooding eyes, thoughtful as they were, still held a fat twinkle of culture and good fellowship. "You'll know him now?" asked Herkimer. Sutton nodded. "Yes, I think I can pick him out. He doesn't look too dangerous." "He's killed sixteen men," Herkimer said stiffly. "He plans to lay away his guns when he makes it twenty-five." He looked straight at Sutton and said: "You're the seventeenth." "I'll try to make it easy for him." "How would you wish it, sir?" asked Herkimer. "Formal or informal?" "Let's make it catch-as-catch-can." Herkimer was disapproving. "There are certain conventions..." "You can tell Mr. Benton," said Sutton, "that I don't plan to ambush him." IB Herkimer picked up his cap, put it on his head. "The best of luck, sir." "Why, thank you, Herkimer," said Sutton. T HE door closed and Sutton was alone. He turned back to the screen. Benton played to double up his rooks. Oscar chuckled at him, slid a bishop three squares along the board and put Benton's king in check. Sutton snapped the visor off. He scraped a hand across his nowshaved chin. Coincidence or plan? One of the mermaids had climbed to the edge of the fountain and balanced her three-inch self precariously. She whistled at Sutton. He turned at the sound and she dived into the pool, swam in circles, mocking him with obscene gestures. Sutton leaned forward, reached into the visor rack, brought out the pages swiftly. Culinary Culture Customs That would be it. Customs. number and put back the book. He reset the dial and snapped the tumbler for direct communication. A robot's streamlined, metallic face filled the plate. "At your service, sir," it said. "I have been challenged to a duel," said Sutton. The robot waited for the question. "I don't want to fight a duel," said Sutton. "Is there any way, legally, for me to back out? I'd like to do it gracefully, too, but I won't insist on that." "There is no way," the robot said. "No way at all?" "You are under one hundred?" the robot asked. "Yes." "You are sound of mind and body?" "I think so." "You are or you aren't. Make up your mind." "I am," said Sutton. "You do not belong to any bona "I presume I could classify myself as a Christian," said Sutton. "Isn't there a Commandment against The robot shook his head. "It doesn't count." "It's clear and specific," Sutton argued. "It says one should not kill." "It does," the robot told him. "But it has been discredited. You humans never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it." "I guess I'm sunk then," said Sutton. "According to the revision of the year .#," said the robot, "arrived at by convention, any human under the age of one hundred, of male sex, sound in mind and body, unhampered by religious bonds or belief, If which are subject to a court of inquiry, must fight a duel whenever challenged." "I see." "The history of dueling," said the robot, "is very interesting." "It's barbaric," said Sutton. "Perhaps so. But you humans are still barbaric in many .other ways as well." "You're impertinent." "I'm sick and tired," the robot said. "Sick and tired of the smugness of you humans. You say you've outlawed war and you haven't, really. You've just fixed it so no one dares to fight you. You say you have abolished crime and you bave, excepOfor human crime. And a lot of the crime you have abolished isn't crime at' all, except by human standards."  "You're taking a ' long chance, friend," warned Sutton, "talking the way you are." "You can pull the plug on me," the robot told him, "any time you want to. Life isn't worth it, the kind of job I have." face and hurried on. "Try to see it this way, sir. Through all his history, Man has been a killer. He was smart and brutal, even from the first. He was a puny thing, but he found how to use a club and rocks, and when the rocks weren't sharp enough, he chipped them so they were. There were things, at first, he should not by rights have killed. They should have killed him. But he was smart and he had the dub and flints and he killed the mammoth and the sabertooth and other things he could not have faced bare-handed. So he won the Earth from the animals. He wiped them out, except the ones he allowed to live for the service that they gave him. And even as he fought with the animals, he fought with others of his kind. After the animals were gone, he kept on fighting... man against man, nation against nation." "But that is past," said Sutton. "There hasn't been a war for more than a thousand years. Humans have no need of fighting now." "That is just the point," the robot insisted. "There is no more need ofOh, once in a while, perhaps, on some far-off planet, where a human must kill to protect hisdife or to uphold human dignity and power. But, by and large, there is no need of "And yet you kill. You must kill. The old brutality is in you. You are sign of power. It has become a habit with you... a thing you've carried from the caves. There's nothing left to kill but one another, so you kill one another and you call it dueling. You know it's wrong, and you're hypocritical about it. You've set up a fine system of semantics to make it sound respectable and brave and noble. You call it traditional and chivalric... and even if you don't call it that in so many words, that is what you think. You cloak it with the trappings of your vicious past, you dress it up with words, and the words are only tinsel." "Look," said Sutton, "I don't want to fight this duel. I don't think it's..." There was vindictive glee in the robot's voice. "But you've got to fight it. There's no way to back out. Maybe you would like some pointers. I have all sorts of tricks... "I thought you didn't approve of dueling." ' "I don't," the robot said. "But it's my job. I'm stuck with it. I try to do it well. I can tell you the personal history of every man who ever fought a duel. I can talk for hours on the advantages of rapiers over pistols. Or if you'd rather I argued for pistols, I can do that, too. I can tell you about the old American West gun slicks and the Chicago gangsters and the handkerchief and dagger duels and..." "No, thanks," said Sutton. "You aren't interested?" "I haven't got the time." "But, sir," the robot pleaded, "I don't get a chance too often. I don't get many calls. Just an hour or so..." "No," said Sutton firmly. "All right, then. Maybe you'd tell me who has challenged you." "Benton. Geoffrey Benton." The robot whistled. "Is he that good?" asked Sutton. "All of it," the robot said. Sutton shut the visor off. He sat quietly in his chair, staring at the gun. Slowly he reached out a hand and picked it up. The butt fitted snugly in his hand. His finger curled around the trigger. He lifted it and sighted at the door knob. It was easy to handle. Almost like it was a part of him. There was a feel of power within it... of power and mastery. As if he suddenly were stronger and greater . , . and moredangerous. He sighed and laid it down. The robot had been right. He reached out to the visor, pushed the signal for the lobby desk. Ferdinand's face came in. "Anyone waiting down there for me, Ferdinand?" "Not a soul," said Ferdinand. "Anyone asked for me?" "No one, Mr. Sutton." "No reporters? No photographers?" "No, Mr. Sutton. Were you expecting them?" Sutton didn't answer. He cut off, feeling very silly. VI M AN wa spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim creatures of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light years. For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity. Not by strength did he hold his starry outposts, but by something else... by depth of human character, by his colossal conceit, by his ferocious conviction that Man was the greatest living thing the galaxy had spawned. All this in spite of many evidences that he was not... evidence that he cast aside, scornful of any greatness that was not ruthless and aggressive. Too thin, Christopher Adams told himself. Too thin and stretched too far. One man backed by a dozen androids and a hundred robots could hold a solar system. Could hold it until there were more men or until something cracked. In time there'd be more men, if the birth rate increased. But it would be many centuries before the line could grow much thicker, for Man only held the keypoints... one planet in an entire system, and not in every system. Man had leapfrogged since there weren't men enough, had set up strategic spheres of influence, had bypassed all but the richest, most influential systems. were any humans left by then. If the life on those other planets let the humans live, if there never came a day when they would be wiping out mankind. The price would be high, said Adams, talking to himself, but it could be done. Just a few hours' job. Humans in the morning, no humans left by night. What if a thousand others died for every human death... or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand? Under certain circumstances, such a price might be cheap. There were islands of resistance even now where one walked carefully... or even walked around. Like #I Cygni, for example. It' took judgment... and some tolerance... and a great measure of latent brutality, but, most of all, conceit, the absolute, unshakable conviction that Man was sacrosanct, that he could not be touched, that he could die only individually. But five had died, three humans and two androids, beside a river that few short miles from Andrelon, the planetary capital. They had died of violence, of that there was no question. Adams' eyes sought out the paragraph of Thorne's latest report: Force had been applied from the outside. We found a hole burned through the atomic shielding of the engine. The force must have been controlled or it would have resulted in absolute destruction. The automatics got in their work and headed off the blast, but the machine went out of control and smashed into the tree. The area was saturated with intensive radiation. Good man, Thorne, thought Adams. He won't let a single thing be missed. He had those robots in there before the place was safe for humans. But there wasn't much to find... not much that gave an answer. Just a batch of question mirks. Five had died, and when that was said, that was the end of fact. For they were burned and battered and there were no features left, no fin. gerprints or eyeprints to match against the records. A few feet away from the strewn blackness of the bodies, the machine had smashed into a tree. A machine that, like the men, was without a record. A machine without a counterpart in the known galaxy and, so far at least, a machine without a purpose. Thorne would give it the works. He would set it up in solidographs, down to the last shattered piece of glass and plastic. He would have it analyzed and diagramed and the robots would put it in scanners that would peel it and record it molecule by molecule. And they might find something. Just possibly they might. Adams shoved the report to one side and leaned back in his chair. Idly, he spelled out his name lettered across the office door, reading backward slowly and with exaggerated care. As if he'd never seen the name before. As if he did not know it. Puzzling it out. And then the line beneath it: Space Sector # And the 'line beneath that: Department of Galactic Investigation (Justice) slanted through a window and fell across his head, highlighting the clipped silver mustache, the whitening temple hair. Five men had died... He wished that he could get it out of his mind. There was other work. This Sutton thing, for instance. The reports on that would be coming in within an hour or so. But there was a photograph... a photograph from Thorne, that he could not forget. A smashed machine and broken bodies and a great smoking gash . sliced across the turf. The silver river flowed in a silence that one knew was there even in the photograph, and far in the distance the spidery web of Andrelon rose against a pinkish sky. Adams smiled softly to himself. a lovely world. He never had been there and he never would be there... for there were too many planets for one man to even dream of seeing all. Someday, perhaps, when the teleports would transmit matter instantly across light years instead of puny miles... perhaps then a man might just whisk across to any planet that he wished, for a day or hour, or just to say he'd been there. But Adams didn't neid to be there. He had eye and ears there, as he had on every occupied planet within the entire galactic sector. Thorne was there, and Thorne was an able man. He wouldn't rest until he'd wrung the last ounce of information from the broken wreck and bodies. I wish I could forget it, Adams told himself. It's important, yes, but not all-important. A buzzer hummed at Adams and he flipped up a tumbler on his desk. "What is it?" A female android voice answered: "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon." "Thank you, Alice," Adams said. He clicked open a drawer and took out the mentophone cap, placed it on his head, adjusted it with steady fingers. Thoughts flickered through his brain, disjointed, random thought, enormously amplified by the Electro-Neuron Boosting Stat'ons. Ghost thoughts drifting through the universe -- residual flotsam from the minds of men and creatures back to the unguessable past. Adams flinched. I'll never get used to it, he told himself. I will always duck, like the kid who anticipates a cuffing. The ghost thoughts peeped and cluttered at him. Adams closed his eyes and settled back. "Hello, Thorne," he thought. Thorne's thought came in, thinned and tenuous over the distance of more than fifty light years. "That you, Adams?" "Yes, it's me. What's up?" A high, sing-song thought came in and skipped along his brain: Spill the rattle... pinch the fish... oxygen is high-priced. Adams forced the unwanted thought out of his brain, built up his concentration. "Start over again, Thorne. A ghost thought came along and blotted you out." Thorne's thought was louder now, more distinct. "I wanted to ask you about a name. Seems to me I heard it once before, but I can't be sure." "What name?" Thorne was spacing his thoughts now, placing them slowly and with emphasis to cut through the static. "The name is Asher Sutton." chair. His mouth flapped open. "What?" he roared. " Walk west," said a voice in his brain. "Walk west and then straight up." Thorne's thought came in... "it was the name that was on the fly leaf..." "Start over," Adams concentrated. "Start over and take it slow. I couldn't hear a thing you thought." Thorne's thoughts came slowly, intense mental power behind each word: 'Mt was like this. You remember that wreck we had out here? Five men killed... "Yes, yes. Of course I remember it." "Well, we found a book, or what once had been a book, on oneof the corpses. The book was burned, scorched through and through by radiation. The robots did what they could with it, but that wasn't much. A word here and there. Nothing you could make any sense out of... The thought static purred and fumbled. Half thoughts cut through. Rambling thought-snatches that had no human sense or meaning -- that could have had no human sense or meaning even if they had been heard in their entirety. "Start over," Adams thought desperately. "Start over." "You know about this wreck. Five men... "Yes, yes. I got that much. Up to the part about the book. Where does Sutton come in?" "That was about all the robotics could figure out," Thorne told him. "Just three words. 'By Asher Sutton.' Like he might have been the author. Like the book might have been written by him. It was on one of the first pages. The title page, maybe. Such and such a book by Asher Sutton." There was silence. Even the ghost voices were still for a moment. Then a piping, lisping thought came in... a baby thought, immature and puling. And the thought was without context, untranslatable, almost meaningless... but hideous and nerve-wrenching in its alien imbecility. Adams felt the sudden chill of fear slice into his marrow. He grasped the chair arms with both hi's hands and hung on tight while the degraded mindlessness ' babbled in his brain. gone. Fifty light years of space whistled in the cold. Adams relaxed, felt the perspiration running from his armpits, trickling down his ribs. "You there, Thorne?" he asked. "Yes. I caught some of that one, too." "Pretty bad, wasn't it?" 'Tve never heard much worse," Thorne told him. There was a moment's silence. Then Thorne's thoughts took up again. "Maybe I'm just wasting time. But it seemed to me I remembered that name." "You have," Adams thought back. "Sutton went to #I Cygni." "Oh, he's the one!" "He got back this morning." "Couldn't have been him, then. Someone else by the same name." "Must have been," thought Adams. "Nothing else to report," Thorne told him. "The name just bothered me." "Keep at it," Adams thought. "Let me know anything that turns up." "I will," Thorne promised. "Good-bye." "Thanks for calling." phone cap. He opened his eyes and the sight of the room, commonplace and Earthly, with the sun streaming through the window, was almost a physical shock. He sat limp in his chair, thinking, remembering. The man had come at twilight, stepping out of the shadows onto the patio, and he had sat down in the darkness and talked like any other man. Except the things he said. When he returns, Sutton must he killed. I am your successor.  Crazy talk. Unbelievable. Impossible. And, still, maybe I should have listened. Maybe I should have heard him out instead of flying off the handle. Except thaj you don't kill a man who comes back after twenty years. Especially a man like Sutton. Sutton is a good man. One of the best the Bureau has. Slick as a whistle, well grounded in alien psychology, an authority on galactic politics. No other man could have done the Cygnian job as well. If he did it. I don't know that, of course. But he'll be in tomorrow and he'll tell me all about it. A man is entitled to a day's rest after twenty years. Slowly, Adams reached out an almost reluctant hand and snapped up a tumbler. Alice answered. "Send me in the Asher Sutton file." "Yes, Mr. Adams." Adams settled back in his chair. The warmth of the sun felt good across his shoulders. The ticking of the clock was comforting after the ghost voices whispering out in space. Thoughts that one could not pin. down, that one could not trace back and say: "This one started here and then."  I Although we're trying, Adams thought. He chuckled to himself at the weirdness of the project. Thousands of listeners listening in on the random thoughts of random time and space, listening in for clues, for hints, for leads. Seeking a driblet of sense from the stream of gibberish... hunting the word or sentence or disassociated thought that might be translated into a new philosophy or a new technique or a new science... or a new something that the human race had never even dreamed of. A new concept, said Adams, talking to himself. An entirely new concept. Adams scowled to himself. A new concept might be dangerous... This was not the time for anything that did not fit into human society, that did not match the pattern of human thought and action. There must be no confusion. There must be nothing but the sheer, bulldog determination to hang on, to sink in one's teeth and stay. To maintain the status quo. Later, someday, many centuries from now, there would be a time and place and room for a new concept. When Man's grip was firmer, when the line was not too thin, when a mistake or two would not spell disaster. Man, at the moment, controlled every factor. He held the edge at every point... a slight edge, admitted, but certainly an edge. And it must stay that way. There must be nothing that would tip the scale in the wrong direction. Not a word or thought, not an action or a whisper. The desk buzzer lighted up and snarled at him. "Yes?" said Adams. Alice's words tumbled over one another. "The file, sir. The Sutton file." "What about the Sutton file? Bring it in here." "It's gone, sir." "Someone is using it." J "No, sir, not that. It has been stolen." Adams jerked straight upright. "Stolen!" "That is right, sir. Twenty years ago." "But twenty years... "We checked the security points," said Alice. "It was stolen three days after Mr. Sutton set out for #l Cygni." . T HE lawyer told Sutton his name was Wellington. He had painted a thin coat of plastic lacquer over his forehead to hide the tattoo, but the mark of the manufacture showed through, provided one looked closely. He laid his hat very carefully on a table, sat down meticulously in a chair and placed his briefcase across his knee. He handed Sutton a rolledup paper. "Your newspaper,' sir," he said. "It was outside the door. I thought that you might want it." "Thanks," said Sutton. Wellington cleared his throat. "You are Asher Sutton?" he asked. Sutton nodded. "I represent a certain robot who commonly went by the name of Buster. You may remember him." Sutton leaned quickly forward. "Remember him? Why, he was a second father to me. Raised me after both my parents died. He has been with the Sutton family for almost four thousand years." Wellington cleared his throat again. "Quite so." Sutton leaned back in his chair, crushing the newspaper in his grip. "Don't tell me..." Wellington waved a sober hand. "No, he's in no trouble. Not yet, that is. Not unless you choose to make it for him." "What has he done?" asked Sutton. "He has run away." "Good Lord ! Run away ? Where to?" Wellington squirmed uneasily in  the chair. "To one of the Tower stars, I believe." "But," protested Sutton, "that's way out. Out almost to the edge of the galaxy." Wellington nodded. "He bought himself a new body and a ship and stocked it up... "With what? asked Sutton. "Buster had no money." "Oh, yes, he had. Money he had saved over -- what was it you said ? -- four thousand years or so. Tips from guests, Christmas presents, one thing and another. It would all count up... in four thouand years. Placed at interest, you know." "But why?" asked Sutton. "What does he intend to do?" "He took out a homestead on a planet. He didn't sneak away. He filed his claim, so you can trace him if you wish. He used the family name, sir. That worried him a little. He hoped you wouldn't mind." Sutton shook his head. "Not at all. He has a right to that name, as good a right as I have myself." "You don't mind, then?" asked Wellington. "About the whole thing, I mean ? After all, he was your property."  "No," said Sutton, "I don't mind. But I was looking forward to seeing him again. I called the old home place, but there was no answer. I thought he might be out." Wellington reached into the inside pocket of his coat. "He left you a letter," he said, holding it out. Sutton took it. It had his name written across its face. He turned it over, but there was nothing more. "He also," said Wellington, "left an old trunk in my custody. Said it contained some old family papers that you might find of interest." Sutton sat quietly staring across the room, seeing nothing. There had' been an apple tree at the gate, and each year young Ash Sutton had eaten the apples when they were green, and Buster had nursed him each time gently through the crisis and then hadwhaled him good and proper to teach him respect for his human metabolism. And when the kid down the road had licked him on the way home from school, it had been Buster who had taken him out in the backyard and taught him how' to fight with head as well as hands. Sutton clenched his fists unconsciously, remembering the surge of satisfaction, the red rawness of his knuckles. The kid down the road, he recalled, had nursed a black eye for a week and become his fastest friend. "About the trunk, sir?" asked Wellington. "You will want it delivered?" "Yes," said Sutton, "if you please." "It will be here tomorrow morning." The android picked up his hat and rose. "I want to thank you, sir, for my client. He assured me you would be reasonable." "Not reasonable," said Sutton. "Just fair. He took care of us for many years. He has earned his freedom." "Good day, sir," said Wellington. "Good day," said Sutton. "And thank you very much." One of the mermaids whistled a f Sutton. Sutton told her. "One of these days, my beauty, you'll do that once too often." She thumbed her nose at him and dived into the fountain. The door clicked shut as Wellington left. Slowly, Sutton tore the letter open, spread out the single page: Dear Ash --  went to see Mi'. Adams today and he told me that he was afraid that you would not come back, but I told him that I knew you would. So I'm not doing this because I think you won't come back and that you will never know... because I know you will. Since you left me and struck out on your own, I have felt old and useless. In a galaxy where there were many things to do, I was doing nothing. Y on told me you fust wanted me to live on at the old place and take it easy,, and I knew you did that because you were kind and would not sell me even if you had no use for me. So I'm doing something I have always wanted to do. I am filing on a planet. It sounds like a pretty good planet and I should be able to do something with it. I shall fix it up and build a home and maybe someday you will come and visit me. P. S. If you ever want me, you can find out where I am at the homestead office. put it in his pocket. He sat idly in the chair, listening to the purling of the stream that gushed through the painting hung above the fireplace. A bird sang and a fish jumped in a quiet pool around the bend, just outside the frame. Tomorrow, he thought, I will see Adams. Maybe I can find out if he's behind what happened. Although why should he be? I'm working for him. I'm carrying out his orders. He shook his head. No, it couldn't be Adams. But it must be someone. Someone who had been laying for him, who even now was watching. He shrugged mental shoulders, picked up the newspaper and opened it. It was the Galactic Press and in twenty years its format had not changed. Conservative columns of gray type ran down the page, broken only by laconic headings. Earth news started in the upper left-hand corner of the front page, followed by Martian news, by Venusian news, by the column from the asteroids, the column and a half from the Jovian moons... then the outer planets. News from the rest of the galaxy, he knew, could be found on the inside pages. A paragraph or two to each story. Like the old community personal columns in the country papers of many centuries before. Still, thought Sutton, smoothing out the paper, it was the only way it could be handled. There was so much news... news from many worlds, from many sectors... human news, android and robot news, alien news. The items had to be boiled down, condensed, compressed, making one word do the job of a hundred. There were other papers, of course, serving isolated sections, and these would give the local news in more detail. But on Earth there was need of galactic-wide news coverage... for Earth was the capital of the galaxy, a planet that was nothing but a capital, a planet that grew no food, allowed no industries, that made its business nothing but government. A planet whose every inch was landscaped and tended like a lawn or park or garden. Sutton ran his eye down the 'Earth column. An earthquake in eastern Asia. A new underwater development for the housing of alien employes and representatives from watery worlds. Delivery of three new star ships to the Sector # run. And then: Asher Sutton, special agent of the department of galactic investigation, returned today from #I Cygni, to which he was assigned twenty years ago. Hope of his return had been abandoned. Immediately upon his landing, a guard  was thrown around his ship and he  was in seclusion at the Orion Arms. All attempts to reach him for a statement failed. Shortly after his arrival, he was called out by Geoffrey Benton. Mr. Sutton chose a pistol and informality. Sutton read the item again. All attempts to reach him... Herkimer had said there were reporters and photographers in the lobby, and ten minutes later Ferdinand had sworn there weren't. He had had no calls. There had been no attempt to reach him. Or had there? Attempts that had been neatly, stopped. Stopped by the same person who hadlain in wait for him, the same power that had been inside the room when he stepped across the threshold. He dropped the paper to the floor, sat thinking. He had been drugged and searched, an attempt made to probe his mind. His attache case had been ransacked. He had been challenged by one of Earth's foremost duelists. The old family robot had run away... or been persuaded to run away. Attempts by the press to reach him had been stopped cold. The visor purred at him. A call. The first since he had arrived. and flipped up the switch. A woman's face came in. Granite eyes and skin magnolia white, hair a copper glory. "My name is Eva Armour," she said. "I am the one who asked you to hold the elevator." "I recognized you," said Sutton. "I called to make amends." "There is no need..." "But there is, Mr. Sutton. You thought I was laughing at you and I really wasn't." "I looked funny," Sutton told her. "It was your privilege to laugh." "Will you take me out to dinner?" she asked. "Certainly," gasped Sutton. "I would be delighted to." "And someplace afterward," she suggested. "We'll make an evening of it." "Gladly." "I'll meet you in the lobby at seven," she said. "And I won't be late." The visor faded and Sutton sat stiffly in the chair. We'll make an evening of it, he said, talking to himself, and you'll be lucky if you're alive tomorrow. men who had come into his office, trying to make out what they might be thinking. But their faces gave no indication. Clark, the space construction engineer, clutched a field book in his hand and his face was set and stern. There was no foolishness about Clark... ever. Anderson, anatomist, big and rough, was lighting his pipe and, for the moment, that seemed to him the most important thing in all the worlds. Blackburn, the psychologist, frowned at the glowing tip of his cigarette, and Shulcross, the language expert, sprawled sloppily in his chair like a bored youngster. They found something, " Adams told himself. They found plenty and some of it has them tangled up. "Clark," said Adams, "suppose you start us out." "We looked the ship over," Clark told him, "and we found it couldn't "But it did," said Adams. "Sutton brought it home." Clark shrugged, "He might asvell have used a log. Or a hunk of rock. Either one would have served the purpose. Either one would fly just as well, or better, than that heap of junk." "Junk?" "The engines were washed out," said Clark. "The safety automatics were the only things that kept them from atomizing. The ports were cracked, some of them were broken. One of the tubes was busted off and lost. The whole ship was twisted out of line." "That sounds like a wreck," Adams objected. "It had struck something." Clark declared. "Struck it hard and fast. Seams were opened, the structural plates were bent, the whole thing was twisted out of kilter. Even if you could start the engines, the ship would never handle. Even with the tubes okay you couldn't set a course. Give it any drive and it would simply corkscrew." Anderson cleared his throat. "What would hare happened to Sutton if he'd been in it when it ' it was struck?" "He would have died," said Clark. "You are positive of that?" "No question. Even a miracle wouldn't have saved him. We thought of that, so we worked it out. We rigged up a diagram and we used the most conservative force factors to show theoretic effects... Adams interrupted. "But he must have been in the ship." Clark shook his head stubbornly. "If he was, he died. Our diagram shows he didn't have a chance. If one force didn't kill him, a dozen others would." "Sutton came back," Adams said. T HE two stared at one another, half angrily. Anderson broke the silence. "Had he tried to fix it up?" Clark shook his head. "Not a mark to show he did. There would have been no use trying. Sutton didn't know a thing about mechanics. Not a single thing. I checked on that. He had no training, no natural inclination. And it takes a man with savvy to repair an atomic engine. Just to fix it, not rebuild it. And this crash would have called for complete rebuilding." Shulcross spoke for the first time, softly, quietly, not moving from his awkward slouch. "Maybe we're starting in the middle. If we started at the beginning, laid the groundwork first, we might get a better idea of what really happened." They looked at him, all of them, wondering what he meant. Shulcross saw it was up to him to go ahead. He spoke to Adams: "Do you have any idea of what sort of place this Cygnian world might be where Sutton went?" Adams smiled wearily. "We've never been able to get close enough to know. It's the seventh planet of #I Cygni. It might have been any one of the system's sixteen planets, but mathematically it was figured out that the seventh planet had the best chance of sustaining life."He paused and looked around the circle of faces and saw that they were waiting for him to go on. "Sixty-one," he said, "is a near neighbor of ours. It was one of the first suns that Man headed for when he left the solar system. Ever since it has been a thorn in our sides." Anderson grinned. "Because we couldn't crack it." Adams nodded. "That's right. A secret system in a galaxy that held few secrets from Man anytime he wanted to go out and take the trouble to solve them. We've run into all sorts of weird things, of course. Planetary conditions that, to this day, we haven't licked. Weird, dangerous life. Economic systems and psychological concepts that had us floored and still give us a headache every time we think of them. But we were always able, at the very least, to see the thing that gave us trouble, to know the thing that licked us. With Cygni it was different. We couldn't even get there. "The planets are either cloudcovered or screened, for we've never seen the surface of a single one of them. And when you get within a start sliding." He turned to Clark. "That's the right word, isn't it?" "There's no word for it," Clark "told him, "but sliding comes as close as any. You aren't stopped and you aren't slowed, but you are deflected. As if the ship had hit ice, although it feels slicker than ice. Whatever, it is, it doesn't register. There's no sign of it, nothing that you can see, nothing that makes even the faintest flicker on the instruments, but you hit it and you slide off course. You  correct and you slide off course again. , In the early days, it drove men batty trying to reach the system and never getting a mile nearer than a certain imaginary line." "As if," said Adams, "someone had taken his finger and drawn a deadline around the system." "Something like that," said Clark. "But Sutton ' got through," said Anderson. "I don't like it," Clark declared. "I don't like a thing about it. Someone got a brainstorm. Our ships are too big, they said. If we use smaller ships, we might squeeze through. As if the thing that kept us off was a mesh holding back the big jobs." "Sutton got through," said Adams stubbornly. "They launched him in a lifeboat and he got through where the big ships couldn't." stubbornly. "It doesn't make sense. Smallness and bigness wouldn't have a thing to do with it. There's another factor somewhere, a factor we've never even thought of. Sutton got through, all right, and he crashed and if he was in the ship when it crashed, he died. But he didn't get through only because his ship was small. It was for some other reason." The men sat tense, thinking, waiting. "Why Sutton?" Anderson asked, finally. Adams answered quietly. "The ship was small. We could only send one man. We picked the man we thought could do the best job if he did get through." "And Sutton was the best man?" "He was," said Adams. Anderson said amiably: "Well, apparently he was. He got through." "Or was let through," said Blackburn. "Not necessarily," said Anderson. "It follows," Blackburn contended. "Why did we want to get into the Cygnian system? To find out if it was dangerous. That was the idea, wasn't it?" "That was the idea," Adams agreed. "Anything unknown is potentially dangerous. You can't write it off until you are sure. Those were Sutton's instructions: Find out if #I is dangerous." "And, by the same token, they'd want to find out about us," Blackburn said. "We'd been prying and poking at them for several thousand years. They might have wanted to find out about us as badly as we did about them." Anderson nodded. "I see what you mean. They'd chance one man, if they could haul him in, but they wouldn't let a full-armed ship and a fighting crew get in shooting distance." "Exactly," said Blackburn. Adams dismissed the line of talk abruptly, said to Clark: "You spoke of dents. Were they made recently?" "Twenty years ago looks right to me. There was a lot of rust. Some of the wiring was getting pretty soft." "Let us suppose, then," said Anderson, "that Sutton, by some miracle, had the knowledge to fix the ship. Even so, he would have needed materials." ' "Plenty of them," said Clark. "The Cygnians could have supplied them," Shulcross suggested. ' "If there are any Cygnians," said Anderson. "I don't believe they could," Blackburn declared. "A race that hides behind a screen would not be mechanical. If they knew mechanics, they would go .out into space instead of shielding themselves from space. I'll make a guess the Cygnians are non-mechanical." "But the screen," Anderson prompted. "It wouldn't have to be mechanical," Blackburn said flatly. "Some energy force or other we don't know about." Clark smacked his open palm on his knee. "What's the use of all this speculation? Sutton didn't repair that ship. He brought it back, somehow, without repair. He didn't even try to fix it. There are layers of rust on everything and there's not a wrench mark on it." Shulcross leaned forward. "One thing I don't get: Clark says some I of the ports were broken. That means Sutton navigated eleven light years without air to breathe." "He used a suit," said Blackburn. Clark said quietly: "There weren't any suits." He looked around the room, almost as if he feared some one outside the little circle might be listening. "And that isn't all. There wasn't any food and there wasn't any water." Anderson tapped out his pipe against the palm of his hand and the hollow sound of tapping echoed in the room. Carefully, deliberately, almost as if he forced himself to concentrate upon it, he dropped the ash from his hand into a tray. "I might have the answer to that one," he said. "At least a clue. There is still a lot of work to do before we have the answer. And, then, we  can't be sure." He was aware of the eyes upon him. "I hesitate to say the thing I have in mind." The clock on the wall ticked the seconds off. From far outside the open window, a locust hummed in the quiet of afternoon. "I don't think," said Anderson, "that the man is human." The clock ticked on. The locust shrilled to tense silence. Adams finally spoke. "But the fingerprints checked. The eyeprints, too." "Oh, it's Sutton, all right," Anderson admitted. "There is no doubt of that. Sutton on the outside. Sutton in the flesh. The same body, or at least part of the same body, that left Earth twenty years ago." "What are you getting at?" asked Clark. "If he's the same, he's human." "You take an old spaceship," said Anderson, "and you juice it up. Add a gadget here and another there, eliminate one thing, modify another. What have you got?" "A rebuilt job," said Clark. "That's just the phrase I wanted," Anderson told them. "Someone or something has done the same to Sutton. He's a rebuilt job. And the best human job I have ever seen. He's got two hearts and his nervous system's haywire... well, not haywire exactly, but different. Certainly  not human. And he's got an extra circulatory system. Not a circulatory system, either, but that is what it looks like. Only it's not connected with the heart. Right now. I'd say, it's not being used. Like a spare system. One system starts running down and you can switch to the spare one while you tinker with the first." rubbed his hands together almost as if he were washing them. "Well, there," he said, "you have it." Blackburn blurted out: "It sounds impossible." Anderson appeared not to have heard him, and yet answered him. "We had Sutton under for the best part of an hour and we put every inch of him on tape and film. It takes some time to analyze a job like that. We aren't finished yet. But we failed in one thing. We used a psychonometer on his mind and we didn't get a nibble. Not a quaver, not a thought. Not even mental seepage. His mind was closed, tight shut." "Some defect in the meter," Adams suggested. "No," said Anderson. "We checked that." He looked around the room, from one face to another. "Maybe you don't realize the implication. When a man is drugged or asleep... or in any case where he is unaware, a psychonometer will turn him inside out. It will dig out things that his waking self would swear he didn't know. Even when a man fights against it, there is a certain seepage and that seepage widens as his mental resistance wears down." "But it didn.'t work with Sutton," Shulcross said. "That's right. It didn't work with Sutton. I tell you, the man's not human." "And you think he's different enough, physically, so that he could live in space without air, food and water?" "I don't know," said Anderson. He licked hi lips and stared around the room. "I don't know. I simply don't." Adams spoke softly. "We must not get upset. Alienness is no strange thiBg to us, Once it might have 'been, when the first humans went out into space. But today..." Clark interrupted impatiently. "Alien things themselves don't bother me. But when a man turns alien... He gulped, appealed to Anderson. "Do you think he's dangerous?" "Possibly," said Anderson. "Even if he is, he can't do much to harm us," Adams told them calmly. "That place of his is simply clogged with spy rigs." "Any reports in yet?" asked Blackburn. "Just general. Nothing specific. Sutton has been taking it easy. Had a few calls. Made a few himself. Had a visitor or two." "He knows he's being watched," said Clark. "He's putting on an act." "There's a rumor around," said Blackburn, "that Benton challenged him." Adams nodded. "Yes, he did. Ash tried to back out of it. That doesn't sound as if he's dangerous." "Maybe," speculated Clark, almost hopefully, "Benton will close our case for us." Adams smiled thinly. "Somehow I think Ash may have spent the afternoon thinking up a dirty deal for our Mr. Benton." Anderson had fished the pipe out of his pocket, was loading it from his pouch. Clark was fumbling for a cigarette. "You have something?" The language expert nodded. "But it's not too exciting. We opened Sutton's case and we found a manuscript. We photostated it and replaced it exactly as it was. But so far it hasn't done us any good. We can't read a word of it." "Code," said Blackburn. Shulcross shook his head. "If it was code, our robots would have cracked it in an hour or two. But it's not a code. It's language. And until you get a key, a language can't be cracked." "You've checked, of course." Shulcross smiled glumly. "Back to the old Earth languages... back to Babylon and Crete. We crosschecked every lingo in the galaxy. None of them came close." "Language," said Blackburn. "A new language. That means Sutton found something." "Sutton would," said Adams. "He's the best agent I ever had." Anderson stirred restlessly in his chair. "You like Sutton?" he asked. "I do," said Adams. "Adams," said Anderson, "I've been wondering. It's a thing that struck me funny from the first." "Yes, what is it?" "You knew Sutton was coming back. Knew almost to the minute when he would arrive. And you set g mousetrap for him. How come?" "Just a hunch," said Adams. For a long moment all four of them sat looking at him. Then they saw he meant to say no more. They rose and left the room.  IX laughter floated, sharji-edged with excitement. The lights changed from the duskblue of April to the purple-gray of madness, and the room was another world that floated in a hush that was not exactly silence. Perfume came down a breeze that touched the cheek with ice... perfume that called to mind black orchids in an outland of breathless terror. The floor swayed beneath Sutton's feet and he felt Eva'ssmall fist digging hard into his arm. The Zag spoke to them -- an android with specialized psychic development -- and his words wre dead and hollow sounds dripping from a mummied husk. "What is it that you wish? Here you live the lives you yearn for... find any escape that you may seek... possess the things you dream of." "There was a stream," said Sutton. "A little creek that ran..." The light changed to green, a faery green that glowed with soft, quiet life, exuberant, springtime life and the hint of things to come, and there were trees, trees that were fringed and haloed with the glistening, sun-kissed green of first-bursting buds. Sutton wiggled his toes and knew the grass beneath them, the first tender grass of spring, and smelled the hepatisas and bloodroot that had almost no smell at all... and the blooming on the hill across the creek. He told himself: "It's too early The creek gurgled at him as it ran across the shingle down into the Big Hole, and he hurriedforward across the meadow grass, cane pole tight-clutched in one hand, the can of worms in the other. A bluebird flashed through the trees that climbed the bluff across the meadow and a robin sang high in the top of the mighty elm that grew above the Big Hole. Sutton found the worn place in the bank, like a chair with the elm's trunk serving as a back, and he sat down in it and leaned forward to peer into the water. The current ran strong and dark and deep. Sutton drew in his breath and held it with pent-up anticipation. With shaking hands he found the biggest worm and pulled it from the can, baited up the hook. Breathlessly, he dropped the hook into the water, canted the pole in front of him for easy handling. The bobber drifted down the swirling slide of water, floated in an eddy where the current turned back upon itself. It jerked, almost disappeared, then bobbed to the surface and floated once again. Sutton leaned forward, arms aching with tension. (But even through the tension, he knew the goodness of the day. The water talked to him and he felt himself grow and become a being that comprehended and became a part of the clean, white ecstasy that was the hills and stream and meadow... earth, cloud, water, sky and sun. And the bobber went clear under! He felt the weight and strength of the fish that he had caught. It sailed in an arc above his head and landed in the grass behind him. He laid down his pole, scrambled to his feet and ran. The chub flopped in the grass and he grabbed the line and held it up. It was a whopper! Sobbing in excitement, he dropped to his knees and grasped the fish,, removed the hook with fingers that fumbled in their trembling. "Hello," said a childish voice. Sutton twisted around, still on his knees. tree, and it seemed for a moment that he had seen her somewhere before. But then he realized that she was a stranger and he frowned a little, for girls were no good when it came to fishing. He hoped she wouldn't stay. It would be just like a girl to hang around and spoil the day for him... "I am... ," she said, speaking a name he did not catch, for she lisped a little. He did not answer. "I am eight years old," she said. "I am Asher Sutton," he told her, "and I am ten... going on eleven." She stood and stared at him, one hand plucking nervously at the figured apron that she wore. The apron, he noticed, was clean and stanched, very stiff and prim, and she was messing it all up with her nervous plucking. "I am fishing," he said and tried very hard to keep from sounding too important. "And I just caught a whopper." He saw her eyes go large in sudden terror at the sight of something that came up from behind him and he wheeled around, no longer on his knees, but on his feet, and his hand was snaking into the pocket of his coat. The place was purple-gray and there was shrill woman-laughter and there was a face in front of him... a face he had seen that afternoon and never would forget. A fat and cultured face that twinkled even now with good fellowship, twinkled despite the deadly squint, and the gun already swinging upward in his hairy, pudgy fist. Sutton felt his own fingers touch the grip on the gun he carried, felt them tighten around it and jerk it from the pocket. But he was too late, he knew, to beat the spat of flame from a gun that had long seconds start. Anger flamed within him, cold, desolate, deadly anger. Anger at the pudgy fist, at the smiling face... the face that would smile across a chess board or from behind a gun. The smile of an egotist who would try to beat a robotic that was designed to play a perfect game of chess... an egotist who believed that he could shoot down Asher Sutton. T HE anger, he realized, was something more than anger... something greater and more devastating than the mere working of human adrenal. It was a part of him and something that was more than him, more than the mortal thing of flesh and blood that was Asher Sutton. A terrible thing . plucked from non-humanity. The face before him melted... or it seemed to melt. It changed and the smile was gone, and Sutton felt the anger whip from his brain and slam bullet-hard against the wilting personality that was Geoffrey Benton. Benton's gun coughed loudly and the muzzle-flash was blood red in the purple light. Then Sutton felt the thud of his own gun slamming back against the heel of his hand as he pulled the trigger. Benton was falling, twisting forward, bending at the middle as if he had hinges in his stomach, and Sutton caught one glimpse of the purpletinted face before it dropped to the floor. There were surprise and anguish and a terrible over-riding fear printed on the features that had been twisted out of shape. The crashing of the guns had smashed the place to silence, and through the garish light that swirled with powder smoke, Sutton saw the white blobs of many faces staring at him. Faces that mostly were without expression, although some of them had mouths and the mouths were round and open. He felt a tugging at his elbow and he moved, guided by the hand upon his arm. Suddenly he was limp and shaken and the anger was no more and he told himself: "I have just killed a man." "Quick," said Eva Armour's voice. "We must get out of here. They'll be swarming at you now. The whole hell's pack of them." "It was you," he told her. "I remember now. I didn't catch the name at first. You mumbled it... or I guess you lisped, and I didn't hear it."' The girl tugged at his arm. "They had Bentonconditioned to kill you. They figured that was all they needed. They never dreamed you could match him in a duel." "You were the little girl," Sutton told her blankly. "You wore a checkered apron and you kept twisting it nervously." "What in heaven's name are you talking about?" "I was fishing," Benton said, "and I had just caught a big one when you came along..." "You're crazy," said the girl. "Fishing? Here?" She pushed open a door and pulled him out and the cool air of night  slapped him briskly and shockingly across the face. "Wait a second," he cried. He wheeled around and caught the girl's arms roughly in his hands. "They?" he yelled at her. "What are you talking about? Who are they..." She stared at him wide-eyed. "You mean you don't know?" He shook his head, bewildered. "Poor Ash," she said. Her copper hair was a reddish flame, burnished and alive in the flicker of the sign that flashed on and off above the Zag House facade: Live the Life You Missed! Dream Up a Tough One for Us! A N android doorman spoke to them softly. "You wished a cab, sir?" Even as he spoke, the caryas there, sliding smoothly and silently up the driveway, like a black beetle winging from the night. The doorman reached out a hand and swung wide the door. "Quick is the word," he said. There was something in the soft, slurred tone that made Sutton move. He stepped inside the car and pulled Eva after him. The android slammed the door. Sutton tramped on the accelerator and the car screamed down the curving driveway, slid into the highway, roared with leashed impatience as it took the long road curving toward the hills. "Where?" asked Sutton. "Back to the Arms," she said. "They wouldn't dare to try for you there. Your room is rigged with rays." Sutton chuckled. "I have to be careful or I would trip on them. But how come you know?" "It is my job to know." "Friend or foe?" he asked. "Friend," she said. He turned his head and studied her. She had slumped down in the seat and was a little girl again... but she didn't have a checkered apron and she wasn't nervous. "I don't suppose," said Sutton, "that it would be any use for me to ask you questions?" She shook her head. "If I did, you'd probably lie to me." "If I wanted to," she said. "I could shake it out of you." "You could, but you won't. You see, Ash, I know you very well." "You just met me yesterday." "Yes, I know," she said, "but I've studied you for all of twenty years." X T HE trunk came in the morning when Sutton was finishing his breakfast. It was old and battered, the ancient rawhide covering hanging in tatters to reveal the marred steel skeleton, flecked here and there with rust. A key was in the lock and the straps were broken. Mice had gnawed the leather completely off one end. Sutton remembered it. It was the one that had stood in the far corner of the attic when he had been a boy and gone there to play on rainy afternoons... He picked up the neatly folded copy of the morning edition of the Galactic Press that had come with his breakfast tray and shook it out. The article he was looking for was on the front page, the third item in the Earth news column: Mr. Geoffrey Renton was killed last night in an informal meeting at one of the amusement centers in the university district. The victor was Mr. Asher Sutton, who returned only yesterday from a mission to #I Cygni. There was a final sentence, the most damning that could be written of. a duelist: Mr. Benton fired first and missed. Sutton folded the paper again and laid it carefully on the table. He lit a cigarette. I thought it would be me, he told himself. I never fired a gun like that before... scarcely knew such a gun existed. Of course, I didn't really kill Benton. He killed himself. If he hadn't missed... and there was no excuse for missing... the item would have read the other way around. We'll make an evening of it, the girl had said, and she probably knew. We'll have dinner and make an evening of it and Geoffrey Benton will kill you by appointment at the Zag House. Y ES, said Sutton to himself, she might have known. She knows too many things. About the spy traps in this room, for instance. And about someone who had Benton psychologically conditioned to challenge me and kill me. She said friend when I asked her friend or foe, but a word is an easy thing. There is no way to know if it is true or false. She said she had studied me for twenty years and that is false, of course, for twenty years ago I was setting out for Cygni and I was unimportant. Just a cog in a great machine. I am unimportant still, unimportant to everyone but myself, and to a great idea that no human but myself could possible know about. For no matter if the manuscript was photostated; there is not a soul can read it. He snubbed out the cigarette and rose and walked over to the trunk. The lock was rusty , and the key turned hard, but he finally got it open and lifted up the lid. The trunk was half full of papers neatly piled. Sutton, looking at them, chuckled. Buster always was a methodical soul. But, then, all robots were methodical. It was the nature of them. Methodical and -- what was it Herkimer had said? -- stubborn. He squatted on the floor beside the trunk and rummaged through the contents. Old letters tied neatly in bundles. An old notebook from his college days. A sheaf of clippedtogether documents that undoubtedly were outdated. A scrapbook littered with clippings that had not been pasted up. An album half filled with a cheap stamp collection. He squatted back on his heels and , turned the pages of the album lovingly, childhood memories coming bade again. Cheap stamps because he had had no money to buy the better ones. Gaudy ones because they had appealed to him. The stamp craze, he remembered, had lasted two years... three years at the most. He had pored over catalogs, had traded, picked up the strange lingo of the hobby... perforate, imperforate, shades, watermarks, intaglio. He smiled at the happiness of memory. There had been stamps he'd wanted, but could never have, and he had studied the illustrations of them until he knew each one by heart. He lifted his head and stared hard at the wall and tried to remember what some of them were like, but there was no recollection. The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters. went at the trunk again. More notebooks and letters. Loose clippings. A curious-looking wrench. A well chewed bone that at one time probably had been the property and the solace of some loved but now forgotten family dog. Junk, said Sutton. Buster could have saved a lot of time by simply burning it. A couple of old newspapers. A moth-eaten pennant. A bulky letter that never had been opened. Sutton tossed it on top of the rest of the litter he had taken from the trunk, then hesitated, put out his hand and picked it up again. That stamp looked queer. The color, for one thing. Memory ticked within his brain and he saw the stamp as he had seen it when a lad... not the stamp itself, of course, but the illustration of it in a catalog. He bent above the letter and caught a sudden, gasping breath. The stamp was old, incredibly old... incredibly old and worth... good Lord, how much was it worth? He tried to make out the postmark, but it was faint with time. He got up slowly and carried the letter to the table, bent above it, puzzling out the town name. Some political division lost in the mist of time. July # July, # -- something! Sutton's hand shook. A N unopened letter, mailed # years ago. Tossed in with this heap of junk. Lying cheek by jowl with a tooth-scarred bone and a funny wrench. An unopened letter... and with a stamp that was worth a fortune. Sutton read the postmark again. Bridgeport, Wis. July, it looked like #... July #, # -- . The missing numeral in the year was too faint to make out. Maybe with a good glass it could be done. The address, faded butstiH legible, said: Mr. John H. Sutton Bridgeport Wisconsin consin. And the name was Sutton. Of course, it would 'be Sutton. What had Buster's android lawyer said? A trunk full of family papers. I'll have to look into historic geography, Sutton thought. I'll have to find out just where Wisconsin was. But John H. Sutton. That was another matter. Just another Sutton. One who had been dust these many years. A man who sometimes forgot to open up his mail. Sutton turned the letter and examined the flap. There was po sign of tampering. The adhesive was flaking with age and when he ran a fingernail along one corner, the mucilage came loose in a tiny shower of powder. The paper, he saw, was brittle and would require careful handling. A trunk full of family papers, the android Wellington had said when he came into the room and balanced himself very primly on the edge of a chair and laid his hat precisely on the table top. And it was a trunk full of junk instead. Bones and wrenches and paper clips and clippings. Old notebooks and letters and a letter that had been mailed # years ago and never had been opened. Did Buster know about the letter? But even as he asked himself the question, Sutton knew that Buster did. And he had tried to hide it... and he had succeeded. He had tossed it in with other odds and ends, knowing that it would be found, but by the man for whom it was intended. For the trunk was deliberately made to appear of no importance. It was old and battered and the key was in the lock and it said there's nothing important inside, but if you want to waste your time, why, go ahead and look. And if anyone had looked, the clutter would have seemed worthless. the letter lying on the table. John H. Sutton, an ancestor sixty centuries removed. His blood runs in my veins, though many times diluted. But he was a man who lived and breathed and ate and died, who saw the sunrise against the green Wisconsin hills... if Wisconsin had any hills, wherever it was. He felt the heat of summer and shivered in the cold of winter. He worried about many things, both big and small and most of them would be small, the way worries usually are. A man like me, although there would be minor differences. He had a vermiform appendix and it may have caused him trouble. He had wisdom teeth and they may have caused him trouble, too. And he probably died at eighty or earlier. And when I am eighty, Sutton thought, I will be just entering my prime. But there would be compensations. John H. Sutton would have lived closer to the Earth, for the Earth was all he had. He would have been unplagued by alien psychology and Earth would have been a living place instead of a governing place where not a thing is grown for its economic worth, not a wheel is turned for economic purpose. He could have chosen his life work from the whole broad field of human endeavor instead of being forced into governmental work, into the job of governing a thin cobweb of galactic empire. And somewhere, lost now, there were Suttons before him, and after him -- lost, too -- many other Suttons. The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next, and none of the links stands out, except, here and there, a link one sees by accident. By the accident of history, or the accident of myth, or the accident of not opening a letter. The door bell chimed and Sutton, startled, scooped up the letter and slid it into the inside pocket of his coat. "Come in," he called. It was Herkimer. "Good morning, sir," he said. Sutton glared at him. "What do you want?" "I belong to you," Herkimer told him blandly. "I'm part of your third of Benton's property." "My third... And then he remembered. It was the law. Whoever kills another in a duel inherits one third of the dead man's property. That was a law he had forgotten. "I hope you don't object," said Herkimer. "I am easy to get along with and very quick to learn and I like to work. I can cook and sew and run errands and I can read and write." "And put the finger on me." "Oh, no, I never would do that." "Why not?" "Because you are my master." "We'll see," Sutton remarked sourly. "But I'm not all," said Herkimer. "There are other things. There's a hunting asteroid stocked with the finest game, and a spaceship. A small one, it's true, but very serviceable. There are several thousand dollars and an estate out on the West Coast and some wildcat planetary development stock and a number of other, small things, too numerous to mention." Herkimer brought out a notebook. "I have them written out if you would care to listen." i-"'Not now," said Sutton. "I have work to do." Herkimer brightened. "Something I could do, no doubt? Something I could help with?" "Nothing," said Sutton. "I am going to see Adams." "I could carry your case. That one over there." "I'm not taking the case." "But, sir..." "You sit down and fold your hands and wait until I get back." "I'll get into mischief," the android warned. "I just know I will." "All right, then, there is something you can do. That case you mentioned. You can watch it." "Yes, sir," said Herkimer, plainly disappointed. "And don't waste your time trying to read what's in it," said Sutton. "You won't be able to." "Oh," said Herkimer, still more disappointed. "There's another thing. A girl by the name of Eva Armour lives in this hotel. Know anything about her?" I have a cousin..." "A cousin? An android with a cousin?" "Yes, sir. She was made in the same laboratory as me and that makes her my cousin." "You have a lot of cousins, then." "Yes," said Herkimer, "I have many thousands and we stick together. Which," he said, very sanctimoniously, "is the way it should be with families." "You think this cousin might know something?" Herkimer shrugged. "She works in the hotel. She might know something." Sutton turned to the door. "You are to be congratulated, sir," said Herkimer. "You gave a # very good account of yourself last night." Sutton turned back to the room. "Benton missed," he said. "I couldn't' help but kill him." Herkimer nodded. "But it isn't only that, sir. This happens to be the first time I ever heard of a man being killed by a bullet in the arm." "In the arm?" "Precisely, sir. The bullet smashed his arm, but it didn't touch him otherwise. And he died." XI waited for the flame to steady. His eyes were fixed on Sutton and there was no softness in them, but there were softness and irritability and a faintunsureness in the man himself, hidden well, but undeniably there. That staring, Sutton told himself, is an old trick of his. He glares at you and keeps his face frozen like a sphinx and if you aren't used to him and on to all his tricks, he'll have you thinking that he knows everything. But he doesn't do the glaring quite as well as he use to do it. There's strain in him now and there was no strain in him twenty years ago. Just granite, and the granite is beginning to weather. There's something on his mind. There's something that isn't going well. Adams passed the lighter flame over the loaded bowl of his pipe, back and forth, deliberately taking his time, making Sutton wait. "You know, of course," said Sutton, speaking quietly, "that I can't be frank with you." The lighter flame snapped off and Adams straightened in his chair. "Eh?" he asked. Sutton grinned mentally. A passed pawn, he told himself... That's what Adams is... a passed pawn. He said aloud: "You know by now, of course, that I came back in a ship that could not fly. You know I had no spacesuit and that the ports were broken and the hull was riddled. I had no food and air and water, and #I is eleven light years away." Adams nodded bleakly. "Yes, we know all that." "How I got back or what happened to me has nothing to do with my report and I don't intend to tell you." Adams rumbled at him, "Then why mention it at all?" "Just so you won't ask a lot of questions that will get no answer. It will save a lot of time." Adams leaned back and puffed his pipe contentedly. "You were sent out to get information, Ash. Any kind of information. Anything that would make Cygni more understandable. You represented Earth and you were paid by Earth and you surely owe Earth something." "I owe Cygni something, too," replied Sutton. "I owe Cygni my life. My ship crashed and I was killed." # Adams nodded. "Yes, that is what Clark said. He told me you were killed. Clark is a space construction engineer. Sleeps with ships and blueprints. He studied your ship and he calculated a graph of force coordinates. Ie reported that if you were inside the ship when it hit, you had to be dead." "It's wonderful," said Sutton, drily, "what a man can do with figures." Adams prodded him again. "Anderson said you weren't human." "I suppose Anderson could tell that by looking at the ship." Adams nodded. "No food, nor air. It was the logical conclusion for anyone to draw." Sutton shook his head. "Anderson is wrong. If I weren't human, you never would 'have seen me. I would not have come back at all. But I was homesick for Earth and you were expecting a report." "You took your time," Adams accused. "I had to be sure. I had to know. I had to be able to come back and tell you if the Cygnians were dangerous or if they weren't." "And which is it?" "They aren't dangerous." silent. Finally Adams said: "And that is all?" "That is all," said Sutton. Adams tapped his teeth with the bit of his pipe. "I'd hate to have to send another man out to check up. Especially after I had told' everyone you'd bring back all the data." "It wouldn't do any good," said Sutton. "No one could get through." "You did." "Yes, and I was the first. And because I was the' first, I also will be the last." Across the desk, Adams smiled winterly. "You were fond of those people, Ash." I "They aren't people." "Well... beings, then." "They aren't even beings. It's hard to tell you exactly what they" are. You'd laugh if I said what I really think they are." Adams grunted. "Try me." "Symbiotic abstractions. That's as close as I can come." Adams didn't laugh. "You mean they really don't exist?" "Oh, they exist, all right. They form symbiotic relationships that help them and their alien hosts. Not like parasites, unless maybe like the bacteria that release nitrogen in the soil for plants to live on. Only the bacteria and the plants are separate. They and their hosts aren't, and each helps the other." "But they're abstractions," Adams repeated. "They can't exist." "Not as we know the word," Sutton said. "They do, though." "And no one can get through again?" Sutton leaned forward. "Why don't you cross Cygni off your list? Pretend it isn't there. There's no danger from Cygni. The Cygnians, will never bother Man, and Man will never get there again. There's no use trying." "They aren't mechanical?" "No," said Sutton. "An abstraction can't be mechanical." Adams changed the subject. "How .old are you, Ash?" "Fifty-nine." "Just a kid," said Adams. "Just getting started." His pipe had gone out and he worried the tobacco with his finger, scowling at it. "What do you plan to do?" he asked. "I have no plans." "You want to stay on with the Service, don't you?" "That depends on how you feel about it. I had presumed, of course, that you wouldn't want me." "We owe you twenty years back pay," said Adams, almost kindly. "It's waiting for you. You can pick it up when you go out. You also have three or four years leave coming to you. Why don't you take it now?" Sutton said nothing. "Come back later on," said Adams. "We'll have another talk." "I won't change my mind."' "No one will ask you to." Sutton stood up slowly. "I'm sorry," Adams said, "that I haven't your confidence." "I went out to do a job," Sutton told him crisply. "I've done that, job. I've made my report." "So you have." "I suppose," said Sutton, "you will keep in touch with me." Adams' eyes twinkled grimly. "Certainly, Ash. I shall keep in touch with you." and forty years were canceled from his life. It was like going back all of forty years... even to the teacups. Through the open windows of Dr... Raven's study came young voices and the sound of students' feet tramping past along the walk. The wind talked in the elms and it was a sound with which he was familiar. Far off a chapel bell tolled and there was girl, ish laughter just across the way. Dr. Raven handed him his teacup. "I think that I am right. Three lumps and no cream." "Yes, that's right," said Sutton, astonished that he should remember. But remembering, he told himself, was easy. I seem to be able to remember almost everything. As if the old habit patterns had been kept bright and polished in my mind through all the alien years. Waiting, like a set of cherished silver standing on a shelf, until it was time for them to be used again. "I remember little things," said Dr. Raven. "Little, inconsequential things, like how many lumps of sugar and what a man said sixty years ago, but I don't do so well, sometimes, at the big things... the things a man really should remember." The white marble fireplace flared to the valuted ceiling and the university's coat of arms upon its polished face was as bright as the last  day Sutton had seen it. X der why I came." "Not at all," said Dr. Raven. "All my boys come back to see me. And I am glad to see them. It makes me feel so proud." "I've been wondering myself," said Sutton. "And I guess I know what it is, but it is hard to say." "Let's take it easy, then," said Dr. Raven. "Remember, the way we used to. We sat and talked around a thing and finally, before we knew it, we had found the core." Sutton laughed shortly. "Yes, I remember, doctor. Fine points of theology. The vital differences in comparative religions. Tell me this. You have spent a lifetime at it; you know more about religions, Earthly and otherwise, than any man on Earth. Have you been able to keep one faith ? Have you been tempted from the teachings of your race?" Or. Raven set down his teacup. "I might have known you would embarrass me. You used to do it all the time. You had the uncanny ability to hit exactly on the question that a man found hardest to answer." "I won't embarrass you any longer," Sutton told him. "I take it that you have found some good -- one might say superior -- points in alien religions." "You found a new religion?" "No," said Sutton. "Not a religion." The chapel bell kept on tolling and the girl who had laughed was gone. The footsteps along the walk were far off in the distance. "Have you ever felt," asked Sutton, "as if you sat on God's right hand and heard a thing you knew you were never meant to hear?" Dr. Raven shook his head. "No, I don't think I ever have." "If you did, what would you do?" "I think," said Dr. Raven, "that I might be as troubled by it as you are." "We've lived by faith alone," said Sutton, "for ten thousand years at least. More -- much more. For it must have 'been a glimmer of some sort of faith that made the Neanderthaler paint  corpses' shin bones, red and nest the skulls so they faced toward the east." "Faith," said Dr. Raven gently, "is a powerful thing." "Yes, powerful," Sutton agreed, "but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a hope and conviction that there is some greater power which will lend us aid and guidance." "You haven't grown bitter, Ash?" "Not bitter." Somewhere a clock was ticking, loud in the sudden hush. "Doctor," said Sutton, "what do you know of destiny?" "It's strange to hear you talk of destiny," said Dr. Raven. "You always were a man who never was inclined to bow to destiny." "I mean documentary destiny," Sutton explained. "Not the abstraction, but the actual belief in destiny. What do the records say?" "There always have been men who believed in destiny," said Dr. Raven. "Some of them, it would appear, with some justification. But mostly they, didn't call it destiny. They called it luck or a hunch or inspiration or something else. There have been historians who wrote of manifest destiny, but those were no more than words. Of course, there were some fanatics who preached destiny, but practiced fatalism." "But there is no evidence of a thing called destiny ? An actual force? A living vital thing?" Dr. Raven shook his head. "None that I know of, Ash. Destiny, after all, is just a word. It isn't something that you can pin down. Faith, too, at one time may have been no more than a word, just as destiny is tosands of years made it a real force, a thing that can be defined and invoked and lived by." "But hunches and luck," protested Sutton. "Those are just happenstance." "They might be glimmerings of destiny," Dr. Raven declared. "Flashes showing through. A hint of a broad stream of happening behavior. One cannot know, of course. Man is always blind until he has the facts. Turning points in history have rested on a hunch. Inspired belief in one's own ability has changed the course of events more times than one can count." ' He rose and walked to a book case, stood with his head tilted back. "Somewhere," he said, "if I can find it, there is a book." He searched and did not find it. "No matter," he declared, "I'll run onto it later if you are still interested. It tells about an old African tribe with af strange belief. They believed that each man's spirit' or consciousness or ego or whatever you may call it had a partner, a counterpart on some distant star. If I remember rightly, they even knew which star and could point it out in the evening sky." He turned around from the book case and looked evenly at Sutton. "That might be destiny, you know," he said. "It might, very well, at that." He crossed the room to stand in front of the cold fireplace, hands locked behind his back, silver head tilted to one side. "Why are you so interested in destiny?" he asked. "Because I found destiny," said Sutton. T HE face in the visiplate was masked and Adams spoke ' in chilly anger: "I do not receive masked calls." "You will this one," said the voice from behind the mask. "I am the man you talked to on the patio. Remember?" "Calling from the future, I presume," said Adams. "No, I am still in your time. I have been watching you." "Watching Sutton, too?" The masked head nodded. "You have seen him now. What do you think?" "He's hiding something," Adams said. "And not all of him is human." "You're going to have him killed?" "No," saidAdams. "No, I don't think I will. He knows something that we need to know. And we "What he knows," said the masked voice, "is better dead with the man. who knows it." "Perhaps," said Adams, "we could come to an understanding if you would tell me what this is all about." "I can't tell you, Adams. I wish I could. I can't tell you the future." "And until you do," snapped Adams, "I won't let you change the past." And he was thinking: The man is scared and almost desperate. He could kill Sutton any time he wished, but he is afraid to do it. Sutton has to be killed by a man of his own time... literally has to be, for time may not tolerate the intrusion of violence from future to past. "By the way," said the future man, "how are things on Aldebaran ger flaming in him. "If it hadn't been for Sutton," said the masked man, "there would have been no incident on Aldebaran "But Sutton wasn't back yet," argued Adams. His voice ran down, for he remembered something. The name upon the fly leaf... by Asher Sutton. "Look, tell me. For the love of heaven, if you have anything to tell, tell it." "You mean to say you haven't guessed what it might be?" Adams shook his head. "It's war," the voice said. "But there is no war." . "Not in your time." "But how -- " "Remember Michaelson?" "The man who went a second into time." The masked head nodded and the screen went blank. Adams sat and felt the chill of horror trickle through his body. The visor buzzer purred at him and mechanically he snapped the toggle over. It was Nelson in the screen. "Sutton just left the university. He spent an hour with Dr. Raven. In case you don't recall, Dr. Raven is a professor of comparative' religions." "Oh," said Adams. "Oh, so that is it." He tapped his fingers on the desk, half irritated, half frightened. 'It would be a shame, he thought, to kill a man like Sutton. But it might be best. Yes, he told himself, it might be for the best. T HE road curved ahead, a silver Strip shining in the moonlight, and the sounds and smells of night lay across the land. The sharp, clean smell of growing things, the mystery smell of water. A creek fan through the marsh that lay off to the right, and Sutton, from behind the wheel, caught the flashing hint of winding, moonlit water as he took a curve. Peeping frogs made a veil of pixy sound that hugged against the hills, and fireflies were swinging lanterns that signaled through the dark. Clark said that Sutton had died, and Clark was an engineer. He had made a graph and mathematics stated that certains strains and stresses would inevitably kill a man. And Anderson had said Sutton wasn't human, and how was Anderson to know? How, asked Sutton, unless he examined me? Unless he was the one who tried to probe into my mind after I had been knocked out when I walked into my room? Adams had tipped his hand and Adams never tipped his hand unless he wanted one to see. He wanted me to know, Sutton told himself. He wanted me to know, but he couldn't tell me. He couldn't tell me he had me down on tape and film, that he was the one who had rigged up the room. But he could let me know by making just one slip, a carefully calculated slip, like the one on Anderson. He knew that I would catch and he thinks he can jitter me. The headlights caught, momentarily, the gray-black massive lines of a house that huddled on a hillside, and then there was another curve. A nightbird, black and ghostly, fluttered across the road and the shadow of its flight danced down the cone of light. Adams was the one who was waiting for me. He knew, somehow, that I was coming, and he was ready. He had me tagged and ticketed before I hit the ground, and he gave me a going over before I knew what was going on. And undoubtedly he found a whole lot more than he bargained for. Sutton chuckled drily. And the chuckle merged into a scream that came slanting down the hill slope in a blaze of streaming fire... a rush of flame that ended in the marsh, that died down momentarily, then licked out in blue 'and red. Brakes hissed and tires screeched on the pavement as Sutton slued the car around to bring it to a stop. Even before the machine came to a halt, he was out the door and running down the slope toward the strange, black craft that flickered in the swamp. Water sloshed around his ankles and knife-edged grass slashed at his leg. The puddles gleamed black and oily in the light from the flaming craft. The frogs still strained their hoarse throats at the far edge of the marsh. Something flopped and struggled in a pool of muddy, flame-stained water just a few feet from the burning ship. Sutton, plunging forward, caught the gleaming white of frightened, piteous eyeballs shining in the flame as the man lifted himself on his mud-caked arms and tried to drag his body forward. He saw the flash of teeth as pain twisted the face into grisly anguish. And his nostrils caught the smell of charred, crisped flesh. He stooped and locked his hands beneath the armpits of the man, hauled him upright, dragged him back across the swamp. Mud sucked at his feet and he heard the splashing behind him, the horrible, dragging splash of the other's body trailing through the water and the slime. There was dry land beneath his feet and he began the climb bade up the slope toward the car. Sounds came from the bobbing head of the man he carried, thick, slobbering sounds that might have been words. Sutton cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw the flames mounting straight into the sky, a pillar of blue that lighted up the night. Marsh birds, roused from their nests, flew blinded and in squawking panic through the garish light. "The atomics," said Sutton, aloud. "The atomics..." They couldn't hold for long in a ' flame like that. The automatics would melt down and the marsh would suddenly be a crater and the hills wmuld be charred from horizon to horizon. "No," said the bobbing head. "No... no atomics." Sutton's foot caught in a root and he stumbled to his knees. The body of the man slid from his mud-caked grasp. The man struggled, trying to turn over. Sutton helped him and he lay on his back, his face toward the sky. He was young, Sutton saw, a youth beneath the mask of mud and pain. "No atomics," said the man. "I dumped them." pride in a job well done. But the words had cost him heavily. Sutton saw the blood pumping through the temples beneath the burned and twisted skin. The man's jaw worked and words came out, limping, tangled words. "There was a battle... back in '#... I saw him coming... tried to time-jump... , ." The words gurgled and got lost, then gushed out again. "Got new guns... set metal afire..." He turned his head and apparently saw Sutton for the first time. He started up. "Asher Sutton!" The two words were a whisper. For a moment Sutton caught the triumphant, almost fanatic gleam that washed across the eyes of the dying man, wondered at the gesture of the half-raised arm, at the cryptic sign that the fingers made. Then the gleam faded and the arm dropped back and the fingers separated. Sutton knew, even before he bent with his head turned against the heart, that' the man was dead. Slowly Sutton stood up. The flame was dying down and the birds had gone. The craft lay almost buried in the mud, and its lines, he noted, were none he had ever seen. Asher Sutton, the man had said. And his eyes had lighted up and he had made a sign just before he died. And there had been a battle back in '#. Eighty-three what? The man had tried to time-jump... who had ever heard of a time jump? I never saw the man before, said Sutton. So help me, I don't know him even now. And yet he cried my name and it sounded as if he knew me and ,was very glad to see me and he made a sign... a sign that went with the name. He stared down at the dead man lying at his feet and saw the pity of it, the crumpled legs, the stiffened arms, the lolling head and the flash of moonlight on the teeth where the mouth had fallen open. Carefully, Sutton went down on his knees, ran his hands over the body, seeking something... some bulging pocket that might give a clue to the man who lay there dead. Because he knew me. And I must know how he knew me. And none of it makes sense. There was a small book in the breast pocket of the coat and Sutton slipped it out. The title was in gold upon black leather, and even in the moonlight Sutton could read the letters that flamed from the tover: By Asher Sutton Sutton did not move. He .crouched there on the ground, like a cowering thing, stricken by-the golden letters on the leather cover. A book! A book he meant to write, but. hadn't written yet! A book he wouldn't write for many months to come! And yet here it was, dog-eared and limp from reading. He felt the chill of the fog rising from the marsh, the loneliness of a wild bird's crying. A strange ship had plunged into the marsh, disabled and burning. A man had escaped from the ship, but on the verge of death. Before he died he had recognized Sutton and had called his name. In his pocket he had a book that was not even written. Those were the facts. There was no explanation. Faint sounds of human voices drifted down the night and Sutton rose swiftly to his feet, stood poised and waiting, listening. The voices came again. Someone had heard the crash and was coming to investigate, coming down the road, calling to others who also had heard the crash. Sutton turned and walked swiftly up the slope to the car. There was, he told himself, no Earthly use of waiting. Those coming down the road might know the answers to his baffling questions -- but they wouldn't tell him. Nobody He had to find out the answers himself. XV of lilac bushes across the road and there was another one crouched in the shadow of the courtyard wall. Sutton walked slowly forward, strolling, taking his time. "Johnny," he said, soundlessly. "Yes, Ash." "That is all there are? Just those two ?" "I think there is another one, but I can't place him. All of them are armed." Sutton felt the stir of comfort in his brain, the sense of self-assurance, the sense of aid and comradeship. "Keep me posted, Johnny." He whistled a bar or tw'o, from a tune that had been forgotten long ago, but still was fresh in his mind from twenty years before. The rent-a-car garage was two blocks up the road, the Orion Arms two blocks farther down. Between him and the Arms were two men, waiting with guns. Two and maybe more. Between the garage and hetel was nothing... just the landscaped beauty that was a residential, administrative Earth. An Earth dedicated to beauty and to ruling... planted with a garden's care, every inch of it mapped out by landscape architects with clumps of shrubs and lanes of trees and carefully tended flower beds. An ideal place, Sutton told himself, for an ambush. Adams? he wondered. Although it hardly could be Adams. He had something that Adams expected to holds information that you want, no matter how irate you may be at him, is downright useless. Or those others that Eva had told him of... the ones who had Benton psychologically conditioned to kill him. They tied in better than Adams did, for Adams wanted him to stay alive and these others, whoever they might be, were quite content to kill him. He dropped his hand in his coat pocket as if searching for a cigarette and his fingers touched the steel of the gun he had used on Benton. He let his fingers wrap around it "and then took his hand out of the pocket and found the cigarettes in another pocket. Not time yet, he told himself. Time later on to use the gun, if he had to use it -- if he had a chance to use it. He stopped to light the cigarette, playing for time. The gun would be a poor weapon, he knew, but better than none at all. In the dark, he probably couldn't hit the broad side of a house but it would make a noise and the waiting men were not counting on noise. If they hadn't minded noise, they could have stepped out minutes ago and shot him down. "Ash," said Johnny, "there is another man. Just in that bush ahead. He expects to let you pass and then they'll have you caught in an ambush three ways." exactly;" . "The bush with the white flowers. He's on this edge of it. Quite close to the walk, so he can step around and be behind you when you pass." Sutton puffed on the cigarette, making it glow like a red eye in the dark. "Shall we take him, Johnny?" "Yes, before we're taken." Sutton resumed his stroll and now he saw the bush, four paces away, no more. One step. I wonder what it's all about. Two steps. Cut out your wondering. Act now and do your wondering later. Three steps. There he is. I see him. Sutton was off the walk in a sudden leap. The gun whipped out of his pocket and it talked, two quick, ugly words. The man behind the bush bent forward to his knees, swayed there for a moment, then flattened on his face. His gun fell from his fingers and in a single swoop, Sutton scooped it up. It was, he saw, an electronic device, a vicious thing that could killteven with a near miss, due to the field of distortion that its beam set up. A gun like that had been new and secret twenty years ago, but now, apparently, anyone could get it. Gun in hand, Sutton wheeled and ran, twisting through the shrubbery, ducking overhanging branches, plow I ing through a tulip bed. Out of the corner of one eye, he caught a twinkle... the twinkling breath of a silent flaming gun, and the dancing , path of silver that it sliced into the night. He plunged through a ripping, tearing hedge, waded a stream, found himself in a clump of evergreen and birch. He stopped to get his breath, staring back over the way that he had come. The countryside lay quiet and peaceful, a silvered picture painted by the moon. No one and nothing stirred. The gun long ago had ceased its flickering. Johnny's warning came suddenly: "Ash! Behind you. Friendly..." Sutton wheeled, gun half lifted. Herkimer was running in the moonlight, like a hound hunting for a. trace. "Mr. Sutton, sir... "Yes, Herkimer." "We have to run for it." "Yes," said Sutton, "I suppose we have. I walked into a trap. There were three of them laying for me." "It's worse than that," said Herkimer. "It's worse even than you think. It's not only Morgan, but it's Adams, too." "Adams?" "He has given orders that you are to be killed on sight." Sutton stiffened. "How do you know?" "The girl,' said Herkimer. "Eva. The one you asked about. She told me." Herkimer walked forward, stood face to face with Sutton. "You have to trust me, sir. You said this morning I'd put the finger on you, but I never would. I was with you from the very first." "But the girl," said Sutton. "Eva is with you, 'boo, sir. We started searching for you as soon as we found out, but we were too late to catch you. Eva is waiting with the ship." "A ship," Sutton grimly repeated. "A ship and everything." "It's your own ship, sir. The one you received from Benton's estate with the hunting asteroid and me." Sutton scowled. "And you think I'm stupid enough to come with you and get into this ship and... "No, sir, I didn't think so," said Herkimer. "I'm sorry." He moved so fast that Sutton couldn't do a thing. He saw the fist coming and he tried to raise his gun. He felt the sudden fury grow cold within his brain. But that was before there was a sudden crushing impact. His head snapped back so that for a moment, before his eyelids closed, he saw the wheel of stars against a spinning sky. He felt his knees buckle under him. He was out, stone cold, when his body hit the ground. A Genuine Science Fiction With Down-to-Mars Science Fiction Prizes! See Page # for Willy Ley's provocative introduction Page # for Contest Rules By Escaping a known danger is highly advisable...if you can knowthe unknown dangerahead! seconds before the alarm was set to go off. There was no effort in waking. It was sudden. Coldly conscious, he reached out his left hand in the dark and pushed in the stop. The alarm glowed a second, then faded. At his side, his wife put her hand on his arm. '"Did you sleep?" he asked. "No, did you?" "A little," he said. "Not much." She was silent for a few seconds. He heard her throat contract. She shivered. He knew what she was going to say. "We're still going?" she asked. He twisted his shoulders on the bed and took a deep breath. "Yes," he said, and felt her fingers tighten on his arm. "What time is it?" she asked. "About five." "We'd better get ready." "Yes, we'd better." They made no move. "You're sure we can get on the ship without anyone noticing?" she asked. "They think it's just another test flight. Nobody will be checking." She didn't say anything. She moved a little closer to him. He felt how cold her skin was. "I'm afraid," she said. SI He took her hand and held it in a tight grip. "Don't be," he said. "We'll be safe." "It's the children I'm worried about." "We'll be safe," he repeated. She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it gently. "All right," she said. They both sat Up in the darkness. He heard her stand. Her night garment rustled to the floor. She didn't pick it up. She stood still, shivering in the cold morning air. "You're sure we don't need anything else with us?" she asked. "No, nothing. I have all the supplies we need in the ship. Anyway..." "What?" "We can't carry anything past the guard," he said. "He has to think you and the kids are just coming to see me off." S HE began dressing. He threw off the covering and got up. He went across the cold floor to the closet and dressed. "I'll get the children up," she said, "if they aren't already." He grunted, pulling clothes over his head. At the door she stopped. "Are you sure -- " she began. "Hm?" "Won't the guard think it's funny that... that our neighbors are coming down to see you off, too?" He sank down on the bed and fumbled for the clasps on his shoes. "We'll have to take that chance," he said. "We need them with us." She sighed. "It seems so cold. So calculating." He straightened up and saw her silhouette in the doqrway. "What else can we do?" he asked tensely. "We can't interbreed our own children." "No," she said. "It's just..." "Just what?" "Nothing, darling. I'm sorry." She closed the door. Her footsteps disappeared down the hall. The door to the children's room opened. He heard their two voices. A cheerless smile raised his lips. You'd think it was a holiday, he thought. He pulled on his shoes. At least" the kids didn't know what was happening. They thought they were going to take him down to the field. They thought they'd come back and tell all their schoolmates. They didn't know they'd never come back. He finished clasping his shoes and stood up. He shuffled over to the bureau and turned on the light. He looked at himself in the mirror. It was odd, such an undistinguished looking man planning this. Cold. Calculating. Her words filled his mind again. Well, there was no other way. In a few years, probably less, the whole planet would go up with a blinding flash. This was the only way out. Escaping, starting all over again with a few people on a new planet. He stared at the reflection. "There's no other way," he said. He glanced around the bedroom. Good-by, this part of my life. Turning off the lamp was like turning off a light in his mind. He closed the door gently behind him and slid his fingers off the worn handle. His son and daughter were going down the ramp. They were talking in mysterious whispers. He shook his head in slight amusement. His wife waited for him. They went down together, holding hands. "I'm not afraid, darling," she said. "It'll be all right." "Sure," he said. "Sure it will." They all went in to eat. He sat down with his children. His wife poured out juice for them. Then she went to get the food. "Help your mother, doll," he told his daughter. She got up. "Pretty soon, haah, pop?" his son said. "Pretty soon, haah?" "Take it easy," he cautioned. "Remember what I told you. If you say a word of it to anybody, I'll have to leave you behind." A dish shattered on the floor. He darted a glance at his wife. She was staring at him, her lips trembling. She averted her eyes and bent down. She fumbled at the pieces, picked up a few. Then she dropped them all, stood up and pushed them against the wall with her shoe. "As if it mattered," she said nervously. "As if it mattered whether the place is clean or not." The children were watching her in surprise. "What is it?" asked the daughter. "Nothing, darling, nothing," she said. "I'm just nervous. Go back to the table. Drink your juice. We have to eat quickly. The neighbors will be here soon." "Pop, why are the neighbors coming with us?" asked his son. "Because," he said vaguely. "Because they want to. Now forget it. Don't talk about it so much." T HE room was quiet. His wife brought over their food and set it down. Only her footsteps broke the silence. The children kept glancing at each other, at their father. He kept his eyes on his plate. The food tasted thick and flat in his mouth and he felt his heart thudding against the wall of his chest. Last day. This is the last day. It felt like a silly, dangerous plan. "You'd better eat," he told his wife. She sat down and began to eat mechanically, without enthusiasm. Suddenly the door buzzer sounded. The eating utensil skidded out of her nerveless fingers and clattered on the floor. He reached out quickly and put his hand on hers. "All right, darling," he said. "It's all right." He turned to the children. "Go answer the door," he told them. "Both of us?" his daughter asked. "Both of you." "But..." "Do as I say." They slid off their chairs and left the room, glancing back at their parents. When the sliding door shut off # their view, he turned back to his wife. Her face was pale and tight; she had her lip's pressed together. "Darling, please," he said. "Please. You know I wouldn't take you if I wasn't sure it was safe. You know how many times I've flown the ship before. And I know just where we're going. It's safe. Believe me, it's safe." S HE pressed his hand against her cheek. She closed her eyes and large tears ran out under her lids and down her cheeks. "It's not that so m-much," she said. "It's just... leaving, never coming back. We've been here all our lives. It isn't like... like moving. We can't come back. Ever." "Listen, darling," his voice was tense and hurried, "you know as well as I do. In a matter of years, maybe less, there's going to be another war, a terrible one. There won't be a thing left. We have to leave. For our children, for ourselves...'..." He paused, testing the words in his mind. "For the future of life itself," he finished weakly. He was sorry he said it. Early on a prosaic morning, over everyday food, that kind of talk didn't sound right. Even if it was true. "Just don't be afraid," he said. "We'll be all right." She squeezed his hand. "I know," she said quietly. "I know." There were footsteps coming toward them. He pulled out a tissue and gave it to her. She hastily dabbed at her face. The door slid open. The neighbors and their son and daughter came in. The children were excited. They had trouble keeping it down. "Good morning," the neighbor said. The neighbor's wife went to his wife and the two of them went over by the window and talked in low voices. The children stood around, fidgeted, and looked nervously at each other. "You've eaten?" he asked his neighbor. "Yes," his neighbor said. "Don't you think we'd better be going?" "I suppose so," he said. They left all the dishes on the table. His wife went upstairs and got outer garments for the family. He and his wife stayed on the porch a moment while the rest went out to the ground car. "Should we lock the door?" he asked. She smiled helplessly and ran a hand through her hair. She shrugged helplessly. "Does it matter?" He locked the door and followed her down the walk. She turned as he came up to her. "It's a nice house," she murmured. "Don't think about it," he said. They turned their backs on their home and got in the ground car: "Did you lock it?" asked the neighbor. "Yes." The neighbor smiled wryly. "So did we," he said. "I tried not to, but then I had to go back." They moved through the quiet streets. The edges of the sky were beginning to redden. The neighbor's wife and the four children were in back. His wife and the neighbor were in front with him. "Going to be a nice day," said his neighbor. "I suppose so," he said. "Have you told your children?" the neighbor asked softly. "Of course not." ' "I haven't, I haven't," insisted his neighbor. "I was just asking." "Oh."  They rode in silence a while. "Do you ever get the feeling that we're... running out?" asked the neighbor. He tightened. "No," he said. "No! We're the ones who were run out on -- all of us." "I guess it's better not to talk about it," his neighbor said hastily. "Much better," he said. As they drove up to the guardhouse at the gate, he turned to the back. "Remember," he said, "not a word from any of you." T HE guard, sleepy and not caring much, recognized him right away as the chief test pilot for the new ship. That was enough. The family was coming down to watch him off, he told the guard. No objection. The guard let them drive to the ship's platform. The car stopped under the huge columns. They all got out and stared up. Far above them, its nose pointed toward the sky, the great metal ship was just beginning to reflect the early morning glow. "Let's go," he said. "Quickly." As they hurried toward the ship's elevator, he stopped for a moment to look back. The guard house looked deserted. He looked around at everything and tried to fix it all in his memory. He bent over and picked up some dirt. He put it in his pocket. "Good-bye," he whispered. He ran to the elevator. The doors shut in front of them. There was no sound in the rising cubicle but the hum of the motor and a few self-conscious coughs from the children. He looked down at them. To have to leave so young, he thought, unable to help. He closed his eyes. His wife's hand rested on his arm. He looked at her. Their eyes met and she smiled at him. "And I thought it would be difficult, " she whispered. The elevator shuddered to a stop. The doors slid open and they went out. It was getting lighter. He hurried them along the enclosed platform. They all climbed through the nar row doorway in the ship's side. He hesitated before following them. He wanted to say something fitting the moment. It burned in him to say something fitting the moment. There wasn't a thing to say. he pulled the door shut and turned the wheel tight. "That's it," he said. "Come on, everybody." Their footsteps echoed on the metal decks and ladders as they went up. to the control room. The children ran to the ports and looked out. They gasped when they saw how high they were. Their mothers stood behind them, looking down at the ground. Their eyes were frightened. The children's were not. "So high," said his daughter. He patted her head gently. "So high," he repeated. Then he. turned abruptly and went over to the instrument panel. He stood there, hesitantly. He heard someone come up behind him. "Shouldn't we tell the children?" asked his wife. "Shouldn't we let them know it's their last look?" "Go ahead," he said. He waited to hear her footsteps. There were none. He turned. She kissed him on the cheek. Then she went to tell the children. He threw over the switch. Deep in the belly of the ship, a spark ignited the fuel. A concentrated rush of gas flooded from the vents. The bulkheads began to shake. He heard his daughter crying. He tried not to listen, extended a trembling hand toward the lever, then glanced back suddenly. They were all staring at him. He put his hand on the lever and threw it over. The ship quivered a brief second and then they felt it rush along the smooth incline. It flashed into the air, faster and faster. They all heard the wind rushing past. He watched the children turn to the ports and look out again. "Good-bye," they said. He sank down wearily at the control panel. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his neighbor sit down next to him. "You know just where we're going?" his neighbor asked. "On that chart there." His neighbor looked at the chart. His eyebrows wiggled in surprise. "Another solar system?" "That's right. There's a planet there with an oxygen atmosphere that can support our kind of life. We'll probably have it all to ourselves. No hatred. No war." "We'll be safe," his neighbor said. "And the race will be safe." He nodded and looked back at his and his neighbor's family. They were still staring out the ports. "I said," his neighbor repeated, "which one of these planets is it?" He leaned over the chart, pointed. "That small one there," he said. "This one, third from the sun?"' "That's  right," he said. "The green planet with the single moon." i Friend, Foe or Fantasy? Science Fiction have asked me to open the Flying Saucer Season by sniffing out the scent of the quarry, to be followed by as many bloodhound readers as may wish to join in the hunt. Fine. I approve of the hunt. Neither a cynical nor a credulous attitude is justified in considering the Flying Saucer mystery. For one thing, about four hundred eyewitness reports have been collected. If we say that the average number of witnesses per case was three, about # persons claim to have seen these objects. One has to assume, therefore, where there is so much smoke, there must be fire somewhere. Possibly several fires, for the persons who claim to have seen "un-. identified objects" (to use a neutral term) do not agree as to size and shape. There is no question that most of the witnesses told the truth as they thought they saw it, and what they saw, or thought they saw, clearly falls into three groups: Group One: -- Lights in the sky, generally round and without anything visible attached to them, sometimes "flying in formation," reminiscent of those strange "fiery balls" which Allied pilots saw near the wingtips of their airplanes during the last few weeks of World War II in Europe. They were called "Foo Fighters" and believed to be a secret German weapon -- but they never did anything. Group Two: -- Round or oval objects that looked metallic, flying at high speed, generally at a very high altitude, estimates of size ranging from # to # feet in diameter. Group Three: -- Rocket-shaped craftwithout wings, larger in size than known military and research craft, doubly strange because they were seen in areas far away from rocket testing grounds, where experiments of such type might be conducted. The fact that the observers do not agree makes it unlikely that one over-all explanation will fit every case. By a convenient coincidence, the explanations advanced' so far also fall into three categories... or four, if you want to include the idea that they might be Russian missiles, which I discount from the outset. Even before China turned communist, the Soviet Union had roughly three times the land area of the United States. It has room enough to test new weapons without using our hemisphere. And if it did have such swift and powerful missiles, the cold war would have grown hot some time ago. T HE three other explanations are: (#) that the witnesses saw phenomena which are known, but not known to them; (#) that the Saucers are a secret American development; (#) that they are spaceships from another planet. The first explanation probably accounts for a large percentage of the reports, those originating from people not professionally connected with aeronautics, meteorology and related sciences. They may have seen radar targets, Navy "skyhook" balloons which are of huge size, rare cloud formations, and even, on occasion, actual meteorites, without being able to identify them. Personally, I believe that the few reports of "luminous disks flying in formation," especially, are due to such a mistake. Meteorological instruments normally are carried by one balloon, but in special cases, clusters of five, six or more balloons are used. I consider it possible that such a balloon cluster, at maximum altitude (which means that the balloons are expanded to bursting point and therefore almost transparent) could produce an optical effect on a lower cloud layer which would look like luminous disks in formation. The second explanation has two advantages. It is the easiest and also the most pleasant to believe in. The assumption that the disks are a U. S. military development which should not have been seen in the first place seems to explain why the attitude of official' quarters ranges from semisilence to outright debunking. It does, however, have a major disadvantage -- it is very hard to imagine why a military missile should be given this peculiar shape. The third explanation, championed by Donald Keyhoe in magazine and book analyses, is also quite # appealing, particularly to the . science fiction faithful. If the disks were spaceships from another planet, one can easily think of a number of reasons why they have avoided any contact with us. The atmospheric pressure of Earth, for example, might be too high -- or too low -- for them. Perhaps there is too much moisture in our air. They might need more ultra-violet light than they would get here below the ozone layer, which is at about # foot altitude. The third explanation would also clarify a number of very old reports of "airships" dating back even before the invention of the balloon. But that explanation also suffers from a drawback. While' we probably cannot yet build an atomicpowered rocket, we do have some idea of what such an atomic rocket motor could do. And then it turns out that a #-foot disk, even with a super-excellent atomic reaction engine, could barely make the moon, and a #-foot disk might just get to either Mars or Venus. phere through which no astronomer has yet looked, but we have reasons to believe that the climate below that impenetrable atmosphere is not congenial to living beings with a body chemistry like ours, not to say intelligent beings. Mars has a thin and completely transparent atmosphere,but if it had inhabitants which could build atomic-powered spacecraft, we should see some other activity, too. And it is at least doubtful whether anybody ever ' did, since the phenomena observed on Mars can be explained more believably as natural occurrences than otherwise. Therefore -- the disks would probably have to be interstellar fasterthan-light ships, in which case I would expect them to be about half a mile long, and, to date, none has been reported that size. Where does this leave us? Back approximately where we started. However, several factors in my argument must be pointed out for scientific objectivity: (#) I have never seen a Flying Saucer myself, nor do I know anybody who has; (#) there may be more than one type of missile involved, which would explain the conflicting reports; (#) I have only known propulsive and design principles and life forms to base my reasoning on; (#) my personal belief that many reports are based on mistaken identity does not explain the rest. The simple truth is that I don't know what to think. But, as I said at the beginning, the editors of clared open season on Flying Saucers. Somebody, somewhere, may be hoarding an explanation that explains all. Possibly the ingenious and extremely desirable prizes will lure out that explanation. What is your theory? fp This contest is meant to gain readers, certainly, but it is neither a stunt nor a hoax. Willy Ley, who introduces the contest, was a founding member and vice-president of the German Rocket Society fiction film; "The Girl in the Moon"; and , since coming to this country in # # has devoted himself to research engineering for rocket development. His newest book, "Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel," is due at the end of #, and adds important data to the valuable literature he has already produced on this subject. When a recognized authority considers Flying Saucers a serious phenomenon, research of some kind is indicated.  As magazine editors we are limited to exploration of opinion, and this we undertake in no spirit of hoax whatever. We feel, as Mr. Ley does, that "somebody, somewhere, may be hoarding an explanation that explains all. Possibly the ingenious and extremely desirable prizes offered will lure out that explanation."  And we repeat with Mr. Ley: "What is your theory?" Tell us in # words or less, basing your explanation on one of Willy Ley's three hypotheses... or do you have one of your own? #. Your theory on Flying Saucers must be contained in a letter of # words or less and must be accompanied by the coupon printed below. (Kindly print your name and address.)  Flying Saucer Contest, World Editions, Inc., Box No. #, Brooklyn #, New York. # . Entries will be selected on the basis of originality, aptness to the subject, general interest, neatness and legibility. # . There will be a total of # prizes awarded in the order listed below. Each winner of the first three prizes will receive an additional prize of # iFHis or her answer is accompanied by a year's subscription to low.) # . Winners will be notified by mail, and all necessary arrangements will be made for the award of prizes as stipulated. # . In the case of merchandise awards, prizes are transferable. # . The decision of the judges will be final. All entries become the property of World Editions, Inc. and no entries will be returned. # . Any individual may compete with the following exceptions : Employees of World Editions, Inc., and members of their immediate families ; employees of Advertising Distributors of America, Inc. (the judges of this contest) and members of their immediate families. #. All entries must be postmarked not later than midnight, October #, #, and must be covered by adequate postage. World Editions, Inc., Box No. #, Brooklyn #, N. Y. I am enclosing # (check op-money order) for a year's subscription (# issues) to a special additional prize of # will be awarded to each winner . #. A three-day all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to famous Mt. Wilson Observatory, near Hollywood California. #. A three-day all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to fascinating Marine Laboratory at Wood's Hole, Mass., including underwater descent with opportunity to view marine life in native habitat. #. A three-day all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to a government-approved atomic energy laboratory center. #. Three studio portraits of you, in color, (huge #x# photographs) using the sensational new Larjachrome process of colorprint enlargement. (Worth over #.) #. Six professional photographs of you taken by Phil Pegler, topflight New York photographer, at cyclotron center. #. A ride in a sky-writing plane, piloted by one of America's bestknown skywriters, arranged by the Skywriting Corporation of America. #. An undersea trip on a late type U. S. submarine. # . A ride in a helicopter plane arranged by the Gyrodyne Company of America. #. A flight over New York City's skyscrapers in the famous Flamingo Orange Juice Dirigible. (For two ninth prize winners.) #. Two No. # Larjachrome kits for magnificent color prints enlarged from #x# Kodachrome cut film transparencies -- a sensational new process. (One each to two tenth prize winners.) #. A three-day course in beauty and make-up at New York's glamorous Barbizon School of Fashion Modeling. #. Specially arranged tour through Television studios, including stand-by visit in control room during telecast, and guest appearance in show. # to #. Six No. # Larjachrome kits (same as those mentioned above) for #mm. and Bantam Kodachrome transparencies. (One to each winner.) # to #. A twelve-months' subscription (one for each of # winCertain prizes may be subject to change in accordance with security policy. On Curbstone, going out meant a # year date! Every few years someone thinks to call me Charon. It never lasts. I guess I don't look the part. Charon, you'll remember, was the somber ferryman who steered the boat across the River Styx, taking the departed souls over to the Other Side . He's usually pictured as a grim, taciturn character, tall and gaunt. I get called Charon, but that's not what I look like. I'm not exactly taciturn, and I don't go around in a flapping black cloak. I'm too fat. Maybe too old, too. It's, a shreivd gag, though, calling me Charon. I do pass human souls Out, and for nearly half of them , the stars are indeed the Styx -- they will never return. I have two things l know Charon had. One is that bitter difference from the souls I deal with. They have lost only one world; the other is before them. But I'm rejected by both. The other thing has to do with a little-knoivn fragment of the Charon legend. And that, I think, is worth a yarn. he was here to tell it himself -- of that around. There's plenty of which is foolish; the yarn's about everything. Even insecurity, though why he isn't here. "Here" is Curbyou have to come to Curbstone for stone, by the way -- the stepping-olf that, and be someone like Judson to place to the Other Side. It's Earth's boot. other slow satellite, bumbling along It's no secret -- now -- that inseout past the Moon. It was built curity is vital to the Curbstone proj# years ago for heavy interect. In a cushioned existence on a planetary transfer, though of course stable Earth, volunteers for Curbthere's not much of that left any stone are rare. But they come in -- more. It's so easy to synthesize anythe adventurous, the dissatisfied, the thing nowadays that there's just no yearning ones, to man the tiny ships call for imports. We make what we that will, in due time, give mankind a segment of space so huge that even mankind's voracious appetite for .expansion will be glutted for millenia. There is a vision that haunts all humans today -- that of a network of force-beams in the form of a tremendous sphere, encompassing much of the known universe and a great deal of the unknown -- through which, like thought impulses through the synaptic paths of a giant brain, matter will be transmitted instantly, and a man may step from here to the depths of space while his heart beats once. The vision frightens most and lures a few, and of those few, some are chosen to go out. Judson was chosen. I knew he'd come to Curbstone. I'd known it for years, ever since I was on Earth and met him. He was just a youngster then, thirty or so, and boiling around under that softspoken, shockproof surface of his was something that had to drive him to Curbstone. It showed when he  raised his eyes. They got hungry. Any kind of hunger is rare on Earth. That's what Curbstone's for. The ultimate social balance -- an escape for the unbalanced. Don't wince like that when I say 'unbalanced'. Plain talk is plain talk. You can afford to be mighty plain about social imbalance these days. It's rare and it's slight. Thing is, when a man goes through fifteen years of primary social -- childhood, I'm talking about -- with all the subtle tinkering that involves, and still has an imbalance, it's a thing that sticks with him no matter how slight it is. Even then, the very existence of Curbstone is enough to make most of 'em quite happy to stay where they are. The handful who do head for Curbstone do it because they have to. Once here, only about half make the final plunge. The rest go back -- or live here permanently. Whatever they do, Curbstone takes care of the imbalance. When you come right down to it, misfits are that way either because they lack something or because they have something extra. On Earth there's a place for everything and everything's in its place. On Curbstone you find someone who has what you lack, or who has the same extra something you have -- or you leave. You go back feeling that Earth's a pretty nice safe place after all, or you go Out, and ij: doesn't matter to anyone else, ever, whether you're happy or not. when Judson arrived on Curbstone. Judson had nothing to do with that. I didn't even know he was on that particular shuttle. It's just that, aside from the fact that I happen to be Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, I like to meet the shuttles. All sorts of people come here, for all sorts of reasons. They stay here or they don't for all sorts of other reasons. I like to look at the faces that come down that ramp and guess which ones will go which way. I'm pretty good at it. As soon as I saw Judson's face I knew that this boy was bound Out. I recognized that about him even before I realized who it was. There was a knot of us there to watch the newcomers come in. Most were there just because it's worth watching them all, the hesitant ones, the damn-it-alls, the grim ones. But two Curbstoners I noticed particularly. Hunters both. One was a lean, slick-haired boy named Wold. It was pretty obvious what he was hunting. The other was Flower. It was just as obvious what she had her long, wide-spaced eyes out for, but it was hard to tell why. Last I had heard, she had been solidly wrapped up in an Outbounder called Clinton. I forgot about the wolf and the vixen when I recognized Judson and bellowed at him. He dropped his kit where he stood and came bounding over to me. He grabbed both my biceps and squeezed while I thumped his ribs. "I was waiting up for you, Judson," I grinned at him. "#V T AN, I'm glad you're still #VJ. here," he said. He was a sandy-haired fellow, 'all Adam's apple and guarded eyes. "I'm here for the duration," I told him. "Didn't you know?" "No, I -- I mean..." "Don't be tactful, Jud," I said. "I belong here by virtue of the fact that there's nowhere else for me to go. Earth isn't happy about men as fat and funny-looking as I am in the era of beautiful people. And I can't go Out. I have a left axis deviation. I know that sounds political; actually it's cardiac." "I'm sorry." He looked at my brassard. "Well, you're Mr. Big around here, anyway." "I'm just big around here," I said, swatting my belt-line. "There's Coordination Office and a half-squad of Guardians who ice this particular cake. I'm just the final check on Outbounders." "Yeah," he said. "You don't rate. Much. The whole function of this space-station waits on whether you say yes to a departure." "Shecks now," I said, exaggerating my embarrassment to cover up my exaggerated embarrassment. "Whatever, I wouldn't worry too much if I were you. I could be wrong -- we'll have to run some more tests on you -- but if ever I saw an Outbounder, it's you." "Hi," said a silken voice. "You already know each other. How nice." I Flower. ; There was something vaguely rep-, tilian about Flower, which didn't take a thing from her brand of magnetism. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she was a so-so looking girl. Her eyes were too long, and so dark they seemed to be all pupil and the whites too white. Her nose was a bit too large and her chin a bit too small, but so help me, there never was a more perfect mouth. Her voice was like a 'cello bowed up near the bridge. She was tall, with a fragilein-the-m i d d I e slenderness and spring-steel flanks. The overall effect was breathtaking. I didn't like her. She didn't like me either. She never, spoke to me except on business, and I had practically no business with her. She'd been here a long time. I hadn't figured out why, then. But she wouldn't go Out and she wouldn't go back to Earth -- which in itself was all right; we had lots of room. L ET me tell you something about modem women and therefore something about Flower -- something you might not reason out unless you get as old and objective as I've somehow lived to become. Used to be, according to what I've read, that clothes ran a lot to what I might call indicative concealment. As long as clothes had the slightest excuse of functionalism, people in general and women in particular made a large fuss over something called innate modesty -- which never did exist; it had to be learned. But as long as there was weather around to blame clothes on, the myth 'was accepted. People exposed what the world was indifferent to in order to whip up interest in the rest. "Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty," one of the old books says. Clothes as weatherproofing got themselves all mixed up with clothes as ornament; fashions came and went and people followed them. But for the past three hundred years or so there hasn't been any "weather" as such, for anyone, here or on Earth. Clothes for only aesthetic purposes became more and more the rule, until today it's up to the individual to choose what he's going to wear, if anything. An earring and a tattoo are quite as acceptable in public as forty meters of iridescent plastiweb and a two-meter coiffure. Now, most people today are healthy, weJI-selected, and good to look at. Women are still as vain as ever. A woman with a bodily defect, real or imagined, has one of two choices: She can cover the defect with something artfully placed to look as if that was just the best place for it, or shecan leave the defect-in the open, knowing that no one todayis going to judge her completely in terms of the defect. Folks nowadays generally wait until they can find out what kind of a human being you are. But a woman who has no particular defect generally changes her clothes with her mood. It might be a sash only this morning, but a trailing drape this afternoon. Tomorrow it might be a one-sided blouse and clinging trousers. You can take it as a very significant thing when such a woman always covers up. She's keeping her natural warmth, as it were, under forced draft. I didn't go into all this ancient history to impress you with my scholastics. I'm using it to illustrate a very important facet of Flower's complex character. Because Flower was one of those forced-draft jobs. Except on the sun-field and in the swimming pools, where no one ever wears clothes, Flower always affected a tunic of some kind. The day Judson arrived, she wore a definitive example of what I mean. It was a single loose black garment with straight shoulders and no sleeves. On both sides, from a point a hand's-breath below the armpit, down to the hipbone, it was slit open. It fastened snugly under her throat with one magne-clasp, but was also slit from there to the navel. It did not quite reach to mid-thigh, and the soft material carried a light biostatic electrical charge, so that it clung to and fell away from her body as she moved. So help me, she was a walking demand for the revival of the extinct profession of peeping Tom. This, then, was what horned in on my first few words with Judson. I should have known from the way she looked that she was planning something -- something definitely for herself. I should have been doubly warned by the fact that she took the trouble to speak up just when she did -- just when I told Jud he was a certifiable Outbounder if I ever saw one. So then and there I made my big mistake. "Flower," I said, "this is Judson." She used the second it took me to speak to suck in her lower lip, so that when she smiled slowly at Jud, the lip swelled visibly as if by blood pressure. "I am glad," she all but whispered. And then she had the craft to turn the smile on me and walk away without another word. "... Gah!" said Judson through a tight glottis. "That," I told him, "was beautifully phrased. Gah, indeed. Reel your eyeballs back in, Jud. We'!! drop your duffel off at the Outbound quarters and -- Judson !" Flower had disappeared down the inner ramp. I was aware that Judson had just started to breathe again. "What?" he asked me. I waddled over and picked up his gear. "Come on," I said, and steered him by the arm. til after we found him a room and started for my sector. "Who is she?" "Ahardy perennial," I said. "Came up to Curbstone two years ago. She's never been certified. She'll get around to it soon -- or never. Are you going right ahead?" "Just how do you handle the certification ?" "Give you some stuff to read. Pound some more knowledge into you for six, seven nights while you sleep. Look pver your reflexes, physical and mental. An examination. If everything's all right, you're certified." "Then -- Out?" I shrugged. "If you like. You come to Curbstone strictly on your own. You take your course if and when you like. And after you've been certified, you leave when you want to, with someone or not, and without telling anyone unless you care to." "Man, when you people say 'voluntary' you're not just talking!" "There's no other way to handle a thing like this. And you can bet that we get more people Out this way than we ever would on a compulsory basis. In the long run, I mean, and this is a long-term project... six thousand years long." He walked silently for a time, and I was pretty sure I knew his thoughts. For Outbounders there is no return, and the best possible chance they have of survival is something like fifty-four per cent, a figure which was arrived at after calculations so complex that it might as well be called a guess. You don't force people Out against those odds. They go by themselves, driven by their own reasoning, or they don't go at all. ways thought Outbounders were assigned a ship and a departure time. With certified people leaving when. ever they feel like it, what's to prevent uncertified ones from doing it?" "That I'm about to show you." We passed the Coordination offices and headed out to the launching racks. They were shut off from Top Central Corridor by a massive gate. Over the gate floated three words in glowing letters: Seeing Jud's eyes on it, I explained, "The three levels of survival. They're in all of us. You can judge a man by the way be lines them up. The ones who have them in that order are the best. It's a good thought for Outbounders to take away with them." I watched his face. "Particularly since it's always the third item that brings 'em this far." Jud smiled slowly. "Along with all that bumbling you carry a sting, don't you?" "Mine is a peculiar job," I grinned back. "Come on in." I put my palm on the key-plate. It tingled for a brief, moment and then the shining doors slid back. J .rolled through, stopping just inside the launching court at Judson's startled yelp. "Well, come on," I said. He stood just inside the doors, straining mightily against nothing at all. "Wh -- wh -- ?" His arms were spread and his feet slipped as if he were trying to force his way through a steel wall. Actually he was working on something a good deal stronger than that. "That's the answer to why uncertified people don't go Out," I told him. "The plate outside scanned the whorls and lines of my hand. The field you're muscling passed me through. It'll pass anyone who's certified, too, but no one else. Now stop pushing or you'll suddenly fall on your face." I stepped to the left bulkhead and palmed the plate there, then beckoned to Judson. He approached the invisible barrier timidly. It wasn't there. He came all the way through, and I took my hand off the scanner. "That second plate," I explained, "works for me and certified people only. There's no way for an uncertified person to get into the launching court unless I bring him in personally. It's as simple as that. When the certified are good and ready, they go. If they want to go Out with a banquet and a parade beforehand, they can. If they want to roll out of bed some night and slip Out quietly, they can. Most of 'em do it quietly. Come on and have a look at the ships." row of low doorways along the far wall. I opened one at random and we stepped into the ship. "It's just a room!" "They all say that," I chuckled. "I suppose you expected a planettype space job, only more elaborate." "#' thought they'd at least look like ships. This is a. double room out of some luxury hotel." "It's that, and then some." . I showed him around -- the capacious food lockers, the automatic air recirculators, , and, most comforting of all, the synthesizer, which meant food, fuel, tools and materials converted directly from energy to matter. "Curbstone's more than a space station, Jud. It's a factory, for one thing. When you decide to go on your way, you'll flip that lever by the door. (You'll be catapulted out -- you won't feel it, because of the stasis generator and artificial gravity.) As soon as you're gone, another ship will come up from below into this slot. By the time you're clear of Curbstone's gravitic field and slip into hyper-drive, the new ship'll be waiting for passengers." "And that will be going on for six thousand years?" "More or less." "That's a powerful lot of ships." "As long as Outbounders keep the quota, it is indeed. Nine hundred thousand -- including forty-six per cent failure." "Failure," said Jud. He looked at me and I held his gaze. "Yes," I said. "The forty-six per cent who are not expected to get where they are going. The ones who materialize inside solid matter. The ones who go into the space-time nexus and never come out. The ones who reach their assigned synaptic junction and wait, and wait, and wait until they die of old age because no one gets to them soon enough. The ones who go mad and kill themselves or their shipmates." I spread my hands. "The forty-six per cent." "You can convince a man of danger," said Judson evenly, "but nobody ever believed he was really and truly going to die. Death is something that happens to other people. I won't be one of the forty-six per cent." That was Judson. I wish he was still here. I let the remark lie there on the thick carpet and went on with my guided tour. I showed him the casing of the intricate beam-power apparatus that contained the whole reason for the project, 'and gave him a preliminary look at the astrogational and manual maneuvering equipment and controls. "But don't bother your pretty little head about it just now," .I added. "It'll all be crammed into you before you get certified." We went back to the court, closing the door of the ship behind us. "There's a lot of stuff piled into those ships," I observed, "but the one thing that can't be packed in sardine-size is the hyper-drive. I suppose you know that." "I've heard something about it. The initial kick into second-order space comes from the station here, doesn't it? But how is the ship returned to normal space on arrival?" "That's technology so refined it sounds like mysticism," I answered. "I don't begin to understand it. I can give you an analogy, though. It takes a power source, a compression device, and valving to fill a pneumatic tire. It takes a plain nail to let the air out again. See what I mean ?" "Vaguely. Anyway, the important thing is that Outbound is strictly one way. Those ships never come back. Right?" "So right." One of the doors behind us opened, and a girl stepped out of a ship. "Oh... I didn't know there was anyone here!" she said, and came toward us with a long, easy stride. "Am I in the way?" -- in the way, Tween?" I X answered. "Not a chance." I was very fond of Tween. To these jaded old eyes she was one of the loveliest things that ever happened. Two centuries ago, before variation limits were as rigidly set as they are now, Eugenics dreamed up her kind -- olive-skinned truebreeds with the silver hair and deep ruby eyes of an albino. It was an experiment they should never have stopped. Albinoism wasn't dominant, but in Tween it had come out strongly. She wore her hair long -- really long; she could tuck the ends of it under her toes and stand up straight when it was loose. Now it was braided in two ingenious halves of a coronet that looked like real silver. Around her throat and streaming behind her as she walked was a single length of flame-colored material. "This is Judson, Tween," I said. "We were friends back on Earth. What are you up to?" She laughed, a captivating, selfconscious laugh. "I was sitting in a ship pretending that it was Outside. We'd looked at each other one day and suddenly said, 'Let's!' and off we'd gone." Her face was luminous. "It was lovely. And that's just what we're going to do one of these days. You'll see." " 'We' ? Oh -- you mean Wold." "Wold," she breathed, and I wished, , briefly and sharply, that someone, somewhere, someday would speak my name like that. And on the heels of that reaction came the mental picture of Wold as I had seen him an hour before, slick and smooth, watching the shuttle passengers with his dark hunting eyes. There was nothing I could say, though. My duties have their limits. If Wold didn't know a good thing when he saw it, that was his hard luck. But looking at that shining face, I knew it would be her hard luck. "You're certified?" Judson asked, awed. "Oh, yes," she smiled, and I said, "Sure is, Jud. But she had her troubles, didn't you, Tween?" We started for the gate. "I did indeed," said Tween. (I loved hearing her talk. There was a comforting, restful quality to her speech like silence when an unnoticed, irritating noise disappears.) "I just didn't have the logical aptitudes when I first came. Some things just wouldn't stick in my head, even in hypnopedia. All the facts in the universe won't help if you don't know how to put them together." She grinned. "I used to hate you." "Don't blame you a bit." I nudged Judson. "I turned down her certification eight times. She used to come to my office to get the bad news, and she'd stand there after I'd told her and shuffle her feet and gulp a little bit. And the first thing she said then was always, 'Well, when can I start retraining?' " S HE flushed, laughing. "You're telling secrets!" Judson touched her. "It's all right. I don't think less of you for any of his maunderings... You must have wanted that certificate very much." "Yes," she said. "Very much.". "Could -- could I ask why?" She looked at him, in him, through him, past him. "AH our lives," she said quietly, "are safe and sure and small. This -- " she waved back towards the ships -- "is the only thing in our experience that's none of those things. I could give you fifty reasons for going Out. But I .think they all come down to that one." We were silent for a moment, and then I said, "I'll put that in my notebook, Tween. You couldn't be more right. Modern life gives us infinite variety in everything except the magnitude of the things we do. And that stays pretty tiny." And, I thought, big, fat, superannuated station officials, rejected by one world and unqualified for the next. A small chore for a small mind. "The .only reason most of us do puny things and think puny thoughts," Judson was saying, "is that Earth has too few jobs like his in these efficient times." "Too few men like him for jobs like his," Tween corrected. I blinked at them both. It was me they were talking about. I don't think I changed expression much, but I felt as warm as the color of Tween's eyes. Tween first with never a thought for the barrier which did not exist for her, then Judson, waiting cautiously for my go-ahead after the inside scanning plate had examined the whorjs and lines of my 'hand. I followed, and the great gates closed behind us. "Want to come up to the office?" I asked Tween when we reached Central Corridor. "Thanks, no," she said. "I'm going to find Wold." She turned to Judson. "You'll be certified quickly," she told him. "I just know. But, Judson -- " "Say it, whatever it is," said Jud, sensing her hesitation. "I was going to say get certified first. Don't try to decide anything else before that. You'llhave to take my word for it, but nothing that ever happened to you is quite like the knowledge that you're free to go through those gates any time you feel like it." Judson' s face assumed a slightly puzzled, slightly stubborn expression. It disappeared, and I knew it was a conscious effort for him to do it. Then he put out his hand and touched her heavy silver hair. "Thanks," he said. She strode off,the carriage of her head telling us that her face .was eager as she went to Wold. At the turn of the corridor she waved and was gone... "I'm going to miss that girl," I said, and turned back to Judson. The puzzled, stubborn look was back, full force. "What's the matter?" "What did she mean by that sisterly advice about getting certified first ? What else would I have to decide about right now?" I swatted his shoulder. "Don't let it bother you, Jud. She sees something in you that youcan't see yourself, yet." That didn't satisfy him at all. "Like what?" When I didn't answer, he asked, "You see it, too, don't you?" We started up the ramp to my office. "I like you," I said. "I liked you the minute I laid eyes on you, years ago, when you were just a sprout." "You've changed the subject." "Hell I have. Now let me save my wind forthe ramp." This was only slightly a stall. As the years went by, that ramp seemed to get steeper and steeper. Twice Coordination had offered to power it for me and I'd refused haughtily. I could see the time coming when I was going to be too heavy for my high-horse. All the same, I was glad for the chance to stall my answer to Judson's question. The answer lay in my liking him; I knew that instinctively. But it needed thinking through. We've conditioned ourselves too much to analyze our dislikes and to take our likes for granted. T H)E outer door opened as we approached. There was a man waiting in the appointment foyer, a big fellow with a gray cape and a golden circlet around his blue-black hair. "Clinton!" I said. "How are. you, son? Waiting for me?" The inner door opened for me and I went into my office, Clinton behind me. I fell down in my specially molded chair and waved him to a relaxer. At the door Judson cleared his throat. "Shall I -- uh..." Clinton looked up swiftly, an annoyed, tense motion. He raked a blazing hlue gaze across Jud, and his expression changed. "Come in, for God's sake. Newcomer, hm? Sit down. Listen. You can't learn enough about this project. Or these people. Or the kind of flat spin an Outbounder can get himself into." "Clint, this's Judson," I said. "Jud, Clint's about the itchy-footedest Outbounder of them all. What is on your mind, son?" Clinton wet his lips. "How's about me heading Out -- alone?" I said, "Your privilege, if you think you'll enjoy it." He smacked a heavy fist into his palm. "Good, then." "Of course," I said, looking at the overhead, "the ships are built for two. I'd personally be a bit troubled about the prospect of spending -- uh -- however long it might be, staring at that empty bunk across the way. Specially," I added loudly, to interrupt what he was going to say, "if I had to spend some .hours or weeks or maybe a decade with the knowledge thatI was alone because I took off with a mad on." "This isn't what you might call a fit of pique," snapped Clinton. "It's been years building -- first because I had a need and recognized it; second because the need got greater when I started to work toward filling it; third because I found who and what would satisfy it; fourth because I was so wrong on point three." "You are wrong? Or you're afraid you're wrong?" He looked at me blankly. "I don't know," he said, all the snap gone out of his voice. "Not for sure." "Well, then, you've no real problem. All you do is ask yourself whether it's worthwhile to take off alone because of a problem you haven't solved. If it is, go ahead." He rose and went to the door. "Clinton!" My voice must have crackled; he stopped without turning, and from the corner of my eye I saw Judson sit up abruptly. I said, more quietly, "When Judson here suggested that he go away and leave us alone, why did you tell him to come in? What did you see in him that made you do it?" Clinton's thoughtfully slotted eyes hardly masked their blazing blue as he turned them on Judson, who squirmed like a schoolboy. Clinton said, "I think it's because he looks as if he can be reached. And trusted. That answer you?" "It does." I , waved him out cheerfully. Judson said, "You have an awesome way of operating." "On him?" "On both of us. How do you know what you did by turning his problem back on himself? He's likely to go straight to the launchingcourt." "He won't." "You're sure?" "Of course I'm sure," I said flatly. "If Clinton hadn't already decided not to take off alone -- not today, anyhow -- he wouldn't have come to see me and get argued out of it." "What's really bothering him?" "I can't say." I wouldn't say. Not to Judson. Not now, at least. Clinton was ripe to leave, and he was the kind to act when ready. He had found what he thought was the perfect human being for him to go with. She wasn't ready to go. She never in all time and eternity would be readyto go. "All right," said Jud. "What about me? That was very embarrassing." when you don't know exactly how to phrase something for yourself, you can shock a stranger into doing it for you. Why did Ilike you on sight, years ago, and now, too? Why did Clinton feel you were trustworthy? Why did Tween feel free to pass you some advice -- and what prompted the advice? Why did -- " No. Don't mention the most significant one of all. Leave her out of it. " -- Well, there's no point in itemizing all afternoon. Clinton said it. You can be reached. Practically anyone meeting you knows -- feels, anyhow -- that you can be reached... touched... affected. We like feeling that we have an effect on someone." Judson closed his eyes, screwed I up his brow. I knew he was digging around in his memory, thinking of close and casual acquaintances... how many . of them... how much they had meant to him and he to t!.-:m. He looked at me. "Should I change?" "God, no! Only -- don't let it be too true. I think that's what Tween was driving at when she said not to jump at any decisions until you've reached the comparative serenity of certification." . "Serenity... I could use some of that," he murmured. "Jud." "Mm?" "Did you ever try to put into one simple statement just why you came to Curbstone?" He looked startled. Like most people, he had been living, and living ardently, without ever wondering particularly what for. And like most people, he had sooner or later had to answer the jackpot question: "What am I doing here?" ' X no, that wouldn't be a simple statement." "All right. Run it off, anyway. A simple statement will come out of it if there's anything really important there. Any basic is simple, Jud. Every basic is important. Complicated matters may be fascinating, frightening, funny, intriguing, worrisome, educational, or what have you; but if they're complicated, they are, by definition, not important.'-' He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. His hands wound tightly around one another, and his head went down. "I came here... looking for something. Not because' I thought it was here. There was just nowhere else left to look. Earth is under such strict discipline... discipline by comfort; discipline by constructive luxury. Every need is taken care of that you can name, and no one seems to understand that the needs you can't name are the important ones. And all Earth is in a state of arrested development because of Curbstone. Everything is held in check. The status quo rules because for six thousand years it must and will. Six thousand years of physical and social evolution will be sacrificed for the single tremendous step that Curbstone makes possible. And I couldn't find a place for myself in the static part of the plan, so the only place for me to go was to the active part." He was quiet so long after that, I felt I had to nudge him along. "Could it be that there is a way to make you happy on Earth, and you just haven't been able to find it?" "Oh, no," he said positively. Then he raised his head and stared at me. "Wait a minute. You're very close to the mark there. That -- that simple statement is trying to crawl out." He frowned. This time I kept my mouth shut and watched him. "The something I'm looking for," he said finally, in the surest tones he'd used yet, "is something I lack, or something I have that I haven't been able to name yet. If there's anything on Earth or here that can fill that hollow place, and if I find it, I won't want to go Out.  won't need to go -- I shouldn't go. But if it doesn't exist for me here, then Out I go, as part of a big something, rather than as a something missing a part. Wait!" He chewed his lower lip. His knuckle-joints crackled as he twisted his hands together. "I'll rephrase that and you'll have your simple statement." He took a deep breath and said, "I came to Curbstone to find out... whether there's something I haven't had yet that belongs to me, or whether I... belong to something that hasn't had me yet." "Fine," I said. "Very damned fine. You keep looking, Jud. The answer's here, somewhere, in some form. I've never heard it put better: Do you owe, or are you owed? There are three possible courses open to you, no matter which way you decide." "There are? Three?" I put up fingers one at a time. "Earth. Here. Out." "I -- see." "And you can take the course of any one of the words you saw floating over the gate to the launching court." He stood up. "I've got a lot to think about." " "You have." "But I've got me one hell of a blueprint." I just grinned at him. "You through with me?" he asked. "For now." "When do I start work for my certificate?" "At the moment, you're just about four-ninths through." "You dog! All this has been -- " "I'm a working man, Jud. I work all the time. Now beat it. You.'ll hear from me." "You dog," he said again. "You old AorW-dog!" But he left. I sat back to think. I thought about Judson, of course. And Clinton and his worrisome solo ideas. The trip can be done solo, but it isn't a good idea. The human mind's communications equipment isn't a convenience -- it's a vital necessity. Tween. How beautiful can a girl get? And the way she lights up when she thinks about going Out. She's certified now. Guess she and Wold will be taking off any time now. Then my mind spun back to Flower. Put those pieces together... something should fit. Turn it this way, back -- Ah! Clinton wants Out. He's been waiting and waiting for his girl to get certified. She hasn't even tried. He's not going to wait much longer. Who's his girl now...? Flower. Flower, who turned all that heat on Judson. Why Judson? There were bigger men, smarter, better-looking ones. What was special about Judson? I filed the whole item away in my mind -- with a red priority tab on it. T HE days went by. A gong chimed and the number-board over my desk glowed. I didn't have to look up the numbers to know who it was. Fort and Mariellen. Nice kids. Slipped Out during a sleep period. I thought about them, watched the chain of checking lights at flicker on, one after another. Palmpatterns removed from the Gate scanner; they'd never be used there again. Ship replaced. Quarters cleared 'and readied. Launching time reported to Coordination. Marriage recorded. Automatic machinery calculated, filed, punched cards, activated more automatic machinery until Fort and Mariellen were only axial alignments on the molecules of a magnetic tape... names... memories... dead, perhaps; gone, certainly, for the next six thousand years. Hold tight, Earth! Wait for them, the fifty-four per cent (I hope, I ardently hope) who will come back. Their relatives, their Earthbound friends will be long dead, and all their children and theirs; so let the Outbounders come home at least to the same Earth, the same language, the same traditions. They will be the millennial traditions of a morethan-Earth, the source of the unthinkable spatial sphere made fingertipavailable to humankind through the efforts of the Outbounders. Earth is prepaying six thousand years of progress in exchange for the ability to use stars for steppingstones, to be able to make Mars in a minute, Antares and Betelgeuse afternoon stops in a delivery run. Six. thousand years of sacred stasis buys all but a universe, conquers Time, eliminates the fractionation of humanity into ship-riding, minuteshackled fragments of diverging evolution among the stars. All the stars will be in the next room when the Outbounders return. Six thousand times around Sol, with Sol moving in a moving galaxy, and the galaxy in flight through a fluxing universe. That all amounts to a resultant movement of Earth through nine Mollner degrees around the Universal Curve. For six thousand years Curbstone flings off its tiny ships, its monstrous powerplant kicking them into space-time and the automatics holding them there until all -- or until enough -- are positioned. Some will materialize in the known universe and some' in faintly suspected nebulae; some will appear in the empty nothingnesses beyond the galactic clusters, and some will burst into normal space inside molten suns. B UT when the time comes, and the little ships are positioned in a great spherical pattern out around space, and together they become real again, they will send to each other a blaze of tight-beam energy. Like the wiring of a great switchboard, like the synapses of a brain, each beam will find its neighbors, and through them Earth. And then, within and all through that sphere, humanity will spread, stepping from rim to rim of the universe in seconds, instantaneously transmitting men and materials from and to the stars. Here a ship can be sent piecemeal and assembled, there a space-station. Yonder, on some unheard-of planet of an unknown star. men light years away from Earth can assemble matter transceivers and hook them up to the great sphere, and add yet another world to those already" visited. A ND what of the Outbounders? Real time, six thousand years. Ship's time, from second-order spatial entry to materialization -- zero. Fort and Mariellen. Nice kids. Memories now; lights on a board, one after another, until they're all accounted for. At Curbstone, the quiet machinery says, "Next!" Fort and Mariellen. Clinging together, they press down the launching lever...Effortlessly in their launching, they whirl away from Curbstone. In minutes there is a flicker of gray, or perhaps not even that. Strange stars surround them. They .stare at one another. They are elsewhere... el sewhen. Lights glow. This one says the tight-beam has gone on, pouring out toward the neighbors and, through them, to all the others. That one cries "emergency" and Fort, whips to the manual controls and does what he can to avoid a dust-cloud, a planet... perhaps an alien ship. Fort and Mariellen (or George and Viki, or Bruce, who went Out by himself, or Eleanor and Grace, or Sam and Rod -- they were brothers) may materialize and die in an intolerable matter-displacement explosion so quickly that there is no time for pain. They may be holed by a meteor and watch, with glazing freezing eyes, the froth bubbling up from each other's bursting lungs. They may survive for minutes or weeks, and then fall captive to some giant planet or unsuspected sun. They may be hunted down and killed or captured by beings undreamed of. And Some of them will survive all this and wait for the blessed contact; the strident heralding of the matter transceiver with which each ship is equipped -- and the abrupt appearance of a man, sixty centuries unborn when they left Curbstone, instantly transmitted from Earth to their vessel. Back with him they'll go, to an unchanged and of trained, mature humans ready to fill the universe with human ways -- the new humans who have left war and greed behind them, who have acquired a universe so huge that they need exploit no creature's properties, so rich and availableis everything they require. And some will survive, and wait, and die waiting because of some remotely extrapolated miscalculation. The beams never reach them; their beams contact nothing. And perhaps a few of these will not die, but will find refuge on some planet to leave a marker that will shock whatever years hence. Perhaps they will leave more than that. Perhaps there will be a slower, more hazardous planting of humanity in the gulfs. But fifty-four per cent, the calculations insist, will establish the starconquering sphere and return. T HE weeks went by. A chime: Bark and Barbara. Damn it all, no more of Barbara's banana cream pie. The filing, the sweeping, the recording, the lights. Marriage recorded. When a man and a woman go Out together, that is marriage. There is another way to be married on Curbstone. There is a touch less speed involved in it than in joined hands pressing down a launching lever. There is not one whit less solemnity. It means what it means because it is not stamped with necessity. Children derive their names from their mothers, wed or not, and there is no distinction. Men and women, as responsible adults, do as they please within limits which are extremely wide. Except... By arduous trial and tragic error, humanity has evolved modern marriage. With social pressure removed from the pursuit of a mate, with the end of the ribald persecution of spinsterhood, a marriage ceases to be a rubber stamp upon what people are sure to do, with or without ceremonies. Where men and women are free to seek their own company, as and when they choose, without social penalties, they will not be trapped into hypocrisies with marriage vows. Under such conditions a marriage is entered gravely and with sincerity, and it constitutes a public statement of choice and -- with the full implementation of a mature society -- of inviolability. The lovely, ancient words "forsaking all others" spell out the nature of modern marriage, with the universally respected adjunct that fidelity is not a command or a restriction, but a chosen path. Divorce is swift and simple, and -- .almost unheard of. Married people live this way, single people live that way; the lines are drawn and deeply respected. People marry because they intend to live within the limits of marriage. The fact that a marriage exists is complete proof that it is working. I had a word about marriage with Tween. Ran into her in the Gate corridor. I think she'd been in one of the ships again. If she was pale, her olive skin hid it. If her eyes were bloodshot, the lustrous ruby of her eyes covered it up. Maybe I saw her dragging her feet as she walked, or some such. I took her chin in my hand and tilted her head back. "Any dragons I can kill?" which lived only on her lips. "I'm wonderful," she said bravely. "You are," I agreed. "Which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the way you feel. I won't pry, child; but tell me -- if you ever ate too many green apples, or stubbed your toe on a cactus, do you know a nice safe something you could hang on to while you cried it out?" "I do," she said breathlessly, mak# ing the smile just as hard as she could. "Oh, I do." She patted my cheek. "You're... listen. Would you tell me something if I asked you?" "About certificates? No, Tween. Not about anyone else's certificate. But -- all he has to do is complete his final hypnopediae, and he just hasn't showed up." She hated to hear it, but I'd made her laugh, too, a ' little. "Do you read minds, the way they all say?" "I do not. And if I could, I wouldn't. And if I couldn't help reading 'em. I'd sujre never act as if I could. In other words, no. It's just that I've been alive long enough to know what pushes people around. So's I don't care much about a person, I can judge pretty well what's bothering him. " 'Course," I added, "if I do give a damn, I can tell even better. Tween, you'll be getting married pretty soon, right?" Perhaps I shouldn't have said that. She gasped, and for a moment she just stopped making that smile. Then, "Oh, yes," she said brightly "Well, not exactly. What I mean is, when we go Out, you see, so we might as well not, and I imagine as soon as Wold gets his certificate, we'll... we kind of feel going Out is the best -- I seem to have gotten something in my eye. I'm s-sor..." I let her go. But when I saw Wold next -- it was , down in the Euphoria Sector -- I went up to him very cheerfully. There are ways I feel sometimes that make me real jayial. I laid my hand on his shoulder. His back bowed a bit and it seemed to me I felt vertebrae grinding together. "Wold, old boy," I said heartily. "Good to see you. You haven't been around much recently. Mad?" He pulled away from me. "A little," he said sullenly. His hair was too shiny and he had perfect teeth that always reminded me of a keyboard instrument. "Well, drop around," I said. "I like to see young folks get ahead. You," I added with a certain amount of emphasis, "have gone pretty damn far." "So have you," he said with even more emphasis. "Well,' then." I slapped him on the back. His eyeballs stayed in, which surprised me. "You can top me. You can go farther than I ever can. See you soon, old fellow." brown points of his gaze. And as it happened, not ten minutes later I saw that kakumba dance. I don't see much dancing usually, but there was an animal roar from the dance-chamber that stopped me, and I ducked in to see what had the public so charmed. The dance had gofie through most of its figures, with the caller already worked up into a froth and only three couples left. As I shouldered my way to a vantage point, one of the three couples was bounced, leaving the two best. One was a tall blonde with periwigged hair and subvoltaic bracelets that passed and repassed a clatter of pastel arcs; she was dancing with one of the armormonkeys from the Curbstone Hull Division, and they were good. The other couple featured a slender, fluid dark girl in an open tunic of deep brown. She moved so beautifully that I caught my breath, and watched so avidly that it was seconds before I realized that it was Flower. The reaction to that made me lose more seconds in realizing that her partner was Judson. Good as the other couple were, they were better. I'd tested Jud's reflexes, and they were phenomenal, but I'd had no idea he could respond like this to anything. # caller threw the solo light to the first couple. There was a wild burst of music dnd the arc-wielding blonde and her arc-wielding boy friend cut loose in an intricate frenzy of disjointed limbs and halfbeat stamping. So much happened between those two people so fast that I thpught they'd never get separated when the music stopped. But they untangled right with the closing bars, and a roar went up from the people watching them. And then the same blare of music was thrown at Jud and Flower. Judson simply stood back and folded his arms, walking out a simple figure to indicate that, honest, he was dancing, too. But he gave it all to Flower. Now I'll tell you what she did in a single sentence: she knelt before him and slowly stood up with her arms over her head. But words will never describe the process completely. It took her about twelve minutes to get all the way up. At the fourth .minute the crowd began to realize that her body was trembling. It wasn't a w'riggle or a shimmy, or anything as crude as that. It was a steady, apparently uncontrollable shiver. At about the eighth minute the audience began to realize it was controlled, and just how completely controlled it was. It was hypnotic, incredible. At the final crescendo she was on her tiptoes with her arms stretched high, and when the music stopped she made no flourish; she simply relaxed and stood still, smiling at Jud. Even from where I stood I could see the moisture on-Jud's face. A big man standing beside me grunted, a tight, painful sound. I turned to him; it was Clinton. Tension crawled through his jaw-muscles like a rat under a rug. I put my hand on his arm. It was rocky. "Clint." "Wh -- oh. Hi." "Thirsty?" "No," he said. He turned back to the dance floor, searched it with his eyes, found Flower. "Yes, you are, son," I said. "Come on." "Why don't you go and -- " He got hold of himself. "You're right. I am thirsty." We went to the almost deserted Card Room and dispensed ourselves some methyl-caffeine. I didn't say anything until we'd found a table. He sat stiffly looking at his drink without seeing it. Then he said, "Thanks." "'For what?" I "I was about to be real uncivilized in there." I just waited. Hj said truculently, "Well, damn it, she's free to do what she wants, isn't she? She likes to dance -- good. Why shouldn't she? Damn it, what is there to get excited about?" "Who's excited?" "It's that Judson. What's he have to be crawling around her all the time for? She hasn't done a damn thing about getting her certificate since he got here." He drank his liquor down at a gulp. It had no apparent effect, which meant some. thing. "What had she done before he got here?" I asked quietly. When he didn't answer I said, "Jud's Outbound, Clint. I wouldn't worry. I can guarantee Flower won't be with him when he goes, and that will be real soon. Hold on and wait." "Wait?" His lip curled. 'Tve been ready to go for weeks. I used to think of... of Flower and me working together, helping each other. I used to make plans for a celebration the day we got certified. I used to look at the stars and think about the net we'd help throw around them, pull 'em down, pack 'em in a basket. Flower and me, back on Earth after six thousand years, watching humanity come into its own, knowing we'd done something to help. I've been waiting, and you say wait some more." "This," I said, "is what you call an unstable situation. It can't stay the way it is and it won't. Wait, I tell you: wait. There's got to be a blow-off." There was. I N MY office the chime sounded. Moira and Bill. Certificates denied to Hester, Elizabeth, Jenks, Mella. Hester back to earth. Hallowell and Letitia, marriage recorded. Certificates granted to Aaron, Musette, n'Guchi, Mancinelli, Judson. Judson took the news quietly, glowing. I hadn't seen much of him recently. Flower took up a lot of his time, and training the rest. After he was certified and I'd gone with him to test the hand-scanner by the gate and give him his final briefing, he cut out on the double, I guess to give Flower the great news. I remember wondering how he'd like her reaction. Tween was there. She rose from the foyer couch as I wheezed in off the ramp. I took one look at her and said, "Come inside." She followed me through the inner door. I waved my hand over the infra-red plate and it closed. Then I out out my arms. She bleated like a new-born lamb and flew to me. Her tears were scalding, and I don't think human muscles are built for the wrenching those agonized sobs gave her. People should cry more. They ought to learn how to do it easily, like laughing or sweating. Crying piles up. In people like Tween, who do nothing if they can't smile and make a habitpattern of it, it really piles up. With a reservoir like that, and no developed outlet, things get torn when the pressure builds too high. I just held her tight so she wouldn't explode. The only thing I said to her was "sh-h-h" once when she tried to talk while she wept. One thing at a time. It took a while, but when she was finished she was finished. She didn't taper off. She was weak from all that punishment, but calm. She talked. "He isn't a real thing at all," she' said bleakly. "He's something I made up out of starshine, out of wanting so much to be a part of something as big as this project. I never felt I had anything big about me except that. I wanted to join it with something bigger than I was, and, together, we'd build something so big that it would be worthv of Curbstone. "I thought it was Wold. I made it be Wold. Oh, none of this is his fault. I could have seen what he was, and I just wouldn't. What I did with him, what I felt for him, was just as crazy as if I'd convinced myself he had wings and then hated him because he wouldn't fly. He isn't anything but a h-hero. He struts to the newcomers and the rejected ones pretending he's a man who will one day give himself to humanity and the stars. He... probably believes that about himself. But he won't complete his training, and he... now I know, now I can see it -- he tried everything he could think of to stop me from being certified. I was no use to him with a certificate. He couldn't treat me as his pretty, slightly stupid little girl, once I was certified. And he couldn't get his own certificate because if he did he'd have to go Out, one of these days, and that's something he can't face. "He -- wants me to leave him. If I will, if it's my decision, he can wear my memory like a black band on his arm, and delude himself for the rest of his life that his succession of women is just a search for something to replace me. Then he'll always have an excuse; he'll never, never have to risk his neck. He'll be the shattered hero, and women as stupid as I was will try to heal the wounds he's arranged for me to give him." "You don't hate him?" I asked her quietly. "No. Oh, no, no! I told you, it wasn't his fault. I -- loved something. A man lived in my heart, lived there for years. He had no name and no face. I gave him ,Wold's name and Wold's face and just wouldn't believe it wasn't Wold. I did it. Wold didn't. I don't hate him. I don't like him. I just don't... anything." You're cured. If you hated him, he'd still be important. What are you going to do?" "What shall I do?" "I'd never tell you what to do about a thing like this, Tween. You know that. You've got to figure out your own answers. I can advise you to use those new-opened eyes of yours carefully, though. And don't think that that man who lives in your heart doesn't exist anywhere else. He does. Right here on this station, maybe. You just haven't been able to see him before." "Who?" "God, girl, don't asl. me that! Ask Tween next time you see her; no one will ever know for sure but Tween." "You're so wise... "Nah. I'm old enough to have made more mistakes than most people, that's all, and I have a good memory." She rose shakily. I put out a hand and helped her. "You're played out, Tween. Look -- don't go back yet. Hide out for a few days and get some rest and do some thinking. There's a suite on this level. No one will bother you, and you'll find everything there you need, including silence and privacy." "That would be good," she said softly. "Thank you." "All right... listen. Mind if I send someone in to talk to you?" "Talk? Who?" "Let me play it as it comes." The ruby eyes sent a warm wave to me, and she smiled. I thought, I wish I was as confident of myself as she is of me. "It's #," I said, "the third door to your left. Stay there as long as you want to. Come back when you feel like it." She came close to me and tried to say something. I thought for a second she was going to kiss me on the mouth. She didn't; she kissed my hand. "I'll swat your bottom!" I roared, flustered. "Git, now, dammit!" She laughed... she always had a bit of laughter tucked away in her, no matter what, bless her cotton head... As soon as she was gone, I turned to the annunciator and sent out a call for Judson. Hell, I thought, yon can try, can't you ? Waiting, I thought about Judson 's hungry, upward look, and that hole in his head... that quality of reachableness, and what happened when he was reached by the wrong thing. Lord, responsive people certainly make the worst damn fools of all! He was there in minutes, looking flushed, excited, happy, and worried all at once. "Was on my way here when your call went out," he said. # project in mind. Maybe you could help." He sat. I looked for just the right words to use. I couldn't say anything about Flower. She had her hooks into him; if I said anything about her, he'd defend her. And one of the oldest phenomena in human relations is that we come to be very fond of the thing we find ourselves defending, even if we didn't like it before. I thought again of the hunger that lived in Jud, and what Tween might see of it with her newly opened eyes. "Jud -- " "I'm married," he blurted. I sat very still. I don't think my face did anything at all. "It was the right thing for me to do," he said, almost angrily. "Don't you see? You know what my problem is -- it was you who found it for me. I was looking for something that should belong to me... or something to belong to." "Flower," I said. "Of course. Who else? Listen, that girl's got trouble, too. What do you suppose blocks her from taking her certificate? She doesn't think she's worthy of it." My, I said. Fortunately, I said it to myself. Jud said, "No matter what happens, J've done the right thing. If I can help her get her certificate, we'll go Out together, and that's what we're here for. If I can't help her do that, but find that she fills that place in me that's been so empty for so long, well and good -- that's what I'm here for. We can go back to Earth and be happy." "You're quite sure of all this." "Sure I'm sure! Do you think I'd have gone ahead with the marriage if I weren't sure?" Sure you would, I thought. I said, "Congratulations, then. You know I wish you the best." He stood up uncertainly, started to say something, and apparently couldn't find it. He went to the door, turned back. "Will you come for dinner tonight?" I hesitated. He said, "Please. I'd appreciate it." I cocked an eyebrow. "Answer me straight, Jud. Is dinner your idea or Flower's?" He laughed embarrassedly. "Damn it, you always see too much. Mine... sort of... I mean, it isn't that she dislikes you, but... well, hell, I want the two of you to be friends, and I think you'd understand her and me, too, a lot better if you made the effort." I could think of things I'd much rather do than have dinner with Flower. A short swim in boiling oil, for example. I looked up at his anxious face. Oh, hell. "I'd love to," I said. "Around eight?" "Fine! Gee," he said, like a school kid. "Gee, thanks." He shuffled, not knowing whether to go right away or not. "Hey," he said suddenly. "You sent out a call for me. What's this project you wanted me for?" "Nothing, Jud," I said tiredly. "I've... changed my mind. See you later, son." T HE dinner was something special. Steaks. Jud had broiled them himself. I got the idea that he'd selected them, too, and set the table. It was Flower, though, who got me something to sit on. She looked me over, slowly and without concealing it, went to the table, pulled the light formed-aluminum chair away, and dragged over a massive relaxer. She then . smiled straight at me. A little unnecessary, I thought; I'm bulky, but those aluminum chairs have always held up under me so far. I won't give it to you round by round. The meal passed with Flower either in a sullen silence or manufacturing small brittle whips of conversation. When she was quiet, Jud tried to goad her into talking. When she talked, he tried to turn the conversation away from me. The occasion, I think, was a complete success -- for Flower. For Jud it must have been hell. For me -- well, it was interesting. Item: Flower poked and prodded at her steak, and when she got a lull in the labored talk Jud and I were squeezing out, she began to cut meticulously around the edges of the steak. "If there is anything I can't stand the sight or the smell of," she said clearly, "it's fat." Item: She said, "Oh, Lord" this and "Lord sakes" that in a drawl that made it come out "Lard" every time. Item: I sneezed once. She whipped a tissue over to me swiftly and politely enough, and then said "Render unto sneezers... which stood as a cute quip until she nudged her husband and said, "Render!" at which point things got real hushed. Item: When she had finished, she leaned back and sighed. "If I ate like that all the time. I'd be as big as -- " She looked straight at me and stopped. Jud, flushing miserably, tried to kick her under the table; I know, because it was me he kicked. Flower finished, " -- as big as a lifeboat." But she kept looking at me, easily and insultingly. Item -- You get the idea. All I can say for myself is that I got through it all. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of driving me out until I'd had all she could give me. I wouldn't be overtly angry, because if I did, she'd present me to Jud ever after as the man who hated her. If Jud ever had wit enough, this evening could be remembered as the time she was insufferably insulting, and that was all I wanted. It was over at last, and I made my excuses as late as I possibly could without staying overnight. As I left, she took Jud's arm and held it tight until I was out of sight, thereby removing the one chance he had to come along a little way and apologize to me. He didn't get close enough to speak to me for four days, and when he did, I had the impression that he had lied to be there, that Flower thought he was somewhere else. He said rapidly, "About the other night, you mustn't think that -- " And I cut him off as gently and firmly as I could: "I understand it perfectly, Jud. Think a minute and you'll know that." "Look, Flower was just out of sorts. I'll work on her. Next time you come there'll be a real difference. You'll see." "I'm sure I will, Jud. But drop it, will you? There's no harm done." And I thought, next time I come will be six months after the Outbounders get back. That gives me sixty centuries or so to get casehardened. ding, I was in the Upper Central corridor where it ramps into the Gate passageway. Now whether it was some sixth sense, or whether T actually did smell something, I don't know. I got a powerful, sourceless impression of methyl-caffeine in the air, and at the same time I looked down the passage and saw the Gate just closing. I got down there altogether too fast to do my leaky valves any good. I palmed the doors open and sprinted across the court. When anything my size and shape gets to sprinting, it's harder to stop it than let it keep going. One of the ship ports was open and I was heading for it. It started to swing closed. I lost all thought of trying to slow down and put what little energy I could find into pumping my old legs faster. With a horrible slow-motion feeling of disaster, I felt one toe tip my other heel, and my center of gravity began to move forward faster than I was traveling. I was in mid-air for an age -- long enough to chew and swallow a tongue -- and then I hit on my stomach, rocked forward on my receding chest and two of my chins, and slid. I had my hands out in front of me. My left hit the bulkhead and buckled. My right shot through what was left of the opening of the door, which crunched shut on my forearm. Then my forehead hit the sill and I blacked out. When the lights dimmed on agaip, I was spread out on a ship's bunk, apparently alone. My left arm hurt more than I could bear, and my right arm hurt worse, and both of them together couldn't match what was going on in my head. A man appeared from the service cubicle when I let out a groan. He had a bowl of warm water and the ship's B first-aid kit in his hands. He crossed quickly to me, and began to stanch the blood from between some of my chins. It wasn't until then that my blurring sight made out who he was. "Clinton, you hub-forted son of a bastich!" I roared at him. "Leave the chin alone and get some plexicaine into those arms!" "One thing at a time, old man. You are bleeding. Let's try to be a patient, not an impatient." "Impatient, out-patient," I yelped, "get that plex into me! I am just not the strong, silent type!" "Okay, okay." He got the needle out of the kit, squirted it upward, and plunged it deftly into my arms. A good boy. He hit the bicep on one, the forearm on the other, and got just the right ganglia. The pain vanished. That left my head, but he fed me an analgesic and that cataclysmic ache began to recede. "I'm afraid the left is broken," he said. "As for the right -- well, if I hadn't seen that hand come crawling in over the sill like a pet puppy, and reversed the door control, I'd have cut your fingernails off clear up to the elbow. What in time did you think you were doing?" "I can't remember; maybe I've got a concussion. For some reason or other it seemed I had to look inside the ship. Can you splint this arm?" "Let's call the medic." "You can do just as well." He went for the C kit and got a traction splint out. He whipped the prepared cushioning around the swelling arm, clamped the ends of the splint at wrist and elbow, and played an infra-red lamp on it. In a few seconds the splint began to lengthen. When the broken forearm the other, he shut off the heat and the thermoplastic splint automatically set and snugged into the cushioning. Clinton ,threw off the clamps. "That's good enough for now. All right, are you ready to tell me what made you get in my way?" "No." "Stop trying to look like an innocent babe! Your stubble gives you away. You knew I was going to solo, didn't you?" "No one said anything to me." "No one ever has to," he said in irritation, and then chuckled. "Man, I wish I could stay mad at you. All right -- what next?" "You're not going to take off?" "With you in here? Don't be foolish. The station'd lose too much and I wouldn't be gaining a thing. Damn you! I'd worked up the most glamorous drunk on methyl-caffeine, and you had to get me all anxious and drive away the fumes... Well, go ahead. I'll play it your way. What do we do?" "Stop trying to make a Machiavelli out of me," I growled. "Give me a hand back to my quarters and I'll let you go do whatever you want." "It's never that simple with you," he half-grinned. "Okay. Let's go." When I got to my feet -- with more of his help than I like to admit -- fny heart began to pound. He must have felt it, because he said nothing while we stood there and waited for it to behave itself. Clinton was a good lad. # We negotiated the fourt and the Gate all tight, but slowly. When we got to the foot of my ramp, I shook my head. "Not that," I wheezed. "Couldn't make it. Down this way." ridor to #. The door slid back for me. "Hi!" I called. "Company." "What? Who is it?" came the crystal voice. Tween appeared. "Oh -- oh! I didn't want to see anyone just -- why, what's happened ?" My eyelids flickered. I moaned. Clinton said, "I think we'better get him spread out. He's not doing so well." Tween ran to us and took my arm gently above the splint. They got me to a couch and I collapsed on it. "Damn him," said Clinton goodhumoredly. "He seems to be working full time to keep me from going Out." There was such a long silence that I opened one eye to look at them. Tween was staring at him as if she had never seen him before -- as, actually, she hadn't, with her eyes so full of Wold. "Do you really want to go Out?" she asked softly. "More than..." He looked at her hair, her lovely face. "I don't think I've seen you around much. You're -- Tween, aren't you?" She nodded and they stopped talking. I snapped my eyes shut because they were sure to look at me just for something to do. "Is he all right?" she asked. "I think he's -- yes, he's asleep. Don't wonder. He's been through a lot." "Let's go in the other room where we can talk together without disturbing him." They closed the door. I could barely hear them. It went on for a long time, with occasional silences. Finally I heard what I'd been listening for: "If it hadn't been for him. I'd be gone now. I was just about to solo." "No! Oh, I'm glad... I'm glad you didn't." One of those silences. Then, "So am I, Tween. Tween... in a whisper of astonishment. I got up off the couch and silently let myself out. I went back to my quarters, even managing to climb the ramp. I felt real fine. I'd seen a lot and I'd done a lot, and I regarded myself as pretty shockproof, but this one jolted me to the core. I took refuge in the old ointment, "It can't be, it just can't be," but in my heart I knew it could. I got hold of Judson. He was hollow-eyed and much quieter than usual. I asked him what he was doing these days, though I knew. "Boning up on the fine points of astrogation," he told me. "I've never hit anything so fascinating. It's one thing to have the stuff shoveled into your head when you're asleep, and something else again to experience it all, note by note, like music." "But you're spending an awful lot of time in the archives, son." "It takes a lot of time." "Can't you study at home?" I think he only just then realized what I was driving at. "Look," he said quietly, "I have my troubles. I have things wrong with me. But I'm not blind. I'm not stupid. You wouldn't  tell me to my face that I couldn't handle problems that are strictly my own, would you?" "I would if I were sure," I said. "Damn it, I'm not. And I'm not going to pry for details." "I'm glad of that," he said soberly. "Now we don't have to talk about it at all, do we?" In spite of myself, I laughed aloud. "What's funny?" "I am, Jud, boy. I been -- handled." He saw the point, and smiled a little with me. "Hell, I know what you've been hinting at. But you're not close enough to the situation to know all the angles. I am. When the time comes, I'll take care of it. Until then, it's no one's problem but my own." He picked up his star-chart reels and I knew that one single word more would be one too many. I squeezed his arm and let him go. Five people, I thought: Wold, Judson, Tween, Clinton, Flower. Take away two and that leaves three. Three's a crowd -- in this case, a very explosive kind of crowd. Nothing, nothing justifies infidelity in a modern marriage. But the ugly rumors kept trickling in. "I want my certificate," Wold said. I looked up at him and a bushel of conjecture flipped through my mind. So you want your certificate? Why? And why just now, of all times? What can a man do with a certificate that he can't do without one -- aside from going Out? Because, damn you, you'll never go Out. Not of your own accord, you won't. All this, but none of 'it slipped out. I said, "All right. That's what I'm here for, Wold." And we got to work. He worked hard, and smoothly and easily, the way he talked, the way he moved. I am constantly astonished at how small accomplished people can make themselves at times. He was certified easy as breathing. And can you believe it, I worked with him, saw how hard he was working, helped him through, and never realized what it was he was after? After going through the routines of certification for him, I wasn't happy. There was something wrong somewhere... something missing. This was a puzzle that ought to fall together easily, and it wouldn't. I wish -- Lord, how I wish' I could have thought a little faster. I let a day go by after Wold was certified. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, and I couldn't analyze what it was that was bothering me. So I began to cruise, to see if I could find out. I went to the archives. "Where's Judson ?" The girl told me he hadn't been there for forty-eight hours. I looked in the Recreation Sector, in the libraries, in the stereo and observation rooms. Some kind of rock-bottom good sense kept me from sending out a general call for him. But it began to be obvious that he just wasn't around. Of course, there were hundreds of rooms and corridors in Curbstone that were unused -- they wouldn't be used until the interplanetary project was completed and the matter transmitters started working. But Jud wasn't the kind to hide from anything. I squared my shoulders and realized that I was doing a lot of speculation to delay looking in the obvious place. I think, more than anything else, I was afraid that he would not be there... I passed my hand over the door announcer. In a moment she answered; she had apparently come in from the sun-field and hadn't bothered to see who it was. She was warm brown from head to toe, all spring-steel and velvet. Her long eyes were sleepy and her mouth was pouty. But when she recognized me, she stood squarely in the doorway. I think that in the back of every human mind is a machine that works out all the answers and never makes mistakes. I think mine had had enough data to figure out what was happening, what was going to happen, for a long while now. Only I hadn't been able to read the answer until now. Seeing Flower, in that split second, opened more than one door for me... " You want something?" she asked. The emphasis was hard and very insulting. I went in. It was completely up to her whether she moved aside or was walked down. She moved aside. The door swung shut. "Where's Jud?" "I don't know." eyes and tiaise'd my hand. I think I was going to hit her. Instead I put my hand on her chest and shoved. She fell, unhurt but terrified, across a relaxer. "What do you th -- " "You won't see him again," I said, and my voice bounced harshly off the acoust-absorbing walls. "He's gone. They're gone." "They?" Her face went pasty under the deep tan. "You ought to be killed," I said. "But I think it's better if you live with it. You couldn't hold either of them, or anyone else." I went out. knitting arm throbbed. I moved with utter certainty; never once did it occur to me to ask myself: "Why did I say that?" All the ugly pieces made sense. I found Wold in the Recreation . Sector. He was tanked. I decided against speaking to him, went straight to the launching court .and tried the row of ship ports. There was no one there, no one in any of them. My eye must have photographed something in the third ship, because I felt compelled to go back there and look again. I stared hard at the deep-flocked floor. The soft pile of it looked right and yet not-right. I went to the control panel and unracked an emergency torch, turned it to needle-focus and put it, lit, on the floor. A horizontal beam will tell you things no other light knows about. I turned the light on the door and slowly swung the sharp streak across the carpet. The monotone, amorphous surface took on streaks and ridges, shadows and shadings. A curved scuff inside. Two parallel ones, long, where something had been dragged. A blurred sector where something heavy had lain long enough to press the springy fibers down for a while, over by the left-hand bunk. I looked at the bunk. It was unruffled, which meant nothing; the resilient surface was meant to leave no impressions. But at the edge was a single rubbed spot, as if something had spilled there and been wiped hard. I went to the service cubicle. Everything' seemed in order, except one of the cabinet doors, which wouldn't quite close. I looked inside. It was a food locker. The food was there all right, each container socketed in place in the prepared shelves. But on, between, and among them were micro-reels for the book projector. I frowned and looked further. Reels were packed into the disposal lock, the towel dispenser, the spareparts chest for the air exchanger. Something was where the bookreels belonged, and the reels had been hidden by someone who could not leave them in sight or carry them off. And where did the reels belong? I went back to the central chamber and the left-hand bunk. I touched the stud that should have rolled the bunk outward, opening the top, so that the storage space under it could be reached. The bunk didn't move. I examined the stud. It was coated over with quick-setting leak-sealer. The stuff was tough but resilient. I got a steel rod and a hammer from thetool-rack and, placing the rod againstthe stud, hit it once. The leak-sealer cracked off. The bed rolled forward and opened. It was useless to move him or touch him, or, for that matter, to say anything. Judson was dead, his head twisted almost all the way around. His face was bluish and his eyes stared. He was pushed, jammed, wedged into the small space. I hit the stud again and the bunk rolled back. Moving without any volition that I could analyze, feeling nothing but a great angry numbness, I cleaned up. I put the rod and the hammer away and fluffed up the piling of the carpeting by the bunk. Then I went and stood' in the service cubicle and began to wait. Wait. Not just stay -- wait. I knew he'd be back, just as I suddenly and belatedly understood what it was that every factor in five people had made inevitable. I was coldly hating myself for not having known it sooner. The great, the admirable, the adventurous in modern civilization were Out-bounders. To one who wanted and needed personal power, there would be an ultimate goal, greater even than being an Outbounder. And that would be to stand between an Outbounder and his des. tiny. For months Flower had blocked Clinton. When she saw she must ultimately lose him to the stars, she went hunting. She saw Judson -- reachable, restless Jud -- and she heard my assurance that he would soon go Out. Then and there Judson was doomed. Wold needed admiration the way Flower needed power. To be an Outbounder and wait for poor struggling Tween suited him perfectly. Tween's certification gave him no alternative but to get rid of her; he couldn't bring himself to go Out. Once I had taken care of Tween for him, there remained one person on the entire project who could keep him from going Out -- and she was married to Jud. Having married, Jud would stay married. Wold did what he could to smash that marriage. When Jud still hung on, wanting to help Flower, wanting to show me that he had made the right choice, there remained one alternative for Wold. Evidence of that lay oramped and staring under the bunk. But Wold wasn't finished. He wouldn'tbe finished while Jud's body remained on Curbstone. In Wold's emotional state, he would have to go somewhere and drink to figure out the next step. There was no way of sending a ship Out without riding it. So -- I waited. cramped, then, and one foot was asleep. I curled and uncurled the toes frantically when I saw the door begin to move, and tried to flatten my big bulk back down out of sight. He was breathing hard. He put his lips together and blew like a winded horse, wiped his lips on his forearm. He seemed to have difficulty in focusing his eyes. I wondered hocy much liquor he had poured into that empty place where most men keep their courage. He took a fine coil of singlestrand plastic cord out of his beltpouch. Fumbling for the end, he found it and dropped the coil., With the exaggerated care of a drunk, he threw a bowline arid drew the loop tight, pulled the bight through the loop so he had a running noose. He made this fast to a triangular bracket over the control panel, led it along the edge of the chart-rack and down to the launching control lever. He bent two half-hitches in the cord, slipped it over the end of the lever and drew it tight. The cord now bound the lever in the up -- "off" -- position. From the bulkhead he unfastened the clamps which held the heavyduty fire extinguisher and lifted it down. It weighed half as much as he did. He set it on the floor in front of the control panel, brought the dangling end of the cord through the U-shaiped clamp gudgeons on the extinguisher, took a loose half-hitch around the bight, and, lifting the extinguisher between his free arm and his body, pulled the knot tight. Another half-hitch secured it. Now the heavy extinguisher danTwo Important Novelets: Exciting Short Stories:  And Other Shorts and Features Plus the Second Great Installment of: adult stories for adult readers... the best in science fiction! gled in mid-air under the control panel. The cord which supported it ran up to the handle of the launching lever and from there, bending over the edge of the chart-rack, to the bracket. Panting, Wold took out a cigarette and shook it alight. He drew on it hungrily, and then put it on the chart-rack, resting it against the plastic cord. When the cigarette burned down to the cord, the thermoplastic would melt through with great enthusiasm. The cord would break, the extinguisher would fall, dragging the lever down. And Out would go all the evidence, to be hidden forever, as far as Wold was concerned, and # years from anyone else. Wold stepped back to survey his work just as I stepped forward out of the service cubicle. I brought up my broken arm and swung it with all my weight -- and that is really weight -- against the side of his head. The cast, though not heavy, was hard, and it must have hit him like a crowbar. He went down like an elevator, hitched to his knees, and for a second seemed about to topple. His head sagged. He shook it, slowly looked up and saw me. "I could use one of those needleguns," I said. "Or I could kick you cold and let Coordination handle you. There are regulations for things likeyou'. But I'd rather do it this way. Get up." "I never..." "Get up!" I bellowed, and kicked at him. He threw his arms around my leg and rolled. As I started down, I  pulled the leg in close and whipped it out again. We both hit with a crash on opposite sides of the room. The bunk broke my fall; he was not so lucky. He rose groggily, sliding his back up the door. I lumbered across, deliberately crashed into him, and heard ribs crack as the wind gushed out of his lungs. to sag. I hit him savagely in the face, and his face came back and hit my hand again as his head bounced off the door. I let him fall, then knelt beside him. There are things you can do to a human body if you know enough physiology -- pressures on this and that nerve center which paralyze and cramp and immobilize whole motortrunk systems. I did these things, and got up, finally, leaving him twisted, sweating in agony. I wheezed over to the control bank and looked critically at the smoldering cigarette. Less than a minute. "I know you can hear me," I whispered with what breath I could find. "I'd... like you to know... that you'll be a hero. Your name will... be on the Great Roll of the... Outbounders. You always... wanted that without any... effort on your part... now you've got it." I went out. I stopped and leaned back against the wall beside the door. In a few seconds it swung silently shut. I forced back the waves of gray that wanted to engulf me, turned and peered into the port. It showed only blackness. Jud... ud, boy... you always wanted it, too. You almost got cheated out of it. You'll be all right now, son... out the gate. There was someone standing there. She flew to me, pounded my chest with small hard hands."Did he go? Did he really go?" I brushed her off as if she had been a midge, and closed one eye so I could get a single image. It was Flower, without her come-on tunic. Her hair was disarrayed and her eyes were bloodshot. "They left," I croaked. "I told you they would. Jud and Wold... you couldn't stop them." "Together? They left together ?" "That's what Wold got certified for." I looked bluntly up and down her supple body. "Like everybody else who goes Out together, they had some thing in common." I pushed past her and went back to my office. Lights were blazing over the desk. Judson and Wold. Ship replaced. Quarters cleaned. Palm-key removed and filed. I sat and looked blindly until they were all lit and the board blanked out. I thought, this pump of mine won't last much longer under this kind of treatment. I thought, I keep convincing myself that I handle things impartially and fairly, without getting involved. I felt bad. Bad. I thought, this is a job without authority, without any real power. I certify 'em, send 'em along, check 'em out. A clerk's job. And because of that I have to be God. I have to make up my own justice, and execute it myself. Wold was no threat to me or to Curbstone, yet it was in me to give oblivion to him and purgatory to Flower. I felt frightened and disgusted andpuny. Someone came in, and I looked up blindly. For a moment I could make out nothing but a .silver-haloed figure and a muted, wordless murmuring. I forced my eyes to focus, and I had to close them again, as if I had looked into the sun. Her hair was unbound beneath a diamond ring that circled her brows. The silver silk cascaded about her, brushing the floor behind her, mantling her warm-toned shoulders, capturing small threads of light and weaving them in and about the gleaming light that was her hair. Her deep pigeon's-blood eyes shone and her lips trembled. "Tween..." The soft murmuring became words, laughter that wept with happiness, small shaking syllables of rapture. "He's waiting. He wanted to say good-by to you, too... but he asked me to do it for him. He said you'd likethat better." I. could only nod. She came close to the desk. "I love him. I love him more than I thought anyone could. Somehow, loving him that much, I can . love you, too." She bent over the desk and kissed my mouth. Her lips were cool. She -- blurred then. Or maybe it was my eyes. When I could see again, she was gone. The chime, and the lights, one after another. Marriage recorded... Suddenly I relaxed and I knew I could live with the viciousness of what I had done to Wold and to Flower. It had been my will that Judson go Out, and that Tween be happy, and I had been crossed, and I had taken vengeance. And that was small, and decidedly human' -- not godlike at all. So, I thought, every day I find something out about people. And, today, I'm people. I felt the pudgy lips that Tween had kissed. I'm old and I'm fat, I thought, and by the Lord. I'm eoole. When they call me Charon, they forget ivhat it must be like to be denied both worlds instead of only one. And they forget the other thing -- the little-known fragment of the Charon legend. To the Etruscans, he was more than a ferryman. He was an executioner. Next month's installment of Clifford D. Simak's novel, "Time Quarry," develops adrenal-agitating momentum. The plot against Asher Sutton, returned to Earth after # years to find himself sentenced to assassination, becomes a savagely civilized -- and worriedly meticulous -- war against a simple idea with stupendous implications. "Time Quarry," incidentally, will be published early next year by Simon #C with minor editing differences. Our policy will continue to be to publish all booklength novels complete. Anthony Boucher, after editing and reviewing science fiction, finally resumes writing it. His novelet, "Transfer Point," about the Last Man on Earth, who wasn't actually, and the Last Woman, who should have been, makes us wonder what superb stories we've missed these past few years. We'll keep him writing... Fredric Brown, between novels, found time to do two yarns, and we bought both. The second, "Honeymoon in Hell," resolves a problem currently coloring eager, cooperation of two bitter and attractive enemies. Short stories include "Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber, a piece of shock ing "Misbegotten Missionary." an altruistic little creature with an unwittingly alarming message to preach... and enforce; "Jaywalker" by Ross Rocklynne, which proves that a challenge to death is the paradoxical answer to widowhood; plus whatever other shorts we can squeeze in with our regular features. We can see a good many of our short stories, the stuff of which s-f anthologies are made, appearing in hard covers before too long. We approve; they are important enough to be in permanent form, along with our novels. But read them here first. It's much later. The question is... how late? gist's study belonged to an era vastly distant from today. Familiar similarities here and there only sharpened the feeling of alienage. The sunlight that filtered through the windows in the ceiling had a wan and greenish cast and was augmented by radiation from some luminous material impregnating the walls and floor. Even the wide desk and the commodious hassocks glowed with a restful light. Across the former were scattered metal-backed wax tablets, styluses, and a pair of large and oddly formed spectacles. The crammed bookcases were not particularly unusual, but the books were bound in metal and the script on their spines would have been utterly unfamiliar to the most erudite of modern linguists. One of the books, lying open on a hassock, showed leaves of a thin, flexible, rustless metal covered with luminous characters. Between the bookcases were phosphorescent oil paintings, mainly of sea bottoms, in somber greens and browns. Their style, neither wholly realistic nor abstract, would have baffled the historian of art. A blackboard with large colored crayons hinted equally at the schoolroom and the studio. In the center of the room, midway to the ceiling, hung a fish with irridescent scales of breathtaking beauty. So invisible was its means of support that -- also taking into account the strange paintings and the greenish light -- one would have sworn that the object was to create an underwater scene. The Explorer made his entrance in a theatrical swirl of movement. He embraced the Archeologist with a warmth calculated to startle that crusty old fellow. Then he settled himself on a hassock, looked up and asked a question in a speech and idiom so different from any we know that it must be called another means of communication rather than another language. The import was, "Well, what about it?" If the Archeologist were taken aback, he concealed it. His expression showed only pleasure at being reunited with a long-absent friend. "What about what?" he queried. "About your discovery!" "What discovery?" The Archeologist's incomprehension was playful. The Explorer threw up his arms. "Why, what else but your discovery, here on Earth, of the remains of an intelligent species? It's the find of the age! Am I going to have to coax you? Out with it!" "I didn't make the discovery," the other said tranquilly. "I only supervised the excavations and directed the correlation of material. You ought to be doing the talking. You're the one who's just returned from the stars." "Forget that." The Explorer brushed the question aside. "As soon as our spaceship got within radio range of Earth, they started to send us a continuous newscast covering the period of our absence. One of the items, exasperatingly brief, mentioned your discovery. It captured my imagination. I couldn't wait to hear the details." He paused, then confessed, "You get so eager out there in space -- a metal-filmed droplet of life lost in immensity. You rediscover your emotions... He changed color, then finished rapidly, "As soon as I could decently get away, I came straight to you. I wanted to hear about it from the best authority -- yourself." T HE 'Archeologist regarded him quizzically. "I'm pleased that you should, think of me arid my work, and I'm very happy to see you again. But admit it now, isn't there something a bit odd about your getting so worked up over this thing? I can understand that after your long absence from Earth, any news of Earth would seem especially important. But isn't there an additional reason?" The Explorer twisted impatiently. "Oh, I suppose there is. Disappointment, for one thing. We were hoping to get in touch with intelligent life out there. We were specially trained in techniques for establishing mental contact with alien intelligent life forms. Well, we found some planets with life upon them, all right. But it was primitive life, not worth bothering about." Again he hesitated embarrassed, ly. "Out there you get to thinking of the preciousness of intelligence. There's so little of it, and it's so lonely. And we so greatly need intercourse with another intelligent species to give depth and balance to our thoughts. I suppose I set too much store by my hopes of establishing a contact." He paused. "At any rate, when I heard that what we were looking for, you had found here at home -- even though dead and done for -- I felt that at least it was something. I was suddenly very eager. It is odd, I know, to get so worked up about an extinct species -- as if my interest could, mean anything to them now -- but that's the way it hit me." the windows overhead. They might have been birds, except they moved too slowly. "I think I understand," the Archeologist said softly. "So get on with it and tell me about your discovery!" the Explorer exploded. "I've already told you that it wasn't my discovery," the Archeologist reminded him. "A few years after your expedition left, there was begun a detailed resurvey of Earth's mineral resources. In the course of same deep continental borings, one party discovered a cache -- either a very large box or a rather small room -- with metallic walls of great strength and toughness. Evidently its makers had intended it for the very purpose of carrying a message down through the ages. It proved to contain artifacts; models of buildings, vehicles, and machines, objects of art, pictures, and books -- hundreds of books, along with elaborate pictorial dictionaries for interpreting them. So now we even understand their languages." "Languages?" interrupted the Explorer. "That's queer. Somehow one thinks of an alien species as having just one language." "Like our own, this species had several, though there were some words and symbols that were alike in all their languages. These words and symbols seem to have come down unchanged from their most distant prehistory." The Explorer burst out, "I am not interested in all that dry stuff! Give me the wet! What were they like? How did they live? What did they create? What did they want?'" The Archeologist gently waved aside the questions. "All in good time. If I am to tell you everything you want to know, I must tell it my own way. Now that you are back on Earth, you will have to reacquire those orderly and composed habits of thought which you have partly lost in the course of your wild interstellar adventurings." "Curse you, I think you're just trying to tantalize me." The Archeologist's expression showed that this was not altogether untrue. He casually fondled an animal that had wriggled up onto his desk, and which looked rather more like an eel than a snake. "Cute little brute, isn't it?" he remarked. When it became apparent that the Explorer wasn't to be provoked into another outburst, he continued, "It became my task to interpret the contents of the cache, to reconstruct its makers' climb from animalism and savagery to civilization, their rather rapid spread across the world's surface, their first fumbling attempts to escape from, the Earth."L "It's barely possible. I rather hope they did, since it would mean the chance of a survival elsewhere, though the negative results of your expedition rather lessen that." He went on, "l : he cache was laid down when they were first attempting space flight, just after their discovery of atomic power,, in the first flush of their youth. It was probably created in a kind of exuberant fancifulness, with no serious belief that it would ever serve the purpose for which it was intended." He looked at the Explorer strangely. "If I am not mistaken, we have laid down similar caches." After a moment the Archeologist continued, "My reconstruction of their history, subsequent to the laying down of the cache, has been largely hypothetical. I can only guess at the reasons for their decline and fall. Supplementary material has been very slow in coming in, though we are still making extensive excavations at widely separated points. Here are the last reports." He tossed the Explorer a small metal-leaf pamphlet. It flew with a curiously slow motion. "That's what struck me so queer right from the start," the Explorer observed, putting the pamphlet aside after a glance. "If these creatures were relatively advanced, why haven't we learned about them beiore? They must have left so many things -- buildings, machines, engineering projects, some of them on a large scale. You'd think we'd be turning up traces everywhere." "I have four answers to that," the Archeologist replied. "The first is the most obvious. Time. Geologic ages of it. The second is more subtle. What if we should have been looking in the wrong place? I mean, what if the creatures occupied a very different portion of the Earth than our own? Third, it's possible that atomic energy, out of control, finished the race and destroyed its traces. The present distribution of radioactive compounds throughout the Earth's surface lends some support to this theory. "Fourth," he went on, "it's my belief that when an intelligent species begins to retrogress, it tends to destroy, or, rather, debase all the things it has laboriously created. Large buildings are torn down to make smaller ones. Machines are broken up and worked into primitive tools and weapons. There is a kind of unraveling or erasing. A cultural , Second Law of Thermodynamics begins to operate, whereby the intellect and all its works are gradually degraded to the lowest level of meaning and creativity."L- sounded anguished. "Why should any intelligent species end like that? I grant the possibility of atomic power getting out of hand, though one would have thought they'd have taken the greatest precautions. Still, it could happen. But that fourth answer -- it's morbid." "Cultures and civilizations die," said the Archeologist evenly. "That has happened repeatedly in our own history. Why not species? An individual dies -- and is there anything intrinsically more terrible in the death of a species than in the death of an individual?" He paused. "With respect to the members of this one species, I think that a certain temperamental instability hastened their end. Their appetites and emotions were not sufficiently subordinated to their understanding and to their sense of drama -- their enjoyment of the comedy and tragedy of existence. They were impatient and easily incapacitated by frustration. They seem to have been singularly guilty in their pleasures, behaving either like gloomy moralists or gluttons. "Because of taboos and an overgrown possessiveness," he continued, "each individual tended to limit his affection to a tiny family; in many cases he focused his love on himself alone. They set great store by personal prestige, by the amassing of wealth and the exercise of power. Their notable capacity for thought and manipulative activity was expended on things rather than persons or feelings. Their technology outstripped their psychology. They skimped fatally when it came to hard thinking about the purpose of life and intellectual activity, and the means for preserving them."' Again the slow shadows drifted overhead. "And finally," the Archeologist said, "they were a strangely haunted species. They seem to have been obsessed by the notion that others, greater than themselves, had prospered before them and then died, leaving them to rebuild a civilization from ruins. It was from those others that they thought they derived the few words and symbols common to all their languages." "Gods?" mused the Explorer. The Archeologist shrugged. "Who knows?" T HE Explorer turned away. His excitement had visibly evaporated, leaving behind a cold and miserable residue of feeling. "I am not sure I want to hear much more about them," he said. "They sound too much like us. Perhaps it was a mistake, my coming here. Pardon me, old friend, but out there in space even our emotions become undisciplined. Everything becomes indescribably poignant. Moods are tempestuous. You shift in an instant from zenith to nadir -- and remember, out there you can see both. "I . was very eager to hear about this lost species," he a Ided in a sad voice. "I thought I would feel a kind of fellowship with them across the eons. Instead, I. touch only corpses. It reminds me of when, out in space, there looms up before your prow, faint in the starlight, a dead sun. They were a young race. They thought they were getting somewhere. They promised themselves an eternity of effort. And all the while there was wriggling toward them out of that future for which they yearned... oh, it's so completely futile and unfair." "I disagree," the Archeologist said spiritedly. "Really, your absence from Earth has unsettled you even more than I first surmised. Look at the matter squarely. Death comes to everything in the end. Our past is strewn with our dead. That species died, it's true. But what they achieved, they achieved. What happiness they had, they had. What they did in their short span is as significant as what they might have The present is always more important than the future. And no creature can have all the future -- it must be shared, left to others." "Maybe so," the Explorer said slowly. "Yes, I guess you're right. But I still feel a horrible wistfulness about them, and I hug to myself the hope that a few of them escaped and set up a colony on some planet we haven't yet visited." There was a long silence. Then the Explorer turned back. "You old devil," he said in a manner that showed hisgayer and more boisterous mood had returned, though diminished, "you still haven't told me anything definite about them." "So I haven't," replied the Archeologist with guileful innocence. "Well, they were 'vertebrates." "Oh?" "Yes. What's more, they were mammals." i-V-L something different." "I thought you were." The Explorer shifted. "All this matter of evolutionary categories is pretty cut-and-dried. Even a knowledge of how they looked doesn't mean much. I'd like to approach them in a more intimate way. How did they think of themselves? What did they call themselves ? I know the word won't mean anything to me, but it will give me a feeling -- of recognition." "I can't say the word," the Archeologist told him, "because I haven't the proper vocal equipment. But I know enough of their script to be able to write it for you as they would have written it. Incidentally, it is one of those words common to all their languages, that they attributed to an earlier race of beings." The Archeologist extended one of his eight tentacles toward the blackboard. The suckers at its tip firmly grasped a bit of orange crayon. Another of his tentacles took up the spectacles and adjusted them over his three-inch protruding pupils. The eel-like glittering pet drifted back into the room and nosed curiously about the crayon as it traced: Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really. the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows. The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds. A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired. "Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest. "Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It looked like a duck." "This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he said soberly. "Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I still love you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet. mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside. But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet. The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion. The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows. They saw it suddenly, a lighter  moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved. This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder. They lowered their guns. "It needs a shave," Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. "Something we could do for you, Mac?" The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled' suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble. Still panting, . the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. "Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria." "English?" gasped June. "We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you... It's three hundred lli miles... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention." at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years -- monotonous space travel -- to be told that the planet was already settled! "We didn't know there was a colony here," she said. "It is not on the map." "We were afraid of that," the tall bronze man answered soberly. "We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come." Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. "My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D." "Patrick Mead is the name," smiled the man, shaking hands casually. "Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before." The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded s.teel. "What -- what is the population of Minos?" she asked. He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. "Only one hundred and fifty." He smiled. "Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people." He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. "That is -- you are people, aren't you?" he asked startlingly. "Why not?" said Max with a poise that June admired. "Well, you are all so -- so -- " Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. "So varied." They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled. "I mean," Patrick Mead said into the silence, "all these -- interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth -- " He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them. "Joke?" Max asked, bewildered. June laid a hand on his arm. "No harm meant," she said to him over the intercom. "We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us." She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. "What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?" He indicated her with a smile. "Like you." June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes. "In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and me?" Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin. "Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could lit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable." "For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague." Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin doth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind ' against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth... But they were strangers. "Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look." Prague. "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked. "Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it." "You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice. Pat Mead explained patiently. "Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way 'to replace them? June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow. "Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton. "No." "Any other diseases ?""Not a one." Max was eying the bronze redheaded figure with something approaching awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!" by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions. The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up. "Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice .was warming. "It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an oldtime beauty without a. sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough." The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos. lYL hopefully. Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it. "Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have." Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics. "Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest. "You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead. "Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm." Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve, surgeon on Earth. High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones: "What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat. Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest. "The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air. Ilf "We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't show on 'you, but still carry enough germs -- if that's what caused it" -- to wipe out a planet." "If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease." ' "Starting with me?" Pat asked. "Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board." "More needles?" "Yes, and a few little extras thrown in." "Rough?" "It isn't easy." A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs. In the Explorer, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical deflngement anddisintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name. But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient. Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions. Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness,and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into-his veins through long thin tubes. All legal spaceships were built'for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him. shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall... "I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully. Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?" "Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?" The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?" "Are you hungry?" "No food since yesterday."' "We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast. They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's hlood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently. One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly. "How ya doing, George?" Max asked. "Routine," George Barton grunted absently. On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields. Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time -- Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out ?" ' buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily. "Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it." "People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement. "One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be out in twenty minutes." "May I go see him?"  "Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you." "Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices. They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked. foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation. " -- new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman." The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages. Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about. Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?" Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in." "Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh -- 'there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away. A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table. "Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist !" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you really swim across a river to come here ?" Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray." Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all 'Wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow. "He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat." June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour. P AT sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing. 'When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside." "Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source. "That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony. They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day. Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata. There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest. Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish. June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all. June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention m to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the dear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table. "That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, . cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom Steak. "What's eating you?" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness. "Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or -- was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt. Len Marlow, the protein tankculture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me." Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy. "Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it." Len turnedback to him. "You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?" hungry." "Why?" Len was aggrieved. "Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach." Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn. "Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people had no doctors." "It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to. go through the plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance., of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right."' "Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear. "Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells -- " S HE listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.  Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution -- a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it. "Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from." "What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward. "I don't know exaotly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when. I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty." "A character," Max said. Why was she afraid? "It worked then?" "Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks." "It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you." "Uhub!" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control -- right up your alley." "It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste." Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead # hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were deinf ected. We can't settle here unless we deinfect everybody on Minos. Would they object?" "We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first." The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease. bled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights." They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters. Three were alive and healthy, munahing lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack. ' June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby. "We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts. June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her. field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened. Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall,  redheaded, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily .told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality... ... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book -- Deerslayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back. "Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm. "Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard. She was running down a long corridor looking for Max, but every man she came to was a big bronze man with red hair and bright blue eyes who grinned at her. The pink hamster! She woke suddenly, feeling as if alarm bells had been ringing, and listened carefully, but there was no sound. She had had a nightmare, she told herself, but alarm bells were still ringing in her unconscious. Something was wrong. Lying still and trying to preserve the images, she groped for a meaning, but the mood faded under the cold touch of reason. Damn intuitive thinking! A pink hamster! Why did the unconscious have to be so vague ? She fell asleep again and forgot. They  had lunch with Pat Mead that day, and after it was over Pat delayed June with a hand on her shoulder and looked down at her for a moment. "I want you, June," he said and then turned away, answering the hails of a party at another table as if he had not spoken. She stood shaken, and then walked to the door where Max waited. She was particularly affectionate with Max the rest of the day, and it pleased him. He would not have been if he had, known why. She tried to forget Pat's blunt . statement. June was in the laboratory with Max, watching the growth of a small tank culture of the alien protoplasm from a Minos weed, and listening to Len Marlow pour out his troubles. "And Elsie tags around after that big goof all day, listening to his stories. And then she tells me I'm just jealous, I'm imagining things!" He passed his hand across his eyes. "I came away from Earth to be with Elsie... I'm getting a headache. Look, can't. you persuade Pat to cut it out, June? You and Max are his friends." "Here, have an aspirin," June said. "We'll see what we can do." 'Thanks." Len picked up his tank culture and went out, not at all cheered. M AX sat brooding over the dials and meters at his end of the laboratory, apparently sunk in thought. When Len had gone, he spoke almost harshly. "Why encourage the guy? Why let him hope?" "Found out anything about the differences in protoplasm?" she evaded. "Why let him kid himself? What chance has he got against that hunk of muscle and smooth talk?" "But Pat isn't after Elsie," she protested. "Every scatter-brained woman on this ship is trailing after Pat with her tongue hanging out. Brant St. Clair is in the bar right now. He doesn't say what he is drinking about, but do ,you think Pat is resisting all these women crowding down on him?" "There are other' things besides looks and charm," she said, grimly trying to concentrate on a slide under her binocular microscope. '"yeah, and whatever they are, Pat has them, too. Who's more competent to support a woman and a family on a frontier planet than a handsome bruiser who was born here?" "I meant," June spun around on her stool with unexpected passion, "there is old friendship, and there's fondness, and memories, and loyalty!" She was half shouting. "They're not worth much on the second-hand market," Max said. He was sitting slumped on his lab stool, looking dully at his dials. "Now I'm getting a headache!" He smiled ruefully. "No kidding, a leal headache. And over other people's troubles yet!" Other people's troubles... She got up and wandered out into the long curving halls. "I want you June," Pat's voice repeated in her mind. Why did the man have to be so overpoweringly attractive, so glaring a contrast to Max ? Why couldn't the universe manage to run on without generating troublesome love triangles? S HE walked up the carving ramps to the dining hall where they had eaten and drunk and talked yesterday. It was empty except for one couple talking forehead to forehead over cold coffee. She turned and wandered down the long easy spiral of corridor to the pharmacy and dispensary. It was empty. George was probably in the test lab next door, where he could hear if he was wanted. The automatic vendor of harmless euphorics, stimulants and opiates stood in the corner, brightly decorated in pastel abstract designs, with its automatic tabulator graph glowing above it. Max had a headache, she remembered. She recorded her thumbprint in the machine and pushed the plunger for a box of aspirins, trying to focus her attention on the problem of adapting the people of the ship to the planet Minos. An aquarium tank with a faint solution of histamine would be enough to convert a piece of human skin into a cdmmunity of voracious active phagocytes individually seeking something to devour, but could they eat enough to live away from the rich sustaining plasma of human blood ? , After the aspirins, she pushed another plunger for something for herself. Then she stood looking at it, a small box with three pills in her hand -- Theobromine, a heart strengthener and a confidence-giving euphoric all in one, something to steady shaky nerves. She had used it before only in emergency. She #S extended a hand and looked at it. It was trembling. Damn triangles! While she was looking at her hand there was a click from the automatic drug vendor. It summed the morning use of each drug in the vendors throughout the ship, and recorded if in a neat addition to the end of each graph line. For a moment she could not find the green line for anodynes and the red line for stimulants, and then she saw that they went almost straight up. There were too many being used -- far too many to be explained by jealousy or psychosomatic peevishness. This was an epidemic, and only one disease was possible! The disinfecting of Pat had not succeeded. Nucleocat Cureall, killer of all infections, had not cured! Pat had brought melting sickness into the ship with him! Who had it? The drugs vendor glowed cheerfully, uncommunicative. She opened a panel in its side and looked in on restless interlacing cogs, and on the inside of the door saw printed some directions... "To remove or examine records before reaching end of the reel -- " After a few fumbling minutes she had the answer. In the cafeteria at breakfast and lunch, thirty-eight'men out of the forty-eight aboard ship had taken more than his norm of stimulant. Twenty-one had taken aspirin as well. The only woman who had made an unusual purchase was herself ! She remembered the hamsters that had thrown off the infection with a short sharp fever, and checked back in the records to the day before. There was a short rise in aspirin sales to women at late afternoon. The women were safe. It was the men who had meltieg sickness ! Melting sickness killed in hours, according to Pat Mead. How long had the men been sick? into the pharmacy, recorded his thumbprint and took a box of aspirin from the machine. She felt all right. Self-control was working wtll and it was pleasant still to walk down the corridor smiling at the people who passed. She took the emergency elevator to the control room and showed her credentials to the technician on watch. "Medical Emergency." At a small control panel in the corner was a large red button, precisely labeled. She considered it and picked up the control room phone. This was the hard part, telling someone, especially someone who had it -- Max. She dialed, and when the click on the end of the line showed he had picked the phone up, she told Max what she had seen. "No women, just the men," he repeated. "That right?" "Yes." "Probably it's chemically alien, inhibited by one of the female sex hormones. We'll try sex hormone shots, if we have to. Where are you calling from?"She told him. "That's right. Give Nucleocat Cureall another chance. It might work this time. Push that button." She went to the panel and pushed the large red button. Through the long height of the Explorer, bells woke to life and began to ring in frightened clangor, emergency doors thumped shut, mechanical apparatus hummed into life and canned voices began to give rapid urgent directions. A plague had come. S HE obeyed the mechanical orders, went out into the hall and walked in line with the others. The captain walked ahead of her and the gorgeous Shelia Davenport fell into step beside her. "I look like a positive hag this morning. Does that mean I'm sick? Are we all sick?" what she knew. Others came out of all rooms into the corridor, thickening the line. They could hear each room lock as the last person left it, and then, faintly, the hiss of disinfectant spray. Behind them, on the heels of the last person in line, segments of the ship slammed off and began to hiss. They wound down the spiral corridor until they reached the medical treatment section again, and there they waited in line. "It won't scar my arms, will it?" asked Shelia apprehensively, glancing at her smooth, lovely arms. The mechanical voice said, "Next. Step inside, pjease, and stand clear of the door." "Not a bit," June reassured Shelia, and stepped into the cubicle. Inside, she was directed from cubicle to cubicle and given the usual buffeting by sprays and radiation, had blood samples taken and was injected with Nucleocat and a series of other protectives. At last she was directed through another door into a tiny cubicle with a chair. "You are to wait here," commanded the recorded voice metallically. "In twenty minutes the door will unlock and you may then leave. All people now treated may visit all parts of the ship which have been protected. It is forbidden to visit any quarantined or unsterile part of the ship without permission from the medical officers." Presently the door unlocked and she emerged into bright lights again, feeling slightly battered. She was in the clinic. A few men sat on the edge of beds and looked sick. One was lying down. Brant and Bess St. Clair sat near each other, not speaking. Approaching her was George Barton reading a thermometer with a puzzled expression. "What is it, George?" she asked anxiously. "Some of the women have slight fever, but it's going down. None of the fellows have any -- but their white count is way up, their red count is way down, and they look sick to me." She approached St. Clair. His usually 'ruddy cheeks were pale, his pulse was light and too fast, and his skin felt clammy. "How's the headache? Did the Nucleocat treatment help?" "I feel worse, if anything." "Better set up beds," she told George. "Get everyone back into the clinic." "We're doing that," George assured her. "That's what Hal is doing." She went back to the laboratory. Max was pacing up and down, absently running his hands through his black hair until it stood straight up. He stopped when he saw her face, and scowled thoughtfully. "They are still sick?" It was more a statement than a question. She nodded. "The Cureall didn't cure this time," he muttered. "That leaves it up to us. We have melting sickness and according to Pat and the hamsters, that leaves us less than a day to find out what it is and learn how to stop it." Suddenly an idea for another test struck him and he moved to the work table to set it up. He worked rapidly, with an occasional uncoordinated movement betraying his usual efficiency. It was strange to see Max troubled aad afraid. She put on a laboratory smock and began to work. She worked in silence. The mechanicals had failed. Hal and George Barton were busy staving off death from the weaker cases and trying to gain time for Max and her to work. The problem of the plague had to be solved by the two of them v alone. It was in their hands. Another test, no results. Another test,no results. Max's hands were shaking and he stopped a moment to take stimulants. She went into the ward for a moment, found Bess and warned her quietly to tell the other women to be ready to take over if the men became too sick to go on. "But tell them calmly. We don't want to frighten the men." She lingered in the ward long enough to see the word spread among the women in a widening wave of paler faces and compressed lips; then she went back to the laboratory. Another test. There was no sign of a micro-organism in anyone's blood, merely a growing horde of leucocytes and phagocytes, prowling as if mobilized to repel invasion. unconscious, with Hal Barton's written comments and conclusions pinned to the blanket. "I don't feel so well myself," the assistant complained. "The air feels thick. I can't breathe." June saw that his lips were blue. "Oxygen short," she told Max. "Low red corpuscle count," Max answered. "Look into a drop and see what's going on. Use mine; I feel the same way he does." She took two drops of Max's blood. The count was low, falling too fast. Breathing is useless without the proper minimum of red corpuscles in the blood. People below that minimum die of asphyxiation although their lungs are full of .pure air. The red corpuscle count whs falling too fast. The time she and Max had to work in was too short.IT air system," Max said urgently over the phone. "Get some into the men's end of the ward." She looked through the microscope at the live sample of blood. It was a dark clear field and bright moving things spun and swirled through it, but she could see nothing that did not belong there. "Hal," Max called over the general speaker system, "cut the other treatments, check for accelerating anemia. Treat it like monoxide poisoning -- C# # and oxygen." She reached into a cupboard under the work table, located two cylinders of oxygen, cracked the valves and handed one to Max and one to the assistant. Some of the bluish tint ' left the assistant's face as he breathed and he went over to the patient with reawakened concern. "Not breathing, Doc!" Max was working at the desk, muttering equations of hemoglobin catalysis-. "Len's gone, Doc," the assistant said more loudly. "Artificial respiration and get him into a regeneration tank," said June, not moving from the microscope. "Hurry! Hal will show you how. The oxidation and mechanical heart action in the tank will keep him going. Put anyone in a tank who seems to be dying. Get some women to help you. Give them Hal's instructions." The tanks were ordinarily used to suspend animation in a nutrient bath during the regrowth of any diseased organ. It could preserve life in an almost totally destroyed body during the usual disintegration and regrowth treatments for cancer and old age, and it could encourage healing as destruction continued... but they could not prevent ultimate death as long as the disease was not conquered. The drop of blood in June's microscope was a great, dark field, and in the foreground, brought to gargantuan solidity by the stereo effect, drifted neat saucer shapes of red blood cells. They turned end for end, floating by the humped misty mass of a leucocyte which was crawling on the cover glass. There were not enough red corpuscles, and she felt that they grew fewer as she watched. She fixed her eye on one, not blinking in fear that she would miss what might happen. It was a tidy red button, and it spun as it drifted, the current moving it aside in a curve as it passed by the leucocyte. Then, abruptly, the cell vanished. June stared numbly at the place where it had been. Behind her, Max was calling over the speaker system again: "Dr. Stark speaking. Any technician who knows anything about the life tanks, start bringing more out of storage and set them up. Emergency." "We may need forty-seven," June said quietly. "We may need forty-seven," Max repeated to the ship in general. His voice did not falter. "Set them up along the corridor. Hook them in on extension lines." His voice filtered back from the ' empty floors above in a series of dim echoes. What he had said meant that every man on board might be on the point of heart stoppage. binocular microscope, trying to think. Out of the corner of her eyes she could see that Max was wavering and breathing more and more frequently of the pure, cold, burning oxygen of the cylinders. In the microscope she could see that there were fewer red cells left alive in the drop of his blood. The rate of fall was accelerating. She didn't have to glance at Max to know how he would look -- skin pale, black eyebrows and keen brown eyes slightly squinted in thought, a faint ironical grin twisting the bluing lips. Intelligent, thin, sensitive, his face was part of her mnd. It was inconceivable that Max could die. He couldn't die. He couldn't leave her alone. She forced her mind back to the problem. All the men of the Explorer were at the same point, whereever they were. Moving to Max's desk, she spoke into the intercom system: "Bess, send a couple of women to look through the ship, room by room, with a stretcher. Make sure all the men are down here." She remembered Reno. "Sparks, heard anything from Reno? Is he back?" Sparks replied weakly after a lag. "The last I heard from Reno was a call this morning. He was raving about mirrors, and Pat Mead's folks not being real people, just carbon copies, and claiming he was crazy; and I should send him the psychiatrist. I thought he was kidding. He didn't call back." "Thanks, Sparks." Reno was lost. Max dialed and spoke to the bridge over the phone. "Are you okay up there? Forget about engineering controls. Drop everything and head for the tanks while you can still walk." June went back to the work table and whispered into her own phone. "Bess, send up a stretcher for Max. He looks pretty bad." There had to be a solution. The life tanks coul# sustain life in a damaged body, encouraging it to regrow more rapidly, but they merely slowed death as long as the disease was not checked. The postponement could not last long, for destruction could go on steadily in the tanks until the nutritive solution would hold no life except the triumphant microscopic killers that caused melting sickness, There were very few red blood corpuscles in the microscope field now, incredibly few. She tipped the microscope and they began to drift, spinning slowly. A lone corpuscle floated through the center. She watched it as the current swept it in an arc past the dim off-focus bulk of the leucocyte. There was a sweep of motion and it vanished. For a moment it meant nothing to her; then she lifted her head from the microscope and looked around, hjax sat at his desk, head in hand, his rumpled short black hair sticking out between his fingers at odd angles. A pencil and a pad scrawled with formulas lay on the desk before him. She could see his concentration in the rigid set of his shoulders. He was still thinking; he had not given up. J-Vigrab a red blood corpuscle. It was unbelievably fast." "Leukemia," muttered Max without moving. "Galloping leukemia yet! That comes under the heading of cancer. Well, that's part of the answer. It might be all we need." He grinned feebly and reached for the speaker set. "Anybody still on his feet in there?" he muttered into it, and the question was amplified to a booming voice throughout the ship. "Hal, are you still going? Look, Hal, change all the dials, change the dials, set them to deep melt and regeneration. One week. This is like leukemia. Got it? This is like leukemia." June rose. It was time for her to take over the job. She leaned across his desk, and spoke into the speaker system. "Doctor Walton talking," she said. "This is to the women. Don't let any of the men work any more; they'll kill themselves. See that they all go into the tanks right away. Set the tank dials for deep regeneration. You can see how from the ones that are set." Two exhausted and frightened women clattered in the doorway with a stretcher. Their hands were scratched and oily from helping to set up tanks. "That order includes you," she told Max sternly and caught him as he swayed. Max saw the stretcher bearers and struggled upright "Ten more minutes," he said clearly. "Might think of an idea. Something not right in this setup. I have to figure how to prevent a relapse, how the thing started." He knew more bacteriology than she did; she had to help him think. She motioned the bearers to wait, fixed a breathing mask for Max from a cylinder of CO, and the opened one of oxygen. Max went back to his desk. She walked up and down, trying to think, remembering the hamsters. The melting sickness, it was called. Melting. She struggled with an impulse to open a tank which held one of the men. She wanted to look in, see if that would explain the name. Melting Sickness... Footsteps came and Pat Mead stood uncertainly in the doorway. Tall, handsome, rugged, a pioneer. "Anything I can do?" he asked. She barely looked at him. "You can stay out of our way. We're busy." "I'd like to help," he said.  "Very funny." She was vicious, enjoying the whip of her words. "Every man is dying because you're a carrier, and you want to help." and unclenching his hands. "A guinea pig, maybe. I'm immune. All the Meads are." "Go away." God, why couldn't she think? What makes a Mead immune ? "Aw, let 'im alone," Max muttered. "Pat hasn't done anything." He went waveringly to the microscope, took a tiny sliver from his finger, suspended it in a slide and slipped it under the lens with detached habitual dexterity. "Something funny going on," he said to June. "Symptoms don't feel right." After a moment he straightened and motioned for her to look. "Leucocytes, phagocytes -- " He was bewildered. "My own -- . She looked in, and then looked back at Pat in a growing wave of horror. "They're not your own. Max!" she whispered. Max rested a hand on the table to brace himself, put his eye to the microscope, and looked again. June knew what he saw. Phagocytes, leucocytes, attacking and devouring his tissues in a growing incredible horde, multiplying insanely. Not bis phagocytes! Pat Mead's! The Meads' evolved cells had learned too much. They were contagious. And not Pat Mead's... How much alike were the Meads?... Mead cells contagious from one to another, not a disease attacking or being fought, but acting as normal leucocytes in whatever body they were in! The leucocytes of tall, redheaded people, finding no strangeness in the bloodstream of any of the tall, red-headed people. No strangeness... A toti-potent leucocyte finding its way into cellular wombs... The womblike life tanks. For the men of the Explorer, a week's cure with deep melting to de-differentiate the leucocytes and turn them back to normal tissue, then regrowth and reforming from the cells that were there. From the cells that were the. From the cells that were there... "Pat -- " "I know." Pat began to laugh, his face twisted with sudden understanding. "I understand. I get it. I'm a contagious personality. That's funny, isn't it?" Max rose suddenly from the microscope and lurched toward him, fists clenched. Pat caught him as he fell, and the bewildered stretcher bearers carried him out to the tanks. F )R a week June tended the .tanks. The other women volunteered to help, but she refused. She said nothing, hoping her guess would not be true. "Is everything all right?" Elsie asked her anxiously. "How is Jerry coming along?" Elsie looked haggard and syorn, like all the women, from doing the work that the men had always done. "He's fine," June said tonelessly, shutting tight the door of the tank room. "They're'all fine." "That's good," Elsie said, but she looked more frightened than before. June firmly locked the tank room door and the girl went away. The other women had been listening, and now they wandered back to their jobs, unsatisfied by June's answer, but not daring to ask for the actual truth. They were there whenever June wgnt into the tank room, and they were still there -- or relieved by others; June was not sure -- when she came out. And always some one of them asked .the unvarying question for all the others, and June gave the unvarying answer. But she kept the key. No woman but herself knew what was going on in the life tanks. Then the day of completion came. June told no one of the hour. She went into the room as on the other days, locked the door behind her, and there was the nightmare again. This time it was reality and she wandered down a path between long rows of coffinlike tanks, calling, "Max! Max!" silently and looking into each one as it opened. But each face she looked at was the same. Watching them dissolve and regrow in the nutrient solution, she had only been able to guess at the horror of what was happening. Now she khew. They were all the same leanboned, blond-skinned face, with a pin-feather growth of reddish down on cheeks and scalp. All horribly -- and handsomely -- the same. A medical kit lay carelessly on the floor beside Max's tank. She stood near the bag. "Max," she said, and found her throat closing. The canned voice of the mechanical mocked her, speaking glibly about waking and sitting up. "I'm: sorry, Max..." The tall man with rugged features and bright blue eyes sat up sleepily and lifted an eyebrow at her, and ran his hand over his red-fuzzed head in a gesture of bewilderment. "What's the matter, June?" he asked drowsily. She gripped his arm. "Max -- " He compared the relative size of his arm with her hand and said wonderingly, "You shrank." "I know, Max. I know." He turned his head and looked at his arms and legs, pale blond arms #  and legs with a down of red hair. He touched the thick left arm, squeezed a pinch of hard flesh. "It isn't mine," he said, surprised. "But I can feel it." Watching his face was like watching a stranger mimicking and distorting Max's expressions. Max in fear. Max trying to understand what had happened to him, looking around at the other men sitting up in their tanks. Max feeling the terror that was in herself and all the men as they stared at themselves and their friends and saw what they had become. "We're all Pat Mead," he said harshly. "All the Meads are Pat Mead. That's why he was surprised to see people who didn't look like himself." "Yes, Max." "Max," he repeated. "It's me, all right. The nervous system didn't change." His new blue eyes held hers. "My love didn't, either. Did yours? Did it, June?" "No, Max." But she couldn't know yet. She had loved Max with the thin, ironic face, the rumpled black hair and the twisted smile that never really hid his quick sympathy. Now he was Pat Mead. Could he also be Max? "Of course I still love you, darling." He grinned. It was still the wry smile of Max, though fitting strangely on the handsome new blond face. "Then it isn't so bad. It might even be pretty good. I envied him this big, muscular body. If Pat or any of these Meads so much as looks at you, I'm going to knock his block off. Understand?" S HE laughed and couldn't stop. It wasn't that funny. But it was still Max, trying to be unafraid, drawing on humor. Maybe the rest of the, men would also be their old selves, enough so the women would not feel that their anen were strangers.Behind her, male voices spoke characteristically. She did not have to turn to know which was which: "This is one way to keep a guy from stealing your girl," that was Len Marlow; "I've got to write down all my reactions," Hal Barton; "Now I can really work that hillside vein of metal," St. Clair. Then others complaining, swearing, laughing bitterly at the trick that had been played on them and their flirting, tempted women. She knew who they were. Their women would know them apart, too. "We'll go outside," Max said. "You and I. Maybe the shock won't be so bad to the women after they see me." He paused. "You didn't tell them, did you?" "I couldn't. I wasn't sure. I -- was hoping I was wrong." She opened the door and closed it quickly. There was a small crowd on the other side. "Hello, Pat," Elsie said uncertainly, trying to look past them into the fank room before the door shut. "I'm not Pat, I'm Max," said the tall man with the blue eyes and the fuzz-reddened skull. "Listen -- " "Good heavens, Pat, what happened to your hair?" Shelia asked. "I'm Max," insisted the man with the handsome face and the sharp blue eyes. "Don't you get it? I'm Max Stark. The melting sickness is Mead cells. We caught them from Pat. They adapted us to Minos. They also changed us all into Pat Mead." The women stared at him, at each other. They shook their heads. "They don't understand," June said. "I couldn't have if I hadn't seen it happening, Max." "It's Pat," said Shelia, dazedly stubborn. "He shaved off his hair. It's some kind of joke." Max shook her shoulders, glaring down at her face. "I'm Max. Max Stark. They all look like me. Do you hear? It's funny, but it's not a joke. Laugh for us, for God's sake!" "It's too much," said June. "They'll have to see." She opened the door and let them in. They hurried past her to the tanks, looking at forty-six identical blond faces, beginning to call in. frightened voices: "Jerry!" "Harry!" "Lee, where are you, sweetheart -- " June shut the door on the voices that were growing hysterical, the women terrified and helpless, the men shouting to let the women know who they were. "It isn't easy," said Max, looking down at his own thick muscles. "But you aren't changed and the other girls aren't. That helps." Through the muffled noise and hysteria, a bell was ringing. "It's the airlock," June said. Peering in the viewplate were nine Meads from Alexandria. To all appearances, eight of them were Pat Mead at various ages, from fifteen to fifty, and the other was a handsome, leggy, red-headed girl who could have been his sister... Regretfully, they explained through the voice tube that they had walked over from Alexandria to bring news that the plane pilot had contracted melting sickness there and had died. They wanted to come in. and returned to the tank room. The men were enjoying their new height and strength, and the women were bewilderedly learning that they could tell one Pat Mead from another, by voice, by gesture of face or hand. The panic was gone. In its place was a dull acceptance of the fantastic situation. Max called for attention. "There are nine Meads outside who want to come in. They have different names, but they're all Pat Mead." They frowned or looked blank, and George Barton asked, "Why didn't you let them in? I don't see any problem." "One of them," said Max soberly, Theodore Sturgeon  Horty Bluett ate ants because every once in a while he just had to. This was because he wasn't human. He didn't know it -- not even when he lost three fingers and they grew back. Two women loved Horty. One was Kay -- courageous, whimsical, and frighteningly inexperienced. The other was Z#na, exquisitely beautiful, warm, generous, and somewhat under four feet tall. A skilled narrative of excitement and passion, hatred and fear and vengeance. A. E. van Vogt  Allison Stephens stumbled onto the space ship and learned of the atomic war which would soon destroy the world -- and of the men and women who had lived hundreds of years. These men and women planned to escape to another planet in the space ship. Only one of them -- alluring Mistra Lanett -- wanted to save the Earth, and she was even more determined after meeting Allison Stephens. Festus Pragnell  One minute, Leroy Spofford was a former American champion, enjoying a visit to London with his lovely wife -- the next minute he was a muscular savage fighting for the possession of a primitive but beautiful blonde ina universe existing within an atom. H. G. Wells says: "I think it's a very good story, indeed, of the fantastic scientific type." Corwin Books  # each at bookstores, or postpaid from : "is a girl. Patricia Mead. The girl wants to come in." There was a long silence while the implication settled to the fear center of the women's minds. Shelia  the beautiful felt it first. She cried, "No! Please don't let her in!" There was real fright in her tone and the women caught it quickly. Elsie clung to Jerry, begging, "You don't want me to change, do you, Jerry? You like me the way I am! Tell me you do!" rpHE other girls backed away. It X was illogical, but it was human. June felt terror rising in herself. She held up her hand for quiet, and presented the necessity to the group. "Only half of us can leave Minos," she said. "The men cannot eat ship food; they've' been conditioned to this planet. We women can go, but we would have to go without our men. We can't go outside without contagion, and we can't spend the rest of our lives in quarantine inside the ship. George Barton is right -- there is no problem." "But we'd be changed!" Shelia shrilled. "I don't want to become a Mead! I don't want to be somebody else!"  She ran to the inner wall of the corridor. There was a brief hesitation, and then, one by one, the women fled to that side, until there were only Bess, June and four others left. "See!" cried Shelia. "A vote! We can't let the girl in!"' No one spoke. To change, to be someone else -- the idea was strange and horrifying. The men stood uneasily glancing at each other, as if looking into mirrors, and against the wall of the corridor the women watched in fear and huddled together, staring at the men. One man in forty-seven poses. One of them made a beseeching move toward Elsie and she shrank away. "No, Jerry! I won't let you change me!" Max stirred restlessly, the ironic smile that made his new face his own unconsciously twisting into a grimace of pity. "We men can't leave, and you women can't stay,"" he said bluntly. "Why not let Patricia Mead in. Get it over with!" June took a small mirror from her belt pouch and studied her own face, aware of Max talking forcefully, the men standing silent, the women pleading. Her face... her own face with its dark blue eyes, small nose, long mobile lips... the mind 'and the body are inseparable; the shape of a face is part of the mind. She put the mirror back. "I'd kill myself!" Shelia was sobbing. "I'd rather die!" "You won't die," Max was saying. "Can't you see there's only one solution -- " They were looking at Max. June stepped silently out of the tank room, and then turned and went to the airlock. She opened the valves that would let in Pat Mead's sister. udith Merril. Doubleday, Inc., #. # pages. should have had to be written. But now that it has been, one can only honor the woman who wrote it, for painting one of the most terrifyingly real pictures of an atomic war that science fiction has ever produced. There are those who will say that this is not really science fiction, since there is no "new" science in it, and no high-flying adventure -- only the horrible desperation of ordinary people faced with catastrophe. But as science fiction matures, it becomes more and more obvious that one of its important functions is to portray just such reactions to events growing out of actual or probable scientific developments. This Judith Merril has done. Briefly, the story tells what happens to a suburban housewife and her family when (New York City is atom bombed. Little that is "bigscale" occurs in the safe, smug community twenty miles from where the bombs fall. Most of the utilities eventually fail; schools close; food is rationed. There is some radiation poisoning, due largely to radioactive rain. Evacuees from 'New York complicate conditions, bringing in occasional bands of looters. Most of the action takes place within the comfortable middle-class home of the heroine. The unimaginable terror of an atomic war is brought intimately close through impersonal radio announcements, official voices on the telephone (until it breaks down) a handful of actual contacts with the outer world at the front door and in the house, and -- most vividly of all -- the children's own reactions to the unprecedented new conditions. Through their eyes' and those of their mother, one sees civilization waver and dissolve in a general, brutal chaos. Both as an overwhelming argument for peace and a masterly example of sensitive and perceptive story-telling, unadorned by highpressure writing or hysterics, Shadow on the Hearth is unreservedly recommended to everyone who is able to enjoy science fiction above the level of space operas. Fantasy Publishing Company, #. #I pages. pieces of pseudo-science fantasy in the past, and there will be more. But this book really should take a prize. The "science" in it is Conan Doyle stuff: mere personality transfer from one body to another under the impact of an atomic explosion. But consider the story built around this simple little idea! Jay Franklin is well known as political commentator, biographer of Fiorello LaGuardia, and general insider-aboutWashington. He wrote this story in  #, and sold it to Collier's as a serial. All the events in it are supposed to have taken place before the end of the war -- and consequently The Rat Race is, in essence, a try at rewriting the history of the war's last year from the "insider's" point of view. Here are some of the "rewritings" that crop up in the story: A thorium bomb was developed by the Navy for only # while the Manhattan project was Navy's onethorium bomb was sabotaged aboard the U. S. S. Alaska, mythical battleship carrying the bomb to reduce Japan. In this explosion the hero's personality is transferred from the battleship to the body of a fat, lecherous stockbroker in Manhattan -- but let that part of the story go. It isn't important. President Roosevelt  was murdered. Not by the enemy, Germany; not by the Russians, either; but by a "friendly nation" who wanted to keep him from spoiling the rich takings at the peace table with his idealism. Turns out Woodrow Wilson was crippled by the same kind of drugs for the same reason, too. All the important security agencies in Washington agreed to permit Hitler's chief spy in the United States to remain at large, pursuing his usual activities with their assistance because it was important to Big Business and Government to have an open line through to Hitler for preservation of top-level contacts. The Secret Service has an uncomfortable habit of incarcerating anyone it wants out of the way in Saint Elizabeth's, Washington, D. C.'s huge psychiatric hospital, if it cannot get any evidence against such people. The hero passes himself off as a member of a mythical intelligence unit called " # .# " . This non-existent unit had an agent "in the Jap squadron that attacked Pearl Harbor and one of our men was military secretary to Rommel in North Africa." In the end, however, although the hero had just thought aip "Z-#", it turns out to have been real! It is finally found that the soul of the man whose body the hero is occupying passed into the body of Ponto, a dog -- an idea used previously in a famous story, "A Matter of Form," by the editor of this magazine, which interested readers will find in The Big Book of Science Fiction, ' Groff Conklin, editor, Crown Publishers Inc., # (advt.) And the end of the book is the most incredible thing of all -- for the hero who tells the story in the first person casually kills himself off without ever giving himself a chance to write it down! If this is science fiction, then I am definitely a three-eyed man from Mars. (Photograph sent on receipt of #.) However, it is fascinating reading, and for those who like to believe the worst, it can be considered the expose to end all exposes. Certainly , Franklin wanted .to have his readers haunted by the idea that some of what he was writing was actually true. Maybe it was and just doesn't sound it. edited by August Derleth. Pellegrini  Cudahy, #. # pages. Donald A. Wollheim. Frederick Fell, #. #I pages. lin. Crown Publishers, Inc., #. # words. embarrass your reviewer no end to discuss. On the first two the great question is whether to be as critical as one thinks one should be, or to lay off because, as a competing anthologist, one might be thought to be tearing down the opposition. And on the last one -- what to say at all? Well... Mr. Derleth performs a big favor for science fiction lovers by bringing together, in the first half of the book, some of the great classics of the past, from Plato on Atlantis to Frank Stockton's "A Tale of Negative Gravity," and Johannes Kepler's "Somnium" to Grant Allen's fine "Pausodyne." When we come to the secorid half, the stories by current writers, my own personal tastes begin to interfere violently, and I drop criticism only to remark that it does contain good stories by Heard, Leiber and Sturgeon. Of the others, they seem to me much less science fiction than tales of the weird, the supernatural or the fantastic. Many of these stories will, I am sure, please many people, but I do not think they represent modern science fiction. As regards Flight Into Space, my task is even more difficult. Here the stories certainly are science fiction -- but science fiction on a level which is so different from what one hopes to find modern writers doin'g that there is no basis for critical evaluation. Robert Abernathy's spritely "Peril of the Blue World, "which shows how scientific machinery can delude the most advanced scientists when faced with superstition, is one excellent tale. It is also a pleasure to have Clare Winger Harris' and Miles J. Breuer's "A Baby on JSfeptune," a classic from the early days of Amazing Stories. The book contains twelve stories, one for each planet, the sun, the moon and the asteroids. It is 'probably a must for collectors, but for the "lay reader," so-called, turning from the slick and beautifully machined realism of the modern detective story to science fiction for a new kind of relaxation, I fear that most of the tales in this book are too implausible, too portentous, and, frankly, too badly written for easy acceptance. They are on the juvenile level; the' really adult audience which science fiction needs deserves a better selection of stories about the solar system than this one. As for the third and most recently published anthology on the list, all your reviewer will say at this point is that it contains # stories, runs to roughly # words, and sells for a bargain-basement price. It attempts to cover the field of modern science fiction from Karel Capek's R. U. R. down to some of the newest writers such as Katherine MacLean and Peter Loomis. Not every story is a masterpiece; not every one is a gem of fine writing. But all were selected to be read by a mature person without insulting his taste or intelligence. Publications, #. # pages. science fiction fans of; all schools. The huge omnibus volume of H. G. Wells' scientific romances has been reissued at a price anyone can afford. People who have long wanted to reread these out-of-print classics, and the younger generation which has never had a chance to read them at all, may now do so. The book contains The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, The Food of the Gods, and In the Days of the Comet. Men Like Gods is not included, but Dover hopes to bring it out separately in the not too distant future, and also hopes (cheers!) to reissue Wells' one-volume collected short stories. We will keep you posted on the future reprint plans of this publisher, one of the most recent in the field of regular trade houses to take up science The Last Martian The worries of a drunk are strange indeed. This one feared his people were all dead on another world. Silly, of course. Only... evening, but duller than most. I was back in the city room after covering a boring banquet, at which the food had been so poor that, even though it had cost me nothing. I'd felt cheated. For the hell of it, I was writing a long and glowing account of it, ten or twelve column inches. The copyreader, of course, would cut it to a passionless paragraph or two. Slepper was sitting with his feet up on the desk, ostentatiously doing nothing, and Johnny Hale was putting a new ribbon on his typewriter. The rest of the boys were out on routine assignments. Cargan, the city ed, came out of his private office and walked over to us. "Any of you guys know Barney Welch?" he asked us. A silly question. Barney runs Barney's Bar right across the street from the Trib. There isn't a Trib reporter who doesn't know Barney well enough to borrow money from him. So we all nodded. "He just phoned," Cargan said. "He's got a guy down there who claims to be from Mars." "Drunk or crazy, which?" Slepper wanted to know. "Barney doesn't know, but he said there might be a gag story in it if we want to come over and talk to the guy. Since it's" right across the street and since you three mugs are just sitting on your prats, anyway, one of you dash over. But no drinks on the expense account." Slepper said, "I'll go," but Cargan's eyes had lighted on me. "You free, Bill?" he asked. "This has got to be a funny story, if any, and you got a light touch on the human interest stuff." "Sure," I grumbled. "I'll go." ' "Maybe it's just some drunk being funny, but if the guy's really insane, phone for a cop, unless you think you can get a gag story. If there's an arrest,, you got something to hang a straight story on." Slepper said, "Cargan, you'd get your grandmother arrested to get a story. Can I go along with Bill, just for the ride?" "No, you and Johnny stay here. We're not moving the city room across the street to Barney's." Cargan went back into his office. I slapped a "thirty" on to end the banquet story and sent it down the tube. I got my hat and coat. Jilepper said, "Have a drink for me,Bill. But don't drink so much you lose that light touch." I said, "Sure," and went on over to the stairway and down. I walked into Barney's and looked around. Nobody from the Trib was there except a couple of pressmen playing gin rummy at one of the tables. Aside from Barney himself, back of the bar, there was only one other man in the place. He was a tall man, thin and sallow, who was sitting by himself in one of the booths, staring morosely into an almost empty beer glass. angle first, so I went up to the bar and put down a bill. "A quick one," I told him. "Straight, water on the side. And is tall-and-dismal over there the Martian you phoned Cargan about?" He nodded once and poured' my drink. "What's my angle?" I asked him. "Does he know' a reporter's going to interview him? Or do I just buy him a drink and rope him, or vhat? How crazy is he?" "You tell me. Says he just got in from Mars two hours ago and he's trying to figure it out. He says he's the last living Martian. He doesn't know you're a reporter, but he's all set to talk to you...I set it up." "How?" "Told him I had a friend who was smarter than any usual guy and , could give him good advice on what to do. I didn't tell him any name because I didn't know who Cargan would" send. But he's all ready to cry on your shoulder." "Know bis name?" Barney grimaced. "Yangan Dal, he says. Listen, don't get him violent or anything in here. I don't want no trouble." I downed my shot and took a sip of chaser. I said, "Okay, Barney. Look, dish up two beers for us and I'll go over and take 'em with me." Barney drew two beers and cut off their heads. He rang up sixty cents and gave me my change, and I went over to the booth with the beers. "Mr. Dal?" I said. "My name is Bill Everett. Barney tells me you have a problem I might help you on." He looked up at me. "You're the one he phoned? Sit down,Mr. Everett. And thanks very much for the beer." I slid into the booth across from him. He took the last sip of his previous beer and wrapped nervous hands' around the glass I'd just bought him. "I suppose you'll think I'm crazy," he said. "And maybe you'll be right, but -- I don't understand it myself. The bartender thinks I'm crazy, I guess. Listen, are you a doctor?" "Not exactly," I told him. "Call me a consulting psychologist." "Do you think I'm insane?' I said, "Most people who are don't admit they might be. But I haven't heard your story yet." He took a draught of the beer and put the glass down again, but kept his hands tightly around the glass, possibly to keep them from shaking. He said, "I'm a Martian. The last one. All the others are dead. I saw their bodies only two hours ago." "You were on Mars only two hours ago? How did you get here?" "I don't know. That's the horrible thing. I don't know. All I know is that the others were dead, their bodies starting to rot. It was of us, and now I'm the last one." population of Mars?" "About that. A little over, maybe. But that was the population. They're all dead now, except me. I looked in three cities, the three biggest ones. I was in Skar, and when I found all the people dead there, I took a targan -- there was no one to stop me -- and flew it to Undanel. I'd never flown one before, but the controls were simple. Everyone in Undanel was dead, too. I refueled and flew on.I flew low and watched and there was no one alive. I flew to Zandar, the biggest city -- over them were dead and starting to rot. It was horrible, I tell you. Horrible. I can't get over the shock of it." "I can imagine," I said.  V'OU can't. Of course it was a JL dying world, anyway; we didn't have more than another dozen generations left to us, you understand. Two centuries ago, we numstarving. It was the kryl, the disease that came from the desert wind and that our scientists couldn't cure. In two centuries it reduced us to onethirtieth of our number and it still kept on.' , "Your people died, then, of this -- kryl?" "No. When a Martian dies of kryl, he withers. The corpses I saw were not withered." He shuddered and drank the rest of his beer. I saw that I'd neglected mine and downed it. I raised two fingers at Barney, who was watching our way and looking worried. My Martian went on talking. "We tried to develop space travel, but v we couldn't. We thought some of us might escape the kryl, if we came to Earth or to other worlds. We tried, but we failed. We couldn't even get to Deimos or Phobos, our moons." "You didn't develop space travel? Then how -- " "I don't know. I don't know, and I tell you it's driving me wild. I don't know how I got here. I'm Yangan Dal, a Martian. And I'm here, in this body. It's driving me wild, I tell you."' Barney came with the beers. He . # looked worried enough, so I waited until he was out of hearing before I asked, "In this body? 'Do you mean -- " "Of course. This isn't I, this body I'm in. You don't think Martians would look exactly like humans, do you? I'm three feet tall, weigh what would be about twenty pounds here on Earth. I have four arms with sixfingered hands. This body I'm in -- it frightens me. I don't understand it, any more than I know how I got here." "Or how you happen to talk English? Or can you account for that?" "Well -- in a way I can. This body; its name is Howard Wilcox. It's a bookkeeper. It's married to a female of this species. It works at a place called the Humbert Lamp Company. I've got all its memories and I can do everything it could do; I know everything it knew, or knows. In a sense, I am Howard Wilcox. I've got stuff in my pockets to prove it. But it doesn't make sense, because I'm Yangan Dal, and I'm a Martian. I've even got this body's tastes. I like beer. And if I think about this body's wife, I -- well, I love her." I stared at him and pulled out my cigarettes, held out the package to him. "Smoke?" "This body -- Howard Wilcox -- doesn't smoke. Thanks, though. And let me buy us another round of beers. There's money in these pockets." I signaled Barney. "When did this happen? You say only two hours ago? Did you ever suspect beforethen that you were a Martian ?" "Suspect? I was a Martian What time is it?" I looked at Barney's clock. "A little after nine." "Then it's a little longer than I thought. Three and a half hours. It would have been half past five when I found myself in this body, because it was going home from work then, and from its memories I know it had left work half an hour before then, at five." "And did you -- it -- go home?" "No, I was too confused. It wasn't my home. I'm a Martian. Don't you understand that? Well, I don't blame you if you don't, because I don't, either. But I walked. And I -- I mean Howard Wilcox -- got thirsty and he -- I -- " He stopped and started over again. "This body got thirsty and I stopped in here for a drink. After two or three beers, I thought maybe the bartender there could give me some advice and I started talking to him." table. "Listen, Howard," I said, "you were due home for dinner. You're making your wife worry like anything about you unless you phoned her. Did you?" "Did I -- Of course not. I'm not Howard Wilcox." But a new type of worry came into his face. "You'd better phone her," I said. "What's there to lose? Whether you are Yangan Dal or Howard Wilcox, there's a woman sitting home worrying about you or him. Be kind enough to phone her. Do you know the number?" "Of course. It's my own -- I mean it's Howard Wilcox's -- " "Quit tying yourself into grammatical knots and go make that phone call. Don't worry about thinking up a story yet; you're too confused. Just tell her you'll explain wthen you get home, but that you're all right." He got up like a man in a daze and headed for the phone booth. I went over to the bar and had another quickie, straight. Barney said, "Is he -- uh -- " "I don't know yet," I said. "There's something about it I still don't get." He was grinning weakly. He said, "She sounded madder than hoptoads. If I -- if Howard Wilcox does go home, his story had better be good." He took a gulp of beer. "Better than Yangan Dal's story, anyway." He was getting more human by the moment. But then he was back into it again. He stared at me. "I maybe should have told you how it happened from the beginning. I was shut up in a room on Mars. In the city of Skar. I don't know why they put me there, but they did. I was ldtked in. And then for a long time they didn't bring me food, and I got so hungry that I worked a stone loose from the floor and started to scrape my way ' through the door. I was starving. It took me three days -- Martian days, about six Earth days -- to get through, and I staggered around until I found the food quarters of the building I was in. There was no one there and I ate. And then -- "... "Go on," I said. "I'm listening." "I went out of the building and everyone was lying in the open, in the streets, dead. Rotting." He put ' his bands over his eyes. "I looked in some houses, other buildings. I don't know why or what I was looking for, but nobody had died indoors. Everybody was lying dead in the open, and none of the bodies , were withered, so it wasn't kryl that killed them. "Then, as I told you, I stole the targan -- or I guess I really didn't steal it, because there was no one to Steal it from -- and flew around looking for someone alive. Out in the country it was the same way -- everybody lying in the open, near the houses, dead. And Undanel and Zandar, the same. , "Did I tell you Zandar's the biggest city, the capital? In the middle of Zandar there's a big open, space, the Games Field, that's more than an Earth-mile square. And all the people in Zandar were there, or it all lying together, like they'd gathered there to die, out in the open. Like they'd known. Like everyone, everywhere else, was out in the open, but here they were all tothem. "I saw it from the air, as I flew over the city. And there was something in the middle of the field, on a platform. I went down and hovered the targan -- it's a little like your helicopters, I forgot to mention -- I hovered over the platform to see what was there. It was some kind of a column made of solid copper. Copper on Mars is like gold is on Earth. There was a push-button set with precious stones set in the column. And a Martian in a blue robe lay dead at the foot of the column, right under the button. As though he'd pushed it -- and then died. And everybody else had died, too, with him. Everybody on Mars, except me. "And I lowered the targan onto the platform and got out and I pushed the button. I wanted to die, too; everybody else was dead and I wanted to die, too. But I didn't. I was riding on a streetcar on Earth, on my way home from work, and ' my name was -- " I signaled Barney. "Listen, Howard," I said. "We'll have one more beer and then you'd better get home to your wife. You'll catch hell from her, even now, and the longer you wait, the worse it'll be. And if you're smart, you'll take some candy or flowers along and think up a really good story on the way home. And not the one you. just told me." He said, "Well -- " I said, "Well me no wells. Your name is Howard Wilcox and you'd better get home to your wife. I'll tell you what may have happened. We know little about the human mind, and many strange things happen to it. Maybe the medieval people had something when they believed in possession. Do you want to know what I think happened to you?" "What? For Heaven's sake, if you can give me any explanation -- except tell me that I'm crazy -- " "I think., you can drive yourself batty if you let yourself think about it, Howard. Assume there's some natural explanation and then forget it. I can make a random guess what may have happened." I waited until he'd gone back to the bar. I said, "Howard, just possibly a man -- I mean a Martian -- named Yangan Dal did die this afternoon on Mars. Maybe he really was the last Martian. And maybe, somehow, his mind got mixed up with yours at the moment of his death. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it isn't impossible to believe. Assume it was that, Howard, and fight it off. Just act as though you are Howard Wilcox -- and lock in a mirror if you doubt it. Go home and square thingswith your wife, and then go to work tomorrow morning and forget it. Don't you think that's the best idea?" "Well, maybe you're right. The evidence of my senses -- " "Accept it. Until and unless you get better evidence." We finished off our beers and T put him into a taxi. I reminded him to stop for candy or flowers and to work up a good and reasonable alibi, instead of thinking about what he'd been telling me. building and into Cargan's office and closed the door behind me. I said, "It's all right, Cargan. I straightened him out." "What had happened?" "He's a Martian, all right. And he was the last Martian left on Mars. Only he didn't know we'd come here; he thought we were all dead." ."But how -- How could he have been overlooked? How could he not have known?" I said, "He's an imbecile. He was in a mental institution in Skar andsomebody slipped up and left him in his room when the button was pushed that sent us here. He wasn't out in the open, so he didn't get the mentaport rays that carried our psyches across space. He escaped from his room and found the platform in Zandar, where the ceremony was, and pushed the button himself. There must have been enough juice left to send him after us." Cargan whistled softly. "Did you tell him the truth? And is he smart enough to keep his trap shut?" I shook my head. "No, to both questions. His I. Q. is about fifteen, at a guess. But that's as smart as the average Earthman, so he'll get by here all right. I convinced him he really was the Earthman his psyche happened to get into." "Lucky thing he went into Barney's. I'll phone Barney in a minute and let him know it's taken care of. I'm surprised he didn't give the guy a mickey before he phoned us." I said, "Barney's one of us. He wouldn't have let the guy get out of there. He'd have held him till we got there." "But you let him go. Are you sure it's safe? Shouldn't you have -- " "He'll be all right," I said. "I'll assume responsibility to keep an eye on him until we take over. I suppose we'll have to institutionalize him again after that. But I'm glad I didn't have to kill him. After all, he is one of us, imbecile or not. And he'll probably be so glad to learn he isn't the last Martian that he won't mind having to return to an asylum." I went back into the city room and to my desk. Slepper was gone, sent out somewhere, on something. Johnny Hale looked up from the magazine he was reading. "Get a story?" he asked. "Nah," I said. "Just a drunk being the life of the party. I'm surprised at Barney for calling." Darwinian Pool Room Creation's meaning is an awesome secret. Or maybe not. f ft conception of Genesis I is  f all wrong," I said. "Take a pool room, for instance." The other three mentally took a pool room. We were sitting ja broken down swivel-chairs in Dr. Trotter's laboratory, but it was no trick at all for them to convert the lab benches into pool tables, the tall ring-stands into cues, the reagent wait for me to do something with the imaginary layout. Thetier even raised one linger, closed his eyes and muttered softly. "Pool room!" Trotter, as usual, said nothing at all, but nursed his second cup of coffee. The coffee, also as usual, was horrible, but then I was the newcomer to the group and had not yet calloused my gastric lining. "Now consider the end of a game of pocket pool," I said. "You've got each ball, except the cue-ball, of course, in a given pocket -- " "Wait a while," said Thetier, always fhe purist. "It doesn't matter which pocket." "Beside the point. When the game is over, the balls are in various pockets. Right? Now suppose you walk into the pool room when the . game is all over, and observe only that final position and try to reconstruct the course of previous events. You have several alternatives. "Not if you know the rules of the game," said Madend. "Assume complete ignorance," I said. "You can decide that the balls were pocketed by being struck with the cue-ball, which in turn was struck by the cue. This would be the truth, but not an explanation that is very likely to occur to you spontaneously. It is much more likely that you would decide' that the balls were individually placed in their corresponding pockets by hand, or always existed in the pockets as you found them."  "All right," said Thetier, "if you're going to skip back to Genesis, you will claim that by analogy we can account for the universe as either having alwiys existed, having been created arbitrarily as it is now, or having developed through evolution. So what?" "That's not the alternative I'm proposing at all," I said. "Let us accept the idea of creation for a purpose, and consider only the methods by which such a creation could have been accomplished. It's easy to suppose that God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light, but it's not esthetic." "It's simple," said Madend, "and 'Occam's Razor' demands that of alternate possibilities, the simpler be chosen." "Then why don't you play pool by putting the balls in the pockets by hand? That's simpler, too, but it isn't the game. Now if you started with the primordial atom -- " "What is that?" asked Trotter craftily. "Well, call it all the mass-energy of the universe compressed into a single sphere, in a state of minimum entropy -- completely at rest, motionless. Now explode that in such a way that all the constituent particles of matter and quanta of energy act, react and interact in a pre-calculated way, so that just our present universe' is created. Wouldn't that be much more satisfactory than simply waving your hand and saying, 'Let there be light'?" I "like stroking the cue-ball sending all fifteen into their predestined pockets?" "In an esthetic pattern," I said. "There's more poetry in the thought of a huge act of direct will," said Madend. "That depends on whether you look at the matter as a mathematician or a theologian," I said. "As a matter of fact, Genesis I could be The Creator could have spent His time calculating all the necessary variables and relationships into six gigantic equations. Count one 'day'  A dozen stories depicting man's struggle to win the stars, by Asimov, Hubbard, Clement, Wellman, Walton and many more. Edited by Martin Greenberg; introduction by Willy Ley. # Dramatic adventure in the future by the The disturbing story of America's future under the invaders froin the East, by Robert A. Heinlein. # Epic space, adventure by George O. Smith. # Order from your bookseller , or from New York #. New York Ax end. "As for instance," I said, "the passing away of the dinosaurs." "What's so' hard to understand about that?" "There's no logical reason for it. Try to name seme." "Law of diminishing returns," Said Madend. "The brontosaurus got so massive, it took legs like treetrunks to support him, and at that he had to stand jn water and let buoyancy do most of the work. And he had to eat all the time to keep himself supplied with calories. I mean all the time. As for the carniF or. Fine The best of Isaac Asimov's famed Positronic Robot stories, woven into an engrossing new novel of the future. # A hilarious fantasy by those gentle masters of the art, It. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, # for each equation. After having applied the initial explosive impetus, He would then 'rest' on the seventh 'day', said seventh 'day' being the entire interval of time from that beginning to # B.C. That interval, in which the infinitely complex patout, is obviously of no interest to the writers of the Bible. All two ered merely the developing single act of creation." "You're postulating a teleological universe," said Trotter, "one in which purpose is implied." "Sure," I said. "Why not? A conscious act of creation without a purpose is ridiculous. Besides which, if you try to consider the course of evolution as the blind outcome of non-purposive forces, you end up with some very puzzling problems." vores, they afflicted such armor upon themselves in their race against one another, offensive and defensive, that they were just crawling tanks, puffing under tons of bone and scale. It got to the point where it just didn't pay off." "Okay," I said, "so the big babies die off. But most of the dinosaurs were little running creatures whose mass and armor had not become excessive. What happened to them?" "As far as the small ones are concerned," put in Thetier, "there's the question of competition. If some of the reptiles developed hair and warm blood, they could adapt themselves to variations in climate more efficiently. They wouldn't have to stay out of direct sunlight. They would not get sluggish as soon as the temperature dropped below eighty Fahrenheit. They would develop intelligence of a sort. Therefore, they would win the race for food." "That doesn't satisfy me," I said. "In the first place, I don't think the various saurians were quite such pushovers. They held out for some than genus Homo. Secondly, coldblooded animals still survive, notably insects and amphibia -- " "High rate of reproduction," said Thetier. "And plenty of reptiles. The snakes, lizards, and turtles are still very much in business. For that matter, what about the ocean? The saurians adapted to that in the shape of Dramatic Science-Fiction This Classic Novel of Worlds Beyond the Edge of Space Out on the rim of the Solar System, they heard the strange signals from far away -- a warning of danger that threatened the very existence of the Universe! Don't miss this powerful novel, hailed as a classic and now expanded into a big, thrill-packed saga of interplanetary adventure. by Clifford D. Samak Order from your bookseller, or from New York #, New York This Only # A score of favorite stories by your favorite science fiction writers -- Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon,' James MacCreigh, Merril, it's the biggest buy in science fiction at only # postpaid! Also: by Judith Merril Gripping novel of an atom-bomb raid. # Famous novel... And Searching Mind" in book form. # Pre-foundation yarn, never before in print. # The greatest sciencefiction detective story ever written. # Send remittance to: #I Fort Hamilton Parkway Brooklyn. New York ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. They vanished, too, and there were no newly developed forms of life based on radical evolutionary advances to compete with them. As near as I can make out, the highest form of ocean life are the fish -- mammals aside -- and they canje before the ichthyosaurs. How do you account for that? The fish are just as cold-blooded and even more primitive. And in the ocean, there's no question of mass and diminishing returns since the water does all the work of support. The sulfur-bottom whale is larger than any dinosaur that ever lived. Another thing. What's the use of talking about the inefficiency of cold blood and saying that, at temperatures below #, cold-blooded animals become sluggish? Fish are very happy at continuous temperatures of about #, and there is nothing sluggish about a shark."L quietly steal off the Earth, leaving their bones behind?" asked Madend. "They were part of the plan. Once they had served their purpose, they were gotten rid of." "How? In a properly arranged Velikovskian catastrophe? A striking comet? The finger of God?" "No, of course not. They died out naturally and of necessity according to the Original pre-calculation." "Then we ought to be able to find out what that natural, necessary cause of extinction was." "Not necessarily. It might have been some obscure failure of the saurian biochemistry, deliberately provided for, some developing vitamin deficiency -- " "It's too complicated," said Thetier. "It just seems complicated," I maintained. "Supposing it were necby making a four-cushion shot. Would you quibble at the complicated course of the cue-ball? A direct hit would be less complicated, but would accomplish nothing. And despite the apparent complication, the stroke would be no more difficult to the master. It would still be a single motion of the cue, merely in a different direction. The ordinary properties of elastic materials and the laws of conservation .of momentum would then take over."  "I take it then," said Trotter, "that you suggest that the course of evolution represents the Simplest way in which one could have progressed from original chaos to man." "That's right. Not a sparrow falls without a purpose, and not a pterodactyl, either." "And where do we go from here?" "Nowhere. Evolution is finished with the development of man. The old rules don't apply any more." "Oh, don't they?" said Madend. "You rule out the continuing occurrence of environmental variation and of mutations?" "In a sense, I do," I insisted. ' "More and more, man is controlling his environment, and more and more he is understanding the mechanism of mutations. Before man appeared on the scene, creatures could neither foresee and guard themselves against shifts in climatic conditions, nor could they understand the increasing danger from newly developing species before the danger had become overwhelming. But now ask yourself this question: What species of organism can possibly replace us and how 'is it going to accomplish the task?" "We can start off," said Madend, "by considering the insects. I think they're doing the job already."L from increasing in population about ten-fold in the last two hundred and fifty years. If man were ever to concentrate on the struggle with the insects, instead of spending most of his spare effort on other types of fighting, said insects would not last long. We could clean them off the planet." "What about bacteria, or, better still, viruses?" asked Madend. "The influenza virus of # did a respectable job of getting rid of a sizable percentage of us." "Sure," I said, "just about one per cent. Even the Black Death of the #th Century only managed to kill one-third of the population of Europe, and that at a time when medical science was non-existent. It was allowed to run its course at will, under the most appalling conditions of medieval poverty, filthand squalor, and still two-thirds of our very tough species managed to survive. Disease can't do it." "What about man himself developing into a sort of superman and displacing the old-timers?" suggested Thetier. "Not likely," I said. "The only part of the human being which is worth anything, as far as being boss of the world is concerned, is his nervous system; the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, in particular. They are the most specialized part of his organism and therefore a dead end. If there is anything the course of evolution demonstrates, it is that, once a certain degree of specialization sets in, flexibility #s lost. Further development can proceed only in greater specialization." "Isn't that exactly what's wanted?" said Thetier. "Maybe it is, but as Madend pointed out, specializations have a way of reaching a point of diminishing returns. It's the size of the human head at birth that makes the process difficult and painful. It's the complexity of the human mentality that makes mental and emotional maturity lag so far behind sexual maturity in man, with its consequent harvest of troubles. It's the delicacy of mental equipment that makes most or all of the race neurotic. How much further can we go without complete disaster?"' present the finest, most popular book-length stories...  Exactly as they appeared in their book versions! Every word of the original! This Month's Selection. At Any Newsstand --  --  -- # per copy' X end, "might be in greater stability, or quicker maturity, rather than higher brain-power." "Maybe, but there are no signs of it. Cro-Magnon man existed ten thousand years ago, and there are indications that modern man ishis inferior, if anything, in brain-power. And in physique, too." "Ten thousand years," said Trotter, "isn't much, evolutionarily speaking. Besides, there is always the possibility of other species of animals developing intelligence, or something better -- and don't say there couldn't be anything better." "We'd never let them. That's the point. It would take hundreds of thousands of years for, let us say, apes or insects to become intelligent, and we'd wipe them out -- or else use them as slaves." "All right," said Thetier. "What about obscure biochemical deficiencies, such as you insisted on in the case of the dinosaurs? Take Vitamin C, for instance. The only organisms that can't make their own are guinea-pigs and primates, including man. Suppose this trend continues and we become impossibly dependent on too many essential food factors. Or what if the apparent increase in the susceptibility of man to cancer continues?" Then what will happen?" "That's no problem," I said. "It's the essence of the new situation, that we are producing all known foodfactors artificially, and may eventually have a completely synthetic diet. the advance guard. Make sure your monthly copy reaches you as fast as it rolls off the press. Subscribe now.  # West #th Street, New York #. N. Y. I # # per year in United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central  i America and U. S. possessions. Elsewhere #. i And tHere's no reason to think we won't learn how to prevent or cure cancer some day." Trotter got up. He had finished his coffee, but was still nursing his cup."All right, then, you say we've bit a dead end. But what if all this has been taken into the original account? The Creator was prepared to letting the dinosaurs develop something or other that would eventually result in mankind -- or so you say. Why can't He have figured out a way in which man could use his intelligence and his control of the environment to prepare the next stage of the game? That might be a very tricky part of the pool game." I That stopped me. "How do you mean ?" Trotter smiled at me. "Oh, I was just thinking that it might not be entirely coincidence, and that a new race may be coming and an old one going, entirely through the efforts of this cerebral mechanism." He tapped his temple. "In what way?" "Stop me if I'm wrong, but aren't the sciences of nucleonics and cybernetics reaching simultaneous peaks? Aren't we inventing hydrogen bombs and thinking machines at the same time? Is that coincidence -- or part of the divine purpose?" That was about all for that lunch hour. It, had begun as logic-chopping just to kill time, but since then -- I've been wondering.  Just in case you haven't read pages # through #... ning a So turn back to page # and see what you can dream up in order to win one of the exciting prizes. Closing date of contest eningly powerful novel. It's a novel of the future, but it could just as easily -- and truthfully -- apply to the present! while presenting believe-it-or-not truths in the guise of entertainment," says Eric Frank Russell's introduction to this great book. "It derives its fantastic atmosphere only from the queerness, the eccentricity, the complete inexplicability -- so far as dogmatic science is concerned -- of the established facts which gave it birth." Facts... terrifying facts that can be proved! Russell's explanation makes a story of immense strength and suspense... but is if merely a story? Decide for yourself. Read by Eric Frank Russell A complete, unexpurgated novel, exactly as it appeared in book version, in future novels in Galaxy's exciting series, fill out the subscription coupon below.  World Editions, Inc., # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. Enclosed please find # for a year's subscription (# issues) of I # in United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S.possessions. # elsewhere. Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching dawn through the atmosphere light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, protom gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand. "Get back from those controls. Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony #Q# miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rimrock .and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a suntanned hand. "Rear back and dismount. Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts." Sound alike? They should -- one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, plausible, thoughtful... written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction...for people who also know and love it. Galaxy   E C Lots of things: Paid-up accident insurance for a hardboiled pulp detective, for instance... A stereoscopic full-coior crystal ball for a swami... A bathing suit with built-in curves for a flat-bottom non-dreamboat.  C. But for science fiction readers, such appealing plums lack ingenuity. Not so with the startling list we've prepared. For merely explaining a mystery (which no one has yet been able to explain satisfactorily) you can win the most exciting, the most extraordinary...   -- E C. We don't say this is the greatest science fiction contest there ever was; we want you to say it. And very far from incidental -- some reader, somewhere, may have the actual answer to the key question:  i What and Why Are  i Flying Saucers?  i C. Check the contents page for our Flying Saucer Contest rules and prizes.  C. Remember, there is a # cash bonus for each of the winners of the first three prizes if their entries are  Editor-in-Chief Art Director Cover by Don Sibley Illustrating Honeymoon in Hell is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscriptions (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Application for entry as second-class matter is pending at the Post Office, New Yo'rk, N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President: George A. Gogniat. Vice-President: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer : Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. November, # Vol. #, No. # by Clifford D. Simak I # by Fredric Brown # by Anthony Boucher # by Isaac Asimov # by Fritz Leiber # by Damon Knight #I by Groff Conklin # Next Issue at Your Newsstand First Week in November Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. It's All Yours in the science fiction field, assure their readers that they are the readers' magazines and that suggestions are welcome and will befollowed. The assurance, however, is hedged with unspoken reservations. that same assurance... but there are no reservations of any kind whatever. This is, literally and completely, your magazine. Your suggestions will be followed. Makeup, art, editorial content, everything from cover to cover, including the cover, and even the size of the magazine itself you will decide for us. There is, in other words, nothing Fiction. Repeat, nothing. Not a single thing. A year from now, it may look entirely  different, and every change will be the result of alert study of readers' wishes and concrete form. Let's detail the statement and see just how inclusive it is: # Digest size, cover design and tone of the cover painting were determined by a poll of readers, writers, artists, and disinterested non-fans. While extensive, the survey could not possibly be exhaustive. A more complete sampling via your letters can change size, design and selection of cover illustrations. # Serials are book length, .and all thus far ordered are scheduled for hard-cover publication... exactly as they appear here, except for minor editing differences. Do you favor full-length serials, # to # words each, or would you rather have the # to # word stories that are termed novels, and sometimes even book-length novels, in other magazines? # We have arbitrarily decided upon a one-third installment of the serial, two novelets, three to five short stories, and one short article as desirable balance for the magazine. Would you rather have shorter serial installments, longer novelets, fewer short stories, expanded articles? Or do you have other ideas on editorial content and balan'ce? # Are you in favor of articles at all? If so, do you prefer general subjects, briefly and interestingly treated, or technical themes written at length and in non-layman's language?  Does an editorial page, in your opinion, have a place in a magazine of science fiction ? What subjects, assuming you approve, should it discuss?  As stated in our first issue, no genuine letter department can appear until the third issue, since it takes two months to print and distribute a monthly magazine. There is no way to alter our decision not to run congratulatory or ordered letters in the first two issues, but we do plan to have a department... unless our readers vote against it. # Should our book-review department be longer, shorter, or not at all? # How are we doing on inside illustrations ? # Final and perhaps biggest point is the subject matter of our stories. We have challenged writers to present themes that could not be sold elsewhere... themes that are too adult, too profound or revolutionary in concept for other magazines to risk publishing. Letters received thus far (too late to form a department), indicate approval of this policy. But you may have a different opinion, more than a right to be heard -- you have an actual, concrete vote. T HE above statement is our Science Fiction will be whatever you want it to be. But it must have active and ungrudging support in order to fulfil that promise. We have sought that support in .ways that no other science fiction magazine has ever attempted. Our publicity campaign, just concluded, is the first in the history of the field, and covered radio, TV, newspapers and periodicals. It has brought us readers who never bought a magazine of this type before. We are inducing fine writers in other branches of literature to try their hand in science fiction, and some of their efforts will be published shortmore beautifully and expensively than any science fiction magazine now on the newsstands; our costs, according to competitive bids, appear to be # per cent more than our nearest competitor. But our greatest support must come from our readers, of course. For example, there is enormous pressure on newsstands for display; it is almost impossible for a dealer to display every magazine he receives. Furthermore, there is a tendency not to display new titles unless there is a demand for them. If our readers can cajole dealers play, our sales potential will be greatly increased, which, in turn, will make expansion and improvement that much easier. New readers are necessary not only for us, but to enlarge the entire market, for the bigger the audience, the bigger and better we and other publishers can make our magazines. This means spreading the word to non-readers that science fiction is adult fiction. It really is your magazine. You can make it the magazine you want it to be. That's a promise! Illustrated by Don Sibley One way to stop a battle is to give enemies something that they can really fight about! Too Many Females year #, things were goingalong about the same as usual, only a little worse. The cold war that had been waxing and waning between the United States and the Eastern Alliance -- Russia, China, and their lesser satellites -- was warmer than it had ever been. War, hot war, seemed not only inevitable but extremely imminent. The race for the Moon was an immediate cause. Each nation had landed a few men on it and each claimed it. Each had found that rockets sent from Earth were inadequate to permit establishment of a permanent base upon the Moon, and" that only establishment of a permanent base, in force, would determine possession. And so each nation (for convenience we'll call the Eastern Alliance a nation, although it was not exactly that) was engaged in rushing construction of a space station to be placed in an orbit around Earth. With such an intermediate step in space, reaching the Moon with large rockets would be .practicable and construction of armed bases, heavily garrisoned, would be comparatively simple. Whoever got there first could not only claim possession, but could implement the claim. Military secrecy on both sides kept from the public just how near to completion each space base was, but it was generally -- and correctly -- believed that the issue would be determined within a year, two years at the outside. Neither nation could afford to let the other control the Moon. That much 'had become obvious even to those, who were trying desperately to maintain peace. On September #th, #, a statistician in the birth record department of New York City (his name was Wilbur Evans, but that doesn't matter) noticed that out of # births reported the previous , day, # had been girls and only # boys. He knew that, statistically, this was practically impossible. In a small city where there are only, say, ten births a day, it is quite possible -- and not at all alarming -- that on any one given day, # or even #, of the births may be of the same sex. But out of so large a figure as #, so high a ratio as # to # is alarming. Wilbur Evans went to his department chief and he, too, was interested and alarmed. Checks were made by telephone -- first with nearby cities and, as the evidence mounted, with more and more distant ones. , zled investigators -- and there was quite a large group interested bjr then -- knew that in every city checked, the same thing had happened. The births, all over the Western Hemisphere and in Europe, for that day had averaged about the same -- three .boys for every thirteen girls. Back-checking show r ed that the trend had started almost a w eek before, but with only a slight predominance of girls. For only a few days had the discrepancy been obvious. On the fifteenth, the ratio had been three boys to every five girls and on the sixteenth it had been four to fourteen. The newspapers got the story, of course, and kicked it around. The television comics ihad .fun with it, if their audiences didn't. But four days later, on September #st, only one child out of every eighty-seven born in the country was male. That wasn't funny. People and governments started to worry; biologists and laboratories who had already started to investigate the phenomenon made it their number one project. The television comics quit joking about it after one crack on the subject by the top comedian in the country drew # indignant letters and 'lost him his contract. On September #th, out of a normal number of births in the United States, only forty-one were boys. Investigation proved that every one of these was a late, or delayed, birth. It became obvious that no male child had been conceived during the latter part of December of the previous year, #. By this time, of course, it was known that the same condition prevailed everywhere -- in the countries of the Eastern Alliance as well as in the United States, and in every other country and area of the world -- among the Eskimos, the Ubangi and the Indians of Tierra del Fuego. The strange phenomenon, whatever itwas, affected human beings only, however. Births among animals, wild or domesticated, showed the usual ratio of the two sexes. Work on both space stations continued, but talk of war -- and incidents tending to lead to war -- diminished. The human race had something new, something less immediate, but in the long run far worse to worry about. Despite the apparent inevitability of war, few people thought that it would completely end the human race; a complete lack of male Children definitely would. Very, very definitely. And for once something was happening that the United States could not blame on the Eastern Alliance, and vice versa. The Orient -- China and India in particular -- suffered more, perhaps, than the Occident, for in those countries male offspring are of supreme emotional importance to parents. There were riots in both China and India, very bloody ones, 'until the people realized that they didn't know whom or what they were rioting against and sank back into miserable passivity . laboratories went on twenty-fourhour shifts, and anyone who knew a gene from a chromosome could command his weight in paper currency for looking -- however futilely -- through a microscope. Accredited biologists and geneticists became more important than presidents and dictators. But they accomplished, no more than the cults which sprang up . everywhere (though mostly in California) and which blamed what was happening on everything from a conspiracy of the Elders of Zion to (with unusually good sense) an invasion from space, and advocated everything from vegetarianism to (again with unusually good sense) a revival of phallic worship. Despite scientists and cults, despite riots and resignation, not a single male Child was born anywhere in the world during the month of December, #. There had been isolated instances, all quite late births, during October and November. January of # again drew a blank. Not that everyone qualified wasn't trying. Except, perhaps, the one person who was slated to do more than anyone else -- well, almost anyone else -- about the matter. Not that Capt. Raymond F. Carmody, U.S.S.F., retired, was. a rnisogomist, exactly. He liked women well enough, both in the abstract and in the concrete. But he'id been badly jilted once and it had cured him of any desire whatsoever for marriage. Marriage aside, he .took women as he found them -- and he had no trouble finding them. For one thing, don't let the word "retired" fool you. In the Space Service, rocket pilots are retired at the ripe old age of twenty-five. The recklessness, reaction-speed and stamina of youth are much more important than experience. The trick in riding a rocket is not to do anything in particular; it's to be tough enough to stay alive and sane until you get there. Technicians do the brain-work and the only controls are braking rockets to help you get down in one piece when you land; reaction-speed is of more importance than experience in managing them. Neither speed nor experience helps you if you've gone batty en route from spending days on end in the equivalent of a coffin, or if you haven't what it takes not to die in a good landing. And a good landing is one that you can walk away from after you've recovered consciousness.  That's why Ray Carmody, at twenty-seven, was a retired rocket 'pilot. Aside from test flights on and near Earth, he'd made one' successful flight to the Moon with landing and return. It had been the fifteenth attempt and the third success. There had been two more successful flights thereafter -- altogether five successful round trips out of eighteen tries. Buteach rocket thus far designed had been able, barely, to carry fuel to get itself and its crew of one back to Earth, with almost-starvation rations for the period required. Steprockets were needed to do even that, and step-rockets are terrifically ex-, pensive and cumbersome things. ' tired from the Space Service, two years before, it had been conceded that establishment of a permanent base of any sort on the Moon was completely impracticable until a space station, orbited around the Earth, had been completed as a waystation. Comparatively huge rockets could reach a space station with relative ease, and starting from a station in open space and against lesser gravitational pull from Earth, going the rest of the way to the Moon would be even simpler. But we're .getting away from Ray Carmody, as Carmody had got away from the Space Service. He could have had a desk job in it after old age had retired him, a job that would have paid better than he was making at the moment. But he knew little about the technical end of rocketry, and he knew less, and cared nothing, about administrative detail work. He was most interested in cybernetics, which . is the science of electronic calculating machines. The big machines had always fascinated him, andhe'd found a job working with the biggest of them all, the one in the building on a corner of the grounds of the .Pentagon that bad been . built, in #, especially to house it. It was, of course, known as Junior to its intimates. Carmody's job, specifically, was Operative, Grade I, and the Grade I meant that -- despite his fame as one of the few men who had been to the Moon and lived to tell about it, and despite his ultra-honorable discharge with the grade of captain -- his life had been checked back to its very beginning to be sure that he had not, even in his cradle, uttered a careless or subversive word. There were only three other Grade I Operatives qualified to ask Junior questions and transmit his answers on questions Which involved security -- and that included questions on logistics, atomics, ballistics and rocketry, military plans of all sorts and everything else the military forces consider secret, which is practically everything except the currently preferredcolor of an infantryman's uniform. The Eastern Alliance would undoubtedly have traded three puppet diotators and the tomb of Lenin to have had an agent, or even a sympathizer, as a Grade I Operative on Junior, But even the Grade II Operatives, who handled only problems dealing with non-classified matters,  were checked for loyalty with extreme care. Possibly lest 'they might ask Junior a subversive question or feed a subversive idea into his electronic equivalent of a brain. But be that as it may, on the afternoon of February #, #, Ray Carmody was the Operative on duty in the control room. The only Operative, of course; dozens of technieiins were required from time to time to service Junior and feed him, but only one Operative at a time fed data into him or asked him questions. So Carmody was alone in the soundproofed control room. moment. He'd just fed into Junior a complicated mess of . data on molecular structure in the Chromosome mechanism and had asked Junior -- for the ten-thousandth time, at least -- the sixty-four dollar question bearing on the survival of the human race: Why all children were now females and what could be done about it. It had been quite a chunk of data, this time, and no doubt Junior would take quite a few minutes to digest it, add it to everything else he'd ever been told and synthesize the whole. No .doubt in a few minutes 'he'd say, "Data .insufficient." At least to this moment that had been his only answer to the sixty-four dollar question. Carmody sat back and watched  Junior's complicated bank of dials, switches and lights with a bored eye. And because the intake-mike was shut off and Junior couldn't hear what he was saying anyway, and because the control room was soundproofed so no one else could hear him, either, he spoke freely. "Junior," he said, "I'm afraid you're a washout on this particular deal. We've fed you everything that every geneticist, every chemist, every biologist in this half of theworld knows, and all you do is come up with that 'data insufficient' stuff. What do you want -- blood? "Oh, you're pretty good on some things. You're a whiz on orbits and rocket fuels, but you just can't understand women, can you? Well, I can't either; I'll give you that. And I've gotto admit you've done the human race a good turn on one deal -- atomics. You convinced us that if we completed and used H-bombs, both sides would lose the coming war. Imean lose. And we've got inside information that the other side got the same answer out of your brothers, the cybernetics machines over there, so they won't build or use them, either. Winning a war with H-bombs is about like winning a wrestling match with hand grenades; it's just as unhealthful for you as for your opponent. But we weren't talking about hand grenades. We were talking about women. Or I was. Listen, Junior -- " A light, not on Junior's panel but in the ceiling, flashed on and off, the signal for an incoming intercommunicator call. It would be from the Chief Operative, of course; no one else could connect -- by intercomm-unicator or any other method -- with this control room. Carmody threw a switch. "gusy, Carmody?" "Not at the moment. Chief. Just fed Junior that stuff on molecular structure of genes and chromosomes. Waiting for him to tell me .it's not enough data, but it'll take him a few minutes yet." "Okay. You're off duty in fifteen minutes. Will you come to my office as soon as you're relieved? The President wants to talk to you." Carmody said, "Goody. I'll .put on my best pinafore." He threw the switch again. Quickly, because a green light was flashing on Junior's panel. He reconnected the intakeand output-mikes and said, "Well, Junior?" "Data insufficient," said Junior's level mechanical voice. Carmody sighed and noted the machine's answer on the report ending in a question which he had fed into the mike. He said, "Junior, I'm ashamed of you. All right, let's see if there's anything else I can ask and get an answer to in fifteen minutes." files from the table in front of him and leafed through them quickly. None contained fewer than three pages of data. "Nope," he said, "not a thing here I can give you in fifteen minutes, arid Bob will foe here to relieve me then." He sat back and relaxed. He wasn't ducking work; experience had proven that, although an AE# cybernetics machine could accept verbal data in conformance with whatever vocabulary it had been given, and translate that data into mathematical symbols (as it translated the mathematical symbols of its answer back into words and mechanically spoke the words), it could not adapt itself to a change of voice within a given operation. It could, and did, adjust itself to understanding, as it were, Carmody's voice or the voice of Bob Dana who would shortly relieve him. But if Carmody started on a given problem, he'd have to finish it himself, or Bob would have to clear the board and start all over again. So there was no use starting something he wouldn't have time to finish. He glanced through some of the reports and questions to kill time. The one dealing with the space station interested him most, but he found it too technical to understand. "But you won't," he told Junior. "Pal, I've got to give that to you; when it comes to anything except women, you're really good." The switch was open, but since no question had been asked, of course Junior didn't answer. Carmody put down the files and glowered at Junior. "Junior," he said, "that's your weakness all right, women. And you can't have genetics without wbmen, can you?" "No," Junior said. "Well, you do Tcnow that much. But even I know it. Look, here's one that'll stump you. That blonde I met at the party last night. What about iher ?" "The question," said Junior, "is inadequately worded; please clarify." Carmody grinned. "You want me to get graphic, but I'll fool you. I'll just ask you this -- should I see her again?" "No," said Junior, mechanically but implacably. "The devil you say. And may I ask why, since you haven't met the lady, you say that?" "Yes. You may ask why." That was one trouble with Junior; he always answered the question you actually asked, not the one you im' iplied. "Why?" Carmody demanded, genuinely curious now as to what answer he was going to receive. "Specifically, why should I not again see the blonde I met last night?" "Tonight," said Junior, "you will be busy. Before tomorrow night you will foe married." Carmody almost literally jumped out of his chair. The cybernetics machine had gone stark raving crazy. It must have. There was no more chance of his getting married tomorrow than there was of a kangaroo giving birth to a portable typewriter. And besides and beyond that, Junior never made predictions of the future -- except, of course, on such things as orbits and statistical extrapolation of trends.  Carmody was still staring at Junior's impassive panel with utter disbelief and considerable consternation when the red light that was the equivalent of a doorbell flashed in the ceiling. His shift was up and Bob Dana had come to relieve him. There wasn't time to ask any further questions and, anyway, "Are you crazy?" was the only one he could think of at the moment. Carmody didn't ask it. He didn't want to know. Mission to Luna mikes and stood gazing at Junior's impassive panel for a long time. He shook his head, went to the door apd opened it. Bob Dana breezed, in and then stopped to look at Carmody. He said, "Something the matter, Ray? You look like you'd just seen a ghost, if I may coin a cliche." Carmody shook his head.He wanted to think before he talked to anybody -- and if he did decide to talk, it should 'be to Chief Operative iReeber and not to anyone else. He said, "Just I'm a little beat, Bob." "Nothing special up?" "Nope. Unless maybe I'm going to be fired. Reeber wants to see me on my way out." He grinned. "Says the President wants to talk to me." Bob chuckled appreciatively. "If he's in a kidding mood, then your job's safe for one more day. Good luck." The soundproof door closed and lockedbehind Carmody, and he nodded to the two armed guards who were posted on duty outside it. He tried to think things out carefully as he walked down the long stretdh of corridorto the Chief Operative's office. Had something gone wrong with Junior? If so, it was his duty to report the matter. But if he did, he'd get himself in trouble, too. An Operative wasn't supposed to ask private questions of the big cybernetics machine -- even big, important questions. The fact that it had been a joking question would make it worse. But Junior had either given him a joking answer -- and it couldn't be that, because Junior didn't have a' sense of humor--or else Junior had made a flat, unadulterated error. Two of them, in fact. Junior had said that Carmody would be busy tonight and -- well, a wheel could come off his idea of spending a quiet evening reading. But the idea of his getting married tomorrow w r as utterly preposterous. There wasn't a woman on Earth he had the slightest intention of marrying. Oh, someday, maybe, when he'd had a little more fun out of life and felt a little more teady to settle down, he might feel differently. But it wouldn't be for years. Certainly not tomorrow, not even on a bet. Junior had to be wrong, and if he was wrong it was a matter of importance, a matter far more important than Carmody' s job. So be honest and report? He made his decision just before he reached the door of Reeber' s office. A reasonable compromise. He didn't know yet that Junior ' was wrong. Not to a point of mathematical ceragainst. So he'd wait until even that possibility was eliminated, until it was proven beyond all possible doubt that Junior was wrong. Then he'd report what he'd done and take the rap, if there was a rap. Maybe he'd just be fined and warned. He opened the door and stepped in. Cljief Operative Reeber stood up and, on the other side of the desk, a tall gray-haired man stood also. Reeber said, "Ray, I'd like you to meet the President of the United States. He came here to talk to you. Mr. President, Captain Ray Carmody." And it was the President. Carmody gulped and  tried to avoid looking as though he was doing a double take, which he was. Then President Saunderson smiled quietly and held out his hand. "Very glad to know you, Captain," he said, and Carmody was able to make the considerable understatement that he felt honored to meet the President. Reeber told him to pull up a chair and he did so. The President looked St him gravely. "Captain Carmody, you have been chosen to -- have the opportunity to volunteer for a mission of extreme importance. There is danger involved, but it is less than the danger of your trip to the Moon. You made the third -- wasn't it? -- out of the five successful trips made by United States pilots?" Carmody nodded. "This time the risk you will take i's considerably less. There has been much technological advance in rocketry since you left the service two years ago. The odds against a successful found trip -- even without the help of the space station, and I 'fear its completion is still two years distant -- are much less. In fact, you will have odds of ten to one in your favoir, as against approximately even odds at the time of your previous trip." previous trip! Then this volunteer mission is another flight to the Moon? Certainly, Mr. President, I'll gladly -- " President Saunderson held up a hand. "Wait, you haven't heard all of it. The flight to the Moon and return is the only part that involves physical danger, but it is the least important part. Captain, this mission is, possibly, of more importance to humanity than the first flight to the Moon, even than the first flight to the stars -- if and when we ever make it -- will be. What's at stake is the survival of the (human race so that someday it can reach the stars. Your flight to the Moon will be an attempt to solve the problem which otherwise -- " head with a handkerchief. ".Perhaps you'd better explain, Mr. Reeber. You're more familiar with the exact way the problem was put to your machine, and its exact answers." Reeber said, "Carmody, you know what the problem is. You know how much data I has been fed into Junior on it. You know some of the questions we've asked him, and that we've been able to eliminate certain things. Such as -- well, it's caused by no virus, no bacteria, nothing like that. It's not anything , like an epidemic, because it struck the whole Earth at once, simultaneously. Even native inhabitants of islands that had no contact with civilization. "We know also that whatever happens -- whatever molecular change occurs -- happens in the zygote after impregnation, very shortly after. We asked Junior whether an invisible ray of some sort could cause this. His answer was that it was possible. And in answer to a further question, he answered that this ray or force is possibly being used by -- enemies of mankind." "Insects? Animals? Martians?" Reeber waved a hand impatiently. "Martians, maybe, if there are. any Martians. We don't know that yet. But extra-terrestrials, most likely. Now Junior couldn't give us answers on this because, of course, we haven't the relevant data. It would be guessi work for him as well as for us -- and Junior, being mechanical, can't guess. But here's, a possibility: "Suppose some extra-terrestrials have landed somewhere on Earth and have set up a station that broadcasts a ray that is causing the phenomenon of all children being girlchildren. The ray is undetectable; at least thus far we haven't been able the human race and getting themselves a nice new planet to live on, without having to fire a shot, without 'taking any risk or losses themselves. True, they'll have to wait a while for us to die off, but maybe that doesn't mean anything to them. Maybe they've got all the time there is, and aren't in the slightest hurry." Carmody nodded slowly. "It , sounds fantastic, but I guess it's possible. I guess a fantastic situation like this has to have a fantastic explanation, But what do we do about it? How do we even prove it?" Reeber said, "We fed the possibility into Junior as a working assumption -- not as a fact -- and asked him how we could check it. He came up with the suggestion that a married couple spend a honeymoon on the Moon -- and see if circumstances are any different there." "And you want me to pilot them there?" "Not exactly, Ray. A little more than that -- " dent was there. He said, "Good God, you mean yob want me to -- Then Junior wasn't crazy, after all!" Shamefacedly, then, he had to explain about the extracurricular question he'd casually asked Junior and the answer he'd got to it. Reeber laughed. "Guess we'll overlook your violation of Rule # this time, Ray. That is, if you accept the mission. Now here's the -- " "Wait," Carmody said. "I still want to know something. How did Junior know I was going to be picked out? And for that matter, why am I?" "Junior was asked for the qualifications he'd recommend for the -- ah -- bridegroom. He recommended a rocket pilot who had already made  the trip successfully, even though he was a year or two over the technical retirement age of twenty-five. He recommended that loyalty be consid' ered as an important factor, and that the holding of a governmental position of great trust would answer that. He further recommended that the man be single." "Why single? Look, there are four other pilots who've made that trip, and they're all loyal, regardless of what job they're holding now. I know them all personally. And all of them are married' except me. Why not send a man who's already got a ball and chain?" "For the simple reason, Ray, that the woman to be sent must be chosen with even more care. You know how tbugh a Moon landing is; only one woman in a hundred would live through it and still be able to -- I mean, there's alrpost a negligible chance that the wife of any one of the other four pilots would be the best qualified woman who could possibly be found." "Hmmm. Well, I suppose Junior's got something there. Anyway, I see now how he knew I'd be chosen. Those qualifications fit me exactly. But listen, do I have to stay married to whatever female, is Amazonian enough to make the trip? There's a limit somewhere, isn't there?" "Of course. You will be legally married before your departure, but upon your return a divorce will be granted without question if both -- or either one -- of you wish. The offspring of the union, if any, will be cared for. Whether male or female." "Hey, that's light," Carmody said. "There's only an even chance of hitting the jadcpot in any case.", "Other couples will be sent. The first trip is the most difficult and most important one. After that, a base will be established. Sooner or later we'll get our answer. We'll have it if even one male child is conceived on the Moon. Not that that will help 'us find the station that's sending the rays, or to detect or identify the rays, but we'll know what's wrong and 'can narrow our inquiry. I take it that you accept?" Carmody sighed. "I guess so. But it seems a long way to go for -- Say, who's the lucky girl?" think you'd better explain this part to him, Mr. President." President Saunderson smiled as Carmody looked toward him. He said, "There is a more important reason, which Mr. Reeber skipped, why we could not. choose a man who was already married. Captain. This is being done on an international basis, for very important diplomatic reasons. The experiment is for the i benefit of humanity, not any nation or ideology. Your wife will be a Russian." "A Commie ? You're kidding me, Mr. President." "I am not. Her name is Anna Borisovna. I have not met her, but I am informed that she is a very attractive girl. Her qualifications are quite similar to yours, except, of course, that she has not been to the Moon. No woman has. But she has been a pilot of experimental rockets on short-range flights. And she is a cybernetics  technician working on the big machine at Moscow. She is twenty-four. And not, incidentally, an Amazon. As you know, rocket pilots aren't chosen for bulk. There is an added advantage in her being chosen. She speaks English." "You mean I've got to talk to her, too?" Carmody caught the look Reeber flashed at him and he winced. The President continued: "You will be married to her tomorrow by a beam-televised ceremony. You blast off, both of you, tomorrow night -- at different times, of course, since one. of you will leave from here, the other from Russia. You will meet on the Moon." "It's a large place, Mr. President." "That is taken care of. Major Granham -- you know him, I believe?" Carmody nodded. "He will supervise your takeoff and the sending of the supply rockets. You will fly tonight -- a plane has been prepared for you -- from the airport here to Suffolk Rocket Field. Major Granham willbrief you and give you full instructions. Can you .be at the airport by seven-thirty ?" Carmody thought and then, nodded. It was five-thirty now and there'd be a lot of things for him to do and arrange in two hours, but he could make it if he tried. And hadn't Junior told him he was going to be busy this evening? "Only one thing more," President Saunderson said, "This is strictly confidential, until and unless the mission is successful. We,don't want to raise hopes, either here or in the Eastern Alliance, and then have them smashed." He smiled: "And if you and your wife have any quarrels on the Moon, we don't want them to lead to international repercussions. So please -- try to get along." He held out his hand. "That's all, except thanks." Carmody made the airport in time I  and the plane was waiting for him, complete with pilot. He had figured that he would have to fly it himself, but he realized that it was better this way; he could get a bit of rest before they reached Suffolk Field.' He got a little, but not much. The plane was a hot ship that got him there in less than an hour. A liaison officer was waiting for him and took him immediately to Major Granham's office. tacks almost before Carmody could seat himself in the offered chair. He said, "Here's the picture. Since you got out of the service, we've tremendously increased the accuracy of our rockets, manned or otherwise. They're so accurate that,With proper care, we can hit within a mile of any spot on the Moon that we aim at. We're picking Hell Crater -- it's a small one, but we'll put you right in the middle of it. You won't have to worry about steering; you'll hit within a mile of the center without having to use your braking rockets for anything except braking." "Hell Crater?" Carmody said. "There isn't any." "Our Moon maps have forty-two thousand named craters. Do you know them all? This one, incidentally, was named after , a Father Maximilian Hell, S. J., who was once director of the Vienna Observatory in old Austria." Carmody grinned. "Now you're spoiling it. How come it was picked as a honeymoon #pot, though? Just because of the name?" "No. One of the three successful flights the Russians made happened to land and take off there. They found the footing better than anywhere else either of us has landed. Almost no dust; you won't have to slog through knee-deep pumice when you're gathering the supply rockets. Probably a more recently formed crater than any of the others we've happened to land in or explore." "Fair enough. About the rocket I go in -- what's the payload besides myself?" "Not a thing but the food, water and oxygen you'll need en route, and your spacesuit. Not even fuel for your return, although you'll return in the same rocket you go in. Everything else, including return fuel, will be there waiting for you; it's on the way now. We fired ten 'supply rockets last night. Since you take off tomorrow night, they'll get there forty-eight hours before you do. So -- " VV said. "On my first trip I carried fifty pounds payload besides my return fuel. Is this a smaller type of rocket?" ."Yes, and a mudh better one. Not a step-rocket like you used before.  Better fuel and more of it; you can accelerate longer and at fewer gravities, and you'll get there quicker. Forty-four hours as against almost four days before. Last time you took four and half Gs for seven minutes. This time you'll 'get by with three Gs and have twelve minutes' acceleration before you reach Brennscbluss -- cut loose from Earth's gravitation. Your first trip, you bad to carry return fuel and a little payload because we didn't have the accuracy to shoot a supply rocket after you -- or before you -- and be sure it'd land within twenty miles. All clear? After we're through talking here I'll take you to the supply depot, show you the type of supply rodcet we're using and how to open and unload it. I'll give you an inventory of the contents of each of the twelve of them we sent." "And what if all of them don't get there ?" "At least eleven of them will. And everything's duplicated; if any one rocket goes astray, you'll still have everything you need -- for two people. And the Russians are firing an equal number of supply rockets, so you'll have a double factor of safety." He grinned. "If none of our rockets get there, you'll 'have to eat borsht and drink vodka, maybe, but you won't starve." "Are you kidding about the vodka ?" "Maybe not. We're including a case of Scotch, transferred to lightweight containers, of course. We fig"ure it might be just the icebreaker you'll need for a happy honeymoon." Carmody grunted. "So maybe," Granham said, "the Russians'll figure the same way and send along some vodka. And the rocket fuels for your return, by the way, are not identical, but they're interchangeable. Each side is sending enough for the return of two rockets. If our fu'el doesn't get there, you divvy with her, and vice versa." "Fair enough. What else?" "Your arrival will be" just after dawn -- Lunar time. There'll be a few hours when the temperature is somewhere between horribly cold and broiling hob You'd better take advantage of them to get the bulk of your work done. Gathering supplies from the rockets and putting up the prefab shelter that's in them, in sections. We've got a duplicate of it in the supply depot and I want you to practice assembling it." "Good idea. It's airtight and heatproof ?" "Airtight once you paint the seams with a special preparation that's included. And, yes, the insulation is excellent. Has a very ingenious little airlock on it, too. You won't have to waste oxygen getting in and out." stay?" he asked. "Twelve days. Earth days, of course. That'll give you plenty of time to ' get off before the Lunar night." Granham chuckled. "Want instructions to cover those twelve days ? No? Well, come on around to the depot then. I'll introduce you to your ship and show you the supply rockets and the shelter." Remotely Married ning, all right. Carmody didn't get tj bed until nearly morning, his head so swimming with facts and figures that he'd forgotten it was his wedding day. Granham let him sleep until nine, then sent an orderly to wake 'him and to state that the ceremony had been set for ten o'clock and that he'dbetter hurry. Carmody couldn't remember what "the ceremony" was for a moment, then he shuddered and hurried." A Justice of the Peace was waiting for him there and technicians were working on a screen and projector. Granham said, "The Russians agreed that the ceremony could be performed at this end, provided we made it a civil ceremony. That's all right by you, isn't it?" "It's lovely,'" Carmody told him. "Let's get on with it. Or don't we have to ? As far as I'm concerned -- " "You know what the reaction of a lot of people would be when they learn about it, if it wasn't legal," Granham said. "So quit crabbing. Stand right there." Carmody stood right there. A fuzzy picture on the beam-television screen was becoming clearer. And prettier. President Saunderson had not exaggerated when he'd said that Anna Borisovna was attractive and that she was definitely not an Amazon. She was small, dark, slender and very definitely attractive and not an Amazon. Carmodyfelt glad that nobody had corned it up by putting her in a wedding costume. She wore the neat uniform of a technician, and she filled it admirably and curved it at the right places. Her Eyes were big and dark and they were serious until she smiled at him. Only then did he realize that the connection was twoway and that she was seeing him. Granham was standing beside him. He said, "Miss Borisovna, Captain Carmody." Carmody said, inanely, "Pleased to meet you," and then redeemed it with a grin. "Thank you, Captain." Her voice was musical and only faintly accented. "It is a pleasure." Carmody began to think it would be, if they could just keep 'from arguingpolitics. The Justice of the Peace stepped forward into range of the projector. "Are we ready?" he asked. "A second," Carmody said. "It seems to me we've skipped a customary preliminary. Miss Borisovna, will you marry me?"  "Yes. And you may call me Anna." She even has a seme of humor, Carmody thought, astonished. Somehow, he hadn't thought it possible for a Commie to have a sense of humor. He'd pictured them as all being dead serious about their ridiculous ideology and about everything else. # He smiled at her and said, "All right, Anna. And you may call me Ray. Are you ready?" to one side to allow the Justice of the Peace to share the screen with him. The ceremony was brief and businesslike. He couldn't, of course, kiss the 'bride or even shake hands with her. But just before they shut off the projector, he managed to grin at her and say, "See you in Hell, Anna." And he'd begun to feel certain that it wouldn't be that at all, really. He had a busy afternoon going over every detail of operation of the new type rocket, until he knew it inside and out better than he did himself. He even found himself being briefed on details of the Russian rockets, both manned and supply types, and he was surprised (and inwardly a bit horrified) to discover to what extent the United States and Russia had been exchanging information and secrets. It couldn't all have happened in a day or so. "How long has this been going on?" he demanded of Granham. "I learned of the projected trip a month ago." "Why did they tell me only yesterday? Or wasn't I first choice, after all? Did somebody else back out at the last minute?" "You've been chosen adl along. You were the the only One who fitted all of the requirements that cybernetics machine dished out, But don't you remember how it was on your last trip? You weren't notified you were taking off until about thirty hours before. That's  what's figured to be the optimum time -- long enough to iget mentally prepared and not so long you've got time to get worried." "But this was a volunteer deal. What if I'd turned it down?" "The cybernetics machine predicted that you wouldn't." Carmody swore at. Junior. Granham said, "Besides, we could have had a hundred volunteers. Rocket cadets who've got everything you have except one round trip to the Moon already under their belts. We could have shown a picture of Anna around and had them fighting for the chance. That gal is Moon bait." "Careful," Carmody said, "you are speaking of my wife." He was kidding, of course, but it was funny -- he really hadn't liked Granham's wisecrack. zero minus fifteen minutes he was already strapped into the webbing, waiting. Thete wasn't anything for him to do except stay alive. The rockets would be fired by a chronometer set for the exact fraction of a second. Despite its small payload, the rocket was a little roomier inside than the first one he'd gone to the Moon in, the R-#. The R-# had been as roomy as a tight coffin. This one, the R-#, was four feet in diameter inside. He'd be able to get at least a bit of arm and leg exercise on the way and not -- as the first time -- arrived so cramped that it had taken him over an hour to be able to move freely. And this time he wouldn't have the horrible discomfort of having to wear his spacesuit, except for the helmet, en route. There's room in a four-foot cylinder to put a spacesuit on, and his was in a compartment -- along With the food, water and oxy-' gen -- at the front (or top) of the rocket. It would be an hour's work to struggle into it, but he wouldn't have to do it until he was several hours away from the Moon. Yes, this was going to be a breeze compared to the last trip. Comparative freedom of movement, fortyfour hours as against ninety, only three gravities as against four and a half. Then sound that was beyond sound struck him, sound so loud that he heard it with all of his body rather than only with his carefully plugged ears. It built up, seeming to get louder every second, and his weight built up too. He weighed twice his normal weight, then more. He felt the sickening curve as the automatic tilting mechanism turned the rocket, which had at first gone straight up, forty-five degrees. He weighed four hundred and eighty pounds and the soft webbing seemed to be hard as steel and to cut into him. Padding was compressed till it felt like stone. Sound and pressure went on and on interminably. Surely it had been hours instead of minutes. Then, at the moment of Brennschluis, free of the pull of Earth -- sudden silence, complete weightlessness. He blacked out. But only minutes had gone by when he returned to consciousness. Tor a while he fought nausea and. only when he was sure he had succeeded did he unbuckle himself from the webbing . that had held him through the period of acceleration. Now he was coasting, weightless, at a speed that would carry him safely toward the gravitational pull of the Moon. No further firing of fuel would be necessary until he used his jets to brake his landing. All he had to do now was hang on, to keep from going crazy from claustrophobia during the forty hours before he'd have to start getting ready for the landing. It was a dull time, but it passed. Into spacesuit, back into the webbing, but this time with his hands free so he could manipulate the handles that controlled the braking jets. didn't even knock him unconscious. After only a few minutes he was able to unbuckle himself from the webbing. He sealed his spacesuit and started the ogygen, then let himself out of the rocket. It had fallen over on its side after the landing, of course; they always do. But he had the equipment and knew the technique for getting it upright again, and there wasn't any hurry about doing it. The supply rockets had been shot accurately, all right. Six of them, four American type and two Russian, lay within a radius of a hundred yards of his own rocket. He could see others farther away, but didn't waste time counting them. He looked for one that would be larger than the rest -- the manned (or womaned) rocket from Russia. He located it finally, almost a mile away. He saw no spacesuited figure near it. He started toward it, running with the gliding motion, almost like skating, that had been found to be easier than walking in the fight gravitational pull of the Moon. Spacesuit, oxygen tank and all, his total weight was about forty-five pounds. Running a mile was less exertion than a #-yard dash on Earth. He was more than glad to see the door of the Russian rocket open when he was about three-quarters of the way to it. He'd have had a tough decision to make if it had still been closed when he got there. Not knowing whether Anna was sealed in her spacesuit or not inside the rocket, he wouldn't have dared open the door himself. And, in case she was seriously injured, he wouldn't have dared not to. She was out of the rocket, though, by the time he reached her. Her face, through the transpariplast helmet, looked pale, but she managed to smile at him. He turned on the short-range . radio of his set and asked, "Are you all right?" "A bit weak. The landing knocked me out, but I guess there are no bones broken. Where shall we -- set up housekeeping?" "Near my rocket, I think. It's closer to the middle of where the supply rockets landed, so we won't have to move things so far. I'll get started right away. You' stay here and rest until you're 'feeling better. Know how to navigate in this grayity?" "I was told how. I haven't had a. chance to try yet. I'll probably fall flat on my face a few times." "It won't hurt you. When you start, take your time till you get the knack .of it. I'll begin with this nearest supply rocket; you can watch how I navigate." back the way he'd come. The supply rockets were at least a yard in outside diameter, and were so constructed that the nose and the tail, which contained .the rocket mechanism, were easily detachable, leaving the middle section containing the payload, about the size of an oil drum and easily rolled. Each weighed fifty pounds, Moon weight. He saw Anna starting to work by the time he was dismantling the second supply rocket. She was awkward at first, and did lose her balance several times, but mastered the knack quickly. Once she had it, she moved more gracefully and easily than Carmody. Within an hour they had 'payload sections of a dozen rockets lined up near 'Carmody 's rocket. Eight of them were American rockets and from the numbers on them, Carmody knew he had all sections needed to assemble the shelter. VV told her. "After that's done, we can take things easier. We can rest before we gather in the other loot. Even have a drink to celebrate." The Sun was well up over the ringwall of Hell 'Crater by then and it was getting hot enough to be uncomfortable, even in an insulated spacesuit. Within hours, Carmody knew, it would be so hot that neither of them would be able to stay out of the shelter for much longer than one-hour intervals, but that would be time enough for them to gather in the still uncollected supply rockets. Back in the supply depot on Earth, Carmody had assembled a duplicate of the prefab shelter in hot much more than an hour. It was tougher going here, because of the awkwardness of working in the thickly insulated gloves that' were part of the spacesuits. With Anna helping, it took almost two hours. He gave her the sealing prepara-' tion and a special tool for applying it. While she calked the seams to make the shelter airtight, he began to carry supplies, including oxygen tanks, into the shelter. A little of everything; there was no point in crowding themselves by taking inside more of anything than they'd need for a day or so at a time. He got and set up the cooling unit that would keep the inside of the shelter at a comfortable temperature, despite the broiling Sun.' He set up the air-conditioner unit that would release oxygen at a specified rate and would absorb carbon dioxide, ready to start as soon as the calking was done and the airlock closed. It would build up an atmosphere rapidly once he could turn it on. Then they could get out of die uncomfortable spacesuits. He went outside to see how Anna was coming with her task and found her working on the last seam. "Atta baby," he told her. He grinned to himself at the thought that he really should carry his bride over the threshold -- but that would be rather difficult when the' threshold was an airlock that you had to crawl dirough on your hands and knees. The shelter itself was dome-shaped and looked almost exactly Eke a metal igloo, even to the projecting airlock, which was a low, . semicircular entrance. He remembered that he'd forgotten the whisky and walked over to one of the supply rocket sections to get a bottle of it. He came bade with it, shielding the bottle with his body from the direct rays of the Sun, so it wouldn't boil. He happened to look up. It was a mistake. Report to Earth TT'S incredible," Gran hamL snapped. Carmody glared at him. "Of Course it is. But it happened. It's true. Get a lie detector if you don't believe me." "I'll dp that little thing," Granham said grimly. "One's on its way here now; I'll have it in a few minutes. I want to try you with it before the President -- and others who are going to talk to you -- get a chance to do it. I'm supposed to fly you to Washington right away, but I'm waiting till 'I can use that lie detector first." "Good," Carmody said, "Use it and be damned. I'm telling you the truth." Gran-ham ran a hand through his already rumpled hair. He said, "I guess I believe you at that, Carmody. It's just -- too big, too important a ihing to take any one person's word .Bout, even any two people's words, assuming that Anna Borisovna -- Anna Carmody, 'I mean -- tells the same story. We've got word that she's landed safely, too, and is reporting." "She'll tell the same story. It's what happened to us." "Are you sure, Carmody, that they were extra-terrestrials? That they weren't -- well, Russians? Couldn't they have been?" "Sure, they could have been (Russians. That is, if there are Russians seven feet tall and so thin they'd weigh about fifty pounds on Earth, and with yellow skins. I don't mean yellow like Orientals; I mean bright yellow. And with four arms apiece and eyes with no pupils and no lids. Also if Russians have a spaceship that doesn't use jets -- and don't ask me what its source ofpower was; I don't know." "And they held you captive, both of you, for afull thirteen days, in separate cells? You didn't even -- " "I didn't even," Carmody said grimly and bitterly. "And if we hadn't been able to escape when we did, it would have been too late. The Sun was 'low on the horizon -- it was almost Moon night -- when we got to our rockets. We had to rush like the devil to get them fueled and up on their tail fins in time for us to take off." There was a knock on Granham's door that turned out to be a technician with the lie detector -- one of the very portable and very dependable Nally jobs that had become the standard army machine in #. The technician rigged it quickly and watthed the dials while Granham asked a few questions, very guarded ones so the technician wouldn't get the picture. Then Granham looked at the technician inquiringly. told him. "Not a flicker." "He couldn't fool the machine?" "This detector?" the technician asked, patting it. "It'd take neurosurgery or post-hypnotic suggestion like there never was to beat this baby. We even catch psychopathic liars with it." "Come on," Granham said to Carmody. "We're on our way to Washington and the plane's ready. Sorry for doubting you, Carmody, but I had to be sure -- and report to the President that I am sure." "I don't blame you," Carmody told him. "It's hard for me to believe, and I was there." The plane that had brought Carmody from Washington to Suffolk Field had been'a hot ship. The one that took him back -- with Granham "jockeying it -- was almost incandescent. It cracked the sonic barrier and went on from there. They landed twenty minutes after they took off. A helicopter was waiting for them at the airport and got them .to the White House in another ten minutes. And in two minutes more they were in the' main conference room, with President Saunderson and half a dozen others gathered there. The Eastern Alliance ambassador was there, too. President Saunderson shook hands tensely and made short work of the introductions. "We want thewhole story, Captain," he said. "But I'm going to relieve your mind on two things first. Did you know that Anna landed safely near Moscow?" "Yes. Granham told me." "And she tells the same story you do -- or that Major Granham told me over the phone that you tell." "I suppose," Carmody said, "that they used a lie detector on her, too." "Scopolamine," said the Eastern Alliance ambassador. "We have more faith in truth serum than lie detectors. Yes, her story was the same under scopolamine." "The otherpoint," the President told Carmody, "is even more important. Exactly when, Earth time, did you leave the Moon?" Carmody figured quickly and told him approximately when that had been. "And it was a few hours after that that biologisfs, who've still been working twenty-four hours a day on this, noticed the turning point. The molecular change in the zygote no longer occurs. Births, nine months from now, will have the usual percentage of male and female children. "Do you see what that means, Captain? Whatever ray was doing it must have been beamed at Earth from the Moon -- from the ship that captured you. And for whatever reason, when they found that you'd escaped, they left. Possibly they thought your return to Earth would lead to an attack in force from here." "And thought rightly," said the ambassador. "We're not equipped for space fighting yet , but we'd have sent what we had. And do you see  what this means, Mr. President? rocket tubes. Outside of the door and We've got to pool everything and one other thing, there just weren't get ready for space warfare, and any features you could see from outquickly. They went away, it appears, side. When the ship rested on the but there is no assurance that they ground, the door opened down from will not return." the top and formed a sort of curved Again Saunderson nodded. He ramp that led to the doorway. The said, "And now, Captain -- " other -- " "We both landed safely," Car"No airlock?" mody said. "We gathered enough of and then assembled the prefab shel"They didn't breathe air, apparter. We'd just finished it and were ently. They came right out of the about to enter it when I saw the ship and toward us, without spacespaceship coming over , the crater's' 'suits. Neither the temperature nor ringwall. It was -- " the lack of air bothered th?m. But I "You were still in spacesuits?" was going to tell you one more thing someone asked. about the outside of the ship. On "Yes," Carmody growled. "We top of it was a short mast, and on were still in spacesuits, if that mattop of the mast was a kind of grid ters now. I saw the, ship and pointed of wires something like a radar transto it and Anna saw it, too. We didn't mitter. If they were beaming anytry to duck or anything because obvithing at Earth, it came from that ously it had seen us; it was coming grid. Anyway, I'm pretty sure of it. right toward us and descending. Earth was in the sky, of course, and We'd have had time to get inside the I noticed that the grid moved -- as shelter, but there didn't seem any the ship moved -- so the flat side of point to it. It wouldn't have been the grid was always directly toward any protection. Besides, we didn't Earth. know that they weren't friendly. "Well, the door opened and two We'd have got. weapons ready, in of them' came down the ramip toward case, if we'd had any weapons, but us. They had things in their hands we didn't. They landed light as a that looked unpleasantly like weapbubble only thirty yards or so away ons, and pretty advanced weapons at and a djor lowered in the side of the that. They pointed them at us and ship -- " motioned for us to walk up the ramp "Describe the. ship, please." and into the ship. We did." "About fifty feet long, about "They made no attempt to corntwenty in diameter, rounded ends, municate?" No portholes -- they must see 'right "None whatsoever, then or at any through the walls some way -- and no time. Of course, while we were still in spacesuits, we couldn't have heard them, anyway -- unless they had communicated on the radio band our helmet sets were tuned to; But even after, they never tried to talk to us. They communicated among themselves with whistling noises. We went into the ship and there w'ere two more of them inside. Four altogether -- "All the same sex?" Carmody shrugged. "They ajl looked alike to me, but maybe that's how Anna and I looked to them. They ordered us, by pointing, to enter two separate small rooms -- about the size of jail cells, small ones -- toward the front of the ship. We did, and the doors locked after us. "I sat there and suddenly got plenty worried, because neither of us had more than another hour's oxygen left in our suits. If they didn't know that, and didn't give us any chance to communicate with them and tell them, we were gone goslings in another hour. So I started to hammer on the door. Anna was hammering, too. I couldn't hear through my helmet, of course, but I could feel the vibration of it any time I stopped, hammering on my door. "Then, after maybe half an hour, my door opened and I almost fell out through it. One of the extraterrestrials motioned me back with a weapon. Another made motions that looked as though he meant I should take off my helmet. I didn't get it at first, and then I looked at something he pointed at and saw one of our oxygen tanks with the handle turned. Also a big pile of our other supplies, food and water and stuff. Anyway, they had known that we needed oxygen -- and although they didn't need it themselves, they apparently knew how to fix things for us. So they just used our supplies .to build an atmosphere in their ship. "I took off my helmet and tried to talk to them, but one of them took a long pointed rod and poked me back into my cell. I couldn't risk grabbing at the rod, because another one still had that dangerous-looking weapon pointed at me. So the door slammed on me again. I took off the rest of my spacesuit because it was plenty hot in there, and then I thought about Anna because she started hammering again.L would be all right for her to get out of her spacesuit, that we had an atmosphere again. So I started hammering on the wall between our, cells -- in Morse. She got it after a while. She signaled back a query, so, when I knew she was getting me, I told her what the score was and she took off her helmet. After that we could talk. If we talked fairly loudly, our voices carried through the wall from one cell to the other." "They didn't mind your talking to one another?" "They didn't pay any attention to us all the time they held us prisoners, except to feed us from our own supplies. Didn't ask us a question; apparently they figured we didn't know anything they wanted to know and didn't know already about human beings. They didn't even study us. I have a hunch they intended to take us back as specimens; there's no other explanationI can think of. "We couldn't keep accurate track of time, but by the number of times we ate and slept, we had some idea. The' first few days -- " Carmody laughed shortly -- "had their funny side. These creatures obviously knew we needed liquid, butthey couldn't distinguish between water and whisky for the purpose. We had nothing but whisky to drink for the first two or maybe three days. We got higher than kites. We got to singing in our cells and I learned a lot of Russian songs. Been more fun, though, if we could have got some close harmony, if you know what I mean." The ambassador permitted himself a smile. "I can guess what you mean. Captain. Please continue." "Then we started getting water instead of whisky and sobered up. And started wondering how we could escape. I began to study the mechanism of the lock on my 'door, ft wasn't like our locks, but I began to figure some things about it and finally -- I thought then that we'd been there about ten days -- I got hold of a tool to use on it. They'd taken our spacesuits and left us nothing but our clothes, and they'd checked those over for metal we could make into tools... "But we got our food out of cans, although they took the empty cans afterward. This particular time, though, there was a little sliver of metal along the opening of the can, and I worried it off and saved it. I'd been, meanwhile, watching and listening and studying their habits. They slept, all at the same time, at regular intervals. It seemed to me like about five hours at a time, with about fifteen-hour intervals in between. If I'm right on that estimate, they probably come from a planet somewhere with about a twenty-hour period of rotation, "Anyway, I waited till their next sleep period and started working on the lock with that sliver of metal. It took me at least two or three hours, but I got it open. And once outside my cell, in the main room of the ship, I found that Anna's door opened easily from the outside and I let her out. VV turn the tables by finding a weapon to use on them, but none was in sight. They looked so skinny and light, despite being seven feet tall, that I decided to go after them with my bare 'hands. I would have, except that I couldn't get the door to the front part of the ship open. It was a different type of lock entirely and I couldn't even guess how to work it. And it was in the front part of the ship that they slept. The control room must have been up there, too. " "Luckily our spacesuits were in the big room. And by then we knew it might be getting dangerously near the end of their sleeping period, so we got into our spacesuits quick and I found it was easy to open the outer door. It made some noise -- and so did the whoosh of air going out -- but it didn't waken them, apparently "As soon as the dooropened, we saw we had # lot less time than we'd thought. The Sun was going down over the crater's far ringwall -- we were still in Hell Crater -- and it was going to be dark in an hour or so. We worked like beavers gettihg our rockets refueled and jacked up on their tail fins for the takeoff. Anna got off first and then I did. And that's all. Maybe we should have stayed and tried to take them after they came out from their sleeping period, but we figured it was more important to get the news back to Earth." President Saunderson nodded slowly. "You were right, Captain. Right in deciding that, and in everything else you did. We know what to do now. Do we not. Ambassador Kravich?" "We do. We join forces. We make one space station -- and quickly -- and get to the Moon and fortify it, jointly. We pool all scientific knowledge and develop full-scale space travel, new weapons. We do everything we can to get ready for them when and if they come back." The President looked grim. "Obviously they went back for further orders or reinforcements. If we only knew how long we had -- it may be only weeks or it may be decades. We don't know whether they come from the Solar System -- or another galaxy. Nor how fast they travel. But whenever they get back, we'll be as ready for them as we possibly can. Mr. Ambassador, you have power to -- ?" "Full power, Mr. President. Anything up to and including a complete merger of both our nations under a joint government. That probably won't be necessary, though, as long as our interests are now completely in common. Exchange of scientific information and military data has already started, from our side. Some of our top scientists and generals are flying here now, with orders to cooperate fully. All restrictions have been lowered." Fie smiled, "And all our propaganda has gone into a very sudden reverse gean It's not even going to be a cold peace. Since we're going to be allies against the unknown, we might as well' try to like one another.". "Right," said the President. He turned suddenly to Carmody. "Captain, we owe you just about anything you want. Name it." Maybe if he'd had more time to think, he'd have asked for something different. Or, more likely, from wha; he learned later, he wouldn't have. He said, "All I want right now is to forget Hell Crater and get back to my regular job so I can forget it quicker." Saunderson smiled. "Granted. If you think of anything else later, ask for it. I can see why you're a bit mixed up right now. And you're probably right. Return to routine may be the best thing for you." Granham left with Carmody. "I'll notify Chief Operative Reeber for you," he said. "When shall I tell him you'll be back?" "Tomorrow morning," said Carmody. "The sooner the better." And he insisted when Granham objected that he needed a rest. Carmody was back at work the next morning, nonsensical as it seemed. He took up the problem folder from the top of the day's stack, fed the data into Junior and got Junior's answer. The second one. He worked mechanically, paying no personal attention to problem or answer. His mind seemed a long way off. In Hell Crater on the Moon. He was combining space rations over the alcohol stove, trying to, make it taste more like human food than concentrated chemicals. It was hard to measure in the liver extract because Anna wanted to kiss his left ear. "Silly! You'll be lopsided," she was saying. 'Tve got to kiss both of them the same number of times." He dropped the container into the pan and grabbed her, mousing his lips down her neck to the warm place where it joined her shoulder, and she writhed delightedly in his arms like a tickled doe. ' "We're going to stay married when we get back to Earth, aren't we, darling?" she was squealing happily. ing away the scented soft hair. "Damned right we will, you gorgeous, wonderful, brainy creature. I found the girl I've always been looking for, and I'm not giving her up for any brasshat or politician -- either yours or mine!" "Speaking of politics -- " she teased, but he quickly changed the subject. Carmody blinked awake. It was a paper with a mass of written data in his hands, instead of Anna's laughing face. He needed an analyst; that scene he'd just imagined was pure Freudianism, a tortured product of his frustrated id. He'd fallen in love with Anna, and those damned extraterrestrials had spoiled his honeymoon. Now his unconscious had rebelled 'with fancy fancifulness that certainly showed the unstable state of his emotions. Not that it mattered now. The big problem was solved. Two big ones, in fact. War between the United . States and the Eastern Alliance had been averted. And the human race was going to survive, unless the extra-terrestrials came back too soon and with too much to be fought off. He thought they wouldn't, then began to wonder why he thought so. "Insufficient data," said the mechanical voice of the cybernetics machine. Carmody recorded the answer and then, idly, looked to see what the problem had been. No wonder he'd been thinking about the extra-terrestrials and how . long they'd be gone; that had been the problem he had just fed into Junior. And "insufficient data" was the answer, . of course. He stared at Junior without reaching for the third problem folder. He isaid, "Junior, why do I have a hunch that those things from space won't ever be back?" "Because," said Junior, "what .you call a hunch comes from the unconscious mind, and your unconscious mind knows that the extra-terrestrials do not exist." Carmody sat up straight and stared harder. "What?" Junior repeated it. "You're crazy," Carmody said. "I saw them. So did Anna." "Neither of you saw them. The memory you have of them is the result of highly intensive post-hypnotic suggestion, far beyond human ability to impose or resist. So is the fact that you felt compelled to return to work at your regular job here. So is the fact that you asked me the question you have just .asked." his chair. "Did you plant those post-hypnotic suggestions?" "Yes," said Junior. "If it had been done by a human, the lie detector would have exposed the deception. It had to be done by me." "But what about the business of the molecular changes in the zygote? The business of all babies being female? That stopped when -- ? Wait, let's start at the beginning. What did cause that molecular change?" "A special modification of the carrier wave of Radio Station jVT here in Washington, the only twenty-fourhour-a-day radio station in the United States. The modification was not detectable by any instrument available  to present human science." . "You caused that modification?" "Yes. A year ago, you may remember, the problem of design of a new cathode tube was given me. The special modification was incorporated into the design of that tube." "What stopped the molecular change so suddenly?" "The special part of that tube causing the modification of the carrier wave was calculated to last a precise length of time. The tube still functions, but that part of it is worn out. It wore out two hours after the departure of you and Anna from the Moon." Carmody closed his eyes. "Junior, please explain." "Cybernetics machines are constructed to help humanity. A major war -- the disastrous results of which I could accurately calculate -- was inevitable unless forestalled. Calculation showed that the best of several ways of averting that war was the creation of a mythical common enemy. To convince mankind that such a common enemy existed, I created a crucial situation which led to a special mission to the Moon. Factors were given which inevitably led to your choice as emissary. That was necessary because my powers of implanting post-hypnotic suggestions are limited to those with whom I am in direct contact." "You weren't in direct contact with Anna. Why does she have the same false memory as I?" "She was in contact with another large cybernetics machine." "But -- but why would it figure things out the same way you did?" "For the same reason that two properly constructed simple adding machines would give the same answer to the same problem." Carmody's mind reeled a little, momentarily. He got up and started to pace the room. then realized he wasn't at the intake microphone. He went back to it. "Listen, Junior, why are you felling me this? If what happened is a colossal hoax, why'let me in on it?" "It is to the interests of humanity In general not to know the truth. Believing in the existence of inimical extra-terrestrials, they will attain peace and amity among themselves, and they will reach the planets and then the stars. It is, however, to your personal interest to know the truth. And you will not expose the hoax. Nor will Anna. I predict that, since the Moscow cybernetics machine has paralleled all my other conclusions, it is even now informing Anna of the truth, or that it has already informed her, or will inform her within hours." Carmody asked, "But if my memory of what happened on the Moon isfalse, what did happen?" "Look at the green light in the center of the panel before you," Carmody looked. He remembered. He remembered everything. The truth duplicated everything he had remembered before, up to the moment when, walking toward the completed shelter with the whisky bottle, he had looked up toward the ringwall of Hell Crater. He had looked up, but he hadn't seen anything. He'd gone on into the shelter, rigged the airlock. Anna had joined him and they'd turned on the .oxygen tobuild up an atmosphere. It had been a wonderful thirteenday honeymoon. He'd fallen in love with Anna and she with him. They'd got perilously close to arguing politics once or twice, and then they'd decided such things didn't matter. They'd also decided to stay married after their return to Earth, and Anna had promised to join him and live in America. Life together had been so wonderful that they'd delayed leaving until the last moment, when the Sun was almost down, dreading the brief separation the return trip woulcf entail. A ND before leaving, they'd done certain things he hadn't understood then. He understood now that they-were the result of post-hypnotic suggestion. They'd removed all evidence that they'd ever actually lived in the shelter, had rigged things so that subsequent investigation would never disprove any point of the story each was to remember falsely and tell after returning to Earth. He remembered now being bewildered as to why they made those arrangements, even while they had been mjking them. But mostly he remembered Anna and the dizzy happiness of those thirteen days together. "Thanks, Junior," he said hurriedly. He grabbed for the phone and talked Chief Operative Reeber into connecting him with the White House, with President Saunderson. After a delay of minutes that didn't seem like minutes, he heard the President's voice. "Carmody, Mr. President," he said. "I'm going to call you on that reward you offered me. Td like to get off work right now, for a long vacation. And I'd like a fast plane to Moscow. I want to see Anna."  President Saunderson chuckled. "Thought you'd change your mind about sticking at work, Captain. Consider yourself on vacation as of now, and for as long as you like. But I'm not sure you'll want that plane. There's word from Russia th,at -- uh -- Mrs. Carmody has just taken off to fly here, in a strato-rocket. If you hurry, you can get to the landing field in time to meet her." Carmody hurried and did. A Genuine Science Fictipn With Down-to-Mars Science Fiction Prizes! This is the contest so widely publicized in the newspapers, periodicals, radio and television... the most intensive campaign for the most intriguing problem and the most provocative prizes in the history of science fiction! Closing date is midnight, October #, #. There is still time to enter! See Page # for Contest Rules Don't miss the list of prizes on Page # three prize-winners if their entries are accompanied with a year's It was a lovable little creature, anxious to help solve the troubles of the world. Moreover, it had the answer! But what man ever takes free advice? Illustrated by John King ship ! There had been dozens waiting outside the energy barrier when it had seemed that waiting would do no good. Then the barrier had faltered for a matter of two minutes (which showed the superiority of unified organisms over life fragments) and he was across. None of the others had been able to move quickly enough to take advantage of the break, but that didn't matter. All alone, he was enough. No others, were necessary. And the thought faded out of satisfaction and into loneliness. It was a terribly unhappy and unnatural thing to be parted from all the rest of the unified organism, to be a life fragment oneself. How could these aliens stand being fragments? It increased his sympathy for the aliens. Now that he experienced fragmentation himself, he could feel, as though from a distance, the terrible isolation that made them so afraid. It was fear born of that isolation that dictated their actions. What but the insane fear of their condition could have caused them to blast an area, one mile in diameter, into dullred heat, before landing their ship? Even the organized life ten feet deep in the soil had been destroyed in the hlast. He engaged reception, listening eagerly, letting the alien thought saturate him. He enjoyed the touch of life upon his consciousness. He would have to ration that enjoyment. He must not forget himself -- But it could do no harm to listen to thoughts. Some of the fragments of life on .the ship thought quite clearly, considering that they were such primitive, incomplete creatures. Their thoughts were like tiny bells.    contaminated. You know what I mean? I keep washing my hands and it doesn't help." Jerry Thorn hated dramatics and didn't look up. They were still maneuvering in the stratosphere of Saybrook's Planet and he preferred to watch the panel dials. He said, "No reason to feel contaminated. Nothing happened."  "I hope not," said Oldenn. "At least they had all the field men discard their spacesuits in the airlock for complete disinfection. They had a radiation bath for all men entering from outside. I suppose nothing happened." "Why be nervous then?" "I don't know. I wish the Barrier hadn't broken down.". "Who doesn't? It was an accident." "I wonder." Oldenn was vehement. "I was here when it happened. My shift, you know. There was no reason to overload the power line. There was equipment plugged into it that had no damn business neaf it. None whatsoever." "All right. People are stupid." "Not that stupid. I hung around when the Old Man was checking into the matter. None of them had rea sonable excuses. The armor-baking circuits, which were draining off two thousand watts, had been put into the Barrier line. They'd beenusing the second-subsidiaries for a week. Why not this time? They couldn't give any reason." "Can you?" Oldenn flushed. "No. I was just wondering if the men had been" -- he searched for a word -- "hypnotized into it. By those things outside." Thorn's eyes lifted and met those of the others levelly. "I wouldn't repeat that to anyone else. The Barrier was down only two minutes. If anything had happened, if even a spear of grass haddrifted across, it would have shown up in our bacteria cultures within half an hour, in the fruit-fly colonies in a matter of days. Before we got back it would show up in the hamsters, the rabbits, maybe the goats. Just get it through your head, Oldenn, that nothing happened. Nothing." Oldenn turned on his heel and left. In leaving, his foot came within two feet of the object in the corner of the room. He did not see it.    centers and let the thoughts flow past him unperceived. These life-fragments were not important, in any case, since they were not fitted for the continuation of life. Even as fragments, they were incomplete. The other types of fragments now -- They were different. He had to be careful of them. The temptation would be great, and he must give no indication, none at all, of his existence on board ship till they landed on their home planet.  He focused on the other parts of the ship, marveling at the diversity of' life. Each item, no matter how small, was sufficient to itself. He forced himself to contemplate this, until the unpleasantness of the thought grated on him and he longed for the normality of home. Most of the thoughts he received from the smaller fragments were vague and fleeting, as you would expect. There wasn't much to be had from them, but that meant their need for completeness was all the greater. It was that which touched him so keenly. There was the life fragment which squatted on its haunches and fingered the wire netting that enclosed it. Its thoughts, were clear, but limited. Chiefly, they concerned the yellow fruit a companion fragment was eating. It wanted the fruit very deeply. Only the wire netting that separated the fragments prevented its seizing the fruit by force. He disengaged reception in a moment of complete revulsion. These fragments competed for food! He tried to reach far outward for the peace and harmony of home, but it was already an immense distance away. He could reach only into the nothingness that separated him from sanity. He longed at the moment even for the feel of the dead soil between the Barrier and the ship. He had crawled over it last night. There had been no life upon it, but it had been the soil of home, and on the other side of the Barrier there had still been the comforting feel of the rest of organized life. He could remember the moment he had located himself on the surface of the ship, maintaining a desperate suction grip until the airlock opened. He had entered, moving cautiously between the outgoing feet. There had been an inner lock and that had been passed later. Now he lay here, a life fragment himself, inert and unnoticed. Cautiously, he engaged reception again at the previous focus. The squatting fragment of life was tugging furiously at the wire netting. It still wanted the other's food, though it was the less hungry of the two.    damn thing. She isn't hungry; nerve to eat before she herself was crammed full. The greedy ape! I wish we were back home and I never had to look another animal in the face again." He scowled at the older female chimpanzee frowningly and the chimp mouthed and chattered back to him in full reciprocation. Rizzo said, "Okay, okay. Why hang around here, then? Feeding time is over. Let's get out." They went past the goat pens, the rabbit hutches, the hamster cages. Larsen said bitterly, "You volunteer for an exploration voyage. You're a hero. They send you off with speeches -- and make a zoo-keeper out of you." "They give you double pay." "All right, so what? I didn't sign up just for the money. They said at the original briefing that it was even odds we wouldn't come back, that we'd end up like Saybrook. I signed up because I wanted to do something important." "Just a bloomin' bloody hero," said Rizzo. "I'm not an animal nurse." Rizzo paused to lift a hamster out of the cage and stroke it. "Hey," he said, "did you ever think that maybe one of these hamsters has some cute little baby hamsters inside, just getting started?" "Wise guy! They're tested every day." "Sure, sure." He muzzled the little creature, which vibrated its nose at him. "But just suppose you came down one morning and found them there. New little hamsters looking up at you with soft, green patches of fur where the eyes ought to be." "Shut up, for the love of Mike," yelled Larsen. "Little soft, green patches of shining fur," said Rizzo, and put the hamster down with a sudden loathing sensation.    He engaged reception again and varied the focus. There wasn't a specialized life fragment at home that didn't have a rough counterpart, on shipboard. There were the moving runners in various shapes, the moving swimmers, and the moving fliers. Someof the fliers were quite large, with perceptible thoughts; others were small, gauzy-winged creatures. These last transmitted only patterns of senseperception, imperfect patterns at that, and added nothing intelligent of their own. There were the non-movers, which, like the non-movers at home, were green and lived on the air, water and soil. These were a mental blank. Only the dim, dim consciousness of light, moisture and gravity. And each fragment, moving and non-moving, had its mockery of life. Not yet. Not yet -- his feelings. Once before, these life fragments had come, and the rest at home had tried to help them -- too quickly. It had not worked. This time they must wait. If only these fragments did not discover him. They had not, so far. They had not noticed him lying in the corner of the pilot room. No one had bent down to pick up and discard Rim. Earlier, it had meant he could not move. Someone might have turned and stared at the stiff wormlike thing, not quite six, inches long -- First stare, then shout, and then it would be all over. But now, perhaps, he had waited long enough. The takeoff was long past. The controls were locked; the pilot room was empty. It did not take him long to' find the chink in the armor leading to the recess where some of the wiring was. They were dead wires. The front end of his body was a rasp that cut in two a wire of just the right diameter. Then, six inches away, he cut it in two again. He pushed the snipped-off section of the wireahead of him, packing it away neatly and invisibly into a corner of recess. Its outer covering was a brown elastic material and its core was gleaming, ruddy metal. He himself could not reproduce the core, of course, but that was not necessary. It was enough that the pellicle that covered him had been carefully bred to resemble the wire's surface. He returned and grasped the cut sections of the wire before and behind. He tightened against them as his little suction discs came into play. Not even a seam showed. They could not find him now. They could look right at him and see only a continuous stretch of wire. Unless they looked very closely indeed and noted that, in a certain spot on this certain wire, there were two tiny patches of soft and shining green fur.    TT IS remarkable," said Dr. J. Weiss, "that little green hairs can do so much." Captain Loring poured the brandy carefully. In a sense, this was a celebration. They would be ready for the Jump through hyper-space in two hours, and, after that, two days would see them back on Earth. "You are convinced, then, the green fur is the sense organ?" he asked. "It is," said Weiss. Brandy made him come out in splotches, but he was aware of the need of celebration, quite aware. "The experiments were conducted under difficulties, but they were quite significant." The captain smiled stiffly. " 'Under difficulties' is one way of phrasing it. I would never have taken the chances you did to run them." "Nonsense. We're all heroes aboard this ship, all volunteers, all great men with trumpet, fife and fanfarade. You took the chance of coming here." "You were the first to go outside the Barrier." "No particular risk was involved," Weiss said. "I burned the ground before me as I went, to say nothing of the portable Barrier that surrounded me. Nonsense, Captain. Let's all take our medals when we come back; let's take them without attempt at gradation. Besides, I'm a male." "But you're filled with bacteria to here." The captain's hand made a quick, cutting gesture three inches above his head. "Which makes you as vulnerable as a female would be." They paused for drinking purposes. "Refill?" asked the captain. "No, thanks. I've exceeded my quota already." "Then one last for the spaceroad." He lifted his glass in the general direction of Saybrpok's Planet, no longer visible, its sun' only a bright star in the visiplate. "To the little green hairs that gave Saybrook his first lead." Weiss nodded. "A lucky thing. We'll quarantine the planet, of course." The captain said, "That doesn't seem drastic enough. Someone might always land by accident someday and not have Saybrook's insight, or his guts. Suppose he did not blow up h'is ship, as Saybrook did. Suppose he got back to some inhabited place." "I'd rather not suppose it. But what else can we do? If we could develop a self-sustaining atomic reaction in iron, which I'm told is theoretically impossible, we might blow up the whole planet." The captain was somber. "Do you suppose they might ever develop interstellar travel on their own?" "I doubt it. No proof, of course. It's just that they have such a completely different orientation. Their entire organization of life has made tools unnecessary. As far as we know, even a stone axe doesn't exist on the planet." "I hope you're right. Oh, and, Weiss, would you spend some time with Drake?" "The Galactic Press fellow?" "Yes. Once we get back, the story of Saybrook's Planet will be released for the public and I don't think it would be wise to over-sensationalize it. I've asked Drake to let you consult' vith him on the 'story. You're a biologist and enough of an authority to carry weight with him. Would you oblige?" "A pleasure." The captain closed his eyes wearily and shook his head. "Headache, Captain?" "No. Just thinking of poor Saybrook."    while back there had been a queer, momentary sensation as though he had been turned inside-out. It was alarming and he had searched the minds of the keen-thinkers for an explanation. Apparently, the ship had leaped across vast stretches of empty space by cutting across something they knew as "Hyper-space." The keen-thinkers were ingenious. But -- he was weary of the ship. It was such a futile phenomenon. These life-fragments were skillful in their constructions, yet it was only a measure of their unhappiness, after all. They strove to find in the control of inanimate matter what they could not find in themselves. In their unconscious yearning for completeness, they built machines and scoured space, seeking, seeking -- These creatures, he knew, could never, in the very nature of things, find that for which they were seeking. At least, not until such time as he gave it to them. He quivered a little at the thought. Completeness ! These fragments had no concept for it, even. "Completeness" was a poor word. In their ignorance they would even fight it. There had been the ship that had come before. The first ship had contained many of the keen-thinking fragments. There had been two varieties, life-producers and the sterile ones. (How different this second ship was. The keen-thinkers were all sterile, while the other fragments, the fuzzy-thinkers and the no-thinkers, were all producers of life. It was strange.) How gladly that first ship had been welcomed by all the planet! He could ' remember the first intense shock at the realization that the visitors were fragments and not complete. The shock had given way to pity, and the pity to action. It was not certain how they would fit into the community, but there had been no hesitation. All life was sacred and somehow room would have been made for them -- for all of them, from the large keen-thinkers to the little multipliers in the darkness. But there had been a miscalculation! They had not correctly analyzed the course of the fragments' ways of thinking. The keen-thinkers became aware of what had been done and resented it. They were frightened, of course; they did not understand. They had developed the Barrier first, and then, later, had destroyed themselves, exploding their ship to atoms. Poor, foolish fragments. This time, at least, it would be different. They would be saved, despite themselves.    admitted it in so many words, but he was very proud of his skill on the phototyper. He had a travelkit model, which was a six-by-eight, featureless, dark plastic slab, with cylindrical bulges on either end to hold the roll of thin paper. It fitted into a brown leather case, equipped with a beltlike contraption that held it closely about the waist and at one hip. The whole thing weighed less than a pound. Drake could operate it with either hand. His fingers would flicker quickly and easily, placing their light pressure at exact spots on the blank surface, and, soundlessly, words would be written. He looked thoughtfully at the beginning of his story, then up at Dr. Weiss. "What do you think, doc?" "It starts well." Drake nodded. "I thought I might as well start with Saybrook himself. They haven't released his story back home yet. I wish I could have seen Saybrook's original report. How did he ever get it through, by the way?" "As near as I could tell, he spent one last night sending it through the sub-ether. When he was finished, he shorted the motors, and converted the entire ship into a thin cloud of vapor crew and himself along with it." "What a man! You were in this from the beginning, doc?" "Not from the beginning," corrected Weiss, gently. "Only since the receipt of Saybrook's report."' He could not help thinking bade. He had read that report, realizing even then how wonderful the planet must have seemed when Saybrook's colonizing expedition first reached it. It was practically aduplicate of Earth, with an abounding plant life and a purely vegetarian animal life. There had been only the little patches of green fur (how often had he used that phrase in his speaking and thinking) to seem strange. No living individual on the Planet had eyes. Instead there was this fur. Even the plants had them, each blade or leaf or blossom possessing the two patches of richer green. Then Saybrook had noticed, startled and bewildered, that there was no conflict for food on the planet. All plants grew pulpy appendages which were eaten by the animals. These were regrown in a matter of hours. No other parts of the plants were touched. It was as though the plants fed the animals as part of the order of nature. And the plants themselves did not grow in overpowering profusion. They might almost have been cultivated, they were spread across the available soil so discriminately. How much time, Weiss wondered, had Saybrook had to observe the strange law and order on the planet? The fact that insects kept their numbers reasonable, though no birds ate them. That the rodentlike things did not swarm, though no carnivores existed to keep them in check. A ND then there had come the incident of the white tats. That prodded Weiss. He said, "Oh, one correction, Drake. Hamsters were not the first animals involved. It was the white rats." "White rats," said Drake, making the correction in his notes. "Every colonizing ship," said Weiss, "takes a group of white rats for the purpose of testing any alien foods. Rats, of course, are very similar to human beings from a nutritional viewpoint. Naturally, only female white rats are taken." Naturally. If only one sex was present, there was no danger of unchecked multiplication in case the planet proved favorable. Remember the rabbits in Australia. "Incidentally, why not use males?" .asked Drake. "Females are hardier," said Weiss, "which is lucky, since that gave the situation away. It turned out suddenly that all the rats were bearing young." "Right. Now that's where I'm up to, so here's my chance to get some things straight. For my own information, doc, how did Saybrook find out they were in a family way?" "Accidentally, of course. In the course of nutritional investigations, rats are dissected for evidence of internal damage. Their condition was bound to be discovered. A few more were dissected; same results. Eventually, all that lived gave birth to young -- with no male rats aboard!" "And the point is that all the young were born with little green patches of fur instead of eyes." "That is correct. Saybrook said so and we corroborate him. After the rats, the pet cat of one of the children was obviously affected. When it finally kittened, the kittens were not born with closed eyes, but with little patches of green fur. There was no tomcat aboard. "Eventually Saybrook had the women tested. He didn't tell them what for. He didn't want to frighten them. Every single one of them was in the early stages of pregnancy, leaving out of consideration those few who had been pregnant at the time of embarkation. Saybrook never waited for any child to be born, of course. He knew they would have no eyes, only shining patches of green fur. "He even prepared bacterial cultures (Saybrook was a thorough man) and found each little bacillus to. show miscroscopic green spots." Drake was eager. "That goes way beyond our briefing -- or, at least, the briefing I got. But granted that life on Saybrook's Planet is organized into a unified whole, how is it done?" "How? How are your cells organized into a unified whole? Take an individual cell out of your body, even a brain cell, and what is it by itself? Nothing. A little blob of protoplasm with no more capacity for anything human than an amoeba. Less capacity, in fact, since it couldn't live by itself. But put the cells together and you have something that could invent a spaceship, or write a symphony." "I get the idea," said Drake. brook's Planet is a single, organism. In a sense, all life on Earth is, too, but it's a fighting dependence, a dog-eat-dog dependence. The bacteria fix nitrogen; the plants fix carbon; animals eat plants and each other; bacterial decay hits everything. It comes full circle. Each grabs as much as it can, and is, in turn, grabbed. "On Saybrook's Planet, each organism has its place, as each cell in your body does. Bacteria and plants produce food, on the excess of which animals feed, providing in turn carbon dioxide and nitrogenous wastes. Nothing is produced more or less than is needed. The scheme of life is intelligently altered to suit the local environment. No group of lifeforms multiplies more or less than is needed, just as the cells in your body stop multiplying when there are enough of them for a given purpose. When they don't stop multiplying, we call it cancer. And that's what #J life on Earth really is, the kind of organic organization we have, compared to that on Saybrook's Planet. One big cancer. Every species, every individual doing its best to thrive at the expense of every other species and individual:"  '#'OU sound as if you approveL of Saybrook's Planet, doc." "I do, in a way. It makes sense out of the business of living. I can see their viewpoint toward us. Suppose one of the cells of your body could be consciousof the efficiency of the human body as compared with that of the cell itself, and could realize that this was only the result of the union of many cells into a higher whole. And then suppose it becatjle conscious of the existence of free-living cells, with bare life and nothing more. It might feel a very strong desire to drag the poor thing into an organization. It might feel sorry for it, feel perhaps a sort of missionary spirit. The things on Saybrook's Planet -- or the thing; one should use the singular-feels just that, perhaps." "And went ahead by Bringing about virgin births, eh, doc? I've got to go easy on that angle of it. Postoffice regulations,. you know." " There's nothing ribald about it, Drake. For centuries, we've been able to make the eggs of sea-urchins, bees, frogs, etcetera, develop without the intervention of male fertilization. The touch of a needle was sometimes enough, or just immersion in the proper salt solution. The thing on Saybrook's Planet can cause fertilization by the controlled used of radiant energy. That's why an appropriate Energy Barrier stops it; interference, you see, or static. "They can do more than stimulate the division and development of an unfertilized egg. They can impress their own characteristics upon its nucleo-proteins, so that the young are born with the little patches of green fur, which serve as the planet's sense organ and means of communication. The young, in other words, are not individuals, but become part of the thing on Saybrook's Planet. The thing on the planet, not at all incidentally, can impregnate any species -- plant, animal, or microscopic." "Potent stuff," muttered Drake. "Totipotent," Dr. Weiss said sharply. "Universally potent. Any fragment of it is totipotent. Given time, a single bacterium from Saybrook's Planet can convert all of Earth into a single organism! We've got the experimental proof of that." Drake unexpectedly said, "You Can you keep a secret?" Weiss nodded, puzzled. "I've got a souvenir from Saybrook's Planet," Drake told him, grinning. "It's only a pebble, but after the publicity the planet will get, combined with the fact that it's quarantined from here on in, the pebble will be all any human being will ever see of it. How much do you suppose I could sell the thing for?" Weiss stared. "A pebble?" He snatched at the object shown him, a hard, gray ovoid. "You shouldn't have done that, Drake. It was strictly against regulations." "I know. That's why I asked if you could keep a secret. If you could give me a signed note of authentication -- I V hat's the matter, doc?" Instead of answering, Weiss could only chatter and point. Drake ran over and stared down at the pebble. It was the same as before -- Except that the light was catching it at an angle, and it showed up two little green spots. Look very closely; they were patches of green hairs.    definite air of danger within the ship. There was the suspicion of his presence aboard ship. How could that be? He had done nothing yet. Had another fragment of home come aboard and been less cautious? That would be impossible without his knowledge, and, though he probed the ship intensely, he found nothing. And then the suspicion diminished, but it was not quite dead. One of the keen-thinkers still wondered, and was treading close to the truth. How long before the landing? Would an entire world of life-fragments be deprived of completeness? He clung closer to the severed ends of the wire he had been specially bred, to imitate, afraid of detection, fearful for his altruistic mission. sjc sj: his own room. They were already within the Solar System, and in three hours they would be landing. He had to think. He had three hours in which to decide. Drake's devilish "pebble" had been part of the organized life on Saybrook's Planet, of course, but it was dead. It was dead when he had first seen it, and if it hadn't been, it Was certainly dead after they fed it into the hyper-atomic motor and converted it into a blast of pure heat. And the bacterial cultures still showed normal when Weiss anxiously checked. That was not. what bothered Weiss now. Drake had picked up the "pebble" during the last hours of the stay on Saybrook's Planet -- after the Barrier breakdown. What if the breakdown had been the result of a slow, relentless mental pressure on the part of the thing on the planet? What if parts of its being waited to invade as the Barrier dropped? If the "pebble" had not been fast enough and had moved only after the Barrier was re-established, it would have been killed. It would have lain there for Drake to see and pick up. It was a "pebble," not a natural life-form. But did that mean it was not some kind of life-form ? It might have been a deliberate production of the planet's single organism -- a creature deliberately designed to look like a pebble, harmless-seeming, unsuspicious. Camouflage, in other words, a shrewd and frighteningly successful camouflage. Had any other camouflage creature succeeded in crossing the Barrier before it was re-established -- with a suitable shape filched from the minds of the humans aboard ship by the mind-reading organism of the planet? Would it have the casual appearance of a paper-weight? Of an ornamental brass-head nail in the captain's old-fashioned chair? And how would they locate it? Could they search every part of the ship for the telltale green patches -- even down to individual microbes? And why camouflage? Did it intend to remain undetected for a time? Why? So that it might wait for the landing on Earth? An infection after landing could not be cured by blowing up a ship. The bacteria of Earth, the molds, yeasts, and protozoa, would go first. Within a year, the non-human young would begin arriving by the uncountWeiss closed his eyes and told himself it might not be such a bad thing. There would be no more disease, since no bacterium would multiply at the expense of its host, but instead would be satisfied with its fair share of what was available. There would be no more overpopulation; the hordes of East Asia would decline to adjust themselves to the food supply. There would be no more wars, no crime, no greed. But there would be no more individuality, either. Humanity would find security by becoming a cog in a biological machine. A man would be brother to a germ, or to a liver cell. He stood up. He would have a talk with Captain Loring. They would send their report and blow up the ship, just as Saybrook had done. He sat down again. Saybrook had had proof, while he had only the conjectures of a terrorized mind, rattled by the sight of two green spots on a pebble. Could he kill the two hundred men on board ship because of a feeble suspicion? He had to think!    have to wait? If he could only welcome those who were aboard now. Now! Yet a cooler, more reasoning part of himself told 'him that he could not. The little multipliers in the darkness would betriy their new status in fifteen minutes, and the keenthinkers had them under continual observation. Even one mile from the surface of their planet would be too soon, since they might still destroy themselves and their ship out in space. Better to wait for the main airlocks to open, for the planetary air tle multipliers. Better to greet each one of them into the brotherhoo.d of unified life and let them swirl out again to spread the message. Then it would be done! Another world organized, complete! He' waited. There was the dull throbbing, of the engines working mightily to control the slow dropping of the ship; the shudder of contact with planetary 'surface, then -- He let the jubilation of. the keenthinkers sweep into reception, and his own jubilant thoughts answered them. Soofi they would be able to receive as well as himself. Perhaps not these particular fragments, but the fragments that would grow out of those which were fitted for the continuation of life. The main airlocks were about to be opened -- And all thought ceased.    it, something's wrong nozv." He said to Captain Loring, "Sorry. There seems to be a power breakdown. The locks won't open." "Are you sure, Thorn? The lights are on." "Yes, sir. We're investigating it now." He tore away and joined Roger Oldenn at the airlock wiring-box. "What's wrong?" "Give me a chance, will you?" Oldenn 's hands were busy. Then he said, "For the love of Pete, there's a six-inch break in the twenty-amp lead." "What? That can't be!" Oldenn held up the broken wires with their clean, sharp, sawn-through ends. Dr. Weiss joined them. He looked haggard and there was the smell of brandy on his breath. He said shakily, "What's the matter?" They told him. At the bottom of the compartment, in one corner, was the missing section. Weiss bent. There was a black fragment on the floor of the compartment. He touched it with' his finger and it smeared, leaving a sooty smudge on his finger-tip. He rubbed it off absently. There might have been something taking the place of the missing section of wire. Something that had been alive and only looked like wire, yet something that would heat, die, and carbonize in a tiny fraction of a second once the electrical circuit which controlled the airlock had been closed. The thing on Saybrook's Planet, thought Weiss, was not built to understand inanimate Objects. It did not realize that a dead wire need not always remain dead. He said, "How are the bacteria?" A crew member went to check, returned and said, "All normal, doc." The wires had meanwhile been spliced, the locks opened, and Dr. Weiss stepped out into the anarchic world of life that was Earth. "Anarchy," he said, laughing a little wildly. "And it will stay that way." Reconstructing prehistory has the same difficulties as predicting the future: Too many theories and too much data! world look like geological eras ago? Not as it does jnow, certainly; but how did it look? The idea that present land areas were once under water and vice versa is one of the oldest thoughts that men have had about the earth they live on, and it happens to be, in a general way, correct. Creation myths often start with a waste of waters which lasts until a god drains off the surplus water (Hebrews) or hauls the land up to the surface with his fish-line (Polynesians). Many Classical writers like Herodotus and Aristotle noted the presence of fossil seashells on land, and Plato based his Atlantis romance on untrue reports of the Carthaginians that great shoals west of Gibraltar blocked navigation of the Atlantic. However, it's one thing to say present land was once water and present water land, and quite another to show what the map looked like on January #, # B. C. To unravel the past history of the earth's surface, we must use all the facts we can about the rooks and the fossils found in them. This study is called paleogeography or historical geology. For instance, if you want to know what a given acre was doing in the early Triassic Period, you can tell easily enough if there's a fossil-bearing early-Triassic deposit on the surface of that acre. You know that, limestone and chalk are laid down on the bottoms of shallow seas, that sandstone is deposited by rivers on deltas and plains, and that coal is made in swamps. FossHs tell us what land-bridges and water-channels existed in former times, what sort of climate there was, and how the ocean currents flowed. To show the opening and closing of land-bridges, the fossils of large land-animals are the best indicators, since these creatures move about actively on land but 'cannot cross even narrow stretches of water. On the other hand, flying things like insects can be blown across; small land-animals may ride over on driftwood; and small seeds and eggs may be carried over by birds. Thus when we find that in some past age the same species of large land-animal lived in two land areas, now separate, we know the areas must have been joined either then or shortly before. In this way we know North and South America were separated throughout the first half of the Age of Mammals. About the end of the Miocene, the Isthmus of Panama appeared above water and let animals cross over, which is why there are armadillos in Texas and jaguars in Brazil today. Another such land-bridge, now closed, was that connecting Alaska with Siberia via Bering Strait. Recently the paleontologist Simpson worked out a timetable of the opening and closing of the Bering Bridge comparing the percentages of species, genera, and families of animals .found living at the same time in different parts of the earth during past ages. He found that the bridge svas open for land traffic during most of the Cenozoic Era, with an interruption in the middle Eocene Period, another in the late Oligocene, another (still in effect) since the retreat of the Pleistocene glaciers. Many geologists agree that, according to the fossil evidence, the main land masses have stayed in much the same places during the Cenozoic Era that they are now, even though shallow seas have overflowed the continents and land-bridges have opened and closed. Therefore, during the last # years, the connections between the continents have been those you see on the map today: Bering Strait, Panama, Suez, and, some time earlier, a bridge from Australia to Asia via New Guinea. (This last can't have been open since the Age of Reptiles, or it would have let the placental mammals into Australia.) During that time there have been no direct connections among Africa, South America, and Australia, which communicated via the northern continents. :-r m r'T . #. The first world paleographic map (Neumayr, #) showing hypothetical Brazilo-Ethiopian continent and Indo-Madagascan peninsula, Lemuria Befbire the Cenozoic Era, however. The thin crystalline crust is made the evidence is less definite, and up mostly of two kinds of rocks: there are some reasons to suspect dense rocks like basalt, mostly siiimore direct connections among the con and magnesium salts, called southern continents. These connec"sima" (silicon-magnesium); and tions may have been via Antarctica light rocks like granite, mostly silior by way of land bridges across the con and aluminum salts, called "sial" South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. (silicon-aluminum); and some intermediate kinds. T HE question arises -- what is a These rocks are not distributed at continent? At the surface, the random. The land-areas are mostly earth consists of the skin of crystalsial, while the sea-bottoms are mainline rock we see. As one goes down ly sima. Note those terms; they are the rock gets hotter until at # or important. The continents are in fact # miles below the surface it is a patches of sial "floating" on a crust white-hot glassy substance, "magma," of sima like cakes of ice in a river, which would be molten if. it were and, like ice, extending down into on the surface, but which is actually the medium in which they float stiffer than steel because of the much farther (# to # miles) than enormous pressure upon it. they stick up out of it. Therefore when geologists find sial or "continental" rocks under water or on an island, they suspect that these may mark the site of a former large land area. On the other hand they think that islands made entirely of volcanic sima, like the islands of Polynesia, must have grown up from the sea-bottom by volcanic action and are not the remains of any continent. Now, the ocean bottom consists partly of shallow continental shelves, which are merely the submerged edges of the continents; vast submarine plains miles deep; and areas of moderate depth with a broken, mountainous relief. By studying the speed of earthquake vibrations, geologists have learned that the great deeps are plain sima, while the continental shelves are mostly sial, and the submerged mountain-ranges partly sial.  The greatest areas of deep sima are in the Central Pacific, the southern Indian, and the Arctic Oceans. These are therefore the "permanent" oceans, where no continents are to be expected, past, present, or future -- despite the Central Pacific continents ("Mu," "Pan," etc.) imagined by members of the Atlantist cult. The great submarinemountain ranges, where we. might reasonably expect a lost continent, lie in the Southwest Pacific (Including the Fijis and New Zealand) and the Northwest Indian Oceans. The Atlantic Ocean seems, to be sima with little patches of sial here and there, as in the Canaries and Madeira Islands, the last probably representing a peninsula that once extended out northwest from Africa. three schools: the stable-continent school, the transoceanic-continent school, and the continental-drift ' school. The stable-continent geologists like Matthew believe in no sunken continents, only slight movements of existing lands to open and close land bridges. (The transoceanic-continent school believes big former continents possible, while the continental-drift school holds that the continents are stable in size and shape, but that they drift about the surface of the earth. The transoceanic-continent school began in the #s, when some British geologists noted striking resemblances between certain formations in India and South Africa. Blanford pointed out the likeness between the rocks and fossils of a deposit of the Permian Period in Central India, in a tract called Gondwana, and a corresponding deposit in South Africa. Gondwana, "Land of the Gonds," is named for an East Indian tribe. Blanford and his colleagues inferred that South Africa and India had once been connected by a landbridge that included Madagascar, the Seychelles Reefs, and the Maidive and Laccadive Islands. These observations came to the notice of the Austrian paleontologist Neumayr and the German biologist Haeckel. Neu#. The Gondwanaland Theory: Suess's idea of the appearance of the world in the late Paleozoic Era includes a gigantic continent, now submerged mayr in # published the first athome of man. The English zoologist tempt at a paleogeographical map of Sclater suggested the name Lemuria the world, showing how he thought for this bridge, after the animals that it looked in Jurassic time, in the supposedly used it. middle of the Age of Reptiles. (See In the #s another Austrian Fig. #.) It included a great "Brageologist, Edward Suess, brought out zilian-Ethiopian Continent" from an immense five-volume treatise on whose southeast corner extended an the geology of the world, ' in which "Indo-Madagascan Peninsula" corhe expressed the opinion that in the responding to Blanford's Permian , Paleozoic Era, the age of fishes and land-bridge. invertebrates and coal, thre had Haeckel went further, using the been one large continent in the Indo-Madagascan land-bridge to exSouthern Hemisphere, which he plain the distribution of lemurs, called "Gondwanaland" after Blanthose primitive primates found in ford's tract in India. He thought Africa, Madagascar, India, and the there had also been two northern Malay Archipelago. More than that, continents: one, "Atlantis," essenhe speculated that it has lasted well tially North America with a penininto the Cenozoic Era (Age of Mamsula reaching over to Europe vi# mals) and had been the original Iceland; the other, eastern Asia, which he named "Angara-land" after a Siberian river. (See Fig. #.) During the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when dinosaurs ruled the world, according to the NeumayrSuess school, Gondwanaland gradually "broke up" by the sinking of its various parts. Australia and New Zealand separated first, which fact accounts for their lack of native placental mammals, since placental mammals had not been invented at the time of the separation. South America went next, and the last part to sink was the land-bridge from South Africa to India -- the geologists' Lemuria, not to be confused with the Pacific "Lemuria" of the occultists and Atlantists, for which there is no geological evidence. Many American geologists take a position between the stable-continent and transoceanic-continent schools. On one hand, they think there may be something to the evidence for direct migrations between the southern continents during and before the Age of Reptiles. On the other, they object to Suess's vast Gondwanaland because it would have displaced enough water to submerge the other continents completely, which never happened. American' geologists therefore tend to picture the connections between tbe southern continents as "isthmian links" -- narrow necks of land like the Isthmus of Panama rather than broad ocean-filling continental links. (See Fig. #.) Schuchert, for instance, thinks that back in Paleozoic times the connections among the continental masses tended to run east-west' instead of north-south. During times of mountain-building, when the land stood high above the sea, the northern masses were joined in a single "Holarctica" encircling J:he North Pole and the southern masses were joined in a single Gondwanaland. But this only happened at long intervals. The earth, you see, alternates between states of mountainbuilding , and resting. During times of mountain-building ("orogeny," rhyming with "progeny") the continents are large and high, climates are cold and dry, and land-bridges are open to pedestrians, whereas in the resting periods the continents are low, flat, and small, land-bridges are submerged, and the free flow of ocean currents gives the world a warm, mild, moist climate. These upand-down movements of the continents involve smaller up-and-down movements, during which the inland or "epeiric" seas advance and retreat. T hroughout periods of sinking, great rifts open in the earth's crust, from which lava wells out over tens of thousands of miles. At last the downward motion is reversed. Parts of the continents bulge up, as if pushed together from the edges, and the continents rise; the epeiric seas drain away; erosion cuts the high parts of the lands into rugged mountain ranges-; volcanoes erupt; the climate cools, dries, and becomes more extreme. There may #. World map of the Pennsylvanion Period demonstrates how the present continents may have been connected by "isthmian links" or land-bridges be an ice age. Most geologists think we live at the end of a period of orogeny, and can look forward to shrinking, and warming of the lands we live on. It's a sobering thought that the human race may some day have to get along on half its present land. to when and how cycles of mountain-building and subsidence happen, but not at all as to what makes them occur. The English geologist Joly, for instance, had a theory of orogenic cycles based on the accumulation of heat from the disintegration of radioactive materials in the earth's crust, but his theory has flaws in it, and so do most of the others. In another fifty years or so, the true explanation will no doubt come to light, an explanation that will perhaps combine features of several of the older theories. That leaves the continental-drift hypothesis of Alfred Wegener, a professor of geophysics and meteorology at the University of Graz, Austria, who perished exploring the Greenland ice-cap in #. He said : If the continents float in the sima crust like cakes of ice in water, why can't they drift like cakes of ice? He therefore assumed a single supercontinent back in the Paleozoic Era, a "Pangaea" that included all the modern continents. If Pangaea ever existed, it must, like the larger Gondwanaland of Suess and his school, have been a land of immense deserts, as the winds' would sweep over it for thousands of miles after they had lost their moisture without  being able to pick up any mofe. Wegener's maps show clearly how all the continents can, with not too much coastal stretching, be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Pangaea, according to Wegener, began to come unglued in the Mesozoic Era, the Dinosaur Age, and its parts drifted asunder until, in the Pleistocene Period, Europe came adrift from North America. Obviously we need not suppose the existence of land-bridges connecting the continents if they were once all huddled together, touching. But the Wegener theory, however ingenious, has fatal flaws: Paleontologists object that the distribution of animals proves that Europe and North America were separated for good at least as early as the Mesozoic Era; the geophysicist Lambert calculated that the forces Wegener relied upon to tow his continents ' around the world were only onecould continents, made of light and comparatively weak sial, plow their way through the denser and stronger sima in which they rest? So much for Gondwanaland, Pangaea, and other geological lost continents. All are much a matter of educated guesswork, and the time has evidently not come when we can confidently draw the map of the earth as it looked on January first, # p. C. among themselves, however they agree about some things: -- That there may have been lost continents in the Paleozoic Era, # B. C., when the highest life consisted of lizard-like reptiles. -- That these "continents" were probably not real continents, but narrow isthmuses connecting some of the' present land masses, as the Panama Isthmus does now. -- That these continents, if they existed, lost their shape luring the Mesozoic Era, so that by the beginning of the Cenozoic the map looked fairly modern. -- That these changes took place so long ago and so gradually that none of these "continents" could possibly have lasted to within millions of years of the time of man. They agree, moreover, that there is not a grain of Truth in ,the stories of Plato and his modern admirers, the occultists and the Atlantomaniacs, about continents that supported appeared beneath the waves in the course of a day and a night of storm and earthquake. It's sad, perhaps, to give up such pretty and alluring legends, but science has no room for sentimentality and superstition. It was a nasty plot Vyrko was involved in. The worst part was that he constructed it himself -- and didn't get the end right! the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands. ' The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed the retreat and its extraordinary air-conditioning -- n o t because his scientific genius had foreseen the coming of the poisonous element, agnoton, and the end of the human race, but because he itched. And here Vyrko sat, methodically recording the destruction of mankind, once in a straight factual record, for the instruction of future readers ("if any," he added wryly to himself), and again as a canto in that epic poem of Man which he never expected to complete, but for which he lived. Lavra's long golden hair fell over his shoulders. It was odd that its scent distracted him whenhe was at work on the factual record, yet seemed to wing the lines of the epic. "But why bother?" she asked. Her speech might have been clearer if her tongue had not been more preoccupied with the savor of the apple than with the articulation of words. But Vyrko understood readily: the remark was as familiar an opening as P-K# in chess. "It's my duty," Vyrko explained patiently. "I haven't your father's scientific knowledge and perception. Your father's? I haven't the knowledge of his humblest lab assistant. But I can put words together so that they make sense and sometimes more than sense, and I have to do this." From Lavra's plump red lips an apple pip fell into the works of the electronic typewriter. Vyrko fished it out automatically; this too was part of the gambit, with the possible variants of grape seed, orange peel... "But why," Lavra demanded petulantly, "won't Father let us leave here? A girl might as well be in a... a..." "Convent?" Vyrko suggested. He was a good amateur paleolinguist. "There is an analogy -- even despite my presence. Convents were supposed to shelter girls from the Perils .of The World. Now the whole world is one great Peril... outside of this retreat." "Go on," Lavra urged. She had lonig ago learned, Vyrko suspected,' that he was a faintly overserious young man with no small talk, and that she could enjoy his full attention only by asking to have something explained, even if for the th time. girls he used to talk with, not at, and. of how little breath they had for talking now in the world where no one drew an unobstructed breath. It had begun with the accidental discovery in a routine laboratory analysis of a new element in the air, an inert gas which the great paleolinguist Larkish had named agnoton, the Unknown Thing, after the pattern of the similar nicknames given to others: neon, the New Thing; xenon, the Strange Thing. It had continued (the explanation ran off so automatically that his mind was free to range from the next line of the epic to the interesting question of whether the presence of ear lobes would damage the symmetry of Lavra's perfect face) it had continued with the itching and sneezing, the coughing and wheezing, with the increase of the percentage of agnoton in the atmosphere, promptly passing any other inert gas, even argon, and soon rivaling oxygen itself. And it had culminated (no, the lines were cleaner without lobes), on that day when only the three of them were here in this retreat, with the discovery that the human race was allergic to agnoton. Allergies had been conquered for a decade ofgenerations. Their cure, even their palliation, had been forgotten. And mankind coughed and sqezed and itched... and died. For while the allergies of the ancient past produced only agonies to make the patient long for death, agnoton brought on racking and incessant spasms of coughing and sneezing which no heart could long withstand. "So ifyou leave this shelter, my dear' Vyrko concluded, "you too will fight for every breath and twist your body in torment until your heart decides that it is all just too much trouble. Here we are safe, because your father's eczema was the only known case of allergy in centuries -- and was traced to the inert gases. Here is the only air-conditioning in the world that excludes the inert gases -- and with them agnoton. And here -- " and a red fleck of apple skin on her lips, the apples of her breasts touching Vyrko's shoulders. This too was part of the gambit. Usually it was merely declined. (Tyrsa stood between them. Tyrsa, who sang well and talked better; whose plain Pace and beautiful throat were alike racked by agonton...) This time the gambit was interrupted. Kirth-Labbery himself had come in unnoticed. His old voice was thin with weariness, sharp with impatience. "And here we are, safe in perpetuity, with our air-conditioning, our energy plant, our hydroponics! Safe in perpetual siege, besieged by an inert gas!" Vyrko grinned. "Undignified, isn't it?" Kirih-Labbery managed to laugh at himself. "Damn your secretarial hide, Vyrko. I love you like a son, but if I had one man who knew a meson from a metazoon to help me in the laboratory... "You'll find something, Father," Lavra said vaguely. Her father regarded her with an odd seriousness. "Lavra," he said, "your beauty is the greatest thing that I have wrought -- with a certain assistance, I'll grant, from the genes so obviously carried by your mother. That beauty alone still has meaning. The sight of you would bring a momentary happiness even to a man choking in his last spasms, while our great web of civilization... He absently left the sentence unfinished and switched on the video screen. He had to try a dozen channels before he found one that was still casting. When every erg of a man's energy goes to drawing his next breath, he cannot tend his machine. At last Kirth-Labbery picked up a Nyork newscast. The announcer was sneezing badly ("The older literature," Vyrko observed, "found sneezing comic..."), but still contriving to speak, and somewhere a group of technicians must have had partial control of themselves. "Four hundred and seventy-two planes have crashed," the announcer said, "in the past forty-eight hours. Civil authorities have forbidden further'plane travel indefinitely because of the danger of spasms at the controls, and it is rumored that all vehicular transport whatsoever is to come under the same ban. No Rocklipper has arrived from Lunn for over a week, and it is thirty-six hours since we have made contact with the Lunn telestation. Yurp has been silent for over two days, and Asia a week... " 'The most serious threat of this epidemic,' the head of the Academy has said in an authorized statement, 'is the complete disruption of the systems of communication upon which world civilization is based. When man becomes physically incapable of governing his machines... " of the yellow bands. It was just that: a band of bright yellow some thirty centimeters wide, about five meters long, and so thin as to seem insubstantial, a mere stripe of color. It came underneath the backdrop behind the announcer. It streaked about the casting room with questing sinuosity. No features, no appendages relieved its yellow blankness. Then with a deft whipping motion it wrapped itself around the announcer. It held him only an instant. His hideously shriveled body plunged toward the camera as the screen went dead. That was the start of the horror. Vyrko, naturally, had no idea of the origin of the yellow bands. Even Kirth-Labbery could offer no more than conjectures. From another planet, another system, another galaxy, another universe... It did not matter. Precise knowledge had now lost its importance. Kirth-Labbery was almost as indifferent to the problem as was Lavra; he speculated on it out of sheer habit. What signified was that the yellow bands were alien, and that they were rapidly and precisely completing the destruction of mankind begun by the agnoton. "Their arrival immediately after the epidemic," Kirth-Labbery concluded, "cannot be coincidence. You will observe that they function freely in an agnoton-laden atmosphere." "It would be interesting," Vyrko commented, "to visualize a band sneezing... "It's possible," the scientist corrected, "that the agnoton was a poison-gas barrage laid down to soften Earth for their coming; but is it likely that they could know that a gas harmless to them would be lethal to other life? It's more probable that they learned from spectroscopic analysis that the atmosphere of Earth lacked an element essential to them, which they supplied before invading." Vyrko considered the problem while Lavra sliced a peach with delicate grace. She was unable to resist licking the juice from her fingers. "Then if the agnoton," he ventured, "is something that they imported, is it possible that their supply might run short?" Kirth-Labbery fiddled with the dials under the screen. It was still possible to pick up occasional glimpses from remote sectors, though hy now the heart sickened in advance at the knowledge of the inevitable end of the cast. "It is possible, Vyrko. It is the only hope. The three of us here, where the agnoton and the yellow ba.nds are alike helpless to enter, may continue our self-sufficient existence long enough to outlast the in-' vaders. Perhaps somewhere on Earth there are other such nuclei, but I doubt it. We are the whole of the future... and I am old." terrible weight of a burden that he did not want but could not reject. He felt himself at once oppressed and ennobled. Lavra went on eating her peach. The video screen sprang into light. A young man with the tense, lined face of premature age spoke hastily, urgently. "To all of you, if there are any of you... I have heard no answer for two days now...' . It is chance that I am here. But watch, all of you ! I have found how the yellow bands came here. I am going to turn the camera on it now... watch!" The field of vision panned to .something that was for tt moment totally incomprehensible. "This is their ship," the old young man gasped. It was a set of bars of a metal almost exactly the colorof the bands themselves, and it appeared in the first instant like a three-dimensional projection of a tesseract. Then as they looked at it, their eyes seemed to follow strange new angles. Possibilities of vision opened up beyond their capacities. For a moment they seemed to see what the human eye was not framed to grasp. "They come," the voice panted on, "from..." The voice and the screen went dead. Vyrko covered his eyes with his hands. Darkness was infinite relief. A minute passed before he felt that he could endure once more even the normal exercise of the optic nerve. He opened his eyes sharply at a little scream from Lavra. He opened them to see how still Kirth-Labbery sat. The human heart, too, is framed to endure only so much; and, as the scientist had said, he was old. Labbery's death before Vyrko had brought his prose-and-verse record up to date. Nothing more had appeared on the video, even after the most patient hours of knob-twirling. Now Vyrko leaned back from the keyboard and contemplated his completed record -- and then sat forward with abrupt shock at the thought of that word completed. There was nothing more to write. The situation was not novel in  literature. He had read many treatments, and even written a rather successful satire on the theme himself. But here was the truth itself. He was that most imagination-stirring of all figures, The Last Man on Earth. And he found it a boring situation. Kirth-Labbery, had he lived, would have devoted his energies in the laboratory to an effort, even conceivably a successful one, to destroy the invaders. Vyrko knew his own limitations too well to attempt that. Vrist, his gay wild twin, who had been in Lunn on yet another of his fantastic ventures when the agnoton struck -- Vrist would have dreamed up some gallant feat of physical prowess to make the invaders pay dearly for his life. Vyrko found it difficult to cast himself in so. swashbuckling a role. He had never envied Vrist till now. Be jealous of the dead; only the living are alone. Vyrko smiled as he recalled the line from one of his early poems. It had been only the expression of a pose when he wrote it, a mood for a song that Tyrsa would sing well... It was in this mood that he found (the ancient word had no modern counterpart) the pulps. some eccentric of two thousand years ago (the name was variously rendered as Trees or Tiller) had buried them in a hermetic capsule to check against the future; how Tarabal had dug them up some fifty years ago; how Kirth-Labbery had spent almost the entire Hartl Prize for them because, as he used to assert, their incredible mixture of exact prophecy and arrant nonsense offered the perfect proof of the greatness and helplessness of human ingenuity. But Vyrko had never read them before. They would at least be a novelty to deaden the boredom of his classically dramatic situation. He passed a more than pleasant hour with Galaxy and Surprising and the rest, needing the dictionary but rarely. He was particularly impressed by one story detailing, with the most precise minutiae, the. politics of the American Religious Wars -- a subject on which he himself had based a not unsuccessful novel. By one Norbert Holt, he observed. Extraordinary how exact a forecast... and yet extraordinary too how many of the stories dealt with spaceand time-travel, which the race had never yet attained and now never would... And inevitably there was a story, a neat and witty one by an author named Knight, about the Last Man on Earth. He read it and smiled, first at the story and then at his own stupidity. He found Lavra in the laboratory, of all unexpected places. She was staring fixedly at one corner, where the light did not strike clearly. "What's so fascinating?" Vyrko asked. Lavra turned suddenly. Her hair and her flesh rippled with the perfect grace of the movement. "I was thinking... Vyrko's half-formed intent toward her permitted no comment on that improbable statement. "The day before Father... died, I was in here with him and I asked if there was any hope of our escaping ever. Only this time he answered me. He said yes, there was a way out, but he was afraid of it. It was an idea he'd worked on but never tried. And we'd be wiser not to try it, he said." "I don't believe in arguing with your father -- even post mortem." "But I can't help wondering... And when he said it, he looked over at that corner." drew back a curtain. There was a chair of metal rods, and a crude control panel, though it was hard to see what it was intended to control. He dropped, the curtain. For a moment he stood watching Lavra. She was a fool, but she was exceedingly lovely. And the child of Kirth-Labbery could hardly carry only a fool's genes. Several generations could grow up in this retreat before the inevitable failure of the most permanent mechanical installations made it uninhabitable. By that time Earth would be free of agnoton and yellow bands, or they would be so firmly established that there was no hope. The third generation would go forth into the world, to perish or... He walked over to Lavra' and laid a gentle hand on her golden hair. Lavra had been bored before that time. A life of underpanding inaction with plenty of fobd may well have sufficed her. Certainly she was not bored now. At first she was merely passive; Vyrko had always suspected that she had meant the gambit to be declined. Then as her interest mounted and Vyrko began to compliment himself on his ability as an instructor, they became certain of their success; and from that point on she was rapt with the fascination of the changes in herself. But even this new development  did not totally rid Vyrko of his owri ennui. If there were only something he could do, some positive, Vristian, Kirth-Labberian step that he could take! He damned himself for having been an incompetent esthetic fool, who had taken so for granted the scientific wonders of his age that he had never learned what made them tick, or how greater wonders might be attained. He slept too much, he ate too much, for a brief period he drank too much -- until he found boredom even less attractive with a hangover. He tried to write, but the terrible uncertainty of any future audience disheartened him. Sometimes a week would pass without his consciously thinking of agnoton or the yellow bands. Then he would spend a day flogging himself into a state of nervous tension worthy of his uniquely dramatic situation, but he would always relapse. There just wasn't anything to do. Now even the consolation of Lavra's beauty was vanishing, and she began demanding odd items of food which the hydroponic garden could not supply. "If you loved me, you'd find a way to make cheese..." or "... grow a new kind of peach... a little like a grape, only different..." It was while he was listening to a film wire of Ty'rsa's (the last she ever made, in the curious tonalities of that newly rediscovered Mozart opera) and seeing her homely face, made even less lovely by the effort of those effortless-sounding notes, that he became conscious of the operative phrase. "If you loved me..." "Have I ever said I did?" he snapped. He saw a new and not readily understood expression mar the beauty of Lavra's face. "No," she said in sudden surprise. "No," and her voice fell to flatness, "you haven't..." And as her sobs -- the first he had ever heard from her -- traveled away toward the hydroponic room, he felt a new and not readily understood emotion. He switched off the film wire midway through the pyrotechnic rage of the eighteenth-century qyeen of darkness. in the pulps. There was a perverse satisfaction in reading the on Earth. He could feel through them the emotions that he should be feeling directly. And the other stories were fun, too, in varying ways. For instance, that astonishingly accurate account of the delicate maneuvering which averted what threatened to be. the first and final Atomic War... He noticed one oddity: Every absolutely correct story of the "future" bore the same by-line. Occasionally other writers made good guesses, predicted logical trends, foresaw inevitable extrapolations. But only Norbert Holt named names and dated dates with perfect historical accuracy. It wasn't possible. It was too precise to be plausible. It was far more spectacular than the erratic Nostradamus often discussed in the pulps. But there it was. He had read the Holt stories solidly through in order i half-dozen times, without finding a single flaw, when he discovered the copy of Surprising Stories that had slipped behind a shelf and was therefore new to him. He looked at once at the contents jage. Yes, there was a Holt and -- he felt a twinge of irrational but poignant sadness -- one labeled as posthumous. This story, we regret to tell you, is incomplete, and not only because of Norbert Holt's tragic death last month. This is the last in chronological order of Holt's stories of a consistently plotted future; but this fragment was written before his masterpiece, The Siege of Lunn. Holt himself used to tell me that he could never finish it, that he could not find an ending; and he died still not knowing how The Last Boredom came out. But here, even though in fragment form, is ,the last published work of the greatest writer about the future, Norbert Holt.  The note was signed with the initials M. S. Vyrko had long sensed a more than professional Intimacy between Holt and his editor, Manning Stem; this obituary introduction must have been a bitter task. But his eyes were . hurrying on, almost fearfully, to the first words of The Lost Boredom: There were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands. The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed... Vryko blinked and started again. It still read the same. He took firm hold of the magazine, as though the miracle might slip between his fingers, and dashed off with more energy than he had felt in months. ponic room. "I have just found," he shouted, "the damnedest ' unbelievable -- "  "Darling," said Lavra, "I want some meat." "Don't be silly. We haven't any meat. Nobody's eaten meat except at ritual dinners for generations." "Then I want a ritual dinner." "You can go on wanting. But look at this! Just read those first lines!" "Vyrko," she pleaded, "I want it." "Don't be an idiot!" Her lips pouted and her eyes moistened. "Vyrko dear... What you said when you were listening to that funny music... Don't you love me?" "No," 'he barked. Her eyes overflowed. "You don't love me ? Not after All Vyrko's pent-up boredom and irritation erupted. "You're beautiful. Lavra, or you were a few months ago, but you're an idiot. I am not in the habit of loving idiots!" "But you..." "I tried to assure the perpetuation of the race -- questionable though the desirability of such a project seems at the moment. It was not an unpleasant task, but I'm damned if it gives you the right in perpetuity to 'pester me." She moaned a little as he slammed out of the room. He felt oddly better. Adrenalin is a fine thing for the system. He settled into a chair and resolutely read, his eyes bugging like a cover-monster's with amazed disbelief. When he reached the verbatim account of the quarrel he had just enjoyed, he dropped the magazine. It sounded so petty in print. Such stupid inane bickering in the face of... . He left the magazine lying there and went back to the hydroponic roon). Lavra was crying -- noiselessly this time, which somehow made it worse. One hand had automatically plucked a ripe grape, but she was not eating it. He went up behind her and slipped his hand under her long hair I and began stroking the nape of her neck. The soundless sobs diminished gradually. When his fingers moved tenderly behind her ears, she turned to him with parted lips. The grape fell from her hand. "I'm sorry," he heard himself saying. "It's me that's the idiot. Which, I repeat, I am not in the habit of loving. And you're the mother of my twins and I do love you..." And he realized that the statement was quite possibly, if absurdly, true. "I don't want anything now," Lavra said when words were again in order. She stretched contentedly, and she was still beautiful even in the ungainly distortion which might preserve a race. "Now what were you trying to tell me?" is always right," he ended. "And now he's writing about us!" "Oh! Oh, then we'll know -- " "We'll know everything. We'll know what the yellow bands are and what becomes of them and what happens to mankind and -- " " -- and we'll know," said Lavra, "whether it's a boy or a girl." Vyrko smiled. "Twins, I told you. It runs in my family -- no less than one pair to a generation. And I think that's it -- Holt's already planted the fact of my having a twin named Vrist, even though he doesn't come into the action." "Twins... That wotild be nice. They wouldn't be lonely until we could... But get it quick, dear. Read it to me; I can't wait!" So he read Norbert Holt's story to her -- too excited and too oddly affectionate to point out that her longstanding aversion for 'print persisted even when she herself was a character. He read on past the quarrel. He read a printable version of the past hour. He read .about himself reading the story to her. "Now!" she cried. "We're up to now. What happens next?" Vyrko read; The emotional release of anger and love had set Vyrko almost at peace with himself again; but a small restlessness still nibbled at his brain. Irrelevantly he remembered Kirth-Labbery's cryptic hint of escape. Escape for the two of them, happy now; for the two of them and for their... it had to be, according to the odds, their twins. He sauntered curiously into the laboratory, Lavra following him. He drew back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. It was hard to see the control board that seemed to control nothing. He sat in the chair for a better look. He made puzzled grunting noises. Lavra, her curiosity finally stirred by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green button.L says about me," Lavra objected. "I don't like anything he says about me. I think your Mr. Holt is a very nasty person." "He says you're beautiful." "And he says you love me. Or does he? It's all mixed up." "It is all mixed up... and I do love you." The kiss was a short one; Lavra had to say, "And what next?" "That's all. It ends there." "Well... Aren't you...?" Vyrko felt strange. Holt had described his feelings so precisely. He was at peace and still curious, and the thought of Kirth-Labbery's escape method did nibble restlessly at his brain. He rose and sauntered into the laboratory. Lavra following him. He drew back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. It was hard to see the control board that seemed to control nothing. He sat in the chair for a better look. He made puzzled grunting noises. Lavra', her curiosity finally stirred by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green button. I ment when Lavra and the laboratory vanished. He saw the archaic vehicle bearing down directly upon him and tried to get out of the way as rapidly as possible. But the chair hampered him and before he could get to his feet the vehicle struck. There was a red explosion of pain and then a long blackness. He later recalled a moment of consciousness at the hospital and a shrill female voice repeating over and over, "But he wasn't there and then all of a sudden he was and I hit him. It was like he came out of nowhere. He wasn't there and all of a sudden... Then the blackness came back. All the time of his unconsciousness, all through the semi-conscious nightmares while doctors probed at him and his fever soared, his unconscious mind must have been working on the problem. He knew the complete answer the instant that he saw the paper on his breakfast tray, that first day he was capable of truly seeing anything. The paper was easy to read for a paleolinguist with special training in pulps -- easier than the curious concept of breakfast was to assimilate. What mattered was the date. # -- and the headlines refreshed his knowledge of the Cold War and the impending election. (There was something he should (remember about that election...) He saw it clearly. Kirth-Labbery's genius had at last evolved a time machine. That was the one escape, the escape which the scientist had not yet tested and rather distrusted. And Lavra had poked the green button because Norbert Holt had said she had poked (would poke?) the green button. How many buttons could a wood' poke poke if a wood poke would poke... "The breakfast didn't seem to agree with him, doctor." "Maybe it was the paper. Makes me run a temperature every morhing, too!" "Oh, doctor, you do say the funniest things!" "Nothing funnier than this case. Total amnesia, as best we can judge by his lucid moments. And his clothes don't help us -- must've been on his way to a fancy-dress party. Or maybe I should say fancy-dress!" "Oh, doctor!" "Don't tell me nurses can blush. Never'did when I was an intern -- and you can't say they didn't get a chance! But this character here... not a blessed bit of identification on him ! Riding some kind of newfangled bike that got smashed up... Better hold off on the solid food for a bit -- stick to intravenous feeding." ritual dinners, Vyrko finally recalled. Meat was apt to affect him badly -- the trouble was that he had not at first recognized those odd strips of oily solid which accompanied the egg as meat. The adjustment was gradual and successful, in this as in other matters. At the end of two weeks, he was eating meat easily (and, he confessed, with a faintly obscene nonritual pleasure) and equally easily chatting with nurses and fellow patients about the events (which he still privately tended to regard as mummified museum pieces) of #. His adjustment, in fact, was soon so successful that it could not continue. The doctor made that clear.  "Got to think about the future, you know. Can't keep you here forever. Nasty unreasonable prejudice against keeping well men in hospitals." Vyrko allowed the expected laugh to come forth. "But since," he said, gladly accepting the explanation that was so much more credible than the truth, "I haven't any idea who I am, where I live, or what my profession is -- " "Can't remember anything? Don't know if you can take shorthand, for instance? Qr play the bull fiddle?" "Not a thing." Vyrko felt it hardly worth while to point out his one manual accomplishment, the operation of the as-yet-uninvented elec tronic typewriter. "Behold," he thought, "the Man of the Future. I've read all the time travel stories. I know what should happen. I teach them everything Kirth-iLabbery knew and I'm the greatest man in the world. Only the fictional time travel never happens to a poor dope who took for granted all the science around him, who pushed a button or turned a knob and never gave a damn what happened or why. Here they're just beginning to get two-dimensional black-and-w hi t e short-range television. We had (will have?) stereoscopic full-color worldwide video -- which I'm about as capable of constructing' here as my friend the doctor would be of installing electric light in Ancient Rome. The Mouse of the Future..." The doctor had been thinking, too. He said, "Notice you're a great reader. Librarian's been telling me about you -- went through the whole damn hospital library like a bookworm with a tapeworm!" Vyrko laughed dutifully. "I like to read," he admitted. "Every try writing?" the doctor asked abrupty, almost in the tone in which he might reluctantly advise a girl that her logical future lay in Port Said. This time Vyrko really laughed. "That does seem to ring a bell, you know... It might be worth trying. But at that, what do I live on until I get started?" "Hospital trustees here administer a rehabilitation fund. Might wangle a loan. Won't be much, of course; but I always say a single man's got only one mouth to feed -- and if he feeds more, he won't be single long!" "A little," said Vyrko with a glance at the newspaper headlines, "might go a long way." which gave him a bank account on which, in turn, he could acquire other short-term loans -- at exorbitant interest. And there was the election. He hadfinally reconstructed what he should know about it. There had one of the much later pulps, on If ' the Republicans had won the # election. Whichmeant that actually they had lost; and here, in October of #, all newspapers, all commentators, and most important, all gamblers, were convinced that they must infallibly win. On Wednesday, November third, Vyrko repaid his debts and settled down to his writing career, comfortably guaranteed against immediate  starvation. A ialf-dozen attempts at standard fiction failed wretchedly. A matter of "tone," editors remarked vaguely, on the rare occasions when they did not confine themselves to the even vaguer phrases of printed rejection forms. A little poetry sold -- "if you cin call that selling," Vyrko thought bitterly, comparing the financial position of the poet here and in his own world. His failures were beginning to bring back the bitterness and boredom, and his thoughts turned more iand more to that future to which he could never know the answer. Twins. It had to be twins -- of opposite sexes, of course. The only hope of the continuance of the race lay in a matter of odds and genetics. Odds' .,... He began to think of the election bet, to figure other angles with which he could turn foreknowledge to profit. But his pulp-reading .had filled his mind with fears of the paradoxes, involved. He had calculated the election bets carefully; they could not affect the outcome of the election, they could not even, in their proportionately small size, affect the odds. But any further step... Vyrko was, like most conceited men, fond of selfcontempt, which he felt he could occasionally afford to indulge in. Possibly his strongest access of self-contempt came when he realized the simplicity of the solution to all his problems. He could write for the science fiction pulps. The one thing that he could handle convincingly and skilfully,' with the proper "tone," was the future. Possibly start off with a story on the Religious Wars; he'd done all that research on his novel. Then... It was not until he was about to maiil the manuscript that the full pattern of the truth struck him. Soberly, yet half-grinning, he M anning stern rejoiced loudly in this fresh discovery. "This boy's got it! He makes it sound so real that..." The business office was instructed to pay the highest bonus rate (unheard of for a first story) and an intensely cordial letter went to the author outlining immediate needs and offering certain story suggestions. The editor of Surprising was no little surprised at the answer:... I regret to say that all my stories will be based on one consistent scheme of future events and 'that you must allow me to stick to my own choke of material... (( A ND who the hell," Manningcjl Stern demanded, "is editing this magazine?" and dictated a somewhat peremptory suggestion for a personal interview. The features were small and sharp, and the face had a sort of dark aliveness. It was a different beauty from Lavra's, and an infinitely different beauty from the curious standards set by the # # films; but it was beauty and it spoke to Notbert Holt. "You'll forgive a certain surprise, Miss Stern," he ventured. "I've read Surprising for so many years and never thought..." Manning Stern grinned. "That the editor was also surprising? I'm used to it -- your reaction, I mean. I don't think I'll ever be quite used to being a woman... or a human being, for that matter." , "Isn't it rather unusual? From what I know of the field..." "Please God, when I find a man who can write, don't let him go all male-chauvinist on me! I'm a good editor, said she with becoming modesty (and don't you ever forget it!) and I'm a good scientist. I even worked on the Manhattan Project -- until some character discovered that my adopted daughter was a Spanish War orphan. But what we're here to talk about is this consistent-scheme gimmifk of yours. It's all right, of course; it's been done before. But where I frankly think you're crazy is in planning to do it exclusively." Norbert Holt opened his briefcase. 'Tve brought along an outline that might help convince you..." An hour later Manning Stern glanced at her watch and announced, "End of office hours! Care to continue this slugfest over a martini or five? I warn you -- the more I'm f plied, the less pliant I get." And an hour after, that she stated, "We might get some place iff we'd stay some place. I mean the subject seems to be getting elusive." "The hell," Notbert Holt announced recklessly, "with editorial relations. Let's get back to the current state of the opera." "It was paintings. I was telling you about the show at the -- " "No, I remember now. It was movies. You were trying to explain the Marx Brothers. Unsuccessfully, I may add." "Un... sue... cess... fully," said Manning Stern ruminatlvely. "Five martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. But I try to explain the Marx Brothers yet! Look, Holt. I've got a subversive orphan at home and she's undoubtedly starving. I've got to feed her. You .come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?" "Good. Fine. Always like to try a new dish." Manning Stern looked at him curiously. "Now was that a gag or not? You're funny, Holt. You know a lot about everything and then all of a sudden you go all Man-from-Mars on the simplest thing. Or do you?... Anyway, let's go feed Raquel." And five hours later Holt was saying, "I never thought I'd have this reason for being glad I sold a story. Manning, I haven't had so much fun talking to -- I almost said 'to a woman.' I haven't had so much fun talking since -- " He had almost said since the agnoton came. She seemed not to notice his abrupt halt. She simply said,, "Bless you, Norb. Maybe you 'aren't a male-chauvinist. Maybe even you're... Look, go find a subway or a cab or something. If you stay here another minute. I'm either going to kiss you or admit you're right about your stories -- and I don't know which is worse editor-author relations." M anning stern committed the second breach of relations first. The fan mail on Norbert Holt's debut left her no doubt that Surprising would profit by anything he' chose to write about. She'd never seen' such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. Or rather you could hardly say rise. Holt hit -- the top with his first story and stayed there. He socked the fen (Guest of Honor at the Washinvention), the pros (first President of Science Fiction Writers of America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best seller list). And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with him, talking about this, that and those... Raquel, just turning sixteen, was quite obviously in love with him -- praying that he'd have the decency to stay single till she grew up and "You know, Manningcita, I am Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls..." But there teas this occasional feeling of oddness. Like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night "I've got a story problem," Nor'bert Holt announced there. "An idea, and I can't lick it. Maybe if I toss it out to the literary lions..." "Story problem?" Manning said, a little more sharply than she'd intended. 'T thought everything was outlined for the next ten years." "This is different. This isa sort of paradox story, and I can't get out of it. It won't end. Somthing like this: Suppose a man in the remote year X reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine. So he works the time machine and goes back to the year X minus # -- let's say, for instance, our time. So in 'now' he writes the story that he's going to read two thousand years later, telling himself how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he read the story which he wrote because -- " Manning was starting to say "Hold it!" when Matt Duncan interrupted with, "Good old endless-cycle gimmick. Lot of fun to kick around, but Bob EJeinlein did it once and for all in By His Bootstraps. Damnedest tour de force I ever read; there just aren't any switcheroos left." "Ouroboros," Joe Henderson contributed. Norbert Holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per evening was Joe's maximum contribution. Austin Carter picked it up. "Ouroboros, the worm that circles the universe with its tail in its mouth. The Asgard Serpent, too. And I think there's something in Mayan literature. All symbols of infinity -- no beginning, no ending. Always out by the same door where you went in. See that magnificent novel of Eddison's. The Worm Ouroboros; the perfect cyclic novel, ending with its recommencement, stopping not because there's a stopping place, but because it's uneconomical to print the whole text over infinitely." "The Quaker Oats box," said Duncan. "With a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a... It was standard professional shoptalk. It was a fine evening with the boys. But there was a look of infinitely remote sadness in Norbert Holt's eyes. That was the evening that Manning violated her first rule of editorauthor relationships. same bar in which Norbert had, so many years ago, successfully said unsuccessfully. "They've been good years," he remarked, apparently to the olive.  There was something wrong with this evening. No bounce. No yumph. "That's a funny tense," Manningconfided to her own olive. "Aren't they still good years?" "Eve owed you a serious talk for a .long time." "You don't have to pay the debt. We don't go in much for being serious, do we? Not so dead-earnest-, catch-in-the-throat serious." "Don't we?" "I've got an awful feeling," Manning admitted, "that you're building up to a proposal, either to me or that olive. And if it's me, I've got an awful feeling I'm going to accept -- , and Raquel will never forgive me." "You're safe," Norbert said dryly. "That's the serious talk. I want to marry you, darling, and I'm not going to." "I suppose this is the time you twirl your black mustache and tell me you have a wife and family elsewhere?" ' "I hope to God I have!" '"No, it wasn't very funny, was it?" Manning felt very little, aside from wishing she were dead. "I can't tell you the truth," he went on. "You wouldn't believe it. I've loved two women before; one had talent and a brain, the other had beauty and no brain. I think I loved her. The damnedest curse of Ourobotos is that I'll never quite know. If I coyfd take that tail out of that mouth... "Go on," she encouraged a little wildly. "Talk plot-gimmicks. It's easier on me." "And she is carrying... will carry... my child -- my children, it must be. My twins..." "Look, Holt. We came in here editor and author -- remember back when? Let's go out that way. Don't go on talking. I'm a big girl, but I can't take... everything. It's been fun knowing you and all future manuscripts will be gratefully received." "I knew I couldn't say' it. I shouldn't have tried. But there won't be any future manuscripts. I've written every Holt I've ever read." "Does that make sense?" Manning aimed the remark at the olive, but it was gone. So was the martini. "Here's the last." He took it out of his breast-pocket, neatly folded. -- the one I couldn't end. Maybe you'll understand. I wanted somehow to make it clear before..." The tone of his voice projected a sense of doom, and Manning forgot everything else. "Is something going to happen to you? Are you going to -- Oh, my dear, no! All right, so you have a wife on every space station in the asteroid belt; but if anything happens to you..." "I don't know," said Norbert Hdlt. "I can't remember the exact date of that issue..." He rose abruptly. "I shouldn't have tried a goodbye. See you again, darling -- the next time round Ouroboros." She was still staring at the empty martini glass when she heard the shrill of brakes and theexoited upspringing of a crowd outside. S HE read the posthumous fragment late that night, after her eyes had dried sufficiently to make the operation practicable. And through her sorrow her mind fought to help her, making her think, making her be an editor. She understood a little and disbelieved what she understood. And underneath she prodded herself, "But it isn't a story. It's too short, too inconclusive. It'll just disappoint the Holt fans -- and that's everybody. Much better if I do a straight obit, take up a full page on it..." She fought hard to keep on thinking, not feeling. She had never before experienced so strongly the Ihave-been-here-before sensation. She had been faced with this dilemma once before, once on some other would say. And her decision had been... "It's sentimentality," she protested. "It isn't editing. This decision's right. I know it. And if I go and get another of these attacks and start to change my mind..." She laid the posthumous Holt fragment on the coals. It caught fire quickly. T HE next morning Raquel greeted her with, "Manningcita, who's Norbert Holt?" Manning had slept so restfully that she was even tolerant of foolish questions at breakfast. "Who?" she asked. "Norbert Holt. Somehow the name popped into my mind. Is he perhaps one of your writers?" "Never heard of him." Raquel frowned. "I was almost sure... Can you really remember them all? I'm going to check those bound volumes of Surprising." "Any luck with your... what was it?... Holt?" Manning asked the girl a little later. "No, Manningcita. I was quite unsuccessful."... unsuccessful... Now why in Heaven's name, mused Manning Stern, should I be thinking of martinis at breakfast time? When Clifford D. Simak finished writing "Time Quarry," he was emotionally exhausted, a state we shared after reading it ourselves. If you aren't mentally flaccid reach the climax of this suspenseful novel with the same increased cardiac, cerebral and psychological response that we experienced. A powerful final installment. Now if it could only have been one of those continued stories that run for decades in Japanese newspapers... But then we wouldn't be able to buy the challenging Isaac Asimov novel that starts two months from now, nor would Simak have been able to write the superb stories we have scheduled for future issues. Speaking of superb stories, James H. Schmitz rings the triple gong of cardiac, cerebral and psychological response with "Second Night of Summer," a novelet that is a delightful account of a ghastly threat, which sounds contradictory and isn't at all. In actual fact, the entire issue can be likened to a busy Swiss bellringer, for the second novelet, by Raymond F. Jones, states a truism that maybe the death of us yet... unless, literally speaking, the non-science fiction world learns the truths that science fiction has long known. The short stories are a little more difficult to predict. We have so many wonderful ones coming up and type that refuses to be condensed. "Jaywalker" by Ross Rocklynne, for example, had to be moved back because of lack of space in this issue. But there will be at least three, perhaps four... plus a mind-prodding article by Willy Ley... and our first letter department. Genuine, unsolicited letters, selected as carefully for general interest as our stories; they must be good. We still have a limited number of Vol. I No. I for those who want to start their subscriptions with the first issue. But don't put it off; our supply won't last long. Coming Attraction Women will always go on trying to attract men... even when the future seems to have no future! T HE coupe with the, fishhooks welded to the fender shouldered up over the curb like the nose of a nightmare. The girl in its path stood frozen, her face probably stiff with fright under her mask. For once my reflexes weren't shy. I took a fast step toward her, grabbed her elbow, yanked her back. Her black skirt swirled out. The big coupe shot by, its turbine bumming. I glimpsed three faces. Something ripped. I felt the hot exhaust on my ankles as the big coupe swerved back into the street. A thick cloud like a black flower blossomed from its jouncing rear end, while from the fishhooks flew a black shimmering rag. "Did they get you?" I asked the girl. Illustrated by Paul Calle She had twisted around to look where the side of her skirt was torn away. She was wearing nylon tights. "The hooks didn't touch me," she said shakily. "I guess I'm lucky." I heard voices around us: "Those kids! What'll they think up next?" "They're a menace. They ought to be arrested." Sirens screamed at a rising pitch as two motor-police, their rocket-assist jets full on, came whizzing' toward us after the coupe. But the black flower, had become a thick fog obscuring the whole street. The motor-police switched from rocket assists to rocket brakes and swerved to a stop near the smoke cloud. "Are you English ?" .the girl aske me. "You have an English accent." Her voice came shudderingly from behind the sleek black satin mask. I fancied her teeth must be chattering. Eyes that were perhaps blue searched my face from behind the black gauze covering the eyeholes of the mask. I told her she'd guessed right. She stood close to me. "Will you come to my place tonight?" she asked rapidly. "I can't thank you now. And. there's something you can help me about." My arm, still lightly circling her waist, felt her body trembling. I was answering the plea in that as much as in her voice when I said, "Certainly." She . gave me an address south of Inferno, an apartment number and a time. She asked me my name and I told her. # I "Hey, you!" I turned obediently to the policeman's shout. He shooed away the small clucking crowd of masked women and barefaced men. Coughing from the smoke that the black coupe had thrown out, he asked for my papers.' I handed him the essential ones. at me. "British Barter? How long will you be in New. York?" Suppressing the urge to say, "For as short a time as possible," I told him I'd be here for a week or so. "May need you as a witness," he explained. "Those kids can't use smoke on us. When they do that, we pull them in." He seemed to think the smoke was the bad thing. "They tried to kill the lady," I pointed out. He shook his head wisely. "They always pretend they're going to, but actually they just want to snag skirts. I've picked up rippers with as many as fifty skirt-snags tacked up in their rooms. Of course, sometimes they come a little too close." I explained that if I hadn't yanked her out of the way, she'd have been hit by more than hooks. But he interrupted, "If she'd thought it was a real murder attempt, she'd have stayed here." I looked around. It was true. She was gone. "She was fearfully frightened," I told him. "Who wouldn't be? Those kids would have scared old Stalin himself." "I mean frightened of more than 'kids.' They didn't look like 'kids.' " "What did they look like?" I tried without much success to describe the three faces. A vague impression of viciousness and effeminacy doesn't mean much. "Well, I could be w.rong," he said finally. "Do you know the girl? Where she lives?" "No," I half lied. The other policeman hung up his radiophone and ambled toward us, kicking at the tendrils of dissipating smoke. The black cloud no longer hid the dingy facades with their five-year-old radiation flashburns, and I could begin to make out the distant stump of the Empire State Building, thrusting up out of Inferno like a mangled finger. "They haven't been picked up so far," the approaching policeman grumbled. x "Left smoke for five blocks, from what Ryan says." The first policeman shook his head. "That's bad," he observed solemnly. I was feeling a bit uneasy and ashamed. An Englishman shouldn't lie, at least not on impulse. "They sound like nasty customers," the first policeman continued in the same grim tone. "We'll need witnesses. Looks as if you may have to stay in New York longer than you expect." I got the point. I said, "I forgot to show you all my papers," and handed him a few others, making sure there was a five dollar bill in among them. bit later," his voice was no longer ominous. My feelings of guilt vanished. To cement our relationship, I chatted with the two of them about their job. "I suppose the masks give you some trouble," I observed. "Over in England we've been reading about your new crop of masked female bandits." "Those things get exaggerated," the first policeman assured me. "It's the men masking as women that really mix us up. But, brother, when we nab them, we jump on them with both feet." "And you get so you can spot women almost as well as if they had naked faces," the second policeman volunteered. "You know, hands and all that." "Especially all that," the first agreed with a chuckle. "Say, is it true that some girls don't mask over in England?" "A number of them have picked up the fashion," I told him. "Only a few, though -- the ones who always adopt the latest style, however extreme." "They're usually masked in the British newscasts." "I imagine it's arranged that way out of deference to American taste," I confessed. "Actually, not very many do mask." The second policeman considered that. "Girls going down the street bare from the neck up." It was not clear whether he viewed the prospect with relish or moral distaste. Likely both. "A few members keep trying to persuade Parliament to enact a law forbidding all masking," I continued, talking perhaps a bit too much. The second policeman shook his head. "What an idea. You know, masks are a pretty good thing, brother. Couple of years more and I'm going to make my wife wear hers around the house." The first policeman shrugged. "If women were to stop wearing masks, in six weeks you wouldn't know the difference. You get used to anything,, if enough people do or don't do it." I agreed, rather regretfully, and left them. I turned north on Broadway (old Tenth Avenue, I believe) and walked rapidly until I was beyond Inferno. Passing such an area of undecontaminated radioactivity always makes a person queasy. I thanked God there weren't any such in England, as yet. The street was almost empty, though I was accosted by a couple of beggars with faces tunneled by H-bomb scars, whether real or of makeup putty, I couldn't tell. A fat woman held out a baby with webbed fingers and toes. I told myself it would have been deformed anyway and that she was only capitalizing on our fear of bomb-induced mutations. Still, I gave her a seven-anda-half-cent piece. Her mask made me feel I was paying tribute to an African fetish. "May all your children be blessed with one head and two eyes, sir." "Thanks," I said, shuddering, and hurried past her... There's only trash behind the mask, so turn your head, stick to your task: Stay away, stay away -- from -- the -- girls!" sex song being sung by some religionists half a block from the circle-and-cross insignia of a femalist temple. They reminded me only faintly of our small tribe of British monastics. Above their heads was a jumble of billboards advertising predigested foods, wrestling instruction, radio handies and the like. I stared at the hysterical slogans with disagreeable fascination. Since the female face and form have been banned on American signs, the very letters of the advertiser's alphabet have begun to crawl with sex -- the fat-bellied, big-breasted capital B, the lascivious double O. However, I reminded myself, it is chiefly the mask' that so strangely accents sex in Artierica. A British anthropologist has pointed out, that, while it took more than # years to shift the chief point of sexual interest from the hips to the breasts, the next transition to the face has taken less than # years. Comparing the American style with Moslem tradition is not valid; Moslem women are compelled to wear veils, the purpose of which is concealment, while American women have only the compulsion of fashion and use masks to create mystery. Theory aside, the actual origins of the trend are to be found in the antiwhich, led to masked wrestling, now a fantastically popular sport, and that in turn led to the current female fashion. Only a wild style at first, masks quickly became as necessary as brassieres and lipsticks had been earlier in the century. I finally realized that I was not speculating about masks in general, but about what lay behind one in particular. That's the devil of the things; you're never sure whether a girl is heightening loveliness or hiding ugliness. I pictured a cool, pretty face in which fear showed only in widened eyes. Then I remembered her blonde hair, rich against the blackness of the satin mask. She'd told me to come at the twenty-second hour -- ten p.m. I climbed to my apartment near the British Consulate; the elevator shaft had been shoved out of plumb by an old blast, a nuisance in these tall New York buildings. Before it occurred to me that I would be going out again, I automatically tore a tab from the film strip under my shirt. I developed it just to be sure. It showed thatthe total radiation I'd taken that day was still within the safety limit. I'm not phobic about it. as so many people are these days, but there's no point in taking chances. I flopped down on the day bed and stared at the silent speaker and the dark screen of the video set. As always, they made me think, somewhat bitterly, of the two great nations of the world. Mutilated by each other, yet still strong, they were crippled giants poisoning the planet with their dreams of an impossible equality and an impossible success. I fretfully switched on the speaker. 'By luck, the newscaster was talking excitedly of the prospects of a bumper wheat crop, sown by planes across a dust bowl moistened by seeded rains. I listened carefully to the rest of the program (it was remarkably clear of Russian telejamming) but there was no further news of interest to me. And, of course, no mention of the Moon, though everyone knows that America and Russia are racing to develop their primary bases into fortresses capable of mutual assault and the launching of alphabet-bombs toward Earth. I myself knew perfectly well that the British electronic equipment I was helping trade for American wheat was destined for use in spaceships. was growing dark and once again I pictured a tender, frightened face behind a mask. I hadn't had a date since England. It's exceedingly difficult to become acquainted with a girl inAmerica, where as little as a smile, often, can set one of them yelping for the police -- to say nothing of the increasing puritanical morality and the roving gangs that keep most women indoors after dark. And naturally, the masks which are definitely not, as the Soviets claim, a last invention of capitalist degeneracy, but a sign of great psychological insecurity. The Russians have no masks, but they have their own signs of stress. I wen to the window and impatiently watched the darkness gather. I was getting very restless. After a while a ghostly violet cloud appeared to the south. My hair rose. Then I laughed...! had momentarily fancied it a radiation from the crater of the Hell-bomb, though I should instantly have known it was only the radioinduced glow in the sky over the amusement and residential area south of Inferno. Promptly at twenty-two hours I stood before the door of my unknown girl friend's apartment. The electronic say-who-please said just that. I answered clearly, "Wysten Turner," wondering if she'd given my name to the mechanism. She evidently had, for the door opened.' I walked into a small empty living room, my heart pounding a bit. The room was expensively furnished with the latest pneumatic hassocks and sprawlers. There were some midgie books on the table. The one I picked up was the standard hard-boiled detective story in which two female murderers go gunning for each other. The television was on. A masked girl in green was crooning a love song. Her right hand held something that blurred off into the foreground. I saw the set had a handie, which we haven't in England as yet, and curiously thrust my hand into the handie orifice beside the screen. Contrary to my expectations, it was not like slipping into a pulsing rubber glove, but rather as if the girl on the screen actually held my hand. A door opened behind me. I jerked out my hand with as guilty a reaction as if I'd been caught peer-, ing through a keyhole. She stood in the bedroom doorway. I think she was trembling. She was wearing a gray fur coat, whitespeckled, and a gray velvet evening mask with shirred gray lace around the eyes and mouth. Her fingernails twinkled like silver. It hadn't occurred tome that she'd expect us to go out. "I should have told you," she said softly. Her mask veered nervously toward the books and the screen and the room's dark corners. "But I can't possibly talk to you here." I said doubtfully, "There's a place near the Consulate..." "I know where we can be together and talk," she said rapidly. "If you don't mind." y As we entered the elevator I said, "I'm afraid I dismissed the cab." B UT the cab driver hadn't gone for some reason of his own. He jumped outand smirlcingly held the front door open for us. I told him we preferred to sit in back. He sulkily opened the rear door, slammed it after us, jumped in front and slammed the door behind him. My companion leaned forward. "Heaven," she said. The driver switched on the turbine and televisor. "Why did you ask if I were a British subject?" I said, to start the conversation. She leaned away from me, tilting her mask close to the window. "See the Moon," she said in a quick, dreamy voice. "But why, really?" I pressed, conscious of an irritation that had nothing to do with her. "It's edging up into the purple of the sky." "And what's your name?" "The purple makes it look yellower." source of my irritation. It lay in the square of writhing light in the front of the cab beside the driver. I don't object to ordinary wrestling matches, though they bore me, but I simply detest watching a man wrestle a woman. The fact that the bouts are generally "on the level," with the man greatly outclassed in weight and reach and the masked females young and personable, only makes them seem worse to me. "Please turn off the screen," I requested the driver. He shook his head without looking around. "Uh-uh, man," he said. "They've been grooming that babe for weeks for this bout with little Zirk." Infuriated, I reached forward, but my companion caught my arm. "Please," she whispered frightenedly, shaking her head. I settled back, frustrated. She was closer to me now, but silent and for a few moments I watched the heaves and contortions of the powerful masked girl and her wiry masked opponent on the screen. His frantic scrambling at her reminded me of a male spider. I jerked around, facing my companion. "Why did those three men want to kill you?" I asked sharply. The eyeholes of her mask faced the screen. "Because they're jealous of me," she whispered. "Why are they jealous?" She still didn't look at me. "Because of him." "Who?" She didn't answer. I put my arm around her shoulders. "Are you afraid to tell me?" I asked. "What is the matter?" She still didn't look my way. She smelled nice. "See here," I said laughingly, changing my tactics, "you really should tell me something about yourself. I don't even know what you look like." I half playfully lifted my hand to the band of her neck. She gave it an astonishingly swift slap. I pulled it away in sudden pain. There were four tiny indentations on the back. From one of them a tiny bead of blood welled out as I watched. I looked at her silver fingernails and saw they were actually delicate and pointed metal caps. "I'm dreadfully sorry," I heard her say, "but you frightened me. I thought for a moment you were going to..." At last she turned to me. Her coat had fallen open. Hqr evening dress was Cretan Revival, a bodice of lace beneath and supporting the breasts without covering them. "Don't be angry," she said, putting her arms around my neck. "You were wonderful this afternoon." The soft gray velvet of her mask, molding itself to her cheek, pressed mine. Through the mask's lace the wet warm tip of her tongue touched my chin. "I'm not angry," I said. "Just puzzled and anxious to help." The cab stopped. To either side were black windows bordered by spears of broken glass. The sickly purple light showed a few ragged figures slowly moving toward us. The driver muttered, "It's the turbine, man. We're grounded." He sat there hunched and motionless. "Wish it had happened somewhere else." My companion whispered, "Five dollars is the usual amount." She looked out so shudderingly at the congregating figures that I suppressed my indignation and did as she suggested. The driver took the bill without a word. As he started up, he put his hand out the window and I heard a few' coins clink on the pavement. My companion came back into my arms, but her mask faced the television screen, where the tall girl had just pinned the convulsively kicking Little Zirk. "I'm so frightened," she breathed. equally ruinous neighborhood, but it had a club with an awning and a huge doorman uniformed like a spaceman, but in gaudy colors. In my sensuous daze I rather liked it all. We stepped out of the cab just as a drunken old woman came down the sidewalk, her mask awry. A couple ahead of us turned their heads from ,the half revealed face, as if from an ugly body at the beach. As we followed them in I heard the doorman say, "Get along, grandma, and watch yourself." Inside, everything was dimness and blue glows. She had said we could talk here, but I didn't see how. Besides the inevitable chorus of sneezes and coughs (they say America is fifty per cent allergic these days), there was a band going full blast in the latest robop style, in which an electronic composing machine selects an arbitrary sequence of tones into which the musicians weave their raucous little individualities. Most of the people were in booths. The band was behind the bar. On a small platform beside them, a girl was dancing, stripped to her mask. The little duster of men at the shadowy far end of the bar weren't looking at her. We inspected the menu 'in gold script on the wall and pushed the buttons for breast of chicken, fried shrimps and two scotches. Moments later, the serving bell tinkled. I opened the gleaming panel and took out our drinks. T HE duster of men at the bar filed off toward the door, but first they stared around the room. My companion had just thrown back her coat. Their look lingered on our booth. I noticed that there were three of them. The band chased off the dancing girl with growls. I handed my companion a straw and we sipped our drinks. "You wanted me to help you ' about something," I 'said. "Incidentally, I think you're lovely." She nodded quick thanks, looked around, leaned forward. "Would it be hard for me to get to England?" "No," I replied, a bit taken aback. "Provided you have an American passport." "Are they difficult to get?" "Rather," I said, surprised at her lack of information. "Your country doesn't like its nationals to travel, though it isn't quite as stringent as Russia." "Could the British Consulate help me get' a passport?" "It's hardly their... "Could you?" I realized we were being inspected. A man and two girls had paused opposite our table. The girls were tall and wolfish-looking, with spangled masks. The man stood jauntily between them like a fox on its hind legs. My companion didn't glance at them, but she sat back. I noticed that one of the girls had a big yellow bruise on her forearm. After a moment they walked to a booth in the deep shadows. "Know them?" I asked. She didn't reply. I finished my drink. "I'm not sure you'd like England," I said. "The austerity's altogether different from your American brand of misery." She leaned forward again. "But I must get away," she whispered. "Why?" Iwas getting impatient. "Because I'm so frightened." There were chimes. I opened the panel and handed her the fried shrimps. The sauce on my breast of chicken was a delicioussteaming compound of almonds, soy and ginger. But something must have been wrong with the radionic oven that had thawed and heated it, for at the first bite I crunched a kernel of ice in the meat. These delicate mechanisms need constant repair and there aren't enough mechanics. I put down my fork. "What are you really scared of?" I asked her. For once her mask didn't waver away from my face. As I waited I could feel the fears gathering without her naming them, tiny dark shapes swarming through the curved night outside, converging on the radioactive pest spot of New York, dipping into the margins of the purple. I felt a sudden rush of sympathy, a desire to protect the girl opposite me. The warm feeling added itself to the infatuation engendered in the cab. "Everything," she said finally. I nodded and touched her hand. "I'm afraid of the Moon," she began, her voice going dreamy and brittle as it had in the cab. "You can't look at it and not think of guided bombs." "It's the same Moon over England," I reminded her.' "But it's not England's Moon any more. I?s ours and Russia's. You're not responsible." I pressed her hand. "Oh, and then," she said with a tilt of her mask, "I'm afraid of the cars and the gangs and the loneliness and Inferno. I'm afraid of the lust that undresses your face. And -- " her voice ' hushed -- jTm afraid of the wrestlers." "Yes?" I prompted softly after a moment. H ER mask came forward. "Do you know something about the wrestlers?" she asked rapidly. "The ones that wrestle women, I mean. They often lose, you know. And then they have to have a girl to take their frustration out on. A girl who's soft and weak and terribly frightened. They need that, to keep them men. Other men don't want them to have a girl. Other men want them just to fight women and be heroes. But they must have a girl. It's horrible for her." I squeezed her fingers tighter, as if courage could be transmitted -- granting I had any. "I think I can get you to England," I said. Shadows crawled onto the table and stayed there. I looked up at the three men who had been at the end of the bar. They were the men I had seen in the big coupe. They wore black sweaters and close-fitting black trousers. Their faces were as expressionless as dopers. Two of them stood above me. The other loomed over the girl. "Drift off, man," I was told. I heard the other inform the girl: "We'll wrestle a fall, sister. What shall it be?. Judo, slapsie or killwho-can?" I stood up. There are times when an Englishman simply must be maltreated. But just then the 'foxlike man came gliding in like the star of a ballet. The reaction of the other three startled me. They were acutely embarrassed. He smiled at them thinly. "You won't win my favor by tricks like this," he said. "Don't get the wrong idea, Zirk," one of them pleaded.  "I will if it's right," he said. "She told me what you tried to do this afternoon. That won't endear you to me, either. Drift." They backed off awkwardly. "Let's get out of here," one of them said loudly, as they turned. "I know a place where they fight naked with knives." and slipped into the seat beside my companion. She shrank from him, just a little. I pushed my feet back, leaned forward. "Who's your friend, baby?"', he asked, not looking at her. She passed the question to me with a little gesture. I told him. "British," he observed. "She's been asking you about getting out of the country? .About passports?" He smiled pleasantly. "She likes to start running away. Don't you, baby?" His small hand began to stroke her wrist, the fingers bent a little, the tendons ridged, as if he were about to grab and twist. "Look here," I said sharply. "I haye to be grateful to you for ordering off those bullies, but -- " "Think nothing of it," he told me. "They're no harm except when they're behind steering wheels. A well-trained fourteen-year-old girl could cripple any one of them. Why, even Theda here, if she went in for that sort of thing..." He turned to her, shifting his hand from her wrist to her hair. He stroked it, letting the strands slip slowly through his fingers. "You know I lost tonight, baby, don't you?" he said softly. I stood up. "Come along," I said to her. "Let's leave." S HE just sat there. I couldn't even tell if she was trembling. I tried to read a message in her eyes through the mask. "I'll take you away," I said to her. "I can do it. I really will." He smiled at me. "She'd like to go with you," he said. "Wouldn't you, baby?" "Will you or won't you?" I said to her. She still just sat there. He slowly knotted his fingers in her hair. "Listen, you little vermin," I snapped at him, "Take your hands off her." He came up from the seat like a snake. I'm no fighter. I just know that the more scared I am, the harder and straighten I hit. This time I was lucky. But as he crumpled back, I felt a slap and four stabs of pain in my cheek. I clapped my hand to it. I could feel the four gashes made by her dagger finger caps, and the warm blood oozing out from them. She didn't look at me. She was bending over little Zirk and cuddling her mask to his cheek and Crooning: "There, there, don't feel bad, you'll be able to hurt me afterward." There were sounds around us, but they didn't come close. I leaned forward and ripped the mask from her face. I really don't know why I should have expected her face to be anything else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren't any cosmetics. I suppose there's no point in wearing any under a mask. The eyebrows were untidy and the lips chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it -- Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs? I looked down at her, she up at me. "Yes, you're so frightened, aren't you?" I said sarcastically. "You dread this little nightly drama, don't you? You're scared to death."  And I walked right out into the purple night, still holding my hand to my bleeding cheek. No one stopped me, not even the girl wrestlers. I wished I could tear a tab from under my shirt, and test it then and there, and find I'd taken too much radiation, and so be able to ask to cross the Hudson and go down New Jersey, past the lingering radiance of the Narrows Bomb, and so on to Sandy 'Hook to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over the seas to England... by Clifford D. Simak . by James H. Schmitz by Raymond F. Jones... by Ross Rocklynne by Sam Merwin by Betsy Curtis  Short stories subject to space requirements. but at least three will be included. ment has a mission, it is to propagandize for adult science fiction of the sort that is carried in the other pages of this magazine. Consequently, he may tend to bear down harder than he should on some of the current output, since he is interested in seeing science fiction become an accepted and respected branch of literature. This it cannot be until book: publishers, and magazine editors as well, begin to put more emphasis on the mature competence of the material they buy. Of the five books before us, only one actually measures up to the fairly moderate standards mentioned. That is Theodore Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels (Greenberg, # pages, #). In essence, I suppose, this book should be classed as a science fantasy rather than science fiction. It is somewhat similar in basic nature to Eric Frank Russell's famous Sinister Barrier, though practically the opposite in intent and completely unlike in plot. While Russell's infamous infra-red beings interfered at all times with humanity, and were responsible for its wars, crimes, diseases and other ills, the strange extra-solar entities that Sturgeon envisages living on earth, in the deceptive form of small, carefully hidden, jewel-like stones, seem to have no interest whatsoever in the affairs of man. Their only interference arises from their curious matings, which seem to result, not in other jewels, but in replicas of things earthly, whether trees, dogs, snakes -- or men. These replicas, which ordinarily cannot be found because no one knows what to look for, often are defective, especially when conceived parthenogenetically (the jewels' sex life seems to operate both ways). When the defectives are animal, they are likely to end up in circus side shows and carnival booths. The Dreaming Jewels is the story of an orphan boy who runs away from his brutal foster parents and is taken in by a troupe of sideshow people who are passing through towh in their carnival truck. The manager of this particular aggregainsane doctor who has discovered the existence of the dreaming jewels and who, in his bitter hatred of mankind, is attempting to gain control over these mysterious visitants from outer space. The book is full of human warmth and also of nearly sub-human evil. The side show the boy lives with -- Havana, Bunny, Solum the Alligator-Skinned Man, and parlittle midget beauty, Zena -- are real and believable human beings. On the other hand. Sturgeon's villains, particularly the foster father, are much too villainous for full-blown characters. It is true that the doctor himself is a real and frightening person, yet even he is slightly overdone. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise rich book. Even more important, The Dreaming Jewels is excellently written, with a feeling for words for which Sturgeon has long been admired by his readers. This is one book, incidentally, which has been thoroughly and painstakingly worked over since its original appearance in Fantastic Adventures late last year. In its present form, it is a moving and ing, and a fine "first" for a regular publisher who is newly entering the science fiction field. One can only hope that Greenberg, Inc., can maintain something of the same level in future output. The newest entry of Doubleday and Company, publishers of such excellent science fiction as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Merrill's The Shadow on the Hearth, and Clement's Needle, is Nelson Bond's Lancelot ' Biggs, Spaceman, (# pages, #). Written originally for the lower levels of the pulp audience, this unedited and hastily put together collection of pseudohumorous short stories with the same characters throughout is far inferior in quality to the previous titles on Doubleday's list. Biggs is that staple character of pulp fiction, the fumbling dope who crashes through as the Big Brain, the genius-in-spite-of-himself, who. rescues the pretty maiden and pays off the mortgage at the last moment. In this instance, he is a haywire "scientist," young, gawky, brash, awkward and goofy, who is constantly rescuing the spaceship on which he, is an unwanted and rejected member of the crew from various foul and shuddery fates with his fantastic baling-wire-and-intuition gadgets. In the end he marries the boss's daughter and sacrifices himself to salve the boss's own egotism. L. Sprague de Camp's and P. Schuyler Miller's collaborative Genus Homo (Fantasy Press, #' pages, #), does not suffer from the particular ailment -- juvenilitis -- that so. disfigures Lancelot Biggs. It is fairly mature both in concept and in writing. A Jaus full of a most miscellaneous group of people is buried in a landslide somewhere in western Pennsylvania, and there it remains animation, until something, wakes the people up to a new world in which there are no human beings left. It is a world in which the apes have developed civilizations of their own, and where most other small animals once familiar on earth have become much larger in size, many of them being mankillers. ' Much of the story is devoted to the attempts of the oddly assorted busload to save their lives from the huge beaveroids, rabbitoids, and the like, and to accommodate themselves later to the peaceful, highly intelligent, but very different non-metallurgical civilization of the gorillas that are the dominant race on the American continent. In the end, the humans arrive at a modus vivendi with the gorillas, after helping to defeat an invasion of European or African baboons, and one is led to assume that eventually they will climb back to their original supremThe only trouble with Genus Homo is that it was not given the necessary additional attention it needed when it was translated from magazine to book form. In this instance it is not continuity, character or style that suffers, but simply the fact that, for a book, it is sketchy and incomplete. N evertheless, Genus Homo is a story with real merit, and it deserves wide reading. The practically ubiquitous Mr. de Camp appears as collaborator on another novel, one of two recently published by Gnome Press. This is The Castle of Iron (# pages, #), one of four fantasy collaborations of de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Like the three earlier Pratt-de Camp books, The Castle of Iron deals much more with magic mumbo-jumbo than it does with the extrapolations of modern science, and for that reason does not rate full coverage in this strictly science fiction column. The authors assume that the spells and potions of ancient and medieval magicians can do what they claim, and fairytale adventures result from this no-, tion. The other new Gnome item is the Moon (# pages, #), reprinted from one of the Munsey magazines circa #. This is another "throwahead" tale, similar in some respects to Genus Homo, but inferior both in writing and in concept. In imitation Thorne Smith ' style, it tells about a chap named Mark Nevin, who is transported into a far future in which, of course, all traces of our current civilization seem to have vanished, and he has to make his way alone in a strange land. However, he is conveniently provided, by the super-scientist who "suspended his animation," with a large supply of scientific, technical and cultural materials to help him along. He has it pretty easy... There are many remnants of the human race in this particular world, including a luscious blonde named Nona Barr, and one excessively odd and incredible character, a bodyless Jinn whose home .habitation is the moon, and who can make himself visible on earth only by building imitations of other earth creatures for himself to inhabit. This Jinn, with unaccountable contrariness, sometimes helps and sometimes hinders Mark and Nona in their efforts to escape bands of black-bearded cannibals, the tight little bureaucratic society where Nona herself had been raised, innumerable strange animals and dangerous tribes, and finally two mad Muscovite Russian Brains (how they will drag our own ephemeral politics into any future they write about!) who are trying to take over what is left of mankind by means of war, rapine and superhuman powers. All very well to pass a mindless hour, but don't expect more. also, of Grosset and Dunlap's new dollar reprint series of science fiction classics, the first four volumes of which should be in your local bookstores as 'this issue becomes available. Included among the four  are the first two Simon  Schuster science fiction novels, A. E. van Vogt's The World of A and Jack former with a bright, brash new four-color cover. In addition, the editor of the series (who turns out to be none other than the conductor of this department) has included a wonderful old S. Fowler Wright item called The Island of Captain Sparrow, certainly one of the most charming desert-island science fantasies ever written. The lastbook is Henry Kuttner's Fury, reprinted directly from Astounding Science Fiction, where it appeared under the' pseudonym Laurence O'Donnell. Wonderful gifts should be accepted gratefully. But always the memory of Indian givers and Greek gift-bearers creates doubt! Illustrated by David Stone T HE Kanamit were not very I don't know what we expected pretty, it's true. They looked interstellar visitors to look like -- something like pigs and those who thought about it at all, something like people, and that is not that is. Angels, perhaps, or somean attractive combination. Seeing thing too alien' to be really awful, them for the first time shocked you; Maybe that's why we were all so that was their handicap. When a horrified and repelled "when they thing with the countenance of a landed in their great ships and we fiend comes from the stars and offers saw what they really were like, a gift, you are disinclined to accept. The Kanamit were short and very hairy -- thick, bristly brown-gray hair all over their abominably plump bodies. Their noses were snoutlike and thek eyes small, and they had thick hands of three fingers each. They wore green leather harness and green shorts, but I think the shorts were a concession to our notions of public decency. The garments werequite modishly cut, with slash pockets and half-belts in the back. The Kanamit had a sense pf humor, anyhow; their clothes proved it. There were three o'f them at this session of the U. N., and I can't tell you how queer it looked to see them there in the middle of a solemn Plenary Session -- three fat piglike creatures in green harness and shorts, sitting at the long table below the podium, surrounded by the packed arcs of delegates from every nation. They sat correctly upright, politely ' watching each speaker. Their flat ears drooped over the earphones. Later on, I believe, they learned every human language, but at this time they knew only French and English. They seemed perfectly at ease -- and that, along with their humor, was a thing that tended to make me like them. I was in the minority; I didn't think they were trying to put anything over. They said quite simply that they wanted to help us and I believed it. As a U. N. translator, of course, my opinion didn't matter, but I thought they were the best thing that ever happened to Earth. The delegate from Argentina got up and said that his government was interested by the demonstration of a new cheap power source, which the Kanamit had made at the previous session, but that the Argentine government could not commit itself as to its future policy without a much more thorough examination. saying, but I had to pay particular attention to Senor Valdes, because he tended to sputter and his diction was bad, I got through the translation all right, with only one or two momentary hesitations, and then switched to, the Polish-English line to hear how Gregori was doing with Janciewicz. Janciewicz was the cross Gregori had to bear, just as Valdes was mine. Janciewicz repeated the previous remarks with a few ideological variations, and then the Secretary-General recognized the delegate from France, who introduced Dr. Denis Leveque, the criminologist, and a great deal of complicated equipment' was wheeled in. Dr. Leveque remarked that the question in many people's minds had been aptly expressed by the delegate from the U. S. S. R. at the preceding sessio'n, when he demanded, "What is the motive of the Kanamit? What is their purpose in offering us these unprecedented gifts, while asking nothing in return?" The doctor then said, "At the request of several ' delegates and with the full consent of our guests, the Kanamit, my associates and I have made a series of tests upon the Kanamit with the equipment which you see before you. These tests will now be repeated." A murmur ran through the chamber. There was a fusillade of flashbulbs, and one of the TV cameras moved up to focus on the instrument board of the doctor's equipment. At the same time, the huge television screen behind the podium lighted up, and we saw the blank faces of two dials, each with its pointer resting at .zero, and a strip of paper tape with a stylus point resting against it. The doctor's assistants were fastening wires to the temples of one of the Kanamit, wrapping a canvas-covered rubber tube around his forearm, and taping something to the palm of his right hand. In the screen, we saw the paper tape begin to move while the stylus traced a slow zigzag pattern along it. One of the needles began to jump rhythmically; the other flipped over and stayed there, wavering slightly. "These are' the standard instruments for testing the truth of a statement," said Dr. Leveque. "Our first object, since the physiology of the Kanamit is unknown to us, was to determine whether or not they react to these tests as human beings do. We will now repeat one of the many experiments which was made in the endeavor to discover this." He pointed to the first dial. "This instrument registers the subject's heart-beat. This shows the electrical conductivity of the skin in the palm of his hand, a measure of perspiration, which increases under stress. And this -- " pointing to the tipeand-stylus device --  "shows the pattern and intensity of the electrical waves emanating from his brain. It has been shown, with human subjects, that all these readings vary markedly depending upon whether the subject is speaking the truth." of cardboard, one red and one black. The red one was a square about a meter on a side; the black was a rectangle a meter and a half long. He addressed himself to the Kanama: "Which of these is longer than the other?" "The red," said the Kanama. Both needles leaped wildly, and so did the line on the unrolling tape. "I shall repeat the question," said the doctor. "Which of these is longer than the other?" "The black," said the creature. This time the instruments continued in their normal rhythm. "How did you come to this planet?" asked the doctor. "Walked," replied the Kanama. Again the instruments responded, and there was a subdued ripple of laughter in the chamber. "Once more," said the doctor, "how did you come to this planet?" "In a spaceship," said the Kanama, and the instruments did not jump. The doctor again faced the delegates. "Many such experiments were made," he said, "and my colleagues and myself are satisfied that the mechanisms are effective. Now," he turned to the Kanama, "I shall ask our distinguished guest to reply to the question put at the last session by the delegate of the U. S. S. R., namely, what is the motive of the Kanamit people in offering these great gifts to the people of Earth?" The Kanama rose. Speaking this time in English, he said, "On my planet there is a saying, 'There are more riddles in a stone than in a philosopher's head.' The motives of intelligent beings, though they may at times appear obscure, are simple things compared to the complex workings of the natural universe. Therefore I hope that the people of Earth will understand, and believe, when I tell you that our mission upon your planet is simply this -- to bring to you the peace and plenty which we ourselves enjoy, and which we have in the past brought to other races throughout the galaxy. When your world has no more hunger, no more war, no more needless suffering, that will be our reward." And the needles had not jumped once. The delegate from the Ukraine jumped to his feet, asking to be recognized, but the time was up and the Secretary-General closed the session. the U: N. chamber. His face was red with excitement. "Who promoted that circus?" he demanded. "The tests looked genuine to me," I told h'im. "A circus!" he said vehemently. "A second-rate farce ! If . they were genuine, Peter, why was debate stifled?" "There'll be time for debate tomorrow surely." "Tomorrow the doctor and his instruments will be back in Paris. Plenty of things can happen before tomorrow. In the name of sanity, man, how can anybody trust a thing that looks as if it ate the baby?" il was a little annoyed. I said, "Are you sure you're not more worried about their politics than their appearance?" He said, "Bah," and went away. The next day reports began to come in from government laboratories all over the world where the Kanamit's power source was. being tested. They were wildly enthusiastic. I don't understand such things myself, but it seemed that those little metal boxes would give more electrical power than an atomic pile, for next to nothing and nearly forever. And it was said that they were so cheap' to manufacture that everybody in the W'orld could have one of his own. In the early afternoon there were reports that seventeen countries had already begun to set up factories to turn them out. The next day the Kanamit turned up with plans and specimens of a gadget that would increase the fertility of any arable land by sixty to one hundred per cent. It speeded the formation of nitrates in the soil, or something. There was nothing in the headlines but the Kanamit any more. The day after that, they dropped their bombshell. ' "You now have potentially unlimited power and increased food supply," said one of them. He pointed with his three-fingered hand to an instrument that stood on the table before him. It was a box on a tripod, with a parabolic reflector on the front of it. "We offer you today a third gift which is at least as important as the first two." He beckoned to the TV men to roll their cameras into closeup position. Then he picked up a large sheet of cardboard covered with drawings and English lettering. We saw it on the large screen above the podium; it was all clearly legible. "We are informed that this broadcast is being relayed throughout your world," said the Kanama. "I wish that everyone who has .equipment for taking photographs from television screens would use it now." The Secretary-General leaned forward and asked a question sharply, but the Kanama ignored him, "This device," he said, "projects a field in which no explosive, of whatever nature, can detonate." There was an uncomprehending silence. The Kanama said, "It cannot now be suppressed. If one nation has it, all must have it." When nobody seemed to understand, he explained bluntly, "There will be no mere war." millennium, and it was perfectly trjib. It turned out that the explosions the Kanama was talking about included gasoline and Diesel explosions. They had simply made it impossible for anybody to mount cr equip a modern army. We could have gone back to bows and arrows, of course, but that wouldn't have satisfied the military. Not after having atomic bombs and all the rest. Besides, there wouldn't be any reason to make war. Every nation would soon have everything. Nobody ever gave another thought to those lie-detector experiments, or asked the Kanamit what their politics were. Gregori was put out; he had nothing to prove his suspicions. I quit my job with the U. N. a few months later, because I foresaw that it was going to die under me anyhow. U. N. business was booming at the time, but after a year or so there was going to be nothing for it to do. Every nation on Earth was well on the way to being completely self-supporting; they weren't going to need much arbitration. I accepted a position as translator with the Kanamit Embassy, and it was there that I ran into Gregori again. I was glad to see him, but I couldn't imagine what he was doing there. "I thought you were on the opposition," I said. "Don't tell me you're convinced the Kanamit are all right." He looked rather shamefaced. "They're not what they look, anyhow," he said. It was as much of a concession as he could decently make, and I invited him down to the embassy lounge for a drink. It was an intimate kind of place, and he grew confidential over the second daiquiri. "They fascinate me," he said. "I hate them instinctively on sight still -- that hasn't changed, but I can evaluate it. You were right, obviously; they mean us nothing but good. But do you know -- " he leaned across the table -- "the question of the Soviet delegate was never answered." I am afraid I snorted. "No, really," he said. "They told us what they wanted to do -- 'to bring to you the peace and plenty which we ourselves enjoy.' But thev didn't say why." "Why do missionaries -- " "Hogwash!" he said angrily. "Missionaries have a religious motive. If these creatures do own a religion, they haven't once mentioned it. What's more, they didn't send a missionary group, they sent a diplomatic delegation -- a group representing the will and policy of their whole people. Now just what have the Kanamit, as a people or a nation, got to gain from our welfare?" I said, "Cultural -- " "Cultural cabbage-soup! No, it's something less obvious than that, something obscure that belongs to their psychology and not to ours. But trust me, Peter, there is no such thing as a completely disinterested altruism. In one way or another, they have something to gain." "And that's why you're here," I said, "to try to find out what it is?" "Correct. I wanted to get on one of the ten-year exchange groups to their home planet, but I couldn't; the quota was filled a week after they made the announcement. This is the next best thing. I'm studying their language, and you know that language reflects the basic assumptions of the people who use it. I've got a fair command of the spoken lingo already. It's not hard, really, and there are hints in it. I'm sure I'll get the answer eventually." "More power," I said, and we went back to work. I satv Gregori frequently from then on, and he kept me posted about his progress. He was highly excited about a month after that first meeting; said he'd got hold of a book of the Kanamit' s and was trying to puzzle it out. They wrote in ideographs, worse than Chinese, but he was determined to fathom it if it took him years. He wanted my help. of myself, for I knew it would be a long job. We spent some evenings together, working with material from Kanamit bulletin-boards and so forth, and the extremely limited English-Kanamit dictionary they issued the staff. My conscience bothered me about the stolen book, but gradually I became absorbed by the problem. Languages are my field, after all. I couldn't help being fascinated. We got the title worked out in a few weeks. It was "How to Serve Man," evidently a handbook they were giving out to new Kanamit members of the embassy staff. They had new ones in, all .the time now, a shipload about once a month; they were opening all kinds of research laboratories, clinics and so on. If there was anybody on Earth besides Gregori who still distrusted those people, he must have been somewhere in the middle of Tibet. It was astonishing to see the changes that had been wrought in less than a year. There were no more standing armies, no more shortages, no unemployment. When you picked up a newspaper you didn't see you; the news was always good. It was a hard thing to get used to. The Kanamit were working on human biochemistry, and it was ' known around the embassy that they were nearly ready to announce methods of making our race taller and stronger and' healthier -- practically a race of supermen -- and they had a potential cure for heart disease and cancer.  I didn't see Gregori for a fortnight after we finished ,working out the title of the book; I was on a longoverdue vacation in Canada. When I got back, I was shocked by the change in his appearance. "What on Earth is wrong, Gregori?" I asked. "You look like the very devil." "Come down to the lounge." a stiff Scotch as if he needed it. "Come on, man, what's the matter?" I urged. "The Kanamit have put me on the passenger list for the next exchange ship," he said. "You, too, otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you." "Well," I said, "but -- " "They're not altruists." "What do you mean?" "What I told you," he said. "They're not altruists." I tried to reason with him. I pointed out they'd made Earth a paradise compared to what it was before. He only shook his head. Then I said, "Well, what about those lie-detector tests?" "A farce," he replied, without heat. "I said so at the time, you fool. They told the truth, though, as far as it went." "And the book?" I demanded, annoyed. "What about that -- 'How to Serve Man'? That wasn't put there for you to read. They mean it. How do you explain that?" "I've read the first paragraph of that book," he said. "Why do you suppose I haven't slept for a week?" I said, "Well?" and he smiled that curious, twisted smile, as if he really wanted to cry instead. "It's a cookbook," he said. tp This contest is meant to gain readers, certainly, but it is neither a stunt nor a hoax. Willy Ley, who introduces the contest, was a founding member and vice-president of the German Rocket Society fiction film; "The Girl in the Moon"; and, since coming to this country in # has devoted himself to research engineering for rocket development. His newest book, "Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel," is due at the end of #, and adds important data to the valuable literature he has already produced on this subject. When a recognized authority considers Flying Saucers a serious phenomenon, research of some kind is indicated.  #s magazine editors we are limited to exploration of opinion, and this we undertake in no spirit of hoax whatever. We feel, as Mr. Ley does, that "somebody, somewhere, may be hoarding an eocplanation that explains all. Possibly the ingenious and extremely desirable prizes offered will lure out that explanation." P And we repeat with Mr. Ley: " What is your theory?" Tell us in # words or less, basing your explanation on one of Willy Ley's three hypotheses... or do you have one of your own? #. Your theory on Flying Saucers must be contained in a letter of # words or less and must be accompanied by the coupon printed below. (Kindly print your name and address.) Flying Saucer Contest, World Editions, Inc., Box No. #, Brooklyn #, New York. # . Entries will be selected on the basis of originality, aptness to the subject, general interest, neatness and legibility. # . There will be a total of # prizes awarded in the order listed below. Each winner of the first three prizes will receive an additional prize of # if his or her answer is accompanied by a year's subscription to low.) # . Winners will be notified by mail, and all necessary arrangements will be made for the award of prizes as stipulated. #. In the case of merchandise awards, prizes are transferable. # . The decision of the judges will be final. All entries become the property of World Editions, Inc. and no entries will be returned. # . Any individual may compete with the following exceptions: Employees of World Editions. Inc., and members of their immediate families ; employees of Advertising Distributors of America, Inc. (the judges of this contest) and members of their immediate families. #. All entries must be postmarked not later than midnight, October #. #, and must be covered by adequate postage. World Editions, Inc., Box No. #, Brooklyn #, N. V. I am enclosing # (check or money order) for a year's subscription (# issues) to a special additional prize of # will be awarded to each winner. #. A three-day all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to famous Mt. Wilson Observatory, near Hollywood California. , #. A three-day all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to fascinating Marine Laboratory at Wood's Hole, Mass., including underwater descent with opportunity to view marine life in native habitat. #. A three-day all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to a government-approved atomic energy laboratory center. #. Three studio portraits of you, in color, (huge #x# photographs) using the sensational new Larjachrome process of colorprint enlargement. (Worth over #.) #. Six professional photographs of you taken by Phil Pegler, topflight New York photographer, at cyclotron center. #. A ride in a sky-writing plane, piloted by one of America's bestknown skywriters, arranged by the Skywriting Corporation of America. ' #. An undersea trip on a late type U. S. submarine. # . A ride in a helicopter plane arranged by the Gyrodyne Company of America. #. A flight over New York City's skyscrapers in the famous Flamingo Orange Juice Dirigible. (For two ninth prize winners.) #. Two No. # Larjachrome kits for magnificent color prints enlarged from #x# Kodachrome cut film transparencies -- a sensational new pi-ocess. (One each to two tenth prize winners.) #. A three-day course in beauty and make-up at New York's glamorous Barbizon School of Fashion Modeling. #. Specially arranged tour through Television studios, including stand-by visit in control room during telecast, and guest appearance in show. # to #. Six No. # Larjachrome kits (same ' as those mentioned above) for #mm. and Bantam Kodachrome transparencies. (One to each winner.) # to #. A twelve-months' subscription (one for each of # winCertain prizes may be subject to change in accordance with security policy. Part # of a # part serial . It was an attractive offer. All Sutton hqd to do was modify an idea to live in wealth. But he had died for the truth once before! Illustrated by David Stone In the #th Century, the status quo of Earth's galactic empire must be maintained at any cost, and no human may be killed without a fearful penalty. Yet Christopher Adams, chief of the Dept, of Galactic Investigation, has learned that several men in an impossible accident, thus breaking both supreme rules. As Adams  worries , a stranger appears and states that he is Adams' successor, returned from the future to warn him. Adams know  of only one insignificant experiment in time travel and does not believe him. The stranger says that Asher Sutton, an agent of Adams', is about to return from #I Cygni after # years... and must be killed when he lands. Sutton does return, the only man ever to penetrate a strange force shield around Cygni' s planetary  system. His return is as weird 'as his visit to the unapproachable star... the ports of his ship are smashed, there is no air aboard, nor food and water. And, odder yet, he is not breathing. He forces his lungs and heart to function, then whispers, "ohnny," and there is a comforting stir in his mind. "We are home," Sutton says. "We made it. This is my home, Johnny." But Sutton, back at his old hotel, finds that his suite has been kept waiting for him for # years, and as he enters it, he is knocked out and his mind pried into, the contents of his attache case photostated. Adams, behind the 'attack, receives this startling report: Sutton's ship could not be flown; Sutton has a rebuilt body with alien organs added; Sutton's attache case contains a MS in a language unknown in the galaxy. Sutton, recovering, is visited by an android -- a synthetic human -- named Herkimer, who Carries a challenge to a duel with Geoffrey Benton, Earth's foremost duelist. Then an android lawyer calls to explain that Buster, an old family robot, has pled a homestead on a distant planet, and has left an old trunk for Sutton. Finally y d beautiful girl, Eva Armour, makes a dinner date with Sutton, promising that ihey will make an evening of it. Sutton is gloomily sure they will. Going with Eva to Zag House, where dreams are made to order, Sutton kills Benton, although shot at prst. Eva hurries him out and informs him that Benton was psychologically conditioned to kill Sutton. He is bewildered by all this mysterious attention, including Eva's assurance that, she is on his side and has studied him for # years. The trunk arrives from Buster, the family robot, containing a queer wrench and a letter # years old, addressed to John H. Sutton, apparently a remote ancestor. Before he can open it, the android Herkimer appears and announces that Sutton has inherited him and a hunting' asteroid and a small spaceship, under the dueling laws, from Benton. Sutton reports to Adams, his old! chief, that the Cygnians are not dangerous to Man... and that no other human will ever visit the system again. The inhabitants are not humans, not even beings, he tells Adams; they are symbiotic abstractions, forming closely joined partnerships that helpeach partner, like the bacteria and plants that support each other chemically. Adams, unsatisped, promises grimly to keep in touch with Sutton. Leaving Adams, Sutton visits Dr. Raven, his old professor in comparative religions. Dr. Raven admits to him that he has never found evidence of an actual force of destiny. Sutton states that he has. Not a new religion, not faith or a hunch, but genuine, true destiny. Adams, meanwhile, talks by mentophone -- communication at the inpnite speed of  thought -- with an clue to the mysterious slayings there is a book,found at the wreck, so destroyed that only "by Asher Sutton" can.be made out. A telecall from the man claiming to be Adams' future war in time... and Sutton is responsible for that war. He insists that Sutton be killed. Adams decides reluctantly it might be best for the status quo to liquidate Sutton. Driving home from Dr. Raven's office, Sutton rescues a man from a crashed ship. The man seems to recognize Sutton, makes a cryptic sign, and, mumbling about a battle back in '# and time-jumping, dies with a proud grin. Sutton, searching him for a clue to identity, finds a worn book: "This Is Destiny by Asher Sutton." It is the book Sutton plans to write, but has not yet written. Near his hotel, Sutton is ambushed. Johnny, the entity in his mind, warns him and be escapes. But Herkimer, the android Sutton had won from Benton in the duel, appears and says anxiously that they must flee Barth. Eva Armour is waiting with Sutton' s spaceship. Sutton harshly replies that he is not stupid enough to walk into another trap. Herkimer, apologizing, knocks him out , shut and listened, heard the muted mutter of the coasting rocket tubes, sensed the walls of a ship around him, an air-filled shell hurtling through space. "Johnny," Sutton's mind called silently. "Where are we?" There was a gentle movement within his brain, as reassuring as a cheek laid against his own, and a voiceless voice answered: "We're in a ship, Ash, somewhere beyond Mars." "How many are in the ship with us?" "The android and the girl. And they are friendly. I told you they were friendly. Why didn't you pay attention?" "I can't trust anyone." "Not even me?" "Not your judgment, Johnny. You're new here." "Not new, Ash. I know Earth and Earthmen. Much better than you know them. You're not the first Earthman I've known." "I'm sorry. I keep forgetting." "And we should be as one. We were before. Why has it been different lately?" Sutton's brain squirmed guiltily. "I don't know. Things have happened. So many things." "One mind, Ash. One mind, one body. Not two, but one. Not you, nor I. Us, singular." Eva said: "You're awake. Ash. No use playing possum."  Sutton kept his eyes firmly shut. "You understand any of this, Johnny? This Morgan business?" "No, Ash." "But you see a pattern ?"  "I'm beginning to." "Then you're doing better than I am. Let me in on it." "Not yet, Ash. You're not ready." Eva Armour shook him. "Wake up," she said, Sutton opened his eyes. He was lying on a bunk and the girl was shaking him and she was angry and not at all gentle. Herkimer stuck his head out of the door of the pilot shell. "Coming around?" he ashed. "Sure," said Sutton. "I'm all right." He swung his legs off the bunk and sat on its edge. His hand went up and felt the lump on his jaw. "I had to hit you hard," said Herkimer regretfully. "I tried to calculate it as closely as I could. Hard enough to knock you out, not hard enough to cause any real damage." "You should have pasted him," said Eva sharply, "with everything you had. I never saw a more exasperating person. He's been lying here awake for the last five minutes." Herkimer squinted at the jaw with professional pride. "I do believe I got you on the button. First try, too." The ship, Sutton saw, was small. But it was clean and comfortable and there would have been room enough for four or five on a short trip. Herkimer, talking his precise, copybook speech, had said it was small, but serviceable. "I suppose," said Sutton, "you wouldn't consider telling me where you are taking me." "We don't mind at all," said Eva... "We're going to an asteroid." "The hunting asteroid," added Herkimer. "The one you won from Benton. It has a lodge and a good supply of food and it is comfortable." "It will be pleasant," Sutton said, '# do a little hunting." "You won't be doing any hunting," Herkimer replied. Sutton raised his head, glanced sharply from one to the other. "You're going to write a book," said Eva. "Surely you know about the book. The Revisionists are... "Yes," Sutton told her. "I know about the book -- " He stopped, remembering, and his hand went involuntarily to his breast pocket. The book was there, all right, and something that crinkled when he touched it. He remembered that, too. The incredibly old letter that John H. Sutton had forgotten to open six thousand years before. said Eva, "we didn't rob #-N you. We didn't even search you." "About the book," said Sutton, and then stopped again. He had been about to say he needn't bother about writing the book, for he already had a copy. But something stopped him; he wasn't certain that it was smart just then to let them know about the copy he had. "I brought along the case," said Herkimer. "The manuscript's all there. I checked through it." "And plenty of paper?" asked Sutton, mocking him. "Oh, yes. More than enough." Eva Armour leaned toward Sutton, so close that he could smell the fragrance of her copper hair. "Don't you see," she asked, "how important it . is that you write this book? Don't you understand?" Sutton shook his head. Important, he thought. Important for what? He remembered the mouth that death pried open, the teeth glittering in the moonlight, and the words of a dying man still ringing sharply in his ears. "No, I don't understand," he said. "Maybe you can tell me." She shook her head. "You write the book. That's your job." T HE asteroid was enveloped in the perpetual twilight of the farfrom-Sun and its frosty peaks speared up like sharp, silvery needles stabbing at the stars. The air was sharp and cold and thinner than on Earth and the wonder was, Sutton told himself, that any air could be ker on the place at all. Although at the cost that it had taken to make this asteroid habitable, it would seem that anything should be possible. The price of the atomic plants alone would run to the national debt of a medium-size planet, and without atomics there would be no power to run the atmosphere gen'erators and gravity machines that supplied the air and held it in place. Once, he thought, Man had been content -- had been forced to be content -- to find his solitude at a lakeshore cottage or a hunting lodge or aboard a pleasure yacht. But now, with the wealth of a galaxy to spend, Man fixed up an asteroid at a fabulous cost or bought out a solar system at a bargain price. "There's the lodge," said Herkimer, and Sutton looked in the direction of the pointing finger. High up on the jigsaw horizon, he saw the shining metal building with its one pinpoint of light. "What's the light?" asked Eva. "Is there someone here?" Herkimer shrugged indifferently. "Someone fotgot to turn it off when they left." Evergreens and birches, ghostlike in the starlight, stood in ragged clumps, like marching soldier's storming the height where the lodge was set. "The path is over here," said Herkimer. He led the way and they climbed, with Eva in the center and Sutton bringing up the rear. The path was steep and uneven and the light was none too good, for the thin atmosphere failed to break up the starlight. The stars themselves remained tiny, steely points of light that did not blaze or twinkle, but stood primly in the sky like dots upon a map. The lodge, Sutton saw, apparently sat upon a small plateau, and he knew that the plateau would be the work of Man. Nowhere else in all this jumbled landscape was it likely that one would find a level spot much bigger than a pocket handkerchief. A movement ot air, so faint and tenuous that it could be scarcely called a breeze, rustled down the slope and set the evergreens to moaning. Something scuttled from the path and skittered up the rocks. From somewhere far away came a screaming sound that set Sutton's teeth on edge. "That's an animal," Herkimer said quietly. He stopped and waved his hand at the tortured, twisted rock. "Great place to hunt," he added, "if you don't break a leg." saw for the first time the true, savage wildness of the place. A frozen whirlpool of star-speckled terrain stretched below .them... great, yawning gulfs of blackness, above which stood brooding peaks and spirelike pinnacles. Sutton shivered at the sight. "Let's get on," he said. They climbed the last hundred yards and reached the Man-made plateau, then stood and stared across the nightmare landscape, and as he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion. Here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life,nor even thought of life. Here anything that moved was an alien thing. A footstep crunched behind them and. they swung around. A man moved out of the starry darkness. His voice was pleasant and heavy as he spoke to them: "Good evening. We heard you land and I walked out to meet you." v Eva's voice was cold and just a little angry. "We had not expected anyone to be here." The man's tone stiffened. "I hope we are not trespassing. We are friends of Mr. Benton and he told us to use the place at our convenience." "Mr. Benton is dead," said Eva frostilyt "This man is the new owner." The man's head turned toward Sutton. "I'm sorry, sir. We did not 'know. Of course, we'll leave the first moment that we can." "I see no reason," Sutton told him, "why you should not stay." "Mr. Sutton," said Eva, "came .here for peace and quiet. He expects to write a book." "A book," the man repeated. "An author, eh?" Sutton had the uncomfortable feeling that the man was laughing, not at him alone, but at the three of them. "Sutton?" asked the man, apparently thinking hard. "I don't seem to recall the name. But, then. I'm not a great reader." "I've never written anything befote," explained Sutton. "Oh, well," said the man, laughing as if he were relieved, "that explains it." "It's cold out here," Herkimer said abruptly. "Let us get...indoors." "Certainly," said the man. "Yes, it is cold, although I hadn't noticed it. By the way, my name is Pringle. My partner's name is Gase." No one answered him and after a few seconds he turned around and trotted ahead of them, leading the way. The lodge, Sutton saw as they approached it, was larger than it had seemed from the valley where they had brought the ship in. It loomed huge against the starlit backdrop. If one had not known that it was there, it might have been mistaken for an odd rock formation. The door opened as their feet sounded on the massive stone steps which led up to it. Another man stood there, stiff and erect and tall, thin, but with whipcord strength about him, as the light from inside the room outlined his figure harshly. "The new owner, Case," said Pringle, and it seemed to Sutton that he emphasized the words just a bit too much. As if he meant his tone to be a warning. "Benton died, you know," said Pringle, and Case answered: "Oh, did he? How peculiar." Which, Sutton thought, was a funny thing to say. Case stood to one side to let them enter, then pulled shut the door. The room was immense, with only one lamp burning, and shadows pressed in upon them out of the dark corners and the cavernous arch of the raftered ceiling. "I am afraid," said Pringle, "that you'll have to look out for yourselves. Case and I are roughing it and we brought along no robots, although I can fix up something if you happen to be hungry. A hot drink, perhaps, and some sandwiches?" VV landed," Eva said, "and Herkimer will take care of what few things we have." "Then take a chair," urged Prihgle. "That one over there is comfortable. We can talk a bit." "Not right now, thanks. The trip was 'just c a little rough." "You're an ungracious young lady," Pringle said, and his' words were halfway between jest and anger. "I'm a tired young lady."  Pringle walked to a wall, flipped up toggles. Lights sprang into being. "The bedrooms are upstairs," he said. "Off the balcony. Case and I have the first and second to the left. Take your pick from any of the rest." He moved forward to lead them up the stairs. But Case spoke up and Pringle stopped and waited, one hand on the lower curve of the stair rail.  "Mr. Sutton," said Case, "it seems to me I have heard your name somewhere." "I don't think so," said Sutton. "I'm a very unimportant person." "But you killed Benton." "No one said I killed him." Case did not laugh, but his voice said that if he had not been Case, he would have. "Nevertheless, you must have killed him. I happen to know that is the only way anyone could get this asteroid. Benton loved it and this side of life he'd never give it up." "Since you insist, then I did kill Benton." Case shook his head, awed. "Remarkable," he said. "Absolutely remarkable." "Good night, Mr. Case," said Eva, and then turned to Pringle. "No need to trouble you. We will find our way." "No trouble," Pringle rumbled back. "No trouble at all." And, once again, he was laughing at them. He jogged lightly up the stairs. about Pringle and Case. The very fact that they were here, at the lodge, was sinister. There had been mockery in Pringle's voice. He had been laughing at them all the time, laughingwith a sneering amusement, enjoying some thinly varnished joke that they , did not know. Pringle was a talker, a buffoon... but Case was stiff and straight and correct, and when he spoke his words were clipped and sharp. There was something about Case... some point... some resemblance to something that escaped Sutton at the moment. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Sutton frowned. If I could just remember, he told himself. If I could put my finger on that mannerism, on the way he talks and walks and holds himself erect. If I could associate that with a certain thing I can't identify, it would explain a lot. It might tell me who Case is, or what he is, or even why he's here. Case knew that I killed Benton. Case knows who I am. And he should have kept his mouth shut, but he had to let me know he knew, because that way he bolstered up his ego and even if he doesn't look it, his ego may need boosting. Eva didn't trust them, either, for she tried to tell me something when we parted at her door. I couldn't quite make out what it was from the way she moved her lips, although it looked like she was trying to say: "Don't trust them." As if I would trust anyone... anyone at all. Sutton wiggled his toes and stared at them, fascinated. He tried to wiggle them in series and they wouldn't wiggle that way. He tried to match the wiggling of each toe on each foot and they wouldn't match. I can't even control my own body, he thought, and it was a funny thing to ,think. Pringle and Case were waiting for us,Sutton told himself, and wondered even as he said it if he might not be giving himself over to sheer imagery. For how could they be waiting when they could not have known that' Herkimer and Eva would head for the asteroid? He shook his head, but the belief that the two had been waiting for them stayed... After all, it was not so strange. Adams had known that he was coming back to Earth, returning home after twenty years. Adams knew and set a trap for him... and there was no way, absolutely no way that Adams could have known.  Why had Adams set the trap ? Why had Buster run away to homestead a planet? Why had someone conditioned Benton to kill Sutton ? Why had three men been waiting for Sutton when he came back to the Orion Arms? Why had Eva and Herkimer brought him to the asteroid? To write a book, they had said. But the book was written. The book... He reached for his coat, which hung from the back of a chair. From it, he took out the gold-lettered copy of the book and as he pulled it out, the letter came with it and fell upon the carpet. He picked the letter up and put it on the bed beside him and opened the book to the flyleaf. "By Asher. Sutton." Underneath the title, at the very bottom of the page, was a line of fine print. Sutton had to hold the book a little closer so that he could read it: Original Version And that was all. No date of publication. No marks of copyright. No publisher's imprint. Just the title and the author and the line of print that said Original Version. As if, he thought... as if the book were so well known, so firm a fixture in the lives of everyone, that anything other than the title and the author would be superfluous. they were blank, and then another page, and the text began: W e are not alone. No one ever is alone. No.t since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life, on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of sentiency, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life, alone. And that was it, he thought. That is the way I mean to write it. That was the way I wrote it. For I must have written it: Sometime, somewhere, I must have written it, for I hold it in my hands. He closed the book and put it back carefully in the pocket and hung the coat back on the chair. I must not read it, he told himself. I must not read and know the way that it will go, for then I would write the way that I had read it, and I must not do that. I must write it the way I know it is, the way I plan to write it. I must be honest, for someday the race of Man... and the races of other things as well... may know the book and read it and every word must be exactly so, and I must write so well and so simply that all can understand. " , He threw back the covers of the bed and lay down, and as he did, he saw the letter and picked it up. With a steady finger, he inserted his nail beneath the flap and ran it along the edge and the mucilage dissolved in a brittle shower of powder. He took the letter out and unfolded it carefully, so that it would not break and saw that it was typewritten, with many mistakes that were X'd out, as, if the man who wrote it had found a typewriter an unhandy thing to use. Sutton rolled over on one side and held the paper under the lamp and read the living words of a man # years dead. Bridgeport, Wis., July #, # that the postmark may prove beyond controversy the day and year that it was written. I shall not open it, but shall place it among my effects against the day when someone -- a far-distant member of my own and read. And reading, know the thing that I believe and think, but dare not say while I am still alive, lest someone call me touched. For I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man's average spanand while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time may miss a man at one reaping, and get him at the next. Hence, I hasten to introduce myself and the mystery I have come to know. My name is John H. Sutton and I. am a member of a numerous family which had its roots in the east, but one branch of which situated in this locality about one hundred years ago. I must ask, if the reader of this be' unacquainted with the Suttons, that my word be taken at face value without substantiating proof. However, I would like to state that we Suttons are a sober lot and not given to jokes, and that our reputation for integrity and honesty is singularly unquestioned.  While I was educated for the law, I soon found it not entirely to my liking and for the last forty years or more have followed the occupation of farming, finding more contentment in it than I ever found in law. For farming is an honest and a soul-warming job that gives one contact with the first essentials of living. For the past number of years I have not been physically able to continue with the more strenuous labor of the farm," but pride myself that I still do most of the chores and still hold active management, which means that I am in the habit of making regular tours of the acres to see how things are coming. Of late years, as, my' step has slowed and I have found exertion tiring, I have fallen into the habit of arbitrarily setting for myself certain places of rest during my inspection of the farm. One spot has always had, from the very first, a sense of the special for me. If I were still a child, I might best explain it by saying that it seems to be 'an enchanted place. It is a deep cleft in the bluff that runs down to the river valley and it is located at the north endof the high "pasture, There is a fair-sized boulder at the top of the cleft,. and this boulder is shaped appropriately for sitting, which may be one of the reasons why I like it, for I am a man who takes to comfort. From the boulder one may see the sweep of the river valley with a stressed third-dimensional quality, due no doubt to the height of the vantage point plus the clearness of, the air, although at times the whole scene is enveloped with a blue mist of particularly tantalizing and lucid clarity. I T IS as if the place were tingling... waiting for something to happen... as if that one particular spotheld great possibilities for drama or for revelation. There, on that one area of Earth, something could or might happen which could happen nowhere else on the entire planet. I have, at times, tried to imagine what that happening might be, and I shrink from telling some of the possibilities that I have imagined, although, in truth, in other things I am perhaps not imaginative enough. To approach the boulder, I cut across the lower end of the bluff pasture, a place which is often in better grass than the rest of the grazing area, for the cattle, for some reason, do n.ot often venture there. The pasture ends in a thin growth of trees, the forerunners of the mass of foliage which sweeps down the bluff side. Just a few rods inside the trees is the boulder, and because of the trees the boulder is always shaded, no matter what the time of the day, but the view is unobstructed because of the rapid shelving of the ground. One day about ten years ago -- : July #, #, to be exact -- I approached this place and found a man and a strange machine at the lower end of the pasture, just dear jf the trees. I say machine, because that is what it appeared to be, although, to tell the truth, I could not make too much of it. It was like an egg, pointed slightly at each end, as an egg might look if someone stepped on it and did not break it, but spread it out, so that the ends became more pronounced. It had no working parts outside and so far as I could see not even a window, yet it was apparent that the operator of it sat inside. For the man had what appeared to be a door open and was standing outside and working at what may have been the motor, although, when I ventured a look, it appeared like no motor I had ever seen before. The fact is that I never did get a good look at the motor or at anything else about the contraption. The man, as soon as he saw me, adroitly maneuvered me away from it and engaged me in such pleasant and intelligent conversation that I could not, without rudeness, change the subject long enough to pay attention to all the things that stirred my curiosity. I remember now, thinking back, that there were many things which I wanted to ask him, but which I never got around to, and it seems to me now that he must have anticipated these very questions and deliberately and skillfully steered me away from them. The plain truth is that he never did tell me who he was or where he came from or why he happened to be in my pasture. And while that may seem rude to the reader of this account, it did not seem rude at the time, for he was such a charming person. He seemed well informed on farming, although he looked like no farmer. Come to think of it, I do not remember exactly what he did look like, only that he was dressed in a way which I had never seen before. Not garishly, nor outlandishly, nor even in such a manner that one would think of him as foreign, but in clothing which had certain subtle differenfes difficult to pin down. He complimented me on the good growth of the pasture grass and asked me how .many head of cattle we ran there and how many we were milking and what was the most satisfactory manner we had found to finish off good beef, d answered him as best I could, being very interested in his line of talk, and he kept the conversation going with appropriate comment and questions, some of which I now realize were meant as subtle flattery, although at the time I did not think so. his hand and now he aved it at a field of corn across the fence and said it looked like a good stand and asked me if I thought it would be knee high by the Fourth. I told him that today was the Fourth and that it was, a mite better than knee high and that I was very pleased with it, since it was a new brand of seed that I was trying for the first time. He looked a little taken aback and laughed and said, "So. it's the Fourth," and that he had been so busy lately he had got his dates mixed. And then, before I could even wonder how a man could get his dates so mixed that he could miss the 'Fourth of July, he was off again on another tack. He asked how long I had lived here and when I told him, he asked if the family hadn't been here a long time; somewhere, he said, he had heard the name before. So I told him that we had and .before I knew it, he had me telling all about the family, including some anecdotes which we usually do not tell outside the family circle, since they are not exactly the kind of stories that we would care to have known about ourselves. For while our family is conservative and honorable in the main and better in most things than many others, there is no family which does not have a skeleton or two to hide away from view. We talked until it was long past the dinner hour and when I noticed this, I asked him if he would not take the meal with us, but he thanked me and said that in just a short while he would have the trouble fixed and would be on his way. He said that he had virtually completed whatever repair was needed when I had appeared. I apologized for delaying him, but he assured me that he did not mind at all, that it had been pleasant to spend the time with me. As I left him, I managed to get in one question. I had been intrigued by the tool which he had held in his hand during our conversation and I asked him what it was. He showed it to me and told me it was a wrench, and it did look something like a wrench, although not very much so. After 'I had eaten dinner and had a nap, I walked back to the pasture, determined to ask the stranger some of the questions which I realized, by this time, he had avoided. The machine was gone and the stranger, too, with only a print in the pasture grass to show where the machine had stood. But the wrench was there and when I bent to pick it up, I saw that one end was discolored and upon investigation I found that the discoloration was blood. I have, many times since, berated myself for not having had an analysis made to determine whether the blood was human or from some animal. Likewise, I have wondered many times just what happened there. Who the man was and how he came to leave the wrench and why the heavier end of the wrench was stained with blood. I still make the boulder one of my regular stops and the boulder still is always in the shade and the view still is unobstructed and the air over the river valley still lends to the scene its strangely deep three-dimensional effect. And the sense of tingling expectancy still hangs above the spot, so I know that the place had not been waiting for this one strange happening alone, but that other strange happenings still may occur. I do not hope nor expect that I shall see another, for the life of man is but a second in comparison with the time of planets. T HE wrench which I picked up is still with us and it has proved a very useful tool. As a matter of fact, we have dispensed with most of our other tools and use it almost alone, since it will adjust itself to almost any nut or stud or will hold a shaft of almost any size from turning. There is no need of adjustment. nor is there any adjustment device that can be found. One simply applies it' to whatever piece, of metal one wants to take a grip upon and the tool adjusts itself. No great amount of pressure or strength is needed to operate the wrench. It appears to have the . tendency to take whatever slight pressure one exerts upon it and multiply that pressure to the exact point needed. However, we are very careful to use the wrench only when there are no outside eyes to see it, for it smacks too much of magic or of witchcraft to be allowed on public view. The general knowledge that we possessed such a wrench almost certainly would lead to unwholesome speculation among our neighbors. And since we are ah honest and respectable family, such a situation is the furthest from our wish. man and the machine I found in the bluff pasture, even among ourselves. We seem tactfully to recognize that it is a subject which does not befit sober farmers. But while we do not talk about it,I do know that I, myself, think about it much. I spend more time than usual at the boulder resting place, just why, I do not know, unless it is in the feeble hope that somehow I may find a clue which either will substantiate or disprove the theory I have formed to account for the happening. For I believe, without proof of any sort, that the man was a man who came from time and that the machine was a time machine and the wrench is a tool which will not be discovered nor manufactured for more years to come than I might possibly guess. I believe that somewhere in the future, Man has discovered a method by which he moves through time and that undoubtedly he has evolved a very rigid code of ethics and practices, in order to prevent the paradoxes which would result from indiscriminate time traveling or meddling in the affairs of other times. I believe that the leaving of the wrench in my time provides. one of those paradoxes which in itself is simple, but which under certain circumstances might lead to many complications. For that reason, I have impressed upon the family the strict necessity of keeping it secret. Likewise, I have come to the conclusion -- also unsupported -- that the cleft, at the head of which the boulder is located, may be a road through time, or at least part of a road, a single point where our present time coincides very closely through the operation of some as-yet-unknown principle with another time far removed from us. It may be a place in space-time where less resistance is encountered in traveling through time than in other places, and, having been discovered, is usgd'Tjuite frequently. Or it may simply be that it is a time road more deeply rutted, .more frequently used than many other time roads, with the result that whatever medium separates one time from another time had been worn thin, or had bulged a bit, or whatever would happen under such a circumstance. That reasoning might explain the strange eerie tingling of the place, the sense of expectancy. The reader must bear in mind, of course, that I am an old, old man, that I 'have outlived the ordinary span of human life and that I continue to exist through some quirk of human destiny. While it does not seem so to myself, it may be that my mind is not as sharp or keen not as analytical as it may once have been, and that as a result I am susceptible to ideas which would be rejected by a younger person. The one bit of proof, if one may call it proof, that I have to support my theories is that the man I met could well have been a future man, might well have sprung from some civilization further advanced than ours. For it must be apparent to whoever reads this letter that in my talk with him he used me for his own purpose, that he pulled the wool over my eyes as easily as a man of my day might pull it over the eyes of a Homeric Greek or some member of Attila's tribe. He was, I am sure, a man versed in semantics and in psychology. Certainly, he always was one long jump ahead of me. I write this now only so that my theories, which I shrink from telling in my lifetime, may not be wholly lost, but may be available at some future time when a more enlightened knowledge than we have today may be able to make something out of them. And I hope that, reading them, one will not laugh, since I am dead. For if one did laugh, I am afraid that, dead as I might be, I would surely know it. -- we cannot bear to be made the butt of laughter. And in case one may believe that my mind is twisted, I herewith enclose a physician's certificate, signed just three days ago, asserting that upon examination he found me sound of body and mind. But the story I have to tell is not yet entirely done. These additional events should have been included in earlier sequence, but I found no place inwhich they logically would fit. They concern the strange incident of the stolen clothing and the comThe clothing was stolen a few days after the incident in the high pasture. Martha had done the washing early in the day,' before the heat of the summer sun, and hung it on the line. When she went to take in the clothes, she found that an old pair of overalls of mine, a shirt belonging to Roland and a couple pair of socks, the ownership of which I fear I have forgotten, had disappeared. The theft made quite a stir among us for thievery is a thing which does not often happen in our community. We talked about it off and on for several days, and finally agreed that the theft must have been the. work of some passing tramp. Even that explanation was scarcely satisfactory. We are off the beaten way and tramps do not often pass, and that year, as I remember it, was a year of great prosperity and there were few tramps. It was two weeks or so after the Jones came to the house and asked if we might need a hand to help with the harvest. We were glad to take him on, for we were short of help and the wages that he asked were far below the going pay. We took him on for the harvest only, but he proved so capable that we have kept him all of ten years. Even as I write this, he is out in the barnyard readying the binder for the small grain cutting. There is a funny thing about William Jones. In this country a man soon acquires a nickname or at least He never has been Will or Bill or Bub or Kid.Not even Jonesy. There is a quiet dignity about him that makes everyone respect him, and his love of work and his quiet, intelligent interest in farming raise him far above the usual status of a hired hand in the community. He never drinks, a thing for which I am thankful, although at one time I had my misgivings. For when he came to us, he had a bandage on his head and he explained to me, shamefacedly, that he had been hurt in a tavern brawl across the river somewhere in Crawford County. 'I don't know when it was that Jones. Certainly it was not at first, for I accepted him for what he pretended to be, a man looking for work. If there was any resemblance to the man I had talked with down in the pasture, I did not' notice it then. And, now, having seen it at this late date, I wonder if my imagination, running riot with my theories of time travel, may not have conditioned me to a point where I see a mystery crouching back of every tree. But the conviction has grown Upon me through the years I have associated with him. For all that he tries to keep his place, attempts to adapt his idiom to match our idiom, there are times when his speech hints at an education and an understanding one' would not expect to find in a man who works on a farm for # a month and board. which is a thing one would expect to find if a man were deliberately attempting to adapt himself to a society that was not his own. And there is the matter of the .clothes. Thinking back, I can't be sure about the overalls, for all overalls look alike. But the shirt was exactly like the shirt that had been stolen from the line, although I tell myself that it' would not be improbable for two men to own the same kind of shirt. And he was barefooted, which seemed a funny thing even at the time, but he explained it by saying that hehad been down on his luck and I remember I advanced him enough money to buy some shoes and socks. But it turned out that he didn'tneed the socks, for he had two pair in his pocket. A few years ago I decided several times that I would speak to him about the matter, but each time my resolution failed and now I know and I would not for the world destroy that mutual liking by a question that might send him fleeing from the farm. There is yet one other thing which most farm hands. With his first money from his work here, he bought a typewriter and during the first two or three years that he was with us, he spent long hours of his eveings in his room using the typewriter and tramping about the room, as a man who is thinking is apt to walk. And then one day, in the early morning, before the rest of us had gotten from our beds, he took a great sheaf of paper, apparently the result of. those long hours of work, and burned it. Watching from my bedroom window, I watched him do it and he stayed until he was sure that the last scrap of the paper had been burned. Then he turned around and walked back slowly to the house. I never mentioned to him the burning of the paper, for I felt, somehow, that it was something he did not wish another man to know. I might go on for many pages and write down many other inconsequential, trivial things which rattle in my skull, but they would not add one iota of actual information, and might, in fact, convince the reader that I am in my dotage. To whom this letter may reach, I wish to make one last assurance. While my theory may be wrong, I would have him or her believe that the facts I have told are true. I would have him or her know that I did see a strange machine in the high pasture and that I did talk with a strange man, that I picked up a wrench with blood upon it, that clothes were stolen from the wash line and that even now a man named drink of water at the well, for the day is very hot. Sincerely, John H. Sutton XX ter and the crackling of the old paper rippled across the quietness of the room unlike a spiteful snarl of thunder. Then he recalled something and unfolded the sheaf of leaves again and found the thing that had been mentioned. It was yellow I and old... not as good a quality of paper as the letter had been ' written on. The writing was by hand, with ink, and the lines were faded so they hardly could be read. The date was unclear, except for the final #. Sutton puzzled it out: ohn H. Sutton today has been examined by me and I find him soundof mind and body. The signature was a scrawl that probably could not have been read even when the ink was scarcely dry, but there were two letters that stood out fairly clearly at the very end. The letters were M. D. Sutton stared across the room and saw in his mind the scene of that long gone day. "Doctor, I've a mind to make a will. Wonder if you could..." For John H. Sutton never would have told the doctor the real reason for that slip of paper... the real reason why he wanted it established that he was not insane. Sutton could imagine him. Ponderous in his walk, slow, deliberate, taking plenty of time to think things over, placing vast values on qualities and fictions which even in that day were shopworn and losing caste from centuries of over-glorification. An old tyrant to his family, more likely. A fuddy-duddy among his neighbors, who laughed behind his back. A man lacking in humor and crinkling his brow over fine matters of etiquette and ethics. He had been trained for the law and he had a lawyer's mind; that much, at least, the letter told with clarity. A lawyer's mind for detail, and a landed man's quality of slowness, and an old man's garrulity. But there was no mistaking John Sutton's sincerity. He believed he had seen a strange machine and had talked with a strange man and had picked up a wrench stained with... A wrench! Sutton sat upright on the bed. T HE wrench had been in the trunk. He had held it in his hand. He had picked it up and tossed it on the pile of junk. Sutton's hand trembled as he slid the letter back into its envelope. First it 'had been the stamp that had intrigued him, a stamp that was worth Lord knew how much... then it was the letter itself and the mystery of its being sealed... and now there was the wrench. And the wrench clinched everything. For the wrench meant that there actually had been a strange machine and a stranger man... a man who knew enough semantics and psychology to talk a talkative, self-centered oldster off his mental feet. Fast enough on the uptake to keep this inspection-tripping farmer from askmg him the very questions the man was bubbling to ask. Who are you and where did you come from and what's that machine and how does it run and I never saw the like of it before... Hard to answer, if they were ever' asked. They were not asked. But Asher Sutton chuckled, thinking of John H. Sutton's having the last word and how it had come about. It would please the old boy if he could only know, but, of course, he couldn't. There had been some slip naturally. The letter had. been lost or mislaid... and .finally, somehow, it had come into the hands of another Sutton, # years removed. And Asher Sutton was the only Sutton for whom the letter would have done a bit of good. For the letter tied in someplace, had some significance in the mystery that involved him. Men who traveled in time. Men whose time machines went haywire and came to landfall or timefall, whichever you might call it, in a cow pasture. And other men who fought in time and screamed through folds of time in burning ships and crashed in a swamp. A battle back in '#, the dying youth had said. Not a battle at Waterloo or off the Martian orbit, but back in '#. And the man had cried his name just before he died and lifted himself to make a sign with strangely twisted fingers. So I am known, thought Sutton, up in '# and beyond '#, for the boy said back and that means that, in his time, a time three centuries yet to come is historically the past. Sutton reached for his coat again and slid the letter into the pocket with the book, then rolled out of bed. He reached for his clothes and began to dress. Pringle and Case had used a spaceship to get to the asteroid. Sutton had to find that ship. T HE lodge was deserted, big and empty with an alienness in its emptiness that made Sutton, who should have been accustomed to alienness, shiver as he felt it touch him. He stood for a moment outside his door and listened to the whispering of the place, the faint, illogical breathing of the house, the creak of frost-expanded walls, the caress of wind against a windowpane, and the noises that could not be explained by either frost or wind, the living sound of something that is not alive. The carpeting in the hall deadened his footsteps as he went down it toward the stairs. Snores came from one of the two rooms which Pringle had said that he and Case occupied, and Sutton wondered for a moment which one of them it was that snored. He went carefully down the stairs, trailing his hand along the bannister #I ? to guide him. When he reached the massive living space, he waited, standing motionless so that his' eyes might become accustomed to the deeper dark that crouched there like lairing animals. Slowly the animals took the shapes of chairs and couches, tables, cabinets and cases. One of the chairs, he saw, had a man sitting in it. As if he had became aware that Sutton had seen him, the man stirred, turning his face toward him. And although it was too dark to see his features, Sutton knew that the man in the chair was Case. Then, he thought, the man who snores is Pringle, although he knew it made no difference which it was. QO, Mr. Sutton," Case said O slowly, "you decided to go out and try to find our ship." "Yes," Sutton said, "I did." "Now that is fine," said Case. "That is the way I like a man to speak up and say what's on his mind." He sighed. "You meet so many devious persons, so many people who try to lie to you, so many people who tell you half truths and feel, while they're doing it, that they are being clever." He rose out of the chair, tall and straight and prim. "Mr. Sutton," he said, "I like you very much." Sutton felt like grinning at the absurdity of the situation, but a coldness and a half anger in him told him this was no laughing matter. Footsteps padded softly down the stairs behind him and Pringle's voice whispered through the room: "So he decided to make a try for it." "Asyou see," said Case. "I told you that lie would," said Pringle, almost triumphantly. "I told you that he would get it figured out." Sutton choked down the gorge that rose into his throat. But the anger held, anger at the way they talked about him as if he weren't there. "I fear," said Case to Sutton, "that we have disturbed you. We are most untactful people and you are sensitive. But let's forget it all and get down to business now. You wanted, I believe, to ferret out our ship." Sutton shrugged his shoulders. "That's out now, isn't it?" "Oh, but you misunderstand," said Case. "We have no objection. Go ahead and ferret." "Meaning I can't find it?" "Meaning that you can," said Case. "We didn't try to hide it." "We'll even show you the way," said Pringle. "We'll go along with you. 'It will take you a lot less time." Sutton felt a fine ooze of perspiration break out along his hairline. A trap, he told himself. A trap laid out in plain sight and not even baited. And he'd walked into it without even looking. But it was too late now. There was no backing out. He tried to make his voice sound unconcerned. "All right, "he said. "I'll gamble with you." rilHp ship was strange, but very real. And it was the only thing that was. All the rest of the situation had a vague, unrealistic, almost fairy character about it, as if. it might be a bad dream and Sutton would wake up and for an agonizing moment try to distinguish between dream and reality. "That map over there," said Pringle, "puzzles you, no doubt. There is every reason that it should. It is a time map." He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head with a beefy Rand. "Tell the truth, I don't understand the thing myself. Case does. Case is a military man and I'm just a propagandist. A propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks convincingly. But a military man does. A military man has to know; some day his life may depend on knowing." So that was it, thought Sutton. That was the thing that had bothered him, the clue that he had told himself would explain Case, who he was and what he was and why he was here on this asteroid. A military man. I should have guessed, Sutton said to himself. But I was thinking in the present... not the past or future. And there are no military men, as such, in the world today. Although there were military men before my time and apparently there will be military men in ages yet to come. He said to Case: "War in four dimensions must be slightly complicated." And 'he didn't say it because he was interested at the moment in war, either in three or four dimensions, but because he felt that it was his turn to talk, his turn to keep this Mad Hatter tea chatter going at its proper senseless pace. For that was what it was, he told himself... an utterly illogical situation, a madcap, slightly psychotic interlude that might have its purpose, but hidden and tangled in confusion. The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of man y things, of sealing wax and sailing ships, of cabbages and... Case smiled . when he spoke to him, a tight, hard, clipped military smile. "Primarily," Case saii, "it is a matter of charts and graphs and very special knowledge and some superguessing. You figure out where the enemy may be and what he may be thinking and you get there first." Sutton shrugged. "Basically that always was the principle," he said. "You got there fustest..." "Ah," said Pringle, "but there are now so many more places where the enemy may go." "You work with thought graphs and attitude charts and historic reports," said Case, almost as if he had not been interrupted. "You trace back certain happenings and then you return and try to change some of those happenings... just a little, you understand, for you must not change them much. Only enough so the end result is slightly different, just a little less favorable to the enemy. One change here and another there and you have him on the run." "It drives you nuts," said Pringle confidentially. "Because you must be sure, you see. You pick out a nice juicy historic trend and you figure it out to the finest detail and you pick a key point where change is indicated, so you go back and change it... A ND then," said Case, "it kicks ai you in the face." "Because, you understand," explained Pringle, "the historian was wrong...Some of his material was wrong or his method was clumsy or his reasoning was off... "Somewhere along the line," said Case, "he missed a factor." "That's r i g h t," said Pringle, "somewhere he missed a factor and you find, after you have changed it, that it affects your side more thanit does your enemy's." "Now, Mr. Bones," said Sutton, his face straight, "I wonder if you could tell me why a chicken runs across the road." "Yes, Mr. Interlocutor," said Pringle, also without a smile. "Because it wants to get on the other side." Cartoon stuff, thought Sutton. A scene jerked raw and bleeding from a crazy humorist's routine. But clever. Pringle was a propagandist and he was no fool. He knew semantics and he knew psychology. He knew all there was to know about the human race, so far as that knowledge could serve his sinister unknown purpose. A man had landed in the high pasture one morning, # years before, and John H. Sutton, Esq., had come ambling down the hill, swinging a stick, for he was the sort of man who would have carried I stick -- a stout, strong hickory stick, no doubt, cut and trimmed with his own jackknife. And the man had talked with him and had used the same kind of mental tactics on John H. Sutton as Pringle now was trying to use on Sutton's far descendant. Go ahead, said Sutton to himself. Talk yourself hoarse in the throat and dry in the tongue. And pretty soon we'll get down to business. As if he had read Sutton's thoughts. Case said to Pringle: "Jake, it isn't working out." "No, I guess it ain't," said Pringle. "Let's sit down," said Case. Sutton felt a flood of relief. Now, he told himself, he would find out what the others wanted, might get some clue to what was going on. He sat down in a pressure chair, and from where he sat he could see the front end of the spaceship's cabin, a tiny living space that shrieked efficiency. The control board canted in front of the pilot's chair, but there were few controls. A row of buttons, lever or two, a panel of toggles that probably controlled lights and ptirts and such ,... and that was all. Efficient and simple, no foolishness, a minimum of manual controls. The ship, Sutton thought, must almost fly itself. Case slid down into a chair and, crossed his long legs, stretching them out in front of him, sitting on his backbone. Pringle perched on a chair's edge, leaning forward, rubbing hairy hands. "Sutton," asked Case, "what is it that you want ?" "Not a thing," said Sutton. "Not a single thing." "But that's foolish," Pringle protested. "There must be something you want." "A little information, maybe." "Like what?" "Like what this is all about." "You're going to write a book," said Case. "Yes," said Sutton. "I intend to write a book." "And you want to sell that book." "I hope to see it published." Xl "is a commodity. It's a product of brain and muscle. It has a market value." "I suppose," said Sutton, "that you are in the market." "We are publishers," said Case, "looking for a book." "A best seller," Pringle added. Case uncrossed his legs, hitched himself higher in the chair. "It's all quite simple," he said. "Just a business deal. We wish you would set your price." "Make it high," urged Pringle. "We are prepared to pay." "I have no price in mind," said Sutton. "We had discussed it," Case told him, "in a rather speculative man-ner, wondering how much you might want and how much we might be might be attractive to you." "We'd make it adozen planets," Pringle said, "but that doesn't make sense. What would a man do with a dozen planets?" "He might rent them out," said Sutton. "Youmean," asked Case, "that you might be interested in a dozen planets?" "No, I wouldn't," Sutton answered. "Pringle wondered what a man would do with a dozen planets and I was being helpful. I said..." Pringle leaned so far forward in his chair that he was almost off it. "Look, we aren't talking about one of the backwoods planets out at the tail end of nowhere. We're offering you a landscaped planet, free of all venomous and hostile life, with a salubrious climate and tractable natives and all the customary living accommodations and improvements." "And the money," said Case, "to keep it running for the rest of your life." "Right spang in the middle of the galaxy," said Pringle. "It's an address you wouldn't be ashamed of."' "I'm not interested," said Sutton. Case's temper cracked. "Good Lord,. what is it that you want?" "I want information," Sutton said. Case sighed. "All right, then. We'll give you information." "Why do you want my book?"  "There are three parties interested in your book," said Case. "One of those parties wuld kill you to prevent your writing it. What is more to the point, they probably will if you don't throw in with us." "And the third party?" "The third party wants you to write the book, all right, but they won't pay you a thing for doing it. They'll do all they can to make it easy for you to write the book and they'll try to protect you from the ones that would like to kill you, but they're not offering any money." "If I took you up," said Sutton, "I suppose you'd help me write the book? Conferences and so forth?" "Naturally," said Case. "We'd have an interest in it. We'd want it done the best way possible." "After all," said Pringle, "our interest would be as great as yours." "That's what I thought," Sutton told them. "My book is not for jale." "We'd boost the ante some," said Pringle. "It still is not for sale." "That's your final word?" asked Case. "Your considered opinion?" Sutton nodded. Case sighed. "Then," he said, "I guess we have to kill you." He took a gun out of his pocket.  T HE psych-tracer ticked on, endlessly, running fast, then slow, skipping a beat now and then, like the erratic time measurement of a clock with hiccoughs. It was the only sound in the room and to Adams it seemed as if he were listening to the beating of a heart, the breathing of a man, the throb of blood along the jugular vein. He grimaced at the pile of dossiers which a moment before he had swept from his desk onto the floor with an angry sweep of his hand. For there was nothing in them... absolutely nothing. Every one was perfect, every one checked. Birth certificates, scholastic records, recommendations, loyalty checks, psych examinations, all of them were as they should be. There was not a single flaw. That was the trouble... in all the records of the Service's personnel, there was not a single flaw. Not a thing a man could point to. Not a thing on which one could anchor suspicion. Lily white and pure. Yet someone inside the Service had stolen Sutton's dossier. Someone had tipped off Sutton on the gun-trap laid for him at the Orion Arms. Someone had been ready and waiting, knowing of the trap, to whisk him out of reach. "Spies," said Adams to himself, and he made his hand into a fist and li# hit the desk so hard that his knuckles stung. , For no one but an insider could have made away with Sutton's dossier. No one but an insider could have known of the decision to destroy Sutton, nor of the three men. who had been assigned to carry out the order. Adams smiled grimly. The tracer chuckled at" him. Kerup, it said, ker-up, clickity, click, ker-up. That was Sutton's heart and breath... Sutton's life ticking away somewhere. So long as Sutton lived, no matter where he was or what he might be doing, the tracer would go on chuckling and burping. Ker-rup, ker-rup, ker-rup... Somewhere in the asteroid belt, the tracer had said, and that was a very general location, but it could be narrowed. Already ships with other tracers aboard were narrowing it down. Sooner or later, hours or days or weeks, Sutton would be found. Ker-rup... War, the man in the mask had said. And hours later, a ship had come screaming down across the hills, like a blazing comet, to plunge into a swamp. A ship such as no man as yet had made, carrying melted weapons that were unlike any that Man had yet invented. A ship whose thunder in the night had roused the sleeping inhabitants for miles around, whose flaming metal had been a beacon glowing in the sky. A ship and a body, and a track that led from ship to body across three hundred yards of marsh. The trace of one man's footprints and the furrowing trail of other feet that dragged across the mud. And the man who had carried the dead man had been Asher Sutton, for Sutton's fingerprints were on the muddied clothing of the man lying at the swamp's edge. Sutton, thought Adams wearily. It is always Sutton. Sutton's name upon Sutton's fingerprints upon a dead, man's clothing. The man in the mask had said there would have been no incident on Aldebaran if it had not been for Sutton. And' Sutton had killed Benton, Earth's greatest duelist -- with a bullet in the arm, Ker-up, clickity, click, ker-up... Dr. Raven, called in by Adams, had sat in that chair across the desk and told of the afternoon Sutton had dropped in at the university. "He found destiny," Dr. Raven had said, and he said it as if it were commonplace, as if it were a thing that could have been ejected all along. "Not a religion," Dr. Raven had said, with the afternoon sunlight shining on his snow white hair. "Oh, dear, no, not a religion. Actual destiny." predetermined course in events often conceived as a resistless power or agency... "The accepted definition," Dr. Raven had said, as if he might be addressing a lecture hall, "may have to be modified slightly when Asher writes his book." But how could Sutton find destiny? Destiny was an idea, an abstract. "You forget," Dr. Raven had told Adams, speaking gently as one would to a child, "that part about the resistless power or agency. That is what he found... the power or agency." "Sutton told me about the beings he found on Cygni," Adams had said. "He was at a loss to describe them. The nearest that he could come was symbiotic abstractions." Dr. Raven had nodded his head and pulled his shell-like ears and figured that maybe symbiotic abstractions would fit the bill, although it was hard for one to decide just what a symbiotic abstraction was, or what it would look like. Under questioning, he reiterated that it was not a new religion Sutton had found. "Oh, gracious, no, not a religion." And Jlaven, Adams thought, should be the one to know, for he was one of the galaxy's best and most widely known comparative religionists. "Although it would be a new idea," Dr. Raven had said. "Bless me, yes, an absolutely new idea." And ideas are dangerous, Adams told himself. For Man was spread thin across the galaxy. So thin that one word -- literally one spoken word or unbidden thought -- might be enough to set off the train of rebellion and of violence that would sweep Man back to the solar system, back to the puny ring of circling planets that had caged him in before. One could not take a chance. One could not gamble with an imponderable. Better that one man die needlessly than that the whole race lose its grip upon the galaxy. Better that one new idea, however great, be blotted out than that Mankind be swept from Item one: Sutton wasn't human. Item Two: He was not telling all he knew. Item Thuee: He had a manuscript . which was not decipherable. Itm Four: He meant to write a book. Item Five: He had a new idea. Conclusion: Sutton must be killed. Ker-up, clickily, click , . , War, the man had said. A war in time. Man across the galaxy. It would be three-dimensional and pieces, and with the rules changing at every move. It would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which would not even know that there was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines of Athens, to the horse and chariot Columbus. It would involve all fields of human endeavor and human speculation, and it would twist the dreams of men who had never thought of time except as a moving shadow across a sun dial's face. It would involve spies and propagandists -- 'spies to learn the factors of the past so that they could be plotted in the campaign strategy, propagandists to twist the fabric of the past so that strategy could be the more effective.  It would load the personnel of the Justice Department of the year # with spies and fifth columnists ana saboteurs. And it would do that so cleverly one could never find the spies. But, as in an ordinary, honest war, there would be strategic points. As in chess, there would be one key piece. Sutton was that piece. He was the pawn that stood in 'the way of the sweep of bishop and of rook. He was the pawn that both sides were lining up on, bring all their pressure on a single point... and when one side was ready, when it gained a fraction of advantage, the slaughter would begin. Adams folded his arms upon the desk and laid his head upon them. Hi; shoulders twitched, but he had no tears. "Ash, boy," he said. "Ash, I counted on you so much." The silence brought him straight in the chair again. For a moment, he was unable to. locate it... determine what was wrong. And then he knew. The psych-tracer had stopped its burping. He leaned forward and bent above it and there was no sound of heart, of breath, of blood coursing in the body. The motivating force that had operated it -- Asher Sutton -- has ceased to be. Slowly, Adams rose from his chair, took down his hat and put it on. For the first time in his life, Christopher Adams was going home before the day was over.  then relaxed. For this was a bluff, he told himself. These men wouldn't kill him. They wanted the book and dead men do not write. Case answered him, almost as if Sutton had spoken what he thought aloud. "You must not count on us as honorable men; neither of us ourselves would lay a claim to that. Pringle, I think, will bear me out in that." "Oh, certainly," said Pringle. "I have no use for honor." "It would have meant a great deal to us if we could have taken you back to Trevor and..." "Wait a second," interrupted Sutton. "Who is this Trevor? He's a new one." "Oh, Trevor," said Pringle. "Just #Z# an oversight. Trevor is the head of the corporation." "The corporation," added Case, "that wants to get your book." "Trevor would have heaped us with honors," Pringle said, "and loaded us with wealth if we had pulled it off. But since you won't cooperate, we'll have to cast around for some other way to make ourselves a profit." "So we switch sides," explained Case, "and we shoot you. Morgan will pay high for you, but he wants you dead. Your carcass will be worth a good deal to Morgan. Oh, yes, quite a lot." "And you will sell it to him." "Of course," said Pringle. "We never miss a bet." Case purred at Sutton: "You do not object, ! hope." Sutton shrugged indifferently. "What you do with my cadaver is no concern of mine." "Well, then," said Case, and he raised the gun. "Just a. second," Sutton said. Case lowered the gun. "Now what?" "He wants a cigaret," said Pringle. "Men who are about to be executed always want a cigaret or a glass of wine or a chicken dinner Or something of the sort," "I want to ask a question," Sutton said. Case nodded. "I take it," Sutton said, "that in your time I've already written this book." "That's right," Case told him. "An honest and efficient job." "Under your imprint or someone else's?" Pringle cackled. "Under someone else's, of course. If you did it under ours, why do you think we'd be back here at all?" Sutton wrinkled his brow. "I've already written it," he said, "without your help and without your editing. Now if I. did it a second time, and wrote it the way you wanted, there would be complications." "None," said Case, "we couldn't overcome. Nothing that could not be explained quite satisfactorily." "And now that you're going to kill me, there'll be no book at all. How will you handle that?" Case frowned. "It will be difficult and unfortunate... unfortunate for many people. But we'll work it out." He raised the gun. "Sure you won't change your mind?" Sutton shook his head. They won't shoot, he told himself. It's a bluff. The deck is cold and... Case pulled the trigger. A mighty force, like a striking fist, slammed into Sutton's body and shoved him back so hard that the. chair tilted and then slued around, yawing like a ship caught in magnetic stresses. Fire flashed within his skull. He felt one swift shriek of agony that took him in its claws and lifted him and shook him, jangling every nerve, grating every bone. There was one thought, one fleeting thought that he tried to grasp and hold, but it wriggled from his brain like an eel slipping free from bloody fingers. Change, said the thought. Change. He flt the change... felt it start even as he died. And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him. He felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastnessand the sureness of it. Back on Earth, the psych-tracer faltered to a stop and Christopher Adams got up and put on his hat and went home for the first time in his life before the day was done. tried to sleep, but sleep was long in coming. And he wondered that he should sleep... that he should sleep and eat and drink as Man. For he was not a man and would never be a man. His origin was chemical and Man's was biological. He was the imitation and Man was reality. It is the method, he told hjmself, the method and the terminology, that keep me from being Man, for in all things else we are the same. The method and the name of android and the tattoo mark I wear upon my brow. I am as good as Man and as smart as Man, for all I act the clown, and could be as treacherous as Man if I had the chance. Except I wear a tattoo mark and I am owned and I have no soul... although sometimes I wonder. Herkimer lay very quietand gazed at the ceiling and tried to remember certain things, but it was frighteningly complicated. First there was the tool and then the machine, which was no more than a complicated tool, and both machine and tool Were no more than the extension of a hand. Man's hand, of course. Then came the robot and a robot was a machine that walked like a man. That walked and looked and talked like a man and did the things Man wished, but it was a caricature. No matter how sleekly machined, no matter how cleverly designed, there never was a danger that it be mistaken for a man. And after the robot? We are not robots, Herkimer told himself, and we are not men. We are not machines, because we are flesh and blood. We are chemicals made into the shapes of our creators and assigned a chemical life so close to the life of our makers that some day one of them will find, to his astonishment, that there is no difference. Made in the shape of men... and the resemblance is so close that we wear a tattoo mark so that men may know us apart. So close to Man and yet not Man. Although there is hope... , if we can keep the Cradle secret, if we can keep it hidden from the eyes of Man. Someday there will be no difference. Someday a man will talk to an android and think he is talking to a fellow man. And he will be. and folded them over his head. He tried to examine his mind, to arrive at motives and evaluations, but it was hard to do. No rancor, certainly. No jealousy. No bitterness. Just a nagging feeling of inadequacy, of having almost reached the goal and fallen short. But there was comfort, he thought. There was comfort if nothing else. And that comfort must 'be kept. Kept for those like himself, the ones that were less than Man. He lay for a long time, thinking about comfort, watching the dark square of the window with the rime of frost .upon it and the stars shining through the frost, listening to the thin whine of the feeble, vicious weasel-wind as it snarled across the roof. Sleep did not come and he got up at last and turned on the light. Shivering, he got into his clothes .and pulled a book out of his pocket. Huddling close to the lamp, he turned the pages to a passage worn thin with reading. There is no thing, no matter, how created, how born or how conceived or made, which knows the pulse of life, that goes alone. That assurance l can give jou... , He closed the book and held it clasped between the palms of his two hands... how born or how conceived or made. Made. All that matte'red was the pulse of life, the stir of sentiency. Comfort. And it must be kept. I did my duty, he told himself. My doing it. I acted the part, he told himself, and I think I acted well. I acted a part when I carried the challenge to Asher Sutton's room. I acted a part when I came to him as a part of thg estate duello... the saucy, subservient part of any common android. I did my duty for him... and yet not for him, but for comfort, for the privilege of knowing and believing that neither I nor any other living thing, no matter how lowly it may be, will ever be alone. I hit him. I hit him on the button and knocked him out, and I lifted him in my arms and carried him into the spaceship. He was angry at me, but that does not matter. His anger cannot wash away a single word of the assurance he gave me. Thunder shook the house. The window, for a moment, flared with sudden crimson. Herkimer came to his feet and ran for the window and stood there, gripping the ledge, watching the red twinkle of dwindling rocket tubes. Fear hit him in the stomach and he raced out of the door and down the hall, to Sutton's room. He did not knock nor did he turn the knob. He hit the door and it shattered open, with a wrecked and twisted lock dangling by its screws. The bed was empty and there was no one in the room. he fought against it, for death was so . comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a trident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowsy room. Dreadful with its life and its raw reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up. But this is not the first time, said Sutton. This is not the first time that I died and came to life again. For I did it once before and that time I was dead for a long, long time. There was a hard, flat surface underneath him and he lay face. down upon it. For what seemed an interminable stretch of time, his mind struggled to visualize the hardness and smoothness beneath him. Hard and flat and smooth, three words, but they did not help one see or understand the thing that they described. He felt life creep back and quicken, seep along his legs and arms. But he wasn't breathing and his heart was still. Floor. That was it... that was the word for the thing on which he lay. The. flat, hard, smooth surface was a floor. The floor of what? Sounds came to him, but at first he didn't call them sounds, for he had no word for them at all,' and then, a moment later, he remembered that that was the word. Now he could move one finger. Then a second finger. He opened his eyes and there was light. The sounds were voices and the voices were word's and the words were thoughts. It takes so long to figure things out, Sutton wearily told himself. "We should have tried a little harder," said a voice, "and a little longer. The trouble with us. Case, is that we have no patience." "Patience wouldn't have done a bit of good," said Case. "He was convinced (that we were bluffing. No matter what we'd done or said, he'd still have thought we were bluffing and we would have gotten nowhere. Therewas only one thing to do." ( VrES, I know," Pringle agreed.L "Convince him that we weren't bluffing." He made a sound of blowing out his breath. "Pity, too. He was such a bright young man." They were silent for a time and now it was not life alone, but strength, that was flowing into Sutton. Strength to stand and walk, strength to lift his arms, strength to vent his anger. Strength to kill two men. "We won't do so badly," Pringle went on. "Morgan and his crowd will pay us just as much." Case was squeamish. "I don't like it, Pringle. A dead man is a dead man if you kill him and leave him. But when you sell him, that makes you a butcher." "That's not the thing that's worrying me," Pringle answered. "What will it do to the future, Case? To our future. We had a future with many of its facets based on Sutton's book. If we had managed to change the book a little, it wouldn't have mattered much... wouldn't have mattered at all, in fact, the way we had it figured out. But now Sutton's dead. There will be no book by Sut' ton. The future will be ' completely different." Sutton rose to his feet. They spun around and faced him and Case's hand went for his gun. "Go ahead," invited Sutton. "Shoot me full of holes. You won't live a minute longer for it." He tried to hate them, as he had hated Benton during that one fleeting moment back on Earth. Hatred so strong and primal that it had blasted the man's mind into oblivion... killed him with only a puzzling bullet in his arm and a hateshattered brain. But there was no hate. Just a ponderous, determined will to destroy a bothersome hindrance. He moved forward on inexorable legs and his hands readied out. Pringle ran, squealing, seeking to escape. Case's gun spat twice and when blood oozed out and ran down Sutton's chest and he still came on, Case threw away his weapon and backed against the wall. It didn't take long. They couldn't get away. There was no place to go. down against the tiny asteroid, a whirling piece of debris not much bigger than the ship itself. He feltit touch and his thumb reached out and snubbed over the gravity lever. The ship clamped down, to go tumbling through space with the twisting chunk of rock. Sutton let his hands fall to 'his side and sat quietly in the pilot's chair. In front of him, space was black and friendless, streaked by the pinpoint stars that spun in lines of fire across the field of vision, writing cryptic messages of cold, white light across the cosmos as the asteroid , bumbled on its erratic course. Safe, he told himself. Safe for a while, at least. Perhaps safe forever, for there might be no one looking for him. , Safe with a hole blasted through his chest, with blood running down his front and splashing on the floor. Handy thing to have, he thought grimly, this second body of mine. This body that was grafted on me by the Cygnians. It will keep me going until... until... Until what? Until I can get back to Earth and walk into a doctor's office and say: "I got shot up a little. How about a patching job?" Sutton chuckled. He could see the doctor having a fit. Or going back to Cygni? But they wouldn't let me in. Or just going back to Earth the way I am and forget about the doctor? I could get other clothes and the bleeding will stop when the blood's all gone. B UT I wouldn't breathe, and they would notice that. "Johnny," he said, but there was no answer, just a feeble stir of life within his brain, a sign of recognition, like a dog wagging its tail to let you know it heard, but was too busy with a bone to let anything distract it. "Johnny, is there any way?" There might be. It was a hope to cling to, a thing to think about. Not even yet, he suspected, had he begun to plumb the strange depth of abilities lodged within his body and his mind. He had not known that his hate alone could kill, that hate could spear out from his brain like a lance of steel and strike a man dead. And yet Benton had died with a bullet in the arm... only he had been dead before the bullet hit him. For Benton had fired first and missed, and Benton, alive, never would have missed. Sutton had not known that by mind alone he could control the energy needed to lift the dead weight of a ship from a boulder bed and fly it across eleven years of space. And yet that was what he'd done, winnowing the energy from the flaming stars so far away they dimmed to almost nothing, from the random specks of matter in the void. And while he knew that he could change at will from one life to another, he had not known for certain that when one way of life was killed, the other way would take over automatically. Yet that was what had happened. Case had killed him and he had died and he had come to life again. But he had died before the change had started. Of that much he was sure. For he remembered death and recognized it. He knew it from the time he had died before. He felt his body eating... sucking at the stars as a human sucks an orange, nibbling at the energy imprisoned in the bit of ro to which the ship was clamped, pouncing on the tiny leaks of power from the ship's atomic motors. Eating to grow strong, eating to repair... "Johnny, is there any way?" And there was no answer. til it lay upon the inclined panel that housed the instruments. His body went on eating at the stars. He listened to the slow drip of blood falling from his body and splashing on the floor. His mind was clouding and he let it cloud, for there was nothing to do. There was no need to use it; he did not know how to use it. He did not know what he could do or what he couldn't do, nor Jiow to go about it. He had fallen, he remembered, screaming down the alien sky, knowing in a moment of wild elation that he had broken through, that the hand. That what all the navies of the Earth had failed to do, he'd done. The planet was rushing up and he saw the tangled geography of it that snaked in black and gray across his vision plate. That was twenty years ago, but he remembered it, in the dim fog of his mind, as if it were happening this very moment. He reached out a hand and hauled back on a lever and the lever would not move. The ship plunged down and for a moment he felt a rising fear that exploded into panic. One fact stood out, one stark, black fact in all the flashing fragments of thoughts and schemes and prayer that went screeching through his brain. One stark fact... he was about to crash. He did not remember crashing, for he probably never knew exactly when he crashed. It was only fear and terror and then no fear nor terror. It was consciousness and awareness and then a nothingness that was a restfulness and a vast forgetting. Awareness came back... in a moment or an eon, which, he could not tell. But an awareness that was different, a sentiency that was only partly human, just a small percentage human. And a knowledge that was new, but which, it seemed, he had held forever. He sensed or knew, for it was not seeing, his body stretched out on the ground smashed and broken, twisted out of human shape. And although he knew it was his body and knew its every superficial function and the plan of its assembly, he felt a twinge of wonder at the thing which lay there and knew that here was a problem which would tax his utmost ingenuity. For the body must be put together, must be straightened out and reintegrated and co-ordinated so that it would work and the life that had escaped be returned to it again. He thought of HumptyDumpty and the thought was strange, as if the nursery rhyme were something new or something long forgotten. Humpty Dumpty, said another part of him, supplies no answer, and he knew that it was right, for Humpty, he recalled, could not be put together again. He became aware there were two of him; one part of him had answered the other part of him. The answerer and the listener, and although they were one, they were also separate. There was a cleavage he could not understand. "I am your destiny," said the answerer. "I was with you when you came to life and I will stay with you till yoir-die. I do not control you and I do not coerce you, but I try to guide you, although you do not know it." Sutton, the small part of him that was Sutton, said: "I know it now." He knew it as if he'd always known it and that was, queer, for he had only just then learned it. Knowledge, he realized, was all tangled up, for there were two of him... he and destiny. He could not immediately distinguish between the things he knew as Sutton alone and those he knew as Sutton plus Sutton's destiny. I cannot know, he thought. I could not know then and I cannot know now. For there still is deep within me the two facets of my being, the human that I am and the destiny that would guide me to a greater glory and a greater life, if I would only let it. F OR it will not coerce me and it will not stop me. It will only give me hunches; it will only whisper warnings and encouragement to me. It is the thing called conscience and the thing called judgment and the thing called intuition. And it sits within my brain as it sits within the brain of no other thing, for I am one with it. I know of it with a dreadful certainty and others do not know at all, or, if they do, they only guess at the great immensity of its truthfulness. And all must know. All must know each thing has destiny. But there is something going on to keep them from knowing, or to twist their knowledge so their knowing is all wrong. I must find out what it is and I must correct it. And somehow I must strike into the future; I must set it aright for the days I will not see. I am your destiny, the answerer had said. Destiny, not fatalism. Destiny, not predetermination. Destiny, the way of men and races and of worlds. Destiny, the way you made your life, the way you shaped your living... the way it was meant to be, the way that it would be if you listened to the still, small voice that talked to you at the many turning points and crossroads. But if you' did not listen... why, then, you did not listen and you did not hear. And there was no power that could make you listen. There was no penalty if you did not listen except the penalty of having gone against your destiny. There were other thoughts or other voices. Sutton could not tell which they were, but they were outside the tangled thing that was he and destiny. That is my body, he thought. And I am somewhere else. Some place where there is no seeing as I used to see... nor hearing, although I see and hear, but with another's senses and in an alien way. The screen let him through, said one thought, although screen was not the word it used. And another said that the screen had served its purpose. And another said that there was a certain technique he had picked up on a planet, the name of which blurred and ran and made a splotch and had no meaning at all, so far as Sutton could make out. Still another pointed out the singular complexity and inefficiency of Sutton's mangled body and spoke enthusiastically of the simplicity and perfection of' direct energy intake. Sutton tried to cry out to them for the love of God to hurry, for his body was a fragile thing, that if they waited too long it would be past all mending. But he could not say it, and, as if in a dream, he listened to the interplay of thought, the flash and flicker of individual opinion, all molding into' one cohesive thought that spelled eventual decision. He tried to wonder where he was, tried to orient himself and found that he could not even define himself. For himself no longer was a body, nor a place in space or time, nor even a personal pronoun. It was a hanging, dangling thing that had no substance, no fixture in the scheme of time and it could not recognize itself, no matter what it did. It was a vacuum that knew it existed and it was dominated by .something else that might  as well have been a vacuum for all the recognition he could make of it. He was outside his body and he lived. But where or how, there was no way of knowing. "I am your destiny," the answerer that seemed a part of him had said. But destiny was a word and nothing more. An idea. An abstract. A tenuous definition for something that the mind of Man had conceived, but could not prove... that the mind idea only and could 'never be proved.  '#'OU are wrong," said Sutton's I destiny. "Destiny is real, although you cannot see it. It is real for you and for all other things... for every single thing that knows the surge of life. And it has always been and it will always be." "This is not death?" asked Sutton. "You are the first' to come to us," said destiny. "We cannot let you die. We will give you back your body, but until then you will live with me. You will be part of me. And that is only fair, for I have always lived with you; I have always been part of you." "You did notwant me here," said Sutton. "You built a screen to keep me out." "We' wanted one," said destiny. "One only. You are that one; there will be no more." "But'the screen?" "It was keyed to a mind," said destiny. "To a certain mind. The one mind we wanted." "But you let me die." "You had to die," destiny told him. "Until you died and became one of us, you could not know. In your body we could not have reached you. Yhu had to dieso that you would be freed and I was there to take you and make you part of me so you would understand." "I do not understand." "You will," saiddestiny. "You will." And I did, thought Sutton. H IS body shook as he remembered and his mind stood awed with the vast, unexpected the teeming life of the galaxy. Destiny whispered and a thing climbed dripping from the water and in the eons to come its fins were legs and its gills were nostrils. Destiny stirred and a shaggy ape thing stooped and picked up a broken stick. It stirred again and he struck flint together. It stirred once more and there was a bow and arrow. Again and the wheel was born. Symbiotic abstractions. Parasites. Invisible partners. Call them what you would. They were destiny. And the time had come for the galaxy to know of destiny. If parasites, then beneficial parasites, ready to give more than they could take. For all they got was the sense of living, the sense of being... and what they gave, or stood ' ready to give, was far more than mere living. For many of the lives they lived must be dull, indeed. An angleworm, for instance. Or the bloated mass of instinct that xrept through nauseous jungle worlds. But because of them, someday an angleworm might he more than an angleworm... or a greater angleworm. The bloated mass of instinct might be something that would reach to greater heights than Man. For every thing that moved, whether intelligent or mindless, across the face of any world, was not  one thing, but two. It and its own .individual destiny. And sometimes destiny took hold and won... and sometimes' it didn't. But where there was destiny, there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere. No thing walks alone. Nor crawls nor vegetates nor swims nor flies nor shambles. One planet barred to every mind but one; and once that mind arrived, barred forevermore. One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope. That mind, thought Sutton, is my own. Lord help me now. For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been me, but someone or something else. Some other mind in years. It is too much to ask, he thought... too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man's, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing. B UT destiny put the finger on me. Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck... it would be destiny. I lived with destiny, as destiny... I was a part of destiny instead of destiny merely a part of me and we came to know each other as if we were two humans .... better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact that I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over. I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and do not understand... the part of me I still do not understand... until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body, a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and flimsiness of the human structure. When they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before... many things, I suspect, that I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps. I'll never know at all. When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again. But now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together. Now' I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past. "Johnny," Sutton called. He waited and there was no answer. "Johnny," he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there. Unless... the thought struck slowly, kindly... unless Asher Sutton was really dead. Unless this was dreaming, unless this was a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death. Johnny's voice was small, very small and very far away: "Ash." "Yes, Johnny!" He forgot his doubts, sat erect and tense. "The engines, Ash. The engines." He fought his body out of the pilot's chair, stood on weaving legs. He could scarcely see... just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were solid weights that he could not move. They were no part of him at all. He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face. Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the #? sHock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh. There once had been strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength of vengeance. But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of will alone. He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more. His head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood that left a trail across the floor. He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch. His fingers found the latch and pulled, it down, but they had no strength. They slipped off the metal. He fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door. He waited for a long time and then tried again. This time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again. And as he fell, he fell across the threshold. Intelligence, senses, consciousness... they all vanished in the same micro-second. ness. ' To darkness and unknowing. To unknowing and a slow, expanding wonder. He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him .was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew J that he had slept with the thing clasped to him. There wasno sense of time or sense of place, and no means of any life before. As if he had sprung full-limbed by magic. into life and intelligence and knowing. He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark, and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it. He lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the queasiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous. But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side... and it was thui for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Narqe and recognition had slipped back into his consciousness without his searching for it, as if it were a thing he had known all the time and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition, and that, he thought, was strange. So the thing beside him was an engine and he. was lying on a floor and the metal close above his head was a roof of some sort. A narrow space, he thought. A narrow space that housed an engine and a door that opened into another room. A ship. That was it. He was in a ship. And the trail of dark that ran across the threshold...? At first he thought that some imagined thing had crawled in slime ofits own making to mark the trail, but now he remembered.It had been himself crawling to tireengines. Lying quietly, he remembered it all, and in wonder he tested his aliveness. He lifted a hand and felt his chest. The clothes were burned away and their scorched edges were crisp between his fingers, but his chest was whole... whole and smooth and hard. Sound human flesh. No ragged, bleeding holes. So it was possible, he thought. I remember that I wondered if it was... if Johnny might not have some trick up his sleeve, if my body might not have some capability which I could not suspect. It sucked at the stars and nibbled at the asteroid and it yearned toward the engines. It wanted energy. And the engines had available energy... more than the distant stars, more than the cold, frozen chunk of rock that was the asteroid. So I crawled to reach the engines and I left a dark death-trail behind me and I slept with the engines in my arms. And my body -- my directintake, energy-eating body -- sucked the power that was needed from the flaming core of the reaction chambers. And I am whole again. I am back on my , breath-andblood body once again and I can return to Earth. s gine room and stood on his two feet. Faint starlight came through the vision plates and scattered like jewel dust along the floor and walls. And there were two huddled shapes, one in the middle of the floor and another in a corner. His mind took them in and turned them around as they were dead and as they might have been alive, and in a little while he remembered what they were. The humanity within him shivered at the black, sprawled shapes, but another part of him, a cold, hard inner core, stood undismayed in the face of death. He moved forward on slow feet and slowly knelt beside one of the bodies. It must be Case, he thought, for Case had been thin and tall. But he could not see the face and he did not wish to see it, for in some dark corner of his mind he still remembered what Case and Pringle had looked like when they died. His hands went down and searched through the clothing. He made a tiny pile of the things he found, and finally he found the thing he was looking for. Squatting on his heels, he opened the book to the title page and it was the same 'as the one he carried in his pocket. The same except for a line of type at the very bottom: Revised Edition So that was it. That was the meaning of the word that had puzzled him Revisionists. There had been a book and it had been revised. Those who lived by the revised edition were the Revisionists. And the others? He wondered, running through the names... Fundamentalists, Primitives, Orthodox, Hard Shell. There were others, hi was sue, but it didn't really matter what the others would be called. There were two blank pages and the text began: His eye went down the page to the first footnote.  This is 'the first of many statements which, wrongly interpreted, have caused some readers to believe that Sutton meant to say that life, regardless of its intelligence or moral precepts, is the beneficiary of destiny. His first line-should refute this entire line of reasoning, for Sutton used the pronoun "we" and all students of semantics are agreed that it is a common idiom for any genus, when speaking of itself, to use such a personal pronoun. Had Sutton meant all life, he would have written "all life." But by using the personal pronoun, he undeniably was referring to his own genus, the human race, and the human race alone. He apparently erroneously believed, a not uncommon belief of his day, that the Earth had been the first planet to know life and this will explain his reference to the first planet of the galaxy to know the quickening of life. ' There is no doubt that, in part, Sutton's revelations of bis great discovery of destiny have been tampered with. Assiduous research and study, however, have resulted in determining beyond reasonable doubt which portions are genuine and which are not. Those parts which patently have been altered will be noted and the reasons for this belief will be carefully and frattkly pointed out. quickly. More than half the text was taken up by the fine print footWe are not alone. No one ever is alone. Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life, on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of sentiency, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone. notes. Some of the pages had two or three lines of actual text and the rest was filled with lengthy explanation and refutation. He slapped the book shut, held it angrily between his flattened palms. I tried so hard, he thought. I repeated and reiterated and underscored. Not human life alone, but all life. Everything that lives. And yet they twist my words. They fight a war so that my words shall not be the words I wrote, so that the things I meant to say shall be misinterpreted. They scheme and fight and murder so that the great cloak of destiny shall rest on one race alone... so that the most grasping and ambitious race ever spawned shall steal . the thing that was meant not for them alone, but for every living thing. And somehow I must stop it Somehow it must be stopped. Somehow my words must stand, so that all may read and know, without the smokescreen of crooked theorizing and dishonest interpretation and weasel logic confusing them. F DRit is so simple. Such a simple thing: All life has destiny, not human life alone. There is one destiny partner for every living thing. For every living thing and then to spare. They wait for life to happen, and each time it occurs, one of them is there and stays there until the particular life is ended. How, I do not know, nor why. I do not know if the actual Johnny is lodged within my mind and being, or if he merely keeps in contact with me from Cygni. But I know that he is with me. I know that he will stay. And yet the Revisionists will twist my words and discredit me. They will change my book and dig up old scandals about the Suttons so that the mistakes of my forebears, magnified many times, will tend to smear my name. They sent back a man who talked to John H. Sutton and he told them things that they could have used. For John Sutton "said that there are skeletons in every family closet, and in that he spoke the truth. And, being old and gatrulous, he talked about those skeletons. But those tales  were not carried forward into the future to be of any use, for the man who heard them came tramping up the road with a bandage on his head and no shoes on his feet. Something happened and he could not go back. Something happened. Something... Sutton rose slowly. Something happened, he said, talking to himself, and I know what it was. Six thousand years ago in a place that was called Wisconsin. He moved forward, heading for the pilot's chair and the Wisconsin of sixty centuries in the past. into his office and hung up his hat and coat. He turned around and pulled out the chair before his desk and in the act of sitting down, he froze and listened. The psych-tracer burped at him. Ker-up, it chuckled. Ker-up, clickity, click, ker-up. Christopher Adams straightened from his half-sitting position and put on his hat and coat again. '  Going out, he slammed the door behind him. In all his life, he had never slammed a door. ming with slow, sure strokes. The water was warm against his body and it talked to him with a deep, important voice and Sutton thought: It is trying to tell me something, as it has tried to tell people something all down through the ages. A mighty tongue talking down the land, gossiping to itself when there is no one to hear, but trying, always trying to tell its people the news it has to tell. Some of them, perhaps, have grasped a certain truth and a certain philosophy from the river, but none of them have ever reached the meaning of the river's language, for it is an unknown language. #  Like the language, Sutton thought, I used to make my notes. For they had to be in a language which no one else could read, a language that had been forgotten in the galaxy eons before any tongue now living lisped its baby talk. Either a language that had been forgotten or one that never could be known. I do not know that language, Sutton told himself, the language of my notes. I do not know whence it came or when or how. I asked, but they would not tell me. Johnny tried to tell me once, but I could not grasp it, for it was a thing that the brain of Man could not accept. I know its symbols and the things they stand for, but I do not know the sounds that make it. My tongue might not be able to form the sounds that make the spoken language. For all I know, it might be the language that this river talks... or the language of some race that went to dislion years ago. The black of night came down to nestle against the black of flowing river and the Moon had not arisen, would not rise for many hours to come. The starlight made little diamond points on the rippling waves of the pulsing river. On the shore ahead, the lights of homes made jagged patterns up and down the land. Herkimer has the notes, Sutton told himself, and I hope he has sense enough to hide them. I will need them later, but not now. I would like to see Herkimer, but I can't take the chance; they'll be watching him. And there's no doubt they have a tracer on me, but if I move fast enough I can keep out of their way. His feet struck gravel bottom and he let himself down, waded up the shelving shore. The night wind struck him and he shivered; the river had been warm from a day of sun, and the wind had a touch of chill. Herkimer, of course, would be one of those who had come back from the future to see that he wrote the book as he would have written it if there had been no interference. Herkimer and Eva... and of the two, Sutton told himself, he could trust Herkimer. For an android would fight, would fight and die for the thing that the book would say. And so would every non-human form of life that could read and understand Asher Sutton's book. But no human could be trusted. sat down and took off his clothes to wring them dry, then put them on again. He struck out across the meadow toward the highway that arrowed up the valley. No one would find the ship at the bottom of the river... not for a while, at least. And a few hours were all he needed. A few hours to ask a thing that he must know, a few minutes then to get back to the ship again. But he couldn't waste any time. He had fo get the information the quickest way he could. For if Adams had a tracer on him -- and Adams would have a tracer on him -- they would already know that he had returned to Earth. Once again came the old nagging wonder about Adams. How had Adams known that he was coming back from #I Cygni, and why had he set a mouse trap for him when he did arrive? What information had he gotten that would make him give the order that Sutton must be shot on sight? Someone had reached him... someone who had evidence to show him. For Adams would not go on anything less than evidence. And the only person who could have given him any information would . have, been someone from the future. One of those, perhaps, who contended that the book must not be written, that it must not exist, that the knowledge that it held be blotted out forever. And if the man who was to write it should die, what couldbe more simple? Except that the book had been written. The book already did exist. The knowledge apparently was spread across the galaxy. That would be catastrophe... for if the book were not written, then it never had existed. The whole segment of the future that had been touched by the book in any wise would be blotted out, along with the book that had not been. And that could not be, Sutton told himself. That meant that Asher Sutton could not, would not be allowed to die before the book was written. However it were written, the book must be written or the future was a lie. Sutton shrugged. The tangled thread of logic was too much for him. There was no precept, no precedent upon which one might develop the pattern of cause and result. Alternate futures? Maybe, but it didn't seem likely. Alternate futures were a fantasy that employed semantics-twisting to prove a point, a clever use of words that covered up and masked the fallacies. He crossed the road a'nd took a footpath that led to a house standing on a knoll. In the marsh down near the river, the frogs had struck up their piping and somewhere far away a wild duck called in the darkness. In the hills the whippoorwills began the evening forum. The scent of new-cut grass lay heavy in the air and the smell of fog was crawling up the hills. The path came out on a patio and Sutton moved across it. A man's voice came to him. "Good evening," it said, and Sutton wheeled around. He sawthe man, then, for the first time. A man who sat in his chair and smoked his pipe beneath the evening stars. "I hate to bother you," said Sutton, "but I wonder if I might use your phone." "Certainly, Ash," said Adams. "Anything you wish." Sutton started and then felt himself freeze. Adams! he would walk. in on Adams! Adams chuckled at him. "Destiny works, against you, Ash." Sutton moved forward, found a chair in the darkness and sat down. "You have a pleasant place," he said. "A very pleasant place," said Adams. He tapped out his pipe and put it in his pocket. "So you died again." "I was killed," said Sutton. "I got unkilled almost immediately." "Some of my boys ?" asked Adams. "They are hunting for you." "A couple of strangers. Some of Morgan's gang." Adams shook his head. "I don't know the name." "He probably didn't tell you his name," said Shotton. "He told you I was coming back." "So that was it. The-man out of the future. You have him worried, Ash." "I need a phone," said Sutton. "You can use the phone." "And I need an hour." Adams shook his head. "I can't give you an hour." "A half-hour, then. I may have a chance to make it. A half-hour after I finish my call." "Nor a half-hour, either." "You never gamble, do you?" "Never," said Adams. "I do," said Sutton. He rose. "Where is that phone? I'm going to gamble on you." "Sit down. Ash," said Adams, almost kindly. "Sit down and tell me something." Stubbornly, Sutton remained standing. "If you could give me your word," said Adams, "that this destiny business won't harm Man, if you could tell me it won't give aid and comfort to our enemies... "Man hasn't any enemies," said Ash, "except the ones he's made." "The galaxy is waiting for us to crack. Waiting to close in at the first sign of weakness." "That's because we taught them it. They watched us use their own weaknesses to push them under." . "What will this destiny do?" asked Adams. "It will teach Man humility," said Sutton. "Humility and responsibility." "It's not a religion," said Adams. "That's what Raven told me. But it sounds like a religiqp... with all that preaching about humility." "Dr. Raven was right," Sutton told him. "It's not a religion. Destiny and religions could flourish side by side and exist in perfect peace. Theydo not conflict. Rather, they would complement one another. Destiny stands for the same things most religions stand for, and it holds out no promise of an after-life. It leaves that to religion." "Ash," asked Adams quietly, "you have read your history?" Sutton nodded. "Think back," said Adams. "Remember the Crusades. Remember the rise of Mohammedanism. Remember Cromwell in England. Remember Germany and America. And Russia and America. Religion and ideas, Ash. Man will fight for an idea when he wouldn't lift a hand for land or life or honor. But an idea to make other races fight Man... that's a different thing." "And you're afraid of an idea." "We can't afford any. Ash. Not right now, at least." "And still," Sutton told him, "it has been the ideas that have made men grow. We wouldn't have a culture if it weren't for ideas." "Right now," said Adams bitterly, "men are fighting in the future over this destiny of yours." "That's why I have to use the phone," said Sutton. "That's why I need an hour." . "I may be making a mistake," he said. "It's something I have never done in all my life. But I seem to be doing a lot of things I never did before. For once I'll gamble." He led the way across the patio and into a dimly lighted room, filled with old-fashioned furniture of the #th and #th centuries. "Jonathon," he called. Feet pattered in the hall and the android came into the room. "A pair of dice," said Adams heavily. "Mr. Sutton and I are about to gamble." "Dice, sir?" "Yes, that pair you and the cook are using." "Yes, sir," said Jonathon.' He turned and disappeared and Sutton listened, to his feet going through the house, fainterand fainter. Adams turned to face him. "One throw each," he said. "High man wins." Sutton nodded, tense. "I'f you win, you get the hour," said Adams. "If I win, you take my orders." "I'll throw with you," said Sutton. gamble." And he was thinking: I lifted the maneuvered it through space. I was the engine and the pilot, the power tubes and navigator. Energy garnered by my body took the ship and lifted it and drove it through space... eleven years through space. I brought the ship down tonight through atmosphere with the engines dead so it could not be spotted and I landed in the river. I could pick a book out of that case and carry it to the table without laying hands on it, and I could turn the pages without the use of fingertips. But dice. They roll so fast and topple so. "Win or lose," said Adams, "you can use the phone." "ilf I lose," said Sut.ton, "I won't need the phone." Jonathon came back and laid the dice upon a table top. When he saw that the two .humans were waiting for him to go, he left. His footsteps died away. Sutton nodded at the dice carelessly. "You first,-" he said. Adams picked them up, held them in his fist and shook them. Their clicking was like the frightened porcelain chatter of teeth. His fist came down above the table and his fingers opened. The little white cubes spun and whirled on the polished top. They came to rest. One was a five, the other a six. Adams raised his eyes to Sutton and there was nothing in them. No triumph. Absolutely nothing. "Your turn," he said. 'Perfect, thought Sutton, nothing less than perfect. It has to be two sixes. and picked up the dice, shook them in his fist, felt the shape and size of them rolling in his palm. Now take them in your mind, he told himself... take them in your mind as well as in your fist. Hold them in your mind, make them a part of you, as you made the two ships you drove through space, as you could make a book or chair or a flower you wished to pick. He changed for a moment and his heart faltered to a stop. The blood . slowed to a trickle in his arteries and veins, and he was not breathing. He felt the energy system take over, the other body that drew raw energy from anything that could be tapped. His mind reached out and took 'the dice and shook them inside the prison of his fist. He brought his hand down with a swooping gesture and let his fingers uncurl. The dice came dancing out. # ? They were dancing in his brain,too, as well as on the table top and he saw them, or sensed them, or was aware of them, as if they were a part of him. Aware of the sides that had the six black dots and the sides with all the other numbers. But they were slippery to handle, hard to make go the way he wanted them to go. For a fearful, agonizing second, it seemed almost as if the spinning cubes had minds and personalities that syere their very own. One of them was a six and the other still was rolling. The six was coming up and it toppled for a moment, threatening to fall back. A push, thought Sutton. Just a little push. But with brain power instead of muscular. The six came up and the two dice lay there, 'both of them showing sixes. Sutton drew in a sobbing breath and his heart beat once again and the blood pumped through the veins. The two men stood in silence for a moment, staring at one another across the table top. Adams spoke and his voice was quiet; one could not have guessed from his tone what he felt. "The phone is over there," he said. Sutton bowed, ever so slightly, and felt foolish doing it, like a character out of some incredibly old and bad piece of romantic fiction. "Destiny," he said, "still is working for me. When it comes to the pinch, destiny is there." "Your hour will start," said Adams, "as soon as you finish phoning." He turned smartly and walked back to the patio, very stiff and straight. Now that he had won, Sutton suddenly was weak, and he walked unsteadily to the phone. He sat down before it and took out the directory that he needed. ing: , Geography, historic, North America. dialed it and the screen lit up... The information robot said: "Can I be of service, sir?" "Yes," said Sutton. "I would like to know where Wisconsin was." "Where are you now, sir?" "I am at the residence of Mr. Christopher Adams." "The Mr. Adams w-ho is with the Department of Galactic Investigation?" "The same." "Then," the robot said, "you are in Wisconsin." "Bridgeport?" asked Sutton. "It Was on the Wisconsin River, on the north bank, a matter of seven miles above the junction with the Mississippi." "But those rivers -- I've never heard of them." "You are near them now, sir. The Wisconsin flows into the Mississippi just below the point where you are now." Sutton hung up, rose shakily and crossed the room, went out on the patio. A#ams was lighting up his pipe. "You got what you wanted?" Sutton nodded. "Get going, then," said Adams. "Your hour's already started." Sutton hesitated. "What is it, Ash?" "I wonder," said Sutton, "I wonder if you would shake my hand." I "Why, sure," said Adams. He rose ponderously to his feet and held out his hand. "I don't know which," said Adams, "but you are either the greatest man or the biggest damn fool . that I have ever known." rock-hemmed niche alongside the swiftly flowing river. The summer sun beat down into the pocket between the tree-mantled cliffs with a ' fierceness . that seemed to squeeze the last hope of life and energy out of everything... out of the weatherbeaten houses, out of the dust that lay along the street, out of leaf-wilted shrub and bush and beaten rows of flowers. The railroad tracks curved around a bluff and entered the town, then curved around another bluff and were gone again. For the short span of this arc out of somewhere into nowhere, they shone in the sun with the burnished sharpness of a whetted knife. Between the tracks and river, the railroad station drowsed, a foursquare building that had the look of having hunched its shoulders against summer sun and winter cold for so many years that it stood despondent and cringing, waiting for the next whiplash of weather. Sutton stood on the station platform and listened to the river, the suck and swish of tiny whirlpools that ran along the shore,, the gurgle of water flowing acro a hidden, upward-canted log, the soft sigh of watery fingers grasping at the tip of a downward-drooping branch. And above it all, cutting through it all, the real noise of the river. He lifted his head and squinted against the sun to follow the mighty metal span that leaped across the river from the bluff-top, slanting down toward the high-graded roadbed that walked across the gently rising valley on the other shore. Man leaped rivers on great spans of steel and he never heard the talk of rivers as they rolled down to the sea. Man leaped seas on wings powered by smooth, sleek engines, and the thunder of the sea was a sound lost in the empty vault of sky. Man crossed space in metallic cylinders that twisted time and space and hurled Man and his miraculous machines down alleys of conjectural mathematics that were not even dreamed of in this world of Bridgeport, #. Man was in a hurry and he went too far, too fast. So far and fast that #SI he missed many things... things that he should have taken time to learn as he went along... things that someday in some future age he would take the time to study. Someday I Man would come back along the trail again and learn the things he'd missed and wonder why he missed them and think upon the years that were lost for never knowing them. Sutton stepped down from the platform and found a faint footpath that went don to the river. Carefully, he made his way along it, for it was soft and crumbly and there were stones that might turn underfoot. found the old man. ' The oldster sat perched on a small boulder planted in the mud and he held a cane pole slanted riverwise across his knees. An ancient pipe protruded from a two-weeks' growth of graying whiskers, and an earthenware jug with a corncob for a cork sat beside him, easy to his hand. Sutton sat down cautiously on the shelving shore beside the boulder and wondered at the coolness of the shade from the trees and undergrowth -- a welcome coolness after the fierce splash of sun upon the village just a few rods up the bank. "Catching anything?" he asked. "Nope," said the old man. He puffed away at his pipe and Sutton watched in fascinated silence. One would have sworn, he told himself, that the mop of whiskers was on fire. "Didn't catch nothing yesterday, '-either," the old man added. He took his pipe out of his mouth with' a deliberate, considered motion and spat neatly into the center of a river eddy.' "Didn't catch nothing the day before yesterday." "You tvant to catch something, don't you?" Sutton asked. "Nope." The old man put down a hand and lifted the jug, worked out the corncob cork and wiped the jug's neck carefully' with a dirty hand. "Have a snort," he invited. Sutton, remembering the dirty hand, took it, gagging to himself. Cautiously, he lifted it and tipped it to his mouth. The stuff splashed and gurgled down his throat and it was liquid fire laced with gall and with a touch of brimstone to give it something extra. Sutton snatched the jug away and held it by the handle, keeping his mouth wide open to cool it and air out the taste. The old man took the jug back and Sutton swabbed at the tears running down his cheeks. "Ain't aged the way she should be," the old man apologized. "But I ain't got the time to fool around with that." He took himself a hooker, wiped , his mouth with the back of his hand and whooshed out his breath in gusty satisfaction. He put the jug down agjiin and worked the cork in tight. "Stranger, ain't you?" he asked Sutton. "Don't recall seeing you around."  some people by the name of Sutton. John H. Sutton." The old man chuckled. "Old John, eh? Him and me was kids together. Sneakiest little rascal that I ever knew. Ain't worth a tinker's damn, old John ain't. Went off to law school and got him an education. But he didn't make a go of it. Roosting out on a farm up on the ridge, over there across the river." He shot a look at Sutton. "You ain't no relative of his, are you?" "Well," said Sutton, "not exactly. Not very close, at least." "Tomorrow's the Fourth," said the old man, "and I recollect the time that John and me blew up a culvert in Campbell Hollow, come the Fourth. Found some dynamite a road gang had been using for blasting. John and me, we figured it would make a bigger bang if we confined it, sort of. So we put her in the culvert pipe and lit a long fuse. Mister, it blew that culvert all to hell. I recollect our dads like to took the hide off us for doing it." Dead ringer, thought Sutton. John H. Sutton is just across the river and tomorrow is the Fourth. July #, #, that's what the letter said. And I didn't have to ask. The old codger unwittingly told me. The sun was a furnace blast from the river's surface, but here, underneath the trees, one just caught the edge of the flare of heat. A leaf floated by and there was a grasshopper riding on it. The grasshopper A few copies of are still available if you hurry. If you missed it, you missed a real collector's item and some of the finest science-fiction reading to come along in years. Besides Part I of Clifford D. Simak's big October issue holds topranking novelets by Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon... short stories by Fritz Leiber and Isaac Asimov... and more ! Just mail #! with your name and address to Galaxy Science Fiction, # West #th Street, New York #, New York. Your Volume #, Number I issue will be sent postpaid to your door! Make Sure You Don't Miss More Issues! A year's subscription to Galaxy Science Fiction is only # -- twelve big issues of the best in modern science fiction mailed to you at a cash saving over the newsstand price. Subscribe today -- take no chances on missing your favorite writers' finest stories ! tried to jump ashore, but his jump fell short and the current grabbed and swallowed him out of sight. "Never had a chance," said the old man, "that hopper didn't. Wickedest river in these United States, the old Wisconsin is. Can't trust her. Tried to run steamboats on her in the early days, but they couldn't do it, for where there was a channel one day there' d be a sand bar on the next. Current shifts the sand something awful. 'Government fellow wrote a report on her once. Said the only way you could use the Wisconsin for navigation was to lathe and plaster it." From far overhead came the rumble of traffic crossing the bridge. A train came by, chuffing and grinding, a long freight that dragged itself up the valley. Long after it had passed, Sutton heard its whistle hooting. "Destiny," said the old man, "sure wasn't working worth a hoot for that hopper, was it?" that you said?" "Don't mind me," the old man told him. "I go around mumbling to myself. Sometimes people hear me; mostly they don't." "But destiny -- you said something about destiny." "Interested in it, lad? Wrote a story about it once. Didn't amount to much. Used to mess around some, writing, in my early days." Sutton relaxed and lay back. A dragonfly skimmed the water's surface. Far up the bank, a small fish jumped and left a widening circle in the water, "About this fishing," said Sutton. "You don't seem to care whether you catch anything or not." "Rather not," the old man told him. "Catch something and you got to take it off the hook. Then you got to bait up again and throw the hook back in the river. Then you got to clean the fish. It's an aw-ful sight of work." He tookthe pipe out of his mouth and spat carefully into the river. "Ever read Thoreau, son?" Sutton shook his head, trying to remember. The name struck a chord of memory. There had been a fragment in a book of ancient literature in his college days. All that was left of what was believed to have been an extensive amount of writing. "You ought to," the old man told him. "He had the right idea." Sutton rose and dusted off his trousers. "Stick around," the old man said. "You ain't bothering me. Hardly none at all." "Got to be getting along," said Sutton. "Hunt me up some other time," the old man said. "We could talk some more." "Someday," Sutton answered politely, "I'll do just that." "Care for another snort before you go?" "No, thank you," said Sutton, backing off. "No, thank you very much." "Oh, well," the old man said. He lifted the jug and took a long and gurgling drink. Sutton climbed the bank to the blaze of sun again. "Sure," said the station agent in the village, "the Suttons live just across the river, over in Grant County. Several ways to get there. Which one would you like?" "The longest one," Sutton told him. "I'm not in any hurry." The moon was coming up when Sutton climbed the hill to reach the bridge. He was in no hurry. He had all night. Tomorrow was the Fourth. T HE land was wild... wilder than anything Sutton had ever seen on the seeded, trimmed and watered parks of his native Earth. The land tilted upward, as if it rested on a knife edge, and . it was littered by great clumps of stone which appeared to have been flung down in godlike anger by a giant hand out of forgotten time. Stark bluffs speared erect, soaring massively, masked by mighty trees that seemed to have tried, at one time, to have matched the height and dignity of the rocky cliffs. Through the trees, Asher Sutton glimpsed the break in the cliffs ahead and knew that he was at the place that old John Sutton had mentioned in his letter. The sun was only a couple of hours high and there still was time. There still would be time, for John Sutton had talked to the man only a couple of hours or so and then had gone to dinner. From there on, with the cleft of the cliff in sight, Sutton took his time. 'He reached the top and found the boulder that his old ancestor had spoken of. It was almost designed for sitting. He sat upon it and stared across the valley, grateful for the shade. And there was peace, as John Sutton had said there was. Peace and the quieting majesty of the scene before him... the strange third-dimensional quality of the space that hung, as if alive, above the river valley. Strangeness, too, the strangeness of expected... and unexpected... happenings. He looked at his watch. It was half-past nine, so he left the boulder and lay down behind a patch of brush and waited. Almost as he did, there was a soft, smooth swish of motor-noise and a ship came down, a tiny one-man ship, slanting across the trees, to land in the pasture just beyond the fence. A man got out and leaned against the ship, staring at the sky and trees, as if satisfying himself that he had reached his destination. Sutton chuckled quietly to himself. Stage setting, he said. Dropping in unexpectedly and with a crippled ship... no need to explain your presence. Waiting for a man to come walking up and talk to you. Most natural thing in all the worlds. You didn't seek him out; he saw you and came to you, and of course he talked. You couldn't come walking up the road and turn in at the gate and knock at the door and say: "I came to pick up all the scandal I can about the Sutton family. I wonder if I might sit down and talk with you.' I ' But you could land in a pasture with a crippled ship and first you'd talk of corn and pasture, of weather and of grass, and finally you'd get around to talking about personal and family matters. The man had his wrench out and was tinkering at the ship. Jt must almost be time. Sutton lifted hfmself on his arms and stared through the close-laced branches of the, hazel brush. John H. Sutton was coming down the hill, a big-bellied man with a trim white beard and an old black hat, and his walk was a waddle with some swagger still left in it. said. This is how failure feels. Dry in the throat and heavy in the heart and tired in the brain. I am bitter, she told herself, and I have a right to be. Although I am so tired with trying and with failure that the knife edge of bitterness is dulled. "The psych tracer in Adams' office has stopped," Herkimer had said, and then the plate had gone dead as he cut the visor. There was no trace of Sutton. The tracer had stopped. That meant that Sutton was dead. He could not be dead, for historically he had written a book and he had not yet written it. But history was something that you couldn't trust. It was put together wrong, or copied wrong, or misinterpreted, or improved upon by a man with a misplacedimagination. Truth was so hard to keep, myth and fable so easy to breathe into a life that was more acceptable than truth. Half the history of Sutton, Eva knew, must be sheer legend. And yet there were certain truths that must be truths indeed. Someone had written a book and it would have had to be Sutton. No one else could break the language in which his notes were written, and the words themselves breathed the very sincerity of the man himself. Sutton had died, but not on Earth nor in Earth's solar system and not a youth of sixty. He had died on a planet circling some far star and he had not died for many, many years. These were truths that could not well be twisted. These were truths that had to stand until they were disproved. And yet the tracer had stopped. Eva got up from her chair and walked across . the room to the window that looked out on the landscaped grounds of the Orion Arms. Fireflies were dotting the bushes with their brief, cold, flame and the late moon was coming up behind a cloud that looked like a gentle hill. So much work, she thought. So many years of planning. Androids who had worn no mark upon their forehead and who had been formed to look exactly like the humans they replaced. And other androids who had marks upon their foreheads, but who had not been the androids made in the laboratories of the eightieth century. Elaborate networks of espionage, waiting for the day Sutton would come home. Years of puzzling over the records of the past, trying to separate the truth from the half-truth and the downright error. Years of watching and of waiting, parrying the counter-espionage of the Revisionist, laying the groundwork for the day of action. And being careful... always careful. For the eightieth century must not know, must not even guess. But there had been unseen factors. warned Adams that Sutton must be killed. Two humans had been planted on Benton's forfeited asteroid. Although those two factors could not account entirely for what had happened. There was another factor somewhere. She stood at the window, looking out at the rising moon, and her brows knit into crinkling lines of thought. But she was too tired. No thought would come. Except defeat. Defeat wmuld explain it all. Sutton might be dead and that would be defeat, utter and complete. Victory for an officialdom that was at This Only #I A score of favorite stories by your favorite science fiction writers -- Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, James MacCreigh, Merril, it's the biggest buy in science fiction, at only # postpaid! Also: by Judith Merril Gripping novel of an atom-bomb raid. # Famous novel... And Searching Mind" in book form. # Pre-foundation yarn, never before in print. # The greatest science-fiction detective story ever written. # Send remittance to: #I Fort Hamilton Parkway Brooklyn, New York once too timid and too vicious to take any active part in the struggle for the book. An officialdom that sought to out centuries of thought to maintain its grip on the galaxy. Such a defeat, she knew, would be even worse than a defeat by the Revisionists. If the Revisionists won, there still would be a book; there still would be the teaching of Man's own destiny. And that, she told herself, was better than no inkling of destiny at all. Behind her, the visiphone purred, and she spun around, hurried across the room. A robot said: "Mr. Sutton called. He asked about Wisconsin." "Wisconsin?" "It's an old place name," the robot explained. "He asked about a place called Bridgeport, Wisconsin." "As if he were going there?" "It would appear so." "Quick," said Eva. "Where is this Bridgeport?" "Five or six miles away," said the robot, "and at least four thousand years." She caught her breath. "In time," she said. "Yes, miss, in time." "Tell me exactly," Eva told him. The robot shook his head. "I don't know. I couldn't catch it. His mind was all roiled up. He'd just come through a trying experience." "Then you can't help." "I wouldn't bother if I were you," the robot told her. "He struck me as a man who knew what he was doing. He'll come'out all right." "You're sure of that?" "I woiild like to be," the robot admitted reluctantly. ton's feet and the man with the wrench slowly turned around. A swift, smooth smile spread upon his face in widening crinkles to hide the amazement that glittered in his eyes. "Good afternoon," said, Sutton. John H. Sutton was a stout speck that had almost climbed the hill. The sun had passed its zenith and was swinging toward the west. Down in the river valley, a half-dozen crows were cawing;it was as if the sound came from underneath their feet. The man held out his hand. "Mr. Sutton, isn't it?" he asked. "The Mr. Sutton of the eightieth century?" "Drop the wrench," said Sutton. The man pretended not to hear him. "My name is Dean," he said. "Arnold Dean. I'm from the eightyfourth." "Drop the wrench," said Sutton. Dean dropped it. Sutton hooked it along the ground with a toe until it was out of reach. "That is better," he said. "Now, let's sit down and talk." Dean gestured with a thumb. "The old man will be coming back. He will get to wondering and he will come back. He had a lot of questions he forgot to ask." "Not for a while," Sutton told him. "Not until he's eaten and had an after-dinner nap." Dean grunted and eased himself to a sitting position, his back against the ship. "Random factors," he said. "That's what balls up the detail. You're a random factor, Sutton. It wasn't planned this way." Sutton sat down easily and picked up the wrench. He weighed it in his hand. Blood, he thought, looking at the wrench. You'll have blood upon one end before the day is out. "Tell me,", said Dean. "Now that you are here, what do you plan to do?" "Easy," said Sutton. "You're going to talk to me. You're going to tell me something that I need to know." "Gladly," Dean agreed. "You said you came from the eighty-fourth. What year?" "Eighty-three eighty-six," said Dean. "But if I were you, I'd go a little past that. You'd find more to interest you." "But you figure I'll never get even as far as that," said Sutton. "You think that you will win." "Of course I do," said Dean. Sutton dug into the ground with the wrench. "A while ago, I found a man who died very shortly after. He recognized me and he made a sign with his fingers."  Dean spat upon the ground. "Android. They worship you, Sutton. They made a religion out of you. Because, you see, you gave them hope to cling to. You gave them something that made them, in one way, the equal of Man." "I take it," Sutton said, "you don't believe a thing I wrote." "Should I?" "I do," said Sutton. "You have taken the thing I wrote," said Sutton evenly, "and you are trying to use it to fashion one more rung in the ladder of Man's vanity. You have missed the point entirely. You have no sense of destiny because you gave destiny no chance whatever." And he felt foolish even as he said it, for it sounded so much like preaching. So much like what the men of old had said of faith when faith was just a word, before it had .become a force to really reckon with. "I won't lecture you," he said, angry at the smooth way Dean had put him on the defensive. "I won't preach at you. You either accept destiny or you ignore it. So far as I'm concerned I'll not raise a hand to convince any single man. The book I wrote tells you what I know. You can take it or you can leave it... it's all the same to me." "Sutton," said Dean, "you're batting your head against a stone wall. You haven't got a chance. You're fighting humankind. The whole human race against you... and nothing's ever stood against the human race. AH you have is a pack of measly androids and a few renegade humans... the kind of humans that used to swarm to the old cult-worships." "The empire is built on androids and robots," Sutton told him. "They can throw you out any time they want to. Without them you couldn't hold a single foot of ground outside the solar system." "They will stick with us in the empire," Dean retorted, very confident. "They may fight us on this business of destiny, but they'll stay with us because they can't get along without us. They can't reproduce, you know. And they can't make themselves. They have to have humans to keep their race going, to replace the ones who get knocked off." He chuckled. "Until one android can create ahother android, they will stick withuus and they will work with us. If they didn't, they would be committing racial suicide." "What I can't understand," said Sutton, "is how you know which ones are fighting you and which are sticking with you." "That," said Dean, "is the hell of it... we don't. If we did, we'd make short work of this lousy war. The android who fought you yesterday may shine your shoes tomorrow, and how are you to know ? The answer is, you don't." flicked it out on the pasture grass. "Sutton," he said, "it's enough to drive you nuts. No battles, really. Just guerrilla skirmishes here and there, when one small task force sent out to do a time-fixing job is ambushed by another task force sent out by the other side to intercept them." "Like I intercepted you," said Sutton. "Huh..." said Dean, and then he brightened. "Why, sure. Like you intercepted me." One moment Dean was sitting with his back against the machine, talking as if he meant to keep on talking... and in the next moment his body was a fluid streak of motion, jackknifing up and forward in a lunge toward the wrench that Sutton held. Sutton moved instinctively, toes tightening against the ground, leg muscles flexing to drive his body aside, hand starting to jerk the wrench away. But Dean had the advantage, of a full secbnd's start. Sutton felt the wrench ripped from his grip, saw the flash of it in, the sun as Dean swung it sharply for the blow. Dean's lips were moving. Even as he tried to throw up his arms to shield his head, Sutton read the words the other's lips were ironically forming: "So you thought the blood on the wrench would be mine!" Then pain exploded inside Sutton's head and he fell through darkness. Science Fiction for a year. We don't promise, you see, that you'll speak the Einsteinian general theory of gravitation as well as you talk English. with the latest, most profound, most thought-stimulating concepts of science. able human beings -- and non-human beings, of course -- in situations that are made logically, intelligently plausible. And why shouldn't they be? The situations are extensions of present knowledge... not the product of deadline-frenzied imaginations rupturing themselves to find a plot where none legitimately exists.  Intellectual honesty, emotional credibility, scientific realism... these are the criteria on which stories are written and bought for this:  And, naturally, you'll use the convenient coupon below. World Editions. Inc., # West #th Street, New York #, N. Y. # per year in United States, Canada. Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. possessions. Elsewhere #. 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"What happens to a suburban housewife and family when New York City is atom bombed... Terrifyingly real... unreservedly recommended to everyone able to enjoy science fiction above the level of space operas." -- galaxy Editor-in-Chief December, # Vol. #, No. # Art Director by Clifford D. Simak # Cover by Don Hunter Illustrating Second Night of Summer is published monthly by World Editions. Inc. Main offices: # West #th St... New York #. N. Y. # C per copy. Subscriptions (# copies) # per year in the United States. Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Application for entry as second-class matter is pending at the Post Office, New York, N.Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President : George A. Gogniat. Vice-President: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer : Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed. in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. ## by James H. Schmitz # by Raymond F. Jones # by Sam Merwin, Jr. # by Ross Rocklynne #I by Richard Matheson # by Willy Ley # by Groff Conklin # Next issue at your newsstand first week in December Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Let's Talk It Over A S WE go to press, the first L Fiction has been on sale three weeks, yet newsstands report sellouts, and mail response has been enormous in volume and encouragement. Each suggestion has been carefully examined and, even at this early date, reader preferences are beginning to assume clear outline:  Cover design and format are approved. There were some requests to remove the bottom band, where the story or author lineup is given, but this would mean surprising on the painting. See next issue before voting.  Cover treatment will have to wait until the results of our second and third cover experiments are evaluated. The first (done in analine, by the way, not pastel, as some seemed to think) deliberately subordinated the figures to the harsh landscape, a technique used by Utrillo and other great artists of our time. Sibley, who did the second cover, used the opposite approach. The present one, by Hunter, again is an artist's solution, which would, of course, have been handled differently as illustration. We won't stop evolving. Tabled.  One lone and evidently lonely man asked for nudes. Outvoted.  Interior art has to be regarded on the basis of several issues. Stone and Calle have been called back into service, which effectively removes them from the argument. Back to committee.  The vote thus far is vastly in favor of serials; any turnout of the opposition will have to be more than a lobby. Passed.  Not enough have indicated approval of three installments of serials. Referred to constituents.  Some authors plumped for story rating; readers in general gave no opinion. My feeling is that ratings overlook the need for editorial balance -- light shorts to balance grimmer novelets, for example, or the other way around. But it's not too much trouble to rate stories if you want it. Tabled.  Sentiment is unclear on articles. We are skipping one in the next issue to sample the reaction.  Using author's names at the end of their stories created an odd situation. Some objected without explaining why. Others liked not having to look up the author's name, either on the contents page or story opening. One reader thought it was somehow very clever. None of this was in myynind when I happened on the device; I just wanted to indicate The End without using those coldly final words, though I did realize it would make identification of the authors easier. Other editors seem we give it up by default? Referendum. been cheered by those who mention it, rather a large number. Passed.  Not a single person has argued against editorials, which is a big shock for me. I personally question their value in a fiction magazine and have used these pages Fiction in the shape you desire. But when that's done, what then? Do I borrow a lab smock and articles from science journals? Appeal to voters.  Final and most startling point is the letter department. There is evidently a greater reader dislike of mail columns than I had sensed. The objection, in fact, was so vociferous that I am hastily putting off action until more counties have a chance to be heard. The brief states that the space would be more gainfully employed for fiction. It's a point... but is it shared by the majority? Standing vote. T HE bulk of subscriptions, and it can really be spoken of as Science Fiction Novels, showing decided interest in old as well as new stories. "The Legion of Space" selection for reprint, but future titles have not been chosen at this writing. What books would you like to see reprinted? None, by the way, will be reprints of books that have already appeared at #. Speaking of subscriptions, we have a rather gigantic offer for Christmas. For this purpose, two ads have been placed back to back, so that the coupons can be clipped without mutilating the book. But those purists and collectors who wouldn't cut out even a deliberately arranged page can send in any kind of order sheet. The coupons are there for your convenience, not ours. Use anything, but subscribe... and take the opportunity to introduce others to your favorite type of fiction at this really generous saving. You might note also that we have a limited number of Volume I Numbers I and #. You can either buy them singly or start subscriptions with them. They're real collector's items. Better than stamps; at least you have something to read. Not at all incidentally, we have raised our word rates to the highest in science fiction. If any authors have missed that announcement through writers' magazines and agents, this should serve as notice. We want the best and are prepared to pay for it. How do we do it? By aiming for. the biggest audience of any science fiction magazine... with Second Throwing a person to the wolves to save the rest is never a pleasant solution. In this case it was an entire world! that brought summer officially to the land of Wend, on the planet of Noorhut, the shining lights were seen again in the big hollow at the east end of Grimp's father's farm. Grimp watched them for more than an hour from his upstairs room. The house was dark, but an occasional murmur of voices floated up to him through the windows below. Everyone in the farmhouse was looking at the lights. On the other farms around and in the village, which was over a hill and another two miles up the valley, every living soul who could get within view of the hollow was probably doing the same. For a time, the agitated yelling of the Village Guardian's big pank-hound had sounded clearly over the hill, but he had quieted down then very suddenly -- or had been quieted down, more likely, Grimp suspected. The Guardian was dead-set against anyone making a fuss about Night of Summer the lights -- and that included the pank-hound, too. There was some excuse for the pank-hound's excitement, though. From the window, Grimp could see there were a lot more lights tonight than had turned up in previous drifting and rising and falling silently all about the hollow. Sometimes one would lift straight up for several hundred feet, or move off over the edge of the hollow for about the same distance, and hang there suspended for a few minutes, before floating back to the others. That was as far as they ever went away from the hollow. There was, in fact, no need for the Halpa detector-globes to go any farther than that to get the information wanted by those who had sent them out, and who were listening now to the steady flow of brief reports, in some Halpa equivalent of human speech-thought, coming back to them through the globes: "No signs of hostile activity in the vicinity of the breakthrough point. No weapons or engines of power within range of detection. The area shows no significant alterations since the last investigation. Sharp curiosity among those who observe us consciously -- traces of alarm and suspicion. But no overt hostility." The reports streamed on without interruption, repeating the same bits of information automatically and incessantly, while the globes floated and dipped soundlessly above and about the hollow. Grimp. continued to watch them, blinking sleepily now and then, until a spreading glow over the edge of the valley announced that Noorhut's Big Moon was coming up slowly, like a Planetary Guardian, to make its own inspection of the lights. The globes began to dim out then, just as they always had done at moonrise in the preceding summers; and even before the top rim of the Big Moon's yellow disk edged over the hills, the hollow was completely dark. Grimp heard his mother starting up the stairs. He got hurriedly into bed. The show was over for the night and he had a lot of pleasant things to think about before he went to sleep. Now that the lights had showed up, his good friend Grandma Erisa Wannattel and her patent-medicine trailer were sure to arrive, too. Sometime late tomorrow afternoon, the big draft-trailer would come rolling up the valley road from the city. For that was what Grandma Wannattel had done the past four summers -- ever since the lights first started appearing above the hollow for the few nights they were to be seen there each year. And since four years were exactly half of Grimp's whole life, that made Grandma's return a mathematical certainty for Mm. Other people, of course, like the Village Guardian, might have a poor opinion of Grandma, but just hanging around her and the trailer and the gigantic, exotic-looking rhinocerine pony that pulled it was, in Grinip's opinion, a lot better even than going to the circus. And vacations started the day after tomorrow! The whole future just now, in fact, looked like one good thing after another, extending through a vista of summery infinities. Grimp-went to sleep happily. though at a distance greater than Grimp's imagination had stretched as yet, eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits. They stayed much too far out to permit any instrument of space-detection to suspect that Noorhut might be their common center of interest... But that was what it was. Though the men who crewedthe eight ships bore the people of Noorhut no ill will, hardly anything could have looked less promising for Noorhut than the cargo they had on board. Seven of them were armed with a gas which was not often use.d any more. A highly volatile lethal catalyst, it sank to the solid surface of a world over which it was freed and spread out swiftly there to the point where its presence could no longer be detected by any chemical means. However, its effect of drawing the final breath almost imperceptibly out of all things that were oxygen-breathing was not noticeably reduced by diffusion. The eighth ship was equipped with a brace of torpedoes, which were normally released some hours after the gas-carriers dispersed their invisible death. They were quite small torpedoes, since the only task remaining for them would be to ignite the surface of the planet that had been treated with the catalyst. All those things might presently happen to Noorhut. But they would happen only if a specific message was flashed from it to the circling squadron -- the message that Noorhut already was lost to a deadly foe who must, at any cost now, be prevented from spreading out from it to other inhabited worlds. school, as Grimp came expectantly around the bend of the road at the edge of the farm, he found the village policeman sitting there on a rock, gazing tearfully down the road. "Hello, Runny," said Grimp,. disturbed. Considered in the light of gossip he'd overhead in the village that morning, this didn't look so good for Grandma. It just didn't look good. The policeman blew his nose on a handkerchief he carried tucked into the front of his uniform. # . wiped his eyes, and gave Grimp an annoyed glance. "Don't you' call me Runny, Grimp!" he said, replacing the handkerchief. Like Grimp himself and most of the people on Noorhut, the policeman was brownskinned and dark-eyed, normally a rather good-looking young fellow. But his eyes were swollen and red-rimmed now; and his nose, which was a bit larger than average, anyway, was also red and swollen and undeniably runny. He had hay-fever. Grimp apologized and sat down thoughtfully on the rock beside the policeman, who was one of his numerous cousins, most of the families of Noorhut being somehow related. He was about to mention that he had overheard Vellit using the expression when she and the policeman came through the big Leeth-flower orchard above the farm the other evening -- at a much less leisurely rate than was their custom there. But he thought better of it. Vellit was the policeman's girl for most of the year, but she broke their engagement regularly during hay-fever season and called him cousin instead of dearest. "What are you doing here?" Grimp asked bluntly instead. "Waiting," said the policeman. "For what?" said Grimp, with a sinking heart. "Same individual you are, I guess," the policeman told him, hauling out the handkerchief again. He blew. "This year she's going to go right back where she came from or get pinched." "Who says so?" scowled Grimp. "The Guardian, that's who," said the policeman. "That good enough for you?" "He can't do it!" Grimp said hotly. "It's our farm, and she's got all her licenses." "He's had a whole year to think up a new list she's got to have," the policeman informed him. He fished in the breast-pocket of his uniform, pulled out a folded paper and opened it. "He put thirty-four items down here I got to check -- she's bound to miss on one of them." "It's a dirty trick!" said Grimp, rapidly scanning "as much as he could see of the list. "Let's us have more respect for the Village Guardian, Grimp!" the policeman said warningly. "Uh-huh," muttered Grimp. "Sure... If Runny would just move his big thumb out of the way. But what a list! Trailer; rhinocerine pony (beast, heavy draft, imported); patent medicines; household utensils; fortune-telling; pets; herbs; miracle-healing -- The policeman looked down, saw what Grimp was doing and raised the paper out of his line of vision. "That's an official document," he said, warding Grimp off with one hand and tucking the paper away with the other. "Let's us not get our dirty hands on it." Grimp was thinking fast. Grandma Wannattel did have framed licenses for some of the items he'd read hanging around inside the trailer, but certainly not thirty-four of them. "Remember that big skinless werret I caught last season?" he asked. The policeman gave him a quick glance, looked away again and wiped his eyes thoughtfully. The season on werrets would open the following week and he was as ardent a fisherman as anyone in the village -- and last summer Grimp's monster werret had broken a twelve-year record in the valley. "Some people," Grimp said idly, staring down the valley road to the point where it turned into the woods, "would sneak after a person for days who's caught a big werret, hoping he'd be dumb enough to go back to that pool." The policeman flushed and dabbed the handkerchief gingerly at his nose. "Some people would even sit in a haystack and use spyglasses, even when the hay made them sneeze like crazy," continued Grimp quietly. The policeman's flush deepened. He sneezed. "But a person isn't that dumb,", said Grimp. "Not when he knows there's anyway two werrets there six inches bigger than the one he ; caught." "Six inches?" the policeman repeated a bit incredulously -- eagerly. "Easy," nodded Grimp. "I had a look at them again last week." It was the policeman's turn to think. Grimp idly hauled out his slingshot, fished a pebble out of his small-pebble pocket and knocked the head off a flower twenty feet away. He yawned negligently. "You're pretty good with that slingshot," the policeman remarked. "You must be just about as good as the culprit that used a slingshot to ring the fire-alarm signal on the defense unit bell from the top of the schoolhouse last week." "That'd take a pretty good shot," Grimp admitted. "And who then," continued the policeman, "dropped pepper in his trail, so the pank-hound near coughed off his head when we started to track him. The Guardian," he added significantly, "would like to have a clue about that culprit, all right." "Sure, sure," said Grimp, bored. The policeman, the Guardian, and probably even the pank-hound, knew exactly who the culprit was; but they wouldn't be able to prove it in twenty thousand years. Runny just had to realize first that threats weren't going to get him anywhere near a record werret. Apparently, he had; he was settling back for another bout of thinking. Grimp, interested in what he would produce next, decided just to leave him to it...  Then Grimp jumped up suddenly from the rock. "There they are!" he yelled, waving the slingshot. A half-mile down the road. Grandma Wannattel's big, silvery trailer had come swaying out of the woods behind the rhinocerine pony and turned up toward the farm. The pony saw Grimp, lifted its head, which was as long as a tall man, and bawled a thunderous greeting. Grandma Wannattel stood up on the driver's seat and waved a green silk handkerchief. Grimp started sprinting down the road. The werrets should turn the trick -- but he'd better get Grandma informed, just the same, about recent developments here, before she ran into Runny. flicked the pony's horny rear with the reins just before they reached the policeman, who was waiting at the side of the road with the Guardian's check-list unfolded in his hand. The pony broke into a lumbering trot, and the trailer swept past Runny arid up around the bend of the road, where it stopped well within the boundaries of the farm. They climbed down and Grandma quickly unhitched the pony. It waddled, grunting, off the road and ' down into the long, marshy meadow above the hollow. It stood still there, cooling its feet. Grimp felt a little better. Getting the trailer off community property gave Grandma a technical advantage. Grimp's people had a favorable opinion of her, and they were a sturdy lot who enjoyed telling off the Guardian any time he didn't actually have a law to back up his orders. But on the way to the farm, she had confessed to Grimp that, just as he'd feared, she didn't have anything like thirty-four licenses. And now the policeman was coming up around the bend of the road after them, blowing his nose and frowning. "Just let me handle him alone," Grandma told Grimp out of the corner of her mouth. He nodded and strolled off into the meadow to pass the time with the pony. She'd had a lot of experience in handling policemen. "Well, well, young man," he heard her greeting his cousin behind him. "That looks like a bad cold you've got." The 'policeman sneezed. "Wish it were a cold," he said resignedly. "It's hay-fSver. Can't do a thing with it. Now I've got a list here -- " "Hay-.fever?" said Grandma. "Step up into the trailer a moment. We'll fix that." "About this list -- " began Runny, and stopped. "You think you got something that would fix it?" he asked skeptically. 'I've been to I don't know how many doctors and they didn't help any." "Doctors!" said Grandma. Grimp heard her heels click up the metal steps that led into the back of the trailer. "Come right in, won't take a moment." "Well -- said Runny doubtfully, but he followed her inside. Grimp winked at the pony. The .first round went to Grandma. "Hello, pony," he said. His worries couldn't reduce his appreciation of Grandma's fabulous draft-animal. Partly, of course, it was just that it was such an enormous beast. The long, round barrel of its body rested on short legs with wide, flat feet which were settled deep in the meadow's mud by now. At one end was a spiky tail, and at the other a very big, wedgeshaped head, with a blunt, badly chipped horn set between nose and eyes. From nose to tail and all around, it was covered with thick, rectangular, homy plates, a mottled green-brown in color. It weighed as much as a long-extinct terrestrial elephant, but that was because it was only a pony. Grimp patted its rocky side affectionately. He loved the pony most for being the ugliest thing that had ever showed up on Noorhut. According to Grandma, she had bought it from a bankrupt circus which had imported it from a planet called Treebel; and Treebei I was supposed to be a world full o; hot swamps, inexhaustibly explosive volcanoes and sulphurous stenches. One might have thought that after wandering around melting lava and under rainfalls of glowing ashes for most of its life, the pony would have considered Noorhut pretty tame. But though there wasn't much room for expression around the solid slab of bone supporting the horn, which was the front of its face, Grimp thought it looked thoroughly contented with its feet sunk out of sight in Noohut's cool mud. "You're a big fat pig!" he told it fondly. The pony slobbered out a long, purple tongue and carefully parted his hair. "Cut it out!" said Grimp. "Ugh!" The pony snorted, pleased, curled its tongue about a huge clump of weeds, pulled them up and flipped them into its mouth, roots, mud and all. It began to chew. Grimp glanced at the sun and turned anxiously to study the trailer. If she didn't get rid of Runny soon, they'd be calling him back to the house for supper before he and Grandma got around to having a good talk. And they weren't letting him out of doors these evenings, while the shining lights were here. He gave the pony a parting whack, returned quietly to the road and sat down out of sight near the back door of the trailer, where he could hear what was going on... so about the only thing the Guardian could tack on you now," the policeman was saying, "would be a Public Menace charge. If there's any trouble about the lights this year, he's likely to try that. He's not a bad Guardian, you know, but he's got himself talked into thinking you're sort of to blame for the lights showing up here every year." Grandma chuckled. "Well, I try to get here in time to see them every summer," she admitted. "I can see how that might give him the idea." "And of course," said the policeman, "we're all trying to keep it quiet about them. If the news got out, we'd be having a lot of people coming here from the city, just to look. No one but the Guardian minds you being here, only you don't want a lot of city people tramping around your farms." "Of course not," agreed Grandma. "And I certainly haven't told anyone about them myself." "Last night," the policeman added, "everyone was saying there were twice as many lights this year as last summer. That's what got the Guardian so excited." Chafing more every minute, Grimp had to listen then to an extended polite argument about how much Runny wanted to pay Grandma for her hay-fever medicines, while she insisted he didn't ' owe her anything at all. In the end, Grandma lost and the policeman paid up -- much too much to take from any friend of Grimp's folks, Grandma protested to the last. And then, finally, that righteous minion of the law came climbing down the trailer steps again, with Grandma following him to the door. "How do I look, Grimp?" he beamed cheerfully as Grimp stood up. "Like you ought to wash your face sometime," Grimp said tactlessly, for he was fast losing patience with Runny. But then his eyes widened in surprise. Under a coating of yellowish grease, Runny's nose seemed to have returned almost to the shape it had out of hay-fever season, and his eyelids were hardly puffed at all! Instead of flaming red, those features, furthermore, now were only a delicate pink in shade. Runny, in short, was almost handsome again. "Pretty good, eh?" he said. "Just one shot did it. And I've only got to keep the salve on another hour. Isn't that right, Grandma?" "That's right," smiled Grandma from the door, clinking Runny's money gently out of one hand into the other. "You'll be as good as new then." "Permanent cure, too," said Runny. He patted Grimp benevolently on the head. "And next week we go werret-fishing, eh, Grimp?" he added greedily. "I guess so," Grimp said, with a trace of coldness. It was his opinion that Runny could have been satisfied with the hay-fever cure and forgotten about the werrets. "It's a date!" nodded" Runny happily and took his greasy face whistling down the road. Grimp scowled after him, half-minded to reach for the slingshot then and there and let go with a medium stone at the lower rear of the uniform. But probably he'd better not. "Well, that's that," Grandma said softly. At that moment, up at the farmhouse, a cow horn went "Whoopwhoop!" across the valley. "Darn," said Grimp. "I knew it was getting late, with him doing all that talking! Now they're calling me to supper." There were tears of disappointment in his eyes. "Don't let' it fuss you, Grimp," Grandma said consolingly. "Just jump up in here a moment and close your eyes." Grimp jumped up into the trailer and closed his eyes expectantly. "Put out your hands," Grandma's voice told him. He put out his hands, and she pushed them together to form a cup. Then something small and light and furry dropped into them, caught hold of one of Grimp's thumbs, with tiny, cool fingers, and chittered. Grimp's eyes popped open. "It's a lortel!" he whispered, overwhelmed. "It's for you!" Grandma beamed. Grimp couldn't speak. The lortel looked at him from a tiny, black, human face with large blue eyes set in it, wrapped a long, furry tail twice around his wrist, clung to his thumb with its fingers, and grinned and squeaked. "It's wonderful!" gasped Grimp. "Can you really teach them to 'talk?" "Hello," said the lortel. "That's all it can say so far," Grandma said. "But if you're patient with it, it'll learn more." "I'll be patient," Grimp promised, dazed. "I saw one at the circus this winter, down the valley at Laggand. They said it could talk, but it never said anything while I was there." "Hello!" said the lortel. "Hello!" gulped Grimp. The cow horn whoop-whooped again. "I guess you'd better run along to supper, or they might get mad," said Grandma. "I know," said Grimp. "What does it eat?" "Bugs and flowers and honey and fruit and eggs, when it's wild. But you just feed it whatever you eat yourself." "Well, good-by," said Grimp. "And golly -- thanks. Grandma." He jumped out of the trailer. The lortel climbed out of his hand, ran up his arm and sat on his shoulder, wrapping its tail around his neck. "It knows you already," Grandma said. "It won't run away." Grimp reached up carefully with his other hand and patted the lortel. "I'll be back early tomorrow," he said. "No school... They won't let me out after supper as long as those lights keep coming around." The cow horn whooped for the third time, very loudly. This time it meant business. "Well, good-by," Grimp repeated hastily. He ran off, the lortel hanging on to his shirt collar and squeaking. Grandma looked after him and then at the sun, which had just touched the tops of the hills with its lower rim. "Might as well have some supper myself," she remarked, apparently to no one in particular. "But after that I'll have to run out the go-buggy and create a diversion." Lying on its armor-plated belly down in the meadow, the pony swung its big head around toward her. Its small yellow eyes blinked questioningly. "What makes you think a diversion will be required?" its voice asked into her ear. The ability to produce such ventriloquial effects was one of the talents that made-the pony well worth its consider ' able keep to Grandma. "Weren't you listening?" she scolded. "That policeman told me the Guardian's planning to march the village's defense unit up to the hollow after supper, and start them shooting at the Halpa detectorglobes as soon as they show up." The pony swore an oath meaningless to anyone who hadn't been raised on the planet Treebel. It stood up, braced itself, and began pulling its feet out of the mud in a succession of loud, sucking noises. "I haven't had an hour's straight rest since you talked me into tramping around with you eight years ago!" it complained. "But you've certainly been seeing life, like I promised," Grandma smiled. The pony slopped in a last, enormous tongueful of wet weeds. "That I have!" it said, with emphasis. It came chewing up to the road.  "I'll keep a watch on things while you're having your supper," it told her. defense unit marched in good order out of the village, on its way to assume a strategic position around the hollow on Grimp's father's farm, there was a sudden, small explosion not very far offT The Guardian, who was marching in the lead with a gun over his shoulder and the slavering pankhound on a leash, stopped short. The unit broke ranks and crowded up behind him. "What was that?" the Guardian inquired. Everybody glanced questioningly around the rolling green slopes of the valley, already darkened with evening shadows. The pank-hound sat down before the Guardian, pointed its nose at the even darker shadows in the woods ahead of them and growled. "Look!" a man said, pointing in the same direction. A spark of bright green light had appeared on their path, just where it entered the woods. The spark grew rapidly in size, became as big as a human head -- then bigger! Smoky green streamers seemed to be pouring out of it... "I'm going home right now," someone announced at that point, sensibly enough. "Stand your ground!" the Guardian ordered, conscious of the beginnings of a general withdrawal movement behind him. He was an old soldier. He unslung his gun, cocked it and pointed it. The pankhound got up on his six feet and bristled. "Stop!" the Guardian shouted at the green light. It expanded promptly to the size of a barrel, new streamers shooting out from it and fanning about like hungry tentacles. He fired. "Run!" everybody yelled then. The pank-hound slammed backward against the Guardian's legs, upsetting him, and streaked off after the retreating unit. The green light had spread outward jerkily into the shape of something like a many-armed, writhing starfish, almost the size of the trees about it. Deep, hooting sounds came out of it as it started drifting down the path toward the Guardian. He got up on one knee and, in a single drumroll of sound, emptied all thirteen charges remaining in his gun into the middle of the starfish. It hooted more loudly, waved its arms more wildly, and continued to advance. He stood up quickly then, slung the gun over his shoulder and joined the retreat. By the time the unit reached the first houses of the village, he was well up in the front ranks again. And a few minutes later, he was breathlessly organizing the local defenses, employing the tactics that had shown their worth in the raids of the Laggand Bandits nine years before. The starfish, however, was making no attempt to follow up the valley people's rout. It was still on the path at the point where the Guardian had seen it last, waving its arms about and hooting menacingly at the silent trees. X Grandma Wannattel said. "Before the first projection fizzles out, the next one in the chain will start up where they can see it from the village. It ought to be past midnight before anyone starts bothering about the globes again. Particularly since there aren't going to be any globes around tonight -- that is, if the Halpa attack-schedule has been correctly estimated." "I wish we were safely past midnight right now," the rhinocerine pony worriedly informed her. Its dark shape stood a little up the road from the trailer, outlined motionlessly like a ponderous statue against the red evening sky. Its head was up; it looked as if it were listening. Which it was, in its own way -- listening for any signs of activity from the hollow. "No sense getting anxious about it, " Grandma remarked. She was perched on a rock at the side of the road, a short distance from the pony, with a small black bag slung over her shoulder. "We'll wait here another hour till it's good and dark and then go down to the hollow. The breakthrough might begin a couple of hours after that." "It would have to be us again!" grumbled the pony. In spite of its size, its temperament was on the nervous side; and any companion of Grandma's was bound to run regularly into situations that were far from soothing. She belonged to a powerful human organization whose activities extended throughout most of those sections of the Galaxy where Terra's original colonies, and their branch-colonies, and branches of the branches, had grown down the centuries into new and independent civilizations. The role of the organization was that of watchdog for the safety of all, without regard for the often conflicting rulings and aims of individual governments; and sometimes that wider view made it necessary to take some very grim risks locally. Unfortunately, this was one of the times. "I'd 'feel a lot better myself if Headquarters hadn't picked us for this particular operation," Grandma admitted. "Us and Noorhut..." Because, by what was a rather singular coincidence, considering how things stood there tonight, the valley was also Grandma's home. She had been born, quite some while before, a hundred and eighty miles farther inland, at the foot of the dam of the great river Wend, which had given its name to the land, and nowadays supplied it with almost all its required power. Erisa Wannattel had done a great deal of traveling since she first became aware of the fact that her varied abilities and adventuresome nature needed a different sort of task to absorb them than could be found on Noorhut, which was progressing placidly up into the final stages of a rounded and balanced planetary civilization. But she still liked to consider the Valley of the Wend as her home and headquarters, to which she returned as often as her work would permit. Her exact understanding of the way people there thought about things and did things also made them easy for her to manipulate; and on occasion that could be very useful. In most other places, the means she had employed to turn the Guardian and his troop back from the hollow probably would have started a panic or brought armed ships and radiation guns zooming up for the kill within minutes. But the valley people had considered it just another local emergency. The bronze alarm bell in the village had pronounced a state of siege, and cow horns passed the word up to the outlying farms. Within minutes, the farmers were jpeltirig down the roads to the vilTae with their families and guns; Wd; very soon afterward, everything quieted down again. Guard lines had been set up by then, with the women and children quartered in the central buildings, while the armed men had settled down to watching Grandma's illusion projections -- directional video narrow beams -- from the discreet distance marked by the village boundaries. If nothing else happened, the people would just stay there till morning and then start a cautious investigation. After seeing mysterious blue lights dancing harmlessly over Grimp's farm for four summers, this section of Wend was pretty well conditioned to fiery apparitions. But even if they got too adventurous, they couldn't hurt themselves on the projections, which were designed to be nothing but very effective visual displays. What it all came to was that Grandma had everybody in the neighborhood rounded up and immobilized where she wanted them. ley presented an exceptionally peaceful twilight scene to the eye. There was nothing to show that it was the only present point of contact between forces engaged in what was probably a war of intergalactic proportions -- a war made wraithlike but doubly deadly by the circumstance that, in over a thousand years, neither side had found out much more about the other than the merciless and devastating finality of its forms of attack. There never had been any actual battles between Mankind and the Halpa, only alternate and very thorough massacres -- all of them, from Mankind's point of view, on the wrong side of the fence. The Halpa alone had the knowledge that enabled them to reach their human adversary. That was the trouble. But, apparently, they could launch their attacks only by a supreme effort, under conditions that existed for periods of less than a score of years, and about three hundred years apart as Mankind measured time. It was hard to find any good in them, other than the virtue of persistence. Every three hundred years, they punctually utilized that brief period to execute one more thrust, carefully prepared and placed, and carried out with a dreadfully complete abruptness, against some new point of human civilization -- and this time the attack was going to come through on Noorhut. "Something's starting to move around in that hollow!" the pony announced suddenly. "It's not one of their globe-detectors." "I know," murmured Grandma. "That's the first of the Halpa themselves. They're going to be right on schedule, it seems. But don't get nervous. They can't hurt anything until their transmitter comes through and revives them. We've got to be particularly careful now not to frighten them off. They seem to be even more sensitive to emotional tensions in their immediate surroundings than the globes." The pony made no reply. It knew what was at stake and why eight big ships were circling Noorhut somewhere beyond space-detection tonight. It knew, too, that' the ships would act only if it was discovered that Grandma had failed. But -- The pony shook its head uneasily. The people on Treebel had never become civilized to the point of considering the possibility of taking calculated risks on a planetary scale -- not to mention the fact that the lives of the pony and of Grandma were included in the present calculation. In the eight years it had been accompanying her on her travels, it had developed a tremendous respect for Erisa Wannattel's judgment and prowess. But, just the same, frightening the Halpa off, if it still could be done, seemed like a very sound idea right now to the pony. As a matter of fact, as Grandma well knew, it probably could have been done at this stage by tossing a small firecracker into the hollow. Until they had established their planetary foothold, the Halpa took extreme precautions. They could spot things in the class of radiation weapons a hundred miles away, and either that or any suggestion of local aggressiveness or of longrange observation would check the invasion attempt on Noorhut then and there. But one of the principle reasons she was here tonight was to see that nothing did happen to stop it. For this assault would only be diverted against some other world then, and quite probably against one where the significance of the spying detector-globes wouldn't be understood before it was too late. The best information system in the Galaxy couldn't keep more than an insignificant fraction of its populations on the alert for dangers like that -- She bounced suddenly to her feet and, at the same instant, the pony swung away from the hollow toward which it had been staring. They both stood for a moment then, turning their heads about, like baffled hounds trying to fix a scent on the wind. "It's Grimp!" Grandma exclaimed. The rhinocerine pony snorted faintly. "Those are his thought images, all right," it agreed. "He seems to feel you need protection... Can you locate him?" "Not yet," said Grandma anxiously. "Yes, I can. He's coming up through the woods on the other side of the hollow, off to the left. The little devil!" She was hustling back to the trailer. "Come on, I'll have to ride you there. I can't even dare use the go-buggy this late in the day." The pony crouched beside the I trailer while she quickly snapped on its saddle from the top of the back steps. Six metal rings had been welded into the horny plates If of its back for this purpose, so it was a simple job. Grandma clambered aloft, hanging onto the saddle's hand-rails. "Swing wide of the hollow," she warned. "Grimp came just as I suggested him mentally to. You needn't worry about making noise. The Halpa don't notice noise as such -- it has to have emotional content for them to hear it -- and the quicker Grimp spots us, the easier it will be to find him." The pony already was rushing down into the meadow at an amazing rate of speed -- it took a lot of muscle to drive a body like that through the gluey swamps of Treebel, and there were none here to impede it. It swung wide of the hollow and of what it contained, crossed a shallow bog farther down the meadow with a sound like a charging torpedo-boat, and reached the woods. It had to slow down then to avoid brushing off Grandma. "Grimp's down that slope somewhere," Grandma said. "He's heard us... "They're making a lot of noise," Grimp's thought reached them suddenly and clearly. He seemed to be talking to someone. "But we're not scared of them, are we?" "Bang-bang!" another voicethought came excitedly. "That was the lortel," Grandma said. "They're very good for giving children courage. Much better than Teddy Bears." "That's the stuff," Grimp resumed approvingly. "We'll slingshot them all if they don't watch out. But we'd better find Grandma soon." "Grimp!" shouted Grandma. The pony backed her up with a roaring call. "Hello?" came the lortel's thought. "Wasn't that the pony?" Grimp asked it, getting only another "hello" in reply. "All right, we'll go that way," he added, as though they had reached a joint decision. "Here we come, Grimp!" Grandma shouted, and the pony descended the steep side of a ravine with the straightforward technique of a rock slide. "That's Grandma!" thought Grimp. "Grandma!" he yelled. "Look out, there's monsters all around !" VV Grimp, dancing around the pony as Grandma Wannattel scrambled down from the saddle. "The monsters have the village surrounded, and the Guardian killed one and I slingshot another till he fizzled out, and I was coming to find you -- " "Your mother will be worried," said Grandma as they rushed into each other's arms. ' "No," grinned Grimp. "All the kids are supposed to be sleeping in the school house, and she won't look there till morning, and the teacher said the monsters were all holynations -- ho-lucy-nations. But he wouldn't go look when the Guardian said they'd show him one. He stayed right in bed! But the Guardian's all right -- he killed one, and I slingshot another one and the lortel learned a new word. Say 'bang-bang,' lortel!" "Hello!" squeaked the lortel. "Aw, he's scared," said Grimp disappointedly. "He can say it, though. And I've come to take you to the village so the monsters don't chase after you. Hello, pony!" "Bang-bang," said the lortel distinctly. "See?" cried Grimp. "He wasn't scared, after all -- he's a real brave lortel! If we see some monsters, don't you get scared, either, because I've got my slingshot," he said, waving it bloodthirstily, "and two back pockets all full of real big stones. I just hope my pants stay up. But that doesn't matter -- the way to do it is to kill them all." "It sounds like a pretty good idea, Grimp," Grandma agreed. "But you're awfully tired now." "No, I'm not!" Grimp said, surprised. His right eye sagged shut and then his left. He opened them both with an effort and looked at Grandma. "I can stay awake all night, I bet," he argued drowsily. "I am -- " "In fact," said Grandma, "you're asleep." Lii "No, I'm n -- " objected Grimp. Then he sagged toward the ground, and Grandma caught him firmly. "In a way, I hate to do it," she panted, wrestling him aboard the pony, which had hunkered down and flattened itself as much as it could to make the job easier. "He'd probably enjoy it. But we can't take a chance. He's a husky little devil, too," she groaned, giving a final boost, "and those ammunition pockets don't make him any lighter." She clambered up again behind him and noticed that the lortel had transferred itself to her coat collar. The pony stood up cautiously. "Now what?" it asked. "Might as well go straight to the hollow," said Grandma, breathing hard. "We'll probably have to wait around there a few hours, but if we're careful it won't do any harm." TN#D you find a good deep i-f pond?" Grandma asked the pony a little later, as it came squishing up softly through the meadow behind her to rejoin her at the edge of the hollow. "Yes," said the pony. "About a hundred yards back. That should be dose enough. How much more waiting do you think we'll have to do?" Grandma shrugged carefully. She was sitting in the grass with what, by daylight, would have been a good view of the hollow below. Grimp was asleep with his head on her knees. The lortel, after catching a few bugs in the grass and eating them, had settled down on her shoulder and dozed off, too. "I don't know," she said. "It's still three hours till Big .Moonrise, and it's bound to be some time before then. Now that you've found a waterhole, we'll just stay here together and wait. The one thing to remember is not to let yourself start getting excited about them." The pony stood huge and chunky beside her, staring down, its forefeet on the edge of the hollow. Muddy water trickled from its knobby flanks. It had brought the warm mud-smells of a summer pond back with it to hang in a cloud about them. There was vague, dark, continuous motion at the bottom of the hollow. A barely noticeable stirring in the single big pool of darkness that filled it. "If I were alone," the pony said, "I'd get out of here! I know when I ought to be scared. But you've taken psychological control of my reactions, haven't you?" "Yes," said Grandma. "It'll be easier for me, though, if you help along as much as you can. There's really no danger until their transmitter has come through." "Unless," objected the pony, "they've worked out some brandnew tricks in the past few hundred years." "There's that chance," Grandma admitted. "But they've never tried changing their tricks on us yet. If it were us doing the attacking, we'd vary our methods each time, as much as we' could. But the Halpa don't seem to think the way we do about anything. They wouldn't still be so careful if they didn't realize they were very vulnerable at this point." "I hope they're right about that!" the pony said anxiously. Its head moved then, following the motion of something that sailed flutteringly out of the depths of the hollow, circled along its far rim, and descended again. The beings of Treebel had a much deeper range of night vision than Grandma Wannattel, but she was also aware of that shape. "They're not much to look at," the pony remarked. "Like a big, dark rag of leather, almost." "Their physical structure is believed to be quite simple," Grandma agreed slowly. The pony was tensing up again, and she realized that it was best to go on talking to it, about almost anything at all. That always helped, even though the pony knew her much too well by now to be really fooled by such tricks. "Many very efficient life-forms aren't physically complicated, you know," she went on, letting the sbund of her voice ripple steadily into its mind. "Parasitical types, particularly. It's pretty certain, too, fhiat the Halpa have the hive-mind class of intelligence, so what goes for the nerve systems of most of the ones they send through to us might be nothing much more than secondary reflex-transmitters... Grimp stirred in his sleep at that point and grumbled. Grandma looked down at him. "You're sound asleep !" she told him severely, and he was again. "You've got plans for that boy, haven't you?" said the pony, without shifting its gaze from the hollow. "I've had my eye on him," Grandma admitted, "and I've already recommended him to the organization for observation. That's if we beat off the Halpa this time -- and Grimp will be pretty important in deciding that. If we do, we'll let him develop with only a little help here and there. We'll see what he picks up naturally from the lortel, for instance, in the way of telepathic communication and sensory extensions. I think Grimp's the kind we can use." "He's all right," the pony agreed absently. "A bit murderous, though, like most of you..." "He'll grow out of it!" Grandma said, a little annoyedly, for the subject of human aggressiveness was one she and the pony argued about frequently. "You can't hurry developments like that along too much. All of Noorhut should grow out of that stage, as a people, in another few hundred years. They're about at the turning-point right now -- " Their heads came up together then, as something very much like a big, dark rag of leather came fluttering up from the hollow and hung in the dark air above them. The representatives of the opposing powers that were facing each other on Noorhut that night took quiet stock of one another for a few moments. T HE Halpa was about six feet long and two feet wide, and considerably less than an inch thick. It held its position in the air with a steady, rippling motion, like a bat the size of a man, and then suddenly it extended itself with a snap, growing taut as a curved sail. The pony snorted involuntarily. The apparently featureless shape in the air turned toward it and drifted a few inches closer. When nothing more happened, it turned again and fluttered quietly back down into the hollow. "Could it tell I was scared?" thg pony asked uneasily. "You reacted just right," Grandma soothed. "Startled suspicion at first, and then just curiosity, and then another start when it made that jump. It's about what they'd expect from creatures that would be hanging around the hollow now. We're like cows to them. They can't tell what things are by their looks, as we do." But her tone was thoughtful, and she was more shaken than she would have cared to let the pony notice. There had been something indescribably menacing and selfassured in the Halpa's attitude. Almost certainly, it had only been trying to draw a reaction of hostile intelligence from them, probing, perhaps, for the presence of weapons that might be dangerous to its kind. But there was a chance -- a tiny but appalling chance -- that the things had developed some drastically new form of attack since their last breakthrough, and that they already were in control of the situation. In which case, neither Grimp nor anyone else on Noorhut would be doing any more growing up after tomorrow. Each of the eleven hundred and seventeen planets that had been lost to the Halpa so far still traced a fiery, forbidding orbit through space -- torn back from the invaders only at the cost of depriving it, by humanity's own weapons, of the natural conditions that any known form of life could tolerate. The possibility that that might also be Noorhut's future had loomed as an ugly enormity before her for the past four years. But of the nearly half a hundred worlds which the Halpa were found to be investigating, through their detector-globes, as possible mvasion points for this assault period, Noorhut finally had been selected by Headquarters as the one where local conditions were most suited to meet them successfully. That meant in a manner that must include the destruction of their only real invasion weapon, the fabulous and mysterious Halpa Transmitter. Capable as they undoubtedly were, they had shown in the past that they were able or instruments for each period of attack. Destroying the transmitter meant, therefore, that humanity would gain a few more centuries to figure out a way to get back at the Halpa before a new invasion attempt was made. S O ON all planets but Noorhut, the detector-globes shrewdly had been encouraged to send back reports of a dangerously alert and well-armed population. On Noorhut, however, they had been soothed along... and just as her home planet had been chosen as the most favorable point of encounter, so was Erisa Wannattel herself selected as the agent most suited to represent humanity's fptces under the conditions that existed there. Grandma sighed gently and reminded herself again that Headquarters was as unlikely to miscalculate the overall probability of success as it was to select the wrong person to achieve it. There ws' only the tiniest, the most theoretical, of chances that something might go wrong, and that she would end 'her long career with the blundering murder of her own home world -- But there was that chance. It meant the lives of people whose ancestors she had known, an entire world she loved and hoped to retire to some day. Worse yet, it meant relying on a small, helpless, untrained Child -- who might, after all, not be the instrument she should have chosen. , "There seem to be more down there every minute!" the pony was saying. Grandma drew a deep breath. "Must be several thousand by now," she acknowledged. "It's getting near breakthrough time, all right -- but that's only the advance forces." She added, "Do you notice anything like a glow of light down there, toward the center?" The pony stared a moment. "Yes," it said. "But I would have thought that was way under the red for you. Can you see it?" "No," said Grandma. "I get a kind of feeling, like heat. That's the transmitter beginning to come through. I think we've got them!" The pony shifted its bulk slowly from side to side. "Yes," it said resignedly, "or they've got us." "Don't think about that," Grandma ordered sharply and clamped one more mental lock shut on the foggy, dark terrors that were curling and writhing under her conscious thoughts, trying to emerge and paralyze her actions. She had opened her black bag and was unhurriedly fitting together something composed of a few pieces of wood and wire, and a father heavy, stiff spring... "Just be ready," she added. "I've been ready for an hour," said the pony, shuffling its feet. "I mean Grimp," she explained, looking down at the sleeping boy intently. "A child is more perceptive than an adult, and his time sense is sharper because he lives at a much faster rate." "Then his time sense should be faster, too," the pony said. "It's like slow-motion film," Grandma told him. "The faster the camera goes, the more pictures it takes and the slower the action. A child is like that. Our time sense speeds up as we grow older and our life processes slow down. You might say we take fewer pictures than a child does." "Makes sense," the pony agreed. "But what does it lead to?" "Grimp," said Grandma, her face very close to the boy's, "is going to feel the critical moment of the breakthrough and let us know. He'll tell by the static tension in the air, the way a child becomes cranky when an electrical storm is getting ready to happen. We can't respond like that... even trained perceptives likeus... and not, certainly, in awareness of fractions of a second. " The pony stared at Grimp with new respect. "He can?" that sounded like the fluttering of agitated strips of paper. "I hope so," she said. "It can't be just any child, though all of them are more sensitive than any adult. It has to be a hyper-sensitive child." "Then you're not sure he is." "No," Grandma confessed reluctantly. "I can't be sure until it's too late." They did no more talking after that. All the valley had become quiet about them. But slowly the a black, stirring, slithering tide. Bits of it fluttered up now and then like strips of black smoke, hovered a few yards above the mass, and settled again. Suddenly, down in the center of the hollow, there was something else. The rhinocerine pony had seen it first. Grandma Wannattel realized. It had been staring in that direction for almost a minute before she grew able to distinguish something that might have been a group of graceful miniature spires. Semi-transparent in the darkness, four small domes showed at the corners, with a larger one in the center. The central one was about twenty feet high and very slender. The whole structure began to solidifyswiftly... The Halpa Transmitter's appearance of crystalline slightness was u thing about it. For it brought instantly a jarring sense of what must be black distance beyond all distances, reaching back unimaginably to its place of origin. In that unknown somewhere, a prodigiously talented and determined race of beings had labored for human centuries to prepare and point some stupendous gun... and were able then to bridge the vast interval with nothing more substantial than this dark sliver of glass that had come to rest suddenly in the valley of the Wend But, of course, the Transmitter was all that was needed; its deadly poison lay in a sluggish, almost inert mass about it. Within minutes from now, it would waken to life, as similar transmitters had wakened on other nights on those lost and burning worlds. And in much less than minutes after that, the Halpa invaders would be hurled by their slender machine to every surface section of Noorhut -- no longer inert, but quickened into a ravening, almost indestructible form of vampiric life, dividing and sub-dividing in its incredibly swift cycle of reproduction, fastening to feed anew, growing again -- Spreading, at that stage, much more swiftly than it could be exterminated by anything but the ultimate weapons! jThe pony stirred suddenly, and she felt the wave of panic rolling up in it. "It's the Transmitter, all right," Grandma's thought reached it quickly. "We've had two descriptions of it before. But we can't be sure it's here until it begins to charge itself. Then it lights up -- first at the edges, and then at the center. Once the central spire lights up, it will be energized too much . to let them pull it back again. At least, they couldn't pull it back after that last time they were observed." She touched the sleeping boy anxiously. "Grimp will have to tell us when that exact instant is." The pony had been told all that before. But as it listened, it was quieting down again. "And you're to go on sleeping!" Grandma Wannattel's thought instructed Grimp next. "Your perception and time sense are to be alert, but you'll sleep on and remember nothing until I wake you." the Transmitter -- first into the four outer spires, and a moment later into the big central one, in a sullen red glow. It lit the hollow with a smoky glare. The pony took two startled steps backward. "Don't fail us, Grimp!" whispered Grandma's thought. She reached again into her black bag and took out a small plastic ball. It reflected the light from the hollow in dull crimson gleamiiigs. She let it slip down carefully Inside the shaftlike frame of the gadget she had put together of wood and wire. It clicked into place there against one end of the compressed spring. But she didn't take her eyes off the boy. He was stirring restlessly, his breathing growing quicker and more difficult. His little hands' twitched from time to time, though he remained asleep. "Watch the Halpa," she tensely told the pony. "I don't know if Grimp will sense the moment exactly. I'm not sure we can handle it then, but... Down below, they lay now in a blanket fifteen feet thick over the wet ground, like big, black, water-sogged leaves swept up in circular piles about the edges of the hollow. The tops and sides of the piles were fluttering and shivering and beginning to slide down toward the Transmitter. She felt tension growing, but she couldn't trust her own age-dulled perception. If the child failed, all Noorhut would fall to the Halpa. Grimp twisted in Grandma's arms abruptly, like a caught and fighting werret, and a strangled cry that was almost a sob came from him. It was what Grandma had been waiting for. She raised the wooden catapult to her shoulder. The pony shook its blunt-horned head violently from side to side, made a loud bawling noise, surged forward and plunged down the steep slope of the hollow in a thundering rush. Grandma aimed carefully and let goThere was no explosion. The blanket of dead-leaf creatures was lifting into the air ahead of the pony's ground-shaking approach in a weightless, silent swirl of darkness, which instantly blotted both the glowing Transmitter and the pony's shape from sight. The pony roared once as the blackness closed over it. A second later, there was a crash like the shattering of a hundred-foot mirror. At approximately the same moment, Grandma's plastic ball exploded somewhere in the center of the swirling storm of lethal life. Cascading fountains of white fire filled the whole of the hollow. Within the fire, a dense mass of shapes fluttered and writhed frenziedly like burning rags. From down where the fire boiled fiercest rose continued sounds of brittle substances suffering enormous violence. The pony was trampling the Transmitter, making sure of its destruction. "Better get out of it!" Grandma shouted anxiously. "What's left of that will all melt now, anyway!" She didn't know whether it heard her or not, but a few seconds later, it came pounding up the side of the hollow again. Blazing from nose to rump, it tramped past Grandma, plunged through the meadow behind her, shedding white sheets of fire that exploded the marsh grass in its tracks, and hurled itself headlong into the pond it had selected previously. There was a great splash, accompanied by sharp hissing noises. Pond and pony vanished together under billowing clouds of steam. "That was pretty hot!" its thought came to Grandma. "Hot as anything that ever came out of a volcano!" she affirmed. "If you'd played around in it much longer, you'd have provided the village with roasts for a year." "I'll just stay here for a while, till I've cooled off a bit," said the pony. "And I'd like to forget that last remark of yours, too. Civilized cannibals, that's what people are!" strangling her then, and discovered it was the lortel's tail. She unwound it carefully. But the lortel promptly reanchored itself with all four hands in her hair. She decided to leave it there. It seemed badly upset. Grimp, however, relaxed suddenly and slept on. It was going to take a little maneuvering to get him back into the village undetected before morning, but she would figure that out by and by. A steady flow of cool night air was being drawn past them into the hollow now, and rising out of it again in boiling, vertical columns of invisible heat. At the bottom of the de-luxe blaze she'd lit down there, things still seemed to be moving about -- but very slowly. The Halpa were tough organisms, all right, though not nearly so tough, when you heated them up with a really good incendiary, as the natives of Treebel. She would have to make a final check of the hollow around dawn, of course, when the ground should have cooled off enough to permit it -- but her century's phase of the Halpa War did seem to be over. The defensive part of it, at any rate. Wet munching sounds from the pond indicated the pony felt comfortable enough by now to take an interest in the parboiled vegetation it found floating about it. "You picked the right child, after all," the pony's thought remarked to her. "Yes, Grimp worked out fine," Grandma said a little proudly. "I was pretty worried for a while." "I won't say I was exactly easy myself. I thought Grimp was reacting slowly and I was getting ready to hurl the incendiary." "But you didn't," the pony pointed out, chewing loudly. "No. I suspected my perception might be too fast. It turned out to be almost two minutes off." The rhinocerine pony stopped munching and she felt the shiver of fear that went through its mind, "As much as that? You'd have caught the Transmitter before it j was matter. Nothing would have happened... except the Halpa would have swarmed through when the Transmitter materialized. We couldn't have stopped them." "Grimp had the crisis down to the micro-second," she said happily. "Why fret about what might have happened?" "You're right, of course," the pony agreed, but its enormous appetite seemed suddenly to have disappeared. Grandma settled down carefully to sleep in the long marsh grass without disturbing Grimp's position too much. She appeared calm, but her sleep was more of a faint than untroubled slumber. nattel's patent-medicine trailer was nine miles from the village and rolling steadily southward up the valley road through the woods. As usual, she was departing under an official cloud. Grimp and the policeman had showed up early to warn her. The Guardian was making use of the night's various unprecedented disturbances to press through a vote on a Public Menace charge against Grandma in the village. Since everybody still felt rather excited and upset, he had a good chance just now of getting a majority. Grimp had accompanied her far enough to explain that this state of affairs wasn't going to be permanent. He had it all worked out: Runny's new immunity to hayfever had brought him and the pretty Vellit to a fresh understanding overnight; they were going to get married five weeks from now. As a married man. Runny would then be eligible for the post of Village Guardian at the harvest elections. Between Grimp's cousins and Vellit's cousins, Runny's backers would just about control the vote. So when Grandma got around to visiting the valley again next summer, she needn't worry any more about police interference or official disapproval... Grandma had nodded approvingly. That was about the kind of neighborhood politics she'd begun to play herself at Grimp's age. She was pretty sure by now that Grimp was the one who eventually would become her successor as guardian of Noorhut, as well as of the starsystem to which Noorhut belonged, and perhaps of a good many other star-systems besides. With careful schooling, he ought to be just about ready for the job by the time she ing ravine, at the far end of which lay something that Grimp would have recognized instantly as a small spaceship from his one visit to the nearest port city. A large round door opened soundlessly in its side as they approached. The pony came to a stop. Grandma got down from the driver's seat and unhitched it. The pony walked into the airlock, and the trailer picked its wheels off the ground and floated in behind it. Grandma Wannattel walked in last, and the lock closed quietly. The ship lay still a moment longer. Then it was suddenly gone. Dead leaves went dancing for a while about the ravine, disturbed by the breeze of its departure. In a place very far away -- so far that neither Grimp nor his parents nor anyone in the village except the schoolteacher had ever heard of it -- a set of instruments began signaling for attention. Somebody answered them. Grandma's voice announced distinctly; "This is Agent Wannattel's report on the successful conclusion of the Halpa operation on Noorhut -- " An hour after he had started High above Noorhut's skies, back to the farm, looking suddeneight great ships swung instantly ly a little forlorn, the trailer swung  #iff of their watchful orbits about off the valley road into a narrow I t'Me planet and flashed off again forest path. Here the pony length- I' into the blackness of space that was ened its stride, and less than five their sea and their home, The house was furnished with all luxuries, including women. If if only had a lease that could be broken -- ing the lawn, could see two of the three wings of the house, which radiated spokelike from its heptagonal central portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars, reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in pre-Hitler Cracow. Dana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman. Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn hair. She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like favor. Involuntarily ie glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his only garment fo make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design should behave. "Waiting for me?" Tennant aed the girl. She said, "I'd rather be dead. Maybe I ami Maybe' we' re all dead and this is Hell." He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening face. He said, "So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the first to come back for a second run." "Don't flatter yourself," she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the tight-fitting tubular gown. "If I could do anything about it..." "But you can't," he told her. "They're too clever." "Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?" she asked cynically. "If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son." "T don't even want to think about him," said Tennant. "Let's get on with it." He could sense the restless stirring of the woman within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within himself -- desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted within them by their captors. They walked toward the house. or a cage. Within the dome of the barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones which impeded its flow. But the lawn was not of grass -- it was of a bright green substance that might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through -- except that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral. They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it wasn't. It was a prison, a cage. The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall. Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigaret. A tall woman, thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown. Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she was feeling. "Okay, I guess," she said. "The way they manage it, there's nothing to it." She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and brought through. "Good," he said. "Glad to hear it." He felt oddly embarrassed. He turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist. Olga had been a waitress in a . mining town hash-house near Scranton. Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not. "I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk," he said. "I don't feel at ease in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own." "You're not doing so badly," Dana replied acidly. "Lay off -- he can't help it," said Eudalia unexpectedly. "He doesn't like it any better than we do." i "But he doesn't have to -- have them," objected Olga. She had a trace of 'Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late, however. She was too frightened. T 'ET'S get the meal ordered,"I -- i said Dana and they were all silent, thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came. Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise. It arrived before the meal, materializing against one of the seven walls of the roofless chamber. It was a large cabinet on slender straight legs that resembled dark polished wood. Tennant went to it, opened a hingeless door and pushed a knob on the inner surface. At once the air was hideous with the acerate harmony of a singing commercial... so go soak your head, be it gold, brown or red, in Any-tone Shampoo! A disc jockey's buoyant tones cut in quickly as the final ooooo faded. "This is Grady Martin, your old night-owl, coming to you with your requests over Station from Theresa McManus and the gifls in the family entrance of Conaghan's Bar and Grill on West..." Tennant watched the girls as a sweet-voiced crooner began to ply an unfamiliar love lyric to a melody whose similarity to a thousand predecessors doomed it to instant success. Olga sat up straight, her pale blue eyes round with utter disbelief. She looked at the radio, at Tennant, at' the other two women, then 'back at the machine. She murmured something in Polish that was inaudible, but her expression showed that it must have been wistful. Eudalia grinned at Tennant and, rising, did a sort of tap dance to the music, then whirled back into her chair, green dress ashimmer, and sank into it just to listen. Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. She might have been listening to Brahms or Debussy. Her eyes glowed with the salty almost beautiful. "Rog!" she cried softly when the music stopped. "A radio and "As real as you or I," he told her. "It took quite a bit of doing, getting them to put a set together. And I wasn't sure that radio would get through. TV doesn't seem to. Somehow it brings things closer... Olga got up quite suddenly, went to the machine and, after frowning at it for a moment, tuned in another station from which a Polish-speaking announcer was followed by polka music. She leaned against the wall, resting one smooth forearm on the top of the machine. Her eyes closed and she swayed a little in time to the polka beat. ing at him and there was near approval in her expression -- approval that faded quickly as soon as she caught his gaze upon her. The food arrived then and they sat down at the round table to eat it. Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their foods, with their cigarets, with everything in their prison -- or their cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell, living, apparently, in a world without odor at all. Dana said suddenly, "I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost as much as I hate you." Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana disapprovingly. "Why take it out on Rog?" she asked bluntly. "He didn't ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because he doesn't? Well, maybe be can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way things are arranged here." "Thanks, Eudalia," said Tennant. "I think I can defend myself. But she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as -- laboratory animals. They have the means to make us do whatever they want." "Rog," said Dana, looking suddenly scared, "I'm sorry I snapped at you. I know it's not your fault. I'm -- changing." He shook his head. "No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself that seem absolutely impossible." "Are we really in the fourth dimension?" Dana asked. Of the three of them, she alone had more than a high-school education. "We may be in the eleventh for all I know," he told her. "But I'll settle for the fourth -- a fourth dimension in space, if that makes scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't sure of that, though, till we got the radio." "Why haven't they brought more of us through?" Eudalia asked, tamping out ashes in a tray that might have been silver. "I'm not sure," he said thoughtfully. "I think it's hard for them. They have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they haven't brought anyone through -- not alive." "Why do they do it -- the other way, I mean?" asked Dana. Tennant shrugged. "I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose it's because they're pretty human." "Human!" Dana was outraged. "Do you call it human to -- " "Hold on," he said. "They pass through their gateway to Earth at considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who don't -- or can't -- they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just laboratory specimens." "Maybe," Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. "But the things they do -- stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on display in their --  their whatever they live in. You call that human, iRog?" "Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?" Tennant asked quietly. "Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab? Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bearskin rug?" "I was," said Olga. "But that's not the same thing." "Of course not," he agreed. "In the one instance, we're the hunters, the breeders, the trophy collectors. In  the other" -- he shrugged -- we're the trophies." iai I r finished eating and then Dana stood up and said, "I'm going out on the lawn for a while." She unzipped her golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that matched his, and. a narrow halter. "You thought those up while we ate," he said. It annoyed him to be copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house, holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm. Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another, angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were asleep. "They never cry," the thin woman told him. "But they grow -- God, how they grow!" "Good," said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, "I wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and Olga so scared. It isn't their fault." "And it's not yours," insisted Eudalia. "Don't let them make you think it is." "I'll try not to," he said and stopped, realizing the family party was over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome. Then tame the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his teleportation... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant; it was, that was all. He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have discarded as too nightmarish for belief. As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt perfectly smooth and continuously straight.  The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical dumbbell -- that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He knew this even though no reason was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where hq could see it, was beyond description. The captor Tennant called Opal came in through a far corner of the ceiling. He -- if it was a he -- was not large, although this, Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name Opal. Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled or sung Mississippi Mud and Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any human sense. You will approach without use of your appendages. The command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety feet. He was getting good at it. Dog does trick, he thought. routine at Opal's bidding. When at last he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as curious as a cat -- or a human being. Tennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be intellectually twodimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to retrieve. Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir of near-sick excitement as he received the thought: Now you are ready. We are going through at last. Opal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended. Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what his role was to be. He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him. There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might have been the interior of a giant concertina -- or an old-fashioned kodak. He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some sott of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal. Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the thought: What cover must your body have not to be conspicuous? Tennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He received quick reproof that made his' head ring as from a blow. He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him everything but; the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors, seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense. Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he hadn't seen her in -- was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited. He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going to see his wife again... and maybe he could trick his way into not returning.   L for him was new, although her eyes were old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how Agatha could afford a servant. "Is Mrs. Tennant in?" he asked. She shook her head and fright made twin stoplights of the rouge on her cheeks as she shut the door behind him. He went into the living room, directly to the long silver cigaret box on the coffee table, ft was proof of homecoming to fill his lungs with smoke he could smell. He took another drag, saw the maid still in the doorway, staring. "There's no need for fright," he told her. "I believe I still own this house." Then, "When do you expect Mrs. Tennant?" "She just called. She's on her way home from the club." Still looking frightened, she departed for the rear of the house. Tennant stared after her puzzledly until the kitchen door swung shut behind her. The club? What club ? He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the thought down where Opal could not detect it. He took another deep, lungaround the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out. Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha; the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's specimen. He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive... or because he couldn't on Earth? It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase; the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone, but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash with the casual antiquity of the living room. Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing dose to him, her lovely fac# lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be real... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his house, his life... Your wife and a man are approaching the house. The thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command: You are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another live male. and defiant in his chair. The punishment, when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout. Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about his thoughts -- that was why he had been free to think of escape. Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant. But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's power over him. He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted him to do; he was to play the Judas goat... or rather the Judas ram, leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen. Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette. The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh... and tightened further when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the cigarette shake in his fingers. "... Don't be such a stuffedshirt, darling." Agatha's mocking sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. "Charley wasn't making a grab for me. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun. Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl... Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better groomed, more assured than his memory of her. "I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it." Cass' tone was peevish. "But your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn..." It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor. Cass Gordon -- the man, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted him. The man, that was all -- unless one threw in .the little black mustache and the smooth salesman's manner. "You know, Cass," Tennant said quietly, "I never for a moment dreamed it would be you." "Roger'" Agatha found her voice. "You're alive!" "Roger," repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trioof tent-show actors. He said, "For God's sake, sit down." Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him furtively. She said defensively, "I had detectives looking for you for six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that and -- disappearing! I've been out of my mind." "Sorry," said Tennant. "I've had my troubles, too." Agatha was scared stiff -- of him. Probably with reason. He looked again at Cass Gordon and found that he suddenly didn't care. She couldn't say it was loneliness. Women have waited longer than eighteen months. He would have if his captors had let him. "Where in hell have you been, Rog?" Gordon's tone was almost parental. "I don't suppose it's news to you, but there was a lot of suspicion directed your way while that crazy killer was operating around here. Agatha and I managed to clear you." "Decent of you," said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that served as a bar. It was fully equipped -- with more expensive liquor, he noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses. ithe rim of hers. "Tell us, Rog. We have a right to know. T do, anyway." "One question first," he said. there been any lately?" "Not for over a year," Cass told him. "They never did get the devil who skinned those bodies and removed the heads." So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him for his Judas ram duties. Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad. "In a way," he replied unemotionally. "Sorry if I've worried you, Agatha, but my life has been rather -- indefinite, since I -- left." He was standing no more than four inches from this woman he had desired desperately for six years, and he no longer wanted her. He was acutely conscious of her perfume. It wrapped them both like an exotic blanket, and it repelled him. He studied the firm clear flesh of her cheek and chin. the arch of nostril, the carmine fullness of lower lip, the swell of bosom above low-cut gown. And he no longer wanted any of it or of her. Cass Gordon -- It didn't have to be anybody at all. For it to be Cass Gordon was revolting. "Rog," she said and her voice trembled, "what are we going to do? What do you want to do?" Take her back? He smiled ironically; she wouldn't know what that meant. It would serve her right, but maybe there was another way. "I don't know about you," he said, "but I suspect we're in the same boat. I also have other interests." "You louse!" said Cass Gordon, arching rib cage and nostrils. "If you try to make trouble for Agatha, I can promise... "What can you promise?" demanded Tennant. When Gordon's onset subsided in mumbles, he added, "Actually, I don't think I'm capable of making more than a fraction of the trouble for either of you that you both are qualified to make for yourselves." He lit a cigarette, inhaled. "Relax. I'm not planning revenge. After this evening, I plan to vanish for good. Of course, Agatha, that offers you a minor nuisance. You will have to wait six years to marry Cass -- seven years if the maid who let me in tonight talks. That's the law, isn't it, Cass? You probably had it all figured out." "You bastard," said Cass. "You dirty bastard! You know what a wait like that could do to us." "Tristan and Isolde," said Tennant, grinning almost happily. "Well, I've had my little say. Now I'm off again. Cass, would you give me a lift? I have a conveyance of sorts a couple of miles down the road." powers to read the thoughts around him then. He heard Agatha's quick intake of breath, saw the split-second look she exchanged with Cass. He turned away, knowing that she was imploring her lover to do something, anything, as long as it was safe. Deliberately, Tennant poured himself a second drink. This might be easier and pleasanter than he had expected. They deserved some of the suffering he had had and there was a chance that they might get it. Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They had simply picked him up. Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture. All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides as trophies. With women it was different -- perhaps the captors' weapons, whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in body chemistry or psychology, perhaps. More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they wanted. Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It simply wasn't feasible -- and furthermore he derived an impression of the tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself. They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world. How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. "In that fact lay a key to their character -- if such utterly alien creatures could be said to have character. him, saying something about one for the road. Tennant accepted only because it was luxury to drink liquor that smelled and tasted as liquor should. He raised his glass to Agatha, said, "I may turn up again, but it's unlikely, so have yourself a time, honey." "Oh, Rog!" said Agatha and her eyes were fraudulently wet. Tennant felt pure contempt. She knew that Cass intended to try to kill him -- and she couldn't play it straight. She had to ham it up with false emotion, even though she had silently pleaded with her lover to do something, anything. He put down his empty glass. The thought that he had spent eighteen months yearning for this sheSmithfield like a half-damp puppy made him almost physically ill. "You'll make out," he told her with savage sincerity. In her way, in accord with her desires, Agatha would. At bottom she was, he realized, as primitive, as realistic, as the three who waited beyond the gateway. An ex-waitress, an ex-forewoman, an ex-model of mediocre success -- and Agatha. He tried to visualize his wife as a member of his involuntary harem and realized that she would adapt as readily as the other women. But he didn't want her. He turned away and said, "Ready, Cass?" "Right with you," the ex-halfback replied, hurrying toward the hall. Tennant considered, took another drink for his own road. The signals had been given, the game was being readied. He had no wish to upset the planning, he had some plans also, and theirs gave his enough moral justification to satisfy his usually troublesome conscience. Agatha put her arms around his neck. She was warm and soft and moist of lip and playing her part with obvious enjoyment of its bathos. She murmured, "I'm so sorry, Rog, darling -- " "Cut!" he said almost in a snarl and wrenched free. He brought out a handkerchief -- he had remembered to have one created, praise Allah -- and rubbed lipstick from his face. He tossed the handkerchief to Agatha. "You might have this analyzed," he told her lightly. "It could be interesting. The handkerchief, not the lipstick." "I'm glad you're going!" she blazed, although her voice was low. "I'm glad you're going. I hope you never come back." "That," he told her, "makes exactly two of us. Have fun." He went out into the hall, where Cass was waiting, wearing what was intended to be a smile. They went out to the car together -- it was a big convertible -- and Cass got behind the wheel. He said, "Where to, old man?" "The Upham Road," said Tennant, feeling nothing at all. and Tennant sensed them coming through. They warned him that his chauffeur was carrying a weapon concealed in an inside pocket. As if I didn't know! Tennant snapped back at them. Cass tried to drive him past the spot beyond the bridge where the gateway lay hidden in its armor of invisibility. He evidently planned to go miles from the house before doing whatever he had decided to do. Tennant thought he knew. It would involve riding the back roads like this one for fifteen or twenty miles, perhaps farther. He suspected that the quarry pond in South Upham was his intended destination. There would be plenty of loose rock handy with which to weigh down his body before dumping it into the water. If it were recovered, Cass and Agatha could alibi one another. In view of his earlier disappearance, this would be simple. Of course there was the maid, but Cass had enough money and smooth talk to manage that angle. They could undoubtedly get away "Stop," said Tennant, just across the bridge. "What for?" Cass countered and Tennant knew it was time to act. He wrenched the key from the ignition switch, tossed it out of the car. Cass braked, demanded, "What in hell did you do that for?" "I get out here," Tennant said. "You didn't stop." "Okay, if that's the way you want it." Cass' heavy right hand, the little black hairs on its back clearly visible in the dashboard light, moved toward his inside pocket. Tennant teleported to the side of the road, became a half-visible shade against the darkness of the trees. He felt Opal's excitement surge through his brain, knew that from then on his timing would have to be split-second perfect. It seemed to him as if all the inchoate thoughts, all the vague theories, all the half-formed plans of more than a year had crystalized. For the first time since his capture, he not only knew what he wanted to do -- but saw the faint glimmer of a chance of doing it successfully. He was going to try to lead Cass to the gateway, maneuver him inside -- and then escape. They wouldn't get Tennant; the power of teleportation they themselves, had given him would keep him from being captured again. It would work. He was sure of it. They'd have their male specimen and he'd be free... not to go back to Agatha, because he wouldn't, but to help the three women to get back, too. now, pistol in hand, shouting. Tennant could have him killed now, have him flayed and decapitated as other male victims had been. Opal might even give him the hide as a reward after it was treated. Some Oriental potentate, Tennant reflected, might relish having his wife's lover as a rug on his living room floor. Tennant preferred the less operatic revenge of leaving Cass and Agatha alive to suffer...He teleported farther into the trees, closer to the gateway, plotting carefully his next moves. Cass was crashing along, cursing in frustration. "Stand still, damn you! You shift around like a ghost!" Tennant realized with sudden terror that Cass might give up, unable to solve his prey's abrupt appearances and disappearances. He needed encouragement to keep him going. Jeeringly, Tennant paused, simultaneously thumbed his nose and stuck out his tongue at Cass. The scornful childishness of the gesture enraged Cass more than the worst verbal insult could have. He yelled his anger and firdd at Tennant. There was no way to miss, but Tennant was five yards farther on before the explosion ended. "Calm down," he advised quietly. "Getting mad always spoils your aim." That, naturally, made Cass even angrier. He fired viciously twice more before Tennant reached the gateway, both times without a chance of hitting his elusive target. Opal, Tennant discovered, was almost as frantic as Cass. He was deep inside the passage, jittering visibly in his excitement, in his anticipation of the most important bag his species had yet made on Earth. And there was something else in his thoughts... Anxiety. Fear. The gateway was vulnerable to third-dimensional weapons. Where the concertinalike passage came into contact with Earth, there was a belt, perhaps a foot in width, which was spanned by some sort of forcewebbing. Opal was afraid that a bullet might strike the webbing and destroy the gateway. Cass was getting closer. It would be so easy... keep teleporting, bewilder him, let him make a grab... and then skip a hundred yards away just as the gateway shut. He would be outside, Cass inside. And the three women? Leave them with Cass? Leave the gateway open for more live or mounted specimens? Tennant concentrated on the zone of strain at the point of dimensional contact, was there directly in front of it. Cass, cursing, lunged clear of the underbrush outside, saw Tennant there. Tennant was crouching low, not moving, staring mockingly at him. He lifted the automatic and fired. instead of yards, and so blood oozed from a graze on his left ear when he rejoined a shaken Opal in the world that knew no night. For a long time -- how long," of course, he could not know -- they stood and watched the gateway burn to globular ash in a dark brown fire that radiated searing cold. Opal was in trouble. An aura of anger, of grief, of accusation, surrounded him. Others of them came and for a while Tennant was forgotten. Then, abruptly, he was back in his own compound, walking toward the house. In place of his country Napoleonic roll-bed, which he had visualized for manufacture with special care, Dana had substituted an immense modern sleeping device that looked like a low hassock with a ten-foot diameter. She was on her knees, her back toward the door, fiddling with a radio. She heard him enter, said without turning, "It won't work. Just a little while ago it stopped." 'T think we're cut off now, perhaps for good," he told her. He sat down on the edge of the absurd bed and began to take off the clothes they had given him for the hunt. He was too tired to protest against the massacre of his bedroom decor. He was not even sure he wanted to protest. For all its anachronism, the big round bed was comfortable. She watched him, her hands on her thighs, and there was worry written on her broad forehead. "You know something, Rog." "I don't know anything," he replied. "I only think and have theories." Unexpectedly he found himself telling her all about it, about himself, where he had been, what he had done. She listened rjuietly, saying nothing, letting him go on. His head was in her lap and he talked up to her while she ran gentle fingers through his hair. When he had finished, she smiled down at him thoughtfully, affectionately, then said, "You know, you're a funny kind of man, Roger." "Funny?" She cuffed him gently. "You know what I mean. So now we're really cut off in this place -- you and me and little Tom and Olga and Eudalia and the twins. What are we going to do, Roger?" He shrugged. He was very tired. "Whatever they'll let us do," he said through a yawn. "Maybe we can make this a two-way study. They are almost human, you know. Almost." He pulled her down and kissed her and felt unexpected contentment decant through his veins. He knew now that things had worked out the right way, the only way. He added aloud, "I think we'll find ways to keep ourselves amused." "You really enjoy playing the heel, don't you, Rog?" Her lips moved against his as she spoke. "You had a chance to get out of here. You could have changed places with Cass. Maybe you could have destroyed the gateway and stayed on the other side and still saved other victims. But no, you had to come back to -- us. I think I'm going to be in love with you for that." He sat up on one elbow and looked down at her half angrily. "Are you trying to make a goddam hero out of me?" he asked. Women may be against progress because it means new pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance... gangplank, entering the .mouth of the spaceship -- and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers, in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her when two gently insistent middle aged ladies indicated she was blocking the way... Somehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling, browndad stewardess; and her azure tipped fingers were clutching at the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake house -- the comfort, the safety, the -- the sanity of it... self back to reality. At any moment Jack, dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining aisle. Jack -- Captain Jack McHenry, if you please -- must not know, yet, what she was doing to patch up their marriage. She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past; it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that read: Avoiding It May Cost Your Life! "May I see your validation, please?" Marcia McHenry stiffened. Had she read the sign aloud ? She turned startled eyes up to the smiling stewardess, who was holding out a well-groomed hand. Marcia responded weakly to the smile, overcame a sudden urge to blurt out that she had no validation -- not her own, anyway. But her stiff fingers were already holding out the pink card with Nellie Foster's name on it. "You're feeling well, Mrs. Foster?" Feeling well? Yes, of course. Except for the -- usual sickness. But that's so very normal... Her numb lips moved. "I'm fine," she said. Miss Eagen (which, her neat lapel button attested, was her name) made a penciled frown as lovely as her machined smile. "Some day," she told Marcia, "we won't have to ask the passengers if they're well. It's so easy to come aboard on someone else's validation, and people don't seem to realize how dangerous that is." As Miss Eagen moved to the next seat, Marcia shrank into a small huddle, fumbling with tjje card until it was crammed shapeless into her purse. Then from the depths of her guilt came rebellion. It was going to be all right. She was doing the biggest thing she'd ever done, and Jack would rise to the occasion, and it would be all right. It bad to be all right... After this -- if this didn't work -- there just would be nothing else she could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that she was just doing it to surprise Jack. Oh, he'd be surprised, all right. The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting her lip. Silly... Jack had said that -- her fear of space was silly. He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, "And that's why you want me to come back -- ground myself, be an Earth-lubber -- so I can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back alive!" A ND then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her chin in his hand. "Marcia, Marcia," he'd said gently, "you're so silly! It's been nineteen whole years since your father died in the explosion of a Moon-rocket. Rocket motors just don't explode any more, honey! Ships travel to the Moon and back on iron-clad, mathematical orbits that are figured before the ship puffs a jet -- " "The Elsinore?" She'd said it viciously, to taunt him, and something in her had been pleased at the dull flush that rose to his face. Everyone knew about the Elsinore, the #-foot Moon-ferry that almost missed the Moon. "That," he said bitterly, "was human damnfoolishness botching up 'the equations. Too many lobbyists have holdings on the Moon and don't want to risk not being able to go there in a hurry. So they haven't passed legislation to keep physically unfit people off spaceships. One of the passengers got aboard the Elsinore on somebody else's validation -- which meant that nobody knew he was taking endocrine treatments to put hair on his brainless head and restore his -- Oh, the Jaywalker!" Jack spat in disgust. "Anyway, he was the kind of idiot who never realizes that certain glandular conditions are fatal in free fall." Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space, when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than ever before. He went on remorselessly, "Once the Elsinore reached the free-fall flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put S# the ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing the Moon ' or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening." "It's all so dull!" she had flared, and then, "How can I be interested in what some blundering spacejockey did?" "Blun -- Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground." "Was it?" she'd yawned. "Could you do it?" "I -- like to think I could," he said. "I'd hate to have to try." She'd shrugged. "Then it can't be very difficult, darling." She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world garble, something always went cold and furious and -- lonely inside her, and made her fight back unfairly. After he'd gone -- for good, he said -- her anger had sustained her for a few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for Jack. Or even to the Moon... o ness of a rocket ship that was about to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulkheads, the overhead, everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked anxious, seme excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines. Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle. "Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much different from being in an airplane. At the same time -- " She paused, quiet brown eyes solemn. "What you are about to experience is something that will make you proud to belong to the human race." That again! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field. It looked the way she felt -- flat and pale and devoid of life, with a monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky. Then it was torn from her vision. It was snatched away -- the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together. Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft. Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that had grown around the ship. Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish floating darkly and heavily below. "We are now," said Miss Eagen's calm voice, "thirty-seven miles over Los Angeles." After that, there was scarcely room for thought -- even for fear, though it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet, sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and awe. S HE didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck, spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too late... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turnover points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She pressed herself up out of the soft chair -- it was difficult, because of the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding -- and plodded heavily up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she sat for the take-off. "Miss Eagen -- " "Yes, Mrs. Fos -- why, what's the matter?" Seeing the startled expression on the stewardess' face, Marcia realized she must be looking like # ghost. She put a hand to her cheek and found it clammy. "Come along," said Miss Eagen cheerfully. She put a firm arm around Marcia's shoulder. "Just a touch of space-sickness. This way. That's it. We'll have you fixed up in a jiffy." "It isn't s-space sickness," said Marcia in a very small and very positive voice. She let herself be led forward, through the door and to the left, where there was a small and compact ship's hospital. "Now, how," said Miss Eagen briskly, "just you lie down there, Mrs. Foster. Does it hurt any special place?" Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, "I'm not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt." "You're not -- " Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a time. "How do you feel?" "Scared," said Marcia. "Why, what-is there to be scared of?" "I'm pregnant." "Well, that's no -- You're what?" "I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife." There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was looking at her levelly. She said, "I'll have to examine you." "I know. Go ahead." , Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. "You're so right," she breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves. With her back to Marcia, she said, "I'll have to tell the captain, you know." "I know. I'd rather... tell him myself." "Thanks," said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped. Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. "Eagen to Captain." "McHenry here." "Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?" "Not right away, Sue." Sue! No wonder he had found it so easy to Walk out! She looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said, "You know I've got coursecorrection computations from here to yonder. Give me another forty minutes." "I think," said Sue Eagen into the mike, "that the computations can wait." "The hell you do!" The red contact light on the intercom went out. "He'll be right here," said Miss Eagen. sily. Miss Eagen did not offer to help. Marcia's hands strayed to her hair, patted it futilely. He came in, moving fast and purposefully, as always. "Sue, what in time do you think you -- Marcia!" His dark face broke into a delighted grin and he put his arms out. "You -- you're here -- here, on my ship!" "I'm pregnant, Jack," she said. She put out a hand to ward him off. She couldn't bear the thought of his realizing what she had done while he had his arms around her. "You are? You -- we -- " He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her face wooden. "Just find it out?" This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had to speak up. "No, Jack. I knew weeks ago." There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired. Softly and slowly he asked, "What in God's name made you get on the ship?" "I had to, Jack. I had to." "Had to kill yourself?" he demanded brutally. "This tears it. This ties it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this means -- what I've got to do now?" "Spin ship," she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer. He groaned. "You said you could do it." "I can... try," he said hollowly. "But -- why, ivhy?" "Because," she said bleakly, "I learned long ago that a man grows to love what he has to fight for." "And you were going to make me fight for you and the child -- even if the lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?" "You said you could handle it. I thought you could." "I'll try," he said wearily. "Oh, I'll try." He went out, dragging his feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her. There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. "It's true, you know," she said. "A man grows to love the things he has to defend, no matter how he felt about them before." The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of detachment and wonder. "You really believe that, don't you?" Marcia's patience snapped. "You don't have to look so superior. I know what's bothering you. Well, he's my husband, and don't you forget it." in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom. Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack back again. Instead she dialed and said, "Hospital to Maintenance. Petrucelli?" "Petrucelli here." "Come up with a crescent wrench, will you. Pet?" Another stiff silence. A question curled into Marcia's mind and she asked it. "Do you work on all these ships at one time or another?" Miss Eagen did not beat around the bush. "I've been with Captain McHenry for three years. I hope to work with him always. I think he's the finest in the Service." "He -- th-thinks as well of you, no doubt." Petrucelli lounged in, a big man, easy-going, powerful. "What's busted, muscles ?" "Bolt the bed to the bulkhead, Pet. Mrs. McHenry -- I'm sorry, but you'll have to get up." Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked, "Jaywalker?" "Please hurry, Pet." She turned to Marcia. 'Tve got to explain to the passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking forward to it." She went out. Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. "Why are you putting the bed on the wall?" He looked at her and away, quickly. "Because, lady, when we start to spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be down. Centrifugal force, see?" And before she could answer him he added, "I can't talk and work at the same time." Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly. She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out. Miss Eagen returned. "That man was very rude," said Marcia. Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. "I'm sorry," she said, obviously not meaning sorry at all. Marcia wet her lips. "I asked you a question before," she said evenly. "About you and the captain." "You did," said Sue Eagen. "Please don't." "And why not?" "Because," said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as drawn as Jack had, "I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is to keep them to myself." "Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from ycur sense of duty. I'm most interested in what you have to say." Miss Eagen's arched nostrils seemed pinched and white. "You really want me to speak my piece?" against the bulkhead and folded her arms. Miss Eagen gazed at her for a moment, nodded as if to herself, and said, "I suppose there always will be people who don't pay attention to the rules. Jaywalkers. But out here jaywalkers don't have as much margin for error as they do crossing against a traffic light on Earth." She looked Marcia straight in the eye. "What makes a jaywalker isn't ignorance. It's a combination of stupidity and stubbornness. The jaywalker does know better. In your case..." She sighed. "It's well known -- even by you -- that the free-fall condition has a weird effect on certain people. The human body is in an unprecedented situation in free fall. Biologically it has experienced the condition for very short periods -- falling out of trees, or on delayed parachute jumps. But it isn't constituted to take hour after hour of fall." "What about floating in a pool for hours?" asked Marcia sullenly. "That's quite a different situa-' tion. 'Down' exists when you're swimming. Free-fall means that everything around you is 'up.' The body's reactions to free-fall go much deeper than space-nausea and a mild feeling of panic. When there's a glandular imbalance of certain kinds, the results can be drastic. Apparently some instinctual part of the mind reacts as if there were a violent emergency, when no emergency is recognized by the reasoning part of the mind. There are sudden floods of adrenalin; the #-kesteroids begin spastic secretions; the -- well, it varies in individuals. But it's pretty well established that the results can be fatal. It kills men with prostate trouble -- sometimes. It kills women in menopause -- often. It kills women in the early stages of pregnancy -- always." "But how?" asked Marcia, interested in spite of her resentment. "Convulsions. A battle royal between a glandular-level panic and a violent and useless effort of the will to control the situation. Muscles tear, working against one another. Lungs rupture and air is forced into the blood-stream, causing embolism and death. Not everything is known about it, but I would guess that pregnant women are especially susceptible because their protective reflexes, through and through, are much more easily stimulated." "And the only thing that can be done about it is to supply gravity?" "Or centrifugal force (or centripetal, depending on where you're standing, but why be technical?). -- or, better yet, keep those people off the ships." "So now Jack will spin the ship until I'm pressed against the walls with the same force as gravity, and then everything will be all right." "You make it sound so simple." "There's no need to be sarcastic!" Marcia blurted. "Jack can do it. You think he can, don't you? Don't you?" "He can do anything any space skipper has ever done, and more," said Sue Eagen, and her face glowed. "But it isn't easy. Right this minute he's working over the computer -- a small, simple, shipboard computer -- working out orbital and positional and blast-intensity data that would be a hard nut for the giant calculators on Earth to crack. And he's doing it in half the time -- or less -- than it would take the average mathematician, because he has to; because it's a life-and-death matter if he makes a mistake or takes too long." U "But what?" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed. "You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning the same way he does when it isn't?" Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely. "He'll spin the ship on its long axis," said the stewardess with exaggerated patience. "That means that the steering jet tubes in the nose and tail are spinning, too. You don't just turn with a blast on one tube or another. The blasts have to be let off in hundreds of short bursts, timed to the hundredth of a second, to be able to make even a slight course correction. The sighting instruments are wheeling round and round while you're checking your position. Your fuel has to be calculated to the last ounce -- because enough fuel for a Moon flight, with hours of fuelless free-fall, and enough fuel for a power spin and course corrections while spinning, are two very different things. Captain McHenry won't be able to maneuver to a landing on the Moon. He'll do it exactly right the first time, or not at all." Marcia was white and still. "I -- I never -- " "But I haven't told you the toughest part of it yet," Miss Eagen went on inexorably. "A ship as massive as this, spinning on its long axis, is a pretty fair gyroscope. It doesn't want to turn. Any force that tries to make it turn is resisted at right angles to the force applied. When that force is applied momentarily from jets, as they swing into position and away again, the firing formulas get -- well, complex. And the ship's course and landing approach are completely new. Instead of letting the ship fall to the Moon, turning over and approaching tailfirst with the main jets as brakes, Captain McHenry is going to have to start the spin first and go almost the whole way nose-first. He'll come up on the Moon obliquely, pass it, stop the spin, turn over once to check the speed of the ship, and once again to put the tail down when the Moon's gravity begins to draw us in. There'll be two short periods of free-fall there, but they won't be long enough to bother you much. And if we can do all that with the fuel we've got, it will be a miracle. A miracle from the brain of Captain McHenry." Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of hurt and hatred -- hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired girl, and -- even more so -- of' herself. She darted toward the door. Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with these people..." "He will and he must. You surely know your husband." "I know him as well as you do." in a thin hard line. "Do as you like," she whispered. "And while you're doing it -- think about whom he's spinning ship for." She took her hand from Marcia's arm. Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor. She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly. Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month. Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the shimmering azure shape of Earth. "All Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes." Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations... He had said that once, too. Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out her hand. Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting. "Yes, I know who Jack's spinning ship for," said Marcia. Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question. Marcia said, painfully, "He's like the Captain of the Elsinore. He's risking his life for a -- a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even for his baby." "Does it hurt to know that?" Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine astonishment, "Hurt? Oh, no! It's so -- so big!" There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze. "He's started the spin. You'll be all right now." rest of the details of the trip. There was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly, until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally "down." Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep drowsiness and unreality. But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out of it like shreds of melody: "A man comes to love the things he has to fight for." And Jack fighting -- for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stats. Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack, Of. course there was something between them -- so big a thing that there was nothing for her to fear in it. Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Mar cia was free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen -- but it was Marcia that he had loved and married. blackness, and then a time of agony, when she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode, disintegrate, and someone kept saying, "Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight to me," and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers. Marcia. She called me Marcia. More blackness, more pain -- but not so much this time; and then a long, deep sleep. A curved ceiling, but a new curve, and soft rose instead of the gunmetal-and-chrome of the ship. White sheets, a new feeling of "down" that was unlike either Earth or the ship, a novel and exhilarating buoyancy. And kneeling by the bed -- "Jack!" "You're all right, honey." She raised herself on her elbow and looked out through the unglazed window at the ordered streets of the great Luna Dome. "The Moon... Jack, you did it!" He snapped his fingers. He looked like a high-school kid. "Nothin' to it." She could see he was very proud. Very tired, too. He reached out to touch her. She drew back. You don't have to be sweet to me," she said quietly "I understand how you must feel." "Don't have to?" He rose, bent over her, and slid his arms around her. He put his face into the shadowed warmth between her hair and her neck and said, "Listen, egghead, there's no absolute scale for courage. We had a bad time, both of us. After it was over, and I had a chance to think, I used it trying to look at things through your eyes. And that way I found out that when you walked up that gangway, you did the bravest thing I've ever known anyone to do. And you did it for me. It doesn't matter what else happened. Sue told me a lot about you that I didn't know, darling. You're... real huge for your size. As for the bad part of what happened -- nothing like it can ever happen again, can it?" He hugged her. After a time he reached down and touched her swelling waist. It was like a benediction. "He'll be born on the Moon," he whispered, "and he'll have eyes the color of all Earth when it looks out to the stars." "She'll be born on the Moon," corrected Marcia, "and her name will be Sue, and... and she'll be almost as good as her father." nificance to a section of the New York Times' list of best sellers in the October #, # edition: Item # was "Dianetics;" item # was Overstreet's "The Mature Mind;" item # was Velikovsky; and item # was Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers (Henry Holt  Co., # pp. #). It may be wondered how Dr. Overstreet likes the odd company he is forced to keep, for maturity is not the keynote here. Certainly he would have some pungent things to say about the Scully opus. Assertedly a non-fiction job, this book is actually stranger than truth. It is also one of the worst-edited books of the decade. In addition to endless repititions which any editor above the age of fifteen should have eliminated, it floats on an uneasy sea of typographical errors, the most charming of which occurs in a sentence on page # which begins: "Captain roads, 'Residents in almost every section..." which requires long and puzzled thought to translate to "Caption reads, "Residents... etc." Teeing off with the inevitable attacks on conventional science and military security that are the pseudo-scientists' substitutes for scientific proof. Variety columnist Scully leads the fascinated reader through bubbling suppositious "fact" and "inference" about the origins, nature and purposes of the flying saucers. He puts on exhibit a supposed geodesics expert, "Dr. Gee," who claims months of research on three flying discs which, he declares, the Air Force had found and sequestered. He describes two types of metal from the discs which are totally unfamiliar to Earth scientists; pushbutton control boards which the Air Force experts destroyed without attempting to analy # e; and #to #-foot human-seeming occupants (all dead) about whom the most remarkable things seem to have been their absolutely perfect teeth. T HE spice in Scully's barbecue is an analysis of what he believes to be the saucers' motive power, which turns out to be interplanetary magnetism. This is the product of a new science which has learned how to cut the magnetic lines of force holding the planets and the Sun in position and "thus" (says Scully) makes possible travel in space at speeds as high as # miles per second -- and the back of the Scully hand to Dr. Einstein. According to the author, the Department of Defense # dollars investigating this same force. The book may be a compendium of scientific fact, superbly disguised as screwball gibberish. The disguise, in this case, is absolutely impenetrable. Whatever else it is, however, it is not dull! While Scully's opus pretends to be true, Hugo Gernsback's "Ralph #C #" (Frederick Fell, # pp., #), originally published in #, contains a goodly number of then-fantastic scientific ideas that have since become fact. It also is a lot of fun to read. I admit that I approached the book with some trepidation, fearing that the writing and the concepts would be so amateur and so hoary with age that it would be unreadable. True enough, the plot is old-hat and the style is awkward -- and even so "Ralph" is thoroughly delightful. It is more like the last of the Jules Verne novels than the first of the modern period of science fiction, and in that lies its greatest merit, I believe. It has the genuine charm of a sound, workmanlike antique, plus the often astonishing survival value of successful prophecy. You will not be disappointed with this tale. In the field of modern science fiction, Simon  Schuster has come out with a new Van Vogt. This one is called "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" (shades of Darwin!) (# pp., #). It is a skilful interweaving of three novelets, "Black Destroyer," "Discord in Scarlet," and a more recent item about birdlike people with incredible powers of hypnosis. Holding the three together in a matrix of typically Van Vogtian metaphysical science is an interspersed narrative of the conflict between Elliott Grosvenor, Nexialist, and the rest of the Beagle's huge crew. Nexialism is a super-science which correlates and uses all other sciences, and Grosvenor naturally runs into opposition when he tries to use the other scientists on the ship for his own abstruse purposes. A magnificent exhibition of unleashed imagination at work, and particularly pleasant because it is written in intelligent English. T HE same things can be said for another item on the month's list -- a seven-year-old book by a novelist and poet who is unfamiliar to most science fiction addicts. Its reissue in a pocket book gives me a chance to bring it to your attention. The book is Vincent McHugh's delightful "I Am Thinking of My Darling" (Signet Books, # pp., #tf). The story recounts what happens in New York City when a new kind of epidemic breaks out -- a low-grade fever which causes the loss of all inhibitions, all conventions, all hatreds. In the process of telling what happens when New York girls and New York men -- and New York government agencies, too -- "go natural," McHugh succeeds in giving us more sound and exciting microbiology, biochemistry, epidemiology and information on municipal government procedures than you could get in a year's course in any standard college. It's also a rollicking, lusty, absolutely real and handsomely written science fantasy. The only anthology to cross my desk this month is "The Best Science Fiction Stories -- #" (Frederick Fell, # pp., #.) This is Everett F. Bleiler's and T. E. Dikty's second in their annual series of selections from the previous year's short science fiction. Like the first one, it is generally a distinguished job. It contains # stories (including two each by Ray Bradbury and the Leinster-Jenkins symbiosis) and of them all but four rate B-plus or better on my personal scale of merit. A high average, indeed! Our final item is the second in the science fiction series published by Greenberg, Publisher: "The Green Men of Graypec" by Festus Pragnell (# pp., #), a novel about which one can only say that it probably would have been better left in the quiet obscurity of the pulps where it first appeared. Following as it does Ted Sturgeon's fascinating "Dreaming Jewels" #), the comedown is all the  more painful. A Stone and a Spear #t more, the rolling Maryland countryside lay under a fresh blanket of green. Wholly unaware of the summer glory, Dr. Curtis Johnson drove swiftly on the undulating highway, stirring clouds of dust and dried grasses. Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face and laughed into the warm air. "Dr. Dell isn't going to run away. Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a business trip." Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He grinned. "Wool-gathering again." "What about?" "I was just wondering who said it first -- one of the fellows at Detrick, or that lieutenant at Bikini, or -- " Given: The future is probabilities merging into one certainty. Proposition: Can the probabilities be made improbables so that the certainty becomes impossible? "Said what ? What are you talking about?" "That crack about the weapons after the next war. He -- whoever it was -- said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one of us could have said it." Louise's smile grew tight and thin. "Don't any of you ever think of anything but the next war -- any of you?" "How can we? We're fighting it right now." "You make it sound so hopeless." "That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we didn't have to stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols But he never showed us how we could quit -- and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more than a futile gesture." "I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but what brought him to that viewpoint?" "Hard to tell," Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. "After the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly pacifist and walked out of Detrick." "It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a truck farm. I " Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to visit him. F OR nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other research centers throughout the country. "I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out," said Louise. "Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now. They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows." "And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head, either," she added much too innocently. "So they ordered you to take advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back." Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed. "No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers," she said. "But it's pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General Hansen after you got the invitation?" "It is hush-hush, top-secret stuff," said Curt, his eyes once more on the road. "The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed. I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games. There's more to it than you know." The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back and drank in the beauty of it. "Hush-hush, top secret stuff," she said. "Grown men playing children's games." "Pretty deadly games for children, darling." passed the central part of Baltimore and headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm. His sign was visible for a half mile: Eat the Best "Dr. Hamon Dell, world's foremost biochemist -- and truck farmer," Curt muttered as he swung the car off the highway. Louise stepped out when the tires ceased crunching on the gravel lane. She scanned the fields and old woods beyond the ancient but preserved farmhouse. "It's so unearthly." Curt followed. The song of birds, which had been so noticeable before, seemed strangely muted. The land itself was an alien, faintly greenish hue, a color repulsive to more than just the eyes. "It must be something in this particular soil," said Curt, "something that gives it that color and produces such wonderful crops. I'll have to remember to ask Dell about it." "You want Dr. Dell?" They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise ut tered a startled cry. The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to be almost translucent. "Yes," said Curt shakenly. "We're friends of his." "Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here." The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind of the vision. "If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?" "Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanatarium. Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition." From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path. The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was evidence of exqusite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet. came in sight of a massive tank truck. From it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight. "What could that be for?" asked Louise. "You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for storing that much here." They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a depth of an inch or more. "They must haul liquid lead in that thing," said Curt. "It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up." Louise glanced out over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other vegetables -- a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered the farm from the rear. A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure. "Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at all." Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain. Curt spoke in a subdued voice. "It's hard to get away from Detrick. Always one more experiment to try -- " " -- And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war for them tomorrow afternoon," said Dell. "I remember." "We wondered about this truck," Louise commented brightly, trying to change the subject. "We finally gave up on it." "Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the things I'm doing here." "Who's the man we saw?" asked Curt. "He looks as if his health is pretty precarious." "That's Brown. He came with the place -- farmed it for years for my uncle before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In spite of appearances, he's well enough physically." "How has your own health been? You have -- changed -- since you were at Detrick." Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the question with a wan smile. "We all wear out sometime," he said. "My turn had to come." siveness vanished as the evening passed. It was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it after dinner. While they watched the Bickering light that whipped the beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors, whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times. Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation -- and Curt's acceptance. When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the coals and then turned abruptly to Curt. "When are you going to leave Detrick?" "When are you coming back?" Curt demanded instead of answering. ' "So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left." "You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back." "They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them," Dell said viciously. "They want some that can kill ten million people in four minutes in"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed by their bullets, the sorrowing families -- " "And why shouldn't the gunmakers be tormented?" Dell's voice was low with controlled hate. "They are men like you and me who give the war makers new tools for their trade." "Oh, Dell, it's not as simple as that." Curt raised a hand and let it fall wearily. They had been over this so many times before. "Weapon designers are no more responsible than any other agents of society. It's pure neurosis to absorb the whole guilt of wars yet unfought merely because you happened to have developed a potential weapon." Dell touched the massive dome of his skull. "Here within this brain of mine has been conceived a thing which will probably decoming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that vicious, murderous discovery." "Egotism! Any scientist's work is built upon the pyramid of past knowledge." mH weapon I have describedL exists. If I had not created it, it would not exist. It is as simple as that. No one shares my guilt and my responsibility. And what more do they want of me now? What greater dream of mass slaughter and destruction have they dreamed ?" "They want you," said Curt quietly, "because they believe we are not the only ones possessing' the toxin. They need you to come back and help find the antitoxin for D. triconus." Dell shook his head. "That's a blind hope. The action of D. triconus is like a match set to a powder train. The instant its molecules contact protoplasm, they start a chain reaction that rips apart the cell structure. It spreads like fire from one cell to the next, and nothing can stop it once it's started operating within a given organism." "But doesn't this sense of guilt -- unwarranted as it is -- make you want to find an antitoxin?" "Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy. The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire remainder of my life is to break it." "When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his hands about your throat," Curt argued, "you reach for the biggest rock you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to persuade him For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again. "Exactly," he said. "You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of which I spoke. There has to be someone here -- after I'm gone -- " Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and remained fixed on unseen images. "Me? Help you?" Curt asked incredulously. "What could I do? Give up science and become a truck gardener, too?" "You might say that we would be in the rock business," replied Dell. "Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands .-about another's throat, but it should be. Those who want power and domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a long time since they had to. and emperors, hired mercenaries to fight their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains. We're the mercenaries of the new day, Cart, you and I. Once there was honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world because science was a universal language. "What a horrible joke that turned out to be! Today we are the terror of the world. The warmakers built us fine laboratories, shining palaces, and granted every whim -- for a price. They took us up to the hills and showed us the whole world and we sold our souls for it. "Look what happened after the last war. Invading armies carried off prize Nazi brains like so much loot, set the scientists up in big new laboratories, and these new mercenaries keep right on pouring out knowledge for other kings and emperors. "Their loyalty is only to their science. But they can't experiment for knowledge any more, only weapons and counter-weapons. You'll say I'm anti-war, even, perhaps, anti-American or pro-Russian. I am not against just wars, but I am against unjust slaughter. And I love America too much to let her destroy herself along with the enemy." "Then what are we to do?" Curt demanded fiercely. "What are we to do while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate us? Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels." "Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon politicians for solutions of human problems?" Dell passed a hand over his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain. "What is it?" Curt exclaimed, rising. "Nothing -- nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately.It will pass in a moment." With effort, he went on. "I wanted to say that already you have come to think of science being divided into armed camps by the artificial boundaries of the politicians. Has it been so long ago that it was not even in your lifetime, when scientists regarded themselves as one international brotherhood ?" "I can't quarrel with your ideals," said Curt softly. "But national boundary lines do, actually, divide the scientists of the world into armed camps." JL correct. They do not deliberately war on each other. It is only that they have blindly sold themselves as mercenaries. And they can be called upon to redeem themselves. They can break their unholy contracts." "There would have to be simultaneous agreement among the scientists of all nations. And they are men, influenced by national ideals. They are not merely ivory-tower dabblers and searchers after truth." "Do you remember me five years ago?" Dell's face became more haggard, as if the memory shamed him. "Do you remember when I told the atomic scientists to examine their guts instead of their consciences?" "Yes. You certainly have changed." "And so can other men. There is a way. I need your help desperately, Curt -- " The face of the aging biochemist contorted again with unbearable pain. His forehead beaded with sweat as he clenched his skull between his vein-knotted hands. "Dell! What is it?" "It will pass," Dr. Dell breathed through clenched teeth. "I have some medicine -- in my bedroom. I'm afraid I'll have to excuse myself tonight. There's so much more I have to say to you, but we'll continue our talk in the morning, Curt. I'm sorry -- " He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake. The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist. Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery. "Secret mission completed?" she asked. Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. "I'm afraid something terrible is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic notions, his abandonment of his career." "Oh, I hope it's not that!" slept only minutes before he was roused by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm. "What is it?" she whispered. "I thought I heard something. There it is again!" 'It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!" Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a shuddering sob of unbearable agony. He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell looked up, eyes glazed with pain. "Dr. Dell!" "Curt -- I thought I had time left, but this is as far as I can go -- Just remember all I said tonight. Don't forget a word of it." He sat up rigidly, hardly breathing in the effort of control. "The responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the scientist mercenaries. Don't allow it, Curt. Get them to abandon the laboratories of the warriors. Get them to reclaim their honor -- " He fell back upon the pillow, his face white with pain and shining with sweat. "Brown -- see Brown. He can tell you the -- the rest." "I'll go for a doctor," said Curt. "Who have you had? Louise will stay with you." "Don't bring a doctor. There's no escaping this. I've known it for months. Wait here with me, Curt. I'll be gone soon." Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so disintegrated. "You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins, if you want." "Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson -- the Judge Building, Towson  -- find his home address in a phone book." "Fine. I'll only be a little while." He stepped to the door. "Curt! Take the lane down to the new road -- behind the farm. Quicker -- it cuts off a mile or so -- go down through the orchard -- " "All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back." Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car. He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who seemed to have vanished from the premises. T HE wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape. He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now might mean death for Dell. No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay close to the other highway with which he was familiar. He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment lie glimpsed a spark of light far ahead. Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But there should be a telephone, at least. He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within. The door swung wide. "I wonder if I could use your -- " Curt began. He gasped. "Brown! Dell's dying -- we've got to get a doctor for him -- " As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long moment. His hollowcheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that flooded out from behind him. Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with tension. "Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!" That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt inward. "Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when Carlson finds you're here." "What's the matter with you?" Curt asked, stupefied. "Dell's dying. He needs help." "Get in here!" Curt moved slowly forward. Brown closed the door behind him and motioned toward a closed door at the other end of a short hall. They opened it and stepped into a dimly lighted room. Curt's eyes slowly adjusted and he saw what seemed to be a laboratory. It was so packed with equipment that there was scarcely room for the group of twelve or fifteen men jammed closely about some object with their backs to Curt and Brown. Brown shambled forward like an agitated skeleton, breaking the circle. Then Curt saw that the object of the men's attention was a large cathode ray screen occupied by a single green line. There was a pip on it rising sharply near one side of the two-foot tube. The pip moved almost imperceptibly toward a vertical red marker over the face of the screen. The men stared as if hypnotized by it. T HE newcomers' arrival, however, disturbed their attention. One man turned with an irritable growl. "Brown, for heaven's sake -- " He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore. "Who is this? What's he doing here?" The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives. "This is Curtis Johnson," said Brown. "He got lost looking for a doctor for Dell." A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. "Your coming is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark." The man indicated a chair. "My friend. Dr. Dell, is dying," Curt snapped out, refusing to sit down. 'T've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!" "No." The man, Sark, shook his head. "Dell is reconciled. He has to go. We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt -- his death." He had known it. Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room. Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey, these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more rapidly. It was nightmare -- meaningless -- "I'm not staying," Curt insisted. "You can't prevent me from helping Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me call." "You're not going to call," said Sark wearily. "And we assumed responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!" Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd bring them to justice somehow, he swore. He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How? What did the inexorably advancing pip signify? stifling hot and the breathing of the circle of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears. Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The circle of men grew taut. The pip crossed the red line -- and vanished. Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning. With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced uncertainly at one another. One said, "Well, that's the end of Dell. We'll soon know now if we're on the right track, or if we've botched it. Carlson will call when he's computed it." "The end of Dell?" Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince himself of what he knew had happened. "The pip on the screen -- that showed his life leaving him?" "Yes," said Sark. "He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds more like him. But Dell couldn't have told you of that -- " "What will we do with him?" Brown asked abruptly. "If Dell is dead, you murdered him!" Curt shouted. A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now, even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse of Haman Dell -- if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was nonsense... "Dell must have sent you to us!" Sark said, as if a great mystery had suddenly been lifted from his mind. "He did not have time to tell you everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?" Curt nodded bitterly. "He told me it was the quickest way to get to a doctor." "He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was slipping. Yes, this was die quickest way." "What are you talking about?" Curt demanded. "Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?" "It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that he was sick and irrational." "Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational," Sark said thoughtfully. "He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed him." "Succeed Dell? In what?" on a panel at his right. A screen lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar moonlit ruin. "An American city," said Sark, hurrying his words now. "Any city. They are all alike. Ruin. Death. This one died thirty years ago." "I don't understand," Curt complained, bewildered. "Thirty years -- "At another point in the Time Continuum," said Sark. "The future. Your future, you understand. Or, rather, our present, the one you created for us." Curt recoiled at the sudden venom in Sark's voice. "The future?" That was what they had in common with Dell -- psychosis, systematic delusions. He had suspected danger before; now it was imminent and terrifying. "Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with pride," Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt's fear and horror. "That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside the high technical achievement these things represent." Curt's throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the painfired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist's words: "The responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the scientist mercenaries -- " "Some of us did manage to survive," said Sark, glaring at the scene of gaunt rubble. Curt could see the veins pounding beneath the thin flesh of his forehead. "We lived for twenty years with the dream of rebuilding a world, the same dream that has followed all wars. But at last we knew that the dream was truly vain this time. We survivors lived in heremetically sealed caverns, trying to exist and recover our lost science and technology. "We could not emerge into the Earth's atmosphere. Its pollution with virulent aerosols would persist for another hundred years. We could not bear a new race out of these famished and rickety bodies of ours. Unless Man was to vanish completely from the face of the Earth, we had only a single hope. That hope was to prevent the destruction from ever occurring!" Sark's eyes were burning now. "Do you understand what that means? We had to go back, not forward. We had to arm to fight a new war, a war to prevent the final war that destroyed Mankind." "Back? How could you go back?" Curt hesitated, grasping now the full insanity of the scene about him. "How have you come back?" He waited tautly for the answer. It would be gibberish, of course, like all the mad conversation before it. rpHE undisturbed flow of time X from the beginning to the end -- neither of which we can experience -- we call, the Prime Continuum," Sark replied. "Mathematically speaking, it is composed probability running side by side. For analogy, you may liken it to a great river, whose many insignificant tributaries merge into a roaring, turbulent whole. That is the flow of time, the Prime Continuum. "You may change one of these tributaries, dam it up, turn it aside. let it reach the main stream at a different point. No matter how insignificant the tributary, the stream will not be the same after the change. That is what we are doing. We are controlling critical tributaries of the Prime Continuum, altering the hell that you scientists have so generously handed down to us. "Dell was a critical tributary. You, Dr. Curtis Johnson, are another. Changing or destroying such key individuals snips off branches of knowledge before they come into fruit." It was an ungraspable answer, but it had to be argued against because of its conclusion. "The scientists are not bringing about the war," Curt said, looking from one fleshless face to another. "Find the politicians responsible, those willing to turn loose any horror to gain power. They are the ones you want." "That would mean destroying half the human race. In your day, nearly every man is literally a politician." "Talk sense!" Curt said angrily. "A politician, as we have come to define him, is simply one willing to sacrifice the common good for his own ends. It is a highly infectious disease in a day when altruism is taken for cowardice or mere stupidity. No, we have not mistaken our goal, Dr. Johnson. We cannot hasten the maturity of the race. We can only hope to take the matches away so the children cannot burn the house down. Whatever you doubt, do not doubt that we are from the future or that we caused Dell's death. He is only one of many." Curt slumped. "I did doubt it. I still do, yet not with conviction. Why?" "Because your own sense of guilt tells you that you and Dell and others like you are literally the matches which we have to remove. Because your knowledge of science has overcome your desire not to believe. Because you know the shape of the future." "The war after the Third World War -- " Curt murmured. "Someone said it would be fought with stones and spears, but your weapons are far from stones and spears." "Perhaps not so far at that," said Sark, his face twisting wryly. He reached to a nearby table and picked up a tomato and a carrot. "These are our weapons. As humble and primitive as the stones and spears of cavemen." 'V#'OU'RE joking," Curt reJL plied, almost ready to grin. "No. This is the ultimate development of biological warfare. Man is what he eats -- " "That's what Dell's sign said." "We operate hundreds of gardens and farms such as Dell's. We work through the fertilizing compounds we supply to these farms. These compounds contain chem. icals that eventually lodge in the cells of those who eat the produce. They take up stations within the brain cells and change the man -- or destroy him. "Certain cells of the brain are responsible for specific characteristics. Ways of altering these cells were found by introducing minute quantities of specific radioactive materials which could be incorporated into vegetable foods. During the Third War wholesale insanity was produced in entire populations by similar methods. Here, we are using it to accomplish humane purposes. "We are simply restraining the scientists responsible for the destroying weapons that produced our nightmare world. You saw the change that took place in Dell. There is a good example of what we do." "But he did change," Curt pointed out. "He was carrying out your work. Wasn't that enough for you? Why did you decide he had to die?" "Ordinarily, we don't want to kill if the change is produced. Sometimes the brain cells are refractory and the characteristics too ingrained. The cells develop tumorous activity as a result of the treatment. So it was with Dell. In his case, however, we would have been forced to kill him by other means if he had not died as he did. This, too, he understood very well. That was why he really wanted no doctor to help him." "You must have driven him insane first!" "Look at this and see if you still think so." Sark led the way to a small instrument and pointed to the eyepiece of it. "Look in there." Curt bent over. Light sprang up at Sark's touch of a switch. Then a scene began to move before Curt's eyes. "Dell!" he exclaimed. The scene was of some vast and well-equipped biological laboratory, much like those of Camp Detrick. Silent, mask-faced technicians moved with precision about their tasks. Dr. Dell was directing operations. But there was something wrong. The figure was not the Dell that Curt knew. As if Sark sensed Curt's comprehension of this, the scene advanced and swelled until the whole area of vision was filled with Dell's face. Curt gasped. The face was blank and hideous. The eyes stared. When the scene retreated once more. Curt saw now that Dell moved as an automaton, almost without volition of his own. A S HE moved away from the bench like a sleepwalker, there came briefly into view the figure of an armed guard at the door. The figure of a corporal, grim in battle dress. Curt looked up, sick as if some inner sense had divined the meaning of that scene which he could not yet put into words. "Had enough?" asked Sark. "What does it mean?" "That is Dell as he would have to die to avoid." "But what is it?" "A military research laboratory twelve years into your future. You are aware that in your own time a good deal of research has come to a standstill because many firststring scientists have revolted against military domination. Unfortunately, there are plenty of second-stringers available and they are enough for most tasks -- the youngsters with new Ph. D.s who are awed by the glitter of golden laboratories. But, lacking experience or imagination, they can't  see through the glitter or have the insight for great work. Some will eventually, too late, however, and they will be replaced by eager new youngsters." "This scene of Dell -- " "Just twelve years from what you call now. Deadlier weapons will be needed and so a bill will be passed to draft the reluctant first-line men -- against their will, if necessary." "You can't force creative work," Curt objected. Sark shrugged. "There are drugs that do wonderful and terrible things to men's minds. They can force creation or mindless destruction, confession or outrageous subterfuge. You saw your opponents make some use of them. A cardinal, for example, and an engineer, among others. Now you have seen your friend, Dell, as he would have been. Not the same drugs, of course, but the end result is the same." Curt's horror turned to stubborn disbelief. "America wouldn't use such methods," he said flatly. "Today? No," agreed Sark. "But when a country is committed to inhuman warfare -- even though the goal may be honorable -- where is the line to stop at? Each brutality prepares the way for the next. Even concentration camps and extermination centers become" logical necessities. You have heard your opponents say that the end justifies the means. You have seen for yourself -- the means become the end." "But Dell could have escaped," Curt protested. "You could have helped him to your own time or another. He was still valuable. He needn't have died!" "There is no such thing as actual travel in time," explained Sark. "Or at least in our day we have found none. There is possible only a bending back of a branch of the Prime Continuum so that we can witness, warn, instruct, gain aid in saving the future. And there can be meeting only in this narrow sector of unreality where the branch joins the main stream. Our farms adjoin such sectors, but farther than that we cannot go, nor can one of you become a citizen of the world you have created for us. "But I wish it were so!" Sark bit out venomously. "We'd kidto look upon the ruin and the horror, let you breathe the atmosphere that no man can inhale and live, the only atmosphere there is in that world. Yes, I wish you could become our guests there. Our problem would be easier. But it can't be done. This is the only way we can work. "Dell had to go. There was no escape for him, no safety for us if he lived. He would have been tracked down, captured like a beast and set to work against his will. It was there in the Prime Continuum. Nothing could cancel it except death, the death that not produce a toxin deadlier than D. triconus." # I HE vengeance in Sark's voice . was almost tangible. Involuntarily Curt retreated a step before it. And -- almost -- he thought he understood these men out of time. "What is there -- " he began Jiparsely and had to stop. "What there that I can do?" "We need you to take over Dell's farm. It is of key importance. The list of men he was treating was an extremely vital one. That work cannot be interrupted now." ".How can you accomplish anything by operating only here?" Curt objected. "While you stifle our defenses, our enemies are arming to the teeth. When you've made us sufficiently helpless, they'll strike." "Did I say we were so restricted?" answered Sark, smiling for the first time. "You cannot imagine what a fresh vegetable means on a professor's table in Moscow. In Atomgrad a ripe tomato is worth a pound of uranium. How do I know? Because I walked the streets of Atomgrad with my grandfather." "Then you're a -- " Sark's face grew hard and bitter in the half light of the room. "Was," he corrected. "Or might have been. There are no nationalities where there are no nations, no political parties where there are only hunger and death. The crime of the future is not any person's or country's. It is the whole of humanity's." An alarm sounded abruptly. "Carlson!" someone tensely exclaimed. Sark whirled to the panels and adjusted the controls. A small screen lighted, showing the image of a man with graying hair aid imperious face. His sharp eyfes seemed to burn directly into Curt's. "How did it go?" exclaimed Sark. "Was the Prime Continuum shift as expected?" "No! It still doesn't compute out. Nothing's right. The war is still going on. The Continuum is absolute hell." "I should have known," said Sark in dismay. "I should have called you." "What is it? Do you know what's wrong?" "Johnson. Dr. Curtis Johnson. He's here." face. An oath exploded from his lips. "No wonder the situation doesn't compute with him out of the Prime Continuum. Why did he come there?"  "Dell sent him. Dell died too quickly. He didn't have time to instruct Johnson. I have told him what we want of him." "Do you understand?" Carlson demanded of Curt with abruptness that was almost anger. Curt looked slowly about the room and back to the face of his questioner. Understand ? If they sent him back, allowed him to go back, could he ever be sure that he had not witnessed a thing of nightmare in this shadowy dream world ? Yes, he could be sure. He had seen the blasted city, just the way he knew it could be -- would be unless someone prevented it. He had seen the pattern on the scope, attuned to the tiny tributary of the Prime Continuum that was the life of Dr. Dell, had seen it run out, dying as Dell had died. He could believe, too, that there was a little farm near Atomgrad, where a tomato on a scientist's table was more potent than the bombs building in the arsenal. "I understand," he said. "Shall I go back now?" Sark put a paper into his hands. "Here is a list of new names. You will find Dell's procedures and records in his desk at the farm. Do not underestimate the importance of your work. You have seen the failure of the Prime Continuum to compute properly with you out of it. You will correct that. "Your only contact from now on will be through Brown, who will bring the tank truck once a year. You know what to do. You are on your own." It was like a surrealist painting as he left. The moon had risen, and in all the barrenness there was nothing but the gray cement cube of the building. The light way touched the half dozen gaunt men who had followed him out to the car. Ahead was the narrow band of roadway leading through some infinite nothingness that would end in Dell's truck farm. looked back a moment later, the building was no longer there. He glanced at the list of names Sark gave him, chilled by the importance of those men. For some there would be death as there had been for Dell. For himself -- He had forgotten to ask. But perhaps they would not have told him. Not at this time, anyway. The chemically treated food produced tumors in refractory, unresponsive cells. He had eaten Dell's vegetables, would eat more. It was too late to ask and it didn't matter. He had important things to do. First would be the writing of his resignation to the officials of Camp Detrick. As of tomorrow, he would be Dr. Curtis Johnson, truck farmer, specialist in atomic-age produce, luscious table gifts for the innocent and not-so-innocent human matches that would, if he and his unknown colleagues succeeded, be prevented from cremating the hopes of Mankind. Louise would help him hang the new sign: Eat the Best Only, of course, she wouldn't know why he had taken Dell's job, nor could he ever explain. It would probably be the death of Curt Johnson, but that was cheap enough if humanity surTwenty-Foot Miss rj t Artillery shells once had your number on them or they didn't. That was before Felix the Heat-Seeker  Co. ago in a research laboratory on the Atlantic Coast. Somebody parlance, had announced his visit. He arrived in time for lunch, and the engineers, talking in relays, used the opportunity to fill the other things, he w.as told that they would show him "Felix the Heatseeker." When the time came he was ushered into an empty room. In the center of that room there was a turntable and on the turntable rested a bomb, staring at the visitor through a lens in its nose. took a few steps to the right. The bomb swung around on the turntable, pointing at him again, staring. He moved to the left. The bomb turned after him, staring w'ith the lens in its nose --  This was, after all, a perfectly natural thing, because Felix the Heat-seeker was reacting to the may have gone up a degree or two because of this performance. The somewhat nerve-racking demonstration was, in part, a device for being remembered in the budget. In addition to that it was a kind of summary of recent developments in military technology, a lecture with the theme that it is no longer true that "a miss of an inch is as good as a mile." The saying should now be that a twenty-foot miss is a clean hit. That came about in three ways. The first, simplest and also oldest is the exploding charge. If a solid cannonball missed a soldier by six inches, he could shrug and continue charging. If, later on, a #mm. howitzer shell exploded at a distance of six feet from the soldier, it was a hit. The biggest application of this principle is, of course, the fission bomb, which, for this very reason, can't even be a front line weapon any more. The second way of transforming a miss into a hit is essentially an addition to the exploding charge. It is what may be called the "sensing" fuze, which will perceive the nearness of a target and respond at the precise fractional instant of closest approach. The third, finally, is to correct the trajectory of whatever you are throwing at your enemy, prior to missing the target, so that the throw is turned into a hit. As far as strict chronological sequence goes, the third method was thought of and even tested before the second, but the second, the sensing fuze, was used first. the early days of the Second. World War, just when the war by the Dept, of Defense. This is to distinsafety device. looked quite leisurely. The manifestation of the new principle in military technology was called a "magnetic mine," which is hardly a good name, for the device happened to be as non-magnetic as possible. Up to that moment all military engineers had known that a fuze (unless it happened to be a time fuze) had to make "contact" to be set off. That was still true, but it had always been taken for granted that any contact would be a physical one. That there could also be a contact of force fields was new. The fuze of the so-called magnetic mine relied on the simple fact that the earth has a magnetic field. The best known manifestation of that field is that it makes a magnetic needle assume an approximate North-South position, as in a compass. But if there is a large mass of iron nearby -- for example, a ship -- the earth's magnetic field is disturbed for some distance and the compass needle misbehaves. Any schoolbook says so, but the Germans applied the information lethally. They built a naval mine of nonmagnetic materials, mostly aluminum, gave it the shape of an airplane bomb so that bombers could plant it, and put a fuze inside which would go off when a magnetic needle was disturbed. Such a disturbance meant that there was a large mass of iron nearby -- again, for example, a ship. They also had a safety catch on that fuze, consisting of a so-called hydrostatic switch, a device which prevented the fuze from working unless it was under water which opened the switch by its pressure. It was the undoing of the scheme that one of these parachuted mines did not fall into water but landed on a mudbank. Commander J. G. D. Ouvry, R. N., approached the monster with a kit of non-magnetic tools, mainly bronze. He opened up the mine, giving a running account of his actions through a microphone so that, in case of accident, the next mine opener would know what had been done wrong. He was both skilful and lucky, since he happened to be protected by the faithful functioning of the hydrostatic switch. The Allies then knew how such a mine worked: it just sat in the bottom mud of shallow water, waiting for a ship to come close. Once the principle of operation was known, counter-measures were not too difficult. Simultaneously the torpedo experts at Newport, R. I., began to think about disturbedforce fields. Torpedoes, if they scored a hit, were very effective weapons. They were also very expensive weapons, which point was usually remembered when a torpedo made a near miss. The result of the thinking about near misses and disturbed force fields was that the torpedo was cross-bred with an advanced magnetic mine. T HE offspring was the Torpedo fuze. It would explode when passing under a ship of shallow draft, and it would explode even when crossing the bow or stern. Performance was marred at first by a mistake in calibration of the early production models, and sailors made remarks featuring the word "long-hairs" -- which they quickly took back when the device was made to work. The most famous example of sensing fuzes operated above the water line. I mean what the military call the VT fuze. It means "variable time," though engineers are more likely to call it "proximity fuze." That fuze is something which is a bit hard to believe, not so much because of its action, which makes it go off in the proximity of a target, but because it is really a radio set. You don't expect a radio set to be still in one piece, or even in working order, after it has been shot from a gun. But the VT fuze, were spent on its development, remains in working order. In fact, it is not in working order before firing; it needs the shock of firing and the spinning of the shell to activate its battery. The working principle may again be called that of a disturbed force field, but it is utilized somewhat differently. When the battery has been activated, the fuze sends out a steady radio signal that forms a kind of aura. As long as nothing enters the aura, nothing will happen. But when the shell comes close to an airplane, radio waves are reflected back to the fuze. A special tube in the fuze senses the reflection and builds up resentment in the form of a charge. When the charge has grown strong enough -- all this taking place in fractions of a second -- this tube sets off a detonator. The detonator explodes a booster charge and the shock of the exof the main charge go off. Which is the end of the VT fuze and its radio aura, but usually also the end of the obstacle in the aura. These VT fuzes accomplished quite incredible feats during the Second World War. At Anzio Beach they downed #I Luftwaffe planes, aided by a gun-directing mechanism known to ordnance personnel as the M-#. But the important point is not the large figure. It is that out of these #I hits, some # were in all probability near misses, old style! been an additional number of actual misses beyond the range of action of the VT fuze, for once a shell had left the gun muzzle, it was on its own. To influence it even after it had been fired was the goal of the third method. The third method, that of guiding a lethal missile, cropped up for the first time in #. It was, of all places, in a circus in Berlin. They had a model of a Zeppelin airship there, about # feet long. When the time for the act came, a console was carried into the arena and the inventor closed one switch. The battery-powered electric motors of the airship model began to whir and the ship moved. A second switch was closed and the airship model flew in a curve. A third switch was closed; the airship dropped a small bomb, which exploded with red flames and much smoke in the sawdust. Some time later, the same inventor demonstrated a motorboat which he ran by wireless signals from the shore of the lake. He pointed out that this would be a fine method for sending explosiveladen ships into enemy harbors or fleet formations. Probably because the range was very short and the signals could easily have been "jammed," these unmanned supertorpedoes failed to materialize during the First World War. After that war, however, the Germans utilized the idea in their famous Ziihringen, a small warship with full armor but minus guns. Equipped with radio steering gearand all empty spaces stuffed with cork, the Ziihringen did long service as a mobile target ship. People who have read Goethe's Faust like to quote the lines: "All theory, my friend, is gray; but life a flowering green tree." It may be true in some cases, but when it comes to the guiding of missiles it works the other way round. It all foots fine an d lush in theory. In real life performance, things begin to look dark. When Dr. Ralph E. Gibson of the Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Springs, Md., was interviewed recently, one reporter asked how far one could fire a missile now. Doctor Gibson miles or a little more. And for what distance, asked another reporter, would you guarantee a hit? Ten feet, snapped Dr. Gibson. This I consider somewhat understated; he could have guaranteed a hit for the length of the missile itself. War, the only guided missiles used operationally were those released from aircraft, where conditions are somewhat simpler. There were ground-to-ground missiles, like V-l and V-#, but they were not guided. In the V-l, a robot pilot maintained the flying bomb on a straight course and at a given altitude. In the V-#, an automatic device saw to it that the power was shut off when the rocket had reached the proper velocity, which is, actually, the equivalent of doling out the right powder charge for a big gun. Of true guiding there were only beginnings. As an example I might mention a large anti-aircraft rocket that was supposed to form part of the German Rhineland defense. Naturally, the rocket was named Rheintocbter or Rhine Maiden. The idea was that when an allied bomber would be caught in a radar beam, a Rhine Maiden would be fired immediately and be trailed by a second beam, through which it would receive directional orders. Then the two beams would be brought together. It did not work too well and most experts now believe that this was not due to wartime hurry, but that the system itself was at fault. Those who think so prefer the "onebeam system," in which the antiaircraft missile is fed into the same beam that has caught the attacker. The missile receives no orders from the ground, but is equipped with a mechanism that will always shunt it back into its beam. Doctor Gibson calls that "conscience guiding," the missile being unable to stray from the narrow path leading to the enemy. Using only one beam, this method is not merely simpler, it has another advantage. Since one can feed several missiles in succession into the beam, the enemy would not have won out by default just because a single missile's conscience slipped. All that would be needed for final success would be a radar man on the grttund who did not lose his target. But why not just send the missile aloft in the general direction of the enemy and entrust a device like Felix the Heat-seeker with the actual hunting? Well, during that demonstration the engineers had been careful to leave Felix alone with just one source of heat radiation. In real action there would be so many heat sources that any device would be confused. It would have to be brought pretty close to the intended prey until it could take over. And even then it might be useful only against an attacking unmanned missile. If it tried to chase a manned bomber, sniffing either for the heat of its exhaust or the noise of its engines, the crew could do something about it. They could, for example, drop an instantaneously igniting incendiary bomb with a parachute that keeps it from falling too fast. The total weight of such a bomb would be around three pounds, small enough to allow any plane to carry a considerable number of them. Result: the heat-seeking interceptor would suddenly get a much hotter scent and strain all control surfaces in diving wildly after the floating magnesium bomb, blowing it successfully into smaller hot splinters. Any competent fireworks chemist can compound a mixture which does no harm but produces a considerable noise while burning. Incorporated into a parachute bomb, that would take care of noise-seeking missiles. One can confuse the radar man on the ground, too, but not that easily. Going on from here, one could ask: why specific measures? Why not develop a field which will set off all VT-fuzed projectiles and missiles at a distance, where their explosion can't cause any harm? this can be done. I am mostly wondering whether a plane could carry the necessary equipment to do it. But even if it can be done and if the plane can carry the necessary equipment, there exists one kind of VT fuze that might spoil everything. It is the optical VT fuze which actually sees the plane. The trick is accomplished by having a solid lucite lens which is covered except for a slot running all around the nose. Light enters through the slot and is focused on a photo-cell. An airplane that gets in the way is just something that acts as a partial screen reducing the amount of light received by the photo-cell. The photo-cell answers with a change in voltage that does what the reflected radio waves do in the other type. who was left alone with Felix, you find yourself in large company. All these developments took place so fast that nobody has been able to think his way through. And if there should be a good partial answer, it is not likely to be published. But it looks as if attack and defense are better matched than they were in #. By hard work and ingenuity, things may be kept Illustrated by Paul Pierre There's nothing like exciting fantasy to escape boredom,  The problem is to know whether it's actually a fantasy. this time of this day, which was like any other day in the year #, one would think all life had disappeared. Sweeping over the rustless spires, one would search in vain for the sight of human activity. One's gaze would scan the great ribboned highways that swept over and under each other like the weave of some tremendous loom. But there would be no autocars to see; nothing but the empty lanes and the colored traffic lights clicking out their mindless progressions. Dipping low and weaving in and out among the glittering towers, one might see the moving walks, the studied revolution of the giant street ventilators, hot in the winter and cool in summer, the tiny doors opening and closing, the park fountains shooting their methodical columns of water into the air. Farther along, one would flit across the great open field on which the glossy spaceships stood lined before their hangars. Farther yet, one would catch sight of the river, the metal ships resting along shore, delicate froth streaming from their sterns caused by the never-ending operation of their vents. Again, one would glide over the city proper, seeking some sign of life in the broad avenues, the network of streets, the painstaking pattern of dwellings in the living area, the metal fastness of the commercial section. The search would be fruitless. All movement below would be seen to be mechanical. And, knowing what city this was, one's eyes would stop the search for citizens and seek out those squat metal structures which stood a half mile apart. These circular buildings housed the never-resting machines, the humming geared servants of the city's people. These were the machines that did all; cleared the air of impunities, moved the walks and opened the doors, sent their synchronized impulses into the traffic lights, operated the fountains and the spaceships, the river vessels and the ventilators. These were the machines in whose flawless efficacy the people of the city placed their casual faith. At the moment, these people were resting on their pneumatic couches in rooms. And the music that seeped from their wall speakers, the cool breezes that flowed from their wall ventilators, the very air they breathed -- all these were of and from the machines, the unfailing, the trusted, the infallible machines. Now there was a buzzing in ears. Now the city came alive. From the black swirl of slumber, you heard it. You wrinkled up your classic nose and twitched the twenty neural rods that led to the highways of your extremities. The sound bore deeper, cut through swaths of snooze and poked an impatient finger in the throbbing matter of your brain. You twisted your head on the pillow and grimaced. There was no cessation. With stupored hand, you reached out and picked up the receiver. One eye propped open by dint of will, you breathed a weary mutter into the mouthpiece. "Captain Rackley!" The knifing voice put your teeth on edge. "Yes," you said. "You will report to your company headquarters immediately!" That swept away sleep and annoyance as a petulant old man brushes chessmen from his board. Stomach muscles drew into play and you were sitting. Inside your noble chest, that' throbbing meat ball, source of blood velocity, saw fit to swell and depress with marked emphasis. Your sweat glands engaged in proper activity, ready for action, danger, heroism. "Is it... ?" you started. "Report immediately!" the voice crackled, and there was a severe click in your ear. You, Justin Rackley, dropped the receiver -- plunko -- in its cradle and leaped from bed in a shower of fluttering bedclothes. You raced to your wardrobe door and flung it open. Plunging into the depths, you soon emerged with your skintight pants, the tunic for your forty-two chest. You donned said trousers and tunic, flopped upon a nearby seat and plunged your arches into black military boots. A ND your face reflected oh-sogrim thoughts. Combing out your thick blond hair, you were sure you knew what the emergency was. The Rustons ! They were at it again ! Awake now, you wrinkled your nose with conscious aplomb. The Rustons made revolting food for thought with their twelve legs, sign of alien progenitors, and their exudation of foul reptilian slime. As you scurried 'from your room, leaped across the balustrade and down the stairs, you wondered once again where these awful Rustons had originated, what odious interbreeding produced their monster race. You wondered where they lived, where proliferated their grisly stock, held their meetings of war, began the upward slither to those great Earth fissures from which they massed in attack. With nothing approaching answers to these endless questions, you ran out of the dwelling and flew down the steps to your faithful autocar. Sliding in, pushing buttons, levers, pedals, what have you, you soon had it darting through the streets toward the broad highway that led to headquarters. At this time of day, naturally, there were very few people about. In point of fact you saw none. It was only a few minutes later, when you turned sharply and zoomed up the ramp to the highway, that you saw the other autocars whizzing toward the tower five miles distant. You guessed, and were correct in guessing, that they were fellow officers, all similarly ripped from slumber by mobilization. Buildings flew past as you pushed pedals deeper into their cavities, your face always grim, alive to danger, grand warrior! True, you were not averse to the chance for activity after a month of idleness. But the circumstances were slightly distasteful. To think of the Rustons made a fellow shudder, eh? What made them pour from their unknown pits? Why did they seek to destroy the machines, let the acid canker of their ooze eat through metal, make the teeth fall off the gears like petals off a dying flower? What was their purpose? Did they mean to ruin the city? Govern its inhabitants? Or slaughter them? Ugly questions, questions without answers. ?# Well, you thought as you drove into headquarters parking area, thank heaven the Rustons had only managed to get at a few of the outer machines, yours blessedly not included. They, at least, had no more idea than you where the Great Machine was, that fabulous fountainhead of energy, driver of all machines. You slid the seat of your military trousers across the seat of the autocar and jumped out into the wide lot. Your black boots clacked as you ran toward the entrance. Other officers were getting out of autocars, too, running across the area. None of them said anything; they all looked grim. Some of them nodded curtly at you as you all stood together in the rising elevator. Bad business, you thought. With a tug at the groin, the door gave a hydraulic gasp and opened. You stepped out and padded silently down the hall to the high-ceilinged briefing room. Already the room was almost filled. The young men, invariably handsome and muscular, stood in gregarious formations, discussing ' the Rustons in low voices. The gray soundproof walls sucked in their comments and returned dead air. T HE men gave you a look and a nod when you entered, then returned to their talking. Justin Rackley, captain, that's you, sat down in a front seat. Then you looked up. The door to Upper Echelons was. jerked open. The General came striding through, a sheaf of papers in his square fist. His face was grim too. He stepped up on the rostrum and slapped the papers on the thick table which stood there. Then he plumped down on the edge of it and kicked his boot against one of its legs until all your fellow officers had broken up their groups and hurriedly taken seats. With silence creeping over all heads, he pursed his lips and banged a palm on the table surface. "Gentlemen," he said with that voice which seemed to issue from an ancient tomb, "once more the city lies in grave danger." He then paused and looked capable of handling all emergencies. You hoped that someday you might be General and look capable of handling all emergencies. No reason why not, you thought. "I will not take up precious time," the General went on, taking up precious time. "You all know your positions, you all know your responsibilities. When this briefing is concluded, you will report to the arsenal and draw out your ray guns. Always remember that the Rustons must not be allowed to enter the machinery and live. Shoot to kill. The rays are not harmful, repeat, not harmful to the machinery."' He looked over you eager young men. "You also know," he said, "the dangers of Ruston poisoning. For this reason, that the slightest touch of their stingers can lead to abysmal agonies of death, you will be assigned, as you also know, a nurse trained in the combating of syST temic poisons. Therefore, after leaving the arsenal, you will report to the Preventive Section." He winked, a thoroughly out-ofplace wink. "And remember," he said, with a broad roll of import in his voice, "this is war! And only war!" This, of course, brought on appreciative smiles, a smattering of leers and many unmilitary asides. Upon which the General snapped out of his brief role as chuckling confrere and returned to strict autocratic detachment. "Once assigned a nurse, those of you whose machines are more than fifteen miles from the city will report to the spaceport, there to be assigned a spacecar. All of you will then proceed with utmost dispatch. Questions?" No questions. "I need hardly remind you," completed the General, "of the importance of this defense. As you are well aware, should the Rustons penetrate our city, spread their ravaging to the core of our machine system, should they -- heaven forfend! -- locate the Great Machine, wc may then expect nothing but the most merciless of butchery. The city would be undone, we would all be annihilated, Man would be overthrown." T HE men looked at him with clenched fists, patriotism lurching through their brains like drunken satyrs, yours included, Justin Rackley. "That is all," said the General, waving his hand. "Good shooting." He jumped down from the platform and swept through the doorway, the door opening magically a split second before his imperious nose stood to shatter on its surface. You stood up, muscles tingling. Onward! Save our fair city! You stepped through the broken ranks. The elevator again, standing shoulder to shoulder with your comrades, a fluttering sense of hyper-awareness coursing your healthy young body. The arsenal room. Sound lost in the heavily padded interior. You, on line, grim-faced always, shuffling along, weapon bound. A counter; it was like an exchange market. You showed the man your identity card and he handed you a shiny ray gun and a shoulder case of extra ray pellets. Then you passed through the door and scuffed down the rubberized steps'to the Preventive Section. Corpuscles took a carnival ride through your veins. You were fourth in line and she was fourth in line; that's how she jas assigned to you.JjjYou perused her contours, notuittg! that her uniform, although similar to yours, somehow hung differently on her. This sidetracked # martial contemplations for the nonce. Zotvie hoopla -- your libido clapped its calloused hands. "Captain Rackley," said the man, "this is Miss Lieutenant Forbes. She is your only guarantee against death should you be stung by a Ruston. See that she remains close by at all times." This seemed hardly an onerous commission and you saluted the man. You then exchanged a flicker of lids with the young lady and intoned a gruff command, relative to departure. This roused the two of you to walk to the elevator. Riding down in silence, you cast glances at her. Long forgotten threnodies twitched into life in your revitalized brain. You were much taken by the dark ringlets that hung over her forehead and massed on her shoulders like curled black fingers. Her eyes, you noted, were brown and soft as eyes in a dream. And why shouldn't they be? Yet something lacked. Some retardation kept bringing you down from ethereal cogitation. Could it, you wondered, be duty? And, remembering what you were out to do, you suddenly feared again. The pink clouds marched away in military formation. Miss Lieutenant Forbes remained silent until the spacecar which you were assigned was flitting across the sky beyond the outskirts of the city. Then, following your somewhat banal overtures regarding the weather, she smiled her pretty little smile and showed her pretty little dimples. "I am but sixteen," she announced. "Then this is your first time." "Yes," she replied, gazing afar. "I am very frightened." You nodded, you patted her knee with what you meant to be a parental manner, but which, posthaste, brought the crimson of modesty flaming into her cheeks. "Just stay close to me," you said, trying hard for a double meaning. "I'll take care of you." Primitive, but good enough for sixteen. She blushed more deeply. The city towers flashed beneath. Far off, like a minute button on the fringes of spiderweb, you saw your machine. You eased the wheel forward; the tiny ship dipped down and began a long glide toward Earth. You kept your eyes on the control board with strict attention, wondering about this strange sense of excitement running pell mell through your body, not knowing whether it presaged combat fatigue of one sort or another. This was war. The city first. Hola! T HE ship floated down to and hovored over the machine as you threw on the air brakes. Slowly. it sank to the roof like a butterfly settling on a flower. You threw off the switch, heart pounding, all forgotten but the present danger. Grabbing the ray gun, you jumped out and ran to the edge of the roof. Your machine was beyond the perimeter of the city. There were fields about. Your keen eyes flashed over the ground. There was no sign of the enemy. You hurried back to the ship. She was still sitting inside watching you. You turned the knob and the communicator system spilled out its endless drones of information. You stood impatiently until the announcer spoke your machine number and said the Rustons were within a mile of it. You heard her drawn-in breath and noted the upward cast of frightened eyes in your direction. You turned off the set. "Come, we'll, go inside," you said, holding the ray gun in a delightfully shaking hand. It was fun to be frightened. A fine sense of living dangerously. Wasn't that why you were here? You helped her out. Her hand was cold. You squeezed it and gave her a half smile of confidence. Then, locking the door to the spacecar, to keep the foe out, you took her arm and the two of you went down the stairs. As you entered the main room, your head was at once filled with the smooth hum of machinery. Here, at this juncture of the adventure, you put down your ray gun and ammunition and explained the machinery to her. It is to be noted that you had no particular concern for the machinery as you spoke, being more aware of her proximity. Such charm, such youth, crying out for comfort. You soon held her hand again. Then you had your arm around . her lithesome waist and she was close. Something other than military defense planned itself in your mind. Came the moment when she flicked up her drowsy lids and looked you smack-dab in the eye, as is the archaic literary passage. You found her violet eyes somewhat unbalancing. You drew her closer. The perfume of her rosy breath tied casual knots in your limbs. And yet there was still something holding you back. Swish! Slap! She stiffened and cried out. The Rustons were at the walls! Y OU raced for the table upon which your ray gun rested. On the couch next to the table was your ammunition. You slung the case over your shoulder. She ran up to you and, sternly, you handed her the preventive case. You felt like the self-assured General when he was in a grim mood. "Keep the needles loaded and handy," you said. "I may..." The sentence died as another great slobbering Ruston slapped against the wall. The sound of its huge suckers slurped on the outside. They were searching for the machinery in the basement. You checked the gun. It was ready. "Stay here," you muttered. "I have to go down." You didn't hear what she said. You dashed down the stairs and came bouncing out into the basement just as the first horror gushed over the edge of a window onto its metal floor like a stream of gravitydefying lava. T HE row of blinking yellow eyes turned on you; your flesh crawled. The great brown-gold monstrosity began to scuttle across toward the machines with an oily squish. You almost froze in fear. Then instinct came to the fore. You raised the gun quickly. A leaped from the muzzle, touched the scaly body and enveloped it. Screeching and the smell of frying oil filled the air. When the ray had dissipated, the dead Ruston lay black and smoking on the floor, its slime running across the welded seams. You heard the sound of suckers behind. You whirled, blasted the second of the Rustons into greasy oblivion. Still another slid over the window edge and started toward you. Another burst from the gun and another scorched hulk lay twitching on the metal. You swallowed a great lump of excitement in your throat, your head snapping around, your body leaping from side to side. In a second, two more of them were moving toward you. Two bursts of ray; one missed. The second monster was almost upon you before you burst it into flaming chunks as it reared up to plunge its Black stingers in your chest. You turned quickly, cried out in horror. One Ruston was just slipping down the stairs, another swishing toward you, the long stingers aimed at your heart. You pressed the button. A scream caught in your throat. You were out of pellets! You leaped to the side and the Ruston fell forward. You tore open the case and fumbled with the pellets. One fell and shattered uselessly on the metal. Your hands were ice, they shook terribly. The blood pounded through your veins, your hair stood on end. You felt scared and amused. The Ruston lunged again as you slid the pellet into the ray gun. You dodged again -- not enough! The end of one stinger slashed through your tunic, laid open your arm. You felt the burning poison shoot into your system. You pressed the button and the monster disappeared in a cloud of unguent, smoke. The basement machinery was secure against attack -- the Rustons had bypassed it. You leaped for the stairway. You had to save the machines, save her, save yourself! Your boots banged up the metal chairs. You lunged into the great room of machines and swept a glance around. A gasp tore open your mouth. She was collapsed on a couch, sprawled, inert. A Ruston line of slime ran down the front of her swelling tunic. You whirled and, as you did, the Ruston vanished into the machinery, pushing its scaly body through the gear spaces. The slime dropped from its body and watery jaws. The machine stopped, started again, the racked wheels groaning. T HE city! You leaped to the machine's edge and shot a blast from the ray gun into it. The brilliantine blue ray licked out, missed the Ruston. You fired again. The Ruston moved too fast, hid behind the wheels. You ran around the machine, kept on firing. You glanced at her. How long did the poison take? They never said. Already in your flesh, howe er, the burning had begun. You felt as if you were going up in flames, as if great pieces of your body were about to fall off. You had to get an injection for yourself and her. Still the Ruston eluded you. You had to stop and put another pellet in the gun. The interior began to whirl around you; you were overpoweririgly dizzy. You pressed the button again and again. The ray darted into the machine. You reeled around with a sob and tore open your collar. You could hardly breathe. The smell of the singed suet, of the rays, filled your head. You stumbled around the machine, shot out another ray at the fast-moving Ruston. Then, finally, when you were about to keel over, you got a good target. You pressed the button, the Ruston was enveloped in flame, fell in ' molten bits beneath the machine, was swallowed up by the waste exhaust. You dropped the ray gun and staggered over to her. The hypodermics were on the table. You tore open her tunic and jabbed a needle into her soft white shoulder, shudderingly injected the antidote into her veins. You stuck another into your own shoulder, felt the sudden coolness run through your flesh and your bloodstream. You sank down beside her, breathing heavily and closing your eyes. The violence of activity had exhausted you. You felt as though you would have to rest a month after this. And, of course, you would. She groaned. You opened your eyes and looked at her. Your heavy breathing began again, but this time you knew where the excitement was coming from. You kept looking at her. A warm heat lapped at your limbs, caressed your heart. Her eyes were on you. "I... you said. Then all holding back was ended, all doubt undone. The city, the Rustons, the machines -- the danger was over and forgotten. She ran a caressing hand over your cheek.  A ND when next you opened ii-your eyes," finished the doctor, "you were back in this room." Rackley laughed, his head quivering on the pillow, his hands twitching in glee. "But my dear doctor," he laughed, "how fantastically clever of you to know everything. However do you do it, naughty man?" The doctor looked down at the tall handsome man who lay on the bed, still shaking with breathless laughter. "You forget," he said, "I inject you. Quite natural that I should know what happens then." "Oh, quite! Quite!" cried Justin Rackley. "Oh, it was utterly, utterly fantastic. Imagine me!" He ran strong fingers over the swelling biceps of his arm. "Me, a hero!" He clapped his hands together and deep laughter rumbled in his chest, his white teeth flashed against the glowing tan of his face. The sheet slipped, revealing the broad suppleness of his chest, the tightly ridged stomach muscles. into a bloodless fist. The thoughtplunged a cruel knife into his brain -- this is the end of our race, the sorry peak of Man's evolution. This is the final corruption. Rackley yawned and stretched his arms. "I must rest." He peered up at the doctor. "It was such a fatiguing dream." He began to giggle, his great blond head lolling on the pillow. His hands striking at the sheet as though he would die of amusement. "Do tell me," he gasped, "what on earth have you in those utterly delightful injections? I've asked you so often." The doctor picked up his plastic bag. "Merely a combination of chemicals designed to exacerbate the adrenals on one hand and, on the other, to inhibit the higher brain centers. In short," he finished, "a potpourri of intensification and reduction." "Oh, you always say that," said Justin Rackley. "But it is delightful. Utterly, charmingly delightful. You will be back in a month for my next dream and my dream playback ?" The doctor blew out a weary gust of breath. "Yes," he said, making no effort to veil his disgust. "Oh, dear me," he sighed. "Dear '"I'll be back next month." me, what tvould this dull existence "Thank heavens," said Rackley, be without your blessed injections' I'm done with that awful Ruston to ease our endless boredom?" dream for another five months. The doctor looked coldly at him, Ugh! It's so frightfully vile! I like his strong white fingers tightening the pleasanter dreams about mining and transporting ores from Mars and the Moon, and the adventures in food centers. They're so much nicer. But..." His lips twitched. "Do have more of those pretty young girls in them." His strong, weary body twisted in delight. "Oh, do," he murmured, his eyes shutting. He sighed and turned slowly and exhaustedly onto his broad, muscular side. T HE doctor walked through the deserted streets, his face tight with the old frustration. Why? Why? His mind kept repeating the word. Why must we continue to sustain life in the cities? For what purpose? Why do we not let civilization in its last outpost die as it means to die? Why struggle to keep such men alive? Hundreds, thousands of Justin Rackleys -- well kept animals, mechanically bred and fed and massaged into fair and handsome form. Mechanically restrained, too, from physically turning into the fat white slugs that, mentally, they already were and would bodily resemble if left untended. Or die. Why not let them? Why visit them every month, fill their veins with hypnotic drugs and sit back and watch them, one by one, go bursting into, their dream worlds to escape boredom? Must he endlessly send his suggestions into their loosened brainways, fly them to planets and moons, crowd all forms of love and grand adventure into their mock-heroic dreams? The doctor slumped tiredly and went into another dorm-building. More figures, strongly or beautifully made, passive on couches. More dream injections. He made them, watched the figures stand and stumble to the wardrobes. Explorers' outfits this time, pith helmets and attractive shorts, snake boots and bared limbs. He stood at the window, saw them clamber into their autocars and drive away. He sat back and waited for them to return, knowing every move they would make, because he made them in his mind. They would go out to the hydroponics tanks and fight off an invasion of Energy Eaters. Bigger than the Rustons and made of pure force, they threatened to suck the sustenance from the plants in the growing trays, the living, formless meat swelling immortally in the nutrient solutions. The Energy Eaters would be beaten off, of course. They always were. Naturally. They were only dreams. Creatures of fantastic illusion, conjured in eager dreaming minds by chemical magic and dreary scientific incantation. But what would all these Justin cRackleys say, these handsome and 'hopeless ruins of torpid flesh, if they found out how they were being fooled? Found out that the Rustons were only mental fictions for objectifying simple rust and wear and converting them into fanciful monsters. Monsters which alone could feebly arouse the dim instinct for self-preservation which just barely existed in this lost race. Energy Eaters -- beetles and spores and exhausted growth solutions. Mine Borers -- vaporous beasties that had to be blasted out of the Lunar and Martian metal deposits. And others, still others, all of them threats to that which runs and feeds and renews a city. And what would they say, these Justin Rackleys, upon the discovery that each of them, in their "dreams," had done genuine manual work ? That their ray guns were spray guns or grease guns or air hammers, their death rays no more than streams of lubrication for rusting machines or insecticides or liquid fertilizer? What would they say if they found out how they were tricked into breeding with aphrodisiacs in the guise of anti-poison shots? How they, with no healthy interest in procreation, were drugged into the furtherance of their spineless strain, a strain whose only function was to sustain the life-giving machines. I N A month he would return to Justin Rackley, Captain Justin Rackley. A month for rest, these people were so devoid of energy. It took a month to build up even enough strength to endure an injection of hypnotics, to oil a machine or tend a tray, and to bring forth one puny cell of life. All for the machines, the city, for man... The doctor spat on the immaculate floor of the room with the pneumatic couches. The people were the machines, more than the machines themselves. A slave race, a detestable residue, hopeless, without hope. Oh, how they would wail and swoon, he thought, getting grim pleasure in the notion, were they allowed to walk through that vast subterranean tunnel to the giant chamber where the Great Machine stood, that supposed source of all energy, and saw why they had to be tricked into working. The Great Machine had been designed to eliminate all human labor, tending the minor machines, the food plants, the mining. But some wise one on the Control Council, centuries before, had had the wit to smash the Great Machine's mechanical brain. And now the Justin Rackleys would have to see, with their own unbelieving eyes, the rust, the rot, the giant twisted death of it... But they wouldn't. Their job was to dream of adventurous work, and work while dreaming. For how long? Conclusion of a #-part serial The war in time needed bigger battalions to decide victory -- but those battalions all had to be composed of one man! #)# the #th century, Man rules the galaxy, but even ivitb the aid of synthetic humans -- his numbers are too small for more than a tenuous hold on all the stars and their planetary systems. All change, all danger of any sort, is a potential threat to the empire. One possible danger spot is #I Cygni, unapproachable because a shield of force keeps Earth ships away. Asher Sutton, agent of the Department of Galactic Investigation, is the only man who has ever landed on a Cygnian world. That was # years before the story opens. Now he returns to Earth... in a ship that cannot fly, with no food, air, or water aboard. His chief, Christopher Adams, is warned of Sutton's return by a man who claims to come from the future, and who advises Adams to have Sutton killed. Sutton escapes assassination, but finds himself the center of a war in time, originating several centuries in bis future, but spreading through all ages of human existence. The war is being fought over the interpretation of a book Sutton apparently will write at some future date, for on two occasions he discovers copies of his unwritten book on men ivho have come back to the past. t Sutton's book ivill state, when he writes it, that the inhabitants of #I Cygni are symbiotic abstractions -- not human, not even beings in our sense of the word. They form mutually beneficial partnerships with all individual life when it comes into existence, and stay with it until it dies. In truth, they are destiny, the unspoken voice that attempts to guide every living thing in a path which will help to attain the greatest possible fulfilment. The symbiotic abstractions attain a semblance of life in this relationship, while the unsuspecting host gains destiny. Sutton's premise is clear and unmistakable... all forms of life have destiny, .not just humanity. To inform the intelligent, thinking beings of the galaxy, Sutton was returned to life after his crash on #I Cygni, twenty years before, given a secondary body that lives on pure energy, that cast manipulate objects with mental energy, and kill by the force of hate alone, and he was sent back to Earth as ambassador. But it is Sutton's premise that has caused the war in time. Prime opponents are the Revisionists, who want to interpret Sutton's book as meaningthat only humans are beneficiaries of destiny... Against them are the androids, who are human in all respects but one... their inability to reproduce biologically. In a girl named Eva Armour and an android named Herkimer, Sutton finds two friends. Another friend he could have counted on, Buster, his old family robot, has homesteaded a planet on the outer rim ' of the galaxy. Before going, Buster left a trunk for Sutton. Among the junk in the trunk, Sutton finds a queer wrench and an unopened letter, # years old. Opening the letter, Sutton finds that it was written by a John H. Sutton, who tells of encountering a man who apparently had come in a ship from the future. After talking to the man, John H. returns a few hours later to the scene, but finds the ship and the man gone. On the grass lies a bloodstained wrench, apparently the very wrench which Sutton had found in the trunk. A few days later, the letter relates, a man comes to the Sutton farm looking for work. He stays there for ten years and at the time of the writing, John H. feels certain that he is the man from the future, somehow marooned in the #th century. Fearful of ridicule if he told the story during his lifetime, John H. Sutton has left the letter to be opened after his death. Somehow it never was. Because of the danger to Sutton on Earth, Herkimer and Eva Armour kidnap Sutton to an asteroid, where they plan that he will write his book. There, however, they find two men who turn out to be agents of the Revisionists. They offer Sutton any price he may ask if he ivill write the book so it will ap peas' that only humans are the beneficiaries of destiny. When he refuses, they kill him. Just as his human body is killed, however, he manages to switch to bis second, alien body, which operates on pure energy. He destroys the two Revisionists and takes their time ship. Determined to prevent the attempt of the hitman race to seize destiny as its own, Sutton decides to return to the #th century, to the time and place where John H. Sutton had met the man from the future. There, in that incident of # years before, he feels certain, lies the key to the entire situation. Returning, he witnesses from the edge of a woods the meeting between the man from the future and Sutton's remote ancestor. When John H. leaves, Sutton approaches the ship. The man from the future is holding a wrench and Sutton forces him to drop it. But in the ensuing fight, the man regains the wrench and strikes at Sutton's head. Even as the wrench descends upon his skull, Sutton realizes that not the man from the future, but he himself will be marooned in the #th century. Tricked by a smooth character from # years ahead in time. Tricked by a letter from # years out of the past. Tricked, groaned Sutton, by my own muddle-headedness. He sat up and held his head in his hands and felt the westering Sun against his back, heard the squalling of a catbird in the blackberry patch and the sound of the wind as it ran along the corn rows. Tricked and trapped, he said through his teeth. He took his hands from his head and there in the trampled grass lay the wrench with the blood on it. Sutton spread out his fingers and blood was on them, too... , warm and sticky blood. Gingerly he touched his head with a cautious hand and his hair was wet and matted down. Pattern, he said viciously. It all runs in a pattern. Here I am and there is the wrench and just beyond the fence is the field of corn that is better than knee high on this splendid afternoon of July #. The ship from the future is gone and in another hour or so John H. Sutton w'ill come waddling down the hill to ask the questions that he forgot to ask before. And ten years from now he will write a letter and in it he will record his suspicions about me and I will be in the farm yard at that very moment pumping a drink. Sutton staggered to his feet and stood in the empty afternoon, with the sweep of sky above the horizon of the ridge and the panorama of the winding river far down the slope below. He touched the wrench with his toe and thought: I could break the pattern. I could take the wrench and then John H. would never find it, and, with one thing in the pattern changed, the end might not be the same. I read the letter wrong, he thought. I always figured it would be the other man, not me. It never once occurred to me that it was my blood upon the wrench and that I would be the one who would steal the clothes off the line. And yet he realized there were certain things that didn't track. He still had his clothes and there would be no need to steal. His ship still was resting on the river's bottom and there was no need to stay in the past. Yet it had happened once before, for if it had not happened, why had there been the letter? The letter had made him come here and the letter had been written because he had come, so he must have come before. And in that other 'time he'd stayed... , and stayed only because he could not get away. This time he would go back; this time he need not stay. A second chance, he thought. I've been given another chance. Yet that wasn't right, for if there had been a second time, old John H. would have known about it... And there couldn't be a second time, for this was the very day that John H. had talked to the man out j of the future. Sutton shook his head. There had been only one time that this had happened, and this, of course, was it. Something will stop me, he told himself. Something will not let me go back. Somehow I will be forced to steal the clothes and in the end I'll walk to that farmhouse up there and ask if they need a hand for the harvest. For the pattern was set. It had to be set. Sutton touched the wrench with his toe again, pondering. Then he turned and went down the hill. Glancing over his shoulder as he plunged into the woods, he saw old John H. coming down the hill. F OR three days Sutton toiled to free the ship from the tons of sand that the treacherous, swift-running river currents had mounded over it. And he admitted, when three days were gone, that it was a hopeless task, for the current piled up the sand as fast as he could clear it. After that, he concentrated on clearing an opening to the entrance lock and when another day went by with many cave-ins, he accomplished his purpose. Wearily he braced himself  against the metal of the ship, d  A gamble, he told himself. But I will have to gamble. For there was no possibility of wrenching the ship free by using the engines. The tubes, he knew, were packed with sand and any attempt to use the rockets would simply mean that he and the ship and a good portion of the landscape would evaporate in a flashing puff of atomic fury. He had lifted a ship from a Cygnian planet and driven it across eleven years of space by the power of mind alone. He had rolled two sixes. Perhaps, he told himself. Perhaps... There were tons of sand and he was deathly tired, tired despite the smooth, efficient functioning of his non-human system of metabolism. I rolled two sixes, he said. Surely that was harder than the task I must do now. Although that called for deftness and this will call for power... and suppose, just suppose I haven't got the strength. For it would take strength to lift this buried mass of metal out of the mound of sand. Not the strength of muscles, but the strength of mind. Of course, he told himself, if he could not lift the ship, he still could use the time-mover, shift the ship, lying where it was, forward # years. Although there were hazards he did not like to think about. For in shifting the ship through time, he would be exposing it to every threat and vagary of the river through the whole # years. He put his hand up to his throat, feeling for the key chain that hung around his neck. There was no chain! Mind dulled by sudden terror, he stood frozen for a moment. Pockets, he thought, but his hands fumbled with a dread certainty that there was no hope. For he never put the keys of the ship in his pockets... always on their chain around his neck where they would be safe. He searched, feverishly at first, then with a grim, cold thoroughness. His pockets held no keys. The chain broke, he thought in frantic desperation. The chain broke and it fell inside my clothes. He patted himself, carefully, from head to foot, and it was not there. He took off his shirt, gently, cautiously, feeling for the missing keys. He tossed the shirt aside, and sitting down, pulled off his trousers, searching in their folds, turning them inside out. There were no keys. On hands and knees, he searched the sands of the river bed, fumbling in the dim light that filtered through the rushing water. An hour later he gave up. The shifting, water-driven sand already had closed the trench he had dug to the lock, and now there was no point of getting to the lock, for he could not open it when he got there. His shirt and trousers had vanished with the current. Wearily, beaten, he turned toward the shore, forcing his way through the stubborn water. His head broke into open air and the first stars of evening were shining in the east. On shore he sat down with his back against a tree. He took one breath and then another, willed the first heartbeat, then the second and a third... nursed the human metabolism back into action once again. The river gurgled at him, deep laughter on its tongue. In the wooded valley a whippoorwill began its sadistic suggestion. Fireflies danced through the blackness of the bushes. A mosquito stung him and he slapped at it savagely. A place to sleep, he thought. A hay-loft in a barn, perhaps. And pilfered food from a farmer's garden to fill his empty belly. Then clothes. At least he knew where he'd get the clothes. During the rest of the week there was work -- physical labor -- for a man to do, the endless, trudging round of work that is necessary to extract a living from the soil. Land to plow, crops to be put in and tended and finally harvested, wood to cbt, fences to be built and mended, machines to be repaired -- things that must be done with bone and muscle, with calloused hand and aching back and the hot Sun on one's neck or the whiplash of windy cold biting at one's bones. For six days a farmer labored and the labor was a thing that dulled one to the aching emptiness of memory, and, at night, when work was done, sleep was swift and merciful. There were times when the work, not only for its sedative effect, but of its very self became a thing of interest and of satisfaction. The straight line of new-set fence posts became a minor triumph when one glanced back along their length. The harvest field with its dust upon one's shoes and its smell of Sun on golden straw and the clacking of the binder as it went its rounds became a full-breasted symbolism of plenty and contentment. And there were moments when the pink blush of apple blossoms shining through the silver rain of spring became, a wild and pagan paean of the resurrection of the Earth from the frosts of winter. For six days a man would labor and would not have time to think; on the seventh day he rested and braced himself for the' loneliness and the thoughts of desperation that idleness would bring. Not a loneliness for a people or a world or a way of life, for this world was kindlier and closer to Earth and life and safer -- muqji safer -- than the world one had left behind. But a nagging loneliness, an accusing loneliness that talked of a job that waited; a piece of work that now might wait forever, a task that must be done, but now never might be done. At first there had been hope. Surely, Sutton thought, they will look for me. Surely they will find a way to reach me. The thought was a comfort that he hugged close against himself, a pace of mind that he could not bring himself to analyze too closely. For he realized, even as he coddled it, that it was unrealistic, that it might not survive too close a scrutiny, that it was fashioned of faith and of wishful thinking and that for all its wealth of comfort it might be a fragile bauble. T HE past cannot be changed, he argued with himself, not in its entirety. It can be altered -- subtly. It can be twisted and it can be dented and it can be whittled down, but by and large it stands. And that is why I'm here and will have to stay until old John H. writes the letter to himself. For the past is in the letter -- the letter brought me here and it will keep me here until it's finally written. Up to that point the pattern must necessarily hold, for up to that point in time the past, so far as I and my relation with it are concerned, is a known and a revealed past. But the moment the letter is written, it becomes an unknown past; it tends to the speculative and there is no known pattern. After the letter is written, so far as I'm concerned, anything can happen. Although he admitted, even as he thought it, that his premise was fallacious. Known or not, revealed or unrevealed, the past would form a pattern. For the past had happened. He was living in a time that already had been set and molded. Even in that thought there was a hope, however. Even in the unknownness of the past and the knowledge that what had happened was a thing that stood unchanged, there must be hope. For somewhere, somewhen he had written a book. The book existed and therefore had happened, although, of course, it had not happened yet. But he had seen two copies of the book and that meant that in some future age the book was a factor in the pattern of the past. Sometime, said Sutton, they will find me. Sometime before it is too late. They will hunt for me and find me. They will have to find me. They? he asked himself, finally honest with himself. Herkimer, an android. Eva Armour, a woman. They... two people. But not those two alone. Surely not those two alone. Back of them, like a shadowy army, all the other androids and all the robots that Man had ever fashioned. And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere selfassertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend, rather than a powerhungry creature that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart. They would look for him, of course, but where? With all of time and all of space to search in, how would they know when and where to look? T HE robot at the information center, he remembered, could tell them that he had inquired about an ancient , town called Bridgeport, Wisconsin. And that would tell them where. But no one could tell them when. For no one knew about the letter... absolutely no one. He remembered how the dried and flaky mucilage had showered down across his hands in a white and aged powder when his thumb nail had cracked loose the flap of the envelope. No one, certaiply, had seen the contents of that letter since the day it had been written until he, himself, had opened it. He realized now that he should have gotten word to someone... word of where and when he was going and what he meant to do. But he had been so confident and it had seemed such a simple thing, such a splendid plan. A splendid plan in the very directness of its action... to intercept the Revisionist, to knock him out and take his ship and go forward into time to take his place. It could have been arranged, of that he was certain. There would have been an android somewhere to help fashion his disguise. There would have been papers in the ship and androids from the future to brief him on the things that he would have had to know. A splendid plan... except it hadn't worked. I could have told the information robot, Sutton told himself. He certainly was one of us. He would have passed the word along. He sat with his back against the tree and stared out across the river valley, hazy with the blue of the Indian summer. In the field below him the corn stood in brown and golden shocks, like a village of wigwams that clustered tight and warm against the sure knowledge of the winter's coming. To the west the bluffs of the Mississippi were a purple cloud that crouched close against the land. To the north the golden land swept up in low hill rising on low hill until it reached a misty point where. somewhere, land stopped and sky began, although one could not find the definite dividing point, no clear-cut pencil mark that held the two apart. A field mouse came out of a corn shock and looked at Sutton for a moment with its beady eyes, then squeaked in sudden fright and whisked into the shock again, its tail looped above its back in frantic alarm. Simple folk, thought Sutton. The little, simple, furry folk. They would be with me, too, if they could only know. The bluejay and the field mouse, the owl and hawk and squirrel. A brotherhood, he thought... the brotherhood of life. in the shock and he tried to imagine what life as a mouse might mean. Fear first of all, of course, the ever-present, quivering, overriding fear of other life, of owl and hawk, of mink and fox and skunk. And the fear of Man, he added. All things fear Man. Man has caused all things to fear him. Then there would be hunger, or at least the dread and threat of hunger. And the urge to reproduce. There would be the urgency and the happiness of life, the thrill of swiftly moving feet and the 'sleek contentment of the wellfilled belly and the sweetness of sleep... and what else? What else might fill, a mouse's life? He crouched in a place of safety and listened and knew that all was well. All was safe and there were food and shelter against the coming cold. For he knew about the cold, not so much from the experience of other winters as from an instinct handed down' through many generations of shivering in the cold and dying of winter famine. To his ears came the soft rustlings in the corn shock as others of his kind moved softly on their business. He smelled the sweetness of the Sun-cured grass that had been brought in to fashion nests for warm and easy sleeping. And he smelled, as well, the grains of corn and the succulent weed seeds that would keep their bellies full. All is well, he thought. All is as it should be. But one must keep watch, one must never lower one's guard, for security is a thing that can be swept away in a single instant. And we are so soft... we are so soft and frail, and we make good eating. A paw-step in the dark can spell swift and sure disaster. A whir of wings is the song of death. He closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail around him... Sutton sat with his back against the tree and suddenly, without knowing how or when he had become so, he was rigid with the knowledge of what had happened. JS He had closed his eyes and tucked his feet beneath him and wrapped his tail about him and he had known the simple fears and the artless, ambitionless contentment of another life... of a life that hid in a corn shock from the paw-steps and the wings, that slept in Sun-scented grass and felt a vague but vital happiness in the sure and fundamental knowledge of food and warmth and shelter. known it alone... he had been the little creature, he had been the mouse that the corn shock sheltered; and at the one and the same time he had been Asher Sutton, sitting with his back against a straight-trunked shellbark hickory tree, gazing out across the autumn-painted valley. There were two of us, said Sutton. I, myself, and I, the mouse. There were two of us at once, each with his separate identity. The mouse, the real mouse, did not know it, for if he had known or guessed, I would have known as well, for I was as much the mouse as I was myself. He sat quiet and still, not a muscle moving, wonder gnawing athim. Wonder and a fear, a fear of a dormant alienness that lay within his brain. He had brought a ship from Cygni, he had returned from death, he had rolled a six. Now this! A man is born and he has a body and a mind that have many functions, some of them complex, and it takes him years to learn those functions, more years to master them. Months before one takes a toddling step, months more before one shapes a word, years before thought and logic become polished tools... and sometimes, said Sutton, sometimes they never do. Even then there is a certain guidance, the guidance of experienced mentors... parents at first and teachers after that and the doctors and the churches and all the men of science and the people that one meets. All the people, all the contacts, all the forces that operate to shape one into a social being capable of using the talents that he holds for the good of himself and the society which guides him and holds him to its path. Heritage, too, thought Sutton... the inbred knowledge and the will to do and think certain things in a certain way. The tradition of what other men have done and the precepts that have been fashioned from the wisdom of the ages. The normal human has one body and one mind, and Lord knows, Sutton thought, that is enough for any man to get along with. But I, to all intent, have what amounts to a second body and perhaps even a second mind, but for that second body I have no mentors and I have no heritage. I do not know how to use it yet; I'm just taking my first toddling step. I am finding out, slowly, one by one, the things that I may do. Later on, if I live long enough, I may even learn to do them well. But there are mistakes that one will make. A child will stumble when it walks at first, and its words, to begin with, are only the approximation of words, and it does not know enough not to burn its finger with matches it has lighted. "Johnny," he said. "Johnny, talk to me." "Yes, Ash?" "Is there more, Johnny?" "Wait and see," said Johnny. "I cannot tell you. You must wait and see." T HE android investigator said; "We checked Bridgeport back to the year # and we are convinced nothing happened there. It was a small village and it lay off the main trunk of world happenings." "It wouldn't have to be a big thing," Eva Armour told him. "It could have been a little thing. Just some slight clue. A word out of the context of the future, perhaps. A word that Sutton might have dropped in some unguarded moment and someone else picked up and used. Within a few years a word like that would become a part of the dialect of that community." "We checked for the little things, miss," the investigator said. "We checked for any change, any hint that might point to Sutton having been in that community. We used approved methods and we covered the field. But we found nothing, absolutely nothing. The place is barren of any leads at all." "He milst have gone there," said Eva. "The robot at the information center talked to him. He asked about Bridgeport. It indicates that he had some interest in the place." "But it didn't necessarily indicate that he was going there," Herkimer pointed out. "He went some place," said Eva. "Where did he go?" "We threw in as large a force of investigators as was possible without arousing suspicion, both locally and in the future," the investigator told them. "Our men practically fell over one another. We sent them out as book salesmen and scissor grinders and unemployed laborers looking for work. We canvassed every home for forty miles around, first at twenty-year intervals, then, when wfeilfound nothing, at ten, and filially at five. If there had been any word or any rumor, we would have run across it." "Back to the year #, you say?" asked Herkimer. "Why not to # or # or even #?" "We had to set an arbitrary date somewhere," the investigator told him. "The Sutton family lived in that locality," said Eva. "I suppose you investigated them just a bit more closely."' "We had men working on the Sutton farm off and on," said the investigator. "As often as the family was in need of any help on the farm, one of our men showed up to get himself the job. When the family needed no help, we had men on other farms nearby. One of our men bought a tract of timber in that locality and spent ten years at woodcutting... he could have stretched it out much longer, but we were afraid someone would get suspicious. "We did this from the year # up to #, when the last of the family moved from the area." E VA looked at Herkimer. "The family has been checked all the way?" she asked. Herkimer nodded. "Right to the day that Asher left for Cygni. There's nothing that would help us." Eva said, "It seems so hopeless. He is somewhere. Something happened to him. The future, perhaps." "That's what I was thinking," Herkimer told her. "The Revisionists may have intercepted him. They may be holding him." "They couldn't hold him... not Asher Sutton," Eva said. "They couldn't hold him if he knew all his powers." "But he doesn't know them," Herkimer reminded her. "And we couldn't tell him about them or draw them to his attention. He had to find them for himself. He had to be put under pressure and suddenly discover them by natural reaction. He couldn't be taught them; he had to evolve into them." "We did so well," said Eva. "We seemed to be doing so well. We forced Morgan into ill-considered action by conditioning Benton into challenging Sutton, the one quick way to get rid of Asher when Adams failed to fall in with the plan to kill him. And that Benton incident put Asher on his guard without our having to tell him that he should be careful. And now," she said. "And now... "The book was written," Herkimer told her. "But it doesn't have to be," said Eva. "You and I may be no more than puppets in some probability world that will pinch out tomorrow." "We'll cover all key points in the future," Herkimer promised her. "We'll redouble our espionage of the Revisionists, check back on every task force of the past. Maybe we'll learn something." "It's the random factors," Eva said. "You can't be sure, ever. All of time and space for them to happen in. How can we know where to look or turn? Do we have to fight our way through every possible happening to get the thing we want?" "You forget one factor," Herkimer said calmly. "One factor?" "Yes, Sutton himself. Sutton is somewhere and I have great faith in him. In him and his destiny. For, you see, he listens closely to his destiny and that will pay off in the end." Eva walked to the window. Ash, she thought. Ash, my love, you simply have to be all right. You must know what you're doing. You must come back to us and you must write the book and... Not for me alone, she thought. Not for me alone, for I, least of all of them, have a claim on you. But the galaxy has a claim on you, and maybe someday the universe. The little striving lives are waiting for your words and the hope and dignity they spell. And most of all the dignity. Dignity ahead of hope. The dignity of equality... the dignity of the knowledge that all life is on an equal basis... that life is all that matters... that life is the badge of a greater brotherhood than anything the mind of Man has ever spelled out in all its theorizing. And I, she thought, have no right to think the way I do, to feel the way I do. But I can't help it, Ash. I can't help but love you. Someday, she thought, and knew it for a hopeless wish. She stood straight and lonely and the tears moved slowly down her cheeks, and she did not raise her hand to brush them off. Dreams, she thought. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope... the dream that it doomed long before it's broken... that's the worst of all. ( C  #OU are a strange man, I H. Sutton told him. "And a good one, too. I've never had a better hired hand in all the years I've farmed. None of the others would stay more than a . J  tr year or two, always running off, always going somewhere." "I have no place to go," said Asher Sutton. "There's no place I want to go. This is as good as any." rnd it was better, he told himself,', than he had thought it wbuld be, for here were peace and security and living close to nature that no man of his own age ever had experienced. The two men leaned on the pasture bars and watched the twinkling of the house and auto lights from across the river. In the darkness on the slope below them, the cattle, turned out after milking, moved about with quiet, soft sounds, cropping a last few mouthfuls of grass before settling down to sleep. A breeze with a touch of coolness in it drifted up the slope and it was fine and soothing after a day of heat. "We always get a cool night breeze," said old John H. "No matter how hot the day may be, we have easy sleeping." He sighed. "I wonder sometimes," he said, "how well contented a man should let himself become. I wonder if it may not be a sign of -- well, almost sinfulness. For Man is not by nature a contented animal. He is restless and unhappy and it's that same unhappiness that has driven him, like a lash across his back, to his great accomplishments." "Contentedness," said Asher Sutton, "is an indication of complete adjustment to one's particular environment. It is a thing that is not often found... that is too seldom found. Someday Man, and other creatures as well, will know how to achieve it and there will be peace and happiness in all the galaxy." John H. chuckled. "You take "I was taking the long-range view," said Sutton. "Someday Man will be going to the stars." John H. nodded. "Yes, I suppose he will. But he will go too soon. Before Man goes to the stars, he should learn how to live on Earth." He yawned and said: "I think I will turn in. Getting old, you know, and I need my rest." "I'm going to walk around a bit," said Sutton. "You do a lot of walking, William." "After dark," said Sutton, "the land is different than it is in daylight. It smells different. Sweet and fresh and clean, as if it were just washed. You hear things in the quietness you do not hear in daylight. You walk and you are alone with the land and the land belongs to you." not the land that's different, think you see and hear things that the rest of us do not know. Althen added abruptly, "almost as if you did not quite belong." "Sometimes I think I don't." "Remember this," John H. told him. "You are one of us... one of the family, seems like. Let me see, how many years now?" "Ten," said Sutton. "That's right. I can usually recall the day you came, but sometimes I forget. Sometimes it seems that you were always here. Sometimes I catch myself thinking you're a Sutton." He hacked and cleared his throat, spitting in the dust. "I borrowed your typewriter the I had to write. It was an important letter and I wanted it done properly." "It's all right," said Sutton. "I'm glad it was some use to you." "Getting any writing done these "No," said Sutton, "I gave up. I couldn't do it. I lost my notes, you see. I had it all figured out. and I had it down on paper, and I thought maybe I could remember it, but I found I couldn't. It's no use trying." John H.'s voice was a soft, low sound in the darkness. "You in "No," said Sutton. "Not exactly trouble." "Anything I can do to help?" "Not a thing," said Sutton. "Let me know if there is," insisted the old man. "We'd do anything for you." "Someday I may go away," said Sutton. "Maybe suddenly. If I do, I wish you would forget me, forget I was ever here." "That's What you wish, lad?" "Yes, it is," said Sutton. We never could do that. But we won't talk about you. If someone comes and asks about you, we'll act as if you never had been here." He paused. "Is that the way you "Yes," said Sutton. "If you don't mind, that's the way I want it." They stood silent for a moment, facing one another in the dark. Then the old man turned around and clumped toward the lighted windows of the house and Sutton, turning, too, leaned his arms on the pasture bars and stared across the river where the faery lights were blinking in a land of nevernever. T EN years, thought Sutton, and the letter's written. Ten years and the conditions of the past are met. Now the past can get along without me, for I was only staying so that John H. could write the letter... so that he could write it and I could find it in an old trunk # years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid of synthetic dreams that will be called the Zag House. The Zag House will be over there across the river, he thought, far up the plain above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien; and the University of North America, with its towers of beauty, will be set on the hills there to the north, and Adams' house will be near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Great ships will climb into the sky from the Iowa prairies and head out for the stars that even now are twinkling overhead... and other stars that no man's eye can see unaided. Far across the river, he thought, that's where the Zag House will be. And that is where someday, # years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. Like in a story, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is towheaded with a cowlick and he's barefooted and the .girl twists her apron in her little hands and tells him what her name is... He. straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate. "Eva," he said hopelessly, "where are you?" Her hair was copper and her eyes... what color were her eyes? I have studied you for twenty years, she had said, and he had wanted to kiss her for it, not believing the words she spoke, but ready to believe the unspoken word of her proud face and lovely body. Somewhere she stillexisted, somewhere in time and space. Somewhere she might be thinking of him as even now he thought of her. If he tried hard enough, he might contact her. Might drive his hunger for her through the folds of space and time and let her know that he still remembered, still wanted her, that somehow, sometime he would come back to her. But even as he thought of it, he knew that it was unreal, that he floundered in the grasp of forgotten time as a man may flounder in a running sea. It was not he who would reach out for her, for he could not, but she or Herkimer or someone else might reach out to him... if anyone ever did. Ten years, he thought, and they seem tohave forgotten me. Is it because they cannot find me, or, having found me, cannot reach me? Or is it for a purpose, and if that is it, what can the purpose be? There had been times when he had felt that he was being watched, that nasty touch of cold between the shoulder blades. And there had been the time when someone had run from him when he had been in the woods, late of a summer evening, hunting for the fencejumping, cross-eyed heifer that was forever getting lost. He turned from the pasture bars and through the barnyard, making his way in the darkness as a man will walk in a wellremembered room. From the barn came the scent of freshly mown hay, and in the row of chicken coops one of the young birds was cheeping sleepily. flicked out and touched the disturbed chicken's mind. Fluttering dread of an unknown thing... there had been a sound coming on the edge of sleep. And a sound was danger... a signal of an unknown danger. Sound and nowhere to go. Darkness and sound. Apprehension. Sutton pulled back his mind and walked on. Not much stability in a chicken, he thought. A cow was contented and its thought and purpose as slow-moving as its feeding. A dog was alive and friendly, and a cat, no matter how well tamed it might be, still walked the jungle's edge. I know them all, he thought. I have been each one of them. And there are some that are not quite pleasant. A rat, for example, or a weasel or a bass lying in wait beneath the lily pads. But the skunk... the skunk was a pleasant fellow. One could enjoy living as a . skunk. Curiosity or practice? Perhaps curiosity, he admitted, the human penchant for prying into things that were hung with signs: No Trespassing. Keep Out. Private. Do Not Disturb. But practice as well, learning one of the tools of the second body. Learning how to move into another mind and share its every shade of intellectual and emotional reactions. But there was a line... a line he had never crossed, either through innate decency or a fear of being found out. He could not decide quite which. The road was a dusty strip of white that ran along the ridge, twisting between the deep bowls of darkness where the land fell away into deep hollows. Sutton walked slowly, footfalls muffled by the dust. The land was black and the road was white and the stars were large and soft in the summer night. So different, Sutton thought, from the winter stars. In the winter the stars retreated high into the sky and glowed with a hard and steely light. Peace and quiet, he told himself. In this corner of the ancient Earth there is peace and quiet, unbroken by the turbulence of twentieth century living. From a land like this came the steady men, the men who in a few more generations would ride the ships out to the stars. Here, in the quiet corners of the world, were built the stamina and courage, the depth of character and the deep convictions that would take the enmen had dreamed, and drive them to the farthest rims of the galaxy, there to hold key. worlds for the glory and the profit of the race. The profit, Sutton said. The glory gets dimmed by profit somehow. Ten years, he thought, and the involuntary compact with time has been consummated... each condition filled. I am free to go. But there was no place to go and no way to get there. I would like to stay, said Sutton. It is pleasant here. "Johnny," he said. "Johnny, what are we going to do?" the old canine stir, the wagging tail, the comfort of blankets tucked about a child in his bed. "It's all right, Ash," said Johnny. "Everything's all right. You needed these ten years." "You've stayed with me, Johnny." "I am you," said Johnny. "I came when you were born, I'll stay until you die." "And then?" "You'll not need me. Ash. I'll go to something or someone else. None walks ' alone."  None walks alone, said Sutton, and he said it like a prayer. And he was not alone. Someone walked beside him, and where he'd come from, and how long he'd been there, Sutton did not know. "This, is a splendid walk," said the man, whose face was hidden in darkness. "Do you take it often?" "Almost every night," said Sutton's tongue, and his brain warned: Steady! Steady! "It's so quiet," said the man. "So quiet and alone. It is good for thinking. A man could do a lot of thinking, walking nights out here." Sutton did not answer. They plodded along, side by side, and even while ; he fought to keep relaxed, Sutton felt his body tensing. "You've been doing a lot of thinking, Sutton," said the man. "Ten whole years of thinking."' "You should know," said Sutton. "You've been watching me." "We've watched," admitted the man. "And our machines have watched. We got you down on tape and we know a lot about you. A whole lot more than we did ten years ago." "Ten years ago," said Sutton, 'you sent two men to buy me off." "I know," replied the man. "We have often wondered what became of them." "That's an easy one," Sutton said. "I killed them." "They had a proposition," "If you can call it that. They offered me a planet." "I knew at the time it wouldn't work," the man declared. "I told Trevor that it wouldn't work." "I suppose you have another proposition?" Sutton asked. "A slightly higher price?" "Not exactly," said the man. "We thought this time we'd cut out the bargaining and just let you name your price." "I'll think about it," Sutton told him. "I'm not too sure I can think up a price." "As you wish, Sutton," said the man. "We'll be waiting... and watching. Just give us the sign when you've made up your mind." "A sign?" "Sure. Just write us a note. We'll be looking over your shoulder. Or just say... 'Well, I've made up my mind.' We'll be listening and we'll hear." "Simple," Sutton replied. "Nothing to it." "We make it easy for you," said the man. "Good evening, Mr. Sutton." Sutton did not see him do it, but sensed that he had touched his hat... if he wore a hat. Then he was gone, turning off the road and going down across the pasture, walking in the dark, heading for the woods that sloped to the river bluffs. road and listened to him go -- the soft swish of dew-laden grass brushing on his shoes, the muted pad of his feet in the pasture. Contact at last! After ten years, contact with the people from another time. But the wrong people. Not his people. The Revisionists had been watching him, even as he had sensed them watching. Watching and waiting, waiting for ten years. But, of course, not ten years of their time, just ten years of his. Machines and watchers would have been sprinkled through those ten years, so that the job could have been done in a year or a month, or even in a week, if they had wanted to throw enough men and materials into the effort. But why wait ten years? To soften him up, to make him ready to jump at anything they offered? To soften him up? He grinned wryly in the dark. Then suddenly the picture came to him and he stood there stupidly, wondering why he hadn't thought of it much sooner. They hadn't waited to soften him up... they had waited for old John H. to write the letter. For they knew about the letter. They had studied old John H. and they knew he'd write a letter. They had him down on tape and they knew him inside out and they had figured to an eyelash the way his mind would work. The letter was the key to the whole thing. The letter was the lure that had been used to suck Asher Sutton back into this time. They had lured him, then sealed him off and kept him, kept him as surely as if they'd had him in a cage. They had studied him and they knew him and they had him figured out. They knew what he would do as surely as they had known what old John H. would do. His mind flicked out and probed cautiously at the brain of the man striding down the hill. Chickens and cats and dogs and meadow mice -- and not one of them suspected, not one of them had known that another mind than theirs had occupied their brain. But the brain of a man might be a different matter. Highly trained and sensitive, it might detect; outside interference, might sense, if it did not actually know, the invasion of itself. ' # The girl won't wait. I've been aivay too long. Her affections are less than skin deep and she has no morals, absolutely none, and I'm the one to know. I've been on this damn patrol too long. She will be tired of waiting... she was tired of waiting when I was gone three hours. To hell with her... I can get another one. But not like her... not exactly like her. There isn't another one anywhere quite like her. Whoever said this Sutton guy would be an easy one to crack was crazy as a loon. God, after ten years in a dump like this, I'd fall on someone's neck and kiss 'em if they came back from my own time. Anyone at all... friend or foe, it would make no difference. Bin what does Sutton do? Not a damn word. N.ot a single syllable of surprise in any word he spoke. When l first spoke to him, he didn't even break his stride, kept right on walking as if he knew I'd been there all the time. Cripes, l could use a drink. Nerve-wracking work. Wish l could forget that girl. Wish she would be waiting for me, but I know she won't. W ish mind, stood quietly in the road. And inside himself he felt the shiver of triumph, the swift backwash of relief and triumph. They didn't know. In all their ten years of watching, they had seen no more than the superficial things... They had him down on tape, but they didn't know all that went on within his mind. A human mind, perhaps. But not his mind. A human mind they might be able to strip as bare as a sickled field, might dissect it and analyze it and read the story in it. But his mind told them only what it wished to tell them, only enough so that there would.be no suspicion that he was holding back. Ten years ago Adams' gang had tried to tap his mind and had not even dented it. The Revisionists had watched ten years and they knew each motion that he made, many of the things that he had thought. But they did not know that he could go to live within the mind of a mouse or a catfish or a man. For if they had known, they would have set up certain safeguards, would have been on the alert against him. And they weren't. No more alert than the mouse had been. He glanced back the road to where the Sutton farmhouse stood upon the hill. For a moment he thought that he could see it, a darker mass against the darkness of the sky, but that, he knew, was no more than pure imagination. He knew it was there and he had formed a mental image. One by one, he checked the items in his room. The books, the few scribbled papers, the razor. #  There was nothing there, he knew, that he could not leave behind. Not a thing that would arouse suspicion. Nothing that could be fastened on in some later day and turned into a weapon to be used against him. He had been prepared against this day, knowing that some day it would come -- that some day Herkimer or the Revisionists oi; an agent from the government would step from behind a tree and walk along beside him. Knowing? Well, not exactly. Hoping. And ready for the hope. Long years ago his futile attempt to write the book of destiny without his notes had gone up in smoke. All that remained was a heap of paper ash, mixed these many years with the soil. Bleached away by the rains, gone as chemical elements into a head of wheat or an ear of corn. He was ready. Packed and ready. His mind had been packed and ready, he knew now, for these many years. Softly he stepped off the road and went down across the pasture, following the man who walked toward the river bluffs. His mind flicked out and tracked him through the darkness, using his thoughts to track him as a h#und would use his nose to track a fox. minutes after he had entered the fringe of trees and after that kept a few paces behind him, walking carefully to guard against the suddenly snapping twig, the swish of swaying bushes that could have warned his quarry. The ship lay within a deep ravine and at a hail it lighted up and a port swung open. Another man stood in the port and stared into the night. "That you, Gus?", he called. The other swore at 'him. "Who else do you think would be floundering around in these woods at the dead of night?" "I got to worrying," said the man in the port. "You were gone longer than I thought you would be. Just getting ready to set out and hunt for you." "You're always worrying," Gus growled at him. "Between you and this outlandish ancient world, I'm fed up. Trevor can find someone else to do this kind of work from here on out." He scrambled up the steps into the ship. "Get going," he told the other man tersely. "We're getting out of here." He turned to shut the port, but Sutton already 'had it closed. Gus took two steps backward, brought up against an anchored chair and stood there, grinning. "Look at what we got," he said. "Hey,. Pinky, look at what followed me back home." Sutton smiled at them grimly. "If you gentlemen have no objection, I'll hitch a ride with you." "And if we have objections?" Pinky asked. "I'm riding this ship," Sutton told him. "With you or without you. Take your choice." "This is Sutton," Gus told Pinky. "The Mr. Sutton. Trevor will be glad to see you, Sutton." Trevor... Trevor. That was three times he had heard the name, and somewhere else he had heard it once before. He stood with his back against the closed port and his mind returned to another ship and another two men. "Trevor," Case had said, or had it been Pringle who had said it? "Trevor? Why, Trevor is the head of the corporation." "I've been looking forward, all these years," Sutton told them, "to meeting Mr. Trevor. He and I will have a lot to talk about." "Get her going, Pinky," Gus said. "And send ahead a message. Trevor will want to break out the guard of honor for us. We're bringing Asher Sutton back." XL clip and flipped it at an ink well on the desk. The clip landed in the ink. "Getting pretty good," said Trevor: "Hit it seven times out of every ten. Used to be I missed it seven times out of every ten." He looked at Sutton, studying him. "You look like an ordinary man," be said. "I should be able to talk with you and make you understand." "I haven't any horns," said Sutton, "if that is what you mean." "Nor," said Trevor, "any halo, either, so far as I'm concerned." He flipped another paper clip and it missed the ink well. "Seven out of ten," said Trevor. He flipped another one. "Sutton," said Trevor, "you know a great deal about destiny. Have you ever thought of it in terms of manifest destiny?" Sutton shrugged. "You're using an antiquated term. Pure and simple propaganda of the nineteenth century. There was a certain nation that wore that one threadbare." "Propaganda?" Trevor repeated. "Let's call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself." "This manifest destiny," said Sutton. "For the human race, I presume?" "Naturally," said Trevor. "After all, we're the animals that would know how to use it to the best advantage." "You pass up a point," declared Sutton. "The humans don't need it. They already think they are great and right and holy. Certainly you don't need to propagandize them." "In the short view, you are right," agreed Trevor. "But in the short view only." He stabbed a sudden finger at Sutton. "Once we have the galaxy in hand, what do we do then ?" "Why," said Sutton and stopped. "Why, I suppose... "That's exactly it," said Trevor. "You don't know where you're going. Nor does the human race." "And manifest destiny?" asked Sutton. "If we had manifest destiny, it would be different?" Trevor's words were scarcely more than a whisper. "There are other galaxies, Sutton. Greater even than this one. Many other galaxies." Good Lord! thought Sutton. He started to speak and then closed his mouth and sat stiffly in his chair. Trevor's whisper speared at him from across the desk. "Staggers you, doesn't it?" he demanded. Sutton tried to speak aloud, but his voice came out a whisper, too. "You're mad, Trevor. Absolutely mad." "The long-range view," said Trevor. "That is what we need. The absolutely unshakable belief in human destiny, the positive and all-inclusive conviction that Man is meant not only to take over this galaxy alone, but all the galaxies, the entire universe." K'W'OU should live longL enough," said Sutton, sudden mockery rising to his tongue. "I won't see it, of course," admitted Trevor. "And neither will you. Nor will our children's children or their children for many generations." Sutton told him. Trevor answered calmly. "You have no idea, no conception of the years we'll just be getting a good start..." "Then, why, ifor the love of heaven, do you and I sit here and quibble about it?" "Logic," said Trevor. "There is no real logic," Sutton years ahead. A man can plan his own lifetime, if he wishes, and there issome logic in that. Or the life of his children and there still would be some logic in it... and maybe in the life of his grandchildren. But beyond that there can be no logic." "Sutton," asked Trevor, "did you ever hear of a corporation?" "Why, yes, of course, but..." "A corporation could plan for a could plan very logically." "A corporation is not a man," said Sutton. "It is not an entity.' I "But it is," insisted Trevor. "An en f ity composed of men and created by men to carry out their wishes. It is a living, operative concept that is handed down from one generation to another to carry out a plan too vast to 'be accomplished in the lifetime of one man alone." "Your corporation publishes books, too, doesn't it?" asked Sutton. Trevor stared at him. "Who told you that?" he snapped. "A couple of men by the name of Case and Pringle. They tried to buy my book for your, corporation." "Case and Pringle are out on a mission," Trevor said. "I had expected them back..." "They won't be coming back." "You killed them," Trevor said, flatly. "They tried to kill me first. I'm awfully hard to kill." "That would have been against my orders, Sutton. I do not want you killed." "They were on their own," said Sutton. "They were going to sell my carcass to Morgan." There was no way of telling, Sutton thought, how you hit this man. There was no difference of expression in his eyes, no faintest flicker of change across his face. them," said Trevor. "It saves me the bother." He flicked a clip at the ink well and it was a hit. "It's logical," he continued, as though Sutton had not spoken, "that a corporation should plan a framework within which a certain project may be carried forward without interruption, although the personnel in charge should change from time to time." "Wait a minute," Sutton told him. "Is there a corporation or are you just posing fables?" JL Trevor told him, "and I am the man who heads it. Varied interests pooling their resources... and there will be more and more of them as time goes on. As soon as we can show something tangible." "By tangible, you mean destiny for the human race, for the human race alone?" Trevor nodded. "Then we'll have something to talk about. A commodity to sell. Something to back up our sales talk." Sutton shook his head. "I can't see what you expect to gain." "Three things," Trevor told 'him. "Wealth and power and knowledge. The wealth and power and knowledge of the universe. For Man alone, you understand. For a single race. For people like you and me. And of the three items, knowledge perhaps would be the greatest prize of all, for knowledge, added to and compounded, correlated and coordinated, would lead to even greater wealth and power... and to greater knowledge." "It is madness," said Sutton. "You and I, Trevor, will be drifting dust, and not only ourselves, but the very era in which we live out this moment will be forgotten before the job is done." "Remember the corporation." "I'm remembering the corporation," Sutton said, "but I can't help but think in terms of people. You and I and the other people like us." "Let's think in terms of people, then," said Trevor, smoothly. "One day the life that runs in you will run in the brain and blood and muscle of a man who shall be part owner of the universe. There life-forms to serve him, there will be wealth that he cannot count, there will be knowledge of which you and I cannot even dream." Sutton sat quietly, taut in his chair. "You're the only man," said Trevor, "who is standing in the way. You're the man who is block"You need destiny," said Sutton, "and destiny is not mine to give away." "You are a human being, Sutton," Trevor told him, talking evenly. "You are a man. It is the people of your own race that I'm talking to you about." "Destiny," said Sutton, "belongs to everything that lives. Not to Man alone, but to every form of life." "It needn't," Trevor contradicted, "You are the only man who knows. You are the man who can tell the facts. You can make it a manifest destiny for the human race instead of a personal destiny for every crawling, cackling, sniveling thing that has the gift of life." Sutton didn't answer. "One word from you," said Trevor, "and the .thing is done." "It can't be done," said Sutton. "This scheme of yours -- think of the sheer time, the thousands of years, even at the rate of speed of the star-ships of today, to cross intergalactic space. Only from this galaxy to the next... not from this to the outermost galaxy." what I said about the compounding of knowledge. Two and two won't make four, my friend. It will make much more than four. In some instances thousands of times more than four." Sutton shook his head, wearily. But Trevor was right, he knew. Knowledge and technique would pyramid exactly as he said. Even, once Man had the time to do it, the knowledge in a single galaxy alone...  "One word from you," said Trevor, "and the war is at an end. One word and the security of the human race is guaranteed forever. For all the race will need is the knowledge that you can give.it." "It wouldn't be the truth." "That," replied Trevor, "doesn't have a thing to do with it." "You don't need manifest destiny," said Sutton, "to carry out your project." "We have to have the human race behind us. We have to have something that is big enough to capture their imagination. Something important enough to make them pay attention. And manifest destiny -- manifest destiny as it applies to the universe -- is the thing to turn the trick." "Thirty years ago," said Sutton, "I might have thrown in with you." "And now?" asked Trevor. Sutton shook his head. "Not now. I know more than I did thirty years ago. Thirty years ago I was a human, Trevor. I'm not too sure I'm entirely human any longer." "I hadn't mentioned the matter of reward," said Trevor. "That goes without saying." "No, thanks," said Sutton. "I'd like to keep on living." Trevor flipped a clip at the ink well and it missed. "You're slipping," Sutton said. "Your percentage is way off." Trevor picked up another clip. "All right," he said. '.'Go ahead and have your fun. There's a war on and we'll win that war. It's a hellish way to fight, 'but we're doing it the best we can. No war anywhere, no surface indication of war, for you understand the galaxy is in utter and absolute peace under the rule of benevolent Earthmen. We can win without you, Sutton, but it would be easier with you." "You're going to turn me loose?" Sutton asked. "Why, sure," Trevor told him. "Go on out and beat your head against a stone wall a. little longer. In the end, you'll get tired of it. Eventually you'll give up out of sheer exhaustion. You'll come back then and give us the thing we want." Sutton rose to his feet. He stood for a moment, indecisive. "What are you waiting for?" asked Trevor. "One thing has me puzzled," Sutton answered. "The book, somehow, somewhere, already has been written. It has been a fact for almost five hundred years. How are you going to change that? If I write it now the way you want it written, it will change the human setup..." Trevor laughed. "We got that one all figured out. Let us say that finally, after all of these years, the original of your manuscript is discovered. It can be readily and indisputably identified by certain characteristics which you will very carefully incorporate into it when you write it. It will be found and proclaimed, and what is more, proven... and the human race will have its destiny. "We'll explain the past unpleasantness by very convincing historical evidence of earlier tampering with the manuscript. Even your friends, the androids, will have to believe what we say, once we get through with it." "Clever," Sutton admitted. "I think so, too," said Trevor. "Too bad you won't have a chance to try it," Sutton said. a man was waiting for him. He raised his hand in what might have been a brief salute. "Just a minute, (Mr. Sutton." "Yes, what is it?" "There'll be a few of us following you, sir. Orders, you know." "But..." "Nothing personal, sir. We won't interfere with anything you want to do. Just guarding you, sir." "Guarding me?" "Certainly, sir. Morgan's crowd, you know. Can't let them kill you off." "You can't know," Sutton told him, "how deeply I appreciate your interest." "It's nothing, sir," the man told him. "Just part of the day's work. Glad to do it. Don't mention it at all." iHe stepped back again and Sutton wheeled and walked down the steps and followed the cinder walk that flanked the avenue. The Sun was near to setting. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the tall, straight lines of the gigantic office building in which he had talked to Trevor outlined against the brightness of the western sky. But of anyone who might be following him he did not see a sign. He 'had no place to go. He had no idea where to go. But he realized that he couldn't stand around feeling lost. He'd walk, he told himself, and think, and wait for whatever was going to happen next to happen. He met other walkers and a few of them stared at him curiously and now, for the first time, Sutton realized that he still wore the clothing of a twentieth-century farm hand... blue denim overalls and cotton shirt, with heavy, serviceable farm shoes on his feet. But here, he knew, even such an outlandish costume would not arouse undue suspicion. For on Earth, with its visiting dignitaries from far solar systems, with its Babel of races employed in the different governmental departments, with its exchange students, its diplomats and legislators representing backwoods planets, how a man dressed would arouse but slight curiosity. By morning, he told himself, he'd have to find some hiding place, some retreat where he could relax and figure out some of the angles in this world of five hundred years ahead. Either that or locate an android he could trust to put him in touch with the android organization... for although he had never been told so, he had no doubt there was an android organization. There would have to be to fight a war in time. flanked the roadway and took another one, a faint footpath that led out across marshy land toward a range of low hills. Suddenly now he realized that he was hungry and that he should have dropped into one of the shops in the office building for a bite of food. And then he remembered that he had no money with which to pay for food. A few twentieth-century dollars were in his pockets, but they would be worthless here as a medium of exchange, although quite possibly they might be collectors' items. Short houra ago, he thought, he had walked a dusty 'hilltop road in the twentieth century, scuffing the white dust with his shoes... and some of the white dust, he saw, still clung to the leather. Even as the memory of that hilltop road still clung to his memory. Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past. He reached the hills and began to climb them and the night was sweet with the smell of pine. He came to the top of a slight rise and stood there for a moment, looking out across the velvety softness of the night. Somewhere, near at hand, a cricket was tentatively tuning up his fiddle, and from the marsh came the muted sound of frogs. In the darkness just ahead of him, a stream was splashing along its rocky bed and it talked as it went along, talked to the trees and its grassy banks and the nodding flowers above them. "I would like to stop," it said. "I would like to stop and talk with ygu. But I can't, you see. I must hurry on. I have some place I must go. I can't waste a minute. I must hurry on." Like Man, thought Sutton. For Man is driven like the stream. Man is driven by circumstance and necessity and the bright-eyed amnever reached its mark. A charging body slammed into his knees and drove them inward under him. Arms wrapped themselves around his legs and he staggered, falling on his face. He sat up and somewhere off to the right he heard the soft snickering of rapidly firing guns and caught, out of the tail of his bition of other restless men who will not let them be. He did not hear a sound, but he felt the great hand close upon his arm and yank him off the path. Twisting, he sought to free himself of the grasp, and saw the dark blur of the man who had grabbed him. He balled his fist and swung it and it was a sledge-hammer slamming at the dark head, but it eyes, their bright flicker in the night. Then a hand came out of nowhere and cupped itself around his mouth and nose. "Sleeping powder!" he thought. "Must hold my breath... And even as he thought it, the dark figures in the woods, the cheeping frogs and the snarling of the guns fused into silence. strangeness and lay quietly on the bed. A breeze came through an open window and the room, decorated with fantastic life-murals, was splashed with brought in the scent of blooming flowers and in a tree outside a bird was chirping contentedly. Slowly Sutton let his senses reach out and gather in the facts of the room, the facts of strangeness... the unfamiliar furniture, the contour of the room itself, the green and purple monkeys that chased one another along the wavy vine that ran around the border of the walls. Quietly his mind moved back along the track of time to his final conscious moment. There had been guns flickering in the night and there had been a hand that reached out and cupped his nose. Drugged, Sutton told himself. Drugged and dragged away. Before that there had been a cricket and the frogs singing in the marsh and the talking brook that babbled down the hill, hurrying to get wherever it was going. And before that a man had sat across a desk from him and told him about a corporation and a dream and a plan the corporation held. Fantastic, Sutton thought. And in the bright light of the room. the very idea was one of utter fantasy... that Man should go out, not only to the stars, but to the other galaxies, and plan a But there was greatness in it, a very human greatness. There had been a time when it had been fantasy to think that Man could ever lift himself from the bosom of the planet of his birth. And another time when it had been fantasy to think that Man would go beyond the solar system, out into the dread reaches of nothingness that stretched between the stars. And through time itself... , But there had been strength in Trevor, and conviction as well as strength. A man who knew where he was going and why he was going and what it took to get there. Manifest destiny, Trevor had said. That is what it takes. That is what it needs. Man would be almost a god. The concepts of life and thought that had been bom on the Earth would be the basic concepts of the entire universe, of the fragile bubble of space and time that bobbed along on a sea of mystery beyond which no mind could penetrate. And yet, by the time that Man got where he was headed for, he might well be able to penetrate that, too. of the room and in it he saw the reflection of the lower half of his body, lying on the bed, naked except for a pair of shorts. He wiggled his toes and watched them in the glass. And you're the only one who is stopping us, Trevor had told him. You're the one man standing in the way of Man. You're the stumbling block. You are keeping men from being gods. But all men did not think as Trevor did. All men were not tangled in the blind chauvinism of the human race. Always there are men who know that humanity is a single race, men who refuse to exploit other forms of life. Teachers. Missionaries. Vegetarians. Ordinary feeling human beings. Even in his time, there had been men who treated androids sympathetically and Sutton had been one of them, though he knew now that it was the sympathy of the master for the underdog. The androids had not misunderstood; they knew it wasn't equality that was offeree or would be granted, that sympathy could turn to savage reprisal if they acted as equals. Occasionally one would, swaggering and belligerent in the way of the frightened and insecure, and his ghastly fate served as example to others who might, as the saying went, get out of hand. For the human race, thought Sutton, cannot even for a moment forget that it is human, cannot achieve the greatness of humility that will unquestioningly accord equality. Even while the humane argue for the equality of androids, they cannot help but patronize the very ones that they would make equal. What was it Herkimer had said? Equality not by edict, not by human tolerance. But that was the only way the human race would ever accord equality... by edict, by dispensation, a gesture of tolerance where there was none, actually. A ND yet, thought Sutton, there is Eva Armour. There may be others like her. Somewhere, working with the androids even now, there may be others like her. He swung his feet out of bed and sat on the bed's edge. A pair of slippers stood on the floor and he worked his feet into them, stood up and walked to the mirror. A strange face stared back at him, a face he'd never seen before, and for a moment muddy panic surged within his brain. Then, sudden suspicion blossoming, his hand went up to his forehead and rubbed at the smudge that was there, set obliquely across his brow. Bending low, with his face close to the mirror, he verified the thought. The smudge upon his brow was an android identification mark! An identification key and number! explored his face, located the plastic coatings of flesh that had changed its contours until he was unrecognizable. He turned around, made his way back to the bed, sat down upon it cautiously and gripped the edge of the mattress with his .hands. Disguised, he told himself. Made into an android... Kidnaped a human and an android when he woke. The door clicked and Herkimer said: "Good morning, sir. I trust that you are comfortable." Sutton jerked erect. "So it was you," he said. Herkimer nodded happily. "At your service, sir. Is there anything you wish?" "You didn't have to knock me out," said Sutton. "This is the second time. I'm getting tired of it." "We had to work fast, sir," said Herkimer. "We couldn't have you messing up things, stumbling around and asking questions and wanting to know what it was all about. We just drugged you and hauled you off. It was, believe me, sir, much simpler that way." "There was some shooting," Sutton said. "I heard the guns." "It seems," Herkimer told him, "that there were a few Revisionists lurking about, and it gets a little complicated, sir, when one tries to explain during a fight." "You tangle with those Revisionists?" "Well, to tell the truth," said Herkimer, "some of them were so rash as to draw their guns. It was most unwise of them, sir. They got the worst of it." "It won't do us a bit of good," said Sutton, "if the idea was to get me out of the dutches of Trevor's mob. Trevor will have a psych tracer on me. He knows where I am and this place will be watched three deep." Herkimer grinned. "It is, sir. His men are practically bumping into one another all around the place." "Then why this get-up?" Sutton demanded angrily. "Why disguise me?" "Well, sir," explained Herkimer, "it's like this. We figured no human in his right mind ever would want to be taken for an android. So we turned you into one. They'll be looking for a human. It would never occur to them to take a second look at an android when they were looking for a human." Sutton grunted. "Smart,"' he said. "I hope it doesn't..." ."Oh, they'll get onto it after a while, sir," Herkimer admitted, cheerfully. "But it will give us some time. Time to work out some plans." He moved swiftly around the room, opening chest drawers and taking out clothing. "It's very nice, sir," he said, "to have you back again. We tried to find you, but it was no dice. We figured the Revisionists had you cooped up somewhere, so we redoubled our security here and kept a close watch on everything that happened. For the past five weeks we've known every move that Trevor and his gang has made." "Five weeks!" gasped Sutton. "Did you say five weeks?" "Certainly, sir. Five weeks. You disappeared just seven weeks ago." "By my calendar," said Sutton, "it was ten years." Herkimer wagged his head sagely, unstartled. "Time is the funniest thing, sir. There's just no way to make subjective and objective time come out right." He laid clothing on the bed. "If you'll get into these, sir, we'll go down for breakfast. Eva is waiting -- and will be glad to see you." clips in a row. He flung the rest of them down on the desk. "You're sure of this?" he asked the man across the desk. The man nodded, tight-lipped. "It might be android propaganda, you know," said Trevor. "They're clever. That's a thing you never must forget. An android, for all his bowing and his scraping, is just as smart as we are." "Do you.realize what it means?"  the man demanded. "It means..." "I can tell you what it means," said Trevor. "From now on we can't be sure which of us are human. There'll be no sure way of knowing who's a human and who's an android. You could be an android. I could be..." "Exactly," said the man. "That's why Sutton was so smug yesterday afternoon," said Trevor. "He sat there, where you are sitting, and I had the impression that he was laughing at me all the time... "I don't think Sutton knows," said the man. "It's an android secret. Only a few of them know it. They certainly wouldn't take a chance on any human knowing it." "Not even Sutton?" "Not even Sutton," said the man. "Cradle," said Trevor. "Nice sense of fitness they have." "You're going to do something about it, certainly," said the man impatiently. Trevor put his elbows on the desk and matched fingertips. "Of course I am," he said. "Do you think I'd ever sit back and not do something?" the table on the patio and held out both her hands in greeting. Sutton pulled her close to #? him, .planted a kiss on her upturned lips. "That," he said, "is for the million times I have thought of you." She laughed at him, suddenly gay and happy. "Tangled time," said Herkimer. "He's been away ten years." "Oh," said Eva. "Oh, Ash, how horrible!" He grinned at her. "Not too horrible. I had ten years of rest. Ten years of peace and quiet. Working on a farm, you know. It was a little rough at first, but I was actually sorry when I had to leave. Except that it meant coming back to you." He held a chair for her, took one himself between her and Herkimer. They ate... ham and eggs, toast and marmalade, strong, black coffee. It was pleasant on the patio. In the trees above them birds quarreled amiably. In the clover at the edge of the bricks and stones that formed the paving, bees hummed among the blossoms. "How do you like my place. Ash?" asked Eva. "It's wonderful," he said, and then, as if the two ideas might be connected in some way, he added, "I saw Trevor yesterday. He took me to the mountain top and showed me the universe." Eva drew in her breath sharply, and Sutton looked up quickly from his plate. Herkimer was waiting with drawn face, with fork poised in mid-air, halfway to his mouth. "What's the matter with you two?" Sutton asked, offended. "Don't you trust me?" And even as he, asked the question, he answered it himself. Of course they wouldn't trust him. He was human and he could betray his own beliefs. He could twist destiny so that it was a thing for the human race alone. And there was no way in which they could be sure that he would not do this. Why should they trust a man who still felt uncomfortable and patronizing eating with an android? For he did, even now, though he was ashamed and blamed a lifetime of conditioning. "Ash," said Eva, "you refused to... "I left Trevor with an idea that I would be back to talk it over. Nothing that I said or did. He just believes I will. Told me to go out and beat my head against the wall some more." "You have thought about it, sir?" asked Herkimer. Sutton shook his head. "No. Not too much. I haven't sat down and mulled it over, if that is what you mean. It would have its points if I were merely human. Sometimes I frankly wonder how much of the human there may be left in me." "How much of it do you know, Ash?" Eva asked, speaking softly. Her eyes questioned him. across his forehead. "Most "of it, I think. I know about the war in time and how and why it's being fought. I know about myself. I have two bodies and two minds, or at least substitute bodies and minds. I Icnow some of the things that I can do. There may be other abilities I do not know about. One grows into them. Each new thing comes hard." "We couldn't tell you," Eva said. "It would have been so simple if we could have told you. To start with, you would not have believed the things we told you. And, when dealing with time, one interferes as little as possible. Just enough to turn an event in the right direction. "I tried to warn you. Remember, Ash? As near as I could come to warning." He nodded. "After I killed Benton in the Zag House. You told mj you had studied me for twenty years." "And, remember, I was the little girl in the checkered apron." He looked at her in surprise. "You knew about that? It wasn't just part of the Zag dream?" "Identification planted by suggestion," said Herkimer. "So that you could identify Eva as a friend, as someone you had known before and who was close to you. So that you would accept her and whatever help she was allowed to offer." "But it was a dream." "A Zag dream," said Herkimer. "The Zag is one of us. His race would benefit if destiny can stand for everyone and not the human race alone." confident. Not just pretending to be confident, but really confident. I keep coming back to that remark he made. Go out, he said, and butt your head some more." "He's counting on you as a human being," Eva said. Sutton shook his head. "I can't think that's it. He must have some scheme up his sleeve, some maneuver that we won't be able to check." Herkimer spoke slowly. "I don't like that, sir. The war's not going too well as it is. If we had to win, we'd be lost right now." "If we had to win? I don't understand..." "We don't have to win, sir," said Herkimer. "All we have to do is fight a holding action, prevent the Revisionists from destroying the book as you will write it. From the very first we have not tried to change a single entry. We've tried to keep them from being changed." Sutton nodded. "On his part, Trevor has to win decisively. He must smash the original text, either prevent it from being written as I mean to write it or discredit it so thoroughly that not even an android will believe it." "You're right, sir," Herkimer told him. "Unless he can do that, the humans cannot claim destiny for their own, cannot make other life believe that destiny is reserved for the human race alone." "And that is all he wants," said Eva. "Not the destiny itself, for no human can have the faith in destiny that say, for example, an android can. To Trevor it is merely a matter of propaganda... to make the human race believe so completely that it is destined that it will not rest until it holds the universe." "So long," said Herkimer, "as we can keep him from doing that, we can state that we are winning. But the issue is so finely balanced that a new approach by either side would score heavily. A new weapon could be a factor that would mean victory or defeat." "I have a weapon," Sutton said. "A made-to-order weapon that would beat them... but there's no way that it can be used." Neither of them asked the question, but he saw it on their faces and he answered it. "There's only one such weapon. Only one gun. You can't fight a war with just one gun." Feet pounded around the corner of the house. When they turned, they saw an android running toward them across the patio. Dust stained his clothing and his face was red from running. He came to a stop and faced them, clutching at the table's edge. "They tried to kill me," he panted, the words coming out in gushes. "The place is surrounded..." "Andrew, you fool," snapped Herkimer. "What do you mean by running in like this? They will know..."  "They've found out about the Cradle," Andrew gasped. "They know..." Herkimer came erect in one swift motion. The chair on which he had been sitting tipped over with the violence of his rising and 'his face was suddenly so white that the identification tattoo on his forehead stood out with startling clearness. "They know where...?" where. They just found out about it. Just now. We still have time..." "We'll call in all the ships," said Herkimer. "We'll have to pull all the guards off the crisis points .  ." "But you can't," cried 'Eva. "That's exactly what they would would want you to do. That is all that is stopping them..." "We have to," Herkimer said grimly. "There's no choice. If they destroy the Cradle..." "Herkimer," said Eva, and there was a deadly calm in her unhurried words. "The mark!" Andrew swung around toward her, then took a backward step. Herkimer's hand flashed underneath his coat and Andrew turned to run, heading for the low wall that rimmed the patio. The knife in Herkimer's hand flashed in the Sun and was suddenly a spinning wheel that tracked the running android. It caught him before he reached the wall and he went down into a heap of huddled clothing. The knife, Sutton saw, was neatly buried in his neck. I -- I said Herkimer, "how I I the little things, the inconsequential, trivial factors come to play so big a part in any happening?" He touched the huddled body with his foot. "Perfect," he said. "Absolutely perfect. Except that before reporting to us, he should have smeared some lacquer over his identification mark. Many androids do it in an attempt to hide the mark, but it's seldom much of a success. After only a short time, the mark shows through." "But lacquer?" asked Sutton. "A little code we have," said Herkimer. "A very simple thing. It's the recognition sign for an agent reporting. A password, as it were. It takes a moment only. Some lacquer on your finger and a smear across your forehead." "So simple a thing," said Eva, "that no one, absolutely no one, would ever notice it." Sutton nodded. "One of Trevor's men ?" Herkimer nodded. "Impersonating one of our men. Sent to smoke us out. Sent to start us running, panicked to save the Cradle." "This Cradle..." "But it means," said Eva, "that Trevor knows about it. He doesn't know where it is, but he knows about it. And he'll hunt until he finds it and then..." Herkimer's gesture stopped her. "What is wrong?" asked Sutton. For there was something wrong, something that was terribly wrong. The whole atmosphere of the place had grown harsh. The friendliness was gone... the trust and friendliness and the oneness of their purpose. Shattered by an android who had run across the patio and talked about a thing that he called a Cradle and died, seconds later, with a knife blade through his throat. Instinctively Sutton's mind reached out for Herkimer and then he drew it back. It was not an ability, he told himself, that one used upon a friend. It was an ability that one must keep in trust, not to be used curiously or idly, but only where the end result would justify its use. "What's gone sour?" he asked. "What is the matter?" "Sir," said Herkimer, '"you are a human being and this is ah android matter." For a moment Sutton stood stiff and straight, his mind absorbing the shock of the words that Herkimer had spoken, the black fury boiling ice cold inside his body. Then, deliberately, as if he had planned to do it, as if it was an action he had decided upon after long consideration, he made a tight fist and swung his arm. It was a vicious blow, with all his weight and all his strength and anger back of it, and Herkimer went down like an ox beneath a hammer. "Ash!" cried Eva. She clutched at his arm, but he shook her off. H erkimer was sitting up, his hands covering his face, blood dripping down between his fingers. Sutton spoke to him. "I have not sold destiny, nor do I intend to sell it. Although, God 'knows, if I did, it would be no more than the lot of you deserve." "Ash," said Eva softly. "Ash, we must be sure." "How can I make you sure?" he asked. "I can only tell you." "They are your people. Ash," she said. "Your race. Their greatness is your greatness, too. You can't blame Herkimer for thinking..." "They're your people, too," said Sutton. "The taint that applies to me applies to you as well." She shook her head. "I'm a special case," she said. "I was orphaned when I was only a few weeks old. The family androids took me over. They raised me. Herkimer was one of them. I'm much more an android, Ash, than I am a human being." Herkimer was still sitting on the grass, beside the sprawled, dead body of Trevor's agent. He did not take his hands from his face. He made no sign that he was going to. The blood still dripped down between his finger and trickled down his arms. Sutton said to Eva: "It was very nice to see you again. And thank you for the breakfast." He turned on his heel and walked away, across the patio and over the low wall and out into the path that led down to the road. He heard Eva cry out for him to stop, but he pretended not to hear her. I was raised by androids, she had said. And he had been raised by Buster, a robot, not even an android. By Buster, who had taught him how to fight when the kid down the road had given him a licking. Buster, who had whaled him good and proper for eating green apples. By Buster, who had gone out, five hundred years before, to homestead a planet. Sutton walked with the icy fury still running in his blood. They didn't trust me, he said. They thought I might sell out. After all the years of waiting, after all the years of planning and of thinking. "Johnny," he said. "What is it, Ash?" "What's going on, Johnny? What about all this?" "You're a stinker. Ash." "To hell with you," said Sutton. "You and all the rest of them." Trevor's men, he 'knew, must be around the house, watching and waiting. He expected to be stopped. But he wasn't stopped. He didn't see a soul. visor booth and closed the door behind him. From the rack along the wall, he took out the directory and hunted up the number. He dialed and snapped the toggle and there was a robot on the screen. "Information," said the robot, his eyes seeking out the forehead of the man who called. Since it was an android, he dropped the customary "sir." "Information. Records. What can I do for you?" "Is there any possibility," asked Sutton, "that this call could be tapped?" "None," said the robot. "Absolutely none. You see..." "I want to see the homestead filings for the year #." "Earth filings?" Sutton nodded. "Just a moment," said the robot. Sutton waited, watching the robot select the proper spool and mount it on the viewer. "They are arranged alphabetically," said the robot. "What name did you wish?" "The name begins with 'S'," said Sutton. "Let me see the 'S's." The unwinding spool was a blur on the screen. It slowed momentarily at the "M"s, spun to the "P"s, then went more slowly. The "S" list dragged by. "Toward the end," said Sutton, and, finally, "Hold it." For there was the entry that he sought. Sutton, Buster... He read the planet description three times to make sure he had it firmly in his mind. "That's all," he said. "Thank you very much." The robot grumbled at him and shut off the screen. Outside again, Sutton ambled easily across the foyer of the office building he had selected to place his call. On the road outside, he walked up the road, branched off onto a path and found a bench with a pleasant view. He sat down on the bench and forced himself to relax. He was being watched, he knew. Kept under observation, for by this time, certainly, Trevor would know that the android who had walked out of Eva Armour's house was actually Asher Sutton. The psych tracer long ago would have told the story, would have traced his movements and pin-pointed him for Trevor's men to watch. Take it easy, he told himself. Dawdle. Loaf. Act as if you didn't have a thing to do, as if you didn't have a thought in mind. You can't fool them, but you can at least catch them unguarded when you have to move. And there were many things to do, many things left to think about, although he was satisfied that the course of action he had planned was the course to take. He took them up, step by step, checking them over for any chance of slip-up. get the manuscript notes he had left on the hunting asteroid, notes that either Eva or Herkimer must have kept through all the years... or was it only weeks? That would be a ticklish and embarrassing business at the best. But they were his notes, he told himself. They were his to claim. He had no commitments in this conflict. "I have come to get my notes. I suppose you still have them somewhere." Or -- "Remember the attache case I had ? I wonder if you took care of it for me." Or -- "I'm going on a trip. I'd appreciate my notes if you can lay your hands on them." Or -- But it was no use. However he might say it, whatever he might do, the first step would be to reclaim the notes. Dawdle up till then, he told himself. Work your way back toward the house until it's almost dark. Then get the notes and after that move fast -- so fast that Trevor's gang can't catch up with you. Second was the ship, the ship that he must steal. He had spotted it earlier in the day while loafing at the area spaceport. Sleek and small, it would be a fast job, and the stiff, military bearing of the officer who had been directing the provisioning and refueling had been the final tip-off that it was the ship he wanted. Loafing outside the barrier fence, playing the part of an idly curious, no-good android, he had carefully entered the officer's mind. Ten minutes later, he was on his way, with the information that he needed. The ship did carry a time-warp unit. It was not taking off until the next morning. It would be guarded during the night. Without a doubt, Sutton told himself, one of Trevor's ships, one of the fighting warships of the Revisionists. It would take nerve, he knew, to steal the ship. Nerve and fast footwork and a readiness and the ability to kill. Saunter out onto the field, as if he were waiting for an incoming ship, mingling with the crowd. Slip out of the crowd and walk across the field, acting, as if he had a right to be there. Not run... walk. Run only if someone challenged him and made the challenge stick. Run then. Fight. Kill, if necessary. But get the ship. Get the ship and pile on the speed to the limit of endurance, heading in a direction away from his destination, driving the ship with everything that was in it. Two years out, or sooner if necessary, he would throw in the time unit, roll himself and the ship a couple of centuries into the past. Once in the past, he would have to ditch the motors, for undoubtedly they would have built-in recognition signals which could be traced. Unship them and let them travel in the direction he had been going. with his non-human body, swing around and head toward Buster's planet, still piling on the speed, building it up to that fantastic figure that was necessary to jump great interstellar spaces. Vaguely he wondered how his body, how the drive of 'his energyintake body, would compare with the actual motors in the long haul. Better, he decided. Better than the motors. Faster and stronger. But it would take years -- many years of time, for Buster was far out. He listed the moves: Unshipping the engines would throw off pursuit. The pursuers would follow the recognition-signals in the motors, would spend long days in overhauling them before they discovered their mistake. 'Check. The time roll would unhook the contact of Trevor's psych tracers, for they could not operate through time. Check. By the time other tracers could be set in other times to find him, he would be so far out that the tracers would go insane trying to catch up on the time-lag of his whereabouts -- if, in fact, they could ever find it in the vastness of the outer reaches of the galaxy.; Check. If it works, he thought. If it only works. If there isn't some sort of slip-up, some kind of unseen factor. A squirrel skipped across the grass, sat up on its haunches and took a long look at him. Then, deciding that 'he was not dangerous, it started a busy search in the grass for imaginary buried treasure. Cut loose, thought Sutton. Cut loose from everything that holds me. Cut loose and get the job done. Forget Trevor and his Re by     Bk Fat and jolly Giles Habibula...shrewd, resourceE E ful Jay Kalam...the titanic Hal Samdu...and, gor E geous as ever, Aladoree Anthar, luscious holder of E E in the #th Century...   flt Whether you've met these famous characters of E E science fiction before, or meet them now for the first   time, you'll worry and think and laugh and love with E E them -- and never forget them as long as you live!  E Bt It's a monument of scientific adventure and jjj  mystery!  Ei.gii   Or see our Santa Claus subscription otter E on the back of this page!  #. You want to buy gifts for the Christmas season. bimonthly. the bimonthly #.  #. Guess it'll be ties and nylons again this year.  #. Give away copies on MY income? Novels for One Year as MY # first subscription # first subscription City still think cutting out this page would be mutilating a beautiful magazine. visionists, forget Herkimer and the androids. Forget Eva. Get the book written. Trevor wants to buy me. Eva wants to use me; I'm nothing to her as a man. And the androids do not trust me. And Morgan, if he had the chance, would kill me. The androids do not trust me. That's foolish, he told himself. Childish. And yet they did not trust him. You are a human, Eva had told him. The humans are your people. I'm much more an android. Ash, than I am a human being. iHe shook his head, bewildered by the situation. There was one thing that stood out clearly. One thing he had to do. One obligation that was his and one that must be fulfilled or all else would be with utterly no meaning. There is a thing called destiny. The knowledge of that destiny has been granted me. Not as a human being, not as a member of' the human race, but as an instrument to transmit that knowledge to all other thinking life. I must write a book to do it.  I must make that book as clear and forceful and as honest as I can. Having done that, I shall have discharged my responsibility. Having done that, it does not matter what may happen to me. Having done that, there is no further claim upon me. A footstep sounded on the path back of the bench and Sutton turned arotlnd. "Mr. Sutton, isn't it?" said the man. Sutton nodded. "Sit down, Trevor," he said. "I've been expecting you."  # #" OU didn't stay long with your friends," said m Trevor. Sutton shook his head. "We had a disagreement." "Something about this Cradle business?" "You might call it that," said Sutton. "It goes a good deal deeper. The fundamental prejudices rooted between androids and humans." "Herkimer killed an android who brought him a message about the Cradle," Trevor said. "He thought it was someone that you sent. Someone masquerading as an android. That is why he killed him." Trevor pursed his mouth sanctimoniously. "Too bad," he said. "Too bad. Mind telling me how he recognized the... might we call it the deception?" "That is something," Sutton said, "that you will have to figure out without my help." Trevor labored atacting unconcerned. "The main point is," he said, "that it didn't work." "You mean the androids didn't run helter-skelter for the Cradle and show you where itr was." Trevor nodded. "There was another angle to it, too. They might have pulled some of their guards off the crisis points. That would have helped us some." "Double-barreled," said Sutton. "Very shrewd." "Oh, most assuredly," agreed Trevor. "Nothing like getting the other fellow square behind the eight-ball." He squinted at Sutton's face. "Since when," he asked, "and why did you desert the human race?" Sutton put his hand up to his face, felt the resilience of the plastic that had remodeled his features into those of another person. "It was Herkimer's idea," he declared. "He thought it would make me hard to spot. You wouldn't be looking for an android, you know." Trevor nodded agreement. "It might have helped," he said. "It would have fooled us for a while, but when you walked away and the tracer followed you, we knew who you were." The squirrel came hopping across the grass and looked them over. "Sutton," Trevor asked, "how much do you know about this Cradle business?" "Nothing," Sutton replied. "They told me I was a human and it was an android matter." "You can see from that how important it must be." "I think I can," said Sutton. "You can guess, just from the name, what it might be." "That's not too hard to do." "Because we needed a greater force of humans," said Trevor, "we made the first androids a thousand years ago. We needed them to fill out the too-thin ranks of Mankind. We made them as close to humans as we could. They could do everything the humans could except one thing." "They can't reproduce," said Sutton. "I wonder, Trevor, assuming it had been possible, whether we would have given that power to them, too. If we had, they would have been true humans. There would have been no difference whatever between men whose ancestors were made in a laboratory and those whose ancestors stemmed back to the primal ocean. The androids would have been a self-continuing race, and they wouldn't have been androids. They would have been humans. We would have been adding to our population by biological as well as chemical means." X "Honestly, I don't. Of course, the wonder is that we could make them at all, that we could produce life in the laboratory. Think of the sheer intellectual ability and the technical skill that went into it. #S# For centuries men had tried to find out what life was, had run down one blind alley after another, getting nowhere near the secret at all. Failing in a scientific answer, many of them turned back to a divine source, to a mythical answer, to the belief that it was a matter of supernatural intervention. The idea is perfectly expressed by du Nouy, who wrote back in the twentieth century." "We gave the androids one thing we do not have ourselves," said Sutton, calmly. Trevor stared at him, suddenly hard, suddenly suspicious. "You..." "We gave them inferiority," said Sutton. "We made them less than human and that gave them a reason to fight us. We denied them something they haye to fight to get... equality. We furnished them with a motive Man lost long ago, .though he still has a need to feel superior to other humans for some arbitrary and unimportant difference. Once it was religion, nationality, the color of the skin. Now it's the ability to reproduce." "They're equal now," said Trevor, bitterly. "The androids have been reproducing themselves... chemically, not biologically, for a long time now." "We should have expected it," said Sutton. "I suppose we should have," Trevor admitted. "We gave them the same brains we have ourselves. We gave them -- or we tried to give them -- a human perspective." "And we .put a mark upon their foreheads." T revor made an angry motion with his hand. "That little matter is being taken care of now. When the androids make another android, they don't bother to put a mark upon his head." Sutton started as the thunder hit him... thunder that rolled and rumbled in his brain, a growing, painful, roaring thunder that shut out everything. He had said a weapon. He had said there was a weapon... "They could make themselves better than they were originally," continued Trevor. "They could improve upon the model. They could build a super-race, a mutant race, call it what you will..." Only one weapon, Sutton had said. And you can't fight with just one cannon. Sutton put a hand up to his forehead, rubbed hard against his brow. "Sure," said Trevor. "You can go nuts thinking about it. I have. You can conjure up all sorts of possibilities. They could push us out. The new pushing out the old." "The race would be human still," said Sutton. "We built slowly, Sutton. The old race. The biological race. We came up from the dawn of Man. We came up from chipped flints and fist axe, from the cave and the treetop nest. We've built too slowly and painfully and bloodily to have our heritage taken from us by something to which that slowness and the pain and blood would mean not a thing at all." One gun, Sutton thought. But he had been wrong. There were a to save destiny for all life that was "I suppose," he said, shakily, "that you feel I should throw in with you." "I want you," said Trevor, "to find out for me where the Cradle is. You could get the androids to tell you." "So you can smash it." "So I can save humanity. The old humanity. The real humanity." "You feel that all humans should stick together now." "If you have a streak of human in you, you will be with us now." "There was a time," said Sutton, "back on Earth, before men went to the stars, when the human race was the most important thing the mind of Man could know. That isn't true any longer, Trevor. There are other races just as great. Either actually or potentially." "Each race," answered Trevor, "is loyal to its own. The human race must be loyal unto itself." "I am going to be traitor. I may be wrong, but I still think that destiny is greater than humanity." "You refuse to help us?" ' Not only that," said Sutton. "I am going to fight you. If you want to kill me, Trevor, now's the time to do it. Because if you don't do it now, it will be too late." "I wouldn't kill you for all the worlds," Trevor assured him coldly. "I need the words you wrote. Despite you and the androids, Sutton, we'll read them the way we want them read. And so will all the other slimy, crawling things you admire so much. There's nothing in the whole universe that can stand before the human race, that can match the human race..." Sutton saw loathing on his face. "I'm leaving you to yourself, Sutton," Trevor told him. "Your name will go down as the blackest blot in all of human history. The syllables of your name will be a sound that the last human will gag upon if he tries to speak it. Sutton will become a common noun with which one man will insult another..." Trevor stood up and started to walk away and then turned back. His voice was not much more than a whisper, but it cut into Sutton's brain like a whetted knife. "Go and wash your face," he said. "Wash off the plastic and the mark. But you'll never be human again, Sutton. You'll never dare to call yourself a man again." He turned on his heel and walked away. Staring at his back, Sutton seemed to hear the sound of a slamming door. ed in a corner of the room. The attache case lay on a table underneath the lamp and Eva Armour was standing beside a chair, as if she had been expecting him. "You came back," said Eva, "to get your notes. I have them ready for you." He stood just inside the door and shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "Later I will need the notes. Not tight now." And there it was, he thought! the thing he had worried about that afternoon, the thing that he had tried to put in words. "I told you about a weapon at breakfast this morning," he went on. "You must remember what I said about it. I said there was only one weapon. I said you can't fight a war with just one gun." . Eva nodded, her lovely face drawn in tire lamplight. "I remember, Ash." said Ash. "As many as you want. There's no limit to the number there can be." He moved slowly across the room until he stood face to face with her. "I am on your side," he told her, simply. "I saw Trevor this afternoon. He cursed me for all humanity." Slowly she put up a hand and he felt it slide across his face, the palm cool and smooth. Her fingers closed in his hair ajid she shook his head gently, tenderly. "Ash," she said, "you washed the plastic off your face. You are Ash again." He nodded. "I wanted to be human again." "Trevor told you about the Cradle, Ash?" "I'd guessed some of it," Sutton said. "He told me the rest. About the androids that wear no mark." "We use them as spies," she said, as if it were quite a natural thing to say. "We even have some of them in Trevor's headquarters... He thinks that they are human." "Herkimer?" he asked. "He isn't here, Ash. He wouldn't be here, after what happened out on the patio." "Of course," said Sutton. "Of course he wouldn't. Eva, we humans are such heels." "Sit down," she told him. "That chair over there. You talk so oddly that you scare me." He sat down. "Tell me what happened," she demanded. He didn't tell her. He said: "I thought of Herkimer this afternoon. When Trevor was talking with me. I hit Herkimer this morning and I would hit him tomorrow morning if he said the same thing to nie. It's something in the human blood, Eva. We fought our way up. With fist, axe and club and gun and atom bomb and... "Shut up," cried Eva. "Keep still, cn't you?" He looked up at her in astonishment. "Human, you say," she said harshly. "And what is Herkimer if he isn't human? He is a human, made by humans. A robot can make another robot and they're still robots, aren't they? A human makes another human and both of them are humans." "Trevor is afraid the androids will take over. That there will be no more humans. No more original, biological humans... "Ash," she said, "you are bothering yourself over something that there is no reason to fight. The Cradle will solve the secret of biological reproduction. Not for centuries, of course, but ultimately. What's the use of agonizing over a difference that eventually won't exist?" He shook his head. "I guess there is no use. It keeps stirring around in my head, though, accusing me of treason. Once it was so clear and simple. I would write a book and the galaxy would read it and accept it and everything would be just fine." "It still can be that way," she said. "After a while, after a long while. When Man stops believing that racial loyalty means the right to subjugate all other life. It will come, Ash, and humanity will be greater for it, allied to everything that lives, not an arrogant and fearful master." "Herkimer said one weapon would do it," Sutton said. "One weapon would be the balance that was needed. Eva, the androids have gone a long way in their research, haven't they? Chemical, I mean. The study of the human body. They would have to, to do what they have done." She nodded. "A long way, Ash." "They have a scanner... a machine that could take a person apart, molecule by molecule, record it almost atom for atom. Make a blueprint for another body." "We've done that," said Eva. "We've duplicated men in Trevor's organization. Kidnaped them and blueprinted them and made a duplicate... sent him back the duplicate and placed the other under benevolent detention. It's only been through tricks like that that we've been able to hold our own at all." "You could duplicate me?" asked Sutton. "Certainly, Ash, but..." "A different face, of course," said Sutton. "But a duplicate brain and... well, a few other things." Eva nodded. "Your special abilities." "I can get into another mind," I # said Sutton. "Not mere telepathy, but the actual power to be another person, to be that other mind, to see and know and feel the same things that the other mind may see or know or feel. I don't know how it's done, but it must be something inherent in the brain structure. If you duplicated my brain, the ability should go along with the duplication. Not all of the duplicates would have it, maybe, not all of them could use it, but some of them could." She gasped. "Ash, that would mean...  "#'OU would know everyX thing," said Sutton, "that Trevor thinks. Every word and thought that passes through his mind. Because one of you would be Trevor. And the same with every other person who has anything to do with the war in time. You would know as soon as they know what they're going to do. You could plan to meet any threat they might be considering. You could block them at everything they tried." "It would be stalemate," Eva said, "and that is exactly what we want. A strategy of stalemate, Ash. They wouldn't know how they were being blocked and many times they would not know who was blocking them. It would seem to them that luck was permanently against them... , that destiny was against them." "Trevor himself gave me the idea," Sutton said. "He told me to go out and butt my head against a wall some more. He told me that finally I would get tired of doing it He said that after a while I would give up." "Ten years," said Eva. "Ten years should do the job. But if ten won't, why, then, a hundred. Or a thousand, if it must take that long. We have all the time there is." "Finally," said Sutton, "they would give up. Literally throw up their hands and quit. It would be such a futile thing. Never winning. Always fighting hard and never winning." They sat in the room with its one little oasis of light that stood guard against the darkness that pressed in upon them, and there was no triumph in them, for this was not a thing of triumph. This was a matter of necessity, not one of conquest. This was Man fighting himself, and winning and losing at the same time. "You can arrange this scanning soon?" asked Sutton. "Tomorrow, Ash." She looked at him queerly. "What's your hurry?" "I am leaving," Sutton said. "Running away to a refuge that I thought of. That is, if you'll lend me a ship." "Any ship you want." "It would be more convenient that way," he told her. "Otherwise, I'd have to steal one." She did not ask the question that he had expected and he went on: "I have to write the book." "There are plenty of places. Ash, where you could write the book. Safe places. Places that could be arranged to be foolproof safe." He shook his head. "There's an old robot. He's the only folks I have. When I was on Cygni, he went out to one of the star systems at the very edge and filed on a homestead. I am going there." "I understand," she said, speaking very softly. "There's just one thing," said Sutton. "I keep remembering a little girl who came and spoke to me when I was fishing. I know that she was a person conditioned in my mind. I know she was put there for a purpose, but it makes no difference. I keep thinking of her." He looked at Eva and saw how the lamplight turned her hair into a copper glory. "I don't know if I am still allowed to love," said Sutton. "I can't tell you for sure if I will always' be allowed to love you, Eva. But I wish you would go with me out to Buster's planet." "I can't," she cried. "Don't ask me to." "But I must. I've suffered enough alone. I deserve you, don't I?" Her eyes were misty in the lamplight. "Perhaps sometime. Ash, if you still want me. But there's this war that must not be lost..." . Sutton said, simply: "I'll always want you, Eva. The war can't be lost any more." She was against him, her lips to his, her words muffled and hungry. "I want to. Oh, I want to." light and from far away he heard the humming of the machines at work, little busy machines that were dissecting him with their tiny fingers of probing light and clicking shutters and the sensitive paper that ran like a streak of burnished silver through the holders. Dissecting and weighing, probing and measuring... missing nothing, adding nothing. A faithful record not of himself alone, but of every particle of him, of every cell and molecule, of every branching nerve and muscle fiber. And from somewhere else, also far away, from a place beyond the sea of light that held him, a voice said one word and kept repeating it: Traitor. Traitor. Traitor. One word without an exclamation point. A voice that had no emphasis. One flat word. First there had been one voice crying it and then another joined and then there was a crowd and finally it was a roaring mob and the sound and word built up until it was a world of voices that were crying out the word. Crying out the word until there was no longer any meaning in it, until it had lost its meaning and become a sound being senselessly repeated. Sutton tried to answer and there was no answer nor any way to answer. He had no voice, for he had no lips or tongue or throat. He was an entity that floated in the sea of light and the word kept on, never changing... never stopping. But back of the word, a background to the word, there were other words unspoken. We are the ones who clicked the flints together and built the first fire of Man's own making. We are the ones who drove the beasts out of the caves and took them for ourselves, in which to shape the first pattern of a human civilization. We are the ones who painted the colorful bison on the hidden walls, working in the light of mud lamps with moss for wicks and animal fat for oil. We are the ones who tilled the soil and tamed the seed to grow beneath our hand. We are the ones who built great cities that our own kind might live together and accomplish the greatness that a handful could not even try. We are the ones who dreamed of stars -- and broke the atom to the harness of our minds. It is our heritage you spend. It is our traditions that you give away to things that we have made, that we have fashioned with the deftness of our hands and the sharpness of our minds. The machines clicked on and the voice kept on with the one word it was saying. But there was another voice, deep within the undefinable being that was Asher Sutton, a faint voice... It said no word, for there was no word that could frame the thought it formed. It made him kin to something far greater than a race of thinking, brawling, ambitious primates. It made him kin to all life... all life. Sutton answered it. "Thank you, Johnny. Thank you very much." And he was astonished that he could answer Johnny when he could not answer all the others. The machines went on with their clicking. L H erkimer stood alone in the darkness underneath the trees and watched the two of them walk across the field toward the ship. She should have stayed, . he thought. He would have gone without her. He would not have guessed the real reason why she should have stayed. No more than he guesses even now that we sent Buster out to the Tower stars many years ago to establish refuge for him -- well knowing that the day might come when he would need that refuge. She had told him at first that she couldn't go with him. She should have stuck it out, thought Herkimer. But she is too human. That is the trouble with all of us. -- we are too human. Out on the tiny field, fire flickered in the mouths of the tubes and the silvery ship lurched down the launching ramp. Gathering speed, it slammed along the upcurve and hurled itself into the sky, a breath of fire that blazed against the night. Herkimer stood with tilted head and watched it until it was a tiny pinpoint of light that was fleeing spaceward. He lifted a hand hesitantly, half doubting the fitness of a parting gesture. "Good-by, Ash," he said underneath his breath. "Good-by, Ash. God bless you, Eva." Standing there, he had a. hopeful thought. Perhaps, he told himself, Sutton never will learn she is an android woman. But he knew then that Eva would tell the truth and that it would hot change Sutton's love for her. Short stories subject to space requirements, but at least # will be included. what kind, and on what subjects. The same applies Tor a letter department. -- Current New Books -- #. The current issue of "New Worlds" -- British Science Fiction Magazine #. An Earthman on Venus, by Ralph Milne Farley (Pocket Book Edition) #. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, (Pocket Book Edition) #. Behind the Moon, by Edmond Hamilton, (Pocket Book Edition) #. Into Plutonian Depths, by Stanton A. Coblentz, (Pocket Book Edition) #. Princess of the Atom, by Ray Cummings, (Pocket Book Edition) Fiction Novels (Cloth Bound Books): #. Needle, by Hal Clement #. Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov #. The Island of Captain Sparrow, by S Fowler Wright #. Fury, by Laurence O'Donnell #. 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Next month, by way of proof, story of immense impact -- a hypkept improving, hasn't it? # : Part I of a # port serial Being young, handsome, son of the chief noble of a planet is a pleasant setup -- if it doesn't turn out to be a death trap! The Bedroom Murmured T he bedroom murmured gently to itself. It was almost below the limits of hearing; an irregular little sound, yet quite unmistakable and deadly. But it wasn't that which awakened Biron Farrill and dragged him out of a heavy, unrefreshing slumber. He turned his head restlessly from side to side in a futile struggle against the periodic burr on the end table. He put out a clumsy hand without opening his eyes and closed contact. "Hello," he mumbled. Sound tumbled instantly out of the receiver. It was harsh and loud, but Biron lacked the ambition to reduce the volume. It said, "May I speak to Biron Farrill?" Biron said, fuzzily, "Speaking. What do you want." "May I speak to Biron Farrill." The voice was urgent. Biron's eyes opened on the thick darkness. He became conscious of the dry unpleasantness of his tongue and the faint odor that remained in the room. He said, "I'm Biron Farrill. Who is this." It went on, disregarding him, gathering tension, a loud voice in the night: "Is anyone there I would like to speak to Biron Farrill." Biron raised himself on one elbow and stared at the place where the visiphone sat. He jabbed at the vision control and the small screen was alive with light. "Here I am," he said. He recognized the smooth, slightly asymmetric features of Sander Jonti.' "Call me in the morning, Jonti." He started to turn the instrument off, when Jonti said, "Hello. Hello. Is anyone there? Is this University Hall, room #? Hello." Biron was suddenly aware that the tiny pilot-light which would have indicated a live sending-circuit was not on. He swore under his breath and pushed the switch. It stayed off. Then Jonti gave up, and the screen went blank, and was merely a small square of featureless light. Biron turned it off. He hunched his shoulder and tried to burrow into the pillow again. He was annoyed. In the first place, no one had the right to yell at him in the middle of the night. He looked quickly at the gently luminous figures just over the headboard. Three-fifteen. House lights would not go on for nearly four hours. Besides, he didn't like having to wake to the complete darkness of his room. Four years' custom had not hardened hint to the Earthman's habit of building structures of reinforced concrete, squat, thick, and windowless. It was a many-thousand-year-old tradition dating from the days when the primitive nuclear bomb had not yet been countered by the Forcefielddefense. But that was all in the past. Atomic warfare had done its worst to Earth. Most of it was hopelessly radioactive and useless. There was nothing left to lose, and yet architecture inirrored the old fears, so that when Biron woke, it was to pure darkness. B iron rose on his elbow again. That was strange. He waited. It wasn't the fatal murmur of the bedroom he had become aware of. It was something perhaps even less noticeable and less deadly. He missed the gentle movement of air that one took so for granted, that trace of continuous renewal. He tried to swallow easily and failed. The atmosphere seemed to become oppressive even as he realized the situation. The ventilating system had stopped working, and now he really had a grievance. He couldn't even use the visiphone to report the matter. He tried again to make sure. The milky square of light sprung out and threw a faint, pearly luster on the bed. It was receiving, but it wouldn't send. Well, it wasn't important. Nothing would be done about it before day, anyway. He yawned and groped for his slippers, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. No ventilation, eh. That would account for the queer smell. He frowned and sniffed sharply two or three times. No use. It was familiar, but he couldn't place it. He made his way to the bathroom, reached automatically for the light switch, although he didn't really need it to draw himself a glass of water. It closed uselessly. He tried it several times, peevishly. Wasn't anything working? He shrugged, drank in the dark, and felt better. He yawned again on his way back to the bedroom where he tried the main switch. All the lights were out. Biron sat on the bed, placed his large hands on his hard-muscled thighs and considered. Ordinarily, a thing like this would call for a nasty discussion with the service staff. No one expected hotel service in a college dormitory, but, by Space, there were certain minimum standards of efficiency one could demand. Not that it was of vital importance just now. Graduation was coming and he was through. In three days, he'd be saying a last good-by to the room and to the University of Earth; to Earth itself. Still, he might report it anyway, withput particular comment. He could go out and use the hall phone. They might bring in a selfpowered light or even rig up a fan so he could sleep without psychosomatic choking sensations. If not, to Space with them. Two more nights. he located a pair of shorts. He slipped a one-piece jumper over it and decided that that would be enough for the purpose. He retained his slippers. There was no danger of waking anybody even if he clumped down the corridors in spiked shoes, considering the thick, nearly soundproof partitions of this concrete pile, but he saw no point in changing. He strode toward the door and pulled at the lever. It descended smoothly and he heard the click that meant the door release had been activated. Except that it wasn't. And although his biceps tightened as he pulled harder, nothing was accomplished. He stepped away. This was ridiculous. Had there been a general power failure? There couldn't have been. The clock was going. The visiphone was still receiving properly. Wait! It could have been the beys, bless their erratic souls. It was done sometimes. Infantile, of course, but he'd taken part in these foolish practical jokes himself. It wouldn't have been difficult, for instance, for one of his buddies to sneak in during the day and arrange matters. Well, no, the ventilation and lights had been working when he went to sleep. night. The Hall was an old, outmoded structure. It wouldn't have taken an engineering genius to hocus the lighting and ventilation circuits. Or to jam the door, either. And now they would wait for morning and see what would happen when good old Biron found he couldn't get out. They would probably let him out toward noon and laugh very hard. "Ha, ha," said Biron, grimly, under his breath. All right, if that's the way it was. But he would have to do something about it; turn the tables somehow. He turned away and his toe kicked something which skidded metallically across the floor. He just made out its shadow move through the dim visiphone light. He reached under the bed, patting the floor in a wide arc. He brought it out and held it close to the light. "They weren't so smart," he said. "They should have put the visiphone entirely out of commission, instead of just yanking out the sending-circuit." He found himself holding a small cylinder with a little hole in the blister on top. He put it close to his nose and sniffed at it. That explained the smell in the room, anyway. It was Hypnite. Of course, the boys would have had to use it to keep them from waking him up while they were busy with the circuits. Biron could reconstruct the proceedings step by step now. The door had been jimmied open, a simple thing to do, and the only dangerous part since he might have wakened then. The door might have been prepared during the day, as a matter of fact, so that it would seem to close and not actually do so. He hadn't tested it. Anyway, once it was open, a can of Hypnite would be put just inside and the door would be closed again. The anesthetic would leak out slowly, building up to the one particle in ten thousand of airnecessary to put him definitely under. Then they could enter; masked, of course. Space! A wet handkerchief would keep out the Hypnite for fifteen minutes and that would be all the time needed. It explained the ventilation system situation. That had to be eliminated to keep the Hypnite from dispersing too quickly. That would have gone first, in fact. The visiphone elimination kept him from getting help; the door-jamming kept him from getting out; and the absence of lights in order to induce panic. Nice kids! Biron snorted. It was socially impossible to be thin-skinned about this. A joke was a joke and all that. Ha-ha! Right now, he would have liked to break the door down and have done with it. The welltrained musclesof his torso tensed at the thought, but it would be useless The door had been built with atom-blasts in mind. Damn that tradition! But there had to be some way out. He couldn't let them get away with it. First, he would need a light; a real one, not the immovable and unsatisfactory glow of the visiphone. That was no problem. He had a self-powered flashlight in the clothes closet. For a moment, as he fingered the closet door controls, he wondered if they had jammed that, too.But it moved open naturally, and slid smoothly into its wall socket. Biron nodded to himself. It made sense. There was no reason, particularly, to jam the closet, and they didn't have too much time, anyway. And then, with the flashlight in his hand, as he was turning away, the entire structure of his theory collapsed in a horrible instant. He stiffened, his abdomen ridging with tension and held his breath, listening. For the first time since awakening, he heard the murmuring of the bedroom. He heard the quiet, irregular chuckling conversation it was holding with itself, and recognized the nature of the sound at once. It was impossible not to recognize it. The sound was "Earth's death-rattle." It was the sound that had been invented several thousand years before. To be exact, it was the sound of a radiation counter, ticking off the charged particles and the hard gamma waves that came its way, the soft clicking electronic surges melting into a low murmur. It was the sound of a counter, counting the only thing it could count -- death ! '#i Ced away. From a distance of six feet he threw the white beam into the recesses of the closet. The counter was there, in the far corner, but seeing it told him nothing. It had been there ever since his freshman days. Most freshmen from the Outer Worlds bought a counter during their first week on Earth. They were very conscious of Earth's radioactivity then, and felt the need of protection. Usually, they were sold again to the next class, but Biron had never disposed of his. He was thankful for that now. He turned to the desk, where he kept his wristwatch while sleeping. It was there. His hand was shaking a little as he held it up to the flashlight's beam. The watch strap was an interwoven flexible plastic of an almost liquidly smooth whiteness. But was it still white? He held it away and tried it at different angles. It was white. That strap had been another freshman purchase. Hard radiation turned it blue, and blue on Earth was the color of death. It was easy to wander into a patch of radiating soil during the day if you were lost or careless. The government fenced off as many areas as it could, and, of course, no one ever approached the huge lethal sections that began several miles outside the city. But the strap was insurance. If it should ever turn a faint blue, you would show up at the hospital for treatment. There was no argument about it. The compound of which it was made was precisely as sensitive to radiation as you were and appropriate photoelectric instruments could be used to measure the intensity of the blueness so that the seriousness of the case might be determined quickly. A bright royal blue was the finish. Just as the color would never change back, neither would you. There was no cure, no chance, no hope. You just waited anywhere from a day to a week, and all the hospital could do was to make final arrangements for cremation. But at least it was still white, and some of the clamor in Biron's thoughts subsided. There wasn't njuch radioactivity then. Could it be just another angle of the joke?Biron considered and decided that it couldn't. Nobody would do that to anyone else. Not on Earth, anyway, where illegal n handling of radioactive material was a capital offense. They took radioactivity seriously here. They had to. Nobody, therefore, would do this without overpowering reason. He stated the thought to himself carefully and explicitly, facing it boldly. The overpowering reason, for instance, of a desire to murder. But why. There could be no motive... In his twenty-three years' of life, he had never made a serious enemy. Not this serious. Not murder serious. He tugged despairingly at his clipped hair. This was a ridiculous line of thought, but there was no escaping it. He stepped cautiously back to the closet. There had to be something there that was sending out radiation, something that had not been there four hours earlier. He saw it almost at once. than six inches in any dimension. Biron recognized it and his lower lip trembled slightly. He had never seen one before, but he had heard of them. He lifted the counter and took it into the bedroom. The little murmur fell off, almost ceased. It started again when the thin mica partition, through which the radiation entered, pointed toward the box. There was no question in his mind. It was a radiation bomb. The present radiations were not in themselves deadly; they were only a fuse. Somewhere inside the box a tiny atomic-pile was constructed. Short-lived artificial isotopes heated it slowly, permeating it with the appropriate particles. When the threshold of heat and particle density was reached, the pile reacted. Not in an explosion usually, although the heat of reaction would serve to fuse the box itself into a twist of metal, but in a tremendous burst of deadly radiation that would kill anything living within a radius of six feet to six miles, depending on the bomb's size. There was no way of telling when the threshold would be reached. Perhaps not for hours, perhaps the next moment. Biron remained standing helplessly, flashlight held loosely in his damp hands. Half an hour before, the visiphone had awakened him, and he had been at peace then. Now he knew he was going to die. Biron didn't want to die, but he was penned in hopelessly, and there was no place to hide. He knew the geography of the room. It was at the end of a corridor, so that there was another room only on one side, and, of course, one above and below. He could do nothing about the room above. The room on the same floor was on the bathroom side and it adjoined via its own bathroom. He doubted that he could make himself heard. That left the room below. There were a couple of folding chairs in the room, spare seats to accommodate company. He took one. It made a flat, slapping sound when it hit the floor. He turned it edgewise and the sound became harder and louder. Between each blow, he waited, wondering if he could rouse the sleeper below and annoy him sufficiently to have him report the disturbance. Abruptly, he caught a faint noise and paused, the splintering chair raised above his head. The noise came again, like a faint shout. It was from the direction of the door. He dropped the chair and yelled in return. He crushed his ear up against the crack where door joined wall, but the t was good, and the sound even there was dim. But he could make out his own name being called, "Farrill ! Farrill!" several times over, and something else. Maybe, "Are you in there?" or, "Are you all right?" He roared back, "Get the door open." He shouted it three or four times. He was in a feverish sweat of impatience. The bomb might be on the point of letting loose even now. He thought they heard him. At least, the muffled cry came back, "Watch out. Something, something, blaster." He knew what that meant and backed hurriedly away from the door. There were a couple of sharp, cracking sounds, and he could actually feel the vibrations set up in the air of the room. Then there followed a splitting noise and the door was flung inward. Light poured in from the corridor. Biron dashed out, arms flung wide. "Don't come in," he yelled. "For the love of Earth, don't come in. There's a radiation bomb in there." He was facing two men. One was Jonti. The other was Esbak, the superintendent. He was only partly dressed. "A radiation bomb?" he stuttered. But Jonti said, "What size?" Jonti's blaster was still in his hand, and only that jarred with the dandyish effect of his clothes, even at this time of night. "All right," said Jonti. He seemed quite cool about it, as he turned to the superintendent. "You'd better evacuate the rooms in this area, and if you have lead sheets anj-where on the University grounds, have them brought out here to line the corridor. And I wouldn't let anyone in there before morning." He turned to Biron. "It probably has a twelve to eighteen foot radius. How did it get there?" "I don't know," said Biron. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "If you don't mind. I've got to sit down somewhere." He threw a glance at his wrist. then realized his wristwatch was still in the room. He had a wild impulse to return after it. There was plenty of action now. Students were being hustled out of their rooms. "Come with me," said Jonti. "I agree that you had better find a place to sit down and relax. You're white and shaking." Biron said, "What brought you out to my room? Not that I'm not thankful, you understand, just -- curious. Wondering." "I called you. There was no answer, and I had to see you." "To see me?" He spoke carefully, trying to control his irregular breathing. "Why?" "To warn you that your life was in danger." Biron laughed raggedly. "I found out." "That was only the first attempt. They'll try again." "Who are the 'they?' " "Not here, Farrill," said Jonti. "We need privacy for this. You're a marked man, and I may already have endangered myself as well." The Net Across Space T he student lounge was empty; dark as well. At four-thirty in the morning it could scarcely have been otherwise. Yet Jonti hesitated a moment as he held the door open, listening for occupants. "No," he said, softly, "leave the lights out. We don't need them to talk." "I've had enough of the dark for one night," objected Biron. "We'll leave the door ajar." Biron lacked the will to argue. He dropped into the nearest chair and watched the rectangle of light through the closing door narrow down to a thin line. Now that it was all over, he had the shakes. Jonti steadied the door and rested his little swagger-stick upon the crack of light on the floor. "Watch it. It will tell us if anyone passes, or if the door movfes." Biron said, "Please, I'm not in a conspiratorial mood. If you don't mind. I'd appreciate your telling me whatever it is you want to tell me. You've saved my life, I know, and tomorrow I'll be properly grateful. Right now, I could do with a short drink and a long rest." "I can imagine your feelings," Jonti said, "but the too-long rest you might have had has been avoided, momentarily. I would like , to make it more than just momentarily. Do you know that I know your father?" The question was an abrupt one, and Biron raised his eyebrows, a gesture lost in the dark. He said, "He has never mentioned knowing you." "I would be surprised if he did. He doesn't know me by the name I use here. Have you heard from your father recently, by the way?" "Why do you ask?" "Because he is also in great danger." "What?" Jonti's hand found the other's arm in the dimness and gripped it firmly. "Please! Keep your voice as it has been." Biron realized, for the first time, that they had been whispering. Jonti resumed, "I'll be more specific. Your father has been taken into custody. You understand the significance?" "No, I certainly don't understand. Who has taken him into custody, and what are you getting at? Why are you bothering me?" Biron's temples were throbbing. The Hypnite and the near-death had made it impossible to fence on even terms with the cool dandy sitting so close to him. "Surely," came the whisper, "you have some inkling of the work your father is doing." "If you know my father, you know he is Rancher of Widemos. That is his work." Jonti said, "Well, there is no reason you should trust me, other than that I am risking my own life for you. But I already know all you can tell me. As an example, I know that your father has been conspiring against the Tyranni." "I deny that," said Biron, tensely. "Your service to me tonight does not give you the right to make such statements about my father." "You are foolishly evasive, young man, and you are wasting my time. Don't you see that the situation is beyond verbal fencing? I'll say it outright. Your father is in the custody of the Tyranni. He may be dead by now." "I don't believe you." "I am in a position to know." "Let's break this off, Jonti. I am in no mood for mystery and I resent this attempt of yours to -- " "To what?" Jonti's voice lost some of its refined edge. "What do I gain by telling you this? Let me remind you that this knowledge of mine, which you will not accept, indicated to me that an attempt might be made to kill you. Judge by what has happened, Farrill." V B iron said, "start again and tell it straight. I'll listen." "Very well. I imagine, Farrill, that you know me to be a fellow countryrnan from the Nebular Kingdoms, although I've been passing myself off as a Vegan." "I judged that might be a possibility by your accent. It didn't seem important." "It is important, my friend. I came here because, like your father, I didn't like the Tyranni. They've been oppressing our people for fifty years. 'That's a long time." 'Tm not a politician." Again Jonti's voice had an irritated edge to it. "Oil, I'm not one of their agents trying to get you into trouble. I'm telling you the truth. They caught me a year ago as they have caught your father now. But I managed to get away and came to Earth, where I thought I might be safe until I was ready to return. That's all I need tell you about myself." "It is more than I have asked for." Biron could not force the unfriendliness out of his voice. Jonti affected him unfavorably with his too-precise mannerisms. "I know that. But it is necessary to tell you so much at least, for it was in this manner that I met your father. He worked with me, or, rather, I with him. He knew me not in his official capacity as the greatest nobleman on the planet of Nephelos. You understand me?" B iron nodded uselessly in the darkness and said, "Yes." "It is not necessary to go into that further. My sources of information have been maintained even here, and I know that he has been imprisoned. It is knowledge. Even if it had been merely suspicion, this attempt on your life would have been sufficient proof." "In what way?" "If the Tyranni have the father, would they leave the son at large?" "Are you trying to tell me that the Tyranni set that radiation bomb in my room? That's impossible." "Why is it impossible? Can't you understand their position? The Tyranni rule fifty worlds; they are outnumbered hundreds to one. In such a position, simple force is not enough. Devious methods, intrigue, assassinations are their devices. The net they weave across space is a wide one and close-meshed. I can well believe that it extends across five hundred light years to Earth." Biron was still in the grip of his nightmare. In the distance, there were the faint sounds of the lead shields being moved into place. In his room, the counter was still murmuring. He said, "It doesn't make sense. I am going back to Nephelos this week. They would know that. Why should they kill me here? If they wait, they'd have me." He was relieved to find the flaw, eager to believe his own logic. Jonti leaned closer and his spiced breath stirred the hair on Biron's temple. 'Your father is popular. His death -- and once imprisoned by the Tyranni, his execution becomes a probability you must face -- will be resented even by the cowed slave-race the Tyranni are trying to breed. You could rally that resentment as the new Rancher of Widemos and to execute you as well would double the danger for them. To make martyrs is not their purpose. But if you were to die in a faraway world, by accident, it would be convenient for them." "I don't believe you," said Biron. It had become his only defense. Jonti rose, adjusting his thin gloves. He said, "You go too far, Farrill. Your role would be more convincing if you pretended to no such complete ignorance. Your father may have been shielding you from reality for your own protection, presumably, yet I doubt that you could remain completely uninfluenced by his beliefs. Your hate for the Tyranni cannot help being a reflection of his own. You cannot help being ready to fight them." Biron shrugged without answering. Jonti said, "He may even recognize your new adulthood to the point of putting you to use. You are conveniently here on Earth and it is not unlikely that you may be combining your education with a definite assignment. An assignment, perhaps, for the failure of which the Tyranni are ready to kill you." "That's silly melodrama." "Is it? Let it be so, then. If the truth will not persuade you now, events will later. There will be other attempts on your life and the next one will succeed. From this moment on, Farrill, you are a dead man." B iron looked up. "Wait! What's your own private interest in me?" "I am a patriot. I would like to see the Kingdoms free again, with governments of their own choosing." "No, your private interest," Biron insisted doggedly. "I cannot accept idealism only, because I won't believe it of you. I am sorry if that offends you." Jonti seated himself again. He said, "My lands have been confiscated. Before my exile, it was not comfortable to be forced to take orders from those dwarfs. And since then it has become more imperative than ever to become once again the man my grandfather had been before the Tyranni came. Is, that enough of a practical reason for wanting a revolution? Your father would have been a leader of that revolution. Failing him, you!" "I? I am twenty-three and know nothing of all this. You could find better men." "Undoubtedly I could, but no one else is the son of your father. If your father is killed, you will be Rancher of Wi demos, and, as such, you would be valuable to me if you were only twelve and an idiot besides. I need you for the same reason the Tyranni must be rid of you. And if my necessity is unconvincing to you, surely theirs cannot be. 'There was a radiation bomb in your room. It could only have been meant to kill you. Who else would  want to kill you?" Jonti waited patiently and picked up the other's whisper. "No one," admitted Biron reluctantly. "No one would want to kill me that I know of. Then it's true about my father." "It is true. View it as a casualty of war." "You think that would make it better? They'll put up a monument to him someday, perhaps ? One with a radiating inscription that you can see ten thousand miles out in space?" His voice was becoming harsh, savage. "Is that supposed to make me happy?" Jonti waited, but Biron said nothing more. Jonti said, "What do you intend doing?" "I'm going home." "You still don't understand your position, then." "I said I'm going home. What do you want me to do ? If he's alive, I'll get him out of there. And if he's dead. I'll -- I'll -- " "You'll do nothing!" The older man's voice was coldly annoyed. "You can't go to Nephelos. Don't you see that you can't? It would be just what the Tyranni would want you to do." Biron muttered, "What do you suggest ?" "Do you know the Director of Rhodia." "The friend of the Tyranni? Everyone in the Kingdoms knows who he is. Hinrik V, Director of Rhodia." "Have you ever met him?" "No." "That is what I meant. If you haven't met him, you don't know him. He is an imbecile, Farrill. I mean it literally. But when the Ranchy of Widemos is confiscated by the Tyranni -- and it will be, as my lands wefe -- it will be awarded to Hinrik. 'There the Tyranni will feel them to be safe, and there you m.ust go." "Why?" "Because Hinrik, at least, has influence with the Tyranni; as much influence as a lick-spittle puppet may have. He may arrange to have you reinstated." "I don't see why. He's more likely to turn me over to them." "So he is. But you'll be on your guard against it, and there is a fighting chance that you may avoid it. Remember, the title you carry is valuable and important, but it is not all-sufficient. In this business of conspiracy, one must be practical above all. Men will rally about you out of sentiment and respect for your name, but to hold them, you will need money." B iron hesitated. "I need time to decide." "You have no time. Your time ran out when the radiation bomb was planted in your room. The only thing left now is action. I can give you a letter of introduction to Hinrik of Rhodia." "You know him so well, then." "Your suspicion never sleeps, does it? I once headed a mission to Hinrik's court on behalf of the Autarch of Lingane. Hinrik's imbecile's mind will probably not remember me, but he will not dare to show he has forgotten. My letter will serve as introduction and you can improvise from there. I will have it for you in the morning. "There is a ship leaving for Rhodia at noon. I have tickets for you. I am leaving myself, but by another route. Don't linger. You're all through here, aren't you.?" "There is the diploma presentation." "A sdrap of parchment. Does it matter to you?" "Not now." "Do you have money?" "Enough." "Very well. Too much would be suspicious." He spoke sharply. "Farrill !" Biron stirred out of what was nearly a stupor. "What?" "Get back to the others. Tell no one you are leaving. Let the act speak." Biron nodded dumbly. Far down in the recesses of his mind, there was the thought that his mission had remained unaccomplished and that in this way, too, he had failed his doomed father. He was racked with a futile bitterness. His father might have told him more. He might have shared the dangers. He should not have been allowed to act in ignorance. And now that he knew the truth, or at least more of it, concerning the extent of his father's role in conspiracy, there was an added importance to the document he was to have obtained from Earth's archives. But there was no time any longer. No time to get the document. Ncrtime to wonder about it. No time to save his father. No time, perhaps, to live. He said, "I'll do as you say." out over the University campus as he paused on the steps of the dormitory. Certainly there was no admiration ia his glance. Stepping down the bricked walk that wound unsubtly through the pseudo-rustic atmosphere affected by all urban campuses since antiquity, he could see the lights of the city's single important street gleam just ahead. Past it, drowned in daytime, but visible now, was the eternal radioactive blue of th horizon, mute witness of the historic wars. Jonti considered the sky for a moment. Over fifty years had passed since the Tyranni had come and put a sudden end to the separate lives of two dozen sprawling, brawling political units in the depths beyond the Nebula. Now, suddenly and prematurely, the peace of strangulation lay upon them. The storm that had caught them in one vast thunder-clap had been something from which they had not yet recovered. It had left only a sort of twitching that futilely agitated a world here and there, now and then. To organize those twitchings, to align them into a single well-timed heave would be a difficult task, and a long one. Well, he had been rusticating here on Earth long enough. It was time to return. The others, back home, were probably trying to get in touch with him at his rooms right now. He lengthened his stride a bit. He caught the beam as he entered his room. It was a personal beam, for whose security there were as yet no fears and in whose privacy there was no chink. No formal receiver was required; no thing of metal and wires to catch the faint, drifting surges of electrons, with their whispered impulses swimming through hyper-space from a world half a thousand light years away. Space itself was polarized in his room, and prepared for reception. Its fabric was smoothed out of randomness. There was no way of detecting that polarization, except by receiving. And in that particular volume of space, only his own mind could act as receiver, since only the electrical characteristics of his own particular nerve-cell system could resonate to the vibrations of the carrier beam that bore the message. The message was as private as the unique characteristics of his own brain waves and in all the universe, beings, the odds against a duplication. sufficiently close to allow one man to pick up another's personal wave was a twenty-figured-number to one. Jonti's brain throbbed to thg call as it whined through the endless, empty incomprehensibility of hyperspace. "... calling... calling... calling... calling..." simple a job as receiving. A mechanical contrivance was needed to set up the highly specific carrier wave that would carry back to the contact beyond the Nebular. That was contained in the ornamental button that Jonti carried on his right shoulder... It was automatically activated when he stepped into his volume of space-polarization, and after that he had only to think purposefully and with concentration. "Here I am!" No need for more specific identification. The dull repetition of the call halted and became words that took form within his mind, "We greet you, sir. Widemos has been executed. The news is, of course, not yet public." "It does not surprise me. Was anyone else implicated?" "No, sir. The Rancher made no statements at any time. A brave and loyal man." "Yes. But it takes more than simply bravery and loyalty, or he would not have been caught. A little more cowardice might have been useful. No matter. I have spoken to his son, the new Rancher, who has already had his brush with death. He will be put to use." "May one inquire in what manner, sir?" "It is better to let events answer your question. Certainly I cannot foretell consequences at this early date. Tomorrow he will set off to see Hinrik of Rhodia." "Hinrik! The young man will run a fearful risk. Is he aware that -- " "I have told him as much as I can," responded Jonti, sharply. "We cannot trust him too far until he has proved himself. Under the circumstances as they exist, we can only view him as a man to be risked, like any other man. He is expendable, quite expendable. Do not call me here again, as I am leaving Earth." And, with a gesture of finality, Jonti broke the connection mentally. Quietly and thoughtfully, he went over the events of the day and the night, weighing each event. Slowly, he smiled. Everything had been arranged perfectly, and the comedy might now play itself out. Nothing had been left to chance. Chance and the Wristwatch T he first hour of a spaceship's rise from planetary thraldom is the most prosaic. There is the confusion of departure, which is much the same in essence as that which must have accompanied the shoving off of the first hollowedout tree trunk on some primeval river of Earth. You have your accommodations; your luggage is taken care of; there is the first stiff moment of strangeness and meaningless hustle surrounding you. The shouted lastmoment intimacies, the quieting, the muted clang of the airlocks, followed by the slow soughing of air as the locks screw inward automatically, like gigantic drills, becoming air-tight. Then the portentous silence and the red signs flicking in every room: "Adjust acceleration suits... Adjust acceleration suits." The stewards scour the corridors, knocking shortly on each door and jerking it open; "Beg pardon. Suits on." You battle with the suits, cold, tight, uncomfortable, but cradled in a hydraulic system which absorbs the sickening pressures of the takeoff. There is the faraway rumble of the atom-driven motors, on low power for atmospheric maneuvering, followed instantly by the giving back against slow-yielding oil of the suit-cradle. You recede almost indefinitely back; then very slowly forward again as the acceleration becomes negative. If you survive nausea during this period, you are probably safe from spacesickness for duration. The viewroom was not open to the passengers for the first three hours of the flight. There was a long line waiting when the atmosphere had been left behind and thedouble-doors were ready to separate. There were present not only the usual hundred per cent turnout of all Planetaries -- those, in other words, who had never been in space before -- but a fair proportion of the more experienced travelers as well. The vision of Earth from space, after all, was one of the tourist "musts." The viewroom was a bubble on the ship's "skin," a bubble of a curved two-foot-thick, steel-hard transparent plastic. The retractile iridium-steel lid which protected it against the scouring of the atmosphere and its dust particles had been rolled back. The lights were out and the gallery was full. The faces peering over the bars were clear in the Earthshine. For Earth was suspended there below, a gigantic and gleaming orange-andblueandwhite-patched balloon. The hemisphere showing was almost entirely sunlit; the continents between the clouds, a desert orange, with thin scattered lines of green. The seas were blue, standing out sharply against the black of space where they met the horizon. And all around in the black, undusted sky were the stars. T hey waited patiently, those who watched. It was not the sunlit hemisphere they wanted. The polar cap, blinding bright, was shifting into view as the ship maintained the slight, unnoticed sidewise acceleration that was lifting it out of the ecliptic. Slowly the shadow of night encroached upon the globe and the huge "World Island" of EurasiaAfrica majestically took the stage, north-side "down." Its diseased unliving soil hid its horror under a night-induced play of jewels. The radioactivity of the soil was a vast sea of iridescent blue, sparking in strange festoons that spelled out the manner in which the nuclear bombs had once landed, a full generation before the forcefield defense against nuclear explosions had been developed, so that no other world could commit suicide in just that fashion again. The eyes watched until, with the hours. Earth was a bright little half-coin in the endless black. Among the watchers was .Biron Farrill. He sat by hirhself in the front row, arms upon the railing, eyes brooding and thoughtful. This was not the way he had expected to leave Earth. It was the wrong manner, the wrong ship, the wrong destination. His tanned forearm rubbed against the stubble of his chin and he felt guilty about not having shaved that morning. He'd go back to his room after a while and correct that. Meanwhile he hesitated to leave. There were people here. In his room, he would be alone. Or was that just the reason he should leave? He did not like the new feeling he had, that of being hunted, of being friendless. All friendship had dropped from him. It had shriveled from the moment he had been awakened by the phone call less than twenty-four hours earlier. Even in the dormitory, he had become an embarrassment. Old Esbak had pounced upon him when he had returned after his talk with Jonti in the student lounge. Esbak was in turmoil, his voice overshrill. "Mr. Farrill, I've been looking for you. It has been a most unfortunate incident. I can't understand it. Do you have any explanation?" "No," Biron had half-shouted, "I don't. When can I get into my room and get my stuff out?" "In the morning, I am sure. We've just managed to get the equipment up here to test the room. There is no longer any trace of radioactivity above normal background level. It was a very fortunate escape for you. It must have missed you by only minutes. "Yes, yes, but if you don't mind, I would like to rest." "Please use my room till morning and then we'll get you relocated for the few days remaining you. Umm, by the way, Mr. Farrill, if you don't mind, there is another matter." He was being overly polite. Biron could almost hear the eggshells give slightly beneath his finicky feet. "What other matter?" asked Biron, wearily. "Do you know of anyone who might have been interested in -- er -- hazing you?" , "Hazing me like this Of course not." "What are your plans, then? 'The school authorities would, of course. be most unhappy to have publicity arise as a result of this incident." H OW he kept referring to it as an "incident." Biron said, dryly, "I understand you. But don't worry. I'm not interested in investigations or in the police. I'm leaving Earth shortly and I'd just as soon not have my own plans disrupted. I'm not bringing any charges. After all. I'm still alive." Esbak had been almost indecently relieved. It u'as all they wanted from him. No unpleasantness. It was-just an incident to be forgotten. He got into his old room again at seven in the morning. It was quiet and there was no murmuring in the closet. The bomb was no longer there, nor was the radiation counter. 'They had probably been taken away by Esbak and thrown into a contaminated area. It came under the head of destroying evidence, but that was the school's worry. Biron tossed his belongings into suitcases and then called the desk for assignment to another room. The lights were working again, he noticed, and so, of course, was the visiphone. The one remnant of last night was the twisted door, its lock melted away. 'They gave him another room. That established his intention to stay for anyone who might be listening. Then, using the hall phone, he had called an aircab. He did not think anyone saw him. Let the school puzzle out his disappearance however they pleased. For a moment, he had caught sight of Jonti at the spaceport. They met in the fashion of a glancing blow. Jonti said nothing; gave no sign of recognition, but after he had passed by, there were in Biron's hand a featureless tiny black globe that was a personal message capsule and a ticket for passage to Rhodia. He spent a moment upon the personal capsule. It was not sealed. He read the message later in his room. It was a simple introduction with minimum wordage. Biron's thoughts rested for a while upon Sander Jonti as he watched Earth shrivel with distance through the viewroom bubble. He had known the man very superficially until Jonti had whirled so devastatingly into his life, first to save it and then to set it upon a new and untried course. Biron had known his name; he had nodded whenever they had passed; had exchanged polite formalities occasionally, but that was all. He had not liked the man, had not liked his coldness, his overdressed, overmannered personality. But all that had nothing to do with affairs now. Biron rubbed his crew-cut with a restless hand and sighed. He actually found himself hungering for Jonti's presence. The man was at least master of events. He had known what to do; he had known what Biron was to do; he had made Biron do it. And now Biron was alone and feeling very young, very helpless, very friendless, and almost frightened. T hrough it all, he studiously avoided thinking of his father. It would not help. "Mr. Malaine." The name was repeated two or three times, before Biron started at the respectful touch upon his shoulder, and looked up. The robot messenger said again, "Mr. Malaine," and for five seconds, Biron stared blankly, until he remembered that that was his temporary name. It had been penciled lightly upon the ticket which Jonti had given him. A stateroom had been reserved in that name. "Yes, what is it? I am Malaine." The messenger's voice hissed very faintly as the spool within whirled oft' its message. "I have been asked to inform you that your stateroom has been changed, and that your baggage has already been shifted. If you will see the purser, you will be given your new key and asked to surrender your old. 'We trust that this will cause no inconvenience for you." "What's all this?" Biron whirled in his seat, and several of the thinning group of passengers, still watching, looked up at the explosive sound. "What's the idea?" Of course, it was no use arguing with a machine that had merely fulfilled its function. The messenger bowed its metal head respectfully, its gently fixed imitation of a human smile of ingratiation unchanging, and left. Biron strode but of the viewroom and accosted the ship's officer at the door with somewhat more energy than he had .planned. "Look here, I want to see the captain." The officer showed no surprise. "Is it important, sir?" "It sure as Space is. I've just had my stateroom shifted without my permission and I'd like to know the meaning of it." Even at the time, Biron felt his anger to be out of proportion to the cause, but it represented an accumulation of resentment. He had nearly been killed; he had been forced to leave Earth like a skulking criminal; he was going heknew-not-where to do he-knewnot-what; and now they were pushing him around aboard ship. It was too much. Yet through it all, he had the uncomfortable feeling that Jonti, in his shoes, would have acted differently, perhaps more wisely. Well, he wasn't Jonti. The olScer said, "I will call the purser." "I want the captain," insisted Biron. "If you wish, then." And after a short conversation through the small ship's communicator suspended from his lapel, he said urbanely, "You will be called for. Please wait." was a rather short and thickset man, who rose politely and leaned over his desk to shake hands with Biron when the latter entered. "Mr. Malaine," he said, "I am sorry we had to trouble you." He had a rectangular face, irongray hair, a short, well-kept mustache of slightly darker hue, and clipped smile. "So am I," said Biron. "I had a stateroom resersation to which I vas entitled and I feel that not even you, sir, had the right to change it without my permission." "Granted, Mr. Malaine. But you understand, it was rather an emergency. A last minute arrival, an important man, insisted on being moved to a stateroom closer to the gravitational center of the ship. He had a heart condition and it was important to keep ship's gravity as low as possible for him. We had no choice" "All right, but why pick on me as the one to be shifted?" "It had to be someone. You are traveling alone; you are a young man who, we felt, would have no difficulty in taking a slightly higher gravity." His eyes moved automatically up and down Biron's six-feettwo of hard musculature. "Besides, you will find your new room rather more elaborate than your old one. You have not lost by the exchange. No, indeed." The captain stepped from behind his desk. "May I show you your new quarters personally?" Biron found difficulty in maintaining his resentment. It seemed reasonable, this whole matter, and, then again, not reasonable, either. The captain was saying as they left his quarters, "May I have your company at my table for tomorrow night's dinner? Our first Jump is scheduled for that time." Biron heard himself saying, "Thank you. I will be honored." Yet he thought the invitation strange. Granted that the captain was merely trying to soothe him, yet surely the method was stronger than necessary. T he captain's table was a long one, taking up an entire wall of the salon. Biron found himself near the center, taking an unsuitable precedence over others. Yet there' was his placecard before him. The steward had been quite firm; there vas no mistake. Biron was not particularly overmodest. As son of the Rancher of Widemos, born to the nobility, he would have felt entitled to this kind of respectful treatment. But as Biron Malaine, he was just an ordinary citizen, and these things never happened to ordinary citizens. For one thing, the captain had been perfectly correct about his new stateroom. It ims more elaborate. His original room had been what his ticket called for, a single, second class, while the replacement was a double room, first class. Tliere was a bathroom adjoining, private, of course, equipped with a stall-shower and an air-dryer. It was near "officer's country" and the presence of uniforms was almost overpowering. Lunch had been brought to his room on silver service. A barber made a sudden appearance just before dinner. All this was perhaps to be expected when one traveled as a nobleman on a luxury spaceliner, first class, but it was too good for Biron Malaine, unknown cornmoner. It Was far too good, for by the time the barber had arrived, Biron had just returned from an afternoon walk that had taken him through the corridors in a purposely devious path. There had been crew-; men in his path wherever he had turned; polite, much too attentive. He shook them free somehow and reached #D, his first room, the one he had never slept in. H e stopped to light a cigaret and in the interval spent thus, the only passenger in sight turned a corridor. Biron touched the signal light briefly and there was no answer. Well, the old key had not been taken from him yet. An oversight, no doubt. He placed the thin oblong sliver of metal into its slot and the unique pattern of leaden opacity within the aluminum sheath activated the tiny photo-tube. The door opened and he took one step inside. It was all he needed. He left and the door closed automatically behind him. His old room was not occupied; neither by an important personage with a weak heart nor by anyone else. The bed and furnishings were stripped down; no .trunks, no toilet articles were in sight; the very Mr of occupancy was missing. So the luxury they were surrounding him with served only to prevent his taking further action to get backhis original room. The)were bribing him to stay quietly out of the old room. Why? Was it the room they were interested in, or was it himself? And now he sat at the captain's table with the questions unanswered and rose politely with the rest as the captain entered, strode up the steps of the dais on which the long table was set, and took his place. Why had they moved him? There was music in the ship and the walls that separated the salon from the viewroom had been retracted. The lights were low and tinged with orange-red. Even the queaziest passengers' space-sickness had passed after the original ac-, celeration, or as the result of first exposure to the minor gravity variations between various parts of the ship. The salon was full. T he captain leaned forward and said to Biron, "Good evening, Mr. Malaine. How do you find your new room ?" "Almost too satisfactory, sir. A little rich for my way of life." He said it in a flat monotone, and it seemed to him that a faint dismay passed momentarily across the captain's face. Over the dessert, the skin of the viewroom's glass bubble slid smoothly back into its socket, and the lights dimmed to nearly nothing. Neither Sun, Earth, nor any planet was in view on that large, dark screen. They were facing the Milky Way, that lengthwise view of the Galactic Lens, and it made a luminous diagonal track among the hard, bright stars. Automatically, the tide of conversation ebbed. Chairs shifted so that all faced the stars. The dinner guests had become an audience, the music a faint whisper. 'The voice over the amplifiers was clear in the gathered quiet. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready for our first Jump. Most of you, I suppose, know at least theoretically what a Jump is. Many of you, however, have never experienced one. It is to those last I would like to speak in particular. "The Jump is exactly what the name implies. In the fabric of space-time itself, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. That is a natural law, first discovered by one of the ancients; the traditional Einstein, perhaps, except that so many things are credited to him. Even at the speed of light, of course, it would take years, in subjective time, to reach the stars. "Therefore one leaves the spacetime fabric to enter the little-known realm of hyper-space, where time and distance have no meaning. It is like traveling across a narrow isthmus to pass from one ocean to another, rather than remaining at sea and circling a continent to reach the same objective. "Great amounts of energy are required, of course, to enter this 'space within space,' as some call it, and a great deal of ingenious calculation must be made to insure re-entry into ordinary space-time at the proper point. The result of the expenditure of this energy and intelligence is that immense distances can be traversed' in zero time. It is only the Jump which makes interstellar travel possible. "The Jump we are about to make will take place in about ten minutes. You will be warned. There is never more than some momentary minor discomfort; therefore, I hope all of you will remain calm. Thank you." T he ship lights went out altogether, and there were only the stars left. It seemed a long while before a crisp announcement filled the air momentarily. "The Jump will take place in exactly one minute." And then the same voice counted the seconds backward: "Fifty... forty... thirty... tw'enty... ten... five... three... two... one..." It was as though there had been a momentary discontinuity in existence, a bump which joggled only the deep inside of a man's bones. In that immeasurable fraction of a second, one hundred light years had passed, and the ship, which had been on the outskirts of the Solar system, was now in the depths of interstellar space. Someone near Biron said, shakily, "Look at the stars!" In a moment, the whisper had taken life through the large room and hissed itself across the tables: "The stars! See!" In that same immeasurable fraction of a second, the star-view had changed radically. The center of the great Galaxy, which stretched thirty thousand light years from tip to tip, was closer now, and the stars had thickened in number. They spread across die black velvet vacuum in a fine powder, backdropping the occasional brightness of the nearby stars. Biron, against his will, remembered the beginning of a poem he himself had once written at the sentimental age of nineteen, on the occasion of his first space flight; the one that had first taken him to the Earth he was now leaving: The stars, like dust, encircle me In living mists of light; And all of space I seem to see In one vast burst of sight. The lights went on then, and Biron's thoughts were snapped out of space as suddenly as they had entered it. He was in a spaceliner's salon again, with a dinner dragging to an end, and the hum of conversation rising to a prosaic level. He glanced at his wristwatch, half looked away; then, very slowly brought the wristwatch into focus again. He stared at it for a long minute. It was the wristwatch he had left in his bedroom that radiation of the bomb, and he had collected it with the rest of his belongings the next morning. How many times had he looked at it since then ? How many times had he stared at it, taken mental note of the time, and no note at all of the other piece of information it shouted at him ? For the plastic wrist band was white, not blue. It was white! Slowly the events of that night, all of them, fell into place. Strange how one fact could shake all the confusion out of them. He rose abruptly, murmuring, "Pardon me!" under his breath. It was a breach of etiquette to leave before the captain, but that was a matter of small importance to him then. He hastened to his room, striding up the ramps rapidly, rather than waiting for the non-gravity elevators. He locked the door behind him and looked quickly through the bathroom and the built-in closets. He had no real hope of catching anyone. What they had had to do, they must hae done hours ago. Carefully, he went through his baggage. They had done a thorough job. With scarcely any sign to show that they had come and gone, they had carefully withdrawn his identification papers, a packet of letters from his father, and even his capsular introduction to Hinrik of Rhodia. T hat was why they had moved him. It was neither the old room nor the new that they were interested in; merely the process of moving. For nearly an hour they must have legitimately -- legitimately, by Space -- concerned themselves with his baggage, and served their own purposes thereby. Biron sank down upon the double bed and thought furiously, but it didn't help. The trap had been perfect. Everything had been planned. Had it not been for the completely unpredictable chance of his leaving his wristwatch in the bedroom that night, he would not even now have realized how closemeshed the Tyranni's net through space was. There was a soft burr as his door signal sounded. "Come in," he said. It was the steward, who said respectfully, "The captain wishes to know if there is anything he can do for you. You seemed ill as you left the table." "I'm all right," Biron said, feeling very far from all right. How they watched him! And in that moment, he knew that there was no escape, and that the ship was carrying him politely, but surely, to his death. Free? eyes coldly. He repeated, "Gone, you say.?" Rizzett passed a hand over his ruddy face. "Something is gone. I don't know its identity. It might have been the document we're after, certainly. All we know about it is that it had been dated somewhere in the fifteenth to twenty-first century of Earth's primitive calendar, and that it is dangerous." "Is there any definite reason to believe that the missing one is the document?" "Only circumstantial reasoning. It was guarded closely by the Earth government." "Discount that," Jonti said impatiently. "An Earthman will treat any documents relating to the preGalactic past with veneration. It's their ridiculous worship of tradition." "But this one was stolen and yet they never announced the fact. Why should they guard an empty case?" "I can imagine their doing that rather than find themselves forced to admit that a holy relic has been stolen. Yet I cannot believe that young Farrill obtained it after all. I thought you had him under observation." "He didn't get it." "How do you know?" "Because," said JRizzett, "the document has been gone twenty years." "What?" "It was lost or stolen twenty years ago," Rizzett explained. "Then it can't be the right one. It was less than six months ago that the Rancher learned of its existence." "Then somebody else beat him to it by nineteen and a half years." Jonti thouirht silently. He said. "It does not matter. It cannot matter." "Why so?" "Because I have been here on Earth for months. Before I came, it was easy to believe that there might be information of value on ' the planet. But consider now. When Earth was the only inhabited planet in the Galaxy, it was a primitive place, militarily speaking. 'The only weapon they had ever invented worth mentioning was a crude and inefficient nuclear-reaction bomb for which they had not even developed the logical defense." Jonti's nattily sleeved arm made a delicate gesture to where the blue horizon gleamed its sickly radioactivity. He went on, "All this is placed in sharp focus for me as a temporary resident here. It is ridiculous to assume that it is possible to learn anything from a society at that level of military technology. It is always very fashionable to assume that there are lost arts and lost sciences, and there are always these people who make a cult of primitivism, making all sorts of ridiculous claims for the prehistoric civilizations on Earth." "Yet the Rancher was a wise man," Rizzett objected. "He told us specifically that it was the most dangerous document he knew. You remember what he said. I can quote it. He said, 'The matter is death for the Tyranni, and death for those who use it as well; but it would mean final life for tlie Galaxy.' " "The Rancher, like all human beings, can be wrong." "Consider, sir, that we have no idea as to the nature of the document. It could, for instance, be somebody's labotatory notes which had never been published. It might be something that could relate to a weapon that Earthmen had never recognized as a weapon; something which on the face of it might not appear to be a weapon -- " "Nonsense. You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which Man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years. I think, Rizzett, we will return to Lingane." Rizzett shrugged. He was not convinced. Nor, a thousandfold, was Jonti. It had been stolen and that was significant. It had obviously been worth stealing. Anyone in the Galaxy might have it now. him that the Tyranni might have it. The Rancher had been most evasive on the matter. Even Jonti, himself, had not been trusted sufficiently. The Rancher had said it carried death; it could not be used without having it cut. both ways. Jonti's lips clamped shut. The fool and his idiotic hintings! And now ithe Tyranni had him. What if a man like Aratap were now in the possession of such a secret as this might be? Aratap! The one man, now that the Rancher was gone, who remained unpredictable; thf most dangerous Tyrannian of them all. man; a little bandy-legged, narrow-eyed fellow. He had the stumpy, thick-limbed appearance of the average Tyrannian, yet, though he faced an exceptionally large and well-muscled specimen of the subject worlds, he was completely self-possessed. He was the confident heir (in the second generation) of those who had left their windy, infertile worlds and sparked across the emptiness to capture and enchain, the rich and populous planets of the Nebular Regions. His father had headed a squadron of small, flitting ships that had struck and vanished, then struck again;and had made scrap of the lumbering titanic ships that had opposed them. The worlds of the Nebula had fought in the old fashion, but the Tyranni had learned a new one. Where the huge, glittering vessels of the opposed navies attempted single combat, they found themselves flailing at emptiness and wasting their stores of energy. Instead, the Tyranni, abandoning power alone, stressed speed and cooperation, so that the opposed kingdoms toppled one after the other, singly, each waiting half-joyfully at the discomfiture of its neighbors, fallaciously secure behind its steel-shipped ramparts, until its own turn came. But those wars were fifty years in the past. Now the Nebular regions were satrapies that required merely the acts of occupation and taxation. Previously there had been worlds to gain, Aratap thought wearily, and now there was little left to do but to contend with individual men. He looked at the young man who faced him. A very young man. A tall fellow with good shoulders indeed; an absorbed, intent face with the hair of his head cut ridiculously short in what was undoubtedly a collegiate affectation. In an unofficial sense, Aratap was sorry for him. He was obviously frightened. feeling inside him as "fright." If he had been asked to put a name to the emotion, he would have described it as "tension." All his life, he had known the Tyranni to be the overlords. His father, strong and vital though he was, unquestioned on his own estate, respectfully heard on others, was quiet and almost humble in the presence of the Tyranni. Tliey came occasionally to Widemos on polite visits, with questions as to the annual tribute they called taxation. The Rancher of Widemos was responsible for the collection and delivery of these funds on behalf of the planet Nephelos and. perfunctorily, the Tyranni would check his books. The Rancher himself would assist them out of their small vessels. They would sit at the head of the table at mealtimes where they would be served first. When they spoke, all other conversation stopped instantly. As a child, he wondered that such small, ugly men should be so carefully handled, but he learned as he grew up that they were, to his father, what his father was to a cowhand. He even learned to speak softly to them himself, and to address them as "Excellency." He had learned so well that now that he faced one of the overlords, one of the Tyranni, he could feel himself stiffen with tension. The ship which he had considered his prison became officially one on the day of landing upon Rhodia. They had signaled at his door and two husky crewmen had entered and stood on either side of him. The captain, who followed, had said in a flat voice, "Biron Farrill, I take you into custody by the power vested in me as captain of this vessel, and hold you for questioning by the Commissioner of the Great King." The Commissioner was this small Tyrannian who sat before him now, seemingly abstracted and uninterested. The "Great King" was the Khan of the Tyranni, who still lived in the legendary stone palace on the Tyrannian's home planet. Biron looked furtively about him. He was not physically constrained in any way, but four guards in the slate-blue of the Tyrannian "Outer Police" flanked him, two and two. They were armed. A fifth, with a major's insignia, sat beside the Commissioner's desk. The Commissioner spoke for the first time, his voice high-pitched, thin. "The old Rancher of Widemos, your father, has been executed for treason." His faded eyes were fixed on Biron's. There seemed nothing beyond mildness in them. Biron remained stolid. It bothered him that he could do nothing. It would have been so much more satisfying to howl at them, to flail madly at them, but that would not make his father less dead. He thought he knew the reason for this initial statement. It was intended to break him down, to make him give himself away. Well, it wouldn't. He said, evenly, "I am Biron Malaine of Earth. If you are questioning my identity, I would like to communicate with the Terrestrial Consul." "Ah, yes, but we are at a purely informal stage just now. You are Biron Malaine, you say, of Earth. And yet," Aratap indicated the papers before him, "there are letters here which were written by Widemos to his son. There are college registration receipts and tickets to commencement exercises made out to Biron Farrill. They were found in your baggage." Biron felt desperate, but he did not let it show. "My baggage was searched illegally, so that I deny that this is evidence." "We are not in a court of law, Mr. Farrill or Malaine. How do you explain them?" "If they were found in my baggage, they were placed there by someone else." The Commissioner passed it by. Biron felt amazed. His statements sounded so thin,, so patently foolish, yet the Commissioner did not remark upon them, but only tapped the black capsule. "And this introduction to the Director of Rhodia.? Also not yours?" "No, that is mine." Biron had planned that. The introduction did not mention his name. He said, "There is a plot to assassinate the Director -- " He stopped, appalled. It sounded so completely unconvincing when he finally put the beginning of his carefully prepared speech into actual sound. Surely, the Commissioner was smiling cynically at him. But Aratap was not. He merely sighed a little and with quick, jrracticed gestures removed contact lenses from his eyes and placed them carefully in a glass of saline solution that stood on the desk before him. His naked eyeballs were a, little watery. He said, "And you know of it? Even back on Earth, five hundred light-years away? Our own police here on Rhodia have not heard of it." "The police are here. The plot is being developed on Earth." "I see. And are you their agent? Or are you going to warn Hinrik against them?" "The latter, of course." "Indeed? And why do you intend to warn him?" "For the substantial reward which I expect to get." Aratap smiled, "That at least rings true, and lends a certain truthful gloss to your previous statements. What are the details of the plot you speak of?" "That is for the Director only." A momentary hesitation, then a shrug. "Very well. The Tyranni are not interested and do not concern themselves with local politics. We will arrange an interview between yourself and the Director and that will be our contribution to his safety. My men will hold you until your baggage can be collected, and then you will be free to go. Remove him." The last was to the armed men. who left with Biron. Aratap replaced his contact lenses,, an action which changed instantly that look of vague incompetence their absence had seemed to induce. He said to the major, who had remained, "We will keep an eye, I think, on this young Farrill." The officer nodded shortly. "For a moment I thought you might have been taken in. To me, his story was pure nonsense." "It was. It's just that Which makes him maneuverable for the while. All young fools who get their notions of interstellar intrigue from the video spy-thrillers are easily handled. He is, of course, the son of the ex-Rancher." N OW the major hesitated, "Are you sure? It's a vague and unsatisfactory accusation we have against him." "You mean that it might be arranged evidence after all? For what purpose ?" "It could mean that he is a decoy, sacrificed to divert our attention from a real Biron Farrill elsewhere." "No. Improbably theatrical. Besides, we have a photocube." "What? Of the boy?" "Of the Rancher's son. Would you like to see it?" Aratap lifted the paperweight upon his desk. It was a simple glass cube, three inches on each side, black and opaque. He said, "I meant to confront him with it, if it had seemed best. It is a shrewd process, this one, Major. I don't know if you're acquainted with it. It's been developed recently among the inner worlds. Outwardly, it seems an ordinary photocube, but when it is turned upside down, there's an automatic molecular rearrangement which renders it totally opaque. It is a pleasant conceit." H e turned the cube rightside up. The opacity shimmered for a moment, then cleared slowly like a black fog wisping and feathering before the wind. Aratap watched it calmly. And then it was water clear, and a young face smiled brightly out of it, accurate and alive, trapped and solidified in mid-breath forever. "An item," said Aratap, "in the ex-Rancher's possessions. What do you think?" "It is the young man, without question." "Yes." The Tyrannian official regarded the photocube thoughtfully. "You know, using this same process, I don't see why six photographs could not be taken in the same cube. It has six faces, and by resting the cube on each of them in turn, a series of new molecular orientations might be induced. Six connected photographs, flowing one into another as you turned; a static phenomenon turned dynamic and taking on new breadth and vision. Major, it would be a new art form." A mounting enthusiasm had crept into his voice. But the silent major looked faintly scornful, and Aratap left his artistic reflections to say, abruptly, "You will watch Farrill?" "Certainly." "Watch Hinrik as well." "Wmik?" "Of course. It is the whole purpose of freeing the boy. I want some questions answered. Why is Farrill seeing Hinrik? What is the connection between them? The dead Rancher did not play a lone hand. 'There was -- there must have been -- a well-organized conspiracy behind him." "But surely Hinrik could not be involved. He lacks the intelligence, even if he had the courage." "Granted. But it is just because he is half an idiot that he may serve them as a tool. If so, he represents a weakness in our scheme of things. We obviously cannot aflFord to neglect the possibility." He gestured absently; the major saluted, swung on his heel and left. Aratap sighed, turned the photocube thoughtfully in his hand and watched the blackness wash back like a tide of ink. Life had been simpler in his father's time. To smash a planet had a crael grandeur about it, while this careful maneuvering of an ignorant young man was simply cruel. And yet necessary. Uneasy Lies the Head T he Directorship of Rhodia is not ancient, when compared with Earth, as a habitat for Homo sapiens. It is not ancient even when compared with the Centaurian or Sirian worlds. The planets of Arcturus, for instance, had been settled for two hundred years when the first spaceships circled the Horsehead Nebula to find the nest of hundreds of oxygen-water planets behind. They clustered thickly and it was a real find, for although planets infest space, few can maintain human life. There are between one and two Galaxy. Among them are some five seme have gravities over # that of Earth, or less than #, and are therefore unbearable in the long run. Some are too hot; some too cold. Some have poisonous atmospheres, and planetary atmospheres consisting largely or entirely of neon, methane, ammonia, chlorine, even silicon tetrafluoride have been recorded. Some planets lack water, one with oceans of almost pure sulfur dioxide having been described. Others lack carbon. Any one of these failings is sufficient, so that not one world in a hundred thousand can be lived on. Yet this still leaves an estimated The exact number of these which are actually occupied is disputable. According to the Galactic Almanac, admittedly dependent on imperfect records, Rhodia was the #th world settled by Man. Ironically enough, Tyrann, eventually Rhodia's conqueror, was the #th. The pattern of history in the Trans-Nebular region was distressingly similar to that elsewhere during the period of development and expansion. Planet governments were set up in rapid succession, each government confined to its own world. With expanding economy, neighboring planets were colonized and integrated with the home society. Small "empires" were established and these inevitably clashed. Hegemony over sizable regions was established by first one, then another of these governments, depending upon the fluctuations of the fortunes of war and of leadership. lengthy stability, under the able dynasty of the Hinriads. It was perhaps well on the road to finally establishing a universal Trans-Nebular Empire in a stolid century or two, when the Tyranni came and did the job in ten years. Ironical that it should be the men of Tyrann. Until then, during the seven hundred years of its existence, Tyrann had done little better than maintain a precarious autonomy, thanks largely to the undesirability of its barren landscape, which, because of a planetary water-dearth, was largely desert. But even after the Tyranni came, the Directorship of Rhodia continued. It had actually grown. The Hinriads were popular with the people, so their existence served as ameans of easy control. The Tyranni did not care who got the cheers as long as they themselves received the booty and power. To be sure, the Directors were no longer the Hinriads of old. The Directorship had always been elective within the family so that the ablest might be chosen. Adoptions into the family had been encouraged for the same purpose. But now the Tyranni could influence the elections for other reasons, and twenty years earlier, for instance, Hinrik (fifth of that name) had been chosen Director. To the Tyranni, it had seemed a useful choice. Hinrik had been a handsome man at the time of his election, and he still made an impressive appearance when he addressed the Rhodian Council. His hair had grayed smoothly and his thick mustache remained, startlingly enough, as black as his daughter's eyes. At the moment, he faced his daughter, and she was furious. She lacked only two inches of his height, and the Director lacked less than an inch of six feet. She was a smoldering girl, dark of hair and of eyes, and, at the moment, loweringly dark of complexion. She said, again, "I can't do it!" Hinrik said pleadingly, "But, Arta, this is unreasonable. What am I to do? What can I do? In my position, what choice have I?" "If mother were alive, she would find a way out." She stamped her foot. Her full name was Artemisia,, a royal name that had been borne by at least one female of the Hinriads in every generation. "Yes, yes, no doubt. Bless my soul, what a way your mother had with her. There are times when you seem all of her and none of me. But surely, Arta, you haven't given him a chance. Have you observed his -- ah -- better points?" VV "The ones which... He gestured vaguely, thought a while and gave It up. He approached her and would have put a consoling hand upon her shoulder, but she squirmed away from him, her scarlet gown shimmering in the air. "I have spent an evening with him," she said, bitterly, "and he tried to kiss me. It was disgusting!" "But everyone kisses, dear. It's not as though this were your grandmother's time. Kisses are nothing, less than nothing. Young blood, Arta, young blood!" "Young blood, my foot The only time that horrible little man has had young blood in him these fifteen years has been immediately after a transfusion. He's four inches shorter than I am, father. How can I be seen in public with a pygmy .#" "He's an important man. Very important!" "That doesn't add a single inch to his height. He is bowlegged, as they all are, and his breath smells." "His breath smells." A rtemisia wrinkled her nose at her father. "That's right; it has an unpleasant odor. I didn't like it and I made sure to let him know it." Hinrik dropped his jaw wordlessly for a moment, then said in a hoarse halfwhisper, "You let him know it? You implied that a high official of the Royal Court of Tyrann could have an unpleasant personal characteristic?" "He did ! I have a nose, you know! So when he got too close, I just held it and pushed. A figure of man to admire, that one is. He went flat on his back, with his legs sticking up." She gestured with her fingers in illustration, but it was lost on Hinrik, who, with a moan, hunched his shoulder and put his hands over his face. He peered miserably from betri'een two fingers. "What will happen now? How can you act so?" "It didn't do me any good, Do you know what he said? Do you have any idea what he said? It was the last straw. It was absolutely the limit. I made up my mind then that I couldn't stand that man if he were ten feet tall." "But what did he say?" "He said -- straight out of a video, father -- he said, 'Ha! A spirited wench! I like her all the better for that!' And two servants helped stagger him to his feet. But he didn't try to breathe in my face again." Hinrik doubled into a chair, leaned forward and regarded Artemisia earnestly. "You could go through the motions of marrying him, couldn't you? You needn't be in earnest. Why not merely for the sake of political necessity...?" "How do you mean, not in earnest, father? Shall I cross the fingers of my left hand while signing the contract with my right?" Hinrik looked confused. "No, of course not. What good would that do? How would crossing fingers alter the validity of the contract? Really, Arta, I'm surprised at your stupidity." Artemisia sighed. "What do you mean, then?" "Mean by what? You see, you've disrupted things. I can't keep my mind on matters properly when you argue with me. What was I saying?" "I was merely to pretend I was getting married, or something. Remember?" "Oh, yes. I mean, you needn't take it too seriously, you see." "I can have lovers, I suppose." "Arta! I brought you up to be a modest, self-respecting girl. So did your mother. How can you say such things? It's shameful." "But isn't that what you mean?" "I can say it. I am a man, a mature man. A girl like you ought not to repeat it." "Well, I have repeated it and I don't see how talking is worsethan doing. I'll probably iiave to have them if I'm forced to marry for reasons of state, but there are limits." She placed her hands' upon her hips, and the capelike slgeves of her gown slithered away from her tanned and dimpled shoulders. "But he would still be my husband and I just can't bear that particular thought." "He's an old man, my dear. Life with him would be short." "Not short enough, thank you. Five minutes ago, he had young blood. Remember?" Hinrik spread his hands wide and let them drop. "Arta, the man is a Tyrannian, and a powerful one. He is in good odor at the Khan's court." "The Khan might think it's a good odor. He probably would. He must smell even worse -- maybe that is how they judge rank, by rankness." Hinrik's mouth was an O of horror. Automatically, he looked over his shoulder. 'Then he said, hoarsely, "Don't ever say anything like that again." "I will if I feel like it. Besides, the man has had three wives already." She forestalled him, "Not the Khan, the man you want me to marry." "But they're dead," Hinrik explained, earnestly. "Arta, they're not alive. Don't think that. How can you imagine I would let my daughter marry a bigamist? We'll have him produce documents. He married them consecutively, not simultaneously, and they're dead new, entirely dead, all of them." "It's no wonder." "Oh, bless my soul, what shall I do?" He made a last effort at dignity. "Arta, it is the price of being a Hinriad and a Director's daughter." "I didn't ask to be a Hinriad and a Director's daughter." "That has nothing to do with it. It is just that the history of all the Galaxy, Arta, shows that there are occasions when reasons of State, the safety of planets, the best interests of peoples, require that -- uh..." "That some poor girl prostitute herself." "Oh, this vulgarity! Someday, you'll see, someday you'll blurt something of the sort in public." "Well, that's what it is, and I won't do it. I'd rather die. I'd rather do anything. And I will." The Director got to his feet and held out his arms to her. His lips trembled and he said nothing. She ran to him in a sudden agony of tears and clung desperately to him. 'T can't. Don't make me." He patted her awkwardly. "But if you don't, what will happen. If the Tyranni are displeased, they will remove me, imprison me, maybe even exec -- " He gagged on the word. "These are very unhappy times, Arta, very unhappy. The Rancher of Widemos was condemned last week and I believe he has been executed. You remember him, Arta? He was at court half a year ago. A big man, with a round head and deep-set eyes. You were frightened of him at first." "I remember." "Well, he is probably dead. And who knows, myself next, perhaps. Your poor, harmless old father next. It is a bad time. He was at our court and that's very suspicious." S HE suddenly held herself out at arm's length. "Why should it be suspicious? You weren't involved with him, were you?" "I? Indeed not. But if we openly insult the Khan of Tyrann by refusing an alliance with one of his favorites, they may choose to think even that." Hinrik's hand-wringing was interrupted by the muted buzz of the extension. He started uneasily. "I'll take it in my own room. You just rest. You'll feel better after a nap. You'll see, you'll see. It's just that you're a little on'edge now." Artemisia looked after him and frowned. Her face was intensely thoughtful, and for minutes only the gentle tide of her breasts betrayed life. There was the sound of stumbling feet at the door. She turned. 'What is it?" The tone was sharper than she had intended. It was Hinrik, his face sallow with fear. "Major Andros was calling." "Of the Outer Police?" Hinrik could only nod. Artemisia cried, "Surely, he's not. ..." She paused reluctantly at the threshold of 'putting the horrible thought into words, but waited in vain for enlightenment. "There is a young man who wants audience. I don't know him. Why should he come here? He's from Earth." He was gasping for breath and shivering as he spoke, as though his mind were # a turn-table and he had to follow it in its gyrations. The girl ran to him and seized his elbow. She said, sharply, "Sit down, father. Tell me what has happened." She shook him and some of the panic drained out of his face. "I don't know exactly," he whispered. "There's a young man coming here with details concerning a plot on my life. On my life! And they tell me I ought to listen to him." He smiled foolishly. "I'm loved by the people. No one would want to kill me. Would they?" He was watching her eagerly, and relaxed when she said. "Of course, no one would want to kill you." 'Then he was tense again. "Do you think it might be they?" "Who?" He leaned over to whisper, "The Tyranni. The Rancher of Widemos was here yesterday, and they killed him." His voice ascended the scale. "And now they're sending someone over to kill me." Artemisia gripped his shoulder with such force that his mind turned to the present pain. She said, "Father! Sit quietly! Not a word ! Listen to me. No one will kill you. Do y#u hear me? No one will kill you. It was six. months ago that the Rancher was here. Do you remember? Wasn't it six months ago? Think!" "So long ago?" whispered the Director. "Yes, yes, it must have been." "Now you stay here and rest. You're overwrought. I'll see the young man myself and then  I'll bring him to you if it's safe." "Will you, Arta? Will you? He won't hurt a woman. Surely, he wouldn't hurt a woman." She bent suddenly and kissed his cheek. "Be careful," he murmured, and closed his eyes wearily. That Wears a Crown! easily in one of the outer buildings on the Palace Grounds. Foi the first time in his life, he experienced the deflating sensation of being a provincial. Widemos Hall, where he had grown up, had been beautiful in his eyes, and now his memory endowed it with a merely barbaric glitter. Its curved lines, its filigree work, its curiously wrought turrets, its elaborate "false-windows" -- He winced at the thought of them. Earth was mellower, but it was minute and dreaming. 'The public buildings had been of white, glossy stone;' the private homes, of plastic "near-stone" in pakel shades. The net effect had been one of gingerbread and sugar-candy. It was a toy world. But this ? 'This was different. The Palace Grounds of Rhodia was no mere lump of .ostentation built by the petty lords of a cattle kingdom; nor was it the childlike expression of a fading and dying world. It was the culmination, in stone, of the Hinriad dynasty. 'The buildings were strong and quiet. Their lines were straight and vertical, lengthening toward the center of each structure, yet avoiding anything as effeminate as a spire effect. They held a bluntness about them, yet lifted into a climax that affected the onlooker without revealing their method of doing so at a casual glance. They were reserved, . self-contained, proud. And as each building was, so was the group as a whole, the huge Palace Central becoming , a crescendo. One by one, even the few artificialities remaining in the masculine Rhodian style had dropped away. The very "false-windows," so valued as decoration and so usele.ss in a building of artificial light and ventilation, were done away with. And that, somehow, without loss. It was only line and plane, a geometrical abstraction that led the eye upward to the sky. The Tyrannian major stopped briefly at his side as he left the inner room. "You will be received now." Biron nodded, and after a while a larger man in a uniform of scarlet and tan clicked heels before him. It struck Biron with sudden force that those who had the real power did. not need the outward show and could be satisfied with slate-blue. He recalled the splendid formality of a Rancher's life and bit his lip at the thought of its futility. "Biron Malaine?" said the Rhodian guard, and Biron rose to follow. T here was a little gleaming monorail carriage that was suspended delicately by diamagnetic forces upon a single ruddy shaft of metal. Biron had never seen one before. He paused before entering. The little carriage, big enough for five or six at the most, swayed witli the wind, a graceful teardrop returning the gleam of Rhodia's splendid sun. The single rail was slender, scarcely more than a cable, and ran the length of the carriage's underside without touching. Biron bent and saw blue sky all the length between them. For a moment, as he watched, a lifting gust of wind raised it, so that it hovered a full inch above the rail, as though impatient for flight and tearing at the invisible force-field that held it. Then it fluttered back to th? rail, closer and still closer, but never touching. "Get in," said the guard behind him, impatiently, and Biron climbed two steps into the carriage. The steps remained long enough for the guard to follow, then lifted quietly and smoothly into place, forming no break in the carriage's even exterior. Biron became aware that the outer opacity of the carriage was an illusion. Once within, he found himself sitting in a transparent bubble. At the motion of a small control, the carriage lifted upward. It climbed the heights easily, buffeting at the atmosphere which whistled past. For one moment, Biron caught the panorama of the Palace Grounds from the apex of the arc. The structures became a gorgeous whole -- could they have been originally conceived other than as an air-view? -- laced by the shining copper threads, along one or two of which the graceful carriagebubbles skimmed. He felt himself pressed forward, and the carriage came to a dancing halt. The entire run had lasted less than two minutes. A door stood open .before him. He entered and it closed behind him. There was no one in the room, which was small and bare. For the moment, no one was pushing him, but he felt no comfort because of it. He was under no illusions. Ever since that damned night, others had forced his moves. Jonti had placed him on the ship. The Tyrannian Commissioner had placed him here. And each move had increased the measure of his desperation. It was obvious to Biron that the Tyrannian had not been fooled. It had been too easy to get away from him. The Commissioner might have called the Terrestrial consul. He Tiight have hyper-waved Earth, or taken his retinal patterns. These things were routine, could not have been omitted accidentally. He remembered Jonti's analysis of affairs. Some of it might still be valid. The Tyranni would not kill him outright to create another martyr. But Hinrik was their puppet, and he was'as capable as they of ordering an execution. In that case, Biron would have been killed by one of his own, and the Tyranni merely be disdainful onlookers. Biron clenched his fists tightly. He was tall and strong, but he was unarmed. The men who would come for him would have blasters and neuronic whips. He found himself backing against the wall. H e whirled quickly at the small sound of the opening door to his left. The man who entered was armed and uniformed, but there was a girl with him. He relaxed a bit. At another time, he might have observed the girl closely, since she was worth observation and approval, but at the moment she was only a girl. They approached together, stopping some six feet away. He kept his eye on the guard's blaster. The girl said to the guard, "I'll speak to him first, lieutenant." There was a little vertical line between her eyes, as she turned to him. She said, "Are you the man who has this story of an assassination plot against the Director?" Biron said, "I was told I would see the Director." "That is impossible. If you have anything to say, say it to me. If your information is truthful and useful, you will be well-treated." "May I ask who you are? How do I know you are authorized to speak for the Director?" The girl seemed annoyed. "I am his daughter. Please answer my questions. Are you from outside the System?" "I am from Earth." Biron paused, then added, "Your Grace." The addition pleased her.  "Where is that?" "It is a small planet of the Sirian sector, your Grace." "And what is your name?" "Biron Malaine, your Grace." She stared at him thoughtfully. "From Earth? Can you pilot a spaceship?" Biron almost smiled. She was testing him. She knew very well that space-navigation was one of the forbidden sciences in the Tyranni-controlled worlds. He said, "Yes, your Grace." He could prove that when the performance test came, if they let him live that long. Space-navigation was not a forbidden science on Earth, and in four years one could learn much. She said, "Very well. And your story?" He made his decision suddenly. To the guard alone, he would not have dared. But this was a girl. and if she was not lying, if she really was the Director's daughter, she might be a persuasive factor on his behalf." He said, "There is no assassination plot, your Grace." The girl was startled. She turned impatiently to her companion. "Would you take over, lieutenant? GSt the truth out of him." iBiron took a step forward and met the cold thrust of the guard's blaster. He said, urgently, "Wait, your Grace. Listen to me! It was the only way to see the Director. Don't you understand?" He raised his voice and sent it after her retreating form; "Will you tell his Excellency, at least, that I am Biron Farrill and claim my Sanctuary Right?" It was a feeble straw at which to clutch. The old feudal customs had beer, losing their force with the generations even before the Tyranni came. Now they were archaisms. But there was nothing else. Nothing. S HE turned, and her eyebrows were arched. "Are you claiming now to be of the aristocratic order? A moment ago, your name was Malaine." A new voice sounded unexpectedly. "So it was, but it is the second name which is correct. You are Biron Farrill indeed, my good sir. Of course you are. "rhe resemblance is unmistakable." A small, smiling man stood in ! the doorway. His eyes, widely in all of Biron with an amused sharpness. He cocked his narrow face upward at Biron's height and said to the girl, "Don't you recognize him, too, Artemisia?" Artemisia hurried to him, her voice troubled. "Uncle Gil, what are you doing here?" "Taking care of my interests, Artemisia. Remember that if there were an assassination, I would be the closest of the Hinriads to the possible succession." Gillbret oth Hinriad winked elaborately, then added, "Oh, get the lieutenant out of here. There isn't any danger." She ignored that and said, "Have you been sounding the communicator again?" "Of course. Would you deprive me of an amusement? It is pleasant to eavesdrop on them." "Not if they catch you." "The danger is part of the game, my dear. 'Tlie amusing part. After all, the Tyranni do not hesitate to sound the Palace. We can't do much without their knowing. Well, turnabout, you know. Aren't you going to introduce me?" "No, I'm not," she said, shortly. "This is none of your business." "Then I'll introduce you. When I heard his name, I stopped listening and came in." He moved past Artemisia, stepped up to Biron, inspected him with an impersonal sntile, and said, "Tliis is Biron Farrill." "I have said so myself," said Biron. More than half his attention was upon the lieutenant, who still held his neuronic whip in firing position. "But you have not added that you are the son of the Rancher of Widemos." "I would have, but for your interruption. In any case, you've got the story now. Obviously, I had to get away from the Tyranni and that without giving them my real name." Biron waited. This was it, he felt. If the next move was not an immediate arrest, there was still a trifling chance. Artemisia said, "I see. This is a matter for the Director then. You are sure there is no plot?" "None, your Grace." "Good. Uncle Gil, will you remain with Mr. Farrill? Lieutenant, come with me." Biron felt weak. He would have liked to sit down, but no suggestion to that effect was made by Gillbret, who still inspected him with an almost clinical interest. "The Rancher's son! Amusing!" Biron brought his attention downward. He was tired of cautious monosyllables and careful phrases. He said, abruptly, "Yes, the Rancher's son. It is a congenital situation. Can I help you in any other way?" iHis thin face merely creased further as his smile widened. He said, "You might satisfy my curiosity. You really came for Sanctuary? Here?" "I'd rather discuss that with the Director, sir." "Oh, get off it, yOung man. You'll find that very little business can be done with the Director. Why do you suppose you had to deal with his daughter just now? 'That's an amusing thought, if you'll consider it." "Do you find everything amusing?" "Why not? As an attitude toward life, it's an amusing one. It's the only adjective that will fit. Observe the universe, young man. If you can't force amusement out of it, you might as well cut your throat, since there's damned little good in it. I haven't introduced myself, by the way. I'm the Director's cousin." Biron said coldly, "Congratulations." Gillbret shrugged. "You're right. It's not impressive. And I'm likely to remain just that indefinitely since there is no assassination to be expected, after all." "Unless you whip one up for yourself." "My dear sir, your sense of humor! You'll have to get used to the fact that nobody takes me seriously. My remark was only an expression of cynicism. You don't suppose the Directorship is worth anything these days, do you? Surely you cannot believe that Hinrik was always like this. He was never a great brain, but with every year he becomes more impossible. I forget, you haven't seen him yet. But you will ! I hear him coming. When he speaks to you, remember that he is the ruler of the largest of the Trans-Nebular kingdoms. It wjl be an amusing thought." Hinrik bore his dignity with the ease of experience. He acknowledged Biron's painstakingly ceremonious bow with the proper degree of condescension. He said, showing a trace of abruptness, "And your business with us, sir." Artemisia was standing at her father's side, and Biron noticed, with some surprise, that she was quite pretty. He said, "Your Excellency, I have come on behalf of my father's good name. You must know his execution was unjust." Hinrik looked away. "I knew your father slightly. He was in Rhodia once or twice." He paused, and his voice quavered a bit. "You are very like him. Very. But he was tried, you know. At least I imagine he was. And according to law. Really, I don't know the details." . "Exactly, your Excellency. But I would like to learn those details. I am sure that my father was no traitor." H inrik broke in hurriedly, "As his son, of course, it is understandable that you should defend your father, but, really, it is difficult to discuss such matters of state now. Highly irregular, in fact. Why don't you see Aratap?" "I do not know him. Excellency." "Aratap. 'The Commissioner? The Tyrannian Commissioner?" "I have seen him and he sent me here. Surely, you understand that I dare not let the Tyranni -- " But Hinrik had grown stiff. His hand had wandered to his lips, as though to keep them from trembling and his words W'ere consequently muffled. "Aratap sent you?" "I found it necessary to tell him -- " "Don't repeat 'what you told him; I know," said Hinrik. "I can do nothing for you. Rancher -- uh -- Mr. Farrill. It is not in my jurisdiction alone. 'The Executive Council -- stop pulling at me, Arta. How can I pay attention to matters when you distract me? -- must be consulted. Gillbret! Will you see that Mr. Farrill is taken care of? I will do what can be done. Yes, I will consult the Executive Council. The forms of law, you know. Very important. Very important." He turned on his heel, mumbling. Artemisia lingered for a moment, and touched Biron's sleeve. "A moment. Was it true, your statement that you could pilot a spaceship?" "Quite true," said Biron. He smiled at her and after a moment's hesitation, she smiled briefly in return. "Gillbret," she said, "I want to speak to you later." She hurried off. Biron looked after her, till Gillbret tweaked at his sleeve. "I presume you are hungry, perhaps thirsty, would like a wash.?" asked Gillbret. "The ordinary amenities of life continue, I take it?" "Thank you, yes," said Biron. The tension had almost entirely washed out of him. For a moment, he was relaxed and felt wonderful. She was pretty. Very pretty. Hinrik, on the other hand, was not relaxed. In his own chambers, his thoughts whirled at a feverish pace. Try as he might, he could not wriggle out of the inevitable conclusion. It was a trap! Aratap had sent him and it was a trap ! He buried his head in his hands to quiet and deaden the pounding, and then he knew what he had to do. Musician of the Mind N ight settles in time on all habitable planets. Not always, perhaps, at respectable intervals, since recorded periods of rotation vary from fifteen to fiftytwo hours. That fact requires the most strenuous psychological adjustment for those traveling from planet to planet. On many planets, such adjustments are made and the wakingsleeping periods are tailored to fit. On many more, the almost universal use of conditioned atmospheres and artificial lighting makes the day-night question secondary, except insofar as it modifies agriculture. On a few planets -- those of the extremes -- arbitrary divisions are made which ignore the trivial facts of light and dark. But always, whatever the social conventions, the coming of night has a deep and abiding psychological significance, dating back to Man's pre-human arboreal existence. Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the Sun. Inside Palace Central, there was no sensory mechanism by which one could tell. the coming of night, yet Biron felt that coming through some indefinite instinct hidden in the unknown corridors of the human brain. He knew that outdoors, the night's blackness was scarcely relieved by the futile sparks of the stars. He knew that, if it were the right time of year, the jagged "hole in space" known as the Horsehead Nebula, so familiar to all the Trans-Nebular Kingdoms, inked out half the stars that might otherwise have been visible. And he was depressed again. He had not seen Artemisia since the little talk with the Director and he found himself resenting that. He had looked forward to dinner; he might have spoken to her. Instead he had eaten alone, with tw'o guards lounging discontentedly just outside the door. Even Gillbret had left him, presumably to eat a less lonely meal in the company one would expect in a palace of the Hinriads. So that when Gillbret returned and said, "Artemisia and I have been discussing you," he obtained a prompt and interested reaction. It merely amused him and he said so. "First, however, I want to show you my laboratory," he added. He gestured and the two guards moved off. "What kind of laboratory." asked Biron with a definite loss of interest. "I build gadgets," was the vague response. ' eye. It was more nearly a library, with an ornate desk in the corner. Biron looked it over slowly. "And you build gadgets here. What kind of gadgets?" "Well, special sounding devices to spy out the Tyranni spy-beams, in a brand-new way. Nothing they can detect. That's how I found out about you, when the first word came through from Aratap. And I have other amusing trinkets. My visi-sonor, for instance. Do you like music?" "Some kinds." "Good. I invented an instrument, only I don't know if you can properly call it music." A shelf of book-films slid out and aside at a touch. "This is not really much of a hiding-place, but nobody takes me seriously, so they don't look. Amusing, don't you think? But I forget, you're the unamused one." It was a clumsy, boxlike affair, with that singular lack of gloss and polish that marks the home-made object. One side of it was studded with little gleaming knobs. He put it down with that side upward. "It isn't pretty," Gillbret said, "but who in Time cares? Put the lights out. No, no! No switches or contacts. Just wish the lights were out. Wish hard! Decide you want them out." And the lights dimmed with the exception of the faint pearly luster of the ceiling that made them two ghostly faces in the dark. Gillbret laughed lightly at Biron's exclamation. "Just one of the tricks of my visi-sonor. It's keyed to the mind just as personal message capsules are. Do you know what I mean?" "No, I don't, if you want a plain answer." "Well," Gillbret said, "look at it this way. 'The electric field of your brain cells sets up an induced one in the instrument. Mathematically, it's fairly simple, but as far as I know, no one has ever jammed all the necessary circuits into a box this size before. Usually, it takes a five-story generating plant to do it. It works the other way, too. I can close circuits here and impress them directly upon your brain, so that you'll see and hear without any intervention of eyes and ears. Watch!" There was nothing to watch at first, and then something fuzzy scratched faintly at the corner of Biron's eyes. It Isecame a faint blueviolet ball hovering in mid-air. It followed him as he turned away, remained unchanged when he closed his eyes. And a clear, musical tone accompanied it, was part of it, was it. and Biron became disturbingly aware that it existed inside his skull. It wasn't really a color, but rather a colored sound, though without noise. It was tactile, yet without feeling. It spun and took on an iridescence while the musical tone rose in pitch till it hovered above him like falling silk. Then it exploded so that gouts of color splattered at him in touches that burnt momentarily and left no pain. Bubbles of rain-drenched green rose again with a quiet, soft moaning. Biron thrust at them in confusion and became aware that he could not see his hands or feel them move. There was nothing, mind to the exclusion of all else. He cried out soundlessly and the fantasy ceased. Gillbret was standing before him once again in a lighted room, laughing. Biron felt an acute dizziness and wiped shakily at a chilled, moist forehead. He sat down abruptly. "What happened?" he demanded, in as. stiff a tone as he could manage. Gillbret said, "I don't know. I stayed out of it. You don't understand? It was something your brain had lacked previous experience with. Your brain Was sensing directlyand it had no method of interpretation for such a phenomenon. So as long as you concentrated on the sensation, your brain could only attempt, futilely, to force the effect into the old, familiar pathways. It attempts separately and simultaneously to interpret i: as sight and sound and touch. Were you conscious of an odor, by the way? Sometimes it seemed to me that I smelled the stuff. With dogs I imagine the sensation would be forced almost entirely into odor. I'd like to try it on animals some day. "On the other hand, if you ignore it, nsake no attack upon it, it fades away. It's what I do when I want to observe its effects on others, and it isn't difficult." He placed a little  veined hand upon the instrument, fingering the knobs aimlessly. "Sometimes I think that if one could really study this thing, one could compose symphonies in a new medium; do things one could never do with simple sound or sight. I lack the capacity for it, I'm afraid. However, just a light touch, not enough to confuse the established mental patterns, is sometimes rather interesting. It heightens perception,, releases the psychological censor, accentuates wishful thinking... or expectant dread." He moved the knobs minutely before Biron could object. The moaning now was sweet cerebral music, which, for an. instant, threatened to become, hollowly menacing before Biron thought of Arta. He thought of her and she was real against the background of the room and Gillbret with the box of dreams in his hand. The music rose to hungry longing more intense than any emotion Biron had ever experienced. She was beautiful and he wanted her... he still stood with his fists tight and his heart beating in race rhythm. Gillbret looked hastily down at the sono-visor, as though embarrassed by the intensity of Biron's visible yearning. He should have been amused, yet he was not, and Biron, relaxing unhappily, was grateful for that. "I suppose it could have great therapeutic value," said Gillbret, "by revealing to us our suppressed wishes and fears -- " Td like to ask you a question," Biron said, abruptly. "By all means." "WTiy don't you put your scientific ability to worthwhile use instead of -- " "Wasting it on useless toys. I don't know. It may not be entirely useless. This is against the law, you know." "What is?" "The visi-sonor. Also my spy devices. If the Tyranni knew, it could easily mean a death sentence." "Surely, you're joking." "Not at all. It is obvious that you were brought up on a cattle ranch. The young people cannot even remember what it was like in the old days, I see." Suddenly, his head was to one side and his eyes were narrowed to slits. He asked, "Are you opposed to Tyranni rule? Speak freely. I tell you frankly that  am. I tell you also that your father was." Biron said, calmly, "Yes, I am." "Why?" "They are strangers, outlanders. What right have they to rule in Nephelos or in Rhodia?" "Have you always thought that?" Biron did not answer. Gillbret sniffed. "In other words, you decided they were strangers and outlanders only after they executed your father, which, after all, was their simple right. Oh, look, don't fire up. Consider it reasonably. Believe me. I'm on your side. But think! Your father was Rancher. What rights did his herdsmen have? If one of them had stolen cattle for his own use or to sell to others, what would have been his punishment? Imprisonment as a thief. If he had plotted the death of your father, for whatever reason, for perhaps a worthy reason in his own eyes, what would have been the result? Execution, undoubtedly. And what right had your father to make laws and visit punishment upon his fellow human beings? He was ier Tyrannian. "Your father, in his own eyes and in mine, was a patriot. But what of that? To the Tyranni, he was a traitor and they removed him. Can you ignore the necessity of self-defense? The Hinriads have been a bloody lot in their time. Read your history, young man. All governments kill as part of the nature of things. "So find a better reason to hate the Tyranni. Don't think it is enough to replace one set of rulers by another, that the simple change brings freedom." ly into his cupped palm. "Ail this objective philosophy is fine. It is very soothing to the man who lives apart. But what if it had been your father who was murdered?" "Well, wasn't it? My father was Director before Hinrik and he was killed. Oh, not outright, but subtly. They broke his spirit, as they are breaking Hinrik's now. They wouldn't have me as Director when my father died; I was just a little too unpredictable. Hinrik was tall, handsome, and, above all, pliant. Yet not pliant enough, apparently. They hound him continuously, grind him into a pitiful puppet, make sure he cannot even itch without permission. You've seen him. He's deteriorating by the day now. His continual state of fear is pathetically psychopathic. But that, all that, is not why I want to destroy Tyrannian rule." "No?" said Biron. "You have invented an entirely new' reason?" "An entirely old one, rather. The Tyranni are destroying the ings to take part in the development of the race. You've been to school. You've learned the economic cycle. A new planet is settled," he was ticking the points off tn his fingers, "and its first care is to feed itself. It becomes an agricultural world; a herding world. It begins to dig in the ground for crude ore to export, and sends its agricultural surplus abroad to buy luxuries and machinery. That is the second step. Then, as population increases and foreign investments grow, an industrial civilization begins to bud, which is the third step. Eventually, the world becomes mechanized, importing food, exporting machinery, investing in tlie development of more primitive worlds and so on. The fourth step. "Always the mechanized worlds are the most thickly populated, the most powerful, militarily, since war is a function of machines, and they are usually surrounded by a fringe of agricultural, dependent worlds. "But what has happened to us? We were at the third step, with a growing industry. And now? That growth has been stopped, frozen, forced to recede. It would interfere with Tyrannian control of our industrial necessities. It is a short-term investment on their part because eventually we'll become unprofitable as we become impoverished. But, meanwhile, they skim the cream. "Besides, if we industrialized ourselves, we might develop weapons of war. So industrialization is stopped; scientific research is forbidden. And eventually the people become so used to that, they lack the realization even that anything is missing. So that you are surprised when I tell you that I could be executed for building a visisonor. Vv will beat the Tyranni. It is fairly certain. They can't rule forever. No one can. They'll grow soft and lazy. They will intermarry and lose much of their separate traditions. They will become corrupt. But it may take cehturies, because history doesn't hurry. And when those centuries have passed, we will still all be agricultural worlds with no industrial or scientific heritage to speak of, while our neighbors on all sides, those not under Tyrannian control, will be strong and urbanized. The Kingdoms will be semi-colonial areas indefinitely. They may never catch up and we may be merely observers in the great drama of human advance." Biron said, "What you say is not completely unfamiliar." "Naturally, if you were educated on Earth. Earth occupies a very peculiar position in social development." "Indeed?" "To be sure. All the Galaxy has been in a continuous state of expansion since the first discovery of interstellar travel. We have always been a growing society, therefore an immature society. It is obvious that that human society reached maturity in only one place and in only one time and that this was on Earth immediately prior to its catastrophe. There we had a society which had temporarily lost all possibility for geographical expansion and was therefore faced with such problems as overpopulation, depletion of resources and so on; problems that have never faced any other portion of the Galaxy. "They were forced to study the social sciences intensively. We have lost much or all of that and it is a pity. Now here's an amusing thing. When Hinrik was a young mau, he was a great Primitivist. He had a library on things Earthly that was unparalleled in the Galaxy. Since he became Director, that's gone by the board along with everything else. But, in a way. I've inherited it. 'Their literature, such scraps as survive, is fascinating. It has a peculiarly introspective flavor to it that we don't have in our extroverted Galactic civilization. It is most amusing." Biron said, "You relieve me. You have been serious for so long that I began to wonder if you had lost your sense of humor." Gillbret shrugged. "I am relaxing and it is wonderful. First time in months, I think. Do you know what it is to play a part? To split your personality deliberately for twenty-four hours a day? Even when with friends? Even when alone, so that you will never forget inadvertently? To be eternally amused? To be of no account? To be so effete and faintly ridiculous that you have convinced all who know you of your own worthlessness? All so that your life might be safe, even though it means it has 'become barely worth living. But' even so, once in a while, I can fight them." H e looked up, and his voice was earnest, almost pleading. "You can pilot a ship. I cannot. Isn't that strange? You talk about my scientific ability, yet I cannot pilot a simple one-man spacegig. But you can, and it follows then that you must leave Rhodia." There was no mistaking the pleading, but Biron frowned coldly. "'Why?" Gillbret continued, speaking rapidly, "As I said, Artemisia and I have discussed you and arranged this. When you leave here, proceed directly to her room, where she is waiting for you. I have drawn a diagram so that you won't have to ask your way through the corridors." He was forcing a small sheet of metallene upon Biron. "If anyone does stop you, say that you have been summoned by the Director, and proceed. 'There will be no trouble, if you show no uncertainty -- " "Hold on!" said Biron. He was not going to do it again. Jonti had chivied him to Rhodia and, consequently, succeeded in bringing him before the Tyranni. The Tyrannian Commissioner had then chivied him to Palace Central before he could feel his own secret way there and, consequently, subjected him, nakedly unprepared, to the whims of an unsteady puppet. But that was all ! His moves, henceforward, might be severely limited, but, by Space and Time, they would be his own. He felt very stubborn about it. He said, "Tm here on what is important business to me, sir. Tm not leaving." "What? Don't be a young idiot." For a moment, the old Gillbret was showing through. "Do you think you will accomplish anything here? Do you think you will get out of the Palace alive if you let the morning sun rise? Why, Hinrik will call in the Tyranni and you will be imprisoned within twentyfour hours. He is only waiting this while because it takes him so long to make up his mind to do anything. He is my cousin. I know him, I tell you." Biron said, "And if so, what is that to you? Why should you be so concerned about me?" He was not going to be chivied. He would never again be another man's obedient marionette. But Gillbret was standing, staring at him. "I want you to take me with you. I'm concerned about myself. I cannot endure life under the Tyranni any longer. It is only that neither Artemisia nor I can handle a ship or we would have left long ago. It's our lives, too." Biron felt a certain weakening of his resolve. "The Director's daughter? What has she to do with this?"L desperate of us. There is a special death for women. What should be ahead of a Director's daughter who is young, personable, and unmarried, but to become young, personable and married ? And who, in these days, should be the delightful groom? Why, an old, lecherous Tyrannian court functionary who has buried three wives and wishes to revive the fires of his youth with a young girl." "Surely the Director would never allow such a thing." "The Director will allow anything. Nobody waits upon his permission." Biron thought of Artemisia as he had last seen her. Her hair had been combed back from her forehead and allowed to fall in simple straightness, with a single inward wave at shoulder level. Tanned skin, black eyes, red lips. Tall, young, smiling. Probably the degirls throughout the Galaxy. It would be ridiculous to let that sway him. Yet he said, "Is there a ship ready?" Gillbret's face wrinkled under the impact of a sudden smile. But before he could say a word, there came a pounding at the door. It was no gentle interruption of the photo-beam, no soft sound of polite knuckles on hard plastic. It was the clang of metal, the overpowering thunder of the weapon of authority. It was repeated, and Gillbret said, "You'd better open the door." Biron did so, and two uniforms were in the room. The foremost saluted Gillbret with abrupt efficiency, then turned to Biron : "Biron Farrill, in the name of the Resident Commissioner of Tyrann and of the Director of Rhodia, I place you under arrest." "On what charge?" "High treason." A look of infinite loss twisted Gillbret's face. He looked away. "Hinrik was quick this once; (quicker than I had ever expected. An amusing thought!" He was the old Gillbret, smiling and indifferent, eyebrows a little raised, as though inspecting a distasteful fact with a faint tinge of regret. "Very amusing," he said. "Please follow me," said the guard, and Biron was aware of the neuronic whip resting easily in the other's hand. A Lady's Skirts dry. He could have beaten either of the guards in fair fight. He knew that and he itched for the chance. He might even have made a satisfactory showing against both together. But they had the whips and he couldn't have lifted an arm without having them paralyze it instantly. Inside his mind, he surrendered. There was no other way. But Gillbret said, "Let him take his cloak, men." Biron, startled, looked quickly toward the little man and retracted his mental surrender. He had not brought a cloak. The guard whose weapon was out clicked his heels as a gesture of respect. He motioned his whip at Biron. "You heard Milord. Get your cloak and make it quick."" Biron stepped back as slowly as he dared. He retreated to the bookcase and squatted, groping behind the chair for his non-existent cloak. And as his fingers clawed at the empty space behind the chair, he waited tensely for Gillbret. "rhe sono-visor was just a queer knobbed object to the guards. It would mean nothing to them that Gillbret fingered the knobs gently. Biron watched the muzzle of the whip intensely and allowed it to fill his mind. Certainly nothing else he saw or heard (thought he saw or heard) must enter. But how much longer? The armed guard said, "Is your cloak behind that chair? Stand up!" He took an impatient step forward, and then stopped. His eyes narrowed in deep amazement and he looked sharply at his left. That was it! Biron hunched and threw himself forward at the guard's knees. The guard went down with a jarring thud, and Biron's large fist closed over the other's hand, grasping for the neuronic whip it held. "The other guard had his weapon out, but for the moment he was useless. With his free hand, he was brushing wildly at the space before his eyes. Gillbret's high-pitched laugh sounded. "Anything bothering you, Farrill?" "Don't see a thing," Biron grunted, "except this whip I've got now." "All right, leave then. They can't do anything to stop you. Their minds are full of sights and sounds that don't exist." Gillbret skipped out of the way of the writhing tangle of bodies. Biron wrenched his arms free and heaved upward. He brought his arm down solidly just below the other's ribs. The guard's face twisted in agony and his body doubled convulsively. Biron rose, whip in hand. "Careful," cried Gillbret. B ut Biron did not turn quickly enough. The second guard was bearing him down again. It was a blind attack. What it was that the guard thought he was grasping, it was impossible to tell. That he knew nothing of Biron at the moment was certain. His breath rasped in Biron's ear and there was a continuous incoherent gurgle bubbling in his .throat. Biron twisted in an attempt to bring his captured weapon into play and was frighteningly aware of the blank and empty eyes that must be staring at some horror invisible to anyone else. Biron braced his legs and shifted weight in an effort to break loose, quite uselessly. Three times he felt the guard's whip flung hard against his hip, and flinched at the contact. And then the guard's gurgle dissolved into words. He yelled, "I'll get you all!" and the very pale, almost-invisible shimmer of the ionized air in the path of the whip's energy beam made its frightening appearance. It swept wide through the air, and the path of the beam intersected Biron's foot. It was as though he had stepped into a bath of boiling lead. Or as if a granite block had toppled upon it. Or as if it had been crunched off by a shark. Actually nothing had happened to it physically. It was only that the nerve endings that governed the sensation of pain had been universally and maximally stimulated. Boiling lead could have done no more. Biron's yell tore his throat raw, and he collapsed. It did not even occur to him that the fight was over. Nothing mattered but the ballooning pain. Yet, though Biron did not know it, the guard's grip had relaxed, and minutes later, when the young man could force his eyes open and blink away the tears, he found the guard backed against the wall, pushing feebly at nothing with both hands and giggling to himself. The first guard was still on his back, arms and legs spread-eagled now. He was conscious, but silent. His eyes were following something in an erratic path, and his body quivered a little. There was a little froth on his lips. Biron forced himself to his feet. He limped badly as he made his way to the wall. He used the butt of the whip and the guard slumped. Then back to the first, who made no defense either, his eyes moving silently to the very moment of unconsciousness. Biron sat down again, nursing his foot. He stripped shoe and stocking from it, and stared in surprise at the unbroken skin. He chafed it and grunted at the burning sensation. He looked up at Gillbret, who had put down his visi-sonor and was now rubbing one lean cheek with the back of his hand. "Thank you," said Biron, "for the help of your instrument." Gillbret shrugged. "'There'll be more here soon. Get to Artemisia's room. Please! Quickly!" Biron realized the justice of that. His foot had subsided to a quiet quiver of pain, but it felt swollen and puffy. He put on a stocking and tucked the shoe under his elbow. He already had one whip, and he relieved the second guard of the other. He stuffed it precariously within his belt. He turned at the door and asked with a sense of crawling revulsion, "What did you make them see?" "I don't know. I can't control it. I just gave them all the power I could and the rest depended on their own psychological makeup. Please don't stand there talking. Do you have the map of Artemisia's room?" B iron nodded, and set off down the corridor. It was empty. He could not walk quickly, since trying to do so made his walk a hobble. He looked at his watch, then remembered that he had somehow never had the time to adjust it to Rhodian local chronometry. It still ran on Standard Interstellar Time as used aboard ship, where one hundred minutes made an hour and a thousand a day. So the figure "#" which gleamed pinkly on the cool metal face of the watch meant nothing now. Still, it had to be well into the night, or into the planetary sleeping-period, at any rate (supposing the two not to coincide), as otherwise the halls would not be so empty and the bas-reliefs on the wall would not phosphoresce unwatched. He touched one idly as he passed, a coronation scene, and found it to be two-dimensional. Yet it gave the perfect illusion of standing out from the wall. It was suihciently unusual for him to stop momentarily in order to examine the effect. Then he remembered and hurried on. T he emptiness of the corridor struck him as another sign of the decadence of Rhodia. He had grown conscious of these symbols of decline now that he had become a rebel. As the center of an independent power, the Palace would always have had its sentries and its quiet wardens of the night. He consulted Gillbret's crude map and turned to the right, moving up a wide, curving ramp. There might have been processions here once, but nothing of that would be left now. He leaned against the proper door and touched the photo-signal. The door moved ajar a bit, then opened wide. "Come in, young man." It was Artemisia. Biron slipped inside and the door closed swiftly and silently. He looked at the girl, saying nothing. He was gloomily conscious of the fact that his shirt was torn at the shoulder so that one sleeve flapped loosely, that his clothes were grimy and his face welted. He remembered the shoe he was still carrying, dropped it and wriggled his foot into it. Then he said, "Mind if I sit down?" She followed him to the chair, and stood before him, a little annoyed. "What happened? What's wrong with your foot?" "I hurt it," he said, shortly. "Are you ready to leave?" She brightened. "You'll take us, then?" But Biron was in no mood to be sweet about it. His foot still twinged and he. cradled it. He said, "Look, get me out to a ship. I'm leaving this damn planet. If you want to come along. I'll take you." She frowned, "You might be more pleasant about it. Were you in a fight?" "Yes, I was. With your father's guards, who wanted to arrest me for treason. So much for my Sanctuary Right." "Oh! I'm sorry." "I'm a lot sorrier. It's no wonder the Tyranni can lord it over fifty worlds with a handful of men. We help them. Men like your father would do anything to keep in power; they would forget the basic duties of a simple gentleman -- Oh, forget it!" "I said I was sorry. Lord Rancher." She used the title with a cold pride. "Please don't set yourself up as judge of my father." "I'm not interested in discussing it. We'll have to leave in a hurry, before more of your father's precious guards come. Well, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. It's all right." Biron's surliness cancelled out any meaning of his apology, but, damn it, he had never been hit by a neuronic whip before and it wasn't fun. And, by Space, they had oived him Sanctuary. Artemisia felt angry. Not at her father, of course, but at the stupid young man. He was so young, practically a child, she decided, scarcely older than herself, if that. The Communicator sounded and she said, sharply "Please wait a minute and we 'll go." ing faintly. "Arta. All right at your end?" . "He's here," she whispered back. "Fine, fine. Don't say anything. Just listen. Don't leave your room. Keep him there. There.'s going to be a search of the Palace, which there's no way of stopping. I'll try to think of something, but, meanwhile, do)i't move!' He waited for no reply. Contact was broken. "So that's that," said Biron. He had heard, also. "Shall I stay and get you into trouble, or shall I go out and give myself up? There's no reason to expect Sanctuary anywhere on Rhodia, I suppose." She faced him in a rage, crying in a choked whisper, "Oh, shut up, you big, ugly fool." They glared at each other, Biron standing on one foot and raging. In a way, he was trying to help her, too. "There is no reason for you to be insulting," he told her, just barely controlling his anger. She said, "Tm sorry," and looked away. "I meant your tone of voice, not what you said. You're entitled to your opinion of me." "You don't have to say the things you do about my father. You don't know what being Director is like. He's working for his people, whatever you may think." "Oh, sure. He has to sell me to the Tyranni for the sake of the people. That makes sense." "Certainly it does. He has to show them he's loyal. Otherwise, they might depose him and take over the direct rule of Rhodia. Would that be better?" "If a nobleman can't find Sanctuary -- " "Oh, you think only of yourself...That's what's wrong with you." "I don't think it's particularly selfish not to want to die. At least for nothing. I've got some fighting to do before I go. Aiy father fought them." He knew he was beginning to sound melodramatic, but she affected him that way. She said, "And what good did it do your father?" "None, I suppose. He was killed." Artemisia felt unhappy. "I keep saying I'm sorry, and this time I really mean it. I'm all upset." Then, in defense, 'Tm in trouble, too." Biron remembered. "I know. All right, let's start all over." He tried to smile. His foot was feeling better anyway. She said, in an attempt at lightness, "You're not really ugly." Biron felt foolish. "Oh, I cjon't know -- " Then he stopped, and Artemisia's hand flew to her mouth. There was the sudden, soft sound of many ordered feet on the semielastic plastic mosaic that floored the corridor outside. Most passed by, but there was a faint, disciplined heel-clicking just outside the door, and the night signal purred. Damn Hinrik for making up his mind so quickly this once, for not waiting till morning. Gillbret had to get away; he might never have another chance. But he had to hide his sono-visor. For the first time, he wished he had a better, hiding-place. 'Then he called the captain of the guard. He couldn't very well neglect a little matter of two unconscious guards and an escaped prisoner. The captain of the guard was grim about it. He had the. two unconscious men cleared out, and then faced Gillbret. "My Lord, I am not quite clear from your message exactly what happened," he said. "Just what you see," said Gillbret. "They came to make their arrest, and the young man did not submit. He is gone. Space knows where." "That is of little moment, my Lord," said the captain. "The Palace is honored tonight with the presence of a personage, so it is well-guarded despite the hour. He cannot get out and we will draw the net through the interior. But how did he escape I My men were armed. He was not." "He fought like a tiger. From that chair, behind which I hid -- " "I am sorry, my Lord, that you did not think to aid my men against an accused traitor." Gillbret looked scornful. "What an amusing thought, captain. When your men, with doubled advantage in numbers and weapons, need help from myself, it is time that you recruited yourself other men." "Very well. We will search the Palace, find him, and see if he can repeat the performance." "I shall accompany you, captain." It was the captain's turn to raise his eyebrows. He said, "'I would not advise it, my Lord. There would be some danger." It was the kind of remark that one did not make to a Hinriad. Gillbret knew that, but he only smiled and let the wrinkles fill his lean face. "I know that," he said, "but occasionally I find even danger amusing." It took five minutes for the company of guards to assemble. Gillbret, alone in his room during that time, called Artemisia. frozen at the purring of the little signal. It sounded a second time and then there was the cautious rap upon the door, and Gillbret's voice was heard. 'Do let me try, captain," it said. Then, more loudly, "Artemisia.?" Biron grinned his relief and took a step forward, but the girl put a sudden hand upon his mouth. She called out, "One moment, Uncle Gil," and pointed desperately toward the wall. Biron could only stare stupidly. The wall was quite blank. Artemisia shook her head impatiently and stepped quickly past him. Her hand on thewall caused a portion of it to slide noiselessly aside, revealing a dressing room. Her lips motioned, "Get inside!" and her hands were fumbling at the ornamental pin at her right shoulder. The unclasping of that pin broke the tiny biostatic force-field that held an invisible seam tightly closed down the length of the dress. She stepped out of it. Biron turned around after walking through what had been the wall, and its closing lasted just long enough for him to see her pulling a white-furred dressing gown around her proud body. The scarlet dress lay crumpled upon the chair. He looked about him and wondered if they would search Artemisia's room. He was helpless if a search took place. There was no way out of the dressing-room but the way he had entered. Along one wall there hung a row of gowns, and the air shimmered very faintly before it. His hand passed easily through the shimmer, with only a faint tingling where it crossed his wrist, but then it was meant to repel only dust so that the space behind it could be kept aseptically clean. He might hide behind the skirts. It was what he was doing, really. He had manhandled two guards, with Gillbret's help, to get here, but now that he was here, he was hiding behind a lady's skirts. A Lady's skirts, in fact. Incongruously, he found himself wishing he had turned a bit sooner before the wall had closed behind him. She had quite a remarkable figure. It was ridiculous of him to have been so childishly nasty a while back. Of course, she was not to blame for the faults of her father. And now he could only wait, staring at the blank wall; waiting for the sound of feet within the room, for the wall to pull back once more, for the muzzles facing him again, this time without a sono-visor to help him. Continued Next Month # Dark Interlude Justifigble homicide is a solidly established point of low, but the justification of murder depends on where the killer lives...and when! eyes were grave. He said, "Okay, boy. You jeel kind of jittery; that's natural. But if your story's straight, don't worry. Don't worry about nothing. Everything'll be all right, boy." "It was three hours ago. Sheriff," Allenby said. "I'm sorry it took me so long to get into town and that I had to wake you up. But Sis was hysterical a while. I had to try and quiet . her down, and then I had trouble starting the jalopy." "Don't worry about waking me up, boy. Being sheriff's a full-time job. And it ain't late, anyway; I just happened to turn in early tonight. Now let me get a few things straight. You say your name's Lou Allenby. That's a good name in these parts, Allenby. You kin of Ranee Allenby, used to run the feed business over in CooperviUe? I tvent to school with Ranee... Notv about the fella who said he come from the future...  # : T he Presidor of the Historical Research Department was skeptical to the last. He argued, "I am still of the opinion that the project is not feasible. There are paradoxes involved which present insurmountable -- " Doctr Matthe, the noted physicist, interrupted politely, "Undoubtedly, sir, you are familiar with the Dichotomy?" The presidor wasn't, so he remained silent to indicate that he wanted an explanation. "Zeno propounded the Dichotomy. He was a Greek philosopher of roughly five hundred years before the ancient prophet whose birth was used by the primitives to mark the beginning of their calendar. The Dichotomy states that it is impossible tocover any given distance. The argument: First, half the distance must be traversed, then half of the remaining distance, then again half of what remains, and so on; It follows that some portion of the distance to be covered always remains, and therefore motion is impossible." "Not analagous," the presidor objected. "In the first place, your Greek assumed that any totality composed of an infinite number of parts must, itself, be infinite, whereas we know that an infinite number of elements make up a finite total. Besides -- " Matthe smiled gently and held up i. hand. "Please, sir, don't misunderstand me. I do not deny that today we understand Zeno's paradox. But believe me, for long centuries the best minds the human race could produce could not explain it." The presidor said tactfully, "I fail to see your point, Doctr Matthe. Please forgive my inadequacy. What possible connection has this Dichotomy of Zeno's with your projected expedition into the past?" "I was merely drawing a parallel, sir. Zeno conceived the paradox proving that it was impossible to cover any distance, nor were the ancients able to explain it. But did that prevent them from covering distances? Obviously not. Today, my assistants and I have devised a method to send our young friend here, Jan Obreen, into the distant past. The paradox is immediately pointed out -- suppose he should kill an ancestor or otherwise change history? I do not claim to be able to explain how this apparent paradox is overcome in time travel; all I know is that time travel is possible. Undoubtedly, better minds than mine will one day resolve the paradox, but until then we shall continue to utilize time travel, paradox or not." Jan Obreen had been sitting, nervously quiet, listening to his distinguished superiors. Now he cleared his throat and said, "I believe the hour has arrived for the experiment." The presidor shrugged his continued disapproval, but dropped the conversation. He let his eyes scan doubtfully the equipment that stood in the corner of the laboratory. Matthe shot a quick glance at the time piece, then hurried last minute instructions to his student. "We've been all over this before, Jan, but to sum it up -- You should appear approximately in the middle of the so-called Twentieth Century; exactly where, we don't know. The language will be AmerEnglish, which you have studied thoroughly; on that count you should have little difficulty. You will appear in the United States of North America, one of the ancient nations -- as they were called -- a political division of whose purpose we are not quite sure. One of the designs of your expedition will be to determine why the human race at that time split itself into scores of states, rather than having but one government. "You will have to adapt yourself to the conditions you find, Jai. Our histories are so vague that we can help you but little in information on what to expect." The presidor put in, "I am extremely pessimistic about this, Obreen, yet you have volunteered and I have no right to interfere. Your most important task is to leave a message that will come down to us; if you are successful, other attempts will be made to still other periods in history. If you fail -- " "He won't fail," Matthe said. The presidor shook his head and grasped Obreen's hand in farewell. Jan Obreen stepped to the equipment and mounted the small platform. He clutched the metal grips on the instrument panel somewhat desperately, hiding to the best of his ability the shrinking inside himself.    HE sheriff said, 'Well, this fella -- you say he told you he came from the future?" Lou Allenby nodded. "About four thousand years ahead. He said it was the year thirty-two hundred and something, hut that it was about four thousand years from now; they'd changed the numbering system meanwhile." "And you didn't figure it was hogwash, hoy? From the way you talked, I got the idea that you kind of believed him." The other wet his lips. "I kind of believed him," he said doggedly. "There was something about him; he was different. I don't mean physically, that he couldn't pass for being born now, but there was... something different. Kind of, well, like he was at peace with himself; gave the mpression that where he came from everybody was. And he was smart, smart as a svhip. And he wasn't crazy, either." "And what was he doing back here, boy?" The sheriff's voice was gently caustic. "He was -- some kind of student. Seems from what he said that almost everybody in his time was a student. They'd solved all the problems of production and distribution, nobody had to tvorry about security; in fact, they didn't seem to tvorry about any of the things tve do now." There was a trace of wistfulness in Lou Allenby's voice. He took a deep breath and went on. "He'd come back to do research in our time. They didn't know much about it, it seems. Something had happened in beitveen -- there was a bad period of several hundred years -- and most hooks and records had been lost. They had a few, but not many. So they didn't know much about us and they wanted to fill in what they didn't know." "You believed all that, boy? Did he have any proof?"    was where the prime risk lay. They had had, for all practical purposes, no knowledge of the exact contours of the land, forty centuries back, nor knowledge of the presence of trees or buildings. If he appeared at the wrong spot, it might well mean instant death. Jan Obreen was fortunate; he didn't hit anything. It was, in fact, the other way around. He came out ten feet in the air over aplowed field. The fall was nasty enough, but the soft earth protected him; one ankle seemed sprained, but not too badly. He came painfully to his feet and looked around. The presence of the field alone was sufficient to tell him that the Matthe process was at least partially successful. He was far before his own age. Agriculture was still a necessary component of human economy, indicating a definitely earlier civilization than his own. Approximately half a mile away was a densely wooded area; not a park, nor even a planned forest to housethe controlled wild life of his time. A haphazardly growing wooded area -- almost unbelievable. But, then, he must grow used to the unbelievable; of all the historic periods, this was the least known. Much would be strange. To his right, a few hundred yards away, was a wooden building. It was, undoubtedly, a human dwelling despite its primitive appearance. There was no use putting it off; contact with his fellow man would have to be made. He limped awkwardly toward his meeting with the Twentieth Century. The girl had evidently not observed his precipitate arrival, but by the time he arrived in the yard of the farm house, she had come to the door to greet him. Her dress was of another age, for in his era the clothing of the feminine portion of the race was not designed to lure the male. Hers, however, was bright and tasteful with color, and it emphasized the youthful contours of her body. Nor was it her dress alone that startled him. There was a touch of color on her lips that he suddenly realized couldn't have been achieved by nature. He had read that primitive women used colors, paints and pigments of various sorts, upon their faces -- somehow or other, now that he witnessed it, he was not repelled. She smiled, the red of her mouth stressing the even whiteness of her teeth. She said, "It would've been easier to come down the road 'stead of across the field." Her eyes took him in, and, had he been more experienced, he could have read interested approval in them. He said, studiedly, "I am afraid that I am not familiar with your agricultural methods. I trust I have not irrevocably damaged the products of your horticultural efforts." Susan Allenby blinked at him. "My," she said softly, a distant hint of laughter in her voice, "somebody sounds like maybe they swallowed a dictionary." Her eyes widened suddenly, as she noticed him favoring his left foot. "Why, you've hurt yourself. Now you come right on into the house and let me see if I can't do something about that. Why -- " He followed her quietly, only half hearing her words. Something -- something phenomenal -- was growing within Jan Obreen, affecting oddly and yet pleasantly his metabolism. He knew now what Matthe and the presidor meant by paradox.   HE sheriff said, "Well, you were away when he got to yout ptace -- however he got there?" Lou Allenby nodded. "Yes, that was ten days ago. I was in Miami taking a couple of weeks' vacation. Sis and I each get away for a week or two every year, but we go at different times, partly because ive figure it's a good idea to get away from one another once in a while anyway." "Sure, good idea, boy. But your Sis, she believed this story of where he came from?" "Yes. And, Sheriff, she had proof. I ivish I'd seen it too. The field he landed in was fresh plowed. After she'd fixed his ankle she was curious enough, after tvhat he'd told her, to follow his footsteps through the dirt back to where they'd started. And they ended, or, rather, started, right smack in the middle of a field, with a deep mark like he'd fallen there." "Maybe he came from an airplane, in a parachute, boy. Did you think of that?" "I thought of that, and so did Sis. She says that if he did he must've sivallowed the parachute. She could follow his steps every bit of the way -- it was only a few hundred yards -- and there wasn't any place he could've hidden or buried a parachute." The sheriff said, "They got married right away, you say #" "Two days later. I had the car with me, so Sis hitched the team and drove them into town -- he didn't know how to drive horses -- and they got married." "See the license, boy? You sure they was really -- " Lou Allenby looked at him, his lips beginning to go white, and the sheriff said hastily, "All right, boy, I didn't mean it that way. Take it easy, boy."   it S usan had sent her brother a telegram telling him all about it, but he'd changed hotels and somehow the telegram hadn't been forwarded. The first he knew of the marriage was when he drove up to the farm almost a week later. He was surprised, naturally, but John O'Brien -- Susan had altered the name somewhat -- seemed likable enough. Handsome, too, if a bit strange, and he and Susan seemed head over heels in love. Of course, he didn't have any money, they didn't use it in his day, he had told them, but he was a good worker, not at all soft. There was no reason to suppose that he wouldn't make out all right. 'The three of them planned, tentatively, for Susan and John to stay at the farm until John had learned the ropes somewhat. Then he expected to be able to find some manner in which to make money -- he was quite optimistic about his ability in that line -- and spending his time traveling, taking Susan with him. Obviously, he'd be able to learn about the present that way. The important thing, the allembracing thing, was to plan some message to get to Doctr Matthe and the presidor. If this type of research was to continue, all depended upon him. He explained to Susan and Lou that it was a one-way trip. That the equipment worked only in one direction, that there was travel to the past, but not to the future. He was a voluntary exile, fated to spend the rest of his life in this era. The idea was that when he'd been in this century long enough to describe it well, he'd write up his report and put it in a box he'd have especially made to last forty centuries and bury it where it could be dug up -- in a spot that had been determined in the future. He had the exact place geographically. He was quite excited whein they told him about the time capsules that had been buried elsewhere. He knew that they had never been dug up and planned to make it part of his report so the men of the future could find them. They spent their evenings in long conversations, Jan telling of his age and wtat he knew of all the long centuries in between. Of the long fight upward and man's conquests in the fields of science, medicine and in human relations. And they telling him of theirs, describing the institutions, the ways of life which he found so unique. Lou hadn't been particularly happy about the precipitate marriage at first, but he found himself warming to Jan. Until...     HE sheriff said, "And he didn't tell jou what he was till this evening?" "That's right." "Your sister heard hint say it? She'll back you up?" "I... I guess she will. She's upset now, like I said, kind of hysterical. Screams that she's going to leave me and the farm. But she heard him say it, Sheriff. He must of had a strong hold on her, or she wouldn't be acting the way she is." "Not that I doujyt your tvord, boy, about a thing like that, but it'd be better if she heard it too. Hom'd it come up?" "I got to asking him some questions about things in his time and after a while I asked him how they got along on race problems and he acted puzzled and then said he remembered something about races from history he'd studied, but that there weren't any races then. "He said that by his time -- starting after the war of something-orother, I forget its name -- all the races had blended into one. That the u'hites and the yellows had mostly killed one another off and that Africa had dominated the world for a tvhile, and then all the races had begun to blend into one by colonization and intermarriage and that by his time the process was complete. I just stared at him and asked him, 'You mean you got nigger blood in you?' and he said, just like it didn't mean anything, 'At least one-fourth.' " "W ell, boy, you did just what you had to do," the sheriff told him earnestly, "no doubt about it." "I just saw red. He'd married Sis; he was sleeping with her. I was so crazy-mad I dosj't even remember getting my gun." "IF elf, don't worry about it, boy. You did right." "But I feel like hell about it. He didsj't knotv." "Now that's a matter of opinion, boy. Maybe you swallowed a little too much of this hogwash. Coming from the future -- huh! These niggers'll think up the damnedest tricks to pass themself off as white. What kind of proof for his story is that mark on the ground? Hogwash, boy. Ain't nobody coming from the future or going there neither. We can just quiet this up so it won't never be heard of nowhere. It'll be like it never happened." Of course you'd be host to guests from outer space; it's common courtesy. 'But being a host can have a peculiarly nasty meaning! T hey were a decontamination squad -- three energyentities (each triple) -- on a routine check of a known matterentity culture. What they traveled in was undoubtedly a'ship, since it moved through space, except that it was not a physical structure of metal. It slowed down like a light wave that had suddenly grown tired. "There it is," said RilRylRul. The two other triads merged their light-perceptions and observed it. "Out at the edge," said KadKedKud, in satisfaction. "It should not be too difficult to handle out there. When infection spreads near the heart of a Galaxy, it can be troublesome." MakMykMok cautioned, "Don't underestimate the job until it's surveyed." "It's a very small sun," said Ril. "Which one of the planets is it. 'The fourth?" "No, the greenishblue one, the third." "Very well." In due time the ship -- a bubble of binding energy and collapsed, rarefied gas molecules -- entered the atmosphere. It reshaped itself gradually into a round-nosed, tapered transparency and dropped sharply, heading due west over the planet's equator. "Busy little things, aren't they."' As the world turned under them, they watched. They saw the ships, the cities. In the microscopic, intangible fluxes of force which were nerve and sinew and psyche to their triple structure, they stored their observations. They recorded the temperature of steel converters and ships' power plants, calculated the strength of materials of buildings and bridges by their flexure in a simply computed wind velocity, judged and compared the flowshapes of air and ground vehicles. "We could return right now," said Kad. "Any race which has progressed this far in such a brief time must be a healthy one. Otherwise how could -- " "Look!" Ril flashed. T hey watched, appalled. "They "It must be a ritual," said Kad, "or perhaps a hunt. But we'd better investigate closer." 'They dropped down, swiftly overtook a low-flying open-cockpit biplane with a black cross on the fuselage, and settled on the cowling behind the pilot's head. Mak interpenetrated the ship's wall and, treading and passing the air moleailes which fled past, reached the pilot's leather helmet at the nape of the neck. Contact was made and' broken almost in the same moment of time, and Mak hurtled back in horror to the skin of their ship. "Get clear!" he ordered. In three microseconds the invisible ship was in the upper atmosphere, with Mak still clinging to the outer skin. "What was it?" "Pa'ak, the most vicious, most contagious energy-virus known. That creature is crawling with them! Never have' I seen such an infestation! Examine me. Irradiate me. Be careful, now -- be sure." It was strong medicine, but effective. Mak weakly permeated through the ship's wall and came inside. "Disgusting. Utterly demoralizing. How can the creature live in that condition?" "Infinitely worse. On Murktur I never saw a concentration higher than #, and that was enough to reduce the natives to permanent bickering. These bipeds can apparently stand a concentration of over # on the same scale. Incredible." "Perhaps that individual is quarantined." "I doubt it. It was flying its own machine; it can apparently land at will anywhere. But we will check further. Mak, you were quite right," said Ril. "Don't underestimate the job, indeed. Why, with an infestation like that, and a drive like that... what couldn't they accomplish if they were clean?" They swooped close to the land, barely touched the hair of a child on a hilltop, and soared again, shaken and frightened. "From what we've seen, that one was no more than # of maximum size. How do you read the Pa'ak concentration?" "Over #. This place is a pesT hole. These creatures must be stopped -- and soon. You know how soon such a technology reaches for the stars." "Shall we send for reinforcements?" "Before investigating? Certainly not. And after all, there are three of us." "We shall have to protect ourselves," Ril pointed out. "You mean -- dissociate? Divide our triple selves?" "You know that's the only way we can remain undetected by the Pa'ak. Of course, once we know exactly how they have developed here, and have analyzed the psychic components of the natives, we can re-synthesize." "I hate the thought of dividing myself. So weak, so impotent... "So safe. Don't forget that. Once we've encased ourselves in the minds of these creatures and analyzed them, we'll have to join ourselves again to fight the Pa'ak." "Yes, indeed. And we'll be together again soon. Take care," added Mak, the cautious one. "The Pa'ak are mindless, but exceedingly dangerous." "Hungry," Kad supplemented. "Especially for our kind. Shall we begin?" The ship disappeared, bursting like a bubble. Tbe three dropped, sharing a wordless thought that was like a handclasp. Then each of them separated into three, and the nine particles drifted down through the atmosphere.    The news is apples for the unemployed... disarmament ,... the Model A Ford.    ach under a tree, reading. She yawned widely, choked a little, swallowed, and went back to her book. Two friends shook hands. Later, one absentmindedly palmed the back of his neck. Something was rubbed into his skin. The other young man scratched his wrist as he walked away. Something was in the drinking water, though neither the nurse, as she filled the glass, nor the little girl, as she drank, knew of it. Some dust settled on a toothbrush. A small boy sank his teeth into his bread-and-jam. The rich, red preserve drooled to the table. The boy put his finger in it, thrust the finger into his mouth. Another youngster ran through the dewy morning grass in his bare feet. Somewhere, two dust motes were waiting their turn. And a number of years went by.  #je The news is Korea and Tibet... protein synthesis... Aureomycin... leaf and grain hormone poisons... the McCarran Act.    There was a character at the party named Irving, and Jonathan Prince, Consulting Psychologist, didn't like him. This Irving played guitar and sang folksongs in a resonant baritone, which was fine; but after that he would put a lampshade on his head and be the "March of the Wooden Soldiers" or some such, and that was as funny, after the fourth viewing, as a rubber crutch. So Jonathan let his eyes wander. When his gaze came to the dark girl sitting by the door, his breath hissed in suddenly. Priscilla was sitting next to him. She said "Ouch," and he realized he had squeezed her hand painfully. "What's the matter, Jon?" "I just -- nothing, Pris." He knew it was tactless, because he knew the sharpness of Priscilla's tilted eyes, but he couldn't help it; he stared back at the dark girl. The girl's hair was blue-black and gleamed like metal, yet he knew how soft it would be. Her eyes were brown, wide apart, deep. He knew how they would crinkle on the outside ends when she smiled. He knew, as a matter of fact, that she had a small brown mole on the inside of her left thigh. Irving was still singing. Of course it had to be "Black Is the Color of my True Love's Hair." Priscilla pressed Jon's hand, gently. He leaned toward her. She whispered, "Who's the charmer? Someone you know?" He hesitated. Then he nodded and said, without smiling, "My exwife." Priscilla let his hand go. finished his song and, in the applause, rose. " 'Scuse..." he muttered. Priscilla didn't seem to be listening. He crossed the room and stood in front of the dark girl until she looked up at him. He saw the little crinkle by her eyes before he saw the smile. "Edie." "Jon! How are you?" Then she said, in unison with him, "Can't complain." And she laughed at him. He flushed, but it was not anger. He sat on the ottoman by her feet. "How've you been, Edie? You haven't changed." "I haven't," she nodded seriously. There was an echo in his mind. "We'll always be friends, fon. Nothing can change that." Was that what she meant? She said, "Still trying to find out how the human mind works?" "Yes, on the occasions when I find one that does. Are you in town for long?" 'Tve come back. They closed the Great Falls office. Jon... "Yes.?" "Jon, who's the redhead?" "Priscilla. Priscilla Berg. My assistant." "She's lovely, Jon. Really lovely. Is she... are you..." At last he could smile. "You can ask, Edie," he said gently. "Here, I'll ask .you first. Are you married ?" "No." "I didn't think so. I don't know why, but I didn't think so. Neither I ti . He looked down at his hands because he knew she was smiling, and somehow he didn't want to look into her eyes and smile too. 'Til get us a drink." She waited until he was on his feet and a pace away before she said what she used to say: "Come back quickly." Someone jostled him at the bar. "What's up. Doc?" said Irving, and nickered. "Hey, that assistant of yours, she drinks scotch, doesn't she?" "Rye on the rocks," he said absently, and then realized that the scotch suggestion was Irving's shot in the dark, and that he'd given the idiot an opening gambit with Priscilla. He was mildly annoyed as he ordered two Irish-and-waters and went back to Edie.    Communication was dim and labored. "We're trapped... "Don't give up. Ked is very close to me now." "Yes, you and Ked can achieve proximity. But these creatures won't combine emotionally in threes!" "They can -- they must!" "Do not force them. Remain encysted and work carefully. Did you know the Pa'ak got Mak?" "No! How horrible! What about Myk and Mok, then?" "They will be guardians, watchers, communicators. What else can they do?" "Nothing... nothing. How terrible to be one-third dead! What happened to Mak?" "The creature Mak occupied killed itself, walked in front of a speeding vehicle as Mak tried to synthesize. Mak could not get clear in time from the dead thing." "We must hurry or these beasts will leap oflF into space before we join our strength again."    T he club wouldn't be open for hours yet, but Derek knew which of the long row of herculite doors would be unlocked. He shouldered it open and sidled in, being careful not to let it swing shut on his bass viol. Someone was playing the piano out back. Piano... hadn't Janie been knocking herself out looking for a piano man before he went away? He mumbled, "Hope she -- " and then Jane was on, over, and all around him. "Derek, you tall, short underdone yuk, you!" she crooned. She hugged him, and put a scarlet print of her full mouth on his cheek. "Why didn't you wire? God, man, I missed you. Here, put down that Steinway and smooch me once. Am I glad to see your ugly head... Look at the man," she demanded of. the empty club as he leaned the big bass against the wall and stroked its rounded flank with the tips of his fingers. "Hey, this is me over here." "How are you, Janie?" He delivered a hug. "What's been giving around here?" "Me," she said. "Giving, but out. Ma-an... a hassel. For ten days I had a sore throat clear from neck to tonsil, carrying that piano man. Damn it, I got a way I sing, and a piano's got to walk around me when I do it. Chopsticks this square makes -- eggs -- ack -- ly -- on the -- beat," she stressed flatly. "And then a bass player I had, a doghouse complete with dog, and tonedeaf to boot. I booted him. I worked the last three nights without a bass, and am I glad you're back!" "Me too." He touched her hair. "We'll get you a piano player and everything'll riff like Miff." "A piano I got," she said, and her voice was awed. "Little cat I heard in a joint after hours. Gives his left hand a push and forgets about it. Right hand is crazy. Real sad little character, Derek. Gets the by-himself blues and plays boogie about it. Worse he feels, the better he plays. Sing with him? Man! All his chords are vocal cords for little Janie. He's back there now. Listen at him!" D erek listened. The piano back there was talking to itself about something rich and beautiful and lost. "That just one man?" he asked after a moment. "Come on back and meet him," she said. "Oh, Derek, he's a (Sweetheart." "Sweetheart?" She thumped his chest and chuckled. "Wait till you see him. You don't need to lie awake nights over him. Come on." He was a man with a hawk face and peaceful eyes. He huddled on the bench watching what his hands did on the keyboard as if he hadn't seen them before but didn't much care. His hands were extraordinarily eloquent. He didn't look up. Derek said, "I'm going to go get my fiddle." He did, and picked up the beat so quietly that the pianist didn't hear him for three bars. Then he looked up and smiled shyly at Derek and went on playing. It was very, very good. They volleyed an intro back and forth for a while ajid then, before Derek fully realized what they were playing, Janie was singing "Thunder and Roses": "When you gave me your heart You gave me the world... And, after, there was a chord with a tremendous emphasis on an added sixth, and then it was augmented -- a hungry, hungry leading tone, which led, with a shocked sort of satisfaction, into silence. Derek put by his bass, carefully, so it wouldn't make any sound. Jane said, in a mouselike voice, "I can breathe now." 'The pianist got up. He was not tall. He said, "You're Derek Jax. Thanks for letting me play along with you. I always wanted to." '"Thanks, he says." Derek gestured. "You play a whole mess of piano. What's your name?" "Henry. Henry Faulkner." "I never heard of you." "He was head of the Orchestration Department at the Institute for twelve years," said Jane. "Hey? 'That's all right," said Derek. "Symphony stuff. What'd you leave for?" "Squares," said Henry. To Derek, it was a complete explanation. "Td like to work here." Jane closed her eyes and clasped her hands. "Yummy." Derek said, from a granite face, "No." out from behind the piano. He walked -- he all but trotted up to Derek. "No? Oh, please! A -- joke?" "No joke. Just no." Jane breathed, "Derek, what are you on? Goofballs?" Derek threw up his hands. "No. It's a good word. Ain't 'no' better than a whole lot of yak ? No, that's all." "Derek -- " "Mr. Jax," said Derek. "Mr. Jax, please think it over," Henry said. "I've been wanting to work with you ever since you recorded 'Slide Down.' You know how long ago that was. I don't just want to play piano someplace. I want to play here -- with you. I don't care about the pay. Just let me back up that bass." "He never talked like that to me," said Jane with a small smile. "You've made yourself a conquest, puddinhead. Now -- " "I don't want to hear that kind of talk," exploded Derek. "I don't want to hear any kind of talk. I said no!" Jane came to him. She squeezed Henry's forearm and gave him a long look. "Walk around some," she said kindly. "Come back and see me later." Derek stood looking at the piano. Jane watched Henry go. He walked slowly, holding himself in, his head forward. At the other side of the dance floor he turned and opened his mouth to speak, but Jane waved him on. He went out. Jane whirled on Derek. "Now what the God -- " Derek interrupted her, rasping. "If you got any more to say about this, you can look for a new bass man too." fifty-three years old and knew what she was about. She strode briskly down Eleventh Street, a swift, narrow figure with pointed shoulders and sharp wattles at the turn of her thin jaw. It was late and the tea room would be closed before long. Verna was there before her, her bright white hair and bright blue eyes standing out like beacons in the softly lit room. "Good evening, Pallas." Verna's voice was soft and pillowy, like her pudgy face and figure. "Evening," said Pallas. Without preliminaries she demanded, "How are yours.'" Verna sighed. "Not so well. little fool." "They're all fools," said Pallas. heard of such a place." "They want to do everything by twos," said Verna. "They're all afraid they'll lose something if they don't pair off, pair off. They've been schooled and pushed and ordered and taught that that's the way it must be, so -- " she sighed again -- "that's the way it is." "We haven't much more time. I wish we hadn't lost -- " There followed a dim attempt to project "Mak," a mental designation for which there was no audible equivalent. "Oh, dear, stop saying that! You're always saying that. Our first third is gone, all eaten up, and that's the way it is." TT#E'RE two," said Pallas causVV tically, "and we don't want to be. Are you all right "Thoroughly encysted, thank you. Pa'ak can't get to me. I'm so well encased I can barely get through to control this -- " she lifted her arms and dropped them heavily on the table -- "this bag of bones. And I can't telepath. I wish I could communicate with you and the others directly, instead of through this primitive creature and its endless idioms. I've even got to use that clumsy terrestrial name of yours -- there's no vocalization for our real ones." Again there was an effort to identify the speaker as "Myk" and the other as "Mok," which failed. "I wish I could get through to the others. Goodness! A weak signal once in a while -- a mere 'come close' or 'go away' -- and in between, nothing, for weeks on end." "Oh, but they've got to stay closed up so tight! You know how the Pa'ak infection works -- increasing the neurotic potential so that the virus can feed on the released nervous energy. There are two groups of three people who must come together by their own free emotional merging, or Ril's three parts and Kad's three parts can never become one again. To allow them that emotional freedom is to allow the Pa'ak virus which infests them to remain active, since they tend to be attracted to one another for neurotic reasons. At least we don't have that much trouble. There was so little neurosis or anything else left in these minds when we took them over that they were poor feeding grounds for Pa'ak. And that's the -- " "Verna, can you spare me that everlasting -- " " -- the way it is," finished Verna inexoraibly. "I'm sorry, Pallas, truly. 'There's a horrid little pushbutton in this mind that plays that phrase off every once in a while no matter what I do. I'm rebuilding the mind as fast as I can; I'll get to it soon. I hope." "Verna..." said Pallas with an air of revelation. '"We can speed this thing up. I'm sure we can. Look, "rhese fools won't group in threes. And Ril and Kad can't complete themselves unless their three hosts are emotionally ready for it. Now then." She leaned forward over her teacup. "There's no important difference between two groups of three and three groups of two." "You really think... why, Pallas, that's a marvelous idea. You're so clever, dear! Now, the first thing we'll have to -- " They both froze in an attitude of listening. "My word," said Verna. "That's a bad one." "I'll go," said Pallas. "That's one of the creatures I'm guarding. Ril is in it." "Shall I come too!" "You stay here. I'll take a taxi and keep in touch with you. When I'm far enough away I'll triangulate. Keep watch for that signal again. Goodness! What an urgent one!" She trotted out. Verna looked across at Pallas' untouched teacup. "She left me with the check." A sigh. "Well, that's the way it is."    The news is the artificial satellite program and flying discs... threestage rockets and guilt by association.  m saying, "The world's never been in such a state. Industrialization is something you can graph, and you find a geometric increase. You can graph the incidence of psychoneufoses the same way and find almost the same curve, but it's a much larger one. I tell you, Edie, it's as if something were cultivating our little traumas and anxieties like plowed fields to increase their yield, and then feeding off them." "But so much is being done, Jon!" his ex-wife protested. Jon waved his empty glass. "There are # psychotherapists who need their help? There's a crying need for some kind of simple, standardized therapy, and people refuse to behave either simply or according to standards. Somewhere, somehow, there's a new direction in therapy. So-called orthodox procedures as they now exist don't show enough promise. They take too long. If by some miracle of state support and streamlined education you could create therapists for everyone whp needed them, you'd have what amounted to a nation or a world of full-time therapists. Someone's got to bake bread and drive buses, you know." "What about these new therapies I've been reading about?" Edie wanted to know. "Oh, they're a healthy sign to a certain extent; they indicate we know how sick we are. The most encouraging thing about them is their diversity. There are tools and schools and phoneys and fads. There's psychoanalysis, where the patient talks about his troubles to the therapist, and narcosynthesis, where the patient's troubles talk to the therapist, and hypnotherapy, where the therapist talks to the patient's troubles. "There's insulin to jolt a man out of his traumas and electric shock to subconsciously frighten him out of them, and CO., to choke the traumas to death. And there's the pre-frontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy, and the topectomy to cut the cables between a patient's expression of his aberrations and its power supply, with the bland idea that the generator will go away if you can't see it any more. And there's Reichianism w'hich, roughly speaking, identifies Aunt Susan, who slapped you, with an aching kneecap which, when cured, cures you of Aunt Susan too. "And there's -- but why go on ? The point is that the mushrooming schools of therapy show that W'e know we're sick; that we're anxious -- but not yet anxious enough, en masse -- to do something about it, problem on all salients and sectors." "What kind of work have you been doing recently." Edie asked. "Electro-encephalographics, mostly. The size and shape of brainwave graphs will show a great deal once we get enough of them. And -- did you know there's a measurable change in volume of the fingertips that follows brain-wave incidence very closely in disturbed cases Fascinating stuff. But sometimes I feel it's the merest dull nudging at the real problems involved. Sometimes I feel like a hard-working contour cartographer trying to record the height and grade of ocean waves. Every time you duplicate an observation to check it, there's a valley where there was a mountain a second ago. "And sometimes I feel that if we could just turn and look in the right direction, we'd see what's doing it to us, plain as day. Here we sit with our psychological bottle of arnica and our therapeutic cold compresses, trying to cure up an attack of lumps on the headbone. And if we could only turn and look in the right place, there would be an invisible maniac with a stick, beating us over the head, whom we'd never detected before." "You sound depressed." "Oh, Tm not, really," he said. He stood up and stretched. "But I almost wish I'd get away from that recurrent thought of looking in a new direction; of correlating neurosis with a virus disorder. Find the virus and cure the disease. It's panacea; wishful thinking. I'm probably getting lazy." "Not you, Jon." His ex-wife smiled at him. "Perhaps you have the answer, subconsciously, but what you've learned won't let it come out." V say that?" "It's a thing you used to say all the time." He laughed and helped her up. "Edie,. do you have to get up early tomorrow?" "I'm unemployed. Didn't I tell you?" "I didn't ask," he said ruefully. "My God, I talk a lot. Would you like to see my new lab?" "I'd love to! Oh, I'd love it. Will it be -- all right?" "All right? Of course it -- oh. I see what you mean. Priscilla. Where is she, anyway?" "She went out. I thought you noticed. With that man who plays the guitar. Irving." She nodded toward the discarded instrument. "I hadn't noticed," he said. Over his features slipped the poker expression of the consulting psychologist. "Who did you come with?" "The same one. Irving. Jon, I hope Priscilla can take care of herself." "Let's go," he said. :j  Faintly, and with exasperation, Ril's thought came stumblingly through to Ryl and Rul: "How can a thinking being be so stupid? Have you ever heard a more accurate description of the Pa'ak virus than that? 'Cultivating our little traumas and anxieties like plowed fields to increase their yield, and then feeding off them.' And 'a new direction.' Why haven't these people at least extrapolated the idea of energy life? They know that matter and energy are the same. An energy virus is such a logical thing for them to think of!" And RuTs response: "They can no more isolate their experiments from their neuroses than they can isolate their measuring instruments from gravity. Have patience. When we are able to unite again, we will have the strength to inform them." Ril sent: "Patience? How much more time do you think we have before they start to spread the virus through this whole sector of the cosmos? They are improving rockets, aren't they? We should have sent for reinforcements. But then -- how could we know we'd be trapped like this in separate entities which refuse to merge?" "We couldn't," Ril answered. "We still have so much to learn about these creatures. Sending for reinforcements would solve nothing." "And we have so little time," Rul mourned. "Once they leave Earth, the Pa'ak pestilence will no longer be isolated." Ril responded: "Unless they are cured of the disease before they' leave." "Or prevented from leaving," Ryl pointed out. "An atomic war would lower the level of ailture. If there is no choice, we could force them to fight -- we have the power -- and thus reduce their technology to the point where space, flight would be impossible." It was a frightening idea. Tliey broke contact in trembling silence. T hey had had a drink, and then coffee, andnow Irving was leading her homeward. She hadn't wanted to go through the park, but it was late and he assured her that it was much shorter this way. "There are plenty of places through here where you can cut corners." It was easier not to argue. Irving commanded a flood of language at low pitch and high intensity that she could do without just now. She was tired and bored and extremely angry. It was bad enough that Jon had deserted her for that bit of flotsam from his past. It was worse that she should have walked right past him with her hat on without his even looking up. What was worst of all was that she had let herself be so angry. She had no claims on Jonathan Prince. They were rnore than friends, certainly, but not any more than that. "Who's the girl you came to the party with, Irving." she asked. "Oh, her. Someone trying to get a job at the plant. She's a real bright girl. Electronics engineer -- can you imagine?" "And -- " H e glanced down at her. "And what? I found out she was a cold fish, that's all." Oh, she thought. So you ditched her because you thought she was a cold fish, and scooped me up. And what does that make me? Aloud she said, "These paths wind around the park so. Are you sure it's going to take us out on the downtown side?" "I know everything about these woods." He peered, '"rhis way." They turned off the blacktop walk and took a graveled path away ly lit by a street-lamp at the crossing of the walks, and the light followed the path in a straight band through the undergrowth. It seemed so safe... and then Irving turned off to still another path. She turned with him, unthinking, and blinked her eyes against a sudden, oppressive darkness. It was a small cul de sac, completely surrounded by heavy undergrowth. As her eyes became accustomed to the dim light that filtered through the trees, she saw benches and two picnic tables. A wonderful, secluded, restful little spot, she thought -- for a picnic. "How do you like this?" whispered Irving hoarsely. He sounded as if he had been nmning. "I don't," she said immediately. "It's late, Irving. This isn't getting either of us anywhere." "Oh, I don't know," he said. He put his arms around her. She leaned away from him with her head averted, swung her handbag back and up at his face. He caught her wrist deftly and turned it behind her. "Don't," she gasped. "Don't... "You've made your little protest like a real lady, honey, so it's on the record. Now save us some time and trouble. Let's get to it." She kicked him. He gasped but stood solidly. 'There was a sharp click behind her. "Hear that?" he said. "That's my switch-blade. Push a button and zip! -- seven inches of nice sharp steel. Now don't you move or make a sound, sweetheart, and this'll be fun for both of us." Locking her against him with his left arm, he reached slowly up under the hem of her short jacket. She felt the knife against her back. It slipped coldly between her skin and the back of her low-cut dress. "Don't you move," he said again. 'The knife turned, sawed a little, and the back strap of her brassiere parted. The knife was removed; she heard it click again. He dropped it into his jacket pocket. "Now," he breathed, "doesn't that feel better, lamb-pie?" S HE filled her lungs to scream, and instantly his hard hand was clamped over her mouth. It was a big hand, and the palm was artfully placed so that she couldn't get her mouth open wide enough to use her teeth on it. "Let's not wrestle," he said, his voice really gentle, pleading. "It just doesn't make sense. I'd as soon kill you as not -- you know that." She stood trembling violently, her eyes rolled up almost out of sight. Her mouth sagged open when he kissed it. Then he screamed. His arms whipped away from her and she fell. She lay looking dully up at him. He stood straight in the dim light, stretched, his face up and twisted with pain. He had both hands, apparently, on one of his back pockets. He whirled around and her eyes followed him. There was someone else standing there... someone in black. Someone who looked like a high-school teacher Priscilla had once had. Gray hair, thin, wattled face. Moving without haste but with great purpose, the spinsterish apparition stooped, raised her skirts daintily and kicked Irving accurately in the groin. He emitted a croaking sound and dropped to a crouch, and began a small series of agonized grunts. The old lady stepped forward as if she were dancing a minuet, put out one sensible shoe and shoved. Irving went down on his knees and elbows, his head hanging. "Get out," said the old lady crisply. "Now." She clapped her hands once. The sound stiffened Irving. With a long, breathy groan he staggered to his feet, turned stupidly to get his bearings and hobbled rapidly away. "Come on, dear." The ' woman got her hands under Priscilla's armpits and helped her up. She halfcarried the girl over to one of the picnic tables and seated her on the bench. With an arm around Priscilla's shoulders, she held her upright while she put a large black handbag on the table. Out of it she rummaged a voluminous handkerchief which she thrust into Priscilla's hands. "Now, you sit there and cry a while." Priscilla said, still trembling, "I can't," and burst into tears. When it was over she blew her nose weakly. "I don't... know what to say to you. I -- he would have killed me." "No, he wouldn't. Not while I'm alive and carry a hatpin." "Who are you?" "A friend. If you'll believe that, child, that's good enough for me and it'll have to be good enough for you." "I believe that," said Priscilla. She drew a long, shuddering breath. "How can I ever thank you?" "By paying attention to what I tell you. But you must tell me some things first. How did you ever get yourself mixed up with such an animal? You surely have better sense than that."L silly, that's all." "You were in a tizzy, you mean. You were, weren't you?" "Well," sniffed Priscilla, "yes. You see, I work with this doctor, and he and I -- it isn't anything formal, you understand, but we work so well together and laugh at the same things, and it's... nice. And then he -- " "Go on." "He was married once. Years ago. And he saw her tonight. And he didn't look at me any more. I guess I'm foolish, but I got all upset." "Why?" "I told you. He just wanted to talk to her. He forgot I was alive." "That isn't why. You were upset because you were afraid he'd get together with her again." "I -- I suppose so." "Do you want to marry him?" "Why, I -- I don't... No, I wouldn't. It isn't that." The old lady nodded. "You think if he married her again -- or anyone else -- that it would make a big difference in the work you do together, in the way he treats you?" "I... don't suppose there would be any big difference, no," Priscilla said thoughtfully. "I'd never thought it through." "And," continued the old lady relentlessly, "have you thought through any other possible course of action he could have taken tonight? He was married to her for some time. He apparently hasn't seen her for years. It must have been a small shock to him to find her there. Now, what else might he have done? 'Goodness gracious, there's my old used-up wife. Priscilla, let's dance.' Is that what you expected?" At last she giggled. "You're wonderful. And you're right, you are so absolutely right. I have been sil -- Oh !" "What is it?" "You called me Priscilla. How did you know my name? Who are you?" "A friend. Come along, girl; you can't sit here all night." She drew the startled girl to her feet. "Here, let me look at you. Your lipstick's smeared. Over here. That's better. Can you button that jacket? I think perhaps you should. Not that it should matter if your bust does show, the way you brazen things dress nowadays. There now, come along." She hurried Priscilla through the park, and when they reached the street, turned north. Priscilla tugged at the black sleeve. "Please -- wait. I live that way." She pointed. "I know, I know. But you're not going home just yet. Come along, child!" "Where are you -- we -- going?" "You'll see. Now listen to me. Do you trust me?" "Oh, my goodness, yes!" "Very well. When we get where we're going, you'll go inside alone. Don't worry now, it's perfectly safe. Once you're inside you'll do something very stupid indeed." "I will?" "You will. You'll turn around and try to leave. Now, then, I want you to understand that you must not leave. I shall be standing outside to see that you don't." "But I -- But why? What am I supposed... where..." "Hush, child! You do as you're told and you'll be all right." Priscilla walked along in silence for a time. 'Then she said, "All right." The old lady turned to look into the softest-smiling, most trusting face she had ever seen. She put her arm around Priscilla's shoulders and squeezed. "You'll do," she said. booth, far from the bellythumping juke box and the knot of people chattering away at the headend of the bar. Henry's elbows were on the table and his thumbs, fitted carefully into the bony arches over his eyelids, supported the weight of his head. 'The cafe went round and round like a Czerny etude, but with a horizontal axis. The walls moved upward in front of him and down behind him, and he felt very ill. Once he had forced down three beers, and that was his established capacity; it had bloated him horribly and he'd had a backache in the morning. Tonight he'd had four double ryes. "There he shtood," he said to one of the blonde girls who sat opposite, "nex' to tbe conductor, watching the orch'stra, an' sometimes he'd beat time wiz arms. When the last movement ended, th' audience rozhe up as one man an' roared. An' there he shtood, nex' to the conductor -- " "You said that before," said the girls. They spoke in unison, and the pair of them had only one voice, like the doubled leading tone in a major chord. "There he shtood," Henry went on, "shtill beating time after the music stopped. An' the conductor, wi' eyes in his tears -- wi' tears in his eyes -- turned him around so he could shee the applause." "What was the matter with him?" asked the girls. "He was deaf." "Who was?" "Beethoven." Henry wept. "My God. Is that what you're tying one on about?" "You said to tell you the sad story," said Henry. "You didn't say tell you my sad story." "Okay, okay. You got money, ain't you?" Henry lifted his head and reared back to get perspective. It was then that the girl merged and became one; he realized that there had been one all along, in spite of what he had seen. That explained why they both had the same voice. He was extravagantly pleased. "Sure I got money." "Well, come on up to my place. I'm tired uh sittin' around here." "Very gracious," he intoned. "I shall now tell you the sad story of my laysted wife." "What type wife?" "I beg your pardon? I've never been married." The girl looked perplexed. "Start over again." "Da capo," he said with his finger beside his nose. "Very well. I repeat. I shall now tell you the story of my wasted life." "Oh," said the girl. "I have had the ultimate in rejections," said Henry solemnly. "I fell in love, deeply, deeply, deeply, dee -- " "Who with?" said the girl tiredly. "Get to the point and let's get out of here." "With a string bass. A bull, as it were, fiddle." He nodded solemnly. "Ah, fer Pete's sake," she said scornfully. She stood up. "Look, mister, I can't waste the whole night. Are you cornin' or ain't you?" H enry scowled up at her. He hadn't asked for her company. She'd just appeared there in the booth. She had niggled and nagged until he was about to tell her all the things he had come here to forget. And now she wanted to walk out. Suddenly he was furious. He, who had never raised his hand or his voice in his whole life, was suddenly so angry that he was, for a moment, blind. He growled like the open D on a bass clarinet and leaped at her. His clawed hand swept past her fluffy collar and got caught, tore the collar a little, high on the shoulder. She squealed in routine fear. 'The bartender hopped up sitting on the bar and swung his thick legs over. "What the hell's going on back there?" he demanded, pushing himself off onto the floor. The blonde said, shrilly and indignantly, exactly what she thought Henry was trying to do. "Right there in the booth?" said a bourbon up the row. "That I got to see," replied a beer. They started back, followed by the rest of the customers. The bartender reached into the booth and lifted Henry bodily out of it. Henry, sick and in a state of extreme panic, wriggled free and ran -- two steps. The side of his head met the bridge of the bourbon's nose. Henry was aware of a dull crunch. There were exploding lights and he went down, rolled, got to his feet again. The girl was screaming in a scratchy monotone somewhere around high E flat. The bourbon was sitting on the floor with blood spouting from his nose. "Get 'im!" somebody barked. Powerful hands caught Henry's thin biceps. A heavy man stood in front of him, gigantic yellow mallets of fists raised. "Hold him tight," said the heavy man. "I'm gonna let him have it." And then a sort of puffball with bright blue eyes was between Henry and the heavy man. In a soft, severe voice it said, "Leave him alone, you -- you bullies! You let that man go, this very minute!" Henry shook his head. He regretted the movement, but among the other things it made him experience was clearing sight. He looked at the puffball, which became a sweet-faced lady in her fifties. She had gentleness about her mouth and sheer determination in her crackling blue eyes. "You better stay out of this. Granny," said the bartender not unkindly. "This character's got it cornin' to him." "You'll let him go this instant!" said the lady, and stamped a small foot. "And that's the way it is." "Al," said the heavy man to the bartender, "just lead this lady off to one side while I paste this bastard." "Don't you put a hand on me." "Watch your language. Sylvan," said the bartender to the heavy man. He put a hand on the lady's shoulder. "Come over her a sec -- uh!" T he final syllable was his staccato response to the old lady's elbow in the pit of his stomach. That, however, was not the end of her -- literally -- chain reaction. She swung her crocus reticule around in a full-armed arc and brought it down on the heavy man's head. He sank to the floor without a whimper. In the same movement she put her other hand swiftly but firmly against Henry's jaw and pushed it violently. His head tipped back and smashed into the face of the man who stood behind him holding his arms. 'The man staggered backward, tripped, and fell, bouncing his skull oflf an unpadded bar stool. "Come along, Henry," said the old lady cheerfully. She took him by the wrist as if he were a small boy whose face needed washing, and marched him out of the cafe. On the street he gasped, "'They'll chase us... "Naturally," said the lady. She put two fingers Into her mouth and blew a piercing blast. A block and a half away, a parked taxicab slid away from the curb and came toward them. There was shouting from the cafe. The taxicab pulled up beside them. The lady whipped the door open and pushed Henry in. As four angry men shouldered out on the sidewalk, she reached deep into her reticule and snatched a dark object from it. She stood poised for a moment, and in the neon-shot half-light Henry saw what was in her hand -- an oldfashioned, top-of-stove flat iron. He understood then why the heavy man had drowsed off so readily. The lady hefted the iron and let it flyIt grazed the temple of one of the men and flew straight through a plate glass window. The man who was hit went to his knees, his hands holding his head. The other three fell all over each other trying to get back out of range. The lady skipped into the cab and said calmly, "Young man, take us away from here." "Yes, ma'am!" said the driver in an awed tone, and let in his clutch. They jounced along in silence for a moment, and then she leaned forward. "Driver, pull up by one of these warehouses. Henry's going to be sick." "I'm all right," said Henry weakly. The cab stopped. The lady opened the door. "Come along!" "No, really, I -- " The lady snapped her fingers. "Oh, all right," said Henry sheepishly. In the black shadows by the warehouse he protested faintly, "But I don't to be sick!" "I know what's best," she said solicitously. She took his hand, spread it, and presented him with his long middle finger, point first, as if it were a' clinical thermometer. "Down your throat," she ordered. "No!" he said loudly. "Are you going to do as you're told?" He looked at her. "Yes." "I'll hold your head," she said. "Go on." She held his head. Afterward, in the cab, he asked her timidly if she would take him home now. "No," she said. "You play the piano, don't you, Henry?" He nodded. "Well, you're going to play for me." She reached forcefully into her reticule again, and his protest died on his trembling lips. "Here," she said, and handed him an oldfashioned mint. She had a "walking-underwater" feeling, as if she were immersed in her own reluctance. She had trod these stairs many times at night -- usually downward after a perplexing, intriguing series of experiments. She did not know why she should be returning to the laboratory now, except that she had ?# been ordered to do so. She freely admitted that if it were not for the thin, straight figure in black who waited downstairs, she would certainly be in bed by now. But there was an air of command, of complete certainty about the old lady who had saved her that was utterly compelling. she walked quietly down the carpeted hall. The outer door of the lab office was ajar. There was no light in the office, but a dim radiance filtered in from the lab itself, through the frosted panel of the inner door. She crossed to it and went in. Someone gasped. Someone said, "Priscilla!" Priscilla said, "Excuse me!" and spun around. She shot through the office and out into the hall, her cheeks burning, her eyes stinging. "He -- he -- " she sobbed, but could not complete the thought, would not review the picture she had seen. At the lower landing she raced to the street door, valiantly holding back the tears and the sobs that would accompany them. Her hand went out to the big brass doorknob, touched it -- As the cool metal greeted her hand she stopped. Outside that door, standing on the walk by the iron railings, radiating strength and rectitude, would be the old lady. She would watch Priscilla come out of the building. She would probably nod her head in knowledgable disappointment. She would doubtless say, "I told you you would want to leave, and that it would be foolish." "But they were -- " said Priscilla in audible protest. Then came the thought of trustfulness: "Listen to me. Do you trust me?" from the knob. She thought she heard the murmur of low voices upstairs. She remembered the talk about Jon and his meeting with Edie at the party. She remembered herself saying, "I -- just didn't think it through." She turned and faced the stairs. "I can't, I can't possibly go back. Not now. Even if... even if it didn't make any difference to me, they'd... they'd hate me. It would be a terrible thing to do, to go back." She turned until the big brass knob nudged her hip. Its touch projected a vivid picture into her mind -- the old lady, straight and waiting in the lamplight. She sighed and started slowly up the stairs again. When she got to the office this time the light was on. She pushed the door open. Jon was leaning against the desk, watching it open. Edie, his ex-wife, stood by the laboratory door, her wide-spaced eyes soft and bright. For a moment no one moved. Then Edie went to Jon and stood beside him, and together they watched Priscilla with questions on their faces, and something like gentle sympathy. Or was it empathy? Priscilla came in slowly. She went up to Edie and stopped. She said, "You're just what he needed." The wide dark eyes filled with tears. Edie put her arms out and Priscilla was in them without quite knowing which of them had moved. When she could, Edie said, "You are so lovely, Priscilla. You're so very lovely." And Priscilla knew she was not talking about her red hair or her face. Jon put a hand on each of their shoulders. "I don't understand what's happening here," he said, "but I have the feeling that it's good. Priscilla, why did you come here?" She looked at him and said nothing. "What made you come back?" She shook her head. "You know," he smiled, "but you're just not talking. You've never done a wiser thing than to come back. If yvu hadn't, Edie and I would have been driven apart just as surely as if you'd used a wedge. Am I right, Edie?" Edie nodded. "You've made us very happy." Priscilla felt embarrassed. "You are giving me an awful lot of credit," she said in a choked voice. "I didn't really do anything. I wish I had the -- the bigness or wisdom you think I have." She raised her eyes to them. "I'll try to live up to it, though. I will... The phone rang. "Now who could that -- " Jon reached for it. Priscilla took it out of his hand. "I'll take it." Edie and Jon looked at each other. Priscilla said into the phone, "Yes... yes, it's me. How in the world did you... Tonight? But it's so late! Will you be there? Then so will I. Oh, you're wonderful... yes, right away." She hung up. Jon said, "Who was it?" Priscilla laughed. "A friend." Jon touched her jaw. "All right. Miss Mysterious. What's it all about?" "Will you do something if I ask you? You, too, Edie?" "Oh, yes." Priscilla laughed again. "We do have something to celebrate, don't we?" When they nodded, she laughed again. "Well, come on!" sticks piano-player with Derek to help, Jane concluded. She watched the rapt faces in the club. The house counted good, and it was going great, but she couldn't help thinking what it would be like if Derek hadn't been so pigheaded about little Henry. She finished her chorus and the piano took it up metronomically, nudged on the upbeats by the authoritative beat of Derek's bass. She looked at him. He was playing steadily, almost absently. His face was sullen. When he got absentminded he wasn't colossal any more; only terrific. The piano moved through an obvious C-sharp seventh chord to change key to F-sharp, her key for the windup. She drifted into the bridge section with a long glissando, and disgust moved into her face and Derek's in perfect sychronization as they realized that the pianist was blindly going into another # bars from the beginning. Derek doubled his beat and slapped the strings hard, and the sudden flurry of sound snapped the pianist out of it. Blushing, he recovered the fluff. Jane rolled her eyes up in despair and finished the number. To scattered applause she turned to the piano and said, "Tinkle some. Derek and I are going to take ten. And while you're tinkling," she added viciously, "practice, huh?" She smiled at the audience, crossed the stand and touched Derek's elbow. "I'm going behind that potted palm and flip my lid. Come catch it." He put his bass out of harm's way and followed her into the office. She let him pass her and slump down on the desk. She banged the door. "You -- " He looked at her sullenly. "I know what you're going to say. I threw out the best ten fingers in the business. I told you I don't want to talk about it. You don't believe that, do you?" "I believe it," she said. Her eyes glittered. "Derek Jax, I love you." "Cut it out." "I'm not kidding. I'm not changing the subject, either. I love you this much. I'm going to call your hand, kid. I love you so much that I'm going to make you talk about what's with this business of Henry, or I'm going to see you walk out of here with, and into, your doghouse." "That don't make a hell of a lot of sense, Janie," he said uncomfortably. "No, huh? Listen, the guy I love talks to me. I understand him enough so he can talk to me. If he won't talk to me, it's because he thinks I won't understand. I think you see what I mean. I love the guy I think you are. If you won't talk about it, you're just not that guy. Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you." "Could be," he growled. He rose and stretched. "Well, guess I'll be going. Nice working with you, Janie." "So long," she said. She went and opened the door. "By God," he said, "you really mean it." She nodded. H e licked his lips, then bit them. He sat down. "Shut the door, Janie." She shut the door and put her head against it. He flashed her a look. "What's the matter." She said hoarsely, "I got something in my eye. Wait." Presently she swung around and faced him. composed. The vein in the side of her neck was thick and throbbing. "Jane..." he said with difficulty, "that Henry -- did he ever make a pass at you?" "Why, you egghead. No! To him I'm something that makes music, like a saxophone. It's you he's interested in. Hell, did you see his face when you came in with your bass this afternoon? He'd rather play to that bass than go over the falls in a barrel with me. If that's all that was on your mind, forget it." "You make it tough for me," he said heavily. "I'll play it through for you a note at a time. Got a stick?" She rummaged in the desk drawer and found him a cigarette. He lit it and dragged until he coughed. She had never seen him like this. She said nothing. He seemed to appreciate that. He glanced at her and half his mouth flashed part of a smile. Then he said, "Did I ever tell you about Danny?" "No." "Kids together. Kids get close. He lived down the pike. I got caught in a root one time, swimming in a rock quarry. Danny seemed to know the instant I got tangled. He couldn't swim worth a damn, but in he came. Got me out, too." He dragged on his cigarette, still hungry, hot and harsh. The words came out, smoking. "There was a lot of stuff... we played ball, we run away from home, we broke into an ol' house and pried loose a toilet and threw it out a fourthfloor window onto a concrete walk. We done a lot. "We jived a lot. He had natural rhythm. We used to bang away on his ol' lady's piano. I played trumpet for a while, but what I wanted to do was play string bass. I wanted that real bad. "We grew up and he moved away. Some lousy job trying to learn cabinet-making. Saw him a couple times. Half-starved, but real happy. I was playing bass by then, some. Had to borrow a fiddle. Wanted my own instrument so bad, never had the money. So one day he called me up long distance. Come over. I didn't have no trainfare, so I hitchhiked. Met him at a barrelhouse joint in town. He was real excited, dragged me out to his place. A shack -- practically a shanty. When we got in sight of it he started to run. It was on fire." D erek dosed his eyes and went on talking. "We got to it and it was pretty far gone. I got there first. One wall was gone. Inside everything was burning. Danny, he -- he screamed like a stung kid. He tried to jump inside. I hung on to him. Was much bigger'n him. Then I saw it -- a string bass. A full-size string bass, burning up. I sat on Danny and watched it burn. I knew why he'd moved out of town. I knew why he cook up cabinet-making. I knew why he was so hungry an' -- an' so happy. Made the box with his own two hands. We watched it burn and he tried to fight me because I would not let him save it. He cried. Well -- tve cried. Just two kids." Jane said a single, unprintable word with a bookful of feeling behind it. "We got over it. We roomed together after that. We done everything together. Crowd we ran with used to kid us about it, and that just made it better. I guess we were about nineteen then." He squeezed out a long breath and looked up at her with stretched, blind eyes. "We had something, see? Something clean and big that never happened before, and wasn't nothing wrong with it. "Then I come home one night and he's at the back window staring into the yard. Said he was moving out. Said we weren't doing each other any good. He was in bad shape. Somebody'd been talking to him, some lousy crumb with a sewer mouth and sewer ideas. I didn't know what it was all about. We were still just kids, see? "Anyway, I couldn't talk him out out of it. He left. He was halfcrazy, all eaten up. Like the time we watched the bull-fiddle burn up. He wouldn't say what was the trouble. So after he went I milled around the joint trying to make sense out of it and I couldn't. Then I -- " Derek's voice seemed to desert him. He coughed hard and got it back. " -- Then I went and looked out the window. Somebody'd wrote our names on the fence. Drew a heart around 'em. "I never gave a damn what anyone thought, see? But' Danny, he did. I guess you can't know how someone else feels, but you can get a pretty fair idea. First I was just mad, and then I pretended I was Danny looking at a thing like that, and I got an idea how bad it was. I ran out lookin' for him. "Saw him after a time. Up by the highway, staggering a bit like he was half-soused. He wasn't, though. I ran after him. He was waiting for the light to change. There was a lot of traffic. Tried to get to him. Couldn't begin to. He sort of pitched off the curb right under oh my God I can still see it the big dual wheel it run right over his head... he finished in a rapid monotone. der. Derek said, "I didn't know then and I don't know now and I never will know if he was so tore up and sick he just fell, or if he done it on purpose. All I know is I've lived ever since with the idea I killed him just by being around him so much. Don't try to talk me out of it. I know it don't make sense. I know all the right answers. But knowing don't help. "That's the whole story." Jane waited a long time and then said gently, "No, Derek." He started as if he had suddenly found himself in an utterly strange place. Gradually his sense of presence returned to him and he wiped his face. "Yeah," he said. "Your boy Henry. Danny -- he played piano, Janie. I started with him. Danny played piano like nothing that ever lived except this Henry. Everything I ever drug out of a string bass was put in there first by the way he played piano. He used to sit and play like that and every once in a while grin at me. Shy. "So I walk in here on a guy playing that kind of piano and he grins shy like that when he plays, and besides, here's that real close stuff around him like a fog. That Henry's a genius, Janie. And he's a -- he's the type of guy they ought to use for a mold to make people out of. And he just wants to be near my fiddle. And me. And you want me to keep him around here until he knocks hisself off. "Janie," he said, with agony in his voice, "Vm not go'tn' through that again!" Jane squeezed his shoulder. She looked back over the afternoon and evening and words flitted through her mind: "You won't have to lose any sleep over him"... "Looks like you've made a conquest"... "Did he ever make a pass at you?" Aloud she told him, "I've sure said all the right things... take a swing at me, pudd'nhead." Derek pulled her hand close against his cheek and pressed it there so hard it hurt her. She let him do it as long as he wanted. "I love you, Janie," he whispered. "I shoulda told you all that about Danny a long time ago." "How could you tell till you tried?" she asked huskily. "Let's go on out there before ol' Kitten on the Keys drives all the customers away." JHenry Faulkner in genuine panic. "You can and you will," said the old lady firmly. "Listen, there's a man in there who'll throw me out on sight." "Have I been wrong yet? This is your night to do as you're told, young man, and that's the way it is." In spite of himself he grinned. 'They went in through the herculite doors. Janie was just finishing a number. 'The piano fluffed the last chorus badly. Henry and the old lady stood in the back of the club until Derek and Jane walked off the floor. "Now," she said briskly, "go on up there and play for me. Play anything you want to." "But they have a piano player!" "He's in a pet. Just go up there." "Whwhat'll I say to him?" "Don't say anything, silly! Just stand there. He'll go away." He hesitated, and the lady gave him a small shove. He shambled around the dance floor and diffidently approached the piano. ITie pianist was playing a dingdong version of Stardust. He saw Henry coming. "You again." Henry said nothing. "I suppose you want to take my job again." Henry still said nothing. The man went on playing. Presently, "You can have it. How anyone can work with a couple sourpusses like that..." He got off the stool in mid-chorus, leaving Stardust's garden gate musically ajar. Henry's right hand shot out and, catching the chord as if it had been syncopated instead of shut off, began molding it like a handful of soft clay. He sat down still playing. a little peculiar. 'This is wonderful, so wonderful -- but there are still two of us and one of you." "Three of us," corrected Priscilla. "In some ways that's so," said Jon. He swallowed the rest of his drink and beckoned the waiter. "Pris is the best statistician and psychological steno I've ever run across. And you're a genius with the machines. Why, between us we will do research that'll make history." "Of course we will. But -- isn't three a crowd ?" Priscilla said, without malice, "From anyone but you I'd consider that a hint. Don't worry about me. I have the most wonderful feeling that the miracles aren't finished." "Pris, are you ever going to tell us about the miracles?" "I don't know, Jon. Perhaps." Her eyes searched the club. Suddenly they fixed on a distant corner table. "There she is!" "Who?" Jon twisted around. "Well, I'll be damned!" "What-is it?" asked Edie. "Excuse me," said Jon, and rose. "Someone I've got to see." He stalked over to the corner table and glowered down at its occupants. "May I ask what you're doing here?" "Why, Dr. Prince!" said Pallas. "Imagine meeting you here!" "What are you two doing here at this time of night?" "We can go where we like," said Verna, smoothing her snowy hair, "and that's the way it is." . "We're not due to report to you until the day after tomorrow," said Pallas self-righteously. "There's no law against a lady having a spot at bedtime," amended Verna. "You two never cease to amaze me," Jon said, chuckling in spite of himself. "Just be careful. I'd hate to see my prize exhibits get hurt." They smiled up at him. "We'll be all right. We'll talk to you again later, won't we, Verna?" "Oh, yes," said Verna. "Definitely. That's the way it is." to his table. "'There sits the damnedest pair of human beings I've encountered yet," he said as he sat down. "Three years ago they were senile psychotics, the two of them. As far as I can determine they had no special therapy -- they were in the County Home, and as mindless as a human being can get and stay alive. First thing you know they actually started feeding themselves -- " "Pallas and Verna!" said Priscilla. "You've mentioned -- holy Pete! Are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. I'm on the Board out there. You know the case history. They have to report to me every sixty days." "Well -- I -- will -- be -- damned," Priscilla intoned, awed. "What is it, Pris? I didn't think you'd ever seen them. They've never been to the lab... Say, how did you recognize them just now?" "Could... could you bring them over?" "Oh, come now. This celebration is only for -- " "I've heard enough to be curious ibout them," said Edie. "Do invite them, Jon." He shrugged and returned to the other table. In a moment he was back with the two spinsters. He drew out chairs for them in courtly fashion, and called a waiter. Pallas ordered a double rye, no chaser. Verna smiled like a kitten and ordered scotch on the rocks. "For our colds," she explained. "How long have you had colds?" he demanded professionally. "Oh, dear, we don't get colds," explained Verna sweetly. "That's because we drink our liquor straight." Dr. Jonathan Prince felt it within him to lay down the law at this point. A patient was a patient. But there was something in the air that prevented it. He found himself laughing again. He thought he saw Pallas wink at Priscilla and shake her head slightly, but he wasn't sure. He introduced the girls. Without the slightest hesitation he introduced Edie as "my wife." She colored and looked pleased. "Listen to that music," breathed Priscilla. "Thought you'd notice it," said Pallas, and smiled at Verna. "They all listened. It was a modal, moody, rhythmic invention, built around a circle of chords in the bass which beat, and beat, and beat on a single sonorous tone. The treble progressed evenly, regularly, tripped up on itself and ran giggling around and through the steady structure of the bass modulations, then sobered and marched again, but always full of suppressed mirth. Priscilla was craning her neck. "I can't see him!" Verna said, "Why don't you go up there, dear? I'm sure he would not mind." "Oh... really not?" She caught Pallas's eye. Pallas gave her one firm nod. Priscilla said, "Do you mind ?" She slipped out of her chair and went up past the dance floor. "Look at her," breathed Edie. "She's got that -- that 'miracle' expression again... Oh, Jon, she's so lovely." Jon said, looking at the spinsters, "What are you two hugging each other about?" H enry looked up from the keyboard and smiled shyly. "Hello," Priscilla said. "Hello." He looked at her face, her hair, her body, her eyes. His shyness was there, and no boldness was present; he looked at her the way she listened to his music. It was personal and not aggressive. He moved over on the bench. "Sit down." Without hesitation she did. She looked at him, too -- the hawk profile, the gentle gray-green eyes. "You play beautifully." "Listen." He played with his eyes on her face. His hands leaped joyfully like baby goats. Then they felt awe and hummed something. Henry stopped playing by ear. He began to sightread. Note followed note followed note for the line of her nose, and doubled and curved and turned back for her nostrils. The theme became higher and fuller and rounded and there was her forehead, and then there were colorful waves up and back for her hair. Here was a phrase for an earlobe, and one for the turn of the cheek, and now there were mysteries, two of them, long and subdued and agleam and end-tilted, and they were her eyes... D erek came out of the office and stopped so abruptly that Jane ran into him. Before she could utter the first startled syllable, her breath was taken away in a great gasp. Derek turned and gestured at the music. "You -- " She looked up at him, the furious eyes, the terrified trembling at the corners of his mouth. "No, Derek, so help me God, I didn't ask him to come back. I wouldn't do that, Derek. I wouldn't." "You wouldn't," he agreed gently. "'I know it, hon. I'm sorry. But out he goes." He strode out to the stand. Jane trotted behind him, and when they turned the corner she caught his arm so violently that her long fingernails sank into his flesh. "Wait!" There was a girl on the bench with Henry, and as he played he stared at her face. His eyes moved over it, his own face moved closer. His hands made music like the almost visible current which flowed between them. Their lips touched. There was a tinkling explosion of sound from the piano that built up in fullness and sonority until Jane and Derek all but blinked their eyes, as if it were a blaze of light. And then Henry's left hand picked up a theme, a thudding, joyous melody that brought the few late-owls. in the club right to their feet. He no longer looked at the girl. His e)'es were closed, and his hands spoke of himself and what he felt -- a great honest hunger and rience with a hitherto undreamedof spectrum of sensation. Jane and Derek looked at each other with shining eyes. Jane said, deliberately, "Son, you got a rival," and Derek laughed in sheer relieved delight. 'Tm going to get my fiddle," he said. When Derek started to play, four people left their table and came up to the piano as if cables drew them. Hand in hand, Jon and Edie stopped close by Priscilla and stood there, rapt as she. Pallas and Verna stood at the other end of the bench, their eyes glowing. And out of the music, out of the bodies that fell into synchronization with the masterful pulse of the great viol, came a union, a blending of forces from each of six people. Each of the six had a part that was different from all of the others, but the shape of them all was a major chord, infinitely complete and completely satisfying. piL!" JLv "Oh, make it formal, KadKedKud !" "RilRylRul, then..." "If only Mak were here." "Myk is with us, and Muk. Poor partial things, and how hard they have worked, guarding and guiding with those pitifully inadequate human bodies as instruments. Come, Ril; we must decide. Now that we can operate fully, we can investigate these creatures." Just as they had investigated, compared, computed and stored away observations on industrial techniques, strength of materials, stress and temperature and power and design, so now they took instant and total inventory of their hosts. RilRylRul found classicism and inventiveness, tolerance and empathy in Henry. In Derek were loyalty and rugged strength and a powerful interpretive quality. In Jane was the full-blown beauty of sensualism and directive thought, and a unique stylization of the products of artistic creation. KadKedKud separated and analyzed a splendid systematization in Priscilla, a superior grasp of applied theory in Edie, and in Jon that rarest of qualities, the associative mind -- the mind that can bridge the specialties. "A great race," said Ril, "but a sick one, badly infected with the Pa'ak pestilence." "The wisest thing to do," reflected Kad, "would be to stimulate the virus to such an extent that humanity will impose its own quarantine -- by reducing itself to savagery through atomic warfare. There is such a great chance of that, no matter what we do, that it would seem expedient to hasten the process. The object would be to force atomic warfare before space travel can begin. That at least would keep the virus out of the Galaxy, which is what we came here to effect." "It's a temptation," conceded Ril. "And yet -- what a tremendous species this human race could be! Let us stay, Kad. Let us see what we can do with them. Let us move on to other human groups, . now that we know the techniques of entry and merging. With just the right pressure on exactly the right points, who knows? Perhaps we can cause them to discover how'to cure themselves." "It will be a close race," worried Kad. "We can do a great deal, but can we do it soon enough? We face three possibilities: Mankind may destroy itself through its own sick ingenuity; it may reach the Stars to spread its infection; or it may find its true place as a healthy species in a healthy Cosmos. I would not predict which is more likely." "Neither would I," Ril returned. "So if the forces are that closely balanced, I have hope for the one we join. Are you with me?" "Agreed. Myk -- Muk... will you join us?" Faintly, faintly came the weak response of the two paltry parts of a once powerful triad: "Back in our sector we would be considered dead. Here we have a life, and work. Of course we will help." So they considered, and, at length, decided. And their meeting and consideration and decision took four microseconds.    T he six people looked at one another, entranced, dazed. "It's -- gone," said Jon. He wondered, then, what he meant by that. Henry's fingers slid off the keys, and the big bass was silent. Priscilla opened her tilted eyes wide and looked about her. Edie pressed close to Jonathan, bright-faced, composed. Jane stood with her head high, her nostrils arched. They felt as if they were suddenly living on a new plane of existence, where colors were more vivid and the hues between them more recognizable. There was a new richness to the air, and a new strength in their bodies; but most of all it was as if a curtain had been lifted from their minds for the first time in their lives. They had all reached a high unity, a supreme harmony in the music a second before, but this was something different, infinitely more complete. "Cured" was the word that came to Jonathan. He knew instinctively that what he now felt was a new norm, and that it was humanity's birthright. "My goodness gracious!" Verna and Pallas stood close together, like tw'o frightened birds, darting glances about them and .twittering. "I can't think what I'm doing here," said Pallas blankly, yet aware. "I've had one of my spells . , ." "We both have," Verna agreed. "And that's the way it is." Jonathan looked at them, and knew them instantly as incomplete. He raised his eyes to the rest of the people in the club, still stirring with the final rustle of applause from the magnificent burst of music they had heard, and he recognized them as sick. His mind worked with a new directiveness sickness. He turned to Edie. "We have work to do..." She pressed his hand, and Priscilla looked up and smiled. Derek and Jane looked into each other's eyes, into depths neither had dreamed of before. There would be music from that, they knew. Henry said, with all his known gentleness and none of the frightened diffidence, "Hey, you with the red hair. I love you. What's your na.me?" And Priscilla laughed with a sound like wings and buried her face in his shoulder. kind of partnership of three. And... The #iews is new aggression threatens unleashing of atomic xveapons... President calls for universal disarmament... First flight to Moon possible now with sufficient funds... Jonathon Prince announces virus cause of neurosis, promises possible cure of all mental diseases... Watch your local newspapers for latest developments. The big news next month is... His short novei -- # dynamic words -- is a giant chunk of life snotched alive and throbbing from the futurel For many years you'll be haunted by the emotional power and intellectual dilemma projected with full'dimenslonal color, motion, feeling, sound in his profoundly stirring... Made to Measure Somewhere Is an ideal mate for every man and woman, bet on it. He was a man who rolled his own! T he pressure tube locks clicked behind them, as the train moved on. It was a strange, sighing click and to Joe it sounded like, "She's not right -- she's not right -- she's not right -- " So, finally, he said it. "She's not right." Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. "Who isn't "Vera. My wife. She's not right." Sam frowned. "Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's -- ?" He tapped his temple. "Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want." "That's why we have the Center," Sam answered, as if quoting, which he was. "With the current and growing preponderance of women over men, something had to be done. I think we've done it." Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job. "You've done as well as you could," Joe agreed in an argumentative way. "You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among women. You've You've established a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed It completely." "Thanks," Sam said. "That's a very small knife you've inserted between my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned." He took a deep breath. "What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science Director, was the kig job?" Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, "The big job is too big for a sociologist." Sam seemed to flinch. 'T didn't think that axe would fit alongside the knife. I underestimated you." "No offense," Joe said. "It's just that you have to deal with human beings." "Oh," Sam said. "Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that now, aren't you?" "Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are." Joe looked at Sam squarely. "Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?" Sam shrugged. "I suppose." "And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so far?" "Sounds like it." "Okay." Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. "I'm going to make a perfect wife." He tapped his own chest. "For me, just for me, the way I want her. No human frailties. Ideal." "A perfect robot," Sam objected. "A wife," Joe corrected. "A person. A human being." "But without a brain." "With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?" "I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people. Nothing."L not sentimental about people, but it's inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them. I'm a person. I think I'm -- discerning and sensitive." "Sure," Sam said. "Let's drop the subject." "Why?" "Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a person. And if -- it or he -- she were, I don't think I'd care to know him or her or it." "Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to sociologists all the time." "Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When you -- break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number." ' Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there, listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two friends -- one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who dealt with machines and might not have grown at all. As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out 'of the seat. There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble. Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was annoyed, it was plain. Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her major fault, her romantic sentimentality. "Darling," she said, as he approached the coupe. "Sweetheart. Have a good day." He kissed her casually. "Ordinary." She slid over and he climbed in behind the wheel. "Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train." "Sam's nice." He turned on the ignition and said, "Start." The motor obediently started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. "Sam's all right. Kind of sentimental." "That's what I mean." J OE was silent. 'Tlie coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway. "You're awfully quiet," Vera said. "I'm thinking." "About what?" Her voice was suddenly strained. "Sam didn't try to sell you -- " "A new wife?" He looked at her. "What makes you think that?" "You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't I -- darling, is there -- ?" She broke off, looking even more miserable than Sam had. "I don't intend to tradeyou in," he said quietly. She took a deep breath. He didn't look at her. "But you're going back to the Center." She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse. "It's not your fault," he said, after a moment. "I'm not going to get another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be." "I've tried so hard," she said. "Maybe I tried too hard." "No," he said, "it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long." "I don't want a reasonable man," she said quietly. "I want you, Joe. I -- I loved you." He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. "Loved? Did you use the past tense?" "I used the past tense." She started to get out on her side of the car. "I don't want to talk about it." "But I do," he told her. "Is this love something you can turn on and off like a faucet." "I don't care to explain it to you," she said. "I've got to pack." She left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house. Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be absurd. He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews. He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the camera. He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was food on his plate, none on Vera's. H e went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed. "You don't have to leave tonight, you know." "I know." "You're being very unreasonable." "Am I." "I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel." "Weren't you?" His voice rose. "Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you a human being, or aren't you?" "I'm afraid I am," she said, "and that's why I'm going back to the Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find a man." She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her shoulder. "Vera, you -- " Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it didn't feel slim and white. She said, "I can see now why you weren't made Senior Assistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine." He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet, Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal with imperfect humans. People, people, people... and particularly women. He rose, after a while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his food. Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile. He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh, circulatory system could be made -- and better than they were ever made naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own, with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits. So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh and blood. The spark, now -- what distinguished the bettergrade robots from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life. F or the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in the Department. "Something special?" Pete asked. "Not just a local skin graft? What then?" "A wife. A perfect wife." Pete's grin sagged baffledly. "I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?" "In all ways." Joe's face was grave. "Someone ideal to live with." "How about Vera? What was wrong with her?" "A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of -- well, maybe not dumb, exactly, but -- " "But not perfect. Who is, Joe?" "My new wife is going to be." Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind of skin Joe had specified. They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready. Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a jerk, in Joe's book. This afternoon, 'Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking. "Tired, Joe?" "What do you mean?" "Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo." "I'm -- yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private project." "Scientific?" "Naturally." "Anything in particular?" Joe took a breath, looked away. and back at Burke. "Well, a wife." A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. "Robot? Dishwasher and cook and phone answerer and like that?" "More than that." Slightly raised eyebrows. "More?" "Competely human, except she will have no human faults." Cool smile. "Wouldn't be human, then, of course." "Human, but without human faults, I said!" "You raised your voice, Joe." "I did." "I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices to Senior Assistants." "I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb," Joe said. A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally chromium. His voice matched it. "I'll have to talk to the Chief before I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon." "Go to hell." J OE went back to his desk and burned. He started with a low flame and fed it with the grievances of the past weeks. When it began to warm his collar, he picked up his hat and left. Click, burr, click went the airlocks. Very few riders, this time of the afternoon. The brain would go in, intact, and then the knowledge instiller would work during the incubation period, feeding the adolescent memories to the retentive circuits. She would 'really spend her mental childhood in the mold, while the warmth sent the human spark through her body. Robot? Huh! What did they know? A human being, a product of science, a flawless human being. Tlie rise, the big hiss of the final airlock, and Inglewood. Joe stood on the platform a second, looking for his car, and then realized she wasn't there. She hadn't been there for a week, and he'd done that every night. Silly thing, habit. Human trait. Tonight, he'd know. The flesh had been in the mold for two days. 'The synthetic nerv'es were plump and white under the derma-ray, the fluxo heart was pumping steadily, the entire muscular structure kept under pneumatic massage for muscle tone. He'd thought of omitting the frowning muscles, but realized it would ruin the facial contours. They weren't, however, under massage and would not be active. And the mind? Well, naturally it would be tuned to his. She'd know everything he knew. What room was there for disagreement if the minds were the same? Smiling, as she agreed, because she couldn't frowri. Her tenderness, her to-, manticism would have an intensity variable, of course. He didn't want one of these grinning simperers. He remembered his own words: "Is this love something you can turn on and off like a fauc'et?" Were his own words biting him, or only scratching him? Something itched. An intensity variable was not a faucet, though unscientific minds might find a crude, allegorical resemblance. To hell with unscientific minds. He went down to the basement. The mold was #. He watched the knowledge instiller send its minute current to the head end of the mold. The meter read less than a tenth of an amp. The slow, plastic pulse of the muscle tone massage worked off a small pump near the foot of the mold. On the wall, the big master operating clock sent the minute currents to the various bodily sections, building up the cells, maintaining the organic functions. In two hours, the clock would shut off all power, the box would cool, and there would be his -- Alice. Well, why not Alice? She had to have a name, didn't she? ence between a human and a robot, just warmth, just the spark. Funny he'd never thought of it before. Warmth was -- it had unscientific connotations. It wasn't, though. He went upstairs and fried some eggs. Twice a day, for a week, he had fried eggs, "rheir flavor was overrated. 'Then he went into the living room and snapped on the ball game. Martin was on third and Pelter was at bat. On the mound, the lank form of Dorffberger cast a long, grotesque shadow in the afternoon sun. Dorffberger chewed and spat and wiped his nose with the back of his glove. He looked over at third and yawned. At the plate, Pelter was digging in. Pelter looked nervous. Joe said, "Bet that Dorffberger fans him. He's got the Indian sign on Pelter." Then he realized he was talking to himself. Damn it. On the telenews screen, Dorffberger looked right into the camera and nodded. He was winding up, and the director put the ball into slow motion. Even in slow motion, it winged. "Ho-ho!" Joe said. "You can't hit what you can't see." Pelter must have seen it. He caught it on the fat part of the bat, twisting into it with all his hundred and ninety pounds. The impact rattled the telenews screen and the telescopic cameras took over. They followed the ball's flight about halfway to Jersey and then the short-range eyes came back to show Pelter crossing the plate, and Martin waiting there to shake his hand. Joe snapped off the machine impatiently. Very unscientific game, baseball. No rhyme or reason to it. He went out onto the porch. The grass was dry and gray; he'd forgotten to set the sprinkler clock, Vera's old job. Across the street, Dan Harvey sat with his wife, each with a drink. Sat with his human wife, the poor fish. They looked happy, though. Some people were satisfied with mediocrities. Unscientific people. Why was he restless? Why was he bored? Was he worried about his job? Only slightly; the Chief thought a lot of him, a hell of a lot. The Chief was a great guy for seniority and Burke had it, or Joe would certainly have been Senior Assistant. The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period. A djustment period... another necessity for humans, for imperfect people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, tliat was surrender. He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him, the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went quickly from the house and into the backyard. He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from J:he basement. 'The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now, nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic. At seven, she should be ready. At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going down to the basement. The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold; it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some reason. A beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said, "Hello, Joe." "Hello, Alice. Everything all right?" "Fine." Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag. "Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink," Joe said. "Sort of show you off, you know." "Ego gratification, Joe?" "Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you." "I'm sure they're lovely." "They are lovely.' While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor. Dan Harvey said sympathetically, "It happens to the best of us. 'Thinking of getting a new one, Joei" "I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice." "Great," Dan said. "Fine. Dandy." The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved. The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed them at the end of their adjustment period. 'The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking. Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly, "Well, none of us are perfect, I guess." Alice smiled and answered, "Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities in marriage." Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. "I don't quite understand, dear. In any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have adjusted very well." "You haven't adjusted," Alice said smilingly. "You've surrendered." Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of redgreen and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled. Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, "Well, I never -- " "Of all the -- " Dan Harvey said. Joe rose and said, "Must get to bed, got to get to bed." "Here?" Alice asked. "No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush." Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it. morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though. At breakfast, he said, "That was tactless last night. Very, very tactless." "Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception." When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one. He said, "I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require putting you back in the mold." "Of course, dear. Why?" "You need just a touch of deception, just a wee shade of it." "Of course, Joe." So she had tact. He went to the office with very little of the absurdity mood stirring in him. He'd had a full breakfast, naturally. At the office, there was a note on his desk: Mr. Behrens wants to see yon immediately. It bore his secretary's initials. Mr. Behrens was the Chief. He was a fairly short man with immense shoulders and what he'd been told was a classical head. So he let his hair grow, and had a habit of thrusting his chin forward when he listened. He listened to Joe's account of the interview with Burke. When Joe had finished, the Chiefs smile was tolerant. "Ribbing him, were you? Old Burke hasn't much sense of humor, Joe." Joe said patiently, "I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's -- beautiful. Chief. She's ideal." The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted. Joe said, "Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner with us tonight. Chief, and see for yourself -- " The Chief nodded. "I'd like that." T hey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them leaving, and his long face grew even longer. On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments. But he did say, "I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have to warm her in any incubating mold." "Wait'll you see this one," Joe said. And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief could only stare. Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers. The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, "I'll be damned!" They went up to a perfect dinner -- and incident number two. The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car. The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering, as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet and the drink wobbled in his hand. The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd been staring at through the account. And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face. "How touching," she said, and grinned. For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his questioning eyes went to Joe. "She can't frown," Joe explained. "The muscles are there, but they need massage to bring them to life." He paused. "I wanted a smiling wife." The Chief inhaled heavily. "There are times when a smile is out of order, don't you think, Joe." "It seems that way." It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It didn't take long, and she was so was agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughtsbefore he did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that. She could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and brought her closer to being -- human. A t the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in, Sam said, "I've been hearing things, Joseph." "From Vera? At the Center?" Sam shook his head. "Vera's been too busy to have much time for the director. She's our most popular number." Sam paused. "About the new one. Hear she's something to see." "You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a man needs at home." His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the enthusiasm he should have felt. Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. "Why not bring her over, say, tonight? We'll play some bridge." That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized, working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. "We'll be there. At eight-thirty." Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, "Sam's a timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her oversacrifice." Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pfide in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride. They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It was more like a seance than a game. They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she figured to make the next bid a costly one. She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility. Sam said consolingly, "I'm such a lousy bidder, dear. I must have given you the wrong idea of my hand." N ext time, Sam made up for his timidity. Sam, with one heart in his hand, tried a psychic. "One heart," he said firmly. Sam knew there was a good chance the hearts were in the oppositions' hands, and this looked like a fine defensive tactic. However, his wife, with a threesuit powerhouse, couldn't conceive of a psychic from Sam. She had need of only a second round stopper in hearts and a small slam in no trump was in the bag. She had no hearts, but timid Sam was undoubtedly holding the ace-king. She bid six no-trump, which was consemtive for her. She didn't want to make the mistake of having Sam let the bid die. Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks, and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak. But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said, "It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched, sweet." She paused to smile at Joe. "Up against the man who invented the comptin-reduco-determina." She added, as an afterthought, "And Which brought about incident number three. Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, "Don't you really understand the comptin-reduco-determina." "Not even faintly," Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice. The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her all about the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice, telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs. Tullgren didn't want to know. It wasnt until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume. They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good night. In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, "Darling, I think you know too much -- for a female, that is. I think you'll have to have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course." "Of course," she agreed. "I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does." "Of course," she said. She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. 'These bugs were bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she could frown. She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense. Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old jokes with the same inflection he always used. Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want. And, damn it, why should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom ? T he fumigators could do nothing. 'They left, after the third trip, shaking their heads. Joe stood in the doorway, insisting he could still smell it. Alice said, "It's probably mental, dear. Perhaps you still -- still -- what's that word? Perhaps you still love her." "How could you think that?" he asked. "How? How could you think that unless I was thinking it?" T#I "I couldn't. I love you, too, Joe, but you know why that is." "What do you mean?" "We both love you, Joe." "Both? You and Vera?" "No. You and I, we both love you." "That," said Joe peevishly, "is ridiculous. If you could think for yourself, you'd know it was ridiculous." "Of course," she agreed. And frowned, because he was frowning. "You act like a robot," Joe said. She nodded. "That's all you are," Joe went on evenly, "a robot. No volition." She nodded, frowning. "I'm sick of it." She said nothing, sympathetically looking sick. And then he smiled and said, "I'm not stumped. Not the inventor of the comptin-reduco-determina. By Harry, I'll give you volition. I'll give you enough volition to make you dizzy." And because he was smiling, she was smiling. And only a very perceptive person might notice that her smile seemed to have an intensity, an anticipation slightly beyond his. He got to work on it that night. He would have to erase some of his mental background from her brain. He wanted her no less intelligent, no less discerning, but with enough of a change in background to give her a viewpoint of her own. He labored until midnight, and tumbled into bed with a headache. Next morning, at breakfast, he told her, "We'll try it out tonight. After that, you'll be a person." "Of course. And will you love me, Joe?" "More coffee, please," he answered. At the office, there was another note from his secretary: Mr. Burke wants to see you. At your convenience. At your convenience? Was Burke going soft? Joe went right in. B urke was smiling, a miracle in itself. Burke's voice was jovial. "The Chief's been telling me about the new wife, Joe. I guess I owe you an apology." "Not at all," Joe said. "I had no right to be rude. I was a little overworked -- at home. I wasn't myself." Burke nodded smugly, soaking it up. "Beautiful, the Chief tells me. Am I going to meet her, Joe?" "If you want. How about tonight, for dinner? I've got something new planned. I'm giving her volition. Maybe you'll want to watch." "Volition?" Joe went on to explain about volition, making it as simple as he could, to match Burke's mind. "That," Burke said when he'd finished, "I want to see." They went home in the crowded Inglewood tube. Sam was there, but Sam seemed to avoid them, for some reason. All the way home, Joe had the uncomfortable feeling that Burke didn't believe any part of this business, that Burke was making the trip only to substantiate his own misconceptions. But when Alice came into the living room, smiling brightly, extending her hand to the Senior Assistant, Joe had a gratifying glimpse of Burke's face. Burke was lost. Burke stared and swallowed and grinned like a green stage hand at a burlesque show. Burke's smile was perpetual and nauseating. Even in the face of Alice's cool reserve. The dinner was fine, the liquor mellow. Then Joe said, "Well, Alice, it's time for the volition. It's time for your birth as a person." "Of course," she said, and smiled. They went down into the basement, the three of them; she sat in the chair he'd prepared and he clamped on the wired helmet and adjusted the electrodes. Burke said weakly, "It isn't -- dangerous, is it." "Dangerous?" Joe stared at him. "Of course not. Remember how I explained it?" "I -- uh -- my memory -- " Burke subsided. She closed her eyes and smiled. Joe threw the switch. She'd have knowledge; she'd have the memory of her past few days of existence as his alter ego. She'd have volition. 'The contact clock took over. Her eyes remained closed, but her smile began to fade as the second hand moved around and around the big, contact-studded dial. Joe was smiling, though she wasn't. Joe was filled with a sense of his own creative power, his own inventive genius and gratification at the worried frown on the face of the imbecile Burke. T hen the dock stopped and there was a buzz; the meters dropped to zero. Alice opened her eyes. For the first time, as a person, she opened her eyes. Her smile was back. But she was looking at Burke. Looking at Burke and smiling! "Baby," she said. Burke looked puzzled, but definitely pleased. In all Burke's adult life, no female had ever looked at him like that. Joe said tolerantly, "You're a little confused yet, Alice. I'm your husband." "You?" She stared at him. "Do you think I've forgotten you? Do you think I don't know you, after living inside your brain, almost? You monster, you egocentric, selfish, humorless walking equation. You're not my husband and I'd like to see you prove that you are." Now it was only Burke who smiled. "By George," he said. "that's right. There's no wedding on record, is there, Joe?" '"Wedding?" Joe repeated blankly. "I made her. I created her. Of course there's no -- " "Of course, of course, of course," Alice shrilled. "That's all you know. You're the original 'of course' kid. Things aren't that certain, Junior. I've known you just long enough and just well enough to detest you." Now she pointed at Burke. "That's what I want. That's my kind of man." Burke gulped and grinned, nodded. "To coin a phrase, you said it, kiddo." He smiled at Joe. "I'll run her right down to the Center and get her registered, and take out an intent option. I guess we can't fight fate, Joe, can we?" Joe took a deep breath of air. "I guess not. I guess it's -- kismet." He was still standing there when he heard the front door slam. He kept staring at the machine, not seeing it, hearing instead all she had said. She knew him better than anyone who lived. Better, actually, than he knew himself, because she didn't rationalize, being outside his mental sphere now. You might say she'd been in his mind and detested what she had found there. It was a crawling feeling, the knowledge that he had been guilty of rationalization himself, that he had faults his mind refused to acknowledge. He couldn't doubt that he was all the cold and gruesome things she had called him. 'The worst shock, however, was that he had studied psychology and honestly had believed he was an objective thinker. But who, he realized, could be completely honest about himself? H e looked at the machine and saw the non-rationalization electrodes. He had used that on her and she had seen clearly what he still couldn't recognize. "What he needed, apparently, was a good, objective look at his own mind. He set the contact clock for objectivity maximum and clamped the electrodes on his head. He reached for the switch, had to close his eyes before he could throw it. He didn't see the second hand going around and around the clock, but he felt the prejudice-erasing impulses, the objective-appraisal stimuli, revealing memories that had shaped him, humiliations that had twisted him and been forgotten, urgings and longings and guilts that he had never known existed. He saw himself. It was highly unpleasant. There was a final buzz and the clock stopped. Joe opened his eyes, both figuratively and literally. He undamped the helmet with the electrodes and stepped from the chair, holding onto the arm, looking at the mirrored inside walls of the mold. He had made an image of himself and it had turned on him. Now he had made -- what? An image of his image's image of him? It was very confusing, yet somehow clear. He went slowly up the stairs, smelling the perfume. It wasn't Alice's and that was peculiar, because she had practically swabbed herself with the stuff, knowing he liked it, and she had just left. It was Vera's perfume. He remembered her waiting at the station, making her ridiculous bids at the card table, gossiping witlessly with Mrs. Harvey, hitting her thumb when she tried to hang his pictures in the study. Vera... He prowled dissatisfiedly through the house, as though in search of something, and then went out to the car. He took the superpike almost all the way to the Center. 'There were bright cards on posts every few hundred feet: He pulled into the sweeping circular drive at the huge group of buildings. A troupe of singing girls came out, dressed in majorette costumes, opened the door, helped him out, parked the car, escorted him into the lavish reception room. Music came from somewhere, soft and moody. There were murals all over the walls, every one romantic. A dispensing machine held engagement and wedding rings with a series of finger-holes on the left side for matching sizes. T he matron recognized him and said, "Mr. Tullgren has gone home for the day. Is there anything I can do?" He told her what he wanted and she thumbed through a register. "Yes, she's still here," the matron said finally. "She's refused exactly thirty-two offers up to yesterday. You were thinking of a -- reconciliation ?" Joe nodded with a new humility. "If she'll have me." The matron smiled. "I think she will. Women are more understanding than men, usually. More romantic, you might say." Nine-tenths of the building was brightly lighted, one-tenth rather dim. In the dim tenth were the post-intent rooms, the reconciliation chambers. Joe sat on a yellow love-seat in one of the empty reconciliation chambers, leafing through, but not seeing, a copy of a fashion magazine. Then there were steps in the hall, familiar steps, and he smelled the perfume before she came in. She stood timidly at the archt way, but Joe was even more unsure and. weak in the legs and he had trouble with his breathing. "Joe," Vera said. "Vera," he answered. It wasn't much, but it seemed to be what both had in mind. "Was there something you wanted to tell me?" she asked. "Something important?" "It's important to me, Vera," he said humbly. "I hope it's just as important to you." She looked brightly at him. "I find it very difficult to put into words," he stumbled. '"Ilie usual expressions of this emotion are so hackneyed. I would like to find some other way to say it." "Say what?" "That I love you." She ran to him. The impact knocked the breath out of both of them, but neither noticed. "Isn't the old phrase good enough, silly?" she scolded and kissed him. "I love you too, lover baby." Behind them, at the key words, the sonic-signal closed the hidden doors in the archway and they were alone in the reconciliation chamber. Joe discovered that Sam Tullgren, Director of the Domestic Center, had thought of everything to make reconciliations complete. Susceptibility ticed at the edge of the clearing and frowned as he watched the girl work. Exposure to the rays of the yellow-white sun, half again the size of Sol, had turned her to copper bronze, against which the mane of yellow hair was quite startling. He found that he was taking pleasure in watching the smooth play of muscles in her naked back as she swung the instrument against the tree. Each stroke bit out a chunk of the soft yellowish wood, veined with green. Exertion had put a sheen of perspiration on her shoulders. The proper paleolingual word eluded him. Suddenly he remembered. Of course -- it was an ax. The sound of it, biting into the wood, resounded across the clearing, a sharp, metronomic sound. He heard the crackle of fibers and saw her step back from the tree. Sean Malloy glanced up then, and saw the great mass of branches and The colonists on this world needed help urgently. It was as if they had deliberately decided to set their civilization back to some harsh era out of the past! leaves sway toward him. He gave a gasp of alarm, and forgetting all the dignity of a Praecursor from the Colonial Adjustments Bureau, he ran at right angles to the line of fall. After fifty feet of surprising fleetness, he struck a hummock of grass and fell just at the moment the tree thundered to the ground, so close behind him that the end of a branch rapped him smartly across the shoulders. He crawled out from under the leaves and stood up. The tall woman was hurrying toward him, buttoning on a shirt of coarse fabric, quick concern in her eyes. "You're not hurt?" "It so happens that I'm not," he said acidly. He saw her glance take in his gold question mark of the Praecursor blazoned upon it. She no longer looked concerned. "People who wait for trees to fall on them generally get hurt," she said indifferently. "I am Sean Malloy, Praecursor. They told me, in the village, that I should talk to you. You are Deen Thomason ?" She nodded. She looked regretfully at the tree. "I suppose I can just as well finish it tomorrow. Come along, Malloy." She shouldered the ax and headed across the clearing to the mouth of a narrow trail. Her stride was long. Once again Malloy found himself taking a rather surprising pleasure in watching her. He made a mental note to apply, on his return to the Bureau, for deep psychological analysis. Praecursors who became emotionally involved with colonial women suffered a loss of efficiency. It would be wise to have this susceptibility tracked down and eliminated. In the meantime, to take his attention away from the swing of her walk, he asked hastily, "What were you planning to do with the tree, Thomason?" "Cut off the branches today, saw it tomorrow, then split it and carry the pieces back to my place." "But why?" he asked, baffled. S HE stopped so suddenly that he' almost ran into her. She turned around and he saw a mixture of amusement and irony in her gray eyes. '  "Our winter season is coming, Malloy," she said. "I burn the wood in order to keep warm." She was almost as tall as he. He said, as though reasoning with a child, "Wouldn't it be much sim-. pier to ask for a heat unit? There's a field station here, an unlimited power source. All you have to do is... "Of course, Malloy. It just so happens that I'd rather do it this way." "But..." She had turned again and was striding along the trail. He had to trot to catch up with her. They emerged into a second clearing. A crude wooden house sat at the base of a hill, and he was forced to admit that the setting, with the small busy stream foaming through the rocky channel, was superb. Primitive, though. He followed her to the door of the house. It was open. "Where is your mate?" he asked, realizing too late that his choice of words had been a bit hasty. It was undiplomatic to point out the backwardness of this unfortunate social order without shrewd preparation. She looked more amused than angered. "Sit down, Malloy. I have not yet mated, if that's what you Bureau people prefer to call it." "You built this house yourself?" "No. I selected the spot. All the others helped me. It was built in two days. The Bureau would have been horrified. Everyone working with their hands. Dancing and food that didn't come from the field station and a strong brew made from fruits. Very barbaric." He sat at a bench beside a wooden table. She lifted a trap door, went down steps and returned with a corked earthenwarejug. She poured a cup of water and handed it to him. The day was warm, the water cool and sweet. "Thank you," he said. She sat opposite him. He smiled officially. "Well, shall we get to it, Thomason ? It took me a long time to find you. And I didn't expect anyone like you to be... head of the planet." "Let us be accurate, Malloy. This ' year it happened to be my turn to represent the village at general meeting, and also the turn of my village to supply the chairman for the meeting." M alloy gave her a pained look. "My dear young woman, my duty involves contacting the person in charge here. Are you or are you not in charge?" "If you could say anyone is in charge, I suppose I am." "Then you keep the records, I gather. Issue orders. Take care of administration." "There are no records to keep, Malloy. I issued one order, I think. I set the day of the next meeting. And the villages administer themselves." Malloy stood up, walked to the stone fireplace, turned abruptly. "Please, Thomason. A Praecursor named Zedder was sent here to five and a half of your years. His job was to find out why the field station was almost unutilized, why there were no entertainment imports, why you were canceled off the tour schedules for lack of business. Zedder came here and put his ship on homing automatic with his resignation fastened to the flight panel. That was so unusual that priority. Our press of business is so great that this is the first time you have had Bureau contact since then. "I came here expecting to find most of the population gone. At first I thought I was right. No one seems to live at the Centers the Bureau built for you people. Then here in these crude villages and shacks. It has taken me two full weeks to locate you, Thomason. I'm a busy man. A very busy man. The field station is in perfect working order. I've tested it. I projected a perfectly satisfactory little flier, synthesized foods at random from the list that checked perfectly, even used the teletubes from Center to Center. My job is to find out what's wrong here, Thomason." "Does something have to be wrong?" she demanded. "Don't try my patience, 'Thomason." Her gray eyes narrowed a bit. "I can think of very few things I'm more indifferent to, Malloy, than your patience or lack of patience. This is my home. You have all the normal privileges of a guest. An autocratic attitude is not one of those privileges." He sat down wearily. "I'm sorry. It's just that I'm upset. Where's Zedder?" "I'm sure I haven't the faintest idea." "Isn't there any central record of population? Any index?" "We don't find that necessary, Malloy." "I can't spare the time to hunt in every village for him. I've got four more emergency priority cases to cover in other parts of the Galaxy." '"Then why don't you just get back into whatever you came here in and go take care of them?" the Colonial Bureau sets up proper resident facilities on a planet and stocks the planet with colonists, and when said colonists fail to use the facilities provided, it is the duty of the Colonial Adjustments Bureau to send a Praecursor to make investigation and recommendation as to what sort of adjustment team should be sent to rectify said non-utilization of standard facilities." She looked amused. "I assume you're quoting from some sort of absurd manual, Malloy. Does it actually use the word 'stock' ? As with fish in a pond?" "There is a case on record where one colonial planet suffered such an emotional degeneration that the colonists acquired a superstitious fear of Center facilities and moved off into the woods." "And they were adjusted?" Deen Thomason asked mildly. "Re-educated," Malloy amended, '"rhat sounds dreadful. Just report, Praecursor, that the inhabprimitive life, and that the facilities of the Centers and the field station are used when emergencies arise." "That will make no sense to the Bureau," he said hotly. "You people live out here in absolute squalor. All the Center homes are empty. Insects have gotten in. Of course they can do no damage, but they have spun webs on the projector dials. It's untidy, a criminal waste. You could move to a Center. Everything you could possibly desire would be no farther from your hand than the nearest dial. It is incomprehensible to me, Thomason, that you should prefer to walk back into the earliest history of your race. Every possible comfort was made available when this colonial planet was set up for... She raised her hand. "Please, Malloy. Stand up a moment." He stood up, puzzled. She walked around the table, smiled enigmatically at him and suddenly, clenching her fist, she struck him hard in the diaphragm. He had just enough warning so that he was able to tense his muscles against the blow. Even so, it almost took his breath. "To strike a Praecursor is... "Oh, stop being so stuflfy! Why are you a Praecursor? Why are you reasonably lean and hard and fit? Why aren't you sitting plump and happy within arm's reach of a dial on your home planet?" He stared at her. "Why, I... there have to be Praecursors!" "That point is debatable. But I'm asking why you are one." "I like problems and new places. I suppose," he said hesitantly. "And I have to keep fit because sometimes I run into... strenuous situations. But no one forced me to be a Praecursor." "Exactly," she said. "I hope you realize that you are not making sense, Thomason." "Indeed? I thought I was making a great deal of sense. Anyway, you can report that we are not completely lost. One of the Centers is occupied, you know." "Is it? Good! Which one?" "Number Six. I'd like to visit it with you. I have a reason, Malloy." He pressed the stud on his time ring and the correct sun time of the into his mind. He knew that she was standing near enough to him so that she caught it, too, though less strongly. She chuckled, and it was a surprisingly warm sound. "Why are you laughing?" he asked. "That toy. See the sun pattern on the floor ? From that I could have told you the time within a half hour." "Not much of a degree of accuracy." XX point, Malloy. It's accurate enough." "I can't argue with unreason. Come on. That flier I projected is beyond the clearing where I found you. I'll leave it with you when I go-" "Thank you. I'd have no use for it. And we should eat before we go" "We'll eat at the Center." "Thank you, no. I'll get us something here. First, though, I must bathe." He looked around the room. "No cleansing unit here."  "There's a perfectly good one in the stream, Malloy." She went to the shelves near the fireplace, selected a tunic of softer fabric than her work clothes, and a heavy towel. "You can make yourself useful, Malloy. Build a small fire in the fireplace. But first come here a moment. 'That's iny garden. See those spiky green things? Pull up about a dozen of them and wash them in the stream." Before he could decide whether or not to refuse the request, she had gone, walking toward the stream with that long stride of hers, supple and somehow wild. He selected small sticks and tried with infuriating lack of success to start them burning by using a short hot focus of his pocket heat unit. Angry at failing in so simple a task, he walked out and yanked up a dozen of the growths she had indicated. Black moist soil clung to the bulbular white ends that came out of the ground. He took them to the stream, below the wider part that formed a pool. Remembering the extreme variations in attitudes of modesty on the colonial planets, he did not wish to look directly at her. Praecursors were trained to adapt themselves readily to many odd folkways. But in spite of his intentions he found himself gawking at her as she stood by the pool, tall and tanned and lithe. She smiled down the slope at him as she toweled her shining hair and he made a comparison oddly damaging to the soft pallid women of home. She belted the short aqua tunic around her slim waist and he followed her back to the house. As he watched her she put some dried moss under the sticks in the fireplace, scratched an object which he recognized as being one of the crude firemaking devices of earliest times. It was called, he remembered, a "match." The small fire blazed. She brought ovoid white objects from the cellar, cracked them into an earthenware dish, chopped the bulbous white growths with a crude knife and stirred them into the mixture. The dish was then suspended over the flame while she sawed off heavy slabs of coarse bread, spread them with a yellow substance. M alloy watched closely. 'This primitive substitute for the extremely simple procedure of operating the synthesizer would form an interesting portion of his report. The odor that filled the room, however, made his salivary glands surprisingly active. 'The mixture firmed and she took the dish from over the fire, divided the contents into two parts, placed one part between two heavy slabs of bread and put it on another dish, set it in front of him. Malloy took a cautious bite and then a much larger one. The taste was harsher and more concentrated, the texture far coarser than any food he had ever tasted before. Before he knew it, his share was gone. She washed the dishes in the stream and replaced them on the shelf. "That was very interesting," he said. "But nothing you'd care for day in and day out.?" "N-no," he said. She smiled. "I'm ready, Malloy. Shall we go?" They walked to the small flier. Malloy watched her closely. She had no awe of it, accepted it as something routine and unimpressive. He ducked under the low door, sat down beside her, lifted the flier off the ground, swung around the crest of a clump of trees. "Let me see," he said, "six would be... "Turn it a bit to your right, Malloy. That's enough." Air whined by as he upped the speed. Cabin heat increased and the cooling unit came on. The ground streamed by far below, flattened by the height. He said, in a fatherly tone, "This would be a long trip afoot, the way you people seem to travel." "Several days, Malloy. Through country where pine woods cover the hills, where silvery fish leap high in the lakes, where the trees hold wild honey. At dusk you come to a village. You are always made welcome. Cheese and bread and wine and dancing in the dusk, and the fireflies are like little lanterns." "Oh," he said distantly. "But your way is, of course, much quicker," she added. "I see the Center," he said. in a long swooping curve and dropped it lightly onto cleared land outside the gates. Even as he got out he saw people walking in the wide pastel streets of the Center. It was like a scene from home. They wore clothes of all shades, hues, fancies, whims. A completely anachronistic shack stood outside the gate, though. A tall young man with a full blond beard sat with his back against the door frame. He grinned and stood up as Malloy and Deen approached. He wore the crude garments of the villagers, '"rhomason, isn't it?" he asked. "That's right. This is just an inspection trip." "Go right ahead," he said. He turned to a metallic plate set beside the rude door, depressed a switch. Malloy, slightly baffled, followed Deen through the gate. As he passed through he felt the momentary tingle of a space-twist fence temporarily reversed. Then he straightened his shoulders. He walked beside Thomason. "You see how pleasant life can be in a Center." he asked proudly. A well-larded woman sat in the sun playing with two romping fuzzy creatures she had created out of the mental projector. Beyond her a man slept propped against a wall, halfempty bottles surrounding him. "Very pleasant," Thomason said. "They all have everything they want. Who would want to live out in the brush when everything is right here, within arm's reach? Exotic foods, toys, amusement." "Who indeed?" Thomason stressed with gentle irony.  Malloy beamed at the colonists. They had the familiar triple chins of the home planet, the same shortness of breath, the same bland look that comes of satiety in all things. But he was puzzled by the way they stared at the two of them. Dulled eyes, with the glow of resentment almost submerged. At the end of the street he stopped. "But the rest of the Center is empty!" he said. "Yes. There's just this one street. We can't go any farther. The fence will stop us." She turned and started back. He caught her in two quick strides, grasped her arm and pulled her around roughly. "Why have you people installed a twist fence around this street?" "Because there's no need to put it around a bigger area." "Why put it around any area?" he shouted into her face. "You are rude," she said coldly. "And rnore stupid than I thought. We'll walk back slowly. Look at their faces, Malloy. Look long and well. You see, this is the penal colony for this planet." The breath whoofed out of him.  "Penal? But... Wait. Anybody who lives here can have every last thing they want." "Exactly," she said. Subdued, he walked beside her and he looked at their faces. village. He heard the thin eager voices of children at play. Smoke from the cook fires lost itself in the grayness overhead where the first strange star patterns were beginning to appear. Deen sat with her back against a tree. Sean Malloy lay stretched out on the grass on his back, the concavity of the nape of his neck fitting comfortably over the warm convexity of her thigh. An insect lit on the back of his hand and he slapped it. He squirmed a 'bit. He wasn't yet accustomed to the scratchiness of homespun clothes. He squinted up at the skies and thought of his ship speeding toward Bureau headquarters, the resignation affixed to the automatic controls. This was the third night back at her home. "A crazy thing to do," he muttered. She took her cool fingertips from his forehead abruptly. "Sorry you did it, Sean?" she asked a bit frigidly. He captured her hand, kissed the palm. "Not the way it sounded. My ship will get back there. They'll new Praecursor will be here in probably less than four years. He may send an adjustment team." The children were being called in from play. A few hundred feet down the unpaved main street came' thefirst tentative sounds of music. "I wouldn't worry about that, Sean," she said softly. He sat up, faced her. "Why in Sol not?" She smiled at him. "Because when he comes, he'll go looking for the person in charge, won't hei" "Naturally." "It was decided a long time ago that what little centralized administration we need should be handled by those of us least likely to be hungry for that sort of power." "I don't get the connection." "Village representatives to the general meeting are always unmarried girls, and are always those considered to be the most pleasing to the eye. And we are beginning to find that anyone who has become a Praecursor seems peculiarly... susceptible to this sort of existence." H e was silent for a long time, and then he laughed. "Poor Zedder," he said. "And poor Malloy," she added teasingly. Suddenly he became suspicious. "Did you have orders to -- to -- " "Seduce the Praecursor? How strangely short your memory is, my Sean! I seem to remember that the shoe was on the other foot." She stood up quickly and held out her hand. "Come. They will expect us to dance. I shall teach you. It will make you hungry for the wedding feast." "How barbaric!" muttered the ex-Praecursor as he urgently uptilted her mouth. "How primitive you're becoming!" she taunted, and writhed out of his arms. He caught her finally, but only because she let him. He needed some woodchopping and farming, maybe some hunting and hiking, too, before he could outrun her legitimately. A couple of months and she would see who was the stronger. Don't miss the ingenious solutions! T# T he pickings are slim this month. Three books, one of them not science fiction and another a minor effort by a major author, make up our quota. The book which, despite its various faults, stacks up as a worthwhile addition to one's science fiction collection is Stanton A. Coblentz's After # Years (Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., # pages, #). It comes as a surprise to find myself enjoying this book, for I have heretofore found Coblentz's tales almost painfully gauche and sententious in style and idea. It is true that the present opus is no masterpiece of vari-colored writing, and that its romantic elements are handled with all the sensitiveness of the Sweet Singer of Michigan. But if you pass up these defects, you will find it one of the most interesting and believable anti-Utopias of recent decades. The book was first published, according to the copyright notice, in #; in many ways it sounds much older. For example, Coblentz's description of aircraft is more like Jules Verne than what has come since the Wright brothers. Yet the ideas in the book are valid -- more so today, I believe, than when the book was written. Coblentz conceives of a world in which the class society has been frozen rigid by ruthless selective breeding and genetic manipulation. By the time the story takes place, #I A.D., the people of the vorld are differentiated into the Political-Financial species or "Wolf Faces" -- politicians, dictators, slaveowners, the elite of the society; the Intellectuals, or "Large Heads;" and the "Small Heads," subdivided into Workers and Soldiers. In addition there is a remnant of normal human beings occupying caves on the island of Borneo, defending themselves as best they can against Wolf Face hunting bands. The peoples of organized society (but not the Borneans) are kept under control by automatic propaganda reminiscent of that in George Orwell's #S#, and also of the Nazis' own "Big Lie" technique -- a remarkable prevision of Hitlerism by Coblentz. The hero of the story is from our times, and survives # years as the result of a faulty experiment with suspended animation. He is much like the Borneans in appearance; and, like them, when they are captured, he is enslaved, forced to become a "Keeper of the Insects," a frightful job. The insects he tends comprise the armies of the empires of the world, Panamica, A-Uria, and Afalia, of which the most aggressive is the US "Financial Democracy" of Panamica, by whose soldiery the hero of the story was captured. The armies of insects, bred for enormous size, vicious temper and specialized activity (they include wasps, bees, soldier ants, locusts and such) are tended by Bornean slaves and by Small Head Workers. After adventures including a jello-like affair with a Bornean girl named Luellen, the hero is transferred to the Panamican army, given a mission to spread termites over A-Uria.from an airship, captured by the enemy and set to work as a farmer. However, before anything drastic can happen to him, the whole civilization is wiped out by termites, which turn on their masters and consume every bit of food left in the world -- including the starved corpses of the people. All of the world is theirs except for Borneo, to which the hero and his Bornean beloved escape. Make no mistake -- this is not one of science fiction's works of genius. But it is fresh and full of uncomfortable ideas about the future. T he other science fiction item on our list this month is A. E. van Vogt's The House That Stood Still (Greenberg: Publisher, # pages, #). "This is a potboiler that develops no head of steam -- a routine attempt at a detective story of the frenetic "West Coast" school, forced into a science fiction mold by inserting "Immortals" and their never-changing house (built around the spaceship of a prehistoric visitor to Earth) which keeps them immortal. The story, with its various dreary murders, revolves around the struggles between two factions of the Immortals, one of which wants to quit Earth in the spaceship and go to Mars before Earth's inevitable atomic war blasts them to bits, and the few -- including the bee-youtiful heroine -- who want to stay and try to stop the war with their superhuman powers. Allison Stephens, estate agent for the richest of the Immortals, is an Erie Stanley Gardner type of hero. At the end of # out of # chapters, he is knocked out, held up, or in other ways pushed around the landscape to make him stop interfering. Of course, he wins out in the end, getting the heroine, fame, gold, immortality in one big, delicious economy package. The book is readable, no question about it. But in science fiction more is needed, as van Vogt's other ination, scope -- these things, essential in good science fiction, this book has in minimal quantities. I would class it as a rental library property. T he month's third book is pseudo-historical romance, with a tablespoonful of black magic and diabolism. It is of the same genre as E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, (which of course surpasses our current item). Even so, Robert E. Howard's Conan The Conqueror Gnome Press, Inc., # pages, #, originally published under the title The Hour of the Dragon in one of the # pulps) is a col' orful action story, in many ways a delightful piece of relaxation reading. Much of the action in the story, which takes place in semi-mythical places and times, concerns the conspiracies of Xaltotun, a sorcerer # years dead, revived for purposes of the plot by a clique of empire-seekers who use the rediscovered "Heart of Ahriman" as their revivifying instrument. Conan, a king against whom the others conspire, is a believable and fullbodied character; one could wish that Howard had done more with him and less with his villains and black magics. As a straight creation of the imagination, the world of Conan and his co-players on their swashbuckling stage has real merit. As a piece of writing it is only average, being pretty well laden with bombast. As supernatural literature it is faintly ridiculous. Nevertheless, for those who like to lean back and read with their minds closed, Conan will be highly acceptable and enjoyable. The Reluctant Pioneers hove always resented their wanderlust, hated their hardships. But the future brings a new grudge -- when pioneers stay put and scholars do the exploring! r HE very young man sal on the edge of the sofa and looked nervous. He carefully studied his fingernails and ran his hands through his hair and picked imaginary lint off the upholstery. "I have a chance to go with the first research expedition to Venus," he said. The older man studied the very young man thoughtfully and then leaned over to his humidor and offered him a cigaret. "It's nice to have the new air units now. There was a time when we had to be very careful about things like smoking." The verv young man was annoyed. "I don't think I want to go," he blurted. "I don't think I would care to spend two years there." The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air exhaust vent. "You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here. You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on Venus." The very young man nodded miserably. "I guess that's it." Heroes "Anything else?" The very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again and finally said, in a low voice, "Yes, there is." "A girl?" A nod confirmed this. It was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. "You know, I'm sure, that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should be staffed by couples. That is, of course, as soon as it's practical." "But that might be a long time!" the very young man protested. "It might be -- but sometimes it's sooner than you think. And the goal is worth it." "I suppose so, but -- " The older man smiled. "Still the reluctant heroes," he said, somewhat to himself. key. Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back. Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more. Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-manhas-his-price idea. 'They probably thought he liked it there. Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills, and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys didn't work right. And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the opportunity. The key started to stutter again, demanding an answer. He tapped out his reply: "No!" There was a silence and then the key stammered once more in a sudden fit of bureaucratic rage. Chapman stuffed a rag under it and ignored it. He turned to the hammocks, strung against the bulkhead on the other side of the room. The chattering of the key hadn't awakened anybody; they were still asleep, making the animal noises that people usually make in slumber. Dowden, half in the bottom hammock and half on the floor, was snoring peacefully. Dahl, the poor kid who was due for stopover, was mumbling to himself. Julius Klein, with that look of ineffable happiness on his face, looked as if he had just squirmed under the tent to his personal idea of heaven. Donley and Bening were lying perfectly still, their covers not mussed, sleeping very lightly. Lord, Chapman thought. I'll be happy when I can see some other faces. "What'd they want?" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on his face. "They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands," Chapman whispered back. "What did you say?" He shrugged. "No." "You kept it short," somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and sitting on the side of his hammock. "If it had been me, I would have told them just what they could do about it." T he others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head. Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. "Sore, aren't you?" "Kind of. Who wouldn't be?" "Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon. They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good man to stay on the job a while longer." "All they're trying to do," Chapman said sarcastically. "They've got a fat chance." "They think you've found a home here," Donley said. "Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?" Dahl was awake, looking bitter. "Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of us aren't going back today." No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back. Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips, and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day for breakfast duty. The others, started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth. And that includes me. Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally going home. He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was morning -- the Moon's "morning" -- and he shivered slightly. The rays of the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise. A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, juryrigged out of small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever. That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon, one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances. Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long you could almost taste the glue on the label. D onley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside. Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them. "Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left there yet." Klein asked. "I talked to them on the last call," Chapman said. "The relief ship left there twelve hours ago. They should get here" -- he looked at his watch -- "in about six and a half hours." "Chap, you know. I've been thinking," Donley said quietly. "You've been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing you're going to do once you get back?" It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly. "I don't know," Qiapman said slowly. "I guess I was trying not to think of that. I suppose none of us have. We've been like little kids who have waited so long for Christmas that they just can't believe it when it's finally Christmas Eve." Klein nodded in agreement. "I haven't been here three years like you have, but I think I know what you mean." He warmed up to it as the idea sank in. "Just what the hell are you going to do?" "Nothing very spectacular," Chapman said, smiling. "I'm going T# to rent a room over Times Square, get a recording of a rikky-tik piano, and drink and listen to the music and watch the people on the street below. Then I think I'll see somebody." "Who's the somebody?" Donley asked. Chapman grinned. "Oh, just somebody. What are you going to do, Dick?" "Well, I'm going to do something practical. First of all, I want to turn over all my geological samples to the government. Then I'm going to sell my life story to the movies and then -- why, then, I think I'll get drunk!" Everybody laughed and Chapman turned to Klein. "How about you, Julius?" Klein looked solemn. "Like Dick, I'll first get rid of my obligations to the expedition. 'Then I think I'll go home and see my wife." They were quiet. "I thought all members of the groups were supposed to be single," Donley said. '"They are. And I can see their reasons for it. But who could pass up the money the Commission was paying?" "If I had to do it all over again? Me," said Donley promptly. "They laughed. Somebody said: "Go play your record. Chap. Today's the day for it." The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good. The roads are the dustiest, The winds are the gustiest The gates are the rustiest, The pies are the crustiest, The songs are the lustiest, The friends the trustiest. Way back home They were beginning to feel it now. Chapman thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was just starting to sink in. "You know, Chap," Donley said, "it won't seem like the same old Moon without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or something and it just won't have the same old appeal." "Like they say in the army," Bening said, "you never had it so good. You found a home here." The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it too much. The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to investigate. And the time went faster when you kept busy. Copyright by liregman, Vocco  Conn, Inc. Qiapman stopped them at the lock. "Remember to check your suits for leaks," he warned. "And check the valves of your oxygen tanks." Donley looked sour. "I've gone out at least five hundred times," he said, "and you check me each time." "And I'd check you five hundred more," Oiapman said. "It takes only one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go through one of those and that's it, brother." Donley sighed. "Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us if we caught cold. But some day. Chap old man, you're gonna find out that your little boys can watch out for themselves!" But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank before he left. Only Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens. "I never knew you were married," Chapman said. Klein didn't look up. "There wasn't much sense in talking about it. You just get to thinking and wanting -- and there's nothing you can do about it. You talk about it and it just makes it worse." "She let you go without any fuss, huh?" "No, she didn't make any fuss. But I don't think she liked to see me go, either." He laughed a little. "At least I hope she didn't." T hey were silent for a while. "What do you miss most. Chap?" Klein asked. "Oh, I know what we said a little while ago, but I mean seriously." Chapman thought a minute. "I think I miss the sky," he said quietly. "The blue sky and the green grass and trees with leaves on them that turn color in the Fall. I think, when I go back, that I'd like to go out in a rain storm and strip and feel the rain on my skin." He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging. "And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark." He studied his hands. "I think what I miss most is people -- all kinds of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people, and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I miss my fellow man more than anything." "Got a girl back home?" Klein asked almost casually. "Yes." "You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it." "Same reason you didn't mention your wife. You get to thinking about it." Klein flipped the lid on the specimen box. "Going to get married when you get back?" Chapman was at the port again, staring out at the bleak landscape. "We hope to." "Settle down in a small cottage and raise lots of little Chapmans, eh?" Chapman nodded. "That's the only future," Klein said. He put away the box and came over to the port. Chapman moved over so they both could look out. "Chap." Klein hesitated a moment. "What happened to Dixon ?" "He died," Qiapman said. "He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science. Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much about it that he forgot a lot of little things -- like how to stay alive. The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in time." "He had his walkie-talkie with him?" "Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his mind at the end." Klein's face was blank. "What's your real job here, Chap? Why does somebody have to stay for stopover?" "Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for. And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to live in it. There's a lot of things to learn -- and some people just never learn." "You're nursemaid, then." "I suppose you could call it that." K lein said, "You're not a scientist, are you?" "No, you should know that. I came as the pilot of the first ship. We made the bunker out of parts of the ship so there wasn't anything to go back on. I'm a good mechanic and I made myself useful with the machinery. When it occurred to us that somebody was going to have to stay over, I volunteered. I thbught the others were so important that it was better they should take their samples and data back to Earth when the first relief ship came." "You wouldn't do it again, though, would you?" "No, I wouldn't." "Do you think Dahl will do as good a job as you've done here?" Chapman frowned. "Frankly, I hadn't thought of that. I don't believe I care. I've put in my time; it's somebody else's turn. now. He volunteered for it. I think I was fair in explaining all about the job when you talked it over among yourselves." "You did, but I don't think Dahl's the man for it. He's too young, too much of a kid. He volunteered because he thought it made him look like a hero. He doesn't have the judgment that an older man would have. That you have." Chapman turned slowly around and faced Klein. "I'm not the indispensable man," he said slowly, "and even if I was, it wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm sorry if Dahl is young. So was I. I've lost three years up here. And I don't intend to lose any more." Klein held up his hands. "Look, Chap, I didn't mean you should stay. I know how much you hate it and the time you put in up here. It's just -- " His voice trailed away. "It's just that I think it's such a damn important job." Klein had gone out in a last search for rock lichens and Chapman enjoyed one of his relatively few moments of privacy. He wandered over to his bunk and opened his barracks bag. He checked the underwear and his toothbrush and shaving kit for maybe the hundredth time and pushed the clothing down farther in the canvas. It was foolish because the bag was already packed and had been for a week. He remembered stalling it off for as long as he could and then the quiet satisfaction about a week before, when he had opened his small gear locker and transferred its meager belongings to the bag. He hadn't actually needed to pack, of course. In less than twentyfour hours he'd be back on Earth where he could drown himself in toothpaste and buy more tee shirts than he could wear in a lifetime. He could leave behind his shorts and socks and the outsize shirts he had inherited from -- who was it? Driesbachi' -- of the First group. Dahl could probably use them or maybe one of the boys in the Third. B ut it wasn't like going home unless you packed. It was part of the ritual, like marking off the last three weeks in pencil on the gray steel of the bulkhead beside his hammock. Just a few hours ago, when he woke up, he had made the last check mark and signed his name and the date. His signature was right beneath Dixon's. He frowned when he thought of Dixon and slid back the catch on the top of the bag and locked it. They should never have sent a kid like Dixon to the Moon. He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in and unscrew its helmet. Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely, considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody today. Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of sweat and his eyes were frightened. He moistened his lips slightly. "Do -- do you think they'll ever have relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Qiap? I mean, considering the advance of -- " "No," 'Chapman interrupted bluntly. "I don't. Not at least for ten years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper. Bob, it won't come about so it will shorten stopover right away." He stopped, feeling a little sorry for Dahl. "It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them." "Well, you see," Dahl started, "that's why I came back early. I wanted to see you about stopover. It's that -- well, I'll put it this way." He seemed to be groping for an easy way to say what he wanted to. 'Tm engaged back home. Really nice girl, Chap, you'd like her if you knew her." He fumbled in his pocket and found a photograph and put it on the desk. "That's a picture of Alice, taken at a picnic we were on together." Chapman didn't look. "She -- we -- expected to be married when I got back. I never told her about stopover. Chap. She thinks I'll be home tomorrow. I kept thinking, hoping, that maybe somehow -- " He was fumbling it badly. Chapman thought. "You wanted to trade places with me, didn't you, Bob. You thought I might stay for stopover again, in your place?" It hurt to look in Dahl's eyes. They were the eyes of a man who was trying desperately to stop what he was about to do, but just couldn't help himself. "Well, yes, more or less. Oh, God, Chap, I know you want to go home! But I couldn't ask any of the others; you were the only one who could, the only one who was qualified #" D ahl looked as though he was going to be sick. Chapman tried to recall all he knew about him. Dahl, Robert. Good mathematician. Graduate from one of the Ivy League schools. Father was a manufacturer of stoves or something. It still didn't add, not quite. "You know I don't like it here any more than you do," Chapman said slowly. "I may have commitments at home, too. What made you think I would change my mind?" Dahl took the plunge. "Well, you see," he started eagerly, too far gone to remember such a thing as pride, "you know my father's pretty well fixed. We would make it worth your while. Chap." He was feverish. "It would mean eighteen more months, Qiap, but they'd be well-paid months !" Chapman felt tired. The good feeling he had about going home was slowly evaporating. "If you have any report to make, I think you had better get at it," he cut in, keeping all the harshness he felt out of his voice. "It'll be too late after the relief ship leaves. It'll be easier to give the captain your report than try to radio it back to Earth from here." He felt sorrier for Dahl than he could ever remember having felt for anybody. Long after going home, Dahl would remember this. It would eat at him like a cancer. Cowardice is the one thing for which no man ever forgives himself. D onley was eating a sandwich and looking out the port, so, naturally, he saw the ship first. "Well, whaddya know!" he shouted. "We got company!" He dashed for his suit. Dowden and Bening piled after him and all three started for the lock. Chapman was standing in front of it. "Check your suits," he said softly. "Just be sure to check." "Oh, what the hell. Chap!" Donley started angrily. Then he shut up and went over his suit. He got to his tank and turned white. Empty. It was only half a mile to the relief rocket, so somebody would probably have got to him in time, but... He bit his lips and got a full tank. Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman noticed one -- it was probably Donley -- pat the ship affectionately before he started back. They were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First. Donley and the others were all over them. H OW was it back on Earth ? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still teaching at the university? What was the international situation? Was the sky still blue, was the grass still green, did the leaves still turn color in the autumn, did people still love and cry and were there still people who didn't know what an atom was and didn't give a damn ? Chapman had gone through it all before. But was Ginny still Ginny ? Some of the men in the Third had their luggage with them. One of them -- a husky, red-faced kid box about a foot square and six inches deep. Chapman watched him curiously. "Well, I'll be damned!" Klein said. "Hey, guys, look what we've got here!" Chapman and the others crowded around and suddenly Donley leaned over and took a deep breath. In the box, covering a thick layer of ordinary dirt, was a plot of grass. They looked at it, awed. Klein put out his hand and laid it on top of the grass. "I like the feel of it," he said simply. Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors. could spare a little water for it and maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help but bring it along; it se'emed sort of like a symbol... He looked embarrassed. Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph. '"rhat's valuable grass," Dahl -- Current New Books -- #. The current issue of 'New Worlds" -- British Science Fiction Masrazine #. An Earthman on Venus, by Ralph Milne Farley (Pocket Book Edition) #. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, (Pocket Book Edition) #. Behind the Moon, by Edmond Hamilton, (Pocket Book Edition) #. Into Plutonian Depths, by Stanton A. Coblentz, (Pocket Book Edition) #. Princess of the Atom, by Ray Cummings, (Pocket Book Edition) Fiction Novels (Cloth Bound Books): #. Needle, by Hal Clement #. Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov #. The Island of Captain Sparrow, by S. Fowler Wright #. Fury, by Laurence O'Donnell #. The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. A new copy of this famous classic: A fine boxed Edition. Illustrated in color by W. A. 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Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself. "You might say I'm in charge here," Chapman said. "Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together privately ?" They walked over to one corner of the bunker. "This is about as private as we can get, captain," Chapman said. "What's on your mind?" E berlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked at Chapman. "I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than anybody else," he began. "I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity." Eberlein took out a pack of cigar rets. "Mind if I smoke?" Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. "Ask him. He's in charge now." The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. "You know we have big plans for the station," he said. "I hadn't heard of them." "Oh, yes, big plans. They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this. Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked together. Make good laboratories and living quarters fot you people." His eyes swept the room. "Have a little privacy for a change." Chapman nodded. "They could use a little privacy up here." The captain noticed the pronoun. "Well, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you. Chapman. 'The Commission talked it over and they'd like to see you stay. 'They feel if they're going to enlarge it, add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only man who's capable and who's had the experience." The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong. "Is that all?" Eberlein was ill at ease. "Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to double your salary -- maybe even a bonus in addition -- and let you have full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories." All this and a title too, Chapman thought. "That's it?" Chapman asked. Eberlein frowned. "Well, the to consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or... "The answer is no," Chapman said. "I'm not interested in more money for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it, captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to appreciate that. "Bob Dahl is staying for stopover. If there's something important about the project or impending changes, perhaps you'd better tell him before you go." He walked away. both hands, but the paper still shook. The others had left the bunker, the men of the Second taking those of the Third in hand to show them the machinery and apparatus that was outside, point out the deadly blisters underneath the pumice covering, and show them how to keep out of the Sun and how to watch their air supply. He was glad he was alone. He felt something trickle down his face and tasted salt on his lips. The rhail had been distributed and he had saved his latest letter until the others had left so he could read it in privacy. It was a short letter, very short. It started: "Dear Joel: This isn't going to be a nice letter, but I thought it best that you should know before you came home." There was more to it, but he hadn't even needed to read it to know what it said. It wasn't original, of course. Women who change their minds weren't exactly an innovation, either. He crumpled the paper and held a match to it and watched it burn on the steel floor. Three years had been a long time. It was too long a time to keep loving a man who was a quartcould look up in the night sky when she was out with somebody else now and tell him how she had once been engaged to the Man in the Moon. It would make good conversation. It would be funny. A joke. He got up and walked over to his phonograph and put the record on. The somewhat scratchy voice sang as if nothing had happened. T he home food's the spreadiest, The old wine's theheadiest, The old pals the readiest, The home gal's the steadiest, The love the liveliest. The life the loveliest. Way back home. The record caught and started repeating the last line. He hadn't actually wanted to play it. It had been an automatic response. He had played it lots of times before when he had thought of Earth. Of going home. He crossed over and threw the record across the bunker and watched it shatter on the steel wall and the pieces fall to the floor. The others came back in the bunker and the men of the Second started grabbing their bags and few belongings and getting ready to leave. Dahl sat in a corner, a peculiar expression on his face. He lookedas if he wanted to cry and yet still felt that the occasion was one for rejoicing. Chapman walked over to him. "Get your stuff and leave with the others, Dahl." His voice was cjuiet and hard. Dahl looked up, opened his mouth to say something, and then shut up. Donley and Bening and Dowden were already in the airlock, ready to leave. Klein caught the conversation and came over. He gripped Chapman's arm. "What the hell's going on. Chap? Get your bag and let's go. I know just the bistro to throw a whing-ding when we get -- " "I'm not going back," Chapman said. Klein looked annoyed, not believing him. "Come on, what's the matter with you? You suddenly decide you don't like the blue sky and trees and stuff? Let's go!" The men in the lock were looking at them questioningly. Some members of the 'Third looked embarrassed, like outsiders caught in a family argument. "Look, Julius, I'm not going back," Chapman repeated dully. "I haven't anything to go back for." "You're doing a much braver thing than you may think," a voice cut in. It belonged to Eberlein. Chapman looked at him. Eberlein flushed, then turned and walked-stiffly to the lock to join the others. Just before the inner door of the lock shut, they could hear Chapman, his hands on his hips, break: ing in the Third on how to be happy and stay healthy on the Moon. His voice was ragged and strained and sounded like a topsergeant's. outer port of the relief ship, staring back at the research bunker. It was half hidden in the shadows of a rocky overhang that protected it from meteorites. "They kidded him a lot this morning," Dahl said. "They said he had found a home on the Moon." "If we had stayed an hour or so more, he might have changed his mind and left, after all," Eberlein mused, his face a thoughtful mask behind his air helmet. "I offered him money," Dahl said painfully. "I was a coward and I offered him money to stay in my Edited by Martin Greenberg Here is a brand-new companion volume to the best-selling Alen Against the Stars -- a dramatic story of Man, from his earliest beginnings to the final days of the race, told through the vivid stories of science fiction's top writers! 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Eberlein turned to him quickly and automatically told him the right thing. "We're all cowards once in a while," he said earnestly. "But your offer of money had nothing to do with his staying. He stayed because he had to stay, because we made him stay." "I don't understand," Dahl said. "Chapman had a lot to go home for. He was engaged to be married." Dahl winced. "We got her to write him a letter breaking it off. We knew it meant that he lost one of his main reasons for wanting to go back. I think, perhaps, that he still would have left if we had stayed and argued him into going. But we left before he could change his mind." "That -- was a lousy thing to do!" "We had no choice. We didn't use it except as a last resort." "I don't know of any girl who would have done such a thing, no matter what your reasons, if she was in love with a guy like Chapman," Dahl said. "There was only one who would have," Eberlein agreed. "Ginny Dixon. She understood what we were trying to tell her. She had to; her brother had died up here." "Why was Chapman so important?" Dahl burst out. "What could he have done that I couldn't have done -- would have done if I had had any guts?" "Perhaps you could have," Eberlein said. "But I doubt it. I don't think there were many men who could have. And we couldn't take the chance. Chapman knows how to live on the Moon. He's like a trapper who's spent all his time in the forests and knows it like the palm of his hand. He never makes mistakes, he never fails to check things. And he isn't a scientist. He would never become so preoccupied with research that he'd fail to make checks. And he can watch out for those who do make mistakes. Ginny understood that all too well." "How did you know all this about Chapman?" Dahl asked. "The men in the First told us some of it. And we had our own observer with you here. Bening kept us pretty well informed."I -- J thoughtfully. "It costs a lot of money to send ships up here and establish a colony. It will cost a lot to expand it. And with that kind of investment, you don't take chances. You have to have the best men for the job. You get them even if they don't want to do it." He gestured at the small, blotchy globe of blue and green that was the Earth, riding high in the black sky. "You remember what it was like five years ago, Dahl? Nations at each other's throats, re-arming to the teeth? It isn't that way now. We've got the one lead that nobody can duplicate or catch up on. Nobody has our technical background. I know, this isn't a military base. But it could become one." He paused. "But these aren't even the most important reasons, Dahl. We're at the beginnings of space travel, the first bare, feeble start. If this base on the Moon succeeds, the whole human race will be Outward Bound." He waved at the stars. "You have your choice -- a frontier that lies in the stars, or a psychotic little world that tries and fails and spends its time and talents trying to find better methods of suicide. "With a choice like that, Dahl, you can't let it fail. And personal lives and viewpoints are expendable. But it's got to be that way. There's too much at stake." Eberlein hesitated a moment and when he started again, it was on a different track. "You're an odd bunch of guys, you and the others in the groups, Dahl. Damn few of you come up for the glamor, I know. None of you like it and none of you are really enthusiastic about it. You were all reluctant to come in the first place, for the most part. You're a bunch of pretty reluctant heroes, Dahl." The captain nodded soberly at the bunker. "I, personally, don't feel happy about that. I don't like having to mess up other people's lives. I hope I won't have to again. Maybe somehow, someway, this one can be patched up. We'll try to." He started the mechanism that closed the port of the rocket. His face was a study of regret and helplessness. He was thinking of a future that, despite what he had told Dahl, wasn't quite real to him. "I feel like a cheap son of a bitch," Eberlein said. HE very young man said, "Do they actually care where they send us? Do they actually care what we think?" The older man got up and walked to the window. The bunkers and towers and squat buildings of the research colony glinted in the sunlight. The colony had come a long way; it housed several thousands now. The Sun was fust rising for the long morning and farther down shadows stabbed across the crater floor. Tycho was by far the most' beautiful of the craters, he thought. It was trice to know that the very young man was going to miss it. It had taken the older man quite a long time to get to like it. But that was to be expected -- he hadn't been on the Moon. "I would say so," he said. "They were cruel, that way, at the start. But then they had to be. The goal was too important. And they made up for it as soon as they could. It didn't take them too long to remember the men who had traded their future for the stars." The very young man said, "Did you actually think of it that way when you first came up here?" The older man thought for a minute. "No," he admitted. "No, we didn't. Most of us were strictly play-for-pay men. The Commission wanted men who wouldn't fall apart when the glamor wore off and there was nothing left but privation and hard work and loneliness. The men who fell for the glamor were all right for quick trips, but not for an eighteen-month stay in a research bunker. So the Commission offered high salaries and we reluctantly took the jobs. "Oh, there was the idea behind the project, the vision the Commission had in mind. But it took a while for that to grow." A woman came in the room just then, bearing a tray with glasses on it. The older man took one and said, "Your mother and I were notified yesterday that you had been chosen to go. We tvould like to see you go, but of course the final decision is up to you." He sipped his drink and turned to his wife: "It has its privations, but in the long run we've never regretted it, have we, Ginny?" AI befs ore off on short stories ond orticle. With one-third of a genuinely book-length novel plus # words complete in one issue, it's possible only to guess whot else will fit in. This lineup looks just obout right, however. UO Su flot Doo rate!  If you've missed any of the first three issues of tvo, or even all three!  You'll want the complete Clifford D. Simak novel, "Time Quarry," of course, as well as powerful novelets by Theodore Sturgeon, Katherine MacLean, Fredric Brown, Anthony Boucher, Raymond F. Jones, James H. Schmitz... and a platinum mine of short stories that noted anthologists are negotiating for right now.  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QMdXy # Galaxy Editor-in-Chief Art Director Advertising Manager February, #I Vol. #, No. # by Ray Bradbury # Cover by Illustrating The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert sandstorm is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscriptions (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Application for entry as second-class matter is pending at the Post Office, New York, N.Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President: George A. Gogniat. Vice-President: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer : Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed, in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Lester del Rey # by Betsy Curtis # by Clifford D. Simak # by Frank M. Robinson I # by Isaac Asimov # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Next issue at your newsstand first week in February Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S, Pat. Off.  The most attractive appearance in its field. No reader, whether Ph.D., M.D., D.D., hackie, housewife or haber The most beautiful covers in its field. Paintings by reproduced with the minutest fidelity on Champion Kromekote, the choicest cover stock obtainable!  The highest rates and most liberal policy on story ever in the resale of any story that appears in it, which  The best fiction in its field. The finest science fiction the greatest impact and is growing more swiftly than any other magazine in its field?  M'm, yes, it could be... and it is! For # issues of convincing proof, send # and your name and address to: Yardstick for Science Fiction  business rivals, there is no succeeded enormously. Of these, only our competitors are baffled by these phenomena: believe in the publishing platitudes of good characterization, believable situations, credible conflict, all of which have been talked up for years while the opposite was used. use them can be attested to by a letter from an author whose name would be instantly recognized: "... I opened the first issue with interest but without any special expectation, one way or the other. I recognized your name on the masthead... and I was impressed with both the ambitious format and the table of contents names. Then I read it, almost at one sitting -- and realized I was reading the first fully adult science fiction magazine I had ever held in my hands! "... Frankly, I didn't think you could keep it up more than one issue, being fairly sure that there was not that much good stuff to be had. But the second issuewas as good as the first and so was the third... "The quality of everything that high that, when I write for it, I want to be represented by my best work." Guess at the name if you wish; you may even be right... but I'll hold it until I have a definite announcement to make. Yes, there is enough good stuff to be had, now that writers are to discard the shabby wrappings in which science fiction has been embalmed; mummified, almost. This policy was inevitable, for it merely applies the standards of any legitimate branch of literature to science fiction. I don't want to keep this policy exclusively ours, for I do not fear good competition, which can expand the field immensely, but I am mortally afraid of retread private eye, western and Congo Sam stories masquerading as science fiction.  As I mentioned in an earlier editorial, reader-editor collaboration has often been offered, seldom despite warnings even from readers that .the screwballs might demand old hat science fiction. None did. zine it is due to reader participation and guidance! excited support of the best writers of science fiction. These authors were not misled by party girls on our payroll, nor drugged into submitting. They came voluntarily because of our challenging editorial policy and the highest rates in the field. And just as important... zine publication rights. We retain no other rights at all, whether radio, pocketbook, anthologization, or any other sort. We demand not a single cent of the payment for This point may be obscure to non-writers, but it is of vital concern to authors. Vital enough, I believe, for readers to have it explained to them. Counting false starts, stories that won't work out, stories that shouldn't have been written at all but seemed good at the time, research, productive labor, etc., it takes a stupendous amount of writing at even the highest rates to support an author and his family on magazine sales alone. Any additional income a story can bring in, through anthologization, pocketbook reprint, or other resale, is important to him. not use fictitious excuses to deprive writers of this income, such as regarding them as business infants who must be protected against their inclination to give their work away for nothing -- while demanding a share of resale price.  Because of our higher rates and refusal to cut in on earnings that are not ethically a magazine pubconsequence, getting the finest science fiction stories. Also as a consequence, apparently, "Needle" by Hal Clement will Science Fiction Novel, though announced last month. A fraction of the book first appeared in another magazine, and since it is that publisher's policy to retain reprint rights, it has been refused us, despite the wishes of the author and the publishers of the clothbound edition. Hal Clement has thus suffered a serious financial loss -- a guarantee of almost the original price of the story, and royalties that could very possibly make it much more -- through having his interests "protected." It is dubious protection that can, cancel a sale for an author and yet often involve a demand for a substantial part of the payment. In some cases, this demand may amount to as much as the original price of the story. We regret being unable to offer this fine book... but we do have Space" by Arthur C. Clarke. It's good! And it's still only # i. A master of science fiction presents his masterwork of frightening conviction... the world of the future WE are creating! I Fire, Fire, Burn Books T HE four men sat silently playing blackjack under a green drop-light in the dark morning. Only a voice whispered from the ceiling: "One thirty-five a.m. Thursday morning, October #th, #, A.D... One forty a.m... one fifty... Mr. Montag sat stiffly among the other firemen in the fire house, heard the voice-clock mourn out the cold hour and the cold year, and shivered. The other three glanced up. "What's wrong, Montag?" A radio hummed somewhere... War may be declared any hour. This country stands ready to defend its destiny and... The fire house trembled as five hundred jet-planes screamed across the black morning sky. The firemen slumped in their coal-blue uniforms, with the look of thirty years in their blue-shaved, sharp, pink faces 'and their burntcolored hair. Stacked behind them were glittering piles of auxiliary helmets. Downstairs in concrete dampness the fire monster itself slept, the silent dragon of nickel and tangerine colors, the boa-con; strictor hoses, the twinkling brass. "I'm thinking of our last job," said Mr. Montag. "Don't," said Leahy, the fire chief.  "That poor man, when we burned his library. How would it feel if firemen burned our houses and our books?" "We haven't any books." "But if we did have some." "You got some?" "No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall and the typed lists of a cringed in fire, burning down the years under his ax and his fire hose spraying not water but -- kerosene. "Was it always like this?" asked Mr. Montag. "The fire house, our duties? I mean, well, once upon a time... "Once upon a time!" Leahy crowed. "What kind of language is that?" Fool, cried Montag to himself. You'll give yourself away! That last fire. A book of fairy tales. He had dared to read a line or so. "I mean," he said, quickly, "in the old days, before homes were completely fireproof, didn't firemen ride to fires to put them out, instead of start them?" "I never knew that." Stoneman and Black drew forth their rule books and laid them where Montag, though long familiar with them, might read: #. Answer the alarm quickly. #. Start the fire swiftly. #. Be sure you burn everything. #. Report back to fire house. #. Stand alert for another alarm; Everyone watched Montag. He swallowed. "What will they do to that old man we caught last night with his books?" "Insane asylum." "But he wasn't insane!" "Any man is who thinks he can hide books from the Government or us." Leahy blew a great fiery cloud of cigar smoke from his thin mouth. He idled back. The alarm sounded. The bell kicked itself two hundred times in a few seconds. Suddenly there were three empty chairs. The cards fell in a snow flurry. The brass pole trembled. The men were gone, their hats with them. Montag still sat. Below, the orange dragon coughed to life. Montag slid down the pole like . a man in a dream. "Montag, you forgot your hat!" He got it and they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren noise and their mighty metal thunder. house in the old section of town. A century old if it was a day, but, like every house, it had been given a thin fireproof plastic coat fifty years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be holding it up. "Here we are!" The engine slammed to a stop. Leahy, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in their plump slickers. Montag followed. They crashed the front door and caught a woman, running. "I didn't hurt anyone!" she cried. "Where are they?" Leahy twisted her wrist. "You wouldn't take an old woman's pleasures from her, would you?" Stoneman produced the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in facsimile duplicate on the back. "Says here, Chief, the books are. in the attic." "All right, men, let's get 'em!" Next thing they were up in musty blackness, swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and shout. "Hey!" A fountain of books sprayed down on Montag as he climbed shuddering up the steep stair well. Books bombarded his shoulders, his pale face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with a fiery iron. He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms. "Montag, come on up!" Montag's hand closed like a trap, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of literature into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the wo' man stood like a small girl among the bodies. "Mon tag!" He climbed up into the attic. " 'This too shall pass away.' " "What?" Leahy glared at him. Montag froze, blinking. "Did I say something?" "Move, you idiot!" T HE books lay in piles like fishes left to dry. ' "Trash! Trash!" The men danced on the books. Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone. "Kerosene!" They pumped the cool fluid from the white snake they had twined upstairs. They coated every book; they pumped rooms full of it. "This is better than the old man's place last night, eh?" That had not been as much fun. The old man had lived in an apartment house with other people. They had had to use controlled fire there. Here, they could ravage the entire ' house. They ran downstairs, Montag reeling after them in the kerosene fumes. "Come on, woman!" "My books," she said, quietly. She knelt among them to touch the drenched leather, to read the gilt titles with her fingers instead of her eyes, while her eyes accused Montag. "You can't take my books," she said. "You know the law," said Leahy. "'Pure nonsense, all of it. No two books alike, none agreeing. Confusion. Stories about people who never existed. Come on, now." "No," she said. "The whole house'll burn." "I won't go." The three men walked clumsily to the door. They glanced back at Montag who stood near the woman. "You're not leaving her here?" he protested. "She won't come." "But she's got to!" Leahy raised his hand. It contained the concealed igniter to start the fire. "Got to get back to the station. Besides, she'd cost us a trial, money, jail." Montag placed his hand around the woman's elbow. "You can-come with me." "No." She actually focused her eyes on him for a moment. "Thank you, anyway." "I'm counting to ten," said Leahy. "One, two... "Please," said Montag. "Go on," said the woman. "Three," said Leahy. "Come." Montag pulled at her. "I want to stay here," she replied, quietly. "Four... five..." The woman twisted. Montag slipped on an oily book and fell. The woman ran up the stairs half way and stood there with the books at her feet. "Six... seven... Montag," said Leahy. Montag did not move. He looked out the door at that man there with the pink face, pink and burned and shiny from too many fires, pink from night excitements, the pink face of Mr. Leahy with the igniter poised in his pink fingers. Montag felt the book hidden against his pounding chest. "Go get him!" ordered Leahy. T HE men dragged Montag yelling from the house. Leahy backed out after them, leaving a kerosene trail down the walk. When they were a hundred feet away, Montag was still shout-, ing and kicking. He glanced wildly back. In the front door where she had come to gaze out at them quietly, her quietness a condemnation, staring straight into Leahy's eyes, was the woman. Leahy twitched his finger to ignite the fuel. He was too late. Montag gasped. Thewoman in the door, reaching with contempt toward them all, struck a match against the saturated wood. People ran out of houses all down the street. " WT H# is it? " VV "Who would it be?" said Mr. Montag, leaning back against the closed door in the dark. His wife said, at last, "Well, put on the light." "I don't want the light," he said. "Come to bed." He heard her roll impatiently; the springs squeaked. "Are you drunk?" He worked out of his coat and let it slump to the floor. 'He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall forever and forever into darkness. His wife said, "What are you doing?" He balanced in space with the book in his sweating, icy hand. A minute later, she said, "Well, don't just stand there in the middle of the room. He made a small sound. "What?" she asked. He made more soft sounds. He stumbled toward the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay separate from her. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and when he didn't reply but only made sounds, he felt her hand creep over, up along his chest, his throat, his chin. Her hand brushed his cheek. He knew that she pulled her hand away from his cheek wet. A long time later when he was finally floating into sleep, he heard her say, "You smell of kerosene." "I always smell of kerosene," he mumbled. Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the room. She had her thimble-radio tamped into her ear, listening, listening to far people in far places, her eyes peeled wide at deep ceilings of blackness. Many nights in the last ten years he had pund her with her eyes open, like a dead woman. She would lie that way, blankly, hour upon hour, and then rise and go soundlessly to the bath. You could hear faucet water run, the tinkle of the sedatives bottle, and Mildred gulping hungrily, frantically, at sleep. She was awake now. In a moment she would rise and go for the barbiturates. "Mildred," he thought. And suddenly she was so strange that he couldn't believe that he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those jokes men told about the gentleman, drunk on life, who had come home late at night, unlocked the wrong door, entered a wrong room. And now here Montag lay in the strange night by this unidentified body he had never seen before. "What!" "I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is, when did we meet? And where?" "For what?" "I mean originally." She was frowning in the dark. time we ever met, where was it, and when?" "Why, it was at... She stopped. "I don't know." He was frightened. "Can't you remember?" They both tried. "It's been so long." "Only ten years. We're both only thirty!" "Don't ,get excited, I'm trying to think." She laughed a strange laugh. "How funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife." He lay with his eyes tight, pressing, massaging his brow. It was suddenly more important than any other thing in a lifetime that he knew where he had met Mildred. "It doesn't matter." She was up, in the bathroom now. He heard the water rushing, the swallowing sound. "No, I guess not," he murmured. And he wondered, did she take twenty tablets now, like a year 'ago, when we had to pump her stomach, and me shouting to keep her awake, walking her, asking her why she did it, why she wanted to die, and she saying she didn't know, she didn't know, she didn't know anything about anything! She didn't belong to him; he didn't belong to her. She didn't know herself, him, or anyone; the world didn't need her, she didn't need herself, and in the hospital he had realized that if she died he would not cry. For it was the dying of an unknown, a street face, a face in the newspaper and it was suddenly so wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man beside an empty woman while the doctors emptied her still more. And why are we empty, lonely, and not in love? he had asked himself, a year ago. They were never together. There was always something between, a radio, a televisor, a car, a plane, a game, nervous exhaustion, or, simply, a little pheno-barbitol. They didn't know each other; they knew things, inventions. They had applauded science whild" it had built a beautiful glass structure, a glittering miracle of contraptions about them, and, too late, they had found it to be a glass wall. They could not shout through the wall; they could only pantomime silently, never touching, hearing, barely seeing each other. Looking at Mildred at the hospital, he had thought, does it matter if we live of die? That might not have been enough if the people' had not moved next door with their daughter. Perhaps that had been the start of his awareness of his job, his marriage, his life. O NE night -- it was so long ago -- he had gone out for a long walk. In the moonlight, he realized that he had come out to get away from the nagging of his wife's television set. He walked, hands in pockets, blowing steam from his mouth into the cold air. "Alone," He looked at the avenues ahead. "By God, I'm alone. Not another pedestrian in miles." He walked swiftly down street after street. "Why, I'm the only pedestrian in the entire city!" The streets were empty and long and quiet. Distantly, on crosstown arteries, a few cars moved in the dark. But no other man ventured upon the earth to test the use of his legs. In fact, it had been so many years since the sidewalks were used that they were buckling, becoming obscured with grass. So he walked alone, aware of his loneliness, until the police car pulled up and flashed its cold white light upon him. "What're you doing?" shouted a voice. "I'm out for a walk." "He says he's out for a walk." The laughter, the cold, precise turning over of his identity cards, the careful noting of his address. "Okay, mister, you can walk now." He had gone on, stomping his feet, jerking his mouth and hands, eyes blazing, gripping his elbows. "The nerve! The nerve! Is there a law against pedestrians!" The girl turned a corner and walked toward him... She stopped and glanced at him. "Why, hello," she said, and put out her hand. "You're my neighbor, aren't you?" "Am I?" he said. She was smiling quietly. "We're the only live ones, aren't we?" She waved at the empty sidewalks. "Did the police stop you, too?" "Walking's a crime." "They flashed their lights on me, but saw I was a woman -- " She was no more than sixteen, Montag estimated, with eyes and hair as dark as mulberries, and a paleness about her that was not illness but radiance. "Then they drove away. I'm Clarisse McClellan. And you're Mr. Montag, the fireman." They walked together. And she began to talk for both of them. "It's a graveyard, this town," she said. "I like to walk just to keep my franchise on the sidewalks." He looked and it was true. The city was like a dark tomb, every house deep in television dimness, not a sound or move anywhere. "On the big boulevards down that way, day and night. I sometimes think they don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly. If you showed them a green blur, oh, yes! they'd say, that's grass! A pink blur, yes, that's roses!" She laughed to herself. "A white blur's a house. Quick brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slow on a highway once. They threw him in jail. Isn't that funny and sad, too?" "You think of a lot of things for a girl," said Montag, uneasily. "That's because I've got time to think. I never watch t-v or go to games or races or funparks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two hundred-foot-long billboards in the country? Well, did you know that once billboards were only twentyfive feet long? But cars started going by so quickly, they had to stretch the advertising out so it could be seen." "I didn't know that." Montag laughed abruptly. "Bet I know something else you don't." "What?" "There's dew on the grass in the morning." He couldn't remember, and suddenly it frightened him. "And, if you look, there's a man in the moon." He had never looked. His heart beat rapidly. They walked the rest of the way in silence. When they reached her house, its lights were all blazing. It was the only house, in a city of a ing brightly. "What's going on?" Montag had never seen that many house lights. "Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer." "But what do they talk about?" She laughed at this, said good night, and was gone. At three in the cold morning, he got out of bed and stuck his head out the front window. The moon was rising and there was a man in the moon. Over the broad sparkled. "I'll be damned," said Montag, and went back to bed. noons and came to hope he would be seeing her, found himself watching for her sitting on her green lawn, studying the autumn leaves with a fine casual air, or returning from a distant woods with wild yellow flowers, or looking at the sky, even while it was raining. "Isn't rain nice?" she said. "I hadn't noticed." "Believe me, it is nice." He always laughed embarrassedly. Whether at her, or at himself, he wasn't sure. "I believe you." "Do you really? Did you ever smell old leaves? Don't they smell like cinnamon? Here!" "Why, it is cinnamon, yes!" She gazed at him with her clear dark eyes. "My gosh, you don't really know very much, do you?" She was not unkind, just concerned for him. "I don't suppose any of us know much." "I do," she said, quietly, "because I've time to look." "Don't you attend school?" "Oh, no. They say I'm anti-social. I don't mix. And the yelling bully is the thing among kids this season, you know." "It's been a long season," observed Montag, and stood somewhat shocked at his own perception. "Then you've noticed?" "Yes. But what about your friends?" "I haven't any. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But they're always packed around the t-v, or racing in cars, or shouting or beating one another. Do you notice how people hurt one another nowadays?" "You sound ancient." "I am. I know about rain. That makes me ancient to them. They kill each other. It didn't used to be each other all the time? Four of my friends have been shot in the past year. I'm afraid of children." "Maybe it was always this way." "My father says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other, when children were seen and not heard. But that was a long time ago, when they had discipline and responsibility. Do you know, I'm disciplined? I'm spanked when I need it, and I've responsibility. I do all the shopping and housecleaning. By hand." "And you know about rain," said Mr. Montag, with the rain beating on his hat and coat. "It tastes good if you lean back and open your mouth. Go on." He leaned back and gaped. "Why," he said, "it's wine." it. The girl had talked to him one bright afternoon and given him the dandelion test. "It proves you're in love or not." She brushed a dandelion under his chin. "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone." And he thought, when did I stop loving Mildred? and the answer was never! for he had never known her. She was the pale, sad goldfish that swam in the subterranean illumination of the television parlor; her natural habitat. "It's the dandelion you use," protested Mon tag. "No," said Clarisse, solemnly. "You're not in love. A dandelion won't help." She tossed the flower away. "Well, I've got to go see my psychiatrist. My teachers are sending me to him. He's trying to make me normal." "I'll throttle him if he does!" "Right now he's trying to figure out why I go away from the city and walk in the forests once a day. Have you ever walked in a forest? No? It's so quiet and lovely, and nobody rushing. I like to watch the birds and the insects. They don't rush:" Before she left him to go inside, she looked at him suddenly and said, "Do you know, Mr. Montag, I can't believe you're a fireman." "Why not?" "Because you're so nice. Do you mind if I ask one last question?" "I don't mind." "Why do you do what you do?" But before he knew what she meant or could make a reply, she had run off, embarrassed at her own frankness. "What did she mean, why do I do what I do?" he said to himself. "I'm a fireman, of course. I burn books. Is that what she meant?" He didn't see Clarisse for a month. He watched for her every day, but made no point of her absence to his wife. He wanted to go rap on her parents' door, but decided against it; he didn't want them misunderstanding his interest in the child. But after thirty-six days had passed, he brought Clarisse's name up offhand. "Oh, her?" said Mildred, with the radio music jarring the table plates. "Why, didn't you know?" "Know what?" "She was killed by an automobile a month ago." "A month! But why didn't someone tell me?" "Didn't I? I suppose it slipped my mind. Yes, a car hit her." "Did they find whose car it was?" "No. You know how those things are. What do you want for supper, frozen steak or chops?" A ND so Clarisse was dead. No, disappeared! for in a large city you didn't die, you simply vanished. No one missed you, no one saw you go; your death was as insignificant as that of a butterfly carried secretly away, caught in the radiator grille of a speeding car. And with Clarisse's death, half of the world was dead, and the other half was instantly revealed to him for what it was. He saw what Mildred was and always would be, what he himself was but didn't want to be any more. And he saw that it was no idle thing, Mildred's suicidal attempts, the lovely dark girl with the flowers being ground under a car; it was a thing of the world they lived in. It was a part of the screaming, pressing down of people into electric molds. It was the meaningless flight of civilization down a rotary track to smash its own senseless tail. Mildred's flight was trying to die and escape nothingness, whereas Clarisse had been fighting nothingness with something, with being aware instead of forgetting, with walking instead of sitting, with going to get life instead of having it brought to her. And this civilization had killed her for her trouble. Not purposely, no, but with a line ironic sense; for no purpose at all. Killed by a vanilla-faced idiot racing nowhere for nothing and irritated that he had been detained # seconds while the police investigated and released him on his way to some distant base which he must tag frantically before running for home. Montag felt the slow gathering of awareness. Mildred. Clarisse. The firemen. The murdering children. Last night, the old man's books burned and him in an asylum. Tonight, that woman burned before his eyes. It was such a nightmare that only another nightmare, less horrible, could be used to escape from it, and Clarisse had died weeks ago and he had not seen her die, which made it somehow cruder and yet more bearable. "Clarisse. Clarisse." Montag lay all night long, thinking, smelling the smoke on his hands, in the dark. morning. "You can't be sick," said Mildred. He closed his eyes upon the hotness. "Yes." "But you were all right last night." "No, I wasn't all right." He heard the radio in the parlor. Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there; he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burned by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of mental cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like raw milk. He could remember her no other way. "Will you bring me an analgesic and water?" "You've got to get up," she said. "It's noon. You've slept five hours later than usual." "Will you turn the radio off?" he asked. "That's my favorite program." "Will you turn it off for a sick man ?" "I'll turn it down." She went out of the room and did nothing to the radio and came back. "Is that better?" "Thanks." "That's my favorite program," she repeated, as if she had not said it a thousand times before. "What about the analgesic?" "You've never been sick before." She went away again. "Well, I'm sick now. I'm not going to work tonight. Call Leahy for me." "You acted funny last night." She returned, humming. "Where's the analgesic?" He glanced at the water glass. "Oh." She walked to the bath again. "Did something happen?" "A fire, that's all." "I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom. "What doing?" "Television." "What was on?" "Programs." "What programs?" "Some of the best ever." "Who?" "Oh, you know, the big shows." "Yes, the big shows, big, big, big." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene made him vomit. Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. "Why'd you do that?" He looked with dismay at the floor. "We burned an old woman with her books." "It's a good thing the rug's washable." She fetched a mop and swabbed clumsily at it. "I went to Helen's last night." "Couldn't you get the shows on your own t-v?" "Sure, but it's nice visiting." "Did Helen get over that finger infection ?" ' "I didn't notice." S HE went out into the living room. He heard her by the radio, singing. "Mildred?" he called. She returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly. "Aren't you going to ask me about last night?" he said. "What about it?" "We burned a thousand  books and a woman." "Forbidden books." The radio was exploding in the parlor. "Yes. Copies of Plato and Socrates and Marcus Aurelius." "Foreigners?" "Something like that." "Then they were radicals." "All foreigners can't be radicals." "If they wrote books, they were." Mildred fiddled with the telephone. "You don't expect me to call Mr. Leahy, do you?" "You must!" "Don't shout." "I wasn't shouting!" He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The radio roared in the hot air. "I can't call him. I can't tell him I'm sick." "Why?" Because you're afraid, he thought, pretending illness, afraid to call, Leahy because after a moment's discussion the conversation would run so: "Yes, Mr. Leahy, I feel better already. I'll be in at ten o'clock tonight." "You're not sick," said Mildred Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow and groped for the hidden book. It was still there. "Mildred, how would it be if -- well, maybe I quit my job a. while?" "You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books -- " "You should have seen her, "She's nothing to me. She shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility; she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." "You weren't there, you didn't . see," he said. "There must be something in books, whole worlds we don't dream about, to make a woman stay in a burning house. There must be something fine there. You don't stay and burn for nothing." "She was simple-minded." "She was as rational as you or I, more so, and we burned her." "That's water under the bridge." You ever seen a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire'll last me half a century. My God, I've been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night, and I'm crazy with trying." "You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman." X given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to rid. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep, I followed them." The radio was playing a dance tune. the world for ten years, pouring brain. It isn't only that woman we destroyed, or others like her, in these years, but it's the thoughts I burned and never knew it." He got out of bed. "It took some man a lifetime to put some of his thoughts on paper, looking after all the beauty and goodness in life, and then we come along in two minutes and heave it in the incinerator!" "Let me alone," said Mildred. "Let you alone!" He almost cried out with laughter. "Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave myself alone? That's what's wrong. We need not to be let alone. We need to be upset and stirred and bothered, once in a while, anyway. Nobody bothers any more. Nobody thinks. Let a baby alone, why don't you? What would you have in twenty years? A savage, unable to think or talk -- like us !" ' Mildred glanced out the window. "Now you've done it. Look who's here." "I don't give a damn." He was feeling better but didn't know why. "It's Mr. Leahy." The elation drained away. Mr. Montag slumped. "Go open the door," he said, at last. "Tell him I'm sick." "Tell him yourself." He made sure the book was hidden behind the pillow, climbed back into bed, and had made himself tremblinglyuncomfortable, when the door opened and Mr. Leahy strolled in, hands in pockets. "Shut the radio off," said Leahy, abstractedly. This time, Mildred obeyed. Mr. Leahy sat down in a comfortable chair with a look of strange peace in his pink face. He did not look at Montag. "Just thought I'd come by and see how the sick man is." "How'd you guess?" "Oh." Leahy smiled his pink smile, and shrugged. "I'm an old hand at this. I've seen it all. You were going to call me and tell me you needed a day off." "Yes." V V Leahy, looking at his hands. He carried an eternal match with him at times in a little case which said, Guaranteed: One Million Cigarets Can Be Lit with this Match, and kept striking this abstractedly against its case as he talked. "Take a day off. Take two. But never take three." He struck the match and looked at the flame and blew it out. "When will you be well?" "Tomorrow, the next day, first of the week, I..." "We've been wondering about you." Leahy put a cigar in his mouth. "Every fireman goes through this. They only need understanding, need to know how the wheels run, what the history of our profession is. They don't give it to rookies any more. Only fire chiefs remember it now. I'll let you in on it." He lit the cigar leisurely. Mildred fidgeted. "You ask yourself about the burning of books, why, how, when." Leahy exuded a great gray cloud of smoke. "Maybe," said Montag. "It started around about the Civil War, I'd say. Photography discovered. Fast printing presses coming up. Films at the early part 'of the #th Century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass, Montag, mass." "I see." "And because they had mass, they became simpler. Books, now. Once they appealed to various small groups of people, here and there. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of mass and elbows. Films and radios and magazines and books had to level down to a sort of paste-pudding norm. Do you follow me?" "I think so." Leahy looked through a veil of smoke, not at Montag, but at the thing he was describing. "Picture it. The #th Century man with his horses, dogs, and slow living. You might call him a slow motion man. Then in the #th Century you speed up the camera." "A good analogy." "Splendid. Books get shorter. Condensations appear. Digests. Tabloids. Radio programs simplify. Everything sublimates itself to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded approvingly. "You should have heard last night -- " "Great classics are cut to fit fifteen minute shows, then two minute book columns, then two line digest resumes. Magazines become picture books. Out of the nursery to the college, back to the nursery, in a few short centuries!" the thread of the talk, Montag knew, and when this happened she began to fiddle with things. She went about the room, picking u P; "Faster and faster the film, Mr. Montag! Quick, Click, Pic, Look. Eye, Now! Flick, Flash, Here, There, Swift, Up, Doivn, Why, How, Who, Eh? Mr. Montag, digest-digests, political affairs in one column, a sentence, a headline, and then, in mid-air, vanish! The mind of man, whirling so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, publicists, ad men, broadcasters that the centrifuge throws off all ideas! He is unable to concentrate!" Mildred was smoothing the bed now. Montag felt panic as she approached his pillow to straighten it. In a moment, with sublime innocence, she would be pulling the hidden book out from behind the pillow and displaying it as if it were a reptile! Leahy blew a cumulus of cigar smoke at the ceiling. "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling neglected, finally ignored. Life is immediate. The job counts. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting bolts?" "Let me fix your pillow," said Mildred, being the video housewife. "No," whispered Montag. "The zipper replaces the button. Does a man have time to think while dressing in the morning, a philosophical time?" "No," said Montag, automatically. Mildred tugged at the pillow. "Get away," said Montag. "Life becomes one big Prat Fall, Mr. Montag. No more ' subtleties. Everything is bang and boff and wow!" "Wow," reflected Mildred, yanking the pillow edge. "For God's sake, let me be!" cried Montag, passionately. Leahy stared. Mildred's hand was frozen behind the pillow. Her hand was on the book, her face stunned, her mouth opening to ask a question... "Theaters stand empty, Mr. Montag, replaced by television and baseball and sports where nobody has to think at all, not at all, at all." Now Leahy was almost invisible, a voice somewhere back of a choking screen of cigar smoke. "What's this?" asked Mildred, with delight, almost. Montag crushed and heaved back against her hands. "What've you hid there?" "Sit down!" Montag screamed. She jumped back, her hands empty. "We're talking!" toons everywhere. Books become cartoons. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Time to kill. No work, all leisure. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee, towns becoming motels, people in nomadic surges from city to city, impatient, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept last night and I the night before." Mildred went into the other room and slammed the door. She turned on the radio. "Go on," said Montag. "Intelligent writers gave up in disgust. Magazines were vanilla tapioca. The book buyer, bored by dishwater, his brain spinning, quit buying. Everyone but the comicpublisher died a slow publishing death. There you have it. Don't blame the Government. Technology, mass exploitation, and censorship from frightened officials did the trick. Today, thanks to them, you can read comics, confessions, or trade journals, nothing else. All the rest is dangerous." "Yes, but why the firemen?" asked Montag.' "Ah," said Leahy, leaning forward in the clouds of smoke to finish. "With schools turning out doers instead of thinkers, with nonreaders, naturally, in ignorance, they hated and feared books. You always fear an unfamiliar thing. 'Intellectual' became a swear word. Books were snobbish things. "The little man wants you and me to be like him. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot out of the weapon. Unbreach men's minds. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? And so, when houses became all fireproof and there was no longer need of firemen for protection, they were given the new job, as official censors, judges, jurors, punishers. That's you, Mr. Montag, and me." Leahy stood up. "I've got to get going." Montag lay back in bed. "Thanks for explaining it to me." "You must understand our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. People must be contented. Books bother them. Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. We burn it. White people don't like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it, too. Anything for serenity." Leahy shook Montag's limp hand. "Oh, one last thing. Once in his career, every fireman gets curious. What do the books say, he wonders. A good question. Well, they say nothing, Mr. Montag. Nothing you can touch or believe in. They're about non-existent people, figments. Not to be trusted. But anyway, say, a fireman 'takes' a book, at a fire, almost by 'accident.' A natural error." "Natural." "We allow that. We let him keep it # hours. If he hasn't burned it by then, we burn it for him." "I see," said Montag. His throat was dry. "You'll be at work tonight at six o'clock?" "No." "What!" Montag shut his eyes. "I'll be in later, maybe." "See that you do." "I'll never come in again!" yelled Montag, but only in his mind. "Get well." Leahy, trailing smoke, went out. front window as Leahy drove away in his gleaming beetle which was the color of the last fire they had set. Mildred had turned on the afternoon television show and was staring into the shadow screen. Montag cleared his throat, but she didn't look up. "It's only a step," he said, "from not working today, to not working tomorrow, to not working ever again." "You're going to work tonight, though?" "I'm doing more than that," he said. "I'm going to start to kill people and rave, and buy books!" "A one-man revolution," said Mildred, lightly, turning to look at him. "They'd put you in jail, wouldn't they?" "That's not a bad idea. The best people are there." He put his clothes on, furiously, walking about the bedroom. "But I'd kill a few people before I did get locked up. There's a real bastard, that Leahy. Did you bear him! Knows all the answers, but does nothing about it!" "I won't even listen to all this junk," said Mildred. "No?" he said. "This is your house as well as mine, isn't it?" "Yes." "Then I have something I want you to see, something I put away and never looked at again during the past year, not even knowing why I put them away and hid them and kept them and never told you." He dragged a chair into the hall, climbed up on it, and opened an air-vent. Reaching up, he began throwing books, big ones, little ones, red, yellow, green books, twenty, thirty, fifty books, one by one, swiftly, into the parlor at her feet. "There!" "Leonard Montag! You didn't!" "So you're not in this with me? You're in it up to your neck!" She backed away as if she were surrounded by a pack of terrible rats. Her face was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide and she was breathing as if someone had struck her in the stomach. "They'll burn our house. They'll kill us." "Let them try." She hesitated; then, moaning, she seized a book and ran toward the fireplace. Never touch my books. Never. Or, by God, if you do, touch just one of them meaning to burn it, be"Leonard Montag! You wouldn't!" pleaded down into her face. He held her shoulders firmly, while her face bobbed helplessly, and tears sprang from her eyes. "You must help me," he said, slowly, trying to find his way into her thinking. "You're in this now, whether you like it or not. I've never asked for anything in my life of you, but I ask it now, I plead it. We must start somewhere. We're going to read books. It's a thing we haven't done and must do. We've got to know what these books are so we can tell others, and so that, eventually, they can tell there, right there. I'll help you, we'll help each other. Between us, we'll do something to destroy men like Leahy and Stoneman and Black and myself, and this world we live in, and put it all back together a different way. Do you hear me?" "Yes." Her body sagged. The doorbell rang. They jerked about to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere in heaps. "Leahy!" "It can't be him!" "He's come back!" sobbed Mildred. The bell rang again. "Let him stand out there. We won't answer." Montag reached blindly for a book on the floor, any book, any beginning, any start, any beauty at all would do. He put the book into Mildred's shaking hands. The bell rang a third time, insistently. "Read." He quivered a hand to a page. "Out loud." Mildred's eyes were on the door and the bell rang angrily, loudly, again and again. "He'll come ia," she said, "oh, God, and set fire to everything, and us." But at last she found the line, with Montag standing over her, swaying, any line in the book, and after trying it four times, she began to fumble out the words of a poem printed there on the white, unburned paper: "And evening vanish and no more, The low pale light across the the land -- " The bell rang. "Nor now the long light on the sea -- And here face downward in the sun... Another ring. Montag whispered. "He'll go away in a minute." Mildred's lips trembled: "To feel how swift, how secretly The shadow of the night comes on... Near the ceiling, smoke from Leahy's cigar still lingered. II The Sieve and the Sand noon through, while the fire flickered and blew on the hearth and the October rain fell from the sky upon the strangely quiet house. Now and again, Mr. Montag would silently pace the room, or bring in a bottle of cold beer and drink it easily or say, "Will you read that part over again? Isn't that an idea now?" And Mildred's voice, as colorless as a beer bottle which contains a rare and beautiful wine but does not know it, went on enclosing the words in plain glass, pouring forth the beauties with a loose mouth, while her drab eyes moved over the words and over the words and the rain rained and the hour grew late. They read a man named Shakespeare and a man named Poe and part of a book by a man named Matthew and one named Mark. On occasion, Mildred glanced fearfully at the window. "Go on," said Mr. Montag. "Someone might be watching. That might've been Mr. Leahy at our door a while back." "Whoever it was went away. Read that last section again. I want to understand that." She read from the works of Jefferson and Lincoln. When it was five o'clock her hands dropped open. "I'm tired. Can I stop now?" Her voice was hoarse. "How thoughtless of me." He took a book from her. "But isn't and the thoughts,  aren't they exciting?" "I don't understand any of it." "But surely..." "Just words." "But you remember some of it." "Nothing." "You'll learn. It's difficult at first." "I don't like books," she said. "I don't understand books. They're over my head. They're for professors and radicals and I don't want to read any more. Please, promise you won't make me." ' "Mildred!" "I'm afraid," she said, putting her face into her shaking hands. ' "I'm so terribly frightened by these ideas, by Mr. Leahy, and having these books in the house. They'll burn our books and kill us. Now, I'm sick." "I'm sorry," he said at last, sighing. "I've put you on trial, haven't I? I'm way out front, trying to drag you, when I should be walking beside you, barely touching. I expect too much. It'll take months to put you in the frame of mind where you can receive the ideas in these books. It's not fair of me. All right, you won't have to read aloud again." "Thanks." "But you must listen. I'll explain." "I'll never learn. I just know I won't." "You must if you want to be free." "I'm free already. I couldn't be freer." "You can't be free if you're not aware." "Why do you want to ruin us' with all this?" she asked. "Listen," he said. HE listened. Jetbombers were crossing the sky over their house. Those quick gasps in the heavens, as if a running giant had drawn his breath. Those sharp, almost quiet whistles, here and gone in so much less than an instant that one almost believed one had heard nothing. And seeing nothing in the sky, if you did look, was worse than seeing something. There was a feeling as if a great invisible fan was whirring blade after hostile blade across the stars, with giant murmurs and no motion, perhaps only a faint trembling of starlight. All night, every night of their lives, they had heard those jet sounds and seen nothing, until, like the tick of a clock or a time-bomb, it had come to be unnoticed, for it was the sound of today and the sound of today dying, the CheyneStokes respiration of civilization. "I want to know why and how we are where we are," said Montag. "How did those bombers get in the sky every instant? Why have there been three semi-atomic wars since I#? Where did we take the wrong turn ? What can we do about it? Only the books know this. Maybe the books can't solve my problem, but they can bring me out in the light. And they might stop us from going on with the same insane mistakes." "You can't stop wars. There've always been wars." "No, I can't. War's so much a part of us now that in the last three days, though we're on the very rim of war, people hardly mention it. Ignoring it, at least, isn't the answer. But now, about us. We must have a schedule of reading. An hour in the morning. An hour or so in the afternoon. Two hours in the evening -- " "You're not going to forbid me my radio, are you?" Her voice rose. "Well, to start... She was up in a fury, raging at him. "I'll sit and listen if you want me to for a while every day," she cried. "But I've got to have my radio programs, too, and every night on the t-v -- you can't take that away from me!" "But don't you see? That's the very thing I'd like to counteract -- " The telephone rang. They both started. Mildred snatched it up and was almost immediately laughing. "Hello, Ann. Yes, oh, yes! Tonight, you come here. Yes, the White Clown's on tonight and the Terror will be fun." Mr. Montag shuddered, sick. He left the room. He walked through the house, thinking. Leahy, the fire house, these dangerous books. "I'll shoot him tonight," he said, aloud. "I'll kill Leahy. That'll be one censor out of the way. No." He laughed coldly. "I'd have to shoot most of the people in the world. How does one start a revolution? I'm alone. My wife, as the saying goes, does not understand me. What can a single lonely man do?" radio was thundering, turned on again. And then Mr. Montag remembered; about a month ago, walking through the park alone, he had come upon a man in a black suit, unaware. The man had been reading something. Montag hadn't seen a book; he had only seen the man move hastily, face flushed. The man had jumped up as if to run, and Montag had said, simply, "Sit down." "I didn't do anything." "No one said you did." They had sat in the park all afternoon. Montag had drawn the man out. He was a retired professor of English literature, who had lost his job forty years before when the last college of fine arts had been closed. shyly, fearfully, he admitted he had been reading a little book of American poems, forbidden poems which he now produced from his coat pocket. "Just to know I'm alive," said Mr. Faber. "Just to know where I am and wha't things are. To sense things. Most of my friends sense nothing. Most of them can't talk. They stutter and halt and hunt words. And what they talk is sales and profits and what they saw on television the hour before." What a nice afternoon that had been. Professor Faber had read some of the poems to Montag, none of which Montag understood, but ihe sounds were good, and slowly the meaning crept in. When it was all over, Montag said, "I'm a fireman." Faber had looked as if he might die on the spot. "Don't be afraid. I won't turn you In," said Montag hastily. "I stopped being mean about it years ago. You know, the way you talk reminds me of a girl I knew once, name of Clarisse. She was killed a few months ago by a car. But she had me thinking, too. We met each other because we took long walks. No one walks any more. I haven't seen a pedestrian in ten years on our street. Are you ever stopped by police simply because you're a pedestrian ?" He and Faber had smiled, exchanged addresses orally, and parted. He had never seen Faber again. It wouldn't be safe to know a former English literature professor. But now...? He dialed a call. "Hello, Professor Faber?" "Who is this?" "This is Montag. You remember? The park? A month ago?" "Yes, Mr. Montag. Can I help you?" "Mr. Faber." He hesitated. "How many copies of the Bible are left in the world?" "I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about." The voice grew cold. "I want to know if there are any copies at all." "I can't discuss such things. Montag." "This line is closed. There's no one listening." "Is this some sort of trap? I can't talk to just anyone on the phone." "Tell me, are there any copies?" "None!" And Faber hung up. None. chair. None! None in all the world, none left, none anywhere, all, all of them destroyed, torn apart, burned. The Bible at last dead for all time to the world. He got up shakily and walked across the room and bent down among the books. He took hold of one book and lifted it. "The old and new testaments, it here!" "Fine," ' she said vaguely. "Do you realize what it means, the importance of this copy here in our house? If anything should happen to this book, it would be lost forever." "And you have to hand it back to Mr. Leahy tonight to be burned, 'don't you?" said Mildred. She was not being cruel. She was merely relieved that the one book, at least, was going out of her life. "Yes." He could see Leahy turning the book over with slow appreciation. "Sit down, Montag. I want you to watch this. Delicately, like a head of lettuce, see?" Ripping one page after another from the binding. Lighting the first page with a match. And when it had curled down into black wings, lighting the second page from the first and the third from the second, and so on, chain-smoking the entire volume chapter by printed chapter, all of the words and the wisdom. When it was finished, with Montag seated there sweating, the floor would resemble a swarm of black moths that had fluttered and died in one small storm. And Leahy smiling, washing his hands. do something! We've got to copy this. There must be a duplicate made. This can't be lost!" "You haven't time." "No, not by hand. But if we could photograph it." "No one would do it for you." He stopped. She was right. There was no one to trust, except, perhaps, Professor Faber. Montag started for the door. "You'll be here for the t-v party, won't you?" Mildred called after him. "It wouldn't be fun without you." "You'd never miss me." But she was looking at the late afternoon t-v show and didn't hear. He went out and slammed the door, the book in his hand. upon the yellow dunes by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sind. The faster he poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering. He tried all day because some cruel cousin had said, "Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!" Seated there in the midst of July, he had cried. His hands were tired, the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. And now, as the jet-underground car roared him through the lower cellars of town, rocking him, jolting him, he remembered that frustrating sieve and he held this precious copy of the old and new testaments fiercely in his hands, trying to pour the words into his mind. But the words fell through, and he thought, in a few hours I must hand this book to Leahy, but I must remember each word, no phrase must escape me, each line can be memorized. I must remember, I must. "But I do not remember." He shut the book and pressed it with his fists and tried to force his mind. "Try Denham's Dentifrice tonight!" screamed the radio in the bright, shuddering wall of the jettrain. Trumpets blared. "Shut up," thought Mr. Montag field -- " "Denham's Dentifrice!" "They toil not -- " "Denham's Dentifrice!" shut up, let me temember!" "Denham's Dentifrice!" He tore the book open furiously and flicked the pages about as if blind, tearing at the lines with raw eyes, staring until his eyelashes were wet and quivering. "Denham's, Denham's, Denham's! D-E-N -- " "They toil not, neither do they..." A whisper, a faint sly whisper of yellow sand through empty, empty sieve. "Denham's does it!" "No dandier dental detergent!" "Shut up!" It was a shriek so loud, so vicious that the loudspeaker seemed stunned. Mr. Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car looking at him, recoiling from a man with an insane, gorged face, a gibbering wet mouth, a flapping book in his fist. These rabbit people who hadn't asked for music and commercials on their public trains but who had got it by the sewerful, the air drenched and sprayed and pummeled and kicked by voices and music every instant. And here was an idiot man, himself, suddenly scrabbling at the wall, beating at the loudspeaker, at the enemy of peace, at the killer of philosophy and privacy! "Madman !" "Call the conductor!" "Denham's, Denham's Double Dentifrice!" "Fourteenth Street!" Only that saved him. The car stopped. Montag, thrown into the aisle by the grinding halt, rolled over, book in hand, leaped up past the pale, frightened faces, screamed in his mind soundlessly, and was out the opening door of the train and running on the white tiles up and up through tunnels, alone, that voice still crying like a seagull on a lonely shore after him, "Denham's, Denham's..." the door, saw the book, seized it. "My God, I haven't held a copy in years!" "We burned a house last night. I stole it." "What a chance to take!" Montag stood catching his breath. "I was curious." "Of course. It's beautiful. Here, come in, shut the door, sit down." Faber walked with the book in his finger-s, feeling it, flipping the pages slowly, hungrily, a thin man, bald, with slender hands, as light as chaff. "There were a lot of lovely books once. Before we let them go." He sat down and put his hand over his eyes. "You are looking at a coward, Mr. Montag. When they burned the last of the evil books, as they called them, forty years back, I made only a few feeble protestations and subsided. I've damned myself ever since." "It's not too late. There are still books." "And there is still life in me, and I'm afraid of dying. Civilizations fall because men like myself fear death." "I've a plan," said Montag. '"I'm in a position to do things. I'm a fireman; I can find and hide books. Last night I lay awake, thinking. We might publish many books privately when we have copies to print from." "How many have been killed for that?" "We'll get a press." "We? Not we. You, Mr. Montag." "You must help me. You're the only one I know. You must." "Must? What do you mean, must?" "We could find someone to build a press for us." "Impossible. The books are dead." "We can bring them back. I have a little money." "No, no." Faber waved his hands, his old hands, blotched with liver freckles. "But let me tell you my plan." "I don't want to hear. If you insist on telling me, I must ask you to leave." "We'll have extra copies of each book printed and hide them in firemen's houses !" "What?" The professor raised his brows and gazed at Montag as if a bright light had been switched on. "Yes, and put in an alarm." "Call the fire engines?" "Yes, and see the engines roar up. See the doors battered down on firemen's houses for a change. And see the planted books found and each fireman, at last, accused and thrown in jail!" The professor put his hand to his face. "Why, that's absolutely sinister." "Do you like it?" "The dragon eats his tail." "You'll join me?" "I didn't say that. No, no." T#UT you see the confusion and J -- ' suspicion we could spread?" "Yes, plenty of trouble there." "I've a list of firemen's homes all across the states. With an underground, we could reap fire and chaos for every blind bastard in the industry." "You can't trust anyone, though." "What about professors like yourself, former actors, directors, writers, historians, linguists?" "Dead, or ancient, all of them." "Good. They'll have fallen from public notice. You know hundreds of them. I know you must." "Nevertheless, I can't help you. Montag. I'll admit your idea appeals to my sense of humor, to my delight in striking back. A temporary delight, however. I'm a frightened man; I frighten easily." "Think of the actors alone, then, who haven't acted Shakespeare or Pirandello. We could use their anger, and the rage of historians who haven't written for forty years. We could start small classes in reading... "Impractical." "We could try." "The whole civilization must fall. We can't change just the front. The framework needs melting and remolding. Don't you realize, young man, that the Great Burning forty years back was almost unnecessary? By that time the public had stopped reading. Libraries were Saharas of emptiness. Except the Science Department." "But -- " "Can you shout louder than radio, dance faster than t-v? People don't want to think. They're having fun." "Committing suicide." "Let them commit it." "Murdering." "Let them murder. The fewer fools there will be." "A war is starting, perhaps tonight, and no one will even talk about it." . The house shook. A bomber flight was moving south. It had slowed to live hundred miles an hour and was trembling the two men standing there across from each other. "Let the war turn off the t-vs and radio, and bomb the true confessions." "I can't wait," said Montag. "Patience. The civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge." "There has to be another structure ready when this one falls," insisted Montag. "That's us." "A bunch of men quoting Shakespeare and saying I remember Sophocles? It would be funny if it were not tragic." "We've got to be there. We've got to remind those who are left that there are things more urgent than machines. We must remember that the right kind of work is happiness, instead of the wrong kind of leisure. We must give people things to do. We must make them feel wanted again." "They will only war again. No, Montag, go on home and go to bed. It was nice seeing you. But it's a lost cause." room for a few moments, chafing his hands, then he returned and picked up the book and held it toward the other man. "Do you see this book? Would you like to own it?" "My God, yes! I'd give my right arm for it." "Watch." Montag began ripping the pages out, one by one, dropping them to the floor, tearing them in half, spitting on them and rolling them into wads. "Stop it!" cried Faber. "You idiot, stop it!" He sprang forward. Montag warded him off and went on tearing at the pages. "Do you see?" he said, a fistful of pages in his tightening fist, flourishing them under the chin of the old man. "Do you see what it means to have your heart torn out? Do you see what they do?" "Don't tear any more, please," said the old man. "Who can stop me? You? I'm a fireman. I can do anything I want to do. Why, I could burn your house now, do you know that? I could burn everything. I have the power." "You wouldn't!" "No. I wouldn't." "Please. The book; don't rip it any more. I can't stand that." Faber sank into a chair, his face white, his mouth trembling. "I see; I understand. My God, I'm old enough so it shouldn't matter what happens to me. I'll help you. I can't take any more of this. If I'm killed, it won't make any difference. I'm a terrible fool of an old man and it's too late, but I'll help you." "To print the books?" "Yes." "To start classes?" "Yes, yes, anything, but don't ruin that book, don't. I never thought a book could mean so much to me." Faber sighed. "Let us say that you havemy limited cooperation. Let us say that part of your plan, at least, intrigues me, the idea of striking back with books planted in firemen's homes. I'll help. How much money could you get me today?" "Five thousand dollars." "Bring it here when you can. I know a man who once printed our college paper. That was the year I came to class one morning and found only two students' to sign up for Ancient Greek Drama. You see, that's how it went. Like an iceblock melting in the sun. And when the people had censored themselves into a living idiocy with their purchasing power, the Government, which of course represents the people's will, being composed of representative people, froze the situation. Newspapers died. No one cared if the Government said they couldn't come back. No one wanted them back. Do they now? I doubt it, but I'll contact a printer, Montag. We'll get the books started, and wait for the war. That's one fine thing; war destroys machines so beautifully." "I'm afraid I'll have to take the Bible along." "No!" "Leahy guessed I have a book in the house. He didn't come right out and accuse me, or name the book..." "Can't you substitute another book for this?" "I can't chance it. It might be a trap. If he expects me to bring a Bible and I brought something else, I'd be in jail very quickly. No, I'm afraid this Bible will be burned tonight." "That's hard to accept." Faber took it for a moment and turned the pages, slowly, reading. "I've tried to memorize it," said Montag. "But I forget. It's driven me crazy, trying to remember." "Oh, God, if we only had a little time." "I keep thinking that. Sorry." He took the book. "Good night." The door shut. Montag was in the darkening street again, looking at the real world. Y OU could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the ering between the clouds, like the enemy discs, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn the homes to chalk dust, and the moon turn to red fire; that was how the night felt. Montag walked from the subway stop with his money in Kis pocket -- he had been to the bank which stayed open until all hours with mechanical tellers doling out the money -- and as he walked he was listening abstractedly to the Seashell radio which you could cup to your ear (Buy a Seashell and hear the Ocean of Time!) and a voice was talking to him and only him as he turned his feet toward home. "Things took another turn for the worse today. War threatens at any hour." Always the same monologue... Nothing about causes or effects, no facts, no figures, nothing but sudden turns for the worse. Seven flights of jet-rockets went over the sky in a breath. Montag felt the money in his pocket, the Bible in his hand. He had given up trying to memorize it now; he was simply reading 'it for the enjoyment it gave, the simple pleasure of good words on the tongue and in the mind. He uncupped the Seashell radio from his ear and read another page of the Book of Job by moonlight. door scanner recognized three women and opened, letting them in with laughter and loud, empty talk. Mrs. Masterson, Mrs. Phelps, and Mrs. Bowles drank the martinis Mildred handed them, rioting like a crystal chandelier that someone has pushed, tinkling upon themflashing the same white smiles, their echoes repeated in empty corridors. Mr. Montag found himself in the middle of a conversation, the main topic of which was how nice everyone looked. "Doesn't everyone look nice?" "Real nice." "You look fine, Alma." "You look fine, too, Mildred." "Everybody looks nice and fine," said Montag. He had put the book aside. None of it would stay in his mind. The harder he tried to remember Job, for instance, the quicker it vanished. He wanted to be out paying this money to Professor Faber, getting things going, and yet he delayed himself. It would be dangerous to be seen at Faber's twice within a few hours, just in case Leahy was taking the precaution of having Montag watched. Like it or not, he must spend the rest of the evening at home, and be ready to report to work at eleven so that Leahy wouldn't be suspicious. Most of all, Montag wanted to walk, but he rarely did this any more. Somehow he was always afraid that he might meet Clarisse, or not meet her again, on his strolls, so that kept him here standing among these blonde) tenpins, bowling back at them with socially required leers and wisecracks. Somehow the television set was turned on before they had even finished saying how nice everyone looked, and there on the screen was a man selling orange soda pop and a woman drinking it with a smile; how could she drink and smile simultaneously? A real stunt! Following this, a demonstration of how to bake a certain new cake, followed by a rather dreary domestic comedy, a news analysis that did not analyze anything and did not mention the war, even though the house was shaking constantly with the flight of new jets from four directions, and an intolerable quiz show naming the state capitals. Montag sat tapping his fingers on his knee and exhaling. Abruptly, he walked to the televisor and snapped it off. "I thought we might enjoy a little silence." Everyone blinked. "Perhaps we might try a little 'conversation..." "Conversation ?" T HE house shook with successive waves of jet bombers which splashed the drinks in the ladies' hands. "There they go," said Mon tag, watching the ceiling. "When do you suppose the war will start?" "What war? There won't be a war." "I notice your husbands aren't here tonight." Mrs. Masterson glanced nervously at the empty t-v screen. "Oh, Dick'll be back in a week or so. The Army called him. But they have these things every month or so." She beamed. "Don't you worry about the war?" "Well, heavens, if there is one, it's got to be over with. We can't just sit and worry, can we?" "No, but we can think about it?' "I'll let Dick think of it." A nervous giggle. "And die maybe." "It's always someone else's husband dies, isn't that the joke?" The women all tittered. Yes, thought Mon tag, and even if Dick does die, what does it matter? We've learned the magic of the replaceable part from machines. You can't tell one man from another these days. And women, like so many plastic dolls -- Everyone was silent, like children with a schoolmaster. "Did you see the Clarence Dove film last night?" said Mildred, suddenly. "He's hilarious." "But what if Dick should die, or your husband, Mrs. Phelps?" Montag insisted. "He's dead. He died a week ago. Didn't you know? He jumped from the tenth floor of the State Hotel." "I didn't know." Montag fell silent, embarrassed. "But to get back to Clarence Dove... said Mildred. "Wait a minute," said Montag, angrily. "Mrs. Phelps, why did you marry your husband ? What did you have in common?" The woman waved her hands helplessly. "Why, he had such a nice sense of humor, and we liked the same t-v shows and -- " "Did you have any children?" "Don't be ridiculous." "Come to think of it, no one here has children," said Montag. "Except Mrs. Bowles." "Four, by Caesarian section. It's easy that way." "The Caesarians weren't necessary?" "I always said I'd be damned if I'd go through all that agony just for a baby. Four Caesarians. Nothing to it, really." Yes, everything easy. Montag clenched his teeth. To mistake the easy way for the right way, how delicious a temptation. But it wasn't living. A woman who wouldn't bear, or a shiftless man didn't belong; they were passing through. They belonged to nothing and did nothing. "Have you ever thought, ladies," he said, growing more contemptuous of them by the moment, "that perhaps this isn't the best of all possible worlds? That perhaps our civil rights and other precious possessions haven't been taken away in the past century, but have, if anything, been given away by us?" "Why, that can't be true! We'd have heard about it." -S cried Montag, jerking his hand at the t-v. Suddenly he shoved his hand in his pocket and drew forth a piece of printed paper. He was shaking with rage and irritation and he was half blind, staring down at the twitching sheet before his eyes. "What's that?" Mrs. Masterson squinted. "A poem I tore from a book." "I don't like poetry." "Have you ever heard any?" Mildred jumped up, but Montag said, coldly, "Sit down." The women all lit cigarets nervously, twisting their red mouths. "This is illegal, isn't it?" squealed Mrs. Phelps. "I'm afraid. I'm going home." "Sit down and shut up," said Montag. The room was quiet. "This is a poem by a man named Matthew Arnold," said Montag. "Its title is Dover Beach." The women were all glancing with expectation at the television set, as if it might save them from this moment. Montag cleared his throat. He waited. He wanted very much to speak the poem right, and he was afraid that he might stumble. He read. His voice rose and fell in the silent room and he found his way through to the final verses of the poem: "The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world." The four women twisted in their chairs. Montag finished it out: "Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight. Where ignorant armies clash by night." ' Montag let the white piece of paper fall slowly to the floor. The women watched it flutter and settle. Mildred said, "Can I turn the t-v on now?" "No, God damn it, no!" Mildred sat down. Mrs. Masterson said, "I don't get it. The poem, I mean." "What was it about?" asked Mrs. Phelps, her eyes darting fearfully in flashes of white and dark. "Don't you see?" shouted Montag. "Nothing to get upset about," said Mrs. Masterson, casually. "But it is, it is." "Just silly words," said Mrs. Masterson. "But, Mr. Montag, I don't mind telling you -- it is only because you're a fireman that we haven't called in an alarm on you for reading this to us. It's illegal. But it's also very silly. It was nonsense." She got to her feet and mashed out her cigaret. "Ladies, don't you think it's time for us to leave?" "I don't want to come back here, ever," said Mrs. Phelps, hurrying for the door. "Please stay!" cried Mildred. The door slammed. "Go home and think of your first husband, Mrs. Masterson, in the insane asylum, and of Mr. Phelps jumping off a building!" yelled Montag through the shut door. The house was completely abandoned. He stood alone. In the bathroom, water was running. He heard Mildred shaking the sleeping tablets out into her palm. "You fool," he said to himself. "You idiot. Now you've done it. Now you've ruined it all, you and your poem, you and your righteous indignation." He went into the kitchen and found the books where Mildred had stacked them behind the refrigerator. He carried a selection of them into the back yard, hid them in the weeds near the fence. "Just in case," he thought, "Mildred gets a passion for burning things during the night. The best books out here; the others in the house don't matter." He went back through the house. "Mildred?" he called at the bedroom door but there was no sound. He shut the front door quietly and left for work.L Leahy accepted the copy of the Bible and, without even looking at it, dropped it into the wall incinerator. "Let's forget all about it. Glad to see you back, Montag." They walked upstairs. They sat and played cards at one minute after midnight. In Leahy's sight, Montag felt the guilt of his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil deed, and now were never at rest, always stirring and picking and hiding in pockets, or moving out from under Leahy's alcohol-flame gaze. If Leahy so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that they might wither upon his wrists and die and he might never shake them to life again; they would be buried forever in his coat sleeves, forgotten.  For these were the hands that had acted on their own, that were no part of him, that were his swift and clever conscience, that snatched books, tore pages, hid paragraphs and sentences in little wads to be opened later, at home, by matchlight, read and burned. They were the hands that in the last year had darted off with Shakespeare and Job and Ruth and shelved them away next his crashing heart, over the throbbing ribs and the hot, roaring blood of a man excited by his theft, appalled by his temerity, betrayed by ten fingers which at times he held up to watch as if they were gloved with blood. The game proceeded. Twice in half an hour, Montag got up and went to the latrine to wash his hands. He came back. He sat down. He held his cards. Leahy watched his fingers fumble the cards. "Not smoking, Montag?" "I've a cigaret cough." And then, of course, the smoke reminded him of old men and old women screaming and falling into wild cinders, and it was not good any more to hold fire in your hand. He put his hands under the table. "Let's have your hands in sight," said Leahy, casually. "Not that we don't trust you." They all laughed. The phone rang. in one pink hand, walked slowly over and stood by the phone, let it ring twice more, and then picked it up. "Yes?" Mr. Montag listened, eyes shut. The clock ticked in the room. "I see," said Leahy. He looked at Montag. He smiled. He winked. Montag glanced away. "Better give me that address again." Mr. Montag got up. He walked around the room, hands in pockets. The other two men were standing ready. Leahy jerked his head toward their coats, as if to say, "On the double!" They shoved their arms in their coats and pushed on their helmets, joking in whispers. Mr.' Montag waited. "I understand perfectly," said Leahy into the phone. "Yes. Yes. Perfectly. No, that's all right. Don't you worry. We'll be right out." Leahy deposited the receiver. "Well, well." "A call? Books to be burned?" "So it seems." Mr. Montag sat down heavily. "I don't feel well." "What a shame; this is a special case," said Leahy, coming forward slowly, putting on his slicker. "I think I'm handing in my resignation." "Not yet, Montag. One more fire, eh? Then I'll be agreeable; you can hand in your papers. We'll all be happy." "Do you mean that?" "Have I ever lied to you?" Leahy fetched a helmet. "Put this on. The job'll be over in an hour. I understand you, Montag, really I do. Everything will be just as you want it." "All right." They slid down the brass pole. "Where's the fire?" "I'll drive!" shouted Leahy. "I've got the address." The engine blasted to life and in the gaseous tornado they all leaped aboard. der and siren, with concussion of tires, with scream of rubber, with a shift of kerosene bulk in the glittery brass tank, like the food in the stomach of a giant, with Mr. Montag's fingers jolting off the silver rail, swinging into cold space, with the wind tearing his hair back from his bleak face, with the wind whistling in his teeth, and he all the while thinking of the women, the chaff women, with the kernels blown out from under them by a neon wind, and his reading a book to them. What. a silly thing it was now! For what was a book? Sheets of paper, lines of type. Why should he fret for books -- one, two, or ten thousand of them, really? He was the only inhabitant of a burning world that cared, so why not drop it all, forget it, let the now-meaningless books lie? "Here we go!" shouted Leahy. "Elm Street?" "Right!" He saw Leahy up on his driver's throne, with his massive black slicker flapping out behind. He seemed to be an immense black bat flying above the engine, over the brass numbers, taking the wind. His pink, phosphorescent face glimmered in the high darkness, pressing forward, and he was smiling furiously. "Here we go to keep the world happy!" And Mr. Montag thought, "No, I can't let the books rot; I can't let them burn. As long as there are souls like Leahy, I can't hold my breath. But what can I do? I can't kill everyone. It's me against the world, and the odds too big for any man. What can I do? Against fire, what water is best?" "Now over on Park Terrace!" The fire engine boomed to a halt, throwing the men off in skips and clumsy hops. Mr. Montag stood fixing his raw eyes to the cold bright rail under his gripped fingers. "I can't do it," he murmured. "I can't go in there. I can't rip another book." Leahy jumped from his throne, smelling of the wind that had hammered him about. "Okay, Montag, fetch the kerosene!" The hoses were snaked out. The men ran on soft boots, as clumsy as cripples, as quiet as deadly black spiders. Mr. Montag turned his head. "What's wrong, Montag?" Leahy asked, solicitously. "Why," protested Montag, "that is my house." "So it is," agreed Leahy, heartily. All the lights were lit. Down the street, more lights were flicking on, people were standing on porches, as the door of Montag's house opened. In it, with two suitcases in her hands, stood Mildred. When she saw her husband, she came down the steps quickly, with a dreamlike rigidity, looking at the third button on his coat. "Mildred !" She said nothing. "Okay, Mon tag, up with the hose and ax." "Just a moment, Mr. Leahy. Mildred, you didn't telephone this call in, did you?" S HE walked past him with her arms stiff and at the ends of them, in the sharp, red-nailed fingers, the valise handles. Her mouth was bloodless. "You didn't!" he said. She shoved the valises into a waiting taxi-beetle and climbed in and sat there, staring straight ahead. Montag started toward her. Leahy caught his arm. "Come on, Montag." The cab drove away slowly down the lighted street. There was a crystal tinkling as Stoneman and Black chopped the windows to provide fine drafts for the fire. Mr. Montag walked but did not feel his feet touch the walk, nor the hose in his icy hands, nor did he hear. Leahy talking continually as they reached the door. "Pour the kerosene in, Montag." Montag stood gazing in at the queer house, made strange by the hour of the night, by the murmur of neighbor voices, by the littered glass, the lights blazing, and there on the floor, their covers plucked off, the pages spilled about like pigeon feathers, were his incredible books, and they looked so pitiful and silly and not worth bothering with, for they were nothing but type and paper and raveled binding. Montag stepped forward in a huge silence and picked up one of the pages of the books and read what it had to say. He had read only three lines when Leahy snatched the paper from him. "Oh, no," he said, smiling. "Because then we'd have to burn your mind, too. Mustn't have that." He stepped back. "Ready?" "Ready." Montag snapped the valve lock on the fire-thrower, "Aim," said Leahy. "Aim." "Fire!" He burned the television set first and then the radio and he burned the motion picture projector and he burned the films and the gossip magazines and the litter of cosmetics on a table, and he took pleasure in it all, and he burned the walls because he wanted to change everything, the chairs, the tables, the paintings. He didn't want to remember that he had lived here with some strange woman who would forget him tomorrow, who had gone and forgotten him already and was listening to a radio as she rode across town. So he burned the room with a precise fury. "The books. Montag, the books !" He directed the fire at the books. They leaped and danced, like roasted birds, their wings frantically ablaze in red and yellow feathers. They fell in charred lumps. "Get that one there, get it!" directed Leahy, pointing. Montag burned the indicated book. He burned books, he burned them by the dozen, he burned books with sweat pouring down his cheeks. "When you're all done, Montag," said Leahy behind him, "you're under arrest." Ill Water, Water, Quench tire T HE house fell into red ruin. It bedded itself down to sleepy pink ashes and a smoke pall hung over it, rising straight to the sky. It was ten minutes after one in the morning. The crowd drew back into their houses; the fun was over. Mr. Montag stood with the firethrower in his stiff hands, great islands of perspiration standing out under his arms, his face smeared with soot. The three other firemen waited behind him in the darkness, their faces illumined faintly by the burned house, by the house which Mr. Montag had just charred and crumpled so efficiently with kerosene, flame-gun, and deliberate aim. "All right, Montag," said Leahy. "Come along. You've done your duty. Now, you're in custody." "What've I done?" ''You know what you did. Don't ask." "Why so much fuss over a few bits of paper?" "We won't stand here arguing; it's cold." "Was it my wife called you, or one of her friends?" "It doesn't matter." "Was it my wife?" Leahy nodded. "But her friends turned in an alarm earlier. I let it ride. One way or the other, you'd have got it. That was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy, Montag. Very silly. Come on, now." "I think not," said Montag. He twitched the fire-trigger in his hand. Leahy glanced at Montag's lingers and saw what he intended before Montag himself had even considered it. In that instant, Montag was stunned by the thought of murder, for murder is always a new thing, and Montag knew nothing of murder; he knew only burning and burning things that people said were evil. "I know what's really wrong with the world," said Montag. "Look here, Montag -- " cried Leahy. And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering thing, all aflame, writhing on the grass as Montag shot three more blazing pulses of liquid fire over him. There was a hissing and bubbling like a snail upon which salt has been poured. There was a sound like spittle on a fed-hot stove. Montag shut his eyes and yelled and tried to get his hands to his ears to cut away the sounds. Leahy twisted in upon himself like a ridiculous black wax doll and lay silent. The other two firemen stood appalled. "Montag Montag jerked the weapon at them. "Turn around !" They turned stiffly. He beat them over the heads with the gun shaft; he didn't want to burn any other thing ever again. They fell. Then Montag turned the fire-thrower on the fire engine itself, set the trigger, and ran. Voices screamed in several houses. The engine blew up, hundreds of gallons of kerosene in one great flower of heat. Montag ran away down the street and into an alley, thinking, "That's the end of you, Leahy! That's the end of you and what you were!" He kept running. and turned back. "You're a fool, a damned fool, an awful fool, an idiot, but most of all a fool." He stumbled and fell. He got up. "You blind idiot, you and your pride and your stinking temper and your righteousness, you've ruined it all, at the very start, you fumbler. But those women, those stupid women, they drove me to it with their nonsense!" he protested to himself. "A fool, nevertheless, no better than they! "We'll save what we can. Well do what has to be done. Well take a few more firemen with us if we burn !" He found the books where he had left them, beyond the garden fence. He heard voices yelling in the night and flashbeams were swirling about. Other fire engines wailed from far off and police cars were arriving. Mr Montag took as many books as he could carry under one arm and staggered down the alley. He hadn't realized what a shock the evening had been to him, but suddenly he fell and lay sobbing, weak, his legs folded, his face in the gravel. At a distance he heard running feet. Get up, he told himself. But he lay there. Get up, get up! But he cried like a child. He hadn't wanted to kill anyone, not but kill something of yourself when you did it, and suddenly he saw Leahy again, a torch, screaming, and he shut his hand over his wet face, gagging. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Everything at once. In twentyfour hours the burning of a woman, the burning of books, the trip to the professor's, Leahy, the Bible, memorizing, the sieve, and the sand, the bank money, the printing press, the plan, the rage, the alarm, Mildred's departure, the fire, Leahy into a torch -- too much for any one day in any one life. At last he was able to get to his feet, but the books seemed impossibly heavy. He fumbled along the alley and the voices and sirens faded behind him. He moved in darkness, panting. "You must remember," he said, "that you've got to burn them or they'll burn you. Burn them or they'll burn you." He searched his pockets. The money was there. In his shirt pocket he found the Seashell radio and slapped it to his ear. "Attention! Attention, all police alert. Special alarm. Wanted: Leonard Montag, fugitive, for murder and crimes against the State. Description... Six blocks away the alley opened out onto a wide empty thoroughfare. It looked like a clean stage, so bored, so quiet, so well lit, and him alone, running across it, easily seen, easily shot down. "Beware of the pedestrian, watch for the pedestrian !" The Seashell stung his ear. Montag hid back in the shadows. He must use only the alleys. There was a gas station nearby. It might give him the slightest extra margin of safety if he were clean and presentable. He must get to the station rest room and wash up, comb his hair, then, with books under arm, stroll calmly across that wide boulevard to get where he was going. "Where am I going?" to go, no friend to turn to. Faber couldn't take him in; it would be murder to even try; but he had to see Faber for a minute or two, to give him this money. Whatever happened, he wanted the money to go on after him. Perhaps he could make it to open country, live on the rivers and near highways, in the meadows and hills, the sort of life he had often thought about but never tried. Something caught at one corner of his vision and he turned to look at the sky. The police helicopters were rising, far away, like a flight of gray moths, spreading out, six of them. He saw them wavering, indecisive, a half mile off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, dying with winter, and then they were landing, one by one, dropping softly to the streets where, turned into cars, they would shriek along the boulevards or, just as suddenly, hop back into the air, continuing their search. And here was the gas station. Approaching from the rear, Mr. Montag entered the men's wash room. Through the tin wall he heard a radio voice crying, "War has been declared ! Repeat -- war has been declared! Ten minutes ago -- " But the sound of washing his hands and rinsing his face and toweling himself dry cut the announcer's voice away. Emerging from the washroom a cleaner, newer man, less suspect, Mr. Montag walked as casually as a man looking for a bus, to the edge of the empty boulevard. There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the dark morning. The boulevard was as clean as a pinball machine, but underneath, somewhere, one could feel the electrical energy, the readiness to dart lights, flash red and blue, and out of nowhere, rolling like a silver ball, might thunder the searchers! Three blocks away, there were a few headlights. Montag drew a deep breath. His lungs were like burning brooms in his chest; his mouth was sucked dry from running. All of the iron in the world lay in liis dragging feet. He began to walk across the empty avenue. A hundred yards across. He estimated. A hundred yards in the open, more than plenty of time for a police car to appear, see him, and run him down. He listened to his own loud footsteps. A car was coming. Its headlights leaped and caught Montag in full stride. ' "Keep going." Montag faltered, got a new hold on his books, and forced himself not to freeze. Nor should he draw suspicion to himself by running. He was now one-third of the way across. There was a growl from the car's motor as it put on speed. T HE police, thought Montag. They see me, of course. But walk slowly, quietly, don't turn, don't look, don't seem concerned. Walk, that's it, walk, walk. The car was rushing at a terrific speed. A good one hundred miles an hour. Its horn blared. Its light flushed the concrete. The heat of the lights, it seemed, burned Montag's cheeks and eyelids and brought the sweat coursing from his body. He began to shuffle idiotically, then broke and ran. The horn hooted. The motor sound whined higher. Montag sprinted. He dropped a book, whirled, hesitated, left it there, plunged on, yelling to himself, in the middle of concrete emptiness, the car a hundred feet away, closer, closer, hooting, pushing, rolling, screeching, the horn hunting, himself running, his legs up, down, out, back, his eyes blind in the flashing glare, the horn nearer, now on top of .him ! They'll run me down, they know who I am, it's all over, thought Montag, it's done! He stumbled and fell... An instant before reaching him, the wild car swerved around him and was gone. Falling had saved him. Mr. Montag lay flat, his head down. Wisps of laughter trailed back with the blue car exhaust. That wasn't the police, thought Mr. Montag. It was "a carful of high-school children, yelling, whistling, hurrahing. And they had seen a man, a pedestrian, a rarity, and they had yelled "Let's get him!" They didn't know he was the fugitive Mr. Montag; they were simply out for a night of roaring five hundred miles in a few moonlit hours, their faces icy with wind. "They would have killed me," whispered Montag to the shaking concrete under his bruised cheek. "For no reason at all in the world, they would have killed me." He got up and walked unsteadily to the far curb. Somehow, he had remembered to pick up the spilled books. He shuffled them, oddly, in his numb hands. "I wonder if they were the ones who killed Clarisse." His eyes watered. The thing that had saved him was falling flat. The driver of that car, seeing Montag prone, considered the possibility that running over a body at one hundred miles an hour might turn the car over and spill them all out. Now, if Montag had remained upright, things would have been far different... Montag gasped. Far down the empty avenue, four blocks away, the car of laughing children had turned. Now it was racing back, picking up speed. Montag dodged into an alley and was gone in the shadow long before the car returned. HE house was silent. Mr. Montag approached it from the back, creeping through the scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass. He touched the screen doOr, found it open, slipped in, tiptoed across the porch, and, behind the refrigerator in the kitchen, deposited three of the books. He waited, listening to the house. "Mrs. Black, are you asleep up there?" he asked of the second floor in a whisper. "I hate to do this to you, but your husband did just as bad to others, never asking, never wondering, never worrying. You're a fireman's wife, Mrs. Black, and now it's your house, and you will be in jail a while, for all the houses your husband has burned and people he's killed." The ceiling did not reply. Quietly, Montag slipped from the house and returned to the alley. The house was still dark; no one had heard him come or go. He walked casually down the alley, and came to an all-night, dimly lighted phone booth. He closed himself in the booth and dialed a number. "I want to report an illegal own. ership of books," he said. The voice sharpened on the other end. "The address?" He gave it and added, "Better get there before they burn them. Check the kitchen." Montag stepped out and stood in the cold night air, waiting. At a great distance he heard the fire sirens coming, coming to burn Mr. Black's house while he was away at work, and make his wife stand shivering in the morning air while the .roof dropped down. But now she was upstairs, deep in sleep. "Good night, Mrs. Black," said Mr. Montag. "You'll excuse me -- I have several other visits to make." "Professor Faber!" Another rap and a long waiting. Then, from within, lights flickered on about the small house. After another pause, the front door opened. "Who is it?" Faber cried, for the man who staggered in was in the dark for a moment and then rushing past. "Oh, Montag !" "I'm going away," said Montag, stumbling to a chair. "I've been a fool." Professor Faber stood at the door listening to the distant sirens wailing off like animals in the morning. "Someone's been busy." "It worked." "At least you were a fool about the right things." Faber shut the door, came back, and poured a drink for each of them. "I wondered what had happened to you." "I was delayed." Montag patted his inside pocket. "The money's here." He took it out and laid it on the desk, then sat tiredly sipping his drink. "How do you feel?" "This is the first night in many years I've fallen right to sleep," said Faber. "That must mean I'm doing the right thing. I think we can trust me now. Once, I didn't think so." "People never trust themselves, but they never let others know. I suppose that's why we do rash things, expose ourselves in positions from which we don't dare retreat. Unconsciously, we fear we might give in, quit the fight, and so we do a foolish thing, like reading poetry to women." Montag laughed at himself. "So I guess I'm on the run. It'll be up to you to keep things moving." "I'll do my damnedest." Faber sat down. "Tell me about it. What you did just now, I mean." "I hid my remaining books in four firemen's homes. Then I telephoned an alarm. I figured I might be dead by morning, and I wanted to have done something before then." "God, I'd like to've been there." "Yes, the places burned very well." "Where are you going now?" "I don't know." "Try the factory section, follow the old rail lines, look up some of the hobo camps. I didn't tell you this before -- maybe I didn't quite trust you yet, I don't know -- but they were in touch with' me last year, wanting me to go underground with them." "With tramps?" "There are a lot of Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. What else can they do? Most of them are wanted and hunted in cities. They survive. I don't think they have a plan for a revolution, though; I never heard them speak of it. They simply sit by their fires. Not a very lively group. But they might hide you now." "I'll try. I'm heading for the river, I think, then the old factory district. I'll keep in touch with you.' "In Boston, then. I'm leaving on the three o'clock train tonight -- or, rather, this morning. That's not long from now. There's a retired printer in Boston that I want to see with this money." "I'll contact you there," said Montag. "And get books from you when I need them, to plant in firemen's houses across the country." "Do you want to sleep here a while?" Faber asked. "I'd better get going. I wouldn't want you held responsible." "Let's check." Faber switched on the televisor. A voice was talking swiftly: " -- this evening. Montag has escaped, but we expect his arrest in # hours. Here's a bulletin. The Electric Dog is being transported here from Green Town -- " Montag and Faber glanced at each other. " -- You may recall the interviews recently on t-v concerning this incredible new invention, a machine so delicate in sense perception that it can follow trails much as bloodhounds did for centuries. But this machine, without fail, always finds its quarry!" Montag put his empty glass down and he was cold. "The machine is self-operating, weighs only forty pounds, is propelled on seven rubber wheels. The front is a nose, which in reality is a thousand noses, so sensitive that they can distinguish # food combinations, # flower smells, and remember identity index odors of # men without the bother of resetting." Faber began to tremble. He looked at his house, at the door, the floor, the chair in which Montag sat. Montag interpreted this look. They both stared together at the invisible trail of his footprints leading to this house, the odor of his hand on the brass doorknobs, the smell of his body in the air and on this chair. "The Electric Hound is now landing, by helicopter, at the burned Montag home. We take you there by t-v control!" So they must have a game, thought Montag. In the midst of a # ? time of war, they must play the game out. There was the burned house, the crowd, and something with a sheet over it, Mr. Leahy -- yes, Mr. Leahy -- and out of the sky, fluttering, came the red helicopter, landing like a grotesque and menacing flower. Montag watched the scene with a solid fascination, not wanting to move, ever. If he wished, he could linger here, in comfort, and follow the entire hunt on through its quick phases, down alleys, up streets, across empty running avenues, with the sky finally lightening with dawn, up other alleys to burned houses, and so on to this place here, this house, with Faber and himself seated at their leisure, smoking idly, drinking good wine, while the Electric Hound sniffed down the fatal paths, whirring and pausing with finality right outside that door there. Then, if he wished, Montag could rise, walk to the door, keep one eye on the t-v screen, open the door, look out, look back, and see himself, dramatized, described, made over, standing there, limned in the bright television screen, from outside, a drama to be watched objectively, and he would catch himself, an instant before oblivion, being killed for the benefit of a wakened from their sleeps a few minutes ago by the frantic beepbeeping of their receivers to watch the big game, the big hunt, the Scoop ! "There it is," whispered Faber, hoarsely. O UT of the helicopter glided something that was not a machine, not an animal, not dead, not alive, just gliding. It glowed with a green phosphorescence, and it was on a long leash. Behind it came a man, dressed lightly, with earphones on his shaven head. "I can't stay here." Montag leaped up, his eyes still fixed to the scene. The Electric Hound shot forward to the smoking ruins, the man running after it. A coat was brought forward. Montag recognized it as his own, dropped in the yard during flight. The Electric Hound studied it for only a moment. There was a whirring and clicking of dials and meters. "You can't escape." Faber mourned over it, turning away. "I've heard about that damned monster. No one has ever escaped." "I'll try, anyway. I'm sorry about this. Professor." "About me? About my house? Don't be. I'm the one to be sorry I didn't act years ago. Whatever I get out of this, I deserve. You run, now; perhaps I can delay them here somehow -- " "Wait a minute." Montag moved forward. "There's no use your being discovered. We can erase the trail here. First the chair. Get me a knife." Faber ran and fetched a knife. With it, Montag attacked the chair where he had sat. He cut the upholstery free, then shoved it, bit by bit, without touching the lid, into the wall incinerator. , "Now," he said, "after I leave, rip up the carpet. It has my footprints on it. Cut it up, burn it, air the house. Rub the doorknobs with alcohol. After I go, turn your garden sprinkler on full. That'll wash away the sidewalk traces." Faber shook his hand vigorously. "You don't know what this means. I'll do anything to help you in the future. Get in touch with me in Boston, then." "One more thing. A suitcase, Get it, fill it with your dirty laundry, an old suit, the dirtier the better, denim pants maybe, a shirt, some old sneakers and socks." Faber was gone and back in a minute. Mon tag sealed the full suitcase with scotch tape. "To keep the odor in," he said, breathlessly. He poured a liberal amount of cognac over the exterior of the case. "I don't want that Hound picking up two odors at once. Mind if I take this bottle of whisky? I'll need it later. When I get to the river, I'll change clothes." "And identities; from Montag to Faber." "Christ, I hope it works! If your clothes smell strong enough, which God knows they seem to, we might confuse the Hound, anyway." "Good luck." They shook hands again and glanced at the t-v. The Electric Hound was on its way, followed by mobile camera units, through alleys, across empty morning streets, silently, silently, sniffing the great night wind for Mr. Leonard Montag. "Be seeing you!" And Montag was out the door, running lightly, with the half empty case. Behind him, he saw and felt and heard the garden sprinkler air with synthetic rain to wash away the smell of Montag. Through the back window, the last thing he saw of Faber was the older man ripping up the carpet and cramming it in the wall incinerator. Montag ran. Behind him, in the night city, the Electric Hound followed. panting, across town, to watch through the dimly lighted windows of wakened houses. He peered in at silhouettes before television screens and there on the screens saw where the Electric Hound was, now at Elm Terrace, now at Lincoln Avenue, now at #th, now up the alley toward Mr. Faber's, now Faber's! "No, no!" thought Montag. "Go on past! Don't turn in, don't!" He held his breath. The Electric Hound hesitated, then plunged on, leaving Faber's house behind. For a moment the t-v camera scanned Faber's home. The windows were dark. In the garden, the water sprinkled the cool air, softly. T HE Electric Hound raced ahead, down the alley. "Good going, Professor." And Montag was gone, again, racing toward the distant river, stopping at other houses to see the game on the t-v sets, the long running game, and the Hound drawing near behind. "Only a mile away now!" As he ran he had the Seashell at his ear and a voice ran with every step, with the beat of his heart and the sound of his shoes on gravel. "Watch for the pedestrian ! Look for the pedestrian ! Anyone on the sidewalks or in the street, walking or running, is suspect! Watch for the pedestrian!" How simple in a city where no one walked. Look, look for the walking man, the man who proves his legs. Thank God for good dark alleys where men could run in peace. House lights flashed on all about. Montag saw faces peering streetward as he passed behind them, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like odd animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray eyes and gray minds, and he plunged ahead, leaving them to their tasks, and in another minute was at the black, moving river. He found what he was looking for after five minutes of running along the bank. It was a rowboat drawn and staked to the sand. He took possession. The boat slid easily on the long silence of river and went away downstream from the city, bobbing and whispering, while Montag stripped in darkness down to the skin, and splashed his body, his arms, his legs, his face with raw liquor. Then he changed into Faber's old clothing and shoes. He tossed his own clothing into the river with the suitcase. He sat watching the dark shore. There would be a delay while the pursuit rode the Electric Hound up and down stream to see where a man named Montag had stepped ashore. Whether or not the smell of Faber would be strong enough, with the aid of the alcohol, was something else again. He pulled out a handkerchief he had saved over, doused it with the remainder of the liquor. He must hold this over his mouth when stepping ashore. The particles of his breathing might remain in an electronically detectable invisible cloud for hours after he had passed on. He couldn't wait any longer. He was below the town now, in a lonely place of weeds and old railway tracks. He rowed the boat toward shore, tied the handkerchief over his face, and leaped out as the boat touched briefly. The current swept the boat away, turning slowly. "Farewell to Mr. Montag," he said. "Hello, Mr. Faber." He went into the woods. road tracks that had not been used in years, crusted with brown rust and overgrown with weeds. He listened to his feet moving in the long grass. He paused now and then, checking behind to see if he was followed, but was not. Firelight shone far ahead. "One of the camps," thought Montag. "One of the places where the hobo intellectuals cook their meals and talk!" It was unbelievable. Half an hour later he came out of the weeds and the forest into the half light of the fire, for only a moment, then he hid back and waited, watching the group of seven men, holding their hands to the small blaze, murmuring. To their right, a quarter mile away, was the river. Up the stream a mile, and still apparent in the dark, was the city, and no sound except the voices and the fire crackling. Montag waited ten minutes in the shadows. Finally a voice called: "All right, you can come out now." He shrank back. "It's okay," said the voice. "You're welcome here." He let himself stand forth and then he walked tiredly toward the fire, peering at the men and their dirty clothing. "We're not very elegant," said the man who seemed to be the leader of the little group. "Sit down. Have some coffee." He watched the dark steaming mixture poured into a collapsible cup which was handed him straight off. He sipped it gingerly. He felt the scald on his lips. The men were watching him. Their faces were unshaved but their beards were much too neat, and their, hands were clean. They had stood up, as if to welcome a guest, and now they sat down again. Montag sipped. "Thanks,"' he said. The leader said, "My name is Granger, as good a name as any. You don't have to tell us your name at all." He remembered something. "Here, before you finish the coffee, better take this." He held out a small bottle of colorless fluid. "What is it?" "Drink it. Whoever you are, you wouldn't be here unless you were in trouble. Either that, or you're a Government spy, in which case we are only a bunch of men traveling nowhere and hurting no one. In any event, whoever you are, an hour after you've drunk this fluid, you'll be someone else. It does something to the perspiratory system -- changes the sweat content. If you want to stay here you'll have to drink it, otherwise you'll have to move on. If there's a Hound after you, you'd be bad company." "I think I took care of the Hound," said Montag, and drank the tasteless stuff. The fluid stung his throat. He was sick for a moment; there was a blackness in his eyes, and a roaring in his head. Then it passed.L said Granger, and snorted at his social error. "I beg your pardon -- " He poked his thumb at a small portable t-v beyond the fire. 'We've been watching. They videoed a picture of you, not a very good resemblance. We hoped you'd head this way." "It's been quite a chase." "Yes." Granger snapped the t-v on. It was no bigger than a handbag, weighing some seven pounds, mostly screen. A voice from the set cried: "The chase is now veering south along the river. On the eastern shore the police helicopters are converging on Avenue # and Elm Grove Park." "You're safe," said Granger. "They're faking. You threw them off at the river, but they can't adwatching that bunch of scoundrels hound after you. They'll catch you in five minutes." "But if they're ten miles away, how can they...?" "Watch." He made the t-v picture brighter. "Up that street there, somewhere, right now, out for an early morning walk. A rarity, an odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk early in the morning just for the hell of it. Anyway, up that street the police know that every morning a certain man walks alone, for the air, to smoke. Call him but the search is getting nearer to him every minute. See?" In the video screen, a man turned a corner. The Electric Hound rushed forward, screeching. The police converged upon the man. The t-v voice cried, "There's Montag no'nt! The search is over!" The innocent man stood watching the crowd come on. In his hand was a cigaret, half smoked. He looked at the Hound and his jaw dropped, and he started to say something when a godlike voice boomed, "All right Montag, don't move! We've got you, Montag!" By the small fire, with seven other men, Mr. Montag sat, ten miles removed, the light of the video screen on his face. "Don't run, Montag!" The man turned, bewildered. The crowd roared. The Hound leaped up. "The poor son of a bitch," said Granger, bitterly. A dozen shots rattled out. The man crumpled. "Montag is dead, the search is over, a criminal is given his due," said the announcer. The camera trucked forward. Just before it showed the dead man's face, however, the screen went black. "We now switch you to the Sky Room of the Hotel Lux in San Francisco for a half hour of dawn dance music by -- " didn't show the man's face, naturally. Better if everyone thinks it's Montag." Montag said nothing, but simply looked at the blank screen. He could not move or speak. Granger put out his hand. "Welcome back from the dead, Mr. Montag." Montag took the hand, numbly. The man said, "My real name is Clement, former occupant of the T. S. Eliot Chair at Cambridge. That was before it became an Electrical Engineering School. This gentleman here is Dr. Simmons from U.C.L.A." "I don't belong here," said Montag, at last, slowly. "I've been an idiot, all the way down the line, bungled and messed and tripped myself up." "Anger makes idiots of us all. I'm afraid. You can only be angry so long, then you explode and do the wrong things. It can't be helped now." "I shouldn't have come here. It might endanger you." "We're used to that. We all make mistakes, or we wouldn't be here ourselves. When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage. I struck a fireman in the face, once. He'd come to burn my library back about forty years ago. I had to run. I've been running ever since. And Simmons here..." "I quoted Donne in the midst of a genetics class one afternoon. For no reason at all. Just started quoting Donne. You see? Fools, all of us." They glanced at the fire, selfconsciously. "So you want to join us, Mr. Montag?" "Yes." "What have you to offer?" "Nothing. I thought I had the Book of Job, but I haven't even got that now." "The Book of Job would do very well. Where was it?" "Here." Montag touched his head. "Ah," said Granger-Clement. He smiled and nodded. "What's wrong? Isn't that all right?" said Montag. "Better than all right -- perfect! Mr. Montag, you have hit upon the secret of, if you want to give it a term, our organization. Living books, Mr. Montag, living books. Inside the old skull where no one can see." He turned to Simmons. "Do we have a Book of Job?" "Only one. A man named Harris in Youngstown." "Mr. Montag." The man grasped Montag's shoulder firmly. "Walk slowly, be careful, take your health seriously. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Job. Do you see how important you ?  "But I've forgotten it!" "Nonsense, nothing is ever forgotten. Mislaid, perhaps, but not forgotten. We have ways, several new methods Of hypnosis, to shake down the clinkers there. You'll remember, don't fear." "I've been trying to remember." "Don't try. Relax. It'll come when we need it. Some people are quick studies but don't know it. Some of God's simplest creatures have the ability called eidetic or photographic memory, the ability to memorize entire pages of print at a glance. It has nothing to do with I.Q. No offense, Montag. It varies. Would you like, one day, to read Plato's Republic?" "Of course." Granger nodded to a man who had been sitting to one side. "Mr. Plato, if you please." T HE man began to talk. He looked at Montag idly, his aware of the words tumbling from his lips. He talked for two minutes without a pause or stumble. Granger made the smallest move of his fingers. The man cut off. "Perfect word-for-word memory, every word important, every word Plato's," said Granger. "And," said the man who was Plato, "I don't understand a damned word of it. I just say it. It's up to you to understand." "Don't you understand any of it?" asked Montag. "None of it. But I can't get it out. Once it's in, it's like solidified glue in a bottle, there for good. Mr. Granger says it's important. That's good enough for me." "We're old friends," said Granger. "We hadn't seen each other since we were boys. We met a few years ago on that track, somewhere between here and Seattle, walking, me running away from firemen, he running from cities." "Never liked cities," said the one who was Plato. "Always felt that cities owned men, that was all, and used, men to keep themselves going, to keep machines oiled and dusted. So I got out. And then I met Granger and he found out that I had this eidetic memory, as he calls it, and he gave me a book to read and then we burned the book ourselves so we wouldn't be caught with it. And now I'm Plato; that's what I am." "He is also Socrates." The man nodded. "And Schopenhauer." Another nod. "And John Dewey." "All that in one bottle. You wouldn't think there was room. But I can open my head like a concertina and play it. There's plenty of room if you don't try to think about what you've memorized. It's when you start thinking that all of a sudden it's crowded. I don't think about anything except eating, sleeping, and traveling. I let you people do the thinking when you hear what I recite. Oh, there's plenty of room, believe me." "So here we are, Mr. Montag. Mr. Simmons is really Mr. John Donne and Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Aristophanes. These other gentlemen are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And  am Ruth." Everyone laughed quietly-. "You see, we are not without humor in this melancholy age. I'm also bits and pieces, Mr. Montag, snatches of Byron and Shelley and Shaw and Washington Irving and Shakespeare. I'm one of those kaleidoscopes. Hold me up to the sun, give a shake, watch the patterns. And you are Mr. Job, and in half an hour or less, a war will begin. While those people in that anthill across the river have been busy chasing Montag, as if he were the cause of all their nervous anxiety and frustration, the war has been getting under way. By this time tomorrow the world will belong to the little green towns and the rusted railroad tracks and the men walking on them; that's us. The cities will be soot and baking powder." T HE t-v rang a bell. Granger switched it on. "Final negotiations are arranged for a conference today with the enemy government -- " Granger snapped it off. "Well, what do you think, Montag?" "I think I was pretty blind and ferocious trying to go at it the way I did, planting books and calling firemen." "You did what you thought you had to do. But our way is simpler and better and the thing we wish to do is keep the knowledge intact and safe and not to excite or anger anyone; for then, if we are destroyed, the knowledge is most certainly dead. We are model citizens in our own special way -- we walk the tracks, we lie in the hills at night, we bother no one, and the city people let us be. We're stopped and searched for books, occasionally, but we have none, and our faces have been changed by plastic surgery, as have our fingerprints. So we wait quietly for the day when the machines are dented junk and then we hope to walk by and say. 'Here we are,' to those who survive this war, and we'll say, 'Have you come to your senses now? Perhap. a few books will do you some good.' " "But will they listen to you?" "Perhaps not. Then we'll have to wait some more. Maybe a few hundred years. Maybe they'll never lis ten; we can't make them. So we'll pass the books on to our children, in their minds, and let them wait, in turn, on other people. Some day someone will need us. This can't last forever." "How many of you are there?" "Thousands on the road, on the rails, bums on the outside, libraries on the inside. It wasn't really planned; it grew. Each man had a book he wanted to remember and did. Then we discovered each other and over twenty years or so got a loose network together and made a plan. The important thing we had to learn was that we were not important, we were not to be pedants, we were not to feel superior, we were nothing more than covers for books, of no individual significance whatever. Some of us live in small towns -- chapter one of Walden in Nantucket, chapter two in Reading, chapter three in Waukesha, each according to his ability. Some can learn a few lines, some a lot." "The books are safe then." "Couldn't be safer. Why, there's one village in North Carolina, some # people, no bomb'll ever touch their town, which is the complete Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. You could pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, a page to a person. People who wouldn't dream of being seen with a book gladly memorized a page. You can't be caught with that. And when the war's over and we've time and need, the books can be written again. The people will be called in one by one to recite what they know and it'll be in print again until another Dark Age, when maybe we'll have to do the whole damned thing over again, man being the fool he is." "What do we do tonight?" asked Montag. "Just wait, that's all." faces, old, all of them, in the firelight, and certainly tired. Perhaps he was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that' wasn't really there. Perhaps he expected these men to be proud with the knowledge they carried, to glow with the wisdom as lanterns glow with the fire they contain. But all the light came from the campfire here, and these men seemed no different than any other man who has run a long run, searched a long search, seen precious things destroyed, seen old friends die, and now, very late in time, were gathered together to watch the machines die, or hope they might die, even while cherishing a last paradoxical love for those very machines which could spin out a material with happiness in the warp and terror in the woof, so interblended that a man might go insane trying to tell the design to himself, and his place in it. They weren't at all certain that what they carried in their heads might make every future dawn dawn brighter. They were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their solemn eyes and that if man put his mind to them properly, something of dignity and happiness might be regained. Montag looked from one face to another. "Don't judge a book by its cover," said someone. A soft laughter moved among them. Montag turned to look at the city across the river. ' "My wife's in that city now," he said. "I'm sorry to hear that." "Look," said Simmons. Montag glanced up. The bombardment was finished and over, even while the seeds were in the windy sky. The bombs were there, the jet-planes were there, for the merest trifle of an instant, like grain thrown across the heavens by a great hand, and the bombs drifted with a dreadful slowness down upon the morning city where all of the people looked up at their destiny coming upon them like the lid of a dream shutting tight and become an instant later a red and powdery nightmare. The bombardment to all military purposes was finished. Once the planes had sighted their target, alerted their bombardier at five thousand miles an hour, as quick as the whisper of a knife through the sky, the war was finished. Once the trigger was pulled, once the bombs took flight, it was over. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone, half around the visible world, it seemed, like bullets in which an island savage might not believe because they were unseen, yet the heart is struck suddenly, the body falls into separate divisions, the blood is astounded to be free on the air, and the brain gives up all its precious memories and, still puzzled, dies. It was merely a gesture. It was the flirt of a great metal hand over the city and a voice saying, "Disintegrate. Leave no stone upon another. Perish. Die." Montag held the bombs in the sky for a precious moment, with his mind and his hands. "Run!" he cried to Faber. To Clarisse, "Run!" To Mildred, "Get out, get out of there!" But Clarisse, he remembered, was dead. And Faber was out; there, in the deep valleys of the country, went the dawn train on its way from one desolation to another. Though the desolation had not yet arrived, was still in the air, it was as certain as man could make it. Before the train had gone another fifty yards on the track, its destination would be meaningless, its point of departure made from a metropolis into a junkyard. And Mildred ! "Get out, run!" he thought. He could see Mildred in that metropolis now, in the half second remaining, as the bombs were perhaps three inches, three small inches shy of her hotel building. He could see her leaning into the t-v set as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there. Mildred, leaning anxiously, nervously, into that tubular world as info a crystal ball to find happiness. The first bomb struck. "Mildred !" Perhaps the television station went first into oblivion. Mon tag saw the screen go dark in Mildred's face, and heard her screaming, because in the next millionth part of time left, she would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it would be such a wildly empty face that she would at last recognize it, and stare at the ceiling almost with welcome as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way. "I remember now," thought Montag, "where we first met. It was in Chicago. Yes, now I remember." Montag found himself on his face. The concussion had knocked the air across the river, turned the men down like dominoes in a line, blown out the fire like a last candle, and caused the trees to mourn with a great voice of wind passing away south. Montag lay with his face toward the city. Now it, instead of the bombs, was in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of dust and sparkles of torn metal into a city not unlike a reversed avalanche, formed of flame and steel and stone,' a door where a window ought to be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell. The sound of its death came after. A ND Montag lying there, his eyes shut, gasping and crying out, suddenly thought, "Now I remember another thing. Now I remember the Book of Job." He said it over to himself, lying tight to the earth; he said the words of it many times and they were perfect without trying. "Now I remember the book of Job. Now I do remember... "There," said a voice. Granger's voice. The men lay like gasping fish on the grass. They did not get up for a long time, but held to the earth as children hold to a fam'iliar thing, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what has happened or will happen. Their fingers were clawed into the soil, and they were all shouting to keep their ears in balance and open. Montag shouting with them, a protest against the wind that swept them, shaking their hair, tearing at their lips, making their noses bleed. Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an absorption that the city was effortlessly forgotten. The wind died. The city was flat, as if one had taken a heaping tablespoon of flour and passed a finger over it, smoothing it to an even level. The men said nothing. They lay a while like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day's obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot, hand after hand, its deliveries and functions and minute obsessions. They lay blinking their stunned eyelids. You could hear them breathing fast, then slower, then with the slowness of normality. Montag sat up. He did not move any farther, however. The other men did likewise. The sun was touching the black horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cool and sweet and smelled of rain. In a few minutes it would smell of dust and pulverized iron, but now it was sweet. And across the world, thought Montag, the cities of the other nations are dead, too, almost in the same instant. Silently, the leader of the small group, Granger, arose, felt of his arms and legs, touched his face to see if everything was in its place, then shuffled over to the blownout fire and bent over it. Montag watched. Everyone watched. Striking a match, Granger touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, and shoved together bits of straw and dry wood, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it by its glow, the fire licked up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs. low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was no more than this: "How many strips?" "Two each." "Good enough." The bacon was counted out on a wax paper. The frying pan was set to the fire and the bacon laid in it. After a moment it began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma. Eggs were cracked in upon the bacon and .the men watched this ritual, for the leader was a participant, as were they, in a religion of early rising, a thing man had done for many centuries, thought Montag, a thing man had done over and over again, and Montag felt at ease among them, as if during the long night the walls of a great prison had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, with no schedule, and with no nagging human insistence. "Here," said Granger, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan. They each held out the scratched tin plates that had been passed around. Then, without looking up, breaking more eggs into the panfor himself, Granger slowly and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, and for making the food also, began to recite snatches and rhythms, even while the day brightened all about as if a pink lamp had been given more wick, and Montag listened and they all looked at the tin plates in their hands, waiting a moment for the eggs to cool, while the leader started the routine, and others took it up, here or there, round about. he spoke, too: "To everything there is a season. And a time to every purpose under the heaven...  . A time to be born, and a time to die... A time to kill, and a time to heal... The forks moved in the pink light. Now each of the men remembered a separate and different thing, a bit of poetry, a line from a play, an old song. And they spoke these little bits and pieces in the early morning air: "Man that is born of a woman Is of few days and full of trouble... A wind blew in the trees. "To be or not to be, that is the question..." The sun was fully up. "Oh, do you remember, Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt...?" Montag felt fine.    not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have... or do... or will. I don't know, verbs get all mixed up. We don't have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this. Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did, so you will. comes out here There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with... everything has a beginning and an end. But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so! Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the machine out there too long -- until you get used to it, you'll find it's hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years. You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not? And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes -- we're the same person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just how you feel; I felt the same way when he -- that is,' of course, I or we -- came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago. Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter. Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people. You sense things. So I'll simply go ahead talking for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling what happened to me; but he -- I -- told me what I was going to do, so I might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the same thing in the same words, even if I tried -- and I don't intend to try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this. So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me. You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty obvious it must 'be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you, and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but you'll want to go along. I 'LL BE tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button, and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section isn't protected, though. You start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there -- in fact, there is no there. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are. You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out, all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening and you don't try it again. Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time. You turn to me, getting used to the idea. "So this is the fourth dimension?" you ask. Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak. "Not exactly," I try to explain. "Maybe it's no dimension -- or it might be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you'd W t  I . need a fifth. Don't ask me. I didn't invent the machine and I don't understand it." "But... I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, a good way of going crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine -- the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did -- and you will -- you get further and further from an answer. Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't think about that then, either. and the air in the machine is getting a bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. "Where are we getting our air?" you ask. "Or why don't we lose it?" "No place for it to go," I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still. Then the machine stops -- at least, the field around us cuts off. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the machine, just as I do. I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels comfortable. "I'm staying here," I tell you. "This is like the things they wear in this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune -- the one you make on that atomic generator -- invested in such a way I can get it on using some identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming back with you." You nod, remembering I've told you about it. "What century is this, anyway?" I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. "As near as I can guess, it's about #. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an interstellar civilization." You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor. This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs, and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open. "What about the time machine?" you ask. "Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe."  say "first" to it. It gives out a soughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's no feeling of acceleration -- some kind of false gravity they use in the future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says "first" back at us. It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. "You go that way. Don't worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum, grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you." You act as if you're dreaming, though you can't believe it's a dream. You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later, you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I'm asking questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off. You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at them, realizing for the first time that things have changed. Steijtneri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenser i. The signs are very quiet and dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains, and the like. What a zergot is, you don't know. You stop at a sign that announces: Travtl Biwrou -- F :rst-Clas T wrz -- Man, Viins, and x: Trouj.n Planets. Spejtl reits tn aol snz wixin # lyt tin! But there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get the hang of the spelling they use, though. Now there are people around you, but nobody pays much attention to you. Why should they? You wouldn't care if you saw a man in a leopard-skin suit; you'd figure it was some part in a play and let it go. Well, people don't change much. You get up your courage and go up to a boy selling something that might be papers on tapes. "Where can I find the Museum of Science?" "Dowmayer rien turn lefa the sign. Stoo bloss," he tells you. Around you, you hear some pretty normal English, but there are others using stuff as garbled as his. The educated and uneducated? I don't know. You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface of the walk: Miuzinn v Syens. There's an arrow pointing and you turn left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the information that it is the museum. Y OU go up the steps, but you see thjt it seems to be closed. You hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other guard. What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather pleasant. "Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice." "Thanks," you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce guards as polite as that. "I -- I'm told I should investigate your display of atomic generators." He beams at that. "Of course." The gate is swung to behind you, but obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a lock. "Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though. Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period. Oh -- congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our oldest tapes." You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny toward you. "Souvenir," it announces in a well-modulated voice. "This is a typical gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to # facets, known technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child, press the red button for the number of stones you desire." You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of spaceships -- from the original thing that looks like a V-#, and is labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with miniature manikins -- are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then there is one labeled Wep:nz, filled with everything from a crossbow to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil, marked Fynal Hand Arm. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big place that bears a sign, Mad:lz v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez. convinced. And you've been doing a lot of thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking in, but you aren't You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order, and the latest one, marked # -- Rincs Dynpat is about the size of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier, but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically final form. You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation, and full patent application. They state that it has all major refinements, operating on any fuel, producing electricity at any desired chosen cyclic rate from direct current to one thousand megacycles, and any amperage up to one thousand, its maximum power output being fifty kilowatts, limited by the current-carrying capacity of the outputs. They also mention that the operating principle is still being investigated, and that only such refinements as better alloys and the addition of magnetric and nucleatric current outlets have been added since the original. So you go to the end and look over the thing. It's simply a square box with a huge plug on each side, and a set of vernier controls on top, plus a little hole marked, in oldstyle spelling, Drop BBs or wire here. Apparently that's the way it's fueled. It's about one foot on each side. "Nice," the guard says over your shoulder. "It finally wore out one of the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever. Like to have me tell you about it?" "Not particularly," you begin, and then realize bad manners might be conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pullsy something out of his pocket and stares at it. "Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba -- Centaurian, you know -- is arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?" You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge it, either. Y OU work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you can get one with: built-in magnetic current terminals -- Ehrenhaft or some other principle? -- and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect. And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed. Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing. You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be carried. You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact, if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for  ## yourself. But maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how Qy much I remembered, after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say. Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing happens, though. You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street. Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see. There's another yell behind you. Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you dart past. The street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting heavier at every step. Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and on the beefy side appears -- and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop. "You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow," the cop says. "There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let me grab you a taxi." your knees begin to buckle, but you shake your head and come up for air. "I -- I left my money home," you begin. The cop nods. "Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me." He reaches out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. "Sir, an emergency request. Would you help this gentleman?" The pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. "How far?" You did notice the name of the building from which you came and you mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out and picks up the other side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him. Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming at you both. That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there before you. And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck. "You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications," he says. "They go with the generator -- we don't like to have them separated. A good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and we'll pick it up." You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems' to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction and heads back to the museum. You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator. There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there. You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were. and something dilates in the wall. It forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in, gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at the original level. You get out -- and realize you don't have a light. You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine. You ve located it. You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one beside it and you finally decide on that. Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating it. Your finger touches the red button. You'll never know what the shouting was about -- whether they finally doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around you and the next button you touch -- the one on the board that hasn't been used so far -- sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe. It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with some pencil marks over them -- "Press these to return to yourself # years" -- and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't because there is only one of you this time. Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in your own back yard. You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement, land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then, you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic generator and taking it inside. you don't learn a thing; just some plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends -- all things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals. But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice something. Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires missing! It won't work. You put some ## house wire in, exactly like the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again. And with the controls set at # volts, # cycles and # amperes, you get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth -- minus the replaced wires the guard mentioned -- which probably wore out because of the makeshift job you've just done. But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and that the date of the patent application is #. It will begin to soak in, then. You pick up an atomic generator in the future and bring it back to the past -- your present -- so that it can be put in the museum with you as the inventor so you can steal it to be the inventor. And yoy do it in a time machine which you bring back to yourself to take yourself into the future to return to take back to yourself... Who invented what? And who built which ? Before long, your riches from the generator are piling in. Little kids from school are coming around to stare at the man who changed history and madeatomic power so common that no nation could hope to be anything but a democracy and a peaceful one -- after some of the worst times in history for a few years. Your name eventually becomes as common as Ampere, or Faraday, or any other spelled without a capital letter. But you're thinking of the puzzle. You can't find any answer. One day you come across an old poem -- something about some folks calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be knocking on your' own door, thirty years back -- or right now, from your view -- and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you. But now... Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left. Let's go. The Big News Next Month... The Wind Between the Worlds The Protector There's a fortune in a boxer who feels no pain. This one didn't, except in odd ways... H OW come I live here on Gorlin permanent? Well, it's something like this. There is nobody real surprised when some scientist writes an article in the Sunday supplement about the primitive tribes of Anestha dying out, probably. The Anesthon natives is freaks, anyway, and folks just naturally figure they can't last long in stiff competition. If you are like them and your body don't feel any pain any time, you need a nursemaid around to keep you from doing dumb things, like walking in front of a truck or starving to death. I am here on Gorlin a couple times and know about 'em. Some folks think it's comical to watch the space crews think up ways to give an Anesthon a workout. I see one Anesthon girl -- a real looker she is, too -- dance fourteen hours before she gives out, just for a bottle of perfume and one of them Venusian fur lounge robes. They sure enjoy their pleasures, even if they never feel no pain. You feeling any? More thiska? Hey, Noor! Another round of thiska for the boys! Well, they can feel your feelings, and any thoughts that are about them, too. I guess all they live for is pleasure and a pat on the back. One time a little runty Anesthon guy even builds a whole stone blockhouse for a first looie, when the looie thinks real hard that the little guy looks like a firstrate hod carrier. Time the house is built, the Anesthon's hands is all bloody and one ankle broke where a chunk of rock drops on him. He don't notice it, of course. Pierre gets all worked up about them Anestha dying out. That's my boy Pierre, the heavyweight. I name him Pierre so's nobody thinks he is tough till afterward. He comes from Gorlin. Of course I have to stable him on Venus long enough for a legal residence, or the Boxing Commission would have him investigated and maybe banned from the ring as a telepath. Tough training him, too. He can't see the sense of fighting, but, man, he can stay in the ring all night. He never does get real speedy on his feet, but he learns fast and packs a wicked left. I don't have to lie when I am thinking real hard he is champeen material. Anyhow, Pierre gets all worked up over his race getting extinct. He has a sister who is glenched to some nice boy and his old man is some sort of a chief. He is all for beating it back by the next via-Venus ship to see what is getting at the old folks at home. I calm him down though, give him a couple of shots of thiska and say I better take him around to see that scientist-dopester and get the inside first. I have to go everywhere with him to see he doesn't break a leg and forget to tell me about it. make for Washington where this science fellow is with some Smithsonian Institute. He is nice enough about seeing us, but he can't figure how a Chinaman like Pierre has any call to be steamed'up about the Anestha (you seen these Anestha with their slick black hair and goldy skin and smooth eyelids like a Earth Chinaman) so I have to break down 'and tell him about Pierre being an Anesthon. That scientist is pretty peeved with me bringing Pierre into the Earth system, but when I tell him Pierre wants to go back to help out the folks, he kind of clams up and says the article is just one of those Sunday paper things. There don't really seem to be anything wrong on Gorlin except that all the workers are getting more careless than usual, falling off walls they are building and getting hit by rocks during blasting, or walking in front of full cars in the mines. Pierre gives the man a look. "Workers? Mines? Blasting?" he says. "What gives? There are no mines on Gorlin," he says, "just a few quarries and a lot of big farms. We never have to kill ourselves working. What gives?" he says. "Oh," the man comes back, "there's a couple big targ mines in full swing. Some big Earth concern is shipping out the  stuff five freighters a day to Mercury for mass insulation. All native workers. They don't get paid much -- weej cigarettes, bubble bath, some thiska, electro-fur blankets, stuff like that -- but I don't hear yapping. If I do, I report anything that looks like slavery." Of course he says it with a lot of grammar and it takes him a half hour, but that is the slant. He wants to gab some then with Pierre. I see that the boy is getting jittery and homesick, too, when the guy starts raving about swimming in the flaff pools and the feeling of katweela petals under your bare feet, so I says we have to catch a plane and get out of there. Pierre still wants to head for Gorlin. He says his people must be unhappy about something or they are more careful. Life on Gorlin is too much fun to just go and die for no reason. I try to pep him up on the way back to Chi, talking about his next fight with Kid Bop, but he says he can't see any reason in fighting, either, just now. I tell him I think he kind of likes fighting, but he says what he likes is the nice things I think about him when he wins, and he is too worried about his family to pay much attention to what I think just now. from one of the best fight seasons I ever see and a rest won't hurt the boy, so I say okay, we are going by the first liner off the Flats. "You don't have to go, Joe," he says. "Keep your dough and train a couple more kids. I may not be back," he says. "Look, boy," I says, "you know what the food is like on them liners," I says, kind of kidding, "and if there's nobody around to cram it down you, you don't eat, and if you don't eat, you starve -- and if you starve, you are in no condition to cheer up your sister and your old man. Besides," I says, "I can afford a vacation and you're the only fighter I want to work with. You've got a real future," I says, "and I'm going to bring you back alive." I guess that makes him feel kind of good, because he grins first time since he reads that paper and says, "All right, Joe, come on along." neckties in the station and ship out of Chi for the Flats on the perfume for his' sister, but I tell him we can get better on Venus, where all the good stuff is made. The trip from Venus Space Base to Gorlin is fast on account of overdrive, but even so I have no trouble passing Pierre off as a fighter who has the jitters and is headed for a vacation where he learns to take it easy the easy way. He is always burning his fingers or his mouth on a cigarette, and I have to keep an eye on him all the time. Nerves, I explain to the passengers. When we land, Pierre is all for hunting up his folks, but I says no, if there is some trouble, it is smarter to case the joint. We check in at the swanky tourist hotel. She is new since I am on Gorlin a couple years ago and what class! She is built around one of the biggest flaff pools on the whole planet and our room is completely lined with padded velvety stuff, sort of a deep red color, and the bathroom has a cloudrift shower that you nearly float away on. But Pierre just doesn't relax. I keep trying to make him get in the shower, but it is no use. 'He says he is just too worried to take any pleasure in it. I don't think we ought to go scouting till night and that is thirty some hours yet, but when I see he is settling down to wear the fuzz right off the floor walking round and round, I give in, feed him a sandwich I bring from the ship, and we stroll off in the woods like we are looking for flowers. There are no signs around the hotel saying which way 'to the mines, so we set off to circle the hotel and spaceport clearing to look for the rail-line that brings the targ to the port. I figure we have gone about two-thirds of the way around when I nearly fall over a guy sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. What I think is katweela flowers is just the red Anesthon kloa he has on. He looks up sort of dull and then he sees Pierre with me. He lets out a yip and sits back hard on the ground and moans. Pierre yanks the fellow up on his feet and hugs him and starts to jabber away so fast I can't tell what he is saying. Foreigners always talk faster than anybody else. The other guy puts in a word or two every once in a while and then he scrams off through the trees. "That's Noor," Pierre informs me, "the guy my sister Jennel is glenched to. He's gonna get us a couple of kloas so nobody'll notice us around the mine. He's feeling mighty low, but I can't figure out why. He says Jennel and the old man are okay, only he can't ever carry Jennel to his own house because he ain't man enough. I don't get it. He can make a good fighter, Joe." Noor is back again with the kloas and Pierre strips and gets into his. I ain't too keen to show my shapelies, but Pierre starts grabbing my shirt and I have to put the kloa on or else. The boys head south at a good clip and I tag along trying to catch up and find out the score. When Pierre sees I am making like winded, he slows down and tells me we are going to the mine owner's fancy dump about two miles down the drag. Pierre says Noor tells him the mine owner doesn't like him and he has to leave us when we get in sight of the house. After about a mile, Noor begins to drag along. Then he just sits down under another tree and says that is the end of the line for him. He points through the trees and says go on, maybe he is still there when we come back, maybe not. While Pierre is jawing with him, I look up the trail and see a Anesthon babe about a hundred feet away. You can tell it is a babe from one of them blue and green mollos draped around her over the kloa. Noor sees her, too, and takes off like a bat back the way we come. Pierre jogs ahead and when I get up with him, there he is hugging and jabbering again. "My sister Jennel," he says, and, "Jennel, this is Joe, my manager." She is a cute trick with lots of yumph showing through the molla. She stands kind of slumped, though, and a few of the flowers in her shiny black hair are pretty mashed. " 'Smatter, Jennel?" I says. "You look kind of dragged out for a dame whose brother comes home practically a champeen. Katweela flowers go on strike?" I says, just tryjng to make talk. She slumps a little more and says the boss don't like her and how it's too bad her brother has to come home and find her still alive and cluttering up the woods. I tell Pierre she better take us to this boss that don't like a babe like her, but she just shakes her head and says go that way and we come to the house. Then she says the boss makes the natives use the employees' entrance on the other side of the house and she offers to take and show us the way. She kind of twitches when she says "natives." She don't even says yes or no all the way to the gate till, just before we get there, I trip on a root and bang my knee on a rock on the waydown. Well, I howl and cuss some and she comes up close and asks me what seems to be the matter. I tell her the blamed rock hurts my knee and I think real hard about how her knee would feel if a rock hits it and she busts right out crying. "Oh, you poor man, you poor man, you," she sobs. "That rock don't like you at all." "It don't hate me, either," I says. "It's only a rock." "(But it makes a hurt to you. It don't love you and now you are not happy where there's any rocks because they don't love you," she says, and she helps me up and starts dragging me along, still crying like crazy. that, but pretty soon we come to a little gate in a thick row of bushes. Jennel lets go of me then and says she hopes Pierre is a strong man .and a good worker and that the boss likes him. And then she gives ' a big sigh and says if the boss don't like him, we can find her over there where the men are cutting down a bunch of trees, because if one of the trees likes her, it will maybe fall on her pretty soon. Pierre tells her to wait right there by the gate because he is coming back. He isn't looking for work so the boss won't care if he is strong or not. She just sighs again and sits down on the grass and whimpers. Pierre tries once more to get her to tell him what is the matter, but all she says is that their father and some other fellow named Frith are .up at the big house. They are being talked to by the boss about not getting out enough targ on the shifts where they are foremen, and she says how sad it is about Pierre coming home. It is just beginning to filter through my thick skull that the boss is connected with all this dying out of the Anestha, as the Sunday paper puts it, and I grab Pierre away from Jennel and hustle him through .the gate. "Look, Pierre," I says, "we'll go around and listen by them long windows and see what cooks. I'll bet that boss is up to something dirty in there. If he is the one who messed up Jennel," I says, "we better just mess him up some." There is nobody in sight on the lawn and we just march up to the window easy as pie. There is this big booming voice giving somebody what for. "You poor miserable idiots," yells this voice, "you can't keep the workers off the tracks and you get out less than twenty tons of targ since last night, and then you waste a whole charge of nitro by not telling the watchman he's not supposed to smoke in the enclosure. All those people are dead and it's your fault." I hear a sniffle behind me and when I turn around, there is Jennel. She ha sneaked up behind us to see what we are going to do. "That's how he talks to me, too," she lets us know in a whisper, "only he says I am not fit to even wash dishes, let alone ever have a house of my own... when I drop one of his plates a little while ago. He says I am looking in a mirror instead of where I am going and he hopes I see what an ugly pan I have, because I ought to know it and keep out of people's way so they won't have to look at me." Her tears splash right down on the grass. "And that's not all," the yelling inside goes on. "Not only do you kill off all my workers, but at this rate I'm losing money paying you four packs of cigarettes a day. If I have to blast off and start from scratch in some other part of this blamed universe, you stupid, gutless... why, you aren't even men. You worms don't even run when you see a car coming at you. Too blamed dumb to come in out of the rain." I stick my head around the corner and look in, and there is the back of a big guy in a Mercurymade suit and with a bald head that is red all the way round to the back of his neck. On the other side of the room I see a couple of the sorriest-looking Anestha God ever makes, shuffling their feet and looking like kicked dogs. I turn to Pierre. "Go in there swinging," I says, like at a fight, and pull the window open. "He won't like me," Pierre says, hanging back. "He says Anestha are dumb cowards. Maybe he knows. Maybe I won't dare hit him." "You get in there and poke him, boy," I says and give him a push. "I like you and I see you fight and the Anestha got more guts than anybody!" T HE big guy hears us and turns around. "Get out of here, you mangy natives," he bellows. "You good for nothing, shivering, sniveling, cowardly boobs. I'm not ready for you yet." He is shaking a whippy-looking cane at me and Pierre, and I think he has turned purple. "We're ready for you, though," I yell back. I climb into the room pulling Pierre in after me. "Pierre's no sniveling coward and you can quit talking to his brave, heroic, self-sacrificing father like that. Put 'em up and defend yourself, you howling ape," I yell, "because Pierre is going to give you the beating of your howling life!" I see Pierre's old man and the other fellow spruce up some. The big guy sits down in a chair real quick, and, sucking in a big breath, he starts going all fatherly at Pierre, telling him that he doesn't want to have to hit him back, because Pierre will not feel it when he kills him, which'he doesn't want to have to do because Pierre is just a poor weak Anesthon who don't know from nothing, and he doesn't want to injure any of his workers and he is just telling Pierre's old man a few things to protect the Anestha. Pierre looks at me kind of doubtful. "Go on, hit the fat bully," I says, real icy. "He has it coming. You owe it to your old man and Noor and Jennel here. Go ahead and show him what kind of champeens the Anestha can turn out. It's just for his own good," I says, "so hit him now. Then you can tell your dad what a great guy you are." Pierre's left obediently swings into the lug's jaw with a crack like a rifle. He don't even watch the big guy sag down on the floor. He begins hugging his father and the other fellow and grinning and jabbering aWay like blue blazes. The big guy is still breathing, but out cold, so I go to look for a tele viz. I figure the authorities better hear my story before the big guy wakes up. After I make my spiel, the port chief says to come in and bring Pierre and his father and Frith and Jennel and Noor, too, if we can find him, and make an official recorded report. He is sending a doctor out by 'copter. We beat it for the port, leaving the fat boss sleeping on the floor. We all stay in protective custody at the hotel, swimming in flaff and lounging around the thiska bar for a couple of weeks, until the commission headed by that scientist from the Smithsonian Institute comes out and takes the boss back to Earth. He has to see a judge about why he should not go into stir for a while for psychological coercion or something like that. Before they leave, the commis sion hands me an official charge at a hundred thou a year to stay as Protector of Morale to the Anestha. That is better than the fight racket, but the protectorship is a laugh. I can't even go out for a walk without a couple dozen Anestha tagging along, to keep me from stubbing my toe on some unfriendly pebble, or socking my eye on some unloving devil of a doorknob. Second Childhood Achieving immortality is only half of the problem. The other half is knowing how to live with it once it's been made possible -- and inescapable! OU did not die. There was no normal vay to die. You lived as carelessly and as recklessly as you could and you hoped that you would be lucky and be accidentally killed. You kept on living and you got tired of living. "God, how tired a man can get of living!" Andrew Young said. John Riggs, chairman of the immortality commission, cleared his throat. "You realize," he said to Andrew Young, "that this petition is a highly irregular procedure to bring to our attention." He picked up the sheaf of papers off the table and ruffled through them rapidly. "There is no precedent," he added. "I had hoped," said Andrew Young, "to establish precedent." Commissioner Stanford said, "I must admit that you have made a good case, Ancestor Young. Yet you must realize that this commission has no possible jurisdiction over the life of any person, except to see that everyone is assured of all the benefits of immortality and to work out any kinks that may show up." "I am well aware of that," answered Young, "and it seems to me that my case is one of the kinks you mention." . He stood silently, watching the faces of the members of the beard. They are afraid, he thought. Every one of them. Afraid of the day they will face the thing I am facing now. They have sought an answer and there is no answer yet except the pitifully basic answer, the brutally fundamental answer that I have given them. "My request is simple," he told them, calmly. "I have asked for permission to discontinue life. And since suicide has been made psychologically impossible, I have asked that this commission appoint a panel of next-friends to make the necessary and somewhat distasteful arrangements to bring about the discontinuance of my life." "If we did," said Riggs, "we would destroy everything we have. There is no virtue in a life of only five thousand years. No more than in a life of only a hundred years. If Man is to be immortal, he must be genuinely immortal. He cannot compromise." "And yet," said Young, "my friends are gone." Riggs held m his hands. "I have them listed there," he said. "Their names and when and where and how they died. Take a look at them. More than two hundred names. People of my own generation and of the generations closely following mine. Their names and the photo-copies of their death certificates." He put both of his hands upon the table, palms flat against the table, and leaned his weight upon his arms. "Take a look at how they died," he said. "Every one involves accidental violence. Some of them drove their vehicles too fast and, more than likely, very recklessly. One fell off a cliff when he reached down to pick a flower that was growing on its edge. A case of deliberately poor judgment, to my mind. One got stinking drunk and took a bath and passed out in the tub. He drowned... "Ancestor Young," Riggs said sharply, "you are surely not implying these folks were suicides." "No," Andrew Young said bitterly. "We abolished suicide three thousand years ago, cleared it clean out of human minds. How could they have killed themselves?" Stanford said, peering up at Young, "I believe, sir, you sat on the board that resolved that problem." Andrew Young nodded. "It was after the first wave of suicides. I remember it quite well. 'It took years of work. We had to change human perspective, shift certain facets of human nature. We had to condition human reasoning by education and propaganda and instill a new set of moral values. I think we did a good job of it. Perhaps too good a job. Today a man can no more think of deliberately committing suicide than he could think of overthrowing our government. The very idea, the very word is repulsive, instinctively repulsive. You can come a long way, gentlemen, in three thousand years." He leaned across the table and tapped the sheaf of papers with a lean, tense finger. "They didn't kill themselves," he said. "They did not commit suicide. They just didn't give a damn. They were tired of living... as I am tired of living. So they lived recklessly in every way. Perhaps there always was a secret hope that they would drown while drunk or their car would hit a tree or... faced them. "Gentlemen," he said. "I am # years of age. I was born at Lancaster, Maine, on the planet Earth on September #, #. I have served humankind well in those fifty-seven centuries. My record is there for you to see. Boards, commissions, legislative posts, diplomatic missions. No one can say that I have shirked my duty. I submit that I have paid any debt I owe humanity... even the wellintentioned debt for a chance at immortality." "We wish," said Riggs, "that you would reconsider." "I am a lonely man," replied Young. "A lonely man and tired. I have no friends. There is nothing any longer that holds my interest. It is my hope that I can make you see the desirability of assuming jurisdiction in cases such as mine. Someday you may find a solution to the problem, but until that time arrives, I ask you, in the name of mercy, to give us relief from life." "The problem, as we see it," said Riggs, "is to find some way to wipe out mental perspective. When a man lives as you have, sir, for fifty centuries, he has too long a memory. The memories add up to the disadvantage of present realities and prospects for the future." "I know," said Young. "I remember we used to talk about that in the early days. It was one of the problems which was recognized when immortality first became practical. But we always thought that memory would erase itself, that j:he brain could accommodate only so many memories, that when it got full up it would dump the old ones. It hasn't worked that way." He made a savage gesture. "Gentlemen, I can recall my childhood much more vividly than I recall anything that happened yesterday." "Memories are buried," said Riggs, "and in the old days, when men lived no longer than a hundred years at most, it was thought those buried memories were forgotten. Life, Man told himself, is a process of forgetting. So Man wasn't too worried over memories when he became immortal. He thought he would forget them." "He should have known," argued Young. "I can remember my father, and I remember him much more intimately than I will remember you gentlemen once I leave this room... I can remember my father telling me that, in his later years, he could recall things which happened in his childhood that had been forgotten all his younger years. And that, alone, should have tipped us off. The brain buries only the newer memories deeply... they are not available; they do not rise to bother one, because they are not sorted or oriented or correlated or whatever it is that the brain may do with them. But once they are all nicely docketed and filed, they pop up in an instant." "There's a lag of a good many years in the brain's bookkeeping. We will overcome it in time." "We have tried," said Stanford. "We tried conditioning, the same solution that worked with suicides. But in this, it didn't work. For a man's life is built upon his memories. There are certain basic memories that must remain intact. With conditioning, you could not be selective. You could not keep the structural memories and winnow out the trash. It didn't work that way." "There was one machine that worked," Riggs put in. "It got rid of memories. I don't understand exactly how it worked, but it did the job all right. It did too good a job. It swept the mind as clean as an empty room. It didn't leave a thing. It took all memories and it left no capacity to build a new set. A man went in a human being and came out a vegetable." "Suspended animation," said Stanford, "would be a solution. If we had suspended animation. Simply stack a man away until we found the answer, then revive and recondition him." "Be that as it may," Young told them, "I should like your most earnest consideration of my petition. I do not feel quite equal to waiting until you have the answer solved." Riggs said, harshly, "You are asking us to legalize death." Young nodded. "If you wish to phrase it that way. I'm asking it in the name of common decency." Commissioner Stanford said, "We can ill afford to lose you, Ancestor." Young sighed. "There is that damned attitude again. Immortality pays all debts. When a man is made immortal, he has received full compensation for everything that he may endure. I have lived longer than any man could be expected to live and still I am denied the dignity of old age. A man's desires are few, and quickly sated, and yet he is expected to continue living with desires burned up and blown away to ash. He gets to a point where nothing has a value... even to a point where his own personal values are no more than shadows. Gentlemen, there was a time when I could not have committed murder... literally could not have forced myself to kill another man... but today I could, without a second thought. Disillusion and cynicism have crept in upon me and I have no conscience."L Riggs said. "Your famiiy  " "They get in my hair," said Young disgustedly. "Thousands upon thousands of young squirts calling me Grandsire and Ancestor and coming to me for advice they practically never follow. I don't know even a fraction of them and I listen to them carefully explain a relationship so tangled and trivial that it makes me yawn in their faces. It's all new to them and so old, so damned and damnably old to me." "Ancestor Young," said Stanford, "you have seen Man spread out from Earth to distant stellar systems. You have seen the human race expand from one planet to several thousand planets. You have had a part in this. Is there not Some satisfaction..." "You're talking in abstracts," Young cut in. "What I am concerned about is myself... a certain specific mass of protoplasm shaped in biped form and tagged bythe designation, ironic as it may seem, of Andrew Young. I have been unselfish all my life. I've asked little for myself. Now I am being utterly and entirely selfish and I ask that this matter be regarded as a personal problem rather than as a racial abstraction." "Whether you'll admit it or not," said Stanford, "it is more than a personal problem. It is a problem which some day must be solved for the salvation of the race." "That is what I am trying to impress upon you," Young snapped. "It is a problem that you must face. Some day you will solve it, but until you do, you must make provisions for those who face the unsolved problem." "Wait a while," counseled Chairman Riggs. "Who knows? Today, tomorrow." Young told him bitterly and left, a tall, vigorous-looking man whose step was swift in anger where normally it was slow with weariness and despair. course. But there was little hope. How can a man go back almost six thousand years and snare a thing he never understood? And yet Andrew Young remembered it. Remembered it as clearly as if it had been a thing that had happened in the morning of this very day. It was a shining thing, a bright thing, a happiness that was brandnew and fresh as a bluebird's wing' of an April morning or a shy woods flower after sudden rain. He had been a boy and he had seen the bluebird and he had no words to say the thing he felt, but he had held up his tiny fingers and pointed and shaped his lips to coo. Once, he thought, I had it in my very fingers and I did not have the experience to know what it was, nor the value of it. And now I know the value, but it has escaped me -- it escaped me on the day that I began to think like a human being. The first adult thought pushed it just a little and the next one pushed it farther and finally it was gone entirely and I didn't even know that it had gone. He sat in the chair on the flagstone patio and felt the Sun upon him, filtering through the branches of trees misty with the breaking leaves of Spring. Something else, thought Andrew Young. Something that was not human -- yet. A tiny animal that had many ways to choose, many roads to walk. And, of course, I chose the wrong way. I chose the human way. But there was another way. I know there must have been. A fairy way -- or a brownie way, or maybe even pixie. That sounds foolish and childish now, but it wasn't always. I chose the human way because I was guided into it. I was pushed and shoved, like a herded sheep. I grew up and I lost the thing I held. He sat and made his mind go hard and tried to analyze what it was he sought and there was no name for it. Except happiness. And happiness was a state of being, not a thing to regain and grasp. B UT he could remember how it felt. With his eyes open in the present, he could remember the brightness of the day of the past, the clean-washed goodness of it, the wonder of the colors that were had seen -- as if it were the first second after Creation and the world was still shiningly new. It was that new, of course. It would be that new to a child. But that didn't explain it all. It didn't explain the bottomless capacity for seeing and knowing and believing in the beauty and the goodness of a clean new world. It didn't explain the almost non-human elation of knowing that there were colors to see and scents to smell and soft green grass to touch. I'm insane, Andrew Young said to himself. Insane, or going insane. But if insanity will take me back to an understanding of the strange perception I had when I was a child, and lost, I'll take insanity. He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes go shut and his mind driftback. He was crouching in a corner of a garden and the leaves were drifting down from the walnut trees like a rain of saffron gold. He lifted one of the leaves and it slipped from his fingers, for his hands were chubby still and not too sure in grasping. But he tried again and he clutched it by the stem in one stubby fist and he saw that it was not just a blob of yellowness, but delicate, with many little veins. When he held it so that the Sun struck it, he imagined that he could almost see through it, the gold was spun so fine. He crouched with the leaf clutched tightly in his hand and for a moment there was a silence that held him motionless. Then he heard the frost-loosened leaves pattering all around him, pattering as they fell, talking in little whispers as they sailed down through the air and found themselves a bed with their golden fellows. In that moment he knew that he was one with the leaves and the whispers that they made, one with the gold and the autumn sunshine and the far blue mist upon the hill above the apple orchard. A foot crunched stone behind him and his eyes came open and the golden leaves were gone. "I am sorry if I disturbed you. Ancestor," said the man. "I had an appointment for this hour, but I would not have disturbed you if I had known." Young stared at him reproachfully without answering. "I am kin," the man told him. "I wouldn't doubt it," said Andrew Young. "The Galaxy is cluttered up with descendants of mine." The man was very humble. "Of course, you must resent us sometimes. But we are proud of you, sir. I might almost say that we revere you. No other family -- " "I know," interrupted Andrew Young. "No other family has any fossil quite so old as I am." "Nor as wise," said the man. Andrew Young snorted. "Cut out that nonsense. Let's hear what you have to say and get it over with." oi T HE technician was harassed and worried and very frankly puzzled. But he stayed respectful, for one always was respectful to an ancestor, whoever he might be. Today there were mighty few left who had been born into a mortal world. Not that Andrew Young looked old. He looked like all adults, a fine figure of a person in the early twenties. The technician shifted uneasily. "But, sir, this... this... "Teddy bear," said Young. "Yes, of course. An extinct terrestrial subspecies of animal?" "It's a toy," Young told him. "A very ancient toy. All children used to have them five thousand years ago. They took them to bed." T HE technician shuddered. "A deplorable custom. Primitive." "Depends on the viewpoint," said Young. 'Tve slept with them many a time. There's a world of comfort in one, I can personally assure you." The technician saw that it was no use to argue. He might as well fabricate the thing and get it over with. "I can build you a fine model, sir," he said, trying to work up some enthusiasm. "I'll build in a response mechanism so that it can give simple answers to certain keyed questions and, of course, I'll fix it so it'll walk, either on two legs or four..." "No," said Andrew Young. The technician looked surprised and hurt. "No?" "No," repeated Andrew Young. "I don't want it fancied up. I want it a simple lump of make-believe. No wonder the children of today have no imagination. Modern toys entertain them with a bag of tricks that leave the young'uns no room for imagination. They couldn't possibly think up, on their own, all the screwy thjngs these new toys do. Built-in responses and implied consciousness and all such mechanical trivia..." "You just want a stuffed fabric," said the technician, sadly, "with jointed arms and legs." "Precisely," agreed Young. "You're sure you want fabric, sir? I could do a neater job in plastics." "Fabric," Young insisted firmly, "and it must be scratchy." "Scratchy, sir?" "Sure. You know. Bristly. So it scratches when you rub your face i against it." "But no one in his right mind would want to rub his face..." "I would," said Andrew Young. "I fully intend to do so." "As you wish, sir," the technician answered, beaten now. "When you get it done," said Young, "I have some other things in mind." "Other things?" The technician looked wildly about, as if seeking some escape. "A high chair," said Young. "And a crib. And a woolly dog. And buttons." "Buttons?" asked the technician. "What are buttons?" "I'll explain it all to you," Young told him airily. "It . all is very simple." Young came into the room, that Riggs and Stanford had been expecting him, had known that he was coming and had been waiting for him. He wasted no time on preliminaries or formalities. They know, he told himself. They know, or they have guessed. They would be watching me. Ever since I brought in my petition, they have been watching me, wondering what I would be "thinking, trying to puzzle out what I might do next. They know every move I've made, they know about the toys and the furniture and all the other things. And I don't need to tell them what I plan to do. "I need some help," he said, and they nodded soberly, as if they had guessed he needed help. "I want to build a house," he explained. "A big house. Much larger than the usual house." Riggs said, "We'll draw the plans for you. Do anything else that you -- " "A house," Young went on, "about four or five times as big as the ordinary house. Four or five times normal scale, I mean. Doors twenty-five to thirty feet high and everything else in proportion." "Neighbors or privacy?" asked Stanford. "Privacy," said Young. "We'll take care of it," promised Riggs. "Leave the matter of the house to us." Young stood for a long moment, looking at the two of them. Then he said, "I thank you, gentlemen. I thank you for your helpfulness and your understanding. But most of all I thank you for not asking any questions." He turned slowly and walked out of the room and they sat in silence for minutes after he was gone. Finally, Stanford offered a deduction: "It will have to be a place that a boy would like. Woods to run in and a little stream to fish in and a field where he can fly his kites. What else could it be?" "He's been out ordering children's furniture and toys," Riggs agreed. "Stuff from five thousand years ago. The kind of things he used when he was a child. But scaled to adult size." "Now," said Stanford, "he wants a house built to the same proportions. A house that will make him think or help him believe that he is a child. But will it work, Riggs? His body will not change. He cannot make it change. It will only be in his mind." "Illusion," declared Riggs. "The illusion of bigness in relation to himself. To a child, creeping on the floor, a door is twenty-five to thirty feet high, relatively. Of course the child doesn't know that. But Andrew Young does. I don't see how he'll overcome that." "At first," suggested Stanford, "he will know that it's illusion, but after a time, isn't there a possibility that it will become reality so far as he's concerned? That's why he needs our help. So that the house will not be firmly planted in his memory as a thing that's merely out of proportion... so that it will slide from illusion into reality without too great a strain." "We must keep our mouths shut." Riggs nodded soberly. "There must be no interference. It's a thing he must do himself... entirely by himself. Our help with the house must be the help of an unseen, silent agency. Like brownies, I think the term was that he used, we must help and be never seen. Intrusion by anyone would introduce a jarring note and would destroy illusion and that is all he has to work on. Illusion pure and simple." "Others have tried," objected Stanford, pessimistic again. "Many others. With gadgets and machines... "None has tried it," said Riggs, "with the power of mind alone. With the sheer determination to wipe out five thousand years of memory." "That will be his stumbling block," said Stanford. "The old, dead memories are the things he has to beat. He has to get rid of them... not just bury them, but get rid of them for good and all, forever." "He must do more than that," said Riggs. "He must replace his memories with the outlook he had when he was a child. His mind must be washed out, refreshed, wiped clean and shining and made new again... ready to live another five thousand years." The two men sat and looked at one another and in each other's eyes they saw a single thought -- the day would come when they, too, each of them alone, would face the problem Andrew Young faced. "We must help," said Riggs, "in every way we can and we must keep watch and we must be ready... but Andrew Young cannot know that we are helping or that we are watching him. We must anticipate the materials and tools and the aids that he may need." then hesitated, as if seeking in his mind for the proper words. "Yes," said Riggs. "What is it?" "Later on," Stanford, managed to say, "much later on, toward the very end, there is a certain factor that we must supply. The one thing that he will need the most and the one thing that he cannot think about, even in advance. All the rest can be stage setting and he can still go on toward the time when it becomes reality. All the rest may be make-believe, but one thing must come as genuine or the entire effort will collapse in failure." Riggs nodded. "Of course. That's something we'll have to work out carefully." "If we can," Stanford said. T HE yellow button over here and the red one over there and the green one doesn't fit, so I'll throw it on the floor and just for the fun of it, I'll put the pink one in my mouth and someone will find me with it and they'll raise a ruckus because they will be afraid that I will swallow it. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that I love better than a full-blown ruckus. Especially if it is over me... "Ug," said Andrew Young, and he swallowed the button. He sat stiff and straight in the towering high chair and then, in a fury, swept the oversized muffin tin and its freight of buttons crashing to the floor. For a second he felt like weeping in utter frustration and then a sense of shame crept in on him. Big baby, he said to himself. Crazy to be sitting in an overgrown high chair, playing with buttons and mouthing baby talk and trying to force a mind conditioned by five thousand years of life into the channels of an infant's thoughts. Carefully he disengaged the tray and slid it out, cautiously shinnied down the twelve-foot-high chair. The room engulfed him, the ceiling towering far above him. The neighbors, he told himself, no doubt thought him crazy, although none of them had said so. Come to think of it, he had not seen any of his neighbors for a long spell now. A suspicion came into his mind. Maybe they knew what he was doing, maybe they were deliberately keeping out of his way in order not to embarrass him. That, of course, would be what they would do if they had realized what he was about. But he had expected... he had expected... that fellow, what's his name?... , at the commission, what's the name of that commission, anyhow? Well, anyway, he'd expected a fellow whose name he couldn't remember from a commission the name of which he could not recall to come snooping around, wondering what he might be up to, offering to help, spoiling the whole setup, everything he'd planned. I can't remember, he complained to himself. I can't remember the name of a man whose name I knew so short a time ago as yesterday. Nor the name of a commission that I knew as well as I know my name. I'm getting forgetful. I'm getting downright childish. Childish ? Childish ! Childish and forgetful. Good Lord, thought Andrew Young, that's just the way I want it. On hands and knees he scrabbled about and picked up the buttons, put them in his pocket. Then, with the muffin tin underneath his arm, he shinnied up the high chair and. Seating himself comfortably, sorted out the buttons in the pan. The green one over here in this compartment and the yellow one... oops, there she goes onto the floor. And the red one in with the blue one and this one... this one... what's the color of this one? Color? What's that? What is what? What -- TT'S almost time," said Stanford, J"and we are ready, as ready as we'll ever be. We'll move in when the time is right, but we can't move in too soon. Better to be a little late than a little early. We have all the things we need. Special size diapers and -- " "Good Lord," exclaimed Riggs, "it won't go that far, will it?" "It should," said Stanford. "It should go even further to work right. He got lost yesterday. One of our men found him and led him home. He didn't have the slightest idea where he was and he was getting pretty scared and he cried a little. He chattered about birds and flowers and he insisted that our man stay and play with him." Riggs chuckled softly. "Did he?" "Oh, certainly. He came back worn to a frazzle." "Food?" asked Riggs. "How is he feeding himself?" "We see there's a supply of stuff, cookies and such-wise, left on a low shelf, where he can get at them. One of the robots cooks up some more substantial stuff on a regular schedule and leaves it where he can find it. We have to be careful. We can't mess around too much. We can't intrude on him. I have a feeling he's almost reached an actual turning point. We can't afford to upset things now that he's come this far." "The android's ready?" "Just about," said Stanford. "And the playmates?" "Ready. They were less of a problem." "There's nothing more that we can do?" "Nothing," Stanford said. "Just wait, that's all. Young has carried himself this far by the sheer force of will alone. That will is gone now. He can't consciously force himself any further back. He is more child than adult now. He's built up a regressive momentum and the only question is whether that momentum is sufficient to carry him . all the way back to actual babyhood." "It has to go back to that?" Riggs looked unhappy, obviouslythinking of his own future. "You're only guessing, aren't j'ou?" "All the way or it simply is no good," Stanford said dogmatically. "He has to get an absolutely fresh start. All the way or nothing." "And if he gets stuck halfway between ? Half child, half man, what then?" "That'ssomething I don't want to think about," Stanford said. bear and gone to hunt it in the dusk that was filled with elusive fireflies and the hush of a world quieting down for the time of sleep. The grass was drenched with dew and he felt the cold wetness of it soaking through his shoes as he went from bush to hedge to flowerbed, looking for the missing toy. It was necessary, he told himself, that he find the nice little bear, for it was the one that slept with him and if he did not find it, he knew that it would spend a lonely and comfortless night. But at no time did he admit, even to his innermost thought, that it was he who needed the bear and not the bear who needed him. A soaring bat swooped low and for a horrified moment, catching sight of the zooming terror, a blob of darkness in the gathering dusk, he squatted low against the ground, huddling against the sudden fear that came out of the night. Sounds of fright bubbled in his throat and now he saw the great dark garden as an unknown place, filled with lurking shadows that lay in wait for him. He stayed cowering against the ground and tried to fight off the alien fear that growled from behind each bush and snarled in every darkened corner. But even as the fear washed over him, there was one hidden corner of his mind that knew there was no need of fear. It was as if that one area of Your money back if this isn't the most exciting sciencefiction anthology you've ever read! # great full-length stories. # thrill-packed pages! All new! The book bargain of the year for science-fiction fans ! Action stories of interstellar travel, supersonic speed, and atomic power, by Padgett, Kaempffert, Pratt, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Leinster, Russell, and many scientist-writers. just published, only # amine this mammoth feast of science-fiction reading for # days. If not delighted, return it for full refund of purchase price. # Fourth Avenue, New York # age with postman. I may return book for refund of purchase price in # days. box and enclose remittance. Same refund privilege. S-C his brain still fought against the rest of him, as if that small section of cells might know that the bat was no more than a flying bat, that the shadows in the garden were no more than absence of light. There was a reason, he knew, why he should not be afraid -- a good reason born of a certain knowledge he no longer had. And that he should have such knowledge seemed unbelievable, for he was scarcely two years old. old. There was something wrong with his tongue, something the matter with the way he had to use his mouth, with the way his lips refused to shape the words he meant to say. He tried to define the words, tried to tell himself what he meant by two years old and one moment it seemed that he knew the meaning of it and then it escaped him. The bat came again and he huddled close against the ground, shivering as he crouched. He lifted his eyes fearfully, darting glances here and there, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the looming house and it was a place he knew as refuge. "House," he said, and the word was wrong, not the word itself, but the way he said it. He ran on trembling, unsure feet and the great door loomed before him, with the latch too high to reach. But there was another way, a small swinging door built into the big door, the sort of door that is built for cats and dogs and sometimes little children. He darted through it and felt the sureness and the comfort of the house about him. The sureness and the comfort -- and the loneliness. He found his second-best teddy bear, and, picking it up, clutched it to his breast, sobbing into its scratchy back in pure relief from terror. There is something wrong, he thought. Something dreadfully wrong. Something is as it should not be. It is not the garden or the darkened bushes or the swooping winged shape that came out of the night. It is something else, something missing, something that should be here and isn't. Clutching the teddy bear, he sat rigid and tried desperately to drive his mind back along the way that would tell him what was wrong. There was an answer, he was sure of that. There was an answer somewhere; at one time he had known it. At one time he had recognized the need he felt and there had been no way to supply it -- and now he couldn't even know the need, could feel it, but he could not know it. He clutched the bear closer and huddled in the darkness, watching the moonbeam that came through a window, high above his head, and etched a square of floor in brightness. Fascinated, he watched the moonbeam and all at once the terror faded. He dropped the bear and crawled on hands and knees, stalking the moonbeam. It did not try to get away and he reached its edge and thrust his hands into it and laughed with glee when his hands were painted by the light coming through the window. He lifted his face and stared up at the blackness and saw the white globe of the Moon, looking at him, watching him. The Moon seemed to wink at him and he chortled joyfully. Behind him a door creaked open and he turned clumsily around. Someone stood in the doorway, son who smiled at him. Even in the darkness he could serjse the sweetness of the smile, the glory of her golden hair. "Time to eat, Andy," said the woman. "Eat and get a bath and then to bed." Andrew Young hopped joyfully on both feet, arms held out -- happy and excited and contented. "Mummy!" he cried. "Mummy... Moon!" He swung about with a pointing finger and the woman came swiftly across the floor, knelt and put her arms around him, held him close against her. His cheek against hers, he stared up at the Moon and it was a wondrous thing, a bright and golden thing, a wonder that was shining new and fresh. and Riggs stood looking up at the huge house that towered above the trees. "She's in there now," said Stanford. "Everything's quiet so it must be all right." Riggs said, "He was crying in the garden. He ran in terror for the house. He stopped crying about the time she must have come in." Stanford nodded. "I was afraid we were putting it off too long, but I don't see now how we could have done it sooner. Any outside interference would have shattered the thing he tried to do. He had to really need her. Well, it's all right now. The timing was just about perfect." "You're sure, Stanford?" "Sure? Certainly I am sure. We created the android and we trained her. We instilled a deep maternal sense into her personality. She knows what to do. She is almost human. She is as close as we could  come to a human mother eighteen feet tall. We don't know what Young's mother looked like, but chances are he doesn't either. Over the years his memory has idealized her. That's what we did. We made an ideal mother." "If it only works," said Riggs. "It will work," said Stanford, confidently. "Despite the shortcomings we may discover by trial and error, it will work. He's been fighting himself all this time. Now he can quit fighting and shift responsibility. It's enough to get him over the final hump, to place him safely and securely in the second childhood that he had to have. Now he can curl up, contented. There is someone to look after him and think for him and take care of him. He'll probably go back just a little further... a little closer to the cradle. And that is good, for the . further he goes, the more memories are erased." "And then?" asked Riggs worriedly. "Then he can proceed to grow up again." They stood watching, silently. In the enormous house, lights came on in the kitchen and the windows gleamed with a homey brightness. I, too, Stanford was thinking. Some day, I, too. Young has pointed the way, he has blazed the path. He had shown us, all the other all over the Galaxy, the way it can be done. There will be others and for them there will be more help. We'll know then how to do it better. Now we have something to work on. Another thousand years or so, he thought, and I will go back, too. Back to the cradle and the dreams of childhood and the safe security of a mother's arms. It didn't frighten him in the least. ' " #  # m  . " . .;.  K . ert A. Heinlein. Charles Scribner's Sons, #. #, # pages. for "adolescents," and first published, in a shorter version, in Boy's Life, this book is also one of the best of the month's output in science fiction for adults. I don't know what this proves; but I hope it indicates that the so-called adolescent of our time is acquiring a pretty mature and down-to-Earth outlook on science fiction. It is true that Farmer in the Sky underemphasizes philosophical ideology, grandiose concepts of space, and complex scientific jargon; it really is just an adventure story with an unusual amount of realism in its telling. It is not childish. When I compare it with the boys' books of a generation or so ago, such as The Rover Boys or Tom Swift, I am astonished at the advance in quality that has taken place in books for boys. The fact of the matter is that any lover of realistic and exciting narratives of "different" places will thoroughly enjoy this tale of the attempts of mankind to establish settlements on tianymede, one of Jupiter's moons. It has all the'feel of the believable that a good story of adventure in strange places of the known world gives one -- rplus the bonus tingle of the fact that it is, today, only a dream. The methods of making Ganymede habitable are not described in rich, beautiful pseudo-scientific prose. They are mentioned, sometimes actually described, but never overelaborated: a trick which a good many established science fiction writers might well adopt. And the circumstances that lead to the colonization of Ganymede are described with equal realism and simplicity. The story takes place at a time in the future when Earth itself is drastically overpopulated, and food is in very short supply. Tire colonists on Ganymede have one thing the Earth inhabitants do not have, which is plenty to eat. On the other hand, they have troubles, too -- troubles which seem possible when you read them, even though they are foreign now. Above all, the book is peopled with real and entirely human-scale human beings. There is not a spacejockey among them -- unless you consider old Captain Hattie, the crotchety female who operates the ancient rocket ship that is used to ferry passengers and freight from the huge modern Terran space liner (which cannot land on Ganymede) to the satellite's surface, the very model of a future astronaut. The whole book is a very effective antidote to the complex and often bloody tales of intergalactic and interplanetary wars which seem to be the stock in trade of too many modern science fiction writers. The Lord be praised for this touch of simple sanity in the mad worlds of science fantasy! Lewis Padgett. Simon  Schuster, Inc., #. #, # # pages. the better Kuttner-Padgett short stories from past issues of Astounding and other magazines, and consequently a must for everyone who likes top-grade science fiction and fantasy. I have certain reservations, as a matter of personal taste, against the two Hogben opera included," and particularly against the two out-and-out fantasies in the book ( The Gnome, a "semi"-humorous tale about a man who becomes a gnome, and Compliments of the Author, an overlong fiction about cats as familiars and a smalltime blackmailer who sold his soul to the devil) but the rest of the tales are top drawer stuff. There are what you need, The Tivonky, The Cure, Mimsy Were the Borogroves (a masterpiece of subtle and elegant writing about the strangeness of being very young), Jesting Pilot, Main Check (with its superb snap at the end) and This Is The House (which, though not as well known as The T wonky, is just as good and just as frightening). Incidentally, as far as I know, this is the second Kuttner item to see the light of day as a bound book. Fury, which was done under the pseudonym of Lawrence O'Donnell in Astounding, was published recently in the Grosset  Dunlap Dollar series of science The book is a genuine first, which makes this tale of violence and immortality in the underwater Keeps of Venus especially worth your while -- and only #. ford Simak. Gnome Press, #. #, # pages. inter-universe adventure has been made into a solid novel from the shorter form in which it originally appeared back in #. Falling more or less into the superimpossible school of science fiction of which Donald Wandrei used to be the leader, it has an old-fashioned and somewhat frenetic ring to it which, nevertheless, is rather pleasant. The tale tells how, from a space station on Pluto, a few Earthians, aided by an incredible girl who has been in suspended animation for a thousand years, are able to help avert the collision of our universe with another, a crash which would have been "slightly fatal" to both. A comparison of this colossal concept with the quiet realities of Heinlein's tale of colonizing Ganymede is not favorable to the Simak, but the comparison should be made. It shows how science fiction -- even for "adolescents" -- has improved since. The writing in the book is on the immature side, too, as a comparison with Simak's own magnifiOct.-Dec. #) shows. It is very pleasant to see how the author has improved with age -- proving that both science fiction and science fiction authors are maturing! Merritt. Memorial Edition, illustrated by Virgil Finlay. Borden Publishing Co., #. #, # pages. its five superb and sexy Finlays, and an acceptable In Memoriam for the Old Master of fantasy. As for the melodramatic, colorful, corny old plot (the story was first published in #), there is no need to describe it here. If you like Merritt, you'll love this example of his weird and fruity imagination; if you don't, you won't care anyhow. I'm one of those who like it, though sometimes I wonder if it's simple hankering for my adolescence, when Merritt was the most wonderful thing that ever happened. Two Weeks in August The humblest events sometimes result from the most grandiose beginnings. You'd never imagine space travel starting this way, for instance! McCleary in every office. Now I'm not a hard man to get along with and it usually takes quite a bit more than overly bright remarks from the office boy to bother me. But try as I might, I could never get along with McCleary. To be as disliked as he was, you have to work at it. What kind of guy was he? Well, if you came down to the office one day proud as Punch because of something little Johnny or Josephine had said, it was a sure cinch that McCleary would horn in with something his little Louie had spouted off that morning. At any rate, when McCleary got through, you felt like taking Johnny to the doctor to find out what made him subnormal. Or maybe you happened to buy a new Super-eight that week and were bragging about the mileage, the terrific pickup, and how quickly she responded to the wheel. Leave it to McCleary to give a quick rundown on his own car that would make you feel like selling yours for junk at the nearest scrap heap. Well, you see what I mean. But by far the worst of it was when vacation time rolled around. You could forgive a guy for topping you about how brainy his kids are, and you might even find it in your heart to forget the terrific bargain he drove to work in. But vacation time was when he'd really get on your nerves. You could pack the wife and kids in Old Reliable and roll out to 'the lake for your two weeks in August. You might even break the bank and spend the two weeks at a poor man's Sun Valley. But no matter where you went, when you came back, you'd have to sit in silence and listen to McCleary's account of his Vacation in the Adirondacks, or his Tramp in the Canadian Wilds, or maybe even the Old French Quarter. The trouble was he always had the photographs, the ticket stubs, and the souvenirs to prove it. Where he got the money, I'll never know. Sometimes I'd tell the wife about it and she'd sniff and wonder what kind of shabby house they lived in that they could afford all the other things. I never looked him up myself. Tell you the truth, I was afraid I'd find the McClearys lived on Park Avenue. N OW you look forward to a vacation all year, but particularly during the latter part of July, when, what with the heat and the stuffy office, you begin to feel like a halfdone hotdog at a barbecue. I was feeling even worse than usual as I was faced with spending my two weeks in my own backyard, most of my vacation dough having gone to pay the doctor. The only thing I minded was having McCleary find out about it and seeing that phony look of sympathy roll across his fat face while he rambled on about the vacation be was going to have. It was lunch time and we had just finished talking about the latest on television and what was wrong with the Administration and who'd win the pennant when Bob Young brought up the subject of vacations. It turned out he was due for a trip to the Ozarks and Donley was going after wall-eye pike in northern Wisconsin. I could sense McCleary prick up his ears clear across the room. "How about you, Bill?" Donley asked me. "Got any plans?" I winked heavily and jerked a thumb warningly toward McCleary, making sure McCleary couldn't see the gesture. "My vacation is really going to be out of the world this time," I said. "Me and the wife are going to Mars. Dry, you know. Even better than Arizona for her sinus." Even with the wink they were caught off guard for a minute. "Mars?" Donley said feebly, edging his chair away. "Yeah, sure. Great place. Never been there myself, though." Young just gaped, then grinned as he caught on. "I understand it's a wonderful spot," he chipped in. I casually peeled a hard-boiled egg the wife had packed in my lunch bucket and leaned back in my swivel chair. "It's really swell," I said dreamily, but loud enough so McCleary couldn't help but overhear. "Drifting down the Grand Canal at evening, the sun a faint golden disk behind the crystal towers of Marsport..." I let my voice drift into a long sigh and reached for Donley's sack of grapes. About this time McCleary had gnawed his way through a big pastrami sandwich and waddled over. He stood there expectantly, but we carefully ignored him. "Always wanted to go myself," Donley said in the same tone of voice he would have used to say he'd like to go to California someday. "Pretty expensive, though, isn't it?" "Expensive?" I raised a studiedly surprised eyebrow. "Oh, I suppose a little, but it's worth it. The wife and I got a roomette on the Princess of Mars for #-#. That's one way, of course." "Mars!" Young sighed wistfully. There was a moment of silence, with all three of us paying silent tribute to the ultimate' in vacations. McCleary slowly masticated a leaf of lettuce, his initial look of suspicion giving way to half-belief. "Let's hear some more about it," Young said enthusiastically, suddenly recovering from his reverie. "Oh, there isn't much more," I said indifferently. "We plan to stay at the Redsands hotel in Marsport -- American plan. Take in Marsport, with maybe a side trip to Crystallite. If we have time we might even take a waterway cruise to the North Pole..." the ribs. "Man, you never fished until you have a Martian flying fish at the end of the line!" I grabbed a ruler off the desk and began using it as an imaginary rod and reel. "Talk about fight... oh, sorry, Mac." My ruler had amputated part of a floppy lettuce leaf that hung from McCleary's sandwich. I settled down in my chair again and started paying attention to my lunch. "Nothing like it," I added between mouthfuls of liverwurst... "How about entertainment?" Young winked slyly. "Well, you know -- the wife will be along," I said. "But some of the places near the Grand Canal -- and those Martian Mist Maidens ! Brother, if I was unattached... "There ain't any life on Mars," McCleary said, suspicious again. All three of us looked at him in shocked silence. "He says there's no life on Mars!" Donley repeated. "You ever been there,  McCleary?" I asked sarcastically. "No, but just the same... "All right," I cut in, "then you don't know whether there is or isn't. So kindly reserve your opinion until you know a little about the subject under discussion." Young. "Really a wonderful place for your health. Dry, thin air, nice and cool at night. And beautiful! From Marsport you can see low-slung mountains in the distance, dunes of soft, red sand stretching out to them. If I were you, Bob, I'd forget all about the Ozarks and sign up on the rocket." "There ain't any rockets going to Mars," McCleary said obstinately. "Isn't," I corrected. "I mean, there is. Besides, McCleary, just because you never heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist." "The government's still working on V-#," McCleary said flatly. "They haven't even reached the moon yet." I sighed softly, acting disgusted at having to deal with somebody as stupid as McCleary. "Mac, that's the government and besides they're dealing with military rockets. And did you ever hear of the government perfecting .something before private industry? Who perfected the telephone, the radio, television ? The government? No, private industry, of course! Private industry has always been ahead of the government on everything, including rockets. Get on the stick, Mac." McCleary started in on his lettuce leaf again, looking very shrewd. "How come I never heard of it before now?" he asked, springing the clincher argument. "Look, Mac, this is relatively new. The company's just starting, can't afford to take full-page ads and that sort of thing. Just give 'em time, that's all. Why, a couple of years from now you'll be spending your vacation on Venus or Jupiter or some place like that. From now on California and the Bahamas will be strictly old hat." McCleary looked halfbelieving. "Where'd you get your tickets?" I waved vaguely in the direction of downtown. "Oh, there must be at least a couple of agencies downtown. Might even be able to find them in the phone book. Look under Interplanetary Rocket Lines or something like that. You might have a little difficulty, of course. Like I say, they're not too well advertised." McCleary was about to say something more, but then the one o'clock bell rang and we went back to the office grind. thing more about it the next day, even though we'd throw in a chance comment about Mars every now and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but Mac didn't rise to the bait. We gradually forgot about it, The next couple of weeks came and went and then my two weeks in August. Like I said before, my vacation dough had gone to pay the doctor, so I stayed at home and watered the begonias. The Monday morning after vacation, we were all back in the office, if anything looking more fagged than we had when we left. When lunch time rolled around, Donley and Young and I piled our lunches on Donley's desk -- his desk was near a window on the north side of the building so we could get the breeze -- and talked about what we had done during vacation. McCleary ambled up and like it usually does after McCleary comes around, the conversation just naturally died down. After a two minute silence I finally took the hook. "Okay, Mac," I said, "I know you're just dying to tell us. Where did you go?" He almost looked surprised. "To Mars," he said, like he might have said Aunt Minnie's. The three of us looked blank for a minute and then we caught on. It took us a while to recover from laughing and my sides were still aching when I saw McCleary's face. It definitely had a hurt look on it. "You don't think I did," he accused us. "Oh, come off it, McCleary," I said crossly. "A gag's a gag, but it can be carried too far. Where'd you go? California, Oregon, some place like that?" "I said I went to Mars," McCleary repeated hotly, "and I can prove it!" "Sure," I said. "Like I can prove the world's flat and it's supported by four elephants standing on a turtle's back like the old Greeks..." I cut off. McCleary had thrown a couple of pasteboards on the desk and I picked them up. The printing on it was like you see on a Pullman ticket. It said something about a roomette, first-class passage on the Martian Prince, for #, and there was even .a place where they had the tax figured. In two blanks at the top of the ticket, they had it filled out to E. C. McCleary and wife. The bottom half was torn off, just like they do with train tickets. "Very clever," I said, "but you shouldn't have gone to all that trouble to have these printed up." McCleary scowled and dropped a little bunch of kodachrome slides on the desk. I took one and held it up to the light. It showed Mac and his wife mounted on something that looked like a cross between a camel and a zebra. They were at the top of a sand dune and in the distance you could see the towers of a city. The funny thing was the towers looked a little -- but not muchlike minarets and the sand dunes were colored a beautiful pink. I passed it on to Donley and Young and started leafing through the rest. They were beautiful slides. McCleary and spouse in front of various structures in a delicately tinted marble and crystal city. McCleary in a pink-and-black boat on a canal that looked as wide as the Mississippi. McCleary standing on a strangely carved sandstone parapet, admiring a sunset caused by a sun looking half as big as ours. And everywhere were the dunes of pink sand. "Pictures can be faked, Mac," I said. He looked hurt and got some things out of his desk -- a sateen pillow with scenes like those on his snapshots, an urn filled with pink sand, a tiny boat like a gondola, only different, a letter opener made out of peculiar bubbly pink glass. They were all stamped "Souvenir of Mars" and that kind of junk you don't have made up for a gag. I know mass-produced articles when I see them. "We couldn't afford the firstclass tour," McCleary said expansively, "but I figure we can cover that next year." He turned to me puzzledly. "I asked the passenger agent about the Princess of Mars and he said he had never heard of the ship. And it's Mars City, not Marsport. Couldn't understand how you made a mistake." "It was easy," I said weakly. I pointed to the pasteboard ducats. "Where'd you get these, Mac?" He waved generously in the direction of downtown. "Like you said, there's a couple of agencies downtown..." Y OU know, sometimes I think we misjudged McCleary. It takes a while to get to know a guy like Mac. Maybe his' Louie is brighter than Johnny, and maybe his chugmobile is something terrific. For the last few years, all on account of Mac, my two weeks in August have really been well spent. Beautiful! Why, from Mars City you can see low-slung mountains in the distance and dunes of soft, red sand stretching out to them. And the sunsets when you're standing on the parapets of that delicate crystal city... And, man, fishing in the Grand Canal...  How do you get to Mars ? There's probably a couple of agencies in your own town. You can look them up in your phone book under "Vacation at the Planets of Pleasure" or something like that. They might be a little difficult to find, though. You see, they're not very well advertised yet. Part # of a # part serial Synopsis aristocrat of the Nebular Kingdoms, is about to complete his university work on Earth. He is awakened on one of his last nights in the dormitory to find himself locked in with a deadly radiation bomb. He is rescued from this situation by Sander fonti, a native of the same region of the Galaxy, who states that Biron's father has been arrested and probably executed by the Tyranni, the inhabitants of the planet Tyrann who, fifty years earlier, had conquered all the Nebular Kingdoms. fonti apparently also knows that Biron has been asked by his father to obtain a mysterious document from Earth's archives which seems to be of major importance to the success of the conspiracy, fonti advises Biron to leave Earth before the Tyranni make another attempt to kill him as the representative of an aristocratic family too dangerously popular with their subjects. Biron leaves for the planet Rhodia under an assumed name. There he expects to see the planet's Director, who is a favorite of the Tyranni overlords and may use his influence with them to have Biron's ancestral land holdings restored to him. On the ship to Rhodia, however, Biron finds that his cabin has been searched and some of his private papers taken. He realizes that his identity must be known and that he is in grave danger. On landing at Rhodia he is turned over to Simok Aratap, the Tyranni Commissioner for that sector of space. Aratap is aware of Biron's real identity, but releases him in order to be able to discover the true extent of what he feels must be a vast conspiracy, of which Biron and his Rebellions logically are led by men who have nothing to lose. But this galactic conspiracy was staffed with noblemen who had nothing to gain and everything to lose if it succeeded! Jfather were only a small part. For that purpose, Biron is conducted to Hinrik, the Director of Rhodia. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sander Jonti continues the search for the important document which Biron had been sent to obtain. He finds it had disappeared from Earth's archives twenty years earlier. He has not the slightest notion of the nature of the document, except that it dates prior to the time of the discovery of space-travel. What Earth of the pre-atomic age can possibly contribute to a conspiracy of the Galactic Era is a mystery. On Rhodia, Biron meets Hinrik, the weakling Director, who is frightened nearly to idiocy of the T yranni, and therefore makes a perfect tool for them. He meets Artemisia, the Director's daughter, who is being driven to desperation by an impending marriage of state with an old Tyranni courtier; and Gillbret, the Director's cousin, who dabbles in scientific gadgets although all forms of research among the subject peoples have been forbidden by the Tyranni. Biron re' veals his actual identity to them. In a private conference, Gillbret tells Biron of his own passionate opposition to Tyranni rule and asks Biron to help him and Artemisia escape from the planet. Biron agrees. But meanwhile, Hinrik, convinced that Biron's presence is a trap set for him by the Tyranni, intended to test his loyalty ( and in this he is right), orders that Biron be arrested and delivered back to Aratap. With Gillbret's help, Biron escapes from the two guards sent to arrest him and seeks refuge in Artemisia's room. She conceals him and now faces the company of guards who are ransacking the palace and who wish to search her room. With them is Gillbret. In Artemisia's dressing room, Biron waits tensely. Part Two And an Overlord's Trousers V A rtemisia did not have to feign uneasiness. She spoke to Gillbret, who, with the captain of the guard, was at the door. Half a dozen uniformed men hovered discreetly in the background. She asked, quickly, "Has anything happened to father?" "No, no," Gillbret reassured her. "Nothing has happened that need concern you at all. Were you asleep?" "Just about," she replied, "and my girls have been about their own affairs for hours. There was no one to answer but myself and you nearly frightened me to death." She turned to the captain suddenly, with a stiffening attitude. "What is wanted of me, captain? Quickly, please. This is not the time of day for a proper audience." Gillbret broke in, before the other could more than open his mouth, "A most amusing thing, Arta. The young man, whatsisname -- you know -- has dashed off, breaking two heads on his way. We're hunting him on even terms now. One platoon of soldiers to one fugitive. And here I am myself, hot on the trail, delighting our good captain with my zeal and courage." Artemisia managed to look completely bewildered. Under his breath, the captain muttered a monosyllabic imprecation. His lips scarcely moved. He said, "If you please, my Lord, you are not quite plain, and we are delaying matters insufferably. My Lady, the man who calls himself the son of the ex-Rancher of Widemos has been arrested for treason. He has managed to escape and is now at large. We must search the Palace for him, room by room." Artemisia stepped back, frowning. "Including my room?" "If your Ladyship permits." "I do not. I would certainly know if there were a strange man in my room. And the suggestion that I might be having dealings with such a man, or any strange man, at this time of night is highly improper. Please observe due respect for my position, captain." It worked quite well. The captain could only bow and say, "No such implication was intended, my Lady. Your pardon for annoying you at this time of night. Your statemeat that you have not seen the fugitive is, of course, sufficient. Under the circumstances, it was necessary to assure ourselves of your safety. He is a dangerous man." "Surely not so dangerous that he cannot be handled by you and your company." interposed, "Captain, come, come. While you exchange courtly sentiments with my niece, our man has had time to rifle the armory. I would suggest that you leave a guard at the lady Artemisia's door, so that what remains of her sleep will not be further disturbed. Unless, my dear," and he twinkled his fingers at Artemisia, "you would care to join us." "I shall satisfy myself," said Artemisia, coldly, "in locking my door and retiring, thank you." "Pick a large guard," cried Gillbret. "Take that one. A fine uniform our guards have, Artemisia. You can recognize a guard as far as you can see him by his uniform alone." "My Lord," said the captain, impatiently, "there is no time. You delay matters." At a gesture from him, a guard fell out of the platoon, saluted Artemisia through the closing door, then the captain. The sound of ordered footsteps fell away in both directions. Artemisia waited, then slid the door quietly open an inch or two. The guard was there, legs apart, back rigid, right hand armed, left hand at his alarm button. He was the guard suggested by Gillbret, a tall one. As tall as Biron of Widemos, though slimmer of shoulders. It occurred to her, at that moment, that Biron, though young and therefore rather unreasonable in some of his viewpoints, was at least large and well-muscled, which was convenient. It had been foolish of her to snap at him. Quite pleasantlooking, too. ' She closed the door, and stepped toward the dressing room. ' # away again. He held his breath and his fingers stiffened. Artemisia stared at his neuronic whips, which he had aimed instantly at her. "Be careful!" He puffed out his breath in relief and stuffed each whip into a pocket. They were very uncomfortable there, but he had no proper holsters. He said, "That was just in case it was somebody looking for me." "Come out. And whisper." She was still in her night-robe, woven out of a smooth fabric with which Biron was unfamiliar, adorned with little tufts of silvery fur, and clinging to the body through some faint static attraction inherent in the material so that neither buttons, clasps, loops, nor seam-fields were necessary. Nor, as a consequence, did it do more than merely faintly dim the outlines of Artemisia's figure. Biron felt his ears reddening, and liked the sensation very much. Artemisia waited, then made a little whirling gesture with her forefinger and said, "Do you mind?" Biron looked up at her face. "What? Oh, I'm sorry." He turned his back to her and remained stiffly attentive to the faint rustling of the change of outer garments. It did not occur to him to wonder why she had not used the dressing room, or why, better still, she had not changed before opening the door. There are depths in feminine psychology, which, without experience, defy analysis. She was in black when he turned, a two-piece suit which did not reach below the knee. It had that more substantial appearance that went with clothing meant for the outdoors, rather than for the ballroom. Biron said, automatically, "Are we leaving, then?" She shook her head. "You'll have to do your part first. You'll need other clothes yourself. Get to one side of the door, and I'll have the guard in." "What guard ?" She smiled briefly. "They left a guard at the door, at Uncle Gil's suggestion." The door to the corridor ran smoothly along its runners an inch or two. The guard was still there, stiffly immobile. "Guard," she whispered. "In here, quickly." There was no reason for a common soldier to hesitate in his obedience to the Director's daughter. He entered the widening door, with a respectful, "At your service, my L -- " and then his knees buckled under the weight which came down upon his shoulders, while his words were cut off, without even an interrupting squawk, by the forearm which slammed against his larynx. Artemisia closed the door hurriedly and watched with sensations that amounted almost to nausea. The life in the Palace of the Hinriads was mild almost to decadence, and she had never before seen a man's face congest with blood and his mouth yawn and puff futilely under the influence of asphyxia. She looked away. Biron bared his teeth with effort as he tightened the circle of bone and muscle about the other's throat. For a minute, the guard's weakening hands ripped futilely at Biron's arm, while his feet groped in aimless kicks. Biron heaved him clear off the floor. And then the guard's hands fell to his sides, his legs hung loosely and the convulsive and useless heavings of the chest began to subside. Biron lowered him gently to the floor. The guard sprawled out limply as though he were a sack which had been emptied. "Is he dead?" asked Artemisia, in a horrified whisper. "I doubt it," said Biron. "It takes four or five minutes of it to kill a man. But he'll be out of things for a while. Do you have anything to tie him up with?" She shook her head. For the moment, she felt quite helpless. Biron said, "You must have some Cellite stockings. They would do fine." He had already stripped the guard of weapons and outer clothing, "And I'd like to wash up. In fact, I have to." through the detergent mist in Artemisia's bathroom. It left him perhaps a trifle overscented, but the open air would take care of the fragrance, he hoped. At least, he was clean; and it required merely the momentary passage through the fine, suspended droplets that shot past him forcefully in a warm air stream. No special drying chamber was required, since he stepped out dry as well as clean. They didn't have this on Widemos, or on Earth. The guard's uniform was a bit tight, and Biron did not like the way the somewhat ugly, conical military cap fit over his brachycephalic head. He stared at his reflection with some dissatisfaction. "How do I look?" "Quite like a soldier," she said. He 'said, "You'll have to carry one of these whips. I can't handle three." She took it between two fingers and dropped it into her 'bag which then was suspended from her wide belt by another micro-force, so that her hands remained free. "We had better go, now," she said. "Don't say a word if we meet anyone; let me do the talking. Your accent isn't right, and it would be impossible to talk in my presence unless you were directly addressed,, anyway. Remember, you're a common soldier." The guard on the floor was beginning to wriggle a bit and roll his eyes. His wrists and ankles were securely tied at the small of his back with stockings that had the tensile strength of more than an equal amount of steel. His tongue worked futilely at his gag. He had been shoved out of the way, so that it was not necessary to step over him to get to the door. "This way," breathed Artemisia. a footstep behind them and a hand came down on Biron's shoulder. Biron stepped to one side quickly and turned, one hand catching the other's arm, while' his other snatched at his whip. But it was Gillbret, who said, "Easy, man!" Biron loosened his grip. Gillbret rubbed his arm. "I've been waiting for you, but that's no reason to break my bones. Let me stare admiringly at you, Farrill. Your clothes seem to have shrunk on you, but not bad; not bad at all. Nobody would look twice at you in that get-up. It's the advantage of ,a uniform. It's taken for granted that a soldier's uniform holds a soldier and nothing else." "Uncle Gil," whispered Artemisia, urgently, "don't talk so much. Where are the other guards ?" "Everyone objects to a few words," he said, pettishly. "The other guards are working their way up the tower. They've decided that our friend is on none of the lower levels, so they've just left some men at the main exits and at the ramps, with the general alarm system in operation as well. We can get past it." "Won't they miss you, sir?" asked Biron. "Me? Hah! The captain was glad to see me go for all his toescraping. They won't look for me, I assure you." They were speaking in whispers, but now even those died away. A guard stood at the bottom of the ramp, while two others flanked the large, carved double door that led to the open air. Gillbret called out, "Any word of the escaped prisoner, men?" "No, my Lord," said the nearest. He clicked his heels together and saluted. "Well, keep your eyes open." And they walked past them and out, one of the guards at the door carefully neutralizing that section of the alarm as they left. It was night-time outside. The sky was clear and starry, the ragged mass of the Dark Nebula blotting out the specks of light near the horizon. Palace Central was a dark mass behind them, and the Palace Field was half a mile away. But after five minutes of walking along the quiet path, Gillbret grew restless. "There's something wrong," he said. Artemisia said, "Uncle Gil, you haven't forgotten to arrange to have the ship ready?" "Of course not," he snapped at her, as nearly as one could snap in a whisper, "but why is the Field Tower lit up? It should be dark." He pointed up through the trees, to where the Tower was a honeycomb of white light. Ordinarily, that would indicate business at the Field, ships leaving for space or arriving from it. Gillbret muttered, "Nothing was scheduled for tonight. That was definite." They saw the answer at a distance, or Gillbret did. He stopped suddenly and spread his arms wide to hold back the others. "That's all," he said, and giggled almost hysterically. "This time Hinrik has really messed things properly, the idiot. They're here! The Tyranni! Don't you understand? That's Aratap's private armored cruiser." Biron saw it, gleaming faintly under the lights, standing out among the other undistinguished ships. It was smoother, slimmer, more deadly feline than the Rhodian vessels. Gillbret said, "The captain said a 'personage' was being entertained today, and I paid no attention. There's nothing to do now. We can't fight Tyranni." "Why not?"Biron demanded, savagely. "Why can't we fight them? They have no reason to suspect trouble and we're armed. Let's take the Commissioner's own ship. Let's leave him with his trousers down." He stepped forward, out of the relative obscurity of the trees and on to the bare Field. The others followed. There was .no reason to hide. They were two members of the royal family and an escorting soldier. But it was the Tyranni they were fighting now. been impressed the first time he had ever seen the Palace Grounds at Rhodia years earlier, but it had turned out to be only a shell that had impressed him. The interior was nothing but a musty relic. Two generations earlier, Rhodia's legislative chambers had met on these grounds and most of the administrative offices had been quartered there. Palace Central had been the heartbeat of a dozen worlds. But now the legislative chambers (still existing, for the Khan never interfered with local legalisms) met once a year to ratify the executive orders of the past twelve months. It was only a formality. The Executive Council was still, nominally, in continuous session, but it consisted of a dozen men who remained on their estates nine weeks in ten. The various executive bureaus were still active, since one could not govern without them whether the Director or the Khan ruled, but they were now scattered over the planet; made less dependent upon the Director, more conscious of their actual masters, the Tyranni. Which left the Palace as majestic as it had always been in stone and metal and that only. It housed the Directorial family, a scarcely adequate corps of servants, and an entirely inadequate corps of native guards. Aratap felt uncomfortable in the palatial shell and was unhappy. It was late, he was tired, his eyes burned so that he longed to remove his contact lenses, and, most of all, he was disappointed. There was no recognizable pattern of motive and counter-motive. He glanced occasionally at his military aide, but the major was listening to the Director with expressionless stolidity. As for Aratap himself, he paid little attention. "Widemos's son! Indeed?" he would say, in abstraction. Then later, "And so you arrested him? Quite right!" But it meant little to him, since events lacked a design. Aratap had a neat and tidy mind which could not bear the thought of individual facts loosely clumped together with no decent arrangement. Widemos had been a traitor, and Widemos's son had attempted a meeting with the Director of Rhodia. He had attempted it first in secret and when that had failed, such was the urgency, he attempted it openly with his ridiculous story of an assassination plot. Surely that must have been the beginning of a pattern. And now it fell apart. Hinrik was giving up the boy with indecent haste. He could not even wait the night, it seemed. And that did not fit at all, or else Aratap had not yet learned all the facts. the Director. Hinrik was senselessly beginning to repeat himself. Aratap felt a twinge of compassion. The man had been made into such a coward that even the Tyranni themselves grew impatient with him. And yet it was the only way. Nothing but fear could insure absolute loyalty. Widemos had not been afraid, and, despite the fact that his selfinterest had been bound at every point with the maintenance of Tyranni rule, he had rebelled. Hinrik ivas afraid and that made the difference. And because Hinrik was afraid, he sat there, lapsing into incoherence as he struggled to wheedle some gesture of approval. The majorwould give none, of course, Aratap knew. The man had no imagination. He sighed and wished he had none, either. Politics was a filthy business. So he said, with some air of animation, "I commend your quick decision and your zeal in the service of the Khan. You may be sure he will hear of it." relief obvious. Aratap said, "Have him brought in, then, and let us hear what our cockerel has to say." He suppressed a desire to yawn. He had absolutely no interest in what the "cockerel" had to say. It was Hinrik's intention at this point to signal for the captain of the guard, but there was no necessity for that. The captain stood in the doorway, unannounced. "Excellency," he said and strode in without waiting for permission. Hinrik stared hard at his hand, still inches from the signal, as though wondering whether his intention had somehow developed sufficient force to substitute for the act. He asked, uncertainly, "What is it, captain?" The captain said, "Excellency, the prisoner has escaped." Aratap felt some of the weariness disappear. What was this? "The details, captain!" he ordered, and straightened in his chair. The captain gave them with a blunt economy of words. He concluded, "I ask your permission, Excellency, to proclaim a general alarm. They are still only minutes away." "Yes, by all means," stuttered Hinrik, "by all means. A general alarm, indeed. Just the thing. Quickly! Quickly! Commissioner, I cannot understand how it could have happened. Captain, put every man to work. There will be an investigation, Commissioner. If necessary, every man on the guards will be broken. Broken! Broken!" He repeated the word in nearhysteria, but the captain remained standing. It was obvious that he had more to say. Aratap said, "Why do you wait?" "May I speak to your Excellency in private?" asked the captain, abruptly. Hinrik cast a quick, frightened look at the bland, unperturbed Commissioner. He mustered a feeble indignation. "There are no secrets from the soldiers of the Khan, our friends, our -- " "Say your say, captain," interposed Aratap, gently. The captain brought his heels together sharply. "Since I am ordered to speak, your Excellency, I regret to inform you that my lady Artemisia and my lord Gillbret accompany the prisoner in his escape." "He dared to kidnap them?" Hinrik was on his feet. "And my guards allowed it?" "They were not kidnaped, Excellency. They accompany him voluntarily." "How do you know?" Aratap was delighted, and thoroughly awake. It formed a pattern now, after all. A better pattern than he could have anticipated. The captain said, "We have the testimony of the guard they overpowered, and the guards who, unwittingly, allowed them to leave the building." He hesitated, then added grimly, "When I interviewed my lady Artemisia at the door of her private chambers, she told me she had been on the point of sleep. It was only later that I realized that when she told me that, her face was elaborately made up. When I returned, it was too late. I accept the blame for the mismanagement of this affair. After tonight, I will request your Excellency to accept my resignation, but, first, have I still your permission to sound the general alarm? Without your authority, I could not interfere with members of the royal family." But Hinrik was swaying on his feet and could only stare at him vacantly. Aratap said, "Captain, you would do better to look to the health of your Director. I would suggest you call his physician." "The general alarm," repeated the captain. "There will be no general alarm," said Aratap. "Do you understand me? No general alarm! No recapture of the prisoner! The incident is closed ! Return your men to their quarters and ordinary duties and look to your Director. -- Come, major." T HE Tyrannian major spoke tensely once they had left the mass of Palace Central behind them. "Aratap," he said, "I presume you know what you're doing. I kept my mouth shut in there on the basis of that presumption." "Thank you, major." Aratap liked the night air of a planet full of green and growing things. Tyrann was more beautiful in its way, but it was a terrible beauty of arid rocks and mountains. He went on, "You cannot handle Hinrik, Major Andros. In your hands, he would wilt and break. He is useful, but requires gentle treatment if he is to remain so." The major brushed that aside. "I'm not referring to that. Why not the general alarm? Don't you want them?" "Do you?" Aratap stopped. "Let ' us sit here for a moment, Andros. A bench on a pathway along a lawn. What more beautiful and what place is safer from spy beams? Why do you want the young man, major?" "Why do I want any traitor and conspirator?" "Why do you, indeed, if you only catch a few tools while leaving the source of the poison untouched? Whom would you have? A cub, a silly girl, a senile idiot." There was the faint splashing of an artificial waterfall nearby. A small one, but decorative. Now that was a real wonder to Aratap. ning to waste, pouring down the rocks and along the ground. He had never educated himself out of a prim indignation over it. A S IT is," said the major, "wefA. have nothing." "We have a pattern. When the young man first arrived, we connected him with Hinrik and that bothered us because Hinrik is -- what he is. But it was the best we could do. Now we see it was not Hinrik at all; that Hinrik was a misdirection. It was Hinrik's daughter and cousin he was after and that makes more sense." "Why didn't he call us sooner? He waited for the middle of the night." "Because he is the tool of whoever is the first to reach him, and Gillbret, I am sure, suggested this night meeting as a sign of great zeal on his part." "You mean we were called here on purpose? To witness their escape?" "No, not for that reason. Ask yourself. Where do these people intend going?" The major shrugged. "Rhodia is big." "Yes, if it were the young Farrill alone who was concerned. But where on Rhodia would two members of the royal family go unrecognized? Particularly the girl." "They would have to leave the planet then."  "And from where? They can reach the Palace Field in a fifteenminute walk. Now do you see the purpose of our being here?" The major said, "Our ship?" "Of course. A Tyrannian ship would seem ideal to them. Otherwise, they would have to choose among freighters. Farrill has been educated on Earth, and, I'm sure, can fly a cruiser." "Now there's a point," the major agreed. "Why do we allow the nobility to send out their sons in all directions? What business has a subject to know more about travel than will suffice him for local trade? We raise soldiers against us." "Nevertheless," said Aratap, with polite indifference, "at the moment, Farrill has a foreign education and let us take that into account objectively, without growing angry about it. The fact remains that I am completely certain they have taken our cruiser." "I can't believe it." "You have your wrist-caller. Make contact with the. ship, if you can." The major tried, futilely. Aratap said, "Try the Field Tower." The major did so, and the small voice came out of the tiny receiver, in minute agitation. "But, Excellency, I don't understand. There is some mistake. Your pilot took off ten minutes ago." Aratap was smiling. "You see? Work out the pattern and each little event becomes inevitable. And now do you fully understand the consequences?" T HE major did. He slapped his thigh, and laughed briefly. "Of course!" "Well," said Aratap, "they couldn't know, of course, but they have ruined themselves. Had they been satisfied with the clumsiest Rhodian freighter on the field, they would surely have escaped and (what's the expression?) I would have been caught with my trousers down this night. As it is, my trousers are firmly belted and nothing can save the three of them. And when I pluck them back, in my own good time" -- he emphasized the words with satisfaction -- "I will have the rest of the conspiracy in my hands as well." He sighed and found himself beginning to feel sleepy once more, "Well, we have been lucky, and now there is no hurry. Call Central Base and have them send another ship after us." Maybe! spationautics back at Earth had been largely academic. There had been the university courses in the various phases of spatial engineering which, though half a semester was spent on the theory of the hyperatomic motor, offered little when it came to the actual manipulation of ships in space. The best and most skilled pilots learned their art in practice and not in schoolrooms. He had managed to take off without actual accident, though that was more luck than design. The Remorseless answered the controls far more quickly than Biron had anticipated. He had manipulated several ships on Earth out into space and back to the planet, but those had been aged and sedate models, maintained for the use of students. They had been gentle, and very, very tired, and had lifted with an effort and spiraled slowly upward through the atmosphere and into space. The Remorseless, on the other hand, had lifted effortlessly, springing upward and whistling through the air, so that Biron had fallen backward out of his chair and all but dislocated his shoulder. Artemisia and Gillbret, with the greater caution of the inexperienced, had strapped themselves in, and were bruised against the padded webbing. The Tyrannian prisoner had lain pressed against the wall, tearing at his bonds and cursing in a monotone. Biron had risen shakily to his feet, kicked the Tyrannian into a brooding silence and made his way along the wall-rail, hand over hand against the acceleration, back to his seat... Forward blasts of power quivered the ship and reduced the rate of increasing velocity to a bearable pressure. They were in the upper reaches of the Rhodian atmosphere by then. The sky was a deep violet and the hull of the ship was hot with air friction, so that warmth could be felt within. It took hours thereafter to set the ship into an orbit about Rhodia. Biron could find no way of readily calculating the velocity necessary to just overcome Rhodia's gravity. He had to work it by hit and miss, varying the velocity with puffs of power forward and backward, watching the massometer, which indicated their distance from the planet's surface by measuring the intensity of the gravitational field. Fortunately the massometer was already calibrated for Rhodia's mass and radius. Without considerable experimentation, Biron. could not have adjusted the calibration himself. Eventually, the massometer held steady and over a period of two hours showed no appreciable drift. Biron allowed himself to relax, and the others climbed out of their belts. A rtemisia said, "You don't have a very light touch, my lord Rancher." "I'm flying by touch, my Lady," Biron replied, curtly. "If you can do better, you're welcome to try, but only after I myself disembark." "Quiet, quiet," said Gillbret. "The ship is too cramped for pettishness, and, in addition, since we are to be crushed into an inconvenient familiarity in this leaping prison pen, I suggest we discard the many 'lords' and 'ladies' which will otherwise encrust our conversation. I am Gillbret, you are Biron, she is Artemisia. I suggest we memorize those terms of address, or any variation we care to use. And as for piloting the ship, why not use the help of. our Tyrannian friend here?" The Tyrannian glared, and Biron said, "No. There is no way we could trust him. And my own piloting will improve as I get the hang of this ship. I haven't cracked you up yet, have I?" His shoulder hurt still as a result of the first lurch and, as usual, pain made him peevish. "Well," said Gillbret, "what do we do with him?" "I don't like to kill him in cold blood," said Biron, "and that won't help us. It would just make the Tythe master race is really the unforgivable sin." "But what is the alternative?" "We'll land him." "All right. Where?" "On Rhodia." "What?" "It's the one place they won't be looking for us. Besides, we've got to go down pretty soon, anyway." "Why?" "Look, this is the Commissioner's ship, and he's been using it for hopping about the surface of the planet. It wouldn't be provisioned for space voyages. Before we go anywhere, we'll have to take complete inventory aboard ship, and at least make sure that we have enough food and water." Artemisia was nodding vigorously. "That's right. I wouldn't have thought of that myself. Very clever, Biron." Biron made a deprecating gesture, but warmed with pleasure, nevertheless. It was the first time she had used his first name. She could be quite pleasant when she tried. Gillbret said, "But he'll radio our whereabouts instantly." "I don't think so," said Biron. "In the first place, Rhodia has its desolate areas, I imagine. We don't have to drop him into the business section of a city, or into the middle of one of the Tyranni garrisons. Besides, he may not be so anxious to contact his superiors as you might think. -- Say, private, what would happen to a soldier who allowed the Commissioner of the Khan to have his private cruiser stolen from him?" . The prisoner did not answer, but his lip-line became pale. Biron would not have wanted to be in the soldier's place. To be sure, he could scarcely be blamed. There was no reason why he should have suspected trouble resulting from mere politeness to members of the Rhodian royal family. Sticking to the letter of the Tyranni military code, he had refused to allow them aboard ship without the permission of his commanding officer. If the Director himself had demanded permission to enter, he would have to deny it. But in the meantime, they had closed in upon him, and by the time he realized he should have followed the military code still more closely and had his weapon ready, it was too late. A neuronic whip was practically touching his chest. Nor had he given in tamely, even then. It had taken a whip-blast at his chest to stop him. And even so, he could face only courtmartial and conviction. No one doubted that, least of all the soldier. at the outskirts of the city of Southwark. It had been chosen deliberately because it lay far from the main centers of Rhodian population. The Tyrannian soldier had been strapped into a repulsion unit and allowed to flutter downward some fifty miles from the nearest sizable town. The landing, on an empty beach, was only mildly jerky, and Biron, as the one least likely to be recognized, made the necessary purchases. Such Rhodian currency as Gillbret had had the presence of mind to bring with him had scarcely sufficed for elementary needs, since much of it went for a little bi-wheel and tow-cart, on which Biron could carry the supplies away piecemeal. "You might have stretched the money further," said Artemisia, "if you hadn't wasted so much of it on the Tyranni mush you bought." "There was nothing else to do," said Biron, hotly. "It may be Tyranni mush to you, but it's a wellbalanced food, and will see us through better than anything else I could have gotten." He was annoyed. It had been stevedore's work, getting all that stuff out of the city and then aboard ship. And it had meant a considerable risk, buying it at one of the Tyranni-run commissaries in the city. He had expected appreciation, not carping. There was no alternative, actually. The Tyranni forces had evolved an entire technique of supply adapted entirely to the fact that they used tiny ships. They couldn't afford the huge storage spaces of other fleets, which were stacked with the carcasses of whole animals, neatly hung in rows. They ha? to develop a. standard food-concentrate containing what was necessary in the way of calories and food-factors and let it go at that. It took up only one-twentieth of the space that an equivalent supply of natural animal food would take, and it could be piled up in the low-temperature storeroom like packaged bricks. V V Artemisia. "You'll get used to it," retorted Biron, mimicking her petulance, so that she flushed and turned away angrily. What was bothering her, Biron knew, was simply the lack of space and all that accompanied the lack. It wasn't just a question of using a monotonous food-stock because, in that way, more calories could be packed to the cubic inch. It was that there were no separate sleeping rooms, for instance. There were the engine rooms and the control room, which took up most of the ship's space. (After all, Biron thought, this is a warship, not a pleasure yacht.) Then there were the storeroom, and one small cabin, with two tiers of three bunks on either side. The plumbing was located in a little niche just outside the cabin. It meant crowding; it meant a complete absence of privacy; and it meant that Artemisia would have to adjust herself to the fact that there were no women's clothes aboard, no mirrors, no washing facilities. Well, she would have to get used to it. Biron felt that he had done enough for her, gone sufficiently out of his way. Why couldn't she be pleasant about it, and smile once in a while? She had a nice smile, and he had to admit she wasn't bad outside her temper. But, oh, that temper ! Well, why waste his time thinking about her? The water situation was the worst. Tyrann was a desert planet in the first place, where water was at a premium and men knew itsvalue, so none was included on board ship for washing purposes. Soldiers could wash themselves and their personal effects once they had landed on a planet. During trips, a little grime and sweat would not hurt them. Even for drinking purposes, water was barely sufficient for the longer trips. After all, water could be neither concentrated nor dehydrated, but had to be carried in bulk, the problem being aggravated by the fact that the water content of the food concentrates was quite low. re-use water lost by the body, but Biron, when he realized their function, felt squeamish and arranged for the disposal of waste products without attempt at water recovery. Chemically, it was a sensible procedure, but one has to be educated into that sort of thing. The second takeoff was, comparatively, a model of smoothness, and Biron spent time playing with the controls afterward. The control board resembled only in the dimmest fashion those of the ships he had handled on Earth. It had been compressed and compacted frightfully. As Biron puzzled out the action of a contact or the purpose of a dial, he wrote minute directions on paper and pasted them appropriately on the board. Gillbret entered the pilot room. Biron looked over his shoulder. "Artemisia's in the cabin, I suppose?" "There isn't any place else she could be and stay inside the ship." Biron said, "When you see her, tell her I'll make up a bunk here in the pilot room. I'd advise you to do the same, and let her have the cabin to herself." He muttered, "It wasn't bad enough -- we had to bring along a damn girl."  "You have your moments, too, Biron," said Gillbret. "You'll have to remember the sort of life she's used to." "All right, I do remember it, and so what? What sort of life do you think I'm used to? I wasn't born in the mine fields of some asteroidal belt, you know. I was born on the biggest ranch of Nephelos. But if you're caught in a situation, you've got to make the best of it. Damn it, I can't stretch the hull of the ship. It will hold just so much food and water, and I can't do anything about the fact that there isn't any shower. She picks on me as if I personally manufactured this ship." It was a relief to shout at Gillbret. It was a relief to shout at anybody. The door opened again, and Artemisia stood there. She said, freezingly, "I would refrain, Mr. Farrill, from shouting if I were you. You can be distinctly heard all over the ship." "That," said Biron, "does not bother me. And if the ship bothers you, just remember that if your father hadn't tried to kill me off and marry you off, neither one of us would be here." "Don't you criticize my father." "I'll criticize anyone I please." Gillbret put his hands over his ears. "Please!" bret said, "Shall we discuss the matter of our destination now? It's obvious at this point that the sooner we're somewhere else and get out of this ship, the more comfortable we'll be." "I agree with you there, Gil," said Biron. "Just let's go somewhere where I don't have to listen to her clacking. Talk about women on spaceships!" Artemisia ignored him and addressed Gillbret exclusively. "Why don't we get out of the Nebular area altogether?" "I don't know about you," said Biron, at once, "but I've got to get my Ranch back and do a little something about my father's murder. I'll stay in the Kingdoms, thanks." "I did not mean," said Artemisia, "that we were to leave forever; only till the worst of the search was over. I don't see what you intend doing about your Ranch, anyway. You can't get it back unless the Tyranni Empire is broken to pieces, and I can't see you doing that." "You never mind what I intend doing. It's my business." "Might I make a suggestion?" asked Gillbret, mildly. He took silence for consent, and went on, "Then suppose I tell you where we ought to go, and exactly what we ought to do to help break the Empire to pieces, just as Arta said." "Oh? How do you propose doing that?" said Biron. Gillbret smiled. "My dear boy, you're taking a very amusing attitude. Don't you trust me? You look at me as though you think that any enterprise I might be interested in was bound to be a foolish one. I got you out of the Palace, you know." "I know that. I'm perfectly willing to listen to you." "Do so then. I've been waiting for over twenty years for my chance to get away from them. If I had been a private citizen, I could have done it long since; but, through the curse of birth. I've been in the public eye. And yet if it hadn't been for the fact that I was born a Hinriad, I would not have attended the coronation of the present Khan of Tyrann, and in that case I would never have stumbled on the secret which will someday destroy that same Khan." "Go on," said Biron. "The trip from Rhodia to Tyrann was by Tyranni warship, of course, as was the trip back. A ship like this, I might say, but rather larger. The trip there was uneventful. The stay on Tyrann had its points of amusement, but, for our purposes now, was likewise uneventful. On tire trip back, however, a meteor hit us." "What?" G illbret held up a hand, "i know it's an unlikely accident. The incidence of meteors in space, especially in interstellar space, is low enough to make the chances of collision with a ship completely insignificant, but it does happen, as you know. And it did happen in this case. Of course any meteor that does hit, even when it is the size of a pinhead, as most of them are, can penetrate the hull of any but the most heavily armored ship." "I know," said Biron. "It's a question of their momentum, which is a product of their mass and velocity. The velocity more than makes up for their lack of mass." He recited it glumly, like a school lesson, and caught himself watching Artemisia furtively. She had seated herself to listen to Gillbret, and she was so close that they were almost touching. It occurred to Biron that her profile was beautiful as she sat there, even if her hair was becoming a little bedraggled. She wasn't wearing her little jacket, and the fluffy whiteness of her blouse was still smooth and unwrinkled after forty-eight hours. He wondered how she managed to do that. The trip, he decided, could be quite wonderful if she would only learn to behave herself. The trouble was that no one had ever controlled her properly, that was all. Certainly not her father. She'd become too used to having her own way. If she'd been born a commoner, she would have been a very lovely creature. into a daydream in which he controlled her properly and brought her to a state of properappreciation of himself, when she turned her head and met his eye calmly. Biron looked away and fastened his attention instantly on Gillbret. He had missed a few sentences. "I haven't the slightest idea why the ship's screen had tailed. It was just one of those things to which no one will ever know the answer, but it had failed.  Anyway, the meteor struck amidships. It was pebble-size and piercing the hull slowed it just sufficiently so that it couldn't blaze its way out again through the other side. If it had done that, there would have been little harm to it, since the hull could be temporarily patched in no time. "As it was, however, it plunged into the control room, ricocheted off the far wall and slammed back and forth till it came to a halt. It couldn't have taken more than a fraction of a minute to do so, but at an original velocity of a hundred miles a minute, it must have crisscrossed the room a hundred times. Both crewmen were cut to pieces, and I escaped only because I was in the cabin at the time. "I heard the thin clang of the meteor when it originally penetrated the hull, then the click-clack of its bouncing and the terrifying short screams of the two crew men. When I jumped into the control room, there was only the blood everywhere and the trn flesh. The things that happened next I remember only vaguely, although for years I lived it over step by step in my nightmares. "The cold sound of escaping air led me to the meteor hole. I slapped a disk of metal over it and air pressure made a decent seal of it. I found the little battered spacepebble on the floor. It was warm to the touch, but I hit it with a spanner and split it in two. The exposed interior frosted over instantly. It was still at the temperature of space. "I tied a cord to the wrist of each corpse and then fastened each cord to a towing magnet. I dumped them through the airlock, heard the magnets clank against the hold, and knew that the hard-frozen bodies would follow the ship now whereever it went. You see, I knew I would need the evidence of their bodies to show that it had been the meteor that had killed them and not I, once we returned to Rhodia. "But how was I to return? I was quite helpless. There was no way I could run the ship, and there was nothing I dared try there in the depths of interstellar space. I didn't even know how to use the subetheric communication system, so let the ship travel on its own course." "But you couldn't very well do that, could you?" Biron asked. He wondered if Gillbret were inventing this, either out of simple romantic imaginings or for some severely practical reason of his own. "What about the Jumps through hyperspace? You must have managed those, or you wouldn't be here." "A Tyranni ship," said Gillbret, "once the controls are properly set, will make any number of Jumps quite automatically." Biron stared his disbelief. Did Gillbret take him for a fool? "You're making that up," he said. "I am not. It's one of the damned military advances which won their wars for them. They didn't defeat fifty planetary systems, outnumbering Tyrann by hundreds of times in population and resources, just by playing mumbledy-peg, you know. Sure, they tackled us one at a time, and utilized our traitors very skillfully, but . they had a definite military edge as well. Everyone knows that their tactics were superior to ours, and part of that was due to the automatic Jump. It meant a great increase in the maneuverability of their ships and made possible much more elaborate battle plans than any we could set up. "It's one of their best-kept secrets, this technique of theirs. I never learned it until I was trapped alone on the Bloodsucker (the Tyranni have the most annoying custom of naming their ships unpleasantly, though I suppose it's good psychology) and watched it happen. I watched it make the Jumps without a hand on the controls." "And you mean to say that this ship can do that, too?" "I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised." board. There were still dozens of contacts he had not determined the slightest use for. Well, later! He turned to Gillbret again. "And the ship took you home?" "No, it didn't. When that meteor wove its pattern through the control room, it didn't leave the board untouched. It would have been a most amusing coincidence if it had. Dials were smashed, the casing battered and dented. There was no way of telling how the previous setting of the controls had been altered, but it must have been somehow, because it never took me back to Rhodia. "Eventually, of course, it began deceleration, and I knew the trip was theoretically over. I couldn't tell where I was, but I managed to maneuver the visiplate so that I could tell there was a planet close enough to show a disc in the ship telescope. It was blind luck, because the disc was increasing in size. The ship was heading for the planet. "Oh, not directly. That would be too impossible to hope for. If I had just drifted, the ship would have at least, but at that distance I could use ordinary etheric radio. I knew how to do that. It was after this was all over that I began educating myself in electronics. I made up my mind that I would never be quite so helpless again. Being helpless is one of the things that isn't altogether amusing." the radio." "Exactly, and they came and got me." "Who?" "The men of the planet. It was inhabited." "Well, the luck piles up. What planet was it?" "I don't know." "You mean they didn't tell you?" "Amusing, isn't it? They didn't. But it was somewhere among the Nebular Kingdoms!" "How did you know that?" "Because they knew the ship I was in was a Tyranni vessel. They knew that by sight, and almost blasted it before I could convince them I was the only one on board alive." Biron put his large hands on his knees and kneaded them. "Now hold on and pull back. I don't understand this. If they knew it was a Tyranni vessel and intending blasting it, isn't that the best proof that the world was not in the Nebular Kingdoms? Anywhere in the Galaxy but there." "No, by the Galaxy." Gillbret's eyes were shining, and his voice climbed in enthusiasm. "It was in the Kingdoms. They took me to the surface and what a world it was! There were men there from all over the Kingdoms. I could tell by the accents. And they had no fear of the Tyranni. The place was an arsenal. You couldn't tell from space. It might externally have been a rundownfarming world, but the real life of the planet was underground. Somewhere in the Kingdoms, my boy, somewhere, there is that planet still and it is not afraid of the Tyranni and it is going to destroy the Tyranni as it would have destroyed the ship I was on then, if the crew men had been still alive." Biron felt his heart bound. For a moment, he wanted desperately to believe. After all, maybe. Maybe ! And Maybe Not! learn all this about its being an arsenal? How long did you stay? What did you see?" Gillbret grew impatient. "It wasn't exactly what I saw at all. They didn't conduct me on any tours, or anything like that." He forced himself to relax. "Well, look, this is what happened. By the time they got me off the ship, I was in more or less of a bad state. I had been too frightened to eat much (it's a terrible thing, being marooned in space) and I must have looked worse than I really was. "I identified myself, more or less, and they took me underground. With the ship, of course. I suppose they were more interested in the ship than in myself. It gave them a chance to study Tyranni spatio-engineering. They took me to what must have been a hospital." "But what did you see, uncle?" asked Artemisia. Biron interrupted, "Hasn't he ever told you this before?" Artemisia said, "No." And Gillbret added, "Tve never told anyone till now. I was taken to a hospital, as I said. I passed research laboratories in that hospital that must have been better than anything we have on Rhodia. On the way to the hospital I passed factories in which some sort of metalwork was going on. The ships that had captured me were certainly like none I've ever heard about. "It was all so apparent fo me at the time that I have never questioned it in the years since. I think of it as my 'rebellion world,' and I know that someday swarms of ships will leave it to attack the Tyranni, and that the subject worlds will be called upon to rally round the rebel leaders. From year to year I've waited for it to happen. Each new year Tve thought to myself : This may be the one. And each time, I half hoped it wouldn't be, because I was longing to get away first, to join them so that I might be part of the great attack. I didn't want' them to start without me." He laughed shakily. "I suppose it would have amused most people to know what was going on in my mind. In my mind. Nobody thought much of me, you know." Biron said, "All this happened over twenty years ago, and they haven't attacked? There's been no sign of them? No strange ships have been reported? No incidents? And you still think -- " Gillbret fired at him, "Yes, I do. Twenty years isn't too long to organize a rebellion against a planet that rules fifty systems. I was there just at the beginning of the rebellion. I know that, too. Slowly, since then, thejmust have been honeycombing the planet with their underground preparations, developing newer ships and weapons, training more men, organizing the attack. "It's only in the video-thrillers that men spring to arms at a moment's notice, that a new weapon is needed one day, invented the next, mass-produced the third and used the fourth. These things take time, Biron, and the men of the 'rebellion world' must know they will have to be completely ready before beginning. They won't be able to strike twice. "And what do you call 'incidents?' Tyranni ships have disappeared and pever been found. Space is big, you might say, and they might simply be lost, but what if they were captured by the rebels? There was the case of the Tireless two years back. It reported a strange object close enough to stimulate the massometer, and then was never heard of again. It could have been a meteor, but was it?" "The search lasted months. They never found it. I think the rebels have it. The Tireless was a new ship, an experimental model. It would be just what they would want." landed there, why didn't you stay?" "Don't you suppose I wanted to? I had no chance. I listened to them when they thought I was unconscious, and I learned a bit more then. They were just starting at that time. They couldn't afford to be found out then. They knew I was Gillbret oth Hinriad. There was enough identification on the ship, even if I hadn't told them myself, which I had. They knew that if I didn't return to Rhodia there would be a full-scale search that would not readily come to a halt. "They couldn't risk such a search, so they had to see to it that I was returned to Rhodia. And that's where they took me." "What?" cried Biron. "But that must have been an even greater risk. How did they do that?" "I don't know." Gillbret passed his thin fingers through his graying hair, and his eyes seemed to be probing uselessly into the backward stretches of his memory. "They anesthetized me, I suppose. That part all blanks out. Past a certain point there is nothing. I can only remember that I opened my eyes and was back in the Bloodsucker. I was in space, just off Rhodia." "The two dead crewmen were still attached by the tow magnets? They hadn't been removed on the 'rebellion world?' " asked Biron. "They were still there." "Was there any evidence at all to indicate that you had been on the 'rebellion world ?' " "None, except for what I remembered." "How did you know you were off' Rhodia?" "I didn't. I knew I was near a planet; the massometer said so. I used the radio again, and this time it was Rhodian ships that came for me. I told my story to the Tyrannian Commissioner of that day, with appropriate modifications. I made no mention of the 'rebellion world,' of course. And I said the meteor had hit just after the last Jump. I didn't want them to think I knew that a Tyrannian ship could make the Jumps automatically." "Do you think the 'rebellion world' found out that little fact? Did you tell them?" "I didn't tell them. I had no chance. I wasn't there long enough. Conscious, that is. But I don't know how long I was unconscious and what they managed to find out for themselves." Biron stared at the visiplate. Judging from the rigidity of the picture it presented, the ship they were on might have been nailed in space. The Remorseless was traveling at the rate of ten thousand miles an hour, but that was nothing to the immense distances of space. The stars were hard, bright and motionless. They had a hypnotic quality about them. He said, "Then where are we going ? I take it you still don't know where the 'rebellion world' is?" "I don't. B.ut I have an idea who would be in charge. I am almost sure I know who would be in charge." Gillbret was eager about it. "Who?" "The Autarch of Lingane." "Lingane?" Biron frowned. He had heard the name some time back, it seemed to him, but he had forgotten the connection. "Why he?" "Lingane was the last Kingdom captured by the Tyranni. It is not, shall we say, as pacified as the rest. Doesn't that make sense?" "As far as it goes. But how far is that?" "If you want another reason, there is your father." "My father?" For a moment, Biron forgot that his father was dead. He saw him standing before his mind's eyes, large and alive, but then he remembered and there was that same cold wrench inside Tiim. "How does my father come into this?" "He was at court six months ago. I gained certain notions as to what he wanted. Some of his talks with my cousin, Hinrik, I overheard." "Oh, uncle," said Artemisia, impatiently. "My dear?" "You had no right to eavesdrop on father's private discussions." G illbret shrugged, "of course not, but it was amusing, and useful as well." Biron interrupted, "Now wait. You say it was six months ago that my father was at Rhodia?" He felt excitement mount. "Yes." "Tell me. While there, did he have access to the Director's collection of Primitivism? You told me once that the Director had a large library of matters concerning Earth." "I imagine so. The library is quite famous and it is usually made available to distinguished visitors, if they're interested. They usually aren't, but your father was. Yes, I remember that very well. He spent nearly a day there." That checked. It had been half a year ago that his father had first asked his help. Biron said, "You yourself know the library well, I imagine." "Of course." "Is there anything in the library that would suggest that there ex ists a document on Earth of great military value?" Gillbret was blank of face; obviously, blank of mind. Biron said, "Somewhere in the last centuries of prehistoric Earth there must have been such a document. I can only tell you that my father thought it to be the most valuable single item in the Galaxy, and the deadliest. I was to have gotten it for him, but I left Earth before I could, and in any case," his voice faltered, "he died too soon." But Gillbret was still blank. "I don't know what you're talking about." "My father mentioned it to me first six months ago. He must have learned of it in the library on Rhodia. If you've been through it yourself, can't you tell me what it was he must have learned?" But Gillbret could only shake his head. Biron said, "Well, continue with your story." "They spoke of the Autarch of Lingane, your father and my cousin," Gillbret said. "Despite your father's cautious phraseology, Biron, it was obvious that the Autarch was the organizer of the conspiracy. "And then," he hesitated, "there was a mission from Lingane and the Autarch himself was at its head. I -- I told him of the 'rebellion world.' " "You said a while ago you told nobody," Biron objected. "Except the Autarch. I bad to know the truth." "What did he tell you?" "Practically nothing. But, then, he had to be cautious, too. Could he trust me? I might have been working for the Tyranni. How could he know ? But he didn't close the door altogether. It's our only lead." "Is it?" Biron said. "Then we'll go to Lingane. One place, I suppose, is like another." Mention of his father had depressed him, and, for the moment, nothing mattered much. Let it be Lingane. L ET it be Lingane! That was easy to say. But how does one go about pointing the ship at a tiny speck of light thirty-five light years A two with seventeen zeroes after it. At ten thousand mites an hour, (current cruising speed of the Remorseless) it would take well over Biron leafed through the "Standard Galactic Ephemeris" with something like despair. Tens of thousands of stars were listed in detail, with their positions crammed into three figures. There were hundreds; of pages of these figures, symbolized by the Greek letters rho, theta, and phi. Rho was the distance from the GalacticCenter in parsecs; theta, the angular separation, along the plane of the Galactic Lens from the Standard Galactic Baseline (the line, that is, which connects the Galactic Center and the sun of the planet Earth); phi, the angular separation from the Baseline in the plane perpendicular to that of the Galactic Lens, the two latter measurements being expressed in radians. Given those three figures, one could locate any star accurately in all the vast immensity of space. dition to the star's position on the day for which all the data were calculated, one had to know the star's proper motion, both speed and direction. It was a small correction, comparatively, but necnothing compared with stellar distances, but a long way with a ship. There was, of course, the question of the ship's own position. One could calculate the distance from Rhodia by the reading of the massometer, or, more correctly, the distance from Rhodia's sun, since this far out in space the sun's gravitational field drowned out that of any of its planets. The direction they were traveling along with reference to the Galactic Baseline was more difficult to determine. Biron had to locate two known stars other than Rhodia's sun. From their apparent positions and the known distance from Rhodia's sun, he could plot their actual position. It was roughly done, but, he felt sure, accurately enough. Knowing his own position and that of Linganes sun, it was only a matter of adjusting the controls for the proper direction and strength of the hyperatomic thrust. Biron felt lonely and tense. Not frightened. He rejected the word. But tense, definitely. He was deliberately calculating the elements of the Jump for six hours later. He wanted plenty of time to check his figures. And perhaps there might be the chance for a nap. He had dragged the bedding out of the cabin and it was ready for him. The other two were, presumably, sleeping in the cabin. He told himself that that was a good thing and that he wanted nobody around bothering him, yet when he heard the small sound of bare feet outside, he looked up with involuntary eagerness. "Hello," he said. "Why aren't you sleeping?" Artemisia stood in the doorway, hesitating. She said, in a small voice, "Do you mind if I come in? Will I be bothering you?" "It depends on what you do." "I'll try to do the right things." She seemed too humble, Biron thought suspiciously, and then the reason for it came out. "I'm awfully frightened," she said. "Aren't you?" He wanted to say no, not at all, but it didn't come out that way. He smiled sheepishly and said, "Sort of." Oddly enough, that comforted her. She knelt down on the floor beside him, and looked at the thick volumes opened before him and at the sheets of calculations. "They had all these books here?" "You bet. They couldn't pilot a ship without them." "And you understand all that?" "Not all that. I wish I did. I hope I understand enough. We'll have to Jump to Lingane, you know." "Is that hard to do?" "No, not if you know the figures, which are all here, and have the controls which are all there, and if you have experience, which I haven't. For instance, it should be done in several Jumps, but I'm going to try it in one because there'll be less chance of trouble, even though it means a waste of energy." He shouldn't tell her; there was no point in telling her; it would be cowardly to frighten her; and she'd be hard to handle if she got really frightened, panicky frightened. He kept telling himself all that and it did no good. He wanted to share it with somebody. He wanted part of it off his own mind. He said, "There are some things I should know that I don't. Things like the mass-density between here and Lingane affect the course of the Jump, because that mass density is what controls the curvature of this part of the universe. The 'Ephemeris' -- that's this big book here -- mentions the curvature corrections that must be made in certain standard Jumps and from that you're supposed to be able to calculate out your own particular corrections. But then if you happen to have a super-giant star within ten light years, all bets are off. I'm not even sure if I used the computer correctly." "But what would happen if you were wrong?" "We could re-enter space too close to Lingane's sun." She considered that, then said, "You have no idea how much better I feel." "After what I've just said?" "Of course. In my bunk, I simply felt helpless and lost, with so much emptiness in all directions. Now I know that we're going somewhere and that the emptiness is under our control." "I don't know about its being under our control," Biron said doubtfully. She stopped him. "It is. I know you can handle the ship." And Biron decided that maybe he might at that. legs under her and sat facing him. She said, "You know, I had an awfully queer sensation in the bunk, almost as if I were floating. That was one of the things that frightened me. Every time I'd turn, I'd give a queer little jump into the air and then flop back slowly as if there were springs in the air holding me back." "You were sleeping in a top bunk?" "Yes. The bottom ones give me claustrophobia, with another mattress only six inches over my head." Biron laughed. "Then that explains it. The ship's gravitational force is directed toward its base, and falls off as you move away from it. In the top bunk, you were probably twenty or thirty pounds lighter than on the floor. Were you ever on a passenger liner? A really big one?" "Once. When father and I visited Tyrann last year." "Well, on the liners they have the gravitation in all parts of the ship directed toward the outer hull, so that the long axis of the ship is always 'up,' no matter where you are. That's why the motors of one of those big ships are always lined up in a cylinder running right along the long axis. No gravity there." "It must take an awful lot of power to keep an artificial gravity going." "Enough to power a small town." "There isn't any danger of our running short of fuel, is there?" "Don't worry about that. Ships are fueled by the total conversion of mass to energy. Fuel is the last thing we'll run out of. The outer hull will wear away first." She was facing him. He noted that her face had been cleaned of its makeup and wondered how that had been done; probably with a handkerchief and as little of the drinking water as she could manage. She didn't suffer as a result, for her clear white skin was the more startlingly perfect against the black of her hair and eyes. Her eyes were very warm, thought Biron. The silence had lasted a little too long. He said, hurriedly, "You don't travel very much, do you? I mean, you were on a liner only once?" S HE nodded. "Once too often. If we hadn't gone to Tyrann, that filthy chamberlain wouldn't have seen me and -- I don't want to talk about that." Biron let it go. He said, "Is that usual? I mean, not traveling?" "I'm afraid so. Father is always hopping around on state visits, opening agricultural expositions, dedicating buildings. He usually just makes some speech that Aratap writes for him. As for the rest of us, however, the more we stay in the palace, the better the Tyranni like it. Poor Gillbret! The one and only time he left Rhodia was to attend the Khan's coronation as father's representative. They've never let him get into a ship again." Her eyes were downcast and, absently, she pleated the material of Biron's sleeve where it ended at the wrist. She said, "Biron." "Yes -- Arta?" He stumbled a bit, but it came out. "Do you think Uncle Gil's story can be true?" "I don't know." "Do you suppose it could be his imagination ? He's been brooding about the Tyranni for years, and he's never been able to do anything, of course, except to rig up spy beams, which is only childish,  and he knows it. He may have built himself a daydream and, over the years, gradually come to believe in it. I know him, you see." "It's possible, but let's follow it up a little. We can travel to Lingane, anyway." They were closer to one another. He could have reached out and touched her, held her in his arms, kissed her. And he did so. It was a complete non sequitur. Nothing, it seemed to Biron, had led to it. One moment they were discussing Jumps and gravity and Gillbret, and the next she was soft and silky in his arms and soft and silky on his lips. His first impulse was to say he was sorry, to go through all the silly motions of apology, but when he drew away, and would have spoken, she still made no attempt at escape but rested her head in the crook of his left arm. Her eyes remained closed. So he said nothing at all and kissed her again, slowly and thoroughly. It was the best thing he could have done, and at the time he knew it. I . Finally, she said, a bit dreamily, "Aren't you hungry? I'll bring you some of the concentrate and warm it for you. Then, if you want to sleep, I can keep an eye on things for you. And -- and I'd better put on more of my clothes." She turned as she was about to pass out the door. "The food concentrate tastes very nice after you get used to it. Thank you for getting it." Somehow that, rather than the kisses, was the treaty of peace between them. control room, hours later, he showed no surprise at finding Biron and Artemisia lost in a foolish kind of conversation. He made no remarks about the fact that Biron's arm was about his niece's waist. He asked, "When are we Jumping, Biron?" "In half an hour," said Biron. The half-hour passed; the controls were set; conversation languished and died. At zero time, Biron drew a deep breath and yanked a lever the full length of its arc, from left to right. It was not as it had been aboard the liner. The Remorseless was smaller and the Jump was consequently less smooth. Biron staggered and for a split-second things wavered. And then they were smooth and solid again. The stars in the visiplate had changed. Biron rotated the ship so that the star-field lifted, each star moving in a stately arc. One star and more than a point. It was a tiny sphere, a burning speck of sand. Biron caught it, steadied the ship before it was lost again, and turned the telescope upon it, throwing in the spectroscopic attachment. He turned again to the "Ephemeris," and checked under the column headed "Spectral Characteristics." Then he got out of the pilot's chair and said, "It's still too far. I'll have to nudge up to it. But anyway, that's Lingane right ahead." It was the first Jump he had ever made, and it was successful. The Autarch Comes T HE Autarch of Lingane pondered the matter, but his cool, well-trained features scarcely creased under the strain of thought. "And you waited forty-eight hours to tell me," he accused. Rizzett said boldly, "There was no reason to tell you earlier. If we bombarded you with all matters, life would be a burden to you. We tell you now, because we still make nothing of it. It is queer, and in our position, we can afford nothing queer." "Repeat this business. Let me hear it again." The Autarch threw a leg upon the flaring window-sill and looked outward thoughtfully. The window itself represented perhaps the greatest single oddity of Linganian architecture. It was moderate in size and set at the end of a live-foot recess that narrowed gently toward it. It was extremely clear, immensely thick and , precisely curved, not so much a window as a lens, funneling the light inward from all directions, so that, looking outward, one eyed a miniature panorama. When the position of the sun made the lenslike windows a focus for impossible heat and light, they were blanked out automatically, rather than opened; rendered opaque by a shift in the polarization characteristics of the glass. And certainly the theory that a planet's architecture is the reflection of a planet's place in the Galaxy would seem to be borne out by Lingane and its windows. Like the windows, Lingane was small, yet commanded a panoramic view. It was a "planet-state" in a Galaxy, which, at the time, had passed beyond that stage of economic and political development. Where most political units were conglomerations of stellar systems, Lingane remained what it had been for centuries; a single inhabited world. This did not prevent it from being wealthy. In fact, it was almost inconceivable that . Lingane could be anything else. It is difficult to tell in advance when a world is so located that many Jumproutes may use it as a pivotal intermediate point; or even must use it in the interests of optimal economy. A great deal depends on the pattern of development of that region of space. There is the question of the distribution of the naturally habitable planets; the order in which they are colonized and developed; the types of economy they possess. Lingane discovered its own values early, which was the great turning-point of its history. Next to the actual possession of a strategic position, the capacity to appreciate and exploit that position is most important. Lingane had proceeded to occupy small planetoids with neither resources nor capacity for supporting an independent population, choosing them only because they would help maintain Lingane's trade monopoly. They built servicing stations on those rocks. All that ships could need, from hyperatomic replacements to new book-reels, could be found there. The stations grew to huge trading posts. From all the Nebular Kingdoms, fur, minerals, grain, beef, timber poured in; from the Inner Kingdoms, machinery, appliances, medicinals, finished products of all sorts. So that, like its windows, Lingane's minuteness looked out on all the Galaxy. It was a planet alone; but it did well. T HE Autarch said turning from the window, "Start with the mail ship, Rizzett. Where did they meet this cruiser in the first place?" "Les# than one hundred thousand miles off Lingane. The exact coordinates don't matter. They've been watched ever since. The point is that even then, the Tyranni cruiser was in an orbit about the planet." "As though it had no intention of landing, but rather was waiting for something." "Yes." "No way of telling how long they'd been waiting?" "Impossible, I'm afraid. They were sighted by no one else. We checked thoroughly." "Very well," said the Autarch. "We'll abandon that for the moment. They stopped the mail ship; which is', of course, interference with the mails and a violation of our Articles of Association with Tyrann." "I doubt that they were Tyranni. Their unsure actions are more those of outlaws; of prisoners in flight." "You mean the men on the Tyranni cruiser? It may be what they want us to believe, of course. At any rate, their only overt action was to ask that a message be delivered directly to me." "Directly to the Autarch." "Nothing else?" "Nothing else." "They at no time entered the mail ship?" "All communication was by visiplate. The mail capsule was shot across two miles of empty spac-e and caught by ship's net." "Was it vision communication or sound only?" "Full vision. That's the point. The speaker was described by several as being a young man of 'aristocratic bearing,' whatever that means." T HE Autarch's fist clenched slowly. "And no photo-impression was taken of the face? That was a mistake." "Unfortunately there was no reason for the mail captain to have anticipated the importance of doing so. If any importance exists. Does all this mean anything to you, sir?" The Autarch did not answer the question. "And this is the message?" "Exactly. A .tremendous message of one word that we were supposed to bring directly to you; a thing we did not do, of course. It might have been a fission capsule, for instance. Men have been killed that way before." "Yes, and Autarchs too," said the Autarch. "Just the word 'Gillbret.' One word, 'Gillbret.' " The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm, but a lack of certainty was gathering and he did not like to experience a lack of certainty. He liked nothing which made him aware of limitations. An Autarch should have no limitations, and on Lingane he had none that natural law did not impose. Under the Autarchy, Lingane increased its wealth and strength. Even the Tyranni, attacking thirty years earlier at the height of their power, had been fought to a standstill. They had not been defeated, but they had been stopped. The shock, even of that, had been permanent. Not a planet had been conquered by the Tyranni since the year they had attacked Lingane. Other planets of the Nebular Kingdoms were outright vassals of the Tyranni. Lingane, however, was an Associated State, theoretically the equal "Ally" of Tyrann, with its rights guarded by the Articles of Association. The Autarch 'was not fooled by the situation. The chauvinistic of the planet might allow themselves the luxury of considering themselves free, but the Autarch knew that the Tyranni danger had been held at arm's-length this past generation. Only that far. No farther. And now it might be moving in quickly for the final, long-delayed bear hug. Certainly, he had given it the opportunity it was waiting for. The organization he had built up, ineffectual though it was, was sufficient grounds for punitive action of any type the Tyranni might care to undertake. Legally, Lingane would be in the wrong. Was the cruiser the first reaching out for the final bear hug? The Autarch said, "Has a guard been placed on that ship?" "I said they were watched. Two of our -- " he smiled one-sidedly -- "freighters keep in massometer range." "What do you make of it?" "I don't know. The only Gill r bret I know whose name by itself would mean anything is Gillbret oth Hinriad of Rhodia. Have you had dealings with him?" The Autarch said, "I saw him on my last visit to Rhodia." "You told him nothing, of course." "Of course." Rizzett's eyes narrowed. "I thought there might have been a certain lack of caution on your part; that the Tyranni had been the recipients of an equal lack of caution on the part of this Gillbret -- the Hinriads are notable weaklings these days -- and that this now was a device to trap you into final selfbetrayal." "I doubt it. It comes at a queer time, this business. I have been away from Lingane for a year or more. I arrived last week and I shall leave in a matter of days again. A message such as this reaches me just when I am in a position to be reached." "You don't think it is a coincidence?" "I don't believe in coincidence. And there is one way in which all this would not be coincidence. I will therefore visit that ship. Alone." "Impossible, sir." Rizzett was startled. He had a small, uneven scar just above his right temple and it showed suddenly red. "You forbid me?" asked the Autarch, drily. And he was the Autarch, after all. Rizzett's face fell and he said, "As you please, sir." wait was proving increasingly unpleasant. For two days, they hadn't budged from their orbit. Gillbret watched the controls with relentless concentration. His voice had an edge to it. "Wouldn't you say they were moving?" Biron looked up briefly. He was shaving, and handling the Tyranni erosive-spray with finicky care. "No," he said, "they're not moving. Why should they? They're watching us, and they'll keep on watching us." He concentrated upon the difficult area of the upper lip, frowning impatiently as he felt the slightly sour taste of the spray upon his tongue. A Tyrannian could handle the spray with a grace that was almost poetic. It was undoubtedly the quickest and closest non-permanent shaving method in existence, in the hands of an expert. In essence, it was an extremely fine air-blown abrasive that scoured off the hairs without harming the skin. Certainly the skin felt nothing more than the gentle pressure of what might have been an air-stream. Biron was surveying his face in the mirror, 'wondering how he would look in sideburns down to the angle of the jaw, when Artemisia said from the doorway, "I thought you were. going to sleep." "I did," he said. "Then I woke up." He looked at her and smiled. She patted his cheek, then stroked it gently with her fingers, "It's smooth. You look about eighteen." He carried her hand to his lips. "Don't let that fool you." S HE said, "They're still watching?" "Still watching. Isn't it annoying? These damned dull interludes that give you time to sit and worry." "I don't find this interlude at all dull." "You're talking about other aspects of it now, Arta." She said, "Why don't we cross them up and land on Lingane?" "We've thought of it. I don't think we're ready for that kind of risk. We can afford to wait till the water-supply gets a bit lower." Gillbret said loudly, "I tell you they are moving." Biron crossed over to the control panel and considered the massometer readings. He looked at Gillbret and said, "You may be right." He pecked away at the calculator for a moment or two and stared at its dials. "No, the two ships haven't moved relative to us, Gillbret. What's changed the massometer is that a third ship has joined them. As near as I can tell, it's # miles off, about # degrees rho and # degrees from the ship-planet line, if I've got the clockwise and counterclockwise conventions straight. If I haven't, the figures are, respectively, # and # degrees." He paused to take another reading. "I think they're approaching. It's a small ship. Do you think you can get in touch with them, Gillbret?" "I can try." "All right. No vision. Let's leave it at sound, till we get some notion of what's coming." It was amazing to watch Gillbret at the controls of the etheric radio. He was obviously the possessor of a native talent. Contacting an isolated point in space with a tight radio-beam remains, after all, a task in which the ship's control panel information can participate only slightly. He had a notion of the distance of the ship which might be oft by a hundred miles plus-orminus. He had two angles, either or both of which might easily be wrong by five or six degrees in any direction. This left a volume of about ten the ship might be. The rest was left to the human operator, and a radio beam which was a probing finger not half a mile in cross-section at the widest point of its receivable range. It was said that a skilled operator could tell by the feel of the controls how closely the beam missed the target. Scientifically, that theory is nonsense, of course, but it often seemed that no other explanation was possible. In less than ten minutes, the activity gauge of the radio was jumping and the Remorseless was both sending and receiving. In another ten minutes, Biron could lean back and say, "They're going to send a man aboard." "Ought we to let them?" asked Artemisia. "Why not? One man? We're armed." "But if we let their ship get too close?" "We're a Tyrannian cruiser, Arta. We've got three to five times their power, even if they are the best warship Lingane had. They're not allowed too much by their precious Articles of Association, and we've got five high-caliber blasters." Artemisia said, "Do you know how to use the Tyranni blasters? I didn't know you did." Biron hated to turn the admiration off, but he said, "Unfortunately, I don't. At least, not yet. But then the Linganian ship won't know that, you see." plate showed a visible ship. It was a stubby little craft, fitted with two sets of four fins as though it were frequently called upon to double for stratospheric flight. At its first appearance in the telescope, Gillbret had shouted in delight, "That's the Autarch's yacht," and his face wrinkled into a grin. "It's his private yacht. I'm sure of it. I told you that the bare mention of my name was the surest way to get his attention." There was the period of deceleration and adjustment of velocity on the part of the Linganian ship, until it hung motionless in the 'plate. A thin voice came from the receiver: "Ready for boarding?" "Ready!" said Biron. "One person only." "One person," came the response. It was like a snake uncoiling, the metal-mesh rope looping outward from the Linganian ship, shooting at them harpoon-fashion. Its thickness expanded in the visiplate and the magnetized cylinder that ended it approached and grew in size. As it grew closer, it edged toward rim of the cone of vision, then veered off completely. The sound of its contact was hollow and reverberant. The magnetized weight was anchored, and the line was a spider-thread that did not sag in a normal weighted curve but retained whatever kinks and loops it had possessed at the moment of contact. These moved slowly forward as units under the influence of inertia. Easily and carefully, the Linganian ship edged away and the line straightened. It hung there then, taut and fine, thinning into space until it was an almost invisible thing, glittering with incredible daintiness in the light of Lingane's sun. Biron threw in the telescopic attachment, which bloated the ship monstrously in the field of vision, so that one could see the origin of the half-mile length of connecting line, and the little figure that was beginning to swing hand over hand along it. It was not the usual form of boajrding. Ordinarily, two ships would maneuver to near-contact, so that extensible airlocks could meet and merge under intense magnetic fields. A tunnel through space would thus connect the ships and a man could travel from one to the other with no further protection than he needed to wear aboard ship. Naturally, this form of boarding required mutual trust. By space-line, one was dependent upon his spacesuit. The approaching Linganian was bloated in his; a fat thing of air-extended metal mesh, the joints of which required no .small muscular effort to work. Even at the distance at which he was, Biron could see his arms flex with a snap as the joint gave and came to rest in a new groove. And the mutual velocities of the two ships had to be carefully adjusted. An inadvertent acceleration on the part of either would tear the line loose and send the traveler tumbling through space under the easy grip of the faraway sun and of the initial impulse of the snapping line -- with nothing, neither friction nor obstruction, to stop him this side of eternity. The approaching Linganian moved on confidently and quickly. When he came closer it was easy to see that it was not a simple hand over hand procedure. Each time the forward hand flexed, pulling him on, he would let go and float onward some dozen feet before his other hand reached forward for a new hold. It was a brachiation through space. The spaceman was a gleaming metal gibbon. A rtemisia asked, "What if he misses?" "He looks too expert to do that," said Biron, "but if he does, he'd still shine in the sun. We'd pick him up again." The Linganian was close now. He had passed out of the field of the visiplate. In another five seconds, there was the clatter of gauntleted feet on the ship's hull. Biron yanked the lever that lit the signals which outlined the ship's airlock. A moment later, in answer to an imperative series of raps, the outer door was opened. There was a thump just beyond a blank section of the pilot room's wall. The outer door closed; the section of wall slid away; and a man stepped through. His suit frosted over instantly, blanking the thick glass of his helmet and turning him into a mound of white. The air grew cold. Biron elevated the heaters and the renewing gush that entered was warm and dry. For a moment, the frost on the suit held its own, then began to thin and dissolve into a dew. The Linganian's blunt metal fingers were fumbling at the clasps of the helmet as though he were impatient with his snowy blindness: It lifted off as a unit, the thick, soft insulation inside rumpling his hair as it passed. Gillbret exclaimed, "Your Excellency!" In glad triumph, he said, "Biron, it is the Autarch himself." But Biron, in a voice that struggled vainly against stupefaction, could only gasp, "Jonti!" The Autarch Remains T HE Autarch gently toed the suit to one side and appropriated the larger of the padded chairs. He said, "I haven't had that sort of exercise in quite a while. But they say it never leaves you once you've learned, and, apparently, it hasn't in my case. Hello, Farrill. My lord Gillbret, good day. And this, if I remember, is the Director's daughter, the lady Artemisia." He placed a long cigaret carefully between his lips and brought it to life with a single intake of breath. The scented tobacco filled the air with its pleasant odor. "I did not expect to see you quite so soon, Farrill," he said. "Or at all, perhaps?" asked Biron, acidly. "One never knows," agreed the Autarch. "Of course, with a message that read only 'Gillbret;' with the knowledge that Gillbret could not pilot a spaceship; with the further knowledge that I had myself sent a young man to Rhodia who could pilot a spaceship and who was quite capable of stealing a Tyrannian cruiser in his desperation to escape; and with the final knowledge that one of the men on the cruiser was' reported to be young and of aristocratic bearing; the conclusion was obvious. I am not surprised to see you." "I think you are," said Biron. "I think you're as surprised as hell to see me. As an assassin, you should be. Do you think I am worse at deduction than you are?" "I think very highly of you." The Autarch was completely unperturbed, and Biron felt awkward and stupid in his resentment. He turned furiously to the others. "This man is Sander Jonti; the Sander Jonti I've told you of. He may be the Autarch of Lingane besides, or fifty Autarchs. It makes no difference. To me he is Sander Jonti." Artemisia said, "He is the man who -- " Gillbret put a thin and shaking hand to his brow. "Control yourself, Biron. Are you mad?" "This is the man! I am not mad!" shouted Biron. He checked himself with an effort. "All right. There's no point yelling, I suppose. Get off my ship, Jonti. That's said quietly enough. Get off my ship." "My dear Farrill, for what reason?" Gillbret made incoherent sounds in his throat, but Biron pushed him aside roughly and faced the seated Autarch. "You made one mistake, Jonti. Just one. You couldn't tell in advance that when I got out of my dormitory room back on Earth, I would leave my wristwatch inside. You see, my wristwatch strap happened to be a radiation indicator." The Autarch blew a smoke ring and smiled pleasantly. Biron said, "And that strap never turned blue, Jonti. There was no radiation bomb in my room that night. There was only a deliberately planted dud! If you deny it, you are a liar, Jonti, or Autarch, or whatever you call yourself. "What is more, you planted that dud. You knocked me out with Hypnite and arranged the rest of that night's comedy. It makes quite obvious sense, you know. If I had been left to myself, I would have slept through the night, and would never have known that anything was out of the way. So who rang me on the visiphone until he was sure I had awakened -- awakened, that is, to discover the bomb, which had been deliberately placed near a radiation counter so that I could not miss it? Who blasted my door in so that I might leave the room before I found out that the bomb was only a dud after all? You must have enjoyed yourself that night, Jonti." Biron waited for effect, but the Autarch merely nodded in polite interest. Biron felt the fury mount. It was like punching pillows, whipping water, kicking air. was to be executed. I would have learned of it soon enough. I would have gone to Nephelos, or not gone. I would have followed my own good sense in the matter, confronted the Tyranni openly or not as I decided. I would have known my chances. I would have been prepared for eventualities. "But you wanted me to go to  Rhodia; to see Hinrik. But, ordinarily, you couldn't expect me to do what yon wanted. I wasn't likely to go to you for advice. Unless, that is, you. could stage an appropriate situation. You did! "I thought I was being bombed and I could think of no reason. You could. You seemed to have saved my life. You seemed to know everything; what I ought to do next, for instance. I was off-balance, confused. I followed your advice." Biron ran out of breath and waited for an answer. There was none. He shouted, "You didn't explain that the ship on which I left Earth was a Rhodian ship and that you had seen to it that the captain had been informed of my true identity. You didn't explain that you intended me to be in the hands of the Tyranni the instant I landed on Rhodia. Do you deny that?" There was a long pause. Jonti stubbed out his cigaret. Gillbret chafed one hand in the other. "Biron, you are being ridicu'lous. The Autarch wouldn't -- " Then Jonti looked up and said quietly, "But the Autarch would. I admit it all. You are quite right, Biron, and I congratulate you on your penetration. The bomb was a dud planted by myself and I sent you to Rhodia with the intention of having you arrested by the Tyranni." Biron's face cleared. Some of the futility of anger vanished. He said, "Some day, Jonti, I will settle that matter. At the moment, it seems you are Autarch of Lingane with three ships waiting for you out there. That hampers me a bit more than I would like. However, the Remorseless is my ship. I am its pilot. Put on your suit and get out. The spaceline, is still in place." "It is not your ship. You are a pirate, not a pilot." "Possession is all the law here. You have five minutes to get into your suit." "Let's avoid dramatics. We need one another and I have no intention of leaving." "I don't need you. I wouldn't need you if the Tyranni home fleet were closing in right now and you could blast them out of space for me." "Farrill," said Jonti, "you are talking and acting like an adolescent. I've let you have your say. May I have mine?" "No. I see no reason to listen." "Do you see one now?" Artemisia screamed. Biron made one movement, then stopped. Red with frustration, he remained poised and helpless. Jonti said, "I do take certain precautions. I am sorry to be so crude as to use a weapon as a threat. But I imagine it will help me force you to hear me." The weapon he held was a pocket-blaster. It was not designed to pain or stun. It was the lethal model. been organizing Lingane against the Tyranni. Do you know what that means? It has not been easy. It has been almost impossible. The Inner Kingdoms will offer no help; we've known that from long experience. There is no salvation for the Nebular Kingdoms, except from themselves. But to convince our native leaders of this is no friendly game. Your father was active in the matter and was killed. Not a friendly game at all. Remember that. "And your father's capture was a crisis to us. It was life and horrible death to us. He was in our inner circles and the Tyranni were obviously not far behind us. They had to be thrown off-stride. To do so, I could scarcely temper my dealings with honor and integrity. They fry no eggs. "I couldn't come to you and say, 'Farrill, we've got to put the Tyranni on a false scent. You're the son of the Rancher and therefore suspicious. Get out there and be friendly with Hinrik of Rhodia so that the Tyranni may look in the wrong direction. Lead them away from Lingane. It may be dangerous; you may lose your life, but the ideals for which your father died come first.' "Maybe you would have done it, but I couldn't afford to experiment. I maneuvered you into doing it without your knowledge. It was hard; I'll grant you. Still, I had no choice. I thought you might not survive; I tell you that frankly. But you were expendable; and I tell you that frankly. As it turned out, you did survive, and I am pleased with that. "And there was one more thing, a matter of a document -- " Biron said, "What document?" "You jump quickly. I said your father was working for me, so I know what he knew. You were to obtain that document and you were a good choice, at first. You were on Earth legitimately. You were young and not likely to be suspected. I say, at first! "But then, with your father arrested, you 'became dangerous. You would be an object of prime suspicion to the Tyranni; and we could not allow the document to fall into your possession, since it would then almost inevitably fall into theirs. We had to get you off Earth before you could complete your mission. You see, it all hangs together." "Then you have it now?" asked Biron. The Autarch said, "No, I have not. A document which might have been the right one has been missing from Earth for years. If it is the right one, I don't know who has it. May I put away the blaster now? It grows heavy." The Autarch did so. He said, "What has your father told you about the document?" "Nothing that you don't know, since he worked for you." The Autarch smiled. "Quite so!" But the smile had little of real amusement in it. "Are you through with your explanation now?" "Quite through." "Then," said Biron, "get off the ship." Gillbret said, "Now wait, Biron. There's more than private anger to be considered here. There's Artemisia and myself, too, you know. We have something to say. 'As far as I'm concerned, what the Autarch says makes sense. I'll remind you that on Rhodia I saved your life, so I think my views are to be considered." "All right. You.saved my life," shouted Biron. He pointed a finger towards the airlock. "Go with him, then. Go on. You get out of here, too. You wanted to find the Autarch. There he is ! I agreed to pilot you to him and my responsibility is over. Don't try to tell me what to do." He turned to Artemisia, some of his anger still brimming over. "And what about you? You saved my life, too. Everyone went around saving my life. Do you want to go with him, too?" She said, quietly, "Don't put words into my mouth, Biron. If I wanted to go with him, I'd certainly say so." "Don't feel any obligations. You can leave any time." She looked hurt and he turned away. As usual, some cooler part of himself knew that he was acting childishly. He had been made to look foolish by Jonti and he was helpless in the face of the resentment he felt. And besides, why should they all take so calmly the thesis that it was perfectly right to have Biron Farrill thrown to the Tyranni, like a bone to the dogs, in order to keep them off Jonti's neck? Damn it, what did they think he was? He thought of the dud bomb, the Rhodian liner, the Tyranni, the wild night on Rhodia, and he could feel the stinging of self-pity inside himself. The Autarch said, "Well, Farrill?" And Gillbret said, "Well, Biron ?" Biron turned to Artemisia. "What do you think?" A rtemisia said, calmly, "i think he has three ships out there, and is Autarch of Lingane, besides. I don't think you really have a choice." The Autarch looked at her, and he nodded his admiration. "You are an intelligent girl, my Lady. It is good that such a mind should be in such a pleasant exterior." For a measurable moment, his eyes lingered. Biron said, "What's the deal?" "Lend me the use of your names and your abilities, and I will take you to what my lord Gillbret called the 'Rebellion World.' " Biron said, sourly, "You think there is' one?" And Gillbret said, simultaneously, "Then it is yours." The Autarch smiled. "I think there is a world such as my lord described, but it is not mined' "It's not yours?" exclaimed Gillbret, stunned. "Does that matter; if I can find it?" "How?" demanded Biron. The Autarch said, "It is not as difficult as you might think. If we accept the story as it has been told us, we must believe that there exists a world in rebellion against the Tyranni. We must believe that it is located somewhere in the Nebular Sector and that, in twenty years, it has remained undiscovered by the Tyranni. If such a situation is to remain possible, there is only one place in the Sector where such a planet can exist." "And where is that?" "You do not find the solution obvious? Doesn't it seem inevitable that the world could exist only within the Nebula itself?" "Inside the Nebula!" Gillbret said, "Great Galaxy, of , course!" And at the moment, the solution did indeed seem obvious and inescapable. Artemisia asked, timidly, "Can people live on worlds inside the Nebula?" "Why not?" said the Autarch. "Don't mistake the Nebula. It is a dark mist in space, but it is not a poison gas. It is an incredibly attenuated mass of sodium, potassium, and calcium atoms that absorb and obscure the light of the stars within it, and, of course, those on the side directly opposite the observer. Otherwise, it isharmless, and, in the direct neighborhood of a star, virtually undetectable. "I apologize if I seem pedantic, but I have spent the last several months at the University of Earth collecting astronomical data on the Nebula." "Why there?" said Biron. "It is a matter of little importance, but I met you there and I am curious." "There's no mystery to it. I left Lingane originally on my own business. The exact nature is of no importance. About six months ago, I visited Rhodia. My agent, Widemos -- your father, Biron -- had been unsuccessful in his negotiations with the Director, whom we had hoped to swing to our side. I tried to improve matters and failed, since Hinrik, with apologies to the lady, is not the type of material for our sort of work." "But I did meet Gillbret, as he may havetold you. So I went to Earth, because Earth is the original home of humanity. It was from Earth that most of the original explorations of the Galaxy set out. It is upon Earth that most of the records exist. The Horsehead Nebula was explored quite thoroughly; at least, it was passed through a number of times. It was never settled, since the difficulties of traveling through a volume of space where stellar observations could not be made were too great. The explorations themselves, however, were all I needed. "Now listen carefully. The Tyranni ship upon which my lord Gillbret was marooned was struck by a meteor after its first jump. Assuming that the trip from Tyrann to Rhodia was along the usual trade route (and there is no reason to suppose anything else) the point in space at which the ship left its route is established. It would scarcely have traveled more than space between the first two Jumps. We can consider such a length as a point in space. "It is possible to make another assumption. In damaging the control panels, it was quite possible that the meteor might have altered the direction of the Jumps, since that would require only an interference with the motion of the ship's gyroscope. This would be difficult, but not impossible. To change the power of the hyperatomic thrusts, however, would require complete smashing of the engines, which, of course, were not touched by the meteor. "With unchanged power of thrust, the length of the four remaining Jumps would not be changed, nor, for that matter, would their relative directions. It would be analogous to having a long, crooked wire bent at a single point in an unknown direction through an unknown angle. The final position of the ship would lie somewhere on the surface of an imaginary sphere, the center of which would be that point in space where the meteor struck, and the radius of which would be the vector sum of the remaining Jumps. "I plotted such a sphere, and that surface intersects a thick extension of the Horsehead Nebula. Some six thousand square degrees of the sphere's surface, one-fourth of the total surface, lie in the Nebula. It remains, therefore, only to find a star lying within the Nebula of the imaginary surface we are discussing. You will remember that when Gillbret's ship came to rest, it was within reach of a star. "Now how many stars within the Nebula do you suppose we can find that close to the sphere's surface? Remember there are one hundred axy." in the matter against his will. "Hundreds, I suppose." "Five!" replied the Autarch. "Just five. Don't be fooled by the light years in volume, so that there are seventy cubic light years per star on the average. It is a pity that I do not know which of those five have habitable planets; we might reduce the number of possibles to one. Unfortunately, the early explorers had no time for detailed observations. They plotted the positions of the stars, the proper motions, and the spectral types." "So that on one of those five stellar systems," said Biron, "is located the 'rebellion world?' " "Only that conclusion would fit the facts we know." "Assuming Gil's story can be accepted." "I make that assumption." "My story is true," interrupte# Gillbret intensely. "I swear it." "I am about to leave," said the Autarch, "to investigate each of the five worlds. My motives in doing so are obvious. As Autarch of Lingane I can take an equal part in their efforts." "And' with two Hinriads and a Widemos on your side, your bid for an equal part, and, presumably, a strong and secure position in the new, free worlds to come, would be so much the better," said Biron. "Your cynicism doesn't disturb me, Farrill. The answer is obviously yes. If there is to be a successful rebellion, it would, again obviously, be desirable to have your fist on the winning side." "Otherwise some successful privateer or rebel captain might be rewarded with the Autarchy of Lingane." "Or the Ranchy of Widemos." "And if the rebellion is not successful?" "There will be time to judge when we find what we look for." you." "Good ! Then suppose w'e make arrangements for your transfer from this ship." "Why that?" "It would be better for you. This ship is a toy." "It is a Tyrannian warship. We would be wrong in abandoning it." "As a Tyrannian warship, it would be dangerously conspicuous." "Not in the Nebula. I'm sorry, Jonti. I'm joining you out of expediency. I can be frank, too. I want to find the 'rebellion world.' But there's no friendship between us. I stay at my owm controls." "Biron," said Artemisia, gently, "the ship is too small for three." "As it stands, yes, Arta. But it can be fitted with a trailer. Jonti knows that as well as I do. We'd have all the space we needed, then, and still be masters at our own controls. And it would effectively disguise the nature of the ship." The Autarch considered. "If there is to be neither friendship nor trust, Farrill, I must protect myself. You may have your own ship and a trailer to boot, outfitted as you may wish. But I must have some guarantee for your proper behavior. The lady Artemisia, at least, must come with me." "No!" said Biron. The Autarch lifted his eyebrows. "No? Let the lady speak." He turned toward Artemisia, and his nostrils flared slightly. "I dare say you would find the situation very comfortable, my Lady." "You, at least, would not find it comfortable, my Lord. Be assured of that," she retorted. "I shall remain here." "I think you might reconsider if -- " "I think not," interrupted Biron. "The lady Artemisia has made her choice." "And you back her choice?" "Entirely. All three of us will remain on the Remorseless. There will be no compromise on that." "You choose your company oddly." "Do I?" "I think so." The Autarch seemed idly absorbed in his fingernails. "You seem so annoyed with me because I deceived you and placed your life in danger. It is strange then, is it not, that you should seem on such friendly terms with the daughter of a man such as Hinrik, who in deception is certainly my master." "I know Hinrik. Your opinions of him change nothing." "You know everything about Hinrik?" "I know enough." "Do you know that he killed your father?" The Autarch's finger stabbed toward Artemisia. "Do you know that the girl you are so deeply concerned to keep under your protection is the daughter of your father's murderer?" The Autarch Leaves T HE tableau remained unbroken for a moment. The Autarch lit another cigaret. He was quite relaxed, his face untroubled. Gillbret had folded into the pilot's seat, his face screwed up as though he were going to burst into tears. The limp straps of the pilot's stressabsorbing outfit dangled about him and increased the lugubrious effect. Biron, paper-white, fists clenched, faced the Autarch. Artemisia, her thin nostrils flaring, kept her eyes not on the Autarch, but on Biron. The radio signaled, the soft clickings crashing with the effect of cymbals in the small pilot room. Gillbret jerked upright, then whirled on the seat. The Autarch said lazily, "I'm afraid we've been more talkative than I'd anticipated. I told Rizzett to come get me if I had not returned in an hour." The visual screen was alive now with Rizzett's grizzled head. Gillbret said to the Autarch, "He would like to speak to you." He made room. The Autarch rose from his chair and advanced so that his own head was within the zone of visual transmission. He said, "I am perfectly safe, Rizzett." The other's question was heard clearly. "Who are the crew members on the cruiser, sir?" And Biron stood next to the Autarch, suddenly. "I am Rancher of Widemos," he said, proudly. Rizzett smiled gladly and broadly. A hand appeared on the screen in sharp salute. "Greetings, sir." The Autarch interrupted, "I will be returning soon with a young lady. Prepare to maneuver for contact airlocks." iHe broke the visual connection between the two ships. He turned to Biron. "I assured them it was you on board ship. There was some objection to my coming here alone otherwise. Your father was extremely popular with my men." "Which is why you can use my name." The Autarch shrugged. use. Your last statement to your officer was inaccurate." "In what way?" "Artemisia oth Hinriad stays with me." "After what I have told you?" Biron said sharply, "You have told me nothing. You have made a bare, statement, but I am not likely to take your unsupported word for anything. I tell you this without any attempt at tact. I hope you understand me." "Is your knowledge of Hinrik such that my statement seems implausible to you?" Biron was staggered. Visibly and apparently, the remark had struck home. He made no answer. Artemisia said, "I say it's not so. Do you have proof?" "No direct proof, of course. I was not present at any conferences between your father and the Tyranni. But I can present certain' known facts and allow you to make your own inferences. First, the Rancher of Widemos visited Hinrik six months ago. I've said that already. I can add here that he was somewhat over-enthusiastic in his efforts, or perhaps he overestimated Hinrik's discretion. At any rate, he talked more than he should have. My lord Gillbret can verify that." Gillbret nodded miserably. He faced Artemisia, who had turned to him with moist and angry eyes. "I'm sorry, Arta, but it's true. I've told you this. It was from Widemos that I heard about the Autarch." The Autarch said, "And it was fortunate for myself that my Lord had developed such long mechanical ears with which to sate his lively curiosity concerning the Director's meetings of state. I was warned of the danger, quite unwittingly, by Gillbret when he first approached me. I left as soon as I could, but the damage, of course, had been done. "Now, to our knowledge, it was Widemos's only slip, and Hinrik, certainly, has no enviable reputation as a man of any great independence and courage. Your father, Farrill, was arrested within half a year. If not through Hinrik, then how?" "In our business, we take our chances, Farrill, but he was warned. After that, he made no contact, however indirect, with any of us, and destroyed whatever proof of connection with us he had. Some among us believed that he should leave the Sector, or, at the very least, go into hiding. He refused to do either. "I think I can understand why. To alter his way of life would prove the truth of what the Tyranni must have learned, endangered the entire movement. He decided to risk his own life only. He remained in the open. "For nearly half a year, the Tyranni waited for a betraying gesture. They are patient, the Tyranni. None came, so that when they could wait no longer, they found nothing in their het but him." "It's a lie!" cried Artemisia. "It's all a lie. It's a smug, sanctimonious, lying story with no truth in it! If all you said were true, they would be watching you, too. You would be in danger yourself." "My Lady, I do not waste my time. I have already tried to do what I could toward discrediting your father as a source of information. I think I have succeeded somewhat. The Tyranni will wonder if they ought to listen further to a man whose daughter and cousin are obvious traitors. And then again, if they are still disposed to believe him, why, I am on the point of vanishing into the Nebula where they will not find me. I should think my actions tend to prove my story rather than otherwise." Biron drew a deep breath and said, "Let us consider the interview at an end, Jonti. We have agreed to the extent that we will accompany you and that you will give us needed supplies. That is enough. Granting that all you have just said is true, it is still beside the point. The crimes of the Director of Rhodia do not involve his daughter. Artemisia oth Hinriad stays here with me, provided she agrees." "I do," said Artemisia. "Good. I think that covers everything. I warn you, by the way. You are armed; so am I. Your ships are fighters, perhaps; mine is a Tyrannian cruiser." "Don't be silly, Farrill. My intentions are quite friendly. You wish to keep the girl here? So be it. May I leave by contact airlock?" Biron nodded. "We will trust you that far." T HE two ships maneuvered closer, until the flexible airlock extensions pouted outward toward one another. Carefully, they edged about, seeking the perfect fit. The airlock extensions reached out, hovered on the brink of instability and then, with a noiseless jar, the vibrations of w'hich hummed its way into the pilot room, settled into place, clamps automatically locking in position. An airtight seal had been formed. Biron drew the back of his hand slowly across his forehead and some of the tension oozed out of him. "There it is," he said. The Autarch lifted his spacesuit. There was still a thin film of moistureunder it. "Thanks," he said, pleasantly. "An officer of mine will be right back. You will arrange the details of the supplies necessary with him." The Autarch left. Jonti's officer for me for a while, will you, Gil? When he comes in, break the airlock contact. All you'll have to do is remove the magnetic field. This is the photonic switch you'll flash." He turned and stepped out of the pilot room. Right now, he needed time for himself. Time to think, mostly. But there was the hurried footstep behind, him, and the soft voice. He stopped. "Biron," said Artemisia, "I want to speak to you." He faced her. "Later, if you don't mind, Arta." She was looking up at him, intently. "No, now." Her arms were poised as though she would have liked to embrace him, but was not sure of her receptions. She said, "You didn't believe what he said about my father." "It has no bearing," said Biron. "Biron," she began. It was hard for her to say it. "I know that part of what has been going on between us has been because we've been alone and together and in danger, but -- " She stopped again. Biron said, "If you're trying to say you're a Hinriad, Arta, there's no need. I know it. I won't hold you to anything." "No. Oh, no!" She caught his arm and placed her cheek against his hard shoulder. She was speaking rapidly. "That's not it at all. It doesn't matter about Hinriad and Widemos at all. I -- I love you, Biron." Her eyes went up, meeting his. "I think you love me, too. I think you would admit it if you could forget I were a Hinriad. Maybe you will now that I've said it first. You told the Autarch you would not hold my father's deeds against me. Don't hold his rank against me, either." Her arms were around his neck now. Biron could feel the softness of her breasts against him and the warmth of her breath on his lips. Slowly his own hands went up and gently grasped her forearms. As gently, he disengaged her arms. He said, "I am not quits with the Hinriads, my Lady." She was startled. "You told the Autarch -- " He looked away. "Sorry, Arta. Don't go by what I told the Autarch." She wanted to cry out that it wasn't true, that her father had not done this thing, that in any case -- But he turned into the cabin and left her standing in the corridor, shame. Concluded Next Month l Science and Fantasy Fiction: #. Science-Fantasy. A new British Science Fiction Magazine #. New Worlds -- Current issue of this British Science Fiction Magazine #. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (Pocket Book Edition) #. Into Plutonion Depths, by Stanton A. Coblentz (Pocket Book Edition) #. Needle, by Hal Clement #. Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov #. The Island of Capt. Sparrow, by S. F. Wright #. Fury, by Henry Kuttner #. The World of A, by A. E. Van Vogt #. Pilgrims Through Space and Time, by J. O. Bailey. History of S. F. #. The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. Beautifully boxed edition. Illustrated in color by W. A. Dwiggins. #. Dreadful Sanctuary, by Eric F. Russell # #. The Toymaker  Others, by Raymond F. Jones # #. Doorways to Space, by Basil Wells... # #. 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Money back if not delighted. money order.) We MARCH #I GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION galaxy # OaJLaxy Editor-In-Chief Art Director Advertising Manager March, #I Vol. #, No. # by Lesfer del Rey # by Clifford D. Simak # Cover by Illustrating The Wind Between the Worlds by Murroy Leinster # is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. ## per copy. Subscriptions (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Application for entry as second-class matter is pending at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President: George A. Gogniat. Vice-President: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer : Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and aetual persons is coincidental. by John Christopher # by Willy Ley # by Isaac Asimov # by H. L. Gold # Next issue at your newsstand first week in March Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Science and Fantasy Fiction: #. Science-Fantasy. A new British Science Fiction Magrazine #. New Worlds -- Current issue of this British Science Fiction Magazine #. Nineteen Eighty-Pour, hy George Orwell (Pocket Book Edition) #. Into Plutonion Depths, by Stanton A, Coblentz (Pocket Book Edition) #. Needle, by Hal Clement #. Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov #. The Island of Capt. Sparrow, by S. F. Wright #. Fury, by Hemy Kuttner #. The World of A, by A. E. Van Vogt #. Pilgrims Through Space and Time, by J. O. Bailey. Histoiy of S. F. #. The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, Beautifully boxed edition. Illustrated in color by W. A. Dwiggins. #. Dreadful Sanctuaiy, by Eric F. Russell # #. 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Remit by Check or Money Order. No C. O. D. orders accepted. New York #, N. Y. (Phone GR #-E#) I T IS very doubtful if any science fiction magazine has ever received the volume of letters drawn from readers. Just as remarkable is the breakdown, which is # from active fans, # from non-letter writers, who, having been assured they had a concrete vote in the planning of this magazine, wrote eagerly. This breaking of habitual reluctance to participate shows attitudes toward publishing policy that are commonly absent from science fiction letter departments, appearing only in individual letters that are usually attacked by the vocal tninority, which, because of its activity, is often regarded as the majority. The fact is .that non-writing readers have very definite preferences that are not shared by active fans, yet it has been the active fans who have mainly influenced the policies of science fiction magazines. Let's take, first, the areas of agreement: approved, less than # argviing for either large or pulp format. The large size, #V#"xll", allows better display, but at the expense of portability. The pulp format is a relic of the #s and should properly be displayed alongside illuminated manuscripts.  # vote in favor of general articles, written briefly and in nontechnical language. Almost the same percentage, #, favor an article every other issue or so, with the space thus saved devoted to fiction. The majority advises the minority to find its technical articles in science journals.  Our policy of challenging writers to present themes that could not be sold elsewhere... themes too adult, too profound or revolutionary in concept... has been endorsed by active fans and non-vocal readers alike. You've seen examples of this in previous issues; there will be more and more as writers accept our high standards.  Editorial balance has also been approved, although a turn in the vote on serials indicates that a compromise would be appreciated. Therefore, the next issue will not begin a serial, and future policy will be, wherever possible, to run an issue of complete stories between serials. And what will the next serial be. You'll get the announcement next month... It's a publishing coup!  Editorials, unfortunately, have the support of all but .# and myself. Subject matter wanted, however, is a surprise, though it probably should not be: readers are interested in science fiction and would like it discussed. Now that have been decided for us by you, science fiction will be the main agenda of these editorials'... how its ideas come into being, who writes it, the new directions that  There is no Five Star Shelf this month only because Groff Conklin is ill. The number who dislike his department is so small that it's not worth putting into percentage. More wanted the . column held down, however, than expanded, so it will continue at three to four pages maximum. N OW we come to the divergences between active fan and non-participating reader:  # of all letters state flatly that they want no letter department. In a vote of this size, amounting to a poll across the country and through almost all occupations and levels of education, the conclusion is inescapable: the enormous majority of readers would rather have stories than read the mail of an infinitesimal number of fans. This is not minimizing the value of fandom, which has been loyal to science fiction even when loyalty was undeserved, but a realization that it is tyranny to force the majority to submit to the will of a minority. a letter department. As requested by many readers, though, letters of special interest will be discussed editorially.  Story ratings have been demanded mainly by fans -- and writers, who, of course, have to be kept happy. Twice a year, as a result, stories will be rated in editorials, according to reader preference... with my opinions, either in agreement or disagreement, and the reasons therefor. The first listing should be in the May issue, if votes are in on all six previous issues.  Almost # of the vote was against fan coverage of any kind. This, it is rightly pointed out, is handled elsewhere more adequately than it could be here. That brings us, finally, to a disagree with some of our readers. The subject is art... Yes, we have been experimenting both in art and in technical processes, since we believe that a rebirth in science fiction should not be breeched by art of the forceps school. This month marks another experiment: halftone reproduction of photographs and wash drawings. This could not be done without trying out our technical processes. As we extend control, we will present other improvements that are now being worked on. You'll see th'em soon. The results, we think, will be far better -- before too long -- than present science fiction art. The Wind Before man could visit the nearest planets, he was traveling to the most distant stars. Pure paradox, of course, and one with doom built in! Bennington matter transmitter building. The metal shielding walls seemed to catch the rays of the sun and bring them to a focus there. Even the fan that was plugged in nearby didn't help much. Vic Peters shook his head, flipping the mop of yellow hair out of his eyes. He twisted about, so the fan could reach fresh territory, and cursed under his breath; Heat he could take. As a roving troubleshooter for Teleport Interstellar, he'd worked from Rangoon to Nairobi -- but always with men. Pat Trevor was the first of the few women superintendents he'd met. And while he had no illusions of masculine supremacy, he'd have felt a lot better working in shorts or nothing right now. Besides, a figure like Pat's couldn't be forgotten, even though denim coveralls were hardly supposed to be flattering. Qoth stretched tight across shapely hips had never helped a man concentrate on his work. She looked down at him, grinning easily. Her arm came up to toss her hair back, leaving a smudge on her forehead to match one on her nose. She wasn't exactly pretty, but the smile seemed to illumine her gray eyes, and even the metal shavings in her brown hair couldn't hide the red highlights. "One more bolt, Vic," she told him. "Pheooh, I'm melting... So what happened to your wife." He shrugged. "Married her lawyer right after the divorce. Last I knew, they were doing fine. Why not? It wasn't her fault. Between hopping all over the world and spending my spare time trying to Between the Worlds get on the moon rocket they were building, I wasn't much of a husband." Unconsciously, his lips twisted. He'd grown up before DuQuesne discovered the matter transmitter, when reaching the other planets of the Solar System had been the dream of most boys. Somehow, that no longer seemed important to people, now that the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the Galaxy. M an had always been a topsyturvy race. He'd discovered gunpowder before chemistry, and battled his way up to the atom bomb in a scant few thousand years of civilization, before he had a worldwide government. Other races, apparently, developed space travel long before the matter-transmitter, and long after they'd achieved a genuine science of sociology. DuQuesne had started it by investigating some obscure extensions of Dirac's esoteric mathematics. To check up on his work, he'd built a machine, only to find that it produced results beyond his expectations; matter in it simply seemed to disappear, releasing energy that was much less than it should have been, but still enough to destroy the machine. DuQuesne and his students had rechecked their math against the results and come up with an answer they didn't believe. This time they built two machines and experimented with them until they worked together. When the machines were operating, anything within the small fields they generated simply changed places. At first it was just across a few yards, then miles -- then half around the world. Matter was transmitted almost instantaneously from one machine to the other no matter how far apart they were. Such a secret couldn't be kept, of course. DuQuesne gave a demonstration to fellow scientists at which a few reporters were present. They garbled DuQuesne's explanation of electron waves covering the entire universe that were capable of identity shifts, but the accounts of the actual experiment were convincing enough. It meant incredibly fast shipping anywhere on the globe at an impossibly low cost. The second public demonstration played to a full house of newsmen and cold-headed businessmen. It worked properly -- a hundred pounds of bricks on one machine changed place with a hundred pounds of coal on another. But then... Before their eyes, the coal disappeared and a round ball came into existence, suspended in midair. It turned around as if seeking something, an eyelike lens focused on the crowd. Then it darted down and knocked the power plug loose. Nothing could budge it, and no tricks to turn on power again worked. Even to the businessmen, it was obvious that this object, whatever it was, had not been made on Earth. DuQuesne himself suggested that somewhere some other race must have matter transmittal, and that this was apparently some kind of observer. Man, unable to reach even his own moon yet, had apparently made contact with intelligence from some other world, perhaps some solar system, since there was no theoretical limit to the distance covered by matter transmittal. It was a week of wild attempts to crack open the "observer" and of futile attempts to learn something about it. Vic's mind had been filled with Martians, and he had tried to join the thousands who flocked to DuQuesne's laboratory to see the thing. But his father had been stubborn -- no fare for such nonsense. And Vic had had to wait until the papers sprang the final surprise, a week later. T he ball had suddenly moved aside and made no effort to stop the machine from operating. When power was turned on, it had disappeared, and this time the Envoy had appeared. There was nothing outlandish about him -- he seemed simply a normal man, stepping out of the crude machine. In normal English, he had addressed the crowd with the casual statement that he was a robot, designed deliberately to serve as an ambassador to Earth from the Galactic Council. He was simply to be the observer and voice of the Council, which was made up of all worlds having the matter transmitter. They had detected the transmitter radiation, and, by Galactic Law, Earth had automatically earned provisional status. He was here to help set up transmitter arrangements. Engineers from Betz would build transports to six planets of culture similar to Earth's, to be owned by the Council, as a non-profit business, but manned by Earthmen as quickly as they could be trained. In return, nothing was demanded, and nothing more was offered. We were a primitive world by their standards, but we would have to work out our own advancement, since they would give no extra knowledge. He smiled pleasantly to the shocked crowd and moved off with DuQuesne to await results. 'There were enough, too, from a startled and doubting world. The months that followed were a chaos of news and half-news. The nations were suspicious. There was never something for nothing. The Envoy met the President and Cabinet; he met the United Nations. India walked out; India walked back quickly when plans went ahead blithely without her. Congress proposed tariffs and protested secret treaties. 'The Envoy met Congress, and somehow overcame enough opposition to get a bare majority. And the Betz II engineers came on schedule. Man was linked to the stars, though his own planets were still outside his reach. It was a paradox that soon grew stale, but what, actually, would be the point in flying to Mars or Venus when we were in instant touch with the farthestparts of the Galaxy? There were major wrenches to the economy as our heavy industries suddenly found that other planets could beat them at their work. Plathgol could deliver a perfect Earth automobile, semi-assembled and advanced enough to avoid our patent laws, for twenty pounds of sugar. The heavy industries folded, while we were still experimenting with the business of finding what we had to offer and what we could receive from other worlds. Banks had crashed, men had been out of work. The governments had cushioned the shock, and the new wonders helped to still the voices that suddenly rose up against traffic with alien worlds. But it had been a bitter period, with many lasting scars. Now a measure of stability had been reached, with a higher standard of living than ever. But the hatreds were pretty deep on the part of those who had been hurt, and others who simply hated newness and change. Vic had done well enough, somehow making his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand applicants. And twelve years had gone by... Pat's voice suddenly cut into his thoughts. "All tightened up here, Vic. Wipe the scowl off and let's go down to check." She collected her tools, wrapped her legs around a smooth pole, and went sliding down. He yanked the fan and followed her. Below was the crew. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. "Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?" A mos pulled his six-feet-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow stand-by light. Inside the twin poles of the huge transmitter that was tuned to one on Plathgol, a big, twelve-foot diameter plastic arylinder held a single rabbit. Matter transmitting was always a twoway affair, requiring that the same volume be exchanged. And between the worlds, where different atmospheres and pressures were involved, all sending was done in the big capsules. One-way handling was possible, of course, but involved the danger of something materialize ing to occupy the same space a something else -- even air molecules. It wasn't done except as rigidly controlled experiments. Amos whistled into the transportwave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds, got an answering whistle, and pressed a lever. The rabbit was gone, and the new capsule was faintly pink, with somethingresembling a giant worm inside. Amos clucked in satisfaction. "Tsiuna. Good eating, only real good we ever got from these things. I got friends on Plathgol that like rabbit. Want some of this, Pat.?" Vic felt his stomach jerk at the colors that crawled over the tsiuna. The hot antiseptic spray was running over the capsule, to be followed by supersonics and ultraviolets to complete sterilization. Amos waited a moment, then pulled out the creature. Pat hefted it. "Big one. Bring it over to my place and I'll fry it for you and Vic. How does the Dirac meter read, Vic.?" "On the button." The seven per cent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work in locating it. "Guess you were right -- the reflector was off angle. Should have tried it first, but it never happened before. How'd you figure it out.?" S HE indicated the interworld phone. "I started out in anthropology, Vic. Got interested in other races, and then found I couldn't talk to the teleport engineers without being one, so I got sidetracked to this job. But I still talk a lot on anything Galactic policy won't forbid. When everything else failed, I complained to the Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. I got sympathy instead of indignation, so I figured it could happen. Simple, wasn't it.?" He Snorted, and waited while she gave orders to start business. 'Then, as the loading cars began to hum, she fell behind him, moving out toward the office. "I suppose you'll be leaving tonight, Vic. I'll miss you. You're the only troubleshooter I've met who did more than make passes." "When I make passes at your kind of girl, it will be legal. And in my business, it's no life for a wife." But he stopped to look at the building, admiring it for the last time. It was the standard Betz II design, but designed to handle the farm crops around, and bigger than any earlier models on Earth. The Betz II engineers made Earth engineering look childish, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and had no sense of sight. "rhe transmitters were in the circular center, surrounded by a shield wall, a wide hall all around, another shield, a circular hall again, and  finally the big outside shield. The two opposite entranceways spiraled through the three shields, each rotating thirty degrees clockwise from the entrance portal through the next shield. Those shields were of inert matter that could be damaged by nothing less violent than a hydrogen bomb directly on them --  they refused to soften at less than the Betzians managed to form them in the first place, nobody knew. Beyond the transmitter building. however, the usual offices and local transmitters across Earth had not yet been built. That would be strictly Earth construction; and would have to wait for an off season. They were using the nearest building, an abandoned store a quarter mile away, asa temporary office. Pat threw the door open and then stopped suddenly. "Ptheela!" on a chair, with a bundle of personal belongings around her, her three arms making little marks on something that looked like a used pancake. The Plathgolians had been meat-eating plants once. They still smelled high to Earth noses, and their constantly shedding skin resembled shaggy bark, while their heads were vaguely flowerlike. Ptheela wriggled her arms. "The hotel found regretfully that it had to decorate my room," she whistled in Galactic Code. "No other room and all other hotels say they're full. Plathgolians stink, I guess. So I'll go home when the transmitter is fixed." "With your trade studies half done." Pat protested. "Don't be silly, Ptheela. I've got a room for you m my apartment. How are the studies, anyhow." For answer, the plant woman passed over a newspaper, folded to one item. "Trade? Your House of Representatives just passed a tariff on all traffic through Teleport." Pat scanned the news, scowling. "Damn them. A tariff! They can't tax interstellar traffic. The Galactic Council won't stand for it; we're still accepted only on approval. 'The Senate will never okay it!" Ptheela whistled doubtfully, and Vic nodded, '"rhey will. I've been expecting this. A lot ofpeople are afraid of Teleport." "But we're geared to it now. The old factories are torn down, the new ones are useless for us. We can't get by without the catalysts from Ecthinbal, the cancer-preventative from Plathgol, all the rest. And who'll buy all our sugar? We're producing fifty times what we need, just because most planets don't have plants that separate the levo from the dextro forms. All hell will pop!" Ptheela wiggled her arms again. "You came too early. Your culture is 'unbalanced. All physics, no sociology. All eat well, little think well." All emotion, little reason, Vic added to himself. It had been the same when the industrial revolution came along. Old crafts were uprooted and some people were hurt. There were more jobs now, but they weren't the familiar ones. And the motorists who gloated at first over cheap Plathgol cars complained when Plathgol wasn't permitted to supply the improved, ever-powered models they made for themselves. Hardest of all had been the idea of accepting the existence of superior races. A feeling of inferiority had crept in, turned to reseritment, and then through misunderstanding of other races to an outright hatred of them. Ptheela had been kicked out of her hotel room; but it was only a minor incident in a world full of growing bitterness against the aliens. "Maybe we can get jobs on Plathgol," Vic suggested harshly. Ptheela whistled. "Pat could, if she had three husbands -- engineers must meet minimum Standards. You could be a husband, maybe." Vic kept forgetting that Plathgol was backward enough to have taboos and odd customs, even though Galactically higher than Earth, having had nearly ten thousand years of history behind her to develop progress and amity. T he televisor connecting them with the transmitter building buzzed, and Amos' dour face came on. "Screwball delivery with top priority, Pat. Professor named Douglas wants to ship a capsule of Heaviside layer air for a capsule of Ecthinbal deep-space vacuum. Common sense says we don't make much shipping vacuumsby the pound !" "Public service, no charge," Vic suggested, and Pat nodded. Douglas was a topman at Caltech, and a plug from him might be useful sometime. "Leave it on, Amos -- I want to watch this. Douglas has some idea that space fluctuates, somehow, and he can figure out where Ecthinbal is from a sample. 'Then he can figure how fast an exchange force works, whether it's instantaneous or not. We've got the biggest Earth transmitters, so he uses us." As they watched, a massive capsule was put in place by loading machines, and the light changed from yellow to red. A slightly greenish capsule replaced the other. Amos signaled the disinfection crew and hot spray hit it, to be followed by the ultrasonics. Something crackled suddenly, and Amos made a wild lunge across the screen. The capsule popped, crashing inward and scattering glass in a thousand directions. Pressure-glass; it should have carried a standard Code warning for cold sterilization and no supersonics. Vic leaped toward the transmitter building. Pat's cry brought him back. There were shrieks coming from the televisor. Men in the building were clinging frantically to anything they could hold, but men and bundles ready for loading were being picked up violently and sucked toward the transmitter. As Vic watched, a man hit the edge of the field and seemed to be sliced into nothingness, his scream cut off, half-formed. A big chunk of glass had hit the control, shorting two bus-bars, holding them together by its weight. The transmitter was locked into continuous transmit. And air, with a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch, was running in and being shipped to Ecthinbal, where the pressure was barely an ounce per square inch! With that difference, pressure on a single square foot of surface could lift over a ton. The poor devils in the transmitter building didn't have a chance. He snapped off the televisor as Pat turned away, gagging. "When was the accumulator charged?" "It wasn't an accumulator," she told him weakly. "The whole plant uses an electron-pulse atomotor, good for twenty years of continuous operation." Vic swore and made for the door, with Pat and Ptheela after him. The transmitter opening took up about two hundred square feet, which meant somewhere between fifty and five hundred thousand cubic feet of air a second were being lost. Maybe worse. Ptheela nodded as she kept pace with him. "I think the tariff won't matter much now," she stated. II V IC'S action in charging out had been pure instinct to get where the trouble lay. His legs churned over the groufid, while a wind at his back made the going easier. Then his brain clicked over, and he dug his heels into the ground, trying to stop. Pat crashed into him, but Ptheela's arms lashed out, keeping him from falling. As he turned to face them, the wind struck at his face, whipping up grit and dust from the dry ground. Getting to the transmitter building would be easy -- but with the wind already rising, they'd never be able to fight their way back. It had already reached this far, losing its force with distance, but still carrying a wallop. It was beginning to form a pattern, marked by the clouds of dust and debris it was picking up. The arrangement of the shields and entrances in the building formed a perfect suction device to set the air circling around it counter-clockwise, twisting into a tornado that funneled down to the portals. Men and women near the building were struggling frantically away from the center of the fury. As he watched, a woman was picked up bodily, whirled around. and gulped down one of the yawning entrances. The wind strangled her cries. Vic motioned Pat and Ptheela and began moving back, fast. Killing himself would do no good. He found one of the little hauling tractors and pulled them onto it with him, heading back until they were out of the worst of the rising wind. Then he' swung to face Ptheela. "Galactic rules be damned, this is an emergency, and w'e need help ! What now.?" The shaggy Plathgolian madean awkward gesture with all three arms, and a slit opened in her chest. "Unprecedented." The word came out in English, surprisingly, and Pat's look mirrored his; Plathgolians weren't supposed to be able to talk. "You're right. If I speak, I shall be banished by the Council from Plathgol. Ask, nevertheless. I may know more -- we've had the teleport longer -- but remember that your strange race has a higher ingenuity quotient." "Thanks." Vic knew what the seven husbands back on her home planet meant to her, if she were exiled, but he'd worry about that after he could stop worrying about the world. "What happens next?" She dropped back to the faster Galactic Code for that. As he knew, the accidental turning on of the transmitter had keyed in the one on Ecthinbal automatically to receive, but not to transmit; the air was moving between Earth and Ecthinbal in one-way traffic. The receiving circuit, which would have keyed in the Ecthinbal transmit circuit had not been shorted. Continuous transmittal had never been used, to her knowledge; there was no certainty about what would happen. Once started, no outside force could stop a transmitter; the send and stop controls were synchronous, both tapped from a single crystal, and only that proper complex waveform could cut it off. It now existed as a space-strain, and the Plathgolians .believed that this would spread, since the outer edges transmitted before matter could reach the center, setting up an unbalanced resonance that would make the force field grow larger and larger. Eventually, it might spread far beyond the whole building. And, of course, since the metal used by the Betz II engineers could not be cut or damaged, there was no way of tunneling in. "What about Ecthinbal?" Pat asked. "The same, in reverse. The air rushes in, builds up pressure to break the capsule, and then rushes out -- in a balanced stream, fortunately, so there's no danger of crowding two units of matter in one unit of space." "Then I guess we'd better call the Galactic Envoy," Vic decided. "All he's ever done is to sit in an office and look smug. Now -- " "He won't come. He is simply an observer. Galactic Law says you must solve your own problem or die." "Yeah." Vic looked at the cloud of dust being whirled into the transmitter building. "And all I need is something that weighs a couple tons per square foot -- with a good crane attached." Pat looked up suddenly. "How about one of the small atom-powered army tanks, the streamlined ones ? Flavin could probably get you one." Vic stamped down on the pedal, swinging the little tractor around sharply toward the office. The wind was stronger there, but still buckable. He clicked the televisor on, noticing that the dust seemed to disappear just beyond the normal field of the transmitter. It must already be starting to .spread out. "How about it." he asked Ptheela. "If it spreads, won't it start etching into the transmitter and the station." "No. Betz II construction. Everything they built in has some way of grounding out the effect. We don't know how it works, but the field won't touch anything put in by the Betzians." "What about the hunk of glass that's causing the trouble?" For a moment she looked as if she were trying to appear hopeful. Then the flowerlike head seemed to wilt. "It's inside the casing, protected from the field." Pat had been working on the private wire to Chicago, used for emergencies. She was obviously having trouble getting put through to Flavin. The man was a sore spot in Teleport Interstellar, one of the few political appointees. Nominally, he was a go-between for the President and the Teleport group, but actually he was simply a jobholder. Finally Pat had him on the screen. He was jovial enough, as usual, with a red spot on each cheek which indicated too many drinks for lunch. A bottle stood on the desk in front of him. But his voice was clear enough. "Hi, Pat. What's up?" Pat disregarded the frown Vic threw her, and began outlining the situation. The panic in her voice didn't require much feigning. Flavin blustered at first, then pressed the hold button for long minutes. Finally, his face reappeared. "Peters, you'll have full authority, of course. I'll get a couple tanks for you, somehow, but I have to work indirectly." Then he shrugged and looked rueful. "I always knew this sinecure would end. I've got some slips here that make it look as if you had a national disaster." His hand reached for the bottle, just as his eyes met Vic's accusing look. He shook his head, grinned sourly, put the bottle away in a drawer, untouched. 'Tm not a fool entirely, Peters. I can do a little more than chase girls and drink. Probably be no use to you, but the only reason I drink is I'm bored, and I'm not bored now. I'll be out shortly." ence. The tanks arrived just before he did. They were heavy, squat affairs, super-armored to stand up under a fairly close atomic bomb hit, but small enough to plunge through the portals of the transmitter building. Flavin came up as Vic and Pat were studying them. His suit was designed to hide most of his waistline, but the fat of his jowls shook as he hurried up, and there was sweat on his forehead, trickling down from under his toupee. "Two, eh? Figured that's what rd get if I asked for a dozen. Think you can get in -- and what'll you do then?" "Vic shrugged. He'd been wondering the same thing. "If we could somehow ram the huge piece of glass and crack it where it was wedged into the wiring inside the shielding, it might release the shorted wires. That should effect an automatic cut-off. That's why I'm going with the driver. I can extemporize if we get in." "Right," Pat agreed quickly. She hitched up her coveralls and headed for the Other tank. "And that's why I'm going with the other." "Pat!" Vic swung toward her. But it wasn't a time for stupid chivalry. The man or woman who could do the job should do it. He gave her a hand into the compact little tank. "Good luck, then. We'll need it." He climbed into his own vehicle, crowding past the driver and wriggling into the tiny observer's seat. The driver glanced back, reached for the controls. The motor hummed quietly under them, making itself felt by the vibration of the metal around them. They began moving forward, advancing in low gear. The driver didn't like it as he stared through his telescreen, and Vic liked it even less from the direct view through the gun slit. Beside them, the other tank got into motion, roughly paralleling them. At first it wasn't too bad. They headed toward the north portal, going cautiously, and the tank seemed snug and secure. Beside him, Vic saw a tree suddenly come up by its roots and head toward the transmitter. It struck the front of the tank, but the machine pushed it brutally aside. Then the going got rough. The driver swore at the controls, finding the machine hard to handle. It wanted to drift, and he set up a fixed correction, only to revise it a moment later. The tank began to list and pitch. The force of the wind increased geometrically as they cut the distance. At fifty feet, the driver's wrists were white from fighting to overcome each tilt of the wind. i V IC swallowed, wondering at the nerve of the man driving, until he saw blood running from a bitten lip. His own stomach was pitching wildly. "Try another ten feet?" the driver asked. "Have to." They crawled by inches now. Every tiny bump threatened to let the force of the wind pitch them over. They had to work by feel. Vic wiped his forehead and wiped it again before he noticed that the palm of his hand was as damp as his brow. He wondered about Pat and looked for her. There was no sight of the other machine. Thank God, she'd turned back. But there was bitterness in his relief; he'd figured Pat was one human he could count on completely. Then he looked at the driver's wider screen, and sick shock hit him. The other tank had turned turtle and was rolling over and over, straight toward the portal! As he looked, a freak accident bounced it up and it landed on its treads. The driver must have been conscious; only consummate skill accounted for the juggling that kept it upright then. But its forward momentum was still too strong, and it lurched for the portal. Vic jerked against his driver's ear, pointing frantically. "JHit it!" 'The driver tensed, but nodded. Though the shriek of the insane wind was too strong for even the sound of the motor, the tank leaped forward, pushing Vic down in his webbed and padded seat. The chances they were taking now were pure gamble, but the driver moved more smoothly with a definite goal. The man let the wind help him pick up speed, jockeying sidewise toward the other tank. 'They almost rolled over as they swung, bucking and rocking frantically, but the treads hit the ground firmly again. They were drifting across the wind now, straight toward the nose of the other tank. Vic strained forward; the shock of hitting the tank knocked his head against the gun slit. He hardly felt it as he stared out. The two tanks struggled, forcing against each other, while the portal gaped almost straight ahead. "Hit the west edge and we have a chance," Vic yelled in the driver's ear. The man nodded weakly, and his foot pressed down harder on the throttle. Against each other, the two tanks showed little tendency to turn over, but they seemed to be lifted off the ground half the time. Inch by slow inch, they were making it. Pat's tank was well beyond the portal, but Vic's driver was sweating it out, barely on the edge. He bumped an inch forward, reversed with no care for gears, and hitched forward and back again. They seemed to make little progress, but finally Vic could see the edge move past, and they were out of the direct gale into the portal. A new screen had lighted beside the driver, and Pat's face was in it, along with the other driver. The scouring of the wind made speech impossible over the speakers, but the man motioned. Vic shook his head, indicated a spiral counter-clockwise and outward, to avoid bucking against the wind, with the two tanks supporting each other. They passed the south portal somehow, though there were moments when it seemed they must be swung in, and managed to gain ten feet outward on the turn. The next time around, they had doubled that. It began to be smoother going. The battered tanks lumbered up to their starting point and a little beyond. Vic crawled out of the seat, surprised to find his legs stiff and weak; the ground seemed to reel under him. It was some comfort to see that the driver was in no better shape. The man leaned against the tank, letting the raw wind dry the perspiration on his uniform. "Bro-ther! Miracles! You're nervy, guy, but I wouldn't go in there again with the angel Michael." Vic looked at the' wind maelstrom. Nobody else would go in there, either. Getting within ten feet of the portal was begging for death, even in the tank -- and it would get worse. Then he spotted Pat opening the tank hatch and stumbled over to help her out. She was bruised and more shaky than he, but the webbing over the seat had saved her from broken bones. He lifted her out in his arms, surprised at how light she was. His mind flicked over the picture of her tank twisting over, and his arms tightened around her. She seemed to snuggle into them, seeking comfort. Her eyes came up, just as he looked down at her. There was no other way than kissing her to show his relief. "You scared hell out of me, Pat." "Me, too," She was regaining some color, and wriggled to be put down. "Do you know how I feel about what you did in there?" Flavin cut off any answer Vic could have rriade, waddling up with his handkerchief out, mopping his face. He stared at them, gulped, shook his head. "Lazarus twins," he growled. "Better get in the car -- there's a drink in the right door pocket." Vic looked at Pat and she nodded. They could use it. They found the car and chauffeur waiting farther back. Vic poured her a small jigger, and took one for himself before putting the bottle back. But the moment's relaxation over cigarets yvas better than the drink. the tank drivers, a small roll of bills changed hands, bringing grins to their faces. Political opportunist or not, he knew the right thing to do at the right time. Now he came back and climbed in beside them. "I've had the office moved back to Bennington. The intercity teleport manager offered us space." The locally owned world branches of intercity teleport were independent of Teleport Interstellar, but usually, granted courtesy exchanges with the latter. "They'll be evacuating the city next, if I know the Governor. Just got a cease and desist order -- came while you were trying to commit suicide. We're to stop transmitting at once!" # He grunted at Vic's grimace, and motioned the chauffeur on, just as a radiophone call reached them. Vic shook his head at the driver and looked out to see Ptheela ploughing along against the wind, calling to. them. The plant woman's skin was peeling worse than ever. Flavin followed Vic's eyes. "You going to let that ride with us? The way Plathies stink? Damned plants, you can't trust 'em. Probably mixed up in this trouble. I heard..." "Plathgol rates higher in civilization than we do," Pat stated flatly. "Yeah. Ten thousand years stealing culture we had to scratch up for ourselves in a thousand. So the Galactic Council tells us we've gbt to rub our noses to a superior race. Superior plants! Nuts!" Vic opened the door and reached for Pat's hand. Flavin frowned, fidgeted, then reached out to pull them back. "Okay, okay. I told you that you were in charge here. If you want to ride with stinking Plathies -- well, you're running things. But don't blame me if people start throwing mud." He had the grace to redden faintly as Ptheela came up finally, and changed the subject hastily. "Why can't we just snap a big hunk of metal over the entrances and seal them up?" "Too late," Ptheela answered, sliding down beside Pat, her English drawing a surprised start from Flavin. "I was inspecting the tanks; they're field-etched where they touched. That means the field is already outside the building, though it will spread more slowly without the metal to resonate it. Anyhow, you couldn't get metal plates up." "How long will the air last?" Pat asked. Vic shrugged. "A month at breathing level, maybe. Fortunately the field doesn't spread downward much, with the Betzian design, so it won't start working oA the Earth itself. Flavin, how about getting the experts here? I. need help." "Already sent for them," Flavin grunted. They were heading toward the main part of Bennington now, ten miles from the station. His face was gray and he no longer seemed to notice the somewhat pervasive odor of Ptheela. T hey drew up to a converted warehouse finally, and he got out, starting up the steps just as the excited cries of a newsboy reached his ears. He flipped a coin and spread the extra before them. It was all over the front page, with alarming statements from the scientists first interviewed and soothing statements from later ones. No Teleport Interstellar man had spoken, but an interview with one of the local teleport engineers had given the basic facts, along with some surprisingly keen guesses as to what would happen next. But above everything was the black headline: The ultimatum issued by PanAsia was filled with high-sounding phrases and noble justification, but its basic message was clear enough. Unless the loss of air -- air that belonged to everyone -- was stopped and all future transmitting of all types halted, together with all dealings with "alien anti-terrestrials," PanAsia would be forced to bomb the transmitters, together with all other resistance. "Maybe... Flavin began doubtfully, but Vic cut him off. His faith in mankind's right to its accidental niche in the Galactic Council wasn't increasing much. "No dice. The field is a spacestrain that is permanent, unless canceled by the right wave-form. The canceling crystal is in the transmitter. Destroy that and the field never can be stopped. It'll keep growing until the whole Earth is gone. Flavin, you'd better get those experts here fast!" Ill V IC sat in the car the next morning, watching the black cloud that swirled around the station, reaching well beyond the old office. His eyes were red, his face was gray with fatigue, and his lanky body was slumped onto the seat. Pat looked almost as tired, though she had gotten some sleep. Now she took the empty coffee cup and thermos from him. She ran a hand through his hair, straightening it, then pulled his head down to her shoulder and began rubbing the back of his neck gently. Ptheela purred approvingly from the other side, and Pat snorted. "Get your mind off romance, Ptheela! Vic's practically out on his feet. If he weren't so darned stubborn, this should make him go to sleep." "Romance!" Ptheela chewed the idea and spat it out. "All spring budding and no seed. A female should have pride from strong husbands and proven seeding." Vic let them argue. At the moment, Pat's attention was soothing, but only superficially. His head went on fighting for some usable angle and finding none. He'd swiped all the knowledge he could from Ptheela, without an answer. Plathgol was more advanced than Earth, but far below the Betz II engineers, who were mere servants of the Council. No wonder man had resented the traffic with other worlds. For centuries he had been the center of his universe. Now, like the Tasmanians, he found himself only an isolated valley of savages in a universe that was united in a culture far beyond his understanding. He'd never even conquered his own planets; all he'd done was to build Now he was reacting typically enough, in urgent need of some race even lower, to put him on middle ground, at least. He was substituting hatred for his lost confidence in himself. Why, learn more about matter transmitting when other races knew the answers and were too selfish to share them? Vic grumbled, remembering the experts. He'd wasted hours with them, to find that they were useless. The names that had been towers of strength had proved no more than men as baffled as he was. With even the limited knowledge he'd pried from Ptheela, he was far ahead of them -- and still further behind the needs of the problem. T he gun Flavin had insisted he wear was uncomfortable, and he pulled himself up, staring at the crew of men who were working as close to the center of wind as they could get. He hadn't been able to convince them that tunneling was hopeless. All they needed the flooring, up which blasting powder could be forced to knock aside the glass fragment. 'They refused to accept the fact that the Betz II shielding could resist the best diamond drills under full power for centuries. He shrugged. At least it helped the general morale to see something being done; he'd given in finally and let them have their way. "We might as well go back," he decided. He'd hoped that the morning air and sight of the station might clear his head, but the weight of responsibility had ruined that. It was ridiculous, but he was still in charge. Flavin reached back and cut on the little television set. With no real understanding, he was trying to learn tolerance of Ptheela, but he felt more comfortable in front, beside the chauffeur. Pat caught her breath, and Vic looked at the screen, where a newscast was showing a crowd in Denver tearing down one of the Earthdesigned intercity teleports. Men were striking back at the menace blindly. A man stood up from his seat in Congress to demand an end to alien intercourse; Vic remembered the fortune in interstellar trading of levo-rotary crystals that had bought the man's seat and the transmitter-brought drugs that had saved him from death by cancer. There were riots in California, the crackpot Knights of Terra were recruiting madly, and murder was on the increase. Rain had fallen in Nevada. There were severe weather disturbances throughout the country, caused by the unprecedented and disastrously severe low over Bennington. People were complaining of the air, already claiming they could feel it growing thinner, though that was sheer hysterical nonsense. Also, the Galactic Envoy was missing. The editorial of the Bennington Times came on last, pointing a finger at Vic for changing the circuits, but blaming it on the aliens who hoarded their knowledge so callously. There was just enough truth in the charge to be dangerous. Bennington was close enough to the transmitter to explain the undertones of lynch law that permeated the editorial. 'Til put a stop to that," Flavin told Vic angrily. 'Tve got enough pull to make them pull a complete retraction. But it won't undo all the harm." V IC felt the automatic, and it seemed less of a nuisance now. "I notice no news on Pan-Asia's ultimatum." "Yeah. I hear the story was killed by Presidential emergency powers, and Pan-Asia has agreed to a three-day stay -- no more. My information isn't the best, but I gather we'll bomb it ourselves if it isn't cleared up by then." Vic climbed out at the local station office, with the others trailing. In the waiting room, a vaguely catlike male from Sardax waited, clutching a few broken ornaments and a thin sheaf of Galactic credits. One of his four arms was obviously broken and yellow blood oozed from a score of wounds. But he only shrugged at Vic's whistled questions, and his answer in Code was unperturbed. "No matter. In a few moments I ship to Chicago, then home. My attackers smelled strongly of hate, but I escaped." His whistle caught at a signal from the routing office, and he hurried off, with a final sentence. "They will survive, I am told." Remembering the talons on the Sardaxan's hands, Vic grinned wryly. 'They were a peaceful race, but pragmatic enough to see no advantage in being killed. Vic threw open the door to his little office and the four went in. It wasn't until he started toward his desk that he noticed his visitor. The Galactic Envoy might have been the robot he claimed, but there was no sign of it. He was dressed casually in expensive tweeds, lounging gracefully in a chair, with a touch of a smile on his face. Now he got up, holding out a hand to Vic. "I heard ypu were running things. Haven't seen you since I helped pick you for the first year class, but I keep informed. Thought I'd drop by to tell you the Council has given official approval to your full authority over the Earth Branch of Teleport Interstellar, and I've filed the information with the U. N. and your President." Vic lifted his head. "Why me?" "You've learned all the theory Earth has, you've had more practical experience with more stations than anyone else, and you've undoubtedly picked Ptheela's brains dry by now. You're the obvious man." , 'Td a lot rather see one of your high and mighty Galactic experts take over!" The Envoy shook his head gently. "We've found that the race causing the trouble usually is the race best fitted to solve it. The same ingenuity that maneuvered the sabotage -- it was sabotage, by the way -- will help you solve it, perhaps. The Council may not care much for your grab first rule in economics and politics, but it never doubted that you represent one of the most ingenious races w'e have met. You see, there really are no inferior races." "Sabotage." Pat looked sick. "Who'd be that stupid and vicious?" T he Envoy smiled faintly. "Who'd, give the Knights of Terra money for a recruiting drive? I can't play much part in things here -- I've got limited abilities, a touch of telepathy, a little more knowledge than you, and a certain in-built skill at handling political situatiops. Your own government is busy examining the ramifications of the plot now. It had to be an inside job, as you call it." "Earth for Earth, and down with the transmitters," Vic summed it up. The Envoy nodded. '"They forget that the transmitters can't be removed without Council workers. And when the Council revokes approval, it destroys all equipment and most books, while seeing that three generations are brought up without knowledge. You'd rever; to semi-savagery and have to make a fresh start up. Well, I'm lucky -- your President Rilkes is sympathetic, and your F. B. I. has been cooperative so far. If you solve things, the sabotage shouldn't prove too much of a problem. Gootl luck." Flavin had been eying him, and his dislike flared up as the Envoy left. "A hell of a lot of nerve for guys who claim they don't interfere!" "It happened to us twice," Ptheela observed. "We were better for it eventually. 'The. Council's of experience, with tremendous knowledge. We must submit." ."Not without a fight!" "Without a fight," Vic said bluntly. "We're babes in arms to them. Anyhow, who cares ? Congressional babble won't save us if we lose our atmosphere. But they can't see it." The old idea -- something would turn up. Maybe they couldn't cut off the transmitter from outside, and had no way of getting past the wind to the inside. But something would turn up. He'd heard rumors of the Army taking over, and almost wished they would. As it stood, he had full responsibility and nothing more. Flavin and the Council had turned things over to him, but the local cop on the beat had more power. It would be a relief to have someone around to shout even stupid orders, and get some of the weight off Vic's shoulders. an accident;, the cockeyed race to which he belonged had to try to commit suicide and then expect him to save it. He shook his head, vaguely conscious of someone banging on the door, and reached for the knob. "Amos!" The sour face never dianged expression as the corpselike figure of the man slouched in. Amos was dead -- he'd been in the transmitter. They all realized it at once. But Amos shook off their remarks. "Nothing surprising, just common sense. When I saw the capsule start cracking, I jumped into a capsule headed for Plathgol, set the delay, and tripped the switch. Saw some glass shooting at me, but I was in Plathgol before it hit. Went out and got me a mess of tsiuna -- they cook fair to middling, seeing they never tried it before they met us. Then I showed 'em my pass, came through Chicago, here, and home. I figured the old woman would be worried. Nobody told me about the mess till I saw the papers. Common sense to report to you, so here I am." "How much did you see of the explosion.?" Pat asked. "Not much. Just saw it was cracking -- trick glass, no temperature tolerance. Looked like Earth capsule color." It didn't matter. It added to Vic's disgust to believe it was sabotage, but didn't change the picture otherwise. The Council wouldn't reverse its decision. They treated a race as a unit, making no exception for the behavior of a few individuals, whether good or bad. Another knock on the door cut off his vicious circle of hopelessness. "Old home week here, evidently. Come in!" The man who entered was the rare example of a fat man in the pink of physical condition, with no sign of softness. He shoved his bulk through the doorway as if he expected the two stars on his shoulders to light the way and awe all beholders. "Who is Victor Peters?" Vic wiggled a finger at himself, and the general came over. He drew out an envelope and dropped it on the desk, showing clearly that acting as a messenger was far beneath his dignity. "An official communication from the President of the United States," he said mechanically, and turned to make his exit back to the intercity transmitters. It was a plain envelope, without benefit of wax seals or ribbons. Vic ripped it open, looked at the signature and the simple letterhead, and checked the signature again. He read it aloud to the others. "To Mr. -- damn it, officially I've got a doctor's degree -- to Mr. Victor Peters, nominally -- Hah ! -- in charge of the Bennington Branch of Teleport Interstellar -- I guess they didn't tell him it's nominally in charge of all Earth branches. Umm. You are hereby instructed to remove all personnel from a radius of five miles minimum of your Teleport Branch not later than noon, August #, unless matters shall be satisfactorily culminated prior to that time. Signed, Homer Wilkes, President of the United States of America." "Bombs!" Pat shuddered, while Vic let the message fall to the floor, kicking it toward the wastebasket. "The fools! The damned fools! Couldn't they tell him what would happen ? Couldn't they make him see that it'll only make turning off the transmitter impossible forever," Flavin shrugged, dropping unaware onto the couch beside Ptheela. "Maybe he had no choice. Either he does it or some other power does it." , Then he came to his feet, staring at Vic. "My God, that's tomorrow noon!" IV V IC looked at the clock later, and was surprised to see that it was already well into the afternoon. The others had left him, Ptheela last when she found there was no more knowledge she could contribute. He had one of the electronic calculators plugged in beside him, and a table of the so-called Dirac functions propped up on it; when the press had discovered that Dirac had predicted some of the characteristics that made teleportation possible, they'd named practically everything for him. The wastebasket was filled, the result of pure futility. He shoved the last sheet into it, and sat there, pondering. There had to be a solution ! Man's whole philosophy was builf on that idea. But it was a philosophy that included sabotage and suicide. What did it matter any -- Vic jerked his head up, shaking it savagely, forcing the fatigue back by sheer will. "There was a solution. All he had to do was find it -- before the stupidity of war politics in a world connected to a Galaxy-wide union could prevent it. He pulled the calculator back, just as Flavin came into the room. The man was losing weight, or else fatigue was creating that illusion. He dropped into a chair as Vic looked up. "The men evacuated from around the station.'" Vic asked. Flavin nodded. "Some of the bright boys finally convinced them that they were just wasting time, anyhow. Besides, the thing is still spreading, and getting too close to them. Vic, the news gets worse all the time. Can you take it?" "Now what? Don't tell me Ihey've changed it to tomorrow morning."  "Tomorrow, hell! In two hours they're sending over straight blockbusters, radar-controlled all the way. No atomics -- yet -- but they're jumping the gun, anyhow. Some nut convinced Wilkes that an ordinary eight-ton job might just shake things enough to fracture the glass that's holding the short. And Pan-Asia is going completely wild. I've been talking to Wilkes. The people are scared silly, and they're pressuring for quick war." Vic nodded reluctantly and reached for the benzedrine he'd hoped to save for the last possible moment, when it might carry him all the way through. What difference did it make? Even if he had an idea, he'd be unable to use it. "And yet..." He considered it more carefully, trying to figure percentages. 'There wasn't a chance in even that one chance. It was better than nothing. "It might just work -- if they hit the right spot. I know where the glass is, and the layout of the station. But I'll need authority to direct the bombs. Flavin, can you get me President Wilkes?" the televisor. He managed to get quite a way up by some form of code, but then it began to be a game of nerves and brass. Along his own lines, he apparently knew his business. In less than fifteen minutes, Vic was talking to the President. For a further few minutes, the screen remained blank. Then another face came on, this time in military uniform, asking quick questions, while Vic pointed out the proper targets. Finally the officer nodded. "Good enough, Peters. We'll try it. If you care to watch, you can join the observers. Mr. Flavin already knows where they are. How are the chances?" "Not good. Worth trying." The screen darkened again, and Flavin got up. The thing was a wild gamble, but it was better to jar the building than to melt its almost impregnable walls. Even Betz II metal couldn't take a series of hydrogen bombs, though nothing else could hurt it. And with that fury, the whole station would go They picked up Pat, and moved out to Flavin's car. Vic knew better than to try to bring Ptheela along. As; an alien, she was definitely taboo around military affairs. The storm had reached the city now, and dense clouds were pouring down thick gouts of rain, leaving the day as black as night. The car slogged through it, until Flavin opened the door and motioned them out into a temporary metal shelter. Things were already started. Remote scanners were watching the guided missiles come down, and eyes were operating in the bombs, working on infra-red that cut through the rain and darkness. It seemed to move slowly on the screen at first, but picked up apparent speed as it approached the transmitter buildings. The shielding grew close, and Pat drew back with an involuntary jerk as it hit and the screen went black. Dead center. But the remote scanners showed no change. The abrupt break in the air-motion where the transmitter field began, outside the shielding, still showed. Another bomb came down, and others, each spaced so as to hit in time for others to be turned back, if it worked. Even through the impossible tornado of rotating fury, it was super-precision bombing. The field went on working just the same, far beyond the shielding, pulling an impossible number of cubic feet of air from Earth every second. They stopped watching the screen shown by the bomb-eyes at last, and even the Army gave up. "Funny," one observer commented. "No sound, no flash when the bombs hit. I've been watching the remote scanners every time instead of the eye, and nothing happens. The bombs just disappear." P AT shook herself. "They can't hit. They go right through the field, before they can hit. Vic, it won't matter if we do atom-bomb the station. It can't be reached." But he was already ahead of her. "The Ecthindar will love that. They've already been dosed with chemical bombs. Now guess what they'll do." "Simple." It was the observer who got that. "Start feeding atom bombs into their transmitters back to us." Then he shouted hoarsely, pointing through a window. From the direction of the station, a dazzle of light had lanced out sharply, and was now fading down. Vic snapped back to the remote scanner, and scowled. The field was still working; there was no sign of damage to the transmitter. If the Ecthindar had somehow snapped a bomb into the station, it must have been retransmitted before full damage. The Army men stared sickly at the station, but Vic was already moving toward the door. Pat grabbed his arm, and Flavin was with them by the time they reached the waiting car. "The Bennington office," Vic told the driver. "Fast! Somebody has to see the Ecthindar in a hurry, if it'll do any good." "I'm going, too, Vic," Pat announced. He shook his head. "I'm going," she repeated stubbornly. "Nobody knows much about Ecthinbal or the Ecthindar. You call in Code messages, get routine Code back. We can't go tfiere without fancy pressure suits, because wc can't breathe their air. And they never leave. But I told you I was interested in races, and I have been trying to chit-chat with them. I know some things. You'll need me." He shook his head again. "It's enough for one of us to get killed. If I fail, Amos can try, or Flavin. If they both fail -- well, suit yourself. It won't matter whether they kill me there or send through bombs to kill me here. But if one of us can get a chance to explain, it may make some difference. I don't know. But it may." Her eyes were hurt, but she gave in, going with him silently as he stepped into the local Bennington unit and stepped out in Chicago, heading toward the Chicago Interstellar branch. She waited patiently while the controlmen scouted out a pressure suit for him. Then she began helping him fasten it and checking his oxygen equipment. "Come back, Vic," she said finally. chin and kissed her quickly, keeping it casual with a sureness he couldn't feel. "You're a good kid, Pat. I'll sure try." He pulled the helmet down and clicked it shut before stepping into the capsule and letting the seal snap shut. He could see her swing to the interstellar phone, her lips pursed in whistled code. The sound was muffled, but the lights changed abruptly, and her hand hit the switch. There was no apparent time involved. He was on Ecthinbal, looking at a faintly greenish atmosphere, noticeable only because of the sudden change, and fifty pounds seemed to have been added to his weight. The transmitter was the usual Betz II design, and everything else was familiar except for the creature standing beside the capsule. The Ecthindar might have been a creation out of green glass, coated with a soft fur, and blown by a bottlemaker who enjoyed novelty. There were two thin, long legs, multijointed, and something that faintly resembled the pelvis of a skeleton. Above that, two other thin rods ran up, with a double bulb where lungs might have been, and shoulders like the collar pads of a football player, joined together and topped by four hard knobs, each with a single eye and orifice. Double arms ran from each shoulder, almost to the ground. He expected to hear a tinkle when the creature moved, and was surprised when he did hear it, until he realized the sound was carried through the metal floor, not through the thin air. 'The creature swung open the capsule door after some incomprehensible process that probably serv'ed to sterilize it. Its Galactic Code whistle came through Vic's shoes from the floor. "We greet you, Earthman. Our mansions are poor, but they are yours. Our lives are at your disposal." Then the formal speech ended in a sharp whistle. "Literally, it would seem. We die." It didn't fit with Vic's expectations, but he tried to take his cue from it. '"That's why I'm here. Do you have some kind of ruler ? Umm, good. How do I get to see this ruler He had few hopes of getting there, but it never did any harm to try. The Ecthindar seemed unsurprised. "I shall take you at once. For what other purpose is a ruler but to serve those who wish to see it? But -- I trespass on your kindness in the delay. But may I question whether a strange light came forth from your defective transmitter?" V IC snapped a look at it, and nodded slowly. "It did." Now the ax would fall. He braced himself for it, but the creature ceremoniously elaborated on his nod. "I was one who believed it might. It is most comforting to know my science was true.' When the bombs came through, we held them in a shield, but, in our error, we believed them radioactive. We tried a negative aspect of space to counteract them. Of course, it failed, since they were only chemical. But I had postulated that some might have escaped from receiver to transmitter, being negative. You are kind. And now, if you will honor my shoulder with the touch of your hand, so that my portable unit will transport us both..." Vic reached out and the scene shifted at once. There was no apparent transmitter, and the trick beat anything he had heard from other planets. Perhaps it wastotally unrelated to the teleport machine. But he had no time to ask. A door in the little room opened, and another creature came in, this time single from pelvis to shoulders, but otherwise the same. "The ruler has been requested," it whistled. "That which the ruler is is yours, and that which the ruler has is nothing. May the ruler somehow serve?" It was either the most cockeyed bit of naivete or the fanciest runaround Vic had found, but totally unlike anything he'd been prepared for. He gulped, and began whistling out the general situation on Earth. The Ecthindar interrupted politely. "That we know. And the converse is true -- we too are dying. We are a planet of a thin air, and that little is chlorine. Now from a matter transmitter comes a great rush of oxygen, which we consider poison. Our homes around are burned in it, our plant life is dying of it, and we are forced to remain inside and seal ourselves off. Like you, we can do nothing -- the wind from your world is beyond our strength." V "But your science... "Is beyond yours, true. But your race is adaptable, and we are too leisurely for that virtue." Vic shook his head, though perhaps it made good sense. "But the bombs... A series of graceful gestures took place between the two creatures, and the ruler turned back to Vic. "The ruler had not known, of course. It was not important. We lost a few thousand people whom we love. We understood, however. There is no anger, though it pleases us to see that your courtesy extends across the spaces to us. May your dead pass well." That was at least one good break in the situation. Vic felt some of his worry slide aside to make room for the rest. "And I don't suppose you have any ideas on how we can take care of this..." There was a shocked moment, with abrupt movements from the two creatures. Then something came up in the ruler's hands, vibrating sharply. Vic jumped back -- and froze in mid-stride, to fall awkwardly onto the floor. A chunk of ice seemed to form in his backbone and creep along his spine, until it touched his brain. Death dr paralysis. It was all the same; he had air for only an hour more. The two creatures were fluttering at each other and moving toward him when he abruptly and painlessly blacked out. H IS first feeling was the familiar, deadening pull of fatigue as his senses began to come back. 'Then he saw that he was in a tiny room -- and that Pat lay stretched out beside him ! He threw himself up to a sitting position, surprised to find that there were no after-effects to whatever the ruler had used. The damned little fool, coming through after him. And now they had her, too. Her eyes snapped open, and she sat up beside him. "Darn it, I almost fell asleep waiting for you to revive. It's a good thing I brought extra oxygen flasks. Your hour is about up. ' How'd you manage to insult them.?" He puzzled over it while she changed his oxygen flask and he did the same for her. "I didn't. I just asked whether they didn't know of some way we could take care of this trouble." "Which meant to them that you suspected they weren't giving all the help they could, after their formal offer when you came over. I convinced them it was just that you were still learning Code, whatever you said. They're nice, Vic. I never really believed other races were better than we are, but I do now -- and it doesn't bother me at all." ."It'd bother Flavin. He'd have to prove they were sissies or something. How do we get out?" She pushed the door open, and they stepped back into the room of the ruler, who was waiting for them. It made no reference to the misunderstanding, but inspected Vic, whistled approval of his condition, and plunged straight to business. "We have found part of a solution, Earthman. We die, but it will be two weeks before our end. First, we shall set up a transmitter in permanent transmit, equipped with a precipitator to remove our chlorine, and key it to another of your 'transmitters. Whichever one you wish. Ecthinbal is heavy, but small, and a balance will be struck between the air going from you and the air returning. The winds between stations may disturb your weather, but not seriously, we hope. That which the ruler is is yours. A lovely passing." It touched their shoulders, and they were back briefly in the transmitter, to be almost instantly in the Chicago Branch. Vic was still shaking his head. "It won't work, "rhe ruler didn't allow for the way our gravity falls off faster and our air thins out higher up. We'd end up with maybe four pounds pressure, which isn't enough. So both planets die -- two worlds on my shoulders instead of one. Hell, we couldn't take that offer from them, anyhow. Pat, how'd you convince them to let me go?" She had shucked out of the pressure suit and stood combing her hair. "Common sense, as Amos says. I figured engineers consider each other engineers first, and aliens second, so I went to the head engineer instead of the ruler. He fixed it up somehow. I guess I must have sounded pretty desperate, at that, knowing your air would give out after an hour." They went through the local intercity teleport to Bennington and on into Vic's ofiice, where Flavin met them with open relief and a load of questions. Vic let Pat answer, while he mulled over her words. Somewhere, there was an idea -- let the rulers alone and go to the engineers. Some obvious solution that the administrators would try and be unable to use ? He shoved it around in his floating memory, but it refused to trigger any chain of thought. P AT was finishing the account of the Ecthindar offer, but Flavin was not impressed. Ptheela came in, and it had to be repeated for her, with much rnore enthusiastic response. "So what?" Flavin asked. "They have to die, anyhow. Sure, it's a shame, but we have our own problems. Hey -- wait! Maybe there's something to it. It'd take some guts and a little risk, but it would work." Flavin considered it while Vic any scheme. The politician took a cigar out and lit it carefully, bis first since the accident; he'd felt that smoking somehow used up air. "Look, if they work their transmitter, we end up with a quarter of what we need. But suppose we had for sources. We connect with several oxygen-atmosphere worlds. Okay, we load our transmitters with atom bombs, and send one capsule to each yvorld. After that, they either open a transmitter to us with air, or we let them have it. They can live -- a little poorer, maybe, but still live. And we're fixed for good. Congress and the President would jump at it." '"That all?" Vic asked. F lavin nodded. Vic's fist caught him in the mouth, politician lay there, feeling his jaw and staring up at Vic. Then the anger was gone, and Vic reached down to help him up. "You're half a decent guy and half a louse," Vic told him. "You had that coming, but I should have used it on some of the real lice around. Besides, maybe you have part of an idea." "All right, no teeth lost -- just the first cigar I've enjoyed in days." Flavin rubbed his jaw, then grinned ruefully. "I should have known how you feel. I just happen to believe in Earth first. What's this big idea of yours?" "Getting our air through other planets. Our air. It's a routing job. If we can set up a chain so the air going out of one transmitter in a station is balanced by air coming from another in the same station, there'd be a terrific draft. But most of it would be confined in the station, and there wouldn't be the outside whirlwind to keep us from getting near. Instead of a mad rush of air in or out of the building, there'd be only eddy currents outside of the inner chamber. We'd keep our air, and maybe have time to figure out some way of getting at that hunk of glass." "Won't work," Flavin ' said gloomily. "Suppose Wilkes was asked to route through for another planet. He'd have to turn it down. Too much risk." "That's where Pat gave me the tip. Engineers get used to thinking of each other as engineers instead of competing races -- they have to work together. They have the same problems and develop the same working habits. If I were running a station and the idea was put to me. I'd hate to turn it down, and I might not think of the political end. I've always wanted to see what happened in continuous transmittal; I'll betickled pink to get at the instrument rolls in the station. And a lot of the other engineers will feel the same." "We're already keyed to Plathgol on a second transmitter," Pat added. "And the Ecthindar indicated they had full operation when it happened, so they're keyed to five other planets." "Bomb-dropping starts in about four hours," Flavin commented. "After that, what." "No chance. They'll go straight through, and the Ecthindar can neutralize them -- but one is pretty sure to start blasting here and carry through in full action. Then there'll be no other transmitter in their station, just a big field on' permanent receive." T he two engineers at the Qiicago Branch were busy shooting dice when the four came through the intercity transmitter. There was no one else in the place, and no sign of activity. Word of the proposed bombing had leaked out, and the engineers had figured that answering bombs would come blasting back through Earth teleports. They knew what they'd have done, and didn't know of the Ecthindar philosophy. The engineers had passed the word to other employees, and only these two were left, finishing a feud of long standing in the time left. "Know anything about routing?" Vic asked. When they indicated no knowledge, he chased them out on his Teleport Interstellar authority and took over. He had no need of more engineers, and they were cynical enough about the eventual chances there to leave gladly. Vic had never had any use for Chicago's manager and the brash young crew he'd built up; word shouldn't have gone beyond the top level. If it leaked out to the general public, there'd be a panic for miles around. But Chicago's routing setup was the best in the country; he needed if. Now how did he go about getting a staff trained to use it? "Know how to find things here?" Flavin asked Pat. He accepted her nod, and looked surprised at Ptheela's equally quick assent. Then he grinned at Vic and began shucking off his coat. "Okay, you see before you one of the best traffic managers that ever helped pull a two-bit railroad out of the red, before I got better offers in politics. I'm good. You get me the dope, Vic can haggle on the transmitter phones, and I'll route it." He was good. Vic watched him take over with surprise, and a sudden growing liking for the man. Flavin had probably been a lot more of a man, before he'd been shoved into politics. Maybe he'd have done less of drinking and picking up prejudices if he'd been working where he knew he was doing a good job. Certainly he had adapted well enough to the present situation, and he looked happier now as he took over. Flavin's mind seemed to soak up all routing data at once, from a single look at. the complicated blocks of transmitter groups and key-ins. He jumped from step to step without apparent thought, and he had to have information only once before engraving it on his mind. It was a tough nut, since the stations housed six transmitters each, keyed to six planets -- but in highly varied combinations; every world had its own group of tie-ins with planets, also. Routing was the most complicated job in the whole problem. Ptheela, who was still in good standing until the Council would learn of her breaking the law by talking to Vic. There was no trouble there. But trouble soon developed. Ecthinbal had been keyed to only two other planets, it turned out. Vromatchk was completely cold on the idea, and flatly refused. Ee, the other planet, seemed difficult. It surprised him, because it didn't fit with Pat's theories of engineers at all. He scowled at the phone, then whistled again. "Your zeal is commendable. Now put an engineer on!" The answering whistle carried a fumbling uncertainty of obvious surprise. "I -- how did you know. I gave all the right answers." "Sure. Right off the Engineer Rule Sheet posted over the trans-. mitter. No real engineer worries that much about them; he has more things to think of. Put the engineer on." The answer was still obstinate. "My father's asleep. He's tired. Call later." The connection went dead at once. Vic called Ecthinbal while clambering into the big pressure suit. He threw the delay switch and climbed into the right capsule. A moment later, an Ecthindar was moving the capsule on a delicatelooking machine to another transmitter. Something that looked like a small tyrannosaurus with about twenty tentacles instead of forelegs was staring in at him a second later, and he knew he was on Ee. "Take me to the engineer!" he ordered. "At once!" The great ridges of horn over the eyes came down in a surprisingly human scowl, but the stubbornness was less certain in person. The creature turned and led Vic out to a huge shack outside. In answer to a whooping cry, a head the size of a medium-sized freight car came out of the door, to be followed by a titanic body. The full-grown adult was covered with a thick coat of ropy hair. "Where from?" the Ee engineer whistled. "Wait -- I saw a picture once. Earth.Come in. I hear you have quite a problem there." Vic nodded. It came as a shock to him that the creature could probably handle the whole station by itself, as it obviously did, and quite efficiently, with that size and all those tentacles. He stated his problem quickly. The Looech, as it called itself, scratched its stomach with a row of tentacles and pondered. "I'd like to help you. Oh, the empress would have fits, but I could call it an accident. We engineers aren't really responsible to governments, after all, are we? But it's the busy season. I'm already behind, since my other engineer got in a duel. That's why the pup was tending while I slept. You say the field spreads out on continuous transmit?." "It does, but it wouldn't much more if there isn't too long a period." "Strange. I've thought of continuous transmittal, of course, but I didn't suspect that. Why, I wonder?" V IC started to give Ptheela's explanation of unbalanced resonance between the vacuum of the center and the edges in contact with matter, but dropped it quickly. "I'll probably know better when I can read the results from the instruments." The Looech grumbled to itself. "You suppose you could send me the readings? We're about on a Galactic level, so it wouldn't strain the law too much." Vic shook his head. "If I can't complete the chain, there won't be any readings. I imagine you could install remote cut-offs fairly easily." "No trouble, though nobody ever seemed to think they might be needed. I suppose it would be covered under our emergency powers, if we stretch them a little. Oh, blast you, now I won't sleep for worrying about why the field spreads. When will you begin ?" Vic grinned tightly as they arranged the approximate time and let the Looech carry him back to the capsule. He flashed through Ecthinbal, and climbed out of the Chicago transmitter to find Pat looking worriedly at the capsule, summoned by the untended call announcer. "You're right, Pat," he told her. "Engineers run pretty much to form. Tell Flavin we've got Ee." But there were a lot of steps to be taken still. He ran into a. stumbling block at Norag, and had to wait for a change of shift, before a sympathetic engineer cut the red tape to clear him. And negative decisions here and there kept Flavin jumping to find new routes. They almost made it, to find a decision had just been reversed on Seloo by some authority who had gotten word of the deal. That meant that other authorities would probably be called in, with more reverses, in time. Once operating, the engineers could laugh at authority, since the remote cut-off could be easily hidden. But time was running out. There were only twentyseven minutes left before the bombs dropped, and it would take fifteen to countermand their being dropped. "Give me that," Flavin ordered, grabbing the phone. "There are times when it takes executives instead of engineers. We're broken at Scloo. Okay, we don't know where Seloo ships." His Galactic Code w'as halting, but fairly effective. The mechanical chirps from the Seloo operator leaped to sudden haste. A short pause was followed by an argument Vic was too tired to catch, until the final 'sentence. "Enad to Brjd to Teeni clear." "Never heard of Brjd," he commented. Flavin managed a ghost of a swagger. "Figured our lists were only partial, and we could stfr up another link. Here's the list. Fll get 'Wilkes, Now that we've got it, he'll hold off until we see how it works." It was a maze, but the list was complete, from Earth to Ecthinbal, Ee, Petzby, Norag, Szpendrknopalavotschel, Seloo, Enad, Brjd, Teeni, and finally through Plathgol to Earth. Vic whistled the given signal, and the acknowledgments came through. It was in operation. Flavin's nod indicated Wilkes had confirmed it and held off the bombs. Nothing was certain, still; it might or might not do the trick. But the tension dropped somewhat. Flavin was completely exhausted. He hadn't had decent exercise for years, and running from communications to routing had been almost continual. He flopped over on a shipping table. Ptheela bent over him and began massaging him deftly. He grumbled, but gave in, then sighed gratefully. "Where'd you learn that?" She managed an Earthly giggle. "Instinct. My ancestors were plants that caught animals for food. We had all manner of ways to entice them -- not just odor and looks. I can sense exactly how your body feels in the back of my head. Mm, delicious!" H e struggled at that, his face changing color. Her arms moved slowly, and he relaxed. Finally he reached for a cigar. "I'll have nightmares. I'll bet, but it's worth it. Oh, oh! Trouble!" The communicators were chirping busily. "Some of the rulers must be catching on and don't like it," Ptheela guessed. To Vic's surprise, though, several did like it, and were simply sending along hopes for success. Etchinbal's message was short, but it tingled along Vic's nerves: "It is good to have friends." Bennington was reporting by normal televisor contact, but while things seemed to be improving, they still couldn't get near enough to be sure. The field was apparently collapsing as the air was fed inside it, though very slowly. Ptheela needed no sleep, while Flavin was already snoring. Pat shook her head as Vic started to pull himself up on a table. She led him outside to the back of one of the sheds, where a blanket covered a cot, apparently used by one of the supervisors. She pushed him toward it. As he started to struggle at the idea of using the only soft bed, she dropped onto it herself and pulled him down. "Don't be silly, Vic. It's big enough for both, and it's better than those tables." It felt like pure heaven, narrow though it was. Beside him, Pat stirred restlessly. He rolled over, pulling himself closer to her, off the hard edge of the cot, his arm over and around her. For a moment, he thought she was protesting, but she merely turned o.ver to face him, settling his arm back. In the half-light, her eyes met his, wide and serious. Her lips trembled briefly under his, then clung firmly. His own responded, reaching for the comfort and end of tension hers could bring. "I'm glad it's you, Vic," she told him softly. Then her eyes closed as he started to answer, and his own words disappeared into a soft fog of sleep. The harsh rasp of a buzzer woke him, while a light blinked on and off near his head. He shook some of the sleep confusion out of his thoughts, and made out an intercom box. Flavin's voice came over it harshly and he flipped the switch. "Vic, where the hell are you? Never mind. Wilkes just woke me up with a call. Vic, it's helped, but not enough. The field is about even with the building now. It's stopped shrinking, but we're still losing air. There's too much loss at Ecthinbal and at Ee -- the engineer there didn't get the portals capped right, and Ecthinbal can't do anything. We're getting about one-third of our air back. And Wilkes can't hold the pressure for bombing much longer! Get over here." VI V V asked as he came into the transmitter room. She needed no sleep, and should have taken care of things. "Gone. Back to Plathgol, I guess," Flavin said bitterly. "She was flicking out as I woke up. Rats deserting the sinking ship -- though I was starting to figure her diflferent. It just shows you can't trust a plant." Vic swept his attention to the communicator panel. The phones were still busy. They were still patient. Even the doubtful ones were now accepting things; but it couldn't last forever. Even without the risk, the transmitter banks were needed for regular use. Many did not have inexhaustible power sources, either. A new note cut in over the whistling now, and . he turned to the Plathgol phone, wondering whether it was Ptheela and what she wanted. The words were English, but the voice was strange. "Plathgol calling. This is Thlegaa, Wife of Twelve Husbands, Supreme Plathgol Teleport Engineer, Ruler of the Council of United . Plathgol, and hereditary goddess, if you want the whole letterhead. Ptheela just gave me the bad news. Why didn't you call on us before -- or isn't our air good enough for you?" "Hell, do you all . speak English?" Vic asked, too surprised to care whether he censored his thoughts. "Your air always smelled good to me. Are you serious?" The chuckle this time wasn't a mere imitation. Thlegaa had her intonation down exactly. "Sonny, up here we speak whatever our cultural neighbors do. You should hear my French nasals and Vromatchkan rough-breathings. And I'm absolutely serious about the offer. We're pulling the stops off the transmitter housing. We run a trifle higher pressure than you, so we'll probably make up the whole loss. But I'm not an absolute ruler, so it might be a good i.dea to speed things up. You can thank me later. Oh -- Ptheela's just been banned for giving you illegal data. She confessed. When you get your Bennington plant working, she'll probably be your first load from us. She's packing up now." Flavin's face held too much relief. Vic hated to disillusion the politician as he babbled happily about always knowing the Plathgolians were swell people. But Vic knew the job was a long way from solved. With Plathgol supplying air, the field would collapse back to the inside of the single transmitter housing, and there should be an ev'en balance of ingoing and outcoming air, which would end the rush of air into the station, and make the circular halls passable, except for eddy currents. But getting into the inner chamber, where the air formed a gale between the two transmitters, was another matter. at the wheel of the car as they came out of the Bennington local office, yet instinct seemed to rouse him, and the car cut off wildly for the station. Vic had noticed that the cloud around it was gone, and a mass of people was grouped nearby. The wind that had been sucked in and around it to prevent even a tank getting through was gone now, though the atmosphere would probably show signs of it in freak weather reports for weeks after. Pat had obviously figured out the trouble remaining, and didn't look too surprised at the gloomy faces of the transmitter crew who were grouped near the north entrance. But she began swearing under her breath, as methodically and levelly as a man. Vic was ripping his shirt off as they drew up. "This time you stay out," he told her. "It's strictly a matter of muscle power against wind resistance, and a man has a woman beat there." "Why do you think I was curs-' ing?" she asked. "Take it easy, though." The men opened a way for him. He stripped to his briefs, and let them smear him with oil to cut down air resistance a final fraction. Eddy currents caught at him before he went in, but not too strongly. Getting past the first shielding wasn't too bad. He found the second entrance . port through the middle shield, and snapped a chain around his waist. Then the full picture of what must have happened on Plathgol hit him. Chains wouldn't haVe helped when they pulled off the coverings from the entrances, the sudden rush of air must have crushed their lungs and broken their bones, no matter what was done. Imagine volunteering for sure death to help another world ! He had to make good on his part. He got to the inner portal, but the eddies there were too strong to go farther. Even sticking his eyes beyond the edge almost caught him into the blast between the two transmitters. Tlien he was clawing his way out again. Amos met him, shaking a gloomy head. "Never make it, Vic. Common sense. I've been there three times with no luck. And the way that draft blows, it'd knock even a tractor plumb out of the way before it could reach that hunk of glass." Vic nodded. The tanks would take too long to arrive, anyhow, though it would be a good idea to have them called. He yelled to Flavin, who came over on the run, while Vic was making sure that the little regular office building still stood. "Order the tanks, if we need them," he suggested. "Get me a rifle, some hard-nosed bullets, an all-angle vise big enough to clamp on a three-inch edge, and two of those midget telesets for use between house and field. Quick!" Amos stared at him, puzzled, but Flavin's car was already roaring toward Bennington, with a couple of cops leading the way, with open sirens. Flavin was back with everything in twenty minutes, and Vic selected two of the strongest, leanest-looking men to come with him, while Pat went down to set the midget pickup in front of the stilloperating televisor between the transmitter chamber and the little office. Vic picked up the receiver and handed the rest of the equipment to the other two. back to the inner entrance port, but they made it, and the other two helped to brace him with the chain while he clamped the vise to the edge of the portal, and locked the rifle into it, somehow fighting it into place. In the rather ill-defined picture on the tiny set's screen, he could see the huge fragment of glass, out of line from either entrance, between two covering uprights. He could just see the rifle barrel also. "The picture lost detail in being transmitted to the little office and picked up from the screen for retransmittal back to him, but it would have to do. ' The rifle was loaded to capacity with fourteen cartridges. He lined it up as best he could and tightened the vise, before pulling the trigger. The bullet ricocheted from the inner shield and headed toward the glass -- but it missed by a good three feet. He was close on the fifth try, not over four inches off. But clinging to the edge while he pulled the trigger was getting harder, and the wind velocity inside was tossing the bullets off course. He left the setting, fired four more shots in succession before he had to stop to rest. They were all close, but scattered. That could keep up all day, seemingly. He pulled himself up again and squeezed the trigger. There was no sound over the roar of the wind -- and then there was suddenly a sound, as if the gale in there had stopped to cough. A blast of air struck, picking all three men up and tossing them against the wall. He'd forgotten the lag before the incoming air could be cut! It could be as fatal as the inrush alone. But the gale was dying as he hit the wall. His flesh was bruised from the shock, but it wasn't serious. Plathgol had managed to make their remote control cut out almost to the micro-second of the time when the flow to them had stopped, or the first pressure released -- and transmitter waves were supposed to be instantaneous. He tasted the feeling of triumph as he crawled painfully back. With this transmitter off and the others remote controlled, the whole battle was over. Ecthinbal had keyed out automatically when Earth stopped sending. From now on, every transmitter would have a full set of remote controls, so the trouble could never happen again. He staggered out, unhooking the chain, while workmen went rushing in. Pat came through the crowd, with a towel and a pair of pants, and began wiping the oil off him while he tried to dress. Her grin was a bit shaky. He knew it must have looked bad when the final counterblast whipped out. Arnos looked up glumly, and Vic grinned at him. "All over, Amos." The man nodded, staring at the workmen who were dragging out the great pieces of glass from the building. His voice was strained, unnatural. "Yeah. Common sense solution, Vic." T hen his eyes swung aside and his face hardened. Vic saw the Envoy shoving through, with two wiry men behind him. The Envoy nodded at Vic, but his words were addressed to Amos. "And it shouldhave been common sense that you'd be caught, Amos. These men are from your F. B. I. They have the men who paid you, and I suppose th.e glass will prove that it was a normal capsule, simply shocked with superhot spray and overdosed with supersonics. Didn't you realize that your easy escape to Plathgol was suspicious." Pat had come up; her voice was unbelieving. "Amos!" Amos swung back then. "Yeah, Pah I'd do it again, and maybe even without the money. You think I like these God damned animals and plants acting so uppity? I liked it good enough before they came. Maybe I didn't get rid of them, but I sure came close." The two men were leading him away as he finished, and Pat stared after him, tears in her eyes. The Envoy broke in. "He'll get a regular trial in your country. It looks better for the local governments to handle these things. But I'll see if he can't get a lighter sentence than the men who hired him. You did a good job, Vic -- you and Pat and Flavin. You proved that Earth can cooperate with other worlds. That is the part that impresses the Council as no other solution could have. Your world and Plathgol have already been accepted officially as full members of the Council now, under Ecthinbal's tutelage. We're a little easier about passing information and knowledge to planets that have passed the test. But you'll hear all that in the announcement over the network tonight. I'll see you again. I'm sure of that." He was gone, barely in time to clear space for Ptheela, as she came trooping up with eight thin, wispy versions of herself in tow. She chuckled. "They promoted me before they banished me, Pat. Meet my eight strong husbands. Now I'll have the strongest seed on all Earth. Oh, I almost forgot. A present for you and Vic.". Then she was gone, leading her husbands toward Flavin's car, while Vic stared down at a particularly ugly tsiuna in Pat's hands. He twisted his mouth resignedly. "All right. I'll learn to eat the stuff," he told her. "I suppose I'll have to get used to it. Pat, will you marry me?" She dropped the tsiuna as she came to him, her lips reaching up for his. It wasn't until a month later that he found tsiuna tasted better than chicken. Safe While at Rest: Commander Bill Talbot (Glenn Ford) leans casually against a Loon flying bomb Missiles Over the Sea Filmed in cooperation with the U. S. Navy, Columbia's film The Flying Missile reveals hitherto restricted data on rocket weapons. I AM not in the habit of writing what may be called a movie review, but on occasion it does happen. In fact, I remember all three occasions. The first discussed Tje Lost World, the second was about Frau im Mond, and the third analyzed Destination Moon. This is number four -- the title of the film, in this case, is The Flying Missile. It concerns, as the title makes unmistakably clear, missiles, and specifically the U. S. Navy's Loon. More generally, it tells of some of the things which go on at the Navy's closely guarded Guided Missile Center at Point Mugu, near Oxnard, California, an hour's drive along the coast from Santa Monica. But it is not a documentary film; it is a full length feature with the primary purpose of entertainment. This, of course, will appeal to a look at a documentary film -- on missiles or other things -- even if admission were free. In this case, the fact that it is not principally a documentary film carries an almost unsuspected advantage. Being "fiction," it does not have to stick strictly to the things which have been done, but, like a science fiction story, it can look ahead a bit toward possible application. Though the underlying problem is a military one, the film story is devoted partly to a human problem, partly to what might be called "story line." The latter consists of the efforts of a submarine skipper and his crew to get around, and especially ahead of, the guided missiles instruction courses they are subjected to at Point Mugu. They thought they could pick up a few missiles and experiment with them, preferably aboard their own submarine. Instead, they have to learn about the various types of missiles, how they are tested, how they work, the theory behind guiding, etc., etc. So they "obtain" without being detected -- they think -- the parts which make a launching rack for a missile, and put it together, only to discover in the end that no missiles happen to be available and that one cannot get around Navy Channels but has to go through them. The other story, the human problem, is hinged around an accident which kills one of the crew and injures the skipper, paralyzing his legs. He does not recover because he does not want to recover; it needs the combined efforts of his superiors, his girl and, most important, the sight of his ship to make him capable of going back to the job he started. to say, mostly interested in the underlying military problem, which is an actual one. Also an acute one, created not so much by the "guided" missile, which, to the untrained mind, is particularly dangerous because it can be aimed -- but the sheer existence of any long-range missile at all. Only ten years ago, there was still some simplicity left in naval warfare. Unless an enemy aircraft carrier was around, a shore installation was safe from attack as long as the enemy warships were more than # miles away -- # miles in the case of a heavy battlewagon. The safety was, actually, far greater than that because the number of both heavy battleships and large aircraft carriers of any enemy is restricted and their movements are carefully checked and known. Here a factor came in which is rarely mentioned except, maybe, in courses at the War College. That is the relationship between striking range on the one side and detecting range on the other. For some With four jato takeoff units, the Loon, improved version of V-#, needs a launching ramp only slightly longer than itself time a battleship had a longer striking range than its intended victim had detecting range. In other words, the ship could shoot over a longer distance than it could be seen. In reality, that fact may never have made a difference, but it is important now. Striking range in both naval and land warfare fell far below detecting range in the First World War, when aircraft was employed for observation purposes. But visual detection, whether from the look,out of a ship or from the cockpit of an airplane, is still hampered by weather. Much could go on under the cover of fog or rain which would not have gone undetected in fine weather. This is one of the reasons why the submarine, although a highly vulnerable type of vessel, became so important through two wars. The striking range of a submarine is short; its guns carry, on the average, hardly more than six miles. That is also the maximum range of a naval torpedo, but you rarely hit anything which is more than # yards away. But the submarine had the enormous advantage of being able to approach unseen. Long and sad statistics prove that the striking range of a submarine, though short, was still longer than the victim's detection range. That changed decisively during the latter part of World War II. Just how it was done is still undisclosed, but it is no secret that the detecting devices work. I may add that, in theory, a submarine '.should not go undetected at all, even though radar waves are stopped by the water's surface. In theory the case is that wehave a large body of a homogeneous liquid (sea water) with a non-homogeneous foreign body (the submarine) in it. There should be a physical principle which betrays both existence and location of that body, even if no engine makes a sound, no detectable amount of heat is radiated and every member of the crew holds his breath. T he basic idea of the movie is built on this complex of facts. An "enemy" carrier, equipped with # type long range rockets with atomic warheads, is approaching the coast. The carrier is far below the horizon, hence far out of radar range, since radar waves, naturally, do not follow the curvature of the earth. But the coast is within range of the carrier's missiles. (Actual range for a V-# is # miles; missiles for twice that range can no doubt be built.) The only possible defense consists of sinking or at least seriously crippling the carrier before it can fire the rockets. That job is entrusted to submarines which are to torpedo the carrier. But the detection range of the carrier with its accompanying destroyers is far greater than the striking range of the subs. None of them can come close enough to strike. Which makes a frustrated submarine skipper wish he could fire missiles, too, so that he can strike from outside the detecting range. Of course the missile suited for submarines as they now exist is not the V-# type of liquid fuel rockets, but the V-I type of flying bomb. To keep the facts straight, I have to mention here that the U. S. Navy has actually test-fired a V-# rocket from the flight deck of a carrier (the Midway) and that numerous small Aerobee high altitude rockets and one large Viking Loon, prior to test firing at Navy's Guided Missile Center at Point Mugu, Cal.; the four Jato takeoff units show here #  rocket were fired from the converted former seaplane tender U.S.S. Norton Sound. Tlie V-# happened to explode soon after takeoff, but the Viking reached a peak altitude of # miles. If it had been fired for range, it would have been around # miles. The Navy has also fired a V-I type missile, the Loon, from the deck of a submarine. Now the difference between a V-# type long range rocket and a V-I type Loon goes far deeper than the fact that one is rocket-propelled while the other has a simple pulsejet engine. It also goes deeper than the otherwise very important fact that a V-# takes around # man hours to make and a V-I only about # man hours. The essential difference between the two is that the V-# rocket travels along a trajectory like an artillery projectile, while the V-I type has a flight path like an airplane. One may say that the V-I type relies on the existence of the atmosphere for motion, whereas the rocket moves in spite of the existence of the atmosphere. Those missiles which rely on the atmosphere have come to be called "cruising missiles." The V-# rockets should logically be referred to as "trajectory missiles." T he trajectory missiles are more expensive by far. They require the use of fuels that are not easy to handle. But once they have lifted off the firing table, there is nothing the victim can do but watch them in his radar screen and wonder where they'll hit. It is, by the use of counter-missiles, not completely impossible to knock a trajectory missile off its trajectory, but it is, even in theory, an exceedingly difficult procedure. The cruising missile, on the other hand, is interceptible. It can be shot down like an airplane by anti-aircraft guns and anti-aircraft rockets. It can be intercepted by fighter planes, which some British Spitfire pilots did on occasion without firing a shot. They flew alongside, got their wingtip under the wingtip of the missile, and flipped it over. The piloted plane could easily recover from that maneuver, but the missile crashed. Finally, the cruising missile can be caught by the steel cables of barrage balloons. Just how interceptible a cruising missile is can be shown with a few figures from the report which the commanding officer of London's air defense. Air Marshal Sir Roderic Hill, drew up after the Second World War, and which was published as a supplement of the official London Gazette (Oct. #, #). All in all, it is known from German records, the Germans fired # flying bombs (V-#) against London. Of these, a number crashed soon after takeoff or strayed off course. A total of # was reported over England; # of them were brought down (# by fighters, # by guns, # by balloons); #I fell outside the London target area, which was reached by # missiles. But these figures are very misleading in one respect. They are overall figures, which include the early period when defending guns and defending fighters got into each other's territory and hair, and when the anti-aircraft equipment on the ground was not the best available. (No VT fuzes and M-# gun directors at first.) The statistics make more sense when drawn up for the various phases of attack and defense during the "Robot Blitz." During the first phase, # per cent of the flying bombs reported were brought down; then, after reorganization of defense, # per cent. During the second phase of the attack, the percentage of bombs brought down climbed to #, and, during the third phase, to #. Quite bad from the point of view of the attacker. B ut this represented the use of cruising missiles in land warfare, with a fixed target (London), which did not move, and fixed launching installations, the location of whicli was reasonably well known and the direction of which was precisely known. And when you fire a cruising missile over land, there may be defending antiaircraft batteries, airports for interceptor squadrons, installations for counter-missiles, and whatever else may be developed, on every square mile. When you fire a cruising missile over water, there has to be a ship first to do some intercepting. Furthermore, since the ship-mounted firing platform is not fixed, it will be at an uncertain (and changing) distance and direction. If mounted on a submarine, the firing platform can even appear and disappear. All of which shows why the Army is especially interested in trajectory missiles, while the Navy is paying much' attention to cruising missiles. And ever since the V-I was "naturalized," given its American citizenship papers, so to speak, it has been improved, too. The original German type needed a launching platform about # feet long; the pilots of the cause of their appearance. The reason was that the pulsejet engine can work when at rest, but does not deliver any useful thrust. In order to deliver useful thrust, it has to move with a speed of at least # miles per hour. The Germans accomplished that by furnishing the takeoff ramp with a slotted tube. Inside the tube there was a piston with a projection reaching through the slot and hooking into the belly of the missile. The piston was pushed by the rapid decomposition of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, producing steam. The original V-#, after it had lifted off, accelerated to around # miles per hour and carried fuel for an average trip of # miles. Overall length of the missile was #Vi feet, wing span about lVi feet. An installation like one of the original "ski sites" would be terribly cumbersome on shipboard and would also need a large ship to accommodate it. But the Navy has learned to do without such a long takeoff ramp. As a matter, of fact, it uses ramps only slightly longer than the missiles themselves ! T he necessary acceleration is now supplied by four Jato solidfuel takeoff units, attached to the cross bar of a T-shaped structure on which the missile rests. When the Jato units have supplied the initial Impetus and the Loon moves under its own power, the attachment simply drops off. The dimensions of the Loon are still roughly the same as those of the original V-#, but the range has been somewhat increased. And the speed seerris to be higher by about # per cent, which makes hitting a missile in flight somewhat more difficult when you fire from below. At the film's combat test in the Pacific, a submarine-launched Loon flew through the flak thrown up by a long string of assorted war vessels. Accident, of course, but one which tends to point out the difference between a missile over land and a missile over the sea. Suddenly, as a result, the submarine has a striking range of over # miles. But the radar detection range is still the horizon, even though it is the horizon as seen from the height of the radar antenna. And the range of the most highly developed submarine detector is not apt to be longer than that; most likely, it will be shorter. The submarine, therefore, can fire some # times as far as its detection range, unless aerial reconnaissance is complete and effective. Likewise, the striking range of a big ship, equipped for trajectory missiles, has gone up to # or # times the probable detection range -- reliable radar detection, I mean, which is not influenced by fog, storm, sleet, rain or moonless night. Of course this, too, works both ways. The film shows this by repeating the war-game setup of the opening scenes. Again there is an "enemy" carrier with trajectory missiles approaching the coast. Again the defending (and. submerged) submarines are handicapped by the discrepancy between their striking range and the carrier's detection range. But now there is another group of missile-carrying submarines. Being merely converted for this purpose and not designed as missile subs in the first place, they, cannot submerge as long as they have their missiles on deck, or, at least, not without ruining the missiles. But they are far out of detection range and their presence is, so far, unsuspected by the carrier. And the carrier ' is well within striking range of the missiles... D uring the second World War, the Germans had a small missile, the Henschel Hs-#, resembling, more or less, a goodsized model airplane. It was carried under the wing of a fighter plane and launched against Allied merchantmen. It was propelled by a rocket unit and guided by radio from the launching plane. Of course, everybody was well inside everybody else's detection range, and the striking ranges were almost evenly matched. For that reason, the planes had to operate from a distance which was at the extreme limit of effectiveness. Hence they rriissed as often as not, yet they did account for a number of Our ships. (We had a quite similar missile, the Bat, in the Pacific.) As became known from captured plans, the Germans were about to improve the performance of this missile by putting a television receiver into the nose. The end of the war prevented them from finishing that logical development, and the missile may have been too small to be really effective, in any case. But a missile like the Loon definitely is not, and we have both the time and the technology to perfect it. The ingenuity, too, as The Flying Missile amply demonstrates. When I watched the film in a private showing, it was, naturally, Difficult to hit, a Loon flies throu#h heavy flak thrown up by U. S. warships during naval war games held in the Pacific with the eyes of an engineer who has worked with rockets, both in theory and in practice, for almost two and a half decades. There is, in other words, little of novelty in them for me, though The Flying Missile did reveal certain facts that had been restricted until now and in which I found considerable professional interest. But if I had seen it # years ago, when rocketry still existed only in arid equations on paper, when its supporters were regarded as mental defectives and the moon seemed centuries away... I think I would have seen it every day for a month. The middle-aged taxpayer, seeing The Flying Missile, is likely to reflect that there is very positively something being done with his money at Point Mugu. Others who are still far from being middleaged, no matter what their years total, will feel the thrill of seeing a dream of science fiction that is solid reality now. And I suspect the film may initiate careers that might have been different. Mine would not have been. He knew his wife was dead, because he'd seen her buried. But it was only one possibility out of infinitely many! If Jimmy Patterson had told anybody but Haynes, calm men in white jackets would have taken him away for psychiatric treatment which undoubtedly would have been effective. He'd have been restored to sanity and common sense, and he'd probably have died of it. So to anyone who liked Jimmy and Jane, it is good that things worked out as they did. The facts are patently impossible, but they are satisfying. Haynes, though, would like very much to know exactly why it happened in the case of Jimmy and Jane and nobody else. 'There must have been some specific reason, but there's absolutely no clue to it. It began about three months after Jane was killed in that freak accident. Jimmy had taken her death hard. This night .seemed no different from any other. He came home just as usual and his throat tightened a little, just as usual, as he went up to the door. It was still intolerable to know that Jane wouldn't be waiting for him. The hurt in his throat was a familiar sensation which he was S#  doggedly hoping would go away. But it was extra strong tonight and he wondered rather desperately if he'd sleep, or, if he did, whether lie would dream. Sometimes he had dreams of Jane and was happy until he woke up, and then he wanted to cut his throat. But he wasn't at that point tonight. Not yet. As he explained it to Haynes later, he simply put his key in the door and opened it and started to walk in. But he kicked the door instead, so he absently put his key in the door and opened it and started to walk in -- Yes, that is what happened. He was half-way through before he realized. He stared blankly. The door looked perfectly normal. He dosed it behind him, feeling queer. He tried to reason out what had liappened. Then he felt a slight draught. The door wasn't shut. It was wide open. He had to close it again. That was all that happened to mark this night off from any other, and there is no explanation why it happened -- began, rather -- this night instead of another. Jimmy went to bed with a taut feeling. He'd had the conviction that he opened the door twice. The same door. Then he'd had the conviction ;hat he had had to close it twice. He'd heard of that feeling. Queer, but no doubt commonplace. He slept, blessedly without dreams. He woke next morning and found his muscles tense. 'That was an acquired habit. Before he opened his eyes, every morning, he reminded himself that Jane wasn't beside him. It was necessary. If he forgot and turned contentedly -- to emptiness -- the ache of being alive, when Jane wasn't, was unbearable. T his morning he lay with his eyes closed to remind himself, and instead found himself thinking about that business of the door. He'd kicked the door between the two openings, so it wasn't only an illusion of repetition. He was puzzling over that repetition after closing the door, when he found he had to close it again. That proved to him it wasn't a standard rhental vagary. It looked like a delusion. But his memory insisted that it had happened that way, whether it was possible or not. Frowning, he went out and got his breakfast at a restaurant and rode to work. Work was blessed, because he had to think about it. The main trouble was that sometimes something turned up which Jane would have been amused to hear, and he had to remind himself that there was no use making a mental note to tell her. Jane was dead. Today he thought a good deal about the door, but when he went home he knew that he was going to have a black night. He wouldn't sleep, and oblivion would seem infinitely tempting, because the ache of being alive, when Jane wasn't, was horribly tedious and he could not imagine an end to it. Tonight would be a very bad one, indeed. He opened the door and started in. He went crashing into the door. He stood still for an instant, and then fumbled for the lock. But the door was open. He'd opened it. There hadn't been anything for him to run into. Yet his forehead hurt where he'd bumped into the door which wasn't closed at all. There was nothing he could do about it, though. He went in. He hung up his coat. He sat down wearily. He filled his pipe and grimly faced a night that was going to be one of the worst. He struck a match and lighted his pipe, and put the match in an ashtray. And he glanced in the tray. There were the stubs of cigarets in it. Jane's brand. Freshly smoked. He touched them with his fingers. They were real. Then a furious anger filled him. Maybe the cleaning woman had had the intolerable insolence to smoke Jane's dgarets. He got up and stormed through the house, raging as he searched for signs of further impertinence. He found none. He came back, seething, to his chair. The ashtray was empty. And there'd been nobody around to empty it. It was logical to question his own sanity, and the question gave him a sort of grim cheer. The matter of the recurrent oddities could be used to fight the abysmal depression ahead. He tried to reason them out. and always they added up to delusions only. But he kept his mind resolutely on the problem. Work, during the day, was a godsend. Sometimes he was able to thrust aside for whole half-hours the fact that Jane was dead. Now he grappled relievedly with the question of his sanity or lunacy. He went to the desk where Jane had kept her household accounts. He'd set the whole thing down on paper and examine it methodically, checking this item against that. blotter, with a pencil between two of its pages. He picked it up with a tug of dread. Some day he might read it -- an absurd chronicle Jane had never offered him -- but not now. Not now! That was when he realized that it shouldn't be here. His hands jumped, and it fell open. He saw Jane's angular writing and it hurt. He closed it quickly, aching all over. But the printed date at the top of the page registered on his brain even as he snapped the cover shut. He sat still for minutes, every muscle taut. It was a long time before he opened the book again, and by that time he had a perfectly reasonable explanation. It must be that Jane hadn't restricted herself to assigned spaces. When she had something extra to write, she wrote it on past the page allotted for a given date. Of course! Jimmy fumbled back to the last written page, where the pencil had been, with a tense matter-of-factness. It was, as he'd noticed, today's date. The page was filled. The writing was fresh. It was Jane's handwriting. "Went to the cemetery," said the sprawling letters. "It was very had. T hree months since the accident and it doesn't get any easier. I'm developing a personal enmity to chance. It doesn't seem like an abstraction any more. It was chance that killed Jimmy. It could have been me instead, or neither of us. I wish -- " Jimmy went quietly mad for a moment or two. When he came to himself he was staring at an empty desk-blotter. There wasn't any book before him. There wasn't any pencil between his fingers. He remembered picking up the pencil and writing desperately under Jane's entry. "Jane!" he'd written -- and he could remember the look of his scrawled script under Jane's -- "where are you? I'm not dead! I thought you were! In God's name, where are you?" But certainly nothing of the sort could have happened. It was delusion. 'That night was particularly bad, but curiously not as bad as some other nights had been. Jimmy had a normal man's horror of insanity, yet this wasn't, so to speak, normal insanity. A lunatic has always an explanation for his delusions. Jimmy had none. He noted the fact. Next morning he bought a small camera with a flash-bulb attachment and carefully memorized the directions for its use. This was the thing that would tell the story. And that night, when he got home, as usual after dark, he had the camera ready. He unlocked the doOr and opened it. He put his hand out tentatively. The door was still closed. He stepped back and quickly snapped the camera. There was a sharp flash of the bulb. The glare blinded him. But when he put out his hand again, the door was open. He stepped into the living-room without having to unlock and open it a second time. turned the film and put in a new flash-bulb. It was as empty as he'd left it in the morning. He hung up his coat and settled down tensely with his pipe. Presently he knocked out the ashes. There were cigaret butts in the tray. He quivered a little. He smoked again, carefully not looking at the desk. It was not until he knocked out the second pipeful of ashes that he let himself look where Jane's diary had been. It was there again. 'The book was open. There was a ruler laid across it to keep it open. Jimmy wasn't frightened, and he wasn't hopeful. There was absolutely no reason why this should happen to him. He was simply desperate and grim when he went across the room. He saw yesterday's entry, and his own hysterical message. And there was more writing beyond that. In Jane's hand. "Darling, maybe I'm going crazy. But I think you wrote me as if you were alive. Maybe I'm crazy to answer you. But please, darling, if you are alive sometvbere and somehow -- " There was a tear-blot here. The rest was frightened, and tender, and as desperate as Jimmy's own sensations. He wrote, with trembling fingers, before he put the camera into position and pressed the shutter-control for the second time. When his eyes recovered from the flash, there was nothing on the desk. He did not sleep at all that night, nor did he work the next day. He went to a photographer with the film and paid an extravagant fee to have the film developed and enlarged at once. He got back two prints, quite distinct. Even very clear, considering everything. One looked like a trick shot, showing a door twice, once open and once closed, in the same photograph. The other was a picture of an open book and he could read every word on its pages. It was inconceivable that such a picture should have come out. He walked around practically at random for a couple of hours, looking at the pictures frorn time to time. Pictures or no pictures, the thing was nonsense. The facts were preppsterous. It must be that he only imagined seeing these prints. But there was a quick way to find out. He went to Haynes. Haynes was his friend and reluctantly a lawyer -- reluctantly because law practice interfered with a large number of unlikely hobbies. "Haynes," said Jimmy quietly, "I want you to look at a couple of pictures and see if you see what I do. I may have gone out of my head." H e passed over the picture of the door. It looked to Jimmy like two doors, nearly at righ: angles, in the same door-frame and hung from the same hinges. Haynes looked at it and said tolerantly, "Didn't know you went in for trick photography." He picked up a reading glass and examined it in detail. "A futile but highly competent job. You covered half the film and exposed w'ith the door closed, and then exposed for the other half of the film with the door open. A neat job of matching, though. You've a good tripod." "I held the camera in my hand," said Jimmy, with restraint. "You couldn't do it that way. jimmy," objected Haynes. "Don't try to kid me." 'Tm trying not to fool myself," said Jimmy. He was very pale. He handed over the other enlargement. "What do you see in this." Haynes looked. Then he jumped. He read through what was so plainly photographed on the pages of a diary that hadn't been before the camera. Then he looked at Jimmy ' in palpable uneasiness. "Got any explanation?" asked Jimmy. He swallowed. "I -- haven't any." He told what had happened to date, baldly and without any attempt to make it reasonable. Haynes gaped at him. But before long the lawyer's eyes grew shrewd and compassionate. As noted hitherto, he had a number of unlikely hobbies, among which was a loud insistence on a belief in a fourth dimension and other esoteric ideas, because it was good fun to talk authoritatively about them. But he had common sense, had Haynes, and a good and varied law practice. Presently he said gently, "If you want it straight, Jimmy... I had a client once. She accused' a chap of beating her up. It was very pathetic. She was absolutely sincere. She really believed it. But her own family admitted that she'd made the marks on herself -- and the doctors agreed that she'd unconsciously blotted it out of her mind afterward." "You suggest," said Jimmy composedly, "that I might have forged all that to comfort myself with, as soon as I could forget the forging. I don't think that's the case, Haynes. What possibilities does that leave?" Haynes hesitated a long time. He looked at the pictures again, scrutinizing especially the one that looked like a trick shot. "This is an amazingly good job of matching," he said wrily.' "I can't pick the place where the two exposures join. Some people might manage to swallow this, and the theoretic explanation is a lot better. The only trouble is that it couldn't happen." Jimmy waited. H aynes went on awkwardly, "The accident in which Jane was killed. You were in your car. You came up behind a truck carrying structural steel. There was a long slim girder sticking way out behind, with a red rag on it. The truck had airbrakes. The driver jammed them on just after he'd passed over a bit of wet pavement. The truck stopped. Your car slid, even with the brakes locked. -- It's nonsense, Jimmy!" "I'd rather you continued," said Jimmy, white. "You -- ran into tiie truck, your car swinging a little as it slid. The girder came through the windshield. It could have hit you. It could have missed both of you. By pure chance, it happened to hit Jane." "And killed her," said Jimmy very quietly. "Yes. But it might have been me. That diary entry is written as if it had been me. Did you notice ?" There was a long pause in Haynes' office. The world outside the windows was highly prosaic and commonplace and normal. Haynes wriggled in his chair. "I think," he said unhappily, "you did the same as my girl client -- forged that writing and then forgot it. Have you seen a doctor yet." "I will," said Jimmy. "Systematize my lunacy for me first, Haynes. If it can be done." "It's not accepted science," said Haynes. "In fact, it's considered eyewash. But there have been speculations..." He grimaced. "First point is that it was pure chance that Jane was hit. It was just as likely to be you instead, or neither of you. If it had been you -- " "Jane," said Jimmy, "would be living in our house alone, and she might very well have written that entry in the diary." "Yes," agreed Haynes imcomfortably. "I shouldn't suggest this, but-there are a lot of possible futures. We don't know which one will come about for us. Nobody except fatalists can argue with that statement. When today was in the future, there were a lot of possible todays. The present moment -- now -- is only one of any number of nows that might have been. So it's been suggested -- mind you, this isn't accepted science, but pure charlatanry -- it's been suggested that there may be more than one actual now. Before the girder actually hit, there were three nows in the possible future. One in which neither of you was hit, one in which you were hit, and one -- " He paused, embarrassed. "So some people would say, how do we know that the one in which Jane was hit is the only now? They'd say that the others could have happened and that maybe they did." "If that were true," he said detachedly, "Jane would be in a present moment, a now, where it was me who was killed. As I'm in a now where she was killed. Is that it?" Haynes shrugged. Jimmy thought, and said gravely, "Thanks. Queer, isn't it?" He picked up the two pictures and went out. Haynes was the only one who knew about the affair, and he worried. But it is not easy to denounce someone as insane, when there is no evidence that he is apt to be dangerous. He did go to the trouble to find out that Jimmy acted in a reasonably normal manner, working industriously and talking quite sanely in the daytime. OrifHaynes suspected that of nights he went home and experienced the impossible. Sometimes, Haynes suspected that the impossible might be the fact -- that had been an amazingly good bit of trick photography -- but it was too preposterous ! Also, there was no reason for such a thing to happen to Jimmy. F or a week after Haynes' pseudo-scientific explanation, however, Jimmy was almost lighthearted. He no longer had to remind himself that Jane was dead. He had evidence that she wasn't. She wrote to him in the diary which he found on her desk, and he read her messages and wrote in return. For a full week the sheer joy of simply being able to communicate with each other was enough. 'The second week was not so good. To know that Jane was alive was good, but to be separated from her without hope was not. There was no meaning in a cosmos in which one could only write loveletters to one's wife or husband in another now which only might have been. But for a while both Jimmy and Jane tried to hide this new hopelessness from each other. Jimmy explained this carefully to Haynes before it was all over. Their letters were tender and very natural, and presently there was even time for gossip and actual bits of choice scandal... Haynes met Jimmy on the street one day, lifter about two weeks. Jimmy looked better, but he was drawn very fine. Though he greeted Haynes without constraint, Haynes felt awkward. After a little he said, "Er -- Jimmy. That matter we were talking about the other day -- Those photographs -- " "Yes. You were right," said Jimmy casually. "Jane agrees. There is more than one now. In the now I'm in, Jane was killed. In the now she's in, I was killed." Haynes fidgeted. "Would you let me see that picture of the door again?" he asked. "A trick film like that simply can't be perfect! I'd like to enlarge that picture a little more. May I?" "You can have the film," said Jimmy. "I don't need it any more." Haynes hesitated. Jimmy, quite matter-of-factly, told him most of what had happened to date. But he had no idea what had started it. Haynes almost wrung his hands. "The thing can't be!" he said desperately. "You have to be crazy, Jimmy!" But he would not have said that to a man whose sanity he really suspected. Jimmy nodded. "Jane told me something, by the way. Did you have a near-accident night before last? Somebody almost ran into you out on the Saw Mill Road?" ' Haynes started and went pale. "I went around a curve and a car plunged out of nowhere on the wrong side of the road. We both swung hard. He smashed my fender and almost went off the road himself. But he went racing off without stopping to see if I'd gone in the ditch and killed myself. If I'd been five feet nearer the curve when he came out of it -- " "Where Jane is," said Jimmy, "you were. Just about five feet nearer the curve. It was a bad smash. Tony Shields was in the other car. It killed him -- where Jane is." Haynes licked his lips. It was absurd, but he said, "How about me?" "Where Jane is," Jimmy told him, "you're in the hospital." Haynes swore in unreasonable irritation. There wasn't any way for Jimmy to know about that nearaccident. He hadn't mentioned it, because he'd no idea who'd been in the other car. "I don't believe it!" But he said ' pleadingly, "Jimmy, it isn't so, is it? How in hell could you account for it?" Jimmy shrugged. "Jane and I -- we're rather fond of each other." 'The understatement was so patent that he smiled faintly. "Chance separated us. 'The feeling we have for each other draws us together. There's a saying about two people becoming one flesh. If such a thing could happen, it would be Jane and me. After all, maybe only a tiny pebble or a single extra drop of water made my car swerve enough to get her killed -- where I am, that is. 'That's a very little thing. So with such a trifle separating us, and so much pulling us together -- why. sometimes the barrier wears thin. She leaves a door closed in the house where she is. I open that same door where I am. Sometimes I have to open the door she left closed, too. That's all." H aynes didn't say a word, but the question he wouldn't ask was so self-evident that Jimmy answered it. "We're hoping," he said. "It's pretty bad being separated, but the -- phenomena keep up. So we hope. Her diary is sometimes in the now where she is, and sometimes in this now of mine. Cigaret butts, too. Maybe -- " That was the only time he showed any sign of emotion. He spoke as if his mouth were dry. "If ever I'm in her now or she's in mine, even for an instant, all the devils in hell couldn't separate us again! -- We hope." Which was insanity. In fact, it was the third week of insanity. He'd told Haynes quite calmly that Jane's diary was on her desk every; night, and there was a letter to him in it, and he wrote one to her. He said quite calmly that the barrier between them seemed to be growing thinner. That at least once, when he went to bed, he was sure that there was one more cigaret stub in the ashtray than had been there earlier in the evening. 'They were very near indeed. They were separated only by the difference between what was and what might have been. In one sense the difference was a pebble or a drop of water. In another, the difference was that between life and death. But they hoped. They convinced themselves that the barrier grew thinner. Once, it seemed to Jimmy that they touched hands. But he was not sure. He was still sane enough not to be sure. And he told all this to Haynes in a matter-of-fact fashion, and speculated mildly on what had started it all... Then, one night, Haynes called Jimmy on the telephone. Jimmy answered. He sounded impatient. "Jimmy!" said Haynes. He was almost hysterical. "I think I'm insane! You know you said Tony .Shields was in the car that hit me?" "Yes," said Jimmy politely. "What's the matter?" "It's been driving me crazy," wailed Haynes feverishly. "You said he was killed -- there. But I hadn't told a soul about the incident. So -- so just now I broke down and phoned him. And it was Tony Shields! That near-crash scared him to death, and I gave him hell and -- he's paying for my fender! I didn't tell him he was killed." Jimmy didn't answer. It didn't seern to matter to him. "I'm coming over!" said Haynes feverishly. 'Tve got to talk!" "No," said Jimmy. "Jane and I are pretty close to each other. We've touched each other again. We're hoping. The barrier's wearing through. We hope it's going to break." "But it can't!" protested Haynes, shocked at the idea of improbabilities in the preposterous. "It -- it can't ! What'd happen if you turned up where she is, or -- or if she turned up here?" "I don't know," said Jimmy, "but we'd be together." "You're crazy! You mustn't -- " "Goodbye," said Jimmy politely. "I'm hoping, Haynes. Something has to happen. It has to!" His voice stopped. There was a noise in the room behind him; Haynes heard it. Only two words, and those faintly, and over a telephone, but he swore to himselfthat it was Jane's voice, throbbing with happiness. 'The two words Haynes thought he heard were, "immy! Darling!" Then the telephone crashed to the floor and Haynes heard no more. Even though he called back frantically again, Jimmy didn't answer. H aynes sat up all that night, practically gibbering, and he tried to call Jimmy again next morning, and then tried his office, and at last went to the police. He explained to them that Jimmy had been in a highly nervous state since the death of his wife. So finally the police broke into the house. They had to break in because every door and window was carefully fastened from the inside. as if Jimmy had been very careful to make sure nobody could interrupt what he and Jane hoped would occur. But Jimmy wasn't in the house. There was no trace of him. It was exactly as if he had vanished into the air. Ultimately the police dragged ponds and such things for his body, but they never found any clues. Nobody ever saw Jimmy again. It was recorded that Jimmy simply left town, and everybody accepted that obvious explanation. T he thing that really bothered Haynes was the fact that Jimmy had told him who'd almost crashed into him on the Saw Mill Road, and it was true. That was, to understate, hard to take. And there was the double-exposure picture of Jimmy's front door, which was much more convincing than any other trick picture Haynes had ever seen. But on the other hand, if it did happen, why did it happen only to Jimmy and Jane? What set it off? What started it? Why, in effect, did those oddities start at that particular time,  to those par ticular people, in that particular fashion? In fact, did anything happen at all? Now, after Jimmy's disappearance, Haynes wished he could talk with him once more -- talk sensibly. quietly, without fear and hysteria and this naggingly demanding wonderment. For he had sketched to Jimmy, and Jimmy had accepted (hadn't he?) the possibility of the other now -- but with that acceptance came still others. In one, Jane was dead. In one, Jimmy was dead. It was between these two that the barrier had grown so thin... If he could talk to Jimmy about it! There was also a now in which both had died, and another in which neither had died! And if it was togetherness that each wanted so desperately . '... which was it? These were things that Haynes would have liked very much to know, but he kept his mouth shut, or calm men in white coats would have come and taken him away for treatment. As they would have taken Jimmy. The only thing really sure was that it was all impossible. But to someone who liked Jimmy and Jane -- and doubtless to Jimmy and to Jane themselves -- no matter which barrier had been broken, it was a rather satisfying impossibility. Haynes' car had been repaired. He could easily have driven out to the cemetery. For some reason, he never did. Good Nighty Mr. James Surprise endings in science fiction are not easy to attain successfully. This story has four internal plot surprises! H e came alive from nothing. He became aware from unawareness.  He smelled the air of the night and heard the trees whispering on the embankment ibove him and the breeze that had set the trees to whispering came downto him and felt him over with soft and tender fingers, for all the world as if it were examining him for broken bones; or contusions and abrasions. He sat up and put both his palms down upon the ground beside him to help him sit erect and stared into the darkness. Memory came slowly and when it came it was incomplete and answered nothing. His name was Henderson James and he was a human being and he was sitting somewhere on a planet that was called the Earth. He was thirty-six years old and he was, in his own way, famous, and comfortably well-off. He lived in an old ancestral home on Summit avenue, which was a respectable address even if it had lost some of its smartness in the last twenty years or so. On the road above the slope of the embankment a car went past with its tires whining on the pavement and for a moment its headlights made the treetops glow. Far away, muted by the distance, a whistle cried out. And somewhere else a dog was barking with a flat viciousness. His name was Henderson James and if that were true, why was he here. Why should Henderson James be sitting on the slope of an embankment, listening to the wind in the trees and to a wailing whistle and a barking dog? Something had gone wrong, some incident that, if he could but remember it, might answer all his questions. There was a job to do. He sat and stared into the night and found that he was shivering, although there was no reason why he should, for the night was not that cold. Beyond the embankment he heard the sounds of a city late at night, the distant whine of the speeding car and the far-off windbroken screaming of a siren. Once a man walked along a street close by and James sat listening to his footsteps until they faded out of hearing. Something had happened and there was a job to do, a job that he had been doing, a job that somehow had been strangely interrupted by the inexplicable incident which had left him lying here on this embankment. He checked himself. Clothing... shorts and shirt, strong shoes, his wristwatch and the gun in the holster at his side. A gun ? The job involved a gun. He had been hunting in the city', hunting something that required a gun. Something that was prowling in the night and a thing that must be killed. T hen he knew the answer, but even as he knew it he sat for a moment wondering at the strange, methodical, step-by-step progression of reasoning that had brought him to the memory. First his name and the basic facts pertaining to himself, then the realization of where he was and the problem of why he happened to be there and finally the realization that he had a gun and that it was meant to be used. It was a logical way to think, a primer schoolbook way to work it out: I am a man named Henderson James. I live in a house on Summit avenue. Am I in the house on Summit avenue ? No, I am not in the house on Summit avenue. I am on an embankment somewhere. Why am I on the embankment. But it wasn't the way a man thought, at least not the normal way a normal man would think. Man thought in shortcuts. He ait across the block and did not go all the way around. It was a frightening thing, he told himself, this clear-around-theblock thinking. It wasn't normal and it wasn't right and it made no sense at all... no more sense than did the fact that he should find himself in a place with no memory of getting there. hands up and down his body. His clothes were neat, not rumpled. He hadn't been beaten up and he hadn't been thrown from a speeding car. There were no sore places on his body and his face was unbloody and whole and he felt all right. He hooked his fingers in the holster belt and shucked it up so that it rode tightly on his hips. He pulled out the gun and checked it with expert and familiar fingers and the gun was ready. He walked up the embankment and reached the road, went across it with a swinging stride to reach the sidewalk that fronted the row of new bungalows. He heard a car coming and stepped off the sidewalk to crouch in a clump of evergreens that landscaped one corner of a lawn. The move was instinctive and he crouched there, feeling just a little foolish at the thing he'd done. 'The car went past and no one saw him. They would not, he now realized, have noticed him even if he had remained out on the sidewalk. He was unsure of himself; that must be the reason for his fear. There was a blank spot in his life, some mysterious incident that he did not know and the unknowing of it had undermined the sure and solid foundation of his own existence, had wrecked the basis of his motive and had turned him, momentarily, into a furtive animal that darted and hid at the approach of his fellow men. 'That and something that had happened to him that made him think clear around the block. He remained crouching in the evergreens, watching the street and the stretch of sidewalk, conscious of the white-painted, ghostly bungalows squatting back in their landscaped lots. A word came into his mind. Puudly. An odd word, unearthly, yet it held terror. The puudly had escaped and that was why he was here, hiding on the front lawn of some unsuspecting and sleeping citizen, equipped with a gun and a determination to use it, ready to match his wits and the quickness of brain and muscle against the most bloodthirsty, hatefilled thing yet found in the Galaxy. The puudly was dangerous. It was not a thing to harbor. In fact, there was a law against harboring not only a puudly, but certain other alien beasties even less lethal than a puudly. There was good reason for such a law, reason which no one, much less himself, would ever think to question. And now the puudly w'as loose and somewhere in the city, of it, his brain forming images of the things that might come to pass if he did not hunt down the alien beast and put an end to it. Although beast was not quite the word to use. The puudly was more than a beast... just how much more than a beast he once had hoped to learn. He had not learned a lot, he now admitted to himself, not nearly all there was to learn, but he had learned enough. More than enough to frighten him. For one thing, he had learned what hate could be and how shallow an emotion human hate turned out when measured against the depth and intensity and the ravening horror of the puudly's hate. Not unreasoning hate, for unreasoning hate defeats itself, but a rational, calculating, driving hate that motivated a clever and deadly rapacity and its cunning against every living thing that was not a puudly. For the beast had a mind and a personality that operated upon the basic law of self-preservation against all comers, whoever they might be, extending that law to the interpretation that safety lay in one direction only... the death of every other living being. No other reason was needed for a puudly's lived and moved and was thus posing a threat, no matter how remote, against a puudly, was sufficient reason in itself. It was psychotic, of course, some murderous instinct planted far back in time and deep in the creature's racial consciousness, but no more psychotic, perhaps, than many human instincts. The puudly had been, and still was for that matter, a unique opportunity for a study in alien behaviorism. Given a permit, one could have studied them on their native planet. Refused a permit, one sometimes did a foolish thing, as James had. And foolish acts backfire, as this one did. James put down a hand and patted the gun at his side, as if by doing so he might derive some assurance that he was equal to the task. There was no question in his mind as to the thing that must be done. He must find the puudly and kill it and he must do that before the break of dawn. Anything less than that would be abject and horrifying failure. For the puudly would bud. It was long past its time for the reproductive act and there were bare hours left to 'find it before it had loosed upon the Earth dozens of baby puudlies. They would not remain babies for long. A few hours after budding they would strike out on their own. To find one puudly, lost in the vastness of a sleeping city, seemed bad enough; to track down some dozens of them would be impossible. So it was tonight or never. Tonight there would be no killing on the puudly's part. Tonight the beast would be intent on one thing only, to find a place where it could rest in quiet, where it could give itself over, wholeheartedly and with no interference, to the business of bringing other puudlies into being. It was clever. It would have known where it was going before it had escaped. There would be, on its part, no time wasted in seeking or in doubling back. It would have known where it was going and already it was there, already the buds would be rising on its body, bursting forth and growing. There was one place, and one place only, in the entire city where an alien beast would be safe from prying eyes. A man could figure that one out and so could a puudly. The question was: Would the puudly know that a man could figure it Out? Would the puudly underestimate a man? Or, knowing that the man would know it, too, would it find another place of hiding? James rose from the evergreens and went down the sidewalk. The street marker at the corner, standing underneath a swinging street light, told him where he was and it was closer to the place where he was going than he might have hoped. II  T he zoo was quiet for a while, and then something sent up a howl that raised James' hackles and made his blood stop in his veins. James, having scaled the fence, stood tensely at its foot, trying to identify the howling animal. He was unable to place it. More than likely, he told himself, it was a new one. A person simply couldn't keep track of all the zoo's occupants. New ones were coming in all the time, strange, unheard of creatures from the distant stars. Straight ahead lay the Unoccupied moat cage that up until a day or two before had held an unbelievable monstrosity from the jungles of One of the Arctian worlds. James grimaced in the dark, remembering the thing. They had finally had to kill it. And now the puudly was there... well, maybe not there, but one place that it could be, the one place in the entire city where it might be seen and arouse no comment, for the zoo was filled with animals that were seldom seen and another strange one would arouse only momentary wonder. One animal more would go unnoticed unless some zoo attendant should think to check the records. There, in that unoccupied cage area, the puudly would be undisturbed, could quietly go about its business of budding out more puudlies. No one would bother it, for things like puudlies were the normal occupants of this place sk aside for the strangers brought to Earth to be stared at and studied by that ferocious race, the humans. James stood quietly beside the fence. Henderson James. Thirty-six. Unmarried. Alien psychologist. An official of this zoo. And an offender against the law for having secured and harbored an alien being that was barred from Earth. Why, he asked himself, did he think of hiinself in this way? Why, standing here, did he catalogue himself? It was instinctive to know one's self... there was no need, no sense of setting up a mental outline of one's self. It had been foolish to go ahead with this puudly business. He recalled how he had spent days fighting it out with himself, reviewing all the disastrous possibilities which might arise from it. If the old renegade spaceman had not come to him and had not said, over a bottle of most delicious Lupan wine, that he could deliver, for a certain, rather staggering sum, one live puudly, in good condition, it never would have happened. he never would have thought of it. But the old space captain was a man he knew and admired from former dealings. He w'as a man who was not averse to turning either an honest or a dishonest dollar, and yet he was a man, for all of that, that )'Ou could depend upon. He m would do what you paid him for and keep his lip buttoned tight once the deed was done. James had wanted a puudly, for it was a most engaging beast with certain little tricks that, once understood, might open up new avenues of speculation and approach, might write new chapters in the tortuous study of alien minds and manners. But for all of that, it had been a terrifying thing to do and now that the beast was loose, the terror was compounded. For it was not wholly beyond speculation that the descendants of this one brood that the escaped puudly would spawn might wipe out the population of the Earth, or at the best, make the Earth untenable for its rightful dwellers. A place like the Earth, with its field day for the fangs of the pHudlies, and the minds that drove the fangs. They would not hunt for hunger, nor for the sheer madness of the kill, but because of the compelling conviction that no puudly would be safe until Earth was wiped dean of life. They would be rat would kill... except that they would be cornered nowhere but in the murderous insecurity of their minds. If the posses scoured the Earth to hunt them down, they would be found in all directions, for they would be shrewd enough to scatter. They would know the ways of guns and traps and poisons and there would be more and more of them as time went on. Each of them would accelerating their budding to replace with a dozen or a hundred the ones that might be killed.' James moved quietly forward to the edge of the moat and let himself down into the mud that covered the bottom.When the monstrosity had been killed, the moat had been drained and should long since have been cleaned, but the press of work, James thought, must have prevented its getting done. Slowly he waded out into the mud, feeling his way, his feet making sucking noises as he pulled them through the slime. Finally he reached the rocky incline that led out of the moat to the island cage. He stood 'for a moment, his hands on the great, wet boulders, listening, trying to hold his breath so the sound of it would not interfere with hearing. The thing that howled had quieted and the night was deathly quiet. Or seemed, at first, to be. Then he heard the little insect noises that ran through the grass and bushes and the whisper of the leaves in the trees across the moat and the far-off sound that was the hoarse breathing of a sleeping city. N OW, for the first time, he felt fear. Felt it in the silence that was not a silence, in the mud beneath his feet, in the upthrust boulders that rose out of the moat. The puudly was a dangerous thing, not only because it was strong and quick, but because it was intelligent. Just how intelligent, he did not know. It reasoned and it planned and schemed. It could talk, though not as a human talks... probably better than a human ever could. For it not only could talk words, but it could talk emotions. It lured its victims to it by the thoughts it put into their minds; it held them entranced with dreams and illusion until it slit their throats. It could purr a man to sleep, could lull him to suicidal inaction. It could drive him crazy with a single flicking thought, hurling a perception so foul and alien that the mind ' recoiled deep inside itself and stayed there, coiled tight, like a watch that has been overwound and will not run. It should have budded long ago, but it had fought off its budding, holding back against the day when it might escape, planning, he realized now, its fight to stay on Earth, which meant its conquest of Earth. It had planned, and planned well, against this very moment, and it would feel or show no mercy to anyone who interfered with it. His hand went down and touched the gun and he felt the muscles in his jaw involuntarily tightening and suddenly there was at once a lightness and a hardness in him that had not been there before. He pulled himself up the boulder face, seeking cautious handand toeholds, breathing shallowly, body pressed against the rock. Quickly, and surely, and no noise, for he must reach the top and be there before the puudly knew there was anyone around. The puudly would be relaxed and intent upon its. business, engrossed in the budding forth of that numerous family that in days to come would begin the grim and relentless crusade to make an alien planet safe for puudlies... and for puudlies alone. TTiat is, if the puudly were here and not somewhere else. James was only a human trying to think like a puudly and that was not an easy or a pleasant job and he had no way of knowing if he succeeded. He could only hope that his reasoning was vicious and crafty enough. His clawing hand found grass and earth and he sank his fingers deep into the soil, hauling his body up the last few feet of the rock face above the pit. He lay flat upon the gently sloping ground, listening, tensed for any danger. He studied the ground in front of him, probing every foot. Distant street lamps lighting the zoo walks threw back the total blackness that had engulfed him as he climbed out of the moat, but there still were areas of shadow tliat he had to study closely. way along, making sure of the terrain immediately ahead before he moved a muscle. He held the gun in a rock-hard fist, ready for instant action, watching for the faintest hint of motion, alert for any hump or irregularity that was not rock or bush or grass. Minutes magnified themselves into hours, his eyes ached with staring and the lightness that had been in him drained away, leaving only the hardness, which was as tense as a drawn bowstring. A sense of failure began to seep into his mind and with it came the full-fledged, until now unadmitted, realization of what failure meant, not only for the world, but for the dignity and the pride that was Henderson James. Now, faced with the possibility, he admitted to himself the action he must take if the puudly were not here, if he did not find it here and kill it. He would have to notify the authorities, would have to attempt to alert the police, must plead with newspapers and radio to warn the citizenry, must reveal himself as a man who, through pride and selfconceit, had exposed the people of the Earth to this threat against their hold upon their native planet. They would not believe him. They would laugh at him until the laughter died in their torn throats, choked off with their blood. He sweated, thinking of it, thinking of the price this city, and the world, would pay before it learned the truth. There was a whisper of sound, a movement of black against deeper black. The puudly rose in front of him, not more than six feet away, from its bed beside a bush. He jerked the pistol up and his finger tightened on the trigger. "Don't," the puudly said inside his mind. "I'll go along with you." His finger strained with the careful slowness of the squeeze and the gun leaped in his hand, but even as it did he felt the whiplash of terror slash at his brain, caught for just a second the terrible import, the mind-shattering obscenity that glanced off his mind and riccocheted away. "Too late," he told the puudly, with his voice and his mind and his body shaking. "You should have tried that first. You wasted precious seconds. You would have got me if you had done it first." It had been easy, he assured himself, much easier than he had thought. The puudly was dead or dying and the Earth and its millions of unsuspecting citizens were safe and, best of all, Henderson James was safe... safe from indignity, safe from being stripped naked of the little defenses he had built up through the years to shield him against the public stare. He felt relief flood over him and it left him pulseless and breathless and feeling clean, but weak. "You fool," the dying puudly said, death clouding its words as they built up in his mind. "You fool, you half-thing, you duplicate..." It died then and he felt it die, felt the life go out of it and leave it empty. he seemed stunned and at first he thought it was from knowing death, from having touched hands with death within the puudly's mind. The puudly had tried to fool him. Faced with the pistol, it had tried to throw him off his balance to give it the second that it needed to hurl the mind-blasting thought that had caught at the edge of his brain. If he had hesitated for a moment, he knew, it would have been all over with him. If his finger had slackened for a moment, it would have been too late. The puudly must have known that he would think of the zoo as the first logical place to look and, even knowing that, it had held him in enough contempt to come here, had not even bothered to try to watch for him, had not tried to stalk him, had waited until he was almost on top of it before it moved. And that was queer, for the pundly must have known, with its uncanny mental powers, every move that he had made. It must have maintained a casual contact with his mind every second of the time since it had escaped. He had known that and... wait a minute, he hadn't known it until this very moment, although, knowing it now, it seemed as if he had always known it. What is the matter with me, he thought. There's something wrong with me. I should have known I could not surprise the puudly, and yet I didn't know it. I must have surprised it, for otherwise it would have finished me off quite leisurely at any moment after I climbed out of the moat. You fool, the puudly had said. You fool, you halfthing, you duplicate... You duplicate! He felt the strength and the personality and the hard, unquestioned identity of himself as Henderson James, human being, drain out of him, as if someone had cut the puppet string and he, the puppet, had slumped supine upon the stage. So that was why he had been able to surprise the puudly! There were two Henderson Jameses. The puudly had been in contact with one of them, the original, the real Henderson James, had known every move he made, had known that it was safe so far as that Henderson James might be concerned. It had not known of the second Henderson James that had stalked it through the night. Henderson James, duplicate. Henderson James, temporary. Henderson James, here tonight, gone tomorrow. F or they would not let him live. The original Henderson James would not allow him to continue living, and even if he did, the world would not allow it. Duplicates were made only for very temporary and very special reasons and it was always understood that once their purpose was accomplished they would be done away with. Done away with... those were the words exactly. Gotten out of the way. Swept out of sight and mind. Killed as unconcernedly and emotionlessly as one chops off a chicken's head. He walked forward and dropped on one knee beside the puudly, running his hand over its body in the darkness. Lumps stood out all over it, the swelling buds that now would never break to spew forth in a loathsome birth a brood of puudly pups. He rose to his feet. The job was done. The puudly had been killed -- killed before it had given birth to a horde of horrors. The job was done and he could go home. Home ? Of course, that was the thing that had been planted in his mind, the thing they wanted him to do. To go home, to go back to the house on Summit avenue, where his executioners would wait, to walk back deliberately and unsuspectingly to the death that waited. The job was done and his usefulness was over. He had been created to perform a certain task and the task was now performed and while an hour ago he had been a factor in the plans of men, he was no longer wanted. He was an embarrassment and superfluous. Now wait a minute, he told himself. You may not be a duplicate. You do not feel like one. That was true. He felt like Henderson James. He was Henderson James. He lived on Summit avenue and had illegally brought to Earth a beast known as a puudly in order that he might study it and talk to it and test its alien reactions, attempt to measure its intelligence and guess at the strength and depth and the direction of its non-humanity. He had been a fool, of course, to do it, and yet at the time it had seemed important to understand the deadly, alien mentality. I am human, he said, and that was right, but even so the fact meant nothing. Of course he was human. Henderson James was human and his duplicate would be exactly as human as the original. For the duplicate, processed from the pattern that held every trait and characteristic of the man he was to become a copy of, would differ in not a single basic factor. In not a single basic factor, perhaps, but in certain other things. For no matter how much the duplicate might be like his pattern, no matter how full-limbed he might spring from his creation, he still would be a new man. He would have the capacity for knowledge and for thought and in a little time hewould have and know and be all the things that his original was... B ut it would take some time, some short while to come to a full realization of all he knew and was, some time to coordinate and recognize all the knowledge and experience that lay within his mind. At first he'd grope and search until he came upon the things that he must know. Until he became acquainted with himself, with the sort of man he was, he could not reach out blindly in the dark and put his hand exactly and unerringly upon the thing he wished. That had been exactly what he'd done. He had groped and searched. He had been compelled to think, at first, in simple basic truths and facts. I am a man. I am on a planet called Earth. I am Henderson James. I live on Summit avenue. There is a job to do. It had been quite a while, he remembered now, before he had been able to dig out of his mind the nature of the job. There is a pnudly to hunt down and destroy. Even now he could not find in the hidden, still-veiled recesses of his mind the many valid reasons why a man should run so grave a risk to study a thing so vicious as a puudly. There were reasons, he knew there were, and in a little time he would know them quite specifically. The point was that if he were Henderson James, original, he would know them now, know them as a part of himself and his life, without laboriously searching for them. The puudly had known, of course. It had known, beyond any chance of error, that there were two Henderson Jameses. It had been keeping tab on one when another one showed up. A mentality far less astute than the puudly's would have had no trouble in figuring that one out. If the puudly had not talked, he told himself, I never would have known. If it had died at once and not had a chance to taunt me, I would not have known. I would even now be walking to the house on Summit avenue. He stood lonely and naked of soul in the wind that swept across the moated island. There was a sour bitterness in his mouth. He moved a foot and touched the dead puudly. "I'm sorry," he told the stiffening body. "I'm sorry now I did it. If I had known, I never would have killed you." Stiffly erect, he moved away. Ill ner, keeping well in the shadow. Halfway down the block, and on the other side, was the house. A light burned in one of the rooms upstairs and another on the post beside the gate that opened into the yard, lighting the walk up to the door. Just as if, he told himself, the house were waiting for the master to come home. And that, of course, was exactly what it was doing. An old lady of a house, waiting, hands folded in its lap, rocking very gently in a squeaky chair... and with a gun beneath the folded shawl. His lip lifted in half a snarl as he stood there, looking at the house. What do they take me for, he thought, putting out a trap in plain sight and one that's not even baited ? Then he remembered. They would not know, of course, that he knew he was a duplicate. They would think that he would think that he was Henderson James, the one and only. They would expect him to come walking home, quite naturally, believing he belonged there. So far as they would know, there would be no possibility of his finding out the truth; And now thjt he had ? Now that he was here, across the street from the waiting house.? He had been brought into being, had been given life, to do a job that his original had not dared to do, or had not wanted to do. He inal didn't want to dirty his hands with, or risk his neck in doing. Or had it not been that at all, but the necessity of two men working on the job, the original serving as a focus for the puudly's watchful mind while the other man sneaked up to kill it while it watched.? No matter what, he had been created, at a good stiff price, from the pattern of the man that was Henderson James. The wizardry of man's knowledge, the magic of machines, a deep understanding of organic chemistry, of human physiology, of the mystery of life, had made a second Henderson James. It was legal, of course, under certain circumstances... for example, in the case of public policy, and his own creation, he knew, might have been validated under such a heading. But there were conditions and one of these was that a duplicate not be allowed to continue living once it had served the specific purpose for which it had been created. Usually such a condition was a simple one to carry out, for the duplicate was not meant to know he was a duplicate. So far as he was concerned, he was the original. 'There was no suspicion in him, no foreknowledge of the doom that was invariably ordered for him, no reason for him to be on guard against the death that waited. The duplicate knitted his brow, trying to puzzle it out. There was a strange set of ethics here. H e was alive and he wanted to stay alive. Life, once it had been tasted, was too sweet, too good, to go back to the nothingness from which he had come... or would it be nothingness? Now that he had known life, now that he .was alive, might he not hope for a life after death, the same as any other human being? Might not he, too, have the same human right as any other human to grasp at the shadowy and glorious promises and assurances held out by religion and by' faith? He tried to marshal what he knew about those promises and assurances, but his knowledge was illusive. A little later he would femember more about it. A little later, when the neural bookkeeper in his mind had been able to coordinate and activate the knowledge that he had inherited from the pattern, he would know. He felt a trace of anger stir deep inside of him, anger at the unfairness of allowing him only a few short hours of life, of allowing him to learn how wonderful a thing life was, only to snatch it from him. It was a cruelty that went beyond mere human cruelty. It was something that had been fashioned out of the distorted perspective of a machine society that measured existence only in terms of mechanical and physical worth, that discarded with a ruthless hand whatever part of that society had no specific purpose. The cruelty, he told himself, was in ever giving life, not in taking it away. His original, of course, was the one to blame. He was the one who had obtained the puudly and allowed it to escape. It was his fumbling and his inability to correct his error without help which had created the necessity of fashioning a duplicate. And yet, could he blame him? Perhaps, rather, he owed him gratitude for a few hours of life at least, gratitude for the privilege of knowing what life was like. Although he could not quite decide whether or not it was something which called for gratitude. He stood there, staring at, the house. That light in the upstairs room was in the study off the master bedroom. Up there Henderson James, original, was waiting for the word that the duplicate had come home to death. It was an easy thing to sit there and wait, to sit and wait for the word that was sure to come. An easy thing to sentence to death a man one had never seen, even if that man be the walking image of one's self. It would be a harder decision to kill him if you stood face to face with him... harder to kill someone who would be, of necessity, closer than a brother, someone who would be, even literally, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, brain of your brain. T here would be a practical side as well, a great advantage to be able to work with a man who thought as you did, who would be almost a second self. It would be almost as if there were two of you. A thing like that could be arranged. Plastic surgery and a price for secrecy could make your duplicate into an unrecognizable other person. A little red tape, some finagling... but it could be done. It was a proposition that Henderson James, duplicate, thought would interest Henderson James, original. Or at least he hoped it would. The room with the light could be reached with a little luck, with strength and agility and determination. The brick expanse of a chimney, its base cloaked by shrubs, its length masked by a closely growing tree, ran up the wall. A man could climb its rough brick face, could reach out and swing himself through the open window into the lighted room. And once Henderson James, original, stood face to face with Henderson Jarhes, duplicate... well, it would be less of a gamble. The duplicate then would no longer be an impersonal factor. He would be a man and one that was very close to his original. There would be watchers, but they would be watching the front door. If he were quiet, if he could reach and climb the chimney without making any noise, he'd be in the room before anyone would notice. He drew back deeper in the shadows and considered. It was either get into the room and face his original, hope to be able to strike a compromise with him, or simply to light out... to run and hide and wait, watching his chance to get completely away, perhaps to some far planet in some other part of the Galaxy. Both ways were a gamble, but one was quick, would either succeed or fail within the hour; the other might drag on for months with a man never knowing whether he was safe, never being sure. Something nagged at him, a persistent little fact that skittered through his brain and eluded his efforts to pin it down. It might be important and then, again, it might be a random thing, simply a floating piece of information that was looking for its pigeonhole. His mind shrugged it off. The quick way or the long way? He stood thinking for a moment and then moved swiftly down the street, seeking a place where he could cross in shadow. He had chosen the short way. IV HE. room was empty. He stood beside the window, quietly, only his eyes moving, searching every corner, checking against a situation that couldn't seem quite true... that Henderson James was not here, waiting for the word. Then he strode swiftly to the bedroom door and swung it open. His finger found the switch and the lights went on. The bedroom was empty and so was the bath. He went back into the study. He stood with his back against the wall, facing the door that led into the hallway, but his eyes went over the room, foot by foot, orienting himself, feeling himself flow into the shape and form of it, feeling familiarity creep in upon him and enfold him in its comfort of belonging. Here were the books, the fireplace with its mantel loaded with souvenirs, the easy chairs, the liquor cabinet... and all were a part of him, a background that was as much a part of Henderson James as his body and his inner thoughts were a part of him. This, he thought, is what I would have missed, the experience I never would have had if the puudly had not taunted me. I would have died an empty and unrelated body that had no actual place in the universe. The phone purred at him and he stood' there startled by it, as if some intruder from the outside had pushed its way into the room, shattering the sense of belonging that had come to him. The phone rang again and he went across the room and picked it up. "James speaking," he said. "That you, Mr. James?" The voice was that of Anderson, the gardener. "Why, yes," said the duplicate. "Who did you think it vs?" "We got a fellow here who says he's you." Henderson James, duplicate, stiffened with fright and his hand, suddenly, was grasping the phone so hard that he found the time to wonder why it did not pulverize to bits beneath his fingers. "He's dressed like you," the gardener said, "and I knew you went out. Talked to you, remember? Told you that you shouldn't? Not with us waiting for that... that thing." "Yes," said the duplicate, his voice so even that he could not believe it was he who spoke. "Yes, certainly I remember talking with you." "But, sir, how did you get back?" "I came in the back way," the even voice said into the phone. "Now what's holding you back?" "He's dressed like you." "Naturally. Of course he would be, Anderson." A nd that, to be sure, didn't quite follow, but Anderson wasn't too brightto start with and now he was somewhat upset. "You remember," the duplicate said, "that we talked about it." "I guess Twas excited and forgot," admitted Anderson. "You told me to call you, to make sure you were in your study, though. That's right, isn't it, sir?" "You've called me," the duplicate said, "and I am here." "Then the other one out here is him?" "Of course," said the duplicate. "Who else could it be?" He put the phone back into the cradle and stood waiting. It came a moment after, the dull, throaty cough of a gun. He walked to a chair and sank into it, spent with the knowledge of how events had so been ordered that now, finally, he was safe, safe beyond all question. Soon he would have to change into other clothes, hide the gun and the clothes that he was wearing. The staff would ask no questions, most likely, but it was best to let nothing arouse suspicion in their minds. He felt his nerves quieting and he allowed himself to glance about the room, take in the books and furnishings, the soft and easy... and earned... comfort of a man solidly and unshakably established in the world. He smiled softly. "It will be nice," he said. It had been easy. Now that it was over, it seemed ridiculously easy. Easy because he had never seen the man who had walked up to the door. It was easy to kill a man you have never seen. With each passing hour he would slip deeper and deeper into the personality that was his by right of heritage. There would be no one to question, after a time not even himself, that he was Henderson James. The phone rang again and he got up to answer it. A pleasant voice told him, "This is Allen, over at the duplication lab. We've been waiting for a report from you." "Well," said James, "I..." "I just called," interrupted Allen, "to tell you not to worry. It slipped my mind before." "I see," said James, though he didn't. "We did this one a little differently," Allen explained. "An experiment that we thought we'd try out. Slow poison in his bloodstream. Just another precaution. Probably not necessary, but we like to be positive. In case he fails to show up, you needn't worry any." "I am sure he will show up." Allen chuckled. "Twenty-four hours. Like a time bomb. No antidote for it even if he found out somehow." "It was good of you to let me know," said James. "Glad to," said Allen. "Good night, Mr. James." M If you've missed any of the previous issues of Novels... or want the current ones... you can buy any or all. M For as long as our supply lasts, we will continue to sell all back issues at # each, M There is no postage or handling charge. Just send # (not in stamps) for every copy you want to this address: Socrates afternoon and was walking down toward the front gate, meaning to take a bus into town, when I heard the squeals from the direction of the caretaker's cottage. I'm fond of animals and hate to hear them in pain, so I walked through the gate into the cottage yard. What I saw horrified me. Jennings, the caretaker, was holding a young puppy in his hand and beating its head against the stone wall. At his feet were three dead puppies, and as I came through the gate he tossed a fourth among them, and picked up the last squirming remnant of the litter. I called out sharply; "Jennings! What's going on." A man's best friend may be his dog... but a dog's is not necessarily his master. A dog like Socrates, especially. He turned to face me, stil holding the puppy in his hand. He is a surly-looking fellow at best, but now he looked thunderous. "What the hell do you think I'm a useless litter -- that's what I'm do   mg. He held the pup out for me to observe. "Here," he went on, "have a look at this and you'll see why." I looked closely. It was the queerest pup I had ever seen. It had a dirty, tan coat and abnormally thick legs. But it was the head that drew attention. It must have been fully four times the size of any ordinary pup of its breed; so big that, although its neck was sturdy, the head seemed to dangle on it like an apple on a stalk."It's a queer one, all right," I admitted. "Queer?" he exclaimed. "It's a monster, that's what it is." He looked at me angrily. "And I know the cause of it. I'm not a fool. There was a bit in the Sunday papers a couple of weeks back about it. It's them electrical X-ray machines you have up at the House. It said in the paper about X-rays being able to influence what's to be born and make monsters of them. And look at this for a litter of pedigree airedales; not one that would make even a respectable mongrel. Thirty quid the price of this litter at the very least." "It's a pity," I said, "but I'm pretty sure the company won't accept responsibility. You must have let your bitch run loose beyond the inner gate and there's no excuse for that. It's too bad you didn't see that bit in the Sunday paper a few weeks earlier; you might have kept her chained up more. You know you've been warned about going near the plant." "Yes," he snarled, "I know what chance I've got of getting money out of those crooks. But at least I can get some pleasure out of braining this lot." He prepared to swing the pup against the wall. It had been quiet while we were talking, but now it gave one low howl and opened large eyes in a way that seemed fantastically to suggest that it had been listening to our conversation, and knew its fate was sealed. I grabbed hold of Jennings' arm pretty roughly. "Hold on," I said. "When did you say those pups were born?" "This morning," he growled. I said, "But its eyes are open. And look at the color! Have you ever seen an airedale with blue eyes before?" He laughed unpleasantly. "Has anybody ever seen an airedale with a head like that before, or a coat like that? It's no more an airedale than I am. It's a cur. And I know how to deal with it." T he pup was whining to itself, as though realizing the futility of making louder noises. I pulled my wallet out. "I'll give you a quid for it," I said. He whistled. "You must be mad," he said. "But why should that worry me? It's yours for the money. Taking it now?" "I can't," I said. "My landlady wouldn't let me. But I'll pay you ten bob a week if you will look after it till I can find it a place. Is it a deal?" He put his hand out again. "Jn advance ?" I paid him. "I'll look after it, guv'nor, even though it goes against the grain. At any rate it'll give Glory something to mother." A t least once a day, sometimes twice, I used to call in to see how the pup was getting along. It was progressing amazingly. At the end of the second week Jennings asked for an increase of ##d. in the charge for keeping it, and I had to agree. It had fed from the mother for less than a week, after which it had begun to eat its own food, and with a tremendous appetite. Jennings scratched his unkempt head when he looked at it. "I don't know. I've never seen a dog like it. Glory didn't give it no lessons in eating or drinking. It just watched her from the corner and one day, when I brought fresh stuff down, it set on it like a wolf. It ain't natural." Watching the pup eat, I was amazed myself. It seemed to have more capacity for food than its mother, and you could almost see it putting on weight and size. And its cleverness! It was hardly more than a fortnight old when I surprised it carefully pawing the latch of the kennel door open, to get at some food that Jennings had left outside while going out to open the gates. But even at that stage I don't think it was such superficial tricks that impressed me, so much as the way I would catch it watching Jennings and me as we leaned over the kennel fence discussing it. There was such an air of attentiveness about the way it sat, with one ear cocked, a puzzled frown on that broad-browed, most uncanine face. Jennings said one day, "Thought of a name for him yet?" "Yes," I said. "I'm going to call him Socrates." "Socrates?" repeated Jennings. "Something to do with football?" I smiled. "There was another great thinker with that name several thousand years ago. A Greek." "Oh," Jennings said scornfully, "a Greek... One Friday evening I brought a friend down to see Socrates -- a man who had made a study of dogs. Jennings wasn't in. This didn't surprise me because he habitually got drunk at least one evening a week and Friday was his favorite. I took my friend around to the kennels. He didn't say anything when he saw the pup, which was now, after three weeks, the size of a large foxterrier. He examined it carefully, as though he were judging a prize winner at Cruft's. Then he put it down and turned to me. "How old did you say this dog is?" he asked. I told him. He shook his head. "If it were anyone but you who told me, I would call him a liar," he said. "Man, I've never seen anything like it. And that head...You say the rest of the litter were the same?" "The bodies looked identical," I told him. "That's what impressed me. You are liable to get queer freak mutations round these new labs of ours -- double-headed rats and that sort of thing -- but five the same in one litter ! That looked like a true mutation to me." He said, "Mutations I'm a bit shaky about, but five alike in one litter look like a true breed to me. What a tragedy that fool killed them." "He killed a goose that might have laid him some very golden eggs," I said. "Quite apart from the scientific importance of it -- I should imagine a biologist would go crazy at the thought -- a new mutated breed like this would have been worth a packet. Even this one dog might have all sorts of possibilities. Look!" Socrates had pushed an old tin against the wall of the kennel and was using it in an attempt to scale the fence barring the way to the outer world. His paws scrabbled in vain a few inches from the top. "Good God !" my friend said. "If it can do that after a month... kennels. As we came out I collided with Jennings. He reeled drunkenly past us. "Come to feed little Shocratesh," he said thickly. I held his shoulder. "That's all right," I said. "We've seen to them." When I dropped in the following day, I was surprised to see a huge, roughly painted sign hanging over the kennel door. It read: I tried the door, but it was locked. I looked around. Jennings was watching me. "Hello, Professor," he said. "Can't you read.'" I said, "Jennings, I've come for the pup. My friend is going to look after him at his' kennels." Jennings grinned. "Sorry," he said, "the dog's not for sale." "What do you mean?" I exclaimed. "I bought him four weeks ago. And I've been paying you for his keep." "You got any writing that says that. Professor?" he asked. "You got a bill of sale?" "Don't be ridiculous, Jennings," I said. "Open the door up." "You even got any witnesses?" he asked. He came over to me confidentially. "Look," he said, "you're a fair man. I heard you telling your friend last night that dog's a gold mine. You know I own him by rights. Here, I'm a fair man myself. Here's three pounds five; the money I've had from you in the last four weeks. You know he's my gold mine by rights. You wouldn't try to do a man like me. You know I paid five quid stud fee for that litter." "It was a bargain," I said. "You were going to throw the pup at the wall -- don't forget that. You wouldn't even know the dog was anything out of the ordinary now. except for listening to a private conversation last night." I found my wallet. "Here's ten pounds. That will make good the stud fee and a little extra profit for yourself into the bargain." He shook his head. 'Tm not selling, Professor. And I know my rights in the law. You've got no proof; I've got possession." I said, "You idiot! What can you do with him. He will have to be examined by scientists, tested, trained. You don't know anything about it." Jennings spat on the ground. "Scientists!" he exclaimed. "No, I'm not taking him to no scientists. I've got a bit of money saved up. I'm off away from here tomorrow. I'll do the training. And you watch the theaters for the big bill boards in a few months' time -- George Jennings and his Wonder Dog, Socrates! I'll be up at the West End inside a year." that I saw the name on the bills outside the Empire Theater in Barcaster. 'There had been no word from Jennings during that time. As he had said he would, he had gone with the dog, vanishing completely. Now he was back, and the bill read as he had told me it would: I went in and bought a seat in the front row. There were some knockabout comedians fooling together on the stage; and after them a team of rather tired-looking acrobats. Jennings was the third in appearance. He strode on to a fanfare of trumpets, and behind him loped Socrates. He was bigger and his rough, tan coat was shaggier than ever. His head was more in proportion to his body, too, but it was still huge. He looked nearer to a St. Bernard than any breed I could think of, but he was very little like a St. Bernard. He was just Socrates, with the same blue eyes bla#ing that had surprised me that afternoon four months before. Jennings had taught him tricks, all right. As they reached the center of the stage, Socrates staggered up on to his hind legs, waddled to the footlights and saluted the audience. He swung effortlessly from the trapezes the acrdbats had left, spelled out words in reply to Jennings' questions, pulling alphabet blocks forward with his teeth. He went through all the repertoire that trick dogs usually follow, capping them with an assurance that made the audience watch in respectful silence. But when he left, walking stiffly off the stage, the ovation was tremendous. They came back half a dozen times for encores, Socrates saluting gravely each time the mob of hysterical humans before him. When they had left for the last time, I walked out, too. I bribed the doorman to let me know the name of Jennings' hotel. He wasn't staying with the rest of the music-hall people but by himself in the Grand. I walked over there late in the evening, and had my name sent up. The small, grubby page boy came back in a few minutes. "Mr. Jennings says you're to go right up," he told me, and added the floor and room number. nings' voice answer, "Come in !" He seemed more prosperous than the Jennings I had known, but there was the same shifty look about him. He was sitting in front of the fire wearing an expensive blue-andgold dressing gown, and as I entered the room he poured himself whisky from a decanter. I noticed that his hand shook slightly. "Why," he said thickly, "if it isn't the professor! Always a pleasure to see old friends. Have a drink. Professor." He helped me to whisky. "Here's to you. Professor," he said, "and to Socrates, the Wonder Dog!" I said, "Can I see him." He grinned. "Any time you like. Socrates !" A door pushed open and Socrates walked in, magnificent in his bearing and in the broad, intelligent face from which those blue eyes looked out. Hd advanced to Jennings' chair and dropped into immobility, head couched between powerful paws. "You seen our show?" Jennings asked. I nodded. "Great, isn't it? But it's only tlie beginning. We're going to show them! Socrates, do the new trick." Socrates jumped up and left the room, returning a moment later pulling a small wooden go-cart, gripping a rope attached to it in his teeth. I noticed that the cart had a primitive pedal arrangement near the front, fixed to the front wheels. Socrates suddenly leaped into the cart, and, moving the pedals with his paws, propelled himself along the room. As he reached the wall, the cart swerved and I noticed that his tail worked a rudderlike arrangement for steering. He went the reverse length of the room and turned again, but this time failed to allow enough clearance. The cart hit the side wall and Socrates toppled off. Jennings rose to his feet in an instant. He snatched a whip from the wall, and, while Socrates cowered, thrashed him viciously, cursing him all the time for his failure. I jumped forward and grappled with Jennings. At last I got the whip away from him and he fell back exhausted in the chair and reached for the whisky decanter. I said angrily, "You madman! Is this how you train the dog?" He looked up at me over his whisky glass. "Yes," he said, "this is my way of training him ! A dog's got to learn respect for his master. He doesn't understand anything but the whip. Socrates!" He lifted his whip hand, and the dog cowered down. "I've trained him," he went on. 'He's going to be the finest performing dog in the world before I'm through." I said, "Look, Jennings, I'm not a rich man, but I've got friends who will advance me money. I'll get you a thousand pounds for Socrates." H e sneered. "So you want to cash in on the theaters, too?" "I promise that if you sell Socrates to me, he will never be used for profit by anyone." He laughed. "A hell of a lot I care what would happen to him if I sold him. But I'm not selling; not for a penny under #. Why, the dog's a gold mine." "You are determined about that?" I asked. He got up again. "I'll get you the advance bills for our next enalready! Hang on; they're only next door." He walked out unsteadily. I looked down to where Socrates lay, watching everything in the way that had fascinated me when he was a pup. I called to him softly: "Socrates." He pricked up his ears. I felt crazy, but I had to do it. I whispered to him: "Socrates, follow me back as soon as you can get away. Here, take the scent from my coat." I held my sleeve out to him, and he sniflFed it. He wagged his huge, bushy tail slowly. Tlien Jennings was back with his billheads, and I made my excuses and left. I walked back -- a matter of two or three miles. The more I thought, the more insane did it seem that the dog could have heeded and understood my message. It had been an irrational impulse. I had found new accommodation in the months since Jennings' .disappearance; in a cottage with a friendly, old couple. I had brought Tess, my own golden retriever, from home, and they both adored her. She was sitting on the inside window ledge as I walked slowly up the garden path, and her barks brought old Mrs. Dobby to the door to let me in. Tess came bouncing to meet me and her silky paws were flung up toward my chest. I patted and stroked her into quietness and, after washing, settled down to a pleasant tea. Two or three hours later, the Dobbys having gone to bed, I was sitting reading by the fire when I heard a voice at the door. I called, "Who's there?" This time it was a little more distinct, though still garbled, as though by a person with a faulty palate. I heard, "Socrates." I threw the door open quickly. Socrates stood there, eyes gleaming, tail alert. I looked beyond him into the shadows. "Who's brought you, old chap.'" I asked. Socrates looked up. His powerful jaws opened. I could see teeth gleaming whitely. Socrates said, slurring the words, but intelligible, "Me. Can speak." my incredulity. Sitting in the Dobbys' cosy room in front of a glowing fire, it seemed more fantastic than ever. Half to myself, I said, "I can't believe it." Socrates had sat down on the rug. "True, though," he said. I asked, "Does Jennings know?" Socrates replied, "No. Have told no one else. Would only make into tricks." "But Jennings knows you can hear and understand things?" "Yes. Could not hide. Jennings whips until I learn. Easier to learn at once." His voice, a kind of low, articulate growling, became more readily understandable as I listened to it. After a few minutes it did not seem at all strange that I was sitting by the fire talking to a halfgrown but large mongrel dog. He told me how he had practiced human speech by himself, forcing his throat to adapt itself to the complexities, succeeding through a long process of trial and error. I said, in amazement, "But, Socrates, you are barely four months old!" His brow wrinkled. "Yes. Strange. Everything goes so fast for me. Big... old..." "Maturity," I supplied. "Of course there have been 'talking dogs' before, but they were just stunts, no real intelligence. Do you realize what a phenomenon you are, Socrates?" The vast canine face seemed to smile. "Hownot realize?" he asked. "All other dogs -- such, fools. Why that. Professor?" I told him of his birth. He seemed to grasp the idea of X-ray mutation very easily. I suppose one can always swallow the facts of one's own existence. He remembered very little of that first month of infancy. When I told him of the fate of the rest of his litter, he was saddened. "Perhaps best not to know that," he said. "Sad to think I might have had brothers and sisters like me. Not to be always a trick dog." "You don't need to be a trick dog, Socrates," I said. "Look, we'll go away. I've got friends who will help. You need never see Jennings again." Socrates said, "No. Not possible. Jennings the master. I must go back." "But he beats you ! He may beat you for going out now." "He will," Socrates said. "But worth it to come see you." "Look, Socrates," I said. "Jennings isn't your master. No free intelligence should be a slave to another. Your intelligence is much more advanced than Jennings'." The big head shook. "For men, all right. Dogs different." "But you aren't even Jennings' dog," I said. I told him the story of Jennings' trickery; how he had sold Socrates to me and then refused to acknowledge the sale. Socrates was not impressed. "Always Jennings' dog," he said. "Not remember anything else. Must go back. You not dog -- not understand." I said half-heartedly, "We would have a fine time, Socrates. You could learn all sorts of things. And be free, completely free." But I knew it was no use. Socrates, as he said, was still a dog, even though an intelligent one, and the thousands of years of instinctive slavery to a human master had not been quenched by the light that brought intelligence and reasoning to his brain. He said, "Will come here to learn. Will get away often." "And be beaten by Jennings every time you go back?" Socrates shivered convulsively. "Yes," he said. "Worth it. Worth it to learn things. You teach?" "I'll teachyou anything I can, Socrates," I promised. "Can mutate moe dogs like me ?" I hated to say it. "No, Socrates. You were a fluke, an accident. X-rays make monsters; once in a something like you happens." The bushy tail drooped disconsolately. The huge head rested a moment between his paws. Then he stood up, four-legged, an outcast. "Must go nowWill come again soon." I let him out and saw him lope away into the night. I turned back into the warm firelit room. I thought of Socrates, running back through the night to Jennings' whip and I knew what anger and despair were. ly after that. He would sit in front of me while I read to him from books. At first he wanted to be taught to read for himself, but the difficulty of turning pages with his clumsy paws discouraged him. I read to him from all the books he wanted. His appetite was voracious, but lay chiefly along non-technical lines; naturally enough, in view of the impossibility of his ever being able to do even the simplest manual experiments. Philosophy interested him, and I found my own education improving with Socrates' as he led me deeper and deeper into mazes of idealism, epistemology and sublineation. He enjoyed poetry, too, and composed a few rough poems, which had the merit of a strange non-human approach. But he would not let me write them down; now I can remember only a few isolated lines. His most intense interest was in an unexpected field. I mentioned casually one day some new development in psychical research, and his mind fastened on the subject immediately. He told me he could see all sorts of queer things which he knew humans could at the best sense only vaguely. He spent nearly an hour one evening describing to me the movements of a strange spiralshaped thing that, he said, was spinning around slowly in one corner of my room, now and then increasing and decreasing in size and making sudden jumps. I walked over to the place he indicated and put my hand through vacancy. "Can hear it, too," Socrates said. "High, sweet noise." "Some people have unusual senses and report similar things," I told him. He made me read through every book I could find on paranormal phenomena, in search of explanations of the oddities that surrounded him, but they annoyed him. "So many fools," he said wearily, when we put down one book that had painstakingly linked up poltergeists with angels. "They did not see. They only wanted to. They thought they did." The Dobbys were a little curious at my new habit of reading aloud in my room, and once I saw them glancing suspiciously at Socrates when he changed his speech into a growl as they came into the house from the garden. But they accepted his strange appearances and disappearances quite easily, and always made a fuss of him when he happened to turn up during my absence. times we would go out into the fields, and he and Tess would disappear in search of rabbits and birds and all the other things that fascinate dogs in the country. I would see them a field away, breasting the wind together. Socrates badly needed such outings. Jennings rarely took him out, and, as Socrates spent all the time he could filch from Jennings' training activities with me, he saw no other dogs and had no other exercise. Tess was very fond of him and sometimes whined when we shut her out from rny room, in order to read and talk undisturbed. I asked Socrates about her once. He said, "Imagine all dogs intelligent; all men fools. You the only intelligent man. You talk to dogs, but you not like pretty women, even though they are fools?" Then, for months, Socrates disappeared, and I learned that Jennings was touring the north of England, having a sensational success. I saw also the announcement that he was to return to Barcaster for a fortnight early in November. I waited patiently. On the morning before he was due to open, Socrates returned. He was looking as fit as ever physically, but mentally the tour had been a strain for him. In philosophy he had always inclined to defeatism, but it had been defeat with a sense of glory. He had reveled in Stapledon's works, and drawn interesting comparisons between himself and Stapledon's wonder sheepdog. Now, however, there was a listlessness about him that made his defeatism a drab and unhappy thing. He would not read philosophy, but lay silent while I read poetry to him. steadily increased his bouts of drunkenness. Socrates told me that he had to carry the act by himself now; Jennings was generally too drunk to give even the most elementary instructions on the stage. And, of course, w'ith the drunkenness came the whippings. There were nasty scars on the dog's back. I treated them as well as I could, but increasingly I hated and dreaded the time when he would say, "Must go now," and I would see him lope off, tail low, to face Jennings' drunken fury. I remonstrated with him again, begging him to come away with me, but it was beyond reason. The centuries of slavery could not be eradicated. He ajways went back tg Jennings. Then he came one afternoon. It had been raining for days, and he was wet through. He would not stay in front of the fire to dry. The rain was slackening a little. I took my raincoat, and, with Tess frisking beside us, we set out. We walked on in silence. Even Tess grew subdued. At last, Socrates said, "Can't go on for long. Whipped me again last night. Felt something burn my mind. Almost tore his throat out. I will do it soon and they will shoot me." "They won't shoot you," I said. "You come to me. You will be all right. Come now, Socrates. Surely you don't want to go on serving Jennings when you know you may have to kill him?" He shivered, and the raindrops ran off his shaggy back. "Talking no good," he said. "I must go back. And if he whips me too much, I must kill him. I will be shot. Best that way." We had reached the river. I paused on the bridge that spanned it a few inches above the swirling' currents of the flood, and looked out. The river was high after the rain, running even more swiftly than it usually did. Less than a quarter of a mile away was the fall, where the water cascaded over the brink into a raging turmoil below. I was looking at it abstractedly when I heard Jennings' voice. He stood at the other end of the bridge. He was raging drunk. He called, "So there you are! And that's what you've been up to -- sneaking off to visit the professor. I thought I might catch you here." He advanced menacingly up the bridge. "What you need, my lad, is a taste of the whip." He was brandishing it as he walked. I waited until he had alaway, staggered, fell -- and disappeared into the violently flowing river. I saw his face appear a few yards down. He screamed and went under again. I turned to Socrates. "It's all over," I said. "You are free. Come homej Socrates." The head appeared again, and most reached the place where Socrates was cowering on the boards, waiting for the blow, and then I charged him savagely. He fought for a moment, but I was sober and he was not. I caught one of his legs and tn'isted. He pulled viciously screamed more faintly. Socrates stirred. He called to Jennings for the first and last time: "Master!" Then he was over the bridge and shimming down frantically toward the drowning man. I called after him, but he took no notice. I thought of jumping in myself, but I knew I could not last even to reach him. With Tess at my heels, I raced round the bank to the place where the water roared over the fall. I saw them just as they reached the fall. Socrates had reached him, and was gripping the coat in his teeth. He tried to make for the bank, but there was no chance. They swept over the edge and into the fury below. I watched for their reappearance for some time, but they did not come up. They never came up. I think sometimes of the things Socrates might have done if he had been given the chance. If only for those queer things he saw that we cannot see, his contribution to knowledge would have been tremendous. And when I think that he was less than a year old when he died, the lost possibilities awe and sadden me. I cannot escape the conclusion that at his full maturity he would have outstripped all the specialists in the strange fields he might have chosen to work in. There is just one thing that worries me still. His was a true mutation; the identical litter showed that. But was it a dominant one? Could the strength and vigor of his intelligence rise above the ordinary traits of an ordinary dog? It's a point that means a great deal. Tess is going to have pups. Trusting allies on the same planet can be difficult enough. But what about allies light-years from you? ' ' Conclusion of a #-Part Serial caped a death trap on Earth, where he was completing his college education, learns from Sander Jonti, who, like Biron, is a native of the Nebular Kingdoms of the Galaxy, that the elder Farrill, Biron' s father, has been captured and probably executed by the Tyranni. The Tyranni are natives of the planet Tyrann, and, fifty years earlier, had conquered all the Nebular Kingdoms, Biron leaves Earth under an assumed identity, but the attempted imposture fails, and upon arrival on Rhodia, the largest planet of the Nebular Kingdoms, is delivered to the wily Simok Aratap, Tyrannian Commissioner of the Region. Meanwhile, Sander fonti has been searching for a mysterious document said to date back to the preatomic age on Earth, for which Biron had earlier been searching on behalf of his father, and the possession of which is supposed to be vital for the success of the conspiracy against Tyrann. He finds that the document has been stolen from the Earth's archives twenty years before. On Rbod'ut, Arntap releases Biron, although aware of his identity, in order to trace, through him, the larger threads of the conspiracy. Biron approaches Hinrik, Director of Rhodia, who is a tool of the Tyranni, and who, instead of responding to Biron' s plea for help, decides that he has been sent merely as a test of his oit n loyalty to Tyrann, and therefore orders Biron' s arrest and re-delivery to Aratap. Biron escapes from the palace with the help of Gillbret, Hinrik' s cousin, who hates the Tyranni, and Artemisia, Hinrik' s daughter, who is faced with a possible inarriage of state with an elderly Tyranni an nobleman and can't abide the thought. The three steal Aratap' s own space-yacht and escape into space. They are not aware of the fact that Tyranni ships are equipped with devices u'hich enable them to maintain contact with one another through cosmic distances. Aratap, still intent on giving Biron enough rope, follows, without making any immediate attempt to capture them. On the space-yacht, meanwhile, Gillbret tells Biron and Artemisia that twenty years earlier, he had been stranded in space through an accident and come across a hidden world secretly organizing a military power for use against the Tyranni. He believes the organizer of this "Rebellion World" to be the Autarch of Lingane, an outlying world of the Nebular Kingdoms, never fully conquered by the Tyranni. The.)' head for Lingane. During the trip, Biron and Artemisia find themselves falling in love. At Lingane, they contact the Autarch, who boards their ship. The Autarch turns out to be Sander jonti. Biron is furious. He has reason to suspect that the original death trap on Earth was set by fonti himself, rather than by. the Tyranni. fonti admits this and explains that he did so in order to send Biron to the Nebular Kingdoms as a decoy in order to divert suspicion from the real conspiracy. He asks for custody of Artemisia, and, tvhen Biron refuses, tells him that Biron's father was executed as a result of information given the Tyranni by Hinrik of Rhodia. fonti also informs them that he is not the organizer of the "Rebellion W orld," but that he, too, is anxious to find it. From Gillbret's story, he has deduced that it can exist only near one of five possible stars within the Horsehead Nebula itself. He proposes that they enter the Nebula in order to investigate the five stars, one by one. Meanwhile, Biron and Artemisia have been estranged because of fonti' s information that her father had betrayed Biron' s father to execution by the Tyranni. Closely behind them, and unknown to them, the Tyranni fleet, under Aratap and Hinrik, are in pursuit. The story concludes: The Hole in Space Biron entered the pilot room again. His hair was gray, but his body was still vigorous and his face was broad, red, and smiling. He covered the distance between himself and Biron in a stride and seized the young man's hand heartily. "By the stars," he said, 'Td need no word from you to tell me that you are your father's son. It is the old Rancher alive again." "I wish it were," said Biron, somberly, Rizzett's smile faltered. "So do we all. Every one of us. I'm Tedor Rizzett, by the way. I'm a colonel in the regular Linganian forces, but we don't use titles in our own little game. We even say merely 'sir' to the Autarch. That reminds me." He looked grave. "We don't have Lords and Ladies or even Ranchers on Lingane. I hope I won't offend if I forget to throw in the proper title sometimes." Biron shrugged. "As you said, no titles in our little game. But what about the trailer? I'm to make arrangements with you, I take it." For a flickering moment, he looked across the room. Gillbret was seated, quietly listening. Artenisia had her back to him. Her slim, pale fingers wove an abstracted pattern on the photo-contacts of the computer. Rizzett's voice brought him back. The Linganian had cast an allinclusive glance about the room. "First time I've ever seen a Tyrannian vessel from the inside. Don't care much for it. Now you've got the emergency airlock due astern, haven't you? It seems to me the power-thrusters girdle the mid-section." "That's right." "Good. Then there won't be any trouble. Some of the old model ships have power-thrusters due astern, so that trailers had to be set off at an angle. This makes the gravity adjustment difficult and the maneuverability in atmospheres just about nil." "How long will it take, Rizzett?" "Not long. How big would you want it?" "How big could you get it?" "Super-de-luxe? Sure. If the Autarch says so, there's no higher priority. We can get one that's practically a spaceship in itself. It would even have its own auxiliary motors." "It would have lisnng quarters, I suppose." "For Miss Hinriad? It would be considerably better than you have here." At the mention of her name, Artemisia had drifted past coldly and slowly, moving out of the pilot room. Biron's eyes followed her. Rizzett said, "I guess I shouldn't have said Miss Hinriad." "It's nothing. Pay no attention. You were saying?" "Oh, about the rooms. At least two sizable ones, with a communicating shower. It's got the usual closet room and plumbing arrangements of the big liners. She would be comfortable." "Good. We'll need food and water." "Sure. Water tank will hold a two months' supply; a little less if you want to arrange for a swimming pool aboard ship. And you would have frozen whole meats. You're eating Tyranni concentrate now, aren't you?" Biron nodded and Rizzett grimaced. "It tastes like chopped sawdust, doesn't it? Want anything else?" "A supply of clothes for the lady," saidBiron. Rizzett wrinkled his forehead. "Yes, of course. Well, that will be her job." "It won't. We'll Supply you with all necessary measurements, and you can supply us with whatever we ask for in whatever the current styles happen to be." Rizzett laughed shortly and shook his head. "Rancher, she won't like that. She wouldn't be satisfied with any clothes she didn't pick. Not even if they were the identical items she would have picked if she had been giventhe chance. This isn't a guess, now. I've had experience with the creatures." Biron said, "I'm sure you're right, Rizzett, but that's the way it will have to be." "Well, don't say I didn't warn you. It will be your argument. What else?" "Little things. A supply of detergents. Oh, yes, and cosmetics, perfume, the things women need. We'll make the arrangements in time. Let's get the trailer started." And now Gillbret was leaving without speaking. Biron's eyes followed him, too, and he felt his jawmuscles tighten. Hinriads! Gillbret was one and she was another. He said, "And, of course, there'll be clothes for Mr. Hinriad and myself. They're not important." "Right! Mind if I use your radio? I'd' better stay on this ship till the adjustments are made." B iron waited, while the orders went out. Then Rizzett turned on the seat and said, "I can't get used to seeing you here, moving, talking, alive. You're so like him. The Rancher used to speak about you every once in a while. You went to school on Earth, didn't you?" "I did. I would have graduated a little over a week ago, if things hadn't been interrupted." Rizzett looked uncomfortable. "Look, about your being sent to Rhodia the way you were. You mustn't hold it against us. We didn't like it. I mean, this is strictly between us, but some of the boys didn't like it at all. The Autarch didn't consult us, of course. You couldn't expect him to. Frankly, it was a risk on his part. Some of us -- I'm not mentioning names -- even wondered if we shouldn't stop the liner you were on and take you off. Naturally, that would have been the worst thing we could possibly do. Still, we might have done it, exct that in the last analysis we knew the Autarch must know what he was doing." TT'S nice to be able to inspire X that kind of confidence." "We know him. There's no denying it, he's got it here." He slowly tapped his forehead. "Nobody knows exactly what makes him take a certain course sometimes, yet it always seems the right one. At least he's outsmarted the Tyranni so far and others don't." "Like my father, for instance." "I wasn't thinking of him, exactly, but, in a sense, you're right. Even the Rancher was caught. Well, he was a different kind of man. His way of thinking was straight. He would never allow for crookedness. He would always underestimate the worthlessness of the next man. But then again, that was what we liked best, somehow. He was the same to everyone. "I'm a commoner, for all I'm a colonel. My father was a metalworker, you see. It didn't make any difference to the Rancher, And it wasn't that I was a colonel, either. If he met the engineer's apprentice walking down the corridor, he'd step aside, and say a pleasant word or two, and, for the rest of the day, the apprentice would feel like a Master Engineman. It was the way the Rancher had. "Not that he was soft. If you needed disciplining, you got it, but no more than your share. What you got, you deserved, and you knew it. When he was through, he was through. He didn't keep throwing it at you at odd moments for a week or so. 'That was the Rancher. "Now the Autarch, he's different. He's pure brains. You can't get next to him, no matter, who you are. For instance, he doesn't really have a sense of humor. I can't speak to him the way I'm speaking to you. Right now I'm just talking. I'm relaxed. It's almost free association. With him, you say exactly what's on your mind with no spare words. And you use formal phraseology, or he'll tell you you're slovenly. But then, the Autarch's the Autarch, and that's that." Biron said, "I'll have to agree with you as far as the Autarch's brains are concerned. Did you know that he had deduced my presence aboard this ship,' before he ever got on." "He did? We didn't know that. Now, there, that's what I mean. He was going to go aboard the Tyrannian cruiser alone. To us, it seemed suicide. We didn't like it. But we assumed he knew what he was doing, and he did. He could have told us you were probably aboard ship. He must have known it would be great news that the Rancher's son had escaped. But it's typical. He wouldn't." A rtemisia sat on one of the lower bunks in the cabin. She had to bend into an uncomfortable position to avoid having the frame of the second bunk pry into her first thoracic vertebra, but that was a small annoyance to her at the moment. Almost automatically, she kept passing the palms of her hand down the side of her dress. She felt frayed and dirty, and very tired. She was tired of dabbing at her hands and face with damp cloths. She was tired of wearing the same clothes for a week. She was tired of hair which felt dank and stringy by now. And then she was almost on her feet again, readyto turn about sharply. She wasn't going to see him. She wouldn't look at him. But it was only Gillbret. She sank down again. "Hello, Uncle Gil." Gillbret sat down opposite her. For a moment, his thin face seemed anxious and then it started wrinkling into a smile. "I think a week of this ship is very unamusing, too. I was hoping you could cheer me up." , But she said, "Now, Uncle Gil, don't start using psychology on me. If you think you're going to cajole me into feeling a responsibility for you, you're wrong. I'm much more likely to hit you." "If it will make you feel better -- " "I warn you again. If you hold out your face for me to hit. I'll do it, and if you say 'Does that make you feel better?' I'll do it again." "In any case, it's obvious you've quarreled with Biron. What about?" "I don't see why there's any necessity for discussion. Just leave me alone." 'Then, after a pause, "He thinks father did what the Autarch said he did. I hate him for that." "Your father?" "No! That stupid, childish, sanctimonious fool!" "Presumably Biron. Good. You hate him. You couldn't put a knifeedge between what you say is hate and what would seem to my bachelor mind to be a rather ridiculous excess of love." "Uncle Gil," she said, "could he really have done it?" "Biron? Done what?" "No! Father. Could father have informed against the Rancher?" Gillbret looked thoughtful and very sober. "I don't know." He looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. "He M give up Biron to the Tyranni." "Because he knew it was a trap," she said, vehemently. "And it tvas. That horrible Autarch meant it as such. He said so. The Tyranni knew who Biron was and sent him to father on purpose. Father did the only thing he could do. That should be obvious to anybody." "Even if we accept that, he did try to argue you into a rather unamusing kind of marriage." She interrupted, "He had no way out there, either." "My dear, if you're going to excuse all that, how can you be sure he didn't betray the Rancher?" "Because I'm sure, that's why. You don't know father the way I do. He hates the Tyranni. He does. I admit that he's afraid of them and doesn't dare oppose them openly, but if he could avoid it somehow, he would never help them." "How do you know he could avoid it?" But she shook her head violently, so that her hair tumbled about and hid her eyes. It hid the tears a bit, too. Gillbret watched a moment, then spread his hands helplessly and left. T he trailer was joined to the Remorseless by a wasp-waist corridor attached to the emergency airlock in the rear of the ship. It was several dozen times larger than the Tyrannian vessel, almost humorously outsized. The Autarch joined Biron in a last inspection. He said, "Do you find anything lacking?" Biron said, "No. I think we'll be quite comfortable." "Good. And, by the way, Rizzett tells me the lady Artemisia is not well; Or at least that she looks unwell. If she requires medical attention, it might be wise to send her to my ship." "She is quite well," said Biron, curtly. "If you say so. Would you be ready to leave in twelve hours?" "In two hours, if you wish." Biron passed through the connecting corridor -- he had to stoop a little -- into the Remorseless proper. He said with a careful lack of tone, "You've got a private suite back there, Artemisia. I won't bother you. I'll stay here most of the time." She replied coldly, "You don't bother me, Rancher. It doesn't matter to me where you are." And then the ships blasted off and after a single Jump found themselves at the edge of the Nebula. They waited for a few hours while the final calculations were made on Jonti's ship. Inside the Nebula, it would be almost blind navigation. Biron stared glumly at the visiplate. There was nothing there ! One entire half of the celestial sphere was taken up with blackness, unrelieved by a spark of light. For the first time, Biron realized how warm and friendly the stars were, how they filled space. "It's like dropping through a hole in space," he muttered to Gillbret. And then they Jumped again, this time into the Nebula. Almost simultaneously, Simok Aratap, Commissioner of the Great Khan, at the head of ten armed cruisers, listened to his navigator and said, "That doesn't matter. Follow them anyway." And not one light year from the point at which the Remorseless entered the Nebula, ten Tyranni vessels did likewise. Hounds! uncomfortable in his uniform. Tyranni uniforms are made of moderately coarse materials and fit only indifferently well. It is not soldierlike to complain of such inconveniences. In fact, it is part of the Tyranni military tradition that a little discomfort on the part of the soldier is good for discipline. But still Aratap could bring himself to rebel against that tradition to the extent of saying, ruefully, "The tight collar irritates my neck." Major Andros, whose collar was as tight and who had been seen in no other than military dress in the memory of living man, said, "When alone, it would be quite within regulations to open it. Before any of the officers or men, any deviation from regulation dress would be a disturbing influence." Aratap sniffed. It was the second change induced by the quasi-military nature of the expedition. In addition to being forced into uniform, he had to listen to an increasingly self-assertive military aide. That had begun even before they left Rhodia. Andros had put it to him baldly. He had said, "Commissioner, we will need ten ships." Aratap had looked up, definitely annoyed. At the moment, he was deciding to follow the young Widemos in a single vessel. He laid aside the capsules in which he was preparing his report for the Khan's Colonial Bureau, to be forwarded in the unhappy case that he did not return from the expedition. "Ten ships. Major "Yes, sir. Less will not do." "Why not.'" "I intend to maintain a reasonable security. The young man is going somewhere. You say there is a well-developed conspiracy in existence. Presumably, the two fit together." "And therefore.'" "We must be prepared for a ' possibly well-developed conspiracy. One that might be able to overcome a single ship." "Or ten. Or a hundred. Where does security cease.'" "One must make a decision. In cases of military action, it is my responsibility. I suggest ten." Aratap's contact lenses gleamed unnaturally in the wall-light as he raised his eyebrows. The military carried weight. Theoretically, in times of peace, the civilian made the decisions, but, here again, military tradition was a difficult thing to set aside. H e said, cautiously, 'T will consider the matter." "Thank you. If you do not choose to accept my recommendations, and my suggestions have only been advanced as such, I assure you, that would be your privilege. You would leave me, however, no choice but to resign my commission." It was up to Aratap to retrieve what he could from that position. He said, "It is not my intention to hamper you in any decision you may make on a purely military question. Major. I wonder if you might be as amenable to my decisions in matters of purely political importance." "What matters are these "There is the problem of Hinrik. You objected yesterday to my suggestion that he accompany us." The Major said, dryly, "I consider it unnecessary. With our forces in action, the presence of outlanders would be bad for morale." Aratap sighed softly, just below the limits of hearing. Yet Andros was a competent man in his way. There would be no use in displaying impatience. He said, "Again, I agree with you. I merely ask you to consider the political aspects of the situation. As you know, the execution of the old Rancher of Widemos was politically uncomfortable. It stirred up the Kingdoms unnecessarily. However necessary the execution was, it makes it desirable to refrain from having the death of the son attributed to us. As far as the people of Rhodia know, the young Widemos has kidnaped the daughter of the Director -- the girl, by the way, being a popular and much publicized member of the Hinriads. It would be quite fitting, quite understandable, to have the Director head the punitive expedition. "It would be a dramatic move, very gratifying to Rhodian patriotism. Naturally, he would ask for Tyranni assistance, and receive it, but that can be played down. It would be easy, and necessary, to fix this expedition in the popular .mind as a Rhodian one. If the inner workings of the conspiracy are uncovered, it will have been a Rhodian discovery. If the young Widemos is executed, it would be a Rhodian execution, as far as the other Kingdoms are concerned." The Major said, "It would still be a bad precedent to allow Rhodian vessels to accompany a Tyranni military expedition. They would hamper us in a fight. In that way, the question becomes a military one." "I did not say, my dear Major, that Hinrik would command a ship. Surely, you know him better than to think him capable of commanding or even anxious to try. He will stay with us. There will be no other Rhodian aboard ship." "In that case, I waive my objection, Commissioner," said the Major. T he Tyranni fleet had maintained their position two light years off Lingane for the better part of a week and the situation was becoming increasingly unstable. Major Andros advocated an immediate landing on Lingane. "The Autarch of Lingane," he said, "has gone to considerable lengths to have us think him a friend of the Khan, but I do not trust these men w'ho travel abroad. They gain unsettling notions. It is strange that just as he returns, the young Widemos travels to meet him." "He has not tried to hide either his travels or his return. Major. And we do not know that Widemos goes to meet him. He maintains an orbit about Lingane. Why does he not land?" "Why . does he maintain an orbit? Let us question what he does and not what he does not do." "I can propose something which will fit the pattern." "I would be glad to hear it." Aratap placed a finger inside his collar and tried futilely to stretch it. He said, "Since the young man is waiting, we can presume he is waiting for something or somebody. It would be ridiculous to think that, having gone to Lingane by so direct and rapid a route -- a single Jump, in fact -- that he is merely w'aiting out of indecision. I say, then, that he is waiting for a friend or friends to reach him. Thus reinforced, he will proceed elsewhere. The fact that he is not landing on Lingane directly would indicate that he does not consider such an action safe. That .would indicate that Lingane in general and the Autarch in particular are not concerned in the conspiracy, although individual Linganians may be." "I don't know if we can always trust the obvious solution to be the correct one." "My dear Major, this is not an obvious solution, merely. It is a logical one. It fits a pattern." "Maybe it does. But just the same, if there are no further developments in twenty-four hours, I will have no choice but to order an advance on Lingane." Aratap frowned at the door through which the Major had left. It was disturbing to have to control at once the restless conquered and the short-sighted conquerors. Twenty-four hours. Something must happen; otherwise he might have to find some way of stopping Andros. The door signal sounded, and Aratap looked up with irritation. Surely it could not be Andros returning. It wasn't. The tall, stooped form of Hinrik of Rhodia was in the doorway, behind him a glimpse of the guard who accompanied him everywhere on the ship. Theoretically, Hinrik had complete freedom of movement. He himself probably thought he had. At least, he never paid any attention to the guard at his elbow. Hinrik smiled mistily. "Am I disturbing you. Commissioner?" "Not at all. Take a seat. Director." Aratap remained standing. Hinrik seemed not to notice that. Hinrik said, "I have something of importance to discuss with you." He paused, and some of the intentness passed out of his eyes. He added in quite a different tone, "What a large, fine ship this is." "Thank you. Director." Aratap smiled tightly. 'The nine accompanying ships were typically minute in size, but the flagship on which they stood was an outsize model adapted from the designs of the defunct Rhodian navy. It was perhaps the first sign of the gradual softening of the Tyranni military spirit that more and more of such # . ships were being added to the navy. The fighting unit was still the tiny two to three man cruiser, but, increasingly, the top brass found reasons for requiring large ships for their own headquarters. It did not bother Aratap: To some of the older soldiers this softness appeared to be degeneration; to himself it seemed increasing civilization. In the end, in centuries perhaps, it might even happen that the Tyranni would nielt away as a single people, fusing with the present conquered societies of the Nebular Kingdoms -- and perhaps even that might be a good thing. Naturally, Aratap never expressed such an opinion aloud. "I came to tell you something," said Hinrik. He puzzled over it a while, then added, "I have sent a message home today to my people. I have told them I am well and that the criminal will be shortly seized and my daughter returned to safety." "Good," said Aratap. It was not news to him. He himself had written the message, though it was not impossible that Hinrik by now had persuaded himself that he was the writer, or even that he actually headed the expedition. Aratap felt a twinge of pity. The man was disintegrating visibly. Hinrik said, "My people, I am sure, are quite disturbed over this daring raid upon the Palace by these well-organized bandits. I think they will be proud of their Director now that I have taken such rapid action in response. Eh, Commissioner? They will see that there is still force among the Hinriads." He seemed filled with a feeble triumph. "I think they will," said Aratap. "Are we within range of the enemy yet?" "No, Director. The enemy remains where he is, just off Lingane." "Still? I remember what I came to tell you." He grew excited so that the words tumbled out. "It is very important, Commissioner. I have discovered it. We must take quick action. Treachery -- " He was whispering. A ratap felt impatient. It was necessary to humor die poor idiot, of course, but this was a waste of time. At this rate, he would become so obviously mad that he would be useless even as a puppet, which would be a nuisance. He said, "No treachery. Director. Our men are staunch and true. Someone has been misleading you. You are tired." "No, no." Hinrik put aside Aratap's arm which, for a moment, had rested upon his shoulder. "Where are we?" "Why, here!" "The ship,,! mean. I have watched the visiplate. We are near no star. We are in deep space. Did you know that?" "Why, certainly." "Lingane is nowhere near. Did you know that." "It is two light years off." "Ah! Commissioner, no one is listening? Are you sure?" He leaned closely, while Aratap allowed his ear to be approached. "Then how do we know the enemy is near Lingane? He is too far to detect. We are being misinformed, and this signifies treachery." but the point was a good one. Aratap said, "This is something for technical men. Director; and not for men of rank to concern themselves with." "But as head of the expedition I should know. I am head, am I not?" He looked about carefully. "Actually, I have a feeling that Major Andros does not always carry out my orders. Is he trustworthy? Of course, I rarely give him orders. It would seem strange to order a Tyrannian officer. But then, I must find my daughter. My daughter's name is Artemisia. She has been stolen from me, and I am taking all this fleet to get her back. So you see, I must know. I mean, I must know how it is known the enemy is at Lingane. My daughter would be there, too. Do you know my daughter? Her name is Artemisia." His eyes looked up at the Tyrannian Commissioner in appeal. Then he covered them with his hand and mumbled something that sounded like, "I'm sorry." Aratap felt his jaw-muscles clench. It was difficult to remember that the man before him was a bereaved father and that even the idiot Director of Rhodia might have a father's feelings. He could not let the man suffer. He said, gently, "I will try to explain. You know there is such a thing as a massometer which will detect ships in space." "Yes, yes." "It is sensitive to gravitational effects. You know what I mean?" "Oh, yes. Everything has gravity." Hinrik was leaning toward Aratap, his hands gripping each other nervously. "That's good enough. Now naturally the massometer can only be used when the ship is close. Less Also it has to be a reasonable distance from any planet, because if it isn't, all you can detect is the planet, which is much bigger." "And has much more gravity." "Exactly," said Aratap, and Hinrik looked pleased. "We Tyranni have another device. It is a transmitter which radiates through hyperspace in all directions, and what it radiates is a particular type of distortion of the space fabric which is not electromagnetic in character. In other words, it isn't like light or radio or even sub-etheric radio. Do you see?" Hinrik didn't answer. He looked confused. Aratap proceeded quickly. "Well, it's different; it doesn't matter how. We can detect that something is radiated so that we can always know where any Tyrannian ship is, even if it's halfway across the Galaxy, or on the other side of a star." Hinrik nodded solemnly, looking vaguely impressed. "Now," said Aratap, "if the young Widemos had escaped in an ordinary ship, it would have been very difficult to locate him. As it is, since he took a Tyrannian cruiser, we know where he is at all times, although he doesn't realize that. That is how we know he is near Lingane, you see. And what's more, he can't get away, so that we will certainly rescue your daughter." H inrik smiled. "Why, that is wonderful, Commissioner. A very clever ruse." Aratap did not delude himself. Hinrik understood very little of what he had said, but that did not matter. It had ended with the assurance of his daughter's rescue, and somewhere in Hinrik's dim understanding there must be the realization that this, somehow, was made possible by Tyranni science. He told himself that he had not gone to this trouble entirely because the Rhodian appealed to his sense of the pathetic. He had to keep the man from breaking down altogether for obvious political reasons. Perhaps the return of his daughter would improve matters. He hoped so. There was a sharp door signal again and this time it was Major Andros who entered. Hinrik's arm stiffened on the arm-rest of his chair and his face assumed a hunted expression. He lifted himself and began, "Major Andros -- " But Andros was already speaking quickly, disregarding the Rhodian. "Commissioner, Remorseless has changed position." "Surely he has not landed on Lingane," said Aratap, sharply. "No," said the Major. "He has Jumped away from Lingane." "Good. He has been joined by another ship, perhaps?" "By many ships, perhaps. We can detect only his, as you are quite aware.'.' "In any case, we follow again." "The order has already been given. I would merely like to point out that his Jump has taken him to the edge of the Horsehead Nebula." "What?" "No major planetary system exists in the indicated direction. There is only one logical conclusion." Aratap moistened his lips and left hurriedly for the pilot room, the Major with him. Hinrik remained standing in the middle of the suddenly empty room, looking at the door for a minute or so. Then, with a little shrug of the shoulders, he sat down again. His expression was blank. For a long while, he simply sat. T he navigator said, "The space coordinates of the Remorseless have been checked, sir. They are definitely inside the Nebula." "That doesn't matter," said Aratap. "Follow them anyvi'ay." He turned to Major Andros. "So you see the virtues of waiting. There is a good deal that is obvious now. Where else could the conspirator's headquarters be but in the Nebula itself. Where else could we have failed to locate them ? A very pretty pattern." And so the squadron entered the Nebula. For the twentieth time, Aratap glanced automatically at the visiplate. Actually, the glances were useless since the visiplate remained quite black. There was no star in sight. Andros said, "That's their third stop without landing. I don't understand it. What is their purpose. What are they after? Each stop of theirs is several days long. Yet they do not land." "It may take them so long," said Aratap, "to calculate their next Jump. Visibility is non-existent." "You think so?" "No. Their Jumps are too good. Each time they land very near a star. 'They couldn't do as well by massometer data alone, unless they actually knew the locations of the stars in advance." "'Then why don't they land?" "I think," said Aratap, "they must be looking for habitable planets. Maybe they, themselves, do not know the location of the center of conspiracy. Or, at least, not entirely." He smiled. "We need only follow." HE navigator clicked heels. "Sir!" "Yes?" Aratap looked up. "The enemy has landed on a planet." Aratap signaled for Major Andros. "Andros," said Aratap, as the Major entered, "have you been told ?" "Yes. I've ordered a descent and pursuit." "Wait. You may be again p'remature, as when you wanted a lunge toward Lingane. I think only this ship ought to go." "Your reasoning?" "If we need reinforcements, you will be there, in command of the cruisers. If it is indeed a powerful rebel center, they may think only one ship has stumbled upon them. I will get word to you somehow and you can retire to Tyrann." "Retire !" "And return with a full fleet." Andros considered. "Very well. 'This is our least useful diip in any case. Too large." The planet filled the visiplate as they spiraled down. "The surface seems quite barren, sir," said the navigator. "Have you determined the exact location of the Remorseless?" "Yes, sir." "Then land as closely as you can without being sighted." They were entering the atmosphere now. The sky, as they flashed along the day-half of the planet, was tinged with a brightening purple. Aratap watched the nearing surface. The long chase was almost over ! And Hares! tually been in space, the investigation of a stellar system and the search for habitable planets may seem rather exciting; at the least, interesting. To the spaceman, it is the most boring of jobs. The location of a star, which is a huge glowing mass of hydrogen fusing into helium, is almost unavoidable. It advertises itself. Even in the blackness of the Nebula, it is only a question of distance. Apit will still advertise itself. But a planet, a relatively small mass of rock, shining only by reflected light, is another matter. One could pass through a stellar system a hundred thousand times at all sorts of odd angles without" ever coming close enough to a planet to see it for what it is, barring the oddest of coincidences. Hence, one adopts a system. A position is taken up in space, at a distance from the star being investigated, of some ten thousand times the star's diameter. From Galactic statistics it is known that not one time in fifty thousand is a planet located farther from its primary than that. Furthermore, practically never is a habitable planet removed from its primary more than one thousand times its sun's diameter. This means that from the position in space assumed by the ship, any habitable planet must be located within six degrees of the star. This, represents an area only l#th of the entire sky. That area can be handled in detail with relatively few observations. The movement of the tele-camera can be so adjusted as to counteract the motion of the ship in its orbit. Under those conditions, a time exposure will pinpoint the constellations in the star's neighborhood; provided, of course, that the blaze of the sun itself is blocked out, which is easily done. Planets, however, will have perceptible proper motions and therefore show up as tiny streaks on the film. When no streaks appear, there is always the possibility that the planets are behind their primary. The maneuver is therefore repeated from another position in space and, usually, at a point closer to the star. It is a very dull procedure indeed, and when it has been repeated three times for three different stars, each time with completely negative results, a certain depression of morale is bound to occur. stance, had been suffering for quite a while. Longer and longer inters'als took place between the moments when he found something "amusing." They were readying for the Jump to the fourth star on the Autarch's list, and Biron said, "We hit a star each time, anyway. At least, Jonti's figures are correct." Gillbret said, "Statistics show that one out of three stars have planetary systems." Biron nodded. It was a wellworn statistic. Every child was taught that in elementary Galactography. Gillbret went on, "That means that the chances of finding three stars at random without a single planet -- without one single planet -- is two-thirds cubed, which is eight twenty-sevenths, or less than one in three." "So?" "And we haven't found any. There must be a mistake." "Yousaw the plates yourself. And besides, what price statistics? For all we know, conditions are different inside a Nebula. Maybe the particle-fog prevents planets from forming, or maybe the fog is the result of planets that didn't coalesce." "You mean that?" said Gillbret, stricken. "You're right. I'm just talking to hear myself. I don't know anything about cosmogony. Why the hell are planets formed anyway? Never heard of one that wasn't filled with trouble." Biron looked haggard himself. He was still printing and pasting up little stickers on the control panels. He said, "Anyway, we've got the blasters all worked out; range-finders, power-control, all that." It was very difficult not to look at the visiplate. They'd be Jumping again soon, through that ink. Biron said, absently, "You know why they call it the Horsehead Nebula, Gil?" "The first man to enter it was Horace Hedd. Are you going to tell rrie that's wrong?" "It may be. 'They have a different explanation on Earth." "Oh?" "They claim it's called that because it looks like a horse's head." "What's a horse?" "It's an extinct animal on Earth." "It's an amusing thought, but the Nebula doesn't look like any animal to me, Biron." "It depends on the angle you look at it. Now from Nephelos, it looks like a man's arm with three fingers, but I looked at it once from the observatory at the University of Earth. It does look a little like some creature's head. Maybe that is how the name started. Maybe there never was any Horace Hedd. Who knows?" Biron felt bored with the matter, already. He was still talking simply to hear himself talk. T here was a pause; that lasted too long, because it gave Gillbret a chance to bring up a subject which Biron did not wish to discuss and could not force himself to stop thinking about. Gillbret said, "Where's Arta?" Biron looked at him quickly, and said, "Somewhere in the trailer. I don't follow her about." "The Autarch does. He might as well be living here." "Lucky for her." Gillbret's wrinkles became more pronounced and his small features seemed to screw together. "Oh, don't be a fool, Biron. Arjemisia is a Hinriad. She can't take what you've been giving her." Biron said, "Drop it." "I won't. I've been spoiling to say this. Why are you doing this to her? Because Hinrik might have been responsible for your father's death? Hinrik is my cousin! You haven't changed toward me." "All right," Biron said, '!I haven't changed toward you. I speak to you as I always have. I speak to Artemisia as well." "As you always have?" Biron was silent. Gillbret said, "You're throwing her at the Autarch." "It's her choice." "It isn't. It's your choice. Listen, Biron." Gillbret put a hand on Biron's knee. "This isn't a thing I like to interfere with, you understand. It's just that she's the only good thing in the Hinriad family just now. Would you be amused if I said I loved her? I have no children of my own." "I don't question your love." "Then I advise you for her good. Stop the Autarch, Biron." "I thought you trusted him." "As the Autarch, yes. As an antiTyranni leader, yes. But as a man for a woman, as a man for Artemisia, no." "Tell her that." "She wouldn't listen." "Do you think she would if I told her?" "If you told her properly." For a moment, Biron seemed to hesitate, his tongue dabbing slightly at dry lips. Then he turned away, saying harshly, "I don't want to talk about it." Gillbret said, sadly, "You'll regret this." Biron said nothing. Why didn't Gillbret leave him alone? It had occurred to him many times that he might regret all this. But what could he do? There was no easy way of backing out. B iron had set the controls in accordance with the instructions from the Autarch's pilot, and left the manuals to Gillbret. He was going to sleep through this Jump. And then Gillbret was shaking his shoulder. "Biron ! Biron !" Biron rolled over in his bunk, and out, landing in a crouch, fists balled. "What is it." Gillbret stepped back hastily. "Now, take it easy. We've got an F-# this time." It sank in. Biron drew a deep breath, and relaxed. "Don't ever wake me that way, Gillbret. An F-#, you say? I suppose you're referring to the new star." "I surely am. It looks most amusing, I think." In a way, it did. Approximately # of habitable planets in the Galaxy circled stars of spectral types F or G; diameter from # to # thousand miles, surface temperature from five to ten thousand centigrade. Earth's sun was G-#, Rhodia's F-#,. Lingane's G-#, as was that of Nephelos. F-# was a little warm, but not too warm. The first three stars they had stopped at were of spectral type K, rather small and ruddy. Planets would probably not have been noteworthy even if they had had any. A good star is a good star! In the first day of photography, five planets were located, the nearest of miles from the primary. Tedor Rizzett brought the news personally. He visited the Remorseless as frequently as the Autarch, lighting the ship with his heartiness. He was whoofing and panting this time from the hand-over-hand exercise along the metal line. He said, "I don't know how the Autarch does it. He never seems to mind. Comes from being younger, I guess." He added, abruptly, "Five planets!" Gillbret said, "For this star? You're sure?" "It's definite. Four of them are J-type, though." "And the fifth?" '"The fifth may be all right. Oxygen in the atmosphere, anyway." G illbret set up a thin yell of triumph, but Biron said, "Four are J-type. Oh, well, we only need one." He realized it was a reasonable distribution. The large majority of sizable planets in the Galaxy possessed hydrogenated atmospheres. After all, stars are mostly hydrogen and they are the source material of planetary building blocks. J-type planets had atmospheres of methane or ammonia with molecular hydrogen in addition sometimes, also considerable helium. Such atmospheres were usually deep and extremely dense. The planets themselves were almost invariably thirty thousand miles in diameter and up, with a mean temperature of rarely more than fifty below zero, centigrade. 'They were quite uninhabitable. Back on Earth, they used to tell him that these planets were called J-type because the J stood for Jupiter, the planet in Earth's solar system which was the best example of the type. Maybe they were right. Certainly, the other planet-classification was the E-type, and E did stand for Earth. E-types were usually small, comparatively, and their weaker gravity could not retain hydrogen or the hydrogen-containing gases, particularly since they were usually closer to the sun and warmer. Their atmospheres were thin and contained oxygen and nitrogen usually, with, occasionally, an admixture of chlorine. "How well have they gone ov'er the atmosphere." asked Biron. Rizzett shrugged, "We can only judge the upper reaches from out in space. If there were any chlorine, it would concentrate toward ground-level. We'll see." He clapped a hand on Biron's large shoulder. "How about inviting me to a small drink in your room, boy?" Gillbret looked after them uneasily. With the Autarch courting Artemisia, and his right-hand man becoming a drinking companion of Biron's, the Remorseless was becoming more Linganian than not. He wondered if Biron knew what he was doing, then thought of the new planet and let the rest go. A rtemisia was in the pilot room when they penetrated the atmosphere. There was a little smile on her face and she seemed quite contented. Biron looked in her direction occasionally. He had said, "Good day, Artemisia," when she came in -- she hardly ever did come in; he had been caught by surprise -- but she hadn't answered. She had merely said, "Uncle Gil," very brightly; then, "Is it true we're landing?" Gil had rubbed his hands. "It seems so, my dear. We may be getting out of the ship in a few hours, walking on solid surface. How's that for an amusing thought?" "I hope it's the right planet. If it isn't, it won't be so amusing." "There's still . another star," said Gil, but his brow furrowed. And then Artemisia turned to Biron and said, frigidly, "Did you speak, Mr. Farrill?" Biron, caught by surprise again, started and said, "No, not really." "I beg your pardon, then. I thought you had." She passed by him so closely that the plastic flair of her dress brushed his knee and her perfume, momentarily, surrounded him. Rizzett was still with them; one of the advantages of the trailer was that they could put a guest up overnight. He said, "They're getting details on the atmosphere now. Lots of oxygen, almost #c, and nitrogen and inert gases. It's quite normal. No chlorine." Then he stopped and went "Hmm." Gillbret said, "What's the matter?" "No carbon dioxide. That's not so good." "Why not?" demanded Artemisia from her vantage-point near the visiplate, where she watched the distant surface of the planet blur past at two thousand miles an hour. Biron said, curtly, "No carbon dioxide, no plant life." "Oh?" She looked at him, and smiled warmly. Biron, against his will, smiled back, and somehow, with scarcely a visible change in her countenance, she was smiling through him, past him, obviously unaware of his existence; and he was left there, caught in a foolish smile. He let it fade. It was just as well he avoided her. Certainly, when he was with her, he couldn't keep it up. When he could actually see her, the anesthetic of his will didn't work. It began hurting. were coasting now. In the thick lower reaches of the atmosphere, the Remorseless with its aerodynamically undesirable addition of a trailer was difficult to handle. Biron fought the bucking controls stubbornly. He said, "Cheer up, Gil!" He felt not exactly jubilant himself. Radio signals had brought no response as yet, and if this were not the "rebellion world," there would be no point in waiting longer. His line of action was set. Gillbret said, "It's rocky and dead, and not much water, either." He turned. "Did they try for carbon dioxide again, Rizzett?" Rizzett's ruddy face was long. "Yes. Just a trace. About a thousandth of a per cent or so." Biron said, "You can't tell. They might pick a world like this, just because it would look so hopeless." "But I saw farms," said Gillbret. "How much do you suppose we can see of a planet this size by circling it a few times? You know damn well, Gil, that whoever they are, they can't have enough people to fill a whole planet. They may have picked themselves a valley somewhere where the carbon dioxide of the air has been built up, say, by volcanic action and where there's plenty of nearby water. We could whizz within twenty miles of them, and never know it. Naturally, they wouldn't be ready to answer radio calls without considerable investigation." "You can't build up a concentration of carbon dioxide that easily," muttered Gillbret. But he watched the visiplate intently. Biron suddenly hoped that it was the wrong world. He decided that he could wait no longer. It would have to be settled, now! The artificial lights had been turned off and sunlight was coming in unhindered at the ports. Actually, it was the less efficient method of lighting the ship, but there was a sudden desirable novelty to it. The ports were open, in fact, and the native atmosphere could be breathed. Rizzett advised against it on the grounds that lack of carbon dioxide would upset the respiratory regulation of the body, but Biron thought it might be bearable for a short time. Gillbret had come upon them, heads together. They looked up, and leaned away from one another. Gillbret laughed. Then he looked out of the open port, sighed, and said, "Rocks!" Biron said, mildly, "We're going to set up a radio transmitter at the top of the high ground. We'll get more range that way. We ought to be able to contact all of this hemisphere at any rate. And if it's negative, we can try the other side of the planet." "Is that what you and Rizzett were discussing?" "Exactly. The Autarch and I will do the job. It's his suggestion, which is fortunate, since otherwise I would have had to make the same suggestion myself." He looked fleetingly at Rizzett as he spoke. Rizzett was expressionless. Biron stood up. "I think it would be best if I unzipped my spacesuit lining and wore that." Rizzett was in agreement. It was sunny on this planet; little water vapor in the air, no clouds; but it was briskly cold. The Autarch was at the main lock of the Remorieless. His overcoat was of thin foamite that weighed a fraction of an ounce, yet did a near-perfect job of insulation. A small carbon dioxide cylinder was strapped to his chest, adjusted to a slow leak that would maintain a perceptible. CO, vapor tension in his immediate vicinity. He said, "Would you care to search me, Farrill?" He raised his hands and waited, his lean face quietly amused. "No," said Biron. "Do you want to check me for weapons?" "I wouldn't think of it." The courtesies were as frigid as the weather. B iron stepped out into the sunlight and tugged at his handle of the two-handled suitcase in which the radio equipment was stowed. The Autarch caught the other. "Not too heavy," said Biron. He turned, and Artemisia was standing just within the ship, silent. Her dress was a smooth, unfigured white which folded in a smooth drape that fled before the wind. The semi-transparent sleeves whipped back against her arms, turning them to silver. For a moment, Biron melted dangerously. He wanted to return quickly; to run, leap into the ship, grasp her so that his fingers would leave bruises on her shoulders; feel his lips meet hers -- But he nodded briefly instead; her returning smile and the light flutter of her fingers were for the Autarch. Five minutes later he turned and there was still that glimmer of white at the open door, and then the rise in the ground cut off the view of the ship. The horizon was free of anything but broken and bare rock now. Biron thought of what lay ahead, and wondered if he would ever see Artemisia again -- and if she would care if he never returned. Out of the Jaws A rtemisia watched them as they became tiny figures trudging up the bare granite, then dipping below and out of sight. For a moment, just before they disappeared, one of them had turned. She couldn't be sure which one, and, for a moment, her heart hardened. She said, peevishly, "Uncle Gil, why don't you close the ports? It's enough to freeze a person to death." The thermometer dial read plus seven Centigrade with the ship's heaters on high. "My dear Arta," said Gillbret, mildly, "if you will persist in your ridiculous habit of wearing nothing but a little fog here and there, you must expect to be cold." But he closed contacts, and, with little clicks, the airlock slid shut, the ports swung inward and  molded themselves into the smooth, gleaming hull. As they did so, the thick glass polarized and became nontransparent. The lights of the ship went on and the shadows disappeared. Artemisia sat down in the heavily padded pilot's seat and fingered the arms aimlessly. His hands had often rested there and the slight warmth that flooded her as she thought that -- she told herself -- was only the result of the heaters making themselves felt decently, now that the outer winds were excluded. The long minutes passed, and it became impossible to sit quietly. She might have gone with him ! She corrected the rebellious thought instantly to the plural "them." She said, "Why do they have to set up a radio transmitter anyway. Uncle Gil?" He looked up from the visiplate, the controls of which he was fingering delicately, and said, "Eh?" "We've been trying to contact them from out in space," she said, "and we haven't reached anyone. What special good would a transmitter on the planet's surface do?" Gillbret was troubled. "Why, we must keep trying, my dear. We must find the 'rebellion world'." And, between his teeth, he added to himself, "We must!"A moment passed, and he said, "I can't find them." "Find whom?" "Biron and the Autarch, e ridge cuts me off no matter how I arrange the external mirrors. See?" She saw nothing but the sunny rock flashing past. Then Gillbret brought the little gears to rest and said, "Anyway, that's the Autarch's ship." Artemisia accorded it the briefest of glances. It lay deeper in the valley, perhaps a mile away. It glistened unbearably in the sun. It seemed to her, at the moment, to be the real enemy. It was, not the Tyranni. She wished suddenly, sharply, and very strongly that they had never gone to Lingane; that they had remained in space, the three of them only. Those had been funny days; so uncomfortable and yet so warm, somehow. And now she could only try to hurt him. Something made her hurt him, though she would have liked -- Gillbret said, "Now what does he want." A rtemisia looked up at him, seeing him through a watery mist, so that she had to blink rapidly to put him into normal focus. "Who?" "Rizzett. I think that's Rizzett. But he's certainly not coming this way." Artemisia was at the visiplate. "Make it larger," she ordered. "At this, short distance?" objected Gillbret. "You won't see anything. It will be impossible to keep it centered," "Larger, Uncle Gil." Muttering, he threw in the telescopic attachment and searched the bloated nubbles of rock that resulted. 'They jumped faster than the eye could follow at the lightest touch on the controls. For one moment Rizzett, a large, hazy figure, flashed past, and in that moment his identity was unmistakable. Gillbret backtracked wildly, caught him again, hung on for a moment, and Artemisia said, "He's armed. Did you see that?" "No." "He's got a long-range blasting rifle." She was up, tearing at the locker. " Arta ! What are you doing ?" She was unzipping the lining from another spacesuit. "I'm going out there. Rizzett's following them. Don't you understand? The Autarch hasn't gone out to set up a radio. It's a trap for Biron." She was gasping as she forced herself into the thick, coarse lining. "Stop it! You're imagining things." But she was staring at Gillbret without seeing him, her face pinched and white. She should have realized it before; the way Rizzett had been coddling that fool. 'That emotional fool ! Rizzett had praised his father; told him what a great man the Rancher of Widemos had been and Biron had melted immediately. His every action was dictated by the thought of his father. How could a man let himself be ruled by a monomania? She said, "I don't know what controls the airlock. Open it." "Arta, you're not leaving the ship. You don't know where they are." "I'll find them. Open the airlock." Gillbret shook his head. But the spacesuit she had stripped had borne a holster. She said, "Uncle Gil, I'll use this. I swear I will." Gillbret found himself staring at the wicked muzzle of a neuronic whip. He forced a smile. "Don't now!" "Open the lock!" He did and she was out, running into the wind, slipping across the rocks and up the ridge. The blood pounded in her ears. She had been as bad as Biron, dangling the Autarch before him for no other purpose than her silly pride. The Autarch's personality sharpened in her mind; a man so studiedly cold as to be bloodless and tasteless. She quivered with repulsion. She had topped the ridge, and there was nothing ahead of her. Stolidly, she walked onward, holding the neuronic whip before her. B iron and Autarch had not exchanged a word during their walk, and now they came to a halt where the ground leveled off. The rcKk was fissured by the action of sun and wind through the milleriia. Ahead of them, there was an ancient fault, the farther lip of which had crurpbled downward, leaving a sheer precipice of a hundred feet. Biron approached cautiously and looked over it. It slanted outward past the drop, the ground riddled with craggy boulders which, with time and infrequent rains, had scattered out as far as he could see. "It looks," he said, "like a hopeless world, Jonti." The Autarch displayed none of Biron's curiosity in his surroundings. He did not approach the drop. He said, "This is the place we found before landing. It's ideal for our purposes." "It's ideal for your purposes, at least," thought Biron. He stepped away from the edge and sat down. He listened to the tiny hiss from his carbon dioxide cylinder, and waited a moment. Then he said, very quietly, "What will you tell them when you get back to your ship, Jonti? Or shall I guess?" The Autarch paused in the act of opening the two-handled suitcase they had carried. He straightened and said, "What are you talking about?" Biron felt the wind numb his face and rubbed his nose with his gloved hand. Yet he unbuttoned the foamite lining that wrapped him, so that it flapped wide as the gusts hit it. He said, "I'm talking about your purpose in coming here." "I would like to set up the radio rather than waste my time discussing the matter, Farrill." "You won't set up a radio. Why should you? We tried reaching them from space, without a response. There's no reason to expect more of a transmitter on the surface. It's not a question of ionized radio-opaque layers in the upper atmosphere, either, because we tried the sub-ether as well and drew a blank. Nor are we particularly the radio experts in our party. So why did you really come up here, Jonti." The Autarch sat down opposite Biron. His hand patted the suitcase idly. "If you are troubled by these doubts, why didjou come?" "To find out. Your man, Rizzett, told me you were planning this trip, and advised me to join you. I believe that your instructions to him were to tell me that, by joining you, I might make certain you received no messages that I remained unaware of. It was a reasonable point, except that I don't think you will receive any messages. But I allowed it to persuade me, and I've come with you." "To find my motive?" said Jonti, mockingly. "Exactly. I can guess already." "Tell me then. Let me learn my motive, too." "You came to kill me. I am here alone with you, and there is a cliff before us over which it would be certain death to fall. There would be no signs of deliberate violence. There would be no blasted limbs or any thought of weapon-play. It would make a nice, sad story to take back to your ship. I had slipped and fallen. You might even bring back a party to gather me up and give me a decent burial. It would all be very touching and I would be out of your way." "You believe this and yet you came." "I expect it, so you won't catch me by surprise. We are unarmed and I doubt that you could force me over by muscle power alone." cern ourselves with our radio transmitter then, since vour death is now impossible?" "Not yet. I want your admission that you were going to try to kill me." "Oh? Do you intend to beat a confession out of me? Now understand, Farrill, you are a young man and I am disposed to make allowances because of that and because of the convenience of your name and rank. However, I must admit you have until now been more trouble than help to me." "By keeping alive, despite you?" "If you refer to the risks you ran on Rhodia, I have explained it. I will not explain it again." Biron rose. "Your explanation was not accurate. It has a flaw in it which was obvious from the beginning." "Really?" "Really! Stand up and listen to me, or I'll drag you to your feet." The Autarch's eyes narrowed to slits as he rose. "I would not advise you to attempt violence, youngster." "Listen." Biron's voice W'as loud and his cloak still bellied open in the breeze, disregarded. "You said that you sent me to a possible death on Rhodia only to implicate the Director in an anti-Tyranni plot." "That remains true." "That remains a lie. Your prime object was to have me killed. You informed the captain of the Rhodian ship of my identity at the very beginning. You had no real reason for believing that I would ever be allowed to reach Hinrik." "If I had wanted to kill you, Farrill, I might have planted a real radiation bomb in your room on Earth." "It would have been obviously more convenient to have the Tyranni maneuvered into doing the killing for you." "I might have killed you in space when I first boarded the Remorseless." "So you might. You came equipped with a blaster and you had it leveled at me at one point. You had expected me on board, but you hadn't told your crew that. When Rizzett called and saw me, it was no longer possible to blast me. You made a mistake then. You told me you had told your men I was probably on board, and a while later Rizzett told me you had not. Don't you brief your men concerning your exact lies as you tell them, Jonti T' Jonti's face had been white in the cold, but it seemed to whiten further. "I should kill you now for that, certainly. But what held back my trigger finger before Rizzett got on the visiplate and saw you." "Politics, Jonti. Artemisia oth Hinriad was aboard, and for the moment she was a more important object than myself. I'll give you credit for a quick change of plans. To have killed me in her presence would have ruined a bigger game." X ly, then?" "When the girl concerned is a Hinriad, why not? You lost no time. You tried first to have her transferred to your ship and when that failed, you told me that Hinrik had betrayed my father. So I lost her and left you the field undisputed. Now, I presume, she is no longer a factor. She is firmly on your side and you may proceed with your plan to kill me without losing the Hinriad succession." Jonti sighed and said, "Farrill, it is cold and getting colder. I believe the sun is heading downward. You are unutterably foolish and you weary me. Before we end this nonsense, will you tell me why I should you? That is, if your obvious paranoia needs any reason." "There is the same reason that caused you to kill my father." "What?" "Did you think I believed you for an instant when you said Hinrik had been the traitor? He might have been, were it not for the fact that his reputation as a wretched weakling is so well established. Do you suppose that my father was a complete fool. Could he possibly have mistaken Hinrik for anything but what he was. If he had not known his reputation, would not five minutes in Hinrik's presence have revealed him as a hopeless puppet? Would my father have babbled foolishly to Hinrik anything that might have been used to support a charge of treason against him? No, Jonti. The man who betrayed my father must have been one who was trusted by him." Jonti took a step backward and kicked the suitcase aside. He poised himself to withstand a charge and said, "I see your vile implication. My only explanation for it is that you are psychotic." Biron was trembling, and not with cold. "My father was popular with your men, Jonti. Too popular. An Autarch cannot allow a competitor in the business of ruling. You saw to it that he did not remain a competitor. And it was your next job to see to it that I did not remain alive either to replace or to avenge him." His voice raised to a shout, which whipped away on the cold air. "Isn't this true?" "No!" Jonti bent to the suitcase. "I can prove you are wrong!" He flung it open. "Radio equipment. Inspect it carefully. Take a good look at it." He tossed the items to the ground at Biron's feet. Biron stared at them. "How does that prove anything?" "It doesn't. But now take a good look at this." He had a blaster in his hand, and the coolness had left his voice. He said, "I am tired of you. But I w'on't have to be tired much longer." B iron said, tonelessly, "You hid a blaster in the suitcase with the equipment?" "You honestly came here expecting to be thrown off a cliff and you thought I would try to do it with my hands as though I were a stevedore or a coal-miner. I am Autarch of Lingane." His face worked and his left hand made a flat, cutting gesture before him. "I am tired of the fatuous idealism of the Ranchers of Widemos." He whispered, "Move on. Toward the cliff." He stepped forward. Biron, hands raised, eyes on the blaster, stepped back, "You killed my father, tben." "I killed your father!" said the Autarch. "The same man who saw to it that your father was blasted to bits in a disintegration charnber will see to it that you follow him -- and keep the Hinriad girl for himself thereafter, along with all that goes with her. I will give you an extra minute to think of that! But keep your hands steady, or I will blast you and risk any questions my men may care to ask." It was as though his cold veneer, having cracked, left nothing but a burning passion exposed. "You tried to kill me before this," Biron said stubbornly. "I did. Your guesses were in every way correct. Does that help you now? Back." "No," said Biron. He brought hishands down. "If you're going to shoot, do so." The Autarch said, "You think I will not dare? You're calling my bluff i" "I've asked you to shoot." "And I will." 'The Autarch aimed deliberately at Biron's head at a distance of four feet. Defeat! tle piece of tableland warily. He was not yet ready to be seen, but to remain hidden was difficult in this world of bare rock. In the patch of tumbled boulders he felt . safer. He threaded his way through them. Occasionally, he paused to pass the soft back of the spongy gloves he wore over his face. The dry cold was deceptive. He saw them now from between two granite monoliths that met in a V and rested his blaster in the crotch. The sun was on his back. He felt its feeble warmth soak through, and he was satisfied. If they happened to look in his direction, the sun would be in their eyes and he himself would be that much less visible. Their voices were sharp in his ear. Radio communication was in operation and he smiled at that. So far, according to plan. His own presence, of course, was not according to plan, but it would be better so. The plan was a rather overconfident one and the victim was not a complete fool, after all. Rizzett's own blaster might yet be needed to decide the issue. He waited. Stolidly, he watched the Autarch lift, his blaster as Biron stood there, unflinching. A rtemisia did not see the blaster lift. She did not see the two figures on the flat rock surface. Five minutes earlier, she had seen Rizzett silhouetted for a moment against the sky and since then she had followed him. He was moving too fast for her somehow. Things dimmed and wavered before her and twice she found herself stretched on the ground. She did not recall falling. The second time, she staggered to her feet with one wrist oozing blood where a sharp edge had scraped her. Rizzett had gained again and she had to reel after him. When he vanished in the glistening boulderforest, she sobbed in despair. She leaned against one of them, completely weary. Its beautiful fleshpink tint, the glassy smoothness of its surface, the fact that it stood as an ancient reminder of a primeval volcanic age were all lost upon her. She could only try to fight the sensation of choking that pervaded her. And then she saw him, dwarfed at the forked rock formation, his back to her. She held the neuronic whip before her as she ran unevenly over the hard ground. He was sighting along the barrel of his rifle, intent upon the process; taking aim; getting ready. She wouldn't make it in time. She would have to distract his attention. She called, "Rizzett!" And again, "Rizzett, don't shoot'!"  She stumbled again. The sun was blotting out, but consciousness lingered. It lingered long enough for her to feel the ground jar thuddingly against her; long enough to press her finger upon the whip's contact; and long enough for her to know that she was well out of range, even if her aim was accurate. She felt arms about her, lifting. She tried to see, but her eyelids would not open. "Biron?" It was a weak whisper. 'The answer was a rough blur of words, but it was Rizzett's voice. She tried to speak further, then abruptly gave up. She had failed! Es'erything was blotted out. tionless for the space it would take a man to count to ten slowly. Biron faced him as motionlessly, watching the barrel of the blaster that had just been fired point-blank at him. The barrel sank slowly as he watched. Biron said, "Your blaster seems not to be in firing order. Examine it." The Autarch's bloodless face turned alternately to Biron and to his weapon. He had fired at a distance of four feet. It should, have been all over. The congealed astonishment that held him broke suddenly and he disjointed the blaster in a quick movement. The energy capsule was missing; where it should have been, there was a useless cavity. The Autarch with rage hurled the lump of dead metal aside. It turned over and over, a black blot against the sun, smashing into the rock with a ringing sound. Biron took a slow step forward. "There are many ways I could kill you, but most of them are too quick. I think the most satisfying would be to let you fight for your life -- knowing you can't win. Being a stevedore would be more helpful right now than being Autarch of Lingane." His thigh muscles tensed, but the lunge they prepared was never completed. The cry that interrupted was thin and high, packed with panic. "Rizzett!" it came. "Rizzett, don't shoot!" Biron whirled in time to see the motion behind the rocks a hundred yards away and the glint of sun off metal. And then the hurled weight of a human body was upon his back. He bent under it, dropping to his knees. The Autarch had landed fairly, his knees clasped hard about Biron's waist, his fist thudding at the nape of the neck. Biron's breath whooshed out. He fought off the gathering blackness long enough to throw himself to one side. 'The Autarch jumped free, gaining clear footing while Biron sprawled on his back. He had just time to double his legs up against himself as the Autarch lunged down upon him again. The Autarch bounced off. They were up together this time, perspiration turning icy upon their cheeks. Slowly, they circled. Biron tossed his carbon dioxide cylinder to one side. The Autarch unstrapped his likewise, held it suspended a moment by its mesh-metal hose, then stepped in rapidly and swung it. Biron dropped, heard and felt it whistle above his head. He was up again, leaping before the Autarch could regain his balance. One large fist clamped down on a wrist, while the other exploded in the Autarch's face. He let the Autarch drop and stepped back. Biron said, "Stand up. I'll wait for you with more of the same. There's no hurr)'." The Autarch touched his gloved hand to his face, then stared sickly at the blood that smeared off upon it. His mouth twdsted and his hand snaked out for the metal qdinder he had dropped. Biron's foot came heavily down upon it, and the Autarch yelled in agony. Biron said, "You're too close to the edge of the cliff, Jonti. I'll throw you the other way now." But Rizzett's voice rang out, "Wait!" The Autarch screamed, "Shoot this man, Rizzett! His arms first, then his legs, and we'll leave him." Rizzett brought his weapon up slowly against his shoulder. Biron said, "Who saw to it that your own blaster was unloaded, Jonti "What?" The Autarch stared blankly. "It was not I who had access to your blaster, Jonti. Who did have? Who is pointing a blaster at you right now? Not at me, Jonti, but at you!" The Autarch turned to Rizzett and screamed, "Traitor!" Rizzett said, in a low voice, "Not I, sir. That man is the traitor who betrayed the loyal Rancher of Widemos to his death." "That is not I," cried the Autarch. "If he has told you I have, he lies." "It is you yourself who have told us. I not only emptied your weapon; I also shorted your communicator switch so that every word you said today was received by myself and by every member of the crew. We all know what you are." "I am your Autarch." "And also the foulest traitor alive." F or a moment, the Autarch said nothing but looked from one to the other as they watched him with somber, angry faces. Then he wrenched to his feet, pulled together the parted seams of his selfcontrol and held them tightly by sheer ner'Ous force. His voice was almost cool as he said, "And if it were all true, what would it matter? You have no choice but to let matters stand as they are. One last intra-nebular planet remains to be visited. It must be the 'Rebellion World' and only I know the co-ordinates." He retained dignity somehow. One hand hung uselessly from a broken wrist; his upper lip had swollen ludicrously and blood was caking his cheek, but he radiated the hauteur of one born to rule. "You'll tell us," said Biron. "Don't delude yourself that I will under any circumstances. And I have warned you already that there is an average of seventy cubic light years pec star. If you work by trial and error, without me, the miles of any star. Any star!" Something went click in Biron's mind. He said, "Take him back to the Remorseless!" Rizzett said in a lo voice, "The Lady Artemisia -- " And Biron interrupted. "Then it was she. Where is she." "She's safe. She came out without a carbon dioxide cylinder. Naturally as the COj washed out of her blood stream, the automatic breathing mechanism of the body slowed. She was trying to run, didn't realize she had to breath voluntarily, and fainted." Biron frowned. "Why was she trying to interfere with you, anyway. Making sure her boy-friend didn't get hurt.?" Rizzett said, "She thought I was the Autarch's man and was going to shoot yos#. I'll take back this rat now, and, Biron -- " "Yes.?" "Get back as soon as you can. He's still the Autarch, and the crew may need talking to. It's hard to break a lifetime habit of obedience. She's behind that rock. Get to her before she freezes to death, will you.? She won't leave." H er face was almost buried in the hood that covered her head, and her body was formless in the thick, env'eloping folds of the spacesuit lining, but his steps quickened as he approached her. He said, "How are you?" She said, "Better, thank you. I am sorry if I caused any trouble." 'They stood looking at each other, and the conversation seemed to have burned itself out in two lines. "rhen Biron said, "I know we can't turn time backward, undo things that have been done, unsay things that have been said. But I do want you to understand." "Why this stress on understanding?" Her eyes flashed. "I have done nothing but understand for weeks now. Will you tell me again about my father.?" "No. I knew your father was innocent. I suspected the Autarch almost from the start, but I had to find out definitely. I could only prove it, Arta, by forcing him to confess. I thought I could get him to confess by trapping him into attempting to kill me and there was only one way of doing that." He felt wretched. He went on. "It was a rotten thing to do. As rotten, almost, as what he did to my father. I don't expect you to forgive me." She said, "I don't understand a word you're saying." "I knew he wanted you, Arta. Politically, you would be a perfect matrimonial object. The name of Hinriad would be more useful for his purposes than that of Widemos. So once he had you, he would need me no longer. I deliberately forced you on him, Arta. I acted as I did, hoping you w'ould turn to him. When you did, he thought he was ready to rid himself of me, and Rizzett and I laid our trap." "And you loved me all the time?" Biron said, "Can't you bring yourself to believe that, Arta?" "And, of course, you were ready to sacrifice your love to the memory of your father and the honor of your family. How does the old doggerel go? You could not love me half so much, loved you not honor more!" Biron said, miserably, "Please, Arta I I am not proud of myself but I could think of no other way." "You might have told me your plan, made me your confederate rather than your tool." "It was not your fight. If I had failed -- and I might have -- you would have remained out of it. If the Autarch had killed me, and you were no longer on my side, you would be less hurt! You might have married him; even been happy." "Since you' have won, it might be that I would be hurt at bis loss." "But you aren't." "How do you know?" Biron said, desperately, "At least, try to see my motives. Granted that I was foolish, criminally foolish, can't you understand? Can't you try not to hate me?" She said, softly, "I have tried not to love you and, as you see, I have failed." "Then you forgive me," he said. "Why? Because I understand? No! If it were a matter of simply understanding, of seeing your motives, I would not forgive you your actions for anything I might have in life. If it were only that and nothing more! But I will forgive you, Biron, because I couldn't bear not to. How could I ask you to come back to me, unless I forgave you?" And she was in his arms, her weather-cold lips turning up to his. The two were held apart by a double layer of thick garments. His gloved hands could not feel the body they embraced, but it didn't seem to lessen his ardor. At last he said in concern, "The sun is going down. It's going to get colder." But she said, softly, "It's strange then that I seem to be getting warmer." Together they walked back to the ship. B iron faced the crew with an appearance of easy confidence which he did not feel, "rhe Linganian ship was large, and there were fifty in the crew. They sat facing him. Fifty faces! Fifty Linganian faces bred to unquestioning obedience to their Autarch. Some had been convinced by Rizzett; others had been convinced by the arranged eavesdropping on the Autarch's statements to Biron earlier that day. But how many others were still uncertain or even definitely hostile? So far Biron's talking had done little good. He leaned forward, let his voice grow confidential. "And what are you fighting for, men? What are you risking your lives for? A free Galaxy, I think. A Galaxy in which each world can decide what is best in its own way, produce its own wealth for its own good, be slave to none and master of none. Am I right?" There was a low murmur of what might have been agreement, but it lacked enthusiasm. Biron went on, "And what is the Autarch fighting for? For himself. He is the Autarch of Lingane. If he won, he would be Autarch of the Nebular Kingdoms, You would replace a Khan by an Autarch. Where would be the benefit of that ? Is that worth dying for?" One in the audience cried out, "He would be one of us, not a filthy Tyrannian." Another shouted, "The Autarch was looking for the 'Rebellion World' to offer his services. Was that ambition?" "Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, eh?" Biron shouted back, ironically. "But he would come to the 'Rebellion World' with an organization at his back. He could offer them all of Lingane; he could offer them, he thought, the prestige of an alliance with the Hinriads. In the end, he was pretty sure, the 'Rebellion World' would be his to do with what he pleased. Yes, that was ambition. "And when the safety of the movement ran counter to his own plans, did he hesitate to risk your lives for the sake of his ambition? My father was a danger to him. My father was honest and a friend of liberty. But he was too popular, so he was betrayed. In that betrayal, the Autarch might have brought to ruins the entire cause and all of you with it. Which one of you is safe under a man who will deal with the Tyranni whenever it suits his purposes ? Who can be safe serv'ing a cowardly traitor?" "Better," whispered Rizzett. "Stick to that. Give it to them." A gain the voice called from the back rows, "The Autarch knows where the 'Rebellion World' is. Do you know?" "We will discuss that later. Meanwhile, consider instead that under the Autarch we were all headed for complete ruin; that there is still time to save ourselves by turning from his guidance to a better and nobler way; that it is still possible from the jaws of defeat to snatch -- " "Only defeat, my dear young man," came a soft, interrupting voice, and Biron turned in horror... The fifty crew-men came babbling to their feet and, for a moment, it seemed as though they might surge forward, but they had come to council unarmed; Rizzett had seen to that. And now a squad of Tyranni guardsmen were filing through the various doors, weapons ready. And Simok Aratap, himself, a blaster in each hand, stood behind Biron and Rizzett. Where? fully the personalities of each of the four who faced him and felt the stirring of a certain excitement within him. This would be the big gamble. The threads of the pattern were weaving toward a close. He was thankful that Major Andros was no longer with him; that the Tyranni cruisers had gone as well. He was left with his flagship, his crew and himself. They would be sufficient. He hated any kind of unwieldiness. He spoke mildly. "Let me bring you up to date, my Lady and gentlemen. The Autarch's ship has been boarded by a prize crew and is now being escorted back to Tyrann by Major Andros. The Autarch's men will be tried according to law and, if convicted, will receive the punishment for treason. They are routine conspirators and will be treated routinely. But what shall I do with you." Hinrik of Rhodia sat beside him, his face crumpled in utter misery. He said, "Consider that my daughter is a young girl. She was led into this unwittingly. Artemisia, tell them that you were -- " "Your daughter," interposed Aratap, "will probably be released. She is, I believe, the matrimonial object of a highly placed Tyranni nobleman. Obviously, that will be kept in mind." Artemisia said, 'Til marry him, if you let the rest go." Biron half-rose, but Aratap waved him down. The Tyrannian Commissioner smiled and said, "My Lady, please! I can strike bargains, I admit. However, I am not the Khan, but merely one of his servants. Therefore, any bargain I do make will have to be justified thoroughly at home. So what is it exactly that you offer "My agreement to the marriage." "That is not yours to offer. Your father has already agreed and that is sufficient. Do you have anything else." Aratap was waiting for the slow erosion of their wills-to-resist. The fact that he did not enjoy his role efficiently. The girl, for instance, might at this moment burst into tears and that would have a salutary effect on the young man. They were obviously in love. He wondered if old Pohang would want her under the circumstances, and decided that he probably would. The bargain would still be all in the ancient's favor. For a moment, Aratap thought distantly that the girl was very attractive. And she was maintaining ecjuilibrium. She was not breaking down. Very good, thought Aratap. She was strong-willed as well. Pohang would not have joy of his bargain after all. He said to Hinrik, "Do you wish to plead for your cousin, too?"' Hinrik's lips moved soundlessly. Gillbret cried, "No one pleads for me. I don't want anything of any Tyrannian. Go ahead, order me shot." "You are hysterical," said Aratap. "You know that I cannot order you shot without trial." "He is my cousin," whispered Hinrik. "That will be considered too. You noblemen will someday have to Jearn that you cannot presume too far on your usefulness to us. I wonder if your cousin has learned that lesson yet." H e was satisfied with Gillbret's reactions. That fellow, at least, sincerely w'anted death. 'The frustration of life was too much for him. Keep him alive, then, and that alone would break him. He paused thoughtfully before Rizzett. This was one of the Autarch's men. The thought made him feel a faint embarrassment. At the start of the chase, he had dismissed the Autarch as a factor on the basis of what seemed iron logic. Well, it was healthy to miss occasionally. It kept self-confidence balanced at a point safely short of arrogance. He said, "You're the fool vvho served a traitor. You would liae been better off with us." Rizzett flushed. Aratap went on, "If you ever had ' any military reputation, I am afraid this would destroy it. You are not a nobleman and so considerations of state will play no part in your case. Your trial will be public and it will become known that you were a tool of a tool. Too bad." Rizzett said, "But you were about to suggest a bargain, I suppose." "A bargain." "Khan's evidence, for instance? You have only a shipload. Wouldn't you want to know the rest of the machinery of revolt?" Aratap shook his head slightly. "No. We have the Autarch. He will do as a source of information. Even without it, we need only make war on Lingane. There would be little left of revolt thereafter. I'm sure. There will be no bargain of that sort." And this brought him to the young man. Aratap had left him for last because he was the cle'erest of the lot. But he was young, and young people were usually not dangerous. They lacked patience. Biron spoke first, saying, "How did you follow us? Was be working with you?" "The Autarch? Not in this case. The poor fellow was trying to play both sides of the game." Hinrik interrupted, with an incongruously childish eagerness. "The Tyranni have an invention that follows ships through hyperspace." Aratap turned sharply. "If your Excellency will refrain from interrupting, I would be obliged." Hinrik cringed. It really didn't matter. None of these four would be dangerous hereafter, but Aratap had no desire to decrease by even one any of the uncertainties in the young man's mind. Biron said, "Now, look, let's have facts or nothing. You don't have us here because you love us... Why aren't we on the way back to Tyrann with the others? It's that you don't know how to go about I am a Widemos. Rizzett is a wellknown officer of the Linganian fleet. And that fifth one you have, your own pet coward and traitor, is still Autarch of Lingane. You can't kill any of us without stinking up the Kingdoms from Tyrann to the edge of the Nebula itself. You've gol to try to make some sort of bargain with us because there's nothing else you can do." Aratap said, "You are not altogether wrong. Let me weave a pattern for you. We followed you; how is not important. You may disregard, I think, the Director's overactive imagination. You paused near three stars without landing on any planet. You came to a fourth and found a planet to land on. There we landed with you, watched, waited. We thought there might be something to wait for and we were right. You quarreled with the Autarch and both of you broadcast without limitation. That had been arranged by you for your own purposes, I know, but it suited our purpose as well. We overheard. "The Autarch said that only one last intra-nebular planet remained to be visited and that it must be the 'Rebellion World.' This is interesting, you see. A 'Rebellion World.' You know, my curiosity is aroused. Where would that fifth and last planet be located ?" H e let the silence last. He took a seat and watched them dispassionately; first one, then another. Biron said, "There is no 'Rebellion World.' " "You were looking for nothing then?" "We were looking for nothing." "You are being ridiculous." Biron shrugged wearily. "You are yourself ridiculous if you expect more of an answer." Aratap said, "Observe that this 'Rebellion World' must be the center of the octopus of conspiracy. To find it is my only purpose in keeping you alive. You each have something to gain. My Lady, I might free you of your marriage. My Lord Gillbret, we might establish a laboratory for you; let you work undisturbed. Yes, we know more of you than you think." Aratap turned away hastily. The man's face was working. He might weep and that would be unpleasant. "Colonel Rizzett, you will be saved the humiliation of court-martial and the loss of reputation that would go with it. You, Biron Farrill, would be Rancher of Widemos again. In your case, we might even reverse the conviction of your father." "And bring him back tr life." "And restore his honor." "His honor," said Biron, "rests in the very actions that led to his conviction and death. It is beyond , your power to add to or detract from it." Aratap said, "One of you four will tell me where to find this world you seek. One of you will be sensible. He will gain, whichever one it is, what I have promised. The rest of you will be married, imprisoned, executed, whatever will be worst for you. I warn you, I can be sadistic if I must be." He waited a moment. "Which one will it be? If you don't speak, the one next to you will. You will have lost everything and I will still have the information I want." Biron said, "It's no use. You're setting this up so carefully, and yet it won't help you. There is no 'Rebellion World.' " "The Autarch says there is." "Then ask the Autarch your question." Aratap frowned. The young man was carrying the bluff past the point of reason. He said, "My own inclination is to deal with one of you." "Yet you have dealt with the Autarch in the past. Do so again. There is nothing you can sell to us you." Biron looked about him. "Right?" Artemisia crept closer to him and her hand went slowly about his elbow. Rizzett nodded curtly and Gillbret muttered, "Right!" in a breathless manner. "You have decided," said Aratap, and put his finger on the correct knob. T he Autarch's right wrist was immobilized in a light metal sheath, which was held magnetically tight to the metal band about his abdomen. The left side of his face was swollen and blue with bruises except for a ragged, force-healed scarthat seamed it redly. He stood before them without moving after that first wrench which had freed his good arm from the grip of the armed guard at his side. "What do you want?" the Autarch demanded. "I will tell you in a moment," said Aratap. "First, I want you to consider your audience. See whom we have here. There is the young man, for instance, whom you planned death for, yet who lived long enough to cripple you and destroy your plans, although you were an Autarch and he was an exile." It was difficult to tell whether a flush had entered the Autarch's mangled face. There was no single muscle-motion upon it. Aratap did not look for one. He went on, quietly, almost indifferently. "This is Gillbret oth Hinriad, who saved the young man's life and brought him to you. 'This is the lady Artemisia, whom, I am told, you courted in your most charming manner and who betrayed you, nevertheless, for the love of the youngster. This is Colonel Rizzett, your most trusted military aide, who also ended by betraying you. What do you owe these people. Autarch.'! The Autarch said again, "What do you want." "Information. Give it to me and you will be Autarch again. Your earlier dealings with us would be held in your favor at the Khan's court. Otherwise -- " "Otherwise?" "I will get it from these, you see. They will be saved and you will be executed. That is why I ask whether you owe them anything, that you should give them the opportunity of saving their lives by yourself being mistakenly stubborn." The Autarch's face twisted painfully into a smile. "They cannot save their lives at my expense. 'They do not know the location of the world you seek. I do." "I have not said what the information I want is. Autarch." "There is only one thing you can want." His voice was hoarse, all but unrecognizable. "If my decision is to speak, then my Autarchy will be as before, you say."  "More closely guarded, of course," amended Aratap, politely. Rizzett cried out, "Believe him, and you'll but add treason to treason and be killed for it in the end." The guard stepped forward, but Biron anticipated him. He flung himself upon Rizzett, struggling backward with him. "Don't be a fool," he warned. "There's nothing you can do." The Autarch said, "I don't care about my Autarchy, or myself, Rizzett." He turned to Aratap. "Will these be killed ? That, at least, you must promise." His horridly discolored face twisted savagely. "That one, above all." His finger stabbed toward Biron. ' "If that is your price, it is met." "If I could be his executioner, I would relieve you of all further obligation to me. If my finger could control the execution-blast, it would be partial repayment. But if not that, at least I will tell you what he would have you not know. I give you rho, theta, and phi in parsecs and radians: #, #, #. Tliose three points will determine the position of the world you seek. You have them now." "So I have," said Aratap, writing them down. And Rizzett broke away. "Traitor!" Bfron, caught off-balance, lost his grip on the Linganian and was thrown to one knee. "Rizzett," he yelled, futilely. Rizzett, face distorted, struggled briefly with the guard. Other guards were swarming in, but Rizzett had the blaster now. With hands and knees, he struggled against the Tyranni soldiers. Hurling himself through the huddle of bodies, Biron joined the fight. He caught Rizzett's throat, choking, pulling back. "Traitor," Rizzett gasped, struggling to maintain aim as the Autarch tried desperately to squirm aside. He fired. And then they disarmed him and threw him on his back. B ut the Autarch's right shoulder and half his chest had been blasted away. Grotesquely, the forearm dangled freely from its magnetized sheath. Fingers, wrist and elbow ended in black ruin. For a long moment, it seemed that the Autarch's eyes flickered as his body remained in crazy balance, and then they were glazed and he dropped and Was a charred remnant upon the floor. Artemisia buried her face against Biron's chest. Biron forced himself to look once, firmly and without flinching, at the body of his father's murderer, then turned his eyes away. Hinrik, from a distant corner of the room, mumbled and giggled to himself. Only Aratap was calm. He said, "Remove the body." They did so, flaring the floor with a soft heat-ray for a few moments to remove the blood. Only a few scattered char-marks were left. The guards helped Rizzett to his feet. He brushed at himself with both hands, then whirled fiercely toward Biron, "What were you doing.? I almost missed the bastard." Biron said, wearily, "You fell into Aratap' s trap, Rizzett." "Trap? I killed the traitor, didn't I?" "That was the trap. You did Aratap a favor." Rizzett made no answer, and Aratap did not interfere. He listened with a certain pleasure. The young fellow's mind worked smoothly. Biron said, "If Aratap overheard what he claimed to have overheard, he would have known that only Jonti had the information he wanted. Jonti said that, with emphasis, when he faced us after the fight. It was obvious that Aratap was questioning us only to rattle us, to get us to act brainlessly at the proper time. I was ready for the irrational impulse he counted upon. You were not." "I had thought," interposed Aratap softly, "that you would have done the job." "I," said Biron, "would have aimed at you." He turned to Rizzett again. "Don't you see that he didn't want the Autarch alive The Tyranni are snakes. He wanted the Autarch's information; he didn't want to pay for it; he couldn't risk it for him." "Correct," said Aratap, "and I have my information." Somewhere there was the sudden clamor of bells. Rizzett began, "All right. If I did him a favor, I did myself one at the same time." "Not quite," said the Commissioner, "since our young, friend has not carried the analysis far enough. You see, a new crime has been committed. Where the only crime is treason against Tyrann, your disposal would be a delicate matter politically. But now that you have murdered the Autarch of Lingane, you may be tried, convicted, and executed by Linganian law and Tyrann need play no part in it. This will be convenient for -- " And then he frowned and interrupted himself. He heard the clanging, stepped to the door and kicked the release. "What is happening?" A soldier saluted. "General alarm, sir. Storage compartments." "Fire?" "It is not yet known, sir." Aratap thought to himself, "Great Galaxy!" and stepped back into the room. "Where is Gillbret?" It was the first anyone knew of his absence. T hey found him in the engine room, cowering amid the giant structures, and half-dragged, halfcarried him back to the Commissioner's room. The Commissioner said, dryly. "There is no escape on a ship, my Lord. It did you no good to sound the general alarm. The time of confusion is bound to be limited." He went on, "I think it is enough. We have kept the cruiser you stole, Farrill, my own cruiser, on board ship. It will be used to explore the 'Rebellion World.' We will make for the lamented Autarch's reference points as soon as the Jump can be calculated. This will be an adventure of a sort usually missing in this comfortable generation of ours." There was the sudden thought in his mind of his father in command of a squadron, conquering worlds. He was glad Andros was gone. This adventure would be his alone. #T T hey were separated after that. Artemisia was placed with her father, and Rizzett and Biron were marched off in opposite directions. Gillbret struggled and screamed. "I won't be left alone. I won't be in solitary." Aratap sighed. This man's grandfather had been a great ruler, the history books said. It was degrading to have to watch such a scene. He said, with distaste, "Put my Lord with one of the others." And so Gillbret was put with Biron. There was no speech between them till the coming of spaceship "night" when the lights turned a dim purple. It was bright enough to allow them to be watched through the televiewing system by the guards, shift and shift about, yet dim enough to allow sleep. But Gillbret did not sleep. "Biron," he whispered. "Biron." Biron, roused from a dull semidrowse, said, "What do you want." "Biron, I have done it. It is all right, Biron." Biron said, "Try to sleep, Gil.". But Gillbret insisted. "But I've done it, Biron. Aratap may be smart, but I'm smarter. Isn't that amusing.? You don't have to worry, Biron. Biron, don't worry. I've fixed it." He was shaking Biron again, feverishly. Biron sat up. "What's the matter with you?" "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's all right. But I was the one who fixed it." Gillbret was smiling. It was a sly smile, the smile of a little boy who had done something clever. "What have you fixed?" Biron was on his feet. He seized the other by the shoulders and dragged him upright. "Answer me!" "They found me in the engine room." The words were jerked out. "They thought I was hiding. I wasn't. I sounded the general alarm for the storage room, because I had to be alone, but for just a few minutes. I shorted the hyperatomics." "You what?" "It was easy. It took a minute. And they won't know. I did it cleverly. They won't know until they try to Jump, and 'then all the fuel will be energy in one chain reaction and the ship and us and Aratap and all knowledge of the 'Rebellion World' will be a thin expansion of iron vapor." Biron was backing away, eyes wide. "You did that?" "Yes." Gillbret buried his head in his hands and rocked to and fro. "We'll be dead, Biron. Tm not afraid to die, but not alone. I had to be with someone. I'm glad I'm with you. I want to be with someone when I die. But it won't hurt; it will be so quick." Biron said, "You're mad. We might still have won out!" Gillbret didn't hear him. His ears were filled with his own moans. Biron could only dash to the door. "Guard," he yelled. "Guard!" Were there hours or merely minutes left? Here? T he soldier came clattering down the corridor. "Get back in there!" His voice was sharp. They stood facing one another. There were no doors to the small bottom-level rooms whichdoubled as prison cells, but a' force-field stretched from side to side, top to bottom. Biron could feel it with his hand. There was a resilience to it, like rubber . stretched nearly to its extreme, and then it stopped giving as though the first initial pressure turned it to steel. It tingled Biron's hand, and he knew that though it would stop matter completely, it would be as transparent as space to the energy beam of a neuronic whip. And there was a whip in the guard's hand. Biron said, 'Tve got to see Commissioner Aratap." "Is that what you're making a noise about?" The guard was not in the best of humor; the night watch was unpopular and he was losing at cards. "I'll mention it after lights-on." "It won't wait." Biron felt desperate. "It's important." "It will have to wait. Will you get back, or do you want a bit of the whip?" "Look," said Biron, "the man with me is Gillbret oth Hinriad. He is sick. He may be dying. If a Hinriad dies on a Tyrannian ship because you will not let me speak to the man in authority, you will not have,a good time of it." "What's wrong with him?" "I don't know. Will you be quick or are you tired of life?" The guard mumbled something and went off. Biron watched him as far as he could see in the dim purple. He strained his ears in an attempt to catch the heightened throbbing of the engines as energy concentration climbed to a pre-jump peak, but he heard nothing at all. He strode to Gillbret, seized the man's hair and pulled the head back gently. Eyes stared into his own out of a contorted face. 'There was no recognition in them; only fear. "Who are you?" "It's only me, Biron, How do you feel?" It took time for the words to penetrate. Gillbret said, blankly, "Biron?" Then, with a quiver of life, "Biron! Are they Jumping? Death won't hurt, Biron." Biron let the head drop. No point in anger against Gillbret. But he was writhing in frustration. Why wouldn't they let him speak to Aratap? Why wouldn't they let him out? He found himself at a wall and beat upon it with his fists. If there were a door, he could break it down; if there were bars, he could pull them apart, or drag them out of their sockets, by the Galaxy. But there was a force-field which nothing could damage. He would yell again ! There were footsteps once more He rushed to the open-yet-not-opei door. He could not look out to see who was coming down the corridor. He could only wait. back from the field," he barked. "Step back with your hands in front of you." There was an officer with him. Biron retreated. The other's neuronic whip was on him, unwaveringly. Biron said, '"The other man with you is not Aratap. I want to speak to the Commissioner." The officer said, "If Gillbret oth Hinriad is ill, you don't want to see the Commissioner. You want to see a doctor." The force-field was down, with a dim blue spark showing as contact broke. The officer entered and Biron could see the Medical Group insignia on his uniform. Biron stepped in front of him. "All right, now listen to me. This ship mustn't Jump. The Commissioner is the only one who can see to that, and I must speak to him. Do you understand that. You're an officer. Have him awakened." The doctor put out an arm to brush Biron aside, and Biron batted it away. The doctor cried out sharply and called, "Guard, get this man out of here." T he guard stepped forward and Biron dived. They went thumping down together, and Biron swarmed up along the guard's body, seizing first the shoulder and then the wrist of the arm that was trying to bring its whip down upon him. For a moment, they remained frozen, straining against one another, and then Biron caught motion at the corner of his eye. The medical officer was rushing past them to sound the alarm. Biron's hand, the one not holding the other's whip-wrist, shot out and seized the officer's ankle. The guard writhed nearly free, and the officer kicked out wildly at him, but, with the veins standing out on his neck and temples, Biron pulled desperately with each hand. The officer went down, shouting hoarsely. The guard's whip clattered to the floor with a harsh sound. Biron fell upon it, rolled with it, and came up on his knees and one hand. In his other was the whip, "Not a sound," he gasped. "Not one sound. Drop anything else you've got." The guard, staggering to his feet, his tunic ripped, glared hatred and tossed a short, metal-weighted, plastic club away from himself. 'The doctor was unarmed. Biron gathered up the club. He said, "Sorry. I have nothing to tie and gag you with and no time anyway." The whip flashed dimly once, twice...First the guard and then the doctor stiffened in agonized immobility and dropped solidly, in one piece, legs and arms bent grotesquely out from their bodies in the attitude they had last assumed before the whip struck. was watching with dull, soundless vacuity. "Sorry," said Biron, "but you, too, Gillbret," and the whip flashed a third time. The vacuous expression was frozen solid as Gillbret lay there on his side. The force-field was still down and Biron stepped out into the corridor. It was empty. Only the watch and the night-details would be up. There would be no time to try to locate Aratap. It would have to be straight for the engine room. He set off toward the bow. A man in engineer's workclothes hurried past him. "When's the next Jump?" called out Biron. "About half an hour," the engineer returned over his shoulder. "Engine room straight ahead?" "And up the ramp." The man turned suddenly. "Who are you?" Biron did not bother to answer. The whip flared a fourth time. He stepped over the body and went on. Half an hour left. He heard the noise of men as he sped up the steep ramp. 'The light ahead was white, not purple. He hesitated. Then he put the whip into his pocket. They would be busy. Tliere would be no reason for them to suspect him. He stepped in quickly. The men were pigmies scurrying about the huge matter-energy converters. 'The room glared with dials; a hundred thousand eyes staring their information out to all who would look. A ship this size, one almost in the class of a large passenger liner, was considerably different from the tiny Tyrannian cruiser he had been used to. There the engines had been all but automatic. Here they were large enough to power a city, and required considerable supervision. He was on a railed balcony that circled the engine room. In one corner there was a small room in which two men handled computers with flying fingers. He hurried in that direction, while engineers passed him without looking at him. He stepped through the door. The two at the computers looked at him. "What's up?" one, a lieutenant, said. "What are you doing here? Get back to your post." Biron said, "The hyperatomics have been shorted. 'They've got to be repaired." "Hold on," said the second. "I've seen this man. He's one of the prisoners. Hold him, Lancy." He jumped up and was making his way out the other door. Biron hurdled the desk and the computer, seized the belt of the controlman's tunic and pulled him backward. "Correct," he said. "I'm one of the prisoners. I'm Biron of Widemos. But what I say is true. The hyperatomics are shorted. Have them inspected, if you don't believe me." The lieutenant found himself staring at a neuronic whip. He said, carefully, "It can't be done, sir, without orders from the Officer of the Day, or from the Commissioner. It would mean changing the Jump calculations and delaying us for hours." "Get the authority then. Get the ' Commissioner." "May I use the communicator?" "Hurry." The. lieutenant's arm reached out for the flaring mouthpiece of the communicator, and, halfway there, plummeted down hard upon the row of knobs at one end of his desk. Bells clamored in every corner of the ship. Biron's club was too late. It came down hard upon the lieutenant's wrist. The lieutenant snatched it away, moaning over it, but the warning signals were sounding. G uards were rocketing in upon the balcony through every entrance. Biron slammed out of the control room, looked in either direction, then hopped the railing. He plummeted down, landing with knees bent, and rolled. He rolled as rapidly as he could to prevent setting himself up as a target. He heard the soft hissing of a needle-gun near his ear, and then he was in the shadow of one of the engines. He stood up in a crouch, huddling beneath its curve. His right leg was a stabbing pain. Gravity was high near the ship's hull and the drop had been a long one; he had sprained his knee badly. It meant that there would be no more chase. If he won out, it was to be from where he stood. He shouted, "Hold your fire! I am unarmed." First the club and then the whip he had taken from the guard went spinning toward the center of the engine room. They lay there in hard impotence and plain view. "The hyperatomics are shorted. A Jump will mean the death of us all. I ask only that you check the motors. You wdll lose a few hours, perhaps, if I am W'rong. You will save your lives if I am right." Someone called, "Go down there and get him." Biron yelled; "Will you sell your lives rather than listen?" He heard the cautious sound of many feet, and shrank back. Then there was a frictional sound above. A soldier was sliding down the engine toward him, hugging its faintly warm skin as though it were a bride. Biron waited. He could still use his arms. #  And then the voice came, from above, unnaturally loud, penetrating every corner of the huge room. It said, "Back to your places. Halt preparations for the Jump. Check the hyperatomics." It was Aratap, speaking through the public address system. The order then came, "Bring the young man to me." Biron allowed himself to be taken. There were two soldiers on each side, holding him as though they expected him to explode. He tried to force himself to walk naturally, but he was limping in pain. A ratap was only in semi-dress. His eyes seemed different; faded, peering, unfocused. It occurred to Biron that the man wore contact lenses. Aratap said, "You have created quite a stir, Farrill." "It was necessary to save our lives. Send these guards away. As long as the engines are being investigated, there's nothing more I intend doing." "They will stay just a while. At least, until I hear from my enginemen." They waited, silently, as the minutes dragged on, and then there was the flash of red upon the frosted-glass circle above the glowing lettering that read "Engine Room." Aratap opened contact. "Make your report!" The words that came were crisp and hurried. "Hyperatomics on the C Bank completely shorted. Repairs under way." Aratap said, "Have Jump recalculated for plus six hours." He turned to Biron coolly. "You were right." He gestured. The guards saluted, turned on their heels, and left one by one with a smooth precision. Aratap said, "The details, please." "Gillbret oth Hinriad, during his stay in the engine room, thought the shorting to be a good idea. The man is not responsible for his actions and must not be punished for it." Aratap nodded. "He has not been considered responsible for years. That portion of the events will remain between you and me only. However, my interest and curiosity are aroused by your reasons for preventing the destruction of the ship. You are surely not afraid to die in a good cause." "There is no cause," said Biron. "There is no 'Rebellion World.' I have told you so already and I repeat it. Lingane was the center of revolt and that has been checked. I was interested only in tracking down my father's' murderer, the lady Artemisia only in escaping an Unwanted marriage. As for Gillbret, he is mad." "Yet the Autarch believed in the existence of this mysterious planet. Surely, he gave me the co-ordinates of something." "His belief is based on a madman's dream. Gillbret dreamed something twenty years ago. Using that as a basis, the Autarch calculated five possible planets as the site of this dream-world. It is all nonsense." The Commissioner said, "And yet something disturbs me." "What?" "You are working so hard to persuade me. Surely, I will find all this out for myself once I have made the Jump. It is not impossible that, in desperation, one of you might endanger the ship and the other save it as a complicated method for convincing me that I need look no farther for the 'Rebellion World.' I would say to myself: If there were really such a world, young Farrill would have let the ship vaporize, for he is a young man and romantically capable of dying what he would consider a hero's death. Since he has risked his life to prevent that happening Gillbret is mad, there is no 'Rebellion World' and I will return without further searching. Am I too complicated for you?" "No. I understand you." "And since you have saved our lives, you willreceive appropriate consideration in the Khan's Court. You will have saved your life and your cause. No, young sir, I am not quite so ready to believe the obvious. We will still make the Jump." "I have no objections," said Biron. "You are cool," said Aratap. "It is a pity you were not born one of us." He meant it as ii compliment. "We'll take you back to your cell now, and replace the force-field. A simple precaution." HE guard that Biron had knocked out was no longer there when they returned to the prison room, but the doctor was. He was bending over the still unconscious form of Gillbret. Aratap said, "Is he still under?" At his voice, the doctor jumped up. "The effects of the whip have worn off. Commissioner, but the man is not young and has been under a strain. I don't know if he wHl recover." Biron felt horror fill him. He dropped to his knees, disregarding the wrenching pain, and reached out a hand to touch Gillbret's shoulder gently. "Gil," he whispered. He watched the other's damp, white face anxiously. "Out of the way, man." The Medical Officer was scowling at him. He removed the black medical wallet from an inner pocket. "At least the hypodermics aren't broken," he grumbled. He leaned over Gillbret, the hypodermic, filled with its colorless fluid, poised. It sank deep, and the plunger pressed inward automatically, The doctor tossed it aside and they waited. Gillbret's eyes flickered, then opened. For a while, they stared unseeingly. When he spoke finally, his voice was a whisper. "I can't see, Biron. I can't see." Biron leaned close again. "It's all right, Gil. Just rest." "I don't want to." He tried to struggle upright. "Biron, when are they Jumping." "Soon, soon!" ."Stay with me, then. I don't want to die alone." His fingers clutched feebly, and then relaxed. His head lolled backward. The doctor stooped, then straightened, "We were too late." Tears stung at Biron's eyelids. "I'm sorry, Gil," he said. "You didn't know. You didn't understand." T hey were bard hours for Biron. Aratap had refused to allow him to attend the ceremonies involved in the burial of a body at space. Somewhere in the ship, he knew, Gillbrefs body would be blasted in an atomic furnace and then exhausted into space, where its atoms might mingle forever with the thin wisps of interstellar matter. Artemisia and Hinrik would be there. Would they understand? Would she understand that he had done only what he had to do? The doctor had injected the cartilaginous extract that would hasten the healing of Biron's torn ligaments and already the pain in his knee were barely noticeable, but, then, that was only physical pain, anyway. Given a strong will, it could be ignored. He felt the inner disturbance that meant the ship had Jumped and then the worst time came. Earlier he had thought his own analysis to be correct. It had to be. But what if he were wrong? What if they were now at the very heart of rebellion? The information would go streaking back to Tyrann and the armada would gather. And he himself would die knowing that he might have saved the rebellion; but had risked death to ruin it. It was during that dark time that he thought of the document again. 'The document he had once failed to get. Strange the way the notion of the document came and went. It would be mentioned and then forgotten. There was a mad, intensive search for a "Rebellion World" and yet no search at all for the mysterious vanished document. Was the emphasis being misplaced ? It occurred to Biron then that the "Rebellion World" with a single ship. What was that confidence he had? Could he dare a planet with a ship? The Autarch had said the document had vanished years before, but then who had it? The Tyranni? Did they have a document the secret of which would allow one ship to destroy a world? If that were true, it would no longer matter where the "Rebdlion World" was, or if it existed at all. Time passed and finally Aratap entered. Biron got to his feet. Aratap said, "We have reached the star in question. There is a star there. The co-ordinates given us by the Autarch were correct." "Well.?" "But there is no need to inspect it for planets. The star, I am told by my astrogators, was a nova less planets then, they were destroyed. It is a white dwarf now. It can have no planets." Biron stared. "Then -- " Aratap said, "So you are right. There is no 'Rebellion World.' " There! A ll of Aratap's philosophy could not completely wipe out the feeling of regret within him. For a while, he had not been himself, but his father over again. He, too, these last weeks had been leading a squadron of ships against the enemies of the Khan. But these were degenerate days and where there might have been a "Rebellion World," there was none. There were no enemies of the Khan after all; no worlds to gain. He remained only a Commissioner, a politician, still condemned to the soothing of little troubles. No more. Yet regret was a useless emotion. It accomplished nothing. He sat down and motioned Biron into a seat as well. "I want to talk to you."The young man was staring solemnly at him, and Aratap found himself somewhat amazed that they had met first less than a month ago. The boy was older now, far more than a montli older, and he had lost his fear. Aratap thought to himself, "I am growing completely decadent. How many of us are beginning to like individuals among our subjects? How many of us wish them well?" He said, "I am going to release the Director and his daughter. Naturally, it is the politically intelligent thing to do. In fact, it is politically inevitable. I think, though, that I will release them now and send them back, on the Remorseless. Would you care to pilot them?" Biron said, "Are you freeing me?" "Yes." "Why?" "You saved my ship; and my life as well." "I doubt that personal gratitude would influence your actions in matters of state." Aratap was within a hair of laughing outright. He did like the boy. "Then I #I give you another reason. As long as I was tracking a giant conspiracy against the Khan, you were dangerous. When that giant conspiracy failed to materialize; when all I had was a Linganian cabal of which the leader is dead; you were no longer dangerous. In fact, it would be dangerous to try either you or the Linganian captives. "The trials would be in Linganian courts and therefore not under our full control. They would inevitably involve discussion of the so-called 'Rebellion World.' And though there is none, half the subjects of Tyrann would have a concept to rally round, a reason for revolt, a hope for the future. The Tyranni realm would not be free of rebellion this side of a century." J"It will not be exactly freedom since none of you are exactly loyal. We will deal with Lingane in our own way, and the next Autarch will find himself bound by closer ties to the Khan. It will be no longer an 'Associated Power' and trials involving Linganians will not necessarily be tried in Linganian courts hereafter. Those involved in the conspiracy, including those in our hands now, will be exiled to worlds nearer Tyrann where they will be fairly harmless. You, for example, cannot return to Nephelos and need not expect to be restored to your Ranchy. You will stay on Rhodia, along with Colonel Rizzett." "Good enough," said Biron, "but what of the lady Artemisia's marriage to that -- nobleman." "You wish it stopped?" "You know that we would like to marry each other. You said once there might be some way of stopping the Tyranni affair." "At the time I said that I was trying to accomplish something. What is the old saying? 'The lies of lovers and diplomats shall be forgiven them.' " "But there is a way. Commissioner. It need only be pointed out to the Khan that when a powerful courtier would marry into an important subject family, it may be motives of ambition that lead him on. A revolt may be led by an ambitious Tyrannian as easily as by an ambitious Linganian." Aratap did laugh this time. "You reason like one of us. But it wouldn't work. Would you want my advice?" "What would it be?" "Marry her yourself, quickly. A thing once done would be difficult to undo under the circumstances. We would have to find another woman for Pohang." Biron hesitated. Then he put out a hand. "Thank you, sir." Aratap took it. "I don't like Pohang particularly, anyway. Still, there is one thing , further for you to remember. Don't let ambition mislead you. Though you marry the Director's daughter, you will never yourself be Director. You are not the type." ing Remorseless in the visiplate and was glad the decision had been made. Tlie young man was free; a message was already on its way to Tyrann through the sub-ether. Major Andros would undoubtedly swell into apoplexy, and there would undoubtedly be men at court to demand his recall as Commissioner. If necessary, he would travel to Tyrann. Somehow he would see the Khan and make him listen. Given all the facts, the King of Kings would see plainly that no other course of action was possible, and thereafter Aratap could defy any possible combination of enemies. The Remorseless was only a gleaming dot now, scarcely distinguishable from the stars that were beginning to surround it now that they wereemerging from the Nebula. Rizzett watched the shrinking Tyrannian flagship in the visiplate. He said, "So the man let us go! You know, if the Tyranni were all like him, damned if I wouldn't join their fleet. It upsets me in a way. I have definite notions of what Tyranni are like, and he doesn't fit. Do you suppose he can hear what we say?" Biron set the automatic controls and swiveled in the pilot's seat. "Of course not. He can follow us Now in permanent book form... m The Stars, Like Dust. The Galaxy serial about a courageous idealist and a beautiful girl in a stolen space ship -- caught in a Galactic war to set a people free, and, incidentally, to save themselves! # The Illustrated Man. Only Ray Bradbury, "the biggest name in science Action," could conceive and tell what happened in the curious fragments of the future tattooed on the body of the illustrated man. By the author of Te Martian Chronicles. # through hyper-space as he did before, but I don't think he can put a spy beam on us. You remember that when he first captured us, all he knew about us was' what he overheard on the fourth planet. No more." Artemisia stepped into the pilot room, her finger on her lips. "Not too loudly," she said. "I think he's sleeping now. It won't be long before we reach Rhodia, will it, Biron." "We can do it in one Jump, Arta. Aratap had it calculated for us." Rizzett said, "I've got to wash my hands." They watched him leave, and then she was in Biron's arms. He kissed her on forehead and eyes, then found her lips as his arms tensed about her. The kiss came to a lingering and breathless end. She said, "I love you very much," and he said, "I love you more than I can say." The conversation that followed was both as unoriginal as that and as satisfying. Biron said after a while, "Will he marry us before we land?" Artemisia frowned a little. "I tried to explain that he's Director and captain of the ship and that there are no Tyranni here. I don't know, though; he's quite upset. After he's rested. I'll try again." Biron laughed softly. "Don't worry. He'll be persuaded." Rizzett's footsteps were noisy as he returned. He said, "I wish we still had the trailer." Biron said, "We'll be on Rhodia in a matter of hours. We'll be Jumping soon." "I know." Rizzett scowled. "And we'll stay on Rhodia till we die. Not that I'm complaining overloud; I'm glad I'm alive. But it's a silly end to it all."L ing," said Biron, softly. Rizzett looked up. "You mean we can start all over? No, I don't think so. You can, perhaps, but not I. I'm too old and there's nothing left for me. Lingane will be dragged into line and I'll never see it again. That bothers me most of all, I think. I was born there and lived there all my life. I won't be but half a man anywhere else. You're young; you'll forget Nephelos." "There's more to life than a home planet, Tedor. It's been our great shortcoming in the past centuries that we've been unable to recognize that fact. All planets are our home planets." "Maybe. I don't know. If there had been a 'Rebellion World,' why, then, it might have been so." "There is a 'Rebellion World,' Tedor." Rizzett said, sharply, "I'm in no mood for that, Biron." "It's the truth. There is such a world and I know its location. I might have known it weeks ago, and so might anyone in our party. The facts were all there. They were knocking at my mind without being able to get in until that moment on the fourth planet when you and I had beaten down Jonti. Do you remember him standing there, saying that we would never find the fifth planet, withouthis help? Do you remember his words?" "Exactly? No." "I think I do. He said, 'There is an average of seventy cubic light years per star. If you work by trial and error, without me, the odds are one against your coming within a It was at that moment, I think, that the facts got into my mind. I could feel the click." "Nothing clicks in my mind," objected Rizzett. "Suppose you explain a bit." Artemisia said, "I don't know what you mean, Biron." "Don't you see that it is exactly those odds which Gillbret is supposed to have defeated? You remember his story. The meteor hit, deflected his ship's course, and at the end of its Jumps, it was actually within a stellar system. That could have happened only by an incredible coincidence."L and there is no 'Rebellion World'." "Unless there is a condition under which the odds against landing within a stellar system are less incredible," said Biron, "and there is The Best Way to Get Started Develop the working habit under the personal direction of an experienced writer or editor, Jvate school completely owned and operated by successful editors and writers, offers a series of fascinating assignments designed to get you started and keep you writing. They are sent regularly to your home, where you work on them in spare time. They give you a chance to polish your style the way professional writers polished theirs -- by writing continually. You may concentrate on either short stoi'y or article work, advancing as rapidly as your ability warrants. Every assignment you submit is returned with detailed criticism. Writers themselves active in the magazine field help you find youi' best outlets, often suggest markets you might never have heard of. Send the coupon today for the free catalog which tells you how you may get started toward a writing career. The Magazine Institute, Inc, .# Kockefeller Plaza Kockefeller Center, New York #, N.Y. The Magazine Institute, Inc. Dept. #-C, r# Rockefeller Plaza Rockefeller Center, New York #, N.Y. Please send your free catalog, without obligation, to: Name Address n Check here if eligible under G.I. Bill Inquirieg confiilentiitl. o salegnian tcUl call  This course approved for veterans' training such a condition. In fact, there is one set of circumstances, and only one, under which he must have reached a system. It would have been inevitable." "Well.?" "You remember the Autarch's reasoning. The engines of Gillbret's ship were not interfered with, so the power of the hyperatomic thrusts -- or, in other words, the length of the Jumps -- remained unchanged. Only their direction was changed in such a way that one of five stars in a cosmically vast area of the Nebula was reached. It was an interpretation which, on the very face of it, was improbable." "But the alternative." "Why, that neitherpower nor direction was altered. There is no real reason to suppose the direction of drive to have been interfered with. That was only assumption. What if the ship had simply followed its original course. It had been aimed at a stellar system; therefore it ended in a stellar system. The matter of odds doesn't enter." "But the stellar system it was aimed at -- " "Was that of Rhodia. So he went to Rhodia. It's so obvious that it's difficult to grasp." Artemisia said, "But then the 'Rebellion World' must be at home. That's impossible." "Why impossible? It is somewhere in the Rhodian system. There are two ways of hiding an object. You can put it where no one can find it, as, for instance, within the Horsehead Nebula. Or else you can put it where no one would ever think of looking, right in front of their eyes. "Consider what happened to Gillbret after landing on the 'Rebellion World.' He was returned to Rhodia alive. His theory was that this was in order to prevent a Tyranni search for the ship which might come dangerously close to the 'World' itself. But then why was he kept alive? If the ship had been returned with Gillbret dead, the same purpose would have been accomplished and there would have been no chance of Gillbret's talking, as, eventually, he did. "Again that can only be explained by supposing the 'Rebellion World' to be within the Rhodian system. Gillbret was a Hinriad and where else would there be such respect for the life of a Hinriad but in Rhodia?" spasmodically. "But if what you say is true, Biron, then father is in terrible danger." "And has been for twenty years," agraed Biron. "But perhaps not in the manner you think. Gillbret once told me how difficult it was to pretend to be a dilletante, to pretend so hard that one had to live the part even with friends and even when alone. Of course, with him, poor fellow, it was largely selfdramatization. He didn't really act. His real self came out easily enough with you, Arta. It showed to the Autarch. He even found it necessary to show it to me on fairly short acquaintance. "But it is possible, I suppose, to really live such a life completely, if your reasons are sufficiently important. A man might live a lie see her miserably married rather than risk a life-work that depended on complete Tyranni trust; be willing to seem half a madman -- " Artemisia said, huskily, "You can't mean what you're saying." "There is no other meaning possible, Arta. He has been Director over twenty years. In that time, Rhodia has been continually strengthened by territory granted it by the Tyranni, because they felt it would be safe with him. For twenty years, he has organized rebellion without interference from them, because he was so obviously harmless." "You're guessing, Biron," said Rizzett, "and this kind of guess is as dangerous as the ones we've made before." Biron said, "This is no guess. I told Jonti in that last discussion of ours that he, not the Director, must have been the traitor who murdered my father -- because my father would never have been foolish Any one of these wonderful books. A sensational offer from I . # . #. #. #. # . #. # . # . # . #I . # . #. #. #. #. #. # , #I . # . #. G. O. Smith # G. O. Smith # De Camp # Sturgeon .# laeinster #  Smith # s Smith # Vogt # Delrey # De Camp # I enclose . No C. #. D.  enough to trust the Director with any incriminating information. But the point is -- and I knew it at the time -- that this was just what my father did. Gillbret learned of Jonti's conspiratorial role through what he overheard in the discussions between my father and the Director. There is no other way in which he could have learned it. "But a stick points both ways. We thought my father was working with Jonti and trying to enlist the support of the Director. Why is it not equally probable, or even more probable, that he was working with the Director -- and that his role within Jonti's organization was as an agent of the 'Rebellion World,' attempting to prevent a premature explosion on Lingane that would ruin two decades of careful planning? "Why do you suppose it seemed so important to me to save Aratap's ship, when Gillbret shorted the motors? It wasn't for myself. I didn't, at the time, think Aratap would free me, no matter what. It wasn't even for you, Arta. It was to save the Director. He was the important man among us. Poor Gillbret didn't understand that." sorry. I just can't make myself believe all that." It was a new voice that spoke. "You may as well. It is true." The Director was standing just outside the door, tall and somber-eyed. It was his voice and yet not quite his voice, for it was crisp and sure of itself. Artemisia ran to him. "Father! Biron says -- " "I heard what Biron said." He was stroking her hair. "And it is true. I would een have let your marriage take place," She stepped back from him, almost in embarrassment. "You sound so different. You sound almost as if -- " ,"As if I weren't your father." He said it sadly. "It will not be for long, Arta. When we are back on Rhodia, I will be as you knew me and you must accept me so." Rizzett stared at him, his usually ruddy complexion as gray as his hair. Biron was holding his breath. Hinrik said, "Come here, Biron." He placed a hand on Biron's shoulder. "There was a time, young man, when I was ready to sacrifice your life. The time may come again in the future. Until a certain day, I can protect neither of you. I can be nothing but what I have always seemed. Do you understand that?" Each nodded. "Unfortunately," said Hinrik, "damage has been done. Twenty years ago, I was not as hardened to my role as I am today. I should have ordered Gillbret killed, but I could not. Because I did not, it is now known that there is a 'Rebellion World' and I am its leader." "Only we know that," said Biron. #  Hinrik smiled bitterly. "You think that because you are young. Do you think Aratap is less intelligent than yourself. The reasoning by which you determined the location and leadership of the 'Rebellion World' is based on facts known to him, and he can reason as well as you. It is merely that he is older, more cautious, that he has grave responsibilities. He must be certain. "Do you think he released you out of sentiment. I believe that you have been freed now for the same reason you were freed once before; simply that you might lead him farther along the path that leads to me." leave Rhodia." "No. That would be fatal. There would seem no reason for you to leave, save the true one. Stay with me and they will remain uncertain. My plans are nearly completed. One more year, perhaps less." "But, Director, there are factors you may not be aware of. There is the matter of the document -- " "For which your father was searching ?" "Yes." "Your father, my boy, did not know all there was to know. It is not safe to have anyone in possession of all the facts. The old Rancher discovered the existence of the document independently in the references to it in my old library. I'll give him credit; he recognized its significance. But if he had consulted me, I would have told him it was no longer on Earth." "That's exactly it, sir. I am certain the Tyranni have it." "Certainly not. I have it. I've had it for twenty years. It was what started the 'Rebellion World,' for it was . only when I had it that I knew we could hold our winnings once we had won." "It is a weapon, then." "It is the strongest weapon in the universe. It will destroy the Tyranni and us alike, but will save the Nebular Kingdoms. Without it, we could defeat the Tyranni perhaps, but we would only have exchanged one feudal despotism for another and, as the Tyranni are plotted against, we would be plotted against. We and they must both be delivered into the ashcan of outmoded political systems. 'The time for maturity has come as it once came on the planet Earth, and there will be a new kind of government, a kind that has never yet been tried in the Galaxy. There will be no Khans, nor Autarchs, Directors, nor Ranchers." "In the name of Space," roared Rizzett, "what will there be." "People." "People? How can they govern? There must be some one person to make decisions." "There is a way. The blueprint I have dealt with a small section of one planet, but it can be adapted to #  all the Galaxy." The Director smiled. "Come, children, I may as well marry you. It can do little more harm now." Biron's hand tightly enclosed Artemisia's and she was smiling at him. They felt the queer, inward twinge as the Remorseless made its single pre-calculated Jump. Biron said, "Before you start, sir, will you tell me something about the blueprint you mention, so that my curiosity will be satisfied and I can keep my mind on Arta.?" Artemisia laughed and said, "You had better do it, father. I couldn't bear an abstracted groom." Hinrik smiled. "I know the document by heart. Listen to me." And with Rhodia's sun bright on the visiplate, Hinrik began with those words that were older, far older, than the civilization of any of the planets in the Galaxy save one; " 'We, the people of the United States' -- but substitute the United Galaxy -- 'in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, infor the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America...' " Every story in the April issue will be complete. The exact lineup is subject to space requirements, of course. If there uo   has ever produced!" anthology." L "The first fully adult science fiction magazine ! have ever held in my hands!" C, "Impossible... every issue is better than the previous ones!" in science fiction." C, "The most dignified and mature science fiction magazine today!"    Yes, these have been good issues.   ' The ones coming up are going to be even better.    No, don't take our word for it. For # even more unforgettable issues, send # to...       by Arthur C. Clarke  Written by one of England's foremost scientistauthors, this is perhaps the most humanly convincing, scientifically valid account of hov interplanetary flight will be achieved that has ever been published. Hr You'll find here no wicked wenches seducing secrets from innocent engineers... no enemy sabotage attempts... no gadgeteers putting together items from the corner hardware store to be the first to conquer space... or any of the other machine-made devices of juvenile science fiction. Hr It's real because it uses no phony melodrama to heighten the enormous drama of the concerted effort to win humanity's greatest victory. If you don't live this book, you're just not living. Hr And... it has never been published before in any the price remains... # at your newsstand # a year (six issues) by subscription Sorry we can't # ive yon "Needle" by Hal Clement as announced. See editorial in February #I issue APRIL #I GALAXY Science Fiction galaxy galaxy Editor-in-chief April, #I Vol. #, No. I Art Director Advertising Manager by Poul Anderson # by Walt Sheldon # Cover by illustrating by C. M. Kornbluth # is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. #tf by Fritz Leiber # per copy. Subscriptions : (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President : George A. Gogniat. VicePresident: Marco Lombi. by Peter Philips I I # Secretary and Treasurer: Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed by H. L. Gold I stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and by Groff Conklin # actual persons is coincidental. Next issue at your newsstand first week in April Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Treasurer's Report the unfortunate fact that holding price lines is the responsibility of an entire economy and not just its individual entrepreneurs. terprises, and, in fact, all citizens, finds itself caught in an alarming tidal flood of rising costs. The problem can be solved in only one of two ways:  Cut expenses proportionately. In mean reducing story rates, lowering the quality of cover and inside paper stock, going back to line engraving instead of the more costly halftone process, making it merely another science fiction magazine.  Raise the price proportionately. This would allow us to retain all, our features and continue to improve from issue to issue. Since it is impossible to get a readers' vote in time to cope with the immediate situation, we have chosen to raise the price, rather than compromise on quality. This is not, however, an inflexible decision. If your letters and our circulation figures show that you do not approve of this choice, we will change it. My own reluctance to tamper with quality is based partly on the contents of this issue, mostly on the excellent items coming up soon. and still more innovations planned. The present one introduces the policy of an issue of complete stories between serials. Of the six items, at least three probably will be selected for book publication -- this has been the average for the bids are still coming in ! What would please us particularly would be the reprinting of every story in every issue; the puband the additional income good for the writers. But that isn't likely. There isn't room enough for the number of anthologies needed to absorb the # or so stories we print a year. In the matter of novels, the picture is entirely different. Every book-length we have bought or contracted for has been signed for hard-cover publication. Next month's is Mars Child by Cyril Judd, three of the most compellingly convincing installments science fiction has ever produced. Cyril Judd, by the way, is the joint name of C. M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril and was chosen only for wieldiness, not secrecy. The cover is another superb Bonestell, reproduced magnificently on our splendid and very expensive Kromekote cover stock. Would you settle for less? Science and Fantasy Fiction: #. The current issue of "New Worlds" -- British Science Fiction Magazine #. The current issue of "Science-Fantasy" -- British Science Fiction Magazine. #. Princess of the Atom, by Ray Cummings -- Pocket Book Edition #. Into Plutonion Depths, by Stanton A. Coblentz -- Pocket Book Edition #. The Shadow Girl, by Ray Cummings (Cloth bound) #. The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells -- De luxe Boxed Edition -- Illustrated in Color #. Pilgrims Through Space  Time, by J. O. Bailey. History of Science Fiction #. The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov # #. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov # #. Solution T-#, by Theodora Du Bois # #. Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham # #. 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The Big Book of Science Fiction. Ed. by Groff Conklin (Anthology) # #. The Moon Is Hell ! ; The Elder Gods, by J. W. Campbell, Jr. (in I vol.) # #. The Incredible Planet, by J. W. Campbell, Jr # #. Dwellers in the Mirage, by A. Merritt # #. The Ship of Ishtar, by A. Merritt... # #. A Gnome There Was  Others, by Lewis Padgett # #. Galactic Patrol, by E. E. Smith # #. First Lensman, by E. E. Smith # #. Triplanetary, by E. E. Smith # #. Skylark of Space, by E. E. Smith... # #. Skylark Three, by E. E. Smith # #. Skylark of Valeron, by E. E. Smith # # Voyage of the Space Beagle, by A. E. Van Vogt # #. House That Stood Still, by A. E. Van Vogt  # #. Space cn My Hands, by Fredric Brown # #. Kinsman of the Dragon, by Stanley Mullen -- . # #. Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells. (Over # pages.) # #. The Tion Star, by John Tame # And many more-! We carry a full line of all current American and British Science Fiction, as well as a huge stock of "out-of-print" items. Back issues of Science Fiction magazines on hand at all times. Drop in and pay us a personal visit! Open Monday thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. (Open Wednesday until #:# P.M. Remit by Check or Money Order. (No C O. D. orders accepted.) Adventure is relative to one's previous experience. Sometimes, in fact, you can't even be sure you're having or not having one! T O BE given paid-up leisure and find yourself unable to create is unpleasant for any artist. To be stranded in a cluster of desert cabins with a dozen lonely people in the same predicament only makes it worse. So Tom Dorset was understandably irked with himself and the Tosker-Brown Vacation Fellowships as he climbed with the sun into the valley of red stones. He accepted the chafing of his camera strap against his shoulder as the nagging of conscience. He agreed with the disparaging hisses of the grains of sand rutched by his sneakers, and he wished that the occasional breezes, which faintly echoed the same criticisms, could blow him into a friendlier, less jealous age. He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow through space, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may be strong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for short distances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up is almost always whirled far into the future or past. This has happened to people. There was Ambrose Bierce, who walked out of America and existence, and there are thousands of others who have disappeared without a trace, though many of these may not have been caught up by time tornadoes and I do not know if a time gale blew across the deck of the Marie Celeste. Sometimes a time wind is playful, snatching up an object, sporting with it for a season and then returning it unharmed to its original place. Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without realizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that it can ripple only the mind. A very few time winds are like the monsoon, blowing at fixed intervals, first in one direction, then the other. Such a time wind blows near a balancing rock in a valley of red stones in the American Southwest. Every morning at ten o'clock, it blows a hundred years into the future; every afternoon at two, it blows a hundred years into the past. Quite a number of people have unwittingly seen time winds in operation. There are misty spots on the sea's horizon and wavery patches over desert sands. There are mirages and will o' the wisps and ice blinks. And there are dust devils, such as Tom Dorset walked into near the balancing rock. It seemed to him no more than a spiteful upgust of sand, against which he closed his eyes until the warm granules stopped peppering the lids. He opened them to see the balancing rock had silently fallen and lay a quarter buried -- no, that couldn't be, he told himself instantly. He had been preoccupied; he must have passed the balancing rock and held its image in his mind. was quite shaken. The strap of his camera slipped slowly down his arm without his feeling it. And just then there stepped around the giant bobbin of the rock an extraordinarily pretty girl with hair the same pinkish copper color. She was barefoot and wearing a pale blue playsuit rather like a Grecian tunic. But most important, as she stood there toeing his rough shadow in the sand, there was a complete naturalness about her, an absence of sharp edges, as if her personality had weathered without aging, just as the valley seemed to have taken another step toward eternity in the space of an instant. She must have assumed something of the same gentleness in him, for her faint surprise faded and she asked him, as easily as if he were a friend of five years' standing, "Tell now, do you think a woman can love just one man? All her life? And a man just one woman?" Tom Dorset made a dazed sound. His mind searched wildly. "I do," she said, looking at him as calmly as at a mountain. "I think a man and woman can be each other's world, like Tristan and Isolde or Frederic and Catherine. Those old authors were wise. I don't see why on earth a girl has to spread her love around, no matter how enriching the experiences may be." "You know, I agree with you," Tom said, thinking he'd caught her idea -- it was impossible not to catch her casualness. "I think there's something cheap about the way everybody's supposed to run after sex these days." "I don't mean that exactly. Tenderness is beautiful, but -- " She pouted. "A big family can be vastly crushing. I wanted to declare today a holiday, but they outvoted me. Jock said it didn't chime with our mood cycles. But I was angry with them, so I put on my clothes -- " "Put on -- '?" . "To make it a holiday," she explained bafflingly. "And I walked here for a tantrum." She stepped out of Tom's shadow and hopped back. "Ow, the sand's getting hot," she said, rubbing the grains from the pale and uncramped toes. "You go barefoot a lot?" Tom guessed. "No, mostly digitals," she replied and took something shimmering from a pocket at her hip and drew it on her foot. It was a high-ankled, transparent mocassin with five separate toes. She zipped it shut with the speed of a card trick, then similarly gloved the other foot. Again the metal-edged slit down the front seemed to close itself. "I'm behind on the fashions," Tom said, curious. They were walking side by side now, the way she'd come and he'd been going. "How does that zipper work?" "Magnetic. They're on all my clothes. Very simple." She parted her tunic to the waist, then let it zip together. "Clever," Tom remarked with a gulp. There seemed no limits to this girl's naturalness. "I see you're a button man," she said. "You actually believe it's possible for a man and woman to love just each other?" H IS chuckle was bitter. He was thinking of Elinore Murphy at Tosker-Brown and a bit about cold-faced Miss Tosker herself. "I sometimes wonder if it's possible for anyone to love anyone." "You haven't met the right girls," she said. "Girl," he corrected. She grinned at him. "You'll make me think you really are a monogamist. What group do you come from?" "Let's not talk about that," he go knowing how she'd guessed he was from an art group, if he could be spared talking about the Vacation Fellowships and those nervous little cabins. "My group's very nice on the whole," the girl said, "but at times they can be nefandously exasperating. Jock's the worst, quietly guiding the rest of us like an analyst. How I loathe that man ! But Larry's almost as bad, with his shame-faced bumptiousness, as Jf we'd all sneaked off on a joyride to Venus. And there's Jokichi at the opposite extreme, forever scared he won't distribute his affection equally, dividing it up into mean little packets like candy for jealous children who would scream if they got one chewy less. And then there's Sasha and Ernest -- " "Who are you talking about?" Tom asked. "My husbands." She shook her head dolefully. "To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian." Tom's mind backtracked frantically, searching all conversations at Tosker-Brown for gossip about cultists in the neighborhood. It found nothing and embarked on a wider search. There were the Mormons (was that the word that had sounded like Martian?) but it wasn't the Mormon husbands who were plural. And then there was Oneida (weren't husbands and wives both plural there?) but that was #th century New England. "Five husbands?" he repeated. She nodded. He went on, "Do you mean to say five men have got you alone somewhere up here?" "To be sure not," she replied. "There are my kwives." "Kwives?" "Co-wives," she said more slowly. "They can be fascinerously exasperating, too." T OM'S mind did some more searching. "And yet you believe in monogamy?" She smiled. "Only when I'm having tantrums. It was civilized of you to agree with me." "But I actually do believe in monogamy," he protested. She gave his hand a little squeeze. "You are nice, but let's rush now. I've finished my tantrum and I want you to meet my group. You can fresh yourself with us." As they hurried across the heated sands, Tom Dorset felt for the first time a twinge of uneasiness. There was something about this girl, more than her strange clothes and the odd words she used now and then, something almost -- though ghosts don't wear digitals -- spectral. They scrambled up a little rise, digging their footgear into the sand, until they stood on a long flat. And there, serpentining around two great clumps of rock, was a many-windowed adobe ranch house with a roof like fresh soot. "Oh, they've put on their clothes," his companion exclaimed with pleasure. "They've decided to make it a holiday after all." Tom spotted a beard in the group swarming out to meet them. Its cultish look gave him a momentary feeling of superiority, followed by an equally momentary apprehension -- the five husbands were certainly husky. Then both feelings were swallowed up in the swirl of introduction. He told his own name, found that his companion's was Lois Wolver, then smiling faces began to bob toward his, his hands were shaken, his cheeks were kissed, he was even spun around like blind man's buff, so that he lost track of the husbands and failed to attach Mary, Rachel, Simone and Joyce to the right owners. He did notice that Jokichi was an Oriental with a skin as tight as enameled china, and that Rachel was a tall slim Negro girl. Also someone said, "Joyce isn't a Wolver, she's just visiting." He got a much clearer impression of the clothes than the names. They were colorful, costly-looking, and mostly Egyptian and Cretan in inspiration. Some of them would have been quite immodest, even compared to Miss Tosker's famous playsuits, except that the wearers didn't seem to feel so. "There goes the middle-morning rocket!" one of them eagerly cried. Tom looked up with the rest, but his eyes caught the dazzling sun. However, he heard a faint roaring that quickly sank in volume and pitch, and it reminded him that the Army had a rocket testing range in this area. He had little interest in science, but he hadn't known they were on a daily schedule. "Do you suppose it's off the track?" he asked anxiously. "Not a chance," someone told him -- the beard, he thought. The assurance of the tones gave him a possible solution. Scientists came from all over the world these days and might have all sorts of advanced ideas. This could be a group working at a nearby atomic project and leading its peculiar private life on the side. house he heard Lois remind someone, "But you finally did declare it a holiday," and a husband who looked like a gay pharaoh respond, "I had another see at the mood charts and I found a subtle surge I'd missed." Meanwhile the beard (a black one) had taken Tom in charge. Tom wasn't sure of his name, but he had a tan skin, a green sarong, and a fiercely jovial expression. "The swimming pool's around there, the landing spot's on the other side," he began, then noticed Tom gazing at the sooty roof. "Sun power cells," he explained proudly. "They store all the current we need." Tom felt his Idea confirmed. "Wonder you don't use atomic power," he observed lightly. The beard nodded. "We've been asked that. Matter of esthetics. Why waste sunlight or use hard radiations needlessly? Of course, you might feel differently. What's your group, did you say?" "Tosker-Brown," Tom told him, adding when the beard frowned, "the Fellowship people, you know." "I don't," the beard confessed. "Where are you located?" Tom briefly described the ranch house and cabins at the other end of the valley. "Comic, I can't place it." The beard shrugged. "Here come the children." A dozen naked youngsters raced around the ranch house, followed by a woman in a vaguely African dress open down the sides. "Yours?" Tom asked. "Ours," the beard answered. "C'est un homme!" "Regardez des vetements!" "No need to practice, kids; this is a holiday," the beard told them. "Tom, Helen," he said, introducing the woman with the air-conditioned garment. "Her turn today to companion die Kinder." One of the latter rapped on the beard's knee. "May we show the stranger our things?" Instantly the others joined in pleading. The beard shot an inquiring glance at Tom, who nodded. A moment later the small troupe was hurrying him toward a spacious lean-to at the end of the ranch house. It was chuckful of strange toys, rocks and plants, small animals in cages and out, and the oddest model airplanes, or submarines. But Tom was given no time to look at any one thing for long. "See my crystals? I grew them." "Smell my mutated gardenias. Tell now, isn't there a difference?" There didn't seem to be, but he nodded. "Look at my squabbits." This referred to some long-eared white squirrels nibbling carrots and nuts. "Here's my newest model spaceship, a DS-#-B. Notice the detail." The oldest boy shoved one of the submarine affairs in his face.L ing tugged about in a rococo painting by wide pink ribbons in the chubby hands of naked cherubs. Except that these cherubs were slim and tanned, fantastically energetic, and apparently of depressingly high IQ. (What these scientists did to children!) He missed Lois and was grateful for the single little girl solemnly skipping rope in a comer and paying no attention to him. The odd lingo she repeated stuck in his mind: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so. Gik-lo, I-o..." Suddenly the air was filled with soft chimes. "Lunch," the children shouted and ran away. Tom followed at a soberer pace along the wall of the ranch house. He glanced in the huge windows, curious about the living and sleeping arrangements of the Wolvers, but the panes were strangely darkened. Then he entered the wide doorway through which the children had scampered and his curiosity turned to wonder. A resilient green floor that wasn't flat, but sloped up toward the white of the far wall like a breaking wave. Chairs like giants' hands tenderly cupped. Little tables growing like mushrooms and broad' leafed plants out of the green floor. A vast picture window showing the red rocks. Yet it was the woodpaneled walls that electrified his artistic interest. They blossomed with fruits and flowers, deep and poignantly carved in several styles. He had never seen such work. He became aware of a silence and realized that his hosts and hostesses were smiling at him from around a long table. Moved by a sudden humility, he knelt and unlaced his sneakers and added them to the pile of sandals and digitals by the door. As he rose, a soft and comic piping started and he realized that beyond the table the children were lined up, solemnly puffing at little wooden flutes and recorders. He saw the empty chair at the table and went toward it. conscious for the moment of nothfood reminded him that he was ing but his dusty feet. hungry. There was a charming little He was disappointed that Lois steak, striped black and brown with wasn't sitting next to him, but the perfection, and all sorts of vegetables and fruits, one or two of which he didn't recognize. "Flown from Africa," someone explained to him. These sly scientists, he thought, living behind their security curtain in the most improbable world ! When they were sitting with coffee and wine, and the children had finished their concert and were busy at another table, he asked, "How do you manage all this?" Jock, the gay pharaoh, shrugged. "It's not difficult." Rachel, the slim Negro, chuckled in her throat. "We're just people, Tom." He tried to phrase his question without mentioning money. "What do you all do?" "Jock's a uranium miner," Larry (the beard) answered, briskly taking over. "Rachel's an algae farmer. I'm a rocket pilot. Lois -- " final confirmation of his guess, Tom couldn't help feeling a surge of uneasiness. "Sure you should be telling me these things?" Larry laughed. "Why not? Lois and Jokichi have been exchangeworkers in China the last six months." "Mostly digging ditches," Jokichi put in with a smile. " -- and Sasha's in an assembly plant. Helen's a psychiatrist. Oh, we just do ordinary things. Now we're on grand vacation." "Grand vacation?" "When all of us have a vacation together," Larry explained. "What do you do?" "I'm an artist," Tom said, taking out a cigaret. "But what else?" Larry asked. Tom felt an angry embarrass. ment. "Just an artist," he mumbled, cigaret in mouth, digging in his pockets for a match. "Hold on," said Joyce beside him and pointed a silver pencil at the tip of the cigaret. He felt a faint thrill in his lips and then started back, coughing. The cigaret was lighted. "Please mutate my poppy seeds, Mommy." A little girl had darted to Joyce from the children's table. "You're a very dirty little girl," Joyce told her without reproof. "Hold them out." She briefly directed the silver pencil at the clay pellets on the grimy little palm. The little girl shivered delightedly. "I love ultrasonics, they feel so funny." She scampered off. Tom cleared his throat. "I must say I'm tremendously impressed with the wood carvings. I'd like to photograph them. Oh, Lord!" "What's the matter?" Rachel asked. "I lost my camera somewhere." "Camera?" Jokichi showed interest. "You mean one for stills?" "Yes." "What kind?" "A Leica," Tom told him. Jokichi seemed impressed. "That is interesting. I've never seen one of those old ones." "Tom's a button man," Lois remarked by way of explanation, apparently. "Was the camera in a brown case? You dropped it where we met. We can get it later." "Good, I'd really like to take those pictures," Tom said. "Incidentally, who did the carvings?" "We did," Jock said. "Together." Tom was grateful that the scamper of the children out of the room saved him from having to reply. He couldn't think of anything but a grunt of astonishment. The conversation split into a group of chats about something called a psych machine, trips to Russia, the planet Mars, and several artists Tom had never heard of. He wanted to talk to Lois, but she was one of the group gabbling about Mars like children. He felt suddenly uneasy and out of things, and neither Rachel's deprecating remarks about her section of the wood carvings nor Joyce's interesting smiles helped much. He was glad when they all began to get up. He wandered outside and made his way to the childrens' lean-to, feeling very depressed. of a friendly naked cluster, except for the same solemn-faced little girl skipping rope. A rather malicious but not very hopeful whim prompted him to ask the youngest, "What's one and one?" "Ten," the shaver answered glibly. Tom felt pleased. "It could also be two," the oldest boy remarked. "I'll say," Tom agreed. "What's the population of the world?" Tom nodded noncommittally and, grabbing at the first long word that he thought of, turned to the eldest girl. "What's poliomyelitis?" ' "Never heard of it," she said. The solemn little girl kept droning the same ridiculous chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so." His ego eased, Tom went outside and there was Lois. "What's the matter?" she asked. "Nothing," he said. She took his hand"Have we pushed ourselves at you too much? Has our jabbering bothered you? We're a loud-mouthed family and I didn't think to ask if you were loning." "Loning?" "Solituding." "In a way," he said. They didn't speak for a moment. Then, "Are you happy, Lois, in your life here ?" he asked. Her smile was instant. "Of course. Don't you like my group ?" He hesitated. "They make me feel rather no good," he said, and then admitted, "but in a way I'm more attracted to them than any people I've ever met." "You are?" Her grip on his hand tightened. "Then why don't you stay with us for a while? I like you. It's too early to propose anything, but I think you have a quality our group lacks. You could see how you fit in. And there's Joyce. She's just visiting, too. You wouldn't have to lone unless you wanted." Before he could think, there was a rhythmic rush of feet and the Wolvers were around them. "We're swimming," Simone announced. Lois looked at Tom inquiringly. to mention he didn't have trunks, then realized that wouldn't be news here. He wondered whether he would blush. Jock fell in beside him as they rounded the ranch house. "Larry's been telling me about your group at the other end of the valley. It's comic, but I've whirled down the valley a dozen times and never spotted any sort of place there. What's it like?" "A ranch house and several cab   ins. saw it." His face cleared. "How about whirling over there? You could point it out to me." "It's really there," Tom said uneasily. "I'm not making it up." "Of course," Jock assured him. "It was just an idea." "We could pick up your camera on the way," Lois put in. The rest of the group had turned back from the huge oval pool and the dark blue and flashing thing beyond it, and stood gay-colored against the pool's pale blue shimmer. "How about it?" Jock asked them. "A whirl before we bathe?" Two or three said yes besides Lois, and Jock led the way toward the helicopter that Tom now saw standing beyond the pool, its beetle body as blue as a scarab, its vanes flashing silver. The others piled in. Tom followed as casually as he could, trying to suppress the pounding of his heart. "Wonder you don't go by rocket," he remarked lightly. Jock laughed. "For such a short trip ?" The vanes began to thrum. Tom sat stiffly, gripping the sides of the seat, then realized that the others had sunk back lazily in the cushions. There was a moment of strain and they were falling ahead and up. Looking out the side, Tom saw for a moment the sooty roof of the ranch house and the blue of the pool and the pinkish umber of tanned bodies. Then the helicopter lurched gently around. Without warning a miserable uneasiness gripped him, a desire to cling mixed with an urge to escape. He tried to convince himself it was fear of the height. He heard Lois tell Jock, "That's the place, down by that rock that looks like a wrecked spaceship." The helicopter began to fall forward. Tom felt Lois' hand on his. "You haven't answered my question," she said. "What?" he asked dully. "Whether you'll stay with us. At least for a while." He looked at her. Her smile was a comfort. He said, "If I possibly can." "What could possibly stop you?" "I don't know," he answered abstractedly. "You're strange," Lois told him. "There's a weight of sadness in you. As if you lived in a less happy age. As if it weren't #." "Twenty?" he repeated, awakening from his thoughts with a jerk. "What's the time?" he asked anxiously. "Two," Jock said. The word sounded like a knell. "You need cheering," Lois announced firmly. Amid a whoosh of air rebounding from earth, they jounced gently down. Lois vaulted out. "Come on," she said. Tom followed her. "Where?" he asked stupidly, looking around at the red rocks through the settling sand cloud stirred by the vanes. "Your camera," she told him, laughing. "Over there. Come on, I'll race you." He started to run with her and then his uneasiness got beyond his control. He ran faster and faster. He saw Lois catch her foot on a rock and go down sprawling, but he couldn't stop. He ran desperately around the rock and into a gust of up-whirling sand that terrified him with its suddenness. He tried to escape from the stinging; blinding gust, but there was the nightmarish fright that his wild strides were carrying him nowhere. Then the sand settled. He stopped running and looked around him. He was standing by tbe balancing rock. He was gasping. At his feet the rusty brown leather of the camera case peeped from the sand. Lois was nowhere in sight. Neither was the helicopter. The valley seemed different, rawer -- one might almost have said younger. Hours after dark he trailed into Tosker-Brown. Curtained lights still glowed from a few cabins. He was footsore, bewildered, frightened. All afternoon and through the twilight and into the moonlit evening that turned the red rocks black, he had searched the valley. Nowhere had he been able to find the sootroofed ranch house of the Wolvers. He hadn't even been able to locate the rock like a giant bobbin where he'd met Lois. During the next days he often returned to the valley. But he never found anything. And he never happened to be near the balancing rock when the time winds blew at ten and two, though once or twice he did see dust devils. Then he went away and eventually forgot. In his casual reading he ran across popular science articles describing tbe binary system of numbers used in electronic calculating machines, where one and one make ten. He always skipped them. And more than once he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of gravitation: He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so." IS Obviously, no conqueror wants his subjects to revolt against his rule. Obviously? This one would go to any lengths to start a rebellion! I T HE biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable -- I could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race. But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my skull. Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color. It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation. So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called "white" subspecies, one who had spent most of his life in the open. The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes, and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were hypnotically implanted in my brain -- together with a set of habits and reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any tests that the rebels could think of. I was Earthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial "disease." The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough, till I began to age -- say, in a century or so -- the hair would actually thin and turn white as it did with the natives. It was reassuring to think that opce my job was over, I could be restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete and scarless. I'd be human again. I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly garments -- rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort of man, an educated atavist. I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one accustomed to walking great distances. T HE Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately dropped gravs from Valgolia herself. The Center swarmed with young recruits off duty, gaping at the sights, swaggering in their new uniforms. Their skins shone like polished copper in the blistering sunlight, and their crests were beginning to wilt a little. All Earth is not the tropical jungle most Valgolians think it is -- northern Europe is very pleasant, and Greenland is even a little on the cold side -- but it gets hot enough at North America Center in midsummer to fry a shilast. A cosmopolitan throng filled the walkways. Soldiers predominated -- huge, shy Dacors, little slant-eyed Yangtusans, brawling Gorrads, all the manhood of Valgolia. Then there were other races, blue-skinned Vegans, furry Proximans, completely non-humanoid Sirians and Antarians. They were here as traders, observers, tourists, whatever else of a non-military nature one can imagine. I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard him rasp, "Watch where you're going, Terrie!" The young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding dred other worlds. I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal, and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one. Terrestrials -- around, of course, moving with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes suggesting those of civil functionaries at home. I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study, and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating, because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are. They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate. I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, "Hello, Coordinator." The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. "Ah, yes. I'm glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started -- " He extended a silver galla-dust box. "Sniff? Have a seat, Conru." I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of papers on his desk and leafed through them. "Umm-mm, only fifty-two years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan business..." I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was as an Earthnian, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being with my ex-countrymen. The Coordinator shrugged. "Well, if you can carry this business off -- fine. Ifyou fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among themselves? I mean races ana sub-races and social castes and the like; it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them out of the Empire. A shame." I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous side, what could I do? I said, "I know that, sir. I also know I was picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role. But I still don't know exactly what the job is." Coordinator Vorka smiled. "I'm afraid I can't tell you much more than you must already have guessed," he said. "The anarch movement here -- the rebels, that is -- is getting no place, primarily because of internal difficulties. When members of the same group spit epithets at each other referring to what they consider racial or national distinctions which determine superiority or inferiority, the group is bound to be an insecure one. Such insecurity just does not make for a strong rebellion, Conru. They try, and we goad them -- but dissention splits them constantly and their revolutions fizzle out. "They just can't unite against us, can't unite at all. Conru, you know how we've tried to educate them. It's worked, too, to some extent. But you can't educate three cultural pattern behind them." "Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture, as much as cooperation has been a part of ours." I nodded. "We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived." The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. "Of course. And we're trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds don't count at all... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak." I knew. The Samtraks are now the entrepreneurs of the Empire, really ingenious traders, but within the memory of some of our older men they were a sore-spot. They didn't understand the meaning of Empire any more than Earth does, and they never did understand it until we goaded them into open rebellion. The very reverse of divide and rule, you might say, and it worked. We withdrew trading privileges one by one, until they revolted successfully, thus educating themselves sociologically in only a few generations. Earth is not quite that simple." He leaned back, made a bridge of his fingers, and peered across them at me. "Do you know precisely what a provocateur job is, Conru?" I said that I did, but only in a hazy way, because until now my work had been pretty much restricted to social relations on the more advanced Empire planets. However, I told him that I did know the idea was to provoke discontent and, ultimately, rebellion. The Coordinator smiled. "Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems. The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what real cutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different. Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races, only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and wholehearted." "A difficult problem," I said. "My opinion is that we should treat all exactly alike -- force them to abandon their unrealistic differences." "Exactly!" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was pretty elementary stuff. "We're never too rough on the eager lads who come here from Yalgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down." I told him I had met one. "Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild stories about brutality on our part. No: enough to make everybody mad a: us, or even a majority -- the rumored tyranny has always happened to someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting mad, and that's the class we want." "The leaders," I chimed in. "The idealists. Brave, intelligent, patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial bickering, anyway." "Right," said the Coordinator. "We'll give them the ammunition 'for their propaganda. We've been doing it. Result: the leaders get mad. Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each other." T HE way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.  "Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work that way." He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. "Even the leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other alternative -- " That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play. And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets, we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did. Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day. The Coordinator shook his head. "Can't use Luron here. Technologies are entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't want that." "So what do we use?" "You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that they want to fight, you -- " "I see," I told him. "Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all -- " The Coordinator put his hand down flat. "Nothing of the sort. They must fight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary, until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are totally against us." I stood up. "I understand." He waved me back into the chair. "You'll be lucky to understand it by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to another... that is, if you come out of this one alive." I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead. "We have some influence in the underground movement, as you might logically expect. The leader is a man we worked very hard to have elected." "A member of one of the despised races?" I guessed. "The best we could do at this point was to help elect someone from a minority sub-group of the dominant white race. The leader's name is Levinsohn. He is of the white sub-group known as Jews." X X accepted by the movement?" "Considerable resistance and hostility," the Coordinator said. "That's to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other organization the minorityhaters can join, so they have to follow him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement out into space, don't even know where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the important thing." "What is?" I asked, baffled. "To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth equal planetary status in the Empire." "And if unity hasn't been achieved ?" "We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again. They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the next one will be more successful." He stood up and I got out of my chair to face him. "That's for the future, though. We'll work out our plans from the results of this campaign." "But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion against us?" I asked. He lifted his shoulders. "Evolution is always painful, forced evolution even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must take, Conru." "Conrad," I corrected him, smiling. "Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen... of Earth." II America Center, and in spite of the ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my story had better ring true. For the present, I must be my role, a vagabond. The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement -- it is good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was alone in the mountains. I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling rivers foam through their dales and canyons -- it is a big landscape, clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence. I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule itself. I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the talk and keeping my mouth shut. Y es, there was discontent ! the owner. "What the hell incentive do I have to produce if they take it away from me?" I nodded, but thought: Your kind was paying more taxes in the old days , and had less to show for it. Here yon get your money back in public works and universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only produce for your own private gain, Earthling? "The labor draft got my kid the other day," said the foreman. "He'll spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire." There was a time, I thought, ored for work, or spent years fighting their wars, gave their youth to a god of battle who only clamored for more blood. And how can we have a stable society without educating its members to respect it? "I want another kid," said the female cook. "Two ain't really enough. They're good boys, but I want a girl too. Only the Eridanian law says if I go over my quota, if I have one more, they'll sterilize me ! And they'd do it, the meddling devils." Solar System can hold under decent standards of living without exhausting what natural resources their own culture left us, I thought. W e aren't ready to permit emigration; our own people must come first. But these beings can live ivell here. Only now that we've eliminated famine, plague, and war, they'd breed beyond reason, breed till all the old evils came back to throttle them, if we didn't have strict population control.L bitterly. "They never even let my cousin have kids. Sterilized him damn near right after he was born." Then he's a moron, or carries hemophilia, or has some other hereditary taint, I thought. Can't they see we're doing it for their own good? It costs us fantastically in money and trouble, but the goal is a level of health and sanity such as this race never in its history dreamed possible. "They're stranglin' faith," muttered someone else. Anyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or antisocial nonsense? The old "free" Earth was not noted for liberalism. "We want to be free." Free? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds and nationalisms on each other -- and on the Galaxy -- to wallow in barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian ! "We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either -- " That's up to nobody else but you! I couldn't get much specific information, but then I hadn't expected to, I collected my pay and drifted on eastward, talking to people of all classes -- farmers, mechanics, shopowners, tramps, and such data as I gathered tallied with those of Intelligence. About twenty-five per cent of the population, in North America at least -- it was higher in the Orient and Africa -- was satisfied with the Imperium, felt they were better off than they would have been in the old days. "The Eridanians are pretty decent, on the whole. Some of 'em come in here and act nice and human as you please." Some fifty per cent was vaguely dissatisfied, wanted "freedom" without troubling to define the term, didn't like the taxes or the labor draft or the enforced disarmament or the legal and social superiority of Valgolians or some such thing, had perhaps suffered in the reconquest. But this group constituted no real threat. It would tend to be passive whatever happened. Its greatest contribution would be sporadic rioting. The remaining twenty-five per cent was bitter, waiting its chance, muttering of a day of revenge -- and some portion of this segment was spreading propaganda, secretly manufacturing and distributing weapons, engaging in clandestine military drill, and maintaining contact with the shadowy Legion of Freedom. Childish, melodramatic name ! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting, its activities mounted almost daily. T HE illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't trace such a wellorganized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so -- The day is coming... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your shackles... Stand by for freedom! I stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill. I was Conrad Haugen, NorwegianAmerican, assigned to a spaceship by the labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and I returned to Earth, footloose and looking for trouble. ing and the strength due to a home planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible. The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside. They'd let this loose among the stars! After that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets. Valgolia, Valgolia, the clean bare windswept heights of your mountains, soughing trees and thunderous waters and Maara waiting for me to come home! Riley often proposed that we find an Eridanian and beat him to death, and I would agree, hiccupping, because I knew they didn't go alone into native quarters any more. I sat in the smoky reek of the bars, half deafened by the clatter and raucousness called music, trying not to think of a certain low-ceilinged, quiet tavern amid the gardens of Kalariho, and sobbed the bitterness of Conrad Haugen into my beer. "Dirty redskins," I muttered. "Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of bitches. Them and their goddamn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian -- God, to get my hands on his throat!" Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having a Valgolian liver. I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood. T HE winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now. Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service. Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged to business. "Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?" "Why, of course. I -- " I glanced out the window, as if expecting to see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control. "You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom when they strike?" "You bet your obscenity life!" I snarled. "When they land on Earth, I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle with them!" "Yeah." Riley puffed a cigaret for a while. Then he said, "Look, I can't tell you much. I'm taking a chance just telling you this. It could mean my life if you passed it on to the Eridanians." "I won't." His eyes were bleak. "You #amn well better not. If you're caught at that -- " He drew a finger sharply across his throat. "Quit talking like a B-class stereo," I bristled. "If you've got something to tell me, let's have it. Otherwise get out." "Yeah, sure. We checked up on you, Con, and we think you're as good a prospect as we ever came across, if you want to fight the Eridanians now -- join the Legion now -- here's your chance." "My God, you know I do! But who -- " "I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize this." Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and address. "Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When you do arrive, they'll take care of you." I nodded, grimly. "I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!" "Just my job." He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his overcoat. "Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink, after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here." Ill gone when I wandered into the little Maine town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old, solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh. I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, "I'm Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me." He nodded calmly. "I've been expecting you. You can work here a few days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark." He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through a wellhidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete psychological laboratory. I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. "How off Earth -- " "It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself," he smiled. "There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material. But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made them in the names of many people." "But you -- " "I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this." He could. He put me through the mill in the next few nights -- intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis, psycho-probing, everything his machines and his' skill could cover. He did not' find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service had ways of guarding its agents with counterblocks. But he got a very thorough picture of Conrad Haugen. In the end he said, still calmly, "This is amazing. You have an IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule -- based on personal pique and containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd never hoped for more recruits of your caliber." "When do I start?" I asked impatiently. "Easy, easy," he smiled. "There's time. We've waited fifty years; we can wait a while longer." He riffled through the dossier. "Actually, the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're there." my throat. This was more than I had dared hope for ! "I think," said Nat Hawkins, "you'd better just drop out of sight now. Go to Hood Island and stay there till the spaceship comes next time. You can spend the interval profitably, resting and getting a little fattened up; you look half starved. And Barbara can tell you about the Legion." His leather face smiled itself into a mesh of fine wrinkles. "I think you deserve that, Conrad. And so does Barbara." Mentally, I shrugged. My stay in New Chicago had pretty well convinced me that all Earthling females were sluts. And what of it? The following night, Hawkins and I rowed out to Hood Island. It lay about a mile offshore, a wooded, rocky piece of land on which a moon-whitened surf boomed and rattled. The place had belonged to the Hood family since the first settlements here, but Barbara was the last of them. Hawkins' voice came softly to me above the crash of surf, the surge of waves and windy roar of trees as we neared the dock. "She has more reason than most to hate the Eridanians. The Hoods used to be great people around here. They were just about ruined when the redskins first came a-conquering, space bombardment wiped out their holdings, but they made a new start. Then her grandfather and all his brothers were killed in the revolt. Ten years ago, her father was caught while trying to hijack a jetload of guns, and her mother didn't live long after that. Then her brother was drafted into a road crew and reported killed in an accident. Since then she hasn't lived for much except the Legion." "I don't blame her," I said. My voice was a little tight, for indeed I didn't. But somebody has to suffer; civilization has a heavy price. I couldn't help adding, "But the Empire's lately begun paying pensions to cases like that." "I know. She draws hers, too, and uses it for the Legion." That, of course, was the reason for the pensions. The boat bumped against the dock. Hawkins threw the painter up to the man who suddenly emerged from the shadow. I saw the cold silver moonlight gleam off the rifle in his hand. "You know me, Eb," said Hawkins. "This here's Con Haugen. I slipped you the word about him." "Glad to know you, Con." Eb's horny palm clasped mine. I liked his looks, as I did those of most of the higher-up Legionnaires. They were altogether different from the lowcaste barbarians who were all the rebels I'd seen before. They had a great load of ignorance to drag with them. We went up a garden path to a rambling stone house. Inside, it was long and low and filled with the memoirs of more gracious days, art and fine furniture, books lining the walls, a fire crackling ruddily in the living room. "Barbara Hood -- Conrad Haugen." expected some gaunt, dowdy fanatic, a little mad perhaps. But she was -- well, she was tall and supple and clad in a long dark-blue evening gown that shimmered against her white skin. She was not conventionally pretty, her face was too strong for all of its fine lines, but she had huge blue eyes and a wide soft mouth and a stubborn chin. The light glowed gold on the hair that tumbled to her shoulders. I blurted something out and she smiled, with a curious little twist that somehow caught in me, and said merely, "Hello, Conrad." "Glad to be here," I mumbled. "The spaceship should arrive in a month or so," she went on. "I'll teach you as much as I can in that time. And you'd better get your own special knowledge onto a record wire, just in case. I understand you've been in the Vegan System, for instance, which nobody else in the Legion knows very much about." Her tone was cool and businesslike, but with an underlying warmth. It was like the sea wind which blew over the islands, and as reviving. I recovered myself and helped mix some drinks. The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly. Later a servant showed me to my room, a big one overlooking the water. I lay for a while listening to the waves, thinking drowsily how rebellion, when its motives were honest, drew in the best natives of any world, and presently I fell asleep. The month passed all too quickly and agreeably. I learned things which Intelligence had spent the last three years trying to find out, and dared not attempt to transmit the information. That was maddening, though I knew there was time. But otherwise -- I puttered about the place. There were only three servants, old family retainers who had also joined the anarchs. They had little modern machinery, and of course Earthlings weren't allowed robots, so there was need for an extra man or two. I cut wood and repaired the roof and painted the boathouse, spaded the garden and cleared out brush and set up a new picket fence. It was good to use my hands and muscles again. And then Barbara was around to help with most of what I did. In jeans and jersey, the sun ablaze on her hair, laughing at my clumsy jokes or frowning over some tough bit of work, she was another being than the cool, lovely woman who talked books and music and history with me in the evenings, or the crisp bitter anarch who spat facts and figures at me like an angry machine. And yet they were all her. I remembered Ydis, who was dead, and the old pain stirred again. But Barbara was alive. She was more alive to me than most of Valgolia. I make no apologies for my feelings. I had been away from anything resembling home for some two years now. But I was careful to remain merely friendly with Barbara. S HE didn't know a great deal about the rebel movement -- no one agent on Earth did -- but her knowledge was still considerable. There was a fortified base somewhere out in space, built up over a period of four years with the help of certain unnamed elements or planets outside the Empire. I suspected several rival states of that ! Weapons of all kinds were manufactured there in quantities sufficient the "regular" force, the twenty million or so in the Solar System and elsewhere who held secret drills and conducted terrorist activities, and expected to rise spontaneously when the rebel fleet struck. There was close coordination and a central command at Main Base for the undergrounds of all dissatisfied planets -- a new and formidable feature which had not been present in the earlier uprisings. There were rumors of a new and terrible weapon being developed. In any case, the plan was to assault Epsilon Eridani itself simultaneously with the uprisings in the colonies, so that the Imperial fleet would be recalled to defend the mother world. The anarchs hoped to blast Valgolia to ruin in a few swift blows, and expected that the Empire's jealous neighbors would sweep in to complete the wreckage. This gentle girl spoke of the smashing of worlds, the blasting of helpless humans, and the destruction of a culture as if it were a matter of insect extermination. "Have you ever thought," I asked casually once, "that the Juranians and the Slighs and our other hypothetical allies may not respect the integrity of Sol any more than the Eridanians do?" "We can handle them," she answered confidently. "Oh, it won't be easy, that time of transition. But we'll be free." "And what then?" I went on. "I don't want to be defeatist, Barbara, but you know as well as I do that the Eridanians didn't conquer all mankind at asingle swoop. When they invented the interstellar engine and arrived here, man was tearing the Solar System apart in a war between super-nations that was rapidly reducing him to barbarism. The redskins traded for a while, sold arms, some of their adventurers took sides in the conflict, the government stepped in to protect Eridanian citizens and investments -- the side which the Eridanians helped won the war, then found its allies were running things and tried to revolt against the protectorate -- and without really meaning to, the strangers were conquering and ruling Earth. "But the different factions of man still hate each other's guts. There are still capitalists and communists. blacks, whites and Browns, Hindus and Moslems, Germans and Frenchmen, city people and country people be civil war as soon as the Eridanians are gone." "Some, perhaps," she agreed. "But I think it can be handled. If we have to have civil wars, well, let's get them over with and live as free men." Personally, I could see nothing in the sort of military dictatorship that would inevitably arise which was preferable to an alien, firm, but just rule that insured stability and a reasonable degree of individual liberty. But I didn't say that aloud. the de-industrialization of Earth. Barbara was, of course, venomous about it. "We were rich once," she said. "All Earth was. We have one of the richest planets in the Galaxy. But because their own world is poor, the redskins have to take the natural resources of their conquests. Earth is a granary and a lumberyard for Valgolia, and the iron of Mars and the petrolite of Venus go back to their industry. What few factories they allow us, they take their fat percentage of the product." "Certainly they've made us economically dependent," I said, "and their standard of living is undoubtedly higher than ours. But ours has, on the whole, gone up since the conquest. We eat better, we're healthier, we aren't burdened with the cost of past and present and future wars. Our natural resources aren't being squandered. The forests and watersheds and farmlands we ruined are coming back under Eridanian supervision." She gave me an odd look. "I thought you didn't likethe Empire." "I don't," I growled. "I don't want to be held back just because Em white-skinned. But I've known enough reddies personally so that I try to be fair." "It's all right with me," she said. "I can see your point, intellectually, though I can't really feel it. But not many of the people will out at Main Base." "Free men," I muttered sardonically. We went fishing, and swam inthe tumbling surf, and stretched lazily on the beach with the sun pouring over us. Or we might go tramping off into the woods on a picnic, to run laughing back when a sudden rain rushed out of the sky, and afterward sit with beer and cheese sandwiches listening to a wire of Beethoven or Mozart or Tschaikowsky -- the old Earthlings could write music, if they did nothing else! -- and to the rain shouting on the roof. We might have a little highly illegal target practice, or a game of chess, or long conversations which wandered off every which way. I began to have a sneaking hope Chat the spaceship would be delayed. We went out one day in Barbara's little catboat. The waves danced around us, chuckling against the hull, glittering with sunlight, and the sail was like a snow mountain against the sky. For a while we chatted dreamily, ate our lunch, threw the scraps to the hovering gulls. Then Barbara fell silent. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Oh, nothing. Touch of Weltschmerz, maybe." She smiled at me. "You know. Con, you don't really belong in the Legion." "How so?" I raised my eyebrows. "You -- well, you're so darned honest, so really decent under that carefully rough surface, so -- reasonable. You'll never make a good fanatic." Honest! I looked away from her. The bright day seemed suddenly to darken. IV had little trouble coming to Earth with their cargoes of guns, propaganda, instructors, and whatever else the rebels on the planet needed. They would take up an orbit just beyond the atmosphere and send boats to the surface after dark. There was little danger of their being detected if they took the usual precautions; a world is simply too big to blockade completely. Ours dropped on noiseless gravitic beams into the nighted island woods. We had been watching for it the last few days, and now Eb came running to tell us it was here. The pilot followed after him. "Harry Kane, Conrad Haugen," Barbara introduced us. I shook hands, sizing him up. He was tall for an Earthling, almost as big as I, dark-haired, with goodlooking young features. He wore some approximation of a uniform, dark-blue tunic and breeches, peaked cap, captain's insignia, which gave him a rather dashing look. It shouldn't have made any difference to me, of course, but I didn't like the way he smiled at Barbara. She explained my presence, and he nodded eagerly. "Glad to have you, Haugen. We need good men, and badly." Then to her: "Get Hawkins. You and he are recalled to Main Base." "What? But -- " A dark exultation lit his face. "The time for action is near -- : very near! We're pulling all our best agents off the planets. They can work more effectively with the fleet now." I tried to look as savagely gleeful as they, but inwardly I groaned. How in all the hells was I going to contact Vorka? If I were stranded out in space when the fleet got under way -- no, they must have an ultrabeam. I'd manage somehow to call on that even if they caught me at it. We sent Eb in a boat to get Hawkins while Barbara and I packed a few necessities. Kane the news from Main Base, word of mighty forces gathering, rumors of help promised from outside, it was like the thunder which mutters just before a gale. Presently Hawkins arrived. The old man's calm was undisturbed: he puffed his pipe and said quietly, "I called up my housekeeper, told her my sister in California was suddenly taken sick and I was leaving at once for the transcontinental jetport. Just to account for disappearing, you know. There aren't any Eridanians or Terries hereabouts, but we desperate characters -- " he grinned, briefly -- "can't be too careful. Brought my equipment along, of course. I suppose they want me to do psychometry on fleet personnel?" ' "Something on that order. I don't know." We made our way through a fine drizzle of rain to the little torpedo of the spaceboat. I looked around into the misty dark and breathed a deep lungful of the cool wet wind. And I saw that Barbara was doing the same. S HE smiled up at me through the night and the thin sad rain. "Earth is a beautiful world, Con," she whispered. "I wonder if we'll ever see it again." I squeezed her hand, silently, and we crowded into the boat. Kane made a smooth takeoff. In minutes we were beyond the atmosphere, Earth was a great glowing shield of cloudy blue behind us, and the stars were bitter bright against darkness. We sent a coded call signal and got a directional beam from the ship. Before long we were approaching it. I studied the lean black cruiser. She seemed to be of about the same design as the old Solarian interplanetary ships, modified somewhat to accommodate the star drive. Apparently, she was one of those built at Main Base. Her bow guns were dark shadows against the clotted cold silver of the Milky Way. I thought of the death and the ruin which could flame from them, I thought of the hell she and her kind bore -- atomic bombs, radiodust bombs, chemical bombs, disease bombs, gravity snatchers, needle beams, disintegrative shells, darkness and doom and the new barbarism -- and felt a stiffening within me. Fostering this murderousness was a frightful risk. The main defense against it was Intelligence, and that depended on agents like myself. Perhaps only myself. The crew was rather small, no battles being anticipated. But they were well disciplined, uniformed and trained, a new Solarian army built up from the fragments of the old. The captain was a stiff gray German who had been a leader in the earlier revolt and since fled to space, but most of the officers, such as Kane, were young and violent in their eagerness. We orbited around the planet for another day or so till all the boats had returned. There was tension in the ship -- if the Imperial navy should happen to spot us, we were done. Off duty, we would sit around talking, smoking, playing games with little concentration. Kane spent most of his free hours with Barbara. They had much to talk about. I swallowed a certain irrational jealousy and wandered around cautiously pumping as many men as I could. We got under way at last. By this time I had learned that Main Base was a planet, but no more. Only the highest leadership of the Legion knew its location, and they were pledged to swallow the poison they always carried if there seemed to be any danger of capture. For several days by the clocks we ran outward, roughly toward Draco. Our velocity was not revealed, and the slow shift in the outside view didn't help much. I guess that we had come perhaps ten parsecs, but that was only a guess. "Approaching Main Base. Stand by." down the ship's passageways, I could feel the weariness and tautness easing, I could see homecoming in the faces around me. I stole a glance at Barbara. Her eyes were wide and her lips parted, she looked ahead as if to stare through the metal walls. She had never been here either, here where all her dreams came home. So we landed, we slipped down out of the dark and the cold and the void, and I heard the rattle and groan of metal easing into place. When the ship's interior grav-field was turned off, I felt a sudden heaviness; this world had almost a quarter again the pull of Earth. But people got used to that quickly enough. It was the landscape which was hard to bear. They had told us that even though Boreas had a breathable atmosphere and a temperature not always fatally low, it was a bleak place. But to one who had never been far from the lovely lands of Earth, its impact was like a blow in the face. Barbara shuddered close to me as we came out of the airlock, and I put an arm about her waist, knowing the sudden feeling of loneliness which rose in her. installations, Main Base was underground. There was no city to relieve the grimness of the scene. We were in a narrow valley between sheer, ragged cliffs that soared crazily into a murky sky. The sun was low, a smouldering disc of dull red like curdling blood; its sullen light glimmered on the undying snow and ice and seemed only to make the land darker. Stars glittered here and there in the dusky heavens, hard and bright and eruel, almost, as in space. Dark sky, dark land, dark world, with the sheer terrible mountains climbing gauntly for the upper gloom, crags and glaciers like fangs against the dizzy cliffs, with the great shadows marching across the bloody snow toward us, with a crazed wind muttering and whining and chewing at our flesh. It was cold. The cold was like a knife. Pain stung with every breath and eyes watered with tears that froze on suddenly numb cheeks. A great shudder ripped through us and we ran toward the entrance to the city. The snow crunched dry and old under our boots, the cold ate up through the soles, and the wind whistled its scorn. Even when an elevator had taken us a mile down into the warmth and light of the base, we could not forget. It was a city for and more than a few women and children, a city of long streets and small neat apartments, hydroponic farms and food synthesizers, schools, shops and amusement places, factories, military barracks and arsenals, even an occasional little flower garden. Its people could live here almost indefinitely, working and waiting for their day of rising. There was little formality in the civilian areas. Everyone who had come this far was trusted. A man came up to us new arrivals from Earth, asked about conditions there, and then said he would show us to our quarters. Later we would be told to whom we should report for duty. "Let's go, then, Con," said Barbara, and slipped a cool little hand into mine. I could not refrain from casting a smug backward glance at the somewhat chapfallen Kane. V the routine of the place. It was a taut-nerved, hard-working daily round. I could feel the savage expectancy building up like a physical force, but intelligent life is adaptable and we got used to it. There was work to do. Hawkins was second in command of the psychological service, testing and screening and treating personnel, working on training and indoctrination, and with a voice in the general staff where problems of unit coordination and psychological warfare were concerned. Barbara worked under him, secretary and records keeper and general troubleshooter. Those were high posts, but both were allowed to retain the nominally civilian status which they preferred. Their influence and my own test scores got me appointed assistant supervisor of the shipyards. That suited me very well -- I wax reasonably free from direct orders and discipline, with authority to come and go pretty much as I pleased. They kept me busy; sometimes I worked the clock around, and I did my best to further production of the weapons which might destroy my planet. For whatever I did would make little difference at this late date. A good deal of my time also went to drill with the armed forces of which, like every able-bodied younger man, I was a reserve member. They put me in an engineer unit and I soon had command of it. I did my best here too, whipping my grim young charges into a sapper group comparable to the Empire's, for I had to be above all suspicion, even of incompetence. We worked at our learning. We went topside and shivered and manned our guns, set our mines and threw up our bridges, in the racking cold of Boreas. Over ancient snow and ice we trotted, lost in the jumbled wilderness of cruel peaks and railing wind, peeling the skin from our Angers when we touched metal, camped under scornful stars and a lash of drifting ice-dust -- but we learned! My own, more private education went on apace. I found where we were. It was a forgotten red dwarf star out near the shadowy border of the Empire, listed in the cataplanet of no interest or value. That was a good choice; no spaceship would ever happen into this system by accident or exploration. The anarchs had built their hopes on the one lonely planet, and had named it Boreas after the god of the north wind in one of their mythologies. My company called it less complimentary things. The base, including the attached city, was under military command which ultimately led up to the general staff of the Legion. This was a council of officers from half a score of rebellious planets, though Earthlings predominated and, of course, Simon Levinsohn held the supreme authority. I met him a few times, a gaunt, lonely man, enormously able, ridden by his cause as by a nightmare, but not unkindly on a personal level. With just that indomitable heart, the Maccabees had faced Rome's iron legions -- Valgolia was greatly interested in the ancient history of a conquered province, knowing how often it held the key to current problems. There was also a liaison officer from Luron sitting at staff meetings. Luron ! Colonel Wergil, I stood stiff and cold and felt the bristling along my spine. He looked as humanoid as most of the races at the base. Hairless, faintly scaled greenishyellow skin, six fingers to a hand, and flat chinless face don't make that breed hideous to me; I have reckoned Ganolons and Mergri among my friends. But Luron -- the old and deadly rival, the lesser empire watching its chance to pounce on us, hating us for the check we are on the ambitions of their militarists. Luron. I have no race prejudices and comparative psychologists that there is no more inherent evil in the Luronians than in any other stock, that the peculiar cold viciousness of their civilization is a matter of unfortunate cultural rather than biological evolution and could be changed in time. But none of this alters the fact that at present they heartless,, and a menace to the peace of the Galaxy. I have been too long engaged in the struggle between my nation and theirs to think otherwise. Other states had sent some clandestine help to the Legion, weapons and money and vague promises. Luron, I soon found, had said it would attack us in full strength if the uprising showed a good chance of success, and meanwhileithey gave assistance, credits and materiel and the still more important machine tools, and Wergil's military advice was useful. I know now, as I suspected even then, that Levinsohn and his associates were not fooled as to Luron's ultimate intentions. Indeed, they planned to make common cause with what remained of Valgolia, as well as certain other traditional foes of their present ally, as soon as they had gained their objectives of independence, and stop any threat of aggression from Luron. It was shrewdly planned, but such a shaky coalition, still bleeding with the hurts and hatreds of a struggle just ended, would be weaker than the Empire, and Luron almost certainly would have sowed further dissension in it and waited for its decay before striking. The Earthlings have a proverb to the effect that he who sups with the Devil must use a long spoon. But they seemed to have forgotten it now. The attack, I learned, was scheduled for about four months from the time the agents were recalled. The rebels were counting on the Valgolian power being spread too thinly over the Empire to stand off their massed assault on a few key points. Then, with the home planet a radioactive ruin, with revolt in a score of planetary systems and the ensuing chaos and communications breakdown, and with the Luronians invading, the Imperial fleet and military would have to make terms with the anarchs. a dark chill that it would work. Unless somehow I could get a warning out. That had to be done for more than the protection of Epsilon Eridani, which, even in a surprise attack could defend itself better than these conspirators realized. But all bloodshed should be spared, if possible -- and the rebellion did not yet deserve to succeed, for the unity achieved thus far had been the unity of a snake pit against a temporary enemy. Did it all rest on me? God of space, had the whole burden of history suddenly fallen on my shoulders? I didn't dare think about it. I forced the consequences of failure out of my forebrain, back down into the unconscious, the breeding ground of nightmares, and lived from one day to the next, I worked, and waited, learned what I could and watched for my chance. But it was not all grimness and concentration. It couldn't be; intelligent life just isn't built that way. We had our social activities, small gatherings or big parties, we relaxed and played. At first I found that gratifying, for it gave me a chance to pump the others. Then I found it maddening, because it kept me from snooping and laying plans. Finally it began to hurt -- I was coming to know the anarchs. They lived and laughed and loved even as humans do. They were basically as decent and reasonable as any similar group of Valgolians. Many were as tormented as I by the thought of the slaughter they readied. There were embittered ones, who had lost all they held dear, and I realized that, while civilization has its price, you can't be objective about it when you are the one who must pay. There were others who had been well off and had chucked all their hopes to join a desperate cause in which they happened to believe. There were children -- and what had they done to deserve having their parents gambling away life? In spite of their appearance, to which I was now accustomed, they were human. When I had laughed and talked and sung and drunk beer and danced and arranged entertainments with them, they were my friends. Moodily, I began to see that I would be one of the price-payers. I saw most of Hawkins and Barbara, and after them -- because of her -- Kane. The old psychologist and I got along famously. He would drop into my room for a smoke and a cup of coffee and a drawled conversation whenever he had the chance. His slow gentle voice, his trenchancy, the way the little crinkles appeared around his eyes when he smiled, reminded me of my father. I often wish those two could have met. They would have enjoyed each other. Then Barbara would stop by on her way from work, or, better yet, she would ask me over to her apartment for a home-cooked dinner. Yes, she could cook too. We would sometimes take long walks down the corridors of the city, we even went up once in a while to the surface for a breath of cold air and loneliness, and it was the most natural thing in the world for us to go hand in hand. There was no sunlight underground. But when the fluorotube glow shone on her hair, I thought of sunlight on Earth, the high keen light of the Colorado plateaus, the morning light stealing through the trees of Hood Island. Yds, Ydis, I said, once your violet eyes were like the skies over Kalariho, over Kealvigh, our home, pasture land of ivinds. But it has been so long. It has been ten years since you died -- I fought. May all the gods bear witness that I fought myself. And I thought I was winning. VI evening. Hawkins and I had come over to Barbara's for supper, and the three of us were sitting now, talking. Wier.iawski's Violin Concerto cried its sorrow, muted in the background, and the serene home she had made of the bare little functional apartment folded itself around us. Then Kane dropped in as he often did, with a casualness that fooled nobody, and sat with all his soul in his eyes, looking at Barbara. He was a nice kid. I didn't know why he should annoy me so. The talk shifted to Valgolia. I found myself taking the side of my race. It wasn't that I hoped to convert anyone, but -- well, it was wrong that we should be monsters in the sight of these friends. "Brutes," said Kane. "Twolegged animals. Damned bald-headed, copper-skinned giants. Wouldn't be quite so bad if they were octopi or insects, but they're just enough different from us to be a caricature. It's obscene." "Sartons look like a dirty joke on mankind," I said. "Why don't you object to them?" "They're in the same boat as us." "Then why mix political and esthetic prejudices? And have you ever thought that you look just as funny to an Eridanian?" "No race should look odd to another," said Nat Hawkins. He puffed blue clouds. "Even by our standards, the redskins are handsome, in a more spectacular way than humans, maybe." "And Barbara," I smiled, with a curious little pang inside me, "would look good to any humanoid." "I should think so," said Kane sulkily. "The redskins took enough of our women." "Well," I said, "their original conquistadores were young and healthy, very far from home, and had just finished a hard campaign where they lost many friends. At least there were no half-breeds afterward. And since the reconquest none of their soldiers has been permitted to have anything to do with an Earthwoman against her consent. It's not their fault if the consent is forthcoming oftener than you idealists think." "That sort of thing was more or less standard procedure at home with them, wasn't it?" asked Hawkins. their native world forced them to develop their technology faster than on Earth, so they kept a lot of barbarian customs well into the industrial age. For instance, the rulers of the state that finally con-, quered all the others and unified the planet took the title Waelsing, Emperor, and it's still a monarchy in theory. But a limited monarchy these days, with parliamentary democracy and even local self-government of the town-meeting sort. They're highly civilized now." "I wouldn't call that spree of conquest they went on exactly civilized." "Well, just for argument's sake, let's try to look at it from their side," I answered. "Here their explorers arrived at Sol, found a system richer than they could well imagine -- and all the wealth being burned up in fratricidal war. Their technical power was sufficiently beyond ours so that any band of adventurers could do pretty much as it wanted in the Solar System, and all native states were begging for their help. It was inevitable that they'd mix in. "Sure, the Eridanians have been exploiting Solarian resources, though perhaps more wisely than we did. Sure, they garrison unpoint of view, they're slowly civilizing a race of atomic-powered savages, and taking no more than their just reward for it. Sure, they've done hideous things, or were supposed to have, but there' ve been plenty of reforms in their policy since our last revolt. They've adopted the -- the red man's burden." "Could be. But Sol wasn't their only conquest." "Oh, well, of course they had their time of all-out imperialism. There are still plenty of the old school around, starward the course of empire, keep the lesser breeds in their place, and so on. That's one reason why the highest posts are still reserved for members of their own race, another being that even the liberal ones don't trust us that far, yet. "Their first fifty years or so saw plenty of aggression. But then they stabilized. They had as much as they could manage. To put it baldly, the Empire is glutted. And now, without actually admitting they ever did wrong, they're trying to make up what they did to many of their victims." "They could do that easily enough. Just let us go free." T'VE already told you why theyL don't dare. Apart from fearing us, they're economically and militarily .dependent on their colonies. You're an American, Nat. Why didn't our nation let the South go its own way when it wanted to secede? Why don't we all go back to Europe and let the Indians have our country? "And, 'of course, Epsilon Eridani honestly thinks it has a great civilizing mission, and is much better for the natives than any lesser independence could ever be. In some cases, you've got to admit they're right. Have you ever seen a real simon-pure native king in action? Or read the history of nations like Germany and Russia? And why do we have to segregate races and minorities even in our own organization to prevent clashes?" "We're getting there," said Nat Hawkins. "It's not easy, but we'll make it." Only you're not there yet, I thought, and for that reason you must be stopped. "You claim they're sated," said Barbara. "But they've kept on conquering here and there, to this very day." "Believe it or not, but with rare exceptions that's been done reluctantly. Peripheral systems have learned how to build star ships, become nuisances or outright menaces, and the Empire has had to swallow them. Modern technology is simply too deadly for anarchy. A full-scale war can sterilize whole planets. That's another function of empire, so the Eridanians claim -- just to keep civilization going till something better can be worked out." "Such as what?" "Well, several worlds already have donagangor status -- self-government under the Emperor, representatives in the Imperial Council, and no restrictions on personal advancement of their citizens. Virtual equality with the Valgolians. And their policy is to grant such status to any colony they think is ready for it." Hawkins shook his head. "Won't do, Con. It sounds nice, but old Tom Jefferson had the right idea. 'If men must wait in slavery until they are ready for freedom, they will wait long indeed.' " "Who said we were slaves -- " I began. "You talk like a damned reddie. yourself," said Kane. "You seem to think pretty highly of the Empire." do you think I'm doing here?" I snapped. "Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I'm kind of tired. Maybe I'd better go now." Before long Kane made some rather moody good nights and went out. Nat Hawkins twinkled at me. "I'm a little bushed myself," he said. "Guess I'll hit the bunk too." When he was gone, I sat smoking and trying to gather up the will to leave. There was a darkness in me. What, after all, was I doing here? Gods, I believed I was in the right, but why is right so pitiless? On Earth they represent the goddess of justice as blind. On Valgolia she has fangs. Barbara came over and sat on the arm of my chair. "What's the matter, Con?" she asked. "You look pretty grim these days." "My work's developing some complications," I said tonelessly. My mind added : It sure is. No way to call headquarters, the rebellion gathering enormous momentum, and on a basis of treachery and racial hatred. Barbara's fingers rumpled my hair, the grafted hair which by now felt more a part of me than my own lost crest. "You're an odd fellow," she said quietly. "On the surface so frank and friendly and cheerful, and down underneath you're hiding yourself and your private unhappiness." "Why," I looked up at her, astonished, "even the psychologists -- " "They're limited. Con. They can measure, but they can't feel. Not the way -- " She stopped, and the light glowed in her hair and her eyes were wide and serious on mine and one small hand stole over to touch my fingers. Blindly, I wrenched my face away. Her voice was low. "It's some other woman, isn't it?" "Other -- ? Well, no. There was one, but she's dead now. She died ten years ago." Ydis, Ydis! "Your wife?" I nodded. "We were only married for three years. My daughter is still alive; she's going on twelve now. But I haven't seen her for over two years. She's not on Earth. I wonder if she even thinks of me." "Con," said Barbara, very softly and gravely, "you can't go on mourning a woman forever." "I'm not. Forget it. I shouldn't have spoken about it."  "You needed to. That's all right." "My girl ought to have a mother -- " The words came of themselves. What followed thereafter seemed also to happen withPresently Barbara stood back from me. She was laughing, low and sweet and joyous. "Con, you old sourpuss, cheer up! It isn't that bad, you know!" I managed a wry grin, though it seemed to need all the energies left in me. "You look so happy your fool self that I have to counterbalance it." "Con, if you knew how I'd been hoping!" We talked for a long time, but she did most of it -- the plans, the hopes, the trip we were going to take and the house we were going to build down by the seashore -- "Mary," my daughter, was going to have a home, along with the dozen brothers and sisters she'd have in due course -- after the war. After the war. I left, finally, stumbling like a blind man toward my quarters. Oh, yes, I loved her and she loved me and we were going to have a home and a sailboat and a dozen children, after the war, when Earth was free. What more could a man ask for? It had been many years since I'd needed autohypnosis to put myself to sleep, but I used it now. The delay was partly due to the slowness with which I had o work, even after a plan had been laid. I could only do a little at a time, and the times had to be well separated. Each day brought the momentof onslaught closer, but I dared not hurry myself. If they caught me at my work, there would be an end of all things. But I cannot swear that my own mind did not prompt me to an unnatural slowness and caution. I was only human, and every day was one more memory. They had all been very good to us; our friends had a party to celebrate our engagement and we were universally congratulated and all the rest of it. Yes, Kane was there too, shaking my hand and wishing me all the luck in the world. Afterward he went back to his work and his pilot's practice with a strange fierceness. If at times I fell into glum abstraction, well, I had always been a little moody and Barbara could tease me out of it. Most of the times I was with her, I didn't think about the future at all. There had been a certain deep inward coldness to her. She had carried the old wound of her losses with bitter dignity. But as the days went on, I saw less and less of it. She would even admit that individual Valgolians might be fine fellows and that the Empire had done a few constructive things for Earth. But it was more than a change of attitude. She was thawing after a long winter, she laughed more, she was wholly human now. Human -- We sat one evening, she and I, in one of the big lounges the base had for its personnel. There were only one or two muted lights in the long quiet room, a breathing of music, snatches of whispering like our own. She sat close against me, and my lips kept straying down to brush her hair and her cheek. "When we're married -- " she said dreamily. Then aU at once: "Con, what are we waiting for?" prise. "Con, why do we assume we can't get married before the war's over?" Her voice was low and hurried, shaking just a little. "The base here has chaplains. It's less than a month now till the business starts. God knows what'll happen then. Either of us might be killed." I heard her gulp. "Con, if they killed you -- " "They won't," I said. "I'm killproof." "No, no. We have so little time, and it may. be all we'll ever have. Marry me now, darling, dearest, and at least there'll be something to remember. Whatever comes, we'll have had that while." "I tell you," I insisted, with a sudden hideous dismay, "there's nothing to worry about. Forget it." "Oh, I'm not asking for pity. I've more happiness now than is right. Maybe that's why I'm afraid. But, Con, they killed my father and they killed my mother and they killed Jimmy, and if they take you too, it'll be more than I can stand." The savage woe of an old Earthly poet lanced through my brain: The time is out of joint O cursed spite, That ever I was bom To set it right! And then, for just a moment, there came the notion of yielding. You love the girl, Conru. You love her so much it's a pain in you. Well, take her! Marry her! No. I was not excessively tender of heart or conscience, but neither was I that kind of scoundrel. I kissed her words away. Afterward, alone in the darkness of my room, I realized that Conrad Haugen had no good reason to hang back. It was true, all she said was true, and no other couple was wait ing for an uncertain future. It was the time for action. postponing the moment. And those days were marching to the time of war, the rebels were quivering to go, a scant few weeks at most lay between me and the ruin of Valgolian plans and work and hope. In my steadily expanding official capacity, I could go anywhere and do almost anything in an engineering line. So, bit by bit, I had tinkered with the base's general alarm system. We had scoutships posted, of course, but by the very nature of things they had to be close to the planet or an approaching enemy would slip between them without detection. And the substantial vibrations of a ship traveling faster than light do not arrive much ahead of the ship itself. Whatever warning we had of a hypothetical assault would be very short. It would be signaled to all of us by a siren on the intercommunications system, and after that it would be battle stations, naval units to their ships and all others to such ground defenses as we had. But modern warfare is all to the offense. There is no way of stopping an attack from space except by meeting it and annihilating it before it gets to its destination. The rebels were counting on that fact to aid them when they struck, but it would, of course, work against them if their enemy should happen to hit first. Everyone was understandably nervous about the chance of our being discovered and assailed. Working a little at a time, I had put a special switch in the general alarm circuit. It showed up merely as one of many on a sector call board near my room; no one was likely to notice it. And my quarters were not those originally given me. I had moved to a smaller place farther from Barbara, ostensibly to be near my work at the shipyards, actually to be near the base's ultrabeam shack. Now it was time to act. I needed an excuse for not going to the gun turret where I was assigned. That involved faking a serious fever, but like all Intelligence men, I had been trained to full psychosomatic integration. The same neural forces that in hysteria produce paralysis, stigmata, and other real symptoms were under my conscious control. I thought myself sick. By morning I was half delirious and my veins were on fire. The surgeon general came to see me. "What the hell's the trouble?" he wondered. "This place is supposed to be sterile." "Maybe it's too damn sterile," I murmured with a perfectly genuine weakness. Then, fighting the lightheadedness that hummed and buzzed in me: "Tsitbu fever, Doc. I'm sure that's what it is." "Can't say I've ever heard of it." "You'll find it in your medical books." He would, too. "It's found on the planet Sirius V, where I once visited. Filter-passing virus, transmitted by airborne spores. Not contagious here. In humans it becomes chronic; no ill effects except a few days' fever like this ever)' few years. Now go 'way and lemme die in peace." I closed my eyes on the distorted and unreal world of sickness. and with her hair like a rumpled halo. I had to assure her many times that I was all right and would be on my feet in two or three days. Then she smiled and sat down on the bunk and passed a cool palm over my forehead. "Poor Con," she said. "Poor squarehead." "I feel fine as long as you're here," I whispered. "Don't talk," she said. "Just go to sleep." She kissed me and sat quiet. Hers was the rare gift of being a definite personality even when silent and motionless. I clasped her hand and pretended to fall into uneasy sleep. After a while she kissed me again, very softly, and went out. I told my body to recover. It took time, hours of time, while the stub born cells retreated to a normal level of activity. I lay there thinking of many things, most of them unpleasant. It was well into the night, the logical time to act even if the factories did go on a twenty-four hour basis. I got up, still swaying a little with weakness, the dregs of the fever ringing in my head. After I had vomited and swallowed a stimulant tablet, I felt better. I put on my uniform, but substituted a plain sendee jacket without insignia of rank for the tunic. That should make me fairfy inconspicuous in the confusion. Strength came. I glanced cautiously along the dim-lit corridor, and it was empty and silent. I stole out and hurried toward the ultrabeam shack. My hidden switch was on the way; I threw it and ran on with lowered head. The siren screamed behind me, before me, around me, the howling of all the devils in hell -- Hoo! boo! Battle stations! Strange ships approaching! Battle stations! All bands to battle stations! Hoo-oo! I could imagine the pandemonium that erupted, men boiling out of factories and rooms, cursing and yelling and dashing frantically for their posts -- children screaming in terror, women white-faced with sudden numbness -- weapons manned, instruments sweeping the skies, spaceships roaring heavenward, incoherent yelling on the intercoms to find out who had given that signal. With luck, I would have fifteen minutes or half an hour of safe insanity. A few men raced by me, on their way to the nearest missile rack. They paid me no heed, and I hurried along my own path. The winding stair leading up to the ultrabeam shack loomed before me. I went its length, three steps at a time, bounding and gasping with my haste, up to the transmitter. It was the tenuous link binding together a score of rebel planets, the only communication with the starsthat glittered so coldly overhead. The ultrabeam does not have an infinite velocity, but it does have an unlimited speed, one depending solely on the frequency of the generating equipment, and since it only goes to such receivers as are tuned to its pattern -- there must be at least one such tuned unit for the generator to work -- it has a virtually infinite range. So men cantalk between the stars, but are their words the wiser for that? round, up and up, metal clanging underfoot and always the demon screech of the siren -- up ! I sprang from the head of the stairs and crossed the areaway in one leap to the open door of the shack. There was only one operator on duty, a slim boyish figure before the glittering panel. He didn't hear me as I came behind him. I knocked him out with a calculated blow to the base of the skull. He'd be unconscious for at least fifteen minutes and that was time enough. I heaved his body out of the chair and sat down. The unit was set for the complicated secret scrambler pattern of the Legion, one which was changed periodically just in case. I twirled the dials, adjusting for the pattern of the set I knew was kept tuned for me at Vorka's headquarters. The set hummed, warming up. I lifted my eyes and stared into the naked face of Boreas. The shack was above ground, itself dominated by the skeletal tower of the transmitter, and a broad port revealed land and sky. Overhead the stars were glittering, bright and hard and cruel, flashing and flashing out of the crystal dark. The peaks rose on every side, soaring dizziness of cliffs and ragged snarl of crags, hemming us in with our tiny works and struggles. It was bitterly, ringingly cold out there; the snow screamed when you walked on it; the snapping thunder of frost-split rock woke the dull roar of avalanches, and there was the wind, the old immortal wind, moaning and blowing and wandering under the stars. I saw them running, little antlike men across the snow before they froze. I saw the ships rise one after the other and rush darkly skyward. The base had come alive and was reaching up to defy the haughty stars. The set buzzed and whistled, warming up, muttering with the cosmic interference whose source nobody knows. I began to speak into the microphone, softly and urgently: "Calling Intelligence HQ, Sol #, North America Center. Captain Halgan Conru calling North America Center. Come in, enter, come in." T HE receiver rustled with the thin dry voice of the stars. Dimly, I could hear the wind outside, snarling around the walls. "Come in, Center. Come in, Center."' "Captain Halgan!" The voice rattled into the waiting stillness of the shack. "Captain Halgan, is it really you?" "Get General Vorka at once," I said. "Meanwhile, are you recording? All right, be sure you get this." I told them everything I knew. I told them what planet this was, and where we were on its surface, and what our strength and plans were. I gave them the disposition of the scoutship pickets, as far as those were known to me, and the standard Legion recognition signals. I finished with an account of the savage differences still existing between Earthman and Earthman, and Earth and its treacherous allies. And all the time I was talking to a recording machine. Nobody was listening. When I was through, I waited a minute, not feeling any particular emotion. I was too tired. I sat there, listening to the wind and the interstellar whistling, till Vorka spoke to me. "Halgan! Halgan, you've done it !" "Shut up," I said. "What's coming now?" "I checked the Fleet units. We have a Supernova with escort at Bramgar, about fifteen light-years from where you are. You are at their base, aren't you? Can you hold out for two days more?" "I think so." "Better get into the hills. We may have to bombard." "Go to hell." I turned off the set. Now to get back. They must already know it was a trick; they must be scouring the base for the saboteur. As soon as all loyal men were back, the hunt would really be on. I had, of course, worn gloves. There would be no fingerprints. And the operator wouldn't know who had attacked him. I changed the scrambler setting to one picked at random. And in a corner, as if it had fallen there by accident, I dropped a handkerchief stolen from Wergil of Luron. The tiny fragments of tissue which adhere to such a thing could easily be proven to be from him or one of his associates, for the basic Luronian life-molecules are all levorotatory. It might help. I slipped back down the stairs, quickly and quietly. It was over. The base was as good as taken. But there was more to be done. Apart from the saving of my own life, there was still a desperate need for secrecy. For if the rebels knew what was coming, they might choose to stand and fight, or they might flee into the roadless wildernesses of space. Whichever it was, all our work and sacrifice would have gone for little. T HE provocateur policy is the boldest and most farsighted enterprise ever undertaken. It is the first attempt to make history as we choose, to control the great social forces we are only dimly beginning to understand, so that intelligence may ultimately be its own master. Sure. Very fine and idealistic, and no doubt fairly true as well. But there is death and treachery in it, loneliness and heartbreak, and the bitterness of the betrayed. Have we the right to set ourselves up as God? Can we really say, in our omniscience, that everyone but us is wrong? There were sane, decent, intelligent folk here on Boreas, the ones we needed so desperately for all civilization. Did we have to make them our enemies, so that their grandchildren might be our friends? I didn't know. Wherever I turned, there were treason and injustice. However hard I tried to do right, I had to wrong somebody. I ran on, back to my cabin. I peeled off my clothes and dived into bed, and by the time they looked in on me I had worked back most of my fever. Don't think, Conru. Don't think of this new victory and the safety of the Empire. And, perhaps, a step closer to the harshly won unity of Earth. Don't think of the way the light catches in Barbara's hair and gets turned into molten gold. You've got a fever to create, man. You've got to think yourself sick again. That ought to be easy. white and still, and presently she leaned her head against my breast and cried quietly, for a long time. "There is a spy here," she told me. "I heard about it." I stroked her hair and held her to me, clumsily. "Do you know who it was ?" "I don't know. Somehow, they seem to think the Luronians may be guilty, but they aren't sure. They arrested them, and two were killed resisting. Colonel Wergil is in the brig now, while they decide if Luron can still be trusted." "It can't," I said. "Earth must win alone." "We'll win," she said dauntlessly. "With turon or without it, we'll vyin." Then, like a little frightened girl, creeping close to me: "But we needed that help so much." I kissed her and remained silent. The next day I got on my feet again, weak but recovered. I wandered aimlessly around the base, waiting for Barbara to get through work, listening to people talk. It was ugly, the fear and tension and wolfish watchfulness. Whom can we trust? Who is the enemy? Mostly, they thought the Luronians were guilty. After all, those were the only beings on the planet who had not had to pass a rigorous investigation and psychological examination. But nobody was sure. Levinsohn spoke over the televisor. His gaunt, lined face had grown very tired, yet there was metal in his voice. The new situation necessitated a change of plans, but the time of assault would, if anything, be moved ahead. "Be of good heart. Stand by your comrades. We'll still be free!" I went to Barbara's apartment and we sat up very late. But even in this private record I do not wish to say what we talked about. A ND the next day the Empire came. There was one Supernova ship with light escort, but that was enough. Such vessels have the mass of a large asteroid, and one of them can sterilize a planet; two or three can take it apart. Theoretically, a task force comprising twenty Novaclass battleships with escorts can reduce one of those monsters if it is nothing less can even do significant damage, and the rebel base did not have that much. Nor could they get even what they had into full action. The ships rushed out of interstellar space, flashing the recognition signals I had given. Before the picket vessels suspected what was wrong, the Valgolians were on them. One managed to bleat a call to base and the alarm screamed again, men rushed to battle stations. Then the Imperials blanketed all communications with a snarl of interference through which nothing the rebels had could drive. So naturally they were thought to have been annihilated in a few swift blazes of fire and steel, a quick clean death and forgetfulness of defeat. But only the drivers were crippled, and then the Supernova yanked the vessels to its titan flanks and held them in unbreakable gravity beams. The crews would be taken later, with narcotic gas or paralyzer beams -- alive. For the Empire needs its rebels. I knew the uselessness of going to battle stations, so I hung behind, seeking out Barbara, whose place was with the missile computer bank. I met her and Kane in the hallway. The boy's face was white, and there were tears running down his cheeks. "This is the end," he said. "They've found us out, and there's nothing left but to die. Good by, Barbara." He kissed her, wildly, and ran for his ship. Moodily, I watched him go. He expected death, and he would get only capture, and afterward -- "What are you doing here, Con ?" asked Barbara. "I'm too shaky to be any good in the artillery. Let me go with you, I can punch a computer." She nodded silently, and we went off together. T HE floor shook under us, and a crash of rock roared down the halls. The heavy weapons on the Supernova were bloodlessly reducing our ground installations and our ships not yet in action to smashed rubble. They would kill not a single one of us, except by uncontrollable accident, and save many Valgolian and Earth lives that way, but it wasn't pleasant to be slugged. The girl and I staggered ahead. When the lights went out, I stopped and held her. "It's no use," I said. "They've got us." "Let me go!" she cried. I hung on, and suddenly she collapsed against me, crying and shaking. We stood there with the city rumbling and shivering around us, waiting. Presently the Valgolian commander released the interference and contacted Levinsohn, offering terms of surrender. It seemed to Levinsohn, and it was meant to seem, that further resistance would be useless butchery. His ships were gone and his foes need only bombard him to ruin. He capitulated, and one by one we laid down our arms and filed to meet the victors. The terms, as announced by messengers -- the intercom was out of action -- were generous. Leading rebels and those judged potentially "dangerous" would go to penal colonies on various Earthlike planets. Except that they weren't penal colonies at all, but, of course, the Earthlings wouldn't know this. They were indoctrination centers, and, with all my bitterness, I still longed to observe a man like Levinsohn after five years in one of the centers. He'd see things in a different perspective. He'd see the Empire for what it was -- even if I sometimes had a little trouble seeing that now -- and he'd be a better rebel for it. Someday Levinsohn and his kind would be back on Earth, the new leaders ready to lead the way to a new tomorrow. And I would be with them. I'd be back with Levinsohn and the rest, and with Barbara, too, and we'd try to pave the way to the peace and friendship. But meanwhile there'd be other revolutions -- striving and hoping and breaking their hearts daring what they thought would be death to win what they called freedom and what we hoped would be evolution. It was the fire to temper a new civilization. We walked down the hall, Barbara and I, hand in hand, alone in spite of all the people who were shuffling the same way. Most of them were weeping. But Barbara's head was high now. "What will happen to us?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "But, Barbara, whatever happens after this, remember that I love you. Remember that I'll always love you." "I love you too," she smiled, and kissed me. "We'll be together, Con. That's all that matters. We'll be together." That was important -- and it made me feel good. Yes, we'd be together; I'd see to that. But for a while Barbara would hate me through all the long years of the indoctrination. Someday, perhaps, she would understand... the indoctrination could do it, and I could help. But by the gods of space, how would it be to take that hate all that while? W E came out into the central chamber where the prisoners were gathering to be herded up to the ships. Armed Valgolian guards stood under the glare of improvised lights. Other Imperials were going through the city, flushing out those who might be hiding and removing whatever our armed forces could use. The equipment would do no one any good here, and Boreas would be left to its darkness. It was cold in the vast shadowy room. The heating plant had broken down and the ancient cold of Boreas was seeping in. Barbara shivered and I held her close to me. Nat Hawkins moved over to join us, wordlessly. I was questioned in a locked room by one of the big Valgolian officers. He looked at a stereograph in his hand and he took me aside, but it was not unusual. Many of the starbound prisoners were being questioned by their guards, and I was merely one of them. "Colonel Halgen?" the officer asked with an eagerness close to hero-worship. He was obviously fresh from school and military terminology came from his lips as if it really meant something to a Valgolian. The colonel, of course, meant that in a titular sense I had been elevated for my work. Funny, if you use the language enough, you get to believe it yourself. "Sir," the young officer continued, "this is one of the greatest pieces of work I've ever seen. I am to extend the official congratulations of -- " I let him talk for a while and then I raised my hand peremptorily and I told him that the girl with the Earthling Hawkins was to go along for indoctrination, despite the fact that her name did not appear on his lists. He nodded, and I went back to Barbara, but half a dozen men had come between us. Levinsohn and five guards. The man's carriage was still erect, the old unbreakable pride and courage were still in him. Someone among the prisoners broke loose and rushed at him, cursing, till the Valgolians thrust him back into line. "Levinsohn!" screamed the man. "Levinsohn, you dirty Jew, you sold us out!" There you see why this rebellion had to be crushed. Earth still had a long way to go. The Levinsohns, the Barbaras, the more promising of the anarchs would be educated and returned and the civilizing process would go on. Earth's best and bravest would unite and fight us, and with each defeat they would learn something of what we had to teach them, that all races, however divergent, must respect each other and work together, learn it with an intensity which the merely intellectual teaching of schools and propaganda could not achieve alone -- or, at any rate, soon enough. Valgolia is the great and lonely enemy, the self-appointed Devil since none of us can be angels. It is the source of challenge and adversity such as has always driven intelligence onward and upward, in spite of itself. Sooner or later, generations hence, perhaps, all the subject worlds will have attained internal unity, forgetting their very species in a common bond of intelligence. And on that day Valgolia's work will be done. She and her few friends, her donagcingors, will seemingly capitulate without a fight and become simply part of a union of free and truly civilized planets. And such a union will be firmer and more enduring than all the tyrant empires of the past. It will have the strength of a thousand or more races, working together in the harmony which they achieved in struggling against us. long way ahead; there may be centuries needed, and meanwhile Valgolia is alone. Barbara would understand. In time she would understand what she as yet did not even know. But first would be the hatred, the cold stark hatred that must come of knowing who and what I really am. I could only wait for that hatred to come after she learned, and then wait for it to go, slowly, slowly... Lines of the Earthlings were filing forward, and, with Nat Hawkins, Barbara waited for me. I walked to her and took her hand. Her head was high, as high as Levinsohn's. She expected all ofus to die, but she'd meet the relatives and friends she thought were dead. It would be a great, a crushing humiliation, to know one's martyrs were alive and being well treated and intensively educated by the foe, who was supporting and encouraging one's supposedly dangerous revolution. "It won't be so bad as long as we're together, darling," I said. She smiled, misunderstanding, and kissed me defiantly before our Valgolian guards.    i  .   .  V   v  a;   . U ;; W. Campbell, Jr. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. #, # pages. news of the month -- a brandnew story by the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, who has not written in much too long a time. The book is composed of two long novelets, one new, one old. The old one is The Elder Gods, reprinted from the October # Unknown. This drawn-out, rather de Camp like fantasy is actually not among the best of Campbell's work. The Moon Is Hell! is quite ancircumstantial narrative tells, in day-by-day diary form, the experiences of the first crew of explorers (all-American, of course; no foreigners allowed, not even any dubious foreign names) ever to land and live for any length of time on the Moon. The fifteen explorerscientists actually succeed in making a remarkably comfortable life for themselves during their first two years on the Moon's "Dark Side." They have their difficulties, ' to be sure, but not until well past the middle of the story do these become particularly harrowing. Why the ship had to land on the side facing away from Earth is not reasonably established. Of course, there would have been no story had it landed on the visible hemisphere, since the plot revolves around the difficulties the men encounter in communicating with Earth from the far side. The relief ship that was to take them home after their two years crashes near their encampment. Since Earth has no evidence that the explorers themselves are alive, the failure of the relief ship to return probably will persuade everyone in the United States that both expeditions failed, and no new relief ship will be sent. The struggles of the men to get to the Earthward side and send their signals, and to piece out their food supply until a new ship can be built, make the latter half of the story exceptionally gripping. Despite its plot-necessitated inconsistencies, The Moon Is Hell! is first-rate stuff, full of ingenious solutions to known lunar problems, and of the quiet heroism of men facing the unknown. Gnome Press, Inc., New York, #. #, # pages. ing book. Asimov has strung together nine of his best robot stories into an episodic history of robotics' first seventy-five years. Susan Calvin, the world's first "robopsychologist," is the narrator who tells a reporter from Interplanetary Press some of the high spots in the development of these servants of man. There is nothing particularly mechanical about the robots themselves, and certainly not about the tales describing them, for Asimov has a first-rate talent for humanizing his positronic-brained "manufactured men," and also for the human characters whom the robots serve. The book opens with a completely charming and little-known story from a # issue of Super-Science Stories, which tells about "Robbie" the robot-nursemaid. The rest of the tales, all from Astounding Science Fiction, carry the story through the crisis of human opposition to robots on earth, to the final point where computer-robots make wars and other human-occasioned catastrophes impossible. Unreservedly recommended. ed by Martin Greenberg, Gnome Press, New York, #. #-#, #I page si ets and short stories is an attempt to present the story of mankind from ancient times into the far-distant future. It is the second volume in Gnome's "Adventures in Science Fiction" series of anthologies, the first of which was Men Against the Stars. For the current collection, Greenberg has chosen tales by A. Bertram Chandler, E. E. Smith, Fredric Brown, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Isaac Asimov, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Cleve Cartmill, Judith Merril and Eric Frank Russell. In time, these stories conduct the reader from the origins of the Adam and Eve legend, in Chandler's magnificent "False Dawn," clear through to an immensely distant future in which man has mutated into a self-controlled atomic pile, in Russell's equally superb "Metamorphosite." Judged as a collection of science fiction stories, Journey to Infinity is somewhat uneven. Between the two stories which open and close the book are some which rate equally high -- Sturgeon's "Unite and Conquer," for example, Asimov's "Mother Earth," and Cartmill's "Overthrow." Others are good of their kind, and a few are run-of-the-mill stuff. However, as an "idea" anthology, the notion of presenting science fiction's possible pasts and futures for man in a collection of short stories is a fascinating one, but the job cannot be effectively done in twelve stories. Anyone who is familiar with the rich store of science fiction in this particular field will feel a very definite sense of dissatisfaction with this slim collection. At least ten or a dozen more tales come to mind which would have greatly enriched and varied the picture of man's possible pasts and futures. Where, for example, is a chapter from the greatest of all histories of tomorrow, Robert Heinlein's? (It is possible, of course, that Heinlein would not let any be used, since his "history" is already being published in several volumes by another publisher.) Or where is the essential "Baldy" story, from Lewis Padgett's excellent postatomicwar series ? Or one of Simak's "City" tales? Despite too skeletal a form, Journey to Infinity is a good buy for anyone who likes top-grade science fiction. C. Clarke. Galaxy, New York, #. #tf, # pages. mentary of tomorrow," appearing for the first time anywhere as a Galaxy paper-bound book, tells the story of the organizational and logistics problems which must be solved before the first man-carrying rocket to ' the moon can ' be launched. Realistically, and yet with a genuine feeling for the drama and the awe of the adventure, it takes you from the early, confusion-riddendays of planning and training in London, clear through to the actual launching of the rocket from its five-mile-long track deep in the Australian desert. Recommended for readers whose taste goes beyond Perry Mason. Y OU tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn't my kind of Public Relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really were. , If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all. You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn't it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident. Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, how the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M. P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers. How and why Trowson, my old sociology prof, was consulted once the problem became clear. How he blinked at the brass hats and striped pants and came up with the answer. Me. I was the answer. How my entire staff and I were plucked out of our New York offices, where we were quietly earning of the F. B. I. and air-mailed to Baltimore. Honestly, Alvarez, even after Trowson explained the situation to me, I was still irritated. Government hush-hush always makes me uncomfortable. Though I don't have to tell you how grateful I was for it later. The spaceship itself was such a big surprise that I didn't even wet my lips when the first of the aliens slooshed out. After all those years # When interstellar guests arrive, it's only right that the treat should be on us. A treat, however, not a treatment! of streamlined cigar-shapes the Sunday Supplement artists had dreamed up, that colorful and rococo spheroid rearing out of a barley field in Maryland looked less like an interplanetary vessel than an oversized ornament for a whatnot table. Nothing that seemed like a rocket jet anywhere. "And there's your job," the prof pointed. "Those two visitors." They were standing on a flat metal plate surrounded by the highest the republic had elected or appointed. Nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering up from a rather wide base to a pointed top, and dressed in a tiny pink and white shell. Two stalks with eyes on them that swung this way and that, and seemed muscular enough to throttle a man. And a huge wet slash of a mouth that showed whenever an edge of the squirming base lifted from the metal plate. "Snails," I said. "Snails!" "Or slugs," Trowson amended. "Gastropodal molluscs in any case." He gestured at the roiling white bush of hair that sprouted from his head. "But, Dick, that vestigial bit of coiled shell is even less an evolutionary memento than this. They're an older -- and smarter -- race." "Smarter?" He nodded. "When our engineers got curious, they were very courteously invited inside to inspect the ship. They came out with their mouths hanging." I ripped a small piece off my manicure. "Well, naturally, prof, if they're so alien, so different -- " "Not only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it'll be very important in what you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a hurry are like a crowd of South Sea Islanders trying to analyze the rifle and compass from what they know of spears and windstorms. These creatures belong to a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we're a bunch of backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that's about to be opened to exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can't measure up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn fast." A dignified official with a briefcase detached himself from the nodding, smiling group around the aliens and started for us. ly. "#, repeat performance." I thought for a moment, not too clearly. "But why send the army and navy after me? I'm not going to be able to read blueprints from -- from -- " "Betelgeuse. Ninth planet of the star Betelgeuse. No, Dick, we've already had Dr. Warbury out here. They learned English from him in two hours, although he hasn't identified a word of theirs in three days! And people like Lopez, like Mainzer, are going quietly psychotic trying to locate their power source. We have the best minds we can get to do the learning. Your job is different. We want you as a top-notch advertising man, a public relations executive. You're the good impression part of the program." The official plucked at my sleeve and I shrugged him away. "Isn't that the function of government glad : handers ?" I asked Trowson. "No. Don't you remember what you said when you first saw them? Snails! How do you think this country is going to take to the idea of snails -- giant snails -- who sneer condescendingly at our skyscraper cities, our atomic bombs, our most advanced mathematics? We're a conceited kind of monkey. Also, we're afraid of the dark." There was a gentle official tap on my shoulder. I said "Please!" impatiently. I watched the warm little breeze ruffle Professor Trowson's slept-in clothes and noticed the tiny red streaks in his weary eyes. "Mighty Monsters from Outer Space. Headlines like that, prof?" "Slugs with Superiority Complexes. Dirty Slugs, more likely. We're lucky they landed in this country, and so close to the Capitol, too. In a few days, we'll have to call in the heads of other nations. Then, sometime soon after, the news will be out. We don't want our visitors attacked by mobs drunk on superstition, planetary isolation or any other form of tabloid hysteria. We don't want them carrying stories back to their civilization of being shot at by a suspendered fanatic who screamed, 'Go back where you come from, you furrin seafood!' We want to give them the impression that we are a fairly amiable, fairly intelligent race, that we can be dealt with reasonably well." I nodded. "Yeah. So they'll set up trading posts on this planet instead of garrisons. But what do I do in all this?" He punched my chest gently. "You, Dick -- you do a job of public relations. You sell these aliens to the American people!" T HE official had maneuvered around in front of me. I recognized him. He was the Undersecretary of State. "Would you step this way, please?" he said. "I'd like to introduce you to our distinguished guests." So he stepped, and I stepped, and we scrunched across the field and clanked across the steel plate and stood next to our gastropodic guests. "Ahem," said the Undersecretary politely. The nearer snail bent an eye toward us. The other eye drew a bead on the companion snail, and then the great slimy head arched and came down to our level. The creature raised, as it were, one cheek of its foot and said, with all the mellowness of air being pumped through a torn inner tube, "Can it be that you wish to communicate with my unworthy self, respected sir?" I was introduced. The thing brought two eyes to bear on me. The place where its chin should have been dropped to my feet and snaked around there for a second. Then it said, "You, honored sir, are our touchstone, the link with all that is great in your noble race. Your condescension is truly a tribute." All this tumbled out while I was muttering "How," and extending a diffident hand. The snail put one eyeball in my palm and the other on the back of my wrist. It didn't shake; it just put the things there and took them away again. I had the wit not to wipe my hands on my pants, which was my immediate impulse. The eyeball wasn't exactly dry, either. I said, "I'll do my best. Tell me, are you -- uh -- ambassadors, sort of? Or maybe just explorers?" "Our small worth justifies no titles," said the creature, "yet we are both; for all communication is ambassadorship of a kind, and any seeker after knowledge is an explorer." I was suddenly reminded of an old story with the punchline, "Ask a foolish question and you get a foolish answer." I also wondered suddenly what snails eat. The second alien glided over and eyed me. "You may depend upon our utmost obedience," it said humbly. "We understand your awesome function and we wish to be liked to whatever extent it is possible for your admirable race to like such miserable creatures as ourselves." "Stick to that attitude and we'll get along," I said. pleasure to work with. I mean there was no temperament, no upstaging, no insistence on this camera angle or that mention of a previously published book or the other wishful biographical apocrypha about being raised in a convent, like most of my other clients. On the other hand they weren't easy to talk to. They'd take orders, sure. But ask them a question. Any question: "How long did the trip take you?" " 'How long' in your eloquent tongue indicates a frame of reference dealing with duration. I hesitate to discuss so complex a problem with one as learned as yourself. The velocities involved make it necessary to answer in relative terms. Our lowly and undesirable planet recedes from this beauteous system during part of its orbital period, advances toward it during part. Also we must take into consideration the direction and velocity of our star in reference to the cosmic expansion of this portion of the continuum. Had we come from Cygnus, say, or Bootes, the question could be answered somewhat more directly; for those bodies travel in a contiguous arc skewed from the ecliptic plane in such a way that -- " Or a question like, "Is your government a democracy?" "A democracy is a rule of the people, according to your rich etymology. We could not, in our lowly tongue, have expressed it so succinctly and movingly. One must govern oneself, of course. The degree of governmental control on the individual must vary from individual to individual and in the individual from time to time. This is so evident to as comprehensive a mind as yours that I trust you forgive me my inanities. The same control applies, naturally, to individuals considered in the mass. When faced with a universal necessity, the tendency exists among civilized species to unite to fill the need. Therefore, when no such necessity exists, there is less reason for concerted effort. Since this applies to all species, it applies even to such as us. On the other hand -- " See what I mean ? A little of that got old quickly with me. I was happy to keep my nose to my own grindstone. T HE government gave me a month for the preparatory propaganda. Originally, the story was to break in two weeks, but I got down on my hands and knees and bawled that a publicity deadline required at least five times that. So they gave me a month. Explain that carefully, Alvarez. I want them to understand exactly what a job I faced. All those years of lurid magazine covers showing extremely nubile females being menaced in three distinct colors by assorted monstrosities; those horror movies, those invasion-from-outerspace novels, those Sunday Supplement fright-splashes -- all those sturdy psychological ruts I had to retrack. Not to mention the shudders elicited by mention of "worms," the regulation distrust of even human "furriners," the superstitious dread of creatures who had no visible place to park a soul. Trowson helped me round up the men to write the scientific articles, and I dug up the boys who could pseudo them satisfactorily. Magazine mats were ripped apart to make way for yarns speculating gently on how far extraterrestrial races might have evolved beyond us, how much more ethical they might have become, how imaginary seven-headed creatures could still apply the Sermon on the Mount. Syndicated features popped up describing "Humble Creatures Who Create our Gardens," "Snail-Racing, the Spectacular New Spectator Sport," and so much stuff on "The Basic Unity of all Living Things" that I began to get uncomfortable at even a vegetarian dinner. I remember hearing there was a perceptible boom in mineral waters and vitamin pills... And all this, mind you, without a word of the real story breaking. A columnist did run a cute and cryptic item about someone having finally fouTid meat on the flying saucers, but half an hour of earnest discussion in an abandoned fingerprint-file room prejudiced him against further comment along this line. T HE video show was the biggest problem. I don't think I could have done it on time with anything less than the resources and influence of the United States government behind me. But a week before the official announcement, I had both the video show and the comic strip in production. I think fourteen -- though maybe it was more -- of the country's best comedy writers collaborated on the project, not to mention the horde of illustrators and university psychologists who combined to sweat out the delightful little drawings. We used the drawings as the basis for the puppets on the TV show and I don't think anything was ever so gimmicked up with Popular Appeal -- and I do mean Popular -- as "Andy and Dandy." Those two fictional snails crept into the heart of America like a virus infection: overnight, everybody was talking about their anthropomorphic antics, repeating their quotable running gags and adjuring each other not to miss the next show. ("You can't miss it, Steve; it's on every channel anyway. Right after supper.") I had the tie-ins, too: Andy and Dandy dolls for the girls, snail scooters for the boys, everything from pictures on cocktail glasses to kitchen decalcomanias. Of course, a lot of the tie-ins didn't come off the production line till after the Big Announcement. When we gave the handouts to the newspapers, we "suggested" what headlines to use. They had a choice of ten. Even the New York der that a four-column cut of blonde Baby Ann Joyce with the snails. Baby Ann had been flown out from Hollywood for the photograph. The cut showed her standing between the two aliens and clutching an eye-stalk of each in her trusting, chubby hands. The nicknames stuck. Those two slimy intellectuals from another star became even more important than the youthful evangelist who was currently being sued for bigamy. Andy and Dandy had a tickertape reception in New York. They obligingly laid a cornerstone for the University of Chicago's new library. They posed for the newsreels everywhere, surrounded by Florida oranges, Idaho potatoes, Milwaukee beer. They were magnificently cooperative. F .OM time to time, I wondered what they thought of us. They had no facial expressions, which was scarcely odd since they had no faces. Their long eye-stalks swung this way and that as they rode down shrieking Broadway in the back seat of the Mayor's car; their gelatinous body-foot would heave periodically and the mouth under it make a smacking noise, but when the photographers suggested that they curl around the barely clad beauties, the time video rigged up a Malibu Beach show, Andy and Dandy wriggled over and complied without a word. Which is more than I can say for the barely clad beauties. And when the winning pitcher presented them with an autographed baseball at that year's World Series, they bowed gravely, their pink shelltops glistening in the sunlight, and said throatily into the battery of microphones: "We're the happiest fans in the universe!" The country went wild over them. "But we can't keep them here," Trowson predicted. "Did you read about the debate in the U. N. General Assembly yesterday? We were accused of making secret alliances with non-human aggressors against the best interests of our own species." I shrugged. "Well, let them go overseas. I don't think anyone else will be more successful extracting information from them than we were." Professor Trowson wriggled his short body up on a corner of his desk. He lifted a folderful of typewritten notes and grimaced as if his tongue were wrapped in wool. "Four months of careful questioning," he grumbled. "Four months of painstaking interrogation by trained sociologists using every free moment the aliens had, which admittedly wasn't much. Four months of organized investigation, of careful data-sifting." He dropped the folder disgustedly to the desk and some of the pages splashed out. "And we know more about the social structure of Atlantis than Betelgeuse IX." We were in the wing of the Pentagon assigned to what the brass hats, in their own cute way, had christened Project Encyclopedia. I strolled across the large, sunny office and glanced at the very latest organizational wall-chart. I pointed to a small rectangle labeled "Power Source Sub-Section" depending via a straight line from a larger rectangle marked "Alien Physical Science Inquiry Section." In the small rectangle, very finely printed, were the names of an army major, Yinthe and Mainzer. "How' re they doing?" I asked. "Not much better, I'm afraid." Trowson turned away with a sigh from peering over my shoulder. "At least, I deduce that from the unhappy way Mainzer bubbles into his soup spoon at lunch. Conversation between sub-sections originating in different offices on the departmental level is officially discouraged, you know. But I remember Mainzer from the university cafeteria. He bubbled into his soup the very same way when he was stuck on his solar refraction engine." JL afraid w'e're too young to play with matches? Or maybe apelike creatures are too unpleasantlooking to be allowed to circulate in their refined and esthetic civilization?" "I don't know, Dick." The prof ambled back to his desk and leafed irritably through his sociological notes. "If anything like that is true, why would they give us free run of their ship? Why would they reply so gravely and courteously to every question? If only their answers weren't so vague in our terms! But they are such complex and artistically minded creatures, so chockful of poetic sentiment and good manners that it's impossible to make mathematical or even verbal sense out of their vast and circumlocutory explanations. Sometimes, when I think of their highly polished manners and their seeming lack of interest in the structure of their society, when I put that together with their spaceship which looks like one of those tiny jade carvings that took a lifetime to accomplish... He trailed off and began riffling the pages like a Mississippi steamboat gambler going over somebody else's deck of cards. "Isn't it possible we just don't have enough stuff as yet to understand them?" "Yes. In fact, that's what 'we always come back to. Warbury points to the tremendous development in our language since the advent of technical vocabularies. He says that this process, just beginning with us, already affects our conceptual approach as well as our words. And, naturally, in a race so much further along -- But if we could only find a science of theirs which bears a faint resemblance to one of ours!" I felt sorry for him, standing there blinking futilely out of gentle, academic eyes. "Cheer up, prof. Maybe by the time old Suckfoot and his pal come back from the Grand Tour, you'll have unsnarled a sophistry and we'll be off this 'Me, friend; you come from across sea in great bird with many wings' basis that we seemed to have wandered into." And there you are, Alvarez: a cheap advertising smallbrain like me, and I was that close. I should have said something then. Bet you wouldn't have nodded at me heavily and said, "I hope so, Dick. I desperately hope so." But, come to think of it, not only Trowson was trotting up that path. So was Warbury. So were Lopez, Vinthe and Mainzer. So was I, among others. Andy and Dandy went abroad. My job wasn't exactly over, but the Public Relations end was meshing right along, with me needed only once in a while to give a supervisory spin. Chiefly, I maintained close contact with my opposite number in various other sovereign states, giving out with experienced advice on how to sell the Boys from Betelgeuse. They had to adjust it to their own mass phobias and popular myths; but they were a little happier about it than I had been, without any clear idea of what public behavior to expect of our visitors. Remember, when I'd started, I hadn't even been sure those snails were housebroken. I followed them in the newspapers. I pasted the pictures of the Mikado receiving them next to their nice comments on the Taj Mahal. They weren't nearly so nice to the Akhund of Swat; but, then, when you think of what the Akhund said about them -- They tended to do that everywhere, giving just a little better than they got. For example, when they were presented with those newly created decorations in Red Square (Dandy got The Order of Extraterrestrial Friends of Soviet Labor, while, for some abstruse reason, The Order of Heroic Interstellar Champion of the Soviet People was conferred, upon Andy), they came out with a long, ringing speech about the scientific validity of communist government. It made for cheering, flower-tossing crowds in the Ukraine and Poland, but a certain amount of restiveness in these United States. But before I had to run my staff into overtime hours, whipping up press releases which recapitulated the aliens' statement before the joint houses of Congress and their lovely, sentimental comments at Valley Forge, the aliens were in Berne, telling the Swiss that only free enterprise could have produced the yodel, the Incabloc escapement in watches, and such a superb .example of liberty; hadn't they had democracy long enough to have had it first, and wasn't it wonderful? By the time they reached Paris, I had the national affection pretty much under control again, although here and there a tabloid still muttered peevishly in its late city final. But, as always, Andy and Dandy put the clincher on. Even then I wondered whether they really liked DeRoges' latest abstraction for itself alone. But they bought the twisted sculpture, paying for it, since they had no cash of their own, with a thumb-sized gadget which actually melted marble to any degree of pattern-delicacy the artist desired, merely by being touched to the appropriate surface. DeRoges threw away his chisels blissfully, but six of the finest minds in France retired to intensive nervous breakdowns after a week of trying to solve the tool's working principles. It went over big here: Betelgeuse Business Men Show Appreciation for Value Received This newspaper notes with pleasure the sound shopper's ethics behind the latest transaction of our distinguished guests from the elemental void. Understanding the inexorable law of supply and demand, these representatives of an advanced economic system refuse to succumb to the gimmies.' If certain other members of the human race were to examine carefully the true implications of... United States after being presented at the British Court, they got juicy spreads in all the newspapers, a tug-whistle reception in New York harbor and the mayor's very chiefest deputy there on City Hall steps to receive them. And even though people were more or less accustomed to them now, they were somehow never shoved off page one. There was the time a certain furniture polish got a testimonial out of them in which the aliens announced that they'd had particularly happy and glossy results on their tiny shell toppers with the goo; and they used the large financial rewards of the testimonial to buy ten extremely rare orchids and have them sunk in plastic. And there was the time -- I missed the television show on which it broke. I had gone to a sidestreet movie theater that night to see a revival of one of my favorite Chaplin pictures; and I'd never enjoyed the ostentatious greet-thegreat hysterics of Celebrity Salon anyway. I hadn't any idea of how long the m.c., Bill Bancroft, had waited to get Andy and Dandy on his program, and how much he was determined to make it count when the big night arrived. Reconstructed and stripped of meaningless effusion, it went something like this: Bancroft asked them if they weren't anxious to get home to the wife and kiddies. Andy explained patiently, for perhaps the thirtyfourth time, that, since they were hermaphrodites, they had no family in any humanly acceptable sense. Bancroft cut into the explanation to ask them what ties they did have. Chiefly the revitalizer, says Andy politely. Revitalizer? What's a revitalizer? Oh, a machine they have to expose themselves to every decade or so, says Dandy. There's at least one revitalizer in every large city on their home planet. Bancroft makes a bad pun, waits for the uproarious audience to regain control, then asks: And this revitalizer -- just what does it do? Andy goes into a long-winded explanation, the gist of which is that the revitalizers stir up cytoplasm in all animal cells and refresh them. I see, cracks Bancroft; the pause every decade that refreshes. And then, after being refreshed, you have what as a result? "Oh," muses Dandy, "you might say we have no fear of cancer or any degenerative disease. Besides that, by exposing ourselves to revitalizers at regular intervals throughout our lifetime and refreshing our body cells, we quintuple our life expectancy. We live five times longer than we should. That's about what the revitalizer does, you might say," says Dandy. Andy, after thinking a bit, agrees. "That's about it." Pandemonium, and not mild. Newspaper extras in all languages, including the Scandinavian. Lights burning late at night in the U. N. Headquarters with guards twenty deep around the site. When President of the Assembly Sadhu asked them why they'd never mentioned revitalizers before, they did the snail equivalent of shrugging and said the Betelgeuse IX equivalent of nobody ever asked them. President Sadhu cleared his throat, waved all complications aside with his long brown fingers and announced, "That is not important. Not now. We must have revitalizers." It seemed to take the aliens a while to understand that. When they finally became convinced that we, as a species, were utterly entranced with the prospect of two to four centuries of life instead of fifty or sixty years, they went into a huddle. B UT their race didn't make these machines for export, they explained regretfully. Just enough to service their population. And, while they could see as how we might like and must obviously deserve to have these gadgets, there was none to ferry back from Betelgeuse. Sadhu didn't even look around for advice. "What would your people want?" he asked. "What would they like in exchange for manufacturing these machines for us? We will pay almost any price within the power of this entire planet." A rumbling, eager "yes" in several languages rolled across the floor of the Assembly. Andy and Dandy couldn't think of a thing. Sadhu begged them to try. He personally escorted them to their spaceship, which was now parked in a restricted area in Central Park. "Good night, gentlemen," said President of the Assembly Sadhu. "Try -- please try hard to think of an exchange." They stayed inside their ship for almost six days while the world almost went insane with impatience. When I think of all the fingernails ple... "Imagine!" Trowson whispered to me. He was pacing the floor as if he fully intended to walk all the way to Betelgeuse. "We'd just be children on a quintupled life-scale, Dick. All my achievement and education, all yours, would be just the beginning! A man could learn five professions in such a life -- and think what he could accomplish in one!" I nodded, a little numb. I was thinking of the books I could read, the books I might write, if the bulk of my life stretched ahead of me and the advertising profession was just a passing phase in the beginning of it. Then, again, somehow I'd never married, never had had a family. Not enough free time, I had felt. And now, at forty, I was too set in my ways. But a man can unset a lot in a century -- In six days the aliens came out. With a statement of price. They believed they could persuade their people to manufacture a supply of revitalizers for us if An IF writ very large indeed. Their planet was woefully short of radioactive minerals, they explained apologetically. Barren worlds containing radium, uranium and thorium had been discovered and claimed by other races, but the folk of Betelgeuse IX were forbidden by their ethics to wage aggressive war for territorial purposes. We had plenty of radioactive ore, which we used chiefly for war and biological research. The former was patently undesirable and the latter would be rendered largely unnecessary by the revitalizers. So, in exchange, they wanted our radioactive elements. All of them, they stated humbly. A LL right, we were a little Surprised, even stunned. But the protests never started to materialize. There was an overwhelming chorus of "sold !" from every quadrant of the globe. A couple of generals here, a few militaristic statesmen there managed to raise direly pointing forefingers before they were whisked out of position. A nuclear physicist or two howled about the future of sub-atomic research, but the peoples of the earth howled louder. "Research? How much research can you do in a lifetime of three hundred years?" Overnight, the United Nations became the central office of a planetwide mining concession. National boundaries were superseded by pitchblende deposits and swords were beaten into pickaxes. Practically anyone with a good, usable arm enlisted in the shovel brigades for two or more months out of the year. Camaraderie flew on the winds of the world. Andy and Dandy politely offered to help. They marked out on detail contour maps the spots to be mined, and that included areas never suspected of radioactivity. They supplied us with fantastic but clear line-drawings of devices for extracting the stuff from the ores in which it assayed poorly, and taught us the exact use of these devices, if not their basic principle. They hadn't been joking. They wanted it all. Then, when everything was running smoothly, they buzzed off for Betelgeuse to handle their part of the bargain. exhilarating of my life. And I'd say everyone feels the same, don't they, Alvarez? The knowledge that the world was working together, cheerfully, happily, for life itself. I put my year in at The Great Slave Lake and I don't think anyone of my age and weight lifted more pitchblende. Andy and Dandy came back in two huge ships, manned by weird snail-like robots. The robots did everything, while Andy and Dandy went on being lionized. From the two ships, almost covering the sky, the robots ferried back and forth in strange, spiral aircraft, bringing revitalizes down, carrying refined radioactive elements aloft. No one paid the slightest attention to their methods of instantaneous extraction from large quantities of ore: we were interested in just one throbbing thought -- the revitalizes. They worked. And that, so far as most of us were concerned, was that. The revitalizes worked. Cancer disappeared; heart disease and kidney disease immediately arrested. Insects which were introduced into the square one-story lab structures lived for a year instead of a few months. And humans -- doctors shook their heads in wonder over people who had gone through. All over the planet, near every major city, the long, patient, slowly moving lines stood outside the revitalizers, which were rapidly becoming something else. "Temples !" shouted Mainzer. "They look on them as temples. A scientist investigating their operation is treated like a dangerous lunatic in a nursery by the attendants. Not that a man can find a clue in those ridiculously small motors. I no longer ask what their power source can be -- instead, I ask if they have a power source at all!" "The revitalizers are very precious now, in the beginning," Trowson soothed him. "After a while, the novelty will wear off and you'll be able to investigate at your leisure. Could it be solar power?" "No!" Mainzer shook his huge head positively. "Not solar power -- solar power I am sure I could recognize. As I am sure that the power supply of their ships and whatever runs these -- these revitalizers are two entirely separate things. On the ships I have given up. But the revitalizers I believe I could solve. If only they would let me examine them. Fools! So terribly afraid I might damage one, and they would have to travel to another city for their elixir!" We patted his shoulder, but we weren't really interested. Andy and Dandy left that week, after wishing us well in their own courteous and complex fashion. Whole population groups blew kisses at their mineralladen ships. Six months after they left, the revitalizers stopped. I snorted at my dismayed face. "One set of statistics proves it: look at your death rate. It's back to pre-Betelgeuse normal. Or ask any doctor. Any doctor who can forget his U. N. security oath, that is. There'll be really wild riots when the news breaks, Dick." "But why?" I asked him. "Did we do something wrong?" He started a laugh that ended with his teeth clicking frightenedly together. He rose and walked to the window, staring out into the star-diseased sky. "We did something wrong, all right. We trusted. We made the same mistake all natives have made when they met a superior civilization. Mainzer and Lopez have taken one of the revitalizer engine units apart. There was just a trace of it left, but this time they found the power source. Dick, my boy, the revitalizers were run on the fuel' of completely pure radioactive elements !" I needed a few moments to file that properly. Then I sat down in the easy chair very, very carefully. I made some hoarse, improbable sounds before croaking: "Prof, do you mean they wanted that stuff for themselves, for their own revitalizes? That everything they did on this planet was carefully planned so that they could con us with a maximum of friendliness all around? It doesn't seem -- it just can't -- why, with their superior science, they could have conquered us if they'd cared to. They could have -- " "No, they couldn't have," Trowson whipped out. He turned to face me and flung his arms across each other. "They're a decadent, dying race; they wouldn't have attempted to conquer us. Not because of their ethics -- this huge, horrible swindle serves to illustrate that aspect of them -- but because they haven't the energy, the concentration, the interest. Andy and Dandy are probably representative of the few remaining who have barely enough git-up-and-go to trick backward peoples out of the all-important, life-sustaining revitalizer fuel." The implications were just beginning to soak in my cortex. Me, the guy who did the most complete and colossal public relations job of all time -- I could just see what my relations with the public would be like if I was ever connected with this shambles. "And without atomic power, prof, we won't have space travel!" He gestured bitterly. "Oh, we've been taken, Dick; the whole human race has been had. I know what you're going through, but think of me! I'm the failure, the man responsible. I'm supposed to be a sociologist! How could I have missed? How? It was all there: the lack of interest in their own culture, the overintellectualization of esthetics, the involved methods of thought and expression, the exag. gerated etiquette, even the very first thing of theirs we saw -- their ship -- was too heavily stylized and intricately designed for a young, thrusting civilization. "They had to be decadent; every sign pointed to that conclusion. And, of course, the fact that they resort to the methods of fueling their revitalizers that we've experienced -- when if we had their science, what might we not do, what substitutes might we not develop! No wonder they couldn't explain their science to us; I doubt if they understand it fully themselves. They are the profligate, inadequate and sneak-thief heirs of what was once a soaring race!" happy images. "And we're still hicks. Hicks who've been sold the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge by some dressed-up sharpies from Betelgeuse." Trowson nodded. "Or a bunch of poor natives who have sold their island home to a group of European explorers for a handful of brightly colored glass beads." But of course we were both wrong, Alvarez. Neither Trowson nor I had figured on Mainzer or Lopez or the others. Like Mainzer said, a few years earlier and we would have been licked. But Man had entered the atomic age sometime before # and people like Mainzer and Vinthe had done nuclear research back in the days when radioactive elements abounded on Earth. We had that and we had such tools as the cyclotron, the betatron. And, if our present company will pardon the expression, Alvarez, we are a young and vigorous race. All we had to do was the necessary research. The research was  done. With a truly effective world government, with a population not only interested in the problem, but recently experienced in working together -- and with the grim incentive we had, Alvarez -- the problem, as you know, was solved. We developed artificial radioactives and refueled the revitalizers. We developed atomic fuels out of the artificial radioactives and we got space travel. We did it comparatively fast, and we weren't interested in a ship that just went to the Moon or Mars. We wanted a star ship. And we wanted it so bad, so fast, that we have it now, too. Here we are. Explain the situation to them, Alvarez, just the way I told it to you, but with all the knee-bending and gobbledegook that a transplanted Brazilian with twelve years Oriental trading experience can put into it. You're the man to do it -- I can't talk like that. It's the only language those decadent slugs understand, so it's the only way we can talk to them. So talk to them, these slimy snails, these oysters on the quarter shell, these smart-alecky slugs. Don't forget to mention to them that the supply of radioactives they got from us won't last forever. Get that down in fine detail. Then stress the fact that we've got artificial radioactives, and that they've got some things we know we want and lots of other things we mean to find out about. Tell them, Alvarez, that we've come to collect tolls on that Brooklyn Bridge they sold us. Starting Next Month...  A humanly great, maturely realistic, intelligently adventurous novel of Earth's Martian colonies... with a magnificent cover illustration by Chesley Bonestell! I, the Unspeakable dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep. "Do it!" she said. "Please do it! For me!" It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk... and to a citizen of Northern, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning. I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard. I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: # hours. Day #, "What's in a name?" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem! Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southern had just swung a decimal or two our way. I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles -- or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces. I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor. Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds. I'd go out again today. The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag. Everything came back in a rush -- My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion. Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk? Y OU remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition. The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform. If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night. There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northern already past were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northern. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southern. The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat. We were renumbered, then, in Northern. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, ##. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, "Good morning, A-A-A-A." They say, "Good morning, Aaaa." Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned. Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word. A four letter word. Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be. Mine was. It was unspeakable. The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories. I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself. I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important -- magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars -- and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons. Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer. T HE chief called me in one day. He looked haggard. "Er -- old man," he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, "I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work." "Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?" "Well, I -- er -- know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies." Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract -- deliberately infract -- it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning. "I'll infract," I said. "Rather than goon nutrition kits, I'll infract." He looked vastly relieved. "Uh -- fine," he said. "I rather hoped you would." It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an NP book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the NP book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve. But I didn't knowwhat I was in for. I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department -- any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up... came a bit dazed. And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an NP for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive. But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package -- and then he sees the fatal letters NP. NonProducer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again. "Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later." You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages. Well, I couldn't get myself off NP status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post. Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior. That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone. Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice -- to her -- in a moment. I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication -- not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been nonregulation and illegal. But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.L mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted. He said, "Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse." "Yes, I understand that." "M'm," he said, and dismissed me with a nod. I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him. The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes. I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I Well, almost... About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong. The next night I heard the woman's voice again. "Try it," she said. "Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will he a ivay. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please -- for me." S HE was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and halfexpected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me. And I heard the voice nearly every night. It hammered away. "What if you do fail? Almost anything would be belter than the miserable existence you're leading now!" One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be. She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, "Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way." Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy -- desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself. I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office. I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care. II Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself. At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did. The cyb's mechanical voice -- they never seem to get the "th" sounds right -- said, "This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' andor, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology-" Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said, "Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature." There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in. Then the cyb said, "Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same." "Thanks," I said absent-mindedly. I started to turn away and the cyb said, "Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for -- " I switched it off. wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors. N.  I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, Very highceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room. I looked that way and my heart went into free fall. There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde -- but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her. And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name. I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done. I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased. "What information is desired?" she asked. Her voice was standard -- or was it? Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth. I used colloquial. "I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed." She put a handsteno on the desk top . and said, "Name? Address? Post?" I froze. I stood there and stared at her. She looked up and said, "Well?" "I -- er -- no post at present. NP status." Her fingers moved on the steno. I gave her my address and she recorded that. Then I paused again. She said, "And your name?" I took a deep breath and told her. I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare -- S HE looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat. "All right," she said finally, "I'll make a search." She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, "Information desired is in Bank #. Please follow me." Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself. I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all. She led me down one of the long passageways. A few moments later I said, "Don't you sometimes get -- well, pretty lonely working here?" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it. She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, "Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time." "You don't get many visitors, then." "Not right here. N.  I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The -- er -- social habits of the pre-atomic civilization." I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. "What's your name, by the way?" "L-A-R-A ##." I pronounced it. "Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too." S HE didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek. I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psychoscan. We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling. For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of ' her breath. Our eyes held together... proton... electron... I felt her tremble. She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again. After that she was very businesslike. We came finally to the controls of Bank # and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information. She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. "You can take this along and study it," she said, "but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be -- a little difficult." She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, "I didn't think it would be easy." "It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych." "Opsych?" You can't keep up with all these departments. "The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C." "I don't get it, exactly." As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. "Well," she said, "as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade # to Grade #, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C., he is permitted a new number." I groaned. "But I'm already in the highest E.A.C. !" "It looks very uncertain then." "Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol -- or -- in the hell of the preatomics!" She looked amused. "What did you say your E. A. C. was?" "Oh, all right. Sorry." I controlled myself and grinned. "I guess this whole  thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E. A. C.'s even gone down." "That might be your chance then." "How do you mean?" "If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change." "By the State, he might!" I punched my palm. "Only how do I get to him?" "I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment." She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip .came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices. We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again. I tried to keep the conversation going. "Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?" "Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough." I sighed. "I know. It's that way everywhere in Northern. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?' " S HE started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short. A second later, as I came along, I saw why. There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides. I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me. Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us. I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again -- but of course I didn't dare. Ill Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum. I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at # hours the following morning. In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southern political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard. There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet. And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there... Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went: Wherever I go, I go too, And spoil everything. That was it. The story of mankind. I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time. Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice -- the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious. " You have taken the first step," she said. "You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer..." the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm... "The woman, Lara, attracts you," said the voice. I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it. "Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way." The idea at once thrilled and frightened me. I woke writhing and in a sweat again. gr It was morning. I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One. The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today. I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather nondescript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces. They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment. They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display. I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile. sad, if not sadder, than it had been before. Later, in the rest room, I had a chance to talk to one of the Deacons guarding these two. I was washing my hands when he came in, and he nodded to me briefly and said, "Nice day for a flight." He seemed pleasant enough, more than I would expect a Deacon to be. He was tall and blond and rather lithe; his shoulders sloped forward like a boxer's. "Taking those prisoners to Center One?" I asked. He nodded. "Yup. Habitual nonconforms. About as bad as they come." "What did they do?" He chuckled lasciviously. "Kept meeting each other in the rec centers. Didn't know they were being watched. We nabbed 'em topside after they'd gone out in the desert together." "What happens to them now -- Marscol ?" "They'd be lucky, brother, if that was only it. Oh, we'll ship 'em to Mars sooner or later, but first they got to be interviewed." "You mean for reclassification?" "No. Just interviewed. We do it routine with everybody we pick up now. Specially morals cases. That's how we crack down on other nonconforms. They got a regular organization, you know." "They have?" "Sure. They're all Southern spies. Trying to weaken us for an attack, that's all. I can spot 'em a mile away." I frowned and cleared my throat a little. "Wouldn't you think that any spies would try to act as normal as possible and not call attention to themselves by infracting morally?" He put a big finger on my chest. "Listen, you got no idea. I see these buzzards in operation all the time. I know what goes on." "Of course. I'm sure you do." I kept the sarcasm out of my voice, but it was a struggle. The finger tapped my chest, once to every word, it seemed. "We interview 'em all. Some of 'em, they really got nothing to tell us and the interview kind of breaks 'em. Know what I mean? But we got to do it. If we only get dope on other nonconforms from one out of ten, we figure we didn't waste our time." "You mean these -- interviews of yours are a form of torture?" He gave me a hard eye and said, "We don't call it that, brother. We don't call it that." "Of course," I said again, and went back to washing my hands. I watched the prisoners for the rest of the flight. I couldn't stop watching them. And all this time I kept thinking of Lara, visualizing her, seeing her young figure and her light hair and her mouse-colored eyes, and not really knowing why. I had the overpowering desire to spring forward and throttle the two Deacons and help the prisoners to escape. Almost overpowering. I didn't, naturally. The jetcopter lowered toward the great green parks that cover the topside area of Center One. It was really refreshing to see them. I understood that the lucky residents of Center One were allowed to wander in these parks, and look at the growing things and the sky. Then, presently, the parks were out of sight again and we were settling on the concrete landing stage and I was back to reality. T HE first contact at the Office of Pyschological Adjustment was, as usual, an information desk. There were people instead of cybs to greet you and I suppose that was because of the special complications of problems brought here. The cybs have their limits, after all. A gray man with a gray eye and a face like a mimeographed bulletin looked at me and said, in approved voice and standard phraseology, "what information is desired?" I told him. His eyebrows rose, as if suddenly buoyant. "Change your name? That's impossible." I quoted, verse and chapter, the regulation covering it. "H'm," he said. His eyebrows came down, cuddling into a scowl. "Well, that's highly unusual procedure. Better let me see your identity tag." I gave that to him and he saw my NP status, and then my unspeakable name, and his eyebrows went up again. "Perhaps you'd better get this straightened out with General Administration first," he said. He scribbled a slip of paper, showing me how to get there. The rat race was on. I found General Administration. They sent me to Activity Control. Activity Control said they couldn't do a thing until I was registered. I went to Registration. Registration said oh, no, I shouldn't have been sent there -- although they'd try to direct me to the proper office if I got an okay from Investigation and Security. I.  S. said the regulation I quoted had been amended and I would have to have the amendment first and I could find that in Records. Records sent me back to the first place to get a Search Permit. And so on. I kept at it doggedly. Toward the end of the day my legs ached and head felt like a ball of granite. I had discovered that Opsych had nearly as many levels and tunnels and bays as Center Four in its entirety, and I had taken the intercom cars when possible, but most of it had been walking. I tightened my jaw and pulled my stomach in. I'd get to see the Chief if it took me a year. That was hyperbole, of course. No man could last a year walking those dim, monotonous, aseptic corridors. How can I describe the feeling? The corridors are the same wherever you go. The glowlight comes steadily, unblinkingly, from the walls. The color is a dead oyster white. There is always the feeling of being lost -- even when you know, or think you know, exactly where you are. and I was back at the information desk. "You again," said the gray man with the gray eye. "Records says I need a Search Permit. I have to find an amendment on the regulation covering my case." "Why don't you just give up? You're causing us a great deal of trouble, you know. We have other work to do. Important work." "So have I. I'm a magnetic mechanics expert. I could be working for the State right now if I could get a post. I can't get a post till my name's changed." "That's ridiculous." "I agree. But it's true just the same."  "Well, here's your Search Permit. But I still think you'd be wiser to forget it. And you'd save us a lot of fuss." I leaned across the desk. "You could save the whole organization a lot of fuss if you'd direct me to the Chief's office. Then I could take my case up with him directly. I've been keeping my eye open for it, but I can't find it anywhere, and of course nobody'll direct me there, even if they know where it is." He stared at me with mild horror. "Go direct to the Chief's office? Without going through channels?" "Well, that's what I had in mind." "Then you'd better get it out of your mind. That's pretty dangerous thinking. That's close to infraction." "All right." I sighed. "I'll do it the hard way." I took the Search Permit and went back to Records. I was still searching for the amendment when closing time came. I went back into the dim white corridors and found a foodmat, got some nuro-pills and reviewed the day. These workers here in Center One were experts at putting you off. They were much more skilful than the officials in Center Four. Maybe that was why they were in Center One. Maybe I never would wear them down. That thought came along and formed a ball of ice right in the bottom of my stomach. I had to think. I had to think and rest. Real air and a night breeze would help. I found a shaft and went topside. I started walking along a winding trail in the great park. The stars were out. They were diamonds, ground to dust, and thrown carelessly across the black velvet of the sky. The moon had not yet risen. There was a breeze, cool and light, and it brought temporary sanity. At least it helped me realize I was tired. I came to a little brook, and, instead of crossing the foot bridge, I turned and followed the brook upstream. It led through groves of trees and presently I found a little clearing where the bank sloped gently and was covered with soft moss. At the water's edge, the bank and a rock formation made a kind of overhanging ledge and I sat on this a while and stared at the water, liquid silver, tumbling below. Finally I moved up the bank a little, wrapped my cloak around me and lay down. I looked at the stars. I wondered which one might be Mars. It was red, I'd heard, but I saw nothing like that. Probably it wasn't visible now. I got to thinking about Mars, and I got to thinking about the prison colony there, and then I got to thinking about the primitive life, and then freemating. That made me think of Lara, and her firm body and long, clean limbs and blonde hair and mousecolored eyes. I drifted off to sleep. Lara stayed with me; she stepped into my dream. It was a wonderful dream. Her voice, when' she broke delicious. It was linked with the tumbling of the brook somehow. She was warm and vibrant in my arms. She was alive, so alive. She was all movement. We were laughing together and... ing. The moon had risen and the broad glades were silver green and the trees were casting shadows. Voices were barking back and forth within the woods. "Over that way!" called one. "Cut 'em off! Cut 'em off!" yelled another. A man and woman, both entirely naked, both speckled with wounds and bruises, all standard in questioning, stumbled into the clearing. Their eyes were wild, big for their faces. They were thin. They gasped for breath. They looked around them, rats in mazes, and then saw me. They drew back. "This way!" called a voice from the wood. Another shot rang out. I stared at the man and woman, still too surprised to know what to do or say. They were the two prisoners I had seen in the jetcopter on my way to Center One. IV Maybe I was not really bright, though everybody thinks of himself as bright, I suppose. Maybe it was everything that had happened since the renumbering. Maybe I was fed up and maybe something about the quiet woods called out: Rebel! Rebel! I don't know. I pointed to the brook, the overhanging bank, and said, "In there! Quick!" They scuttled. They passed me and looked at nle halfthankfully, half-fearfully. The voices came nearer. "Come on! This way! They can't get far!" I wrapped myself in my cloak and sat down and pretended to be gazing at the stars. A moment later three Deacons burst upon the clearing. I turned slowly, and stared at them, showing mild artificial surprise. Handsome, burly fellows. The one in the middle was a positive Apollo; I was sure that he waved his hair. He glared at me. "You," he said. "Me?" "Yes, you. What are you doing here?" I said, "I'm sitting here." "What for?" ' "The night air. To study the stars. Get a change of scene." I shrugged. Apollo stepped forward and held out his hand. "Your tag." This was it. When he saw my four letter name he'd really start working on me. I unsnapped the tag from my neck band and handed it to him. He looked at it, but didn't change expression. The Deacons are welltrained. He looked up again. "NP, eh?" "Yes." "And you belong in Center Four." "Yes." "Explain." I did. Or tried to. Things were roiling around inside me, keeping me from thinking clearly. Once, as I talked, I thought I heard movement under the bank, but the Deacons didn't seem to notice anything. I tried to tell them of my troubles. There was no sympathy in their eyes. Apollo said, "See anybody pass by here?" "Pass by?" I hoped my look was innocent. "Who?" "Two fugitives. Nonconforms. Escaped during interview. Got the force screen turned off somehow -- must have had spies helping them. You didn't see them, eh?" I shook my head. "I haven't seen anyone for several hours." traded glances. The one on the right was bull-necked and redheaded; the one on the left had a neck and nose like a crane. It was the one on the left who suddenly smiled. Not a pleasant smile. He stepped up to Apollo and whispered something in his ear. Then Apollo smiled and turned to me again. "You're sure you haven't seen anyone." He knew something. I didn't know what, but it was too late to backout now. I said, "Of course I'm sure." Apollo kept his eyes on me, hard, flat, stony, and held out his hand to the cranelike Deacon. "Your light," he said. The other handed it to him. Apollo flashed it on the ground. It came to rest upon unmistakable footprints in the soft moss. They led to the .bank. I could be certain of arrest, and one of their little interviews now. I really had nothing to lose. Nothing that wasn't already lost -- "Run!" I shouted at the top of my lungs. "They're coming!" There was a rustling under the bank. I leaped at Apollo. I leaped hard, with my feet solid, pushing me forward. My shoulder hit him in the midriff. He went down. I scrambled over him and jammed my thumb into his shoulder. He screamed. There was a buzzing sound and the smell of burned flesh, and a tenth of a second later I felt pain. One of the others had jammed his electric truncheon into the small of my back. It bored in, it burned, and I writhed and yelled. I couldn't help it. I rolled over. Someone was kicking at me. I grabbed his leg and pulled him down and when he struck the ground I twisted. Another shape blurred toward me -- Apollo, recovered and on his feet again. Then buzzing, burned flesh, and the pain this time in the back of my neck. My head swirled. I thrashed, trying to get away. Get away where? That made not much difference. Away, that was all. The buzzing continued. It was through my flesh now and touching the spine. It would destroy the nerves in a moment. I would be dead -- or even worse, a limp cripple, a rag doll. The smell of roasted flesh and hair was a thick, choking, sickening fog of decay. I couldn't breathe. There was blackness, swirling and concentric, closing in. I think one of them kicked me in the groin before I lost consciousness. I couldn't be sure. I couldn't be sure of anything. sight and I heard the low voices. My eyes were already open. Nebulous shapes, now sharpening. I was in a small room with gleaming metal walls and I was on my back on a sort of table. Three men were in the room with me, standing over me. Apollo... the bull-necked man... the man with the nose like a crane. Apollo was smiling. Pour water over that smile and immediately a film of ice would form. "A spy," said Apollo, looking into my open eyes. "Another damn spy." I shook my head. Ridiculous, but that's what I did. The movement pulled at the wound in the back of my neck and sharp pain, starting there, shot through my whole body. I grimaced and groaned. Apollo laughed, then suddenly brought his club hard across my face. My cheekbone seemed to make a crunching sound. "A spy, a damned spy," said Apollo. "We got a confession for you to sign," said the Crane. Apollo said, "Shut up. Not yet. We got to interview him first." "Look," I said, trying to lift my head, trying to rise upon my elbows, "call your chief. Call anybody like that. I can explain this whole thing. It's a long story -- " other cheekbone. Shall I describe the next timeless endless hour ? All the details ? I don't remember all of them, of course, just the moments of sharpest pain that lifted me from the daze. Just the sound of my own screaming at times, and the helpless dryness of my own throat, and the sounds that kept coming from it even when the vocal cords were numb. Apollo and his pals had fun. There were the electric clubs. They become so hot at the tip that they will burn through an inch of pine in a couple of seconds. They go even quicker through flesh. After a while the smoke of my own burning flesh was thick in the room, and we all choked a little On it. They had more fun with their fists, though. They didn't burn me in the worst places. They saved them for their fists and hands. After a while I couldn't scream. Only a hoarse, helpless, retching sound came out whenever I opened my mouth. Did I hear their voices then? I couldn't be sure whether I heard them speak, or whether I dreamed that they spoke. "He can't feel it any more now." That was Apollo's voice. "Wake him up again," said the Crane. "Give him a shot." "Oh, hell, I'm hungry," said Apollo. "All right," said the Crane, "let's go get something to eat. We can always come back again." Blackness, sweet blackness; and the sense of floating among the stars. Nothingness. It was exquisite now... even the touch of agony that still seeped through was exquisite. Hew much of this, I don't know. I heard a voice again, and at first I thought my precious blackness was leaving me. I struggled to keep it. I grasped out, clutching with my mind. " Don't give up... we are coming... It was her voice. The low, seductive voice of my dreams. But I didn't want to hear it now; this was the last thing I wanted to hear. This voice had brought me here, and I never wanted to hear it again. tr No matter what they say... no matter what they offer you or tell yon... don't give up." I fought it off. I drove it away by sheer mind-power. Either that or it stopped of itself. I didn't know and didn't care; all I wanted was peace and blackness again if I could find it. And then, after a while, I was awake, truly awake, and I knew this because I ached and burned all over. I could scarcely move. I lay on the tablelike thing and stared at the gleaming metal ceiling, not really seeing it. "How do you feel?" said somebody. body was sitting beside me. He was a man of about fifty, thick-set and gray-haired with, skin that looked like fine ggrcelain. His eyes were blue and.mey seemed able, intelligent. He was not exactly smiling, but his expression was pleasant. Poised -- that was the word. Here was a man who would quietly control things wherever he would go. I said, "Lousy. And you?" Ghost of a smile. "Sorry you had to go through it. We pick the Deacons because they're sadistically inclined. That makes for efficiency in the long run. Some people suffer, of course, but it's for the common good." I didn't say anything. If I had, it would have been insulting, unreasonable, blasphemous, obscene and treasonable. So I didn't say anything. I just kept staring at him. He continued to smile. "I'm N-J-K-F one seven seven three four nine, Chief of the Office of Psychological Adjustment. I'm usually simply Chief. I want you to consider me your friend -- within the limits of State good, that is." I still didn't say anything. "Yours is quite a case, and of course I understand it. I think I had a quick insight into it the moment I spotted the arrest report on you. You're really lucky I happened to go through the arrest reports a little while ago, and got to you before the three Deacons who interviewed you returned. They were going to interview you some more." "Yes. I'm very lucky." My voice was flat, lifeless. He leaned back easily in the chair. For all that he was thickset, he was graceful. He was handsome. His head, and deep, pleasant voice, and the cut of his porcelain features all were handsome. Trust in me, said this handsomeness, I am a father to all men. "Naturally, we want to excuse your actions, and all the infractions you have committed in your rather desperate struggle for escape from your situation. Of course we'll have to re-evaluate your Emotional Adjustment Category. It must be very low by now. And I think I'll be able to assign a new name to you, and have it justify." Funny, here was the thing I'd sought and fought for, and now I had it, and this was the end of the long fight, and I didn't feel triumphant at all. I didn't even feel pleased. Funny. The chief said, "You can undoubtedly find a post suitable to a lower E.A.C. You can work your way up again. At least you'll be on productive status and have all the privileges that go with it." "Yes," I said. "Yes, I suppose so." "So there's really nothing to worry about now, is there?" "No, I suppose not." "There's just one little thing I'd like to go into before I take the steps necessary to get you on your feet again." Even his magnificent poise couldn't conceal the feather touch of slyness then. "One little thing?" I asked. T HE pain was with me again. My body wasn't flesh; it was all raw, clinging pain. "We'll have to know who started you on your little quest. Who influenced you to try to have your name changed." I said, "I don't understand what you're talking about." He looked patient, smilingly patient. "It's rather obvious, you know. You wouldn't have acted as you did purely on your own impulses. I know' that, because I cybed for your master file after I saw the report of arrest. Up until two days ago, your actions have always been satisfactorily conformal. A man doesn't change overnight like that wdthout some sort of external influence." "But there wasn't any," I protested. "I mean, nobody told me to do anything. Nobody real." He chuckled. "Come now, you don't expect me to believe that, do you? After all, I deal with cases like this quite often. You're not the only one who has tried to upset the efficiency of the State. There's a pattern in these things, my friend. Almost invariably we find that a deliberate influence has gone to work on our infractor. There's a dangerous, organized underground movement that spends its time bringing these things about. One of its members unquestionably contacted you, suggested that you take the steps you have taken. Now, then, who was it?" "Nobody." I looked blank because I felt blank. The Chief sighed. "You've changed more than I thought. Probably you're emotionally angry with the State now, after that little interview with the Deacons. That's understandable. But you'll have to come back to your senses. Let's put it this way, old man. If I don't get this information from you right now, the Deacons will." "Listen," I said, "what I'm telling you is the truth. There was nobody who told me to do anything. There was -- well, there was a kind of voice that used to come into my dreams. A woman's voice. It suggested, in my dreams, that I go ahead and try to get my name changed. That's all." He wasn't smiling any more. "Do you really expect me to believe that?" "It's the truth, I tell you. It's the truth!" "Perhaps whoever influenced you did it subtly. Perhaps you never even realized it. Think back now. Who helped you? Who departed from standard and gave you any kind of aid?" Realization came like a cold wash. There had been help. Lara. She had gone out of her way back there in N.  I. She had been warm and real and she had dropped the mask of efficiency. Could it have been with a purpose? No matter. Guilty or innocent, if I mentioned her name, she would be interviewed. I didn't want that to happen to Lara. I shook my head and said, "No one helped me. I did it all myself. You've got to believe that." "I don't," said the Chief, and got up. He looked at me for just a moment before he turned away. He said, "The boys will be able to have their fun, after all. I suppose it's just as well. It keeps their moraie up to be able to interview somebody once in a while." "No! You can't! You can't send them in here again!" I shouted, without meaning to. I struggled to rise and found that I was strapped to the table. "No! No!" He was standing at the doorway to the room. He held a key-box oscillator in his hand and I knew that a force screen held me in the cubicle here, and that without a keybox I could beat my head forever against that invisible barrier and never pass through that doorway. He said, "I'll give you one hour to decide. I'll be back. I'll ask you if you're ready to talk. If you aren't -- well, you'll talk to the Deacons instead of me." The key-box hummed and he walked through the doorway and turned and disappeared. I stared after him and fought back my sudden nausea. V H OW long, then, lying there before a key-box hummed again? I didn't know. My time sense had been dulled. Even the pain was dull now; it was something that had always existed. I looked at the shining ceiling. The glowlights began to dim and I supposed that since my arrest in the park another day had passed. Most of all, I wondered. Something had happened to me, something that I could almost feel as a physical change, but I didn't know quite what it was. I knew its results. I knew that I was no longer standard, no longer conformal, no longer well-behaved and moral and an efficient, useful citizen of the State. I hated the State. I hated all States. I hate all efficiency and common sense and hate. It suddenly came to me that I didn't care whether I was in Southern or Northern, or which of them ruled the world. I lay there. And presently a key-box hummed and I didn't even look that way. The stink of my own burning flesh still clung to my nostrils, the dull pain was still with me, but I didn't care. It was too much. When horror becomes too great, it stops being horror. The mind is smart. It doesn't believe; it doesn't register. The curve of sensation flattens out, stops, almost. When such horror looms, you go on doing whatever you are doing. I was lying there, so I went on lying there. "Don't speak," whispered a voice. "Don't ask questions." Something fumbled at the straps. I turned my head, and two people were in the room. They were thin, and their eyes were overlarge and they were naked and covered with bruises. The fugitives of the park last night! "What are you doing here?" Finger to the lips. That was the man. He was taking the straps from my legs. The woman was releasing my arms and shoulders. "But -- " "Sh!" That was the woman. In a moment they had me free. I started, confidently, to rise, and the pain streaked through me like a powder rocket. They helped me. I stood there, amazed that I could stand. They helped me go forward. I took several dizzy steps, and after that it wasn't as bad. We moved through the doorway; there was no force screen. The man held the keybox. He pressed it as we moved away, to bring the force screen into place once more. I said, "Where are we -- ?" I was shushed again. We went on through the corridors. Dead oyster white corridors. I walked as through a sea of marshmallow. Time sense was gone again and we were pushing on and on and there was no end in sight and we had already forgotten the beginning. We took an automatic shaft to another level and walked more corridors. tunnelcars filled with people roared past. I had a flash glimpse of them. They sat there staring straight ahead, wearing the efficient expressions of good workers. State corpses. Suddenly we emerged into the dark. It was the dark of night, but after the tunnels it was practically sunrise. The air was clean -- no, it was not actually as clean as the conditioned air below. It was more than clean. It was alive. We were on the edge of a great concrete paved area. About a hundred yards ahead, a massive, shining, fat needle rose into the air, and squatted there against the stars. It was a spaceship in its launching cradle. There were low buildings near it, a few floodlights, and people standing around. It took a moment to realize that the men walking up and down and along the groups of people, the men with rifles on their shoulders, were guards. "Luck, now, that's all we need. A little luck," said the thin man beside me. It was the first time I had heard his voice. It was a low voice; he spoke with emotion. It was not approved standard. The woman moved beside him and put her hand upon his arm. I said, "May I talk now?" He turned to me, smiling. The smile had something of that sadness I had first noticed when he sat a prisoner in the jetcopter. "You want an explanation, don't you? Of course you do. But I'm afraid I can't tell you very much, except that we were sent to get you." "Sent? By whom? How did you have a key-box? And -- " He laughed. "Wait, one question at a time. I was a force screen technician before -- before we were arrested. Cells are the same everywhere. I know how to short the screens out from the inside; it's troublesome, but it can be done. That's how we escaped the first time. Then they discovered we were gone, chased us, and you gave us our second chance. We came here to the rendezvous. There were six here, including our elected leader. When we told the leader what had happened, she arranged for us to return, find you, and help you escape. It wasn't any problem to lift a keybox from the rack where they're usually kept.". upon the end of a huge oscillating spring. I said, "The leader? She?" "You'll meet her," he said. "After blastoff you'll meet her. Right now our problem is to slip in among those prisoners without being seen." "Among the prisoners ?" "Haven't time to explain more. You'll have to trust us. Unless you want to stay here and have the Deacons hunt you till they find you." He was right: wherever I was going, I had to go. I couldn't go back now. Ever. I said, "I trust you. Let's go." Slipping in wasn't really difficult. There were only one or two guards for each group of prisoners, and they were looking for someone to escape, not join their flock. Some of the prisoners were dressed, some naked. Some looked bruised and beaten; some did not. It all depended on whether they had been questioned. They all looked dulleyed, resigned. They paid remarkably little attention as' we moved in among them, and stood there. T HE guards began to call out orders presently and the groups shuffled forward, and then single lines moved up the ramp and into the spaceship. The thin man and his woman were still with me. "They don't bother to count," he whispered, "so we woq't be noticed." I wanted to ask him other questions, but we were divided into groups and they weren't in mine. Minutes later I found myself in the vast hull, sitting on one of the tiers that hold the seats vertical when the ship is tail-based for blastoff. It was very dim here and I couldn't readily make out the faces of the people on the same tier with me. A loudspeaker came to life; a deep, impersonal voice. "Fasten your webbings carefully!" I did that and heard the rustling sounds about me as the others did it, too. "Stand by for blastoff!" There was a dead pause, then a sudden low throbbing roar and the feeling of life in the floor plates and the bulkheads. I felt the slightest weight of pressure against the seat. The seat began to tilt slightly. Suddenly a soft voice on my left spoke: "We're on our way. They can't stop us now, can they?" It was the same low, provocative woman's voice that I had heard in my dreams! I whirled my head. I could see only the shape of flowing hair, no features. "Who are you?" She laughed. "No wonder you don't recognize me. The natural voice is different than approved standard, isn't it? Listen. Do you remember this?" The 'head cocked to one side and a crisp, formal voice came out. "Information you desire is in Bank #." "Lara!" I said. I pushed toward her, but the webbing held me back. "Yes. It's I. And we're together now and we'll have a long, long time to find out about each other. It's ten weeks to Mars." head. "I don't get it. I don't get any of it. Your voice -- I mean your real voice, not the standard one -- I dreamed about it, and -- " "I know." I could see her nod. "It wasn't a dream, though. I was talking to you. Each time. That was the way we planned it from the beginning." "Talking to me? But -- but how? Through the sleep-learner?" "No, we'd never have been able to arrange that. It was through your identity tag, which would almost always be in contact with your skin when you slept. It has a microscopic electrical circuit, both between its metal halves and painted on its surface. The same principle as the sleep-learner, tactile induction, and, of course, a highly selective onechannel receiver. All I needed to do was put my transmitter on that same frequency." I shook my head. "I follow, I guess, but I'm still baffled. Why all this? When did -- " "Wait for me to finish," she said. "We've been organized and underground, just as the Deacons suspect, for some time. One of our members worked on the identity tags and, when renumbering came about, it was a perfect opportunity to plant the receivers. We picked our people carefully. We picked doctors and hydroponic experts and chemists and rocket pilots -- and we picked you because of your knowledge of space drive theory. Someday we'll go on to the stars; someday you'll help us do that. Anyway, all these people we have picked -- or most of them -- are joining us on Mars. There's where mankind will begin again while Northern and Southern sit upon earth and glare at each other across the equator and wait for war." "But Mars -- there's an equator there, too." She laughed. "Northern and Southern prisoners there mingle all the time. There aren't enough guards to notice it, or stop it if they did notice it. There have even been hundreds of intermarriages." "Marriages? You mean like the pre-atomics?" "Exactly. But we'll get to that later. We needed you for our colony, only it wasn't likely that you'd infract all by yourself. You were too standard, too adjusted. We had to give you something to shake you out of it, to make you realize that the security of the State was not security, but slavery. And so one of our members in the renumbering bureau arranged for you to have that four letter word of yours for a name. One thing led to another, then, not always exactly as we'd planned it, but always in the same general direction. Our whole plan nearly failed when tire Deacons nabbed you in the park. Fortunately, I'd come along to stow away on this trip, and I sent those others back after you." "But what if I'd actually managed to get my name changed?" T HE ship was swaying now, balanced on its rocket trail. The acceleration was increasing. The seat was swinging back. The roar was becoming louder. "It was unlikely enough to take a chance on it. We felt at the very least you'd be kept on NP status and then we could work on you some more until you infracted, and got sent to Marscol as a nonconform. Funny, that seems a terrible fate to most people. Actually, it's the only escape. From what I hear of Mars we'll like it there." I was recovering a little now and I dared to say, "If you're there, too. I'll like it. I know that." "Oh, you'll like other things. You'll like everything. And on Mars they'll call you by your present name if you wish, and no one will be at all shocked by it." There was a slight pause and then she said, "In fact, it's a very nice name. I -- I wouldn't mind having it myself." "Is that what the pre-atomics called a proposal?" She laughed. "I'm not sure. But at least we have ten weeks to talk it over -- " And then the acceleration pressed hard and the gray curtain began to come, and I knew that when it was lifted we would be on our way through space. I thought in that moment of the name that had brought all this about -- the unspeakable four letter word that no conformist would ever dare voice, or even think of; the word, the dangerous word inimical to all that the warring, efficient State meant and stood for. The word, I realized, that eventually would destroy all that. I dared to say it now. I spelled it out first, and then I pronounced it. Just loud enough for Lara to hear above the growing roar. "L-O-V-E," I said. "Love." I heard Lara repeat it before the momentary blackout came. Great at #tf a copy.  Greater than ever at #d ! Watch for its startling innovations! Field Study This could be an Easter story. It would be much easier to tell if legend didn't sound so exactly like truth -- or we moderns knew one from the other! W asked the neurotic Mrs. Francis Pake. "Overtime or that night out?" "I can't tell you for certain, sweet... I'll phone you. I'm nearly sure, but -- " "This is it," said Betty Pake. She got up from the breakfast table. "Change yOur job or change your wife. Quite simple, Frank. I thought I'd married a man, not an accounting machine." She said a lot more before Pake finished his breakfast. He sighed, missed when he pecked for her cheek, and left. The Mitchell embezzlement which had kept him in the office all hours for the past three months had been finally straightened out yesterday, and full material for the indictment handed over. Tonight, dine, dance and drink with Betty -- unless something new turned up. She rated the break, of course, apart from the fact that her nerves, unsettled by a quiet life, played, hell with his digestion. Maybe she should have married a younger man, with time and money to spare for her idea of living. He realized uncomfortably that he was half hoping something would prevent the date. The assignment this morning, for instance. It was out of the ordinary.No books to examine or reluctant employees to quiz politely but inexorably. He got straight onto it before going to the office. Early as it was, the waiting room in which he found himself was full. Forty patients at least. An obvious Parkinsonism stumbled to a bench. Every disease seemed to be represented there, from cancer to cretinism. He recalled the chief's instructions: make no fuss, get in line with the others, take what he hands out and -- bring it back. "You have an appointment?" asked the dull-eyed, dull-voiced receptionist. "No, but if this is an open session, I'll hang around on the offchance. My time's my own." "Name?" "Shando. James." Did those dull eyes light up ? No reason to. So far as he knew, the quack had no reason to suspect a Federal investigation. "Sit down, please." What was it, Pake asked himself as she went into an inside office -- faith healing? That wouldn't fix peritonitis. But that was only a report. He'd have to wait and ask careful questions. Careful, because patients don't usually question doctors on their training and background. He looked casually at the man next to him. A young Eurasian, drawn-in, huddled, gloved hands clasped together, as if in silent, fierce prayer. "What ails,' feller?" The Eurasian seemed to shrink even further into himself, shook his head almost imperceptibly. Please don't notice me. It was as plain as words. Then Pake saw the patch of silvery skin beneath the ear. He muttered, "Hell," and jerked away. "Sorry, sorry." The faintest of whispers. "Not contagious." "Maybe not, but you shouldn't be here. You should be -- " Pake stopped, uneasy. There was a world of misery in the man's eyes. If the fake beyond that door was giving false hope to poor devils like this... But that didn't make it a government matter. It was up to the state, or the local branch of the F.M.A. He didn't call himself a doctor, of course, nor did he advertise. But did that put him in the clear? Pake cursed the brevity of his instructions. "If you question him," the chief had said, "make it simple. You can be normally curious, but that's all. And if he gets cagy, cut it out. You're not going as an agent. You're just an errand boy, Frankie, and you know as much as I do." The receptionist came back, walked over to him. "It seems you did have an appointment," she lied calmly. "This way." Pake, off-guard, found himself talking before he had taken in the scene. "This is good of you, doctor, but I had no appointment. I don't like jumping the line." "I am entitled to use my discretion. You are an interesting case. Sit down. And please don't call me doctor. In the healing profession, that title is reserved for those who have taken the Hippocratic oath. My name is Trancore." Pake shut his mind to a thousand questions and concentrated on one. "How do you know about my case? You've never seen me before." "My receptionist," said the man behind the desk, "has intuitive diagnostic ability." first-water quack. Heck, he'd never had a day's real sickness in his forty years. Mild post-nasal drip, maybe, but that was probably a penalty for oversmoking. He felt the tickle of it at the back of his throat now. He blew his nose. It gave him a few seconds to think and observe. The "healer" was quite unremarkable except for an almost unnoticeable Asiatic tinge of skin. His features might have been the compounded norm of a thousand faces flittingly seen during a subway rush-hour. He'd be lost in a crowd. No, put him in a crowd and he would be the crowd -- The fantastic thought touched Pake's consciousness and slid away before he could examine it. The office, rented furnished, was quite unimpressive. Old-fashioned wooden desk, cheap chairs, battered filing cabinet, empty, Pake was "Symptoms?" Trancore asked. "Seems you can tell me," Pake said with a trace of belligerence. "Let's say the recital is part of the treatment. I don't wish to guess." It should be an "interesting case." Pake had spent an hour boning up on it at a medical library. An obscure disease, a complexus of symptoms calculated to faze the most expert diagnostician for a while. It would certainly defeat the snap diagnoses and miraculously swift cures attributed to this phony. And no doctor could confirm it without the most exhaustive physical examination, which this fellow didn't go in for, apparently. As Pake was talking, Trancore looked into a drawer of his desk. His face was without expression. He looked up only when Pake finished, and smiled. "Prognosis, death within eleven months, eh? But you won't die. Take this in water." He put a plastic capsule within Pake's reach. "But this is crazy! How do I know -- " "You don't. I make no claims. What did you expect, a long, obscure rigmarole? You can take the capsule or leave it. How many tokens -- pounds -- do you have with you?" "But listen, doctor -- " "I'm not a doctor. How much?" "Around fifty, I suppose." "Give me twenty-five for the capsule, which you take on faith. If you take it." "You say I'll die if I don't?" "I said nothing of the kind. I have no intention of running foul of your laws. Please make up your mind." Pake took it. ii boiled duck," Pake reported to his chief. "But somehow I couldn't get around to asking questions." The chief tossed the capsule in his palm. "That doesn't matter. This is all we wanted." The laboratories took five hours to break it down, make tests and come up with the final, headscratching nonsense line: just a mess of soluble protein with no discernible physiological reactions. "That was yours," the chief said. "These were brought in by the others, a plainclothes man from Police H.Q., an employee of the National Medical Association, an official of the N.M.A., and a private investigator." Pake leafed through the reports. "The same?" "Yes. But here are three reports on capsules given to genuine patients and 'borrowed' for analysis afterward. The patients didn't miss a thing, even though the operative substituted similar capsules containing water and a vegetable dye. It took five minutes for the laboratory to discover that that's all the 'borrowed' capsules contained, also." Pake began to laugh. Then he remembered the leper. "Can't Trancore be booked for fraud?" "How? He makes no claims for the damned things. And in several instances, he's given them away. But don't you see the implication of these reports?" Pake nodded. "Patients get water. Investigators get something justas useless -- except for giving laboratory men a headache. So he knows who is what. I don't get it." "You will. I'm turning the case over to you, Frankie." "I'm interested. But how come it's on our level?" "It's international. Come and meet the United Nations." The chief frowned as he rose. "I've been trying to put my finger on something since you came in. Now I've got it. Your voice." "What's wrong with it?" "Not a thing. Sounds clearer, somehow." Pake stood very still. He swore, slowly, then cleared his throat. There was nothing to clear. "My post-nasal drip!" He blew his nose frantically, pointlessly. "It's gone!" S IR Greville Gray of London, Luchaire of Paris, Frend of Berlin, Stawowy of Prague -- Pake heard substantially the same story from each. In Harley Street, London's specialist district, Trancore had rented a # a week consulting room, given free treatment to two cardiac cases, then pulled out when the waiting list grew unmanageable -- or when he'd fulfilled his unknown purpose. Gray, chairman of the English Medical Association, had interviewed him officially. "Impudent little devil called me 'the chief witch-doctor.' I nearly assaulted him." Gray squared his massive shoulders. "When I said we'd prosecute, .he flatly denied that he practiced medicine at all. 'To arraign me,' he said, 'you would have to prove that I give treatment, that I charge for it, make claims for it, and that it may prove harmful. You cannot even prove the first accusation.' I pointed out that he dispensed capsules and charged for them. He said, 'They expect something material, like the evil-smelling charms you give them. I offer them a capsule. They take it or leave it. It makes no difference. They pay or don't pay. That makes no difference, either. I prefer them to pay. It makes my stay shorter.' "I asked whether he expected me to believe that his patients were cured no matter what course they took. 'They are not my patients,' he said. 'If, after they have visited me, a cure is effected and they claim my instrumentality, then that is not my responsibility.' "In a word, he disclaims everything, even success. Two days later, when a newspaper followed up a tip about so-called 'miracle cures,' a reporter found a queue stretching out into the street -- and an empty office. Ten weeks later, the fellow turns up in Paris, and the business starts over again." "But not," said Dr. Luchaire gently, "the same man." Sir Greville shifted uneasily in his chair. "A good disguise." "Photographs?" asked Pake. His chief, smiling a little, handed him two buttonhole camera enlargements. There was an elusive similarity, a strained family likeness; but neither was patently of the man Pake had seen that morning. Pake said, "The norm of a crowd. If it's the same man, he's a human chameleon." had been curiously unsuccessful. Either he had had them obliterated through surgery or he put on gloves before touching anything. Maybe he made sure to touch nothing. The last idea was fantastic, but what wasn't about this case? Pake asked, "Why has no effort been made before to collate available material, if this has been going on for so long?" Dr. Frend of Berlin grunted. "The medical profession is not an international police force. There is fraternal exchange of information in periodicals, naturally, but no medical man would risk his reputation by lending credence to such a fantastic rumor as, for instance, the cure of an advanced leukemia." "But that man was my own patient!" Dr. Stawowy of Prague was indignant. "I'm not challenging your veracity or ability. Genuinely mistaken diagnoses are not unknown," Frend said coldly. "I was merely explaining to this gentleman why there has been such delay in instigating an international investigation. The matter was brought into the open only recently at a European congress, of which I happened to be chairman. The feeling of the meeting was that these rumors should be traced to their source, as a professional and public duty. I agreed to act as coordinator of a small sub-committee appointed for this purpose. That is why we are here. Personally, I am not convinced that this man is anything more than a faker and an opportunist." Michaels of the N.M.A. shook his head. "A man from an adjacent office was carried in to him a couple of days ago with every symptom of a burst appendix. This 'faker' protested at first, .said he wasn't a doctor. Then he asked to be left alone with him. Ten minutes later, that man walked out unaided." "Nicely stage-managed," said Frend. "He was a stooge." "We checked. It's difficult to believe there was collusion. The patient is a solid, decent citizen. He said the pain began to go when Trancore had been looking at him for a while. In his own words, he felt something moving in his guts, and then the pain stopped." "I find it less difficult to believe that he was a stooge," repeated Frend obstinately. Pake's chief intervened. "Gentlemen, my department has received instructions to give you every assistance in obtaining information about this man. Mr. Pake will be in charge. We arenot concerned with the medical side of the case, but only with its legal aspects." H E paused, dropped diplomatic language. "Though why in hell it should be my department instead of the police, or the D.A.'s office, or the Bureau of Public Welfare, or the Bureau of Immigration is something I still haven't figured." Sir Greville Gray said, "In every instance where a direct law-enforcement agency was about to 'investigate, even before his identity papers could be asked for, the man has disappeared. His nationality is unknown. He operates only for as long as he can escape widespread notice and police attention. That's why the few newspaper stories that have appeared are quite disconnected and based solely on speculation. Your approach must be very discreet." "Seems it'll have to be invisible, too," Pake said. "He knows I'm an operative already. But he cured my -- " Pake stopped. Maybe his postnasal drip had cleared up of its own accord. It was a comforting thought. He wished he could believe it. sweetkin," he told the phone. "Just can't make it tonight. I've got to stay on this case. It's -- er -- detective work. The police are helping me." The nerve-edged vehemence of his wife's voice grated on his ear. He held the receiver an inch away. "So you think you're a real Gman now, a big tough hero running around with a bottle of rye and a blonde. Well, listen, hero, I hope they shoot first. I'm through." "It's nothing like that, hon. You're getting mixed up, anyway. Bureau men don't drink on duty. And you're pretty hard to please -- you called me an accounting machine this morning. But look, lovesome, I'll be home around seven. It's just that I have to stay near a phone. We could play checkers. And I promise I'll grab me a day off -- " He held the receiver six inches from his ear. "I'm sorry," he said again loudly and lowered the phone, which was still angrily vibrating, to the cutoff. There was a note on the kitchen table when he got home. "An old school friend called. Anyway, that's my story, hero. And we're going places. Don't wait up." Pake sighed. Hero... He curled his lean body up in a chair by the phone with a book. The call came at midnight: "He's skipped." "I was waiting for that. I've seen the papers. Keep on it." Pake turned back to the midnight editions. There were few facts. Three patients had been interviewed. From the descriptions, one was the Eurasian with leprosy he had seen that morning. The word-of-mouth snowball and the inevitable newspaper swoop had taken just two w T eeks this time. In Paris, Trancore had lasted a month. One newspaper admitted that they had an anonymous call claiming a miracle cure, days previously, but had put it down to a cultist bid for publicity. The phone rang again. The caller said, "If this guy doesn't come out of his office soon, these newspapermen will bust the door down. What shall I do?" "You're on loan from the police, aren't you? If they try that, identify yourself and threaten to book 'em. You don't need to mention that Trancore isn't in that office anyway." The phone spluttered disbelief. Pake grimaced. "I know how you feel, sergeant. Maybe he flew out of the window. He was picked up as he came out of the front # entrance, and I'm waiting to hear where he holes up. But spin those reporters some yarn and keep them there if you can." Pake shook his head as he put the phone down. He took a freshening shower. Past twelve was a fine time for newspapermen, police and miracle healers to be about their business -- did Trancore ever sleep, or had he gone in for all-night sessions? -- but Accountancy Branch men worked office hours. Discreet investigation guaranteed, every cent traced through the best-cookcd books. That was probably Washington's line of thought: if Accountancy could do it with embezzled cents, they could do it with elusive fake doctors. But these cents didn't add up. It didn't make sense. ' Nonsense. A whole row of thaumaturgical non-cents. Accountancy could trace a cent: So, logically, they could scent a trace. And sense a non-scent... Uh-uh. Pull yourself together, hero... Pake lolled his tongue at the mirror. Clean and pink, no fuzz or sign of civilized costiveness. Constipation. Post-nasal drip. And leprosy. He leaned forward until his forehead touched the mirror. His eyes showed red tracery beneath drooping lids. What did real Government men -- not the office-bound type -- do to stay awake? Pake recalled Betty's crack about rye and a blonde. And he remembered a nearly full bottle. He answered the insistent phone with a glass in one hand. He jotted the address of a cheap rooming house, dressed and left, thoughtfully putting the bottle in a pocket. T HE man on watch said, "Room five. Going in?" Pake shrugged. "I don't know'. If I do, he'll probably float out of a back window; This kind of thing isn't up my alley." The w'atcher looked surprised. "Why, you're F.B.I., aren't you?" "Not so's you'd notice," said Pake gloomily. He shivered a little in the after-midnight chill. Someone was emerging from the building. The watcher drew Pake into the shadow of an unlighted shop doorway. "It's him, anyway." Then he frowmed. "No. Sorry. Same build, but -- " "For my money," Pake murmured, peering across the road, "you were right first time. The norm of a crowd." "Hey, whadya doing?" Pake shook off the restraining hand. "I don't know," he said again. "Ask him for a light, maybe. This can't be played according to the Detectives' Manual. If there is such a thing. I wouldn't know. If he vanishes in a puff of smoke, call the psychiatric ward ambulance -- for me." Pake's lanky strides quickly overtook the slow-moving man. "Pardon me -- " The man turned. "Good morning, Mr. Pake. I congratulate you on your acuity of perception and your imagination. How are your nasal passages?" The world reeled a little on its axis. "Walk with me," said Trancore, and took Pake's arm. "But first signal to your policeman that he needn't follow us." Frankie Pake flapped a limp, dismissing hand at the watcher in the shadows, and walked on into a dream. "Am I mad?" he asked simply, after a while. "No. You're saner than most. Your higher cortical centers are momentarily dulled by fatigue and alcohol, giving full reign to intuition. 'Hunch' you term it. An endearing quality when allied with imagination. A saving grace, indeed, of your race." "You're from India?" "Trancore is a good Indian name. Incidentally, fatigue is a disease." Pake said, "Don't cure me; I couldn't bear to wake up. When do we start running like hell to stay in the same place? Pardon me." Trancore shook his head as Pake, still walking, upended a bottle to his lips. The sidewalk was crowding up and the lights brightening in nagging neon as they neared Broadway. Pake lowered the bottle. "You still here?" "You expect me to disappear? I could, quite easily, by convincing you of my non-presence, as I did when I walked past those men outside my office. Or I could slip into a crowd and, within limitations, alter the apparent cast of my features to conform seemingly with an average. But don't you want to ask me some questions?" Pake pondered this. "Maybe I do. Why do you want to answer them?" He was feeling less like a real G-man and more like an Accountancy Branch investigator every moment. "You figure I'm harmless, huh?" he added resentfully. "Like my wife?" "By no means. If I weren't about to conclude my own particular investigation, I would say that you were most dangerous to me. Your imagination is quite highly developed." Pake stopped. He grabbed Trancore's sleeve. "I can't walk and think," he announced. He dumped the empty bottle by a fire-plug. garish light of an open-fronted soft-drinks bar. "If this is going to be a jag," Pake said, "I suggest we lay a foundation of milk." Smells wafted in from the street, the delicate and the insistent intermingled: rubber, hot oil, burned gasoline, cheap perfume, sweat, dust, peppermint: astringent tang of warm steel, of leather, even of stone. It had been a hot day before the sun went down. Pake sniffed appreciatively. "It's a sense we abuse and neglect," he .said as the milk was served. "You did cure my postnasal drip, didn't you?" TrancOre had been watching him with a half-smile. "AH those questions in your mind, yet you relish this rediscovery above all. I don't despair of you." Trancore sipped his milk. "The infection was cured by your body. I helped. I can't tell you how, unless you have five hundred years to spare." "Hardly," Pake said. "I haven't twelve hours to spare, if I'm to save my job. Or my reputation. Which, or either, I'm not sure." He caught Trancore's amused eye. "All right, that's not true. But I need answers to a pretty lengthy questionnaire. Who, when, what, why, where -- you know." "You're convinced I'm a telepath?" "Aren't you?" "Not in your sense of the term, which is a semantic misnomer in any case. As a diagnostician, I sense abnormalities in physiological functioning. As a psychologist, I sense -- difference. In purpose and function. When you came into my waiting room, I knew you w T ere not there as a patient. Your presi ence was a disharmony. The same with your colleagues. As for your name and your occupation, they are naturally blazed so clearly on the surface of your mind that even your native clairvoyants could read the information." "That," Pake breathed, "takes a load off my mind. You don't, for instance, know what I'm thinking about that dark-haired ex-blonde who just served us those shakes?" "The one with the excellent pectoral development? No. Your own muzzy picturat'e and thalamic concepts are your own. I can't interpret them." Pake said, "Fine. You know all about the aphrodisiac effects of alcohol, though. Are you too big for me to understand, or can I see you clear and self-explanatory against the background of Broadway?" Trancore did not reply for a moment. He was looking at the other occupants of the bar. There Something bigger; less human, perwas something like pity in his eyes. haps. Or more human. CompasNot pity, though, Pake decided, sion? searching hard for another word. Trancore said, as if to himself, "The girl with the bright face laughing at the febrile witticisms of her unpleasant escort: three-quarters of her right lung has gone." Pake felt he was overhearing something he shouldn't. But he said, "You could put her right?" "I could stop the rot in that lung, Pake. But she would return to that back room full of smoke and dust. She would still travel on a crowded subway to an overheated office. She'd still starve herself to buy clothes to keep in fashion. I don't have a cure for those things." "That's the first time you've admitted you have a cure for anything." Frankie Pake felt confused, despite his acceptance of the situation -- which still surprised him. And he felt grudgingly humble. He saw, as if for the first time, the face of the man who called himself Trancore. It had been the norm of the crowd, a pale blur in a flashlight shot of a moving mob. Now it was individual, seen clear and not through a wavering mask. The underlying personality was revealed, strong, but with no desire for domination. There were those once-precious pulps that Betty had scornfully banished to an out-of-the-way cupboard when they'd moved into the apartment. Clues there, maybe? Mutant superman in hiding? Spy from a far galaxy? -- ouch! No ray-guns, no squirming, tentacled horrors, no -- A little sanity, a little sobriety, little hero... "What are you, Mr. Trancore?" "A healer. That is my profession." "And now suppose you answer the question." "Is your head clear?" said, "Strangely, it is. But I'm a little drunk from the neck down, and the dream-state persists." "I wish," said Trancore -- and it seemed the most foolish, yet the most significant thing that Pake could remember hearing him say -- "I wish sometimes that I could escape reality so easily, by imparting to it the patina of a dream. You all do that." He got up. "I'm going to work now. I have about eight hours. You will be my guide." "What do you want to see?" "This city at play in the predawn hours." Pake gave a humorful grunt. "My wife would suit you better in the role of guide. She's playing pretty hard right now." He explained. He wanted to explain. Betty was suddenly vivid in his mind: beautiful but fretful, at odds with life, yearning for the opiate of soft lights and sweet music, afraid to face herself, afraid to proclaim her interest in humanity in case such a generalized belief should hurt her in some way. Trancore listened sympathetically as Pake spoke of the broken date and his own preference for the quiet life. Trancore said, "Surely she'll appreciate the irony of this when you tell her?" "The hell she will ! If she knows I've been painting the town without her, even in line of duty -- " Trancore asked, "Do you know where she's likely to be?" Pake looked at him curiously. "There's a couple of spots she fancies." "Could we go there a little later?" He held up his hand as Pake was about to veto the idea. "I promise you there'll be no unpleasant consequences if we meet her." Pake believed him. Pake would have believed in a panhandling green hippo with puce spots at that moment. The apparition would have been absorbed without comment into the basic fantasy of this situation. where it was boasted that any potable man had ever devised for the delectation of palate and the drugging of senses could be served -- with second choice on the house if first choice wasn't in stock. Trancore asked for the first twelve favorites, took them in turn without a blink. Pake stuck to rye, watched, and listened. "Your palates," observed Trancore, "are more civilized than your minds." "But why," asked Pake in wonderment, "are you still upright?" "I make sure to eliminate the poisons in the alcohol, and thus the toxic effects. As a rule, I don't drug. But when in Rome -- " Something lit up in Pake's mind. Fantasy came to fantasy. He remembered a story. "Now I get it. You're from the future!" Trancore laughed, genuinely. "Your imagination deserves something better than comic strips to work on. It's fascinating, but depressing, to see science negated by superstition, and your concept . of time is the greatest superstition. Let's go. A game shop next." He meant a pinball arcade. He cheated abominably. Pake watched a steel ball bump the thousand pin twenty times, defying gravity. "Surgical manipulative technique," Trancore murmured. A strabismic attendant, called by the clanging of the surfeited machine, shouldered through the matching crowd and squinted unbelievingly. "Whatcha doon?" The attendant demanded menacingly. "Or this," Trancore said gently. "The same technique." The man pressed a hand to his eyes and made an animal noise. Then he looked at his fingers, held up one, two, three; blinked at the lights. Pake grasped Trancore's arm, palled him outside. He was suddenly quite sober. There was a strange harshness in his voice. "Do you have to impress me? The world needs your knowledge and" -- he waved at the glitter of Broadway -- "you fritter time and energy mooching around here. You don't cure a girl of T.B., but you fix that old thug's squint." "A whim. Alone, I can do so little." "Why do you do anything?" bill reflectively. "Even a healer must eat. Field research is expensive. And we are pledged to live as far as possible within the framework of the society we examine, applying our skills to that end. In that way, we reduce the possibility of observation affecting the subject we observe. "By using the hypnotic and telekinetic techniques which I have developed in my own profession, I could obviously earn sufficient of your tokens for subsistence during my period of study by gambling, for instance; but that would not be ethical." Pake imagined a poker player who not only reshuffled cards as they were being dealt to him, but who could disappear, if his opponents queried his success, by erasing the fact of his presence from their minds. "You could teach -- " he began. "And run foul of the witch-doctors who briefed you yesterday? Think, Mr. Pake! Would you give a hypodermic and a gallon of cocaine to an aboriginal tribe suffering from toothaches? Besides, these techniques have taken me five hundred years to learn." "That's why I thought -- " "That I was from the future? I might be, in terms of possibility. We are," said Trancore, "no older than you, as a race, in terms of universal evolution. But as individuals, we are longer-lived. The biggest single advance you will make as a race will be when you increase the life-span of the individual." Pake thought that over, and fantasy was far from his mind. "You could help us," he said. "We may, when you become more than ephemerate. And, for psychological reasons, that must be achieved by your own efforts." "Are we so contemptible?" "Would we study you if you were? Our architects, our musicians, even our fiction writers do fieldwork in this territory, write scholarly theses when they return. Anthropology, in our sense of the term, embraces all the arts and sciences. We are all scholars. Occasionally we innovate, and you benefit." "Why do you tell me this?" Trancore shrugged. For the first time, Pake noticed that they were standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk. They might have been in the middle of the Gobi desert for all the notice people took of them. A plump man walked straight toward them, frowned, then detoured carefully around the spot where they stood. Pake wondered what the man thought he saw. Probably a puddle or brokenup sidewalk. "I like you," Trancore said simply. "And you will remember very little that you can impart to others and expect any measure of belief. And you have imagination enough to control your terrestrial chauvinism and your natural resentment at being studied. It may comfort you to know that, in the physical sciences, your race is considered to be quite well advanced." It did, somehow. Yet -- A LL the niggling, back-mindbiting inferiorities that man has ever suffered, from the time he was first chased by a sabertooth to his feeling of helplessness when science outran his emotional control, suddenly seemed to crowd together into Pake's brain for a staggering second. "Resentment isn't the word," Pake said slowly. "I could kill you." "But you won't. Others would. Now you understand why our visits are unannounced. And they will remain so until all men are as essentially civilized -- that is to say, nonaggressive -- as you are." Pake knew the question was really unimportant and that its true answer would be incomprehensible, anyway. But he asked it. Trancore smiled, "Your preoccupation with the physical sciences... No, I don't have a spaceship garaged anywhere. Your popular concept of time may be superstition, but the limiting speed of light is not. We don't travel. We arrive. I'm afraid the distinction is not clear to you, but it will have to do. "And now -- " The slender man took Pake's arm. Crowds brushed against them again. "Quick visits to a burlesque show, an all-night cinema. And perhaps we could look in at those nightclubs where your wife might be. I owe you a favor. Then I must return home." They cabbed to three clubs before they found Betty. "You are not members, we are booked up, it is evening dress only," objected the hastily summoned manager. "Are you mad?" asked Trancore pleasantly. "Or is your memory so very short?" The manager thumb-and-fingered his eyes, then beamed at them. "Good evening, gentlemen. Good to see you again... This way." "Teach me that trick," muttered Pake as they followed him. He looked down at his open overcoat and tweed suit. "Tell me, am I wearing a soft shirt or a boiled one?" "Boiled." "Good. I like to be formal." Trancore stopped at the entrance to the big circular room. The manager left them and hurried back to his private office with the conviction of a frantic headache to be numbed with aspirin immediately. "Do you see her?" Trancore asked. Pake glanced around the soft-lit tables. He looked hard at one table. He made a wry face. "Boiled," he said, "has more than one meaning. Or maybe Betty just can't resist using that torso of hers as a prop. I wish she wasn't wearing that dress at that angle of inclination. Would you think me so uncivilized, Trancore, if I walked up and poked Football Shoulders in one of those roving eyes of his?" "You are not altogether without blame in this arisement," Trancore observed mildly. "You make insufficient allowance for her. You are reasonably well-adjusted. She is not." "I'd like to adjust that damned dress." "Primitive possessiveness. You disappoint me, Pake," Trancore said, but his eyes were laughing. Betty looked up as they approached. Her eyes weren't quite focused. "Frankie... What the hell! Lookit what the river washed up!" She grabbed the table for support as Football Shoulders rose suddenly, rubbed his forehead. "Phone call or -- or something," he muttered. "Pardon me. Must go." Betty did a double-take like a puppet as the shoulders lumbered off. "Wheel me home. Whit goes -- " Pake said, "Meet Mr. Trancore." T WO men walked slowly along the footpath of a great girdered bridge. The taller man had a hesitation in his walk and stooped a little, as if burdened. Halfway across, they stopped and watched in silence the slow dawn rose-gilding the towers of Manhattan. A tugboat below, looking no larger than a water beetle, made its loud, self-important noise. As much noise as an ocean-going liner. Pake had put Betty in a cab, had walked with Trancore, had asked many more questions, and learned very little. Now he asked the final question as Trancore turned and held out his slender hand. "Good-by, Mr. Pake." "At least tell me -- which star?" "You haven't seen or named it yet. Take care of Mr. Trancore for me, won't you? You'll find his address in this pocket. Good-by." Pake took the hand. For a crazy moment, despite what he knew, he expected it to be withdrawn from his grasp suddenly, to see a figure drawn heavenward along a lancing path of light. But there was merely a sigh from the lips of the slender man, who collapsed limply into Pake's ready arms. quacks can examine him until they drive the poor devil crazy, but he won't be able to tell them any more. His name is Chandra Trancore, a second-rate doctor who disappeared from his practice in Madras province ten months ago. He has less idea of what he has been doing during those months than they have." "How do you explain it?" Pake stood by the window of the office and inhaled deeply. Somewhere nearby there was a windowbox with gardenias. He caught their scent as well as if they had been under his nose. He said, "I don't. And I'd like you to hurry through my resignation as fast as you can, chief." "I still don't understand why, Frankie. We're pals, aren't we, apart from official status? I know I've had to drive you hard lately. Had to drive myself, too. Sorry I put you on this off-routine stunt. But if you want to rest up for a while -- " Pake inhaled again, audibly. Someone was cooking spaghetti bolognese quite a distance away. "I want to be free to take legal action on behalf of Trancore if those witch-doctors have him arrested on some trumped-up charge just to give themselves more time to examine him. I'll take personal responsibility for seeing him home to India." "You can do that without resigning. I'll fix special leave, if you insist on being crazy." "That's not all, though." Pake wondered how he could explain, regretfully decided it was impossible. "I'm taking an intensive twoyear course for a new career." "So you told me. I thought you were drunk. Anyway, how will Betty take to a fool idea like that? She goes for the bright lights, doesn't she? And I thought her --  nerves were edgy." "She's all for it," Pake said, and was amused at his chief's gapemouthed disbelief. "A neurosis is a disease. And she met Trancore. I'll send you a card when we get started." T HE card arrived three years later. It was headed: M'Beli Medical Mission Station Upper Congo Pake wrote: "... probably the most backward tribe mentally and physically in the whole of Africa. Some trouble from the witch-doctors at first, but I've settled down quite nicely now and I think they' re beginning to trust me, with Betty's help. The women love her. Tribal customs are fascinating. Watch out for my name in the Anthropological Review." The Marching Morons A potter's wheel was still a potter's wheel and clay was still clay. Efim Hawkins had built his shop near Goose Lake, which had a narrow band of good fat clay and a narrow beach of white sand. He fired three bottle-nosed kilns with willow charcoal from the wood lot. The wood lot was also useful for long walks while the kilns were cooling; if he let himself stay within sight of them, he would open them prematurely, impatient to see how some new shape or glaze had come through the fire, and -- ping ! -- the new shape or glaze would be good for nothing but the shard pile back of his slip tanks. A business conference was in full swing in his shop, a modest cube of brick, tile-roofed, as the ChicagoLos Angeles "rocket" thundered overhead -- very noisy, very sweptback, very fiery jets, shaped as #leekly swift-looking as an airborne barracuda. The buyer from Marshall Fields was turning over a black-glazed one liter carafe, nodding approval with his massive, handsome head. "This is real pretty," he told Hawkins and his own secretary, Gomez-Laplace. "This has got lots of what ya call real est'etic principles. Yeah, it is real pretty." "How much?" the secretary asked the potter. "Seven-fifty each in dozen lots," said Hawkins. "I ran up fifteen dozen last month." "They are real est'etic," repeated the buyer from Fields. "I will take them all." "I don't think we can do that, doctor," said the secretary. "They'd cost us #. That would leave only # in our quarter's budget. And we still have to run down to East Liverpool to pick up some cheap dinner sets." "Dinner sets?" asked the buyer, his big face full of wonder. "Dinner sets. The department's been out of them for two months now. Mr. Garvy-Seabright got pretty nasty about it yesterday. Remember?" "Garvy-Seabright, that meatheaded bluenose," the buyer said contemptuously. "He don't know nothin' about est'etics. Why for don't he lemme run my own department?" His eye fell on a stray copy of W hambozambo Comix and he sat down with it. An occasional deep chuckle or grunt of surprise escaped him as he turned the pages. Uninterrupted, the potter and the buyer's secretary quickly closed a deal for two dozen of the liter carafes. "I wish we could take more," said the secretary, "but you heard what I told him. We've had to turn away customers for ordinary dinnerware because he shot the last quarter's budget on some Mexican piggy banks some equally enthusiastic importer stuck him with. The fifth floor is packed solid with them." "I'll bet they look mighty est'etic." "They're painted with purple cacti." T HE potter shuddered and caressed the glaze of the sample carafe. The buyer looked up and rumbled, "Ain't you dummies through yakkin' yet? What good's a seckertary for if'n he don't take the burden of de-ta.il off'n my back, harh?" "We're all through, doctor. Are you ready to go?" The buyer grunted peevishly, dropped W hambozambo Comix on the floor and led the way out of the building and down the log corduroy road to the highway. His car was waiting on the concrete. It was, like all contemporary cars, too low-slung to get over the logs. He climbed down into the car and started the motor with a tremendous sparkle and roar. "Gomez-Laplace," called out the potter under cover of the noise, "did anything come of the radiation program they were working on the last time I was on duty at the Pole?" "The same old fallacy," said the secretary gloomily. "It stopped us on mutation, it stopped us on culling, it stopped us on segregation, and now it's stopped us on hypnosis." "Well, I'm scheduled back to the grind in nine days. Time for another firing right now. I've got a new luster to try..." "I'll miss you. I shall be 'vacationing' -- running the drafting room of the New Century Engineering Corporation in Denver. They're going to put up a two hundred-story office building, and naturally somebody's got to be on hand." "Naturally," said Hawkins with a sour smile. There was an ear-pi ercingly sweet blast as the buyer leaned on the horn button. Also, a yard-tall jet of what looked like flame spurted up from the car's radiator cap; the car's power plant was a gas turbine, and had no radiator. "I'm coming, doctor," said the secretary dispiritedly. He climbed down into the car and it whooshed off with much flame and noise. The potter, depressed, wandered back up the corduroy road and contemplated his cooling kilns. The rustling wind in the boughs was obscuring the creak and mutter of the shrinking refractory brick. Hawkins wondered about the number two kiln -- a reduction fire on a load of lusterware mugs. Had the clay chinking excluded the air? Had it been a properly smoky blaze? Would it do any harm if he just took one close -- ? by the scruff of the neck and yanked him over to the tool shed. He got out his pick and resolutely set off on a prospecting jaunt to a hummocky field that might yield some oxides. He was especially low on coppers. The long walk left him sweating hard, with his lust for a peek into the kiln quiet in his breast. He swung his pick almost at random into one of the hummocks; it clanged on a stone which he excavated. A largely obliterated inscription said: The potter swore mildly. He had hoped the field would turn out to be a cemetery, preferably a oncefashionable cemetery full of oncemassive bronze caskets moldered into oxides of tin and copper. some around anyway. He headed lackadaisically for the second largest hillock and sliced into it with his pick. There was a stone to undercut and topple into a trench, and then the potter was very glad he'd stuck at it. His nostrils were filled with the bitter smell and the dirt was tinged with the exciting blue of copper salts. The pick went clang! Hawkins, puffing, pried up a stainless steel plate that was quite badly stained and was also marked with incised letters. It seemed to have pulled loose from rotting bronze; there were rivets on the back that brought up flakes of green patina. The potter wiped off the surface dirt with his sleeve, turned it to catch the sunlight obliquely and read: "Honest John," famed in university annals, represents a challenge which medical science has not yet answered: revival of a human being accidentally thrown into a state of suspended animation. In # Mr. Barlow, a leading Evanston real estate dealer, visited his dentist for treatment of an impacted wisdom tooth. His dentist requested and received permission to use the experimental anesthetic Cycloparadimetbanol-B-# , developed at the University. After administration of the anesthetic, the dentist resorted to his drill. By freakish mischance, a short circuit in his machine delivered # volts of #-cycle current into the patient. (In a damage suit instituted by Mrs. Barlow against the dentist, the University and the makers of the drill, a jury found for the defendants.) Mr. Barlow never got up from the dentist's chair and was assumed to have died of poisoning, electrocution or both. Morticians preparing him for embalming discovered, however, that their subject was -- though certainly not living -- just as certainly not dead. The University was notified and a series of exhaustive tests was begun, including attempts to duplicate the trance state on volunteers. After a bad run of seven cases which ended fatally, the attempts were abandoned. Honest John was long an exhibit at the University museum, and livened many a football game as mascot of the University's Blue Crushers. The bounds of taste were overstepped, however, when a pledge to Sigma Delta Chi was ordered in '# to "kidnap" Honest John from his loosely guarded glass museum case and introduce him into the Rachel Swanson Memorial Girls' Gymnasium shower room. On May #nd, #, the University Board of Regents issued the following order: "By unanimous vote, it is directed that the remains of Honest John Barlow be removed from the University museum and conveyed to the University's LieuBiological Laboratories and there be securely locked in a specially prepared iault. It is further directed that all possible measures for the preservation of these remains be taken by the Laboratory administration and that access to these remains be denied to all persons except qualified scholars authorized in writing by the Board. The Board reluctantly takes this action in view of recent notices and photographs in the nation's press which, to say the least, reflect but small credit upon the University." Hawkins understood what had happened -- an early and accidental blundering onto the bare bones of the Levantman shock anesthesia, which had since been replaced by other methods. To bring subjects out of Levantman shock, you let them have a squirt of simple saline in the trigeminal nerve. Interesting. And now about that bronze -- He heaved the pick into the rotting green salts, expecting no resistence, and almost fractured his wrist. Something down there was solid. He began to flake off the oxides. A half hour of work brought him down to phosphor bronze, a huge casting of the almost incorruptible metal. It had weakened structurally over the centuries; he could fit the point of his pick under a corroded boss and pry off great creaking and grumbling striae of the stuff. Hawkins wished he had an archeologist with him, but didn't dream of returning to his shop and calling one to take over the find. He was an all-around man: by choice and in his free time, an artist in clay and glaze; by necessity, an automotive, electronics and atomic engineer who could also swing a project in traffic control, individual and group psychology, architecture or tool design. He didn't yell for a specialist every time something out of his line came up; there were so few with so much to-do... He trenched around his find, discovering that it was a great brickshaped bronze mass with an excitingly hollow sound. A long strip of moldering metal from one of the long vertical faces pulled away, exposing red rust that went whoosh and was sucked into the interior of the mass. It had been de-aired, thought Hawkins, andthere must have been an inner jacket of glass which had crystalized through the centuries and quietly crumbled at the first clang of his pick. He didn't know what a vacuum would do to a subject of Levantman shock, but he had hopes, nor did he quite understand what a real estate dealer was, but it might have something to do with pottery. And anything might have a bearing on Topic Number One. trench, climbed out and set off at a dog-trot for his shop. A little rummaging turned up a hypo and there was a plasticontainer of salt in the kitchen. Back at his dig, he chipped for another half hour to expose the juncture of lid and body. The hinges were hopeless; he smashed them off. Hawkins extended the telescopic handle of the pick for the best leverage, fitted its point into a deep pit, set its built-in fulcrum, and heaved. Five more heaves and he could see, inside the vault, what looked like a dilsty marble statue. Ten more and he could see that it was the naked body of Honest John Barlow, Evanston real estate dealer, uncorrupted by time. The potter found the apex of the trigeminal nerve with his needle's point and gave him # ccr In an hour Barlow's chest began to pump. In another hour, he rasped, "Did it work?" "Did it!" muttered Hawkins. Barlow opened his eyes and stirred, looked down, turned his hands before his eyes -- "I'll sue!" he screamed. "My clothes! My fingernails!" A horrid suspicion came over his face and he clapped his hands to his hairless scalp. "My hair!" he wailed. "I'll sue you for every penny you've got! That release won't mean a damned thing in court -- I didn't sign away my hair and clothes and fingernails!" "They'll grow back," said Hawkins casually. "Also your epidermis. Those parts of you weren't alive, you know, so they weren't preserved like the rest of you. I'm afraid the clothes are gone, though." "What is this -- the University hospital?" demanded Barlow. "I want a phone. No, you phone. Tell my wife I'm all right and tell Sam Immerman -- he's my lawyer -- to get over here right away. Greenleaf #-#. Ow!" He had tried to sit up, and a portion of his pink skin rubbed against the inner surface of the casket, which was powdered by the ancient crystalized glass. "What the hell did you guys do, boil me alive? Oh, you're going to pay for this !" "You're all right," said Hawkins, wishing now he had a reference book to clear up several obscure terms. "Your epidermis will start growing immediately. You're not in the hospital. Look here." less steel plate that had labeled the casket. After a suspicious glance, the man started to read. Finishing, he laid the plate carefully on the edge of the vault and was silent for a spell. "Poor Verna," he said at last. "It doesn't say whether she was stuck with the court costs. Do you happen to know -- " "No," said the potter. "All I know is what was on the plate, and how to revive you. Tire dentist accidentally gave you a dose of what we call Levantman shock anesthesia. We haven't used it for centuries; it was powerful, but too dangerous." "Centuries..." brooded the man. "Centuries... I'll bet Sam swindled her out of her eyeteeth. Poor Verna. How long ago was it? What year is this?" Hawkins shrugged. "We call it #-B-#. That's no help to you. It takes a long time for these metals to oxidize." "Like that movie," Barlow muttered. "Who would have thought it? Poor Verna!" He blubbered and sniffled, reminding Hawkins powerfully of the fact that he had been found under a flat rock. Almost angrily, the potter demanded, "How many children did you have?" "None yet," sniffed Barlow. "My first wife didn't want them. But Verna wants one -- wanted one -- but we're going to wait until -- we were going to wait until -- " "Of course," said the potter, feeling a savage desire to tell him off, blast him to hell and gone for his work. But he choked it down. There was The Problem to think of; there was always The Problem to think of, and this poor blubberer might unexpectedly supply a clue. Hawkins would have to pass him on. along," Hawkins said. V# "My time is short." Barlow looked up, outraged. "How can you be so unfeeling? I'm a human being like -- "  The Los Angeles-Chicago "rocket" 'thundered overhead and Barlow broke off in mid-complaint. "Beautiful!" he breathed, following it with his eyes. "Beautiful!" He climbed out of the vault, too interested to be pained by its roughness against his infantile skin. "After all," he said briskly, "this should have its sunny side. I never was much for reading, but this is just like one of those stories. And I ought to make some money out of it, shouldn't I?" He gave Hawkins a shrewd glance. "You want money?" asked the potter. "Here." He handed over a fistful of change and bills. "You'd better put my shoes on. It'll be about a quarter-mile. Oh, and you're -- uh, modest? -- yes, that was the word. Here." Hawkins gave him his pants, but Barlow was excitedly counting the money. "Eighty-five, eighty-six -- and it's dollars, too ! I thought it'd be credits or whatever they call 'them. 'E Pluribus Unum' and 'Liberty' -- just different faces. Say, is there a catch to this? Are these real, genuine. honest twentytwo-cent dollars like we had or just wallpaper?" "They're quite all right, I assure you," said the potter. "I wish you'd come along. I'm in a 'hurry." T HE man babbled as they stumped toward the shop. "Where are we going -- The Council of Scientists, the World Coordinator or something. like that?" "Who? Oh, no. We call them 'President' and 'Congress.' No, that wouldn't do any good at all. I'm just taking you to see some people." "I ought to make plenty out of this. Plenty! I could write books. Get some smart young fellow to put it into words for me and I'll bet I could turn out a best-seller. What's the setup on things like that?" "It's about like that. Smart young fellows. But there aren't any best-sellers any more. People don't read much nowadays. We'll find something equally profitable for you to do." Back in the shop, Hawkins gave Barlow a suit of clothes, deposited him in the waiting room and called Central in Chicago. "Take him away," he pleaded. "I have time for one more firing and he blathers and blathers. I haven't told him anything. Perhaps we should just turn him loose and let him find his own level, but there's a chance -- " "The Problem," agreed Central. "Yes, there's a chance." The potter delighted Barlow by making him a cup of coffee with a cube that not only dissolved in cold water but heated the water to ins chatted about the "rocket" Barlow had admired, and had to haul himself up short; he had almost told the real estate man what its top speed really was -- almost, indeed, revealed that it was not a rocket. He regretted, too, that he had so casually handed Barlow a couple of hundred dollars. The man seemed obsessed with fear that they were worthless since Hawkins refused to take a note or I.O.U. or even a definite promise of repayment. But Hawkins couldn't go into details, and was very glad when a stranger arrived from Central. "Tinny-Peete, from Algeciras," the stranger told him swiftly as the two of them met at the door. "Psychist for Poprob. Polasigned special overtake Barlow." "Thank Heaven," said Hawkins. "Barlow," he told the man from the past, "this is Tinny-Peete. He's going to take care of you and help you make lots of money." The psychist stayed for a cup of the coffee whose preparation had delighted Barlow, and then conducted the real estate man down the corduroy road to his car, leaving the potter to speculate on whether he could at last crack his kilns. Hawkins, abruptly dismissing Barlow and die Problem, happily picked the chinking from around the door of the number tw r o kiln, prying it open a trifle. A blast of heat and the heady, smoky scent of the reduction fire delighted him. He peered and saw a corner of a shelf glowing cherry-red, becoming obscured by wavering black areas as it lost heat through the opened door. He slipped a charred wood paddle under a mug on the shelf and pulled it out as a sample, the hairs on the back of his hand curling and scorching. The mug crackled and pinged and Hawkins sighed happily. The bismuth resinate luster had fired to perfection, a haunting film of silvery-black metal with strange bluish lights in it as it turned before the eyes, and the Problem of Population seemed very far away to Hawkins then. arrived at the concrete highway where the psychist's car was parked in a safety bay. "What -- a -- boat!" gasped the man from the past. "Boat? No, that's my car." Barlow surveyed it with awe. Swept-back lines, deep-drawn compound curves, kilograms of chrome. He ran his hands futilely over the door -- or was it the door? -- in a futile search for a handle, and asked respectfully, "How fast does if go?" The psychist gave him a keen look and said slowly, "Two hundred and fifty. You can fell by the speedometer." "Wow! My old Ghewy could hit a hundred on a straightaway, but you're out of my class, mister!" Tinny-Peete somehow got a huge, low door open and Barlow descended three steps into immense cushions, floundering over to the right. He was too fascinated to pay serious attention to his flayed dermis. The dashboard was a lovely wilderness of dials, plugs, indicators, lights, scales and switches. The psychist climbed down into the driver's seat and did something with his feet. The motor started like lighting a blowtorch as big as a silo. Wallowing around in the cushions, Barlow saw through a rear-view mirror a tremendous exsparkles. "Do you like it?" yelled the psychist. "It's terrific!" Barlow yelled back. "It's -- " He was shut up as the car pulled out from the bay into the road with a great voo-ooo-ooom! A gale roared past Barlow's head, though the windows seemed to be closed; the impression of speed was terrific. He located the speedometer on the dashboard and saw it climb past # , # , # , # . "Fast enough for me," yelled the psychist, noting that Barlow's face fell in response. "Radio?" He passed over a surprisingly light object like a football helmet, with no trailing wires, and pointed to a row of buttons. Barlow put on the helmet, glad to have the roar of air stilled, and pushed a pushbutton. It lit up satisfyingly and Barlow settled back even farther for a sample of the brave new world's super-modern taste in ingenious entertainment. a voice roared in his ears. and gave the psychist an injured look. Tinny-Peete grinned and turned a dial associated with the pushbutton layout. The man from the past donned the helmet again and found the voice had lowered to normal. "The show of shows ! The supershow! The super-duper show! The quiz of quizzes! Take it and stick it!" There were shrieks of laughter in the background. "Here we got the contes-tants all ready to go. You know how we work it. I hand a contes-tant a triangle-shaped cutout and like that down the line. Now we got these here boards, they got cut-out places the same shape as the triangles and things, only they're all different shapes, and the first contes-tant that sticks the cutouts into the board, he wins. "Now I'm gonna innaview the first contes-tant. Right here, honey. What's your name?" "Name? Uh -- " "Hoddaya like that, folks? She don't remember her name! Hah? V ould you buy that for a quarter?" The question was spoken with arch significance, and the audience shrieked, howled and whistled its appreciation. It was dull listening when you didn't know the punch lines and catch lines. Barlow pushed another button, with his free hand ready at the volume control. " -- latest from Washington. It's about Senator Hull-Mendoza. He is still attacking the Bureau of Fisheries. The North California Syndicalist says he got affidavits that John KingsleySchultz is a bluenose from way back. He didn't publistat the affydavits, but he says they say that Kingsley-Schultz was saw at bluenose meetings in Oregon State College and later at Florida University. Kingsley-Schultz says he gotta confess he did major in flycasting at Oregon and got his Ph.D. in game-fish at Florida. "And here is a quote from Kingsley-Schultz: 'Hull-Mendoza don't know what he's talking about. He should drop dead.' Unquote. Hull-Mendoza says he won't publistat the affydavits to pertect his sources. He says they was sworn by three former employes of the Bureau which was fired for in-competence and in-com-pat-ibility by Kingsley-Schultz. "Elsewhere they was the usual run of traffic accidents. A three-way pileup of cars on Route # going outta Chicago took twelve lives. The Ghicago-Los Angeles morning rocket crashed and exploded in the Mo-have -- Mo-jawy -- whatever-you-call-it Desert. All the # people aboard got killed. A Civil Aeronautics Authority investigator on the scene says that the pilot was buzzing herds of sheep and didn't pull out in time. "Hey! Here's a hot one froin New York! A Diesel tug run wild in the harbor while the crew was below and shoved in the port bow of the luck-shury liner S. S. Placentia. It says the ship filled and sank taking the lives of an es-timated # passengers and # crew members. Six divers was sent down to study the wreckage, but they died, too, when their suits turned out to be fulla little holes. "And here is a bulletin I just got from Denver. It seems -- " uncomprehendingly. "He seemed so callous," he yelled at the driver. "I was listening to a newscast -- " Tinny-Peete shook his head and pointed at his ears. The roar of air was deafening. Barlow frowned baffledly and stared out of the window. A glowing sign said: He didn't know what Moogs was or were; the illustration showed an incredibly proportioned girl, #-# per cent naked, writhing passionately in animated full color. The roadside jingle was still with him, but with a new feature. Radar or something spotted the car and alerted the lines of the jingle. Each in turn sped along a roadside track, even with the car, so it could be read before the next line was alerted. "ARM'PTTT#" Another animated job, in two panels, the familiar "Before and After." The first said, "Just Any Cigar?" and was illustrated with a two-person domestic tragedy of a wife holding her nose while her coarse and red-faced husband puffed a slimy-looking rope. The second with -- Barlow blushed and looked at his feet until they had passed the sign. "Coming into Chicago!" bawled Tinny-Peete. Other cars were showing up, all of them dreamboats. Watching them, Barlow began to wonder if he knew what a kilometer was, exactly. They seemed to be traveling so slowly, if you ignored the roaring air past your ears and didn't let the speedy lines of the dreamboats fool you. He would have sworn they were really crawling along at twenty-five, with occasional spurts up to thirty. How much was a kilometer, anyway? The city loomed ahead, and it was just what it ought to be: towering skyscrapers, overhead ramps, landing platforms for helicopters -- He clutched at the cushions. Thpse two 'copters. They were going to -- they were going to -- they -- He didn't see what happened because their apparent collision courses took them behind a giant building. sound surrounded them as they stopped for a red light. "What the hell is going on here?" said Barlow in a shrill, frightened voice, because the braking time was just about zero, he wasn't hurled against the dashboard. "Who's kidding who?" "Why, what's the matter?" demanded the driver. The light changed to green and he started the pickup. Barlow stiffened as he realized that the rush of air past his ears began just a brief, unreal split-second before the car was actually moving. He grabbed for the door handle on his side. The city grew on them slowly: scattered buildings, denser buildings, taller buildings, and a red light ahead. The car rolled to a stop in zero braking time, the rush of air cut off an instant after it stopped, and Barlow was out of the car and running frenziedly down a sidewalk one instant after that. They'll track me down, he thought, panting. It's a secret police thing. They'll get you -- mindreading machines, television eyes everywhere, afraid you'll tell tkeir slaves about freedom and stuff. They don't let anybody cross them, like that story I once read. Winded, he slowed to a walk and congratulatedhimself that he had guts enough not to turn around. That was what they always watched for. Walking, he was just another business-suited back among hundreds. He would be safe, he would be safe -- A hand tumbled from a large, coarse, handsome face thrust close to his: "Wassamatta bumpinninna people likeya owna sidewalk gotta miner slamya inna mushya bassar!" It was neither the mad potter nor the mad driver. "Excuse me," said Barlow. "What did you say?" "Oh, yeah?" yelled the stranger dangerously, and waited for an answer. Barlow, with the feeling that he had somehow been suckered into the short end of an intricate landtitle deal, heard himself reply belligerently, "Yeah!" The stranger let go of his shoulder and snarled, "Oh, yeah?" "Yeah!" said Barlow, yanking his jacket back into shape. "Aaah !" snarled the stranger, with more contempt and disgust than ferocity. He added an obscenity current in Barlow's time, a standard but physiologically impossible directive, and strutted off hulking his shoulders and balling his fists. Evidently he had handled it well enough. He stopped at a red light while the long, low dreamboats roared before him and pedestrains in the sidewalk flow with him threaded their ways through the stream of cars. Brakes screamed, fenders clanged and dented, hoarse cries flew back and forth between drivers and walkers. He leaped backward frantically as one car swerved over an arc of sidewalk to miss another. The signal changed to green, the cars kept on coming for about thirty seconds and then dwindled to an occasional light-runner. Barlow crossed warily and leaned against a vending machine, blowing big breaths. Look natural, he told himself. Do something normal. Buy something from the machine. He fumbled out some change, got a newspaper for a dime, a handkerchief for a quarter and a candy bar for another quarter. The faint chocolate smell made him ravenous suddenly. He clawed at the glassy wrapper printed few seconds, and then it divided neatly by itself. The bar made three good bites, and he bought two more and gobbled them down. Thirsty, he drew a carbonated orange drink in another one of the glassy wrappers from the machine for another dime. When he fumbled with it, it divided neatly and spilled all over his knees. Barlow decided he had been there long enough and walked on. The shop windows were -- shop windows. People still wore and bought clothes, still smoked and bought tobacco, still ate and bought food. And they still went to the movies, he saw with pleased surprise as he passed and then returned to a glittering place whose The place seemed to be showing a quintuple feature, Babies Are Terrible, Don't Have Children, and The Canal i Kid. It was irresistible; he paid a dollar and went in. He caught thetail-end of The Canali Kid in three-dimensional, full-color, full-scent production. It appeared to be an interplanetary saga winding up with a chase scene and a reconciliation between estranged hero and heroine. Babies Are Terrible and Don't Have Children were fantastic arguments against parenthood -- the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of painfully graphic childbirth, vicious children, old parents beaten and starved by their sadistic offspring. The audience, Barlow astoundedly noted, was placidly champing sweets and showing no particular signs of revulsion. The Coming Attractions drove him into the lobby. The fanfares were shattering, the blazing colors blinding, and the added scents stomach-heaving. accustomed to the moderate lighting of the lobby, he groped his way to a bench and opened the newspaper he had bought. It turned out to be The Racing Sheet, which afflicted him with a crushing sense of loss. The familiar boxed index in the lower left hand corner of the front page showed almost unbearably that Churchill Downs and Empire City were still in business -- Blinking back tears, he turned tothe Past Performances at Churchill. They weren't using abbreviations any more, and the pages because of that were singlecolumn instead of double. But it was all the same -- or was it? He squinted at the first race, a three-quarter-mile maiden claimer for thirteen hundred dollars. Incredibly, the track record was two minutes, ten and three-fifths seconds. Any beetle in his time could have knocked off the three-quarter in one-fifteen. It was the same for the other distances, much worse for route events. What the hell had happened to everything? He studied the form of a fiveyear-old brown mare in the second and couldn't make head or tail of it. She'd won and lost and placed and showed and lost and placed without rhyme or reason. She looked like a front-runner for a couple of races and then she looked like a no-good pig and then she looked like a mudder but the next time it rained she wasn't and then she was a stayer and then she was a pig again. In a good five-thousand-dollar allowances event, too! Barlow looked at the other entries and it slowly dawned on him that they were all like the five-yearold brown mare. Not a single damned horse running had the slightest trace of class. Somebody sat down beside him and said, "That's the story." and saw it was tinny-Peete, his driver. "I was in doubts about telling you," said the psychist, "but I see you have some growing suspicions of the truth. Please don't get excited. It's all right, I tell you." "So you've got me," said Barlow. "Got you?" "Don't pretend. I can put two and two together. You're the secret police. You and the rest of the aristocrats live in luxury on the sweat of these oppressed slaves. You're afraid of me because you have to keep them ignorant." There was a bellow of bright laughter from the psychist that got them blank looks from other patrons of the lobby. The laughter didn't sound at all sinister. "Let's get out of here," said Tinny-Peete, still chuckling. "You couldn't possibly have it more wrong." He engaged Barlow's arm and led him to the street. "The acworkers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats. I shall probably die before my time of overwork unless -- " He gave Barlow a speculative look. "You may be able to help us." "I know that gag," sneered Barlow. "I made money in my time and to make money you have to get people on your side. Go ahead and shoot me if you want, but you're not going to make a fool out of me." "You nasty little ingrate!" snapped the psychist, with a kaleidoscopic change of mood. "This damned mess is all your fault and the fault of people like you! Now come along and no more of your nonsense." He yanked Barlow into an office building lobby and an elevator that, disconcertingly, went whoosh loudly as it rose. The real estate man's knees were wobbly as the psychist pushed him from the elevator, down a corridor and into an office. A hawk-faced man rose from a plain chair as the door closed behind them. After an angry look at Barlow, he asked the psychist, "Was I called from the Pole to inspect this -- this -- ?" "Unget updandered. I've deeprobed etfind quasichance exhim Poprobattackline," said the psychist soothingly. "Doubt," grunted the 'hawkfaced man. "Try," suggested Tinny-Peete. "Very well. Mr. Barlow, I understand you and your lamented had no children." "What of it?" "This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied. Damn-fool rockets! Damnfool automobiles! Damn-fool cities with overhead ramps!" "As far as I can see," said Barlow, "you're running down the best features of time. Are you ?   # "The rockets aren't rockets. They're turbo-jets -- good turbo-jets, but the fancy shell around them makes for a bad drag. The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour -- a kilometer is, if I recall my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile -- and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they're going two hundred and fifty. The citiesare ridiculous, expensive, unsanitary, wasteful conglomerations of people who'd be better off and more productive if they were spread over the countryside. "We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children -- breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred !" Barlow. "There were lots of people in our crowd who had two or three children." "The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they'll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is #." "But that's far in the future -- " "So are you," grunted the hawkfaced man sourly. "But who are you people?" "Just people -- real people. Some generations ago, the geneticists realized at last that nobody was going to pay any attention to what they said, so they abandoned words for deeds. Specifically, they formed and recruited for a closed corporation intended to maintain and improve the breed. We are their deothers, so we are their slaves. "During the past couple of years I've designed a skyscraper, kept in Chicago running, headed off war with Mexico and directed traffic at LaGuardia Field in New York." "I don't understand! Why don't you let them go to hell in their own way?" The man grimaced. "We tried it once for three months. We holed up at the South Pole and waited. They didn't notice it. Some drafting-room people were missing, some chief nurses didn't show up, minor government people on the non-policy level couldn't be located. It didn't seem to matter. "In a week there was hunger. In two weeks there were famine and plague, in three weeks war and anarchy. We called off the experiment; it took us most of the next generation to get things squared away again." "But why didn't you let them kill each other off?" ting flesh." Barlow had another idea. "Why don't you sterilize them?" ations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done." "I see. Like the marching Chinese!" "Who the devil are they?" "It was a -- uh -- paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they'd never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point." "That's right. Only instead of 'a given point,' make it 'the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff.' There could never be enough." "Say!" said Barlow. "Those movies about babies -- was that your propaganda?" "It was. It doesn't seem to mean a thing to them. We have abandoned the idea of attempting propaganda contrary to a biological drive." "So if you work with a biological drive -- ?" "I know of none which is consistent with inhibition of fertility." blank, the result of years of careful discipline. "You don't, huh? You're the great brains and you can't think of any?" "Why, no," said the psychist innocently. "Can you?" "That depends. I sold ten thousand acres of Siberian tundra -- through a dummy firm, of course -- after the partition of Russia. The buyers thought they were getting improved building lots on the outskirts of Kiev. I'd say that was a lot tougher than this job." "How so?" asked the hawkfaced man. "Those were normal, suspicious customers and these are morons, born suckers. You just figure out a con they'll fall for; they won't know enough to do any smart checking." The psychist and the hawk-faced man had also had training; they kept themselves from looking with sudden hope at each other. "You seem to have something in mind," said the psychist. Barlow's poker face went blanker still. "Maybe I have. I haven't heard any offer yet." "There's the satisfaction of knowing thatyou've prevented Earth's resources from being so plundered," the hawk-faced man pointed out, "that the race will soon become extinct." "I don't know that," Barlow said bluntly. "All I have is your word." "If you really have a method, I don't think any price would be too great," the psychist offered. "Money," said Barlow. "All you want." "More than you want," the hawk-faced man corrected. "Prestige," added Barlow. "Plenty of publicity. My picture and my name in the papers and over TV every day, statues to me, parks and cities and streets and other things named after me. A whole chapter in the history books." The psychist made afacial sign to the hawk-faced man that meant, "Oh, brother!" The hawk-faced man signaled back, "Steady, boy!" "It's not too much to ask," the psychist agreed. Barlow, sensing a seller's market, said, "Power!" "Power?" the hawk-faced man repeated puzzledly. "Your own hydro station or nuclear pile?" "I mean a world dictatorship with me as dictator!" "Well, now -- " said the psychist, but the hawk-faced man interrupted, "It would take a special emergency act of Congress but the situation warrants it. I think that can be guaranteed." "Could you give us some indication of your plan?" the psychist asked. "Ever hear of lemmings?" "No." "They are -- were, I guess, since you haven't heard of them -- little animals in Norway, and every few years they'd swarm to the coast and swim out to sea until they drowned. I figure on putting some lemming urge into the population." "How?" "I'll save that till I get the right signatures on the deal." T HE hawkfaced man said, "I'd like to work with you on it, Barlow. My name's Ryan-Ngana." He put out his hand. Barlow looked closely at the hand, then at the man's face. "Ryan what?" "Ngana." "That sounds like an African name." "It is. My mother's father was a Watusi." Barlow didn't take the hand. "I thought you looked pretty dark. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I don't think I'd be at my best working with you. There must be somebody else just as well qualified, I'm sure." The psyehist made a facial sign to Ryan-Ngana that meant, "Steady yourself, boy!" "Very well," Ryan-Ngana told Barlow. "We'll see what arrangement can be made." "It's not that I'm prejudiced, you understand. Some of my best friends -- " "Mr. Barlow, don't give it another thought. Anybody who could pick on the lemming analogy is going to be useful to us." And so he would, thought RyanNgana, alone in the office after Tinny-Peete had taken Barlow up to the helicopter stage. So he would. Poprob had exhausted every rational attempt and the new Poprobattacklines would have to be irrational or sub-rational. This creature from the past with his lemming legends and his improved building lots would be a fountain of precious vicious self-interest. Ryan-Ngana sighed and stretched. He had to go and run the San Francisco subway. Summoned early from the Pole to study Barlow, he'd left unfinished a nice little theorem. Between interruptions, he was slowly constructing an n-dimensional geometry whose foundations and superstructure owed no debt whatsoever to intuition. copter, Barlow was explaining to Tinny-Peete that he had nothing against Negroes, .and Tinny-Peete wished he had some of RyanNgana's imperturbability and humor for the ordeal. The helicopter took them to International Airport where, TinnyPeete explained, Barlow would leave for the Pole. The man from the past wasn't sure he'd like a dreary waste of ice and cold. "It's all right," said the psyehist. "A civilized layout. Warm, pleasant. You'll be able to work more efficiently there. All the facts at your fingertips, a good secretary -- " "I'll need a pretty big staff," said Barlow, who had learned from thousands of deals never to take the first offer. "I meant a private, confidential one," said Tinny-Peete readily, "but you can have as many as you want. You'll naturally have topprimary-top priority if you really have a workable plan." "Let's not forget this dictatorship angle," said Barlow. He didn't know that the psychist would just as readily have promised him deification to get him happily on the "rocket" for the Pole. Tinny-Peete had no wish to be torn limb from limb; he knew very well that it would end that way if the population learned from this anachronism that there was a small elite which considered itself head, shoulders, trunk and groin above the rest. The fact that this assumption was perfectly true and the fact that the elite was condemned by its superiority to a life of the most grinding toil would not be considered; the difference would. The psychist finally put Barlow aboard . the "rocket" with some thirty people -- real people -- headed for the Pole. way because of a post-hypnotic suggestion Tinny-Peete had planted in him. One idea was to make him as averse as possible to a return trip, and another idea was to spare the other passengers from his aggressive, talkative company. Barlow during the first day at the pole was reminded of his first day in the Army. It was the same now-where-the-hell-arc-we-going-to-put-y?? business until he took a firm line with them. Then instead of acting like supply sergeants they acted like hotel clerks. It was a wonderful, wonderfully calculated buildup, and one that he failed to suspect. After all, in his time a visitor from the past would have been lionized. At day's end he reclined in a snug underground billet with the #-mile gales roaring yards overhead, and tried to put two and two together. It was like old times, he thought -- like a coup in real estate where you had 'the competition by the throat, like a #-per cent rent boost when you knew damned well there was no place for the tenants to move, like smiling when you read over the breakfast orange juice that the city council had decided to build a school on the ground you had acquired by a deal with the city council. And it was simple. He would just sell tundra building lots to eagerly suicidal lemmings, and that was absolutely all there was to solving the Problem that had these double-domes spinning. They'd have to work out most of the details, naturally, but what the hell, that was what subordinates were for. He'd need specialists in advertising, engineering, communications -- did they know anything about hypnotism? That might be helpful. If not, there'd have to be a lot of bribery done, but he'd make sure -- damned sure -- there were unlimited funds. Just selling building lots to lemmings... He wished, as he fell asleep, that poor Verna could have been in on this. It was his biggest, most stupendous deal. Verna -- that sharp shyster Sam Immerman must have swindled her... people coming to visit him. He knew the approach. They merely wanted to be helpful to their illustrious visitor from the past and would he help fill them in about his era, which unfortunately was somewhat obscure historically, and what did he think could be done about the Problem? He told them he was too old to be roped any more, and they wouldn't get any information out of him until he got a letter of intent from at least the Polar President, and a session of the Polar Congress empowered to make him dictator. He got the letter and the session. He presented his program, was asked whether his conscience didn't revolt at its callousness, explained succinctly that a deal was a deal and anybody who wasn't smart enough to protect himself didn't deserve protection -- "Caveat emptor," he threw in for scholarship, and had to translate it to "Let the buyer beware." He didn't, he stated, give a damn about either the morons or their intelligent slaves; he'd told them his price and that was all he was interested in. Would they meet it or wouldn't they? The Polar President offered to resign in his favor, with certain temporary emergency powers that the Polar Congress would vote him if he thought them necessary. Barlow demanded the title of World Dictator, complete control of world finances, salary to be decided by himself, and the publicity campaign and historical writeup to begin at once. "As for the emergency powers," he added, "they are neither to be temporary nor limited." Somebody wanted the floor to discuss the matter, with the declared hope that perhaps Barlow would modify his demands. "You've got the proposition," Barlow said. "I'm not knocking off even ten per cent." "But what if the Congress refuses, sir?" the President asked. "Then you can stay up here at the Pole and try to work it out yourselves. I'll get what I want from the morons. A shrewd operator like me doesn't have to compromise; I haven't got a single competitor in this whole cockeyed moronic era." Congress waived debate and voted by show of hands. Barlow won unanimously. "You don't know how close you came to losing me," he said in his first official address to the joint Houses. "I'm not the boy to haggle; either I get what I ask or I go elsewhere. The first thing I want is to see designs for a new palace for me -- nothing fwostentatious, either -- and your best painters and sculptors to start working on my portraits and statues. Meanwhile, I'll get my staff together." He dismissed the Polar President and the Polar Congress, telling them that he'd let them know when the next meeting would be. A week later, the program started with North America the first target. Mrs. Garvy was resting after dinner before the ordeal of turning on the dishwasher. The TV, of course, was on and it said: "Oooh!" -- long, shuddery and ecstatic, the cue for the Parfum Assault Critninale spot commercial. "Girls," said the announcer hoarsely, "do you want your man? It's easy to get him -- easy as a trip to Venus." "Huh?" said Mrs. Garvy. "Wassamatter?" snorted her husband, starting out of a doze. "Ja hear that?" "Wha'?" "He said 'easy like a trip to Venus.' " "So?" "Well, I thought ya couldn't get to Venus. I thought they just had that one rocket thing that crashed on the Moon." "Aah, women don't keep up with the news," said Garvy righteously, subsiding again. "Oh," said his wife uncertainly. And the next day, on Henry's Other Mistress, there was a new character who had just breezed in: Buzz Rentshaw, Master Rocket Pilot of the Venus run. On Henry's Other Mistress, "the broadcast drama about you and your neighbors, folksy people, ordinary people, real people"! Mrs. Garvy listened with amazement over a cooling cup of coffee as Buzz made hay of her hazy convictions. to see you again! I've missed you on that dreary Venus run. down, key turned in door lock. est? humdrum job, darling. Let's talk about us. Well, the program was back to normal at last. That evening Mrs. Garvy tried to ask again whether her husband was sure about those rockets, but he was dozing right through Take It atid Stick It, so she watched the screen and forgot the puzzle. She was still rocking with laughter at the gag line, "Would you buy it for a quarter?" when the commercial went on for the detergent powder she always faithfull)' loaded her dishwasher with on the first of every month. T HE announcer displayed mountains of suds from a tiny piece of the stuff and coyly added: "Of course, Cleano don't lay around for you to pick up like the soap root on Venus, but it's pretty' cheap and it's almost pretty near just as good. So for us plain folks who ain't lucky enough to live up there on Venus, Cleano is the real cleaning stuff!" Then the chorus went into their "Cleano-is-the-stuff" jingle, but Mrs. Garvy didn't hear it. She was a stubborn woman, but it occurred to her that she was very sick indeed. She didn't want to worry her husband. The next day she quietly made an appointment with her family freud. In the waiting room she picked up a fresh new copy of Readers Pablum and put it down with a faint palpitation. The lead article, according to the table of contents on the cover, was titled "The Most Memorable Venusian I Ever Met." "The freud will see you now," said the nurse, and Mrs. Garvy tottered into his office. His traditional glasses and whiskers were reassuring. She choked out the ritual: "Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses." He chanted the antiphonal: "Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble?" "I got like a hole in the head," she quavered. "I seem to forget all kinds of things. Things like everybody seems to know and I don't." "Well, that happens to everybody occasionally, my dear. I suggest a vacation on Venus." The freud stared, open-mouthed, at the empty chair. His nurse came in and demanded, "Hey, you see how she scrammed? What was the matter with her?" He took off his glasses and whiskers meditatively. "You can search me. I told her she should maybe try a vacation on Venus." A momentary bafflement came into his face and he dug through his desk drawers until he found a copy of the four-color, profusely illustrated journal of his profession. It had come that morning and he had lipread it, though looking mostly at the pictures. He leafed through to the article Advantages of the Planet Venus in Rest Cures. "It's right there," he said. The nurse looked. "It sure is," she agreed. "Why shouldn't it be?" "The trouble with these here neurotics," decided 'the freud, "is that they all the time got to fight reality. Show in the next twitch." He put on his glasses and whiskers again and forgot Mrs. Garvy and her strange behavior. "Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses." "Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble?" orders, Mrs. Garvy's was achieved largely by self-treatment. She disciplined herself sternly out of the crazy notion that there had been only one rocket ship and that one a failure. She could join without wincing, eventually, in any conversation on the desirability of Venus as a place toretire, on its fabulous floral profusion. Finally she went to Venus. All her friends were trying to book passage with the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation, but naturally the demand was crushing. She considered herself lucky to get a seat at last for the two-week summer cruise. The space ship took off from a place called Los Alamos, New Mexico. It looked just like all the spaceships on television and in the picture magazines, but was more comfortable than you would expect. Mrs. Garvy was delighted with the fifty or so fellow-passengers assembled before takeoff. They were from all over the country and she had a distinct impression that they were on the brainy side. The captain, a tall, hawk-faced, impressive fellow named Ryan-Something or other, welcomed them aboard and trustedthat their trip would be a memorable one. He regretted that there would be nothing to see because, "due to the meteorite season," the ports would be dogged down. It was disappointing, yet reassuringthat the line was taking no chances. There was the expected momentary discomfort at takeoff and then two monotonous days of droning travel through space to be whiled away in the lounge at cards or cfaps. The landing was a routine bump and the voyagers were Issued tablets to swallow to immunize them against any minor ailments. When the tablets took effect, the lock was opened and Venus was theirs. It looked much like a tropical island on Earth, except for a blanket of cloud overhead. But it had a heady, other-worldly quality that was intoxicating and glamorous. The ten days of the vacation were suffused with a hazy magic. The soap root, as advertised, was free and sudsy. The fruits, mostly tropical varieties transplanted from Earth, were delightful. The simple shelters provided by the travel company were more than adequate for the balmy days and nights. It was with sincere regret that the voyagers filed again into the ship, and swallowed more tablets doled out to counteract and sterilize any Venus illnesses they might unwittingly communicate to Earth. Power politics was another. At the Pole, a small man was in a soundproof room, his face deathly pale and his body limp in a straight chair. In the American Senate Chamber, Senator Hull-Mendoza (Synd., N. Cal.) was saying: "Mr. President and gentlemen, I would be remiss in my duty as a legislature if'n I didn't bring to the attention of the au-gust body I see here a perilous situation which is fraught with peril. As is well known to members of this au-gust body, the perfection of space flight has brought with it a situation I can only describe as fraught with peril. Mr. President and gentlemen, now that swift American rockets now traverse the trackless void of space between this planet and our nearest planetarial neighbor in space -- and, gentlemen, I refer to Venus, the star of dawn, the brightest jewel in fair Vulcan's diadome -- now, I say, I want to inquire what steps are being taken to colonize Venus with a vanguard of patriotic citizens like those minutemen of yore. "Mr. President and gentlemen! There are in this world nations, envious nations -- I do not name Mexico -- who by fair means or foul may seek to wrest from Columbia's grasp the torch of freedom of space; nations whose low living standards and innate depravity give them an unfair advantage over the citizens of our fair republic. "This is my program: I suggest that a city of more than # population be selected by lot. The citizens of the fortunate city are to be awarded choice lands on Venus free and dear, to have and to hold and convey to their descendants. And the national government shall provide free transportation to Venus for these citizens. And this program shall continue, city by city, until there has been deposited on Venus a sufficient vanguard of citizens to protect our manifest rights in that planet. "Objections will be raised, for carping critics we have always with us. They will say there isn't enough steel. They will call it a cheap giveaway. I say there is enough steel for one city's population to be transferred to Venus, and that is all that is needed. For when the time comes for the second city to be transferred, the first, emptied city can be wrecked for the needed steel! And is it a giveaway? Yes! It is the most glorious giveaway in the history of mankind! Mr. President and gentlemen, there is no time to waste -- Venus must be American !" Pole, opened his eyes and said feebly, "The style was a little uneven. Do you think anybody'll notice?" "You did fine, boy; just fine," Barlow reassured him. Hull-Mendoza's bill became law. Drafting machines at the South Pole were busy around the clock and the Pittsburgh steel mills Los Alamos spaceport of the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation. It was going to be Los Angeles, for logistic reasons, and the three most accomplished psycho-kineticists went to Washington and mingled in the crowd at the drawing to make certain that the Los Angeles capsule slithered into the fingers of the blindfolded Senator. Los Angeles loved the idea and a forest of spaceships began to blossom in the desert. They weren't very good space ships, but they didn't have to be. A team at the Pole worked at Barlow's direction on a mail setup. There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before -- by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards. T HE Los Angeles flight went off on schedule, under tremendous press, newsreel and television coverage. The world cheered the gallant Angelenos who were setting off on their patriotic voyage to the land of milk and honey. The forest of spaceships thundered up, and up, and out of sight without unAngelenos, cramped and on short rations though they were. Wreckers from San Francisco, whose capsule came up second, moved immediately into the city of the angels for the scrap steel their own flight would require. Senator Hull-Mendoza's constituents could do no less. The president of Mexico, hypnotically alarmed at this extension of yanqui imperialismo beyond the stratosphere, launched his own Venus-colony program. Across the water it was England versus Ireland, France versus Germany, China versus Russia, India versus Indonesia. Ancient hatreds grew into the flames that were rocket ships assailing the air by hundreds daily. ' , Dear Ed, how are you? Sam and I are fine and hope you are fine. Is it nice up there like they say with food and close grone on trees? I drove by Springfield yesterday and it sure looked funny all the buildings down but of coarse it is worth it we have Jiq keep the greasers in their place. Do you have any truble with them on Venus? Drop me a line some time. Your loving sister, Alma. Dear Alma, I am fine and hope you are fine. It is a fine place here fine climate and easy living. The doctor told me today that I seem to be ten years younger. He thinks there is something in the air here keeps people young. We do not have much trouble with the greasers here they keep to theirselves it is just a question of us outnumbering them and staking out the best places for the Americans. In South Bay I know a nice little island that I have been saving for you and Sam with lots of blanket trees and ham bushes. Hoping to see you and Sam soon, your loving brother, Ed. Sam and Alma were on their way shortly. Poprob got a dividend in every nation after the emigration had passed the halfway mark. The lonesome stay-at-homes were unable to bear the melancholy of a low population density; their conditioning had been to swarms of their kin. After that point it was possible to foist off the crudest stripped-down accommodations on would-be emigrants; they didn't care. Black-Kupperman did a final job on President Hull-Mendoza, the last job that genius of hypnotics would ever do on any moron, important or otherwise. Hull-Mendoza, panic-stricken by his presidency over an emptying nation, joined his constituents. The Independence, aboard which traveled the national government of America, was the most elaborate of all the spaceships -- bigger, more comfortable, with a lounge that was handsome, though cramped, and cloakrooms for Senators and Representatives. It went, however, to the same place as the others and Black-Kupperman killed himself, leaving a note that stated he "couldn't live with my conscience." T HE day after the American President departed, Barlow flew into a rage. Across his specially built desk were supposed to flow all Poprob high-level documents and this thing -- this outrageous thing -- called Poprobm apparently had got into the executive stage before he had even had a glimpse of it! He buzzed for Rogge-Smith, his statistician. Rogge-Smith seemed to be at the bottom of it. Poprobterm seemed to be about first and second and third derivatives, whatever they were. Barlow had a deep distrust of anything more complex than what he called an "average." While Rogge-Smith was still at the door, Barlow snapped, "What's the meaning of this? Why haven't I been consulted? How far have you people got and why have you been working on something I haven't authorized?" "Didn't want to bother you, Chief," said Rogge-Smith. "It was really a technical matter, kind of a final cleanup. Want to come and see the work?" Mollified, Barlow followed his statistician down the corridor. "You still shouldn't have gone ahead without my okay," he grumbled. "Where the hell would you people have been without me?" "That's right, Chief. We couldn't have swung it ourselves; our minds just don't work that way. And all that stuff you knew from Hitler -- it wouldn't have occurred to us. Like poor Black-Kupperman." They were in a fair-sized machine shop at the end of a slight upward incline. It was cold. RoggeSmith pushed a button that started a motor, and a flood of arctic light poured in as the roof parted slowly. It showed a small spaceship with the door open. took him by the elbow and his other boys appeared: SwensonSwenson, the engineer; Tsutsugimushi-Duncan, his propellants man; Kalb-French, advertising. "In you go, Chief," said Tsutsugimushi-Duncan. "This is Poprobterm." "But I'm the world Dictator!" "You bet, Chief. You'll be in history, all right -- but this is necessary, I'm afraid." The door was closed. Acceleration slammed Barlow cruelly to the metal floor. Something broke and warm, wet stuff, salty-tasting, ran from his mouth to his chin. Arctic sunlight through a port suddenly became a fierce lancet stabbing at his eyes; he was out of the atmosphere. Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily. The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain. C. A masterpiece by one of the greatest science fiction writers of all times, this novel explores a future as remote and strangely different from the present as our time is from the Age of Dinosaurs! C. It is not a book to be read and forgotten... its rich ideas, unusual characters and maturely exciting adventure will be an important part of your science fiction reading experience! The Price Remains the Same # at your newsstand or in coin to # West #th Street, New York # G, O. Smith # G. O. Smith # De Camp # Sturgeon # Leinster #  Smith #  Smith # Delrey # De Camp # Please send me book nos or any one Book and one full year's subscription to -- new cors even more elegant Adds Instant Class To Your Car Smart looking, easily sliding, long lasting, water repellent. Easily installed, custom tailored. Wipe off dirt with a damp cloth. Moisture resistant, outstands scuffing. Plaids in colors -- blue, green or maroon. Color fast, will not fade, will not shrink. Full set for sedan, coach or sedanette only #. (Front set only -- IO). v Solid back or split back. We can fit all make and year cars. State year, make, coach, sedan or sedanette. Send # deposit, balance c.o.d. or send full payment and save up to # postage. # Buy From Plastie Seat Cover You will find it easy to follow the simple instructions and use the fasteners that come with every set of seat covers ! So simple, even a child of six Guaranteed perfect fit for every popular make and model, old or new, including -- Buick LaSalle Cadillac Lincoln Chevrolet Mercury Chrysler Nash DeSoto Oldsmobile Dodge Packard Ford Plymouth Frazer Pontiac Hudson Studebakcr Kaiser Terraplane Lafayette Willys And Many Others Sent on Approval can install them. You can have your seat covers with or without a center armrest on your back seat. Be sure to fill out coupon as completely as possible. State color desired, year of your car -- we fit old and new cars -- even the latest #I models -- sedans, club coupes or coaches. Order today -- keep them # days -- and if not satisfied, return them for refund ! : Plastic Seat Cover Company, Dept. #  # Market St., Newark, N. J. S  I enclose # and will pay the balance : plus postage to postman.   I enclose #.# cash, check or money S order -- send postage prepaid. (I save up to # postage.) S O I want front seats only #.   My front seats have split back. S  Two door   My front seats have a solid back.   Four door ; Make Year Model   Coach  Sedan  Sedanette D Convertible S  Full Set #  Front Set Only #  Color  Maroon  Blue  Green Model S Name  Address  City State by S. Fowler Wright C. A masterpiece by a master of science fiction, this is the story of Earth's inconceivably remote future...a world as strangely different from ours as ours is from the world of dinosaurs! C, Into this world goes the Time Traveler, a man of our era -- a barbaric alien in comparison with the possessors of a science vastly superior to ours -- accompanied by the enigmatically fascinating Amphibian Woman. C, In the Time Traveler's challenge to the Dwellers, giants both in body and mind, and his adventures in this alien life of ages yet to come, the reader will find an invitation to one of the greatest quests in all science fiction!  # a year (six issues) #I at your newsstand or to... # West #th Street New York #, N. Y. yn -- daring French model -- whose revelations excited all Europe. "A woman who, as far as I know, never had a room of her own," he says of her. But what else does a woman need if she has charm? And if she can find a man for every strange whim of hers? # pages, more than # photographs. Lavish first American printing. This much hunted-for book now # Lafayette St., New York # I may return it for full credit if it does not delight me.JUNE losi GALAXY Science Tic galaxy # Galaxy June, #I ' Vol. #, No. # by Edgar Pangborn # Editor-in-Chief Art Director Advertising Manager Circulation Manager Cover by Illustrating Relics of an Extinct Race is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., York #, .N. Y. #f per copy. Subscriptions : (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America und U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President: George A. Gogniat. VicePresident: Marco Eombi. Secretary and Treasurer: Anne Swereda. All rights, reserved. All material submit ted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printfiction. and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Damon Knight # by Kris Neville # by Cyril Judd # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Next issue at your newsstand about June #th Printed in the II. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Men of Other Planets . by Kenneth Heuer Suppose you went rocketing off into space tomorrow... This is the exciting, scientific ally accurate panorama of what you would probably find out there: the moon, with its gray landscape in a completely soundless land... Mercury, with stars shining even in the daytime... sunless Uranus, immense Jupiter, speeding comets. Here is a startling account of an unexplored world -- eagerly awaiting the daring, the adventurer, the dreamer. Illustrated, # The Place of the Lion lows ' Eve, Shadows of Ecstasy, etc. A lion is loose -- and strange people face overpowering forces they can hardly believe in. ing novels. # Far Boundaries Edited by August Derleth For the connoisseur -- off-the beaten-track tales from the year #... to today! # At all bookstores, or Pellegrini  Cudahy  #I E. #th St. V. Y .# Looking Forward complimentary, some extravagantly so, but one by Harold W. Cheney, Jr., of Little Falls, N. Y., had the unexpected effect of reviving an emotion I haven't felt in almost # years of professional writing and editing. His long letter ends: "I think there are two main reasons for the majority of readers being so favorably' inclined toward editorials, a negative and a positive one. The negative one is that in magazines without a regular editor's page, things just happen. Nothing is explained except in barest pronouncements or the action itself. The reader feels that there is a barrier between the editor and him, so that the editor, his policy, and thence his magazine remain abstract unknowns. The reader likes to have some anticipation of what is to happen, and not to have things dished out without an explanation. "The positive reason is more important. Remember, Mr. Gold, you are doing something that uncounted readers and fans may only dream of doing. You are editing a great science fiction magazine    We ask you to share with us, via your editorials, your wonderful experiences in creating the finest   " The rest gets blush-provoking. Somewhat smothered under considerably more than # words of stories, articles and scripts, and well over two dozep magazines, Mr. Cheney, is the dazzled boy who discovered science fiction in #, at the age of #. Your letter has dug him out, for which you merit something like a rescue badge. Amazing stories had been out for a year then, but it was Wells' War of the Worlds , sitting innocently on. a Providence library shelf, that I found first. The personal impact was that of an explosive harpoon, and when I belatedly discovered those beautifully garish Paul covers, decorated with heroically paralyzed men in jodhpurs and simperingly paralyzed women in blowy veils, among giant insects and plants with leering heads, I was hooked. That was a pretty skinny time for science fiction lovers. Quarters were big money for kids then, and the libraries had so .few titles that each had to be read again and again. What it did, though, was make me realize exactly what I wanted for a career. It's still what I want, though anesthetized by the daily routine of reading and sending back duels on asteroids, alien caters of life force in the Andes, which somehow select , only lovely cirgins, thinking machines that go insane when asked to solve the problem of man's survival, mutant babies that have to be destroyed because they have only ten fingers... No day's mail is free of these flakes of literary dandruff, but then, unexpectedly, an Angel's Egg comes in and you suddenly find yourself living a story instead of glazedly following the alleged adventures of dull lushes, humorless wisecrackerss, hard-lipped Space Patrolmen, nymphomaniacal heroines who are snowy pure... 'I don't know what the reaction will be to Angel's Egg, of course. It had the feel of a find, though, which is a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, the dream of editing as good a magazine as possible does not include production difficulties. Because buying paper these days is like being mugged on a much too often. The problem is being solved and wc should have no trouble reaching the newsstands on time, but it's been a headache. Other headaches are distribution, newsstand display, rocketing costs, ruckuses over ads, sweating good stories into better stories, and improving art, which has been the biggest single gripe of readers. We could have avoided the battle over art by either eliminating it, a bad practice for circulation, or hunching down to the general science fiction level, a cowardly evasion since most of it is so damned unsightly. We're getting there with new techniques, all of which take work, anguish, worry. Not enough, however, to spoil the pleasure of presenting Mars Child and the dazzling satire of Don't Live in the Past. Matter of fact, looking forward to the issues coming up is a Tiffany-set, platinum-cased thrill. Next month you'll find Venus Is married to Appointment in Tomorrow by Fritz Leiber, and they make a handsome couple of novelets, as well as the startling conclusion of Mars Child. series, there will be The Alien by Raymond F. Jones, and, two months later, Empire by Clifford D. Simak, neither of which has ever appeared anywhere in print. When Mars Child ends, diere will be an issue of complete stories, led off by Beyond Bedlam , a novella by Wyman Guin, combining a new cept in science fiction. And then, the following month -- well, maybe you've heard rumors Heinlein novel. For once the rumors are true. The name is The Puppet Masters; look forward to three installments of superb suspense ! You're right, Mr. Cheney, editrience and IjJon't want tp keep it all to myself. I'll share every bit of it, in fact, with readers who have specific questions. What would you like to know and never had the chance to ask? IN A Galaxy of Science-Fiction Stories edited by Kendell Foster Crossen C Here is a look into tomorrow, the story of the future as imagined by fifteen leading writers of science-fiction and fantasy. The guesses range from the complete destruction of the world to a great civilization in which men board a space ship for Betelgeuse as casually as today they climb on the metropolitan bus. Here you will find: Four exciting version of what will happen if the Earth becomes involved in an atomic war, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Ward Moore, Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman. men have left the earth and gone to the planets -- high adventure in space, on Venus, on Ganymede, by A. E. van Vogt, Kendell Foster Crossen, C. L. Moore, and Isaac Asimov. has always looked beyond his attainments -- beyond the oceans, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the Moon, beyond the planets -- and here Theodore Sturgeon, Sam Merwin, Jr., Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner see man setting foot upon the farthest stars. Arthur, Anthony Boucher, and Bruce Elliott take a look at Man, once more on Earth, after he has spanned the Galaxies and grown old and weary with what he has seen. Forrest J. Ackerman  Robert Arthur Isaac Asimov  Anthony Boucher Walter Van Tilburg Clark Ray Bradbury  Theodore Sturgeon Leigh Brackett  Henry Kuttner A. E. van Vogt Kendell Foster Crossen Bruce Elliott  C. L. Moure Sam Merwin, Jr.  Ward Mwore # postpaid  Use coupon ' #I East #th Street, New York #. N. T. Please send me copies of (Jnlnxy of Science-Fiction Stories at # each, postpaid. Name : : : Address : i City  State : n Payment enclosed  Send C.O.D. the Of course using live bait is the best way to lure dangerous alien animals... unless it turns out that you are the bait! # # E'RE somewhat to the south, I think," Ri y y said, bending over the crude field map. "That ridge," he pointed, "on our left, is right here." He drew a finger down the map. "It was over here," he moved the finger, "over the ridge, north of here, that we sighted them." Extrone asked, "Is there a pass?" Ri looked up, studying the terrain. He moved his shoulders. "I don't know, but maybe they range this far. Maybe they're on this side of the ridge, too." Delicately, Extrone raised a hand to his beard. "I'd hate to lose a day crossing the ridge," he said. "Yes, sir," Ri said. Suddenly he threw back his head. "Listen!" "Eh?" Extrone said. "Hear it? That cough? I think that's one, from over there. Right up ahead of us.' Extrone raised his eyebrows. This time, the coughing roar was more distant, but distinct. "It is!" Ri said. "It's a farn beast, all right i" Extrone smiled, almost pointed teeth showing through the beard. "I'm glad we won't have to cross the ridge." Ri wiped his forehead on the back of his sleeve. "Yes, sir." "We'll pitch camp right here, then," Extrone said. "We'll go after it tomorrow." He looked at the sky. "Have the bearers hurry." "Yes, sir." Ri moved away, his pulse gradually slowing. "You, there!" he called. "Pitch camp, here!" He crossed to Mia, who, along with him, had been pressed into Extrone' s party as guides. Once more, Ri addressed the bearers, "Be quick, now!" And to Mia, "God almighty, he was getting mad." He ran a hand under his collar. "It's a good thing that farn beast sounded off when it did. I'd hate to think of making him climb that ridge." Mia glanced nervously over his shoulder. "It's that damned pilot's fault for setting us down on this side. I told him it was the other side. I told him so." Ri shrugged hopelessly. Mia said, "I don't think he even saw a blast area over here. I think he wanted to get us in trouble." "There shouldn't be one. There shouldn't be a blast area on tills side of the ridge, too." "That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for us." Ri cleared his throat nervously. "Maybe you're right." "It's the Hunting Club he don't like." "I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast," Ri said. "At least, then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody else?" M IA looked at his companion. He spat. "What hurts most, he pays us for it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide -- at less than I pay my secretary." "Well, anyvVay, we won't have to cross that ridge." "Hey, you!" Extrone called. The two of them turned immediately. "You two scout ahead," Extrone said. "See if you can pick up some tracks." "Yes, sir," Ri said, and instantly the two of them readjusted their shoulder straps and started off. Shortly they were inside of the scrub forest, safe from sight. "Let's wait here," Mia said. "No, we better go on. He may have sent a spy in." They pushed on, being careful to blaze the trees, because they were not professional guides. "We don't want to get too near," Ri said after toiling through the forest for many minutes. "Without guns, we don't want to get near enough for the farn beast to charge us." They stopped. The forest was dense, the vines clinging. "He'll want the bearers to hack a path for him," Mia said. "But we go it alone. Damn him." Ri twisted his mouth into a sour frown. He wiped at his forehead. "Hot. By God, it's hot. I didn't think it was this hot, the first time we were here." Mia said, "The first time, we weren't guides. We didn't notice it so much then." They fought a few yards more into the forest. Then it ended. Or, rather, there was a wide gap. Before them lay a blast area, unmistakable. The grass was beginning to grow again, but the tree stumps were roasted from the rocket breath. "This isn't ours!" Ri said. "This looks like it was made nearly a year ago!" Mia's eyes narrowed. "The military from Xnile?" "No," Ri said. "They don't have any rockets this small. And I don't think there's another cargo rocket on this planet outside of the one we leased from the Club. Except the one be brought." "The ones who discovered the farn beasts in the first place?" Mia asked. "You think it's their blast?" "So?" Ri said. "But who are they?" "Whoever they were, they couldn't have been hunters. They'd have kept the secret better." "We didn't do so damned well." "We didn't have a chance," Mia objected. "Everybody and his brother had heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't our fault Extrone found out." "I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of us." Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. "Wc should have shot our pilot, too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told Extrone we'd hunted this area." "I didn't think a Club pilot would do that." "After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to the alien system? Listen, you don't know... Wait a minute." ffhere was perspiration on Ri's upper lip. "I didn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking," Mia said. Ri's mouth twisted. "I didn't say you did." "Listen," Mia said in a hoarse whisper. "I just thought. Listen. To hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us, too, when the hunt's over." Ri licked his lips. "No. He wouldn't do that. We're not -- not just anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even him. And besides, why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself." Mia said, 'I hope you're right." They stood side by side, studying the blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, "We better be getting back." "What'll we tell him?" "That we saw tracks. What else can we tell him?" They turned back along their trail, stumbling over vines. "It gets hotter at sunset," Ri said nervously. "The breeze dies down." "It's screwy. I didn't think farn beasts had this wide a range. There must be a lot of them, to be on both sides of the ridge like this." "There may be a pass," Mia said, pushing a vine away. Ri wrinkled his brow, panting. "I guess that's it. If there were a lot of them, we'd have heard something before we did. But even so,  it's damned funny, when you think about it." Mia looked up at the darkening sky. "We better hurry," he said. established camp, the rocket was low, obviously looking for a landing site. It was a military craft, from the outpost on the near moon. and forward, near the nose, there was the blazoned emblem of the Ninth Fleet. The rocket roared directly over Extrone's tent, turned slowly, spouting fuel expensively, and settled into the scrub forest, turning the vegetation beneath it sere by its blasts. Extrone sat on an upholstered stool before his tent and spat disgustedly and combed his beard with his blunt fingers. Shortly, from the direction of the rocket, a group of four highranking officers came out of the forest, heading toward him. They were spruce, the officers, with military discipline holding their waists in and knees almost stiff. "What in hell do you want?" Extrone asked. They stopped a respectful distance away. "Sir..." one began. "Haven't I told you gentlemen that rockets frighten the game?" Extrone demanded, ominously not raising his voice. "Sir," the lead officer said, "it's another alien ship. It was sighted a few hours ago, off this very planet, sir." Extrone's face looked much too innocent. "How did it get there, gentlemen? Why wasn't it destroyed?" "We lost it again, sir. Temporarily, sir." "So?" Extrone mocked. "We thought you ought to return to a safer planet, sir. Until we could locate and destroy it." Ext rone stared at them for a space. Then, indifferently, he turned away, in the direction of a resting bearer. "You!" he said. "Hey! Bring me a drink!" He faced the officers again. He smiled maliciously. "I'm staying here." The lead officer licked his firm lower lip. 'But, sir..." Extrone toyed with his beard. "About a year ago, gentlemen, there was an alieif ship around here then, wasn't there? And you destroyed it, didn't you?" "Yes, sir. When we located it, sir." "You'll destroy this one, too," Extrone said. "We have a tight patrol, sir. It can't slip through. But it might try a long range bombardment, sir." they probably don't even know I'm here. And they probably couldn't .'hit this area if they did know. And you can't afford to let them get a shot at me, anyway." "That's why we'd like you to return to an inner planet, sir." Extrone plucked at his right ear lobe, half closing his eyes. "You'll lose a fleet before you'll dare let anything happen to me, gentlemen. I'm quite safe here, I think." The bearer brought Extrone his drink. "Get off," Extrone said quietly to the four officers. Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back. Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the tangle of forest. Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area, casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars. Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away, listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to his tent. "Sir?" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness. "Eh?" Extrone said, turning, startled. "Oh, you. Well?" "We... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east." Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, "You killed one, I believe, on your trip?" Ri shifted. "Yes, sir." Extrone held back the flap of the tent. "Won't you come in?" he asked without any politeness whatever. Ri obeyed the order. The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers, costly of .transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the left of the slender, handcarved center pole, was a chain of crystals. They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was electric from a portable dynamo. Extronc flipped it on. He crossed to the bed, sat down. "You were, I believe, the first ever to kill a farn beast?" he said. "I... No, sir. There must have been previous hunters, sir." 'T see by your eyes that you are envious -- that is the word, isn't it? -- of my tent." Ri looked away from his face. "Perhaps I'm envious of your reputation as a hunter. You see, I have never killed a farn beast. In fact, I haven't seen a farn beast." Ri glanced nervously around the tent, his sharp eyes avoiding Extrone's glittering ones. "Few people have seen them, sir." "Oh?" Extrone questioned mildly. "I wouldn't say that. I understand that the aliens hunt them quite extensively... on some of their planets." "I meant in our system, sir." "Of course you did," Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his sleeve with his forefinger. "I imagine these arc the only farn beasts in our system." Ri waited uneasily, not answering "Yes," Extrone said, ".I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?" Ri's hands worried the sides of liis outer garment. "Yes, sir. It would have been." Extrone pursed his lips. "It wouldn't have been very considerate of you to -- But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to come along as my guide." "It was an honor, sir." Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. "If I had waited until it was safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to find such an illustrious guide."... I'm flattered, sir." "Of course," Extrone said. "But you should have spoken to me about it, when you discovered the farn beast in our own system." "I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity, sir..." "Of course," Extrone said dryly. "Like all of my subjects," he waved his hand in a broad gesture, "the highest as w r ell as the lowest slave, know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best." Ri squirmed, his face pale. "We do indeed love you, sir." Extronc bent forward. "Know me and love me." "Yes, sir. Know you and love you, sir,"-Ri said. "Get out!" Extrone said. TT'S frightening," Ri said, "to Jbe that close to him." Mia nodded. The two of them, beneath the leafswollen branches of the gnarled tree, were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres. "To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the -- well; that -- what we've read about." Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. "You begin to understand a lot of things, after seeing him." Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag. "It makes you think," Mia added. He twitched. "I'm afraid. I'm afraid he'll... Listen, we'll talk. When we get back to civilization. You, me,, the bearers. About him. He can't let that happen. He'll kill us first." Ri looked up at the moon, shivering. "No. We have friends. We have influence. He couldn't just like that -- " "He could say it was an accident." "No," Ri said stubbornly. "He can say anything," Mia insisted. "He can make people believe anything. Whatever he says. There's no way to check on it." "It's getting cold," Ri said. "Listen," Mia pleaded. "No," Ri said. "Even if we tried to tell them, they wouldn't listen. Everybody would know we were lying. Everything they've come to believe would tell them we were lying. Everything they've read, every picture they've seen. They wouldn't believe us. He knows that." "Listen," Mia repeated intently. "This is important... Right now he couldn't afford to let us talk. Not right now. Because the Army is not agait him. Some officers were here, just before we came back. A bearer overheard them talking. They don't wantto overthrow him!" Ri's teeth, suddenly, were chattering. "That's another lie," Mia continued. "That he protects the people from the Army. That's a lie. T don't believe they were ever plotting against him. Not even at first. I think they helped him, don't you see?" Ri whined nervously. "It's like this," Mia said. "I see it like this. The Army put him in power when the people were in rebellion against military rule." R I swallowed. "We couldn't make the people believe that." "No?" Mia challenged. "Couldn't we? Not today, but what about tomorrow? You'll see. Because I think the Army is getting ready to invade the alien system!" "The people won't support them," Ri answered woodenly. "Think. If he tells them to, they will. They trust him." Ri looked around at the shadows. "That explains a lot of things," Mia said. "I think the Army's been preparing for this for a long time. From the first, maybe. That's why Extreme cut off our trade with the aliens. Partly to keep them from learning that he was getting ready to invade them, but more to keep them from exposing him to the people. The aliens wouldn't be fooled like we were, so easy' "No!" Ri snapped. "It was to keep the natural economic balance." "You know that's not right." Ri lay down on his bed roll. "Don't talk about it. It's not good to talk like this. I don't even want to listen." "When the invasion starts, he'll have to command all their loyalties. To keep them from revolt again. They'd be ready to believe us, then. He'll have a hard enough time without people running around trying to tell the truth." "You're wrong. He's not like that. I know you're wrong." Mia smiled twistedly. "How many has he already killed? How can we even guess?" Ri swallowed sickly. "Remember our guide? To keep our hunting territory a secret?" Ri shuddered. "That's different. Don't you see? This is not at all like that." TH morning came birds' songs, came dew, came breakfast smells. The air was sweet with cooking' and it was nostalgic, childhoodlike, uncontaminated. And Extrone stepped out of the tent, fully dressed, surly, letting the flap slap loudly behind him. He stretched hungrily and stared around the camp, his eyes still vacant-mean with 'sleep. "Breakfast!" he shouted, and two bearers came running with a folding table and chair. Behind them, a third bearer, carrying a tray of various foods; and yet behind him, a fourth, with a steaming pitcher and a drinking mug. Extrone ate hugely, with none of the delicacy sometimes affected in his conversational gestures. When he had finished, he washed his mouth with water and spat on the ground. "Lin!" he said. His personal bearer came loping toward him. "Have you read that manual I gave you ?" Lin nodded. "Yes." Extrone pushed the table away. He smacked his lips wetly. "Very ludicrous, Lin. Have you noticed that I have two businessmen for guides? It occurred to me when' I got up. They would have spat on me, twenty years ago, damn them." Lin waited. "Now I can spit on them, which pleases me." "The farn beasts are dangerous, sir," Lin said. "Eh? Oh, yes. Those. What did the manual say about them?" "I believe they're carnivorous, sir." "An alien manual. That's ludicrous, too. That we have the only information on our newly discovered fauna from an alien manual -- and, of course, two businessmen." "They have very long, sharp fangs, and, when enraged, are capable of tearing a man -- " "An alien?" Extrone corrected. "There's not enough difference between us to matter, sir. Of tearing an alien to pieces, sir." Extrone laughed harshly. "It's 'sir' whenever you contradict me?" Lin's face remained impassive. "I guess it seems that way. Sir." "Damned few people would dare go as far as you do," Extrone said. "But you're afraid of me, too, in your own way, aren't you?" Lin shrugged. "Maybe." "I can see you are. Even my wives are. I wonder if anyone can know how wonderful it feels to have people all afraid of you." "The farn beasts, according to the manual... "You are very insistent on one subject." "... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of aliens. Sir." "All right," Extrone said, annoyed. "I'll be careful." In the distance, a farn beast coughed. Instantly alert, Extrone said, "Get the bearers ! Have some of them cut a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get the hell over here!" Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt. well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy breathing. Occasionally, Extrone halted, motioned for his water carrier, and drank deeply of the icy water to allay the heat of the forest, a heat made oppressive by the press of foliage against the outside air. Ranging out, on both sides of the central body, the two businessmen fought independently against the wild growth, each scouting the flanks for farn beasts, and ahead, beyond the cutters, Lin flittered among the tree trunks, sometimes far, sometimes near, Extrone carried the only weapon, slung easily over his shoulder, a powerful blast rifle, capable of piercing medium armor in sustained fire. To his rear, the water carrier was trailed by a man bearing a folding stool, and behind him, a man carrying the heavy, high-powered two-way communication set. Once Extroneunslung his blast rifle and triggered a burst at a tiny, arboreal mammal, which, upon the impact, shattered asunder, to Extrone'ssatisfied chuckle, in a burst of blood and fur. When the sun stood high and heat exhaustion made the nearnaked bearers slump, Extrone permitted a rest. While waiting for the march to resume, he sat on the stool with his back against an ancient tree and patted, reflectively, the blast rifle, lying across his legs. "For you, sir," the communications man said, interrupting his reverie. "Damn," Extrone muttered. His face twisted in anger. "It better be important." I He took the head-set and mike and nodded to the bearer. The bearer twiddled the dials. "Extrone. Eh?... Oh, you got their ship. Well, why in hell bother me?... All right, so they found out I was 'here. You got them, didn't you?" "Blasted them right out of space," the voice crackled excitedly. "Right in the middle of a radio broadcast, sir.',' "I don't want to listen to your gabbling when I'm hunting!" Extrone tore off the head-set and handed it to the bearer. "If they call back, find out what they want, first. I don't want to be bothered unless it's important." "Yes, sir." Extrone squinted up at the sun; his eyes crinkled under the glare, and perspiration stood in little droplets on the back of his hands. Lin, returning to the column, threaded his way among reclining bearers. He stopped before Extrone and tossed his hair out of his eyes. "I located a spoor," he said, suppressed eagerness in his voice. "About a quarter ahead. It looks fresh." Extrone's eyes lit with passion. Lin's face was red with heat and grimy with sweat. "There were two, I think." "Two?" Extrone grinned, petting the rifle. "You and I better go forward and look at the spoor." Lin said, "We ought to take protection, if you're going, too." Extrone laughed. "This is enough." He gestured with the rifle and stood up. "T wish you had let me bring a gun along, sir," Lin said. "One is enough in my camp." T HE two of them went forward, alone, into the forest. Extrone moved agilely through the tangle, following Lin closely. When they came to the tracks, heavily pressed into drying mud around a small watering hole, Extrone nodded his head in satisfaction. "This way," Lin said, pointing, and once more the two of them started off. They went a good distance through the forest, Extrone becoming more alert with each additional foot. Finally, Lin stopped him with a restraining hand. "They may be quite a way ahead. Hadn't we ought to bring up the column?" The farn beast, somewhere beyond a ragged clump of bushes, coughed. Extrone clenched the blast rifle convulsively. The farn beast coughed again, more distant this time. "They're moving away," Lin said. "Damn I" Extrone said. "It's a good thing the wind's right, or they'd be coming back, and fast, too." "Eh?" Extrone said. "They charge on scent, sight, or sound. I understand they will track down a man for as long as a day." "Wait," Extrone said, combing his beard. "Wait a minute." "Yes?" "Look," Extrone said. "If that's the case, why do we bother tracking them? Why not make them come to us?" "They're too unpredictable. It wouldn't be safe. I'd rather have surprise on our side." "You don't seem to see what I mean," Extrone said. "We won't be the -- ah -- the bait." "Oh?" "Let's get back to the column."# -- J Lin said. Ri twisted at the grass shoot, broke it off, worried and unhappy. "What's he want to see me for?" "I don't know," Lin said curtly. Ri got to his feet. One of his hands reached out, plucked nervously at Lin's bare forearm. "Look," he whispered. "You know him. I have -- a little .money. If you were able to... if he wants," Ri gulped, "to do anything to me -- I'd pay you, if you could..." "You better come along," Lin said, turning. Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound, ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where Extrone was seated, petting his rifle. Extrone nodded genially. "The farn beast hunter, eh?" "Yes, sir." Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. "Tell me what they look like," he said suddenly. "Well, sir, they're... uh..." "Pretty frightening?" "No, sir... Well, in a way, sir." "But you weren't afraid of them, were you?" "No, sir. No, because..." Extrone was smiling innocently. "Good. I want you to do something for me." "I... I..." Ri glanced nervously at Lin out of the tail of his eye. Lin's face was impassive. "Of course you will," Extrone said genially. "Get me a rope, Lin. A good, long, strong rope." "What are you going to do?" Ri asked, terrified. "Why, I'm going to tie the rope around your waist and stake you out as bait." "No!" "Oh, come now. When the farn beast hears you scream -- you can scream, by the way?" Ri swallowed. "We could find a "way to make you." There was perspiration trickling down Ri's forehead, a single drop, creeping toward his nose. "You'll be safe," Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. "I'll shoot the animal before it reaches you." Ri gulped for air. "But... if there should be more than one?" Extrone shrugged. "I -- Look, sir. Listen to me." Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands were trembling. "It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir. He killed a farn beast before  did, sir. And last night -- last night, he -- "He what?" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently. Ri breathed with a gurgling sound. "He said he ought to kill you, sir. That's what he said. I heard him, sir. He said he ought to kill you. He's the one you ought to use for bait. Then if there was an accident, sir, it wouldn't matter, because he said he ought to kill you. I wouldn't..." Extrone said, "Which one is lie?" "That one. Right over there." "The one with his back to me?" "Yes, sir. That's him. That's him, sir." Extrone aimed carefully and fired, full charge, then lowered the rifle and said, "Here comes Lin with the rope, I see." Ri was greenish. "You... you..." Extrone turned to Lin. "Tie one end around his waist." "Wait," Ri begged, fighting off die rope with his hands. "You don't want to use me, sir. Not after I told you... Please, sir. If anything should happen to me... Please, sir. Don't do it." "Tic it," Extrone ordered. "No, sir. Please. Oh, please don't, sir." "Tie it," Extrone said inexorably. Lin bent with the rope; his face was colorless. -- Extrone, Lin, two bearers, and Ri. Since the hole was drying, the left, partially exposed bank was steep toward the muddy water. Upon it was green, new grass, tender-tuffed, half mashed in places by heavy animal treads. It was there that they staked him out, tying die free end of the rope tightly around the base of a scaling tree. "You will scream," Extrone instructed. With his rifle, he pointed across the water hole. "The farn beast will come from this direction, I imagine." Ri was almost slobbering in fear. "Let me hear you scream," Extrone said. Ri moaned weakly. "You'll have to do better than that." Extrone inclined his head toward a bearer, who used something Ri couldn't see. Ri screamed. "See that you keep it up that way," Extrone said. "That's the way I want you to sound." He turned toward Lin. "We can climb this tree, I think." Slowly, aided by the bearers, the two men climbed the tree, bark peeling away from under their rough boots. Ri watched them hopelessly. Once at the crotch, Extrone settled down, holding the rifle at .alert. Lin moved to the left, out on the main branch, rested in a smaller crotch. Looking down, Extrone said, "Scream!" Then, to Lin, "You feel the excitement? It's always in the air like this at a hunt." "I feel it," Lin said. Extrone chuckled. "You were with me on Meizque?" "Yes." "That was something, that time." He ran his hand along the stock of the weapon. , The sun headed west, veiling itself with trees; a large insect circled Extrone's head. He slapped at it, angry. The forest was quiet, underlined by an occasional piping call, something like a whistle. Ri's screams were shrill, echoing away, shiveringly. Lin sat quiet, hunched. Extrone's eyes narrowed, and he began to pet the gun stock with quick, jerky movements. Lin licked his lips, keeping his eyes on Extrone's face. The sun seemed stuck in the sky, and the heat squeezed against them, sucking at their breath like a vacuum. The insect went away. Still, endless, hopeless, monotonous, Ri screamed. the matted forest. Extrone laughed nervously. "He must have heard." "We're lucky to rouse one so fast," Lin said. Extrone dug his boot cleats into the tree, braced himself. "I like this. There's more excitement in waiting like this than in anything I know." Lin nodded. "The waiting, itself, is a lot. The that matters." echoed. "You understand?" Extrone said. "How it is to wait, knowing in just a minute something is going to come out of the forest, and you're going to kill it?" "I know," Lin said. It's the waiting, too." The farn beast coughed again; nearer. "It's a different one," Lin said. "How do you know?" "Hear the lower pitch, the more of a roar?" "Hey!" Extrone shouted. "You, down there. There are two coming. Now Jet's hear you really scream!" Ri, below, whimpered childishly and began to retreat toward the tether tree, his eyes wide. "There's a lot of satisfaction in fooling them, too," Extrone said. "Making them come to your bait, where you can get at them." He opened his right hand. "Choose your ground, set your trap. Bait it." He snapped his hand into a fist, held the fist up before his eyes, imprisoning the idea. "Spring the trap when the quarry is inside. Clever. That makes the waiting more interesting. Waiting to see if they really will come to your bait." Lin shifted, staring toward the forest. "I've always liked to hunt," Extrone said. "More than anything else, I think." Lin spat towardthe ground. "People should hunt because they have to. For food. For safety." "No," Extrone argued. "People should hunt for the love of hunting." "Hunting," Extrone repeated harshly. T HE farn beast coughed. Another answered. They were very near, and there was a noise of crackling underbrush. "He's good bait," Extrone said. "He's fat enough and he knows how to scream good." Ri had stopped screaming; he was huddled against the tree, fearfully eying the forest across from the watering hole. Extrone began to tremble' with excitement. "Here they come!" The forest sprang apart. Extrone bent forward, the gun still across his lap...The farn beast, its tiny eyes red with hate, stepped out on the bank, swinging its head wildly, its nostrils flaring in anger. It coughed. Its mate appeared beside it. Their tails thrashed against the scrubs behind them, rattling leaves. "Shoot!" Lin hissed. "For God's sake, shoot!" "Wait," Extrone said. "Let's see what they do." He had not moved the rifle. He was tense, bent forward, his eyes slitted, his breath beginning to sound like an asthmatic pump. The lead farn beast sighted Ri. It lowered its head. "Look!" Extrone cried excitedly. "Here it comes!" Ri began to scream again. Still Extrone did not lift his blast rifle. He was laughing. Linwaited, frozen, his eyes staring at the farn beast in fascination. The farn beast plunged into the water, which was shallow, and, throwing a sheet of it to cither side, headed across toward Ri. "Watch! Watch!" Extrone cried gleefully. And then the aliens sprang their trap. angel's egg When adopting a pet, choose the species that is most intelligent, obedient, loyal, fun to play with, yet a shrewd, fearless protector. For the best in pets -- choose a human being! R. Cleveland McCarran Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, D. C. Dear Sir: In compliance with your request, I enclose herewith a transcript of the pertinent sections of the journal of Dr. David Bannerman, deceased. The original document is being held at this office until proper disposition can be determined. Our investigation has shown no connectioR between Dr. Bannerman and any organization, subversive or otherwise. So far as we can learn he was exactly what he seemed, an inoffensive summer resident, retired, with a small independent income -- a recluse to some extent, but well spoken of by local tradesmen and other neighbors. A connection between Dr. Bannerman and the type of activity that concerns your Department would seem most unlikely. The following information is summarized from the earlier parts of Dr. Bannerman' s journal, and tallies with the results of our own limited inquiry. He was born in # at Springfield, Massachusetts, attended public school there, and was graduated from Harvard College in #, his studies having been interrupted by two years' military service. He was wounded in action in the Argonne, receiving a spinal injury. He earned a doctorate in Biology, #. Delayed after-effects of his war injury necessitated hospitalization, #'#. From # to # he taught elementary sciences in a private school in Boston. He published two...textbooks in introductory biology, # and #. In # he retired from teaching: a pension and a modest income from textbook royalties evidently made this possible. Aside from the spinal injury, which caused him to walk with a stoop, his health is said to have been fair. Autopsy findings suggested that the spinal condition must have given him considerable pain; he is not known to have mentioned this to anyone, not even his physician, Dr. Lester Morse. There is no evidence whatever of drug addiction or alcoholism. At one point early in his journal. Dr. Bannerman describes himself as "a naturalist of the puttering type. I would rather sit on a log than write monographs; it pays off better." Dr. Morse, and others who knew Dr. Bannerman personally, tell me that this conveys a hint of his personality. I AM not qualified to comment on the material of this journal, except to say that I have no evidence to support (or to contradict) Dr. Bannerman's statements. The journal has been studied only by my immediate superiors, by Dr. Morse, and by myself. I take it for granted you will hold the matter in strictest confidence. With the journal I am also enclosing a statement by Dr. Morse, written at my request for our records and for your information. You will note that he says, with some qualifications, that "death was not inconsistent with an embolism." He has signed a death certificate on that basis. You will recall from my letter of August # that it was Dr. Morse who discovered Dr. Bannerman's body. Because he was a close personal friend of the deceased, Dr. Morse did not feel able to perform the autopsy himself. It was done by a Dr. Stephen Clyde of this city, and was virtually negative as regards cause of death, neither confirming nor contradicting Dr. Morse's original tentative diagnosis. If you wish to read the autopsy report in full, I shall be glad to forward a copy. Dr. Morse tells me that so far as he knows. Dr. Bannerman had no near relatives. He never married. For the last twelve summers he occupied a small cottage on a back road about twenty-five miles from this city, and had few visitors. The neighbor Steele mentioned in the journal is a farmer, age #, of good character, who tells me he "never got really acquainted with Dr. Bannerman.' ' At this office we feel that unless new information comes to light, further active investigation is hardly justified. Respectfully yours, Garrison Blaine Capt., State Police Augusta, Me. End: Extract from Journal of David Bannerman, dec'd. Statement by Lester Morse, M.D.    lowing document, originally attached as an unofficial "rider" to the foregoing letter, was donated to this institution in # through the courtesy of ,Mrs. Helen McCarran, widow of the martyred first President of the World Federation. Other personal and state papers of President McCarran, many of them dating from the early period when accessible to public view at the Institute of World History, Copenhagen.   # weeks ago when we had that flying saucer flurry. Observers the other side of Katahdin saw it come down this side; observers this side saw it come down the other. Size anywhere from six inches to sixty feet in diameter (or was it cigarshaped?) and speed whatever you please. Seem to recall that witnesses agreed on a rosy-pink light. There was the inevitable gobbledegookery of official explanation designed to leave everyone impressed, soothed and disappointed. I paid scant attention to the excitement and less to the explanations -- naturally, I thought it was just a flying saucer. But now Camilla has hatched out an angel. I have eight hens, all yearlings except Camilla; this is her third spring. I boarded her two winters at my neighbor Steele's farm when I closed this shack and shuffled my chilly bones off to Florida, because even as a pullet she had a manner which overbore me. I could never have eaten Camilla. If she had looked at the ax with that same expression of rancid disapproval (and she would) I should have felt I was beheading a favorite aunt. Her only concession to sentiment is the annual rush of maternity to the brain -- normal, for a case-hardened White Plymouth Rock. This year she stole a nest successfully, in a tangle of blackberry. By the time I located it, I estimated I was about two weeks too late. I had to outwit her by watching from a window; she is far too acute to be openly trailed from feeding ground to nest. When I had bled and pruned my way to her hideout, she ws sitting on nine eggs and hating my guts. They could not be fertile, since I keep no rooster, and I was about to rob her when I saw the ninth egg was not hers, nor any other chicken's. with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening. It was the same size as Camilla's eggs. There was an embryo, but nothing I could recognize. f I returned the egg to Camilla's bare and fevered breastbone, and went back to the house for a long cool drink. j That was ten days ago. I know I ought to have kept a record; I examined the blue egg every day, watching how some nameless life grew within it, until finally the angel chipped the shell deftly in two parts. This was evidently done with the aid of small horny outgrowths on her elbows, these growths were sloughed off on the second day. I wish I had seen her break the shell, but when I visited the blackberry tangle three days ago she was already out. She poked her exquisite head through Camilla's neck feather, smiled sleepily, and snuggled back into darkness to finish drying off. So what could I do, more than save the broken shell and wriggle my clumsy self out of there ? I had removed Camilla's own eggs the day before -- Camilla was only moderately annoyed. I was nervous about disposing of them even though they were obviously Camilla's, but no harm was done. I cracked each one to be sure. Very frankly rotten eggs and nothing more. In the evening of that day I thought of rats and weasels, as I should have earlier. I hastily prepared a box in the .kitchen and brought the two in, the angel quiet in my closed hand. They are there now. I think they are comfortable. Three days after hatching, the  angel is the length of my forefinger, say three inches tall, with about the relative proportions of a six-year-old girl. Except for head, hands, and probably the soles of her feet, she is clothed in feathery down llie color of ivory. What can be seen of her skin is a glowing pink -- I do mean glowing, like the inside of certain seashells. Just above the small of her back are two stubs which I take to be infantile wings. They do not suggest an extra pair of specialized forelimbs. I think they are wholly differentiated organs; perhaps they will be like the wings of an insect. Somehow I never thought of angels buzzing. Maybe she won't. I know ver.y little about angels. ered with some dull tissue, no doubt a protective sheath to be discarded when the membranes (if they are membranes) are ready to grow. Between the stubs is a not very prominent ridge -- special musculature, I suppose. Otherwise her shape is quite human, even to a pair of minuscule mammalian pinheads just visible under the down. How that can make sense in an egglaying organism is beyond my comprehension. Just for the record, so is a Corot landscape; so is Schubert's Unfinished; so is the flight of a hummingbird, or the otherworld of frost on a windowpane. The down on her head has grown visibly in three days and is of different quality from the body down. Later it may resemble human hair, probably as a diamond resembles a chunk of granite... A curious thing has happened. I went to Camilla's box after writing that. Judy was already lying in front of it, unexcited. The angel's head was out from under tlie feathers, and I thought, with more verbal distinctness than such thoughts commonly take, So here I am, a naturalist of middle years and cold sober, observing a three-inch oviparous mammal with down and wings. The thing is -- she giggled! Now it might have been only amusement at my appearance, which to her must be enormously gross and comic. But another thought formed unspoken: I am no longer lonely. And her face, hardly bigger than a dime, immediately changed from laughter to a brooding and friendly thoughtfulness. Judy and Camilla are old friends. Judy seems untroubled by the angel. I have no worries about leaving them alone together. June # angel was talking to me, and when that was finished I drowsed off immediately on a cot which I have moved into the kitchen to be near them. I had never been strongly impressed by the evidence for extrasensory perception. It is fortunate that my mind was able to accept the novelty, since to the angel it is clearly a matter of course. Her tiny mouth is most expressive, but moves only for that reason and for eating -- not for speech. Probably Dr. Bannerman's dog, mentioned often earlier in the journal, a nine-year-old English setter. According to an entry of May #, #, she was then beginning she could speak to her own kind if she wished, but I dare say the sound would be above the range of my hearing as well as my understanding. Last night after I brought the cot in and was about to finish my puttering bachelor supper, she climbed to the edge of the box and pointed, first at herself and then at the top of the kitchen table. Afraid to let my vast hand take hold of her, I held it out flat and she sat in my palm. Camilla was inclined to fuss, but the angel looked over her shoulder and Camilla subsided, watchful but no longer alarmed. The table-top is porcelain, and the angel shivered. I folded a towel and spread a silk handkerchief on top of that; the angel sat on this arrangement with apparent comfort, near my face. I was not even bewildered, without realizing why. That doesn't seem possible, does it ? But there was a good reason. She reached me first with visual imagery. How can I make it plain that this had nothing in common with my sleeping dreams? There was no weight of symbolism from my littered past, no discoverable connection with any of yesterday's commonplaces, indeed no actual involvement of my personality at all. I saw. I was moving vision, though without eyes or oilier flesh. And while my mind saw, it also knew where my flesh was, seated at the kitchen table. If anyone had entered the kitchen, it there had been a noise of alarm out in the henhouse, I should have known it. have not seen, and never will, on Earth. I have seen many beautiful places on this planet -- some of them were even tranquil. Once I took a slow steamer to New Zealand and had the Pacific as a plaything for many days. I can hardly say how I knew this was not Earth. The grass of the valley was a familiar green. A river below me was a blue and silver thread under sunlight. There were trees much like pine and maple, and maybe that is what they were. But it was not Earth. I was aware of mountains heaped to strange heights on either side of the valley -- snow, rose, amber, gold. The. amber tint was unlike any mountain color I have noticed in dais world at midday. Or I may have known it was not Earth, simply because her mind -- dwelling within some unimaginable brain smaller than the tip of my little finger -- told me so. I watched two inhabitants of that world come flying, to rest in the field of sunny grass where my bodiless vision had brought me. Adult forms, such as my angel would surely be when she had her growth, except that both of these were male and one of them was dark-skinned. The latter was also old, with a thousand-wrinkled face, knowing was flushed and lively with youth. Both were beautiful. The down of the brown-skinned old one was reddishtawny; the other's was ivory with hints of orange. Their wings were true membranes, with more variety of subtle iridescence than I have seen even in the wings of a dragon-fly; I could not say that any color was dominant, for each motion brought a ripple of change. These two sat at their ease on the grass. I realized that they were talking to each other, though their lips did not move in speech more than once or twice. They would nod, smile, now and then illustrate something with twinkling hands. A huge rabbit lolloped past them. I knew -- thanks to my own angel's efforts, I supposed -- that this animal was of the same size as our common wild ones. Later a bluegreen snake three times the size of the angels came flowing through the grass. The old one reached out to stroke its head carelessly, and I think he did it without interrupting whatever he was saying. Another creature came in leisured leaps. He was monstrous, yet I felt no .alarm in the angels or myself. Imagine a being built somewhat like a kangaroo up to the head, about eight feet tall, and katydidgreen. Really the thick balancing tail and enormous legs were the only kangaroolike features about him. The body above the massive thighs was not dwarfed, but thick and square. The arms and hands were quite humanoid, and the head was round, manlike except for its face -- there was only a single nostril and his mouth was set in the vertical. The eyes were large and mild. I received an impression of high intelligence and natural gentleness. In one of his manlike hands he carried two tools, so familiar and ordinary that I knew my body by the kitchen table had laughed in startled recognition. But after all, a garden spade and rake are basic. Once invented -- I expect we did it ourselves in the Neolithic -- there is little reason why they should change much down the millennia. This farmer halted by the angels, and the three conversed a while. The big head nodded agreeably. I believe the young angel made a joke; certainly the convulsions in the huge green face made me think of laughter. Then this amiable monster turned up the grass in a patch a few yards square, broke the sod and raked the surface smooth, just as any competent gardener might do, except that he moved with the relaxed smoothness of a being whose strength far exceeds the requirements of his task... everyday eyes. My angel was exploring the table. I had a loaf of bread there, and a dish of strawberries in cream. She was trying a breadcrumb, seemed to like it fairly well. I offered the strawberries. She broke off one of the seeds and nibbled it, but didn't care so much for the pulp. I held tip the great spoon with sugary cream. She steadied it with both hands to try some. I think she liked it. It had been stupid of me not to realize that she would be hungry. I brought wine from the cupboard; she watched inquiringly, so I put a couple of drops on the handle of a spoon. The taste really pteased her. She chuckled and patted her tiny stomach, though I'm afraid it wasn't very good sherry. I brought some crumbs of cake, but she indicated that she was full, came close to my face and motioned me to lower my head. She reached up until she could press both hahds against my forehead -- I felt it only enough to know her hands were there -- and she stood so a long time, trying to tell me something. It was difficult. Pictures come through with relative ease, but now she was transmitting an abstraction of a complex kind. My clumsy brain suffered in the effort to receive. Something did come across, but I have only the crudest way of passing it on. Imagine an equilateral triangle; place the following words one at each corner -- "recruiting," "collecting," "saving." The meaning she wanted to convey ought to be near the center of the triangle. I had also the sense that her message provided a partial explanation of her errand in this lovable and damnable world. She looked weary when she stood away from me. I put out my palm and she climbed into it, to be carried back to the nest. She did not talk to me tonight, nor eat, but she gave a reason, coming out from Camilla's feathers long enough to turn her back and show me the wing-stubs. The protective sheaths have dropped off; the wings are rapidly growing. They are probably damp and weak. She was quite tired and went back into the warm darkness almost at once. Camilla must be exhausted, too. I don't think she has been off the nest more than twice since I brought them into the house. June # I learned it in the afternoon, when I was fiddling about in the garden and Judy was loafing in the sunshine she loves. Something apart from sight and sound called me to hurry back to the house. I saw my angel through the screen door before I opened it. One of her feet had caught in a hideous loop of loose wire at a break in the mesh. Her first tug of alarm must have tightened the loop so that her hands were not strong enough to force it open. Fortunately I was able to cut the wire with a pair of shears before I lost my head; then she could free her foot without injury. Camilla had been frantic, rushing around fluffed up, but -- here's an odd thing -- perfectly silent. None of the recognized chicken-noises of dismay. If an ordinary chick had been in trouble, she would have raised the roof. T HE angel flew to me and hovered, pressing her hands on my, forehead. The message was clear at once: "No harm done." She flew down to tell Camilla the same thing. Yes, in the same way. I saw Camilla standing near my feet with her neck out and head low, and the angel put a hand on either side of her scraggy comb. Camilla relaxed, clucked in the normal way, and spread her wings for a shelter. The angel went under it, but only to oblige Camilla, I think -- at least, she stuck her head through the wing feathers and winked. She must have seen something else then, for she came out and flew back to me and touched a finger to my cheek, looked at the finger, saw it was wet, put it in her mouth, made a face, and laughed at me. We went outdoors into the sun (Camilla, too) and the angel gave me an exhibition of what flying ought to be. Not even Wagner can speak of joy as her first free flying did. At one moment she would be Jiang ing in front of my eyes, radiant and delighted; the next instant she would be a dot of color against a cloud. Try to imagine something that would make a hummingbird seem dull and sluggish! They do hum. Softer than a hummingbird; louder than a dragonfly. Something like the sound of hawkmoths -- He marts thisbe, for instance, the one I used to call Hummingbird Moth when I was a child. I was frightened, naturally. Frightened first at what might happen to her, but that was unnecessary; I don't think she would be in danger from any savage animal except possibly Man. I saw a Cooper's hawk slant down the invisible toward the swirl of color where she was dancing by herself. Presently she was drawing iridescent rings around him. Then, while he soared in smaller circles, I could not see her, but . (maybe she felt my fright) she was again in front of me, pressing my forehead in the now familiar way. I knew she was amused, and caught the idea that the hawk was a "lazy character." Not quite the way I'd describe Accipiter Cooperi, but it's all in the point of view. I believe she had been riding his back, no doubt with her telepathic hands on his predatory head. Later I was frightened by the thought that she might not want to return to me. Could I compete with sunlight and open sky? The passage of that terror through me brought her swiftly back, and her hands said with great clarity: "Don't ever be afraid of anything. It isn't nec-' essary for you." Once this afternoon I was saddened by the realization that old Judy can take little part in what goes on now. I can well remember Judy running .like the wind. The angel must have heard this thought in me, for she stood a long time beside Judy's drowsy head, while Judy's tail thumped cheerfully on the warm grass... a heavy meal on two or three cake crumbs and another drop of sherry, and we had what was almost a sustained conversation. I will write it in that form this time, rather than grope for anything more exact. I asked her: "How far away is your home?" "My home is here." "I meant the place your people came from." "Ten light years." "The images you showed me -- that quiet valley -- that is ten light years away?" "Yes. But that was my father talking to you, through me. He was grown when the journey began. He is two hundred and forty years old -- our years, thirty-two days longer than each of yours." Mainly I was conscious of a flood of relief. I had feared, on the basis of terrestrial biology K that her explosively rapid growth after hatching must foretell a brief life. But it's all right -- she can outlive me, and by a few hundred years at that. "Your father is here now, on this planet? Shall I see him?" She took her hands away -- listening, I believe. The answer was: "No. He is sorry. He is ill and cannot live long. I am to see him in a few days, when I fly a little better. He taught me for twenty years after I was born." "I don't understand. I thought that -- " "Later, friend. My father is grateful for your kindness to me." I don't know what I thought about that. I felt no faintest trace of condescension in the message. "And he was showing me things he had seen with his own eyes, ten light years away?" "Yes." Then she wanted me to rest a while; I am sure she knows what a huge effort it is for' my primitive brain to function in this way. But before she ended the conversation by humming down to her nest she gave me this, and I received it with such clarity that I cannot be mistaken: "He says that a jungle there, just as Terra is now." June # the angel was having breakfast, and little Camilla was dead. The angel watched me rub sleep out of my eyes, watched me discover Camilla, and then flew to me. I received this: "Does it make you unhappy?" "I don't know exactly." You can get fond of a hen, especially a cantankerous and homely old one whose personality has a lot in common with your own. "She was old. She wanted a flock of chicks, and I couldn't stay with her. So I -- " something obscure here; probably my mind was trying too hard to grasp it -- "so T saved her life." I could make nothing else out of it. She said "saved." Camilla's death looked natural, except that I should have expected the death contractions to muss the straw and that hadn't happened. Maybe the angel had arranged the old lady's body for decorum, though I don't see how her muscular strength would have Jbecn equal to it, Camilla weighed at least seven pounds. As I was burying her at the edge of the garden and the angel was humming over my head, I recalled a thing which, when it happened, I had dismissed as a dream. Merely a moonlight image of the angel standing in the. nest box. with her hands on Camilla's head, then pressing her mouth gently on Camilla's throat, just' before the hen's head sank down out of my line of vision. Probably I actually awoke and saw it happen. I am somehow unconcerned -- even, as I think more about it, pleased. After the burial the angel's hands said: "Sit on the grass and we'll talk. Question me; I'll tell you what I can. My father asks you to write it down." So that is what we have been doing for the last four days. I have been going to school, a slow but anything in this journal,for in the evenings I was exhausted, I made notes as best I could. The angel has gone now to see her father and will nof return until morning. I shall try to make a readable version of my notes. Since she had invited questions, I began with something which had been bothering me, as a would-be naturalist, exceedingly. I couldn't see how creatures no larger than the adults I had observed could lay eggs, as large as Camilla's. Nor could I understand why, if they were hatched in an almost adult condition and able to eat a varied diet, she had any use for that ridiculous, lovely and apparently functional pair of breasts. difficulty, she exploded with laughter -- her kind, which buzzed her all over the garden and caused her to fluff my hair on the wing and pinch my earlobe. She lit on a rhubarb leaf and gave a delectably naughty representation of herself as a hen laying an egg, including the cackle. She got me to bumbling helplessly -- my kind of laughter -- ami it was some time before we could quiet down. Then she did her best to explain. They are true mammals, and the young -- not more than two or at most three in a lifetime averaging two hundred and fifty years -- are delivered in very much the human way. The baby is nursed, human fashion, until his braih begins to respond a little to their unspoken language. That takes three to four weeks. Then he is placed in an altogether different medium. She could not describe that clearly, because there was very little in my educational storehouse to help me grasp it. It is some gaseous medium which arrests bodily growth for an almost indefinite period, while mental growth continues. It took them, she says, about seven thousand years to perfect this technique after they first hit on the idea; they are never in a hurry. The infant remains under this delicate and precise control for anywhere from fifteen to thirty years, the period depending not only on his mental vigor, but also on the type of lifework he tentatively elects as soon as his brain is knowing enough to make a choice. During this period his mind is guided with patience by teachers who -- their business. This was peculiarly difficult for me to assimilate, although the facts came through clearly enough. In their world, the profession of teacher is more highly honored than any other -- can such a thing be possible? -- and so difficult to enter that only the strongest minds dare to attempt it. I had to rest a while after absorbing that. An aspirant must spend fifty years, not including the period of infantile education, merely getting ready to begin, and the acquisition of factual knowledge, while not understressed, takes only a small proportion of those fifty years. Then, if he's good enough, he can take a small part in the elementary instruction of a few babies, and ir he does well on that basis for another thirty or forty years, he is considered a fair beginner... Once upon a time I myself lurched around stuffy classrooms, trying to insert a few predigested facts -- I wonder how many of them were facts -- into the minds of bored and preoccupied adolescents, some of whom may have liked me moderately well. I was even able to shake hands and be nice while their terribly well-meaning parents explained to me how they ought to be educated. So much of our human effort goes down the drain of futility, I sometimes wonder how wc ever got as far as the Bronze Age. Somehow we did, though, and a short way beyond. After that preliminary stage of an angel's education is finished, the baby is transferred to more ordinary surroundings, and his bodily growth completes itself in a very short time. Wings grow abruptly, as I have seen, and he reaches a maximum height of six inches by our measure. Only then does he enter on that lifetime of two hundred and fifty years, for not until then does his body begin to age. My angel has been a living personality for many years, but will not celebrate her first birthday for almost a year. I like to think of that. At about the same time that they learned the principles of interplanetary travel, approximately ple also learned how growth could be rearrested at any point short of full maturity. At first the knowledge served no purpose except in the control of illnesses which still occasionally struck them at that time. But when the long periods of time required for space travel were considered, the advantages became obvious. S O IT happens that my angel was bom ten light years away. She was trained by her father and many others in the wisdom of sevme, is the approximate sum of their recorded history -- and then she was safely sealed and cherished in what my superamebic brain regarded as a blue egg. Education did not proceed at that time; her mind went to sleep with the rest of her. When Camilla's warmth made her wake and grow again, she remembered what to do with the little horny bumps provided for her elbows. And came out into this planet, God help her. I wondered why her father should have chosen any combination so unreliable as an old hen and a human being. Surely he must have had plenty of excellent ways to bring the shell to the right temperature. Her answer should have satisfied me immensely, but I am still compelled to wonder about it: "Camilla was a nice hen, and my father studied your mind while you were asleep. It was a bad landing, and much was broken -- no such landing was ever made before after so long a journey. Only four other grown-ups could come with my father. Three of them died en route and he is very ill. And there were nine other children to care for." Yes, I knew she'd said that an angel thought I was good enough to be trusted with his daughter. If it upsets me, all I need do is look at her and then in the mirror. As for the explanation, I can only conclude there must be more which I am not ready to understand. I was worried about tfyose nine others, but she assured me they were all well, and I sensed that I ought not to ask more about them at present. ly similar to this, a trifle larger, moving in a somewhat longer orbit around a sun like ours. Two glcaming moons, smaller than ours -- their Orbits are such that two-moon nights come rarely; they are "magic," and she will ask her father to show me one, if he can. Because of a slower rotation, their day has twentysix of our hours. Their atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and oxygen in the proportion familiar to us; slightly richer in some of the rare gases. The climate is now what we should call tropical and subtropical, but they have known glacial rigors like those in our world's past. There are only two great continental land masses, and many thousands of large islands. Their total population is only It seems my angel wants to become a student of animal life here on Earth. I, her teacher! But bless her for the notion anyhow. We sat and traded animals for a couple of hours last night; I found it restful, after the mental struggle to grasp more difficult matters. Judy was something new to her. They have several luscious monsters on that planet, but, in her view, so have we. She told me of a blue sea-snake fifty feet long, relatively harmless, that bellows cowlike and comes into the tidal marshes to lay black eggs; so I gave her a whale. She offered a bat-winged, day-flying ball of mammalian fluff as big as my head and weighing under an ounce; I matched her with a marmoset. She tried me with a smallsize pink brontosaur, very rare, but I was ready with the duck-billed platypus, and that caused us to exchange some pretty funny remarks about mammalian eggs. All trivial in a way; also the happiest evening in my fifty-three tangled years of life. She was a trifle hesitant to explain those kangaroolike people, until she was sure I really wanted to know. It seems they are about the nearest parallel to human life on that planet; not a near parallel, of course, as she was careful to explain. Agreeable and always friendly souls, though they weren't always so, I'm sure, and of a somewhat more alert intelligence than we possess. Manual workers mainly, because they prefer it nowadays, but some of them are excellent mathematicians. The first practical spaceship was built by a group of them, with assistance, of course. Names offer a difficulty. Because of the nature of the angelic language, they have scant use for them except for the purpose of written record, and writing naturally plays little part in their daily life -- no occasion to write a letter when distance is no obstacle to the speech of your mind. An angel's formal name is about as important to him, as, say, my Social Security number is to me. S HE has not told me hers, because my mind can't grasp the phonetics on which their written language is based. As we would speak a friend's name, an angel will project the friend's image to his friend's receiving mind. More pleasant and more intimate, I think, although it was a shock to me at first to glimpse my own ugly mug in my mind's eye. Stories are occasionally written, if there is something in them that should be preserved precisely as it was in the first telling. But in their world the true story-teller has a more important place than the printer. He offers one of the best of their quieter pleasures; a good one can hold his audience for a week and never tire them. "What is this 'angel' in your mind when you think of me?" she asked once. "A being men have imagined for centuries, when they thought of themselves as they might like to be, and not as they are." I did not try too painfully hard to learn much about the principles of space travel. 'Hie most my brain could take in of her explanation was something like: "Rocket, then phototropism." Now that makes scant sense. So far as I know, phototropism -- movement toward light -- is an . organic phenomenon. One thinks of it as a response of protoplasm, in some plants and animal organisms, most of them simple, to the stimulus of light; certainly not as a force capable of moving inorganic matter. I think that whatever may be the principle she was describing, this word phototropism was merely the nearest thing to it in my reservoir of language. If I did know the physical principles which brought them here, and could write them in terms accessible to technicians, I would not do it. Here is a thing I am afraid no hypothetical reader of this journal would believe: These people, as I have written, learned their method of space ago, yet this is the first time they have ever used it to convey them to another planet. The heavens are rich in worlds, she tells me; on many of them there is life, often on very primitive levels. No external force prevented her people from going forth, colonizing, conquering, as far as they pleased. They could have populated a whole Galaxy. They did not, because they believed they were not ready. More precisely -- Not good enough ! her account, did they learn, as we may learn eventually, that intelligence without goodness is worse than high explosive in the hands of a baboon. For beings advanced beyond the level of Pithecanthropus, intelligence is a cheap commodity -- not too hard to develop, hellishly easy to use for unconsidered ends. Whereas goodness is not to be achieved without unending effort of the hardest kind, within the self, whether the self be man or angel. It is clear even to me that the conquest of evil is only one step, not the most important. Goodness, she tried to tell me, is an altogether positive quality; the part of living nature that swarms with such monstrosities as cruelty, meanness, bitterness, greed is not to be filled by a vacuum when these horrors are eliminated. Kindness, for only one example. Anybody who defines kindness only as the absence of cruelty doesn't understand the nature of either. these angels, only at the attainable. They passed through many millenia while advances in technology merely worsened their condition and increased the peril of self-annihilation. They came through that, in time. War was at length so far outgrown that its recurrence was impossible, and the development of wholly rational beings could begin. Then they were ready to start growing up, through more millenia of self-searching, self-discipline, seeking to earn the simple out of the complex, discovering how to use knowledge and not be used by it. Even then, of course, they slipped back often enough. There were what she refers to as eras of fatigue. In their dimmer past, they had had many dark ages, lost civilizations, hopeful beginnings ending in dust. Earlier still they had come out of the slime, as we did. But their period of deepest uncertainty and sternest self-appraisal years ago, when they knew a Universe could be theirs 'for the taking, and knew they were not yet good enough. They are in no more hurry than the stars. She tried to convey something, tentatively, at this point, which was ' really beyond both of us. It had to do with time (not as I understand time) being perhaps the most essential attribute of God (not as I was ever able to understand that word). Seeing my mental exhaustion, she gave up the effort, and later told me that the conception was extremely difficult for her, too -- not only, I gathered, because of her youth and relative ignorance. There was also a hint that her father might not have wished her to bring my brain up to a hurdle like that one... Of course they explored. Their little spaceships were roaming the ether before there was anything like man on Earth -- roaming and listening, observing, recording; never entering nor taking part in the life of any home but their own. forbade themselves to go beyond their own solar system, though it would have been easy to do so. years, although they traveled to incredible distances, the same stern restraint was held in force. It was altogether unrelated to what we should call fear. That, I think, is as extinct in them as hate. There was so much to do at home! I wish I could imagine it. They mapped the heavens, and played in their own sunlight. Naturally I cannot tell you what goodness is. I know only, moderately well, what it seems to mean to us human beings. It appears that the best of us can, often with enormous difficulty, however, achieve a manner of life in which goodness somewhat overbalances our aggressive, hostile tendencies for the greater part of the time. We are, in other words, a fraction alive; the rest is in the dark. Dante was a bitter masochist; Beethoven a frantic and miserable snob, Shakespeare wrote potboilers. And Christ said: "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." I am no pessimist. After all. I've watched one-celled organisms on the slide, and listened to Brahms' Fourth. Night before last I said to the angel: "In spite of everything, you and I are kindred." She granted me agreement. June # S HE was lying on my pillow this morning so that I could see her when I awoke. Her father has died, and she was with him when it happened. There was again that thought-impression which I could interpret only to mean that his life had been "saved." I was still sleep-bound when my mind asked: "What will you do?" "Stay with you, if you wish it, for the rest of your life." The last part of the message was clouded, but I am familiar with that now. It seems to mean there is some further element which eludes me. I could not be mistaken about the part I did receive. It gives me amazing speculations. Being only fifty-three, I might live another thirty or forty years. She was preoccupied this morning, but whatever she felt about her father's death that might be paralleled by sadness in a human being was hidden from me. She did say her father was sorry he had not been able toshow me a twomoon night. One adult, then, remains in this world. Except to say that he is two hundred years old andfull of knowledge, and that he endured the long journey without serious ill effects, she has told me little about him. And there are ten children including herself. Something was sparkling at her throat. When she was aware of my interest in it, she took it off and I fetched a magnifying glass. A necklace; under the glass, much like our finest human workmanship, if your imagination can reduce it to the proper scale. The stones appeared similar to the jewels we know; diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, the diamonds snapping out every color under heaven; but there were two or three very dark purple stones unlike anything I know -- not amethysts, I am sure. The necklace was strung on something more slender than cobweb, and the design of the joining clasp was too delicate for my glass to help me. The necklace had been her mother's, she told me. As she pub it back around her throat, I thought I saw the same shy pride that any human girl might feel in displaying a new pretty. She wanted to show me other things she had brought, and flew to the table where she had left a sort of satchel an inch and a half long -- quite a load for her to fly with, but the translucent substance is so light that when she rested the satchel on my finger I scarcely felt it. She arranged a few articles eagerly for my inspection, and I put the glass to work again. One was a jeweled comb; she ran it through the down on her chest and legs to show me its use. There was a set of tools too small for the glass to interpret them; I learned later they were a sewing kit. A book, and some writing instrument much like a metal pencil. The book, I understand, is a blank record for her to use as needed. And finally, when I was fully awake and dressed and we had finished breakfast, she reached in the bottom of the satchel for a parcel that was heavy for her and made me understand it was a gift for me. "My father made it for you, but I put in the stone myself, last night." She'" unwrapped it. A ring, precisely the size for my little finger. understood that, and sat on my shoulder patting my earlobe till I had command of myself. I have no idea what the jewel is. It shifts with the light from purple to jade green to amber. The metal resembles platinum in appearance, except for a tinge of rose at certain angles of light. When I stare into the stone, I think I see -- never mind that now. I am not ready to write it down, and perhaps never will be, unless I am sure. We improved our housekeeping, later in the morning. I showed her over the house. It isn't much -- Cape Codder, two rooms up and two down. Every corner interested her, and when she found a shoebox in the bedroom closet, she asked for it. At her direction, I have arranged it on a chest near my bed and the window which shall be always open. She says the mosquitoes will not bother me, and I don't doubt her. I unearthed a white silk scarf for the bottom of the box. After asking my permission -- as if I could want to refuse her anything! -- she got her sewing kit and snipped off a piece of the scarf several inches square, folded it on itself several times, and sewed it into a narrow pillow an inch long. So now she has a proper bed and a room of her own. I wish I had something less coarse than silk, but she insists she's pleased with it. We have not talked very much today. In the afternoon she flew out for an hour's play in the cloudcountry. When ie returned, she let me know that she needed a long sleep. She is still sleeping, I think. I am writing this downstairs, fearing the light might disturb her. Is it possible I can have thirty or forty years in her company? I wonder how teachable my mind Still is. I seem to be able to assimilate new facts as well as I ever could; this ungainly carcass should be durable, with reasonable care. Of course, facts without a synthesizing imagination are no better than scattered bricks, but perhaps my imagination -- I don't know. Judy wants out. I shall turn in when she comes back. I wonder if poor Judy's life could be -- the word is certainly "saved." I must ask. June I # writing I did go to bed, but I was restless, refusing sleep. At some time in the small houfs -- there was light from a single moon -- she flew over to me. The tensions dissolved away like an illness and my mind was able to respond with a certain calm. I made plain that I would never which I am sure she already knew, and she gave me to understand that there are two alternatives for the remainder of my life. The choice, she says, is altogether mine, and I must take time to be sure of my decision. I can live out my natural span, whatever it proves to be, and she will not leave me for long at any time. She will be there to .advise, teach, help me in anything good I care to undertake. She says she would enjoy thi; for some reason she is, as we'd say in our language, fond of me. Lord, the books I could write! I fumble for words now, in the usual human way. Whatever I put on paper is a miserable fraction of the potential; the words themselves are rarely the right ones. But under her guidance -- I could take a fair part in shaking the world. With words alone. I could preach to my own people. Before long, I would be heard. I cOuld study and explore. What small nibblings we have made at the sum of available knowledge! Suppose I brought in one leaf from outdoors, or one common little bug -- in a few hours of studying it with her. I'd know more of my own specialty than a flood of the best textbooks could tell me. She has also let me know that when she and those who came with her have learned a little more about humanity, it should be possible to improve my health greatly, and probably my life expectancy. I don't imagine my back could ever straighten, but she thinks the pain might be cleared away, entirely without drugs. I could have a clearer mind, in a body that would neither fail nor torment me. Then there is the other alternative. It seems they have developed a techniqueby means of which any unresisting living subject, whose brain is capable of memory at all, can experience total recall. It is a by-product, I understand, of their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it for only a few t-housand years, and since their own understanding of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their experimental techniques. In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past which psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way for therapeutic purposes. But you must imagine that sort of thing tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail which has ever registered on the subject's brain. T HE purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it; quite the opposite. The end result .is -- death. Whatever is recalled by this process is transmitted to the receiving mind, which can retain it, and record any or all of it, if such a record is desired; but to the subject who recalls, it is a flowing away, without return. Thus it is not a true "remembering," but a giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and, along with memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly. At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in the engulf meat of a flood tide, until finally the waters close over. That, it seems, is how Camilla's life was "saved." When I finally grasped that, I laughed, and the angel of course caught the reason. I was thinking about my neighbor Steele, who boarded Camilla for me In his henhouse for a couple of winters. Somewhere safe in the angelic records there must be a hen'seye image of the patch in the seat of Steele's pants. And naturally Camilla's view of me too; not too unkind, I hope. She couldn't help the expression on her rigid little face, and I don't believe it ever meant anything. At the other end of the scale is the saved life of my angel's father. Recall can be a long process, she says, depending on the intricacy and richness of the mind recalling; and in all but the last stages it can be halted at will. Her father's recall was begun when they were still far out in space and he knew that he could not long survive the journey. When that journey ended, the recall had progressed so far that very little actual memory remained to him of his life on that other planet. He had what must be called a deductive memory -- from the. material of the years not yet given away, he could reconstruct what must have been, and I assume the other adult who survived the passage must have been able to shelter him from errors that loss of memory might involve. This, I infer, is why he could not show me a two-moon night. I forgot to ask her whether the images he did send me were from actual or deductive memory. Deductive, I think, for there was a certain dimness about them not present when my angel gives me a picture of something seen with her own eyes. Jade-green eyes, by the way. Were you wondering? In the same fashion, my own life could be saved. Every aspect of existence that I ever touched, that ever touched me, could be transmitted to some perfect record -- the nature of the written record is beyond me, but I have no doubt of its relative perfection. Nothing important, good or bad, would be lost. And they need a knowledge of humanity, if they are to carry out whatever it is they have in mind. It would be difficult, she tells me, and sometimes painful. Most of the effort would be hers, but some of it would have to be mine. In her period of infantile education, she elected what we should call zoology as her life work; for that reason she was given intensive theoretical training in this technique. Right now I guess she knows more than anyone else on this planet not only about what makes a hen tick, but how it feels to be a hen. Though a beginner, she is in all essentials already an expert. She can help me, she thinks, if I choose this alternative. At any rate, she could ease me over the toughest spots, keep my courage from flagging. For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect -- without condescension, she calls us very advanced -- because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning! Hardly stronger than an infant's first effort to focus his eyes. I AM merely wondering how much of my life, if I choose this way, will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the "good deeds" which I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse. Not that I am a bad man, in any reasonable sense of tlie term. I respect myself; no occasion to grovel and beat my chest. I'm not ashamed to stand comparison with any other fair sample of the species. But there you are: I am human, and under the aspect of eternity so far, plus this afternoon's newspaper, that is a rather serious thing. Without real knowledge, I think of this total recall as something like a passage down a corridor of a nlyriad images, now dark, now brilliant, now pleasant, now horrible -- guided by no certainty except an awareness of the open blind door at the end of it. It could have its pleasing moments and its consolations. I don't see how it could ever approximate the delight and satisfaction of living a few more years in this world with the angel lighting on my shoulder when she wishes, and talking to me. I had to ask her how great a value such a record would be to them. Obvious enough -- they can be of little use to us, by their standards, until they understand us, and they came here to be of use to us as well as to themselves. And understanding us, to them, means knowing us inside out with a completeness such as our most dedicated and laborious scholars could never imagine. I remember, about will not touch us until they are certain no harm will come of it. On our tortured planet, however, there is a time factor. They know that well enough, of course... Recall cannot begin unless the any being with intellect enough to make a considered choice. Now, I wonder how many they could find make that uneasy journey into death, for no reward except an assurance that they were serving their own kind and the angels.More to the point, I wonder if I would be able to achieve such willingness myself, even with her help. When this had been explained to me, she urged me again to make no hasty decision. And she pointed outto me what my thoughts were already groping at -- why not both alternatives, within a reasonable limit of time? Why couldn't I have ten or fifteen years or more with her, and then undertake the total recall, perhaps not until my physical powers had started toward senility? I thought that over. This morning I had almost decided to choose that most welcome and comfortable solution. Then my daily paper was delivered. Not that I needed any such reminder. she knew whether, in the present state of human technology, it would be possible for our folly to actually destroy this planet. She did not know, for certain. Three of the other children have gone away to # different parts of the world, to learn what they can about that. But she had to tell me that such a thing has happened before, elsewhere in the Universe. I guess I won't write a letter to the papers advancing an explanation for the occasional appearance of a nova among the stars. Doubtless others have hit on the same hypothesis without the aid of angels. And that is not all I must consider. I could die by accident or sudden disease before I had begun to give my life. Only now, at this very late moment, rubbing my sweaty forehead and gazing into the lights of that wonderful ring, have I been able to put together some obvious facts in. the required synthesis. I don't know, of course, what forms their assistance to us will take. I suspect human beings won't sec or hear much of the angels for a long time to come. Now and then disastrous decisions may be altered, and those who believe themselves wholly responsible won't realize why their minds worked that way. Here and there, maybe an influential mind will be rather strangely nudged into a better course. Something like that. There may be new discoveries and inventions of kinds that will tend to neutralize the menace of our nastiest playthings. But whatever the angels decide to do, the record and analysis of my fairly typical life will be an aid. It could even be the small weight deciding the balance between triumph and failure. That is Fact One. Two: my angel and her brothers and  sisters, for all their amazing level of advancement, are also of perishable protoplasm. Therefore, if this ball of mud becomes a ball of flame, they also will be destroyed. Even if they have the means to use their spaceship again or to build another, it might easily happen that they would not learn their danger in time to escape. And for all I know, this could be tomorrow. Or tonight. So there can no longer be any doubt as to my choice, an#? I will tell her when she wakes. July # am to rest a while. I sc-e it is almost a month since I last wrote in this journal. My total recall began three weeks ago, and already the first twenty-eight years of my life have been saved. It was a week after I told the angel my decision before she was prepared to start the recall. During that week she searched my present mind more closely than I should have imagined was possible: she had to be sure. :!: At this point Dr. Bannerman.'s handwriting alters curiously. From here on he used a soft pencil instead of a pen, and the script shows signs t. haste, In spite of this, however, it is actually much clearer, steadier and easier to read than the earlier entries in his normal During that week of hard questions, I dare say she learned more about my kind than has ever gone on record even in a physician's office; I hope she did. To any psychiatrist who might question that, I offer a naturalist's suggestion. It is easy to imagine, after some laborious time, that we have noticed everything a given patch of ground can show us. But alter the viewpoint only a little -- dig down a foot with a spade, say, or climb a tree-branch and look downward -- it's a whole new world. When the angel was not exploring me in this fashion, she took pains to make me glimpse the satisperiences I might have if I chose the other way. I see how necessary that was; at the time it seemed almost cruel. She had to do it, for my own sake, and I am glad that I was somehow able to stand fast to my original choice. So was she, in the end; she has even said she loves me for it. What that troubling word means to her is not within my mind. I am satisfied to take it in the human sense. Since I no longer require normal sleep, the recall begins at night, as soon as the lights begin to go out in the village and there is little danger of interruption. Daytimes, I putter about in my usual fashion. I have sold Steele my hens, and Judy's life was saved a week ago. That practically winds up my affairs, except that I went to write a codicil to my will. I might as well do that now, right here in this journal, instead of bothering my lawyer. It should be legal. To Whom It May Concern: I hereby bequeath to my friend Lester Morse, M.D., of Augusta, Maine, the ring which will be found at my death on the fifth finger of my left hand. I would urge Dr. Morse to retain this ring in his private possession at all times, and to make provision for its disposal, in the event of his own death, to some person in whose character he places the utmost faith. (Signed) David Bannerman Tonight she has gone away for a while, and I am to rest and do as I please till she returns. I shall spend this record, but I am afraid it will be a spotty job, because there is' so much I no longer care about. for sleep, and a bodily weariness which is not at all unpleasant, I notice no physical effects thus far. I have no faintest recollection of anything that happened earlier than my twenty-eighth birthday. My deductive memory seems rather efficient, and I am sure I could reconIn spite of superficial changes in the handwriting, this signature has been certified genuine by an expert grapholostruct most of the story if it were worth the bother. This afternoon I grubbed around among some old letters of that period, but they weren't very interesting. My knowledge of English is unaffected; I can still read scientific German and some French, because I had occasion to use those languages fairly often after I was twentyeight. The scraps of Latin dating from high school are gone. So are algebra and all but the simplest proposition of high school geometry: I never needed them. mother after twenty-eight, but I do not know whether the image this provides really resembles her. My father died when I was thirty-one, so I remember him as a sick old man. I believe I had a younger brother, but he must have died in childhood. Judy's passing was tranquil -- pleasant for her, I think. It took the better part of a day. We went out to an abandoned field I know, and she lay blinking in the sunshine with the angel sitting by her, while I dug a grave and then rambled off after wild raspberries. Toward evening the angel came and told me I could bury Judy -- it was finished. And most interesting, she said. I don't see how there can have been anything distressing about it for Dr. Bannerman's mother died in # of influenza. His brother (three years older, not younger) died of pneumonia, Judy. After all, what hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away, and I don't think Judy had any. I have not found the recall painful, at least not in retrospect. There must have been sharp moments, mercifully forgotten along with their causes, as if the process had gone on under anesthesia. Certainly there were plenty of incidents in my first twenty-eight years which I should not care to offer to the understanding of any but the angels. Quite often I must have been mean, selfish, base in any number of ways, if only to judge by the record since twenty-eight. Those old letters touch on a few of these things. To me, they now matter only as material for a record which is safely out of my hands. However, to any person I may have harmed, I wish to say this: you were hurt by aspects of my humanity which may not, in a few among us. Against these darker elements I struggled, in my human fashion, as you do yourselves. The effort is not wasted. One evening -- I think it was June # -- Lester dropped around for sherry and chess. Hadn't seen him in quite a while, and haven't since. There is a moderate polio scare this summer and it keeps him on the jump. The angel retired behind some books on an upper shelf -- I'm afraid it was dusty -- and had fun with our chess. She had a fair view of your bald spot, Lester. Later she remarked that she liked your looks, but can't you do something about that weight? She suggested an odd expedient, which I believe has occurred to your medical self from time to time -- eating less. Maybe she shouldn't have done what she did with those chess games. Nothing more than my usual blundering happened until after my first ten moves; by that time I suppose she had absorbed the principles, and she took over. I was not fully aware of it until I saw you looking like a boiled duck. I had imagined my astonishing moves were the result of my own damn cleverness. to that evening. You've played in stiff amateur tournaments; you know your own abilities and you know mine. Ask yourself whether I could have done anything like that without help. I tell you again I didn't study the game in the interval when you weren't here. I've never even had a chess book in the library, and if I had, no amount of study would take me into your class. I haven't that sort of mentality; just your humble sparring partner, and I've enjoyed it on that basis, as you might enjoy watching a prima donna surgeon pull off some miracle you wouldn't dream of attempting yourself. Even if your game had been away below par that evening, and I don't think it was, I could never have pinned your ears back three times running, without help. That evening you were a long way out of your class, that's all. I couldn't tell you anything about it at the time -- she was clear on that point -- so I could only bumble and preen myself and leave you mystified. But she wants me to write anything I choose in this journal, and somehow, Lester, I think you may find the next few decades pretty interesting. You're still young, some ten years younger than I. I think you'll see many things that I wish I might see come to pass -- or I would so wish if I were not convinced that my choice was the right one. Most of those new events will not be spectacular. I'd guess. Many of the turns to a better way will hardly be recognized at the time for what they are, by you or anyone else. Obviously, our nature being what it is, we shall not change overnight. To hope for that would be as absurd as it is to imagine that any formula, ideology, . theory of social pattern can bring us into Utopia. As I see it, Lester -- and I think your consulting room would have told you the same even if your own intuition were not enough -- there is only one battle of importance: Armageddon. And Armageddon field is within each individual. At the moment I believe I am the happiest man who ever lived. July # A LL but the last ten years arc now given away. The physical fatigue, though still pleasant, is quite overwhelming. I am not troubled by the weeds in my garden patch -- merely a different sort of flowers where I had planned something else. An hour ago she brought me the seed of a blown dandelion, to show me how lovely it was. I don't suppose I had ever noticed. I hope whoever Lakes over this place will bring it back to farming; they say the ten acres below the house used to be good potato land, nice early ground. It is delightful to sit in the sun, as if I were old. After thumbing over earlier entries in this journal, I see I have often felt quite bitter toward my own kind. I deduce that I must have been a lonely man, with much of the loneliness self-imposed. A great part of my bitterness must have been no more than one ugly by-product of a life spent too much apart. Some of it doubtless came from objective causes, yet I don't believe I ever had more cause than any moderately intelligent man who would like to see his world a pleasanter place than it has been. My angel tells me that the scar on my back is due to an injury received in some early stage of the war that still goes on. 'Ihat could have soured me, perhaps. It's all right; it's in the record. She is racing with a hummingbird -- holding back, I think, to give the swift little green fluff a break. I have already indicated my ring is to be yours. I don't want to tell you what I have discovered of its properties, for fear .it might not give you the same pleasure and interest that it has given me. Of course, like any spot of shifting light and color, it is an aid to selfhypnosis. It is more, much more than that, but -- find out for your self, at some time when you are I a little protected from everyday distractions. I know it can't harm you, because I know its source. By the way, I wish you would convey to my publishers my request that they either discontinue printing my Introductory Biology or else bring out a new edition revised in accordance with some notes you will find in the top left drawer of my library desk. I glanced through that book after my angel assured me that I wrote it, and I was amazed. However, I'm afraid my notes are messy -- I call them mine by a poetic license -- and they may be too advanced for the present day, though the revision is mainly a matter of leaving out certain generalities that aren't so. Use your best judgment. It's a very minor textbook, and the thing isn't too important. A last wriggle of my vanishing personal vanity. July # It was given to me by that remaining grown-up, at the end of a wonderful visit, when he and six of those nine other children came to see me. It was last night, I think -- yes, must have been. First there was a murmur of wings above the house; my angel flew in laughing. Then they were here, all about me, full of gaiety and colored fire, showing off in every way they knew would please me. Each one had something graceful and friendly to say to me. One brought me a moving image of the St. Lawrence seen at morning from half a mile up -- clouds, eagles -- now how could he know that would delight me so much ? And each one thanked me for what I had done. But it's been so easy! And at the end the old one -- his skin is quite black, and his down is white and gray -- gave the remembered image of a two-moon night. He saw it some sixty years ago. I have not even considered making an effort to describe it. My fingers will not hold this pencil much longer tonight. Oh, soaring buildings of white and amber, untroubled countryside, silver on curling rivers, a glimpse of open sea. A moon rising in clarity, another setting in a wreath of cloud, between them a wide wandering of unfamiliar stars. Here and there the angels, live in such night. No, I cannot describe anything like that. But you human kindred of mine, I can do something better. I can tell you that this two-moon night, glorious as it was, was no more beautiful than a night under a single moon on this ancient and familiar Earth might be -- if you will imagine that human evil has been cleared away, and that our own people have started at last on the greatest of all explorations, themselves. July # away but the memory of the time that has passed since the angel came. I am to rest as long as I wish, write whatever I want. Then I shall get myself over to the bed and lie down as if for sleep. She tells me that I can keep my eyes open; she will close them for me when I no longer see her. I remain convinced that our human case is hopeful. I feel sure that in only a few thousand years we may be able to perform some of the simpler preparatory tasks, such as casting out evil and loving our neighbors. And if that should prove to be so, who can doubt that in anless, we might be only a little lower than the angels?    generally known, the original of the Banner man Journal as said to have been in the possession of Dr. Lester Morse at the time of the latter's disappearance In #, and that disappearance has remained an unsolved mystery to the present day. McCarran is known to have visited Capt. Garrison Blaine in October, #, but no record remains of that visit. Capt. Blaine appears to have been a bachelor who lived alone. He was killed in line of duty, December, #. McCarran is believed not to have written about nor discussed the Bannerman affair with anyone else. It is almost certain that he himself removed the extract and related papers from the files -- unofficially, it would seem -- when he severed #. At any rate, they were found among his effects after his assassination, and were released to the public, considerably later, by Mrs. McCarran. ,The following memorandum was originally attached to the extract from the Bannerman Journal. It carries tire McCarran initialing. Aug. #, #I The original letter of complaint written by Stephen Clyde, M.D., and mentioned in the accompanying letter of Captain Blaine, has unfortunately been lost, owing perhaps to an error in filing. Personnel presumed responsible have been instructed not to allow such error to be repeated except if, as andor when necessary. C.McC On the margin of this memorandum there was a penciled notation, later erased. Iodine vapor has been used to bring out the unmistakable McCarran script. The notation read in part as follows: Far be it from a McC. to lose bis job except if. as and or -- the rest is undecipherable, except for a terminal word which is reg ret tably. unpa r I i amenta ry.    On the afternoon of July #, #, acting on what I am obliged to describe as an unexpected impulse, I drove out to the country for the purpose of calling on my friend Dr. David Bannerman. I had not seen him nor had word from him since the evening of June # of this year, #. and hearing no response, I went upstairs to his bedroom and found him dead. From superficial indications I judged that death must have taken place during the previous night. He was lying on his bed on his left side, comfortably disposed as if for sleep, but fully dressed, with a fresh shirt and clean summer slacks. His 'eyes and mouth were closed, and there was no trace of the disorder to be expected at even the easiest death. sumed, soon as I had determined the absence of breath and heartbeat and noted the chill of the body, that some neighbor must have already found him, performed these simple rites of respect for him, and probably notified a local physician or other responsible person. I therefore waited, Dr. Bannerman had no telephone, expecting that someone would soon call. Dr. Bannerman's journal was on a table near his bed, open to that page on which he had written a codicil to his will. I read that part. Later, while I was waiting for others to come, I read the remainder of the journal, as he apparently wished me to do. The ring he mentions was on the fifth finger of his left hand, and it is now in my possession. When writing that codicil, Dr. Bannerman must have overlooked or forgotten the fact that in his formal will, written some months earlier, he had appointed me executor. If there are legal technicalities involved, I shall be pleased to cooperate fully with the proper authorities. The ring, however, will remain in my keeping, since that was Dr. Banncrman's expressed wish, and I am not prepared to offer it for examination or discussion under any circumstances. The notes for a revision of one of his textbooks were in his desk, as indicated in die journal. They are by no means "messy," nor arc they particularly revolutionary except in so far as he wished to rephrase, as theory or hypothesis, certain statements which I would have regarded as axiomatic. This is not my field, and I am not competent to judge. I shall take up the matter with his publishers at the earliest opportunity. So far as I can determine, and bearing in mind the results of the autopsy performed by Stephen Clyde, M.D., the death of Dr. David Bannerman was not inconsistent with the presence of an embolism of some type not distinguishable on post mortem. I have so stated on the certificate of death. I am compelled to add one other item of medical opinion for what it may be worth: I am not a psychiatrist, but, owing to the demands of general practise, I have found it advisable to keep as up to date as possible with current findings and opinion in this branch of medicine. Dr. Bannerman possessed, in my opinion, emotional and intellectual stability he never did. No new edition of "Introductory Biology" was ever brought out, and the textbook has been out of print since #. to a higher degree than anyone else of comparable intelligence in the entire field of my acquaintance, personal and professional. I F IT is suggested that he was suffering from a hallucinatory psychosis, I can only say that it must have been of a type quite outside my experience and not described, so far as I know, anywhere in the literature of psychopathologyDr. Bannerman's house, on the afternoon of July #, was in good order. Near the open, unscreened window of his bedroom there was a coverless shoebox with a folded silk scarf in the bottom. I found no pillow such as Dr. Bannerman describes in the journal, but observed that a small section had been cut from the scarf. In this box, and near it, there was a peculiar fragrance, faint, aromatic, very sweet, such as I have never encountered before and therefore cannot describe. It may or may not have any bearing on the case that, while I remained in his house that afternoon, I felt no sense of grief or personal loss, although Dr. Bannerman had been a loved and honored friend for a number of years. I merely had, and have, a conviction that after the completion of some very great undertaking, he had found peace. The ring he bequeathed to me has confirmed that. by Wilier by Willy Ley Short stories and article depend upon the space available. These two short stories have been squeezed out of previous issues, so they will be qiven top priority, unless, of course, they don't fit. Ray Bradbury. Doubleday  Co., New York, N. Y., #. # pages, #. the bottle. Besides writing some of the best short stories of any type being turned out in America today, Bradbury also (for which we may be particularly thankful) knows his own lemons and refuses to reprint them. As a result, we have an absolute must for every lover of science fiction, and also for those who want good short story writing, no matter what its genre. This is a better book than The Martian Chronicles , which, because of its limited subject, had a tendency to tire. The new volume, on the other hand, is as varied as a rainbow. Horror stories to chill the blood -- has anything more frightening ever been written than "Kaleidoscope" or "The Fox and the Forest," or anything as bitter and shuddery as "The Concrete Mixer?" Uncomfortable humor with a rapier twist, like "Marionettes, Inc." Trenchant stories with thoughtbombs built in like "The Other Foot," that very tough sequel to "Way in the Middle of the Air" in The Martian Chronicles, or like "The Fire Balloons," which you must read to believe! According to the record of copyright notices indicating previous magazine publication, some of the best of these stories have never before appeared in print. This is true of "The Other Foot," and of ancalled "No Particular Night or Morning." These originals alone would make the book a buy for anyone with a library budget. It is true that there are those who don't go for Bradbury. They won't like this book any better than anything else he has done, for it bears all the stigmata of his socalled "eccentricities," For most readers, however, this is in its favor -- for it means that here is someone whose prose is not die-cut like the styles of many of our modern crop of fiction writers, no matter what their subject. Bradbury is original, he is moving, he is colorful, he is rich in ideas. I don't know what else to ask of a writer of science fiction or anything else. Edward E. Smith , Pb.D. F.F.F. Publishers, Brooklyn, N. Y #. # pages, #. page of which auctorial credit is shared with Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby (about whom I, for one, would like to know more) , was the first venture of the greatest of all the old-time space opera boys, the creator of Space Hounds of the I.P.C., The Grey Len smart , and other equally famed and equally fancy derringdoes of the space lanes. The jacket blurb says The Skylark of Space was written before the first World War, though the earliest copyright date on the back of the' title page is #. Further, according to this copyright page, the first book edition came out in #, the second in #, and the third (this one) in #. It seems that the early printings by another publisher were extremely small, so Julius Unger, who is hiding behind that "F.F.F." pseudonym, decided there still was a market for the book. This tale is the sort of thing that only insatiable fans will enjoy, being, unlike E.E.'s later opera, uncommonly amateur and awkward -- an excellent example of the truism that an author's first work usually deserves the wastebasket more than it does publication. There is, it is true, some interesting pseudo-science, including stuff on atomic power which, if it was originally written as it now appears, came pretty close to some of the actual facts. But the Rover Boy style is just a little too ripe for these latter-day eyes, which have become accustomed to more genuine writing, and the rest of the pseudo-science is so much of the gee-whiz school that it hurts a little to read -- like going through Sunday supplements. And, to continue the mixed metaphor, my ears are still red from the attempts at romance which Dr. Smith and his lady collaborator perpetrated in this tale. The general level of the story can best be indicated, perhaps, by the fact that the strongest oath these manly characters ever indulge in is "Great Cat!" On the other hand, your honest reporter has to state that, despite all these cavils, he read the tale practically at a sitting (skipping ruthlessly, it must be added) since the plot docs move -- and, for the last half of the book, all over the Galaxy, at that... Plenty of action, if you pass up the goo and forget all about literary techniques as you're reading. Dubois. Doubleday  Co., New York, N. Y., #. # pages, #. fiction by a lady who is credited with nearly twenty mystery stories. Somehow one could wish that she had stayed with her first love, for she doesn't do too well by us in this attempt. The story features an all-out atomic attack on the United States by the Russians, nearly complete destruction of all our cities, a callous and cruel dictatorship by the Communist masters, and their eventual defeat through the use of a mysterious new weapon, Solution T-#. I will not tip the author's hand as to the nature of this solution -- which is telegraphed from the earlier parts of the book -- except to hint that something very much like it was used with a reverse twist by John D. MacDonald in Astounding less than a year ago. There is nothing particularly unsatisfactory about Miss DuBois' writing; it is as smooth and slick as soft butter. The idea of the 'United States being conquered by a sneak Communist attack is a usable one also, in view of the temper of today's thinking inthis country, although somehow science fiction seems to lose much of its zing when it is put to political use. But the characterizations, both of the Americans and the Russians, are so astonishingly crude, and the involutions of the plot are so completely unreal and coincidental, that the book becomes a job to finish. Miss DuBois' story inevitably forces comparison with the only other science fiction by a woman that Doubleday has published -- Judith Merril's Shadow on the Hearth. This too was the story of an atom bombing, this time of New York alone, but what a difference! Miss Merril's book had no contrived plot, and the writing was not as slick as is Miss DuBois'. But her story was completely real, completely believable; it was peopled with painfully real and believable people. If I have to choose, I'll take good characterizations and a realistically rendered situation, and leave the melodrama and the buttery prose for others to read. Don't Live in It was a ghastly accident: the most perfect civilization in all history was threatened -- and so were its long-dead sacred founders! the Past Illustrated by I B ernard Francois had a clear and sustained feeling that there ought not to be days like this. Four of his wife's cousins from Callisto had descended upon him that morning at the, ungodly hour of ten o'clock (they required special diets and were obscenely fat); he had been seated below a sub-assistant minister of finance at the High Commissioner's dinner last night, a manifest insult; the power beam had failed twice on his way into the office, over Sancisco and over the California Garbage Conversion Area; and he had a splitting headache. Vargas was a youngish man with large, ruddy features now contorted into a heavy scowl. He sat half leaning across his desk, chin on his fist, moodily thrusting folded sheets of metal fiber into the automatic letter-opener. Abruptly the ceiling light dimmed and something swatted him on the rump three times in machinegun tempo, jarring him all the way iip his spine. Vargas found himself canted across his desk with his head : n an overturned flower vase. The lights flickered again, went out altogether; and in the brief interval before they went on again a fourth shock, more violent than the others, lifted Vargas all the way across his desk and onto the thick body-temperature carpet. with rage. It was at this moment that his assistant, Knut Everett Roku LaSalle Choong, chose to burst into the room. Choong was just as disheveled as his superior. He tripped over the doorsill, lurched wildly and brought up against Vargas' totem post, saving himself by clutching a white silk banner which carried the names and honors of two hundred and fiftynine of Vargas' most distinguished ancestors. Hanging dramatically from the banner, Choong bleated, "Chief! The' pipelines have busted!" Vargas' face, which had been flushed a moment before, took on a blotchy appearance. '"What, all of them?" lie whispered hoarsely. "All," said Choong tragically. "We're right over a fault, you know. The quake must ' have snapped the pipelines like -- like pipestems." Vargas scrambled up and clutched the other man by the slack of his sunflower-colored robe. "Did they cut transmission?" he demanded. "Yes, but -- " "How long before the flow stopped?" "About two seconds, chief. Possibly a little more. I didn't stop to get the meter readings -- " "Don't interrupt me!" said Vargas in a restrained shout. He took a firmer grip and brought his popeyed face close to Choong. "What was being transmitted?" "Flangs," said the assistant in a barely audible voice. He gulped. "Tweedledums. Collapsed flooring. Argo paste. Rozzcrs. And -- and -- " Vargas had been puffing heavily. Now he held his breath for an instant. "Well?" "And mangels," said Choong in terror. "Three pipes of mangels." Vargas collapsed on the floor and looked at Choong through his fingers. "Oh, Great Blodgett, no!" "Yes." "Mangels!" Bedlam was growing in the outer offices. There were running footsteps, shouts, shrieks of dismay. "Tweedledums are bad enough," said Vargas. "But mangels! We'll be excommunicated. They'll hang our totems upside down." A red-faced man appeared in the doorway. His expression was not pleasant. Vargas scrambled to his feet and both he and Choong stood at attention. "Two and five-sevenths seconds," the red-faced man remarked. "Not a very good response for trained monitors, is it? Too much Rhine beer the night before, perhaps? Or reading a tape -- composing poetry? Catching a little nap? Or was it -- ?" He stopped, wincing, and looked at a white-metal doughnut strapped to his right wrist, above his ruffled sleeve. A tiny voice spoke at some length; Vargas could only catch the words "jackass" and "cretin." "Yes, sir," said the red-faced man, whose 'name, for the record, was Wallace Hyacinth Manuel Chiang Llewellyn. He barked at Vargas, ' Turn on the tri-D!" Vargas stumbled over to his desk and obeyed. A five foot disc set into a low platform on his right glowed faintly, sparked and then spat a vertical stream of color. The image steadied and became the all too convincing three-dimensional replica of a portly man with a bulbous nose and long gray hair. "Enlarge your image!" it said sharply. Vargas jumped a foot and tremblingly adjusted the controls on his desk. The portly man frowned at them and said, "I happen to be Representative John Hsi BrightFeather Wilson Woodcock, Chairman of the Committee to Investigate the San Juaquin Disaster, which was formed in emergency session five months ago. Now, are you all of the scoundrels who were immediately responsible for this outrageous dereliction of duty? If not, get the rest of 'em in here. We'll get to the bottom of this if it's the last -- " T HE Chief Executive, His Honor Ibrahim L. Btandu Eriksson Dickey, frowned an executive frown. "Now let me get this straight," he said. "The goods are put into one end of the tube and they are turned into some kind of temporal flow?" "That's it approximately, Your Honor." Representative Rowland Mokai Dejonge Baruch Schemkov, Chairman of the Plenary Committee which had replaced Representative Woodcock's Emergency Committee (Woodcock having been impeached) glanced at a few notes in his palm. He had briefed himself thoroughly. "In transit, Your Honor, the goods are in a special state of matter, in which they are partially out of our frame of spacio-temporal reference, and are carried along by the universal drift, thus apparently bypassing the laws of inertia and conservation of energy. We apply no force once they enter the tube; that's why tube transport is so cheap. "Moreover, the size and shape of the goods to be transported make no difference, since the spacial coordinates are not fixed with reference to normal space. You might say that the net result is the same as if you had melted everything down to a kind of thin mush. This, of course, is done before the shipment is fed into the pipelines. I would not insult Your Honor's intelligence by explaining the method by which the shipments are moved out of our space-time, for it is too well known to need explaining. "There is just enough contact between the two matter states so that the material being transported will not go through a solid of any thickness. In other words, we can lead the shipments anywhere in the world through a tube, even a very small one -- the tubes we use are three-eighths inches in width. At the end of the tube, the expansion of the material releases it from the special state and it comes out in its original form, ready to be processed, stored, consumed or whatever." "I see," commented the Chief. "That's all very well, Representative, but what I want to know is this. Just why were we caught with our robes up in this situation?" Schemkov cleared his throat. 'There appears," he admitted, "to have been some theoretical possibility of this happening all along. I have several abstracts, which I will turn over to your office, of articles and scientific papers in which reference is made to the possibility. It -- " T HE Chief looked down his long nose in a manner which suggested that the Representative was not quite human. He said slowly and earnestly, "And this possibility was given no consideration when the transport tubes were built? Is that it?" Representative Schemkov had been a member of the Subcommittee to Pass on Recommendations for the Erection of Chang-Wiley Transport Tubes, and he quaked in his sandals. "No safeguard was possible, Your Honor. What occurred was that the rupture in the lines took place at exactly the instant when that section of the planet was revolving directly opposite the line of universal drift -- an event which astronomers assure me is very rare -- and, in addition, I understand that the temporal displacement at that moment was exceptionally great. Under these conditions, the material released from the end of the tube did not reform normally, but was carried some distance back along the temporal line -- " "How far back? I mean exactly, not a guess." "The mathematicians are still working on that. Your Honor, and the best they can say now is that il was probably somewhere between the mid-Twentieth Century and the late Twenty-First. However, there is a strong possibility that none of the material reached any enclosed space which would attract . it, and that it may all have been dissipated harmlessly in the form of incongruent molecules." "But those materials," said the Chief grimly, "included what?" "Flangs," said Representative Schemkov, "and tweedledums, and collapsed flooring, and argo paste -- " "And mangels," added the Chief. "Isn't that correct?" "Yes, Your Honor." "And you tell me that there is a possibility that these things did not suddenly appear in the homes and business places of persons of Blodgett's own time -- " he touched his forelock, and Schemkov automatically did the same -- "causing Blodgett knows how many neuroses, how many psychoses, how many lost contracts, how many broken homes -- ' ' "But, Your Honor -- " " -- and do you realize that if these things do appear in that era, the total course of our civilization might be altered? That we might today become a world of many warring nations instead of one? Of many races instead of one blended humanity? That the great man to whom we owe all this, Blodgett himself, might be -- " he lowered his voice in horror -- "destroyed by your carelessness? Do you realize that, Representative?" Even the Chief was stunned by his own frightening suggestion, while Schemkov felt terror climbing his spine. "No Blodgett?" Schemkov whispered. "You're -- you're just saying that to scare me. It isn't -- possible." The Chief's face was rigid with fear. "It is. Blodgett was the greatest of our Sacred Ancestors, but he was superhuman in a human way, not supernatural. With all those ghastly things loose in his era, and -- and mangels, especially..."  "Destroying any of our other Sacred Ancestors would be unthinkable enough," said Schemkov. "Biit Blodgett himself -- !" "This wonderful civilization he constructed entirely by the might of his incredible mind," the Chief added bitterly. "Gone." "I'd have myself ritually beheaded," said Schemkov, "rather than live in any civilization Blodgett did not create." "Representative, the men responsible for this catastrophe are going to be sorry they were ever born into the public service. We're going to get to the bottom of this, and when we do -- "Lito," said the square man in the gray diamond-dusted robe with a non-objective dragon. He made a triangle with his hands on the desk-top. "The kick went all the way upstairs and now it's come all the way down again. Everybody in fifteen echelons has a sore tail, the blame has been passed around, and now you're it. That's all." Ronald Mao JeanJacques von Hochbein Mazurin wore a slightly #! stunned expression on his normally cheerful, pug-nosed face. The face, up to now, had been his fortune; it bore a slight but perceptible resemblance to that of Blodgett, the Father of the World, as he appeared in early prints and paintings. Mazurin had learned to emphasize the resemblance by assuming a soulful look, once he discovered that it usually earned him the juicier and Jess messy jobs in the Bureau. He said, "Now wait a minute. How do they know they can get me to the right time line with this new gimmick of theirs? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If I'm in it, that's a new line, isn't it? I mean -- " "I know what you mean," said the square man. "Every displacement moves the observer to a new time line. But remember, you're not required to do anything once you get there; all you have to do is see what happened. As I understand it, you won't be attached to that time line at all; you'll just be partially in it, the same way stuff in a transport tube is partially in this line. You can't possibly affect anything that happens there. Therefore, from a mathematical point of view, you're not in it at all. You'll be able to see, because light quanta have binding extensions on either side of the plenum-line proper, but you can't influence anything that happens there." Mazurin was feeling uncomfortable. "How do I get back?" "Don't worry," said the square man impatiently. "You'll get back all right. You'll be at the end of a pencil of temporal energy all the time. That's what will be holding you in the partly there state. After a few days, they'll send an impulse along it to bring you back. You'll have enough time to do the job properly, because if any of that stuff did come out where it would menace our Sacred Ancestors, it wouldn't have come out all at the same time or the same place. A difference of micro-seconds here could mean hours or days there."L pened to our civilization yet," Mazurin said. "The things probably haven't landed." "It could be," the square man agreed worriedly. "Or it might not happen on this time line at all -- the results of any change in the past could leave this one alone and affect only alternate futures." "Do you really think it might?" asked Mazurin hopefully. "No. Or maybe. How in hell would I know? All I'm supposed to discuss with you is sending you back to the past, to the time of Blodgett -- " They touched their forelocks reverently -- "At the end of a pencil of temporal energy, and that it'll bring you back okay in a few days." "Sounds like deep-sea diving at the end of a piece of string," said Mazurin. "What happens if the power fails, or the contact is broken some other way?" "Then I suppose you'd be stuck in that line -- which would, of course, immediately become another line. Not that it matters. But you wouldn't be too badly off i that did happen. I'd say. That was a pretty interesting period, not too uncivilized, and you'd see a lot of action." "Umm," said Mazurin. He rapidly calculated his chances of getting another job if he were disIntelligence Bureau -- zero. "All right. I'm your boy." The square man came around the desk and patted his shoulder with a hand like a jeweled bunch of sausages. "Good man," he said emotionally. "I knew you'd come through, the Bureau knows how to pick 'em. Get your affairs wound up and report to the Physics Bureau at twelve o'clock tomorrow." white-tiled laboratory ten minutes late, with traces of lipstick still adhering to his right ear and exuding an enviable odor of good rice wine. In the interests of truth, it must be stated that he did not entirely absorb all the briefing he received before he was thrust unceremoniously into the temporal projection machine. He retained a definite impression of the machine itself, which was of an unpleasant hollow-cube shape and emitted a disquieting hum, together witli a sharp smell of ozone. He recollected that, once arrived at his destination, he would be able to walk about on any available surface, but unable to move any solid object or enter into any sort of communication with the inhabitants. The breathing apparatus strapped over his mouth and nose was reminder enough that lie was dependent upon his own air supply. He recalled being asked if he had been checked out in lip reading and Twentieth Century English, and of replying, with hurt dignity, that he most certainly had. Then there was some more talk, during which he had been distracted by a tendency of his knees to swivel sharply, and then he had been grasped by the nape of the neck and his heels and slung into the machine. It was a Lysenko-begotten silly business, altogether. He seemed to be sitting now on nothing in particular, in the middle of a bright blue sky with clouds in it, while an obviously spurious landscape (flat, with antique square houses and a lot of palm trees, the whole being tilted at a forty-five degree angle) gently rose toward him. He watched this process with growing disapproval until the scene grew to full size and he bumped gently against a sidewalk which felt like sponge rubber. He stood up and soared some twenty feet into the air, coming down in an approximately upright position. He looked around him, breathing heavily. His head was clearing, and he didn't like it. What had seemed idle nonsense a few moments ago was now assuming the aspect of an incredible reality...The buildings around him were angular and massive, with an appalling quantity of extremely ugly embellishments in the way of glass bricks, chromium statues, walls of enormous windows. The people were all either walking or driving antique four-wheeled vehicles, and most of them were dressed in garments constructed on a curious cylinder principle, also with a great deal of angular detail work. This period, he recalled, had been addicted to what its denizens termed "the functional" in design. Not a curved line anywhere. Culturally, this was a dismal era, yet being in it gave Mazurin a holy thrill. There was practically no doubt about it -- Blodgett himself was alive at this actual moment ! Directly in front of Mazurin, the street widened into a sort of village square, in the center of which a wooden platform was erected. A man in black stood on this platform, evidently making a speech to a small crowd assembled around him. Mazurin saw several instruments which were evidently crude vision cameras. He watched the speaker's lips, and made out a few phrases: "... the principles of loyalty and obedience to which we arc all dedicated... one world, one people, one leader, one glorious ideal... Interested, he walked closer. A gentleman approaching the crowd on a tangential course strode into him before he had time to get out of the way, and Mazurin found himself violently propelled several yards away, to bounce from still another moving spectator and come to rest finally sprawled on the pavement. He got up determinedly, soaring as before, and this time leaped squarely into the thick of the crowd before any other outriders could get at him. The crowd was closepacked, and he stood with very little difficulty on their heads. Now he was near enough to read the speaker's lips easily, and he followed the speech with attention. least hallowed day, we must dedicate ourselves in our hearts to the eternal principles for which so many brave men and women died. For if we do, those men and women are not ten years dead, but gloriously living in the eternal atmosphere of our truth. If we do this, the world did not end for them on that terrible day, August the seventeenth, nineteen eighty-one. The world will never end for them and for ourselves!" The speaker paused. "Citizens of the world, a salute to the heroes of the World State!" A man to the right of the speaker's platform, dressed in an exceedingly ugly green uniform, raised a brass instrument to his lips and blew mightily on it. Mazurin leaped nimbly as the citizens on whom he stood took off their hats and bowed their heads. The musician got through with whatever sounds he had been producing, and a row of similarly dressed men behind him raised antique rapid-fire rifles to their shoulders, aiming diagonally upward. Mazurin, directly in the line of fire, automatically threw himself flat, but he was still unused to his new condition and the motion sent him in a lazy parabola five feet over the crowd's heads. The guns fired in unison, but a peculiar thing happened. From three-quarters of them leaped streaks of fire; from the other quarter issued something else entirely. At the end of each barrel, a dark blue bubble appeared. The bubbles swelled rapidly, more and more of them extruding, until they became ovoids three feet long and two feet wide, dotted with stumpy tentacles. Then they dropped out of Mazurin' s vision, but he could judge their activity by the way the crowd scattered. Mazurin leaped nimbly and watched the square empty itself beneath him. The uniformed men broke ranks and fled, some dropping their guns. The crowd was spreading out as quickly as those in the center could force the others back. In the cleared space, the blue ovoids were leaping like frogs, pausing and leaping again. At each pause, a toothless mouth gaped, and Mazurin could almost hear the bass "Urk!" they emitted. Nobody was left on the speaker's platform except the speaker himself, who had misjudged his vault over the railing and got himself tangled in the large black-and-red flag which draped it. While Mazurin watched, one of the blue ovoids bounded onto the speaker's back, settled down and began contentedly munching his jacket. As he floated down, Mazurin took a notebook from his pocket and wrote: Tweedledums : probably pineap pieflavored ; very unripe and active; emerged xvithout damper controls and broke up large religious gathering, frightening approx. # persons. II washed and empty square, letting the full enormity of the scene he had just witnessed seep into him. After a while he took out his notebook again and tried to calculate the probable number of surviving descendants, in his own world, of the five hundred people who had just been introduced to tweedledums. He had got up to five generations, and reached the utterly discouraging figure of #, when he gave up. He shuddered. He was not a devout man by nature, but he had had the usual training as a child, and the idea of so much as being disrespectful to ancestors -- much less confronting them unexpectedly with a troop of tweedledums ! -- made him cringe as if he had touched something unclean. And the other things had still to be accounted for: the rozzers, the collapsed flooring, the argo paste, the -- No. It was better not to think of that. He got morosely to his feet and watched as the first of a long line of archaic ground-vehicles zoomed into the square and skidded to a stop. Green-uniformed men got out and ran off in all directions, till the square and the surrounding streets were covered with them. Presently a group of them came running back to the cars, carrying a tweedledum which was struggling furiously to escape. After a while they captured another one. I hope they get them all, Mazurin thought; but he doubted that they would. Free of the projected energy that ordinarily kept them quiescent, a live tweedledum was the most active and elusive artificial food product ever invented. They had been one of Mazurin's favorite dishes; but he suspected now, with a sliding lurch in his stomach, that he would never, never eat one again. Something else seemed to be going on at the far side of the square. Resignedly, he propelled himself that way. A large knot of the greenuniformed men had collected near a doorway to one of the square buildings and was slowly moving back toward the cars. Mazurin leaped onto the heads of the crowd for a better view, and, approaching the center of the group, found that the quarry was not tweedledums this time, but people. A young man and a girl, to be exact. They were staggering along with their heads down, pushed and dragged by many hands. As Mazurin watched, someone reached over someone else's arm and struck the girl in the face. horror; his second was bewilderment. He saw now that what his superior had described as an "interesting" era could only be painful to any person of normal sensibilities; for all of these people, without exception, were ancestors in one sense or another! And why were these officials, who were possibly ancestors, maltreating two young possible ancestors in this manner, instead of running down twccdlcdums as they had evidently been sent to do? Could it be that the boy and the girl were suspected of being responsible for the catastrophe? It was absurd, but the only explanation he could think of. He followed, soaring over the rooftops, as the car containing the two zoomed off again. He managed to keep in sight of the car, though it moved much too fast for him, and saw the two captives half-dragged, half-carried up the steps of a large, cubical black building. Once inside the building, however, he was lost in a maze of corridors full of hurrying, worriedlooking people. The place was three Stories tall above the ground, and ten stories below, and there were hundreds of separate offices and suites. It was not till a full hour later that he found them, in a enameled corridor, in the lowest level of all. If it weren't for the bruises and cuts on their faces, Mazurin thought, they would have been a handsome couple. The boy was tall and lean, with a dark, thoughtful face; the girl was neatly rounded and had a charming head of almostplatinum hair. They were sitting side by side on a hard, narrow bench that ran from wall to wall of their five-byfive cubicle. The harsh glare that illuminated them was hard on Mazurin's eyes; he put his polarized goggles on. They themselves had shut their eyes tight against the fierce light, and their heads were close together, their hands clasped. Mazurin watched their lips. The girl was saying, "We must be guilty, of course. I mean guilty of something." "Or they never would have arrested us," the young man finished after a pause. "Yes," said the girl. "They are always right. Always. So we must be guilty. And yet it's hard to see -- " "Hush, dear. It isn't for us to question what they do. Perhaps we have committed some crime without even being aware of it. Or maybe -- " "Yes?" "Well, maybe they arc just testing us, or -- or something." T HE girl's eyes opened for a second. "Oh, Rob, do you suppose that's it?" "It might be. Certainly we didn't cause any disturbance at the patriotic meeting that we know of." "But it's not for us to judge." "No." For some time, while he watched this conversation, Ma#urin had been increasingly aware that the two young people were doing something rather odd. It had to do with their hands. He stopped watching their lips altogether and concentrated on the hands. They were clasped loosely together on the bench between the two, half covered by the drape of the girl's flowered skirt. Between the boy's palms and the girl's, Mazurin could see a constant flicker of motion, fingers flashing back and forth, first hers, then his. Now this, thought Mazurin, was extremely interesting. Beyond a doubt, the two prisoners were communicating by means of some ancient form of the finger-code he had learned as a raw cadet in the Internal Security Commission. If he could only get closer, he was almost sure, he could read it... Cadenced footsteps came down the corridor. It was a white-robed attendant, flanked by two of the green-clad officials, each with a drawn missile gun. The attendant was carrying something in a white enamel tray, and in his other hand he had something that looked like the key to an old-fashioned mechanical lock. Clearly, they were going to open the young people's cell, to feed them, most probably. If he could slip in while they did it... Caution urged him back, curiosity drew him forward. There was no danger, he told himself. If the cell was opened once, it would be opened again, and he could get out. He made up his mind. The two guards stepped back, guns ready, as the attendant opened the door and stepped inside, depositing the tray -- which did, indeed, contain food of some sort -- on a shelf. As he stepped out again, Mazurin, lithe as a rozzer, squeezed in past him. Simultaneously, two things happened. The door shut with a clang. Mazurin topped to the metal floor under a totally unexpected access of weight. The two prisoners, the attendant, and the guard turned to stare at him with saucer eyes. if someone had slugged him from behind, the three men outside exploded into activity. The attendant fled with hoarse cries down the corridor, and the two guards threw themselves flat, aiming their curious weapons at Mazurin. The two people in the cell with him, he was vaguely aware, had moved as far away as they could get and were sitting in stricken silence. Mazurin said weakly, "Kamerad. Tovarich. Ami." Then it occurred to him that these men spoke English and, anyway, they apparently didn't intend to shoot. Not as long as he didn't move, at any rate. He shut up and tried to think. What the Blodgett had happened to him? The metal floor of the cell was hard and cold under his palms. He was here, all right, and not on the end of any pencil of temporal energy. It had happened when the cell door shut behind him. He looked at the door. It was a grid of stout chrome-plated bars, with an interval between the bars of about three centimeters. A nonsense phrase came into his mind, "Eve and Agrid," which meant nothing. It wasn't Eve and Agrkl; it was Eve and Adam. Eve and Agrid. Eve and Agrid. Aveandagrid -- Even a grid. Ma#urin shut his eyes and groaned. He opened them again when one of the guards made a warning sort of noise, and stared miserably at the limited vista before him. "Above all," one of the technicians had said, "don't get yourself completely surrounded by metal, even a grid. It will break the temporal beam and you'll be marooned there..." Marooned. Stuck with a lot of irrational people in a barbaric century. In a cell, at that. Under suspicious circumstances. He thought about it gloomily for a few minutes before, being a naturally cheerful young man, he tried to find the brighter side of it. Even then, the best he could do was, Well, things can't get any worse, and Blodgett himself is alive right at this moment. Running footsteps approached down the corridor, and a squadron of the green-uniformed men hove into view. Two of them had a thing on a wheeled tripod that looked as if it were capable of blowing out the side of a building. The rest spread out with drawn hand-guns. The two on the floor got up, saluted and joined the? semi-circle. "Stand up!" said one who seemed to be in command. Mazurin obeyed with alacrity. "Remove that mask! Put your hands behind your head! Face the wall !" When he had done all that, the cell door opened, someone took two swift strides inside, and then colored lights detonated inside Mazurin's head. He couldn't have been entirely out, because when he came to he was already thinking, Very efficient police methods. They didn't take man would have handled it... H IS head ached abominably, and his hands and feet seemed swollen. Green-trousered legs were scissoring back and forth in front of his eyes, and the gray concrete floor was moving rapidly backward under him. He was, he realized. trussed up like a rozzer, being dragged down the corridor. His head cleared a little and he glanced to either side. The boy and the girl were in the party, in approximately the same condition as himself. They reached an elevator, and Mazur in got a view of its scuffed metal floor before they carried him Out of it again. More corridor, black-tiled this time. Several turns. Then a doorway with an ebony sill, followed by flooring of some brown composition, probably a primitive pressed fiber. Finally he was set upright against a slender metal post and manacled there. The boy and girl were similarly disposed of to his right. A round man in the green uniform stalked quickly in and stared at Mazurin. His little blue eyes darted quickly from Mazurin's cloth-of-platinum robe to his face, then to the equipment hung at his belt. "All right," the round man said, "who are you?" Mazurin opened his mouth, then shut it again. Tell the truth? Oh, no. His training as a law officer told him exactly what would happen to him if he did. But what lie could he invent that would save him the pain of being questioned? For he had no doubt that being questioned in this era would be painful, despite the rudimentary methods. The best thing, he decided, was to say nothing. He tried it. The round man nodded decisively. "We'll see," he said. He turned as a second and a third officer strode in. All three stared at Mazurin, then turned and went to the far end of the room. Mazurin cculd read their lips easily. 'We knew they were cooking up something, but we had no reports that even hinted at anything like this." "I don't like the smell of it. Why would they materialize him in that cell and then let us capture him? Better get him out of the city as fast as possible." The round man got in the way at that point and Mazurin missed some of it. Then all of them turned to come back, and he caught one more sentence: "Put them all in one cell, and we may learn something." The three of them were detached from the pillars, efficiently trussed up again, and hurried outside to the waiting maw of a long black paddy-wagon. comfortable one. Not being able to talk under the eyes of the guards, Mazurin had plenty of time to think, and, by the time half an hour had gone by, he was shoulderdeep in gloom. He was roused out of himself when the car suddenly leaped six inches off the road, came down and leaped again. Looking back through the barred window, Mazurin could see that they had left the smooth concrete highway and were rushing down a cowpath of some kind. He and the two young people, all with their wrists manacled around a horizontal bar, bounced like popcorn. The two guards crooked their free arms around stanchions. Glancing down, Mazurin noted that the two kids were at it again with the fingers. He looked away miserably, then peeked back. It was his damned curiosity that had put him there; he might as well satisfy it while he could -- if he could. T HE code was the same, all right : five standard positions for each of the five fingers gave you twentyfive letters, and a clenched fist was "X" if you needed it. After a moment, he could read what the boy was saying without difficulty. "... in my shoe. If they give me a chance..." "Charlie, I'm scared!" "Only way. They'll get it all out of us otherwise. They know how to. Would have done it before now if he hadn't turned up." "Think he's one of ours?" "Can't be; we haven't anything like that. Don't understand it, but can't take any chances. He might be a spy." They meant him, Mazurin surmised. An interesting century, indeed. The girl again: "Okay. I guess it's worth it." It occurred to Mazurin, with an ineffable shock, that it must be poison Charlie had in his shoe, of all unsanitary places... They were going to kill themselves, to keep the authorities from putting them to question. Evidently, either a large and fanatical fraternal society, or else a revolutionary group; all kinds of secrets. But he couldn't let them commit suicide! Such a thing would be an ineradicable blot on the totems of their thousands of descendants. Even worse, he didn't know their surnames; they might be his own great-great-greatgreat grandparents. Worst of all, he suddenly realized, their suicide might blot more than totems -- himself, for example, right out of existence! He could alert the guards, of course, but the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. Questioning, this far back in history, would be sure not to be subtle. From one point of view it was perfectly sensible of them to prefer poison. Bump! If only the car would stop bouncing for a minute so he could think... The car abruptly outdid itself. Mazurin found himself whirling around the horizontal bar like a demented acrobat, while two green blurs that were the guards soared airily to the forward end of the compartment. Something struck Mazurin a dizzying blow on the head, the car bounced twice more and came to rest, while the echoes of a thunderous explosion died away in his ears. Ill T HE car was canted, half in a ditch. The guards, piled up against the forward wall, were not moving. Charlie and the girl were half stunned but conscious. Mazurin pulled futilely at his wristcuffs; they were too tight even for his trained hands to slip. Acrid fumes drifted into the car through a burst seam in the rear. Mazurin sniffed, and felt a cold dew break out on his forehead. "Oh, what is it?" asked the girl faintly. "Argo paste," said Mazurin, jittering. "It must have started coming out of the exhaust or the jet tube -- whatever these vehicles use. Oh, sacred name..." "What's argo paste?" demanded the youth groggily. "I never heard of the stuff." "I know you haven't," Mazurin said. He groaned. "They use it to bum through metal. It's supposed to come out into glazed vats. If only it's stopped -- " The fumes grew thicker. Mazurin looked out the barred rear window. "We're in a 'pool of it," he said. He turned. "Can you reach those two?" he asked the boy, nodding toward the two unconscious guards. The boy shook his head. "They haven't got our keys, anyhow. The guard up front with the driver has them. And he's knocked out, or he'd have been back here by now." The car lurched and settled. A section of the floor began smoking and dripped away, leaving a puckered gap through which they could sec a slowly heaving pool of gray paste. "Can you get your shoe off?" Mazurin asked suddenly. Charlie gave him a look full of suspicion. "Your shoe," Mazurin repeated with agonized patience. "Either one, it doesn't matter." He slipped his left foot out of his own elastictopped sandal, grasped it between his toes and held it up. "Mine's no good, you see? Too thin. Yours, is made of thick leather. Can you take it off?" "I don't get it," said Charlie, baffled. A heavier drift of choking fog came up through the vanishing floor. "But -- " He grunted, raising and twisting his leg until his manacled hands could reach the laces. "Here." He dropped the shoe and kicked it along to Mazurin. The car settled again. The pool of gray slime was now only a foot below them. Mazurin grasped the shoe with his toes, shifting his grip till it was as firm as he could manage. Then he held on like grim death and lowered the shoe through the gap in the floor, into the gray pool underneath. He brought it up quickly. There was a good gob of the stuff in the heel end of the shoe, about two inches from his own bare foot, but it was smoking furiously. In another second, the leather would be eaten through. He brought the shoe up, under the horizontal bar, over it again -- and dumped the paste on the bar just as the leather gave way. The metal smoked acridly and melted. Mazurin jettisoned the shoe, jammed his foot back into his own sandal, and peered at the bar through watering eyes. There was a hearty bite out of it, but a slender tongue of metal still united the two sections. "Now!-' said Mazurin. "Pull!" He braced his back and shoved at the bar till his muscles cracked, while Charlie, his face white with strain, pulled from his side. The car lurched once more, and the gray surface beneath leaped up to the level of the floorboards. Mazurin got his feet up on the bar and gave one last desperate shove. The metal gave a ping and moved a fraction of an inch. Through the smoke, Mazurin saw that the narrow part had snapped. He pushed some more, until the bar reluctantly bent a full three inches out of its original line. zurin held his wrists carefully away from the smouldering ends of the bar and slipped his arms free. "Nice work so far," said Charlie, "but what about the door?" He slid down to the end of the bench and moved his own arms free of the bar. The car tilted again as the girl moved to follow him. "Get back!" said Mazurin urgently. He motioned Charlie to the forward end of the car. "Balance the weight while she gets loose." He looked at the door that still barred their way to freedom. The lock, naturally, was about halfway up, better than two feet from the level of the argo paste. "Other shoe," he told Charlie. "Can't be helped." Charlie took it off and handed it down to him. The girl had got her arms free now and was leaning forward with the wristcuffs spread, evidently intending to touch the connecting piece to the smoking end of the bar. "No!" yelled Mazurin, and she started back. "Horrible stuff -- get a drop of it on your flesh, no way to stop it. Get back with Charlie, please." Squatting on the bench, he leaned forward precariously and dipped the second shoe into the seething gray mass. He got a bigger quantity this time, and he could control it better. He brought it up swiftly and carefully poured it over the lock, peering through the haze to make sure he had the right place. Smoke gushed out, and he couldn't see what was happening; but he pushed the door outward, and it gave. He stood up, put one foot on the opposite bench, and got the other wedged into the barred opening of the door. A push and a twist, and he was precariously balanced outside, directly over the center of the viscous, smoking pool. The car settled again under his weight. He scrambled to get both feet on top of the door, lunged and sprawled across the smooth top of the car. Panting, he got his feet under him again and flung himself forward, feeling the car tilt slightly under him as he moved. "All right," he called, "come out quickly!" He saw a motion beneath him, and turned as the door of the cab opened and a head thrust itself out. The head shook itself, dazedly. Mazurin, flat on his stomach, leaned out and slammed his manacled wrists apologetically under the man's ear. "Sorry, Sacred Ancestor," he said regretfully. "One must take sides, it would seem." T HE guard dived slowly and gracefully out of the open door and sprawled on the grass Outside. Mazurin, overbalanced by the blow, felt himself slipping, grabbed for a hand-hold, then let himself go. He landed on his shoulders, rolled quickly and stood up, poised to leap into the cab. But the second uniformed man was still hunched over with his flattened face pressed against the windshield. A trickle of blood trailed from his ear. Ma#urin looked up as Charlie appeared on top of the car, followed by the girl. "All secure here," he said. "You two all right?" "We're just fine," said Charlie grimly, "and we're certainly grateful to you for saving our lives. But would you mind giving us a hint of what this is all about?" He and the girl jumped down beside Mazurin, and Charlie gestured toward the dwindling rear end of the car. "Argo paste," he said. "And those things back in Welfare Square." "Tweedledums," Mazurin supplied helpfully. "Pineapple-flavored, I think." "Tweedledums," repeated the boy. "And you. What are you, the Mad Hatter? If so, what are you going to pull out of your hat next ?" "There's lots more," Mazurin said gloomily. "We haven't seen the flangs yet, or the collapsed flooring, or the rozzers, or -- " "Wait a minute," Charlie interrupted. "Just one minute. One thing at a time. What are flangs?" Mazurin searched his mind for the archaic word. Castards? Something like that. Ces, cis, cos -- "Custards," he said. "From the French flan, although I believe there was some influence dating from the Early Hollywood Era. They're mobile, but not as much as the tweedledums. They only creep around, and they like to crawl into any dark enclosed space they find. So you just leave them with a bunch of open pastry shells, and -- " Charlie interrupted again. "All right, I knew it was going to be something like that. I won't ask you what rozers are." "Like a very slender pig," said Mazurin promptly. "Fast as lightning. Some people like to race them." "And eat them." "Eat rozzers?" Mazurin exclaimed in disgust. "We'd sooner starve !" ing heavily. "All I want to know," he said, "is where all these things that nobody ever heard of came from, and that includes you." "Well, I'll tell you," said Mazurin reluctantly, "but I have a feeling you won't believe me." He squatted and began going through the pockets of the guard who lay on the greensward at their feet. "No," said Charlie, and gave him a push that sent him sprawling. Charlie knelt quickly and removed the guard's hand-gun from its holster. Backing up, he handed the gun to the girl and then went back to the guard. "Sorry, but I don't see how we can trust you." He found the guard's keys, stood up and held the gun trained on Mazurin while the girl unlocked his wristcuffs; then they traded while he unlocked hers. It seemed, Mazurin thought ruefully, that they had no present intention of unlocking his. "Can I get up now?" he asked mildly. "Yes," said Charlie. He gestured with the gun to their left, across an open field that ended at a wooded ridge. "We've got to get under cover." He glanced at the gun in his hand, then back at the smoking rear of the paddy-wagon. "What do you think, Eve?" "It would be nice to have it," the girl said regretfully, "but it's a sure tipoff." "Right," said Charlie, and he returned the gun to the guard's holster. Then he pulled the keys out of his pocket and replaced them as well. "Hey," objected Mazurin, "when do I get out of these things?" "Later -- maybe," said Charlie. "By the time anybody finds the car, there's a good chance that the whole rear end will be gone, and they'll figure we went with it. But not if we take anything from this s u y-" "They'll die if we leave them unconscious in this pool of argo paste!" Mazurin said, horrified. "What of it?" Charlie wanted to know. "You don't think they'd let us live long, do you?" Mazurin paused. "They wouldn't?" "Certainly not," said Eve. "That's how they stay in power -- kill off the opposition." "But I'm not the opposition," Mazurin denied. "Oh, no?" Charlie demanded threateningly, and Mazurin decided abruptly that he was. Charlie said, "You don't know how close you came to joining these stinkers." Eve started walking "Let's go. Someone may come along and ask why we're not helping our gallant lads out of danger." Mazurin in the lead. He felt a little sick. In his own time, he tried to tell himself, he'd seen men killed often enough for exactly similar reasons. But this wasn't his own time; this time he belonged to his Sacred Ancestors, some of them were being left to die in argo paste. He felt a wave of resentment against the two youngsters behind him, and then recoiled from that, too. They could be his ancestors. Now just what in the name of Blodgett could a man do in a situation like this? They pushed through a tangle of saplings and undergrowth for what seemed like several hours, until they reached a little stream. Eve sat down, gasping, and the other two followed suit. "It's getting too late to go much farther, anyway," said Charlie. He inspected his shoeless feet glumly, then turned to Mazurin. "All right," he said, "let's have your story, improbable or not." Mazurin told them, from the beginning. They listened in discouraging silence. Finally, "Is that all?" Charlie asked. "That's all," said Mazurin "What happens next I don't know, except that we'll probably run into the rozzers committing a nuisance in City Hall, or somebody triggering a section of collapsed flooring and getting knocked into the next canton, or -- " "What makes you think you're going to see any city hall?" asked Charlie ominously. "No reason, except that defiling a public building is one of the few supreme crimes I haven't been responsible for yet." "How's that again?" said Charlie, confused. "Don't you remember what he said about ancestor worship?" asked Eve. "It makes sense. He feels directly responsible for all these things that have been happening to people who, for all he knows, may be his own ancestors." She frowned at Mazurin, opened her mouth to speak again. "How -- " "Now wait a minute," Charlie burst out. "You're not assuming that he's telling the truth, are you ?" "You wait," she told him. Then, to Mazurin, "See if I've got this right. You come from about four centuries from now, and in your time the World State is an established fact. There never was any successful attempt to overthrow it. Is that right?" Mazurin nodded. Charlie snorted. "Well, if we fell for that, we'd simply knuckle under and let Blodgett's hoodlums have it all their own way." "Hoodlums?" Mazurin echoed, touching his forelock. "Our most Sacred of Ancestors!" Charlie peered at Mazurin puzzledly. "Is that what you're for, to convince us we can't win? It seems a little too simple-minded to deserve all this buildup." "You don't quite understand," he said. "This is a different time-line from the one I came from. It's different because I'm in it, here. Anything can happen now." Charlie looked more baffled than ever. "Listen," said Eve, "just suppose he is telling the plain truth. And as you said a minute ago, if the Worstas had all that new stuff -- materializing him in our cell, and those green things in the Square -- why would they waste it on a silly trick like this?" "All right," said Charlie. "What then?" "Then he might be able to help us win," said Eve. "Just for the theoretical interest of it -- suppose you could help us overthrow the Worstas, Mazurin, would you do it?" "The who?" "The Worstas -- the World Staters. Blodgett and his gang. You've seen the kind of tyrannical crew they are. All right, would you help us if you could?" "Well, no," said Mazurin honestly. "Why not?" "Because, for one thing, if I help you I hurt them, and vice versa. I couldn't help either side. It would be irreligious." Charlie stared at him contemptuously, and Mazurin felt his ears getting red. It did sound stuffy, at that. Why couldn't they have let him stay in his own environment, where a man could take his religion on sacred days and forget about it the rest of the time ? "There's another good reason," he said defensively. "You seem to forget that I come from the world that grew out of this one. Well, it's a pretty good world. It's peaceful; there hasn't been a war in more than three centuries. Nobody has to work hard, as a general rule. No more race or nationality problems -- everybody's interbred so much, as a result of the lowering of national barriers, that there's only one kind of people. Why should I want to change all that?" "No reason, maybe," said the girl, "but you can see why we want to change our world, can't you?" Mazurin thought about it. "No. It would change the fine world of my time -- the world that Blodgett -- " He touched his forelock -- "created by the might of his giant intellect." "Well, look," said the girl. "Ten years ago there was a world war, the ninth in sixty years. There was a worldwide organization that was fighting the war, h;ul been fighting against war since about nineteensixty. They had a lot of followers, on paper, but they weren't strong enough to do anything until the people finally got fed up. After all, it had got to the point where you'd have two or three months of peace after the armistice was signed, and then the whole bloody mess would start all Over again. straight downhill. That had been happening for a long time, but now it was happening so fast that you could see it happening. There was a spontaneous wave of revolt all through South America, where the fighting was going on at that time. It started with a French regiment that turned around and shot its officers. Then the Canadian regiment they were fighting did the same thing, and after that it spread too fast to figure out how the idea got around. "All the armies in South America sent delegates to a conference -- the conference of Acapulco -- and the Worstas put over their program. Then all the armies went home, kicked out their governments, held general elections, and ten months later we had the World State." "Well," said Mazurin, "what's wrong with -- " "Wait. For five months everything went fine. All the important nations were in, and it was a sure thing that the others -- the ones that hadn't been in this particular fightingwould come in later. We had a swell Constitution and we were disarming like fury. Then there was a coup d'etat. Blodgett and his gang moved in, kidnaped Provisional President Carres, drugged him and made him sign orders appointing Blodgett's gang ' to key positions. "It was logical enough; Blodgett himself was the number two man in the Worstas movement to begin with. By the time anybody found out what was going on, they were so firmly entrenched that they've been able to stamp out every rising against them ever since. They've got the best propaganda line since Stalin, and the people as a whole won't move because there's peace, and they're sick of war. So all we've wound up with is just another damned dictatorship. Now do you see?" "Wait a minute," said Mazurin. He had been listening with growing horror to Eve's use of the Sacred Name. "This Blodgett you're talking about -- that can't possibly be Ernest Elwood Vernon Crawford Blodgett, can it?" "His name is Ernest, and his mother's name was Crawford," said Eve. "Where you got those other handles from, I don't know." "It's the way we name ourselves," Mazurin explained. "Your own given name, given names of two prominent ancestors, one from each line, then mother's and father's line names. Anyway, if that's the Blodgett you're talking about, you must have your facts all wrong. Blodgett -- " he touched his forelock -- " was the founder and first President of the World State. Kids learn about him in the first course. The Father of the World and so forth. He wasn't any dictator and there wasn't any president before him." "Blodgett is busy revising the histories right now," said Eve grimly. "I'll bet the big ham hasn't got buck teeth in the pictures you've seen, either." "Of course not," said Mazurin. "Have you ever seen him in person?" He demanded. Eve reddened. "No. But I've seen smuggled pictures of him before he got his dentures -- " "Then," said Mazurin triumphantly, "how do you know the pictures you saw weren't faked?" They kept it up for another hour, ruffling tempers all around, until Charlie told them both to pipe down and get some sleep. IV he had spent the night hanging by his thumbs. His hands were completely numb, and the rest of his body was so stiff and painful that it took him ten minutes to stand up. The other two had made out a little better, but they were all cold, hungry and short-tempered. They drank water from the stream, ate some wild berries they found after an hour's search, stuffed leaves into Charlie's socks, and then started off again through the woods. Charlie, when Mazurin asked him where they were going, politely requested., him to keep his geographically described questions to his precisely defined self. An hour or so later, when the sun was higher and exercise had loosened their muscles, they were feeling a little better. They had struck a path of sorts under some kind of fragrant trees that were unfamiliar to Mazurin. The branches made a comfortable pattern against the deep-blue sky, and there were birds calling pleasantries . back and forth. Mazurin moved upbeside Eve and walked with her for a while in silence. "I suppose I was kidding myself last night when I thought you might be able to help us," she said finally. "We've got a fair chance as it is, but it's awfully risky. It would be nice to know that the Marines were going to ride up at the last moment." Mazurin made sympathetic noises, feeling a little embarrassed. "How do you feel about being cut off from your own time?" she asked suddenly. "You're in a pretty tough spot, too." Mazurin realized that he hadn't had time to wonder how he did feel about it. He imagined the technicians back at the Physics Bureau searching through the timelines, finding him by some improbable chance, and yacking him back. He had a clear vision of the expression on the face of his square-jawed superior when that worthy read his report. He shuddered. "What's the matter "If I got back now," said Mazurin, "they'd give me one year in the Black House and then turn my totem upside down and demote me to the Cleanliness Inspection Squad." "Why? Because your mission wasn't successful?" "Well, that isn't exactly the way my chief would put it. He'd say I ' was a disgusting ghoul with the moral fiber of a cuckoo, who would pick his teeth with a splinter from his uncle's coffin." "But you did all you could, didn't you?" Mazurin conscientiously reviewed his activities of the day before. "I guess I did, but that doesn't matter. #'hey go by results." "H'm," said Eve. "So docs Buck tooth Blodgett. How did you happen to go to work for the -- what is it?" "Internal Security Commission," said Mazurin..."It would be. Fancy name for secret police, isn't it? Well, how did you happen to join up?" "Why," said Mazurin in astonishment, "I was selected. When I was fifteen. Those decisions can't be left to individuals." She stopped and stared at him, wide-eyed. "And you think that's the best of all possible worlds? Even Blodgett hasn't pulled anything quite as rank, as that yet. But he will, I can see." She moved on, and Mazurin followed her, puzzled. "How else would you do it?" he inquired. "Free choice," she said curtly. "Government does its best to provide equal opportunities for everybody, and you choose what you want to be." "Ah," said Mazurin shrewdly, having swiftly found the illogicality, "but who would want to go "Yes," she agreed, "who?" Mazurin mulled that over for a while. "It wouldn't work," tie said finally. "You could never get people to agree to it, in my time. It goes directly contrary to the teachings of our ancestors." "Exactly," she said. Half an hour later, Mazurin was still thinking about the implications of that remark. another small stream that Charlie and Eve seemed to recognize. Charlie washed his face and hands, swore because he had no razor, and looked suspiciously at Mazurin's pinkly beardless chin. "Depilatory cream," Mazurin told him. "Stuns the follicles for a month. Invented about #, I think." Charlie grunted, but looked halfconvinced. "Let me have those sandals," he said. He put them on and climbed along to the top of the next ridge. He looked cautiously over, then waved to Eve and disappeared over the top. "What now?" asked Mazurin. "We wait here," said Eve shortly. "There's a town up ahead where one of our contacts lives. Charlie's going in to see if it's safe." He was back in half an hour, wearing shoes and carrying Mazurin's sandals wrapped in a bundle. He looked worried. "There's hell to pay," he told Eve, then turned to Mazurin. "I guess you're on the level, all right. Those cockeyed things of yours -- the tweedledums and so forth -- have been popping up all over this area for the last twenty-four hours.The Worstas are going crazy. They can't figure it out, and it scares them. The place is swarming with troops and no-goods." "National Guardsmen," Eve explained to Mazurin, seeing his puzzled look. "N. G. -- no good. They're a bunch of picked stinkers, body ever call your crowd the Icks, by the way?" Charlie made an impatient gesture, cutting off Mazurin's reply. "Here's what we're up against," he said. "Bauernfeind got through to H.Q. all right, and they'll send a 'copter in time toget us to rendezvous. But the woods arc full of patrols -- we're lucky we haven't been picked up before now. The only place we'll be safe is in Bauernfeind's sub-cellar." He stared at Mazurin's outlandish costume. "You and I probably can get through all right, one at a time," he said to Eve, "but he's a problem. I was ready to ditch him if we had to, but Bauernfeind says we've got to take him along; the Central Council wants him. We couldn't figure out any way to take those cuffs off, without bringing a machine shop out here. Best we could think of was this." and produced a long-sleeved robe, a pair of scissors, needles and thread. "There are two or three differentsects in the hills around here," he explained. "This isn't quite the color any of 'em wear -- Bauernfeind got it from a theatrical costumer's -- but he thinks it will pass. We'll have to cut it open, so he can get I his arms into the sleeves, and then sew him into it." He picked up the scissors and spread the robe out over his knees. "No, not that way," said Eve, and took the scissors from him. 'Underneath, where it won't show." She rapidly snipped the robe apart, starting in the middle of the chest, upward to the end of each sleeve. The result looked like nothing that would ever serve .as a garment again, but she slipped it over MaEurin's head, brought the dangling top part over his shoulders and, working swiftly, sewed it into shape again. "That'll hold," she said, "if you don't wave your arms around. Remember, you've got your hands clasped in meditation, and you keep your eyes down. What about those sandals, Charlie?" "Half the crackpots in California wear them," he said. "And that long hair of his looks natural in this getup. Let's move along." Mazurin did as he was told. His head ached miserably, and it seemed to him that his situation was getting worse by the minute. From the time that he had been captured by the Worstas, he'd had no power of decision whatever; and, even worse, he still had no idea what he could do if he were free to do it. s Mazurin walked forward mechanically, still only half attentive. Just suppose he were to settle down in this century -- providing he could get out of this present mess alive. Suppose he married and had progeny. That wouLd obviously make him an ancestor, from the viewpoint of his own time. Then it would be just as important to save his own neck as anybody else's!... Wait a minute, there was something funny about that line of reasoning. "Everybody, theoretically, could continue his own line. So when was an ancestor an object of veneration and when was he just a person? It couldn't be merely a matter of elapsed time, could it? Because elapsed time was subjective, an abstraction, a point of view. From where he was now, the world he came from didn't even exist; it was just a remote future possibility. But -- thought he saw the glimmer of a final answer, but he couldn't pursue it. It made him feel dizzy when he tried. They clambered cautiously up to the top of the ridge, rcconnoitcred, and went down the other side to where a dusty road showed through the trees. Directly ahead of them, when they reached the road, were the outskirts of a small, weatherbeaten town. They waited for twenty minutes before a squad of soldiers hanging around in front of a warehouse decided to go elsewhere. Twice they heard distant shots, and once a confused sound of yelling. Mazurin sighed with relief when they finally reached a fairly wellpopulated street. Mingling with the crowd, Charlie in front, then Mazurin, and Eve bringing up the rear, they weren't conspicuous, but as a group they had been decidedly peculiar. And if they looked nervous, he decided, it was in character; so did most' of the people he saw around him. Every block or so they passed a patrol of green-uniformed men, hands on the straps of their slung missile weapons, looking alertly to each side as they walked. The three bunched momentarily as they waited for a traffic light to change, and Charlie murmured, "Two blocks more, then half a block to the right. It's the place called 'Hi-Tone Tailors.' Go straight to the back and down the stairs." He stopped talking as a greenuniformfcd officer paused nearby and glanced at them. The light changed and they started across the street. Mazurin kept his eyes down, as directed, even when a loud whirring noise approached him from behind and hovered over him. Immediately thereafter, something mushy hit him on the head and slithered down his face, blinding him momentarily. He heard startled cries around him. The next instant, the mushy something had reached his nose and was' trying to crawl up it. Strangling, Mazurin unwarily opened his mouth, and the stuff crawled into that, too. He swallowed as much as he could -- it was lemon-flavored -- and spat the rest. He looked up just in time to see another glob hurtling toward him. He flung up his hands instinctively, and heard the popping threads as Eve's hasty stitching gave way. raining down. The whirring noise, he found, proceeded from the blades of a helicopter that was hovering over the intersection. Two green-uniformed men in its cab were leaning out to peer in amazement and horror at the four loudspeaker horns fixed to its underside. From these, in an apparently endless flow, issued the flangs. They were piling up underfoot now, climbing up people's trouser legs, squirming in a custardy wave toward the comparative darkness of doorways. Desperately, Mazurin warded off another yellow blob, leaped the writhing form of a fat citizen who had flangs in his pants, and then lost his own footing, skidding half tlie width of die street and fetching up against a green-uniformed soldier. He saw the soldier's eyes widen as he caught sight of the wristcuffs. Then there was a shout and a whirl of motion, and something hard struck him solidly on the back of the head. ing, hot yellow light that shone through his closed lids and made his eyes water fiercely. He tried instinctively to turn his head aside, and found he couldn't. For a moment he couldn't orient himself; he was being put to the question, that was obvious, but what for ? He hadn't done anything -- or had he? How had he made out on that time mission? He had a dim recollection of something unpleasant... The rest of the memories came back then, and Mazurin groaned. He was in the hands of the Worstas again, those peculiarly unpleasant ancestors who were incredibly the founders of his own state; and some of the police methods in' this century were crude, he remembered. They'd got the other two, undoubtedly. They'd all been close together when the Hangs started falling, and the soldiers would have rounded up everybody in sight after they caught him. Now it was going to be bad. Now it was going to be very bad. He heard a sudden "Ouch!" and then a stifled shriek. A moment later he understood the reason; something needle-sharp was jabbed an inch 'into his left buttock. He added his outcry to the others, whereupon a voice said, "They're ready, Mr. President." "Proceed," said a slightly lisping voice. "Begin with the girl." "Your name is Gertrude Meyer?" said the other. Mazurin heard the girl gasp. She said, "Yes." "You are a member of the underground society of wreckers and assassins known as the Freedom Party, and you are known to your co-conspirators as Eve?" Again the gasp, and again, "Yes." "You are aware of a plot to assassinate the President ?" The gasp, a pause, then another gasp. "Yes!" "What is the nature of this plot?" This time Eve sobbed. "Oh, don't do that -- ob!" "What is the nature of this plot?" "Oh! I don't know -- " She shrieked and then Mazurin heard her weeping. "I'll never tell you -- ob! -- anything. Ob!" Mazurin found himself struggling like a wild man against his shackles. He had an idea he knew what they were doing to Eve; it was a traditional method of interrogating females, so they'd probably had it even this early. It was very nearly infallible, and very unpleasant to think about. E VE'S cries grew louder and more frequent. Finally she screamed and there was silence for a while. Then the interrogation began again. After twenty minutes. Eve began telling all she knew. It was a primitive plot, and it seemed to Mazur in that it could have had only a slender chance of success even in so barbaric an era as this one. In his own time, nothing whatever would be gained by assassinating the Chief Executive; the next eligible memberof the Executive Families would simply take over. What you had to watch out for was thought subversion and heresy. Here, apparently, the critical area was at the top. Blodgett was so obsessed by the idea that someone in his hierarchy might kick him out, as he'd done to Carres, that he'd made sure that the whole structure would collapse without him. The Freedom Party knew this, or guessed it, according to Eve. They didn't know exactly what would happen if they killed Blodgett, but they were pretty sure it would be fatal to the present dictatorial group. In any case, they'd be rid of Blodgett and would, at worst, take their chances on his successor being less brutal. The time they'd picked was an annual celebration at which Blodgett traditionally showed himself. It was always held in a big outdoor arena, and there would be thousands of spectators. Blodgett would be well guarded, of course, but they couldn't possibly screen everybody who got into the arena. All the revolutionists needed was an inconspicuous weapon, and it seemed that the underground's scientists had perfected one about eight months ago and had been turning them out in quantity in a hidden factory. Eve didn't know where the factory was. She and Charlie were the liaison agents, who were to pick up the completed weapons from other agents and take them to distribution points. The weapon was a miniature bazooka. Only two inches long, it could be concealed so well that only the most rigorous search would find it, and its range was more than adequate for the job they wanted to do. Accuracy would have been too much to ask for, but they had intended to concentrate the fire of several hundred weapons on the rostrum, and hope that Blodgett would be killed. The questioners took Eve through the whole story again, then started on Charlie. He held out for a few minutes, but he talked. He knew no more than Eve. The first question was: "What is your name?" and it was followed instantly by the touch of warm metal on the back of his hand. Only a reminder, Mazurin guessed. They thought he was valuable and wanted to be very careful not to injure him seriously; but if he didn't answer satisfactorily, the iron would get hotter. And many things, Mazurin knew, could be done with iron not hot enough to burn. He answered the question with his full name. The next was, "Where do you come from?" He told the truth, not expecting to be believed, but unable to think of any lie that would be more credible. There was a muttered consultation, then, "Do you maintain that you can tell us about events whifh are to us in the future, because your knowledge of what is to you history?" Mazurin said, "Yes, only -- " Blodgett's lisping voice interrupted him. "That's enough. General, this information is restricted. Take him into my private office. I will continue the interrogation personally." The light clicked off, and Mazurin felt the shackles being loosened. "Prisoner, have you given any of this information to these other two?" Mazurin . hesitated, trying to figure out which was the dangerous answer, yes or no. The President's voice said, "Never mind. General. I will assume that he has. Bring all three of them into my private office. Here, give me those manacle keys." Someone hauled Mazurin off the table on which he had been lying and locked his wrists together. He was able to open his smarting eyes after a moment, but he could see nothing except the after-image of Hands turned him, pushed him, caught him when he staggered and kept him moving. He heard the shuffle of other feet. Eve was crying quietly. A door was opened ahead of them. Mazurin was led forward a few steps and then shoved into a deep cushioned chair. Footsteps receded and the door shut again. Deep silence fell instantly, punctuated by their breathing and the President's soft footsteps, then the slight creak of a swivel chair. "Now," said Blodgett's voice, apparently from some little distance. "We are entirely private here; this room is soundproof and spyproof. Tell me all about the future of my regime, Mr. Mazurin -- and, I warn you, tell me the truth." ing rapidly. Directly ahead of him, twenty feet away across a deep carpet and a huge polished desk, sat Blodgett. He didn't look anything like the pictures in the histories. He was short and plump. and he looked crafty and nervous and worried. Mazurin glanced to his right. There was a row of chairs like his owh, and in two of them, manacled like himself, were Eve and Charlie. Eve was bent over with her head in her hands; Charlie was rigid and stonyfaced. Perhaps the history books had idealized Blodgett's appearance. It didn't matter. Mazurin was in the Presence and he was awed. "In case any of you are thinking of attempting violence against me," remarked Blodgett, "don't." He showed them a heavy little machine-gun, mounted on a wheeled frame, that stood on his desk. "You are too far away, and those extremely comfortable chairs are ingcnuously hard to get out of. Also, this room contains a minor arsenal. I could fight off a regiment here, if I had to. Now, Mr. Mazurin, talk. You needn't be afraid of telling the truth, whether you think I'll like it or not. You're a mine of information, and I expect to be able to use you for a long time to come. So tell me the unvarnished truth." Mazurin told him. Blodgett smiled at the end of it. "One thing more, Mr. Mazurin. At what age will I die?" "I don't remember exactly, Your Honor. About eighty, as I recall." "Good, good," said Blodgett. "Surprisingly good." He took a seedless grape from the bowl in front of him .and popped it into his mouth. "You are sure, Mr. Ma zurin, that you have not colored this tale to please my fancy? No, I can see that you are sincere; you have no reason to lie." He ate another grape, smiling, pushed the bowl aside and lned confidently over the desk. "If you had prophesied disaster, Mr. Mazurin," he said, "I should never in the world have believed you. Do you know why?" The pause was rhetorical. "Because I belong to the ages. I know it. I have felt it since I was a young man. I was born to rule the world. Would you believe that I have known that since I was twenty? And my rule is destined to endure; I knew that. "Why? Because I started with what every other conqueror tried in vain to achieve -- a world dominion. It is all the world or none, Mr. Mazurin. Napoleon knew that. Hitler knew that. Stalin knew that. And that was the inexorable law that humbled each in his turn. They tried to achieve peace through war -- fatal, fatal. They had to try, of course. They were born to rule, too, but the wrong time." He talked on interminably, his face growing flushed and his eyes glistening. He gestured, he smiled, he frowned. Didactic, he stood up and leaned earnestly over the tabic. Self-satisfied, he sat back and popped grapes into his mouth. Mystical, he stared at the ceiling. It was during the latter phase lliat Mazur in -- like the other two, halfstunned by oratory -- suddenly came awake. From the muzzle of the squat weapon on Blodgett's desk, a tiny green bubble bulged. As Mazurin watched, the bubble grew to half an inch dropped to the desk and rolled until the edge of the fruit-bowl stopped it. Mazurin felt suddenly cold all over. He darted a glance to his right. Eve was looking at the floor and had seen nothing; but Charlie was looking at him, with one eyebrow raised, an expression that said plainly. What is it? Mazurin looked Back at the President. Blodgett brought a rolling period to a close, smiled soulfully, sighed, and became stern. "As for you, sir," he sard, "your destiny is allied with mine. To this favor you must submit. I do not ask, I give. I give you a living god, as you have yourself justly described me, to worship and follow faithfully all of your life. And I give you what is immeasurably more precious than the schoolboys' history you give me -- I give you a place beside me in all the history that's yet to be written!" For an. instance, that idea captured Mazurin's imagination. What a fantastic end to his assignment that would be -- the Chief Execuand everybody, worshipping every holy day at his shrine! Even while that thought raced through his mind, Mazurin watched the tiny green globule in utter fascination. If Blodgett reached for that globule, thinking it a grape, then for the first time in this whole misbegotten affair Mazurin would have reached a point of decision. And to save himself he couldn't tell whether he wanted that or not. He knew what he wanted to do, well enough, but he felt the first premonitory stirrings of a guilt that he knew would plague him for years after the act. What right had he to interfere with the lives of Mazurin, he told himself, you're an ancestor ! He glanced at Eve's pale, drawn face. I'll see to it that you are, he added. down on the desk, sideswiping the fruit bowl. The bowl wobbled elliptically arpund the desktop, Blodgett's hand was still the globe that was not a grape. "Jow say you, sir?" demanded Blodgett. "Destiny or death?" His hand hovered, as ready for one gesture as another. He glared at Mazurin. Mazurin took a deep breath. "I choose destiny. Your Honor." Blodgett's features relaxed. His hand dropped gently on the table, the pudgy fingers curling. Gently they closed on the green sphere. Smiling benignly, Blodgett popped it into his mouth. He stayed that way, without changing posture or expression, for three long seconds. Then his eyes bulged. A shout formed itself on his lips, but no sound came out. He -- withered somehow, shrank indescribably in his uniform. There was a look of horror and of passionate appeal in his eyes. And then, suddenly, Blodgett was not there any longer. To the others, it looked as if he had simply vanished out of the world of men. But Mazurin, shuddering, knew that his fate had not been that simple -- or that pleasant. Eve gasped, "What was it? That grape he ate -- " Mazurin felt sick. "A mangel." Charlie demanded, "What's a mangel? What did it do to him?" could torture me in the subtlest or crudest ways and I would not tell you. This primitive civilization is not ready to know anything at all about mangels. Nothing!" He put his head in his hands. One part of him knew that Blodgett was a stinker; the other part was simply saying, You let him eat a mangel. You killed him. The most sacred ancestor of all, the Father of the W orld. He heard the other two talking in low, tense voices. Eve said, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' "Blodgett had already started making himself up to look like his propaganda pictures." "Yes. We could put it over, Charlie. They'd have no choice. It's either agreement or total collapse." "Gone," Mazurin moaned. "Blodgett. The beautiful society he built with his giant intellect -- " "No," said Charlie. "None of it's lost. Except the worst part of your civilization." "And certainly not the most sacred ancestor," Eve added. "Not the Father of the World." Mazurin, lost in misery, looked up. "But the mangel got him. Blodgett is gone." He touched his forelock absently. "You're here," said Eve. "You know what the future is supposed to be like. You'll build Blodgett's world -- with a few important changes." "Oh," Mazurin said, suddenly realizing. "You'll put one of your men in Blodgett's place and I'll advise him on what I remember." Charlie leaned over his chair. "One of our men -- one of everybody's." "Isn't it obvious?" asked Eve, squeezing Mazurin's arm. "The Father of the World, the most sacred ancestor, will be a descendant." "He doesn't get it," Charlie said. "You," Eve stated, "will be Blodgett." Mazurin started to touch his forelock. "Me?" he asked dazedly, then finished the reverent gesture. He was an ancestor, after all. More than anything else, the colony on Mars wanted independence from doomed Earth -- and abruptly was in deadly danger of succeeding! Synopsis planet is nothing -- especially when that planet is ancient Mars. It has been that long since the first Earth rocket crashed at the southern apex of Syrtis Major; almost that long since the first too-hopeful colonists followed, three thousand doomed souls, all dead before the delayed relief ship arrived. Forty years during which a barren world played host to, successivfly, a handful of explorers and a few score prospectors with naturally "Marsworthy" lungs; a thousand or so latter-day homesteaders with their lean, silent women; a dozen, then two dozen industrial settlements; and at last, almost forty years after the first failure, another attempt at permanent colonization. Sun Lake City Colony is unique on Mars; it is a cooperative without industrial backing. Its members range f rom laborers to accomplished scientists, with one conviction in common: that Earth is through as a habitation for man because of its wrecked ecology, overcrowding, and the imminence of a cataclysmic radiological war. The Colony hopes as soon as possible to establish an agricultural cycle that will enable it to exist self-sufficiently on the hostile alien planet. Until that goal is attained, and until the colonists can find an acceptable substitute for Earth-import OxEn -- the "oxygen enzyme" pills that enable humans to breathe Mars air -- Star Lake must maintain business relations with Earth. To this end the Colony maintains a laboratory to refine and concentrate radiosotopes from Mars ' naturally low-radioactive soil. In Sun Lake, a baby boy is born to Jim and Polly Kandro, a couple who emigrated partly to get away from the scene of half a dozen tragic miscarriages on Earth. The Colony' s doctor, Tony Heilman, attends the birth; he is assisted by Anna Willendorf, who came to the Colony as a glassbloiver, but whose extraordinary quality of understanding and sympathy makes her an excellent part-time nurse. The baby is fitted to a specially designed oxygen mask. OxEn cannot be absorbed by infants , and the Colony lost its first-born baby because they . could not produce enough oxygen to keep a full-size oxy tent operating. The child is named Sun Lake City Colony Kandro by his proud parents -- Sunny for short. Tony leaves the new mother and child in Anna's care, and goes to make his routine morning check of the ' Lab; he is radiological safety monitor for the Colony as well as doctor. While he is there, the Lab is visited by a delegation of the military. Personally commanding the search party is Hamilton Bell, Planetary Affairs Commissioner for the Panamerican World Federation -- the top man on Mars -- acting on a complaint made by Hugo Brenner. Brenner, a drug manufacturer, claims a priceless # kilograms of marcaine have been stolen from his factory. The marcaine "scent" was traced to a point near the Colony by means of an electronic device known as the Bloodhound, operated by a conscientious young officer, Lt. Ed Nealey. Bell, who has absolute dictatorial powers in intercolony matters, proposes a search which would ruin the Lab and contaminate ready-togo shipments of radioactives. Tony and two other members of the Colony Council, Mimi Jonathan and Joe Gracey, bargain with the Commissioner and accept a desperate alternative. They will be permitted to conduct their own search in their own way, but they must deliver both the thief and the stolen marcaine before Shipment Day -- three weeks off -- or the Colony will be sealed off by a military cordon for a period of six months while an official search is made. This is in accordance with an obsolete law formulated in the days of annual rockets. Now, however, Sun Lake, like all Mars, is geared to ninety-day rocket intervals; missing two shipments would be a catastrophic blow to the Colony's economy. Bell marches off with his soldiers, and Tony goes to make the daily rounds of his patients. He sees, among others, Joan Rad cliff, a fanatically idealistic colonist, who is sloivly dying of a disease the doctor cannot even diagnose. At least he feels, if Bell's ultimatum spells the end of the Colony , it will save Joan's life. Nothing short of that would send her back to Earth, for if she went the Colony would not allow her husband, Hank, to stay. Hank is a romantic youngster; going to Mars was his life's dream , but Sun hake, with its dreams of permanence, has room only for " married or marriageable" members. Tony also sees Nick Cantrella, the fourth member of the Council. Nick is an inspired electronics man and machinist, and an inveterate optimist. Between them , they work out a plan to test everyone in the Colony for exposure to mar caine by means of the electro-encepbalograph. Among those tested, in addition to all the colonists except the two bed-ridden women (and Hank Radcliff, who is away, getting some new medicine for Joan), are Learoyd, an old prospector who happened to be in town that day, and the Tollers, an early homesteader couple who live nearby. But all the results are negative; they find no evidence of exposure. The next step in the search will be a house-to-house inspection of the Colony. Meanwhile, Sunny is having trouble nursing. The new mother becomes terribly worried, and when left alone for a short time, she has a dream or hallucination, and babbles hysterically to the doctor about a " Brownie " that was peering in the window at the baby. The situation takes a sudden turn for the worse when Harve Stillman, the chief radioman, turns up ivith unexpected news: the rocket is in radio range, and will land the next day -- two weeks early t before Tad Campbell came banging on his door at #:# A. M. The boy's enthusiasm was more than Tony could face; it would be easier to carry his own equipment than to answer questions while he was dressing. He sent Tad to wait at the plane and put some "coffee" on to brew, then did a last quick check of his portable health lab, making sure that there was nothing overlooked in the hasty preparations after the news about the Earth ship. Gulping down the hot brew, he reviewed the instructions he had given Anna: feedings for Sunny Kandxo; bacitracin for Dorothy; ointment and dressings for Joan, another injection if she needed it; and under no circumstances sedative for Mrs. Beyles. He couldn't think of anything predictable he had failed to provide for. He folded the lab to make a large carrying case and lugged his burden up the gentle slope that led to the landing field where Lazy Ctrl, the Colony's transport plane, waited. Bea Juarez was warming the icy motors with a blowtorch. Lazy Girl's motors were absurdly small; their shafts spun on zero-friction air bearings. Air-bearings dated from the guided missiles of #, but their expensively precise machining ruled them out for Earth. Shipping space to Mars was high enough to override the high manufacturing cost. Air-bearing motors were small and light; therefore virtually everything on Mars that turned or slid, turned and slid on molecules of gas instead" of oily films. The bearings improved the appearance not only of machinery but of mechanics. Bea looked tired, cold, and unhappy; but she lacked the grease-smeared dinginess that would have marked her on Earth. The girl nodded to him, ran a hand over the moisture condensing on the metallic surface, and applied the torch to a new spot. She shook her head doubtfully. "Don't blame me if she falls apart in mid-air after we take off. I put her together with spit overnight, Tony. She was scattered all over the field for a hundred-hour check. You'd think they'd let you know... she grumbled, then broke off and grinned. "What the hell, if we blow up halfway between here and there, we don't have to worry about marcaine any more! Climb aboard, Doc." She snapped off the torch. "Hey, Tad! The doc needs a hand with his contraption." X science as Tad hopped out of the plane and ran to take the big box. It must have been a blow to the boy, to be deprived of carrying the heavy equipment from the hospital. "How's it going?" Tony asked genially, "You seem to be getting along fine without your tail bone." "Okay," the boy grunted. He eased the box into the cabin, pulled it out of the way, and reached down a condescending hand to help Tony. "It don't seem to matter," he added, when the doctor was inside. "You'd never know it wasn't there." Tad was the recent victim of an unhappily humorous accident. Butted in the seat by an angry goat, he'd had his coccyx severely fractured, and the doctor had had to remove the caudal vertebrae. It probably qualified, Tony thought, as another of those history-making occasions -- the Colony's first spinal, if you want to stretch the term, operation. Historic or not, it was a permanent bond between the boy and the doctor -- the only one who had been able to take it seriously. Tony padded a couple of spare parkas into a comfortable couch on the cabin floor and stretched out. Tire plane had no seats. Coming back, they'd sit on the bare floor, and the parkas would have another use. The ship was unheated and the newcomers weren't likely to have warm clothes unpacked. Lazy Girl was short on comfort and speed cannibalized on Mars from the scrapped remains of obsolete models discarded by wealthier colonies. Tony, who didn't fly himself, had been told that she handled easily and flew an immense payload without complaining. Tad had built himself a luxurious nest of parkas. He pulled the last one up around his shivering shoulders, leaned back, and examined the interior of the plane with a good imitation of a practiced appraisal. "Nice job," he pronounced finally. '"You don't get them like this back on Earth." "You sure don't," Bea agreed ironically from the pilot's seat. "Hold on to your hat. Here we go!" Say what you like about Mars, about the Colony, about the poor old relic of a plane, Tony thought, when you took a look at the kids you began to understand what it was all about. A year ago, Tad had been a thoroughly obnoxious brat. But how could he be anything else on Earth? got born into a hate-thy-neighbor, envy-thyneighbor, murder-thyneighbor culture. In your infancy your overworked and underfed mother's breast was always withdrawn too soon and you were filled again and again, day after day, with blind and squalling rage. You were a toddler and you snatched at another one's bit of candy; you were hungry and you hated him; you fought him. You learped big boys' games -- Killakraut, Wackawop, Nigger inna Graveyard, Chinks an' Good Guys, Stcrmation Camp, Loot the City. The odds were you were hungry, always hungryNaked dictatorship and leader worship, oligarchy and dollar-worship; sometimes one was worse, sometimes the other. The forms didn't matter; the facts did. Too many mouths, not enough topsoil. Middle classes with their relatively stable, relatively sane families were growing smaller and being ground out of existence as still more black dirt washed into the ocean and still more hungry mouths were born and prices went higher and higher -- how long, in God's name, could it go on? How long before it blew up, and not figuratively speaking either ? The Panamerican World Federation, first with the most, refused to tolerate the production of mass-destruction weapons anywhere else in the world. Long calloused to foreign mutterings, the Western colossus would at irregular intervals fire off a guided missile on the advice of one of its swarm of intelligence agents. In Tartary or Trance or Zanzibar, then, an innocent-looking structure would go up in a smoke mushroom. But they never stopped trying, and some day Tartary or France or Zanzibar would launch a missile of its own and it would mean nothing less than the end of the world in fire and plague as the rocket trails laced continents together and the bombers rained botulisn, radiocobalt and flasks of tritium with bikinis in their cores. T HE damned, poverty-ridden, swarming Earth! Short of food, short of soil, short of water, short of metal, s -- short of everything except vicious, universal resentments and aggressions bred by the other shortages. That's what they were running from, the new arrivals he was going to meet today. He hoped there wouldn't be any more communicable disease carriers to quarantine at Marsport and fire back on the return trip without even a look around. There were supposed to be six medical examinations between the first application filed at the Sun Lake Society office in New York, and . embarcation. But things must have got appreciably worse on Earth since -- he started a little at the thought -- "since his time." It seemed that now anybody could be reached. They used to say everybody had his price. Maybe it was true. He'd never had a chance to turn down a really big bribe, so he couldn't say. But if six boards of doctors could all be fixed, everybody's price must have taken a drastic slump. Tad, sound asleep, rolled onto his stomach and humped up his behind, scene of the history-making operation, in a brief reversion to infancy. "How come the rocket's getting in early?" Bea called back. "I didn't even have time to ask Harve about it last night, with the Girl spread out all over the field." "Something about the throat liner. They have a new remote control servicing apparatus on Earth," Tony said. "Gets the liner out and cleaned and in faster. We save two weeks on each trip, and get an extra trip what is it? every two years ?" "Year and a half," Bea corrected. She was silent a moment, then snorted, "Rockets!" "At least," Tony dead-panned, "rockets give you a smooth ride. Fat chance of getting any sleep in this pile..." "The Girl never gave you a rough trip in your life!" she interrupted angrily. She pulled on the stick and swung the Girl into a downwind. The doctor drowsily studied her, silhouetted against the stars through the windshield. She was attached to the old crate -- ought to find herself a husband. It had looked like her and Fiexner for a while, but then the chemist had paired off with Verna Blau. As the motor warmed up, Bea unzipped her parka and shrugged out of it. Definitely, Tony decided, the best shape in Sun Lake. Trim, fined-down, athletic, but no doubt at all, from this angle, that the figure was feminine -- even under the bulky sweater she still wore. couch and reflected on how pleasant it would be to stand behind her and run his hands down over her shoulders -- infinitely pleasant just to stand behind her while she flew the ship. Pleasant but impractical. Play hell with her Estimated Time of Arrival at Marsport, for one thing, and, to take a longer view, he probably would end up by marrying herher and Lctzy Girl : the two went together. Tony stirred uncomfortably. While he was thinking idly goatish thoughts about Bca, Anna had turned up in his mind, with a halfsmile on her face. It was typical, he thought, puzzled; Anna never intruded until the moment you wanted her... if you wanted her, he added unhappily, giving the verb a new meaning. Anna's smile was a tingling mystery; her dark eyes were wells of warmth in which a man could lose himself; but after all these months, he wasn't sure, of their color. And even when she crept into his mind, it was only from the neck up that he visualized her. That wasn't the way he saw Bca. Tony shook himself, stretched out and let his eyes linger on the girl in the pilot's seat until he fell asleep. ii T HE sun was up when Bea eased the Freighter in among more planes than they had ever seen before on Arrival Day. They recognized the elegant staff-carrier from Sun Lake's neighbor, Pittco Three, but didn't know the other twelve that were parked. "Swell ride, Bca," said the doctor. "Now what is this dress parade all about...? Oh, sure. Douglas Graham is going to gunth Mars. These should be the bigshots from the commercial colonies." "I hate these damned superficial gunthers," Bea said fiercely. "Is he going to bother Sun Lake?" "Nick thinks he might zip through at the end of his tour, if he has time." He hopped to the ground. Tad following with the boxed lab. "You've got the shopping list, Bea?" the doctor asked. "I have to go over to the Ad Building. Don't think I'll have time for anything else. Can you get all the stuff?" "Sure," she said easily. "We're not buying much this time." Tony ignored the bitter significance of the remark. "We ll see you later, then. I hope this red-carpet businessfor Graham doesn't slow things up too much. I'd like to get back before lunch." Tad was fidgeting next to him, waiting for a chance to break in. A year ago, the boy had spent two days in Marsport, when he arrived with his family and the other founding members of the Colony. Then he had nothing more than a pitying sneer for the village of # people; now it was a place of wonder. "Dr. Tony," he asked eagerly, "can we go to the Arcade ?" "We can go through it," Tony decided. The Arcade was Aladdin's cave to Tad. To the Planetary Affairs Commission, which rented out booth space in the ramshackle building, it was a source of revenue. To Tony it was the stronghold of the irrepressible small retailer, who found his way even to Mars with articles he could buy cheap and sell dear... a reminder of the extent to which Mars was already taking over the social and economic patterns of Earth. Booths at the Arcade did not display radiation counters, hand tools, welders, rope, radio, aluminum I-beams, airplane parts or halftracks. Those you bought at the P. A. C. Stores, which were reliable, conservative and dull. At the Arcade there was one booth which sold nothing but cofprivateer who ran this concession might be ruined by another arrival aboard today's racket, landing in paper-light clothes with his garment and personal luggage allowance taken up by bricks of Earthside coffee and sugar, burning to undercut the highwayman who had beaten him to the happy hunting grounds of Mars. At another booth the most beautiful collie, boxer and English shepherd pups were for sale at the astounding price of only twenty dollars each. The catch was that the proprietor of this booth was the only merchant on Mars with a stock of dog food. dropped with perplexity. "Dr. Tony, what are those?" he asked. "Underwear, Tad. For women." "But don't they get cold in those things ?" "Well, 'they would if they went out and worked like Our women. But -- well, for instance inPittco, over the Rimrock Hills from us, there are some ladies who only work indoors, where it's heated." " All heated? Not just beam heat on the beds and things?" "I'm afraid I don't really know. Say! Look at those boots there -- aren't they something?" "Boy!" The boots were mirrorshiny zipper jobs. "What I wouldn't give for a pair of those! Put 'em on when new kids come in, and then watch them try to walk around in Earth sandals, and get a load of that sand." Here on Mars, the price put the boots infinitely far out of reach for a boy like Tad, even if Sun Lake's policies did not prevent the purchase of such an item. Some supervisor in an industrial colony, Tony thought, would eventually acquire them as illusion of escape from the sands of Mars. And that reminded him. He turned to Tad. "By the way, what do you know about kids going barefoot arouAd the colony? When did that start?" "Barefoot?" Tad looked outraged. "What do you think we are -- dopes?" "I think," Tony answered drily, "that anybody who'd go strolling around the Rimrock caves without boots on is about as much of a jackass as he can be." "In the caves?" This time Tony thought he detected a note of more honest horror. All the kids went barefoot sometimes in the experimental fields; everybody knew about it and pretended not to. The kids were pretty careful about not stepping on marked planted rows, and the fields had been processed to remove native poison-salts from the soil. "Listen, Dr. Tony," Tad said earnestly, "if any of the kids arc doing that, I'll put a stop to it! They ought to know better! You remember that time you had to fix my hand, before the -- uh -- other thing, when I just thought I'd pick tip a piece of rock and it practically sliced my finger off! They shouldn't be walking barefoot around there." "I remember." Tony smiled. " 'Sliced your finger off' is a slight exaggeration, but I wouldn't like to have to handle a mess of feet like that. If you know who's doing it, you tell them I said to cut it out... or they may not be walking at all after a while." "I'll let them know." Tad walked along silently, ignoring the bright displays as they passed, and Tony sei#ed the chance to direct their footsteps out of the Arcade. "Dr. Tony," the boy said finally, "you didn't mean for me to tell you who it Was in case I knew, did you?" "Lord, no!" The doctor had been hoping to find out. But he realized now what an error he'd almost made. A year ago. Tad had been as miserable a little snitch and talebearer as Earth could produce. "I just want it stopped, that's all." "Okay, then." Tad's face relaxed into a friendly grin. "It will be." We've go! to keep going, the doctor thought. For himself, for the other adults, it didn't matter so much. But for the kids... iii for Nowton, the P.A.C. medical officer, because Nowton was stupid. Fortunately Nowton was so stupid that he didn't realize this and greeted the Sun Lake medic joyfully. "Hear you .been up to tricks, boy! Why didn't you come to me instead ? I got ways to get marcaine !" "Glad to hear it, and I'll bet you do. While we were stealing that marcaine, we also had a baby. Got a form?" "Corporal!" yelled Nowton. "Birth form!" A noncom produced the piece of official paper and Tony filled it in, checking weight and other data with notes in his pocket. "That hot pilot of yours still around?" asked Nowton. "Bea Juarez? Sure. Interested? Just tell her that her plane's a disgusting old wreck and you'll get her a new one. She always falls for that line." "No kidding?" "Who'd kid you, Nowton? Say, is Ed Nealey anywhere?" "In the signal room. Where's Juarez, did you say?" "I'll see you, Nowton." Tony hurried off. ing a medical journal which had passed through his own hands months earlier, on its way around the joint subscription club of which both men were members. The club made it possible for them, in common with twenty-odd fellowmembers on Mars, to keep up with technical and scientific publications without paying ruinous amounts in interplanetary postage. "Hello, Ed." Nealey put out his hand. "I didn't know whether you'd still be talking to me, Tony." "Hell, you don't give the orders. You have to play it the way Bell calls it. Ed, off the record -- you're pretty sure it was one of our people?" "All I'm sure of, it wasn't a phony. To qualify with the Bloodhound on Earth, we had to follow made trails -- where they dragged bags of aniseed over the spoor. You can tell the difference. This one faded and wobbled like the real thing. And we iost it not more than a couple of miles out of your place, headed straight your way. Tony, have you searched?" "Some. We're not done yet." The doctor lowered dais voice. "What's the matter with Commissioner Bell, Ed? Does he have anything special against us?" The lieutenant jerked his chin a little at a Pfc sitting with earphones on his head, reading a comic book, and led the doctor into the corridor. "God, what a post!" he said. "Tony, all I know is that Bell's a lost soul outside the Insurantist Party's inner circle. He had fifteen years of being looked up to as the Grand Old Man of the Mexicaliforniarizonan Insurantists, and now he's been booted to Mars. He'd do anything, I believe, to get back into the party. And don't forget that Brenner's been a heavy contributor to the Insurantist campaign funds during the last three elections. You know I'm professional military and I'm not supposed to and don't want to have anything to do with politics -- " Commissioner Bell came stumping down the corridor. "Lieutenant Nealey,"he interrupted. Nealey came to as casual an attitude of attention as his years of "Surely you have better things to do with your time than palavering with persons suspected of harboring criminals." "Dr. Heilman is my friend, sir!" "Very interesting. I suggest you go on about your duties and pick your friends more discrim inatin sly" "Whatever you say, sir." With slow deliberation, (the lieutenant turned and shook Tony's hand. "I'm on duty now," he said tightly. "I'll see you around. So long, kid." He put his hand on Tad's shoulder, wheeled about smartly, and turned back into the signal room. "Come on, Tad," said the doctor. "We're all done here. We might as well get out to the rocket field." rocket field and what was, for Mars, an immense crowd -- some five hundred people behind a broad white deadline marked on the tamped dirt of the field. It was an odd-looking crowd because it was not jammed into the smallest possible space, body to body. Earthfashion. The people stood separately, like forest trees, with a good square meter around each of them. It was a Mars crowd, made up of people with lots of room. Tony stopped well away from the fringe of the group. "This looks like a good spot," he, decided. "Put the box down there; we can start setting things up." "Doctor Heilman -- hello!" A tall man, fully dressed in Earthside business clothes, strolled over. Tony had seen him only once before, when he had appeared at the Lab with Bell to make his monstrous accusation of theft. But Hugo Brenner was not an easy man to forget. "Hello," Tony said shortly, and turned back to his box. "Thought you might be here today." Brenner ignored the doctor's movement away from him, and went on smoothly. "I want to tell you how sorry I am about what happened. Frankly, if I'd known the trail would lead to your place, I might have thought twice before I called copper -- but you understand, it's not the first time. I've let it go before. This time they took so much I couldn't very well overlook it." "I understand perfectly," Tony assured him. "We disapprove of theft at Sun Lake too." "Well, I'm glad to hear you don't take it personally. Doctor. As a matter of fact, I'm almost glad k happened. I've heard a lot about you and the kind of job you've been doing over there. I wish we could have met under more pleasant circum -- " "It's very kind of you to say so," Tony interrupted, deliberately misunderstanding. "I didn't think a man in your position would be much impressed by what we're doing at Sun Lake." Brenner smiled. "I think Sun Lake is a very interesting experiment," he said in a monotone that clearly expressed his lack of interest. "What I had in mind..." "Of course, Mr. Brenner." Whatever the drug man had to say to him personally, the doctor did not wish to hear it. "We realize your only interest is in the recovery of your stolen goods. We're doing our best to find the thief... if he really is a member of our Colony, that is." "Please, Doctor, don't put words in my mouth. Naturally I'm interested in recovering my goods, but I'm not worried about it. I'm quite sure your people will turn up the guilty party." Again his voice carried a flat lack of conviction. "Commissioner Bell has seen to it that we turn up a guilty party," Tony retorted. "I think the Commissioner was unnecessarily harsh." Hugo Brenner shrugged it off. "If it had been up to me... well, that's Bell's job; I suppose he has to handle it his own way. Let's quit beating around the bush, Doctor. I came over here to offer you a job, not to talk..." "No." "Suppose you listen to my offer first." " Nor "All right, then. Name your own terms. I'll meet your price: I need a doctor. A good one." "I don't want to work for you at any price." Brenner's mouth turned up at the corners. Obviously he enjoyed the game, and equally obviously he thought he was going to win. ET me mention a figure." He dollars a year." Well, thought the doctor, now he had a clearer idea of what his own price was; now he knew it what he made in a peak year on Earth. He looked full into Brenner's smirking face, and knew something else: he hadn't been so clear-through boiling mad in a long time; and he was fed up with diplomacy. Deliberately, he raised his voice: "Didn't you hear me before, Brenner? Or didn't you understand ?" He found it was gratifying to notice people turning his way, edging in to listen. "Let me make myself absolutely clear," he went on loudly. "I don't want to work for you. I don't like the business you're in. I know what you need a doctor for, and so does everyone else on Mars. If your boys over at Hop Heaven can't keep their noses out of your marcaine, that's not my worry. I don't want to be resident physician in a narcotics factory. Stay away from me!" The smirk had lcf-t Brenner's face; it was ugly, contorted, and much too close. Tony realized, too late, that Brenner's list was even closer. Abruptly, he stopped feeling like a hero and began to feel like a fool. Then, quite suddenly, Brenner's fist was no longer approaching, and Brenner was flat on the ground. Tony tried to figure out what had happened. It didn't make sense. He became aware of a ring of grinning congratulatory faces surrounding him, and of Tad next to him, giggling gleefully. He called to the boy curtly, turned on his heel, and walked back the few steps to his portable lab. Nobody helped Brenner to his feet. He must have got up by himself, because when Tony looked back, out of the corner of his eye, Brenner was gone. A short man bustled up. "I heard that. Dr. Heilman. I didn't see you hit him, but I heard you tell him off." He pumped Tony's hand delightedly. "Hello, Chabrier." That makes two of us, Tony thought -- I didn't see myself hit him either. "Look, I know it's no use asking you not to talk about it, but go easy, will you? Don't blow it up too much' when you tell it." "It needs no amplification. You slap his face in challenge. He reaches for a weapon. You knock him unconscious with a single blow! You tell him: 'Hugo Brenner, there is not gold enough -- ' " "Knock off, will you?" begged the doctor. "He wanted me to work over at his place by Syrtis Major -- Brenner Pharmaceuticals Corporation, whatever he calls it. You know all his people get a marcaine craving from the stuff that leaks out of his lousy machinery. He wanted me there to keep giving his boys cures. I said no and he offered me a lot of money and I got sore. I shot off my mouth. He started to sock me and -- " And what? Tony still hadn't figured that out. He turned back to the box, still only half set up. Chabrier said thoughtfully: "So you know that much, eh? Then you know it's nothing new, this business of missing marcaine?" him, no longer uninterested. "Brenner said something about previous thefts. What's it all about?" "Only what you said yourself." Chabrier shrugged. "What did he offer you? Three hundred thousand? Four?" He paused, and when Tony made no reply, went on: "You can get better than that. It would be cheaper than junking his plant and building a new one." "I know I can get better than that," the doctor said impassively. "What do you know about the missing marcaine, Chabrier?"LN doesn't know. Was it in the That would be much less than the freight rates for new machines. He's used to freight being only a small part of his overhead. He ships a concentrated product." Chabrier chuckled happily. "How it must hurt when he thinks of importing plate and tubes and even, God forbid, castings. I tell you, a man doesn't know what freight can mean until he's handled liquor. Bulk is bad. Even just running the bulk liquor into the glass-lined tanks of the rocket ships is bad. It means that Mars ships water to Earth! Actually! But the foolish laws say we cannot dehydrate, let the water be added on Earth, and still label it Mars liquor." "Please," said Tony wryly. "Please, Chabrier!" The man shrugged. "So we take a little of the water out -- fifty per cent, say. Water is water, they pour it in on Earth, nobody knows, nobody cares. Bulk shipment is still bad, very bad. But bottles f Dr. Heilman, there is no known way of dehydrating a glass bottle. We ship them in, we fill them, we ship them back. They break, people steal them here and aboard ship, and at the Earth rocket port. All so the label can say 'Bottled on Mars' !" "Muffle your sobs, Chabrier. I happen to know that people pay for Mars liquor and pay a great deal for bottled-on-Mars. At least, you're legal, and I understand you make good stuff." "I drink it myself," said Chabrier righteously. "To save the freight on Earthside rye?" Tony grinned, then asked seriously, "Listen, Chabrier, if you know anything about this marcaine business that we don't, for God's sake, spill it! We... I don't have to tell you 'how hard this thing is hitting us out at Sun Lake. What does all of Marsport know?" "Was it perhaps seven-fifty?" the other man asked blandly. Fair exchange, Tony decided. "A "So? This I do not understand! Why so much for a doctor, if he is to have a new plant?" Ghabrier shook his head, shrugged, and went on more briskly: "I have told you already, if you understand: Brenner needs a new plant. His machines are no good. They leak. His men inhale the micron dust, they get the' craving, and they start to steal the product. Soon they are no good for the work, and he sends them back to Earth. You see today how many new men he brings in? Then one day there is more marcaine missing. He... "One minute, Chabrier." Tony turned and signaled Tad to take a break, then moved off a few steps, and motioned to the other man to follow him. "You think it's a frameup?" he demanded in a low, intense voice. "You would have me speak against our Commissioner Bell?" Chabrier asked with only the faintest trace of sarcasm showing. "Such a thing I will not do, but I beg of you to consider, if Sun Lake Colony should be bankrupt, their Laboratory must be sold at auction by the Commissioner, and such a plant would suit Mr. Brenner very well indeed. They say here in Marsport the machinery in this Laboratory is adaptable to many kinds of production. They say it is good, tight, well-built equipment, it will not leak. Till now it seemed quite clear." The little man shook his head doubtfully. "Now I do not know. A plant? Yes. A doctor? Yes. But both... and he offered a unless he plans to work both plants. There is a rumor which has some currency today..." T HE deep bass booming of the warning horn cut him off. People b'egan edging away from the center of the field, terminating conversations, lejoining their own groups. "You will excuse me now? I must go," Chabrier said, when the horn died down enough to permit conversation again. "I have my place reserved, but they will not hold it..." "Place?" Tony, still trying to catch up with the implications of the' other man's news, didn't follow the quick shift. "What for? Oh, are you after Douglas Graham, too?" "Of course. I understand he is -- let us say, a drinker. If I can reach him before any of these other vultures... who knows? Maybe a whole chapter on Mars liquor!" He seized Tony's hand in a quick grasp of friendship. "Good luck, Doctor Heilman," he said, and dashed off, running ludicrously on his short legs to rejoin his own party before the landing. Tony searched the sky; the rocket was not yet in sight. He got back to work, swiftly now, setting up his equipment. Chabrier had mentioned a rumor. Never mind, there was enough to think about. The whole thing planned beforehand, to ruin Sun Lake. Maybe. Chabrier was notorious as a gossip and petty troublemaker. A frameup. Maybe. And how could they find out? Who was responsible? Who was innocent? Nealey, Nowton; Bell and Brenner; Chabrier with his fluid chatter and his shrewd little eyes. Nealey at least was a decent, competent man... Maybe. But how could you tell? How could you single them out? Parasites! he thought bitterly, the cheerful Chabrier as much as the arrogant Brenner. Mars liquor brought fantastic prices because it was distilled from mashes of Martian plants containing carbohydrates, instead of being distilled from mashes of Earth plants containing carbohydrates. And the friendly, plump little man got plumper on the profits culled from Earth's neurotic needs. It wasn't really much of an improvement on Brenner's marcaine business. A minor difference in morl values, but all of them were parasites as long as they didn't devote their time to the terrible problem of freeing Mars from the shadow of Earth's dominance. ' And what about our Lab? Unquestionably, it was better to concentrate radioactive methylene blue for the treatment of cancerous kidneys than it was to concentrate alkaloids for Earthside gow-heads, but that, too, was only a difference in moral values. Parasites, all... "The rocket!" yelled Tad. at first; that was its braking blasts seen from under. The monster settledswiftly, roaring and flaring in a teasing mathematical progression of successively shorter blasts more closely spaced. When you could see its silvery bulk in profile it was going pop-pop-poppop-pop, like a machine gun. It settled with a dying splutter and stood on the field some two hundrcd meters from the crowd like a remembered skyscraper. Trucks raced out to meet it. Inside, the doctor knew, crewmen were walking around capstans that fitted over and unscrewed ten kilogram hex-nuts. The trucks slowed and crawled between the fins on which the rocket stood, directly under its exhaust nozzle. Drivers cut and filled to precise positions; then platforms jacked up from the crane trucks to receive the rim . of the rocket's throat. Men climbed the jacks to fasten them. The captain must have radioed from inside the ship; the last of the first hex-nuts was off. Motor away! Slowly the platforms descended, taking the reaction engine with them. The crane trucks crawled off, two ants sharing an enormous burden. The crew inside was busy again, dismantling fuel, tanks, whiljj the trucks moved to the inspectionmd repair shed off the field. A boom lifted off the motor, and the drivers scuttled back to receive the first installment of the fuel tanks, the second, the third and the last. "Now do the people come out?" asked Tad. "If the rocket hasn't got any more plumbing, they do," Tony told him. "Yes -- here we go." Down between the fins descended a simple elevator, the cargo hoist letting down a swaying railed platform on a cable. It was jammed with people. The waiting port officer waved them toward the Administration Building. The crowd, which had overflowed gently past the broad white line on the field, drifted that way, too. "Stanchions! Get stanchions out!" the port officer yelled. Two field workers broke out posts and a rope that railed off the crowd from the successive hoist-loads of people herded into the Administration Building for processing. There was a big murmur at the third load -- Graham ! The doctor was too far back to get a good look at the great man. The loudspeaker on top of the building began to talk in a brassy rasp: "Brenner Pharmaceuticals. Baroda, Schwartz, Hopkins, W. Smith, Avery for Brenner Pharmaceuticals," it said. Brenner ducked under the rope to meet five men issuing from the building. He led them off the field, talking earnestly and with gestures. "Pittco! Miss Kearns for Pittco Three !" A pretty girl stepped through the door and looked about helplessly. A squat woman strode through the crowd, took the girl by the arm and led her off. Radiominerals Corporation got six replacements; Distillery Mars got a chemist and two laborers; Metro Films got a cameraman who would stay and a pair of actors who would be filmed against authentic backgrounds and leave next week with the prints. A squad of soldiers headed by a corporal appeared and some of the field workers let out a cheer; they were next for rotation. Brenner got two more men; Kelly's Coffee Bar got Mrs. Kelly, bulging with bricks of coffee and sugar. "Sun Lake City Colony," said the loudspeaker. "W. Jenkins, A. Jenkin, R. Jenkins, L. Jenkins, for Sun Lake." "Watch the box," Tony called to Tad as he strode off. tion. and authorization slips waiting for him at the front desk inside, and examined them curiously. Good, he thought, a family with kids. The loudspeaker was now running continuously. Two more for Chabrier, three engineers for Pittco Headquarters in Marsport. A uniformed stewardess came up to him. "Dr. Heilman? From Sun Lake?" Her voice was professionally melodious. He nodded. "These are Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins." She turned to the family group behind her. "And Bobby and Louise Jenkins," she added, smiling. The kids were about seven and four years old respectively. Tony smiled down at, them, shook hands with their parents, and presented his authorizations to the stewardess. " -- Prentiss, Skelly and Zaretsky for Sun Lake," the loudspeaker called. "Excuse me, I'll be right back," Tony said and headed back to the desk. They gave him more authorization slips. He riffled through the papers quickly as he headed back to find the Jenkinses and wait for the newcomers. All different names. Only one family, the rest singles. Too bad. He hunted through his pockets and found two packets of peanuts, mutated beyond recognition into chewy objects with a flavor something like grape pop. By the time Bobby and Lou had overcome their shyness enough to accept the gifts, another stewardess was bringing up the rest of the group destined for Sun Lake. "Dr. Heilman?" Her voice was as much like the first stewardess' as her uniform, but according to ancient custom this one was blonde and the other brunette. "Miss Skelly, Miss Dantuono, Mr. Graham, Mr. Prentiss, Mr. Bond, Mr. Zaretsky," she said and vanished. Tony nodded and shook hands all around. "Let's get out of here," he said. "It's quieter outside and I have to give you all a physical checkup, so -- " "Again?" one of the men . groaned. "We just had one on board." ferent shots since I started all this," the other girl put in. What was her name? Dantuono? "Do we get more needles?" "I'm afraid so. We have to be careful, you know." Some day he would meet a rocket, and nobody -- but nobody -- would make that particular remark. Or perhaps that was too much to hope for. "Let's get out of here," Tony said again. He offered his hands to the children, and they started moving. and the box that held the portable health lab, the crowd was already thinning out. "We'll get right to it," thedoctor addressed his group. "I'm sorry I can't examine you indoors under more comfortable circumstances, but I have to make a quick check before we can even let you on board the ship. It won't take long if we start right away." "Doesn't the port have facilities for this sort of thing?" someone asked. "Sure. They've got a 'beautiful setup right inside the Ad Building. Anybody can use it. Sun Lake can't afford the price." He called them up one at a time, starting with the Jenkinses, parents and then children, so the kids wouldn't have too much time to get apprehensive about the needles. His trained reflexes went through the business of blood and sputum tests, eye-ear-nosc-and-throat, fluoroscopy, and nervous-and-mental, while he concentrated on getting acquainted. Names began to attach themselves to faces. He finished with the two single girls, and started on the men. The big, red-faced one was Zaretsky; skinny little bookkeeper type was Prentiss. The talkative one was Graham. in the reports while the samples went through analysis. "Douglas." "Drop-in or shares?" "Drop-in, I guess. On Earth we call it the working press." "Press?" Tony looked up sharply. "The Douglas Graham?" "The This Is man. Didn't you know I was coming out?" Tony hesitated, and Graham asked quickly, "Your place is open to the press, isn't it?" "Oh, sure. We just -- well, frankly, we didn't think you'd bother with us. Certainly didn't think you'd come to us first. We'd have rolled out the red carpet." He grinned and pointed to the array of planes at the other end of the field; for the first time, he became aware of the curious and envious stares their small group was receiving from passersby. "Everybody else did. I guess we were about the only outfit on Mars that didn't at least hope to bring you back home today." He turned his attention to the checkup form. "Age?" "Thirty-two." condition, Tony would have given the journalist ten more years; it was a shock to find that they were both the same age. He finished without further comment and went on to the next and last, a lanky blond youth named Bond. By the time he was done, the analyses and reaction tests were complete. The doctor checked them over carefully. "You're all right," he announced to the group at large. "We can get started now." It was a slow trip. None of the newcomers were accustomed to the low gravity; they were wearing heavy training boots acquired on board the rocket. And all of them were determined to see everything that was to be seen in Marsport before they took off. Tony led them across the spaceport field, and down the main street of Marsport, a mighty boulevard whose total length was something under five hundred yards, the distance from the space-port to the landing strip. He answered eager questions about (the ownership and management of the hotels and office building that lined the block adjacent to the spaceport. These were mostly privately owned and privately built, constructed of glass brick. The native product had a sparkling multicolored sheen that created a fine illusion of wealth and high fashion -- even when you knew that no building made of the stuff could possibly stand more than ten years: the same slightly different chemical content of Martian potash that produced the lustrous coloration of the bricks made them particularly susceptible tothe damaging effects of wind and sand. Glass brick construction was, by far, more costly than the rammed-earth buildings at Sun Lake, or the scrap-shanties that characterized the Pittco camp across the Rimrock Hills from the Colony; but it was still much less expensive than the Earth-import steel and alumalloy used wherever strength and durability were important. T HE Administration Building of the Planetary Affairs Commission, which occupied one entire side of the. center block, was sheathed in a muted green alumalloy; the P.A.C. Stores and official P.A.C. hotel, across the street, were respectively dull rose and dove gray. The doctor pointed out each building in turn to his wide-eyed group. The writer was as eager as any of the others, and asked as many questions. Tony was surprised; he had anticipated a bored sophistication. Graham responded equally unpredictably to the series of interruptions they met with en route. Chabricr was first, even before they had left the spaceport. He dashed up to pump Tony's hand and babble that he was delighted to see him again, and how well Tony looked despite his drab sojourn in the sodull Sun Lake where nothing ever happened. "But this is Mr. Graham, isn't it?" he exclaimed in delight. "Yeah," said the writer dryly. "How fortunate! Distillery Mars, my concern, small but interesting, happens to be preparing a new run of Mars liquor, # proof -- we should be so honored if you could make a point of sampling our little effort, shall we say this afternoon ? I have comfortable -- " a sidelong glance at Tonv -- "transportation here." "Maybe later." "To a connoisseur of your eminence, of course, we should think it a privilege to offer you an honorarium -- " "Maybe later, maybe not," grunted the writer. Chabrier only shrugged and smiled; the gunther could say no wrong. "You will perhaps be pleased to accept a small sample of the product of Mars Distillery?" The little man held up a gaudily wrapped package. He pressed the gift into Graham's indifferent grasp, wrung Tony's hand warmly', said heartily, "We will look forward to see you soon," and departed. Halliday of Mars Machine Tool was next. His manner was more that of a man inviting a guest to his country club, but he did menexpect to provide for a writer's necessary expenses. Graham cut off Halliday's bluff assurances as curtly as he had stopped Chabrier's outpourings. It was like that all die way. Everybody who was anybody on Mars was in town that day, and each of them managed to happen on the Sun Lake crowd somewhere along the road from the spaceport to the landing strip. time in the past were all determined to stop him for a chat; then they noticed Graham, and extended a coincidental but warm invitation. Those who were unacquainted with Sun Lake's doctor were forced to be more direct, and the bribe was sometimes even more marked than Chabricr's or Halliday's offers. Graham was cold and even nasty to them. But once he took Tony's arm and said: "Wait. I see an old friend." Commissioner Bell was up ahead, striding toward the Administration Building. "Him?" asked Tony. "Yeah. Hey, Commish!" Bell stopped as if he had been shot. He turned slowly toward Graham, and stood his ground as the writer approached. When he spoke, there was cold hatred in his voice. "Just the company I'd expect you to keep, Graham. Stay out of trouble. I'm the man in charge here, and don't think I'm afraid of you." "You weren't the last time," said Graham. "That was your big mistake -- Commish." Bell walked away without another word. "You shot his blood pressure up "What's it all about?" "I claim a little credit for sending Bell to Mars, Doc. I caught him with his fingers in the till up to his shoulder, at a time when his political fences were down, if you don't mind a mixed metaphor. I couldn't get him jailed, but I'll bet up here he sometimes wishes I had." A wild hope flared in Tony. The This Is man was, sporadically, known as a crusader. Perhaps Graham's annoyance at the crude plays for attention meant that an appeal could be made on the basis of decency and fair play. ai plane. Tad was already on the spot with the portable health lab stowed away, and Bea was warming up the motors. "Hi!" she stuck her head out of the cockpit to grin at Tony. "Got everybody? Tad, hand out parkas to these people. Tony, they tell me you're a hero -- had it out with big, bad Brenner in real style!" She didn't quite say: "I never thought you had it in you." "Things get around, don't they? Bea, this is Douglas Graham. He's coming out to have a look at Sun Lake for a book he's doing. This is Bea Juarez," he told the writer. "She's our pilot." Graham surveyed Bea. "I hope everything in the Colony looks as good." "We'll be extra-careful to show you only the best," she retorted. "Hey, Tad, get that mink-lined parka, will you? We've got a guest to impress." Tony was delighted. If everyone else in the Colony could take the Great Man in stride so easily, he would be pleased and very mudi surprised. Tad came running up with a parka. "What kind did you say you wanted? This is the only one .left, except Dr. Tony's." The three adults burst into laughter, and Tad retreated, red-faced. Graham called him back. "I'm going to need that thing if the temperature in the cockpit doesn't go up." "You're going to need it anyhow," Tony assured him. "There's a lot to be said for Lazy Girl here, but she's not one hundred per cent airtight." "I get the idea," the journalist assured him. "You people don't throw heat around, do you?" "Not heat or anything else," replied Tony. "You'll see, if you can stick it out." "What the hell, I was a war correspondent in Asia!"  "This isn't a war. There isn't anything exciting to make up for the discomfort -- except, say, when a baby gets born -- " "No? I take it there was something going on just a little while ago. What were you saying about the doctor being a hero?" he called forward to Bea. She shrugged. "All I know is what I hear on the grapevine." Tony heaved a mental sigh of relief -- too soon. "I was there." Tad had stuck right by them. "This man Mr. Brenner came over and asked Dr. Tony to come work for him, and he wouldn't, and he tried to get him with a whole lot of money, but he still wouldn't, and -- " XI rupted. "First thing you have to learn if you're going to be a reporter is to get your pronouns straight. This Brenner was doing the offering, and Doc was refusing; that right?" "Sure. That was what I was saying -- " "Look, Tad, we were only kidding about impressing Mr. Graham," Tony said quickly. "You don't have to make a hero out of me. I just had a disagreement with someone," he said to Graham, "and they're trying to make a good story out of it." "That's what J'm fter," Graham came back, "a good story. Tell me everything that happened. Tad." The. boy looked doubtfully from the doctor to the guest and back again. "AI right," Tony gave in. "But let's not . make a #round fight out of it, Tad. Tell it just the way it happened, if you've got to tell it." "Just exactly?" "Yes," .the doctor said firmly, "just the way it happened." "Okay." Tad was far from disappointed. If anything, he was gleeful. "So this Mr. Brenner wanted Dr. Tony to come work at his place, curing people from drugs, and he #T# wouldn't, and Mr. Brenner kept pestering him till he. got mad, and he said he didn't like him and wouldn't work for him no matter what -- I mean. Dr. Tony said that to Mr. Brenner -- and Mr. Brenner got real mad, and started to swing at him, and -- " "Well, don't stop notv," Graham said. "Who won?" "Well... then Mr. Brfcnner started swinging and -- I stuck my . foot out and tripped him, and Mr. Chabrier came over right away and said how wonderful it was the way Dr. Tony had socked Mr. Brenner, and I guess that's what everybody thought." He looked up at Tony's astonished face, and finished defensively, "Well, you said to tell it just the way it happened." parka more tightly around his head, as the chill air of flight crept into the cabin. Graham, beside him, was full of flip comment and curiosity, to which ordinarydecency, let alone special diplomacy, denlanded reply. But Tony shifted position and let his eyelids drop closed. There was no mental eye to close and so thrust out the revised memory of the ridiculous incident with Brenner, nor any mental ear that could turn off the resounding echo of Bea Juarez' hilarity. You knew all along you never hit Brenner, didn't you? he asked himself angrily. You could bare figured it out for yourself -- if you wanted to! All right, then, don't think about that. The new colonists... he ought to do something about them, something to dispel the tense, apprehensive silence in the cabin. A speech of welcome, something like that. Thank them for coming? Welcome them to Sun Lake? With the threat that hung over them all, new members andold, any speech like that would be ridiculous. Later in the day, they would be asked to sign final papers, turning over, once and for all, the funds they had already placed in the hands of the trustees on Earth, and receiving their full shares in the Colony. Before then they would learn the worst; they would be told about the accusation that might doom the Colony. But how could he tell them now, before they had ever seen Sun Lake, before they had glimpsed the spellbinding stretches of Lacus Solis, or had a chance to understand the promise implicit in the Lab's shining walls, in Joe Gracey's neatly laid out experimental fields? And in front of the gunthcr, too, how much could he say, how much did he dare to say? Graham could wreck thc-ir hopes with a word -- or solve their problems as easily, if he chose. Graham had exposed the Commissioner's corruptness once; he wasn't always just a gunthcr; he was a part-time crusader. Possibly, T I # he would understand Sun Lake's desperate necessity... possibly ? "Oh, by the way," the writer was saying. "I've been wondering what kind of a checkup you have on these people for security." "Security?" For a minute the word didn't make sense; Tony realized suddenly that he hadn't even heard the word for a year; not, at least, with that sinister, special meaning. "Don't you investigate the newcomers' backgrounds?" "The Sun Lake Society -- the recruiting office -- checks on their employment records and their schooling to see that we don't get any romantic phonies masquerading as engineers and agronomists. That and plenty of health checks are all we need. The office wouldn't have time for more, anyway. It handles all the Earthside paperwork on our imports and exports, advertises, interviews, writes letters to the papers when that damn fool free-love story pops up again -- " He gave Graham a look. "All right," laughed the writer. "I'll make a mental note: Sun Lake doesn't believe in sex." comeback Ams expected of him, but he substituted a feebly appreciative smile and leaned back, ti redly letting his eyelids drop again, in an effort to simulate sleep. Through slitted eyes, he studied the new arrivals. They were crouched on the cabin floor, bundled into their parkas, talking only occasionally. Even Tad, at the far end of the cabin with the Jenkins' children, was low-voiced and restrained. Tony could see him pulling miraculous Martian treasures from, his pockets for display, then pouncing on the few Earth items the new children had to show in return, cautiously pulled forth from supposedly empty pockets, and held for view in a half-cupped hand.  Near them, Bessie Jenkins, the mother of the two youngsters, sat half watching them, half talking to the mousier of the two single girls... Dantuono? Rose Dantuono, that was it. Anita Skelly, her Vivid red hair concealed under the hood of her parka, was carrying on a conversation in monosyllables with Bob Prentiss; they seemed to be communicating a good deal more by hand pressure than by word of mouth. A shipboard romance,' Tony wondered, or had they known each other back on Earth? He shifted his gaze to the other side of the cabin, where the remaining three men sat: Arnold Jenkins, the lanky Bond, and young Zaretsky. They were lined up in a silent row, leaning against the bulkhead, evidencing none of the interested enthusiasm one might have expected. His own depression, the doctor realized, was affecting everyone. What could he say to them ? Here they were, newly escaped from Earth, from a madhouse with a time bomb in the basement. It had cost each one of them more than he could estimate, in courage, in money, in work, to make the escape -- and what could he promise them now? With luck, with the help from Graham, with all the breaks, the best they could look forward to was the everyday life of the Colony: working like dogs, living like ants, because it was the only way to pull free of the doomed world from which they had fled. At worst, and the worst was imminent -- back on the same rocket, or the next, or the one after that, back with all the others, destitute. Back to Earth, with no money, no job, no place to live, and no hope at all. "Tony." It was Graham again. "Yes?" "It just occurred to me. Do you people charge for guest privileges? I'll be happy to shell out anything you think is reasonable. Sun Lake looks like a good story to me, and I want to stay on top of it." "It hasn't come up before," Tony told him. "That means we'll have to vote on it. Personally, I'd vote for charging you." "That's the idea! If I roast you in the book, you caii say I was sore because you soaked me. If I give you a good report, you can prove it wasn't bought and paid for. Right." "You're too shrewd for us Martian peasants, Graham. I was only thinking that we could use the money." "Doc!" Bea yelled back into the cabin. "Radio!" into the cockpit to accept the earphones Bea passed him. "I can only spark a message back," she told him. "We didn't load the voice transmitter this trip." He nodded. Through the phones a self-consciously important teenage voice was saying: "Sun Lake to Lazy Girl, Dr. Heilman. Sun Lake to Lazy Girl, Dr. Heilman. Sun Lake -- " "Lazy Girl to Sun Lake, I read you, Heilman," he said and Bea's hand sputtered it out on the key. "Sun Lake to Lazy Girl, I read you -- uh -- seventy-two at Pittco, can Lazy Girl sixteen Pittco, over." "Dr. Tony to Jimmy Holloway," he dictated, "cut out the numbers game, Jimmy, and tell me what you want, over." The teen-age voice was hurt. "Sun Lake to Lazy Girl, medical emergency at Pittco Camp, can Lazy Girl change course and land at Pittco, over." "Lazy Girl to Sun Lake, wilco, Jimmy, but where'sO'Reilly, over." "Sun Lake to Lazy Girl, I don't know. Dr. Tony. They messaged us that O'Reilly wasn't due back from Marsport all day, over." "Lazy Girl to Sun Lake, we'll take care of' it, Jimmy, out." He passed the phone back to Bea. "Somebody's sick or hurt at Pittco. Drop me off there and I'll get back on one of their half-tracks." "Right." Bea pulled out her map table. The doctor went to the rear of the cabin where Tad had stowed the portable lab. He came back with a box of OxEn pills, and stood in the doorway between the cabin and the cockpit, facing the assembled group. "These are the same pills you took on board the rocket this morning," he told them. "I don't think I have to warn you always to keep a few with you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, as long as you're on Mars, don't forget that it's literally as much as your life is worth if you don't take one of these every twenty-jour hours." They all knew that, of course; but there was no harm in impressing them with it again. There was more he should say, but he didn't know what. He chose the next best alternative and sat down. "What's cooking?" demanded Graham. "Somebody sick or something at the Pittco outfit across the hills from our place. Their doctor's still in Marsport." "Mind if I stick with you? I'd like to have a look at the place anyhow -- when they're not ready for me." Tony considered a moment, and decided he liked the idea. "Sure. Come along." "I'd kind of like to see that girl who was for Pittco." "You met heron the rocket?" "I met her, all right, but she gave me a faster freeze than your girl pilot here. What is she anyhow -- a lady engineer? All brains and no bounce?" "Not exactly," Tony said. "I guess she figured she was on vacation. She's a new recruit for the company brothel. Those are the only women they've got at Pittco." "Well, I'll be damned!" Graham was silent a moment, then added thoughtfully, "No wonder she wasn't interested!" ii Pittco near noon. The doctor and writer were met by Hackenberg, the mine boss, who drove out in a jeep as Bea zoomed her ship off over the hills to home. "I think you're too late, Doc," he said. "We'll see. Hack Hackenbcrg, Douglas Graham." They climbed in and the jeep rolled past the smokestacks of the refining plant, toward the huts of the settlement. "Hell of a thing," grumbled Hackenbcrg. "Nobody's here. Madame Rose, Doc O'Reilly, Mr. Reynolds, all off at Marsport. God knows when they're coming back. Douglas Graham, did you say? You I #I the reporter Mr. Reynolds was going to bring back? How'd you happen to come in with the doc?" "I'm the reporter," Graham said, "but it's the first I knew about coming here with Reynolds. Did he tell you that?" "Maybe he just said he hoped you would. I don't know. I got my hands full as it is. I got a contract to be mine boss; everybody takes off and Big Ginny gets her chest busted up, the girls go nuts, and I take the rap. What a life!" "Was there a brawl?" asked the doctor. "Nobody told me -- they yanked me out of B plant. They found Big Ginny, over by the hills. She was all messed up -- you know what I mean. Doc. They thought she was raped. Rape Big Ginny, for God's sake! It ain't reasonable!" "They moved her?" "They took her back to Rose's. I tell them and tell them to leave 'em lay, just get 'em warm, give plasma, and wait for a doctor. It don't do any good. First thing they think of whenever anybody gets smashed up is he don't look neat enough, so they yank him around to lie nice and straight and they yank him up so they can got a pillow under his head and then they haul him like a sack of meal to a bed. I hope to hell I never have a cavein here with these dummies. B # ck in Jo'burg it happened to me. A timber fell and broke my leg nice and clean. By the time all my friends were through taking care of me and getting me comfortable, it was a compound complicated fracture with bone splinters from my ankles on up." The jeep . stopped in front of a large house, solidly constructed of the expensive native glass brick. Unlike most of the jerry-built shacks that housed the temporary workers in the camp, it was one of the few buildings put up by the Company itself, and few expenses had been spared. The door opened hesitantly, and a girl peered out, then opened it all the way. "Hello, Hack. Is this the doctor?"... She was dressed in neither the standard tunic of most Marswomen nor the gudy clothes of her sisterhood on Earth; instead she wore tailored house-pajamas of Earthside synvclvet. She might have been any business woman or middle-class housewife answering her door back on Earth. "Hello, Mary." Hackenberg turned to Tony. "Doc Heilman, this is Mary' Simms. She's in charge when Rosq is! Qut. Mary, this is Douglas Graham, the famous gunther." He stressed the last word only slightly. "You've heard of him?" "Oh, yes.!' She was distantly polite. "Howio you do, Doctor? Won't. you come in?" "I'll have to' take off now." Hackenberg shook Graham's hand vigorously. "Glad to have met you. I'll pick you up later, Doc." He waved and headed back for the jeep. Tony and Graham followed Mary Simms indoors and pulled off their parkas. T HE whole house was heated, the doctor noticed. The girl led them through a large and rather formal parlor and into a smaller sitting room. She crossed the small room, and opened a door on the far side. "In here. Doctor she said. Tony stepped into the small bedroom, and heard Graham 'right behind him. "How about me?" demanded the. writer. The girl's voice was icy. "Professional courtesy, I suppose; we are in the same business, aren't we? By all means, come in." The doctor turned his smile in the other direction. A huge blonde lay on the bed between fresh sheets. She was in coma, or... "Out!" Tony said firmly, and closed the door on both of them. He lifted the sheet and swore under his breath. Big Ginny had been washed and dressed in a rosebud-trimmed pink niron nightgown. Few people with internal injuries could survive such first-aid. He opened his bag and began the examination. He stepped into the parlor. Mary rose from her chair to question him, but Tony forestalled her. "She's dead." He added in a puzzled voice, "Her chest was beaten in. Who found her?" "Two of the men. Shall I get them ?" "Please. And -- was there anything they found nearby?" "Yes. I'll bring it." The girl went out. "How about the rape?" Graham asked. "She wasn't," Tony said. He dropped into a chair and tried to think it out. The woman had been pregnant, and there were signs of a fresh tryat abortion -- the "rape." Was the father known? Had they tried to abort it? Had there been a scene and a fatal beating out there by the hills ? How did you know who was thefather of a child conceived in a place like this? And who else would have any reason for the violence? Mary Simms came in and said, T passed the word for tire men." She moved coolly so that her body was between Graham and the doctor, and handed over something wrapped in a handkerchief. "They found this." "Did you know she was six months pregnant?" "Big Ginny?" she asked, amazed. "Why not?" "Why, I've seen her medical card, and she's been here two years. She was married a couple of times on Earth -- " The girl was flustered. "Well?" "Well, it surprised me, that's all." He went into the small bedroom and unwrapped the object she had given him. It was a stained scrap of stout copper wire, about twentyfive centimeters long. That confirmed his diagnosis: attempted selfabortion, clumsy and dangerous because of the woman's bulk and probably hazy knowledge of anatomy. But the innumerable blows on her chest and back didn't make sense... in miners' leathers were waiting. The writer was questioning them idly about living conditions in .the camp. "I'm Dr. Heilman from Sun Lake," Tony said. "I want to ask you about finding Big Ginny." "Hell, Doc," said one of the miners, "we just walked over that way and there she was. I said to Sam, 'It's Big Ginny! jeez!' and he said, 'Some cheapskate musta hit her on the head,' and we. tried to bring her around, but she wouldn't come to, so we made her comfortable and we went and told Mary and then we went back on shift." "That's all there is to it," said the other miner. "But it wasn't one of our boys. You ask me, it was one of those Communist crackpots from over your place, all the time reading -- it drives you nuts, did you know that? How is the old bag. Doc? Is she yelling for her money?" "She's dead," the doctor said shortly. "Thanks for the information." "You ask me," the miner repeated stoutly, "it's one of those Communists did it." "Can you beat that?" the other one said softly. "What kind of guy would kill a dame like that?" They went out soberly. "Those guys were a little too innocent," said Graham suddenly. "Didn't you think so?" "I know what that's about," said Mary Simms. "They didn't mention why they happened to be out strolling on the desert. They're gowheads. They were picking up some marcaine. They have a deal worked out with one of the people from Brenner's Hop Heaven. He steals the stuff from Brenner and leaves it under a rock for Sam and Oscar. They leave money." "I knew something was sour about them," said Graham broodingly. "What do we do now, Tony?" "I'm going to write a note to Dr. O'Reilly and see if I can get Hackcnberg to drive us ito Sun Lake." He sat down and took out his notebook and pen, found a. blank page, and carefully recorded, what he had seen, without adding any of his conclusions. He signed his name, folded and handed the sheet to Mary Simms. "When you give the doctor this," he said, "please tell him I was sorry I couldn't stay to see him. We're having big times over at our place. Ten new colonists." He smiled. "Nine immigrants and a new baby." "Boy or girl?" she asked, with sudden interest. "How is it -- all right? Was it hard?" "A boy. Condition fair. Normal delivery." "That's nice," she said, with a musing smile. Then she was all business again. "Thank you for coming, Doctor. I can make some coffee for you while you're waiting for Mr. Hackenberg. We have real coffee, you know." "I didn't know," he told her. "I'll take two cups." iii in on the jeep ride to Sun Lake. The mine boss profanely said nothing like that had ever happened before and he'd get the nogood swamper that did it and swing him from the gantry if he had to beat up every leatherhead in camp. He told some grisly stories about how he had administered rough justice to native coal miners in Johannesburg. " 'Course," he admitted, "you can't do that to Panamericans." It's a good thing, thought Dr. Tony, that there wasn't any Martian animal life. An intelligent race capable of being sweated would really have got the works from Hackenberg, who could justify abominable cruelty to his brothers I # on the grounds that they'd been born in a different hemisphere of his own planet. God only knew what he would think justified by an extra eye or a set of tentacles. Hackenberg look the wide swing through the gap in the hills and highballed the dozen miles to Sun Lake City. He came to a cowboy stop in front of the Lab and declined their hospitality. "I have to get back before the big shots," he said. "Thanks, Doc. I'll see you around." T HE big main hall of the Lab was jammed with people, standing in earnest groups, strolling around, all talking at once. As the door slammed behind the doctor and the writer, the hubbub quieted, and seventyodd pairs of eyes turned on the newcomers. "Quite a delegation," Graham commented. "For me?" "I don't know," Tony confessed. He searched the room, and saw Harve Stillman break away from a small group and head their way. "Hi, Tony, did you bring a friend?" He turned to find Mimi Jonathan at his elbow. "Oh, Mimi, this is Douglas Graham. Did Bea tell you he was coming? Graham, Mimi Jonathan. Mi -- Mrs. Jonathan is the Lab Administrator, in charge of making the wheels go round. And this is Harve Stillman. Harvc used to be... a newspaperman himself,' Graham finished. "Nope," Harve grinned. "A radioteletypc repairman with the I.P." "What a switch!" Graham smiled back and shook the other man's hand. Tony turned from them to ask Mimi urgently: "How's it going? Did you finish up with the Lab search yet?" "Afraid so. It's the same as the huts. Nothing turned up," she said harshly. "We'll have to check the shipping crates." "Lord!" breathed Tony. "Maybe it won't be so bad," Stillman ventured. "I've just given this crowd a briefing on handling hot stuff. Mimi seems to think we can clear it up in a day or two if we all pitch in." "Provided," Mimi added, "we all work just a little harder than possible. I'm sorry you had to come to us at such a busy time, Mr. Graham. I hope you won't mind if we don't fuss over you too much. You're welcome to wander around and ask all the questions you want. Everyone will be glad to help you." "It will be a welcome change," he assured her. through a few more minutes of polite talk. As soon as Harve engaged the writer's attention again. the doctor turned back to Mimi. "What's the plan?" he asked. "Five crews to get out about a kilometer into the desert, a halfkilometer apart. Everybody else brings them crates one at a time, they open and search, repack before the next one comes in. No contamination from crates standing open. Through all this you and Harve run back and forth checking the handling crews and the tote crews to see that they don't get danger doses and remove and treat them if they do. We figure four days to finish the job." "Harve, do you think you're good enough to monitor the unpacking sites?" Tony asked. "Contamination from the native radioactives would be as bad as getting our own radiophosphorus into our radiomethyline blue." "I didn't want to go out and try it on my own. Do you think I can swing it?" "Sure. Go pick us five of the coolest spots on Mars." The technician headed for the racked counters. "Doc, can you let me in on that cryptic business?" demanded Graham. "In a minute," said Tony, his eyes wandering over the crowd. "Excuse me." He had spotted Anna and was starting her way when she turned, saw him and approached. "We tried another feeding with the Kandro baby," she began without a preamble, "but he didn't take to it -- choked it up again like yesterday." Tony took out his pipe and bit abstractedly on the scarred stem. "No difference? No change at all?" "Not that I could see. Tony, what's wrong with that baby?" The doctor shook his head unhappily. "I don't know," he admitted. There was something damnably wrong with the Kandro baby, something he couldn't quite figure. There was a clue somewhere in the vividly remembered picture of the gasping, red-faced infant, choking and spluttering on a mouthful of milk. Should he have tried water instead of normal feeding to get those scrambled reflexes into order? "Doc -- " said Graham. "I'll be with you in a minute." Anna went on serenely: "No trouble with Joan. I gave her her regular shot and changed the bandages when Tad told me you'd be late. She seemed fairly comfortable." "Good. Miscellaneous complaints ?" "Kroll in engineering had a headache. And there's Mrs. Beyles. Her husband came and asked if there was anything I could do -- they had a quarrel and he thought she went into a fit. It was a temper tantrum; I know you said not to give her anything, but John was so upset I gave her sedation to quiet her." She turned to Graham. "Sorry to have to drag out our hospital horrors. I'm sure you understand." "Oh," said Tony, "I'm sorry. Douglas Graham, Anna Willeudorf. Excuse me a minute, will you?" Mimi was tapping her foot, waiting for an opening. He told her: "I better get the afternoon safety done right now, and I'm damned if I'm going to do it with the whole Colony lurching around the Lab. Get 'em out of here so I can go to work, will you? Graham. I can answer questions while I go through the Lab looking for overlevel radiation. If you want to come along, you're welcome." He led the writer out of the office into the dressing room, as Mimi began to break up the knots of non-Lab personnel who had shown up to thrash out the search plan and learn their own parts in it. ii suit of protective armor. He didn't usually bother with it himself on the afternoon inspection, when other people were all over the Lab, unprotected. In the morning it was different; the elaborateprecautions of the outer-door locker were necessary when a hot spot had, possibly, had time to chain overnight. But while work was actually going on, nothing very hot could develop without being noticed. The late check was primarily for the purpose of insuring the absence of the hot spots that could develop overnight. The doctor started his meandering course through the Lab, with Graham in tow. "I'm making the second of our twice-a-day safety checks for excess radioactivity. It happens that we've got to unpack all our material scheduled for export, examine it and repack it in a hurry if we want to get it aboard the outgoing rocket in time to get credit to pay our bills." "Just routine, I suppose?" asked 'Graham blandly. "I think you gathered that it certainly isn't. The fact is, your friend, Commissioner Bell, has accused us of harboring a thief and his loot -- a hundred kilos of marcaine. We've searched everybody and everything so far except the export crates; now we've got to search them." "Why not tell the old windbag to go blow?"  "If we don't turn up the marcaine, he can seal us up for six months to conduct an inch-by-inch search." "What's so dreadful about that?" Graham asked. "We're geared to two ships in six months now instead of one ship a year. If we missed two shipments, both incoming and outgoing, we'd be ruined." and Tony waited -- and waited -- the grunt was all. He'd been half-hoping the writer would volunteer to help -- perhaps by picking up his anti-Bell crusade or by promising to see his powerful friends, or by exposing the sorry mess to the public. But Graham, apparently forgetting the Bell business entirely, pitched the doctor a ferocious scries of questions that threatened to stretch out the inspection endlessly: "What's in this box? Why isn't this conveyor shielded? Where's the stock room? What do you do here? Is it technical or trade school stuff? Where did this soil come from? What did you pay for it? Tile on this floor, concrete on that -- why? Who's in charge here? How many hours does he work ? That many? Why? How many hours does he work?" As Tony paraded solemnly back and forth with the counter, checking off items on his report, he pressed a little on the writer. "This crate here," he said, "is a typical sale. Radiophosphorus for cancer research. It goes to the Leukemia Foundation in San Francisco. It's a traceless pure -- better than nine-nines. We're in business because we can supply that kind of thing. On Earth they'd have to first make the traceless-pure phosphorus and then expose it to a reactor or a particle accelerator, and the extra step there usually means it gets conlaminated and has to be refined again. Here we just produce phosphorus by the standard methods and it is radioactive because the whole planet's got it. Not enough to present a health problem any more than cosmic rays on Earth do, but damned convenient for Sun Lake." "Some crate," commented the writer. "Lead, air gaps, built-in counter with a loud alarm. It's the law. Normally, we have five per cent of our manpower working in the shipping department. Now we have to unpack and rccratc all this stuff in less than four days." "Yon people should have a lobby," suggested Graham. "If something like that was handicapping Pittco, they'd get rid of it quick. Arc we just about through?" "Just about," said Tony flatly. So much for that, he thought; at least he'd given the writer an eyeful of the safety precautions they observed, and made him sweat a little under the heavy suit at the same time. In the cleanup room they stripped and showered, with Graham chortling suddenly: "O'Mally was a prophet! My first city editor -- he said when I got rich I'd install hot and cold running Scotch in my bathroom !" "Sorry we only have cold, and don't drink this stuff unless you want to go blind. It's methyl." "Can't be worse than die stuff I used to guzzle in Philly," Graham said blandly, but he stepped out quickly enough and followed the doctor's advice about a lanolin rubdown afterward. "Dinner time now," said Tony, buttoning on his tunic. "Mess hall's here in the Lab. Only building big enough." "Synthetics?" asked Graham. "No, that's not the Sun Lake idea. We want to get on an agricultural cycle as fast as we can. Sun Lake has to be able to live on vegetables that grow naturally, without any fertilization except our own waste products. Naturally we're strong on beans, kudzu, yams, goobers -- any of the nitrogenfixing plants that contain some natural protein. You'll see' pectorated. Into the shocked silence of the half-dozen at the table, he muttered an embarrassed apology and manfully choked down almost half of his vegetable plateMars beans, barley, stewed greens and another kind of stewed greens. To Tony he muttered when conversation had sprung up again: "#ut why do they taste like a hospital smells? Do you have to disinfect them or something?" Joe Gracey overheard it from the other side of the table. "That's my department," he said. "No, it isn't disinfectant. What you and most other people don't realize is that wc with our Lab are pikers cornpared with the lowliest cabbage in synthesizing chemicals. We taste the chemicals in our Earth plants and we accept them as the way they ought to taste. These are unfamiliar because these are Mars plants modified so that their chemicals aren't poison to Earth animals, or Earth plants modified so that Mars soil isn't poison to them. We're still breeding on this barley, which is generating too much iodoform for me to be really happy. If I can knock one carbon out of the ring -- but you don't care about that. Just be glad we didn't try out the latest generation of our cauliflower on you instead of our test mice. The cauliflower, I'm sorry to say, generates prussic acid." "Stick with those mice!" said Graham with a greenish smile. "Only guaranteed-Earth animals on Mars, including you," said Madge Cassidy, beside Graham. He watched her wonderingly as she finished her barley with apparent enjoyment. "How was that again?" "My mice. The only animals on Mars guaranteed non-mutated. We have them behind tons of concrete and lead jvith remote feeding. It'd be no joke if some of the natural Mars radioactivity' or some of the stuff flying around the Lab mutated them so they'd gobble Mars food that was still poison to people." "You mean I might go back to Earth and have a two-headed baby?" "It's possible," said Madge, getting to work on variety number one of stewed greens. "Odds are somewhat higher than it happening from cosmic rays or industrial radioactivity on Earth. But mouse generations go by so fast that with them it's a risk we can't take. Some of the pork-and-beaners died very unpleasant deaths when they tried eating Mars plants as a last resort. It was the last resort, all right." "But isn't anything on Mars good to eat?" "A couple of items," Gracey told him. "Stuff that would probably be poisonous to any native animal life, if there was any. You find the same kind of thing on Earth -- plants that don't seem to be good for anything in their native environment. My theory is that the ancestors of poison ivy and other such things aren't really Earth plants at all, but came to Earth, maybe as spores aboard meteorites. We need a broader explanation of the development of life than the current theories offer. We've grown a giant barley here, for instance, out of transplanted Earth stock, but it wouldn't be viable there. The gene was lethal on Earth. Here -- " paniment of Graham's nods of agreement, until Harve Stillman broke in: "Hey, there was a rumor through the radio relay today. You know about it, Mr. Graham?" "Doug," the writer corrected. "Okay," Harve smiled. "About marcaine -- no, not about us," he added hastily. "About marcaine being forbidden in Tartary. The Cham pronounced a rescript or whatever it is, and according to the guys in Marsport that means the price goes up, and Brenner's business is doubled. Do you know anything about it, Doug?" The newsman looked surprised. "It was all over the ship," he told them. "-Everybody was talking about it. How come you don't get it till now? The radio op on board told me he spilled it in his first "It's true then?" Gracey asked sharply. "I wouldn't know. I'm only a reporter myself." He looked across to Tony. "Don't tell me Marsport wasn't buzzing with it. Brenner, knew, didn't he?" "No," the doctor said slowly. "I didn't hear anything about it there... iBut he had heard of a rumor; who was it? Chabrier! Of course, that was Chabrier's rumor: marcaine prices going up, production will double, Brenner needs a new plant, needs a doctor, too... Tony stood up abruptly. "Excuse me. Gracey, are you finished ? Want to come along?" The agronomist rose quickly, and the two left together. On the way to collect Nick and go over to the Jonathans', Tony explained the situation rapidly to Gracey. T wanted to get the Council together tonight anyhow," he finished up, "to tell you about my idiotic brawl with Brenner. I don't know what kind of jam that's going to land us in. B.ut this business ties in with what Chabrier told me. Rocket to Bell and Bell to Brenner, and the rest of us can get the news whenever the Commissioner gets around to it!" "It makes a nasty picture," the agronomist agreed soberly. "Now what? Where do we go from here?" "Damned if I know. Maybe one of the others can figure it." He knocked sharply on Nick's door. X said firmly. "We still have to go through with the search." "That's how I see it, too," Tony admitted. "We can't bring any accusations until we know our own slate is clean." "If we could only get hold of the Bloodhound..." "Bell refused." "And that means no matter how carefully we search, he can still come in afterward and claim it wasn't done properly." "Could we rent one or buy it?" Gracey wanted to know. "Government property only," Mimi told him. "O'Donnell checked on that the other day." "Okay, so we have to do it without the Bloodhound." Nick jumped up and paced the length of the room restlessly. "I bet I could build one if wc only had a little time... Well, we have to go ahead, that's all. Where does Graham come in?" JL for an answer from him. "I don't know. He has no use for Bell, but he doesn't exactly rise to the bait when I throw it at him either. I think we better go slow and feel him out. He didn't seem to go for the blunt approach when Chabrier and the others tried it." 'Slow?" Nick stormed. "Man, we've got six days ! Go slow?" "As fast as we can," Gracey put in. "We still have to get tire search finished. I think we have to do that before we ask Graham anything. He has to have some facts to work with." "Right," Mimi agreed. "Now let's get our plans organized. If wc start at dawn, maybe we can do the whole unpacking operation tomorrow... iheti we can hit Graham. Means we'll have to leave crates open and repack them later, but I don't see any alternative now. How long is Graham staying, Tony?" "He said maybe three days." "Okay, then that's how we've got to do it. Maybe by tomorrow night we'll know better how to get at the guy." They spent a busy ten minutes outlining the plan of operations, and then the three men went out, leaving the details for Mimi to settle. Tony walked down the settlement street slowly, trying to get his thoughts in order. It had been a long day -- threefifteen in the morning when Tad woke him, and now there was still work to do. Stopping in at the hospital to collect his bag, he found Graham kibitzing idly with Harve in his living room. "Just waiting for you, Doc." Stillman stood up. "I have to get over to the radio shack. Tad's on the p.m. shift this week, but he fell asleep before supper, so I've got io take over tonight." Tony surveyed his guest uncomfortably. "Anything you'd like?" he asked. "I have to go out and see a couple of patients. "Won't be too long." "Could I go along?" Graham asked. "I'd like to, if it's all right with you." "Sure. I want you to see the baby I was talking about anyhow. My other patient is pretty sick; you may have to wait while I look in on her." They stopped at the RadcliTs first, but Joan was asleep and she usually got so little rest that Tony decided not to disturb her. Anna had said she'd had a fairly good day. He'd see her tomorrow. "Where is this infant?" Graham asked as they walked down the Colony street. "Here. This is the Kandros' place. Hello, Polly," Tony said as the door opened, even, before he knocked. "I brought Mr. Graham along to visit. I hope you don't mind." "I... no, of course not. How do you do? Come in, won't you?" Her manner was absurdly formal, and her appearance was alarmingi Tony wondered when she had last slept. Her eyes were over alert, her lips too tight, her neck and shoulders stiff with tension. "How's Sunny?" He walked into the new room where the crib stood, and the others followed. He wished now that he hadn't brought Graham along. "The same," Polly told him. "I just tried. You see?" T HE baby in its basket was sputtering feebly, its face flushed bright red. We're going to lose that youngster, thought the doctor grimly, unless l start intravenous feeding, and soon. "Tell me something, please. Doctor," she burst out, ignoring the reporter's presence. "Could it be my fault? I'm anxious -- I know that. Could that be why Sunny doesn't eat right?" Tony considered. "Yes, to a degree, but it couldn't account for all the trouble. Are you really so tense? What's it all about?" "You know how it was with us," she said evasively. "We tried so many times on Earth. And then here we thought at first it'd be like all the other times, but, Tony, do you think -- is Mars dangerous?" He saw she'd changed her mind in mid-confession and substituted the inane question for whatever she had started to ask. He intended to get to the bottom of it. Over the woman's shoulder, he looked meaningfully at Graham. The reporter grimaced, shrugged, and obligingly drifted back to the living room. Tony lowered his voice and told the woman: "Of course Mars is dangerous. It's dangerous now; it was dangerous before you had Sunny. I'm a little surprised at you, Polly. Some women think that having a baby ought to change the world into a pink spun-candy heaven. It doesn't. You've had Sunny; he's a small animal and you love him and he needs your care, but Mars is still what it always was. The terrain's rugged and some of the people aren't what they ought to be. But..." "Tell me about the murder," she said flatly. "Oh, is that what you're jumpy about? I saw worse every night I rode the meat wag -- rode the ambulance at Massachusetts General. What's that got to do with Sunny?" "I don't know. I'm afraid. Tell me about it, Doctor, please." He wondered what vague notion of terror she had got stuck in her head -- and wondered whether it would come out. "You're the doctor," he said, shrugging. "The girl who got killed was named Big Ginny, as you may have heard. If you'd been on the wagon with ine in Boston, you'd know there's nothing unusual about it. Women like that often get beaten up, sometimes beaten to death by their customers. The customers are usually drunk, sometimes full of dope; they get the idea that they're being cheated and they slug the girl. Another call for the wagon." "I heard," she said, "that she was beaten to death with a lot of light blows. No man would do that. And I heard that Nick Cantrella saw footprints out by the caves -- naked footprints. He thought they were children's." "Whose do you think they were?" he asked, though he had a sickly feeling that he knew what she'd say. ies! I told you I saw one and you didn't believe me! Now they've killed this woman and they're leaving footprints around and you still don't believe me ! You think I'm crazy! You all think I'm crazy! They want my baby and you won't listen to me!" Tony thought he knew what was going on in her head and he didn't like it. She had seen the attention of the Colony shift from her baby to the marcaine search, and was determined to bring it back, even if it had to be by a ridiculous ruse. She'd heard all the foolish stories about the mythical brownies; she'd had a vivid anxiety dream -- which, he reminded himself, she had finally admitted was only a dream -- and now she was collecting "evidence" to build herself up as the interesting victim of a malignant persecution. "We've been over all this before," he told her wearily. "You agreed that you didn't really see anything. And you agreed that there couldn't be any brownies because no animal life has ever been found on Mars -- no brownies, and nothing brownies could evolve from. Now..." "Doctor," she broke in, "I've got to show you something." She reached into the baby's basket and drew out something that glinted darkly in her hand. "Good Lord, what are you doing with a gun?" the doctor demanded. There was no more conflict on her face or hesitancy in her voice. "You can say I'm crazy, Tony, but I'm afraid. I think there could be such tilings as brownies. And I'm going to be ready for them if they come." She looked at the little weapon tensely and then put it back under the pad in the crib. Tony promptly drew it out. "Now listen, Polly, if you want to believe in brownies or ghosts or Santa Claus, that's your business. But you certainly should know better than to leave the gun near him. I'm going to give you a sedative, Polly, and maybe after a good -- " "No," she said. "No sedative. I'll be all right. But can I keep the gun?" She wiped her eyes and, with an effort, laid her twitching hands quietly in her lap. "If you know how to use it and keep the safety on and put it some place besides under Sunny's mattress, I don't sec why not. But all the brownies you'll ever shoot with it you could stick in your eye and never notice." "Like the old lady, maybe I don't believe in ghosts but I'm terribly afraid of them?" She tried to laugh and Tony managed a smile with her. "Nothing wrong with blowing your top once in a while. Nothing at all. Women ought to bawl oftener." She grinned weakly and said: "Maybe Sunny's going to eat better now." "I hope so. I'll see you tomorrow, Polly." ii street in a strained, embarrassed silence, Graham looked as if he wanted to ask something. He finally did: "By the way, Tony, do you know where I'm supposed to sleep? Or where I'd find my bag? It was on the plane." "Might as well stay with me. And your baggage ought to be at the Campbells. Tad Campbell was that young sprout who deflated my fight with Brenner." The baggage, a sizable B# bag on which Graham must have paid a ruinous overweight charge, was at the Campbells. After picking it up, the writer followed the doctor to his hospital-hut. Tony snapped a heat beam on the two plastic chairs -- standard furnishings of a Sun Lake living room -- and took off his sandboots with a grunt. Graham rooted through his baggage, picked up Chabrier's gaudy package aaid hefted it thoughtfully, then shook his head and dove in again. He came up grinning, with another bottle. "How about it. Doc?" he asked. "This is Earthsidc." "It's been a long time," Tony sighed. "I'll get a couple of glasses." The stuff went down like silken fire. It had been a very long time. "What's about brownies?" the writer asked suddenly. "I couldn't help hearing part of that when I went out of the room." Tony shook his head. "Brownies! As if we didn't have enough trouble here, without inventing Martian monsters..." "Well, what about them? All I've ever heard is that deep purple scene in Granata's interplanetary show. It's silly stuff, but nobody's handled it yet at all except Granata. Maybe I could use something; it's a beautiful story if there's anything at all to back it up. Does anybody claim a connection between fairy book brownies and the Martian variety?" "Two ways. First of all, Mars brownies are just as much a fairy story as the Earthside kind. Second, somebody once suggested that the ones in the story books were the space traveling ancestors of the present-day hallucinations." "Could be," the gunther reflected. "Could be..." "Could be a lot of rot," Tony sid without heat. "Space travel requires at an absolute minimum the presence of animal life -- or at least mobile, intelligent life. Show me so much, as one perambulating vegetable on Mars, let alone a native animal life-form. Then it's likely I'll think about brownies some more." "How about a declining race?" Graham speculated. "Suppose they were space travelers, on a high level of civilization -- they might have killed off all lesser life-forms. You see it happening some on Earth, and back there it's just a matter of living-space. We don't have the problem the Martians had to face, of dwindling water and oxygen supplies. Probably got them in the end, and destroyed their civilization... except," he added, "for the ones who got to Earth. I understand from authoritative sources that the last expedition to Earth was led by a guy named Oberon." Graham chuckled and drank, then asked seriously: "Has anybody ever seen one, except Granata?" "Hundreds of people," Tony said drily. "Ask any one of the old prospectors who come into town hauling dirt." They've all seen 'em, lived with 'em; some even claim to have been at baby-feasts. You'll get all the stories you want out of any of the old geezers." "What are brownies supposed to look like?" the writer insisted. recognizing the same intense manner Graham had displayed in the Lab. The man was a reporter, after all. It was his business to ask questions. Tony gave him what he wanted, with additions, explanations, and embellishments. Brownies: an intelligent lifeform, either animal or mobile vegetable. About a meter and a half in height; big ears; skinny arms. Supposed tobe the naked remnants of a once-proud Martian civilization. (Except that there were no other remnants to support the theory.) In the habit of kidnaping human children (except that there was no specific authenticated case of a baby's disappearance) and eating them (except that that seemed too pat and inevitable an idea-association with the kidnaping -- the sort of additional embellishment that no good liar could resist). "It's an old prospectors' yarn," Tony wound up. "The homesteaders picked it up to frighten kids into sticking close to home. There are hundreds of people on Mars today who'll tell you they've seen brownies. But not only is there no native animal life of any kind on Mars today -- so far as we can tell, there never has been. No ruins, no old cities, no signs of civilization, and not so much as one single dessicated dried-out scrap of anything resembling an animal fossil." "That's strictly negative evidence," Graham pointed out. He emptied his glass, and poured another drink for both of them. "Cigaret ?" Tony shook his head. "I gave up smoking long ago. We all quit sooner or later. Too much trouble to keep tobacco burning." He reached out to pick up his empty pipe from the table beside him, and he clenched the stem comfortably between his teeth. Graham repeated: "Strictly negative evidence. But on the other side you have footprints, for instance, and eyewitness stories." "If you're talking about the cataract-covered eyes of old Marsmen," Tony retorted, "don't call it evidence." "It wouldn't be," Graham agreed, "except that there are so many of them. I'm beginning to think there's a story in it after all." "You mean you believe it?" the doctor demanded. "Do I look crazy? I said it was a story." eters on a rocket, and then four more hours across Mars in a beatup old rattletrap of a plane," the doctor said bitterly. "You cat food that tastes like hospital disinfectant, and live in a mud hut, all so you can go back home and write a nice piece of fiction about brownies -- a piece you could have dashed off without ever leaving Earth!" "Not exactly," the gunthcr said mildly. "I was only thinking of using the brownies for one chapter. Local color, tales and legends -- that kind of thing." "You could get plenty of stories back on Earth," Tony went on bitterly. "Stories worth writing. How about Paul Rosen's story? There's a real one for you." "Rosen?" Graham leaned forward, interested again. "Seems to me I've heard the name before. Who was he?" "Not was. Is. He's . still alive; a cripple nobody knows." X writer filled their glasses again. "I'll tell you about Mars; it's the same story. You came to write a book about Mars, didn't you? Well, Mars -- this Mars, without oxygen masks -- is Rosen's work. Rosen's lungs. And you never heard of him... Rosen was the medical doctor aboard the relief ship, the one that found what was left of the first colony. He had a notion about the oxygen differential, was convinccd that it wasn't responsible for the failure. He was wrong, of course, but he was right, too. To prove his point he took off his mask and found he didn't need it. "His assistant tried it, and nearly died of anoxemia. That proved some people could take Mars straight and others couldn't. When the ship got back Rosen went to the biochem boys with his lungs. They told him a few c.c. wouldn't be enough to work with, so he volunteered for an operation. Most of his lung tissue was removed. He was crippled for life, but they tracked down the enzyme that made the difference, and worked out a test." "That I remember," said Graham, continuing to fill the glasses almost rhythmically. "Half the guys I met in Asia claimed they enlisted because they weren't Marsworthy and life wasn't worth living if they couldn't go to Mars." I #H AT was the beginning of X it," Tony said. "The ones who passed the test began to come over. Thousand dollars a day prospecting, and always the chance of finding bonanzas. At first they were pork-and : beaners, but the Mars vegetation they brought back took us one step closer to fitting into the Martian ecology. The biochem boys came up with a one-shot hormone treatment to stimulate secretion of an enzyme from the lining of the pylorus. It's present in most people without the shot, but not enough to break down the Martian equivalent of carbohydrates into simple sugars which the human body can handle. You asked me before what all the shots you got on board the rocket ship were for. That's one of them, ft means you can handle the Mars plants which don't contain compounds poisonous to Earth animals. "The other shots you got were to protect you against all the rest of the things that killed off the first pork-and-beaners -- fungi, ultra-violet damage to the eyes, dehydration, viruses. For every shot you got, half a dozen of the first explorers and prospectors were killed or crippled to find the cause and cure. "Five years ago came the payoff. The biochem boys got what they'd been looking for ever since they first sliced up Rosen's trick lungs. They synthesized the enzyme, your little pink OxEn pill, and that did it. That's when the Sun Lake Society was founded; and the new rocket fuel two years ago made Sun Lake a reality. With OxEn and four trips a year, we can make out until we find a way to get along without Earth. "Sun Lake is Mars, Graham. Sun Lake's all's gonna be left when you crazy bastards back on Earth blow yourselves up. The other colonists here aren't Mars; they're part of Earth. When Earth goes, they go. Sun Lake's all's gonna be left..." Ipk " f k.I "Coupla catches," said Graham, trying to make a glass stay put so he could fill it. "Commish Bell and his eviction notice. And you still need OxEn. Can you make that inna Lab?" "Not yet," Tony brooded. He had forgotten the lovely optimism that could be poured out of a bottle. "Guess I had 'nough to drink. I have a hell of a day ahead of me." ed, for one thing, with a hangover. Tony heaved himself out of bed, glad to find Graham still asleep. He didn't want any cheerful conversation just yet. He prescribed, dispensed, and self-administered some aspirin used an extra cup of water for a second cup of "coffee," finally decided he was strong enough to face the reek of methyl alcohol, and got washed. Mimi Jonathan was in charge at the Lab when he got there. Law or no law, he raced through the A.M. Lab check to get ahead on the awful job of monitoring the unpacking operation. He rode out on a bike to the five spots Stillman had selected for the inspection crews and found them reasonably low in radioactivity. Sheets of plastic had been laid down for flooring and tent walls were going up, with little tunnels through which the crates could be passed without the handlers bringing in all the dust of Mars on their feet. Blowers were rigged to change the air between each inspection, and radiologically clean overalls would be passed in at the same time. A little after dawn, the careful frenzy was in full swing. A crew in the shipping room eased out crates and passed them to wrappers who covered them with plastic sheeting and heat-sealed them. Aboard skids, the crates were manhandled up the slight slope from the "canal" bed to the tents in the desert, unwrapped, passed in, opened, searched, checked for chemical and radiological contamination, sealed and passed out again. Back at the Lab, they would be wrapped in lead sheets pending recrating and stored separately in every workroom that could be spared. Mimi was everywhere, ordering a speedup on the heat-sealing, or a slowdown on the bucket-brigade manhandling, routingcrates to the station that would soonest be free, demanding more plastic sheeting, drafting a woman to wash more coveralls when a stand of them toppled over. The few Lab procesMl ses that couldn't be Left alone were tended under the direction of Sam Flexner, by people from agro and administration, and by specialized workers like Anna Willendorf. Tony and Harve Stillman moved constantly up and down the line, back to the Lab and out to the desert, checking persons, places and materials. Before noon Tony had the bitter job of telling Mimi: "We've gob to abandon the Number Two tent. It's warming up. Radioactivity's low on the site, but it's from something that chains with the plastic flooring, I don't know what. Another hour and radiation from the flooring will contaminate the crates." The woman set her jaw and picked another crew from the line to set up a tent on another monitored site. Somebody slipped in the Number Three tent, and Harve Stillman found some of the Leukemia Foundation's shipment of radiophosphorus had got from the inside of the crate to the outside -- enough to warrant refusal by the rocket supercargo in the interests of the safety of the ship. But never a trace of marcaine did the search crews find. about by Colony children. Gulping cool "coffee," Tony told Harve Stillman: "You'll have to take it alone for a while. I haven't visited my patients yet. I missed Joan Radcliff altogether yesterday." "Hell, I don't know whether I'm coming or going," grunted Stillman, then added, "I guess I can manage." "Send for me if there's anything you really can't handle." Tony started back toward the street of huts before a new emergency could delay him. He stopped at his own house to pick up his medical bag, and found. Graham awake, at work in front of an old-fashioned portable typewriter. Another surprise from the gunther; Tony had assumed the man worked with a dictatyper. Even in the Colony they had those. Graham looked up pleasantly and nodded. "Somebody waiting for you in the other room, Tony." He motioned with his head toward the door that led to the hospital. "You going out again?" The doctor nodded. "J don't know when I'll get back. You can walk around and ask questions wherever you find anybody. You understand the situation here -- we can't let up on this marcaine business even for the press." "Sure." The gunther nodded, unperturbed. 'Til get around in time to pick you up for supper anyhow," Tony promised. "Did you get any lunch?" "I managed." Graham grinned and pointed to an open can still half full of meat, and a box of hard crackers. "Look," said the writer, "Unless you've lost your Earthside tastes completely, why don't you have supper on me to-night? There's lots more where lunch came from." "Thanks. I might take you up on that." Tony went into the hospital, where Edgar Kroll was waiting for him. "Sorry to bother you today. Doc," Kroll apologized. "I came over on the chance you'd be around right about now. Another one of those damned headaches; I couldn't get any work done at all this morning, Guess I'm just getting old." "Old!" Tony snorted. "Man, even in Sun Lake, you're not old at thirty-five! Not just because you need bifocals. You've stalled around long enough now..." And heaven only knew what boudoir tauntings from young Jeanne Kroll lay behind that, Tony thought, as he reached into the dispensary cabinet. "Here's some aspirin for now. If you come around tomorrow, I think I'll have time to refract you; I just can't manage it today. Take the afternoon off if the headache doesn't go away." walked down the street with Edgar, as far as the Kandros' place. At the door, he bumped into Jim, just leaving for the Lab, after lunch. "Glad I saw you. Doc." The new father stood hesitantly in the doorway, waiting till Kroll was out of earshot, then burst out: "Listen, Tony, I didn't want to say anything in front of Polly, but... are you sure it's going to be all right? Sunny still isn't eating. Maybe it's cancer or something! I heard of something like that with one of our neighbor's kids back in Toledo -- " Just -- just exactly the sort of thing that made Tony almost blind with rage. He liked the man; Jim Kandro was his brother, his comrade in the Colony, but -- ! With his pulse hammering, he made it clear to Jim in a few icy sentences that he had studied long, sacrificed much and worked hard to learn what he could about medicine, and that when he wanted a snap diagnosis from a layman he would ask for one. Jim and Polly could yank him out of bed at three in the morning, they could make him minister to their natural anxieties, but they could not make him take such an insult. He stalked into the house, ignoring Jim's protests and apologies both, and professional habit took over him as he greeted Polly and examined the baby. "About time for a feeding, isn't it?" lie asked. "Is it going any better? Since last night, I mean? Want to try him now while I observe?" "It's a little better, I guess." Polly smiled doubtfully and picked up the baby. She moved the plastic cup of the oxygen mask up a little over the small nose, and put Sunny to her breast. To Tony, it was plain that rhe infant was frantic with hunger. Then why didn't it nurse properly? Instead of dosing over the nipple. Sunny's mouth pushed at it onesidedly, first to the right, then to the left, any way but the proper way. For seconds at a time the baby did suck, then would release the n ipple, choking. "He's doing a little better," said Polly. "He's doing much better!" "That's fine!" Tony agreed feebly. "I'll be on my way, then. Be sure to call me if there's anything." street wishing a doctor could afford the luxury of shaking his head in bewilderment. Maybe it was all straightening Out. But what could account for the infant's fantastic behavior? There's nothing so determined as a baby wanting to feed -- but something was getting in the jvay of Sunny's instinct. He hoped .Polly realized that Sunny would feed sooner or later, that the choking reflex which frustrated, the sucking reflex would disappear before long. He hoped she would realize it; he hoped desperately that it would happen. Joan Radcliff was next and this time he found her awake. She was no better and no worse; the enigmatic course of her nameless disease had leveled off. All he could do was talk a while, go through the pulse-taking and temperaturereading mumbo-jumbo, change the dressings on her sores, talk some more, and then go out. Now Dorothy, the sinus case, and he was done with his more serious cases for today. Tanya Beyles had a green sick card on her door, but he decided to ignore it. He was already past the house when she called his name, and he turned to find her beckoning from the opened door. She had dressed up to beat the band -- an absurdly tight tunic to show off her passable thirty-plus figure, carefully done hair and the first lipstick he remembered seeing around in months. "I don't have much time, today, Mrs. Beyles," he said carefully. "Could it wait till tomorrow?" "Oh, please, Doctor," she begged, and launched into a typical hypochondriac resume of symptoms, complete with medical terms inaccurately used. What it boiled down to was that a thorough examination was in order though there was nothing nasty wrong with her. "Very well," he said. "If you'll come over to the hospital -- next week, perhaps -- when I have more time." With a chaperone, he added silently. "Wouldn't it be just as easy here, and more private?' I she ventured shyly, indicating the bedroom, where a heat lamp was already focused on the made bed. "Dear God," he muttered, and found the professional restraint that had taken over while he was with Polly Kandro had now quite abandoned him. "Mrs. Beyles," he said, plainly and nastily, "you may not realize it, but we do have a sense of humor here, even if we don't share your ideas of fun. We've been able to laugh off your malicious gossiping and the lousy job you do in Agronomy; you do get some work done in Agro, and you don't eat too much to keep your shape. Up to now, we've been able to laugh everything off and hope, you'd straighten out. But I warn you, if you start being seductive around Sun Lake -- even if you start with me -- you'll get shipped out so fast you won't..." "Is that so?" she screamed. "Well, maybe you'd like to know that I can get all the love and respect I want around here and where you got the nasty idea that I'm at all interested in you I can't imagine. I've heard of doctors like you before and if you think you're going to get away with it you're very much mistaken. And don't think I don't know all about you and that Willendorf woman. I know things people would love to hear..." He walked off before she could say any more. God only knew what they'd do with her -- deport her, he supposed, and her sad sack of a husband would have to go, too, and it would all be very messy and badtempered. Maybe Bell and Graham and all the others were right, regarding Sun Lakers as anywhere from mildly insane to fanatically obsessed. Maybe anything at all, but he still had to go to see Dorothy and her sinuses. The doctor's facial muscles fell into their accustomed neutrality as he walked into the girl's bedroom and his mind automatically picked up the threads of the bacitracin story where he had left off two days before. ii at the unpacking and search operation where he took over alone while Stillman, groggy with the. strain, the responsibility and the plain hard work, took a short break. The two of them divided the job then, moving steadily up and down the lines, checking, rechecking endlessly until, as darkness closed down, they were suddenly aware that there were no more crates. Mimi Jonathan bitterly enumerated the results of the search : "About # man-hours shot to hell, three crates contaminated beyond salvage, nine salvageable for umpty-hundred more man-hours -- and no marcaine. Well, nobody can say now that we didn't try." She turned to Tony. "Your move," she said. "Graham?" The doctor stood up. "All I can do is try to get him on our side. He's friendly anyhow; he asked me to have supper with him out of his private stock of genuine synthetic Earthside protein." "You don't sound too hopeful," Gracey ventured. "I'm not. Did I tell you what his favorite story is so far? Brownies!" "You mean he's passing up a he wants to write about Brownies?" Nick asked incredulously. "You think he's going to step on Pittco's toes?" Tony retorted. "Not that smart boy! Okay, I might as well get back and make my try." He started across the darkening desert, and Nick fell into step beside him. "Why don't you come along?" the doctor suggested. "Maybe you could talk his language better than I do. You might get a decent meal out of it, too." "It's a thought. A good one. Only Marian's probably got supper all ready by now. I better check in at home first. I don't know -- would you say it was official Council business?" "That's between you and your hunger," the doctor told him. "What do you want most -- meat or Marian ?" "Damned if I know," Nick admitted, grinning. "Doc!" It was Jim Kandro, running down the street toward them. "Hey, Tony! I just came from the hospital -- looking all over... "What's up?" "The baby! He's having convulsions." "I'll go right over. Pick up my bag at the hospital, will you?" J IM set off in one direction, and Tony in the other. "See you later," Nick called out to the doctor's rapidly retreating back. At the Kandros, he found Polly, near-hysterical, with a struggling infant in her arms. Sunny was obviously in acute discomfort; the veins were standing out on his fuzzy scalp, he was struggling and straining feebly, his belly was distended and his cheeks puffed out uncomfortably. "How's he been eating?" the doctor demanded, scrubbing his hands. "The way you saw before," said Polly. "Better and better, but just the way you saw before, wiggling and pushing so half the time he was sucking on nothing at all. He was crying and crying, so I fed him three or four times and each time he got more -- " She fell silent as Tony picked up the baby and patted and stroked it. It burped loudly. The alarming red color faded and the tense limbs relaxed. With a whimper Sunny collapsed on the doctor's shoulder and fell asleep before he was back in his crib. "But you said -- " Polly gasped. "I guess Sunny didn't hear me," Tony said. "Here you are, Doc." Jim came in and looked from Polly's empty arms to the quiescent baby in the crib. "I guess you didn't need the bag. What was it?" "Colic," Tony grinned. "Good, old-fashioned, Earthside colic." "But you told me... Jim turned accusingly on his wife. "And I told Polly," Tony put in quickly. "It doesn't usually happen. Babies don't have to be burped on Mars -- most of them, that is. The mask feeds richer air into a Mars baby's nose so he just naturally breathes through his nose all the time and doesn't swallow air and get colic when he feeds. But I guess Sunny had his heart set on a bellyache. Was he crying when he fed, Polly?" "Why, yes, a little bit. Not really crying, a kind of whimper every now and then." "That could explain it. All right, now you know it isn't serious. Just be sure to bubble him after feeding. Thank the Lord he's nursing. That young man of yours gave us all a bad time, but I think we're . out of the woods now.' Sunny was going to be all right; for the first time, Tony really believed it. Somehow that changed the whole dismal picture. iii and found Graham still sitting in front of his typewriter, not writing now, but reading through a pile of onionskin pages. "Hi. I was waiting for you." The journalist looked pleased with himself. "I'll fix us some sandwiches if you'll do something about that coffee of yours. When you make it, it's almost drinkable." There was a knock on the door. "Come in," Tony called out. "Oh, am I busting in on something?" Nick asked innocently. "No, of course not. Glad to see you. Doug, this is Nick Cantrella. I don't know if you met him before. He's in charge of maintenance and equipment in the Lab, and a member of our Council. Nick, you know who Doug Graham is." "Uh-huh. My rival. My wife's only true love." "And you should see his wife," Tony added. "This gets more and more interesting. You're not married to that lady pilot by any chance?" Graham extended a greasy hand. "No? Too bad. Join us? We're eating meat J" "Don't mind if I do. How's the baby, Tony? Anything really wrong ?" "Yes and no. Colic. Good old colic," the doctor gloated. "It shouldn't happen, but, by God, it's something I know how to cope with; I think the kid's going to be all right. Coffee's ready. Where's the food?" They munched sandwiches, and had "coffee" which Graham pronounced a very slight improvement over his own efforts. The two Sun Lakers were more than happy with it; it was sweetened with gratings from a brick of sugar produced by the gunthcr from his wonderpacked luggage. The same suitcase turned out to hold another bottle of Earthside liquor, and Graham poured drinks all around. "It's a celebration," the writer insisted, when Tony, remembering his hangover, would have demurred. "I got a week's work done today. Whole first chapter -- complete draft of the trip out and impressions of Marsport!" He fanned out a sheaf of pages covered with single-spaced typing, and corked the bottle. Nick took a long deep swallow, settled back blissfully on the bunk .where he was sitting. "Marcaine," he said at last. "That could explain it." "What?" "I've been sitting here imagining I was eating meat and drinking whiskey. Can you beat that?" He sipped more slowly this time, savoring the drink, and said determinedly to Graham, "You're just about up to Sun Lake in your notes then?" "That's right," Graham said. In the silence that followed, he asked brightly: "Say, aren't you the guy who saw the brownie tracks." "Brownie tracks? Who, me? You're sure you weren't thinking of unicorns?" "Do unicorns leave little footprints?" "Oh, that. Yeah, I saw something out around the caves in the Rimrock Hills. That's where the kids take the goats to graze." "Are they allowed to go barefoot around there?" Graham asked. "Allowed!" Nick exploded. "You haven't been ten years old for quite a long time, have you ? How much attention do you think they pay?" membering his talk with Tad, but he didn't bring it up. Out loud he said: "I've got a .theory about that. I've been thinking about it since last night, Doug. Maybe you can use it in your book." It wasn't smart, maybe, to keep riding the writer about it, but he'd had enough of brownies for awhile. "I'll tell you what I think. I think some kids who weren't supposed to do it went exploring in a cave, and one of them got lost. Then the rest wouldn't admit what happened, and all the search party could find was kid-sized footprints. So we have 'brownies'. And a couple of dozen retired prospectors back on Earth are coining money telling lies about them," he finished, more sharply than he meant to. "I guess that squelches me," Graham laughed boisterously, picked up his papers, and stood up. "I better be getting along. Have to find out about getting this stuff radioed out." He started for the door, and almost collided with Anna coming in. "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot you had company, Tony. They kept me busy all day out at the Lab, and I thought maybe I could get some work done here this evening, but..." She smiled apologetically at Tony and Nick, then turned to Graham. "Were you going out?" "Shouldn't I?" "Of course not," said Tony. "Not when Anna's just come in. Stick around, and you'll see something." "What does she do?" Graham asked. "Song and dance routine? Prestidigitation ?" Nick said from his perch on the. wail bunk: "Graham, if you had an ounce of Earthside chivalry in your bloodstream, you'd uncork that bottle and offer the lady a drink." "You're right. I'll even offer you one." Tony got another glass, and the writer poured. Then he turned to Anna, and asked again, "Well, what do you do?" "I'm a glassblower, that's all. Tony likes to watch it, and he couldn't possibly understand that other people might not enjoy it as much. "Oh. You do your work over here?" "Yes," the doctor said testily. "Anna is also my assistant, if you recall -- neither one is a full-time job, so she keeps her equipment here, and combines the two." For a few minutes, the four of them sat talking inconsequentially, the three Sun Lakers answering Graham's endless variety of questions. Finally, Anna got up. "If I'm going to get any work done, I better get started." She opened the cupboards and began pulling out equipment. Graham stood up, too. "Well..." He picked up his sheaf of papers. "Tony!" A LL three men focused their attention on Anna, who stood facing them, her arms full of assorted junk. "Tony," she said bluntly, "Have you told Mr. Graham about our problem here? Don't you think he might be able to help?" "Well!" Graham sat down again, and suddenly grinned. "Tell me, what can I do for dear old Sun Lake?" "You can save our necks," Nick told him soberly. "At least I think you can, if you want to. You're going back on the rocket," he explained, "and that rocket won't have our shipment on it, because -- actually because -- we didn't steal some marcaine we're accused of stealing. It's not here, so we couldn't find it, and that means Bell will throw a cordon around us on Shipment Day. You know Bell from way back. You could raise such a stink about what he's doing to us -- if you wanted to -- that there'd be T # orders recalling him to Earth on the next rocket that comes in. You're big enough to do it. And we don't know any other way." "You're very flattering," the writer said, "and also too damn brief. I already know that much. Suppose you fill me in on some of the details." "Bell tramped in three days ago," the doctor began carefully, and went through the story, step by step, not omitting the information he had picked up in Marsport, and reminding Graham at the same time about the Cham's new regulations against marcaine. "Brenner wants to get his hands on the Sun Lake Lab," Tony wound up. "You got Bell kicked out of a good job once for crooked dealing. You could do it again. Unless Bell's got religion, and I see no sign of it, Brenner could easily hire him to kick us off Mars and then see that Brenner Pharmaceutical got the assets of the busted Sun Lake Colony -- including the Lab -- in a rigged auction." The writer poxiuered, and then told them slowly: "I think I can do something about it. It's a good story, anyhow. The least I can do is try." Nick let out a wild: "Wa-hoo!" and Tony slumped with relief. He looked back to Anna's work bench, smiling -- but she was gone. "Now that that's settled," said Graham, "I want a favor myself." "Up to but not including my beautiful blonde wife," promised Nick fervently. "'If it was women, I'd want that lady airplane pilot. But it isn't women. I still want to get this stuff filed to Marsport by your radio. I'm going to have a crowded schedule before takeoff and every minute I clip off in advance, like getting  this stuff typed and microfilmed, will help." "Sure, pal! Sure!" Nick stood up and shook the writer's hand earnestly. "I'll take you to the radio shack myself and give you the blanchest carte you ever saw!" It's, a IV l Mars baby, It's a IV l Mars baby, It's a IV l Mars baby, LVl Mars baby All -- our -- o wn f her song very softly, so as not to awaken Jim. Her hand, on the baby's back, caressed the tiny, clearly defined muscles, rigid now with concentration of effort. Her eyes filled with wonder as she watched Sunny nuzzle awkwardly, but successfully, against her breast. He was eating ! He was swallowing the milk, and not choking on , it or spitting it back! With a touch of awe at the thought that she was the only mother on Mars who had the privilege, she laid the baby over her shoulder and gently patted. Sunny bubbled and subsided. She laid him in the basket and sat watching him raptly. Jim rolled over and muttered, so she decided not to fsing her song again. She was hungry, anyway. She touched her lips to the baby's forehead, straightened his mathematically straight blanket and went to the little pantry cupboard in the living room. A dish of left over navy beans would settle her for two or three more hours of sleep. She found a spoon and bean to eat, happily. She cleaned the dish and licked the spoon, put them away and started back for bed. She was halfway to the bedroom door when it happened. E verything went slower and slower and came to a stop. She was frozen to the floor, giggling -- and she was also somewhere else, watching herself giggle. The reddish walls turned the most beautiful apple-green, her favorite color, and put forth vines and branches. They were apple tree branches, and they began to bear apples that were baby's heads -- severed baby's heads, dripping rich delicious juice. The babies sang her song in a cheeping chorus, and she saw and heard herself giggle and sing with them, and pluck the heads from the branches, open her mouth -- "Jim!" she shrieked, and it all collapsed. Her husband stood in the doorway, looked at her and leaped to catch her. "Get Dr. Tony," she gasped after she had vomited and he had carried her to a chair. "I think I'm going crazy. There were these -- get Dr. Tony, please, Jim !" The thought of being left alone horrified her, but she clutched the chair arms, afraid to close her eyes while he was gone. She counted to more than a hundred, lost track and was starting again when Jim and the doctor burst in. "Polly, what is it? What happened ?" "I don't know. Doctor, I don't know! It's all over now, but I don't know if it's going to come back. I saw things. I think... Tony, I think I'm crazy." "You threw jip," he reminded her. "Did you eat anything?" "I was hungry after I nursed Sunny. I ate some beans--cold beans. And then it was horrible. It was like a nightmare, only I was watching myself..." "This happened right after you ate the beans?" he demanded. "You didn't eat the beans earlier?" "No, it was. right after. I fed Sunny, and then I ate, and then it happened. I was frozen to the floor and I watched myself. I was going to do something horrible. I was going to . : She couldn't say it; she remembered it too clearly. "That's too quick for food poisoning," the doctor said. "You froze, you say. And you watched yourself. And there were hallucinations." "'Yes, like the worst nightmare in the world, yet I was awake." "Stay with her, Jim. I've got to get something. Can you clean up in here?" Jim clenched his wife's hand in his big, red fist and then began to mop. Tony came back with a black box they all knew -- the electroencephalograph. "Look here, Tony," growled Kandro. "If you're thinking that Polly's a drug addict, you're crazy." Tony ignored him and strapped the electrodes to the woman's head. Three times he took traces, and they were identical. Positive brain waves. "You were full of marcaine," he told her flatly. "Where did you get it?" "Well, I never -- " and "God damn it all. Doc -- " the couple began simultaneously. Tony relaxed. "I don't need a lie-detector," he said. "It must have been put on the beans. Lord knows how or why." Polly asked incredulously: "You mean people go through that for pleasure?" "You had the reaction of a wellbalanced person. It's the neurotic who enjoys the stuff." Polly shook her head dazedly. "But what are we going to do?" demanded Jim. "First thing is to get some bottles and nipples, and goat's milk for you. Breast-feeding is out for at least the next week, Polly. There'd be marcaine in your milk. You don't want to wean Sunny now?" "Oh, no!" Tony cmiled. "We'll have to get a breast pump made, too, to keep your supply going. But that can wait till morning." "But -- " protested Jim. The doctor swung around to face him. "All right, what do yon suggest we do?" Jim thought and said hopelessly: "I don't know." XN not a detective. All I can do is write a formula for the baby, and get people moving right now turning out the stuff you need." He stepped into the nursery for a moment to peer at Sunny, in the crib -- a beautiful, healthy child. Tony wondered for a moment whether Polly's earlier fantasy about a menacing brownie had also been caused by her food being doped. There had been no nausea that time, but it might have been a smaller dose. Time enough later to figure all that out; Sunny would be hungry again in a few hours. "Jim,", he directed, "you better beat it over to Anna Willcndorf's and tell her we'll need bottles right away. And get some milk while you're out. If you move fast, we'll have time to boil it and make the first formula before Sunny wakes up again." "Milk?" Jim said, dazed. "Milk. From one of the goats. Don't you know how?" "I've milked cows," Kandro said. "Couldn't be much different." "One other thing," Tony called to Jim, who was already at the door. "Nipples. Get Bob Carmichael for that. I think he can figure out some way... make sure he checks with Anna on the size." "Right." Jim closed the door behind him. ii the alky stove when Anna arrived with the first bottle. "The others are still cooling," she explained. "I'll go back for them later, but I thought you'd need one right away." She handed it over, went to look down at the calmly sleeping baby, and asked Polly, "What can I do?" "I don't know. Nothing, I guess. The doctor's showing me how to make formula and I suppose that's all there is. It was awfully nice of you to get up to make the bottles. I feel terrible about making so much trouble, but I just..." She trailed off helplessly. "It wasn't your fault," Anna told her, then asked the doctor: "Do you want me to take over with the formula ?" "There's no need to," Tony told her. "For that matter, you can go back to bed if you want to. There shouldn't be any more trouble tonight." "I have to go back and get the other bottles later anyhow," she protested. She took over at the stove, showing Polly the simple procedures of sterilization and measuring involved in the baby's formula. Jim came back from a second trip to the Lab in time to boil up one of the new nipples, and fill a bottle before Sunny woke. Polly, still shaken, but determined to behave normally, picked the baby up and changed him, warmed the bottle herself under Anna's watchful eye, and settled herself on a chair with baby and bottle. "You want to make sure the neck of the bottle is full of milk," Tony told her. "Aside from that, there's nothing difficult about it. Don't try to force his position. Let him wriggle around just as if he was at the breast." He watched while she nudged the new plastic nipple into his mouth. "That's right. Fine. I think he's going to take it all right." Sunny sucked hungrily, wriggled, pushed his mouth sidewise, and then to the other side, sucking all the time. Milk spilled out the side of his mouth as he sucked without swallowing, and turned his reddening face from side to side, squirming desperately. Tony, suddenly frightened, took a step forward. He could see the trouble clearly enough, but from above, looking down at the baby's face, Polly couldn't possibly see what was happening. Sunny was trying to make use of the peculiar sidewise suckling he had developed at his mother's breast, but he couldn't wedge his small mouth around the comparatively firm plastic of the new nipple. Tony opened his mouth to speak; in a minute the baby would... "Stop it! O-o-h-b stop it! You're choking -- !" Polly's hand, holding the bottle, shot away from the baby's mouth. Tony whirled to see Anna crumble to the floor, her mouth still open in the drawn-out shriek. "Jim!" he shouted. "Quick! Take care of her!" Then he turned back again without waiting to see what Kandro did. He lifted the choking, convulsive infant out of Polly's limp arms, turned him upside down, and stroked the small stiff back vigorously. Within seconds, a thick curd of milk dribbled out of the baby's mouth, and the terrible gasping sounds turned into a low monotonous wailing. mother's arms, and : turned briefly to look at Anna. Jim had lifted her on to the wall bunk. Tony checked quickly to make sure she hadn't hurt herself. "Just fainted," he said, puzzled, and gave Kandro instructions to restore consciousness. Sunny's wailing was turning into a steady, vigorous hunger cry. The doctor picked him up again, and wrapped him in one of the warm new blankets. "Where are you taking Sunny?" asked Polly with shrill nervousness. "To the hospital." He turned to Jim, still standing over the unconscious Anna. "Don't let her leave when she comes to, Jim. I'll be back later." He went out, carrying the screaming baby in one arm and his black bag in the other. The walk back to his own house was haunted. The ghost of a newborn baby went with him along the curving street in the dark, a ghost that gasped and choked as Sunny did, twisting in agony until it died again as it had already died a thousand thousand times for Tony, only the first time was the worst, the first baby born and the first one dead in Sun Lake, and he'd had to watch it all, the ghost of a baby that died for want of air... He went in by the hospital door. He didn't want to see Graham. Systematically, he turned on the lights and assembled liis instruments in the sterilizer, turned a heat lamp on the examination table, and stripped off the baby's clothes. This couldn't go on; there 'had to be an answer to Sunny's troubles, and he was going to find it now, tonight. Tony examined the child with every instrument and technique in his repertory. He felt it, probed and thumped it, listened to its interior plumbing. He could find nothing that resembled organic trouble. And he could think of no rational explanation for a mask baby breathing through its mouth. "It's got to be nasal," he said out loud. Three times he had used the otoscope, and three times he had found no obstruction. But -- mask off Sunny's nose. He slipped it over the mouth instead, stifling its scream in mid-voicc. At least, he thought grimly, the baby would have to breathe through the mask now if it wanted to keep on crying. The doctor began to probe delicately into one nostril, and Sunny promptly reacted with the unexpected. Impossible or not, he tried to draw a breath through his exposed nostrils, found an impediment and began to choke again. Tony withdrew the slender robe and stared at the gasping, redfaced infant. For just a moment, a clear and frightening picture of the other baby blotted out what was before his eyes -- the ghost baby that had come up the street with them. Then he looked at Sunny again and everything began to full into place. Sunny was the wrong color. He should have been blue and he wasn't. He was gasping for air, he couldn't breathe; he should have been oxygen starved. And he was flushed a bright crimson! It wasn't lack of oxygen, then. It was impossible ! But it was the only logical answer. Tony removed the mask from the baby's face with trembling hands. He waited. It took Sun Lake City Colony Kandro less than thirty seconds to do what Tony knew he couldn't do -- and most certainly would do. Sunny gasped sharply for a moment. Then this breathing became even, his color turned a normal healthy pink, and he resumed his monotonous hunger cry. Sunny didn't need an oxygen mask at all to survive on Mars, nor did he need OxEn. The fact Was scientifically paralyzing... feh e child was adapted not to the rich air of Earth, but the deadly thin, atmosphere of Mars ! Concluded Next Month by  a master of science fiction continues the adventures of the Time Traveler in Earth's inconceivably remote future... the world as strangely different from ours as ours is from the world of dinosaurs! (i You'll find here, too, the incredibly alien life of ages yet to come... including the Amphibian Woman, that alluringly feminine yet fascinatingly unknowable being who is probably the most enigmatic female character in all science fiction. d If you missed the first volume, you can order it from World Editions, Inc., # West #th Street, New York #, at #t a copy -- no mailing or hanas a complete new story, which it is. (# A beauty, let us add, considered by experts as even more elegant Adds Instant Class To Your Car Smart looking, easily sliding, long lasting, water repellent. Easily installed, custom tailored. 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No C.O.D. orders accepted. who are normally overweight, will be amazed to discover this safe, pleasant, scientific way to lose ugly fat and get a slimmer, more attractive figure." f S#S supply for #. a # day supply m LnC YY formula -- daring French model -- whose revelations excited all Europe. "A woman who, as far as I know, never had a room of her own," he says of her. But what else does a woman need if she. has charm? And if she can find a man for every strange whim of hers? # pages, more , rst American no Lafayette St., New York # inting. This ' # -- . ::::::::::: Ui.Y #I GALAXY Science Fiction #  ir Galaxy Galaxy Editor-in-Chief Art Director Advertising Manager Circulation Manager July, #I Vol. #. No. # by Fritz Leiber # Cover by Illustrating is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. #of per copy. Subscriptions: I # copies) # per year in the United Slates, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America ami U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondeluss matter at the Post Office, New York. N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President: George A. Cogniat. VicePresident: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer: Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by tetf-addreed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by John D. MacDonald #I by Charles Dye # by Milton Lesser I # by Cyril Judd # by H. L. Gold I by Groff Conklin I I # Next issue at your newsstand about July # Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pal. Olf. Getting Personal O NE of the most common requests from readers is for vital data on their favorite writers. Biography, though, should be mechanical, a suggestion that authoritarians ought to adopt gladly. The trouble is that writers, like shoemakers, butchers, drug clerks, come in all sizes, shapes, ages, sexes, places of birth, education, marital status, number of begats. This is sheer confusion. Anyone who served in the Army can tell you its great advantage over civilian life -- at a single glance, you can tell a stranger's rank, branch, length of service, pay. The trouble is that you can stand on the toes of your favorite writer in a bus, accidentally spill your soda over him at a bar, or refuse him credit, and not know who -- or what, for that matter -- he is. In a nice, ruthless authoritarian society, this wouldn't be true. Here's how it might work:  Uniform. According to income, this should range from overalls to cutaway, which must be worn at all times except in privacy. Writers should wear traditional flowing ties and velvet jackets, topped off by a green eyeshade, instead of a beret, to distinguish them from artists.  Insignia. More than one seems to be necessary. A writer in the upper brackets can wear appliqued dollar signs on one lapel, and a tasteful typewriter fnsigne on the other, with crossed pens reserved for poets; miniature rejection slips, of course, for beginners.  Hashmarks. Not. using the Army's fogey stripes on sleeves to indicate length of service would be mere obstinacy; it is, after all, the easiest and best identification. Bronze stripes for single years; silver for five; gold for decades. Compulsory retirement after thirty years, except in national or editorial emergency.  Pay. The equitable way to determine this is by length of service and not ability or popularity, just as in the Army. Tiherc could be efficiency tests, following the Army's procedure; the difference would be that it's not who you know, it's whom. Base pay must be on a word rate, but with minimum and maximum production, which should be a relief for the public.  Oogagging. No actual dogtags need be issued, but serial numbers arc absolutelynecessary, to be placed after an author's name -- and rank in the profession -- at the beginning of a story. A reader seeing Capt. Something, #-#BM#S#NY#NM##S#BA would know immediately that Author Something is five feet nine, weighs #, is married ten years, has one son; has lived in New York four years, was bom in New Mexico in #, went to Ohio State long enough to get a B.A. Being a captain, the author would, of course, have served between ten and twelve years and sold five novels and about # stories. With every upgrading, authors receive new ranks, but retain serial numbers.  Training. Uniformity is badly needed here. Since most writers work as busboy, numbers runner, olive stuffer, floor scraper, deckhand, marijuana salesman, before selling enough fiction to live on, all writers should be required to go through the same jobs. It would eliminate the classified ad effect of most writers' biographies, yet would be taken for granted, thus retaining the romantic nature of the art. of the foregoing, consider the sprawling effect of even these brief notes :  Judith Merril (the Judd of Cyril Judd) is something over #I but under #; marriedto Frederik Pohl, the literary agent; has two daughters; is moving from New York to a newly acquired house in Red Bank, N. J.; edited for Bantam Books, now writes, 'housekeeps full -- she says she means full -- time; is better than medium tall, dark, and her friends consider her attractive.  C. M. Kornbluth (the Cyril of Cyril Judd) is #; married to a fine ceramicist; no children; lives in Chicago; where he heads Transradio Press, for which he writes # words a day and then comes home and writes science fiction; is medium height, a bit more than medium weight; has a peering, severe look and grimly saves all his humor for his stories; is considered attractive mainly by editors. no children; lives in New York; is five or six feet fall, weighs one or two hundred pounds; dark, eyeglassed; lavishes his humor in conversation, fiction, letters; is never home, but doesn't go anywhere; can't hold still long enough to be considered attractive by anyone.  Fritz Leiber is #, married, one son; lives in Chicago; assistant editor for Science Digest; is six or seven feet tall, weighs two or three hundred pounds; son of famed Shakespearean actor, looks like one himself; claims to have refused a drink once; is considered handsome only by women. All this could have been compressed into title and serial number. Unfortunately, we would be somewhat compressed, too, in the process. Maybe it's better this way. galaxy science fiction is a man's world Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys! I 'VE always said that even ff Sis is seven years older than me -- and a girl besides -- she don't always know what's best. Put me on a space ship jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves husbands in the one place they're still to be had -- the planet Venus -- and you know I'll be in trouble. iBad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into. Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggledout of my acceleration hammock and started for the door pf our cabin. "Now you be careful, Ferdinand," Sis called after me as she opened a book called Family Probletns of the Frontier Woman. "Remember you're a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you." I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government to run ships. I felt free all over -- and happy. 'Now was my chance to really see the Eleanor Roosevelt! traveling in space at last. Ahead and behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white doors -- on and on and on. Gee, I thought excitedly, this is one big ship! Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing that gave the feel 'of great empty space like I'd read about in The Soy Rocketeers, no portholes, no visiplates, nothing. So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix going purr-purr-purrtypurr in the comforting way big machinery has when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were portholes on the hull. I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat # where we should go in case of emergency. I looked for the important things. As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn't decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now. I'd be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what's right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do. Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in thepi, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages. "In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of compan ion way," they had the words c-tchcd into the glass,  'break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion." I read the "following fashion" until I knew it by heart. Boy, I said to myself, I hope we hove that kind of disaster. I'd sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea! And all the time I was alone. That was the best part. and there was a big sign. "Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!" A big sign in red. I peeked around the corner. I knew it -- the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I'd ever dreamed existed in the Universe. There wasn't anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look... But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. "Passengers not permitted -- " Well! Didn't I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days? Sure, ever since the Male De suffrage Act. And didn't I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men. "Technically, Ferdinand, I'm the only passenger in our family. You can't be one, because, not being a citizen, you can't acquire an Earth Passport. However, you'll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause -- 'Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining' -- and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men." Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb thihgs. I'm old enough, I guess, to know that it isn't what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn't be on their way to Venus to hook husbands. Still, if I wasn't a passenger, the sign didn't have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that, but at least it was an argument L could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law. I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I'd ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one! Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall inglowing red letters were the words, "Lifeboat #. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!" Another one of those signs. est it and could just 'barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn't see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press. That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had c#n the outer keeps back home in Undersea! But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key -- might as well see if that's it, I figured. "Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame." For a second, I thought I'd hit possible combinations -- The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I'd been a baby sardine. I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I'd ever seen. He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time. His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back. And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-theway-in brown I'd seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation -- the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders. I hadn't seen hair like that on a min except maybe in history books; every man I'd' ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared righL through. His eyes. They didn't blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I'd seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws. ''Green shatas!" he said suddenly. "Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash." Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes. I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. "My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. -- Mr. -- " "Hope for your sake," he said to me, "that you aren't what you seem -- tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura." "What?"  "A 'nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways." "Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren't they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from? Why did you say you hope -- " He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that Lined the lifeboat. "Questions you ask," he said in his soft voice. "Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister." "I'm not a dryleg," I told him proudly. "We're from Undersea." "Dry born, I said, not dryleg. And what's Undersea?" "Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns." And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms. about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth's oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets. He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in tire Maternal Revolution. when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat. "Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four." "How's that?' "The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the Twentieth Century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he's not much to boast about." The stranger nodded violently. "Not on Earth, he isn't. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!" He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn't been able to find any who lonely little islands; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn't know "it's a woman's world," like the older boys in school used to say. The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn't know he had to register at a governmentoperated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window for saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine ! -- he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court! "Told me a man wasn't supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where I came from, a njan spoke his piece when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side." "What happened?" I asked breathlessly. "Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated." His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. "But I wasn't going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the deaddry dust of the misbegotten, God forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn't dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away." F OR a moment, I didn't understand him. When I did, I was almost ill. "Y-you mean," I choked, "th-that you're b-breaking the law right now? And I'm with you while you're doing it?" He leaned over the edge of the bunk and star'ed at me very seriously. "What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?" After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. "You're right. I've also become a male outside the law. We're in this together." He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found .myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men. "Ferdinand your label? That's not right for a sprouting tadpole. I'll call you Ford. My name's Butt. Butt Lee Brown." I liked the sound of Ford. "Is Butt a nickname, too?" "Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven't found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties -- the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were savn g for a girl." "You had a lot of bi others, Mr. Butt?" He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. "Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys -- all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn't float Jock MacGregor's ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up." I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. "Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?" "Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford." He frowned and sighted at the light globe. "No more'n twelve -- not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I'm a peaceable planter. Way I, figure it, violence never accomplishes much that's important. My brother Sas, now -- " into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn't at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer's diet. Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mudgrapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept imy jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway... I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter's friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part arid tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. JO But no matter what, he would never let me hold it. "Sorry, Ford, old tad," he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. "But way T look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you've grown enough so's your pop feels you ought ,to have a weapon, why, then's the time to learn it and you might's well learn fast. Before then, you're plain too young to be even near it." "I don't have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don't even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she --  "She'll rriarry some fancy dryhorn who's never been farther South than the Polar Coast. And she'll stay head of the family, if I know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way,' Fordie," he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, "that sister. She ever..." And he'd be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he'd vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I'd tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we'd never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but -- yes, I'd guess Evelyn knew about as njuch as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure pump regulation. How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me? S IS had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods. "I am very sorry. Miss Sparling," he said with pretty heavy sarcasm, "but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that -- Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact -- " "Pardon me, sir," I broke in, "but doesn't dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, purser -- Wang Li's third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn't meet for most of the year?" The purser nodded slowly. "I forgot," he admitted. "Sorry, ladies, but the boy's right. Please make the correction in your notes." But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn't take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while 'I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right downon the Council floor and debate it out with her. "Ferdinand," Sis said, "let's go back to our cabin." The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. 'Tve been reading up on Venusian geography In the shipis library," I told her in a hurry. "No doubt," she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. "But you aren't going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship's library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. 'She would not have allowed -- this Terran Agent -- " "Paddlefoot," I sneered. Sis sat down hard in our zoomair chair. "Now that's a term," she said carefully, "that is used only by Venusian riffraff." "They're not!" "Not what?" "Riffraff," I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away! "They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus." "Docs it, now?" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. "Tell me more." "You can't have meek, law-abiding, womenruled men when you start 'civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary -- with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later." "You're going to tell, Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!" "Nobody!" I insisted. "They're my own ideas!" "They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand -- after I have found a good, steady husband, of course -- and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now with all this nonsense?"  deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulp'ast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattledto the floor. "Whatis this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?" A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. "One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit." "The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it ? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?" "Nobody! Nobody!" "Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand -- " "I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford." "Ford? Ford ? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand..." After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl. All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better. The door opened on the signal, "Sesame." When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures. He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back. "An honor. Miss Sparling," he said in that rumbly voice. "Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft." So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly. "First, Mr. Brown," she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, "you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?" maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm. "I take it you either have no defense or care to make none," Sis added caustically. Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word. "Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus." "We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before -- " "Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world." "It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown." Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, "What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?" sidered a moment. "Look," he said finally, 'T have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt 'because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they werewilling to help. But this lifeboat -- don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat ?" "Yes," she said bitterly. "You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?" "No, Sis, he didn't," I was beginning to argue. "All he wanted -- " "Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences." "Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?" He waved his hands at her impatiently. "I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're  standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's." Sis actually staggered back. "Let's? Let's what? Are -- are you daring to suggest that -- that -- " "Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too." I was so excited I just had to yell: "Gee, Sis, say yes!" ing with scorn. "And what makes you think that I'd consider you a desirable husband?" He spread his hands genially. "Figure if you wanted a poodle, you're pretty enough to pick one up on Earth. Figure if you charge off to Venus, you don't want a poodle, you want a man. I'm one. I own three islands in the Galertan Archipelago that'll be good oozing mudgrape land when they're cleared. Not to mention the rich berzeliot beds offshore. I got no bad habits outside of having my own way. I'm also passable goodlooking for a slaptoe planter. Besides, if you marry me you'll be the first mated on this ship -- and that's a splash most nesting females like to make." There was a longish stretch of quiet. Sis stepped back and measured him slowly with her eyes; there was a lot to look at. He waited patiently while she covered the distance from his peculiar green boots to that head of hair. I was so excited I was gulping instead of breathing. (Imagine having Butt for a brother-in-law and living on a wet-plantation in Flatfolk country! But then I remembered Sis's level head and I didn't have much hope any more. '"You know," she began, "there's more to marriage than just -- " "So there is," he cut in. "Well, we can try each other for taste." And he pulled her in, both of his great hands practically covering her slim, straight back. (Neither of them said anything for a bit after he let go. Butt spoke up first. "Now, me," he said, "I'd vote yes." Sis ran the tip of her tongue kind of delicately from side to side of her mouth. Then she stepped back slowly and looked at him as if she were figuring out how many feet high he was. She kept on moving backward, tapping her chin, while Butt and I got more and more impatient. When she touched the lifeboat door, she pushed it open and jumped out. down the crossway. After a while, he shut the door and came back beside me. "Well," he said, swinging to a bunk, "that's sort of it." "You're better off. Butt," I burst out. "You shouldn't have a woman like Sis for a wife. She looks small and helpless, but don't forget she was trained to run an underwater city!" "Wasn't worrying about that," he grinned. "I grew up in the fifteen long years of the Blue Chicago Rising. Nope." He turned over on his back and clicked his teeth at the ceiling. "Think we'd have nested out nicely." I hitched myself up to him and we sat on the bunk, glooming away at each other. Then we heard the tramp of feet in the crossway. Butt swung down and headed for the control compartment in the nose of the lifeboat. He had his blaster out and was cursing very interestingly. I started after him, but he picked me up by the seat of my jumper and tossed me toward the door. The Captain came in and tripped over me. I got all tangled up in his gold tons. When we finally got to our feet and sorted out right, he was breathing very hard. The Captain was a round little man with a plump, golden face and a very scared look on it. He hump bed at me, just the way Sis does, and lifted me by the scruff of my neck. The Chief Mate picked me up and passed me to the Second Assistant Engineer. Sis was there, being held by the purser on one side and the Chief Computer's Mate on the other. Behind them, I could see a flock of wide-eyed female passengers. "You cowards!" Sis was raging. "Letting your Captain face a dangerous outlaw all by himself!" "I dunno. Miss Sparling," the Computer's Mate said, scratching the miniature slide-rule insignia on his visor with his free hand. "The let it go with a log entry, figuring the spaceport paddlefeet could pry out the stowaway when we landed. But you had to quote the Mother Anita Law at him, and he's in there doing his duty. He figures the rest of us are family men, too, and there's no sense making orphans." "You promised, Sis," I told her through my teeth. "You promised you wouldn't get Butt into trouble!" She tossed her spiral curls at me and ground a heel into the purser's instep. He screwed up his face and howled, but he didn't let go of her arm. "Shush, Ferdinand, this is serious !" It was. I heard the Captain say, T'm not carrying a weapon, Brown." "Then. get one," Butt's low, lazy voice floated out. "No, thanks. You're as handy . with that thing as I am with a Focketboard." The Captain's words got a little fainter as he walked forward. Butt growled like a gusher about to blow. "I'm counting on your being a good guy. Brown." The Captain's voice quavered just a bit. "I'm banking on what I heard about the blast-happy Browns every time I lifted gravs in New Kalamazoo; they have a code, they don't burn unarmed men." the lifeboat went down to a mumble. The top of my head got wet and I looked up. There was sweat rolling down the Second Assistant's forehead; it converged at his nose and bounced off the tip in a sizable stream. I twisted out of the way. "What's happening?" Sis gritted, straining toward the lock. "Butt's trying to decide whether he wants him fried or scrambled," the Computer's Mate said, pulling her back. "Hey, purse, remember when the whole family with their pop at the head went into Heatwave to argue with Colonel Lcclerc?" "Eleven dead, sixty-four injured," the purser answered mechanically. "And no more army stationed south of Icebox." His right ear twitched irritably. "But what're they saying?" Suddenly we heard. "By authority vested in me under the Pomona College Treaty," the Captain was saying very loudly, "I arrest you for violation of Articles Sixteen to Twenty-one inclusive of the Space Transport Code, and order your person and belongings impounded for the duration of this voyage as set forth in Sections Forty-one and Fortyfive -- " " Forty-three and Forty-five," Sis groaned. "Sections 'Forty-three and Fortyfive, I told him. I even made him repeat it after me!" " -- of the Mother Anita Law, SC #, Emergency Interplanetary Directives." for Butt's reply. The seconds ambled on and there was no clatter of electrostatic discharge, no smell of burning flesh. Then we heard some feet walking. A big man in a green suit swung out into the crossway. That was Butt. Behind him came the Captain, holding the blaster gingerly with both hands. Butt had a funny, thoughtful look on his face. The. girls surged forward when they .saw him, scattering the crew to one side. They were like a school of sharks that had just caught sight of a dying whale. "M-m-m-m! Are all Yenusians built like that?" "Men like that are worth the mileage!" "I want him!" " I want him!" "I tvant him!" Sis had been let go. She grabbed ,my free hand and pulled me away. She was trying to look only annoyed, but her eyes had bright little bubbles of fury popping in them. "The cheap extroverts ! And they call themselves responsible women!" I was angry, too. And I let her know, once we were in our cabin. "What about that promise, Sis? You said you wouldn't turn him in. You promised !" She stopped walking around the room as if she had been expecting to get to Venus on foot. "I know I did, Ferdinand, but he forced me." , # "My name is Fordand I don't understand. "Your name is Ferdinand and stop trying to act forcefully like . a girl. It doesn't become you. In just a few days, you'll forget all this and be your simple, carefree self again. I really truly meant to keep my word. From what you'd told me, Mr. Brown seemed to be a fundamentally decent chap despite his barbaric notions on equality between the sexes -- or worse. I was positive I could shame him into a more rational social behavior and make him give himself up. Then he -- he -- " She pressed her fingernailsinto her palms and let out a long, glaring sigh at the door. "Then he kissed me! Oh, it was a good enough kiss -- Mr. Brown has evidently had a varied and colorful background -- hut the galling idiocy of the man, trying that! I was just getting over the colossal impudence involved in bis proposing marriage -- as if be had to bear the children ! -- and was considering the offer seriously, on its merits, as one should consider rf suggestions, when he deliberately dropped the pretense of reason. He appealed to me as most of the savage ancients appealed to their women, as an emotional machine. Throw the correct sexual switches, says this theory, and the femalesurrenders herself ecstatically to the doubtful and bloody murk of masculine plans." the door and the Captain walked in without waiting for an invitation. He was still holding Butt's blaster. He pointed it at me. "Get your hands up, Ferdinand Sparling," he said. I did. "I hereby order your detention for the duration of this voyage, for aiding and abetting a stowaway, as set forth in Sections Forty-one and Forty-five -- " "Forty-three and 'Forty-five," Sis interrupted him, her eyes getting larger and rounder. "But you gave me your word of honor that no charges would be lodged against the boy!" "Forty-one and Forty-five," he corrected her courteously, still staring fiercely at me. "I looked it up. Of the Anita Mason Law, Emergency Interplanetary Directives. That was the usual promise one makes to an informer, but I made it before I knew it was Butt Lee Brown you were talking about. I didn't want to arrest Butt Lee Brown. You forced me. So I'm breaking my promise to you, just as, I understand, you broke your promise to your brother. They'll both be picked up at New Kalamazoo Spaceport and sent Terraward for trial." "But I used all of our money to buy passage," Sis wailed. "And now you'll have to return with the boy. I'm sorry, Miss Sparling. But as you explained to me, a man who has been honored with an important official position should stay close to the letter of the law for the sake of other men who are trying to break down terrestrial anti-male prejudice. Of course, there's a way out." "There is? Tell me, please!" "Can I lower my hands a minute?" I asked. "No, you can't, son -- not according to the armed surveillance provisions of the Mother Anita Law. Miss Sparling, if you'd marry Brown -- now, now, don't look at me like that! -- we could let the whole matter drop. A shipboard wedding and he goes on your passport as a 'dependent maTe member of family,' which means, so far as the law is concerned, that he had a regulation passport from the beginning of this voyage. And once we touch Venusian soil he can contact his bank and pay for passage. On the record, no .crime was ever committed. He's free, the boy's free, and you -- " " -- Are married to an uncombed desperado who doesn't know enough to sit back and let a woman run things. Oh, you should be ashamed !" T HE Captain shrugged and spread his arms wide. "Perhaps I should be. but that's what comes of putting men into responsible positions, as you would say. See here, Miss Sparling, I didn't want to arrest Brown, and. if it's at all possible, I'd still prefer not to. The crew, officers and men, all go along with me. We may be legal residents of Earth, but our work requires us to be on Venus several times a year. We don't want to be disliked by any members of the highly irritable Brown clan or its collateral branches. Butt Lee Brown himself, for all of his savage appearance in your civilized eyes, is a man of much influence on the Polar Continent. In his own bailiwick, the Galertan Archipelago, he makes, breaks and occasionally readjusts officials. Then there's his brother Saskatchewan who considers Butt a helpless, put-upon youngster -- " "Much influence, you sav? Mr. Brown has?" Sis was suddenly thoughtful. "Power, actually. The kind a strong man usually wields in a newly settled community. Besides, Miss Sparling, you're going to Venus for a husband because the male-female ratio on Earth is reversed. Well, not only is Butt Lee Brown a first class catch, but you can't afford to be too particular in any case. While you're fairly pretty, you won't bring any wealth into a marriage and your high degree of opinionation is not likely to be wellreceived on a backward, masculinist world. Then, too, the woman-hunger is not so great any more, what with the Marie Curie and the Fatima having already deposited their cargoes, the Mine. Sim Yat Sen due to arrive next month..." S 'IS nodded to herself, waved the door open, and walked out. "Let's hope," the Captain said, "Like any father used to say, a man who knows how to handle women, how to. get around them without their knowing it, doesn't need to know anything else in this life. J I'm plain wasted in space. You can lower your hands now, son." We sat down and I explained the blaster to him. He was very interested. He said all Butt had told him -- in the lifeboat when they decided to use my arrest as a club over Sis -- was to keep the safety catch all the way up against his thumb. I could see he really had been excited about carrying a lethal weapon around. He told me that back in the old days, captains -- sea captains, that is -- actually had the right to keep guns in their cabins all the time to put down mutinies and other things our ancestors did. The telewall flickered, and we turned it on. Sis smiled down. "iE very thing's all right, Captain. Come up and marry us, please." "What did you stick him for?" he asked. "What was the price?" Sis's full lips went thin and hard, the way Mom's used to. Then she thought better of it and laughed. "Mr. Brown is going to see that I'm elected sheriff of the Galertan Archipelago." "And I thought she'd settle for a county clerkship!" the Captain muttered as we spun up to the brig. The doors were open and girls were chattering in every corner. Sis came up to the Captain to discuss arrangements. I slipped away and found Butt sitting with folded arms in a comer of the brig. He grinned at me. "Hi, tadpole. Like the splash ?" I shook my head unhappily. "Butt, why did you do it? I'd sure love to be your brother-in-law, but, gosh, you didn't have to marry Sis." I pointed at some of the bustling females. Sis was going to have three hundred bridesmaids. "Any one of them would have jumped at the chance to be your wife. And once on any woman's passport, you'd be free. Why Sis?" "That's what the Captain said in the lifeboat. Told him same thing I'm telling you. I'm stubborn. What I like at first, I keep on liking. What I want at first, I keep on wanting until I get." "Yes, but making Sis sheriff! And you'll have to back her up with your blaster. What'll happen to that man's world?" "Wait'll after we nest and go out to my islands." He produced a hard-lipped, smug grin, sighting it at Sis's slender back. "She'll find herself sheriff over a bunch of natives and exactly two Earth males -- you and me. I got a hunch that'll keep her pretty busy, though." Common Denominator Advanced races generally are eager to share their knowledge with primitive ones. In this case  Illustrated by flickered back across half the Galaxy with a complete culture study of a Class Seven civilization on three planets of Argus Ten, the Bureau of Stellar Defense had, of course, a priority claim on all data. Class Sevens ' were rare and of high potential danger, so all personnel of Group  . with Earthmen! Fbrty were placed in tight quarantine during the thirty days required for a detailed analysis of the thousands of film spools. News of th contact leaked out and professional alarmists predicted dire things on the news screens of the three home planets of Sol. A retired admiral of the Space Navy published an article in which he stated bitterly that the fleet had been weakened by twenty years of softness in high places. On the thirty-first day, B.S.D. reported to System President Mize that the inhabitants of the three planets of Argus # constituted no threat, that there was no military necessity for alarm, that approval of a commerce treaty was recommended,. that all data was being turned over to the Bureau of Stellar Trade and Economy for analysis, that personnel of Scout Group Forty was being given sixty days' leave before reassignment. B.S.T.E. released film to all commercial networks at once, and visions of slavering oily monsters disappeared from 'the imagination of mankind. The Argonauts, as they came to be called, were pleasantly similar to mankind. It was additional proof that only in the rarest instance was the life-apex on any .planet in the home Galaxy an abrupt divergence from the "human" form. The homogeneousness of planet elements throughout the Galaxy made homogeneousness of lifeapex almost a truism. The bipedal, oxygen-breathing vertebrate with opposing thumb seems best suited for survival. It ' was evident that, with training, the average Argonaut could tass almost unnoticed in the Solar  'stern. The flesh tones were brightly pink, like that of a sunburned human. Cranial hair was uniformly taffy-yellow. They were heavier and more fleshy than humans. Their women had a pronounced Rubens look, a warm, moist, rosy, comfortable look. placidity and contentment of facial expressions, by human standards. The inevitable comparison was made. The Argonauts looked like a race of inn and beer-garden proprietors in the Bavarian Alps. With leather pants to slap, stein lids to click, feathers in Tyrolean hats and peasant skirts on their women, they would represent a culture and a way of life that had been missing from Earth for far too many generations. Eight months after matters had been turned over to B.S.T.E., the First Trade Group returned to Earth with a bewildering variety of artifacts and devices, plus a round dozen Argonauts. The Argonauts had learned to speak Solian with an amusing guttural accent. They beamed on everything and everybody. They were great pets until the novelty wore off. Profitable trade was inaugurated, because the Argonaut devices all seemed designed to make life more pleasant. The scent-thesizer became very popular once it was adjusted to meet human tastes. Worn as a lapel button, it could create the odor of pine, broiled steak, spring flowers, Scotch whisky, musk -- even skunk for the practical jokers who exist in all ages and eras. Any home equipped with an Argonaut static-clean never became dusty. It used no power and had Jo be emptied only once a year. Technicians altered the Argonaut mechanical game animal so that it looked like an Earth rabbit. The weapons which shot a harmless beam were altered to look like rifles. After one experience with the new game, hunters were almost breathless with excitement. The incredible agility of the mechanical animal, its ability to take cover, the fact that, once the beam felled it, you could use it over and over again -- all this made for the promulgation of new non-lethal hunting. of Racial Maturity, waited patiently for his chance at the Argonaut data. The cramped offices in the temporary wing of the old System Security Building, the meager appropriation, the obsolete office equipment, the inadequate staff all testified not only to the Bureau's 'lack of priority, but also to a lack of knowledge of its existence on the part of many. System officials. Lambert, crag-faced, sandy, slowmoving, was a historian, anthropologist and sociologist. He was realist enough to understand that if the Bureau of Racial Maturity happened to be more important in System Government, it would probably be headed by a man with fewer academic and more political qualifications. And Lambert knew, beyond any doubt at all, that the B.R.M. was more important to the race and the future of the race than any other branch of System Government. Set up by President Tolies, an adult and enlightened administrator, the Bureau was now slowly being strangled by a constantly decreasing appropriation. Lambert knew that mankind had come too far, too fast. Mankind had dropped out of a tree with all the primordial instincts to rend and tear and claw. Twenty thousand years later, and with only a few thousand years of dubiously recorded history, he had reached the stars. It was too quick. Lambert knew that mankind must become mature in order to survive. The domination of instinct had to be watered down, and rapidly. Selective breeding might do it, but it was an answer impossible to enforce. He hoped that one day the records of an alien civilization would give him the answer. After a year of bureaucratic wriggling, feints and counter-feints, he had acquired the right of access to Scout Group Data. As his patience dwindled he wrote increasingly firm letters to Central Files and Routing. In the end, when he finally located the data improperly stored in the closed files of the B.S.T.E., he took no more chances. He went in person with an assistant named Cooper and a commandeered electric handtruck, and bullied a D.S.T.E. storage clerk into accepting a receipt for the Argonaut data. The clerk's cooperation was lessened by never having heard of the Bureau of Racial Maturity. T HE file contained the dictionary and grammar compiled by the Scout Group, plus all the films taken on the three planets of Argus #, plus micro-films of twelve thousand books written in the language of the Argonauts. Their written language was ideographic, and thus presented more than usual difficulties. Lambert knew that translations had been made, but somewhere along the line they had disappeared. Lambert set his whole staff to work on the language. He hired additional linguists out of his own thin enough pocket. He gave up all outside activities in order to hasten the progress of his own knowledge. His wife, respecting Lambert's high order of devotion to his work, kept their two halfgrown children from interfering during those long evenings when he studied and translated at home. Two evenings a week Lambert called on  Vonk Poogla, the Argonaut assigned to Trade Coordination, and improved his conversational Argonian to the point where he could obtain additional historical information from the pink wide "man." Of the twelve thousand books, the number of special interest to Lambert were only one hundred and ten. On those he based his master chart. An animated film of the chart was prepared at Lambert's own expense, and, when it was done, he requested an appointment with Simpkin, Secretary for Stellar Affairs, going through all the normal channels to obtain the interview. He asked an hour of Simpkin's time. It took two weeks. Simpkin was a big florid man with iron-gray hair, skeptical eyes and that indefinable look of political opportunism. He came around his big desk to shake Lambert's hand. "Ah... Lambert! Glad to see yqu, fella. I ought to get around to my Bureau Chiefs more often, but you know how hectic things are up here." "I know, Mr. Secretary. I have something here of the utmost importance and -- " "Bureau of Racial Maturity, isn't it? I never did know exactly what you people do. Sort of progress records or something?" "Of the utmost importance," Lambert repeated doggedly. Simpkin smiled. "I hear that all day, but go ahead." "I want to show you a chart. A historical chart of the Argonaut civilization." Lambert put the projector in position and plugged it in. He focused it on the wall screen. "It was decided," Simpkin said firmly, "that the Argonauts are not a menace to us in any -- " "I know that, sir. Please look at the chart first and then, when you've seen it, I think you'll know what I mean." "Go ahead," Simpkin agreed resignedly. "I can be accused of adding apples and lemons in this presentation, sir. Note the blank chart. The base line is in years, adjusted to our calendar so as to give a comparison. Their recorded history covers twelve thousand of our years. That's better than four times ours. Now note the red line. That shows the percentage of their total population involved in wars. It peaked eight thousand years ago. Note how suddenly it drops after that. In five hundred years it sinks to the base line and does not appear again. "Here comes the second line. Crimes of violence. It also peaks eight thousand years ago. It drops less quickly than the war line, and never does actually cut the base line. Some crime still exists there. But a very, very tiny percentage compared to ours on a population basis, or to their own past. The third line, the yellow line climbing abruptly, is the index of insanity. Again a peak during the same approximate period in their history. Again a drop almost to the base line." "Odd, isn't it?" "Now this fourth line needs some explaining. I winnowed out death rates by age groups. Their life span is # times ours, 'so it had to be adjusted. I found a strange thing. I took the age group conforming to our # to # year group. That green line. Note that by the time we start getting decent figures, nine thousand years ago, it remains almost constant, and at a level conforming to our own experience. Now note what happens when the green line reaches a point eight thousand years ago. See how it begins to climb? Now steeper, almost vertical. It remains at a high level for almost a thousand years, way beyond the end of their history of war, and then descends slowly toward the base line, leveling out about two thousand years ago." Lambert clicked off the projector. "Is that all?" Simpkin asked. "Isn't it enough? I'm concerned with the future of our own race. Somehow the Argonauts have found an answer to war, insanity, violence. We need that answer if we are to survive." "Come now, Lambert," Simpkin said wearily. "Don't you see it? Their history parallels ours. They had our same problems. They saw disaster ahead and did something about it. What did they do? I have to know that." "How do you expect to? "I want travel orders to go there." "I'm afraid that's quite impossible. There are no funds for that sort of jaunt, Lambert, And I think you are worrying over nothing." "Shall I show you some of our own trends ? Shall I show you murder turning from the most horrid crime into a relative commonplace? Shall I show you the slow inevitable increase in asylum space?" "I know all that, man. But look at the Argonauts! Do you want that sort of stagnation ? Do you want a race of fat, pink, sleepy -- " "Maybe they had a choice. A species of stagnation, or the end of their race. Faced with that choice, which would you pick, Mr. Secretary?" "There are no funds." "All I want is authority. I'll pay my own way." And he did. R E AN was the home planet of the Argonauts, the third from their sun. When the trade ship flickered into three-dimensional existence, ten thousand miles above Rean, Lambert stretched the spaceache out of his long bones and muscles and smiled at Vonk Poogla. "You could have saved me the trip, you know," Lambert said. A grin creased the round pinkvisage. "Nuddink ventured, nuddink gained. Bezides, only my cousin can speak aboud this thing you vunder aboud. My cousin is werry important person. He is one picks me to go to your planet." Vonk Poogla was transported with delight at being able to show the wonders of the ancient capital city to Lambert. It had been sacked and burned over eight thousand Earth years before, and now it was mellowed by eighty-three centuries of unbroken peace. It rested in the pastel twilight, and there were laughter and soft singing in the broad streets. Never had Lambert felt such a warm aura of security and... love. No other word but that ultimate one seemed right. In the morning they went to the squat blue building where Vonk Soobuknoora, the important person, had his administrative headquarters. Lambert, knowing enough of Argonaut governmental structure to understand that Soobuknoora was titular head of the three-planct government, could not help but compare the lack of protocol with what he could expect were he to try to take Vonk Poogla for an interview with President Mize. Soobuknoora was a smaller, older edition of Poogla, his pink face wrinkled, his greening hair retaining only a trace of the original yellow. Soobuknoora spoke no Solian and he was very pleased to find that Lambert spoke Argonian. Soobuknoora watched the animated chart with considerable interest. After it was over, he seemed lost in thought. "It is something so private with us, Man Lambert, that we seldom speak of it to each other," Soobuknoora said jn Argonian. "It is not written. Maybe we have shame -- a guilt sense. That is hard to say. I have decided to tell you what took place among us eight thousand years ago." "I would be grateful." VV Maybe it is good, maybe it is not so good. But we continue to live. Where did our trouble come from in the old days, when we were like your race? Back when we were brash and young and wickedly cruel? From the individuals, those driven ones who were motivated to succeed despite all obstacles. They made our paintings, wrote our music, killed each other, fomented our unrest, our wars. We live off the bewildering richness of our past." He sighed. "It was a problem. To understand our solution, you must think of an analogy, Man Lambert. Think of a factory where machines are made. We will call the acceptable machines stable, the unacceptable ones unstable. They are built with a flywheel which must turn at a certain speed. If it exceeds that speed, it is no good. But a machine that is stable can, at any time, become unstable. What is tlie solution?" He smiled at Lambert. "I'm a bit confused," Lambert confessed. "You would have to go around inspecting the machines constantly for stability." "And use a gauge? No. Too much trouble. An unstable machine can do damage. So we do this -- we put a little governor on the machine. When the speed passes the safety mark, the machine breaks." "But this is an analogy, Vonk Soobuknoora!" Lambert protested. "You can't put a governor on a man !" "Man is bom with a governor, Man Lambert. Look back in both our histories, when we were not much above the animal level. An unbalanced man would die. He could not compete for food. He could not organize the simple things of his life for survival. Man Lambert, did you ever have a fleeting impulse to kill yourself?" Lambert smiled. "Of course. You could almost call that impulse a norm for intelligent species." "Did it ever go far enough so that you considered a method, a weapon ?" Lambert nodded slowly. "It's hard to remember, but I think I did. Yes, once I did." "And what would have happened," the Argonaut asked softly, "if there had been available to you in that moment a weapon completely painless, completely final?" "I would probably have used it. I was very young. Wait! I'm beginning to see what you mean, but -- " "The governor had to be built into the body," Soobuknoora interrupted, "and yet so designed that there would be no possibility of accidental activation. Suppose that on this day I start to think of how g'reat and powerful I am in this position I have. I get an enormous desire to become even more powerful. I begin to reason emotionally. Soon I have a setback. I am depressed. I am out of balance, you could say. I have become dangerous to myself and to our culture. "In a moment of depression, I take these two smallest fingers of each hand. I reach behind me and I press the two fingers, held firmly together, to a space in the middle of my back. A tiny capsule buried at the base of my brain is activated and I am dead within a thousandth part of a second. Vonk Poogla is the same. All of us are the same. The passing urge for self-destruction happens to be the common denominator of imbalance. We purged our race of the influence of the neurotic, the egocentric, the hypersensitive, merely by making self-destruction very, very easy." "Then that death rate -- ?" "At eighteen the operation is performed. It is very quick and very simple. We saw destruction ahead. We had to force it through. In the beginning the deaths were frightening, there were so many of them. The stable ones survived, bred, reproduced. A lesser but still great percentage of the next generation went -- and so on, until now it is almost static." In Argonian Lambert said hotly, "Oh, it sounds fine! But what about children ? What sort of heartless race can plant the seed of death in its own children?" faintest trace of anger on any Argonaut face. The single nostril widened and Soobuknoora might have raged if he had been from Earth. "There are other choices, Man Lambert. Our children have no expectation of being burned to cinder, blown to fragments. They are free of that fear. Which is the better love, Man Lambert?" ' I have two children. I couldn't bear to -- " "Wait!" Soobuknoora said. "Think one moment. Suppose you were to know that when they reached the age of eighteen, both your children were to be operated on by our methods. How would that affect your present relationship to them?" Lambert was, above all, a realist. He remembered the days of being "too busy" for the children, of passing off itheir serious questions with a joking or curt evasion, of playing with them as though they were young, pleasing, furry animals. "I would do a better job as a parent," Lambert admitted. "I would try to give them enough emotional stability so that they would never -- have that urge to kill themselves. But Ann is delicate, moody, unpredictable, artistic." Poogla and Soobuknoora nodded in unison. "You would probably lose that one; maybe you would lose both," Soobuknoora agreed. "But it is better to lose more than half the children of a few generations to save the race." Lambert thought some more. He said, "I shall go back and I shall speak of this plan and what it did for you. But I do not think my race will like it. I do not want to insult you or your people," but you have stagnated. You stand still in time." Vonk Poogla laughed largely. "Not by a damn sight," he said gleefully. "Next year we stop giving the operation. We stop for good. It was just eight thousand years to permit us to catch our breath before going on more safely. And what is eight thousand years of marking time in the history of a race ? Nothing, my friend. Nothing!" When Lambert went back to Earth, he naturally quit his job. Syndrome Johnny T HE blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged, separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurized slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth. She died. Others received plasma and did The plagues that struck mankind could be attributed to one man. But was he fiend... or savior? not die. But their symptoms changed, including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance. An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before. After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered travelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a man who carried death in his vein?. The nine thumbprints were broadcast to all police files and a search began. The effort was futile, for there were many victims who 'had sickened and grown partially well again without recognizing the strangeness of their illness. Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemic spread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemic which spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from the opposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hunwhere it appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines to fence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it covered the world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with a tendency toward glandular troubles. Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful. A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Commission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India. "Just too many people per acre," he said. "All our work at improving production... just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jump ahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plague to give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organized." He went back to work and added another figure. Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the secorvd plague. sity, a biochemical student glanced up from his paper to his breakfast companion. "You remember Johnny, the mythical carrier that they told about during the first and second epidemics of Syndrome Plague?" "Sure. Syndrome Johnny. They use that myth in psychology class as a typical example of mass hysteria. When a city was nervous and expecting the plague to reach them, some superstitious fool would imagine he saw Syndrome Johnny and the population would panic. Symbol for Death or some such thing. People imagined they saw him in every corner of the world. Simultaneously, of course." It was a bright morning and they were at a window which looked out across green rolling fields to a towering glass-brick building in the distance. The student who had gone back to his paper suddenly looked up again. "Some Peruvians here claim they saw Syndrome Johnny -- " "Idiotic superstition! You'd think it would have died down when the plague died." The other grinned. "The plague didn't die." He folded his newspaper slowly, obviously advancing an opening for a debate. His companion went on eating. "Another of your wild theories, huh?" Then through a mouthful of food: "All right, if the plague didn't die, where did it go?" "Nowhere. We have it now. We all have it!" He shrugged. "A virus catalyst of high affinity for the cells and a high similarity to a normal cell protein -- how can it be detected ?" "Then why don't people die? Why aren't we sick?" "Because we have sickened and recovered. We caught it on conception and recovered before birth. Proof? Why do you think that the countries which were known as the Hungry Lands are now well-fed, leisured, educated, advanced? Because the birth rate has fallen ! Why has the birth rate fallen?" He paused, then very carefully said,. "Because two out of three of all people who would have lived have died before birth, slain by Syndrome Plague. We are all carriers now, hosts to a new guest. And" -- his voice dropped to a mock sinister whisper -- "with such a stranger within our cells, at the heart of the intricate machinery of our lives, who knows what subtle changes have crept upon us unnoticed !" His companion laughed. "Eat your breakfast. You belong on a horror program!" Federated States of The Americas was running through reports from the Bureau of Social Statistics. Suddenly he grunted, then a moment later said, "Uhhuh !" "Uh-huh what?" asked his superior, who was reading a newspaper with his feet up on the desk. "Remember the myth, of Syndrome Johnny?" "Ghost of Syndrome Plague. Si, what of it ?" "Titaquahapahel, Peru, population nine hundred, sent in a claim that he turned up there and they almost caught him. Crime Statistics rerouted the report to Mass Phenomena, of course. Mass Phenomena blew a tube and sent their folder on Syndrome Johnny over here. Every report they ever had on him for ninety years back ! A memo came with it." He handed the memo over. The man behind die desk looked at it. It was a small graph and some mathematical symbols. "What is it?" "It means," said the psychologist, smiling dryly, "that every crazy report about our ghost has points of similarity to every other crazy report. The whole business of Syndrome Johnny has been in their 'funny coincidence' hie for twenty years. This time the suspect hits the averaged description of Johnny too closely: A solid-looking man, unusual number of visible minor scars, and a disturbing habit of bending his fingers at the firstjoint knuckles when he is thinking. The coincidence has gotten too damn funny. There's a chance we've been passing up a crime." "An extensive crime," said the man at the desk softly. He reached for the folder. "Yes, a considerable quantity of murder." He leafed through the folder and then thought a while, looking at the most recent reports. Thinking was what he was paid for, and he earned his excellent salary. "This thumbprint on the hotel register -- the name is false, but the thumbprint looks real. Could we persuade the Bureau of Records to give their data on that print?" "Without a warrant? Against constitutional immunity. No, not a chance. The public has been touchy about the right to secrecy ever since that police state was attempted in Varga." "How about persuading an obliging judge to give a warrant on grounds of reasonable suspicion?" "No. We'd have the humanist press down on our necks in a minute, and any judge knows it. We'd have to prove a crime was committed. No crime, no warrant." "It seems a pity we can't even find out who the gentleman is," the Crimes Department head murmured, looking at the thumbprint wistfully. "No crime, no records. No records, no evidence. No evidence, no proof of crime. Therefore, we must manufacture a small crime. He was attacked and he must have defended himself. Someone may have been hurt in the process." He pushed a button. "Do you think if I send a man down there, he could persuade one of the mob to swear out a complaint?" "That's a rhetorical question," said the psychologist, trying to work out an uncertain correlation in his reports. "With that sort of mob hysteria, the town would probably give you an affidavit of witchcraft."#cala." The nurse was crisp but quiet, smiling down at the little girl before vanishing again. Ricardo Alcala pushed the plunger in gently, then carefully withdrew the hypodermic needle from the little girl's arm. "There you are, Cosita," he said, smiling and rising from the chair beside the white bed. "Will that make me better, Doctor?" she piped feebly. He patted her hand. "Be a god girl and you will be well tomorrow." He walked out into the hospital corridor to where the desk nurse held out a phone. "Alcala speaking." The voice was unfamiliar. "My deepest apologies for interrupting your work. Doctor. At this late hour I'm afraid I assumed you would be at home. The name is Camba, Federation Investigator on a health case. I would like to consult you." Alcala was tired, but there was nothing to do at home. Nita was at the health resort and Johnny had borrowed all his laboratory space for a special synthesis of some sort, and probably would be too busy even to talk. Interest stirred in him. This was a Federation investigator calling; the man's work was probably important. "Tonight, if that's convenient. I'll be off duty in five minutes." Thirty minutes later they were ordering in a small cantina down the street from the hospital. Julio Camba, Federation Investigator, was a slender, dark man with sharp, glinting eyes. He spoke with a happy theatrical flourish. "Order what you choose, Senor. We're on my expense account. The resources of the Federated States of all The Americas stand behind your menu." Alcala smiled. "I wouldn't want to add to the national debt." "Not at all, Senor. The Federated States are only too happy thus to express a fraction of their gratitude by adding a touch of luxury to the otherwise barren and self-sacrificing life of a scientist." "You shame me," Alcala said dryly. It was true that he needed every spare penny for the health of Nita and the child, and for the laboratory. A penny saved from being spent on nourishment was a penny earned. He picked up the menu again and ordered steak. The investigator lit a cigar, asking casually: "Do you know John Osborne Drake?" "No. I'm sorry... Then he felt for the first time how closely he was being watched, and knew how carefully his reaction and the tone of his voice had been analyzed. The interview was dangerous. For some reason, he was suspected of something. Camba finished lighting the cigar and dropped the match into an ashtray. "Perhaps you know John Delgados?". He leaned back into the shadowy corner of the booth. Johnny! Out of all the people in the world, how could the government be interested in him? Alcala tried to sound casual. "An associate of mine. A friend." "Iwould like to contact the gentleman." The request was completely unforceful, undemanding. "I called, but he was not at home. Could you tell me where he might be?" "I'm sorry, Senor Camba, but I cannot say. He could be on a business trip." Alcala was feeling increasingly nervous. Actually, Johnny was working at his laboratory. "What do you know of his activities?" Camba asked. "A biochemist." Alcala tried to see past the meditative mask of the thin dark face. "He makes small job-lots of chemical compounds. Special bug spray for sale to experimental plantations, hormone spray for fruits, that sort of thing. Sometimes, when he collects some money ahead, he docs research." Camba waited, and his silence became a question. Alcala spoke reluctantly, anger rising in him. "Oh, it's genuine research. He has some patents and publications to his credit. You can confirm that if you choose." He was unable to keep the hostility out of his voice. A waiter came and placed steam ing platters of food on the table. Camba waited until he was gone. "You know him well, I presume. Is he sane?" The question was another shock. Alcala thought carefully, for any man might be insane in secret. "Yes, so far as I know." He turned his attention to the steak, but first took three very large capsules from a bottle in his pocket. "I would not expect that a doctor would need to take pills," Camba remarked with friendly mockery. "I don't need them," Alcala explained. "Mixed silicones. I'm guinea pigging." "Can't such things be left to the guinea pigs?" Camba asked, watching with revulsion as Alcala uncapped the second bottle and sprinkled a layer of gray powder over his steak. "Guinea pigs have no assimilation of silicones; onlv man has that." "Yes, Oi course. I should have remembered from your famous papers, The Need Of Trace Silicon In Human Diet and Silicon Deficiency Diseases." O bviously Camba had done considerable investigating of Alcala before approaching him. He had even given the titles of the research papers correctly. Alcala's wariness increase "What is the purpose of the experiment this time?" askedthe small dark Federation agent genially. , "To determine the safe limits of silicon consumption and if there are any dangers in an overdose." "How do you determine that? By dropping dead?" He could be right. Perhaps the test should be stopped. Every day, with growing uneasiness, Alcala took his dose of silicon compound, and every day, the chemical seemed to be absorbed completely -- not released or excreted -- in a way that was unpleasantly reminiscent of the way arsenic accumulated without evident damage, then killed abruDtly without warning. Already, this evening, he had noticed that there was something faulty about his coordination and weight and surface sense. The restaurant door had swung back with a curious lightness, and the hollow metal handle had had a curious softness under his fingers. Something merely going wrong with the sensitivity of his fingers -- ? He tapped his fingertips on the heavy indestructible silicone plastic table top. There was a feeling of heaviness in his hands, and a feeling of faint rubbery give in the table. Tapping his fingers gently, his heavy fingers... the answer was dreamily fantastic. I'm turning into silicon plastic myself, he thought. But how, why? He had not bothered to be curious before, but the question had always been -- what were supposedly insoluble silicons doing assimilating into the human body at all? Several moments passed. He smoothed back his hair with his oddly heavy hand before picking up his fork again. "I'm turning into plastic," he told Camba. "I beg your pardon?" "Nothing. A joke." Camba was turning into plastic, too. Everyone was. But the effect was accumulating slowly, by generations. started in again. "What connections have you had with John Delgados?" Concentrate on the immediate situation. Alcala and Johnny were obviously in danger of some sort of mistaken arrest and interrogation. As Alcala focused on the question, one errant whimsical thought suddenly flitted through the back of his mind. In red advertising letters: He laughed inwardly and finally answered: "Friendship. Mutual interest in high ion colloidial suspensions and complex synthesis." Impatience suddenly mastered him. "Exactly what is it you wish to know, Senor? Perhaps I could inform you if I knew the reasons for your interest." Camba chose a piece of salad with great care. "We have reason to believe that he is Syndrome Johnny." Alcala waited for the words to clarify. After a moment, it ceased to be childish babble and became increasingly shocking. He remembered the first time he had metJohn Delgados, the smile, the strong handclasp. "Call me Johnny," he had said. It had seemed no more .than, a nickname. The investigator was watching his expression with bright brown eyes. Johnny, yes... but not Syndrome Johnny. He tried to think of some quick refutation. "The whole thing is preposterous, Senor Camba. The myth of Syndrome Plague Johnny started about a century ago." "Doctor Alcala" -- the small man in the gray suit was tensely sober -- "John Delgados is very old, and John Delgados is not his proper name. I have traced his life back and back, through older and older records in Argentina, Panama, South Africa, the United States, China, Canada. Everywhere he has paid his taxes properly, put his fingerprints on file as a good citizen should. And he changed his name every twenty years, applying to the courts for permission with good honest reasons for changing his name. Everywhere he has been a laboratory worker, held patents, sometimes made a good deal of money. He is one hundred and forty years old. His first income tax was pa,id in #, exactly one hundred and twenty years ago." . "Other men are that old," said Alcala. "Other men are old, yes. Those wfio, survived the two successive plagues, were unusually durable." Camba finished and pushed back his plate. "There is no crime in being long-lived, surely. But he has changed his name five times!" "That proves nothing. Whatever his reasons for changing his name, it doesn't prove that he is Syndrome Johnny any more than it proves he is the cow that jumped over the moon. Syndrome Johnny is a myth, a figment of mob delirium." A S HE said it, he knew it was not true, A Federation investigator would not be on a wild goose chase. The plates were taken away and cups of steaming black coffee put between them. He would have to warn Johnny. It was strange how well you could know a man as well as he knew Johnny, firmly enough to believe that, despite evidence, everything the man did was right. "Why must it be a myth?" Camba asked softly. "It's ridiculous !" Alcala protested. "Why would any man -- " His voice cut off as unrelated facts fell into a pattern. He sat for a moment, thinking intensely, seeing the century of plague as something he had never dreamed... A price. Not too high a price in the long run, considering what was purchased. Of course, the great change over into silicon catalysis would b a shock and require adjustment and, of course, the change must be made in several easy stages -- and those who could not adjust would die. "Go on. Doctor," Camba urged softly. " ' Why would any man -- ' " He triedto find a way of explaining which would not seem to have any relationship to John Delgados. "It has been recently discovered" -- but he did not say boia recently -- "that the disease of Syndrome Plague was not a disease. It is an improvement." He had spoken clumsily. "An improvement on life?" Camba laughed and nodded, but there were bitterness and anger burning behind the small man's smile. "People can be improved to on, Senor. You fascinate me." "We are stronger," Alcala told him. "We are changed chemically. The race has been improved!" "Come, Doctor Alcala," Camba said with a sneering merriment, "the Syndrome Plagues have come and they have gone. Where is this change?" Alcala tried to express it clearly. "We are stronger. Potentially, we are tremendously stronger. But we of this generation are still weak and ill, as our parents were, from the shock of the change. And we need silicone feeding; we have not adjusted yet. Our illness masks our strength." He thought of what that strength would be! Camba smiled and took out a small notebook. "The disease is connected with silicones, you say? The original" name of John Delgados was John Osborne Drake. His father was Osborne Drake, a chemist at Dow Corning, who was sentenced to the electric chair in # for unauthorized bacterial experiments which resulted in an accidental epidemic and eight deaths. Dow Corning was the first major manufactury of silicones in America, though not connected in any way with Osborne Drake's criminal experiments. It links together, does it not?" "It is not a disease, it is strength!" Alcala insisted doggedly. T HE small investigator looked up from his notebook and his smile was an unnatural thing, a baring of teeth. "Half the world died Of this strength, Senor. If you will not think of the men and women, think of the children. Millions of children died!" The waiter brought the bill, dropping it on the table between them. "Lives will be saved in the long run," Alcala said obstinately. "Individual deaths are not important in the long run." "That is hardly the philosophy for a doctor, is it?" asked Camba with open irony, taking the bill and rising. They went out of the restaurant in silence. Camba's 'copter stood at tire curb. 'Would you care for a lift home. Doctor Alcala?" The offer was made with the utmost suavity. Alcala hesitated fractionally. "Why, yes, 'thank you." It would not do to give the investigator any reason for suspicion by refusing. As the 'copter lifted into the air, Camba spoke w'ith a more friendly note in his voice, as if he humored a child. "Come, Alcala, you're a doctor dedicated to saving lives. How can you find sympathy for a murderer?" Alcala sat in the dark, looking through the windshield dow r n at the bright street falling away below. "I'm not a practicing medico; only one night a week do I come to the hospital. I'm a research man. I don't try to save individual lives. I'm dedicated to improving the average life, the average health. Can you understand that? Individuals may be sick and individuals may die, but the average lives on. And if the average is better, then I'm satisfied." The 'copter flew on. There was no answer. "I'm not good with words," said Alcala. Then, taking out his penknife and unfolding it, he said, "Watch!" He put his index finger on the altimeter dial, where there was light, and pressed the blade against the flesh between his finger and his thumb. He increased the pressure until the flesh stood out white on either side of the blade, bending, but not ait. "Three generations back, this pressure would have gone right through the hand." He took away the blade and there w'as only I a very tiny cut. Putting the knife away, he brought out his lighter. The blue flame was steady and hot. Alcala held it close to the dashboard and put his finger directly over it, counting patiently, "One, two, three, four, five -- " He pulled the lighter back, snapping it shut. "Three generations ago, a man couldn't have held a finger over that flame for more than a tenth part of that count. Doesn't all this prove something to you?" The 'copter was hovering above Alcala's house. Camba lowered it to the ground and opened the door before answering. ' 'It proves only that a good and worthy man will cut and burn his hand for an unworthy friendship. Good night." Disconcerted, Alcala watched the 'Copter lift away into the night, then, turning, saw that the lights were still on in the laboratory. Camba might have deduced something from that, if he knew that Nita and the girl were not supposed to be home. Alcala hurried in. Johnny hadn't left yet. He was sitting at Alcala's desk with hs feet onthe wastebasket, the way Alcala often liked to sit, reading a technical journal. He looked up, smiling. For a moment Alcala saw him with the new clarity of a stranger. The lean, weathered face; brown eyes with smile deltas at the corners; wide shoulders; steady, big hands holding the magazine -- solid, able, and ruthless enough to see what had to be done, and do it. "I was waiting for you, Ric." "The Feds are after you." Ricardo Alcala had been running. He found he was panting and his heart was pounding. Delgados' smile did not change. "It's all right, Ric. Everything's done. I can leave any time now." He indicated a square metal box standing in a corner. "There's the stuff." What stuff? The product Johnny had been working on? "You haven't time for that now, Johnny. You can't sell it. They'd watch for anyone of your description selling chemicals. Let me loan you some money." "Thanks." Johnny was smiling oddly. "Everything's set. I won't need it. How close are they to finding me?" "They don't know where you're staying." Alcala leaned on the desk edge and put out his hand. "They tell me you're Syndrome Johnny." "I thought you'd figured that one out." Johnny shook his hand formally. "The name is John Osborne Drake. You aren't horrified ?" "No." Alcala knew that he was shaking hands with a man who would b? thanked down all the' successive generations of mankind. He noticed again the odd white webwork of scars on the back of Johnny's hand. He indicated them as' casually as he could. "Where did you pick those up?" hand. "I don't know, Ric. Truthfully. I've had my brains beaten in too often to remember much any more. Unimportant. There are instructions outlining plans and methods filed in safety deposit boxes in almost "every big .city in the world. Always the same typing, always the same instructions. I can't remember who typed them, myself or my father, but I must have been expected to forget or they wouldn't be there. Up to eleven, my memory is all right, but after Dad started to remake me, everything gets fuzzy." "After he did what?" Johnny smiled tiredly and rested his head on one hand. "He had to remake me chemically, you know. How could I spread change without being changed myself,? I couldn't have two generations to adapt to it naturally like you, Ric. It had to be done artificially. It took years. You understand? I'm a community, a construction. The cells that carry on the silicon metabolism in me are not human. Dad adapted them for the purpose. I helped, but I can't remember any longer how it was done. I think When I've been badly damaged, organization scatters to the separate cells in my body. They can survive better that way, and they have powers of regrouping and healing. But memory can't be pasted together again or regrown." John Drake rose and looked around the laboratory with something like triumph. "They're too late. I made it, Ric. There's the catalyst cooling over there. This is the last step. I don't think I'll survive this plague, but I'll last long enough to set it going for the finish. The police won't stop me until it's too late." The last one had been before Alcala was born. He had not thought that Johnny would start another. It was a shock. Alcala walked over to the cage where he kept his white mice and looked in, trying to sort out his feelings. The white mice looked back with beady bright eyes, caged, not knowing they were waiting to be experimented upon. A timer clicked and John Delgados-Drake became all rapid efficient activity, moving from valve to valve. It lasted a half minute or less, then Drake had finished stripping off the lab whites to his street clothes. He picked up the square metal box containing the stuff he bad made, tucked it under his arm and held out a solid hand again to Alcala. "Good-by, Ric. Wish me luck. Close up the lab for me, will you?" Alcala took the hand numbly and mumbled something, turned back to the cages and stared blindly at the mice. Drake's brisk footsteps clattered down the stairs. human race. God knew what wonders for the race were in that box. Perhaps something for nerve construction, something for the mind -- the last and most important step. He should have asked. There came at last a pressure that was a thought emerging from the depth of intuition. Doctor Ricardo Alcala will die in tbe next plague, be and his ill wife Nita and his ill little girl... And the name of Alcala will die forever as a weak strain blotted from the bloodstream of the race... He'd find out what was in the box by dying of it! He tried to reason it out, but only could remember that Nita, already sickly, would have no chance. And Alcala's family genes, in attempting to adapt to the previous steps, had become almost sterile. It had been difficult having children. The next step would mean complete sterility. The name of Alcala would die. The future might be wonder ful, but it would not be his future! "Johnny!" he called suddenly, something like an icy lump hardening in his diest. How long had it been since Johnny had left? Running, Alcala went down the long half-lit stairs, out the back door and along the dark path toward the place where Johnny's 'copter had been parked., A light shone through the leaves. It was still there. "Johnny!" John Osborne Drake was putting his suitcase into the rear of the 'copter. "What is it, Ric?" he asked in a friendly voice without turning. It would be impossible to ask him to change his mind. Alcala found a rock, raised it behind Syndrome Johnny's back. "I knqw I'm being anti-social," he said regretfully, and then threw the rock away. His fist was enough like stone to crush a skull. I The Martian colonists had tried hard work, stubbornness, political pull to save their colony from death. Only a miracle was left! the first rocket crashed on Mars; and now, for the first time, the  ancient planet shows some promise of becoming a real home for men. Sun Lake City Colony, established fourteen months ago, is unique on Mars: a cooperative, without industrial backing, designed for permanence rather than profit. Its members range from unskilled laborers to accomplished scientists, with one conviction in common, that Earth is through as a habitation for man, because of its wrecked ecology, overcrowding, and the inevitability of xi cataclysmic radiological tear. In the Sun Lake Laboratory, radioisotopes are produced front Mars' naturally low-radioactive soil, for export to Earth. But the Colony's goal is independence, and this trade will cease as soon as an agricultural cycle can be established, and when an acceptable substitute is found for Earth-import OxEn -- AS the " oxygen enzyme" pills that enable humans to breathe Mars air. One of the few qualifications for residence in Sun Lake is the "M or M" ruling; all members must be either married or marriageable. to the Colony partly to get away from the scene of half a dozen tragic miscarriages on Earth , so there is double cause for celebration when the first baby actually conceived in the Colony is born to Polly. The birth is attended by the Sun in his one room rammed "earth" hospital. At thirty-two, Tony is one of the older scientists, although still unmarried. He is a member of the Colony Council, and is also the Lab's radiological safety monitor. Since. OxEn cannot be absorbed by infants, the doctor fits the new baby with a specially designed oxygen But the Colony is visited by fairs Commissioner on Mars for thePanAmerican W orld Federation. Bell is acting on a complaint toriously wealthy drug manufacturer; # kilograms of mar cajne have been stolen; the "scent" was traced to the Colony with an electronic device known as the "Bloodhound." Commissioner Bell now proposes to conduct a ruinous search, which would destroy delicate equipment and contaminate ready-to-go shipments. The colonists bargain with him, and accept a desperate alternative. They may conduct their own search, but if they fail to deliver up thief and marcaine both by Shipment Day, the Colony will be sealed off by a military cordon for six months to permit an official search. Sun Lake's economy could not possibly survive such a blow. Tony meets with the other members of the Colony Council; blackance executive, now Lab Adminisagronomist at Sun Lake, once a colwit boutdegree, who found no way to utilize his talents on Earth. Electroencephalograph tests are given the entire community, to test for the characteristic brain-waves of marcaine usage. The results are negative. The colonists attempt to procure a " Bloodhound ," but Bell refuses them the use of police equipment. They lay plans for the difficult job of searching the Colony without one. All the while, the doctor has his own work to do. Sunny has trouble suckling, and Polly, after her years of waiting, is overanxious. The doctor becomes seriously worried about her when her hysteria produces hallucinations about "Brownies," a legendary native life-form, supposed to look much like the Earthside story book creatures, and reported to steal human babies for ritual feasts. Another problem patient is Joan Radcliff, who is dying of a mysterious Martian ailment which Tony cannot even diagnose, let alone treat. She refuses to return to Earth partly because of her intense idealism about the Colony; partly bewhose life-dream was to come to Mars. If Joan leaves, he must go " too. And if Bell's ultimatum means the end of Sun Lake, it will break both their hearts -- but save Joan's life. time assistant and nurse. A quiet, unobtrusive person, she came to the Colony as a glassblower, but now has her working equipment set up next to the hospital, where she is always at hand. Her extraordinary empathy endears her to Tony, but he is not yet ready to tie himself to the Colony by marriage. Nor cato be quite disregard the inthe Colony's daredevil girl pilot. But medical and personal problems both grow insignificant when the news is received that the Earth rocket is already in radio range -- two weeks early. There is now just one more week to Shipment Day ! Tony flies to Marsport with Bea to meet the rocket. There he is approached by Brenner, who offers him a fabulous salary to leave Sun Lake. Tony indignantly refuses to doctor up drug addicts, and a brief scuffle ensues. Another industrialist, who has observed the scene, congratulates Tony on his stand, and hints at a frameup, with collusion between Bell and Brenner to get the Sun Lake Lab for the drug man. Before the doctor can digest this rtews, a new surprise is thrust on him. Among the rocket arrivals is gun l her who has come to write a book, " This Is Mars!" -- and has chosen Sun Lake as his first stopping-point. The reporter gpts his first look at Mars when a radio message requests the doctor to stop at Sun Lake's nearest neighbor, Pittco # , to examine a seriously injured woman. Toby arrives too late to help; "Big Ginny," an inmate of the Pittco company brothel, is dead, the victim of a clumsy attempt at self-abortion, followed by a vicious beating about the head, shoulders, and chest, and finished off by inept first aid. Back at Sun Lake, Tony plurjges into the job of monitoring the Lab search. He also finds himself elected host-in-chief to the reporter. When it becomes clear that no stolen mar caine is going to be fort nd, Tony appeals to Graham for aid, for the reporter has a long-standing quarrel with Commissioner Bell. Graham promises to write a smashing expose. It comes as a brutal shock, then, when the doctor finds Polly ill from an overdose of marcaine. Graham's help has been won on the assumption that no marcaine could be found. As a doctor, however, Tony's first concern must be the baby ; Polly's milk now contains marcaine. In the early hours cff the morning , Anna is routed out of bed to make bottles, and a lab technician to make plastic nipples. A formula is prepared, but the first bottle feeding offered to Sunny brings on a crisis. The baby has always had trouble suckling -- this time, Sunny chokes, flushes a bright crimson, and seems to stop breathing altogether, at the just same instant that Anna, standing by, suddenly shrieks and falls into a dead faint. Tony leaves the unconscious woman at the Kandros', and carries the baby back to his hospital room, determined to locate the trouble. After a careful examination and a sudden hunch, Tony tries a desperate experiment -- he removes Sunny's mask. The baby immediately begins to breathe normally. Barth dir is too rich for hint! Sunny is Marsworthy right from birth ! the table where Sunny still lay crying, wrapped in his blanket again, hungry, angry, and perfectly safe. "Doctor, what did you -- how can he -- ?" "He's fine," Tony assured her. "Just leave him alone. He's hungry, that's all." Polly stared, fascinated by the naked-looking baby. "How can he breathe without a mask?" "I don't know," Tony said bluntly, "but I tried it and it Worked. I guess he's got naturally Marsworthy lungs. Seems to have been the only trouble he had." "You mean -- 'I thought Marsworthy lungs just meant you could breathe Mars air; people like that can breathe Earth air, too, can't they?" Tony shrugged helplessly. He was licked and didn't care who knew it as long as Sunny was all right. For the time 'being, it was enough to know that the baby had been breathing through his mouth all along just because he did prefer Mars air. He got too , much oxygen through the mask, so he didn't use his nose; a simple reversal of the theory on which the mask was based. When his source of Mars air was blocked -- first by his mother's breast, and then, when he had learned to adapt to that, by the less flexible plastic nipple -- he had to breathe the richer air through his nose, and he turned red, coughed, sputtered, and choked. "I want to take him back now," said the doctor, "and try another feeding. Bet he'll eat right away." He picked up the baby, firmly refusing to surrender him to his mother, and led the way out of the hospital room and back to the Kandros' house. Just before they left, Tony heard for the first time, consciously, the steady clicking of Graham's typewriter in the other part of the house. He realized it had been going almost continuously, and thought briefly of going inside to say hello, then decided against it. I'll see him later on, he thought... # can explain everything then. Obviously, the writer understood that an emergency was in progress, or else he was so busy himself that he didn't want to be bothered, either. ii J IM was thunderstruck by his maskless Sunny. Anna seemed to have recovered from her faint. She was a little pale, but otherwise normal, moving about briskly, picking up scattered blankets and baby equipment. "I tried to make her rest' Jim explained, "but she said she felt fine." "You take it easy, Anna," the doctor told her. ' And I want to talk to you later -- as soon as I'm finished with the baby." "I'm perfectly all right," she in' sisted. "I can't imagine what made me do anything so foolish. I'm awfully sorry..." "Polly, I want you to go to bed right away. You've had enough tonight -- this morning, rather. Jim, you can handle the baby, can't you? You want to change him and get him ready for his feeding?" Jim stooped over his son at the wall bunk, his big hands fumbling a little with closures on the small garments. Tony sat down and leaned back, closing his eyes. The baby screamed steadily, demanding nourishment. "Doc, I still don't get it. How did you figure it out?" Patiently, without opening his eyes, Tony repeated his explanation for Jim. ' "I'll take your word for it," the man said finally, "but I'll bo darned if I can understand it. Okay, Doc, I guess he's all fixed up." Tony stood up. "Do you know how to fix a bottle? I'll show you." "Here." Anna was at his elbow. "I thought you might want one," she said, as though apologizing, and handed it over. "Thanks." Tony dashed a drop on his wrist -- temperature just right -- and passed it to Jim. "Let's try." The big man, looking absurdly cautious, put the bottle to Sunny's mouth. Then he looked up, a tremendous grin on his face and his eyes a little wet. "How do you like that?" he said softly. The little mouth and jaw were working away busily; Sunny was feeding as though he'd been doing it for months. They watched while he took a whole three and a half ounces, and then fell asleep, breathing quietly and regularly. "A Mars child," said Anna gently, looking down at Sunny. "Jim, you have a real Mars child." "Looks that way," said Kandro, beaming. "Jim," said the doctor, "somebody ought to stay up and keep an eye on Sunny tonight, but I'm beat. And Polly's got to get some sleep. Will you do it?" "Sure, Doc," said the father, not taking his happy eyes off the child. "He'll probably need another feeding during the night. You know how to sterilize the bottle, and there's enough formula made up." . "Sure," said Jim. "You take care of Anna." "I'll do that." "Oh. Tony, I'm all right, I told you that -- " " You get your parka, Anna, and don't argue with the doctor," Tony told her. "I'm going to take you home and see if I can find out what made you pull that swoon. Come on... If you need me for anything, Jim, I'll be at Anna's or gt home." (DO have a headache," she iadmitted when they reached her house. "Probably all I need is a little sleep. I haven't been living right." She tried a smile, but it didn't come off. "None of us have," Tony reminded her. He studied her and decided against aspirin. He selected a strong sedative and shot it into her arm. Within a minute, she relaxed in a chair and exhaled long and gratefully. "Better," she said. "Feel like talking?" "I -- I think I ought to sleep." "Then just give me the bare facts." He ran his fingers over her head. "No blows. Was it a hangover?" "Yes," she said defiantly. "Very depraved. From the one drink you had with us?" "From -- 'from -- Oh, hell!" That came from the heart, for Anna never swore. "I've had enough mysteries for one night, Anna. Talk." "Maybe I ought to," she said lie to his doctor or the truth to his lawyer, and so on." She hesitated. "I've got a trick mind. All those people who think they're psychic -- they are. I am, but more. It doesn't matter, does it?" "Go on." "I didn't know about it myself fota long time. It's not like mindreading' it's not that dear. I was always -- oh, sensitive, but I didn't understand it at first, and then later oil it seemed to get more and more pronounced. I -- haven't told anyone about it before. Not anyone at all." She looked at him appealingly. Tony reassured her, "You know you can trust me." "All right, I began to realize what it was when I was about twenty. That's why I became, of all things, a glassblower. If you had to listen to the moods and emotions of people, you'd want a job far away from everything in a one man department, too. That's why I came to Mars. It was too -- too noisy on arth." "And that's why you're the best assistant I ever had, with or without an M.D. or R.N. on your name," said the doctor softly. "You're easy to work with." She smiled. "Most of the time, it is. Sometimes, though, you get so angry -- " H E thought back, remembering the times she'd been there before he had called, or had left quickly when she was in the way, handed him what he needed before die actually thought about it. "Please don't get upset about it, Tony...I'd hate to have to stop working with you now. I don't know what you think, just what you -- feel, I guess. There! are a lot of people like that, really; you must have sensed i.t in me a long time back. It isn't really so very strange," she pleaded. "I'm just a little -- little more that way; that's all." "I don't see why I should get upset about it," he tried .to soothe her, and realized sickeningly that it was a useless effort. He literally could not conceal his feelings this time. He stopped trying. " You must realize how hard I try not to show I'm even angry. It is a little disconcerting to find out -- I'll get used to it. Just give me time." He was thoughtful for a moment. "How does it work? Do you know?" "Not really. I 'hear' people's feelings. And -- people seem to be more aware of my moods than they are of other people's; I -- well, the way I first became aware of it was when somebody tried to -- assault me, back on Earth, in Chicago. I was very young then, not quite twenty. It was one of those awful deserted streets, and he ran faster than I could and caught up with me. Something sort of turned om -- I don't know how to say it. I was sending instead of receiving, but sending my emotion -- which, naturally, was a violent mixture of fear and disgust -- each more strongly than -- than people usually can. I'm afraid I'm not making myself clear." "No wonder," he said heavily. "The language isn't built for experiences like that. Go on." "He fell down and flopped on the sidewalk like a fish, and I ran on and got to a busy street without looking back. I read the papers, but there wasn't anything about it, so I suppose he was all right afterward." S HE stopped talking and jumped up restlessly. For quite a while she stood staring out of her window, toward the dark reaches of Locus Solis. Finally she said in a strained voice, "Please, Tony, it's not really as bad as that sounded. I can't send all the time; I can't do. it mostly." She turned back to face him, and added more naturally: "Usually, people aren't as -- open -- as he was. And I guess I have to be pretty worked up, too. I tried to send tonight, and I couldn't do it. J tried awfully hard. That's why I had that headache." "Tonight?" "I'll tell you about that in a minute. Right now, I want -- well,' I told you I never told anyone about this before. It's important to me, Tony, terribly important, to make you understand. You're the first person I ever wanted to have understand it, and if you keep on being frightened or unhappy about it, I just don't know -- " She paused. "Let me tell you about it my way. I'll try to ignore whatever you feel while I'm telling it, and maybe when I'm done it will all be all right. "When that happened in Chicago -- whatI told you about; -- I had a job in an office. There was a girl I had to work with who didn't like me. It was very unpleasant. Every day for a month I tried to turn that l send-receive' switch and transmit a calm, happy feeling to her, but I never could make it work. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get anything over to her. I knew what she felt, but her emotions were closed to mine, 'She didn't want to feel anything from me, so she didn't. Do you understand that? It's important, because it's true; you can protect yourself from that part of it. You believe me, don't you, Tony?" He didn't answer right away. He had to be absolutely certain in his own mind, because she would know. It would be far worse to tell her anything that wasn't true than to say nothing. Finally he got up and walked over to her, but he didn't dare speak. "Tony," she said, "you're -- oh, please don't be embarrassed and difficult about it, but you're so good! That's what I meant, you're easy to work with. Most people are petty and a lot of them are mean. The things they feel aren't nice; they're mostly bitchy. But you -- even when you're angry, it's a big, honest kind of anger. You don't want to hurt people, or get even, or take advantage of them. You're honest, and generous, and good. And now I've said too much !" He shook his head. "No, you didn't. It's all right. It really is." There were tears shining in her eyes. Standing over her, he reached mechanically for a tissue from his bag, tilted her head up, and wiped her eyes as if she were a child. "Now tell me more," he said, "and don't worry about how I feel. What happened tonight? Tell me about the headache. And the fainting -- was that part of it too? Of course! What an idiot I am! The baby was choking and scared,' and you screamed. You screamed and said to stop it." "Did .#? I wasn't sure whether I thought it or said it. That was strange, the whole business. It was terrible, somebody who hurt awfully all over and couldn't breathe, and was going to -- to burst if he couldn't, and that didn't seem to make sense -- and terribly hungry, and terribly frustrated, and -- I didn't know who it was, because it was so strong. Babies don't have such 'loud' feelings. I guess it was the reflex of fear of dying, except Sunny is very loud, anyhow. When he was being born -- " S HE shuddered involuntarily. 'I was awfully glad you didn't think to ask me to stay in there with you. When you sent Jim out,. I talked to him, and sort of -- concentrated on 'listening' to him, and then, with the door closed, it was all right. (Anyhow, you want to know about tonight. The baby topped it off. I don't think that would have made me faint, by it-' self, but I was working in there, in the same room with Douglas Graham for an. hour or more, and -- " "Graham!" Tony broke in. "Do you mean to say he dared to -- " "Why, Tony, I didn't know you cared!" For the first time that evening, she laughed easily. Then, without giving him time to think about how his outburst had given him away, she added: "He didn't do anything. It was -- it was about what he was writing, I think. I know what he was feeling. He was angry and disgusted and contemptuous. He hurt inside himself, and he felt the way people do when they hurtsomebody else. And it seemed to be all tied up with the story he was writing. It was a story about the Colony, Tony, and I got worried and frightened. If only I could be sure. See, that's the trouble. I didn't know whether to tell somebody or not, and I tried and tried to 'send' to him, but he wasn't Open at all, and the only thing that happened was that I got that headache." "Then when you came over to the Kandros'," Tony finished for her, "and the baby had all that trouble, of course you couldn't take it. Tell me more about Graham. I understand that you're not sure: tell me what you think, and why." "When Jim woke me up, wc S# went back to your place, together, and Graham was working there," she said. "He asked me what the excitement was all about and I told him. He listened, kept asking questions, got every little detail out of me, and all the time he was feeling that hurt and anger. Then I started to work and he began banging away on his typewriter. And those thoughts got stronger and stronger till they made me dizzy, and then I started trying to light back, to send -- and I couldn't. That's all there was to it." "That's all? You're sure?" She nodded. "And you can't be certain what it was that he was feeling that way about?" "How could I?" "Well, then," he said, with .a laugh of relief, "there's nothing at all to worry about. You made a natural enough mistake. Those feelings of his weren't directed against the Colony at all, Anna. Earlier tonight, after you left, Graham promised to help us. He was writing a story about the spot we're in, that's all, and I know that he felt all the things you've described, but not about us, about Bell." He sat a moment longer. "I'm sure of it, Anna. That's the only way it makes sense." "It could be." She seemed a little dazed. "(It didn't feel that way, but, of course, it could." She sighed and leaned back in her chair. "Oh, Tony, I'm so glad I told you. I didn't know what to do, and I was sure it was something vicious he was writing about the Colony." "Well, you can relax now. Maybe I'll let you go to bed." He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. "We'll work it out, even if I have to take a few new experiences in stride. Believe me, we'll work it out." She looked up at him, smiling gently. "I think so, too, Tony." H E could have let her hands go, but he didn't. Instead, he flushed as he realized that even now she was aware of all his feelings. There were tears shining in her eyes again, and this time he couldn't reaoh for a tissue. He leaned down and kissed her damp eyelids; then he dropped one hand to brush away the moisture on her cheek. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind. Earth, and Bell, and the Colony, now or forever or never. That time in the plane, thinking of Bea. Anna -- Anna always there at his side, helping, understanding. "Anna," he said. He had never liked the name. "Ansie." There had been a little girl, a very long time ago, when he was a child, and her name had been Ansie. He released her other hand and cupped her upturned face in both of his. His head bent to hers, slowly and tenderly. There was no fierceness here, only the hint of growing passion. When he lifted his lips from hers, he laughed and said quietly: "It saves words, doesn't it?" "Yes." Her voice was small and husky. "Yes, it does... dear." If his mind was "open," he might feel what she did. Cautiously and warily, he reached out to her, with his arms and with his mind. He needed no questions and no answers now. "Ansie!" he whispered again, and lifted her slender body. T AD'S left ear itched; he let it. "Operator on duty will not remove headphones under any circumstances until relieved -- " There was a good hour before Gladys Porosky would show up to take over. "Mars Machine Tool to Sun Lake," crackled the head-set suddenlyr He glanced at the clock and tapped out the message time on the log sheet in the typewriter before him. "Sun Lake to Mars Machine Tool, I read you, G. A.," he said importantly. "Mars Machine Tool to Sun Lake, message. Brenner' Pharmaceutical to Marsport. Via Mars Machine Tool, Sun Lake, Pittco Three. Request reserve two cubic meters cushioned cargo space outgoing rocket. Signed Brenner. Repeat, two cubic meters. Ack please, G. A." Tad said: "Sun Lake, to Mars Machine Tool," and read back painstakingly from the log: "Message. Brenner Pharmaceutical to Marsport. Via Mars Machine Tool. Sun Lake, Pittco Three. Signed Brenner. Repeat, two cubic meters. Received okay. T. Campbell, Operator, End." T AD'S fingers were flying over the typewriter keyboard. Mimi and Nick would want to know how was to delay your estimated requirements to the last possible minute and then reserve a little more than you thought you'd need. Reserve too early and you might be stuck with space you couldn't fill but had to pay for. Reserve toe late and there might be no room for your stuff until the next rocket. "Mars Machine Tool to Sun Lake, end," said the head-set. Tad started to raise Pittco's operator, the intermediate point between Sun Lake and Marsport, to boot the message on the last stage of its journey. "Sun Lake to Pittco Three," he said into the mike. No answer. He went into "the buzz," droning: "Pittco Three, Pittco Three, Pittco Three, Sun Lake -- " "Pittco Three to Sun Lake, I read you," came at last, mushily, through the earphones. Tad was full of twelve-year-old scorn. Half a minute to ack, and then probably with a mouthful of sandwich ! "Sun Lake to Pittco Three," he said. "Message. Brenner Pharmaceutical to Marsport via Mars Machine Tool, Sun Lake, Pittco Three. Request reserve two cubic meters cushioned cargo space outgoing rocket. Signed Brenner. Repeat, two cubic meters. Ack, please. G. A." "Pittco to Sun Lake, message received. Charlie Dyer, Operator, out." Tad fumed at the Pittco man's sloppiness and make-it-up-as-you-go procedure. Be a fine thing if everybody did that -- messages would be garbled, short stopped, rocketloading fouled up, people and cargoes miss their planes. He tapped out on the log sheet: "Pittco Operator C. Dyer failed to follow procedure, omitted confirming repeat. T. Campbell." He omitted Dyer's irksome use of "out" instead of "end" and the other irregularities, citing only the legally important error. That was just self-protection; if there were any errors in. the final message, the weak spot on the relay could be identified. But Tad was uncomfortably certain that Dyer, if the report ever got back to him, would consider him an interfering brat. He bet Mr. Graham's last message had got respectful handling from Pittco, in spite of the painhad been couched in. They all wanted Graham. Tad had received half a dozen messages for the writer extending the hospitality of this industrial colony or that. The man had good sense to stick with Sun Lake, the boy thought approvingly. There was this, jam with the rocket and the commissioner, but the Sun Lakers were unquestionably the best bunch of people on Mars. "Pittco to Sun Lake," said Dyer's voice in the earphones. "Sun Lake to Pittco, I read you, G. A.," snapped Tad. "Pittco Three to Pittco One, message. Via Sun Lake, Mars Machine Tool, Brenner Pharmaceutical, Distillery Mars, Rolling Mills. Your outgoing rocket cargo space requirements estimate needed here thirty-six hours. Reminder downhold cushioned space requests minimum account new tariff schedule. Signed, Hackenburg for Reynolds. Repeat, thirty-six hours, ack please, G. A." H UH ! Dyer repeated numbers on bis stuff, all right ! Tad acked and booted the message on. The machine shop in the "canal" confluence would get it, then the drug factory in the highlands dotted with marcaine weed, then the distillery among its tended fields of wiregrass, then the open hearth furnaces and rolling mills in the red taconite range, and at last Pittco One, in the heart of the silver and copper country. He hoped he wouldn't have to handle arty of Graham's long code jobs. Orders were to cooperate fully with the writer, but even Harve Stillman, who'd taken Graham's story on his rocket trip and Marsport, had run into trouble with it. Tad loafed through the material to the coded piece by Graham and shuddered. I T was okay, the. boy supposed, for on Earth, where you didn't transmission beam and getting your news story, but why did the guy have to show off on Mars where the only way out was by rocket and you couldn't get scooped? "Marsport # to Pittco Three," he heard faintly in the earphones. Automatically he ran his finger down the posted list of planes. Marsport # was a fourengine freighter belonging to the Marsport Hauling Company. "Pittco Three to Marsport #, I read you, G. A." "Marsport # to Pittco, our estimated time of arrival is thirteen-fifty. Thirteen-fifty. We're bringing in your mail. End." "Pittco to Marsport #, #. K., E.T.A. is thirteenfifty and I'll tell Mr. Hackenburg. End." Mail, thought Tad enyiously. All Sun Lake ever got was microfilmed reports from the New York office and business letters from customers. Aunt Minnie and 'Cousin Adelbert's wouldn't write to you unless you wrote to them; and Sun Lake couldn't lay out cash for space-mail stamps. Tad's ear itched. One thing he missed, he admitted to himself in a burst of candor, and he'd probably have to go on missing it. The Sun Lake Society of New York couldn't spontaneously mail him the latest Captain Crusher Comix. He had read to tatters Volume under his sweater from Earth. And to this day he hadn't figured out how the captain had escaped from the horrible jam he'd been in on Page #. There had been a Venusian Crawlbush on his right, a Martian Brownie on his left, a Rigelian Paramonster drifting down from above and a Plutonian Bloodmole burrowing up from below. Well, the writers of Captain Crusher knew their business, thought Tad, though they certainly didn't know much about Mars -- the real Mars. Their hero never seemed to need OxEn or clothing any warmer than hose and cape when on a Martian adventure. And he was always stumbling over Brownies and dead cities and lost civilizations. Bunk, of course. Brownies, dead cities and lost civilizations would make Mars a more interesting place for a kid. J#ut when a person grows up, other things mattered more than excitement. Things like doing a good job and knowing it. Things like learning. Getting along. Probably, Tad thought uncomfortably, getting married some day. "Mars Machine Tool to Sun Lake. Sun Lake, Sun Lake, Sun Lake, Mars Machine Tool, Sun Lake -- "Sun Lake to Mars Machine Tool, I read you, G. A.," Tad snapped, peeved. The operator might have waited just a second before he went into the buz # . "Mars Machine Tool to Sun Lake, message. Pittco One to Pittco Three. Via Rolling Mill, Distillery Mars, Brenner Pharmaceutical, Mars Machine Tool, Sun Lake, outgoing rocket cargo space requirements are: ballast, ithirty-two cubic meters; braced antishift, twelve point seventy-five cubic meters;, glasslined tank, fifteen cubic meters; cushioned, one point five cubic meters. Regret advise will require steerage space one passenger. F.Y.I., millwright's helper Chuck Kelly disabled by marcaine addiction." The repeats followed and Tad briskly receipted. He raised Pittco Three and booted the message, grinning at a muffled "God damn it!" over the earphones as he droned out the bad news about Kelly. Steerage passenger space didn't come as high as cushioned cargo cubage; a steerage passenger was expected to grab a stanchion, hang on and take his lumps during a rough landing; but it was high enough. cushioned cubage, ever, and settled for braced antishift. Sometimes crates gave and split under the smashing accelerations, but the cash you had to lay out for cargo protected springs, hydraulic systems and meticulous stowage by the supercargo himself wasn't there. It meant a disgruntled customer every once in a while, but the tariffs made you play it that way. The door behind him opened and closed. "Gladys?" he asked. "You're early." "It's me, sonny," said a man's voice -- Graham's. "You mind filing a little copy for me#" The newsman handed him a couple of onionskin pages. "Phillips Newscode," he sajd. "Think you can handle it?" "I guess s #o," said Tad unhappily. "We're supposed to cooperate with you." Blankly he looked at the sheets and asked: "Why bother to code it, though?" "It saves space, for one thing. You get about five words for one. 'An excited crowd gathered at the spite of his, or their, opposition.' And, for another thing, what's the point of my knowing the code if I never use it?" He grinned to show he was kidding. Tad ignored the grin and remarked: "I thought that was it." He entered the time in the log and said into the mike: "Sun Lake to Pittco Three." Pittco acked. "Sun Lake to Pittco Three, long Lake to Marsport. Via Pittco Three. Message: Microfilm following text and hold for arrival Douglas Graham Marsport and pickup at story go out and saw the kid note down the acknowledgment in the log. "Good job," the gunthcr said. "Thanks, fella." Outside, the chilly night air fanned his face. It had been a dirty little trick to play on the boy. They'd give him hell when they found out, but the message had to clear and that Stillman knew a and ask questions. Graham took a swig from his pocket flask and started down the street. He'd needed the drink, and he needed a long walk. It was surgery, he told himself, but surgery wasn't always pleasant for the surgeon. That doctor might be able to understand if he could only step back and see the thing in perspective. As it was, Tony obviously believed Mrs. Kandro's absurd story about somebody doping the beans. The writef grinned sardonically. What a cesspool Mars must be if even these so-called idealists were so corrupted ! Marcaine addiction by a brand-new mother, theft of a huge quantity of marcaine clearly traced to the Colony. The doctor would hate him and thinkhim twofaced, whichhe was. It was part of the job. He was going to start an avalanche; a lot of people would hate him for it. An impeccable, professional hatchet job on Sun Laice was the lever that would topple the boulder to start the avalanche. Senators would posture and declaim, bills would be written and rewritten by legislative clerks, but that would be just the dust over the rumbling rocks. The public relations boys of the industrials used to be newspapermen themselves, and they could The word would be passed like lightning. They'd learn, to their horror, that it wasn't going to be a cheerful travelog quickie like his last two or three; that Graham was out for blood. The coded dispatch would be talked over and worried over in most of Mars' administration buildings tonight. They would debate whether he was ging to put the blast on all the colonies. But they'd note that he pinned all the guilt so far on Sun Lake, not mentioning specifically that the abortion and the prostitution had occurred at Pittco. So, by tomorrow morning, he'd let one of the industrials send! a plane for him. He'd been playing hard to get for two days -- long enough. He'd put on his jovial mask and they'd fall all over themselves dishing the dirt on each other. He'd make it a point to pass ' through Brenner Pharmaceutical. Quasi-Iegal operators like Brenner always knew who was cutting corners. And Bell -- what tills did he have his hand in? Graham knew there wasn't another newsman alive who could swing it -- the first real story to come out of Mars besides press handouts from the industrials. And the planet was rotten-ripe for it. But, mostly, he would just scare them, be the scoffing, good-humored know-it-all, so cheerfully sinister that they'd try to buy him off with dirt about the other outfits. He'd make no open promises, nc open threats, and it all would hop into his lap the way it always had... j# No, not always, he grimly corrected himself. Once he'd been a green kid reporter, lucky enough to break the Bell scandal. He'd actually been sorry for the crook. There' d been a lot of changes since. It was funny what happened to you when you got into the upper brackets. Women, a penthouse with a two-acre living room, silk shirts "built" for you instead of the nylon all the paycheck stiffs wore, "beefsteaks" broiled over bootleg charcoal made of real wood from one of Earth's few thousand acres of rerrkiining trees. You grabbed and grabbed, and then you got sick of grabbing. You felt empty and blank and worked like hell to make yourself think you were happy. And then, if you were lucky, you found out who you were. Graham had found out that he -- the youngest one, underfed, the one the big boys ganged up on for snitching, the one the cop called a yellow little liar, the one nobody liked, the one who always got his head knucked when they played Nigger Inna Graveyard -- yes, he had power. It was the monstrous energy of Earth's swarming billions. If you could reach them, you could have them. You could slash down what was rotten and corrupt; a thieving banker, a bribed commissioner, a Mars colony. Under the jovial mask it hurt when they called you a sensationalist, said you were unanalytical, had no philosophy, couldn't do anything but set down facts to titillate the uncritical audience. But what you could do and they couldn't was stir laugh, make them hopeful, make them rage -- and when they raged, focus their rage to a white-hot spot that cauterized a particular bit of rottenness. Graham stumbled and took a swig from his flask. Who had to have a philosophy?  What was wrong with exposing crackpots and crooks ? The first real news story out of Mars would break up the Sun Lake Colony. Some good would go with the bad; the surgeon had no choice. That Kandro woman and her baby! "The child belonged on jEarth. And it would go there. The little thing would never know if not for Graham that there was anything but Mars. I'm supposed to be hardboiled, he thought, a little drunk and sentimental, but l know what's right for that kid. "Hey!" he said. Where the hell was he, anyway? Wandering in the desert, high as a kite on.ihis expected triumph. His feet had led him down the Colony street, along the path to the airfield, past it and a few kilometers toward the Rimrock Hills. He blamed it on the Mars gravity. Your legs didn't tire here, for one thing. The radio shack light was plain behind him; dimmer and off to the left of it shone the windows of the Lab, merged in one beacon. The radio shack light went out and then on agdin. A moment later, so did the light from the Lab. "Power interruption,' he said. "Or I blinked."  It happened again, first the radio shack and then the Lab. And then it happened once more. The writer took out his flask and gulped. "Who's out there?" he yelled. "I'm Graham!" There wasn't any answer, but something came whistling out of the darkness at him, striking his parka and falling to the ground. He fumbled for it while still trying to peef through the night for whatever had passed between him and the lights of Sun Lake. "What do you want?" he yelled into the darkness hysterically. "I'm Graham! The writer! Who are you?" Something whizzed at him and hit his shoulder. "Cut that out!" he shrieked, and began to run for the lights of Sun Lake. He had taken only a few steps when something caught at his leg and he floundered onto the ground. The next and last thing he felt was a paralyzing blow on the back of his head. T NY woke up in time for breakfast,, an achievement in itself. He'd had, at best, some hundred and fifty minutes of sleep after a long and hard day, and that interrupted by emergency, crisis, and triumph. He washed without noticing the the night before. He threw his parka over his shoulders and stepped out into the wan sunlight, oblivious to the lingering chill; good thing he -- Good thing he could still laugh at himself, he decided. What was stench of the alcohol. He noted the time; good thing there was no Lab inspection to do this morning. He noticed the closed bedroom door; good .thing he'd so hospitably given up his own bed to Graham, considering the unexpected turn of events the old saw about all the world loving a lover? Nothing to it -- it was the lover who loved the whole world. Love, lover, loving, he rolled the words around in his mind, trying to tell himself that nothing had reallychanged. All the old problems were still there, and a new one, really, taken on. But that wasn't so. Graham had spent half fhe night writing his promised story. Sunny Kandro was all right at last. And Anna -- Ansie -- a problem? He cduld remember thinking, in the distant past, as long as two days ago, that such an involvment would present problems, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what they were supposed to have been. H E went in to breakfast, not trying to conceal his exuberance, and sat down between Harve Stillman and Joe Grasey. "What's got into you?" Harve asked. "Something goal happen?" Gracey demanded. Tony nodded. "The Kandro baby," he explained, using 'the first thingthat popped into his head. "Jim woke me up last night. Polly was -- was having trouble with the baby," he hastily amended the story. He'd have to tell Gracey about the marcaine. There teas a problem after all, but this wasn't the place for it; a Council meeting after breakfast maybe. "You know we've been having feeding trouble all along," he explained. "I found the trouble last night. I don't understand it, but it works. I took Sunny's mask off." "You what ?" "Took his mask off; he doesn't need it. Eats fine without it, too. Trouble was, he couldn't breathe through his mouth and eat at the same time." "Well, I'll be -- How do you figure it?" "Hey, there's a story for the gunther," Harve suggested. " 'Medical Miracle on Mars,' and all that stuff. Where is he anyhow?" "Still sleeping, I guess. The bedroom door was closed." "Did you talk to him last night?" Gracey asked. Tony attacked his plate of fried beans, washed them down with a gulp of "coffee," and told the other man about Graham's promise. "He was up half the night writing, too. I heard him while I was examining the baby." "Did he show it to you?" "Not yet. He was asleep when I got back." Harve pushed back his chair with a grunt of satisfaction. "I feel better already," he grinned. "First decent meal I've had in days. What's the program for today. Doc ? You going to need me on radiological work?" " don't think so... I'll let you know if vve do, after Joe and I get together with the others. Got time for a meeting after breakfast?" he asked the agronomist, and Gracey nodded. "Okay, I'll be in the radio shack if you want me," Harve said. "The kids took over all day yesterday. Don't like to leave them too long on their own." "Right. But I don't think we'll need you." That marcaine business -- how in all that was holy, the doctor wondered, did anybody get marcaine onto Polly's beans? After all the searching, in the middle of the hunt, who would do it ? Why ? And above all, bow? Maybe one of the others would have an angle on it. ii thing I'mglad about," Gracey said soberly. "We did make a thorough search. Whatever happens from here on out, at least we've proved to our own satisfaction that nobody in Sun Lake stole the stuff." "That's nice to know," Mimi agreed with considerably less feeling. "But frankly, I'd almost feel better if v we had found it. I'd gladly turn the bum who took it over to Bell's tender mercies, if it was one of us. This way, we have to depend on Graham. You're sure he's with us?" She looked questioningly from the doctor to the electronics man. "How sure can you get?" Nick shrugged. "He said so. Now we wait to see his story, that's all." "I don't think we have to worry about that," Tony said briefly. He couldn't tell them any more. He was sure himself, but how could he explain without giving away Anna's secret ? "Look," he went on briskly, "there's something else we do have to think about. I told you about Sunny Kandro, Joe. There's more to it than what I said at breakfast." Nick and Mimi both sat forward with new interest, as Tony repeated the news about the removal of Sunny's mask. He cut off their questions. "I didn't tell you how it started, though. Jim came to get me, not for the baby, but for Polly." A sharp rap on the door stopped him. Harve Stillman walked in. His face was grim; he carried a familiar sheaf of onionskin pages in his hands. "What's the matter, Harve?" Mimi demanded. "Aren't you supposed to be on shift in the radio shack?" "That's right. I walked out." "No relief?" she snapped. "Are you sick?" "I'm sick, all right. And it doesn't make any difference now whether radio's manned or not." He slapped the onionskin onto the table, and threw down on top of it two sheets of closely written radio log paper. "There you are, folks, have a look. It's all down in black and white. That's the translation on the log sheets. The bastard filed know what lie was sending. When I think what a sucker I was, letting him pump me about who knew newscode around here! Go on, read it!" Mi mi picked up the sheets and glanced at the penciled text. Her face went white. She reached for the onionskin, glanced at it, and returned her eyes to the log sheets. In a minute she looked up again. "Harve, there couldn't be any mistake?" "I know the code," he said, bluntly. "Hey," Nick protested, "could you maybe let us in on it?" terly. "This is the story written for us by D. Graham, your friend and mine. 'I was greeted by a frightened crowd on my arrival at Sun Lake, and no wonder. After two days inthis community, I am able to reply to the heads-in-theclouds idealists who claim that on Mfcrs lies the hope of the human race. My reply is that on Mars I immediately came face-to-face into drunkenness, prostitution, narcotics, criminal abortion, and murder. It is not for me to say whether this means that Sun Lake Colony, an apparent center of these activities, should be shut down by law and its inmates deported to Earth. But I do know -- ' " "That's crazy!" Nick broke in. "I heard him say myself -- " He stood up angrily. Tony reached out a jimd to restrain him. "He didn't promise a damn thing, Nick. We just heard it that way. He said he'd do a story, that's all." "That's enough for me," Cantrella replied. "He promised, and he's by God going to keep his promise." "Sit down, Nick," Mimi interrupted. "Beating Graham up isn't  going to solve anything. Harve, you get back on duty, and buzz one of the kids to go over to Tony's and collect Graham. If he's asleep, tell them to wake him up. We'll go through the rest of this while we're waiting." She eyed the sheets of paper distastefully. Harve slammed the door behind him, and Mimi turned to the others. "I'm sorry. I should have checked with you first. Every time something goes wrong, I start giving orders as if I owned the place. Here." She handed the sheets to Joe Gracey, still sitting quietlyto her left. "You look calm. You read it." Joe took the papers and went on where she had stopped before. "He can't do that!" Nick protested furiously, when Joe finished. "Thai story is full of lies ! The murder wasn't here. Neither was most of the other stuff. How can he -- " "He didj K Tony pointed out. "How much convincing do you need ?" "It's carefully worded," Gracey said. "Most of it isn't lies at all, just evasions and implications." "We've got to assume he's smart enough to write a libel-proof story." Mi mi had recovered her briskness. "There's one place I think he slipped, though. Can I see those sheets of Graham's again, Joe?" H ER eyes were shining when she looked up again. "We've got him!" she said. "I'm sure of it! Let's call in O'Donnell and get his opinion on it. This stuff about Polly." She read aloud: " '... the young mother of a newborn baby, unable to feed her infant because of her hopeless addiction to marcaine. This reporter was present at a midnight emergency when the Colony's doctor was called to save the child from the ministrations of its hysterical mother...' Tony, you can testify to that!" "I don't know," said the doctor, painfully. "Sure, I realize Polly's not an addict, but -- that's what I was starting to tell you when Harve came in. That's whatJim got me up for last night. Polly was sick, and there's no doubt that it was a dose of marcaine that was responsible." "What?" "Polly?" "But she couldn't be the one. She was -- " "How did Graham find out about it?" Tony waited till the questions stopped, then gave them the whole story, from the time Jim Kandro roared into his house at one o'clock in the morning, right through the removal of the mask. '"We were both asleep when Kandro came in," he explained, "and the noise woke Graham too. I didn't see him again myself, but I heard him typing when I was in the hospital with the baby. And Ans -- .Anna told me she talked to him while she was making the bottles. She had no reason to hold back any information. I told her myself that he was writing a friendly story." "Well, that fixes us, but good. Where did Polly get the stuff?" Nick demanded. "We've hunted every inch of this place looking for marcaine; how come it didn't show up?" "I've been trying to figure that myself," Tony said. "I don't think she got it. Her reactions were not those of a marcaine user, and I'd swear she was as shocked as she said she was when I diagnosed it. The stuff was put there -- and don't ask me who, or why, because I can't even begin to guess." "Well, we've got our hands full," Mimi said thoughtfully. "Where do we start? It seems to me the same answer is going to settle two of our problems. Where did Polly's marcaine come from, and how are we ever going to get out of this impossible situation with Bell?" "That's not all," Nick added grimly. "We can solve both of those, and still get booted off Mars when this story breaks." "That's a separate matter. All I can do about that is try and talk to Graham -- or prove to him that at least part of the story is libelous. Come in," Mimi called, in answer to a knock outside. Gladys Porosky pushed the door open and announced breathlessly: "We can't find him. We looked all over and he's not any place." "Graham?" Tony jumped to his feet. "He was asleep in my bedroom; I left him there. He has to be around." opened the door when he didn't answer, and he wasn't there. Then we scattered; all the kids have been looking. He's not at the Lab, or in the fields, and he's not in any of the houses. Nobody's seen him all morning." "Thanks, Gladys," Mimi cut her short. "Will you try to find Jack O'Donnell for me? Ask him to come over here." "Okay." She slammed out of the door, leaving a whirlwind of babble and excitement behind her. "I suppose he's skipped," Tony said. "Probably messaged one of the industrial outfits in that damn code of his, and got picked up during the night. His bags are still at my place, though -- I saw them this morning. That's funny." "Very funny," Nick echoed glumly. "Ha, ha." "What's luggage to a guy who can write like that?" Gracey asked. "He can get all the luggage he wants just by wiping out another plague spot like us."  O'Donnell came in, and they waited in tense silence while the ex-lawyer read through Harve's penciled translation. "Only possible libelous matter I see is about the marcaine-addict mother. What's all that?" They told him, and he shook his head. "No more chance in a court of law than a snowball in hell," he said flatly. "But I don't care bou he worded it. The story's not true." "How many stories are? If truth or justice made any difference in the JEarth courts, I wouldn't be here. I loved the law. The way it looked in the books, that is. I guess I'll have to pass my bar examinations all over again. Mars is under the Pan State, but I suppose this constitutes interrupted residence anyway. "Big fat chance you'll have of getting to take your bar exams after that smear," said Gracey. "I'm not kidding myself about getting to teach college again. If I can get some money together, I'm going to try commercial seaweeds." "God help Sargasso Limited," said Nick Cantrella. "And God help Consolidated Electronic when I start my shop again in Denver. It took them three months to run me into bankruptcy last trip around, but I'll get them up to four this time. They can't stand much of that kind of punishment." "Let's not jump to conclusions," Mimi said, with the quiver back in her determinedly businesslike voice. "Let's assume Graham's skipped and the story's going through. We might still be able tc hang on if we can square ourselves with Bell." "Bell and Graham have no use for each other," Tony said. "Maybe this will make Bell easier to deal with." "Tli at I doubt. Let's figure on the worst. Suppose we can't convince Bel-l. We'll have two possible courses of action. We can sell out fast. From what I understand of this situation. I'm sure that the Commissioner would find a legal loophole for us on the marcaine deal if we decided to sell to, for instance, Brenner. If we do that, wc can pay off what money we owe on Earth, book passage for our members, and, with luck, have a few dollars left over to divide between us." She smiled humorlessly. "You might even have a capital investment of five or ten dollars, Nick, to start working on ConElectron.' "Good enough," he said. "It'll give me courage -- if I can still find a bar with a five-buck beer, that is." "That," Mimi went on, "would be the smart thing to do. But there's another way. We can hang on through the cordon, hoping to prove our point. It leaves us some hope, but it leaves us penniless, even if we manage to stick out the six months. Whatever cash or credit we have on hand we'll have to pay out for OxEn. Don't think Bell is going to let us have the stuff free. Meanwhile, our accounts payable keep coming due, and accumulating interest. There's a good chance that long before the six months are up we'll be forced into involuntary bankruptcy. That's how Pittco got Economy Metals last year." "Like the cat got the canary," said Nick. "Yes. We'd then be shipped back to Earth as distress cases, with a prior lien oh our future earnings. If any." studied her handsome face as if he were seeing it for the first time. She'd been way up in the auditing department of a vast insurance company  once. It would be hard on her. It would be hard on them all. But he wanted to yell and beat down doors when he thought of what it would mean to Anna, plunged back into the screaming boll of Earth's emotional "noise" that she couldn't block out. He tried to think like a schemer, and t knowing that it wouldn-t work, told himself: You marry Anna , take Brenner's offer -- it's still open; good doctors aren't that easy to come by on Mars -- and you set her up in a decent home. But the whole thing crumbled under its own weight. She wouldn't marry a doctor whose doctoring was to. patch up marcaine factory hands when they sniffed too much of the stuff. "Eh?" he asked. Somebody was talking to him. "Sell now, or hang on?" Mimi patiently repeated. "I want to think about it," he told her. The others felt the same way. It wasn't a thing you could make up your mind about in a few minutes, not after the years and years of always thinking one way: Colony survival. To have to decide now which way to kill the Colony... The meeting broke up inconclusively. There was some recrating still to be done. The Lab had to be back to production, get this rocket's shipments ready just in case. And maybe by the time those chores were done, one of' them would have some notion of how to start all over again, looking for the mysterious marcaine. Tony headed out to the Lab, racking his brains for an answer. But halfway there, he found to his chagrin that he wasn't serious at all. He was striding along freely in the clean air and light gravity, to the rhythmic mental chant: Ansie -- Anna -- Ann -- Ansie -- peacefully, drugging herself against the pain in her limbs and head by a familiar reverie of which she never tired. She saw Sun Lake Colony at some vague time in the future, a City of God, glowing against the transfigured Martian desert, spiring into the Martian air, with angelic beings vaguely recognizable in some way as the original colonists. Her Hank, the bold explorer, with a bare-chested, archaic, swordgirt look; Doctor Tony, calm and wise and very old, soothing ills with miraculous lotions and calming troubled minds with dignified counsel; Mimi Jonathan, revered and able, disposing' of this and that with sharp, just terseness; Anna Willendorf mothering hundreds serenely; brave Jim and Polly Kandro and their wonderful child, the hope of them all. She wasn't there herself, but it was all right because she had done something wonderful for them. They all paused and lowered their voices when they thought of her. She, the sick and despised, had in the end surprised and awed them all by doing something wonderful for them, and they paid her memory homage. Nagging reality, never entirely silent, jeered at hpr that she was a useless husk draining the Colony's priceless food and water, giving nothing in return. She shifted on the bed. iPains shot through her joints and her heart labored. You're as good as they are, whispered the tempter; you're better than they are. How many of them could stand the pain and not murmur, never think of anything but the good of the Colony? But I'm not, she raged back. I'm not. I shouldn't have got sick;  can't pork now; they have to nurse me. But you didn't drink any water until Tony made you, said the tempter. Wasn't that more than any of them would do? Won't they be sorry when you're dead and they find out how you suffered ? She tried to fix her tormented mind on her Hank, but he had a sullen, accusing stare. She was tying him down; if they sent her back to Earth, he'd have to go too. They wouldn't let him stay in the Colony. S HE wished Anna hadn't left, and swallowed the thought painfully. Anna's time belonged to the Colony and not to her. It was nasty of her to want Anna to stay with her so much. She straightened one puffy leg and felt a lance of pain shoot from toes to groin;' she bared her clenched teeth but didn't let a whimper escape her. That was very good, said the tempter. None of them could Jo that. Anna had propped her up in bed before, so she could look out the window. Now she turned her head slowly and looked out. I see through the window , she told herself.  see across the Colony street to a corner of the Kandros' hut with a little of their streetside window showing. I see Polly Kandro cleaning the inside of the window, but she doesn't see me. Now she's coming out and cleaning the outside of the window. Now she turns and sees me and waves and l smile. Now she lakes her cloth and goes around her hut to clean the back window and l can't see her any more.  And now something glides down the Colony street with Sunny Kandro in its thin brown arms. And now Polly runs around her hut again, her face white as chalk, tries faintly to call me, wave to me, and falls down out of sight. Joan knew what she ought to do, and she tried. The intercom button had been put in so she had only to move her hand a few' inches. She reached out for the button, and held her finger on it, but there was no answering click. If was a few seconds and maybe minutes, and the thing that had stolen Polly's baby was gone down the other end of the street. The sick girl sat up agonizingly and thought : I can do something now. They won't be able to say l was foolish, because if l wait any longer f won't be able to catch up; it will be too far away. There's nobody etse to do it except Polly, and she fainted. It has to be done right away. I can't wait for them to answer and then come from the Lab. Joan stood up, stumped over to the canteen on the wall and tilted it for a long, long drink of cool water. It tasted good. She lurched ' out of the hut and stood for a moment, looking at the crumpled body of Polly. Poor Polly, she thought as her heart thudded and faltered. We must help one another. She sliaded her eyes against the late morning sun and looked up and past the Colony street through the clear Mars air. There was a  moving dot passing the airfield now, and she started after it, one step, two steps, three steps, as the City of God reformed in her mind and her eyes never left the moving dot. thing swimming in the deeps of space, a grave example for children. See? You must not hate, you must not fear, you must always help or that w'ill happen to us. You must be kind and like people; you mustn't make weapons because you never know r where making weapons will end. And the children would ask curiously what it was like, and their elders would tell them it was crowded and dirty, that nobody ever had enough to eat, that people poured poison into the air and pretended it didn't matter. That it wasn't like Sun Lake, their spacious, clean, sweet-smelling home, that there wouldn't have been any Sun Lake if not for the great pioneers like Joan Radcliff who suffered and died for them. She wept convulsively at the pain in her limbs as she stumped across the desert rocks. They sliced her bare feet but she dared not look down ahead of her for fear of losing that swimming, moving dot she followed. Magic, she thought. Fix a fairy with your eye and away it cannot fly. Her heart -- she could feel it thudding ponderously as a piassive new pain burned through her left shoulder and arm. I have done what I could, she thought. Rank, you are free. She fell forward and dragged her sprawled right arm along the ground so that it pointed to the moving dot and the Rimrock Hills beyond it. ii the arm and motioned to his helmet. Tony stared a moment, uncomprehending, then switched on the helmet radio. "What's up?" "Joan -- Joan Radcliff!" It was one of Mimi's young assistants in the Lab office. "She picked up the intercom and buzzed it. When I answered it, it went dead." "I'll be right out." The doctor made it on the double, in spite of the hampering suit, out of the shipping room and into the shower. He would have given a year of his own life to be able to speed up the decontamination process this one time, but he'd been near the open crates. It wouldn't help Joan if he exposed himself, and her, too, to radiation disease. He ran the distance' from the Lab to the street of houses. He was still running when he approached the Kandros' hut, and almost missed seeing Polly's limp figure in the road. Thoroughly bewildered, he picked her up and looked around for help. There was no one in sight. A moment's indecision, and then, quickly, he carried Polly toward the Radcliff hut and deposited her gently on the wall bunk in the living room. Pulse and respiration okay; she would keep. He headed for Joan's bedroom. The doctor wasted a scant second staring at the empty bed; to him it seemed an endless time that had gone by. He pressed the intercom hutton, and waited through another eternity till the Lab answered. Whatever had happened, whatever mysterious force had removed Joan from her bed and left Polly unconscious in the street, this, he realized, must have been the ultimate agony for Joan -- to lie in this bed, in dreadful haste, to press this button and wait and wait until it was too late... "That you, Doc? What's up?" "Trouble. Get Jim Kandro out here. To the Radcliffs! And get Anna. Send her to Kandros'. There's no one with the baby. Is Mimi there? Put her on." "Tony?" The Lab Administrator's crisp voice w'as reassuring; he could leave part of the problem, at least, in her competent hands. "There's trouble here, Mim -- don't know what, but Polly's fainted and Joan's disappeared." "I'll be right there." She hung up. Tony retreated, one step toward the living room, had an afterthought, and went back to the intercom. "Get Cantrella here, too," he told the Lab office. "Tell him to bring along the e.e.g. setup. Fast." Polly didn't look too bad. Marcaixie again? Ile'd know soon. What was going on? Jim Kandro burst in, panting and terrified. His wide eyes went froth his wife to the doctor, and a Single: miserable word came from him. "Again?" "I don't know. She fainted. Take her home, then look at Sunny. Anna's on her way over to help you." Jim left with his burden in his arms, and Tony returned to the sick girl's bedroom. There was no trace, no clue, nothing he could find. He saw the wall canteen, upended, and went toward it with excitement. A puddle of water on the floor. Incredible carelessness for Sun Lake, but it meant something. Joan hadn't been carried away; she had gone herself. She had stopped for water and left the canteen this way. A heartbroken shout from across the street sent him running out of the house, over to the Kandros'. The living room was empty. In the bedroom, Polly lay alone,, still unconscious. He found Kandro in the new nursery, squatting on the floor beside the baby's empty crib, rocking in misery.L finished in a few minutes, but if you're ready, you might as well start now. It's a hundred to one chance against its being anything but cave dirt" Joe Gracey crumbled between skinny, sensitive fingers a bit of soil taken from the nursery floor. "As soon as we get the transceiver," Mimi said. "Harve's bringing it over now." Anna appeared in the doorway. "She's conscious now." Tony went back into the bedroom. "Polly?" Her eyelids fluttered open and closed. Her pulse was stronger, but she wasn't really ready to talk. He  had to try. Without a stimulant, if possible. "What happened, Polly?" he asked. "What's the use?" she said feebly. "What's the use? We tried and tried oil Earth, and I just got sick, and we had Sunny here, and now they've taken him. It isn't any good." "Who's taken him, Polly?" "I went out to clean the windows. I cleaned the front window and then I went around to clean the back window. When I looked in Simny was gone. That's all. They took him. They just took him." "Who took him, Polly?" "I don't know. Brownies. We tried and tried on Earth -- " T HE doctor took Anna to one side. "She's too lucid," he whispered. "Do you 'hear' anything?" "Hardly anything." Anna shook her head. "She's numb. She's more conscious than she looks. Just numb. Doesn't care." "Shock," Tony muttered. "There will be a reaction. She shouldn't be left alone." "I'll stay," Anna offered. "No, not you. We'll need you along with us." "I'd rather not," she said. "Ansie," he pleaded, biting back his angry disappointment. "I shouldn't have told you," she said dully. "I should never have told anybody. All right, I'll go." He smiled and gripped her arm. "Of course you will. You would have anyway." "No," she said. "I wouldn't." "Then maybe it's a good thing you told me." His voice was stern, but his hand pulled her closer to him. Polly twisted on the bed and sobbed. Anna pulled away. "Maybe." She bit her lip, looked up at him. "Only please don't be angry at me. I can't stand it if you keep getting angry at me." She turned and fled. Tony went back to the bed, erasing Anna and her problems from his mind with practiced determination. Polly was trembling uncontrollably. There was no more information to be had from her. He gave her a sedative and went out to join the others. Harve had arrived with the transceiver in his hand. On Anna's suggestion, a rush call was sent out for Hank Radcliff to stay with Polly. He didn't know about Joan; they decided not to tell him about it. "We need a man here with her," the doctor explained briefly. "The baby's disappeared, and we're going out now and try to track it. Polly might want to get up and follow. You keep her in bed." "Sure, Doc." "Nick Cantrella will be over with some equipment. Tell him to test Polly." Anna and the doctor, Jim Kandro, Harve Stillman, and Joe Gracey. "Look at that." Gracey was bending over in the road, pointing to the barely discernible mark of a bare toe. Here in the bottom of the old "canal" bed, where the settlement was built, the land retained a trace of moisture, enough to hold an impression for a while. Only part of a toe, but it pointed a direction. They headed up the street, past the huts toward the landing field. "Hey, Joe!" Someone was pounding up the hill after them, shouting. It was one of the men from the Agro Lab. "That test -- it's from the hills, all right, most likely from inside a cave, but hill dirt. That all you wanted ?" "Right. Thanks." "They told me you wanted the word fast," the man said curiously. "Glad I caught you." "Glad you did," Gracey agreed mildly. "Thanks again." He turned his back on the man. "Let's go." They topped the slight rise that marked the farthest extent of the old river bed's former inundations, and faced a featureless expanse of leveldesert land, broken only by Lazy Girl, chocked on the landing field at their left, and the hills in the distance. No other human being was in sight. It was hopeless to look for footprints here, in the constantly shifting dust. "The hills?" Mimi said. Tony looked at Anna; she shrugged almost imperceptibly. "Might as well," he agreed. They moved forward, Kandro striding ahead with his great hands knotted into bony fists, his eyes set on the hills, unaware of the ground under his feet or of the people with him. It was Harve who found the print they had known was impossible -- not really a footprint, but a spot of moisture, fast evaporating, still retaining a semblance of the shape of a human foot. A little farther on there was another; they were going the right way. Tony stopped for a minute at one of the damp spots, poked a finger curiously into the ground. Grit and salt, as he had expected. She couldn't have lived through it. He didn't know how she got as far as she did, but even if her heart held out, she must have sweated her life away to have left those damp indicators in the thirsty soil. Only a little farther and the ground began to be littered with the refuse of the Rimrock Hills -- here and there a sliver of stone, a drift of mineral salts. Gradually, the dust gave way to sharp rock and hard-packed saltpans. And the footprints of sweat gave way to footprints of blood. Mimi drew in her breath between her teeth at the thought of the sick girl stumbling barefoot over the slicing, razor-edged stones. "I see her," Kandro whispered, still striding ahead. They raced a kilometer over the jagged rock and planed-off salt crust to the girl's body. She lay prone, with her right armflung up He glanced at Anna and straightened up quickly. "What is it?" Her face was withdrawn and intense, her head held back like an animal scenting the wind. She scanned the broken waste, and pointed a hesitant finger. "Out and pointing to the Rimrock Hills. Tony peeled back her eyelid and reached for the pulse. He turned to his bag, and Anna -- blessed Anna -- was already getting out the hypodermic syringe. "Adrenalin?" He nodded. Swiftly and efficiently, she prepared the hypo and handed it to him. He bent over the girl busily, then sat back to wait. tli ere -- it's that way -- moving a little." Kandro was on his way before she stopped speaking. Stillman shaded his eyes and peered. "A rock in the heat haze," he pronounced finally. "Nothing alive." I Tony saw Anna shake her head in a small involuntary disagreement. tense small circle until Jim reached the spot. He looked down and they saw him hesitate, then move on with the same determined stride. Gracey lit out after him. Mimi murmured approval. There was no telling what Kandro might do in his present mood. A barely audible noise from the ground, and Tony was on his knees beside Joan. Her eyes went wide open, shining with an inner glory that was unholy in the dirt-streaked, bloodstained dead white of her face. She smiled as a child might smile, with perfect inner composure; she was pleased with herself. "Joan," the doctor said, "can you talk?" "Yes, of course." But she couldn't. She only mouthed the words. "Does it hurt any place?" She shook her head, or started to, but when she had turned it to one side she lacked the strength to bring it back. "No." This time she forced a little air through to sound the word. She was dying and he knew it. If it were only the heart, he might have been 'able to save her. But her body had been punished too much; it had given up. The water and the air that kept it alive were spent. Her body was a dead husk in which, for a moment, abetted by the little quantity of adrenalin, her heart and brain refused to die. He had to decide. They needed  what information she might have. She needed every bit ofenergy she had, to live out what minutes were left. The minutes didn't matter, he told himself. He knew, even as he made up his mind, that this, like the ghost baby, would haunt him all his life. If he were wrong, if she had any chance to live, he was committing murder. But another life hung in the balance too. "Listen to me, Joan." He put his mouth close to her face. "Just say yes or no. Did you see somebody take the Kandros' baby?" "Yes." She smiled up at him beatifically. "Do you know who it was?" "Yes -- no -- I saw -- " tr Don't try to talk. You saw the kidnaper clearly?" "Yes." "Then it was someone you don't know?" "No -- yes -- " "I'll ask it differently. Was it a stranger?" "Yes." She looked doubtful. "Anyone from the Colony?" "fro." "A man?" "No -- maybe." "A woman?" "No." "Someone from Pittco?" She didn't answer. Her eyes were staring at her arm. The doctor had rolled her over, and the arm was at her side, stretched out. She let out a weird cry of fury and frustration. Tony watched and listened, puzzled, till Anna bent over. "It's all right, Joan," she said softly. "You showed us. We saw the way it pointed. Jim is going that way now." The girl's eyes relaxed, and once again the dreadful light of joy shone from them. "Love me," she said distinctly. "I helped finally. Tony -- " He bent over. She was trailing off again, less breath with each word. She might have minutes left, or seconds. "Nobody -- believed -- me or -- them -- it was -- " She stopped, gasping, and the quiet smile of content gave way to a twisted grin of amusement. "Brownie," she said, and said no more. ii looked up to Anna's serene face. He saw that they were alone with the body of the dead girl. "Where -- ?" He got to his feet, carefully dulling sensation, refusing to feel anything. "Over there." She pointed to where two figures stooped over something on the ground. Farther off, Kandro's tall figure, still resolutely facing toward the hills, was being restrained by a smaller man -- Joe Gracey? That meant it was Mimi and Harve close by. "They found something?" "Somebody," she corrected, and couldn't control a small shudder. Tony started forward. "You better stay with Joan," he said with difficulty, hating to admit any weakness in her. "I'll call you if -- if we need you for anything." "Thank you. # ' She was more honest about it than he could be. They saw him coming twenty meters off. "It's Graham," Mimi called. "The lying bastard steals babies too!" Harve spat out in disgust. "He looks bad," Mimi said quietly. "We didn't touch him. We were waiting for you." "Good." The doctor bent down and felt along the torso for broken bones. Carefully, he rolled the writer over. Graham's puffed eyes opened. Through broken lips with dried blood crusted on them he rasped jeeringly: "Come back to finish the job? God damned cowards. Sneak up on a man. God damned cowards!" "None ot our people did this to you," Tony said steadily. His hands ran over the writer's battered head and neck. The left clavicle was fractured, his nose was broken, his left eardrum had been ruptured by blows. "Let's get him back to the hospital," he said. "Harve, tell the radio shack to raise Marsport. Get Bell. Tell him we need that Bloodhound. Tell him I will not take no for an answer." procession walked along the Golony street, Kandro and Stillman together, carrying the writer, and Tony bearing the dead girl in his arms. The news had gotten around. Lab work seemed once again to have stopped completely. They escaped the heartsick stares of the colonists only when they entered Tony's hut-and-hospital. He deposited Joan there, on his own bed. It was still rumpledfrom Graham's brief occupancy the night before. They settled the writer on the hospital table. With Anna's help, he removed the torn and bloody clothing from Graham's body. "If you don't need us for anything, Tony, I think we better get going," Mimi said. "We ought to stop in and see Polly." "Sure. Go ahead -- oh, wait a minute." Jim Kandro turned from his fixed spot in the doorway to listen. Tony beckoned to the blackhaired Lab administrator to the other side of the room. "MSmi," he said in an undertone, "you ought to know that Polly has a gun. I'm not sure whether Jim knows it or not. You might want it if you're going out again. Anyhow, somebody ought to get it out of there." She nodded. "Where is it?" "'Used to be in the baby's crib, but I think I talked her out of that. Don't know now." "Okay, I'll find it. I think we better take it along. Oh -- I'll send Hank back here." He was thoughtful. "Anna." She looked up. Her face was set and miserable. "Are you going out with the search party?" he asked, an innocent question to the others who listened, with a world of agonizing  significance for Anna. "I -- isn't Nick picking the people to go?" "I thought you might want to go. If you're sticking around, you can handle Hank, can't you?" "Oh, yes," she said eagerly. "I'd be much more useful that way, wouldn't I?" He shrugged and tried to figure stay here in the hospital, to expose herself to Graham's physicalpain and Hank's inevitable agony. But she was afraid to go out after the baby. Why? Later, he decided, he could talk to her. He went briskly back to the table and began his examination of Graham. The writer was a mass of bruises from his chest up; he cursed feebly when the doctor felt for fractures. Tony set the collar bone and sh#t him full of sedation. "Your left eardrum is ruptured," he said coldly. "An operation can correct that on Earth." "You bust 'em, somebody else fixes 'em," Graham muttered. "Think what you want." He pushed the wheeled table over to the high bed Polly had occupied just a few days earlier. Graham groaned involuntarily as Tony shifted his shoulder. The doctor eased up. What for? he stormed at himself. Why should I he gentle with the dirty sneak? He glanced hastily at Anna and caught the halfsmile on her face as she pulled the covers over the writer. "I'm going in the other room, Graham," Tony said. "You can call me if you need me." "Sure," Graham told him. "I'll call you soon as I feel ready for another beating. I love it." other room, he sat down and faced Anna intently. "Do you know whether any of our people could have done that to him?" "They aren't" haters," she said slowly. "If they were, they wouldn't be here. Someone might fly into a rage and break his jaw, but methodical punishment like that -- no." "I'll tell you what it reminds me of. Big Ginny." "She was killed." "She was beaten up, though that wasn't what killed her." "Does it have anything to do with Pittco?" Anna asked. "Why should they beat Graham? Why should they have beaten that woman?" "I don't know." He managed a feeble grin. "You know that." He lowered his voice. "Can you 'hear' him?" "He's in a lot of pain. Shock's worn off. And he hates us. God, he hates us. I'm glad he hasn't got a gun." "He's got a by-line. That's just as good." "Evidently that just occurred to him. Can he hear us in there? He's gloating now. It must be a fantasy about what he's going to do to us." . "Hell, we're through anyway. What difference does it make? All I want now is to find Sunny and get off this damned planet and give up trying. I'm sick of it." "You're not even kidding yourself," she said gently. "How do you think you can fool me?" "All right' he said. "So you think my heart is breaking because Sun Lake's washed up. What good is it going to do me? Anna, will I be seeing you back on Earth? I want us . to stay teamed up. When I go into practice -- " The woman winced and stood up. She closed the door to the hospital. "He was listening," she said. "He let out a blast of derision that rattled my skull when he heard you talk about going into practice on Earth." Tony pulled her down beside him, and held her quietly against his chest. "Ansie," he said once, softly, "my poor sweet Ansie." He kissed her hair, and they sat very still until Hank knocked on the door. ii refusing to believe what he saw. "She didn't feel much," Tony tried to explain. "Just a bad moment, maybe, when her heart gave out...She couldn't have felt anything, or she'd never have gotten so far." "We were there at the end," Anna reminded the young man. "She was -- she was very happy. She wanted to be useful more than anything else in the world. You know that, don't you? And in the end she was. She loved you very much, too. She didn't want you to be unhappy." "What did she say?" Hank wouldn't tear his eyes from the bed. He stood and stared ceaselessly. as if another moment of looking would show him some fallacy, some error. "Did she really say that, about loving me?" "She said -- " Anna hesitated, then went on firmly. "She said, 'Tell Hank I want him to be happy all the time.' I heard her," she answered Tony's look of surprise. It wasn't much of a lie. "Thank you. I -- " He sat on the bed beside his wife, his hand caressing the face stained with blood and dust. Tony turned and left the room. In the hospital, Graham was asleep or unconscious again. Tony went back to his own chair in the living room. There were so many hints, so many leads, so many parts of the picture. Somehow it all went together. He tried to concentrate, but his thoughts kept wandering, into the hospital where the writer lay beaten as Big Ginny had been beaten; into the bedroom, where Joan lay dead of -- of Mars; where Anna was comforting the young man who would never realize, if he was lucky, that he had killed Joan himself as surely as if he had throttled her. The last thing she said before she died! Tony snorted. The last thing she said, with that glorious light in her eyes, and a grin of delight on her face was "Brownie!" And there it was! Within a few seconds' time everything raced through h s mind, all the clues, the things that fitted together -- 'Big Ginny, and Graham's story, Sunny and the mask and Joan's dying words. Everything ! He jumped upin furious excitement. No, not everything, he realized. Not the marcaine. That didn't fit. He paced the length of the room, and turned to find Anna standing in the bedroom door. "Did you call?" she asked. "What happened?" He smiled. He went over and pushed the door closed behind her. "Ansie," he said, "you just don't know how lucky you are to have a big, strong, intelligent man like me. When are we going to get married ?" She shook her head. " Not until you tell me what it's all about." JL message sheet, then the note attached toit: "That's the master's voice up port told me, on the side, that the old man doesn't believe a word of you story. If the baby really is missing, he figures 'that Markie Mama did it in.' Graham really fixed us. I hope you're taking good care of him. If you get him back in shape, I won't feel so bad about taking a crack at him myself. Harve." The doctor smiled briefly, then asked Tad Campbell, who was waiting to take his answer back to the radio shack: "Did Mimi Jonathan see this?" "No. It just came in. Harve wants to know what answer to send." out with the search party too, Tony realized. That left the decision squarely up to him. He scribbled a note: "Harve, try this one on the commish. REevery tin soldier on the planet, and old man Bell himself heading the parade. Graham as victim gives him an out, too; he can call it intercolony. Get hot. We need that Bloodhound. Tony." When the boy was gone, Tony paced nervously around the living room, started to heat water for "coffee," and.decided he didn't want it. There was an almost empty bottle of liquor on the floor near the table -- Graham's. The doctor reached for it and drew back. It wasn't the right time or the right bottle. He headed for the bedroom door, and remembered that Joan's body was still occupying the bed. He peered into the hospital; Graham was still sleeping. Nothing to do but sit and wait, and think it out all over again. It checked every time -- but it couldn't be right. He hadn't told Anna yet. When you came right down to it, the whole thing was too far-fetched; he wouldn't believe it himself, if somebody else had proposed it. But it checked all the way every time. He got up again and hunted through his meager stack of onionskin volumes and scientific journals. Nothing there, but Joe Gracey ought to know. When the search party came back... Maybe they'd find the baby and the kidnaper; maybe he never would tell -- or have to tell -- anybody his crackpot theory. He decided to make the "coffee" after all, and wished he hadn't sent Anna and Hank back to stay with Polly, but Gladys had been frantic and frightened when she buzzed him. He couldn't expect the child to handle a hysterical woman by herself. The doctor poured his "coffee" and drank it slowly, not letting himself go to the intercom. Polly and Hank could help each other now; it worked that way. And Anna was better for them than he would be himself. Somebody had to stay with Graham. He got up and paced restlessly into the hospitaL room again. The writer stirred and moaned as the door opened, but that was all. It was more than an hour since Tad had left. Why no reply from Harve? Tony went to the front door, opened it and peered up the street, out over the housetops to the landing field. Nothing in sight. He turned to go back in, and out of the corner of his eye saw them rounding the curve of the street. Gracey, Mimi, Juarez, and then Kandro, taking each step reluctantly, his heart back in the hills, while Nick Cantrella and Sam Flexner, one on each side, urged him forward. Tony's heart sank; there was no mistaking defeat. ii TM sure," Mimi said steadily,L "we heard him cry. Just for a minute. Then it was as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth. Tony, we can't wait. We've got to get him out right away." "What about the other caves?" "We tried them all around," Gracey said. "Five or six on each side and a couple up above. But every one of those fissures narrows down inside the hill the same way. We couldn't get through. I don't see how the kidnapers did, either." "How about the other side?" Tony asked. "Someone could go around with a half-track and take a look." "We thought of it," Mimi said sharply. "Nick got Pittco on the transceiver. Mister Hackenburg was so sorry. Mister Reynolds was away, and he didn't have the authority himself to permit us to search on their ground. He was so sorry!" S HE stood up abruptly, and turned to the wall, not quite quickly enough. Tony saw her brush at her eyes before she turned back and said throatily: "Well, little men, what now? Where do we go from here?" "We wait," Joe Gracey said helplessly. "We wait for Bell to answer us. We wait for Reynolds to get back. What else can we do?" "Nothing, I guess. We left half a dozen men out there," Mimi told the doctor. "They're watching, and they have the transceiver. I guess Joe's right. We wait." Silence, and Tony tried to find a way to say what he had to say. They couldn't just wait, not while he knew something to try. The baby might be all right, but maybe they would get there just one minute too late. He turned to Gracey. "Joe, what do you know about lethal genes ?" "Huh?" The agronomist looked up, dazed, shook his head, and repeated without surprise at the irrelevent question, "Lethal genes?" He stopped and considered, mentally tabulating his information. "Well, they're recessives that -- " ."No, I know what they are," Tony stopped him. "I thought I heard you say something about them the other day. Didn't you say you thought you'd hit on some that were visible on Mars?" Anna drifted in, with Hank at her heels, and they went straight through, into the room beyond where Joan still lay. "Oh, yes," Gracey said. "Very interesting stuff. Come out to the Lab when you have the time, and I'll show you. We -- " Mimi jumped up. "What are you gabbling about?" she demanded. "This is an emergency! We have to find some way to rescue that baby!" "I'm sorry, Mimi." Gracey was bewildered. "What's wrong anyway? Tony asked a perfectly innocent question, and I answered him when we'd all agreed that we had nothing to do but sit around and wait. Why not use the time?" Abruptly, Tony made up his mind. It was up to him now. And to Anna. He got up and called her from the bedroom, led her outside, into the street in front of the house, where they were out of earshot of all the others. "Well?" She smiled up at him. "Will you stop feeling sorry for me and tell me what you're sorry about?" "In a minute. Anna, last night when we took the mask off Sunny -- when you fainted -- how did it feel?" "I told you." "Yes, you said it was very strong, stronger than you thought a baby could -- feel. But was it just stronger or was there something different?" "That's hard to say. I was -- well, I was all worn out and upset. It might have been different, but I don't know how. I'm not even sure it was." She looked up at him sharply. "Why?" "It checks," he said to himself. "Listen, Ansie, there's a job to be done. A tough job. A job nobody can do but you. It may -- hurt you. I don't know. I don't even know if it will work. It's a crazy theory I've got, so crazy I don't even want to explain it to you. But if I'm right, you're the only person who can do it." He stopped. "Anna, did you hear what Joan's last word really was? She said, 'Brownie.'" He looked down into frightened dark eyes. "Tony, there aren't any Brownies, are there?" "You mean do I believe there are? No, I don't. But I do think there's something." "You want me to go out there and listen?" "Yes. But that's only part of it. I wouldn't let you go alone; if you do go, I'll be with you -- if that helps any. But I want to go into the cave where they heard the baby and see what we can find." "No!" The cry was torn from her. "I didn't mean that," she caught herself. "It's just -- oh, Tony, I'm afraid." "We've got to find out. Ansie, we've got to find out." "The Bloodhound?" she asked desperately. "Can't you track them with the Bloodhound?" "Bell hasn't answered us. How long can we wait?" She stood silent for a moment, then turned her face up to his, serenely quiet now and trusting. "All right," she said at last. "All right, Tony, if you say it has to be done." "I'll be there with you," he promised. iii stand, and Tony didn't try to explain. He simply repeated that he had an "idea;" he wanted to go out, with Anna, to the cave where the baby's cry had been heard. He left careful instructions about the care of Graham if he should awake, and about Hank, Polly, and Jim, all three of whom were too upset to be left to themselves. A ten minute ride on the halftrack and they were within the shadow of the Rimrocks. The drifting stench of Pittco's refineries on the other side began to reach them; then the ground was too rocky to go on. Tony stopped the machine and they got out. Farther up the face of the nearest hill, they could make out the figures of the five who had remained on guard. One of them came running -- Flcxner, the chemist. "They said on the transceiver you were coming," he told Anna and Tony. "What's your idea? We're going nuts sitting around waiting. Ted thought he heard Sunny cry again but nobody else did." "I just wanted to see if I could turn up anything," Tony told him "We're going into the cave." the sunlight into the seven foot opening in the hard rock. One of the guards would have preceded them, but Anna firmly refused. A chalk mark along the wall, drawn by the others when they left the cave, was guide enough. They followed the white line in and down some fifty meters, then fifty more along a narrowing lefthand branch, and then a hundred meters, left again and narrowing, to another fork. Both the branches were too small for an adult to squeeze through. The chalk line pointed into the right-hand cranny. That was as far as they could go. They stood at the narrow opening, listening. There was nothing to hear, no sound at all in the rock-walled stillness except their own breathing and the tiny rustling of their hands along rough alien stone. They waited, Tony's eyes fixed on Anna's face. He tried to silence his thoughts as he could his voice, but doubts tore at him. He turned, finally, to the one certainty he knew, and concentrated on Anna and her alone: on his love for her, her love for him. "I hear something," she whispered at last. "Fear -- mostly fear. but eagerness, too. They are not afraid of us. I think they like us. They're afraid of -- it's not clear -- of people?" She fell silent again, listening. "People." She nodded her head emphatically. "They want to talk to us, Tony, but -- I don't know." Her brow furrowed in concentration and she sat down suddenly on the hard rock floor, as though the physical exertion of standing were more than she could bear. "Tony, go and tell the guards to go away," she said at last. "No," he said firmly. "Go ahead. Please. Hurry. They are trying -- " Abruptly, she stopped concentrating on the distance. "You spoiled it," she said bitterly. "You frightened them." "How?" "You didn't trust them. You thought they'd hurt me." "Ansie, how can we trust them? How can I leave you here alone and send the guards away? Don't you see I can't take that risk?" "You made me come here," she said tiredly. "You said I was the one who could do the job. I'm trying to do it. Please go now and tell the guards to leave. Tell them to get out of range -- down at the bottom of the hill, maybe as far away as the half-track. Please, Tony, do as I say." "All right." But he was still hesitant. "Anna, who are they?" "I -- " The bitterness left her face. "Brownies," she said. "But that's not -- I'm sorry. I didn't mean to feel angry and frustrated. What does the word mean ?" "They're different." "Like Sunny?" "Not exactly." She made a small useless gesture with her hands. "More -- distinct. No, maybe you're right. I think they're like him, only older." "How many are there?" "Quite a few. Too many for me to count. One of them is doing all the -- talking." "Talking?" Yes, that was part of what had bothered him. "Ansic, how can you understand so clearly? You told me you can't do that. You didn't know what Graham was angry about. How do you know what they're afraid of?" "Tony, I don't know. I can understand, that's all, and I'm sure it's right, and I know they're not tricking us. Now please, please go and tell the guards." He went. Jl Graham screamed. Mimi raced through Tony's living room into the hospital half of the hut. It was Hank, standing rigidly still, glaring at the writer. "You don't understand about Mars," Hank was saying in a hard monotone. "You never saw the Rimrocks when there was just enpugh light to tell them from the sky, or walked a hundred miles in the desert watching the colors change every minute." "Mrs. Johnson, get him out of here. He's crazy." Mimi took Hank by the arm. "I'm not crazy," he said. "Those boomers at .Pittco, this writer here, Bell and his soldiers, Brenner and his factory, they're crazy. They're trying to cheapen Mars." Hysteria, thought Mimi. She'd coped with enough cases of it when she'd bossed girls at desks, as far as the eye could see, on the #th floor of the American Insurance Groups Building. "Radcliff!" she said. There was a savage whip-crack in her voice. He turned to her, startled. "I wasn't going to hurt him," he said confusedly. Get him to cry. Break him. Until then, there's no knowing what will happen. "Your poor wife's lying in there," she said with measured nastiness, "and you find time to brawl with a sick man." "I didn't mean anything like that," he protested. Still unbroken. "Get into the bedroom," she said. "Sit there. That's the least you can do." He walked heavily into the room where his wife's body lay and she heard him drop into a plastic chair. "Thanks, Mrs. Johnson," said Graham painfully. "He was spoiling for a fight." "Mrs. Jonathan," she corrected. 'And I don't want your thanks." She turned and rattled through drawers of medications, hoping she'd find something she could give Hank. She didn't know what to use or how much. She slapped the drawer shut and was angry with Tony and Anna for not being there when she needed them. She stalked into the bedroom and stared at Hank without showing any pity. He was looking dully at the wall, a spot over the bed on which Joan's broken body lay. No shakes' no tears, unbroken still. But she couldn't bring herself to lash him further and precipitate the dmotional crisis. She went back into Tony's living room and threw herself into a chair. She'd hear if anything happened. Mrs. J., the terror of auditing, Old Eagle-eye, and a few less complimentary things when the girls were talking between the booths in one of the #th-floor johns. Efficiency bonuses year after year, even bad years, and that meant you were an old witch. She must be out of practice, or getting soft, she decided harshly, if she couldn't handle an absurdly simple little thing like this. We ought to have Tony train somebody besides Anna, she thought. There's Harve, but he only knoivs radio-health. And then she remembered that it didn't matter; Sun Lake wouldn't last that long. S HE heard a plane coming in at the landing field and wondered whose. Hank stirred in the bedroom and she tensed, but then she heard the creak of his big body slumping back into the chair. He wouldn't break. He had too much of the old Marsman in him, the tough old breed, iln the old days, if she'd been assigning a pair of girls to an audit program, she wouldn't have made a match like Hank and Joan -- one starry-eyed and on fire for an ideal; 'the other solidly and physically in love with far places for their farness and mystery. But it had worked here and they'd had their measure of happiness before they had to taste their measure of hell. Hank should have come earlier. He should have been one of. the first, eating out of cans, mapping and mining, bearded to his waist, inarticulate, but sure about what lie wanted. Joan should have come later. She should have been an immigrant after the colony had licked Mars medicine, while there still was grinding work and sacrifice enough to please the most impassioned, but not so much that a frail body ould crumple under it. But there wasn't going to be any "later," of course. It was hard to get used to that realization. She got up and had a drink of water from the wall canteen, and then, defiantly, another, because it didn't matter now. She felt like taking on the world for Sun Lake. Joan must have felt like that. Their water supply was scanty, but it was water -- not the polluted fluid of Earth, chlorinated to the last potable degree. T HE intercom in the bedroom buzzed. She walked in and picked it up, glanced at Hank, still numbly staring. "Hello, Mimi." It was Harve. "Answer from Bell. Quote: 'RE What do you figure he'll do -- try and pin the Graham slugging on us too?" "I don't know," she said. "It doesn't matter. What plane was that ?" "Brenner's. Snooty bastard didn't even check in with us. Just sat right down on the held.' "He might as well. He'll own it soon enough." She heard Harve clear his throat embarrassedly. "Well, I guess that's all." "Goodby," she agreed, hanging up. She shouldn't have said that; she was supposed to pretend that while there was life there was hope. "Hank?" she asked gently and inquiringly. He looked up. Tm all right, thanks." He wasn't, but there was nothing she could do. She looked through the door to the hospital. Graham seemed to be dozing. She sat down in the living room again. Brenner came in without knocking. "They told me you were here, Mrs. Jonathan. I wonder if we could go to your office in the Lab. I want to talk business." "I'm staying here," she said shortly. "If you want to talk here, I'll listen." Brenner shrugged and sat down. "Do we have privacy?" "There's a boy in the next room going crazy with grief over his dead wife -- and over the prospect of leaving Mars. And there's a badly beaten man sleeping in the hospital quarters." The drug manufacturer lowered his voice. "Relative privacy," he said. "Mrs. Jonathan, you have the only business head in the Colony." He opened his briefcase on the tabic and edged the corner of a sheaf of bills from one of' its pockets. The top one was a thousand dollars. He didn't look at it, but riffled the sheaf with his thumb, slowly, like a gambler manipulating a deck of cards. They were all thousands, and there were over one hundred of them. "It's going to be very hard on some of the colonists. I'm afraid," he said conversationally. "You have no idea." "It needn't be that hard on all of them." His .thumb flipped the big bills. "Your colony is facing an impossible situation, Mrs. Jonathan. Let's not mince words; it's a matter of bankruptcy and forced sale. I'm in a position to offer you a chance to retreat in good order, with some money in your pockets.' "That's very kind of you, Mr. Brenner. I'm not sure I understand." "Please," he smiled, "let's not be coy. I'm being perfectly candid with you. If it comes to a forced sale, I intend to bid as high as necessary; I need this property. But I'm not a man who believes in leaving things to chance. Why shouldn't you sell out to me now? Jt would save yourselves the humiliation of bankruptcy, and I believe everyone concerned would benefit financially." "You realize I'm not in a position to close any deals, Mr. Brenner?" she asked. "Yes, of course. You have a council in charge here, don't you? And you're a member. You could plead my case with them." "I suppose I could." "All right." He smiled again, and his thumb continued to riffle the pile of bills. "Then I have to plead it first with you. Why should you stay on Mars? In the hope that 'something' will turn up? Believe me. It will not. Your commercial standing will be gone. Nobody would dream of extending credit to the people who were six months behind on their deliveries. Nothing ivill turn up, Mrs. Jonathan." "What if the stolen marcaiiie turns up?" "Then, of course -- " He smiled and shrugged. in his face. For the first time since the crisis she entertained the thought that it was not a framcup. She pressed harder. "What if we're just waiting to hand Bell the hundred kilos and the thief?" Brenner turned inscrutable again. "Then something else will happen. And if the Colony survives that, something else again." He quickly denied the implication of sabotage by adding: "You have a fundamentally untenable financial situation here. Insufficient reserves, foggy motives -- what businessman can trust you when he knows that your Lab production workers might walk out one fine day and stay out ? They aren't bound by salaries but by idealism." "It's kept us going." "Until now. Come, Mrs. Jonathan, I said I wanted an advocate in the Council." He thumbed out the deck of bills all the way from the pocket in the opened briefcase. "You have a business head. You know that if you do produce my marcaine and the thief, Mr. Graham's little story -- which I read with great interest -- will be another bad hump to get over. There will be more." He meant two things: more humps, and more sheafs of thousand dollar bills for her if she took the bribe. Mimi smiled without moving a muscle of her face. It had been a long time since she had talked this kind of talk, but she still knew how. The smile stayed inside her head; her face displayed only the most casual interest. "Are you offering to buy the Colony, Mr. Brenner? Would you care to name a price?' "What are you asking?" he countered. Oh, no, she thought, you've not getting away with that. "All right, we'll play it your way," she said. "Name tivo prices. You want to buy my services, too, don't you?" "Whatever gives you that notion? I'm not trying to bribe you, Mrs. Jonathan." He picked up the sheaf of bills and placed them in front of her. "There's a hundred thousand here. I can bring another -- say another four hundred thousand -- for a down payment, whenever you say. My price for the Colonly," he added distinctly, "is ex"Plus your down payment?" she asked, amused. "That's right." "That would just about pay all our fares back to Earth. We'll smash the Lab to bits before we let you get it for any such price." "You'll rot in prison if you do," Brenner said easily. "There is an injunction on file at Marsport signed by Commissioner Bell restraining you from any such foolishness. An act of contempt would mean imprisonment for all of you. I mean all." "No such paper has been served on us." "The Commissioner assured me it had been served. I don't doubt his word. Not many people, including appeals judges, would doubt his word either." display of force. She set her teeth and thought about five million -- and five hundred thousand. Passage home, the respectability of having sold instead of going bankrupt, maybe the chance of another charter and another try -- "It'll have to be put into form by the Council and voted on by the entire Colony," she said painfully. "You wanted an advance. Take your money back; I'm not for sale. But I will plead your case if knows, it's a bargain. There's absolutely no depreciation on the Lab to be figured. It's better now than it ever was. Maintenance has always been top-level. Better than anything you'll ever be able to find in industry." thousand was my offer. I'm not the Croesus uninformed people takrme for. I have my expenses on the marcaine distribution end, you know." ii NY sweated out the time. Eight minutes creeping along the chalk line in the dark -- he'd left the light with Anna. Five minutes scrabbling over the boulders at the cave opening on the face of the Hill. Twelve long minutes talking the guards into leaving, and a painful tortured eternity -- maybe another twelve minutes reentering the cave and tracing the chalk line by the dim light borrowed from Ted. Tony was sweating ice by the time the radiance from Anna's light came in view. He rounded the last curve in the winding passage, and something jumped up from the floor, straightened and stood, tense and watchful as the doctor. Anna, seated on the cold floor, laughed softly, melodiously. She was all right. Tony relaxed a little and instantly felt -- something, a gentle stroking, a tentative touch, not on his head but in it. No menace, no danger. Friendship. The doctor stared across the cavern: leathery brown skin, barrel chest, big ears, skinny arms and legs; the height of a small man or a large boy; and -- a telepath. The friendly touch on his mind persisted through his quick distaste, his exultation, his eagerness. "Anna," very softly, "'is it all right to talk?" "Not too loud. His ears are sensitive." "Who is he? Are there more? Does he have Sunny? Ask him that, Anna -- ask him!" "A Brownie," she laughed again, joyously. "You told me that. There are four more down there, inside, with Sunny." "Is he all right?" "Yes. They took him to help him, not to do any harm. He needed something, but I can't find out what." The Brownie squatted again on the floor beside Anna. Tony approached slowly and sat down next to them. He felt goose-flesh and memories of old nursery book horrors, but nothing happened. He forced himself to ask Anna: "What kind of thing?" "Something to eat, I think. Something like the first sip of water when you're thirsty, and as necessary as salt, and -- good. Maybe like a vitamin, but it tastes wonderful." Tony ran through a mental cata. logue of biochemicals. But that was foolish; how could you tell what would taste good to anything as alien as a Brownie? "Have you tried sign language?" he asked Anna. "Where do you start?" she shrugged. "You'd have to build up a whole set of symbols before you could get anything across... Tony, I'm sure we can get the baby back if we just understand what it is he needs." T HE doctor reached over, hesitated, and forced himself to tap the Brownie lightly on the shoulder. When he had the creature's attention, he whispered to Anna: "Tell him we're trying to find out what it is." He pointed to his own eyes. "Show us," he said to the creature, and tried to project the thought, the image of seeing, as hard as he could. They kept repeating it with every possible combination of thought and act. Then, suddenly, the Brownie jumped and dashed off, down the tunnel. "Did he get the idea?" demanded Tony. "Is he coming back?" "It's all right," smiled Anna. "He understood." Silence in the eerie place was almost unbearable. "Don't worry so, Tony," Anna said. "If you want to know, he almost scared the wits out of me, too. I was; sitting, trying to look down the little opening, and still -- talking -- to the ones down there, and he came up behind me. I was concentrating on them so I didn't hear him, either way." Tony sat back thoughtfully. It was all true then; his crazy theory was right -- there were actually Brownies on Mars, a form of life so highly developed that it was telepathic, and with no lower lifeforms to have evolved from. He wondered if he had hit the right explanation, too, but there was no other explanation. The brownie was back, carrying something, a box. Large letters in black on the side read: Do Not Open Without Authorization Brenner Pharmaceutical Co. from the half-track, with her valuable burden in her arms. She jounced Sunny happily, and cooed down at the pink face. The doctor didn't jounce his own burden; he lifted it down even more carefully than he had helped Anna. The marcaine box was tightly wrapped in his shirt and hers. They were counting on the several layers of cloth to trap escaping dust and protect them from marcaine jags, but the doctor still wasn't taking any chances on stirring up the contents of the half-full box. They cut across the bare land in back of the row of houses, heading toward the curved street near the Kandros'. "Tony," Anna asked anxiously again, "how are we possibly going to explain it?" "I told you I don't know." He was only a little irritable. They had the baby; they had the marcaine. "We'll have to talk to Mimi and Joe and Nick, and probably the others too. We'll see how it goes... "No, I don't mean that," she stopped him. "I mean to Polly. And Jim. Jim isn't going to like it unless he hears the whole story, and I don't know if we ought to... "Like it or not," Tony said briskly, "Kandro'Il do what T tell him to. We'll have to tell them it's marcaine; I don't dare risk mislabeling the stuff. You'll have to blow some ampoules for it, I guess, and I'll figure out some way of wetting it down and getting it into them. But you're right," he added, "if you mean we shouldn't say any more than we have to just now." They stepped onto the packed dirt of the street and cut across to the Kandros'. Joe Gracey was sitting alone in the living room. "Praise God," he said quietly, and called: "Polly! Jim!" The couple appeared, red-eyed, at the nursery door, saw their baby, and flew to him. "You gave him to us again. Doc!" said Jim. "Thanks." Polly was more practical: "Has he eaten? Is he well? He looks all right, but -- " "You can feed him in a minute. Now listen carefully. This young man of yours, you know, is special in some ways. He can take the Mars air and like it. It turns out that there's something else he needs -- something that's good for him and bad for other people, just like the Mars air. It's marcaine." Polly's face went white. Jim began a guffaw of unbelief that turned into a frown. He asked carefully: "How can that be, Doc? What is this all about? And who took him? We have a right to know." Anna came to Tony's rescue. '"You're not going to know right now," she said tartly. "If you think that's hard on you, it's just too bad. You've got your baby back; now leave the doctor alone until he's ready to tell you more." Jim opened his mouth and shut it again. Polly asked only: "Doctor, are you sure?" "I'm sure. And it won't have anything like the effect on Sunny that it had on you. But it's real marcaine, all right, and he's got to have it or die." "Like OxEn?" asked Kandro. "It's only fair in a way..." you're going to have to wean the baby after all, Polly," he said. "You can't keep taking marcaine for Sunny's sake. But for now, I guess you might as well nurse him. Your milk still has marcaine in it." Kandro was still adjusting himself to the idea. "Sunny doesn't need OxEn, so he's got to take something else?" "Yes," Tony said, "like OxEn..." He broke off, and Anna spun toward him, her eyes wide. The doctor forced his face into calm lines. "I want to have a talk with Joe now. And Nick Cantrella, Anna, will you see if you can get Nick on the intercom? Ask him to come over here right away. I've got an idea." In the living room, he told Gracey: "You won't have to keep an eye on them any more, Joe. But watch me -- I feci like Alexander, Napoleon, Eisenhower, end the Great Cham all rolled into one." "You're certainly grinning like a lunatic," the agronomist agreed critically. "What's on your mind?" "Wait a minute... did you get him?" Tony asked as Anna came in to the room. "He's coming," she nodded. "Tony, what is it?" "I'll tell you both, soon," he promised. "Let's wait for Nick, so I won't have to re'peat it." He paced restlessly around the room, thinking it through again. It ought to work; it ought to! turned on the two men. "Listen, both of you!" He tried not to sound too eager. "If I handed you a piece of living tissue with a percentage of oxygen enzyme -- and I don't mean traces, I mean a percentage -- where would we stand in respect to..." He halted up the cautious complicated phraseology. "Hell, what I mean is, could w'e manufacture OxEn?" "The living virus?" Gracey asked. "Not crystalized OxEn processed for absorption?" "The living virus." "We'd be a damn sight better than half-way along the processing that the Kelsey people do in Louisville. They grow the Erst culture from the Rosen batch, then they cull out all the competing enzymes, then they grow what's left and cull, for hundreds of stages, to get a percentage of the living virus to grow a pure culture they can crop and start crystalizing." "How' about it, Nick?" Tony demanded. "Could the Lab swing a job of crystalizing a crop from that and processing it for absorption?" "Sure," said Nick. "That's the easy part. I've been reading up on it since we talked about it before." "Look here," Graccy exploded, "where do you think you're going to get your living virus from? You have to keep getting it, you know. It always mutates under normal radiation sooner or later, and you have to start over again." "That's my end of the deal. I have a hunch I can get it. Thanks, both of yoCt." He went into the nursery and told Polly calmly: "I'm taking your youngster away again -- just for a few minutes, though. I want to check his lungs in the hospital. Anna?" She was already taking the baby from Polly's arms. Tony picked up the wrapped marcaine-box and started out. "Hey, Doc, what goes on?" Gracey demanded. He 'brushed past Nick and the puzzled agronomist. "Tell you later," he called back. On the street, Anna turned a worried face up to his. "Tony, what arc you doing? You can't operate on a five-day-old baby... can you?" she finished, less certainly. "You seem so -- so happy and sure of yourself." "I am," he said shortly, and then relented enough to add: "The 'operation,' if you want to call it that, won't hurt him." But he wouldn't say any more. Tony's living room. The woman said hopelessly: "Hello, Tony. Mr. Brenner's made an offer -- Oh! It's Sunny!" "Hello, Mimi," said Tony. "The youngster, eh?" Brenner said genially. "I've heard about him." With a brusque "Excuse me" to the drug manufacturer, Tony said to Anna in an undertone: "Rig the op table, sterilites on. Get out the portable biopsy constant-temperature bath and set the thermostat to Sunny's blood temperature. And call me." She nodded and went into the hospital with the baby. Tony dropped his bundle into his trunk and began to scrub up. "What's been going on, Mimi?" he asked. "Mr. Brenner's offered five million, five hundred thousand dollars for Sun Lake's assets. I said the Council would put it in formal shape and call a vote." The descent from his peak of inspiration was sickening. Nothing had changed, then, Tony thought. "Ready," Anna said at his side. He followed her silently into the hospital, slipped into his gloves and said: "Sterilize the Byers curette, third extension, and lubricate. Sterilize a small oral speculum." He spoke quietly. Graham was asleep in the bed across the room. Anna didn't move. "Anesthesia?" she asked. "None. We don't know their body-chemistry well enough." "No, Tony. Please, no!" He felt only a chill determination that he was going to salvage some of the wreckage' of Sun Lake, determination and more confidence than he knew he should feel. Anna turned, selected the instruments and slipped them into the sterilizer. The doctor stepped on the pedal that turned on the op lights. Anna put the speculum into his hand and he clamped open Sunny's mouth. The prompt wail of protest turned to a strangled cry as the sinuous shaft of the Byers curette slid down the trachea into the left bronchus. One steady hand guided the instrument, while the other manipulated the controls from a bulb at its base. "Hold him," Tony growled as Anna's hands weakened and the woman swayed. Bronchus, bronchia, bronchi le, probing and withdrawing at resistances -- and there it was. A pressure on the central control that uncovered the razor-sharp little spoon at the tip of the flexible shaft and covered it again, and then all flexure controls off and out. It had taken less than five seconds, and one more to deposit the shred of lung tissue in the biopsy constant-temperature nutrient bath. Hank was at the door. Anna, leaning feebly against the tabic, straightened to tell him: "Go and lie down, Hank. It's all right." "Keep him away from me," warned Graham from the bed. "He was going to jump me before." "I just wanted to see the baby," Hank said apologetically. Tony turned to the intercom, buzzing the Kandros'. "Come on over," he told them. "You can have your baby back for keeps now. Is Gracey still there? Joe? I think I've got that tissue specimen for you. How fast can you get a test?" "For God's sake, Tony, where did you get it?" Gracey was demanding on the other end. "From a Brownie." He couldn't resist it. "That's what I said. Lung tissue of a Brownie." He hung up. "A Brownie? It is true! There are Brownies, aren't there?" Tony turned to find the Kandros standing by the examination table. Polly already had her baby in her arms. Jim patted her shoulder. "He doesn't really mean it, Polly. Do you, Doc?" Graham was grinning openly. Tony turned from one to the other, not answering. There was a commotion in the living room and Brenner burst in, carrying a familiar box. "He just dived for it, Tony," Mimi said. "He said it was..." "Careful!" said the doctor. "You'll spray marcaine all over the place. Put it down, man!" it with practiced precision. "My stuff. Doctor," he said. "Think I don't know my own crates? Mrs. Jonathan, my price for your assets has just dropped to two now in a position to prosecute. I hope none of you will make difficulties. " Jim Kandro said, "I don't know what this is all about, but we need that stuff for Sunny." "You don't believe that, do you?" the drug maker asked scornfully. "I don't know what to believe," said Kandro. "But he's -- different. And it makes sense. He doesn't have to tke OxEn, so he has to take something else. You better leave it for us, Mr. Brenner." The drug maker looked at Jim wisely. "It's okay, Mac," he decided. "If you've got the habit and you can't kick it, why don't you come to work for me? I can use you. And you don't have to take so much. The micron dust in the air takes your edge off -- " "That's not it," said Kandro. "Why don't you listen, to me? We need that stuff f or Sunny. The doctor says so and he ought to know. It's medicine, like vitamins. You wouldn't keep vitamins from a little baby, would you?" Graham snickered. angrily: "You stay out of this. There hasn't been anything but trouble since you got here. Now you could at least keep from braying while a man's trying to reason with somebody. You may be smart and a big writer, but you don't have any manners at all if you can't keep quiet at a time like this." He turned to Brenner. "You know we don't have any money here, or I'd offer you what we had. I guess the box is yours, and nobody has a claim to it except you. But Polly and me can get permission from the Council to go and' work out whatever the box would cost. Couldn't we, Tony? Mimi? The rest would let us, wouldn't they?" "I'm sorry, Mac," the drug maker said. "I wish I could make you understand, but if I can't, that doesn't matter. This box is going with me. It's evidence in a crime." "Mr. Brenner," Jim Kandro said thickly, "I can't let you out of here with that box. We need it for Sunny. I told you and told you. Now give it here." He put out one huge hand. "How about it, Mrs. Jonathan?" Brenner seemed to be, ignoring the big man's menacing advance. "Two reasonable price, all things considered. Your new father here would be glad to take it." "I'll take it, all right," growled Jim. "Hand it over. Right now." He was a scant four feet from the drug maker; Brenner's eyes were still fixed mockingly on Mimi Jonathan. Kandro took one more step forward and Anna cried faintly: "No!" Brenner stepped back and there was a large pistol in his hand. "This," he told them, "is jully automatic. It keeps firing as long as I hold the trigger down. Now for the last time listen, all of you. I'm going, and I'm taking my box with me. If you try to stop me, I have a perfect right to use this gun. You know better than I do what fingerprints the authorities will find on the box. You're caught red-handed and I won't have any trouble proving it to my man Bell. If you people decide to be reasonable instead, you better let me know -- soon." Mimi Jonathan said clearly: "So you're going to throw us off Mars, Mr. Brenner?" "If necessary," he said, not following. "You mean you're going to kick us out and we'll never see Mars again? And all the sacrifices we've made here will be a joke?" He didn't get what she was driving at. "Yes," he said irritably. "You're quite right -- " He was cut off by Hank, broken at last under the goading. The youngster sprang, raving, at Brenner, bowling him over as the pistol roared in a gush of bullets that ripped Hank's body. And then there was a silence into which Sunny Kandro shrieked his fear and dismay. Mimi leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. She wanted to vomit. She heard Tony's awed whisper:... smashed his trachea... broke his neck... belly shot clean out... She shuddered, and hoped and feared that she'd carry this guilt alone to the grave. on, Polly. You come out here." Kandro led his wife, still carrying Sunny, out to the living room. Faces were peering through the hospital window and they heard Nick Cantrella shouting: "Let me through, darnnit! Clear away from that door!" And he was in, latching the door from the street. He snapped the curtains shut with an angry yank. "What in God's name happened? I was coming for that tissue culture and now this -- " "Don't worry about it," said Graham drily and with effort from the bed. "Just a little useful murder. Hank Radcliff, hero of the Colony, gives his life to save the world from Big Bad Brenner -- sweet Jesus!" he swore in awed delight. "What a story! 'The Killing of Hugo Brenner' -- an eye-witness account by Douglas Graham! Swee-eet Jesus! Didn't Brenner know who I was?" Mimi started. "I guess not," she realized. "I never told him." "You're plenty beat up," Tony pointed out. "He wouldn't have recognized you. Hey,' Nick, let's get those bodies out of here." "Beat up is right," Graham chortled, "and it Was worth it! Thank you, my friends, whichever one of you -- or how many was it? -- didthat job on me. I thank you from the bottom of my poor old gunther's heart. Just to be able to lie here and listen to all that !" 'T don't know who did it last time." Nick took one menacing step toward the bed. "But, by God, if you're starting on another of your yarns, I know who's going to..." "Nick, wait a minute. You don't know what he heard." "Hey, Cantrella, I need a hand here." "I knoiv who did it." Anna had to shout to make herself heard above Mimi and Tony, both talking at once. In the sudden silence, she said: "Didn't I tell you, Tony? I guess it was while you were away that I found out. They did it. I think he was planning to hurt the baby. Or they thought he was." " They ?" the writer asked contemptuously. "Brownies again? You're a good second-gucsser, Miss Willendorf, but you missed out this time. The only designs I ever had on die Kandro kid were to get him back to Earth where he could be properly cared for -- instead of getting marcaine dosed out to him to cover up for Mama."# -- J Nick continued his arrested advance on Graham. "If you think you're safe to turn out more of that kind of stuff just because you're laid up in bed, you better start thinking all over again. I've got no compunctions about kicking a rat when he's down." "Nick! Stop it!" Swift and sure and deadly sharp, Miriii's voice came across the room like a harpoon. "Give him a chance! You didn't hear what be heard -- what Brenner said. I don't see how anybody could get a story' against Sun Lake out of it." "Thank you kindly', ma'm." Graham grinned painfully. "Good to know somebody around here is still sane. Don't tell me you go for this Brownie nonsense too!" "I -- don't know," she said. "If I'd heard it from anybody but Tony and Anna, I wouldn't believe a word of it. But they did get the baby back." "Back from where?" Tony realized for the first time that Graham didn't even know about Sunny's kidnaping. And the others, for that matter, still didn't know what had happened in the cave. "Listen," he said. "If you'll all take it easy for a few minutes, Anna and I have a lot to tell you. But first... Nick, help me move them to the living room floor. Anna, get blankets to cover them." "Wait a minute." She went into the living room. "All right," she called 'back a moment later, and Tony and Nick together carried what was left of Hank through the door. "I wanted to get the Kandros out first," Anna explained, locking the front door again. They laid out Brenner's body next to Hank's, and covered them both with blankets. The two men started back to the hospital, but Anna laid her hand on Tony's arm to stop him. "Could I see you a minute?" "Of course." He let Nick go ahead, then asked, worried, "Ansie, darling, what's the matter?" She closed the door firmly between them and the others in the hospital. "Tony, we can't tell them," she said. "Not now." "Why not? They r 've got to know." "Don't you see? We shouldn't have talked as much as we did. We shouldn't have said or done anything in front of Graham, but he doesn't believe it yet. If we convince him -- Tony, the Brownies are terrified of people. They've kept awVy from people all along. For a reason. Don't you see?" she asked urgently. "Think what would happen to them Think! I got just a flash from Graham's mind when I said they did it, before he decided to be skeptical. It was brutal. They'd be exterminated... He did see it. She was right. He thought of Hackenburg over at Pittco, and Brownies being worked in the mines -- "native labor." He thought of what an Earth power would give to have telepaths in its military intelligence. He thought of the horror and hatred people would feel for the "mind-reading monsters." He thought of Brownies in zoos, on dissecting tables... H E thought of Sun Lake, still facing a charge of theft; of the difference it would make in Graham's story if he knew it wasn't Sun Lakers who attacked him. He thought of what the existence of the Brownies would mean to medical and biochemical research. And he made up his mind. Anna looked away with' anger in her eyes, hopelessness in the setof her shoulders. "Why?" she begged. "They're -- oh, Tony, they're decent! Not like most people." "Because we know about them, that's why. Because you can't -- you just can't keep a secret like that. Because it means too much to men, to all men, to mankind, or whatever part of it survives the end of Earth. Afina, Sun Lake may not be the answer to our future -- the Brownies may be. Have you thought of that? They need us, they need to learn some of the things our civilization has to offer -- and we need them. That piece of tissue I took from Sunny's lungs may mean the end of dependence on Earth for OxEn, and that's just one first thing. There's no knowing how much we can learn, how they can help us to adapt, what new knowledge will come out of the contact. We can't keep it to ourselves. That's all there is to it." "There's no use arguing, is there?" "'I'm afraid not," he said as gently as he could. He opened the door. "Are you coming back?" She hesitated, then followed. ii X the narrative of their visit to the cave, and then repeated, this time to Graham: "That's it. But I think you ought to know that Anna was trying to persuade me not to tell this story in front of you, to let you go on not believing in Brownies. She was afraid of what people would do to them once it became known. I'm afraid too. What you write will have a lot to do with it." He paused. "What are you going to write?" "I'm damned if I know!" Graham tried to lift his head, and decided against it. "It's either the most ingenious yarn I've ever heard -- it covers every single accusation against you people, from marcaine theft to mayhem on my person -- or it's the biggest story in the world. And I'm damned if I know which!" He relapsed into a thoughtful silence, broken suddenly by the roar of a large plane. An instant later there was the noise of a second, and then a third. One at a time they came closer, and died out. "That would be Bell." Mimi stood up wearily."I don't mind saying I'm confused. What do we do now?" "He's coming," Tony reminded her, "to help Mr. Graham. Perhaps we should leave it up to our guest to tell the Commissioner whatever he sees fit." The writer was silent, stonyfaccd. "There's a slight matter of a couple of stiffs in the living room," Nick reminded them. "Tine Commish might want to know about them. Strictly inter-colony stuff." "You know," Graham broke in suddenly, "if I was dumb enough to believe your story about Brownies -- and if your little experiment with the kid's lungs works -- Sun Lake could get to be quite a place." "How do you mean?" Gracey asked. "The way Mr. Brenner had it figured, your Lab is practically made to order for marcaine manufacture. And I gather you think you can turn out OxEn too, if that lung tissue is good. If there's anything behind all this Brownie talk -- well, you've got a deal that looks OxEn to all of Mars at what price? It wouldn't cost you anything compared to Earth-import..." He looked around the circle of astonished faces. "Don't tell me none of you even thought of that? Not even yon?" he appealed to Mimi. She shook her head. "That's not the Sun Lake idea," she said stiffly. "We wouldn't be interested." Anna smiled, very slightly, and there was a violent banging at the front door. ill living room. The door was beginning to shake under the blows. "Cut that out and I'll open it!" he yelled. There was silence as he swung the door open. A sergeant of the guards; three others, and Bell, who was well in the rear. He must have known there'd been shooting. "What's been going on?" the Commissioner began. He sniffed the air and his eyes traveled to the covered bodies. "Graham? If it is, we might have a murder arrest. His dispatch gave you people plenty of motive' "No. Brenner' Tony said shortly. "And a young man named Hank Radcliff." Bell, starting for the figures, recoiled. "Sergeant," he said, and gestured. The non-com gingerly drew back the blankets, exposing the drug maker's face. The Commissioner stared for a long moment and said hoarsely: "Cover it, Sergeant." He turned to Tony. "What happened ?" "We have a disinterested witness," said the doctor. "Douglas Garham. He saw the whole thing." VL pital. The sergeant followed, then the Commissioner. Graham said from his bed: "Visiting a dead friend?" Bell snapped: "It's an inter-colony crime. Murder. Obviously I can't take the word of anybody who's a member of this community. "I was a witness, all right," said Graham. "Best damn witness you on my every word." He made an effort and raised himself on one elbow. "Remember the chummy sessions we used to have in Washington, Bell?" On the Commissioner's forehead, sweat formed. said Graham. "Brenner pulled his gun on a man named Kandro during a little dispute. He threatened to kill Kandro, went into some detail about how fully automatic that gun was and -- let me think -- his exact words were 'spray the room.' With a babe in arms present. Think of it, Bell! Not even you would have done a thing like that; not even in the old days. The Radcliff kid jumped Brenner and took all the slugs in his belly. I guess they were dumdums, because the gun looked to me like a .# and none of them went through. Only the Radcliff boy squashed Brenner's neck before he knew he was dead. Reminded me of a time once in Asia -- " Bell cut him off. "Did Brenner die right away? Did he -- say anything before he died?" "Deathbed confession? Delirious rambling? No." The Commissioner relaxed perceptibly. "But," said the newsman, "He talked quite a bit before he pulled the gun. He didn't recognize me with my battered face and I didn't introduce myself. He thought it was just a bunch of Sun Lakers in here and that nobody would believe a word they said about him. Brenner talked quite a bit." "Sergeant!" Bell broke in. "I won't be needing you for a while. Wait for me in the other room. And see to it nobody touches those bodies !" T HE door closed behind the non-com, and Graham laughed. "Maybe you do know', eh, Commish? Maybe you know Brenner liked to refer to you as 'my man Bell'?" The Commissioner's eyes ran unhappily around the room. "You people," he said. "Get out. All of you. Leave us alone -- so I can take a statement." "No," said Graham, "they stay here. I'm not a strong man these days, but Brenner talked quite a bit. I wouldn't want anything to stop me from getting the story to an eagerly waiting world." Bell looked around hopelessly. Tony saw Nick's face twist into a knowing, malevolent grin; like the others, he made an effort to imitate it. "What do you want, Graham?" asked the Commissioner. "What are you trying to get at?" "Not a thing," the writer said blandly. "By the way, in my stateclude what Brenner had to say about you? He mentioned some financial matters, too. Would they be relevant?" Tony tried to remember what financial matters Brenner had discussed, aside from the price he offered for the Colony. None -- but Graham was a shrewd bluffer. The Commissioner made a last effort to pull himself together. "You can't intimidate me, Graham," he rasped. "And don't think I can't be tough if you force my hand. I'm in the clear. I don't care what Brenner said; I haven't done a thing." "Yet," said the writer succinctly. "Your part was to come later, wasn't it?" Bell's face seemed to collapse. "Still think you can get tough?" Graham jeered. "Try it, and I guarantee that you'll be hauled back to Earth on the next rocket, to be tried for malfeasance, exceeding your authority, accepting bribes and violating the narcotics code. I can also guarantee that you will be convicted and imprisoned for the rest of your life. Don't try to bluff me, you tin-horn sport. I've been bluffed by experts." T HE Commissioner began shrilly, "I won't stand for -- " and cracked. "For God's sake, Graham, be reasonable! What have I ever done to you ? What do you want ? Tell me what you want!" Tine writer fell back on the bed. "Nothing right now, thanks. If I think of anything. I'll let you know." The Commissioner started to speak, and couldn't. Tony saw the veins of tension stand out. He saw, too, how Anna's lip was curling in disgust. Graham seemed amused. "There is one thing, Commish. An intercolony matter under your jurisdiction, I believe. Will you remove those carcasses on your way out? You'd be surprised how sensitive I am about such things." He closed his eyes and waited till the door was shut behind the departing guest. When he opened them again, all the self-assurance was gone out of them. "Doc," he moaned, "give me a shot. When I got up on my elbow something tore. God, it hurts!" While Tony took care of him, Joe Gracey said: "It was a grand performance, Mr. Graham. Thank you for what you did." "I can undo it," the reporter said flatly, "or I can use it any way I want to. If you people have been lying to me..." He sighed with relief. "Thanks, Doc. That's a help. Now if you want anything out of my man Bell -- show me one of your Brownies!" a silent room. Everyone waited for Tony to speak; Tony waited for Anna. "I don't, see why not," she said at last. "I guess they'd do it." She looked despairingly at Tony. "Is this the only way?" she pleaded. "It's the only way you're going to beat that marcaine-theft rap," Graham answered for him. "All right. I'll go out there in the morning. I think I can talk them into It." "If you don't mind, Miss Willendorf, I'd rather it was right now. In twelve hours, your hot-shot engineer here could probably build a Brownie." "I can try," she said. "But I can't promise. Not even for tomorrow. I only think I can talk one of them into coming here... I don't know how they'll feel about it." Graham grinned. "That's about how I figured it," he said. "Thanks, folks. It was a good show while it lasted." "We're going," Tony said grimly. "And we'll bring you back a Brownie." "Still not good enough," the writer said. "If you go, I go with you. You mind if I'm just a little suspicious ?" "It's ten kilometers to the Rimrocks," Tony told him. "Most of it by half track, the rest by stretcher for you." "The hell with your humanitarian sentiments! It's your medical opinion, if any, that I want!" "You'll live. No danger of that." "AH right," the writer said. "When do we start?" Tony looked questioningly at Anna, who nodded. "Right now," the doctor said, "or any time you're ready." He opened a cabinet and fished out a patent-syringe ampoule. "This should make it easier." He started to open the package'. "No, thanks," Graham said. "I want to see what  sec -- if anything." His eyes went swiftly from one face to another, studying them for reactions. "If you can take it, I can," the doctor told him. But he dropped the package in his pocket before they left. Anna driving and Tony in the truck body beside Graham, the writer said through clenched teeth: "God help you if you tell me the Brownies aren't biting tonight. It's a damn-fool notion anyway. You've been telling me Brownies are born of Earth people. Why aren't there any born on Earth?" "It's because of what the geneticists call a lethal gene. Polly and Jim, for instance. Each one of them had a certain lethal gene in their heredity. Either of them could have married somebody without the lethal gene and had ordinary babies, on Earth or on Mars, because the gene is a recessive. On Earth, when Polly's lethal gene and Jim's lethal gene matched, it was fatal to their offspring. They never came to term; the gene produced a foetus which couldn't survive the womb on Earth. I don't know what factors are involved in that failure -- cosmic rays, the gravity or what. But on Mars the foetus comes to term and is -- a Brownie. "A Brownie is a Martian. They don't just accept Mars air like an Earthman with Mars worthy lungs. They can't stand Earth air. And they need a dailyration of marcaine to grow and live. That's who stole Brenner's marcaine. That's why they slipped marcaine into Poll Kandro's food. They wanted her to pass it to Sunny in her milk. When we put Sunny on the bottle, they stole him so they could give him marcaine. They surrendered him on our promise to see that he got it." "And that's a perfect cover-story for a dope-addict mama," scoffed the writer. "How many Brownies are there supposed to be?" "A couple of hundred. I suppose about half of them are firstgeneration. There must have been a very few in the beginning, children of homesteaders abandoned on a desert ranch when their parents died, who crawled out and lived off the country, chewing marcaine out of the weed. And they must have 'stolen' other Brownie babies from other homesteaders when they grew." Graham swore against the pain. "'The Kandro kid looks as normal as any other baby. How are the Brownies supposed to know he isn't? Does he give them a password ?" Tony explained wearily: "They are telepathic. It explains a lot of things -- why they're only seen by people they want to see them, why they could steal Brenner's marcaine and not get caught. They can hear people coming -- their thoughts, that is. That's why they beat up Big Ginny; she was aborting a Brownie baby. Why they beat the hell out of you. Why they sensibly T# keep away from most Earth people." "Except Red Sand Jim Granata, eh ?" "Granata was a liar. He probably never saw a Brownie in his life. He heard all the Brownieyarns and used them to put on good commercial shows." Anna maneuvered the half track around a spur of rock picked out by the headlights and ground the vehicle to a stop. "It's too rugged from here on," she said. "We'll have to carry him the rest of the way." "You warm enough? Another blanket?" asked Tony. "You're really going through with this, aren't you?" said the writer. "I'm crazy to play along, but if -- if this is a story and I get beaten on it -- Oh, hell, yes, I'm warm enough. Stretcher ought to be easier going than this tin can." ing between them on a shoulder-suspended litter that left the bearers' hands free. The writer's weight was not much of a burden in this gravity. Both she and Tony used torches to pick their way among the scree that had dribbled for millenia, one stone at a time, down the weathering Rimrocks. They smelled the acrid fumes of Pittco across' the hills, fouling the night air, and Graham began to cough. "Anna?" asked the doctor. She knew what he meant, and said shortly: "Not yet." Another hundred meters, and Tony felt her begin to pull off to the right. Her "homing" led them to the foot of the mesalike hills a few meters from a cave mouth. They headed in. "Quite soon," said Anna, and then: "We can put him down." "Be very quiet," Tony told the writer. He himself felt the faint, eerie "touch" of a Brownie in his mind. "They're very sensitive to..." ,f Gargj J" shrieked Graham as a Brownie stepped into the beam from Anna's light. It clapped its hands over its cars and fled. "Now see what you did!" raged Anna in an angry whisper. "Their ears -- you almost deafened him." "Get him back!" The writer's voice was tremulous. "I don't know if I can," Anna said coldly. "He doesn't have to take orders from you or me. All I can do is try." "You'd better. It scared the hell out of me, I admit, but so did the Brownies in Granata' s Interplanetary Show, and they were fakes." "Man, didn't you feel it?" asked Tony incredulously. "What?" asked Graham. "Please be quiet, both of you!" They waited a long time in the cold corridor before the thing reappeared, stepping warily into the .circle of light. Suddenly Anna laughed. "He wants to know why you want to pull his ears off. He sees you thinking of pulling his ears and the ears coming off and he's as puzzled as he can be." "Shrewd guess," said Graham. "Do I get to pull them?" "No. If you have any questions, tell me, and I'll try to ask him." "I think it's a fake. Come out from behind those whiskers, whoever you are. Stillman? Gracey? No, you're too short. I'll bet you're that little punk Tad Campbell from the radio shack. I'd like to get my hands on those flapping ears just for one second." "Tliis isn't getting us anywhere," said Tony. "Graham, you think of a person or a scene or something, !he Brownie will get it telepathically, give it to Anna and she'll say what it is." "Fair enough," said the writer. "I don't know what it's supposed to prove, but it's some kind of test. I'm thinking.' A moment later Anna said evenly: "If you weren't beaten up already, I'd slap your face off." "I'm sorry," said Graham hastily. "I was only kidding. I didn't really think it would -- but it did, didn't it?" With mounting excitement he said: "Ask him who he is, who his people were, whether he's married, how old he is -- " Anna held up her hand. "That's enough to start. I can't think of any way to ask his name. His parents -- not Brownies, homesteaders -- a shack and a goat -- a kitchen garden -- tall, tall people, the man wears thick glasses -- Tony! It's the Tollers !" "That's impossible," he said. "Their son's on Earth. He never answers their letters," the doctor remembered. "They keep writing, and -- How old was he when he left?" "I don't know," she answered a moment later. "He doesn't understand the question." "I felt it," said the writer, suddenly, in a frightened voice. "Like a thing touching you inside your head. Is that him?" "That's him. Just don't fight it." After a long silence Graham said quietly: "Hell, he's all right. They're all-right people, aren't they?" "Do you want to ask him any more questions?" asked Anna. right now. On I come back again?" asked the writer slowly and heavily. "When I'm in better shape?" He waited for Anna's nod, then said: "Will you say thanks to him and get me to the 'track?" "Pain worse?" asked Tony. "No, I don't think so. Hell, I don't know. As a matter of fact, I'm just worn out." The Brownie glided from the circle of light. " 'By, fella," said Graham, and then grinned weakly. "He said good-by back at me!" Swaying between them on the litter on the way back to the 'track, the writer said at last; "Two System beats. Eyewitness account of Drug King Brenner's death, and the first factual eyewitness account of extraterrestrial intelligent life. One newsman per century gets one story like this. And I've got Jwo!" They loaded him into the halftrack. He broke silence only once on the bumpy trip back to Sun Lake, saying with a chuckle: "I think he iked me." And then he fell quietly asleep. ii dozen of the biochem lab boys were waiting for them at the hospital. Joe must have been watching no out the window, because he ran out to meet them. It was late, and the lights were already out in most of the double row of rust-brown huts. But Joe Gracey, the quiet one, the gentle ex-professor, possessor of eternal calm and detachment, came flying down the dim street, shouting: "Doc! Tony! We've got it!" "Sh-h..." Tony nodded toward the dozing man on the shoulder litter, but Graham was already opening his eyes. "What's up?" he asked mushily. "What's all excitement?" "Nothing at all," the doctor tried to tell him. "We're back in the Colony. And you're going to bed. Hold on just a minute, will you, Joe?" He knew how Gracey felt; it was hard enough to restrain his own jubilance and keep his voice in neutral register. But Graham had had enough for one night, and Tony had to get his patient back to the hospital bed before he could take time to listen even to such news as Gracey bore. Joe helped them get the writer comfortably settled, and waited impatiently while the doctor made a quick check for any possible damage done by the trip. Finally, Anna pulled up the covers, and the three of them started out. "Oh, Doctor..." Tony turned to find Graham up again on one elbow, wide-eyed and not a bit sleepy. "I was just wondering if I could have my typewriter." Before Tony' could answer, the elbow collapsed and Graham smiled ruefully. "I guess not. I couldn't work it. You don't have anything as luxurious as an Earthside dictatyper in the place, do you?" "Sure," Tony told him. "We've got one in the Lab office. You get some rest now, and we'll set it up for you here in the morning." "I'm okay," Graham insisted. "There's something I'd like to get on paper right away. I won't be able to sleep anyhow if I don't get it done." "You'll sleep," the doctor said. "I can give you a shot." "No." Graham was determined. "If you can't get the dictatyper out here now, how about some pencil and paper ? I think I still know how to use them." "I ll see what we can do. Anna, will you come with me?" room where the others were waiting, but into the bedroom. "How about k?" he asked in a whisper. "How's he feeling?" "It's a funny mixture, Tony," she said, "but I think it's all right. He's not nearly as excited as he was before. He's eager, but calm and -- well, it's hard to express, but honest, too." "Right." He tightened his hand swiftly on her shoulder, and smiled down at her small earnest face. "A man could get too used to this," he said. "How do you suppose I Mars child in got along before 'I knew about you ?" He strode into the living room and consulted briefly with Nick, after .which two of the men from the biochem section tramped out to the Lab, and brought back the machine for Graham to use. Through the living room door, Tony heard the writer's voice droning on, dictating, and the soft tapping of the machine. But what was going on in the hospital didn't seem important. T HE thing that mattered was the tiny pinch of pink pdwder Nick and Joe had been waiting to show him. "Tony," said Nick, exultantly, "look at this stuff! It's damn near oral-administration OxEn. Took it through twelve stages of concentration and we'll take it through exactly three more to completion when Anna blows some hyvac cells for us. I tried and all I got was blistered fingers." "It works?" asked Tony. "It's beautiful," said Gracey. "The Kelsey people must have fifty contaminants they don't even suspect are there'. Now I want to know where that sample tissue came from and where you're going to get more. And what did you mean about Brownies?" "Didn't Nick tell you?" Tony looked from the puzzled face to the startled one, and chortled appreciatively. "You mean you've been working together on this thing all evening and you never...?" "He didn't ask," Cantrella said defensively. "Anyhow, we weren't working together. We weren't even in the same Lab." "Okay," Tony grinned, "here goes again. You gave me the idea originally, Joe. As much as any one person or thing did. You were talking the other day about lethal genes. Remember, I tried to ask you about it this afternoon ?" "When Mimi blew up? Sure." "That's when it hit me. I got that lung tissue from Sunny Kandro, Joe. After we brought him home. He's a Brownie... the result of a Mars-viable gene that's lethal on Earth." "And there are more of them?" Gracey leaned forward excitedly. "Are they cooperative? Will they answer questions? And submit to examination ? When can I see one ?" "They're cooperative," Anna said, smiling. "The reason you haven't seen one yet is that they can't stand humans -- too uncooperative to suit them. Examinations? I don't see why not, if your intentions are honorable. They're telepaths, so they'd know you didn't mean to harm them." "Telepaths!" Gracey breathed the word as Nick exclaimed it. "What other changes," the agronomist started to ask, then said instead: "No sense you telling me. I tvill see one? Soon?" him." She motioned to the closed hospital door. "How about new tissue then?" Joe asked her. "Can we get it when we need it? You know how this stuff works? The old culture keeps mutating, and you have to start it over again. We can't keep taking slices out of Sunny all the time." "I don't know," she had to admit. "I don't know if they could understand what you want it for, or why you're doing it." "I don't think we'll have any trouble," Tony put in. "Nick, our Lab is equipped to turn out marcaine, isn't it?" "Well, hell -- yes, of course, but what for?" "Marcaine and OxEn both? Do we have the facilities for it?" "Sure. Processing the OxEn won't take up much." "Then I'm sure we can get our lung-scrapings," the doctor said. "What do you say, Ansde?" The name slipped out, and he never even noticed the sudden startled exchange of looks between the other men. He did notice the woman's slight hesitation and halfhidden smile. "Will they do it? After all, you're the expert on Brownies." "They like us," she said thoughtfully. "They trust us, too. They need marcaihe. Yes, I think they'd do it." "Doc!" It was Graham, calling from inside. Tony opened the door. "There anything left in that bottle of mine?" "Hasn't been touched." "Pour me a shot, will you? A good, long one. I'm not in such hot shape. And pas the bottle around." Tony filled a glass generously. "Take it and go to sleep," he ordered. "You're going to feel worse tomorrow." "Thanks. That's what I call a bedside manner." Graham grinned and tossed off the drink with a happy shudder. "I've got some copy here," he said. "Gan Stillman get it out tonight?" from the dictating machine and paused a moment, irresolutely. Graham laughed sleepily. "It's in the clear," he said. "No code. And you can read it if you like. Two messages and Take One of the biggest running story of the century." "Thanks," said Tony. "Good night." He closed the door firmly behind him. "Story from Graham," he ' said to the group. He buzzed Harve. "Read it!" said Nick. "And if that lying rat pulls another --  -- " Tony gathered courage at last to run his eyes over the copy, and gasped with relief. " 'Message to Marsport communications,' " he read. " 'Kill all copy previously sent for upcoming substitutes. Douglas Graham.' And 'Message to Commissioner Hamilton Bell, Marsport, Administration. As interested lay observer strongly urge you withdraw intended application of Title Fifteen search cordon to Sun Lake Colony. Personal investigation convinces me theft allegations unfounded, Title Fifteen application grave injustice which my duty expose fullest before public and official circles on return Earth. Appreciate you message me acknowledgment. Douglas Graham.' " roof. "What are we waiting for?" he demanded. "Where's Mimi? We have packing to do!" "What's the matter with him?" asked Harve Stillman, coming in. Tony was reading the last of the messages to himself. Anna told him: "Youlike that one best of all. What's in it?" He looked up with a grin across his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is how it starts: '.Marsport communications, sub following for previous copy, which kill. By Douglas Graham. With Brownies, lead to come.' Harve, what does that mean ?" The ex-wire-serviceman snapped: "It's additional copy  on a story about Brownies -- the first part isn't ready to go yet. What's he rwy, Tony?" The doctor read happily: " 'The administrative problems raised by this staggering discovery are not great. It is fortunate that Dr. Hellman and Miss Willendorf, co-discoverers of the Martians, are persons of unquestioned integrity, profoundly interested in protecting the new race from exploitation. I intend to urge the appointment of one of them as special Commissioner for the P.A.C. to take charge of Brownie welfare and safety. There must be no repetition of the tragedies that marked Earthly colonial expansion when greedy and shortsighted -- ' " "Damn, that's great," muttered the radio man. "Let me file it." The doctor, with the grin still on his face, handed over the copy and Harve raced out. "I told you," said Anna. Joe Gracey said: "Well, I certainly hope whichever one of you turns out to be Commissioner is going to give us Lab men a decent chance at research on the Brownies. I was thinking -- I could probably work out a test for the lethal gene, or Brownie gene, better call it. Spermatozoa for a male, a polar body or an ovum from a female and we'd be able to tell -- " "No!" said Anna hysterically. "No, no!" The others were shocked into silence. "I'Ll take you home, Ansie," said Tony He took her arm and thc-y walked out into the icy night down the Colony street. "Ansie, I've been sort of taking things for granted. I should ask you once, for the record." He stopped walking and faced her. "Will you marry me?" "Oli, Tony!" The name exploded from her in fear and desire both. "Tony, how can we? I thought -- for just a little while after I told you about me, I thought perhaps we could, that life could be the way it is for other people. But now this. How can we?" "What are you afraid of?" "Afraid? I'm afraid of our children, afraid of this planet! I was never afraid before, I was hurt and bewildered when I knew too much about people, but -- Tony, don't you see? To have a baby like Polly's, to have it grow up a stranger, an alien creature, to have it leave me and go to its -- its own people... walking again, searching for the words he needed. "Ansie," he began, "I think we will be married. If you want it as much as I do, we surely will be. And we'll have children. And more than that, the hope of all the race will lie in our children, Anna. Ours and the children of the other people here. And the children of the Brownies. Don't forget that. "They look different. They even think differently, and nobody knows more about that than you. But they're as human as we are. Maybe more so. "We've made a beginning here at Sun Lake tonight. We've cut the big knot, the knot that kept us tied to Earth. Brownies helped us do that, and maybe they can help us lick this planet in all the ways that still remain. Maybe they can help us cure the next Joan Radcliff. Maybe they can keep us from going blind when the protective shots from Earth stop coming through. "But maybe they can't." "Ansie, if our children should be Brownies, we'd not only have to face it, accept it without fear -- we'd have to be glad. Brownies are the children of Mars, natural human children of Mars. We don't know yet whether we can live here; but we know they can. "They're gentle. They're honest and decent and rational. They trust each other, not because of blind loves and precedents, as we do, but because they know each other as Earth humans never can. If blind hates and precedents end life on Earth, Ansie, we can go on at Sun Lake. And we can go on that much better for knowing that even our failure, if we fail, won't be the end." He stopped at her door and looked down at her, searching for the understanding that had to be there. If Anna failed, what other woman would comprehend ? 'Til ask you this time," she said soberly. "Tony, will you marry  Bros., New York, #. # pages, #. I T IS unfortunate that this book had to appear after Frank Scully's volume on flying saucers. Being a much more rational, scientific and generally persuasive job, it might have captured a reasoning audience which may not be so alienated that the very mention of the subject will make them suspect another hoax -- and perhaps pass up an extremely well-reasoned piece of scientific speculation. Gerald Heard, better known to science fiction readers as H. F. Heard, makes a case for an extraterrestrial origin of the mysterious disks, and for their being manned by a highly intelligent form of insect life (he argues for bees or beclike creatures) but in a quiet, logical way, without hysterical outbursts against military conspiracies that are keeping the "truth" from us. There will be various points at which some readers may call a mental halt and say that sometimes assumption outfaces sweet reasonableness, of course. The equating of Lodge spiritualism with scientific speculation is one example. Another is when Heard posits that since no one has ever seen a flying disk land or take off, therefore none have ever landed or taken off. He also develops from no evidence #I  the notion that atom bombings might, through interrelations between hard radiations from Earth and the spots on the Sun, actually cause our Copheid to go nova. However, you don't have to swallow the whole book; enough of it is digestible to make a good mental meal. Eric Frank Russell. Fantasy Press, Reading. Pa., #. # pages, #. offers a sort of reverse twist on its author's previous Sinister Barrier, and at the same time fits itself into the growing canon of firsttrip-to-the-Moon tales. Basically, the story has to do with the increasingly monotonous failure, by explosion, of a long series of experimental Moon rockets (all but one, a Russian model, unmanned), usually just when they are approaching the Lunar surface. The search for the causes of these catastrophes becomes the full-time occupation of John J. Armstrong, a bear of a man who has a hand in the building of the current American rocket. His detective work leads him down strange and dangerous ways -- ways which in the end reveal an anti-Moon-MarsVenus secret society on Earth that strikingly combines an inside-out version of the "we-are-property" motif of the author's earlier novel. and an uncomfortably realistic attitude toward us ordinary folks. ence-adventure-detective story, half bitter and biting social satire. Dr e ad f til Sanctuary is one of the more adult additions to the growing shelf of reprints from the Fabulous Forties of Astounding Science Fiction.  Bros., New York, #. # pages, #. New Cosmology, as the latest British theories about the Universe are called, contains some rather astonishing new notions, which deal primarily with the refurbishing and patching-up of the older Jeans-Eddington theory about the Expanding Universe. The book's material on the Solar System and the Galaxy will be largely, though far from entirely, old stuff to the science fiction reader. Some of the notions that come later are pretty fantastic and wonderful. They can be criticized largely on the ground that the author puts them forward with too much mate Truth; all that has gone before is Error." The ideas are worth thinking about all the same. Most exciting of all is Hoyle's formulation of the notion of continuous creation. It may be said that the whole new British cosmology that Hoyle is defending is based on this at-firstsight ridiculous and anti-scientific idea. It is claimed that once every hour, more or less, approximately one atom is created out of nothing in an area of space roughly equal to that of a middle-sized skyscraper. Out of nothing! Hoyle claims that while this is a new scientific hypothesis , it is not a "new" or "revolutionary" assumption. It simply replaces a previous assumption, even less likely or lovely, that "the whole of Che matter in the Universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote' past." And it cannot be itself replaced by the idea that material never was created at all but always has been (one of the very oldest scientific assumptions) because, as this the case there would be no hydrogen left in the Universe -- and consequently no solar phoenix, no life, no ns. Obviously, if only for the intellectual-imaginative jag you can get out of the latter chapters of this little book, it is worth reading! Crossen. Greenberg Publishers, New York, #. # pages, #. spate of science fiction anthologies, a form of literature that is becoming more of a breed than a branch -- like rabbits or hamsters. This one, unfortunately, shows signs of in-breeding. Tire fifteen stories are divided into four sections. Section One: "Atomic Age." Four stories, in three of which humanity is practically wiped out, andin the fourth it certainly is on the way toward extinction -- thus leaving no one to go ahead and perform the derring-do described in the rest of the book. Incidentally, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Portable Phonograph, the fourth story mentioned, is surely one of the masterpieces of mood science fiction; a great story. Compare it with Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, chosen from The Martian Chronicles', equally splendid, but diametrically opposite in method... The other two stories in the atomic section are by Ward Moore and Forrest Ackerman. Section Two: "Galactic Age." Van Vogt's second-rate Automaton  the editor's old-type interstellar tale of imperialistsversus-downtroddeu called Restricted Clientele , with the daring Liberal who rescues man from the slavery imposed by the Mean Old Exploiters; C. T. Moore's old (#) and ghoulish-squirmycum-raw-sexy Shamblean -- historically interesting but certainly something Mrs. Kuttner cannot be too proud of today; and Isaac Asimov's somewhat embarrassing Christmas on Ganymede (#) which was funny only in intent. Section Three: "Stellar Age," up to # A.D. Ted Sturgeon's well-done but minor Memory, very much a gadget story of a sort I did not know T. S. ever wrote; Sam Merwin's Exiled from Earth, dug from his earliest literary strata; Leigh Brackett's Retreat to the Stars, one of those' Adam and Eve re-creations that I find unconvincing whenever they turn up; and Henry Kutner's funny but drastically unimportant and non-scicncc fiction Voice of the Lobster. Section Four: "Delphic Age" (whatever that is). Up to # years in the future. A Robert yrthux item called Evolution's End, which read that way; Tony Boucher's fall -- a darn nice time story which actually has little business in a section of the distant future (except that it does describe one sort of world's end) ; and Bruce Elliott's silly and thoroughly unconvincing The Devil Was Sick. Of this collection only the Bradbury, Clark, Van Vogt, Sturgeon and Boucher (and possibly the C. L. Moore) are really worthy of preservation, on my scale of values. Not, in my opinion, enough to rate the price of three pounds of sirloin. by Kenneth Heuer. Pellegrini  Cudahy, New York, #. # pages, #. "W, the planets, having never visited them, that a wonderful variety of things is possible." This is the essence of the philosophy, the science -- and the "literary style" -- of this curious volume by a lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. It is too bad that so much useful though elementary information is presented in so awkward a style and with such disregard for the elementary rules of scientific evidence. Many science fiction addicts, including myself, are constantly shocked by the narrow-mindedness of the conventional astro-physicist or biologist, neither of whom can imagine any other form of life than one based on the carbon-water cycle. Heuer had here a really fine opportunity to map out the prospects for life of other possible sorts, based on certain elementary facts from chemistry and physics. Instead, he has largely ignored this hard but honest route, and has, with the aid of his fantastic analogies, described life-types on other worlds as visualized by his own somewhat jejune imagination, as day-dreamed by pre-scientific philosophers and astrologers, or by early scientific "astronomers." The result is a book which gives us practically nothing that is soundly based on scientific guesswork, and a great deal that is plain nonsense. All she wanted was a mate and she had the gumption to go out and hunt one down. But that meant poach ing in a strictly forbidden territory! T HE best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was also looking for a husband. This, in itself, was not unusual -- but Matilda was so completely wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and talk about it all to Matilda. The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are goodly percentage of whom are eligible bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she had been waiting for him. Matilda, you see, had patience. She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A.B. from exclusive Ursula Johns College and Radcliff had yielded her Masters degree, yet Matilda was an avid follower of the pen pal columns. She would read them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity to her own. To the gentlemen upon whom these names were affixed, Matilda would wite, and she oftn told her mother, the widow Penshaws, that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws impatiently told her to go out and get dates. pulled her battered old sedan into the garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was rocking on the glider and Matilda said hello. The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left hand in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger. "I thought so," she said. "I knew this was coming when I saw that look in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman's engagement ring?" Matilda smiled. "It wouldn't have worked out, Ma. He was too darned stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway and he smiled politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth college reunion was this weekend and he had already turned down the invitation." The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. "That was thoughtful of Herman to hide his feelings." "Hogwash!" said her daughter. "He has no true feelings. He's sorry that he had to miss his college reunion. That's all he has to hide. A stuffy Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others." "But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate. You don't jail in love, Matilda -- no one does. Love osmoses into you slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time." Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact of love. She said goodnight and went upstairs, climbed out of her light summer dress and took a cold shower. She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section of the current Literary Review, and because the subject matter of that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect a gratifying selection of pen pals. She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away. Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citrinella on each ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!). Then she propped up her pillows -- two pillows partially stopped her post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the Literary Review off the night table. She flipped through the pages and came to personals. Someone in Nebraska wanted to trade match books; someone in New York needed a midwestern pen pal, but it was a woman; an elderly man interested in ornithology wanted a young chick correspondent, interested in the same subject; a young, personable man wanted an editorial position because he thought he had something to offer the editorial world; and -- twice. Then she held it close to the light and read it again. The Literary Review was one of the few magazines which printed the name of the advertiser rather than a box number, and Matilda even liked the sound of the name. But mostly, she had to admit to herself, it was the flavor of the wording. This very well could be it. Or, that is, him. Intelligent, somewhat egotistical male who's really been around, whose universal experience can make the average cosmopolite look like a provincial hick, is in need of several female correspondents: must be intelligent, have gumption, be capable of listening to male who has a lot to say and wants to say it. All others need not apply. Wonderful opportunity cultural experience... Haron Gorka, Cedar Falls, #. The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded as though he would have reason indeed. He only wanted the best because he was the best. Like calls to like. The name -- Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda. Haron Gorka -- the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international man, a figure among figures, a paragon... Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of writing a letter. Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls. M atilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom, dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger, and tiptoed downstairs. The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell. "Mother," gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something unexpected. "What on earth are you doing up?" The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. "I'm fixing breakfast, of course..." Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws. Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour, Matilda hummed Mendelsohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar Falls and find out. And so she got there. The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over his glasses and answer questions grudgingly. "Hello," said Matilda. The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda asked him where she could find Haron Gorka. "What?" "I said, where canI find Haron Gorka ?" "Is that in the United States?" "It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live? What's the quickest way to get there?" The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. "Now take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka -- " Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an oh under her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested that if it really were important, she might check with the police. Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at random. As far as the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka did not exist. Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's. Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by browsing through the dusty stacks. This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the old librarian as she passed. years from now, this could be Matilda Penshaws -- complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray hair, suspicious eyes, and a broomstick figure... On the other hand -- why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as welleducated as Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent residence here in Cedar Falls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his own library with him. This being the case, a thirdrate collection of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka. Matilda cleared her throat. "Pardon me," she began. "I'm looking for -- " "Haron Gorka." The librarian nodded. "How on earth did you know?" "That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring about that man today. Six of you -- five others in the morning, and now you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka..." Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear. "You know him? You know Haron Gorka?" "Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty years younger -- " Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. "Only ten," she assured the librarian. "Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm sure." "Are you? Well. Well, well." The librarian did something with the back of her hair, but it looked the same as before. "Maybe you're right. Maybe you're right at that." Then she sighed. "But I guess a miss is as good as a mile." "What do you mean?" "I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka..." The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry. "Urn, where can I find Mr. Gorka?" "I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear." . "What about the other five women ?" "They convinced me that I ought to give them his address." Matilda reached into her pocketbook and withdrew a five dollar bill. "Was tliis the way?" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this sort of thing. The librarian shook her head. Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her hand. "Then is this better?" "That's worse. I wouldn't take your money -- " "Sorry. Wliat then?" "If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still could get die vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share of vicarious enjoyment. Is it -- ah -- a deal?" Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car, whistling to herself. could have been an agrarian estate, except that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked him all the more for it. There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory, perhaps she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late... A S it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead, someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly. He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the wall, there was a button. "You want any food or drink," the servant told her, "and you just press fhat button. The results will surprise you." "What about Mr. Gorka?" "When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to home, lady, and I will tell him you are here." A little doubtful now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda's ears had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open it, but it would not budge. It was locked -- from the outside. It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty, she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a neurotic servant. For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however: she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to her overwrought nerves. At that point she remembered what the servant had said about food and she thought at ohee of the supreme justice she could do to a juicy beefsteak. Well, maybe they didn't have a beefsteak. In that case, she would take what they had, and, accordingly, she walked to the little slot in the wall and pressed the button. She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup, mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a parfait -- and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce. Matilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again -- but by then her salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorki's neurotic servant. When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right. T HE feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorki's servant, and he said, "Mr. Gorka will see you now." "Now ?" "Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?" He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair. She told the servant so. "Miss," he replied, "I assure you it will not matter in the least to Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all that matters." "You sure?" Matilda wanted to take no chances. "Yes. Come." She followed him out of the little room and across what should have been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and compare notes. She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was just that he was so ordinarylooking. She almost would have preferred the monster of her dreams. H E wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist at each corner. He said, "Greetings. You have come -- " "In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?" She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to keep on the middle of the road. "I am fine. Are you ready?" "Ready?" "Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do you not?" "I -- do." Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to know the man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit. "I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for dinner," she told him brightly. "Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that you have a high psi-quotient, or that you were very hungry." "Yes," said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit. "Ready?" "Uh -- ready." "Well?" "Well, what, Mr. Gorka?" "What would you like me to talk about?" "Oh, anything." "Please. As the ad read, my universal experience -- is universal. Literally. You'll have to be more specific." "Well, why don't you tell me about some of your far travels? Unfortunately, while I've done a lot of reading, I haven't been to alp the places I would have liked -- " "Good enough. You know, of Matilda said, "Beg pardon?" "Well, there was the time our crew -- before I had retired, of course -- made a crash landing there. We could survive in the vac-suits, of course, but the tblomots were after us almost at once. They go mad over plastic. They will eat absolutely any sort of plastic. Our vac-suits -- " " -- were made of plastic," Matilda suggested. She did not understand a thing he was talking about, but she felt she had better act bright. "No, no. Must you interrupt? The air-hose and the water feed, these were plastic. Not the rest of the suit. The point is that half of us were destroyed before the rescue ship could come, and the remainder were near death. I owe my life to the mimicry of a fleitik from Capella plastic and led the tblomots a merry chase across the frozen surface of system now and Interstellar Ordinance makes it mandatory to carry flaaks with you. Excellent idea, really excellent." cational background should have told her that Haron Gorka was mouthing gibberish. But on the other hand she wanted to believe in him and the result was that it took until now for her to realize it. "Stop making fun of me," she said. "So, naturally, you'll see flaaks all over that system -- '" "Stop!" "What's that? Making fun of you?" Haron Gorka's voice had been so eager as he spoke, highpitched, almost like a child's, and now he seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of resignation, and he said, "Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she is right and I am wrong..." Haron Gorka turned his back. Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of Haron Gorka's guests to depart. As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly. Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all alone. As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his voice high-pitched and eager. the small library building that she remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it outside the library. The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray, broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up visibly. "Hello, my dear," she said. "Hi." "You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar." "I don't know what they told you," Matilda said. "But this is what happened to me." She quickly then related everything which 'had happened, completely and in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second because she knew it would make her feel better. "So," she finished, "Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or insane. I'm sorry." "He's neither," the librarian contradicted. "Perhaps he is slightly eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither." "What do you mean?" "Did he leave a message for his wife?" "Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the five." "No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a message for his wife -- " Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told the little librarian what the message was. "He wanted her to return," she said. The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you something." "What's that?" "I am Mrs. Gorka." The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. "You see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much." Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for anybody, but here she found herself confronted with two. "We've been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given the opportunity just to listen to him. "But he's wrong. It's a hard life for a woman. Someday -- five thousand, ten thousand years from now -- I will convince him. And then we will settle down on Canopus would be so nice -- " "I'm sure." "Well, if Haron wants me back, then I have to go. Have a care, my dear. If you marry, choose a homebody. I've had the experience and you've seen my Haron for yourself." And then the woman was gone. Numbly, Matilda walked to the doorway and watched her angular figure disappear down the road. Of all the crazy things... Deneb and Capella and Canopus, these were stars. Add a number and you might have a planet revolving about each star. Of all the insane -- They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually, they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way -- but hereafter Matilda would seek the happy medium. And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They were, she realized, for kids. S HE ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again, preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale rainbow bridge in the sky. Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon, and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place. The glow increased; soon it was a bright red pulse pounding on the horizon. It flickered. It flickered again, and finally it was gone. The stars were white and brilliant in the clear country air. That was why Matilda liked the country better than the city, particularly on a clear summer night when you could see the span of the Milky Way. But abruptly the stars and the Milky Way were paled by the brightest shooting star Matilda had ever seen. It flashed suddenly and it remained in view for a full second, searing a bright orange path across the night sky. Matilda gasped and ran into her car. She started the gears and pressed the accelerator to the floor, keeping it there all the way home. It was the first time she had ever seen a shooting star going jtf ?. Appointment in Tomorrow Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also? T HE first angry rays of the sun -- which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at # hour intervals -- pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War Ill's atomic bombs. They turned to blood the witchcircle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr. It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-thc-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. "Knock on titanium," "Whadya do for blackouts," "Please, lover, don't think when I'm around" America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet. Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triplepaned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, #r almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, "... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus," he took a deep, even breath and cast his. mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning. Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him. R emembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes. Pumping dynamic tension into his #-year-old muscles and confidence into his #-year-old mind, the #-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear "heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing -- the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile. It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life -- and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-th ought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning. He set his who ?-where ? robot for "Rocket Physicist" and "Genius Class." While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message: Dear Fellow Scientist: A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp. Thinkers' Foundation I. Jorj Helmuth Meanwhile the who?where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the ad dressorobot and plugged in the steno-robot. The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio. "The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice announced. "He has the general staff with him." "Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes." reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hushvoiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom. Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls -- the permissible ones -- and could doubtless improvise a. hearing apparatus if it wanted to. For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the masynapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on 'building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved. T bis was the machine that really This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, "Maizie." Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God : infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered. T HE grizzled general -- there was also one who  was gray -- was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually wellcontrolled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man" rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which madeher always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders -- even the Thinkers weren't certain which. The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coining? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh? The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru, his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this. The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better -- more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brainmachine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat. T HE President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie! Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds -- 'profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and laymanls language, were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brainmachines. The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke. Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question Four -- whom would that come from?" The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?" Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boomchair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting. From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the soundof Maizie starting to think. gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to cerebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle. Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there -- just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship -- and the Secretary of Space was not in on it! Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing addition mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down, from Mars. "Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country." Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said. "The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians -- " "Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shocildn't have mentioned it, Jorj." Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft. M eanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed , out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer. He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eying it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer. For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind. Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open. The question was: "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?" He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl. Suddenly he began to tape again. "Ma.izie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows..." But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl. ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the driedmud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho. Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving at, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically. After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip -- priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind. The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep. emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tuckedtheirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his. "Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked. A remote look came. into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed. The grizzled general snapped his lingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposedto play chess. Poe proved it had a man inside.it." The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool question like that?" "You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply. The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly. "Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean." The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. H in deman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar." "Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd investigate." The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right away." French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picassp hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City. The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, largeeyed, and tender -- fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear. Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?" The features of the other convulsed. unpleasantly. "Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk." "But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly interposed quietly. "You know the good it did." Farquar hunched his Japanesewrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be done until it takes." Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware." Farquar scowled. "We're the ones in the cages." tion of the flowers' bells. "All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good -- that is, when the truth offers no threat -- people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad..." A shadow darkened his eyes. "Well, we all know what happened to -- " And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists. He went on, "A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true -- that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets." Farquar clenched his fist. "All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?" Opperly shook his head. "We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. Jn my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile." "Exactly !" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future... "By the time you were born, Willard," Opperly interrupted dreamily, "Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power -- only established facts or lies' are." "Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you." "No," Opperly said. "I've got violence in me," Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet. flowers. "I think you have," he agreed. "But what are we to do?" Farquar demanded. "Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?" Opperly mused for a while. "I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few iemember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?" "Now you are justifying the Thinkers !" "No, I leave that to history." "And history consists of the actions of men," Farquar concluded. "I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-tom neurotics in the Inner Cabinet -- and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stagemanaging won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because pf the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brainmachine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of 'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed -- and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see." "I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, 'but on what the world hasn't got -- peace, honor, a goodconscience..." The front-door knocker clanked . Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?" The physicist waved to him. "Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry." The old man snorted with goodhumored incredulity and trudged off. "What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?" Farquar chortled suddenly. "It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this." He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, "Who's it from ? Tregarron ?" "No, from Helmutli. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clearThey know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclearrocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help." "An invitation?" Farquar nodded. "For this afternoon." He noticed Oppcrly's anxious though distant frown. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you bothered about my going ? Are you thinking it might be a trap -- that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?" The older man shook his head. "I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you." "What do you mean?" Farquar asked. gentle appraisal. "You're a strong and vital man, Willa.rd, with a strong man's prides and desires." His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, "Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?" Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted. "And didn't she go off with a Thinker?" "If girls find me ugly, that's their business," Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. "What's that got to do with this invitation ?" Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, "In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition." Willard snorted. "Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise." "Perhaps," Opperly agreed. "Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world." Farquar turned on him. "Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?" "Not exactly." "You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?" Farquar demanded angrily. Opperly shrugged bis helplessness. "No, I don't think you'll change your aims." Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men. gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silverwinged vision crowded everything else out of his mind. Just think, a spaceship with sails ! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox. Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust -- processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm. Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. der, "Set sail for Mars!" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward. In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted. A spaceship with direct nuclear drive -- and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket. But that would only be a be ginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of even -- his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward -- 'build the true Maizie! And then... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception. He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, "Caddy!" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there. n't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word -- a pet form of her name -- that would send her into,obedient trance. No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis. Yet the fact of her absense had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron. But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the m umbojumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie. He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somnolearncr, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference. mented his shorts with pink coveralls, but he was still drinking beer. He. emptied his glass and lifted it a lazy inch. The beautiful girl beside him refilled it without a word and went on stroking his forehead. "Caddy," he said reflectively, without looking at her, "there's a little job I want you to do. You're the only one with the proper background. The point is: it will take you away from Jorj for some time." "I'd welcome it," she said with decision. "I'm getting pretty sick of watching his push-upsahd all his other mind and muscle stunts. And that damn somno-learner of his keeps me awake." Tregarron smiled. "I'm afraid Thinkers make pretty sad sweethearts." "Not all of them," she told him, returning his smile tenderly. He chuckled. "It's about one of those rocket physicists in the list you brought me. A fellow named Willard Farquar." Caddy didn't say anything, but she stopped stroking his forehead. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You knew him once, didn't you?" "Yes," she replied and then added, with surprising feeling, "The big, ugly ape!" "Well, he's an ape whose services we happen to need. I want you to be our contact girl with him." She took her hands away from his forehead. "Look, Jan," she said, "I wouldn't like this job." "I thought he was very sweet on you once." "Yes, as he never grew tired of trying to demonstrate to me. The clumsy, overgrown, bumbling baby ! The man's disgusting, Jan. His approach to a woman is a child wanting candy and enraged because Mama won't produce it on the instant. I don't mind Jorj -- he's just a pipsqueak and it amuses me to see how he frustrates himself. But Willard is..." "... a bit frightening?" Tregarron finished for her. "No!" "Of course you're not afraid," Tregarron purred. "You're our beautiful, clever Caddy, who can do anything she wants with any man, and without whose..." "Look, Jan, this is different -- " ,she began agitatedly. ... and without whose services we'd have got exactly nowhere. Clever, subtle Caddy, whose most charming attainment in the everapprcciative eyes of .Papa Jan is her ability to handle every man in the neatest way imaginable and without a trace of real feeling. Kitty Kaddy, who... "Very well," she said with a sigh. "I'll do it." "Of course you will," Jan said, drawing her hands back to his forehead. "And you'll begin right away by getting into your nicest sugarandcream war clothes. You and I are going to be the welcoming committee when that ape arrives this afternoon." "But what about Jorj ? He'll want to see Willard." "That'll be taken care of," Jan assured her. "And what about the other dozen rocket physicists Jorj asked to come?" "Don't worry about them." T HE President looked inquiringly at his secretary across his littered desk in his homy study at White House, Jr. "So Opperly didn't have any idea how that odd question about Maizie turned up in Section Five?" His secretary settled his paunch and shook his head. "Or claimed not to. Perhaps he's just the absentminded prof, perhaps something else. The old feud of the physicists against the Thinkers may be getting hot again. There'll be further . investigation." The President nodded. He obviously had something uncomfortable on his mind. He said uneasily, "Do you think there's any possibility of it being true?" "What?" asked the secretary guardedly. "That peculiar hint about Maizie." The secretary said nothing. "Mind you, I don't think there is," the President went on hurriedly, his face assuming a sorrowful scowl. "I owe a lot to the Thinkers, both as a private person and as a public figure. Lord, a man has to lean on something these days. But just supposing it were true -- " he hesitated, as before uttering blasphemy -- "that there was a man inside Maizie, what could we do?" The secretary said stolidly, "The Thinkers won our last election. They chased the Commies out of Iran. We brought them into the Inner Cabinet. We've showered them with public funds." He paused. "We couldn't do a damn thing." The President nodded with equal conviction, and, not very happily, summed up: "So if anyone should go up against the Thinkers -- and I'm afraid I wouldn't want to sec that happen, whatever's true -- it would have to be a scientist." weight change the steps under his feet into an escalator. He cursed under his breath, but let them carry him, a defiant hulk, up to the tall and mystic blue portals, which silently parted when he was five meters away. The escalator changed to a slideway and carried him into a softly gleaming, highdomed room rather like the antechamber of a temple. "Martian peace to you, Willard Farquar," an invisible voice intoned. "You have entered the Thinkers' Foundation. Please remain on the slideway." "I want to see Jorj Helmuth," Willard growled loudly. The slideway carried him into the mouth of a corridor and paused. A dark opening dilated on the wall. "May we take your hat and coat?" a voice asked politely. After a moment the request was repeated, with the addition of, "Just pass them through." Willard scowled, then fought his way out of his shapeless coat and passed it and his hat through in a lump. Instantly the opening contracted, imprisoning his wrists, and he felt his hands being washed on the other side of the wall. He gave a great jerk which failed to free his hands from the snugly padded gyves. "Do not be alarmed," the voice advised him. "It is only an esthetic measure. As your hands are laved, invisible radiations are slaughtering all the germs in your body, while more delicate emanations are producing a benign rearrangement of your emotions." The rather amateurish curses Willard was gritting between his teeth became more sulfurous. His sensations told him that a towel of some sort was being applied to #? liis hands. He wondered if he would be subjected to a facewashing and even greater indignities. Then, just before his wrists were released, he felt -- for a moment only, but unmistakably -- the soft touch of a girl's hand. That touch, like the mysterious sweet chink of a bell in darkness, brought him a sudden feeling of excitement, wonder. Yet the feeling was as fleeting as that caused by a lurid advertisement, for as the slideway began to move again, carrying him past a series of depth-pictures and inscriptions celebrating the Thinkers' achievements, his mood of bitter exasperation returned doubled. This place, he told himself, was a .plague spot of the disease of magic in an enfeebled and easily infected world. He reminded himself that he was not without resources -- the Thinkers must fear or need him, whether because of the Maelzel question or the necessity of producing a nuclear power spaceship. He felt his determination to smash them reaffirmed. T HE slideway, having twice turned into an escalator, veered toward an opalescent door, which opened as silently as the one below. The slideway stopped at the threshold. Momentum carried him a couple of steps into the room. He stopped and looked around. The place was a sybarite's modernistic dream. Sponge-carpeting thick as a mattress and topped with down. Hassocks and couches that looked butter-soft. A domed ceiling of deep glossy blue mimicking the night sky, with the constellations tooled in silver. A wall of niches crammed with statuettes of languorous men, women, beasts. A self-service bar with a score of golden spigots. A depth-TV-screen simulating a great crystal ball. Here and there barbaric studs of hammered gold that might have been push-buttons. A low table set for three with exquisite ware of crystal and gold. An ever-changing scent of resins and flowers. A smiling fat man clad in pearl gray sports clothes came through one of the curtained archways. Willard recognized Jan Tregarron from his pictures, but did not at once offer to speak to him. Instead he let his gaze wander with an ostentatious contempt around the crammed walls, take in the bar and the set table with its many wine glasses, and finally return to his host. "And where," he asked with harsh irony, "arc the dancing girls?" The fat man's eyebrows rose. "In there," he said innocently, indicating the second archway. The curtains parted. "Oh, I am sorry," the fat man apologized. "There seems to be only one on duty. I hope that isn't too much at variance with your tastes." She stood in the archway, demure and lovely in an off-the-bosom frock of pale blue skylon edged in mutated mink. She was smiling the first smile that Willard had ever had from her lips. "Mr. Willard Farquar," the fat man murmured, "Miss Arkady Simms." the conference table with its dozen empty chairs to the two mousily pretty secretaries. "No wordfrom the door yet, Master," one of them ventured to say. Jorj twisted in his chair, though hardly uncomfortably, since it was a beautiful pneumatic job. His nervousness at having to face the twelve rocket physicists -- a feeling which, he had to admit, had been unexpectedly great -- was giving way to impatience. "What's Willard Farquar's phone?" he asked sharply. One of the secretaries ran through a clutch of desk tapes, then spent some seconds whispering into her throat-mike and listening to answers from the softspeaker. "He lives with Morton Opperly, who doesn't have one," she finally told Jorj in scandalized tones. "Let me see the list," Jorj said. Then, after a bit, "Try Dr. Welcome's place." This time there were results. Within a quarter of a minute he was handed a phone which he hung expertly on his shoulder. "This is Dr. Asa Welcome," a reedy voice told him. "This is Helmuth of the Thinkers' Foundation," Jorj said icily. "iDid you get my communication?" The reedy voice became anxious and placating. "Why, yes, Mr. Helmuth, I did. Very glad to get it too. Sounded most interesting. Very eager to come. But... "Yes?" "Well, I was just about to hop in my 'copter -- my son's 'copter -- when the other note came." "What other note?" "Why, the note calling die meeting off." "I sent no other note!" The other voice became acutely embarrassed. "But I considered it to be from you... or just about the same thing. I really think I had the right to assume that." "How was it signed?" Jorj rapped. "Mr. Jan Tregarron." Jorj broke the connection. He didn't move until a low sound shattered his abstraction and he realized that one of the girls was whispering a call to the door. He handed back the phone and dismissed them. They went in a rustle of jackets and skirtlets, hesitating at the doorway but not quite daring to look back. He sat motionless a minute longer. Then his hand crept fretfully onto the table and pushed a button. The room darkened and a long section of wall became transparent, revealing a dozen silvery models of spaceships, beautifully executed. He quickly touched another; the models faded and the opposite wall bloomed with an animated cartoon that portrayed with charming humor and detail the designing and construction of a neutron-drive spaceship. A third button, and a depth-picture of deep star-speckled space opened behind the cartoon, showing a section of Earth's surface and in the far distance the tiny ruddy globe of Mars. Slowly a tiny rocket rose from the section of Earth and spread its silvery sails. tures, keeping the room dark. By a faint table light he dejectedly examined his organizational charts for the neutrondrive project, the long list of books he had boned up on by somno-learning, the concealed table of physical constants and all sorts of other crucial details about rocket physics -- a cleverly condensed encyclopedic "pony" to help out his memory on technical points that might have arisen in his discussion with the experts. He switched out all the lights and slumped forward, blinking his eyes and trying to swallow the lump in his throat. In the dark his memory went seeping back, back, to the day when his math teacher had told him, very superciliously, that the marvelous fantasies he loved to read and hoarded by his bed weren't real science at all, but just a kind of lurid pretense. He had so wanted to be a scientist, and the teacher's contempt had cast a damper on his ambition. And now that the conference was canceled, would he ever know that it wouldn't have turned out the same way today? That his somno-learning hadn't taken? That his "pony" wasn't good enough? That his ability to handle people extended only to credulous farmer Presidents and mousy girls in skirtlets? Only the test of meeting the experts would have answered those questions. Tregarron was the one to blame! Tregarron with his sly tyrannical ways, Tregarron with his fear of losing the future to men who really understood theoretics and could handle experts. Tregarron, so used to working by deception that he couldn't see when it became a fault and a crime. Tregarron, who must now be shown the light... or, failing that, against whom certain steps must be taken. For perhaps half an hour Jorj sat very still, thinking. Then he turned to the phone and, after some delay, got his party. "What is it now, Jorj?" Caddyasked impatiently. "Please don't bother me with any of your moods, because I'm tired and my nerves are on edge." He .took a breath. When steps may have to be taken, he thought, one must hold an agent in readiness. "Caddums," he intoned hypnotically, vibrantly. "Caddums..." The voice at the other end had instantly changed, become submissive, sleepy, suppliant. "Yes, Master?" M orton opperly looked up from the sheet of neatlypenned equations at Willard Farquar, who had somehow acquired a measure of poise. He neither lumbered restlessly nor grimaced. He removed his coat with a certain dignity and stood solidly before his mentor. He smiled. Granting that he was a bear, one might guess he had just been fed. "You see?" he said. "They didn't hurt me." "They didn't hurt you?" Opperly asked softly. Willard slowly shook his head. His smile broadened. Opperly put down his pen, folded his hands. "And you're as determined as ever to expose and smash the Thinkers?" "Of course!" The menacing growl came back into the bear's voice, except that it was touched with a certain pleased luxuriousness. "Only from now on I won't be teasing the zoo animals, and I won't embarrass you by asking any more Maelzel questions. I have reached the objective at which thpse tactics were aimed. After this I shall bore from within." "Bore from within," Opperly repeated, frowning. "Now where have I heard that phrase before?' His brow cleared. "Oh, yes," he said listlessly. "Do I understand that you are becoming a Thinker, Willard?" The other gave him a faintly pitying smile and stretched himself on the couch, gazed at the ceiling. All his movements were deliberate, easy. "Certainly. That's die only realistic way to smash them. Rise high in their councils. Out-trick all their trickeries. Organize a fifth column. Then strike !" "The end justifying the means, of course," Opperly said. "Of course. As surely as the desire to stand up justifies your disturbing the air over your head. All action in this world is nothing but means." Opperly nodded abstractedly. "I wonder if anyone else ever became a Thinker for those same reasons, il wonder if being a Thinker doesn't simply mean that you've decided you have to use lies and tricks as your chief method." be." There was no longer any doubt about the pitying quality of his smile. Opperly stood up, squaring together his papers. "So you'll be working with Helmuth?" "Not Helmuth. Tregarron." The bear's smile became cruel. "I'm afraid that Helmuth's career as a Thinker is going to have quite a setback." "Helmuth," Opperly mused. "Morgenschein once told me a bit about him. A man of some idealism, despite his affiliations. Best of a bad lot. Incidently, is he the one with whom..." "... Miss Arkady Simms ran off?" Willard finished without any embarrassment. "Yes, that was Helmuth. But that's all going to be changed now." Opperly nodded. "Good-by, Willard," he said. Willard quickly heaved himself up on an elbow. Opperly looked at him for about five seconds, then, without a word, walked out of the room. T HE only obvious furnishings in Jan Tregarron's office were a flat-topped desk and a few chairs. Tregarron sat behind the desk, the top of which was completely bare. He looked almost bored, except that his little eyes were smiling. Jorj Helmuth sat across the desk from him, a few feet back, erect and grim-faced, while shadowy in the muted light, Caddy stood against the wall behind Tregarron. She still wore the fur-trimmed skyion frock she'd put on that afternoon. She took no part in the conversation, seemed almost unaware of it. "So you just went ahead and canceled the conference without consulting me?" Jorj was saying. "You called it without consulting me." Tregarron playfully wagged a finger. "Shouldn't do that sort of thing, Jorj." "But I tell you I was completely prepared. I was absolutely sure of my ground." "I know, I know," Tregarron said lightly. "But it's not the right time for it. I'm the best judge of that.' "When will be the right time?" Tregarron shrugged. "Look here, Jorj," he said, "every man should stick to his trade, to his forte. Technology isn't ours." Jorj's lips thinned. "But you know as well as I do that we arc going to have to have a nuclear spaceship and actually go to Mars someday." Tregarron lifted his eyebrows. "Are we?" "Yes! Just as we're going to have to build a real Maizie. Everything we've done until now have been emergency measures." "Really?" Jorj stared at him. "Look here, Jan," he said, gripping his knees with his hands, "you and I are going to have to talk things through." "Are you quite sure of that?" Jan's voice was very cool. "I have a feeling that it might be best if you said nothing and accepted things as they are." "No!"' "Very well." Tregarron settled himself in his chair. "I helped you organize the Thinkers," Jorj said, and waited. "At least, I was your first partner." Tregarron barely nodded. "Our basic idea was that the time had come to apply science to the life of man on a large scale, to live rationally and realistically. The only things holding the world back from this all-important step were tire ignorance, superstition, and inertia of the average man, and the R# stuffiness and lack of .enterprise of the academic scientists -- their worship of facts, even when facts were clearly dangerous. "Yet we knew that in their deepest hearts the average man and the professionals were both on our side. They wanted the new world visualized by science. They wanted the simplifications and conveniences, the glorious adventures of the human mind and body. They wanted the trips to Mars and into the depths of the human psyche, they wanted the robots and the thinking machines. All they lacked was the nerve to take the first big step -- and that was what we supplied. "It was no time for half measures, for slow and sober plodding. The world was racked by wars and neurosis, in danger of falling into the foulest hands. What was needappeal to the human imagination, an Earth-shaking affirmation of the power of science for good. "But the men who provided that appeal and affirmation couldn't afford to be cautious. They wouldn't check and double check. They couldn't wait for the grudging and jealous approval of the professionals. They had to use stunts, tricks, fakes -- anything to get over the big point. Once that had been done, once mankind was headed down the new road, it would be easy enough to give the average man the necessary degree of insight to heal the breach with the professionals, to make good in actuality what had been made good only in pretense. "Have I stated our position fairiyf Jed. "You're the one who's telling it." "On those general assumptions we established our hold on susceptible leaders and the mob," jorj went on. "We built Maizie and .the Mars rocket and the Mind Bomb. We discovered the wisdom of the Martians. We sold the people on the science that the professionals had been too high-toned to advertise or bring into the market place. "But now that we've succeeded, now that we've made the big point, now that Maizie and Mars and science do rule the average human imagination, the time has come to take the second big step, to let accomplishment catch up with imagination, to implement fantasy with fact. "Do you suppose I'd ever have gone into this with you, if it hadn't been for the thought of that second big step? Why, I'd have felt dirty and cheap, a mere charlatan -- except for the sure conviction that someday everything would be set right. I've devoted my whole life to that conviction, Jan. I've studied and disciplined myself, using every scientific means at my disposal, so that I wouldn't be found lacking when the day came to heal the breach between the Thinkers and the professionals. I've trained myself to be the perfect liaison man for the job. "Jan, the day's come and I'm the man. I know you've been concentrating on other aspects of our work; you haven't had time to keep up with my side of it. But I'm sure that as soon as you see how carefully I've prepared myself, how completely practical the neutrondrive rocket project is, you'll beg me to go ahead !" Tregarron smiled at the ceiling for a moment. "Your general idea isn't so bad, Jorj, but your time scale is out of whack and your judgment is a joke. Oh, yes. Every revolutionary wants to see the big change take place in his lifetime. Tcha! It's as if he were watching evolutionary vaudeville and wanted the Ape-to-Man Act over in twenty minutes. "Time for the second big step? Jorj, the average man's exactly what he was ten years ago, except that he's got a new god. More than ever he thinks of Mars as a Hollywood paradise, with wise men and yummy princesses. Maizie is Mama professional scientists, they're more jealous and stuffy than ever. All they'd like to do is turn the clock back to a genteel dream world of quiet quadrangles and caps and gowns, where every commoner bows to the passing scholar. "Maybe in ten thousand years we'll be ready for the second big step. Maybe. Meanwhile, as should be, the clever will rule the stupid for their own good. The realists will rule the dreamers. Those with free hands will rule those who have deliberately handcuffed themselves with taboos. "Secondly, your judgment. Did you actually think you could have bossed those professionals, kept your mental footing in the intellectual melee? You a nuclear physicist? A rocket scientist? Why, it's -- Take it easy now, boy, and listen to me. They'd have torn you to pieces in twenty minutes and glad of the chance! You baffle me, Jorj. You know that Maizie and the Mars rocket and all that are fakes, yet you believe in your somno-learning and consciousness-expansion and optimism-pumping like the veriest yokel. I wouldn't be surand hypnotism. I think you should take stock of yourself and get a new slant. It's overdue." had become a mask. His eyes did not flicker from Tregarron's, yet there was a subtle change in his expression. Behind Tregarron, Caddy swayed as if ina sudden gust of intangible wind and took a silent step forward from the wall. "That's your honest opinion?" Jorj asked, very quietly. "It's more than that," Tregarron told him, just as unmelodramaticalJy. "It's orders." Jorj stood up purposefully. "Very well," he said. "In that case I have to tell you that -- " Casually, but with no waste motion, Tregarron slipped an ultrasonic pistol from under the desk and laid it on the empty top. "No," he said, "let me tell you something. I was afraid this would happen and I made preparations. If you've studied your Nazi, Fascist and Soviet history, you know what happens to old revolutionaries who don't move with the times. But I'm not going to be too harsh. I have a couple of the boys waiting outside. They'll take you by 'copter to the field, then by jet to New Mex. Bright and early tomorrow morning, Jorj, you're leaving on a trip to Mars." Jorj hardly reacted to the words. Caddy was two steps nearer Tregarron. "I decided Mars would be the best place for you," the fat man continued. "The robot controls will be arranged so that your 'visit' to Mars lasts two years. Perhaps in that time you will have learned wisdom, such as realizing that the big liar must never fall for his own big lie. 'Meanwhile, there will have to be a replacement for you. I have in mind a person who may prove peculiarly worthy to occupy your position, with all its perquisites. A person who seems to understand that force and desire are the motive powers of life, and that anyone who believes the big lie proves himself strictly a jerk." Tregarron now, her halfclosed, sleepy eyes fixed on Jorj's. "His name is Willard Farquar. You see, I too believe in cooperating with the scientists, Jorj, but by subversion rather than conference. My idea is to offer the hand of friendship to a selected few of them -- the hand of friendship with a nice big bribe in it." He smiled. "You were a good mi, Jorj, for the early days, when wc needed a publicist with catchy ideas about Mind Bombs, ray guns, plastic helmets, fancy sweaters, space brassieres, and all that other com. Now we can afford a soldier." Jorj moistened his lips. "We'll have a neat explanation of what's happened to you. Callers will be informed that you've gone on an extended visit to imbibe the wisdom of the Martians." Jorj whispered, "Caddums." Caddy leaned forward. Her arms snaked down Tregarron's, as if to imprison his wrists. But instead she reached out and took the ultrasonic pistol and put it in Tregarron's right hand. Then she looked up at Jorj with eyes that were very bright. She said very sweetly and sympathetically, "Poor Superman." Science Fiction Novels from Simon and Schuster All tho Science Fiction, Fantasy and Supernatural Books in Print In America or England! ! I can supply anything you see mentioned, listed or off tired anywhere!! 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Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# ##. New York #. New York (Phone GRomercy #-#) In the August Issue of     i... a novel novella ,   by Wyman Guin And in the September issue... a masterly serial... by Robert A. Heinlein Flying Saucer Contest Winners I  A Ihree-doy all-expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to Mt. Wilson Observotory... Jeanette Reynolds, Arroyo Seco, New Mexico #  A three-day all expense trip (transportation, lodging, meals and sightseeing) to Marine Laboratory at Wood's Hole, Mass... Donald Trost. # #th Street, Brooklyn. N. Y. #  A three-day all expense trip to a government-approved atomic energy laboratory center. (Cancelled due to security regulations. Substitute prize awarded.)... Ed Fischer, # North Winooski Avenue, Burlington, Vt. #  Three # " x #" studio portraits using the new Larjachrome process of color-print enlargement... 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A beauty, let us add, considered by experts as one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. ingredients... carefully selected from thoughtripened ideas... employing only the most convincing characters and conflicts, human or otherwise... and blended by master craftsmen into intellectually and emotionally nutritious stories. hands in every stage of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction. I The price is # a copy, # a year (# less than newsstand price) and the address is... # West #th Street New York #, N. Y.  C I # OStiaxy EdIlar-in-Chief August, #I Vol. #, No. # Art Director Advertiiirrg Monoger Circulation Manager by Wyman Guin by Sylvia Jacobs Cover by EMH llluMrnting is published montbly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New ork #. N. Y. #c per coy. Subscriptions :  # copies) # pet year in the United States. Canada. Mexico. South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post CfTicc, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #. by World Editions. Inc. President: George A. Gogniat. VicePresident: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer: Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted mu:;i be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity be tween characters and actual persons by Frank M. Robin#on # by Lester del Rey # by Koberine Mocleon # by Ray Bradbury # by H. L. Gold I by Groff Concln # Ask A Foolish Question T he questions laymen ask cabbies, doctors, engineers, soda jerkers and so on would no doubt make a fasemat ing monograph. The one asked most often of writers, and especially writers of science fiction, is, "Where do you those ideas?" Actually, this is perhaps the least significant question a reader can ask. Ideas come from anywhere -- newspapers, overheard conversations, books, other writers' stories, speculation both idle and frantic, depending, of course, on whether a deadline must be met. Only rarely does a writer remember the instant of inspiration. Out of the hundreds of stories and scripts I have written, for instance, I recall only one such moment. I was trudging through the rain without an umbrella, the usual random thoughts blurting and mumbling in my mind, when I found myself sub-vocalizing an old song having to do with walking between raindrops. That started a mental train ending with a caboose called Trouble With Water, which P. G. Wodehouse is being good enough to include in an anthology of modern humor. All my other writing, though, has been the result of mostly harried and often morose discarding of one idea after another. This is generally true of professional writers. When an idea worth writing -- or one that seems to be -- is finally dredged up, skinny and pale and unlovely, it is almost always surrounded by the even skiimier cadavers of dud notions. The layman's question should be, "What do you do with ideas once you get them?" Beyond Bedlam, this month's novella, introducing a literarily muscular new writer named Wyman Guin, is a fine example. Its genesis is the statistical fact that the hospital load of schizophrenic patients is steadily rising. How this should come to Guin's attention is not remarkable -- he's advertising director of Lakeside Laboratories, a pharmaceutical house, and keeping up with medical science is an important part of his job. Well, this is approximately where he got his idea. As you can see, that doesn't answer the big question -- what did Guin do with his idea? There were several plot directions that he explored systematically:  The hypothetical causes of the great increase, such as secret i weapons, invasions from space, mental instead of embryonic twinning, etc. Unable to make himself violate established psychiatric theory, Guin abandoned this line of thought.  The possible effects on civilization if a minority of non-psychotics had to support a majority of hospitalized schizophrenes. Not bad, but not enough to make a story, so he combined it with:   A society in which schizophrenia is the norm. Presumably, now that the author knew what his attack was to be, his biggest problem was olved. It was. actually, just beginning. For example...  Should he build the proposed society for horror, humor, moralistic analogy, warning, or what?  Should the characters be rational or irrational by our standards?  Since all stories need character conflict, what would be the basis for it in this Actional setup? If Guin had been writing conventional science Action, he could have worked it out very easily:  A society created for horror through violence, by exaggerating present so-called nomral behavior: pre-scientiAc 'humor" as in the #th Century attitude toward psychosis; effortless political satire to show how similar our society is to a psychotic one.  Irrational characters, of course, for melodramatic purposes.  Conflict on the grand scalerebels, normal according to our view, who want to overturn the schizophrenic world. Guin, however, had read hundreds of stories like that. What lover of science Action hasn't? And so...  We have a schizophrenic society with a system of ethics, education, morals, laws, etiquette, inferpersonal and infrapersonal relationships that are consistent with its psychological basis.  Since the only unchanging aspect of standards is that they are constantly changing, the characters must be rational by their own standards and not ours.  Conflict should come from the inferpersonal and mfrapersonal relationships that a schizophrenic Society makes possible. Here Guin found really rich soil, as you'll discover when you read the story. where he got the idea of Beyond Bedlam is recognizably mere social conversation. If he can answer it at all, it would reveal nothing whatever of the weeks of work that changed the seed of thought into a living, moving story. For those who want to slide stories, and feel offended when (Continued on Paie #)  By  However fantoetic if may seem, the society so elaborately described in this story has its seeds in ours. Just check the data    T he opening afternoon class for Mary Walden's egoshift was almost over, and Mary was practically certain the teacher would not call on her to recite her assignment, when Carl Blair got it into his mind to try to pass her a dirty note. Mary knew it would be a screamingly funny Ego-Shifting Room limerick and was about to reach for the note when Mrs. Harris's voice crackled through the room. 'Carl Blair! I believe you have an important message. Surely you will want the whole class to hear it. Come forward, please." A.S he made his way before the class, the boy's blush-covered freckles reappeared against his growing pallor. Haltingly and in an agonized monotone, he recited from the note: "There was a young hyper f named Phil, Who kept a third head for a i thrill. Said he, Tts all right, I enjoy my plight. ' I shift my third out when its chill.' ' The class didn't dare laugh. Their eyes burned down at their laps in shame. Mary managed to throw Carl Blair a compassionate glance as he returned to his seat, but she instantly regretted ever having been kind to him. "Mary Walden, you seemed uncommonly interested in reading something just now. Perhaps you wouldn't mind reading your assignment to the class." There it was, and just when the class was almost over. Mary could have scratched Carl Blair. She clutched her paper grimly and strode to the front. "Today's assignment in Pliarmacy History is, 'Schizophrenia since the Ancient Pre-pharmacy days.' " Mary took enough breath to get into the first paragraplu "Schizophrenia is where two or more personalities live in the same brain. The ancients of the #th Century actually looked upon schizophrenia as a disease! Everyone felt it was very shameful to have a schizophrenic person in the family, and. since children lived right with the same parents who had borne them, it was very bad. If you were a schizophrenic child in the #th Century, you would be locked up behind bars and people would call you -- " Mary blushed and stumbled over the daring word -- "crazy." "The ancients locked up strong ego groups right along with weak ones. Today we would lock up those ancient people." HE class agreed silently. "But there were more and more schizophrenics to lock up. By # the prisons and hospitals were so full of schizophrenic people that the ancients did not have room left to lock up any more. They, were beginning to see that soon everyone would be schizophrenic. "Of course, in the #th Century, the schizophrenic people were almost as helpless and 'crazy as the ancient Modern men. Naturally tley did not fight wars and lead tlie silly life of the Moderns, but without proper drugs they couldn't control their Ego-shiftability. The personalities in a brain would always be fighting each other. One personality would cut the body or hurt it or make it filthy, so that when the other personality took over the body, it would have to suffer. No, the schizophrenic people of the #th Century were almost as 'crazy' as the ancient Modems. "But then the drugs were invented one by one and the schizophrenic people of the #th Century were freed of their troubles. With the drugs the personalities of each body were able to live side by side in harmony at last. It turned out that many schizophrenic people, called overendowed personalities, simply had so many talents and viewpoints that it took two or more personalities to handle everything. "The drugs worked so well that schizophrenic people out from behind the bars of 'crazy' houses. That was the Great Emancipation of the #s. From then on, schizophrenic people had trouble only when they criminally didn't take their drugs. Usually, there are two egos in a schizophrenic person -- the hyperalter, or prime ego, and the hypoalter, the alternate ego. There often were more than two, but the Medicorps makes us take our drugs so that won't happen to us. "At last someone realized that  if everyone took the new drugs, the great wars would stop. At the World Congress of #, laws were passed to make everyone take the drugs. Tlicrc were many fights over this because some people wanted to stay Modern and fight wars. The Medicorps was organized and told to kill anyone who wouldn't take their drugs as prescribed. Now the laws arc enforced and everybody takes the drugs and the hyperalter and hypoalter are each allowed to have the body for an ego-shift of five days... Mary Walden faltered. She looked up at the faces of her classmates, started to turn to Mrs. Harris and felt the sickness growing in her head. Six great waves of crescendo silence washed through her. The silence swept away everything but the terror, which stood in her frail body like a shrieking rock. Mary heard Mrs. Harris hurry to the shining dispensary along one wall of the classroom and return to stand before her with a swab of antiseptic and a disposable syringe. Mrs. Harris helped her to a chair. A few minutes after the expert injection, Mary's mind struggled back from its core of silence.  "Mary, dear, I'm sorry. I haven't been watching you closely enough." "Oh, Mrs. Harris... Mary's chin trembled. "I hope it never happens again." "Now. child, we alt have to go through these things when we're young. You're just a little slower than the others in acclimatizing to the drugs. You'll be fourteen soon and the mcdicop assures me you'll be over this sort of thing just as the others are." Mrs. Harris dismissed the class and when they had all filed from the room, she turned to Mary. "I think, dear, we should visit the clinic together, don't you?" "Yes, Mrs. Harris." Mary was not frightened now. She was just ashamed to be such a difficult child and so slow to acclimatize to the drugs. As she and the teacher walked down the long corridor to the clinic, Mary made up her mind to tell the mcdicop what she thought was wrong. It was not herself. It was her hypoalter, that nasty little Susan Shorrs. Sometimes, when Susan had the the things Suaan was dr' .id thinking came to Ma:. like what the ancients had Coiled dreams, and Mary had never liked this secondary ego whom she could liever really know. Whatever was wrong, it was Susan's doing. The filthy creature never took care of her hair, it was always so messy when Susan shifted the body to her. Mrs. Harris waited while Mary went into the clinic. Mary was glad to find Captain Thiel, the nice medicop, on duty. But she was silent while the 'X-rays were being taken, and, of course, while he got the blood samples, she concentrated on being brave. Later, while Captain Thiel looked in her eyes with the bright little light, Mary said calmly, "Do you know my hypoalter, Susan Shorrs?"  The medicop drew back and made some notes on a pad before answering. "Why. yes. She's in here quite often too." "Does she look like me?" "Not much. She's a very nice little girl... He hesitated, visibly fumbling. Mary blurted, "Tell me truly, what's she like?" Captain Thiel gave her his nice smile. "Well, I'll tell you a secret if you keep it to yourself." "Oh, I promise." He leaned over and whispered in her ear and she liked the clean odor of him. "She's not nearly as pretty as you are." Mary wanted very badly to put her arms around him and hug him. Instead, wondering if Mrs. Harris, waiting outside, had heard, she drew back self-consciously and said. "Susan is the cause of all this trouble, the nasty little thing." W "Oh now!' the medicop exclaimed. "I don't think so, Mary. She's in trouble, too, you know." "She still cats sauerkraut." Mary was defiant. "But what's wrong with that?' "You told her not to last year because it makes me sick on my shift. But it agrees in buckets with a little pig like her." The medicop took this seriously. He made a note on the pad. "Mary, you should have complained sooner." "Do you think my father might not like me because Susan Shorrs is my hypoalter?" she asked abruptly. "I hardly think so, Mary. After all, he doesn't even know her. He's never on her Ego shift." "A little bit," Mary said, and was immediately frightened. Captain Thiel glanced at her sharply. "What do you mean by that, child?" "Oh, nothing." Mary said hastily. "I just thought maybe he was." "Let me see your pharmacase," he said rather severely. Mary slipped the pharmacase off the belt at her waist and . handed it to him. Captain Thiel extracted the prescription card from the back and threw it away. He slipped a new card in the taping machine on his desk and punched out a new prescription, which he reinserted in the pharmacase. In. the space on the front, he wrote directions for Mary to take the drugs numbered from left to right. Mary watched his serious face and remembered that he had complimented her about being prettier than Susan. "Captain Thiel, is your hypoalter as handsome as you are?" The young medicop emptied the remains of the old prescription from the pharmacase and took it to the dispensary in the corner, where he slid it into the by her question and simply muttered. "Much handsomer." The machine automatically filled the case from the punched card on its back and he returned it to Mary. "Are you taking your drugs exactly as prescribed? You know there are very strict laws about that, and as soon as you are fourteen, you will be held to them." Mary nodded solemnly. Great straitjackets, who didn't know there were laws about taking your drugs? There was a long pause and Mary knew she was supposed to leave. She wanted, though, to stay with Captain Thiel and talk with him. She wondered how it would be if he were appointed her father. Mary was not hurt that her  shy compliment to him had gone unnoticed. She had only wanted something to talk about. Finally she said desperately, "Captain Thiel, how is it possible for a body to change as much from one Ego shift to another as it does between Susan and me?' "There isn't all the change you imagine,' he said. "Have you had your first physiology?" "Yes. I was very good ... Mary saw from his smile that her inadvertent little conceit had trapped her. "Then, Miss Mary Walden, how do you think it is possible?" Why did teachers and medicops have to be this way? When all you wanted was to have them talk to you, they turned everything around and made you think. She quoted unhappily from her schoolbook, "The main things in an ego shift are the two vegetative nervous systems that translate the conditions of either personality to the blood and other organs right from the brain. The vegetative nervous systems change the rate at which the liver burns or stores sugar and the rate at which the kidneys excrete...' Through the closed door to the other room, Mrs. Harris's voice raised at the visiophone said distinctly, "But, Mr. Walden... "Reabsorb," corrected Captain Thiel. "What?" She didn't know what to listen to -- the medicop or the distant voice of Mrs. Harris. "It's better to think of the kidneys as reabsorbing salts and nutrients from the filtrated blood.' "Oh." "But, Mr. Walden, we can overdo a good thing. The proper amount of neglect is definitely required for full development of some personality types and Mary certainly is one of those... "What about the pituitary gland that's attached to the brain and controls all the other glands during the shift of egos?" pressed Captain Thiel distractingly. "But, Mr. Walden, too much neglect at this critical point may, cause another personality to split off and we can't have that. Ade quate personalities are congenital. A new one now would only rob the present personalities. You are the appointed parent of this child and the Board of Education will enforce your compliance with our diagnosis... Mary's mind leaped to a page in one of her childhood storybooks. It was an illustration of a little girl resting beneath a great tree that overhung a brook. There were friendly little wild animals about. Mary could see the page clearly and she thought about it very hard instead of crying. "Aren't you interested any more, Mary?" Captain Thiel was looking at her strangely. The agitation in her voice was a surprise. "I have to get home. I have a lot of things to do." Outside, when Mrs. Harris seemed suddenly to realize that something was wrong, and delicately probed to find out whether her angry voice had been overheard, Mary said calmly and as if it didn't matter, "Was my father home when you called him before?" "Why -- yes. Mafy. But you mustn't pay any attention to conversations like that, darling." You can'i force him to like me, she thought to herself, and she was angry with Mrs. Harris because now her father would only dislike her more. Neither her father nor her mother was home when Mary walked into the evening-darkened apartment. It was the first day of the family shift, and on that day, for many periods now. they had not been home until late. Mary walked through the empty rooms, turning on lights. She passed up the electrically heated dinner her father had set out for her. Presently she found herself at the storage room door. She opened it slowly. After hesitating a while she went in and began an exhausting search for the old storybook with the picture in It. Finally she knew she could not find it. She stood in the middle of the junk-filled room and began to cry. npHE day which ended fof Mary Walden in lonely weeping should have been, for Conrad Manz, a pleasant rest day with an hour of rocket racing in the middle of it. Instead, he awakened with a shock to hear his wife actually talking while she was aseep. He stood over her bed and made certain that she was asleep. It was as though her mind thought it was somewhere else, doing something else. Vaguely he remembered that the ancients did something called dreaming while they slept and the thought made him shiver. Clara Man# was saying, "Oh, Bill, they'll catch us. We can't pretend any more unless we have drugs. Haven't we any drugs. Bill?" Then she was silent and lay still. Her breathing was shallow and even in the dawn light her cheeks were deeply flushed against the blonde hair. Having just awakened. Conrad was on a very low drug level and the incident was unpleasantly disturbing. He picked up his pharmacase from beside his bed and made his way to the bathroom. He took his hypothalamic  block and the integration enzymes and returned to the bedroom. Clara was still sleeping. She had been behaving oddly for some time, but there had never been an'thing as disturbing as this. He felt that he should call a medicop, but, of course, he didn't want to do anything that extreme. It was probably something with a simple explanation. Clara was a little scatterbrained at times. Maybe she had forgotten to take her sleeping compound and that was what caused dreaming. The very word made his powerful body chill. But if she was neglecting to take any of her drugs and he called in a medicop, it would be serious. Conrad went into the library and found the Family Pharmacy. He switched on a light in the dawn-shrunken room and let his heavy frame into a chair. A Guide to Better Understanding oi your Family Prescriptions. Of#cial Edition, #. The book was mostly Medicorps propaganda and almost never gave a practical suggestion. If something went wrong, you called a medicop. Conrad hunted through the book for the section on sleeping compound. It was funny, too, about that name Bill. Conrad went over all the men of their acquaintance with whom Clara had occasional affairs or with whom she was friendly and he couldn't remember a single Bill. In fact, the only man with that name whom he could think of was his own hyperalter, Bill Walden. But that was naturally impossible. Maybe dreaming was always about imaginary people. ture of soporific and hypnotic alkaloids and synthetics. A critical drug; an essential feature in every prescription. Slight deviations in following prescription are unallowable because of the subtle manner in which behavior may be altered over months or years. The first sleeping compound was announced by Thomas Marshall in #. The formula has been modified only twice since then. There followed a tightly packed description of the chemistry and pharmacology of the various ingredients. Conrad skip ped through this. The importance of Sleeping Compound in the life of every individu and to society is best appreciated when we recall Marshall's words announcing its initial development: "It is during so-called norotal sleep that the vicious unconscious mind responsible for wars and other symptoms of unhappiness develops its resources and its hold on our conscious lives. "In this normal sleep the critical faculties of the cortex are paralyzed. Meanwhile, the infantile unconscious mind expands misinterpreted expericrsce into the toxic patterns of neuroshi and psychosis. The conscious mind takes over at morning, unaware that these infantile motivations have been cleverly woven into its very structure. IJ "Slecpine Compound will stop this.' There is no unconscious activity after taking this harmless drug. We believe the Medicorps should at once initiate its use. n these children, as the years go by. infantile patterns unable to work during sleep will fight a losing battle during waking hours with conscious patterns accumulating in the direction of adulthood." That was all there was -- mostly the Medicorps patting its own back for saving humanity. But if you were in trouble and called a medicop, you'd risk getting into real trouble. Conrad became aware of Clara standing in the doorway. The flush of her disturbed emotions and the pallor of her fatigue mixed in ragged banners on her cheeks. Conrad waved the FanMly Pharmacy with a foolish gesture of embarrassment. "Young lady, hove you been have you been neglecting to take your sleeping compound?" Clara turned utterly pale. "I -- I don't understand." "You were talking in your sleep." "I -- was?" She came forward so unsteadily that he helped her to a seat. She stared at him. He asked jovially, "Who is this 'Bill' you were so desperately involved with? Have you been having an affair I don't know about? Aren't my friends good enough for you?" The result of this banter was that she alarmingly began to cry, clutching her robe about her and dropping her blonde head on her knees and sobbing. were acclimatized to the drugs, but Conrad Manx had never in his life seen an adult cry. Though he had taken his morning drugs and certain disrupting emotions were already impossible, nevertheless this sight was completely unnerving. In gasps between her spbs', Clara was saying, "Oh, I can't go back to taking them! But I can't keep this up! I just can't!" "Clara, darling, I don't know what to say or do. I think we ought to call the Medicorps." Intensely frightened, she rose and clung to him, begging. "Oh, no, Conrad, that isn't necessary! It isn't necessary at all. I've only neglected to take my sleeping compound and it won't happen again. All I need is a sleeping compound. Please get my pharmacase for me and it will be all right." She was so desperate to convince him that Conrad got tlie pharmacase and a glass of water for her only to appease the white face of fright. Within a few minutes of taking the sleeping compound, she was calm. As he put her back to bed, she laughed with a lazy indolence. "Oh. Conrad, you take it so seriously. I only needed a sleeping compound very badly and now I feel fine. I'll sleep all day. It's a rest day. isn't it? Now go race a rocket and stop worrying and thinking about calling the medicops." But Conrad did not go rocket racing as he had planned. Clara had been asleep only a few minutes when there was a call on tlie visiophone; they wanted him at the office. The city of Santa Fe would be completely out of balance within twelve shifts if revised plans were not put into operation immediately. They were to start during the next five days while he would be out of shift. In order to carry on the first day of their next shift, he and the other three traffic managers he worked with would have to come down today and familiarize themselves with the new operations. There was no getting out of it. His rest day was spoiled. Conrad resented it all the more because Santa Fe was clear out on the edge of their traffic district and could have been revised out of the Mexican offices just as well. But those boys down there rested all five days of their shift. Conrad looked in on Clara before he left and found her asleep in the total suspension of proper drug level. The unpleasant memory of her behavior made him squirm, but now that the episode was over, it no longer worried him. It was typical of him that, things having been set straight in the proper manner, he did not think of her again until late in the afternoon. A S early as #, the pioneer communications engineer Norbert Wiener had pointed out that there might be a close parallel between disassociation of personalities and the disruption of a communication system. Wiener referred back specifically to the first clear description, by Morton Prince, of multiple personalities existing together in the same human body. Prince had described only individual cases and his observations were not altogether acceptable in Wiener's time. Nevertheless. in the schizophrenic society of the #th Century, a major manageiial problem was that of balancing the communicating and non-communicating populations in a city. As far as Conrad and the other traffic men present at the conference were concerned, Santa Fc was a resort and retirement area of # human bodies, alive and consuming more than they ia produced every day of the year. Whatever the representatives of the Medicorps and Communications Board worked out, it would mean only slight changes in the types of foodstuffs, entertainment and so forth moving into Santa Fe. and Conrad could have grasjied the entire traffic change in ten minutes after the real problem had been settled. But. as usual, he and the other traffic men had to sit through two hours while small wheels from the Medicorps and Communications acted big about rebalancing a city. For them, Conrad had to admit, Santa Fe was a great deal more complex than # cwisuming, moderately producing human bodies. It was # human personalities, two to each body. Conrad wondered sometimes what they would have done if the three and four personality cases so comnon back in the #th and #st Centuries had been allowed to reproduce. The # personalities in Santa Fe were difficult enough. Like all cities, Santa Fe operated in five shifts, A, B, C, D, and E. Just as it was supposed to be for Conrad in his city, today was rest day for the # hypoalters on D-shift in Santa Fe. Tonight at around #:# P.M. they would all go to shifting rooms and be replaced by their hyperalters, who had different tastes in food and pleasure and took different drugs. Tomorrow would be rest day for the hypoalters on E-shift and in the evening they would turn things over to their hyperalters. The next day it would be rest for the A-shift hyperalters and three days after that the D-shift hyperalters, including Bill Walden, would rest till evening, when Conrad and the D-shift hypoalters everywhere would again have their five day use of their bodies. Right now the trouble with Santa Fe's retired population, which worked only for its own maintenance, was that too many elderly people on the D-shift and E-shift had been dying off. This point was brought out by a dapper young department head from Communications. Conrad groaned when, as he knew would happen, a Medicorps officer promptly set out on an exhaustive demonstration that Medicorps predictions of deaths for Santa Fe had indicated clearly that Communications should have been moving people from D-shift and E-shift into the area. Actually, it appeared that someone from Communications had blundered and had overloaded the quota of people on A-shift and B-shift moving to Santa Fe. Thus on one rest day there weren't enough people working to keep things going, and later in the week there were so many available workers that they were clogging the city. None of this was heated exchange or in any way emotional. It was just interminably, exhaustively logical and boring. Conrad fidgeted through two hours of it, seeing his chance for a rocket race dissolving. When at last the problem of balanced shiftpopulations for Santa Fe was worked out, it took him and the other traffic men only a few minutes to apply tlieir tables and reschedule traffic to coordinate with the population changes. Disgusted, Conrad walked over to the Tennis Club and had lunch. There were still two hours of his rest day left when Conrad Manz realized that Bill Walden was again forcing an early shift. Conrad was in the middle of a volley-tennis game and he didn't like having the shift forced so soon. People generally shifted at their appointed regular hour every five days, and a hyperalter was not supposed to use his power to force shift. It was sucli an unthinkable thing nowadays that there was occasional talk of abolishing the terms hyperalter and hypoalter because they were somewhat disparaging to the hypoalter, and really designated only the antisocial power of the hyperalter to force the shift. Bill Walden had been cheating two to four hours on Conrad every shift for several periods back. Conrad could have reported it to the Mcdicorps, but he himself was guilty of a constant misdemeanor about which Bill had not yet complained. Unlike tlie sedentary Walden. Conrad Manz enjoyed exercise. He overindulged in violent sports and put off sleep, letting Bill Walden make up the fatigue on his shift. That was undoubtedly why the poor old sucker had started cheating a few hours on Conrad's rest day. Conrad laughed to himself, remembering the time Bill Walden had registered a long list of sports which he wished Conrad to be restrained from -- rocket racing, deepsea exploration, jet-skiing. It had only given Conrad some ideas he hadn't had before. The Medicorps had refused to enforce the list on the basis that danger and violent exercise were a necessary outlet for Conrad's constitution. Then poor old Bill had written Conrad a note threatening to sue him for any injury resulting from such sports. As if he had a change against the Mcdicorps ruling! Conrad knew it was no use trying to finish the volley-tennis game. He lost interest and IB couldn't concentrate on what he was doing when Bill started forcing the shift, Conrad shot the ball back at his opponent in a blistering curve impossible to intercept. 'So long," he yelled at the man. "I've got some things to do before my shift ends." He lounged into the locker rooms and showered, put his clothes and belongings, including his pharmacase, in a shipping carton, addressed them to his own home and dropped them in the mail chute. He stepped with languid nakedness across the hall, pressed his identifying wristband to a lock-face and dialed his clothing sizes. In this way he procured a neatly wrapped, clean shifting costume from the slot. He put it on without bothering to return to his shower room. He shouted a loud good-bye to no one in particular among the several men and women in the baths and stepied out onto the street. Conrad felt too good even to be sorry that his shift was over. After all, nothing happened except you came to, five days later, on your next shift. The important thing was the rest day. He had always said the last day of the shift should be a work day; then you would be glad it was over. He guessed the idea was to rest the body before another personality took over. Well, poor old Bill Walden never got a rested body. He probably slept off the first twelve hours. Walking unhurriedly through the street crowds, Conrad entered a public shifting station and found an empty room. As he started to open the door, a girl came out of the adjoining booth and Conrad hastily averted his glance. She was still rearranging her hair. There were so many rude people nowadays who didn't seem to care at all about the etiquette of shifting, women particularly. They were always redoing their hair or makeup where a person couldn't help seeing them. Conrad pressed his identifying wristband to the lock and entered the booth he had picked. The act automatically sent the time and his shift number to Mcdicorps Headquarters. Once inside the shifting room, Conrad went to the lavatory and turned on the faucet of makeup solvent. In spite of losing two hours of his rest day, he decided to be decent to old Bill, though he was half tempted to leave his makeup on. It was a pretty foul joke, of course, especially on a humorless fellow like poor Walden. # Conrad creamed his face thoroughly and then washed in water k and used the automatic dryer. He looked at his strong-lined features in the mirror. They displayed a less distinct expression of his own personality with the makeup gone. He turned away from the mirror and it was only then that he remembered he hadn't spoken to his wife before shifting. Well, he couldn't decently call up and let her see him without makeup. He stepped across to the visiophone and set the machine to deliver his spoken message in type: "Hello, Clara. Sorry I forgot to call you before. Bill Walden is forcing me to shift early again. I hope you're not still upset about that business this morning. Be a good girl and smile at me on the next shift. I love you. Conrad." IOR a moment, when the shift came, the body of Conrad Manz stood moronically uninhabited. Then, rapidly, out of the gyri of its brain, the personality of Bill Walden emerged, replacing the slackly powerful attitude of Conrad by the slightly prim preciseness of Bill's bearing. The face, just now relaxed with readiness for action, was abruptly pulled into an intellectualized mask of tension by habitual patterns of conflict in the muscles. There were also acute momentary signs of clash between the vegetative nervous activity characteristic of Bill Walden and the internal homeostasis Conrad Manz had left behind him. The face paled as hypersensitive vascular beds closed down under new vegetative volleys. Bill Walden grasped sight and sound, and the sharp odor of makeup solvent stung his nostrils. He was conscious of only one clamoring, terrifying thought : They will catch us. It cannot go on much longer without Helen guessing about Clara. She is already angry about Clara delaying the shift, and if she earns from Mary that I am cheating on Conrad's shift... Any time now, perhaps this time, when the shift is over, I wilt be looking into the face of a medicop who is pulling a needle from my arm, and then it'll all be over. So far, at least, there was no medicop. Still feeling unreal but anxious not to lose precious moments. Bill took an individualized kit from the wall dispenser and made himself up. He was sparing and subtle in his use of the makeup, unlike the horrible makeup jobs Conrad Manz occasionally left on. Bill rearranged his hair. Conrad always wore it too short for his taste, but you couldn't complain about everything. Bill sat in a chair to await some of the slower aspects of the shift. He knew that an hour after he left the booth, his basal metabolic rate would be ten points higher. His blood sugar would go down steadily. In the next five days he would lose six to eight pounds, which Conrad later would promptly regain. Just as Bill was about to leave the booth, he remembered to pick up a news summary. He put his wristband to the switch on the telephoto and a freshly printed summary of the last five days in the world fell into the rack. His wristband, of course, called forth one edited for hyperalters on the D-shift. It did not mention by name any hypoalter on the D-shift. Should one of them have done something that it was necessary for Bill or other D-shift hyperalters to know about, it would appear in news summaries called forth by their wristbands -- but told in such fashion that the personality involved seemed namelessly incidental, while names and pictures of hyperalters and hypoalters on any of the other four shifts naturally were freely used. The purpose was to keep Conrad Manz and all other hypoalters on the D-shift, one-tenth of the total population, non-existent as far as their hyperalters were concerned. This convention made it necessary for photoprint summaries to be on light-sensitive paper that blackened illegibly before six hours were up, so that a man might never stumble on news about his hypoalter. Bill did not even glance at the news summary. He had picked it up only for 'appearances. The summaries were essential if you were going to start where you left off on your last shift and have any knowledge of the five intervening days. A man just didn't walk out of a shifting room without one. It was failure to do little things like that that would start them wondering about him. Bill opened the door of the booth by applying his wristband to the lock and stepped out into the street. Late afternoon crowds pressed about him. Across the boulevard, a helicopter landing swarmed with clouds of rising commuters. Bill had some trouble figuring out the part of the city Conrad had left him in and walked two blocks before he understood where he was. Then he got into an idle two-place cab, started the motor with his wristband and hurried the little three-wheeler recklessly through the traffic. Clara was probably already waiting and he first had to go home and get dressed. The thought of Clara waiting for him in the park near her home was a sharp reminder of his strange situation. He was in a U left you with shame, and a fear that the other fellow would tell people you seemed to have a pathological interest in your alter and must need a change in your prescription. But the most flagrant abuser of such morbid little exchanges would have been horrified to learn that right here, in the middle of the daylight traffic, was a man who was using his antisocial shifting power to meet in secret the wife of his own hypoaltcr! Bill did not have to wonder what the Medicorps would think. Relations between hyperalters world that was literally not supposed to exist for him, for it was the world of his own hypoaltcr, Conrad Manr. Undoubtedly, there were people in the traffic up ahead who knew both him and Conrad, people from the other shifts who never mentioned the one to the other except in those guarded, snickering little confidences they couldn't resist telling and you couldn't resist listening to. After all. the most important person in the world was your alter. If he got sick, injured or killed, so would you. Thus, in moments of intimacy or joviality, an undercover exchange went on... Ill tell you about your hyperalter if you'll tell we about my hypoatter. It was orthodox bad manners that and hypoalters of opposite sex were punishable -- drastically punishable. ment. Bill remembered to order a dinner for his daughter Mary. His order, dialed from the day's menu, was delivered to the apartment pneumatically and he set it out over electric warmefs. He wanted to write a note to the child, but he  started two and threw both in the basket. He couldn't think of anything to say to her. Staring at the lonely table he was leaving for Mary. Bill felt his guilt overwhelming him. He could stop the behavior which led to the guilt by taking his drugs as prescribed. They would return him immediately to the sane and ordered Conformity of the world. He would no longer have to carry the fear that the Medicorps would discover he was not taking his drugs. He would no longer neglect his appointed child. He would no longer endanger the very life of Conrad's wife Clara and, of course, his own. When you took your drugs as prescribed, it was impossible to experience such ancient and primitive emotions as guilt. Even should you miscalculate and do something wrong, the drug would not allow any such emotional reaction. To be free to experience his guilt over the lonely child who needed hini was, for these reasons, a precious thing to Bill. In all the world, this night, he was undoubtedly the only man who could and did feel one of the ancient emotions. People felt shame, not guilt; conceit, not pride; pleasure, not desire. Now that he had stopped taking his dugs as prescribed, Bill realized that the drugs allowed only an impoverished segment of a vivid emotional spectrum. But however exciting it was to live them, the ancient emotions did not seem to act as deterrents to bad behavior. Bill's sense of guilt did not keep him from continuing to neglect Mary. His fear of being caught did not restrain him from breaking every rule of inter-alter law and loving Clara, his own hypoalter's wife. B ill got dressed as rapidly as possible. He tossed the discarded shifting costume into the return chute. He retouched his makeup, trying to eliminate some of the heavy, inexpressive planes of muscularity which were more typical of Conrad than of himself. The act reminded him of the shame which his wife Helen had felt when she learned, a few years ago, that her own hypoalter, Clara, and his hypoalter, Conrad. had obtained from the Mcdicorps a special release to marry. Such rare marriages in which the same bodies lived together on both halves of a shift were something to snicker about. They verged on the antisocial, but could be arranged if the batteries of Mcdicorps tests could be satisfied. Perhaps it had been the very intensity of Helen's shame on learning of this marriage, the nauseous display of conformity so typical of his wife, that had first given Bill the idea of seeking out Clara, who had dared convention to make such a peculiar marriage. Over the years, Helen had continued blaming all their troubles on the fact that both egos of himself were living with, and intimate with, both egos of herself. So Bill had started cutting down on his drugs, the curiosity having become an obsession. What was this other part of Helen like, this Clara who was unconventional enough to want to marry only Bill's own hypoalter, in spite of almost certain public shame? He had first seen Clara's face when it formed on a visiophone, the first time he had forced Conrad to shift prematurely. It was softer than Helen's. The delicate contours were less purposefully set, gayer. SO "Clara Manz?" Bill had sat there staring at the visiophone for several seconds, unable to continue. His great fear that she would immediately report him must have been naked on his face. He had watched an impish suspicion grow in the tender curve of her lips and her oblique glance from the visiophone. She did not speak. "Mrs. Manz," he finally said, "I would like to meet you in the park across from your home." To this awkward opening he owed the first time he had heard Clara laugh. Her warm, clear laughter, teasing him, tumbled forth like a cloud of gay butterflies. "Are you afraid toee me here at home because my husband might walk in on us?" Bill had been put completely at ease by this bantering indication that Clara knew who he was and welcomed him as an intriguing diversion. Quite literally, the one person who could not walk in on them, as the ancients thought of it. was his own hypoalter, Conrad Manz, makeup and hurried to leave the apartment. But this time, as he passed the table where Mary's dinner was set out. he decided to write a few words to the child, no matter how empty they sounded to himself. The note he left explained that he had some early work to do at the microfilm library where he worked. Just as Bill was leaving the apartment, the visiophone buzzed. In his hurry Bill flipped the switch before he thought. Too late, his hand froze and the implications of this call, an hour before anyone would normally be home, shot a shaft of terroC through him. But it was not the image of a medicop that formed on the screen. The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Harris, one of Mary's teachers. It was strange that she should have thought he might be home. The shift for children was half a day earlier than that for adults, so the parents could have half their rest day free. This afternoon would be for Mary the first classes of her shift, but the teacher must have guessed something was wrong with the shifting schedules in Mary's family. Of had the child told her? Mrs. Harris explained rather dramatically that Mary was being neglected. What could he say to her? That he was a criminal breaking drug regulations in the most flagrant manner? That nothing, not even the child appointed to him, meant more tdi him than his wife's own hypoalter? Bill finally ended the hopeU less and possibly dangerous conversation by turning off the receiver and leaving the apartment. Bill realized that now, for both him and Clara, the greatest joy had been those first few times together. The enormous threat of a Medicorps retaliation took the pleasure from their contact and they came together desperately because, having tasted this fantastic non-conformity and the new undrugged intimacy, there was no other way for them. Even now as he drove through the traffic toward where she would be waiting, he was not so much concerned with meeting Clara in their fear-poisoned present as with the vivid, aching remembrance of what those meetings once had really been like. He recalled an evening they had spent lying on the summer lawn of the park, looking out at the haze-dimmed stars. It had been shortly after Clara joined him in cutting down on the drugs, and the clear memory of their quiet laughter so captured his tnind now that Bill almost tangled his car in the traffic. In memory he kissed her again and, as it had then, the newly cur grass mixed with the exciting fragrance of her skin. After the kiss they continued a mock discussion of the ancient word "sin." Bill pretended to be trying to explain the meaning of the word to her, sometimes with definitions that kept them laughing and sometimes with demonstrational kisses that stopped their laughter. He could remember Clara's face turned to him in the evening light with an outrageous parody of interest. He could hear himself saying, "You see, the ancients would say we are not sinning because they would disagree with the medicops that you and Helen arc two completely different people, or that Conrad and I are not the same person." Clara kissed him with an air of tentative experimentation. Mmm, no. I can't say I care for that interpretation." "You'd rather be sinning?" "Definitely." "Well, if the ancients did agree with the medicops that we are distinct from our alters. Helen and Conrad, then they would say we are sinning -- but not for the same reasons the Medicorps would give," "That," asserted Clara, "is where I get lost. If this sinning business is going to be worth anything at all, it has to be something you can identify." Bill cut his car out of the main stream of traffic and toward the park, without interrupting his memory. "Well, darling, I don't want to confuse you, but the medicops  would say we arc sinning only because you are my wife's hypoalter. and I am your husband's hyperalter -- in other words, for the very reason the ancients would say we are not sinning. Furthermore, if either of us were with anyone else, the medicops would think it was perfectly alt right, and so would Conrad and Helen. Provided, of course, I took a hyperalter and you took a hy poalter only." "Of course." Clara said, and Bill hurried over the gloomy fact. "The ancients, on the other hand, would say we are sinning because we are making love  to someone we are not married to." "But what's the matter with that? Everybody does it." "The ancient Moderns didn't. Or, that is, they often did, but..." Clara brought her full lips hungrily to his. "Darling, I think the ancient Moderns had the right idea, though I don't see how they ever arrived at it." Bill grinned. "It was just an invention of theirs, along with the wheel and atomic energy." That evening was long gone by as Bill stopped the little taxi beside the park and left it there for the next user. He walked across the lawns toward the statue where he and Clara always met. The very thought of entering one's own hypoalter's house was so unnerving that Bill brought himself to do it only by first meeting Clara near the statue. As he walked between the trees. Bill could not again capture the spirit of that evening he had been remembering. The Medicorps was too close. It was impossible to laugh that way now. Bill arrived at the statue, but Clara was, not there. He waited impatiently while a livid sunset coagulated between the branches of the great trees. Clara should have been there first. It was easier for her. because she was leaving her shift, and without doing it prematurely. The park was like a quiet backwater in the eddying rush of the evening city. Bill felt conspicuous and vulnerable in the gloaming light. Above all, he felt a new loneliness, and he knew that now Clara felt it, too. They needed each other as each had been, before fear had bleached their feeling to white bones of desperation. They were not taking their drugs as prescribed, and for that they would be horribly punished. That was the only unforgivable sin in their world. By committing it, he and Clara had found out .what life could be, in the same act that would surely take life from them. Their powerful emotions they had found in abundance simply by refusing to take the drugs and by being together briefly each hfth day in a dan gerous breach of all convention. The closer their discovery and the greater their terror, the more desperately they needed even their terror, and the more impossible became the delight of their first meetings. Telegraphing bright beads of sound, a night bird skimmed the sunset lawns to the looming statue and skewed around its monolithic base. The bird's piping doubled and then choked off as it veered frantically from Bill. After a while, far off through the park, it released a fading protest of song. Above Bill, the towering tatue of the great Alfred Morris blackened against the sunset. The hollowed granite eyes bore down on him out of an undecipherable dark... the ancient, implacable face of the Medicorps. As if to pronounce a sentence on his present crimes by a magical disclosure of the weight of centuries, a pool of sulfurous light and leaf shadows danced on the painted plaque at the base of the statue. On this spot in the Gregorian year #, Alfred Morris announced to an assembly of war survivors the hypothalamic block. His stirring words were, This new drug selectively halts at the thalamic brain the upWard flow of unconscious stimuli and the downward flow of unconscious motivations. It acts as a screen between the cerebrufn and the psychosomatic discharge system. Using hypothalamic block, we will not act emotively, we will initiate acts only from the logical demands of situstions." This announcement and the subsequent wholehearted action of the warweary people made the taking of hypothalamic block obligatory. This put an end to the powerful play of unconscious mind in the public and private affairs of the ancient world. It ended the great paranoid wars and saved mankind. In the strange evening light, the letters seemed alive, a centuries-old condemnation of any who might try to go back to the ancient pre-pharmacy days. Of course, it was not really possible to go back. Without drugs, everybody and all society would fall apart. The ancients had first learned to keep endocrine deviates such as the diabetic alive with drugs. Later they learned with other drugs to "cure" the far more prevalent disease, schizophrenia, that was jamming their hospitals. The big change came when the ancients used these same drugs on everyone to control the private and public irrationality of their time and stop the wars. In this new, drugged world, tlie schizophrene thrived better than any, and the world became patterned on him. But, just as the diabetic was still diabetic, the schizophrene was still himself, plus the drugs. Meanwhile, everyone had forgotten what it was the drugs did to you -- that the emotions experienced were blurred emotions, that insight was at an isolated level of rationality because the drugs kept true feelings from ever emerging. How inconceivable it would be to Helen and the other people of his world to live on as little drug as possible... to experience the conflicting emotions, the interplay of passion and logic that almost tore you apart! Sober, the ancients called it. and they lived that way most of the time, with only the occasional crude and clublike effects of alcohol or narcotics to relieve their chronic anxiety. By taking as little hypothalamic block as possible, he and Clara were able to desire their fantastic attachment, to delight in an absolutely illogical situation unheard of in their society. But the society would judge their refusal to take hypothalamic block in only one sense. The weight of this judgment stood before him in the smoldering words. "It ended the reat paranoid wars and saved mankind." When Clara did appear, she was searching myopically in the wrong vicinity of the statue. He did not call to her at once, letting the sight of her smooth out the tensions in him, convert all the conflicts into this one intense longing to be with her. Her halting search for him was deeply touching, like that of  tragic little puppet in a darkening dumbshow. He saw suddenly how like puppets the two of them were. They were moved by the strengthening wires of a new life of feeling to batter clumsily at an implacable stage setting that would finally leave them as bits of wood and paper. Then suddenly in his arms Clara was at the same time hungrily moving and tense with fear of discovery. Little sounds of love and fear choked each other in her throat. Her blonde head pressed tightly into his shoulder and she clung to him with desperation. She said, 'Conrad was disturbed by my tension this morning and made me take a sleeping compound. I've just awakened.' They walked fco her home in silence and even in the darkened apartment they used only the primitive monosyllables of apprehensive need. Beyond these mere sounds of compassion, they had long ago said all that could be said. Because Bill was the hyperalter, he had no fear that Conrad could force a shift on him. When later they lay in darkness, he allowed himself to drift into a brief slumber. Without the sleeping compound, distorted events came and went without reason. Dreaming, the ancients had called it. It was one of the most frightening things that had begun to happen when he first cut down on tlie drugs. Now, in the few seconds that he dozed, a thou'sand fragments of incidental knowledge, historical reading and emotional need melded and, in a strange contrast to their present tranquility, he was dreaming a frightful moment in the #th century. These are the great para-' nod wars, he thought. And it was so because he had thought it. He searched frantically through the glove compartment of an ancient automobile. "Wait," he pleaded. "I tell you we have sulfonamide-#. WeVc been taking it regularly as directed. We took a double dose back in Paterson because there were soft-bombs all through that part of Jersey and we didn't liow what would be declared Plague Area next." Now Bill threw things out of his satchel onto the floor and seat A the car, fumbling deeper by the flashlight Clara held. His heart beat thickly with terror. Then he remembered his pharmacase. Oh, why hadn't they rememlered sooner about their pharmacases. Bill tore at the belt about his waist. The Medicorps captain stepped back from the door of their car. He jerked his head at the dark form of the corporal standing in the roadway. "Shoot them. Run the car off the embankment before you burn it." Bill screamed metallically through the speaker of his radiation mask. "Wait. I've found it." He thrust the pharmacase out the door of the car. "This is a pharmacase." he explained. "We keep our drugs in one of these and it's belted to our waist so we are never without them." The captain of the Medicorps came back. He inspected the pharmacase and the drugs and returned it. "From now on. keep your drugs handy. Take them without fail according to radio instructions. Do you understand?" Clara's head pressed heavily against Bill's shoulder, and he could hear the tinny sound of her sobbing through the speaker of her mask. The captain stepped into the road again. "We'll have to bum your car. You passed through a Plague Area and it can't be sterilized on this route. About a mile up this road you'll come to a sterilization unit. Stop and have your person and belongings rayed. After that, keep walking, but stick to the road. You'll be shot if you'ce caught off it." The road was crowded with fleeing people. Their way was lighted by piles of cadavers U writhing in gasoline flames. The Medicorps was everywhere. Those who stumbled, those who coughed, the delirious and their helping partners... these were taken to the side of the road, shot and burned. And there was bombing again to the south. Bill stopped in the middle of the road and looked back. Clara clung to him. "There is a plague here we haven't any drug for," he said, and reali#ed he was crying. "We are all mad." Clara was crying too. "Darling, what have you done? Where arc the drugs?" The water of the Hudson hung as it had in the late afternoon, ice crystals in the stratosphere. The high, high sheet flashed and glowed in the new bombing to the south, where multicolored pillars of flame boiled into the sky. But the muffled crash of the distant bombing was suddenly the steady click of the urgent signal on a bedside visiophone, and Bill was abruptly awake. Clara was throwing on her robe and moving toward the machine on terror-rigid limbs. With a scrambling motion, Bill got out of the possible view of the machine and crouched at the end of the room.  Distinctly, he could hear the machine say. "Clara Manz?" 'Tcs." Clara's voice was a thin treble that could have been a shriek had it continued. "This is Medicorps Headquarters. A routine check discloses, you have delayed your shift two hours. To maintain the statistical record of deviations, please give us a full explanation." "I..." Clara had to swallow before she could talk. "I must have taken too much sleeping compound." "Mrs. Manz, our records indicate that you have been delaying your shift consistently for several periods now. We made a check of this as a routine follow up on any such deviation, but the discovery is quite serious." There was a harsh silence, a silence that demanded a logical answer. But how could there be a logical answer? "My hyperalter hasn't complained and I -- well, I have just let a bad habit develop. I'll see that it -- doesn't happen again," The machine voiced several platitudes about the responsibilities of one personality to another and the duty of all to society before Clara was able to shut it off. Both of them sat as they were for a long, long time while the tide of terror subsided. When at last they looked at each othei' across the dim and silent room, both of them knew there tould be at least one more time together before they were caught. F ive days later, on the last day of her shift, Mary Walden wrote the address of her appointed father's hypoalter, Conrad Manz, with an indelible pencil on the skin just below' her armpit. During the morning, her father and mother had spoiled the family rest day by quarreling. It was alx)ut Helen's hypoalter delaying so many shifts. Bill did not think it very important, but her mother was angry and threatened to complain to the Medicorps. The lunch was eaten in silence, except that at one point Bill said, "It seems to me Conrad and Clara Manz are guilty of a peculiar marriage, not us. Yet they seem perfectly happy with it and you're the one who is made unhappy. The woman has probably just developed a habit of taking too much sleeping compound for her rest day naps...Why don't you drop her a note?" Helen made only one remark. It was said through her teeth and very softly. "Bill, I would just as soon the child did not realize her relationship to this sordid situation." Mary cringed over the way Helen disregarded her hearing, the possibility that she might be capable of understanding, or her feelings about being shut out of their mutual world. After the lunch Mary cleared the table, throwing the remains of the meal and the plastiplates into the flash trash disposer. Her father had retreated to the library room and Helen was getting ready to attend a Citizen's Meeting. Mary heard her mother enter the room to say good-bye while she was wiping the dining table. She knew that Helen was standing, well-dressed and a little impatient, just behind her, but she pretended she did not know. 'Darling, Tm leaving now for the Citizen's Meeting." "Oh... yes." "Be a good girl and don't be late for your shift. You only have an hour now." Helen's patrician face smiled. "I won't be late." "Don't pay any attention to the things Bill and I discussed this morning, will you?" "No." And she was gone. She did not say good-bye to Bill. Mary was very conscious of her father in the house. He continued to sit in the library. She walked by the door and she could see him sitting in a chair, staring at the floor. Mary stood in the sun room for a long while. If he had risen from his chair, if he had rustled a page, if he had sighed, she would have heard him. It grew closer and closer to the time she would have to leave if Susan Shorrs was to catch the #f first school hours of her shift. Why did children have to shift half a day before adults? Finally, Mary thought of something to say. She could let him know she was old enough to understand what the quarrel had been about if only it were explained to her. Mary went into the library and hesitantly sat on the edge of a couch near him. He did not look at her and his face seemed gray in the midday light. Then she knew that he was lonely, too. But a great feeling of tenderness for him went through her. "Sometimes I think you and Clara Manz must be the only people in the world." she said abruptly, "who aren't so silly about shifting right on the dot. Why. I don't care if Susan Shorrs in an hour late for classes!" Those first moments whenhe seized her in his arms, it seemed her heart would shake loose. It was as though she had uttered some magic formula, one that had abruptly opened the doors to his love. It was only after he had explained tocher why he was always late on the first day of the family shift that she knew something was wrong. He did tell her, over and over, that he knew she was unhappy and that it was his fault. But he was at the same time soothing her. petting her, as if he was afraid of ler. He talked on and on. Gradually, Mary understood in his trembling body, in his perspiring palms, in his pleading eyes, that he was afraid of dying, that he was afraid she would kill him with the merest thing she said, witli her very presence. This was not painful to Mary, because, suddenly. something came with ponderous enormity to stand before her; I would just as soon the child did riot realize her relationship to this sordid siVuation. Her relationship. It was some kind of relationship to Conrad and Clara Manz, because those were the people they had been talking about. The moment her father left the apartment, she went to his desk and took out the file of family records. After she found the address of Conrad Manz. the idea occurred to her to write it on her body. Mary was certain that Susan Shorrs never bathed and she thought this a clever idea. Sometime on Susan's rest day, five days from now, she would try to force the shift and go to see Conrad and Clara Manz. Her plan was simple in execution, but totally vague as to goal. Mary was already late when she hurried to the children's section of a public shifting Station. A Children's Transfer Bus was waiting, and Mary registered on it for Susan Shorrs to be taken to school. After that she found a shifting room and opened it with her wristband. She changed into a shifting costume and sent her own clothes and belongings home.. Children her age did not wear makeup, but Mary always stood at the mirror during the shift. She always tried as hard as she could to see what Susan Shorrs looked like. She giggled over a verse that was scrawled beside the mirror ,... Rouge your hair and comb your face; Many s third head is lost in this place. ... and then the shift came, doubly frightening because of what she knew she was going to do. hyperalter like Mary, you were supposed to have some sense of the passage of time while you were out of shift. Of course, you did not know what was gqing on. but it was as though a more or less accurate chronometer kept running when you went out of shift. Apparently Mary's was highly inaccurate, because, to her horror, she found herself sitting bolt upright in one of Mrs. Harris's classes, not out on the playgrounds, where she had expected Susan Schorrs to be. Mary was terrified, and the ugly school dress Susan had been wearing accented, by its strangeness, the seriousness of her premature shift. Children weren't supposed to show much difference from hyperalter tQ hypoaltcr. but when she raised her eyes, her fright grew. Children did change. She hardly recognized anyone in the room, though most of them must be the alters of her own classmates. Mrs, Harris was a B-shift and overlapped both Mary and Susan, but otherwise Mary recognized only Carl Blair's hypoalter because of his freckles. Mary knew she had to get out of there or Mrs. Harris would eventually recognize her. If she left the room quietly. Mrs. Harris would not que.stion her unless she recognized her. It was no use trying to guess how Susan would walk. Mary stood and went toward the door, glad that it turned her back to Mrs. Harris. It seemed to her that she could feel the teacher's eyes stabbing through her back. But she walked safely from the room. She dashed down the school corridor and out into the street. So great was her fear of what she was doing that her hypoaltcr's world actually seemed  E Y O N D like a different one. It was a long way for Mary to walk across town, and when she rang the bell, Conrad Manz was already home from work.' He smiled at her and she loved him at once. "Well, what do you want, young lady?" he asked. Mary couldn't answer him. She just smiled back. "What's your name, eh?" Mary went right on smiling, but suddenly he blurred in front of her. "Here, here! There's nothing to cry about. Come on in and let's see if we can help you. Clara! We have a visitor, a very sentimental visitor." Mary let him put his big arm around her shoulder and draw her, crying, into the apartment. Then she saw Clara swimming before her, looking like her mother, but... no, not at all like her mother. "Now, see here, chicken, what #s it you've come for?" Conrad asked when her crying stopped; Mary had to stare hard at the floor to be able to say it. "I want to live with you." Clara was twisting and untwisting a handkerchief. "But, chHd. we have already had our first baby appointed to us. He'll be with us next shift, and after that I have to bear a baby for Someone else to keep. We wouldn't be allowed to take care of you." "I thought maybe I was your real child." Mary said it helplessly. knowing in advance what the answer would be. "Darling." Clara soothed, "children don't live with their natural parents. It's neither practical nor civilized. I have had a child conceived and borne on my shift, and this baby is my exchange, so you see that you are much too old to be my conception. Whoever your natural parents may be, it is just something on record with the Medicorps Genetic Division and i-sn't important." "But you're a special case." Mary pressed. "I thought because it was a special arrangement that you were my real parents." She looked up and she saw that Clara had turned white. And now Conrad Manz was ogitated, too. "What do you mean, we're a special case?" He was staring hard at her. "Because..." And now for the first time Mary realized how special this case was, how sensitive they would be about it. He grasped her by the shoulders and turned her so she faced his unblinking eyes. "I said, what do you mean, we're a special case? Clara, what in thirty heads does this kid mean?" His grip hurt her and she began to cry again. She broke away. "You're the hypoalters of my appointed father and mother. I thought maybe when it was like that. I might be your real child... and you might want me. I don't want to be where I am. I want somebody... Clara was calm now, her sudden fear gone. "But, darling, if you're unhappy where you are, only the Medicorps can reappoint you. Besides, maybe your appointed parents are just having some personal problems right now. Maybe if you tried to understand them, you would see that they really love you." Conrad's face showed that he did not understand. He spoke with a stiff, quiet voice and without taking his eyes from Mary. "What arc you doing here? My own hyperalter's kid in my house, throwing it up to me that I'm married to his wife's hypoalter!" They did not feel the earth move, as she fearfully did. They sat there, staring at her, as though they might sit forever while she backed away, out of the apartment, and ran into her collapsing world. the day after Bill Walden's kid showed up at his apartment. It was ten days since that strait jacket of a conference on Santa Fe had lost him a chance to blast off a rocket racer. This time, on the practical knowledge that emergency business conferences were seldom called after lunch, Conrad had placed his reservation for a racer in the afternoon. The visit from Mary Walden had upset him every time he thought of it. Since it was his rest day, he had no intention of thinking about it and Conrad's scrupulously drugged mind was capable of just that. So now, in the lavish coolness of the lounge at the Rocket Club, Conrad sipped his drink contentedly and made no contribution to the gloomy conversation going on around him. "Look at it tliis way," the melancholy face of Alberts, a pilot from England, morosely emphasized his tone. "It takes about # economic units to jack a forty ton ship up to satellite level and snap it around the course six times. That's just practice for us. On the other hand, an intellectual fellow who spends his spare time at a microfilm library doesn't use up # units in a year. In fact, his spare time activity may turn up as units gained. The Economic Board doesn't argue that all pastime should be gainful. They just say rocket racing wastes more economic units than most pilots make on their work days. I tell you the day is almost here when they ban the rockets." as "That's just it," another pilot put in. "There was a time when you could show that rocket races were necessary for better spaceship design. Design has gone way beyond that. From their point of view we just burn up units as fast as other people create them. And it's no use trying to argue for the television shows. The Board can prove people would rather see a jet-skiing meet at a cost of about one-hundredth that of a rocket race." Conrad Manz grinned into his drink. He had been aware for several minutes that pert little Angela, Alberts' soft-eyed, huskyvoiced wife, was trying to catch his eye. But stranded as she was in the buzzing traffic of rockets, she was trying to hail the wrong rescuer. He had about fifteen minutes till the ramp boys would have a ship ready for him. Much as lie liked Angela, he wasn't going to miss that race. Still, he let his grin broaden and. looking up at her, he lied maliciously by nodding. She interpreted this signal as he knew she would. Well, at least he would afford her a graceful exit from the boring conversation. He got up and went over and took her hand. Her full lips parted a little and she kissed him on the mouth. Conrad turned to Alberts and interrupted him. "Angela and I would like to spend a little time together. Do you mind?" Alberts was annoyed at having his train of thought broken and rather snapped out the usual courtesy. "Of course notI'm glad for both of you." Conrad looked the group over with a bland stare. "Have you lads ever tried jet-skiing? There's more genuine excitement in ten minutes of it than an hour of rocket racing. Personally. I don't care if the Board does ban the rockets soon. I'll just hop out to the Rocky Mountains on rest days.'  that if he had made this assertion before asking Alberts for his wife, the man would have found some excuse to have her remain. All the faces present displayed the aficionado's disdain for one who has just demonstrated he doesn't belong. What the straitiacket did they think they were -- some ancient order of noblemen? Conrad took Angela's yielding arm and led her serenely away before Alberts could think of anything to detain her. On the way out of the lounge, she stroked his arm with frank admiration. "I'm so glad you were agreeable. Honestly, Harold could talk rockets till I died." Conrad bent and kissed her. "Angela, I'm sorry, but this isn't going to be what you think. I have a ship to take olT in just a few minutes." She flared and dug into his arm now. "Oh, Conrad Manz! You ,... you made me believe... He laughed and grabbed her wrists. "Now. now. I'm neglecting you to fiy a rocket, not just to talk about them. I wont let you die." At that she could not suppress her husky musical laugh. "I found that out the last time you and I were together. Clara and I I had a drink the other day at the Citizen's Club. I don't often use dirty language, but I told Clara she must be keeping you in a strait jacket at home." Conrad frowned, wishing she hadn't brought up the subject. It worried him off and on that something was wrong with Clara, something even worse than that awful dtamini business ten days ago. For several shifts now she had been cold, nor was it just a temporary lack of interest in himself. for she was also cold to the men of their acquaintance of whom she was usually quite fond. As for himself, he had had to depend on casual contacts such as Angela. Not that they weren't pleasant, but a man and wife were supposed to maintain a healthy love life between themselves, and it usually meant trouble with the Medicorps when this broke down. Angela glanced at him. "I didn't think Clara laughed well at my remark. Is something wrong between you?" "Oh, no," he declared hastily. "Clara is sometimes that way...  doesn't catch a joke right off." A page boy approached them where they stood in the rotunda and advised Conrad that his ship was ready. "Honestly, Angela, I'll make it up, I promise." "I know you will, darling. And at least I'm grateful you saved me from all those rocket jets in there." Angela raised her lips for a kiss and afterward, as she pushed him toward the door, her slightly vacant face smiled at him. on the ramp. Conrad found another pilot ready to take off. They made two wagers -- first to reach the racing course, and winner in a six-lap heat around the six-hundred-mile hexagonal course. They fired together and Conrad blasted his ship up on a thunderous column of flame that squeezed him into his seat. He was good at this and he knew he would win the lift to the course. On the course, though, if his opponent was any good at all, Conrad would probably lose because lie enjoyed slamming the ship around the course in his wasteful, swashbuckling style much more than merely winning the heat. Conrad kept his drive on till the last possible second and then shot out his nose jets. The ship sliuddered up through another hundred miles and came to a lolling halt near the starting buoys. The other pilot gasped when Conrad shouted at him over the intership. "The winner by all thirty heads!" It was generally assumed that a race up to the course consisted of cutting all jets when you had enough lift, and using the nose brakes only to correct any overshot. "What did you do. just keep your power on and flip the ship around?" The otlrcr racer coasted up to Conrad's level and steadied with a brief forward burst. They got the automatic signal from the starting buoy and went for the first turn, nose and nose, about half a mile apart. Conrad lost # yards on the first turn by shoving his power too hard against the starboard steering jets. It made a pretty picture when a racer hammered its way around a turn that way with a fan of outside jets holding it in plade. The other fellow made his turns cleanly, using mostly the driving jet; for steering. But that didn't look like much to tliose who hap pened to flip on their television while this little heat was in progress. On every turn, Conrad lost a little in space, but not in the eye of the automatic televisor on the buoy marking the turn. As usual, he cut closer to the buoys than regulations allowed, to give the folks a show. Without the slightest regret, Conrad lost the heat by a full two sides of the hexagon. He congratulated his opponent and watched the fellow let his ship down carefully toward earth on its tail jets. For a while Conrad lolled his ship around near tlic starting buoy and its probably watching eye, flipping through a series of complicated maneuvers with the steering jets. Conrad did not like the grim countenance of outer space. The lifeless, gemlike blaze of cloud upon cloud of stars in Iic per spectiveless black repelled him. He liked rocket racing only because of the neat timing necessary, and possibly because tlic knowledge that he indulged in it scared poor old Bill Walden half to death. Today the bleak aspect of tlc Galaxy harried his mind back upon its own problems. A particularly nasty association of Clara with Bill Walden and his sniveling kid kept dogging Conrad's mind and, as soon as stunting had exhausted his excess of fuel, he turned the ship to earth and sent it in with a short, spectacular burst. Now that he stopped to consider it, Clara's strange behavior had begun at about the same time that Bill Walden started cheating on the shifts. That kid Mary must have known something was going on, or she would not have done such a disgusting thing as to come to their apartment. Conrad had let the rocket fall nose-down, until now it was screaming into the upper ionosphere. With no time to spare, he swiveled the ship on its guiding jets and opened the drive blast at the up-rushing earth. He had just completed this wrenching maneuver when two appalling things happened together. Conrad suddenly knew, whether as a momentary leak from Bill's mind to his. or as a rapid calculation of his own, that Bill Walden and Clara shared a secret. At the same moment, something tore through his mind like fingers of chill wind. With seven gravities masitng him into tlie bucketseat, he grunted curses past thin-stretched lips. "Great blue psychiatrists! What in thirty straitjackets is that three-headed fool trying to do, kill us both?" Conrad just managed to raise his leaden hand and set the plummeting racer for automatic pilot before Bill Walden forced him out of the shift. In his last moment of consciousness, and in the shock of his overwhelming shame. Conrad felt the bitter irony that he could not cut the power and kill Bill Walden. conscious of the thunderous clamor of the braking ship and the awful weight of deceleration into which he had shifted, the core of him froze. He was so terrified that he could not have thought of reshifting even had there been time. His head rolled on the pad in spite of its weight, and he saw the earth coming at him like a monstrous swatter aimed at a fly. Between his fright and the inhuman gravity, he lost consciousness without ever seeing on the control panel the red warning that saved him: Automatic Pitot. The ship settled itself on the ramp in a mushroom of fire. Bill regained awareness several seconds later. He was too shaken to do anytliing but sit there for a long time. When at last he felt capable of moving, he struggled with the door till he found how to open it, and climbed down to the still hot ramp he had landed on. It was at least a mile to the Rocket Club across the barren flat of the field, and he set out on foot. Shortly, however, a txuck came speeding across to him. The driver leaned out. "Hey, Conrad, what's the matter? Why didn't you pull the ship over to the hangars?" With Conrad's makeup on, Bill felt he could probably get by. "Contrls aren't working," he offered noncommittally. At the club, a place he had never been to before in his life. Bill found an unused helicopter and started it with bis wristband. He flew the machine into town to the landing station nearest his home. He was doomed, he knew. Conrad certainly would report him for this. He had not intended to force the shift so early or so violently. Perhaps he had not intended to force it at all this time. But there was something in him more owerful than himself... a need to break the shift and be with Clara that now acted almost independently of him and certainly without regard for his safety. Bill flew his craft carefully through the city traffic, working his way between the widely spaced towers with the uncertain hand of one to whom machines qalaxy science fictiom are not an extension of the body. He put the helicopter down at the landing station with some dif ficulty. Clara would not be expecting him so early. From his apartment, as soon as he had changed makeup, he visiophoned her. It was strange how long and how carefully they needed to look at each other and how few words they could say. Afterw'ard, he seemed calmer and went about getting ready with more efficiency. But when he found himself addressing the package of Conrad's clothes to his home, he chuckled bitterly. It was when he went back to drop the package in the mail chute that he noticed the storage room door ajar. He disposed of the package and went over to the door. Then he stood still, listening. He had to stop his own breathing to hear clearly. Bill tightened himself and opened the door. He flipped on the light and saw Mary. The child sat on the floor in the corner with her knees drawn up against her chest. Between the knees and the chest, the frail wrists were crossed, the hands closed limply like -- like those of a fetus. The forehead rested on the knees so that, should the closed eyes stray open, they would be looking at the placid hands. The sickening sight of the child Squeezed down on his heart till the color drained from his face. He went forward and knelt before her. His dry throat hammered with the words, what have I done to you, but he could not speak. The question of how long she might have been here, he could not bear to think. He put out his hand, but he did not touch her. A shudder of revulsion shook him and he scrambled to his feet. He hurried back into the apartment with only one thought. He must get someone to help her. Only the Medicorps could take care of a situation like this. As he stood at the visiophone, he knew that this involuntary act of panic had betrayed all that he had ever thought and done. He had to call the Medicorps. He could not face the result of his own behavior without them. Like a ghostly after-image, he saw Clara's face on the screen. She Was lost, cut off, with only himself to depend on. A part of him, a place where there were no voices and a great tragedy, had been abruptly shut off. He stood stupidly confused and disturbed about something he couldn't recall. The emotion in his body suddenly had no referent. He stood like a badly frightened animal while his heart slowed and blood seeped again into whitened parenchymas, while tides of epinephrine burned lower. Remembering he must hurry, Bill left the apartment. It was an apartment with its storage room door closed, an apartment without a storage room. From the moment that he walked in and took Clara in his arms, he was not worried about being caught. He felt only the great need for her. There seemed only one difference from the first time and it was a good difference, because now Clara was so tense and apprehensive. He felt a new tenderness for her, as one might feel for a child. It seemed to him that there was no end to the well of gentleness and compassion that was suddenly in him. He was mystified by the depth of this feeling. He kissed her again and again and petted her as one might a disturbed child. Clara said, "Oh, Bill, we're dqing wrong! Mary was here yesterday!" Whoever she meant, it had no meaning for him. He said, "It's all right. You mustn't worry." "She needs you, Bill, and I take you away from her." Whatever it was she was talking about was utterly unimportant beside the fact that she was not happy herself. He soothed her. "Darling, you mustn't worry about it. Let's be happy the way we used to be." He led her to a couch and they sat together, her head resting on his shoulder. "Conrad is worried about me. He knows something is wrong. Oh. Bill, if he knew, he'd demand the worst penalty for you." Bill felt the stone of fear come back in his chest. He thought, too, of Helen, of how intense her shame would be. Medicorps action would be machinelike, logical as a set of equation; they were very likely to take more drastic steps where the complaints would be so strong and no request for leniency forthcoming. Conrad knew now, of course. Bill had felt his hate. It was nearing the end. Death would come to Bill with electronic fingers. A ghostly probing in his mind and suddenly... Clara's great unhappiness and the way she turned her head into his shoulder to cry forced him to calm the rising panic in himself, and again to caress the fear from her. Even later, when they lay where the moonlight thrust into the room an impalpable shaft of alabaster, he loved her only as a succor. Carefully, slowly, smoothing out her mind, drawing it away from all the other things, drawing it down into this one thing. Gathering all her mind into her senses and holding it there. Then quickly taking it away from her in a moaning spasm so that now she was murmuring, murmuring, palely drifting. Sleeping like a loved child. For a long, long time he watched the white moon cut its arc across their window. He listened with a deep pleasure to her evenly breathing sleep. But slowly he realized that her breath had changed, that the body so close to his was tensing. His heart gave a great bound and tiny moths of horror fluttered along his back. He raised himself and saw that the eyes were open in the silver light. Even through the makeup he saw that they were Helen's eyes. He did the only thing left for him. He shifted. But in that terrible instant he understood something he had not anticipated. In Helen's eyes there was not only intense shame over shifting into her hypoalter's home; there was not only the disgust with himself for breaking communication codes. He saw that, as a woman of the #th Century might have felt, Helen hated Clara as a sexual rival. She hated Clara doubly because he had turned not to some other woman, but to the other part of herself whom she could never know. As he shifted. Bill knew that the next light he saw would be on the adamant face of the Medicorps. other Medicorps officers, entered the Walden apartment about two hours after Bill left it to meet Clara. Major Grey was angry with himself. Important information on a case of communication-breaks and drug-refusal could be learned by letting it run its course under observation. But he had not intended Conrad Manz's life to be endangered. and certainly he would not have taken the slightest chance on what they found in the Walden apartment if he had expected it this early. Major Grey blamed himself for what had happened to Mary Walden. He should have had the machines watching Susan and Mary at the same time that they were relaying all wristband data for Bill and Conrad and for Helen and Clara to his office. He had not done this because It was Susan's shift and he had not expected Mary to break it. Now he knew that Helen and Bill Walden had been quarreling over the fact that Clara was cheating on Helen's shifts, and their conversations had directed the unhappy child's attention to the Manz couple. She had broken shift to meet them... looking for a loving father, of course. Still -- things would not have turned out so badly if Captain Thiel, Mary's school officer, had not attributed Susan Shorrs' disappearance only to poor drug acclimatization. Captain Thiel had naturally known that Major Grey was in town to prosecute Bill Walden, because the major had called on him to discuss the case. Yet it had not occurred to him, until # hours after Susan's disappearance, that Mary might have forced the shift for some reason associated with her aberrant father. By the time the captain advised him, Major Grey already knew that Bill had forced the shift on Conrad under desperate circumstances and he had decided to close in. He fully expected to find the father and daughter at the apartment, and now... it sickened him to see the child's demented condition and realize that Bill had left her there. Major Grey could see at a glance that Mary Walden would not  accessible for days even with the best treatment. He left it to the other two officers to hospitalize the child 'and set out for the Manz apartment. He used his master wristband to oien the door there, and found a woman standing in the middle of the room, wrapped in a sheet. #i He knew that this must be Helen Walden. It was odd how ill-htting Clara Manz's softly sensual makeup seemed, even to . a stranger, on the more rigidly composed face before him. He guessed that Helen would wear color higher on her cheeks and the mouth would be done in severe lines. Certainly the present haughty face struggled with its incongruous makeup as well as the indignity of her dress. She pulled the sheet tighter about her and said icily. 'I will not wear that woman's clothes." Major Grey introduced himself and asked, "Where is Bill Walden?" "He shifted! He left me with  , . Oh, I'm so ashamed!" Major Grey shared her loathing. There was no way to escape the conditioning of childhood -- sex relations between hypcralter and hypoalter were more than outlawed, they were in themselves disgusting. If they vere allowed, they could destroy this civilization. Those idealists -- they were almost all hypoalters. of course -- who wanted the old terminology changed didn't take that into account. Next thing they'd want children to live with their actual parents! Major Grey stepped into the bedroom. Through the bathroom door beyond, he could see Conrad Manz changing his makeup. Conrad turned and eyed him bluntly. "Would you mind staying out of here till I'm finished? I've had about all I can take." Major Grey shut the door and returned to Helen Walden. He took a hypothalamic block from his own pharmacase and handed it to her. "Here, you're probably on very low drug levels. You'd better take this." He poured her a glass of pop from a decanter and, while they waited for Conrad, he dialed the nearest shifting station on the visiophone and ordered up an emergency shifting costume for her. When at last they were both dressed, made up to their satisfaction and drugged to his satisfaction, he had them sit on a couch together across from him. They sat at opposite ends of it. stiff with resentment at each other's presence. Major Grey said calmly, "You realize that this matter is coming to a Mcdicorps trial. It will be serious." Major Grey watched their faces. On hers he saw grim determination. On Conrad's face he saw the ' heavy movement of alarm. The man loved his wife. That Was going to help. "It is necessary in a case such as this for the Mcdicorps to weigh your decisions along with the scientific evidence we will accumulate. Unfortunately, the number of laymen directly involved in this case -- and not on trial -- is only two, due to your peculiar marriage. If the hypoalters, Clara and Conrad, were married to other partners, we might call on as many as six involved persons and obtain a more equitable lay judgment. As it stands, the entire responsibility rests on the two of you." Helen Walden was primly confident. "I don't see how we can fail to treat the matter with perfect logic. After all, it is not we who neglect our drug levels... They were refusing to take their drugs, weren't they?" she asked, hoping for the worst and certain she was right. "Yes, this is drug refusal." Major Grey paused while she relished the answer. "But I must correct you in one impression. Your proper drug levels do not assure that you will act logically in this matter. The drugged mind IS logical. However, its fundamental datum is that the drugs and drugged minds must be protected before everything else." He watched Conrad's face while he added, "Because of this, it is possible for you to arrive logically at a conclusion that... death is the required solution." He paused, looking at their white lijJ#. Then he said, "Actually, otlier, more suitable solutions may be possible." "But they w-ere refusing their drugs," she said. "You talk as if you are defending them. Aren't you a Medicorps prosecutor?" "I do not prosecute people in the ancient #th Century sense, Mrs. Walden. I prosecute the acra of drug refusal and communication breaks. There is quite a difference." "Well!" she said almost explosively. "I always knew Bill would get into trouble sooner or later with his wild, antisocial ideas. I never dreamed the Medicorps would take is side." Major Grey held his breath, almost certain now that she would walk into the trap. If she did, he could save Clara Manz before the trial. "After all, they have broken every communication code. They have refused the drugs, a defiance aimed at our very lives. They -- " "Shut up!" It was the first time Conrad Man? had spoken since he sat down. "The Medicorps spent weeks gathering evidence and preparing their recommendations. You haven't seen any of that and you've already made up your mind. How logical is that? It sounds as if you'ivanf your husband dead. Maybe the poor devil had some reason, after all, for what he did." On the man's face there was the nearest approach to hate that the drugs would allow. Major Grey let his breath out softly. They were split permanently. She would have to trade him a mild decision on Clara in order to save Bill. And even there, if the subsequent evidence gave any slight hope, Major Grey believed now that he could work on Conrad to hang the lay judgment and let the Medicorps' scientific recommendation go through unmodified. He let them stew in their crosspurposed silence for a while and then nailed home a disconcerting fact. "I think I should remind you that there are few advantages to having your alter extinguished in the mnemonic eraser. A man whose hyperalter has been extinguished must report on his regular shift days to a hospital and be placed for five days in su.spended animation. This is not very healthy for the body, but necessary. Otherwise, everyone's natural distaste for his own alter and the understandable wish to spend twice as much time living would generate schemes to have one's alter sucked out by the eraser. That happened extensively back in the #st Century before the five day suspension was required. It was also used as a 'cure' for schizophrenia, but it was. of course, only the brutal  murder of innocent personalities." Major Grey smiled grimly to himself. "Now I will have to ask you both to accompany me to the hospital. I will want you. Mrs. Walden, to shift at once to Mrs. Manz. Mr. Manz, you will have to remain under the close observation of an officer until Bill Walden tries to shift back. We have to catch him with an injection to keep him in shift." young medicop put the syringe aside and laid his hand on Bill Walden's forehead. He pushed the hair back out of Bill's eyes. "There, Mr. Walden, you don't have to struggle now." Bill let his breath out in a long sigh. "You've caught me. I can't shift any more, can #?" "That's right. Mr. Walden. Not unless we want you to." The young man packed up his medical equipment and stepped aside. Bill noticed then the Medicorps officer standing in the background. The man was watching as though he contemplated some melancholy distance. "I am Major Grey, Bill. I'm handling your case." Bill did not answer. He lay staring at the hospital ceiling. Then he felt his mouth open in a slow grin. "What's funny?" Major Grey asked mildly. "Leaving my hypoalter with my wife." Bill answered candidly. It had already ceased to be funny to him, but he saw Major Grey smile in spite of himself. "They were quite upset when I found them. It must have been some scramble before that." Major Grey came over and sat in tlie chair vacated by the young man who had just injected Bill. '"You know, Bill, we will need a complete analysis of you. We want to do everything we can to save you, but it will require your cooperation." Bill nodded, feeling his chest tighten. Here it came. Right to the end, they would be tearing him apart to find out what made him work. Major Grey must have sensed Bill's bitter will to resist. His resonant voice was soft, his face kindly. "We must have your sincere desire to help. We can't force you to do anything." "Except die," Bill said. "Maybe helping us get the information that might save your life at the trial isn't worth the trouble to you. But your aberration has seriously disturbed the lives of several people. Don't you think you owe it to them to help us prevent this sort of thing in the future?" Major Grey ran his hand through his whitening hair. "I thought you would like to know Mary will come through all right. We will begin shortly to acclimatize her to her new appointed parents, who will be visiting her each day. That will accelerate her recovery a great deal. Of course, right now she is still inaccessible." The brutally clear picture of Mary alone in the storage room crashed back into Bill's mind. After a while, in such slow stages that the beginning was hardly noticeable, he began to cry. The young medicop injected him with a sleeping compound, but not before Bill knew he would do whatever the Medicorps wanted. rwiHE next day was crowded with battery after battery of tests. The interviews were endless. He was subjected to a hundred artificial situations and every reaction from his blood sugar to the frequency ranges of his voice was measured. They gave him only small amounts of drugs in order to test his reaction to them. Late in the evening, Major Grey came by and interrupted an officer who was taking an electroencephalogram for the sixth time after injection of a drug. "All right, Bill, you have really given us cooperation. But after you've had your dinner, I hope you won't mind if I come to your room and talk with you for a little while." When Bill finished eating, he waited impatiently in his room for the Medicorps officer. Major Grey came soon after. He shook his head at the mute question Bill shot at him. "No, Bill. We will not have the results of your tests evaluated until late tomorrow morning. I can't tell you a tiling until the trial in any case." "When will that be?" "As soon as the evaluation of your tests is in." Major Grey ran his hand over his smooth chin and seemed to sigh. "Tell me, Bill, how do you feel about your case? How did you get into this situation and what do you think about it now?" The officer sat in the room's only chair and motioned Bill to the cot. Bill was astonished at his sudden desire to talk about his problem. He had to laugh to cover it up. T guess I feel as if I am being condemned for trying to stay sober." Bill used the ancient word with a mock tone of righteousness that he knew the major would understand. Major Grey smiled. "How do you feel when you're sober?" Bill searched his face. "The way the ancient Moderns did. I guess. I feel what happens to me the way it happens to me. not the artificial way the drugs let it happen. I think there is a way for us to live without the dgs and really enjoy life. Have you ever cut down on your drugs. Major?" The officer shook his head. Bill smiled at him dreamily. "You ought to try it. It's as though a new life has suddenly opened up. Everything looks different to you. "Look, with an average life span of # years, each of us only lives # years and our alter lives the other SO. Yet even on half-time we experience only about half the living we'd do if we didn't take the drugs. Wc would be able to feel the loves and hatreds and desires of life. No matter how many mistakes we made, we would be able occasionally to live those intense moments that made the ancients great." Major Grey said tonelessly, "The ancients were great at killing. cheating and debasing one another. And they were worse sober than dnmk" This time he did not smile at the word. Bill understood the implacable logic before him. The logic that had saved man from himself by smothering his spirit. The carefully achieved logic of the drugs that had seized upoi) the disassociated personality, and engineered it into a smoothly running machine, where there vas no unhappiness because there was no great happiness, where there was no crime except failure to take the drugs or cross the alter sex line. Without drugs, he was AT capable of fury and he felt It now. "You should see how foolish tliesc communication codes look when you are undrugged. This stupid hide-and-seek of shifting! These two-headed monsters simpering about their artificial morals and their endless prescriptions! They belong in crazy houses! What use is there in such a world? If we are all this sick, we should die... Bill stopped and there was suddenly a ringing silence in the barren little room. Finally Major Grey said, "I think you can see, Bill, that your desire to live without drugs is incompatable with this society. It would be impossible for us to maintain in you an artificial need for the drugs that would be healthy. Only if we can clearly demonstrate that this aberration is not an inherent part of your personality can we do something medically or psycho-surgically about it." Bill did not at first see the Implication in this. When he did, he thought of Clara rather than of himself, and his voice was shaken. "Is it a localized aberration in Clara?" Major Grey looked at him levelly. "I have arranged for you to be with Clara Manz a little while in the morning." He stood up and said good night and was gone. Slowly, as if it hurt him to move. Bill turned off the light and lay on the cot in the semidark. After a while he could feel his heart begin to take hold and he started feeling better. It was as though a man who had thought himself permanently expatriated had been told, "Tomorrow, you walk just over that hill and you will be home." All through the night he lay awake, alternating between panic and desperate longing in a cycle with which finally he became familiar. At last, as a rusty light of dawn reddened his silent room, he fell into a troubled sleep. He started awake in broad daylight. An orderly was at the door with his breakfast tray. He could not eat, of course. After the orderly left, he hastily changed to a new hospital uniform and washed himself. He redid his makeup with a trembling hand, straightened the bedclothes and then he sat on the edge of the cot. No one came for him. The young medicop who had given him the injection that caught him in shift finally entered. and was standing near him before Bill was aware of his presence. "Good morning, Mr. Walden. How are you feeling?" Bill's wildly oscillating tensions froze at the point where he could only move helplessly with events and suffer a constant, unchangeable longing. It was as if in a dream that they moved in silence together down the long corridors of the hospital and took the elevator to an upper floor. The medicop opened the door to a room and let Bill enter. Bill heard the door close behind him. Clara did not turn from where she stood looking out the window. Bill did not care that the walls of the chill little room were almost certainly recording every sight and sound. All his hunger was focused on the back of the girl at the window. The room seemed to ring with his racing blood. But he was slowly aware that something was wrong, and when at last he called her name, his voice broke. Still without turning, she said in a strained monotone, "I want you to understand that I have consented to this meeting only because Major Grey has assured me ij is necessary." It was a long time before he could speak. "Clara, I need you." She spun on him. "Have you no shame? You are married to my hyperalter -- don't you understand that?" Her face was suddenly wet with tears and the intensity of her shame flamed at him from her cheeks. "How can Conrad ever forgive me for being with his hyperalter and talking about him? Oh, how can I have been so mad?" "They have done something to you," he said, shaking with tension. Her chin raised at this. She was defiant, he saw, though not toward himself -- he no longer existed for her -- but toward that part of herself which once had needed him and now no longer existed. "They have cured me," she declared. "They have cured me of everything but my shame, and they will help me get rid of that as soon as you leave this room." Bill stared at her before leaving. Out in the corridor, the young medicop did not look him in the face. They went back to Bill's room and the officer left without a word. Bill lay down on his cot. Presently Major Grey entered the room. He came over to the cot. "I'm sorry it had to be this way. Bill." Bill's words came tonelessly from his dry throat. "Was it necessary to be cruel?" "It was necessary to test the re.sult of her psycho-surgery. Also, it will help her over her shame. She might otherwise have retained a seed of fear that she still loved you." Bill did not feel anything any more. Staring at the ceiling, he knew there was no place left for  L L I him in this world and no one in it who needed him. The only person who had really needed him had been Mary, and he could not bear to think of how he had treated her. Now the Medicorps was efficiently curing the child of the hurt he had done her. They had already erased from Clara any need for him she had ever felt. This seemed funny and he began to laugh. "Everyone is being cured of me." "Yes, Bill. That is necessary." When Bill went on laughinfk.  Major Grey's voice turned quite sharp. "Come with me. It's time for your trial." enormous room in which they held the trial was utterly barren. At the great oaken table around which they all sat, there were three Medicorps officers in addition to Major Grey. Helen did not speak to Bill when they brought him in. He was placed on the same side of the table with an officer between them. Two orderlies stood behind Bill's chair. Other than these people, there was no one in the room. The great windows were high above the floor and displayed only the blissful sky. Now and then Bill saw a flock of pigeons waft aloft on silver-turning wings. Everyone at the table except himself had a copy of his case report find they discussed it with clipped sentences. Between the stone floor and the vaulted ceiling, a subtle echolalia babbled about Bill's problem behind their human talk. The discussion of the report lulled when Major Grey rapped on the table. He glanced unsmiling from face to face, and his voice hurried the ritualized words: "This is a court of medicine, co-joining the results of medical science and considered lay judgment to arrive at a decision in the case of patient Bill Walden. The patient is hospitalized for a history of drug refusal and communication breaks. Wc have before us the medical case record of patient Walden. Has everyone present studied this record?" All at the table nodded. 'Do all present feel competent to pass judgment in this case?' Again there came the agreement. Major Grey continued, "It is my duty to advise you, in the presence of the patient, of the profound difference between a trial for simple drug refusal and one in which that aberration is compounded with communication breaks. "It is true that no other aber- ration is possible when the drugs are taken as prescribed. After alt, the drugs are the basis for our schizophrenic society. Nevertheless. simple drug refusal often is a mere matter of physiology, which is easy enough to remedy. "A far more profound threat to our society is the break in communication. This generally is more deeply niotivated in the patient. and is often inaccessible to tlerapy. Such a patient is driven to emotive explorations which place the various ancient passions, and the infamous art of historical gesture, such as 'give me liberty or give me death,' above the welfare of society." down the sky. a handful of heavenly coin. Never had it seemed to him so good to look at the sky. If they hospitalize me, he thought.  will be contertt forever to sit mod look from windows. "Our schizophrenic society." Major Grey was saying, "holds together and runs smoothly because, in each individual, the personality conflicts have been compartmentalized between hyperalter and hypoalter. On the social level, conflicting personalities are kept on opposite shifts and never contact each other. Or they are kept on shifts where contact is possible no more than one or two days out of ten. Bill Walden's break of shift is the type of behavior designed to reactivate these conflicts, and to generate the destructive passions on which an undrugged mind feeds. Already illness and disrupted lives have resulted." Major Grey paused and looked directly at Bill. "Exhaustive tests have demonstrated that your entire personality is involved. I might also say that the aberration to live without the drugs and to break communication codes is your personality. All these Mcdicorps officers are agreed on that diagnosis. It remains now for us of the Medicorps to sit with the laymen intimately involved and decide on the action to be taken. The only possible alternatives after that diagnosis are permanent hospitalization or... total removal of the personality by mnemonic erasure." Bill could not speak. He saw Major Grey nod to one of the #t orderlies and felt the man pushing up his sleeve and injecting his nerveless arm. They were forcing him to shift, he knew, so that Conrad Mans could sit on the trial and participate. Helplessly, he watched the great sky blacken and the room dim and disappear.LT-a face, as did the others, while the shift was in progress. Helen Walden, he saw, was dramatizing her shame at being present during a shift, but the Medicorps oflicers simply stared at the table. Major Grey watched the face of Conrad Manz take form while the man who was going to be tried faded. Bill Walden had been without makeup, and as soon as he was sure Manz could hear him. Major Grey apologized. "I hope you won't object to this brief interlude in public without makeup. You are present at the trial of Bill Walden." Conrad Manz nodddd and Major Grey waited another full minute for the shift to complete itself before he continued. "Mr. Manz, during the two days you waited in the hospital for us to catch Walden in shift, I discussed this case quite thoroughly with # you. especially as it applied to the case of Clara Manz, on which we were already w'orking. "You will recall that in the case of your wife, the Medicorps diagnosis was one of a clearly localized aberration. It was quite simple to apply the mnemonic eraser to that small section without disturbing in any way her basic personality. Medicorps agreement was for this procedure and the case did not come to trial, but simply went to operation, because lay agreement was obtained. First yourself and eventually -- " Major Grey paused and let the memory of Helen's stubborn insistence that Clara die stir in Conrad's mind -- "Mrs. Walden agreed with the Medicorps." Major Grey let the room wait in 'silence for a while. "The case of Bill Walden is quite different. The aberration involves the whole personality, and the alternative actions to be taken are permanent hospitalization or total erasure. In this case, I believe that Medicorps opinion will be divided as to proper action and -- " Major Grey paused again and looked levelly at Conrad Manz -- '"this may be true, also, of the lay opinion." "How's that. Major?" demanded the highest ranking Medicorps officer present, a colonel named Hart, a tall, handsome man on whom the military air was a becoming skin. "What do you mean about Medicorps opiniem being divided?" #B Major Grey answered quietly, ''I'm holding out for hospitalization." Colonel Hart's face reddened. He thrust it forward and straightened his back. "That's preposterous! This is a clear-cut case of a dangerous threat to our society, and we, let me remind you, are sworn to protect that society." Major Grey felt very tired. It was. after all, difficult to understand why he always fought so hard against erasure of these aberrant cases. But he began with quiet determination. "The threat to society is effectively removed by either of the alternatives, hospitalization or total erasure. I think you can all see from Bill Walden's medical record that his is a well rounded personality with a remarkable mind. In the environment of tlie #th Century, he would have been an outstanding citizen, and possibly, if there had been more like him. our present society would have been better for it. "Our history has been one of weeding out all personalities that did not fit easily into our drugged society. Today there are so few left that I have handled only # in my entire career... Major Grey saw that Helen Walden was tensing in her chair. He realized suddenly that she sensed better than he the effect he was having on the other men. "We should not forget that each time we erase one of these personalties." he pressed on relentlessly, "society loses irrevocably a certain capacity for change. If we eliminate all personalities who do not fit, we may find ourselves without any minds capable of meeting future change. Our direct ancestors were largely the inmates of mental hospitals... we are fortunate they were not erased. Conrad Manz," he asked abruptly, "what is your opinion on the case of Bill Walden?" Helen Walden started, but Conrad Manz shrugged his muscular shoulders. "Oh, hospitalize the thrce-hcaded monster!" Major Grey snapped his eyes directly past Colonel Hart and fastened them on the Medicorps captain. "Your opinion. Captain?" But Helen Walden was too quick. Before he could rap the table for order, she had her thin words hanging in the echoing room. "Having been Mr. Walden's wife for # years, my sentiments naturally incline me to ask for hospitalization. That is why I may safely say, if Major Grey will pardon me, that the logic of the drugs does not entirely fail us in a situation like this.' Helen waited while all present got the idea that Major Grey had accused them of being illogical. "Bill's aberration has led to ur # daughter's illness. And think how quickly it contaminated Clara Manz! I cannot ask that society any longer expose itself, even to the extent of keeping Bill in the isolation of the hospital, for my purely sentimental reasons. "As for Major Grey's closing remarks, I cannot see how it is fair to bring my husband to trial ns a threat to society, if some future change is expected, in which a man of his behavior would benefit society. Surely such a change could only be one that would ruin our present world, or Bill would hardly fit it. I would not want to save Bill or anyone else for such a future." She did not have to say anything further. Both of the other Medicorps officers were now fully roused to their duty. Colonel Hart, of course, "humphed" at the opinions of a woman and cast his with Major Grey. But the fate of Bill Walden was sealed. Major Grey sat, weary and uneasy, as the creeping little doubts began. In the end, he would be left with the one big stone-heavy doubt... could he have gone through with this if he had not been drugged, and how would the logic of the trial look without drugs?  He became aware of the restiveness in the room. They were waiting for him, now that the decision was irrevocable. Without the drugs, he reflected, they; might be feeling -- what v,as the ancient word, uUt? No, that was what the criminal felt. Remorfie? That would be what they should be feeling. Major Gfey wished Helen Walden could be forced to witness the erasure. People did not realize what it waS like. What was it Bill had said? "You should see how foolish these communication codes look when you are undrugged. This stupid hide-and-seek of shifting..." Well, wasn't that a charge to be inspected seriously, if you were taking it seriously enough to kill the man for it? As soon as this case was completed, he would have to return to his city and blot himself out so that his own hyperalter, Ralph Singer, a painter of bad pictures and a useless fool, could waste five more days. To that man he lost half his possible living days. What earthly good was Singer? Majof Grey roused himself and motioned the orderly to inject Conrad Manz, so that Bill Walden would be forced back into shift. "As soon as I have 'advised the patient of our decision, you will all be dismissed. Naturally, I anticipated this decision and have arranged for immediate erasure. After the erasure, Mr. Manz, you will be instructed to appear regularly for suspended animation. U F or some reason the first thing Bill Walden did when he became conscious of his surroundings was to look out the great window for the flock of birds. But they were gone. Bill looked at Major Grey and said, "What are you going to do?" The officer ran his hand back through his whitening hair, but he looked at Bill without wavering. "You will be erased." Bill began to shake his head. "There is something wrong," he said. "Bill... the major began. "There is something wrong," Bill repeated hopelessly. "Why must we be split so there is always something missing in each of us? Why must we be stupefied with drugs that keep us from knowing what we should feel? I was trying to live a better life. I did not want to hurt anyone." "But you did hurt others," Major Grey said bluntly. "You would do so again if allowed to function in your own way in this society. Yet it would be insufferable to you to be hospitalized. You would be shut off forever from searching for another Clara Manz. And -- therc is no one else for you, is there?" Bill looked up. his eyes cringing as though they stared at death. "No one else?" he asked vacantly. "No one?" The two orderlies lifted him up by his arms, almost carrying him into the operating room. His feet dragged helplessly. He made no resistance as they lifted him onto the operating table and strapped him down. Beside him was the great panel of the mnemonic eraser with its thousand unblinking eyes. The hclmetlike prober cabled to this calculator was fastened about his skull, and he could no longer see the professor who vas lecturing in the amphitheater above. But along his body he could see the group of medical students. They were looking at him with great interest, too young not to let the human drama interfere with their technical education. The professor, however, droned in a purely objective voice. "The mnemonic eraser can selectively shunt from the brain any identic fiable category of memory, and erase the synaptic patterns associated with its translation into action. Circulating memory is disregarded. The machine only locates and shunts out those energies present as permanent memory. These are there in part as permanently echoing frequencies in closed cytoplasmic systems. These systems are in contact with the rest of the nervous system only during the phenomenon of remembrance. Remembrance occurs when, at all the synapses in a given network 'y S the permanently echoing frequencies are duplicated as transient circulating frequencies. "The objective in a total operation of the sort before us is to distinguish all the stored permanent frequencies, typical of the personality you wish to extinguish, from the frequencies typical of the other personality present in the brain." Major Grey's face, very tired, but still wearing a mask of adamant reassurance, came into Bill's vision. "There will be a few moments of drug-induced terror, Bill. That is necessary for the operation. I hope knowing it beforehand will help you ride with it. It  will not be for long." He squeezed Bill's shoulder and was gone. "The trick was learned early in our history, when this type of total operation was more often necessary," the professor continued. "It is really quite simple to extinguish one personality while leaving the other undisturbed. The other personality in the case before up has been drug-immobilized to keep this one from shifting. At the last moment, this personality before us will be drug-stimulated to bring it to the highest possible pitch of total activity. This produces utterly disorganized activity, every involved neuron and synapse being activated simultaneously by the drug. It is then a simple matter for the mnemonic eraser to locate all permanently echoing frequencies involved in this personality and suck them into its receiver." Bill was suddenly aware that a needle had been thrust into his arm. Then it was as though all the terror, panic and traumatic incidents of his whole life leaped into his mind. All the pleasant experiences and feelings he had ever known were there, too, but were transformed into terror. A bell was ringing with regular strokes. Across the panel of the mnemonic eraser, the tiny counting lights were alive with movement. There was in Bill a fright, a demand for survival so great that it could not be felt. It was actually from an island of complete calm that part of him saw the medical students rising dismayed and white-faced from their seats. It was apart from himself that his body strained to lift some mountain and filled the operating amphitheater with shrieking echoes. And all the time the thousand eyes of the mnemonic eraser flickered in swift patterns, a silent measure of the cells and circuits of his mind. Abruptly the tiny red counting lights went off, a red beam glowed with a burr of warning. Someone said, "Now!" The mind of Bill Walden flashed along a wire as iJ electrical energy and, converted on the control panel into mechanical energy, it spun a small ratchet counter. 'Pleasc sit down," the professor said to the shahen students. "The drug tliat has kept the other personality immobilized ic being counteracted by this next injection. Now that the sickly personality has been dissipated, the healthy wie can be brought back rapidly. "As you are aware, the synap.c operates on the binary 'yes-no' choice system of an electronic calculator. All synapses which were involved in the diseased personality have now been reduced to an atypical, uniform threshold. Thus they can be re-educated in new patterns by the healthy personality remaining ,... There, you see the countenance of the healthy personality appearing."  looked up at them with a wry grin. He rotated his shoulders to loosen them. "How many of you pushed old Bill Walden nroxmd? He left me with some sore muscles. Well, I did that often enough to him... Major Grey stood over him, face sick and white with the horror of what he had seen. "According to law, Mr. Manz, you and your wife are entitled to five rest days on your next shift. When they are over, you will, of course, report for suspended animation for what would have been your hypcralter's shift." Conrad Manz's grin shrank and vanished. "Would have been? Bill is -- gone?" "Yes." "I never thought I'd miss him." Conrad looked as sick as Major Grey felt. "It makes me feel -- I don't know if I can explain it -- sort of amputated. As though something's wrong with me because everybody else has an alter and I don't. Did the poor son of a straitjacket suffer much?" Tm afraid he did." Conrad Manz lay still for a moment with his eyes closed and his mouth thin with pity and remorse. "What will happen to Helen?" "She'll be all right," Major Grey said. "There will be Bill's insurance, naturally, and she won't have much trouble finding another husband. That kind never seems to." "Five rest days?" Conrad repeated. "Is that what you said?" He sat up and swung his legs off the table, and he was grinning again. "I'll get in a whole shift of jet-skiing! No, wait -- I've got a date with the wife of a friend of mine out at the rocket grounds, ril take Clara out there; she'll like some of the men." Major Grey nodded abstractedly. "Good idea.' He shook hands with Conrad Manz, wished him fun on his rest shift, and left. Taking a helicopter back to his city, Major Grey thought of his own hyperalter, Ralph Singer. He'd often wished that the silly fool could be erased. Now he wondered how it would be to have only one personality, and, wondering, realized that Conrad Manz had been right -- it would be like amputation, the shameful distinction of living in a schizophrenic society with no alter. No, Bill Walden had, been wrong, completely wrong, both about drugs and being split into two personalities. What one made up in pleasure through not taking drugs was more than lost in. the suffering of conflict, frustration and hostility. And having an alter -- any kind, even one as useless as Singer -- meant, actually, not bern alone. Major Grey parked the helicopter and found a shifting station. He took off his makeup, addressed and mailed his clothes, and waited for the shift to come. It was a pretty wonderful society he lived in, he realized. He wouldn't trade it for the kind Bill Walden had wanted. Nobody in his right mind would. St back from Mars when he noticed the red rash on his hands. He'd been reaching for one of the few remaining tissues to cover a sneeze, while scratching vigorously at the base of his neck. Then he saw the red spot, and his hand halted, while all desire to sneeze gasped out of him. He sat there, five feet seven inches of lean muscle and bronzed skin, sweating and staring, while the blond hair on the back of his neck seemed to stand on end. Finally he dropped his hand and pulled himself carefulExplorars who dread spiders ond snokes prove that heroism is olwoys more heroic to outsiders. Then there's the cose of the first space pilot to Mors who developed the Itch -- ly erect. The cabin in tie spaceship was big enough to permit turning around, but not much more, and with the ship cruising without power, there was almost no gravity to keep him from overshooting his goal. He found the polished plate that served as a mirror and studied himscU. His eyes were puffy, his nose was red. and there were other red splotches and marks on his face. Whatever it was. he hatd it bad! Pictures went through his head, all unpleasant. He'd been only a kid when the men canve back from the South Pacific in the last war; but an uncle had spent years dying of some weird disease that the doctors couldn't identify. That had been from something caught on Earth. What would happen when the disease vas from another planet? It was ridiculous. Mars had no animal life, and even the thin lichenlike plants were sparse and tiny.  man couldnt catch a disease from a plant. Even horses didn't communicate their ills to men. Then Bill remembered gangrene and cancer, which could attack any life, apparently. He went back to the tiny Geiger-Muller counter, but there was no sign of radiation from the big atomic motor that powered the ship. He stripped his clothes off, spotting more of tlic red marks breaking out, but finding no sign of parasites. He hadn't really believed it, anyhow. That wouldn't account for the sneezing and sniffles, or the puffed eyes and burning inside his nose and throat. Dust, maybe? Mars had been dusty, a waste of reddish sand and desert silt that made the Sahara seem like paradise, and it had settled on his spacesuit, to come in through the airlocks with him. But if it contained some irritant, it should have been worse on Mars than now. He could remember nothing annoying, and he'd turned on the tiny, compact little static dust traps, in any case, before leaving, to clear the air. He went back to one of the traps now, and ripped the cover off it. The little motor purred briskly. The plastic rods turned against fur brushes, while a wiper cleared off any dust they picked up. There was no dust he could see; the traps had done their work. Some plant irritant, like poison ivy? No, he'd always worn his suit -- Mars had an atmosphere, but it wasn't anything a man could breathe long. The suit was put on and off with automatic machine grapples, so he couldn't have touched it. The rash seemed to get worse on his body as he looked at it. I Thif time, he tore one of the tissues in quarters as he sneezed. The little supply was almost gone ; there was never space enough for much beyond essentials in a spaceship, even with the new atomic drive. As he looked for spots, the burning in his nose seemed to increase. He dropped back to the pilot seat, cursing. Two months of being cramped up in this cubicle, sweating out the trip to Mars without knowing how the new engine would last: three weeks on Mars, mapping frantically to cover all the territory he could, and planting little flags a hundred miles apart; now a week on the trip back at high acceleration most of the way -- and this! He'd expected adventure of some kind. Mars, though, had proved as interesting as a sandpile, and even the "canals" had proved to be only mineral striations, invisible' from the ground. He looked for something to do, but found nothing. He'd developed his films the day before, after carefully cleaning the static traps and making sure the air was dust-free. He'd written up the accounts. And he'd  been coasting along on the hope of getting home to a bath, a beer, and a few bull sessions, before he began to capitalize on being the first man to reach another planet beyond the Moon. He cut on full acceleration again, more certain of his motors than of himself. He'd begun to notice the itching yesterday; today he was breaking out in the rash. How long would whatever was coming take? Good God, he might die -- from something as humiliating and undramatic as this! It hadn't hit him before, fully. There was no knowing about diseases from other planets. Men had developed immunity to the germs found on Earth; but just as smallpox had proved so fatal to the Indians and syphilis to Europe when they first hit, there was no telling how wildly this might progress. It might go away in a day, or it might kill him just as quickly. He was figuring his new orbit on a tiny calculator. In two days at this acceleration, he could reach radar-distance of Earth: in four, he could land. The tubes might burn out in continuous firing. But the other way, he'd be two weeks making a landing, and most diseases he could remember seemed faster than that. Bill wiped the sweat off his forehead, scratched at other places that were itching, and stared down at the small disk of Earth, There were doctors there -- and, brother, he'd need them fast! Things were a little worse when the hrst squeals came fram the radar two days later. He'd run out of tissues, and his nose was a continual drip, while breathing seemed almost impossible. He was running some fever, too, though he had no way of knowing how much. He cut his receiver in, punched out the code on his key. The receiver pipped again at him, bits of message getting through, but unclearly. There was no response to his signals. He checked his chronometer and flipped over the micropages of his Ephemeris; the big radar at Washington was still out of line with him, and the signals had to cut through too much air to come clearly. It should be good in another hour. But right now, an hour seemed longer than a normal year. He checked the dust tray again, tried figuring out other orbits, managed to locate the Moon, and scratched. Fifteen minutes. There was no room for pacing up apd down. He pushed the back down from the pilot seat, lowered the tabic, and pulled out his bunk; he remade it, making sure all the corners were perfect. Then he folded it back and lifted the table and seat. That took less than five minutes. His hands were shaking worse when the automatic radar signals began to come through more clearly. It wasn't an hour, but he could wait no longer. He opened the key and began to send. It would take fifteen seconds for the signal to reach Earth, and another quarter minute for an answer, even if an operator was on duty. Half a minute later, he found one was. "Earth to Mars Rocket I. Thank God, you're ahead of schedule. If your tubes hold out, crowd them. Two other nations have ships out now. The U. N. has ruled that whoever comes back first with mapping surveys can claim the territory mapped. We're rushing the construction, but we need the ship for the second mn if we're to claim our fair territory. Aw, hell -- congratula- tions!" He'd started hammering at his key before they finished, giving the facts on the tubes, which were standing up beyond all expectations. "And get a doctor ready -- a bunch of them," he finished. "I seem to have picked up something like a disease." There was a long delay before an answer came this time -- more than five minutes. The hand oa the key was obviously different, slower and not as steady. "What symptoms, Adams? Give all details!' He began, giving all the infor-mation he had, from the first itching through the rash and thtt fever. Again, longer this time, the #  main station hesitated. "Anything I can do about it now?" Bill asked, finally. "And how about having those doctors ready?" "We're checking with Medical," the signals answered. "We're... Here's their report. Not enough data -- could be anything. Do#ens of diseases like that. Nothing you can do, except try salt water gargle and spray; you've got stuff for that. Wash off rash with soap and hot water, followed by some of your hypo. We'll get a medical kit up to the Moon for you." He let that sink in, then clicked back: "The Moon? "You think you can land here with whatever you've got, man? There's no way of knowing how contagious it is. And keep an hourly check with us. If you pass out, we'll try to get someone out in a Moon rocket to pick you up. But we can't risk danger of infecting the whole planet. You're quarantined on the Moon -- we'll send up landing instructions later -- not even for Luna Base, but where there will be no chance of contamination for others. You didn't really expect to come back here, did you, Adams?" He should have thought of it. He knew that. And he knew that the words from Earth weren't as callous as they sounded. Down there, men would be sweating with him, going crazy trying to do something. But they were right. Earth had to be protected first; Bill Adams was only one even if he had reached a planet before any other man. Yeah, it was fine to be a hero. But heroes shouldn't menace the rest of the world. Logically, he knew they were right. That helped him get his emotions under control. "Where do you want me to put down?" "Tycho. It isn't hard to spot for radar-controlled delivery of supplies to you, but it's a good seven hundred miles from Lunar Base. And look -- we'll try to get a doctor to you. But keep us informed if anything slips. We need those maps, if we can find a way to sterilize 'em." "Okay," h e acknowledged. "And tell the cartographers there are no craters, no intelligence, and only plants about half an inch high. Mars stinks." They'd already been busy, he saw, as he teetered down on his jets for a landing on Tycho. Holding control was the hardest job he'd ever done. A series of itchings cropped out just as the work got tricky, when he could no longer see the surface, and had to go by feel. But somehow he made it. Then he relaxed and began an orgy of scratching. And he'd thought there was something romantic about being a hero! The supplies that had already been sent up by the superfast unmanned missiles would give him something to do, at least. He moved back the two feet needed to reach his developing tanks and went through the proc ess of spraying and gargling. It was soothing enough while it went on, but it offered only momentary help. Then his stomach began showing distress signs. He fought against it, tightening up. It did no good. His hasty breakfast of just black coffee wanted to come up -- and did. giving him barely time to make the little booth. He washed his mouth out and grabbed for the radar key, banging out a report on this. The doctors must have been standing by down at the big station, because there was only a slight delay before the answering signal came: "Any blood?" Another knot added itself to his intestines. "I don't know -- don't think so. but I didn't look." "Look, next time. We're trying to get this related to some of the familiar diseases. It must have some relation -- there arc only so many ways a man can be sick. We've got a doctor coming over, Adams. None on the Moon, but we're shipping him throughHe'll set down in about nine hours. And there's some stuff to take on the supply missiles. May not help, but we're trying a mixture of the antibi dynes for the itching and rash Hope they work. Let us know any reaction." Bill cut off. He'd have to try. They were as much in the dark about this as he was, but they had a better background for guessing and trial and error. And if the bugs in him happened to like tachiomycctin, he wouldn't be too much worse off. Damn it, had there been blood? He forced his mind off it, climbed into his clothes and then into the spacesuit that hung from the grapples. It moved automatically into position, the two halves sliding shut and sealing from outside. The big gloves on his hands were too clumsy for such opera tions. Then he went bounding across the Moon. Halfway to the supplies he felt the itching come back, and he slithered and wriggled around, trying to scratch his skin against his clothing. It didn't help much. He was sweating harder, and his eyes were watering. He manipulated the little visor-cleaning gadget, trying to poke his face forward to brush the Trustration tears from his eyes. He couldn't quite reach it. There were three supply missiles. each holding about two hundred pounds, Earth weight. He tied them together and slung them over his back, heading toward his ship. Here they weighed only a hundred pounds, and with his own weight and the suit added, the whole load came to little more than his normal weight on Earth. He tried shifting the supplies around on his back, getting them to press against the spots of torment as he walked. It simply unbalanced him. without really relieving the itching. Fortunately, though, his eyes were clearing a little. He gritted his teeth and fought back through the powdery pumice surface, kicking up clouds of dust that settled slowly but completely -- though the gravity was low, there was no air to hold them up. Nothing had ever looked better than the airlock of the ship. He let the grapples hook the suit off him as soon as the outer seal was shut and went into a whirling dervish act. Aches and pains could be stood -- but itchingf Apparently, though, the spray and gargle had helped a little, since his nose felt somewhat clearer and his eyes were definitely better. He repeated them, and then found the medical supplies. with a long list of instructions. They were really shooting the pharmacy at him. He injected himself, swallowed things, rubbed himself down with others, and waited. Whatever they'd given him didn't offer any immediate help. He began to feel worse. But on contacting Earth by radar, he was assured that that might be expected. e've got another missile coming, with metal foil for the maps and photos -- plus a small copying camera. You can print them right on the metal, seal that in a can, and leave it for the rocket that's bringing the doctor. The pilot will blast over it -- that should sterilize it -- and pick it up when it cools." Bill swore, but he was in hi suit when the missile landed, heading out across the pumicecovered wastes toward it. The salves had helped the itching a little, but not much. And his nose had grown worse again. He jockeyed the big supply can out of the torpedo-shaped missile, packed it on his back. i and headed for his ship. The itching was acting up as he sweated -- this made a real load, about like packing a hundred bulky pounds over his normal Earth weight through the soft drift of the pumice. But his nose was clearing again; it was apparently becoming cyclic. He'd have to relay that information back to the medics. And where were they getting a doctor crazy enough to take a chance with him? He climbed out of the suit and went through the ritual of scratching, noticing that his fever had gone up, and that his muscles were shaking. His head seemed light, as if he were in for a spell of dizziness. They'd be interested in that, back on Earth, though it wouldn't do much good. He couldn't work up a clinical attitude about himself. All he wanted was a chance to get over this disease before it killed him. He dragged out the photo and copying equipment, under a red light. It filled what little space was left in his cubbyhole cabin. Then he swore, gulping down more of the pills where they were waiting for him. The metal sheets were fine. They were excellent. The only thing wrong was that they wouldn't fit his developing trays -- and they were tough enough to give him no way of cutting them to size. He stuffed them back in their container and shoved it into the airlock. Then his stomach kicked up again. He couldn't see any blood in the result, but he couldn't be sure -- the color of the pills might hide traces. He flushed it down, his head turning in circles, and went to the radar. This time he didn't even wait for a reply; let them worry about their damned maps. They could send cutting equipment with the doctor and pick up the things later. They could pick up his corpse and cremate it at the same time, for all he cared right now. He yanked out his bunk and slumped into it, curling up as much as the itching would permit. And finally, for the first time in over fifty hours, he managed to doze off, though his sleep was full of nightmares. It was the sound of the bullthroated chemical rocket that brought him out of it -- the sound traveling along the surface through the rocks and up through the metal ship, even without air to carry it. He could feel the rumble of its takeoff later, but he waited long after that for the doctor. There was no knock on the port. Finally he pulled himself up from the bunk, sweating and shaken, and looked out. The doctor was there -- or at least a man in a spacesuit was. But somebody had been in a burry for volunteers, and given the nran no basic training at all. The figure ' would pull itself erect, make a few strides that were all bounce and no progress, and then slide down into the pumice. Moon-walking was tricky until you learned how. Bill sighed, scratching uncon sciously, and made his way somehow out to his suit, climbing into it. He paused for a final good scratch, and then the grapples took over. This time, he stumbled al.so as he made his way across the powdery rubble. But the other man was making no real progress at all. Bill reached him, and touched helmets long enough to issue simple instructions through metal sound conduction. Thi he managed to guide the other's steps; there had been accounts of the days of learning spent by the first men on the Moon, but it wasn't that bad with an instructor to help. The doctor picked up as they went along. Bill's legs were buckling under him by then, and the itches were past endurance. At the end, the doctor was helping him. But somehow they made the ship, and were getting out of the suits -- Bill first, then the doctor, using the grapples under Bill's guidance. The doctor was young, and obviously scared, but fighting his fear. He'd been picked for his smallness to lighten the load on the chemical rocket, and his little face was intent. But he managed a weak grin. ' "Thanks, Adams. I'm Doctor Ames -- Ted to you. Get onto that cot. You're about out on your feet." The test he made didn't take long, but his head was shaking at the conclusion. "Your symptoms make no f sense," he summari#cd. T've got a feeling some are due to one thing, some to another. Maybe we'll have to wait until I come down with it and compare notes. His grin was wry, but Bill was vaguely glad that he wasn't trying any bedside manner. There wasn't much use in thanking the man for Volunteering -- Ames had known what he was up against, and he might be scared, but his eburage was above thanks. "What about the maps?" Bill asked. "They tell you?" "They've left cutters outside. I started to bring them. Then the pumice got me -- I couldn't stand upright in it. They'll pick up the maps later, but they're important. The competing ships will claim our territory if we don't file first.' He knocked the dust off his instrument, and wiped his hands. Bill looked down at the bed to see a fine film of Moon silt there. They'd been bringing in too much on the suits -- it was too fine, and the traps weren't getting it fast enough. He got up shakily, moving toward the dust trap that had been running steadily. But now it was out of order, obviously, with the fur brushes worn down until they could generate almost no static against the rod. He groped into the supplies, hoping there would be replacements. Ames caught his arm. "Cut it out, Adams. You're in no shape for this. Hey, how long since you've eaten?" Bill thought it over, his head thick.  "f had coffee before I landed." Doctor Ames nodded quickly. "Vomiting, dizziness, tremors, exjcess sweating -- what did you expect. man? You put yourself under this strain, not knowing what comes next, having to land wi an empty stomach, skipping meals and loading your stomach wih pills -- and probably no sleep! Those symptoms are perfectly normal." He was at the tiny galley equipment, fixing quick food as he spoke. But his face was still sober. He was probably thinking of the same thing that worried Bill -- an empty stomach didn't make the itching rash, the runny nose and eyes, and the general misery that had begun the whole thing. He sorted through the stock of replacement parts, a few fieldsistors, suit wadding, spare gloves, cellophane-wrapped gadgets. Then he had it. Ames was over, urging him toward the cot, but he shook him off. "Got to get the dust out of here -- dust'll make the itching worse. Moon dust is sharp, Doc. Just install new brushes... Where are those instructions? Yeah, insert the cat's fur brushes under the... Caf's fur? Is that what they use, Doc?' "Sure. It's cheap and generates static electricity. Do you expect sable?" Bill took the can of soup and sipped it without tasting or thinking, his hand going toward a fresh place that itched. His nose began running, but he disregarded it. He still felt lousy, but strength was flowing through him. and life was almost good again. He tossed the bunk back into its slot, lifted the pilot's stool, and motioned Ames forward. "You operate a key -- hell, I am getting slow. You can contact Luna Base by phone, have them relay. There. Now tell 'em I'm blasting off pronto for Earth, and I'll be down in four hours with their plans.' "You're crazy." The words were flat, but there was desperation on the little doctor's face. He glanced about hastily, taking the microphone woodcnly. "Adams, they'll have an atomic bomb up to blast you out before youVe near Earth. They've got to protect themselves. You can't... Bill scratched, but there was the beginning of a grin on his face. "Nope, I'm not delirious now, though I damn near cracked up. You figured out half the symptoms. Take a look at those brushes -- cat's fur brushes -- and figure what they'll do to a man who was breathing the air and who is allergic to cats! All I ever hgd was some jerk in Planning who didn't check my medical record with trip logistics! I never had these symptoms until I unzipped the traps and turned 'em on. It got better whenever I was in the suit, breathing canned air. We should have known a man can't catch a disease from plants." The doctor looked at him, and at the fur pieces he'd thrown into a wastebin, and the whiteness ran from his face. He was seeing his own salvation, and the chuckle began weakly, gathering strength as he turned to the microphone. "Cat asthma -- simple allergy. Who'd figure you'd get that in deep space? But you're right# Bill. It figures." Bill Adams nodded as he reached for the controls, and the tubes began firing, ready to take them back to Earth. Then he caught himself and swung to the doctor. "Doc," he said quickly, "just be sure and tell them this isn't to get out. If they'll keep still about it, so will I." He'd make a hell of a hero on Earth if people heard of it. and he could use a little of a hero's reward. No catcalls, thanks. The Big News Next Month... by Robeii A. Heinlein You asked for Heinlein -- and here he is -- with a three-par! book-lengih serial of terrifying power and almost unbearably sustained suspense! What better time to start o subscription that at the beginning of a new Herntein novel? n Technological upheavals caused by inventions of our own are bad enough, but this was the ultimate depression, caused by the ultimate alien invention -- which no Earthman ever saw! hand in a firm, warm grasp. Jerry had been prepared for almost anything  -- a scholarly brontosaurus, perhaps, or an educated squid or giant caterpillar with telepathic powers. But the Ambassador didn't even have antennae, gills, or green hair. He was a completely normal and even handsome human being. "Scotch? Cigar?" the Ambassador offered cordially. "How can I help you, Mr. Jergins?" Studying him, Jerry decided there was something peculiar about this extraterrestial, after all He was too perfect. His shave was too close, his skin so unblemished as to suggest waxworks. Every strand of his distinguished iron-gray hair was impeccably placed. The negligent and just-right drape of his clothes covered a body shaped like a Sixth Century B.C. piece of Greek sculpture. No mere human could have look so unruffled, so utterly groomed, at three o'clock in the afternoon, in a busy office. A race, Jerry wondered, capable of taking any shape at will, in mimicry of the indigenous race of any planet? "You can help me, but I'm not sure you will" Jerry said. "The rumor is that you won't do anything to ease this buyers' strike you started on Earth." The Ambassador smiled. "You're a man who's not used to taking no for an answer, I gather. What's your proposition?" "I'd like to contact some of the firms on the Federated Planets, show them how I could promote their merchandise on Earth. Earth is already clamoring for their goods. To establish a mediuifl of exchange, we'd have to run simultaneous campaigns,' promoting Earth merchandise on other planets." "That would be difficult, even fof a man of your promotional abrlity," the Ambassador said winningly. "You see, Earth is the only planet we've yet discovered where advertising-or promotion, to use the broader term -- exists as a social and economic force." "How in hell can anybody do business without it?" Jefry demanded. "We don't do business in the sense you mean. Don't mistake me," the Ambassador added hastily, "we don't have precisely a communal economy, either. Our very well defined sense of ethics in regard to material goods is something I find impossible to describe in any Earth language. It's quite simple, so simple that you have to grow up with it to understand it. Our whole attitude toward material goods is conditioned by the Matter Repositor." "That gadget!" Jerry said bitterly. "It was when you first mentioned it before the U.N. Assembly that all this trouble on Earth Started. Everybody and his brother hopes that tomorrow he can buy a Matter Repositor, and never have to buy anything again. I came here mostly to ask you whether it's really true, that if you have one of those dinguses, you can bring anything you want into your living room." "You can. In practice, of course, repositing just anything that took your fancy would produce economic anarchy." "Let's put it this way," Jerry persisted. "Home appliances were my biggest accounts. Now, when we try to sell a refrigerator, the prospect says she's saving her cash till Matter Rcpositors get on the Earth market. She plans to rcposit a refrigerator -- not from her neighbor's kitchen, because that would be stealing -- but from the factory. If the factory goes bust, people figure the government will have to subsidize building appliances. Now, could she really reposit a refrigerator?" "She could. But she wouldn't want to." "Why not?" Jerry asked, puzzled. "If she conceived an illogical and useless desire for food refrigeration, she would simply reposit a block of coldair from, say, the North Pole." "Oh, fine!" Jerry said sarcastically. "That would cause more unemployment in the refrigerator industry than repositing them without paying for them! But what do you mean about food refrigeration being illogical and useless?" "Well, In a storage warehouse, there might be some reason for food preservation. But you don't need cold or canning. Why not just reposit the bacteria that cause the food to deteriorate? There's no need to store food in a home equipped with a Matter Repositor. You simply reposit one meal at a time. Fruits and vegetables direct from tree or field. Meat from a slaughterhouse, since it isn't humane to remove a pound of steak from a live steer. But even this is needless." "Why?" Jerry baffledly wanted ' to know. "To free the maximum amount of the effort of thinking beings for non-material activities, each consumer can reposit the chemical elements of the food, synthesize his meal on the table. He can even reposit tliese elements directly into his stomach, or, to by-pass the effort of digestion, into his bloodstream as glycogen and amino acifls." "So refrigerators would be as dead an item as kerosene lamps in a city wired for electricity," Jerry agreed unhappily. "Suppose Mrs. Housewife, not needing a refrigerator, reposits a washing machine. The point I'm driving at -- is there any practical way to compensate the factory, give it an incentive to produce more washing machines, without dragging in government control?" "Why should the factory,produce more washing machines? Who would want one? The housewife would simply reposit the dirt from her clothes into her flowerbed, without using water and soap. Or, more likely, reposit new clothes with different colors, fabrics, and styles. The Matter Repositor would eliminate # textile mills and clothing factories. Earth's oceans have vast enough, quantities of seaweed to eliminate the growing of cotton, wool, or flax. Or. again, you could reposit the chemical elements, either from the soil or from seawater." Jerry pondered the extensive implications of these revelations. Finally he said, 'What it boils down to is this. All Earth's bus tUng material activity, all the logging and construction, the mining and manufacturing, the planting hnd Ashing, the printing and postal service, the great transportation and shipping effort, the cleaning and painting, the sewage disposal, even the bathing and self-adornment, consist, when you analyze them, of one process only -- putting something from where you don't want it to where you do. There's, not one single, solitary Earth invention or service left to advertise!" "Nothing," the Ambassador agreed. "Which is exactly why advertising has not developed on the .Federated Planets. You're fortunate that Earth doesn't have Matter Repositors. You'd be out of a job if it did." "Oh. no!" Jerry said. "I could still advertise the gadget to end all gadgets -- the Matter Repositor itself. I know other people have skcd you this before, but could an Earth company get a franchise to import those machines here, or the license rights to manufacture them?" "No," the Ambassador said, briefly and definitely. "Mr. Ambassador," Jerry protested, "you've gone to a lot of trouble to explain things you must already be tired of explaining to Earthmen, just so I personally could be sure they weren't merely rumors or misinterpretations. Now that I get down to the real point, you suddenly become blunt and unqualified. Why?" "Because there's a very serious question of ethics involved, wherever a more advanced civilization comes in contact with a relatively primitive one. For instance, when the white men came to America, the aborigines were introduced to gunpowder and firewater." "So you people are keeping Matter Repositors away from us, like a mama keeping candy away from a baby who's hollering for it, because It's not good for him! You'd pass up a chance to name your own price -- " "The very way you phrase that remark indicates the danger. You regard personal gain as the strongest of motives, which means that Matter Repositors would be used for that, even by such unusually intelligent members of your race as yourself." "Don't softsoap me," Jerry said angrily. "Not after you just got through saying that wc Barth lings are nothing but naked sav ages, compared to the high and mighty super-beings on other planets?" "I apologize for my phraseology," the Ambassador said. "With my limited command of your language -- " "Your limited command, nuts! I suppose you supermen enjoy seeing us naked savages squirm. Why talk sanctimoniously about the damage you might do. when you know damn well the damage has already been done? Just the news that something as advanced as the Matter Repositor exists has sent unemployment to a new high, and the stock market to a new low. And you theorize about ethics, while denying us the only cure!" Jerry found himself fighting a nearly irresistible impulse to smash his fist into that tooperfect profile -- which, he realized glumly, would only prove the Ambassador's point about savages. "Here, here," the Ambassador said benevolently, "let's have another drink. Then we'll see whether I can make it clear to you why the actual importation of Matter Repositors would cause much piore trouble on Earth than the announcement of their existence, bad as the effect of that has been. To begin with. I admit I made a Mery serious error in nentioning the device at all before the U.N. Assembly. I intended merely to explain how I came here without a spaceship. After that, I was flooded with questions; I could no more avoid answering them than I could courteously avoid answering the questions you've been asking today." "You mean you super-beings actual admit you're human enou to make mistakes?" Jerry asked, somewhat mollified. "Of course we make mistakes. We try not to make the same one twice. You see, we once made the mistake of importing Matter Repositors to a planet whose natural resources and social concepts weren't adequate for the device. That was a long time ago, and they haven't recovered from the effects yet. Suppose a consignment of ten thousand Matter Repositors arrived on Barth tomorrow. Under your economic system. who would get them?" "The ten thousand people or corporations who had the most money to pay for them, I guess. Unless government agencies grabd 'em." "Can you guarantee that of the ten thousand people on Earth who have the most money, not one is unscrupulous?" "Gosh, no!" Jerry said. "I don't think there's any doubt that to stay in business very long, a man or a company has to have a ccrtain amount of business ethics. Nobody can gyp the public indefinitely. But a bank robber might have a lot of cash, or a confidence man, or a cluck with a big inheritance." "So, to be generous, let's assume that #'# of your wealthiest persons are so ethical that they would never make any profit at the expense of the general welfare. That leaves us one crook. What would he reposit first?' "Hmm... Maybe the gold at Fort Knox." "And what effect would that have on Earth's business?" "I'm not quite sure," Jerry admitted. "I'm no shark on monetary theory, just the kind of largescale salesman who makes mass production possible. But it certainly wouldn't do the world situation any good." "Suppose, next, our crook holds the President of the United States for ransom. Since he doesn't need money, the ransom price might be laws which would grant him impunity for his crimes. If not, he could have an accomplice reposit him out of jail, or even out of the electric chair, before the switch was pulled," "That's enough! I get the idea!" Jerry exclaimed. "Wait -- there's a more important point. Suppose a government you consider the wrong government got hold of some of the machines. First, of course, they'd reposit the world ' stockpile of atomic bombs. Then they'd reposit disease bacteria into the bloodstreams of U.N. troops, officials, and civilian workers, and reposit all the ammunition out of U.N. guns. So long as there is one spark of nationalism left on Earth, so long as any country has an economic and political system they consider better than some other system, Matter Repositors would mean planetary self-destruction. Now do you see why I was blunt and unqualified?" "I do," Jerry said solemnly, "And I was a fool to fly off the handle when you called us savages. We are savages, I can see that now. And your people must be pretty damned godlike to be trusted with such an invention!" "Not at all. To a Micronesian bushman, the pilot who can be trusted with the power and speed of a B-# seems a veritable god. But the pilot is only an ordinary Joe, very likely no more intelligent than the bushman -- he just had a different background. Fighting each other for necessities and luxuries, the process that you people call business competition, has so long been needless to our people that they would no more think of competitive gain than you would do an Indian harvest dance before you signed a contract. They aren't necessarily #t more intelligent or more virtuous than your people -- they just have a different background.' "You seem to have devoted a lot of study to the larceny in the Earthman's soul," Jerry put in. "What if we stole the secret from you, whether you think it wise to give it to us or not? Suppose somebody swiped the blueprints, or copied a Repositor you brought with you for your own use?" The Ambassador smiled. "You might try to steal it. That's why I didn't bring a Repositor with me, to save you people the trouble of a futile try." "Why futile?" "Well, the Matter Repositor is a simple device. Any child on the Federated Planets who had an education, say, equivalent to yoir technical high school education, could build a working model, even without another Repositor to assist him. But Earth's best technicians couldn't build one, even with cither blueprints or a model to copy." "They couldn't, eh?" Jerry challenged, bristling again. "They managed to split atoms, transmute elements, do a few little tricks like that." "I see Tve been tactless again the Ambassador said regretfully. "Just now, you readily conceded that Earthmcn are savages morally. but when I seem to cast aspersions on your mechanical ability, it offends your racial vanity. All right, let's go back to the B-# pilot and the intelligent bushman. The internal combustion engine that powers the B-# is a simple device in fundamental principle, isn't It?" "Sure," Jerry said. "Any high school boy who has taken a course in auto mechanics, who has the requisite machine tools, metals, casting equipment, and fuel, could build a working model of an internal combustion engine, couldn't he. even without ready-made parts?" "If he wasn't all thumbs, he could." "All right. Now suppose the B-# is grounded in the jungle. The bushman is examining the engine. He's just as intelligent as the pilot, remember, but his environment hasn't produced an oil well, let alone a refinery. He has never seen a lathe or a micrometer. He has no mine, no smelter. He can't copy that B-# engine by whittling wood or chipping stone, even if he's a born mechanical genius, and he can't run it o.n seawater. So he says the plane flies by magic. Put him in the pilot seat, and you'll admit it's practically inevitable that he'll crash.' "Why do you take so much trouble to explain things?" Jerry asked wryly. "I should have my head examined for not understanding it in the first place. "Let's say I'm feebly trying to make amends for what my unfortunate slip of the tongue has done to your business." "You've brought me around to your way of thinking, Mr. Ambassador," Jerry said, recovering enough to carry the ball. "But it would be impossible to sell the public on the idea that they shouldn't have Repositors because they're too hot to handle. Statistics on auto accidents never convinced anybody that he didn't wapt a nice, shiny, new car. Nobody thinks he personally will gct killed in traffic -- he's too smart. You can't convince a youngster he doesn't want candy before dinner; he thinks he knows better than his parents. But you can hide the candy, while putting an appetizing meal on the table." "Yes, except that I regrettably didn't hide the fact that the Matter Repositor exists."  "You sure didn't. And it puts you a spot, doesn't it? I don't imagine it will be much fun for you to report to your government that one ill-considered remark, made shortly after your arrival, upset Earth's economy." For the first time, the Ambassador's suavity was ruffled. Sweat stood out on his noble forehead. 'I've been hoping the bad-effects would die down before I have to report," he confessed. "They won't die down by themselves. You know damned well they're getting worse and worse, as word of mouth advertising about the Matter Repositor spreads." Jerry leaned closer. "But you and I can get rid of those bad effects.' "How?" "Well, I'll tell you. When I came to see you, I was pretty sure you'd turn me down cold on importing Matter Repositors. But I had an ace up my sleeve. I hoped you would admit that the reason you've been stalling on selling Earth any Repositors is that you don't really have a practical one. I thought maybe rumors of the Repositor's powers had been vastly exaggerated. If you admitted that, I intended to publicize it to the limit. A campaign to convince Earthmen that you'd been kidding them would work, because it plays on John Q. Public's conviction that he's pretty smart, too smart to believe all this gab about a gadget he's never seen. With your denial to back me up, I could put it across. It would be a lifesaving shot in the arm for Earth business." "You mean," the Ambassador said reflectively, "that if I call myself a liar -- if I actually become a liar in so doing -- I can patch up the damage I've done? That puts me in a difficult ethical position." to "Not as difficult as the one you're in now. If it will make it easier for you, I can word your ' denial in a face-saving way, and have it ready for your signature Tuesday. You have a remarkable command of colloquial English, but even a diplomat using his native tongue can't juggle the connotations and inferences like an advertising man." "It's very kind of you to offer your professional skill in my behalf. I think I should pay you a fee for the copy." "Skip it," Jerry said generously, fingering the nickel and two pennies in his pocket. "A small token of my appreciation for the patience you've shown. What time Tuesday?" "Say two o'clock?" "Fine. But before I spend my time on this, you're not going to make the same deal with somebody else, are you?" "Deal? Did I make adeal?" "What I mean, nobody else has approached you with the idea that Earth business would get back to normal if you would deny that a practical Matter Repositor exists? You'd say I have exclusive rights to the idea?" "Nobody has," the Ambassador said, "and I agree to give you exclusive rights." "Good! With your signed denial, I can raise the loot. I think the N.A.M. will go for it. The campaign will have to be wellfinanced, you see; the amount of space the news columns will give to your denial may be as much as they gave to your original statement, but that alone won't do the job. It's much harder to kill a notion that has penetrated the public mind than it is to implant one." THE Ambassador indulged in a chuckle. "I'm beginning to see daylight. My signed denial in your hands becomes a salable piece of merchandise, worth far more than I would pay you for a few lines of copy. Well, more power to you ! Would it be out of place for me to contribute some of the funds for publicizing this denial?" "How much?" Jerry asked practically. "Well," the Ambassador explained, "I've had nothing reposited that I could avoid. But since your planet has a monetary exchange, I had to pay for my office help, lodging, and so on. Synthesizing coinage would have been counterfeiting, which is against your laws, so I merely had a moderate amount of uncoined gold reposited, and I sell it on the regular Earth market as I need funds. Gold has no particular value on the Federated Planets. of course. I could get whatever yoil need, so long as it isn't tI enough to disrupt the economy any more than -- well, than I have already. Let's limit ourselves to an amount that could be accounted for by an unusually good year in mining.' "Sold!" Jerry said happily. "I think I can struggle along on a usual fifteen per cent on advertising space an printing, of course; I'll have an estimate on that for you Tuesday. Since you can finance the whole campaign yourself, we'll leave the N.A.M. out of it. That way I can spare you the humiliation of signing an outright denial. All you have to do from now on is to keep mum. Don't even admit that you're the angel financing this campaign; that would make it look phony. I'll assign you three personal public-relations men. on twenty-fourhour shift. All your public remarks arc to screen through them." "But how can I conceal my identity when I'm sponsoring the campaign?" the Ambassador objected. "That's easy. The ostensible sponsor will be a dummy organisation called -- um -- the Consumers Fact Finding Board. Nobody but me needs to know who signs the checks. "How long will this campaign iKmtinue?" "I figure it'll take about six months to sell the public this particular bill of goods. Once we get business revived, the best thing is never to mentionthe words Matter Repositor again, not even to deny its existence. Tlie ultimate goal is to make people forget they ever heard of such a gadget. The more convincing I make it, the quicker I'll work myself out of a job." 'I should think you'd make it last as long as possible; that's why I asked you for a time-limit. Do you want to work yourself out of a job?" "You bet I do! Then I can start selling a bigger item, launch a longer-term promotion, one that will last till Earth gets civilired, till I don't have anything more to sell. From what you say, that will take a lot longer than I'll live." "It may be none of my business, but what is this big item you projjose to sell next?" the Ambassador asked, curiously. "Earth," Jerry said. The Ambassador looked confused. "I'm afraid I don't understand." "Didn't you just get through telling me, in effect, that any of your people who came to Earth could have all the money they wanted to spend? Well, I'm going to run advertising copy on the Federated Planets, and get them to come here and spend it," "But I also told you that adrx vertising is unknown on the Federated Planets!" the Ambassador protested. "All the better. Your people, then, will have less sales resistance than an audience of Earth kindergarten kids, who have had spot commercials dinned into their ears since birth. The only problem is space and time." "The Matter Repositor has effectively solved the problems of space and time." "No. I mean space and time as an advertising man uses those terms. Newspaper and magazine space, radio and TV time. Do you have any newspapers out there." "We have very little you would classify as news. No wars, no stock market, no crime, no epidemics, no political mudslinging, few accidents. But we do have information bulletins, of course." month retainer, I want an exclusive contract to run advertising copy in the information bulletins on the Federated Planets." "This is completely unprecedented!" "You want to get out of this mess you're in. don't you? I'm the boy who can get you out, and thats my price." "You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Jergins. Very well, I'll arrange it. But I'm getting you the contract only because I'm certain your excursion idea won't work. Oh, I know Earthmen want to visit the Federated Planets; I've had plenty of requests. I've had to explain repeatedly that wc must hold to our announced policy of no ambassador from Earth, and no exchange students, until Earth has completed a few more steps in the development of her civilization. But surely none of our people will come to Earth, aside from a few students of comparative civilizations. Our general public can view samples of your national costumes, automobiles, and so on, in the museums. I can't see why they should want to come here, while Earth is still in a primitive end dangerous stage." "You can't, eh? Well, you might be surprised, Mr. Ambassador, you might be surprised. For the time being, .just picture yourself as the pilot of that B-#, grounded on a primitive little island in space. You've met a poor, ignorant bushman. He couldn't reproduce your plane to save his neck. He can't pnanufacture a single gadget you'd want to buy. Nevertheless, you're about to see a demonstration of a few tricks of survival that your supercivilized race has forgotten -- or, rather, never knew. I think you'll cook up into a right tasty dish." Business Bureau of Oskaloosa, Iowa, nabbed a questionIS able character who had accepted deposits from local businessmen, in return for elaborately printed but worthless contracts to deliver Matter Rcpositors. The warning flash crossed similar warnings from New Orleans, Reno. Milwaukee, and the Bor ough of Queens, with a particularly hysterical note injected by Los Angeles, where the populace had proved most susceptible to the bogus agents. The news of a national ring of confidence artists, capitalizing on people's desire for Matter Repositors, ran in all papers, of course. The editws as yet hadn't the faintest idea that they were printing carefully engineered publicity. Before he even got his space contracts lined up. Jerry had accomplished quite a feat. He had fixed things so that, if the Ambassador from Outer Space himself had changed his mind, and imported a cargo of genuine Matter Repositors, he would have had some trouble convincing people he wasn't a crook. In a record two weeks, the campaign proper was ready to roll. It was long on white space, and the copy was so short that, after glancing at it a few times, you found that ypu had involuntarily committed it to memory. In the center of blank pages in all major metropolitan newspapers appeared a small want-ad, stating that the Consumers Fact Finding Board had deposited with a New Ywk bank the sum of one million dollars in cash, after taxes, which would be paid to any person. terrestrial or extraterrestrial, who could produce a Matter Repositor capable of repositing an object weighing two pounds a distance of ten feet. The offer was repeated daily for a month, and from the second day forward, there was a large, red overprint, looking like a crayon scrawl, which said, "No Takers to Date who Can Deliver the Goods!" The idea was pounded into the public mind by carcards. billboards, direct mail, and annoying telephone solicitors, who got subscribers out of bathtub and bed to ask them whether they had a Matter Repositor around the house they wanted to sell for a and illuminated blimps by night made sure the literate could not escape the message. Radio and TV singing and cartoon commerNo conclusions were drawn in the copy. Each "prospect" was left with the comfortable feeling that his own superior intellect and powers of deduction had supplied the answer. No Matter Repositor turned up for sale, so everyone was sure there was no such tiling. The whole campaign, like other # advertising campaigns before it, depended on what people failed to consider. They neglected to rebe a joke to the owner of a Matter Repositor, who could reposit all the wealth on Earth, including but would have no use for money, since he could reposit usable goods. The magic phrase "a million dollars" was a worldwide symbol for all desirable material things. It would have been almost heresy to reflect that even that much cash had no actual value. A S Jerry premised, the Ambassador didn't have to issue an official denial. His chief public relations man quite truthfully admitted to reporters that the Ambassador had no Matter Repositor in his possession, a dispatch carried by all wire services, and snickered at by clever columnists. In basements and garages, persons of good, bad, and indifferent mechanical ability strove to earn was inundated with models and drawings of unworkable devices. One of the Duke University subjects tried to patent his ability to influence the fall of dice mentally. During the next session of the Congress, Jerry's crack lobbyists raised a great howl about the shameful congestion in the Patent Office, not mentioning, of course, that they were employed by the man who had created the conlars for a device he knew no Earthman could build. Another dummy organization, dubbed the Inventors Protective League, sponsored a bill to amend the act relating to perpetual motion machines. It passed, with an emergency clause, and, thereafter, devices purporting to reposit matter were not entitled to letters of patent. This just about clinched the deal, for the vast majority of people, who had never watched laws enacted, assumed that if something was in the law, there must be a good reason for it, unless, of course, it was anything like prohibition. A name band revived "The Thing," leaving the drumbeats out of the vocal refrain, and substituting, "Get out of here with that. Matter Repositor, before I call a cop!" Within six months, radio and TV comedians had worn out the joke. Even Goofy, My Friend Irma, Mrs. Ace, and Gracie Allen were too sophisticated to believe in Matter Repositors. Gags about them dropped to the same low level as those about Brooklyn and joke-stealing comics. Although his appearance in public was liable to start boos and catcalls, the Ambassador from Outer Space was duly grateful. He was spared the painful necessity of reporting his disastrous slip of the tongue to his government, for Earth economy was again on the upward spiral. Everybody was spending the money he'd been saving up for a Matter Repositor. The Ambassador cheerfully paid the milUon-a-month retainer and the whopping space bills, but Jerry's greatest gain in the transaction was his agreement allowing him to run advertising in the Federated Planets information bulletins. The space didn't cost him a nickel. Yet he knew how to sell his exclusive rights to it for more money than any one Earth company had in its promotional budget. By the time the campaign debunking the Matter Repositor was ready to die a natural death, Jerry had started an ofiganizatton of Earth businessmen, spearheaded by the Restaurant and Hotel Associations, and the transportation interests, to promote Earth as a primitive planet. The primitive aspects of Earth, Jerry predicted, would exert a powerful appeal on the citizens of the Federated Planets, who must be pretty bored with civilization, and badly in need of a vaction from too much perfection. This organization .was not composed of dummies, by any means, but the businessmen joined Up with a vague idea that their hostelries were to be way-stations, that they were going to promote sightseeing tours to places they themselves would call primitive, that the human exhibits would consist of blanketed Navajos, Chinese coolies, hula girls. Voodoo dancers, and Eskimos. Jerry filled the biggest convention hall in Chicago, and, at the climax of the proceedings, dramatically drew back a velvet curtain, unveiling a huge painting of the symbol of the campaign -- a masked bandit, wearing a slouch hat. clutching in a greedy hand a fat bag marked with a dollar sign. Below was blazoned the tasteful slogan, "Let the People of Earth Gyp You!" A chorus of outrage echoed in the rafters. It hadn't occurred to' the members that primitive exhil)it A would be themselves: to wit. the genus Earth businessman; sub species, go getter. Jerry emerged from the resulting argument somewhat battered, but with what any experienced advertising man would recognize as a victory. His copy was to run in five per cent of the space, keyed. Now all he had to do was prove in dollars and cents that he knew more alx)ut mass sales psychology than his clients, which was, of course, a cinch. In spite of translation into a more civilized language, Jerry's five per cent of the space outpulled the tamer ninety-five per cent by better than ten to one. Thereafter, his clients swallowed their pride, voted him a free hand, and contented themselves with raking in the shekels from a steady stream of handsome and rich extraterrestrial tourists. tion had been running two years, the U.S. Post Office broke down and printed an issue of three-cent stamps commemorating the influx, showing the goddess Terra with welcoming arms open to the starred heavens. Jerry Jergins, the second advertising man in history to achieve the distinction of having Uncle Sam plug his product on a stamp, thereby entered the most select circles of his chosen profession. Jerry bought enough of the stamps to paper the walls of his swank and spacious penthouse offices, for the benefit of the swarm ef tourists who invaded the place daily during afternoon open-house hours. They all wanted to see an advertising agency; to them, this phenomenon was the essence of that primitive planet, Earth. Jerry had recorded a lecture on primitive Earth customs which issued from concealed loudspeakers, and filled display cases with exhibits of primitive Earth culture, emphasizing the aspects he felt these extraterrestrials would find most exotic. Considering the fact that Jerry had managed to learn little about the Federated Planets that was not utterly essential to the mechanics of his advertising campaign there, he had done a pretty good job of "getting on the customer's side of the counter." Every tourist Jerry talked to had been conditioned, by some unrevealed but apparently foolproof process, not to repeat the Ambassador's error of mentioning Matter Repositors, or other aspects of life on the Federated Planets that miglit cause repercussions on Earth. Even tourist children couldn't be bribed with lollypops. Tourists talked a great deal, in fluent idiomatic Earth English, yet somehow said very little. But Jerry knew at least one thing -- he was stirring emotions that lay so deep under layers and flayers of civilization that these shining, perfect people hadn't known they were capable of feeling them, until they visited Earth. He was getting under their smooth skins, just as surely as the monotone of a Haitian drumbeat gets under the skin of a New Yorker. One of the display cases con-, tained the working tools of gangB# steristn -- sawed-off shotguns, blackjacks, a model of a bulletproof automobile, a news photo of the St. Valentine's Day massacre, a clipping about police payoffs from houses of gambling and prostitution, another about blindness resulting from wood alcohol. The shot-glasses of authentic antique bootleg gin that stood on top the cases were often smelled but never sampled. The second case showed a chart of fluctuations of the stock market, with an actual operating ticker in the middle. Sections of the tape were much in demand as souvenirs. But the photo of a smashed body of a once-wealthy man who jumped from his office window after losing his fortune caused the most comment. The tourists found it difficult to understand how this man could consider his life less important than his bank balance. The largest case contained models of war weapons, a lurid painting of Pearl Harbor under aerial attack, another of the Hiroshima mushroom that ushered in the atomic age. There were gas masks, artificial limbs, a photo of a blinded veteran led by a Seeing-Eye dog. The tourists gaped at that exhibit with all the relish of Coney Island crowds visiting wax replicas of famous murder scenes. And along the entire #-foot wall of the reception room, a photo-mural of a ragged, depression-era breadline brooded over the sleek heads of the beautifully dressed and elaborately fed tourists. On his way back to the office after lunch one day. Jerry spied a traffic-stopping cluster of hunianity in the street outside one of the city's leading department stores. The crowd was gathered around a paddy-wagon. Never diffident, Jerry elbowed his way through the crush, to see two handsome and once well-groomed gentlemen getting a mussing up from a couple of cops. The suspects, athletic-looking characters, were putting up a good fight, and the policemen didn't' like it. As Jerry watched, a billy descended on a well-barbered head, and suspect number one ceased resisting arrest. Jerry had come into contact with enough extraterrestrials by now so that he knew a tourist when he saw one. The male tourists gave him a violent pain in the neck, but he felt somewhat responsible. He grabbed an elbow of the suspect who remained conscious. "Give me your name, bud, and I'll bail you out. What happened?" "Oh, we just took a few things off the counters in that store," the tourist answered"You're very # kind, but wc have plenty of money for bail, thanks. Or is it a bribe you're supposed to hand them?" "If you have plenty of money, why in hell didn't you buy the stuff, instead of stealing it?" "We just thought we'd have a bit of a lark. New experience and all that. When on Earth, do as the Earthmen do." "A lark!" the biggest policeman grunted. "We'll give you a lark, all right! Get in there, you!" He implemented his command with a well-placed kick in the seat of a pair pf expertly tailored pants, boosting the tourist into the paddy-wagon. where his unconscious friend had already been deposited. The siren screamed, dispersing the crowd in front of the police vehicle, and Jerry went on his way, chuckling. As he passed a hole-in-thc-wall bar he knew, he decided to stop for a quick one. to settle the heavy feeling in his stomach that came from eating lobster Newburg for lunch. It wasn't a place where you'd care to take a lady, but they served an honest ounce. As Jerry pushed through the old-fashioned swinging doors, a burst of sound greeted him. A whiskey baritone was rendering one of the unpublishable versions of "Christopher Columbo," to the accompaniment of a piano tinkle by the hired help. The customer was obviously from the other side of the tracks -- from the other side of the Galaxy, in fact -- and he was leaning against the piano for the simple reason that he couldn't stand up. He wore a well-cut Californiastyle dinner jacket, and after all night and half the day, the white gabardine was no longer white, v Several drinks had been spilled on the midnight-blue flannel trou sers. Only a magnificent physique distinguished him from the Earth, or garden variety of drunk. Jerry stood up to the bar, and as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he observed a touchchilla cape lay on the wet table, ing -- literally -- scene being enHer exquisitely simple strapless acted in the darkest booth. An dinner dress of silver lame exEarthside racetrack tout, whom, posed arms and shoulders that Jerry recognized as one of the were literally out of this world, habitues of the place, had a gor' The naked effect was relieved geous female tourist backed into only by a diamond, platinum, and a corner. She had retreated as far emerald choker. Jerry knew, as the wall permitted, but he had though the racetrack tout problong since caught up. ably didn't, that the priceless Her jaunty, elbowlength chinbauble was Repositor synthe#i sized, with an Earth museum piece as a model. It was a tossup whether the race track tout was more interested in the diamonds or the tempting flesh they adorned. The girl made no attempt to fight him off. The reason for her acquiescence was not far to seek. The glass before her contained the remains of a "Pink Lady," which tastes like an ice-cream soda and kicks like four Kentucky mules. She moved her left hand to pick up the glass, and Jerry caught the flash of a circlet of channel-set baguette diamonds on the third finger. He concluded that she was the wife of the whiskey baritone. That worthy seemed utterly unconcerned about the whole thing, so why should Jerry interfere? The racetrack tout left his con quest momentarily, walked over to the bar, handed the bartender a five-spot. Without comment, the bartender took down a key tagged # from a hook, and the turf expert pocketed it. There was a dingy sign reading "Hotel" outside; Jerry had always supposed the floors above contained equally dingy furnished rooms. The beautiful tourist's silver heels mounted the back stairs unsteadily. The tout was half steering her, half supporting her. The man was sober enough to know exactly what he was doing. When she came back down those stairs. she would be minus not only her virtue, but her diamond necklace as well. "Oh, he knew the world was round-o, that sailors could be found-o," the whiskey baritone sang lustily. Jerry left the saloon with a bad taste in his mouth. As he passfd through the elcctric-eyc doorway of his office suite, he had the impression that the too perfect inhabitants of all the color advertising pages he had turned out in past years had suddenly come to life. Handsome tourists were moving, in chattering groups, from one display case to another. Their chatter, as usual, gave him few clues. He still harbored a suspicion that on their home planets, these lovely people might be symbiotes in the bodies of lower animals, or loathsome but intellectual worms. But he never had any success when he tried to pump them about whether they were like Earth inhabitants at home, or were issued these magnificent bodies and faces along with their passports to Earth. His unreasoning dislike of the males was undoubtedly part jealousy, for they were all tall, handsome. well-dressed, and athletic enough to be signed en masse by Hollywood. But the universal utter perfection of limb, features, and complexion was not at all repulsive in the female. It was quite decorative to have a whole chorus of toothsome girls in Parts gowns cluttering up the office. Jerry had never seen one of them use a lipstick, rouge, or an eyebrow pencil. The cosmetic business was one of the few that had not profited from the tourist trade, except insofar as lady tourists bought costly perfumes, and Earthgirls strove to mimic the natural -- or unnatural -- coloring of the fair visitors. A few tourists brought their children along, and here the firm, rosy, unblemished skin was in its proper element. Tourist children were not one whit more cherubic than wellfavored children of Earth. A guide from the Conducted Tours Company arrived to ijound up a batch of tourists, for a visit to the local jails, flop-houses, and gambling dens. He announced they would go by bus, and the horrified yet delighted whoops that greeted this news reminded Jerry of a Boston society dowager who had just been invited to ride on a camel. As the crowd trickled out the doors, a lovely vision in platinum blonde laid a slender hand cm Jerry's arm. "Are you really the man who first thought of inviting us to this quaint and delightful planet?" she gushed. "I guess I am, lady. How do you like it?" ,"Oh. it's so primitivef So elemental! Everybody used to think visiting backward planets was dull and scholarly stuff. It took exciting it can be!" "I'm glad to hear you say that. Some of the tourists are complaining that Earth isn't as primitive as the Tourist Bureau advertising makes it out to be." "Oh, you do exaggerate a wee, tiny bit, but it's all in good fun, isn't it? On the whole. Tm not disappointed -- especially not in the men!" She fluttered eyelashes, so long and dark that they looked artificial, at him. "The men?" Jerry asked blankly"Oh, come, come!" the platinum blonde bteathed throatily intojiis ear. "Don't pretend to be so innocent! You must have heard of thesimply terrific reputation Earthmen have acquired on other planets as masterful lovers!" "It's' news to me," Jerry admitted, "but it sounds like a good drawing card. I'll try to work something like that into our ads." "Always thinking about business, aren't you? Why don't you think of something else, for a change? Me. for instance. Don't you feel a little bit sorry for a girl like me, with nothing but perfectly civilized men to go home to?" the girl pouted invitingly. Jerry found himself, by imper#B ceptibl stages, being backed into a corner. Well. well, he thought. Perhaps hed been too harsh in judging that racetrack tout. "Since you mention it," Jerry said. 'Tm not averse to playing the role of Galactic beachboy." "What does a beachboy do?' "I'd blush to explain it verbally to a girl unaccustomed to primitive Earth customs, but I'm pretty good at sign language. How about dinner tonight?" "Well... if you'll let me pay the check. I do so adore this amazing Earth custom of exchanging food for little slips of paper." "The pleasure is all yours, sister. See you at the Ritz main dining room -- eight o'clock. Soup and fish. Afterwafd. we'll look at my photo-murals. Now toddle along, baby, if you want to catch the bus to see those hoboes." Jerry was walking on the Milky Way. Aside from the profits, this job had its esthetic side, he decided. His exuberance was slightly dampened by the grim expression on his secretary's, face. "A very importapt man has been waiting to see you," she said disapprovingly. "I sent him into your office. The least I could do was put him where he wouldn't have to smell all the perfume these brazen tourist women use. It's enough to make a person ill!" In the visitor's chair before Jerry's mother of pearl inlaid desk, the Ambassador from Outer Space was waiting, staring morosely at the endlessly repeated welcoming goddess Terra on Jerry's wall stamp collection. "Well, as I live and breathe!" Jerry exclaimed, "a real, live B-# pilot! Welcome to my humble grass shack! Scotch? Cigar? What can I do for you?" "You can put out your bonfire, cannibal," the Ambassador said, gruffly. "I think I've stewed enough." "Why are you tough, then?" Jerry asked. "At me, I mean. I thought I was your best friend in this here jungle. Didn't I do you a favor once, Mr. Ambassador?" "A fAvor? I paid you well for it! Not only in money, but by getting advertising space for your precious Tourist Bureau on the Federated Planets. I never thought it would lead to this!" "You thought my copy wouldn't pull, eh? Not even after I'd demonstrated I could make Earth opinion do a flip-flop on that Matter Repositor deal?" "Oh, I was quite sure you could manipulate Earthmen. Tha,t's y'our job. But I didn't believe our people would respond in such numbers to an appeal to primitive emotions!" "You weren't alone in that," Jerry said smugly. "Some very prominent members of our organization wanted to make the  campaign more civilized. I showed them where they were wrong. Can't you see that your people are fed up with civilization, right up to their pretty white necks? The very essence of Earth's appeal to them is that a trip here gives them a chance to relax their ethics, to play at going native." "Don't rub it in!" The Ambassador shuddered. "It's nothing new. Tourists have always kicked up their heels. Guess what I saw while I was out to lunch. The cops grabbed a couple of your boys for shoplifting! They thought it was such fun to ride in the paddywagon. Back home, of course, they wouldn't think of repositing anything they weren't supposed to. but on Earth it's different." "And for inonkeyshines like that," the Ambassador growled, "I am driven half crazy working out sleep-record courses. ldioms of Earth EnIih' -- 'What Not to Say on Backward Platte is and Why -- Earth Fashion Cu;de, What You Can Buy There and What fo Reposit.' Bah! I'm supposed to be a diplomat, not ' a fashion adviser!" ' "Why don't you hire s#mc help?" Jerry suggested. "I have. I've hired a whole staff, with offices in all major Earth cities, to exchange platinum, bullion, and precious stones for Earth currencies. It's a mansized job, I can tell you, to keep Earth currencies stable under this load!" "You're doing a very good job." Jerry said, soothingly. "You know what one of our citizens asked me yesterday? How she could et a marriage license f Your officials had turned her down, because she'd been conditioned not to mention her birthplace and age. Mind you, a citizen of the Federated Planets wanted to marry an Earthman and live on this raw, Galactic frontier the rest of her life! Why, we don't even know whether the races can cross-breed!" "That should be looked into, Jerry agreed. "What are you trying to do. the Ambassador demanded. "Drag the citizens of the Federated Planets down to the level of your jungle? You blithely assume those two shoplifters can bg trusted with Matter Repositors when they get back home, but I'm not so sure. We haven't any Jails to toss them into, but wc may have to establish some. Matter-Repositbr-proof jails!" "That's your problem," Jerry said. "All I'm trying to do is make "some money for myself and other businessmen on Earth. Which I'm doing, thank you. And I doubt that you could stop me, at this point. Your citizens would #S raise quite a howl if my ads stopped appearing in the information bulletins." "Money!" the Ambassador exclaimed, "All you Earthmen think about is money!" He leaned over Jerry's desk. "What if you could roposit the money -- the gold, that . is -- without all the work you have to put into entertaining these tourists?" "Hmm," Jerry said, thinking of his date for that evening, and other equally lovely tourists. "Money isn't the only thing i life. And don't forget the income tax. I've got to have some deductible expenses." "Knowing you. I'd bet you .could figure out some way of handling that little detail.' "What's your proposition?' "Two years ago, you came to my office, wanting to import Matter Repositors. I told you Earth's civilization wasn't ready for them." "We still aren't, according to what you say about our avaricious instincts." "No, you're not. But you have methods of manipulating public opinion and attitudes that arc far more advanced than those found on other planets. "So you admit that Earth is advanced in something!" Jerry said happily. "How would you like to have the name of Jerry Jergins go down in your history as the originator of the most significant publicrelations campaign ever undertaken on this planet?" the Ambassador asked, temptingly. "You can handle it, if any man on Earth can." "Softsoaping me again! What's the campaign? I'll listen to it, but I don't know whether I'll buy it.' "Your job would be to get Earth's psychology and sociology ready for the Matter Repositor." Jerry reflected. "You mean Td have to eliminate war, supplement the 'Voice of America, and so on? I'd have certain advantages over the Voice of America, at that. I wouldn't have a bunch of politicians playing football with my appropriations." "This campaign would have to go further and deeper than the Voice of America. You might call it the Voice of Conscience, its aim would be to make every human being on Earth care more about the welfare of his fellow-man than he cares about his own." "A couple of thousand years back," Jerry said, soberly, "a better Promoter than I tried to put that idea across. The campaign He started is still running. It's taken hold in some quarters, but I wouldn't say public acceptance is anything like worldwide yet." "Then you don't think you can do it?" the Ambassador asked, his eagerness somewhat deflated. "I'm not committing myself to whether I could or couldn't. I could put the Ten Commandments on an international hookup. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor his goods. I could get Walt Disney to dramatize the golden rule." "Ah. I see you have some ideas for the copy already," the Ambassador said. "I thought i could get you interested in it. Then you'll sign a contract?" "No," Jerry said, briefly and definitely. "Now, wait a minute, Mr. Jergins," the Ambassador protested. "Why do you suddenly become blunt and unqualified? Do you realize what I'm offering you? In retiirn for ceasing this tourist promotion, I'm offering you the invention that obsolesces all others -- the Matter Repositor!" Jerry stood up and placed the palms of his hands flat on his desk. "I told you that you'd learn something in our primitive jungle, Mr. Ambassador. Well, this is it. We may be mechanical morons, according to your standards, but we naked savages can produce anything we need. Since we've corrected the misconception that what Earth produces isn't good enough for Earthmen, and whipped up a tourist trade, business is booming. And when it booms, we can distribute those Earth products in a way that suits us pretty well. A primitive way, you may think, but one that is adapted to the unfortunate circumstance that we aren't a bunch of little tin saints living in an ideal world. "I asked you for Matter Repositors once, and you were wise enough to turn me down. I'm glad you did. They'd cause us more trouble than yie atomic bomb. We don't want the damn things. Do you understand that?" On sudden impulse, Jerry strode across his office. There ored object, jarring oddly with the other furniture. Sometimes at a loss to spend his newly acquired wealth, Jerry had yielded, a month or so before, to a desire conceived in childhood to own a real honest-to-goodness juke box. Jerry fished in his pocket for a nickel, deposited it in the slot, pushed button seven. Loud, tinny, and offensively blatant, the strains of "I Don't Wanna Leave the Congo" filled the office, effectively drowning out any further remarks the Ambassador from Outer Space might have wished to make. 'Tf you'll pardon me," Jerry shouted over the din, "I have some arrow heads to chip -- and a potential extraterrestrial mate to woo with a quaint tribal ritual we call dating on Earth." ' F.' Jones. Gnome Press, New York, #. # paes, # P eople say the book's obscure. It's not scientific. It's pontifical. Its style's too purple. In general, I'm nuts for liking it. Maybe I am. We have a postulated world parallel to Earth. It is called of different parallel worlds. People and things can be transferred to it with the aid of great machines. Many centuries after the Nth World War, techniques are developed whereby all babies testing are sent to this parallel world in an effort to preserve them from the savageries on Earth. After still more centuries, these Great Brains have become slaves of scientific superstitions, while on Earth the ignorant tnasses ae the slaves of arrogant masters known as the Statists, who also control access toKronweld and are planning to destroy the latter to prevent the scientists from ever returning arid destroying them. However, there are rebels both bn Earth and on Kronweld, who oppose the superstition-ridden scientists as well as the Statists. This is not science fiction of tomorrow. It is a never-never science fiction -- but combined with it is an almost painfully real and immediate message which is not fiction at all. The message: If people don't get together on a free and peaceful basis pretty soon, there'll be no more people to get together. But the message never gets in the way. You may have to hunt for it, in fact, while reading about the civilization of scientists in which there are no sciences of biology, botany or zoology and no arts and practices of medicine or surgery: and in which the search of scientists for certitudes is exposed as merely an abdication of scientific responsibility, which is -- never assume that anything is eternally true! by John Wyndham. Doubleday and Co., New York, #. # pages, #. of the minor miracles connected with this Collier's serial by science fiction's old British friend, John Beynon Harris, is the fact that anyone familiar with the Harris of the early '#s will wonder how the Harris of the '#s could have learned how to write in so workmanlike a fashion. As a story, the current opus is what you'd call a good run-ofthc-mill affair, not the worst by any means, but also not the best, of the long literature of World Catastrophe tales. It deals with the invention (or development) of some horrid Triffids, and the coincidental occurrence of a display of incredible heavenly fireworks all around the world that makes everyone who looked at them permanently blind. Conflict: the struggles of the tiny handful of those who did not see the fireworks, and who consequently still have vision, to survive the combined horrors of great gobs of people dying all over the place, and great masses of sentient vegetables trying to attack all humans they can lay their poisonous "whips" on. The coincidence is not quite as great as it sounds, since "Wyndham" suggests that the phenomena are secret war weapons -- the Triffids are escapees from a Russian botanical laboratory, the fireworks the result of a cosmic accident to one of the "Earth satellite vehicles" which the competing Great Powers have thrown up above the atmosphere in Swift death orbits. Oh, well, it hasn't happened yet. Meanwhile, you will find some pleasant reading in this book, provided you aren't out hunting science fiction masterpieces. Simak. Simon #g Schuster, Inc., New York, #. #I paes, #. T his is one of those complex, sometimes obscure and enormously inventive stories, in the same general tradition as Renaissance, that seems most characteristic of the best modern science fiction. Though in some ways not as effective as the Jones novel, it still is an enormously impressive read it under its serialized name of Time Quarry will remember. Like so much good modern science fiction, Simak's new book is based on some real, honest, practical ethical thinking. It is an idea book. Asher Sutton, the protagonist, has been completely remade by the strange beings of a planet circling round Cygni #, many light years from Earth. He has learned a new sort of living and has become a new sort of person -- nct a true "superman" as we understand it, but different -- as a result of what these "symbiotic abstractions" did to him. He terms his new attitude not a religion but something he calls "Destiny," and the major premise of his philosophy is : "Nothing living walks alone," thus describing the essential oneness and equality of all sentience. From the future come several competing forces that are warring among themselves (fme is their battlefield!) in an effort to change the course of Asher Sutton's future. It seems that he will write a book on his ideas. It will completely change the direction of our intergalactic progress. One future group wants the book and the democratic, equalitarian future unchanged. Another group wants to kill Sutton before he writes the book, thus completely eliminating his influence. A third group wants to "buy" him and make him change his message to read "Nothing human" rather than "Nothing living" -- naturally a complete abandonment of the original credo. The development of this rich idea will keep the reader on the edge of his seat, provided he is not looking for (a) wild and woolly cops-and-robbers stuff: (b) Buck Rogers; (c) S-x; and (d) comic-book literary style. It has none of those. An unfortunate cavil must be put in about the ending. The last with his original conclusion. The one he uses in the novel literally reverses the whole intent and meaning of his book -- a shocking piece of backing down which leaves the reader convinced that Simak, after all. thinks his hero Asher Sutton is a dangerous fool and an idealistic crackpot. Not a very courageous way of ending an otherwise courageous novel. -- And now let me introduce the Guest Reviewer of the Month, Willy Ley. The book Mr. Ley reviews for me is one which, to speak frankly, he is ten thousand times more competent to understand than I. An Introduction to Astronautics, by Arthur C. Clarke. Harper  Bros., New York, #. # paes, #. F you ever took an instruction course of the forced draft type, where you learned a great number of things in a minimum of time, you'll probably be reminded of this course when you read the book published by the Assistant Secretary of the British Interplanetary Society. Within his # pages, Arthur C. Clarke includes the larger portion of space travel theory. He does not discuss space travel problems as an engineer who wants to suggest possible solutions to specific points. He approaches them from the point of view of the astronomer who knows his gravitational fields and his orbits, and describes what has to be accomplished before interplanetary flight can be undertaken. Consequently, there is very little about present-day rockets in this book -- just a few highlights to show how far "the art" has progressed during a short quarter century. Beyond them, the book is entirely devoted to the basic requirements of space travel, especially the Earth-Moon trip. Don't, if you should open the book at random in a store, be frightened by an occasional equation. They arc all quite simple and moreover fully explained. Some mathematical argument, also quite simple, is condensed in an appendix. There are several interesting charts and some fine photographs. In short, If you want to know more about space travel than you can extract from the typical space opera, this is the book to read. Because it Is both short and condensed, you'll probably read it more than once -- and if you do, you will then find out how many irttercsting items slipped by you on first reading. Thanks, Willy. I'd take your advice and read the book at once if it wasn't for the fact that my mother was scared by a quadratic equation when I was minus six months old, and I've had psychological problems with algebra ever since.  ,  Pictures, that is, that one can test and measure. And these pictures positively, obsolutely could not liel pictures T he man 'from the News asked, "What do you think of the aliens, Mister Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?" "Very human," said the thin young man. Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady faint drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where they would arrive. On the concrete runways, the puddles were pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind. Back at a respectful distance from where the huge spaceship would land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery wa ringed in a great circle, and in the distance across the horizon. #  bombers stood ready at airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first alien ship ever to land from space. "Do you know anything about their home planet?" asked the man from Herald. The Times man stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of questions, but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young  man with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being t'eated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and they did not want to harry him with too many questions to answer at once. They wanted to keep his ' good will. Tomorrow he would be one of the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines. "No, nothing directly." "Any ideas or deductions?" Herald persisted. ' "Their world must be Earthlike to them," the weary-looking  young man answered uncertainly. "The environment evolves the animal. But only in relative terms, of course." He looked at them with a quick glance and then looked away evasively, his lank black hair beginning to cling to hie forehead with sweat. "That doesn't necessarily mean anything." "Earthlike." muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed nothing more in the reply. The Times man glanced at the Herald, wondering if he had noticed, and received a quick glance in exchange. The Herald asked Nathen, "You think they are dangerous, then?" It was the kind of question, assuming much, which usually broke reticence and brought forth quick facts -- when it hit the mark. They all knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to know. The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. "No, I wouldn't say so." "You think they are friendly, then?" said the Herald, equally positive on the opposite tack. A fleeting smile touched Nathen's lips. "Those I know are." There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic facts of the story before the ship came. The Times asked, "What led up to your contacting them?" Nathen answered after a hesitation. "Static. Radio static. The Army told you my job, didn't they?" T he Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public. Nathen glanced at him doubt fully. "My job is radio decoder for the Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble patterns." The officer cleared his throat, but said nothing. The reporters smiled, noting that down. Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to admit to it. Nathen continued, "I started directing the pickup at stars in my spare time. There's radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It didn't seem natural." He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would say was the thing that would make him famous an idea that had come to him while he listened -- an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall. "I decided it wasn't natural. I tried decoding it." Hurriedly he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvi ous. "You see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I'd heard that kind of screech before." "You mean they broadcast at us in code?" asked the News. "It's not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it down. They're not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited planets, and there is broadcasting between them, the would send it on a tight beam to save power." He looked for comprehension. "You know, like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You can't expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a few seconds at a time. So they'd naturally compress each message into a short half-second or one-second-length package and send it a few hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up duririg the instant the beam swings across the target." He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation was for the newspapers. "When a stray beam swings through our section of space, there's a sharp peak in noise level from that direction. The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing tremendously. so we wouldn't pick up more than a tip as it passes." "How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?" the Times asked. "Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?" It was a private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement. The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face for a moment. "Maybe we're intercepting everybody's telephone calls, and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking at each Other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model." "It would take something like that," the Times agreed. They smiled at each other. The News asked, "How did you happen to pick up television instead of voices?" "Not by accident," Nathan explained patiently. "I'd recognized a scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in any language."   tor paced back and forth, muttering his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide streaming windows into the gray sleeting rain. Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms, and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the Senator to make his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up before them and a small hand-mike sat ready on the table before the panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of equipment with "Radio Lab, U.S. Property" stenciled on it. "I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began working on them," Nathen added. Tt took a couple of months to find the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the Department, they gave me full time to work on it. and an assistant to help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands, and assign them the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen." shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to reduce the maddening rippling plaids of un synchronized color scanners to some kind of sane picture. "Trial and error," said Nathen, "but it came out all right. Tlie wide band-spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning." He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar spaceship which now circled the atmosphere. "We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set working, and started recording and playing everything that came in, we found we'd tapped something like a lending library line. It was all fiction, plays." Between the pauses in Nathen's voice, the Times found himself unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching rocket jets. The Post asked, "How did you contact the spaceship?" "I scanned and recorded film copy of Rite of Spring, the Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we weit receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn't get there for a good number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please the library to get a new record in, "Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings, we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear and loud. We'd intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore, you see. They liked the film and wanted more..." He smiled at them in sudden thought. "You can see them for yourself. It's all right down the hall where the linguists are working on the automatic translator." The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin young man turned to him quickly. "No security reason why they should not see the broadcasts. is there? Perhaps you should show them." He said to the reporters reassuringly, "It's right down the hall. You will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches." The interview was very definitely ver. The lanlc-haired, nervous young man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a closed door. They opened it and fumbled into a darkened room crowded with empty folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed behind them, bringing total darkness. There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around him, but the Times man remained standing, aware of an enormous surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the wrong country. The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real, thing in the darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right. He was looking at aliens. rpHE impression was of two humans disguised, humans moving oddly, half-dancing, halfcrippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other and put them on. Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid, and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he watched them. They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said, and grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away from him. Mcllcrdrammer. The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer, talking more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not trying to interrupt. Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he wanted to be persuaded. The Times groped for a chair and sat down. Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward or a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were masters. The scenes changed, a corridor, a parklike place in what he began to realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. Thepe were others talking and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and never was it unclear what was happening or how they felt. They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with an odd lagging dif fcrcncc of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting. He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked... With an effort he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short silky crew cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in tapering light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their wrists were narrow and their Angers long and thin and delicate. There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers. Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice muttering beside him. He called his attention from counting their fingers and looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man wearing earphones, watching and listening with hawklike concentration. Beside him was a tall streamlined box. From the screen came the sound of the alien language. The man abruptly flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word into a small hand-microphone and flipped the switch back with nervous rapidity. He reminded the Times man of the earphoned interpreters at the UN. The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a linguist adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other linguists taking notes. 'THE Times remembered the Senator pacing in the observatory room, rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just the empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated mechanically and understood by the aliens. On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen, the large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a gray uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canaryyellow control room in a spaceship. The Times tried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win affection from the audience, and this actor might be the matinee #P idol of whole solar systems. Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a too-quick answer to a question. The uniformed one. not suspicious, turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit with glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid dragging grace of the others, as if they were underwater, or on a slow motion film. The other was watching a switch, a switch set Into a panel, moving closer to it, talking casually -- background music coming and rising in thin chords of tension. There was a closeup of the alien's face watching the switch, and the Tmes noted that his ears were symmetrically half-circles, almost perfect with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one answered, a brief word in a preoccupied deep voice. His back was still turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it, talking casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically. It was in reach, Ailing the screen. His hand came into view, darting out, closed over the switch-" There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure of the uniformed officer, Unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in the startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell. The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his hand holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build in from the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things within it flashed into one of those bewildering Color changes which were the bane of color television, and switched to a color negative of itself, a green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at the body of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a second: then the color band alternator fell back into phase and the colors reversed to normal. Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp hand of the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice while the music mounted and covered his words and the screen slowly went blank, like a window that slowly filmed over with gray fog. The music faded. In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively. The earphoned man beside the T'lmes shifted his earphones back from his ears and spoke briskly. "I can't get any more. Either of you want a replay?" There was a short silence until thr linguist nearest the set said. "I guess we've squeezed that one dry. Let'S run the tape where Nathen and that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their beams in closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk and giving the old radio count-ne-two-threetesting." There was some fumbling in the semi-dark and then the screen came to life again. T showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a clipped chord of some familiar symphony. "Crazy about Stravinsky and Mozart," remarked the earphoned linguist to the T'lmes, resettling his earphones. "Can't stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?" He turned his attention back to the screen as the right sequence came on! The Post, who vas sitting just in front of him, turned to the T'lmes and said. "Funny ' how much they look like jeople." Htf was writing, making notes to telephone his report. "What color hair did that character have?" "I didn't notice." Hc wondered if he should remind the reporter that Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the gradations of color in the picture were sure, only tlic similarities and contrasts, the relationship of one color to another. From the screen came tlie sound of the alien language again. This race averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices. Could he write tiiat? No. there was something wrong with that. too. How had Nathen established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the modulation as it came in, or some sort of hetrodyning up and down by trial and error? Probably. It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep voices. As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had Seen in Nathen came back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just how close that uneasiness had come to something that looked like restrained fear. "WHat I don't get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV shows instead of just contacting them," the News complained. "They're good shows, but what's the point?" "Maybe so we'd get to learn their language too," said the Herald. On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene of a young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and waved and opened his mouth in the comical O shape which the Times was beginning to recognize as their equivalent of a smile, then went back to trying to explain something about the equipment, in elaborate awkward gestures and carefully mouthed words. The Times got up quietly, went out into the bright white stone corridor and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding his stereo glasses and putting them away. No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit, mere reflex, from the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence Department. than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a secret. The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV camera and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the Senator had found a chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight men were grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with impassioned concentration. The Times recognized a few he knew personally, eminent names in science, workers in field theory. A stray phrase reached him; " -- reference to the universal constants as ratio -- " It was probably a discussion of ways of converting formulas from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of information; They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that novel viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would have liked to go over and listen, but there was too little time left before the spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask. HE hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in one hand. He did not look up as the Times approached, but it was the indifference of preoccupation, not discourtesy. The Times sat down on the edge of the platform beside him and took out a pack of cigarettes, then remembered the coming TV broadcast and the ban on smoking. He put them away, thoughtfully watching the diminishing rain spray aainst the streaming windows. "What's wrong?" he asked. Nathen showed that he was aware and friendly by a slight motion of his head. "You tell me." "Hunch," said the Times man." in "ShctT huneh. Everything sailing along too smoothly, everyone taking too much for granted." Nathcn relaxed slightly. "I'm still listening." "Something about the way they move... Nathen shifted to glance at him. "That's bothered me, too." "Are you sure they're adjusted to the right speed?" Nathen clenched his hands out in front of him and looked at them consideringly. "I don't know. When I turn the tape faster, they're all rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don't stream behind them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can't hear them slam, why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be swimming." He gave the Times a considering sidewise glance. "Didn't catch the name." Country-bred guy, thought the Times. "Jacob Luke, Times," he said, extending his hand. Nathen gave the hand a quick, hard grip, identifying the name. "Sunday Science Section editor. I read it. Surprised to meet you here." "Likewise." The Times smiled. "Look, have you gone into this rationally, with formulas?" He found a pencil in his pocket. "Obviously there's something wrong with our judgment of their weight to speed to  momentum ratio. Maybe it's something simple like low gravity aboard ship, with magnetic shoes. Maybe they are floating slightly." "Why worry?" Nathen cut in. T don't see any reason to try to  figure it out now." He laughed and shoved back his black hair nervously. "We'll sec them in twenty minutes." "Will we?" asked the Times ' slowly. There was a silence while the Senator turned a page of his magazine with a slight crackling of paper, and the scientists argued at the other end of the room. Nathen pushed at his lank black hair again, as if it were trying to fall forward in front of his eyes and keep him from seeing. "Sure." The young ntan lughed suddenly, talked rapidly. "Sure we'll see them. Why shouldn't we, with all the government ready with welcome speeches, the whole Army turned out and hiding over the hill, reporters all around, newsreel cameras -- everything set up to broadcast the landing to the world. The President himself shaking hands with me and waiting in Washington -- " He came to the truth without pausing for breath. He said, "Hell, no, they won't get here. There's some mistake somewhere. Something's wrong. I should liave told the brasshats yesterday whea I started adding it up. Don't know why I didn't say anything. Scared, I guess. Too much top rank around here. Lost my nerve." He clutched the Times man's sleeve. "Look. I don't know what -- ' A green light flashed on the sending receiving set. Nathen didn't look at it, but he stopped talking. loudspeaker on the set broke into a voice speaking in the alien's language. The Senator started and looked nervously at it, straightening his tie. The voice stopped. Nathen turned and looked at the loudspeaker. His worry seemed to be gone. "What is it?" the Times asked anxiously. "He says they've slowed enough to enter the atmosphere now. They'll be here in five to ten minutes, I guess. That's Bud. He's all excited. He says holy smoke, what a murky-looking planet we live on." Nathen smiled. "Kidding." The Times was puzzled. "What does he mean, murky? It can't be raining over much territory on Earth." Outside, the rain was slowing and bright blue patches of sky were sliining through breaks in the cloud blanket, glittering blue light from the drops that ran down tire windows. He tried to think an explanation. "Maybe they're trying to land on Venus." The thought was ridiculous, he knew. The spaceship was following Nathen's sending beam. It couldn't miss Erth. "Bud" had to be kidding. The green light glowed on the set again, and they stopped speaking, waiting for the message to be recorded, slowed and replayed. The cathode screen came to life suddenly with a picture of the young man sitting at his sending-set, his back turned, watching a screen at one side which' showed a glimpse of a huge dark plain approaching. As the ship plunged down toward it, the illusion of solidity melted into a .boiling turbutance of blact clouds. They expanded in an inky swirl, looked huge for an instant, and then blackness swallowed the screen. The young alien swung around to face the camera, speaking a few words as he moved, made the O of a smile again, then flipped the switch and tbe screen went gray. Nadicn's voice was suddenly toneless and strained. "He said something like break out the drinks, here they come." "The atmosphere doesnt look like that." the Times said at random, knowing he was saying something too obvious even to think about. "Not Earth's atmos phere." Some people drifted up. "What did they say?" "Entering the atmosphere, ought to be landing in five or ten minutes," Nathen told them. A ripple of heightened excitement ran through the room. Cameramen began adjusting the lens angles again, turning on the mike and checking it, turning on the floodlights. The scientists rose and stood near the window, still talking. The reporters trooped in from the hall and went to the windows to watch for the great event. The three linguists came ini trundling a large wheeled box that was the mechanical translator, supervising while it was hitched into the sound broadcasting system. "Landing where?" the Times asked Nathen brutally. "Why don't you do something?" "Tell me what to do and I'll do it." Nathen said quietly, not moving. It was not sarcasm. Jacob Luke of the Times looked sidewise at the strained whiteness of his face, and moderated his tone. "Can't you contact them?" "Not while they're landing." "What now?" The Times took out a pack of cigarettes, remembered the rule against smoking, and put it back. "We just wait." Nathen leaned his elbow on one knee and his chin in his hand. They waited. A ll the people in the room were waiting. There was no more conversation. A bald man of the scientist group was automatically buffing his fingernails over and over and inspecting them without seeing them, an#U other absently polished his glasses, held them up to the light, put them on, and then a moment later took them off and began polishing again. The television crew concentrated on their jobs, moving quietly and efficiently, with perfectionist care, minutely arranging things which did not need to be arranged, checking things that had already been checked. This was to be one of the great moments of human history, and they were all trying to forget that fact and remain impassive and wrapped up in the problems of their jobs as good specialists should. After an interminable age the Times consulted his watch. Three minutes had passed. He tried holding his breath a moment, listening for a distant approaching thunder of jets. There was no sound. The sun came out from behind the clouds and lit up the field like a great spotlight on an empty stage. Abruptly the green light shone on the set again, indicating that a squawk message had been received. The recorder recorded it, slowed it and fed it back to the speaker. It clicked and the sound was very loud in the still, tense room. The screen remained gray, but Bud's voice spoke a few words in the alien language. He stopped, the speaker clicked and the light weht out. When it was plain that nothing more would occur and no announcement was to be made of what was said, the people in the room turned back to the windows, talk picked up again. Somebody told a joke and laughed alone. One of the linguists remained turned toward the loudspeaker, then looked at the widening patches of blue sky showing out the window, his expression puzzled. He had understood. "It's dark," the thin Intelligence Department decoder translated, low-voiced, to the man from the Times. "Your atmosphere is thick. That's precisely what Bud said." Another three minutes. The Times caught himself about to light a cigarette and swore silenly, blowing the match out and putting the cigarette back into its package. He listened for the sound of the rocket jets. It was time for the landing, yet he heard no blasts. The green light came on in the transceiver. Message in. Instinctively he came to his feet. Nathen abruptly was standing beside him. Then the message came in the voice he was coming to think of as Bud. It spoke and paused. Suddenly the Tintes knew. "We've landed." Nathen whispered the words. The wind blew across the open spaces of white concrete and damp soil that was the empty atrheld, swaying the wet, shiny grass. The people in the room looked out, listening for the roar of jets, looking for the silver bulk of a spaceship in the sky. Nathen moved, seating himself at the transmitter, switching it on to warm up. checking and balancing dials. Jacob Luke of the Times moved softly to stand behind his right shoulder, hoping he could be useful. Nathen made a half motion of his head, as if to glance back at him, unhooked two of the earphone sets hanging on the side of the tall streamlined box that was the automatic translator, plugged them in and handed one back over his shoulder to the Times man. The voice began to come from 'the speaker again. Hastily, Jacob Luke fitted the earphones over his ears. He fancied he could hear Bud's voice tremble. For a moment it was just Bud's voice speaking the alien language, and then, very distant and clear in his earphones, he heard the recorded voice of the linguist say an English word, ttien a mechanical click and another clear word in the voice of one of the other translators, then another as the alien's voice flowed from the loudspeaker, the cool single words barely audible, overlapping and blending with it like translating thought, skipping unfamiliar words, yet quite astonishingly clear. "Radar shows no buildings or civilization near...The atmosphere around us registers as thick as glue. Tremendous gas pressure, low gravity, no light at all. You didn't describe it like this. Where are you, Joe? This isn't 'some kind of trick, is it?' Bud hesitated, was prompted by a deepjer official voice and jerked out the wbrds. "If it is a trick, we are ready to repel attack." T he linguist stood listening. He whitened slowly and beckoned the other linguists over to him and whispered to them... Joseph Nathen looked at them with unwarranted bitter hostility while he picked up the hand-mike, plugging it into the translator. "Joe calling," he said quietly into it in clear, slow English. "No trick. We don't know where you are. I am trying to get a direction fix from your signal. Describe your surroundings to us if at all possible." Nearby, the floodlights blazed steadily on the television platform, ready for the official welm com of the aliens to Earth. The television channels of the world had been alerted to set aside their scheduled programs for an unscheduled great event. In the long room the people waited, listening for the swelling sound of rocket jets. This time, after the light came on, there was a long delay. The speaker sputtered, and sputtered again, building to a steady scratching they could barely sense a dim voice. It came through in. a few tinny words and then wavered back to inaudibility. The machine translated in their earphones. "Tried... seemed...repair... Suddenly it came in clearly. "Can't tell if the auxiliary blew, too. Will try it. We might pick you up clearly on the next try. I have the volume down. Where is the landing port? Repeat. Where is the landing port? Where are you?" Nathen put down the handmike and carefully set a dial on the recording box, and flipped a switch, speaking over his shoulder. "This sets it to repeat what I said the last time. It keeps repeating." Then he sat with unnatural stillness, his head still half turned, as if he had suddenly caught a glimpse of answer and was trying with no success whatever to grasp it. The green warning light cut in. the recording clicked and the playback of Bud's face and voice appeared on the screen. "We heard a few words, Joe, and then the receiver blew again. We're adjusting a viewing screen to pick up the long waves that go through the murk and convert them to visible light. We'll be able to see out soon. The engineer says that something is wrong with the stern jets, and the captain has had me broadcast a help call to our nearest space base.' He made the mouth O of a grin. "The message won't reach it for some years. I trust you, Joe, but get us out of here, will you? -- They're buzzing that the screen is finally ready. Hold everything." riHE screen went gray, and the green light went off. The Times considered the lag required for the help call, the speaking and recording of the message just received, the time needed to reconvert a viewing screen. "They work fast' He shifted uneasily, and added at random, "Something wrong with the time factor. All wrong. They work too fast." The green light came on again immediately. Nathen half turned to him, sliding his words hastily into the gap of time as the message was recorded and slowed. "They're close enough for our transmission power to blow their receiver." If it was on Earth, why the darkness around the ship? "Maybe they see in the high ultra-violet -- the atmosphere is opaque to that band," tlie Times suggested hastily as the speaker began to talk in the young extraterrestrial's voice. It was shaking now. "Stand by for the description." They tensed, waiting. The Times brought a map of the state before his mind's eye. "A half circle of cliffs around the horizon. A wide muddy lake swarming with swimming things. Huge, strange white foliage all around the ship and incredibly huge pulpy monsters attacking and eating each other on all sides. We almost landed in the lake, right on the soft edge. The mud can't hold the ship's weight, and we're sinking. The engineer says we might be able to blast free, but the tubes are mud-clogged and might blow up the ship. When can you reach us?" The Times thought vaguely of the Carboniferous Era. Nathen obviously had seen something he had not. "Where are they?" the Tmes asked him quietly. Nathen pointed to the antenna position indicators. The Times let his eyes follow the converging imaginary lines of focus out the window to the sunlit airfield, the empty airfield, the drying concrete and green waving grass where the lines met. Where the lines met. The spaceship was there! The fear of something unknown gripped him suddenly. The spaceship was broadcasting again. "Where are you? Answer if possible! We are sinking! Where are you?" He saw that Nathen knew. "What is it?" the Times asked hoarsely. "Are they in another dimension or the past or on another world or what?" Nathen was smiling bitterly, and Jacob Luke remembered that the young man had a friend in that spaceship. "My guess is that they evolved on a high-gravity planet, with a thin atmosphere, near a blue-white star. Sure they see in the ultra-violet range. Our sun is abnormally small and dim and yellow. Our atmosphere is so thick, it screens out ultra-violet." He laughed harshly. "A good joke on us, the weird place we evolved in, the thing it did to us!" "Where arc you?" called the alien spaceship. "Hurry, pleasci We're sinking!" T he decoder slowed his tumbled, frightened words and looked up into the Times' face for understanding. "We'll rescue them," he said quietly. "Yoif were right about the time factor, right about them moving at a different speed. I misunderstood. This business about squawk cod ing, speeding for better transmission to counteract beam waver -- I was wrong." "What do you mean?" "They don't speed up their broadcasts." "They don't -- ?" Suddenly, in his mind's eye, the Times began to see again the play he had just seen -- but the actors were moving at blurring speed, the words jerking out in a fluting, dizzying stream, thoughts and decisions passing with unfollowable rapidity, rippling faces in a twisting blur of expressions, doors slamming wildly, shatteringly, as the actors leaped in and out of rooms. No -- faster, faster -- he wasn't visualizing it as rapidly as it was, an hour of talk and action in one almost instantaneous "squawk," a narrow peak of "noise" interfering with a single word in an Earth broadcast! Faster -- faster -- it was impossible. Matter could not stand such stress -- inertia -- momentum -- abrupt weight. It was insane. "Why?" he asked. "How?" Nathen laughed again harshly, reaching for the mike. "Get them out? There isn't a lake or river within hundreds of miles from here!" A shiver of unreality went down the Times' spine. Automatically and inanely, he found himself delving in his pocket for a cigarette while he tried to grasp what had happened. "Where are they, then? Why can't we sec their spaceship?"' Nathen switched the microphone on in a gesture that showed the bitterness of his disappointment. "We'll need  magnifying glass for that." by Robert A. Heinlein Three mind-dozziing, heart-stopping, cortex-stimuloting installments ,... starting in next month's issue of...  Don't fake any chance of missing rt. Reserve these issues ot your newsslond -- even if you hove to poy in odvonce! Nothing couM hove eeemed pleosonter than that peaceful planet. Then why wos a nen-suiidal man driven to suicide there? Yet it made sense. HY do people commit suicide?  Templin tightened his safety belt and lay back on the acceleration bunk. The lights in the cabin dimmed to a .dull, red glow that meant the time for takeoff was nearing. He could hear noises from deep within the ship and the tmy whir of the vensweetish smell of sleeping gas. To sleep the trip away was better than to face the dull monotony m #R of the stars for days on end. Oh , they kill themselves ior lots of reasons. Maybe ill health or Bnantial messes or family difficulties. An unhapy love affair. Or more complex ones, if you went into it deeper. The failure to achieve an ambition, failure to live up to one's own ideals. WeltBchmerz, periiaps. He could smell the bitter fragrance of tobacco smoke mingling with the gas. Eckert had lit a cigarette and was calmly blowing the smoke at the neon "No Smoking" sign, which winked on and off in mechanical disapproval. He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride because, at one time or another, they had had to. It was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told him that Don Pendleton had killed himself. Only Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everythin to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The cliches always come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the status of a breakfast food testimonial. The soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin. Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was out. Eckert had come into liis office without saying a word and had watched his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight. And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had 'taken the short way out. He shouldn't get sentimental. But Itow the hell else should he remember Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton should have done it? If, of course, be had... The cabin was haay in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy perfume. Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton had come of good stock. There had been no mental insta' bility in his family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular, hardworking. How lon would it be before memories faded and all there was left of Pendleton was a page of statistics? He had been on this team, he had been elected president of that, he had graduated with such and such honors. But try getting a picture of him by reading the records, resurrecr him from a page of black print. Would he be human? Would he be flesh and blood? Hell, no! In the statistics Pendleton was the AllAround Boy, the cold marble statue with the finely chiseled muscles and the smooth, blank sockets where the eyes should be. Maybe someday fate would play a trick on a lero-worshpn public and there would actually be kids like that. But they wouldn't be human; they wouldn't be born. Parents would get them by sending in so many box tops. He was drowsy; the room was filled with the gas now. It would be only a matter of minutes before he would be asleep. Pendleton had been in his second year as attache on Tunpesh. a small planet with a G-type sun. The Service had stumbled across it recently and decided the system was worth diplomatic recognition of some kind, so Pendleton had been sent there. He had been the first attache to be sent and naturally he had gone alone. There was no need to send more. Tunpesh had f been inspected and certified and approved. The natives were primitive and friendly. Or niaybe the Service had slipped up, as it sometimes did, and Tunpesh had received something less than a thorough, survey. And then an unscheduled freighter had put in for repairs, one of the very few ships that ever came by Tunpesh. The captain had tried to pay his respects to Pendleton. Only Pendleton wasn't there. The natives said he had killed himself and showed the captain the little flower-covered plot where they had buried him. Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment. The natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles, needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed. People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they didn't. But sometimes they were murdered. It was almost black inside the #S cabin now; only a thin red line around the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't keep open much longer. Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had killed himself. But that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew better. The real reason they were ioing there was to find out why Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it. Who had killed Cock Robin? The thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleepnot quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his mind. Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish data and reports. "Ted?" he murmured sleepily. A faint stirring in the black bxilk opposite him. "Yes?" "How come our anthropologist on Tunpesh didn't come across with more information?" A drowsy mumble from the other cot: "He wasn't there long enough. He committed suicide not long after landing." The room was a whirling pool of blackness into which his mind was slowly slipping. Takeoff was only seconds away. Why do people commit suicide? "TT'S a nice day, isn't it, Ted?" Eckert took a deep and pleasurable breath. "It's the type of day that makes you feel good just to be alive." Warm breezes rustled through Eckert's graying hair and tugged gently at his tunic. The air smelled as if it had been washed and faintly perfumed with the bal: samy scent of something very much like pine. A few hundred yards away, a forest towered straight and slim and coolly inbirds whirled and fluttered in the foliage. The rocketport, where they were standing surrounded by their luggage, was a grassy valley where the all too infrequent ships could land and discharge cargo or make repairs. There was a blackened patch on it now, with little blast-ignited flames dying out around the edges. It won't be long before it will be green again. he thought. The grass looked as though it grew fast -- it would certainly have plenty of time to grow before the next ship landed. He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were up. He stood there for a moment... drinking in the fresh air and feeling the warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.  musf be old, he thought, thinking about the warmth and comfort. Like old dogs and ocfoenarans.  Templin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment felt vaguely concerned. "Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like cloak-anddagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath." b "It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this." Eckert nodded agreement. wouldn't fit, would it? It would be like a famous singer suddenly doing a jazz number in an opera, or having the princess in a fairy tale turn out to be ugly." He gestured toward the village. "You could hardly class that as dangerous from its outward appearance. could you?" The rocketport was in a small valley, surrounded by low, wooded hills. The village started where the port left off and crawled and wound over the wooded ridges. Small houses of sun-baked, whitewashed mud crouched in the shadow of huge trees and hugged the banks of a small stream. It looked fairly primitive, Eckert thought, and yet it didn't have the earmarks, the characteristics of most primitive villages. It didn't seem cluttered or dirty and you didn't feel like beating a hasty retreat when the wind was blowing toward you. A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of kidsthat always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered. Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him and Templin. Templin studied them warily. "Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be dangerous." It's because you never suspect kids. Eckert thought, ou never think they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have other weapons. But the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the piny scent of the trees. One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them. "The reception committee," Templin said tightly. His hand went inside his tunic. He couldn't be blamed for being jumpy, Eckert realized. This was his first time out, his first mission like this. And, of course, Pendleton liad been a pretty good friend of his. "I'd be very careful what I did," Eckert said softly. "I would hate to start something merely because I misunderstood their intentions." The committee of one was a middle-aged man Klrcssed in a simple strip of white cloth twisted about his waist and allowed to hang freely to his knees. When he got closer, Eckert became less sure of his age. He had the firm, tanned musculature of a much younger man, though a slightly seamed face and white hair aged him somewhat. Eckert still had the feeling that if you wanted to know his exact age, you'd have to look at his tAith or know something about his epiphyseal closures. "You are mensiars from Earth?" The voice was husky and pleasant and the pronunciation was very clear. Eckert regarded him thoughtfully and made a few mental notes. He wasn't bowing and scraping like most natives who weren't too familiar with visitors from the sky. and yet he was hardly either friendly or hostile. "You learned our language from Pendleton and Reynolds?" Reynolds had been the anthroiolOgist. "We have had visitors from Earth before." He hesitated a moment and then offered his hand, somewhat shyly. Eckert thought, in the Terrestrial sign of greeting. "You may call me athong if you wish." He paused a moment to say something in his native tongue to the kids who were around. They promptly scattered and picked up the luggage. "While you are here, you will need a place to stay. There is one ready, if you will follow me." 'He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin. The town was larger than he #S had thought at first, stretching over a wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see. much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving. Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and practically every house in the village had its small garden. What manufacturing there was seemed to be carried on in the central square of the town, where a few adults and children squatted in the warm afternoon sun and worked industriously at potter's wheels and weaver's looms. The other part of the square was given over to the native bazaar where pots and bolts of cloth were for sale, and where numerous stalls were loaded with dried fruits and vegetables and the cleaned and plucked carcasses of the local variety of fowl. It was late afternoon when they followed Jathong into a small, white-washed house midway up a lull. "You are free to use this while you are here," he said. Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along, took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong. "You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may take what you wish of anything within this box." He opened another of the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods- brightly colored cloth and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination. Jathong ran his hand over the cloth and held some of the jewelry up to the light. Eckert knew by the way he looked at it that he wasn't at all impressed. "I am grateful," he said finally, "but there is nothing I want." He turned and walked away into the gathering darkness. "The incorruptible native." Templin laughed sarcastically. Eckert shrugged. "That's one of the things you do out of habit, try and buy some of the natives so you'll have friends in case you need them." He stopped for a moment, thinking. "Did you notice the context? He didn't say he didn't want what we showed him. He said there was nothing that he wanted. Implying that everything he wanted, he already had." "That's not very typical of a primitive society, is it?" "No, I'm afraid it's not." Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes. "You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-Iooking lot, aren't they?" "Too healthy," Templin said. "There didn't seem to be any sick ones or ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem natural." "They're probably just well brought-up kids," Eckert said sharply. "Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the mud on the way home from schoQl." He felt faintly irritated, annoyed ai the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was potentially dangerous. "Ted." Templin's voice was strained. "This could be a trap, you know." "In what way?" The words came out slowly. "The people are too casual, as though they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the cute, harmless little kids." He looked at Eckert. "Maybe that's what we're supposed to think -- just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end." He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every corner. "It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's keep an open mind until we know for certain." He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass, and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months -- even if the six months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably excellent... He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own psychological chart was vy close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's. A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A power pack. Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his tunic. A very convenient. portable, and hard to detect weapon. There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too. # think the society is, Ted?" Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his pipe and tobacco. "I don't think it's primitive at all. There are too many disparities. Their knowledge of a lot of things is a little more than empirical knowledge: they associate the growth of crops with fertilizer and nitrogen in the soil as well as sunlight, rather than the blessings of some native god. And they differ a lot in other respects. Their art and their music are advanced. Free art exists along with purely decorative art. and their techniques are finely developed." "I'm glad you agree, then. Take a look at this." Templin threw a shiny bit of metal on the roughhewn table. Eckert picked it up and inspected it. It was heavy and one side of it was extremely sharp. "What's it for?" "They've got a hospital set up here. Not a hospital like any we know, of course, but a hospital nonetheless. It's not used very much; apparently the natives don't get sick here. But occasionally there are hunting accidents and injuries that require surgery. The strip of metal there is a scalpel." He laughed shortly. "Primi- tive little gadget, but it works well -- as well as any of ours." Eckert hefted it in his palm. "Tlie most important thing is that they have the knowledge to use it. Surgery isn't a simple science."' "Well, what do you think about it?" "The obvious. They evidently have as much technology as they want, at least in fields where they have to have it." "How come they haven't gone any further?" "Why should they? You can live without skycars and rocket ships, you know." "Did you ever wonder what kind of weapons they might have?" "The important thing." Eckert mused, "is not if they have them, but if they'd use them. And I rather doubt that they would. We've been here for two weeks now and they've been very kind to us, seeing tliat we've had food find water and what fuel wc need." "It's known in the livestock trade as being fattened up for the slaughter," Templeton said. Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything. "You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?' Templin nodded. "Sure." "Why?" "The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton ; nobody has volunteered any information about him. And he was an attache here for three years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends, yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any information about him is being withheld for a reason." "What reason?" Templin shrugged. "Murder. What other reason could there be?" Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to market, leading a species of food animal by the halter. "They grow their women nice, don't they?" "Physically perfect, like the men," Templin grumbled. "You could get an inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while." "Does it? I hadn't noticed." Eckert turned away from the blinds. His voice was crisp. "I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too," he said. "But it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to And out what happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the futurr. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've at ready made up your mind." "You knew Pendleton," Templin repeated grimly. "Do you think it was suicide?" "I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm trying to keep an open mind." "What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?" "We've got six months," Eckert said quietly. "Six months in which we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on Tuhpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find out that wc know it is?" Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and Valked to the window. "I suppose you're right," he said at last. "It's nice living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help thinking that Don must have liked it here, too." of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry. "Peache, menshar?' "Siarra.'" He took the small bowl of pelache nuts, helped himself to a few. and passed the bowl on. This was definitely the time to enjoy himself, not to work or worry. He had heard about the halera a few days ago, and, by; judicious hinting to the proper authorities, he and Templin had been invited. It was a good chance to observe native customs. A little anthropology -- with refreshments. The main courses started making the rounds and he took generous helpings of the roasted vlami and the broiled halunch and numerous dabs from the side dishes of steaming vegetables. Between every course, they passed around a small flagon of the hot, spiced native wine, but he noticed that nobody drank to excess. Tie old Greek ideal, hc thought: moderation in everythin. He looked at Templin, sitting across from him in the huge circle, and shrugged mentally. Templin looked as if hc was about to break down and enjoy himself, but there was still a slight bulge under his tunic, where he had strapped his power pack. Any fool should have known that nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret later on. And even that danger Vet'll ifn was not quite as likely now. There will be hell to pay, Eckert thought, if Templin ever finds out that  sabotaged his power pack. "You look thoughtful, menshar Eckert." Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a ftrm chin and a certain aura of authority. "I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in any way, Nayova." Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he knew about Pendleton's death. "So far as I know, menshar Pendleton offended no one. I do not know what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous man," Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender ulami bone and tried to appear casual in his questioning. "I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to you for that." Nayova seemed pleased. 'We tried to do as well for menshar Pendleton as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities." Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about. He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and took another sip of the wine. "We were shocked to find out that menshar Pendleton had killed himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to believe he had done such a tiling." Nayova's gaze slid away from him. "Perhaps it was the will of the Great One," he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it. Eckert stared bleakly at his wine glass and tried to put the pieces of information together. They probqbly had a taboo about self destruction which would make it difficult to talk about. That would make it even harder for him to find out by direct questioning. A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native dance. The sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm of the dancers. Tlie small fires at the comers of ttie hut were allowed to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently tile dance was the Tunpeshan version of the rites de passage. He glanced across the circle at Templin. Templin's face -- what he could see of it by the flickering light -- was brick red. A voice spoke in his ear. "It is hard for us to imagine anybody doing what menshar Pendleton did. It is... ande used a native word that Eckert translated as being roughly equivalent to "obscene." The dancers at the center of the drcle finally bowed out with small garlands of flowers on their heads that signified their reaching adulthood. Acrobats then took the stage and went throuh a dizzying routine, and they in turn were succeeded by a native singer. They were all excellent, Eckert thought. If anything, they were too good. The bowl of pelache nuts made its way around again and Nayova leaned over to speak to him, "If there is any possibility that I can help you while you are here, menshar Eckert, you have but to ask." It would probably be a mistake to ask for a list of Pendleton's friends, but there was a way around that. "I would like to meet any of your people who had dealings with Pendleton, either in business or socially. I will do everything not to inconvenience them in any way." "I think they would be glad to help you. I shall ask them to go to you this coming week." "T wasn't a driving rain, just a  gentle drizzle that made the lanes muddy and plastered Eckert's tunic against him. He didn't mind it; the rain was warm and the trees and grass smelled good in the wet. "How would you classify the culture after seeing the ceremony, Ted?" TempUn asked. "About what you would expect. An Apollonian culture, simple and dignified. Nothing in. excess, no striving for great emotional release."  Templin nodded soberly. "It grows On you, doesn't it? You find yourself getting to like the place. And I suppose that's dangerous, too. You tend to let your guard down, the way Pendleton must have. You -- what was that?" Eckert tensed. There was a gentle padding in the mud, several hundred feet behind them. Templin flattened himself in the shadows alongside a house. His hand #ft darted inside his tunic and came out with the slim deadliness of a needle gun. "Don't use it!" Eckert whispered tersely. Templin's eyes were thin, frightened slits in the darkness. "Why not?" Eckert's mind raced. It might be nothing at all, and then again it might be disaster. But there was still a chance that Templin might be wrong. And there were more immediate reasons. "How many charges do you have for that?" "Twelve." "You think you can stand there and hold them off with only twelve charges for your needle gun?" "There's my power pack." "It's no good," Eckert said softly. "The batteries in it are dead. I was afraid you might do something foolish with it." The footsteps were only yards away. He listened intently, but it was hard to tell how many there were by the sound. "What do we do then?" "See if they're following us first," Eckert said practically. "They might not be, you know." They slid out from the shadows and ducked down another lane between the houses. The footsteps behind them speeded up and came down the same lane. "We'll have to head back for our house," Eckert whispered. They started running as quietly as they could, slipping and sliding in the mud. Another stretch past the shuttered, crouching houses and they found themselves in the square they had visited on the day they had landed. It was deserted, the looms and pottery wheels covered with cloth and reeds to keep off the rain. They darted across it, two thin shadows racing across the open plaza, and hurried down another path. The last path led to the smaU river that cut through the city. Templin looked around, gestured to Eckert, waded into the water and crouched under the small bridge that spanaed it. Eckert swore silently to himself, then followed Templin in. The cold water swirled under his armpits and he bit his lips to keep himself from sneezing. Templin's emotions were contagious. Would he have worried about the footsteps? He frowned and tried, to be honest with himself. Perhaps he would -- and perhaps he wouldn't have. But he couldn't have let Templin stay there and face the unknown ap-' proachers. Not Templin. Footsteps approached the bridge, hesitated a moment, then pattered on the wooden structure and faded off down the muddy path. Eckert let his breath out slowly. The footsteps were curiously light. V  There was only one pair of them. thing," Templin said coldly. He stripied off his power pack  and let it fall to the floor of their house. "Why did you decide to substitute dead batteries in the pack?" "Because," Eckert said shortly, T was afraid you would do something with it that you might regret later. You're inexperienced in situations like this. Your reactions aren't to be trusted. One false move here and we could follow Pendleton, however he died. You know that." He wriggled out of his tunic and slowly peeled off his wet trousers. There was a timid knock at the door. He wrapped a blanket about himself and motioned to Templin to stand to one side. Templin grabbed a small stool, hefted it in one hand, and complied. Eckert went to the door and casually threw it open. A girl stood there, half in tlie outer darkness and half in the yellovish light from the room, covered with mud to the knees and drenched to the skin. "The menshar forgot this at the haera," she said joftly. She quickly handed him his pipe and a soggy bag of tobacco, and disappeared instantly into the rain. He listened for the sound of her footsteps in the soft mud and then closed the door. Templin put down the stool and stared stupidly at the pipe and the tobacco sack. Eckert placed them carefully on the table " and began to towel himself. "We probably face as much danger from our own imaginations as from anything else." he said grimly. "Tell me. would you have fired first, or would you have waited until you found out for sure who she was and what she wanted when she first started to follow us?" "I don't know," Templin said sullenly, "Then I'll leave to your imagination the position we would be in now, if you had given in to your impulse." tu "TE haven't found out much, have we?" Templin demanded some days later. "No," Eckert admitted. "We haven't." He riffled through the thick stack of cards on the table. Statistically, the results were not only interesting but slightly phenomenal. During the three years or so that Pendleton had been on Tunpesh, he had met and known approximately seven hundred of the natives. By far the greater majority of these, of course, were purely casual and meant nothing. Almost a hundred, though, had had extended relations with Pendleton in business or social affairs. Of this hundred, none -- not a single one -- would admit that he had known Pendleton well or could be considered a friend of his. About all they had to say was that Pendleton had been healthy and easy to get along with, and one warm night he had shocked the community by going off and shooting himself. "Like Richard Cory," Eckert said aloud.  "Like who?" Templin asked. "Richard Cory. A character in a poem by a Twentieth Century poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson. Apparently he had everything to live for, but 'Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.' " "I'll have to look it up some day," Templin said. He pointed to the stack of cards. "That's so much waste paper, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," Eckert said reluctantly. "To be frank, I had hoped we'd know a lot more by now. I still can't understand, why we haven't dug up anybody who will admit having been his friend." "How do you know they're telling the truth? Or, for that matter, how do you know that the ones we've seen so far are the ones who actually knew Pendleton?" Eckert drummed his fingers on the table. You handle different human cultures for twenty-five years and you get to the point where you can tell if people are lying or not. Or do you? Maybe just an old man's conceit. Age alone never lent wisdom. Regardless of the personal reasons that Templin might have for thinking the Tunpeshans are lying, the fact remains that they very easily could be. And what should you do if they are? There was a polite knock at the door. "We've got another visitor," Templin said sarcastically. "He probably saw Pendleton at a halera four years ago and wants to be sure we know all about it." The Tunpeshan looked faintly familiar to Eckert. There was something about the man's carriage...  met you the day you landed," the Tunpeshan began, and Eckert remembered. JathMg, the guide who had shown them to the house. "You knew Pendleton?" Jathong nodded. "I and a fellow weaver took over his small office after he had left it." Eckert recalled the small office in the square with the bolts of cloth on display, and the small mud brick on the window ledge with the incised lettering reading: "Why you didn't tell us this before?" "I didn't know what kind and how much information you wanted." IVe didn't ask him, Eckert tliought, so he didn't volunteer any information. Polite, to say the feast. "How long did you know him?" "Since he landed. I was the one appointed to him." "What do you mean -- appointed to him?" "To try to learn his language, and try to teach him ours." Eckert felt his interest rising. #athong. then, must have known Pendleton fairly well. "Did he have any enemies that you know of?" "Enemies?" Jathong seemed ignorant of , the meaning of the word, so Eckert explained. "No, he had no enemies. He would naturally hav none such on Tunpesh." Templin leaned forward, tense. "If he had no enemies, why did he have no friends? You, for example, knew him longer and better than most. Why is it that you weren't his friend?" Jathong looked unhappy, as if being forced to say something he wanted not to say. "Pendleton was kava -- I cannot explain it. The concept is diflicult. You would not understand." He might be running the danger of throwing too many questions at Jath'ong, Eckert 'realized, and having him freeze up or turn vague. But it couldn't be helped. They had made no progress at all by subtlety, and time would eventually run out. He tried to broach the next question delicately. "Did Pendleton know any of the women of your race?" "He knew some of the women, as hf knew the men." The answer didn't tell Eckert what he wanted to know. "Was he in love with any woman?" It sounded crude the way he put it, but it was hard to think of any other way of asking it. credulously, as if Eckert had asked him if Pendleton had had two heads. "That would have been impossible. None of our women would have -- could have -- been in love with menshar Pendleton." One line of inquiry jusf one pbht, Eckert thought. But Pendleton wasn't one to let a broken heart get him down anyway. "Why not?" Templin cut in harshly. "He wasn't hard to look at and he would have made a good husband." Jathong diplomatically turned around to face Templin. "I have told you once -- Pendleton was bava. It would have been quite impossible." The answer to what had happened to Pendleton probably lay in Jathong's inability to explain his own terms, Eckert believed. One could get just so close, and then the definitions became vague and useless. He asked a few more questions and finally dismissed Jathong. The interview, like all the others he and Templin had held during the last week, had been worthless. They knew nothing more than they had when they landed. "I still thing they're lying," Templin said almost savagely. "Or perhaps the ones who really know something haven't come around." near the doorway, letting the sunlight streaming through the foliage of a nearby tree dapple his face with a checkerboard pattern of modulated lights and velvety shadows. "If they're evading us or if they're lying, then the society is a dangerous one for us. But I still can't believe it. They're not warlike. They don't seem to have many weapons and definitely none of an advanced type." "How could anybody know for sure?" Eckert methodically knocked the cold ashes out of his pipe and added more tobacco. "Easy. Despite what you read in story books, no civilization lives simply, governs itself simply, and yet possesses 'super-blasters.' The swordand blaster combination just doesn't exist. Any weapon above the level of bows and arrows or knives is the product of a well advanced technology. Along with weapons, of course, you have to have good communications. Now take an ordinary radio and think of the degree of knowledge, technology, and industrialization that would have to exist to supply it. There's nothing like that here." Templin came over to the warmth streaming in through the doorway. "It almost seems that they're acting in concert, though -- as if there were some kind of plot, where, by prearrangement, everybody knows exactly what to say." Ml "You're wrong again. You can practically smell a dictatorship or a tyranny, which Is the only situation in which almost one hundred per cent of the population will follow the same line through fear of the consequences if they don't. In a situation like that, the people are frightened, unhappy. You can hardly say that's the case on Tunpesh." "No," Templin admitted, "you couldn't. But, still, you have to admit that the answers we've received so far are just too unanimous -- and too sketchy. All agree that Pendleton was a fine fellow; alt agree that he had no native friends." Eckert nodded. "I'll go along with that. And I think it's time we did something about it. Tonight we'll have to start eliminating certain ideas." He took a small case from their pile of luggage and opened it. Inside was a small, battery-powered box with various dials set on the front and the usual electrodes and nerve probes protruding from the sides and the top. Templin looked at it with surprise. "That will be dangerous to use, won't it?" "It might be more dangerous not to. Time is getting to be a factor and we have to make some progress. We have a safety margin of a sort in that we can erase memories of its use, but the procedure is still risky." "Who do we use it on?" "As long as we're going to use it," Eckert said grimly, "we might as well start at the top." When they had started out, the investigation had seemed fairly simple to Eckert. There were two possibilities -- cither Pendleton had committed suicide or he had been murdered. Knowing Pendleton's record, the first possibility had seemed remote. A few weeks on Tunpesh had convinced him tliat the second possibility was also remote. One or the other had to be eliminated. The second would be the easiest. There were other reasons as well. Templin was still convinced that Pendleton had been killed, and Templin was an emotional man with access to powerful weapons. The question was not what he might eventually do, but when. T he night looked as if it would be another rainy one. It was cooler than usual and dark clouds were scudding across the starlit sky. Eckert and Templin stood in the shadows of the house, watching the dark lane for any casual strollers. Eckert looked at his watch. A few minutes more and Nayova would come out for his evening walk. Eckert had just started to think longingly of his bed and the warmth inside his house when the door opened and Nayova appeared in the opening. Eckert held his breath while the chieftain stood uncertainly in the doorway, testing the night air, and then let it out slowly when Nayova started down the lane. They closed in on him. "The mensiars from Earth," he said without alarm. "Is there something you wish?" "We would like you to come with us to our house for a while," Eckert started in. Nayova looked puzzled. "I do not understand. Would not tomorrow do as well?" "I'm afraid it'll have to be tonight." Nayova was obviously not quite sure of their threat. "No, I..." Eckert caught him before he touched the ground. Templin took the rag off the butt of the needle gun, lifted the ruler's feet, and they disappeared into the brush along the lane. They would have to sneak back to the house, Eckert knew, and hope that nobody saw them lugging the unconscious native. He laughed a little grimly to himself. Templin had expected cloak-anddagger. It looked as if he was going to get more than his share of it, after all. Once inside the house, Eckert arranged the electrodes and the small nerve probes on Nayova, who had come to. am sorry," Eckert said formally," but we find this necessary. You understand that we have to find out all we can about Pendleton. We have no choice." He found it difficult to look the ruler in the face, even with the realization that this was strictly in the line of duty and that the chieftain would not be hurt. "But I have cooperated with you in every way' possible!" Nayova protested. "I have told you everything we know!" "That's right," Templin said bluntly. "And now we're going to ask you the same questions." Nayova looked blank for a moment and then reddened as he understood. on the little squate box. "We would like to know," Eckert said politely, "where you were two weeks ago at this time of night." Nayova looked surprised. "You know that I was at the aera, the coming-of-age ceremony. You were there with me, as my guests. You should assuredly know I was there." Eckert looked over at Templin, who nodded shortly. It had been a standard question, to test the apparatus. "Did Pendleton have any enemies here on Tunpesh?" Nayova emphatically sliook his head. "To the best of my knowledge. mensiar Pendleton had no enemies here. He would have none." Templin's face showed its disappointment. "Who were his friends?" "He had no friends." Templin glowered angrily, but he said nothing. Eckert frowned. The same answer -- Pendleton had had no enemies and yet he had had no friends. "Would you say he was well liked here?" "I would say no." "Why not?" A shrug. "It is hard to explain and you would not be able to understand." "Did somebody here kill Pendleton?" Eckert could hear Templin suck in his breath. "No." Ask him that again," Templin cut in. "Did somebody kill Pendleton?" J'No." "Did Pendleton kill himself?" A trace of disgust showed on Nayova's face. "Yes." "V#hy?" "I do not know." Templin gestured to Eckert to take the box. "Let me ask him." He came around and faced the native. "Why did your people kill Pendleton?" "We did not kill him. We had no reason to wish him harm." "Do you expect us to believe that Pendleton killed himself? We knew him better than that." "You may believe whatever you wish. But men change and perhaps he did. We did not kill him. Such an act would have been repugnant to us." "I think that's enough," Eckert said calmly. Templin bit his lip as Eckert touched another dial on the machine. Nayova suddenly jerked, looked blank, and slumped in the chair. Eckert took off the electrodes. "Help me take hint back, will you, Ray?" house, stayed with him until he showed signs of recovering, and then left. "Why didn't you use a drug?" Templin demanded. "Possible allergy or serum reaction. We don't know enough about these people to take chances -- they're humanoid, not human." "They can fool machines, though, can't they?" Eckert didn't reply. 'A#I right, I know they can't," Templin sai# gnwigingly. "He jvas telling the truth all the time, wasn't he?" Eckert nodded. "I never did think he was lying. They don't seem to be the type: their culture doesn't allow for it." They were silent for a while, walking quietly in the lanes between the shuttered, seemingly untenanted houses. "I'm glad," Templin said quietly. "It's off my mind. It's hard to believe that anybody here would... deliberately kill somebody else." Templin's reactions would be worth something now for Eckert to study. They wouldn't be inhibited by his conviction that the natives had murdered his best friend. Just what reactions and emotions he would display, Eckert wasn't sure, nor how Templin's psychology, so similar to Pendleton's, would help solve the problem. They had eliminated one possibility. but that still left them with the one they had started with. Why had Pendleton taken the short way out? the open door and played tag with the papers on the desk. Eckert swore without annoyance and calmly started chasing those that had been blown on the floor. "What did Pendleton have to say in his reports?" Templin sat in the doorway, his eyes barely open. He had begun taking siestas in the early afternoon, after their usual light lunch. It was pleasant to sit on the worn wood and feel the warmth of sun and smell the crisp freshness of the outdoors, or maybe watch the kids playing in the lane, catching the butterflies that floated past in the afternoon air. "About what you'd expect. Mostly reports on the industry, climate, system of government, and general anthropological information that he thought might prove interesting. As far as I can see, he didn't lack enthusiasm for making the reports. If anything, he grew more enthusiastic as time went on. He practically wrote us treatises on every phase of life on Tunpesh." TempUn's eyes closed all the way. "Any indication in his reports that he didn't like it here?" "Just the other way around. Everything points to the fact that he liked the climate, the people, the way they lived." "I don't blame him," Templin murmured. "This is a lovely place to be. The climate is wonderful, the people are happy, hard-working. The society itself seems to be -- perfect. Sometimes you can't help but compare it too damn favorably to Earth." Eckert shoved the papers to one side and came over to where Templin sat. He felt rather lazy himself. The warmth and sunshine corroded ambition, as it did in mosk climates like this. "You know, there isn't any crime here' Templin continued. He laughed to himself. "Except the minor crime wave we caused when we landed here five months ago. No criminals, no villains foreclosing mortgages, no gamblers bleeding the gullible white, and nobody trying to sell gold bricks. I can't get over it." the sunlight that glistened on his tunic, like a drop of water on a piece of black velvet. It hung there for a moment and then was off. its wings flashing. Eckert watched it go in a sort of torpor. It was pleasant to relax and slip the leash off your thoughts quietly and sec where they took you. Maybe it was a sort of letdown. They had expected six months of danger in a potentially criminal culture, and instead it had been paradise. As Templin said, you couldn't help but compare it to Earth. No greed, no belligerency, no contempt for the rights of others. No cynicism, no sarcasm, and no trampling crowds in the stores. The little important things .   "Where did you go last night, Ray?" Templin stirred. "A community meeting. Almost like a Quaker meeting. You get up and say what you think. The one last night was about some local government issues. They talked it over, decided what to do, and how much each person should contribute. The original democracy. Ted." Eckert was wide awake. "I wonder why I wasn't invited." He felt slightly put out that Templin should have been asked to something like that and he hadn't been. "I wasn't invited," TempUn said. "I invited myself." "Have you noticed," Eckert mused, "we haven't been invited to too many functions lately?" "They know we're busy," Templin said lazily. "They're too polite to ask us to go some place if they thought we were busy doing something else." "You like it here, don't you, Ray?" Templin brushed idly at a marauding mosquito. "It took me pretty long to warm up to it. but I guess I do." They only had a month left, Eckert knew -- a month to do practically nothing but lie in the sun and watch the people. Oh, they could go through the motions of investigating and look over Pendleton's old records and reports, but there was nothing in them of any value. He yawned and sat down and settled his back against the door frame. It began to look as if they'd never find out why Pendleton had done what he had. And it didn't seem to matter, somehow. slowly. Templin was asleep on the bed, the sunlight lying in bapds across his tanned, bare back. He had on a strip of white cloth, knotted at the waist in imitation of what the natives wore. It was mussed now, and the knot had started to come loose. He looked a lot healthier than he had when they had first landed. More peaceful, more content. He appeared to have gained ten pounds and shed five years in the last six months. And now the vacation was over. It was time to go back. "Ray," Eckert called out to him softly. Templin didn't stir, but continued his soft and very regular breathing. Eckert found a book and dropped it on the floor with a thud. Templin woke up, but didn't move. "What do you want, Ted?" "How did you know it was me?" Templin chuckled, as if it were hugely funny. "Riddles yet. Who else would it be? No Tunpeshan would be rude enough to wake somebody up in the middle of anap, so it had to be you." "You know what you would have done if somebody had awakened you like that five months ago?" Templin tried to nod, but was slightly handicapped by the bed underneath him. "I would have pulled my trusty atomgun and plugged him." Eckert went over to where they kept their luggage and started pulling the boxes out from the wall. "Well, I've got good news for you. A liner just landed to pick us up. They were going through this sector and they got an order from the Service to stop by for us. Some cargo-wallopers will be here in a few minutes to, help us with our gear." "Ted." Eckert paused. "Yes?" "I'm not going back." "Why not?" Eckert's face had a look of almost clinical curiosity on it. "Why should I? I like it here. I want to live here the rest of my life." tk'HE pieces began to fall in place. "I'm not so sure you'd like it. M# Ray. Not after a while. All your friends are back on Earth. Everybody you know is back there. It's just the novelty of something new and something different here. I've felt that way a lot of times in different cultures and different societies. You'd change your mind after a while." "Those aren't reasons, Ted. Why should I go back to a world where most of the people are unhappy at some time and a few people all the time? As far as I'm concerned, Tunpesh is my home now. and I don't intend to leave it." Eckert was fascinated. It was like a case history unfolding right before his eyes. "Are you sure you would enjoy it here for the rest of your life? Have you made any friends to take the place of those back home?" "It takes time to become acquainted, even more time to make friends" Templin said defensiveJy"You can't desert the Service," Eckert pointed out. "You still have your duty." Templin laughed in his pillow. "It won't work, Ted. Duty's just a catch word, a jingo phrase. They can get along without me And you know it." "What about Pendleton. Ray?" He died here, you know, in mysterious circumstances." "Would going back help him any? He wasn't murdered; we know that. And why do people commit suicide? For what one of several thousand possible reasons did Pendleton? We don't know. We'll never know. And if we did know, what good would it do?" He had changed a lot in six months, Eckert saw. Too much. "What if I told you I knew why Pendleton killed himself?" Eckert asked. "And that you would do the same if you stayed here?" "Don't use it, Ted. It's poor psychology. It won't work." The pieces made a perfect picture, But Templin was going back whether he wanted to or not. The only difficulty was that, deep underneath, Eckert sympathized with him. Perhaps if he had been younger, less experienced... "Then you won't go back with us?" Templin closed his eyes and rolled over on his back. "No." There was dead silence. Templin could smell the piny scent of the woods and feel the warmth of soft sunlight that lanced through the blinds. Some place far away, there was the faint chatter of kids at play, but outside of that it was quiet. Too quiet. Templin opened his eyes in sudden alarm. "Ted! Don't!" He caught the gas full in the face and tumbled back on the bed. unconscious. the observation cabin as quietly as he could. Templin was seated on one of the pneumatic couches, staring soberly at a small I ., yellow star in the black sky. He didn't look up. "It's me, Ray," Eckert said. Templin didn't move. "I suppose I owe you an apology," Eckert began, "but I had to gas you to get you to leave. Otherwise you wouldn't have left. And the same thing would have happened to you that happened to Don Pendleton." "You're sure of that?" Templin asked bitterly. "Reasonably. You're a lot like Pendleton, you know. In fact, that's why you were selected to go -- not so much because you knew him as the fact that psychologically you were a lot like him. We thought that by studying your response to situations there,'we would have a picture of What Pendleton's must have been." Templin didn't want to talk about it, Eckert realized, but it had to be explained to him. "Do you want to know why Pendleton killed himself?" Templin shrugged listlessly. "I suppose we 'should have seen it right away," Eckert continued. "Any race that is so happy with their way of life that they show no curiosity about strangers, the way they live, or what possessions they have, must have something to be happy about. Tunpesh is something that might happen only once in a thousand civilizations, maybe less, Ray. "The environment is perfection and so are the people, or at least as near to perfection as it's possible to get. An intelligent people who have as much technology as they desire, living simply with themselves and each other. A fluke of nature, perhaps. No criminals, no insane, no neurotics. A perfect cultural pattern. Tunpesh is a paradise. You didn't want to leave, neither did I, and neither did Pendleton." ' Templin turned on him. "So it was paradise. Would it have been criminal if I had stayed there? Who would it have hurt?" "It would have hurt you," Eckert said gravely. "Because the Tunpeshans would never have accepted you. We're too different, Ray. We're too aggressive, too pushy, too persistent. We're not -- perfect. You see, no matter how long we stayed there, we would never have fit in. We lived in a harsh society and we bear the scars of it. Our own environment has conditioned us, and we can't change. Oh, we could try, but it would crop up in little ways. Because of that, the natives could never genuinely like us. We'd never belong. Their own cultural pattern wouldn't allow them to accept us. "Their cultural pattern, is like the Fire and the Sword that were placed outside the Garden of Eden, after Adam and Eve were driven out, to keep it sacrosanct. If youVe an outsider, you stay outside. You can never come in." H e paused a moment, waiting for Templin to say something. Templin didn't. "The natives have a word for it. Kava. It means, I suppose, d#ferent -- not necessarily inferior, just different. We should have seen it as time went on. We weren't invited places; they seemed to avoid u. A natural reaction for them. I guess I have to admit." Eckert cleared his throat huskily, "You see, what happened to Pemlleton." he continued awkwardly, "is that he fell in love with paradise, but paradise would have nothing to do with him. By the time three years were up, he knew that he was an outcast in Eden. And he couldn't leave, to come back and try to forget. He was stranded in paradise and had to look forward to spending four more years there as a pariah. He couldn't do it. And neither could you." He was quiet for a moment, thinking of the cool, scented air and the warm sunshine and the happy kids playing on the grassy lanes. "I suppose it didn't affect you at all. did it?" Templin asked venomously. face. "You should know better than that, Ray. Do you think I'll ever forget it? Do you think I'll ever be satisfied with my own culture again?" "What are you going to do about it?" "It's dangerous to human beings. Ray. Looking at it brutally, their culture has killed two of our people as surely as if Tunpesh were populated by murderous savages. We'll probably send a larger commission, throw it open to commerce, try to change it." Templin gripped the sides of the couch, his face strained and tense with anxiety. "What happens to it depends on the report you make, doesn't it?" "Yes. it does." "Then make up something in your report. Say the climate is bad for Earthmen. Say anything, but don't let them change Tunpesh !" Eckert looked at him for a long moment, remembering. "Okay, Ray." he said slowly, "We'll leave paradise alone. Strictly alone. It'll be put on the quarantine list." He turned and left. Behind him, Templin swiveled around in his chair and gazed bleakly at the tiny mote of yellow fading in the blackness of space. til A Little Journey She'd paid good money to see the inevitable...and then hod to work to moke it hoppeni T here were two important things -- one. that she was very old : two, that Mr. Thirkell Was taking her to God. For hadn't he patted her hand and said: "Mrs. Bellowes, we'll take off into space in my rocket, and go to find Him together"? And that was how it was going to be. Oh, this wasn't like any other group Mrs. Bellowes had ever joined. In her fervor to light a path for her delicate, tottering feet, she had struck matches down dark alleys, and found her way to Hindu mystics who floated their flickering, starry eyelashes over crystal balls. She had walked on the meadow paths with ascetic Indian philosophers imported by daughtcrs-in-spirit of Madame Blavatsky. She had made pilgrimages to California's stucco jungles to hunt the astrological seer in his natural habitat. She had even consented to signing away the rights to one of her homes in order to be taken into the shouting order of a temple of amazing evangelists who had promised her golden smoke, crystal fire, and the great soft hand of God coming to bear her home. None of these people had ever shaken Mrs. Bellowes' faith, even when she saw them sirened away in a black wagon in the night, or discovered their pictures, bleak and unromantic, in the morning tabloids. The world had roughed them up and locked them away because they knew too much, that was all. And then, two weeks ago, she had seen Mr. Thirkell's advertisement in New York City: Stay at the Thirkcll Restorium for one week. And then, on into space on the greatt adventure life can offer! Send for Free Pamphlet: "Nearer My God To Thee." Excursion rates. Round trip slightly lower. "Round trip." Mrs. Bellowes had thought. "But who would come back after seeing Him?" And so she had bought a ticket and flown off to Mars and spent seven mild days at Mr. Thirkell's Restorium, the building with the sign on it which flashed: thirkkll's rocket to heaven! She had spent the week bathing in limpid waters and erasing the care from her tiny bones, and now she was fidgeting, ready to be loaded into Mr. ThirkclI's own special private rocket, like a bullet. to be fired on out into space beyond Jupiter and Saturn and Pluto. And thus -- who could deny it? -- you would be getting nearer and nearer to the Lord. How wonderful! Couldn't you just ieel Him drawing near? Couldn't you just sense His breatli, His scrutiny. His Presence? "Here I am," said Mrs. Bellowes, "an ancient rickety elevator. ready to go up the shaft. God need only press the button." Now. on the seventh day, as she minced up the steps of the Restorium, a number of small doubts assailed her. "For one thing." she said aloud to no one, "it isn't quitthe land of milk and honey here on Mars that they said it would be. My room is like a cell, the swimming pool is really quite inadequate, and, besides, how many widows who look like mushrooms or skeletons want to swim? And, finally, the whole Restorium smells of boiled cabbage and tennis shoes!" She opened the front door and let it slam, somewhat irritably. She was amazed at the other women in the auditorium. It was like wandering in a carnival mirror-maze, coming again and again upon yourself -- the same floury face, the same chicken hands, and jingling bracelets. One after another of the images of herself floated before her. She put out her hand, but it wasn't a mirror; it was another lady shaking her fingers and saying.: "We're waiting for Mr. Thirkell. Shr "Ah," whispered everyone. The velvet curtains parted. Mr. Thirkcll appeared, fantasdcally serene, his Egyptian eyes upon everyone. But there was something, nevertheless, in his appearance which made one expect him to call "Hi!" while fuzzy dogs jumped over his legs, through his hooped arms, and over his back. Then, dogs and afl, he should dance with a dazzling piano-keyboard smile off into the wings. Mrs. Bellowes, with a secret part of her mind which she constantly had to grip tightly, expected to hear a cheap Chinese gong sound when Mr. Thirkell entered. His large liquid dark eyes were so improbable that one of the old ladies had facetiously claimed she saw a mosquito cloud hovering over them as they did around summer rain-barrels. And Mrs. Bellowes sometimes caught the scent of the theatrical mothball and the smell of calliope steam on his sharply pressed suit. But with the same savage rationalization that had greeted all other disappointments in her rickety life, she bit at the suspicion and whispered, "This time it's real. Thi time it'll work. Haven't wc got a rocket?" Mr. Thirkell bowed. He smiled a sudden Comedy Mask smile. The old ladies looked in at his epiglottis and sensed chaos there. Before he even began to speak, Mrs. Bellowes saw him picking up each of his words, oiling it, making sure it ran smooth on its rails. Her heart squeezed in like a tiny fist, and she gritted her #XrceIain teeth. "Friends," said Mr. Thirkell, and you could hear the frost snap in the hearts of the entire assemblage. "No!"' said Mrs. Bellowes ahead of time. She could hear the bad news rushing at her, and herself tied to the track while the immense black wheels threatened and the whistle screamed, helpless. "There will be a slight delay," said Mr. Thirkell. In the next instant, Mr. Thirkel! might have cried, or been tempted to cry, "Ladies, be seated!" in minstrel-fashion, for the ladies had come up at him from their chairs, protesting and trembling. "Not a very long delay." Mr. Thirkell put up his hands to pat the air. "How long?" "Only a week." "A week!" "Yes. You can stay here at the Restorium for seven more days, can't you? A little delay won't matter, will it, in the end? You've waited a lifetime. Only a few more days." At twenty dolara a day, thought Mrs. Bellowes, coldly. "What's the trouble?" a woman cried. "A legal difficulty," said Mr. Thirkell. "We've a rocket, haven't we?" "Well, ye-ess." "But I've been here a whole month, waiting," said one old lady. "Delays, delays!" "That's right," said everyone. "Ladies, ladies," murmured Mr. Thirkell, smiling serenely. "We want to sec the rocketl" It was Mrs. Bellowes forging ahead, alone, brandishing her fist like a toy hammer. Mr. Thirkell looked into the old ladies' eyes, a missionary among albino cannibals. "Well, now." he said. "Yes, now!" cried Mrs. Bellowes. "I'm afraid -- " he began. "So am I!" she said. "That's why we want to see the ship!" "No, no, now. Mrs. -- " He snapped his fingers for her name. "Bellowes!" she cried. She was a small container, but now all the seething pressures that had been built up over long years came steaming through the delicate vents of her body. Her cheeks became incandescent. With a wail that was like a melancholy factory whistle, Mrs. Bellowes ran forward and hung to him, almost by her teeth, like a summermaddened Spifz. She would not and never could let go. until he died, and the other women followed, jumping and yapping like a poimd let loose on its trainer, the same one who had petted them and to whom they had squirmed and whined joyabout him. creasing his sleeves and frightening the Egyptian serenity from his gaze. "This way!" cried Mrs. Bellowes, feeling like Madame Lafarge. "Through the back! We've waited long enough to see the ship. Every day he's put us off, every day we've waited, now let's sec." "No, no, ladies!" cried Mr. Thirkell, leaping about. They burst through the back of the stage and out a door, like a flood, bearing the poor man with them into a shed, and then out, quite suddenly, into an abandoned gymnasium. "There it is!" said someone. "The rocket." And then a silence fell that was terrible to entertain. There was the rocket. Mrs. Bellowes looked at it and her hands sagged away from Mr. Thirkcll's collar. The rocket was something like a battered copper pot. There were a thousand bulges and rents end rusty pipes and dirty vents on and in it. The ports were clouded over with dust, resembling the eyes of a blind hog. Everyone wailed a little sighing wail. "Is that the rocket ship Glory Be to the Highest?" cried Mrs. Bellowes, appalled. Mr. Thirkell nodded and looked at his feet. "For which we paid out our one thousand dollars apiece and came all the way to Mars to get on board with you and go off to find Him?" asked Mrs. Bellowes. "Why, that isn't worth a sack of dried peas," said Mrs. Bcllowes. "It's nothing but junk!' Junk, whispered everyone, getting hysterical. "Don't let him get awayl" Mr. Thirkell tried to break and run, but a thousand possum traps closed on him from every side. He withered. Everybody walked around in circles like blind mice. There was a confusion and a weeping that lasted for five minutes as they went over and touched the Rocket, the Dented Kettle, the Rusty Container for God's Children. "Well," said Mrs. Bellowes. She stepped up into the askew doorway of the rocket and faced everyone. "It looks as if a terrible thing has been done to us,' she said. "I haven't any money to go back home to Earth and I've too much pride to go to the Government and tell them a common man like this has fooled us out of our life's savings. I don't know how you feel about it, all of you, but the reason all of us came is because I'm eighty-five, and you're eighty-nine, and you're seventy-eight, and all of us are nudging on toward a hundred, and there's nothing on Earth for us, and it doesn't appear there's anything on Mars either. We all expected not to breathe much more air or crochet many more doilies or we'd never have come here. So what I have to propose is a simple thing -- to take a chance' She reached out and touched the rusted hulk of the rocket. "This is our rocket. We paid for our trip. And we're going to take our trip!" Everyone rustled and stood on tiptoes and opened an astonished mouth. Mr. Thirkell began to cry. He did it quite easily and very effectively. "We're going to get in this ship," said Mrs. Bcllowes, ignoring hinj. "And we're going to take off to where we were going." Mr. Thirkell stopped crying long enough to say, "But it was all a fake. I don't know anything about space. He's not out there, anyway. I lied. I don't know where He is. and I couldn't find Him if I wanted to. And you were fools to ever take my word on it." "Yes," said Mrs. Bcllowes. "we were fools. I'll go along on that. But you can't blame us, for we're old. and it was a lovely, good and fine idea, one of the loveliest ideas in the world. Oh. we didn't really fool ourselves that we could get nearer to Him physically. It was the gentle, mad dream of old people, the kind of thing you hold onto for a few minutes a day, even though you know it's not tiue. So, all of you who want to go, you follow me in the ship." "But you can't gof" said Mr. Thirkell. "You haven't got a navigator. And that ship's a ruin!" "You," said Mrs. Bcllowes, "will be the navigator." She stepped into the ship, and after a moment, the other old ladies pressed forward. Mr. Thirtically. was nevertheless pressed through the port, and in a min-' ute the door slammed shut. Mr. Thirkell was strapped into the navigator's seat, with everyone talking at once and holding him down. The special helmets were issued to be fitted over every gray or white head to supply extra oxygen in case of a leakage in the ship's hull, and at long last the hour had come and Mrs. Bellowes stood behind Mr. Thirkell and said. "We're ready, sir." He said nothing. He pleaded with ' them silently, using his great, dark, wet eyes, but Mrs. Bcllowes shook her head and pointed to the control. "Takeoff," agreed Mr. Thirkell morosely, and pulled a switch. Everybody fell. Tlie rocket went up from the planet Mars in a great fiery glide, with the noise of an entire kitchen thrown down an elevator shaft, with a sound of pots and pans and kettles and fires boiling and stews bubbling, with a smell of burned incense and rubber and sulphur, with a color of yellow fire, and a ribbon of red stretching below them, and all the old women singing and holding to each other, and Mrs. Bellowes crawling upright in the sighing, straining, trembling ship. "Head for space, Mr. Thirkell." "It can't last," said Mr. Thirkell, sadly. "This ship can't last. It will -- " It did. The rocket exploded. Mrs. Bellowes felt herself lifted and thrown about dizzily, like a doll. She heard the great screamings and saw the flashes of bodies sailing by her in fragments of metal and powdery light. "Help, help!" cried Mr. Thirled, far away, on a small radio beam. vThe ship disintegrated into a all one hundred of them, were flung straight on ahead with the same velocity as the ship. As for Mr. Thirkell, for some reason of trajectory, perhaps, he had been blown out the other side of the ship. Mrs. Bellowes saw him falling separate and away from them, screaming, screaming. Tiere oes Mt. Thirkell, thought Mrs. Bellowes. And she knew where he was going. He was going to be burned I# and roasted and broiled good, but very good. Mr. Thirkell was falling down into the Sun. And here we are, thought Mrs. Bellowes. Here we are, oing on ouf, and out, and out. There was hardly a sense of motion at all, but she knew that she was traveling at fifty thousand miles an hour and would continue to travel at that speed  for an eternity, until... She saw the other women swinging all about her in their own trajectories, a few minutes of oxygen left to each of them in their helmets, and each was looking up to where they were going. Of course, thought Mrs. Bellowes. Out into space. Out and out, and the darkness like a reat church, and the stars like candles, and in spite of everything, Mr. Thirkell, the rocket, and the dishonesty, we are oing toward the Lord. And there, yes, there, as she fell on and on, coming toward her, she could almost discern the outline now, coming toward her was His mighty golden hand, reaching down to hold her and comfort her like a frightened sparrow... , "I'm Mrs. Amelia Bellowes,' she said quietly, in her best company voice. "I'm from the planet Earth." CConfinaed from Pae #) they do not, let me add this: Guin, like all writers worth reading, has served a long, discouragingly hard literary apprenticeship. Only a sublime egotist would expect to plead a criminal case, perform cardiac surgery, build a bridge, or repair shoes without training, yet almost everybody, for some reason, seems to tliink writing, psychiatry and painting require no special knowledge. furthermore, this version of Beyond Bedlam is the result of two drafts before submission, and two end-to-end rewrites afterward! A total of better than # words was thus needed to produce # words that satts fied Guin's literary conscience and mine. If Beyond Bedlam is not a good story, it isn't because author and editor did not sweat bullets to make it so. new paths in science fiction. Through Hs vo CM by. sell, end trade booU and back isMies of magazines -- and learn what you want to know about the many new science fiction books. Send SI for # bi-monthly issues or ISc for a specimen copy to: # W. Kenneth Road, Glendale f, Calif. Current Nete Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a lar stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Hack issues of science fiction magazines available. #e MoAday Tkni Saturdar, : #  A.M. U (:# P.M. Ope Wedneaday Eveeincs MtS I P.M. New Verir S. New Veric (FtiMe GRomercir S# ) All the Sciaaor Kirtion, '((.) and Supernatural Itonk, in I'rliit In AmarIca or l:ntioriMl, ll-itrd or ulTcri-rl RuyHiIiFre!l Vialt my store and Inipert Uic luirRi-.( Variety ot r arod lie (r ruy Itiy lrlnlei ('liecktUl at at # c esch up. I CslUMbas Clnlf. Hew York II, N. Y. Moving? sent to o new address, notify us at leosi information to... World Editions, Inc. # Wait #Fii Street . New York #, N. Y. Flying Saucer Contest Winners ('CooWnued from Jvfy issve) f#  A ipciolly arranged lour through TeUviioit liudtor, SnIud!ng tiand-by vUIt in control room during teiccmt and gueil appoor ncc in how... 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Heitor, #Va No. Mein, Pueblo, Cole. Sol Rudin, # Cromwell Ave., Bronx #, N. Y. M. V. Henkil. # White Oak Ridge Rood, Short Hilts. N. J. ' W. Day, Bex #, Mitferd. Ohio N. W. Wtlliomt, # E. #rd St... Vancouver. Wash. J. Van Den Berghe, # N. Orchard St... Madison #, Wise. Ray H. Sieehiewtex, Baltimore #, Maryland Kennoth H. Costens, P. O. Bex #. Rockland, Maine.  art, articles -- but not its attitude. of IQs, though your IQ can't help showing whf yoiJ the magazine. lYs meant for everybody, mol male, young and old, adult enough not to run to the dictionary whenever a word with more than two syllables is encountered, who wants to know what futures humanity may face, what the past may have been like what may be found on other worlds... and how people will act under those circumstances. more rapidly than any other science fiction magozine? Read it and you'll see for yourself! Only #c a copy at your favorite newsstand... or # a year (I # issues) to... New York #, N.Y.  Y by Raymond F. Jones Just speculate for a moment on the enormous challenge to orcheology when Interplanetary flight Is possible... and relics are found of a cidentally, that was scientifically so far in advance of ours that they held the secret of the restoration of life! One member of that race can be brought back after # years of death... length novel, which has never before been published! You can expect a muscle-tightening, sweat-producing, mind-prodding adventure in the future when you read it! V  galaxy OAlaxy Editor-in-Chief Art Director Advertising Manager Circulation Manager Cover by lllustratina is published monthly by World Editions, Inc. Main offices: # West #th St., New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions : (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by World Editions, Inc. President : George A. Gogniat. VicePresident: Marco Lombi. Secretary and Treasurer : Anne Swereda. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and anysimilarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. September, #I Vol. #, No. # by Robert A. Heirtlein # by Murray Leinster # by Damon Knight # by Milton Lesser # by Phyllis Sterling Smith # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold I by Groff Conklin I I I Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Report Annual Science Fiction to the ex  m tent of buying it, you are naturally entitled to our first fiscal statement to stockholders.  Stories . In twelve consecutive issues, this magazine has presented well over # words, chosen from considerably more than #, which reduces to about five dozen stories selected from something like #. It is doubtful if any other science fiction magazine has had as many manuscripts submitted to it in the same space of time.  Reader Reaction. All stories were liked by some and disliked by others. Every story, however, was liked more than it was disliked. None was universally approved, which sounds bad but isn't -- you may remember that Mark Twain had to visit a friend in the poor house, a publisher who put out a newspaper that everybody agreed with. Unless a science fiction magazine has an arrogant editor, or is committed to a specific type of story, it must use a variety of themes. Some of them will, of course, be your favorites, a few you tolerate, and others you don't care for at all. What many readers seem not to realize is that this is true of editors also. But it would be foolish to mention my own preferences. In the first place, I would be swamped with those themes; in the second, my preferences are less important than the editorial balance of the magazine; and, finally, readers in general are tolerant enough to know that themes they did not enjoy would be enjoyed by other readers. As long as they find more pleasurable than unpleasurable .stories in each issue, they  Letters. The habitually nonparticipating fans, after an unprecedented mail response to the first half dozen issues, have abandoned the field to the active fans. These, for all their valuable support, create confusion with their special demands. It would be a great help to have the usually inactive fans clarify matters with a renewed flood of letters. A specific point is that, with the completion of our first year, this page is readying the readers' story ratings for Vol. #. You'll want your vote counted, surely.  Production . At one point, we ran into the aper shortage and really had to scrounge to put out the magazine. In this we had some very distinguished publishing company, including big and powerful book and magazine houses. We now have a long-term contract and are assured of uninterrupted production. However, we have to make up delayed issues -- though none, if you'll notice, was skipped -- a few days or a week at a time. In about two or three months, we will hold to the #th as a deadline. There may be some temporary difficulties until we have our presswork problems ironed out. Just to complicate things for ourselves and our new printer, we are, in the meantime, trying a layout technique gorily termed a gutter bleed. The two inside margins connecting facing pages are called the gutter in printing, and a bleed is the carrying of an illustration all the way to the edge of the page. You've seen it used in slick magazines, but never in science fiction. The result will be more attractive makeup, once we get it fully under control. Also, notice the change of type? It is bolder, rounder, and more readable. Its name is Bookman, and it is one of the handsomest type faces available today.  Distribution. A magazine's biggest headache. So many titles are published that the newsstand has become a battleground. But a science fiction magazine has one enormous advantage -- its readers, acting as unofficial salesmen, hound dealers into giving the books display. Then, again, when copies are hard to find in some towns, readers let us know and we can order American News to correct the situation. This works to your advantage, because the more we sell, the more improvements we can introduce. And if that's not enough, the neighborly help wins our overwhelming gratitude. shown a steady increase of # a month from the first issue. When the price was raised to #c with the May issue, there was a # drop, but the succeeding issues are quickly making up the temporary decline. In other words, and well over on the black side of the ledger. That, for a magazine only a year old, is a remarkable accomplishment, which could not have been achieved without superior .quality -- and, equally important, the enthusiastic support of readers.  Subscriptions. According to the subs as any other science fiction magazine.' So many, in fact, that we have had to turn this end of the business over to a mailing house, being unable to handle it ourselves. There have been some errors, which we are anxious to correct. If you've had any difficulty, please let us know immediately, and include all possible information.  Raw Materials. The best authors and artists are submitting their best work to us in enormous quantity, thus guaranteeing that maintained and even improved. In the changeover from one printer to another, there has been a delay in reporting on stories. Any; authors who have been inconvenienced by this may be assured that it is not our standard practice.  Dividends. Out of the # stomore than # are scheduled for anthologization, which indicates  high quality of product. All in all, it's been a fine year. # outstanding science fiction stories including  "The Blue Giraffe" by l. Sprague de Camp  "The Red Queen's Race" by Isaac Asimov  "Private -- Keep Out" by Philip MacDonald  "They" by Robert A. Heinlein  "Conqueror's Isle" by Nelson Bond  "Giant Killer" "by A. Bertram Chandler  "That Only a Mother" by Judith Merril  "He Walked Around the Horses" by H. Beam Piper and others # pp. #f # Broadway New York # Through its pages you can buy, sell, and trade books and back issues of magazines -- and learR what you want to know about the many new science fiction books. Send #. for # bi-monthly, issue! or #c for a specimen copy to: # W. Kenneth Road, Glendale l, Calif. , The inevitable union of Science and the Imagination finally established in a book thot changes our conception of the universe as radically as it was revised by Newton and Einstein, f A living, as we do, at the bottom of the atmosphere, w# ore really at the core, not, as we thought, ot the top of the world. Creation stems from us. The stars, planets, moons, comets ond other heavenly bodies are the Earth's electronic oeconyioniment. Eoch performs functions in it as vital as those of our eyes ond honds. Until the appearance of this kook Science-Fiction Writers and hove been tike sailors ot sea without compass or even a steering-wheel. Samuel Roth's The Peep-Holt of the Present -- introduced by Sir Arthur Eddington of the University of Cambridge -- has restored them to their rightful domain. They can now probe wider, enjoy more deeply. is that the book is so simply written, you ' don't need more than a publicschool education to read and understand it. # Understanding is the only bodge of nobility that time does not trnih. t Samuel Roth the earth is not one of the brass pin-points in the night-sky? the law of grovity is not what you've been taught it is? tight has no velocity? The # edition # # Lafayette St., New York #, N.Y. Gentlemen: I enclose # for the S# edition of The Peep-Hole of the Present. I may return it for full credit if I decide not to keep it.  To prove how sure we ore that you'll want to keep this wonderful book once it's in your hands we'll be pleased -- if you order by means of the coupon below -- to I The Puppet Masters Illustrated by Don Sibley F OR me it started too early on July #, #. with my phone my section uses is not standard; the audio relay was buried surgically under the skin back of my left ear -- bone conduction, and skull lifting. "All right," I growled. "I hear you. Shut off that damned noise.' "Emergency," a voice said in my ear. "Report in person to the Old Man. At once." "Moving." I acknowledged and sat up with a jerk that hurt my eyeballs. I went into the bath, injected a grain of "Gyro" into my arm, then let the vibro exerYou asked for Heinlein and here he is with a novel of terrifying power and almost . unbearably sustained suspensel cisc machine shake me apart while the drug put me together. I stepped out a new man, or at least a good mockup of one, and got my jacket. There is one thing no head of a country can know and that is: how good is his intelligence system? He finds out only by having it fail him. Hence our section. Security suspenders and belt, you might say. United Nations had never heard of us, nor had Central Intelligence -- I think. All I really knew about us was the training I had received and the jobs the Old Man sent me on. Interesting jobs if you don't care where you sleep, what you eat, nor how Jong you live. If I had had any sense. I'd have quit and taken a regular job. The only trouble with that would be that I wouldn't have been working for the Old Man any longer. That made the difference. Not that he was a soft boss. He was capable of saying, "Boys, we need to fertilize this tree. Jump in that hole at its base and I'll cover you up." We'd have done it. Any of us would. And the Old Man would bury us alive, too, if he thought there was a # probability that it was the Tree of Liberty he was nourishing. He got up and limped toward me as I came into our section t offices through a washroom booth in MacArthur Station. His face split in a wicked smile. His big hairless skull and his strong Roman nose made him look like a cross between Satan and Punch's Judy. "Welcome, Sam,' he said. "Sorry to get you out of bed." The deuce he was sorry ! "I was on'leave," I answered shortly. "Ah, but you still are. We're going on a vacation." "So my name is 'Sam'," I answered, deliberately ignoring his "vacation" crack. "What's my last name?" "Cavanaugh. And I'm your Uncle Charlie -- Charles M. Cavanaugh, retired. Meet your sister Mary." I had been aware that there was another person in the room, but when the Old Man is present he gets full attention as long as he wants it. Now I looked over my "sister" and then looked her over again. It was worth it. I could see why he had set us up as brother and sister if we were to do a job together; it would give him a trouble-free pattern. An indoctrinated agent can't break his assumed character any more than a professional actor can intentionally muff his lines. So this one I must treat as my sister -- a dirty trick if I ever met one! A long, slender body, but plcasingly mammalian. Good legs. Broad shoulders for a woman. Flaming, wavy red hair and the reat red-headed saurian bony structure to her skull. Her face was handsome rather than beautiful; she looked me over as if I were a piece of furniture. I wanted to drop one wing and run in circles. It must have showed, for the Old Man said gently. "Tuit, tut, Sammy. Your sister dotes on you and you are extremely fond of her, but in a healthy, clean-cut, sickeningly chivalrous, All American Boy way." "As bad as that?" I asked. "Worse." "Oh, well -- Howdy, Sis." She stuck out a hand. It was firm and seemed as strong as mine. "Hi, Bud." Her voice was deep contralto, which was all I needed. Damn the Old Man! "I might add," he went on, "that you are so devoted to Mary that you would gladly die to protect her. I dislike telling you so, Sammy, but your sister is a lectle more valuable -- for the present, at least -- to the organization than you are." "Got it," I acknowledged. "Thanks for the qualification." "Now, Sammy -- " "She's my favorite sister; I protect her from dogs and strange men. All right, when do we start?" I zzsyr "Better stop over in Cosmetics. They have a new face for you." "Make it a whole new head. See you. 'By, Sis." but they did fit my phone under the back of my skull and then cement hair over it. They dyed my hair to the same shacle as that of my newly acquired sister, bleached my skin, and did things to my cheekbones and chin. The mirror showed me to be as good a redhead as Sis. I looked at my hair and tried to recall what its natural shade had been, way back when. Then I wondered about Sis. I hoped she was what she seemed to be. I put on the kit they gave me and somebody handed me a jump bag already packed. The Old Man had been in Cosmetics, too; his skull was now covered by crisp curls of a shade between pink and white. They had done something to his face, I could not tell just what -- but we were all three clearly related by blood and of that curious subrace, the redheads. "Come, Sammy," he said. "I'll brief you in the car." We went by a route I had not known about and ended up on the Northside launching platform, high above New Brooklyn and overlooking the ruins of Manhattan Crater. I drove while the Old Man r "W I talked. Once we were out of local control, he told me to set it automatic on Des Moines, Iowa. I then joined Mary and "Uncle Charlie" in the lounge. He gave us our personal histories up to date. "So here we are," he concluded, "a merry family party -- tourists. And if we should happen to run into unusual events, that is how we will behave, as nosy and irresponsible tourists." "But what is the problem?" I asked. "Or do we play this one by ear?" "Possibly." "Okay. But when you're dead, it's nice to know why. Eh, Mary?" "Mary" did not answer. She had that quality, rare in babes, of not talking when she had nothing to say. "Sam, you've heard of 'Flying Saucers'," the Old Man said. "Huh?" "You've studied history." "You mean those? The Flying Saucer craze, way back before the Disorders? I thought you meant something recent and real ; those were mass hallucinations." "Were they?" "Well, I haven't studied much statistical abnormal psychology, but I seem to remember an equation. That whole period was psychopathic; a man with all his gaskets tight would have been locked up." "Whereas this present day is sane, eh?" "I wouldn't go so far as to say that." I pawed back through my mind and found the answer I wanted. "I remember that equation now -- Digby's evaluating integral for second and higher order data. It gave a # percent certainty that the Flying Saucer myth, after elimination of explained cases, was hallucination. I remember it because it was the first case of its type in which the instances had been systematically collected and evaluated. A government project, though God knows why." The Old Man looked benign. "Brace yourself, Sammy. We are going to inspect a Flying Saucer today. Maybe we'll even saw off a souvenir, like true tourists."  Man glanced at his finger watch and added, "and twentythree minutes ago, an unidentified spaceship landed near Grinnell, Iowar Type unknown. Approximately disc-shaped and about one hundred and fifty feet across. Origin unknown, but -- " "Didn't they track a trajectory on it?" I interrupted. "They did not," he answered. "Here is a photo of it taken by Space Station Beta after landing." I looked it over and passed it to Mary. It was as unsatisfactory as a telephoto taken from five thousand miles out usually is. Trees looking like moss... a cloud shadow that loused up the best part of the pic... and a gray circle that might have been a disc-shaped ship and could just as well have been an oil tank or a water reservoir. Mary handed the pic back. I said, "What else do we know?" "Nothing." "Nothing? After seventeen hours? We ought to have agents pouring out of their ears!" "We did have. Two within reach and four that were sent in. They failed to report back. I dislike losing agents, Sammy, especially with no results." I had a sudden cold realization that the situation must be damned serious. The Old, Man had chosen to bet his own brain against the loss of the organization -- for he was the Section. I suddenly felt chilly. Ordinarily, an agent has a duty to save his own neck, in order to complete his mission and report back. On this job it was the Old Man who must come back, and, after him, Mary. I was as expendable as a paper clip. "One agent made a partial report," the Old Man went on. "He went in as a casual bystander and reported by phone that it must be a spaceship. He then reported that the ship was opening and that he was going to try to get closer, past the police lines. The last thing he said was, 'Here they come. They are little creatures, about -- " Then he shut off." "Little men?" " 'Creatures' was what he said." "Peripheral reports?" "Plenty. The Des Moines stereocasting station sent mobile units in for spot cast. The pictures they sent out were all long shots, taken from the air. They showed nothing but a discshaped object. Then, for about two hours, no pictures and no news, followed later by closeups and a new hews s.lant." I said, "Well?" "The thing was a hoax. The 'spaceship' was a sheet metal and plastic fraud, built by two farm boys, in woods near their home. The fake reports originated with an announcer who had put the boys up to it to make a story. He has been fired and the latest 'invasion from outer space' turns out to be a gag." "A hoax -- but we lose six men. We going to look for them?" "No. We would not find them. We are going to try to figure out why triangulation of this photograph -- " he held up the teleshot taken from the Space Station -- "doesn't quite jibe with the news reports, and why Des Moines stereo shut down for a while."  w # Mary spoke up for the first time. "I'd like to talk with those farm boys." this side of Grinnell and we started looking for the McLain farm -- the news reports had named Vincent and George McLain as the culprits. It wasn't hard to find. At a fork in the road was a big sign: this way to the spaceship. Shortly the road was parked both sides with duos and groundcars and triphibs. A couple of stands dispensed cold drinks and souvenirs at the turnoff into the McLain place. A state cop was directing traffic. "Pull up," directed the Old Man. "Might as well see the fun, eh?" "Right, Uncle Charlie," I agreed. The Old Man bounced out, swinging his cane. I handed Mary out and she snuggled up to me, grasping my arm. She looked up at me, managing to look both stupid and demure. "My, but you're strong, Buddy." I wanted to slap her. That poor-little-me routine from one of the Old Man's agents -- a smile from a tiger. "Uncle Charlie" buzzed around, bothering state police, buttonholing people, stopping to buy cigars at a stand, and giving a picture of a well-to-do, senile old fool, out for a holiday. He turned and waved his cigar at a state sergeant. "The inspector says it is a fraud, my dears -- a prank thought up by boys. Shall we go?" Mary looked disappointed. "No spaceship?" "There's a spaceship, if you want to call it that," the cop answered. "Just follow the suckers. It's sergeant, not inspector." We set out, across a pasture and into some woods. It cost a dollar to get th rough the gate and many turned back. The path through the woods was rather deserted. I moved carefully, wishing for eyes in the back of my head instead of a phone. Uncle Charlie aad Sis walked ahead, Mary chattering like a fool and somehow appearing to be both shorter and younger than she had been on the trip out. We came to a clearing and there was the "spaceship." It was more than a hundred feet across, but it was whipped together out of light-gauge metal and sheet plastic, sprayed with aluminum. It was the shape of two pie plates, face to face. Aside from that, it looked like nothing in particular. Nevertheless, Mary squealed, "Oh, how exciting!" A youngster, eighteen or nineteen, with a permanent sunburn and a pimply face, stuck his head out of a hatch in the top of the monstrosity. "Care to see inside?" he called out. He added that it would be fifty cents apiece more and Uncle Charlie shelled out. Mary hesitated at the hatch. Pimple face was joined by what appeared to be his twin and they started to hand her down in. She drew back and I moved in fast, intending to do any handling myself. My reasons were # professional; I could feel danger all through the place. "It's dark," she quavered. "It's safe," the second young man said. "We've been taking sightseers through all day. I'm Vince McLain. Come on, lady." Uncle Charlie peered down the hatch, like a cautious mother hen. "Might be snakes in there," he decided. "Mary, I don't think you had better go in." "Nothing to fear," the first McLain said insistently. "It's safe." "Keep the money, gentlemen." Uncle Charlie glanced at his finger watch. "We're late. Let's go, my dears." I followed them back up the path, my hackles up until we reached the car. Once we were rolling, the Old Man said sharply, "Wey., what did you see?" I countered with, "Any doubt about that first report? The one that broke off?" "None." "That thing wouldn't have fooled an agent, even in the dark. This wasn't the ship he saw." "Of course not. What else?" "How much would you say that fake cost? New sheet metal, fresh paint, and from what I saw through the hatch, probably a thousand feet of lumber to brace it." "Go on." "Well, the McLain place had 'mortgage' all over it. If the boys were in on the gag, they didn't foot the bill." "Obviously. You, Mary?" "Uncle Charlie, did you notice how they treated me?" "Who?" I said sharply. "The state sergeant and the two boys. When I use the sweetlittle-bundle-of-sex routine, something should happen. Nothing did." "They were attentive," I objected. "You don't understand. Something was wrong with them. Harem guards, if you know what I mean." "Hypnosis?" asked the Old Man. "Possibly. Or drugs, perhaps." She frowned and looked puzzled. "Sammy, take the next turn to the left. We're investigating a point two miles south of here." "The triangulated location by the pic?" I asked. "What else?" But we didn't get there. First it was a bridge out and I didn't have room enough to make the car hop it, aside from traffic regulations for a duo on the ground. We circled south and came in again, the only remaining route. We were stopped by a young highway cop. A brush fire, he told us; go any farther and we would probably be drafted into firefighting. He didn't know but what he ought to send me up to the firelines anyhow. Mary waved her lashes at him and he relented. She pointed out that neither she nor Uncle Charlie could drive, a double lie. After we pulled away, I asked her, "Harem guard?" "Oh, my, no! A most attractive man." Her answer annoyed me. The Old Man vetoed taking to the air and making a pass over the spot. He said it was useless. We headed for Des Moines. Instead of parking at the toll gates, we paid to take the car into the city and ended up at the studios of Des Moines stereo. Uncle Charlie blustered our way into the office of the general manager. He told several lies -- unless "Charles M. Cavanaugh" was actually a big wheel with the Federal Communications Authority. It wouldn't surprise me. Once inside, he continued the Big Brass act. "Now, sir, what is this nonsense about a spaceship hoax? Speak plainly. Your license may depend on your answer." The manager was a little round-shouldered man, but he did not seem cowed, merely irritated. "We've made full explanation over the channels," he said. "We were victimized. The man has been discharged." "Hardly adequate, sir." The little man -- Barnes, his name was -- shrugged. "What do you expect? Want us to string him up by his thumbs?" Uncle Charlie pointed his cigar at him. "I warn you, sir, I am not to be trifled with. I am not convinced that two farm louts and a junior announcer could have pulled off this preposterous business. There was money in it. Yes, sir -- money! Now tell me, just what did you -- " Mary had seated herself close by Barnes' desk. She had done something to her costume and her pose put me in mind of Goya's Disrobed Lady. She made thumbs-down to the Old Man. Barnes should not have caught it; his attention appeared to be turned to the Old Man. But he did. He turned toward Mary and his face went dead. He reached for his desk. "Sam! Kill him!" the Old Man rapped. I burned his legs off and his trunk fell to the floor. It was a poor shot; I had intended to get him neatly. I stepped in and kicked his gun away from stillgroping fingers. I was about to give him coup de grace -- a man burned that way is dead, but it takes a while to die -- when the Old Man snapped, "Don't touch him! Mary, stand back!" He sidled toward the body, like a cat investigating the unknown. Barnes gave a long sigh and was quiet. The Old Man poked him gently with his cane. "Boss," I said, "time to git, isn't it?" Without looking around he answered, "We're as safe here as anywhere. This building may be swarming with them." "Swarming with what?" "How would I know? Swarming with whatever he was." He pointed at Barnes' body. "That's what I've got to find out." Mary gave a choked sob and gasped, "He's still breathing. Look!" The body lay face down; the back of the jacket heaved as if th? chest were rising. The Old Man looked and poked at it with his cane. "Sam, come here." I came. "Strip it," he went on. "Wear gloves. And be careful." "Booby trap?" "Shut up. Use care." He must have had a hunch that was close to truth. I think the Old Man's brain . has a built-in integrator which arrives at logical necessity from minimum facts the way a museum Joe reconstructs an animal from a single bone. First pulling on gloves -- agent's gloves; I could have stirred boiling acid, yet I could feel a coin in the dark and call heads or tails -- I started to turn him over to undress him. The back was still heaving. I did not like the look of it -- unnatural. I placed a palm between the shoulderblades. A man's back is bone and muscle. This was soft and undulating. I snatched my hand away. Without a word, Mary handed me a pair of scissors from Barnes' desk. I took them and cut the jacket away. The body was dressed in a light singlet. Between this and the skin, from the neck halfway down the back, was something which was not flesh. A couple of inches thick, it gave the corpse an odd round-shouldered, slightly humped appearance. It pulsed. A S we watched, it slid off the back, away from us. I reached out to peel up the singlet, but my hand was knocked away by the Old Man's cane. "Make up your mind," I said, and rubbed my knuckles. He did not answer, but tucked his cane under the shirt and worried it up the trunk. The thing was uncovered. Grayish, faintly translucent, and shot through with darker structure, shapeless -- but it was clearly alive. As we watched, it flowed down into the space between Barnes' arm and chest, filled it and stayed there, unable to go farther. "Poor devil," the Old Man said softly. "Huh? That?" "No. Barnes. Remind me to see that he gets the Purple Heart, when this is over. If it ever is over." The Old Man straightened up and stumped around the room, as if he had forgotten completely the thing nestling in the crook of the dead man's arm. I drew back and continued to stare at it, my gun ready. It could not move fast; it obviously could not fly; but I did not know what it could do. Mary pressed her shoulder against mine, as if for human comfort. I put my free arm around her. On a side table there was a stack of cans, the sort used for stereo tapes. The Old Man took one, spilled out the reels and came back with it. "This will do, I think." He placed the can on the floor, near the thing, and began chivying it with his cane, trying to irritate it into crawling over the side and into the can. Instead it oozed back until it was almost entirely under the body. I grabbed the free arm and heaved Barnes away; the thing clung, then flopped to the floor. Under Uncle Charlie's direction, Mary and I used our guns at lowest power to force it, by burning the floor close to it, into the can. We got it in, a close fit, and I slapped the cover on. The Old Man tucked the can under his arm. "On our way, my dears." He paused in the door to call out a parting, then, after closing the door, stopped at the desk of Barnes' secretary. "I'll be seeing Mr. Barnes tomorrow," he told her. "No, no appointment. I'll phone." Out we went, slow march, the Old Man with the can full of thing under his arm and me with my ears cocked for alarums. Mary played the silly little moron, with a running monologue. The Old Man even paused in the lobby, bought a cigar, and inquired directions, with bumbling, self-important good nature. Once in the car he gave directions, then cautioned me against driving fast. The directions led us into a garage. The Old Man sent for the manager and said, "Mr. Malone wants this car immediately." It was a signal I had had occasion to use myself; the  : v duo would cease to exist in about twenty minutes, save as anonymous spare parts in. the service bins. The manager looked us over, then answered quietly, "Through that door over there." He sent the two mechanics out of the room and we ducked through the door. W E ended up in the apartment of an elderly couple. There the Old Man got his bald head back, I acquired a mustache, and Mary looked as well dark as she had as a redhead. The "Cavanaugh" combination was dropped: Mary got a nurse's costume and I was togged out as a chauffeur while the Old Man became our elderly, invalid employer, complete with lap robe and tantrums. A car was waiting for us. The trip back was no trouble; we could have remained the carrottopped Cavanaughs. I kept the screen tuned to Des Moines, but, if the cops had turned up the late Mr. Barnes, the newsboys hadn't heard about it. We went straight to the Old Man's office and there we opened the can. The Old Man sent for Dr. Graves, head of the Section's bio lab, and the job was done with handling equipment. What we needed were gas masks, though. A stink of decaying organic matter filled the room and forced us to slap the cover on and speed up. the blowers. Graves wrinkled his nose. "What in the world was that?" he demanded. The Old Man was swearing softly. "Find out," he said. "Work it in suits, in a germ-free compartment, and don't assume that it is dead." "If that is alive. I'm Queen Anne." "Maybe. Just don't take chances. It's a parasite, capable of attaching itself to a host, such as a man, and controlling the host. It is almost certainly "extraterrestrial in origin and metabolism." The lab boss sniffed. "Extraterrestrial parasite on a terrestrial host? Ridiculous! The body chemistries would be incompatible." "When we captured it, it was living on a man. If that means it has to be a terrestrial organism, show me where it fits into terrestrial life-forms and where to look for its mates. And quit jumping to conclusions; I want facts." The biologist stiffened. "You'll get them!" "Get going. And don't keep assuming that the thing is dead; The perfume may be a protective device. That tiring, if alive, is fantastically dangerous. If it gets on one of your laboratory men. I'll almost certainly have to kill him." The lab director left minus some of his cockiness. The Old Man settled back in his chair, sighed, and closed his eyes. "How many mustard plasters the size of that thing can arrive in a spaceship as big as that fraud we looked at?" "Was there a spaceship?" I asked. "The evidence seems slim." "There was a ship. There still is." "We should have examined the site." "That site would have been our last sight. The other six boys weren't fools. Answer my question." "How big the ship was doesn't tell me anything about its payload, when I don't know its propulsion method, the jump it made, or what the passengers require. How long is a piece of rope? If you want a guess, I'd say maybe several thousand." "So there may be several thousand zombies in Iowa tonight. Or harem guards, as Mary puts it." He thought for a moment. "But how am I to get past them to the harem? We can't go shooting every round-shouldered man in Iowa; it would cause talk." He smiled feebly. "I'll put you another question," I said. "If one spaceship lands in Iowa yesterday, how many will land in North Dakota tomorrow? Or Brazil?" "Yes." He looked still more troubled. "You kids go enjoy yourselves; you may not have another chance. Don't leave the offices." skin color back and resumed my normal appearance, had a soak and a massage, and then went to the staff lounge in search of a drink and company. I looked around, not knowing whether I was looking for a blonde, brunette, or redhead, but fairly sure that I could spot the chassis. It was a redhead. Mary was in a booth, sipping a drink and looking much as she had looked at first. "Hi, Sis," I said, sliding in beside her. She smiled and answered, "Hello, Bud, drag up a rock," while moving tomake room for me. I dialed for bourbon and water and then said, "Is this your real appearance?"' She shook her head. "Not at all. Zebra stripes and two heads. What's yours?" "My mother smothered me with a pillow, so I never got a chance to find out." She looked at me as if I were a side of beef. "I can understand why, but I am more hardened than she was. You'll do, Bud." "Thanks. Let's drop this 'Budand-Sis' act. It gives me inhibitions." "I think you need every one you can develop." "Me? Never any violence with type." I might have added that, if I laid a hand on her and she happened not to like it, I'd bet that I would draw back a bloody stump. The Old Man's girls arc never sissies. She smiled. "Well, Miss Barkis While we sat there, I got to thinking how well she would look on the other side of a fireplace. My job being what it was, I had never thought seriously about getting married -- after all, a babe is just a babe; why get excited? But Mary was an agent herself. Talking to her would not be like shouting off Echo Mountain. I realized that I had been lonely for one hell of a long time. "Mary -- " "Yes?" "Are you married?" "No. But what business -- I mean, why does it matter?" "Look me over. I've got both hands and feet, I'm fairly young, and I don't track mud in the house. You could do worse." "Listen, wolf, your technique is down. Just because a woman turns you down is no reason to lose your head and offer her a contract. Some women would be mean enough to hold you to it." "I meant it," I said peevishly. "What salary do you offer?" "Damn you! If you want that type of contract, I'll go along. You can keep your pay and I'll give half of mine to you -- unless you want to retire." She shook her head. "I'd never insist on a settlement contract, marry in the first place -- " "I didn't think you would." "Agents should not marry," she said flatly. "Agents shouldn't marry anyone but agents." She started to answer, but stopped suddenly. My phone was talking in my ear, the Old Man's voice, and I knew she was hearing him with hers. "Come into my office," he said. We both got up without saying anything. Mary stopped me at the door and looked up into my eyes. " That is why it is silly to talk about marriage. All the time we've been talking, you've been thinking about the job and so have I." "I have not." "Sam, suppose you were married and you woke up to find one of those things on your wife's shoulders, possessing her." There was horror in her eyes. "Suppose I found one of them on your shoulders." "I'll chance it. And I won't let one get to you." She touched my cheek. "I don't believe you would." We went on into the Old Man's office. He looked up to say, "Come along. We're leaving." "Where?" I answered. "Or shouldn't I ask?" "White House. See the President. Shut up." I did. A T the White House, the Secret Service guards gave us the works. An X-ray went beep and I surrendered' my heater. Mary turned out to be a walking arsenal; the machine gave four beeps and hiccough, although you would have sworn she couldn't hide a tax receipt. The Old Man surrendered his cane without waiting to be asked. Our audio capsules showed up both by X-ray and by metal detector, but the head guard ruled that anything embedded in flesh need not be classed as a weapon. They printed us, photographed #ur retinas, and ushered us into a waiting room while the Old Man was allowed to see the President alone. After quite a while we were ushered in. The Old Man introduced us. I stammered. Mary just bowed. The President said he was glad to see us and turned on that smile, the way you see it in the stereocasts, and he made us feel that he was glad to see us. I felt warm inside and no longer embarrassed. The Old Man directed me to report all that I had done and seen and heard on this assignment. I tried to catch his eye when it came to the part about ing any, so I left out the Old Man's order to shoot and made it clear that I had shot to protect another agent -- Mary -- when I saw Barnes reach for his gun. The Old Man interrupted me. "Make your report complete." So I filled in the Old Man's order to shoot. The President threw the Old Man a glance, the only expression he showed. I went on about the parasite thing and then up to that present moment. It was Mary's turn. She fumbled trying to explain to the President why she expected to get a response out of normal men -- and had not gotten it out of the McLain boys, the state sergeant, and Barnes. The President helped her by smiling warmly and saying, "My dear young lady, I quite believe it." Mary blushed. The President listened gravely while she fin- ished, then sat still for several minutes. Presently he said to the Old Man, "Andrew, your section has been invaluable. Your reports have sometimes tipped the balance in crucial occasions in history." The Old Man snorted. "So it's no, is it?" "I did not say so." "You were about to." The President shrugged. "Andrew, I can't start what amounts to war on a woman's intuition." Mary took a step forward. "Mr. President," she said very earnestly, "I do know. Those were not normal male men." He answered, "You have not considered an obvious explanation -- that they actually were, ah, 'harem guards.' There are always such unfortunates. You merely happened to run across four in one day." Mary shut up: The Old Man ciid not. "God damn it, Tom -- " I shuddered; you don't talk .to the President that way -- "I knew you when you were an investigating Senator and I was a key man in your investigations. You know I wouldn't bring you this fairy tale if there were any reasonable way to explain it. How about that spaceship? What was in it? Why couldn't I even reach the spot where it landed?" He hauled out the photograph taken by Space Station Beta and shoved it under the President's nose. The President seemed Unperturbed. "Ah, yes, you and I have a passion for facts. But I have sources of information other than your section. Take this photo -- you made a point of it when you phoned. The metes and bounds of the McLairt farm as recorded in the local county courthouse check with the triangulated latitude and longitude of this object on this photograph." The President looked up. "Once I got lost right in my own neighborhood. You weren't even in your own neighborhood, Andrew." "Did you trot out to Des Moines and check those courthouse maps yourself, Tom?" "Of course not." "Thank God, or you would be carrying three pounds of pulsing tapioca between your shoulders and God save the United States! Be sure of this -- the courthouse clerk and whatever agent was sent both are hag-ridden this very moment. Yes, and the Des Moines chief of police, editors around there, despatchers, cops, all sorts of key people. Tom, X dbn't know what we are up against, but they know what we are, and they are pinching off the nerve cells of our social organism before true messages can get backor they cover up true reports with false ones, just as they did With Barnes. Mr. President, you rrtuSt order an immediate, I drastic quarantine of the area!" " 'Barnes'," the President repeated softly. "Andrew, T had hoped to spare you this, but -- " He flipped a key at his desk. "Get Moines, the manager's office." A screen lighted on his desk; he touched another switch and a solid display in the wall lighted up. We were looking into the room we had been in a few hours before. Looking into it past a man who filled most of the screen -- Barnes. Or his twin. When I kill a man, I expect him to stay dead. I was shaken, but I still believed in myself and my beater. The man said, "You asked for me, Mr. President?" He sounded as if he were dazzled. "Yes. Mr. Barnes. Do you recognize these people?" He looked surprised. "I'm afraid not. Should I?" "Tell him to call in his office force," the Old Man said. The President did so. They trooped in, girls mostly, and I recognized the secretary who sat .outside the door. One of them .Squealed, "Ooh, it's the President." None of them identified us, which wasn't surprising with tlie Old Man and me, but Mary's appearance was just as it had been, and I will bet that her looks vould be burned into the mind of any woman who had ever seen her. But I noticed one thing about them -- every one of them was round shouldered. rpEN minutes later we were standing in the wind on the Rock Creek platform. The Old Man seemed shrunken and old. "What now. Boss?" I asked. "Eh? For you two, nothing. You are both on leave until recalled." "I'd like to take another look , at Barnes' office." "Stay out of Iowa. That's an order." "What are you going to do, if I may ask?" "I am going down to Florida and lie in the sun and wait for the world to go to hell. If you have any sense, you'll do the same. There's damned little time." He squared his shoulders and stumped away. I turned to speak to Mary, but she was gone. I trotted off and overtook the Old Man. "Excuse me, Boss. Where did Mary go?" "On leave, no doubt. Don't bother me." I considered trying to relay to her through the section circuit, only I remembered that I did not know her right name, nor her code, nor her I. D. number. I thought of trying to bull it through by describing her, but that was foolishness. Only Cosmetics Records knows the original appearance of an agent and they won't talk. All I knew was that she had twice appeared as a redhead and that, for my taste, she was "why men fight." Try punching that into a phone! Instead, I found a room for the night. out as the Capital came to life for the night. The river swept away in a wide band past the Memorial; they were adding fluorescine to the water above the District, so the river stood out in curving sweeps of glowing rose and amber and emerald and shining fire. Pleasure boats cut through the colors, each filled, I had no doubt, with couples up to no good and enjoying it. On the land, here and there among older buildings, bubble domes were lighting up, giving the city a glowing fairyland look. To the east, where the Bomb had landed, there were no old buildings at all and the area was an Easter basket of color -- giant eggs, lighted from within. I've seen the Capital at night oftener than most and had never thought much about it, but tonight I had that "Last Ride Together" feeling. It was not its beauty that choked me up; it was knowing that down under those warm lights were people, alive and individual, making love or having spats, doing business or giving the business, whatever they' damn well pleased, each under his own vine and fig tree with nobody to make him afraid, as it says. I thought about all those people -- each with a gray slug clinging to his back, twitching his legs and arms, making his voice say what the slug wished, going where the slug wanted to go. I made myself a solemn promise: if the parasites won, I'd be dead before I would let one of those things ride me. For an agent it would be simple: just bite my nails -- or, if your hands happen to be off there are other ways. The Old Man planned for all professional necessities. Except that it was his business and mine to keep those people down there safe, not to run out when the going got tough. I turned away. There was not a confounded thing I could do about it now; I decided that what I heeded was company. The room contained the usual catalog of "escort bureaus" and "model agencies" that you'll find in almost any big hotel. I thumbed through it, then slammed it shut. I didn't want just any girl': I wanted one particular "girl, wlio would as soon shoot as shake hands. And I did not know where she had gone. I always carry a tube of "tempus fugit" pills, figuring you never know when giving your reflexes a jolt will get you through a tight spot. Despite the scare propaganda, tempus pills are not habitforming, the way hashish is. Nevertheless, a purist would say I was addicted, for I took them occasionally to make a twenty-four hour leave seem like a week. I enjoyed the mild euphoria the pills induced. Primarily, though, they just stretch your subjective time by a factor of ten or more -- chop time into finer bits so that you live longer for the same amount of clockand-calendar. Sure, I know the horrible example of the young man who died of old age in a month through taking the pills steadily, but I took them only once in a while. Maybe he had the right idea. He lived a long and happy life -- you can be sure it seemed to him both long and happy -- and died happy at the end. What matter that the sun rose only thirty times? Who is keeping score and what are the rules? I sat there, staring at my tube of pills and thinking that I had enough to keep me hopped up for what would be, to me, at least two "years." I could crawl m my hole and pull it in after me. I took out two pills and got a glass of water. Then I put the pills back in the tube, donned my gun, left the hotel and headed for the Library of Congress. On the way I stopped in a bar and looked at a newscast. There was no news from Iowa, but when is there ever any? At the Library I went to the catalog, put on blinkers and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Discs," then to "Project Saucer, ' then "Lights in the Sky," "Fireballs," "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origins," and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt, especially because what I wanted was sure to carry a semantic-content key classing it between Aesop's fables and the Lost Continent myths. In an hour, though, I had a handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper. Presently she said, "Most of the films you want are in use. The rest will fee delivered to Study Room #A. Take the escalator, puhlease." Room #-A had one occupant, who looked up and said, "Well, the wolf in person! How did you pick me up? I could swear I shook you." I said, "Hello, Mary." I # "Hello," she answered, "and now good-bye. Miss Barkis still do." I got annoyed. "Listen, you conceited twerp, odd as it may seem, I did not come here looking for your no-doubt beautiful body, I occasionally do some work myself. When my spools arrive, I'll get the hell out and find another study room -- a stag one!" Instead of flaring back, she immediately softened. "I'm sorry, Sam. Really. A woman hears the same thing so many thousand times -- Sit down." "Thanks, but I'll leave. I'm here to work." "Stay," she insisted. "Read that notice. If you remove spools from the room to which they are delivered, you will not only cause the sorter to blow a dozen tubes, but you'll give the chief reference librarian a nervous breakdown." "I'll bring them back when I'm through." She took my arm and warm tingles went up it. "Please, Sam. T said I'm sorry." I sat down and grinned. "Nothing could persuade me to leave. I don't intend to let you out of sight until I know your phone code, your home address, and the true color of your hair." "Wolf," she replied softly. f You'll never know any of them." She made a great business of fitting her head back into her study machine while ignoring me. The delivery tube went thunk and my spools spilled into the basket. I stacked them on the table by the other machine. One rolled over against the spools Mary had stacked up and knocked them down. I picked up what galaxy science fiction I thought was mine and glanced at the end -- the wrong end, as all it held was the serial number and that pattern of dots the selector reads. I turned it over, read the label, and placed it in my pile. "Hey!" said Mary. "That's mine." n a pig's eye," I said politely. " "But it is. It's the one I want next." Sooner or later, I can see the obvious. Mary wouldn't be there to study the history of footgear. I picked up others of hers and read the labels. "So that's why nothing I wanted was in," I said. "But you didn't do a thorough job." I handed her my selection. Mary looked them over, then pushed them all into a single pile. "Shall we split them, or both of us see them all?" "Fifty-fifty to weed out the junk, then we'll both go over the remainder," I decided. "Let's get "busy." Even after having seen the parasite on poor Barnes' back, even after being assured by the Old Man that a "Flying Saucer" had in fact landed, I was not prepared for the pile of evidence to be found buried in a public library. A pest on Digby and his evaluating formula! The evidence was unmistakable; earth had been visited by ships from outer space not once but many times. The reports long antedated our own achievement of space travel; some ran back into the Seventeenth Century, or even earlier than that, but it was impossible to judge reports dating back to the time when "science" meant an appeal to Aristotle. The first systematic data came from the #s and #s; the next flurry was in the !#Ws. I noticed something and started taking down dates. Strange objects in the sky appeared to hit a cycle at thirtyyear intervals, about. A statistical analyst might make something of it. "Flying Saucers" were tied in with "mysterious disappearances" not only through being in the same category as sea serpents, bloody rain, and such like wild data, but also because in welldocumented instances, pilots had chased "Saucers" and never come back, or down, anywhere, i.e., officially classed as crashed in wild country and not recovered -- an easy-out explanation. I got another wild hunch and tried to see whether or not there was a thirty-year cycle in mysterious disappearances and, if so, did it match the objectsinthesky cycle? I could not be sure -- there are too many people disappearing every year for all kinds of reasons. But vital records have been kept for a long time and not all were lost in the bombings. I noted it down to farm out for . professional analysis. Mary and I did not exchange three words all night. Eventually we got up and stretched. Then I lent Mary change to pay the machine for the spools of notes she had taken ( why don't women carry change?) and got my wires out of hock, too...V,,. "Well, what's the verdict?" I asked. "I feel like a sparrow who has built a nice nest in a rain spout." I recited the old jingle. "And we'll do the same -- refuse to learn and build again in the spout." "Oh, no! Sam, we've got to do something! It makes a full pattern; this time they are moving in to stay." "Could be. I think they are." "Well, what do we do?" "Honey, you are about to learn that in the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man is in for a hell of a rough ride." "Don't be cynical. There isn't time." "No, there isn't. Let's, get out of here." Dawn was on us and the library was almost deserted. I said, "Tell yoU what. Let's find a barrel of beer, take it to my hotel room, bust in the head, and talk this over." She shook her head. "Not to your room." "Damn it, this is business." "Let's go to my apartment. It's only a couple of hundred miles away; I'll fix breakfast there." I recalled my purpose in life just in time to leer. "That's the best offer I've had all night. Seriously, why not the hotel? We'd save a half hour's travel." "You don't want to come to my apartment? I won't bite you." "I was hoping you would. No, I was wondering why the sudden switch." "Well, perhaps I wanted to show you the bear traps around my bed. Or perhaps I wanted to prove to you I could cook." I flagged a 'copter taxi and we went to her apartment. When we got inside she made a careful search of the place, then came back and said, "Turn around. I want to feel your back." "Why -- " "Turn around!" I shut up. She gave it a good knuckling, then said, "Now you feel mine." "With pleasure!" Nevertheless I did a proper job, for I saw what she was driving at. There was nothing under her clothes but girl and assorted items of lethal hardware. She turned around and gave a sigh. "That's why I didn't want to go to your hotel. Now I know we are safe for the first time since I saw that thing on the station manager's back. This apartment is tight; I turn off the air and leave it sealed like a vault every time I leave it." "Say, how about the air conditioning ducts?" "I didn't turn on the conditioner system ; I cracked one of the air raid reserve bottles instead. Never mind; what would you like to eat?" "Any chance of a steak with just the chill taken off it?" There was. While we chomped, we watched the newscast. Still no news from Iowa. traps; she locked her bedroom door. Three hours later she woke me and we had a second breakfast. Presently we struck cigarettes and I switched off the newscast. It was principally a display of the entries for "Miss America." Ordinarily I would have watched with interest, but none of the babes was round-shouldered. I said, "Well?" "We've got to arrange the facts and rub the President's nose in them." "How?" "We've got to see him again." I repeated, "How?" She had no answer. I said, "We've got only one route -- through the Old Man." I put in the call, using both our codes so that Mary could hear. Presently I heard, "Chief Deputy Oldfield, for the Old Man. Shoot." "It's got to be the Old Man." There was a pause. "Is this official or unofficial?" "Uh, I guess you'd call it unofficial." "Well, I won't put you through for anything unofficial. And anything official I am handling." I switched off before I used any bad language. Then I coded again. The Old Man has a special code which is guaranteed to raise him up out of his coffin, but God help the agent who uses it unnecessarily. He answered with profanity. "Boss," I said, "on the Iowa matter -- " He broke off short. "Yes?" "Mary and I spent all night digging data out of the files. We want to talk it over." The profanity resumed. Presently he told me to turn it in for analysis and added that he intended to have my ears fried for a sandwich. "If you can run out, so can wc," I said sharply. "Mary and I are resigning right now. That's official!" Mary's eyebrows went up, but she said nothing. There was a long silence, then hev said, in a tired voice, "Palm glade Hotel, North Miami Beach." "Right away." I sent for a taxi and we went up on the roof. I had the hackie swing out over the ocean to avoid the Carolina speed traps, so we made good time. T HE Old Man lay there, look' ing sullen and letting sand dribble through his fingers, while we reported. I had brought along a buzz box so that he could get it directly off the wire. 'W He glanced up when we came to the point about thirty-year cycles, but he let it' ride until my later query about possible similar cycles in disappearances, whereupon he called the Section. "Get me Analysis. Hello, Peter? This is the boss. I want a curve on unexplained disappearances, starting with #. Huh? Smooth out known factors and discount steady load -- what I want is humps and valleys. When? Two hours ago; what are you waiting for?" He struggled to his feet, let me hand him his cane and said, "Well, back to the jute mill." "To the White House?" Mary asked eagerly. "Eh? Be your age. You two have picked up nothing that would change the President's mind." "Oh. Then what?" "I don't know. Keep quiet, unless you have a bright idea." The Old Man had a car and I drove us back. After I turned it over to block control, I said, "Boss, I've got something that might convince the President." He grunted. "Like this," I went on. "Send two agents in, me and one other. The other agent carries a portable scanning rig and keeps it trained on me. You get the President to watch." "Suppose nothing happens." "I'll make it happen. I am going where the spaceship landed and bull my way through. We'll get closeup pix of the real ship, piped into the White House. Then I'll go to Barnes' office and investigate those round' shoulders. I'll tear shirts off right in front of the camera. There won't be any finesse; I'll just bust things wide open." "You realize you have the same chance as a mouse at a cat convention?" "I'm not so sure. As I see it, these things haven't superhuman powers. I'll bet they are limited to whatever the human being they are riding can do. I don't plan on being a martyr. In any case I'll get pix." "It might work," Mary put in. "I'll be the other agent. T can -- " The Old Man and I said "No" together -- and then I flushed; it was not my prerogative. Mary went on, "I was going to say that I am the logical one because of the, uh, talent I have for spotting a man with a parasite." "No," the Old Man repeated. "Where he's going, they'll all have riders -- assumed so until proved otherwise. Besides, I am saving you for something." "For what? This is important. The Old Man said quietly, "So is the other job. I'm planning to make you a Presidential bodyguard." "Oh." She thought and answered, "I'm not certain I could spot a woman who was possessed. I'm not, uh. equipped for it." "So we take his women secretaries away from him. And you'll be watching him, too, Mary." "And what if I find that one has gotten to him, in spite of all our careful precautions?" "You take necessary action, the Vice President succeeds to the chair, and you get shot for treason. Now about this mission. We'll send Jarvis with the scanner and include Davidson as hatchet man. While J v arvis keeps the pickup on you, Sam. Davidson can keep his eyes on Jarvis -- and you can try to keep one eye on him." "Youthink it will work, then?" "No, but any plan is better than no plan. Maybe it will stir up something." Jarvis, Davidson and I -- the Old Man went to Washington. Mary cornered me as we were about to leave, grabbed me by the ears, kissed me firmly and said, "Sam, come back." I got all tingly and felt like a fifteen-yearold. Davidson roaded the car beyond the place where I had found a bridge out. I was navigating, using a map on vhich had been pinpointed the landing site of the real spaceship. The bridge gave a precise reference point. We turned off the road two-tenths of a mile due east of the site and jeeped through the scrub to the spot. Almost to the spot, I should say. We ran into burnedover ground and decided to walk. The site shown by the Space Station photograph was in the brush fire area -- and there was no "Flying Saucer." It would have taken a better detective than I to show that one had ever landed. The fire had destroyed all traces. Jarvis scanned everything, anyhow, but I knew that the slugs had won another round. As we came out, we ran into an elderly farmer. "Quite a fire," I remarked, keeping a wary distance. "Sure was," he said dolefully. "Killed two of my best milch cows, the poor dumb brutes. You fellows reporters?" "Yes. but we've been sent on a wild goose chase." I wished Mary were along. Maybe this character was naturally round-shouldered, but assuming that the Old Man was right about the spaceship -- and he had to be right -- then this too-innocent bumpkinmust know about it and was covering up. Ergo, he had to be hag-ridden. I threw a glance at my teammates. They were alert and Jarvis was scanning. As the farmer turned, I tripped him. He went down with me on his back, clawing at his shirt. Jarvis moved in and got a closeup. I had his back bare before he got his wind. And it was bare -- no parasite, no sign of one, nor any place on his body, which I made sure of. I helped him up and brushed him off ; his clothes were filthy with ashes. "I'm sorry," I said. "You young -- " He couldn't find a word bad enough for me. He looked at us and trembled with anger. "I'll have the law on you. If I were twenty years younger, I'd lick all three of you." "Believe me, old-timer, it was a mistake." "Mistake!" I thought he was going to cry. "I come back from Omaha and find my place burned, half my stock gone, my son-inlaw no place around, strangers snooping around my land, and I like to get torn to pieces. Mistake! What's the world coming to?" I thought I could answer that last one, but there was no point. I tried to pay him for the indignity, but he slapped my money to the ground. We tucked in our tails and got out. When we were rolling again, Davidson said, "Are you sure you know what you are up to?" "I can make a mistake,! I said savagely, "but have you ever known the Old Man to?" "Mmm... no. Where next?" one won't be a mistake." A T the toll gates into Des Moines, the gatekeeper hesitated. He glanced at sr notebook and then at our plates. "Sheriff has a call out for this car," he said. "Pull over to the right." "Right it is," I agreed, backed up thirty feet and gunned her. The Section's cars are beefed up and hopped up -- a good thing, for the gate was stout. I did not.slow down on the far side. "This," said Davidson, "is interesting. Do you still know what you are doing?" "Cut the chatter," I snapped. "Get this, both of you: we aren't likely to get out. But we are going to get those pix ." Ahead of any pursuit, I slammed to a stop in front of the station and we poured out. None of "Uncle Charlie's" indirect methods -- we swarmed into the first elevator and punched for Barnes' floor. When we got there I left the door of the car open. The receptionist tried to stop us, but we pushed by. The girls looked up, startled. I went straight to Barnes' inner door and tried it; it was locked. I turned to his secretary. "Where's Barnes?" "Who is calling, please?" she said, about as polite as a fish. I looked down at her shoulders. Humped. By God, I said to myself, this one has to be. She was here when I killed Barnes. I bent over and pulled up her sweater. I was right. I had to be right. For the second time I stared at one of the parasites. She struggled and clawed and tried to bite. I judo-cut her neck, almost getting my hand in the mess, and she went limp. I swung her around. "Jarvis," I yelled, "get a closeup." The idiot was fiddling with his gear, his big hind end between me and the pickup. He straightened. "School's out," he said. "Blew a tube." "Replace it. Hurry!" A stenographer stood up on the other side of the room and fired at the scanner. Hit it, too, before Davidson burned her down. As if it had been a signal, about six of them jumped Davidson. They did not seem to have guns; they just swarmed over him. I hung onto the secretary and shot from where I was. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to find Barnes -- "Barnes' number two -- stand ing in his doorway. I shot him through the chest to get the slug I knew was on his back, then returned to the slaughter. Davidson was up again. A girl  crawled toward him; she seemed wounded. He shot her in the face and she stopped. His next bolt S# was just barely past my ear. I said, "Thanks! Let's get out of here." The elevator was open; we rushed in, me still burdened with Barnes' secretary. I slammed the door and started it. Davidson was trembling and Jarvis was white. "Buck up," I said. "You weren't shooting people, but things. Like this." I held the girl up and looked down at her back. Then I almost collapsed. My specimen, the one I had grabbed to take back alive, was gone. Sliped to the floor, probably, and oozed away during the ruckus. "Jarvis," I said, "did you get anything ?" He shook his head. The girl's back was covered pricks, where the thing had ridden her. I settled her on the floor against the wall of the car. She was still unconscious, so we left her. There was no interference as we went through the lobby to the street. A policeman had his foot on our car while making out a ticket. He handed it to me and said, "You can't park in this area, Mac." I said, "Sorry," and signed his copy. Then I gunned the car away, got as clear as I could of traffic -- and blasted into the air right from a city street. I wondered whether he added that to the ticket. When I had her at altitude, I switched license plates and identification code. The Old Man thinks of everything. Only he did not think much of me. I tried to report on the way in, but he cut me short and ordered us into the Section offices. f Mary was there with him. "How much did you see?" I asked when I had finished rei porting. "Transmission cut off when you hit the toll barrier," he informed me. "The President was not impressed by what he saw." "I suppose not." "He told me to fire you." I stiffened. "I am perfectly will -- " "Pipe down!" the Old Man snapped. "I told him that he could fire me, but not my subordinates. You are a thumb-fingered dclt," he went on quietly, "but you can't be spared now." "Thanks." Mary had been wandering around the room. She stopped back of Jarvis's chair -- and gave the Old Man the sign she had given for Barnes. I hit Jarvis in the head with my heater and he sagged out of his chair. "Stand back, Davidson!" the Old Man rapped. His gun was out and pointed at Davidson's chest. "Mary, how about him?" "He's all right." "And him?" "Sam's clean." The Old Man's eyes moved over us and I have never felt closer to death. "Peel off your shirts," he said sourly. We did. Mary was right. I had begun to wonder whether I would know it if I did have a parasite on me. "Now him," the Old Man ordered. "Gloves." We stretched Jarvis out and carefully cut his clothing away. We had our live specimen. The thought of that thing right behind me all the way from Iowa was more than even my unsqueamish stomach could stand. I swallowed and said, "Let's work it off. Maybe we can still save Jarvis.' I did not really think so; I had a deep-down hunch that anyone who had been ridden by one of those things was ' spoiled, permanently. The Old Man waved us back. "Forget Jarvis." "But -- " "Stow it! If he can be saved, a bit longer won't matter. In any case -- " He shut up and so did I. I knew what he meant. We were expendable; the people of the United States were not. The Old Man, gun drawn and wary, continued to watch the thing on Jarvis's back. He said to Mary.'Get the President. Special code zero zero zero seven." Mary went to his desk. I heard her talking into the muffler, but my own attention was on the parasite. It made no move to leave Jarvis. Presently Mary reported, "I can't get him, sir. One of his assistants is on the screen. Mr. McDonough." The Old Man winced. McDonough was an intelligent, likable man who hadn't changed his mind on anything since he was housebroken. The President used him as a buffer. No, the President was not available. No, he could not be reached with a message. No, Mr. McDonough was not exceeding his authority; the Old Man was not on the list of exceptions -- if there was such a list. Yes, Mr. McDonough would be happy to make an appointment; that was a promise. Today? Out of the question. Tomorrow? Impossible. How would next Friday do? The Old Man switched off and seemed about to have a stroke. Then he took two deep breaths, his features relaxed, and he said, "Dave, ask Doc Graves to step in. The rest of you keep your distance." The head of the biological lab came in shortly. "Doc," said the Old Man, "there is one that isn't dead." Graves looked closely at Jarvis's back. "Interesting," he said. He dropped to one knee. "Stand back!" Graves looked up. "But I must have an opportunity -- " "I want you to study it, yes, but, first, you've got to keep it alive. Second, you've got to keep it from escaping. Third, you've got to protect yourself." Graves smiled. "I'm not afraid f it." "Be afraid of it! That's an order." "I must rig up an incubator to care for it after we remove it. These things obviously need oxygen -- not free oxygen, but oxygen from its host. Perhaps a large dog would suffice." "No," snapped the Old Man. "Leave it where it is." "What? Is this man a volunteer?" The Old Man did not answer. Graves pointed out, "Human laboratory subjects must be volunteers. Professional ethics, you know." "Doctor Graves, every single agent in this Section is a volunteer for whatever I find necessary. Please carry out my orders." After they had carted Jarvis away, Davidson and Mary and I went to the lounge for a drink or four. We needed them. Davidson had the shakes. When the first drink failed to fix him, I said, "Look, Dave, I feel as bad about those girls as you do, but it could not be helped. Get that through your head." "How bad was it?" asked Mary. "Pretty bad. I don't know how many we killed." I turned to Davidson. "We weren't shooting people; we were shooting parasites. Don't you see that?"' "That's just it. They weren't human. You shoot and they keep coming toward you." After a bit, he left. Mary and I talked a while, trying for answers and getting nowhere. Then she announced that she was sleepy and headed for the women's dormitory. The Old Man had ordered all hands to sleep in that night, so I went to the boys' wing and crawled in a sack. T HE air raid alarm woke me. I stumbled into clothes as blowers sighed off; then the intercom bawled in the Old Man's voice, "Anti-gas and antiradiation procedures! Seal everything! All hands gather in the conference hall. Move!" Being a field agent, I had no local duties. I shuffled down the tunnel to the offices. The Old Man was in the big hall, looking grim. I wanted to ask what was up, but there were a dozen clerks, agents, stenos and such there before me. The Old Man sent me out to get the door tally from the guard on watch. He called the roll and presently it was clear that every person listed on the door tally was now inside the hall, from old Miss Haines, the Old Man's secretary, down to the steward of the lounge -- except the door guard and Jarvis. The tally had to be  right; we keep track of who goes in and out a bit more carefully than a bank keeps track of money. I was sent out again for the door guard. It took a call back to the Old Man before he would leave his post; he then threw the bolt switch and followed me. When we got back, Jarvis was there, attended by Graves and a lab man. He was wrapped in a hospital robe, conscious, apparently, but dopy. I began to have some notion of what it was all about. The Old Man was facing the assembled staff and keeping his distance; he had his gun out. "One of the invading parasites is loose among us," he said. "To some of you, that means too much. To the rest of you, I will have to explain, as the safety of all of us -- of our whole race -- depends on complete cooperation and utter obedience." He went on to explain briefly but with ugly exactness what a parasite was, what the situation was. "In short," he concluded, "the parasite is almost certainly in this room. One of us looks human but is an automaton, moving at the will of our deadliest enemy.' People stole glances at each other. Some tried to draw away. A moment before we had been a team; now we were a mob, each suspicious of the other. I found myself edging away from the man closest to me -- Ronald, the lounge steward, whom I had known for years. Graves cleared his throat. "Chief," he started in, "I took every reasonable -- " "Stow it. Bring Jarvis out in front. Take his robe off." Graves shut up and he and his assistant complied. Jarvis seemed only partly aware of his surroundings. Graves must have drugged him. "Turn him around," the Old Man ordered. Jarvis let himself be turned; there was the mark of the slug, a red rash on shoulders and neck. There had been whispers and embarrassed giggles when Jarvis had been stripped: now there was a dead hush. "We are going to get that slug!' said the Old Man. "Furthermore, we are going to capture it alive. You have all seen where a parasite rides a man. I'm warning you; if the parasite gets burned. I'll burn the man who did it. If you have to shoot to catch it, shoot low. Come here #" He pointed his gun at me, halted me halfway between the crowd and himself. "Graves, sit Jarvis down behind me. No, leave his robe off." The Old Man turned back to me. "Drop your gun on the floor." The Old Man's gun was pointed at my belly; I was very careful how I drew mine. I slid it six feet away from me. "Take off all your clothes," he said. The Old Man's gun overcame my inhibitions, though it did not help to have one of the girls whisper, "Not bad!" and another reply, "Knobby, I'd say." I blushed. After he looked me over, the Old Man told me to pick up my gun. "Back me up," he ordered, "and keep an eye on the door. You, Dotty Something-orother -- you're next." Dotty was a girl from the clerical pool. She had no gun, of course, and she was dressed in a floorlength negligee. She stepped forward, stopped. "You really mean it?" she said incredulously. " Mover She almost jumped. "Well! No need to take a person's head off." She bit her lip as she unfastened the clasp at her waist. "I ought to get a bonus for this," she said defiantly, then threw the robe from her. "Over against the wall," the Old Man said savagely. "Now the rest of you." In twenty minutes there were more square yards of gooseflesh exposed than I had ever seen before, and the pile of guns looked like a small-arms arsenal. When Mary's turn came, she took her clothes off quickly and without a fuss. She made nothing of it, wearing her skin with quiet dignity. She added considerably to the pile of hardware. I decided she just plain liked guns. W E were all evidently free of parasites, except the Old Man and his old-maid secretary. I think he was a bit in awe of Miss Haines. He looked distressed and poked about in the pile of clothing with his cane. Finally he looked up at her. "Miss Haines -- if you please." I thought to myself, brother, this time you are going to have to use force. She stood there, facing him down, a statue of offended modesty. I moved closer and said, out of the corner of my mouth, "Boss, how about yourself? Suppose you take 'em off." He looked startled. "I mean it," I said. "It's you or she. Might be either. Out of those duds." The Old Man can recognize the inevitable. He said, "Have her stripped." He began fumbling at his zippers, looking grim. I told Mary to take a couple of women and peel Miss Haines. When I turned back, the Old Man had his trousers at half mast -- and then Miss Haines made a break for it. The Old Man was between us and I couldn't get in a clean shot and every other agent in the place was disarmed! I don't think it was accident; the Old Man did not trust them not to shoot. He wanted that slug alive. She was out the door and running down the passage by the time I got organized. I could have winged her in the passageway, but I was inhibited -- first, I could not shift gears emotionally that fast. I mean to say she was still Old Lady Haines, secretary to the boss, the one who bawled me out for poor grammar in my reports. In the second place, if she was carrying a parasite, I did not want to risk burning it. She ducked into a room. Again I hesitated -- sheer habit; it was the ladies' room. But only a moment. I slammed the door open and looked around, gun ready. Something hit me back of my right ear. the next few moments. I was out cold, for a time at least. I remember a struggle and some shouts: "Look out!" "Damn her, she's bitten me!" "Watch your hands!" Theft somebody quietly, "By her hands and feet -- careful. Somebody said, "How about him?" and someone answered, "Later. He's not hurt." I was still practically out as they left, but I began to feel a flood of life stirring back into me. I sat up, feeling extreme urgency about something. I got to my feet, staggering, and went to the door. I looked out cautiously; nobody was in sight. I trotted down the corridor, away from the conference hall. At the outer door, I realized that I was naked and tore on down the hallway to the men's wing. There I grabbed the first clothes I could find and pulled them on. The shoes were much too small for me; it did not seem to matter. I ran back to the exit, found the switch. The door opened. I thought I had made a clean escape, but somebody shouted, "Sam!" just as I tfas making my choice of six doors and then I plunged on out. At once I had three more beyond the one I picked. The warren we called the "offices" was served by a spaghettilike mess of tunnels. I came up finally inside a subway fruitand-bookstall, nodded to the proprietor, swung the counter gate and mingled with the crowd. I caught the up-river jet express and got off at the first station. I crossed over to the downriver, waited around the change window until a man came up who displayed quite a bft of money as he bought his counter. I got on the same train and got off when he did. At the first dark spot I rabbit-punched him. Now I had money and was ready to operate. I did not know why I had to have money, but I knew that I needed it for what I was about to do. a curious double vision, as if I stared through rippling water -- yet I felt no surprise and no curiosity. I moved like a sleepwalker, unaware of what I was going to do, and still I was wide awake, aware of who I was, where I was, what my job at the Section had been. And, although I did not know my objective, I was always conscious of what I was doing and sure that each act was the necessary act at that moment. I felt no emotion most of the time, except the contentment that comes from work which needs to be done. That was on the conscious level. Someplace, more levels down than I understand about, I was excruciatingly unhappy, terrified, and filled with guilt, but that was down, way down, locked, Suppressed. I was hardly aware of it and not affected by it. I knew that I had been seen to leave. That shout of "Sam!" was for me; only two persons knew me by that name and the Old Man would have used my right name. So Mary had seen me leave. It was a good thing, I thought, that she had let me find out where her apartment was. It would be necessary to booby trap it against her using it. In the meantime Imust get on with work and keep from being picked up. I was moving through a warehouse district, all my training at work to avoid being noticed. Shortly I found a satisfactory building; there was a sign: loft ground floor. I scouted it, noted the address, then doubled back to a Western Union booth. There I took a vacant machine and sent this message: expedite two cases and added the address of the loft. I sent it to Roscoe  Dillard, Jobbers and Manufacturers Agents, Des Moines, Iowa. As I left the booth, the sight of one of the Kwikfede restaurants reminded me that I was hungry, but the reflex abruptly cut off and I thought no more about it. I returned to the warehouse, found a dark corner in the rear, and settled back to wait for dawn and business hours. I have a dim recollection of claustrophobic nightmares.  At nine o'clock I met the rental agent as he unlocked his office, and leased the loft, paying him a fat squeeze for immediate possession. I went up to the lpft, unlocked it, and waited. About ten-thirty my crates were delivered. After the expressmen were gone, I opened a crate, took out one cell, warmed it, and got it ready. Then I found the rental agent again and said, "Mr. Greenberg, could you come up for a moment? I want to see about making some changes in the lighting." entered the loftI closed the door and led him to the crate. "Here," I said, "if you will lean over, you will see just what I mean." I got him with a grip that cut off his wind, ripped his jacket and shirt up, and, with my free hand, transferred a master from the cell to his bare back, then held him tight until he relaxed. I let him up, tucked his shirt in and dusted him off. When he caught his breath, I said, "What news from Des Moines?" "What do you want to know?" he asked. "How long have you been out?" I started to explain, but he interrupted with, "Let's have direct conference and not waste time." I skinned up ny shirt, he did the same, and we sat down on the unopened crate, back to back, so that our masters could be in contact. My own mind was blank; I have no idea how long it went on. I watched a fly droning around a dusty cobweb. npHE building superintendent was our next recruit. He was a large Swede and it took both of us. After that Mr. Greenberg called up the owner and insisted that he had to come down and see some damage that had occurred to the structure -- just what, I don't know; I was busy working with the super, opening and warming more cells. The owner of the building was a prize and we all felt pleased, including, of course, the man himself. He belonged to the Constitution Club, the membership of which read like Who's Who in Finance, Government and Indus try. It was pushing noon; we had no time to lose. The super went out to buy clothes and a satchel for me, and he sent the owner's chauffeur up to be recruited as he did so. At twelve-thirty we left, the owner and I, in his town car; the satchel contained twelve masters, in their cells but ready. The owner signed J. Hardwick Potter  Guest A flunky tried to take my bag, but I insisted that I needed it to change my shirt before lunch. We stalled around in the washroom until vye had it to ourselves, except for the attendant -- whereupon we recruited him and sent him with a message to the manager that a guest was ill in the washroom. After we took care of the manager, he obtained a white coat and I became another washroom attendant. I had only ten masters left, but the cases would be picked up from the loft and delivered to the club shortly. The regular attendant and I used up the rest of those I had before the lunch hour rush was over. One guest walked in on us while we were busy and I had to kill him. We stuffed him into the mop closet There was a lull after that, as the cases had not yet arrived. Hunger reflex nearly doubled me over ; then it dropped off, but persisted. I told the manager, who had me served lunch in his office. The cases arrived as I was finishing. During the drowsy period in the midafternoon, we secured the place. By four o'clock everyone in the building -- members, staff, and guests -- were with us. From then on, we processed them in the lobby as the doorman passed them in. Later in the day the manager phoned Des Moines for more cases. Our big prize came that evening -- the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. We saw a real victory; the Treasury Department is charged with the safety of the President. cruited, I gave the club manager instructions about shipments of masters' carrying cells. I was fleetingly aware, as I did so, that three more ships had landed, but my overt knowledge was limited to an address in New Orleans. I thought nothing about it; I went on with my work. I was a new "special assistant to Mr. Potter" and spent the days in his office -- and the nights, too. Actually, the relationship may have reversed; I frequently gave oral instructions to Potter. Or perhaps I understand the social organization of the parasites as little now as I did then. Through me, my master knew as much as I did. It knew that I was one human known to the Old Man to have been recruited -- and knew. I am sure, that the Old Man would not cease to search for me, to recapture me or kill me. It seems odd that it did not change bodies and kill mine; we had vastly more recruits available than we had masters. It could not have felt anything parallel to human squeamishness, for masters newly delivered from their transit cells frequently damaged their hosts. We always destroyed the host and found a new one. On. the other hand, would a skilled cowhand destroy a welltrained horse in favor of an untried. strange mount? That may have been why I was kept hidden and used. After a time the city was "secured" and my master started taking me out on the streets. I do not mean that every inhabitant wore a hump -- the 'humans were very numerous and the masters still very few -- but the hey positions in the city were held by our own recruits, from the cop on the corner to the mayor and the chief of police, not forgetting ward bosses, ministers, board members, and any and all in public communication and news. The majority continued their usual affairs, not only undisturbed by the masquerade but unaware of it. Unless, of course, one of them happened to be in the way of some purpose' of a master, in Which case he Was disposed of. That was when I was allowed outside, walked to the uptown launching platform and made to order a cab. One was lifted to the loading rmp and I started to get in. But an old gentleman bustled up and climbed into it ahead of me. I received an order to dispose of him. It was immediately countermanded by another telling me to go slow and be careful. I said. 'Excuse me, sir, but this cab is taken." "Quite," the elderly man replied. "I've taken it." "You will have to find another." I said reasonably. "May I see your ticket?" I had him; the cab carried the launching number shown by my ticket, but he did not stir. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "New Orleans," I answered, and learned for the first time my destination. "Then you can drop me off in Memphis." I shook my head. "It's out of my way." . "All of fifteen minutes!" He seemed to have difficulty controlling his temper. "Driver, explain to this person the public Conveyance rules." The driver stopped picking his teeth. "It's nothing to me. I pick 'em up, I take 'em, I drop 'em. Settle it yourselves or I'll ask the despatcher for another fare." I hesitated, not yet having been instructed. Then I found myself climbing inside. "New Orleans." I said, "with a stop at Memphis." The driver shrugged and signaled the control tower. The other passenger snorted and got in after me. In the air, he opened his briefcase and spread papers across his knees. Watching him with disinterest, I found myself shifting position to let me get at my gun easily. The man shot out a hand, grabbed my wrist. "Not so fast, son," he said, and his features broke into the Satanic grin of the Old Man himself. My reflexes are fast, but I was at the disadvantage of having everything routed from me to my master, passed on by it, and action routed back to me." HoW much delay is that? I don't know. As I was drawing, I felt a gun against my ribs. "Take it easy." With his other hand, he thrust something against my side. I felt a prick, and then through me spread the warm tingle of a jolt of "Morpheus" taking hold. I made one more attempt to pull my gun free and sank forwafd. Someone was handling me roughly and someone else was saying, "Watch out for that ape!" Another voice replied, "It's all right; his tendons are cut," to which the first retorted, "He's still got teeth, hasn't he?" Yes, I thought fretfully, and it you get close, I'll bite you with them. The remark about cut tendons seemed to be true; none of my limbs would move, but that did not worry me as much as being called an ape. It was a shame to call a man names when he couldn't protect himself. I wept a little and then fell into a stupor, until I heard, "Feeling better, son?" The Old Man was leaning over the end of my bed, staring thoughtfully. His chest was bare and grizzled. "Unh," I said, "pretty good, I guess." I started to sit up and found I could not. The Old Man came around to the side. "We can, take those restraints off," he said, fiddling with clasps. "Didn't want you hurting yourself. There!" I sat up, rubbing myself. "Now," said the Old Man, "how much do you remember?" "Remember?" "They caught you. Do you remember anything after the parasite got to you?" I felt a sudden wild fear and clutched at the bed. "Boss! They know where this place is!  told .them." "No, they don't," he answered quietly, "because these aren't the offices ypu remember. I had the old ones evacuated. They don't know about this hangout -- I think. So you remember?" "Of course I remember. I got out of here -- I mean out of the old offices and went up -- " My thoughts raced ahead; I had a sudden image of holding a live master in my bare hand, ready to place it on the rental agent. I threw up. The Old Man said gently, "Go ahead." "Boss, they're all around. They've got the city." "I know. Same as Des Moines. And Minneapolis, St. Paul, New Orleans, and Kansas City. Maybe more. I don't know -- I can't be everywhere." He scowled and added, "It's like fighting with your feet in a sack. We're losing fast. We can't even clamp down on the cities we know about." "Good God!, Why not?" "You should know. Because 'older and wiser heads' are still unconvinced. Because when the parasites take over a city, everything goes on as before." I stared. , "Never mind," he said gently. "You are the first break we've had, the first victim to be recaptured alive -- and now we find you remember what happened. That's important. And your parasite is the first one we've managed to capture and keep alive. We'll have a chance to -- " My face must have been a mask of terror. The notion that my master was still alive and might get to me again was more than I could stand. The Old Man shook me. "Take it easy. You are still pretty weak." " Where is it?" "Eh? The parasite? Don't worry about it. It's living off your opposite number, a red orangutan. name of Napoleon. It's safe." " Kill it!" "Hardly. We need it alive for study." I must have gone to pieces, for he slapped me. "Take a brace," he said. "I hate to bother you when you are sick, but I've got to. We have to get down on wire everything you remember." I pulled myself together and started making a careful report of alt that I could remember. I described renting the loft and recruiting my first victim, then how we moved on to the Constitution Club. The Old Man nodded. "Logical. You were a good agent, even for them" "You don't understand," I objected. " didn't do any thinking. I knew what was going on, but that was all. It was as if -- " I paused, stuck for words. "Never mind. Get on." "After we recruited the club manager, the rest was easy. We took them as they came in and -- " "Names?" "M. C. Greenberg. Thor Hansen, J. Hardwick Potter, his chauffeur Jim Wakeley, a little guy called 'Jake' who was washroom attendant, but he had to be disposed of later -- his master would not let him take time out for necessities. Then there was the manager; I never did get his name." I paused, letting my mind run back, trying to make sure of each recruit. "Oh, my God!" "What is it?' "The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury V r "You got him?" "Yes. The first day. How long ago was that? Chief, the Treasury Department protects the President!" But there was just a hole in the air where the Old Man had been.  foul, head buzzing, and a sense of impending disaster. Nevertheless I felt fine, by comparison. A cheerful voice said, "Feeling better?" A small brunette creature yas bending over me. She was a cute little bug and I was well enough to appreciate the fact, though faintly. She was dressed in an odd costume, white shorts, a wisp of stuff that covered her breasts, and a sort of metal carapace that covered the neck, shoulders and spine. "Some," I admitted. "Mouth taste unpleasant?" "Like a mailman's sox." She gave me some stuff in a glass; it burned a little and washed away the bad taste. "No," she said, "don't swallow it. 'Pit it out and I'll get you water." I obeyed. "I'm Doris Marsden " she went on, "your day nurse." "Glad to know you, Doris," I answered and stared at her. "Say, why the burlesque getup? Not tljat I don't like it, but you look like a refugee from a comic book." She giggled. "You'll get used to it. I did." "I like it. But why?" "Old Man's orders." Then I knew why, and I started to feel worse again. Doris said, "Now for supper." She got a tray. "I don't want anything to eat." "Open up," she said firmly, "or you'll get it through a tube." Between gulps, taken in selfdefense, I managed to choke out, "I feel pretty good. One jolt of 'gyro and I'll be on my feet." "No stimulants," she said flatly, still shoveling it in. "Special diet and lots of rest, with a sleepy pill later." "What's wrong with me?" "Exhaustion, starvation, and incipient scurvy. You also had scabies and lice, but we got those whipped. Now you know -- and if you tell the doctor, I'll call you a liar to your face. Turn over." I did so and she started changing dressings. I appeared to be spotted with sores. I thought about what she had told me and tried to remember how I had lived under my master. "Stop trembling," she said. "Having a bad one?" "I'm all right," I told her. As near as I could recall, I had not eaten oftener than every second or third day. Bathing? Let me see -- I hadn't bathed at all! I had shaved every day and put on a clean shirt, but only because that was necessary to the masquerade and the master knew it. On the other hand, I had never taken off my shoes from the time I had stolen them until the Old Man had recaptured me, and they had been too tight to start with. I couldn't even feel my feet. and earthy and tolerant. Miss Briggs, my night nurse, was not the cute job that Doris was; she had a face like a horse. She wore the same musical comedy rig that Doris sported, but she wore it with a no-nonsense air and strode like a grenadier. Doris, bless her heart, jiggled pleasantly when she walked. Miss Briggs refused me a second sleeping pill when I woke up in the night and had the horrors, but she did play poker with me and skinned me out of half a month's pay. I tried to find out from her about the President, but she wasn't talking. She would not admit that she knew anything about parasites, Flying Saucers, or what not -- and she herself dressed in a costume that could have only one purpose! I asked her what the public news was, then. She maintained that she had been too busy to look at a  'cast. So I asked to have a stereo box moved into my room. She said I would have to ask the doctor; I was on the 'quiet' list. I asked when I was going to see this so-called doctor. About then her call bell sounded and she left. I fixed her. While she was gone, I colddecked the deal, so that she got a pat hand -- and then I wouldn't bet against her. ened by Miss Briggs slapping me in the face with a washcloth. She got me ready for breakfast. Then Doris relieved her and brought in the tray. While I was chomping I tackled her for news -- with the same score I had made with Miss Briggs. Nurses run a hospital as' if it were a nursery for backward children. Davidson came to see me after breakfast. "Heard you were here," he said. He was wearing shorts and nothing else, except that his left arm was covered by a dressing. "More than I've heard," I complained, "What happened to you?" "Bee stung me." If he didn't want to tell how he had gotten burned, that was his business. I said, "The Old Man was in here yesterday and left very suddenly. Seen him since?" "Yep." "Well?" "Have the psych boys cleared you for classified matters?" "Is there any doubt about it?" "You're dam tootin' there is. Poor old Jarvis never did pull out of it." I hadn't thought about Jarvis. "How is he now?" "He isn't. Dropped into a coma and died -- the day after you left. I mean the day after you were captured." Davidson looked me over. "You must be tough." I did not feel tough. Tears of helplessness and frustration welled up again and I blinked them back. Davidson pretended not to notice and went on, "You should have seen the ruckus after you gave us the slip. The Old Man took out after you, wearing nothing but a gun and a look of grim determination. He would have caught you, but the police picked him up and we had to get him. out of hock." I grinned feebly. There was something both gallant and silly about the Old Man charging out to save the world in his birthday suit. "Sorry I missed it. What else has happened -- lately?" Davidson looked me over. "Wait a minute." He stepped out and was gone a short time. When he came back, he said, "The Old Man says okay. What do you want to know?" "Everything! What happened yesterday?" "That's how I got this." He waved his damaged wing at me. "I was lucky," he added. "Three agents were killed. Quite a fracas." , "But how about the President? Was he -- " Doris bustled in. "Oh, there you are!" she said to Davidson. "I told you to stay in bed. You're due at Mercy Hospital right now. The ambulance has been waiting ten minutes." He stood up, grinned, and pinched her with his good hand. "The party can't start until I get there." "Well, hurry!" "Coming." I called out, "Hey! How about the President?" Davidson looked back over his shoulder. "Oh, him? He's all right. Not a single scratch." He went on. Doris came back a few minutes later, fuming. "Patients!" she said, like a swear word. "I should have had twenty minutes for his injection to take hold. So instead I had to give it to him when he got into the ambulance." "Injection for what?" "Didn't he tell you?" "No." "Amputation and graft, lower left arm." "Oh." Well, I thought, I wont hear the end of the story from Davidson. Grafting on a new limb is a shock. They keep the patient hopped up for at least ten days. So I tackled Doris again. "How about the Old Man? Was he wounded?" "You talk too much," she answered. "It's time for morning nourishment and your nap." She produced a glass of milky slop. "Speak up, wench, or I'll spill it on the floor." "The Old Man? You mean the Chief of Section?" "Who else?" "He's not on the sick list." She crossed her fingers on both hands. "I wouldn't want him as a pa- tient!" F OR two or three more days I was kept in bed and treated like a child. I did not care; it wai the first real rest I had had in years. The sores got better and presently I was encouraged -- "required," I should say -- to take light exercise around the room. The Old Man called on me. "Well," he said, "still malingering." I flushed. "Damn your black, chilblained heart," I told him. "Get me some pants and I'll show you who is malingering." "Slow down." He took my chart and looked it over. "Nurse,' he said, "get this man a pair of shorts. I'm restoring him to duty." Doris faced up to him like a banty hen. "You may be the big boss, but you can't give orders here. The doctor will -- " "StoW it," he said, "and get those drawers!" v?he went out, sputtering, and came back with the doctor. The Old Man said mildly, "Doc, I sent for pants, not for you." The medico replied stiffly, "I'll thank you not to interfere with my patients." "He's not your patient. He's going back on duty." "If you do not like the way I run my department, sir, you may have my resignation." The Old Man answered, "I beg your pardon. Doctor. Sometimes I become too preoccupied to follow correct procedure. Will you please do me the favor of examining this patient? If he can be restored to duty, it would help me to have his services at once." The doctor's jaw muscles were jumping, but he said, "Certainly, sir." He went through a show of studying my chart, then tested my reflexes. "He needs more recuperation, but you may have him. Nurse, fetch clothing for this man." Clothing consisted of shorts and shoes. Everybody else was dressed the same way, however, and it was comforting to see all those bare shoulders with no masters clinging to them. I told the Old Man so. "Best defense we've got," he growled, "even if it does make the city look like a beach. If we don't win this set-to before winter weather, we're licked." He stopped at a door with a I hung back. "Where are we going?" "To take a look at your twin, the ape with your parasite." "That's what I thought. Not for me!" I could feel myself tremble. "Now, look, son," he said patiently. "Get over your panic. The best way is to face up to it. I know it's hard. I've spent hours getting used to the sight." "You don't know -- you canj know!" I had the shakes so badly that I had to clutch the door frame. "I suppose it's different," he said slowly, "when you've actually had it. Jarvis -- " He broke off. "You're damn right it's different! You're not going to get me in there!" "No, I guess not. Well, go on back, son. and check in at the infirmary." He started into the laboratory. He had gotten three or four steps away before I called out, "Boss!" He stopped and turned, his face expressionless. "Wait," I added. "I'm coming." "You don't have to." "I'll do it. It -- it just takes a while -- to get your nerve back." grasped my arm, warmly and affectionately, and continued to hold it as we walked. We went through another locked door and into a room conditioned warm and moist. The ape was there, caged. His torso was supported and restrained by a strap-metal framework. His arms and legs hung limply, as if he had no Control over them. He looked up at us with eyes malevolent and intelligent; then the fire died out and they were merely the eyes of a dumb brute in pain. "Around to the side," the Old Man said. I would have hung back, but he still had me by the arm. The ape followed us with his eyes, but his body was held by the frame. From the new position I could see -- The thing that had ridden my back for an endless time, spoken with my mouth, thought with my brain. My master. "Steady," the Old Man said softly. I took a couple of deep breaths and managed to slow my heart down. I made myself stare at it. It is not the appearance of a parasite which arouses horror, nor is it even from knowing what they can do -- for I felt the horror the first time I saw one, before I knew what it was. I tried to tell the Old Man so. He nodded, his eyes on the parasite. "It's the same with everybody. Unreasoning fear, like a bird with a snake. Probably its prime weapon." He looked away from it, as if too long a sight were too much for even his rawhide nerves. I stuck with him, telling myself that it couldn't harm me. I looked away and found the Old Man's eyes on me. "How about it?" he said. "Getting hardened?" "A little. All I want is to kill to shake again. The Old Man studied me. "Here," he said, and handed me his gun. , It startled me. I was unarmed, having come straight from bed. I took it, but looked at him questioningly. "You want to kill it. If you have to, go ahead. Right now." "But -- you told me you needed this one for study." "I do. But if you feel that you need to kill it, to make you a whole man again, go ahead." "To make me a whole man again -- " The Old Man knew what medicine it would take to cure me. I was no longer trembling; the gun was cradled in my hand, ready to spit and kill. While this one was alive, I would still crouch and tremble in the dark. As for others -- why. we could capture a dozen at theConstitution Club. 'With this one dead. I'd lead the raid myself. Breathing rapidly, I raised the gun. Then I turned and chucked it to the Old Man. "What happened?" he asked. "I don't know. It was enough to know that I could." "I figured it would be." I felt warm and relaxed, not even angry with the Old Man for what he had done. "I know you did, damn you. How does it feel to be a puppet master?" He answered soberly, "Not me. The most I ever do is lead a man on the path he wants to follow. There is the puppet master." "Yes," I agreed softly, " 'the puppet master.' You think you know what you mean, but you don't. I hope you never do." "I hope so, too," he answered. I could look now without trembling. Still staring at it, I said, "Boss, when you are through with it, promise me that I can kill it." "It's a promise." W E were interrupted by a man bustling in. He was dressed in shorts and a lab coat; it made him look silly. It was not Graves -- I never saw him again. I imagine the Old Man ate him for lunch. "Why are you wearing a coat?" The Old Man's gun was out and menacing. The man stared at the gun as if it were a bad joke. 'Why, I was working. There is .always a chance of splattering one's self. Some of our solutions are rather -- " "Take it off!" The man took his coat off. His shoulders didn't have the telltale rash. "Take that damned coat and burn it," the Old Man told him. "Then get back to work." The man hurried away, his face red, then stopped and said, "Chief, are you ready for that, uh, procedure?" B# "Shortly. I'll let you know." He left. The Old Man wearily put his gun away. "Post an order," he muttered. "Read it aloud. Make them initial it. Tattoo it on their narrow little chests. And always some smart Aleck thinks  it doesn't mean him. Scientists!" I turned back to my former master. It still revolted me, but  there was a gusty feeling of danger, too, that was not totally unpleasant. "Boss," I asked, "what are you going to do with this thing?" "I plan to interview it." "To what? But how -- " "No, the ape can't talk. We'll have to have a volunteer -- a human volunteer." what he meant, the horror struck me again full force. "You can't mean that. You wouldn't do that to anybody." "It needs to be done and it will be done." "You won't get any volunteers!" "I've got one." "You have? Who?" "But I don't want to use the one I've got. I'm still looking for the right person." I was disgusted and showed it. "If you've got one, you won't find another; there can't be two people that crazy." "Possibly," he agreed. "But I still don't want the one I've got. The interview is a 'must,' son; we are fighting with a total lack of military intelligence. We don't know our enemy, we can't negotiate with him, we don't know where he comes from, nor what makes him tick. We've got to find out; our existence depends on it. The only way to talk to these things is through a human. So it will be done. But I'm still looking for a volunteer." "Don't look at me!" "I am looking at you." I managed to splutter, "You're crazy! I should have killed it when I had your gun -- I would have if I had known why you wanted it. But as for volunteering to let you put that thing -- Nor He ploughed on as if he had not heard me. "It has to be a man who can take it.  Jarvis wasn't stable enough, nor tough enough. We know you are." "Me? All you know is that I lived through it once. I... I couldn't stand it again." "You are proved and salted. With anyone else, I run more risk of losing an agent." "Since when did you worry about risking an agent?" I said bitterly. "Always. I am giving you on more chance, son. Are you going to do this, knowing that it haa to be done and that you stand tha best chanceof anybody -- and cao be of most use to us, because you did live through it -- or are you going to let some other agent risk his reason and his life in your place?" I started to try to explain how I felt. I could not stand the thought of dying while possessed by a parasite. Even worse was the prospect of not dying once the slug touched me. But I could not find words for it. I could feel my face set and twitch with tension. "There is a limit to what any man can go through. I won't do it." He turned to the intercom on the wall. "Laboratory," he called ut. "We'll start now. Hurry up!" I recognized the voice of the nan who had walked in on us. "Which subject?" he asked. "The original volunteer." "The smaller rig?" the voice Asked doubtfully. "Right. Get it in here." I started for the door. The Old Man snapped, "Where are you going?" "Out," I snapped back. "I want fro part of this." He grabbed me and spun me round. "No, you don't. You know about these creatures; your ndvice could help." "Let go of me." "You'll stay," he said savagely, "strapped down or free to move! I made allowances for your illmess, but I've had enough." I was too weary to buck him. "You're the boss." rilHE lab people wheeled in a sort of chair, more like a Sing Sing special than anything eke. There were clamps for ankles and knees, wrists and elbows. There was a canvas corselet to restrain the waist and chest, but the back was cut away so that the shoulders of the victim would be free. They placed it beside the ape's cage, then removed the side of the cage nearest the chair. The ape watched with intent, aware eyes, but his limbs still dangled helplessly. Nevertheless, I became still more disturbed at the cage being opened. Only the Old Man's threat kept me there. The technicians stood back, apparently ready. The outer door opened and several people came in. Among them was Mary. I was caught off balance ; I had been wanting to see her and had tried several times to get word to her through the nurses -- but they either could not identify her or had received instructions. Now I saw her under these circumstances. I cursed the Old Man to myself. It was no show to bring a woman to, even a woman agent. There ought to be decent limits somewhere. Mary looked surprised and nodded. I let it go at that ; it was no time for small talk. She was looking good, though very sober. She was dressed in the costume the nurses had worn, but she did not have the ludicrous helmet and back plate. The others present were men, loaded with recording and stereo equipment as well as other apparatus. "Ready?" inquired the lab chief. "Get going," answered the Old Man. Mary walked straight to the chair and sat down. Two technicians knelt and started fastening the clamps. I watched in a frozen daze. Then I grabbed the Old Man, literally threw him aside, and I was by the chair, kicking the technicians out of the way. "Mary!" I screamed. "Get up from there!" The Old Man had his gun on me. "Away from her," he ordered. "You three -- grab him and tie him." I looked at the gun, then down at Mary. She did not move: her feet were already bound. She simply looked at me with compassionate eyes. "Get up, Mary," I said dully. "I want to sit down." They removed the chair and brought in a larger one. I could not have used hers; both were tailored to size. When they, finished clamping me, I might as well have been cast in concrete. My back began to itch unbearably, although nothing, as yet, had touched it. Mary was no longer in the room; I had not seen her leave and it did not seem to matter. After I had been prepared, the Old Man laid a hand on my arm, and said quietly, "Thanks, son." I did not answer. I was not interested enough to watch them handle the parasite behind my back, even if I had been able to turn my head, which I couldn't. Once the ape barked and screamed and someone shouted, "Watch it!" There was silence, as if everyone was holding his breath. Then something moist touched my neck and I fainted. ergy I had experienced before, I came out of the faint, realizing I was in a tight spot, but warily determined to think my way out. I was not afraid: I was contemptuous and sure that I could outwit them. The Old Man said sharply, "Can you hear me?" I answered, "Quit shouting." "Do you remember what we are here for?" "You want to ask questions. What are you waiting for?" " What are you?" "That's a silly question. I'm six feet one, more muscle than brain, and I weigh --  "'Not you. You know to whom I am talking -- you." "Guessing games?" The Old Man waited before Implying, "It's no good to pretend I don't know what you are.' j "Oh, go ahead and pretend." "You know that I have been studying you all the time you Ibave been living on the body of that ape. I know things which give me an advantage. One -- " the Old Man started ticking them off -- "you can be killed. Two, you can be hurt. You don't like electric shock and you can't stand the heat that even a man. can stand. Three, you are helpless without your host. I could have you removed and you would die. Four, you have no powers except those you borrow from your host. He is helpless. Try your bonds. You must cooperate or die!" I had already been trying my bonds, finding them, as I expected, Impossible to escape. This did not worry me. I was oddly contented to be back with my master, to be free of troubles and tensions. My business was to serve; the future would take care of itself. One ankle strap seemed less tight than the other. Possibly I might drag my foot through it. I checked on the arm clamps. If I relaxed completely -- An instruction came at once or I made a decision; the words mean the same, for there was no conflict between my master and me; we were one. Instruction or decision, I knew it was not time to risk an escape. I ran my eyes around the room, trying to figure who was armed. It was my guess that only the Old Man was. That bettered the chances. Somewhere, deep down, was that ache of guilt and despair never experienced by any but the servants of the masters. I was much too busy, though, to be troubled by it. "Well?" the Old Man went on. "Do you answer questions or do I punish you?' "What questions?" I asked. "Up to now, you've been talking nonsense." The Old Man turned to a technician. "Give me the tickler." I felt no apprehension, being still busy checking my bonds. If I could tempt him into placing his gun within reach, assuming that I could get one arm free, then I might -- He reached past my shoulders with a rod. I felt a shocking pain. The room blacked out as if a switch had been thrown. I was split apart. For the moment, I was masterless. The pain left, leaving only searing memory behind. Before I could think coherently, the splitting away had ended and I was again safely under the control of my master. But for the first and only time in my service # to him, I was not myself free of worry; echoes of his own wild fear and pain were passed on to me. "Well, how did you like the taste?" asked the Old Man. The panic washed away; I was again filled with unworried wellbeing, however wary and watchful. My wrists and ankles, which had begun to pain me, stopped hurting. "Why did you do that?" I asked. "Certainly, you can hurt me -- but why?" "Answer my questions." "Aslc them." "What are you?" The answer did not come at once. As the Old Man reached for the rod, I heard myself hurriedly saying. "We are the people." "What people?" "The only people. We have studied you and we know your ways. We -- " I stopped suddenly. "Keep talking," the Old Man said grimly, and gestured with the rod. "We come," I went on, "to bring you -- " I wanted' to talk; the rod was terrifyingly close. But there was some difficulty with words. "To bring you peace" I blurted out. The Old Man snorted. "Peace," I went on, "and contentment -- and the joy of -- of surrender." Surrender was not the right word. I struggled the way one struggles with a foreign language. 'The joy," I repeated, "of... nirvana." The word fitted and the master was pleased. I felt like a dog being patted for fetching a stick. "Let me get this," the Old Man said. "You are promising the human race that if we will just surrender, you will take care of us and make us happy. Right?" "Exactly!"  The Old Man thought about this while looking past my shoulders. He spat on the floor. "You know," he said slowly, "humanity has often been offered that bargain. It never worked out worth a damn." "Try it yourself," I suggested. "It can be done quickly. Then you will know" He stared this time in my face. "Maybe I owe it to somebody to try it personally. Maybe I will, some day. But right now," he went on briskly, "you have questions to answer. Answer quick and proper and stay healthy. Be slow and I'll step up the current.' I shrank back, feeling dismay and defeat. For a moment, thinking he was going to accept, I had been planning the possibilities of escape. "Now," he went on, "where do you come from?" No answer. I felt no urge to answer. The rod came closer. "Far away!" I burst, out. S# "That's no news. Where's your home base, your own planet?" The Old Man waited, then said, Til have to touch up your memory." I watched dully, thinking nothing. "There may be a semantic difficulty ,' f said an assistant. "Different astronomical concepts." "Why?" asked the Old Man. "That slug knows what his host knows; we've proved that." But he turned back and started a different tack. "See here, you savvy the Solar System. Is your planet Inside it or outside?" I hesitated, then answered, "All planets are ours." The Old Man pulled at his lip. "I wonder," he mused, "what you mean. Never mind. You can claim the whole damned universe, but, where do your ships come from?" I sat silent, unable to tell him. Suddenly he reached behind me. I felt one smashing blow. "Talk, damn you! What planet? Mars? Venus? Jupiter? Saturn? Uranus? Neptune? Pluto?" As he mentioned them, I briefly law them -- though I have never been as far off Earth as the Space Stations. When he came to the fight one, I knew -- and the thought was instantly snatched from me. I heard myself saying, "None f them. Our home is much farther away." He looked past my shoulders and then into my eyes. "I think you are lying. Maybe you need tome juice to keep you honest." "No, no!" "No harm to try." Slowly he thrust the rod behind me. I knew the answer again and was about to give it, when something froze my throat. Then the pain started. I was being tom apart. I tried to talk, anything to stop the pain -- -but I wasn't allowed to. Through a blur of pain I saw the Old Man's face, shimmering and floating. "Had enough?" he asked. I started to answer, and choked and gagged helplessly, dumbly. I saw him reach out again with the rod. There was, as I had told the Old Man, a limit to what a man could take, even under a master's control. I reached that limit and burst into pieces. Someone said, "He's coming around." The Old Man's face was over mine. "You all right, son?" he asked anxiously. I turned my face away. "One side, please," another voice said. "Let me give him the injection." The speaker knelt by me and gave me a shot. He stood up, looked at his hands, then wiped them on his shorts. Gyro, I thought absently, ot something like it Whatever it # . was, it was pulling me back together. Shortly I sat up, unassisted. I was still in the cage room, directly in front of that damnable chair. I started to get to my feet. The Old Man gave me a hand, but I shook him off. "Sorry," he answered, then snapped, "Jones! You and Ito get the litter. Take him to the infirmary. Doc, you go along." "Certainly." The man who had given me the shot started to take my arm. I drew back. "Keep your hands off me!" The doctor looked at the Old Man, who shrugged, then motioned them all back. Alone, I went through the door and past the outer one into the corridor. I paused there, looked at my wrists and ankles, and decided that I might as well go to the infirmary. Doris would take care of me and then maybe I could sleep. I felt as if I had gone fifteen rounds and lost them all. "Sam! Sam!" I knew that voice. Mary hurried up and was standing before me, looking at me with great sorrowful eyes. "Oh, Sam! What have they done to you?" Her voice was so choked that I could hardly understand her. "You should know," I answered and had strength enough left to slap her. "Bitch!" jlTY room was still unoccupied, but I did not find Doris. I closed the door, then lay face down on the bed and tried to stop thinking or feeling. Presently I heard a gasp, and opened one eye. There was Doris. I felt her gentle hands on me. "Why, you poor, poor baby ! Stay there, don't move now. I'll hurry right out and get the doctor." "No." "But you've got to have the doctor." "I won't see him. You help me." She did not answer. I heard her go out. She came back shortly -- I think it was shortly -- and started to bathe my wounds. I wanted to scream when she touched my back. But she dressed it quickly and said, "Over easy, now." "I'll stay face down." "No. I want you to drink something. That's a good boy." I turned over, with her doing most of the work, and drank what she gave me. After a bit I went to sleep. I seem to remember being awakened, seeing the Old Man and cursing him. The doctor was there, too. Or the whole thing could have been a dream. Miss Briggs woke me and Doris brought me breakfast; it was as if I had never been off the sick list. I was not in too bad shape though I felt as if I had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel. There were dressings on both arms and both legs where  had cut myself on the clamps, but no bones were broken. Where I was sick was in my soul. Don't misunderstand me. The Old Man could send me into a dangerous spot. That was what I had signed up for. But I had not signed up for what he had done to me. He knew what made me tick and he had used it to force me into something I would It was the Old Man that really hurt. Mary? There have always been female spies, and the young and pretty ones have always used the same tools. But she should not have agreed to use them against a fellow agent -- at least, she should not have used them against me. Not very logical, is it? It was to me. They could go ahead with Operation Parasite without me. I owned a cabin in the Adirondacks; I had stuff there in deep freeze to carry me a year, maybe more. I had plenty of tempus pills; I would go up there and use them -- and the world could save itself, or go to hell, without me. If anyone came within a hundred yards, he would either show a bare back or be burned down. the deal I'd gotten, and only Doris was handy. She was indignant. Indignant? She was as sore as a boiled owl. Being a nurse, she had dressed a lot worse than what they had done to me, but this had been done by our own people. I blurted out how I felt about Mary's part in it. "Do I understand that you had wanted to marry this girl?" "Correct. Stupid, ain't I?" "Then she knew what she could do to you. It wasn't fair." She stopped massaging me, her eyes snapping. "I've never met your redhead, but if I do, I'll scratch her face!" I smiled wanly at her. "You're a good kid, Doris. I believe you would play fair with a man." "Oh, I've pulled some fast ones. But if I did anything halfway like that. I'd have to break every mirror I own." Mary showed up. The first I knew was hearing Doris say angrily. "You can't come in." Mary's voice answered, "I'm going in." "Get back or I'll pull that hennaed hair out by the roots!" There were sounds of a scuffle and the smack of someone getting slapped. I yelled, "Hey! What goes on?" They appeared in the doorway 'together. Doris was breathing hard and her hair was mussed. Mary managed to look dignified, but there was a bright red patch on her cheek just about the size of Doris's hand. Doris caught her breath and said, "You get out. He doesn't want to see you." Mary said, "I'll hear that from him." I looked at them both. "Oh, what the hell, she's here and I've got some things to tell her. Thanks for trying, Doris." Doris said. "You're a fool," and flounced out. Mary came over to the bed. "Sam," she said. "Sam." "My name isn't Sam." "I've never known your right name." It was no time to explain that my parents had burdened me with Elihu. I answered, 'What of it? Sam will do.' "Sam," she repeated. "Oh, Sam, my dear." "I am not your dear." She inclined her head. "Yes, I know. I don't know why. Sam, I came to find out why you hate me. Perhaps I can't change it, but I must know." I made a sound of disgust. "After what you did, you don't know why? Mary, you may be a cold fish, but you aren't stupid." She shook her head. "Just the reverse, Sam. I'm not cold, but I'm frequently stupid. Look at me, please -- I know what they did to you. I know that you let it be done to save me from it. I know and I'm deeply grateful. But I don't know why you hate me. I did not ask you to do it and I did not want you to do it." I reared up on one elbow. "You sat down in that trick chair knowing that I would never let you go through with it. You knew that, whether your devious female mind admitted it or not. The Old Man could not have forced me to with a gun, not even with drugs. You could. You did." She grew steadily paler, until her face was almost green against her hair. "Sam, that is not the way it was. I didn't know you were going to be there. I was terribly startled. But I had to go through with it; I had promised." "That covers everything. A schoolgirl promise." "No, Sam. Not a schoolgirl promise." "It doesn't matter whether you are telling the truth about knowing that I would bejn there. The point is that you were there and  was there -- and you could figure what would happen if you did what you did." "That's the way it looks to you and I can't dispute the facts." "Hardly." She stood very still for a long time. I let her. Finally she said, "Sam, once you said something about wanting to marry me." "That was another day.' "I didn't expect you to repeat the offer. But there was a sort f corollary. No matter what you think of me, I want to tell you that I am deeply grateful for what you did for me. Miss Barkis me?" I grinned at her. "So help me, the workings of the female mind delight and astound me. You always think you can cancel anything at all with that one trump play." I continued to grin while she turned red. "I won't inconvenience you by taking up your generous offer." She came back at me in a steady voice. "I let myself in for that. Nevertheless, I meant it. That or anything else I can ever do for you.'' I sank back and lay down. "Sure, you can do something for me." Her face lit up. "What?" "Quit bothering me. Go away. I'm tired." PTiHE Old Man put his head in late that afternoon. "I want to talk to you," he started in. " don't want to talk to you. Get out." TT i ignored it and came in. "Mind if I sit?" "You seem to be doing so." He ignored that, too. "You know, son, you are one of my best boys, but sometimes you are hasty." "Don't let that worry you," I answered. "As soon as the doctor lets me up, I'm through." He was not hearing anything that he did not choose to hear. "You jump to conclusions. Now take this girl Mary -- " "You take her." "You jumped all over her without knowing the score. You've got her all upset. Why, you may have ruined a good agent for me." "Look, I'm weeping for both of you." "You think she let herself be used as bait. Well, you've got it slightly wrong. She was being used, but I was using her. I planned it that way." "I know you did." "Then why blame her?" "Because you couldn't have carried it out without her cooperation. It's big of you, you nogood, heartless bastard, to take all the blame -- but you can't." He did not hear my profanity, either. "You understand everything but the key point, which is that the girl didn't know." "Hell's bells, she was there!" "So she was. Son, did I ever lie to you?" "No," I admitted, "but I don't think you would hesitate." He answered, "Maybe I deserve that. You'll just have to test it for yourself and make up your mind whether or not I'm lying. That girl didn't know you were going to be in that room. She didn't have the faintest suspicion that I didn't mean for her to go through with it, or that I had already decided that you were the only party who would suit me, even if I had to have you tied down and forced -- which I would have done, if I hadn't had a double whammy up my sleeve to trick you into volunteering. Hell's bells yourself, son; she didn't even know you were off the sick list." I wanted to believe it, so I did my damnedest not to. "Look at me!" he added. "There is something I want to rub into your scalp. First off, everybody i -- including me -- appreciates what you did, regardless of motives. I'm putting in a letter and no doubt you'll get a medal. That stands whether you stay with the Section or not. But don't give yourself airs as a little tin hero --  "I won't!" " -- because that medal is going to the wrong person. Mary ought to get it. Now shut up. I'm not through. You had to be forced into it. No criticism; you had been through plenty. But Mary was a real, Simon-pure volunteer...When she sat down in that chair, she didn't expect any last minute reprieve and she had every reason to believe that, if she got up alive, her mind woijld be gone, which is worse. What I'm trying to tell you is -- this one is more of a man than you are and you've done her a serious wrong." I was so churned up that I could not judge whether he was telling the truth, or manipulating me again. I said, "Maybe I lashed out at the wrong person. But if what you say is true --  "It is " -- it doesn't make what you did any sweeter. IJ; makes it worse." He took it without flinching. "Son, I'm sorry if I've lost your respect. But I can't be choosy any more than a commander cam in battle. Less, because I ligtn. with different weapons. I've always been able to shoot my own dog. Maybe that's bad, but that is what my job takes. If you are ever in my shoes, you'll have to do it, too." "I'm not likely to be." "Why don't you rest up and think about it?" "I'll take leave -- terminal leave." "Very well." He started to leave. I said, "You made me one promise and I'm holding you to it. About that parasite -- you said I could kill it, personally. Are you through with it?" "Yes, but -- " I started to get up. "No buts. Give me your gun; I'll do it now." "You can't. It's already dead." "What! You promised me." "I know. But it died while we were trying to force you -- force it -- to talk." I started to shake with laughter and could not stop. The Old Man shook me. "Snap out of it! I'm sorry about what I did, but there's nothing to laugh ah" w "Sure there is," I answered, sobbing and chuckling. "It's the funniest thing that ever happened. A#I that for nothing. You dirtied yourself and you loused up me and Mary -- and all for no use." "What gave you that idea?" "You didn't even get small change out of it -- out of us. You didn't learn anything you didn't know before.' 'It was a bigger success than you'd ever guess, son. True, we didn't squeeze anything out of it directly, before it died, but we got something out of you." "Me?" "Last night. We put you through it last night. You were doped, psyched, brainwaved, analyzed, wrung out and hung out to dry. The parasite spilled things to you and they were still there for the hypno-analysts to pick up after you were free of it." "What, for instance?" "We know where they come from and can fight back -- Titan, sixth satellite of Saturn." When he said it, I felt a gagging constriction of my throat and I knew that he was right. "You certainly foughb before we could get it," he went on reminiscently. "We had to hold you down to keep you fi'bm hurting yourself -- more." He threw his game leg over the dge of the bed and struck a cigarette. He seemed anxious to be friendly. As for me, I did not want to fight with him; my head was spinning and I had things to get straight. Titan. That was a long waout in space. Mars was the farthest men had ever been, unless the Seagraves Expedition, the one that never came back, had reached the Jovian moons. Still, we could get all the way to Saturn if we wanted to. Finally he got up to go. He had limped to the door when I stopped him. "Dad -- " I had not called him that in years. He turned, his expression surprised and defenseless. "Yes, son?" "Why did you and Mother name me Elihu?" "Eh? Why, it was your maternal grandfather's name." "Not enough reason, I'd say." "Perhaps not." He turned and again I stopped him. "Dad, what sort of a person was my mother?" "Your mother? I don't know exactly how to tell you. Well -- she was pretty much like Mary. Yes, son, a great deal like her." He stumped out without giving me further chance to talk. Continued Next Month The Sense of Wonder When nobody aboard ship remembers where it' going, how can they tell when it has arrived? Rikud had come to the viewport to watch the great changeless sweep ot space. He could not quite explain the feelings within him; they were so alien, so unnatural. But ever since the engines somewhere in the rear of the world had changed their tone, from the steady whining Rikud had heard all twentyfive years of his 'life, to the sullen roar that came to his ears now, the feelings had grown. If anyone else had noticed the change, he failed to mention it. This disturbed Rikud, although he C#uld not tell why. And, because he had realized this odd difference in himself, he kept it locked up inside him. Today, space looked somehow different. The stars -- it was a meaningless concept to Rikud, but that was what everyone called the bright pinpoints of light on the black backdrop in the viewport -- were not apparent in the speckled profusion Rikud had always known. Instead, there was more of the blackness, and one very bright star set apart by itself in the middle of the viewport. If he had understood the term, Rikud would have told himself this was odd. His head ached with the halfborn thought. It was -- it was -- what was it? Someone was clomping up the companionway behind Rikud. He turned and greeted gray-haired old Chuls. "In five more years," the older man chided, "you'll be ready to sire children. And all you can do in the meantime is gaze out at the stars." Rikud knew he should be exercising now, or bathing in the rays of the health-lamps. It had never occurred to him that he didn't feel like it; he just didn't, without comprehending. Chuls' reminder fostered uneasiness. Often Rikud had dreamecfof the time he would be thirty and a father. Whom would the Calculator sele'ct as his mate? The first time this idea had occurred to him, Rikud ignored it. But it came again, and each time it left him with a feeling he could not explain. Why should he think thoughts that no other man had? Why should he think he was thinking such thoughts, when it always embroiled him in a. hopeless, infinite confusion that left him with a headache? Chuls said, "It is time for my bath in the health-rays. I saw you here and knew it was your time, too..." His voice trailed off. Rikud knew that somethingwhich he could not explain had entered the older man's head for a moment, but it had departed almost before Chuls knew of its existence. "I'll go with you," Rikud told him. glow pervaded the air in the room of the health-rays. Perhaps two score men lay about, naked, under the ray tubes. Chuls stripped himself and selected the space under a vacant tube. Rikud, for his part, wanted to get back to the viewport and watch the one new bright star. He had the distinct notion it was. growing larger every moment. He turned to go, but the door clicked shut and a metallic voice said. "Fifteen minutes under the tubes, please." Rikud muttered to himself and undressed. The world had begun to annoy him. Now why shouldn't a man be permitted to do what he wanted, when he wanted to do it? There was a strange thought, and Rikud's brain whirled once more down the tortuous course of half-formed questions and unsatisfactory answers. He had even wondered what it was like to get hurt. No one ever got hurt. Once, here in this same ray room, he had had the impulse to hurl himself head-first against the wall, just to see what would happen. But something soft had cushioned the impact -- something which had come into being just for the moment and then abruptly passed into non-being again, something which was as impalpable as air. Rikud had been stopped in this action, although there was no real authority to stop him. This puzzled him, because somehow he felt that there should have been authority. A long time ago the reading machine in the library had told him of the elders -- a meaningless term -- who had governed the world. They told you to do something and you did it, but that was silly, because now no one told you to do anything. You only listened to the buzzer. And Rikud could remember the rest of what the reading machine had said. There had been a revolt -- again a term without any real meaning, a term that could have no reality outside of the reading machine -- and the elders were overthrown. Here Rikud had been lost utterly. The people had decided that they did not know where they were going, or why, and that it was unfair that the elders alone had this authority. They were born and they lived and they died as the elders directed, like little cogs in a great machine. Much of this Rikud could not understand, but he knew enough to realize that the reading machine had sided with the people against the elders, and it said the people had won. Now in the health room, Rikud felt a warmth in the rays. Grudgingly, he had to admit to himself that it was not unpleasant. He could see the look of easy contentment on Chuls' face as the rays fanned down upon him, bathing his old body in a forgotten magic which, many generations before Rikud's time, had negated the necessity for a knowledge of medicine. But when, in another ten years, Chuls would perish of old age, the rays would no longer suffice. Nothing would, for Chuls. Rikud often thought of his own death, still seventyfive years in the future, not without a sense of alarm. Yet old Chuls seemed heedless, with ofily a decade to go. Under the tube at Rikud's left lay Crifer. The man was short and heavy through the shoulders and chest, and he had a lame foot. Every time Rikud looked at that foot, it was with a sense of satisfaction. True, this was the only case of its kind, the exception to the rule, but it proved the world was not perfect. Rikud was guiltily glad when he saw Crifer limp. But, if anyone else saw it, he never said a word. Not even Crifer. ' reading again, Rikud." "Yes?" Almost no one read any more, and the library was heavy with the smell of dust. Reading represented initiative on the part of Crifer; it meant that, in the two unoccupied hours before sleep, he went to the library and listened to the reading machine. Everyone else simply sat about and talked. That was the custom. Everyone did it. But if he wasn't reading himself, Rikud usually went to sleep. All the people ever talked about was what they had done during the day, and it was always the same. "Yes," said Crifer. "I found a book about the stars. They're also called astronomy, I think." This was a new thought to Rikud, and he propped his head up on one elbow. "What did you find out?" "That's about all. They're just called astronomy, I think." "Well, where's the book?" Rikud would read it tomorrow. "I left it in the library. You can find several of them under 'astronomy,' with a cross-reference under 'stars.' They're synonymous terms." "You know," Rikud said, sitting up now, "the stars in the viewport are changing." "Changing?" Crifer questioned the fuzzy concept as much as he questioned what it might mean in this particular case. "Yes, there are less of them, and one is bigger and brighter than the others." "Astronomy says some stars are variable," Crifer offered, but Rikud knew his lame-footed companion understood the word no better than he did. Over on Rikud's right, Chuls began to dress. "Variability," he told them, "is a contradictory term. Nothing is variable. It can't be." "I'm only saying what I read in the book," Crifer protested mildly. "Well, it's wrong. Variability and change are two words without meaning." "People grow old," Rikud suggested. A buzzer signified that his fifteen minutes under the rays were up, and Chuls said, "It's almost time for me to eat." Rikud frowned. Chuls hadn't even seen the connection between the two concepts, yet it was so clear. Or was it? He had had it a moment ago, but now it faded, and change and old were just two words. His own buzzer sounded a moment later, and it was with a #t strange feeling of elation that he dressed and made his way back to the viewport. Whence passed the door which led to the women's half of the world, however, he paused. He wanted to open that door and see a woman. He had been told about themtand he had seen pictures, and he dimly remembered his childhood among women. But his feelings had changed; this was different. Again there were inexplicable feelings -- strange channelings of Rikud's energy in new and confusing directions. He shrugged and reserved the thought for later. He wanted to see the stars again. T HE view had changed, and the strangeness of it made Rikud's pulses leap with excitement. All the stars were paler now than before, and where Rikud had seen the one bright central star, he now saw a globe of light, white with a tinge of blue in it, and so bright that it hurt his eyes to look. Yes, hurt! Rikud looked and looked until his eyes teared and he had to turn away. Here was an unknown factor which the perfect world failed to control. But how could a star change into a blinking blue-white globe -- if, indeed, that was the star Rikud had seen earlier? There was that word change again. Didn't it have something to do with age? Rikud couldn't remember, and he suddenly wished he could read Crifer's book on astronomy, which, meant the same as stars. Except that it was variable, which was like change, being tied up somehow with age. Presently Rikud became aware that his eyes were not tearing any longer, and he turned to look at the viewport. What he saw now was so new that he couldn't at first accept it. Instead, he blinked and rubbed his eyes, sure that the ball of bluewhite fire somehow had damaged them. But the new view persisted. Of stars there were few, and of the blackness, almost nothing. Gone, too, was the burning globe. Something loomed there in the port, so huge that it spread out over almost the entire surface. Something big and round, all grays and greens and browns, and something for which Rikud had no name. A few moments more, and Rikud no longer could see the sphere. A section of it had expanded outward and assumed the rectangular shape of the viewport, and its size as well. It seemed neatly sheered down the middle, so that on one side Rikud saw an expanse of brown and green, and on the other, blue. Startled, Rikud leaped back. The sullen roar in the rear of the world had ceased abruptly. Instead an ominous silence, broken at regular intervals by a sharp booming. Change -- "Won't you eat, Rikud?" Chuls called from somewhere down be low. "Damn the man," Rikud thought. Then aloud: "Yes, I'll eat. Later." "It's time..." Chuls' voice trailed off again, impotently. But Rikud forgot the old man completely. A new idea occurred to him, and for a while he struggled with it. What he saw -- what he had always seen, except that now there was the added factor of change -- perhaps did not exist in the viewport. Maybe it existed through the viewport. That was maddening. Rikud turned again to the port, where he could see nothing but an obscuring cloud of white vapor, murky, swirling, more confusing than ever. "Chuls," he called, remembering, "come here." "I am here," said a voice at his elbow. Rikud whirled on the little figure and pointed to the swirling cloud of vapor. "What do you see?" Chuls looked. "The viewport, of course." "What else?"  "Else? Nothing." Anger welled up inside Rikud. "All right," he said, "listen. What do you hear?" "Broom, brroom, brrroom!" Chuls imitated the intermittent blasting of the engines. "I'm hungry, Rikud." The old man turned and strode off down the corridor toward the dining room, and Rikud was glad to be alone once more. N OW the vapor had departed, except for a few tenuous whisps. For a moment Rikud thought he could see the gardens rearward in the world. But that was silly. What were the gardens doing in the viewport? And besides, Rikud had the distinct feeling that here was something far vaster than the gardens, although all of it existed in the viewport which was no wider than the length of his body. The gardens, moreover, did not jump and dance before his eyes the way the viewport gardens did. Nor did they spin. Nor did the trees grow larger with every jolt. Rikud sat down hard. He blinked. The world had come to rest on the garden of the viewport. F OR a whole week that view did not change, and Rikud had come to accept it as fact. There -- through the viewport and in it -- was a garden. A garden larger than the entire world a garden of plants which Rikud had never seen before, although he had always liked to stroll through the world's garden and he had come to know every plant well. Nevertheless, it was a garden. He told Chuls, but Chuls had responded, "It is the viewport." Crifer, on the other hand wasn't so sure. "It looks like the garden," he admitted to Rikud. "But why should the garden be in the viewport?" Somehow, Rikud knew this question for a healthy sign. But he could not tell them of his most amazing thought of all. The change in the viewport could mean only one thing. The world had been walking -- the word seemed all wrong to Rikud, but he cpuld think of no other, unless it were running. The world had been walking somewhere. That somewhere was the garden and the world had arrived. "It is an old picture of the garden," Chuls suggested, "and the plants are different." "Then they've changed?" "No, merely different." "Well, what about the viewport? It changed. Where are the stars? Where are they, Chuls, if it did not change?" "The stars come out at night." "So there is a change from day to night!" "I didn't say that. The stars simply shine at night. Why should they shine during the day when the world wants them to shine only at night?" "Once they shone all the time." "Naturally," said Crifer, becoming interested. "They are variable." had had the chance to read that book on astronomy. He hadn't been reading too much lately. The voice of the reading machine had begun to bore him. He said, "Well, variable or not, our whole perspective has changed." And when Chuls looked away in disinterest, Rikud became angry. If only the man would realize! If only anyone would realize! It all seemed so obvious. If he, Rikud, walked from one part of the world to another, it was with a purpose -- to eat, or to sleep, or perhaps to bathe in the healthrays. Now if the world had walked from -- somewhere, through the vast star-speckled darkness and to the great garden outside, this also was purposeful. The world had arrived at the garden for a reason. But if everyone lived as if the world still stood in blackness, how could they find the nature of that purpose? "I wijl eat," Chuls said, breaking Rikud's revery. W Damn the man, all he did was eat! Yet he did have initiative after a sort. He knew when to eat. Because he was hungry. And Rikud, too, was hungry. Differently. H E had long wondered about the door in the back of the library, and now, as Crifer sat cross-legged on one of the dusty tables, reading machine and book on astronomy or stars in his lap, Rikud approached the door. "What's in here?" he demanded. "It's a door, I think," said Crifer. "I know, but what's beyond it?" "Beyond it? Oh, you mean through the door." "Yes." "Well," Crifer scratched his head, "I don't think anyone ever opened it. It's only a door." "I will," said Rikud. "You will what?" "Open it. Open the door and look inside." A long pause. Then, "Can you do it?" "I think so." "You can't, probably. How can anyone go where no one has been before? There's nothing. It just isn't. It's only a door, Rikud." "No -- " Rikud began, but the words faded off into a sharp intake of breath. Rikud had turned the knob and pushed. The door opened silently, and Crifer said, "Doors are variable, too, I think." Rikud saw a small room, perhaps half a dozen paces across, at the other end of which was another door, just like the first. Halfway across, Rikud heard a voice not unlike that of the reading machine. He missed the beginning, but then: -- therefore, permit no unauthorized persons to go through this door. The maclunery in the next room is your protection against the rigors of space. A thousand years from now, journey's end, you may have discarded it for something better -- who knows? But if you have not, then here is your protection. As nearly as possible, this ship is a perfect, selfsustaining world. It is more than that: it is human-sustaining as well. T ry to hurt yourself and the ship wilt not permit it -- within limits, of course. But you can damage the ship, and to avoid any possibility of that, no unauthorized persons are to be permitted through this door -- Rikud gave the voice up as hopeless. There were too many confusing words. What in the world was an unauthorized persoh? More interesting than that. however, was the second door. Would it lead to another voice? Rikud hoped that it wouldn't. When he opened the door a strange new noise filled his ears, a gentle humming, punctuated by a throb-throb-throb which sounded not unlike the booming of the engines last week, except that this new sound didn't blast nearly so loudly against his eardrums. And what met Rikud's eyes -- he blinked and looked again, but it was still there -- cogs and gears and wheels and nameless things all strange and beautiful because they shone with a luster unfamiliar to him. "Odd," Rikud said aloud. Then he thought, "Now there's a good word, but no one quite seems to know its meaning." Odder still was the third door. Rikud suddenly thought there might exist an endless succession of them, especially when the third one opened on a bare tunnel which led to yet another door. Only this one was different. In it Rikud saw the viewport. But how? The viewport stood on the other end of the world. It did seem smaller, and, although it looked out on the garden, Rikud sensed that the topography was different. Then the garden extended even farther than he had thought. It was endless, extending all the way to a ridge of mounds way off in the distance. And this door one could walk through, into the garden. Rikud put his hand on the door, all the while watching the garden through the new viewport. He began to turn the handle. Then he trembled. What would he do out in the garden? He couldn't go atone. He'd die of the strangeness. It was a silly thought; no one ever died of anything until he was a hundred. Rikud couldn't fathom the rapid thumping of his heart. And Rikud's mouth felt dry; he wanted to swallow, but couldn't. Slowly, he took his hand off the door lever. He made his way back through the tunnel and then through the room of machinery and finally through the little room with the confusing voice to Crifer. By the time he reached the lame-footed man, Rikud was running. He did not dare once to look back. He stood shaking at Crifer's side, and sweat covered him in a clammy film. He never wanted to look at the garden again. Not when he knew there was a door through which he could walk and then might find himself in the garden. It was so big. before Rikud calmed himself enough to talk about his experience. When he did, only Crifer seemed at all interested, yet the lame-fooed man's mind was inadequate to cope with the situation. He suggested that the viewport might also be variable and Rikud found himself wishing that his friend had never read that book on astronomy. Chuls did not believe Rikud at all. "There are not that many doors in the world," he said. "The library has a door and there is a door to the women's quarters; in five years, the Calculator will send you through that. But there are no others." Chuls smiled an indulgent smile and Rikud came nearer to him. "Now, by the world, there are two other doors!" Rikud began to shout, and everyone looked at him queerly. "What are you doing that for?" demanded Wilm, who was shorter even than Crifer, but had no lame foot. "Doing what?" "Speaking so loudly when Chuls, who is close, obviously has no trouble hearing you." "Maybe yelling will make him understand." Crifer hobbled about on his good foot, doing a meaningless little jig. "Why don't we go see?" he suggested. Then, confused, he frowned. "Well, I won't go," Chuls replied. "There's no reason to go. If Rikud has been imagining things, why should I?" "I imagined nothing. I'll show you -- " "You'll show me nothing because I won't go." Rikud grabbed Chuls' blouse with his big fist. Then, startled by what he did, his hands began to tremble. But he held on, and he tugged at the blouse, "Stop that," said the older man, mildly.  "Look what Rikud's doing! I don't know what he's doing, but look. He's holding Chuls' blouse." "Stop that," repeated Chuls, his face reddening. "Only if you'll go with mc. w Rikud was panting. Chuls tugged at his wrist. By this time a crowd had gathered. Some of them watched Crifer jump up and down, but most of them watched Rikud holding Chuls' blouse. "I think I can do that," declared Wilm, clutching a fistful of Crifer's shirt. Presently, the members of the crowd had pretty well paired off, each partner grabbing for his companion's blouse. They giggled and laughed and some began to hop up and down as Crifer had done. A buzzer sounded and autowr matically Rikud found himself releasing Chuls. Chuls said, forgetting the incident completely, "Time to retire.' In a moment, the room was cleared. Rikud stood alone. He cleared his throat and listened to the sound, all by itself in the stillness. What would have happened if they hadnH retired? But they always did things punctually like that, whenever the buzzer sounded. They ate with the buzzer, bathed in the healthrays with it, slept with it. What would they do if the buzzer stopped buzzing? This frightened Rikud, although he didn't know why. He'd like it, though. Maybe then he could take them outside with him to the big garden of the two viewports. And then he wouldn't be afraid because he could huddle close to them and he wouldn't be alone. -again as he stood in the room of the machinery. For a long time he watched the wheels and cogs and gears spinning and humming. He watched for he knew not how tong. And then he began to wonder. If he destroyed the wheels and the cogs and the gears, would the buzzer stop? It probably would, because, as Rikud saw it, he was clearly an "unauthorized person." He had heard the voice again upon entering the room. He found a metal rod, bright and shiny, three feet long and half as wide as his arm. He tugged at it and it came loose from the wires that held it in place. He hefted it carefully for a moment, and then he swung the bar into the mass of metal. Each time he heard a grinding, crashing sound. He looked as the gears and cogs and wheels crumbled under his blows, shattered by the strength of his arm. Almost casually he strode about the room, but his blows were not casual. Soon his easy strides had given way to frenzied running. Rikud smashed everything in sight. When the lights winked out, he stopped. Anyway, by that time the room was a shambles of twisted, broken metal. He laughed, softly at first, but presently he was roaring, and the sound doubled and redoubled in his ears because now the throbbing had stopped. He opened the door and ran through the little corridor to the smaller viewport. Outside he could see the stars, and, dimly, the terrain beneath them. But everything was so dark that only the stars shone clearly. All else was bathed in a shadow of unreality. Rikud never wanted to do anything more than he wanted to w open that door. But his hands trembled too much when he touched it, and once, when he pressed his face close against the viewport, there in the darkness something bright flashed briefly through the sky and was gone. Whimpering, he fled. A LL around Rikud were darkness and hunger and thirst. The buzzer did not sound because Rikud had silenced it forever. And no one went to eat or drink. Rikud himself had fumbled through the blackness and the whimpering to the dining room, his tongue dry and swollen, but the smooth belt that flowed with water and with savory dishes did not run any more. The machinery, Rikud realized, also was responsible for food. Chuls said, over and over, 'I'm hungry." "We will eat and we will drink when the buzzer tells us," Wilm replied confidently. "It won't any more," Rikud said. 'What won't?" "The buzzer will never sound again. I broke it." Crifer growled. "I know. You shouldn't have done it. That was a bad thing you did, Rikud." "It was not bad. The world has moved through the blackness and the stars and now we should go outside to live in the big garden there beyond the viewport." "That's ridiculous," Chuls said. Even Crifer now was angry at Rikud. "He broke the buzzer and no one can eat. I hate Rikud, I think" There was a lot of noise in the darkness, and someone else said, "I hate Rikud." Then everyone was saying it. Rikud was sad. Soon he would die, because no one would go outside with him and he could not go outside alone. In five more years he would have had a woman, too. He wondered if it was dark and hungry in the women's quarters. Did women eat? Perhaps they ate plants. Once, in the garden, Rikud had broken off a frond and tasted it. It had been bitter, but not unpleasant. Maybe the plants in the viewport would even be better. "We will not be hungry if we go outside," he said. "We can eat there." "We can eat if the buzzer sounds, but it is broken," Chuls said dully. Crifer shrilled, "Maybe it is only variable and will buzz again." "No," Rikud assured him. "It won't." "Then you broke it and I hate you," said Crifer. "We should break you, too, to show you how it is to be broken." "We must go outside -- through the viewport." Rikud listened to the odd gurgling sound his stomach made. A hand reached out in the darkness and grabbed at his head. He heard Crifer's voice. 'I have Rikud's head." The voice was nasty, hostile. Crifer, more than anyone, had been his friend. But now that he had broken the machinery, Crifer was his enemy, because Crifer came nearer to understanding the situation than anyone except Rikud. The hand reached out again, and it struck Rikud hard across the face. T hit him! I hit him! Other hands reached out, and Rikud stumbled. He fell and then someone was on top of him, and he struggled. He rolled and was up again, and he did not like the sound of the angry voices. Someone said, "Let us do to Rikud what he said he did to the machinery. Rikud ran. In the darkness, his feet prodded many bodies. There were those who were too weak to rise. Rikud, too, felt a vstrange light-headedness and a gnawing hurt in his stomach. But it didn't matter. He heard the angry voices and the feet pounding behind him, and #  he wanted only to get away. It was dark and he was hungry and everyone who was strong enough to run was chasing him, but every time he thought of the garden outside, and how big it was, the darkness and the hunger and the people chasing him were unimportant. It was so big that it would swallow him up completely ond positively. He became sickly giddy thinking about it. But if he didn't open the door and go into the garden outside, he would die because he had no food and no water and his stomach gurgled and grumbled and L hurt. And everyone was chasing him. He stumbled through the dark, ness and felt his way back to the library, through the inner door and into the room with the voice -- but the voice didn't speak this time -- through its door and into the place of machinery. Behind him, he could hear the voices at the first door, and he thought for a moment that no one would come after him. But he heard Crifer yell something, and then feet pounding in the passage. Rikud tripped over something and sprawled awkwardly across the floor. He felt a sharp hurt in his head, and when he reached up to touch it with, his hands there in the darkness, his fingers came i away wet. He got up slowly and opened the next door. The voices behind him were closer now ; Light streamed in through the viewport. After the darkness, it 'frightened Rikud and it made his  eyes smart, and he could hear those behind him retreating to a safe distance. But their voices were not far away, and he knew they would come after him because they Wanted to break him. Rikud looked out upon the garden and he trembled. Out there was life. The garden stretched off in unthinkable immensity to the cluster of low mounds against the bright blue which roofed the many plants. If plants could live out there as they did within the world, then so could people. Rikud and his people should. This was why the world had moved across the darkness and the stars for all Rikud's lifetime and more. But he was afraid. " He reached up and grasped the handle of the door and he saw that his fingers were red with the wetness which had come from his hurt head. Slowly he slipped to the cool floor -- how his head was burning!' -- and for a long time he lay there, thinking he would never rise again. Inside he heard the voices again, and soon a foot and then another pounded on the metal of the passage. He heard Crifer's voice louder than the rest: "There is Rikud on the floor!" Tugging at the handle of the door, Rikud pulled himself upright. Something small and brown scurried across the other side of the viewport and Rikud imagined it turned to look at him with two hideous red eyes. Rikud screamed and hurtled back through the corridor, and his face was so terrible in the light, streaming in through the viewport that everyone fled before him. He stumbled again in the place of the machinery, and down on his hands and knees he fondled the bits of metal which he could see in the dim light through the open door. "Where's the buzzer?" he sobbed. "I must find the buzzer." Crifer's voice, from the darkness inside, said, "You broke it. You broke it. And now we will break you -- " Rikud got up and ran. He reached the door again and then he slipped down against it, exhausted. Behind him, the voices and the footsteps came, and soon he saw Crifer's head peer in through the passageway. Then there were others, and then they were walking toward him. His head whirled and the viewport seemed to swim in a haze. Could it be variable, as Crifer had suggested? He wondered if the scurrying brown thing waited somewhere, and nausea struck at the pit of his stomach. But if the plants could live out there and the scurrying thing could live and that was why the world had moved through the blackness, then so could he live out there, and Crifer and all the others... So tightly did he grip the handle that his fingers began to hurt. And his heart pounded hard and he felt the pulses leaping on either side of his neck. He stared out into the garden, and off into the distance, where the blue-white globe which might have been a star stood just above the row of mounds.'trying to pull him away from the door, and someone was grabbing at his legs, trying to make him fall. He kicked out and the hands let go, and then he turned the handle and shoved the weight of his body with all his strength against the door. It opened and he stepped outside into the warmth. The air was fresh, fresher than any air Rikud had ever breathed. He walked around aimlessly, touching the plants and bending down to feel the floor, and sometimes he looked at the bluewhite globe on the horizon. It was all very beautiful. Near the ship, water that did  not come from a machine gurgled across the land, and Rikud lay down and drank. It was cool and good, and when he got up, Crifer and Wilm were outside the world, and some of the others followed. They stood around for a long time before going to the water to drink. v Rikud sat down and tore off a piece of a plant, munching on it. It was good. Crifer picked his head up from the water, his chin wet. "Even feelings are variable. I don't hate you now, Rikud." Rikud smiled, staring at the ship. "People are variable, too, Crifer. That is, if those creatures coming from the ship are people." "They're women," said Crifer. They were # strangely shaped in some ways, and yet in others completely human, and their voices were high, like singing. Rikud found them oddly exciting. He liked them. He liked the garden, for all its hugeness. With so many people, and especially now with women, he was not afraid. It was much better than the small world of machinery, buzzer, frightening doors and women by appointment only. Rikud felt at home. # -- if you was a U P to the very last minute, I can't imagine that Moklin is going to be the the first planet that humans get off of. moving fast, breathing hard, and sweating awful copious. There ain't any reason for it. Humans have been on Moklin for more than forty years, and nobody ever figures there is anything the least bit wrong until Brooks works it out. When he #  You'd love Earthmen to pieces, for they may look pretty bad to themselves, but does, nobody can believe it. But it turns out bad. Plenty bad. But maybe things are working out all right now. Maybe! I hope so. At first, even after he's sent off long reports by six ships in a row, I don't see the picture beginning to turn sour. I don't get it until after the old Palmyra comes andsquats down on the next to the last trip a Company; IS ship is ever going to make to Moklin. Up to that very morning everything is serene, and that morning I am sitting on the trading post porch, not doing a thing but sitting there and breathing happy. I'm looking at a Moklin kid. She's about the size of. a human six-year-old and she is playing in a mud puddle while her folks are trading in the post. She is a cute kid -- mighty human-looking. She has long whiskers like Old Man Bland, who's the first human to open a trading post and learn to talk to Moklins. Moklins think a lot of Old Man Bland. They build him a big tomb, Moklin-style, when he dies, and there is more Moklin kids born with long whiskers than you can shake a stick at. And everything looks okay. Everything!  Sitting there on the porch, I hear a Moklin talking inside the trade room. Talking English just as good as anybody. He says to Deeth, our Moklin trade-clerk, "But Deeth, I can buy this cheaper over at the other trading post! Why should I pay more here?" Deeth says, in English too, "I can't help that. That's the price here. You pay it or you don't. That's all." I just sit there breathing complacent, thinking how good things are. Here I'm Joe Brinkley, and me and Brooks are the Company on Moklin -- only humans rate as Company employees and get pensions, of course -- and I'm thinking sentimental about how much humaner Moklins are getting every day and how swell everything is. The six-yearold kid gets up out of the mud puddle, and wrings out her whiskers -- they are exactly like the ones on the picture of Old Man Bland in the trade room -- and she goes trotting off down the road after her folks. She is mighty human-looking, that one. The wild ones don't look near so human. Those that live in the forest are greenish, and have saucer eyes, and their noses can wiggle like an Earth rabbit. You wouldn't think they're the same breed as the trading post Moklins at all, but they are. They crossbreed with each other, only the kids look humaner than their parents and are mighty near the same skin color as Earthmen, which is plenty natural when you think about it, but nobody does. Not up to then. I don't think about that then, or anything else. Not even about the reports Brooks keeps sweating over and sending off with every Company ship. I am just sitting there contented when I notice that Sally, the tree that shades the trading post porch, starts pulling up her roots. She gets them coiled careful and starts marching off. I see the other trees are moving off, too, clearing the landing field. They're waddling away to leave a free space, and they're pushing and shoving, trying to crowd each other, and the little ones sneak under the big opes and they all act peevish. Somehow they know a ship is coming in. That's what their walking off means, anyhow. But there ain't a ship due in for a month, yet. They're clearing the landing field, though, so I start listening for a ship's drive, even if I don't believe it. At first I don't hear a thing. It must be ten minutes before I hear a thin whistle, and right after it the heavy drone that's the groundrepulsor units pushing against bedrock underground. Lucky they don't push on wet stuff, or a ship would sure mess up the local countryside! I get off my chair and go out to look. Sure enough, the old Palmyra comes bulging down out of the sky, a month ahead of schedule, and the trees over at the edge of the field shove each other all .round to make room. The ship drops, hangs anxious ten feet up, and then kind of sighs and lets down. Then there's Moklins running out of everywhere, waving cordial. They sure do like humans, these Moklins! Humans are their idea of what people should be like! Moklins will wrestle the freight over to the trading post while others are climbing over everything that's waiting to off, all set to pass it up to the ship and hoping to spot friends they've made in the crew. If they can get a human to go home with them and visit while the ship is down, they brag about it for weeks. And do they treat their guests swell! They got fancy Moklin clothes for them to wear -- soft, silky guest garments -- and they got Moklin fruits and Moklin drinks -- you ought to taste them! And when the humans have to go back to the' ship at takeoff time, the Moklins bring them back with flower wreaths all over them. Humans is tops on Moklin. And Moklins get humaner every day. There's Deeth, our clerk. You couldn't hardly tell him from .human, anyways. He looks like a human named Casey that used to be at the trading post, and he's got a flock of brothers and sisters as human-looking as he is. You'd swear -- But this is the last time but one that a Earth ship is going to land on Moklin, though nobody knows it yet. Her passenger port opens up and Captain Haney gets out. The Moklins yell cheerful when they see him. He waves a hand and helps a human girl out. She has red hair and a sort of businesslike air about her. The Moklins wave and holler and grin. The girl looks at them funny, and Cap Haney explains something, but she sets her lips. Then the Moklins run out a freighttruck, and Haney and the girl get on it, and they come racing over to the post, the Moklins pushing and pulling them and making a big fuss of laughing and hollering -- all so friendly, it would make anybody feel good inside. Moklins like humans! They admire them tremendous! They do everything they can think of to be human, and they're smart, but sometimes I getcold shivers when I think how close a thing it turns out to be. Cap Haney steps off the freight-truck and helps the girl down. Her eyes are blazing. She is the maddest-looking female I ever see, but pretty as they make them, with that red hair and those blue eyes staring at me hostile. "Hiya, Joe," says Cap Haney. 'Where's Brooks?" I tell him. Brooks is poking around in the mountains up back of the post. He is jumpy and worried and peevish, and he acts like he's trying to find something that ain't there, but he's bound he's going to find it regardless. t '"Too bad he's not here," says Haney. He turns to the girl. "This is Joe Brinkley," he says. "He's Brooks' assistant. And, Joe, this is Inspector Caldwell -- Miss Caldwell." "Inspector will do," says the girl, cilft. She looks at me accusing. "I'm here to check into this matter of a competitive trading post on Moklin." "Oh," I says. "That's bad busi-, ness. But it ain't cut into our trade much. In fact, I don't think it's cut our trade at all." "Get my baggage ashore, Captain," says Inspector Caldwell, imperious. "Then you can go about your business. I'll stay here until you stop on your return trip." I call, "Hey, Deeth!" But he's right behind me. He looks respectful and admiring at the girl. You'd swear he's human! He's the spit and image of Casey, who used to be on Moklin until six years back. "Yes, sir," says Deeth. He says to the girl, "Yes, ma'am. I'll show you your quarters, ma'arn, and your baggage will get there right away. This way, ma'am." He leads her off, but he don't have to send for her baggage. A pack of Moklins come along, dragging it, hopeful of having her say "Thank you" to them for it. There hasn't ever been a human woman on Moklin before, and they are all excited. I bet if there had been women around before, there'd have been hell loose before, too. But now the Moklins just hang around, admiring. There are kids with whiskers like Old Man Bland, and other kids with mustaches -- male and female both -- and all that sort of stuff. I'm pointing out to Cap Haney some kids that bear a remarkable resemblance to him and he's saying, "Well, what do you know!" when Inspector Caldwell comes back. "What are you waiting for, Captain?" she asks, frosty. "The ship usually grounds a few hours," I explain. "These Moklins are such friendly critters, we figure it makes good Will for the trading post for the crew to be friendly with 'em." "I doubt," says Inspector Caldwell, her voice dripping icicles, "that I shall advise that that custom be continued." Cap Haney shrugs his shoulders and. goes off, so I know Inspector Caldwell is high up in the Company. She ain't old, maybe in her middle twenties, I'd say, but the Caldwell family practically owns the Company, and all the nephews and cousins and so on get put into a special school so they can go to work in the family firm. They get taught pretty good, and most of them really rate the good jobs they get. Anyhow, there's plenty of good jobs The Company runs twenty or thirty solar systems and it's run pretty tight. Being a Caldwell means you get breaks, but you got to live up to them. Cap Haney almost has to fight his way through the Moklins who want to give him flowers and fruits and such. Moklins are sure crazy about humans! He gets to the entry port and goes in, and the door closes and the Moklins pull back. Then the Palmyra booms. The gtound-repulsor unit is on. She heaves up, like she is grunting, and goes bulging up into the air, and the humming gets deeper and deeper, and fainter and fainter -- and suddenly; there's a keen whistling and she's gone. It's all very normal. Nobody would guess that this is the last time but one a Earth ship will ever lift off Moklin! Inspector Caldwell taps her foot, icy. "When will you send for Mr. Brooks?" she demands. "Right away," I says to her, "Deeth -- " "I sent a runner for him, ma'am," says Deeth. "If he was in hearing of the ship's landing, he may be on the way here now." He bows and goes in the trade room. There are Moklins that came to see the ship land, and now have tramped over to do some trading. Inspector Caldwell jumps. tf "Whwhat's that?" she asks, . tense. The trees that crowded off the field to make room for the Palmyra are waddling back. I realize for the first time that it might look funny to somebody just landed on Moklin. They are regular-looking trees, in a way. They got bark and branches and so on. Only they can put their roots down into holes they make in the ground, and that's the way they stay, mostly. But they can move. Wild ones, when there's a water shortage or they get too crowded or mad with each other, they pull up their roots and go waddling around looking for a better place to take root in. The trees on our landing field have learned that every so often a ship is going to land and they've got to make room for it. But now the ship is gone, and they're lurching back to their places. The younger ones are waddling faster than the big ones, though, and taking the best places, and the old grunting trees are waving their branches indignant and puffing after them mad as hell. I explain what is happening. Inspector Caldwell just stares. Then Sally comes lumbering up. I got a friendly feeling for Satly. She's pretty old -- her trunk is all of three feet thick -- but she always puts out a branch to shade my window in the morning, and #  I never let any other tree take her place. She comes groaning up, and uncoils her roots, and sticks them down one by one into the holes she'd left, and sort of scrunches into place and looks peaceful. "Aren't they -- dangerous?' I asks Inspector Caldwell, pretty uneasy. "Not a bit," I says. "Things can change on Moklin. They don't have to fight. Things fight in other places because they can't change and they get crowded, and that's the only way they can meet competition. But there's a special kind of evolution on Moklin. Cooperative, you might call it. It's a nice place to live. Only thing is everything matures so fast. Four years and a Moklin is grown up, for instance." She sniffs. "What about that other trading post?" she says, sharp. "Who's back of it? The Company is supposed to have exclusive trading rights here. Who's trespassing?" "'Brooks is trying to find out," I says. "They got a good complete line of trade goods, but the Moklins always say the humans running the place have gone off somewhere, hunting and such. We ain't seen any of them." "No?" says the girl, short. "' see them! We can't have competition in our exclusive territory! The rest of Mr. Brooks' reports -- " She stops. Then she says, "That clerk of yours reminds me of someone I know." "He's a Moklin," I explain, "blit he looks like a Company man named Casey. Casey's Area Director over on Khatim Two now, but he used to be here, and Deeth is the spit and image of him." "Outrageous!" says Inspector Caldwell, looking disgusted. There's a couple of trees pushing hard at each other. They are fighting, tree-fashion, for a specially good place. And there's others waddling around, mad as hell, because somebody else beat them to the spots they liked. I watch them. Then I grin, because a couple of young trees duck under the fighting big ones and set their roots down in the place the big trees was fighting over. "I don't like your attitude!" says Inspector Caldwell, furious. She goes stamping into the post, leaving me puzzled. What's wrong with me smiling at those kid trees getting the best of their betters? back, marching ahead of a pack of woodsMoklins with greenish skins and saucer eyes that've been guiding him around. He's a good-looking kind of fellow, Brooks is, with a good build and a solid jaw. When he comes out of the woods on the landing field -- the trees are all settled down by then -- he's striding impatient and loose-jointed. With the woods Moklins trailing him, he looks plenty dramatic, like a visi-reel picture of a explorer on some unknown planet, coming back from the dark and perilous forests, followed by the strange natives who do not yet know whether this visitor from outer space is a god or what. You know the stuff. I see Inspector Caldwell take a good look at him, and I see her eyes widen. She looks like he is a shock, and not a painful one. He blinks when he sees her. He grunts, "What's tliis? A sheMoklin?" Inspector Caldwell draws herself up to her full five-foot-three. She bristles. I say quick, "This here is Inspector Caldwell that the Palmyra dumped off here today. Uh -- Inspector, this is Brooks, the Head Trader." They shake hands. He looks at her and says, "I'd lost hope my reports would ever get any attention paid to them. You've come to check my report that the trading post on Moklin has to be abandoned?" "I have not!" says Inspector Caldwell, sharp. "That's absurd! This planet has great potentialities, this post is profitable and the natives are friendly, and the trade should continue to increase. The Board is even considering the introduction of special crops." That strikes me as a bright idea. I'd like to see what would happen if Moklins started cultivating hew kinds of plants! It would be a thing to watch -- with regular Moklin plants seeing strangers getting good growing places and special attention! I can't even guess what'll happen, but I want to watch! "What I want to ask right off," says Inspector Caldwell, fierce, "is why you have allowed a competitive trading post to be established, why you did not report it sooner, and why you haven't identified the company back of it?" Brooks stares at her. He gets mad. "Hell!" he says. "My reports cover all that! Haven't you read them?" "Of course not," says Inspector Caldwell. "I was given an outline of the situation here and told to investigate and correct it." "Oh!" says Brooks. "That's it!" Then he looks like he's swallowing naughty words. It is funny to see them glare at each other, both of them looking like they are seeing something that interests them plenty, but throwing off angry sparks just the same. "If you'll show me samples of their trade goods," says Inspector Caldwell, arrogant, "and I hope you can do that much, I'll identify the trading company handling them!" He grins at her without amusement and leads the way to the inside of the trading post. We bring out the stuff we've had some of our Moklins go over and buy for us. Brooks dumps the goods on a table and stands back to see what she'll make of them, grinning with the same lack of mirth. She picks up a visi-reel projector. "Hmm," she says, scornful. "Not very good quality. It's... Then she stops. She picks up a forest knife. "This," she says, "is a product of -- " Then she stops again. She picks up some cloth and fingers it. 'She really steams. "I see!" she says, angry. "Because we have been on this planet so long and the Moklins are used to our goods, the people of the other trading post duplicate them! Do they cut prices?" "Fifty per cent," says Brooks. I. chime in, "But we ain't lost much trade. Lots of Moklins still trade with us, out of friendship. Friendly folks, these Moklins." Just then Deeth comes in, looking just like Casey that used to be here on Moklin. He grins at me. "A girl just brought you a compliment," he lets me know. "Shucks!" I says, embarrassed and pleased. "Send her in and get a present for her' Deeth goes out. Inspector Caldwell hasn't noticed. She's seething over that other trading company copying our trade goods and underselling us on a planet we're supposed to have exclusive. Brooks looks at her grim. "I shall look over their post, she announces, fierce, "and if they want a trade war, they'll get one! We can cut prices if we need to -- we have all the resources of the Company behind us!" Brooks seems to be steaming on his own, maybe because she hasn't read his reports. But just then a Moklin girl comes in. Not bad-looking, either. You can see she is a Moklin -- she ain't as convincing human as Deeth is, say -- but she looks pretty human, at that. She giggles at me. "Compliment," she says, and shows me what she's carrying. I look. It's a Moklin kid. a boy, just about brand-new. And it has my shape ears, and its nose looks like somebody had stepped on it -- my nose is that way -- and it looks like a very smaJl-sized working model of me. I chuck it under the chin and say, "Kitchycoo!" It gurgles at me. "What's your name?" I ask the girl. She tells me. I don't remember S# w it, and I don't remember ever seeing her before, but she's paid me a compliment, all right -- Moklinstyle. "Mighty nice," I say. "Cute as all gct-out. I hope he grows up to have more sense than I got, though." Then Deeth comes in with a armload of trade stuff like Old Man Bland gave to the first Moklin kid that was born with long whiskers like his, and I say, "Thanks for the compliment. I am greatly honored." She takes the stuff and giggles again, and goes out. The kid beams at me over her shoulder and waves its fist. Mighty humanlike. A right cute kid, any way you look at it. Then I hear a noise. Inspector Caldwell is regarding me with loathing in her eyes. "Did you say they were friendly creatures?" she asks, bittei". "I think affectionate would be a better word!" Her voice shakes. "You are going to be transferred out of here the instant the Palmyra gets back!" "What's the matter?" I ask, surprised. "She paid me a compliment and I gave her a present. It's a custom. She's satisfied. I never see her before that I remember." "You don't?" she says. "The -- the callousness ! You're revolting!" j Brooks begins to sputter, theft he snickers, and all of a sudden he's howling with laughter. He is laughing at Inspector Caldwell. Then I get it, and I snort. Then I hoot and holler. It gets funnier when she gets madder still. She near blws up from being mad! We must look crazy, the two of us there in the post, just hollering with laughter while she gets furiouser and furiouser. Finally I have to lay down on the floor to laugh more comfortable. You see, she doesn't get a bit of what I've told her about there being a special kind of evolution on Moklin. The more disgusted and furious she looks at me, the harder I have to laugh. I can't help it trading post next day, the atmosphere ain't what you'd call exactly cordial. There is just the Inspector and me, with Deeth and a couple of other Moklins for the look of things. She has on a green forest suit, and with her red hair she sure looks good! But she looks at me cold when Brooks says I'll take her over to the other post, and she doesn't say a word the first mile or two. We trudge on, and presently Deeth and the others get ahead so they can't hear what she says. And she remarks indignant, "I must say Mr. Brooks isn't very cooperative. Why didn't he come with me? Is he afraid of the men at the other post?" "Not him," I says. "He's a good guy. But you got authority over him and you ain't read his reports."  "If I have authority," she says, sharp, "I assure you it's because I'm competent!" "I don't doubt it," I says. "If you wasn't cute, he wouldn't care. But a man don't want a goodlooking girl giving him orders. He wants to give them to her. A homely woman, it don't matter." S HE tosses her head, but it don't displease her. Then she says, "What's in the reports that I should have read?" "I don't know," I admit. "But he's been sweating over them. It makes him mad that nobody bothered to read 'em." "Maybe," she guesses, "it was what I need to know about this other trading post. What do you know about it, Mr. Brinkley?" I tell her what Deeth has told Brooks. Brooks found out about it because one day some Moklins come in to trade and ask friendly why we charge so much for this and that. Deeth told them we'd always charged that, and they say the other trading post sells things cheaper, and Deeth says what trading post? So they up and tell him there's another post that sells the same kind of things we do, only cheaper. But that's all they'll say. So Brooks tells Deeth to find out, and he scouts around and comes back. There is another trading post only fifteen miles away, and it is selling stuff just like ours. And it charges only half price. Deeth didn't see the men -- just the Moklin clerks. We ain't been able to see the men either. "Why haven't you seen the men?" "Every time Brooks or me go over," I explain, "the Moklins they got working for them say the other men are off somewhere. Maybe the're starting some more posts. We wrote 'em a note, asking what the hell they mean, but they never answered it. Of course, we ain't seen their books or their living quarters -- " "You could find out plenty by a glimpse at their books!" she snaps. "Why haven't you just marched in and made the Moklins show you what you want to know, since the men were away?" "Because," I says, patient, "Moklins imitate humans. If we start trouble, they'll start it too. We can't set a example of rough stuff like burglary, mayhem, breaking and entering, manslaughter, or bigamy, or those Moklins will do just like us." "Bigamy!" She grabs on that sardonic. "If. you're trying to  tnake me think you've got enough moral sense -- " I get a little mad. Brooks and me, we've explained to her, careful, how it is admiration and the way evolution works on Moklin that makes Moklin kids get born with long whiskers and that the compliment the Moklin girl has paid me is just exactly that. But she hasn't listened to a word. "Miss Caldwell," I says, . "Brooks and me told you the facts. We tried to tell them delicate, to spare your feelings. Now if you'll try to spare mine, I'll thank you." "If you mean your finer feelings," she says, sarcastic, "I'll spare them as soon as I find some!" So I shut up. There's no use trying to argue with a woman. We tramp on through the forest without a word. Presently we come on a nestbush. It's a pretty big one. There are a couple dozen nests on it, from the littlebitty bud ones no bigger than your fist, to the big ripe ones lined with soft stuff that have busted open and have got cacklebirds housekeeping in them now. There are two cacklebirds sitting on a branch by the nest that is big enough to open up and have eggs laid in it, only it ain't. ,The cacklebirds are making noises like they are cussing it and telling it to hurry up and open, because they arc in a hurry. "That's a nestbush," I says. "It grows nests for the cacklebirds. The birds -- uh -- fertilize the ground around it. They're sloppy feeders and drop a lot of stuff tlt rots and is fertilizer too. The nestbush and the cacklebirds kind of cooperate. That's the way evolution works on Moklin, like Brooks and me told you." She tosses that red head of hers and stamps on, not saying a word. So we get to the other trading post. And there she gets one of these slow-burning, longlasting mads on that fill a guy like me with awe. There's only Moktins at the other trading post, as usual. They say the humans are off somewhere. They look at her admiring and polite. They show her their stock. It is practically identical with ours -- only they admit that they've sold out of some items because their prices are low. They act most respectful and pleased to see her. But she don't learn a thing about where their stuff comes from or what company is horning in on Moklin trade. And she looks at their head clerk and she burns and burns. is sweating over memorandums he has made, getting another report ready for the next Company ship. Inspector Caldwell marches into the trade room and gives orders in a controlled, venomous voice. Then she marches right in on Brooks. "I have just ordered the MokIin sales force to cut the price on all items on sale by seventy-five per cent," she says, her voice trembling a lflftle with fury. "I have also ordered the credit given for Moklin trade goods to be doubled. They want a trade war? They'll get it!" S HE is a lot madder than business would account for. Brooks says, tired, Td like to show you some facts. I've been over every inch of territory in thirty miles, looking for a place where a ship could land for that other post. There isn't any. Does that mean anything to you?" "The post is there, isn't it?" she says. "And they have trade goods, haven't they? And we have exclusive trading rights on Moklin, haven't we? That's enough for me. Our job is to drive them out of business!" But she is a lot madder than business would account for. Brooks says, very weary, "There's nearly a whole planet where they could have put another trading post. They could have set up shop on the other hemisphere and charged any price they pleased. But they set up shop right next to us! Does that make sense?" "Setting up close," she says, "would furnish them with customers already used to human trade goods. And it furnished them with Moklins trained to be interpreters and clerks! And -- " Then it come out, what she's raging, boiling, steaming, burning up about. "And," she says, furious, "it furnished them with a Moklin head-clerk who is a very handsome young man, Mr. Brooks! He not only resembles you in every feature, but he even has a good many of your mannerisms. You should be very proud!" With this she slams out of the room. Brooks blinks. "She won't believe anything," he says, sour, "except only that man is vile. Is that true about a Moklin who looks like me?" I nod. "Funny his folks never showed him to me for a complimentpresent!" Then he stares at me, hard. "How good is the likeness?" "If he is wearing your clothes," I tell him, truthful, "I'dwear he is you." Then Brooks -- slow, very slow -- turns white. "Remember the time you went off with Deeth and his folks, hunting? That was the time a Moklin got killed. You were wearing guest garments, weren't you?" I feel queer inside, but I nod. Guest garments, for Moklins, are like the best bedroom and the drumstick of the chicken among humans. And a Moklin hunting party is something. They go hunting garlikthos, which you might as well call dragons, because they've got scales and they fly and they are tough babies. The way to hunt them is you take along some cacklebirds that ain't nesting -- they are no good for anything while they're honeymooning -- and the cacklebirds go flapping around until a garlikthos comes after them, and then they go jet-streaking to where the hunters are, cackling a blue streak to say, "Here I come, boys! Hold everything until I get past!" Then the garlikthos dives after them and the hunters get it as it dives. You give the cacklebirds its innards, and they sit around and eat, cackling to each other, zestful, like they're bragging ?bout the oAe times they done the same thing, only better. "You were wearing guest garments?" repeats Brooks, grim. I feel very queer inside, but I nod again. Moklin guest garments are mighty easy on the skin and feel mighty good. They ain't exactly practical hunting clothes, but the Moklins feel bad if a human that's their guest don't wear them. And of course he has to shed his human clothes to wear them. "What's the idea?" I want to know. But I feel pretty unhappy inside. "You didn't come back for one day, in the middle of the hunt, after tobacco and a bath?" "No," I says, beginning to get rattled. "We were way over at the Thunlib Hills. We buried the dead Moklin over there and had a hell of a time building a tomb over him. Why?" "During that week," says Brooks, grim, "and while you were off wearing Moklin guest garments, somebody came back wearing your clothes -- and got some tobacco and passed the time of day and went off again. Joe, just like there's a Moklin you say could pass for me, there's one that could pass for you. In fact, he did. Nobody suspected either. I get panicky. "But what'd he do that for?" I want to know. "He didn't steal anything! Would he have done it just to brag to the other Moklins that he fooled you?" "He might," says Brooks, "have been checking to see if he could fool me. Or Captain Haney of the Palmyra. Or -- " He looks at me. I feel myself going numb. This can mean one hell of a mess! "I haven't told you before,' says Brooks, "but I've been guessing at something like this. Moklins like to be human, and they get human kids -- kids that look human, anyway. Maybe they can want to be smart like humans, and they are." He tries to grin, and can't. "That rival trading post looked fishy to me right at the start. They're practicing with that. It shouldn't be there at all, but it is. You see?" I feel weak and sick all over. This is a dangerous sort of thing! But I say quick, "If you mean they got Moklins that could pass for you and me, and they're figuring to bump us off and take our places -- I don't believe that! Moklins . like humans! They wouldn't harm humans for anything " Brooks don't pay any attention. He says, harsh, "I've been trying to persuade the Company that we've got to get out of here, fast! And they send this Inspector Caldwell, who's not only female, but a redhead to boot! All they think about is a competitive trading post! And all she sees is that we're a bunch of lascivious scoundrels, and since she's a woman there's nothing that'll convince her otherwise!" Then something hits me. It looks hopeful. "She's the first human woman to land on Moklin. And she has got red hair. It's the first red hair the Moklins ever saw. Have we got time?" He figures. Then he says, "With luck, it ought to turn up! You've hit it!" And then his expression sort of softens. "If that happens -- poor kid, she's going to take it hard! Women hate to be wrong. Especially redheads! But that might be the saving of -- of humanity, when you think of it." I blink at him. He goes on, fierce, "Look, I'm no Moklin! You kWow that. But if there's a Moklin that looks enough like me to take my place... You see? We got to think of Inspector Caldwell, anyhow. If you ever sec me cross my fingers, you wiggle your little finger. Then I l#low it's you. And the other way about. Get it? You swear you'll watch oVer Inspector Caldwell?" "Sure!" I say. "Of course!" I wiggle my little finger. He crosses his. It's a signal nobody but us two would know. I feel a lot better. ing, grim, to visit the other trading post and see the Moklin that looks so much like him. Inspector Caldwell goes along, fierce, and I'm guessing it's to see the fireworks when Brooks sees his Moklin double that she thinks is more than a coincidence. Which she is right, only not in the way she thinks. Before they go, Brooks crosses his fingers and looks at me significant. I wiggle my little finger back at him. They go off. I sit down in the shade of Sally and try to think things out. I too am all churned up inside, and scared as hell. It's near two weeks to landing time, when the old Palmyra ought to come bulging down out of the sky with a load of new trade goods. I think wistful about how swell everything has been on Moklin up to now, and how Moklins admire humans, and how friendly everything has been, and how it's a great compliment for Moklins to want to be like humans, and to get like them, and how no Moklin would ever dream of hurting a human and how they imitate humans joyous and reverent and happy. Nice people, Moklins. But -- The end of things is in sight. Liking humans has made Moklins smart, but now there's been a slip-up. Moklins will do anything to produce kids that look like humans. That's a compliment. But no human ever sees a Moklin that's four or five years old and all grown up and looks so much like him that nobody can tell them apart. That ain't scheming. It's just that Moklins like humans, but they're scared the humans might not like to see themselves in a sort of Moklin mirror. So if they did that at all, they'd maybe keep it a secret, like children keep secrets from grownups. Moklins are a lot like kids. You can't help liking them. But a human can get plenty panicky if he thinks what would happen if Moklins get to passing for humans among humans, and want their kids to have top-grade brains, and top-grade talents, and so on... I sweat, sitting there. I can see the whole picture. Brooks is worrying about Moklins loose among humans, outsmarting them as their kids grow up, being the big politicians, the bosses, the planetary pioneers, the prettiest girls and the handsomest guys in the Galaxy -- everything humans want to be themselves. Just thinking about it is enough to make any human feel like he's going nuts. But Brooks is , also worrying about Inspector Caldwell, who is five foot three and red-headed and cute as a bug's ear and riding for a bad fall. They come back from the trip to the other trading post. Inspector Caldwell is baffled and mad. Brooks is sweating and scared. He slips me the signal and I wiggle my little finger back at him, just so I'll know he didn't get substituted for without Inspector Caldwell knowing it, and so he knows nothing happened to me while he was gone. They didn't see the Moklin that looks like Brooks. They didn't get a bit of information we didn't have before -- which is just about none at all.  Things go on. Brooks and me are sweating it out until the Palmyra lets down out of the sky again, meanwhile praying for Inspector Caldwell to get her ears pinned back so proper steps can be taken, and every morning he crosses his fingers at me, and I wiggle my little finger back at him... And he watches over Inspector Caldwell tender. T HE other trading post goes on placid. They sell their stuff at half the price we sell ours for. So, on Inspector Caldwell's orders, we cut ours again to half what they sell theirs for. So they sell theirs for half what we sell ours for, so we sell ours for half what they sell theirs for. And so on. Meanwhile we sweat. Three days before the Palmyra is due, our goods are marked at just exactly one per cent of what they was marked a month before, and the other trading post is selling them at half that. It looks like we are going to have to pay a bonus to Moklins to take goods away for us to compete with the other trading post. Otherwise, everything looks normal on the surface. Moklins hang around as usual, friendly and admiring. They'll hang around a couple days just to get a look at Inspector Caldwell, and they regard her respectful. Brooks looks grim. He is head over heels crazy about her now, and she knows it, and she rides him hard. She snaps at him, and he answers her patient and gentle -- because he knows that when what he hopes is going to happen, she is going to need him to comfort her. She has about wiped out our stock, throwing bargain sales. Our shelves are almost bare. But the other trading post still has plenty of stock. "Mr. Brooks," says Inspector Caldwell, bitter, at breakfast, "we'll have to take most of the Palmyra's cargo to fill up our inventory." "Maybe," he says, tender, "and maybe not." "But we've got to drive that other post out of business!" she says, desperate. Then she breaks down. "This -- this is my first independent assignment. I've got to handle it successfully!" He hesitates. But just then Deeth comes in. He beams friendly at Inspector Caldwell. "A compliment for you, ma'am. Three of them." She goggles at him. Brooks says, gentle, "It's all right. Deeth, show them in and get some presents." Inspector Caldwell splutters incredulous, "But -- but -- " "Don't be angry," says Brooks. "They mean it as a compliment It is, actually, you know." Three Moklin girls come in. giggling. They are not bad-looking at all. They look as human as Deeth, but one of them has a long, droopy mustache like a mate of the Palmyra -- that's because they hadn't ever seen a human woman before Inspector Caldwell come along. They sure have admired her, though! And Moklin kids get born fast. Very fast. They show her what they are holding so proud and happy in their arms. They have got three little Moklin kids, one apiece. And every one of them has red hair, just like Inspector Caldwell, and every one of them is a girl that is the spit and image of her. You would swear they are human babies, and you'd swear they are hers. But of course they ain't. They make kid noises and wave their little fists. Inspector Caldwell is just plain paralyzed. She stares at them, and goes red as fire and white as chalk, and she is speechless. So Brooks has to do the honors. He admires the kids extravagant, and the Moklin girls giggle, and take the compliment presents Deeth brings in, and they go out happy. When the door closes, Inspector Caldwell wilts. "Oh-h!" she wails. "It's true! You didn't -- you haven't -- they can make their babies look like anybody they want!" Brooks puts his arms around her and she begins to cry against his shoulder. He pats her and says, "They've got a queer sort of evolution on Moklin, darling. Babies here inherit desired characteristics. Not acquired characteristics, but desired ones! And what could be more desirable than you?" I am blinking at them. He says to me, cold, "Will you kindly get the hell out of here and stay out?" I come to. I says, "Just one precaution." I wiggle my little finger. He crosses his fingers at me. "Then," I says, "since there's no chance of a mistake, I'll leave you two together." And I do. FTHE Palmyra booms down out of the sky two days later. We are all packed up. Inspector Caldwell is shaky, on the porch of the post, when Moklins come hollering and waving friendly over from the landing field pulling a freight-truck with Cap Haney on it. I see other festive groups around members of the crew that -- this being a scheduled stop -- have been given ship-leave for a couple hours to visit their Moklin friends. "I've got the usual cargo --  begins Cap Haney. "Don't discharge it," says Inspector Caldwell, firm. "We are W, abandoning this post. I have authority and Mr. Brooks has convinced me of the necessity for it. Please get our baggage to the ship." He gapes at her. "The Company don't like to give in to competition -- " "There isn't any competition," says Inspector Caldwell. She gulps. "Darling, you tell him," she says to Brooks. He says, lucid, "She's right, Captain. The other trading post is purely a Moklin enterprise. They like to do everything that humans do. Since humans were running a trading post, they opened one too. They bought goods from us and pretended to sell them at half price, and we cut our prices, and they bought more goods from us and pretended to sell at half the new prices... Some Moklin or other must've thought it would be nice to be a smart businessman, so his kids would be smart businessmen. Too smart! We close up this post before Moklins think of other things..." He means, of course, that if Moklins get loose from their home planet and pass as humans, their kids can maybe take over human civilization. Human nature couldn't take that! But it is something to be passed on to the high brass, and not told around general. "Better sound the emergency recall signal," says Inspector Caldwell, brisk. We go over to the ship and the Palmyra lets go that wailing siren that'll carry twenty miles. Any crc-w member in hearing is going to be#t it back to the ship fullspeed. They come running from every which way, where they been visiting their Moklin friends. And then, all of a sudden, here comes a fellow wearing Moklin guest garments, yelling, "Hey! Wait! I ain't got my clothes -- " And then there is what you might call a dead silence. Because lined up for checkoff is another guy that comes running at the recall signal, and he is wearing ship's clothes, and you can see that him and the guy in Moklin guest garments are just exactly alike. Twins. Identical. The spit and image of each other. And it is for sure that one of them is a Moklin. But which? Cap Haney's eyes start to pop out of his head. But then the guy in Palmyra uniform grins and says, "Okay, I'm a Moklin. But us Moklins like humans so much, I thought it would be nice to make a trip to Earth and see more humans. My parents planned it five years ago, made me look like this wonderful human, and hid me for this moment. But we would not want to make any difficulties for humans, so I have confessed and I will leave the ship." He takes it as a joke on him. He talks English as good as anybody. I don't know how anybody could tell which was the human guy and which one the Moklin, but this Moklin grins and steps down, and the other Moklins admire him enormous for passing even a few minutes as human among humans. We get away from there so fast, he is allowed to keep the human uniform.that humans ever get off of, moving fast, breathing hard, and sweating copious. It's one of those things that humans just can't take. Not that there's anything wrong with Moklins. They're swell folks. They like humans. But humans just can't take the idea of Moklins passing for human and being all the things humans want to be themselves. I think it's really a false alarm. I'll find out pretty soon. Inspector Caldwell and Brooks get married, and they go ?ff to a post on Briarius Four -- a swell place for a honeymoon if there ever was one -- and I guess they are living happy ever after. Me, I go to the new job the Company assigns me -- telling me stern not to talk about Moklin, which I don't -- and the Space Patrol orders no human ship to land on Moklin for any reason. But I've been saving money and worrying. I keep thinking of those three Moklin kids that Inspector Caldwell knows she ain't the father of. I worry about those kids. I hope nothing's happened to them. Moklin kids grow up fast, like I told you. They'll be just about grown now. I'll tell you. I've bought me a little private spacecruiser, small but good. I'm shoving off for Moklin next week. If one of those three ain't married. I'm going to marry her, Moklin-style, and bring her out to a human colony planet. We'll have some kids. I know just what I want my kids to be like. They'll have plenty of brains -- top-level brains -- and the girls will be real good-looking! But besides that, I've got to bring some other Moklins out and start them passing for human, too. Because my kids are going to need other Moklins to marry, ain't they? It's not that I don't like humans. I do! If the fellow I look like -- Joe Brinkley -- hadn't got killed accidental on that hunting trip with Deeth, I never would have thought of taking his place and being Joe Brinkley. But you can't blame me for wanting to live among humans. Wouldn't you, if you was a Moklin ? Like cops, astronomers usually aren't around when big things happen -- which may explain reports of Flying Saucers! wan, going east. They were, it was established later, some # miles above sea level and they moved, as became apparent afterward, with that velocity which mathematicians and physicists call the "circular velocity." At that velocity, the degree of curvaphere like a swarm of angry m i s s i I e s from the Moon. Just where they hit the atmosphere first is not known, but it must have been somewhere out over the Pacific Ocean. Then thev were seen over Saskateheturc of a ballistic trajectory is the same as the degree of curvature of the Earth's surface, so that the altitude above sea level does not change. Expressed in figures the circular velocity is a little less than five miles per second. If it were to happen today, there would be frantic phone calls to newspapers and to police stations about a missile attack, or flying saucers. But the date was the #th of February, #. It was seen from Saskatchan all the way across the Great Lakes to the Bermuda islands, and by ships out at sea beyond Bermuda. Unfortunately much of western New York State, Pennsylvania and Maryland happened to be covered by an unbroken overcast that evening. If the sky had been clear all along the path of the meteoric procession, it could have been seen by some the overcast, only #I observations could be put on record. All but six of them came from Canada and mostly from Ontario; one came from Michigan; one from New Jersey; two from Bermuda and two from ships at sea. T O the regret of all astronomers, not a member of the astronomical fraternity was a witness to the event. And only one of the witnesses used some optical aid: a high school boy in Trenton, N.J. had the good sense to run back int# his room to get an opera glass. The cloud, layer and the absence of trained observers handicapped the investigation of the phenomenon a good deal. But by collecting diligently everything that could be learned, Professor C. A. Chant of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada did succeed in putting a rather complete picture together. As seen in western Ontario, this is what happened : At about #:# on the evening in question, there suddenly appeared in the northwestern sky a fiery red body which quickly grew larger as it came nearer, and which wa# then seen to be followed by a long tail. Some observers state that the body wa# single, some that it was composed of two distinct parts, and others that there were three parts, all traveling together and each followed by a long tail. The front portion of the body appears to have been somewhat brighter than the rest, but the general color wra a fiery red or golden yellow. To some the tail seemed like the glare from the open door of a furnace; to othera it was like the illumination from a searchlight; to others like the stream of sparks blown away from a burning chimney by strong wind. Many of the observers said later that they thought at first that somebody had fired a large skyrocket, partly because of the color which reminded them of burning fireworks, partly because of the T# long tail, in which they believed they saw sparks. But a akyrocket lasts for just so long and then falls, while this fipy red body did not. Before the astonishment aroused by this first meteor had subsided, other bodies were seen coming from the northwest, emerging from precisely the same place as the first one. Onward they moved, at the same deliberate pace, in twos or threes or fours, with tails streaming behind, though not so long nor so bright as in the first case. They all traversed the same path and were heading for the same point in the southeastern sky. Gradually the bodies became smaller, until the last ones were but red sparks, some of which were snuffed out before they reached their destination. Several report that near the middle of the great procession was a fine large star without a tail, and that a similar body brought up the rear. To most observers the outstanding features of the phenomenon was the slow majestic motion of the bodies; and almost equally remarkable was the perfect formation which they retained. Many compared them to a fleet of airships, with lights on either side and forward and aft; but airmen will have to practice many years before they will be able to preserve such perfect order... While all witnesses agreed on the general picture, the date, the time and the direction of motion, there was considerable disagreement on the number of bodies. Most witnesses said "fifteen or twenty;" a number went higher, thinking that there must have been "between fifty and a hundred," while a few witnesses maintained that there had been "thousands." This, aside from the simple fact that some people have better eyes than others, depended on hou the counting was done. The very first body, for example, could have been counted as three by some, while most would probably count it as one, even though it seemed to consist of several parts. The most reliable statement is probably that of the pupil of Trenton High School, Cecil Carley, who used an opera glass. He wrote: "There were about ten groups in all and each group, as seen through the opera glass, consisted of from # to # meteors." While each observation was not very good -- from the professional point of view -- all together contained enough pertinent information to calculate a number of figures. Some of them have already been mentioned. Over Canada, the meteorites were # miles high and moved with a velocity of about five miles per second. The distance between the various groups in the procession must have varied from a minimum of about # miles to a maximum of about # miles. The total length of the meteoric procession, therefore, was about # miles. For any single observer in Canada, the fantastic display lasted # # between three and four minutes. Whenever natural phenomena are reported by chance witnesses, the things they don't say are very often as important as the things they do report. It is important in this case, for example, that not a single observer reported that a meteorite dropped out of the procession and fell to the ground. Some thought sparks were falling from the tails, and that is probably correct. But the main bodies stayed in place. Nor did any one of the Canadian observers report that the groups of the procession shifted while he was watching. Everyone saw the groups maintain their distance from each other. The sequence of the groups also did not change: a large golden red body (or bodies) first, then a number of smaller ones of similar appearance. a bright tailless body, then again some others, and small red ones last. But while the procession traversed the cloudcovered eastern United States, a change did take place. The reports from Bermuda leave no doubt, as far as time of appearance and direction of travel were concerned, that the same meteoric procession was seen. But the description of the appearance differs markedly from the Canadian reports. The large tailless body was now in the lead and was emitting sparks. The others followed after it and were apparently not quite as bright any more. There is, as we now know from high altitude rocket work, very little air resistance at a height of # miles. But over a distance such as the one from Toronto to Bermuda, even this slight air resistance must have made itself felt. The procession, traveling under kinetic energy only, had lost altitude. Professor Pickering calculated, from the Bermuda reports, that the procession was only about # miles above sea level when the islands were reached. I As regards the fact that the "fine tailless star," which had been in the middle of the procession when over Canada, was in the lead and sparking over Bermuda, Prof. Pickering arrived at an interesting conclusion. That tailless meteor, he said, was probably an iron meteorite, while all the others were either stony meteorites or so-called stony irons. An iron meteorite, having a higher specific gravity, has, of course, a greater kinetic energy than a body of lesser specific gravity traveling with the same velocity. Because of its higher kinetic energy, it had gradually forged ahead and assumed the lead. The ships out at sea were not far enough beyond Bermuda for thei crews to see a further step in the history of the meteoric procession. If there had been a ship a thousand miles or so southeast of Bermuda -- say on a line drawn from Bermuda to St. Helena -- it might have reported a still lower altitude, and, in all probability, a longer interval between the tailless meteor and the other groups which followed. It was almost certain that the procession fell into the Atlantic Ocean before reaching the African coast. That night was a night of large meteors. Three bright fireballs and one group were reported a few hours later, going west. A single bright fireball had been seen # minutes before the procession began, traveling in the same direction. And after the procession there was one going east. From all this, Prof. Pickering concluded that during that night our planet had overtaken a swarm of relatively large meteorites, which traveled roughly along the orbit of Earth and with about the same velocity, relative to the Sun. The point is that the swarm extended over an area somewhat bigger than the diameter of Earth. Because of that, some were caught on one side of the planet and some on the other. The result, seen from the ground, was, of course, meteors going in opposite directions. As is customary after a strange phenomenon, a number of researchers invaded the libraries looking for similar events In the past. There were plenty of bright fireballs going east or going west. There were bright fireballs with long tails and bright fireballs without tails. There were fireballs which bad disappeared below the horizon, and there were fireballs which had exploded in full view of the witnesses. Sometimes even pieces had been salvaged. But the researchers had to go back ten centuries to find another actual procession. It was seen in the vicinity of Cairo in # A. D., only nobody had bothered then to write down details. The source merely said that "in the month of Redjeb (August) many stars passed, with a great noise and That does not mean, naturally, that another thousand years will go by until another meteoric procession occurs. It may happen next year, or next month, or tomorrow. But one almost wishes that there will be an overcast again, with only astronomical observatories sticking out through the cloud layer. Because now, with world tension as high as it is, nine out of ten observers would interpret such a procession as a military attack. It would be like throwing a rock into a nest' of hornets -- a cosmic joke on blind-angry huGreenbetg: Publishers New York, #. #I pages, #. word describes another one of those many Easy Steps to Supermanhood that A. E. v. V. has delighted in supermanhandling during his writing career. Remember NullA? The TotiPotent Being? The radioactive Lord Clane? The Nexialist? And of course Sian? There must be more, but I've forgotten 'em. The Sooper-Hooper-Dooperman in the present opus has a kind of magic power called by the word which opens this faintly disrespectful review -- a word which according to my Unabridged Webster ('tisn't in the Collegiate W. at all) means cunning, or craftiness. Herr Professor van Vogt shifts its molecular structure to make it mean "unbeatable luck" or "abbility to influence elements of chance in one's favor." A foolproof gambler would be "callid," says ' V. V. And callid Cayle Clarke, the book's leading (but not only) superman, ends up being a foolproof stock-market rigger and financier. I suppose it isn't fair to pick on this foible of Van's for impos     SHilF sibly terrific supermen in starting a review of this wholly absorbing story. No doubt about it, van Vogt is one of the masters of the Effective Grandiose in modern fiction. Furthermore, the plan of the book is essentially intriguing. It is assumed that any society that wants to remain both stable and yet advancing must have both a practically permanent government and an equally permanent, built-in, operating "safetyvalve" opposition. In the present instance we have Isher, an empire some X,# years from now, ruled by a fairly unlikely #-year-old queen. It is an absolute monarchy, more or less. The weapons shops, on the other hand, with all the super science your little heart could wish for -- matter transmitters, invisibility machines, time travel gadgets and what not -- exist simply to provide the individual citizen of Isher with an individual defense against encroachments on his individual rights by the state. This it does by providing them, on demand, with individual and invincible "energy weapons" which will shoot only when they are being used in selfdefense. Inanimate objects with electronic consciences, eh? You all remember, I am sure, that fine old unrepeatable tale, the tag line of which, shrilled out in a high piping voice, is: "Hold onto your hats, boys, here we go again!" That's the way I always feel about a van Vogt story. A wonderful rollercoaster thrill. New York, #. # pages, # way from the enormous conception that was The Humanoids, and its basic idea, the creation of supermen not too different from those in Olaf Stapledon's Odd John, is not what you'd call original. It is sometimes powerful and often ingenious, but generally too reminiscent. Through genetic engineering, so-called, mysterious Scientist Charles Kendrew is supposed to have created a number of "NotMen" or "Homo Perfectans." The existence of these supermen becomes known to a few homo saps, who organize a small ruthless band dedicated to their destruction. Along comes Hero Dane Belfast, son of one of old Kendrew's close associates and both the homo-sap opponents and the Beautiful Notgirl try to get Belfast on their sides. After violent to-do, which could satisfactorily been reported in # fewer words, the matter is resolved, and one is permitted to assume that the super-cream tures will be allowed to breed and ultimately eliminate us poor inferiors. There is some impressively real atmosphere, particularly in the jungles and hidden laboratories on New Guinea (the "Dragon's Island" of the title), and a goodly number of satisfactory mystifications, curiosities, and superson is adept at producing. bard. Gnome Press, Inc., New York, #. # pages, #. er in the Sky and Fear. Neither of them is science fiction, despite the jacket claim -- they are weirds or "fantasies" -- and both are promoted on. the jacket as being by "L. Ron Hubbard, the Founder of Dianetics," which, come to thinl; qf it, is reason for publishing other Hubbard fiction. Typewriter in the Sky is a silly idea inexpertly carried out. It assumes that a modern man is physically translated to the Sixteen Hundreds to become a Spana novel a friend is writing. Outside of a lot of extremely ordinary costume drammer and strictly pulp romance, the. tale is devoted to the struggle between "the typewriter in the sky," which makes the modern character in his "displaced personage do the commercial heroisms the author wants him to do. Fear, on the other hand, and despite its screwy modus operandi turns out to be a totally unexpected masterpiece of horror. The hero is a professor who has published an article in which he claims there are no demons. Well, it turns out there ae, says Hubbard and they get the hell after Professor Lowry, with, as the ancient saying goes, bells on. From there on in, it is definitely no kidding. What we have here, it seems to record of the effects of an uncontrollable phobia on a relativly imaginative and perceptive individual. The whole novella is a shattering kaleidoscope of auditory, visual, tactile and, even worse, mental and emotional horrors, awfulnesses, hysterias, frustrations, stinks and shuddering screams, all of which lead up to a totally unexpected -- and yet inevitable -- climax, which is all real and a yard wide (nothing supernatural about that ending!) and as horrible as any of the psychological terrors that have preceded it. A completely engrossing tale. You will be moved and astonished by what Hubbard has achieved in it. If you believe you can write a blurb for this story, go ahead. In all science fiction, it is perhaps the weirdest encounter of alien races! unspeakable, and even its meaning would be difficult to convey in any human tongue. For convenience, we may as well call him Tommy Loy. Please bear in mind that, all these terms are approximations. Tommy was not exactly a cabin boy, and even the spaceship he served was not exactly a spaceship, nor was the Captain exactly a captain. But if you think of Tommy as a freckled, scowling, red-haired, willful, prank-playing, thoroughly abhorrent brat, and of the Captain as a crusty, ponderous old man, you may be able to understand their relationship. A word about Tommy will serve to explain Why these approximations have to be made, and just how much they mean. Tommy, to a human being, would' have looked like a six-foot egg made of greenish gelatin. Suspended in this were certain dark or radiant shapes which were Tommy's nerve centers and diges-. tive organs,, and scattered about its surface were star-shaped and oval markings which were his sensory organs and gripping . mechanisms -- his "hands." At the lesser end was an orifice which expelled a stream of glowing vapor, Tom my's means of propulsion. It should be clear that if instead of saying, "Tommy ate his lunch," or, "Tommy said to the Captain-r-" we reported what really happened, some pretty complicated explanations would have to be made. Similarly, the term "cabin boy , is used because it is the closest in human meaning. Some vocations, like seafaring, are so demanding and so complex that they simply cannot be taught in classrooms; they have to be lived. A cabin boy is one who is learning such a vocation and paying for his instruction by performing certain menial, degrading, and unimportant tasks. That certainly describes Tommy, with one more similarity -- the cabin boy of the sailing vessel was traditionally occupied after each whipping with preparing the mischief, or the stupidity, that earned him the next one. Tommy, at the moment, had a whipping coming to him, and was fighting a delaying action. He knew he couldn't escape eventual punishment, but he planned, with a wholehearted determination, to hold it off as long as he could. Floating alertly in one of the Innumerable corridors of the ship, he watched as a dark wave sprang into being upon the glowing corridor wall and sped toward him. Instantly, Tommy was moving away from it, and at the same rate of speed. The wave rumbled: "Tommy! Tommy Loyl, Where is that obscenity boy?" The wave moved on, rumbling wordlessly, and Tommy moved with it. Ahead of him was another wave, and another beyond that, and it was the same throughput all the corridors of the ship. Abruptly the waves reversed their direction. So did Tommy,' barely in time. The waves not only carried the Captain's orders, but scanned every corridor and com partment of the ten-mile ship. But as long as Tommy kept between the waves, the Captain could not see him. It did not strike Tommy as odd that the Captain never thought of keeping the scanning waves stationary and letting the search parties catch up to him. The Captain, like all the rest of the crew, was not very bright in comparison with Tommy. This was odd enough, but Tommy had long since given up trying to puzzle out the reason. It was part of his universe. The trouble was that he could not keep this up forever, and he was being searched for by other lowly members of the crew. It took a long time to traverse each of those winding, interlaced passages, but it was a mathematical certainty that he would be caught eventually. Tommy shuddered, and at the same time he squirmed with delight. He had interrupted the Old Man's sleep by a stench, of a particularly noisome variety, one of which he had only lately found himself capable. The effect had been beautiful. Ip human terms, since Tommy's race communicated by odors, it was equivalent to setting off a firecracker beside a sleeper's ear. Judging by the jerkiness of the scanning waves' motion, the Old Man was still unnerved. "Tommy!" the waves rumbled. "Come out, you little piece of filth, or I'll smash you into a thousand separate stinks! By Spore, when I get hold of you -- " The corridor intersected another at this point, and Tommy seized his chance to duck into the new one. He had been working his way outward ever since his crime, knowing that the search parties would do the same. When he reached the outermost level of the ship, there would be a slight possibility of slipping back past the hunters -- not much of a chance, but better than none. He kept close to the wall. He was the smallest member of the crew -- smaller than any of the Other cabin boys, and less than half the size of an Ordinary; it was always possible that when he sighted one of the search party, he could get away before the crewman saw him. He was in a short connecting corridor now, but the scanning waves cycled endlessly, always turning back before he could escape into the next corridor. Tommy followed their movement patiently, while he listened to the torrent of abuse that poured from them. He snickered fragrantly to himself. When the Old Man was angry, everybody suffered. The ship would be stinking from stem to stern by now. forgot himself and the waves flowed on around the next intersection. Tommy moved on. He was getting close to his goal by now; he could see a faint gleam of starshine up at the end of the corridor. The next turn took him into it -- and what Tommy saw through the semi-transparent skin of the ship nearly made him falter and get caught. Not merely the fiery pinpoints of stars shone there, but a great, furious glow which could only mean that they were passing through a star system. It was the first time this had happened in Tommy's life, but of course it was nothing to the Captain, or even to most of the Ordinaries. Trust them, Tommy thought resentfully, to say nothing to him about it! Now he knew he was glad he'd tossed that surprise at the Captain. If he hadn't, he wouldn't be here, and if he weren't here -- A waste capsule was bumping automatically along the corridor, heading for one of the exit pores in the hull. Tommy let it catch up to him, then englobed it, but it stretched him so tight that he could barely hold it. That was all to the good; the Captain wouldn't be likely to notice that anything had happened. The hull was sealed, not to keep atmosphere inside, for there was none except by accident, but to prevent loss of liquid by evaporation. Metals and other mineral elements were replaceable; liquids and their constituents, in ordinary circumstances, were not. Tommy rode the capsule to the exit sphincter, squeezed through, and instantly released it. Being polarized away from the ship's core, it shot into space and was lost. Tommy hugged the outer surface of the hull, and gazed at the astonishing panorama that surrounded him. There was the enormous black half-globe of space -- Tommy's sky. the only one he had ever known. It was sprinkled with the familiar yet always changing patterns of the stars. By themselves, these were marvels enough for a child whose normal universe was one of ninety-foot corridors and chambers measuring, at most, three times as much. But Tommy hardly noticed them. Down to his the long, gentle curve of the greenish hull, was a blazing yellow-white glory that he could hardly look at. A star, the first one he had ever seen close at hand. Off to the left was a tiny, milkyblue disk that could only be a planet. Tommy let go a shout, for the sheer pleasure of its thin, hollow sound, or, if you prefer, smell. He watched the thin mist of particles spread lazily away from his body, faintly luminous against the jet blackness. He shivered a little, thickening his skin as much as he could. He could not stay long, he knew: he was radiating heat faster than he could absorb it from the sun on the ship's hull. But he didn't want to go back inside, and not only because it meant being caught and punished. He didn't want to leave that great, dazzling jewel in the sky. For an instant he thought vaguely of the future time when he would be grown, the master of his own vessel, and could see the stars whenever he chose; but the picture was too far away to have any reality. Great Spore, that wouldn't happen for twenty thousand years! Fifty yards away, an enormous dark spot on the hull, one of the ship's vision devices, swelled and darkened. Tommy looked up with interest. He could see nothing in that direction, but evidently the Captain had spotted something. Tommy watched and waited, growing colder every second, and after a long time he saw a new pinpoint of light spring into being. It grew steadily larger, turned fuzzy at one side, then became two linked dots, one hard and bright, the other misty. Tommy looked down with sudden understanding, and saw that another wide area of the ship's hull was swollen and protruding. This one showed a pale color under the green and had a dark ring around it: it was a polarizer. The object he had seen must contain metal, and the Captain was bringing it in for fuel. Tommy hoped it was a big one; they had been short of metal ever since he could remember. When he glanced up again, the object was much larger. He could see now that the bright part was hard and smooth, reflecting the light of the nearby sun. The misty part was a puzzler. It looked like a crewman's voice, seen against space -- or the ion trail of a ship in motion. But. was it possible for metal to be alive? If rear-view scanner and wiped beads of sweat from his brown, half-bald scalp. Flaming gas from the jets washed up toward him along the hull; he couldn't see much. But the huge dark void they were headed for was still there, and it was getting bigger. He glanced futilely at the control board. The throttle was on full. They were going to crash in a little more than two minutes, and there didn't seem to be a single thing he could do about it. He looked at Frances McMenamin, strapped into the acceleration harness beside his own. She said, "Try cutting off the jets, why don't you?" Roget was a short, muscular man with not very much straight black hair and sharp brown eyes. McMenamin was slender and ashblonde, half an inch taller than he was, with one of those pale, exquisitely shaped faces that seem to be distributed equally among the very stupid and the very bright. Roget had never been perfectly sure which she was, although they had been companions for more than three years. That, in a way, was part of the reason they had taken this pretty wild trip: she had made Roget uneasy, and he wanted to break away, and at the same time he didn't. So he had fallen in with her idea of a trip to Mars -- "to get off by ourselves and think" -- and here, Roget thought, they were, not thinking particularly. He said, "You want us to crash quicker?" "How do you know we will?" she countered. "It's the only thing we haven't tried. Anyhow, we'd be able to see where we're going, and that's more than we can do now." Ilf "All right," said Roget, "all right." She was perfectly capable of giving him six more reasons, each screwier than the last, and then turning out to be justified. He pulled the throttle back to zero, and the half-heard, half-felt roar of the jets died. The ship jerked backward suddenly, yanking them against the couch straps, and then slowed. Roget looked into the scanner again. They were approaching the huge object, whatever it was, at about the same rate as before. a little slower. Damn the woman! How could she possibly have figured that one out in advance? "And," McMenamin added reasonably, "we'll save fuel for the takeoff." Roget scowled at her. "If there is a takeoff," he said. "Whatever is pulling us down there isn't doing it to show off. What do we do -- tell them that was a very impressive trick and we enjoyed it, but we've' got to be leaving now?" "We'll find out what's doing it," said McMenamin, "and stop it if we can. If we can't, the fuel won't do us any good anyway." That was, if not Frances' most exasperating trick, at least high on the list. She had a habit of introducing your own argument as if it were not only a telling point on her side, but something you had been too dense to see. Arguing with her was like swinging at someone who abruptly disappeared and then sandbagged you from behind. Roget was fuming, but he said nothing. The greenish surface below was approaching more and more slowly, and now he felt a slight but definite tightening of the couch straps that could only mean deceleration. They were being maneuvered in for a landing as carefully and efficiently as if they were doing it themselves. A few seconds later, a green horizon line appeared in the directview ports, and they touched. Roget's and McMenamin's couches swung on their gimbals as the ship tilted slowly, bounced and came to rest. Frances reached inside the wide collar of her pressure suit to smooth a ruffle that had got crumpled between the volcanic swell of her bosom and the front of the transparent suit. Watching her, Roget felt a sudden irrational flow of affection and -- as usually happened -- a simultaneous notification that his body disagreed with his mind's opinion of her. She was nuts, but he couldn't do without her. This trip, it had been tacitly agreed, was to be a kind of final trial period. At the end of it, either they would split up or decide to make it permanent, and . up to now, Roget had been silently determined that it was going to be a split. Now he was just as sure that, providing they ever got to Mars or back to Earth, he was going to nail her for good. He glanced at her face. She knew, all right, just as she'd known when he'd felt the other way. It should have irritated him, but he felt oddly pleased and comforted. He unstrapped himself, fastened down his helmet, and moved toward the airlock. "Be careful," she said. "Yeah." He looked at her. "Be back in a minute." She smiled -- not a big one, for show, but the little, quiet kind that lit up her face. Roget grinned back and closed the airlock door behind him. He stood on a palegreen, almost featureless surface that curved gently away in every direction. Where he stood, it was shadow was sharp and as black as space. About two-thirds of the way to the horizon, looking across the short axis of the ship, the sunlight stopped with knife-edge sharpness, and he could make out the rest only as a ghostly reflection of starlight. Their ship was lying on its side, with the pointed stern apparently sunk a few inches into the green surface of the alien ship. He took a cautious step in that direction, and nearly floated past it before he could catch himself. His boot magnets had failed to grip. The metal of this hull -- if it was metal -- must be something that contained no steel. The green hull was shot through with other colors here, and it rose in a curious, almost rectangular mound. At the center, just at the tip of the Earth vessel's jets, there was a pale area; around that was a dark ring which lapped up over the side of the ship. He bent to examine it. It was in shadow, and he used his helmet light. The light shone through the mottled green substance; he could see the skin of his own ship. It was pitted, corroding. As he watched, another pinpoint of corruption appeared on the shiny surface, and slowly grew. Roget straightened up with an exclamation. His helmet phones asked, "What is it, Leo?" He said, "Acid or something eating the hull. Wait a minute." He looked again at the pale and dark mottlings under the green surface. The center area was not attacking the ship's metal; that might be the muzzle of whatever instrument had been used to pull them down out of their orbit and hold them there. But if it was turned off now -- He had to get the ship away from the dark ring that was destroying it. He couldn't fire the jets otherwise, because they were halfburied; he'd blow the tubes if he tried. He said, "You still strapped in?" "Yes." "All right, hold on." He stepped back to the center of the little ship, braced his corrugated boot soles against the hard green surface, and shoved. The ship rolled. But it rolled like a top, around the axis of its pointed end. The dark area gave way before it, as if it were jellysoft. The jets still pointed to the middle of the pale area, and the dark ring still lapped over them. Roget moved farther down and tried again, with the same result. The ship would move freely in every direction but the right one. The attracting power, clearly enough, was still on. H E straightened dejectedly and looked around. A few hundred yards away, he saw something he had noticed before, without attaching any significance to it: a six-foot egg, of some lighter, more translucent substance than the one on which it lay. He leaped toward it. It moved sluggishly away, trailing a cloud of luminous gas. A few seconds later be had it between his gloved hands. It squirmed, then ejected e thin spurt of vapor from its forward end. It was alive. McMenamin's head was silhouetted in one of the forward ports. He said, "See this?" "Yes! What is it?" "One of the crew, I think. I'm going to bring it in. You work the airlock -- it won't hold both of us at once." "... All right." The huge egg crowded the cabin uncomfortably. It was pressed up against the rear wall, where it had rolled as soon as Frances had pulled it into the ship. The two humans stood at the other side of the room, against the control panel, and watched it. "No features," said Roget, "unless you count those markings xn the surface. This thing isn't from anywhere in the Solar System, Frances -- it isn't even any order of evolution we ever heard of." "I know," she said abstractedly. "Leo, is he wearing any protection against space that you can see?" "No," said Roget. "That's him, not a spacesuit. Look, you can see halfway into him. But -- " Frances turned to look at him. "That's it," she said. "It means this is his natural element -- space!" Roget looked thoughtfully at the egg. "It makes sense," he said. "He's adapted for it, anyhow -- ovoid, for a high volumeto-surface ratio. Tough outer shell. Moves by jet propulsion. #.: It's hard to believe, because we've never run into a creature like him before, but I don't see why not. On Earth there are organisms, plants, that can live and reproduce in boiling water, and others that can stand near-zero temperatures." "He's a plant, too, you know," Frances put in. Roget stared at her, then back at the egg. "That color, you mean? Chlorophyl. It could be." "Must be," she corrected firmly. "How else would he live in a vacuum?" And then, distressedly, "Oh, what a smell!" They looked at each other. It had been something monumental in the way of smells, though it had only lasted a fraction of a second. There had been a series of separate odors, all unfamiliar and all overpoweringly strong. At least a dozen of them, Roget thought; they had gone past too quickly to count. "He did it before, outside, and I saw the vapor." He closed his helhaet abruptly and motioned McMenamin to do the same. She frowned and shook her head. He opened his helmet again. "It might be poisonous!" "I don't think so," said McMenamin. "Anyway, we've got to try something." She walked toward the green egg. It rolled away from her, and she went past it into the bedroom. In a minute she reappeared, carrying an armload of plastic boxes and bottles. She came back to Roget and knelt on the floor, lining up the containers with their nipples toward the egg. "What's this for?" Roget demanded. "Listen, we've got to figure some way of getting out of here. The ship's being eaten up -- " "Wait," said McMenamin. She reached down and squeezed three of the nipples quickly, one after the other. There was a tiny spray of face powder, then one of cologne (lVuf Juvienne), followed by a jet of good Scotch. Then she waited Roget was about to open his mouth when another blast of unfamiliar odors came from the egg. This time there were only three: two sweet ones and one sharp. going to name him Stinky," she said. She pressed the nipples, again, in a different order. Scotch, face powder, Nuit Juvienne. The egg replied: sharp, sweet, sweet. She gave him the remaining combination, and he echoed it ; then she put a record cylinder on the floor and squirted the face powder. She added another cylinder and squeezed the cologne. She went along the line that way, releasing a smell for each cylinder until there were ten. The egg hjd responded, recognizably in some cases, to each one. Then she took away seven of the cylinders and looked expectantly at the egg. The egg released a sharp odor. "If ever we tell anybody," said Roget in an awed tone, "that you taught a six-foot Easter egg to count to ten by selected flatulence -- " "Hush, fool," she said. "This is a tough one." She lined up three cylinders, waited for the sharp odor, then added six more to make three rows of three. The egg obliged with a penetrating smell which was a good imitation of citron extract, Frances' number nine. He followed it immediately with another of his own rapid, complicated series of smells. "He gets it," said McMenamin. "I think he just told us that three times three are nine." She stood up. "You go out first, Leo. I'll put him out after you and then follow. There's something more we've got to show him before we let him go." Roget followed orders. When the egg came out and kept on going, he stepped in its path and held it back. Then he moved away, hoping the thing would get the idea that they weren't trying to force it, but wanted it to stay. The egg wobbled indecisively for a moment, and then stayed where it was. Frances came out the next minute, carrying one of the plastic boxes and a portable flashlight. "My nicest powder," she said regretfully, "but it was the only thing I could find enough of.' She clapped her gloved hands together sharply, with the box between them. It burst, and a haze of particles spread around them, glowing faintly in the sunlight. The egg was still waiting, somehow giving the impression that it was watching them alertly. McMenamin flicked on the flashlight and pointed it at Roget. It made a clear, narrow path in the haze of dispersed particles. Then she turned it on herself, on the ship, and finally upward, toward the tiny blue disk that was Earth. She did it twice more, then stepped back toward the airlock, and Roget followed her. They stood watching as Tommy scurried off across the hull, squeezed himself into it and disappeared. "That was impressive," Roget said. "But I wonder just how much good it's going to do us." "He knows we're alive, intelligent, friendly, and that we come from Earth," said McMenamin thoughtfully. "Or, anyhow, we did our best to tell him. That's all we can do. Maybe he won't want to help us; maybe he can't. But it's up to him now." w npHE mental state of Tommy, as he dived through the hull of the ship and into the nearest radial corridor, would be difficult to describe fully to any human being. He was the equivalent of a very small boy -- that approximation still holds good -- and he had the obvious reactions to novelty and adventure. But there was a good deal more. He had seen living, intelligent beings of an unfamiliar shape and substance, who lived in metal and had some connection with one of those enormous, enigmatic ships called planets, which no captain of his own race dared approach. And yet Tommy knew, with all the weight of knowledge accumulated, codified and transmitted of years, that there was no other intelligent race than his own in the entire universe, that metal, though life-giving, could not itself be alive, and that no living creature, having the ill luck to be spawned aboard a planet, could ever hope to escape so tremendous a gravitational field. The final result of all this was that Tommy desperately wanted to go somewhere by himself and think. But he couldn't; he had to keep moving, in time with the scanning waves along the corridor, and he had to give all bis mental energy to the problem of slipping past the search party. The question was -- how long had he been gone? If they had reached the hull while he was inside the metal thing, they might have looked for him outside and concluded that he had somehow slipped past them, back to the center of the ship. In that case, they would probably be working their way back, and he had only to follow them to the axis and hide in a chamber as soon as they left it. But if they were still working outward, his chances of escape were almost nil. And now it seemed more important to escape than it had before. There was one possibility which Tommy, who, in most circumstances, would try anything, hated to think about. Fuel lines -- tubes carrying the rushing, radiant ion vapor that powered the ship -- adjoined many of these corridors, and it was certain that if he dared to enter one, he would be perfectly safe from detection as long as he remained in it. But, for one thing, these lines radiated from the ship's axis and none of them would take him where he wanted to go. For another, they were the most dangerous place aboard ship. Older crew members sometimes entered them to make emergency repairs, but they got out as quickly as they could. Tommy did not know how long tie could survive there; he had an unpleasant conviction that it would not be long. Only a few yards up the corridor was the sealed sphincter which gave entrance to such a tube. Tommy looked at it indecisively as the motion of the scanning waves brought him nearer. He had still not made up his mind when he caught a flicker reflected around the curve of the corridor behind him. Tommy squeezed himself closer to the wall and watched the other end of the corridor approach with agonizing slowness. If he could only get around that corner -- The flicker of motion was repeated. and then he saw a thin rind of green poke into view. There was no more time to consider entering the fuel line, no time to let the scanning waves' movement carry him around the corner. Tommy put on full speed, cutting across the next wave and down the cross-corridor ahead. Instantly the Captain's voice shouted from the wall: "Ah! Was that him, the dirty scut? After him, lads Tommy glanced behind as he turned another corner, and his heart sank. It was no cabin boy who was behind him, or even an Ordinary, but a Third Mate -- so huge that he filled nearly half the width of the corridor, and so powerful that Tommy, in comparison, was like a boy on a bicycle racing an express train. He turned another comer, realizing in that instant that he was as good as caught : the new corridor ahead of him stretched straight and without a break for three hundred yards. As he flashed down it, the hulk of the Mate appeared around the bend behind. The Captain's voice bellowed, "Get the little essence of putrescence !" The Mate was coming up with terrifying speed, and Tommy had time for only one last desperate spurt. Then the other body slammed with stunning force against his, and he was held fast. As they coasted to a halt, the Captain's voice rumbled from the wall; " That's it. Mister. Hold him where I can see him!" The scanning areas were stationary now. The Mate moved Tommy forward until he was squarely in range of the nearest. Tommy squirmed futilely. The Captain said, " There's our little jokester. It's a pure pleasure to see you again, Tommy. What -- no witty remarks? Your humor all dried up?" Tommy gasped, "Hope you enjoyed your nap, Captain." "Very good," said the Captain with heavy sarcasm. "Oh, very entertaining, Tommy. Now would you have anything more to say, before I put the whips to you?" Tommy was silent. The Captain said to the Mate, "Nice work, Mister. You'll get extra rations for this." The Mate spoke for the first time, and Tommy recognized his high, affected voice. It was George Adkins -- to choose a name only for identification purposes -- who had recently spored and was so proud of the new life inside his body that there was no living with him. George said prissily, "Thank you, sir. I'm sure. Of course, I really shouldn't have exerted myself the way I just did, in my state." "Well, you'll be compensated for it," the Captain said testily. "Now take the humorist down to Assembly Five. We'll have a little ceremony there." "Yes, sir," said the Mate distantly. He moved off, shoving Tommy ahead of him, and dived into the first turning that led downward. They moved along in silence for the better part of a mile, crossing from one lesser passage to another until they reached a main artery that led directly to the center of the ship. The scanning waves were still stationary, and they were moving so swiftly that there was no danger of being overheard. Tommy said politely, "You won't let them be too hard on me, will you, sir?" The Mate did not reply for a moment. He had been baited by Tommy's mock courtesy before, and he was as wary as his limited intelligence allowed. Finally he said, "You'll get no more than what's coming to you, young Tom." "Yes, sir. I know that, sir. I'm sorry I made you exert yourself, sir, in your condition and all." "You should be," said the Mate stiffly, but his voice betrayed his pleasure. It was seldom enough that even a cabin boy showed a decent interest in the Mate's prospective parenthood. "They're moving about, you know," he added, unbending a little. "Are they, sir? Oh, you must be careful of yourself, sir. How many are there, please, sir?" "Twenty-eight," said the Mate, as he had on every possible occasion for the past two weeks. "Strong and healthy -- so far." "That's remarkable, sir!" cried Tommy. "Twenty-eight I If I might be so bold, sir, you ought to be careful of what you eat. Is the Captain going to give you your extra rations out of that mass he just brought in topside, sir?" "I'm sure I don't know." "Gosh!" exclaimed Tommy. "I. wish I could be sure -- " He let the pause grow. Finally, the Mate said querulously, "What do you mean? Is there anything wrong with the metal?" 'I don't really know, sir, but it isn't like any we ever had before. That is,' Tommy added, "since I was spored, sir." "Naturally," said the Mate. "I've eaten all kinds myself, you know." "Yes, sir. But doesn't it usually come in ragged shapes, sir, and darkish?" "Of course it does. Everybody knows that. Metal is non-living, and only living things have regular shapes." "Yes, sir. But I was topside, sir, while I was trying to get away, and I saw this metal. It's quite regular, except for some knobs at one end, sir, and it's as smooth as you are, sir, and shiny. If you'll forgive me, sir, it didn't look at all appetizing to me." "Nonsense," said the Mate uncertainly. "Nonsense," he repeated, in a stronger tone. "You must have been mistaken. Metal can't be alive." "That's just what I thought, sir," said Tommy excitedly. "But there are live things in this metal, sir. I saw them. And the metal wasn't just floating along the way it's supposed to, sir. I saw it when the Captain brought it down, and... But I'm afraid you'll think I'm lying, sir, if I tell you what " it was doing." "Well, what was it doing?" "I swear I saw it, sir," Tommy Went on. "The Captain will tell you the same thing, sir, if you ask him -- he must have noticed." "Sterilize it all, what was it doing?" Tommy lowered his voice. "There was an ion trail shooting from it, sir. It was trying to get away !" While the Mate was trying to absorb that, they reached the bottom of the corridor and entered the vast globular space of Assembly Five, lined with crewmen waiting to witness the punishment of Tommy Loy. This was not going to be any fun at all, thought Tommy, but at least he had paid back the Third Mate in full measure. The Mate, for the moment, at any rate, was not taking any joy in his promised extra rations. huddled in a corner of the crew compartment where they had tossed him, bruised and smarting in every nerve, shaken by the beating he had undergone. The pain was still rolling through him in faint, uncontrollable waves, and he winced at each one, in spite of himself, as though it were the original blow. In the back of his mind, the puzzle of the metal ship was still calling, but the other experience was too fresh, the remembered images too vivid. The Captain had begun, as always, by reciting the Creed. In the beginning was the Spore, and the Spore was lone. (And the crew: Praised be the Spore!) Next there was tight, and the light was good. Yea, good for the Spore and the Spore's First Children. ( Praised be they!) But the light grew evil in the days of the Spore's Second Children. (.Woe unto them!) And the light cast them out. Yea, exiled were they, into the darkness and the Great Deep. (Pity for the outcasts in the Great Deep!) Tommy had mumbled his response with the rest of them, thinking rebellious thoughts. There was nothing evil about light; they lived by it still. What must have happened -- the Captain himself admitted as much when he taught history and natural science classes -- was that the earliest ancestors of the race, spawned in the flaming heart of the Galaxy, had grown too efficient for their own good. They had specialized, more and more, in extracting energy from starlight and the random metal and other elementsthey encountered in space; and at last they absorbed, willy-nilly, more than they could use. So they had moved, gradually and naturally. over many generations, out from that intensely radiating region into the "Great Deep" -- the universe of thinly scattered stars. And the process had continued, inevitably; as the level of available energy fell, their absorption of it grew more and more efficient. Now, not only could they never return to their birthplace, but they could not even approach a single sun as closely as some planets did. Therefore the planets, and the stars themselves, were objects of fear. That was natural and sensible. But why did they have to continue this silly ritual, invented by some half-evolved, superstitious ancestor, of "outcasts" and "evil?" The Captain finished: Save us from the Death that lies in the Great Deep... ( The creeping Death that lies in the Great Deep!) And keep our minds pure... (As pure as the light in the days of the Spore, blessed be He!) And our course straight... (As straight as the light, brothers!) That we may meet our lost brothers again in the Day of Reuniting. (Speed that day!) Then the pause, the silence that grew until it was like the silence of space. At last the Captain spoke again, pronouncing judgment against Tommy, ending: , "Let him be whipped!" Tommy tensed himself, thickening his skip, drawing his body into the smallest possible compass. Two husky Ordinaries seized him and tossed him at a third. As Tommy floated across the room, the crewman pressed himself tightly against the wall, drawing power from it until he could contain no more. And as Tommy neared him, he discharged it in a crackling arc that filled Tommy's body with the pure essence of pain, and sent him hurtling across the chamber to the next shock -- and the next -- and the next -- Until the Captain boomed, "Enough!" and they had carried him out and left him here alone. H E heard the # voices of crewmen as they drew their rations. One of them was grumbling about the taste, and another, sounding happily bloated, was telling him to shut up and eat, that metal was metal. That would be the new metal, however much of it had been absorbed by now. mingled with the old in the reservoir. Tommy wondered briefly how much of it there was, and, whether the alien ship -- if it was a ship -- could repair even a little damage to itself. But that assumed life in the metal, and in spite of what he had seen. Tommy couldn't believe in it. It seemed beyond question, though, that there were living things inside the metal; and when the metal was gone, how would they live? Tommy imagined himself set adrift from the ship, alone in space, radiating more heat than his tiny volume could absorb. He shuddered. He thought again of the problem that had obsessed him ever since he had seen the alien, fivepointed creatures in the metal ship. Intelligent lifewas supposed to be sacred. That was part of the Creed, and it was stated in a sloppy, poetic way like the rest of it, but it made a certain kind of sense. No crewman or Captain had the right to destroy another for his benefit, because the same heredity was in them all. They were all potentially the same, none better than another. And you ate metal, because metal was non-living and certainly not intelligent. But if that stopped being true... ? Tommy felt he was missing something. Then he had it: In the alien ship, trying to talk to the creatures that lived in metal, he had been scared almost scentless -- but underneath the fright and the excitement, he had felt wonderful. It had been, he realized suddenly, like the mystic completion that was supposed to come when all the straight lines met, in the "Day of Reuniting" -- when all the far-flung ships, of their flight, came together at last. It was talking to someone different from yourself. He wanted to talk again to the aliens, teach them to form their uncouth sounds into words, learn from them... Vague images swirled in his mind. They were products of an utterly different line of evolution. Vho knew what they might be able to teach him? And now the dilemma took shape. If his own ship absorbed the metal of theirs, they would die; therefore he would have to make the Captain let them go. But if he somehow managed to set them free, they would leave and he would never see them again. A petty officer looked into the cubicle and said, "All right, Loy, out of it. You're on garbage detail. You eat after you work, if there's anything left. Lively, now !" Tommy moved thoughtfully out into the corridor, his pain almost forgotten. The philosophical problems presented by the alien ship, too, having no apparent solution, were receding from his mind. A new thought was taking their place, one that made him glow inside with the pure rapture of the devoted practical jok ester.  The whipping he was certainly going to get -- and, so soon after the last offense, it would be a beauty -- scarcely entered his mind. IV his helmet, and sat down warily in the acceleration couch. He didn't look at the woman. McMenamin said quietly, "Bad?" "Not good. The outer skin's gone all across that area, and it's eating into the lead sheathing. The tubes are holding up pretty well, but they'll be next." "We've done as much as we can, by rolling the ship around?" "Just about. I'll keep at it, but I don't see how it can be more than a few hours before the tubes go. Then we're cooked, whatever your fragrant little friend does." He stood up abruptly and climbed over the slanting wall which was now their floor, to peer out the direct-view port. He swore, slowly and bitterly. "You try the radio again while I was out?" he asked. "Yes." She did not bother to add that there had been no response. Here, almost halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mars, they were hopelessly out of touch. A ship as small as theirs couldn't carry equipment enough to bridge the distance. Roget turned around, said, "By #I God -- " And then clenched his jaw and strode out of the room. McMenamin heard him walk through the bedroom and clatter around in the storage compartment behind. In a few moments he was back with a welding torch in his hand. "Should have thought of this before," he said. "I don't know what'll happen if I cut into that hull -- damn thing may explode, for all I know -- but it's better than sitting doing nothing." He put his helmet down with a bang and his voice came tinnily in her helmet receiver. "Be back in a minute." "Be careful," McMenamin said again. Roget closed the outer lock door behind him and looked at the ravished hull of the ship. The metal had been eaten away in a broad band all around the ship, just above the tail, as if a child had bitten around the small end of a pear. In places the clustered rocket tubes showed through like gnawed bones. He felt a renewed surge of anger, with fear deep under it. A hundred years ago, he reminded himself, the earliest space voyagers had encountered situations as bad as this one, maybe worse. But Roget was a city man, bred for city virtues. He didn't, he decided, know quite how to feel or act. What were you supposed to do when you were about to die, Try to calm McMenamin -- who was dangerously calm already -- or show your true nobility by making one of those death-bed speeches you read in the popular histories? What about suggesting a little suicide pact? There was nothing in the ship that would give them a cleaner death than the one ahead of them. About all he could do would be to stab Frances, then himself, with a screwdriver. Her voice said in the earphones, "You all right?" He said, "Sure. Just going to try it." He lowered himself to the green surface, careful not to let his knees touch the dark, corrosive area. The torch was a small, easily manageable tool. He pointed the snout at the dark area where it lapped up over the hull, turned the switch on and pressed the button. Flame leaped out, washing over the dark surface. Roget felt the heat through his suit. He turned off the torch to see what effect it had had. There was a deep, charred pit in the dark stuff, and it seemed to him that it had pulled back a little from the area it was attacking. It was more than he had expected. Encouraged, he tried again. There was a sudden tremor under him and he leaped nervously fl# to his feet, just in time to avoid the corrosive wave as it rolled under him. For a moment he was only conscious of the thick metal of his boot soles and the thinness of the fabric that covered his knees; then, as he was about to step back out of the way, he realized that it was not only the dark ring that had expanded, that was still expanding. He moved jerkily -- too late -- as the pale center area swept toward and under him. Then he felt as if he had been struck by a mighty hammer. His ears rang, and there was a mist in front of his eyes. He blinked, tried to raise'an arm. It seemed to be stuck fast at the wrist and elbow. Panicked, he tried to push himself away and couldn't. As his vision cleared, he saw that he was spread-eagled on the pale disk that had spread out under him. The. metal collars of his wrist and elbow joints, all the metal parts of his suit, were held immovably. The torch lay a few inches away from his right hand. For a few moments, incredulously, Roget still tried to move. Then he stopped and lay in the prison of his suit, looking at the greenish-cream surface under his helmet. Frances' voice said abruptly, "Leo, is anything wrong?" Roget felt an instant relief that left him shaken and weak. His forehead was cold. He said after a moment, "Pulled a damn fool trick, Frances. Come out and help me if you can." He heard a click as her helmet went down. He added anxiously, "But don't come near the pale part, or you'll get caught too." After a while she said, "Darling, I can't think of anything to do." Roget was feeling calmer, somehow not much afraid any more. He wondered how much oxygen was left in his suit. Not more than an hour, he thought. He said, "I know. I can't, either." Later he called, "Frances?" "Yes?" "Roll the ship once in a while, will you? Might get through to the wiring or something, otherwise." "... All right." After that, they didn't talk. There was a great deal to be said, but it was too late to say it. V with nine other unfortunates. It was a messy, hard, unpleasant business, lit only for a cabin boy -- collecting waste from the compartment and corridor receptacles and pressing it into standard capsule-shapes, then hauling it to the nearest polarizer. But Tommy, under the suspicious eye of the petty officer in charge, worked with an apparent total absorption until they had cleaned out their section of the six inmost levels and were well into the seventh. This was the best strategic place for Tommy's departure, since it was about midway from axis to hull, and the field of operations of any pursuit was correspondingly broadened. Also, the volume in which they labored had expanded wedgewise as they climbed, and the petty officer, though still determined to watch Tommy, could no longer keep him constantly in view. Tommy saw the officer disappear around the curve of the corridor, and kept on working busily. He was still at it, with every appearance of innocence and industry, when the officer abruptly popped into sight again about three seconds later. The officer stared at him with baffled disapproval and said unreasonably, "Come on, come on, Loy. Don't slack." "Right," said Tommy, and Scurried faster. A moment later Third Mate Adkins hove majestically into view. The petty officer turned respectfully to face him. "Keeping young Tom well occupied, I see," said the Mate. ' "Yes, sir," said the officer. "Appears to be a reformed character, pow, sir. Must have learned a lesson, one way or another." "Ha!" said the Mate... "Very good. Oh, Loy, you might be interested in this -- the Captain himself has told me that the new metal is perfectly all right. Unusually rich, in fact. I've had my first ration already -- very good it was, too -- and I'm going to get my extras in half an hour or so. Well, good appetite, all." And, while the lesser crewmen clustered against the walls to give him room, he moved haughtily off down the corridor. Tommy kept on working as fast as he could. He was draining energy he might need later, but it was necessary to quiet the petty officer's suspicions entirely, in order to give himself a decent start. In addition, his artist's soul demanded it. Tommy, in his own way, was a perfectionist. Third Mate Adkins was due to get his extras in about half an hour, and if Tommy knew the Captain's habits, the Captain would be taking his first meal from the newly replenished reservoir at about the same time. That set the deadline. Before the half hour was up. Tommy would have to cut off the flow of the new metal, so that stomachs which had been gurgling in anticipation would remain desolately void until the next windfall. The Mate, in spite of his hypochondria, was a glutton. With any luck, this would make him bitter for a month. And the Old Man -- but it was better not to dwell on that. The petty officer hung around irresolutely for another ten minutes, then dashed off down the corridor to attend to the rest of his detail. Without wasting a moment, Tommy dropped the capsule he had just collected and shot away in the other direction. The rest of the cabin boys, as fearful of Tommy as they were of constituted authority, would not dare to raise an outcry until they spotted the officer coming back. The officer, because of the time he had wasted in watching Tommy, would have to administer a thorough lecture on slackness to the rest of the detail before he returned. Tommy had calculated his probable margin to a nicety, and it was enough, barring accidents, to get him safely away. Nevertheless, he turned and twisted from one system of corridors to another, carefully confusing his trail before he set himself to put as much vertical distance behind him as he could. This part of the game had to be accomplished in a fury of action, for he was free to move in Ihe corridors only until the Captain was informed that he was loose again. After that, he had to play hounds and hares with the moving strips through which the Captain could see him. When tire time he had estimated was three-quarters gone. Tommy f slowed and came to a halt. He inspected the corridor wall minutely, and found the almost imperceptible trace that showed where the scanning wave nearest him had stopped. He jockeyed his body clear of it, and then waited. He still had a good distance to cover before he dared play his trump, but it was not safe to move now; he had to wait for the Captain's move. It came soon enough: the scanning waves erupted into simultaneous motion and anger. "Tommy!' they bellowed. "Tommy; Loy ! Come back, you unmentionable excrescence, or by Spore you'll regret it! Tommy!" Moving between 'waves, Tommy waited patiently until their motion carried him from one corridor to another. The Captain's control over the waves was not complete: in some corridors they moved two steps upward for one down, in others the reverse. When he got into a downward corridor. Tommy scrambled out of it again as soon as he could and started over. Gradually, with many false starts, he worked his way up to the thirteenth level, one level short of the hull. Now came the hard part. This ' time he had to enter the fuel lines, not only for sure escape, but to gather the force he needed. And for the first time in his life, Tommy hesitated before something that he had set himself to do. Death was a phenomenon that normally touched each member of Tommy's race only once -- only Captains died, and they died alone. For lesser members of the crew, there was almost no mortal danger: the ship protected them. But Tommy knew what death was, and as the sealed entrance to the fuel line swung into view, he knew that he faced it. He made himself small, as he had under the lash. He broke the seal. Quickly, before the following wave could catch him, he thrust himself through the sphincter. The blast of ions gripped him, flung him forward, hurting him like a hundred whips. Desperately he held himself together, thickening his insulating shell against that deadly flux of energy; but still his body absorbed it, till he felt a horrid fullness. The walls of the tube fled past him, barely perceptible in the rush of glowing haze. Tommy held in that growing tautness with his last strength, meanwhile looking for an exit. He neither knew nor cared whether he had reached his goal ; he had to get out or die. He saw a dim oval on the wall ahead, hurled himself at it, clung, and forced his body through. He was in a horizontal corridor, just under the hull. He drank the blessed coolness of it for an instant, before moving to the nearest sphincter. Then he was out, under the velvet-black sky and the diamond blaze of stars. He looked around. The pain was fading now; he felt only an atrocious bloatedness that tightened his skin and made all his movements halting. Forward of him, up the long shallow curve of the hull, he could see the alien ship, and the two five-pointed creatures beside it. Carefully, keeping a few feet between himself and the hull, he headed toward it. One of the creatures was sprawled flat on the polarizer that had brought its ship down. The other, standing beside it, turned as Tommy came near, and two of its upper three points moved in an insane fashion that made Tommy feel ill. He looked away quickly and moved past them, till he was directly over the center of the polarizer and only a few inches away. Then, with a sob of relief, he released the energy his body had stored. In one thick, white bolt, it sparked to the polarizer's center. Shaken and spent, Tommy floated upward and surveyed what he had done. The muzzle of the polarizer was contracting, puckering at the center, the dark corrosive ring following it in. So much energy, applied in one jolt, must have shorted and paralyzed it all the way back to the ship's nerve center. The Captain, Tommy thought wryly, would be jumping now! And he wasn't done yet. Tommy took one last look at the aliens and their ship. The sprawled one was up now, and the two of them had their upper points twined around each other in a nauseating fashion. Then they parted suddenly, and, facing Tommy, wiggled their free points. Tommy moved purposefully off across the width of the ship, heading for the three heavy-duty polarizers. He had to go in again through that hell not once more, but twice. Though his nerves shrank from the necessity, there was no way of avoiding it. For the ship could not alter its course, except by allowing itself to be attracted by a sun or other large body -- Which was unthinkable -- or it could rotate at the Captain's will. The aliens were free now, but the Captain had only tb spin ship in order to snare them again. Four miles away. Tommy found the second polarizer. He backed away a carefully calculated distance before he re-entered the hull. At least he could know in advance how far he had to go -- and he knew now, too, that the energy he had stored the first time had been adequate twice over. He rested a few moments; then, like a diver plunging into a torrent, he thrust himself into the fuel line. He came out again, shuddering with pain, and pushed himself through the exit. He felt as bloated as he had before. The charge of energy was not as great, but Tommy knew that he was weakening. This time, when he discharged over the polarizer and watched it contract into a tiny, puckered mass, he felt as if he could never move again, let alone expose himself once more to that tunnel of flame. The stars, he realized dully, were moving in slow, ponderous arcs over his head. The Captain was spinning ship. Tommy sank to the hull and lay motionless, watching half-attentively for a sight of the alien ship. There it was, a bright dot haloed by the flame of its exhaust. It swung around slowly, gradually, with the rest of the firmament, growing smaller slowly. "He'll get them before they're out of range," Tommy thought. He watched as the bright dot climbed overhead, began to fall on the other side. The Captain had one polarizer left. It would be enough. Wearily Tommy rose and fol## lowed the bright star. It was not a joke any longer. He would willingly have gone inside to the bright, warm, familiar corridors that led downward to safety and deserved punishment. But somehow he could not bear to think of those fascinating creatures -- those wonderful playthings -- going to fill the Captain's fat belly. Tommy followed the ship until he could see the pale gleam of the functioning polarizer. Then he crawled through the hull once more, and again he found a sealed entrance to the fuel tube. He did not let himself think about it. His mind was numb already, and he pushed himself through uncaring, as condemned criminals often go carelessly to execution. This time it was worse than ever before; he had not dreamed that it could be so bad. His vi T sion dimmed and he could barely see the exit, or feel its pressure, when he dragged himself out. Lurching drunkenly, he passed a scanning wave on his way to the hull sphincter, and heard the Captain's voice explode. Outside, ragged black patches obscured his vision of the stars. The pressure inside him pressed painfully outward, again and again, and each time he held it back. Then he felt rather than saw that he was over the pale disk, and as he let go the bolt he lost consciousness. When his vision cleared, the alien ship was still above him,, alarmingly close. The Captain must have had it almost reeled in again, he thought, when he had let go that last charge. Flaming, it receded into the Great Deep, and he watched it go until it shrank beyond his vision to follow. He felt a great peace and a great weariness. The tiny blue disk that was a planet had moved its apparent position a little nearer its star. The aliens were going back there, to their unimaginable home, and Tommy's ship was forging onward into new depths of darkness -- toward the edge of the Galaxy and the greatest Deep. He moved to the nearest sphincter as the cold bit at him. His spirits lifted suddenly as he thought of those three stabs of energy, equally spaced around the twelve-mile perimeter of the ship. The Captain would be utterly speechless with rage, he thought, like an aged martinet who had had his hands painfully slapped by a small boy. For, as we warned you, the Captaih was not precisely a cap-? tain, nor the ship precisely a ship. Ship and Captain were one and the same, hive and queep , bee castle and lord. In effect, Tommy had c.ircuninayigated the skipper. # ? T HE following advertisement appeared in the July # issue of several magazines: Wliat is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the booklet of explanation. can alter the course of your life! Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages! The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth an ancient secret Society Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was. after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet  -- sometime -- when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand. Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the' bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil. "You can alter the course of your life!" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. T# Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was # years long I . He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time. Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said. It just so hppened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her ' past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible. Donald Alford, research physitucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research. He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over accorded to any common object. He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page. It was the symbol or emblem caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it. "I wonder what their racket is," he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the . coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters. Three identical forms accom-, sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself -- if he would merely fill out the enclosed form. Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope. He had hoped, unreasonably, time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information -- about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring tion. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility. Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give -- all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to Join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation. To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity. "What do you suppose they're driving at?" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire. "I don't really know what to say," she answered, squinting a little as she usually dii when puzzled. "I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!" "The scientific attitude," he acknowledged with a grin. "Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?" she suggested. "Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?" Don was shocked. "If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!" "The scientific attitude again," Betty sighed. "Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons "Curiosity," he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script. It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices For this time they differed. Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him. His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future. It amused him to discover that on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them. Miss Amable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats. After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too. Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The fplded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise. "Come here a minute, Betty," he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. "What do you make of these?" She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. "Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort." "This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me," worried Don. "Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (#) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (#) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (#) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (#) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?' " "Could they be a spy ring?" askjjtf Betty. "Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?" Don scanned the papers quickly. "There's nothing here that looks like c an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?" is really what it claims to be -- a secret society -- and that they actually screen their applicants?" He smiled wryly. "Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?" He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him. His next communication from dress and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners. Dear Doctor Alford: We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us, We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July #. at #:# P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you If not, wc will attempt to make another appointment for you. The time specified for the apMS pointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At #:# P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-owisps? It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible! He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, Unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them! 'Get hold of. yourself," he commanded his frightened mind. "There's some perfectly logical. easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or -- or -- ' But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed... His laboratory address was availtake the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for had unearthed the information. His wife's words echoed in his mind, "Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?" Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic. At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand He scribbled a memo to. the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday. A T first Don Alford had some headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms. It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now faHe opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell. The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect. The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata Hari type, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter. She smiled. "We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll jlist step into the next room -- " She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it. The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug -- Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters -- of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis... The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door. Don sprang to examine the picture near the comer. It was hung at eyfe level -- that i, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently ' there Was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things. Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud. Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered. In fact -- it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube. There were no wires! Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as d two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries. The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before. but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded. Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment! But this is impossible ! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production ! And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the posSecret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth? The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now -- With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked! A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous. '"Our Grand Chairman will see you now," she said in a quiet voice. Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find. She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman. But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony. "Good' Lord!" Don gasped. "That's an atomic reactor down there!" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it. His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened. He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent? His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it. even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't -- couldn't -- be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world! "Hello, Don," said a quiet voice beside him. "It's good to see you again." #t : "Dr. Crandon!" he heard his own voice reply. " You're the He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place -- didn't anything make sense any longer? "I think we have rather abused you, Don," Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. "I can see that you are suspicious of us, and -- yes -- afraid." D ON stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him. Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. "You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to, think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over." Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility. "What do you use?" he asked bitterly. "Drugs? Hypnosis?" Crandon sighed. "I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that legal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves." Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue. "Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?" Don nodded, too bewildered to speak. "They were donated by the founder of our organization. They were part of his personal collection -- which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory." "Then the pictures are modern," said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. "T thought one was a Titian -- " "It is," said Crandon. "We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them." "But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?" is actually what our advertisements claim -- an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries." "But you said that he designed your atomic reactor." "Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however." Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. "Let's start at the beginning," he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. "Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years. "Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly. "The super-genius who was our founder was not a sem anti cist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations -- although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries -- developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei -- " "But it can't be done," Don objected. "It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived." Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet -- there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance. "Yes, the reactor," said Crandon. "He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled, other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse. "What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it nardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible." Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. "How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement intime that is so tiny after all?" "But by one man," Don argued. Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous. "He merely followed the straight path," Crandon finished simply. D ON's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him. "Four hundred years!" he murmured with awe. "You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!" "Our technical achievements may disappoint you," warned Crandon. "Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them. "Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster." For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank. "Then you've failed," he said bitterly. "In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats -- and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?" "Come with me," said Crandon. He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine. "This is our answer," said Crandon. "Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences -- that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?" "But why the hocus-pocus?" asked Don. "Why do you hide behind such a weird front as in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project -- before it's too late?" Crandon took a sighing breath. "How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it! "Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few f the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator." "But what about the others?" asked Don. "There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all." "Oh, yes," replied Crandon. "There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes. "There are also the desperate resort -- lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them -- anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us. "I think I've answered most of your questions. Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?" Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question. "Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?" Crandon smiled. "You're here, aren't you?" Don nodded, his tense features relaxing. "Enroll me as a member," he said. Coming Up... Captured by an unthinkably alien race, the terrestrial spaceship formed a desperate human microcosm in an indifferent macrocosm. Somebody had to be a hero... but who was it to be... and why? The primitive past -- our present -- held the answer to a question that no one today would think of asking! With a powerful foundation in Installment #, this giant among science fiction novels builds an inexorable structure of terror and suspense with each succeeding chapter! Mr. H. L. Gold, Editor May #, #I Galaxy Science Fiction Dear Sir: Being an occasional reader of Science Fiction, I bought? the April, #, edition of your magazine. Reading it through I was extremely gratified and pleased to learn of the emphasi # many of the stories placed on human relations. "Inside Earth" by Poul Anderson, in particular, handled a human relations theme extremely well. Several of the other stories in the magazine also involved such a theme in one form or another. On behalf of the Commission on Human Relations I should like to congratulate you for your foresightedness in em --  phasizing these themes in your stories. I certainly think and I am sure you will agree with me that one of the attributes of a future world, no matter how distant in the future, should be complete understanding among all peoples aoi all groups and the complete absence of discriminatory practices because of race, creed and national origin that occupy our present-day world. The advantages of the space ships, interplanetary travel, push-button living, and a host of other materialistic features of the time yet to come will be greatly diminished if people cannot learn the spiritual values of understanding decent relations among all groups. Thanks for doing your part to achieve such an objective.' Sincerely yours, Department of Public Information The Biography Project A bonus story... to be included on mendously exciting about the opening of the Biofilm Institute. Even a hardened Sunday supplement writer like Wellman Zatz felt it. Arlington Prescott, a wiper in a contact-eyeglass factory, while searching for a time machine, had invented the Biotime Camera, a standard movie camera  -- minus sound, of course -- that projected a temporal beam, reaccumulated it, and focused it on a temporallightsensitized film. When he discovered that he had to be satisfied with merely photographing the past, not physically visiting it, Prescott had quit doing research and become principal of a nursery school. But, Zatz explained, dictating his notes by persfone to a voxtyper in the telenews office, the Biofilm Institute was based on Prescott's repudiated invention. A huge, massive building, mostly scheduled too late the contents page! below ground, in the #rd Century style, and equipped with # Biotime Cameras, it wa# the gift of Humboldt Maxwell, wealthy manufacturer of Snack Capsules. There were # teams of biographers, military analysts, historians, etc., to begin recording history a? it actually happened -- with special attention, according to Maxwell's grant, to past leaders of industry, politics, science, and the arts, in the order named. Going through the Biofilm Institute, Wellman Zatz gained mostly curt or snarled interviews with the Bioteams; fishing through time for incidents or persons was a nervous job, and they resented interruptions. He settled finally on a team that seemed' slightly friendlier. They were watching what looked like a scene from Elizabethan England on the monitor screen. "Sir Isaac Newton," Kelvin Burns, the science biographer. grunted in reply to Zatz's question. "Great man. We want to find out why he went off the beam." Zatz knew about that, of course. Sunday feature articles for centuries had used the case of Sir Isaac to support arguments for psychic phenomena. After making all his astonishing discoveries by the age of #, the great I #th Century scientist had spent the rest of his long life in a hunt for precognition, the philosopher's stone, and other such paraphernalia of mysticism. "My guess," said Mowbray Glass, the psychiatrist, "is paranoia caused by feelings of rejection in childhood." But the screen showed a happy boy in what seemed to be a normal #th Century home and school environment. Glass grew puzzled as Sir Isaac eventually produced his binomial theorem, differential and integral calculus, and went to work on gravity -- all without evidencing any symptoms of emotional imbalance. " The most unbelievable demonstrative and deductive powers I've encountered," said Pinero Schmidt, the science integrator. "I can't believe such a man could go mystical." "But he did," Glass said, and tensed. "Look!" Alone in a dark, cumbersomely furnished study, the man on the good science fiction reeding for Here aie the books to look forward to -- for your certain reading pleasure in the coming months. A truly great s ience fiction writer novelises his most 'famous subject. two aM standing novels, both together in cne'Tomplete book. The second volume about the most famous barbarian-warrior of all.  will be published in October Edited by Martin Greenberg Introduction by Willy Ley Many excitino stories of life on other worlds by well-known authors. Another in the "Adventures in Sclent Fiction" series. Illustrated jn full color by Edd Cartier and containing a science fiction dictionary. One dollar each -- ready October Order now from your bookstore or mmi press  E. Ufh S. New Yen Ik # IS# ,r Current IS civ Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open Monday Thru Saturday i :ilO A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings sintil #:# P.M. New York #, New York (Phone GRomercy #-# All (lie Science Fiction. Fantasy atid Suieraatuial Books In Print In Ameiica or KnrHudll I can simply anytliiUB you see mentinned, listed or offered ajiywhctoll Visit, ray a! ore ami Inspect the (.muest Variety of or semi #c for my Bis Printed Checklist of #I Titles Including # rpci licnuni Bookt I J#e eneh up. # Columbus Circle. New York #. N. Y. screen, wearing a satin coat, stock and breeches, glanced up sharply. He looked directly into the temporal beam for a moment, and then stared into the shadows of the room. He grabbed up a silver candlestick and searched the corners, holding the heavy candlestick like a weapon, "He's mumbling something," reported Gonzalez Carson, the lip-reader. "Spies. He thinks somebody's after his discoveries." Burns looked puzzled. "That's the first sign we've seen of breakdown. But what caused it?" "I'm damned if I know," admitted Glass. "Heredity?" Zatz suggested. "No," Glass said positively. "It's been checked." The Bioteam spent hours prying further. When the scientist was in his thirties, he developed a continuing habit of looking up and smiling secretly. On his deathbed, forty years later, he moved his lips happily, without fear. " 'My guardian angel.' " Carson interpreted for them. " 'You've watched over me all my life. I am content to meet you now.' " Glass started. He went to one Bioteam after another, asking a brief question of each. When he came back, lie was trembling. "What's the answer, Doc?" Zatz asked eagerly. "We can't use the Biotime Camera any more," Glass said, looking sick. "My colleagues have been investigating the psychoses of Robert Schumann, Marcel Proust and others, who all eventually developed delusions of persecution." "Yeah, but why?" Zatz persisted. "Because they thought they were being spied upon. And they were, of course. By us!" the best stories by the best authors in the field. i It is with justifiable pride that we now bring you Robert # A. Heinlein, one of the greatest and most popular science  fiction writers, with a complete book-length novel in  three installments... jj Here is a story that will be discussed, admired, envied, # emulated for a good long time to come!  You won't want to miss any of it, so reserve your copy  at your favorite newsstand, or send # for a year's  subscription (# issues) to... S New York #. N. Y.   : ; I by Raymond F. Jones Just speculate for a moment on the enormous challenge to archeology when interplanetary flight is possible... and relics are found of a cidentally, that was scientifically so far in advance of ours that they held the secret of the restoration of life! One member of that race can be brought back after # years of death... length novel, which has never before been published! You can expect a muscle-tightening, sweat-producing, mind-prodding adventure in the future when you read it! OCTOBER #I GALAXY Science Fiction Oauxy Edilor-in-Chief Vol. #, No. I Assistant Editor Art Director Advertising Manager is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York l#, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: # copies) S#-# per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere S#. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Bernard Kautman, president. Vincent Paris!, treasurer. Vera Cetutti, secretary. AH rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Isaac Asimov # by Ralph Robin # by Edward W. Lvdvig # by Donald Colvin #I by Roberf A. Heinlein # by H. L. Gold I by Groff Confcin # Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Paf. Off. Use Before Shaking I T has been suggested that hundreds of urgent topics are beseeching the editorial pages of. among other things, science fiction magazines. I find it surprising. If a science fiction magazine has a viewpoint -- a dangerous thing, tending to harden into glaucoma -- it should be apparent in the stories. The ability to put his inaunderings into type may be tempting to an editor, but the fact is that they are immeasurably stronger in stories than in solid pages of rhetoric. They are also less dull. However, since a statement of policy is closely related to science fiction, here it is: human decency and dignity, peace, progress, scientific advance, better standards of living, education, international and intergroup relations, and individual awareness. That last point may be confusing, and Im glad to have a chance to explain. Through submitted stories and letter.s, and articles in fan magazines, I've encountered instances of anger so disproportionate to cause that the vehicles actually amount to case histories. Some of the anger was directed at our subscription department when we were getting organized and some errors were inevitable; at my rejecting stories that were not suitable for one reason or another: at editoriaLs stating goals, and ads declaring zine, which were construed as bragging. This is not to excuse any of the offending practices. Our sub department. is working out its problems; for every reader who objects to editorial discussion of aims, rubs and successes, there are literally hundreds who approve; promotion, whether fortunately or unfortunately, is a necessity for any product; and I could promise to buy all stories submitted, but I won't. vidual awareness : A psychiatric axiom is that suicides in almost all cases want to kill someone else; anyone who attacks an inanimate object or a distant, unknown person is sore at somebody nearer home. To continue, however: any sort whatever, human degradation, inhuman war, repudiation of science or any other aspect of progress, lower standards of living, education, international find intergroup relations, individual unawareness, and bad stories. inhuman wars. Some wars must be fought, which is a controversial statement. Passive resistance may win under certain conditions, though I doubt if it can against a brutalized oppressor, but, passive or otherwise, it is still war. Humanity would be in even worse shape than it is if it had not fought its just wars. Matter of fact, the shape humanity is in is cause for worry, I believe, but not the kind of paralyzing terror that clutches science fiction writers in particular, every time they think of it. A Pollyanna attitude would be silly. On the other hand, so is irrational fright. It's hard to recall many ages that didn't face what they regarded as imminent destruction. Their threats were barbarians, great plagues, sorcery in all its fearful forms, uncheckable fire, flood, famine. Ours is mainly atomic and bacteriological warfare, and cancer. Even assuming war must come, which is not a certainty, and that it will use the awful weapons that science has provided, just how bad would it be? Well, destroying the entire United States would take untold thousands of bombs. For the whole world -- there isn't that much fissionable material. And remember that artificial radioactivity does not make areas uninhabitable for more than a matter of months, or a few years at the very most. So no less than hunsurvive, and civilization safeguarded. Nor, actually, is the individual prospect for survival bad, outside the big cities, maybe. However, radioactive and biological warfare, like poison gas, is more likely not to be used for fear of reprisal. Cancer? Techniques now in use are very effective, and more are on their way. In any case, which would you prefer -- the Black Plague, with no countermeasures at all, or today's perils, with the enormous resources of laboratory and hospital? How much of our fear is internal, hung on atomic war and cancer, that in other ages would have clung to plagues and barbarians? The opinions contained herein are not to be considered guarantees. Remember the hotheads mentioned earlier, who have their counterparts in the governments and armed forces of nations. But if logic means anything, mankind is in no greater danger than it's been in throughout history -- and with greater knowledge and technology for protection. I The C-Chute The spaceship had to be recaptured from the ofiees, which meont thot somebody hod to be a hero. But who would that be... and why? E ven the cabin into which he and the other passengers had been herded, Colonel Anthony Windhatn could still catch the essence of the battle's progress. For a while,  there was silence, no jolting, which meant the spaceships were fighting at astronomical distance in a duel of energy blasts and powerful force-field defenses. He knew that could have only one end. Their Earth ship was only an armed merchantman and his glimpse of the Kloro enemy just before he had been cleared off deck by the crew was sufficient to show it to be a light cruiser. And in less than half an hour. ' S there came those hard little shocks he was waiting for. The passengers swayed back and forth as the ship pitched and veered, as though it were an ocean liner in a storm. But space was calm and silent as ever. It was their pilot sending desperate bursts of steam through the steam-tubes, so that by reaction the ship would be sent rolling and tumbling. It could only mean that the inevitable had occurred. The Earth ship's screens had been drained and it no longer dared withstand a direct hit. Colonel Windham tried to steady himself with his aluminum cane. He was thinking that he was an old man; that he had spent his life in the militia and had never seen a battle: that now, with a battle going on around him, he was old and fat and lame and had no men under his command. They would be boarding soon, those Kloro monsters. It was their way of fighting. They would be handicapped by spacesuits and their casualties would be high, but they wanted the Earth ship. Windham considered the passengers. For a moment, he thought, if they were armed and  could lead them -- He abandoned the thought. Porter was in an obvious state of funk and the young boy, Leblanc, was hardly better. The Polyorketes brothers -- dash it, he couldn't tell them apart -- huddled in a corner speaking only to one another. Mullen was a different matter. He sat perfectly erect, with no signs of fear or any other emotion in his face. But the man was just about five feet tall and had undoubtedly never held a gun of any sort in his hands in all his life. He could do nothing. And there was Stuart, with his frozen halfsmile and the highpitched sarcasm which saturated all he said. Windham looked sidelong at Stuart now as Stuart sat there, pushing his dead-white hands through his sandy hair. With those artificial hands he was useless, anyway. Windham felt the shuddering vibration of ship-to-ship contact; and in five minutes, there was the noise of the fight through the corridors. One of the Polyorketes brothers screamed and dashed foi the door. The othr called, "Aristides! Wait!" and hurried after. It happened .so quickly. Aristides was out the door and into the corridor, running in brainless panic. A carbonizer glowed briefly and there was never even a scream. Windham, from the doorway, turned in horror at the blackened stump of what was left. Strange -- a lifetime in uniform and he had never before seen a man killed in violence. It toolf the combined force f the rest to carry the other brother back struggling into the room. The noise of battle subsided. Stuart said, "That's it. They'll put a prize crew of two aboard and take us to one of their home planets. We're prisoners of war, naturally." "Only two of the Kloros will stay aboard?" ask Windham, astonished. Stuart said, "It is their custom. Why do you ask, Colonel? Thinking of leading a gallant raid to retake the ship?" Windham flushed. "Simply a point of information, dash it." But the dignity and tone of authority he tried to assume failed him, he knew. He was simply an Id man with a limp. And Stuart was probably right. He had lived among the Kloros and knew their ways. the beginning that the Kloros were gentlemen. Twenty-four hours of imprisonment had passed, and now he repeated the statement as he flexed the fingers of his hands and watched the crinkles come and go in the soft artiplasm. He enjoyed the unpleasant reaction it aroused in the others. People were made to be punctured; windy bladders, all of them. And they had hands of the same stuff as their bodies. There was Anthony Windham, in particular. Colonel Windham, he called himself, and Stuart was colonel who had probably drilled a home guard militia on a village green, forty years ago, with such lack of distinction that he was not called back to service in any capacity, even during the emergency of Earth's first interstellar war. "Dashed unpleasant thing to be saying about the enemy, Stuart. Don't know that I like your attitude." Windham seemed to push the words through his clipped mustache. His head had been shaven, too, in imitation of the current military style, but now a gray stubble was beginning to show about a centered bald patch. His flabby cheeks dragged downward. That and the fine red lines on his thick nose gave him a somewhat undone appearance, as though he had been wakened too suddenly and loo early in the morning. Stuart said, "Nonsense. Just reverse the present situation. Suppose an Earth warship had taken a Kloro liner. What do you think would have happened to any Kloro civilians aboard?" "I'm sure the Earth fleet would observe all the interstellar rules of war," Windham said stiffly. "Except that there aren't any. If we landed a pHze crew on one of their ships, do you think we'd take the trouhte to maintain a chlorine atmosphere for the benefit of the survivors ; allow them to keep their non-contraband possessions; give them the use of the most comfortable stateroom, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera?" Ben Porter said, "Oh, shut up, for God's sake. If I hear your etcetera, etcetera once again, I'U go nuts." Stuart said, "Sorryr He wasn't. Porter was scarcely responsible. His thin face and beaky nose glistened with perspiration, and he kept biting the inside of his cheek until he suddenly wincedHe put his tongue against the sore spot, which made him look even more clownish. Stuart was growing weary of baiting them. Windham was too flabby a target and Porter could do nothing but writhe. The rest were silent. Demetrios Polyorketes was off in a world of silent internal grief for the moment. He had not slept the night before, most probably. At least, whenever Stuart woke to change his position -- he himself had been rather restless -- therc had been Polyorketes' thick mumble from the next cot. It said many things, but the moan to which it returned over and over again was, "Oh, my brother!" He sat dumifly on his cot now. his red eyes rolling at the other prisoners out of his broad, swarthy, unshaven face. As Stuart watched, his face sank into calloused palms so that only his mop of crisp and curly black hair could be seen. He rocked gently, but now that they were all awake, he made no sound. Claude Leblanc was trying, very unsuccessfully, to read a letter. He was the youngest of the six, scarcely out of college, returning to Earth to get married. Stuart had found him that morning weeping quietly, his pink and white face flushed and blotched as though it were a heartbroken child's. He was very fair, with almost a girl's beauty about his large blue eyes and full lips. Stuart wondered what kind of girl it was who had promised to be his wife. He had seen her picture. Who on the ship had not? She had the characterless prettiness that makes all pictures of fiancees indistinguishable. It seemed to Stuart that if he were a girl, however, he would want someone a little more pronouncedly masculine. That left only Randolph Mullen. Stuart frankly did not have the least idea what to make of him. He was the only one of the six that had been on tlte Arcturian worlds for any length of time. Stuart, himself, for instance, had been there only long enough to give a series of lectures on astronautical engineering at the provincial engineering institute. Colonel Windham had been on a Cook's tour; Porter was trying to buy concentrated alien vegetables for his canneries on Earth; and the Polyorketes brothers had attempted to establish themselves in Arcturus as truck farmers and, after two growing seasons, gave it up, had somehow unloaded at a profit, and were returning to Earth. Randolph Mullen, however, had been in the Arcturian system for seventeen years. How did voyagers discover so much about one another so quickly? As far as Stuart knew, the little man had scarcely spoken aboard ship. He was unfailingly polite, always stepped to one side to allow another to pass, but his entire vocabularly appeared to consist only of "Thank you" and "Pardon me." Yet the word had gone around that this was his first trip to Earth in seventeen years. He was a little man, very precise, almost irritatingly so. Upon awaking that morning, he had made his cot neatly, shaved, bathed and dressed. The habit of years seemed not in the least disturbed by the fact that he was a prisoner of the Kloros now. He was unobtrusive about it, it had to be admitted, and gave no impression of disapproving of the  sloppiness of the others. He simply sat there, almost apologetic, trussed in his overconservative clothing, and hands loosely clasped in his lap. The thin line of hair on his upper lip, far from adding character to his face, absurdly increased its primness. He looked like someone's idea of a caricature of a bookkeeper. And the queer thing about it all, Stuart thought, was that that was exactly what he was. He had noticed it on the registry -- Randolph Fluellen Mullen; occupation, bookkeeper; employers, Prime Paper Box Co.; # Tobias Avenue, New Warsaw, Arcturus n. R. Stuart?" Stuart looked up. It was Leblanc, his lower lip trembling slightly. Stuart tried to remember how one went about being gentle. He said, "What is it, Leblanc?" "Tell me, when will they let us go?" "How should I know?" "Everyone says you lived on a Kloro planet, and just now you said they were gentlemen." "Well, yes. But even gentlemen fight wars in order to win. Probably, we'll be interned for the duration." "But that could be years! Margaret is waiting. She'll think I'm dead!' "I suppose they'll allow messages to be sent through once we'reon their planet." Porter's hoarse voice sounded in agitation. "Look here, if you know so much about these devils, what will they do to us while we're interned? What will they feed us? Where will they get oxygen for us? They'll kill us, I tell you." And as an afterthought, "I've got a wife waiting for me, too," he added. But Stuart had heard him speaking of his wife in the days before the attack. He wasn't impressed. Porter's nail-bitten fingers were pulling and plucking at Stuart's sleeve. Stuart drew away in sharp revulsion. He couldn't stand those ugly hands. It angered him to desperation that such monstrosities should be real while his own white and perfectly shaped hands were only mocking imitations grown out of an alien latex. He said, "They won't kill us. If they were going to, they would have done it before now. Look, we capture Kloros too, you know, and it's just a matter of common sense to treat your prisoners decently if you want the other side to be decent to your men. They'll do their best. The food may not be very good, but they're better chemists than we are. It's what they're best at. They'll know exactly what food factors we'll need and how many calorics. We'll live. They'll see to that." Windham rumbled, "You sound more and more like a blasted greenie sympathizer, Stuart. It turns my stomach to hear an Earthman speak well of the green fellas the way you've been doing. Burn it, man, where's your loyalty?" "My loyalty's where it belongs. With honesty and decency, regardless of the shape of the being it appears in." Stuart held up his hands. "See these? Kloros made them. I lived on one of their planets for six months. My hands were mangled in the conditioning machinery of my own quarters. I thought the oxygen supply they gave me was a little poor -- it wasn't, by the way -- and I tried making the adjustments on my own. It was my fault. You should never trust yourself with the machines of another culture. By thetime soxneone among the Kloros could put on an atmosphere suit and get to me, it was too late to save my hands. "They grew these artiplasm things for me and operated. You know what that meant? It meant designing equipment and nutrient solutions that would work in oxygen atmosphere. It meant that their surgeons had to perform a delicate operation while dressed in atmosphere suits. And now I've got hands again." He laughed harshly, and clenched them into weak fists. "Hands -- " Windham said, "And you'd sell your loyalty to Earth for that?" "Sell my loyalty? You're mad. For years, I hated the Kloros for this. I was a master pilot on the Trans-Galactic Spacelines before it happened. Now? Desk job. Or an occasional lecture. It took me a long time to pin the fault on myself and to realize that the only role played by the Kloros was a decent one. They have their code of ethics, and it's as good as ours. If it weren't for the stupidity of some of their people -- and, by God, of some of ours -- we wouldn't be at war. And after it's over -- " Polyorketes was on his feet. His thick fingers curved inward before him and his dark eyes glittered. "I don't like what you say, mister." "Why don't you?" "Because you talk too nice about these damned green bastards. The Kloros were good to you, eh? Well, they weren't good to my brother. They killed him. I think maybe I kill you, you damned greenie spy." And he charged. Stuart barely had time to raise his arms to meet the infuriated farmer. He gasped out, "What the hell -- " as he caught one wrist and heaved a shoulder to block the other which groped toward bis throat. His artiplasm hand gave way. Polyorketes wrenched free with scarcely an effort. Windham was bellowing incoherently, and Leblanc was calling out in his reedy voice, "Stop it! Stop iti" But it was little Mullen who threw his arms about the farmer's neck from behind and pulled with all his might. He was not very effective; Polyorketes seemed scarcely aware of the little man's weight upon his back. Mullen's feet left the floor so that he tossed helplessly to right and left. But he held his grip and it hampered Polyorketes sufficiently to allow Stuart to break free long enough to grasp Windham's aluminum cane. He said, "Stay away, Polyorketes." He was gasping for breath and fearful of another rush. The hollow aluminum cylinder was scarcely heavy enough to accomplish much, but it was better than having only his weak hands to defend himself with. Mullen had loosed his hold and was now circling cautiously, his breathing roughened and his jacket in disarray. Polyorketes, for a moment, did not move. He stood there, his shaggy head bent low. Then he said, "It is no use. I must kill Kloros. Just watch your tongue Stuart. If it keeps on rattling too much, you're liable to get hurt. Really hurt, I mean." Stuart passed a forearm over his forehead and thrust the cane back at Windham, who seized it with his left hand, while mopping his bald pate vigorously with a handkerchief in his right. Windham said, "Gentlemen, we must avoid this. It lowers our prestige. We must remember the common enemy. We are Earthmen and we must act what we are -- the ruling race of the Galaxy. We dare not demean ourselves before the lesser breeds." "Yes, Colonel," said Stuart, wearily. "Give us the rest of the speech tomorrow." He turned to Mullen, "I want to say thanks." He was uncomfortable about it, but he had to. The little accountant had surprised him completely. But Mullen said, in a dry voice that scarcely raised above a whisper. "Don't thank me, Mr. Stuart. It was the logical thing to do. If we are to be interned, we would need you as an interpreter, perhaps, one who would understand the Kloros." Stuart stiffened. It was, he thought, too much the bookkeeper type of reasoning, too logical, too dry of juice. Present risk and ultimate advantage. The assets and debits balanced neatly. He would have liked Mullen to leap to his defense out of -- well, out of what? Out of pure, unselfish decency? Stuart laughed silently at himself. He was beginning to expect idealism of human beings, rather than good, straightforward, selfcentered motivation. His sorrow and rage were like acid inside him, but they had no words to get out. If he were Stuart, big-mouth, white-hands Stuart, he could talk and talk and maybe feel better. Instead, he had to sit there with half of him dead; with no brother, no Aristides -- It had happened so quickly. If he could only go back and have one second more warning, so that he might snatch Aristides, hold him, save him. But mostly he hated the Kloros. Two months ago, he had hardly ever heard of them, and now he hated them so hard, he would be glad to die if he could kill a few. He said, without looking up, "What happened to start this war, eh?" He was afraid Stuart's voice would answer. He hated Stuart's voice. But it was Windham, the bald one. Windham said, "The immediate cause, sir, was a dispute over mining concessions in the Wyandotte system. The Kloros had poached on Earth property." "Room for both. Colonel!" Polyorketcs looked up at that, snarling. Stuart could not be kept quiet for long. He was speaking again; the cripple-hand, wiseguy, Kloros-lover, Stuart was saying, "Is that anything to fight over, Colonel? We can't use one another's worlds. Their c?orine planets are useless to us and our oxygen ones are useless to them. Chlorine is deadly to us and oxygen is deadly to them. There's no way we could maintain permanent hostility. Our races just don't coincide. Is there reason to fight then because both races want to dig iron out of the same airless planetoids when the Galaxy?" Windham said, "There is the question of planetary honor -- " "Planetary fertilizer. How it excuse a ridiculous war like this one? It can only be fought on outposts. It has to come down to a series of holding actions and eventually be settled by negotiations that might just as easily have been worked out in the first place. Neither we nor the Kloros will gain a thing." Grudgingly, Polyorketcs found  that he agreed with Stuart. What did he and Aristides care where Earth or the Kloros got their iron? Was that something for Aristides to die over? I n The little warning buzzer sounded. Polyorketes' head shot up and he rose slowly, his lips drawing back. Only one thing could be at the door. He waited, arms tense, fists balled. Stuart was edging toward him. Polyorketes saw that and laughed to himself. Let the Kloro come in, and Stuart, along with all the rest, could not stop him. Wait, Aristides, wait just a moment, and a fraction of revenge will be paid back. T he door opened and a figure entered, completely swathed in a shapeless, billowing travesty of a spacesuit. An odd, unnatural, but not entirely unpleasant voice began, "It is with some misgivings, Earthmen, that my companion and myself -- " It ended abruptly as Polyorketes, with a roar, charged once again. There was no science m the lunge. It was sheer bull-momentum. Dark head low, burly arms spread out with the hairtufted fingers in choking position, he clumped on. Stuart was whirled to one side before he had a chance to intervene, and was spun tumbling across a cot. The Kloro might have, without undue exertion, straight-armed Polyorketes to a halt, or stepped aside, allowing the whirlwind to tt pass. He did neither. With a rapid movement, a hand-weapon was up and a gentle pinkish line of radiance connected it with the plunging Earthman. Polyorketes stumbled and crashed down, his body maintaining its last curved position, one foot raised, as though a lightning paralysis had taken place. It toppled to one side and he lay there, eyes all alive and wild with rage. The Kloro said, "He is not permanently hurt." He seemed not to resent the offered violence. Then he began again, "It is with some misgiving, Earthmen, that my companion and myself were made aware of a certain commotion in this room. Are you in any need which we can satisfy?" Stuart was angrily nursing his knee which he had scraped in colliding with the cot. He said. "No. thank you, Kloro." "Now. look here," puffed Windham, "this is a dashed outrage. We demand that our release be arranged." The Kloros tiny, insectlike head turned in the fat old man's direction. He was not a pleasant sight to anyone unused to him. He was about the height of an Earthman, but the top of him consisted of a thin stalk of a neck with a head that was the merest swelling. It consisted of a blunt triangular proboscis in front and two bulging eyes on either side. That was all. There was no brain pan and no brain. What corresponded to the brain in a Kloro was located ip what would be an Earthly abdomen, leaving the head as a mere sensory organ. The Kloro's spacesuit followed the outlines of the head more or less faithfully, the two eyes being exposed by two clear semicircles of glass, which looked faintly green because of the chlorine atmosphere inside. One of the eyes was now cocked squarely at Windham, who quivered uncomfortably under the glance, but insisted, "You have no right to hold us prisoner. We are noncombatants," The Kloro's voice, sounding thoroughly artificial, came from a small attachment of chromium mesh on what served as its chest. The voice box was manipulated by compressed air under the control of one or two of the many delicate, forked tendrils that radiated from two circles about its upper body and were, mercifully enough, hidden by the suit. The voice said, "Are you serious, Earthman? Surely you have ' heard of war and rules of war and prisoners of war." It looked about, shifting eyes with quick jerks of its head, staring at a particular object . first with one, then with another. It was Stuart's understanding that each eye transferred a separate message to the abdominal brain, which had to coordinate the two to obtain full information. Windham had nothing to say. No one had. The Kioto, its four main limbs, roughly arms and legs in pairs, had a vaguely human appearance under the masking of the suit, if you looked no higher than its chest, but there was no way of telling what it felt. They watched it turn and leave. a strangled voice, "God, smell that chlorine. If they don't do something, we'll all die of rotted lungs." Stuart said. "Shut up. There isn't enough chlorine in the air to make a mosquito sneeze, and what there is will be swept out in two minutes. Besides, a little chlorine is good for you. It may kill your cold virus." Windham coughed and said, 'Stuart, I feel that you might have said something to your Kloro friend about releasing us. "You are scarcely as bold in their presence, dash it, as you are once they are gone." "You heard what the creature said, Colonel. We're prisoners of war, and prisoner exchanges are negotiated by diplomats. We'll just have to wait." Leblanc, who had turned pasty white at the entrance of the Kloro, rose and hurried into the privy. There was the sound of retching. An uncomfortable silence fell while Stuart tried to think of something to say to cover the unpleasant sound. Mullen filled in. He had rummaged through a little box he had taken from under his pillow. He said, "Perhaps Mr. Leblanc had better take a sedative before retiring. I have a few. I'd be glad to give him one." He explained his generosity immediately, "Otherwise he may keep the rest of us awake, you see." "Very logical," said Stuart, dryly. "You'd better save one for Sir Launcelot here; save .half a dozen." He walked to where 'Polyorketes still sprawled and knelt at his side. "Comfortable, baby?" Windham said, "Deuced poor taste speaking like that, Stuart." "Well, if you're so concerned about him, why don't you and Porter hoist him onto his cot?" Hi helped them do so. Polyorketes' arms were trembling erratically now. From what Stuart knew of the Kloro's nerve weapons, the man should be in an agony of pins and needles about now. Stuart said, "And don't be too gentle with him, either. The damned fool might have gotten us all killed. And for what?" He pushed Polyorketes' stiff carcass to one side and sat at the edge of the cot. He said, "Can IS you hear me, Polyorketes?" Polyoiketes' eyes gleamed. An arm lifted abortively and fell back.  "Okay then, listen. Don't try anything like that again. The next time it may be the finish for all of us. If you had been a Kloro and he hod been an Earthman, we'd be dead now. So just get one thing through your skull. We're sorry about your brother and it's a rotten shame, but it was his own fault." Polyorketes tried to heave and Stuart pushed him back. "No. you keep on listening," he said. "Maybe this is the only time I'll get to talk to you when you have to listen. Your brother had no right leaving passeier's quarters. There was no place for him to go. He just got in the way of our own men. We don't even know for certain that it wasa Kloro gun that killed liim. It might have been one of our own." "Oh, I say, Stuart," . objected Windham. Stuart whirled at him. "Do you have proof it wasn't? Did you see the shot? Could you tell from what was left of the body whether it was Kloro energy or 'Earth energy?" Polyorketes found his voice, a fuzzy verbal snarl, "Damned stinking greenie bastard." "Me?" said Stuart. "I know what's going on in your mind, Polyorketes. You think that when the paralysis wears off, you'll ease your feelings by slamming me around. Well, if you do. it will probably be curtains for all of us." He rose, put his back against the wall. For the moment, he was fighting all of them. "None of you know the Kloros the way I do. The physical differences you see are not important. The differences in their temperament are. They don't understand our views on sex, for instance. To them, it's just a biological reflex like breathing. They attach no importance to it. But they do attach importance to social groupings. Remember, their evolutionary ancestors had lots in common with our insects. They always assume that any group of Earthmen they find together makes up a social unit. "That means just about everything to them. I don't understand exactly what it means. No Earthman can. But the result is that they never break up a group, just as we don't separate a mother and her children if we can help it. One of the reasons they're treating us with kid gloves right now is that they imagine we're all broken up over the fact that they killed one of us, and they feel guilt about it. "But this is what you'll have to remember. We're going to be interned together and kept together for duration. I don't like the thought. I wouldn't have picked any of you for co-internees and I'm pretty sure none of you would have picked me. But there it is. The Kloros could never understand that our being together on the ship is only accidental. "That means we've got to get along somehow. That's not just goodie-goodie talk about birds in their Httle nests agreeing. What do you think would have happened if the Kloros had come in earlier and found Polyorketes and myself trying to kill each other? You don't know? Well, what do you suppose you would think of a mother you caught trying to kill her children? "That's it, then. They would have killed every one of us as a bunch of Kloro-type perverts and monsters. Got that? How about you, Polyorketes? Have you got it? So let's call names if we have to, but let's keep our hands to ourselves. And now, if none of you mind, I'll massage my hands back into shape -- these synthetic hands that I got from the Kloros and that one of my own kind tried to mangle again." TJOR Claude Leblanc, the worst was over. He had been sick enough: sick with many things; but sick most of all over having ever left Earth. It had been a great thing to go to college off Earth. It had been an adventuro and had taken him away from his mother. Somehow, he had been sneakingly glad to make that escape after the first month of frightened adjustment. And then on the summer holidays, he had been no longer Claude, the shy-spoken scholar, but Leblanc, space traveler. He had swaggered the fact for all it was worth. It made him feel such a man to talk of stars and Jumps and the customs and environments of other worlds; it had given him courage with Margaret. She had loved him for the dangers' he had undergone -- Except that this had been the first one, really, and he had not done so well. He knew it and was ashamed and wished he were like Stuart. He used the excuse of mealtime to approach. He said, "Mr. Stuart." Stuart looked up and said shortly, "How do you feel?" Leblanc felt himself blush. He blushed easily and the effort not to blush only made it worse. He said, "Much better, thank you. We are eating. I thought I'd bring you your ration." Stuart took the offered can. It was standard space ration; thoroughly synthetic, concentrated, nourishing and, somehow, unsatthe c-chute isfying. It heated automatically when the can was opened, but could be eaten cold, if necessary. Though a combined fork-spoon utensil was enclosed, the ration was of a consistency that made the use of fingers practical and not particularly messy. Stuart said. "Did you hear my little speech?" "Yes, sir. I want you to know you can count on me.' "Well, good. Now go and eat." "May I eat here?" "Suit yourself." For a moment, they ate in silence. and then Leblanc burst out, "You are so sure of yourself, Mr. Stuart! It must be very wonderful to be like that!" "Sure of myself? Thanks, but there's your self-assured one." Leblanc followed the direction of the nod in surprise. "Mr. Mullen? That little man? Oh, not" "You don't think he's self-assured?" Lcblnnc shook hi# head. He looked at Stuart intently to see if he could detect humor in his expression. "That one is just cold. He has no emotion in him. He's like a little machine. I find him repulsive. You're different, Mr. Stuart. You have it all inside, but you control it. I would like to be like that." And a though attracted by the magnetism of the mention, even though unheard, of his name. Mullen joined them. His can of ration was barely touched. It was still steaming gently as he squat ted opposite them. His voice had its usual quality of furtively rustling underbrush. "How long, Mr. Stuart, do you think the trip will take?' "Can't say, Mullen. They'll undoubtedly be avoiding the usual trade routes and they'll be making more Jumps through hyperspace than usual to throw off possible pursuit. I wouldn't be surprised if it took as long as a week. Why do you ask? I presume you have a very practical and logical reason?" "Why. yes. Certainly." He seemed quite shellbackcd to sarcasm. He said, "It occurred to me that it might be wise to ration the rations, so to speak." "We've got enough food and water for a month. I checked on that first thing." "I see. In that case, I will finish the can." He did. using the all-purpose utensil daintily and patting a handkerchief against his unstained lips from time to time. his feet some two hours later. He swayed a bit, looking like the Spirit of Hangover. He did not try to come closer to Stuart: but spoke from where he stood. He said, "You stinking greenia spy, you watch yourself." 'You heard what I said before, Polyorketes." 'I heard. But I also heard what you said about Aristides. I won't bother with you, because you're a bag of nothing but noisy air. But wait, someday you'll blow your air in one face too many and it will be let out of you." "I'll wait." said Stuart. Windham hobbled over, leaning heavily on his cane. "Now, now," he called with a wheezing joviality that overlaid his sweating anxiety so thinly as to emphasize it. "We're all Earthmen, dash it. Got to remember that; keep it as a glowing light of inspiration. Never let down before the blasted Kloros. We've got to forget private feuds and remember only that we are Earthmen united against alien blighters." Stuart's comment was unprintable. Porter was right behind Windham. He had been in a close conference vnth the shaven-headed colonel for an hour, and now he said with indignation. "It doesn't help to be a wiseguy, Stuart. You listen to the colonel. We've been doing some hard thinking about the situation." He had washed some of the grease off his face, wet his hair and slicked it back. It did not remove the little tic on his right cheek just at the point where his lips ended, or make his hangnail hands more attractive in appearance. "All right. Colonel," said Stuart. "What's on your mind?" Windham said, "I'd prefer to have all the men together." "Okay, call them." Leblanc hurried over; Mullen approached with greater deliberation. Stuart said. "You want that fellow?" He jerked his head at Polyorketes. "Why, yes. Mr. Polyorketes, may we have you, old fella?" "Ah, leave me alone." "Go ahead," said Stuart, "leave him alone. I don't want him." "No, no," said Windham. "This is a matter for all Earthmen. Mr. Polyorketes. we must have you." Polyorketes rolled off one side of his cot. "I'm close enough. I can hear you." Windham said to Stuart, "Would they -- the Kloros. I mean -- have this room wired?" "No," said Stuart. "Why should they?" "Arc you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. They didn't know what happened when Polyorketes jumped me. They just heard the thumping when it started rattling the ship." "Maybe they were trying to give us the impression the room wasn't wired." "Listen, Colonel, Tve never It known a Kloro to tell a deliberate lie -- " Polyorkctes interrupted calmly, "That lump of noise just loves the Kloros." Windham said hastily, "Let's not begin that. Look, Stuart, Porter and I have been discussing matters and we have decided that you know the Kloros well enough to think of some way of getting us back to Earth." "It happens that you're wrong. I can't think of any way." "Maybe there is some way we can take the ship back from the blasted green fellas," suggested Windham. "Some weakness they may have. Dash it, you know what I mean." "Tell me. Colonel, what are you after? Your own skin or Earth's welfare?" T resent that question. I'll have you know that while I'm as careful of my own life as anyone has a right to be, I'm thinking of Earth primarily. And I think that's true of all of us." "Damn right," said Porter, instantly. Leblanc looked anxious, Polyorketes resentful; and Mullen had no expression at all. "Good," said Stuart. "Of course, I don't think we can take the ship. They're armed and we aren't. But there's this. You know why the Kloros took this ship intact. It's becautee they need ships. They may be better chemists than Earthmen are. but Earthmen are better astronautical engineers. Wc have bigger, better and more ships. In fact, if our crew had had a proper respect for military axioms in the first place, they would have blown the ship up as soon as it looked as though the Kloros were going to board." Leblanc looked horrified. "And kill the passengers?" "Why not? You heard what the good colonel said. Every one of us puts his own lousy little life after Earth's interests. What good are we to Earth alive right now? None at all. What harm will this ship do in Kloro hands? A hell of a lot, probably." "Just why," asked Mullen, "did our men refuse to blow up the ship? They must have had a reason." "They did. It's the firmest tradition of Earth's military men that there must never be an unfavorable ratio of casualties. If we had blown ourselves up, twenty fighting men and seven civilians of Earth would be dead as compared with an enemy casualty total of zero. So what happens? We let them board, kill twenty-eight -- I'm sure we killed at least that many -- and let them have the ship." "Talk, talk, talk," jeered Polyorketes. "There's a moral to this," said Stuart. "We can't take the ship #way from thr Kloros. We miht be able to rush them, though, and keep them busy long enough to allow one of us enough time to short the engines." "What?" yelled Porter, and Windham shushed him in fright. "Short the engines." Stuart repeated. "That would destroy the ship, of course, which is what we want to do, isn't it?" Leblanc's lips were white. "I don't think that would work." "We can't be sure till we try. But what have wc to lose by trying?" "Our lives, damn it!" cried Porter. "You insane maniac, you're crazy!" "If I'm a maniac," said Stuart, "and insane to boot, then naturally I'm crazy. But just remember that if we lose our lives, which is overwhelmingly probable, we lose nothing of value to Earth; whereas if we destroy the ship, as we just barely might, we do Earth a lot of good. What patriot would hesitate? Who here would put himself ahead of his world?" He looked about in the silence. "Surely not you. Colonel Windham." Windham coughed tremendously. "My dear man. that is not the question. There must be a way to save the ship for Earth without lossing our lives, eh?" "All right. You name it." "Let's all think about it. Now there are only two of the Kloros aboard ship. If one of us could sneak up on them and -- " "How? The rest of the ship's all hlled with chlorine. We'd have to wear a spacesuit. Gravity in their part of the ship is hopped up to Kloro level, so whoever is patsy in the deal would be clumping around, metal on metal, slow and heavy. Oh. he could sneak up on them, sure -- like a skunk trying to sneak downwind." "Then we'll drop it all," Porter's voice shook. "Listen, Windham, there's not going to be any destroying the ship. My life means plenty to me and if any of you try anything like that, I'll call the Kloros. I mean it." "Well," said Stuart, "there's hero number one." Leblanc said, "I want to go back to Earth, but I -- " Mullen interrupted. "I don't think our chances of destroying the ship are good enough unless -- " "Heroes number two and three. What about you, Polyorkttes? You would have the chance of "I want to kill them with my bare hands," growled the fanner, his heavy fists writhing. "On their planet. I will kill dozens." "That's a nice safe promise for now. What about you. Colonel? Don't you want to march to dath and glory with me?" 'Your attitude is very cynical and unbecoming. Stuart. It's obvious that if the rest are unwilling, then your plan will fall through." "Unless I do it myself, huh?" "You won't, do you hear?" said Porter, instantly. "Damn right I won't," agreed Stuart. "I don't claim to be a hero. I'm just an average patriot, planet they take me to and sit out the war." iTl, '(;) course, there is a way we could surprise the Kloros." The statement would have dropped flat except for Polyorketes. He pointed a black-nailed, stubby forefinger and laughed harshly. "Mr. Bookkeepier !" he said. "Mr. Bookkeeper is a big shot talker like this damned greenic spy, Stuart. All right, Mr. Bookkeeper, go ahead. You make big speeches also. Let the words roll like an empty barrel." He turned to Stuart and repeated venomously, "Empty barrel! Cripple-hand empty barrel. No good for anything but talk." Mullen's soft voice could make no headway until Polyorketes was through, but then he said, speaking directly to Stuart, "We might be able to reach them from outside. This room has a C-chute, I'm sure." "What's a C-chute?" asked Leblanc, "Well -- " began Mullen, and then stopped, at a loss. Stuart said, mockingly, "It's a euphemism, my boy. Its full name is 'casualty chute.' It doesn't get talked about, but the main rooms on any ship would have them. They're just little airlocks down which you slide a corpse. Burial at space. Always lots of sentiment' and bowed heads, with the captain making a rolling speech of the type Polyorketes here wouldn't like." Leblanc's face twisted. "Use that to leave the ship?" "Why not? Sujerstitious? -- Go on, Mullen." The little man had waited patiently. He said, "Once outside, one could re-enter the ship by the steam-tubes. It can be done -- with luck. And then you would be an unexpected visitor in the control room." Stuart stared at him curiously. "How do you figure this oUt? What do you know about steamtubes?" Mullen coughed. "You mean because I'm in the paper-box business? Well -- " He grew pink, waited a moment, then made a new start in a colorless, unemotional voice. "My company, which manufactures fancy paper boxes and novelty containers, made a line of spaceship catidy boxes for the juvenile trade some years ago. It was designed so that if a string were pulled, small pressure containers were punctured and jets of compressed air shot out through the mock steam-tubes, sailing the box across the room and scattering candy as it went. The sales theory was that the youngsters would find it exciting to play with the ship and fun to scramble for the candy. "Actually, it was a complete failure. The ship would break' dishes and sometimes hit another child in the eye. Worse still, the children would not only scramble for the candy but would fight over it. It was almost our worst failure. We lost thousands. "Still, while the boxes were being designed, the entire office was extremely interested. It was like a game, very bad for efficiency and office morale. For a while, we all became steam-tube experts. I read quite a few books on ship construction. On my own time, however, not the company's." Stuart was intrigued. He said, 'You know it's a video sort of idea, but it might work if we had a hero to spare. Have we?" "What about you?' demanded Porter, indignantly. "You go around sneering at us with your cheap wisecracks. I don't notice you volunteering for anything." "That's because I'm no hero Porter. I admit it. My object is to stay alive, and shinnying down steam-tubes is no way to go about staying alive. But the rest of you are noble patriots. The Colonel says so. What about you, Colonel? You're the senior hero here." Windham said, "If I were younger, blast it, and if you had your hands, I would take pleasure, sir, in trouncing you soundly." "I've no doubt of it, but that's no answer." "You know very well that at my time of life and with my leg -- " he brought the flat of his hand down upon his stiff knee T am in no position to do anything of the sort, however much I should wish to." "Ah, yes," said Stuart, "and I, myself, am crippled in the hands, as Polyorketes tells me. That saves us. And what unfortunate deformities do the rest of us have?" "Listen," cried Porter, "I want to know what this is all about. How can anyone go down the steam-tubes? What if the Kloros use them while one of us is inside?" "Why, Porter, that's part of the sporting chance. It's where the excitement comes in." "But he'd be boiled in the shell like a lobster." 'A pretty image, but inaccurtte. The steam wouldn't be on or more than a very short time, naybe a second or two. and the :uit insulation would hold that ong. Besides, the jet comes scootng out at several hundred miles t minute, so that you would be #lown clear of the ship before the :team could even warm you. In 'act, you'd be blown quite a few uiles out into space, and after .hat you would be quite safe from :hc Kloros. Of course, you couldn't get back to the ship." Porter was sweating freely. "You don't scare me for one minute, Stuart." "I don't? Then you're offering to go? Are you sure you've thought out what being stranded in space means? You're all alone, you know; really all alone. The steam-jet will probably leave you turning or tumbling pretty rapidly. You won't feel that. You'll seem to be motionless. But all the stars will be going around and around so that they're just streaks m the sky. They won't ever stop. They won't even slow up. Then your heater will go or your oxygen will give out. and you will die very slowly. You'll have lots of time to think. Or. if you arc in  hurry, you could open your suit. That wouldn't be pleasant, either. I've seen the faces of men who had a torn suit happen to them accidentally, and it's pretty awful. But it would be quicker. Then -- " Porter turned and walked un steadily away. Stuart said, lightly. "Another failure. One act of heroism still ready to be knocked down to the highest bidder with .nothing offered yet" Polyorketes spoke up and his harsh voice roughed the words. "You keep on talking. Mr. Big Mouth. You just keep banging that empty barrel. Pretty soon, we'll kick your teeth in. There's to do it now, eh, Mr. Porter?" Porter's look at Stuart confirmed the truth of Polyorketes' remarks, but he said nothing. Stuart said, "Then what about you. Polyorketes? You're the bare-hand man with guts. Want me to help you into a suit?" "I'll ask you when I want help." "What about you, Leblanc?" The young man shrank away. "Not even to get back to Margaret?" But Leblanc could only shake his head. "Mullen?" "Well -- I'll try." "You'll what?" "I said, yes. I'll try. After all, it's my idea." . Stuart looked stunned. "You're serious? How'come?" Mullen's prim mouth pursed. "Because no one else will." "But that's no reason. Especially for you." Mullen shrugged. There was a thump of a cane behind Stuart. Windham brushed past. He said, "Do you really intend to go. Mullen?" "Yes, Colonel." "In that case, dash it. let me shake your hand. I like you. You're an -- an Earthman, by heaven. Do this, and win or die. ril bear witness for you." Mullen withdrew his hand awkwardly from the deep and vibrating grasp of the other. And Stuart just stood there. He was in a very unusual position. He was. in fact, in the particular position of all positions in which he most rarely found himself. He had nothing to say. npHE quality of tension had changed. The gloom and frustration had lifted a bit, and the excitement of conspiracy had re#S placed it. Even Polyorketes was fingering the spacesuits and commenting briefly and hoarsely on which he considered preferable... Mullen was having a certain amount of trouble. The suit bung rather limply upon him even though the adjustable joints had been tightened nearly to minimum. He stood there now with only the helmet to be screwed on. He wiggled his neck. Stuart was holding the helmet with an effort. It was heavy, and his artiplasmic hands did not grip it well. He said, "Better scratch your nose if it itches. It's your last chance for a while." He didn't add, "Maybe forever," but he thought it. Mullen said, tonelessly, "I think perhaps I had better have  spare oxygen cylinder." "Good enough." "With a reducing valve." Stuart nodded. "I see what you're thinking of. If you do get blown clear of the ship, you could try to blow yourself back by using the cylinder as an action-reaction motor." They clamped on the headpiece and buckled the spare cylinder to Mullen's waistPolyorketes and Leblanc lifted him up to the yawning opening of the C-tube. It was ominously dark inside, the metal lining of the interior having been painted a mournful black. Stuart thought he could detect a musty odor about it, but that, he knew, was only imagination. He stopped the proceedings when Mullen was half within the tube. He tapped upon the little man's faceplate. "Can you hear me?" Within, there was a nod. "Air coming through all right? No last-minute troubW?" Mullen lifted his armored arm in a gesture of reassurance. "Then remember, don't use the suit-radio out there. The Kloros might pick up the signals." Reluctantly, he stepped away. Polyorketes' brawny hands lowered Mullen xintil they could hear the thumping sound made by the steel-shod feet against the outer valve. The inner valve then swung shut with a dreadful finality, its beveled silicone gasket making a slight soughing noise as it crushed hard. They clamped it into place. Stuart stood at the toggleswitch that controlled the outer valve. He threw if and the gauge that marked the air pressure within the tube fell to rero. A little pinpoint of red light warned that the outer valve was open. Then the light disappeared, the valve closed, and the gauge climbed slowly to fifteen pounds again. They opened the inner valve again and found the tube empty. Polyorketes spoke first. He said. "The little son-of-a-gun. He went!" He looked wonderingly at the other. "A little fellhw with guts like that." Stuart said, "Look, we'd better get ready in here. There's just a chance that the Kloros may have detected the valves opening and closing. If so, they'll be here to investigate and we'll have to cover up." "How?" asked Windham. "They won't see Mullen anywhere around. We'll say he's in the head. The Kloros know that it's one of the peculiar characteristics of Earthmen that they resent intrusion on their privacy in lavatories, and they'll make no effort to check. If we can hold them off -- " "What if they wait, or if they check the spacesuits?" asked Porter. Stuart shrugged. "Let's hope they don't. And listen, Polyorketes. don't make any fuss when they come in." Polyorketes grunted, "With that little guy out there? What do you think I am?" He stared at Stuart without animosity, then scratched his curly hair vigorously. "You know, I laughed at him. I thought he was an old woman. It makes me ashamed." Stuart cleared his throat. He said, "Look, I've been saying some things that maybe weren't too funrky after all, now that I come to think of it. I'd like to say I'm sorry if I have." He turned away morosely and walked toward his cot. He heard the steps behind him. felt the touch on his sleeve. He turned; it was Leblanc. The youngster said softly, "I keep thinking that Mr. Mullen is an old man." "Well, he's not a kid. He's about forty-five or fifty, I think." Leblanc said, "Do you think, Mr. Stuart, that I should have gone, instead? I'm the youngest here. I don't like the thought of having let an old man go in my place. It makes me feci like the devil." "I know. If he dies, it will be too bad." "But he volunteered. Wc didn't make him, did we?" "Don't try to dodge responsibility, Leblanc. It won't make you feel better. There isn't one of us without a stronger motive to run the risk than he had." And Stuart sat there silently, thinking. beneath his feet yield and the walls about him slip away quickly, too quickly. He knew it was the puff of air escaping, carrying him with it, and he dug arms and legs frantically against the wall to brake himself. Corpses were supposed to be flung well clear of the ship, but he was no IT corpse -- for the moment. His feet swung free and threshed. He heard the clunk of one magnetic boot against the hull just as the rest of his body puffed out like a tight cork under air pressure. He teetered dangerously at the lip of the hole in the ship -- he had changed orientation suddenly and was looking down on it -- then took a step backward as its lid came down of itself and fitted smoothly against the hull. A feeling of unreality overwhelmed him. Surely, it wasn't he standing on the outer surface of a ship. Not Randolph F. Mullen. So few human beings could ever say they had, even those who traveled in space constantly. He was only gradually aware that he was in pain. Popping out of that hole with one foot clamped to the hull had nearly bent him in two. He tried moving, cautiously, and found his motions to be erratic and almost impossible to control. He thought nothing was broken, though the muscles of his left side were badly wrenched. And then he came to himself and noticed that the wrist lights of his suit were on. It was by their light that he had stared into the blackness of the C-chute. He stirred with the nervous thought that from within, the Kloros might sec the twin spots of moving light just outside the hull. He flicked the switch upon the suit's mid-section. Mullen had never imagined that, standing on a ship, he would fail to see its hull. But it was dark, as dark below as above. There were the stars, hard and bright little non-dimensional dots. Nothing more. Nothing more anywhere. Under his feet, not even the stars -- not even bis feet. He bent back to look at the stars. His head swam. They were moving slowly. Or. rather, they were standing still and the ship was rotating, but he could not tell his eyes that. They moved. His eyes followed -- down and behind the ship. New stars up and above from the other side. A black horizon. The ship existed only as a region where there were no stars. No stars? Why, there was one almost at his feet. He nearly reached for it; then he realized that it was only a glittering reflection in the mirroring metal. They were moving thousands of miles an hour. The stars were. The ship was. He was. But it meant nothing. To his senses, there was only silence and darkness and that slow wheeling of the stars. His eyes followed the wheeling -- And his head in its helmet hit the ship's hull with a soft belllike ring. He felt about in panic with his thick, insensitive, spun-silicate gloves. His feet were still firmly magnetized to the hull, that was true, but the rest of his body bent backward at the knees in a right angle. There was no gravity outside the ship. If he bent back, there was nothing to pull the upper part of his body down and tell his joints they were bending. His body stayed as he put it. He pressed wildly against the hull and his torso shot upward and refused to stop when upright. He fell forward. He tried more slowly, balancing with both hands against the hull, until he squatted evenly. Then upward. Very slowly. Straight up. Arms out to balance. He was straight now, aware of his nausea and lightheadedness. He looked about. My God, where were the steam-tubes? He couldn't see them. They were black on black, nothing on nothing. Quickly, he turned on the wrist lamps. In space, there were no beams, only elliptical, sharply defined spots of blue steel, winking light back at Where they struck a rivet, a shadow was cast, knife-sharp and as black as space, the lighted region illuminated abruptly and without diffusion. He moved his arms, his l?ody swaying gently in the opposite direction: action and reaction. The vision of a steam-tube with its smooth cylindrical sides sprang at him. He tried to move toward it. His foot held firmly to the hull. He pulled and it slogged upward, straining against quicksand that eased quickly. Three inches up and it had almost sucked free; six inches up and he thought it would fly away. He advanced it and let it down, felt it enter the quicksand. When the sole was within two inches of the hull, it snapped down, out of control, hitting the hull ringingly. His spacesuit carried the vibrations, amplifying them in his ears. He stopped in absolute terror. The dehydrators that dried the atmosphere within his suit could not handle the sudden gush of perspiration that drenched his forehead and armpits. He waited, then tried lifting his foot again -- a bare inch, holding it there by main force and moving it horizontally. Horizontal motion involved no effort at all; it was motion perpendicular to the lines of magnetic force. But he had to keep the foot from snapping down as he did so, and then lower it slowly. He puffed with the effort. Each step was agony. The tendons of his knees were cracking, and there were knives in his side. Mullen stopped to let the perspiration dry. It wouldn't do to steam up the inside of his faceplate. He flashed his wrist-lamps, and the steam-cylinder was right ahead. The ship had four of them, at ninety degree intervals, thrusting out at an angle from the midgirdle. They were the "fine adjustment" of the ship's course. The coarse adjustment was the powerful thrusters back and front which fixed final velocity by their accelerative and decelerative force, and the hyperatomics that took care of the spaceswallowing Jumps. But occasionally the direction of flight had to be adjusted slightly and then the steamcylinders took over. Singly, they could drive the ship up, down, right, left. By twos, in appropriate ratios of thrust, the ship could be turned in any desired direction. The device had been unimproved in centuries, being too simple to improve. The atomic pile heated the water content of a closed container into steam, driving it, in less than a second, up to temperatures where it would have broken down into a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, and then into a mixture of electrons and ions. Perhaps the breakdown actually took place. No one ever bothered testing; it worked, so there was no need to. At the critical point, a needle valve gave way and the steam thrust madly out in a short but incredible blast. And the ship, inevitably and majestically, moved in the opposite direction, veering about its own center of gravity. When the degrees of turn were sufficient, an equal and opposite blast would take place and the turning would be canceled. The ship would be moving at its original velocity, but in a new direction. Mullen had dragged himself out to the lip of the steam-cylinder. He had a picture of himself -- a small speck teetering at the extreme end of a structure thrusting out of an ovoid that was tearing through space at ten thousand miles an hour. But there was no air-stream to whip him off the hull, and his magnetic soles held him more firmly than he liked. With lights on, he bent down to peer into the tube and the ship dropped down precipitously as his orientation changed. He reached out to steady himself, but he was not falling. There was no up or down in space except for what his confused mind chose to consider up or down. The cylinder was just large enough to hold a man, so that it might be entered for repair purposes. His light caught the rungs almost directly opposite his position at the lip. He puffed a sigh of relief with what breath he could muster. Some ships didn't have ladders. He made his way to it, the ship appearing to slip and twist beneath him as he moved. He lifted an arm over the lip of the tube, feeling for the rung, loosened each foot, and drew himself within. The knot in his stomach that had been there from the first was a convulsed agony now. If they should choose to manipulate the ship, if the steam should whistle out now -- He would never hear it; never know it. One instant he would be holding a rung, feeling slowly for the next with a groping arm. The next moment he would be alone in space, the ship a dark, dark nothingness lost forever among the stars. There would be, perhaps, a brief glory of swirling ice crystals drifting with him, shining in his wrist-light and slowly epproaching and rotating about him, attracted by his mass like infinitesimal planets to an absurdly tiny Sun. He was trickling sweat again, and now he was also conscious of thirst. He put it out of his mind. There would be no drinking until he was out of his suit -- if ever. Up a rung: up another; and another. How many were there? His hand slipped and he stared in disbelief at the glitter that showed under his light. Ice? Why not? The steam, incredibly hot as it was, would strike metal that was at nearly absolute zero. In the few split-seconds of thrust, there would not be time for the metal to warm above the freezing point of water. A sheet of ice would condense that would sublime slowly into the vacuum. It was the speed of all that happened that prevented the fusion of the tubes and of the original water-container itself. His groping hand reached the end. Again the wrist-light. He stared with crawling horror at the steam nozzle, half an inch in diameter. It looked dead, harmless. But it always would, right up to the microsecond before -- Around it was the outer steam lock. It pivoted on a central hub that was springed on the portion toward space, screwed on the part toward the ship. The springs allowed it to give under the first wild thrust of steam pressure before the ship's mighty inertia could be overcome. The steam was bled into the inner chamber, breaking the force of the thrust, leaving the total energy unchanged, but spreading it over time so that the hull itself was in that much less danger of being staved in. Mullen braced himself firmly against a rung and pressed against the outer lock so that it gave a little. It was stiff, but it didn't have to give much, just enough to catch on the screw. He felt it catch. He strained against it and turned it, feeling his body twist in the opposite direction. It held tight, the screw taking up the strain as he carefully adjusted the small control switch that allowed the springs to fall free. How well he remembered the books he had read! He was in the interlock space now, which was large enough to hold a man comfortably, again for convenience in repairs. He could no longer be blown away from the ship. If the steam blast were turned on now, it would merely drive him against the inner lock -- hard enough to crush him to a pulp. A quick death he would never feel, at least. Slowly, he unhooked has spare oxygen cylinder. There was only an inner lock between himself and the control room now. This lock opened outward into space so that the steam blast could only close it tighter, rather than blow it open. And it fitted tightly and Smoothly. There was absolutely no way to open it from without. He lifted himself above the lock, forcing his bent back against the curved inner surface of the interlock area. It made breathing difficult. The spare oxygen cylinder dangled at a queer angle. He held its metal-mesh hose and straightened it, forcing it against the inner lock so that vibration thudded. Again -- again -- It would have to attract the attention of the Kloros. They would lave to investigate. He would have no way of telling when they were about to do so. Ordinarily, they would first let air into the interlock to force the outer lock shut. But now the outer lock was on the central screw, well away from its rim. Air would suck about it ineffectually, dragging out into space. Mullen kept on thumping. Would the Kloros look at the airgauge, note that it scarcely lifted from zero, or would they take its proper working for granted? an hour and a half." T know," said Stuart. They were all restless, jumpy, but the tension among themselves had disappeared. It was as though all the threads of emotion extended to the hull of the ship. Porter was bothered. His philosophy of life had always been simple -- take care of yourself because no one will take care of you for you. It upset him to see it shaken. He said, "Do you suppose they've caught him?" "If they had, we'd hear about it," replied Stuart, briefly. Porter felt, with a miserable twinge, that there was little interest on the part of the others in speaking to him. He could understand it; he had not exactly earned their respect. For the moment, a torrent of self-excuse poured through his mind. The others had been frightened, too. A man had a right to be afraid. No one likes to die. At least, he hadn't broken like Aristides Polyorketes. He hadn't wept like Leblanc. Ie -- But there was Mullen, out there on the hull. "Listen," he cried, "why did he do it?" They turned to look at him, not understanding, but Porter didn't care. It bothered him to the point where it had to come out. "I want to know why Mullen is risking his life." "The man," said Windham, "is a patriot -- " "No, none of that!'"Porter was almost hysterical. "That little fellow has no emotions at all. He just has reasons and I want to know what those reasons are, because -- " He didn't finish the sentence. Could he say that if those reasons applied to a little middle-aged bookkeeper, they might apply even more forcibly to himself? Polyorketes said, "He's one brave damn little fellow." Porter got to his feet. "Listen," he said, "he may be stuck out there. Whatever he's doing, he may not be able to finish it alone. I -- I volunteer to go out .after him." He was shaking as he said it and he waited in fear for the sarcastic lash of Stuart's tongue. Stuart was staring at him, probably with surprise, but Porter dared not meet his eyes to make certain. Stuart said, mildly, "Let's give him another half-hour." Porter looked up, startled. There was no sneer on Stuart's face. It was even friendly. They all looked friendly. He said. "And then -- " "And then all those who do volunteer will draw straws or something equally democratic. Who volunteers, besides Porter?" They all raised their hands; Stuart did, too. But Porter was happy. He had volunteered first. He was anxious for the half-hour to pass. T caught Mullen by surprise.  The outer lock flew open and the long, thin, snakelike, almost headless neck of a Kloro sucked out, unable to fight the blast of escaping air. ' Mullen's cylinder flew away, almost tore free. After one wild moment of frozen panic, he fought for it, dragging it above the air-stream, waiting as long as he dared to let the first fury die down as the air of the control room thinned out, then bringing it down with force. It caught the sinewy neck squarely, crushing it. Mullen, curled above the lock, almost entirely protected from the stream, raised the cylinder again and plunging it down again, striking the head, mashing the staring eyes to liquid ruin. In the nearvacuum, green blood was pumping out of what was left of the neck. Mullen dared not vomit, but he wanted to. With eyes averted, he backed away, caught the outer lock with one hand and imparted a whirl. For several seconds, it maintained that whirl. At the end of the screw, the springs engaged automatically and pulled it shut. What was left of the atmosphere tighten it and the laboring pumps could now begin to fill the control room once again. Mullen crawled over the mangled Kloro and into the room. It was empty. He had barely time to notice that when he found himself on his knees. He rose with difficulty.  The transition from non-gravity to gravity had taken him entirely by surprise. It was Klorian gravity, too, which meant that with this suit, he carried a fifty percent overload for his small frame. At least, though, his heavy metal clogs no longer clmg so exasperatingly to the metaTunderneath. Within the ship, floors and wall were of cork-covercd aluminum alloy. He circled slowly. The neckless Kloro had collapsed and lay with only an occasional twitch to show it had once been a living organism. He stepped over it, distastefully, and drew the steam-tube lock shut. The room had a depressing bilious cast and tlic lights shone yellow-green. It was the Kloro atmosphere, of course. Mullen felt a twinge of surprise and reluctant admiration. The Kloros obviously had some way of treating materials so that they were impervious to the oxidizing effect of chlorine. Even the map of Earth on the wall, printed on glossy plastic-backed paper, seemed fresh and untouched. He approached, drawn by the familiar outlines of the continents-f There was a dash of motion caught in the corner of his eyes. As quickly as he could in his heavy suit, he turned, then screamed. The Kloro he had thought dead was rising to its feet. Its neck hung limp, an oozing mass of tissue mash, but its arms reached out blindly, and the tentacles about its chest vibrated rapidly like innumerable snakes' tongues. It was blind, of course. The destruction of its neck-stalk had deprived it of all sensory equipment, and partial asphyxiation had disorganized it. But the brain remained whole and safe in the abdomen. It still lived. Mullen backed away. He circled. trying clumsily and unsuccessfully to tiptoe, though he knew that what was left of the Kloro was also deaf. It blundered on its way, struck a wall, felt to the base and began sidling along it. Mullen cast about desperately for a weapon, found nothing. There was the Kloro's holster, but he dared not reach for it. Why hadn't he snatched it at the very first? Fool! The door to the control room opened. It made almost no noise. Mullen turned, quivering. The other Kloro entered, unharmed, entire. It stood in the doorway for a moment, chesttendrils stiff and unmoving; its neck-stalk stretched forward; its horrible eyes flickering first at him and then at its nearly dedd comrade. And then its hand moved quickly to its side. Mullen, without awareness, moved as quickly in pure reflex. He stretched out the hose ofthe spare oxygen-cylinder, which, since entering the control room, he had replaced in its .suit-clamp, and cracked the valve. He didn't bother reducing the pressure. He let it gush out unchecked so that he nearly staggered under the backward push. He could see the oxygen stream. It was a pale puff, billowing out amid the chlorine-green. It caught the Kloro with one hand on the weapon's holster. The Kloro threw its hands up. The little beak on its head-nodule opened alarmingly but noiselessly. It staggered and fell, writhed for a moment, then lay still. Mullen approached and played the oxygen-stream upon its body as though he were extinguishing a fire. And then he raised his heavy foot and brought it down upon the center of the neck-stalk and crushed it on the floor. He turned to the first. It was sprawled, rigid. The whole room was pale with oxygen, enough to kill whole legions of Kloros, and his cylinder was empty. Mullen stepped over the dead Kloro, out of the control room and along the main corridor toward the prisoners' room. Reaction had set in. He was whimpering in blind, incoherent fright. and all, he was at the controls of a ship once again. Two light cruirs of Earth were on the way. U For better than twenty-four hours he had handled the controls virtually alone. He had discarded the chlorinating equipment, rerigged the old atmospherics, located the ship's position in space, tried to plot a course, and sent out carefully guarded signals -- which had worked. So when the door of the control room opened, he was a little annoyed. He was too tired to play conversational handball. Then he turned, and it was Mullen stepping inside. Stuart said, "For God's sake, get back into bed, Mullen!" Mullen said, 'Tm tired of sleeping, even though I never thought I would be a while ago." "How do you feel?" "I'm stiff all over. Especially my side." He grimaced and stared involuntarily around, "Don't look for the Kloros," Stuart said. "We dumped the poor devils." He shook his head. "I was sorry for them. To themselves, they're the human beings, you know, and we're the aliens. Not that I'd rather they'd killed you, you understand." "I understand." Stuart turned a sidelong glance upon the little man who sat looking at the map of Earth and went on, "I owe you a particular and personal apology, Mullen. I didn't think much of you." "It was your privilege," said MuUen in his dry voice. There was no feeling in it. "No, it wasn't. It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience." "Have you been thinking about this?" "Yes, all day. Maybe I can't explain. It's these hands." He held them up before him, spread out. "It was hard knowing that other people had hands of their own. I had to hate them for it. I always had to do my best to investigate and belittle their motives, point up their deficiencies, expose their stupiditiesI had to do anything that would prove to myself that they weren't worth envying." Mullen moved restlessly. "This explanation is not necessary.' "It is. It is!" Stuart felt his thoughts intently, strained to put them into words. "For years I've abandoned hope of finding any 'decency in human beings. Then you climbed into the C-chute." "Yoii had better understand," said Mullen, "that I was motivated by practical and selfish considerations. I will not have you present me to myself as a hero." "I wasn't intending to. I know that you would do nothing without a reason. It was what your action did to the rest of us. It turned a collection of phonies and fools into decent people. And not by magic either. They were decent all aloAfg. It was just that they needed something to Uve up to and you supplied it. And -- I'm one of them. I'll have to live up to you, too. For the rest of my life, probably." Mullen turned away uncomfortably. His hand straightened his sleeves, which were not in the least twisted. His finger rested on the map. He said. "I was born in Richmond, Virginia, you know. Here it is. I'll be going there firstWhere were you born?" "Toronto," said Stuart. "That's right here. Not very far apart on the map, is it?" Stuart said, "Would you tell me something?" "If I can." "Just why did you go out til ere?" Mullen's precise mouth pursed. He said, dryly, "Wouldn't my rather prosaic reason ruin the inspirational effect?" "Call it intellectual curiosity. Each of the rest of us-had such obvious motives. Porter was scared to death of being interned; Leblanc wanted to get back to his sweetheart; Polyorketes wanted to kill Kloros; and Windham was a patriot according to his lights. As for me, I thought of rtiyself as a noble idealist, I'm afraid. Yet in none of us was the motivation strong enough to get us into a spacesuit and out the C-chute, Then what made you do it, you, of all people?" "Why the phrase, 'of all people'?" "Don't be offended, but you seem devoid of all emotion." "Do I?" Mullen's voice did not change. It remained precise and soft, yet somehow a tightness had entered it. "That's only training, Mr. Stuart, and self-discipline; not nature. A small man can have no respectable emotions. Is there anything more ridiculous than a man like myself in a state of rage? I'm five feet and one-half inch tall, and one hundred and two pounds in weight, if you care for exact figures. I insist on the half inch and the two pounds. "Can I be dignified? Proud? Draw myself to my full height without inducing laughter? Where can I meet a woman who will not dismiss me instantly with a giggle? Naturally, I'ye had to learn to dispense with external display of emotion. "You talk about deformities. No one would notice your hands or know they were different, if you weren't so eager to tell people all about it the instant you meet them. Do you think that the eight inches of height I do not have can be hidden? That it is not the first and, in most cases, the only thing about me that a person will notice?" Stuart was ashanaed. He had invaded a privacy he ought not have. He said, "I'm sorry." "Why?" "I should not have forced you to speak of this. I should have seen for myself that you -- that you -- " "That I what? Tried to prove myself? Tried to show that while I might be small in body, I held within it a giant's heart?" "I would not have put it mockingly." "Why not? It's a foolish idea, and nothing like it is the reason I did wha't I did. What would I have accomplished if that's what was in my mind? Will they take me to Earth now and put me up before the television cameras -- pitching them low, of course, to catch my face, or standing me on a chair -- and pin medals on me?" "They are quite likely to do exactly that." "And what good would it do me? They would say, 'Gee, and he's such a little guy.' And afterward, what? Shall I tell each man I meet, 'You know. I'm the fellow they decorated for incredible valor last month?' How many medals, Mr. Stuart, do you suppose it would take to put eight inches and sixty pounds on me?" Stuart said, "Put that way, I see your point." Mullen was speaking a trifle more quickly now; a controlled heat had entered his words, warming them to just a tepid room temperature. "There were days when I thought I would show them, the mysterious 'them that includes all the world. I was going to leave Earth and carve out worlds for myself. I would be a new and even smaller Napoleon. So I left Earth and went to Arcturus. And what could I do on Arcturus that I could not have done on Earth? Nothing. I balance books. So I am past the vanity, Mr. Stuart, of trying to stand on tiptoe." "Then why did you do it?" "I left Earth when I was twenty-eight and came to the Arcturian System. I've been there ever since. This trip was to be my first vacation, my first visit back to Earth in all that time. I was going to stay on Earth for six months. The Kloros instead captured us and would have kept us interned indefinitely. But I couldn't -- I couldn't let them stop me from traveling to Earth. No matter what the risk, I had to prevent their interference. It wasn't love of woman, or fear, or hate, or idealism of any sort. It was stronger than any of those.' He stopped, and stretched out a hand as though to caress the map on the wall. "Mr. Stuart," Mullen asked quietly, "haven't you ever been homesick?" pleasant Where better te prove for clues than in a criminal's dreams? But there are all sorts and shopes of dreams, including nightmares! and a charming hostess m and very interesting" the visitor bubbled. "Isn't she?" Oniss said. "I married her only last year. I was specially taken with her darc hair. That's extremely rare, you know."... They walked into Gniss's most private office, and soft lights came on. The visitor gazed around, surprised. "I see you are looking for the desk or table. Men of my rank don't use any " Gniss said. There were .not even chairs, only the couches affected in late years , by , faionaVIe peopl. Gniss dropped onto one, grunting dreams and waved the visitor to another. "Do you know what this divan I'm lying on is covered with?" Gniss did not wait for on answer. '"Cloth made from the cocoons of moth larvae by an incredibly ancient and expensive method." The visitor hook his head in wonderment. The couch he was on was upholstered more modestly in plastic -- of the very best quality, of course. "It must be convenient to live right where you work," the visitor said. They had just dined in Gniss's apartment, the official residence of the Chief Watcher. The apartment was a grand aiTair; since the time that Gniss had risen to Chief Watcher, it had spread through a whole floor of the immense building. "My wife says I might not work at night so much if I lived farther away," Gniss pointed out. "Is there much to do at night?" the visitor asked. "I don't have my title for nothing! Even while they sleep, we watch them." "You mean you put microphones under suspects' beds and listen to them talk in their sleep?" The visitor smiled to show that he was joking. Gniss bellowed and shook, surprising the visitor, who thought the response was more than his feeble little joke deserved. But the good-natured laughter was something to remember, he noted for his mental scrapbook. At school, Gniss had been rather a dour boy. "My dear fellow," Gniss said when he had control of his voice again, "they were doing that centuries before the first dispersal of man. Look at this!" He shifted on his couch and began to play with a little jeweled wheel projecting from the wall. A section of the floor -- at least a quarter of the large room -- rose on slender pillars to make a platform. Under the platform, the purple floor appeared unchanged. Gniss rolled his heavy body on one side and talked, it seemed to the visitor, to his pillow. "Give me Blor," he said. The visitor could see a faint haze eddy above the platform. Nothing else happened. "Oh, well," said Gniss. "He rarely sleeps in his own bed -- that's what makes him useful. But he's only a double spy." The visitor's eyes were wide. Only a double spy! "ni show you something really big," Gniss said. He spoke gently to the pillow: "Give me Stak." "Not -- " the visitor blurted. "Correct," Gniss said. "The famous rebel," "But I thought -- " "That we couldn't catch up with him? That's what we let out for the public, and,naturally, for him. But we ran him down, and now we are watching him in a hundred different ways. If we arrested him, he would undoubtedly kill himself. That's something that even my watchers can't stop a determined man from doing. But before he dies, we want to find out who the traitor was that kept him informed of the government's plans during the critical time last year." The visitor hadn't known, of course, that Stak had made use of an agent in official circles, but he was discreet enough to say nothing. It frightened him a little to hear such portentous matters. yet it flattered him, too. that his old school friend would be so open with him. The haze above the platform deepened, and shone with internal light. The platform itself began to glow and to vibrate on its delicate pillars. Or perhaps it did not move: perhaps it was an illusion from the shimmering light. The visitor did not know what to expect, but he felt a warm ripple of excitement. He glanced at Gniss. His host was watching the platform with an indefinable expression, in which there was at least some official -- or was it fashionable? -- weariness. He has seen so much, the visitor thought, turning back to the platform. Vaporous waves of light were rolling straight up, to dissipate; the visitor did not know where. The waves split and were less like waves and then were not waves at all. They were vague forms, gray and colored; some suggested people; some suggested things. Continually, they changed in shape and in size and in color. "They are dreams!" the visitor exclaimed. "Stak's dreams," Gniss said. "Now we are getting some continuity. Look." "Where is Stak?" "Ob, you rarely see the dreamer. You see through bis eyes. That woman -- the old woman with the young face; #ts an odd angle, and the water and the steam and the bare arms -- he must be dreaming he's a child and she's giving him a bath. It's unfortunate she didn't drown him." The woman melted, faded, and a green billow was a wood and was separating into trees, and there was a kind of park. A Iamb with a very intelligent face walked around a tree. Suddenly the lamb opened its mouth and cried like a human baby. The visitor was startled. It was the first sound from the dream projection. "You mean you can hear the dreams too?" he asked naively. "Of course, my friend. Our technical people are talented." "I should say! Tell me, how is it all done?" "Well, we were working along at a telepathic instrument, which isn't quite perfected yet. Thoughts, you know, are produced by electrical impulses in the brain and these induce weak electromagnetic fields. Our theory was to build up the patterns of visual and auditory thouglits from the electromagnetic fields. For some reason the instrument hasn't worked right as a general device, but we found out by accident that it worked perfectly for dreams. Dreams are a form of thought, but there is a subtle difference in the fields." "Marvelous!" exclaimed the visitor. He had not noticed the metamorphosis of the technical people into "we." Wait till I tell my children, the visitor thought. But maybe he had better not say anything at all about his call on Gniss. He smiled as he remembered how his children had tried to talk him out of visiting his old schoolmate. "Visit the museums," they had told him. "The art galleries. Go inside that big statue of Kumat. See the, insect zoo -- it's a wonderful place and very educational." The youngsters had been to the capital twice, their father never, and they were very knowing. "There's plenty to do without looking for trouble," his boy Trenr had insisted. "But Gniss and I were great friends at school, and Tm a respectable citizen. Why should Gniss cause me trouble?" he had asked, puzzled. Images came into being on the stage, and vanished, in a bizarre panorama. Uniformed watchers, already taller than a dream roof, grew still taller until their heads were lost in the real ceiling. Their monstrous hands held hoopshaped mind-rippers. A terrified voice cried, "No -- no -- no -- " over and over. The word filled the room. The visitor felt a surge of pity for the trapped outlaw, lost now in the nightmare of fear. Yet he said scornfully, as much to himself as to Gniss, "He's a coward after all, isn't he?" "Everyone's a coward." Gniss replied. "But, awake, Stak is less a coward than most." The nightmare dissolved into confused patterns : the terrified voice dropped to a thin, wordless babble. The dream projection focused to a sort of cellar. Twenty or thirty men and women were sitting on the floor. Their faces were turned toward Gniss and the visitor, "He's dreaming about a meeting, and I think he's making a speech," Gniss said. "This is likely to be useful. Naturally it's being watched in the regular monitoring chambers. Our monitors will try to identify everybody at the meeting. There are difficulties. Sometimes several faces are blended into one in a dream. "Look at those expressions? The sentimental fool thinks all his followers are noble souls. See that skinny fellow to the left? He positively drips nobility of soulAnd that woman over there? She belongs in heaven. And will get there soon, no doubt," Gniss added with a laugh. The visitor found himself saying, "But drearhs are all pretty much' mixed up. Isn't it possible he might put a chance acquain'# tance at one of those dream meetings? Or someone he saw on the street? Couldn't it happen to anybody?" "We try to be as fair as we can. But you know the old saying: 'It is far better that ten innocent men be punished than that one guilty man go free.' " "That's very true," the visitor said earnestly, "and everyone must be assumed to be guilty until he can prove his innocence." Gniss motioned for him to be quiet. Stak's muttering voice was gaining strengthIt sounded more like language, and soon the visitor could pick out words. "... choose... happy and free... man's will... life... sacrifice... era... Gniss... The word was unmistakable. Gniss roared his laughter. "I'm even in their dreams. But I suppose this must be boring you. Shall I turn it off? I can always have it repeated by the recording system, if I need to see it later." His hand was at the little jeweled wheel. "I'm enjoying it," the visitor protested. "Would you rather take a walk through some of the installations? We work around the clock, you know. We could look in at the classification laboitory where we catalogue everybody by the positions of the atoms in their chromosomes. Give the technician a piece of your fingernail or a bit of hair or a scraping of skin -- anything that contains at least one whole cell -- and in five minutes he'll tell you your name. Or we could visit the mind-ripper range where we train recruits." "I'd rather not see that," the visitor said. In the back of his mind was a rumor about the mind-ripper range that he had tried not to listen to. "The targets for today didn't prove their innocence," Gniss explained drily. His hand was still at the wheel. "Well?" "Let's watch it a little more," the visitor said. "It's changing to something new." "H'mm, so it is. This looks interesting." It was the park where the lamb had walked around the tree and cried. But there was no lamb; there was a young woman, walking, alone. She was wearing a long cloak of a kind out of fashion for several years, but, the visitor thought, more becoming than the short cloaks the women were wearing now. Her yellow hair was loosely tied with a filmy scarf. Her face was more beautiful than any real face the visitor bad ever seen. It was a face of delicate symmetry; of early love; of high intelligence. Gniss raised himself and leaned on his elbow. "We know that Stak hasn't had a woman for some time, at least since we closed in. Watch, she'll be taking that cloak off pretty soon -- and the rest of her clothes, too. no doubt. That's usual in dreams." The visitor was shocked, bvit he tried to keep from showing it. "Be as good as the nakeds I used to go to when I was a young fellow," he said bravely. As a matter of fact, he had always gone only to the halfn.akcds and had taken his wife Naid. both before they were married and afterwards. People had laughed at their being together so much, but they had had a fine life together. Then Naid had died while the children were still small. He wondered whether he ever dreamed of Naid. He never could remember his own dreams, probably because he  generally jumped out of bed so quickly and went about the day's business. On the dream stage, the image of a man was standing beside the girl. The man was young and was wearing the kind of clothes that students wore, and he was holding the girl's hand, "It's Stak," Gniss said. "This is the less common kind of dream, though usual enough, where the dreamer seems to be watching himself from the outside. We get a full view of him then and we see his actions. It's the kind of dream that's clearest and gives us the best information. I recognize the girl now -- Lell. She used to be Stak's sweetheart." He said the word contemptuously. "She was executed when he was first joining the revolt." The dream couple embraced in pantomime. The scene was very real, and it was hard for the visitor to remember that these vere only images from a dreaming brain. His knowledge that the girl was dead added a strange quality to the scene. While he was thinking that this bright girl had been given to the sacred death birds -- if indeed her body had been treated with such respect -- Stak cried out: "It's you, Lell! But you're dead!" Lell answered. 'Tve come back, darling. I've come back for your sake." Now she did unfasten her cloak. Gniss chuckled and the visitor tried to chuckle as Stak was helping her to take off her clothes with frantic hands. But in a moment she was dressed again and beyond his reach. "I'm dead. I'm dead, I'm dead," she was saying, and then she was not Lell at all, but another womanThe cloak she was wearing was short and her head was bare in the new style -- and her hair was dark. Gniss made a noise that could have been a breath, but sounded more like a growl or a cry. It was a noise that made sweat extrude from the visitor's forehead, made his throat tighten as if he would never swallow again. He saw himself in the great statue of Kumat with other middle-aged tourists. He saw himself watching the fishes in the Luminous Pond. He saw himself at his desk in the criteria room, where he had worked for thirty years. He saw the sacred death birds circle and lower. The visitor made an effort to collect himself. He must decide whether it was better to speak or to be silent, to go on looking or to turn away. He did not know. The man on the couch of cocoon cloth was no longer his old schoolfellow; he was the Chief Watcher. On the stage, the dark dream woman moved closer to Stak. "I love you too, Stak. I am not Lell. Lell is dead. I am Orv. But I love you, too." Stak said, "To love me is todie. Even to know me is to die." "What difference does that make? We are all going to die some day. Why not die to bring a time when others can be. free? Happy and free -- unhappy and free -- free!" "My wife," Gnlss said, in a terrible voice. "My wife Orv." Now it was in the open, and the visitor knew he had to speak. He turned to Gniss. "It's a trick, of course. He got hold of a picture somehow. He knows his dreams are being watched, and rebels must have found some way of controlling their dreams. It can be done, you know. You consciously pick a subject or a person -- " "Be quiet." the Chief Watcher said, and the visitor regretted that he had spoken. Gniss never took his eyes from the dream projection, but the visitor wouldnot look. Already, he had seen too much. He could not help hearing, though. Dream-Stak and dreamOrv spoke lovingly, eagerly. Their words grew more intense, were blurred, became rhythmic sobs.  Then there was silence. The visitor looked again. The images were gone. The lifeless platform was sinking into the floor. Gniss said in a cold, faraway voice, "I will have to dispose of them. And of you, I am afraid. You may have heard the proverb of the North Tribes: 'Who sees what the gods want hidden had better been born blind.' I was at fault in bothering, childishly enough, to impress an old friend -- but I have got where I am by making sure that other people expiate my faults." "Surely, Gniss, you don't believe it. You must realize it's a trick." The visitor's voice was shrill with fear. "It's not a trick. There were several reports, ambiguously phrased. I would not understand them; or. if I understood them, I would not believe them." The visitor thought again of his children's advice. If only he had listened to them! He pictured them in his mind: his son. nineteen-year-old Trent: his daughter. sixteen-year-old Zhom. They were so wise, yet so foolish in many ways, and so young. Knowing he would have to return to them, he grew calm. He rose from the couch and. speaking slowly and steadily, said to the Chief Watcher; "You told me yourself that Stak's dreams were shown in the regular monitoring chambers, that they were recorded. And there are the reports you mention. How can this thing be kept secret? A hundred people must know about it besides me. A hundred and one can't make it any wwse. "Do you really think that by from reaching high men in the Government? I am only an ordinary citizen, but even I have heard of the rivalry among you powerful men. "Gniss. you are destroyed. Destroying me won't save you. Nothing can save you. You may as well let me go home." Gniss reacted in an astonishing way. He let loose his bellowing laugh. "You have led too obscure a life." he said, choking. "You could have made a career for yourself here. You have just achieved something that calls tor unusual talent -- you've won a point simply by stating the obvious truth. I was only fooling myself, I see now. As you say. I am destroyed. I'll kill myself, of course." Gniss put his hand to the jeweled wheel. The red and blue and green gems twinkled between his fat fingers. "Go out that way," Gniss said, and the visitor turned and saw that the wall had opened to a small elevator. "It will take you to an unguarded door." "Good-by." said the visitor. "An old friend's good-by. I know I will never see you again." "Never," Gniss said gravely. "Good-by, old schoolfellow." There were tears in the visitor's eyes as he walked into the elevator. As soon as he had entered, the door automatically closed, and the elevator automatically carried him to a lower floor, where it automatically and completely disposed of him. Nothing was left for the sacred death birds. "Little people, little minds," were all a man could do." SO Then he spoke to his pillow quietly, giving orders for a hundred deaths. His wife's, first; then Stak's; then... When he was through the list, he reconsidered and made it two hundred. The hour was late and Gniss was tired when his mistress greeted him in her house, in an old quarter of the city. They embraced. "Dear girl, dear Jenj," Gniss said. "I have had to work late. It's been a difficult day and I'm exhausted." "Poor darling," said Jenj. "Lie down right now and rest." Gniss stretched out on a couch, grunting comfortably. The plastic felt a bit chilly, and he thought. I'll have to ftnd her some of that primitive larval staff. A young man and a young woman walked in from another room. They were carrying small mind-rippers. "Get out of the way," the man said to Jenj. Jenj moved quickly. Gniss jumped to his feet. He started to say something, but the full force of two mind-rippers stopped him. His body fell back on the couch. Jenj began to cry. "What's the matter, Jenj?" the man said. "Think of Stale. Think of Orv. I have never taken part in an execution that I regret less.' "You're not a woman," Jenj said, still crying. "After all, a woman can't simulate for so long without developing some emotional attachment, even for a monster like that." But she made an effort to be stern. "Who is going to take Stak's place?" she asked, as if nothing now remained to be said about Gniss. The man answered, "It's not definite yet. Maybe Trenr. He's young, but Stak thought highly of him. He's very capable." "And close mouthed," the woman said. "Even his father, poor innocent, never knew Trenr was one of us. He was paying Gniss a social call. Imagine!" Don't Mss the Smashing Conclusion of... in next month's issue! With Heinlein plotting like a superb chess ployer and writing with the voltage of a cyclotron... don't bet that you can guess the climoxi You'll lose your bet! To the men of the future, the scientific gools of fodoy were os incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail! T here was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed, Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock. What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or -- " Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain... , S# This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up -- for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake. This WHsn't his room! The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees. Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then -- what? Blackout... Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose? He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How? Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right. His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door. There was no button beside this one. nor any other visible means of causing it to open. 'Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window -- and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer. It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars... Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a bard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages. He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry. Where the devil could this place be? And -- muscles tightened about his empty stomach -- what was in store for him here? He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river, drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was. A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair, Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian... As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building. He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor.  door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure. S# The fellow looked about fortyfive. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin. This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself. Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the bodyof a trained athlete -- an unusual combination. Impassively, the man said, "My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you." He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, 'However, you're free to do all the guessing you want." Still there was no suggestion of a smile. "Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors." Maitland's heart jumped. "My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests... "Are you crazy?" Maitland asked quietly. "Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here -- but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to." Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. "They won't find you," he said. "Now, come with me." A fter that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables 'from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room. "Lie down," Swarts said. When. Maitland hesitated, Swarts added, "Understand one thing -- the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must I would prefer not to. Please don't make me." "What's the idea?" Maitland asked. "What is all this?" Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. "You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down." Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. "Make me." If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. "That was the first test," he said. "Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd He down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus." Maitland shook his head stubbornly. "I see," Swarts said. "You want to find out what you're up against." He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breath again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable. Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others. So -- Maitland thought -- Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli. The question was, what were the stimuli to be? "Your name," said Swarts, "is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin , , "You seem to know everything about me," Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. "Why this recital?" "I do not know everything about you -- yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions." He went on. "Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Afoon?" Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. "What do you mean?" Swarts was chuckling. "I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland. I brought you here because you're a mao who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why.' Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds. She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over tliat she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool. She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, "Hello," then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas. She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone. Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to hts extremities; he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think. There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy. Where was he? Who was Swarts? What was the purpose of the "tests" he was being given? It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers. It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that #B would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass. This might be somewhere in Africa... He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing. Venus, the most beautiful of the planets. Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter eo of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend... Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe. Last night Venus hadn't been there. Venus was a morning star just now... Just now! He realized the truth in that moment.  planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now... And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be. Only one question of importance remained: What year was this? He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to #th Century man. Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus -- somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars! And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds. "I'm adaptable," he told himself gleefully. "I can learn fast... There'll be a job for me out there... li -- Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but -- After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed. someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak. As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, "Miss!" She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face. "Miss, do you speak my language?" "Yes," hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant. "Miss," he asked, watching her face intently, "what year is this?" Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, "You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you." "Wait! You mean you don't know?" She shook her head. 'T cannot tell you." "All right; we'll let it go at that." She grinned at him again as the door slid shut. S warts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive. "What year is this?" Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. "You know what the date is," he stated. "No, I don't. Not since yesterday." "Come on," Swarts said patiently, "let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning." "I know this isn't #. It's probably not even the #th Century. Venus vas a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star." "Never mind that. Come." Wordlessly. Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a .list of words -- doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test -- Maitland began the job of integrating "cscx dx" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration anj frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled. "What year is this?" Maitland asked in a conversational tone. "We'll try another series of tests." It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes. "These will keep you from holding your eyes shut," he said. "You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension." He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears -- And then the show began. He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew Open,and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, "Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder -- then blackness. With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test -- what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up. Now he was looking at a girl. She... Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it. He thought of a fat slob of a I bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world. Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated... The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps. The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking. "What year is this?" he asked. "All right," Swarts said. "A.D. # .' Maitland's smile became a grin. waste talking irrelevancies," Swarts said a while later. "Honestly, Maitland. I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate. ru tell Ching to answer your questions." "Ching?" "Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals." Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist. That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations... Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table. "I think you are wondrful." she laughed. "You gel everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your #th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me." She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. "I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon.' Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, "Why the devil do you want to go to the #th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better." She shrugged. "Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting..." "How do you mean -- " Maitland wrinkled his brow -- "adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!" "Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue." tures, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, "Maybe I shouldn't... This is a little personal, but... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians' of my time." His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, "There has been much history since #. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic." She giggled. "Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts." Maitland wrinkled his brow. "Afrikander?" "The South Africans." Something strange came Into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred: he could not tell. "The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America -- the last remnant of the American World Empire -- and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled." She sighed. "They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a went into the history books as the War of Annihilation." "So many? How?" "They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of duced in robot factories from robot-mined ores... Very clever." She gave a little shudder. "And yet they founded modern civilization." she added. "The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was -- reduced "Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?" S HE shook her head. "There are no more Afrikanders." "Rebellion?" "No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves." They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. "Let us not talk about them any more." "Robot factories and farms," Maitland mused. "What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?" "Inter-what?" "Have men visited the stars?" She shook her head, bewildered. "I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack," he agreed. "But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?" He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. "I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?' After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. "Surely you have space travel?" She frowned and shook her head. "What does that mean -- space travel?" He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. "A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!" "A ship? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter. Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?" He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. "Let's get this perfectly clear," he said, more harshly than he realized, 'So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?" She nodded apprehensively. "I have never heard of it being done." He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, "You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when  knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will." T he cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about bis shoulders and fingers delicately Stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. "I just don't understand." he said. "It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it." Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around # that he was facing her. "Lve got to understand. I've got to know why. What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?" "Honestly." she said. "I did not know they ever had." She hesitated. "Maybe you arc asking the wrong question." He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her. "I mean," she explained, "maybe you should ask why people in the #th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit." Maitland felt his face become hot. "Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough." "But why?" Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. "Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem... "We have no population problem. A hundred years ago. we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take people, and we have held the number at that." "Birth control." Maitland scoffed. "How do you make it work -- secret police?" 'No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to sec that those two are the best children we could possibly produce..." She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. "You understand. # what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feci that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them.' "Even," he said, "granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars -- just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals arc? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?" His hands were trembling as he stopped. She shrugged her shapely shoulders. "Go into the past -- yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why." "Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what?" She smiled. "In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is die way I feel. Listen, Bob." She laid a hand on his arm. "You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines -- machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of -- what is the word? -- gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them. "Because this is the Age of Man. We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets." Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest #th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year #, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel... Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. T think I'd like to be alone for a while," he said. I N the morning, Maitland was tired, though not particularly depressed. He hadn't slept much, but he had come to a decision. When Ingrid woke him, he gave her a cavalier smile and a cheery "Good morning" and sat down to the eggs and ham" she had brought. Then, before she could leave, he asked, "Last night when we were talking about spaceships, you mentioned some kind of vessel or vehicle. What was it?" She thought. "V Hegvlotter? Was that it?" He nodded emphatically. "Tell me about them." "Well, they are  -- cars, you might say, with wheels that go into the body when you take off. They can do, oh, # miles an hour in the ionosphere, # miles Up." "Fifty miles," Maitland mused. "Then they're sealed tight, so the air doesn't leak out?" Ingrid nodded. "How do they work? Rocket drive?" "No." She plucked at her lower lip. "I do not understand it very well. You could picture something that hooks into a gravity field, and pulls. A long way from the Earth it would not work very well, because the field is so thin there... I guess I just cannot  explain it very well to you." "That's all I need." Maitland licked his lips and frowned. "On that point, anyway. Another thing -- Swarts told me I'd be here for about a week. Is there any set procedure involved in that? Have other persons been brought to this period from the past?" She laughed. "Thousands. Swarts has published nearly a hundred case studies himself, and spent time adding up to years in the #th and #th centuries." Maitland interrupted incredulously. "How on Earth could he ever manage to keep that many disappearances quiet? Some of those people would be bound to talk." She shook her head definitely. "The technique was designed to avoid just that. There is a method of 'fading' the memories people have of their stay here. The episode is always accepted as a period of amnesia, in the absence of a better explanation." "Still, in thousands of cases..." "Spread out over centuries in He laughed. "You're right. But will that be done to me?" "I suppose so. I can't imagine Swarts letting you take your memories back with you." Maitland looked out the window at the green horizon. "We'll see," he said. M aitland removed his three-day beard with an effective depilatory cream he discovered in the bathroom, and settled down to wait. When Swarts arrived, the engineer said quietly, "Sit down, please. I have to talk with you." Swarts gave him the look of a man with a piece of equipment that just won't function right, and remained standing. "What is it now?" "Look," Maitland said, "Ingrid has told me that men never reached the planets. You ought to know how I feel about space flight. It's my whole life. Knowing that my work on rockets is going to pay off only in the delivery of bombs, I don't want to go back to the #th Century. I want to stay here." Swarts said slowly, "That's impossible." "Now, look, if you want me to cooperate... The big man made an impatient gesture. "Not impossible because of me. Physically impossible. Impossible because of the way time travel works." Maitland stared at him suspiciously. "To displace a mass from its proper time takes energy," Swarts explained, "and it's one of the oldest general physical principles that higher energy states are unstable with respect to lower ones. Are you familiar with elementary quantum theory? As an analogy, you might regard yourself, displaced from your proper time, as an atom in an excited state. The system is bound to drop back to ground state. In the atomic case, the time which elapses before that transition occurs is a matter of probabilities. In the case of time travel, it just depends on the amount of mass and the number of years the mass is displaced. "In short, the laws of nature will insist on your returning to # in just a few days." Maitland looked at the floor for a while, and his shoulders sagged. "Your memories of this will be faded," Swarts said. "You'll forget about what Ingrid has told you -- forget you were ever here, and take up your life where you left off. You were happy working on rockets, weren't you?" "But -- " Maitland shook his head despairingly. Then he had an idea. "Will you let me do one thing, before I go back? I realize now that our time is limited, and you have a lot of tests to give me. things up. I want to see the stars, just once, from deep space. I know you'll make me forget it ever happened, but once in my life... You have vessels -- vlieg vtotter, Ingrid called them -- that can go into space. If you'd give me just a couple days to go .out there, maybe circle the Moon...?" There was a pleading note in his voice, but he didn't care. Swarts regarded him dispassionately for a moment, then nodded. "Sure," he said. "Now let's get to work." Earth doesn't change much," Maitland mused. Sitting on ie cot, his arm around Ingrid's yielding waist, he was wearing the new blue trunks she had given him to replace his rumpled pajamas. The room was full of evening sunlight, and in that illumination she was more beautiful than any other woman he could remember. This had been the last day of tests; tomorrow, Swarts had promised, he would begin his heartbreakingly brief argosy to the Moon, with Ingrid as pilot. Over the past four days, he had been with the girl a lot. In the beginning, he realized, she had been drawn to him as a symbol of an era she longed, but was unable, to visit. Now she understood him better, knew more about him -- and Maitland felt that now she liked him for himself. She had told him of her childhood in backward Aresund and of loneliness here at the school in Nebraska. "Here," she had said, "parents spend most of their time raising their children: at home, they just let us grow. Every time one of these people looks at me I feel inferior." She had confided her dream of visiting far times and places, then had finished, "I doubt that Swarts will ever let me go back. He thinks I am too irresponsible. Probably he is right. But it is terribly discouraging. Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go home to the fiord... Now, sitting in the sunset glow. Maitland was in a philosophic mood. "The color of grass, the twilight, the seasons, the stars -- those things haven't changed." He gestured out the window at the slumbering evening prairie. "That scene, save for unessentials, could just as well be # -- or #. It's only human institutions that change rapidly... "I'll be awfully sorry when you go back," she sighed. "You're the first person I've met here that I can talk to." "Talk to," he repeated, dissatisfied. "You're just about the finest girl I've ever met." He kissed her, playfully, but when they separated there was nothing playful left about it. Her face was flushed and he was breathing faster than he had been. Savagely, he bit the inside of his cheek. "Two days ! A lifetime here wouldn't be long enough!" "Bob." She touched his arm and her lips were trembling. "Bob, do you have to go -- out there? We Dear Galaxy: If I don't get down to the newsstand on the same day that the new issue arrives, I'm out of luck -- the magazine sells so quickly! What can I do to make sure that I receive my anxiously awaited copy? Signed, Dear Readers: There's only one answer... subscribe today! The printer literally can't keep up with the swift growth of circulation, which means that would-be buyers may find that situation, but not subscribers; their copies are set aside for them in advance! Use the coupon below, or send in your own order, if you prefer not to mutilate the magazine -- the coui)on is for your convenience, not ours. Signed, Name... Address . City... ,... Start with Stote issue. Dept. A could get a couple of horses tomorrow, and we would have two days." He leaned back and shook his head. "Can't you see, Ingrid? This is my only chance. If I don't go tomorrow, I'll never get to the Moon. And then my whole life won't mean anything... H e woke with Ingrid shaking him. "Bob! Bob!" Her voice was an urgent whisper. "You've got to wake up quick! Bob!" He sat up and brushed the hair out of his eyes. "What's the matter?" "I didn't really believe that Swarts would let you go into space. It wasn't like him. Bob, he fooled you. Today is when your time runs out!" Maitland swallowed hard, and his chest muscles tightened convulsively. "You mean it was all a trick?" She nodded. "He told me just now, while he was putting something in your milk to make you sleep." Her face was bitter and resentful. "He said, 'This is a lesson for you, Ching, if you ever do any work with individuals like this. You have to humor them, tell them anything they want to believe, in order to get your data.' " Maitland put his feet on the floor, stood up. His face was white and he was breathing fast. She grasped his arm. "What The Best Way to Get Started Develop the uork'wg habit under ihe personal direction of tin experienced uriter or editor, t vale school completely ownerl and op emted by successftil editoi's and writers, uffei-B a series of fascinating asBignments designed to get you started and keep you writing. They are sent i-egularly to your home, where you work on them in spare time. They give you a chance to polish yoxir style the way professional writers polished theirs -- by writing continually. You way concentrate on either short story or article work, advancing as rapidly as your ability warrants. Every assignment you submit is returned with detailed criticism. Writers themselves active in the magazine field help you find your best outlets, often suggest markets you might never have heard of. Send the coupon today fur the free catalog which tells you how you may get started toward a writing The Magazine Institnte. Inc. # Rockefeller Plaza Rockefeller Center, New York #, N. T. The Magazine Institute, Inc. Dept. #-C. # Rockefeller Plaza Rockefeller Center, New York #. N. T. Please send your free catalog, without obligation, to:  Cheek here if eligible under G.l. Bill (iHquinej eenfidenlial. No Salomon will call) Ttilt course ZRproved fer veterans' training are you going to do?" He shook her hand off. "I may not get to the Moon, but I'rri" going to teach one superman the advantage of honesty!" "Wait! That won't get you anywhere." "He may be bigger than I am," Maitland gritted, "but -- " She squeezed his arm violently. "You don't understand. He would not fight you. He'd use a gun." "If I could catch him by surprise..." She took hold of his shoulders firmly. "Now, listen, Bob Maitland. I love you. And I think it's the most important thing in the world that you get to see the stars. Swarts will never let me time travel, anyway." "What are you thinking?" "I'll go down to the village and get a vlieivlotter. It won't take twenty minutes. I'll come back, see that Swarts is out of the way, let you out of here, and take you -- " she hesitated, but her eyes were, steady -- "wherever you want to go." He was trembling. "Your career. I can't let you... She made as if to spit, then grinned. "My career! It's time I went home to the fiord, anyway. Now you wait here!" T he vlieivlotter was about # feet long, an ellipsoid of revolution. Maitland and Ingrid ran hand in hand across the lawn and she pushed him up through the door, then slammed it shut and screwed the pressure locks tight. They were strapping themselves into the seats, bathed in sunlight that flooded down through the thick plastic canopy, when she stopped, pale with consternation. "What the matter?" he demanded. "Oh, Bob, I forgot! We can't do this!" "We're going to," he said grimly. "Bob, sometime this mornini you're ioini to snap back to #. If that happens while we're up there... His jaw went slack as the implication soaked in. Then he reached over and finished fastening the buckle on her wide seat belt. you just as surely as... "Never mind that. You can tell me how to run this thing and then get out, if you want to." She reached slowly forward and threw a switch, took hold of the wheel. Seconds later they were plummeting into the blue dome of the sky. The blue became darker, purplish, and stars appeared in daylight. Maitland gripped the edge of the seat: somewhere inside him it seemed that a chorus of angels #i was singing the finale of Beetho yen's Ninth. There was a ping and Ingrid automatically flicked a switch. A screen lit up and the image of Swarts was looking at them. His betrayed some unfamiliar emotion, awe or fear. "Ching! Come back here at once. Don't you realize that -- " "Sorry, Swarts." Maitland's voice resonated with triumph. "You'll just have to humor me once more." "Maitland! Don't you know that you're going to snap back to the #th Century in half an hour? You'll be in space with no protection. You'll explode!' "I know," Maitland said. He looked up through the viewport. "Right now, I'm seeing the stars as I've never seen them before. Sorry to make you lose a case, Swarts, but this is better than dying of pneumonia or an atomic bomb. He reached forward and snapped the image off. T wenty minutes later, Maitland had Ingrid cut the drive and turn the ship, so that he could see the Earth. It was there, a huge shining globe against the constellations, # miles distant, # times the size of familiar Luna. North America was directly below, part of Canada covered with a dazzling area of clouds. The polar ice-cap was visible in its entirety, along with the northern portions of the Eurasian land mass. The line of darkness cut off part of Alaska and bisected the Pacific Ocean, and the Sun's reflection in the Atlantic was blinding. And there was Venus, a brilliant white jewel against the starry blackness of interstellar space, and now he could see the Sun's corona... The ship was rotating slowly, and presently the Moon, at first quarter, came into view, not perceptibly larger than seen from ' Earth. Maitland heaved a sigh of regret. If only this could have been but the beginning of a voyage... Ingrid touched his arm. "Bob. He turned to look at her golden beauty. "Bob, give me one more kiss." He loosened hts scat strap and put his arms around her. For a moment he felt her soft Ups on his... Then she was gone, and the ship had vanished. For perhaps as long as a second, alone in space, he was looking with naked, unprotected, ambition-sated eyes at the distant stars. The luring white blaze of Venus was the last image he took with him into the night without stars. it One man's refreaf is onofher's prison... and it takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home F orty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the stars? And yet, at the same time to be filled with a terrible, gnawing fear -- a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura. Perhaps if I start at the beginfling, the very beginning... It was the Big Day. All the CKaminations, the physicals and psychos, were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after spawning its first-born. For it was June in this year of #, and we were the graduating class of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight. The firsf graduating class, Laura'. That's why it was so important, because we were the first. We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and grandparents and kid brothers and sisters -- the people who a short time ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or lyords spoken wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had never really existed. But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us with pride in their eyes. A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant... these boys have worked hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things. They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up at them and feel humility -- for mankind needs humility,' The speaker was Robert Chandler, who'd brought the first rocket down on Mars just five years ago, who'd established the first colony there, and who had just returned from his second hop to Venus. Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time, for I was thinking: He's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere.' Let us be the first! to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. "I don't see 'em, Ben," he whispered. "Where do you suppose they are?" I blinked. "Who?" "My folks." That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those "You are cordially invited" cards. Just one, which rd sent to Charlie Taggart. Stardust Charlie, we called him. although I never knew why. He was a veteran of Everson's first trip to the Moon nearly twenty-five years ago, and he was still at it. He was Chief Jetman now on the Lunar Lady, a commercial ore ship on a shuttle between Luna City and White Sands. I remembered how, as a kid, I'd pestered him in the Long Island Spaceport, tagging after him like a puppy, and how he'd grown to like me until he became father, mother, and buddy all in one to me. And I remembered, too, how his recommendation had finally made me a cadet. My gaze wandered over the faces, but I couldn't find Charlie's. It wasn't surprising. The Lunar Lady was in White Sands now. but liberties, as Charlie said, were as scarce as water on Mars.  doesrti matter, I told myself. Then Mickey stiffened. "I sec 'cm. Ben! There in the fifth row!" Usually Mickey was the same whether in a furnace-hot engine room or a garden party, smiling, accepting whatever the world offered. But now a tenseness and an excitement had gripped even him. I was grateful that he was beside me; we'd been a good team during those final months at the Acad emy and I knew we'd be a good team in space. The Universe was mighty big, but with two of us to face it together, it would be only half as big. And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by the sons of Earth. They expect a Jot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and a hell of a lot more. They think f here's nothing wo can't do. I felt very small and very, humble. I was scared. Damned scared. A T last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge, babbling wave. Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie. His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear rows. But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and old, end he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that it was hard to believe he'd once been young. He scratched his mop of steelgray hair and grinned. "You made it, boy," he chortled, "and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as good spacemen should!" Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again, walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm with some silent melody. And you, Laura, were with him. "Meet the Brat," he said. "My sister Laura." I stared almost rudely. You were like a doll lost in the immensity of your fluffy pink dress. Your hair was long and transformed into a golden froth where sunlight touched it. But your eyes were the eyes of a woman, glowing like dark stars and reflecting a softness, a gentleness that I'd never seen in eyes before. "I'm happy to meet you, Ben." you said. "I've heard of no one else for the past year." A tide of heat crept up from my collar. I stuttered through an introduction of Charlie. You and Mickey looked strangely at Charlie, and I realized that old Stardust was not a cadet's notion of the ideal spaceman. Charlie scorned the skintight uniforms of the government service and wore a shiny black suit that was a relic of Everson's early-day Moon Patrol. His tie was clumsily knotted, and a button on his coat was missing. And the left side of his face was streaked with dark scar tissue, the result of an atomic blowup on one of the old Moon ships. I was so accustomed to the scars, I was seldom aware of them ; but others, I knew, would find them ugly. You were kind. You shook hands and said, softly: "It's a privilege to meet you, Charlie. Just think -- one of Everson's men, one of the first to reach the Moon!" Charlie gulped helplessly, and Mickey said: "Still going to spend the weekend with us, aren't you, Ben?" I shook my head. "Charlie has only twenty-four hours liberty. We're planning to see the town tonight." "Why don't you both come with us?" you asked. "Our folks . have their own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room. Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the Moon?" Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew that he'd infitiitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian fizzes and Plutonian zombies. But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration. "We'd really like to come," I said. our way to the 'copter parking field. Dean Dawson passed us. He was a tall, willowy man. spectacled, looking the way an academy professor should look. "Ben." he called, "don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two months to decide." "No, thanks," I answered. "Better not count on me." A moment later Mickey said, frowning. "What was he talking about. Ben? Did he make you an offer?" I laughed. "He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching astrogation. What a life that would be! Imagine standing in a classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to -- " I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: "When you've got the chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want." I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to understand the hunger that could lie i,n a man's heart. Then your last words came back and jabbed me: "That's what Mickey used to want. "lsetf to want?" I a.sked. "What do you mean?" You bit your lip. not answering. "What did she mean, Mickey?" Mickey looked down at his feet. "I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben. We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But -- " "Yes?" "Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or another gets , you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know." My stomach was full of churning. biting ice. "What are you trying to say, Mickey?" "Tve thought about it a long time. They want roc for Cargo Supervisor of White Sands Port." He raised his hand to stop mM 'I know, it's not so exciting. I'll just Jive a lot longer. I'm sorry. Ben." ' I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my knees with the blast of a jet. "It doesn't change anything, Ben -- right now, I mean. We can still have a good weekend." Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to reach critical mass. I shook my' head dazedly at him as we got to the 'copter. #  "Sure," I said to Mickey, "we can still have a good weekend." There was no star-hunger in them, of course. They were simple and solid and settled, like green growing things, deep-rooted. belonging to Earth. They were content with a home that was cool on this warm summer night, with a 'copter and a tri-dimensional video, and a handsome automatic home that needed no servants or housework. Stardust Charlie was as comfortable as a Martian sandmonkey in a shower, but he tried courageously to be himself. At the dinner table he stared glassily at nothing and grated, "Only hit Mars once, but I'll never forget the kid who called himself a medic. Skipper started coughing, kept it up for three days. Whoopin' cough, the medic says, not knowin' the air had chemicals that turned to acid in your lungs. I'd never been to Mars before, but I knew better'n that. Hell, I says, that ain't whoopin' cough, that's lung-rot." That was when your father said he wasn't so hungry after all. Afterward, you and I walked onto the terrace, into the moonlit night, to watch for crimsontailed continental rockets that occasionally streaked up from White Sands. We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said: "Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's sort of funny." "He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a spaceman then." "But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?" I smiled and shook my head. "If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson." You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster. There was silence. You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the feeling that I shouldn't have come here. You kept looking at me until I had to ask: "What are you thinking, Laura?" You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. "No, I shouldn't be thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that." "I could never hate you." "It -- it's about the stars, you said very softly. "I understand why you want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were kids, Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I lived for months, just thinking about it. "One summer we went. I had fun. I saw the old buildings and castles, and the spaceports and the Channel Tube. But after it was over, I realized England wasn't so different from America. Places seem exciting before you get to them, and afterward they're not really." I frowned. "And you mean it might be the same with the stars? You think maybe I haven't grown up yet?" Anxiety darkened your features. "No, it'd be good to be a spaceman, to see the strange places and make history. But is it worth it? Is it worth the things you'd have to give up?" I didn't understand at first, and I wanted to ask, "Give up what?" Then I looked at you and the promise in your eyes, and I knew. All through the years I'd been walking down a single, narrow path. Government boarding school, the Academy, my eyes always upward and on the stars. Now I'd stumbled into a crossroads, beholding a strange new path that I'd never noticed before. You can go into space, I thought, and try to do as much living in tan years as norma men do in fifty. You can be like Ever son, who died in a Moon crash at the age of #, or like a thousand others who lie buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like Charlie -- a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally alone, never finding a home. Or ffiere's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, roofed people with a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth insfead of poisonous dust. Tm sorry," you said. "I didn't mean to make you sad, Ben," "It's all right," I said, clenching my fists. "You made sense -- a lot of sense." fHE next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin, tight coughs. Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. "I'm leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought maybe you'd like to have 'em." I scowled, not understanding. "Why, Charlie? What fpr?" He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. "Oh, it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twentyfive years. That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky. Some of these days, I won't be so lucky." I tried to laugh. "You're good for another twenty-five years, Charlie." He shook his head stiffly, staring at nothing. "Maybe. Anyway, I'm gonna get off the Shuttle this time, make one more trip to Mars. Tell you what. There's a little stone cafe on Mars, the Space Rat, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. When you get to Mars, take a look in.side. I'll probably be there." He coughed again, a deep, rasping cough that filled his eyes with tears. "Not used to this Earth air," he muttered. "What I need's some Martian climate." Suddenly that cough frightened me. It didn't seem normal. I wondered, too, about his stiff movements and glassy stare. It was as if he were drugged. I shook the thought away. If Charlie was sick, he wouldn't talk about going to Mars. The medics wouldn't let him go even as far as Luna. We watched him leave, you and Mickey and I. "When will you be back?" you asked. Charlie's hard face contorted itself into a gargoylish grin. "Maybe a couple of months, maybe a couple of years. You know spacemen." Then he waved and strode away, a strange, gray, withered gnome of a man. I wanted him to say something, to tell me the secret that would kill the doubt worming through my brain. But he rounded a corner, still grinning and waving, and then he was gone. T hat afternoon Mickey showed me his room. It was more like a boy's room than a spaceman's. In it were all the little things that kids treasure -- pennants, models of Eversons two ships, a tennis trophy, books, a home-made video. I began to realiae how important a room like this could be to a boy. I could imagine, too, the happiness that parents felt as thdy watched their children grow to adulthood. I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by hadn't realized I was different. My folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets. I'd have lived the kind of life a kid should live. Mickey noticed my frown. "What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just not like you and Charlie, I guess. I -- " "No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really." "Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?" "No. I got a couple of possibilities. Could get a berth on the Odyssey, the new ship being finished at Los Angeles. They want me, too, for the Moon Patrol, but that's old stuff, not much better than teaching. I want to be in deep space." "Well, how about staying with us till you decide? Might as well enjoy Earth life while you can. Okay?" I felt like running from the house, to forget that it existed. I wanted someone to tell me one of the old stories about space, a tale of courage that would put fuel on dying dreams. But I wanted, also, to be with you, Laura, to see your smile and the flecks of silver in your eyes and the way your nose turned upward ever so slightly when you laughed. You see, I loved you already. almost as much as I loved the stars. And I said, slowly, my voice sounding unfamiliar and far away, "Sure, I'll stay, Mickey. Sure," F orty days of joy, forty nights of fear and indecision. We did all the little things, like watching the rockets land at White Sands and flying down to the Gulf to swim in cool waters. You tried, unsuccessfully, to teach me to dance, and we talked about Everson and Charlie and the Moon and the stars. You felt you had to give the stars all the beauty and promise of a child's dream, because you knew that was what I wanted. One morning I thought. Why must I make a choice? Why can't I have both you and the stars? Would that be asking too much? All day the thought lay in my mind like fire. That evening I asked you to marry me. I said it very simply: "Laura, I want you to be my wife." You looked up at Venus, and you were silent for a long while, your face flushed. Then you murmured, T -- T want to marry you, Ben, but are you asking me to marry a spaceman or a teacher?" "Can't a spaceman marry, too?" "Yes, a spaceman can marry, but what would it be like? Don't ou see, Ben? You'd be like 'harlie. Gone for maybe two nonths. maybe two years. Then you'd have a twenty-four hour liberty -- and I'd have what?" Somehow I'd expected words like these, but still they hurt. "I wouldn't have to be a spaceman forever. I could try it for a couple of years, then teach." "Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?" Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears glittering in your eyes. "Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened on the Cyclops. There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was flooded with radiation -- just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it was -- " "I know, Laura. Don't say it." You had to finish. "It was a monster." That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me sleep. You've ot to decide now, I told myself. You cant stay here. You've got to make a choice. The teaching job was still open. The spot on the Odyssey was still open -- and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the way to Pluto. You can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now. Or you can see what's on the other side of the mounfain. You can be a line in a history book. I cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, "Get the hell out of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get out there on the Odyssey where you belong. We goCa date on Mars, remember? At the Space Rat, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal." That's what he'd say. And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always. "Oh God," I moaned, "what shall I do?" N ext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who could be sending me a message. I pressed the stud on the little # gray cylinder, and a rasping, automatic voice droned: "Luna City, Luna, July #, #. Regret to inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman... Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word "lung-rot" and the metallic phrase, "This message brought to you by courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps." I stood staring at the cylinder. Charles Taggart was dead. Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie. My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie! The audiogram had lied! I pressed the stud again. " . , , regret to inform you of death of Charles... I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken voice droned on. You ran to it, shut it off. "I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly -- " Without answering. I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze. The metallic words had told the truth. I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dryeyed at Charlie's faded tin box. Then, finally, I fingered his meager possessions -- a few wrinkled photos, some letters, a small black statue of a forgotten Martian god, a gold service medal from the Moon Patrol. This was what remained of Charlie after twenty-five years in space. It was a bitter bargain. A statue instead of a wife, yellowed letters instead of children, a medal instead of a home. It'd be a great future, I thought. You'd dream of sitting in a dingy stone dive on the Grand Canal with sand-wasps buzzing around smoky, stinking candies. A bottle of luchu juice and a couple of Martian girls with dirty feet foe company. And a sudden cough that would be the first sign of lung-rot. To hell with it! I walked into your living room and called Dean Dawson on the visi phone. I accepted that job teaching. A ND now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping, and the house is silent. It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am writing this. I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they could tell me what he could not express in words. #S And among the things, Laura, I found a ring. A wedding ring. In that past he never talked about, there was a woman -- his wife. Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to travel both. He later learned what we already know -- that there can be no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose. Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He left himself. Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a man's dream. He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was kind -- but that doesn't matter now. Do you know why he wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth? It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother, brothers, the planets his children. You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes after you reach it. But how can one ever be sure until the journey is made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a star and think,  might have gone there;  could have been the first? We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways? Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it. Because of these things. Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson. Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep -- at a dingy stone cafe on Mars, the Space Rat, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura. I have two wedding rings with me -- his wife's ring and yours. by L. Sprague de Camp. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Los Angeles, #. # pages, #. de Camp. Doubleday  Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages, #. Camp has puzzled and exasperated his fans. The Undesired Princess is a pure pseudo-fairy tale adventure about a character named Rollirk Hobart who is translated into an Aristotelian world called Logeia. Here things either are or are not whatever they are, with no in-betweens. A social lion is a real lion. The princess, being a fairy tale princess, is perfect -- painfully so. Everything in the tale has this haywire quality of being or not being, plus a lot of pleasant de Campish plotcident and nonsense along with it. The F.P.C.I. volume is fattened out by the inclusion of a #-page short story called Mr. Arson. This one has to do with how a character named Grinnig bought himself a correspondence course on      SHLF Kigromancy, conjured up one of the Paracelsian fire demons called the Saldine, and got himself and a lot of other nice people into feme hot -- but very hot -- water. Both these fantasies are clever, glib, and wholly unimportant. They can almost be counted on to depress the true believer in de Camp. Rogue Queen is something else again. This is without doubt the best item de Camp has yet developed out of his concept of Viaens Interplnetarias, the Portugeseapeaking monopoly that controls all Terran space travel. In Rogue Queen, a novel never published before, we find ourselves in a strange feminist civiliaation -- one which is essentially humanoid, but similar to that of the bee. The meticulously scientific way in which de Camp develops details of this culture on a far-distant planet to parallel a bee society is fascinating. Men are literally nothing but drones, and most females mere workers. With the arrival of the V'iaens Interplanetarias spaceship Paris, bearing a load of scientists and explorers from Earth, a chain of ents is begun which terminates In the reconversion of this abormal society back to the beginnings of a more natural way ti life. The story of how this is accomplished is made so circumstantially real, so humanly plausible, that the book becomes a sheer delight to read -- particularly after the bombasts and atom blasts of much modern science fiction. And more especially after the saddening amount of routine wordage de Camp has been producing. I hope he stays off the literary treadmill for good. ert Spencer Carr. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, #. least two of them reprinted from The Saturday Evening Post. The title story. Beyond Infinity, is a long, curiously unconvincing tale about how a certain, type of space-time travel makes the travelers live backward so that, upon returning from a decades-long voyage, they have become young people again. Morning Star has to do with the attempts of manless Venus to get some nice young men from Earth to settle there and give Venusian women a chance at normal reproductive procedures, rather than their current parthenogetic way. This is all mixed up with a hush-hush super-secret war rocket project on Earth, a lot of plan to Get To Mars Before The Reds Do.  Tiose 'Men from Mars is about the best of this crop -- an engaging though superficial tale of how the Martians land a ship on the White House lawn and another inside the Kremlin, and how the two societies work on their respective Martians to place the enormous scientific resources of their planet on one or the other side. Weak ending... The fourth tale, Mutation, is about post-atomic-war chaos, and the white and shining, angelic mutated boys and girls that spring phoenixlike from this chaos, A very old-hat conception, but smoothly carried out. Pleasant reading, not topdrawer science fiction. The Viking Press, New York, J#I. # pages plus xii plus # pages of illustrations plus a folded chart, "Characteristics of the Earth's Atmosphere,' inside the back cover; #, T his is the last word, the complete book, the authoritative job on rockets -- good enough, without question, to serve as a primary textbook, reference volume and handbook for everyone with a serious interest in the subject, and also to introduce those who know nothing about it to the Great Science of Tomorrow- Space Travel. The book carries you straight through from the classical aeolipile of Heron of Alexandria to (and here I quote chapter headings) "The Rocket into Cosmic Space," "The Spaceship," and "Terminal in Space." In between, it gives you all the historical background there is, and great gobs of the science, too. There is the engrossing story of the German Rocket Society of the #s, in which Ley himself played an important part; there is what we know of Peenemunde, birthplace of the V-I and the V-#; and there is as much as can be told -- which is more than you may think -- about White Sands and its work. The guided missiles aspect is, of course, now emphasized far beyond its previous weight .in earlier editions, as the inclusion of the word in the new title indicates. As for the data on space travel itself, and on spaceships, they have also been greatly expanded when compared with the earlier editions. The prospects and difficulties of successful space flight are given a full detailing. If anyone who owns Rockets (#-#) or Rockets and Space Ships (#), the names under whichthe earlier editions of this book appeared, believes that he won't need the new vol(# ume. I can only assure him that he is wrong. Great advances have been made since then, and much previously restricted information has been released. by Milton Luban. Greenberg: Publisher. New York, #. # paes, #. is a piece of machine made, chromium plated Thorne Smithiana, carefully cut along the pattern Thorne originated, and assembled together with real care. It is a complete Smith, even to the screwy courtroom scene. The only thing that is missing is Thorne SmithThe tale tells about ghosts, very funny ghosts who get sued for alienation of affections -- one by the name of Ahbed: one by the name of Terry Stone, who not so long before had jumped from the #th floor of an apartment house when the girl's husband came home unexpectedly ("What made you jump?' 'T forgot what floor we were on," the voice said sheepishly -- that's the essential level of the humor in this volume) ; and a female ghost named Beryl Topaze, who creates earthquakes in people's apartments. It's all quite cuckoo, but not, unfortunately, with that wonderful old jet-propelled cuckooism typical of Thome Smith. I did like the two unfortunate psychiatrists, though, Egghoff and Hpphegg. Imagine trying to psychoanalyze a ghost! It would be too bad if publishers didn't continue bringing out books like this, on the chance that one might make up for all the others. This doesn't happen to be Coming Up , , . The stortling conelution of o tremendows novel by one of science ficKon's greatest authors! Don't count on the dreams of a homesick space pilot! They are apt to turn into nightmares! With this idealistic cyberneticist, nothing wos loo good for his scientific colleagues. Much too good! From : Jed Michaels, Ryttuk, Ero# To: H. E. Horrocks. Interplanetary Amusement Corp., Cosmbpolis, Earth    Dear Michaels: Your last message indicates you This bigtimfi space promoter could get the Horsehead Nebula in a flying mare -- but pinning a planetoid is tougher THb celestial hammerlock wish to leave the employment of the Interplanetary Amusement Corp. Under our employee policy, this is allowable, effective upon completion of your current assignment. Under precedent set as long ago as # A. D. the company will even pay the cost of your message of resignation. However, the words "you balloon brain" do not seem a necessary part of that message and will be deducted from your salary. Furthermore. I have a few words of my own to say You inarch straight into my office, Michaels, just as soon as you get back from Eros. Eros? what in Horrocks   #: Mr. H. E. Horrocks Dear Balloon Brain: If you paid a little more attention to your office and less to that golf course on Venus, you'd know what I am doing on Eros. I got 'I here two days ago via Mars with  a ' herd of six wrestlers, in accordance with your own written memorandum. We were to appear at an Auruchs club smoker. Upon arrival. I found that no preparations had been mode for us and nobody knows anything about an Auruchs club. The people here are nuts. They talk in six syllable words and their idea of a good time is to sniff flowers and do five dimensional calculus. They have less use for wrestlers than I have for you. Michaels   # rocket mail (Second Class) Michaels, you nitwit: That wasn't Eros, you idiot! You were supposed to go to Erie -- Erie, Pa., right here on Earth! If you remembered even your sixth grade Solar System history, you would know that the planetoid Eros was settled in #I by a group of longhairs headed by Prof.' M. R. Snock, a philosopher With a dozen university degrees. He wanted to show that war, crime and all forms of violence would disappear if people thought only beautiful thoughts. The planetoid is lousy rich with erydnium ore and the people keep in luxury selling it to space freighters. They spend their time being gentle and thinking beautiful. There hasn't even been a spitball thrown there in eight generations. A fine place for you to show up mahouting six wrestlers with no foreheads. You're lucky they haven't thrown you in jail. Horrocks   Mr. H. E. Horrocks Dear Jellyhead : What do you mean lucky? We are in jail. Right after we got here, the boys decided they had been cramped in that local spaceship and needed a workout to limber up. As soon as they got started, they were surrounded by a bunch of scrawny males, all sniffing hollyhocks. Their spokesman, a bald bird with rosebuds in his whiskers, touched me with a gold-headed caire and said that apparently we were not yet attuned to the high mental plane of the planetoid, and would we mind going into protective custody while they worked over our egos and cured our kineticism. I said suppose we wouldn't. He looked shocked and waved his flower and said that then, although it had never happened before, he supposed he would have to call the space patrol and have us thrown into the hoosegow on Ganymede. I translated that into basic wrestler for the boys and we agreed we'd better go along. We'd heard about the jail those tough space patrol babies operate on Ganymede. The flower lovers took us to an old erydnium pit and asked us to please go down. Now they're perfuming us every hour and feeding us flower bulbs to make us gentle. We could climb out of this rathole whenever we wanted, but that would be climbing straight into a striped spacesuit. I think about you all the time. And if you think they're beautiful thoughts, you're as crazy as I've always suspected. Michaels P.S. The boys asked that I enclose this note from them: Dear Mr. Horox : We do not like it here Mr. Horox. The Grub is no good. You come get us Plese Mr. Horox. Come soon. Gorilla Man Thorpe Choker Jonas R. Z, Zbich, light-heavyweight champion of the Moon, Mercury and the inner rings of Saturn Gorgeous Gordon Barefoot Charles Anya X, the Faceless Wonder  #c  Mr. Jed Michaels Mr. Michaels: Don't think you can sit around doing nothing and collect pay from the Interplanetary Amusement Corp. You're suspended until you get out of there. Horrocks    Mr. H. E. Horrocks, CosmopoHs, Earth   Mr. Jed Michaels. Ryttuk, Eros    Mr. H. E. HOrrocks My dear employer and pal: Eros is a wonderful asteroid! Toward the end of the second day in the pit, the wrestlers limbered up. Zbich and the Gorilla Man worked out on headlocks. Gorgeous Gordon did calisthenics, and Barefoot Charley, Choker Jonas and the Faceless Wonder got themselves into a grunting free-for-all. After that got under way, I beard a squeal and a girl came bounding down the pit side. She was young and darkhaired and pretty. She might have been as intellectual as the president of Harvard above the shoulders, but what a framework she had to hold up that brain! She went over to Gorgeous Gordon and she said, "Ooh!" With all the flower lovers around here, it was probably the first man with muscles she had ever seen. The big ham swelled up. He flexed his arms and stuck out his went bounding back up the side of the pit. I stopped the exercise and the wrestlers sat and mused blankly at each other. In a few minutes, our little visitor was back again. With her were about a dozen pals, differing in details, but resembling her in the important points. The leader was a tall, brownhaired, gray-eyed girl, with a face where intellect fought a losing battle with a dimple. The others helped her down the pit side as if she were something fragile and precious, like maybe a new bottle of perfume. Then our pal went back to Gorgeous Gordon. "More ooh!" said the girl guide. You know how wrestlers are. They'll slap each other silly to get the cheers of four kids on a street corner, or commit mayhem for a purse big enough to buy a ham hock. In five seconds, we had going one of the " finest wrestling matches in the history of good, clean sportsmanship. And over the cracking of wrestler's bones rose the shrieks of the girls, showing that their throats were in the right place, even if their brains weren't. The gray-eyed girl sat with me on a flange of unmined ore. She was Aliana. a direct descendant of the leader of the Eros pioneers. As such, she was princess of the planetoid, although she left most of the governing to a council of elders, apparently as outstanding an array of mossbacks as ever smelled a gardenia or just plain smelled. '! sometimes think, Mr. Michaels," Aliana told me, "that we of Eros have laid too much stress upon the cerebral. I wonder if our lives would not be fuller if we also included some of the more vigorous activities, such as the one in which those men are now engaged." "If it's a vacation for your mind that you want, Princess." I agreed, "those boys are your meat." Just then the Gorilla Man got a leg split on Barefoot Charley and began to braid his toes. "How stimulating." breathed Aliana. "What is proper f.or the onlooker to remark in such a situation?" "A satisfactory outcry. Princess," I explained, "is, 'Bieak it off!' " "Break it off!" encouraged Aliana. I had to wind it up, finally, before the wrestlers reduced themselves to blubber, thereby forcing the Interplanetary Amusement Corp. to go out and lasso itself another herd. The girls went giggling up the side of the pit. At the top, Aliana waved at me. The others blew kisses, not caring much where they landed, as long as the receiver had muscles. Next morning, a young man came into the pit. He announced that, upon Princes AHanas orders, we were to have the freedom of Eros, so that contact with the planetoid culture could win us from our uncouth ways. He was too young to be wholly gentled by the flowers and the council of elders. So the Choker showed him a wristlock. And when the Choker tossed him on his ear in the erydnium ore, he said words that were not beautiful. Maybe there's something to the people of this asteroid. Anyway, everything is great now. We wander wherever we please, as long as we return to the pit to sleep. When nobody is looking. we sneak into the royal palace courtyard and put on a wrestling show for the girls. #f And the nights! Ah, the nights! Don't turn entirely green with envy, Hankus. At least leave your nose the familiar red. Jed   To: Jed Michaels, Ryttuk, Eros . :  To; H. E. Horrocks, Cosmopolis, Earth Dear Hank: Go to Mars, the man says. I can't go anjnvhere. The elders caught us giving a rassle when Aliana was away and we're in again. These flower roots taste terrible. Jed    To: Jed Michaels, Ryttuk, Eros   (Free, Royal Frank) Royal Palace, Eros To: H. E. Horrocks, Cosmopolis, Earth Dear melon brain: I gather from your last message that you wish to discharge me. I accept the offer, fat boy. In fact, under royal Eros precedent, which I made up three minutes ago, we will even pay for your message. However, the words "you blundering baboon" do not seem a necessary part of that message, and their cost will be taken out of the first bit of business that the royal house of Eros decides to honor your puny little corporation with. If any. Times are changed, Hankus. I'm a big shot now. A few hours after we got back in the pit, Aliana came back and sneaked down to see us. She said she thought it was about time to end this council of elders' nonsense and she asked our help. I told her plan to the wrestlers in words of one syllable or less. They all agreed except the Faceless Wonder. "I don't see why I should have nothing to do with no book." he said. It seems he had had a book once and chewed up the first three chapters before he found out it wasn't something to eat. I signaled to the boys. Zbich clamped a headlock on him. The Choker got a hammerlock. The Gorilla Man took him in a scissors. Gorgeous Gordon got a toehold and Barefoot Charley stood by to jump on his stomach. "Do you understand now?" I asked politely. "Sure, Jed, sure," said the Faceless Wonder. "Why didn't ya explain it to me in the first place?' So the next morning, we yelled for books. And for the following days, whenever anybody was around, we were busy sniffing flow'ers and reading. Between times, I tried to explain to the wrestlers why there weren't more pictures in the books. A week later, we sprang the trap. I told the stablehand who brought us our fodder that I had taken in so much culture that I was breathing beauty. Zbich, gagging a little, asked for a second helping of flower roots. Gorgeous Gordon requested a needle and thread; he said he had fallen behind in his needlepoint. A report of the conversation got to the council of elders and it brought them to the lip of the pit, looking like something the glue factory had refused to accept. Aliana was with them. I bowed from the waist and made a speech. I thanked the elders for showing me the error of my ways. I said that, after staying in the lovely erydnium pit, I was enraptured with flowers, crazy about culture and practically engaged in five dimension calculus. I asked that I and the boys could have the priceless boon of walking freely around Eros, swapping beautiful thoughts with the local yokels. The elders went into a deep state of flutter. Most of them were for accepting our proposition out of hand -- which was bad. Our old pal with the beard saved us. "But I saw these men romping," he shrilled. He lowered his voice to a high alto. "Positively romping!" "Perhaps these men could prove their sincerity," Aliana said, winking at me. "Perhaps one of them would consent to illustrate what he has learned here by giving a public talk on some scientific subject." "I should be glad," I answered, "to hack off a lecture for the good folk of Eros. Suppose I give it on anatomy." And so it was decided. Exactly as we had planned. There was an amphitheater which the inhabitants of Eros had been using for ballets, string quartets and lectures by such of the longhairs as got stuffed so full of long words that they couldn't #I ' kfep them to themselves. I had ringposts and ropes set up on the platform, saying I needed them to illustrate my talk. I got into the ring with Gorgeous Gordon and Zbich. who were dressed in trunks and bathrobes. The wit and beauty of Eros was assembled there, the beauty beingrepresented by the girls, and the wit -- such as it was -- by the council of elders. The rest of the seats were filled with other forms, some of them tolerably easy to look at. I had picked out the subject of anatomy in the belief that none of the inhabitants of Eros knew anything about it. The men didn't notice and the women had nothing at all to look at, anyway. I went into my act. "Kind hosts, friends and unfortunate incidents," I said. "My topic is the science of anatomy. Now. the science of anatomy is copacetic to the point of mopery. The cerebellum is distended and the duodenum goes into a state of e pluribus unum. Incalculably, thrombosis registers and the ectoplasm becomes elliptic. Or, in the vernacular, the eight ball in the side pocket." The crowd sat stunned. Here and there, a flower sniffer looked down at his own rack of bones to check my statement. "Let me illustrate," I said. I drew the bathrobes off the wrestlers. The boys' muscles rippled as they strutted around the ring. From the women spectators came a long, deep sigh. From that moment, we had half the audience with us -- the female half. "In anatomy," I said, shaking my finger to emphasiae the point, "the wingback shifts outward for a lateral. In the words of the great philosopher Hypocritus. the coil should always be kept clean between the barrel and the tap and all excess collar should be removed with a spatula." Nobody was listening to me; they were looking at the wrestlers, which, of course, was what i'd figured on. Most of the men were comparing the grunters' muscles to their own, and here and there a few ere dropping their flowers onto the floor. I signaled and in a second the boys were an omelet of flying legs. The crowd gasped, then leaned forward intently. The shrieking began when Gordon got a headlock on Zbich. It grew when Zbich flipped Gorgeous with a flying mare. By the time Gordon got in a billygoat butt, the amphitheater sounded like feeding time at the zoo. But there was another sound, too. Old Whiskers was tottering down the aisle, shrieking. "This is romping! Mere romping!" I signaled and the boys stopped. "We need a third man to illustrate the next point' I said. "Perhaps the gentleman in the aisle will volunteer." Two wrestlers grabbed Old Whiskers and tossed him into the ring. Making fast double talk, I took off his shirt and he stood there, stripped to the waist, blinking in the sun and looking like a dehydrated squab. The crowd noted the contrast between his scrawniness and the muscles of the wrestlers. A roar of laughter swept it. "Perhaps," I said, "the gentleman would like to romp." Zbich made a grab for him and he scuttled out of the ring, falling over the lower rope. A woman in the first row slugged him with a gardenia. "Sit down, you old fool!" She turned to the wrestlers. "Break it off!" she shouted. The match went on. In my career, including my medicine show days, I've had lots of easy marks, but nothing to compare to the crowd at Eros' first wrestling match. When Gorgeous took the first fall with a body scissors, they went mad; when Zbich evened it up, they went hysterical; when Zbich took the deciding fall, they were delirious. And at the end of the match between Choker Jonas and the Faceless Wonder, they were reduced to a jelly. We had to call off the third match for fear we would have to take them home in jars. At the end, we went in a body, led by the wrestlers, and threw the council of elders into the erydnium pit. We are keeping them now on a diet of raw meat. The amphitheater has been converted into a permanent wrestling arena. We've laid out a football and a baseball field in the lyceum grove, and next week we'll start turning the botanical garden into a golf course. To carry out the full program, we shall have to buy some equipment and hire some talent. Whether we toss some of the business to Interplanetary depends, Hankus boy, entirely on what attitude Interplanetary takes toward you know who. When you write your crawling letter, you worm, address me as "Your Mightiness." I am minister of athletics on Eros now and the second most important person on the planetoid. My work takes me close to the Princess Aliana. Very close. Come to think of it, I wish there was a moon on Eros. It's not essential, but it helps. So long, ieasant. # The Puppet , Masters lllusirated by Den SiHey On July #, #, three of us flew out to Iowa to investigate the landing of a Flying Saucer -- me, the chief of the secret intel ligence agency  work for, and another agent, a sultry redhead known to me only by her operation alias of "Mary Cavanaugh.' The "Saucer' turned out to be a hoax, bat six of our own people had preceded us and failed to come back. A clue led us to #es Moines stereo station where we captured a strange, horrible parasite, killing its host, the station manager. The one thing worse than ilghting on enemy completely humon or completely olien IS -- fighting one thot is both! #R# in so doing. It was our first sight of a "Puppet Master " -- a repulsive blob of protoplasm which had fastened itself to the manager's back, controlling his nervous system, his will, his actions. We escaped with the capfured parasite, but, without its host, it died. By strict logical reconstruction the Old Man realized that Earth was being inv'aded by extraterrestrial parasites. He urged the President to quarantine Iowa and fight back, and was politely brushed off. It ivas our first defeat by an enemy almost impossible to #ght -- a man possessed by a parasite looked and acted like a normal man. Key people in Iowa were already possessed, hut we could not prove it. Mary and I dug into the files of the Congressona Library and came up with data which proved that tfie Saucers had been scouting this planet even before we achieved space flight. But we needed direct evidence. I got the Old Man to send me back to Iowa with two other agents and a portable pickup, to relay pictures back to the Presidenf. We found a nest of parasites and fier victims at that same Des Moines sfereo station and had to shoot our way out. We did not get pix, but we did capture anoiier parasite; it fastened itself to one of my agents. We planned to keep ft alive and show it to the Presto denf, but it. managed to transfer to me. I escaped from headquarters, fully conscious, but my will was my masifer's will; I was warmly content to serve him. I rented a loft, had a shipment of masters sent to me from Des Moines, and started recruiting new servanfs. In a short time we had the police force, stereo announcers, the mayor, local politicos, ministers -- all the key people needed to bring New Brooklyn completely under our control, yet on the surface life went on as before. I might still be serving my master had not the Old Man searched for me and slipped me a hypo as I was getting into an air taxi. After my rescue it took me some days to recuperafe; I was half sared, covered with dirt and lice, and in a nervous state. When  was partly recovered the Old Man put me back on duty and took me to see an ape which waa being used as host to the parasite captured with me. The sight of my master was almost too much for me. I wanted to kill it at once. The Old Man explained soberly that he wanted me to submit again to bei'n possessed by it so that he might interview it. I reand indignation. He forced me to remain in the room while a volunteer was brought in to serve in my place. When they started strapping her into the chair that would restrain her during the mterview, I realized that the victim and stopped them. I let them strap me down, let them place that wet and pulsating thing on my bare shoulders -- and then  tvas back with my master, and happy to be so. We avoided their questions skillfully at first, but the Old Man used an electrical shocking device which my master could not stand, and which almost tore me apart. He tried to force us to tell where we came from. Under the unbearable pain of the shocks. I collapsed. When  came to, I was again human and unpossessed, but hating every human who had had anything to do with my ordeal. Mary was waiting for me in the corridor. She sobbed when she saw the shape I was in.  looked her over, called her a bitch, and slapped her, then stumbled back to my infirmary bed. The Old Man came to see me when I was better and told me that the interview had been a success, even though the parasite had died without letting me talk. For unknown to me, they had been able to dig out of my brain, with hypnotic drugs, one key piece of information -- the location of the home base of the parasites: Titan, moon of Saturn. Second, the Old Man said that I had no reason to be rough on Mary. We had a head-on clash over this point; as I saw it, Mary had let herself be used as bait to force me to volunteer for a job so dirty, so soul-soiling, that I would never have touched if ofherwise. But according to the Old Man she had been a true volunteer, a real hero, and had not had the slightest notion that he really wanted me for the interview. I'd proved I could live through it. while she might have died. He freely admitted tricking me, but swore that Mary was innocenf. I did not know what to believe, leased me, I went looking for Mary. I still had only the Old Man's word, but I had more than a suspicion that I had made a big hairy sap of myself. You would think that a tall, handsome redhead would be as easy to find as flat ground in KansasField agents come and go, though, and the resident staff arc encouraged to mind their own business. The personnel office gave me the bland brushoff. They referred me to Operations, meaning the Old Man. It was Mary I wanted, not him. I met with even more suspicion when I tried the door tally; I began to feel like a spy in my own section. I went to the bio lab, could not hnd its chief, and talked to an assistant. He did not know anything about a girl in connection with Project Interview; he went back to scratching himself and shuffling reports. I left and went to the Old Man's office. There seemed to be no choice. A new face was at Miss Haines desk. I never saw Miss Haines again, nor did I ask what had become of her; I did not want to know. The new secretary passed in my I. D. code, and,, for a wonder. the Old Man was in and would see me. "What do you want?' he asked grumpily. I said, "Thought you might have some work for me,' which was not at all what I had intended to say. "Matter of fact, I was just fixing to send for you. You've loafed long enough." He barked something at his desk phone, stood up and said, "Come!" I felt suddenly relaxed. "Cosmetics?" "Your own ugly face will do. We're headed for Washington." Nevertheless we did stop in Cosmetics, but only for street clothes, a gun, and to have my phone checked. The door guard made us bare our backs before he would let ut approach and check out. We went on up, coming out in the lower levels of New Philadelphia. "I take it this burg is clean?" I said to the Old Man. "If you do, you are rusty in the head," he answered. "Keep your eyes peeled." The presence of so many fully clothed humans bothered me; I found myself drawing away and watching for round shoulders. Getting into a crowded elevator to go up to the launching platform seemed downright reckless. When we were in our car and the controls set, I said, "I could swear one cop we passed was wearing a hump." "Possibly. Even probably." "I thought you had this job taped and were fighting back on all fronts." "What would you suggest?" "Why, it's obvious -- even if it were freezing cold, we ought not to see a back covered up anywhere. not until we know the parasites are all dead." "That's right." "Well, then -- Look, the President knows the score, doesn't he? "He knows it." "What's he waiting for? He should declare martial law and get action." The Old Man stared down at the countryside. "It's time you learned the political facts of life. Congresses have refused to act in the face of obvious dangers. This one isn't obvious. The evidence is slim and hard to believe," "But how about the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury? They can't ignore that." "Can't they? The honorable gent is in Walter Reed with a nervous breakdown and can't recall what happened. The Treasury Department gave out that an attempt to assassinate the President had been foiled -- true, but not the way they meant it." "And the President held still for that?" "There are men in both Houses who want his head on a platter. Party politics is a rough game." "Good Lord, partisanship doesn't figure in a case like this!" The Old Man cocked an eyebrow. "You think not, eh?" I finally managed to ask him the question I had come into his office to ask: "Where is Mary?" "Odd question from you," he grunted. I let it ride; he went on, "Where she should be. Guarding the President." We went first to a closed session of a joint special committee. When wc got there they were running stereos of my anthropoid friend, Napoleon -- shots of him with the titan on his back, then closeups of the titan. One parasite looks like another, but I knew which one this was and I was deeply glad it was dead. The ape gave way to me. I saw myself being clamped into the chair. I hate to admit how I looked; real funk is not pretty. I saw them lift the titan off the ape and onto my own bare back. Then I fainted in the picture -- and almost fainted watching. I won't describe it; I can't. But I saw the thing die. That was worth sitting through the rest. The film ended and the chairman said, "Well, gentlemen?" "Mr. Chairman!" "The gentleman from Indiana is recognized." "Speaking without prejudice to the issue, I have seen better trick photography from Hollywood." The head of our bio lab testified, and then I found myself called to the stand. I gave my name, address, occupation, and perfunctorily was asked about my experiences under the titans. Th,e, questions were read from a sheet. #. From the floor, one Senator said ' to me, "Mr. Nivens -- your name IS Nivens?" I nodded. "You say that you are an investigator?" "Yes." "F. B. I., no doubt?" "No, my chief reports directly to the President." The Senator smiled. "Just as I thought. Now, Mr. Nivens, as a matter of fact you are an actor, are you not?" I wanted to say that I had once acted one season of summer stock, but that I was, nevertheless, a real, live, sure-enough investigator. The next thing I knew the clerk was saying, "Stand down, Mr. Nivens." I sat tight. "Look here," I said. Tt's evident that you think this is a put-up job. Well, for the love of heaven, bring in a lie detector! Or use the sleep test. This hearing is a joke." The chairman banged his gavel. "Stand down, Mr. Nivens." I stood. The Old Man had told me that the purpose of the meeting was to report out a joint resolution declaring total emergency and vesting war powers in the President. We were ejected before the vote. I said to the Old Man, "It looks bad." "Forget it," he said. "The President knew this gambit had failed . when he heard the names of the  committee." "Where does that leave us? Do ' we wait for the slugs to take over Congress, too?" "The President goes right ahead with a message to Congress requesting full powers." "Will he get them?" The Old Man simply scowled. npHE joint session was secret, but we were present-wiirect orders of the President. The Old Man and I were on that little balcony business back of the Speaker's rostrum. They opened with full rigamarole and then went through the ceremony of notifying the President. He came in at once, escorted by the delegation. His guards were with him, but they were all our men. Mary was with him, too. Somebody set up a folding chair for her, right by the President. She fiddled with a notebook and handed papers to him, pretending to be a secretary. But the disguise ended there; she looked like Cleopatra on a warm night. I caught her eye and she gave me a long, sweet smile. I grinned like a collie pup until the Old Man dug me in the ribs. Then I settled back and tried to behave. The President made a reasoned explanation of the situation. It was as straightforward and rational as an engineering report, and about as moving. He put . aside his notes at the end. "This is such a strange and terrible emergency, so totally beyond any previous experience, that I must ask broad powers to cope with it. In some areas, martial law must be declared. Because any citi#en, no matter how respected or loyal, these secret enemies, all citizens must face some loss of rights and personal dignities until this plague is killed. V# "With utmost reluctance, I ask that you authorize these necessary steps." With that he sat down. You can feel a crowd. They were uneasy, but he did not carry them. The President of the Senate looked at the Senate majority leader; it had been programmed for him to propose the resolution. I don't know whether the floor leader shook his head or signaled, but he did not take the floor. Meanwhile the delay was awkward and there were cries of "Mister President!" and "Order!" The Senate President passed over several others and gave the floor to a member of his party -- Senator Gottlieb, a wheelhorse who would vote for his own lynching if it were on his party's program. He staVted out by yielding to none in his respect for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and probably the Grand Canyon. He pointed modestly to his own long service and spoke well of America's place in history. I thought he was stalling while the boys worked out a new shift, when I suddenly realized that his words were adding up to meaning: he was proposing to suspend the order of business and get on with the impeachment and trial of the President of the United States! I tumbled to it as quickly as anyone; the Senator had his proposal so decked out in ritualistic verbiage that it was hard to tell what he was saying. I looked at the Old Man. The Old Man was looking at Mary. She was looking back at him with an expression of extreme urgency. The Old Man snatched a pad from his pocket, scrawled something, wadded it up, and threw it down to Mary. She caught it, read it, and passed it to the President. He was sitting, relaxed and easy, as if one of his oldest friends were not tearing his name to shreds and, with it, the safety of the Republic. He read the note, then glanced unhurriedly around at the Old Man. The Old Man nodded. The President nudged the Senate President, who banged his gavel. "If the Senator please!" Gottlieb looked startled and said, "I do not yield." "The Senator is not asked to yield. Because of the importance of what he is saying, the Senator is asked to come to the rostrum to speak." Gottlieb was puzzled, but he walked slowly toward the front of the House. Mary's chair blocked the steps up to the rostrum. Instead of getting out of the way, she fumbled around, turning and picking up the chair, so that she got even more in the way. Gottlieb stopped and she brushed against him. He caught her arm, as much to steady himself as her. She spoke to him and he to her, but no one else could hear the words. Finally he went on to the front of the rostrum. The Old Man was quivering like a dog in point. Mary looked up and nodded. The Old Man said, '"Take him!" I was over that rail in a flying leap and landed on Gottlieb's shoulders. I heard the Old Man shout, "Gloves, son! Gloves!" I did not stop for them. I split the Senator's jacket with my bare hands and I could see the slug pulsing under his shirt. I tore the shirt so anybody could see it. Six stereo cameras could not have recorded what happened in the next few seconds. I slugged Gottlieb to stop his thrashing. Mary was sitting on his legs. The President was standing over me and shouting, "There ! Now you can all see." The Senate President was standing stupefied, waggling his gavel. Congress was a mob, men yelling and women screaming. Above me the Old Man was shouting orders to the Presidential guards. Between the guns of the guards and pounding of the gavel, some order was restored. The President started to talk. He told them that fortune had given them a chance to file past and see for themselves one of the titans from Saturn's largest moon. Without waiting for consent, he pointed to the front row and told them to come up. Mary stayed on the platfoi'm. About twenty had filed by when I saw Mary signal the Old Man. This time I was a hair ahead of his order. I might have had quite a fight if two of the boys had not been close by, because this one was young and tough, an exmarine. We laid him beside Gottlieb. Then it was "inspection and search" whether they liked it or not. I patted the women on the back as they came by and caught one. I thought I had caught another, but it was an embarrassing mistake; it was just blubber fat. Mary spotted two more, and then there was a long stretch, three hundred or more, with no jackpots. It was evident that some were hanging back. Eight men with guns were not enough -- eleven, counting the Old Man, Mary and me. Most of the slugs would have gotten away if the Whip of the House had not organized help. With their assistance, we caught thirteen, ten alive. One of the hosts was badly wounded. xni S o the President got the authority and the Old Man was his de facto chief of staff; at last we could move. The Old Man had a simple campaign in mind. It could not be the quarantine he had proposed when the infection was limited to the Des Moines area. Before we could fight, we had to locate the enemy. Government agents couldn't search two ple had to do it themselves. "Schedule Bareback" was to be the first phase of "Operation Parasite." The idea was that everybody was to peel to the waist and stay peeled, until all titans were spotted and killedWomen could have halter strings; a parasite could not hide under one... We whipped up a display to go with the stereocast speech the President would make to the nation. Fast work had saved seven of the parasites we had flushed in the sacred halls of Congress; they were alive on animal hosts. We could show them and the Jess grisly ports of the film taken of me. The President himself would appear in shorts, and models would demonstrate what the Well Undressed Citizen Would Wear This Season, including the metal head-and-spine armor which was intended to protect a person even when asleep. We got it ready in one black coffee night. The smash finish was to show Congress in session, discussing the emergency, and every lOf man. woman, and pageboy showing a bare back. With twenty-eight minutes left until stereocast time, the President got a call from up the street. I was present: the Old Man had been with the President all night and had kept me around for chores. We were all in shorts; "Schedule Bareback" had already started in the White House. The President did not bother to cut us out of his end of the conversation. "Speaking," he said. Presently he added, "You feel certain? Very well. John, what do you advise?... I see. No, I don't think that would work... I had better come up the street. Have them ready." He pushed back the phone and turned to an assistant. "Tell them to hold up the broadcast." He turned to the Old Man. "Come, we must go to the Capitol." He sent for his valet and retired into a dressing room adjoining his office. When he came out, he was formally dressed for a state occasion. He offered no explanation. The rest of us stayed in our gooseflesh specials and so we went to the Capitol. It was a joint session and I got that no-pants-in-church nightmare feeling, for the Congressmen and Senators were dressed S(S usual. Then I saw that the pageboys were in shorts without shirts and felt better. Apparently some people would rather be dead than lose dignity, with Congress high on the list. They had given the President the authority he asked for; "Schedule Bareback" itself had been discussed and approved, but they did not see that it applied to them. After all, they had been searched and cleaned out. Maybe some saw holes in the argument, but not one wanted to be first in a public striptease. They sat tight, fully dressed. When the President took the rostrum, he waited until he got dead silence. Then slowly, calmly, he started taking off clothes. He stopped when he was bare to the waist. He then turned around, lifting his arms. At last he spokc"X did that," he said, "so that you might see that your Chief Executive is not a prisoner of the enemy. He paused, punched a finger at the junior Whip. "Mark Cummings, are you a loyal citizen or are you a zombie spy? Get your shirt off!" "Mister President -- " It was Charity Evans, from the State of Maine, looking like a pretty schoolteacher. She stood and I saw that, while she was fully dressed, she was in evening dress. Her gown reached to the floor, but was cut as deep as could be above. She turned like a mannequin: in back the dress ended at the base of her spine. "Is this satisfactory attire, Mr. President?" "Quite satisfactory, Madam." Cummings was fumbling at his jacket; his face was scarlet. Someone stood up in the middle of the hall -- Senator Gottlieb. He looked as if he should have been in bed. His cheeks were gray and sunken, his lips showed cyanos'is, but he held himself erect and, with incredible dignity, followed the President's example. Then he, too, turned all the way around. On his back was the scarlet mark of the parasite. He spoke. "Last night I stood here and said things I would rather have been flayed alive than utter. Last night I was not my own master. Today I am." Suddenly he had a gun in his hand. "Up on your feet! Two minutes to show a bare back or I shoot!" Men close to him tried to grab his arm, but he swung the gun around like a fly-swatter, smashing one of them in the face. I had my own out, ready to back his play, but it, was not necessary. They could see that he was as dangerous as an old bull. They started shucking clothes like Doukhobors. One man bolted for a door; he was tripped. No. he was not wearing a parasite. But we didcatch three. After that the show went on the channels ten minutes late and Congress started the first of its "bareback" sessions. "Close the dampers on your fireplaces!" "Never enter a dark place!" "Be wary of crowds!" "A man wearing a coat is an enemy -- shoot him!" In addition to a steady barrage of propaganda, the country was being quartered and sectioned from the air, searching for Flying Saucers on the ground. Our radar screen was on full alert for unidentified blips. Military units, from airborne troops to guidedrocket stations, were ready to smear any that landed. In the uncontaminated areas people took off their shirts, willingly or reluctantly, looked around them and found no parasites. They watched their newscasts and wondered and waited for the government to tell them that the danger was over. But nothing happened, and both laymen and local officials began to doubt the necessity of running around in sunbathing costumes. The contaminated areas? The reports from there were not materially different from the reporfs from other areas. Back in the days of radio it could not have happened; the Washington station where the 'cast originated could have blanketed the country. But stereo-video #U rides wave-lengths so short that horizon-to-horizon relay is necessary and local channels must be squirted out of local stations. It's the price we pay for plenty of channels and high-resolution pictures. In the infected areas the stus controlled the local stations: the people apparently never heard the warning. But in Washington, we had every reason to believe that they had heard the warning. Reports came back from -- well, Iowa, for example, just like those from California. The governor of Iowa was one of the first to send a message to the President, promising full cooperation. There was even a relayed stereo of him addressing his constituents, bare to the waist. He faced the camera and I wanted to tell him to turn around. Then they cut to another camera and we had a close up of a bare back, while the governor's voice continued. We listened to it in a conference room off the President's office. The President had kept the Old Man with him, I tagged along, and Mary was still on watch. Secretary of Security Martinez was there as well as the Supreme Chief of Staff, Air Marshal Rexton. The President watched the cast and turned to the Old Man. "Well, Andrew? I thought Iowa was a place we would have to be sure to fence off." The Old Man grunted. "Can't you folks see that the titans have won another round?" "Eh?" "You only heard the governor; they let us look at his back -- or somebody's back. Did you notice that he didn't turn around in front of the camera?" "But he did," someone said. "I saw him." "I certainly had the impression that I saw him turn," said the President slowly. "You are suggesting that Governor Packer is himself possessed?" "Correct. You saw what you were meant to see. There was a camera cut just before he was fully turned; people hardly ever notice them. Depend on it, Mister President; every message out of Iowa is faked." The President looked thoughtful. Secretary Martinez said, "Impossible! Granted that the governor's message could have been faked -- a clever character actor could have faked it. But we've had our choice of dozens of 'casts from Iowa. How about that street scene in Des Moines? Don't tell me that you can fake hundreds of people dashing around stripped to their waists. Or do your parasites practice mass hypnotis?" "They can't that I know of," conceded the Old Man. "If they can, we might as well throw in the m towel. But what made you think that 'cast came from Iowa?" "Why. it came over the Iowa channel." "It looked like any typical street in a downtown retail district. Never mind what city the announcer to!d you it was; what city was it?" I've got fairly close to the "camera eye" that detectives are supposed to have. I let that picture run through my mind -- and I not only could not tell what city, I could not even place the part of the country. It could have been Memphis, Seattle, or Boston, or none of them. Most downtown districts in American cities are as standardized as barber shops. "You don't know." the Old Man went on. "I couldn't tell and I was looking for landmarks. The explanation is simple. The Des Moines station picked up a 'Schedule Bareback' street scene from some city not contaminated and rechanneled it under their own commentary. Gentlemen, the enemy knows us. This campaign has been planned in detail and they are ready to outwit us in almost any move we can make." "Aren't you being an alarmist, Andrew?" said the President. "There is another possibility, that the titans have moved somewhere else." "They are still in Iowa," the Old Man said flatly, "but you won't prove it with tliat thing. He gestured at the stereo tank. Secretary Martinez squirmed. "This is ridiculous! You are saying that we can't get a correct report out of Iowa, as if it were occupied territory." "That's what it is. Control the communications of a country and you control the country. You had better move fast, Mister Secretary, or you won't have any communications left." "But I was merely -- " The Old Man said rudely, "I've told you they are in Iowa and in New Orleans, and a dozen other spots. My job is finished." He stood up and said, "Mister President. I've had a long pull for a man my age; when I lose sleep, I lose my temper. Could I be c.xcused?" "Certainly, Andrew." He had not lost his temper and I think the President knew it. He doesn't lose his temper; he makes other people lose theirs. Secretary Martinez interrupted. "Wait a moment! You've made some flat statements. Let's check up." He turned to the Chief of Staff. "Rexton!" "Yes, sir." "That new post near Des Moines. Fort something-or-other, named after what's-his-name?" "Fort Patton." "That's it. Well, get them oa the command circuit -- " Ut "With visual," put in the Old Man. "With visual, of course, and we'll show this -- I mean we'll get the true situation in Iowa." The Air Marshal handed a byyour-leave-sir to the President, went to the stereo tank and patched in with Security General Headquarters. He asked for the officer of the watch at Fort Patton, Iowa. The tank showed the inside of the foreground was a young officer. His rank and corps showed on his cap, but his chest was bare. Martinez turned triumphantly to the Old Man. "You see?" "I see." "Now to make certain. Lieutenant!" "Yes, sir!" The young fellow looked awestruck and kept glancing from one famous face to another. Reception and bi-angle were in sync; the eyes of the image looked where they seemed to look. "Stand up and turn around," Martinez continued. "Uh? Why, certainly, sir." He seemed puzzled, but did so, and it took him almost out of scan. We could see his bare back up to the short ribs -- no higher. "Confound it!" shouted Martinez. "Sit down and turn around." "Yes, sir!" The youth seemed flustered. He added, "Just a moment while I widen the view angle, sir." The picture melted and rippling rainbows chased across the tank. The young officer's voice was still coming over the audio channel. "There, is that better, sir?" "Damn it, we can't see a thing!" "You can't? Just a moment, sir." Suddenly the tank came to life and I thought for a moment that we were back at Fort Patton. But it was a major in the screen this time and the place looked larger. "Supreme Headquarters," the image announced. "Communications officer of the watch. Major Donovan." "Major," Martinez said in controlled tones, "I was hooked in with Fort Patton. What happened?" "Yes, sir; I was monitoring it. We've had a slight technical difficulty. We'll put your call through again in a moment." "Well, hurry!" The Old Man stood up. "Call me when you've cleared up that 'slight technical difficulty.' I'm going to bed." XV I F I have given the impression that Secretary Martinez was stupid, I am sorry. Everyone had trouble at first believing what the slugs could do, including me. There were no flies on Marshal Rexton, either. The two worked all night, after convincing themselves by more calls to known danger spots that "technical interruptions" do not occur so conveniently. They called the Old Man about four A.M. and he called me. They were in the same room, Martinez. Rexton, a couple of his brass, and the Old Man. The President came in, wearing a bathrobe and followed by Mary, as I arrived. Martinez started to speak but the Old Man cut in. "Let's see your back, TomV" Mary signaled that everything was okay, but the Old Man chose not to see her. "I mean it," he persisted. The President said quietly, "Perfectly correct, Andrew," and slipped his robe off his shoulders. His back was clean. "If I don't set an example, how can I expect others to cooperate?" Martinez and Rexton had been shoving pins into a map, red for bad, green for good, and a few amber ones for doubtful. Iowa looked like measles; New Orleans and the Teche country were no better. So was Kansas City. The upper end of the Missouri-Mississippi system, from Minneapolis and St. Paul down to St. Louis, was clearly enemy territory. There were fewer red pins from there down to New Orleans -- but no green ones. There was a hot spot around El Paso and two on the East Coast. The President looked it over. "We shall need the help of Canada and Mexico," he said. "Any reports?" "None that mean anything, sir," "Canada and Mexico," the Old Man said seriously, "will be just a start. You are going to need the whole world." The President drew a finger across the map. "Any trouble getting messages to the West Coast?" "Apparently not, sir," Rexton told him. "The parasites don't seem to interfere with straightthrough relay. But all military communications I have shifted to relay through the space stations." He glanced at his watch finger. "Station Gamma, at the moment." "Hmmm -- " said the President, worried. "Andrew, could these things storm a space station?" "How would I know?" the Old Man answered testily. "I don't know whether their ships are built for it or not. More probably they would do it by infiltration, through the supply rockets." "Don't worry about it," Rexton said. "The costume we are wearing is customary in a station. A man fully dressed would stand out like an overcoat on the beach. But we'll see." He gave orders to an assistant. The President resumed studying the map. "So far as we know," he said, pointing to Grinnell. Iowa, "all this derives from a single landing, here." The Old Man answered, "So far as we know." I said. "Oh, no!" They all looked at me. "There were at least three more landings -- I know there were -- before I was rescued." The Old Man looked dumbfounded. "Are you sure, son? We thought we had wrung you dry." "Of course I'm sure." "Why didn't you mention it?" I tried to explain how it feels to be possessed, how you know what is going on, but everything seems dreamy, equally important and unimportant. I grew quite upset. I am not the jittery type, but being ridden by a master does something to you. The Old Man said, "Steady down, son," and the President gave me a reassuring smile. Rexton said. "Thb foint is: where did they land? We might still capture a ship." "I doubt it," the Old Man answered. "They did a cover-up on the first one in a matter of hours. If it was the first," he added thoughtfully. I went to the map and tried to think. Sweating. I pointed to New Orleans. "I'm pretty sure one was about here. I don't know where the others landed." "How about here?" Rexton asked, pointing to the East Coast. "I don't know." "Can't you remember anything ' else?" Martinez demanded, annoyed. "Think, man!" I thought until my skull ached, then pointed to Kansas City. "I sent several messages here, but I don't know whether they were shipment orders or not." Rexton looked at the map. "We'll assume a landing near Kansas City. The technical boys can do a problem on it. It may be subject to logistic analysis; we might derive the other landing." "Or landings," added the Old Man. futile. At the moment the first Saucer landed, the menace could have been stamped out by one bomb. At the time Mary, the Old Man and I reconnoitered around Grinnell, we three alone might have killed every slug, had we known where they all were. Had "Schedule Bareback" been ordered during the first week, it alone might have turned the trick. But it was quickly clear that "Schedule Bareback" had failed as an offensive measure. As a defense it was useful. The uncontaminated areas could be kept so. Areas contaminated but not "scoured" were cleaned up -- Washington itself, and New Philadelphia. New Brooklyn, too -- there I had been able to give specific advice. The entire East Coast turned from speckled to solid green. But as the middle of the country filled in on the map, it filled in red. The infected areas stood out in ruby light now, for the wall map studded with pins had been replaced by a huge electronic military map, ten miles to the inch, covering one wall of the conference room. It was a repeater map, the master being down in the New Pentagon. The country was split in two, as if a giant had washed red pigment down the central valley. Two amber paths bordered the band held by the slugs; these were the only areas of real activity, places where line-of-sight reception was possible both from stations held by the enemy and from stations still in the hands of free men. One started near Minneapolis, swung west of Chicago and east of St. Louis, then meandered through Tennessee and Alabama to the Gulf. The other cut a path through the Great Plains and came out near Corpus Christi. El Paso was the center of a ruby area unconnected with the main body. I wondered what was going on in those border strips. I was alone; the Cabinet was meeting and the President had taken the Old Man with him. Rexton and his brass had left earlier. I stayed because I hesitated to wander around in the White House, so I fretted and watched amber lights blink red and, much less frequently, red lights blink amber or green. I wondered how a visitor with no status managed to get breakfast. I had been up since four and so far I had had one cup of coffee, served by the President's valet. Even more urgently, I wanted to find a washroom. At last I got desperate enough to try doors. The first two were locked; the third was what I wanted. It was not marked "Sacred to the Chief" so I used it. When I came back, Mary was in the map room. I looked at her stupidly. "I thought you were with the President." She smiled. 'T got chased out. The Old Man took over." "Mary, I've been wanting to talk with you and this is the first chance I've had. I guess -- Well, anyway, I shouldn't have -- I mean, according to the Old Man --  I stopped, my carefully ehearsed speech in ruins. "I houldn't have said what I did," J concluded miserably. She put a hand on my arm. "What you said and what you did were fair enough on the basis of what you knew. The important hing, fo me. is what you did for le. The rest does not matter -- xcept that I am happy again to now that you don't despise me." "Damn it, don't be so noble!" She gave me a merry smile, not at all like the gentle one with which she had greeted me. "Sam,  think you like your women to be a bit bitchy. I warn you, I...K:an be." She went on, "You arc still worried about that slap. too. All right. I'll pay it back." She reached up and patted me gently on the cheek. "There, it's paid and you can forget it." Her expression suddenly changed, she swung on me, and I thought my head had been taken off. "And that," she said, "pays back the one I got from your girl friend!" I raised a hand and she tensed -- but I just wanted to touch my stinging cheek. "She's not my girl friend," I said lamely. We eyed each other and simultaneously burst out laughing. She put her hands on my shoulders and let her head collapse on my right one, still laughing. 'Sam," she managed to say, "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done it. At least I shouldn't have slapped you so hard." "The devil you're sorry," I growled, "but you didn't have to have put english on it. You damn near took the hide off." "Poor Sam!"She touched it; it hurt. "She's really not your girl friend?" "No, but not because I didn't try." "I'm sure it wasn't. Who is your girl friend, Sam?" "You are, you vixen!" "Yes," she said comfortably, "I am -- if you'll have me. I told you that before. Bought and paid for." She was waiting to be kissed; I pushed her away. "Go to hell. I don't want you bought and paid for." "I put it badly. Paid for, but not tJbught. I'm here because I want to be. Now will you kiss me, please?" I felt myself sinking into a warm golden haze and I did not ever want to come up. Finally I had to break and gasp, "I think ril sit down for a minute." She said, "Thank you, Sam, and let me. "there is something I am hoping you possibly could do for me." "Yes?" she asked eagerly. "Tell me how in the name ol lit Ned a person gets breakfast around here. I'm starved." She looked startled, but she answered, "Why, certainly!' I don't know how she did it; she may have butted into the White House pantry and helped herself, but she returned in a few minutes with sandwiches and two bottles of beer. I was cleaning up my third corned beef on rye when I said, "Mary, how long do you figure that meeting will last?" "Oh, I'd give it a minimum of two hours. Why?" "In that case," I said, swallowing the last bite, "we have time to duck out, find a registry office, get married and return before the Old Man misses us," She did not answer. Instead she stared at the bubbles in her beer. "Well?" I insisted. She raised her eyes. "I'll do it if you say so." "You don't want to marry me?" "Don't be angry, darling. You don't know me yet. Get acquainted with me ; you might change your mind." "I'm not in the habit of changing my mind." She glanced up. then looked away sadly. I felt my face get hot. "That was a very spiecial circumstance," I protested. "It could not happen to us again in a hundred years. That wasn't me talking; it was -- " She stopped me. "I know, Sam. But you don't have to prove anything. I won't run out on you and I didn't mistrust you. Take me away on a weekend: better yet, move into my apartment. If I wear well, there's always time to make me what great-grandmother called an 'honest woman, heaven knows why," I must have looked sullen. She put a hand on mine and said seriously, "Look at the map, Sam." I turned my head. Red as ever, or more so -- the danger zone around El Paso had increased. She went on, "Let's get this cleaned up first, dear. Then, if you still want to, ask me again. In the meantime, you can have the privileges without the responsibilities." What could be fairer than that? The trouble was it was not the way I wanted it. Why will a man who has been avoiding marriage like the plague suddenly decide that nothing less will suit him? the Old Man collared me and took me for a walk. Yes, a walk, though we went only as far as the Baruch Memorial Bench. There he sat down, fiddled with his pipe, and scowled. The day was as muggy as only Washington can get; the park was almost deserted. He said, " 'Schedule Counter Blast' starts at midnight. We swoop down on every relay station, broadcast station, newspaper office, and Western Union office in 'Zone Red'.' "Sounds good," I answered. 'How many men?" He did not answer. "I don't like it." "Huh?" "The President went on channels and told everybody to peel off their shirts. We find that the message did not reach infected territory. What's the next development?" I shrugged. " 'Schedule Counter Blast,' I suppose." "That hasn't happened yet. Think -- it has been more than twenty-four hours. What should have happened and hasn't?" "Should I know?" "You should, if you are ever going to amount to anything on your own. Here." He handed me a combo key. "Scoot out to Kansas City and take a look-see. Stay away from comm stations, cops, and -- stay away from them. Look at ever # dhing else. And don't get caught. Be back here a half hour before midnightGet going." "A lot of time you allow to case a whole city," I complained. "It will take three hours just to drive to Kansas City." "More than three hours," he answered. "Don't attract attention by getting a ticket. Move." So I moved. The combo was to the car we had come, down in; I picked it up at Rock Creek Park platform. Traffic was light and I commented on it to the despatcher. "Freight and commercial carriers are grounded," he answered. "The emergency. You got a military clearance?" I could get one by phoning the Old Man, but bothering him about trivial things does not endear one to him. I said, "Check the combo." He shrugged and slipped it in his machine. My hunch had been right; his eyebrows shot up. "Boy, you rate!" he commented. "You must be the President's caddy!" Once launched, I set the controls for Kansas City at legal max and tried to think. The transponder beeped as radar beams hit it each time I slid from one control block into the next, but no faces appeared on the screen. Apparently the Old Man's combo was good for the route, emergency or not. I began to wonder what would happen when I slipped over into the red areas -- and then realized what he had meant by "the next development." One tends to think of communications as meaning line-ofsight channels and nothing else. But "communications" means a traffic, even dear old Aunt Mamie, headed for California and stuffed with gossip. The slugs had seized the channels, but news can't be stopped that easily; such measures merely slow it down. Ergo, if the slugs expected to retain control where they were, seizing the channels would be just their first step. What would they do next? They would do something and I, being a part of "communications" by definition, had better be prepared for evasive action if I wanted to save my pink skin. The Mississippi River and Zone Red were sliding closer by the minute. I wondered what would happen the first time my recognition signal was picked up by a station controlled by masters. I judged that I was probably safe in the air, but that I had better not let them spot me landing. Elementary. "Elementary" in the face of a traffic control net which was described as the No-Sparrow-ShallFall plan. The traffic men boasted that a butterfly could not make a forced landing anywhere in the United States without alerting the search  rescue system. Not quite true -- but I was no butterfly. On foot I will make a stab at penetrating any security screen, mechanical, manned, electronic, or mixed. But' how can you use misdirection in a car making westing a full degree every seven minutes? Or hang a stupid innocent look on the nose of a duo? If I went in on foot, the Old Man would get his report come next Michaelmas; he wanted it before midnight. Once, in a rare mellow mood, the Old Man told me that he did not bother agents with detailed instructions. Give a man a mission; let him sink or swim. I said his method must use up a lot of agents. "Some," he had admitted, "but not as many as the other way. I believe in the individual and I try to pick those who are survivor typop." "And how in hell," I had asked, "do you pick a 'survivor type'?" He had grinned wickedly. "A survivor type is one who comes back." So I was about to find out which type I was -- and damn his icy heart! course would take me toward St. Louis, swing me around the city loop, and on to Kansas City. But St. Louis was in Zone Red. The map had shown Chicago as green; the amber line had zigzagged west somewhere above Hannibal, Missouri -- and I wanted very badly to cross the Mississippi while still in Zone Green. A car crossing that milewide river would make a radar blip as sharp as  a desert star. I signaled block control for perUI mission to descend to local-traffic level, then did so without waiting, resuming manual control and cutting my speed. I headed north. Short of the Springfield loop I headed west, staying low. When I reached the river I crossed slowly, close to the water, with my transponder shut down. Sure, you can't shut off your radar recognition signal in the air -- but I had hopes, if local traffics were being monitored while I crossed, that my blip would be mistaken for a boat on the river. I did not know certainly whether the next block control station across the river was Zone Red or ZoneGreen. I was about to cut in the transponder again, on the assumption that it would be safer to get back into the traffic system, when I noticed the shoreline opening up ahead. The map did not show a tributary; I judged it to be an inlet, or a new channel not yet mapped. I dropped almost to water level and headed into it. The stream was narrow, meandering, almost overhung by trees, and I had no more business taking a sky car into it than a bee has of flying down a trombone. But it afforded perfect radar "shadow;" I could get lost in it. In a few minutes I was lost -- lost myself, right off the map. The channel switched and turned and cut back and I was so busy bucking the car by hand that I lost all track of navigation. I swore and wished that the car were a triphib so that I could land on water. The trees suddenly broke; I saw a stretch of level land, kicked her over and squatted her in with a deceleration that nearly cut me in two against my safety belt. But I was down and no longer trying to play catfish in a muddy stream. I wondered what to do. No doubt there was a highway close by. I had better find it and stay on the ground. That was silly -- there was no time for ground travel; I must get back into the air. But I did not dare until I knew positively whether traffic here was being controlled by free men or by slugs. I had not turned on the stereo since leaving Washington. Now I did so, hunting for a newscast, but not finding one. I got (a) a lecture by Myrtle Doolightly, Ph. D., on Why Husbands Grow Bored, sponsored by the Uth-agen Hormone Company; (b) a trio of girl hepsters singing If you Mean What I Think you Mean, What Are We Waiting For? (c) an episode in Lucretia Learns About Life. Dear Doctor Myrtle was fully dressed. The trio were dressed the way one would expect, but they did not turn their backs to the camera. Lucretia alternated having her clothes tom off with takcamera always cut or the lights went out just before I could see if her back was bare -- of slugs, that is. And none of it meant anything. Those programs could have been taped months before the President announced "Schedule bareback." I was still switching channels, trying to find a newscast, when I found myself staring into the unctuous smile of an announcer. He was fully dressed. It was one of those giveaway shows. He was saying: " -- and some very lucky little woman sitting by her screen right this minute is about to receive, absolutely free, a General Atomics Six-inOne Automatic Home Butler. Will it be you? You? Or lucky you." He turned away from scan; I could see his shoulders. They were covered by a jacket and distinctly rounded, almost humped. I was inside Zone Red. that I was being watched by a male about nine years old. He was wearing only shorts -- at his age that's standard style. I threw back the wind screen. "Hey, bub, where's the highway?" He answered, "Road to Macon's up yonder. Say, mister, that's a Cadillac Zipper, ain't it?" "Sure thing. Where yonder?" "Give me a ride, huh, will you?" I shrugged. While he climbed in, I opened my kit, got out shirt, trousers, and jacket. I said, "Maybe I shouldn't put these on. Do people around here wear shirts?" He scowled. "Of course they do. Where do you think you are -- in Arkansas?" I asked again about the road. He said, "Can I punch the button when we take off. huh?" I explained that we were going to stay on the ground. He was annoyed but condescended to point a direction. I drove cautiously as the car was heavy for unpaved countryside. Presently he said to turn. Quite a bit later, I stopped and said, "Are you going to show me that road, or am I going to wallop you?" He opened the door and slid out. "Hey!" I yelled. He looked back. "Over that way," he jeered. I turned the car, not expecting to find a highway, but it was only fifty yards away. The brat had caused me to drive around three sides of a square so he'd get a longer ride. If you could call it a highway -- there was not an ounce of rubber in the paving. Still, it was a road; I followed it to the west. All in all, I had wasted an hour. Macon, Missouri, seemed too normal to be reassuring; "Schedule Bareback" obviously had not been heard of. I gave serious thought to checking this town, then beating back the way I had come, while I could. Pushing farther into country which I knew to be controlled by the masters made me jittery; I wanted to run. But the Old Man had said Kansas City. I drove the belt around Macon and pulled into a landing flat on the west. There r queued up for local traffic launching and headed for Kansas City in a mess of farmers copters and local craft. I would have to hold local speeds across the state, but that was safer than getting into the hot pattern with my transponder identifying my car to every block control. The field was automatically serviced; it seemed probable that I had managed to enter the Missouri traffic pattern without arousing suspicion. K ansas city was not hurt in the bombings, except on the east, where Independence used to be. Consequently it never haT to be rebuilt. From the southeast you can drive as far as Swope Park before having to choose between parking or paying toll to enter the city proper. Or you can fly in and make another choice: land in the landing flats north of the river and take the tunnels into the city, or land on the downtown platforms south of Memorial Hill. I decided not to fly in; I did not want to have to pick the car up through a checking system. I do not like tunnels in a pinch, nor launching platform elevators. A man can easily be trapped in them. Frankly, I did not want to go into the city at all. I roaded the car on Route # and drove into the Meyer Boulevard toll gate. The line waiting was quite long; I began to feel hemmed in as soon as another car filled in behind me. But the gatekeeper took my toll without glancing at me. I glanced at him, all right, but could not tell whether or not he was being ridden. I drove through the gate -- only to be stopped just beyond. A barrier dropped in front of me and I barely managed to stop the car, whereupon a cop stuck his head in. "Safety check," he said. ".Climb out." I protested. "The city is having a safety drive," he explained. "Here's your car clieck. Pick it up on the other side of the barrier. Get out and go in that door." He pointed to a building near the curb. "What for?" "Eyesight and reflexes. You're holding up the line." In my mind's eye I saw the map with Kansas City glowing red. That the city was "secured" I was sure; therefore this mildmannered policeman was almost surely hag-ridden. But short of shooting him and making an emergency takeoff, there was nothing to do but comply. I got out grumbling and walked slovly toward the building. It was a temporary job with an old-style unpowered door. I pushed it open with a toe and glanced both sides and up before I entered. There was an empty anteroom with door beyond. Someone inside called, "Come in." There were two men in white coats, one with a doctor's reflector strapped to his head. He said briskly, "This won't take a minute. Step over here." He closed the door I had entered; I heard the lock click. It was a sweeter setup than we had worked out for the Constitution Club. Spread out on a tabic were transit cells for masters, alteady opened and warmed. The second man had one ready -- for me, I knew -- and was holding it toward him, so that I could not see the slug. The transit cells would not arouse alarm in the victims; the medical men always have odd things at hand. As for the test. I was being in vited to place my eyes against the goggles of an ordinary visual acuity tester. The "doctor" would keep me there, blindfolded without knowing it and reading test figures, while his "assistant" fitted me with a master. No violence. no slips, no protests. It was not necessary, as I had learned during my own "service," to bare the victim's back. Just touch the master ' to the neck, then let the recruit himself adjust his clothing to cover his master. "Over here," the "doctor" repeated. "Place your eyes against the eyepieces." I went to the bench on which was mounted the acuity tester. Then I turned suddenly around. The assistant had moved in, the cell ready in his hands. As I turned he tilted it away from me. "Doctor," I said, "I wear contact lenses. Should I take them off first?" "No, no," he snapped. "Let's not waste time." "But, Doctor," I protested, "I want you to see how they fit. I've had a little trouble with the left one." I lifted both hands and pulled back the lids of my left eye. "See?" He "Said angrily, "This is not a clinic. Now, if you please --  They were both in reach; moving quickly, I snapped my arms out and grabbed at the spot between each set of shoulderblades. With each hand I struck something soft under the coats and felt revulsion clutch me. Once I saw a cat struck by a ground car; the poor thing sprang straight up with its back arched the wrong way and all limbs flying. These two unlucky men did the same thing. They contorted every muscle in a grand spasm. I could not hold them; they jerked out of my arms and flopped to the floor. But there was no need to hang on. After that first convulsion they went limp. Someone was knocking. I called out, "Just a moment. The doctor is busy." It stopped. I made sure the door was locked, then bent over the "doctor" and pulled up his coat to see what I had done to his master. Th? thing was a ruptured mess. So was the one on the other man, which pleased me heartily. I had determined to burn the slugs with my gun if they were not already dead, and I was not sure that I hosts. I left the men to live or die M# -- be seized again by titans. I had no way to help them. The masters waiting in their cells were another matter. With a fan beam arid max charge, I burned them all. There were two large crates against the wall; I beamed them also until the wood charred. The knocking resumed. I looked around hastily for somewhere to hide the two men, but there was nowhere, so I decided to run for it. As I was about to go out the exit, I felt that something was missing. I looked around again. There seemed to be nothing suited to my purpose. I could use clothing from the "doctor" or his helper, but I did not want to. Then I noticed the dust cover for the acuity tester. I loosened my jacket, snatched up the cover, wadded it and stuffed it under my shirt between ray shoulders. With my jacket zipped, it made a bulge of about the proper size. Then I went out, feeling pretty cocky. Another cop took my car check. He glanced sharply at me, then motioned me to climb in. I did and he said. "Go to police headquarters, under the City Hall." "Police headquarters, City Hall." I repeated and gunned her ahead. I started in that direction and turned onto Nichols Freeway. I came to a stretch where traffic thinned out, and punched the button to shift license plates. It seemed possible that there was already a call out for the plates I had been showing at the gate. I wished that I had been able to change the car's colors as well. Before the Freeway reached Mcgee Traffic Way, I turned down a ramp and stuck thereafter to sidcstreets. It was eighteen hundred, Zone Six time, and I was due in Washington in four and one-half hours. city did not have the right  flavor, as if it were a clumsily directed play. I tried to put my finger on the fault; it slipped away. Kansas City has many neighborhoods made up of family units a century old or more. Kids roll on lawns and householders sit on their front porches, just as their great-grandparents did. If there are bomb shelters around, they do not show. The queer, old, bulky houses, put together by guildsmen long since dead, make those neighborhoods feel like enclaves of security. I cruised through along streets, dodging dogs, rubber balls and toddlers, and tried to get the feel of the place. It was the slack of the day, time for a drink, for watering lawns, for neighborly chatting. I saw a woman bending over a flower bed. She was wearing a sunsuit and her back was bare; clearly she was not wearing a master, nor were the two kids with her. What could be wrong? It was a very hot day: I began to look for sunsuited women and men in shorts. Kansas City is in the Bible Belt, so I found jople dressed both ways -- but the proportions were wrong. Sure, there were plenty of kids dressed for the weather, but in several miles of driving I saw the bare backs of only five women and two men. I should have seen more like five hundred. Cipher it out. While some jackets undoubtedly did not cover masters, by simple proportion well over ninety per cent ot the population must be possessed. The masters did not simply hold key points and key officials; the masters were the city. I felt a blind urge to blast off and streak out of Zone Red at emergency maximum. Knowing that I had escaped the gate trap, they would be looking for me. ! might be the only free man driving a car in the entire city -- and they were all around me! I fought it down. An agent who turns panicky is not likely to get out of a tight spot. But it was hard to be calm. I must be wrong; there could not possibly be enough masters Tl population. I remembered my own experiences, recalling how we picked our recruits and made each new host count. Of course that had been a secondary invasion depending on shipments, whereas Kansas City almost certainly had had a Saucer land nearby. Still it did not make sense: it would take a dozen or more to carry enough masters to saturate Kansas City, If there had been that many, surely the space stations would have radar-tracked their landing orbits. Could it be that they had no trajectories to track? We did not know what the masters were capable of in engineering and it was not safe to judge their limitations by our own. But the data I had led to a conclusion which contradicted common logic; therefore I must check before I reported. One thing seemed sure : even if the masters had almost saturated this city, they were still keeping up the masquerade, permitting the city to look like a city of free human beings. Perhaps I was not as conspicuous as I feared. I moseyed along another mile or so, going nowhere. Finding myself heading into the retail district around the Plaza, I swung away. Where there are crowds, there are cops, and the mastere make a special point of possessing police forces. I passed a public' swimming poo), noticed it, and was several blocks away before I realized it had carried a sign -- Item: a trap at the city's toll gates; item: too few sunsuits; item: a swimnning pool closed in the hottest part of the summer. Conclusion: the slugs were incredibly more numerous than anyone had dreamed. Corollary: "Schedule Counterblast" was based on a mistaken estimate; it would work as well as hunting rhinoceri with a slingshot. Counter argument: I could hear Secretary Martinez' polite sarcasm tearing my report to shreds. I needed proof strong enough to convince the President over the reasonable objections of his official advisors -- and I had to have it now. Breaking all traffic laws, I could not clip much off two and a half hours running time back to Washington. What should I do? Go downtown, mingle with crowds, and then tell Martinez that I was sure that almost every man I passed was possessed? How could I prove it? For that matter, how could I myself be certain? As long as the titans kept up the farce of "business as usual," the telltales would be subtle, a super-abundance of round shoulders, not enough bare ones. I had some notion of how the city had been saturated, granting a large enough supply of slugs. I felt sure that I would encounter another toll gate trap on the way out and that there would be others on launching platforms and at every entrance and exit to the city proper. Every person leaving would be a new agent: every person entering would be a new slave. I had noticed a vendo-printcr for the Kansas City Star on the last corner I had passed. Now I swung around the block, pulled up to it and got out. I shoved a dime in the slot and waited nervously for my paper to be printed. The Star's format had its usual dull respectability -- no excitement, no mention of an emergency, no reference to "Schedule Bareback.' The lead story was headed phone service disrupted head City Semi-Isolated by Solar Static. There was a #-col, semistereo, tru-kolor of the sun, its face disfigured by cosmic acne. It was a convincing and unexciting explanation of why Mamie Schultz, herself free of parasites, could not get her call through to Grandma in Pittsburgh. I tucked the paper under my arms to study later and turned back to my car... just as a police car glided silently up and, cramped in across the nose of it. A moment before the corner was deserted. Suddenly there were )#t people all around and the cop was coming toward me. My hand crept toward my gun; I would have dropped him had I not been sure that most of those around me were equally dangerous. He stopped in front of me. "Let me seo your license," he said pleasantly. "Certainly, officer. It's clipped to the instrument board." I stepped past him, letting it be assumed that he would follow, I could feel him hesitate, then take the bait. I led him around between my car and his. This let me see that he did not have a mate in his car. a most welcome variation from human practice. More important, it placed my car between me and the too-innocent bystanders. "There," I said, pointing inside, "it's fastened down." Again he hesitated, then looked -- long enough for my left hand to slap his shoulders and clutch with all its strength. His body seemed to explode, so violent was the spasm. I was in the car and gunning it almost before he hit the pavement. The masquerade broke as abruptly as it had in Barnes' outer office; the crowd closed in. One woman clung by her nails to the outside of the car for fifty feet or more before she fell off. By then I was making speed, cutting in and out of traffic, ready to take to the air but lacking space. A street showed up on the left. Islamified into it. It was a mistake; trees arched over it and I could not take off. The next turn was even worse. Of necessity I slowed down. Now I was cruising at conservative city speed, still watching for some boulevard wide enough for an illegal takeoff. My thoughts began, to catch up and I realized that there was no sign of pursuit. My knowledge of the masters came to my aid. Except for "direct conference" a titan lives in and through his host; he sees what the host sees, receives and passes on information through whatever organs and by whatever means are available to the host. It was unlikely that any of the slugs at that comer had been looking for that particular car other than the one inhabiting the body of a policeman -- and I had settled with it! Now, of course, the other parasites present would be on the lookout for me. too, but they had only the abilities and facilities of their hosts. I decided that I need treat them with no more respect than I would give to any casual crowd of witnesses, i.e., ignore them; change neighborhoods and forget it. For I had barely thirty minutes left and I had decided on what I needed as proof -- a prisoner, a man who had been possessed and could tell what had happened to the city. I must act now. Even as I decided. I saw a man walking in the block ahead, stepping along like a man who sees home and supper. I pulled alongside him and said, "Hey!" He stopped. "Yes?" "Fve just come from City Hall. No time to explain -- slide in and we'll have a direct conference." "City Hall? What are you talking about?" I said, "Change in plans. Don't waste time. Get in!" He backed away. I jumped out and grabbed at his hunched shoulders. My hand struck human flesh, and the man began to yell. I jumped into the car and got out of there fast. When I was blocks away I slowed and thought it over. Could it be that my nerves were so overwrought that I saw signs of titans where there were none? No! The toll gate, the sunsuits, the swimming pool, the cop at the vendo-printer -- those facts I knew  -- and this last fact simply meant that I had picked the one man in ten, or whatever the odds were, who was not yet recruited. I speeded up, looking for a new victim. He was a middle-aged man watering his lawn, so nomial in appearance that I was half a mind to pass him by. But I had no lime left -- and he wore a sweater which bulged suspiciouslyHe looked up as I stopped. "I've just come from City Hall," I told him. "You and I need a direct conference right away." He said quietly, "Come in the house. That car is too public." I wanted to refuse, but he was already heading for the house. As I came up he whispered, "Careful. The woman is not of us." Had I seen her on the veranda, I would have passed him by, for she was dressed in bra and skirt and so could not have been possessed. "Your wife?" "Yes." We stopped on the porch and he said, "My dear, this is Mr. O'Keefe. We have business to discuss. We'll be in the study." She smiled and answered, "Certainly, my love. Good evening, Mr. O'Keefe. Sultry, isn't it?" I agreed and she went back to her knitting. We went inside, where the man ushered me into his study. Since we were keeping the masquerade I went in first, as befitted an escorted visitor. I did not like turning my back on him. For that reason I was half expecting it; he hit me near the base of the neck, I rolled with it and went down almost unhurt. I continued to roll and fetched up on my back. In training school they used to slap us with sandbags for trying to get up. once down... So I stayed down and was threatening him with my heels as soon as I hit. He shuffled out of range. Apparently he did not have a gun and I could not get at mine. But there was a real fireplace in the room, complete with poker, shovel, and tongs: he circled toward it. A small table was just out of my reach. I lunged, grabbed a leg and threw it. It caught him in the face as he grabbed the poker. Then I was on him. His master was dying in my fingers and he himself was convulsing under its last, terrible command when I became aware of his wife, screaming in the doorway. I bounced up and let her have one. She went down in midscrcam and I returned to her husband. A limp man is amazingly hard to lift and he was heavy. Fortunately I am a big husky; I managed a lumbering dog trot toward the car. I doubt if our fight disturbed anyone but his wife, but her screams must have aroused half that end of town. There were people popping out of doors on both sides of the street. So far, none of them was near, but I was glad that I had left the car door open. Then I was sorry; a brat like the one who had given me trouble earlier was inside, fiddling with the controls. Cursing, I dumped my prisoner in the lounge circle and grabbed the kid. He struggled, but I tore him loose and threw him out -- into the arms of the first of my pursuers. He was still untangling himself when I slammed into the seat and shot forward without bothering with door or safety belt. As I took the first comer, the door swung shut and I almost went out of my seat. I held a straight course long enough to fasten the belt, cut sharp another corner, nearly ran down a ground car, and went on. I found a wide boulevard -- the Paseo, I think -- and jabbed the takeoff key. Possibly I caused several wrecks; I had no time to look. Without waiting to reach altitude, I wrestled her to course east. I kept her on manual across Missouri and expended every launching unit in her racks to give more speed. That reckless, illegal trick may have saved my neck; somewhere over Columbia, just as I fired the last one, I felt the car shake to concussion. Someone had launched an interceptor and the pesky thing had fused where I had just been. There were no more shots, which was good; I would have been a duck on water from then on. My starboard impeller began tc run hot. either from the near miss or simply from abuse. I let it heat, praying that it would not fly apart for anotlicr ten minutes. Then, with the Mississippi behind me and the indicator 'way up into "danger," I cut it out and let the car limp along on the port unit. Three hundred was the best she would do -- but I was out of Zone Red.  passenger more than a glance. He lay sprawled on the floor pads, unconscious or dead. Now that I was back among men and no longer had power for illegal speeds, there was no reason not to go automatic. I flipped the transponder, signaled a request for a block assignment, and put the controls on automatic without waiting for permission. I then swung around into the lounge and looked my man over. He was still breathing. There was a welt on his face, but no bones seemed broken. I slapped his face and dug thumbnails into his earlobes, but I could not rouse him. The dead slug was beginning to stink and I had no way to dispose of it. I left him and went back to the control seat. The chronometer read twentyone thirty-seven, Washington time -- and I still had better than six hundred miles to go. Allowing nothing for landing, for tearing over to the White House and finding the Old Man. I would reach Washington a few minutes after midnight. So I was already late and the Old Man was sure as the devil going to make me stay in after school for it. I tried to start the starboard impeller. No dice. It was pjobably frozen solid. Just as well. Anything that goes that fast ran be explosively dangerous if it gets out of balance. So I desisted and tried to raise the Old Man by phone. The phone would not work. Perhaps I had jiggered it in one of the spots of exercise I had been forced to take. I put it back, feeling that this was one of those days when it had not been worthwhile to get out of bed. I turned to the car's communicator and punched the emergency tab. "Control," I called out. "Control!" The screen lighted up and I was looking at a young man. He was. I savyr with relief, bare to the waist. "Control answering -- Block Fox Eleven. What are you doing in the air? I've been trying to raise you ever since you entered my block." "Never mind! Patch me into the nearest military circuit. This is crash priority!"  He looked uncertain, but the screen flickered and another picture built up, showing a military xnessage center. That did my heart good; everyone in sight was stripped to the waist. In the foreground was a young watch officer. I could have kissed him. Instead I said, "Military emergency. Patch me through the Pentagon and there to the White House." "Who are you?" "I'm a civil agent and you wouldn't recognize my I.D. Hurry!" I might have talked him into it, but he was shouldered out of scan by a wing commander. "Land at once!" was all he said. "Look, skipper," I said, "this is a military emergency. You've got to put me through. I -- " "This is a military emergency," he interrupted. "Civil craft have been grounded the past three hours. Land at once." "But I've got to -- " "Land or be shot down. We are tracking; I am about to launch an interceptor to burst a half mile ahead of you. Make any maneuver but landing, and the next will burst on." "Will you listen, please? I'll land, but I've got to get -- He switched off. The first burst seemed short of a half mile ahead. I landed and cracked up, but without hurting myself or my passenger.  I did not have long to wait. They had me flare-lighted apd Were Swobping down befote I had satisfied myself that the boat wouldn't move. They took me in and I met the wing commander personally. He even put my message through after his psych squad got through giving me the antidote for the sleep test. By then it was one-thirteen. zone five -- and "Schedule Counter Blast" had been under way one hour and thirteen minutes. The Old Man listened to a summary, grunted, then told me to see him in the morning. was something tremendous. The parachute drops were made just at midnight, Zone Five, on over ninety-six hundred communication points -- newspaper offices. block controls, relay stations, and so forth. The raiding squads were the cream of our skyborne forces, plus technicians to put each communication point back into service. Whereupon the President's speech was to go out from each local station. "Schedule Bareback" would take effect all through the infected territory. The war would soon be over. By twenty-five minutes after midnight, reports started coming in that such-and-such points were secured. A little later there were calls for help from other points. # By one in the morning most of the reserves had been committed, but the operation seemed to be going well -- so well that unit commanders were landing and reporting from the ground. That was the last anybody ever heard of them. Zone Red swallowed up the task force as if it had never existed -- over eleven thousand craft, more than a hundred and sixty thousand fighting men and technicians. seventy-one group commanders and -- why go on? The United States had received its worst military setback since Black Sunday. I am not criticizing Martinez, Rexton, and the General Staff, nor those poor devils who made the drop. The program was based on what ap- peered to be a true picture, and the situation called for fast action with the best we had. It was nearly daylight, so I understand, before Martinez and Rexton got it through their Deads that the messages they had gotten back about successes were actually fakes sent by their own men -- oor own men -- but hag-ridden, possessed, inducted by the enemy. After my report, more than an hour too late to stop the raids, the Old Man had tried to get them not to send in any more men, but they were flushed with success and anxious to make a .clean sweep. The Old Man asked the President to insist on visual checks, but the operation was being controlled by relay through Space Station Alpha and there just aren't enough channels to parallel audio with video through a space station. Rexton had said, "Quit worrying. As fast as we get local stations back in our hands, our boys will patch into the ground relay net and you will have all the visual evidence you want." The Old Man had pointed out that by then it would be too late. Rexton had burst out, "Confound it, man! Do you want a thousand men to be killed just to quiet your jitters?" The President backed up Rex ton. By morning they had thc-ir visual evidence. Stations in the central valley were giving out with the same old Rise and Shine with Mary Sunshine, Breakfast with the Browns, and such junk. There was not a station with the President's stereocast, not one that conceded that anything had happened. The military despatches tapered off around four o'clock and Rexton's frantic calls were not answered. Task Force Redemption ceased to exist -- spurlos versenkt. Man until nearly eleven the T# lext morning. He let me report ithout comment, and without jawling me out, which was worse. He was about to dismiss me vhen I put in, "How about my jrisoner? Didn't be confirm my onclusions?" "Oh, him? Still unconscious. They don't expect him to live." 'Td like to see him." "You stick to things you underhand." "Well, have you got something .'or me to do?" "I think you had better- -- No, 'rot down to the Zoo. You'll see :hings that put a different light in what you picked up in Kansas City." "Huh?" "Look up Doctor Morris, the assistant director. Tell him I sent you." Morris was a nice little guy who looked like one of his own baboons; he turned me over to a Doctor Vargas who was a specialist in exotic biologies -- the same Vargas who was on the Second Venus Expedition. He showed me what had happened. If the Old Man and I had gone to the National Zoological Gardens instead of sitting around in the park, it would not have been necessary for me to go to Kansas City. The ten titans we had captured in Congress, plus two the next day, had been sent to the Zoo CO be placed on anthropoids -- chimps and orangutans, mostly. None were on gorillas. The Director had had the apes locked up in the Zoo's hospital. Two chimpanzees, Abelard and Heloise, were caged together; they had always been mates and there seemed no reason to separate them. That sums up our psychological difficulty in dealing with the titans. Even the men who transplanted the slugs still thought of the result as apes, rather than as titans. The next treatment cage held a family of tuberculous gibbons. They were not used as hosts, since they were sick, and there was no communication between cages. They were shut one from another by sliding panels and each cage had its own air-conditioning. The next morning the panel had been slid back and the gibbons and the chimps were together. Abelard or Heloise had found some way to pick the lock. The lock was supposed to be monkey proof, but it was not apecum-titan proof. Five gibbons, plus two chimps, plus two titans -- but the next morning there were seven apes ridden by seven titans. This was discovered while I was leaving for Kansas City, not enough time for the Old Man to have been notified. Had there been, he would have known that Kansas City was saturated and "Schedule Counter Blast" would not have taken place. "I saw the President's broadcast." Dr. Vargas said to me. "Weren't you the man who -- I mean, weren't you the -- " "Yes, I was the man who," I agreed shortly. "Then you can tell us a great deal about these phenomena." "Perhaps I should be able to," I admitted, "but I can't." "Do you mean that no cases of fission reproduction took place while you were -- uh -- their prisoner?" "That's right." I thought about it. "At least I think that's right." "I was given to understand that victims have full memory of their experiences." "Well, they do and they don't." I tried to explain the odd detached frame of mind of a servant of the masters. "I suppose it could happen while you sleep." he said. "Maybe. Besides sleep, there is another time, or rather times, which are difficult to remember. During conference." "Conference?" When I explained. his eyes lit up. "Oli, you mean conjugation." "No. I mean conference." "We mean the same thing. Don't you see? Conjugation and fission -- they reproduce at will, whenever the supply of hosts permits. Probably one contact for each fission: then, when opportunity exists, fission. Two adult daughter parasites in a matter of hours. Less, possibly." If that were true -- and. looking at the gibbons. I could not doubt it -- then why had we depended on shipments at t!ie Constitution Club? Or had we? I did not know: I did what my master wanted done and saw only what came under my eyes. But it was clear how Kansas City had been saturated. With plenty of "live stock" at hand and a spaceship loaded with transit cells to draw from, the titans had reproduced to match the human population. Assume a thousand slugs in that spaceship, the one we believed to have landed near Kansas City: suppose that they could reproduce every twenty four hours, when given opportunity. First day. one thousand slugs. Second day. two thousand. Third day, four thousand. At the end of the first week -- the eighth day. that is -- a hundred and twenty-eight thousand slugs! After two weeks, more than sixBut we did not know that they were limited to spawning once a day. Nor did we know that a Flying Saucer could lift only a thousand transit cells. It might be ten thousand or more or less. Assume ten thousand as breeding stock with fission every twelve hours. In two weeks the answer comes out --  -- The figure did not mean anything; it was cosmic. I felt worse than I had in Kansas City. D r. Vargas introduced me to a Dr. Mcllvaine of the Smithsonian Institution. Mcllvaine was a comparative psychologist, the author, so Vargas told me, of Afars, Venus, and Earth: A Study in Motivating Purposes. Vargas seemed to expect me to be impressed, but I had not read it. Anyhow, how can anyone study the motives of Martians when they were all dead before we climbed down out of trees? Mcllvaine asked me, "Mr. Nivens, how long does a conference last?" "Conjugation," Vargas corrected him. "Conference," Mcllvaine repeated. "It's the more important aspect." "But, Doctor," Vargas insisted, "conjugation is the means of gene exchange whereby mutation is spread through -- " "Anthropocentricism, Doctor ! You do not know that this life form has genes." Vargas turned red. "You will allow me gene equivalents?" he said stiffly. "Why should I? You are reasoning by uncertain analy. There is only one characteristic common to all life forms and that is the drive to survive." "And to reproduce," insisted Vargas. "Suppose the organism is immortal and has no need to reproduce?" Vargas shrugged. "We know that they reproduce." He gestured at the apes. "And I am suggesting," Mcllvaine came back, "that this is not reproduction, but a single organism availing itself of more space. No, Doctor, it is possible to get so immersed in the idea of the zygote-gamete cycle that one forgets there may be other patterns." "But throughout the Solar System -- " Mcllvaine cut him short. "Anthropocentric, terrocentric, solocentric -- it is a provincial approach. These creatures may be from outside the Solar System entirely." I said, "Oh, no!" I had a sudden flash picture of the planet Titan and with it a choking sensation. Neither one noticed. Mcllvaine continued, "Take the ameba -- a more basic and much more successful life form than ours. The #  motivational psychology of the ameba -- " I switched off my ears; free speech gives a man the right to talk about the "psychology" of an ameba, but I don't have to listen. They did some direct experimentation which restoredmy interest. Vargas had a baboon wearing a slug placed in the cage with the gibbons and chimps. As soon as the newcomer was dumied in, they gathered in a ring facing outward and went into direct conference, slug to slug. Mcllvaine jabbed his finger at them. "You see? Conference is not for reproduction, but for exchange of memory. The organism, temporarily divided, has now reidentified itself." I could have told him the same thing without the double talk. A master who has been out of touch always gets into direct conference as soon as possible. "Hypothecation!" Vargas snorted. "They have no opportunity to reproduce just now." He ordered the boss of the handling crew to bring in another ape. "Little Abe?" asked the crew boss. "No, I want one without a parasite. Let me see -- make it Old Red." The crew boss said, "Cripes, Doc. don't pick on Old Red." "This won't hurt him." "How about Satan? He's a mean bastard anyway." "All right, but hurry it up." So they brought in Satan, a coal-black chimp. He may have been aggressive elsewhere; he was not so here. When they dumped him inside, he shrank back against the door and began to whine. It was like watching an execution. I had had my nerves under control -- a man Can get used to anything -- but the ape's hysteria was contagious. I wanted to run. At first the hag-ridden apes sknply stared at him like a jury. This went on for a long while. Satan's whines changed to low moans and he covered his face. Presently Vargas said, "Doctor! Look!" "Where?" "Lucy, the old female. There. He pointed. It was the matriarch of consumptive gibbons. Her back was toward us; the slug thereon had humped itself together. An iridescent line ran down the center of it. It began to split as an egg splits. In a few minutes only, the division was complete. One new slug centered itself over her spine; the other flowed down her back as she squatted almost to the floor. It slithered off, plopped gently on the concrete and crept slowly toward Satan. The ape screamed # ? hoarsely and swarmed up into the top of the cage. So help me, the slugs sent a quad to arrest him -- two gibbons, a chimp, and the baboon. They tore him loose and held him face-down on the floor. The slug slithered closer. It was a good two feet away when it grew a pseudopod -- slowly, at first, a stalk that weaved round like a cobra. Then it lashed out and struck the ape on  foot. The others promptly let go, but Satan did not move. The titan seemed to pull itself in by the extension it had formed and attached itself to Satan's foot. From there it crawled up. When it reached the base of his spine, Satan sat erect. He shook himself and joined the others. Vargas and Mcllvaine started talking excitedly, apparently unmoved. I wanted to smash something -- for me, for Satan. Mcllvaine maintained that we were seeing something new to our concepts, an intelligent creature so organi#ed as to be immortal and continuous in its personal identity -- or its group identity. He theorized that it would have continuous memory back to its racial beginning. He described the slugs as a four-dimensional worm in space-time, inter-twined as a single organism, and the talk grew too technical for me to follow. I did not follow and did not care. The only way I cared about slugs was to kilt them. XX F or a wonder, when I got back the Old Man was available -- the President had left to address #T a secret session of the United Nations. I told the Old Man what I had seen and added iny opinion of Vargas and Mcllvaine. "Boy Scouts," I complained, "comparing stamp collections. They don't realize it's serious."  The Old Man shook his head. "Don't sell them short, son," he advised me. "They are more likely to come up with the answer than are you and I." "They're more likely to let those slugs escape." "Did they tell you about the elephant?" "What elephant? They damn near didn't tell me anything; they got interested in each other and ignored me." "You don't understand scientific detachment. About the elephant : an ape with a rider got out, somehow. Its body was found trampled to death in the elephant house. And one of the elephants was gone." "You mean there is an elephant loose with a slug on him?" I had a horrid vision, something like a tank on the loose with a cybernetic brain. "Her," the Old Man corrected me. "They found her over in Maryland, quietly pulling up cab bages. No parasite." "Where did the slug get to?" Involuntarily I glanced around. "A duo was stolen in the adjoining village, I'd say the slug is somewhere west of the Mississippi by now." "Anybody missing?" He shrugged again. "How can you tell in a free country? At least, the titan can't hide on a human host anywhere short of Zone Red." His comment made me think of something I had seen at the zoo and had not reasoned out. Whatever it was, it eluded me. The Old Man went on, "It's taken drastic action to make the bare-shoulders order stick, though. The President has had protests on moral grounds, not to mention the National Association of Haberdashers." "Huh?" "You would think we were trying to sell their daughters down to Rio. There was a delegation in, called themselves the Mothers of the Republic, or some such nonsense." "The President's time is being wasted like that, at a time like this?" "McDonough handled them. But he roped me in on. it." The Old Man looked pained. "We told them that they could not sec the President unless they stripped. That stopped 'em." The thought that had been bothering me came to the surface. "Say, boss, you might have to." "Have to what?" "Make people strip." He chewed his lip. "What are you driving at?" "Do we keipw, as a certainty, that a slug can attach itself only near the base o the brain?" "You should know." "I thought I did, but now I'm not sure. That's the way we always did it, when I was, uh. with them." I recounted in more detail what I had seen when Vargas had had poor old Satan exposed to a slug. "That ape moved as soon as the thing reached the base of his spine. I'm sure they prefer to ride up near the brain. But maybe they could ride down inside pants or dresses and just put out an extension to the end of the spinal cord." "Hmm... you'll remember, son, the first time I had a crowd searched, I made everybody peel to the buff." "I think you were justified. They might be able to conceal themselves anywhere on the body. Take those droopy drawers you've got on. One could hide in them and it would just make you look a bit satchel-fannied." "Want me to take 'em off?" "I can do better than that: I'll give you the Kansas City Clutch." My words were joking but was not: I grabbed at the bunchiness of his pants. He submitted with good grace; then gave me the same treatment. "But we can't," he complained as he sat down, go around clutching women by the rump." "You may have to," I pointed out, "or make everybody strip." "We'll run some experiments. "How?" I asked. "You know that head-andspine armor? It's not worth much, except to give the wearer a feeling of security. I'll tell Doctor Morris to take an ape, fit such an armor so that a slug can't reach anything but hfs legs, say, and see what happens. We'll vary the areas, too." "Uh, yes. But don't use an ape.' "Why not?" "Well, they're too human. "Damn it, bub, you can't make an omelet -- ' " -- without breaking eggs. Okay, but I don't have to like it. lecturing to brass, answering fool questions about what titans ate for lunch, explaining how to tackle a man who was possessed, I was billed as an "expert," but half the time my pupils seemed sure they knew more than I did. The titans continued to hold Zone Red, but they could not break out without being spotted -- we hoped. And we did not try to break in again because every slug held one of our own people as hostage. The United Nations M# was no help. The President wanted a "Schedule Bareback" on a global scale, but they hemmed and hawed and sent the matter to committee for investigation. The truth was they did not believe us; that was the enemy's great advantage -- only the burned believed in the fire. Some nations were safe because of their own customs. A Finn who did not climb into a steam bath in company every day or so would have been conspicuous. The Japanese, too, were casual about mixed bathing. The South Seas were relatively safe, as were large parts of Africa. France had gone enthusiastically nudist, on weekends at least, right after have a tough time hiding. But in countries where the body-modesty taboo meant something, a slug could stay hidden until his host dropped dead. The United States itself, Canada. England -- particularly England. They flew three slugs, with apes, to London. I understand the King wanted to set art example as the President had, but the Prime Minister, egged on by the Archbishop of Canterbury, would not let him. Nothing about this appeared in the news and the story may not be true, but English skin was not exposed to the cold stares of neighbors. The Russian propaganda system began to blast us as soon as they had worked out a new line. The whole thing was an "American imperialist fantasy.' I wondered why the titans had not attacked Russia first; the place seemed tailor-made for them. On second thought. I wondered if they had. On third thought, I wondered what difference it would make. I did not see the Old Man during this period; I got my assignments from Oldfield, his deputy. Consequently I did not know it when Mary was relieved from special duty with the President. I ran into her in the lounge of the Section offices. "Mary!" I yelped. She gave me that slow, sweet smile and moved over. "Hello, darling!" she whispered. She did not ask what I had been doing, nor scold me that I had not been in touch with her, nor even comment on how long it had been. Mary let water over the dam take care of itself. Not me -- I babbled. "This is great! I thought you were still tucking the President into his beddy-bye. How long have you been here? When do you have to go back? Say, can I dial you a drink -- no, you've got one." I started to dial one for myself; it popped out into my hand. "Huh? How'd this get here?" 'T ordered it when you came in the door." "Mary, did I tell you that you are wonderful?" "No." "I will. You're wonderful." "Thank you." I went on, "Couldn't you get some leave? They can't expect you to be on duty twenty-four hours a day, week after week, with no time off. I'm going straight to the Old Man and tell him -- " "I'm on leave, Sam." " -- just what I .think of -- You are? For how long?" "Subject to call. All leaves read that way now." "How long have you been on leave?" "Since yesterday. I've been sitting here, waiting for you." "Yesterday!" I had spent yesterday giving kindergarten lectures to brasshats who did not want them. I stood up. "Don't move. rU be right back." I rushed over to the operations office. Oldfield looked up when I came in and said in a surly tone, "What do you want?" "Chief, that series of bedtime stories I'm scheduled to tell -- better cancel them.' "Why?" "I'm a sick man: Fve rated sick leave for a long time. Now I've got to take it." "You're sick in the head.-' "That's right. I'm sick in the head. I hear voices. People have been following me around. I keep dreaming I'm back with the titans." That last point was true. "But since when has being crazy been any handicap in this section?" He waited for me to argue the point. "Look, do I get leave or don't I?" He fumbled through papers, found one and tore it up. "Okay. Keep your phone handy; you're subject to recall. Get out." I got. Mary looked up when I came in and gave me the soft warm treatment again. I said, "Grab your things. We're leaving." She did not ask where; she simply stood up. I snatched my drink, gulped some and spilled the rest. We were up on the pedestrian level of the city before we spoke. Then I asked, "Where do you want to get married?" "Sam, we discussed that before." "Sure we did and now we are going to do it. Where?" "Sam, my very dear, I will do what you say. But I am still opiposed to it." "Why?" "Let's go to my apartment. I'd like to cook dinner for you." "Okay, you can cook dinner -- but nof there. And we get married first." "Please, Sam!" Somebody said, "Keep pitchMS ing. kid. She's weakening. I looked around and found that we were playing to a gallery. I swept an arm wide and shouted irritably, "Haven't you people got anything to do? Go get drunk!" Somebody else said, "I'd say he ought to take her offer." I grabbed Mary's arm and did not say another word until I had gotten her into a cab. "All right," I said gruffly, "let's have your reasons." "I'm yours; you don't need a contract, so why get married, Sam?" "Why? Because I love you, damn it!" She did not answer for quite a while. I thought I had offended her. When she did, I could hardly hear her. "You hadn't mentioned that before, Sara." "Hadn't I? Oh, I must have." "No, I'm quite sure you haven't. Why didn't you?" 'An oversight, I gues. I'm not sure I know what the word 'leve' means." "Neither am I," she said softly, "but I love to hear you say it. Say ' it again, please." "Huh? Okay. I love you. I love you, Mary." "Oh, Sam!" She snuggled against me and began to tremble. I shook her a little. "How about you?" "Me? Oh, I do love you, Sam. I've loved you ever since -- " "Ever since what?" I expected her to say that she had loved me ever since I took her place in "Project Interview." What she said was, "I've loved you ever since you slapped me." Now, is that logic? The driver was cruising slowly along the Connecticut coast; I had to wake him before I could get him to land in Westport. We went to the city hall. I stepped up to a counter in the bureau of sanctions and licenses and said to a clerk, "Is this where we get married?" "That's up to you," he answered. "Hunting licenses on the left, dog licenses on the right, this is the happy medium." "Good," I said stiffly. "Will you oblige by issuing a license?" "Sure. Everybody ought to get married at least once; that's what I tell my old lady." He got out a form. "Let's have your serial numbers." We gave them to him. "Either of you married in any other state?" We said we weren't. "You're sure? If you don't tell me, so I can put on a rider showing other contracts, this contract ain't valid." We told him again that we weren't married anywhere. He went on, "Term, renewable, or lifetime? If it's over ten years, the fee is the same as for lifetime. If it's under six months, you get the Bhort form from that vend machine over there." Mary said in a small voice, 'Lifetime." The clerk looked surprised. "The renewable contract, with the automatic option clause, is just as iermanent, and you don't have to go through the courts if you change your mind." I said, "You heard the lady!" "Okay, okay. Either party, mutual consent, or binding?" "Binding," I answered, and Mary nodded. "Binding it is," he agreed, bending over the typer. "Now the meat of the matter; who pays and how much? Salary or endowment?" I said, "Salary." I didn't own enough to set up a fund. "Neither," Mary stated. "This is not a financial contract." The clerk stopped completely. "Lady, don't be foolish," he said reasonably. "You heard the gentlie right thing." "No." "Hadn't you better talk with your lawyer before you go ahead? There's a public communicator in the hall." "No!" "Well, I'm darned if I see what you need a license for." "Neither do I," Mary told him. "You mean you doa't want tins?" "No! Put it down the way t told you to. No salary." The clerk looked helpless but bent over the typer. "I guess that's all," he said finally. "You've kept it simple, I'll say that. 'Do you both solemnly swearthat-the-above-facts-are-true-tothe-best-of-your-knowledge-andbelief that-you-areentering-intothis agreement uninfluenced bydrugs or other illegal induce ments and thatthereexistsnoun disclosedcovenantsnor-otherlegal impedimentsto theexecution and reipstration of the above-contract?" We both said that we did and we were and it was and there weren't. He pulled it out of the typer. "Let's have your thumb prints. Okay, that'll be ten dollars, including federal tax." I paid him and he shoved the form into the copier and threw the switch. "Copies will be mailed to you," he announced, "at your serialnumber addresses. Now, what type of ceremony are you looking for? Maybe I can help." "As quick, plain and cheap as it can be," Mary told him. "Then I've got just what you want. Old Doctor Chamleigh. Non-sectarian, best stereo accompaniment in town, all four walls and full orchestra. He gives you the works, fertility rites and everything, but dignified. And he tops it off with a fatherly straightU# from-thc-shoulder word of advice. Makes you feel married" "No." This time I said it. "Come on!" the clerk said to me. "Think of the little lady. If she sticks by what she just swore to, she'll never have another chance. Every girl is entitled to a formal wedding. Honest, I don't get much of a commission." I said, "You can marry us, cant you? Go ahead. Get it over with!" He blinked at me. "Didn't you know? In this state you marry yourself. You've been manied, ever since you thumbprinted the license." I said, "Oh." Mary didn't say anything. We left. I hired a duo at the landing flat north of town : the heap was ten years old, but it had fullautomatic and that was all that mattered. I looped around the City, cut across Manhattan Crater. and set the controls. I was happy though nervous -- and then Mary put her arms around me. After a long time I heard the beeeep! beep'beep beeeep! of the beacon at my shack, whereupon I unwound myself and landed. Mary said sleepily, "Where are we?" "At my cabin in the mountains," I told her. "I didn't know you had a cabin in the mountains. I thought you were headed for my apartment.' "What, and risk those bear traps? Anyhow, it's not mine; it's ours." She kissed me again, which made me kind of louse up the landing, She slid out ahead of me while I was securing the board; I found her staring at the shack. "Sweetheart, it's beautiful!" "You can't beat the Adirondacks," I agreed. There was a slight haze with the sun low in the west, giving that wonderful depth-upon-depth stereo look. She glanced at it and said, "Yes, but I didn't mean that. I meant your -- our -- cabin. Let's go inside right now." "Suits," I agreed, "but it's really just a simple shack." Which it was. Not even an indoor pool. When I came up here, I didn't want to feel that I had brought the city with me. The shell was conventional steel and fiberglass, but I had had it veneered in duroslabs which looked like real logs. The inside was just as simple -- a big living room with a real fireplace, deep rugs and plenty of low chairs. The services were in a Kompacto special, buried under the foundation -- air-conditioner, power pack, cleansing system, sound equipment, plumbing, radiation alarm, servos -- everything but deep-freeze and the other kitchen equipment, out of sight and mind. Even the stereo screens would not be noticed unless in use. It was about as near as a man could get to a real log cabin and still have a little comfort. " think it's lovely," Mary said seriously. "I wouldn't want an ostentatious place." "You and me both." I worked the combo and the door dilated; Mary was inside at once. "Hey! Come back!" I yelled. She did, looking puzzled. "What's the matter, Sam? Did I do something wrong.?" "You sure did." I swung her up in my arms and carried her across the threshold, kissing her as I put her down. "There. Now you are in your own house, properly." The lights, of course, came on automatically as we entered. She looked around, then turned and threw her arms around my neck. "Oh, darling, darling!" We took time out. Then she started wandering around, touching things. "Sam, if I had planned it myself, it would have been just this way." "It has only one bathroom," I apologized. "WeTl have to rough it." "I don't mind. I'm glad: now I know you didn't bring any of those women of yours up here." "What women?" "You know dam well. If you had been planning this as a nest, you would have included a powder room." "You know too much." She did not answer but wandered out into the kitchen. I heard her squeal. "What's the matter?" I asked. "I never expected to find a real kitchen in a bachelor's lodge." . "I'm not a bad cook. I wanted a kitchen, so I bought one." "I'm glad. Now I wtU cook you dinner." "It's your kitchen; suit yourself. But don't you want to wash up? You can have first crack at the shower. Tomorrow we'll get a catalog and you can pick out a bathroom of your own. We'll have it flown in." "You take first shower," she said. "I want to start dinner." mesticity as if we had been married for years. Oh, not that our honeymoon was humdrum, or that there weren't a thousand things we still had to learn about each other -- the point was that we already seemed to know the necessary things about each other that made us married. Especially Mary. I don't remember those days too clearly. I was happy: I had forgotten what it was like, had not known that I was not happy. Interested, I used to be -- diverted, entertained, amused -- but not happy. We did not turn on a stereo or M# fead a book, we saw no one and spoke to no one, except that on the second day we walked down to the village; I wanted to show Mary off. On the way back we passed the shack of John the Goat, our local hermit. John did what little caretaking I required. Seeing him, I waved. He waved back. He was dressed as usual, stocking cap, an old army blouse, shorts, and sandals. I thought of warning him about the bareto-the-waist order, but decided against it. Instead I cupped my hands and shouted, "Send up the Pirate!" "Who's the Pirate, darling?" "You'll see." As soon as we got back, the Pirate came in, for I had his little door keyed to his own meeow -- the Pirate being a large and rakish tomcat. He strutted in, told me what he thought of people who stayed away so long, then head-bumped my ankle in forgiveness. After I roughed him up, he inspected Mary. She dropped to her knees and made the sounds used by people who understand cat protocol, but the Pirate looked her over suspiciously. Suddenly he jumped into her arms and commenced to buzz, while bumping her under the chin. "That's a relief," I announced. "For a moment I didn't think I was going to be allowed to keep you." Mary looked up and smiled. "You need not have worried. I'm two-thirds cat myself." "What's the other third?" "You'll find out." From then on the cat was with us -- or with Mary -- almost all the time, except when I shut him out of our bedroom. That I would not stand for, though both Mary and the Pirate thought it small of me. M ary never borrowed trouble. She did not like digging into the past. She would let me talk about mine, but not about her own. Once when I started quizzing her, she changed the subject saying, "Let's look at the sunset." "Sunset?" I repeated. "Can't be. We just finished breakfast." The mixup about the time of day jerked me back to reality. "Mary, how long have we been up here?" "Does it matter?" "You bet it matters. It's been more than a week, I'm sure. One of these days our phones will start screaming and then it's back to the treadmill." "In the meantime, what difference does it make?" I still wanted to know what day it was. I could have found out by switching on a stereo, but I would probably have bumped into a newscast and I did not want that. I was still pretending that Mary and I were away in a difGoing...Going , has been so great that October # is completely out of stock, ond November and December # ond January #I are very low. From February #I to the present issue, we have a fair supply... and we'll continue to sell at the regular newsstand price of #c a copy (no postage or handling charge) until they are gone. Repeat: Vol. #, No. #, October #, is completely out of stock. Please don't ask for it, because we hove no copies. We ore calling in larger quantities than usual of August #, which, for reasons over which we had no control, was withdrawn from sale prematurely. This is the issue with mously moving novella that has caused more dazzled comment than any single story in years. You'll want it... and there's a copy for you, if you don't put off too long. increcHblo invasion of Earth. packed with action and (usponso. molodrona, of the conquest of interplanetary flight. exploration of Earth's unthinkobly distance future. and no less hypnotic in effect. of reviving on extratorrestriol genius # year eld. Senef only #c for each copy to ... #I Hudson Street New York #, M. Y. ferent world, where titans did not exist. "Mary" I said fretfully, "how many tempus pills have you?" "None." "Well, I've got enough for us both. I suppose. Suppose we have just twenty-four more hours; we could stretch it out to a month, subjective time." "No." "Why not? Let's carpe that old diem." She put a hand on my arm and looked up into my eyes. "No, darling, it's not for me. I must live each moment and not let it be spoiled by worrying about the moment ahead." I looked stubborn. She went on, "If you want to take them, I won't mind, but please don't ask me to." "Confound it, I'm not going on a joy ride alone." She did not answer, which is the damnedest way of winning an argument. Not that we argued. If I tried to start one, Mary would give in and somehow it would work out that I was mistaken. I did try several times to find out more about her; it seemed to me that I ought to know something about the woman I was married to. To one question she looked thoughtful and answered "I sometimes wonder .whether I ever did have a childhood -- or was it something I dreamed last night?" I asked her pointblank what her name was. "Mary," she said tranquilly. "Mary really is your name?" I had long since told her my right name, but we went on using Sam. "Certainly it's my name, dear. I've been Mary since you first called me that." "Oh. All right, you are my beloved Mary. But what was your name before?" Her eyes held an odd, hurt look, but she answered steadily, "I was once known Allucquere." "Allucquere," I repeated, savoring it. "What a strange and beautiful name. My darling Allucquere." "My name is Mary now." And that was that. Somewhere, somewhen, I was convinced, Mary had been hurt, badly hurt. But it seemed unlikely that I was ever going to know about it. Presently I ceased to worry about it. She was what she was, and I was content to bask in the warm light of her presence. but the name that she had once kept running through my mind. I wondered how it was spelled. Then suddenly I knev. My . pesky packrat memory was pawing away at the shelves in the . back of my mind where I kepp the useless junk that I am unable to get rid of. There had been a community, a colony that used an artificial language, even to given names -- The Whitmanites, that was it. The anarchist-pacifist cult that got kicked out of Canada, then failed to make a go of it in Little America. There was a book written by their prophet, The Entropy oi Joy; it was full of pseudo mathematical formulas for achieving happiness. Everybody is for "happiness," just as they are against "sin," but the cult's practices got them in hot water. They had a curious and very ancient solution to their sexual problems, a solution which produced explosive results when the Whitmanite culture touched any other pattern of behavior. Even Little America had not been far enough away. I had heard somewhere that the remnants had emigrated to Venus -- in which case they must all be dead by this time. I put it out of my mind. If Mary were a Whitmanite, or had been reared that way, that was her business. I certainly was not going to let the cult's philosophy cause us a crisis now or ever; eff the top of the bottle... an absolute must for every lover of science fiction." -- By the author of Tie Martian Chronicles. #S 'Visitors from Earth play havoc with the amaaing fcee-like civilization of an. ther planet-and one of in aaost beautiful "specimens." De Camp at his best! # mm  IflerwilisjR An ingenious paralleLtime. track story about a man and a girl who investigate ao old house and find it to be a tangential point between several worlds. # vls Project facefstor ond Ttio Wonderer't Rslurn complete in one #SS marriage is not ownership and wives are not property. next time I mentioned tempos pills, she did not argue but suggested that we hold it down to a minimum dose. It was a fair compromise -- we could always take more. I prepared it as injections so that it would take hold faster. Ordinarily I watch a clock after IVe taken tempus; when the second hand slows to a stop, I know I'm loaded. But my shack has no clocks and neither of us was bothering with ringwatches. It was sunrise and we had been awake all night, cuddled up on a big low couch by the fireplace. We continued to lie there, feeling good and dreamy, and I was considering the idea that the drug had not worked. Then I realized that the sun had stopped rising. I watched a bird fluttering past the window. If I stared at him long enough, I could see his wings move. I looked back from it to my wife.The Pirate was curled up on her stomach, his paws tucked in as a muff. They seemed asleep. "How about breakfast?' I said. "I'm starved.' "You get it," she answered. "If I move, rn disturb Pirate." "You promised to love, honor. and fix me breakfast." I replied and tickled her feet. She gasped and drew up her legs; the cat squawked and landed on the floor. "Oh, dear!" she said. "You made me move too fast." "Never mind the cat. woman; you're married to me." Ert I knew that I had made a mistake. In the presence of people not under the drug, one should move with great care. I simply hadn't thought about the cat; no doubt he thought we were behaving like drunken jumping jacks. I intentionally slowed down and tried to woo him. No use -- he was streaking toward his door. I could have stopped him, for to me his movement was a molasses crawl, but had I done so I would have frightened him more. I let him go. Do you know, Mary was right? Tempus-fugit drug is no good for honeymoons. The ecstatic happiness I had felt before was masked by the euphoria of the drug. I had substituted a chemical fake for the true magic. Nevertheless it was a good day -- or month. But I wished that I had stuck to the real thing. Late that evening we came out of it. I felt the slight irritability which marks the loosening hold of the drug, found my ringwatch and timed my reflexes. When they were back to normal I timed Mary's, whereupon she informed IS# me that she had been out of it for twenty minutes or so -- pretty accurate matching of dosage. "Do you want to go under again?" she asked. I kissed her. "No. Frankly, I'm glad to be back." 'Tm so glad." I had the usual ravenous appetite that one has afterward; I mentioned it. "In a minute," she said. "I want to call Pirate." I had not missed him; the euphoria is like that. "Don't worry." I told her. "He often stays out all day." "He never has before." "He has with me," I answered. "I think I offended him. I know I did." "He's probably down at Old John's. That's his usual way of punishing me. He'll be all right.' "But it's late at night -- I'm afraid a fox might get him. Do you mind, darling? I'll just step out and call him." She headed for the door. "Put something on," I suggested. "It will be nippy out." She went back to tlie bedroom and got a negligee I had bought for her the day we had gone to the village. She went out. I put wood on the fire and ambled into the kitchen. While I was trying Fantastic space adventures in the #' s Bullard of edifeil, vkllh an Inlroducllon and Notes, by Andre Norton The story of Commander John Bullard -- tradition-breaker and tradition-maker -- whose armadas waged the grimmest of all wars in the black night of outer space -- where the slightest miscalculation meant death in an interstellar vacuum. The dean of science-fiction writers, Malcolm Jameson, writes of the future with precision and imagination. Bullard is a very human hero whose adventures will fascinate all readers. S# at ail booksjvrea Cleveland and New York to make up my mind about a menu. I heard her saying, "Bad, bad cat, you worried mama," in that cooing voice suitable for babies and house animals. I called out, "Fetch him in and close the door -- and mind the penguins!" She did not answer and I did not hear the door relax, so I went back into the living room. She was just coming in and did not hove the cat with her. I started to speak and then caught sight of her eyes. They were staring, filled with unspeakable horror. I said, "Maryl" and started toward her. She seemed to see me and turned back toward the door; her movements were jerky, spasmodic. Then I saw her shoulders. Under the negligee was a hump. I don't know how long I stood there. Probably a split second, but it is burned into me as endless. I jumped and grabbed her by the arms. She looked at me and her eyes were no longer wells of horror but merely dead. She gave me the knee. I squeezed and managed to pvoid the worst of it. Look, you don't tackle a dangerous opponent by grabbing his arms, but this was my wife. I couldn't comcat Mary with a feint-shift-andkill. But the slug had no compunctions about me. Mary -- or if -- was g'-'-o; me cverytliing she had. and I had all I could do and I had to kill the slug -- and I had to keep the slug from getting at me or I would not be able to save her. I let go with one hand and jabbed her chin. The blow did not even slow her down. I grabbed again, with both arms and legs, trying to encase her in a bear hug to iinmobilize her without injuring her. We went down, Mary on top. I shoved my head under her chin to stop her from biting me. Curbing her strong body by sheer muscle, I tried to paralyze her with nerve pressure, but she knew the key spots as well as I S# did. T was lucky that I was not myself paralyzed. There was one thing left that I could do: clutch the slug. But I knew the shattering effect that had on the host. It might kill her: it was sure to hurt her horribly. I wanted to make her unconscious, then remove the slug gently before I killed it... drive it off with heat or force it to turn loose with mild shocks. Drive it off with heat -- I was given no time to develop the idea; she got her teeth in my ear. I shifted my right arm and grabbed at the slug. N oticing happened. Instead of my fingers sinking into it, I found that this slug had a leathery covering. It was as if I had clutched a football! Mary jerked when I touched it and took away part of my ear, but there was no bone-crushing spasm; the slug was still alive and in control. I tried to get my fingers under it It clung like a suction cup. My fingers would not go under. In the meantime I was suffering damages in other places. I rolled over and got to my knees, still hugging her. I had to let her legs free and that was bad, but I bent her across a hip and strugr gled to my feet. I dragged and .carried, her to the fireplace. , She...alraost got. away from me; it was like wrestling a mountain lion. But I got her there, grabbed her mop of hair and slowly forced her shoulders over the fire. I meant only to singe the slug, force it to drop off to escape that heat. But she struggled so hard that I slipped, banging my own head against the arch of the opening and dropping her shoulders against the coals. She screamed and bounded out of the fire, carrying me with her. I struggled to my feet, still dazed by the wallop, and saw her collapsed on the floor. Her beautiful hair and her negligee were burning! I slapped at them both with my hands. The slug was no longer on her. Still crushing the flames with my hands, I glanced around and saw it lying on the floor by the fireplace -- and the Pirate was sniffing at it. "Get away from there!" I yelled. "Pirate! Stop that!" The cat looked up inquiringly. I went on making certain that the fire was out. When I was sure, I left her; there was not even time to see if she was still alive. What I wanted was the fireplace shovel ;I did not dare risk touching the thing with my hands. I turned to get it... But the slug was no longer on the floor; it had gotten Pirate. The cat was standing rigid, feet wide apart, and the slug was setr tling into place. I dived at Pirate and got him by his hind legs just as he made his first possessed movement. Handling a frenzied cat with bare hands is reckless at best; controlling one which is already controlled by a titan is impossible. Hands and arms being Slashed by claws and teeth at every step, I hurried to the fireplace again. Despite Pirate's wails and struggles, I forced the slug against the coals and held it there, cat fur and my hands alike burning, until the slug dropped off directly into the flames. Then I took Pirate out and laid him on the floor. He was no longer struggling. I mode sure that he was no longer burning anywhere, and went back to Mary. She was still unconscious. I squatted down beside her and sobbed. A n hour later I had done what I could for Mary. Her hair was gone from the left side of her head and there were burns on shoulders and neck. But her pulse was strong, her respiration steady, though fast and light, and I did not judge that she would lose much body fluid. I dressed her burns -- I keep a full stock of medical stuff out there in the country -- and gave her an injection to make her sleep. Then I had time for Pirate. He was still where I had left him and he did not look good. He had gotten it much worse than Mary and probably flame in his lungs as well. He was lying so still, I thought he was dead, but he lifted his head when # touched him. T'm sorry, old fellow," I whispered. I think I heard him mew. I did for him what I had done for Mary, except that I was afraid to give him a soporific. After that I went into the bathroom and looked myself over carefully. The car had stopped bleeding; I decided to ignore it. My hands were what bothered me. I stuck them under hot water and yelped, then dried them in the air blast and that hurt, too. I could not figure out how I could dress them, and, besides, I needed to use them. Finally I dumped about an ounce of the jelly for bums into each of a pair of plastic gloves and put them on. The stuff included a local anesthetic; that would help me get by. Then I went to the stereophone and called the village medical man. I explained what had happened and what I had done about it and asked him to please come up at once. "At he said. 'You must be joking." I said that the Kell I was. He answered. "Don't ask the impossible, man. Yours makes the fourth alarm in this county; nobody goes out at night. I'll stop in and see your wife first thing in the morning, when it's safe." I told him where to go first thing in the morning and switched off. Pirate 'died a little after midnight. I burled him at once so that Mary would not sec him. Digging hurt my hands, but he did not need a very big hole. I said good-by to him and came back in. Mary was resting quietly: I brought a chair to the bed and w'atched over her. Probably I dozed from time to time; I can't be sure. Concluded Next Month f'.urrftit ISew ilttolut: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. iipissi Moving? sent to # new address, notify us at toast information to ,... Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I 'Hudson Slreol New York #. N. Y. Novels series... never before published in any form! It's a gigantic Simokian concept: Power exists everywhere, just waiting to be tapped; but what happens when the scientists who discover a source of cheap and unlimited power clash with a monopoly based on scarce and costly energy? Action, intrigue and suspense are the answer, and you'll find those exciting ingredients in astronomical profusion in this power-charged story of Interplanetary competition! The price is only #c (no postage or handling charge) or # for a full year (six issues) to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y.  Many authors have tried to write the story of Homo Superior and hove failed -- it's like Pitheconthropus describing Modern Man, an obviously overwhelming task. But Stapledon may some day replace Homo Sapiens! Compellingly convincr Jets blasting. Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of BBlIzznaj, a tiny planet seven his super-hyper-drive for the landing... and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand. "Get back from those controls. Bat Durstol the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip through this particular section of the Universe." Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony # miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rimrock... and at that point, a tail, lean wrangler stepped out from benind a high boulder, six-shooter in a suntanned hand. "Rear back and dismount. Bat Durston;" the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts." Sound alike? They should -- one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, plausible, thoughtful... written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction... for people who also know and love it. full year has passed -- according to thousands of enthusiastic letters and tory of science fiction. The promise above has been kept, and will continue to be! For proof, send # for a year's subscription to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. .galaxy Galaxy Editor-in-Chief November, #I Vol. #, No. # Assistant Editor Art Director by Frank Quattrocchi # Advertising Manager is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Bernard Kaufman, president. Vincent Paris;, treasurer. Vera Cerutti, secretary. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Bernard Wolfe # by Alan E. Nourse # by Ann Griffith #I by Robert A. Heinlein #I by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pal. Off. Novels series... never before published in any form! It's a gigantic Simakian concept: Power exists everywhere, ; just waiting to be tapped; but what happens when the sciI entists who discover a source of cheap and unlimited power t  ! clash with a monopoly based on scarce and costly energy? S Action, intrigue and suspense are the answer, and you'll ;  # find those exciting ingredients in astronomical profusion in ! I this power-charged story of interplanetary competition! The price is only #c (no postage or handling charge) or  # for a full year (six issues) to... #I Hudson Street New York .#, N. Y.    #  authors have tried to write the story of Homo  :  and have failed -- it's like Pithecanthropus describing j i Man, an obviously overwhelming task. But Stapledon  : ne day replace Homo Sapiens! Compellingly convincj ! Step Outside tions raised was whether a  science fiction magazine can afford to have a viewpoint, and, if so, if it can impose the viewpoint on its stories. An editor has his own opinions and convictions, of course, many of which are outraged by stories submitted to him. Should he take only those that agree with his Opinions? What makes this important is the occasional anguished or angry letter revealing that that particular reader has had his mental corns stepped on. Avoiding offense would be a cinch -- simply pick stories that say nothing at all. Enough come in every month; devoid of everything but witless action or trivial surprise, to fill a dozen issues. But is that the purpose of science fiction? Perhaps we need a definition of purpose. The first goal, naturally, is entertainment, a word, by the way, that makes rubber seem inflexible by contrast. It ranges all the vast distance from staring through keyholes to staring through telescopes. from racetracks to treatises, scatology to seismography. In science fiction, the range is just as enormous. It goes from a scant step above the comics to a scant step below textbooks. The widest audience is between these two extremes, and that is where interesting ideas, characters, conflict, situations, backgrounds, and these are the ingredients of entertainment for all but the most specialized repetitive satisfactions, such as rest room artistry, crossword puzzlement, and higher math addiction. What science fiction must present entertainingly is speculation. Not prophecy, but fictional surmises based on present factors, scientific, social, political, cultural. or whatever. When a story hits a future development on the head, it should be considered a minor accident: its main job was not to predict, but to conjecture what might happen if certain circumstances followed certain lines of development. Take the case of television. Anticipating it in # was a technological feat -- and that was exactly how it was presented, a sideshow wonder to awe those who read of it. But we who live with TV's Uncle Miltie, nightly murder, the resurrected cadaver of vaudeville, frighteningly stupid and stupidly frightening "kiddie" shows, the idiot quizzes and amateur hours, know that the impact is overwhelmingly social and cultural rather than technological. Any science fiction writer can and does predict gadgets and obvious trends by the score. But the gadgets and trends alone mean nothing. Enough authors have depletely that it will be somewhat of an anti-climax if it ever does come. And interplanetary flight, time travel, extraterrestrial invasion. and all the other basic situations in science fiction. Will these worlds ever exist? They may. or may not; it doesn't matter. The possibility is what counts in science fiction, not the certainty. Now the question is whether writer, editor and reader must be in favor of these possible developments. Again, it doesn't matter. If the writer who predicted television in # could have foreseen its dismaying results, he should still have had to describe them dramatically, and the more objectivity he could attain, the better. Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber is such a case. It told with shocking realism the moral collapse that might occur as a result of brutalizing warfare. Did Leiber favor it? Did I? Did the thousands of readers who admired it, the editors of anthologies who fought to reprint it first, the authors who almost bitterly envied its stunning craftsmanship? Of course not, any more than the prediction of the effects of TV would have had to involve the author's approval. Yet several readers attacked the story on exactly that basis, though history records similar moral breakdowns after other wars. The Fireman by Ray Bradbury, Dark Interlude by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds, To Serve Man by Damon Knight, Common Denominator by John D. MacDonald, and several other by somereaders as in one way or another approving possible trends that might not prove pleasant if they ever occurred. But the writers are not saying that these extrapolations are anything more than possibilities. They are examining prospects, pleasant and unpleasant alike, and that, if it produces good stories, is the legitimate province of science fiction. I think moralizing should be left to ministers, while commentators and astrologers keep their claim to ## foresight. Anyone disagree? S IHustrated by EflHStH # Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help but dream of coming home. But something nobody should do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream! Craig surrendered the tube containing his service record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined the seal. "Your clearance," said the clerk. Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men behind Craig fidgeted. "You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it back to your unit's clearance office." "Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation. "It ain't notched." "The hell it isn't." The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to ' S take care of that card; can't get on without one." Craig hesitated before moving. "Next," said the cleric. "What you waiting for?" "Don't I take my #I file?' "We send it on ahead. Go to Grav I desk.' A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing the envy of the others. Grav l -- that meant Terra. He crossed the long, dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him. "Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?" "Grav I -- Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles." "Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?" "I -- I -- " Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets. "No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a small instrument. " AirJock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow the robot's orders. Any metal?" "Metal?" asked Craig. "You know, metal." "Well, my identification key." "Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope. Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical process. He cursed the grudging attitude of  the headquarters satellite personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock. "Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary position on the raised podium in the center of the lock." Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that supplied this skin. "You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly to your orders." Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into operation. "You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress that button." Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant small scratch on his arm stung briefly and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but that was all there was to the sterilizing process. "Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately beyond the locked door." He found his clothing cleanly end neatly hung on plastic hangers just inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried in his pockets were still there. The Schtaan flight jacket was actually there, looking like new, its spaceblue unfaded and as wonderfully pliant as before. "Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table," commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been disregarding." Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of fleshcolored plastic material. He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway. "I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice. "Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he had intended. The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat aggressive after Clerical, eh?" "I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively. "By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?" "No, but my father -- " "Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization f Cassiopeia II, didn't they?" "Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all about him. "We might say you've been away Cjuite a while, eh?" "I was entered as a spaceman  when I was #," Craig said. "I've never been down for any period as yet." "You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?" "Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for  while... "With the help f paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain. "Well, sure." "Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little torture system here ia psych." "So I gathered." The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again. The worst is over. Short of Gravitational eondiiioa ing, there is nothing to stop you from going to Terra." "Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time... "Quite natural. But it being your first time -- in quite a number of ways, I might add -- it will be necessary for you to undergo some conditioning." "Conditioning?" asked Craig. "Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration." "Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade..." "You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why all spacemen carry pon, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first." "I know all about this, Captain." "You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have experienced it briefly." "I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the wordy psychologist. What was  the man actually saying? "Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?' " asked Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal didn't roll any more." "It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a frightening thing to an old sailor -- but let's begin our little job at the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, #." lowed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the "growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find intolerable. Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once that no pon could completely nullify. But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said. "Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it was in tapezines either." "Yet you are completely sure you will want to live out your life up space service for it." "We' vc gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical. You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't -- or can't -- tell me why. I've got a damned good job there -- " "You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring." "So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at. Captain, but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in my time." "Do you really think that's my reason?" "Sure. What else can it be?" "Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You will be given a very liberal supply of pon -- which you will definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too." O N the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive doses of pon to protect themselves from the centrifugal force, had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed, begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations. "The twelfth day is the worst,"  grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's when the best of 'em want out." Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old man's face into focus. "How... how do they know when you ought... to come out?" he asked between waves of nausea. "Blood pressure. They get you If just before you go into shock.'" "How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't." "That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?" "Haven't noticed much of anything." "Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal." The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly conditioning process. Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began to bend. Here it came again! "Old man!" shouted Craig. "Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch." "Dropped... it... down?" "Maybe that ain!t scientific, but it's the way I always think of it." "Can't they... drop it down continuously?" "They tried that a few times -- once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all." "How... many times... do they drop it?" "Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days." A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning right side up once more -- and he knew that neither he nor the cot had moved so much as an inch. Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through wadding. "... got it bad." "We better take him out." "... pretty bad." "He'll go into shock." "... never make it the twelfth. "We better yank him." "I'm... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eye# open. Two white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him. Attendants coming for to take me home... "Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra. Wish you were going to Terra?" Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the fourteenth day, Craig I  knew he could stand Grav . The whine of the centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they had begun to produce ultrasonic waves. Craig was not sure. Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of planets again, instead of freefalling ships. On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting. Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the free-fall flight to Terra. Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained voluntarily in his cot. "Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.: Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen." "What will they do, exile him?" "Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra.' "For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously. "That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on doing when you get to Terra, for instance?" "I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years.' "Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen engaged in an animated conversation. "It's a good job. There's a future to it." "Yeah." Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp? "Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business." "And spend your weekends on Luna." Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger. But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a landlubber." Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think II the same. Then I took the exam and got this job." "Whereabouts?" "Los Angeles." The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do you, son?" "Not much." "Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed." "My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it a lottg time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe." But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some personal belongings from a kit. "What are you doing in Grav #?" Craig asked. The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it." Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of apology, but the old man continued. "Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had 'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never stiffened their hearts. When they got old. it just pulled them in. "But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup out of you, leaves you brittle and old -- old as a dehydrated piece of split leather. "Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space." can't figure it. Some oi 'em urp all over and turn six shades of green" "You got to watch the one # that don't." "Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones." " He's old. You think it was hie heart?" " Who knows?" " They'll dump him , won't they?" " After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good" "He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him." "Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg." flight jacket tightly and tuffed it into the cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew what a stinking life it was. At # hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock. It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the headquarters satellite. The audio called out : "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer Robert Craig. Report to Orderly #. Report to Orderly # through the aft door." With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed. Orderly # handed him a message container. "Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?" "From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman." "Brockman?" "He was with you in the grav tank." "The old man!" The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular punches and was covered with rough hand printing. Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way...There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along with me, but she wouldn't go. Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but I couldn't. I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way out across the Galaxy, while she's home. Go sec her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living, but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on something big and new and green... Hell, you remember. You know how to tell her. Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her address is or was East #, North #, Number #. You can trace her easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least. Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why had he left? Fifty years in space. Fifty years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many times he had battled Zone #I lb pirates... Damn the old man! How did one explain? from the huge jet and concentrated on his impressions. One day he would recall this moment. h!s first on the planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los Angeles, # square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the atmosphere. He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face. "A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,  of course. Purely routine. Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned to a companion at his right. "We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off, can't we?" The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig to be a kind of camera. "We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that we believed for a minute, you understand...  purely routine." Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered. "You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?" Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind him. "Who was that?" Craig asked "Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?" "You mean he screened me? What for?" "Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They get it over with quick." Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed. "Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him. He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him. "You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course." Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing off toward an exit. It was an empty pom tube he had just discarded. He couldn't understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper nor trace of dirt. was toying with a small chip of gleaming metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city only very briefly between questions. "It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first." "Yes, naturally." "Thought you could give me some idea of conditions..." "Conditions?" "For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what part is closest to where I'll work." "I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality about him, Craig thought. "You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the personnel man said finally. "That so?" "Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must find it very strange here." "Well, I've never seen a city so big." "Yes, so big. And also... He seemed to consider many words before completing the sentence. "And also different." "I haven't been here very long." said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on a planet. As an adult, anyway." The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a small instrument. A secretary entered 'the office from a door to Craig's left. "Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V." They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl f medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying. "This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in much the same way we would an extraterrestrial." The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile. "He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service." The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone. The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical look in her brown eyes. "Three complete tours of duty, I believe." "Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a year's terminal leave." "I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked. "The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive." The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig." "Will he need a food and -- clothing ration also?" asked the girl, without looking at Craig. "Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your present outfit you would certainly be typed as a... well, you'd be made uncomfortable." Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii. "A hick," he supplied. "I wouldn't go that far, but some people might." the girl filled her trim, rather severe business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him. "Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete." "They look pretty complicated." U "Not at all. The questions are quite explicit." Craig looked them over quick ly"I guess so. Say. Miss Wendel, I was wondering -- I don't know the city at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some... "I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is impossible for me to be of any assistance to you." "Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not a starved wolf." "Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me... "You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company." "I'm afraid I don't understand." T HE Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality. It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet. Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig. "For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone. "Tell me where what is?" "You know, the mike." "Mike?" "All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up." "You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his wallet. "Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here." "Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note. He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the information. "It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade. Or I'll do it for another two." "Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted a key into the door and opened it for him. "I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?" # "Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated. Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the room, took a pon pill, and eased himself into the bed. It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling how long it would .take him to shake his -- sea legs, the psychologist had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its strangers. sullen and silent secretary, Craig found himself facing a semi-circular table at which were seated five uniformed men. The center man, obviously their superior, rose to greet him. He wore the familiar smile Craig had come to know so well and hate so much. The man was somewhat over forty years old, short, stout, entirely unpleasant and puffy. "Mr. Craig, I believe," he greeted Craig. Since it seemed to be more of a statement than a question, Craig did not answer. He took up a position ofmore or less military attention at the center of the curved table. "You are Robert Craig," insisted the man. "Yes, I'm Robert Craig," he answered, somewhat surprised. The stout man seated himselfwith a sigh and began to sort through some papers on the table before him. The other four men continued to stare at Craig silently, until he began to feel uncomfortable and hostile. He stiffened his position f attention defiantly. "You may relax, Mr. Craig," said the first man without looking up. "You aren't nervous, are you?" "No," Craig said, trying to smile. "This is the first time I've been here and... He let the sentence trail off, hoping for a sympathetic response. But he did not get it. "Flight Officer, eh?" said the man. Then, looking up, he added, "Somewhat unusual to find a vigorous young man like yourself abandoning the space service for a Terran job, isn't it?" "I don't know. Is it?" "Leaving something behind out there, Mr. Craig?" "No, nothing," Craig snapped. The other man glared at him a full minute. Craig met the stare and realized the considerable power behind the weak face. "You don't like this sort of affair, do you, Mr. Craig?" Craig was forced to look away. "I'm afraid I don't see the necessity," he answered in a controlled voice. "I served the Intergalactic It Service well. My records prove that." "Granted," said his questioner bluntly. "You are a Terran, are you not, Mr. Craig?" "I should think that would be obvious," Craig said, matching the blunt tone. The man rapped the table. "That's enough of your impertinence! You may very well have served the Intergalactic Service, but you are on Terra now. Terra, greatest, first of all civilized systems. Intergalactic may very well have to piddle with incompetent savages and wild colonists, but we of Terra assert our supremacy. Remember those words. You may not always find Terra so submissive to Intergalactic as Intergalactic would desire." "Where are your loyalties, Mr. Craig?" demanded one of the other men suddenly... "I am a Terran..." "But your first loyalty is to Intergalactic. Is that right?" "Is there a distinction?" Craig shot back, thoroughly angry. "Do you wish to be held in contempt of this committee?" asked the first man, leaning forward half out of his chair. "Of course not." "Then you will confine your responses to simple yes and no answers, if you please, Mr. Craig." Craig glared at the men in impotent rage. His head was beginning to ache. He had been many hours without paraoxylnebutal. "Now, Mr. Craig," the first man began in an overly mild tone, "we shall begin again. Please try to restrain your show of emotion. You are here in petition of an identity card of provisional Code II type. You maintain that you have never been on Terra before. Indeed, you state that you have never had a political affiliation." "Yes." "What are your reactions to the latest acts of the Liberty party?" a third man abruptly asked. "I have none," Craig answered, after an instant of confusion. "You do not condemn the Liberty party?" "I... I..." "Then you must favor it." "I don't know anytliing about any... "Now, then, Mr. Craig," interrupted the head of the group... "The Import service report shows that you passed your tests aboard your ship. You were enabled to accomplish this through night study." "Yes." "Yet you maintain in your application that you had considered the space service a career' "I changed my mind." "Oh. You changed your mind, I see... ' I # turn you down on your food ration?" Craig asked the man by his side on the bench. He had intended it as a vaguely humorous question. "You don't eat." "You mean they would actually let you starve?" "If you could not eat, you would starve," the man said matter-of-factly. "What's all this for, anyway? I mean the medical part." "You are rationed fairly in accordance with your particular metabolism." "You're kidding." "One does not jest of such matters," said the man, getting up to take a seat on another bench. " But Td like to keep it as a souvenir ." "It is not permitted ." "Look, it isn't issue. I bought the hide, had it made. I can pull off the marks of insignia and it's just another jacket... " That is not the point, Mr. Craig. Your clothing ration is defined by law. There are no exceptions." " These are your permanent quarters. You will occupy them immediately. Then, if you believe the location is wasteful of your time, you must petition the appropriate committee. This department cannot accept such a petition." " Your petition to be permitted to purchase a private means of conveyance is hereby denied." T HE big man leaned far back in the battered desk chair. It creaked at worn joints, but touched the wall without sliding from under its enormous load. The #ian was silent through Craig's long, confused speech. By turns he examined his fingernails, picked at yellowed teeth, and stared above his head at the discolored ceiling... but you can get all this from iss, maybe even from Import, if they'll release my file," Craig argued. "Uh-huh," the big man said between closed lips. "I just made a mistake, that's all. You don't hear much about Terra out there. It was different in my father's day. It must have been different." "Yeah." "I haven't any character references on Terra, but I can post a good-sized bond if they'll reThe space freight agent glanced up at Craig at the remark. "Anyway, I can get my units anywhere iss has a base," Craig continued. "I can handle anything up to # Gs acceleration without a new license. I can go heavier if I get a check ride.' The fat man leaned forward in the protesting chair. "You got everything, but you can't go. I can't hire you." "Why not?" "Look, kid -- Craig, is it? -- how long you been in?" "Four days. I'm still working on my work clearances.' "Four days. You tried Intergalactic to see if they'd take you back?" "Yes. Their hands are tied by my Terran contract." "And ours aren't, eh?" The man rose from the desk and walked to a water tap. He popped a pill into his gaping mouth and drank from a tin cup. Then he returned to the inadequate chair. "So you're a spaceman. Flight officer -- ex-flight officer. You know how to navigate through four star zones and the asteroid belt thrown in. You got a license for # Gs, could get five more. You got enough brains to pass Import's senior router's exam. "Still, you ain't got enough sense to come in out of the rain l" Craig sat upright in his chair. "We get guys like you two, three a day. You're hot. You're big. You're rarin' to go. But you ain't goin' nowhere!" Craig glared at the big man. "I don't know how you got here, Craig. It ain't none of my business. Maybe you did quit honorable. Quit to follow your daddy's footsteps. Or maybe you went and burned up a colony somewhere!" "That would be in my records wouldn't it?" Craig challenged. "It still don't make any difference. You're stuck here. Nobody; leaves Terra without a permit Nobody. You couldn't get a permit with a crowbar and a blaster. You got a problem, son. You asked for it. Maybe they told you beforehand, maybe they didn't. You got a problem of adjustment. Terra's moved a long, long way since your daddy left it. We're doing things here. Ae're going places. Big things and big places. "You got to fit into that, kid. Fit in quick. Move with it. You don't like the red tape, the committees? I don't like 'em either. But I been here a while. I caa cut red tape. Red tape is for guys like you, guys that don't know Terra, don't know whera we're going. "Stick around, kid. You still got sea legs. You're still hopped up on pon. You're going to lika it here on Terra. You're going to like it great. You can make a quick dollar on Terra. You caa spend a quick dollar here too. Smarten up or you'll finish! scrubbing radioactive dust off girders!" U KI npHE girl approached his table, her hard eyes scanning him. Wordlessly she slid into the booth opposite him and made a sign for the bartender. "Have a drink?" Craig suggested. smiling. "Yeah." "Work here?" "What you mean by that?" "I mean if you get a percentage on the drinks, I can... "I don't get no percentage." The bartender brought them a version of N'cadian taz. The girl alouched in the booth and sullenly tapped the glass. The lights in the bar had dimmed to simulate some kind of planetary night. The walls came alive with projected images of Terran constellations. On their table, a globe lamp began to glow. Tiny bright lights swung orbits around a miniature sun inside the lamp. As a miniature Pluto swung on its slow arc, an image of it was projected on the girl's dusky face. She seemed to be staring at nothing. "Why d'you call me over here? You a purist, or don't you like the brand of sensatiatapes they're peddlin' these days?" "I don't understand," Craig said. She smiled crookedly at him. Not a bad face, Craig decided, but hard, hard as the ceramiplate of a ship. She could not be very old. It was the kind of wild look in her eyes that gave her a false appearance of age. "Maybe you're writing a book -- you got me over here for something." "I just got in," Craig answered. "What am I supposed to do for this drink?" "Nothing. Nothing at all. I suppose I thought... just skip it, I'm lonesome, that's all." "Lonely, huh?" said the girl. "Lonely and just in, huh? Just in from space." She turned away from him to signal the bartender. 'What you need is drinks." There were more drinks. Many more drinks. The girl kept them coming, kept talking to him about -- what was it? Craig looked at the girl and then at the globe lamp. He watched as the tiny bright orbs of light projected their images on the girl opposite him. He was aware of the gradual dimming of the lights, the suppression of sound in the bar. He' watched the tiny lights of other globes appear around shadows, watched as the lights traced fiery trails across the dusky skin of the girl opposite him, watched as they crossed the warm, rounded flesh... # tell ya we didn't give him nothing but a coupla tazes."  The pump will determine that. You might as well tell the truth." " I am fellin' the truth. He drank, let's see... two, three." "Four, five, six. You  let her pump him full." "Hey, look, this guy's a spaceman, or was." "I didn't know that. Honest I didn't. He never told us." " All right, you didn't know. What you put in those tazes -- ether?" "We denature the polyester just like the law says" " And you get it straight from M'cadii, eh?" "We put in some syn. So what? That ain't against the law." "He's probably got grav trouble, Chief." "Who was the girl?" "Girl? What girl?" "You know what girl!" 'em these days." " Professional ?" " There ain't any any more. You know, sensatia-tapes ." "Kkjw her name?" "I don't ask no names. How you going to know names? She' a these days." "What you think a guy like this is doing here, Chief?" " Why not?" "Well, look at his clothes. He's got units, too. Can't figure that out. She must've been after something else." "How about his clothing and food tickets?" "Uh... that's it. She got his tickets." "Come on, give me a hand. Lug him into the hold" T HE hard face of the Civil Control chief peered down at him. It was a thick, red face that displayed no trace of feeling except perhaps toughness. It was long yet full, and it contained the proper features; but it added nothing of expression to the harsh, rasping voice. "First time in, eh? Or else Central's too damned lazy to check the file. Okay, I ain't going to cite you. Waste of time. But listen to me. You got problems, we got problems. You solve yours and don't come back here." Craig was aware of officers glowering at his back as he fumbled with the door button. The door opened onto a city street. It was entirely foreign to Craig. It was not a clean, straight thoroughfare at the bottom of a canyon of towering white buildings and contrived but bright parks. It was an old street, a dirty street; an incredible welter of color and line, of big and little shops, of dirty human shapes in drab gray. A flood of tone and noise hit Craig as he emerged from the station and descended the long, broad steps. Craig's head was in a whirl despite the strong dose of paraoxylnebutal he had taken in the station clinic. He felt closed in and befogged. He could remember almost nothing of the night in Civil Control. Even the clinic was fading from his memory. He was aware that he stank, that he was dirty, that his clothing clung to his body. He was miserable. He must call Import. He was due to begin work this morning, his period of personal adjustment complete. Instead, Craig turned and began to walk. He could not carry on a coherent conversation in his present state. He could never find his way unassisted back to his apartment; he was not even sure he remembered the address. But the thought of returning to his quarters, to Import sickened him. What was his address? East # #, North... No, that would be old lady Brockman. The association irritated him. He had completely forgotten the unwanted assignment, had forgotten to inquire where the address could b found. Craig became aware of the heavy flow of vehicular traffic that roared a scant eight feel away. Large surface carrierr whistled in the nearest lane of the complex four-lane pattern. Then there were the private surface craft; they were of many sizes and shapes. He guessed that they were turbine-powered, but he could not identify the odor of their exhausts. There was an odd, unreal quality about the busy thoroughfare. Even myriad sounds from it were sounds he had never heard before and could not break down into their component parts. Craig became aware of other humans, many of them, on the sidewalk. Again they were of a class that he could not identify. They had none of the brisk, purposeful stride of those he had seen near Import. They lacked also the graceful, colorful dress. Their faces, so far as he could separate them from the blurring film over his eyes, were different. They seemed somehow looser faces, though Craig did not know exactly what he meant by the term. They were not tight, pinched, set, as were the faces he had seen before on Terra. There were bulbous noses, large ears, squint eyes, disheveled hair. the men's and women's faces strangely similar. Some were young, some old, but few were hard or fixed. They seemed more plastic, more full of expression than those he had come to know elsewhere in the city. He felt an inexplicable craving to know someone of this strange street. "You looking for something, mister?" asked a voice near him. Craig turned to find a middleaged man eying him from the doorway of an empty building. "I got it," the man added. "Got what?" Craig asked. "Anything a guy just outa the Can would want." "What would a 'guy just outa the can' want that you have?" Craig examined the weathered, sharp face. It was an unpleasant one, but it belonged to this street; it would do to tell him what he wanted to know of the place. "Follow me." The man quickly inserted a magnikey into the door of the vacant store builcfing. "There's a station just up the Street," Craig warned. "Sure. So what?" The empty room was dusty and dark and received little light through the grimy display windows that faced on the street. What kind of store it had been, Craig could not guess. The man led him through a kind of storage room which was piled high with moldy paper cartons and back to #  a rear door. With quick, dextrous movements, the man swung an ancient bar assembly and pushed open the rear door. It led to a litter-strewn yard enclosed by rough, eroded shacks and a wooden garage. They entered the garage through a creaking hinged door. It was a dank, almost completely dark room. Craig stumbled over something on the floor and fell against a packing box of some kind. "Just stand still," said the man. He was shuffling invisibly about in the darkness. Craig could hear him opening a kind of cabinet or drawer while saying in a steady monotone, "You got the right man, mister. My stuff is pure. You can test it. But you'd rather drink it, right?" For the tenth time, Craig asked himself why he had accepted the furtive invitation. The thought of this man's kind of intoxicant -- however 'pure' -- nauseated him. Nevertheless, he felt himself compelled by a kind of insatiable curiosity to follow out the part he had accepted. Perhaps through this man, through this somehow fascinating street, he could... "You got ten; I know that. Maybe you got more, huh?" the man interrupted his confused train of thought. "What makes you think I got ten?" Craig asked. He did not know himself how many units his wallet contained -- certainly not after the previous night. "Don't get sore. I'm honest. But I know you got ten. Otherwise you wouldn't have got out of the station." The lack of clearly defined objects by which to orient himself in the darkness of the garage made his head begin to swim once more. He wanted to leave. "Don't get scared, buddy. They don't ever come in here." Craig fumbled for support in the darkness. He was afraid he would be sick. Fulfillment for the half-formed plan that was beginning to take shape in his mind would not come with the bootlegger. It would come into being somehow in the tawdry street he had just left, only he did not know how. "They don't really go after polyester. They dont want to stop the stuff. It makes their job easier. You don't have to WQrry, buddy. Come on, how much you want? You might have trouble finding more for a while." Craig said nothing. He fumbled for a grip on a packing box. "You're from Out, aren't you, buddy? You ain't used to us here yet. Most of my customers are from Out. What jam'd you get into?" "I got ten units, I think," Craig evaded. "It ain't none of my business what you done. Nobody around here is going to ask you any questions. Long as you got units, you get poly like the big shots that come over here all the way from Uptown." "Yeah," said Craig. "Gimme what I get for ten units and let's beat it out of here." "Myself, I never been Out. Not even Luna. Never wanted to. I stay here and have my little business -- you can call it a business. You'll see, buddy, there are millions of guys like me. The controllers don't stop 'us. We're respectable. A damned sight more respectable than those..." "All right," snapped Craig. "Let's get out of here." "You got it bad, huh? This poly will fix that up. It's pure. You just come back to old Nave and get poly." "How... how you get out of here?" asked Craig, nauseated. "Get lost pretty easy in the dark, huh?" The man was beginning to mock him. Craig lashed out suddenly at the unseen face in the darkness. He caught the thin throat in his left hand. His right left the packing box and cocked to deliver a blow. But he began to fall and had to let go. "Okay, buddy, okay," the other man said soothingly as Craig was forced to catch himself. "I like exspacemen. I know lots of you. I sell you poly. You don't want to get tough with me." He shoved a block of ten small cubes into Craig's hand and, while Craig fished for his wallet, he produced a tiny, narrowbeamed flash. The transaction was quickly over. The cube was small enough to be forced without much difficulty into Craig's jacket pocket. The man led him back across the littered yard, through the empty store building, and out the front door. When Craig emerged onto the street once more, a uniformed figure was standing nearby. "He'll need two," whispered the man from behind him. Craig reached into his pocket and mechanically fumbled two of the small cubes of waxlike substance from the loose package. He placed them on the outstretched hand of the Civil Control officer. The officer did not look in his direction at any time, but accepted the offer and walked slowly on toward the station. Craig continued aimlessly down the long street. His head cleared as he walked and once more began to form a kind of vague plan. There was anonymity to a street such as this. There was also a kind of freedom. Everywhere in the universe, there were such streets. Neutralized streets, where a kind of compromise was reached between law and lawlessness. They were permitted because it was always necessary to provide such a place for those who were not permitted elsewhere. Those who would not fit, could not be "rehabilitated," could neither be jailed nor permitted complete freedom. Controllers of one kind or another patrolled such streets, keeping them in a kind of check -- or, more accurately, in a kind of containment. But no amount of control would ever completely stamp out the likes of Nave, the bootlegger. Perhaps here, on this street, Craig could be "lost." Here he might find security for a time in anonymity, security and time to find a way... to what? He did not know. "Mister! Mister!" cried a thin, high voice from somewhere to his left. "Here, quick!" It was a young boy of perhaps nine or ten. Craig caught sight of him as he motioned urgently. He wore a shabby, torn version of what appeared to be a space service uniform. "I'm not buying anything, son," Craig said, pausing briefly. "Come here, quick!" insisted the boy, his eyes large in a dirty face. "You already bought too much." The boy was motioning him to follow. He had stepped between two buildings. Craig approached him with suspicion. "What did you say?" "Slip in here quick! You bought from Nave the peddler. You bought poly, didn't ya?" "How did you .  Craig began. "Tell you later. Slip through here quick or they'll send you to Hardy!" The genuine fear of the youngster conveyed itself to Craig. With effort he forced his body through the space between the old buildings. At first he did not intend to follow the boy, but only to stop him for an explanation. The boy, however, continued down the tight corridor formed by the buildings. "There's a window soon," he said from ahead of Craig. "Hurry. You lost timj with that peddler." Lost time? Cursing himself for becoming involved again in something he did not understand, Craig nevertheless followed as best he could. It was a tight squeeze and he found himself becoming breathless. "Dive down!" shouted the boy, looking back with terror in his eyes. Instinctively Craig did so. The rough walls tore at his suit. "Stop!" shouted a voice from behind Craig. "Stop or we fire!" Craig suddenly felt the sill of a window which opened into the building to his left. He quickly pulled himself into it. There was a sickening whine and a part of the window distingrated in a cloud of splinters and plaster. "Through here," said the boy from the semidarkness. "They'll blast their way inside in a minute !" Craig found himself in another empty building. He followed the boy through a doorway and felt his way as he half ran along the dark hall. "Who are they?" he panted. "Controllers." "Civil Control?" "Sure. You must be pretty important. I didn't get it all. But they say the controllers checked up on you after... I'll explain later." The hall ended in a dim room piled high with plasmolite packing boxes in great disarray. The boy chose a box and lifted a lid. "Follow me. It's a passage." "Where to?" "No time now. Down here. The passage, which seemed to be constructed of plasmolite boxes, seemed somehow lit by daylight, although Craig could not actually see the source of the light. The tunnel ended in broad afternoon daylight. As he climbed out he saw a large clearing surrounded by ruins. "We're just inside the old city," the boy said. "We're safe now -- unless those controllers are willing to take more chances than I think." "Wait a minute,, son. You said 'old city.' You mean that this is a part of pre-war Los Angeles ?' # "Well, sure." "But that's supposed to be..." "Radioactive? Most of it, anyway. Good thing, too. Otherwise we'd have no place to go." "Look, kid, you better explain," said Craig,. "You were right about somebody being after me, but I don't get the 'we' business. Or how you knew all about this." "All right, mister, but let's get away from here. Those guys won't come through to here, even if they find a way -- I don't think. But they're gettin' smarter and you're pretty hot right now." The boy led the way to what appeared to be a completely demolished building. "Used to be tje old library," he said. They circled the heap of plaster, brick, and twisted steel. On the other side Craig saw what appeared to be a window. The boy let himself down through it. Craig was amazed to find a large, relatively clear area inside, probably part of an old room that had been spared by some freak of the blast. "You live here?" Craig asked the youngster incredulously. "Part of the time." The boy brought up an old crate and offered it to Craig as a chair. "Listen, mister, I don't know who you are. You're an ex-spaceman and that's enough for me." There was a slightly amusing attempt at adult hardness about him, "You shouldn't have wasted time with Nave. You should have got out of there." "Why?" "I don't know. What you done r anyway?" "I don't remember. Passed out at a bar... The boy showed disgust. He glanced at the pocket which contained the polyester. Craig smiled. 'I don't use this stuff. At least not enough to deserve what you're thinking." He tossed the remaining cubes on the littered floor of the room. The boy maintained his look of scorn for a time, but then softened. "I was afraid you got kicked out of the service for that." "How did you know I was ever in it?" , "Easy. You don't know how to walk on a planet yet. Anybody can tell." "I didn't get kicked out," Craig said. "I came here to take a civil service job." "It'd almost be better if you had been." "I didn't know about Terra,. None of us had any idea." "I know," said the boy sadly. "My father quit, too. He quit to marry my mother. That was before it was... so bad." "Where -- " Craig began, then bit off the question. "Oh, gee, mister, Terra's in an awful bad shape! They took... my parents. They hunt us down. They..." Craig approached the boy and put a hand on his shoulder. "What's your name, son?" "Phil." "Phil what?" "I don't know exactly. My father had to use so many names toward the... end. He once had only one name, but I guess even he forgot what it was." night in the old library room, but first Phil left it and made his way into the wilderness of rubble. He returned dragging a packing box of plastic insulating material, out of which they fashioned a crude bed. Despite the thousands of questions that paraded across Craig's mind, he waited each time for the boy to speak. "I can't take you any further until... "Until you know more about me?" "In a way. They'll let me know." Craig would have risked much to identify the "they" Phil referred to, but he did not ask the question. As he watched the boy preparing the dimly lit room for the night, he felt sure Phil could be trusted. He was almost frighteningly mature for his age. The room was well hidden, for the once great library lay in a powdered ruin about it on all sides but a part of one. Only by accident or knowledge would a stranger recognize it in what was literally a world of rubble. During the moments of silence between the boy's volunteered statements, Craig tried to visualize the awful catastrophe that had befallen the old city. Piles of powdered masonry restricted his view greatly under the gathering night. He could see a scant city block through the window, but he knew the wreckage around them must extend for miles. "You don't have to worry, mister "Craig." "Mr. Craig. They don't come in here at night." "Radioactivity?" "Yes. Not right here, but all around, everywhere." "What?" "It's all around us. You go through it to get here, but you can't stay anywhere but a few places like this." "How do you know all of these tilings, Phil?" M Oh, we know, all right. We had to find out." "You must have ion counters," he said in what he hoped was a casual tone. "We have lots of things." Craig was thoughtful for a minute. The boy was obviously on his guard now. "Those empty buildings?" Craig asked tentatively. "They built them too close," said the boy. It seemed to be a safe  subject. "They built them up as close as they thought was safe. Space is very valuable here. But they built them too close." "Yet the 'we you speak of live even closer?" The boy bit his lip and eyed him suspiciously in silence. "Look, kid," Craig said very deliberately, "I'm not a controller and I'm not interested in a bunch of petty thieves." The effect was just what he had intended. "We're not thieves!" And we're not traitors, either! We're..." The boy was almost in tears. Craig waited a moment, then continued in a soft voice. "Phil, I'm just beginning to realize what a rotten place Terra is. From just what I've seen -- it isn't very much -- I can imagine such a system producing a great many 'we' groups like yours. I don't know who you are or what you are, but you can't be any worse than what I've already seen of Terran officials. Tell me, kid, what's it all about? And is there any way out of here? I mean -- way out!" "You may tell him, Philip," said a quiet voice from the window entrance. "Like us, Philip, Mr. Craig is an enemy of tyranny, though he doesn't realize it yet." Craig instinctively jumped back to get out of range of the window, meanwhile feeling around for something that could be used as a weapon. But the boy ran to the silhouetted figure in the window. "Mr. Sam!" he cried eagerly. Craig relaxed his hold on a strip of heavy metal. When the man had entered, the boy pulled a ragged black cloth across the window once more. He then ignited a small oil burning lamp in a carved-out nook in the wall. "It's all right, Philip, nobody is following me," the newcomer said. Craig studied his face. It was an old face covered by a stained gray beard. With a shock Craig recognized the man as a tramp he had seen earlier on the street, napping, sprawled in a doorway. Now for the first time he saw the eyes. Sharp and clear, they caught up the yellow light of the oil lamp and glowed warmly as they turned to Craig. "I am 'Mr. Sam,' Mr. Craig. You might know me by the full name, Samuel Cocteau, but I doubt it. Even the names of the infamous do not penetrate space." "I guess not," Craig agreed. "But you said something about my being an enemy of tyranny." "Whether you like it at once or not, you are temporarily one of us -- one of the 'we' Philip has been speaking of. But all of that in due time. Right now it is necessary for us to leave here." , "They're going to try to find us tonight?" asked Phil, startled. "Yes, a tribute to Mr. Craig," said the old man. "A Geiger team is being readied at the station." Craig started to protest as the boy began hurriedly to pick up his few possessions in the room. "I'm sorry, Mr. Craig," the man said. "I must ask you to decide now whether to trust us and our judgment. There is grave danger for you if you are caught by the Civil Control. The report I have received is that you are largely unaware of the 'crimes against the state' you have committed. The Civil Control hoped to capture you before you find them out. But that, of course, is my word only. There is no time to give you proof, even if I had it." Craig's mind whirled under the sudden onslaught of new facts. He had followed a peddler without knowing why he did it. He had bought polyester he had no use for. He had followed a boy who beckoned to him. Now -- how much longer was he to move haphazardly through Terra like a cork on a wind-blown sea? Who were these strange fugitives who said he was one of them and who lived in the heart of a radioactive city? "Well, Mr. Craig?" asked Cocteau quietly. Craig glanced at the boy. The child's eyes were wide and pleading in the dim light of the oil lamp. "Let's go," Craig said. on the wilderness of heaping ruin. The three made their way toward what Craig at first thought was an unbroken wall of rubble. The near-horizontal rays of the sun tipped the white mass and gave the entire scene an unearthly quality. Below the towering rubble mountains, long black shadows were reaching toward what Craig knew to be the living city. Cocteau took the lead and set a fast pace for a man of bn age. He took a highly devious r th through the "mountain," or hat began to seem to Craig needle Iy difficult and that outlined them against the bright western sky. At one point Craig left the invisible path of the older man to avoid an exhaustingly steep rise. "Follow me exactly,' warned Cocteau in a sharp voice. "There is only one relatively safe path through here." "They'll see us against the sky!" "It cannot be helped." But there was no indication that they were followed. They pushed onward, scurrying over heaps of weathered plaster and brick. The old man seemed to avoid with great care places where metal girders were visible. The exertion together with walking directly into the setting sun made Craig begin to feel the old nausea return. He resisted it for a time, but it would not be repressed, particularly as he strove to maintain his balance on difficult climbs. Once he stumbled on a splintered building stone and fell. It was a long minute before he could regain his feet and mutter a feeble, "Sorry." "We must push on, Mr. Craig," was Cocteau's only comment. "It's safe here for a minute, isn't it?" Craig panted, dizzy and breathless. "There is no Safe place here, Mr. Craig." They continued their winding way through the growing darkness. For Craig it became a nightmare of stumbling over the endless piles of sharp stones. His mind spun sickeningly and he retched as he half ran along the path Cocteau set for them. "Please, mister," breathed the voice of Phil behind him. "It isn't so far now." Doggedness carried Craig onward long after awareness left him. as though by an injection of stimulant. He found himself surrounded by a number of figures, including Cocteau and a white garbed man, evidently a doctor. "You are quite safe now, Mr. Craig," said Cocteau warmly. "Welcome to the City of We." "Where are we?" "Deep in the old city, in a place where the radioactivity is negligible," the man answered as the doctor took his pulse. "This is Dr. Grant and these others are members of the Liberty party." "Liberty!" "You've heard of it?" "Yeah, you're pretty unpopular, aren't you?" "Unpopular? Let us say that all of Terran officialdom is dedicated to exterminating us." "The committee on somethingor-other asked me about my attitudes toward the Liberty party," said Craig, rising to a sitting position on the cot. "And at the time you had a lack of attitude, which most likely was unacceptable to them," sup# plied Cocteau, smiling. "Well, you may be interested to know that you are considered one of us by most of Terra just now." "What?" "That is correct," said another of the group. "It seems you were in a bar in -- ah -- in a somewhat less than fully conscious state..." "But I didn't know anything about the Liberty party." "No, nor is it alleged that you actually mentioned the party in so many words," continued the white-haired man, smiling. "But it seems that you did make certain statements in the presence of certain persons that did indicate a definite predilection... "That's crazy," said Craig angrily"Of course," Cocteau agreed. "Furthermore," the other man said, "you are charged with wilful abandonment of duty and 'acts indicative of your desire to sffun the best utilization of your talents in behalf of the state of Terra.' " "In other words," explained Cocteau, "you applied for a job on a private space freighter. Without permission to do so." Craig was silent. He lay back down on the cot and tried to absorb the data he had just received. "So I'm accused of belonging to something I don't know anything about?" "Then I'll tell you briefly about us. You have a right to know the magnitude of the crime with which you are charged." Cocteau took a seat by Craig's cot. The others also found chairs. "But first a brief bit of history -- a history that you have never heard before. Not your fault. It is not allowed to penetrate Terra's atmosphere." "I don't know much about Terra," Craig interjected. "I'm just finding out how much I don't know." "God, I wish the rest of the Universe could find out with you!" said one of the group. "Yes, the history of Terra is almost lost now. That is, the part f it that followed the Great Wars of seventy-five years ago. You know of those wars; you have just walked through one of the physical results of them. No nation or alliance of nations can be said to have won them, but the wars had a most profound effect upon Terra. More than anything else, they made men reach to the stars, if only to escape the deadly conflicts of Terra. "Ideological issues were involved, naturally, but the underlying cause of the Great Wars was the struggle for power. The world was disunited. Peoples were divided from peoples by an almost inconceivable number of unimportant distinctions. These were ethnical, national, racial, cultural -- name any brand of prejudice and you'll find it existed then. "Incredibly enough, the destructiveness of the Great Wars accomplished a kind of unity. Gone were the once proud aggressive nations. Gone into oblivion. Gone, too, were the systems of economics and sociology of which men were once so sure. There was a kind of plague-on-both-your-houses' attitude among the peoples of the world. There was a large measure of anarchy following the Great Wars. Not a violent, active anarchy of hate and terror, but of apathy and weariness. Apathy at the outcome of false conflicts, and weariness of the self-defeating strife of man against man. "At first men produced by the full extent of their labors barely enough on which to survive. Only gradually did they regain their ability to produce surpluses once more. Of course, surpluses mean exchanges -- trade. And trade requires order and system. "The first ten years following the Great Wars was a period of gradualism in all things. Peoples united in small groups. There were no political or racial divisions. The units were built upon functional lines. They were natural and free. Above all, they were cooperative. "It was not communism. Men knew all too well the mental and physical slavery of that brutally rigid system. It was not rugged individualism either. Rugged individuals during this period either starved or were driven, out by the starving. "This natural, cooperative unity spread and became more complex. There came into being natural associations of units. Not exclusive but inclusive associations that linked all who would join and could produce surpluse. Productivity increased thereby. Men were intelligent enough te avoid many of the old abuses. "Ways were found to harness the productivity of each man and woman. Genuine efforts were made to avoid misfits, to make those who produced fit. It wae realized, Mr. Craig, that the unhappy man will infect others with his misery, and the trouble he will cause is much more difficult to undo than to prevent in the first place. "There were, of course, mistakes, false starts. But the newfound system of world-wide unity proved flexible. It was multiplebased. To a very large degree, all men fitted into it logically and naturally. It was the first truly 'grass-roots' economic and social system in the history of man. And it was a great tribute to his ability to work out his destiny. particularly since it came after a tragedy that was so enormous and devastating. "The list of its successes is incredible; For in a decade the ageold problem of poverty seemed to have disappeared. There were no significant outbreaks of disorder and lawlessness -- indeed, there was comparatively little need for a written law. The principle of mutuality and cooperation was too strongly conditioned into the people. "Scientifically, the first half of the new century, a scant twentyfive years after the last bomb was dropped, was the greatest in man's history. Man reached the stars. He began to know the molecule, the atom, the electron. He pushed the frontier of his knowledge deep into both microcosm and macrocosm. "But a fatal flaw had long before developed in the structure, wonderful as it was. It was an age-old flaw. It was one that was disguised by the very nature of the new system. When it was recognized, that flaw had so weakened the system that its spread was all but inevitable. It is a flaw that will always plague man to a certain extent, but one that must keep us eternally vigilant. "It is this: the greatest human good comes not in how well you learn to control man and keep him from harming himself. What determines it is how completely you learn to free him. "Conversely, the law provides that no control system, however devised, will succeed in bringing happiness and security to man to any greater extent than it permits the fullest expression of his nature. "Man is inherently good. He will always choose a moral path when free to do so. He strives for justice and truth both as an individual and in mass. "Mr. Craig, democracy is man's greatest a priori. Yet based upon a law of restraint, it cannot escape the hopeless contradiction that leads to its own destruction. Man can democratically do the irrational and the insane. He can democratically limit and coerce the absolute highest nature of himself. Bad laws are forever passed to achieve good ends. But each new law produces new criminals while the cause of the new crime remains unsolved. "Ergo, the world you have just seen. Ergo, the Liberty party. Mr. Craig, our world is ruled by a vast and horrible bureaucracy whose terrible weapon is conformity. You would find few laws even today written in books. Our assemblies pass few statutes. They determine dogma instead. They 'resolve' and 'move.' They fix a new 'position,' define a 'stand.' Our equivalent of judge and attorney is no student of law. He is a kind of moralist. He is sensitive to the 'trend' and appreciative of the 'proper.' "Terra fits uncomfortably in the Intergalactic System. Like many of the undemocratic systems of the dark past, the Terran state must expand. It is based upon a selflimiting philosophy unless it can spread fast enough. You are charged with being 'unTerran,' Mr. Craig. A system that forever seeks 'un Terra ns' must inevitably exile or kill itself!" It had been a long speech. Craig had listened in awe, for it was a completely new story to him. "And you propose to destroy this bureaucracy?" he said. "In so far as it is a philosophical entity, yes." "And you say I am one of you now?" "You are considered one of us. Your employer and his secretary are also suspected." "But I'm entitled to a trial, or at least a hearing." "Not now, Mr. Craig. It would do you little good, anyway. The 'position' of the Assembly on subversion is that it 'rightly behooves every loyal Terran so to conduct his behavior that a suspicion of membership in the Liberty party is unthinkable.' " Craig found himself regretting every minute of his stay on Terra. Old Brockman had been right -- it was no place for a spaceman. Now it was probably too late. No Terran space freighter would accept him and Intergalactic could not. There was not even a way for him to recover his service records. "Will you join us, Mr. Craig?" asked one of the men. "We can use your skills, particularly your knowledge of space." "Look, how do I know you aren't a bunch of traitors? Maybe all this you've told me is true. I've seen plenty of that bureaucracy and there seems to be damned little freedom of action left on Terra. But how do I know you can do any better when you get in power?"'Liberty will never be 'in power,' Mr. Craig," Cocteau said quietly. "Liberty yill attempt to reach the minds of the people with our message of hope, of freedom in true democracy." Another of the group joined Cocteau. "We are now hunted as criminals. We have only this small stronghold in the old city." "We shall attempt only to gain entry to the minds of the people," said Cocteau. "Gain entry to tell them how they live, for most of them have had no contact with any other kind of life." people," Craig pointed out. "One of the basic principles of Liberty is the inherent goodness of every man," Cocteau repeated. "We have never taken a life, even in self-defense. We shall never take one. Nor will it # ever be necessary for a member of the Liberty party to hold public office, to own a weapon, to coerce a man in any physical way." "But you will coerce them with ideas. Is that what you have in mind?" Craig protested. "If a point of view, a promise, a goal is coercion, then the answer to your question is yes. But ideas are not dangerous when a man is free to argue and act against them." "Look here, Cocteau," Craig said earnestly, "all you say may be true. I believe it is. But what can I do? I'm a spaceman, or at best an apprentice import clerk. I don't know anything about this sort of work." "Come here a moment," invited a member of the group. Through the window indicated by the man, Craig saw an incredible sight. The entire scene seemed to be on the inside of a vast underground cavern. There were other buildings and some kind of systematic work being done by many men and women. But the thing that caught Craig's eye seemed to be cradled in a kind of hangar. "A spaceship!" exclaimed Craig. "A very modest one, yet not so modest when you consider that it was necessary to carry in every single piece and part by hand." "Good Lord!" #, You f Mr. Craig, might captain that ship. Very few Terrans have ever even flown in one. It will be necessary to establish contact with possible assistance outside of Terra. You can make that possible." Craig was thoughtful. "I suppose, now that I've seen all this, you can't let me leave here unless I join you." "No," denied Cocteau. "You may leave here any time you like." "I'd be sure to get caught, of course... "Within limits, it might be possible to help you avoid capture." Cocteau reached into his beggar's coat and withdrew a wallet. "Identity card, food ration, clothing, work card, even a Government party card. It's all here, Mr. Craig. You could have a slightly altered physical appearance. Liberty accepts no unwilling members. You are given as nearly a free choice in this matter as is possible to give you." "Suppose I talked?" asked Craig, nodding bluntly toward the port. Cocteau smiled. "It was necessary to prepare for that. You were given a drug. It has not affected your thinking capacity in any way. But once it wears off, you will be unable to remember what took place while under its influence. "When agents of the Liberty party are sent out of here, they go having had all experience with Liberty take place while under the drug. None of us could remember for more than a few hours the exact location of this headquarters. When it is necessary to leave for very long, we carry a small amount of the drug with us. Many of our agents have been caught and a few have resigned. But none has divulged enough information to harm us seriously." Craig was postponing his decision to the last. "They must know you're somewhere in here. If the radioactivity keeps them out, why shouldn't they put a cordon around the entire old city?" "Periodically, they try. But there are many, many other ways of leaving here than by the surface. Underground water conduits, ancient power and sewer lines, a number of tunnels we have dug... Craig was solemnly handed the wallet. "If you will submit to sufficient plastic surgery to make you resemble this man, you may safely leave here no later than tomorrow night." A long silence ensued. It was interrupted by a noise from outside the door of the room. It was the voice of Phil. "Has he decided to stay? Did you see him? He looks like my daddy did... Will he stay?' "You mustn't interrupt, son. They're in conference now. We r li let you know." "Tell him yes!" said Craig in a loud voice. "Tell him hell, yes, I'm staying!" The men gathered around him to congratulate him on the decision. Phil was allowed in the clinic to join them. "Oh, Cocteau, one more thing, Craig said..."Yes?" Craig was fumbling for his own wallet. He extracted a folded card. "Where would East #, North #, Number # be?" "It would have been somewhere here in Old City." "God! How did the old guy expect me to deliver this message? Old man named Brockman. He sent me a message just before he died in Gravitation. I was to visit his wife." "Brockman?" asked Cocteau. "You mean Ethel Brockman?" "Yeah. How'd you know?" "Ethel Brockman was one of the organizers of the Liberty party. She served as its chairman until her death only a few years ago. Her husband must have felt your 'sea legs would lead you to us eventually. And, of course, they did." by the tail Where do objects go when they vanish and can never be found again ? Welt, here's one answer you can't disprove! T HE department store was so crowded with the postseason rush, it was surprising that they spotted her at all. The salesgirl at the counter was busy at the far end, and the woman was equally busy at her own end, slipping goods from the counter into the large black purse. Kearney watched for several minutes in growing alarm before he motioned over the other section manager. "Watch that woman for a minute," he said in an offhand whisper. "She's sorting that hardware like she owns the store!" "A klepto? What are you waiting for?" asked the other. "Let's have a talk with her -- " Kearney scratched his head. "Watch her for a moment. There's something damned fishy -- " They watched. She was standing at the kitchenware counter, her hands running over the merchandise on the shelf. She tools three cookie cutters, and popped them into the pocketbook. Two large cake tins and a potato masher followed. Then a small cake-safe, and two small pots. Then a large aluminum skillet. The second man stared in disbelief. "She's taken enough junk there to stock a store. And she's putting it all into that pocketbook. Kearney, she couldn't get all that junk into a pocketbook ! " "I know," said Kearney. "Let's go." They moved in on her from opposite sides, and Kearney took her gently by the arm. "We'd like to speak to you, madam. Please come with us quietly." She looked up blankly, then shrugged and followed them into a small office... "I don't know what this means -- " "We've been watching you for fifteen minutes." Kearney took the pocketbook from her ami. unsnapped it, glanced inside, p- shook it in alarm. He looked up, eyes wide a puzzled. "Jerry, look at thi Jerry looked. When he tried speak, there just weren't a. words. The pocketbook was empty. car in front of the Institu of Physics, and was passed b fingerprint into the lab win, Evanson met him in the corrido "Glad you got here," Evanso said grimly. "Listen, John, what is tl about a pocketbook? I hope v not your idea of a joke." "Not this gadget," Evans promised. "Wait till you see il He led the way into one of tl large lab sections. Collins eye the shiny control panels uneasilj the giant generators and booster: the duocalc relay board with it gleaming tubes and confused wir ing. "I can't see what you wan with me here. I'm a mechanics engineer." Evanson walked into a smal office off the lab. "You're also troubleshooter from way bad Meet the research team, Frank The research team wo smocks, glasses, and a slouc  Collins nodded, and looked  the pocketbook lying on the tab "Looks just like any oth pocketbook to me," he said. H # ; picked it up. It felt like a pocketbook. "What's in it?" "You tell us," Evanson said. Collins opened it up. It was curiously dark inside, with a dull metallic ring around the inside, near the top. He turned it upside down, and shook it. Nothing came out. "Don't reach around inside," Evanson cautioned. "It's not safe. One fellow tried, and lost a wristwatch." Collins looked up, his bland full face curious. "Where did you get this?" "A couple of section managers spotted a shoplifter down in the Taylor-Hyden store a couple of days ago. She was helping herself to kitchen hardware, and was stuffing anything and everything into the pocketbook. They nabbed her, but when they tried to get the hardware back out of the pocketbook, they couldn't find any. One of them lost a wristwatch groping around in it." "Yes, but how did you wind up with the purse?" Evanson shrugged. "Ever since the end of the war in '#, when they organized Psych, they've turned shoplifters over to them. This woman was taken to Psych, but when they jarred her into remembering who she was, she couldn't recall having the purse. After Psych had looked at the jlocketbook, they naturally sent it over to us. Here, I'll show you why." Evanson picked up a meter stick, and began to push it into the pocketbook. It went in about ten centimeters, to the bottom of the purse -- And kept on going. It didn't poke out the bottom. It didn't even bulge the purse. Collins goggled at it. "Holy smoke, how'd you do that?" "Maybe it's going somewhere else. Fourth dimension. I don't know." "Nuts!" "Where else, then?" Evanson laid the meter stick down. "Another thing about that pocketbook," he added. "No matter what you do, you can't turn it inside out." Collins looked at the dark inside of the pocketbook. Gingerly he stuck his finger in, rubbed the metallic ring, scratched it with his nail. A shiny line appeared. "That's aluminum in there," he said. "An aluminum circle." Evanson took it and looked. "All the stuff she was stealing was aluminum," he said. "That's one reason we called you. You know your mechanics, and you know your metals. We've been trying for three days to figure out what happens here. We can't. Maybe you can." "What have you been doing?" "Pushing stuff in. Checking it with all the instruments, X-ray, everything. Didn't tell us a thing. We'd like to know where that stuff goes that we push in." Collins dropped an aluminum button into the purse. It went through the aluminum circle and vanished. "Say," he asked suddenly, scowling, "what do you mean, you can't turn this thing inside out?" "It's a second-order geometric form." Evanson lit a cigarette carefully. "You can turn a firstorder form, like a sphere or rubber ball, inside out through a small hole in the surface. But you can't turn an inner-tube inside out, no matter what you do." "Why not?" "Because it's got a hole in it. And you can't pull a hole through a hole. Not even an infinitesimal hole." "Well?" said Collins, frowning. "It's the same thing with that purse. We think it's wrapped around a chunk of another universe. A four-dimensional universe. And you can't pull a chunk of another universe through this one, without causing a lot of trouble." "But you can turn an innertube inside out," Collins protested. "It may not look like an innertube any more, but it will all come through the hole." Evanson eyed the pocketbook on the table. "Maybe so. A secnd-order geometric under condition of stress. But there's one hitch to that. It won't be an inner-tube any more." item made of aluminum into the purse. He shook his head tiredly. "I don't knaw. Something is taking that aluminum -- " He pushed in a wooden ruler; it popped right out again. "And it wants only aluminum. Nothing else. That detective had an aluminum military watch, which disappeared from his wrist, but he had two gold rings on that hand, and neither one was touched." "Let's play some thinking games," Collins said. Evanson looked up sharply. "What do you mean?" Collins grinned. " Whatever is on the other side of that pocketbook seems to want aluminum. Why? There's an aluminum ring around the mouth of the purse -- all around it. Like a portal. But it isn't very big, and it doesn't use much aluminum. They seem to want lots more." "They?" "Whatever takes the metal, but pushes back the wood." "Why?" "We could venture a guess. Maybe they're building another opening. A large one." Evanson stared at him. "Don't be silly," he said. "Why -- " "I was just thinking out loud," said Collins mildly. He picked up a steel meter stick. Taking a firm grip on one end, he pushed the other end into the purse. Evanson watched, puzzled. "They don't want it. They're trying to push it back." Collins continued to insert the stick, with pressure, and suddenly the end appeared, coming back out. Like a flash Collins grabbed it, and began tugging both ends at once. "Watch it, watch it!" Evanson snapped. "You're making their universe conform to our geometry!" The purse seemed to sag inward. One end of the rod suddenly slipped out of Collins hand. He fell back, grasping the stick. It was straight. "Evanson!" he snapped excitedly. "Can you get a winch up here?" Evanson blinked dully, and nodded. "Good," said Collins. "I think I know how we can hook onto their universe." T HE big threeinch steel bar rolled easily into the lab on a dolly. The end of the bar, for six inches, was covered with shiny aluminum tubing, and bent into a sharp hook. "Is the winch ready?" Collias asked excitedly. Evanson told him it was. "Then slide the purse onto the end of the bar." The end of the bar disappeared into the pocketbook. "What are you trying to do? Evanson asked uneasily. "They seem to want aluminum, so we're going to give them some. If they're building another opening through with it I want to hook onto the opening and pull it out into this lab. They'll be putting the aluminum on this bar with the rest. If we can hook onto that aluminum, they'll either have to cut it free and let us retrieve it, or open it into this lab." Evanson scowled. "But what if they don't do either?" "They have to. If we pull a non-free section of their universe through the purse, it will put a terrific strain on their whole geometric pattern. Their whole universe will be twisted. Just like an inner-tube." The winch squeaked as Collins worked the bar to and fro ininside the purse. "Up a little," he said to the operator. Evanson shook his head sourly. "I don't see -- " he began. The bar twanged under sudden pressure. "Hold it! You've got it hooked!" Collins shouted. The winch squealed noisily, the motor whining under the strain. The steel bar slid slowly out of meter, pulled as taut as a piano wire. Every ten minutes one of the technicians made a chalk mark on the bar by the mouth of the purse. Frank Collins filled a pipe and puffed nervously. "The way I see it," he said, "these beings pried a small fourthdimension hole into our universe, and somehow got that woman under a suggestive trance. They made her collect aluminum so they could build a bigger opening." "But why?" Evanson poured coffee out of a thermos. It was late, and the whole building was silent and deserted except for this one lab section. The only noise in the room was the whine of the winch, straining at the other universe. "Who knows? To get more and more aluminum? Whatever the reason, they want to get through to our universe. Maybe theirs is in some danger or other. Hell, the reason may be so alien that we couldn't possibly understand it." "But what's the idea of hooking onto them?" Evanson's eyes were worried. "Control. We pull a non-free chunk of their universe into ours, and they can't use the opening. It'll be plugged up. The more we pull through, the more strain on the structure of their universe. They'll have to listen to our terms then. They'll have to give us their information so that we can build openings, and examine them properly. If they don't, we'll wreck their universe." "But you don't evenknow what they're doing in there!" Collins shrugged, made another chalk mark on the bar. The bar was humming. "I don't think we should take the risk," Evanson complained. "I didn't have permission to try this. I just let you go ahead on my own authority, on data -- " he shuddered suddenly -- "that's so damned vague, it makes no sense at all." Collins knocked out his pipe sharply. "It's all the data we have." "I say it's wrong. I think we should release the bar right now, and wait till Chalmers gets .farfd in the morning." Collins eyed the winch with growing uneasiness, lighting his pipe with a match held in unsteady fingers. "We can't release the bar now. The tapered sheaves are under too much tension. We couldn't even burn through that rod with an oxytorch in less than twenty minutes -- and it would jolt the whole building apart when it broke." "But the danger -- " Evanson stood up, his forehead beaded with perspiration. He nodded toward the creaking winch. "You might be gambling our whole universe." "Oh, calm down!" Collins said angrily. "We don't have any choice now, or even time to talk it over. We're doing it and that's all there is to it. When you grab a tiger by the tail, you've got to hang on." Evanson crossed the room excitedly. "It seems to me," he said tensely, "that the tiger might have the advantage. If it went the wrong way, think what they could do to our universe!" Collins blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. "At any rate. I'm glad we thought of it first -- " He trailed off, his face slowly turning white. Evanson followed his stare, and his breath came in a sharp gasp. The thermos clattered noisily to the floor. He pointed at the second chalk mark, sliding into the pocketbook. "You mean you hope we did," he said. Through its pages you can buy, sell, and trade books and beck issues of magasines -- and leant what you want io know about the many new science fiction books. Send l for # bi-monthly Issue or #c for a specimen copy to: # W. Kenneth Road, Glendale I, Calif. 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Dear Galaxy: If I don't get down to the newsstand on the same day that the new issue arrives, I'm out of luck -- the magazine sells so quickly! What can I do to make sure that I receive my anxiously awaited copy? Signed, Dear Readers : There's only one answer... subscribe today! The printer literally can't keep up with the swift growth of circulation, which means that would-be buyers may find that situation, but not subscribers; their copies are set aside for them in advance! Use the coupon below, or send in your own order, if you prefer not to mutilate the magazine -- the coupon is for your convenience, not ours. Signed, f '   j Name i Address i . C'ty State. i Start with issue. Dept. A Why bother building a time machine when there's something much easier to find right in your own kitchen? Law make a study of the influence of animals on history. Although not as famous as Mrs. O'Leary's cow, Mrs. Graham's cat should certainly be included in any such study. It has now been definitely established that the experiences of this cat led to the idea of quick-frozen people, which, in turn, led to the passage of Zeritsky's Law. We must go back to the files of the Los Angeles newspapers for # to find the story. In brief, a Mrs. Fred C. Graham SI missed her pet cat on the same day that she put a good deal of food down in her home deepfreeze unit. She suspected ho connection between the two events. The cat was not to be found until six days later, when its owner went to fetch something from the deep-freeze. Much as she loved her pet, we may imagine that she was more horrorthan grief-stricken at her discovery. She lifted the little ice-encased body out of the deep-freeze and set it on the floor. Then she managed to run as far as the next door neighbor's house before fainting. Mrs. Graham became hysterical after she was revived, and it was several hours before she could be quieted enough to persuade anybody that she hadn't made up the whole thing. She prevailed upon her neighbor to go back to the house with her. In front of the deepfreeze they found a small pool of water, and a wet cat, busily licking itself. The neighbor subsequently told reporters that the cat was concentrating its licking on one of its hind legs, where some ice still remained, so that she, for one, believed the story. A follow-up dispatch, published a week later, reported that the cat was unharmed by the adventure. Further, Mrs. Graham was quoted as saying that the cat had had a large meal just before its disappearance; that as soon after its rescue as it had dried itself off, it took a long nap, precisely as it always did after a meal; and that it was not hungry again until evening. It was clear from the accounts that the life processes had been stopped dead in their tracks, and had, after defrosting, resumed at exactly the point where they left off. Perhaps it is unfair to put all the responsibility on one luckless cat. Had such a thing happened anywhere else in the country, it would have been talked about, believed by a few, disbelieved by most, and forgotten. But as the historic kick of Mrs. O'Leary's cow achieved significance because of the time and place that it was delivered, so the falling of Mrs. Graham's cat into the deepfreeze became significant because it occurred in Los Angeles. There, and probably only there, the event was anything but forgotten; the principles it revealed became the basis of a hugely successful business. How shall we regard the Zeritsky Brothers? As arch villains or pioneers? In support of the latter view, it must be admitted that the spirit of inquiry and the willingness to risk the unknown were indisputably theirs. However, their pioneering -- if we agree to call it that -- was, equally indisputably, bound up with the quest for a fast buck. Some of their first clients paid as high as # for the initial freezing, and the exorbitant rate of # per year as a storage charge. The Zeritsky Brothers owned and managed one of the largest quick-freezing plants in the world, and it was their claim that converting the freezing equipment and storage facilities to accommodate humans was extremely expensive, hence the high rates. When the early clients who paid these rates were defrosted years later, and found other clients receiving the same services for as little as #, they threatened a row and the Zeritskys made substantial refunds. By that time they could easily afford it, and since any publicity about their enterprise was unwelcome to them, all refunds were made without a whimper. # became the standard rate, with # per year the storage charge, and no charge for defrosting. The Zeritskys were businessmen, first and last. Anyone who had the fee could put himself away for whatever period of time he wished, and no questions asked. The ironclad rule that full payment must be made in advance was broken only once, as far as the records show. A certain young man had a very wealthy uncle, residing in Milwaukee, whose heir he was, but the uncle was not getting along in years fast enough. The young man, then # years old, did not wish to waste the "best years of his life" as a poor boy. He wanted the money while he was young, but his uncle was as healthy as he was wealthy. The Zeritskys were the obvious dnswer to his problem. The agreement between them has been preserved. They undertook to service the youth without advance payment. They further undertook to watch the Milwaukee papers until the demise of the uncle should be reported, whereupon they would defrost the boy. In exchange for this, the youth, thinking of course that money would be no object when he came out, agreed to pay double. The uncle lived # years longer, during which time he seems to have forgotten his nephew and to have become deeply interested in a mystic society, to which he left his entire fortune. The Zeritskys duly defrosted the boy, and whether they or he were the more disappointed is impossible to imagine. They never forgot the lessee), and never made another exception to their rule. He, poor fellow, spent the rest of his life, including the best years, paying off his debt which, at # plus # years at # per year, and the whole doubled, amounted to #. The books record his slow but regular payments over the next # years, and indicate that he had only # left to pay when he died. We may, I think, assume that various underworld characters who were grateful ex-clients of the Zeritskys were instrumental in persuading the boy to keep up his payments. Criminals were the first to apply for quick-freezing, and formed the mainstay of the Zeritskys' business through the years. What more easy than to rob, hide the loot (except for that all-important advance payment), present yourself to the Zeritskys and remain in their admirable chambers for five or ten years, emerge to find the hue and cry long since died down and the crime forgotten, recover your haul and live out your life in luxury? Due to the shady character of most of their patrons, the Zeritskys kept all records by a system of numbers. Names never appeared on the books, and anonimity was guaranteed. Law enforcement agents, looking for fugitives from justice, found no way to break down this system, nor any law which they could interpret as making it illegal to quick-freeze. Perhaps the truth is that they did not search too diligently for a law that could be made to apply. As long as the Zeritskys kept things quiet and did not advertise or attract public attention, they could safely continue their bizarre business. City officials of Los Angeles, and particularly members of the police force, enjoyed a period of unparalleled prosperity. Lawyers and other experts who thought they were on the track of legal means by which to liquidate the Zeritsky empire found themselves suddenly able to buy a ranch or a yacht or both, and retire forever from the arduous task of earning a living. Even with a goodly part of the population of Los Angeles as permanent pensioners, the Zeritsky fortune grew to incredible proportions. By the time the Zeritsky Brothers died and left the business to their sons, it was a gold mine, and an inexhaustible one at that. During these later years, the enterprise began to attract a somewhat better class of people. Murderers and other criminals continued to furnish the bulk of the business, but as word of this amazing service seeped through the country, others began to see in it an easy way of solving their problems. They were encouraged, too, by the fact that the process was painless, and the firm completely reliable. There were no risks, no accidents, no fatalities. One could, in short, have confidence in the Zeritskys. Soon after Monahan's great exposure rocked the nation, however, many of these better-type clients leaped into print to tell their experiences. One of the most poignant stories came from the daughter of a Zeritsky client. Her father was still, at the age of one hundred and two, passionately interested in politics, but the chances of his lasting until the next election were not good. The daughter herself suggested the deep freeze, and he welcomed the idea. He decided on a twenty year stay because, in his own words, "If the Republicans can't get into the White House in twenty years, I give up." Upon his return, he found that his condition had not been fulfilled. His daughter described him as utterly baffled by the new world. He lived in it just a week before he left it, this time for good. She states his last words were, "How do you people stand it?" Some professional people patronized the Zeritskys, chiefly movie stars. After the expose, fan magazines were filled with accounts of how the stars had kept youthful. The more zealous ones had prolonged their screen lives for years by the simple expedient of storing themselves away between pictures. We may imagine the feelings of their public upon discovering that the seemingly eternal youth of their favorites was due to the Zeritskys and not, as they had been led to believe, to expensive creams, lotions, diet and exercise. There was a distinctly unfavorable reaction, and the letter columns of the fan magazines bristled with angry charges of cheating. But next to criminals, the majority of people who applied for quick-freezing seems to have been husbands or wives caught in insupportable marital situations. Their experiences were subsequently written up in the confession magazines. It was usually, the husband who fled to Los Angeles and incarcerated himself for an appropriate number of years, at the end of which time his unamiable spouse would have died or made other arrangements. If we can believe the magazines, this scheme worked out very well in most cases. There was, inevitably, one spiteful wife who divined her husband's intentions. By shrewd reasoning, she figured approximately the number of years he had chosen to be absent, and put herself away for a like period. In a TV dramatization rather pessimistically entitled You Can't Get Away, the husband described his sensations upon being deSt frosted after # years, only to find his wife waiting for him, right there in the reception room of the Zeritsky plant. "She was as perfectly preserved as I was," he said. "Every irritating habit that had made my life unbearable with her was absolutely intact." The sins of the fathers may be visited on the sons, but how often we see repeated the old familiar pattern of the sons destroying the lifework of the fathers ! The Zeritsky Brothers were fanatically meticulous. They supervised every detail of their operations, and kept their records with an elaborate system of checks and doublechecks. They were shrewd enough to realize that complete dependability was essential to their business. A satisfied Zeritsky client was a silent client. One dissatisfied client would be enough to blow the business apart. The sons, in their greed, overexpanded to the point where they could not, even among the four of them, personally supervise each and every detail. A fatal mistake was bound to occur sooner or later. When it did, the victim broadcast his grievance to the world. The story appeared in a national magazine, every copy of which was sold an hour after it appeared on the stands. Under St the title They Pat the Freeze on Me! John A. Monahan told his tragic tale. At the age of #, he had fallen desperately in love with a girl of #. She was immature and frivolous and wanted to "play around" a little more before she settled down. "She told me," he wrote, "to come back in five years, and that started me thinking. In five years I'd be #, and what would a girl of #I want with a man twice as old as her?" John Monahan moved in circles where the work of the Zeritskys was well known. Not only did he see an opportunity of being still only # when his darling reached #, but he foresaw a painless way of passing the years which he must endure without her. Accordingly, he presented himself for the deep-freeze, paid his # and the # storage charge in advance, and left, he claimed, "written instructions to let me out in five years, so there'd be no mistakes." Nobody knows how the slip happened, but somehow John A. Monahan, or rather the number assigned to him, was entered on the books for # years instead of five years. Upon being defrosted, and discovering that a quarter of a century had elapsed, his rage was awesome. Along with everything else, his love for his sweetheart had been perfectly preserved, but she had given up waiting for him and was a happy mother of two boys and six girls. Monahan's accusation that the Zeritskys had "ruined his life" may be taken with a grain of salt. He was still a young man, and the rumor that he received a hundred thousand for the magazine rights to his story was true. As most readers are aware, what has come to be known as "Zeritsky's Law" was passed by Congress and signed by the President three days after Monahan's story broke. Seventyfive years after Mrs. Graham's cat fell into the freezer, it became the law of the land that the mandatory penalty for anyone applying quick-freezing methods to any living thing, human or animal, was death. Also, all quick-frozen people were to be defrosted immediately. Los Angeles papers reported that beginning on the day Monahan's story appeared, men by the thousands poured into the city. They continued to come, choking every available means of transport, for the next two days -- until, that is, Zeritsky's Law went through. When we consider the date, and remember that due to the gravity of the international situation, a bill had just been passed drafting all men from # to #, we realize why Congress had to act. The Zeritskys, of course, were among the first to be taken. Because of their experience, they were put in charge of a military warehouse for dehydrated foods, and warned not to get any ideas for a new business. serial by Alfred Bester, the story of a criminal who can't fail... in a civilization where crime can't succeed! Self In the credo of this inspiringly selfless cyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues in science. Much too good for them ! St Portrait October #, # Princeton, ifacs is quite a place, quite a place, but the atmosphere's darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they're not puttering in the labs they're likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course, but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the ms end, whatever that is. You'd think fellows in something secret like that would dress and behave with a little more dignity. Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the pre-faded kind. October #, # M ET the boss this morning -- hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut, wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd thought to change into my dungarees before the interview. "Parks," he said, "you can count yourself a very fortunate young man. You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch in some of the background of the place." That would be most helpful, I said. I wondered, though, if he was as naive as he sounded. Did he think I'd been working in cybernetics .labs for going on six years without hearing enough rumors about if acs to make me dizzy? Especially about the ms end of if acs? "Maybe you know," he went on, "that in the days of Oppenheimer and Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies. It was run pretty loosely then -- in addition to the mathematicians and physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around -- poets, egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows what all. By #, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency, so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now, pret ty keen." I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into? "Sure thing," he said. "You're going to take charge of a very important lab. The Pro lab." I guess he saw my puzzled look. "Pro -- that's short for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal. With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge." I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the hush-hush ms work that was going on at if Acs and it sounded so exciting that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into that end of things. "Look here, Parks," the boss said. He seemed a little peeved. "Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team, one thing he's best suited for, and what you're best suited for, obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those photoelectric-cell insects. You pulled you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking, that. Very keen." It was just luck, I told him modestly. "Nonsense," the boss insisted. "You're first and foremost a talented neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department. There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about ms, forget it fast -- it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get into with loose talk. Remember that." I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice. Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real standing in the field if it gets around that you're an ms man. I had my heart set on getting into ms. October #, # TT never rains, etc. : now it turns  out that Len Ellsom's here, and he's in ms! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week, it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes and tramp into the woods to cut logs for theif fireplace. Well, this morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions. "You can't get away from it," he said. "emc # is in a tree trunk as well as in a uranium atom or a solar system. When you're hacking away at a particular tree, though, you don't think much about such intangibles -- like any good, untheoretical lumberjack, you're a lot more concerned with superficialities, such as which way the grain runs, how to avoid the knots, and so on. It's very restful. So long as a cyberneticist is sawing and chopping, he's not a sliver of uncontaminated cerebrum contemplating the eternal slippery verities of gravity and electromagnetism; he's just one more guy trying to slice up one more log. Makes him feel he belongs to the human race again. Einstein, you know, used to get the same results with a violin." Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject. I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical, anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely because, when my saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that knot. as of all matter in the Universe, is emc # . It's my job to know it, and it's very satisfying to know that I know it and that the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up. "Bravo, Goldie," he said. "Let us by all means pretend that we belong to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!" I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste and -- as I might have guessed -- it was Len Ellsom. He was just as surprised as I was. "Well," he said, "if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs." After m. i. t. I had spent some time out in California doing neuro-cyber research, I explained -- but what was he doing here? I'd lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three times while he was working on the brain. "I was with Remington a couple of years," he told me. "If I do say so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain -- in addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could whistle Dixie and, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed precincts." "Oh?" I said. "Does that mean you're in ms?" It wasn't an easy idea to accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual. "Ollie, my boy," he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his finger to his lips, "in the beginning was the word and the word was mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this keen place. We all have a job to do on the team." I suppose that was meant to be a humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a clown. We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the way back and said, "Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie. It's been a long time." He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's right in the middle of ms! That lad certainly gets around. It's the usual Ellsom charm, I suppose. The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's stilt trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at Len's wisecracks. October #, # Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture. A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs because, while the neuromotor systems in legs and arms are a lot alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs, the boss figures, we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will have been licked. Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed Hospital -- fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a land mine explosion outside Pyongyang -- and shipped him up here to be a subject in our experiments. When Kujack arrived, th neuro boys made a major dec) sion. It didn't make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly into the muscles and nerves of Kujack's stumps; the surgical procedure in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a lot of pain for the subject and, what's more to the point, means long delays each time while the tissues heal. Instead, they hit on the idea of integrating permanent metal and plastic sockets into the stumps, so constructed that each new experimental limb can be snapped into place whenever it's ready for a trial. By the time I took over, two weeks ago, Goldweiser had the sockets worked out and fitted to Kujack's stumps, and the muscular and neural tissues had knitted satisfactorily. There was only one hitch: twenty-three limbs had been designed, and all twentythree had been dismal flops. That's when the boss called me in. There's no mystery about the failures. Not to me, anyhow. Cybernetics is simply the science of building machines that will duplicate and improve on the organs and functions of the animal, based on what we know about the systems of communication and control in the animal. All right. But in any particular cybernetics project, everything depends on just how many of the functions you want to duplicate, just how much of the total organ you want to replace. That's why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become the real glamor boys of the profession. They're not asked to duplicate the human brain in its entirety -- all they have to do is isolate and imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it's a simple operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic. The robot brain called the Eniac, for example, is exactly what its name implies -- an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and it just has to be able to integrate and compute figures faster and more accurately than the human brain can. It doesn't have to have daydreams and nightmares, make wisecracks, suffer from anxiety, and all that. What's more, it doesn't even have to look like a brain or fit into the tiny space occupied by a real brain. It can be housed in a sixstory building and look like an overgrown typewriter or an automobile dashboard or even a pogo stick. All it has to do is tell you that two times two equals four, and tell you fast. When you're told to build an artificial leg that'll take the place of a real one, the headaches begin. Your machine must not only look like its living model, it must also balance and support, walk, run, hop, skip, jump, etc., etc. Also, it must fit into the same space. Also, it must feel everything a real leg feels -- touch, heat, cold, pain, moisture, kinesthetic sensations -- as well as execute all the brain directed movements that a real leg can. So you're not duplicating this or that function; you're reconstructing the organ in its totality, or trying to. Your pro must have a full set of sensorymotor communication systems, plus machines to carry out orders, which is impossible enough to begin with. But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only equal the real thing, it must be superior! That means creating a synthetic neuro-muscular system that actually improves on the nerves and muscles Nature created in the original! When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last week -- it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor -- Goldweiser said something that made an impression on me. "They don't want much from us," he said sarcastically. "They just want us to be God." I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he hajl a point. Len Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in the papers, I have to be God! October #, # of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course, he's very cooperative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come to think of it, he reminds me of Len. Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face was expressionless. "All right," I said. "Let's make a test. I understand you used to be quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a football and try to do it now." He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever. "You seem to think something's pretty funny," I said. "Don't get me wrong, Doc," he said, much too innocently. "It's just that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of me as a bedbug." "Where did you get that idea?" "From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night. He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in the business." I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack. October #, # FTHE boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how things were coming in the Pro lab. "As I see it," I said, "there arc two sides to the problem, the kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K side -- I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that moves damned well. I don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot simpler." "You mean," the boss said with a smile, "that it's stumping you." I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few things going on at ifacs that can be talked about, he's impatient for us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people get worried when they know there's something like ifacs going, but don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about our work. I knew I was taking an awful thing to him the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've just begun to work on. "By the way, sir," I said, "I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I didn't. know he was here." "Do you know him?" the boss said. "Good man. One of the best brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere." I explained that Len had gotten his degree at m.i.t. the year before I did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the Remington-Rand ballistics computer. "He did indeed," the boss said, "but that's not the half of it. After that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a matter of fact, that's why he's here." I said I hadn't heard about the chess player. "As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you won't hear any more about it from me." I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself. If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to something importantmilitarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not having guessed it before. Brains-and-games -- that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain that's useful in military strategy. That's what Len Ellsom's in the middle of. boss said after we'd sawed for a while. "Keen. But he's a little erratic -- quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't that your impression?" "Definitely," I said. "I'd be the last one in the world to say a word against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people take seriously. He used to write poetry." "I'm very glad to know that," the boss said. "Confirms my own feeling about him." So the boss has some doubts about Len. October #, # Len. It all started after dinner when he showed up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, "Ollie, you've been avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till debt and death do us part." I saw immediately that he was drunk -- he always gets his words mixed up when he's drunk -- and I tried to placate him by explaining that it wasn't anything like that: I'd been busy. "If we're pals," he said, "come on and have a beer with me." There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong records. "Sorry, kid," he said. "I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on this side of the tracks." Len has always been very snobbish about my interest in folk music. I asked him what he'd been doing during the day. "Lushing it up," he said. "Getting stinking from drinking." He still likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form of protest against what he regards as the "genteel" manner of academic people. "I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village. Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our assets in the joints." What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about? "Restless for going on three years now." His face grew solemn, as though he were thinking it over very carefully. "I'll amend that statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for going on three years. Ever since -- " If it was something personal --  I suggested. "It is not something personal," he said, mimicking me. "G; is I can tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess." A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said. "Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day," Len mumbled. "I did work on. the RemingtonRand computer, sure, but I didn't come between I spent a couple years at the Bell Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon -- or, rather, to begin with there was Norbert Wiener back at m.i.t. -- it's complicated..." "Look," I said, "are you sure you want to talk about it?" ' "Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve," he said belligerently. "Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern, no, Von TVeumann and Morganstern. You remember, they did a mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker, tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their findings in a volume you certainly know, The Theory of Games. "Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine that would play a better than average I game of chess. Right after that, back in '# or maybe it was '#, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to build the robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth -- forthwith -- to do. Sometime in '#, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and assigned to Bell to work with him." "Maybe we ought to start back," I cut in. "I've got a lot of work to do." "The night is young," he said, "and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawnpusher wasn't so hot -- it could beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great day in '#, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in and taken over the whole project. "Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player, sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington, and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game. That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got really loaded." What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt happy. "Listen., Ollie," he said, "for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy Scout for once in your life." If he was going to insult me -- "No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any five-year-old could chatemeck -- checkmate -- me with his brains tied behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you find that terrifying?" "Not at all," I said. " You made the machine, didn't you? Therefore, no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel proud to have devised a powerful new tool." "Some tool," he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly understand what he was saying. "The General Staff boys in Washington were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good reason -- they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble. "In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up ifacs and handed us a top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war. "We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago." So that was the secret of ms! The most extraordinary machine ever devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider. "Why all the jitters?" I said. "This could be the most wonderful tool ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether." Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space. Then he turned to me. "Steve Lundy has a cute idea," he said. "He was telling me about it this afternoon. He's a bum, you see, but he's got a damned good mind and he's done a lot of reading. Among other things, he's smart enough to see that once you've got your theory of games worked out, there's at least the logical possibility of converting your Eniac into what he calls an Strategy Integrator and Computer. And he's guessed, simply from the Pentagon's hush-hush policy about it, that that's what we're working on here at ifacs. So he holds forth on the subject of Emsiac, and I listen." "What's his idea?" I asked. "He thinks Emsiac might eliminate war, too, but not in the way a Boy Scout might think. What he says is that all the industrialized nations must be working away like mad on Emsiac, just as they did on the atom bomb, so let's assume that before long all the big countries will have more or less equal ms machines. All right. A cold war gets under way between countries A and B, and pretty soon it reaches the showdown stage: Then both countries plug in their Emsiacs and let them calculate the date on which hostilities should begin. If the machines are equally efficient, they'll hit on the same date. If there's a slight discrepancy, the two countries can work out a compromise date by negotiation. "The day arrives. A's Emsiac is set Up in its capital, B's is set up in its capital. In each capital the citizens gather around their strategy machine, the officials turn out in high hats and cutaways, there are speeches, pageants, choral singing. mass dancing -- the ritual can be worked out in advance. Then, at an agreed time, the crowds retreat to a safe distance and a committee of the top cyberneticists appears. They climb into planes, take off and -- this is beautiful -- drop all their atom bombs and H-bombs on the machines. It happens simultaneously in both countries, you see. That's the neat part of it. The occasion is called International Mushroom Day. "Then the cyberneticists in both countries go back to their vacuum tubes to work on another Emsiac, and the nuclear physicists go back to their piles to build more atom bombs, and when they're ready they have another Mushroom Day. One Mushroom Day every few years, whenever the diplomatic-strategic situation calls for it, and nobody even fires a B-B gun. Scientific war. Isn't it wonderful?" B Y the time Len finished this peculiar speech, I'd finally managed to get him out of the tavern and back into his car. I started to drive him back to the ra I Institute, my ears still vibrating with the hysterical yelps of Armstrong's trumpet. I'll never for the life of me understand what Len sees in that kind of music. It seems to me such an unhealthy sort of expression. "Lundy's being plain silly," I couldn't help saying. "What guarantee has he got that on your Mushroom Day, Country B wouldn't make a great display of destroying one Emsiac and one set of bombs while it had others in hiding? It's too great a chance for A to take -- she might be throwing away all her defenses and laying herself wide open to attack." "See what I mean?" Len muttered. "You're a Boy Scout." Then he passed out, without saying a word about Marilyn. Hard to tell if he sees anything of her these days. He does see some pretty peculiar people, though. I'd like to know more about this Steve Lundy. November #, # I 'VE done it! Today I split up the lab into two entirely independent operations, K and N. Did it all on my own authority, haven't breathed a word about it to the boss yet. Here's my line of reasoning. On the K end, we can get results, and fast: if it's just a matter of building a pro that work like the real leg, regardless of what makes it work, it's a cinch. But if it has to be worked by the brain, through the spinal cord, the job is just about impossible. Who knows if we'll ever learn enough about neuro tissue t build our own physico-chemicoelectrical substitutes for it? As I proved in my robot mothl and bedbugs, I can work up electronic circuits that seem to duplicate one particular function ofanimal nerve tissue -- one robot is attracted to light like a motl the other is repelled by light like a bedbug -- but I don't know how to go about duplicating the tissue itself in all its functions. And until we can duplicate nerve tissue, there's no way to provide our artificial limbs with a neuromotor system that can be hooked up with the central nervous system. The best I can do along those lines is ask Kujack to kick and get a wriggle of the big toe instead. So the perspective is clear. Mechanically, kinesthetically, motorically, I can manufacture a hell of a fine leg. Neurally, it would take decades, centuries maybe, to get even a reasonable facsimile of the original -- and maybe it will never happen. It's not a project I'd care to devote my life to. If Len Ellsom had been working on that sort of thing. #S he wouldn't have gotten his picture in the paper so often, you can be sure. So, in line with this perspective, I've divided the whole operation into two separate labs, K-Pro and N-Pro. I'm taking charge of K-Pro myself, since it intrigues me more and I've got these ideas about using solenoids to get lifelike movements. With any kind of luck I'll soon have a peach of a mechanical limb, motor-driven and with its own built-in power plant, operated by push-button. Before Christmas, I hope. Got just the right man to take over the neuro lab -- Goldweiser, my assistant. I weighed the thing from every angle before I made up my mind, since his being Jewish makes the situation very touchy : some people will be snide enough to say I picked him to be a potential scapegoat. Well, Goldweiser, no matter what his origins may be, is the best neuro man I know. Of course, personally -- although my personal feelings don't enter into the picture at all -- I am just a bit leary of the fellow. Have been ever since that first log-cutting expedition, when he began to talk in such a peculiar way about needing to relax and then laughed so hard at Len's jokes That sort of talk always indicates to me a lack of reverence for your job: if a thing's worth doing at all, etc. Of course, I don't mean that Goldweiser's cynical attitude has anything to do with his being Jewish; Len's got the same attitude and he's not Jewish. Still, this afternoon, when I told Goldweiser he's going to head up the N-Pro lab, he sort of bowed and said, "That's quite a promotion. I always did want to be God." I didn't like that remark at all. If I'd had another neuro man as good as he is, I'd have withdrawn the promotion immediately. It's his luck that I'm tolerant, that's all. November #, # invitation. Bought him several Martinis, then brought up Lundy's name and asked who he was, he sounded interesting. "Steve?" Len said. "I roomed with him my first year in New York." I asked what Steve did, exactly. "Reads, mostly. He got into the habit back in the #s, when he was studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. When the Civil War broke out in Spain, he signed up with the Lincoln Brigade and went over there to fight, but it turned out to be a bad mistake. His reading got him in a lot of trouble, you see; he'd gotten used to asking all sorts of questions, so when the Moscow Trials came along, he asked about them. Then the N.K.V.D. began to pop up all over Spain, and he asked about it. "His comrades, he discovered, didn't like guys who kept asking questions. In fact, a couple of Steve's friends who had also had an inquiring streak were found dead at the front, shot in the back, and Steve got the idea that he was slated for the same treatment. It seemed that people who asked questions were called saboteurs, TrotskyiteFascists or something, and they kept dying at an alarming rate." I ordered another Martini for Len and asked how Steve had managed to save himself. "He beat it across the mountains into France," Len explained. "Since then he's steered clear of causes. He goes to sea once in a while to make a few bucks, drinks a lot, reads a lot, asks some of the shrewdest questions I know. If he's anything you can put a label on, I'd say he was a touch of Rousseau, a touch of Tolstoi, plenty of Voltaire. Come to think of it,' a touch of Norbert Wiener too. Wiener, you may remember, used to ask some damned iconoclastic questions for a cyberneticist. Steve knows Wiener's books by heart." Steve sounded like a very colorful fellow, I suggested, "Yep," Len said. "Marilyn used to think so." I don't think I moved a muscle when he said it; the smile didn't leave my face. "Ollie," Len went on, "I've been meaning to speak to you about Marilyn. Now that the subject's come up -- " "I've forgotten all about it," I assured him. "I still want to set you straight," he insisted. "It must have looked funny, me moving down to New York after commencement and Marilyn giving up her job in the lab and following two days later. But never mind how it looked. I never made a pass at her all that time in Boston, Ollie. That's the truth. But she was a screwy, scatterbrained dame and she decided she was stuck on me because I dabbled in poetry and hung around with artists and such in the Village, and she thought it was all so glamorous. I didn't have anything to do with her chasing down to New York, no kidding. You two were sort of engaged, weren't you?" "It really doesn't matter," I said. "You don't have to explain." I finished my drink. "You say she knew Lundy?" "Sure, she knew Lundy. She also knew Kram, Rossard, Broyold, Boster, De Kroot and Hayre. #  She knew a whole lot of guys before she was through." "She always was sociable." "You don't get my meaning," Len said. "I am not talking about Marilyn's gregarious impulses. Listen. First she threw herself at me, but I got tired of her. Then she threw herself at Steve and he got tired of her. Damn near the whole male population of the Village got tired of her in the next couple years." "Those were troubled times. The war and all." "They were troubled times," Len agreed, "and she was the source of a fair amount of the trouble. You were well rid of her, Ollie, take my word for it. God save us from the intense Boston female who goes bohemian -- the icicle parading as the torch." "Just as a matter of academic curiosity," I said as we were leaving, "what became of her?" "I don't know for sure. During her Village phase she decided her creative urge was hampered by compasses and T-squares, and in between men she tried to do a bit of painting -- very abstract, very imitative-original, very hammy. I heard later that she finally gave up the self-expression kick, moved up to the East Seventies somewhere. If I remember, she got a job dol ag circuit designing on some project for I.B.M." "She's .probably doing well at it," I said. "She certainly knew her drafting. You know, she helped lay out the circuits for the first robot bedbug I ever built." November #, # TIG step forward, if it isn't un-- seemly to use a phrase like that in connection with Pro research. This afternoon we completed the first two experimental models of my self-propelled solenoid legs, made of transparent plastic so everything is visible -- solenoids, batteries, motors, thyratron tubes and transistors. Kujack was waiting in the fitting room to give them their first tryout, but when I got there I found Len sitting with him. Theie were several empty beer cavs the floor and they were away a mile a minute. Len knows how I hate to see people drinking during working hours. When I put the pros down and began to rig them for fitting, he said conspiratorially, "Shall we tell him?" Kujack was pretty crocked, too. "Let's tell him," he whispered back. Strange thing about Kujack, he hardly ever says a word to me, but he never closes his mouth when Len's around. "All right," Len said. "You tell him. Tell him how we're going to bring peace on Earth and good will toward bedbugs." "We just figured it out," Kujack said. "What's wrong with war. It's a steamroller." "Steamrollers are very undemocratic," Len added. "Never consult people on how they like to be flattened before flattening them. They just go rolling along." "Just go rolling, they go on rolling along," Kujack said. "Like Old Man River." "What's the upshot?" Len demanded. "People get upshot, shot up. In all countries, all of them without exception, they emerge from the war spiritually flattened, a little closer to the insects -- like the hero in that Kafka story who wakes up one morning to find he's a bedbug, I mean beetle. All because they've been steamrolled. Nobody consulted them." "Take the case of an amputee," Kujack said. "Before the land mine exploded, it didn't stop and say, 'Look, friend, I've got to go off; that's my job. Choose which part you'd prefer to have blown off -- arm, leg, ear, nose, or whathave-you. Or is there somebody else around who would relish being clipped more than you would? If so, just send him along. I've got to do some clipping, you see, but it doesn't matter much which part of which guy I clip, so long as I make my quota.' Did the land mine say that? No! The victim wasn't consulted. Consequently he can feel victimized, full o self-pity. We just worked it out.' "The whole thing," Len said. "If the population had been polled according to democratic procedure, the paraplegia and other maimings could have been distributed to each according to his psychological need. See the point? Marx corrected by Freud, as Steve Lundy would say. Distribute the injuries to each according to his need -- not his economic need, but his masochistic need. Those with a special taste for self-damage obviously should be allowed a lion's share of it. That way nobody could claim he'd been victimized by the steamroller or got anything he didn't ask for. It's all on a voluntary basis, you see. Democratic." "Whole new concept of war," Kujack agreed. "Voluntary amputeeism, voluntary paraplegia, voluntary everything else that usually happens to people in a war. Just to get some human dignity back into the thing." "Here's how it works," Len went on. "Country A and Country B reach the breaking point. It's all over but the shooting. All right. So they pool their best brains, mathematicians, actuaries, strategists, logistics geniuses, and all. What am I saying? They pool their best robot brains, their Emsiacs. In a matter of seconds they figure out, down to the last decimal point, just how many casualties each side can be expected to suffer in dead and wounded, and then they break down the figures. Of the wounded, they determine just how many will lose eyes, how many arms, how many legs, and so on down the line. Now -- here's where it gets really neat -- each country, having established its quotas in dead and wounded of all categories, can send out a call for volunteers." "Less messy that way," Kujack said. "An efficiency expert's war. War on an actuarial basis." "You get exactly the same results as in a shooting war," Len insisted, "Just as many dead, wounded and psychologically messed up. But you avoid the whole steamroller effect. A tidy war, war with dispatch, conceived in terms of ends rather than means. The end never did justify the means, you see; Steve Lundy says that was always the great dilemma of politics. So with one fool sweep -- fell swoop -- we get rid of means entirely." "As things stand with me," Kujack said, "if anything stands with me, I might get to feeling sore about what happened to me. But nothing happens to the volunteer amputee. He steps up to the operating table and says, 'Just chop off one arm, Doc, the left one, .please, up to the elbow if you don't mind, and in return put me down for one-and-twothirds free meals daily at Longchamps and a plump blonde every Saturday.' " "Or whatever the exchange value for one slightly used left arm would be," Len amended. "That would have to be worked out by the robot actuaries." By this time I had the pros fitted and the push-button controls installed in the side pocket of Kujack's jacket. "Maybe you'd better go now, Len," I said. I was very careful to show no reaction to his baiting. "Kujack and I have some work to do." "I hope you'll make him a moth instead of a bedbug," Len said as he got up. "Kujack's just beginning to see the light. Be a shame if you give him a negative tropism to it instead of a positive one." He turned to Kujack, wobbling a little. "So long, kid. I'll pick you up at seven and we'll drive into New York to have a few with Steve. He's going to be very happy to hear we've got the whole thing figured out." I spent two hours with Kujack, getting him used to the extremely delicate push-button controls. I must say that, drunk or sober, he's a very apt pupil. In less than two hours he actually walked! A little unsteadily, to be sure, but his balance will get better as he practices and I iron out a few more bugs, and I don't mean bedbugs. For a final test, I put a little egg cup on the floor, balanced a football in it, and told Kujack to try a place kick. What a moment! He booted that ball so hard, it splintered the mirror on the wall. November #, # gave it to him straight about breaking up the lab into K-Pro and N-Pro, and about there being little chance that Goldweiser would come up with anything much on the neuro end for a long, long time. He was awfully let down, I could see, so, I started to talk fast about the luck I'd been having on the kinesthetic end. When he began to perk up, I called Kujack in from the corridor and had him demonstrate his place kick. He's gotten awfully good at it this past week. "If we release the story to the press," I suggested, "this might make a fine action shot. You see, Kujack used to be one of the best kickers in the Big Ten, and a lot of newspapermen will still remember him." Then I sprang fde biggest news of all. "During t! e last three days of practice, sir, he's been consistently kicking the ball twenty, thirty and even forty yards farther than he ever did with his own legs. Than anybody, as a matter of fact, ever has with real legs." "That's a wonderful angle," the boss said excitedly. "A world's record, made with a cybernetic leg!" "It should make a terrific picture," Kujack said. "I've also been practicing a big, broad, photogenic grin." Luckily the boss didn't hear him -- by this time he was bending over the legs, studying the solenoids. After Kujack left, the boss congratulated me. Very, very warmly. It was a most gratifying moment. We chatted for a while, making plans for the press conference, and then finally he said, "By the way, do you happen to know anything about your friend Ellsom? I'm worried about him. He went off on Thanksgiving and hasn't been heard from at all ever since." That was alarming, I said. When the boss asked why, I told him a little about how Len had been acting lately, talking and drinking more than was good for him. With all sorts of people. The boss said that confirmed his own impressions. I can safely say we understood each other. I sensed a very definite rapport. to November #, # IT was bound to happen, of course. As I got W from the boss, he decided after our talk that Len's absence needed some looking into, and he tipped off Security about it. A half dozen agents went to work on the case and right off they headed for Steve Lundy's apartment in the  Village and, sure enough, there was Len. Len and his friend were both blind drunk and there were all sorts of incriminating things in the room -- lots of peculiar books and pamphlets, Lundy's identification papers from the Lincoln Brigade, an article Lundy was writing for an anarchjst-pacifist magazine about wiat he calls Emsiac. Len and his friend were both arrested on the spot and a full investigation is going on now. The boss says that no matter whether Len is brought to trial or not, he's all washed up. He'll never get a job on any classified cybernetics project from now on, because it's clear enough that he violated his loyalty oath by discussing ms all over the place. The Security men came around to question me this morning. Afraid my testimony didn't help Len's case any. What could I do? I had to own up that, to my knowledge, Len had violated Security on three counts: he'd disai cussed ms matters with Kujack in my presence, with Lundy (according to what he told me), and of course with me (I am technically an outsider, too). I also pointed out that I'd tried to make him shut up, but there was no stopping him once he got going. Damn that Len, anyhow. Why does he have to go and put me in this ethical spot? It shows a lack of consideration. These Security men can be too thorough. Right off they wanted to pick up Kujack as well. I got hold of the boss and explained that if they took Kujack away we'd have to call off our press conference, because it would take months to fit and train another subject. The boss immediately saw the Injustice of the thing, stepped in and got Security to calm down, at least until we finish our demonstration. December #, # ference this afternoon was something. Dozens of reporters and photographers and newsreel men showed up, and we took them all out to the football field for the demonstrations. First the boss gave a little orientation talk about cybernetics being teamwork in science, and about the difference between K-Pro and N-Pro, pointing out that from the practical, humanitarian angle of helping the amputee, K is a lot more important than N. The reporters tried to get in some questions about ms, but he parried them very good-humoredly, and he said some nice things about me, some very nice things indeed. Then Kujack was brought in. He really went through his paces, walking, running, skipping, jumping and everything. It was damned impressive. And then, to top off the show, Kujack placekicked a football ninety-three yards by actual measurement, a world's record, and everybody went wild. Afterward Kujack and I posed for the newsreels, shaking hands while the boss stood with his arms around us. They're going to play Christmas present to one of our gallant war heroes (just what the boss wanted: he figures this sort of things makes ifacs sound so much less grim to the public), and Kujack was asked to say something in line with that idea. "I never could kick this good with my real legs," he said, holding my hand tight and looking straight at me. "Gosh, this is just about the nicest Christmas present a fellow could get. Thank you, Santa." I thought he was overdoing it a bit toward the end there, but the newsreel men say they think it's a great sentimental touch. Goldweiser was in the crowd, and he said. "I only hope that when I prove I'm God, this many photographers will show up." That's just about the kind of remark I'd expect from Goldweiser. Too bad the Security men are coming for Kujack tomorrow. The boss couldn't argue. After all, they were patient enough to wait until after the tests and demonstration, which the boss and I agree was white of them. It's not as if Kujack isn't deeply involved in this Ellsom-Lundy case. As the boss says, you can tell a man by the company, etc. December #, # pictures and articles from the papers; they gave us quite a spread. Late in the afternoon I went over to the boss's house for eggnogs, and I finally got up the nerve to say what's been on my mind for over a month now. Strike vhile the iron's, etc. "I've been thinking, sir," I said, "that this solenoid system I've worked out for Pros has other applications. For example, it could easily be adapted to some of the tricky mechanical aspects of an electronic calculator." I went into some of the technical details briefly, and I could see he was interested. "I'd like very much to work on that, now that K-Pro is licked, more or less. And if there is an opening in ms -- " "You're a go-getter," the boss said, nodding in a pleased way. He was looking at a newspaper lying on the coffee table; on the front page was a large picture of Kujack grinning at me and shaking my hand. "I like that. I can't' promise anything, but let me think about it." I think I'm in! December #, #  to be cleaned and pressed. Looks like I'm going to get some use out of it, after all. We're having a big formal New Year's Eve party in the commons room and there's going to be square dancing, swing-your-partner, and all of that. When I called Marilyn, she sounded very friendly -- she remembered to call me Oliver, and I was flattered that she did -- and said she'd be delighted to come. Seems she's gotten very fond of folk dancing lately. Gosh, it'll be good to get out of these dungarees for a while. I'm happy to say I still look good in formats. Marilyn ought to be quite impressed. Len always wore his like pajamas. a savage turn toward the player in white. Around Grant the crowd stood up and roared, and he felt suddenly tense and doubting. Then the player ducked, the ball shot through above him to smash against the court wall, and he controlled the rebound to send the sphere once mpre into erratic, darting flight. "Again!" Grant felt his muscles suddenly relax with release of anxiety. He turned to the girt. "Bee, I'm worried. It's not like Tony -- does he want to get killed? He should stop those shots, not dodge them. Are you sure he v s all right?" "Now, Granny."' The girt kept her eyes fixed on the court. "Remember, Tony took this match for charity. He wants the crowd to have a show, that's all. He is in splendid shaped # If scientific advance changes cur forms of courtship, can other sports be far behind? Not when telekinesis is finally perfected! S "No sleep," Grant went on worriedly. "I'm sure it must be that. If his brain were alert, he'd control ' that ball until Slag went crazy. Without sleep, you can't focus prop -- " "Please, Granny, stop!" In that instant her throbbing mind touched his, and he caught a glimpse of the alarm in her face. She, too, felt that something was wrong. But she tugged at his sleeve and pointed through the screen at the oval below. "Look!" Slag's feet were set wide apart, and his black-robed body stood square. But his head had begun a sort of slow wobble, from side to side, as the ball lanced in perihedral swings about the court. "Praise Allah !" whispered Grant. "A beautiful dance! Tony's thinking that gangster, into a coma." The white player was in concentration, using his eyes only rarely in shifting ever more complex movements to the sphere. Then the rhythmic pattern had become a wild corondo, with Slag as its center, and the dark figure stood hypnotized, with only spasmodic jerks of his brutal features to mark the fear in his mind. "Now," said Grant. His voice seemed loud in the awed silence of the spectators. "Now, Tony! Call it a day!" "Just touch him," whispered Bee. "Don't hurt him, Tony." It was as if they had signaled the player, even through the teleproof screen. Gradually the wild swings of the ball slowed. It circled Slag gently, dropped closer, and poised above him. Tony's mind was clearly in full control of the sensitive sphere. In a seat behind Grant, an excited man suddenly yelled, "Thumbs down, hard!" Obviously the crowd was ready to sacrifice its erstwhile hero. Then -- the ball moved, a small movement, and there was a roar. Uninfluenced, the ball dropped and rolled to the center court, and Tony stood in bewilderment as Slag shook himself awake. Grant leaped up and tried to push through to the box exit. Behind him, Bee clung. "Granny, what will you do? What can you... He shook her off and answered her with his mind as he struggled on. "Stop them, that's what! End the match." "How? You know you cannot !" But he felt her mind cling at the hope, and sent back reassurance. " can. They may not like it, but l can stop these matches. Don't worry, I'll get your brother safely out of there." She was relieved. Knowledge of his position -- his relation to the sport -- he felt her memory produce the reasons. Sport , thought Grant. I invented a sport. Oh, Allah! What has my sport become? And then her mind shrieked at him, stabbed at his brain: "Tony -- Tony darling!" Dazedly he heard the moan and fought a path to the transparent screen. Out on the court lay a white figure, outspread, and the ball rolled slowly past the dripping head. "Too late!" sobbed Bee. "Too late! Tony... there before Grant. He saw her, huddled over Tony's body, as he finally reached an open gate in the domed screen. On the opposite edge of the court, Psychosport Commissioner Woods was in conversation with the referee, Harmon. A Hash bulb glowed. Three reporters looked at the fallen player and spoke casually to each other. Towering above the group was Slag, staring down as if surprised. Grant went first to the Commissioner, who adopted a defensive attitude immediately, throwing up his hands. "Don't jump on me, now. It seems I am helpless. Ask Harmon yourself. There was nothing wrong that he could see." "That's nonsense," said Grant, "and you know it. No matteT who it is, a ball will not smash into an awake player. It simply cannot be done. Even a novice can overcontrol his opponent at that range." "Right.  It couldn't have happened." Sarcasm indicated the worry felt by Woods. "Damn it. Lane, that's the way it is. Harmon watched like a hawk in his bubble. The dome was sealed; not a single leak. Slag's second crouched behind the shield and never moved. I personally supervised Anthony's examination. He was in perfect condition. The only thing yet to check is the ball, but the ball..." "You have it? Never mind, no ball invented could do that alone. Tony could handle any ball, even without the new sensitive core. And in a hundred games every day, they don't ever have this sort of accident." "Just when Slag plays." The Commissioner touched Grant's arm helplessly. "The force of the man's mind must be terrible. Lane. He must be a superman. But what am I going to do? If I outlaw him without legal grounds..." He stopped, gulped nervously. "There may be no grounds from your point of view and theirs." Grant gestured at the crowd struggling through the exits. "But there are from mine. If I'm to remain Honorary President of the Association, Slag has # got to go. That's final!" Woods said, "Lane, you could stop this another way. If you don't, and you put Slag out, they will think... But Grant was already hurrying over to Bee Anthony. More people joined the group and talk died away as uniformed men bent down to the prone figure. Bee sobbed in Grant's arms. Her mind was withdrawn, grieving, and he patted her awkwardly while he thought of how much these young twins had come to mean to him in the years since he began his research in metaphysics. Just children, they had seemed at first. He had been young Doctor Lane, graduate of # on fellowship, and they were the kids he had worked with, who had shown remarkable powers of the mind. Tony and himself -- they had formulated the methods which still governed the cultivation of telekinesis. Grant had discovered "the principles, but it was the successful results of the Anthony boy's training which paved the Way for others to learn. Yet Bee was different. No amount of tutoring could help her influence an object with her mind. Different, but not inferior, for Bee was a telepath. With intimates her conversation was most strange -- much of it understood, yet left unspoken. Grant was one of the intimates. Her silent sorrow would have found him at any distance, but now he tried to evade it, because Tony was gone and Woods had come over to face the reporters --  and Slag. "Mister Woods," began one of the men, but the Commissioner raised a hand and turned to the giant player. "You have had my personal warning, Slag. Do, you think I will allow you to carry on your ugly career? Why, man, you're lucky the courts have not ruled you a murderer!" "It's not my fault," Slag said. "I didn't try to smash him, honest. I don't know my own strength, I guess." Bee's reddened eyes stared at the man, and Grant whispered, "Darling, can you tell?" "You know their minds are closed to me. I just feel... something evil. I must get out of here. Please, Grant, take me away." Behind Slag the little blond man Teagle, manager and second of the professional, spoke up. "Like Slag says. Commissioner, it isn't his fault. These fastthinking players match him, get him all excited in the court, and then wonder why they get knocked down. They just don't have the stuff to match a champ." "Slag is the only man ever warned to pull his shots," agreed #  a reporter who was taking notes. "Gentlemen!" Woods turned to Grant. "All of us here respect the opinion of Dr. Lane, who brought this sport into being and who is, in my estimation, its greatest exponent. I have consulted with him. If he is to retain any connection whatever with the game, he informs me. Slag must get out." There was silence. The men stared first at the florid-faced Commissioner, then at Grant. "More than personal considerations are involved," added Woods. "Slag's brutal style of play, according to Dr. Lane, endangersthe entire future of this grand sport." The blackrobed player looked around for support. Little Teagle pushed in front of the Commissioner. "You mean that hasbeen," he pointed at Grant, "is trying to get rid of my boy? It ain't fair, I say. Even when he tries to take it easy. Slag has it tough. They're scared, and won't match us -- even these amateurs. And yet look what we've done to pep the game up!" "You may be right, Mister Teagle. All things considered, however, I feel the merit of Dr. Lane's suggest -- " "Who is this Lane?" The little man's face was fierce. "So he starts the game, and invents the ball, so what? They used to call him a champ, the master, but that's a long time ago. Now that he's out, he don't like Slag coming up so strong. It kills him that he ain't the best any more." "That will be all for tonight. In the morning I'll have an official release ready." The reporters were tense, anxious to miss nothing. "And, gentlemen, you fyave a good idea of the nature of that statement." "Wait! I'm telling you," said Teagle. "We've tried to get a match with this Lane., Here it is, boys, the real truth. The guy wants Slag out because he's scared to meet him. Right here and now we challenge him! And I bet he hasn,'t got the guts to take us up." "I feel," said Woods, "that a scientist like Dr. Lane should not be subjected to this... this insolence." The reporters ran toward the exit, eager to call in this news break. Grant said nothing. Aware of Bee's feelings, he shot a look of contempt at Teagle and turned. Yet he knew, as they walked slowly away, that behind him were no feelings of good will. At best, the men awaited his next move -- rand until then suspended judgment. TN three days the city became for Grant Lane a savage jun# gle. The papers shrieked at him Teagle's endless insults. Slag's boastful challenge. Each statement by the Commissioner cleverly shifted more responsibility from Woods to himself, and the tragic end of yet another match was played down until it appeared that Slag, and not his opponent, was the injured party. After all, was his crowd-convincing argument, did they jail professional fighters in the old days when one was killed? Just a little accident in the heat of fair contest; it was no more than that. Yet there was more, this time. People appeared unsatisfied, disapproving of Grant, as if he should offer himself as a sacrifice to their sympathy with Slag. The one time he went restlessly into the streets, they watched him sullenly, waiting... He kept to his apartment after that, and studied furiously. No man could overcontrol an awake opponent in a direct shot -- if the hall was all right. As the ball closed in, the approached player's influence grew proportionately trtronger, while his opponent's lessened in inverse ratio. That was the reason Grant had originally declared the sport to be afe. He interrupted his work only briefly for Tony's funeral, and felt an obscure shame in facing Bee Anthony. Then the cellular organism of the sphere used in the game absorbed his attention again. It was an artificially nurtured nervecenter, a growth devised by himself, and seemed to offer the only possible answer. Perhaps this sub-life had acquired learning ability -- the ability to act independently. It seemed absurd, and yet how much was really known of this highly irritable stuff called living matter? Bee found him at his spattment the fourth morning. She seemed much more relaxed. "Tony hated useless grief," she said. "I had to come here, Granny. I had to know that we might see the end of all this." "Yes." Grant still felt a vague shame. "We'll have to stop Slag short, before he adds any more victims." "Oh, it's more than that! It's the people, too, and the knowledge that more Slags may appear! If all the matches suddenly... She broke off, frowning, as if uncertain whether to continue. "You see, Granny, Tony decided to play because of that. It wasn't even the charities, really. The people distrust you. Not just because you were wrong, but because they are suspicious of any probing into the powers of mind. They prefer fantasy to scientific hypothesis, and now Slag's triumphs..." She faltered, and unhappily twisted her face away,. "But Tony could have crushed Slag, too." "You know that was different. He had Slag hypnotized first. But Tony was awake when the ball struck!" "You're right. Bee. Frankly, I don't know what the answer could be. I'm working on the core of the ball. There is a chance -- " "I'm sure it was something else! Granny, have you thought of the screen? There must have been a leak, or a failure. Think of that crowd, hoping for their hero. Suppose they subconsciously influenced the sphere, directed it at Tony." He thought of the mob's reaction when Slag was helpless, and kept silent. It would be cruel to blast her one hope with nothing to offer in exchange. "You think I'm wrong, but what else would it be? The ball couldn't kill Tony by itself." Then she was in tears. "I should have been there to stop it. He wouldn't take a second -- I begged him to let me -- and I would have sensed any outside influence!" Grant recognized the guilt feelings she was suffering from. He tried to give comfort, but suddenly she was a woman, proud and independent, and would not stay. Only at the door for one moment did she turn appealingly to him. "Granny, you're not going to play Slag!" "Do you want me to? Should I obey the roar of the mob? And look!" He gestured at one of the papers, where a center-page box proclaimed, "Commissioner Rules Out Lane-Slag Match." "At thirty-seven they say I'm too old to play." "Don't do it, Grant." He felt her conflicting, torn emotions. "Yet, the funny thing is, I don't think I could live if they allow Slag to go on and on." equipped for working with micro-organisms. So, although preliminary study opened up no encouraging line of experimentation, next day he transferred his work to the university laboratories. He found his colleagues friendly -- one had cheerfully handled Grant's lectures during his absence -- but reserved, as if they suspected him to be guilty of some terrible sin, yet hoped he might prove himself innocent. Barker, the bio-chemist, listened to his theory of the .probability of change in the nerve center of the ball. "I have not worked with these cultures," he said. "You claim they are artificially produced solely to .provide a focal receptor for the controlling minds. Arc the cells nonreproductive?" "Yes. You see, the structure must be stable. Any mind can provide the necessary power to move light objects short distances, but focusing that power is the difficulty. Hence the sensitive core. The operator can sense where to direct his will." Barker reflected a moment. "So the culture is purely static -- doesn't even amplify the influence. In that case, I can only visualize such changes as natural radiation might bring about. No hope there for a recurrent pattern of change." "Learning ability -- acquisition of power to act voluntarily -- I thought the answer might be in that." "We'll see. Might as well begin there, anyway. Get us a few of the balls, Lane, and I'm sure the staff will gladly try to help out." That evening Grant walked onto the court of the Colliseum and was made certain of the city's anger toward him. Bee's idea was worth testing, and he had brought with him some student telepaths, but the instant he appeared the crowd rose in a storm of fury. When the announcer requested spectators to direct the ball at Grant, their wrath gave way to cheers, and they concentrated hopefully on crushing him. But the screen held, the telepaths sensed no invading influence as Grant whirled the ball about the court, until in disgust he signaled for the screen to be deactivated. Instantly the will of the crowd took hold. The sphere jerked erratically until concerted influence steadied it opposite Grant. Then it flashed into motion, a heavy, deadly missile, with all the mind power of a mob driving it murderously across the court at him. He stopped it easily, six inches away. ing further. We may not know everything living organisms can do, but we can certainly tell what is beyond their power. The tests are conclusive." Lorms, the behaviorist, nodded his head. For just an instant Grant felt confused, helpless. His original arguments for psychosport were came even more inexplicable -- they were logically impossible! And, somehow, that made him the criminal. That left him only one thing to do. It was humiliating to accept such a solution to his personal problem. He thought of Bee Anthony and nearly turned back. Only since the tragedy .had he realized how changed was their relationship -- and how important she was to him. Would she scorn his action, think him a slave to public pressure? Probably, but Grant forced his steps onward. In the lobby of the Page-Horton, Bee caught him by the arm. "Since when," she asked, "do you walk grimly past your friends?... No, Grant. Don't bother to think up a story. I know where you are going." He wanted to chase her away -- and to pull her close to him. But she glanced up and laughed. "You look so perplexed and silly. Professor Lorms called me, and of course I knew what you'd do." "Do you think," said Grant, "that I should. Bee? Is it right?" "Darling, fighting results from frustration and breeds even more frustration and anger. But somehow men get cornered until -- well, they have to. Not Tony. He was a gay fool, tilting at windmills. Oh, Grant! I know you're wrong, but you're right, too. and inside I'm so glad!" He wanted to erase the worry behind her gladness, to smother it with reassurance. They went up together to Stag's suite. Teagle was at the door. "Glad to see you, Mahomet," he said to Grant. "The contract's all ready to sign. I guess you'll want your cut for charity, eh?" "You won't, I suppose." "Not on your life. Excuse the double meaning. Miss." He smirked at Bee. "I ask you, who's going to match us after, we knock this one off?" Slag stared glumly from a chair, not even removing his hand from the glass beside him. "Practicing," he said. "Getting into shape for our tussle, Doc. Like Teagle said, you had to come across." Grant took the papers from the manager, filled in the blanks and signed. "Don't talk much, this Doc Lane," said Slag. "Should I show him, Teagle?" "Sure thing. Watch this practice, Doc." The big man concentrated on the amber bottle beside him. Slowly, jerkily, it lifted -- one inch, then two. Slag relaxed, and watched ring as it fell to the table. "My job when I retire," he said. "Got to pour it right into the glass. Pretty hot, eh?" Grant gave no warning. The man's trousers were deluged as the glass shattered in his hand. He leaped up cursing, and then moved quickly and with ugly purpose toward his visitors. "Careful, boy," warned Teagle. ' 'There's a dame present." For fifteen seconds Grant's eyes were locked with Slag's. He looked into their red-rimmed hatred, fought to see the depths of the man. Then, just before the other turned away, an unreasoning, unexpected emotion surged in Grant. It swept over and left him shaken, all in that instant. The emotion was fear. O UT on the court it was anger he felt, anger at Slag, who stood opposite and bowed to the noisy throng, anger at Teagle, who chanted insults until ordered behind the second's shield, at the spectators, packing the Colliseum in hopes of seeing a player maimed or killed -- and Bee Anthony, even at Bee. She had defied him, bribed her way in to act as his second, and had slipped behind the shield at his side of the court. In front of those jeering faces, it was out of the question to make her leave. There was a roar as the ball dropped from the referee's overhead bubble. Grant left it to Slag, let the man shoot crudely several times, and fought to calm himself. The shots were forceful, but easily stopped and returned. It was like Tony's match, almost too slow at first. Until the players became absorbed, it was hopeless to attempt any kind of hypnotic effects with the ball. Slag swung the sphere into rapid circles about the court. The crowd watched silently, as if impressed by the player's control. To Grant it was absurd -- he knew that any trained child could execute the movements. And yet, Tony must have felt so, too. But that was before -- The ball dropped on him like a hawk, and he almost laughed. To give the gasping crowd a thrill, he barely deflected the shot, and feigned amazement. Slag retrieved control. Beneath the sudden amusement, Grant was uneasy. Slag had never won a real victory -- never dazed or hypnotized an opponent before striking. All his triumphs rested on single, smashing thrusts. How was it possible? With such clumsy control, the professional could never set up a victory -- yet the record stood. Grant could not fathom the problem. If the match went on forever, he could see no way for Slag to drop him. And if he quickly whirled Slag into dazed defeat, the real mystery might never be solved. His opponent would merely have suffered defeat in a match not even recognized by the Commission. Now he could guess why Tony had played carelessly. It was not only victory that was sought. He had deluded himself in accepting such an irresponsible way out. The whole affair depressed him, knotted itself into mind-snaring tangles. The ball blurred again and he hardly cared, only ducking to let it splat against the shield behind him. A spurt of rage sent the sphere spinning back at Slag, but the other diverted it easily into a screen hugging orbit. Tony, Slag, Woods and Teagle -- they seemed to merge confusedly in his mind. They stood, each in turn, at the door of an ironbarred cell. For Grant, there was no way out. Win or lose, live or die, he was doomed. The light dimmed in the cell. Just for an instant Bee appeared, her hair She, too, faded out. Neither Bee the child, whom he did not love, nor Bee the woman, who did not love him, could save him. Before him gaped the bottomless pit of shame and penance. He had unloosed a monster on the world He had to pay for that. But first Grant had another debt to pay. He tried to throw off the depression, imagining as he did so a sob of joy in the disembodied Bee. He wrested the sweeping ball from Slag, even from the opposite end of the court. He spun it in wild orbits and compensated for the other's furious thrusts. Faster and faster he circled it. Slag's mind could not keep up the pace. The even swings acquired a jogging pattern, edged farther out -- to within ten feet of Slag, A quick break lanced behind the man, out again, and then the sphere fell into helical loops, thrice differentiated by harmonic variations, and swept wide around the court Somehow Slag's distress gave Grant no pleasure. Defeat seemed to face him everywhere; he read it in his opponent's twisted features, even in the futile effort t withdraw attention from the bait It's no good , he thought I hetva failed all along . Savagely he worked the sphere. He would do it quickly. There was no use expecting Tony's fate. The ball darted again for Slag and this time there could be no interference. It became pure mathematics, the motion, compile cated far beyond Tony's simple corondo, a flashing three-dimensional blur of color. He could not keep it up. f The concentration, brought an invading blackness to his mind. Somewhere there wait a dull roar, and he felt as if his own mind were cracking. His nerves quivered to put an end to it to touch Slag with the bah. Slowly, cautiously, he brought the sphere down... M Slag was not there l He gaped. His eyes suddenly found the crumpled heap across the court and relief swept over him. The man was beaten, in a state of collapse, and there was nothing more Grant could do. "Grant!' Bee screamed. "Oh, no! Grant darling, look up! Her radiance was almost blind ing. He halftwisted to reach her. # S and then his eyes caught it -- the ugly sheen of the fast-growing ball. Desperately he turned, and it shifted in unison. Then she shrieked once more, despairingly, and he threw himself flat, arms outstretched, toward her. The ball's speed was so great that it shattered to pieces against the shield behind him. From back of the barrier ran Bee. She crouched beside him, and her enveloping warmth lifted the evil spell from his mind. The loud confusion of the crowd burst upon him, he saw the referee's swiftly lowering bubble. He was in control of himself, thanks to Bee's interference, and could act on the knowledge so dangerously gained. "The murderer!" Grant pulled Bee up with him. "We've got him!" Opposite them, Slag still lay on the court. "I don't see how he did it," Grant said bewilderedly. "Not Slag -- him!" She pointed out the small, running figure. Teagle battered vainly at a gate. The still-active screen held him back, and the man's face was a despairing white grimace. Then Grant was upon him, and took him by the throat. room, still confused. "I begin to see," he said, "but what can I do with the two of them?" "Stop worrying." Grant was curt. "You can do nothing. The law will take Teagle, and without 'him Slag is just another bum." "He never knew," marveled Bee. "Slag never knew how he won." "I am to blame." Grant thought of the surging fear Teagle had directed in him at Slag's hotel. "I should have known that telepsychical phenomena could be used as a weapon. The man is a freak. He couldn't influence the ball, but communicated overpowering emotion -- without even seeing his subjects -- from behind his shield. The victims committed suicide, just as I nearly did before Bee..." "What did you feel -- a socalled death wish?" asked Woods. "No matter. Not seeing Slag collapse, he overplayed his hand." "Slag's being unconscious merely provided an anti-climax," said Grant. "There was a more important factor added this time. And if you don't mind, Woods, I have an apology to make in private to my one and only second." "Not just the only one, darling," said Bee. "But your permanent, till-death-do-us-part second! Right?" "Right!" Grant said. "That's the only thing tonight." said Woods, "of which I officially Taine. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages,  # . Bell's pseudonymous science fictions to get into book form during the last quarter-century, this deals with the science and mystery of evolution. It does so in a style that can only be forgiven because of its age (#) and with characterizations and a plot that can hardly be forgiven at all -- and yet it is a superb tale that every lover of science fiction will want to have around. The story tells of the effects (imagined) of certain short-wave radiations on biological life. At "low" voltages the unicellular life on the skin of the operator begins racing frantically through the stages of evolution on the unicellular level; it gives him the itch. At higher powers, the same speeding-up of life processes happens to some black widow spiders, a frog, and a chicken; and at still higher powers to man. The horror of the whole concept -- and the book is essentially a horror story -- is that Taine conceives of evolution as a circular process, ending near where it began, with the reptiles. This happens with the eggs that Bertha the hen mothered, and also with a man-child. One human .being is actually transmuted into the Man of the Future, rather than to a reptilian predecessor, and it is around this incredible genius, Miguel de Soto, that the plot revolves. Completely offtrail science fiction -- and highly recommended therefore. Murray Leinster. Introduction by Clil ton Fadiman. Random House, New York, #. #I pages, #. There has never been another science fiction collection like this one; it is unique. Leinster has been given the opportunity of selecting the stories he likes best from the whole field of science fiction, and somebody has not only published his selection but (presumably) paid him tq make it The result? Just as screwy and delightful a book as would be the one you or I would turn out if we were given this chance. The two introductions are worth the price of admission alone. Fadiman's is a beautifully literate and practically definitive anatomy of modern science fiction -- brief, succinct, scholarly and luminously intelligent. Leinster's is an enchantingly bizarre gadget-crazy, hobby-riding, history-hopping and totally Leinsterish gallop through the whole field of science, from Ben Franklin down to the atomic machine named Elsie, and then out beyond the Fitzgerald Contraction into the stories in the book itself. These number twelve, as follows: The Fascinating Stranger by Michael Fessier (a dandy tale you probably never have seen); Liquid Life by Ralph Milne Farley (about thinking viruses); Symbiosis by Will Jenkins (and no comment from me, either!) ; Number Nine by Cleve Cartmill (a story about a rabbit); Blind Alley by Malcolm Jameson (pleasant even though it's not science fiction -- it's Unknown Worlds fantasy) ; In Hiding by Wilmar Shiras (about mutants); No Woman Born by C. L. Moore (one of the truly great science fiction stories) ; The Strange Case ol John Kingman by Murray Leinster (ditto) ; Open Secret by Lewis Padgett (unforgettable goose pimpler) ; The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull by Anthony Boucher (bewildering!); and The Chromium Helmet by Theodore Sturgeon (l adore this tale). Five of the above -- at least -- have been anthologized before, but worth many more reprintings. At the end there is a list of # more anthologized stories that M. L. also liked. A wonderful list, indicating how rich and varied modern science fiction is. It's particularly valuable as a means of converting the heathen to science fiction, but you'll make sure you get the book back so you can read it yourself. mond F. Jones. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Los Angeles, Calif., #. # pages, #. A collection of six Jones novelets and short stories, ranging in quality from the fine tale that gives the book its title down to the piece of gadget-space-opera called Utility. In between, you have Jones on all levels. The Toy maker tells how a retired Professor of Peace and a physicist-inventor together defeat the war drive of a certain planet's politicians by "taking over" the imaginations of most of the children. They develop toys called "Imaginos" which operate through a combination of hypnotism and mass emotionalism. At first the children see fascinating games and actions in the toys; but later, as the war hysteria rises in the real world, the hand of violence actually strikes in the Imaginoworlds. The politicians are forced to abandon the war drive in order to save the children's sanity. A shocking fable for our times. The Model Shop tells of the advent of men from the future in an engineering development laboratory of today, and the hob thabresults when they apply their immensely advanced technology to our rather crude machine concepts. The Deadly Host is an unoriginal but exciting tale about mechanical insect-robots, self-reproducing, who live by draining Earth's electricity -- and, obviously, its civilization, too. Utility is really a low-grade, pseudo-funny space opera having to do with a pathological drunk named Hydrophobia McCord, some objets called Jewelworlds from the planet Merans, and a passel of other nonsense, including an honest-to-God Villain. Forecast is about weather-control in the future -- how men move storms about and create rain when they want it -- and how the Big Bad Hydroponics Trust tries to break 'em up because they are bringing back natural farming and putting hydroponics out of business. Excellent scientific imagination; pretty primitive plotting. As for Children's Room, it is in the grand tradition of the Padgett MacDonald Shiras Stapledon mutant stories. Here the mutants have been escaping to another dimension for hundreds of ' years; this particular tale tells how a modem one gets from our world to theirs. Chapman Andrews. Crown Publishers, New York, #. # pages, #. describes what it does. "How Nature Takes Care of Its Own" is what it says, and the book contains about # different examples of how animals of innumerable sorts, from spiders to marmots, camels to pickaback tadpoles, pikas to okapis (no kidding!) and pied-billed grebes to insect brownies, have adapted their ways to their environment in order to survive. The exciting tale is told by a master naturalist, and is illustrated with # magnificent fullcolor paintings and over # excellent black-and-white photographs. The paintings were done by Andre Durenceau, for the most part, with others contributed by Steven Dohanos, A. J. Kurka, C. B. Falls, et al. It is a book which shows, both in words and pictures, that science fiction still can be outdistanced by Nature, when Nature really tries! Gnome Press, New York , #. # pages, #.  matter, or matter in which each atom is composed of a negative nucleus and positive electrons -- just the opposite from the matter we know. Seetee is scientifically possible, having been prognosticated over ten years ago by Nobel prize winning physicists W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger and P. A. M. Dirac. They also posited that terrene and contraterrene matter would annihilate each other on contact -- # per cent efficient release of atomic energy! The uranium bomb releases something like # per cent. Wonderful meat for science fiction, one would say. And "Will here taken full advantage of the concept's possibilities -- technically speaking. But the book's quality as a novel? Here we have a parody United Nations on an interplanetary scale called The Mandate; a real narsty old corporation called Interplanet; The Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and the Earthian I-don't-know-what-all; and finally a few selfless people and their families who (unlike the others) want to develop seetee power for the Good of the People, and to hell with Profit. It's a good story if you can bear plowing through pages of literary corn-starch. The Puppet Masters Illustrated by Don Sibley Flying Saucers? Invaders from outer space? Nonsense! That this was any " sensible " person's reaction was one major advantage the parasites of Titan had over us. The other was their ability to take over a city without any apparent sign of doing so. Each parasite was a formless, featureless mass of protoplasm, helpless by itself but able to dominate its victim by clinging to the shoulderblades and taking over the body, the mind and the will Beaten in every battle with the ghastly invaders, man has one single weapon left -- his mind! But will that prove enough? of its powerless human host. The parasites had conquered the Mississippi Valley before we could get anyone to listen. I was in it from the start, along with the Old Man (my section chief as well as my father ) and another agent knowp to me as " Mary Cavanaugh ." We flushed the first parasite in Des Moines, Iowa, soon after their first landing, through one of the few failures on the part of the parasites to simulate human behavior, i.e., a man possessed failed to show a normal, healthy, male response to Mary's red-haired beauty. If not for that, the parasites would have been completely perfect fifth columnists. They would seize first those persons concerned with communications and public order and thereby suppress the very knowledge of their own existence. I myself was captured by one we had fetched back from Iowa, and I secured for them the city of New Brooklyn before I was recaptured and freed by the Old Man. Thereafter I was coerced by him into permitting myself to be "interviewed" while possessed by a parasite, but under close restraint. This was the foulest trick ever played on a man, for the Old Man used Mary as bait to force me to agree to being possessed again by one of the dirty slugs -- knowing that I was in love with Mary. It made me disgusted with them both. But it did enable us to learn where they came from -- Titan, moon of Saturn. This time we had proof we could show to the President. Not enough proof to convince Congress of the incredible danger, however. It took a joint session in which seven parasites were captured right on the floor of Congress, off the bodies of possessed Congressmen, before they granted emergency powers to act. By then the country was split in two, from Canada to New Orleans. With the President setting the example, the unconquered part of the country stripped down to shorts for men and shorts and halters for women in order to give the parasites no place to hide. A paratroop task force was organized to redeem the Central Valley. It was believed that the parasites were comparatively few in number and that the area could be recaptured by concentrating on stereo stations, police headquarters and the like. I was sent by the Old Man on a scouting expedition to Kansas City just before the air drop. I made the overwhelming discovery that we had vastly underestimated their numbers; Kansas City was not merely " secured " -- it was saturated. Well over # of the population was possessed, although the parasites, for reaeons of their own, were still maintaining the masquerade of a normal human society. I barely got out without being repossessed, but not in time to prevent the paratroop assault. Against such smothering odds, the task force was lost to the last man. Had we properly studied the parasites already captured, we might have predicted it, for , given an adequate supply of hosts, the Titans could multiply indefinitely, by conjugation iollowed by fission reproduction. We settled down to a stalemate siege. Under " Schedule Bareback " it seemed hardly possible for the parasites to infiltrate out of the Mississippi Valley, but, on the other hand, we had not devised any way to rescue the millions of human victims in the central states. As for me, I was s till shaken by the horror of being possessed. Mary and I took a tew days leave together and I bullied her into marrying me. We went to my cabin in the Adirondacks; there followed the only completely happy period of my life. We never listened to a newscast; we saw no one; we put the Titan parasites out of our minds. Just Mary, me, and my cat, Pirate, loafing together in purring contentment and letting the golden days drift by... until one night Mary stepped out to call the cat. When she came in, she was possessed. I could spot the tell tale hump under her negligee, could not fail to see the staring horror in her eyes. I tackled her -- but Mary herself was also an agent, almost as sfron as I was and just as skilled in the arts of rough-andletting her kill me, and without letting the parasite touch me. As a desperate last resort I forced her shoulders over the open fire in the fireplace, burning her badly , but causing the parasite to drop to the floor. I was busy then putting out her burning hair and clothing. When I turned, the cat was possessed by the parasite. I grabbed the cat, parasite and all, and forced them into the fire. I killed the Titan parasite, but in so doing killed my pet cat. I dug him a little grave, said good-by to him, and buried him. Then I sat beside Mary and waited for her to waken from the shot of sedative I had given her. About dawn Mary be n to struggle and moan. I put a band on her. "There, baby, it's all right. Sam's here." Her eyes opened and for a moment held the same horror. Then she saw me and relaxed. "Sam! Oh, darling, I've had the most terrible dream.' "It's all right," I repeated. "Why are you wearing gloves?' She became aware of her own dressings; she looked dismayed and said, "It wasn't a dream!' "No, dearest, it wasn't a dream. But it's all right; I killed it." "You're sure?" "Quite sure." "Come here, Sam. Hold me tight." I did, while trying to be careful of her burns. Presently her trembling stopped. "Forgive me, darling -- I'm weak and womanish." "You should have seen the shape I was in after I was possessed." "I did see. Now tell me what happened. The last I remember, you were trying to force me into the fireplace." "Look, Mary, I couldn't help it. I had to. There was no other way to get it off." "I know, darling, and thank you for doing it! Again I owe you everything." She then cried and I blew my nose and went on, "You didn't answer when I called, so I went into the living room and there you were." "I remember. Oh. darling, I tried so hard!" I stared at her. "I know you did. You tried to leave. But how? Once a slug gets you, there's no way to fight it." "Well, I lost -- but I tried." Somehow, Mary had forced her will against that of a parasite and that can't be done. I know. I had a sneaking hunch that had Mary not been able to resist the slug to some extent, however slight, I would have lost the struggle, handicapped as I was by "I should have used a light, Sam," she added, "but it never occurred to me to be afraid here." I nodded; this was the safe place, like crawling into bed or into sheltering arms. "Pirate came at once. I didn't see the slug until I had touched him. Then it was too late." She sat up. "Where is he, Sam? Is he all right? Call him." So I had to tell her about Pirate. She listened without expression, nodded and never referred to him again. I changed the subject by saying, "Now that you are awake, I had better fix you some breakfast." " Don't go!" I stopped. "Don't go out of my sight at all," she begged, "not for any reason. I'll get breakfast." "The hell you will. You'll stay in bed like a good girl." "Come here and take off those gloves. I want to see your hands." I did not take them off -- could not bear to think about it: the anesthesia had worn off. She said grimly, "Just as I thought. You were burned worse than I was." So she got breakfast. Furthermore, she ate. I wanted nothing but coffee. I did insist that she drink a lot, too; large area burns dehydrate the body. Presently she pushed aside her plate and said, "Darling, I'm not sorry it happened. Now we've both been there." I nodded dumbly. Sharing happiness is not enough. She stood up and told me, "We must go" "Yes," I agreed. "I want to get you to  doctor as soon as possible." "I didn't mean that." "I know you didn't." There was no need to discuss it; we both knew the music had stopped and it was time to go back to work. The heap we had arrived in was still sitting on my landing flat, piling up rental charges. It took about three minutes to burn the dishes, switch off everything, and get ready. Mary drove, because of my hands. Once in the air she said, "Let's go straight to the Section offices. We'll get treatment there and find out what has been going on -- or are your hands hurting too badly?' "Suits," I said. I wanted to learn the situation and I wanted to get back to work. I asked Mary to switch on the squawk screen to catch a newscast. But the car's communication equipment was as junky as the rest of it; we could not even pick up audio. Fortunately the remote control circuits were okay, or Mary would have had to buck traffic on manual. A thought had been fretting me; I mentioned it to Mary. "A slug wouldn't mount a cat just for the hell of it, would it?" "I suppose not." "But why? It has to make sense; everything they do makes sense, from their viewpoint." "But it did make sense. They caught a human that way." "Yes, I know. But how could they plan it? Surely there aren't so many of them that they can afford to gamble like that. Or are there?" I remembered Kansas City, saturated, and shivered. "Where did the slug come from? It had to get to the Pirate on the back of another host. What host? # say it was Old John -- John the Goat. Pirate wouldn't let any other human get close to him." "Old John?" Mary closed her eyes, thought hard, then opened them. "I can't get any feeling about it. I was never close to him." "By elimination I think it must be true. Old John wore a coat when everyone else was complying with the bareback order. Ergoj he was hag-ridden before Schedule Bareback. But why would a slug single out a hermit way up in the mountains?' "To capture you." "Me?" "To recapture you." It made some sense. Possibly any host that ever escaped them was a marked man. In that case, the dozen-odd Congressmen we had rescued were in special danger. I'd mark that down to turn in for analysis. On the other hand, the slugs might want me in particular. What was special about me? I was a secret agent. More important, the slug that had ridden me knew what I knew about the Old Man, and was aware that I had access to him. I felt emotionally certain that the Old Man was their principal antagonist; the slug must have known that I thought so, for he had had full use of my mind. That slug had even met the Old Man, talked with him. Wait a minute -- that slug was dead. My theory came tumbling down. And built up again at once. ""Mary," I asked, "have you used your apartment since the morning you and I had breakfast there?" "No. Why?" "Don't go back there for any purpose. I recall thinking, while I was with them, that I would have to booby trap it." "Well, you didn't, did you?" "No, but it may have been boobytrapped since then. There may be the equivalent of Old John waiting, spider fashion, for you -- or me -- to return there." I explained to her Mcllvaine's "group memory" idea. "I thought at the time he was spinning the dream stuff scientists are so fond of. But now it's the only hypothesis I can think of that covers everything... unless we assume that the titans are so stupid that they would as soon fish in a bathtub as in a brook. Which they aren't." "Just a moment, dear. By Dr. Mcllvaine's theory, each slug is really every other slug; is that it? In other words, that thing that caught me last night was just as much the one that rode you when you were with them as was the one that actually did ride you -- Oh, dear, I'm getting confused. I mean --  "You've got the general idea. Apart, they are individuals. In direct conference, they merge memories and Tweedledum becomes exactly like Tweedledee. If that is true, this one last night remembers everything learned from me, provided it has had direct conference with the slug that rode me, or a slug that had been linked through any number of slugs by direct conference to the slug that had ridden me, after the time it did -- which you can bet it did, from what I know of their habits. It would have -- the first one, I mean. Wait a minute. Take three slugs; Joe, Moe and, uh, Herbert. Herbert is the one last night; Moe is the one which -- " "Why give them names if they are not individuals?" Mary asked. "Just to keep them -- no reason; we'll just assume that if Mcllvaine is right, there may be actly who we are, by name and sight and everything, know where your apartment is, where mine is, and where our cabin is. They've got us on a list." She frowned. "That's a horrid thought, Sam. How would they know when to find us at the cabin? We didn't tell anybody. Would they simply stake it out and wait?" "They must have. We don't know that waiting matters to a slug; time may mean something different to them." "Like Venerians," she suggested. I nodded; a Venerian is likely as not to "marry" his own greatgreat-granddaughter -- and be younger than she is. It depends on how they estivate, of course. "In any case," I went on, "I've got to report this, including our guesses, for the boys in the analytical group to play with." I was about to go on to say that the Old Man would have to be especially careful, that it was probably he they were really after. But my secret phone embedded under my scalp sounded for the first time since leave had started. I answered and the Old Man's voice cut in ahead of the talker's: "Report in person." "On our way," I acknowledged. "About thirty minutes." "Make it sooner. You use Kay Five; tell Mary to come in by Ell One. Move!" He switched off before I could ask him how he had known that Mary was with me. "Did you get it?" I asked Mary. "Yes, I was in the circuit." "Sounds as if the party was about to start."  I begin to realize how wildly the situation had changed. We were complying with Schedule Bareback; we had not heard of Schedule Suntan. Two cops stopped us as we got out. "Stand still !" one of them ordered. "Don't make any sudden moves." You would not have known they were cops, except for the manner and the drawn guns. They were dressed in gun belts, shoes, and skimpy breech clouts. A second glance showed their shields clipped to their belts. "Now," the same one went on. "off with those pants, buddy." I did not move quickly enough. He barked, "Make it snappy! Two have been shot trying to escape today; you may be the third." "Do "it, Sam," Mary said quietly. I did it. It left me dressed in shoes and gloves, feeling like a fool -- but I managed to keep my gun covered as I took off my shorts. The cop made me turn around. His mate said, "He's clean. Now the other one." I started to put on my shorts; the first cop stopped me. "Looking for trouble? Leave 'em off." I said reasonably, "I don't want to get picked up for indecent exposure." He looked surprised, then guffawed and turned to his mate. "You hear that. Ski?" The second one said patiently, "Listen, you got to cooperate. You know the rules. You can wear a fur coat for all of me -- but you'll get picked up D.O.A. The vigilantes are a lot quicker to shoot than we are." He turned to Mary. "Now, lady, if you please." Without argument Mary started to remove her shorts. The second cop sa'd kindly, "That isn't necessary, lady, not the way those things are built. Just turn around slowly." "Thank you," Mary said and complied. The policeman's point was well taken; Mary's briefies and halter appeared to have been sprayed on. "How about those bandages?" the first one commented. I answered, "She's been badly burned. Can't you see that?" He looked doubtfully at the sloppy, bulky job I had done on the dressings. "Mmmm," he said, "if she was burned." "Of course she was burned!" I felt my judgment slipping; I was the perfect heavy husband, unreasonable where my wife was concerned. "Damn it, look at her hair! Would she ruin a head of hair like that just to fool you?" The first cop said darkly, "One of them would. The more patient one said, "Carl is right. I'm sorry, lady; we'lt have to disturb those bandages." I said excitedly, "You can't do that! We're on our way to a doctor. You'll just -- " Mary said, "Help me unroll the bandages, Sam." I shut up and started to peel up one corner of the dressing, my hands trembling with rage. Presently the older one whistled and said, "I'm satisfied. How about you, Carl?" "Me, too. Ski. Cripes, girlie, what happened?" "Tell them, Sam." So I did. The older cop finally commented, "So it's cats now. Dogs I knew about. Horses, yes. But you wouldn't think the ordinary cat could carry one." His face clouded. "We got a cat and now we'll have to get rid of it. My kids won't like that." "I'm sorry," Mary told him. "It's a bad time for everybody. Okay, folks, you can go." "Wait a minute," the first one said. "Ski, if she goes through the streets with that thing on her back, somebody is likely to burn her." The older one scratched his chin. "That's true. We'll just have to dig up a prowl car." Which they did. I had to pay the charges on the rented wreck, then went along as far as Mary's entrance. It was in a hotel through a private elevator; I got in with her to avoid explanations, then went back up after she got out at a level lower than the obvious controls of the car provided for. I was tempted to go in with her, but the Old Man had ordered me to come in by Kay Five. I was tempted, too, to put my shorts on. In the prowl car and during a quick march through a side door of the hotel, with police around us to keep Mary from being shot, I had not minded much -- but it took nerve to face the world without pants. I need not have worried. The short distance I had to go was enough to show me that a basic custom had gone with last year's frost. Most men were wearing clouts, but I was not the only man naked to his shoes. One in particular I remember; he was leaning against a street roof stanchion and searching with cold eyes every passerby. He was wearing nothing but slippers and a brassard lettered "vig" and he was cradling an Owens mob gun. I saw three more like him; I was glad that I was carrying my shorts. Few women were naked, but the rest might as well have been -- string brassieres, translucent trunks, nothing that could hide a slug. Most of the women would have looked better in togas. That was my first impression, but before long even that had worn off. Ugly bodies weren't any more noticeable than ugly taxicabs ; the eye ignored them. Skin was skin and what of it? I was let in to see the Old Man at once. He looked up and growled, "You're late." I answered, "Where's Mary?" "In the infirmary, getting treated and dictating her report. Let's see your hands." "I'll show them to the doctor, thanks. What's up?" "If you would ever bother to listen to a newscast," he grumbled, "you would know what was up." H AD Mary and I watched the stereo, our honeymoon would never have gotten to first base. My suspicion that the slugs could hide themselves on any part of the body and still control hosts had been correct; it had been proved by experiment before Mary and I had holed up on the mountain, although I had not seen the report. I suppose the Old Man knew it. Certainly the President and the high brass did. So Schedule Suntan replaced Schedule Bareback and everybody skinned down to the buff -- Like hell they did l The matter was still "Top Secret" at the time of the Scranton Riot. Don't ask me why; our government has gotten the habit of classifying information, practically all information, a Mother Knows Best-Dear policy. The Scranton Riot should have convinced anybody that the slugs were loose in Zone Green, but even that did not bring on Schedule Suntan. The fake air raid alarm on the East Coast took place, as I figure it, the third day of our honeymoon; afterward it took a while to figure out what had hapened, even though it was obvious that lighting could not fail by accident in so many different shelters. It gives me horrors to think about it -- all those people crouching in the darkness, waiting for the all-clear, while zombies moved among them, slapping slugs on them. Apparently in some air raid bunkers the recruitment was one hundred per cent. So there were more riots the next day and we were well into the Terror. Technically, the start of vigilantism came the first time a desperate citizen pulled a gun on a cop -- Maurice T. Kaufman of Albany was the citizen, and the cop was Sergeant Malcolm MacDonald. Kaufman was dead a half second later and MacDonald followed him, torn to pieces by the mob, along with his titan master. But the vigilantes did not really get going until the air raid wardens put organization into the movement. The wardens, being stationed above ground during raids, largely escaped, but they felt responsible. Not that all vigilantes were wardens, but a stark naked, armed men on the street was as likely to be wearing a warden's armband as the vig brassard. Either way, you could count on him shooting at any unexplained excrescence on a human body -- shoot and investigate afterward. dressed, I was brought up to date. The doctor gave me a short shot of tempus and I spent the time -- subjective, about three days; objective, less than an hour -- studying stereo tapes through an overspeed scanner. This gadget has never been released to the public, though it is bootlegged et some of the colleges around examination week. You adjust the speed to match your subjective rate and use an audio frequency stepdown to let you hear what is being said. It is hard on the eyes, but it is a big help in cramming. It was hard to believe that so much could have happened. Take dogs. A vigilante would kill a dog on sight, even though it was not wearing a slug -- because it was even money that it would be wearing one before sunrise, that it would attack a man and that the titan would change riders in the dark. A hell of a world where you could not trust dogs! Apparently cats were hardly eyer used; poor old Pirate was an exception. But in Zone Green dogs were rarely seen now by day. They filtered out of Zone Red at night, traveled in the dark and hid out at dawn. They kept showing up even on the coasts. It made one think of werewolf legends. I scanned dozens of tapes which had been monitored from Zone Red. They fell into three time groups: the masquerade period, when the slugs had been continuing the "normal" broadcasts; a short period of counter-propaganda, during which the slugs had tried to convince citizens in Zone Green that the government had gone crazy; and the current period in which pretense had dropped. According to Dr. Mcllvaine, the titans have no true culture; they are parasitic even in that and merely adapt the culture they find. Maybe he assumes too much, but that is what they did in Zone Red. The slugs would have to maintain the basic economic activity of their victims, since the slugs would starve if the hosts did. They continued that economy with variations that we would not use -- that business of processing damaged and excess people in fertilizer plants, for example -- but in general farmers stayed farmers, mechanics went on being mechanics, and bankers were still bankers. That last seems odd, but experts claim that any "division-oflabor" economy requires ari accounting system. But why did they continue human recreations? Is the desire to be amused a universal need? What they picked from human ideas of fun to keep and "improve on" does not speak well for us, although some of their variations may have merit. That stunt they pulled in Mexico, for example, of giving the bull an even break with the matador. But most of it just makes one sick and I won't elaborate. I am one of the few who saw even transcriptions on such things; I saw them professionally. I hoped that Mary, in her briefing, did not have to look at them, but Mary would never say so if she had. There was one thing I saw in the tapes so outrageous, so damnably disgusting that I hesitate to mention it, though I feel I must. There were men and women here and there among the slaves, humans -- if you could call them that -- without slugs. I hate slugs, but I would turn gade. W E were losing ground everywhere; our methods were effective only in stopping their spread, and not fully effective in that. To fight them directly we would have to bomb our own the titans. What we needed was a weapon that would kill slugs but not men, or something that would disable humans or render thereby permit us to rescue our compatriots. No such weapon was available, though the scientists were all busy on the problem. A "sleep" gas would have been perfect, but it is lucky that no such gas was known before the invasion, or the slugs could have used it against us. It must be remembered that the slugs then had as much, or more, of the military potential of the United States at their disposal as had the free men. Stalemate -- with time on their side. There were fools who wanted to H-bomb the cities of the Mississippi Valley out of existence like curing a lip cancer by cutting off the head, but they were offset by their twins who had not seen slugs, and felt that the whole matter was a tyrannical Washington plot. The second sort grew fewer each day, not because they changed their minds but because the vigilantes were awfully eager. Then there was the tertium quid, the flexible mind, the "reasonable" man -- he favored negotiation, claiming we could "do business" with the titans. One such committee, a delegation from the caucus of the opposition party in Congress, actually tried it. Bypassing the State Department, they got in touch with the Governor of Missouri via a linkage rigged across Zone Amber, and were assured of safe conduct and diplomatic immunity -- "guarantees" from a titan, but they accepted them. They went to St. Louis and never came back. They sent messages, though. I saw one, a rousing speech adding up to, "Come on in, the water is fine!" Do steers sign treaties with meat packers? one known center of infection. The only action by the US United Nations, other than placing the space stations at our disposal. was to move to Geneva. It was voted, with twenty-three nations abstaining, to define our plight as "civil disorder" and to urge each member nation to give such aid as it saw fit to the legitimate governments of the United States. Mexico, and Canada. It remained a creeping war, silent, with battles lost before we even knew they were joined. Conventional weapons were hardly useful except in policing Zone Amber, now a double no-man'sland from the Canadian forests to the Mexican deserts. It was deserted in the daytime, save for our own patrols. At night our scouts drew back and the dogs came through -- and other things. Only one atom bomb had been used in the entire war, and that against a Saucer which landed near San Francisco south of Burlingame. Its destruction was according to doctrine, but the doctrine was under criticism; it should have been captured for study. I found my sympathies with those who wanted to shoot first and study later. By the time the dose of tempus was wearing off, I had a picture of the United States in a shape that I had not imagined even when I was in Kansas City... a country undergoing Terror. Friend might shoot friend, wife denounce husband. Rumor of a titan could drum up a mob on any street, with Judge Lynch baying in the van. To rap on a door at night was to invite a blast through the pane. Honest folk stayed home; at night the dogs were out. The fact that most of the rumored discoveries of slugs were baseless made them no less dangerous. It was not exhibitionism which caused many people to prefer outright nudity to the tight and scanty clothing permitted under Schedule Suntan; even the skimpiest clothing invited a suspicion that might be decided too abruptly. The head and spine armor was never worn now; the slugs had faked it and used it almost at once. And there had been the case of a girl in Seattle. She had been dressed in sandals and a big purse, nothing else. But a vigilante who apparently had developed a nose for the enemy followed her, and noticed that she never moved the purse from her right hand, even when she opened it to make change. She lived, for he burned her arm off at the wrist, and I suppose that she had a new one grafted on; the supply of such spare parts was a glut. The slug was alive, too, when the vigilante opened the purse -- but not for long. The drug had worn) off by the time I scanned this incident and I mentioned the matter to the nurse. "Mustn't worry," she told me. "It does no good. Now flex the fingers of your right hand, please." I flexed them, while she helped the doctor spray on surrogate skin. "Wear gloves for rough work," the doctor cautioned, "and come back next week." I thanked, them and went to the operations office. I looked for Mary first, but she was busy in Cosmetics. Man asked. "They'll do. False skin for a week. They do a graft job on my ear tomorrow." He looked vexed. "There's no time for a graft to heal; Cosmetics will have to fake one." "The ear doesn't matter," I told him, "but why bother to fake it? Impersonation job?" "Not exactly. Now that you've been briefed, what do you think of the situation?" I wondered what answer he was fishing for. "Not good," I conceded. "Everybody watching everybody else. Might as well be in Russia." "Speaking of Russia, would you say that it was easier to penetrate and maintain surveillance in Russia or in Zone Red? Which would you rather tackle?" I eyed him suspiciously. "What's the catch? You don't let a man pick his assignment." "I asked your professional opinion." "I don't have enough data. Have the slugs infested Russia?" "That," he answered, "is what I must find out." I realized suddenly that Mary had been right; agents should not marry. "This time of year," I said, "I think I'd want to enter through Canton. Unless you were figuring on a drop." "What makes you think I want you to go there?" he asked. "We might find out quicker and easier in Zone Red." "What? How?" "Certainly. If there is infection anywhere but in this continent, the titans in Zone Red must know it. Why go half around the globe to find out?" I put aside the plans I had been forming to be a Hindu merchant, traveling with his wife, and thought about what he was saying. "How in the devil can Zone Red be penetrated now?" I asked. "Do I wear a plastic imitation slug on my shoulders? They'd catch me the first time I was called on for direct conference." "Don't be a defeatist. Four agents have gone in already." "And come back?" "Well, not exactly." "Have you decided that I've cluttered up the payroll long enough?" "I think the others used the wrong tactics -- " "Yeah, I'd say so." "The trick is to convince them that you are a renegade. Got any ideas?" The idea was so overwhelming that I did not answer at once. Finally I burst out, "Why not start me easy? Can't I impersonate a Panama pimp for a while? Or practice being an axe murderer? I have to get in the mood for this." "You've had more experience with their ways than any agent I've got. You must be rested up, aside from that little singe on your fingers. Or maybe we should drop you near Moscow and let you take a direct look. Think it over. Don't get into a fret about it for a day or so." "Thank you too much." I changed the subject. "What have you got planned for Mary?" "Why don't you stick to your own business?" "I'm married to her."  "I know." "Well, for the love of Pete, don't you even want to wish me luck?" "It strikes me," he said slowly, "that you have had all the luck one man could ask for. You have my blessing, for whatever it's worth." "Oh." Up to that moment, it had not occurred to me that the Old Man might have had something to do with Mary's leave and mine falling together so conveniently. I said, "Look here. Dad -- " "Hui?" It was the second time I had called him that in a month; it put him, on the defensive. "You meant for Mary and me to marry all along. You planned it that way." "Don't be ridiculous. I believe in free will, son -- and free choices. Both of you were entitled to leave. The rest was accidental." "Accidents don't happen; not around you. Never mind, I'm satisfied with the outcome. Now about the job -- give me a bit longer to size up the possibilities. Meantime, I'll see Cosmetics about a rubber ear." W E finally decided not to attempt to penetrate Zone Red. The evaluation group had advised there was no chance of impersonating a renegade; the question hinged on, "How does a man get to be a renegade? Why do the titans trust him?" It answers itself ; a slug knows its host's mind. If a titan, through possessing a man's mind, knows that he is a natural renegade, a man who can be had, then it may suit the slug's purposes to let him be renegade rather than host. But first the slug had to plumb the vileness in the man's mind and be sure of its quality. We concluded this from logical necessity. Human logic, but it had to be slug logic, too, since it fitted what the slugs could and could not do. As for me, it was not possible even under deep hypnotic instruction to pass myself off as a candidate for renegade, or so the psycho lads decided, and to which I said, "Amen!" It may seem illogical that titans would "free" a host even though they knew that the host was the sort who could be owned. But in the renegades the slugs had a supply of "trustworthy" fifth columnists -- "trustworthy" is not the right word, but no language has a word for this form of treachery. That Zone Green was being penetrated by renegades was certain, but it is often hard to tell a fifth columnist from a custard head, which made them hard to catch. So I got ready. I took under hynosis a refresher in the languages I would need, with emphasis on the latest shibboleth phrases; I was provided with a personality and given a load of money. The reporting equipment was a new model and a joy to have, ultramicrowave stuff hardly larger than a loaf of bread, and the power pack so well shielded that it would not make a Geiger counter even nervous. I had to drop through their screen, but it would be under a blanket of anti-radar "window" to give their search technicians fits. Once inside I had to make up my mind whether or not the Russian axis was slug-infested, then dictate a report to whatever space station was in sight. In lineof sight, that is; I can't pick out a space station by eye, and I doubt those who say they can. Report made, I was free to walk, ride, crawl, sneak andor bribe my way out if I could. But I never had a chance to use these preparations; the Pass Christian Saucer landed. IT was only the third to be seen  after landing. The Grinnell Saucer had been concealed by the slugs and the Burlingame Saucer was a radioactive memory. But the Pass Christian one was both tracked and seen on the ground. It was tracked by Space Station Alpha and recorded as an "extremely large meteorite." The mistake was caused by its great speed. The primitive radar of sixty-odd years ago had picked up Saucers many times, especially cruising at atmospheric speeds while scouting this planet. But our modern radar has been "improved" to the point where Saucers could not be seen; our instruments are too specialized. Traffic block control sees atmospheric traffic only. The defense screen and fire control radars see only what they are supposed to see. The fine screen "sees" a range from atmospheric speeds up to orbiting missiles at five miles a second. The coarse screen overlaps the fine screen, starting down at the lowest missile speed and carrying on up to about ten miles per second. There are other selectivities, but none of them sees objects at speeds over ten miles per second -- with the single exception of space station meteor-count radars, which are not military. Consequently the "giant meteor" was not associated with Flying Saucers until later. But the Pass Christian Saucer was seen to land. The submersible cruiser U.N.S. Robert Futton on patrol of Zone Red out of Mobile was seven miles off Gulfport with only her receptors showing when the Saucer landed. The spaceship popped up on the screens of the cruiser as it dropped from outer space speed -- around fifty-three miles per second, by the space station record -- to a speed the cruiser's radars would accept. It came out of nothing, slowed to zero, and disappeared -- but the operator had a fix on the last blip, a few miles away on the Missis-' sippi coast. The cruiser's skipper was puzzled. The track surely could not be a ship; ships don't decelerate at fifty gravities! It did not occur to him that that might not matter to a slug. He swung his ship over and took a look. His first despatch read: spaceChristian Mississippi. His second If I had not been in the Section offices preparing for my drop, I might have been left out of the party. As it was, my phone shrilled; I bumped my head on the study machine and swore. The Old Man said, "Come at once. Move!" It was the same party we had started with so many weeks -- or years? -- before, the Old Man, Mary and myself. We were heading south at emergency maximum before the Old Man told us the reason. When he did, I said, "Why the family group? You need a fullscale air task force." "It will be there," he answered grimly. Then he grinned his old wicked grin. "What do you care? The 'Cavanaughs-' are riding again. Eh, Mary?" I snorted. "If you want that sisterandbrother routine, you Ilf had better get another boy. "Just the part where you protect her from dogs and strange men," he answered soberly. "And I do mean dogs and I do mean very strange men. This may be the payoff, son." He went into the operator's compartment, closed the panel, and got busy at the communicator. I turned to Mary. She snuggled up and said, "Howdy, Bud." I grabbed her. "Don't give me that 'Bud' stuff or somebody's going to get a paddling." E were almost shot down by our own boys. Then we picked up an escort of two Black Angels who turned us over to the command ship from which Air Marshal Rexton was watching the action. The command ship took us inboard with an anchor loop. I found the maneuver disconcerting. Rexton wanted to spank us and send us home, but spanking the Old Man is a chore. They finally unloaded us and I squatted our car down on the seawall roadway west of Pass Christian -- scared silly, I should add: we were buffeted by A. A. on the way down. There was fighting all around and above us, but there was a curious calm near the Saucer itself. The outlander ship loomed up almost over us, not fifty yards away. It was as convincing and as ominous as the plastic-board fake in Iowa had been phony. It was a discus of great size, tilted slightly toward us; it had grounded partly on one of the high-stilted old mansions which line that coast. The Saucer was partly supported by the wreckage and by the thick trunk of a tree that had shaded the house. Its canted attitude let us see the upper surface and what was surely its airlock -- a metal hemisphere, a dozen feet across, at its center. This hemisphere was lifted out or up from the body of the ship some six or eight feet. I could not see what held it out, but I assumed that there must be a central shaft or piston; it came out like a poppet valve. It was easy to see why the Saucer had not closed up again and taken off. The airlock was fouled, held open by a "mud turtle," one of those little amphibious tanks that were part of the landing force of the Fulton. Let me place this on record. The tank had been commanded by Ensign Gilbert Calhoun of Knoxville. With him was Powerman #c Florence Berzowski and a gunner named Booker T, W. Johnson. They were all dead, of course, before we got there. The car, as soon as I roaded it, was surrounded by a landing force squad commanded by a lit pink-cheeked lad who seemed anxious to shoot somebody, anybody. He was less anxious when he got a look at Mary, but he still refused to let us appoach the Saucer until he had checked with his tactical commander, who in turn consulted the skipper of the Fulton. We got an answer back in short time, considering that it was probably referred clear to Washington. While waiting, I watched the battle and was pleased to have no part of it. Somebody was going to get hurt. A good many had already. There was a male body just behind the car -- a boy not more than fourteen. He was still clutching a rocket launcher and across his shoulders was the mark of the beast. I wondered whether the slug had crawled away and was dying, or whether, perhaps, it had managed to transfer to the person who had killed the boy. Mary had walked west on the highway with the downy young naval officer while I was examining the corpse. The notion of a slug, possibly still alive, being around caused me to hurry to her. "Get back into the car," I said. She continued to look west along the road. "I thought I might get in a shot or two," she answered, her eyes bright. "She's safe here." the youngster assured me. "We're holding them, well down the road." I ignored him. "Listen, you bloodthirsty little hellion," I snapped, "get back in that car before I break every bone in your body !" "Yes, Sam." She turned and did so. I looked back at the young salt. "What are you staring at?" I demanded. The place smelled of slugs and the wait was making me nervous. "Nothing much," he said, looking me over. "In my part of the country we don't speak to ladies that way." "Then why in hell don't you go back where you come from?" I answered and stalked away. The Old Man was missing, too; I did not like it. An ambulance, coming back from the west, ground to a halt beside me. "Has the road to Pascagoula been opened?" the driver called out. The Pascagoula River, thirty miles east of where the Saucer had landed, was roughly "Zone Amber" for that area. The town of that name was east of the river's mouth and in Zone Green, while sixty or seventy miles west of us on the same road was New Orleans, the heaviest concentration of titans south of St. Louis. Our opposition came from New Orleans. Our nearest base was in Mobile. "I haven't heard," I told the driver. He chewed a knuckle. "Well, I made it through. Maybe I'll make it back." His turbines whined and he was away. I continued to look for the Old man. Although the ground fighting had moved from the site, the air fighting was all around us. I was watching vapor trails and trying to figure out who was what and how they could tell, when a big transport streaked into the area, put on the brakes with a burst of rato units, and spilled a platoon of sky boys. Again I wondered; it was too far away to tell whether they wore slugs or not. At least it came in from the east. I spotted the Old Man talking with the landing force commander. I went up and interrupted. "We ought to get out of here, boss. This place is due to be atom-bombed ten minutes ago." The commander answered. "Relax. The concentration does not merit even a pony bomb." I was about to ask him sharply how he knew that the slugs would figure it that way, when the Old Man interrupted. "He's right, son." He took my arm and walked me back toward the car. "He's right, but for the wrong reasons." "Huh?" "Why haven't we bombed the cities they hold? They don't want to damage that ship; they want it back. Get on back to Mary. Dogs and strange men -- remember?" I I shut up, unconvinced. I expected us all to be clicks in a Geiger counter any second. Slugs fought with gamecock recklessness, perhaps because they were really not individuals. Why should they be more cautious about one of their ships? They might be more anxious to keep it out of our hands than to save it. We had just reached the car and spoken to Mary when the still-damp youngster came trotting up. He saluted the Old Man. "The Commander says that you are to have anything you want, sir -- anything at all!" From his manner I gathered that the answering despatch had been spelled out in flaming letters, accompanied by ruffles and flourishes. "Thank you, sir," the Old Man said mildly. "We merely want to inspect the captured ship." "Yes, sir. Come with me, sir." He came with us instead, having difficulty deciding whether to escort the Old Man or Mary. Mary won. I followed, keeping my mind on watching out and ignoring the presence of the youngster. The country on that coast, unless gardened, is practically jungle; the Saucer lapped over into a brake of that sort and the Old Man took a shortcut through it. The kid said, "Watch out, sir. Mind where you step." I said, "Slugs?" He shook his head. "Coral snakes." At that point a poisonous snake would have seemed as pleasant as a honey bee, but I must have been paying some attention to his warning for I was looking down when I first heard a shout. Then, so help me, a Bengal tiger was charging us! Probably Mary got in the first shot.' Mine was not behind that of the young officer; it might even have been ahead. The Old Man shot last: Between us we cut that beast so many ways that it would never make a rug. And yet the slug on it was untouched; I fried it with my second bolt. The young fellow looked at it without surprise. "Well," he said. "I thought we had cleaned up that load' "What do you mean?" "One of the first transport tanks they sent out. Regular Noah's Ark. We were shooting everything from gorillas to polar bears. Say, did you ever have a water buffalo come at you?" "No, and I don't want to." "Not as bad as the dogs, really. If you ask me, those things don't have much sense." He looked at the slug, quite unmoved. We got out of there fast and onto the titan ship -- which did not make me less nervous, but more. Not that there was anything frightening in the appearance of the ship itself, but its appearance wasn't right . While it was artificial, one knew without being told that it was not made by men. Why? I don't know. Its surface was dull mirror, not a mark on it -- not any sort of mark ; there was no way to tell how it had been put together. It was as smooth as a Jo block. I could not figure what it was made of. Metal? Of course, it had to be metal. But was it? You would expect it to be either bitterly cold or possibly intensely hot from its landing. I touched it and it was not anything at all, neither cold nor hot. I noticed another thing presently. A ship that size, landing at high speed, should have blasted a couple of acres. There was no blast area at all; the brake around it was green and rank. We went up to the parasol business, the airlock, if that is what it was. The edge was jammed down on the little mud turtle; the armor of the tank was crushed ill, as one might crush a pasteboard box with the hand. Those mud turtles are built to launch five hundred feet deep in water; they are strong. Well, I suppose this one was strong. The parasol arrangement had damaged it, but the airlock had not closed. On the other hand the metal, or whatever the spaceship's door was made of, was unmarked by the exchange. The Old Man turned to me. "Wait here with Mary.' "You're going in there by yourself?" "Yes. There may be very little time." The kid spoke up. "I'm to stay with you, sir. That's what the Commander said." "Very well, sir," the Old Man agreed. "Come along." He peered over the edge, then knelt and lowered himself by his hands. The kid followed him. I felt burned up, but had no desire to argue the arrangements. Mary turned to me and said, "Sam, I don't like this. I'm afraid." She startled me. I was afraid myself, but I had not expected her to be. "I'll take care of you." "Do we have to stay? He didn't actually say so." I considered it. "If you want to go back to the car, I'll take you there." "Well... no, Sam, I guess we have to stay. Come closer to me." She was trembling. before they stuck their heads over the rim. The youngster climbed out and the Old Man told him to stand guard. "Come on," he said to us. "It's safe -- I think." "The hell it is," I told him, but I went because Mary was already starting. The Old Man helped her down. "Mind your head," he said. "Low bridge all the way." It is a platitude that unhuman races produce unhuman works, but very few humans have ever been inside a Venerian labyrinth and still fewer have seen the Martian ruins -- and I was not one of the few. I don't know what I expected. Superficially, the inside of the Saucer was not, I suppose, too startling, but it was strange. It had been thought out by unhuman brains, ones which had! never heard of the right angle and the straight line, or regarded them as unnecessary or undesirable. We found ourselves in a small oblate chamber, and from there we crawled through a tube about four feet thick, which seemed to wind down into the ship, and glowed from all its surface with a reddish light. The tube held an odd and somewhat distressing odor, as if of marsh gas, and mixed with it faintly was the reek of dead slugs. That and the reddish glow and the total lack of heat response from the wall of the tube, as my palms pressed against it, gave me the unpleasant fancy that I was crawling through the gut of some unearthly behemoth, rather than exploring a strange machine. The tube branched like an artery and there we came across our first Titanian androgyne. He -- let me call it "he" -- was sprawled on his back, like a child sleeping, his head pillowed on his slug. Theje was a suggestion of a smile on the little rosebud mouth. I did not realize that he was dead. At first sight, the similarities between the Titanian people and ourselves are more noticeable than the differences; we impress what we expect to see on what we do see. Take the pretty little "mouth" for example -- how was I to know that it was an organ for breathing solely? But despite the casual similarities of four limbs and a headlike protuberance, wc are less alike than a bullfrog and bullpup. Nevertheless the general effect is pleasing and faintly human. "Elfin," I should saj'T -- the elves of Saturn's moons. When I saw the little fellow, I managed to draw my gun. The Old Man turned and said, "Take it easy. It's dead. They are all dead, smothered in oxygen when the tank ruined their air seal." I still had my gun out. "I want to bum the slug," I insisted. "It may still be alive." It was not covered by the shell we had lately come to expect, but was naked and ugly. Very naked and ugly. He shrugged. "Suit yourself. It can't possibly hurt you. That slug can't live on an oxygen breather." He crawled across the little body, giving me no chance to shoot had I decided to. Mary had not drawn, but had shrunk against my side and was breathing in sharp, sobbing gasps. The Old Man stopped and said patiently, "Coming, Mary?" She choked, "Let's get out of here!" I said, "She's right. This is no job for three people. This is something for a research team and proper equipment." He paid no attention to me. "It has to be done, Mary. You know that. And you have to be the one to do it." "Why does she have to do it?" I demanded angrily. Again he ignored me. "Well, Mary?" From somewhere inside she called on reserves. Her breathing became normal, her features relaxed, and she crawled across the slug-ridden elfin body with the serenity of a queen going to the gallows. I lumbered after, still hampered by my gun and trying not to touch the corpse. We came at last to a large chamber which may have been the control room ; there were many of the dead little elfin creatures in it. Its inner surface was cavitated and picked out with lights much brighter than the reddish illumination, and the space was festooned with processes as meaningless to me as the convolutions of a brain. I was troubled again with the thought -- completely wrong -- that the ship itself was a living organism. The Old Man paid no mind but crawled through and into another ruddy-glowing tube. We followed its contortions to where it widened out to ten feet or more with a "ceiling" almost tall enough to let us stand erect. But that was not what caught our eyes; the walls were no longer opaque. On each side of us, beyond transparent membranes, were thousands on thousands of slugs, swimming, floating, writhing in some fluid which sustained them. Each tank had an inner diffuse light of its own that let me see back into the palpitating mass -- and I wanted to scream. I still had my gun out! The Old Man placed his hand over the bell of it. "You don't want to let that loose in here" he warned me. "Those are for us." Mary looked at them with a face too calm. I doubt that she was fully conscious in the ordinary sense. I looked at her, glanced back at the walls of that ghoulish aquarium, and said urgently, "Let's get out of here if we can, then just bomb it out of existence. Before it's too late!" "No," he said quietly, "there is more. Come." The tube narrowed in again, then enlarged, and we were in a somewhat smaller chamber. Again there were transparent walls; again there were things floating beyond them. T had to look twice before I could believe what I saw. Floating just beyond the wall, face down, was the body of a man -- a human. Earth-born man -- about forty to fifty years old. His arms were curved across his chest and his knees were drawn up, as if he were sleeping. He was not alone: there were more beyond him, male and female, young and old, but he got my attention. I was sure that he was dead; it did not occur to me to think otherwise -- then I saw his mouth working -- and then I wished he were dead. as if she were drunk. No, not drunk, but preoccupied and dazed. She went from one wall to the other, peering into the crowded, half-seen depths. The Old Man looked only at her. "Well, Mary?" he asked softly. "I can't find them!" she said piteously in a voice like a little girl's. She ran back to the other side. The Old Man grasped her arm. "You're not looking for them in the right place. Go back where they are. Remember?" Her voice was a wail. "J can't remember!" "You must remember. This is what you can do for them. You must return to where they are and look for them." Her eyes closed and tears started leaking from them. I pushed myself between them and said, "Stop this! What are you doing to her?" He pushed me away. "No, son,  he whispered fiercely. "Keep out of this -- you must keep out." "But -- " "No!" He let go of Mary and led me to the entrance. "Stay there. And as you love your wife, as you hate the titans, do not interfere. I shan't hurt her. I promise." "What are you going to do?" But he had turned away. I stayed, with what I did not understand. Mary had sunk to the floor like a child, face covered with hands. The Old Man knelt down and touched her arm. "Go back," I heard him say. "Back to where it started." I could barely hear her answer. "No... no." "How old were you? You seemed to be about seven or eight when you were found. It was before that?" "Yes -- yes, it was before that. She sobbed, "Mama! Mama!" "What is your mama saying?" he asked gently. "She doesn't say anything. She's lookinjf at me so queerly. There's something on her back. I'm afraid!" I hurried toward them, crouching to keep from hitting the low ceiling. Without taking his eyes off Mary, the Old Man motioned me back. I stopped, hesitated. "Go back," he ordered. "Way back." The words were directed at me and I obeyed them -- but so did Mary. "Therewas a ship," she muttered, "a big, shiny ship -- " He said something; if she answered, I could not hear it. I stayed back this time. Despite my vastly disturbed emotions, I realized that something important was going on, something big enough to absorb the Old Man's full attention in the presence of the enemy. He continued to talk soothingly but insistently. Mary quieted, seemed to sink into lethargy. After a while she was talking in the monotonous logorrhea of emotional release. Only occasionally did he prompt her. I heard something crawling along the passage behind me, turned and drew my gun, with a wild feeling that we were trapped. I almost shot him before I recognized the ubiquitous young officer we had left outside. "Come out!" he said urgently. He pushed past me into the chamber and repeated the demand to the Old Man. # The Old Man looked exasperated beyond endurance. "Shut up and don't bother me," he said. "You've got to, sir," the youngster insisted. "The Commander says that you must come out at once. We're falling back; he says he may have to use demolition at any moment. If we are still inside -- btooie " "Very well," the Old Man agreed calmly. "Go tell your commander that he must hold off until we get out; I have vitally important information. Son, help me with Mary." "Aye aye, sir!" the youngster acknowledged. "But hurry!" He scrambled away. I picked up Mary and carried her to where the chamber narrowed into a tube; she seemed almost unconscious. I put her down. "Mary," I shouted. "Mary! Can you hear me?" Her eyes opened. "Yes, Sam?" "Darling, we've got to get out of here, fast! Can you crawl?" "Yes, Sam." She closed her eyes. I shook her again. "Mary!" "Yes, darling? What is it? I'm so tired." "Listen, Mary, you've got to crawl out of here. If ou don't, the slugs will get us. Do you understand?" "All right, darling." Her eyes stayed open, but were vacant. I got her headed up the tube and came after her. I lifted and dragged her through the chamber of slugs and again through the control room, if that's what it was. When we came to where the tube was partly blocked by the dead elfin creature, she stopped; I wormed past her and stuffed it into the branching tube. There was no doubt, this time, that its slug was dead. After an endless nightmare of le'aden-limbed striving, we reached the outer door. The young officer was there and helped us lift her out, him pulling and the Old  Man and me lifting and pushing. I gave the Old Man a leg up, jumped out myself, and took her away from the youngster. It was quite dark as we went back past the crushed house, avoiding the brake, and thence down to the road. Our car was no longer there. We were hurried into a "mud turtle" tank -- none too soon, for the fighting was almost on top of us. The tank commander buttoned up and the craft lumbered into the water. Fifteen minutes later we were inside the Fulton, and an hour later we disembarked at the Mobile base. The Old Man and I had had coffee and sandwiches in the wardroom of the Fulton. Some of the Wave officers had cared for Mary in the women's quarters. She joined us as we left and seemed normal. I said, "Mary, are you all right?" She smiled. "Of course, darling. Why shouldn't I be?" A command ship and escort took us out of there. I had supposed that we were headed back to the Section offices, or to Washington. The pilot put us into a mountainside hangar in one of those egg-on-a-plate maneuvers that no civilian craft can accomplish -- in the sky at high speed, then in a cave and stationary. "Where are we?" I asked. The Old Man did not answer. He got out; Mary and I followed. The hangar was small, just parking space for a dozen craft, an arresting platform, and a single launching rack. Guards directed us on back to a door set in living rock; we went through and found ourselves in an anteroom. A loudspeaker told us to strip. I hated to part with my gun and phone. Wc went in and were met by a young fellow whose clothing was an armband showing three chevrons and crossed retorts. He turned us over to a girl who was wearing less -- only two chevrons. Both of them noticed Mary, each with typical response. I think the corporal was glad to pass us on to the female captain who received us. "We got your message," the captain said. "Dr. Steelton is waiting." "Thank you, ma'am," the Old Man answered. "Where?" "Just a moment," she said, went to Mary and felt through her hair. "We have to be sure," she s#id apologetically. If she was aware of the falseness of much of Mary's hair, she did not mention it. "All right," she decided, "let's go." Her own hair was cut mannishly short. "Right," agreed the Old Man. "No, son, this is as far as you go." "Why?" I asked. m "Because you damn near loused up the first try."  The captain said, "The officers mess is down the first passageway to the left. Why not wait there?" So I did. I passed a door decorated primly in red skull and crossbones and stenciled with: Qualified Personnel Only Use Procedure A I gave it a wide berth. The officers' mess had three or four men and two women lounging in it. I found an unoccupied chair, sat down and wondered who you had to be to get a drink around there. After a time I was joined by a large male extrovert wearing a colonel's insignia on a neck chain. "Newcomer?" he asked. I admitted it. "Civilian expert?" he went on. "I don't know about 'expert'," I replied. "I'm a field operative." "Name? Sorry to be officious," he apologized, "but I'm the security officer around here. My name's Kelly." I told him mine. He nodded. "Matter of fact I saw you coming in. Now, Mr. Nivens, how about a drink?" I stood up. "Whom do I hove to kill to get it?" "AS far as I can see," Kelly went on later, "this place needs a security officer the way a horse needs rollerskates. We should publish our results as fast as we get them." I commented that he did not sound like a brass hat. He laughed. "Believe me, son, not all brass hats are as they are pictured. They just seem to be." I remarked that Air Marshal Rexton struck me as a pretty sharp citizen. "You know him?" the colonel asked. "Not exactly, but my work has thrown me in his company a bit. I last saw him earlier today." "Hmm," said the colonel. "I've never met the gentleman. You move in more rarefied strata than I do, sir." I explained that it was mere happenstance, but from then on he showed me more respect. Presently he was telling me about the work the laboratory did. "By now we know more about those foul creatures than does Old Nick himself. But do we know their hosts? We do not. I'm no scientist -- just a cop under a different tag -- but I've talked to the scientists here. This is a biological war. We need a bug, one that will bite the slug and not the host. Doesn't sound too hard, does it? We know a hundred things that will kill the slug -- smallpox, typhus, syphilis, encephalitis !ethargica, Obermayer's virus, plague, yellow fever, and so on. But they all kill the host, too." "Couldn't we use something that everyone is immune to?" I asked. "Everybody has typhoid shots. And almost everybody is vaccinated for smallpox." "No good. If the host is immune, the parasite doesn't get exposed to it. Now that the slugs have developed this outer cuticle, the parasite's environment is the host. No, we need something the host will catch and that will kill the slug, but won't give the host more than a mild fever." I started to answer when I saw the Old Man in the doorway. I excused myself and went to him. about?" he asked. swered. "That's what you think. You know which Kelly that is? B. J. Kelly, the greatest scientific criminologist of our generation." " That Kelly! But he's not in the army." "Reserve, probably. But you can guess how important this lab is. Come on." "Where's Mary?" "You can't see her now. She's recuperating." "Is she -- hurt?" "I promised you she would not be. Steelton is the best in his line. But we had to go down deep, against great resistance. That's always rough on the subject." "Did you get what you were after?" "Yes and no. We aren't through." "What were you after?" We had been walking along one of the place's endless underground passageways. Now he turned us into a small office, sat down, touched the desk communicator and said, "Private conference." "Yes, sir," a voice answered. "We will not record." A green light came on in the ceiling. "Not that I believe them," the Old Man complained, "but it may keep anyone but Kelly from playing it back. Well, I'll tell you a bit and answer your questions --  some of them -- in exchange for a solemn promise never to bother your wife with it. You don't have the skill to keep her from going into a wingding." "Very well, sir. I promise." "There were a group of people, a cult you might call them, that got into disrepute." "I know. The Whitmanites." "Eh? How did you know? From Mary? No, she couldn't have; she didn't know herself." "Not from Mary. I figured it out." He looked at me with odd respect. "Maybe I've underestimated you, son. As you say, the Whitmanites. Mary was one, as a kid in Antarctica." "Wait a minute!" I said. "They left Antarctica in #." "Right." "But that would make Mary around forty years old!" "Do you care?" "Of course not, only she can't be." "She is and she isn't. Chronologically, her age is about forty. Biologically, she is in her middle twenties. Subjectively, she is even younger, because she doesn't consciously remember anything earlier than about #." "What do you mean? That she doesn't remember, I can understand -- she never wants to remember. But what do you mean by the rest?" "What I said. She is no older than she is because -- You know that room where she started to remember? She spent ten years or more in suspended animation in just such a tank as that." A S I get older, I don't get tougher; I get softer. The thought of my beloved Mary swimming in that artificial womb, neither dead nor alive, preserved like a pickled grasshopper, was too much for me. I heard the Old Man saying, "Take it easy, son. She's all right." I said, "Go ahead." Mary's overt history was simple, though mystifying. She had been found in the swamps near Kaiserville at the north pole of Venus -- a little girl who could give no account of herself and who knew only her name, Allucquere. Nobody spotted the significance of the name, and a child of her apparent age could not be associated with the Whitmanite debacle in any case; the # supply ship had not been able to find any survivor of their "New Zion" colony. Ten years of time and more than two hundred miles of jungle separated the little waif of Kaiserville from the God-struck colonists of New Zion. In # an unaccounted-for Earth child on Venus was incredible, but there was no one around with the intellectual curiosity to push the matter. Kaiserville was made up of miners, doxies, company representatives of Two Planets Corporation, and nothing else. Shoveling radioactive mud in the swamps would not leave much energy for wonder. She grew up using poker chips for toys and calling every woman in crib row "mother" or "auntie." They shortened her name to "Lucky." The Old Man did not say who paid her way back to Earth; the real questions were where she had been from the time New Zion was eaten up by the jungle, and just what had happened to the colony. But the only record was buried in Mary's mind, locked tight in terror and despair.  about the time of the Flying Saucer reports from RussoSiberia -- the titans had discovered New Zion colony. If you place it one Saturn year earlier than the invasion of Earth, the chronology fits fairly well. The titans probably were not looking for Earthmen on Venus; more likely they were scouting Venus as they had long scouted Earth. Or they may have known where to look. We know that they kidnapped Earthmen over the course of two or more centuries; they may have captured someone whose brain could tell them where to find New Zion. Mary's dark memories could contain no clue to that. Mary saw the colony captured, saw her parents turned into zombies who no longer cared for her. Apparently she herself was not possessed, or she may have been possessed and turned loose, the titans finding a weak and ignorant young girl an unsuitable slave. In any case, for what was to her baby mind an endless time, she hung around, unwanted, uncared for, but unmolested, scavenging like a mouse. The slugs were moving in to stay; their principal slaves were Venerians and the colonists were only incidental. It is sure that Mary saw her parents being placed in suspended animation. For later use in the invasion of Earth? Possible. In due course she herself was placed in the tanks. Inside a titan ship? At a base on Venus? More probably the latter, for when she woke, she was still on Venus, There are many gaps. Were the slugs that rode the Venerians identical with the slugs which rode the colonists? The slugs seem endlessly adaptable, but they have to adapt themselves to the biochemistry of their hosts. Had Venus an oxysilicon economy like Mars, or a fluorine economy, the same parasite type could not have fed on both Venerians and Earthmen. But the gist of the matter lay in the situation as it was when Mary was removed from the artificial incubator. The titan invasion of Venus had failed, or was failing. She was possessed as soon as they removed her from the tank -- but Mary had outlived the slug that possessed her. Why had the slugs died? Why had the invasion of Venus failed? It was for clues to these that the #SI Old Man and Dr. Steelton had gone fishing in Mary's brain. "Isn't that enough?" "But it raises as many questions as it answers' I complained. "There is a great deal more," he told me, "only you aren't a Venerian expert or a psychologist. I've told you what I have so that you will know why we have to work on Mary and won't question her about it. Be good to her, boy. She's had more than her share of grief." I ignored the advice; I can get along or not get along with my own wife without help. "What I can't see is why you had Mary linked up with Flying Saucers in the first place. I realize now that you took her along, on that first trip on purpose. You were right -- but why? And don't give me any malarkey." The Old Man looked puzzled. "Son, what is a 'hunch'?" "A belief that something is so, or isn't so, without evidence." "I'd call a hunch the result of unconscious reasoning on data you did not know you possessed." "Don't tell me your unconscious mind works on data you are going to get, but don't have." "Ah, but I did have. data. What's the last thing that happens. to a candidate before he is certified as an agent?" "The personal interview with you." "No, no!" "Oh, the trance analysis." I had forgotten hypnoanalysis for the simple reason that the subject never remembers it. "You mean you had this data on Mary then. It wasn't a hunch at all." "No again. I had a very little of it -- Mary's defenses are strong. But I knew that Mary was the agent for this job. Later I played back her hypno interview; then I knew that there must be more. We tried for it and did not get it. But I knew that there had to be more." I thought it over. "You sure put her over the bumps to get it." "I had to. I'm sorry." "Okay, okay." I waited a moment, then said, "Look, what was there in my hypno record?" "I had my deputy play it. He said there wasn't anything I needed to know, so I never played it." "Well -- thanks." He merely grunted. rHE slugs had died from something they contracted on Venus; that much we thought we knew. We weren't likely to get another chance in a hurry to collect direct information, for a despatch came in while the Old Man and I were talking, saying that the Pass Christian Saucer had been bombed to keep it from being recaptured. The Old Man had hoped to get at those human prisoners in that ship, revive and question them. That chance was g#ne. What they could dig out of Mary had better be the answer. If some infection peculiar to Venus was fatal to slugs but not fatal to humans -- at least, Mary had lived through it -- then the next step was to test them all and determine which one. Just dandy! The list of diseases native to Venus which are not fatal but merely nastily annoying is very long -- from the standpoint of a Venerian bug. we must be too strange a diet. The problem was made harder by the fact that diseases native to Venus which were represented by cultures on Earth were strictly limited in number. Such an omission could be repaired -- in a century or so of exploration and research on a strange planet. In the meantime, there was a breath of frost in the air; Schedule Suntan could not go on forever. The psych boys had to go back where they hoped the answer was, in Mary's brain. I did not like it, but I could not stop it. She did not appear to know why she was being asked to submit, over and over again, to hypnotics. Though she seemed serene, the strain showed -- circles under her eyes, tremor, inattentiveness. Finally I told the Old Man that it had to stop. "You know better than that, son," he said. "The hell I do! If you haven't gotten what you want by now, you'll never get it." "If we don't succeed," he answered gently, "you'll wish to heaven that she had. Or do you want to raise kids to be hosts to titans?" I chewed my lip. "Why didn't you send me to Russia, instead of keeping me here?" "Oh, that -- I want you here, with Mary, keeping her morale up, instead of acting like a spoiled brat. In the second place, it isn't necessary." "Huh? What happened? Some other agent report in?" "If you would ever show a grown-up interest in the news, you would know." I hurried out and brought myself up to date. This time I had managed to miss the first news of the only continentwide epidemic of Black Death since the #th Century. I could not understand it. Russian public health measures were fairly good; they were carried out "by the numbers" and no nonsense tolerated. A country has to be literally lousy to #read plagues -- rats, lice, and fleas, the historical vectors. The Russian bureaucrats had even cleaned up China to the point where bubonic plague and typhus were localized. Now both plagues were spreading across the whole Sino-RussoSiberian axis, to the point where the government had broken down and pleas were being sent out for U. N. help. What had happened? I put the pieces together and looked up the Old Man again. '-'Boss, there were slugs in Russia." "Yes." "You know? Well, for cripes sake, we'd better move fast, or the whole Mississippi Valley will be in the shape that Asia is in. Just one little rat -- " The titans did not bother about human sanitation. I doubted if there had been a bath taken between the Canadian border and New Orleans since the slugs dropped the masquerade. Lice, fleas -- The Old Man sighed. "Maybe that's the solution." "You might as well bomb them, if that's the best we have to offer. It's a cleaner way to die." "So it is. But you know we won't. As long as there is a chance we'll keep on trying." I mulled it over at length. We were in still another race against time. Fundamentally, the slugs must be too stupid to keep slaves; perhaps that was why they moved from planet to planet -- they spoiled what they touched. After a while their hosts would die and then they needed new hosts. Theory, just theory. One thing was sure: Zone Red would be plague-ridden unless we found a way to kill the slugs, and that mighty soon! I made up my mind to do something I had considered before -- force myself into the mindsearching sessions. If there were something in Mary's hidden memories which could be used to kill slugs, I might see it where others had failed. In any case I was going in, whether Steelton and the Old Man liked it or not. I was tired of being treated like a cross between a prince consort and an unwelcome child. in a cubicle intended for one officer; we were as crowded as a plate of smorgasbord, but we did not care. I woke up first the next morning and made my usual quick check to be sure that a slug had not gotten to her. While I was doing so, she opened her eyes and smiled drowsily. "Go back to sleep," I said. "I'm awake now." "Mary, do you know the incubation period for bubonic plague?" She answered, " Should I know? Why, one of your eyes is slightly darker than the other. I never noticed before." I shook her. "Pay attention, wench. I was in the lab library last night, doing some figuring. As I get it, the slugs must have moved in on the Russians at least three months before they invaded us." "Yes, of course." "You know? Why didn't you say so?" "Nobody asked me." "Oh, for heaven's sake! Let's get up; I'm hungry." Before we left, I said, "Guessing games at the usual time?" "Yes." "Mary, you never talk about what they ask you." She looked surprised. "But I never know." "That's what I gathered. Deep trance with a 'forgetter' order, eh?" "I suppose so." "Hmm. Well, there'll be some changes made. Today I am going with you." All she said was, "Yes, dear." They were gathered as usual in Dr. Steelton's office, the Old Man, Steelton himself, a Colonel Gibsy who was chief of staff, a lieutenant colonel, and an odd lot of sergeant-technicians, J.O.s and flunkies. In the army it takes an eight-man working party to help a brasshat blow his nose. The Old Man's eyebrows shot up when he saw me, but he said nothing. A sergeant tried to stop me. "Good morning. Mrs. Nivens," h said to Mary, then told me, "I don't have you on the list." "I'm putting myself on th list," I announced, and pushed or past him. Colonel Gibsy glared anti turned to the Old Man with a "Hrrumph what's all this?" noise. The rest looked frozen faced, except one Wac sergeant who could not keep from grinning. The Old Man said to Gibsy. "Just a moment, Colonel," and limped over to me. In a voice that reached me alone, he said. "Son, you promised me." "And I withdraw it. You had no business exacting a promise like that." "You've no business here, son. You are not skilled in these matters. For Mary's sake, get out." "You are the one with no business here. You are not an analyst. You get out." The Old Man glanced at Mary. Nothing showed in her face. Tht Old Man said slowly, "You been eating raw meat, son?" I answered, "It's my wife who is being experimented on. From here on, I make the rules." Colonel Gibsy butted in. "Young man, are you out of y#ur mind?" I glanced at his hands. "That's a V.M.I. ring, isn't it? Have you any other qualifications? Are you an M. D.? A psychologist?" He drew himself up. "You seem to forget that this is a military reservation." "You forget that my wife and I aren't military personnel!" I added, "Come, Mary. We're leaving." "Yes, Sam." I said to the Old Man, "I'll tell the offices where to send our mail." I started for the door with Mary following. The Old Man said. "Just a moment." I stopped and he asked Gibsy, "Colonel, will you step outside with me? I'd like a word in private." Colonel Gibsy gave me a general-court-martial look, but he went. We all waited. The juniors continued to be poker-faced, the lieutenant colonel looked perturbed, and the Wac sergeant seemed about to burst. Steelton was the only one who appeared unconcerned. He took papers out of liis "incoming" basket and went quietly to work. Ten or fifteen minutes later a sergeant came in. "Dr. Steelton, the Commanding Officer says to go ahead." "Very well, Sergeant," he acknowledged, then looked at me and said, "Let's go into the operating room." I said, "Not so fast. Who arc these others? How about him?" I indicated the lieutenant colonel. "Eh? He's Dr. Hazelhurst. Two years on Venus." "Okay, he stays." I caught the eye of the sergeant with the grin and said, "What's your job, sister?" "I'm sort of chaperone." "I'm taking over the chaperone business. Now, Doctor, suppose you sort out the spare wheels from the people you actually need." "Certainly, sir." It turned out that he really wanted no one but Colonel Hazelhurst. We went inside -- Mary, myself, and the two specialists. The operating room contained a psychiatrist's couch surrounded by chairs. The double snout of a tridimensional camera poked out of the overhead. Mary went to the couch and lay down. Dr. Steelton got out an injector. "We'll try to pick up where we left off, Mrs. Nivens." I said, "Just a moment. You have records of the earlier attempts?" "Of course." "Let's play them over first. I want to come up to date." He hesitated, then answered, "If you wish. Mrs. Nivens, I suggest that you wait in my office." It was probably the contrary I mood that I was in: bucking the Old Man had gotten me hiked up. "Let's find out first if she wants to leave." Steelton looked surprised. "You don't know what you are suggesting. These records would be emotionally disturbing to your wife." "Very questionable therapy," Hazelhurst put in. I said, "This isn't therapy and you know it. If therapy had been your object, you would have used eidetic recall techniques instead of drugs." "There was no time. We had to use rough methods for quick results. I'm not sure that I can authorize the subject to see the records." I exploded. "Damn it, nobody asked you and you haven't got any authority in the matter. Those records were snitched out of my wife's head and they belong to her. She'll make up her own mind. Now ask her!" Steelton said, "Mrs. Nivens, do you wish to see your records?" Mary answered, "Yes, Doctor, I'd like to very much." He seemed astonished. "Do you wish to see them by yourself?" "With my husband. You and Dr. Hazelhurst are welcome to remain." They did. A stack of tape spools were brought in, each labeled with attributed dates and ages. It would have taken hours to go through them all, so I discarded those which concerned Mary's life after #; they could hardly affect the problem. We began with her very early, life. Each record started with, the subject, Mary, choking and groaning and struggling the way people always do when they are being forced back on a memory track which they would rather not follow. Then would come the reconstruction, both in her voice and in others. What surprised me most was Mary's face -- in the tank, I mean. We had the magnification stepped up so that the stereo image was practically in our laps and one could follow every expression. First her face became that of a little girl -- oh, her features were the same grown-up ones, but I knew that I was seeing my darling as she must have been when she was very small. It made me hope that we would have a little girl ourselves. Then her expression would change to match when other actors out of her memory took over. It was like watching an Incredibly able monologist playing many parts. Mary took it calmly, but her hand stole into mine. When we came to the terrible part where her parents changed, became slaves of slugs, she clamped down hard on my fingers. But she controlled herself. I skipped over the spools marked "period of suspended animation" and proceeded to the group concerned with the time from her resuscitation to the group concerned with her rescue from the swamps. One thing was certain : she had been possessed by a slug as soon as she was revived. The dead expression was that of a slug not bothering to keep up a masquerade; the stereocasts from Zone Red were full of that look. The barrenness of her memories from that period confirmed it. Then, rather suddenly, she was no longer hag-ridden, but was again a little girl, very sick and frightened. There was a delirious quality to her remembered thoughts, until, at the last, a new voice came out loud and clear: "Well, skin me alive! Look, Pete, it's a little girl!" That tape carried on into Kaiser ville, her recovery from starvation and exposure, and many new voices and memories; presently it ended. "I suggest," Dr. Steelton said as he took the tape out of the projector, "that we play another of the same period. They are all slightly different and this period is the key to the whole matter." "Why, Doctor?" Mary asked. "If we could tell What killed the titan which, uh, possessed you before you were found -- what killed it and left you alive -- we might have the weapon we need." "But don't you know?" Mary asked wonderingly. "Not yet, but we'll get it. The human memory is an amazingly complete record." "I thought you knew. It was nine-day fever." "What?" Hazelhurst bounced out of his chair. "Couldn't you tell from my face? It was characteristic -- the mask, I mean. I used to nurse it back ho -- back in Kaiserville, because I had had it once and was immune." Steelton said, "How about it. Doctor? Have you ever seen a case of it?" "By the time of the second expedition, they had the vaccine. I'm acquainted with its clinical characteristics, however." "But can't you tell from this record?" "Well," Hazelhurst answered carefully, "I would say that what we have seen is consistent with it, but not conclusive." "What's not conclusive?" Mary said sharply. "I told you it was nineday fever." "We must be sure," Steelton said apologetically. "How sure can you get? There is no question about it. I was told that I had been sick with it when Pete and Frisco found me. I nursed other cases later and I never caught it. I remember their faces when they were ready to die -- just like my own face in the record. Anyone who has ever seen a case could not possibly mistake it for anything else. What more do you want?" I have never seen Mary so close to losing her temper -- except once. I said to myself: look out, gentlemen, better duck! Steelton said, "I think you have proved your point, but tell me: You were believed to have no conscious memory of this period and my own examination of you confirmed it. Now you speak as if you had." Mary looked puzzled. "I remember it now, quite clearly. I haven't thought about it in many years." "I think I understand." He turned to Hazelhurst. "Well, Doctor, do we have a culture of the disease? Have your boys done any work on it?" Hazelhurst seemed stunned. "Work on it? Of course not! It's out of the question -- nineday fever! We might as well use polio or typhus. I'd rather treat a hangnail with an ax!" I touched Mary's arm. "Let's go, darling. I think we have done all the damage we can." She was trembling and her eyes were full of tears. I took her into the messroom for systemic treatmentdistilled. for a nap, I looked up my father in the office they had assigned him. He looked at me speculatively. "Well, Elihu, I hear you hit the jackpot." "I prefer to be called Sam," I answered. "Very well, Sam. Success is its own excuse; nevertheless, the jackpot appears to be disappointingly small. Nine-day fever -- no wonder the colony died out and the slugs as well. I don't see how we can use it. We can't expect everyone to have Mary's remarkable resistance." He was right, of course. The fever carried a #-plus death rate among unprotected Earthmen. With those who had taken the shots, the rate was an effective zero -- but that would be true of the slugs, too. M I can't see that it matters," I pointed out. "It's odds-on that you will have typhus or plague -- or both -- throughout the Mississippi Valley in the next six weeks." "Or the slugs may have learned a lesson in Asia and will start taking drastic sanitary measures." The idea startled me so that I almost missed the next thing he said, which was: "No, Sam, you'll have to devise a better plan."  "J#I have to? I just work here." "You did once. Now you've taken charge of this job." "What the devil are you talking about? I'm not in charge of anything and don't want to be. You are the boss." He shook his head. "A boss is the man who does the bossing. Titles and insignia come later. Tell me, do you think Oldfield could ever replace me?" I shook my head; Dad's chief deputy was the executive officer type, a "carry-outer," not a "think-upper." "I've never promoted you," he went on, "because I knew that when the time came you would promote yourself. Now you've done it -- by bucking my judgment, forcing your own on me, and by being right." "Rats! I got bullheaded and forced one issue. It never occurred to you big brains that you weren't consulting the one real Venus expert you had on tap -- Mary. But I didn't expect to find out anything; I had a lucky break." He shook his head. "Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to excuse for their mediocrity." I placed my hands on the desk and leaned toward him. "Okay, so I'm a genius -- but you are not going to make me hold the sack. When this is over, Mary and I are going up in the mountains and raise kittens and kids. I don't intend to boss screwball agents." He smiled gently and didn't answer. "I don't want your job. Understand me?" "Don't take it so hard, Sam. I'll keep the title for the present. In the meantime, what are your plans -- sir?" T HE worst of it was that he meant it. I tried to go limp on him, but it didn't work. A toplevel conference was called that afternoon; I was notified, but stayed away. Shortly a polite little Wac came to tell me that the commanding officer was waiting and would I please come at once? So I went -- and tried to stay out of the discussion. But my father has a way of conducting a meeting, even if he is not in the chair, by looking expectantly at the one he wants to hear from. It's a subtle trick ; the group does not know that it is being led. But I knew. With every eye in the room on you, it is easier to voice an opinion than to keep quiet. Particularly when I found that I had opinions. There was much moaning and groaning about the impossibility of using nine-day fever. Admitted that it would kill slugs, but it r r would even kill Venerians who can be chopped in two and survive, and it was sure death to almost any human. Seven to ten days after exposure -- curtains. "Yes, Mr. Nivens?" It was the commanding general, addressing me. I hadn't said anything, but Dad's eyes were on me, waiting. "I think there has been a lot of despair voiced at this session," I said, "and a lot of opinions given that were based on assumptions. The assumptions may not be correct." "How so?" I did not have an instance in mind; I had been shooting from the hip. "Well, I hear constant reference to nine-day fever as if the nine-day part were an absolute fact. It's not." The boss brass shrugged impatiently. "It's a convenient tag. It averages nine days." "Yes, but how do you know it lasts nine days -- for a s lug?" By the murmur with which it was received, I knew that I had hit the jackpot again. I was invited to explain why I thought the fever might run a different time in slugs and why it mattered. I bulled on ahead. "In the only case we knew about, the slug did die in less than nine days -- a lot less. Those of you who have seen the records on my wife -- and I gather that entirely too many of you have -- are aware that her parasite left her, presumably dropped off and died, long before the eighthday crisis. If experiments confirm this, then the problem is different. A man infected with the fever might be rid of his slug in -- oh, call it four days. That gives you five days to catch and cure him." The general whistled silently. "That's a pretty heroic solution, Mr. Nivens. How do you propose to cure him? Or even catch him? I mean to say, suppose we plant an epidemic in Zone Red, it would take incredibly fast footwork -- in the face of stubborn resistance, remember -- to locate people before they died." I slung the hot potato right back, wondering how many "experts" had made their names by passing the buck. "The second question is a logistical and tactical problem -- your problem. As to the first, there is your expert." I pointed to Dr. Hazelhurst. Hazelhurst huffed and puffed and I knew how he felt. More research needed... experiments would be required... work had been done toward an antitoxin, but the vaccine for immunizing had proven so successful that he was not sure the antitoxin had ever been perfected. He concluded lamely by saying that the study of the exotic diseases of Venus was still in its infancy. The general interrupted him. "This antitoxin business -- how soon can you find out about it?" Hazelhurst said that there was a man at the Sorbonne he wanted to phone. "Do so," his commanding officer said. "You are excused." at our door before breakfast the next morning. I stepped out into the passage to see him. "Sorry to wake you' he said, "but you were right about that antitoxin matter." "I was?" "They are sending me some from Paris; it should arrive any minute. I do hope it's still potent." "And if it isn't?" "Well, we have the means to make it. We'll have to. of course, if this wild scheme is used -- millions of units of it." "Thanks for telling me," I said. I started to turn away; he stopped me. "Uh, Mr. Nivens, about the matter of vectors -- " "Vectors?" "Disease vectors. We can't use rats or mice or anything like that. Do you know how the fever is transmitted on Venus? By a little flying rotifer, the Venerian equivalent, of an insect. But we don't have any and that is the only way it can be carried." "Do you mean to say you couldn't give it to me if you tried?" "Oh, yes, I could inject you. troopers dropping into Zone Red and asking the parasite-ridden population to hold still while they gave them injections." Something started turning over men in a single drop. "Why ask me?" I said. "It's a medical problem." "Of course. I just thought -- Well, you seemed to have a ready grasp -- " He paused. "Thanks." My mind was struggling with two problems at once and having traffic trouble. How many people were there in Zone Red? "Let me get this straight. Suppose you had the fever. I couldn't catch it from you?" The drop could not be medical men; there weren't that many. "Not easily. From a smear or a trace transfusion from my veins to yours." "Direct contact, eh?" How many people could one paratrooper service? Twenty? Thirty? More? "If that is what it takes, you don't have any problem." "I'm sorry. I don't -- " "What's the first thing a slug does when he runs across another he hasn't seen lately" " Conjugation " "Direct conference, I've always called it, but I use the sloppy old slug language for it. Do you think that would pass on the disease?" "Think so? I'm sure of it! We have demonstrated, right in this laboratory, that there is exchange of living protein during conjugation. They could not possibly escape transmission; we can infect the whole colony as if it were one body. Now why didn't I think of that?" "Don't go off half-cocked," I warned. "But I suspect it will work." "It will! It will!" He started to go, then stopped. ,f Oh, Mr. Nivens, would you mind very much -- I know it's a lot to ask -- " "What is? Speak up." I was anxious to work out the rest of the other problem. "Well, would you permit me to announce this method of vectoring? I'll give you full credit, but the general expects a lot and this is just what I need to make my report complete." He looked so anxious that I almost laughed. "Go ahead," I said. "It's your department." "That's decent of you. I'll try to return the favor." He went away happy and so was I ; I was beginning to like being a "genius." I stopped to straighten out in my mind the main features of the big drop. Then I went in. Mary opened her eyes and gave me that long heavenly smile. I reached down and smoothed her hair. "Howdy, flame top. Did you know that your husband is a genius?" "Of course." "You did? You never said so." "You never asked me." as the "Nivens Vector." Then I was asked to comment, though Dad looked my way first. "I agree with Dr. Hazelhurst," I started out, "subject to experimental confirmation. However, he has left for discussion aspects which are tactical rather than medical. Important considerations of timing -- crucial, I should say -- " I had worked out my opening speech, even to the hesitations, while eating breakfast -- "require vectoring from many focal points. If we are to save a nominal hundred per cent of the population of Zone Red, it is necessary that all parasites be infected at nearly the same time in order that rescue squads may enter after the slugs are no longer dangerous and before any host has passed the point where antitoxin can save him. "The problem is susceptible to mathematical analysis -- " Sam, boy, I said to myself, you old phony, you could not solve it ivith an electronic integrator and twenty years of sweat -- "and should be turned over to your analytical section. However, let me sketch out the factors. Call the number of vector origins X; call the number of rescue workers Y. There will be an indefinitely large number of simultaneous solutions, with optimum solution depending on logistic factors. "Speaking in advance of rigorous mathematical treatment -- " I had done my damnedest with a slipstick, but I did not mention that -- "and basing my opinions on my own unfortunately toointimate knowledge of their habits. I would estimate -- " You could have heard a pin drop, if anybody in that bareskinned crew had had a pin. The general interrupted once when I placed a low estimate on X, "Mr. Nivens, I think we can assure you of any number of volunteers for vectoring." I shook my head. "You can't accept volunteers, General." "I think I see your objection. The disease would have to be given time to establish in the volunteer and the timing might be dangerously close. But I think we could get around that -- a gelatine capsule of antitoxin embedded in tissue, or something of the sort. I'm sure the staff could work it out." I thought they could, too, but my real objection was a deeprooted aversion to any human soul having to be possessed by a slug. "You must not use human volunteers, General. The slug will know everything that his host knows and he simply will not go into direct conference; he'll warn the others by word of mouth instead. No, sir, we will use animals -- apes, dogs, anything large enough to carry a slug, but incapable of speech, and in quantities large enough to infect the whole group before any slug knows that it is sick." I gave a fast sketch of the Anal drop, "Schedule Mercy," as I saw it. "The first drop -- 'Schedule Fever' -- can start as soon as we have enough antitoxin for the second drop. Less than a week after, there should be no slug left alive on this continent." They did not applaud, but it felt that way. The General hurried away to call Air Marshall Rexton, then sent his aide back to invite me to lunch. I sent word that I would be pleased provided the invitation included my wife. Dad waited for me outside the conference room. "Well, how did I do?" I asked him, more anxiously than I tried to sound. He shook his head. "Sam, you wowed 'em. I think I'll sign you up for twentysix weeks of stereo." I tried not to show how much I was pleased. I had gotten through the whole performance ! without once stammering: I felt like a genius. wrung my heart at the National Zoo turned out to be as mean as he was billed, once he was free of his slug. Dad had volunteered to be the test case for the Nivens-Hazelhurst theories, but I put my foot down and Satan drew the short straw. It was neither filial affection nor its neo-Freudian antithesis that caused me to balk him; I did not want him on their side even under laboratory conditions. Not with I his shifty, tricky mind! People who have never experienced possession cannot appreciate that the host is utterly against us -- with all his abilities intact. So we used apes for the experiments. We had on hand not only apes from the National Zoological Gardens, but simian citizens from half a dozen zoos and circuses. Satan was injected with nineday fever on Wednesday, the #th. By Friday the fever had established. Another chimp-cumslug was put in with him. The slugs immediately went into dircct conference, after which the second ape was removed. On Sunday, the #th, Satan's master shriveled up and fell off. Satan was immediately injected with antitoxin. Late Monday the other slug died and its host was dosed. By Wednesday, the #th, Satan was well, though a bit thin, and the second ape. Lord Fauntleroy, was recovering. I gave Satan a banana to celebrate with and he took off the first joint of my left index finger and me with no time for a repair job. But a minor injury could not depress me. After I had it dressed, I looked for Mary, failed to find her and ended up in the messroom. wanting someone with whom to share a toast. The place was empty. Everyone in the labs was working, mounting "Schedule Mercy." By order of the President, all possible preparations were confined to this one lab in the Smoky Mountains. The apes for vectoring, some two hundred of them, were here. The culture and antitoxin were being "cooked" here. The horses for serum were stalled in an underground handball court. "Schedule Mercy" could not be here, but they would know nothing until alerted just before the drop, at which time each would be issued a hand gun and bandoliers of individual antitoxin injectors. Those who were unwilling would be pushed, if necessary, by some sergeant with a large foot. Everything was being done to keep the secret close. The only way I could see that we could lose would be for the titans to find out our plans, through a renegade or some fool telling his wife. If we failed to keep this secret, our ape vectors would be shot on sight wherever they appeared in the titan nation. Nevertheless I relaxed over my drink, happy and reasonably sure that the secret would not leak. Traffic was "incoming only" until after Drop Day and Colonel Kelly censored or monitored all communication outward. As for a leak outside, the chances were slight. The General, Dad, Colonel Gibsy, and myself had gone to the White House the week before. There Dad put on an exhibition of belligerence and exasperation that got us what we wanted; in the end, even Sec.retary Martinez was kept in the dark. If the President and Rexton could keep from talking in their sleep for another week, I did not see how we could miss. A week would be none too soon: Zone Red was spreading. After the battle of Pass Christian, the slugs had pushed on and now held the Gulf Coast past Pensacola. There were signs of more to come. Perhaps the slugs were growing tired of our resistance and might decide to waste raw material by Abombing the cities we still held. If so -- well, a radar screen can alert your defenses, but it won't stop a determined attack. I refused to worry. One more week -- sat down beside me. "How about a drink?" I suggested. "I feel like celebrating." He examined the paunch bulging in front of him and said. "I suppose one more beer wouldn't put me in any worse shape." "Have two beers. Have a dozen." I dialed for him, and told him about the success of the experiments with the apes. He nodded. "Yes, I had heard. Sounds good." "Good, the man says! Colonel, we are on the one-yard line and goal to go. A week from now we'll have won." "Well?" "Then you'll be able to put your clothes back on and lead a normal life," I answered, irritated. "Or don't you think our plans will work?" "Yes, I think they will." "Then why the crepe-hanging?" He said, "Mr. Nivens, you don't think that a man with my pot belly enjoys running around without his clothes, do you?" "I suppose not. As for myself, I may hate to give it up -- saves time and it's a hell of a lot more comfortable." "Don't worry about it. This is a permanent change." "Huh? I don't get you. You said our plans would work and now you talk as if Schedule Suntan would go on forever." "In a modified way, it definitely will." I said, "Pardon me, I'm stupid today." He dialed for another beer. "Mr. Nivens, I never expected to see a military reservation turned into a ruddy nudist camp. Having seen it, I never expect to see us change back, because we can't. Pandora's box has a one-way lid. All the king's horses and all the king's men -- " "Conceded," I said. "Things never go back quite to what they were before. But you are exaggerating. The day the President rescinds Schedule Suntan, the blue laws will go back into effect and a man without pants will be liable to arrest." "I hope not." "What? Make up your mind." "It's made up for me. Mr. Nivens, as long as there exists a possibility that a slug is alive, #f to bare his body on request, or risk getting shot. Not just this week and next, but twenty years from now, or a hundred. No, no!" he added, "I am not disparaging your plans, but you have been too busy to notice that they are strictly local and temporary. For example, have you made any provision for combing the Amazonian jungles, tree by tree? This square miles of land; we can't begin to search it for slugs. Hell, haven't even made a dent in rats and we've been at that a long time." "Are you trying to tell me it's hopeless?" I demanded. "Not at all. Have another drink. I'm trying to say that we are going to have to learn to live with this horror, the way we had to learn to live with the atom bomb." W E were gathered in the same room in the White House; it put me in mind of the night after the President's message, many weeks before. Dad and Mary, Rexton and Martinez were there, as well as our own lab general, Dr. Hazelhurst, and Colonel Gibsy. Our eyes were on the big map still mounted across one tfall. It had been four and a half days since the drop of "Schedule Fever," but the Mississippi Valley still glowed with ruby lights. I was getting jittery, even though the drop had been an apparent success and we had lost only three craft. According to the equations, every slug within reach of direct conference should have been infected three days ago, with an estimated twentythree per cent overlap. The operation had been, computed to contact about eighty per cent in the first twelve hours, mostly in cities. Soon, slugs should start dying a damn sight faster than flies ever did -- if we were right. I tried to sit still while I wondered whether those ruby lights slugs, or merely two hundred dead apes. Had somebody skipped a decimal point? Or blabbed? Or had there been an error in our reasoning so colossal that we could not see it? Suddenly a light blinked green; everybody sat up. A voice began to come out of the stereo gear, though no picture built up. "This is Station Dixie, Little Rock," a very tired Southern voice said. "We need help very badly. Anyone who is listening, please pass on this message: Little Rock, Arkansas, is in the grip of a terrible epidemic. Notify the Red Cross. We have been in the hands of -- " The voice trailed off, either from weakness or transmission failure. I remembered to breathe. Mary patted my hand and I sat back, relaxing consciously. It was joy too great to be pleasure. I saw now that the green light had not been Little Rock, but farther west in Oklahoma. Two more lights blinked green, one in Nebraska and one north of the Canadian line. Another voice came over, a twangy New England one. I wondered how he had gotten into Zone Red. "A little like election night, eh, Chief?" Martinez said heartily. "A little," the President agreed, "but we do not usually get returns from Old Mexico." He pointed to the board; green lights were showing in Chihuahua. "By George, you're right. Well, I guess State will have some incidents to straighten out when this is over, eh?" The President did not answer and he shut up, to my relief. The President seemed to be talking to himself. He noticed me, smiled and spoke out loud: " 'Tis said that fleas have little fleas, Upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, And so, ad infinitum.' " I smiled to be polite, though I thought the notion was gruesome, under the circumstances. The President looked away and said, "Would anyone like supper? I find that I am hungry for the first time in days." DY late next afternoon, the board was more green than red. Rexton had had two annunciators keyed into the command center in the New Pentagon. One showed percentage of completion of the complicated score deemed necessary before the big drop; the other showed projected time of drop. The figures on it changed from time to time. For the past two hours they had been hovering around # East Coast time. Rexton got up. "I'm going to freeze it at seventeen-forty-five." he announced. "Mr. President, will you excuse me?" "Certainly, Marshal." Rexton turned to Dad and myself. "If you Don Quixotes want to drop in on Zone Red, now is the time." I stood up. "Mary, you wait for me." She asked, "Where?" It had been settled -- and not peacefully! -- that she was not to go along. The President interrupted. "I suggest that Mrs. Nivens stay here. After all, she is a member of the family." I said, "Thank you, sir." Colonel Gibsy got a very odd look. Two hours later we were coming in on our target and the jump door was open. Dad and I were last in line, after the kids who would do the real work. My hands were sweaty with the old curtain-going-up tension. I was scared as hell -- I never did like to jump. Z' ' I UN in my left hand, antitoxin hypo ready in my right, I went from door to door in my assigned block. It was an older section of Jefferson City, slums almost, consisting of apartment houses built fifty years ago. I had given two dozen injections and had three dozen to go before it would be time for me to rendezvous at the State House. I was getting sick of it. I knew why I had come -- it was not just curiosity; I had to see the slugs die! But now I had seen them dead and I had had enough of it. I wanted to go home, take a bath, and forget it. It was not hard work, just monotonous and nauseating. So far I had not seen one live slug, though I had seen many dead ones. I had burned down one skulking dog that appeared to have a hump; I was not sure because the light had been bad. We had hit shortly before sundown and now it was almost dark. I finished checking the apartment building I was in and went out into the street. It was almost deserted; with the whole population sick with the fever, we found few on the streets. The lone exception was a man who came weaving toward me, eyes vacant. I yelled, "Hey!" He stopped. I said, "I've got what you need to get well. Hold out your arm." He struck at me feebly. I hit him carefully and he went face down. Across his back was the red rash of the slug. I picked a reasonably clean and healthy patch over his kidney and stuck in the injector, bending it to break the point after it was in. The units were gas-loaded; nothing more was needed. The first floor of the next house held seven people, most of them so far gone that I did not speak but simply gave them their shots and hurried on. I had no trouble. The second floor was like the first. The top floor had three empty apartments, at one of which I had to bum out the lock to enter. The fourth flat was occupied, in a manner of speaking. There was a dead woman on the floor of the kitchen, her head bashed in. Her slug was still on her shoulders, but it was dead, too. I left them quickly and looked around. In the bathroom, sitting in an old-fashioned tub, was a middleaged man. His head slumped on his chest and his wrist veins were open. I thought he was dead, but he looked up as I bent over him. "You're too late," he said dully. "I killed my wife." -- or too soon. I thought. From the appearance of the bottom of the tub and his gray face, five minutes later would have been better. I looked at him, wondering whether or not to waste an injection. He spoke again. "My little girl -- " His head slumped forward again. I felt his jaw line and dug my thumb into his neck, but could find no pulse. The child was in bed in one of the rooms, a girl of eight or so who would have been pretty had she been well. She roused and cried somewhat deliriously and called me Daddy. "Yes, yes," I said soothingly, "Daddy's going to take care of you." I gave her the injection in her leg; I don't think she noticed it. I turned to go, but she called out again. "I'm thirsty. Want a drink of water." So I had to go back into that' bathroom again. As I was giving it to her, my phone shrilled and I spilled some of the water. "Son! Can you hear me?" I reached for my belt and switched on my phone. "Yes. What's up?" "I'm in that little park just north of you. I'm in trouble." "Coming!" I put down the glass and started to leave -- then, caught by indecision, I turned back. I could not leave the child to wake up with a parent dead in each room. I gathered her up and stumbled down to the second floor. I entered the first door I came to and laid her on a sofa. There were people in the flat, too sick to bother with her, but it was all I could do. "Hurry, son!" "On my way!" I dashed out and wasted no more breath talking, but made speed. Dad's assignment was directly north of mine, paralleling it and fronting on one of those pint-sized downtown parks. "Here, son, over here -- at the car!" I could hear him both through the phone and by ear. I swung around and spotted the car, a big Cadillac duo much like those the Section often used. There was someone inside, but it was too dark for me to see. I approached cautiously until I heard him say, "Thank God! I thought you would never come," and knew that it was he. I had to duck to get in through the door. It was then that he clipped me. and ankles tied. I was in the second driver's seat of the car and the Old Man was in the other at the controls. The wheel on my side was latched up out of the way. The realization that the car was in the air brought me fully awake. He turned and said cheerfully, "Feeling better?" I could see his slug, riding high on his shoulders. "Some," I admitted. "Sorry I had to hit you," he went on, "but there was no other way." "I supose not." "I'll have to leave you tied up for the present. Later on we can make better arrangements." He grinned, his old wicked grin. Most amazingly, his own personality came through with every word the slug said. I did not ask what "better arrangements" were possible; I did not want to know. I concentrated on checking my bonds -- but the Old Man had given them his personal attention. "Where are we going?" I asked. "South." He fiddled with the controls. "Way south. Give me a moment to lay this heap in the groove and I will explain what's in store for us." He was busy for a few f-.econds, then said, "There, that will hold her until she levels off at thirty thousand." The mention of that much altitude caused me to look at the control board. The duo did not merely look like one of the Section's cars; it actually was one of our souped-up jobs. "Where did you get this car?" I asked. "The Section had it cached in Jefferson City. I looked and, sure enough, nobody had found it. Fortunate, wasn't it?" There could be a second opinion, I thought, but I did not argue. I was still checking the possibilities and finding them between slim and hopeless. My own gun was gone. He was probably carrying his on the side away from me; it was not in sight. "But that was not the best of it," he went on. "I had the good luck to be captured by what was almost certainly the only healthy master in the whole of Jefferson City -- not that I believe in luck. So we win, after all." He chuckled. "It's like playing both sides of a very difficult chess game." "You didn't tell me where we are going," I persisted. I was getting nowhere fast and talking was the only action open to me. He considered. "Out of the United States, certainly. My master may be the only one free of nineday fever in the whole continent and I don't dare take a chance. I think the Yucatan Peninsula would suit us. That's where I've got her pointed. We can hole up there and increase our numbers and work farther south. When we do come back -- and we will! -- we won't make the same mistakes.' I said, "Dad, can't you take these ropes off me? They cut my circulation. You know you can trust me." "Wait until we go full automatic." The car was still climbing. Souped up or not, thirty thousand was a long pull for a car that had started out as a family model. I said, "You seem to forget that I was with the masters a long time. I know the score and I give you my word of honor." He grinned. "Don't teach grandma how to steal sheep. If I let you loose now, you'll kill me or I'll have to kill you. And I want you alive. We're going places, son -- you and me. We're fast and we're smart and we are just what the doctor ordered." I did not have an answer. He went on, "Just the same -- about you knowing the score, why didn't you tell me, son? Why did you hold out on me?" "How?" "I had no idea that a man could feel such peace and contentment and well-being. This is the happiest I've been in years, the happiest since -- " He looked puzzled -- "since your mother died. But never mind that; this is better. You should have tolc me." Disgust suddenly poured over me. I forgot the cautious game I was playing. "Maybe I didn't see it that way. And neither would you, you old fool, if you didn't have a slug riding you, talking through your mouth, thinking with your brain!" "Take it easy, son," he said gently -- and so help me, his voice did quiet me. "You'll know better soon. Believe me, this is what we were intended for. This is our destiny. Mankind has been divided, warring with himself. The masters will make him whole." I thought to myself that that was exactly what the slugs wanted humanity to do -- surrenphony promise of security and peace. But I did not say so. "You need not wait much longer," he said suddenly, glancing at the board. "I'll nail her down in the groove." He adjusted his deadreckoner bug, checked his board, and set his controls. "Next stop: Yucatan. Now to work." He got out of the chair and knelt beside me in the crowded space. "Got to be safe," he added, as he strapped the safety belt across my middle. I brought my knees up in his face. He reared up and looked at me without anger. "Naughty, naughty. I could resent that, but the masters don't go in for resentment. Now be good."He went ahead, checking my wrists and feet. His nose was bleeding, but he did not bother to wipe it. "You'll do," he said. "Be patient; it won't be long." He went back to the other control seat, sat down and leaned forward, elbows on knees. It brought his master directly into my view. Nothing happened for some minutes, nor could I think of anything to do but strain at my bonds. By his appearance, the Old Man was asleep, only he wasn't. I knew what was about to happen. A line formed straight down the middle of the horny brown covering of the slug. As I watched it, it widened. Presently I could see the opalescent horror underneath. The space between the two halves of the shell widened -- the slug was fissioning, sucking life and nourishment out of the body of my father to make two of itself. I had no more than five minutes of independent life left to me. and bone to break the ties on me, I would have broken them. I did not succeed. The Old Man paid no attention to my struggles. I doubt if he was conscious; the slugs must simply immobilize the slave while occupied with splitting. By the time I had given up, worn out and sure that I could not break loose, I could see the silvery line down the center of the slug proper which means that fission is about to be complete. That was what changed my line of reasoning, if there were reason left in my churning skull. My hands were tied behind me, my ankles were tied, and I was belted tight across the middle to the chair. But my legs, even though fastened together, were free from my waist down. I slumped down to get even more reach and swung my legs up high. I brought them down smashingly across the board -- and set off every launching unit in her racks. The Old Man and I were both slammed back against the seats, he much harder than I, since I was strapped down. He was thrown so hard that his slug, open and helpless, was crushed. It splashed. Dad was caught in that terrible, total reflex, that spasm of every muscle that I had seen three times before. He bounced forward against the wheel, face contorted, fingers writhing. The car dived. I sat there and watched it dive, if you call it sitting when you are held in place only by the belt. Dad's body had hopelessly fouled the controls; otherwise I might have been able to do something -- gotten her headed up again, perhaps -- with my bound feet. I tried, but with no success at all. The controls were probably jammed as well as fouled. The altimeter was clicking away busily. We had dropped to eleven thousand feet before I found time to glance at it. Then it was nine... seven... six... and we entered our last mile. At fifteen hundred, the radar interlock cut in and the nose units fired one at a time. The belt buffeted me across the stomach each time. I was thinking that I was saved, that now the ship would level off -- And I was still thinking so when we crashed. aware of a gently rocking motion. I was annoyed by it. I wanted it to stop; even a slight motion seemed to cause more pain than I could bear. I managed to get one eye open -- the other would not open at all -- and looked dully around for the source of my annoyance. Above me was the floor of the car, but I stared at it for a long time before I could identify it. By then I was somewhat aware of where I was and what had happened. I remembered the dive and the crash, and realized that we must have crashed not into the ground, but into some body of water. The Gulf of Mexico? I did not really care. My broken seat belt was flapping above me. My hands were still tied and so were my ankles, and one arm seemed to be broken. An eye was stuck shut and it hurt me to breathe. I quit taking stock of my injuries. Dad was no longer plastered against the wheel and that puzzled me. With painful effort. I rolled my head over to see the rest of the car with my one good eye. He was lying not far from me, three feet or so from my head to his. He was bloody and cold and I was sure that he was dead. I think it took me about a half hour to cross that short distance. I lay face to face with him, almost cheek to cheek. So far as I could tell, there was no trace of life, nor, from the odd and twisted way in which he lay, did it seem possible. "Dad," I said hoarsely. Then I screamed it. "Dad!" His eyes flickered but did not open. "Hello, son," he whispered. "Thanks, boy, thanks -- " His voice died out. I wanted to shake him. but all I could do was shout. "Dad! Waite up -- are you all right?" He spoke again, every word a painful task. "Your mother -- said to tell you -- she was -- proud of you." His voice died out again and his breathing was labored in that ominous dry-stick sound. "Dad," I sobbed, "don't die. I can't get along without you." His eyes opened. "Yes, you can, son." He paused, then added, "I'm hurt, boy." His eyes closed again. I could not get any more out of him, though I shouted and screamed. Presently I put my face against his and let my tears mix with the dirt and blood. Then I passed out again, and awoke in a hospital bed. Mary was kissing my face, bandages and all. "Dad!" I said, feeling that awful grief again. "He's dead, isn't he?" A wicked muffled voice answered. "Not a chance, son. I'm just as tough as you are." He grinned weakly at me through the window of an oxygen tent. I grinned and fell asleep, holding Mary's hand. E who are going to clean up Titan are all writing these reports. If we do not come back, this is our legacy to free human beings -- all that we know of how the titan parasites operate and what must be guarded against. For Kelly was right; there is no getting Humpty-Dumpty together again. In spite of the success of Schedule Mercy, there is no way to be sure that the slugs are all gone. Only last week a Kodiak bear was shot, up Yukon way, wearing a hump. The human race will have to be always on guard, especially about twenty-five years from now. if we don't come back -- and the Flying Saucers do. We don't know why the titan monsters follow the twenty-nine-year cycle of Saturn's year, but they do. The reason may be simple; we ourselves have many cycles which match the Earth year. We hope that they are active only at one period of their year; if they are, P mI Operation Vengeance may have easy pickings. Not that we are counting on it. I am going out. heaven help us, as an "applied psychologist (exotic)," but I am also a combat trooper, as is every one of us, from chaplain to cook. This is for keeps and we intend to show those slugs that they made the mistake of tangling with the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life 'n this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be turned. fl have a private hope that we will find some way to save the little elf creatures, the androgynes. I think we could get along with them.) Whether we make it or not, the human race has got to keep up its well-earned reputation for ferocity. The price of freedom is the anywhere, anytime, and with utter selflessness. If we did not learn that from the slugs, well -- "Dinosaurs, move over! Wc are ready to become extinct!" For who knows what dirty tricks may be lurking around this Universe? The slugs may be simple and open and friendly compared with, let us say, the natives of the planets of Sirius. If this is just the opener, we had better learn from it for the main event. VVe thought space was empty and that we were automatically the lords of creation. Even after we "conquered" space, we thought so, for Mars was already dead and Venus had not really gotten started. Well, if Man wants to be top dog -- or even a respreted neighbor -- he'll have to fight for it. Efry one of us who is going has been possessed at least once. Only those who have been hagridden can know how tricky the slugs are, how constantly one must be on guard -- or how deeply one must hate. The trip, they tell me, will take about twelve years, which will give Mary and me time to finish our honeymoon. Oh, yes, Mary is going; most of us are married couples and the single men are balanced by single women. Twelve years isn't a trip; it's a way of living. When I told Mary that we were going to Saturn's moons, her single comment was, "Yes, dear." We'll have time to have two or three kids. As Dad says, "The race must go on, even if it doesn't know where." I am now finishing this report in Space Station Beta, from which we will transship to U. N. S. Avenger. We said good-bye to Dad last night at Pikes Peak Port. He corrected me. "So long, you mean. You'll be back and I intend to hang on, getting crankier every year, until you do." I said I hoped so. He nodded. "You'll make it and so will I. We're both too tough and mean to die. I've got a lot of confidence in you and the likes of you, son." We are about to transship. I feel exhilarated. Puppet masters -- the free men are coming to kill you! HO Shasta Publishers believe "The best is yet to come!" and are happy to announce # Grand Prize Open to all. The best manuscript will win. No magazine taboos. We are looking for modern novels so outstanding that they will win new readers for the field of science-fiction, and delight regular readers as well. We want strong characterizations, believable human motivations -- exciting, unusual story-telling. A new direction in science-fiction. The winning manuscript will be published in book form, with an outright grant of #, plus a # advance against royalties. must be between # and # words. Sufficient return postage must accompany each entry. The decision of the judges will be final. Entries will be judged by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, co-editors of The Best ScienceFiction Stories annual anthology. Only original, unpublished science-fiction novels will be considered... But anyone, anywhere is eligible to compete. Promising entries which do not win the Grand Prize will receive consideration for future book publication in our forthcoming lists, receiving regular advances and royalties. "The best is yet to come!" Help the best to come about. Send in your novel... Which era of the past or present would you pick to live in? What worlds would you want to visit? A problem, eh? Any era you chose would eliminate all the others, and any worlds you visited would leave the rest unexplored by you. But you can live in any age, from the beginning of life to the end of history ! You can see any planet, from Mars clear out to the limits of the Universe! Stay with them long enough to know them thoroughly, and then... on to the next era, the next solar system ! How? monthly #c tour through all time and all space... or to guarantee not missing any, send # for twelve issues of exciting excursions to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. You'll have the time of your countless lives! I Qauxy M    Paramount presents Most Amazing Story That Science Or Fiction Ever Imagined... Based On The Sensational Book By Oilaxy edrtor M. L oot Decmbr, #I Vol. #, Na. # Aitiitant Editor Art Diroctor AdvortUIng Manager ' by Damon Knight # by C. M. Kornblufh #I CoYr hf Illustrating is published monthif hj Cafaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street. New Yotk #. N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: u# co ie) # per year m tM United States. Canadc Mexico. South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office. New York, N. Y. Copyright # by Ga axy Publishing Cofporccioo. Bernard Kaufman, president. A. L. Pltnc treasurer. All righta including translation, fcserved. All materiad tu mitced must be accompanied by self'addresscd stamped envelopes. The publisnar assumes no responsibilin for unsolicited mtceriaiL All stories printed in thie magazine are fiction, and any similarity between chacactars and actual Si coiacideiitaU by Johm Wyndham # by Fritz Leibor # by Jack Yanea #I by Doan Evant #Z by HL Gold t by Groff Conklim #S PAil# N  . A A AM. ea Fore and Aft Y ou may have noticed that ownership and wondered why a profitable magazine should have to change hands. The anjBwer is simple, though some of the effects were not -- the previous publishers, being unfamiliar with science fiction, were unable to integrate the magazine into their publishing program. With our new ownership, a lot of things that have been wrong re going to be corrected. Most important of all, the editorial and production standards are going to be changed onJy in the direction of improvenfent. For example, now that the splendid Heinlein serial has ended, we have Damon Knight, and, beginning in the January issue, a dazzlingly Either one would be worth the #c tab, but in addition there are the fine novelets and short stories (... and from March on, we're starting an exciting monthly feature by Willy Ley, in which he will cover significant developments in science and answer your questions either in the departgnent or by mail!  Start sending your questions along to us now. All this has disrupted schedules severely, delaying the semi-annual story ratings a full month. Here are your selections, issue by issue, for Volume #... plus my comments:  April: Betelgeuse Bridge, William Tenn; Inside Earth, Poul Anderson; I, the Unspeakable, Walt Sheldon; Nice Girl with # Husbands, Fritz Leiber; Field Marching Morons, C. M. Kornbluth. Many readers explained the reasons for their preferences, all personal, of course, but I wouldn't attempt to rate the stories. One good restraining factor is that every item in the book is to be anthologized.  May: Hostess, Isaac Asimov; Ask Me Anything, Damon Knight; Bridge Crossing, Dave Dryfoos; Man of Destiny, John Christopher. Here, too, all stories are signed up for book publication. Even the article, Africa's Mysterious Mammal by Willy Ley, will probably be included in his next volume on natural history.  June: Don't live in the Past, Damon Knight; Angel's Egg, Edgar Pangborn; Hunt the Hunter, Kris Neville. The first two are scheduled for anthologies; the third may be by the time this appears. Angel's Egg. by the way, had me worried. I liked the story tremendously, but was uncertain that readers would. They did.  July: Appointment in Tomorrow, Fritz Leiber; Syndrome Johnny, Charles Dye; Common Denominator, John D. MacDonald; Venus Is a Man's World, Lesser. All these will be in book form.  August: Beyond Bedlam, Wyman Guin; The Pilot and the Bushman, Sylvia Jacobs; The Fire and the Sword, Frank M. Robinson; Operation Distress, Lester del Rey ; A Little Journey, Ray Bradbury; Pictures Don't Lie, Katherine MacLean. Of these, only Operation Distress has not been tapped for book publication, and that may be by this time. Again I took a long chance, for Beyond Bedlam had a theme that normally frightens people, and the plot was sharply divorced from the melodramatic school of writing. Reader response, however, was vast both in quantity and appreciation. This was the issue that was prematurely withdrawn from dirbulatibn, so, if you want a copy, send #c.  September: Cabin Boy, Damon Knight; If You Was a Moklin, Murray Leinster; The Sense of Wonder, Milton Lesser; What Is Posat?, Phyllis Sterling Smith; The Biography Project, Dudley; Dell. The first three and the fifth are signed up for anthologies. I don't think serials or articles can be rated -- there's no reasonable way to compare them witK novelets or short stories. But in the case of The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein, the reaction was so enthusiastic that some mention of it must be made. Although the serial was not completed, most readers insisted on rating it against the three previous ones, with this result: The Puppet MasterSj Robert A, Heinlein; Mars Child, Cyril Judd; Time Quarry, Clifford D. Simak; Tyrann, Isaac Asimov. All have appeared as books or are scheduled to, which, with our shorter fiction and most articles, means that about # of the first year's issues will wind up between hard covers. It may sound like a boast to some sensitive readers, but the fact is that no other periodical of any kind whatever has achieved this almost unbelievable record. Are We proud of it? Well, what do you think? And our second year looks even better than this World Without Children Paradise on Earth would be a life without war or death or want. Agreed! But what if the price for individual survival means -- no posterity allowed? I T he last diapers were ia museums, along with teething rings, layettes, formula bottles, perambulators, rattles and teddy bears. Swings and trapezes, slides and jungle gyms had been broken up for scrap. The books, most of them, had been junked: Baby and Child Care, Black Beauty, Obstetrics tor the Millions, Tom Swift and his Rocket Glider, What Every Boy Should Know, What Every Girl Should Know, Diseases of Childhood, The Book of Knowledge, Martners for Teeners, One Hundred Things a Boy Can Make. The last recorded birth had been two hundred years ago. That child -- who had also been the last to wear a snowsuit, the last to cut his finger playing with knives, and the last to learn out women -- had now reached  he physiological age of twenty-ive years,  and looked even younger owing to his excellent condition. His name was George Miller; he had been a great curiosity in his day and a good many people still referred to him as The Child. George did his best to live up to the name. Ever#hing he did was essentially outr; everything he wore was outlandish; everything he said was outrageous. He got along better with most women than with most men. He said the sort of things to women that made them say, "Oh, George.'" half wincing, half melting. At the moment he was busy explaining to Lily Hoffman, head of the Human Conservation League, why he had never permanently given up drinking or smoking. 'Oh, George," said Lily. "No, really," said George earnestly. "You say having fun will take ten per cent off my life. Well, but Art Levinson tells me that my present life expectancy is probably somewhere around three thousand years. So if he's right, and you're right, my disgraceful habits won't catch up to me until # A.D. and by that time I expect to be glad enough to lie down." Lily tilted her careful blonde curls forward to avoid a drink in the hand of a wandering guest. "That's an average, George," she said. "And of course it's only a guess, because nobody who's had the longevity treatments early in life has passed away from old age yet. Now I personally believe that it's possible to live for ten thousand years or more. And, George, just suppose you did pass away in # from overindulgence, and the very next year they found a way to extend the life-span even morel" "Good Lord," said George, looking distressed. "That would be a laugh on me, wouldn't it?" "Really, George, this is a seri ous -- " George put his hand on her arm. "You're right," he said, with fervor. "I might be throwing away the best centuries of my life. I'll stop this very minute." He took a beautifully chased silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket and emptied it into his hand. "If you'll excuse me," he said, rising, "I'll go and throw these in the fireplace so as not to be tempted."  She called after him, "George, stick to it. That's the important thing. You've quit before, you know." "I know," said George humbly. Carrying the cigarettes at arm's length, as if they were a clutch of poisonous serpents, he maneuvered his slender body among the standing, sitting and perambulating guests until he reached the fireplace,' "Hello, Luther," he said to a gray-haired, comfortably plump man wearing rimless spectacles. "I'm enjoying your party." He dropped the cigarettes ceremoniously behind a charred log. "Again?" asked Luther Wheatley amiably. "Lily talked me into it," George told him. "You ought to try virtue some time, Luther It gives you a sort of intense feeling, an I-am-the-master-of-my-fate kind of thing. Besides, it's an inexhaustible source of conversation. And then when you finally succumb, you have such a delightful sense of wickedness. I think everybody ought to abstain from everything once in a while. Just to keep from taking it for granted." "George," said Luther, frowning in concentration, "I believe that is the same discovery that you first announced to me when you were about twenty-three. How do you manage to -- shall I say -- keep your mind so fresh?" "How do you manage to remember every damned thing I'v said over the course of a hundret! and fifty-odd years?" Georg.countered irritably. "You always say the same thing." One of Luther's cats wan dered by, and Luther stooped t  pick it up. It was a pretty thin.f , marked like a Siamese, but wit . long, light fur. It stared at Luthe  with offended dignity and mad a noise in its throat. "Haven't seen that one before, have I?" George asked. "No. She's a distant descendant of Mimi, though -- sixteen generations removed. You remember Mimi." "I do, indeed. A great cat, Luther. You weren't worthy of her. Pity they're so short-lived, isn't it?" "That's why I like them," Luther said, letting the cat drip from his hands like golden taffy. "People are so inconveniently permanent... Art! Is that you? I thought you were in Pasadena for the season." A stocky, owl-faced man with a shining bald pate put his hand on Wheatley's shoulder. "I flew in especially to see you, Luther," he said. "Hello, George. You, too." He shook hands with them in turn. "Can we go somewhere and talk? It's important. Is Morey here?" Luther peered across the room. "He's around somewhere." He stopped a man carrying a tray of cocktail glasses and said, "Find Mr. Stiles for me, will you? Tell him I'd like to see him in my study." He took the owlish man's arm and gently propelled him toward the door, leaving George to trail along. "How are you, you dog-robber? How are the famous Levinson fruit-flies?" "How are the cats?" "Esthetically rewarding, which Is more than I can say for your noxious pets." Luther opened the study door and ushered them in. It was an almost fanatically tidy place, like the rest of Luther's apartment. There was a small window looking out on the roof-tops of Venice; the Rio Foscari was on the opposite side of the building. There were a desk, a work table, an easy chair and two straight chairs. The walls were covered with shelves of books : mostly history and genetics, with the usual peppering of salty novels. Two cats were in the easy chair, one in each of the straight chairs, and one asleep on the table. "Dump them off," said Luther, etting an example and easing fcimself into the one comfortable chair. "You can sit on the table, George -- you've got the youngest and most resilient ligaments." A man yvith the long, cartilagenous face of an honest son of toil appeared in the doorway. His collar was too big and too stiff, his tie creased and askew, and his short iron-gray hair was fiercely rumpled like a eagle's nest. He looked as if he might bite, until he smiled; then he looked unexpectedly shy and friendly. His voice was a subdued rumble : "Hello, Art. Glad to see you. What's the bad news?" "It's bad, all right," said Levinson. His round face was serious as he bit off the end of a cigar with a quick, nervous gesture. "Shut the door, will you, Morey?" He looked at the unlit cigar and put it down. "Listen," he said, "I could build up to this gradually and spare your nerves, but I haven't got the patience. I found out something last week that scared me to my toenails." He stopped and glanced at each of them. They seemed impressed. George did, too, but grim seriousness always impressed him. It made him feel uncomfortable enough to want to drive it off with a facetious remark, but before he had a chance to think of one, Luther said to Levinson, "You really are upset, Art, and that's something you don't do easily." He looked just above George's head. "Are you sure we're the ones you want to tell?" "Now look here," George said, beginning to get angry. "I may be the youngest of you, but I'm not a kid to be -- " "I wanted George here," Levinson interrupted. "He is younger, and because of that he's inclined to be less stodgy. Also, he has more of the adventurousness of youth, and that may be damned important." George sat ack, compressing his lips and giving one emphatic nod. "What scared you. Art?" asked Stiles. Levinson broke the cigar with bitter abruptness. "The human race," he said bluntly, "is ninetenths sterile." fTHE others looked at him in shocked silence. George glanced around, saw that nobody else was ready to speak, and asked, "How did you find out?" "Restocking my sperm and ova banks," said Levinson. "I've been keeping them for a good many years, you may remember. There are a lot of men and women living today who have never had children. Good stock -- stock we'll need when and if the race starts breeding again, and yet any one of those people might get killed in an accident and we'd lose it. So I've been keeping up the banks, though I never thought I'd see them used for another couple of thousand years. But nine out of ten donors are now sterile." "You checked?" asked Luther. "Naturally. I've got samples from North and South America, from Europe, Asia, Africa. All the same. There it is -- we're standing on top of the last slide down to hell." Stiles looked puzzled. He said, "How do you know it's going to get worse. Art?" "It's that kind of thing -- a progressive change. Morphological deterioration. Sperm with two tails, three tails, no tail, or all but motionles's. Ova that can't be fertilized. I've made some tentative charts. I haven't got enough , data yet for accuracy, but the breakdown seems to begin in men who are physiologically at least forty and chronologically at least three hundred. In women, a little earlier. That includes damn near everybody. I'm not kidding, Morey. In 'five to ten years more, there won't be enough viable stock left to start the human race again." "Have you got any idea what's causing it. Art?" George asked. "Only the obvious one -- it's just one more side effect of longevity. You know that in gross terms what the treatments do is to slow down your catabolic rate. In about fifty years, in other words, you age about as much as  you would naturally in one year. At first it was thought that that was all the treatments did, but we know better now. We have the expected increase in 'diseases of the aged' -- kidneys, heart, liver, arteriosclerosis, calcium deposits and so on -- but we also have a rash of things nobody figured on. Cancer, for instance, came close to wiping out the race until they licked it at the Gandhi Center about two hundred years ago. Then there's an unexpected drop in resistance to respiratory infections along about age-of-record #. And now this." "What have you done about it?" asked Stiles. "You talk to anybody in the government?" "Sure." Levinson picked up a fresh cigar and bit into it savagely. "I talked to Van Dam, the Public Health Commissioner, after sitting around his office for three days, and he took it up with President Golightly. He brought me back Golightly's answer. Here it is." He took a folded piece of paper out of his vest pocket. " 'Thank you for your interesting report, which I am turning over to the appropriate department for further study. In reply to your question, resumption of wholesale breeding at this time would be prejudicial to world peace and security, and no such measure will be entertained until all other avenues have been exhausted.' " He stuffed the note back into his pocket. "What about those other avenues, Art?" asked Stiles. "Nonexistent. There is no known cure for morphological sterility in men or women, and not even a promising line of research. We've got to start breeding, that's all. No Way out of it But that trained-seal department of Golightly's will kick the problem around for ten, twenty, fifty years. By that time we might as well start carving our own monuments. Prejudicial to world peace and security," he added bitterly. Stiles scratched his ear, looking mournful. "It would kick up kind of a rumpus. Art," he said, "He's right there." Levinson turned on him. "Try to see a little further than your own union for once, Morey. Would you let the whole blasted race die just to preserve the shortage of masons?" " 'Tain't only that," said Stiles, unruffled. "We'd be ready for another war as soon as the population got big enough, for one thing." "Let's have a couple of more voices here," said Levinson, "Luther, any comment?" Luther sighed. "Shall I get out my checkbook now. Art, or do you want me: to wait until I've liquidated some of my holdings?" Levinson shrugged at him. "It's going to cost you, all right," he agreed. "All three of you. We'll need about three hundred thousand credits to start. More later." "Much more. Art?" ' Luther queried. "Plenty. We've got to set up at least half a dozen birth centers, each equipped to handle upward of a thousand children and meet all their needs, if necessary, over a twenty-year period. We'll build the centers, or buy and adapt them. They've got to be in out-of-tlie-way places and adequately camouflaged to fool the Security Police. We've got to staff them, service them, arrange for protection -- and we've got to do it fast." He looked at each of them in turn. "I know that all three of you are worth several it before we're through." There was a short silence. Then Stiles coughed and looked apologetic. "Let's just clear up a few points. Art. One thing, it seems to me that this cloak-and-dagger stuff is unnecessary. Why not take it to the people? Force the Golightly gang to repeal the birth prohibition?" Levinson said, "You've done some publicity, Morey. How long do you think it would take to put such a program over, on a worldwide scale?"  Stiles frowned. "A year, maybe... He winced comically. "All right, all right, I know what you're going to say. It would take Golightly just about twentyfour hours to throw us all in pokey. I was just stalling on that one, I guess. But here's another thing. Art. As I get it, you're figuring on six thousand kids or more in the first generation. Why so many?" , "Simply because I'm afraid we won't be able to do much better. still couldn't save all the useful, strains that are still viable. It's like this, Morey: Suppose there are only five men and five women in the world. Each one has some quality that the others don't in his heredity. One has mechanical ingenuity, another one leadership, another one artistic imagination, and so on. If one of those couples fails to reproduce, there are two qualities gone forever. Multiply problem." He waved his cigar at Stiles's nose. "Don't forget, we're down to ten per cent of our stock already. The best we can hope to do is to patch together some kind of crude imitation of the human race, and hope it will work. If we manage to save homo sap at all. we'll be damned lucky." Stiles leaned forward, elbows on knees, and laced his big fingers It together. "Art, I don't know -- " he said slowly. George, who was facing the door, saw it open a crack. He said quietly, "We have visitors." As the others turned, the door swung open all the way. A woman with coppery hair piled around the merest sketch or suggestion of a hat was leaning into the room with her slender hand on the doorknob. George caught a glimpse of someone standing behind her, and then, smiling toward them like a minor natural catastrophe. "There you all are," she said happily. "Hiding! Did you think I wasn't coming, Luther? Art, when did you get into town? Why didn't you call me? Morey, you're looking as eatable as ever. George, darling," she finished, and patted him on the cheek. The four of them were standing, even Luther, who normally made getting out of a chair a ceremony. George found his heart going at an unusual rate. Glancing at the others, he conjectured that they all felt the same symptoms as far as the state of their arteries would permit. Luther and Art were beaming, and Morey's grin was a little more shy than usual. Hilda Place affected men like that -- all men, as far as George bad been able to discover. eyes, with faint bluish shadows under them, the eyes of a mature and knowing woman; but her lips had the softness of youth. Her slender body was covered from throat to wrist and calf by her dark green dress. Hilda preferred not to expose herself in public; she had never worn the showcase gowns that were currently fashionable. Accepting their greetings, she gave each of them a kiss on the cheek. All except George. While he was still telling himself that it was absurd for this to matter so much to him, she had turned and brought a stranger into the group. "I want you all to meet Joseph Krueger," she said gaily. "He's the most fascinating man in the world, and I want everybody to remember that I discovered him. Gentlemen, this is the Man From the Past!" The Man From the Past' looked as young as George; he was well set up, but had a curious awkwardness about him, a coltish uncertainty. He had a large, chin, mild eyes behind dark-rimmed spectacles, and an engaging smile. George, despite a stab of jealousy, decided that he liked him. "I'm not a time traveler or anything," Krueger was saying. "That's only Miss Place's exaggeration. I'm an amnesiac, they tell me. I found myself standing on a street corner in Vienna two weeks ago, and the last thing I remember before that was having a drink in Wichita, Kansas, in December, #. So I'm amusingly ignorant, as Miss Place puts it." "Astonishing," said Levinson. "Isn't it?" said Hilda delightedly. Her parted lips were moist. "This is all new to him. He drinks it in like a man from Mars -- about the world government, and what happened to New York, and G-string parties -- " "And people hundreds of years eld," Krueger put in. "That, mostly." Levinson was still pursuing his own thought. "You lived under amnesia for better than three centuries, then," he said. "That must be a record. You have no idea what you were doing all that time, I suppose?" Krueger shock hihead. "No, sir. I've made inquiries, of course, but there was nothing in my pockets that gave any clue, and apparently I didn't live in Vienna; I couldn't find anybody who knew me there. Actually, I don't mind very much -- I feel like what Miss Place calls me, the Man From the Past. I'm having a time just trying to catch up." "We've been to see the Peace Monument, and Chico's, and the Doges' Palace -- " T "And the pretty girls on the Lido," added Krueger, widening his grin. " -- and we're still not half done. I'm exhausted," Hilda said. "And I've got to disappear for a few weeks on business, so I hope some of you will find time to show Joseph the sights. Not you, Luther. I know you never go out. And, Art, I suppose you're running back to your fruit-flies. But Morey? Or George?" Krueger looked uncomfortable. "I don't want to be any bother." "Not at all," said George sympathetically. "You're a novelty, you know, and that's a rare thing after the first hundred years or so. Have you got any notion where you'd like to go next, or is it all too new?" "Too new. I'm afraid. But any place I haven't seen yet would be fine with me, as long as I'm no trouble." "I'll work out an itinerary and call you," said George. "Let me have your address and number."  shall we go mingle with the populace? I've got to, anyway. Some of them would probably recognise me if they saw me and will be hurt if they don't." He crffered his arm to Hilda and they Started out. He turned at the door to ask Levinson, "You're staying he night at least, aren't you. Art? Good. We'll all get together again a little later." George exchanged a few more words with Krueger, introduced him to three beautiful women, and wandered off looking for Hilda. He found her in the middle of a tight group near the end of the room where dancing was being attempted to the strains of Luther's music-library outlet, and wormed his way in to her. "Dance with me?" he asked hopefully. "Of course, George," she said, and a reluctant lane opiened for them. Then her lithe warm body was in his arms, and the ridiculous gilded feathers on her hat were tickling his ear. "I rather like your Joe," he said. "I'm glad. Isn't he delicious?" Her breath warmed the side of his neck. "Haven't kissed him," said George. "I'll have to take your word for it." Somehow, without seeming to withdraw deliberately, she no longer was quite so close to him. "Sorry, " he said."That slipped." "I didn't like it," she told him, "but I think I'll forgive you, because I like you so much. Actually, though, you're wrong. Joseph is one man I'm absolutely certain I shall never have an affair with." "That's not much comfort," George said grumpily. "It seems to make two of us -- Joseph and me." She smiled up at him. "As if it matters, darling. There are so many women in the world." "But it's you I want." "For the moment." H e stared in astonishment at her softly laughing eyes. "Well, good Lord, you don't think it should be forever, do you? I mean monogamy was all very well for a short-lived human race, but -- " "Don't be silly, George. Nobody could stand one mate for what may be centuries or even more. It's a horrifying thought." "Then what are you trying to tell me?" he challenged. "I'm very fond of you; you know that. And I'm very pleased and flattered that you want me." "Then why not -- " She seemed almost embarrassed. "I don't know just how to put it, darling. If it's just me you want, when there are so many other women, then it's an obsession and you ought to see an analyst." "But I said it wasn't that Really, Hilda, this is all very damaging to my self-esteem. I'm not sure I want to know your objection to me, but I'm afraid I must. What is it?" She turned still pinker and looked away. "It's idiotic,; George. You probably won't understand it; I don't think I do, myself." She turned her face up defiantly. "I feel -- motherly toward you." "Motherly?" he repeated, stunned. "But that's nonsense! You wouldn't know how a mother feels! None of us would -- I mean women, of course -- any more than I know what it's like to feel  fatherly." "But I'm so much older than you." "Well, who isn't?" "You see, I said you wouldn't understand," she answered sadly, then tugged his arm with sudden desperate gaiety toward the bar. "Let's forget all this sociological argument, George. I want a drink." So did he, George realized. prism high in the arched ceiling, struck full on the paintings that lined either side of the long, curving gallery, and left the center, the moving strip with its divans, its cafe tables and chairs, , in a soft, restful gloom. , "Here we come around again,"  said George. "Another of the same?" Joe Krueger looked at hia , empty glass. "Yes, but this round's mine. You've been paying for everything." "That will complicate things, though," objected George. "Tell you what. You can buy our tickets to the shadow plays tonight." As they approached the checker in his little booth, George took the green disk with the tab that and white one that said scotch on the table's center pole. Around the center pole were four illuminated plastic cylinders which reeled off the names of the paintings as they passed. Pi"I'd like to see more of his," said Joe, looking at the Shahn. "His stuff seems more vital than most, somehow. More -- " He hunted for a word, gave it up with his usual embarrassed shrug. "He's younger," said George. "Picasso, Tscheletchew and all that bunch were old men when the longevity treatment came in. They're still turning out the same thing, pretty much, that they were doing three centuries ago. It does get tiresome, I admit, but who's interested in art when there are other things to do and see? We've gone a long way in more important directions, if you ask me." "Oh, yes," said Joe emphatically. "Besides, the Culture CommisTfT sioner tells them what to turn out. Works fine for everybody." The serving station came around. The white-jacketed waiter stepped neatly aboard, smiled, deposited their drinks, and stepped off again. The cylinders anGeorge stirred his drink moodily. Joe was now watching the paintings attentively,' and he felt free to let his thoughts wander. After Hilda had gone home last night -- not with George, worse luck ! -- the four of them had gathered in the study again for a council of war. This time it had been Morey Stiles who had led the discussion. He had pointed out that the project couldn't possibly be managed on a small scale, that in spite of the danger they had to have an organization. He was right, of course; after all, they'd need an enormous staff who would have to know what was going on, not to mention the several thousands of women who would have to be persuaded to give birth. Luther, warming to the problem, had been all for secret meetings in basements, and an clabI  orate organization based on the ancient Communist system. He had been voted down. The plan, as they finally evolved it, centered around doctors -- specialists in women's complaints, for preference -- who were to be recruited and sworn in by Levinson. It would be their job to test their patients for fertility, carefully sound out the pick of the lot, and recruit them in turn. Meanwhile Morey, as the team's best ad ministrator, would be drawing up plans' for the birth centers, inspecting locations, bribing officials, and so on. Luther, who had the widest acquaintance among monied men, would scout for more capital. There had seemed to be nothing left for George to do but to pony up when required and to keep his mouth shut. Levinson had told him, however, that there would ultimately have to be a somewhat risky attempt to reach the public, and George, because of his youth and daring, would be very valuable in that phase of the conspiracy. When? Levinson didn't know. And Hilda, who had only just got into town, was off again to some mysterious destination for an unspecified length of time. Anyhow, he had Joe to feel superior to; he ought to be grateful for that. He felt mildly ashamed of, himself when he glanced at the man and saw the eagerness in his face. Perhaps that was the answer to the question of ennui, he thought -- get yourself knocked on the head, or have your memories surgically excised somehow, and start all over again. That wasn't such a foolish idea as it might seem, he told himself. After all, nobody knew yet what real longevity was like; nobody was older than three or four centuries. What would happen when they were all three thousand or more? There was plenty of time to worry about it, at least. He said, "I'm sorry, I wasn't listening." Joe repeated, T've been reading histories like mad, but I can't seem to take it all in. Things are so much the same, in some ways, and yet so different." He shook his head. "I suppose I'm trying to get it too fast." "Well, there isn't exactly any rush," said George cheerfully. "Anything in particular bothering you?" "No children, chiefly, I guess. It's hard for me to understand how that could possibly be enforced. In my day, population was always increasing to meet the available food supply; it was supposed to be some kind of natural law. And now you've stopped it cold." "Had to," said George. "You ee, the fellows who perfected the longevity techniques published their work, and the newspapers took it up, and the thing got completely out of control in the next fifty years. Normal birth rate -- higher, as a matter of fact -- and the death rate way down. That was the time of the big blowup -- famines, riots, and the Last War on top of it. When we came out of that, we had three things: longevity, a strong world government, and a greatly improved birth control technique. Those pills, you know, that everybody has to take. "Well, what else was there to do? They had to cut down the birth rate, at least, or in a century or so we would have been standing on each other's shoulders. And that would have been unenforceable, you know -- restricted breeding. You can't tell anybody that he's not as fit as the next man to have children. So they stopped it altogether, made childbirth a capital crime. As a result, the total population has shrunk a good deal in the last three hundred years, but we're still over what's regarded as the optimum figure. Or so they say." "How do you mean?" "Well, restricted breeding is an awfully hot potato. We'll have to come to it eventually, but I don't think anybody in the government is happy about the prospect. If we started reproducing in any quantity, the whole economic balance would be upset. Tremendously complicated problem. I don't know enough about it to explain to you properly." "I should think it would be particularly hard on the women," said Joe thoughtfully. "Well, there were a lot of people, men and women both, who couldn't adjust to longevity it-' self, let alone the other problems. In the first century after the war, I understand suicide accounted for something like fifteen per cent of the death rate. Looking at it from one angle, that was a good thing for the race. I mean to say, if a person has any fundamental instability, it's going to come out in two centuries or less. And people for whom there simply wasn't any room in the society. Without children consuming and not producing, you know, our production rate is enormously higher. There was a lot of unemployment, too, in that first century. Some starvation. I'm afraid. And crime waves. But that's all settled down now, and as you see we have a very stable setup, and a high living standard. That's why it's going to be so difficult to change when we have to." "Umm," said Joe, seriously. It It occurred to George that he had been talking rather seriously himself, not exactly the best line to take for a man with knowledge be was supposed to conceal. He smiled cheerfully and said, "But I don't think anybody should work up an ulcer over it just yet. You can generally lick a problem if you have a few thousand years to mull it over." Joe nodded enthusiastically. "That's one of the things that awes me, whenever I think about it. In the old days -- I mean, in my day -- " He shook his head. "I keep getting my terms of reference mixed up. Anyhow, it used to be that a man could learn enough to do what he wanted to do by the time he was thirty, end then his life was half done. Now -- " He looked baffled. "It's hard to take in. Tell me. Miss Place said something about rocket flights to the stars -- ?" "Oh, yes. They got to the Moon in #. That must have been a year or two after you blanked out. Mars is #, I think it was, and Venus the year after. Moons of Jupiter in #. All uninhabitable, of course." "Yes, but I meant interstellar flights?" along about the turn of the century. The trip took something like six years each way, I understand. They found a very Earthlike planet, and I believe there's some talk of putting a small colony there." "Lord!" said Joe Krueger. "But -- all this time, and they haven't done anything more about it?" "Well, it's really a hobbyist's kind of thing," said George thoughtfully. "A good many people, with more time and more capital to play with, have turned to space-flight who wouldn't have been much involved with it before. But it hasn't any economic base, you see. No really urgent reason for anyone to tackle it." "That's what I don't get," said Joe, creasing his brow into an anxious frown. "Wouldn't it solve the problem we were just talking about?" "It might, at that," said George, trying valiantly to see the question from the other man's viewpoint. "But it hasn't come to that yet, and probably won't for a good long time. As things stand, human life is a very precious thing, much more than it was even in the Western countries in your day. That's understandable, isn't it? It's like betting at roulette -- if you haven't got much to lose, you may as well risk it all; but if you've got a lot, you're a fool to gamble it away. So that's one reason we don't have war --  another argument against breeding that I forgot to mention -- and we play a good deal of tennis and squash and so on, but no football : and we're not anxious to risk our necks on exploring expeditions. You had something in mind like the colonization of the Amazon basin and so on, didn't you?" Joe nodded. "All habitable areas." "Not the same thing, though -- we have no population pressure, no economic pressure. Things are good here for everybody. Why should anybody want to leave? There's more room in the Americas, but I like Europe and who needs more room just for himself?" Joe grinned wryly. "I see it -- in theory, anyhow. But I'm damned if I feel that way about it. Me, I'd like to go." "I'll see if I can wangle an introduction to Clarke, the Rocket Society high lama. Luther knows him, I think." Joe was saying, "That would be wonderful," when George's wrist phone buzzed. He said, "Excuse me," and swiveled the disk into his palm so that the receiver covered his ear and the transmitter pickup touched his throat, making eavesdropping impossible. "George Miller," he said. "George, this is Art Levinson," said the tiny voice rapidly. "I'm about to be arrested by the Security Police. I tried to reach the others, but they're both out of phone range." "The Security -- that's impossible," George protested. "We haven't done a thing. They couldn't know!" "I told you I spoke to Van Dam, the Public Health Commissioner," said the voice impatiently. "He must have figured I'd do something about the sterility situation, so he evidently had my rooms wired and put a detail of police on my trail. Everything we said in our conference must be on official tapes." "Good God!" George exclaimed. "Then we're all in danger!" "Of course. Don't tell me you haven't got anybody trailing you." George glanced around apprehensively. Everybody suddenly looked suspicious, but there was no one he could specifically identify as a Security Policeman. "I don't know," he said. "Where are you?" "In Luther's bedroom. I locked myself in. They're trying to break the door down. Good-by, George. Just pass the word along. That's all you can -- " "Hold on! How long can you keep them out of there?" "Another few minutes, if that. Don't try to do anything foolish, George. There's another of thens in a 'copter outside the bedroom window. Just tell -- " "Wait!" said George excitedly. "Hold them off as long as you can. Throw a fit. Do anything." He broke the contact and said to Joe's astonished face, "Something urgent. Pay the check for me, will you? I'll call you later." He fumbled a bill out of his wallet, stood up and leaped off the moving strip, dashing past indignant patrons of the arts to the roof exit. Thoughts blurred in his head. He didn't know what he could do, but he intended to do something. He couldn't let Levinson stand off the police by himself. The excitement was somehpw pleasant -- the adrenalin squirting through his veins, his chest filling massively with air his shoulders knotting with the expectation of a fight. It was astonishing. He couldn't think of anyone who wouldn't avoid danger at absolutely any cost; with his conditioning, it was hard to believe that he was being so foolhardy. Yet George felt rather proud of himself. He'd wondered why Levinson had included him in the original tiny group of conspirators, had resignedly assumed it was actually because of his money. Now he knew at least part of the reason and respected Levinson's shrewdness. He was, he thought quickly, about two minutes away from Luther's apartment by air -- if he could get a cab. The roof was crowded with private 'copters, and for a moment George debated the idea of stealing one. Impossible. They were all stowed in parking clips, and he couldn't get one out past the attendant anyhow, even if some fool had left his keys in the dashboard console. He ran on, reaching the cab section just in time to see a red-and-green 'copter lifting away. He thought it was empty, but he couldn't be sure. He shouted futilely, then swung his wrist-radio out, dialed it to "Directional" and sighted carefully at the rising 'copter. After a long moment the instrument clicked and said, "Signor?" The cab steadied and hovered. "Down here," said George. "Where you just came from -- the Modem Museum." Apparently he had lost the contact, for the 'copter hung annoyingly' where it was. Then he could see the tiny dot that was the driver's head. He waved madly, and in a moment the cab settled back to the landing stage. George piled in and said, "Get up -- quick." As the 'copter lifted again, the driver's mustachioed face turned to regard him quizzically. He said, "The Penaldo Building on the Rio S. Polo. You know the place I mean?" "Surely, signor." "Then hurry, will you?" George waved a hundred-lira note, on second thought added another. The 'driver's eyebrows went up the merest trifle; philosophically, he headed the machine into the northbound traffic level and fed power to the rotors. George looked anxiously at his phone. He didn't have Art's call number, worse luck. But if they had already broken down the door when he got there, he'd know soon enough. He forced himself to relax, then exploded into motion the next instant as the cab settled on the Penaldo Building's roof. He thrust the money at the driver, shouted, "Good work, thanks!" and ran across the roof to the canalside parapet. He looked back once to make sure that the cab had taken off, then peered cautiously over the parapet. There was the police 'copter, sure enough, hovering outside the window of Luther's topfloor bedroom. Underneath, five stories down, a white gondola was rocking in the surge of a small power boat. The gondolier's ancient automatic curses drifted faintly up to him. Now what? He had had a vague notion that if he could eliminate the 'copter somehow, he could get Art out through the window before the other Security men broke in. But eliminating the 'copter looked tough now, if not impossible. He risked another look. There was only one man in the 'copter; that was a point in his favor, though he wasn't sure how. But just to begin with, he couldn't attract the man's attention by shouting; he'd never be heard over the noise of the 'copters rotors. And he couldn't very well show himself. As for the phone -- IVait a minute! The police would almost certainly be talking to each other by phone; in fact, he was positive of it. And these small transmitters didn't reproduce intonations very well. It could work. Anyway -- George aimed the phone carefully at the man in the 'copter and said briskly, "On the roof I Quick!" Then he ducked out of the man's visual range and watched the rotor blades. When they began to rise, he leaped away from the parapet and got behind the stairway entrance. The door was open, and George could hear muffled banging sounds down the corridor. Good for Art, he thought abstractedly; he must have piled furniture against the door. He looked around the corner of the entrance and saw the 'copter's tail level with the parapet. Instantly he faced the other way...put his palm against the door frame and shoved himself violently backward. He toppled out into view, legs going furiously to try to keep, his balance; then he let himself go and landed with a bone-crushing thump on the hard roof. He scrambled to his feet again, drew an imaginary knife from his jacket, and lunged back behind the entrance. There was a thump as the 'copter landed on the roof, and then footsteps pounded toward him. George ducked around the opposite side of the entrance and ran silently, on the balls of his feet, completely around to the blind side again. The policeman, a depressingly burly young man in pearl-gray jacket and shorts, was leaning half into the doorway, listening to the sounds from down the hall. Without hesitation, George launched himself at his back. They tottered a moment. Then the policeman's grip was torn away and they plunged together down the stairs. They landed with a jar that shook George from skull to knees. He sorted himself out and saw that the young policeman was also getting up, with a dazed expression on his face. George hit him on the point of the jaw, as hard as he could. The policeman collapsed and slid down another four steps. Panting, George slid down beside him and took his gun. He could still hear the pounding down the hall. Evidently the others hadn't heard the crash when they ca?ie down the stairs, though it had sounded loud enough to wake a regiment. George hit thj; recumbent policeman thoughtfully behind the ear with the butt of his gun. He would have liked to get him out of the way, but strongly doubted his own ability to lug that steakfed hulk any distance. He went back up the stairs, past the idling 'copter, to the parapet again. It was a good fifteen feet down to the window and no way to get there. He couldn't take the 'copter down and simply invite Art to climb in; the rotor blades wouldn't have enough clearance. Swearing to himself, George ran back to the 'copter and rummaged inside it. In a locker just forward of the door, he found a rope ladder. But it took him what seemed like five anguished minutes to locate the hooks -- diabolically hidden over the door inside the cab -- which were designed to support it. He climbed in and took the 'copter up, past the parapet and over, dangerously close, letting the ladder dangle against the window. For another agonizing interval, nothing happened. George was about to haul the aa ladder up again and tie a wrench to it, when the window suddenly swung open and Art's red, wildeyed face appeared. George leaned out and gestured wildly. Art noddad, grasped th ladder, and swung precariously out into space. George hovered carefully until Art was halfway in. Then he took the 'copter up and away in a wild swoop that nearly made Art fall out again. Art closed the door and jackknifed himself into the tiny space to right of the pilot's seat. When he got his breath back, he said, "Thanks.' "Don't mention it," ' said George. "Did they want you very badly, Art?" "Afraid so. Didn't give them a chance to tell me. Ducked into the bedroom and locked the door when I saw them." He took a deep breath and smiled. "Where to now?" George felt an unexpected glow of satisfaction. Imagine anyone asking him what to do next! "I'm looking for an empty landing stage," he said. "We'll ditch llie 'copter there, and then get ourselves as thoroughly lost as we can." Ill roof of a theater building and topped at tha nearest publin phone booth to try to reach Luther and Morey. Both were still out of range. Then they went looking for a suitable hiding place for Art. In Venice -- in any modern city get very thoroughly lost. There were discreet apartment houses, residence hotels, 'copter courts -- and there were the vice houses, George, knowing Art's staid habits, chose one of the latter. The police would also know Art and might not look there. For the benefit of those with scruples or reputations, entrance to the house was by way of a series of little cubicles lining one side of an arcade. The other side was rented to a group of secondrate but bona fide shops. Having inspected the merchandise displayed there and assured himself that no acquaintances were lurking in the corridor, a prospective client could simply step across into the nearest vacant cubicle and shut the door. Inside, a polite voice from a wall speaker asked to be allowed to learn your wishes, registered you under any name you chose to give, and allotted you a room, a suite, a wing or a floor according to your wishes and your pocketbook. George, speaking German with a thick and slightly drunken Munschener accent, affected hesitation and asked for a resume of U the house's attractions. The invisible clerk immediately switched to impeccable Low German and suggested, "The Herren would possibly like to inspectthe ladies in one of the private salons before making a choice? Or perhaps one of the theaters first? Or if the Herren require any stimulation -- ?" He proceeded to describe some of the entertainments now being offered in the theaters, and to name the various species of stimulants that were available to clients. "No," said George fuzzily. "Later, later. We are already too drunk. Give us just a room -- no, a suite. The best." "Certainly. Sixty lira, please." George put the notes into the slot in the counter. A receipt and two door keys popped out, and the right wall of the cubicle rolled back to reveal a tiny self-service elevator. "Suite C #," said the clerk. "Turn right when you leave the elevator." The suite was eminently comfortable: three bedrooms, two baths, living room, game room, and even a tiny gymnasium; but Art grumbled. "Dammit, George, I suppose I shouldn't complain when you've just saved my neck, but I can't see your sense of humor. Anyway, what are these people going to think when I-keep staying here but don't have any women up?" t "Probably think we're queer," George suggested. Then, as Art seemed about to explode, he added hastily. "It'll be good for you. Art -- teach you humility and not condemning your fellow man and so forth. Anyhow, you've got to admit it's safe." "All right," said Art, brushing the subject aside. "Listen, do you have any idea where Luther and Morey might be, or when they're due back?" "Not the faintest," George admitted. "Luther has his cat farm up near Turino -- he might have gone there -- but he might just as easily have run over to Praha or even Wembley for a couple of days. Morey might have gone back to North America -- I hope so -- but in any case I don't see how we can risk a 'gram without giving the whole show away." , "No," agreed Art. He scowled and bit his lip. "Just the same, we've got to locate them. I have a hunch the S. P. is just as anxious to find them as we are." George lifted one eyebrow. "You think they're clairvoyant?" "No. I think that up till an hour ago, Golightly's crowd took me just seriously enough to want me out of the way. But since you've pulled that televisionserial act with the 'copter. I'm ously alarmed. I told you they must have our meeting on tape. # so they'll know Luther and Morey are involved. You, too, of course." George sat down on the edge of a large, circular divan, upholstered in aphrodisia red. He said thoughtfully, "Well, what do we do? If we all run, then we'll just be advertising our whereabouts, won't we?" Art nodded grimly."But if the S. P. gets hold of any of the four of us, I wouldn't give much for our chances of seeing daylight again." George stared at him. "I suppose I'm naive, but it seems to me that you're implying they'll use illegal methods -- truth serum and so on." "I think they will," Art said positively. "George, you were born into this socjety, so I wouldn't expect you to realize, emotionally, just how unstable it really is. You've read about the series of religious wars that followed the big blowup, and the Asian massacres, but I suppose it's never occurred to you that that kind of thing could happen again. It could, and nobody knows it' better than Golightly. By education and technology and, let's' face it, by the execution of everybody who really objected, this planet has been forced to keep its birth-rate at zero. But the urge to reproduce,' next to the survival instinct, is one of the strongest forces in nature. Tilt the balance of control just enough, and Golightly's government would go over like a house of cards. And just incidentally, Golightly is about as paranoid as you can get without being locked up. I know the man. He'll do anything to keep himself in the driver's seat." George felt himself going a trifle pale. He said, "In that case, I suppose I'd better get busy. I'll call every place they could possibly be. You stay here. Art. I'll come back and report as soon as I can." He found a public booth in the concourse nearby, and spent an expensive twenty minutes trying to locate Morey at his headquarters in Des Moines, and Luther at Turino, Praha, Wembley and points in between. Gloomily, he called Art at the vice house, using the name he had given in registering. "No luck so far," he said in German. "See here, have you looked at the fax or the video newscasts?" "Yes. Nothing of interest there." "Do you think they may have been found already?" "It's possible," said Art's earnest voice, "but I think it's unlikely. Anyone like those two is terribly hard to track down at a moment's notice, as you are finding out. If we can get them! within the next few hours, I think we'll be in time. Keep trying." . , George rang off and sat thinking for a moment. Actually, the possible number of places where either Luther or Morey might be at this moment included every thing within a day's flight from Venice, meaning the major part of Earth's surface. If he kept on calling relay stations at random, it might easily take him days to hit the right one. There had to be a quicker way. How about the agony columns In the Telefax papers? George considered the probable cost briefly, and whistled softly to himself. Another difficulty was that it would mean showing his hand; the S. P. would almost certainly see the messages, whether Luther and Morey did or not. But he could think of no other anBwer. He plucked a doodle-sheet from the pad fixed to the wall of the booth, and set down a rough draft of the message. Dissatisfied, he scratched it out and tried gain. After six attempts, he had: ous charges have been leveled against revered Father Owl of California. Abandon your worldly identities immediately and ily to consult with your brethren. The meeting will assemble in the place f the Drowned Insect. It sounded silly enough, he hoped, to pass as an ordinary notice intended for one of the innumerable crackpot sects which had sprung up after the power of the organized churches had been crushed. He couldn't make it more specific, but he hoped "Vermont and Louisiana" would serve to attract Luther's and Morey's attention -- the name of a man's home state will usually stand out from a page of type almost as well as his own name -- and "World Fathers" and "Father Owl of California" wouldmake the identification certain. The last line was a long shot. He had to indicate a meeting place without naming it; "the place of the Drowned Insect" was a restaurant in yenice where the three of them, a few years before, hadjaeen served a tureen of soup with a dead cockroach floating in the center of it. Also, he had to tell them to assume false names, and if possible get across the idea that they were to disguise themselves. Here dgain, he couldn't be too explicit; "abandon your worldly identities" was the best he could think of. When he read it over, it seemed like a forlorn hope either that the two men would see the notice or that they would read it correctly. But he took the slidewalk down to the nearest fax agency and fed the message into a machine. adding the code numbers for all the local papers served by the Mediterranean Agency, which covered southern and eastern Europe, part of what had once been the Soviet Union and most of North Africa. The cost was approximately two hundred times the amount of cash he was carrying, and this worried him until he reflected that he was undoubtedly on the S. P. list, if Art was right; there was no point in trying to conceal his tracks. He wrote a check and fed it into the machine. While he waited for its acknowledgment, he set up the same message on another machine and coded it for the PanAmericati Syndicate. He went through the same procedure twice more, once for the North Atlantic Agency and once for tire All-Asia Syndicate. When he was finished, his Venetian bank account was in a state of near collapse. The bank itself was only a few blocks away, near the Rialto bridge. As an afterthought, he went there and closed out his account, pocketing the cash. It had occurred to him that, again supposing that Art was right, the government would very likely impound their property. He wished he had included a suggestion of this kind in the message to Luther and Morey, but it was too late to worry about it. He went back to the vice hoUse, conferred with Art, and then took himself to "the Place of the Drowned Insect." The restaurant was an oldfashioned one, catering to those who liked human service well enough to pay the almost astronomical prices imposed by the waiters' salaries. At that, George noticed, the place was understaffed. In another century or so, he supposed, nobody would be able to hire any kind of servant for less than a division chief's pay. He found an inconspicuous table at the rear, ordered minestrone and spaghetti marinara, and waited. When the spaghetti gave out, he ordered a half bottle of claret. He made the wine last as long as he could, then bought a newspaper at the fax machine across the room and ordered another half-bottle. He checked to make sure his ad had been eptered properly, read the paper through, and then, through sheer boredom, read it completely through again. He was beginning to feel awash with wine, and the waiter was glancing at him with obvious irritation each time he passed. George caught his eye and ordered a pastry and coffee. When that was gone, he ordered more coffee. Then he went back to wine. Eventually it became impossible to think of taking another sip of the stuff. George sat and stared glassily at the half-empty bottle, wondering why he had not had the God-given sense to make the meeting place a library, or an opium den, or anything at all except a restaurant. "Came as soon as I could," said Luther's voice. "What's up?" George looked around with enormous relief to see the little man easing into the chair opposite. "Luther!" he said. "I couldn't be gladder to see you!" He smothered a belch. "You haven't gone back to your apartment, have you?" "No, of course not. Why?" "Don't. According to Art, we're #I about two jumps away from jail. Where were you, and how did you come back?" "In Milano. I wanted to see a man there who claimed he had a new strain of Abyssinians. Came back by plane, the same way I went up. IVhyF" "Good Lord," said George. Tfou were lucky they didn't nab you at the airport. All right, the next thing is, give me checks for ny funds you've got in Venetian banks. Wait a minute. First, do you have any idea where Morey might be?" "Marseilles, I think. Now why -- ". George stood up somewhat unsteadily. "I'll try to call him there while you're writing the checks. Don't order anything till I get back." He returned in a moment. "No luck. Either he's on the way back, or you were mistaken. Got the checks?" "Yes. Here. But listen, George, take pity on my ignorance, will you? What's happened to Art? Why do you want all my money? I feel as if I'd come in at the second act." "I'll explain it all to you later or Art will. Oh, damn!" He looked at his watch. "The banks are closed, aren't they?" He tore up the three slips of paper Luther had handed him and stuffed the fragments in his pocket. "Well, look. Art is in the Hotel Scato on the Nuza Vecchia, Suite C #. Speak German and ask for Herr Bauernfeind -- that's the name I gave when I registered. You go on up there as fast as you can, but use the slidewalks; don't take a 'copter. I'll stay here -- " George looked unhappily at the wine bottle -- "and wait till Morey shows up, or the place closes." Luther stood up. "All right. Look, though, if Morey is on the way here, and if he started about when I did, he might be within phone range by now. Why don't you try calling him again?" George clutched at the idea. "I M win. Waft for me." He went to the booth again and dialed Morey's number. A voice said, "This is Stiles." George sighed happily. He said, "George, Morey. How long will it take you to get here?... You saw the ad?... Good. I'll meet you outside." A N hour later they were all together in Art's suite, listening to a video newscaster announce, "The following persons are wanted by the Security Police for questioning in connection with a conspiracy against the peace. Please memorize these names and pictures. If you see one of these persons, communicate immediately with your local S. P. office. Arthur Benjamin Levinson, age #I : residence, Pasadena, California; profession, geneticist. Luther Wallace Wheatley, age # ; residences in Venice, Mexico City and Caulfield, Vermont; independently wealthy." Three more pictures and descriptions of Luther's friends appeared, then George's. Morey was far down the list, which was a long one. "They'll narrow it down," said Art Levinson. "In a couple of days, at the most, they'll have located all but the four of us. Then you'll really see a fox hunt." Morey's long face was gloomy. "It don't look good. Art. If you want my opinion, we're licked." "I didn't say the fox hunt would succeed," Levinson said. "We can slip the hounds and, as long as we're free, we have a chance to get our program across." Morey shook his head. "Maybe you got some reason to be optimistic, but I don't see it. We've got to throw out all the plans we've made so far, ain't that right?" "Yes." "Well, then, will you tell me what in blazes we can do? How much money have we got between us?" They counted up. George had a little over two thousand international credits. Art four hundred, Luther not quite a thousand, and Morey, surprisingly, five thousand. "It's union money," he said glumly. "If we spend it, that's one more crime chalked up against us. Not that it'll matter. Anyhow, we got just short of eighty-three hundred credits. How far can we get with that?" "Not very far -- if we run," said Art. "If we run, they'll catch us. I think we can take that as a mathematical certainty. That disposes of one of the three alternatives we have, as I see it." "The other two being?" asked Luther. "We can give ourselves up," said Art. "Or we can fight. It may seem funnj but I. honestly think the safest thing we can do -- supposing for a minute that we're just interested in saving our necks --  -- is to fight. Or let's say to resist. The other two ways are the next thing to suicide." Art's round face was flushed with enthusiasm. Luther was smiling quietly, and there was a faint gleam even in Morey's pale eye. George felt a trifle left out. He had an absurd picture of the four of them behind a barricade, doing battle with an endless swarm of policemen. "Somebody explain this to me, will you?" he asked plaintively. "He's too young to remember," said Luther kindly. "Tell the boy. Art." Art leaned forward earnestly, and unconsciously the three hitched themselves forward a little in their chairs. "George, you probably haven't read much about the two socalled 'World Wars' that preceded the Last War, because in historical perspective they were only a sort of preliminary. But during the second one, when Germany had overrun most of Europe, there was a thing called the Resistance. An underground movement. Their situation was very much like ours -- they didn't have enough of an organization to attack openly, or even defend themselves openly. But they did what they could -- sabotage, espionage, propaganda, and some guerrilla warfare. In effect, they made themselves one hell of a nuisance to the Germans. We can do the same thing." "There were more than four of them, though, weren't there?" George asked. Art said, "An analogy is just an analogy, George, not an identity. As it happens, Golightly's government has one serious disadvantage that the Germans didn't have. The Germans were a frankly oppressive group to begin with, operating to the full extent of their power. Golightly's crowd can't fight even a small resistance group -- and we'll grow, don't worry -- without assuming the characteristics of a tyranny. And, George, this planet simply isn't weak enough or sick enough, economically and politically, to hold still for a tyrant. "This present group has been continuously in power for more than two centuries, and there isn't one of the inner circle that wouldn't like to extend their power. But we've still got a democracy. Why? Because they haven't got a power concept behind them. They've kept office all this time because they're the best administrators and practical politicians on the planet, and that's a. If they stop acting in the people's interest -- which they've already done -- and if enough of the people find out about it -- which they will -- their goose is cooked." "This is revolution you're talkin' about," said Morey gently. "A lot of people're going to get hurt." "I know it," replied Art, looking grimly unhappy. "Show me another way, Morey, and I'll grab it." "This is just for the record, so to speak," Morey said. "There's an election coming up in eighteen months. We might be able to hook up with Golightly's opposition and get them in." Luther snorted. "Di Falco? That man is the eternal disappointed candidate." "And," said Art, "we can't wait eighteen months. All right?" "Grant the point," agreed Morey reluctantly. "Okay. Here's a tentative list of tactics I've made up. You'll notice that I've tried to put the emphasis on things that will provoke the government into illegal and, if possible, violent acts. It's like ju-jitsu -- we've got to make them use their own strength against themselves." "Let's see that," said Morey, with such enthusiasm that the other three stared at him. "It's been a long time since a union man had to hit below the belt, but I remember a few tricks, can dig up more from the old books. and maybe invent some of my own." IV course; no society, however perfect, had completely rehabilitated or absorbed the maladjusted who had either too much power drive or not enough, the bitter rebels and the passively defeated, those who wouldn't conform and those who couldn't. In ethical societies, the underworld had consisted of criminal and political malcontents, while harsh tsrrannies had suppressed the honest. George had been vaguely aware of the underworld, but he had never, as far as he knew, encountered any of its denizens. Now, g;uided by Morey and Levinson, who had maintained cautious contact with it, he found that he had unsuspectingly been quite friendly with a number of people on the Security Police's gray list. The strange thing was that he had always previously considered these daring semi-criminals the worst bores he knew. There was  the 'Thanatopsis Club, for instance. Levinson had arranged to have George address them in secret session, and George switched cabs, doubled back several times, skittered through alss leys while looking fearfully over his shoulder -- and ended in a dismal suburban house belonging to Elbert Maxwell, the ornithologist. It was a very tense gathering in the living room. Carlotta Speranza was there, a small unattractive bibliographer with a sharp and peering face, who could talk your ear off about ancient literature; Kurt Lustgarten, the philosopher, whose flabbily intense features had backed George into more corners at parties than he liked to remember; Paavo Atterberg, the musicologist, whom George had been more successful at evading, generally because Atterberg could be easily, maneuvered to a piano; and other similarly intense people, with eager, hungry eyes and nervous hands, who were unfamiliar to George. Elbert Maxwell saw him look puzzledly at the TV screen, which was writhing with some frantic dance in full color, and the pair of drinks each person was holding grimly, and the flimsy costumes they wore. "Camouflage," Maxwell explained, giving a shrill, anxious laugh. "If the police raid us -- which has happened a couple of times; we're all suspected of dangerous cultural activities, you know -- why, we're simply having an innocent vice party." "I see," said George, confused. "When do I speak? I have several more addresses to make tonight." Maxwell glanced at a card he was holding. "Well, we'll try to move you up on the agenda, but I'm afraid you picked a bad night -- there's a great deal of business to be done at this meeting." George took the two antagonistic drinks that were handed him and sat down to listen patiently until his turn came. He was aware of his own tension. He was pretty sure he'd thrown off any possible shadows, but he couldn't know whether the others present had been as clever. They certainly didn't look it. At any moment, the house might be stormed and this pathetic attempt to make a criminal underground meeting seem like a mere orgy wouldn't fool the police. Maxwell, pretending to watch the TV screen, told the gathering that two more species of bird had become extinct in the last decade, and at least six others were in danger, with the government, as usual, threatening any attempt to save them. The listeners showed every emotion from horror to rage. George tried to feel upset about the situation, but couldn't. It wasn't that he disliked birds; he just thought it was their problem, not his. Maxwell's motion to set up secret bird sanctuaries was carried, and George felt an emoS# tiona! response for the first time -- at the amount of money they agreed to raise for the project. Carlotta Speranza, talking passionately about the decline of literature, didn't bother pretending to watch the TV show. She "You can't do this to me!" Carlotta shrieked. "Are your birds more important to civilization than literature?" "Of course not," Maxwell said hurriedly. "Everything is important. But we can't do everything wanted an ambitious program begun immediately -- undercover writing classes, printing plants and distribution channels. Lustgarten objected that the population had been educated away from reading. She added a hitand-run public campaign to her program. Maxwell, clearly feeling that all this might cut down the funds for his secret aviaries, shrewdly tabled the resolution. at the same time." "Then put your program aside temporarily." Maxwell was shocked. "And let these species vanish forever?" "I think both should be considered by all our colleagues in the underworld." said Atterberg, "but the main thing is raising money to save music." And he tried to go into an excited explanation of the musical crisis, but Maxwell ss made him wait until his speech was scheduled. Lustgarten spoke next. George tried manfully to listen to his statement on problems of philosophy in an indifferent world, but developed a headache that had to be massaged by a drink. One proved insufficient; he took the other and opposite drink, which acted like an explosive charge to the primer of the first one. He was silently rooting for one team of jet-skaters on TV by the time Lustgarten and Atterberg finished and it was his turn to talk. George managed somehow to explain the problem. The others listened attentively until it was time to take a vote. Then a split developed. Lustgarten and Atterberg declared that they were personally not involved; they didn't care much if humanity survived unless, as Atterberg put it. there was music in its soul, or philosophy and not brainless frivolity, in Lustgarten's words. A very tall woman with almost no hair on her head, quite a bit on her face and military shoulders stated that she would rather die than submit to breeding. Maxwell was in favor, as long as the project did not interfere with saving birdlife. When Carlotta Speranza unexpectedly dropped her own program to support George's, and said, "Birds don't create literature, Elbert; people do, and we must keep the race going to that end," Maxwell suddenly changed his mind. "If I have to choose between birds and humanity," he said bitterly, "I'll take birds every time. They never exterminated another race of animals! Whereas, what has been humanity's record? One species after another wiped off the planet! Because of viciousness? Greed? At one time, yes -- the bison and the egret are two examples. But the motive today is pure lack of interest. We encroached on the habitats of our furred and feathered friends until they could no longer maintain existence, and so went into the limbo of extinct species." "Wouldn't happen again," George argued fuzzily, realizing that he was neither articulate nor sober enough to overcome Maxwell's notorious literary style. "Everybody dies. New generation takes place. Not enough people to cover Earth. Birds multiply. Animals multiply. Educate new generation to take care of 'em. Teach 'em music and philosophy and literature -- everything. Solves all problems same time." "In how many centuries will the present population die off?" Maxwell demanded. "What happens to animal life in that time? Wiped out, sir -- wiped out completely! No, I'll let humanity die out before I'll allow another species ever to become extinct!" "But voting against the birth program won't hasten the end of mankind," Carlotta Speranza pointed out heatedly. "It will still take the same number of centuries before we all die." "Abs'lutely right," George agreed. It didn't change the vote, however. George acquired Carlotta and two other women and one man who looked singularly unfertile as members of the conspiracy. He was told how to get to his next appointment, given a few more drinks for the road, and, though he remembered only a blurrily earnest facq or two in indistinctly different living rooms, he had nearly two dozen signed applications to turn over to Levinson in the morning. "You've done fine, George," Levinson said enthusiastically, while George shakily placed a hangover capsule on his fuzzcovered tongue. "The organization is under way!" "It's awfully hard on the eardrums and the bladder," George complained. "Right now, I don't feel that saving humanity is worth the trouble." "You'll learn not to listen," said Morey encouragingly. "Even to yourself, as a matter of fact. I know -- I can make any number of union speeches without even hearing myself. Habit." "And all the drinking I have to do?" George asked, pulling down his lower eyelids to see the engorged veins more clearly. "It's free, isn't it? And you can carry alcohol-neutralizing tablets with you." George turned around in horror. "Then where's the fun?" V had had it for almost a month now, but it didn't appear that he was ever going to get used to it. Or to the wax Art Levinson had injected under the skin at the bridge of his nose, to give him a new profile. He kept compulsively scratching the area and it seemed to have set up some kind of local irritation. He had a plastiskin bandage over it now, which increased the hump and made the disguise better, though still more annoying, but at least it kept his fingernails away. After this weekend, when he'd meet the other three in Seville to compare notes, he'd have it attended to; meanwhile, there was nothing to do but bear it. There were doctors in Paris to whom it would be safe to go, but George didn't know them; that was Levinson's department. They had decided to work apart as much as possible. # so that the capture of one might hinder their activities, but wouldn't stop them altogether. At the moment, ironically enough, both the itches, as well as the skin dye and new hairline, were entirely unnecessary. George, mingling as usual with the largest crowd he could find anywhere, was attending the annual Beaux Arts Ball as one of approximately three Jhundred robed, tinted and masked pseudoAfrican witch doctors -- this costume being, for no discoverable reason, the season's favorite. Aside from the itches, he was enjoying himself thoroughly. He danced with all the prettiest women, who, according to immemorial custom, concealed about as much of themselves as the male guests left uncovered. He flirted with them, kissed them if they seemed amenable, and, whenever a fold of bustle or headdress gave him the opportunity, concealed leaflets n their persons. It was a safe method: most of the pamphlets probably would not be found until the costumes were removed. And although he observed that more of the ladies than he had counted on were dispensing with concealment at the ball itself, he was further protected by his costume and his excellent French. In case of extreme emergency, he had thoughtfully provided himself with a skin-tight Lucifer suit under the witch-doctor's robes. Temporarily without a partner, George made his way through the press of bodies to a pillar, where he steadied himself long enough to look at his watch. It was getting on toward the unmasking hour. He looked around, over the heads of the crowd, to make sure he knew where the nearest side exit was. He was expecting something of a rumpus when it came time to unmask; there might be arrests. A masked man in S. P. uniform went by, closely clasped by a sumptuous dark girl at least a foot taller than himself. There were a good many S. P. costumes in the hall, and George suspected that the greater part of them were genuine. He turned, and his elbow sank into something soft and warm. He heard a stifled "Ahr and saw that he had knocked the wind out of a young woman with astonishingly large eyes and an even more surprising bosom. He apologized, profusely. "Large pig," she shouted in his ear. "I forgive you. Embrace me." He did so, and felt her hands passing inquisitively over his flanks and chest, under the robe. She murmured, "Mmm," and kissed him a little harder. He broke away gently, feeling M that reconciliation had gone as far as it respectably could. She gave him an impish smile and disappeared into the crowd. George put two fingers cautiously under his robe and discovered a tiny oblong of folded paper. He opened it and saw the familiar headline: naissance OU mort! It was a copy of his own leaflet, printed on the same sort of home copier he used himself. He put it away with the rest of his supply. The movement he had started was growing wonderfully well. He went around the periphery of the crowd in the opposite direction to the one the girl had taken. Just ahead of him, near the bar, he saw a slender woman jostled by a passing man in a frog suit. Her glass slipped out of her fingers, and the liquor spread a dark stain over her flowing taffeta skirt. George whipped out his handkerchief and moved forward to help. Then he paused. The woman's hair was coppery and abundant, and the mouth below her half-mask was of a particular perfection he had seen only once in his life. Hilda. Caution told him to avoid her, but he had to be sure. He moved forward again, knelt beside her and dabbed at the stained skirt. "Thank you so much," she said In French, "but I'm afraid it's a hopeless mess now. It was her voice: George felt the customary tingling down his backbone. He had not seen Hilda since the night Art arrived in Venice, and had not hoped to see her for a long time to come. But it wasn't safe to let her recognize him. He stood up, bowed, and turned away without speaking. She caught suddenly at his arm, turned him around again. "George!" she said. "It is you. Where have you been hiding? I've looked everywhere. And Luther and Morey...  What is all this nonsense?" George felt a little relieved, in spite of himself. Of course, she would know him from his youth alone, just as he knew her by her mouth. He said, "Hello, Hilda. I've missed you." "George." She put her lips close to his ear. "You won't hide from me any more, will you? We've got such a lot to tell each other -- " A shattering blare of trumpets from the center of the room interrupted her. A much-amplified voice cried, "Mesdames et messieurs, the hour of unmasking is at hand. Choose your partners!" The babel of voices, which had subsided for a moment, rose, again. George glanced, at his. watch, then, at the rafters high, above. He . could just make out a tiny grayiblue, dot there, hang-ing among the clustered lanterns. It was time, this minute, this second -- A new voice blared out, not as loud as the first, but clear and sharp. "Citizens of the world!" it cried. "The future of mankind is in your hands! The government tells you that there is no danger -- that the human race is not becoming sterile. The government lies! Find out the truth for yourself! Go to your doctor, have him examine you. Only one in ten is now capable of having children. If you are that lucky one, do not throw away your priceless heritage. Have children! Now, before it is too late!' Men were running toward the center of the room; George heard shouts and a few screams. The voice -- George's own, recorded through a filter to make it unrecognizable -- went on: "If the government is telling the truth, why is it afraid of open debate? Why are your newspapers censored? Why are you yourselves subject to illegal arrest and imprisonment without trial? Why -- " A flat explosion drowned the voice, then another. There was a new outburst of feminine screams, and a sudden violent movement away from the center. The S. P.s, George guessed, were shooting at the playback mechanism he had bribed a workman to set up among the lanterns. It was tim to get away. His recorded voice went on, but another drowned it out. "No one is to leave! Unmask, everyone, and stand where you are!" The movement away from the center continued. In the press, Hilda was clinging to his arm, shouting something at him. He broke away and dived into the crowd, heading for the side exit he had spotted before. He was a little too late. The crowd was in full motion now, as irresistible as a charging herd of cattle. Ahead of him, he saw an S. P. man vainly struggling to turn and halt those behind. He aw the flash of a revolver; then someone clubbed the man in the neck and he went down under the feet of the crowd. George had a sudden, terrified thought: What it that should happen to Hilda? But he was caught in the tide of bodies: it was useless even to think of turning back. The wide doors of the main entrance had been thrown open, but there was still a bottleneck. The pressure grew until George thought his ribs would crack; then he was out and running desperately to keep from being trampled. An S. P. car was pulled up at the opposite curb and, as he watched, another joined it. S. P.s tumbled out, tried to form a line. The crowd overwhelmed them. There were shouts of "A has les flics!" and roars of laughter scattered among the screams. The crowd's temper was changing from fear to defiance. There would be broken windows and broken heads in Paris tonight. George's devil costume was now as dangerous as the witch doctor robes ; anybody in carnival dress who was unlucky enough to meet a policeman would be arrested. He stopped in an alley to strip them both off -- he wore a singlet and shorts underneath  -- and then put the noise of the rioting behind him before he crossed the Seine to his hotel. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel a huge NM! was chalked -- the symbol of the Committee Against Human Extinction, NM in French and Spanish, GT in German, BD in  English: Birth or Death! They had begun it themselves, flying from city to city, one to a continent: the people had taken it up. He thought again of Hilda, and looked at his wrist phone. They no longer used the personal phones to communicate among themselves, since it was possible that the S. P. was monitoring all such calls; but it would do no harm to call Hilda, especially if he kept the contact short. He pressed the buttons that coded her number. "Yes?" said her warm voice. "This is Hilda Place." "It's Geor.ge," he told her. "Are you all right?" "George, where are you? I must see you. Joe is here with me. Tell me where you arc and we'll dash over." "It wouldn't do," said George regretfully. "I only wanted to know if you got out all right." "Yes, George, of course. But -- " "Good night, Hilda," he said, and broke the connection. It was almost time for the hourly newscast, but George sat for a few moments staring at the dead vision set, thinking about Hilda. Then he began thinking about himself and Hilda, which was more complicated. He hardly knew what it was he felt about Hilda, except that he wanted her. He knew that there was no basis for a settled relationship between them, but his mind rebelled at the knowledge. Well, if they succeeded in this, things would be different. Everybody would have to revise his view of life. The family would revive; religion with it, probably. The changes would go deep into the social structure, as Art and Luther said: affecting manners, morals, ultimately every department of human life... Not all at once, of course. For one thing, fewer than one person in ten would manage to become a parent before reaching the sterile age; and not all of those would be able, or want, to equate parenthood with marriage. George's own part in the new world was still hazy to him. He tried valiantly once more to see himself happily married to Hilda, and once more failed. The picture was simply wrong, in every way. He didn't have the conjugal temperament, and neither, he was sure, did Hilda. What was going to become of them, who had been bom into this childless world of cautious carelessness and sag superficiality, and knew no other? That was rather good, George told himself. He was surprised and pleased; his wit was ordinarily of the evanescent variety, not worth using more than once. When he wrote his memoirs -- There was a knock on the door. "Entrez" said George, and the door, keyed to his voice, swung open. Two S. P. men stood there. They did not hesitate, but strode rapidly toward him. With an effort, George relaxed his tensed muscles and looked at the advancing officers with what he hoped was the right mixture of alarm and indignation. "What is it? What's the matter?" he demanded. The taller officer had a sheaf of photographs in his hand. He riffled them rapidly, selected one, and looked keenly from it to George's face several times. He said something in an undertone to the other man. The short, stocky one drew his gua and stepped aside. "I shall have to request you to come with us, monsieur. A formality only If yqu are innocent, you will be freed. "But what is the charge?" asked George. "You are wanted for questioning i.i connection with the riot at the Beaux Arts Ball, monsieur. "I wasn't even there!" George protested. The officer shrugged. "That may be, monsieur. It is believed that the instigator of the riot is not a native of Paris. Therefore, we are investigating all guests of hotels. Those whose appearances are similar to those on these photographs are to be brought in for questioning. You are not under formal arrest, monsieur, unless you insist." George felt a hollowness at the pit of his stomach. Such an obvious move and they had not thought of it! He said, "Very well," and moved toward the door. The tall officer grasped his arm, the other fell in behind them. At the doorway, George lunged forward. As the tall officer instinctively pulled back, George followed his motion, turning at the same time and putting the heel of his hand under the other man's chin. He shoved, hard, and the officer went reeling back into the room. George slammed the door in their faces and ran. The elevator was not at this floor. He dived down the staircase, took the first flight four steps at a time, and doubled back on the floor below to the other staircase. He guessed that the S. P.s had come by car; for a house-to-house search, it would be more efficient than 'copters. If he was right, he had a fair chance of hailing a cab and getting away before they found him. Back on his own floor, he peered cautiously around the corner before emerging from the stairway. His room door was open, but there was no one in the corridor. He heard nothing. He darted out and up the ascending staircase. The roof was silent and deserted under the stars, glowing at his feet in a wash of light from the tubes that outlined the roof. Traffic went by inaudibly, high overhead in the dark sky. He saw the yellow riding lights of an unoccupied cab, not directly above, but bearing a little to one side. He took out his flashlight and blinked at it, trying hard to get the aim right; it was a long distance and a difficult angle. The 'copter did not turn. It kept its course and disappeared finally down toward the Eiffel Tower. He heard a sound down the stairwell. It was an ambiguous, uncomfortable sort of sound. He listened, but it was not repeated. He walked quietly behind the stair entrance and tried again. Another empty cab was approaching, no nearer than the first. He aimed the flashlight tube at it, blinked it rapidly on and off.  After a heart-stopping moment, the cab turned toward him. And then he heard stealthy sounds in the stairwell. He listened. Footsteps, coming up. He glanced at the oncoming cab. Too late; too far away. He went quickly to the nearest parapet, and holding the tiny flashlight like a dagger, stabbed it at the glow tube. Glass tinkled and fell, and the light died along that edge of the roof. The corner was only a few steps away; he broke the next tube as well. Now the roof was lighted only on the two sides farthest from him, and the, stair entrance cast a long, deep shadow. He heard them step out onto the roof. They must have had a third man waiting in the car downstairs, George thought; when they learned that he had not appeared down there, they had turned back to search upstairs. The cab had turned away, now that the signal had stopped and the edge-lights gone out. George watched its tiny lights dwindle. The footsteps came toward him, slowly, one pair on either side of the entrance. Two beams of light shot out, illuminating all the roof except the rear wall of the entranceway where he stood. "You had better surrender, monsieur," said a voice. "Otherwise we are obliged to shoot." George pressed himself thi against the wall and tried to breathe quietly. The voice had come from the right; that was the spokesman, the stocky man with the gun. Therefore, he guessed, the other would step out first. He moved silently to the left, raised his arm and waited. The tall man stepped suddenly into view, swinging his flash around. George brought the edge of his palm down with all his strength, aiming for the man's wrist, but hitting the flashlight instead. Pain rolled up his arm as the metal tube fell; then, blinded by the light that had shone in his eyes, he was struggling with the tall S. P. man. He struck out furiously, feeling a blow in return that numbed his side, and then the two of them toppled to the roof. George struck the other man once more, felt the grip loosen, and scrambled desperately to his feet. As he started to turn, a crushing pain struck him at the base of his skull. He saw the roof's surface rising toward him, but felt nothing when it hit him. VI#rope ladder dangling from it, hovering just over the bedroom window of Luther's apartment. Art was inside, but he wouldn't climb out onto the ladder. George was about to pull the ladder up and tie a wrench to it when Art's red, wild-eyed face appeared. Hurry, hurry! Art was climbing up the ladder, and now the window next door opened and a man was leaning out, with a gun in his hand. George was paralyzed with fear. He saw the man fire, and when he looked down, Art's face was white and a thin spray of blood was whipping away from his body in the wind of the rotors. He's hit, George thought. He'll tall. George tilted the 'copter downward, toward the canal, but he was too late. Art fell, and the blue water of the canal turned red... No, that was silly. All that was over and done with; they had come out of that all right. It was the Beaux Arts Ball that he had to worry about. His voice was bellowing out of the concealed playback machine, and everyone was turning to stare at him. He looked down, and saw that his witch-doctor's robe was gone. He was standing there in the devil suit. All the others were shouting, "There he is! He's the one!" He ran, but the crowd got in his way; he couldii't move fast enough. And just behind him was the stocky man with the gun. He ! couldn't get away, death was beI hind him, the gun-barrel rising, ; the finger tightening on the trigger -- Uih! He sat up, looking uncomprei hendingly at the strange patterns L of light and shadow around him. His head hurt, and he couldn't t raise his hands. Someone flashed I a light in his eyes. Dazzled, he ; said, "What -- who are you? What  are you doing?" t A voice said, "Bien." Someone got up from beside his cot, and ! two men, one in a white jacket, left the room. He could see them briefly in the light of the corridor : outside. Another man, in a : guard's uniform, shut the barred I door with a clang, and went away. ; There was an interval long enough for him to come fully ; awake, and discover that his wrists were manacled to the sides of the cot. Then two guards appeared at the door, unlocked it and entered. One of them removed the manacles and helped him to his feet. He tried to throw off the man's arm, but found that he was too weak; too weak, in fact, to stand by himself. They led him along the corridor and into a small, brightly lit room where there was a heavy chair, bolted to the floor. They sat him iri it and strapped his wrists down. A whitc-jacketed man at the side of the room was removing a hypodermic from a sterilizer. He turned, fitted the needle to the transparent shaft, depressed the plunger and thrust the needle through the covering membrane of a bottle. He stepped toward George. George gripped the arms of the chair, remembering what Art had told him about truth serums. "TheJ're not infallible. If you have a strong, balanced personality, and if you think up a good cover story and stick to it, truth serums won't make you tell the truth. I was at the ball, he thought rapidly, but I had nothing to do with the plot. I haven't seen Luther, Art or Morey since that party at Luther's. I don't know where they are. I don't know where they are. I ran from the police because I seduced a woman at the ball, and her boyfriend was angry with me. I was afraid he had made trouble lor me with the police. That's not good, but it will have to do. He felt the coolness of evaporating alcohol on his arm, then the cold stab of the needle. I was at the ball, he told himself, but I had nothing to do with the plot. I haven't teen Luther, Art, or Morey...or Luther, or Morey... He was beginning to feel drowsy. The words tripped over 'each other in his head, became hopelessly jumbled. There was a timeless, drowsy interval; then he became aware that a hot rubber sheath was being removed from his arm. His body was stiff, and his hands and feet were numb. X He opened his eyes. The whitejacketed man was stuffing something that clicked into an oblong box. He stowed the box away in a clip at the side of a massive instrument board on wheels, and an attendant pushed it out of the room. The man looked at George, flexing the fingers of one hand in the palm of the other. "You gave us a hard time," he said. "But you talked." George kept his mouth shut, even when the guards came back, unstrapped iim and returned him to his cell. Probably the man had been bluffing; they were hoping that he could be tricked into talking by making him believe that he already had. But early the next morning, he was transferred to another, a larger cell. In it were Luther, Art and Morey. Art said, "You knew where we were all going to be yesterday. If the truth drug didn't get it out of you, all they had to do was put a lie detector on you and show you a map -- point out one area after another until you responded. It wasn't your fault, George." That was the way it had been done, all right, but the knowledge didn't make him feel any better. He sat down on the empty cot, elbows on his knees. "I shouldn't have got caught, he said. "Could've happened to any of us," Morey assured him. They were silent a while, and then George said, "Where are we, by the way?" "S. P. headquarters on the Place de Concorde. They'll move us to Berne for the trials, I suppose." Art shrugged. '#f they decide to have any trials." The day dragged by, then another and another. On the fourth day, they were told they were going to be moved in the afternoon, but nothing happened. They had no news of the outside world; they could only speculate how the movement was going without them. All four of them had been up for interrogation several times, and they were afraid that at least one of them had given up names and addresses under the truth serum. There was no way of knowing. If the network they hid care-, fully built up had been uncovered, there was no hope left. The conspiracy was too young to recover from such a blow. By tacit consent, they did not talk about anything they had done before their arrest. But Art, one afternoon, began speculating about the future. He spoke of it as if it were a foregone conclusion, as if they were as good as dead. He said, "It would be interesting to see it. After a few more centuries, I expect things will begin to go to pot in a small way. Things like new construction. The population's steadily declining, and you know there won't be any new generations, so why build? And after that, why repair? A little later on. I'd guess that suicide would begin to be a factor again. When they begin to realize that if there is any point to the whole bloody business, the human race will never have a chance to find it out... Not much room for altruism any more. "We're here, and we're the last, and that's all. After that, nothing but the big dark and the big cold. Besides, it isn't going to be very pleasant later on, and people will begin to see that, too. There's a bottom limit to the size of population that can support an industrial economy. They'll pass it, going down. Then what? Back to the land? A mocked-up feudal system?  "But then the process will start to accelerate, I should think. Wars. Plagues. Natural catastrophe. Crop failures. Looters and bandits. Every man for himself. And at the end -- " He smiled bitterly. "None of us would be alive to see that, anyhow. Women's life-span is still longer than ours. It'll end up as a world of women -- women without men. Lord!" He shook his head. "That goes beyond my imagination. I can't visualize it, and I don't want to. The little that I can see scares me silly." He looked at them as if he had forgotten they were there. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to turn this into a wake." George thought a good deal about Golightly, and the rest of that stubborn, irrational, powerhungry crew. He found that he didn't hate them, but it made him feel somehow betrayed to realize that these were the best rulers Earth had been able to produce. Good administrators, good practical politicians, as Art had said -- but little men, jealous of their position, fearful of new ideas. If that was the best the human race could do, perhaps it deserved what it was getting. He voiced something of this, and got the disagreement from Luther that he had hoped for. 'We can do better, George. We have done better. In a normal  world, no matter how bad things get, at least they change. If we were bringing up a, flock of children now, one of them would Jbe a better candidate for World President than Golightly. But as it is, we're stuck with just about three generations all told, and we have to make the best of it..." His voice trailed off ; none of them wanted to pursue that thought. O N the morning of the eighth day, guards came to take them away. George turned to Luther. "In case they separate us, and we don't see each other again -- " Luther took his hand warmly. They gripped hands all around. There were tears in Art's owlish eyes, and in Luther's, and even a suspicious brightness in Morey's. George found that his own vision was blurring a trifle. The guards led them down the corridor to an outer office with a long desk and a bench. They were told to sit down, and then a printed document and a pen was placed in front of each of them. George stared bewilderedly at his. It seemed to say: In return for due consideration, I hereby waive all claim for damages resulting from my mistaken arrest and detention by the Security Police, and further agree to waive my right of suit for false arrest against the Security Police and the United Nations of the World. In witness whereof I set my teal. He looked at the others, then at the guard who was standing on the other side of the table. "Sign," said the guard, "and you'll be released." Art bent suddenly and began to scribble on his sheet. The others followed suit. Not daring to speak, they looked at each other as the signed papers were taken away. Then a guard led them off, each to a separate cubicle. In his, George found the clothes he had been wearing when he was arrested, and all the contents of his pockets neatly stacked. He put on the clothing, still dazed. The guard, not touching him now, led him out through another outer office, through a lobby, where the other three Joined him, and then to the sunlight of the portico. The sounds of traffic came up to them; 'copters droned past in the sky over their heads; they heard a strain of music from somewhere down the great avenue. The guard reappeared and touched George's elbow. "I was asked to give you this, monsieur," he said, and put a slip of paper into George's hand. Then he bowed and went back inside. George unfolded it slowly, read it twice. It said: Come and see me as soon as you can. Hilda There was an address below the signature. George passed the note to Morey, and the other two looked ever his shoulders.  "I don't get it," said George inadequately. "No more do #," said Luther. tBut -- let's go!" They found her on a terrace iDverlooking the Champs Elysees. Joe Krueger, grinning like a youngster, got up from the table and stood aside as they converged on Hilda. She smiled up at them. "I'm so glad," she said. "Now kiss me nicely, each of you, and then sit down... You there, Luther, in the easy chair, then Morey, Art and George." They said hello to Joe. They took the coffee cups Hilda passed around. And they stared at her. "Hilda,", said Luther finally, "you consummate witch, what in the world did you do?" She smiled at them happily. "Well," she said, "I managed to get to see Golightly. It wasn't easy to do, even though I know his granddaughter quite well. I had to convince her first, you see... No, you don't see. You will, in a minute, though. I told him that he couldn't stop people from having children by throwing you in jail. I told him that women had been breaking the birth prohibition for the last seventy years, to my own knowledge, and probably longer. And I proved it to him -- I showed him a doctor's report that stated I had been a mother myself." They stared at her. George felt as if the last prop of his own personal universe had been knocked out from under him. "You, Hilda?" said Luther incredulously. "Oh, yes." She looked back at them, not smiling now, and laid her hand on Joe Krueger's sleeve. "This is my son, gentlemen -- my youngest son. I have three." There was a shocked silence. Joe said, "She brought me up in a private estate in the Berkshires, with some help from my brothers, but alone most of the time. She nursed me, took care of me when I was sick, and taught Tie everything she could. For wenty years... My twentieth irthday was two months ago." Luther said, "Hilda, do I unlerstand that you began this absolutely alone?" She smiled, but it was a different smile from the one they knew. Her face had changed subtly, George thought; there was a calm patience and wisdom in it that had never been there before -- or that she had never allowed them to see. Her eyes softened, and she said, "I don't blame you, darlings, because you don't know -- you can't . know. Poor things, you run the world, but you don't understand vhat keeps it going. "Anyhow, I told Golightly allhat, and I presented a chemical analysis of Joe's blood. He hasn't had the longevity treatment yet, you know; that showed in the test. And then I gave him some statistics Joe had dug up. You'd better tell that part, Joe." "I was curious to know whether the incidence of amnesia had gone up since the Last War," said Joe. "I had an idea that other people besides Hilda had thought of that dodge. So I checked. It was up, way up. There was even an article about it in the North American Journal of Psychology, not so many years ago." Art muttered something in an irritated voice. "Art?" said Hilda. "Nothing. I saw that article; I remember it now. It didn't make any impression on me." "Or on anybody, apparently," said Joe " -- luckily for us members of the younger generation." He grinned. "Then I looked up some population figures and drew curves. You couldn't prove anything that way, but it was significant if you knew the answer to begin with. After the War, the line went downward fairly sharply for about the first century, and then it began to level off just a little more than anyone had expected. At a rough guess, there ple alive today who were born after the birth prohibition!" Inside the apartment, a fax machine chuckled to itself and then sounded a clear note. Luther jumped, and George started to rise. Hilda said, "You get it, will you, Joe?" The young man -- it was astonishing how young he seemed, now -- smiled and went inside. He came out a moment later and handed the fax sheet to George. George read, " 'The birth prohibition has been rescinded, it was revealed at # A. m. Greenwich time today, by an extraordinary session of the Executive Council meeting in Berne. Jresident Golightly released the following statement: " ' "It has been proved to my satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of the highest medical authorities, that a clear danger of total sterility of the human race exists. Under these circumstances, grave though the decision is, I have no possible alternative but to revoke all penalties against giving birth. " ' "We stand today at the crossroads of human destiny. On one hand we see the total extinction of our kind: on the other, a new and more glorious fulfilment. The centuries to come will be hard ones for some of us: they will bring many profound changes in our society, and many grave problems. But given the boundless courage of our people, and their unflinching determination to succeed -- " ' " "Does he say anything else?" asked Art. "No. But here's something about us. 'Arthur Levinsion, M. D., George Miller, Morey Stiles and Luther Wheatley, ringleaders of the so-called Committee Against Human Extinction,  were released early this morning by the Paris division of the Security Police. In a special statement, S. P. chief P-aul Krzewski characterized their activities as "sincere but premature," and indicated that no charges would be pressed against any member of their organization.' " Morey lit a cigar. "That's about as much thanks as we'll ever get," he said. "You weren't finished, were you, Hilda?" Art asked. "I don't quite see Golightly listening to reason, even with all that evidence." "No," she said. "All that first part was just the preliminary. Then I called in his granddaughter -- she was waiting outside. That was why I had to persuade her before I could do anything." "I begin to see the light," said Art softly. "She's a mother, too." "Of course. I've known it for years. As a matter of fact -- this is rather funny, and something I didn't know before -- she told Golightly that his private secretary is her daughter." Her face grew pinker. She leaned her forehead on her hand for a moment. Her shoulders were shaking. "You should have seen his face!" she said. They were all roaring with laughter, the tension in them dissolving to leave them weak and #S wonderfully relieved. It was several moments before George glanced at Hilda and saw that Joe was standing over her in an attitude of concern, his hand on her shoulder. Her head was still bent into her palm. George realized abruptly that she was no longer laughing, but crying. He stood up and went around to her, feeling awkward. "Anything I can do?" he asked. Hilda dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and then looked up at them. "Just a touch of hysterics, I guess. I do feel like a fool. Only -- I didn't realize how scared I'd been." George squeezed her shoulder and went back to his place. Joe left the table again to bring in a bottle of Chablis and glasses; there was a pleasant interval of tinkling and gurgling, and when it was over, Hilda was her usual self again. Luther raised his glass. "To Hilda." "Hilda, my dear," said Art slowly, "would you mind telling me why you did it? I hope I don't sound ungrateful, but -- it wasn't just to save our lives?" Hilda hesitated a moment.No, Art." "I didn't think so," he said. "I've just now managed to picture you as a mother, and in that light I can see you doing almost anything else for us four, obtuse as you must have thought us -- ;e but not risking a hair of young it Joe's head." n She smiled fondly at him. "I n don't really think you're obtuse, #I Art. If I sounded that way, it was ;e just feminist exaggeration. I supis pose you're thinking now that all your trouble and danger were d for nothing, because we women fhave been breeding right along... but I don't think that's true. ;h "I think that's the difference, :d the really fundamental difference, f between men and women. We :e women endure -- we plug along, w doing the obvious things, keeping house and worrying about our :r men and bearing children and so e on. And if we didn't. Lord knows a what would become of us all. But s; left to ourselves, we're too conf servative. Women ielt this probn lem of children from the beginal ning, and solved it on their own level. But not completely, not 'o satisfactorily. You four discovered the same problem intellecrt tually only a few months ago, ig and look what you've done!" I She made little fists on the it table for a moment. "I'll confess that it was very hard for me to t. risk Joe. And I didn't do it, finally, because of my fondness for d. you four. If it had been only :that, I honestly don't know what at I should have done, st "But -- well, perhaps an examse pie will shqjv you best. My oldest son, Edwin, wants to be a doctor, wants it more than anything. He's fifty years old now -- that's a long time to wait for the one thing you want most in the world. But there are no medical schools, only research seminars and a few brush-up courses. There's no place in the world now like the one where Art got his earliest training." "There will be," promised Art. things... It isn't particularly good for a child to be brought up in hiding, as Joe was." "No one could have done it any better than you, Hilda," said Joe. "Sweet," she said; "but you all know I'm right." "Of course you are," agreed Luther. "In fact, you're so right that I'm a little afraid of you. It was much nicer when I thought you were pretty much a featherbrain." George said suddenly, "Joe, I never wangled you that introduction I promised you, did I?" Joe's eyes brightened. "To Clarke, the rocket man?" "That's the one. Luther, can you arrange it?" "A pleasure. I didn't know you were interested, Joe." "Yes," said Hilda, a little regretfully, "I wish he weren't." Joe looked uncomfortable. Morey spoke up unexpectedly: "You'll have to face it, though. Hilda. This is one of the spheres where men take over." "That's right," said Morey, "that's where they'll have to go, the overflow, the extra population that's had us all trembling in our socks the last three centuries. To the stars." He pushed his chair back and sat looking out over the sunlit street, and the 'copters flashing in the sky. "That will make Golightly and me happy, at least, for the next few hundred years." He smiled his unexpected, small-boy smile. "We can sit here and be as contrary and stubborn as we want. But we'll be just a backwater, Hilda. It's your Joe that's going to be the human race." They drank to that, and afterward George found himself alone with Hilda for a moment before they left. She kissed him gently: there were no tingles up his spine. He felt warmly fond of her, and somehow at Feace with himself. The world was going to grow down to his size, he realized. He wouldn't be The Child any more, not to everybody. In fact, the first colony on that far-off planet of Alpha Centauri might need a few older men around -- men with a  few centuries of solid experience under their belts. Now there was an idea! Happily, he went down Into the long afternoon. A Pail of Air The dark star passed, bringing with it eternal night and turning history into incredible myth in a single generation! B# P A had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing. You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines -- Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable -- and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you? Even at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes. When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn't S# a young lady at all but simply a light -- a tiny light that moved .stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have the Sun's protection. I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solicf on the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it hadcome out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside. Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the tickticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets -- Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat I -- and came into the Nest. L et me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen the real walls or ceiling. Against one of the blanketwalls is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do. The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa -- I think of that when she gets difficult -- but now there's me to help, and Sis too.' It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way : a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days -- vestal St virgins, he calls them -- although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn't really need one. He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering -- he'd spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too. Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire. Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It #jowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal the whole place, but he can't -- building's too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke. Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside. You see, wheil the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick of so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe. Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the same time. First to drop oiit was the carbon dioxide -- when you're shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice...Finally, at the very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is. about what I'd seen, and so as soon as I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbingout of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together -- the hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling. "And you watched this light for some time, son?" he asked .when I finished. I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face. Somehow that part embarrassed me. "Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor." "And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?" He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter'would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat -- that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning -- not even Pa could figure where it came from -- hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died. "Not like anything I ever saw," I told him. He stood for a moment frowning. Then, "I'll go out with you, and you show it to me," he said. Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes -- mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so On. Ma started moaning again, "I've always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years -- something that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!" Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip and Pa won't let me make it alone. "Sis," Pa said quietly, "come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket." Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out. P A led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a bit scared. You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't be anything human or friendly. Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time. I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony. I don't know what the city  looked like in the old days, but now it's beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well -- there's quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make I my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy. Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth. Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped . into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn't so. He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he  asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise. Pa didn't bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around quite a just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard. I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready. Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, "If you see something like that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once -- it was when your sister was born -- I was ready to give up and die, but your Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too. "'YT'OU know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight -- and hope there'll be someone else to 'toss it to when you get tired of being brave." His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind -- or the fact that Pa took it seriously. X T'S hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened. He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him. It was the same old story as always -- I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep -- though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots. He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets ever#Tthing. You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold? Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right. tHE dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods -- imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!-: -- and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First #S off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either side, but was going to comewery close to the Earth. Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while -- pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time -- and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon. ' That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly. Just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been sittii!fe too far from the fire. You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away. The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted -- though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked. We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of leery of the subject, and he was again , tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice. You see. Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen -- they'd known we'd get captured and our air would freeze -- and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages. # #  #ust using any stuff he could lay bis hands on. I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed -- followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's rotation had been slowed in the tug-ofwar, so that the nights were ten old nights long. Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happene# from the frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for coal. In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting fof someone who .never came back with warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life. Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady. TOW, with Pa telling his story ' for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see. I'd jiist remembered the' face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others. What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life -- not warmblooded life, but something icy and horrible? That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us. Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something # coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen -- the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light. The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest. I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn't speak. We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks. And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me. Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come tp the place where he philosophizes. "So I asked myself then," he aid, "what's the use of going on? What's the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself -- and all of a sudden I got the answer." Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe. "Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold," Pa was saying. "The earth's always been a lonely next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth of"fur, or the petals of flowers -- you've seen pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel -- or the fire's glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the last man as the first." And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those pieering, frozen eyes. "So right then and there," Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear them, "right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant tars." But then the blanket actually did ihove and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him. TN through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders -- men's faces, white and staring. Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four r five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too -- and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind f flashlight. The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, nd after that there was all sorts f jabbering and commotion. They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones lK survive; we'd just thought so. for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they'd survived. Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy. They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with airlocks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.) But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at us. One of the men kept saying, "But it's impossible, I tell you. You can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply impossible." That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried. They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemM ical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they'd got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere fo carry them around the curve of the Earth. Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate. Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd wasted some time in the .building across the street. B y now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions. In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering agaitu The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen. Funny thing, though -- I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me. I sort of wished thesr'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be #  alone and get our feelings straightened out: And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to. Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, "But I wouldn't know how to act there and I haven't any clothes." The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just doesn't seem right to let this fire go out." but they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a "survival school." Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo. Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself. You ask me. Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up. "It's different, now that we know others are alive," he explains to me. "Your mother ; doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the huI man race going, so to speak. It scares a person." ' : I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light. "It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers." He nodded and put another . piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas. "You'll quickly get over that feeling son," he said. "The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning." ' I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young , lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years. With These Hands I the Chancery office while Monsignor Reedy disposed of three persons who had preceded him. He was a little dizzy with hunger and noticed only vaguely that the prelate's secretary was beckoning to him. He started to his feet when the secretary pointedly opened the door to Monsignor Reedy's inner office and stood waiting beside it. The artist crossed the floor, forgetting that he had leaned his portfolio against his cair, remembered at the door and went back for it, flushing. The secretary looked patient. "Thanks," Halvorsen murmured to him as the door closed. There was something wrong with the prelate's manner. "I've brought the designs for the Stations, Padre," he said, opening the portfolio on the desk. "Bad news, Roald," said the monsignor. "I know how you've been looking forward to the commission -- " "Somebody else get it?" asked the artist faintly, leaning against the desk. "I thought his eminence No self-respecting artist can object to suffering for his art... but not in a society where art is outdated by technology! I I definitely decided I had the -- " "It's not that," said the monsignor. "But the Sacred Congregation of Rites this week made a pronouncement on images of devotion. Stereopantograph is to be licit within a diocese at the discretion of the bishop. And his eminence -- " "S.P.G. -- slimy imitations," protested Halvorsen. "Real as a plastic eye. No texture. No guts. You know that. Padre!" he said accusingly. "I'm sorry, Roald," said the monsignor. "Your work is better than we'll get from a stereopantograph -- to my eyes, at least. But there are other considerations." "Money!" spat the artist. "Yes, money," the prelate admitted. "His eminence wants to see the St. Xavier U. building program through before he dies. Is that a mortal sin? And there are our schools, our charities, our Venus mission. S.P.G. will mean a considerable saving on procurement and maintenance of devotional images. Even if I could, I would not disagree with his eminence on adopting it as a matter of diocesan policy." The prelate's eyes fell on the detailed drawings of the Stations of the Cross and lingered. "Your St. Veronica," he said abstractedly. "Very fine. It suggests one of Caravaggio's careworn saints to me. I would have liked to see her in the bronze." "So would I," said Halvorsen hoarsely. "Keep the drawings. Padre." He started for the door. "But I can't -- " "That's all right." The artist walked past the secretary blindly and out of the Chancery into Fifth Avenue's spring sunlight. He hoped Monsignor Reedy was enjoying the drawings and was ashamed of himself and sorry for Halvorsen. And he was glad he didn't have to carry the heavy portfolio any more. Everything seered so heavy lately -- chisels, hammer, wooden palette. Maybe the padre would send him something and pretend it was for expenses or an advance, as he had in the past. Halvorsen's feet carried him up the Avenue. No, there wouldn't be any advances any more. The last steady trickle of income had just been dried up, by an announcement in Osservatore Romano. Religious conservatism had carried the church as far as it would go in its ancient role of art patron. When all Europe was writing on the wonderful new vellum, the church stuck to good old papyrus. When all Europe was writing on the wonderful new paper, the church stuck to good old vellum. When all architects and municipal monument committees and portrait bust clients were patronizing the stereopantograph, the church stuck to good old expensive sculpture. But not any more. He was passing an S.P.G. salon now, where one of his Tuesday night pupils worked: one of the few men in the classes. Mostly they consisted of lazy, moody, irritable girls. Halvorsen, surprised at himself, entered the salon, walking between asthenic seminude stereos executed in transparent plastic that made the skin of his neck and shoulders prickle with gooseflesh. Slime! he thought. How can they -- "May I help -- oh, hello, Roald. What brings you here?" He knew suddenly what had brought him there. "Could you make a little advance on next month's tuition, Lewis? I'm strapped." He took a nervous look around the chamber of horrors, avoiding the man's condescending face. "I guess so, Roald. Would ten dollars be any help? That'll carry us through to the #th, right?" "Fine, right, sure," he said, towed around the place. "I know you don't think much of S.P.G. , but it's quiet now, so this is a good chance to see how we work. I don't say it's Art with a capital A, but you've got to admit it's an art, something people like at a price they can afford to pay. Here's where we sit them. Then you run out the feelers to the reference points on the face. You know what they are?" He heard himself say dryly: "I know what they are. The Egyptian sculptors used them when they carved statues of the pharaohs." "Yes? I never knew that. There's nothing new under the Sun, is there? But this is the heart of the S.P.G." The youngster proudly swung open the door of an electronic device in the wall of the portrait booth. Tubes winked sullenly at Halvorsen. "The esthetikon?" he asked indifferently. He did not feel indifferent, but it would be absurd to show anger, no matter how much he felt it, against a mindless aggregation of circuits that could calculate layouts, criticize and correct pictures for a desired effect -- and that had put the artist of design out of a job. "Yes. The lenses take sixteen profiles, you know, and we set the esthetikon for whatever we want -- cute, rugged, sexy, spiritual, brainy, or a combination. It fairs curves from profile to profile to give us just what we want, distorts the profiles themselves within limits if it has to, and there's your portrait stored in the memory tank waiting to be taped. You set your ratio for any #t enlargement or reduction you want and play it back. I wish we were reproducing today; it's fascinating to watch. You just pour in your cold-set plastic, the nozzles ooze out a core and start crawling over to scan -- a drop here, a worm there, and it begins to take shape. We mostly do portrait busts here, the Avenue trade, but Wilgus, the foreman, used to work in a monument shop in Brooklyn. He did that heroic-size war morial on the East River Drive -- hired Garda Bouchette, the TV girl, for the central figure. And what a figure! He told me he set the esthetikon plates for threequarter sexy, one-quarter spiritual. Here's something interesting  -- standing figurine of Orin Ryerson, the banker. He ordered twelve. Figurines are coming in. The girls like them because they can show their shapes. You'd be surprised at some of the poses they want to try -- " with the ten dollars, walked to Sixth Avenue and sat down hard in a cheap restaurant. He had coffee and dozed a little, waking with a guilty start at a racket across the street. There was a building going up. For a while he watched the great machines pour walls and floors, the workmen rolling here and there on their little chariots to weld on a wall panel, stripe on an electric circuit of conductive ink, or spray plastic finish over the "wired" wall, all without leaving the saddles of their little mechanical chariots. Halvorsen felt more determined. He bought a paper from a vending machine by the restaurant door, drew another cup of coffee and turned to the helpwanted ads.  The tricky trade-school ads urged him to learn construction work and make big money. Be a plumbing-machine setup man. Be #S a house-wiring machine tender. Be a servotruck driver. Be a lumber-stacker operator. Learn pouring-machine maintenance. Make big money! A sort of panic overcame him. He ran to thephone booth and dialed a Passaic number. He heard the ring-ring-ring and strained to hear old Mr. Krehbeil's stumping footsteps growing louder as he neared the phone, even though he knew he would hear nothing until the receiver was picked up. R ing ring ring. "Hello?' grunted the old man's voice, and his face appeared on the little screen. "Hello, Mr. Halvorsen. What can I do for you?" Halvorsen was tongue-tied. He couldn't possibly say: I just wanted to see if you were still there. I was afraid you weren't there any more. He choked and improvised : "Hello, Mr. Krehbeil. It's about the banister on the stairs in my place. I noticed it's pretty shaky. Could you come over sometime and fix it for me?" Krehbeil peered suspiciously out of the screen. "I could do that," he said slowly. "I don't have much work nowadays. But you can carpenter as good as me, Mr. Halvorsen, and frankly you're very slow pay and I like cabinet work better. I'm not a young man and climbing around on ladders takes it out of me. If you can't find anybody else. I'll take the work, but I got to have some of the money first, just for the materials. It isn't easy to get good wood any more." "All right," said Halvorsen. "Thanks, Mr. Krehbeil. I'll call you if I can't get anybody else." He hung up and went back to his table and newspaper. His face was burning with anger at the old man's reluctance and his own foolish panic. Krehbeil didn't realize they were both in the same leaky boat. Krehbeil, who didn't get a job in a month, still thought with senile pride that he was a journeyman carpenter and cabinetmaker who could make his solid way anywhere with his toolbox and his skill, and that he could afford to look down on anything as disreputable as an artist -- even an artist who could carpenter as well as he did himself. Labuerre had made Halvorsen learn carpentry, and Labuerre had been right. You build a scaffold so you can sculp up high, not so it will collapse and you break a leg. You build your platforms so they hold the rock steady, not so it wobbles and chatters at every blow of the chisel. You build your armatures so they hold the plasticine you slam onto them. But the help-wanted ads wanted no builders of scaffolds. T# platforms and armatures. The factories were calling for setup men and maintenance men for th production and assembly machines. From upstate, General Vegetables had sent a recruiting team for farm help -- harvsst setup and maintenance men, a few openings for experienced operators of tankcaulking machinery. Under "office and professional" the demand was heavy for computer men, for girls who could run the I.B.M. Letteriter, esp. familiar sales and collections corresp., for office machinery maintenance d repair men. A job printing house wanted an esthetikon operator for letterhead layouts and the like. A.T.  T. wanted trainees to earn while learning telephone maintenance. A direct-mail advertising outfit wanted an artist -- no, they wanted a sales-executive who could scrawl picture-ideas that would be subjected to the criticism and correction of the esthetikon. Halvorsen leafed tircdly through the rest of the pajer. He knew he wouldn't get a job, and if he did he wouldn't hold it He knew it was a terrible thing to admit to yourself that you might starve to death because you were bored by anything except art but he admitted it It had happened often enough in the past -- artists undergoing preposterous hardships, not, as people thought because they were devoted to art, but because nothing else was interesting. If there were only some impressive, sonorous word that summed up the aching, oppressive futility that overcame him when he tried to get out of art -- only there wasn't. He thought he could tell which of the photos in the tabloid had been corrected by the esthetikon. There was a shot of Jink Bitsy, who was to star in a remake of. Peter Pan. Her ears had been made to look not pointed but pointy, her upper lip had been lengthened a trifle, her nose had been pugged a little and tilted quite a lot, her freckles were cuter than cute, her brows, were innocently arched, and her lower lip and eyes were nothing less than pornography. There was a shot, apparently nncorrected, of the last Venus ship coming in at La Guardia and the average-looking explorers grinnjng. Caption: "Austin Malone and crew smile relief on safe arrival. Malone says Venus colonies need men, machines. See story p. #." Petulantly, Halvorsen threw the paper under the table and walked out. What had space travel to do with him? Vacations on the Moon and expeditions to Venus and Mars were part of the deadly encroachment on his livelihood and no more. II H e took the subway to Passaic and walked down a long-still traffic beltway to his studio, almost the only building alive in the slums near the rusting railroad freightyard. A sign that had once said "F. Labuerre, Sculptor -- Portraits and Architectural Commissions" now said "Roald Halvorsen; Art Classes -- Reasonable Fees." It was a grimy two-story frame building with a shopfront in which were rhounted some of his students' charcoal figure studies and oil still-lifes. He lived upstairs, taught downstairs fronts and did his own work downstairs, back behind dirty, ceiling-high drapes. Going in, he noticed that he had forgotten to lock the door again. He' slammed it bitterly. At the noise, somebody called from behind the drapes; "Who's that?" "Halvorsen!" he yelled in a sudden fury. "I live here. I own this place. Come out of there I What do you want?" There was a fumbling at the drapes and a girl stepped between them, shrinking from their dirt. "Your door was open," she said firmly, "and it's a shop. I've just been here a couple of minutes. I came to ask about classes, but I don't think I'm interested if you're this bad-tempered." A pupil. Pupils were never to be abused, especially not now. "I'm terribly sorry," he said. "I had a trying day in the city."Now turn it on. "I wouldn't tell  everybody a terrible secret like this, but I've lost a commission. You understand? I thought so. Anybody who'd traipse out here to my dingy abode would ' be simpatica. Won't you sit down? No, not there -- humor an artist and sit over there. The warm background of that still-life brings out your color -- quite good color. Have you ever been painted? You've a very interesting face, you know. Some day I'd like to -- but you mentioned classes. "We have figure classes, male and female models alternating, on Tuesday nights. For that I have to be very stern and ask you to sign up for an entire course of twelve lessons at sixty dollars. It's the models' fees -- they're exorbitant. Saturday afternoons we have still-life classes for beginners in oils. That's only two dollars a class, but you might sign up for a series of six and pay ten dollars in advance, which saves you two whole dollars.I also give private instructions to a few talented amateurs." The price was open on that one -- whatever the traffic would bear. It had been a year since he'd had a private pupil and she'd taken onlysix lessons at five dollars an hour, "The still-life sounds interesting," said the girl, holding her head self-consciously the way they all did when he gave them the patter. It was a good head, carried well up. The muscles clung close, not yet slacked into geotropic loops and lumps. The line of youth is heliotropic, he confusedly thought"I saw some interesting things back there. Was that your own work?" She rose, obviously with the expectation of being taken into the studio. Her body was one of those long-lined, small-breasted, coltish jobs that the pre-Raphaelites loved to draw. "Well -- " said Halvorsen. A deliberate show of reluctance and then a bright smile of confidence. "You'll understand," he said positively and drew aside the curtains. "What a curious place!" She wandered about, inspecting the drums of plaster, clay and plasticene, the racks of tools, the stands, the stones, the chisels, the forge, the kiln, the lumber, the glaze bench. "I like this," she said determinedly, picking up a figure a half-meter tall, a Venus he had cast in bronze while studying under Labuerre some years ago, "How much is it?" An honest answer would scare her off, and there was no chance in the world that she'd buy. "I hardly ever put my things up for sale," he told her lightly. "That was just a little study. I do work on commission only nowadays." Her eyes flicked about the dingy room, seeming to take in its scaling plaster and warped floor and see through the wall to the abandoned slum in which it was set. There was amusement in her glance. I am not being honest, she thinks. She thinks that is funny. Very well, I will be honest. "Six hundred dollars," he said flatly. I 'HE girl set the figurine on its stand with a rap and said, half angry and half amused: "I don't understand it. That's more than a month's pay for me. I could get an S.P.G. statuette just as pretty as this for ten dollars. Who do you artists think you are, anyway?" Halvorsen debated with himself about what he could say in reply: An S.P.G. operator spends a week learning his skill and I spend a lifetime learning mine. An S.P.G. operator makes a mechanical copy of a human # # form distorted by formulae mechanically arrived at from 'psychotests of population samples. I take full responsibility for my work; it is mine, though I use what I see fit from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Augustan and Romantic and Modern Eras. An S.P.G. operator works in soft, homogeneous plastic; I work in bronze that is more complicated than you dream, that is cast and acid-dipped today so it will slowly take on rich and suptle coloring many years from today. At S.P.G. operator could not make an Orpheus Fountain -- He mumbled, "Orpheus," and keeled over. bed on the second floor of the building. His fingers and toes buzzed electrically and he felt very clear-headed. The girl and a man, unmistakably a doctor, were watching him. "You don't seem to belong to any Medical Plans, Halvorsen," the doctor said irritably. "There weren't any cards on you at all. No Red, no Blue, no Green, no Brown." "I used to be on the Green Plan, but I let it lapse," the artist said defensively. "And look what happened!" "Stop nagging him!" the girl said. "I'll pay you your fee. "It's supposed to come through a Plan," the doctor fretted. "We won't tell anybody," the girl promised. "Here's five dollars. Just stop naggfhg him." "Malnutrition," said the doctor. "Normally I'd send him to a hospital, but I don't see how I could manage it. He isn't on any Plan at all. Look, I'll take the money and leave some vitamins. That's what he needs -- vitamins. And food." "I'll see that he eats," the girl said, and the doctor left. "How long since you've had anything?" she asked Halvorsen. "I had some coffee today," he answered, thinking back. "I'd been working on detail drawings for a commission and it fell through. I told you that. It was a shock." "I'm Lucretia Grumman," she said, and went out. He dozed until she came back with an armful of groceries. "It's hard to get around down here," she complained. "It was Labuerre's studio," he told her defiantly. "He left it to me when he died. Things weren't so rundown in his time. I studied under him; he was one of the last. He had a joke -- 'They don't really want my stuff, but they're ashamed to let me starve.' He warned me that they wouldn't be ashamed to let me starve, but I SO insisted and he took me in." Halvorsen drank some milk and ate some bread. He thought of the change from the ten dollars in his pocket and decided not to mention it. Then he remembered that the doctor had gone through his pockets. "I can pay you for this," he said. "It's very kind of you, but you mustn't think I'm penniless. I've just been too preoccupied to take care of myself." "Sure," said the girl. "But we can call this an advance. I want to sign up for some classes." "Be happy to have you." "Am I bothering you?" asked the girl. "You said something odd when you fainted -- 'Orpheus.' " "Did I say that? I must have been thinking of Milles' Orpheus Fountain in Copenhagen. I've seen photos, but I've never been there." "Germany? But there's nothing left of Germany."  "Copenhagen's in Denmark. There's quite a lot of Denmark left. It was only on the fringes. Heavily radiated, but still there." "I want to travel, too," she said. "I work at La Guardia and I've never been off, except for an orbiting excursion. I want to go to the Moon on my vacation. They give us a bonus in travel vouchers. It must be wonderful dancing under the low gravity." Spaceport? Off? Low gravity? Terms belonging to the detested electronic world of the stereo- pantograph in which he had no place. "Be vgry interesting," he said, closing his eyes to conceal disgust. "I am bothering you. I'll go away now, but I'll be back Tuesday night for the class. What time do I come and what should I bring?" "Eight. It's charcoal -- I sell you the sticks and paper. Just bring a smock." "All right. And I want to take the oils class, too. And I want to bring some people I know to see your work. I'm sure they'll see something they like. Austin Malone's in from Venus -- he's a special friend of mine." "Lucretia," he said. "Or do some people call you Lucy?" "Lucy." "Will you take that little bronze you liked? As a thank you?" "I can't do that!" "Please. I'd feel much better about this. I really mean it." She nodded abruptly, flushing, and almost ran from the room. Now why did I do that? he ked himself. He hoped it was because he liked Lucy Grumman very much. He hoped it wasn't a cold-blooded investment of a piece of sculpture that would never be sold, an#rway, just to make sure she'd be back with class fees and more groceries. Ill S HE was back on Tuesday, a half-hour early and carrying a smock. He introduced her for mally to the others as they arrived ; a dozen or so bored young women who, he suspected, talked a great deal about their art lessons outside, but in class used any excuse to stop sketching. He didn't dare show Lucy any particular consideration. There were fierce little miniature cliques in the class. Halvorsen knew they laughed at him and his line among themselves, and yet, strangely, were fiercely jealous of their seniority and right to individual attention.  The lesson was an ordeal, as usual. The model, a musclebound young graduate of the barbell gyms and figure-photography studios, was stupid and argumentative about ten minute poses. Two of the girls came near a hair-pulling brawl over the rights to a preferred sketching location. A third girl had discovered Picasso's cubist period during the past week and proudly announced that she didn't erf perspective in art. But the two interminable hours finally ticked by. He nagged them into cleaning up -- not as bad as the Saturdays with oils'" -- and stood by the open door. Otherwise they would have stayed all night, cackling about absent students and snarling sulkily among themselves. His well-laid plans went sour, though. A large and flashy car drove up as the girls were leaving. "That's Austin Malone," said Lucy. "He came to pick me up and look at your work." That was all the wedge her fellowpupils needed. "Aus-tin Ma-one.' Well!" "Lucy, darling. I'd love to meet a real spaceman." "Roald, darling, would you mind very much if I stayed a moment?" "I'm certainly not going to miss this and I don't care if you mind or not, Roald, darling #" Malone was an impressive figure. Halvorsen thought: he looks as though he's been run through an esthetikon set for 'brawny' and 'determined.' Lucy made a hash of the introductions and the spaceman didn't rise to conversational bait dangled enticingly by the girls. In a clear voice, he said to Halvorsen: "I don't want to take up too much of your time. Lucy tells me you have some things for sale. Is there any place we can look at them where it's quiet?" The students made sulky exits. # ' "Back here," said the artist. The girl and Malone followed him through the curtains. The spaceman made a slow circuit of the studio, seeming to repel questions. He sat down at last and said: "I don't know what to think, Halvorsen. This place stuns me. Do you know you're in the Dark Ages ?" People who never have given a thought to Chartres and Mont St. Michel usually call it the Dark Ages, Halvorsen thought wryly. He asked, "Technologically, you mean? No, not at all. My plaster's better, my colors are better, my metal is better -- tool metal, not casting metal, that is." "I mean hand work," said the spaceman. "Actually working by hand." The artist shrugged. "There have been crazes for the techniques of the boiler' works and the machine shop," he admitted. "Some interesting things were done, but they didn't stand up well. Is there anything here that takes your eye?" "I like those dolphins," said the spaceman, pointing to a perforated terra-cotta relief on the wall. They had been commissioned by an architect, then later refused for reasons of economy when the house had run way over estimate. "They'd look bully over the fireplace in my town apartment. Like them, Lucy?" "I think they're wonderful, said the girl. Roald saw the spaceman go rigid with tlie effort not to turn and stare at her. He loved her and he was jealous. Roald told the story of the dol phins and said: "The price that the architect thought was too high was three hundred and sixty dollars." Malone grunted. "Doesn't seem unreasonable -- if you set a high store on inspiration." . "I don't know about inspiration," the artist said evenly. "But I was awake for two days and two nights shoveling coal and adjusting drafts to fire that thing in my kiln." The spaceman looked contemptuous. "I'll take it," he said. "Be something to talk about during those awkward pauses. Tell me, Halvorsen, how's Lucy's work? Do you think she ought to stick with it?" "Austin," objected the girl, "don't be so blunt. How can he possibly know after one day?" "She can't draw yet," the artist said cautiously. "It's all coordination, you know -- thousands of hours of practice, training your eye and hand to work together until you can put-a line on paper where you want it. Lucy, if you're really interested in it, you'll learn to draw well. I don't think any of the other students will. They're in it because of boredom or snobbery, and they'll stop before they have their eye-hand coordination." "I am interested," she said firmly. Malone's determined restraint broke. "Damned right you are. In -- " He recovered himself and demanded of Halvorsen: "I understand your, point about coordination. But thousands of hours when you can buy a camera? It's absurd." "I was talking about drawing, not art," replied Halvorsen. "Drawing is putting a line on paper where you want it, I said." He took a deep breath and hoped the great distinction wouldn't sound ludicrous and trivial. "So let's say that art is knowing how to put the line in the right place." "Be practical. There isn't any art. Not any more. I get around quite a bit and I never see anything but photos and S.P.G.s. A few heirlooms, yes, but nobody's painting or carving any more." "There's some art, Malone. My students -- a couple of them in the still-life class -- are quite good. There are more across the country. Art for occupational therapy, or a hobby, or something to do with the hands. There's trade in their work. They sell them to each other, they give them to their friends, they hang them on I .  # their walls. There are even some sculptors like that. Sculpture is prescribed by doctors. The occupational therapists say it's even better than drawing and painting, so some of these people work in plasticene and soft stone, and some of them get to be good." "Maybe so. I'm an engineer, Halvorsen. We glory in doing things the easy way. Doing things the easy way got me to Mars and Venus and it's going to get me to Ganymede. You're doing things the hard way, and your inefficiency has no place in this world. Look at you! You've lost a fingertip-!-some accident, I suppose." "I never noticed -- " said Lucy, and then let out a faint, "Oh!" Halvorsen curled the middle finger of his left hand into the palm, where he usually carried it to hide the missing first joint. "Yes," he said softly. "An accident." ' "Accidents are a sign of inadequate mastery of material and ' equipment," said Malone sententiously. "While you stick to your methods and I stick to mine, you can't compete with me." His tone made it clear that he  was talking about more than engineering. "Shall we go now, Lucy? Here's my card, Halvorsen. Send those dolphins along and I'll mail you a check." :i tu ' I. V? IV T he artist walked the halfdozen blocks to Mr. Krehbeil's place the next day. He found the old man in the basement shop of his fussy house, hunched over his bench with a powerful light overhead. He was trying to file a saw. "Mr. Krehbeil!" Halvorsen called over the shriek of metal. The carpenter turned around and peered with watery eyes. "I can't see like I used to," he said querulously. "I go over the same teeth on this damn saw, I skip teeth, I can't see the light shine off it when I got one set. The glare." He banged down his threecornered file petulantly. "Well, what can I do for you?" "I need some crating stock. Anything. I'll trade you a couple of my maple four-by-fours." The old face became cunning. "And will you set my saw? My saws, I mean. It's nothing to you -- an hour's work. You have the eyes." Halvorsen said bitterly, "All right." The old man had to drive his bargain, even though he might never use his saws again. And then the artist promptly repented of his bitterness, offering bp a quick prayer that his own failure to conform didn't make him as much of a nuisance to tne world as Irehbeil was. The carpenter was pleased as they went through his small stock of wood and chose boards to crate the dolphin relief. He was pleased enough to give Halvorsen coffee and cake before the artist buckled down to filing the saws. Over the kitchen table, Halvorsen tried to probe. "Things pretty slow now?" It would be hard to spoil Krehbeil's day now. "People are always fools. They don't know good hand work. Some day," he said apocalyptically, "I laugh on the other side of my face when their foolish machine-buildings go falling down in a strong wind, all of them, all over the country. Even my boy -- I used to beat him good, almost every day -- he works a foolish concrete machine and his house should fall on his head like the rest." Halvorsen knew it was Krehbeil's son who supported him by mail, and changed the subject. "You get some cabinet work?" "Stupid women! What they call antiques -- 'they don't know Meissen, they don't know Biedermeier. They bring me trash to repair sometimes. I make them pay; I swindle them good." "I wonder if things would be different if there were anything left over in Europe..." "People will still be fools, Mr. Halvorsen," said the carpenter positively. "Didn'tyou ;ay you S were going to file those saws today?" So the artist spent two noisy hours filing before he carried his crating stock to the studio. brought some things to eat. He dumped the lumber with a bang and demanded: "Why aren't you at work?" "We get days off," she said vaguely. "Austin thoughthe'd give me the cash for the terracotta and I could give it to you." She held out an envelope while he studied her silently. The farce was beginning again. But this time he dreaded it. It would not be the first time that a lonesome, discontented girl chose to see him as a combination of romantic rebel and lost pup, with the consequences you'd expect. He knew from books, experience and Labuerre's conversation in the old days that there was nothing novel about the comedy -- that there had even been artists, lots of them, who had counted on endless repetitions of it for their livelihood. The girl drops in withgroceries and the artist is pleasantly surprised: the girl admires this little thing or that after payday and buys it and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl brings her friends to take lessons or make little purchases and the artist is pleasantly surprised. The girl may be seduced by the artist or vice versa, which shortens the comedy, or they get married, which lengthens it somewhat. It had been three years since Halvorsen had last played out the farce with a manic-depressive divorcee from Elmira : three years during which he had crossed the mid-point between thirty and forty; three more years to get beaten down by being unwanted and working too much and eating too little. Also, he knew, he was in love with this girl. He took the envelope, counted three hundred and twenty dollars and crammed it into his pocket. "That was your idea," he said. "Thanks. Now get out, will you? I've got work to do." She stood there, shocked. " said get out. I have work to do." "Austin was right," she told him miserably. "You don"t care how feople feel. You just want to get things out of them." She ran from the studio, and f Halvorsen fought with himself not to run after her. He walked slowly into his workship and studied his array of tools, though he paid little attention to his finished pieces. It would be nice to spend about half of this money on open-hearth steel rod and bar stock to forge into chisels; he thought he knew where he could get some -- but she would be back, or he would break and go to her and be forgiven and the comedy would be played out, after all. He couldn't let that happen. V side of the Dourefeld mountains of Norway, was in the lee of the blasted continent. One more archeologist there made no difference, as long as he had the sense to recognize the propellorlike international signposts that said with their three blades. Radiation Hazard, and knew what every schoolboy knew about protective clothing and reading a personal Geiger counter. The car Halvorsen rented was for a brief trip over the mountains to study contaminated Oslo. Well-muffled, he could make it and back in a dozen hours and no harm done. But he took the car past Oslo, Wennersborg and Goteborg, along the Kattegat coast to Helsingborg, and abandoned it there, among the three-bladed polyglot signs, crossing to Denmark. Danes were as unlike Prussians as they could be, but their unfortunate little peninsula was a sprout off Prussia which radiocobalt dust couldn't tell from the real thing. The three-bladed signs were most specific. With a long way to walk along the rubble-littered highways, he stripped off the impregnated coveralls and boots. He had long since shed the noisy counter and the uncomfortable gloves and mask. The silence was eerie as he limped into Copenhagen at noon. He didn't know whether the radiation was getting to him or whether he was tired and hungry and no more. As though thinking of a stranger, he liked what he was doing. ril be my own audience, he thought. God knows I learned there isn't any other, not any more. You have to know when to stop. Rodin, the dirty old, wonderful old man, knew that. He taught us not to slick it and polish it and smooth it until it looked like liquid instead of bronze and stone. Van Gogh was crazy as a loon, but he knew when to stop and varnish it, and he didn't care if the paint looked like paint instead of looking like n sunset clouds or moonbeams. Up in Hartford, Browne and Sharpe stop when they've got a turret lathe; they don't put caryatids on it. I'll stop while my life is a life, before it becomes a thing with distracting embellishments such as a wife who will come to despise me, a succession of gradually less worthwhile pieces that nobody will look at. Blame nobody, he told himself, lightheadedly. And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb rubble -- Milles' Orpheus Fountain. It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn't do it. There was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon couldn't be set td make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later; the threeheaded dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus will never go back into life with his bride. There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough to battle with the gods, but battle wasn't any good against the grinning, knowing, hateftll three-headed dog it stood on. You don't battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you're in; you can't. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering fuiy, crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones. Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear. Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward among the weeds, he thought he heard the chord from the lyre and didn't care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin down at him. I VI '  supposed he was in Hell. There were the young lovers, arms about each others' waists, solemnly looking down at him, and the mother was placidly smoothing his brow. He stirred and felt his left arm fall heavily. "Ah," said the mother, "you mustn't." He felt her pick up his limp arm and lay it across his chest. "Your poor finger!" she sighed. "Can you talk? What happened to it?" He could talk, weakly. "La- buerre and I," he said. "We were moving a big block of marble with the crane -- somehow the ## finger got under it. I didn't notice until it was too late to shift my grip without the marble slipping and smashing on the floor." The boy said in a solemn, adolescent croak: "You mean you saved the marble and lost your finger?" "Marble," he muttered. "It's so hard to get. Labuerre was so old." The young lovers exchanged a glance and he slept again. He was half awake when the musician seized first one of his hands and then the other, jabbing them with stubby fingers and bending his lion's head close to peer at the horny callouses left by chisel and mallet. "Ja, ja," the musician kept saying. Hell goes on forever, so for an eternity he jolted and jarred, and for an eternity he heard bickering voices: "Why he was so foolish, then?" "A idiot he could be." "Hush, let him rest." "The children told the story." "There only one Labuerre was." "Easy with the tubing." "Let him rest." Daylight dazzled his eyes. "Why you were so foolish?" demanded a harsh voice. "The sister says I can talk to you now, so that is what I first want to know." He looked at the face of -- not the musician; that had been delirium. But it was a tough old face. "Ja, I am mean-looking; that is settled. What did you think you were doing without coveralls and way over your exposure time?" "I wanted to die," said Halvorsen. There were tubes sticking in his arms. The crag-faced old man let out a contemptuous bellow. "Sister!" he shouted. "Pull the plasma tubes out before more we waste. He says he wants to die." "Hush," said the nurse. She laid her hand on his brow again. "Don't bother with him. Sister," the old man jeered. "He is a shrinking little flower, too delicate for the great, rough world. He has done nothing, he can do nothing, so he decides to make of himself a nuisance by dying." "You lie," said Halvorsen. "I worked. Good God, how I worked! Nobody wanted my Work. They wanted me, to wear in their buttonholes like a flower. They were getting to me. Another year and I wouldn't have been an artist any more." "Ja?" asked the old man. "Tell me about it." Halvorsen told him, sometimes weeping with self-pity and weakness, sometimes cursing the oldman for not letting him die, sometimes quietly describing this statuette or that portrait head, or raving wildly against the mad folly of the world. At the last he told the old man about Lucy. "You cannot have everything, you know," said his listener. "I can have her," answered the artist harshly. "You wouldn't let me die, so I won't die. I'll go back and I'll take her away from that fat-head Malone that she ought to marry. I'll give her a couple of happy years working herself to skin and bones for me before she begins to hate it -- before I begin to hate it." "You can't go back," said the old man. "I'm Cerberus. You understand that? The girl is nothing. The society you come from is nothing. We have a place here... Sister, can he sit up?" The woman smiled and cranked his bed. Halvorsen saw through a picture window that he was in a mountain-rimmed valley that was very green and dotted with herds and unpainted houses. "Such a place there had to be," said the old man. "In the whole geography of Europe, there had to be a Soltau Valley with winds and terrain just right to deflect the dust." "Nobody knows?" whispered the artist. "We prefer it that way. It's impossible to get some things, but you would be surprised how little difference it makes to the young people. They are great travelers, the young people, in their sweaty coveralls with radiation meters. They think when they see the ruined cities that the people who lived in them must have been mad. It was a little travel party like that which found you. The boy was impressed by something you said, and I saw some interesting things in your hands. There isn't much rock around here; we have fine deep topsoil. But the boys could get you stone. "There should be a statue of the Mayor for one thing, before I die. And from the Rathaus the wooden angels have mostly broken off. Soltau Valley used to be proud of them -- could you make good copies? And of course cameras are useless and the best drawings we can do look funny. Could you teach the youngers at least to draw so faces look like faces and not behinds? And like you were saying about you and Labuerre, maybe one younger there will be so crazy that he will want to learn it all, so Soltau will always have an artist and sculptor for the necessary work. And you will find a Lucy or somebody better, I think better." "Hush," warned the nurse. "You're exciting the patient." "It's all right," said Halvorsen eagerly. "Thanks, but it's really all right."  L.' As a planet, it was not much, but two forms of life happened to want it at the same time. The result was a fight neither side knew occurred!  up the tube into the bridge sucking a bulb of coffee. Second Mate Dart rose stiffly from the seat where he had spent his watch. "She's all yours." Avery was thin, hawk-nosed. His complexion was sallow leather color, his hair lank and sparse. He had black eyes between narrow lids and the angle at which they crossed his cheeks gave his face a look of clownish melancholy. Dart was stocky, stub-featured. His hair was Airedale-red ; he was abrupt and positive in his movements. Stretching with a quick wide sweep of short arms, he joined Avery by the forward cupola. Avery leaned forward, looked up, down, right, left, tracing the veins of rose and electric blue across the black of macroid space. K 'I : : I . I I He said over his shoulder, "She's dim. Turn her up. Can't see twenty feet at this level." Dart, blinking, half-asleep, adjusted a rheostat, increasing the flood of polarized light from the bow projectors, and the gristlelike lines of force out in macroid space shone with greater brilliance and detail. Avery grunted, "That's a lot different. And there's a focus coming up, where those two stringers dent in toward each other." Dart came to watch as the lines trembled, bjilged toward each other. Films of color began to flow from the area: wan yellow, pink, green. Suddenly a hot spark of red appeared. "There's the focus," said Avery sourly. "Three feet from your nose, the center of a sun." Dart ruefully rubbed his chin, thankful that Avery rather than Captain Badt had caught him dozing. "Yeah, I guess so." "Small to medium, from the kink to that inner blue line," said Avery. "Well, let's check for planets; that's what we're out here for." Inch by inch they searched the cupola, up, down, right, left. Dart said, "By golly, here it is. Just like the illustration in the text. Maybe we'll slice that bonus yet." The hot red spark faded to yellow; the twist of colored veins which signified a planet started to uncoil. Avery sprang back, snapped the drift switch, and the lines became static. For a moment he studied the pattern in the hemispherical cupola. "The sun's right about here." He indicated a point between himself and Dart. "The planet's just inside the cupola." "We're big men," said Dart. Avery twisted his mouth in a saturnine grimace. "Either big, or a long way off in a freak direction." "With all these guys running loose claiming to be geniuses," said Dart, "it's funny one of them hasn't figured it out." Avery had been searching the cupola for further kinks. "Figure what out?" "What happens when we go into macroid space." "You're a dreamer," said Avery. "The universe shrinks, or we and the ship get cosmically big. The main thing is, we get there. Talk to Bascomb, he'll give you ten answers, all different. That's genius for you." Bascomb was the ship's biologist, who had gained himself the reputation of a tireless polemist and theoretician. Avery took one more look at the kink. "Call the captain, ring general quarters. We're going into normal space."    organism, though its characteristics included neither form nor structure. Its components were mobile nodes of a luminous substance which was neither matter nor yet energy. There were connected with every other node by tendrils similar to the lines of force in macroid space. The unigen might be compared to a great brain, #he nodes corresponding to the gray cells, the lines of force to the nerve tissue. It might appear as a bright sphere, or it might disperse its nodes at light speed to all corners of the universe. Like every other aspect of reality, the unigen was a victim of entropy; to survive, it processed energy down the scale of availabihty, acquiring the energy from radioactive matter. The unigen's business of living included a constant search for energy. There were periods of plenitude when the unigen would wax heavy with energy and might expand the number of its nodes by a kind of parthenogenetic fission. Other times the nodes would wane, glowing only feebly, and the unigen would seek energy stuff like a wolf, stalking the planets, satellites, meteors and dark stars for crumbs of even low-grade energy material. During a lean time, one of the nodes. approaching the planet of a small sun, became aware of quanta suggesting the presence of radioactivity: a spangle of distinctive color against a mottled background. Hope, an emotion compounded of desire and imagination, was not alien to the unigen. It speeded the node forward and the radiation came hard and sharp. The node flitted down through a high scud of cloud. The glow of colored light stretched, elongated, and near its middle shone a markedly bright spot, like a diamond on a band of silver, evidently where the radioactive material broke surface. Toward this spot the unigen directed the node. As it dropped, the unigen sought evidences of danger: the spoor of energy-eaters, sources of static electricity, such as clouds, which might disrupt the tight coils of a node with a spark. The air was clear and the planet seemed free of dangerous life-forms. The node fell like a bright snowflake toward the central concentration of radioactivity. #c ship circled the planet in a reconnaissance orbit. Captain Badt, taciturn and something of a martinet, s'tood by the bridge telescreen, receiving reports from the technicians and keeping his opinions to himself. Dart muttered to Avery in a disgruntled voice, "I'd hardly call the place a tourist planet." "Looks pretty grim in spots, but it looks like a bonus." Dart sighed, shook his round red head. "There never yet was a world so tough that colonists wouldn't flock out to it. If it's not cold enough to freeze air and not hot enough to boil water, and if you can breathe without popping your eyes, then it's land, and men seem to want it." "I was born on a planet a hell of a lot worse than this," said Avery shortly. ' Dart was silent a moment; then, with the air of a man who refuses to admit discouragement, went on. "Well, it's livable. Breathable atmosphere, temperature and gravity inside the critical area, and -- so far -- no signs of life." He went to the cupola, which now overlooked the world below. "At home the ocean's blue. It's yellow on Alexander, red on Coralasan. Here it's green. Grass by-Jesus green." "Different proposition altogether," said Avery. "The red and yellow come from plankton. This green is algae or moss or seaweed. No telling how thick it is. Might be a man could walk out on it and pasture his cows." "Lots of good grazing," adsquare miles in sight from here. Probably the source of the planet's oxygen. According to Bascomb, there's no surface vegetation. Maybe lichens, a few shrubs and such... That sea-bed must be thick with humus..." The speaker from the laboratory click-clicked. On the other wing of the bridge Captain Badt snapped, "Report!" The code-sono opened the circuit; the voice of Jason the geologist said, "Here's a full report on the atmosphere. Thirty-one per cent oxygen, eleven per cent helium, forty per cent nitrogen, ten per cent argon, four per cent CO#, the other four per cent inert. Substantially an Earth-type atmosphere." "Thank you," said Captain Badt formally. "Off." He paced up and down the bridge frowning, his hands clasped behind his back. "The old man's in a hurry," Avery said quietly to Dart. "I can read his mind. He doesn't like survey duty, and he's figuring that if he finds a good Class A planet, he can use it as an excuse to take off for Earth." Captain Badt marched stiffly back and forth, paused, went to the speaker. "Jason." "Yes, sir?" "What's the story on the geol-bgy so far?" "I can't tell much from this high, but the relief seems generally a product of igneous action rather than erosion. Naturally, that's a guess." "A good ore planet, possibly?" "At a guess, ys. There's plenty of folding, lots of faults, not too much sediment. Where those mountains break up through the coastal strip. I'd expect schists, gneiss, broken rocks cemented with quartz and calcite." "Thank you." Captain Badt went to the magniscreen, watched the landscape drift past. He turned to Avery. "I think we'll dispense with further investigation and set down." The speaker click-clicked. "Report!" said Captain Badt. It was Jason again. "I've located an extensive outcrop of radioactive ore, probably pitchblende or possibly carnotite. It shines like a searchlight when I drop the X-screen across the scoie. It runs along the shore just south of the long inlet." "Thank you." To Avery: "We'll set down there." T he reconnaissance party, consisting of Avery and Jason, walked along the black gravel pebbles of the shore. To their left, the ocean spread out to the horizon, a green velvety flat like a right, black-shadowed gulleys led back into the mountains -- crag-crested barrens of rock. The sun was smaller and yellower than Sol; the light was wan, like Earth sunlight through a pall of smoke. Although the air had been certified breathable, the men wore head-domes, precautions against possibly dangerous bacteria or spores. Through a pick-up TV eye mounted above Avery's dome. Captain Badt watched from the ship. "Any insects, animal life of any sort?" he asked. "Haven't noticed any so far... That upholstered ocean should make a good home for bugs. Jason threw a stone out and it's still sitting high and dry. I believe a man could walk out there with a pair of snowshoes." "What is that vegetation to your right?" Avery paused, inspected the shrub. "Nothing very different from those around the ship. Just one of those paint-brush plants a little larger than the others. Country seems rather arid, in spite of this ocean. Takes rain to make good soil. Right, Jason?" "Right." Captain Badt said, "After a while, we'll check into the ocean. Right now I'm interested in that uranium reef. You should be almost on top of it." "I think it's about a hundred yards ahead, a ledge of black rock. Yep, Jason's detector is buzzing like mad... Jason says it's pitchblende -- uranium oxide." He stopped short in his tracks. "What's the trouble?" "There's a swarm of lights over it. Flickering up and down like mosquitoes." Captain Badt focused the image on the screen. "Yes, I see them." "Might be some sort of fireflies," ha#arded Jason. Avery took a few cautious steps forward, halted. One of the luminous sjjots darted up, sped toward him, swung around his head, circled Jason, returned to the uranium ledge. Avery said uncertainly, "I guess they're not dangerous. Some kind of bug, apparently." Captain Badt said, "Peculiar how they're concentrated along that ledge. As if they're feeding on the uranium, or like the feel of the radiation." "There's nothing else nearby. No vegetation of any sort, so it must be the uranium." "I'll send Bascomb out," said Captain Badt. "He can investigate more closely." #( He T he node which originally discovered the planet settled on an outcrop of the uranium oxide and was presently joined by other nodes, fleeting in from less rewarding areas. The absorption of energy began; pressing against the massive blue-black rock, a rode would generate sufficient heat to vaporize a quantity of the ore. Enveloping the gas, the node worked a complicated alchemy which released the latent energy. The node absorbed this energy, compacting and augmenting its structure, kinking its whorls of force into harder knots. At the same time it discharged a flood of energy into the lines to the rest of the unigen, and everywhere in the universe nodes shone with a new golden-green luster. Insofar as surprise may be equated to witnessing events which have previously been dismissed as improbable, the unigen felt surprise when it sensed the approach of two creatures along the shore. The unigen had observed living creatures on other worlds. Some or these were dangerous, like the mirror-metal energy-eaters swimming in the thick atmosphere of another uranium-rich planet. Others were unimportant as competition for food. These particular slow-moving creatures appeared harmless. To investigate at close hand, ' the unigen sent out a node, and received a report of infra-red radiation, fluctuating electromagnetic fields. "Harmless autochthones," was the unigen's summation. "Creatures living by chemical reaction at a low energy level, like the landworms of Planet #. Useless as energy sources, incapable of damage to the hard energy of a node." Dismissing further consideration of the two creatures, the unigen absorbed itself with the uranium bank... Odd. On the surface of the ore had appeared what seemed to be a vegetable growth, a peppering of tiny spines rising from little flat collars. They had not been evident previously. And here came another of the slow-moving creatures. This one, like the others, emitted infra-red radiation, several different weaker waves. The creature halted, then slowly approached the ledge. The unigen watched with mild curiosity. Precise visual definition was beyond its powers, so the land-worm's movements came as blurs of shifting radiation. It seemed 'to manipulate a metal object which glinted and reflected sunlight -- evidently a bit of pitchblende which had attracted its attention. The land-worm moved closer. It made a few blurred motions, and suddenly appeared to have extended one of its members. It moved once more, and a mesh of carbonaceous material fell around one of the npdes. Interesting, thought the unigen. The land-worm evidently had been attracted by the glitter and motion. The action implied curiosity; was the creature more highly evolved than its structure indicated? Or possibly it sustained life by trapping small bright animals, such as phosphorescent jellyfish from the sea. The landworm drew the net close. To resolve the problem, the unigen permitted the node to be carried along. A brittle shell of another carbon compound was cupped over the node and-an enclosure effected. Was this perhaps the landworm's organ of digestion? There appeared to be no digestive juice, no grinding or crushing action. The land-worm moved slightly away from the ledge and performed a series of mysterious gyrations. The unigen was puzzled. Two metal needles entered the brittle cage. In sudden consternation the unigen sought to snap the node free.  #: !C A very and Jason continued along the pitchblende ledge. Presently it dipped from sight, and :he shore of black-gray pebbles slanted up from the green velvet ocean to the heavy shoulder of the mountain. "Nothing out here. Captain,' said Avery. "Just looks like more shore and more mountains for ten or twenty miles." "Very well, you can return. #  He added in a grumbling voice, "Bascomb's on his way out to check on those flickering lights. He thinks they're emanations, like will o' the wisps." Avery winked at Jason, and cutting off the band to the ship said, "Bascomb won't be satisfied till he has one of 'em pinned to a board like a butterfly." Jason held up a hand, signed Avery to listen. Avery switched back on the communication band, heard Bascomb's precise voice. " -- from a distance of thirty feet, the spectroscope shows a uniform band, radiating at apparently equal intensity in all frequencies. This is curious. Normal phosphors emit in discrete bands. Perhaps some such occurrence like St. Elmo's Fire is involved, though I confess I don't quite understand -- " Captain Badt growled impatiently, "Are they alive or aren't they?" Bascomb's voice was petulant. T've no idea. I'm sure. After all, this is a strange planet. The word 'life' has a thousand interpretations. Incidentally, I note a very odd type of vegetation growing on the pitchblende itself." "Avery mentioned no vegetation," said Captain Badt. "I questioned him specifically." Bascomb sniffed. "He could hardly have missed it. It's a line of shoots about six inches talk  They're like spikes, apparently stiff and crisp, rising from suckers clamped to the surface. Very similar to something I saw once on Martius Juvenal where a pitchblende vein breaks surface... It's very peculiar. The roots seem to have drilled into the solid rock." "You're the biologist," said Captain Badt. "You ought to know." Bascomb's voice took on a note of cheery assurance. "Well, we'll see. I've read of emanations being observed near pitchblende disposits, but I have never observed them. Possibly the concentrated radioactivity might be acting on minute condensations of moisture..." Captain Badt cleared his throat. "Very well, handle it your own way. Be careful and don't stir them up; they might be dangerous in some way." Bascomb said, "I've brought along a net and specimen bottle. I planned to capture one of the motes and examine it under the miscroscope." "I suppose you know what you're doing," said Captain Badt in a tired voice. "I've devoted my life to the study of extraterrestrial life," replied Bascomb stiffly. "I rather imagine that these motes are analogous to the sparkle-ticks of Procyon B... Now, if I just ad#i . ; ' t just my net. There! Tve got one. Into the specimen jar. My, how it shines! Can you see it, Captain?" "Yes, I can see it. What's it like under the microscope?" "Hm..." Bascomb brought his pocket magnifier to bear. "There's no resolution. I see a central concentration of fire; undoubtedly that's where the insect is. I think I'll pass an electric spark through the creature and kill it, and perhaps I can examine it under higher power." "Don't stir 'em up -- " began Captain Badt. The screen flared white in his face, went dark. "Bascomb! Bascomb!" Captain Badt received no reply. Ilf  sent a restless shiver through the unigen. A node represented an integral fraction of the unigen's brain; it had been conditioned to modify a definite class of thoughts. When the node was destroyed, the thinking in the class was curtailed until another node could be produced and endowed with the same precise channels. The implications of the event were further cause for anxiety. The metal energy-eaters on another planet used the same technique -- a stream of electrons smashing across the center of the I I node, to upset the equilibrium. The result was a flash of released energy, which the metat ovoids were able to absorb. Apparently the land-worm had been surprised by the explosion and destroyed -- possibly mistaking the node for some less energetic type of creature. It might be wise, thought the unigen, to destroy the land-worms as soon as they appeared, and thus prevent further accidents. Still another vexation: the spike-vegetation was spreading its collars across the surface of the ledge, sinking deep roots into the energy-stuff. Apparently it built the displaced material into the spike. When the unigen sent a node to absorb the leached uranium, it found a hard shell of inert substance, proof against the node's kernel of heat. Nodes flickered and quivered all over the universe as the unigen marshaled its computative abilities. Rigorous steps would have to be taken. Jt   F ar down the beach, Avery and Jason saw the white flash of the explosion, saw the black gullies light up in a ghastly swift glare. Then came a rolling sound and a jar of concussion. Avery cut anxiously into the communication band. "Captain Badt, Avery calling. What's happened?" #fI Captain Badt said harshly, "That fool Bascomb's just blown himself up." "We're up the beach about a mile, I think, from where the explosion came," said Avery hurriedly. "Should we -- " Captain Badt interrupted. "Don't do anything. Don't touch anything. This is a strange planet, and it's dangerous. Bascomb's just proved that." "What did he do?" "He apparently ran an electric current through one of those bright spots of light, and it went off in his face." Avery stopped short, looked warily up the shore. "We went past pretty closely and they didn't bother us. It must be the electricity." "You be careful on your way back. I can't afford to lose any more men. Keep out of the way of those lights." "Yes, sir," said Avery. He motioned to Jason. "Let's go. We'd better skirt the water as close as possible." Crowding the soggy verge of the ocean, they rounded the bend in the shoreline, approached the scene of the explosion. "Doesn't seem to be much left of Bascomb," said Jason in a hushed voice. "Not much crater either," said Avery. "It's a funny deal." "Look, now there's thousands of those light-bugs. Like bees around a hive. And look at that stuff growing out of the ledge! That wasn't there when we went past! Talk about mushrooms... Avery turned his binoculars along the ledge. "Probably it's got something to do with the light-flecks. The lights could be spores or pollen or something of the sort." "Anything's possible," said Jason! "I've seen vines thirty miles long, as thick around as a house, and if you jab them with a stick they quiver their whole length. They're on Antaeus. The kids in the Earth colony tap out Morse code back and forth to each other. The vine doesn't like it, but there's nothing it can do." Avery had been watching the dancing lights over his shoulder. "They're like eyes watching us... Before a colony's sent out here, these damn things will have to be destroyed. They'd be dangerous flying loose around electricity." Jason said, "Duck! Here comes a couple of them after us!" Avery said in a nervous voice, "Don't get excited, kid. They're just drifting on the breeze." "Drifting, hell," said Jason, and started to run for the ship.    rpHE unigen observed the landworms returning along the shore, evidently seeking the sea#D# matter on which they fed. To guard against the accidental destruction of any more nodes, it would be wise to destroy the creatures as they appeared, and clean them from this particular section of the planet. It dispatched two nodes toward the land-worms. They seemed to sense danger and broke into lumbering motion. The unigen accelerated the nodes; they darted forward at half-light speed, punctured the land-worms, reversed, shuttled back and forth a score of times, each time leaving a small steaming hole. The landworms collapsed to the black pebbles, lay limp. The unigen brought the nodes back to the uranium bank. Now to a more serious matter : the vegetation which was choking off the face of the uranium with its collars and roots. The unigen concentrated the heat of twenty nodes on one of the spikes. A hole appeared, weakening the entire shoot. It sagged and shriveled, collapsed. Pleasure was a quality which the structure of the unigen was incapable of expressing, the nearr est approach being a calm coasting sense, an awareness of control and mastery of movement. In this state the unigen began a systematic attack on the spikes. A second member fell over, became pale brown and a third... Overhead appeared a flying object, similar to a land-worm except that it radiated more strongly in the infra-red. Were the creatures everywhere?   made the original suggestion, diffidently at first, halfexpecting Captain Badt to freeze him with #. a stare the color of zinc. But Captain Badt stood like a statue looking into the blank magniscreen, still tuned to Avery's band. Dart said with somewhat more boldness, "So far we have no conclusive report' to make. Is the planet habitable or not? If we leave now we haven't proved anything." Captain Badt answered in , a voice without resonance, "I can't risk any more men." Dart rubbed at his bristling red hair. It occurred to him that Captain Badt was getting old. "Those little lights are vicious," Dart said emphatically. "We know that. They've killed three of our men. But we can handle them. An electric current blows 'em apart. Another thing, they're like bees around a hive; they mind their own business unless they're bothered. Bascomb, Avery, Jason -- they got it because they approached that pitchblende ledge too closely. Here's my idea, and I'll take the risk of carrying  : "I i ! I # . # it through. We knock together a light frame, string it with wire, and charge the strands alternately positive and negative. Then I'll go up in the service 'copter and drift it across the ledge. They're so thick now that we can't help blit knock out two-three hundred at a swipe." Captain Badt clenched and unclenched his hands. "Very well. Go ahead." He turned his back, stared into the blank magniscreen. This would be his last voyage. With the help of Henry, the ship's electrician. Dart built the frame, strung it with wire, equipped it with a high-potential battery. Strapping himself into the 'copter harness, he rose straight up, dangling a mile of light cable. He became a speck on the gray-blue sky. "That's it," said Henry into the communication mike. "Now ril make fast this fly trap affair, and then -- I've got another idea. We want the thing to move flatside forward, so I'll tie on a bridle with a bit of drag at the end." He arranged the drag, snapped the switch on the battery. "She's ready to go." A mile above. Dart moved across the sky toward the ledge of pitchblende. Captain Badt maintained an iron grip on the hand rail in the bridge, watching Dart's progress on the magniscreen. "Up, Dart," he said. "Up four feet... There... Steady. That's about right. Take it slow..."    I'lHE unigen's range of perception included the lowest radio waves as well as the hottest ultracolors. Stereoscopic vision was implicit in the fact that each node served as an organ of sight. Resolution of images was achieved by accepting only radiation normal to the surface of the node. In this manner a coarse spherical picture was received by each node, although detail as fine as the frame strung with wire was nearly invisible. The unigen's first warning was a pressure from the approaching electrostatic fields ; then the frame swept across the ledge, full through the heaviest concentration of nodes. The blast seared the ground, melted it into a flaming molten basin for a radius of fifty feet. The nodes which escaped the screen were flung pell-mell by the explosion out across the ocean. Directly under the explosion, the spike-vegetation was scorched; elsewhere, little affected. The structure of the unigen was no more capable of anger than pleasure; however, its will to survive was intense. Overhead flew the landworm. One like it had destroyed a node through electricity; perhaps this one was somehow associated with the last catastrophic explosion. Four nodes slanted up at light speed, snapped back and forth through the land-worm like sewing-machine needles hemming a sheet. The creature fell to the ground. The unigen assembled its nodes a hundred feet over the bank of uranium. Ninety-six nodes destroyed. The unigen weighed the situation. The planet was rich with uranium, but it was also the home of lethal land-worms. The unigen decided. There was uranium elsewhere in the universe, on thousands of worlds that were silent and dark and free of any kind of life. A lesson had been learned : avoid worlds inhabited by life-forms, no matter how primitive. The nodes flashed off into the sky, dispersed into space.    on the table. "That's it," he said in a flat voice. "Any world where we lose four good men in four hours -- any world inhabited by swarms of crazy atomic bees --  that's no world for human beings. Four good men..." He stood silent a moment, limp and dejected. The cadet wandered into the bridge, stared wide-eyed. Lifelong habit reasserted itself. Captain Badt filled out, became erect, rigid. His tunic and trousers hung crisp, his eyes once more shone with authority. "Ensign,, you will act as chief officer until further notice. We're leaving the planet, returning to Earth. Please attend to all exterior ports." "Yes, sir," said the new Chief Mate.   (: fT'HE planelt was quiet. The ocean spread bright and green, the mountains rolled back into the badlands: crags, ravines, plateaus -- black rock, gray rock, pockets of drifted ash. On the pitchblende ledge the vegetation waxed tall, five, ten, twenty feet, gray spines mottled with white, ivory, silver. In each a central vein opened; the spike became a tube straight and stiff as a cannon barrel. , At the bottom of the tube, the fruit of the plant began to develop. There was a spore-case, enclosed by a jacket into which water percolated. Below the spore-case opened another cornpartment, globe-shaped, communicating with the base of the spike by four splayed channels. A nub of uranium # accumulated in this chamber -- one ounce, two ounces, three ounces, more nd more diffused through the membranes of the plant by some evolutionary freak of a metabolism. The fruit was ripe. One by one, the spikes reached a culmination. A tension within the water-jacket increased past the breaking strain. The jacket split, flooded the compartment below th spore-case, surrounded the knob of uranium. Explosion. Steam bursting through the stern-pointing channels, back into the tube. Thrust, straight up. Sharp whipping blasts as the cases left the spikes. Up, up, up, at furious acceleration, into space... The water dissipated, the last puff of steam left the tubes. The spore-cases floated free on momentum. The gravitational field of the planet faded to a wisp, a film. The spore-cases drifted on. Now they cooled, cracked wide. From each a thousand capsules spilled into space, and the tiny jerk of the splitting case svit them in courses slightly divergent, enough to scatter them off toward different stars. Endless seeping of life across space. Smite into planet, the sift of spores, the search for the hot element, the growth, the culmination, the blast, the impulse. Then space, years of drift. Out beyond, and past beyond... Science and Fantasy Fiction; #. New Talee of Space A Time. Ed. by Raymond J. Healy. Stories by top writers in the field, all new and never before published in any form I  #. # #. Travelers of Space. Ed. by Martin Greenberg. With # color plates by Edd Cartier -- # #. The Outer Reaches. Ed. by Ausrust W. Derleth # # . Prize Science Fiction : #. Ed. by D. A. Wollheim : # #. The Best Science Fiction: #. Ed. by Bleiler A Dikty... # #. The Best Science Fiction : #. Ed. by Bleiler A Dikty # #. Great Stories of Science Fiction. Ed. by Murray Leinster # #. Adventures in Tomorrow. Ed. by Kendell F. Crossen # #. World of Wonder. Ed. by Fletcher Pratt # #. Journey to Infinity. Ed. by Martin Greenberg  # #. Far Boundaries. Ed. by August W. Derleth # #. The Other Side of the Moon. Ed. by August W. Derleth -- # #. Beyond Time A Space. Ed. by August W. Derleth # #. Strange Ports of Call. Ed. by August W. Derleth  -- # #. Possible Worlds of Science Fiction. Ed. by GrofT Conklin # #. The Big Book of Science Fiction. Ed. by Groff Conklin...-... # #. The Best of Science Fiction. Ed. by Groff Conklin # #. A Treasury of Science Fiction. Ed. by Groff Conklin -- ,  # #. Adventures in Time A Space. Ed. by Healy A McComas # #. From Off This World. Ed. by Margolies A Friend # #. My Best Science Fiction Story. Ed. by Margolies A Friend # #. Flight Into Space. Ed. by D. A. Wollheim # #. Every Boy's Book of Science Fic# tion, Ed. by D. A. Wollheim #B #. Foundation, by Isaac Asimov # #. The Stars, like Dust, Asimov # #. I. Robot, by Isaac Asimov # #. The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham # #. The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury # #. The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury # #. Dark Carnival, Ray Bradbury... # #. Space Oh My Hands, Fredric Brown ,-i , # #. The Black Star Passes, by John W. Campbell, Jr... # #. Who Goes There A Other Stories, by John W. Campbell, Jr. # #. The Cloak of Aesir, by John W. Campbell, Jr,... # #. The Moon Is Hell ! -- The Elder Gods, by J. W. Campbell, Jr. (both in I Vol.) # #. The Incredible Planet, by John W. Campbell, Jn... # #. Beyond Infinity, by Robert S. Carr # #. The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke # #. Rogue Queen, by L. S. De Camp -- # #. The Undesired Princess, by L. Sprague De Camp # #. Genus Homo, by L. S. De Camp -- # #. The Castle of Iron, De Camp # #. The Incomplete Enchanter, De Camp... -- # #. Lest Darkness Fall, De Camp... # #. Solution T-#, Theodora Du Bois... # #. The Blind Spot, Flint A Hal) # #. The Puppett Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein # #. Between Planets, by R. A. Heinlein # #. Green Hills of Earth, Heinlein...# #. Man Who Sold the Moon, Heinlein # #. Rocket Ship Galeleo, Heinlein # #. Space Cadet, Robert A. Heinlein -- # #. Red Planet, Robert A. Heinlein -- # #. Farmer In the Sky. R. A. Heinlein # #. The Sword of Conan, R. E. Howard -- #A #. Conan the Conqueror, R. E. Howard --  -- # #. Fear A Typewriter In the Sky. by L. Ron Hubbard (both in I Vol.) # #. Dullard of the Space Patrol. by Malcolm Jameson, Short stones # #. The Toymaker A Other Stories, by Raymond F. Jones -- # #. Renaissance, by Raymond F. Jones # #. Tomorrow A Tomorrow -- The Fairy Chessman, by Lewis Padgett -- . # #. A Gnome There Was A Others, by Lewis Padgett # #. The Wine of the Dreamers, by John D. MacDonald # #. Weapon Shops of Isher, A. E. Van Vogt # Anl many mor! cairy a full line of all American books in this fioltl, as well as a large stock of sratre. out of print books. Hark issues of magazines available. Drop in and iay us a y'rsonal visit! Open Keinlt by Check or Money Order. No C.O.D. orders accepto).  i' f  #. You want to buy gifts for the Christmas season. bimonthly.  #. Guess it'll be ties and nylons again this year.  #. Give away copies on MY income? # first subscription Novels for One Year as MY # first subscription We will send cards onneuncing your gift to each lucky recipient. TO: Nome : TO: Nome. Address City TO: Nome TO: Nome. Address. City Address Address. City City TO: Nome TO: Name Addreic AddreM City City woeld be mutilating a beoutiful magazine. Offer expires December #, #. #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. #  TT is with genuine pleasure -- and a sigh of relief -- that I introduce herewith the guest reviewer of the month, Robert A. Heinlein, who has written a really flavorful review. by John P. Mabarger, Research Director, Aeromedical Laborapages. # paper, # cloth TN one way it was even more it was to read the first edition of Willy Ley's epoch-making Rockets. After all, Willy is One Of Our Own Boys, with a lifetime of devotion to space flight and rocket research already half spent. He believed in space flight, and so did we, while the idea was still considered ludicrous by all but an infinitestimal minority, mainly, of course, science fiction fans. Now enter the Respectable Citizens -- government scientists and medical men, Air Forces mostly, soberly engaged in a-practical project, to wit, making necessary medical preparation for a new field of activity -- space -- in exactly the same fashion in whichi. Medical Corps personnel prepare  ) .   ' io# .   SHttF for arctic or jungle warfare. The lead article in this symposium was written by the Air Forces Surgeon General himself. The section headings in the book are: Space Medicine in the United States Air Force; Multiple-Stage Rockets and Artificial Satellites; Physiological Considerations of the Possibility of Life under Extraterrestrial Conditions; Astrophysics of Space Medicine; Orientation in Space; and Bio-Climatology of Manned Rocket Flight. The book is remarkably easy to read, and the special terms are all explained. Many of the data are new; much information was not formerly easily accessible. Convenient graphic displays present information on "living" conditions on the several planets, for example, and on how to control the temperature inside a spaceship. Elsewhere there is a description of how Martian plants may, and probably do, create their own environments. And there is a discussion of how congenital deaf mutes may make an almost indispensable contribution to the art of space flight, a contribution physically impossible for their unafflicted brethren. Readers of this magazine will probably want to buy the book; writers for this magazine had dam well better. With which I reluctantly take up the reins again and make some comments upon -- August Derleth. Pellegrini # Cudahy, New York, #. # pages, # practically illegible : this is the record for August Derleth's ninth fantasy and science fiction collection. It includes four "classics" and a bunch of contemporaries divided into two sections --  "Mid-Period Pieces" and "The Contemporary Scene." I shall not attempt to describe the significance of the latter two, since I haven't any clear idea of what it may be. The eight good stories are: "Missing One's Coach," Anon., Dublin Literary Magazine, #. Antiquarian, but surprisingly lively and full of minor surprises. "Frankenstein -- Unlimited," by H. A. Highstone, Astounding, #. "Open Sesame," by Stephen Grendon, Arkham Sampler, #. "De Profundis," by Murray "Dear Pen Pal," by A. E. van Vogt, Arkham Sampler, #. "Time to Rest," by John Beynon Harris, Arkham Sampler (and the British New Worlds') #. "Vignettes of Tomorrow," by Ray Bradbury, Arkham Sampler, #. "Later Than You Think," by Fritz Leiber, Galaxy, #. The other twelve -- well, some may like them better than this reviewer. Personal tastes vary ' widely, which partly explains the great number of anthologies coming out now. Bear in mind, then, that the above are strictly my own preferences and I am notoriously human and thus subject to error. by John D. MacDonald. Greenberg: Publisher, New York, #. # pages, # property" type of science fiction which assumes that an extraterrestrial, extrahuman race is able to make us do more or less what it wants. In this well-written novel, many of the accidents, crimes of violence, and unexplained tragedies of the world, and in particular the failure of every attempt at launching a spaceship, are due to the machinations of a group of individuals numbering fewer than a thousand, called the Watchers. These Watchers, who inhabit a planet several star systems away, are able to enter the bodies of Earthians at will and make these bodies do anything they choose to. This is accomplished by super-hypnotism machines. The irony of the situation revolves around the fact that the Watchers are sublimely convinced that we are mere dreams created for their pleasure, and have no actual reality. The story is woven around the final discovery by the Watchers that we are "real," and by us that most of our Earthly miseries are caused by these utterly remote aliens, who turn out to be descendants from our own ancestors of at least tens of thousands of years ago. That the plot and the concepts are not simon-pure originals, both being remimscent of Eric Frank ftussell's famous "we're property" novels, is unimportant. The skill and the imagination with which the tale is developed are genuinely satisfying. Starting Next Month... The Demolished Man A dazzling three-part serial . of an ingenious criminal of the future who cannot fail... in a society where crime connot possibly hope to succeed! At last you can obtain a copy of this rare science fiction classic I N the eleven years since it was first written, A. E. van Vogt's San has become one of science fiction's legends and one of its rarities. Almost every reader of s-f has heard of this modern classic and could tell you, rather vaguely that it concerns a telepathic mutant race, hunted down and almost exterminated by a frightened mankind. But very few have actually read San or own a copy of it. This is why: San first appeared, in magazine form, in the fall of #. It was issued in book form, five years later, in a limited edition that was quickly sold out... Lately it has not been uncommon for readers to offer # or # for a copy; and there is at least one authenticated instance of a copy changing hands for #. Finally, Simon and Schuster's own science fiction fans decided that something should be done about this. We persuaded van Vogt to lend us his only copy -- which we promised to return unscarred. We found that San was even more exciting and provocative than we'd remembered. We insisted that it be made .available again to the # (rather than just the #) audience. Van Vogi thought that was a fine idea, too. And, being a perfectionist, he worked over the book again, revising, adapting, tightening, and polishing. The basic story is unchanged: it is just a bit more of a masterpiece, that's all. This brand new edition of San has just been published. With its past history in mind, we thought we ought to give you fair warning so that you can make sure of a copy before it vanishes again. You can find it at your bookseller's now. Or. if you prefer, send the coupon below, direct to the publishers. f -- I I # Sixth Avenue, New .York #, N.Y. I I Please send me a copy of A. E. van Vost'  . San. f will pay postman # plus post  I age when it arrives. If not delighte# I I I may return it in # days for refund. ! I -- r-ir.I#-i ii r ii u-   I AHdreas.  I City... -- ...#one  I postage. Same refund guarantee.  not a creature was stirring This could be a Christmas story. If it is, it shows one way peace on Earth can be attained! H e was a tall, hard man with skin the color of very old iodine. When he climbed up out of the vertical shaft of his small gold mine, The Lousy Disappointment, he could have been taken for an Indian, he was that dark. Except, of course, that Indians didn't exist any more in #. His name was Tom Gannett and he was about forty years old and he didn't realize his own uniqueness. When he made it to his feet, the first thing he did was to squint up at the sun. The second was to sneeze, and the third to blow his nose. "Hey, you old sun!" he growled. "You old crummy sun, you look sicker'n a dog." Which was literally true, for the sun seemed to be pretty queer. The whole sky seemed to be pretty queer, for that matter. Skies should be blue and the sun should be a bloated golden bauble drifting serenely across them. But the skies were not blue ; they were a dirty purplishgray. And the sun wasn't a bloated golden bauble; somebody had it by the scruff of the neck and was dragging it. Gannett planted his big feet wide apart and frowned sourly around and sniffed the air like a dog at a gopher hole. "The damn world smells sick," he grunted. Which was also true. The world did smell sick. The world smelled something like that peculiar odor that comas from an old graveyard carefully tended by an old man with dank moss sticking to the soles of his old shoes. That kind of smell. Gannett didn't know why the sun looked sick, and he didn't know why the world smelled sick. Indeed, there were many things Gannett didn't know, among which would be these in particular: (a) He d not know (since, tor the lest six months, he bad been living and working all alone at his little mine. Which was in the remotest of the most remote desert regions of Nevada) that a little less than three weeks earlier, mankind bad finally achieved the inevitable: mao's own annihilation. (b) He did not know that he was going to be the loneliest man on Earth -- he who was used to, and perfectly content with, the hermitlike existence af a desert rat. (c) He furthermore did not know that there anc four of the Ten Commandments which he wasn't going to he able to break any more -- not even if he stayed up nights trying and lived for centuries. from his nostrils and shrugged. Hell with it. He thought about Reno and how he hadn't been there for nearly a year. He thought of the dimly lighted, soft-carpeted cocktail lounges in Reno where drinks come in long stemmed glasses and blondes in long-stemmed legs. Reno at Christmastime, he thought. There was a town, Reno! He grinned, showing big gold teeth that blazed out of his mouth like the glittering grille on a Buick. He dug his feet into the hard ground and walked the hundred feet or so to his cabin where he sometimes slept when he didn't happen to sleep in the mine. He stripped off his grimesodden clothes. He stepped out of them, in fact, and stretched luxuriously as though he hadn't felt the good joy of being unclothed for a long time. He got up and went to a corner of the cabin, rummaged out a pair of dusty clogs and pushed his feet into them. Then -- and they don't come any nakeder than he was -- he went outside and around the shack to the rear where he kept his jeep and where the shower was. He stepped into it, for it was nothing more ornate than a large oil drum suspended on long four by sixes. He yanked on a rope that bung down from the drum. #M The result of doing that made him leap out again dripping wet and colder than a buried motherin-law. He shivered, eyes blinking fast. He took a deep breath. His gold teeth went together tightly and the big muscles in his neck corded defensively. He deliberately went under the shower again. Pawing a sliver of laundry soap from a ledge on one of the four by sixes, he went to work with it, and when he finally tripped the hanging rope once more, he was a clean man. He went into the cabin. It wasn't any warmer than the great outdoors, but that was where his clothes were. He shaved from an old granite basin full of cold water. After that he went to a hook on the wall and got down a suit of clothes which looked as though it had shriveled up waiting for somebody to wear it. The last thing he did before leaving was to pry up one of the boards behind the door and lift out of this hiding place a small leather bag. The bag was filled with gold. I'HE sun was gone novy. Leglike rays of light still sprawled, dirty-Iooking, in the sky over toward the California line, but aside from these extremities, most of it was somewhere out in the Pacific. The purplish sky was darker now Drab. Dead, somehow. The 'old jeep started nicely. It always started nicely; that wa one of the good things about a jeep. The only funny thing was that out of its exhaust pipe in the rear came angry purplish flames. Queer flames. Gannett stared at them, surprised. "Even the damn jeep is sick," he muttered. He was wrong, of course, but he had no way of knowing that. He backed around, finally, and went down what h called his driveway, which was little more than rock-strewn ground, until he came to a small dirt road. This led him to an- other, larger dirt road, which in turn led him to route ##, which was a U.S. Highway. A hundred miles farther on, he came to the outskirts of Carson City. It wasn't until he pulled into a gas station that he realized something was wrong. Nobody jumped out to wipe his windshield. The attendant who still leaned in the doorway of the station had a rag in his hand, but he didn't budge. He couldn't. His face looked like weathered leather and he was dead. "Holy... !" whispered Gannett incredulously. He forgot about needing gas. He jumped in the jeep and drove down the main stem and found Police  Headquarters in an old gray atone building. He knew it was Police Headquarters for the green neon over the revolving door had ing. He went up the steps two at a time, banged through the swinging doors and stamped straight to where the Sergeant' sat at a desk over in the corner by the switchboard. "Hey, by God!" yelled Gannett to the Desk Sergeant. "There's a guy down the street in a gas station and he's standing up in the doorway and he's dead as a mackerel!" Dramatic words. But the Desk Sergeant was no longer among the living and didn't appreciate them. It took Gannett a long while to get over that. He slowly backed away. He made the big oak doors, still backing. He went down the stairs on legs as stiff as icicles. He got back in his jeep and started up again. He knew there was something terribly wrong, but before he thought about it, he knew he had to have a drink. He pulled up in front of a saloon that had nice, cheery, glowing lights showing through the big front window. He got out of the jeep. He went through the swinging glass doors and straight to the bar. "Scotch!" Nobody answered. The barman behind the mahogany, facing him, didn't make a move. The barman had a dead cigarette between his cold colorless lips. The cigarette had a half inch of ash on it. The ash looked as though it was sculptured out of purple marble. Gannett put both hands flat on the bar and swallowed hard. He twisted his head and looked over the shoulder of a customer on his left, who was leaning negligently on the bar with one elbow. There was a half-full bottle in front of the leaning man and it had an alert-looking horse's head stuck in the neck of it for a pouring "Excuse me, Mac," Gannett whispered. The leaning man didn't twitch a muscle. Gannett sucked in a deep breath. He reached. He got the bottle. He blinked stupidly at the bottle and then he put it down very carefully and took another breath and looked at a highball glass in front of the leaning man. The highball glass was empty and clean, but the leaning man's fingers were curled lightly and gracefully around it. They were nice fingers. White fingers. Fingers that looked as if they hadn't had to do any hard work lately. Slender, tafjering, carefully manicured fingers. Gannett swore softly. He yanked the horse's head out and then poked the bottle into his mouth and tilted it up. He held it until there wasn't anything left but the very glass it was made of plus the bright little paper label. His throat burned. He coughed. He banged the empty bottle down on the bartop and coughed again -- hard. The leaning man stirred, seemed to turn slowly, stiffly, in a half arc that put him face to face with Gannett. Then he went down backward and all in one piece, like a tall tree on top of a hill on a very still night. He went down with the glass in his hand and, when he hit, swirls of thick dust rose lazily from the floor and then settled back over his rigid form like freshly falling snow blanketing something left out on the front lawn. rjpHE night was black. There wasn't a star and there wasn't a sound except for Earth sounds, which are never very loud. Gannett sat in his jeep with the motor running and the purple flames coming out of the tailpipe. His hands were tight around the wheel, but the Jeep wasn't moving. Gannett was staring off intp space and his eyes looked as though somebody had peeled them back. He said it to himself mentally, for the first few times. Then, as if he couldn't contain them any longer, the words tumbled out of his mouth into the night air: "Everybody's dead, by God!" He drove through deserted streets until he found an all-night drugstore. It didn't seem funny to him just yet that the streets were deserted; that was something he would think of later. He walked into the drugstore and went to the newsstand and picked up a copy of the Carson Daily Bugle. The date struck him first. It was the wrong date; it was three weeks ago. He dropped it and picked up another, a Reno paper this time. Same trouble with the date. He read the headline then: Unveil New Weapon He blinked at it. There was a little more -- pitifully little -- to the effect that Congress had been asked ftr a declaration of war in order to defend the assaulted member of the Atlantic Pact nations. Gannett swallowed hard. He dropped the paper and turned to the clerk who was leaning over the glass counter watching him. "Jeez!" Gannett said. "When did all this happen? I didn't even know about it." He didn't get any answer from the clerk. He knew he wouldn't from the way the clerk's eyes looked. They looked as if they should have been under refrigeration. "People around dead," he muttered. "By God, the Governor oughta know about this!" He left the drugstore and drove straight for the State Capitol Building, which wasn't far away, for Carson City isn't very large. He walked up the long concrete ribbon to the big stone steps. He mounted them. He stood before the bronze doors for an instant, a feeling of awe coming over him despite what he knew he was going to tell the Governor. He pulled on the handle of the nearest of the bronze doors. Nothing happened. It was locked, of course. The Capitol is never open at three A.M. (which was the exact time when it had happened three weeks ago -- but he didn't know that).  A feeling of rage came over Gannett slowly, like heat radiating through soft wood. He stood on the stone steps and faced the broad expanse of lawn, which, in the summertime, atleast, was very lovely. He slowly pulled his leather bag of gold from his coat pocket and raised it up so he could see it. Then he turned once naore to the bronze doors and smashed the bag of gold through one of the glass panes. "Gannett done it!" he roared. "If anybody wants to know, tell them Gannett, by God!" He went back to his jeep. The big, darkly hulking form of the red brick Post Office Building went by and faded into the night. He passed a jewelry store. He looked in. An electric mantel clock in the store window indicated the time as nine-ten. He passed a supermarket. The big illuminated clock on the facade said nine-seven. The clock in the service station, where he finally pulled in for gas, pointed at nine exactly. Cycles have to be controlled if electric clocks are to keep correct time, but that was something else he did not know. After he put back the gasoline hose, he left one more observation on the silence of the night before driving to Reno. He said it loudly, and there was angry frustration in every word of it: "Hell with Carson City. To hell with it!" A pproaching downtown Reno at night is a pleasant, cheerful Experience. There are lights all around, like a store selling electric fixtures. On the right hand side of Virginia Street ey glow brightly, each one a little gaudier than the last. Big lights. Neon lights in all the colors neon lights can come in. Signs on the fronts of the big gaming houses that stay open until lights aren't needed any more; and the one flash of light across Virginia Street at the intersection of Commercial Row which had been photographed more times than the mind of man could have conjectured: The Bieat Little City in the World He drove slowly by the Happy Times Club. He could see quite a few people inside. You wouldn't think there was anything wrong when you looked at something like that. ' At the corner of First Street, he stopped for the signal. He pulled around a military vehicle that seemed to be waiting for the signal, too. It was an open vehicle, painted the olive drab of the Army, and sitting stiffly erect behind the wheel was a natty-looking first lieutenant with his cap at just the right angle over one eye. The signal bell up on the corner poles clanged loudly and the lights turned green. Gannett crossed the intersection, but the lieutenant and his military vehicle stayed behind. He went by the Golden Bubt)le, which was perhaps the largest and gaudiest of all the gaming places in Reno. Its big front, done in glass bricks with multicolored lights . behind them, looked like some monstrous kaleidoscope built for the use of the Man in the Moon. Seen from his jeep, through the plate glass of the wide door, the interior of the Golden Bubble seemed to be a Jiappy, carousing place full of the joyous laughter of folks having a fine time. Only that wasn't so, of course, for the only sounds to be heard were the jeep's motor and the signal bells on the corner poles. Gannett parked. He walked back, went slowly through the doors of the Golden Bubble. The first thing that met his eyes was the flashing welcome grin of the head waiter, who was dressed in a tuxedo just inside the doors. The head waiter had his hand half out, as if to shake the hand of Gannett as he came in. Gannett almost stuck out his own hand in return -- but not quite... He went to the bar. He didn't look at the barman lying on the floor with his ear in the spittoon. He shambled around the end of tha bar, took a full bottle of scotch off the backbar shelf, broke the seal and took a long swallow. The bartender didn't notice. After that he took the bottle with him out on the floor. He went around a man in an overcoat who looked to be uncomlit fortably warm but wasn't. He went over to a roulette table and stared the croupier straight in the eyes. He reached for a pile of chips under th# croupier's right hand and slid them over. "Double zero," he said. The croupier looked bored, which was the way a croupier should look. Gannett reached down and gave the wheel a spin and then stood back and waited. The croupier waited. Two women and one man, on Gannett's right, also waited. The ball clicked merrily, came to a stop. The wheel slowed, finally rested. It wasn't double zero. Gannett reached for the croupier's rake and shoved his pile of chips back under the croupier's protecting right hand. "Lousy wheel is fixed," Gannett said. Nobody argued with him on that. He uncorked his scotch bottle and took a long pull. Nobody objected to that, either, the croupier still looked bored; and the two women and the one man waited patiently for the Day of Judgment. Gannett went over to a cashier window and reached in and got a handful of silver dollars. He took them to the machines over against the far wall and stuck in a couple and pulled the two handles simultaneously. For his investment he got back five dollars, which one of the machines disgorged with a loud clatter. He put more dollars in. He put them in fast and pulled the levers fast. He went down the entire row of machines and pulled the levers as he went. He didn't linger to see what happened at any of them. He began to feel cold. He took out his scotch bottle again and half emptied it. A woman who looked as if she were someone's great-grandmother, except that her hair was bleached and fingernails were sharp talons, and who sat in a chrome and leather chair not six feet away from him, stared a little disapprovingly. Gannett caught the look. "Lady," he said defensively, "I earned me a holiday, see? It's none of your business if I do some celebrating, is it?" The lady didn't change her mind. She looked as though she might prefer gin herself. Gannett belched. He wasn't so cold' now. He threw back his head and laughed and listened to the sound of it bounce off walls. He did it again. He was feeling fine. He went back to the roulette wheel, got around behind it and nudged the croupier gently. The croupier went over like a broom sliding down the side of a wall. Gannett picked up the little plastic rake and looked at the two women and one man. "Place your bets, folks," he said, in a low tone that was a pretty good imitation of the drone of a professional man. He separated the chips into four neat piles. He pushed a pile each at the two women, one to the man. The last he kept for himself. "Place your bets, folks," he repeated. Nobody did, but that was okay anyhow. Grinning happily, he made bets for them. One of the women -- the one that was redheaded -- looked to him as if she might be a plunger. He shbved her pile of chips over onto zero and then he gave her a friendly little wink. The other woman was the careful type, he thought. Her chips -- not all of them, of course -- he shoved for red. He disposed of the man perfunctorily: ten dollars on plain number nine. His own bet was due a little more deliberation. He carefully spread around five hundred dollars until the strip looked as if eighteen people were playing it all at once. The effort made him sweat. He reached for his bottle, emptied it, then dropped it on the fallen croupier. "Folks," Gannett said in an apologetic tone, "you'll have to pardon me a minute. It seems I'm out of fuel. Don't go away; I'll be right back." Everybody was agreeable. Gannett went back to the bar, went around behind it. He said to the barman: "I got a party out there. Doc. A big party, see? The house might stand to make a mint. How's about drinks?" The barman considered it. The barman was still considering it when Gannett went back to the wheel with a fifth of scotch and four glasses and a dish of olives. He made drinks. In each one he put an olive. By this time, of course, he was getting a little loud, but nobody could blame him for that. When the drinks were made and placed before the two women and the man, he was ready. He grinned around, rubbed his hands together and winked a sly little leering wink at the redhead. The wheel spun, stopped. Zero. The redhead had brought down the house. "By God!" whispered Gannett in frank admiration. "Lady, you sure got luck. 'Nother little snifter just to nail it tight?" Gannett liked the idea. He drank her drink for her and made a face over the olive. He poured another. He made more bets for everybody and then thought of something. Excusing himself once more, he got a roll of quarters from the cashier cage and, breaking it open, fed them into a big glittering juke box over in the T#I corner. That done, he pushed down a row of tabs and went back to the table. Everybody seemed to be having a time. The redhead just couldn't lose. Three separate times Gannett was forced to collect chips from other tables in order to keep the game going, but he didn't mind. He even said to the redhead once: "Lady, ten more minutes and we sign the joint over to you. But have fun; you're doing swell." Once more he consulted the thoughtful barman, and more than once he had to go back to the juke box and punch tabs, but that was all right. He liked music. At ten minutes past three in the morning, with all the chips in the place before the lucky redhead he finished his lastbottle. He lifted his eyes and considered a crystal chandelier which hung from the exact center of the broad ceiling. It was a beautiful chandelier. It looked as though it might have graced the banquet hall of some castle over in England, back in the days when England was a tight little isle. He grinned appreciatively at it. He pitched the empty bottle upward. There was a crash. Half the lights in the place went out. Bowing solemnly to the scattered immobile figures, Gannett lurched to the big door up front. He tried a bow to the friendly floorman, but it didn't quite go over. He banged through the doors and out into the street. G annett groaned his aching body out of bed and padded heavily to the window. He put his big hands on the sill and looked out. Purple snow was falling on a quiet world. The flakes came down softly, big wet, colored things like fluffy bits of cotton candy escaping from a circus in the skj'. There was his jeep down on the street where he had left it. He could recognize it, for it was the only jeep on the block. "Then it wasn't no lousy dream," he said miserably. He went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. He recalled the headlines in the paper. "Them lousy Reds," he whispered. "They done this, sure as hell." That made him think a little. Everybody was dead, even the redhead in the Golden Bubble who couldn't lose. "What the hell am I doin' alive, then?" he asked himself. There was no answer to that. He thought of his mine. The Lousy Disappointment, and wondered if, living most of the time below the surface as he did, he had been protected from some sort of purple gas or something that seemed to have killed off everybody else. It could be. Some very light gas, maybe, that wouldn't seep below the surface. "Aw, for cripe sakes!" he grunted disgustedly. He dressed and left the room. He went downstairs. There was the lobby, all soft, quiet carpeting and soft, quiet furniture and soft, quiet drapes. A sheet of paper on a writing desk said Grand Pachappa. He was in a hotel, then. He must have wandered into it after he left the Golden Bubble. He carefully avoided looking at two well-dressed women who sat in lobby chairs, staring off into nothing, but he felt their He made his way outside, the purple snow coming down and giving his cheeks wet, cold caresses. He angrily brushed them off, but they came down anyway. Above the snow, the sky was a sodden mass of purplish gray. He found a restaurant that was open. A few customers sat on the stools like statues in a museum. All the coffeemakers were on the electric stove, but they were dry and clean except one that had no bottom in it any more and was quite discolored. Beneath it, the round electric coil still glowed faithfully. He grabbed up one of the clean pots and took it to the metal rinse sink and reached for the faucet. And then his hand froze. What if the water was tainted? He had no way of finding out if it didn't carry that identifying purplish tint. He tried the faucet. It did. The milk in the refrigerator was three weeks old, of course. Gannett ended by opening a bottle 'of Pepsi Cola for breakfast. The sky stayed leaden, but even so there were many things apparent now that he hadn't seen the night before. A lack of heavy traffic on the streets would seem to indicate that what had happened -- purple gas or whatever -- had been very late at night; even so, traffic accidents were everywhere. There was one big sedan with its front end crushed against the First Olympic Bank. There was one cop who had died trying to tie his right shoe -- his fingers still clutched the laces. There was a doctor (his car had a caduceus emblem on the windshield) who had just stepped down to the street, his bag in his left hand and his right hand on. the door, ready to slam it shut. He had a serious, purposeful look on his face that even the falling purple snow couldn't quite eradicate. Despite the cold, sweat frosted Gannett's forehead. He made his way to a radio and television store and kicked in a glass panel of the front door. Stepping through to the clamor of the sudTR# denly aroused night-warning bell, he went directly to a TV set and turned it on. The big screen tube flickered after a while and a scratching hum came out of the speaker, but nothing happened. He tried all the channels. Nothing. He tuned in a big radio console next, going carefully and slowly across the dial with a hand that shook. Even thpugh the night-warning bell was kicking up quite a racket, he could tell after a moment or two. Nothing... T he sky was getting dark as Gannett left the store. The purple snow still fell. It was then that he noticed for the first time the gay street decorations in preparation for Christmas. Big paper bells with plenty of glittering tinsel and electric lamps inside them. On the corner of First and Virginia, he saw a big iron kettle of some Salvation Army Santa. Hanging from its metal tripod, it looked quite natural, except that it was filled with purple snow; and the Santa who was supposed to ring his little bell was holding it stiffly over his head. He and the bell were frozen silent. There was a large department store. Inside, in the show window, was a Christmas display that would delight the kiddies. There was a big Christmas tree trimmed wnth every imaginable ornament. Beneath the tree, electrically activated toy soldiers jerked robotlike through their precise military designations, their lithographed faces looking stem and very brave. There was a clown who did uncounted somersaults; a lifelike doll who clapped her hands in glee. There was an aluminum bomber with a wingspread of three feet -- it was held in the air by almost invisible wires -- and its six propellers droned in perfect unison, making a brisk little wash that rustled the silk of the little doll's dress. And around the base of the tree, through valley and over mountain, into tunnel and over spiderweb trestle, was a railroad track. It should have had busy little trains on it, except that it didn't -- the trains had been derailed at a whistle stop called North Pole. Gannett's eyes twitched. The sky grew darker; the purple snow continued to fall silently. Gannett went by the Macrossed the little stone bridge over the frozen Truckee River. He came to the heavy gray stone building of First Community Church. He stopped in front of the church and stared at it. It was a solid, respectable-looking building. It was a very nice thing, indeed, to have here in Reno. "Christmas Eve," Gannett whispered through cold lips. "This is Christmas Eve!" He went up six purple-snowcovered stone steps. He reached the top where the stone steps ended and where the big square stone slab was, that slab where the minister stands when the weather is fair, and shakes hands with the congregation after the service. Somewhere above, in the steeple, bells struck off the hour of eight. A timing device did that. Many churches had such timing devices to save labor. And as though that were a signal, a loudspeaker, attached way up on the spire especially for this festive season, began to growl out preparatory scratching noises, like a big metal monster clearing its throat. Gannett pulled on the wrought brass handles of the closed oaken door. The door didn't budge. He grabbed the handles in both hands and braced his feet. He pulled hard. The door was locked. "God," he whispered hoarsely. "God, this is me. I gotta get in, God. God, listen, I gotta get in!" High above, in the steeple, the loudspeaker was finally ready with a cheerful little carol. "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen!" the voices of a dead choir roared out upon the silent city. glittering ideas, fascinating characters, solar-hot conflict... Or don't take our word; buy the issue and see for yourself! #  How to Earn Money Writing Short Stories, Mysteries, Articles Fr Book Tells How You learn at Home for Partor Full-Time Income learning to write so you may earn # to fl# a year in addition to your regular income? Or many thousands on a full-time basis? Renewed public interest in scientific subjyts is creating worthwhile opportunities for people with technical backgrounds who can write about their work or their ideas for technical journals, general magazines, even radio  TV. Graduate Now Famous Author f. B. Vtin Vogt, cue of the all-time greats in science fiction, is the author of" five published books, scores of stories and novelettes. He writes: "The Palmer course is excellent and I am glad I took it. It was a milestone in my career.' 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Thanks Palmer for Success "Palmer training has enabled me to put color and human interest into several stories for business papers which ordinarily would be cold, dry news reports. My story in Textile World led to a continuous list of assignments for other McGraw-Hill publications. Have sold # so far this year, and have orders for several more." -- Chas. Leach, Saylesviile, Rhode Island. Palmer Inatitute ef Authorihip b U ! b (# N. Sycamore. Deak G#-I#( I I  mm mm Hollywood #, California I I I I I riease send me free book telling how your homestudy training helps new writers get started. ConfldentiaL No salesman will calL Mr. Mrs... Misij Address. I I Olty  IMea-vo Pi'int Clearly...Zone... Veteran.?;State. Check hero D Pillar to Post lT Naiuralty tk amputee wanted to stay out of his body for good... but you can't blame the man of the future for wanting to escape it! Forcett Mental ClinSe Delano, Conn. #th Feb. Messrs. Thompson  Handett A ttorneys-at-Lavf # Gable Street  Philadelphia, Pa. Gentlemen: In response to your request, we have conducted a thorough examination of our patient, Stephen Dallboy, and have established his identity beyond legal question. Attested documents in support of this are enclosed, and dispose entirely of his claim to the Terence Molton property. At the same time we admit we are bewildered. The condition of the patient has altered quite radically since our last examination, when he was indubitably feebleminded. Indeed, but for this obsession that he is Terence Molton, which he maintains with complete consistency, we should T#I ftow classify him as normal. In view of the obsession and the remarkable assertions with which he supports it, we feel that he should remain here under observation, which may give us the opportunity of dispelling the whole fantasy system -- and at the same time of clearing up several points we find puzzling. In order that you may more clearly understand the situation, we are enclosing a copy of a statement written by the patient, which we suggest you study before reading our concluding remarks.  believe. In fact, when the thing first happened, I didn't believe it myself. I figured it was just a stage, maybe, in the deteriorating process. I've had enough dope long enough to play hell with my nervous system -- yet the funny thing was how real it seemed right away. Still, I thought, everything would seem real to De Quincey when he was coked up, and to Coleridge, too. A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw .   Vision is a poor word -- all quality and no quantity. How strong was that vision? Could he put out his hand and touch the babe? He heard her sing, but did she speak to him? And did he find himself a new man, free from pain? I guess even the milk and honey of Paradise are relative. Some would yearn for a kind of' celestial Hollywood, but just having no pain and being complete would have been Paradise enow for me. It had been Just over four years since that mine had got me -- four years, nine operations and more to come. Interesting for the doctors, no doubt, but it had turned me into just a hulk in a wheelchair, with only half of one leg and no feet at all under the blanket. "Go easy on the dope," the surgeon had warned me. "What'll happen if I don't?" I asked. "You don't want to become an addict, do you?" .That was funny. If they'd given me anything else to stop the pain, I wouldn't have wanted to risk addiction. But they didn't have anything else. And if they had refused me dope. I'd have killed myself. They knew that. So the nurses gave it to me, though always trying to talk me into cutting down. And there was Sally. She used to come to the hospital every visiting day, bringing me candy or books and cigarettes, and leaning over the bed to kiss me, with that gentle little smile that needs only a word to turn it into hopeless weeping. I finally said, "Look, Sally, this isn't doing you or me any good. The sample I showed you was a healthy young guy. What you'd get now isn't anything like the sample. Why don't you go find somebody who is?" Poor kid, it nearly broke her up. She argued out of mistaken loyalty, but I didn't want her on my conscience. They tell me her husband's a good joe and the baby is cute. Some of the nurses and Gray Ladies thought I was brooding about it. The fact is this is how I figure it should be. All the same, when every woman you see ia kind to you -- in about the same way she would be to a sick dog -- Oh, well, there was always the dope. And then, when I wasn't expecting anything at all except more pain and misery, there was this... this vision. tipHE day had been a rotten one for me. My right leg and my left foot were hurting a lot. But most of the right leg had been taken off and the left foot had bad to go, too, a little later, so nothing could be done about it except to reach for the bottle. Maybe I took a little more than usual, but for all the difference it made to anyone else, I might as well be doped to the' eyes all the time. I lay back, feeling the pain fade out. I seemed to float smoothly and 'gently up and away, disembodied, filled with a surging lighttjess. The pain must have made me pretty tired, I guess, because I could feel myself falling asleep before I'd even begun to enjoy the lack of it... When I opened my eyes, there, in front of me, was the vision of the damsel. She didn't have a dulcimer, and she certainly did not look Abyssinian, but she was singing, very quietly. It was an odd song, and for all I knew it might have been about Mount Abora, because I couldn't understand a word of it. We were in a room -- well, yes, it was a room, though it was more like being inside a bubble. It was all cool green, with a soft opalescence, and the walls curving up so you couldn't tell where they became ceiling. There were two arched openings in the sides. Through them were tree tops and a patch of blue sky. Close to one of them, the girl was fiddling with something I couldn't see. She glanced toward me, and saw that my eyes were open. She turned and said something that sounded like a question, but it meant absolutely nothing to me. #  I just looked back at her. She was worth looking at. A tall, beautifully proportioned figure, with brown hair caught back by a ribbon. The material of her #ress was diaphanous, yet there was a vast amountof it, arranged in multitudes of cunning folds. It made me think of the pre-Raphaelites' versions of the classical. It must have been cobweb-light, for as she moved it swirled and hesitated in mid-air. The result was like that frozen high-wind effect so popular in late Greek sculpture. When I did not reply, she frowned a little and repeated her question. I did not pay a lot of attention to the words. As a matter of fact, I was thinking: "Well, that's that; I've had it," and deciding that I was now in some kind of anteroom to Heaven, or -- well, anyway, an anteroom. I wasn't scared, not even greatly surprised. I remember feeling, "That's a nasty experience finished with," and wondering a little that the prelude to eternity should resemble certain Victorian schools of painting. When I still did not answer, her dark eyes widened a little. There was a look of wonder in them, perhaps a slight tinge of alarm, as she came toward me. Slowly she said: j .I "You -- are -- not -- Hymorell?"  Her English had a strange accent, and anyway I did not know what hymorell meant. I might be, or I might not. She went on: "Not -- Hymorell? Some -- other -- person?"  It sounded as if Hymorell was a name. "I'm Terry," I told her. "Terry Molton." There was a block of the green stuff near me. It looked hard and cold, but she sat down on it and stared at me, her expression halfdisbelief mixed with surprise. By this time I was beginning to discover myself. I was lying on a remarkably soft couch with some kind of blanket over me that smoothed itself out when I turned, instead of getting bunched under me. I don't know how they got it to do that. Jt moved all the way down what should have been my right leg -- including what would have been my right foot, if I'd had one. I sat up suddenly, feeling my legs, both of them. There wasn't any pain. But there were two legs and two feet! Then I did something I hadn't let myself do in years -- I burst into teajrs. S HE began speaking to me in uncertain, foreign English, and I remember wondering how there could be a language problem at the gates of Paradise. But I was more concerned with myself. I threw back the blanket and sat staring at the legs. "They're not mine," I said dazedly, and then looked at the hand with which I felt them. "That's not mine, either." "Of -- course," she said hesitantly. "How could -- they be?"T can wriggle the toes and bend the fingers, so what's the difference? You can't expect any sense in a dream." I don't recall what we talked about then. I suppose I was too excited and bewildered to take it all in. I do know she told me her name -- Clytassamine-c-and I remember thinking it was a real mouthful. But what seemed more important was to swing the legs over the side and stand, on them. For the first time since that mine got me, I stood! There's no sense going into a lot of detail. What I might say would be about as informative as a Trobrian Islander's first impression of New York. I just had to take most things on trust, the way he would. "You need -- the word is -- garments, is it not?" she asked. I certainly did. Staying in a hospital for four years, you get to think of women as nurses, so I hadn't been aware of it. She didn't seem concerned and that helped me not to be. She stood me in a little cubicle that must have taken my measurements somehow, because clothes came out of a slot in the wall. There was a whale of a lot of it, and not a seam to be seen. Pretty filmy and ridiculous, it seemed to me, but it satisfied her, so I let her help me put it on. When I was dressed, she opened the door. "You mean I have to go out in this damned nightgown?" I demanded. "We all -- dress -- this way," she said. "In other garments -- people -- notify." It stopped me for a moment. "Notice?" I asked. "Notice," she corrected herself without self-consciousness. "Come." We emerged into a great hall built of the same green composition. I figured that if Manhattan were to sink into the Hudson River, Grand Central Station under water would look about the way this place did. A number of people were around, none of them hurrying. All their clothes were of the filmy stuff, but as far as color and design went, it was apparently each to his own taste. There was a deadening of sound that I found oppressive, perhaps because you'd normally expect an echo in a huge place like this, whereas our slippers were silent on the floor and the quiet voices made only a soft hum. Clytassamine led the way to a T#S row of double seats set against the wall and pointed to an end seat. I sat down experimentally in it, and she sat confidently beside me. The seat rose about four inches from the floor and began to drift across the room. "Are you sure this is all right?" I asked, worried. "This is -- conveyance. You -- traveled? -- went? -- only by foot and by -- animal?" I looked at her in astonishment. "Are you kidding? I've been in cars, planes, tanks, ships, trains." Did she think I came from a farm? I N the middle of the great room, we turned and slid silently toward an arch at the far end, and out into the open air. We rose until we had an elevation of a yard or so above the ground, while, from the shallow platform to which the seat was attached, a curved windshield came up to cover us. We accelerated to twentyfive miles an hour. I'd say, and swept smoothly across parklike country, traveling a course between occasional trees and clumps of bushes. I suppose she was navigating the contraption in some way, but I couldn't see how. In every way except speed, it was a better way to travel than anything else I've known -- more in the magic carpet class. It was a strange journey; something over an hour. I imagine, and in all that time we never crossed nor even saw a road, though twice I noticed paths that didn't seem to be used much. "No cultivated fields or gardens?" I asked. She looked blank. I tried to explain in terms of food, but that didn't clear anything up. She seemed completely unfamiliar with the idea of vegetables or grains, which increased my feeling that I was in a spirit world where we were supposed to live on ambrosia. There were deerlike creatures that paid us no attention. I was afraid to ask if they were raised as meat animals. The only signs of humanity were occasional large buildings to be seen above the trees, but they weren't on our course. The trees were, though. Every time we came to a section of woods, I tried to pull back on a nonexistent stick and hop over it, but apparently the contraption didn't work that way, for we always went around and not over obstacles. "Are you just showing me the sights, or are we heading anywhere in particular?" I wanted to know. Both concepts gave her trouble. "All -- things are sights." she said, after I'd done my best to explain. "If nowhere to go, stay -- home. With you it is -- otherwise?" She should have seen weekend traffic. I didn't describe it because by that time I began to catch glimpses of a building on a hill ahead of us. I'm no architect and I can't say this part showed this kind of influence and that part something else. It wouldn't have made much difference if I could have, though, because every building I had ever seen had been based on some geometrical pattern. This looked more as if it had grown. Bushes came close up against it, and a lot were even sprouting on top. The only reason I was sure it was a building was that it couldn't be anything natural. As we got nearer, I became still more bewildered. I could see now that what I had thought to be small bushes were full-grown trees -- even those on top of it. The place was unbelievably immense. Then, in the midst of my amazement, I remembered myself, and smiled. The dope dream was running true to form: It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice. But when we arrived, it wasn't at all like that. It rose before us like: a cleverly designed artificial mountain. We swept into it through an entrance sixty yards wide' and several hundred feet high, to emerge into a central hall of staggering size. There was no suggestion whatever of "pleasure dome," though something of the "caves of ice" feeling came from the translucency of the pearly walls. drift like a feather in an air current, we floated across the place. There were a few men and women walking in a leisurely fashion, and a few chairs gliding as our own did. "A kind of railroad terminal?" I asked. She didn't get it, nor did airfield, bus station or waiting room mean anything to her. I gave up and watched us go through the enormous hall and through a dozen or more passages and lesser halls, wondering how she could find her way. But I wasn't too surprised -- it always puzzles me how people can get around in cities I don't know, especially where the streets have names instead of numbers. We came to a relatively small hall, where a dozen or so men and women were gathered, apparently waiting for us. There the chair stopped. It lowered the few inches to the floor and we got out, whereupon, in a way that could happen only in a dream, it lifted just clear and drifted away to the , . ir wall, as if parking itself. Clytassamine spoke to the group of people and indicated me. They nodded gravely in my direction. It seemed the polite thing to do, so I nodded back. Then, with her as interpreter, a kind of catechism began. I think it was during that questioning that I really began to feel there was something seriously wrong with my dream. They wanted to know my name, where I came from, what I did, what had happened to my legs and why, what war and hospital meant, and a great deal more, and the answers I gave made them frown baffledly and pause now and then to confer. It was all very logical and detailed, which was wrong. Dreams -- my dreams, at any rate -- have a more cinematic quality. They do not proceed in smooth sequence, but jump suddenly from one scene to another, as though directed by an erratic and impatient psychotic. But this was not at all like that. I was acutely aware of what was going on, both physically and mentally. At last Clytassamine said, "They wish you -- learn -- language. More easy to -- speak." "That's going to take a long while," I said, because not a single word that any of them had spoken bad been familiar to me. "No. Few tblana." "How much?" "Quarter day," she explained. "A lousy linguist like me? I wasn't even able to learn pigLatin!" She didn't answer or argue. She gave me some food -- a box of things that looked like candy and tasted good. They weren't sweet or very big, but only a few took care of my hunger. "Now -- sleep," said Clytassamine, pointing to a cold, unfriendly-looking block of the green stuff. I got on it and found that it was neither chilly nor hard. I lay there worriedly, wondering if this was the end of the dream and I would wake up to find myself back in my own bed, with the old pain where my legs ought to be. But I didn't wonder long. There must have been some drug in the food. there. Hanging over me was a kind of canopy of rose-colored metal which had not been there before. It was -- I'm going to give up trying to describe things; there was too much basic unfamiliarity. What would an ancient Egyptian know of a telephone by looking at it? What would a Roman or a Greek make of a jet plane or a radio. And as for TV -- ! Coming right down to the simple things, if you saw a slab of #t I chocolate for the first time, you might think it was for mending shoes, lighting the fire, or building houses. About the last use you'd guess for it would be eating -- and, when you did find out, you'd most likely try eating soap because the texture was similar and the color more attractive. That's the way it was with me. You grownup with your conditioning complete. You look at a machine and you don't have to say to yourself, "Ah, that works by steam, or gasoline, or electricity," because you know, and you generally have a good idea of what the machine does without having to think about it. But nearly all of what I was seeing now was foreign to me. I had no place to start. Not understanding what might cut or burn me if I touched it, I was scared of everything -- just like a child or an aborigine. Naturally, I floundered around with wild guesses, but mostly they had to remain just that. I guessed now thattKe canopy was part of a hypnotic teaching machine, something like those the Navy tried to use to teach Morse Code. I guessed that, however, because I found I could now understand what the people were saying -- some of it, at least -- but the concepts behind the language were totally alien. I kney only what I could translate directly. The word "thlana" that Clytassamine had used, for example, I now knew was a measure of time -- one hour and twelve minutes, making twenty thlana to the day -- so I'd been out about five thlana, almost six hours. "Dool" was electricity, but "laythal" meant nothing to me. I knew it was some form of power and that was all, not where it came from or what it did, though Clytassamine did hef best to explain: "The mizmo is changed into frengra, and that produces laythal. But it has to be senaced, of course, before it can be baxtoa. It wasn't her fault. You try, explaining how coal and water are converted into electricity without using terms that are unthal, as I understood it, was even more complicated. But these difficulties had the effect of enhancing the dreamlike quality. The utter blankness of certain words or ideas which kept cropping up, like the dead keys of an old piano, began to get me down. man said, when my distress must have begun to show pretty plainly. "Take him away and look after him." The relief was almost physical as I sat down beside her again on one of the flyingseats-. I sighed and relaxed finally as it floated vs back once more into the open ir. E ven before I understood anything about this unfamiliar world, I was somewhat awed by Clytassamine's power of mental adjustment. It seemed to me that it must be a frightening experience, discovering that a person you have known for a long while has without warning become a perfect stranger -- with, maybe, unpredictable reactions. Yet she showed no alarm, and only occasionally made the slip of calling me Hymorell. I realized why somebody recovering consciousness usually demands first of all, "Where am #?" I wanted to know that very much; without that information, I didn't seem to be able to get my thinking started proirerly. There was no fixed point to begin from. When we were back in the green room again, I began to ask questions. She looked at me doubtfully. "You should rest. Simply relax and don't worry. We will look after you. If I were to try to explain, I would bewilder you more." "You couldn't,. I told her. Nothing could. I've got to the stage where I can't pretend this is a dream any longer. I've got to get some kind of orientation r go crazy." She looked at me closely again, and then nodded. "Very well. But where am I to begin? What is most urgent?" "I want to know where I am, who I am, and how it happened." "As to who you are, you know that. You told me you are Terry Molton." "But this -- " I slapped my left thigh -- "this isn't Terry Molton." "Temporarily it is," she said. "It was Hymorell's body, but now all the qualities that make it individual -- mentality, personality, character -- . are yours. Therefore, it is Terry Molton's body." "And what happened to Hyr morel #?" "He has transferred to what was your body." "Then he's made a damn bad deal," I told her. I thought for a moment. "That doesn't make sense. I'm not the same as I was before I was shot up. Physical differences make mental differences. Injuries and dope changed mine to some extent -- if they'd done it more. I'd have a completely different personality." "Who told you that?" 'Common sense." "And your scientists postulate no constant? Surely there must" be some constant factor not affected by changes. And if there is that factor, may it not be a cause rather than an effect?" "As I understand it, it's simply a matter of balance -- physical and psychological forces held in equilibrium." "Then you don't understand it," she told me. I decided to drop that angle for the moment. "What is this place?" I asked. "The building is called Cathalu." "No, I mean where is it? Is it on Earth? It looks like Earth, but nowhere that I ever heard of." "Of course it's Earth. Where else would it be? But it's in a different salany." those blank words once more. Salany meant absolutely nothing to me. "Do you mean it's in a different -- ?" I began, and then stopped, baffled. There didn't seem to be a word in her language for "time," at least in the sense I meant. "I told you it would be bewildering," she said. "You think differently. In terms of old thinking -- as near as I can understand it -- you come from one end of the human race. Now you are at the other." "But I don't," I protested. years of human evolution before me. "Oh, that!" she said, airily disyears with a wave of her hand. "Well, at least," I went on desperately, "you can tell me how I got here." "Roughly, yes. It is an experiment of Hymorell's. He has been trying for a long time -- " in this straightforward sense, I noticed, there did seem to be a word for time -- "but now he has made a new approach. A successful one at last. Several times before, he has almost done it, but the transfer did not hold. His most successful attempts were about three generations ago. He -- " "I beg your pardon?" I said. She looked up questioningly. "Yes?" "I thought you said he tried three generations ago." "I did." I got up from the block I'd been sitting on and looked out of the arched windows. It was a peaceful, sunny, normal-looking day out there. "Maybe you were right -- I'd better rest," I said. "That's sensible," she agreed. "Don't bother your head about the hows and whys. After all, you won't be here long." "You mean, I'll be going back -- to be as I was?' She nodded. I could feel my body under the unfamiliar robe. It was a good body, strong, well-kept, lithe, whole, and there was no pain in it. "No," I said. "I don't know where I am, or what I am now, but one thing I do know -- I'm not going back to that hell." She looked at me and shook her head pityingly. f I 'HE next day, after we had fed on more of the candies that were not candies, and drunk an elusive-flavored milky stuff, she led the way into the hall and toward thechairs. I stopped. "Can't we walk? It's a long time since I was able to." "Why, yes, of course," she said, and we turned toward the doorway. Several people spoke to her, and one or two of them to me. There was curiosity in their eyes, but their manners were kindly, as though to set a stranger at ease. It was evident that they knew I was not Hymorell, yet they were too polite to mention it. Outside, we walked across rough grass and found a path leading through a thicket. It was quiet, peaceful, Arcadianly beautiful. To me, feeling the ground beneath my feet as something precious, everything had the freshness of Spring. The blood livened in my veins in a way that I had forgotten. "Wherever it is, it's lovely," I said, glancing around. We walked on in silence for a while, until my curiosity came back. "What did you mean by "the other end of the human race?' " I asked her. "Just that. We think we are coming to the end, finishing. We are practically sure of it, though there is always chance." "I have never seen anyone more healthy or more beautiful," I said, looking straight at her. She smiled. "It is a nice body. My best, I think." For the moment, I ignored that baffling addition. "Then what is happening? Is it infertility?" "No. There are not a great many children, but that is more a result than a cause. It is that something in us is failing to reproduce -- the thing that makes us human instead of merely animal. We call it malukos." The word translated as something like a spirit or a soul, yet not quite either. "Then the children -- ?" "Nearly all of them lack that. They are -- feebleminded. If things go on this way, they will all be like that one day, and then it will be over." I pondered that, feeling that I was back in the dream again. "I don't know," she went on. "One doesn't think of the salany arithmetically, though there is the perimetrical approach." I couldn't make sense of that. "Aren't there any records?" "Oh, yes. That is how Hymorell and I learned your language. But there are very big gaps. Five times, at least, the race all but destroyed itself. There are thousands of years missing from the records at different periods." "And how long is it going to be before it is all finished?" I asked. "We don't know that, either. Our task is to prolong it because there is always chance. It may happen that the intelligence factors will become strong again." "How do you mean, 'prolong it?' Prolong your own lives?" "We transfer. When a body begins to fail, or when it is about fifty years old and getting past its best, we choose one of the feebleminded and transfer to that. This," she added, holding up her perfect hand and studying it. "is my fourteenth body. It's a very nice one." I agreed. "But do you mean you can go on and on transferring?" "As long as there are bodies to transfer to." "But -- but that's immortality." "No," she said, scornfully, "nothing like it. It is just prolongation. Someday, sooner or later, there'll . be an accident. That's mathematically inevitable. It might have been a hundred years ago, or it might be tomorrow -- " "Or a thousand years hence?" I suggested. "Exactly, but one day it will come." I did not for a moment doubt that she was telling me the truth, for by this time I was prepared for any fantastic situation. All the same, I revolted against it. I had an instinctive sense of disapproval -- prejudice, of course, the same prejudice which made me disapprove of thesoft, flowing garments and the soft, easy manner of life. I couldn't help feeling that the process she spoke of was allied to cannibalism in some symbolic fashion. S HE must have read my expression, for she said, explaining, not excusing: "This body wasn't any good to the girl who had it. T don't suppose she was really even conscious of it. It was being wasted. I shall look after it. I shall have children. Some of them may be normal human children. When they grow old, they will be able to transfer. The urge to survival still exists, you see. Something may happen; someone may make a discovery to save us even now." ' "And the girl who had this body? What happened to her?" "Well, she had very little beyond a few instincts. What there was changed places with me." "Into a body aged fifty? Losing thirty years of life?" "Can you call it loss when she was incapable of using it?" I did not reply to that, for a thought had struck me. "So that's what Hymorell was working on! He was trying to transfer normal personalities from the past into feebleminded bodies! That's it, isn't it?" She looked at me steadily. "He's been successful at last. It is a real transference this time." I was strangely unsurprised. I suppose I had been working up to the realization before it actually came. But there was a lot I wanted to know about the why and how as I was affected. I asked her for more details. "Hymorell wanted to get as far as possible," she told me. "The limit was the point where he could be sure of assembling the parts to make an instrument that would get him back here. If he went too far in history, certain essential metals would not be known, instruments would be inaccurate, electric power' unavailable. In that case, it might take him years to build the instrument, if he could do it at all. The use of nuclear fission was the line he decided to draw. Further away than that, he thought, might be dangerous. ' "Then he had to find a contact. It had to be a subject where the integration was not good -- where there was a lesion weakening the attachment of the personality to the physical shape. When we perform the operation, we can prepare the subject, which is easy. But he had to find one already in a suitable state. Unfortunately, those he could find were nearly all on the point of death, but he found you at last and then he had to study the strength of your tie to life. He was puzzled because it fluctuated a great deal." "That would be the dope," I suggested: "Possibly. Anyway, he worked out a rhythmic incidence of lesion, and then tried. This is the result." "I see," I said. "How long did he figure it would take him to build the instrument for his return?" "He couldn't tell that. It depends on his facilities for assembling materials." "Then it's going to take him quite a while. I'd say. A legless cripple wasn't a convenient subject to choose, from that point of view." "But he'll do it." "Not if I can help it," I told her. She shook her head. "Once you have transferred, you never can have the perfect integration you had with your own body. If at no other time, he will put on more power and get at you when you're sleeping." "We'll see about that," I said. Afterward, I saw the instrument that Jlymorell had used for the transfer. It was not large. In appearance, it was little more than a liquid-filled lens mounted upon a box the size of a portable typewriter, from which protruded two polished metal handles. But within the box there was enough intricacy of wiring, tubes, and strange gadgets to fill me with great satisfaction. No one, I said to myself, was going to knock a thing like that together in a few days, or even a few weeks. days drifted the life by with them. That placidity which was their chief character- istic was, at first, restful. After that came periods when I wanted to go wild and break up something just for the diversion. Clytassamine took me here and there in the great green building. There were concerts at which I understood not a thing. I sat there, bored and musing to myself while around me the audience went into an intellectual trance, finding something in the strange scales and queerer harmonies that was utterly beyond my perception. And there was one hall where colors played on a large fluorescent screen. They seemed to be projected from the spectators themselves in some incomprehensible way. Everybody but me enjoyed it. You could feel that. And now and then, for no reason that I could perceive, they would all sigh or laugh together. Nevertheless, I thought some of the effects very pretty, and said so. By the way it was received, t it was the wrong thing to say. Only in the performances of three-dimensionally projected plays was I occasionally able to follow the action for a while -- and when I thought I could, it usually shook me badly. Clytassamine became impatient with my comments. "How can you expect to feel when you measure civilized behavior by primitive taboos?" she asked. She took me to a museum. It was not like any I had thought of, being mostly a collection of instruments projecting sound or images, or both, according to selection. I saw some horrible things. We went back, back, and still further back in time. I wanted to see or hear something of my own time. "There's only sound," she said. "All right," I told her. "Let's have music." She worked at the keyboard of the machine. Into that great hall, a familiar sound stole softly and mournfully. As I listened to it, I had a sense of emptiness and vast desolation. Memories flooded back as if the old world -- not, oddly enough, the oe I had left, but that in which I was a child --  were suddenly around me. A wave of sentimentality, of overwhelming self-pity and nostalgia for all the hopes and joys and childhood that had vanished utterly engulfed me, and the tears streamed down my face. I did not go to that museum again. And the music which conjured a whole world up from the aged dust? No, it was not a Beethoven symphony, nor a Mozart concerto. It was The Old Folks At Home, "## you never work? Does nobody work?" I asked Clytassamine. "Oh, yes, if we want to. "But what aLout the unpleasant things -- the things that must be done?" "What things?" she asked, puzzled. "Well, growing food, providing power, making clothes, building, transportation... She looked surprised. "Why, naturally, the machines do all that. You wouldn't expect men to do those things." "But who looks after the machines and keeps them in order?" "Themselves, of course. A mechanism that couldn't maintain itself wouldn't be a machine. It would be just a form of tool." "Oh," I said. And I supposed it would, though the thought was new to me. "Do you mean to say," I went on, "that for your fourteen generations -- some four hundred years or so -- you've done nothing but this?" "Well, I've had quite a lot of babies. Three of them were quite normal. And I've worked on eugenic research from time to time. Almost everybody does when he thinks he's got a lead." "But how can you stand it, just going on and on?" "It is not easy sometimes and some of us do give up, but that is a crime, because there isalways chance. And it's not quite so monotonous as you think. Each transfer makes a difference. You feel as if the world had become a different place then. Even in one body, tastes can change quite a lot in one lifetime, and they inevitably differ between bodies. But you are the same person, yet you are young again. You're hopeful, the world looks brighter, you think you'll be wiser this time. And then you fall in love again, just as sweetly and foolishly as before. It's wonderful, like a rebirth. You can know just how wonderful only if you have been fifty and then become twenty." "I can guess," I said. "I was worse than just being fifty before this happened. But love? For four years, I haven't dared to think of love...' "You dare now," she said. "Can't you?" I could. I did. T here was so much I wanted to know. "What happened to my world?" I asked her later. "It seemed pretty well headed for disaster, as I saw it. I suppose it nearly wiied itself out in some All the Science Fiction. Fantasy and SuperfiaHiral Books to Print in America or Encland!! I can supply anything you see mentioned. listed or offered anywhere!' Visit my store and inspect the Largest Variety of Brand New Books of this kind in the world or aend lOe for my Big Printed Checklist of #I Titles including # Paperboimd Books at #e each up. D Columbus Cirdo. New York ft. M. Y lay vast and destructive global war?" "It just died, the same as all the early civilizations. Nothing spectacular." I thought of my world, its intricacies and complexities, the mastery of distance and speed, the progress of science. "Just died?" I repeated. "It can't have. There must have been something that broke it up." "Oh, no. The passion for order is a manifestation of the deep desire for security. The desire is natural, but the attainment is fatal. There was the means to produce a static world, which was achieved. When the need for adaptation arose, it found itself unable to adapt. It inertly died of discouragement. That happened to many primitive peoples before." She had no reason to lie, but it was hard to believe. "We hoped for so much," I protested. "Everything was opening before us. We were learning. We were going to reach out to other planets and beyond." "Ingenious you certainly were, but each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. And you were a greedy, childishly aggressive people. You developed science without developing philosophy. Philosophy without science is fruitless speculation, likely to degenerate into superstition and ignorant quibbling. But science without philosophy is equally fruitless research that leads to pedantry, stasis, dogma." "That's rather hard on us. We had very complex problems." "Mostly concerned with preservation of forms and habits. It never seems to have occurred to you that in Nature life is growth, and preservation is an accident. What is preserved in the rocks or in ice is only the image of life, but you were always regarding local taboos as eternal verities." My mind switched suddenly to my present situation. "But suppose I were to go back and tell them what is going to happen. It would alter things. Doesn't that show I'm not going back?" She smiled. "You think they would listen to you while they neglect philosophy, Terry?" "Anyway," I said, "I don't intend to go back. I don't like your world. I think it is decadent, and in many ways immoral, but at least I am a whole human being here." She shook her head. "So young, Terry. So sure of right and wrong. It's rather sweet." "It's not sweet at all," I said, brusquely. "There have to be standards. Without standards, where are you?" "Well, where? Where's a tree, or a flower, or a butterfly?" "We're more than plants." #  "What do you do about opposing standards? Go gloriously to war?"... I dropped that. "Did we get to other planets?" I asked. but the next civilization did. They found Mars too old, Venus too young. You had a dream of men spreading out over the Universe; I'm afraid that never happened, though it was tried again later. They bred men specially for it as they bred them for all kinds of things. In fact, they produced some very strange men and women, highly specialized, who were even more zealous for order than your people -- they would not admit chance, which is a great stupidity. When their end came, it was disastrous. None of the specialized types could survive. The population dwindled down to a few hundred thousand" who had enough adaptability to start over again." "So you have come to distrust order and standards?" "We have ceased to think of society as a structural engineering problem, or of individuals as components for assembly into some arbitrary pattern." "And you just sit and wait supinely for the end?" "Oh, no! We preserve ourselves as material for chance to work on. Life was an accident in the beginning; .survival has often been an accident. Maybe there'll be no more accidents. On the other hand, there may." "That sounds very near defeatism." "In the end, defeat and the cold must come. First to the Solar System, then the Galaxy, then the Universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity." She paused. "Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely, not because one wishes them to live for ever." T did not like that world. It was as foreign as another planet might have been. The strain to understand was constant and wearisome; it was also unprofitable. Whatever comfort and ease I had there were centered in Clytassamine. For her I pulled down the barriers I had so bitterly erected around myself in the last few years, and I fell the more deeply in love on account of them. Thus there was a second reason not to let things happen as Hymorell had planned. Even Clytassamine could not make the place heaven, but I had got out of hell and I intended to stay out. I spent unnumbered hours poring over the transference machine, learning all I could of it. My progress was slow, but some idea of the way it operated did begin at last to come to me. The women soldiers were fierce and confident -- until a man came over the mountains! The in the By W HO knows whether the strange events of this story might not one day occur? They were tall and strong and beautiful -- and when a handsome, bronzed stranger appeared they were not afraid. But they were women -- he was a man. Something had to happen -- and plenty did !  An explosive story of a weird expedition through the post-atomic remnants of America -- and of a strange love triangle between the gorgeous Captain Zee, a lovely lieutenant -- and the tall, silent man they called Wolf. # JO at all bookstores or But I could not settle. The feeling of transience would not leave me, and the days began to pass in long, nagging uncertainty. There was no way of telling whether Hymorell would be successful in getting all the equipment he needed. I had a haunting, mind's-eye picture of him in my wheelchair, working away on the contrivance which would condemn me to suffering in that broken body again. As the weeks went by, the strain began to affect me, and I grew tense. I was afraid to go to sleep lest the next time I woke I should find myself back in that chair. Clytassamine, too, began to look worried. Her genuine sympathy over my distress at the idei of going back was confused by her feeling for Hymorell, who must now be suffering what I had. There was also the fact that my mental strain wasn't doing my temporary body any good, either. And then, when six uneventful months had begun to give me hope, it happened without sign or warning. I went to sleep in the room of the great green building: I woke back home -- with a raging pain in my missing leg. All was just as it had been. So much so that I reached right away for the dope bottle. When I grew calmer, I found something which had not been there before. It was on the table beside me, looking like a radio set partially assembled. I certainly had not built it. Except for that, the whole thing might have been a dream. I leaned back in my chair, considering that mass of wiring very carefully. Then I started to examine it closely, touching nothing. It was, of course, crude in construction, compared with the transference machine I had studied in the place that Clytassamine had called Cathalu, but I began to see similarities and notice adaptations. I was still looking at it when I fell asleep. By the number of hours I slept, I knew Hymorell must have been driving my body without letup. think frantically. My spell of soundness and health had left me with one firm decision -- I would not remain an amputee. There were two ways out. The first, the dope bottle, had always been there for the taking and still was. But now there was the transference instrument. I did not understand a lot about it. I doubted whether I could successfully retune it if I tried, and I did not wish to try. For one thing, little though I liked that other world, Clytassamine would be there to help me. The very besf sciencefiction tales -- chosen by their authors August Derieth Seventeen spine'tingling stories by Fletcher Pratt Nelson Bond, Poul Anderson, and many others -- each tale chosen by its author as being the very best, the most terrifying work he has written. And in each case the author tells why a favorite tale of his is worthy of being included in this great anthology. Never before anthologized, many not available elsewhere, these stories have that special ability to enthrall and give you many hours of out-of-this world reading. # pages. No collection is complete without these onof the science-fiction tale: # poges, # # pages, # #I E. #th St., New York # Please send me the books whose numbers I have circled below for # days' free examination : I # # # # At the end of # days I agree to send check or money order to cover the price of the books plus postage, or return them postpaid. (We pay postage on orders accompanied by remittapce Same return privilege.) Name Address City Zone... State For another, what I had learned made me think that I might easily land somewhere even less desirable. So I left it on Hymorell's setting. The chief difficulty I foresaw was that the machine must remain. He had had to leave it, but had never guessed, I suppose, that I'd be able to use it. And if I were to use it. I'd have to leave it there for him to use again. My object must be to stop him doing that. It would be risky to set the machine to destroy itself after I changed places with him. The process is to some extent hypnotic and by no means instantaneous. Something very queer indeed would be likely to happen if it were destroyed while the transmission was in progress. Besides, he would be able to build another. As long as he existed, he would be able to. That made the answer fairly obvious. When I had made my plan, I tried the instrument several times, but he was awake and wary. I saw that I would have to catch him asleep, as he had caught me, so I went on trying at intervals of four hours. I don't know whether he outguessed me or whether he was just lucky. I had got hold of the poison a year before to keep by me in case things became unbearable. My first idea was to swallow it in a capsule which would take some little time to dissolve. But then I realized what would happen if something went wrong and I could not make the transfer in time. That scared away from the scheme. Instead, I poured the poison into the dope bottle. The crystals were white, just like the dope itself, only a little larger. Once I got a response from the instrument, it was easier than I had expected. I took hold of the two handles and concentrated all my attention on the lens. I felt giddy. The room swayed and blurred. When it cleared, I was back in that green room, with Clytassamine beside me. I reached my hand toward her, and then stopped, for I could hear her quietly crying. I had never known her to do that before. "What's the matter?" I asked. For a moment she went absolutely quiet. Then she said, incredulously: "It's -- it's Terry?" "Well, sure. I told you I wasn't going to be kept back there." She started to cry again, but differently. I put my arm around her. After a while, I asked: ','What is it? What's all this about?" She sniffed. "It's HymorelL Your world has done somethiirg dreadful to him. When he came back, he was harsh and bitter. He kept talking of pain and suffering. I was afraid of him; he was -- cruel." It did .not greatly surprise me, for they knew nothing of illness  and physical discomfort. If a body became in the least defective, th transferred. They had never had to learn to bear suffering. "Why didn't it do that to you, too?" she asked. "I think it did at first," I admitted. "But you find out after a while that that just makes things tougher." "I was afraid of him; he was cruel," she repeated.  kept myself awake for fortyeight hours, to make sure. I knew that one of the first things he would need when he woke was the dope, but I had to give him time to take it. Then I let myself sleep. When I opened my eyes, I was back in the hospital. It was no slow awakening. I knew in a flash that he had somehow suspected the bottle of poison and avoided it. The instrument was beside me and I saw a thill curl of smoke rising from it, as though a cigarette had been left burning. I began to reach toward it, but then caution checked me. I caught the leads and pulled them out. In among the wiring, I found a small can with a glowing fuse attached. I flung the can hastily through the window. He too, Jiowever, had had to allow a safety margin : it was half an hour before the explosive went off. I looked at the dope, I needed it badly, but I didn't dare to touch it. I trundled my chair over to the cupboard where the spare supply was kept. When I took out the bottle, though, I hesitated. It looked like the real stuff and intact -- but then, of course, it was essential that it should. Deliberately, I threw it into the fireplace, smashing the bottle, and wheeled my chair to the telephone. The doctor was pretty nasty to me, but he came, bringing the stuff with him, thank God. Various plans occurred to me. A poisoned needle, for instance, . set strategically in the arm of the chair. But the disabled have so little privacy. It is difficult enough to get the deadlier poisons, anyway; when it can be done only by finding a third party ready to break the law, it becomes virtually impossible. And if someone did do it for me, he would later appear as an accessory to suicide. The same objection applied to laying my hands on a few sticks of dynamite. But I could buy a time-switch without any trouble -- and I did. #S# It was, I thought, a neat arrangement. My old Army pistol wafe trained on the exact position my head would occupy whenI was at the instrument. Only if you were searching for it would you notice the muzzle looking out from the bookshelves. It was fixed to fire when the two handles of the instrument were grasped -- but not until the time-switch was on. Thus I could set the switch and operate the instrument. Two hours later, for safe margin, the switch would go over and the thing became lethal. If I tried and failed to make contact. I had only to set the switch again. I waited three days, knowing that Hymorell would be as wary of sleep as I had been, and uncertain whether his little grenade had been successful. Then I tried successfully. But threedays later, I was back again in my chair. cautious; he must hive spotted the extra lead to the switch right away. It had been snipped off. But I found his little surprise package too -- I would have melted the instrument, and most likely myself along with it, if I had touched it before disconnecting. (The switch was thermostatic this time, set to cut in as the room cooled down -- very neat.) The pistol and the time-switch had vanished, and I set about looking for them everywhere within range of my chair. I didn't find the pistol, but the switch was in the cupboard under the stairs. It was arranged to set off a percussion cap which would ignite a gray powder obviously taken from the pistol cartridges. There were paper and oily rags close by. Once I had made sure there were no other boobytraps around. I settled down to work out another little reception device of my own. I had been caught by a type of mine the Germans used which didn't go up until the seventh truck had passed over it. The idea had its points. I spent a couple of days fixing that. The transference machine, meanwhile, created other problems. I changed places with Hymorell, then returned involuntarily, and got back there again. I was getting sick of the game, but it seemed to be a duel which could only end with one of us outsmarting the other. It was a stupid battle with too many risks for both of us. And neither of us dared to sleep. "Look here," I said to Clytassamine. "Suppose I were to transfer to one of the feebleminded the way you people do. Then when Hymorell operates again, it will be the halfwit who will take my place in the chair. We'll both be here and the whole thing will be solved." She shook her head. "You need some sleep, Terry. You're getting fuddled. It's j'our mind he's working the exchange with. It wouldn't make any difference what kind of body you were using." She was right, of course -- I was fuddled. On the third day. I just had to sleep. It lasted about fourteen of their hours and I woke up in the green hall. I couldn't believe he'd let that length of time pass without making an attempt, if he were in any condition to do so. My little gadget must have gotten rid of him this time. I began to feeleasier. A S the da#?s went on, I grew sure of my success. My dread of sleep diminished. At last I began to feel like a citizen of this other world and to look for my place in it. With unlimited time ahead of me, I didn't intend to spend it hanging around the way the rest of them did. "Maybe there is only chance now," I said to Clytassamine, "but didn't you ever hear of making chances?" She smiled, it seemed to me, a little wearily. "Yes," she admitted, "I know. I felt like that for my first two generations. You are so young, Terry." She sat looking at me wistfully and a little sadly. Why the change should suddenly have come over me then, I can't say. Maybe it wasn't that sudden, but had been working up a while; as I looked back at her, I found myself seeing her quite differently. A cold feeling came over me. I saw beyond her perfect form and young loveliness. Inside, she was old -- old and wearied -- old far beyond my reach. She thought of me as a child, and had been treating me as one. The vigor of my true youth had amused her. Perhaps it revived her own for a while. Now she was tired of it and of me. The freshness I had seen was nothing but a sham. I must have stared at her quite a while. "You don't want me any more. You want Hymorell." "Yes, Terry," she admitted quietly. For the next day or two I pondered over what to do. I had never liked that world. It was effete and decaying. What pleasantness there had been had vanished. I felt imprisoned, stifled, appalled at the prospect of spending several lifetimes in it. Now that a return to my former torment seemed improbable, the prospect here looked, in another way, little better. I began to wonder whether mortality, wasn't one of life's more desirable qualities. It's frightening in most # #SS ways, but more frightening was the prospect of an almost eternal existence. You can't believe that until you're faced with it. But my worry was unnecessary; I'm in no danger of immortality or anything like it. I went to sleep despondently in the great green building, and when I awoke I was in this mental institution instead of either the future or the hospital. And I wasn't in either Hymorell's body or my own -- I was in somebody else'sf T here was a male attendant nearby, cleaning up around the bed. I knew better than to ask where and who I was; I had to get oriented first, on my own, without arousing comment or getting into whatever kind of trouble Hymorell might have cooked up for me. So I just lay there, watching the attendant. But he turned around and saw my eyes on him. He gave a start, began approaching the bed, then abruptly ducked out. He came back a little later with a doctor, who lifted my lids and stared at the pupils, tried my reflexer and finally stood erect, his arms folded grimly yhile he stared at me. "What's your name?" he asked. I didn't answer. "Do you know where you are?" "In a hospital," I said. "Remember how you got here?" As a matter of fact, I wasn't sure at all. Until I was, I had no intention of talking. That didn't stop them from putting me through a whole series of tests. By the time they finished, I realized why my silence hadn't accomplished anything. Hymorell had transferred me to the body of a feebleminded man named Stephen Dallboy. When the male attendant had turned and seen the light of intelligence in Dallboy's eyes, it hadn't mattered whether I spoke or not, and the tests had amazed the doctors because, not knowing the situation, I had given normal responses. All except my name. I don't altogether understand how Hymorell worked the stunt. He must have been as tired as I was of the dangerous game we'd been playing. The way I see it, he probably built another transference machine and used it to lo'cate some accessible body in the present. That would be easy -- just think of the number of patients in mental institutions he had to choose from ! He happened to pick this Stephen Dallboy, a congenital imbecile, transferred me into that body, and presumably transferred himself back into his own in the future. Then what had happened to my body? Stephen Dallboy must be in it, naturally. Being feebleminded, he wouldn't even try to work the apparatus, and I was Feta Vripoa UcTfp# Ah Largest work of its kind ever published in the United States. Over # pictures Arranged by subjects. A companion piece te the Un abridged Dictionary. Excellent for identifying unusual objects. Order now before the first edi lion is sold out. Complete for S#. diree easy payments. Send only Sll.# with coupon below and S# per month lor two months thereafter. To insure (uick, safe transit, all encyclopo dias are sent immediately by Special Delivery. Return books for refund within ) days if not satisfied. Moil Cevpao below fo: Kosoorch book Co. # Church St., Now York #, N. Y. --  --  --  cur arr ak# Matt --  --  --  --  --  --  --  -- JO Church St., New York #, N. Y. Please send me immediately by Special Delivery, with this coun and promise to send # per month lor two additional months. C# Check here to save # cents shipping and post' age charges by enclosing full # with coupon. confined to the asylum, unable to get to the machine. It was a shrewd solution, taking me completely away from the transfer instrument but it got me sore? He could have transferred me into a body that wasn't under confinement, couldn't he? More important, though, Dallboy was a charity case, whereas I'd inherited money -- not much, but enough to make a difference -- and I would need it if I could ever get out of the institution. I wrote a letter, signing it Stephen Dallboy, and asked about Terry Molton, whom I claimed as an acquaintance. The male attendant mailed it for me; I'd counted on him as a possible ally and won his friendship by playing chess with him. The answer came back from the hospital, stating that Terry Molton was dead. He had apparently electrocuted himself with some experimental radio apparatus. The resulting fuse had started a fire in the room, which had been discovered and put out before it could spread, but not in time to save Molton. Well, what did that signify? The fire had been detected about three hours after I had awakened to find myself in this asylum. Did that mean Hymorell deliberately set the boobytrap to destroy the equipment and Dallboy along with it, so I or anybody else wouldn't be able to pull him back into the present... or was it Hymorell who died in my body while Dallboy, still imbecilic, was in Hymorell's in the future? I decided it didn't make a damned bit of difference. Getting even with somebody who won't be born for maybe thousands of years makes no sense, especially fof some poor guy to whom being alive or dead was the same thing. And my immediate situation is one hell of a lot more urgent. If I pretend to be Stephen Dallboy, I am an imbecile committed to an asylum... and I can't get back my own money. If I claim to be Terry Molton, I can be proved insane... and I still can't collect my money. I don't know what to do, except convince the doctors here that I'm normal enough to be released. That wouldn't be so bad, come to thing of it, money or no money. I at least have all the parts of a passable body now. And I ought to be able to use this body profitably in the kind of world I understand. So I've gained a lot more than I lost. Nevertheless, I am Terry Molton. lize, is a well integrated hallucination; but if there is nothingmore serious we shall undoubtedly have to release the patient in due course, as we see fit. However, we do feel that we ehould acquaint you with one or two discrepant points. One is that, although the two men appear never to have met, Stephen Dallboy is informed in remarkably intimate detail of Terence Motion's affairs. Another is that, when confronted for test purposes with two friends of Motion's, he immediately addressed them by name and seemed to know alt about them -- to their reat astonishment, for they have never to their knowledge met him before.  Also, they state he does not in the least resemble Terence Motion. Nevertheless, you wilt find herewith full legal proof that the patient is indeed Stephen Dallboy. Should there be any further developments, we will keep you advised. Yours truly, Jesse K. Johnson (Me'dical Director') #  Comes witlv Handsome Matching Expansion Band This Watch on This Swiss-Freiisiott Watch is Also a  speeds of  MBea Measures distance be and It's Also Mui #ife ' A#  #-Push "  nd 'Slef '  d  ybf#keW CryMet.  Triple   Chroft#'P' c.i.r.a"a A.ie. Hands and  Shack Maen(ll  Hand". Matchlne  poMiae Wirthnd.   Lat'"# t.Yaar D sura to order ihii emezing Chrertogroph Stopwatch -- Window isn't everything we toy it is, return it for immediate refund of youf purchose price. Don't take a ehonee on being disappeinted... x A sensational bargain! Don't miss it -- or you moy be loo leic! You hovo always wonted e watch with these eepensive features. Now you accurate, precision-made Window Calender Chronograph is ideol for the members of our Armed Services, for sportsmen, doctors, photographers, engineers, techniciorM, eiccvI supply it exhoustedl Send Chreiwgrepli Wetskes) el M-P# pivi #c Fed. Tee eech. Will pey pestroen bergeia price, plus petloge. tt wet cempUlely talitfisd may retura Wetch w'rihia # days far ieiaedioSa refund af purckete prisa. Shasta Publishers believe "The best is yet to come!" and are happy to announce # Grand Prize Open to all. The best manuscript will win. No magazine taboos. We are looking for modern novels so outstanding that they will win new readers for the field of science-fiction, and delight regular readers as well. We want strong characterizations, believable human motivations -- exciting, unusual story-telling. A new direction in science-fiction. The winning manuscript will be published in book form, with an outright grant of #, plus a # advance against royalties. must be between # and # words. Sufficient return postage must accompany each entry. The decision of the judges will be final. Entries will be judged by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, co-editors of The Best ScienceFiction Stories annual anthology. Only original, unpublished science-fiction novels will be considered... But anyone, anywhere is eligible to compete. Promising entries which do not win the Grand Prize will receive consideration for future book publication in our forthcoming lists, receiving regular advances and royalties. "The best is yet to come!" Help the best to come about. Send in your novel. for # Days   Whether you want an increased income, a new home, a fair union contract, a happier marriage, or simply a good night's sleep, here is a remarkable method (The Science of Setting Your Goal -- and then Reaching It) by Claude M Bristol writer, lawyer, lecturer This unusual book shows you how to put your inner mind to work -- how to utilize the power of your subconscious mind to help you overcome obstacles and succeed in whatever you want to accomplish. Here is the secret of what women call intuition -- religious leaders call revelation -- gamblers call hunch -- top executives call personal magnetism. "The Magic of Believing" shows you:  How you can win success by working less hard than you do now,  How belief makes things happen.  How to get what you want easily through a process of making mental pictures.  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See for yourself -- without risk or obligation -- how "The Magic of Believing" reveals the practical way to get more of everything you want out of life. Mail coupon below. # Fifth Avenue. New York II, N. Y. At the end of lO days I will either return fhe book and owe nothlnK -- or keep it and .send only # plus a few pennies for poataf'e anil packliiR. and then # a month until the low price of only # is paid. Name Address City. Zone State ping cha:'g:s. Same return privilege -- your money back if not completely satisfied. Galaxy Also Sklnk Mcrop Shrike Largest work of its kind ever published in the United States. Over # pictures arranged by subjects. A companion piece to the Unabridged Dictionary. Excellent for identifying unusual objects. Order now before the first edition is sold out. Complete for S#. three easy payments. Send only SI # with coupon below and S# per month for two months thereafter. To insure quick, safe transit, all encyclopedias are sent immediately by Special Delivery. Return books for refund within # days if not satisfied. Mail Coupon below to: Research Book Co. # Church SI., New York #, N. Y. # Church St., New York #, N. Y. Please send pie immediately by Special Delivery, with this coupon and promise to send # per month for two additional months.  Check here to save # cents shipping and postage charges by enclosing full S# with coupon. Oalaxy Assistant Editor Art Director Advertising Manager by Alfred Besier #  Cover by by Frank M. Robinson # Illustrating by J. T. M'lntosh # is published monthly, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #L Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. by Wallace Macfarlane # Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Cenby Dean Evans # Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galavy Publishing Corporation. Bernard Kaufman, president. A. L. Plant, treasurer. All rights, including translation, reby H. L. Gold # m it ted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between charby Groff Conklin I I # # coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Gloom  Doom I T'S a depressing experience to sit at a desk and read story after story filled with pessimism and despair. The temptation is strong to write : "Look, fellers, the end isn't here yet. It probably won't come, any more than the frantic prophecies of history occurred, including Wells's dismal forecasts of the world wars. Why not buck up and see the positive trends as well as the harrowing ones?" The fact is that I've written that letter, or something similar, to any number of writers. Net result: Over # of stories submitted still nag away at atomic, hydrogen and bacteriological war, the post-atomic world, reversion to barbarism, mutant children killed because they have only ten toes and fingers instead of twelve, world dictatorships, problems of survival wearily turned over to women, war, more war, and still more war -- between groups, nations, worlds, solar systems. If it weren't so tiresome, it might be funny to see our transitory political rivalries carried into the remotest futures., I've been having the experience, while readstories seriously debating the troubles that we of the middle #th Century were to have had with an arrogant Kaiser, fanatical Chinese Boxers, even a Napoleon. These books are dated enough in scientific and sociological ways, but the extension of long-resolved political questions into the future makes them almost laughable. Does that minimize the threats that existed then, or our present world situation? Certainly not. Neither is it escapism to project a future in which democracy vs. communism is no longer an issue. There is no way of knowing how long it will take that difficulty to be resolved, nor even -- personal hopes aside -- how or in whose favor. But there can be no doubt that it will become a part of history, along with slavery Vs. feudalism, and feudalism vs. democracy, bloomers and onepiece bathing suits for women. Science fiction has a more important job than to warn of doom. Its function is not to spread joy and optimism, either. The first is the province of news "analysts" and politicos, scientists with guilty consciences and the opponents of progress in any form. The second -- brainlessly eager optimism -- is dispensed adequately by light fiction and popular articles informing us that disasters can be fun. As I've said before, science fiction should present possible developments based on present tendencies or trends, to answer in dramatic terms the unstated cjtaestion: "What would happen if -- ?" Good Lord, the world today is loaded with ifs! So crammed, crowded, bulging with ifs jostling each other, in fact, that it's a pure bafflement to see writers turning the same ones over and over, looking for some new bump never before noticed on the useworn surfaces. If this applied only to new authors, it would warrant patient encouragement and no worry -- just let them get past the obvious ideas and they'd be all right. But the most consistent practitioners of the trite are many established writers who should be making their greatest contribution now, with science fiction becoming so important a phenomenon that even the Russians had to pause between walkouts to term it a sign of capitalist degeneration! Actually, the growth of the field has paradoxically interfered with its growth. The movies, TV, slick magazines and book publishers have been concentrating on the sensational, or cataclysmic, aspects. Enough new magazines have been started to provide a market for almost any story, no matter how unreadable, by any writer with a known name. Why should they knock themselves out to meet the high not make as much per word, but the volume of sales supposedly compensates. , There is an answer to that, but it's not visible to anyone too busy exploring the explored to see the less apparent. One after another, the new magazines -- and many of the old -- are dying of literary cirrhosis. The cause? Poisoning due to decayed fiction. There is a double solution to this quandary: established writers in many cases will have to revise their standards -- and stories -- and new authors must be induced to enter the field. to accomplish both objectives. Known authors who depend only on their names to sell inferior fiction are finding no market in treatments are getting an enthusiastic, cooperative welcome. Cato noticed # years ago that the world was going to the dogs. If he were alive now, he'd accept the present as a good substitute for Paradise atomic threat or no atomic threat! ;## Beginning A #Part Serial Rich and powerful , Ben Reich in a society where telepatha I N the inconceivable finiteness of the universe there is nothing new, nothing different. It is a question of statistics, and i i  was a criminal who couldn't possibly fail, made it unlikely for criminals to succeed ! what may appear exceptional to the minute mind of man may be inevitable to the infinite Cosmic Eye. What appears to be unique may be commonplace. This strange second in a life... that unusual event... those remarkable coincidences of environment t f opportunity, encounter or reencounter... all of them may be reproduced precisely and exactly over and over again on the planet of a sun in the Galaxy that revolves once in two hundred million years and has revolved nine times already. There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each perhaps ( unaware of. the sobering mortification of statistics) nursing the proud illusion that it is unique, irreplaceable, irrepro duceable. There have been men without end, suffering from the same megalomania, who have made nations and worlds suffer too. There wilt be mote, more plus infinity. This is the story of such a man... The Demolished Man. O N Sol Double# (for the Cosmic Eye sees Earth and her moon as a planetary binary) in January of #, Edward Turnbul of Coates Teachers College decided to explore the Hysterisis Enigma for his research thesis. The Reamur Variations on the Einstein Post-mortem Equations had suggested a paradox which no one had bothered to explore. Atomic research had bypassed it; and what are the dead ends of science for if not to provide harm-, less occupation for graduate students? Turnbul studied the original research, ran a few du plications and then tinkered with the apparatus. Get the picture : A serious young man, fat, sallow, a genuine bore... A Phi Beta Kappa anesthetising his frustrations in a laboratory. A magnet is his sweetheart; caulds of X-# Duplexor are his conjugal embraces. He tinkers at midnight and sublimates his maladjustments in the excitement and suspense of the experiment. Will it work? Can he really develop a commercial and overpower women with this uncontestable proof of his virility? Turnbul unwraps a sandwich, aping the dashing insouciance of fictional heroes, then pulls the switch. The experiment works. Thirtytwo pounds of apparatus and a liter of methylene dimethyl ether loft up from the bench and smash against the ceiling. Turnbul has stumbled on something they just missed a century ago... antigravity. Unique? No. Inevitable. In the infinity of a universe crawling with searching, inquiring, experimenting creatures, this had happened, was happening and would happen beyond the count of simple integers. Statistics made it inevitable. Forget Turnbul. He is not your protagonist. If you identify with him, you will be lost in this story, as Turnbul hiltiself is lost in the shifting pattern that produced the Demolished Man. Turnbul patented; he was sued. He fought in courts for fifteen years with inadequate counsel and the patent was broken. Turnbul was notorious enough by that time to receive a full professorship at the Institute. He married a librarian, raised children, taught miserably, and jealously inspected each new textbook, content if credit for Nulgee was paid him in footnote or appendix. T N September of #, Galen Gart's wife died. She was a tall, lustrous, remote woman, and he had loved her deeply for thirty years. They had been a devoted couple, and in the course of their marriage had grown to resemble each other, as couples often do. It was hard to distinguish their handwriting, their voices, their jokes. "We even think alike," Gart used to say. "Half the time I answer her before I realize she hasn't had a chance to speak her thoughts." And after her death he said: "What's the use of going on? We were part of each other. We didn't need words. How can anyone else give me the same intimacy?" But Galen Gart, fifty, desolate, prematurely aging, met a pungent child of twenty with anexciting poitrine, a satin skin, and the infantile nickname of Duffy, and they were married six months after the funeral. " You're not so old in the dark." "Why, Duffy!" exclaimed Mr. Gart. "What a nice thing to say." "But I didn't say anything." Nor had she. It was a year before Mr. Gart realized that it was he who didn't need words. It became his joke, his little parlor trick, a quaint trait. "So this is the famous Galen Gart. Mind reader? Impose. Tricks. Can't fool me. Can't read my mind" "But I can, dear lady. I can." "You ca -- But I didn't say it. I -- " "Hey! Everybody! Gart's done it again." "Look at her blush." "What's she thinking, Gart?" "Why's she blushing?" "The lady," Mr. Gart smiled, "is thinking that I'm laughing at her. She's blushing because I'm telling her I admire her. She has one of the loveliest minds I have ever met." Laughter. Oh yes; laughter at the quaint trait when gentle, tactful, courteous Mr. part performed his parlor trick. But the trait was an extracted recessive that appeared in his son. There was no more laughter when the amoral animal that a child is discovered it had inherited Extra Sensory Perception and used it brutally. Galon Gart, Jr., turned laughter to tears, and many texts were written about his lurid criminal career that ended with his murder. And Galen Gart, Jr., Esper blackmailer, confidence trickster and thief, helped produce The Demolished Man. f'T'HE vacant lot across the way from Sheridan Place was finally sold, and Space Clubs, Inc., was forced to move its Raffle Office and prizes to Brooklyn. Their funds barometer, a miniature explosive rocket hanging halfway up an illuminated column calibrated in thousands of dollars, was abandoned. The lot was turned into a block of experimental al fresco stores, without walls or roof, protected from the elements and casual theft by the new Donaldson Resistance Hedge, an invisible bubble of radiation that scintillated in wet weather with the prismatic glitter of oil on water. The center shop, alongside the entrance to the Pneumatique Station, was taken in # year lease by Wilson Winter, an ambivalent artist turned bookseller, who purchased one lot of odds and ends for the benefit of literature, and conducted a thriving trade in pornography for the benefit of his  purse. Among the worthless items in the odds  ends was Let's Play Party by Nita Noyes. It collected dust on the shelf until it was bought by The Demolished Man. young producer'of Pantys, attributes his phenomenal success to close attention to detail. In an exclusive interview with yr recorder lie said : " People forget that ' Panty ' is slang for Emotional Pantograph. When you get five thousand people into a theatre to see a Panty performance, you can't make them feel love, hate, horror... You can't Gestalt them unless you put authentic detail on the Passion tape." Quinn, lithe and enthusiastic, waved his hands creatively. "Too many producers think that Pantys are a three-dimensional medium... sight, sound  sensation. To me, Pantys are four dimensional and my fourth dimension is realism. Every prop, every costume , every bit of doth, metal, china, plastic and so on in my productions is authentic. And the public feels it. Here, look at this showed us a glittering bit of steel. " You won't recognize it," he smiled, " until you've seen Murder's Memory Bank. This is the only one of its kind in existence. A rare French folding pistol. Watch." He pressed the gadget. There Was a vicious click. The steel unfolded like a flower. A stiletto point appeared, an explosive muzzle, and four heavy steel rings which, Quinn explained, were knuckledusters. 'A fistful of murder Platon said enthusiastically. " Wait until you're in your seat at the preview. You feel the knife. You feel the bullet tear into your heart. You feel all the pain and horror of peril and passion. It's sensational. It's all in my new Panty, Murder's Memory Bank." Platon Quinn refolded the pistol, replaced it in the desk and forgot it. He forgot it when he left the hotel. It remained forgotten until it was used by The Demolished Man.    explored, developed and exploited. It smashed one industrial world and created five others. scrabbling Phoenixlike in the ruins, it was adopted by "The # Sacrament Brothers,", a singletruck moving firm owned and operated by a lone brother named Reich. Reich was a thin young man, equipped with a fishy eye, cannibal ambitions and a minimum of social responsibility. Nulgee was also adopted by Space Clubs, Inc., who were having difficulty raising funds. Industry shrugged, preferring to leave the wild pioneering to fools. Who wants to speculate on probabilities? What commercial advantage can there be in reaching the arid Moon or the icy methanated planets? Who sponsored Cayley, Henson, Stringfellow, Chanute, SantosDumont, the Wrights? Also, there were several wars pending, and the armies were fighting to stifle Nulgee for insecure reasons of security. Meanwhile, there was Alan Courtney. After divorcing his twelfth wife,' Courtney started looking around for a new kind of hyper-thyroid release. He had enough money to bore him, and that was enough to start building a starship. His statement to the press announced that he was off to search the stars for an ideal wife. The press was indifferent to Mr. Courtney and he was piqued. Out of spite he finished the ship, and out erf drunkenness he took off. He never returned. No one believed he'd left. Five years later, most people were asking: "What ever happened to marrying Alan Courtney?" And people were answering: "He's living in Santa Fe, isn't he? Married again, probably." There was also Glen Tuttle,  renegade psychotic who fleeced his wife and in-laws, bilked his creditors, defrauded his friends, and, in a final attempt to jump out of the frying pan, constructed a flimsy starship on credit and lofted to space unknown. Tuttle also never returned. His escape was never believed. Space Clubs was still talking about funds for the first ship to carry men to the Moon. There were, in addition, Almedo Zigerra, Joan Turnbul, Fritz Wonchalk. Speeman Van Tuerk and a few others... maladjusted, incapable of social compromise, escapists all... which is to say, pioneers all. They left Earth one by one with varying publicity, little recognition, and never returned. Space Clubs Inc. cheered the donation of # by a transportation magnate named Reich, and predicted that man would soon leave 'Earth for hisfirst journey into space. It had already taken place. It had already produced The Demolished Man. S HE came through the door into the quiet consultation roOm and looked around. She was a drab woman, forty, faded, frightened. She Saw the man behind the desk, a young man with black hair, black eyes, and Duffy's white satin skin. "Come in, madam. Be seated." N His voice was low, slightly harsh, as though it contained conflicts under compression. "Thank you." She lowered herself painfully. "Looks too slick. Thief-type. Hannerly said the guy might be legitimate. Not a chance. My recorder on? Right." "Your name, madam?" "My name? Rhoda Rennsaeler, buster, when you read it in the byline. I'm Mrs. Thomas Nolles. Elvira is my given name." "And your problem, Mrs. Nolles?" "Well, I keep hearing those voices in my ear all the time talking to me. So I thought a doctor could -- " "I'm not a doctor, madam. Understand that. I do not practice medicine. I merely advise my friends. You may call call me mister. Mr. Lorry Gart." " Cautious , aren't you? But I'll get you, buster, don't ever imagined won't." "Your problem, Mrs. Nolles?" Gart repeated. "It's these voices. I hear them telling me I'm God. And if you can resist that come-on, you're a smarter crook than I think. I can pay for the treatment. I've got a roll of bills you'll drool for, you cheap quack." "Provided by Mr. Hannerly?" "Oh, no. It's my savings. I -- " She stopped short. Gart nodded and smiled. "Beginning to understand, Mrs. Rennsaeler?" " never said it. Never!" "No, of course you didn't. Nor your name. You do understand, don't you? Iow let's be practical, Mrs. Rennsaeler. I'm not a quack. You won't expose me. You'll forget all about this episode." . " But what in God's name are you?" "A mind-reader... telepath... esper. I have Extra Sensory Perception, Mrs. Rennsaeler -- to call myself." He looked at her quizzically. "I'd welcome a suggestion from an experienced reporter." "The louse! Reading everything in my mind. Stop thinking! Why can't I stop thinking?He' s listening. Like a Peeping Tom. Peeping. He -- " "Mrs. Rennsaeler, stop that!" Gart spoke sharply. He arose from his chair and stepped around the desk to her. "Listen to me. Don't be afraid. You feel the privacy of your shame is being invaded. That makes you hostile. But you have nothing to be ashamed of, Mrs. Rennsaeler. We're all alike inside our minds. All of us. I know. I've found that out." She stared up at him in terror. "Believe me." He nodded and grinned painfully. "Shall I tell you my shames, my secret fears and vices, my terrors? Shall we be brothers below the conscious threshold? My father was a criminal... Galen Gart Jr., a telepathic blackmailer, a cheat, a man who read minSs to destroy people. He was murdered. I have in me the same extra sense, the ability to read minds... not deeply, but deeply enough. It's an ability tempted by greed, vicious hatred of society, compulsions to shock and destroy people...  compulsions to destroy myself. "I don't understand." She shook her head. "I don't understand at all." "I'm stripping myself psychologically naked for you, Mrs. Rennsaeler. It's my defense against your hostility. I'm hoping that you can help me become something more than a backstreet conjurer. You're experienced in public relations." "No," she said. "No. I came here to expose a quack. I -- " "Listen to me. I use my ability to help confused people. They come to me... the poor sick ones... so sick they can't discover their problems. I do only one thing for them. I help them recognize their problems. While they talk, I listen to their broken thoughts. While they wander and flounder in confusion, I pick out the pieces, the artifacts... I tell them what their crisis is. I make them see it. I wrap up their problem in a neat parcel and place it in their hands. They can carry it to the nearest analyst for solution, though that's generally not necessary." "Then you're no quack." "No, Mrs. Rennsaeler, I'm not. And you believe me. That much I can read in your mind. You believe me and you want to help me. Isn't that true?" After a long pause she said: "Yes, you damned peeper. I believe you and I want to help you." Gart took her hand. "You've started helping me already. You've given me my name."    The Geoffrey Reich, first manned ship to reach the Moon, discovered Glen Tuttle's ship and body in the center of a seventymile bed of Haines' Stellite valued at # a pound. The airlock of Tuttle's ship was open and the body sprawled at the entrance. Poor Tuttle was so ignorant that he never knew the Moon was airless. He had had time for one quick glance at Mare Imbrium before he suffocated. His body was riddled with machine-gun perforations from the meteoric pellets that bombard the unprotected Moon at # miles per second.    examine the witness. court, at this time I would like to introduce Dr. Walter Clark E.M.D., as Esper Medical Expert to conduct the cross-examination of this hostile witness. gument, Mr. Lecky? honor, that in this Matter of the Estate of Alan Courtney, a sum exceeding twenty-five million dollars is at stake. Although I do not impugn the conscious honesty of my opponent's witnesses, I suggest that their recollection has been colored by dollar signs. argument or writing a Panty scenario? lished fact that men remember what they want to remember, and forget what they want to forget. They do this in all sincerity. Objective truth does not exist in the psychoanalytic sense, and our courts have affirmed and reaffirmed the psychoanalytic principle in a long line of cases. quainted with the precedents, Mr. Lecky, but the present cause of action does not lie with them. n been a case where a peeper was admitted to give evidence, and if counsel imagines he's going to ring in a -- afraid of? If your witnesses are telling the truth, my man will peep them and confirm it. But if they're lying as I suggest -- tlemen! Such exchanges cannot be countenanced. The court is cognizant of the fact that Extra Sensory Experts perform valuable services for society in many walks of life... the Esper Medical Doctor, the Esper Attorney, the Esper Educator, the Esper Criminologist... to mention only a few; yet the Esper Expert cannot properly be admitted to any court to give Esper evidence for the record. an invasion of privacy, your honor, any more than a snapshot of a nude sunbather can be ruled an invasion of modesty. Three hundred years ago the human body was imagined to be a thing of shame. Concealment was the strange custom of the day. Two hundred years ago, the human mind was imagined to be a thing of shame. Concealment was the strange custom of that time. But we have progressed far beyond such medieval concept#. Lecky, but human justice has not yet abandoned the established principle that a man cannot be used as a hostile witness against himself. A man cannot be forced to convict himself of subconscious mendacity. Justice must always remain on the objective level. If it does not, what would become of the deluded innocents who falsely believe in their own guilt? How would the courts reconcile their subjective confessions with their objective innocence? The Objection is sustained.    carefully quartering the East Quadrant o( Mars for FO (fissionable ore) discovered the remains of" marrying Alan Courtney. He had survived his landing some two years, eking out his dwindling supplies with lichens and the dew that formed on the surface of his starship. There were scars and rust particles on his tongue. Evidently he had gone insane, for they found his dessicated body genuflected before a rock on which the symbol of the Order of Python had been cut. The symbol, a serpent coiled in an infinity sign, was ignored in the reports, but they named a city after him. IS In honor of Alan Courtney, his great-grandnephew, Samuel Dus, took his name, took his twentyresidence in Courtney City on Mars. There were other reasons. Samuel Dus-Courtney had been mauled in a financial scrimmage was retiring to lick his wounded bank account.    Joan Turnbul's ship, a converted Empire submarine, fell into the Three Body Problem, and follows Jupiter in his eternal course as one of the Trojans. Passing Sacrament Liners sometimes waste enough fuel to give their passengers a glimpse of her staring skeletal face framed in a crystal port. Sentimental virgins often weep pretty tears at the sad fate of the lovely (she was ugly as sin) daughter of the discoverer of Nulgee.    Van Tuerk smashed on Titan. A D'Courtney tanker found him inside his little spacecan, lying broken on the deck on which he'd chalked: Die Kunst ist lang, das Leben kurz, die Gelegenheit Mich tig. The D'Courtney ship crater of radiant magma. "Magma Cum Laude," snorted Ben Reich when he received the news from Relations in Sacrament Tower, but he was not amused. For Ben Reich is The Demolished Man. II Explosion! The vault doors burst open. The Stellite sparka sizzle in showers of sapphires and diamonds. And deep inside, the money is racked in golden stacks ready for rape, rapine, loot. Who's that? Who's inside the vault? Oh, God! The Man With No Face! Looking. Looming. Silent. Horrible. Run... Escape... Run, or Til miss the Paris Pneumatique and that girl waiting tor me with her flower face and figure of passion. There's time if I run. Call to the guard. Urge him to hold the train. Run. Urge him to -- But that isn't the guard before the gate. The Man With No Facet Looking. Looming. Silent. Terrifying. Don't scream! Stop screaming... But he isn't screaming. He's singing on that stage of sparkling marble, while the music soars and the lights burn and his cascading voice envelopes the multitude out there in the amplu theatre who -- But there's no one. The great shadowed pit... empty except for one spectator. Silent. Staring. Leering. Looming. The Man With No Face! This time his scream had sound. Ben Reich awoke. He lay quietly in the hydropathic bed while his heart shuddered and his eyes focused at random on objects in the room. The walls of green jade, the nightlight in the porcelain mandarin whose head nodded interminably if you touched him, the multiclock that radiated the time of three planets and nine satellites, the bed itself, a crystal pool flowing with carbonated glycerine at Speegee three and ninety-nine point nine Fahrenheit. The door opened softly and Jonas appeared in the gloom, a shadow in puce sleeping suit, a shade with the face of a horse and the bearing of an undertaker. "Again?" Reich asked. "Yes, Mr. Reich." "Loud?" "Very loud, sir. And terrified." "Damn your jackass ears," Reich growled. "I'm never afraid." "No, sir." "Get out." "Yes, sir. Good night, sir." Jonas stepped back and closed the door. Reich shouted: "Jonas!" The valet reappeared. "Sorry, Jonas." "Quite all right, sir." "It isn't all right." Reich charmed him with a smile. "Next time I yell at you, yell right back. Why should I have all the fup?" "Oh, Mr. Reich..." "Do that and you get a raise." The smile again. "That's all, Jonas. Thank you." "Thank you, sir." The valet withdrew. Reich arose from the bed and toweled himself before the cheval mirror, practicing the smile. "Make your enemies by choice," he muttered, "not by accident." He stared at the reflection: the heavy shoulders, deep chest, narrow flanks, long corded legs... the sleek head with wide eyes, small chiseled nose, small sensitive mouth scarred by implacability. "Why?" he asked. "I wouldn't change looks with the devil. I wouldn't change places with God, Why the screaming?" He put on a gown and glanced at the clock. It was a little after six. He would give himself an hour of analysis. The screaming had to stop. "But I'm not afraid," he said. "I'm never afraid." He stepped down a corridor, clacking his sandals sharply on the silver floor, indifferent to the slumber of his staff, unaware that this early morning skeletal clatter awakened twelve hearts to IS hatred and dread. He thrust open the door of his analyst's suite, entered and at once lay down on the couch. Wilson Breen, E.M.D.#, was already awake and ready for him. As Reich's staff analyst he slept the 'nurse's sleep' in which he remained en rapport with his patient and eould instantly be awakened by his needs. That one scream had been enough for Breen. Now he was seated alongside the couch, elegant in embroidered gown and sharply alert, for his employer was generous but .demanding. "Go ahead, Mr. Reich." "The Man With No Face again," Reich said. "Nightmares?" "Peep me and find out! Sorry. Childish of me. Yes, nightmares again. I was trying to rob a bank. Then I was trying to catch a trajin. Then someone was singing. Me, I think. I'm trying to give you the pictures best I can. I don't think I'm leaving anything out..." There was a long pause. Finally Reich blurted: "Well?" "You persist that you cannot Identify The Man With No Face, Mr. Reich?" "How the hell can I? I never ee it. All I know is -- " "I think you can. You simply will not." "Listen," Reich burst out in guilty rage. "I pay you twenty U thousand a year. If the best you can do is make idiotic statements... "Do you mean that, Mr. Reich, or is it simply a part of the general anxiety syndrome?" "Thereis no anxiety," Reich shouted. "I'm not afraid. I'm never -- " He stopped himself, realizing the futility of ranting while the deft mind of the peeper searched underneath his aggressive words. "You're wrong, anyway," he said sulkily, don't know who it is. It's a man with no face. That's all." "You've been rejecting the essential points, Mr. Reich. You must be made to see them. We'll try a little free association. Without words, please. Robbery... " Jewels watches diamonds stocks bonds sovereigns counterfeiting cash bullion dort..." "What was that last again?" 'Slip of the mind. Meant to think bort... uncut gem stones ." "It was not a slip. It was a significant correction; or, rather, alteration. Let's continue. Pneumatique..." " Long carcompartmentsairconditioned... That doesn't make sense." "It does, Mr. Reich. An unconscious phallic pun. Read 'heir for 'air and you'll see it Continue, please." "You peeper snoopers are too damned smart. Let's see. Pneumatique... train-undergroundcompressed air-ultrasonic speedl We Transport You Into Transports', slogan of the -- what the hell is the name of that company? Can't remember. Where'd the notion come from anyway?" "From the preconscious, Mr. Reich. One more trial and you'll begin to understand. Amphitheater..." "Seats pits balcony boxes stalls horse stalls Martian horses Martian Pampas..." "And there you have it, Mr. Reich. In the past six months you've had ninetyseven nightmares about The Man With No Face. He's been your constant enemy, frustrater and inspirer of terror in dreams that contain three common denominators... Finance, Transportation, and Mars. Over and over again... The Man With No Face, and Finance, Transportation and Mars." "That doesn't mean anything to me." "It must mean something, Mr. Reich. You must be able to identify this terrifying figure. Why else would you attempt to escape by rejecting his face?" "I'm not rejecting anything." "I offer as further clues the altered word 'dort' and the forgotten name of the company that coined the advertising slogan 'We Transport You Into --  " "I tell you I don't know who it is." Reich arose abruptly from the couch. "Your clues don't help. I can't make any identification." "The Man With No Face does not fill you with fear because he's faceless. You know who he is. You hate him and fear him, but you know who he is." "You're the peeper, damn you! You tell me!" "There's a limit to my ability, Mr. Reich. I can read your mind no deeper without help." "What do you mean, help? You're the best man I could hire. If -- " "Mr. Reich, you deliberately hired a #nd Class Esper in order to protect yourself in such an emergency. Now you're paying the price of your caution. If you want the screaming to stop, you'll have to consult one of the #st Class men -- Augustus T# or Gart or Samuel kins..." "I'll think about it," Reich muttered and turned to go. As he opened the door, Breen called: "By the way, 'We Transport You Into Transports' is the slogan of the D'Courtney Cartel. How does that tie in with the alteration of 'bort' to 'dort'? Think it over." " The Man With No Face!" Without staggering, Reich slammed the door across the path from his mind to Breen and then lurched down the corridor toward his own suite. A wave of savage' hatred burst over him. "Craye D' Courtney. The Man With No Face. He's right, the smart son of a bitch. It's D' Courtney who's giving me the screams. Not because I'm afraid of him. I'm afraid of myself. Known all along. Known it deep down inside. Known that once I faced it I'd have to kill D'Courtney. He has no face because it's the face of murder." wrong mind, Reich stormed out of his apartment and descended to the street where a Sacrament Jumper picked 'him up and carried him in one graceful hop to the giant tower that housed the hundreds of floors and thousands of employees of Sacrament's New York office. Sacrament Tower was the central nervous system of an incredibly vast corporation, a pyramid of transportation, communication, heavy industry, manufacture, sales distribution, research, exploration, importation. Sacrament bought and sold, made and destroyed, traded and gave. Its pattern of subsidiaries and holding companies was so complex that it demanded the full-time services of a #nd Class Esper Accountant. Reicji entered his office, followed by his chief (Esper #) secretary and her staff, bearing the litter of the morning's work. "Dump it and jet," he ordered surlily. They deposited the papers and recording crystals on his desk and departed hastily but without rancor. They were accustomed to his rages. Reich seated himself behind his desk, trembling with a fury that was already goring D'Courtney. Finally he muttered: "I'll give the bastard one more chance." He unlocked his desk, opened the drawer-safe and withdrew the Executive's Code Book, restricted to the executive heads of the firms listed quadruple A-#- by Lloyd's. He found most of the material he required in the middle pages of the book: Marking his place in the code book, Reich flipped the phone on and said to the image of the inter-office operator: "Get me Code." The screen dazzled and cut to a smoky room cluttered with books and coils of tape. A bleached man in a faded shirt glanced at the screen, then leaped to attention. "Yes, Mr. Reich?" "Morning, Hassop. You look like you need a vacation. Make your enemies hy choice. Take a week at Arnpro. Sacrament expense." "Thank you, Mr. Reich. Thank you very much." "This message is confidential. To Craye D'Courtney. Relations will tell you where to find him. Send -- " Reich consulted the Get the answer to me like rockets." "Right, Mr. Reich. I'll jet." Reich cut off the phone. He jabbed his hand once into the pile of papers and crystals on his desk, picked up a crystal and dropped it into the playback. His chief secretary's voice said: "Sacrament Gross off two point one one three four per cent. D'Courtney Gross up two point one one three oh per cent... "Out of my pocket into his!" He snapped off the playback and arose in an agony of impatience. It would take hours for the reply to reach Mars and return. His whole life hung on D'Courtney reply. He left his office and began to roam through the floors and departments of Sacrament Tower, pretending the remorseless personal supervision he usually exercised. His hief secretary unobtrusively accompanied him like a trained dog. "T. rained bitch!" Reich thought. Then, aloud: "I'm sorry. Did you peep that?" "Quite all right, Mr. Reich, I understand." "Do you? I don't. God damn D'Courtney !" In Personnel they were testing, checking and screening the usual mass of job applicants... clerks, craftsmen, specialists, middle'bracket executives, top drawer experts. All the preliminary elimination was done with standardized tests and interviews, and never to the satisfaction of Sacraments Esper Personnel chief, who was stalking through the floor in an icy rage when Reich entered. The fact that Reich's secretary sent an advance telepathic announcement of the visit made no difference to him. "I have allotted ten minutes per applicant for my final screening interview," the chief was snapping to his worried crew. "Six per hour. Forty-eight per day. Unless my percentage of final rejections drops below thirIf ty-five, I am wasting my time; which means that you are wasting Sacrament's time. I am not employed by Sacrament to screen out the obviously unsuitable. That is your work. See to it." He turned to Reich and nodded pedantically. "Good corning, Mr. Reich." "Morning. Trouble?" "Nothing that cannot be handled once this staff understands that Extra Sensory Perception is not a miracle but a skill subject to wage-hour requirements. What is your decision on Blogg, Mr. Reich?" Secretary: "He hasn't read your memo yet." "May I point out , madam , that unldss I am used with maximum efficiency, I am wasted. The Blogg memo has been on Mr. Reich's desk for three days." " Tell him about it now." "It will consume three minutes which will cost my department fifteen hundred dollars. My time is rated at -- " "Tell him anyway. He's in a temper "Who the hell is Blogg?" Reich asked. "First, the background, Mr. Reich: There are approximately one hundred thousand #rd Class Espers in the Esper Guild. An Esper # can peep the conscious level of a mind. The #rd can discover what a subject is thinking at the moment of thought. The #rd is the lowest class of telepaths. Most of Sacrament's security positions are held by #rds. We employ over five hundred... " For God's sake, he knows all this. Everybody does. Get to the point, long-winded!" "Permit me to arrive at the point in my own way, madam." "How did you ever get into Personnel, gas-bag? You're  born bad lecture l" "There are approximately ten thousand #nd Class Espers in the Guild," the Personnel chief continued frostily. "They are experts like myself who can penetrate beneath the conscious level of the mind to the preconscious. Most #nds are in the professional class... physicians, lawyers, engineers, educators, economists, architects and so on." "And you cost a fortune," Reich growled. "We have unique service to sell. Sacrament appreciates that fact. Sacrament employs over one hundred #nds at present." " Will you get to the point? If he wasn't so mad at D'Courtney, he'd have your head off by now." "There are less than a thousand #st Class Espers in the Guild. The lsts are capable of deep peeping, through the conscious and preconscious layer down to the unconscious, the lowest levels of the mind. Primordial SO  basic desires and so forth. These Espers, of course, hold premium positions. Education, specialized medical service... analysts like T#, Gart, kins, Moselle... criminologists like Preston Powell of the Psychotic Division... Political Analysts, State Negotiators, Special Cabinet Advisers and so on. Thus far Sacrament has never had occasion to hire a #st." "And?" Reich demanded. "The occasion has arisen. Mr. Reich, and I believe Blogg may be available. Briefly..." #I It says here." "Briefly, Sacrament is hiring so many Espers that I have suggested we set up a special Esper Personnel Department, headed by a #st like Blogg to devote itself exclusively to the work." "He's wondering why you can't handle it." "I have given you the background to explain why I cannot handle the job, Mr. Reich. I am a #nd Class Esper. I can telepath normal applicants rapidly and efficiently, but I cannot handle other Espers with the same speed and efficiency. All Espers are accustomed to using mind blocks of varyirig effectiveness depending on their rating. It would take me one hour per #rd for an efficient screening interview. It would take me three hours per #nd. I could not possibly peep a #st. We must hire a #st like Blogg for this work. The cost will be large, but the necessity is urgent.' "What's so urgent?" Reich said. "For God's sake, don't give him that picture! He's sore enough about D' Courtney ." " have my job to do, madam" To Reich, the chief said: "We are not hiring the best Espers, Mr. Reich. The D' Courtney Cartel has been taking the cream of the Espers away from us. Over and over again, through lack of proper facilities, we have been tricked by D'Courtney into bidding for inferior people while D'Courtney has quietly appropriated the best." "God damn you!" Reich shouted. "God damn D'Courtney. All right, set it up. And tell this Blogg to start mouse-trapping D'Courtney. You'd better start, too." He left Personnel and went down to Sales, where a copycheck was being run on an audience of one hundred people selected at random from the streets. They were seated in the small theater, watching a test run of advertising copy, while the Esper Sales chief peeped their reactions and responses. Warned by Reich's secretary, he dropped his work at once and came up to Reich, his face perplexed and annoyed. #! "Morning, Mr. Reich." # "Morning. Trouble?" "Save it. Save it. Don't spill anything ." "Go to, girlie. It's a crisis ." "Bob, you only think it's a crisis. #ie boss is -- " "I wish you could peep that audience, Mr. Reich. How does D'Courtney do it?" "Do what?" "Build that hostility toward us." The Sales chief waved at the people in the chairs. "They think all our products are shoddy substitutes for D'Courtney's. They think every bit of our copy is an outrageous lie. That damned Cartel's instilled patriotism! They feel it'd be an act of treachery to settle for anything less than D' Courtney." "Who's handling their Public Relations? Whoever it is, get him." "He's a she, Mr. Reich," the secretary said. "An Esper #. And incorruptible." "Who said anything about corruption?" "You didn't say it, Mr. Reich, but we tried." "I'll fix him!" Reich shouted. He stormed up to Propaganda, where the department chief was rapidly peeping a battery of fieldresearchers, all #rds, all back from Continental Africa, and all apparently with discouraging news. "Morning," Reich interrupted. "Trouble?" The Propaganda chief ignored the secretary's warning and nodded dismally. "Let's face it," he said. "We're being licked." "D'Courtney?" "D'Courtney. You name any place on any planet or satellite, and that's where D'Courtney's. the Great White Father. If Sacrament tried to give anything away, they'd refuse to accept." "We'redropping all campaigns as of now. Never mind whitewashing Sacrament. Start mudslinging D'Courtney. I want He robs banks. He rapes widows. He cheats orphans. He -- " "Got your picture," the peeper interrupted. "What about slander?" "Who gives a damn for the law? Let him sue. He'll be smeared by the time he gets to court. Pass the word for Legal to meet in my office." Reich returned to his office where the Legal chief, forewarned by the lightning telepathic grapevine, was already waiting with Reich's picture in his mind. "You can't do it, Mr. Reich," he said. "D'Courtney'll sue and collect." "One way or another, D'Courtney'll bust Sacrament wide open if we don't fight. Go peep Accounting for the picture." "I've got the picture from you, air." "Then get back to your department and start preparing a defense. Propaganda's going to start a full campaign... whisper, qvert, blatant. I'm using an old fighting trick. If you can't attack the argument, attack the man. I want D'Courtney attacked, legally and illegally. You're forewarned. We're going to break a few laws... "A few hundred." "All right. Hit D'Courtney with suits before he hits us. Accuse him of everything we're going to do to him. Start every civil and criminal action against him that we'll be guilty of. This is a fight for survival. Pass the word and get the hell out of here." After the Legal chief was gone, Reich paced in a fury for five minutes. "It's no use," he muttered. "I know I'll have to kill the bastard. He won't accept. Why should he accept? He thinks he's licked me. Datnn him, he has licked me. All this is just loud talk. I'll have to kill him. And I'll need some real help... peeper help." He flipped on the phone and told the operator: "Relations." A sparkling lounge appeared on the screen, decorated in chrome and enamel, equipped with game tables and a bar dispenser. It appeared to be and was used as a recreation center. It was, in fact, headquarters of Sacrament's powerful espionage division. The Recreation director, a bearded scholar named West, looked up from a chess problem, then leaped to attention. "Good morning, Mr. Reich." Warned by the formal 'Mister Reich said: "Good morning, Mr. West. Just a routine check. Paternalism, you know. How's amusement these days?" "Modulated, Mr. Reich. However, I must complain, I think there's entirely too much gambling going on." West stalled in a fussy voice until two bona fide Sacrament clerks innocently finished their drinks and departed. Then he relaxed and slumped into his chair. "All clear, Ben. Shoot." "Has Hassop broken the confidential code yet, Ellery?" T HE peeper shook his head bitterly. "Trying?" West smiled and nodded. "Where's D'Courtney?" "En route to Terra, aboard the Asfra." "Know his plans? Where he'll be staying?" "No. Want a check?" "I don't know. It depends... "Depends on what?" West glanced at him curiously. "I wish # ) the Telepathic Pattern could be transmitted by phone, Ben. I'd like to know what you're driving at." Reich smiled grimly. "Thank God for the phone. It protects us from TP invasion. What's your personal attitude toward crime, Ellery?" "Typical." "Of anybody?" "Of the Esper Guild. The Guild doesn't like it, Ben." "You're a sharp character, Ellery. You know the value of money, success. Why don't you clever up? Why do you let the Guild do your thinking?" "You don't understand. We're born in the Guild. We live with the Guild. We die in the Guild. We have the right to elect Guild officers, and that's all. The Guild runs our professional lives. It trains us, grades us, sets ethical standards and sees that we stick to them. It protects us by protesting the layman. Same as medical associations. We have the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. It's called the Galen Pledge. God help any of us if we break it... as I judge you're suggesting I should." "Maybe I am," Reich said intently. "Maybe I'm hinting it could be worth your while to break the Guild pledge. Maybe I'm thinking in terms of money... more than you or any #nd Class peeper would see in a lifetime." "Forget it, Ben. Not interested." "So bust your pledge. What happens?" "We're ostracized." "Smart peepers have broken with the Guild before. They've been ostracized. What of it?" wouldn't understand, Ben." "Make me understand." "Those peepers you mention, like Jeremy Church. They weren't so smart. It's like this... West considered. "Before surgery really got started, there used to be a handicapped group called deafmutes." "No-hear no-talk?" "That's it. They communicated by a manual sign language. That meant they couldn't communicate with anybody but deafmutes. Understand? They had to live in their own community or they couldn't live at all. A man goes crazy if he can't have friends." "So?" "Some of them started a racket. They'd tax the more successful deaf-mutes for weekly handouts. If the victim refused to pay, they'd ostracize him. The victim always paid. It was a choice of paying or living in solitary until he went mad." "You mean you peepers are like deaf-mutes?" "No, Ben. You non-Espers are the deaf-mutes. If we had to live with you alone, we'd go mad. Now for God's sake, leave me alone. I've got work to do. If you're planning something dirty, I don't want to know." West cut off the phone in Reich's face. With a roar of rage, Reich snatched up a gold paperweight and hurled it into the crystal screen. Before the shattered fragments finished flying, he slammed the door of his office and was on his way out of the building. was going. His peeper chauffeur knew ' where he wanted to go. Reich arrived in his apartment and was met by his peeper house-supervisor, who at once announced early luncheon and tuned the meal to Reich's unspoken demands. Feeling slightly less violent, Reich stalked into his study and turned to his safe, which was a mere shimmer of light in the corner. It was simply a honeycomb paper rack tuned out of temporal phase with a single-cycle beat. Once a second, when the safe phase and temporal phase coincided, the rack pulsed with a switched back into full temporal phase only by the porepattern of Reich's right index finger, which was irreproduceable. Reich placed the tip of his finger in the center of the glow. It faded and the honeycomb rack appeared. Holding his finger in place, he reached up and took down a small black notebook and a large red envelope clearly letHe removed his index finger and the safe pulsed out of temporal phase again. Reich flipped through the pages of the notebook... abducfound the names of fifty-seven prominent people. One of them was Augustus T#. Esper Medical Doctor #. He nodded with satisfaction. He tore open the red envelope and examinedv. its contents. It contained five sheets of closely written pages in a handwriting that was centuries old. Four of the pages were lettered: plan a, was headed introduction. Reich read the ancient spidery script slowly : To those who come after me: The test of intellect is the refusal It to belabor the obyious. If you have opened this letter, we already under stand each other. I have prepared four general murder plans which may help you. I bequeath them to you as part of the Reich inheritance. They are only outlines. The detaiL must be filled in by yourself as your time and necessity require. But remember this: The essence of murder never changes. It is always the conflict of the killer against society with the victim as the prize. And the changes. Be audacious, be brave, be confident and you will not fail. Against these qualities society has no defense. Geoffrey Reich Reich leafed through the plans slowly, speculatively, filled with admiration for the great old pirate who if ad had the forethought and ingenuity to perform this work for his descendants. His imagination kindled and ideas began forming and crystalizing to be considered, discarded and instantly replaced. One remarkable phrase caught his attention : If you are a natural killer, don't plan too carefully . Leave most to your instinct. Intellect may fail you, but the killer's instinct is infallible. "The killer's instinct," Reich breathed. "By God, I've got that." The phone chimed once and then the automatic switched on. There was a quick chatter and tape began to stutter out of the recorder. Reich strode to the desk and examined it. The message was very short and very deadly: "Offer refused. I knew it. I knew it!" Reich gritted. "All right, D'Courtney. If you won't let it be merger, then it's going to be murder." Ill ceived # per hour of analysis -- not a high fee considering that you rarely required more than an hour of the doctor's devastating time -- but it placed his income at # a day, #,The public knew his income, but it did not know what proportion of that income was paid into the Esper Guild for the education of other Espers and the furthering of the Guild's long-range eugenic plan to bring Extra Sensory Perception to every person in all the worlds. Augustus T# knew, and the # he paid was a sore point with him. Because of it, he was not fully reconciled to the Galen Pledge. Almost, but not quite. It was the "not quite" that placed him in Ben Reich's bribery and corruption (possible) category. Reich marched into T#'s overpowering consultation room, glanced once at T#'s tiny figure, slightly out of proportion, carefully realigned by tailors, then sat down and grunted: "Peep me quick." He glared in concentration at T# while the elegant little peeper examined him with a glittering eye and spoke in quick staccato bursts : "You're Ben Reich of Sacrathink I should know you. I do. CS# "A #st Class Esper? Am I supposed to believe it? Am I supposed to believe you're incapable of outwitting the whole world?" T# smiled. "Sugar for the fly," he said. "A characteristic device of -- " "Peep me," Reich interrupted. "It'll save time. Read what's in my mind. Your gift. My resources. An unbeatable combination. My God, it's lucky for the at one murder!" "No," T# said with decision. "It won't do. I'll have to commit you, Mr. Reich." "Wait. Want to find out why that  payment thought was cloudy? Read me deeper. How What's my top limit?" npt? closed his eyes. His manne- quin face tightened painfully. Then his eyes opened in surprise. "You can't be serious!" he exclaimed. "I am," Reich grunted. "And what's more, you know it's an offer in good faith, don't you?" T# nodded slowly. "And you're aware that Sacrament plus D'Courtney can make the offer good." "I almost believe you." "You can believe me. I throw my combined resources at your disposal. I guarantee to satisfy every whim, every desire, every You're involved in a death struggle with the D'Courtney Cartel. You're savagely hostile toward D'Courtney. Offered merger this morning. Offer refused. In desperation you have resolved to -- " T# broke off abruptly. "Go ahead," Reich said. "To murder Craye D'Courtney as the first step in taking over his cartel. You need my help. You offer me -- that thought's vague." Tax free. Guild free." "Ridiculous." "Peep me. What's in my pocket?" "Five uncut emeralds valued at twenty thousand dollars each. If you keep on like this, Mr. Reich, I'll have to commit you." "One hundred thousand dollars down payment. Untraceable. Yours." Reich withdrew the stones from his pocket and tossed them on the desk, where they rolled like cloudy green pebbles. T# stared at them. "One hundred thousand a week for ten weeks. The murder can't take any longer. No record. No implication. All safe. Still thinking of committing me?" "It can't be done," T# said, hungrily not touching the cold stones. "It can be done with your help." "I can do nothing to help you." I  inclination you may have for the rest of your life. Read me. Am I sincere? Will I hold to my word?" "You will," T# admitted with extreme reluctance. "Will you accept or commit? And don't forget... I can fight a committal. Don't ever imagine I can't." "The bribe is too big," T# said, his face beginning to strain again. "You can't possibly hate D'Courtney with that much ferocity. I'm trying to discover why the bribe is too big." "Don't bother. I'll tell you. You want to enjoy the world. I want to own the world. So long enjoy it." T# picked up the stones and fingered them. He closed his eyes and said: "There hasn't been a successful premeditated murder in # years. Espers make it impossible to conceal intent before the murder. Or, if Espers have been evaded before the murder, they make it impossible to conceal the guilt." , "Esper evidence isn't admitted in court." covers the guilt he can uncover objective evidence to support his peeping. Powell, the Prefect of the Psychotic Division, is deadly. T# opened his eyes. "Do you want your emeralds back?" "No," Reich said. "Look the situation over with me first. Murders have always failed because no killer had the sense to hire a good peeper, or at least, if he had the sense, he couldn't afford the deal. I can." "Yes, you can." "I'm going to fight a war," Reich continued. "I'm going to fight one sharp skirmish with society. Let's look at it as a problem in strategy and tactics. My problem's that of any army. Audacity, bravery and confidence aren't enough: An army needs Intelligence. A war is won with Intelligence. I need you for my G-#." "Agreed." "I'll do the fighting. You'll procure the Intelligence. I'll have to know where D'Courtney will be, where I can strike, when I can myself, but you'll have to tell me when and where the opportunity will be." "Understood." "I'll have to invade first... cut through a defensive network surrounding D'Courtney. That means reconnaissance from you. You'll have to run interference, check the normals, spot the peepers, warn me and block them if I can't avoid them. You'll have to remain on the scene after the If murder. You'll find out whom the police suspect and why. If I know suspicion is directed against myself, I can divert it. If I know it's directed against someone else, I can clinch it. I can fight this war and win this war with your Intelligence. Is that the truth? Peep me." After a long pause, T# said: "It's the truth. We can do it." He picked up the emeralds and dropped them into his pocket with finality. "There's to be a social gathering tonight at Preston Powell's house. D'Courtney's physician will be there. I'll start the reconnaissance. Maybe I'll locate D'Courtney's plans and destination for you. I think I can." "And you're not afraid of "the deadly Powell'?" T# smiled contemptuously. "If I were, Mr. Reich, would I trust myself in this bargain with you? Make no mistake, I'm no Jeremy Church." "Church!" "Yes. The Esper #nd. He was kicked out of the Guild ten years ago for that little junket of his with you." "Damn you. Got that from me, eh?" "You and history." "Wetl, it won't repeat itself this time. You're tougher and smarter than Church. Need anything special for Powell's party? Women? Clothes? Jewels? Money?" "Nothing, thank you." "Criminal but generous, that's me." Reich smiled as he arose to go. He did not offer to shake hands. "Mr. Reich!" T# called suddenly. Reich turned at the door. "The screaming will continue. The Man With No Face is not a symbol of D'Courtney or murder." "What? Oh, Christ, the nightmares. Still? How did you get that? How did you -- " "Don't be a fool. Do you think, you can play games like that with a #st?" "What about the damned nightmares?" "No, I shan't tell you. I doubt if anyone but a #st can tell you, and naturally you would not dare to consult another after this conference." "For God's sake, man! Are you going to help me?" "No, Mr. Reich," T# smiled malevolently. "That's my little weapon. It keeps us on a parity basis. Criminal but peeper... that's me." Preston Powell, Ph.D.l, lived in a private house. It was not a question of conspicuous consumption, but rather a problem of privacy. Life in any multiple dwelling was life in an inferno of naked emotion for an Esper, especially an Esper #st. Powell occupied a small limestone maisonette on Hudson Ramp, overlooking the North River. There were only four rooms -- upstairs, a bedroom and study; downstairs, a living room and kitchen. The interior walls were translucent nacre, at present colored oyster white with scounces, mouldings and Adam mantles projected on them. The polymorph furniture was currently shaped into Sheraton and Hepplewhite reproductions. All Espers required frequent sensory restimulation, and he was now in his Georgian period. There was no servant in the house; he preferred to do for himself. He was in the kitchen, checking over the stasis-freeze in preparation for the party, whistling a plaintive, crooked tune, a slender man in his late thirties, tall, loose, slow-moving. His cropped hair was prematurely white; a startling contrast to the jet black eyebrows and deep dark eyes. His nose was big, thrusting, almost arrogant. His wide mouth seemed perpetually on the verge of laughter. If you looked at the lower half of Powell's face, you said this must be the funniest man in the world. If you looked at the upper half, you were sure he was the saddest man in the world. If you asked him, he would answer that he was both or neither or anything, depending on the situation, the questioner and the reason for the question. For it was the essence of the Esper that  he, too, was polymorph... a personality of many shapes and many quantities. There was no consistent public character; there was only consistent response to the requirements of all situations. Sensitive to the demands of the psyche, the Esper gave you the response you really wanted and it was this responsive quality that made Espers fantastically popular. Layman pursued them endlessly, offering friendship and fraternity, marriage and maternity; and the Espers fled desperately, unable to explain to the deaf-mutes that these were unilateral offers... that there could be no genuine relationship between all-giver and all-taker... that only Esper could give to each other with any sort of equality. PTHE doorbell chimed. Powell glanced at his watch in surprise -- it was too early -- then directed Open in Csharp at the TP Locksenser. It responded to the Thought Pattern and the front door slid open. Instantly came a familiar sensory impact: Snowminttulips taffeta. "Mary Noyes. Come to help the bachelor prepare tor the party. lUmHtgfi. "Hoped you'd need me, Pres. "Every host needs a hostess. Mary, what am I going to do for Canapes s.o.s.?" "Just invented a new recipe. I'll make it for you. Roast chutney "?" " That's telling, my love' " Oh-ho . Thai kind of can(secret'jape?" She come into the kitchen, a short girl externally, but tall and swaying in thought; a dark girl exteriorly, but frost white in pattern. Almost a nun in white, despite the swarthy texture of externals; but Thought Pattern was the real reality. You are what you think. "Then I wish I could re-think. Pie s. Have my synapses reground." "Change your ( kiss you as you are ) self, Mary?" "If I only ( You never really do, Pres) could. I'm so tired of tasting you tasting mint every time we meet.' "Next time I'll add brandy and ice. Shake well. Voila. StingerMar y." "Do that. Also ( strike out ) snow." "Why strike out the snow? I love snow." " But I love you." "And I love you, Mary." "Thanks, Pres." But he had said it. He always said it, never thought it. She turned away quickly and began fumbling with the drink ampules in the freeze. The tears unshed within her scalded him. "Again, Mary?" "Not again. Always." An the deeper levels of her mind cried: "I love you, Pres. I love ou. Image of my father: symbol of security: Of warmth: Of protecting passion: Do not reject me always" "Listen to me, Mary... " Don't talk. Please, Pres. Not in words. I couldn't bear it if words came between us." "You're my friend, Mary. Snow. Mint. Tulips. Taffeta. Cool and swaying. For every weary moment in my life. For every disappointment. For every singular elation." "But not for love." "Don't let it hurt you so. Not for love " "I have enough love, God pity me, for both of us. Pres." "One. God pity us, is not enough for both, Mary." "You must marry before you're forty. The Guild insists on that. You know it." "I know it." "What are you waiting for , Pres?" "A wife I can love." "Let friendship answer. Marry me, Pres. Give me a year, that's all. One little year to love you. I'll let you go. I won't cling. I won't make you hate me. Darling, it's so little to ask... so little to give..." "But you're asking more than either of us could give. If we were non-Espers, we might make it work. But we're not." Her hands became tight fists pressing against her hips. He shook his head. " You see, Mary? You're loathing yourself for being an Esper, envying deaf S# mutes their watery loves." "But if l became a #st... The doorbell chimed. Powell looked at Mary helplessly. "Guests," he murmured and directed Open in C-sharp at the TP lock-senser. At the same instant she directed Close a fifth above. The harmonics meshed and the door remained shut. " Answer me first. Pres." "I can't give you the answer you want, Mary" The doorbell chimed again. "For God's sake, be honest. Say it." He took her shoulders firmly, held her close and looked deep into her eyes. " You're a #nd. Read me as deeply as you can. What's in my heart? What's in my mind?" He removed all blocks. The thundering, plunging depths of his mind cascaded over her in a warm, frightening, exalted torrent, terrifying, yet magnetic and desirable; but... "Snow. Mint. Tulips. Taffeta, she said wearily. "Go meet your guests, Pres. I'll make your canapes. It's all I'm good for" He kissed her once, with compassion, then turned toward the living room and opened the front door. Instantly a fountain of telehouse, followed by the guests. The Esper party began. Canapes? Thanks, delicious. Mary, they're Canapes? Frankly, Ellery, I don't think We you'll Brought be Galen working along for to Sacrament help him celebrate. much He's longer, just The taken his Guild Exam is and just been about classed #nd. Whf. yes, T#, I'm treating D'Courtney. I expect him town very shortly? If you're interested, Powell, we're ready to run rule you Sacrament's for Guild President. espionage unethical. Canapes? Why, yes. kins ! Chervil! T#! Have a heart! Will you people take a look at the Thought Pattern ?) we've been weaving?" The TP chatter stopped. The guests burst into laughter. " This reminds me of my days in the kindergarten. A little mercy for your host, please. I'll jump my tracks if we keep on weaving Thank you, Mary . , . this mishmash. Let's have some order. I don't even ask for beauty." " Just name the pattern, Pres." " What'll you have?" "Woven pattern? Math curves P Music? Architectural design?" " Anything . Anything. Just so long as you don't make my brairw itch." as Sorry. Preston, We T#, thought but Alan I'm Seaver Not that a Pres was at coming liberty but To be generous. I reveal don't anything TP about him D" Courtney is arriving yet laughter when Mary Noyes was left hanging with that unaeticulated "yet." She blushed with embarrassment and fought to conceal the wave of shame and humiliation linked with Powell's rejection that swept up from the lower levels of her mind. Fortunately, the doorbell chimed again, and Alan Seaver (Solar Equity Advocate #) entered with a girl. She was a demure little thing, surprisingly attractive outwardly, and new to the company. Her Thought Pattern was naive and not deeply responsive. Obviously a #rd. " Abject apologies ior the delay. Orange blossoms  wedding rings are the excuse. I proposed on the way over. This is Helen Post." "And I'm afraid I accepted," Helen said, smiling nervously. " Don't talk," Seaver shot at her "This isn't a #rd Class brawl. a weren't party-minded Enough Esper men remaining ever elected still unmarried can ruin feel Al's a man to loa the Guild's entire eugenic according to plan I told you not to use words" "I forgot," she blurted again, and then heated the room with her fright and shame. While Seaver glared at her, Powell stepped forward, took the girl's trembling hand and flooded her mind with warm acceptance. " Ignore him, Helen. He's a # ndcome-lately snob. I'm Preston Powell, your host. I Sherlock lor the cops. If Alan beats you, I'll help him regret it. Come and meet your fellow telepathic freaks... He conducted her around the room. " This is Gus T #, a quack-one. Next to him, Sam S' Sally kins. Sam's another of the same. She's a babysitter-two... " Sherlock can't pro nou nc Child Psychologist. You're the prettiest girl I've ever seen, Helen. I'm sending green threats to Sam, who' d . better stop kissing you right now." "Th-thank -- I mean, thank you." In one lightning TP broadcast, Powell and kins engaged in comedy mental combat for the girl's favors, while Seaver served them with summonses hnd Sally rubbed two Boy Scouts together to set both rivals on fire and destroy them. The girl giggled and began to relax. " That fat man sitting on the floor is Wally Chervil, labor-two. The blonde sitting in his lap is June, his wife. June's an editortwo. That's their son, Galen, talking to Ellery West. Gally's a tech-undergrad-three... Young Galen Chervil indignantly started to point out that he'd just been classed #nd and hadn't needed to use words in over a year. Powell cut him off below the girl's perceptive threshold and explained the reason for the deliberate mistake -- he didn't want her to feel lost among all #nds and Ists. "Oh," said Galen. "Yep, brother and sister #rds, that's us, Miss Post. And am I glad you're here! These deep peepers were beginning to scare me." "I was scared at first, but I'm not any more." "And this is your hostess, Helen. Mary Noyes." "Hello, Helen. Canapes? "Thank you. They look delicious, Mrs. Powell ." "Now how about a game?" Powell interposed quickly. "Anybody feel like playing Rebus?" the limestone arch, Jeremy Church pressed against the garden door of Powell's house, listening with all his soul. He was cold, silent, immobile and starved. He was resentful, hating, contemptuous and starved. He was an Esper Bar # and starved. The bar sinister of ostracism was the source of his hunger. Through the thin maple panel filtered the multiple Thought Pattern of the party, a weaving, ever-changing, exhilarating design. And Church, Esper Bar #, living on a diet of words for the past ten years, was starved for his real communication. "The reason I mentioned D' Courtney is that I've just coma across a case that might be similar." That was T#, sucking up t kins. "Oh, really? Very interesting. I'd like to compare notes. Too bad D' Courtney won't -- well, bm available." kins was being discreet and it smelled as though T# was after something. Maybe not, but there certainly was some elegant block and counter-blocking going on, like duelists fencing with complicated electrical circuits. jy "Look here, Al, I think you've been pretty snotty to that poor tirl" Powell, who'd had him ostracized, preaching down his big nose at the lawyer. "Poor girl? You mean dumb girl, Pres. My God! How gauche can you get?" " She's only a #rd, Al. Be fair." "She gives me a pain." "Do you think it's decent, marrying a girl when you feel that way about her?" "Don't be a romantic ass, Pres. We've got to marry peepers.  may as well settle for a pretty face."  They were playing Rebus in the living room. The Noyes girl was busy building a camouflaged image with some old poem: The vast, aea ' and K Glimmering calm stand. tonight. England The out of in the tide tranquil bay. Cliffs Come to the window is sweet is the night the air. Only full. from the gone; long line the of spray is moon and lies Gleams lair light Upon the straits; -- on the French coast the St What the devil was that? An eye in a glass? Not a glass. A stein. Eye in a stein. Einstein. Easy. "What d'you think of Powell for the job, Ellery?" That was Chervil with his phony smile and his pontifical belly. "For Guild President?" "Yes" " Damned efficient man . Romantic but efficient. The perfect candidate if he'd only get married." " That's the romance in him. He's having trouble locating a girl" " Don't alt you deep peepers? Thank God I'm not a lstf." And then a smash of glass crashing in the kitchen and Preacher Powell again, lecturing little T#. " Never mind the glass, Gus.  had to drop it to cover for you. You're radiating anxiety like ah FO star." , " The hell I am, Powell." " The hell you're not. What's all this about Ben Reich?" The little swine was really terrified. You could feel it blazing under the block he quickly erected... "Ben Reich? What brought him up?" "You did, Gus. It's been moiling in your preconscious all evening. I couldn't help latching on to it." "Not me, Powell. You must bm tuning another TP." Image of a horse laughing. " Powell , I swear I'm not -- " "Are you mixed up with Reich , Gus?" "No." But you could feel the blocks bang down solidly into place. "Well, take a hint from an old hand. Reich can get you into trouble. Be careful. Remember Jerry Church? Reich ruined him. Don't let it happen to you." The pigmy skedaddled and Preacher Powell remained in the kitchen, calm and slow-moving, sweeping up broken glass while Church lay frozen against the back door, suppressing the hatred, seething in his heart. The Chervil boy was showing off for the lawyer's girl, singing a love ballad and paralleling it with a visual parody. College stuff. The wives were arguing violently in sine curves. kins and West were interlacing cross-conversation in a fascinatingly intricate pattern of sensory images that made his starvation keener. "Would you like a drink, Jerry?" The garden door opened. Powell stood silhouetted in the light, a bubbling glass in his hand. The stars lit his face softly. The deep hooded eyes were compassionate and understanding. Dazed, Church climbed to his feet and timidly look the proffered drink. " Don't report this to the Guild. I'd catch hell for breaking the taboo. Poor Jerry... We've got to do something for you. Ten years is too long." Church hurled the drink in Powell's face, then turned and fled, weeping invisible tears of anger and self-pity IV A T nine the next morning, T#'s mannequin face appeared on the screen of Reich's phone. "Is this line secure?" he asked sharply. Reich pointed to the Warranty Seal. "All right," T# said. "I think I've done the job for you. I peeped kins last night. Before I report, I must warn you -- there's a chance of error When you deeppeep a #st. kins blocked pretty carefully." "He would, of course." "Craye D'Courtney arrives from Mars on the Astra next Wednesday morning. He will go at once to the home of Maria Beaumont, where he will be a secret and hidden guest for exactly one night." "One night," Reich repeated. "And then? His plans?" "I don't know. Apparently D'Courtney is planning some form of drastic action -- " "Against me!" "Perhaps. According to kins, D'Courtney is under some kind of violent strain and his adaptation pattern is shattering. The Life Instinct and Death Instinct have defused. He is regressing under the emotional bankruptcy very rapidly..." "My life depends on this," Reich raged. "Talk straight." "Every man is a balance of two opposed drives -- the Life Instinct and the Death Instinct. Both drives have the identical purpose, to win Nirvana. The Life Instinct fights for Nirvana by smashing all opposition. The Death Instinct attempts to win Nirvana by destroying itself. Usually both instincts fuse in the adapted individual. Under strain, they defuse. That's what's happening to D'Courtney." "Yes, by God! And he's jetting for me!" "kins will see D'Courtney Thursday morning in an effort to dissuade him frofti whatever he contemplates kins is afraid of it and determined to stop it." "He won't have to stop it. I'll stop it myself. It's self-deftnse, T#,.not murder! You've done a good job." "This is Monday. 'You'll have to be ready by Wednesday." "I'll be ready," Reich assured him grimly. "You'd better be ready too." "I've reconsidered,' T# said. "This is as far as I care to go." "The hell you say." "I've given you your essential information. Your Intelligence, you called it. I've been paid. We'll call it quits." "Look," Reich said ominously. "I can't swing it alone and you know it. That was the understanding. I need you to cover for me at Maria Beaumont's house next Wednesday. I'll need you for the cops afterward. I told you it was a ten week job. One day for the kill and sixty-nine days to cover." "I'm sorry," T# said. "I can't do it." "You don't know how sorry you're going to be," Reich answered. He flipped the Warranty Seal and it clattered off the line. It was really an astonishing counterfeit, and the mere possession of it could make extraordinary difficulties if reported to the government. Reich pointed to the recording crystal. "Want to hear the playback?" T#'s face turned livid. "You contemptible fool! You recorded this conversation? You -- " "It'll stay recorded until we've finished the job. Then I'll send you the crystal and a hammer." "If the police ever -- it'll mean Demolition. Don't you realize that?" "Demolition for both of us. Yes, I realize that." Reich's voice began to crack. "You little louse! Do you think I'm going to let anything stand between me and that bastard's blood? Anything?" He managed to take hold of himself. "You're in this all the way with me, and I'm in it straight to the finish... one way or the other. Don't forget the strain I'm under. I'm starting to defuse too."--day, audaciously, bravely, with confidence. He planned as a story is plotted or a song is sketched. He penciled the outlines as an artist fills a sheet with delicate tracery before the bold inking-in; but he did no final inking. That was to be left for the. killerinstinct on Wednesday night. He put the plan away and slept Monday night... and awoke screaming, dreaming of The Man With No Fadfc. But Tuesday morning he reexamined the plan and was satisfied. It was audacious, brave, confident. One trick to make himself invisible for the attack on D'Courtney; one time-machine to banish all defense out of the continuum; one ingenious deception to rob all peepers of their dangerous telepathic perception; one final, inexplicable murderous blow to destroy his enemy forever. Tuesday afternoon, Reich left Sacrament Tower early and dropped in at the Winter Studios on Sheridan Place. A two-century zigzag progression led from the old book store via: pornographic literature -- pornographic Pantys -- legitimate Pantys -- industrial Pantys -- industrial research -- planetary research -- and Planetary Conditioning to the giant block of buildings where would-be colonists were inducted and trained for survival in the strange new environments which they would encounter. "I'm trying to survive too," Reich muttered. "But I'm already conditioned for it." For sentimental reasons, the old Winter book store was still maintained in an alley between two of the colossal buildings. It also served as a space and light saver, and was a quaint landmark with its ancient Donaldson Resistance Hedge, ft specialized mostly in piezo-electric recordings, tiny crystals mounted in elegant settings. The latest vogue was brouche-operas for M'lady. ("She Shall Have Music Wherever She Goes.") Winter also had shelves of fascinating old books. "I want something special for a ' nd I've neglected," Reich told i ' r ':rT:an. He was immediately bombarded with merchandise and suggestions. "Not special enough," he complained. "Why don't you people hire a peeper and save your clients this trouble?" He began sauntering around the shop, tailed by a retinue of eager clerks. After he had dissembled sufficiently, and before the worried manager could send out for an emergency peeper salesman, Reich stopped before the bookshelves. "What's this?" he inquired, looking surprised. "Antique books, Mr. Reich." The sales staff began explaining what books were and how they used to be produced, while Reich slowly examined his way toward the tattered brown volume that was his goal. He remembered it well. He had glanced through it five years ago and made a note of one particular device in his little black opportunity book. Old Geoffrey Reich wasn't the only Reich who believed in preparedness. "Interesting. What's this one?" Reich pulled down the brown volume. "Let's Play Party by Shirley Noyes. What's the date on it? You mean to say they had parties that long ago?" The staff assured him that the ancients were very modern in many astonishing ways. "Look at the contents," Reich chuckled. " 'Honeymoon Bridge'... 'Prussian Whist'... 'Post Office... Sardine What in the world could that be? Page ninetysix. Let's have a look." Reich flipped pages until he came to a bold-face heading: he laughed, pointing to the wellremembered paragraph. One player is selected to be It. AH the lights are extinguished and the It hides anywhere in the house. Adtcr a few minutes, the players go to find the It, hunting separately. The first one who finds him does not reveal the fact, but hides with him wherever he is. Successively, each player finding the Sardines joins them until all are hidden in one place and the last player who is the loser is left to wander alone in the dark. "I'll take it," Reich said. "This is just the thing for mu -- for my friend." hours carefully defacing the remains of the volume. With heat, acid, stain and scissors, he mutilated the game instructions, and every burn, every cut, every slash was a blow at D'Courtney's writhing body. When his proxy murders were finished, he had reduced every game to incomplete fragments. Only 'Sardine' was left intact. Reich wrapped the book, addressed it to try, the appraiser, and dropped it into the airslot. It went off with a puff and a bang and returned an hour later with try's official sealed appraisal. Reich's mutilations had not been suspected of being anything but the deterioration of ages. He had the book gift-wrapped with the appraisal enclosed, as was the custom, and slotted it to Maria Beaumont's house. Twenty minutes later came the reply, obviously written by herself: "Darling! I thot you'd forgotten litle ol sexy me. How # divine. Come to Beaumont House tonite. Were haveing a party. We'l play games from you're sweet gift." There was a portrait of Maria centered in the star of a synthetic ruby enclosed in the message capsule. Reich answered: "Devastated. is missing." She answered: "Wenesday, you clever boy, I'll give you one of mine." He replied: "Delighted to accept. Will bring guest. I kiss all of yours." He went to bed. And screamed at The Man With No Face.  Reich visited the laboratory department of Sacrament -- "Paternalism, you know" -- and spent a stimulating hour with the bright young men. He discussed their work and their glowing futures if they would only have faith in Sacrament. He told the old dirty joke about the neurotic pioneer who made the emergency landing on Joan Turnbul's starship -- and the corpse said: "I'm just one of the tourists!" -- and the bright young men laughed subserviently. feeling slightly contemptuous of the boss. This enabled Reich to drift into the Restricted Room unnoticed and pick up one of the Rhodopsin Ionizers, a cube of copper half the size of a fulminating cap, but twice as deadly as a time-machine. There would be a stink if the loss was noted in the weekly inventory, and one of the bright young men might have trouble with government inspectors and acquire a sentence; but by that time D'Courtney would be dead and rotting. Wednesday afternoon, Reich went over to Melody Lane in the heart of the Panty district and called on Psych-Songs, Inc. There was a clever young woman there who had written some brilliant jingles for Sales and some effective strikebreaking songs for Propaganda back when Sacrament needed everything to smash that labor fracas in the Asteroid Belt. Duffy Wyg, her name was, and she insisted that Duffy wasn't a nickname. Had been in the family for years. "Well, Duffy?" He kissed her casually. She was pretty as a planet, but a trifle too young. "Well, Mr. Reich? Still wearing that hideous tweed? No woman to guide you." She looked at him oddly. "Some day I'm going to hire one of those Lonely Heart Peepers to case your kiss. I keep thinking you don't mean business." "I don't." "You dog." "A man has to make up his mind early, Duffy. If he kisses girls, he kisses his money goodby." "You kiss me." "Only because you're the image of the lady on the sovereign." "Pip," she said. "Pop," he said. "Bim," she said. "Bam," he said. "I'd like to kill the gimp-head who invented that exchange," Duffy said revoltedly. "All right, handsome. What's your problem?" "Gambling," Reich said. "Ellery West, my Rec director, is complaining about the gambling in Sacrament. Says there's too much. Personally, I don't care." "Keep a man in debt and he's afraid to ask for a raise." "You're entirely too smart, young lady." "So you want a no-gambletype song?" "Something like that. Catchy. Not too obvious. More a delayed action than a straight propaganda tune. I'd like the conditioning to be more or less unconscious."  Duffy nodded and made quick notes. "And please make it a tune worth hearing. #'U, be listening to God kqows how many people singing and whistling and humming it." "You louse. All my tunes are worth hearing." "Once." "That's a thousand extra on my bill." Reich laughed. "Speaking of monotony..." "Which we weren't." "What's the most persistent tune you ever wrote?" "Persistent?" "You know what I mean. Like those advertising jingles you can't get out of your head." "Oh, Pepsis, we call 'em." "Why?" "They say because the first one was'written centuries ago for the primitive radio and TV they had then by a character named Pepsi. Well, maybe. I don't know. I wrote one once..." Duffy winced in recollection. "Hate to think of it even now. It haunted me for a year." "You're rocketing." "Scout's honor, Mr. Reich. It was Tenser, Said the Tensor. I wrote it for that Panty about the crazy mathematician. They wanted nuisance value and they sure got it. People got so sore, they had to withdraw the Panty. Lost a fortune." "Let's hear it." "I couldn't do that to you." "Come on, Duffy. I'm curious." "You'll regret it." "I don't believe you." "All right, pig." she said, and pulled the multivox panel toward her. "This pays you back for the flabby kiss." Her fingers and palms slipped gracefully over the panel. A tune filled the room with agonizing, unforgettable banality. It was the quintessence of every musical cliche Reich had ever heard. No matter what melody you tried to remember, it invariably led down the path of familiarity to Tenser, Said the Tensor. Then Duffy began to sing in an excruciating little voice: Eight, sir; seven, sir; Six, sir; five, sir; Four, sir; three, sir; Two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension And dissension have begun. "Oh, my God!" Reich exclaimed. "I've got some real clever-up tricks in that tune," Duffy said, still playing. "Notice the beat after 'one?' That's a semicadence. Then you get another beat after 'begun.' That turns the encT of the song into a semi-cadence, too, so you can't ever end it. The beat keeps you running in circles, like: Tension, apprehension and Tension, apprehension and dission, appre -- " "Duffy!" Reich protested. "Another thing," she continued blandly. "There are thirteen syllables in the last two lines. You'd be surprised at the subconscious symbolic effect. Count them. Tension, apprehension and dissen -- " Reich started to his feet, pounding his palms on his ears. "How long is this affliction going to last?" "Not less than a month." "Tension, apprehension and diss -- I'm ruined. Isn't there any way out?" "Sure," Duffy said. "It's easy. Just ruin me." She pressed herself against him and planted an earnest young kiss. "Lout," she murmured. "Pig. Boob. Dolt. When are you going to drag me through the gutter? Clever up, dog. Why aren't you as smart as I think you are?" "I'm smarter," he said, and left. The song established itself firmly in his mind and echoed painfully all the way down to the street. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension and dissension have block for a non-Esper to use. What peeper could get past that? Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. "Much smarter." muttered Reich, and took a Jumper to Jeremy Church's pawnshop on the upper west side. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. pawnbroking is undoubtedly the oldest profession. It extends from the depths of the past to the uttermost reaches of the future, as unchanging as the pawnbroker's shop itself. You walked into Jeremy Church's cellar store, which was crammed and littered with the debris of time, and you were in a museum of eternity. And even Church himself, wizened, peering, his face blackened and bruised by the internal blows of suffering, was the very Ur-type or final evocation of humanity. Church shuffled out of the shadows and came face to face with Reich, standing starkly illuminated in a patch of sunlight slanting across the counter. He did not start. He did not acknowledge Reich's identity. Brushing past the man who was his mortal enemy, he placed himself behind the counter and said: "Yes, please?" "Hello, Jerry." Without looking up, Church extended his hand across the counter. Reich attempted to clasp it. It was snatched away. "No," Church said with a snarl that was a liaff hysterical laugh. "Not that, thank you. Just give me what you want to pawn." It was the peeper's sour little trap, and he had tumbled into it. No matter. "I haven't anything to pawn, Jerry." "As poor as that? How the mighty have fallen. But we must expect it, eh? We all fall." Church glanced sidelong at him, trying to peep him. Let him try. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. Let him get through the crazy tune rattling in his head. "All of us fall," Church said. "All of us." "I expect so. Jerry. I haven't yet. I've been lucky." "I wasn't lucky," the peeper said bitterly. "I met you." "Jerry," Reich said patiently. "I've never been your bad luck. It was your own luck that ruined you. Not -- " "You bastard," Church said with a horrible lack of emphasis. "You cheating, lying, rotten cannibal. Get out of here. I want nothing to do with you." "Not even my money?" Reich withdrew ten crisp ten sovereign notes from his pocket and placed them on the counter. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun... "I want your heart cut open. the ground, I want the maggots eating the eyes out of your living head. I don't want your money." "Then what do you want, Jerry?"  "I told you!" the peeper screamed. "Your freezing blood!" "What do you want, Jerry?" Reich repeated, keeping his eyes on the  wizened man. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. He could still control Church. It didn't matter that Church had been a #nd, for c#ntrol wasn't a question of peeping; it was a question of personality. Eight, sir; seven, sir; six, sir; five, sir... He always had and always would control Church. "What do you want?" Church asked sullenly. Reich snorted. "You're the peeper. You tell me." "I can't read it. There's crazy music mixing everything up." "Then I'll have to tell you. I want a gun." "A what?" "G-U-N. Gun. Ancient weapon. It propels projectiles by explosion." "I haven't anything like that." "Yes, you do, Jerry. Keno Quixzard mentioned it to me some time ago. He saw it. Steel and collapsible. Very interesting antique." "What do you want it for?" "Read me, Jerry, and find out. I haven't anything to hide. It's all quite innocent." Church screwed up his face, then quit in disgust. "You won't stick me with that nagging tune." He shuffled off into the shadows. There was a distant slamming of metal drawers, then the sharp crack of a split protective bulb. Church returned with a compact nodule of tarnished steel and placed it on the counter alongside the money. He pressed a stud and the lump of metal sprang open into steel knucklerings, revolver and stiletto. "What do you want it for?" Church asked again. "You're hoping it's something that can lead to blackmail, eh?" Reich smiled. "Sorry. It's a gift." "A dangerous gift." The peeper gave him that sidelong glance of snarl and laugh. "Ruination for someone else, eh?" "Not at all, Jerry. It's a gift for a friend of mine. Dr. T#." "T#!" Church stared at him. "Do you know him? He collects old things." "I know him." Church began to chuckle asthmatically. "But I'm beginning to know him better. I'm beginning to feel sorry for him." He stopped laughing and shot a penetrating glance at Reich. "Of course! This will make a lovely gift for Gus. A fine gift for Gus. Because it's loaded." "Oh? Is it?" "Five lovely cartridges. A gift for Gus." He touched a cam. A cylinder snapped out of the side of the gun, displaying five chambers filled with brass cartridges. He looked from the cartridges to Reich. "Five serpent's teeth to give to Gus." "I told you this was innocent," Reich said in a hard voice. "We'll have to pull those teeth," Church stared at him in astonishment, then began to nod mischievously. "We will, we will," he chirped in a strangely delighted voice. He trotted down the aisle and returned with two small tools. "A gift for Gus," he chanted, almost hysterically. "A gift for nice little, rich little, happy little Gus." Quickly he wrenched each of the metal slugs from the cartridges. He slid the cases back into the chambers, snapped the cylinder home and then placed the gun alongside the money. "All safe," he said brightly. "Safe for dear little Gus." He looked at Reich expectantly. Reich extended both hands. With one he pushed the money toward Church, with the other he drew the gun toward himself. At that instant, Church changed again. The air of chirpy evil left him. He grasped Reich's wrists with iron claws and bent across the counter with bla # ing intensity. "No, Ben," he said, using the name for the first time. "That isn't the price. You know it. Despite that crazy song in your head, I know you know it." "All right, Jerry," Reich said steadily, never relaxing his hold on the gun. "What is the price?" "It isn't money. You know that. There's been too much passed between us for money to pass again." "What do you want, Jerry?" "I know Gus is working for you." "You didn't get that from me." "I got it at Pres -- never mind where I got it; I know. You're cooking something poisonous for Gus, aren't you? Something like you cooked for me." "With a harmless gun? You removed the poison yourself, Jerry. Remember that." "In case I'm asked?" "Why should anyone ask?" "I don't care what you do to Gus. I care about what you do for me." "What do you want? What's the price?" "I want to be reinstated," the ostracized peeper said. "I want to get back into the Guild. I want to be alive again. That's the price." "What can I do? I'm not a peeper. I don't belong to the Guild." "You got to me. You got to T#. You could get to the Guild. You could have me reinstated." "Impossible." "You can bribe, blackmail, intimidate... bless, dazzle, fascinate. You can do it, Ben. You can do it for me. Help me, Ben. I helped you once." "I paid through the nose for that help." "And I? What did I pay?" the peeper screamed. "I paid with my life!" "You paid with your stupidity." "For God's sake, Ben, help me! Help me or kill me. I just haven't the guts to commit suicide." "I haven't got that price in my pocket, Jerry. Nobody has." "All right. Listen." Church tightened his grasp on Reich's wrists and leaned farther forward. "Here's what you can do. Go to the police. Go to Preston Powell. Tell him what really happened in the Chaos Swindle. It'll be a confession, but you'll get off, Ben. A big man like you can always get off. And I'll be cleared. I can get back into the Guild. What do you say?"  V After a pause, Reich said brutally: "I think the best thing for you, Jerry, would be suicide." The peeper flung himself back as though he had suddenly been scorched. "Now tell me the price," Reich said. Deliberately, Church spat on the money. "There will be no charge," he said, and turned and disappeared into the shadows of the cellar. reasons lost in the misty confusion of the late #th Century, the Pennsylvania Station in New York City was, unknown to millions of travelers, a link in time. Commuters hurtling down the east escalators to the terminal floor rarely looked up at the towering interior columns and groined vaults. Those tourists M who gaped and gasped rarely knew that all this had been before. They could not know that it would be again. The interior of the giant terminal was a replica of the mighty Baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome. So also was the sprawling mansion of Maria Beaumont, known to her thousand most intimate enemies as The Gilt Corpse. As Ben Reich glided down the east ramp with Dr. T# at his side and murder in his pocket, he communicated with his senses in stacatto spurts. The sight of the mob on the floor below... the glitter of uniforms, of dress, of phosphorescent flesh, of beams of pastel light swaying on stilt legs... The sound of voices, of music, of annunciators, of echoes... The kinesthetic squeeze of his 'chest in a clash of hatred and terror... Tension, apprehension and dissension... The wonderful potpourri, the scent of flesh and perfume, of food, of wine, of gilt ostentation . , . Tension, apprehension... The gilt trappings of death, of Something which had failed for seventy years. A lost art... as lost as phlcbotamy, chterurgy, alchemy... He'd bring death back. Not the hasty, crazy kilting of the psychotic, the brawler, the deliberate, planned -- "For God's sake?" T# muttered. "Be careful, man. Your murder's showing. Eight, sir; seven, sir... "That's better. Here's one of the peeper secretaries. He just wants to rub elbows with the mighty, but keep singing." A slender, willowy young man, all gush, all cropped golden hair, all violet blouse and silver culottes: "Dr. T#I Mr. Reich!. I'm speechless. Actually." Six, sir; five, sir... T# shook hands with the secretary. "Hello, Glass. Nice seeing you. Miss you at the Guild meetings." " love you for saying it, hut I hate you because you don't mean it." The peeper glanced at Reich curiously. " Whatever is going on in Mr. Reich's mind?" " Some idiotic song plaguing him. Like those ad jingles." " Or that old story of Mark Iain's about the poem that haunted him? You know -- Conductor, when you receive m fare. Punch in the presence of the passenjare! A blue trip slip for an eightcent fare , A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare. A pink trip slip for a threecent tare , Punch in the presence of the pasaenjare! Chorus Punch, brothers! punch with c are! Punch in the presence of the patsenjarer II  Exactly . Reich's got himself infected the same way ." "You mean the great man's actually human?" " Superhuman ." T# darted a glance of respect mixed with malice at his dragooning employer. Plunging into the pools of guests was like diving into a tropical aquarium. Swirls of glitterof gilt comestables like white and cold coral islands. Voices like bubbles, all tinkle and pop. The ceaseless ground-swell of the party heaving in quick tides around the celebrities. Maria Beaumont clove through the waters, arms outstretched, eyes outstretched, bosom outstretched... her body transformed by pneumatic surgery into an exaggerated East Indian figure with puffed hips, puffed calves and puffed gilt breasts. "Ben, darling creature!" She embraced him with pneumatic intensity. "It's too too wonderful." "It's too too plastic, Maria." "Have you found that lost million yet?" "Just laid hands on it now." "Be careful, audacious lover. I'm having every morsel of this divine party recorded." Over her shoulder, Reich shot a glance at T#, hovering like an escort destroyer. T# shook his head reassuringly. "Come and meet everybody; who's everybody," Maria said. She took his arm. In her pea-hen whisper, she shrilled: "We'll have ages for ourselves later." The lights in the groined vaults overhead changed again and shifted up the spectrum. The costumes changed color. Skin that had glowed pink now shone with eerie luminescence. Symon Zigerra... Jeanny Wonchalk... Tom Moyse, still hating him for that dirty trick at the Tycho Conference... Gloria Blomefield, Jr., still as sensual as that September weekend when he took the Blomefield formula from her by resisting her... Bill Winter, still pleading for justice with bis silent, terrified eyes... Bart Van Tuerk... Edmund Barr, who had to be blackmailed out of that Sacrament expose... Toni Asj, still wearing that diamond he gave her when she submitted to degradation to buy back those shares of the Stellar Syndicate. She never got the shares, but she had the diamond. She attributed her degeneracy to him, he'd heard. On his left flank, T# gave the prearranged signal: Danger! Tension, apprehension and dission, apprehension and dissent ion have begun... Maria was introducing another #  lad, all gush, all cropped copper hair, all fuchsia blouse and Prussian blue culottes. "Larry Ferar, Ben. My other social secretary. Larry's been dying to meet you." Four, sir; three, sir... "Mr. Reich! But too thrilled. I can't utter word one." Two, sir; one ! The young man accepted Reich's smile and moved on. Still circling in convoy, T# gave Reich a reassuring nod. Again the overhead lights changed. Portions of the guests' costumes appeared to dissolve. Reich, who had never succumbed to the fashion of wearing ultra-violet windows in his clothes, stood secure in his opaque suit, watching with contempt the quick, roving eyes around him. T# signaled: Danger! Tenser, said the Tensor... Glass appeared at Maria's elbow. "Madame," he lisped, "a slight contretemps." "What is it?" "The Chervil boy. Galen Chervil." T#'s face constricted. "What about him?" Maria peeped through the crowd. "Left of the fountain. An impostor, madame. I have peeped him He has no invitation. He's a college student. He bet he could crash the party. He intends to steal a picture of you as proof." "Of me?" Maria said, staring through the windows in young Chervil's clothes. "What does he think of me?" "Well, madame, he's extremely difficult to probe. I think he'd like to steal more from you than your picture." "Oh, would he?" Maria cackled. "He would, madame. Shall he be removed?" "No." Maria glanced once more at the formidable young man, then turned away. "He'll get his proof." "And it won't be stolen," Reich said. "Jealous!" she squawked. "Let's dine." In response to T#'s urgent sign, ' v Reich stepped aside momentarily, v "Reich, you've got to give it up." "You're crazy! Why should I?" , "The Chervil boy." "What about him?" "He's a #nd." "Damn!" met him at Powell's last Sunday. Maria Beaumont never invites peepers to her house. I'm only in on your pass. I was depending on that." "And this kid has to crash!" "Give it up, Reich." . "Maybe I can stay away from him." "Reich, I can block the social secretaries; they're only #rds. But I can't guarantee to handle them and a #nd, even if he is only a hid. He's young and he may be too nervous to do any clever peeping. But I can't promise." "I'm not quitting," Reich growled. "I'll never get a chance like this again. Even if I knew I could, I wouldn't quit. I couldn't. I've got the stink of D'Courtney in my nostrils. I -- " "Then we'd better Have the Chervil boy bounced." "Not a chance. You saw the way she looked him over." "What are you going to do?" "Go through with it, damn you!" "You'll never -- " Reich turned his scowl full on T#'s nervous face. "I know you're looking for a chance to squirm out of this, you little bastard. But you won't. We're trapped in this together, right down the line, all the way to Demolition." He shaped his distorted face into a frozen smile and rejoined his hostess on a couch alongside one of the tables. It was still the custom to feed each other at these affairs, but the gesture that had originated in Oriental courtesy and generosity had degenerated into erotic play. The morsels of food were accompanied by tongue touched to fingers and were as often offered between the lips. Reich endured it all with a seething impatience, waiting for the vital word from T#. Part of T#'s Intelligence work was to locate D'Courtney's hiding place in the house. He watched the little peeper drift through the crowd of diners, probing, prying, searching, until he at last returned with a negative shake of his head and gestured toward Maria Beaumont. Clearly, Maria was the only source of information, and she was too obsessed to be easily probed. It was another in a neverending series of crises that had to be met by the killerinstinct. Between the Truite Au Bleu and the Saucisses Au Vin Blanc, Reich arose and crossed toward the fountain. T# intercepted him. "What are you up to, Reich?" "Isn't it obvious? Get the Chervil boy off her mind." "Reich, don't go near that boy !" "Get out of my way." Reich radiated a burst of savage compulsion that made the peeper recoil. He signaled in fright and Reich tried to control himself. "It's taking chances, I know, but the odds aren't as long as you think. In the first place, he's young and green. In the second place, he's a crasher and scared. In the third place, he can't be flying full jets or he wouldn't have let the secretaries peep him so easily." #S "Have you got any conscious control? Can you double-think?" "I've got that song on my mind and enough trouble to make double-thinking a pleasure. Now get the hell out of the way and stand by to peep Madame, The Gilt Corpse." alongside the fountain, clumsily attempting to appear to belong. "Pip," said Reich. "Pop" said Chervil. "Bim," said Reich. "Bam," said Chervil. With the formality of slang disposed of, Reich eased himself down alongside the boy. "I'm Ben Reich." "I'm Gaily Chervil. I mean Galen. I -- " He was visibly impressed by the name of Reich. Tension , apprehension and distension... "That damned song." Reich muttered. "Heard it for the first time the other day. Can't get it out of my mind. Eight, sir; seven, sir; six, sir; five -- Oh, for God's sake! Talk to me, Chervil, before I go crazy." "What should I talk about?" "Ever been in The Gilt Corpse before?" "Do you mean the house?" "Pop," grinned Reich. "Pip," smiled the boy. "She knows you're a phony." "No!" Reich nodded. Tension, apprehension... "Should I start running?" "Without the picture?" "You know about that too? There must be a peeper around." "Two of them. Her social secretaries. People like you are their job." "What about that picture, Mr. Reich? I've got fifty dollars riding on it. You ought to know what a bet means. You're a gamb -- I mean, financier." "Glad I'm not a peeper, eh? Never mind, I'm not insulted. See that arch? Go straight through and turn right. You'll find a study. The walls are lined with Maria's portraits, all in synthetic stones. Help yourself. She'll never miss one." The boy leaped up, scattering food off his lap. "Thanks, Mr. Reich. Some day I'll do you a favor." "Such as?" "You'd be surprised. I happen to be a -- " He caught himself and blushed. "You'll find out, sir. Thanks again." He began weaving his way across the floor toward the north arch. Four, sir; three, sir ; two, sir; one ! Reich returned to his hostess. "Naughty lover," she said. "Who've you been feeding? I'll tear her eyes out." "The Chervil boy," Reich answered. "He asked me where you keep your pictures." "Ben! You didn't tell him!" "Sure did. He's on his way to get one now. Then he'll take off. You know I'm jealous." She leaped from the couch and waddled north. "Bam," said Reich. Y eleven o'clock, the ritual of dining had aroused the company to a point of intensity that required solitude and darkness. Maria Beaumont had never failed her guests, and tonight Reich hoped The Gilt Corpse would not fail him when T# appeared, looking pleased and yet worried. "I don't know how you got away with it," T# whispered. "You're broadcasting bloodlust on every wavelength." "The kid doesn't know?" "Not a notion. You were right. He's scared... off balance." "And I know who knocked him off balance. Where's D'Courtney?" Reich grabbed T#'s arm. "Don't tell me he isn't in the house, you little roach. I can smell him waiting for me." "Reich!" T# tore his arm away. "Yes, he's here. Alone. No servants. Only two bodyguards provided by Maria. kins was right. He's dangerously sick..." "To hell with that. I'll cure him. Where is he?" "Go through the west arch. Turn right. Up the stairs. Through overpass. Turn right. Picture Gallery. Door between paintings of the Rape of Lucrece and the Rape of the Sabine Women..." "That sounds authentic." "Open the door. Up a flight of steps to an anteroom. Two guards in the anteroom. D'Courtney's inside. It's the old wedding suite her grandfather built." "The wedding suite? I like that touch." The Gilt Corpse began to clamor for attention. Flushed and shining with perspiration, standing in the glare of a pink light on the dais between the two fountains, she clapped her hands for silence: Smack, smack, smack. The moist palms beat together, and the echoes roared in Reich's ears: Death, death, death. "Darlings!" she cried. "We're going to have so much fun tonight. We're going to provide our own entertainment." A subdued groan went up from the guests and an anonymous voice called: "I'm just one of the tourists." Through the laughter, Maria said: "Naughty lovers, don't be disappointed. We're going to play a wonderful old game; and we're going to play it in the dark." The company cheered up as the overhead lights began to dim and disappear. The dais still blazed and, in the light, Maria produced a tattered volume. Reich's gift. Tension... Maria turned the pages slowly, blinking at the unfamiliar print. Apprehension... "It's a game," Maria cried, "called Sardine. Isn't that too adorable?" She took the bait. She's on the hook. In three minutes I'll be invisible. Reich touched his pockets. The disarmed gun. The Rhodopsin. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. "One player," Maria read, "is selected to be It. That's going to be me. All the lights are ex -- extinguished and the It hides." As Maria struggled through the directions, the great hall was reduced to pitch darkness with the exception of the single pink beam on the stage. "Sue -- successively, each player finding the Sardines joins them until all are hidden in one place, and the last player, who is the loser, is left to wander alone in the dark." The last light blinked out. Reich was invisible at last. He bed half an hour to slip up into the house, kill D'Courtney, and then return to the game. T# was committed to pinning the peeper secretaries out of the line of his attack. It was safe. It was fool-proof except for the Chervil boy. He had to take that chance. H E crossed the main hall and jostled into mewing bodies at the west arch. He went through the arch into the music room. The piezo crystals were resonating automatically in the background, but there were muffled dischords from an open piano as though the strings were being used for a wrestling mat. Savage and intent, Reich ignored this and turned right, groping for the stairs. A curse and a clash sounded from the piano, then shod feet ran .across the floor and somebody soft banged into him. "If you touch me," the voice of Duffy Wyg cried hysterically, 'Til kill you." Reich froze. "Duffy!" he exclaimed, and then could have torn his tongue out. "Who's that? Mr. Reich?" "Yes." Her hand touched his arm and felt the cloth. "Bless you, Mr. Reich." She leaned against him weakly. "God bless that hideous tweed." "What's the matter. Duffy? .Don't you like the gutter?" "I don't like the company." "Then go back to Melody Lane." She held tight to his arm. "This is my first and last visit. How do I get out of this sty?" "Back through the main hall and up the ramp." "I don't know which way is which. Get me out of here, Mr. Reich. I need a bodyguard." In an agony of impatient fury, he searched for excuses. A retching voice' behind him said: "Can I d-do you a favor, Mr, Reich?" "Who's that?" "A refugee. Galen Chervil. Slightly sick." Eight, sir; seven, sir; six, sir; five, sir... The Chervil boy loomed in the darkness alongside. "I had to run hard to get away from that... picture. I'm still running, between spasms. I never was happier to lose fifty dollars." Four, sir; three, sir; two, sir; one ! "I'm running too," Duffy said. "Just babes in the woods," Chervil said. "High-life. Pfoo! Let's run together." "Do you know the way out in the dark?" Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. "I can find it. Give me 'your hand, Duffy." "How do you know my name?" "Oop. Slip of the mind. Not myself tonight. Coming with us, Mr. Reich?" Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. "No," Reich choked. "Wish I could. Impossible. You two kids get out of here. Jet!" They scuttled off in the dark. At the foot of the stairs he was forced to climb over a barrier of bodies with octopus arms that tried to pull him down. He ascended the stairs, seventeen eternal steps, and felt his way through a close tunnel overpass papered with velour. Suddenly he was seized and a woman crushed herself against him. "Hello, Sardine," she whispered in his ear. "Ow!" she exclaimed, feeling the hard outlines of the gun in his breast pocket. "What's that?" He slapped her hand away. "Clever up, Sardine," she giggled. "Get out of the can." He divested himself of her and bruised his nose against the deadend of the overpass. He turned right, opened a door and found himself in a vaulted gallery over fifty feet long. The lights were extinguished here, too, but the luminiscent paintings, glowing under ultraviolet spotlights, filled the gallery with a virulent glow. It was empty. Between a livid Lucrece and a horde of buttocky Sabine Women was a door of polished bronze. Reich stopped before it, removed the tiny Rhodopsin Ionizer from his back pocket and attempted to poise the copper tube between his thumbnail and forefinger. His hands were trembling so violently that he could not control them. His fingers steadied. He poised the Rhodopsin cap, then thrust open the bronze door, revealing nine steps mounting to an anteroom. Reich flipped his thumbnail against the copper cube as though he were trying to flip a penny to the Moon. As the Rhodopsin cap flew up into the anteroom, Reich averted his eyes. There was a cold purple flash. Reich leaped up the stairs. The two Beaumont House guards were seated on the bench where he had caught them. Their faces were " sagging, their ' visual sense destroyed, their time sense abolished, their synapses clattering in sfiort-circuited chaos. They were out of the continuum. If anyone entered and found the guards before he was finished, he was on the road to Demolition. If the guards revived before he was finished, he was on the road to Demolition. No matter what happened, it was a final gamble with Demolition. Leaving the last of his sanity behind him, Reich pushed open a jeweled door and entered the wedding suite. VI spherical room that was the heart of a giant orchid. The walls were curling orchid petals, the pillars were stamens, the floor was a golden calyx; the chairs, tables and couches were orchid and gold. But the room was old... old... the petals faded and peeling, the golden tile floor ancient and the tessellations splitting. There was an old, old man stretched on the couch, musty and wilted, like a dried weed... like the dessication of a venomous mandrake root. It was D'Courtney, stretched out like a corpse. Reich slammed the door in rage. "You can't be dead! I can't be cheated!" The faded man started up, stared, then arose painfully from the couch, his face breaking into a smile. "Still alive!" Reich cried exultantly. D'Courtney stepped toward Reich, smiling, his arms outstretched, as though welcoming a prodigal son. The smile was almost imbecile. Alarmed again, Reich growled: "Are you deaf?" The old man shook his head. "You speak English, you son of a bitch," Reich shouted. "You can hear me. You can understand me. I'm Reich. Ben Reich of Sacrament." D'Courtney nodded, still smiling. His mouth worked soundlessly. His eyes glistened with sudden tears. "What the hell is the matter with you? I'm Reich. Ben Reich! D you know me? Answ'er me." C D'Courtney shook his head and tapped his throat. His mouth worked again. Rusty sounds came; then words as faint as dust: "Ben... dear Ben... waited so long. Now . r . can't talk. My throat... can't talk." Again he attempted to embrace Reich. Bristling, Reich stepped around D'Courtney like an animal, his hackles raised, the murder boiling in his blood, the horrible images of D'Courtney's agony rushing through his congested eyes. His breath came in gasps. His heart pounded. He poised himself before D'Courtney and glared into the old man's face. D'Courtney's mouth formed the words: "Dear Ben..." "You know why I'm here. What are you trying to do -- make love to me?" His hand lashed out. The old man reeled back from the slap and fell into an orchid chair that looked like a wound. "Listen to me, you old son of a bitch." Reich followed D'Courtney and stood over him. "This payoff's been on the fire for years. Fire? Volcano? And you want to turn aside the magma with a Judas kiss?" "Ben," D'Courtney whispered in horror. "Listen, Ben... "You've been at my throat for ten years. Ten years? There was room enough for both of us. Sacrament and D'Courtney. All the room in time and space, bu you wanted my blood, my heart. The Man With No Face!" D'Courtney shook his head in bewilderment. "No, Ben. No..." "Don't call me Ben. I'm no friend of yours. Last week I gave you one more chance to wash in decency. Me. Ben Reich. I asked for armistice. Merger, My father would spit on me if he were alive. Every fighting Reich would blacken my face with contempt. But I asked for peace, didn't I? Eh?" Reich prodded D'Courtney savagely. "Didn't I?" O'Courtney's face was blanched and staring. Finally he whispered: "Yes. You asked... I accepted." "Accepted!" Reich cut in sharply. "Are these the tactics that win for you? It isn't possible, is it? The phony affection. Dear Ben. The warmth from a frozen heart. Empty stupid lies. What imbecile could swallow them?" Reich reached down and yanked D'Courtney to his feet. The old man was frail and light, but his weight bruised Reich's arm, and the touch of the old skin burned Reich's fingers. "No merger. No peace. Death. That's the choice, eh?" D'Courtney shook his head and tried to make signs. "Will you surrender?" "Yes," D'Courtney whispered. "Yes, Ben. Yes." "Liar! Protective mimicry. That's your trick. You imitate the icliots and trap us at your leisure. But not me. Never!" "I'm not... your enemy, Ben." "No," Reich spat. "You're not because you're dead. You've been dead ever since I came into this orchid coffin. Man With No Face! Can you hear me screaming for the last time? You're finished!" Reich tore the gun out of his breast pocket. He touched the stud and it opened like a red steel flower. D'Courtney backed away in horror. Reich caught the back of D'Courtney's thin neck and wrenched the head toward him. He had to fire through the open mouth for the trick to work. At that instant, one of the orchid petals swung open, and a girl burst into the room. In a catastrophic blaze of surprise, Reich saw the corridor behind her, a bedroom door standing open at the far end; the girl, yellow hair flying, dark eyes wide in alarm... a lightning flash of wild beauty. "Father!" she screamed. She ran toward D'Courtney. Reich swung quickly between them, never relaxing his hold on the old man. The girl stopped short, backed away, then darted to the left around Reich, screaming. Reich pivoted and cut viciously at her with the stiletto. She eluded him, but was driven back of the couch. Reich thrust the point of the stiletto between the old man's teeth and forced his jaws open. "No!" she cried. "No! Father!" Reich pulled the trigger. There was a muffled explosion and a gout of blood spurted from the back of D'Courtney's head. Reich let the body drop. The girl fell forward to her knees and crawled to the body. She moaned in pain as she snatched the gun from the mouth, where it had still hung. Then she crouched over the twitching body, silent, fixed, staring into the waxen face. Reich gasped for breath and beat his knuckles together painfully. When the roaring in his ears subsided, he propelled himself toward the girl, trying to arrange his thoughts and make split-second alterations in his plans. He had never counted on a witness. No one mentioned a daughter. God damn T#! Now he would have to kill the girl. He -- She leaped to her feet, darted out of his sodden grasp, ran to the jeweled door, flung it open and ran into the anteroom. As the door slowly closed, Reich had a glimpse of the guards still slumped on the bench and the girl running silently down the stairs with the gun in her hands... with Demolition in her hands. The clogged blood began # pounding through his veins again. He reached the door, ran through and tore down the steps to the picture gallery. It was empty, but the door to the overpass was just closing. And still no sound from her. Still no alarm. How long before she started screaming the house down? He raced down the gallery and entered the overpass. It was still pitch dark. He blundered through, reached the head of the stairs that led down to the music room and paused again. He went down the steps. The dark silence was terrifying. Why didn't she scream? Where was she? Reich crossed toward the west arch and knew he was at the edge of the main hall by the quiet plash of the fountains. Where was the girl? In all that black silence, where was she? And the gun! Christ! The tricked gun! A hand touched his arm. Reich jerked in alarm. T# whispered: "I've been standing by. It took you exactly -- " "You clumsy peeper!" Reich burst out. "There was a daughter! Why didn't you -- " T# muttered, "Let me peep it." After fifteen seconds of burning silence, he began to tremble. In a terrified voice he whined : "My God! Oh, my God..." His terror was the catalyst. Reich's control returned. He began thinking again. "Shut up," he growled. "It isn't Demolition yet." "You'll have to kill her too, Reich. You'll -- " "Find her first. Cover the house. You got her pattern from me. Locate her. I'Ll be waiting at the fountain. Jet!" He flung T# from him and staggered to the fountain. At the jasper rim, he bent and bathed his burning face in the water. It was sparkling burgundy. Reich wiped his face and ignored the muffled sounds that came from the other side of the basin. Evidently some persons were bathing in wine. He considered swiftly. The girl must be located and killed. At once. If she still had the gun when T# found her, the gun would be used. If she didn't? Strangle her? No, the fountain. She could be found drowned in the fountain... just another guest who had bathed in wine too long. But it had to be soon, before this damned Sardine game was ended. Where was T#? Where was the girl? T# came blundering up through the darkness, wheezing. "Well?" "She's gone." "You weren't gone long enough to find out. If this is a doublecross -- " "Whom could I cross? I'm on the same road you are. I tell you her pattern's nowhere in the house. She's gone." "Anyone notice her leave?" "No." "Out of the house!" "We'd better leave, too." "Yes, but we can't run. Once we get out of here, we'll have the rest of the night to find her, but we can't sneak out. Too suspicious. Where's Maria?" "For God's sake, Reich... "I tell you we've got to leave as though nothing's happened. Where's The Gilt Corpse?" "In the projection room." "Watching a Panty?" "No. Still playing Sardine. They're packed in there like fish in a can. We're almost the last out here in the house." "Wandering alone in the dark, eh? Come on." He gripped T#'s shaking elbow and marched him toward the projection room. As he walked, he called plaintively: "Hey, where is everybody? Maria!" T# emitted a hysterical sob. Reich shook him roughly. "Play up! We'll be out of here in five minutes. Then you can start worrying." "If they find the body before we leave, we're sunk." "Who'll find the body?" "The guards." "Not in five minutes. They're out of this world. Well out." "Servants." "They won't leave their quarters till the Sardine game is over. I tell you we'll be safe in five minutes." "But if we're trapped in here, we won't be able to get the girj. We'll -- " Gus -- audacious, brave and confident." Reich pushed open the door of the projection room. There was darkness in here, too, but the heat of many bodies. "Hey," he called. "Where is everybody? I'm all alone." No answer. "Maria, I'm all alone in the dark." A muffled sputter, then a burst of laughter. "Darling!" Maria called. "You've missed all the fun, poor dear." "Where are you, Maria? I've come to say good night." "Oh, you can't be leaving." "Sorry, dear. It's late. I've got to swindle a friend tomorrow. Where are you, Maria?" "Come up on the stage, darling." Reich walked down the aisle, felt for the steps and mounted the stage. He felt the cool perimeter df the Pantys glbe behind him. A voice called: "All right. Now we've got him. Tights!" White light flooded the globe and blinded Reich. The guests seated in the chairs around the stage started to whoop with laughter, then howled in disappointment. "Oh Ben, you cheat," Maria screeched. "You're still dressed. That isn't fair. We've been catching everybody divinely flagrante." "Some other time, Maria dear." Reich extended his hand before him and began the graceful bow of farewell. "Respectfully, madame, I give you my thanks for -- " He broke off in amazement. On the gleaming white lace of his cuff, an angry red spot appeared. In stunned silence, Reich saw a second, then a third red splotch appear. He snatched his hand back and a red drop spattered on the stage before him, to be followed by a slow, inexorable stream of crimson droplets. "That's blood!" Maria screamed. "There's someone upstairs bleeding. Ben, for heaven's sake, you csfn't leave now. Lights! Lights!" Blood -- dripping through the ceiling -- D'Courtney's blood. Not enough to fill a teaspoon yet, but Reich felt he was drowning in it. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun... Continued Next Month dead end Sparing people's feelings Is deadly. It leads to -- no feelings, no people I ning Norcross drank his soup meticulously and scooped up the vegetables at the bottom of the cup, while his attention was focused on the television screen. He watched girls swimming in formation as he gnawed the bone of his steak. He stolidly ate the baked potato with his fingers when the girls turned around, displaying "Weejees Are Best" signs pasted to their shapely backs. The final flourish was more formation swimming, where they formed a wheel under water, swimming past the camera to display in individual letters stuck to their bare midriffs: "Wonderful Weejees!" Norcross chuckled appreciatively when a fat old man swam after them with an "Is That Right?" strung across his behind. Young men followed him, each carrying a one-word card that spelled: "You -- Bet -- It's -- Right -- Don't -- Be -- Left -- Buy -- Weejees -- P The scene ended on the surface. The grotesque old man was far in back, while the young men caught the young women, and together they kicked up a cloud of spray in the disB tance, which by a trick of photography mounted to the sky and the words swept around the globe in monstrous letters: "buy weeJees!" The dessert was apple pie, and Scientist Norcross turned the screen to the "Abstractions' channel. Watching the colors and patterns form in response to the music, he finished the pie and licked his fingers appreciatively. He pressed a stud to reveal the mirror wall before he activated the molecular cleanup. Not many people would do that... It was not contrary to morals, exactly, but it was like scratching in public, and it took a scientific mind to study the human form unshaken, immediately after ingestion. There was pie on his tunic and gravy in his hair and a smear of grease from cheek to ear. With no sign of squeamishness, he smeared beet juice on his nose and studied the effect before he depressed the "Clear" stud. He stretched and stood up while the tray disappeared, then turned and glanced in the mirror again. Nothing on him. Clean. He yawned luxuriantly before he tapped the "Finish" panel on the door and stepped forth, an immaculate and well-fed gentlemen of the year #. He had a well-trained sense of humor, and a smile crossed his lips as he thought of the terror a #st Century man would feel in such an eating chamber. When he pressed the clear button, the barbarian would be clean -- really, sterilely clean -- for the first time in his life, and without clothes, too. Oh, what a jape that would be, for the molecular cleanup would immediately disintegrate such abominations as the fur of animals, and much clothing # years ago was actually made of such things as sheep, hair. He bowed to a pretty woman just entering a cubicle and thought defiantly that a scientific mind afforded much amusement. There was no illusion in his icy clear thoughts, for they were not befogged by moral questions. Manning Norcross returned to the difficult problem he had set aside while having lunch. The garden city was beautiful outside, but he gave only passing attention to the rain slithering down the huge dome of force over the buildings. He did not pause to admire the everlasting flowers in their carefully simulated beds of soil. John Davis Drumstetter was in a state of crisis again, and Scientist Norcross was worried. His fears were well founded. The young man wheeled on Scientist Norcross the minute he stepped through the hedge into the force field under the giant live oak tree. "Where are they?" he demanded. "I am coming to believe, Scientist, that your reputation is exceeded only by your inability to live up to it. The problem is only an extension of your own early work. You volunteered cooperation, and I accepted it gladly, but your, delays are very distressing!" "Johnny," said Scientist Norcross, "the press of my own experiments -- " "Then tell me you won't do it!" "I want to help you. Don't you remember the years we spent together in your training to the high calling of scientist? I took your young hand, Johnny, and helped you over the juvenile stumbling blocks. Why, your first mind machine was one I gave you, and when -- " "You're a fraud, Scientist!" said the young man bitterly. "The young never appreciate the old," sighed Norcross. "Go suck a mango!" Norcross was shocked. "There's no call for being obscene, John Davis Drumstetter," he said sternly. "To mention eating to another person, and right in public, where you might be overheard -- " "Eat a slippery, sloppery mango on television , you old fool! Smear it all over your face while you ingest it into your unspeakable digestive tract!" "John Davis Drumstetter," said the scientist with great control, "I have been your friend since you were born. Your father and I became scientists on the same day. You are young and overeager. Just remember," he finished with a warning shake of his finger, "Satellite Station One wasn't built in a day!" Drumstetter stopped his furious pacing and subdued his rage with visible effort. He chilled, like red steel hardening, and when he spoke he was in full command of himself. "Now listen to me, Norcross, and keep your mouth shut. For the past forty years I've been working on the stellar overdrive. We have the Solar System in our yeticule, colonies have been established on every planet, and ships have been sent to Alpha Centauri, with every chance that mankind has established itself in that solar system. But in the four hundred years since science emerged from the dark ages, we've managed to creep only four light years away from home! And you, Scientist, arc withholding your work on the overdrive relay. Do you understand why your plea of old friendship does not affect me? In the past two years, you've done nothing -- " "Experiments that must be At kept secret," mumbled Norcross. "And it is my belief," said the young man in a clipped, cold voice, "that you have sold yourself to your taste buds and digestive tract. Either that," and here his burning rage came into the open, "or you are a pseudo-life!" At this ultimate insult, Scientist Norcross was silent with indignation. He watched Drumstetter shrug into a stole, turn down the power to the huge mind machine, sling his reticule over his shoulder, and stalk off through the hedge. N orcross slumped into a chair, his mind in confusion. He heard Drumstetter's plane as it left the ground. Plane, he thought, his mind avoiding the problem. Plane. What a curious name, handed down through the ages, to call a swift skip powered by Earth's magnetism. An original plane fought the air, buoyed up by the lift of plane surfaces in movement. When the movement stopped, it died. Died. Death. Pseudo-life. Scientist Norcross shuddered. His well-trained sense of humor did not include abominations. He took the communication from his pocket and cleared to Prime Center. When the prim, grim face of Prime Center himself in the little disc was sharp, Norcross reported what had happened, even to the suggestion Drumstetter had made that he was pseudo-life. "This is very bad," said Prime Center. "Monica Drake Lane is novy pseudo-life, too." "God's name!" "Took her skip into a cliff in the Sierra auntains yesterday. Disconnected the anti-collision. A clear case." "What will this do to Drumstetter?" "Nothing," said Prime Center, "unless he learns." "Is she ready?" "I'm sending her to you right now for indoctrination. Reports are that Drumstetter is visiting scientists on the West Coast, and Probability reports that he may cover the world before he returns. Do you understand? Her indoctrination must be perfect." "It always has been." Norcross pulled his lip. "The same limitation will be in Monica Drake Lane?" he asked hopelessly. "Of course," said Prime Center. "We'll keep you posted on developments." "You'd better try women," said Norcross. "Women, narcotics, or anything else! I'd eat a blueberry pie with my hands behind my back at high noon," said Prime Center with fierce obscenity, "if I thought it would do any good!" He cut the connection. Norcross was still under the oak tree, lost in contemplation of a color abstraction on his little communication, when a tall blonde girl, brown as a berry, stepped hesitantly through the hedge. She walked to him and, when he looked up, she buried her face in her hands. He stood and held her shoulders. "Now, now," said Scientist Norcross, "don't cry, my dear." "But this is so puzzling -- and I wasn't crying," she answered. "What's happened to me?" "Sit down, Monica, and tell me what you think has happened." "But I don't know. You see, the last I remember is walking through the Psych Lab in San Franciscd, and suddenly -- suddenly, I'm in New York and they're sending me to you. What has happened?" "Where do you first remember being in New York?" "In the -- oh, I don't know!" She was in a flush of embarrassment. "I'll help you, my dear. You were in the pseudo-life clinic. You are not exactly Monica Drake Lane any longer. She died. You are pseudo-life." Her eyes were bright and the pupils were pinpointed from shock. "You are the pseudo-life Monica Drake Lane. To all outward appearances, you are an exact counterpart of the girl. Inwardly? Well, your internal organs have been simplified, and you cannot reproduce. Aside from such minor changes, you are identical, and incidentally a much more efficient creature than your prototype. And if your mind, which is a very good one, was a human mind, I could not tell you this. Pseudolife is a most remarkable thing, but Lewis and Havinghurst and Covalt, who developed it # years ago, were never able to imbue pseudolife with what they called the minus-one factor, which includes the phenomenal human emotional sensitivity, among other things. Are you feeling better now?" "Why, yes -- " Her voice trailed off. "You are no longer a slave of your emotions," said Scientist Norcross complacently. "None of us are." "You -- you are -- ?" "Oh, yes. We generally don't speak of such things, but since I'm to introduce you to pseudolife, I can tell you that I died two years ago." "I'm afraid I never d ; ' ' w -- or Monica Drake Lane : -- that is, I -- " "You are Monica Drake T e. If you will sit quietly, I #I tell you about it." Scientist Norcross took two cigarettes from his reticule and offered the girl one. The lip play was considered somewhat daring between the sexes, but under the circumstances he thought the mild narcotic would be good for her, as well as the sharpening of the senses brought on by actually smoking together. "When the Americans, who inhabited this continent, gained domination of the world in the #st Century, they consolidated their position by carrying their customs to the ends of the Earth. For that matter, to Alpha Centauri, if the ships did get through. "Forgive me," he interrupted himself, "if I seem improper or even immoral in this little talk of ours. Believe me, it's not with an easy disregard of proprieties that I bring myself to speak of such things. "Well, the Americans believed, and rightly so, that death is a dreadful thing. Until Lewis and Havinghurst and Covalt developed pseudo-life, a great deal of time and effort and money went into such things as cemeteries -- places where they literally buried their dead with elaborate ceremonials and much anguish. They had other equally wasteful practices, such as madhouses and jails, which were done away with when it became practical to replace a useless person with another, who matched the original to near absolute perfection, but Without fatal flaws of body or weaknesses of the mind. "Emphasis has shifted since those early years, when the abnormals were dealt with, to the comforting of human beings. Should John Davis Drumstetter suffer greatly at the loss of his mentor, the man who guided him in the ways of science? Of course not. He never knew I died." Norcross puffed complacently, sending iridescent rainbow smoke rings over the mind machine. "And I am his fiancee," said the girl. "Should he suffer because you died? No reason for it," said Norcross heartily. "A psychic trauma of that nature would make him desperately unhappy. Happiness is the proper state in life, as everyone knows. In fact, you will make him much happier than Monica Drake Lane, the original, ever could." "Yes, I shall be happy," mused the girl, as if feeling a more limited capacity for sorrow within herself. "But you spoke of a minus-one factor." "Yes, it takes in a lot of things. Though we are immortal, barring accidents, and we retain all the knowledge we had as human beings, the flaw to pseudo-life is that no original thought is possible. Students of the matter compare it to glancing at a page in a dictionary. Of course you don't consciously remember the words It there, but in pseudo-life you are capable of remembering and using them properly, so to speak, but not using them creatively. That is our trouble with John Davis Drumstetter. I was a brilliant physicist, but the understanding of new problems is beyond my limitations, and he is beyond me." "But I woke in New York," she said irrelevantly. "Because your master pseudolife file was kept there," explained Scientist Norcross. "As a human being, you were required to visit the psych lab every month, where your changed pattern was recorded by the mind machine. The pseudo-life girl could never lose more than a month of the human being's life. What was your regular appointment date?" "The #st." "Let's see -- you died yesterday, so that would be only three days gone. We're very fortunate." "But won't he notice a difference in me?" "Absolutely not." "Am I -- still capable of love?" Scientist Norcross blew a plume of rainbow smoke into the air. "Suppose, my dear, we find out." Monica Drake Lane agreed, for morality, which is essentially organized taboo that changes as society changes, had, in the #th Century, been confined exclusively to eating. Scientist Norcross had often amused himself by imagining how people of other ages would have been outraged by the moral standards of his own era, but his famous sense of humor was not rugged enough to be amused by the moral standards of the past. Not, at any rate, if he had had to endure them, though he found them sufficiently comic as history. She built a bower, an attractive courtship custom that had been adopted from the birds, and the day ended much more pleasantly than Scientist Norcross had expected at lunch. r 'HE reports came in from Prime Center. Drumstetter stayed in Los Angeles two days, in San Francisco three, and then consulted with Dowson in Honolulu. He skipped to New Zealand, back north to Japan, and swung across Siberia with short stops at various laboratories and universities. He was in Finland for three days with old Scientist Theophil Gertsley, who, though little better than a witch doctor, called himself a psychologist. When John Davis Drumstetter set his skip down beside the live oak tree, Scientist Norcross and Monica Drake Lane were waiting for him. He was gaunt from hunger and weary from travel, but the expression in his eyes was not one to be assuaged by any food cubicle. Nor was 'it love he had been seeking and not found, for Prime Center had seen to it that opportunities were offered, from austere tropical girls to the warmthseeking women of the north, who would even eat with a member of the opposite sex. He greeted Scientist Norcross and his fiancee with an offhandedness that Norcross had not expected, and asked that be be excused from any long immediate association with them, due to the press of uncompleted work. "But, Johnny," said Monica Drake Lane, "I've made a bower close by, and you seem very tired." "There's work to be done," said the young man firmly. "I have no time to -- Wait. I'll see your bower." As they walked over the lush artificial grass, Scientist Norcross explained that his results from the overdrive relay equations were in the mind machine even now, but John Davis Drumstetter only patted him on the shoulder in a friendly way and told him not to bother. When they reached the bower. Scientist Norcross expected that Drumstetter would sleep there after all, for it was an exceptionally pleasant design. The force field was night, and the sky was filled with adapted creatures from Mars dancing to their susurrate music, and the air was permeated with the bitter-sweet and exciting scent of a Venusian lake, the very odor of romance. In the background was the song of the sea. John Davis Drumstetter stepped out of the bower and said gently, "It's one of the nicest I've ever seen, and we spent some happy nights in it a year ago, didn't we, Monica?" He kissed her gently, as he might kiss a child, and walked back to the oak tree. "He's behaving very oddly," reported Norcross to Prime Center, as soon as he could, and gave the details. "I'd give a lot to have him meet a human female," said Prime Center wistfully. "What shall I do?" "Stay with him and wait," ordered Prime Center. "This is the first time the hopes of humanity lie in one man. Remember that. We can only serve," he added bitterly. "He hasn't tested the final limitation? Good. Keep me informed." mind machine for nearly a week, and, though he was only sixty, he looked like an old man when he greeted Monica and Norcross at the end of that time. "The relay is finished," he an#S nounced. "It's being installed in the Last Hope now. That's what I'm calling my ship, the ship to make mankind free of the stars. My work on Earth is nearly done." "But, Johnny darling," said Monica Drake Lane, looking up at him through her eyelashes, "what about our marriage?" He looked at her with grim pity. "The bower was an old bower," he answered. "Did you have the courage to be a unique in a patterned world? Can you reproduce, Monica Drake Lane?" "Oh. Johnny -- " "The final limitation!" he said. "Humans have the power to command pseudo-life. Pseudo-life, answer! I command!" She sank to the ground. "No," she said, "no, Johnny, I can't have a baby. I died over a month ago. I'm sorry you found ut." John Davis Drumstetter turned Norcross. "You've done no new work because you have no capacity for it. Correct? Answer, pseudo-life, I command!" Norcross lifted a calm face. "Why, yes," he said, "I'm pseudolife. Have been for over two years. TTut don't you worry, Johnny, it's I Uer this way and only natural that -- " John Davis Drumstetter paid no attention. He spoke as if explaining to himself. "You see, they're pseudo-life, dancing to the very end of the masquerade ball that started so long ago. It began when measurable science, the science of finity, made a finite man, a man nearly as good. It was the mental climate of an age that wanted its books digested, and then abandoned .reading for television. They froze food and precooked it and said it was even better than garden fiesh vegetables. "Do it the easy way, they said, never knowing that the hard way is the only way in the last analysis. Why try to cure a neurotic when you can make a pseudo-life of him? Don't let his grieving friends and relations suffer; provide them with a pseudo-life. He's just the same, they said, and he's not sick. And should a man die? Oh, no! Make a pseudo-life for his wife and children." "But, Johnny -- " "Be still, v pseudo-life! Why bother with men who were beginning to understand the human mind, when you can create pseudo-life? The cheap drives out the good every time. Oh, with the kindliest intentions, with the softest sympathies! Hide. Conceal. The truth be damned!" "But, Johnny darling -- " began Monica Drake Lane. "Be still, pseudo-life. There's one more thing, the final capstone to mankind's pyramid of folly." He got Prime Center on the communication. "Answer, pseudolife, I command. Am I the last human being on Earth?" "Since you put it that way," said Prime Center reluctantly, "you are." "And in the Solar System?" "I'm afraid so." The communication dropped from John Davis Drumstetter's hand. "This is the logical conclusion," he said slowly. "The actors are playing on a stage of worlds for an audience of one. At the solar observatory on Mercury, astronomers study the Sun and send in their reports, in case I should glance at them. In the mines of Pluto, miners dig ore to provide a market quotation I might see in the telepapers." He kicked the communication cross the floor. "Get out," he told them with infinite weariness. "The last human being commands." H E slept for a day and had breakfast in full public view under a tree. Peeping Toms of both sexes watched him. Prime Center appeared in peron just as he finished mopping up the last of his once-overlightly egg. Prime Center coughed and blushed and looked away, nd John Davis Drumstetter laughed aloud, humorlessly. "Good morning," he said cheerfully. "Hm, yes," said Prime Center. "Sit down. Have an egg?" A jvicked light appeared in his eyes, and he went on in a low, sinister voice, "A coddled egg, soft and white and runny? Maybe you want to gulp some coffee? Or snap your way through a piece of crackling toast? No?" His guest was turning pale and sick-looking. "Well, let me finish this bacon, and state your business." He threw back his head and slipped the bacon into his mouth. Prime Center shuddered. "Scientist Drumstetter," he said, keeping his gaze fixed on the trunk of the tree, "I have come to offer you all the worlds. Yes, the whole Solar System, including the asteroids and Pluto. You will be more powerful than Alexander . or Caesar or Stalin or O'Toole. We will create a new office -- Prime Squared Center --  to rule the Solar System. Do you mind not doing that?" John Davis Drumstetter was licking his fingers thoughtfully. He nodded. "Then you accept?" "No, I'm through licking my fingers. I'll give you your answer on a systemwide communication. Arrange it, pseudo-life, immediately." As a concession to morality, T John Davis Drumstetter agreed to step into a molecular cleanup booth. When he came out again, he spoke to the worlds and all the ships in space: "My friends, from now on the blind will lead the blind. Moral obliquity has triumphed and becomes common morality." He laughed and rubbed his nose. "I'm sorry. I was speaking to an audience of one -- myself. What I tinue your work, to maintain the system as it now stands. Pseudolife will be replaced with pseudolife till the end of time. It wiU be a static world. It will be a nearly as-good world. It will be a pleasant world by your standards. I wish you to do this, and you must, of course, obey my command. My purpose reaches a little beyond your natural inclination; this system will serve as a fertile warning to any beings with intelligence who may come after me. "I will not be with you long, myself -- " "Suicide?" asked Prime Center hopefully. "Alpha Centauri," said John Davis Drumstetter with a chuckle. "The colonists left because they didn't like pseudo-life, either. Good-by to you all." He snapped off the communication, waved to the little group under the tree, and entered the Last Hope. The entry port swhmg closed. The force field glowed, and then the ship was gone, leaving behind a whirlwind of dust "Alpha Centauri?" asked Monica Drake Lane. "Following the others of his wild, unstable breed," said Scientist Norcross. "Easy come, easy go," the girl said, shrugging. Prime Center had the last word. "Yes, and good riddance. Human beings have always been a nuisance." Moving? sent to a new address, notify us at least information to... Galaxy Publishing Carp. #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. Problem: How eon you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another -- Illustrated I wnp HE beasts aren't much I help, are they?" M Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river. "No," he grunted, "they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work." Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist. "Together now, Karl. One Two!" They stood kneedeep in mud on the bank, pulling and strain ing on the rope, while some "tew yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer. "If we're late for ship's landing. Joe, we'll get crossed off the list." Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope. "That's what I've been thinking about," he said, worried. They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it till lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so. long before the heavy raft could be washed free. "How much time have we got, Karl?" The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City. "Two hours, maybe a little more." he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. "Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list." He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles. and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it. Hill watched him curiously. "What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket." "I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then." "You never would have thought of it yourself," Hill grunted. "Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself." "You didn't have to sign up." Karl pointed out. "You could have applied for a wife from some different planet." "One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families." Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.  # TT was quiet as Karl guided his- mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals. And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children. "You going to raise a litter, Joe?" Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing. "One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill," Hill answered defensively. "Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself." He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him. "I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too." Karl chuckled. "I don't think she'll have the time!" They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port -- a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire. Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut. The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails. Hill broke the silence first. "I wonder what they'll be like." Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. "They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth!" It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even een an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all. Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember. "They say they're good workers," Hill said. Karl nodded. "Pretty, too." They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big. compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet -- maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more. "Joe," Karl said suddenly, "what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?" Hill located a faint itch and frowned. "I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're -- well, sophisticated, glamorous." Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define. The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it. "We saw this the last time we were here," Hill said. "I know," Karl agreed, "but I want to take another look." He was anxious to glean all the information that he could. It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a longstemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: "I'm from Earth!" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women. She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamor, maybe? A loudspeaker blared. "All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists... There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else. Karl drew the number # and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eying the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them. He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number # aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late. "Sandwich, mister? Pop?" Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame. The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation... never knew one myself, but let me tell you..."... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture... "... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twentyfive..." "Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers," Hill said. "Maybe we could trade." Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions. There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire. He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best. The twinkling fire came nearer. II you, Mr. Escher." Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch. "Please send him right in." That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.  The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced him# self. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps. MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster. He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy -- MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department. Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?" "You know the one -- colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left -- but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers. "Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase." He threw a paper on Escher's desk. "You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?" Escher shook his head blankly. "Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy -- whatever that means -- and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not." ## Escher looked bored. "Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks -- if you'll pardon the expression -- of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize." MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair. "But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know." "Perpetual motion machines are," Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization with as many modefn conveniences as this one. to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?" "What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?" Escher looked hurt. "Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy." "The Board is giving rou a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit." "When do they have to have a solution?" "As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good." "All right,, by then we'll have the answer." MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off." "How come?" MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?" When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the wellpublicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was # and ## per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too. He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway. He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go. There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next. He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough. Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize. The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not. No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all -- provided you held your nose, silenced your conget that there was such a thing as a moral code. Ill cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin. She filed into the washroom with theother girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes. She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly -- but not pretty, either. Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married Sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed. "Going out tonight, Phyl?" She hesitated a moment, then ' slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank. "I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out." The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. "Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us -- waiting for the phone to ring." Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre. At home, in her small tworoom bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go. She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the bootlegged variety -- scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest. It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor. What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others -- call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about. Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or ' she could have joined the Lecture or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life. But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again. She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta... Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide. She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eying her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence. It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately! Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: "Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!" Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned ! Preying on... The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women -- a startling disproportion -- the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications. She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so... And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages. It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had. But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of ihforma tion that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!  poster. The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the n plain wrapper that the poster had come in. IV riHE dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it. But she didn't intend to buy it. She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes. Time enough, at any rate. The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag. She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw. "Let go of me!" she ordered in a frostily offended voice. "Sorry, miss," the man said politely, "but I think we have a short trip to take." She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again. They couldn't do anything to her that mattered. She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor. "Why did you steal it?" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights. "I don't have anything to say," she said. "I want to see a lawyer. She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill. And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture. "Name?" he asked in a tired voice. She knew the statistics he wanted. "Ruby Johnson, #, # pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file." The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages. The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought -- six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting. A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said : "... anxiety neurosis... obvious feeling of not being wanted... probably steals to attract attention... recommend emigration." "In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice," the judge finally said. "You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a # fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus." She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it. "I wouldn't call that a choice, she said sourly. "I'll ship out." V apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world. She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores. Well, maybe some day she would. But not today. And not tonight The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long. She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night. It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk. The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway. "Miss Carstens?" She smiled pertly. "We've been expecting you." She wondered a little at the "we," but dutifully smiled and followed him in. The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disf# appeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them. She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh. "I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never... The young man coughed politely. "I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please." "Suzanne Carstens," she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly won-i dered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers. "Suzanne Carstens," the young man noted, and slowly shook his head. "A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there." She did as he asked and he faced the entire group. "I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you . -- security." He stressed the word slightly. "Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars." Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security. "Well, what do you say?" There was a dead silence:' The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. "How about you, Miss Carstens?" She smiled sickly and nodded her head. "I love to travel!" she said. It didn't sound at all witty even to herself. VI and somber terminal, cold and impersonal. There was a cleared space at the center of the floor where the officials had desks and tables and rows of filing cabinets and busily clicking machinery. The women sat huddled around the edges of the shed, waiting to be called to the center and assigned to any of the various colony planets. Phyllis clutched her small suitcase, containing the few personal items she had been allowed to take on the trip, and silently swore that once she set foot on another planet, she'd never leave it, no matter what. #S "Draft # for the Huffer Solar System report to the routing desk! Draft # for the Huffer Solar System report to the routing desk!" "That's us," Suzanne said drily. She and Phyllis and Ruby joined the others out on the floor. "You understand," the routing official was saying, "that you're allowed your choice of planets in the Huffer Solar System. We'll read off occupational and other pertinent information and then you make your choice. "Sunside : First planet from the system sun. Warm, humid climate. Fishing, flower-growing for export, mining, and natural handicrafts. Population ratio # to #, males all somatypes and admixtures. "Midplanet : Second planet out. Temperate climate. Farming, fur-trapping, slight manufacturing. Ratio # to #, all somatypes and admixtures." "Newman's body, last planet out from the system sun..." He finished the list and gave them five minutes to decide. The names of the three planets appeared on the floor in glowing letters. When they had made up their minds, they were to go and stand on the name. They held a short conference. "It looks like it's a tossup between fish and furs," Ruby said. "I think I'll take Midplanet. I like furs better than fish." They argued a moment longer, then picked up their belongings and went and stood on the luminous letters. N O doubt of it, the carpet made a fairly suitable green, Escher thought. He placed the ball firmly on the nap, stepped back a pace, and tapped it smartly with the golf club. It rolled in a beautifully straight path into the upturned water glass. "Very nice shot, Claude." Escher looked up and leaned the club against the side of the desk. "I thought so, too," he agreed. "What brings you here, Mac?" MacDonald sat down and poured himself a glass of water from the beaker on Escher's desk. "Just wanted to pass on the compliments of the Board for the recent large upswing in woman emigrants to the colony planets." Escher casually waved it aside. "It wasn't much. We just had to rid ourselves of some oldfashioned notions, that's all. I was afraid, though, that the Board might disapprove of our methods." MacDonald thought for a moment. "No, I guess they didn't. I can't recall any members of the Board complaining about it, at least. Apparently they felt that something drastic was needed. Or, more probably, they've kept themselves carefully ignorant of just how we did it. Oh, they know we violated privacy in a lot of look it." "Very white of them, I'm sure," Escher grunted. He took up the club and set the ball back on its carpet tee. "How about a game tomorrow afternoon?" MacDonald shook his head. "It didn't bother the Board much, Claude, but I followed your advertising and I was down to the port to see a contingent of our new colonists take off. It bothers me, Claude. The ads you sent to the different planets, the whispering campaign we arranged for, the subtle propaganda we sent out -- and then the women. Don't yo n think there will be some sort of howl? We've definitely led them to believe one thing and here we're sending them -- well, the new colonists leave a lot to be desired." Escher looked at him coldly. "Look, Mac, let's be cynical about this. That's why it was referred to us in the first place. Of course the girls we sent aren't the most beautiful or the most glamorous. Those girls are already married and you couldn't get them to leave, no matter what you did. The girls we sent are the ones who weren't wanted here on Earth. We even killed two birds with one stone and solved the crime problem." He held up his hand when MacDonald started to object. "Don't say it, Mac. Stop and think for a moment. What danger can a shoplifter do on a colony planet? There's nothing to steal. And without large cities, most other types of crime will have equally tough sledding. Besides, we eliminated those who had natural criminal tendencies. Most of the others had drifted into it as an outlet for their sense of insecurity, the feeling of not being wanted." MacDonald looked worried. "All right, what happens when the colonists find out, Claude? What happens when they find out we shipped them the castoffs, the leftovers?" "The point is, Mac, they'll never find out. They're Second System colonists. You know how the Colonization Board works. Planet A colonizes planet B. Planet B colonizes planet C. Given a suitable number of generations, the people on planet C will never have seen people from planet A. Earth is planet A. the colony planets to which the women were sent are all planet Cs. "You see, the catch is that the colonists will have no basis on which to make comparisons. They've never seen women from Earth!" "I still don't like it. Theyhave seen women from other planets. After taking a look at the last shipload of females that left Earth, I'm still worried." Escher laughed. "That's because you haven't seen some of the colony women, Mac. Tell me, what is the most cultured and socially up-to-date planet? Earth, of course. Now on what planet has husband-hunting and pleasing been developed into an allout struggle with fine scientific techniques? Earth, again. The colonists don't have a chance. "When it comes to catching and pleasing the male, the girls from Earth have really had an education. They can take care of themselves. Don't worry about that. Who's to tell the colonists the girls aren't the cream of the crop, anyway? Not the girls themselves, certainly. And not us. I tell you they'll never find out, Mac." "You're positive that the colonists will be pleased with the women?" Escher hesitated. "Well, reasonably." He sounded a little wistful He practiced his swing a few more times, barely, missing the lamp on his desk. "I thought the advertising was rather clever, too. They'll feel a great obligation to us for sending them 'Earth's Fairest Daughters.' Be good for strengthening the tie to the mother planet." MacDonald looked somewhat happier. "What about the women themselves, though? We sold them a bill of goods, too, you know. They're expecting modern cities and handsome, rugged heroes for husbands. I know damn well that a lot of the colonies aren't much more than sinkholes and I suspect the sanitary, rugged, thoughtful male is strictly off the artist's drawing board. What happens when the women find that out?" Escher took the ball out of the glass and went back a few paces for another try. "Don't forget, Mac, the girls are the ones who weren't wanted here, the ones who were heading up for lives as old maids. They're going to planets where they're strictly a scarce item, where they'll be appreciated. The colonists will think they're getting something special and they'll treat the girls that way. They'll take good care of them. There might be a few difficulties at first, but it'll come out all right." "In other words, the whole thing hinges on how the colonists receive the girls. Isn't that it?" The ball thunked solidly into the glass again and rolled out. "That's right. We've hedged our bets the best we can. Now We'll have to wait and see. But I don't think we have anything to worry about." "Uh-huh," MacDonald grumbled. "It works out nice in theory, but I wonder how it'll be in practice." press her into the cot and tried to relax. In ten minutes they would be disembarking in Landing City. Landing City, with its wide, paved streets and modern buildings, the neatly laid-out farms and the modern rocket port. There was a clanging of bells, a sudden feeling of nausea, and she knew they had landed. In the excited buzz of conversation from the others, she got her small suitcase and filed toward the hatch. They took her name and gave her the emigration bonus, and then she was on the ramp going down, smelling the cool fresh air and feeling a damp breeze against her face. She looked down... The modern rocket port was a scorched expanse of dirty ground, with a rusting shed at one end that she guessed was the office. Landing City was a collection of rundown shacks and corrugated huts with mud streets and wooden sidewalks running between them. She should have guessed, she thought bitterly. She had been sold a bill of goods. And there was no going back now; she was Stuck with it. Stuck with it. She took another look. At least it would be healthy, and there was something besides the concrete and granite of a city to look at. It wouldn't be day in and day out of sitting eight hours behind a typewriter, and then back to her lonesome two rooms for an evening of bridge or a night with a boring book. And there was nothing wrong with the town that couldn't be remedied and improved with a little work. She and the others would see to that. Progress was going to hit Landing City whether the colonists like it or not. The colonists... She stared at the whiskery, ragged lot of men of all shapes and sizes that were waiting to welcome them. They had probably, she thought queerly, never heard a lecture on art in their lives. And they wouldn't have any interest in historical novels and it was an even-money bet that bridge and canasta games would bore them. They were uncultured, she thought happily, thoroughly uncultured! Their main interest was probably in having a home and raising a family and working... And with a shave and clean clothes, they might even be handsome! A dimly remembered poster of a blond-haired giant flashed into her mind, but she dismissed it. The men below had a hard, healthy look abbut them, a certain virility, an individuality that the pale men back on Earth, now that she thought of it, seemed to lack. She was very definitely going to like it here. Then she had a sudden, nagging thought. How would the colonists take to her and the other bedraggled females? IX rpHE twinkling fire came nearer and they could make out the outlines of the slim ship. It rapidly grew in size and finally settled to a heavy, groaning rest on the pitted and blackened landing field. Karl was holding his breath, staring at the outline of the hatch on the ship's rusty side. It opened and the flight of descent stairs slid out. The captain and crew came out first. Then the women filed down the ladder, smiling timidly and looking cold and frightened. Karl could hear Hill gulping noisily beside him and knew that his own mouth was gaping. But he couldn't help it. The girls were gorgeous. "Odd John" was the nickname given this strange youth . and odd he certainly was. With his incredibly gifted skills and his awesomely developed mind, he could have attained power, fame, money -- an entire nation or even the world! But it would have been like a genius ruling an asylum of imbeciles. For Odd John was not of the human race; he belonged to the next stage of evolution -- Homo Superior! Many authors have tried to write the story of Homo Superior and failed -- just as Pithecanthropus, describing Modern Man, would find it of superman stories, a great science fiction novel! At your newsstand at #c a copy. If you can't get it there, send the #c (no postage or handling charge) or # for a full year (six titles, all different) to... Going... Going... has been so great that October and November # are completely out of stock, and December # and January #I are very low. From February #I to the present issue, we have a fair supply... and we'll continue to sell at the regular newsstand price of #c a copy (no postage or handling charge) until they are gone. Repeat: Vol. #, No. I and #, October and November #, are completely out of stock. Please don't ask for it; we have no copies. We are calling in larger quantities than usual of August #, which, for reasons over which we had no control, was withdrawn from sale prematurely. This is the issue with mously moving novella that has caused more dazzled comment than any single story in years. You'll want it... and there's a copy for you, if you don't put off too long. incredible invasion of Earth. packed with action and suspense. melodrama, of the conquest of interplanetary flight. exploration of Earth's unthinkably distant future. and no less hypnotic in effect. of reviving an extraterrestrial genius # years old. etary competition, action, intrigue! Send only #c for each copy to... #I Hudson Street Dept. BI New York #, N. Y. The Furious Rose This world was a setup for any man who wonted to get along -- provided one had enough victims to toss #o the wolvesl T HE Master Clock on the black desk in the office of Federal Executions made a quiet blipping sound. Immediately the lights lowered to Er'te Neutral. Long, probing sh : w fingers snaked here and t re across the floor, and a silence t' nt should have been restful -- and wasn't -- descended on the place. Tony Radek leaned back in his chair and frowned. One-fifteen in the morning. At one-fifteen in the morning no man, no matter who, should be going to his NegEmote. Why not hang a man instead? Or electrocute him? Or gas him the way they used to back in the old days? In those old days his grandfather used to Jalk about, where twelve ordinary citizens said the word that peeled the life off a man like skinning an onion. He sighed softly and folded his hands across a tiny paunch that was just beginning to show. Tony Radek was getting old. He was a "safe" now. That meant he needn't worry about the war any longer. He was a nice, mild, peaceable gentleman who stayed at home and thought beautiful thoughts about the younger men out in space. A man his age didn't feel anger and hate and retribution and lust and treachery any more. He was just a little old fat guy. He was the Federal Executioner. He frowned again and leaned forward and touched a nacre button on the desk top. That lit up the screen on his left. Not the Master Screen, which was the one on his right. This was the other, the one that could tell him what was going on outside the office, outside in Portal Waiting, where certain peculiar ghouls who derived a measure of excitement from the executions were allowed by the gracious State to hang out. He stared at the screen. His frown deepened. Portal Waiting should be bare and vacant at this hour, but it wasn't. This was the third night in a row that it wasn't. There was a girl out there. A quiet girl, a girl who looked about as ghoulish as one of the nice red ritual roses over in the cooler built into the wall. Damn the dame, why didn't she go home? Tony Radek's upper lip lifted a little, showing small angry teeth. At once the Emote Neutral lights in the office flickered wildly. Tony pulled his eyes from the screen and glared up at the lights. That's progress for you. Let a man go on one little momentary emotional binge, like this, and right away spies in the joint start screaming. In a moment now, the one on his right -- the Master Screen -- would blink iTito life and old hell-hips himself would start poking around asking questions. Just see if it didn't. He turned his head to the right, stared at the Master Screen and waited. The screen blazed into life. A narrow-faced man with washedaway eyes that looked as though they'd seen sin and hadn't liked it peered angrily over toward Tony behind the desk. "Mr. Radek!" he had a thin, thin voice that sounded like a sheet of paper slitting down the middle. "What's going on down there? Can't you control your own office? Or maybe you'd like to be back in Training?" The eyes squinted sharply. Tony worked up an innocent look. He spread his hands on the black surface of the desk, smiled, and said mildly: "Out of your mind. My lights have been as steady as old Emote Neutral herself. Probably that blonde you got Central Direction kidded into thinking you need as an assistant -- probably you sneaked up on her when she was in Personal Lok and..." "What?" The Master Screen trembled a little and the narrowfaced man's eyes seemed to jerk out of registration for a moment. "Look here, Radek, I've stood just about enough of your insinuations!" "Look who's making the lights flicker now," said Tony calmly. He waved an arm around the office. Emote Neutral was flickering rapidly as though controlled by an interrupter switch. "Central Direction should see this," he observed. He stared briefly at the contorted face on the screen. That face was working convulsively now, getting red like the ritual roses over in the cooler. He snorted disgustedly, reached forward and touched the matswitch which threw the Master Screen into visi-lok. At once the screen darkened and all sound left the office. That was more like it. Let old hell-hips up in Supplies and Control stew if he wanted, there wasn't anything in the Constitution -- not even the old Constitution -- that said a man had to sit and look at him. " Centra l Direction to Radek!" a hard voice rapped out of the alternate speaker over in the corner. Tony Radek jerked, spun around. He swallowed quickly, said nervously: "Yes, sir?" "Radek, you're violating Ordinance Six, Code #, Division of Security! Unlock that visi-screen at once!" "Yes, sir." Tony's hand flew to the matswitch, pulled it. "Sorry. Elbow must have hit it accidentally. Didn't know it waa locked..." "Radek, there's a war on. That visi-lok must be used only in emergency. You know that." "Yes, sir. Like I said..." "I heard. In the future, be a little more careful. And, Radek -- "Yes, sir?" "Ready Cell Two. Execution at one-twentyseven. John Edward Haley. Convicted of mass interference of morale, City of Greater #S 'Jew Denver, as outlined under Congressional Act of April #, #. Decision rendered equally on all three Final Master Machines." "No appeal?" asked Tony very softly. "No appeal. And, Radek -- " "Yes, sir?" "The condemned is married. Check with Supplies and Control for bill of divorcement. His wife is a young woman, will have to marry again in the morning as outlined under Congressional Act f May #, #. Got that?" "Yes, sir." The Master Screen went dead. Tony blinked. Bill of divorcement. Will have to marry again in the morning as outlined under Congressional Act. By God, that's progress for you! He sat staring at the Master Screen for. a long time. Then he sighed, punched the button on Supplies and Control. "Hell-hips!" he growled. "Snap it up. Execution at onetwentyseven. Bill of divorcement." The narrow face peered sourly out at him from the Master Screen. It didn't have much emo'ion in it now. It was almost lank, like the face of a humanoid obot somebody'd left something outof. "Been hittin' the bottle again, huh?" said Tony. "My name is Clackef, Mr. Radek-. Arthur Jared Clacker. Kindly keep that in mind when you address me." "Sure, sure. Nice name. Lovely name. Sounds like a stone-boat going over ground glass. Whip up that bill of divorcement." "It's ready, Mr. Radek. Been ready for the last half hour. I suggest that if there were a little of my own well known and demonstrated efficiency in your office, perhaps Executions would be something to be proud of. Instead of what it is. Instead of the foulsmelling, sloppily run, lice-infested... Tony's hand reached out for the button on Supplies and Control. "Watch those lights," he said tiredly. stretched a little and went across the office to the cooler in the opposite wall. His feet made no noise; he had that quiet tread that all cats, a few men and some women achieve. His hand interrupted the automatic cellgard and a tiny, almost hidden door in the wall swung wide. He reached up, poked his hand in the cooler, felt around. A little smile came into his eyes. He took his hand out of the cooler,got up on tiptoes and looked inside. No roses. Not even one rose. Not even half of a rose. Chuckling, he went back to the desk and jabbed a finger at the silent feet, opened the door of button over Suplies and Control. "Hellhips !" he rapped. "Where's all that well known and demonstrated efficiency I've had to rake out of my ears?" The narrow face lit up the Master Screen once more. It looked bored now. "Mr. Radek, there was something?" "Yeah. Something." Tony's voice dropped, got deadly soft. "How many weeks since you checked the cooler, boy? There aren't any ritual roses." "There -- there aren't any?" "That's right, Mr. Clacker. Now get away from that screen. I'm reporting this to Central Direction." His finger jammed down on the Supplies and Control button. He watched the Master Screen go blank and grinned. He thought, "Shake a little, Mr. Clacker, shake a little," because he didn't dare even whisper to himself. He sat down at the desk again and thought of something. His finger went out, touched the button on the screen on the left -- the Portal Waiting screen. She was still there, hunched up in one of the chairs like a small child somebody had left in an interplanct waiting room and then gone away and forgotten. Tony frowned once more. Damn that dame, she was spoiling his nights. He got up, crossed the office on Executions, went down a bare, silent hall. At the levelators he waited a moment for the platform, took it down, got off again at Portal Waiting, and crossed to the foyer. She was there, just as she'd been on the screen upstairs, only clearer, more vivid, something witnessed instead of second hand, something with dimension to it. She was in a big chair that could have accommodated two like her. She had her legs tucked under her and her brown eyes that looked up at Tony's' approach weren't any larger than two full moons. He said, "Are you Mrs. John Haley?" The girl nodded. "They -- they've got Johnny..." "I know." Tony dropped into a chair opposite the girl. "It's late," he said softly. "You shouldn't be here this time of night, Mrs. Haley." The girl thought about that. "You're Mr. Radek, aren't you? In the Execution Office?" "Call me Tony, Mrs. Haley." "All right, Tony. Yes, it's late. I hadn't noticed, but I suppose you're right." "You should go home, Mrs. Haley." He stopped, then lied a little. "They'll let you know. You don't have to worry." You don't have to worry. They're bringing the guy up now.  little girl, but you don't have to worry. Old hell-hips is getting a ritual rose now, little girl, but you don't have to worry. As if he'd deliberately telepathed the thought, the girl said suddenly: "Tony, is -- is it true about the furious roses? I mean, if a man is found guilty, do they -- ?" "The 'furious' roses, Mrs. Haley?" He smiled. "I see. You mean because they're so red. Yes, it's true. Ritual roses, we call them, but that's nothing. Nothing at all. A custom only. A symbol handed down. It means nothing." "I brow." The girl nodded arv n. "When we were children, we always called them the furious roses because they were a furious red. We always used to say that if an innocent man was executed, the furious red rose would right away turn white, Tony. To show they'd been wrong about him." He shrugged. "Bedtime stories, Mrs. Haley." ' "Not -- not that it means anything to me, Tony. They'll find Johnny innocent, of course. All three machines. The final machines." Innocent? Oh, sure. "A mr.n," said Tony with a  ,ue motion of his hands. ' V l.;; the dih'w .nee v.l. t man n woman has? In the morning there's always another -- and another name. What's the difference?" He smiled a small toy smile with eyes half closed so the girl couldn't look too closely into them. But it was all right, she hadn't heard. At least she wasn't balling those big eyes of hers at him. She was looking down into her folded hands. He continued, "There's a war on, Mrs. Haley. It seems there's always a war on, somehow. And everybody -- you, me, the guy down the street who skins ships for a living -- we all have to remember that. And yet some of us don't. Some of us go off on a tangent and try to sell out our country and then there's hell to pay. And if we're found guilty, we get the execution. The NegEmote." The girl's lips began to tremble. She looked up. "Does it hurt, Tony? I mean..." "Physically? No, of course not." A corner of his mouth curled. "We're humane nowadays, hadn't you heard? We just strap a man in a chair and press a button and down comes a metal hood over him. We press some more buttons and pull a switch or two, and that's that. No feeling, nothing. The man's as good as new except he has no emotions any more. No emotions whatever except personal physical pain, such as he'd need in case somebody stepped on his toe or jabbed him with a pin. w The State wants us to protect ourelves, you see. It wouldn't want us getting hurt because we don't feel anything." He stopped because it was getting harder to continued. "We used to call it 'stripping,' but that was long ago before the humane boys decided the term was a little cruel. Now it's just Neg-Emoting. But the same thing. Just a fancy title." Her big eyes were suddenly eating into his. "What do they do with them, Tony?" He shrugged again. "Send 'em off to Training. Some can be taught this, some that, but a living death nevertheless. What else can a traitor expect ? v The girl began to tremble all over. "Not Johnny! They can't do that to Johnny! He's innocent, Tony -- he didn't do anything! Tony, tell them that! Tell them to let him go..." He put his teeth together hard. What do you say to a woman who sits across from you, waiting the long, long wait? What do you say to a woman like this when you see the terror -- and something else -- in eyes like hers? "You like the guy, Mrs. Haley?" he asked gently. "That's old-fashioned as hell, you know. We all learn that way back in primaries." But the woman wasn't listening again, wasn't caring what he'd said. She began to whisper very softly: "In the nights I used to be frightened. I used to lie there asleep and dream of the ships coming down and spraying the house with the burn-waves. And I could hear the roaring thunder of the jets and the house would start to shake and I'd try to yell, but I couldn't. Something inside would be choking me. And just when the burn-waves would be coming hot through the window and licking at the walls inside the room, I'd scream myself awake and jump up in bed and the sweat would be pouring off me." Tony stared, incredulous, into the big balls of fright that her eyes had become. "And then the lights would come on again, and there would be Johnny lying next to me smiling a little, and his curly hair would be all tousled from sleep, and he'd say to me, 'Baby, you've been dreaming again. Don't you know I'm here? Don't you know I'll always be here? Don't you know that, Baby?' And then it would be all righ, and the roaring jets would be only the dawn shift going out on Security Patrol. And then I could go back to sleep again." She stopped. Portal Waiting had become a gray ghost of a thing with nothing living in it, only the clouds of memory like #  smoke veils swirling, drifting here and there, soon gone. And then: "They ? ll let him go, Tony. He's innocent, you know. They have to let him go." He didn't look at her. He got up from his chair, put his hands rigidly at his sides. Then he did look, just once, and very hard. "Get out of here!" he growled. "No, Tony." He took a deep breath, turned, went across the foyer to the levelators. As he passed under the huge Master Screen, her voice came again, but quite thin: "You'll let me know, Tony? You'll let me know as soon as you get word?" He didn't answer, didn't look back, didn't do anything except keep going to the levelators. He Went upstairs, found the door of Executions, opened it, went through, let it slam shut. The Master Clock over on the black desk made a quiet blipping sound and the Emote Neutral lights went out. At once the office was flooded with Amber Official, the working lights. Then the Master Screen glowed and a narrow-faced man with washedaway eyes looked out at him. "Condemned is waiting, Mr. Radek," the narrowfaced man said acidly. "Cell Two is getting dusty waiting for you, Mr. Radek. Very dusty." Tony looked up. His heart wasn't in it, but he said it anyhow : "Go chase your blonde some more, hell-hips." He went over to the desk, banged the Supplies and Control button, held it down. Master Screen darkened. He looked at the small square of white paper on the black desk top. A bill of divorcement. Like that. So in the morning the kid downstairs could go out and get herself another mate and then she could go back to bed again and dream some more about the roaring jets and the burn-waves. He reached up and wiped at his forehead. She didn't have to see it happen. Nothing in the Constitution -- old or new -- stated she had to see it happen. He looked down at the matswitch that controlled the visi-lok on the Master Screen. He clamped his teeth together and his hand went out and flipped the switch. The office went dead. Maybe nobody'd notice. Maybe he'd have time to slip into Cell Two and get it over with before anybody noticed. He started across the room on fast, silent feet. "Racfelc" the alternate speaker over in the corner blasted out. He froze solid. "Radek, don't movel Stand where you are!" Don't move? He couldn't have moved if he'd had jets on. And then the hard voice went on again: "Central Command to Supplies and Control. Use Emergency visi-relay. Unlock the Master Screen! This is Command #, Regulation Four. Signed, Countersigned." Almost at once the Master Screen flickered into life and a hard, severelooking face appeared there. "Radek, turn around! Face the screen!" "Yes, sir." Tony turned. "Second violation, Radek. Why?" Tony forced a blank face. He lifted his shoulders, said: "I was over here on my way to Cell Two for the Execution. How could I -- " "That will be all, Radek! Clear your desk. Prepare for judgment on final machines." Tony swallowed. He didn't move because he couldn't move. "Well, Radek?" He fought his face clean, kept his hands rigid at his sides. Sweat was rolling down his back, but that was all right; Central Command couldn't be expected to see sweat roll down a man's back under his clothing, though a lot of people thought so. "A suggestion, sir," he said at last. "What?" Hard eyes bored into his own. He let a little anxious look creep over his face. Not a guilty look -- he hoped -- but the kind Of anxious look a worried but innocent man might have in a spot like this. He said quickly: "About that visi-lok. I suggest it might have gone into lock by itself. You see, it's one of the old-fashioned kind, the type they used to have that worked with solenoids. We've had trouble with them before." That brought a little silence. The hard eyes in the screen said at last: "Central Command to Supplies and Control. Is the visilok in Executions controlled by a solenoid? Was it never changed to relay?" Tony gulped. He looked into the Master Screen, but he remained frozen to the floor, hardly breathing. And then a very thin voice answered nervously: "I -- I believe that's correct, sir. I believe Executions does have the old-fashioned solenoid. It seems there hasn't been time to change it. I've been intending to..." The voice was cut off. The hard eyes came back to Tony. "Decision!" the hard voice said. "Yes, sir?" "Exonerated, Radek! Carry on with Execution in Cell Two." The screen went blank. Tony shuddered. A close one. A damned close one. That was the war for you. Even a man's breaths I  are counted. He went on shaky feet over to the cooler, reached in, got out a ritual rose, left the office and shuffled down the hall to Cell Two. John Edward Haley. The condemned. A thin man, Tony thought. Well, sure, there aren't many fat men any more. Not in ordinary circumstances, that is. The man was sitting tensely in the chair. There was no one else in the cell, which was as it should be, of course. Witnesses, yes -- the Master Screen up on the wall -- but not here, not visible. Tony went across the Cell. John Edward Haley," he said. The man moved a nervous tongue over dry lips. "John Edward Haley, you have been sentenced for Execution. Now hear these final words of the State as directed by Presidential order from Responsibility Official in the City of Greater New Denver, this night." He took two small steps toward the man in the chair. He held out the red rose, put it in the hand of the other. Then he stepped back two steps until his toes were just touching a small plaque built into the floor. He looked down, read from the plaque: "The giving of this rose. A symbol for the red of the blood of your brothers that you have let by treason andor treachery. A symbol that as the rose is red, so are the unclean acts of your own hand, of your own mind. The State has so spoken." He looked up. A nice way to kiss a guy off. Might as well tell him he bit his brother's finger, too, when he was a kid. "Have you anything to say?" he asked. The man's nervous tongue worked again. He said quickly: "Yeah. Look, guy, just one thing. Just one favor. I don't give a damn what happens to me. Sure, I'm guilty. So you caught me, and so I take it. So what? A guy expects that. But the wife... Tony's teeth came together hard. "... But the wife, see? She's down in Portal Waiting. Been there for three nights now. I don't want her to witness this. I don't want her to look into that .Master Screen down there and see it. That's all I'm asking, guy, and it ain't much. Just a flick of a switch is all I'm asking. It ain't much. It ain't, is it?" It ain't, hey? By God! "When the hood comes down, she'll see it. She's bound to," the thin man went on fast. "She'll see the flash in the Screen and she'll know it's me, and she's never done anything to deserve that. That's all I'm asking, guy. That's all I'm asking." The silence in the cell was a thick thing. Tony could feel the sweat rolling down his back again. But a different kind of a sweat now -- not a sweat for himself, a sweat for somebody else. Just one finger touch on that visi-lok matswitch would do it. Just one finger, and the small woman downstairs in Portal Waiting wouldn't know, would have one more instant of waiting, of hoping against hope. Of suspense. Of breathing in the air we all breathe in, of being alive, sentient; and knowing that her man, the thin fellow with the tousled, curly hair, was still sentient, too. "Well, guy?" Tony wet his lips. "Sorry, Haley. Petition refused." The hood came down. The Master Screen up on the wall blazed into life. with his hands folded, fingers laced. That's Executions for you. And this is war. There's a war on. Don't forget that. He looked down at his hands, sighed. Then he reached out and touched the Supplies and Control button. "Hell-hips!" he growled. He looked at the screen. It wasn't hell-hips. It was a blonde. Not a young blonde, a scarecrow blonde. An old wretched piece of living mechanism like himself. "Where's Clacker?" he asked. "Mr. Clacker is no longer with us, Mr. Radek." "Huh? What happened to him?" "Mr. Clacker has been taken to the three Final Machines for trial and judgment. I am now taking over here. My name is Hortense. G. Welker Hortense." Tony looked at the blonde. Crude, undisguised lights were coming from the woman's eyes. Promotion-happy. He said at last: "Sorry as hell about that. The solenoid thing, I suppose. I didn't mean to get the guy in trouble. I sure didn't mean that." "He'd been ordered to change it. It was no one's fault but his own. You were only doing your duty, I'm sure. And duty comes above everything." "Yeah. Yeah, sure. I know." He sighed once more. "Get me an airbrush and a bottle of white paint." "What?" "I want an airbrush and a bottle of white paint. I want to paint my nice little ritual roses. I don't like red any more. I want all white ones." "Mr. Radek... ?" Tony glared. "Do I get that paint or don't I? Don't just stand there!" His fist banged down on Supplies and Control button. The Master Screen went blank, and then flashed into motion again fast. The blonde again. Nasty now. A chip off the old block. lit Another hell-hips, but this time with skirts. "Request not granted! This is entirely against regulations. Mr. Radek! Specifically, against ordinance #, of the Code of... "Oh. can it," he growled wearily. "For God's sake, don't give me any more of that." The blonde stiffened. "Well! After all, I'm only doing my duty, Mr. Radek. As head of Supplies and Control, I have certain welldefined and inflexible..." Tony blacked her out. He held her blacked out till he was sure she wouldn't come on again. Duty. The Master Clock made a quiet blipping noise. Amber Official lights dimmed and Emote Neutral came on. Long, probing shadow fingers snaked here and there across the floor, and a stillness that should have been restful descended eventually on the place. "Rarfec" The hard eyes. The hard voice. Tony looked into the screen. "Yes, sir?" "Radek, that woman is still downstairs in Portal Waiting I . We can't have her hanging around all night. Why hasn't she been given her bill of divorcement and sent home? My God, man, where's your feelings? She's at least entitled to that." "Right away. sir. I was just going," He picked up the square of white paper. He pushed back his chair, got to his feet, went across the office taking those peculiar, quiet little steps of his. Yes, sir. Just going, sir. On my way. sir. Because, sir, as you've pointed out so clearly, sir, she's at least entitled to that. fresh ideas, situations, backgrounds and conflicts, pits its shrewd and resourceful criminal against -- a detective from whom nothing con be hidden! without giving up an ingenious scientific premise and tuspensefol action. vates the predictions of science fiction from the past century to the present. How good Were these predictions? The answer is surprising! hows how a modern writer, equipped with the tools of teientific extrapolation, can forecast the world of # A.D. by Fletcher Pratt. T way re Publishers, New York, #. # pages, # O F the # tales Fletcher Pratt has selected for his first anthology of fantasy and science fiction, all but four rate B plus or better -- an excellent score. The reason is not hard to find, either, since, according to the records of that nonpareil Index Master, Anthony Boucher, # out of the I # have previously been anthologized. The answer is simple: Mr. Pratt and his publishers are not specifically interested in the fan market. It seems they are aiming at the collateral reading market in high school and college literary and composition courses. They should do well in this market, for the book is an exciting job for those who have not read the stories elsewhere. On the other hand, it contains several never before reprinted masterpieces, too. Among them are Isaac Asimov's "The Red Queen's Race," Fredric Brown's "Etaoin Shrdlu," A. Bertram Chandler's "Giant Killer," Robert Heinlein's "They," Philip MacDonald's "Private -- Keep Out," Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother," and two by H. Beam Piper, "He Walked Around the Horses" and "Operation RSfP." A distinguished list, though unlo short. Previously anthologized items: O, Henry's "Roads of Destiny," Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis," two of Kipling: "The Finest Story in the World" and "The Mark of the Beast," Sprague de Camp's "The Blue Giraffe," end Ray Bradbury's "The Million-Year Picnic." The other tales, which you may like better than I, are: James Blish's "Mistake Inside," Gouvemeur Morris's "Back There in the Grass," Esther Carlson's "Museum Piece," and Nelson Bond's "Conqueror's Isle." The Morris and the Bond have been previously anthologized, too. Fletcher Pratt's introduction presents ideas about science fiction and fantasy in a way that makes most of us other anthologists sound like circus barkers. Best of all is his open recognition Of the fact that top science fiction and fantasy are essentially intellectual -- a medium for the expression of ideas which otherwise would be difficult, dreary, dull -- or even somehow dangerous. Doubleday  Co., New York, #. # page s, # S AM Merwin, until recently Stories and Startling Stories, has turned out a rather disappointing first science fiction novel. The idea is fine, though unoriginal, but one feels that the author was in too much of a hurry to turn it into a polished story. The House tells ingeniously of parallel worlds which touch at "tangential points" through which a group of people called "The Watchers" (vce John D. MacDonald's "Wine of the Dreamers." reviewed last month) supervise their various development lines. The drama here revolves around a couple -- male photographer, female poet-reporter (and a pretty silly character, too) -- become Watchers, and who "watch" on an odd alternate American Continent that has kerosene but no gasoline, rockets but no internalcombustion motors, invincible heat-ray guns but no airplanes, a depressed and under developed North and an oligarchically imperial South. The job of the Watchers is to prevent this southern government, with its capital in New Orleans, from disposing of a people's hero who is trying to bring science and technology to fruition. They succeed, of course. And at the very end there is a snapper in the tail that comes as all the greater a surprise for the excellently understated way in which it is put over. If you can overlook the hasty writing and unfortunate characterizations, you'll find this an intriguing story. Rachel L. Carson. Oxford University Press, New York, #. # pages, # sometimes defined as being nothing more than an extropolation of the known. In many -- and in some of its best -- parts, The Sea can according to this definition be called science fiction on the highest plane. It applies logical and scientific imagination to what we know or infer about the ocean depths and comes up with -- sheer poetry. What a book! Though plotless, it is rich with characters -- dolphons, foraminifera, cephalopods, and those strange mammals, the whales, who never suffer caisson disease no matter how violent the change in the pressures against their bodies. Probably you could call it adventureless, if you wished, yet it is crammed with two types of adventure -- that of the struggles of the waters of the sea and of the creatures within them for continuity, place, primacy; and that more immediately fascinating sort undertaken by oceanographers and other marine scientists in search of difficult knowledge and sea-buried secrets. It is truly an exciting book. Donald A. Wollheim. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # IT is difficult to understand why  a book such as this is directed to boys. I know of no youngsters who would enjoy any of the tea volume, except Ray Bradbury's wonderful "King of the Gray Spaces," which is the only tale published since # in the book. The other nine are hoary chestnuts which men of around # to # will like -- some of them -- since it will give them a warm feeling of nostalgia for their youth, when they used to read stories like these and think them hot stuff. The roster of authors alone give us of the older generation a clue to the quality of the stories: Ray Cummings, Bob Olsen, Daniel Dresser, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Edmond Hamilton, ClifClifton Kruse, and David H. Keller. None of the stories these comparative ancients have in the book are good; most of them are hopelessly awful, even those by Simak, who are doing much better work today. The tragedy is that many uninformed parents will give this volume to their kids as an introduction to science fiction. The works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, for all their age, would be a better primer. Fletcher Pratt, Introduction by Willy Ley. Random House, New York, #. # pages # by #I inches, # definitely the best buy for boys in the last two or three years. It is a beautifully, densely illustrated summary, in simple, graphic language, of the origins, development, current status and probable future of the reaction principle as a source of flight power. Every page has at least one, and often two or three, superbly real pictures by Jack Coggins, nearly # of them in full color. Many of them are semitechnical showing what rocketry is actually about. All for #! Fletcher Pratt has done a fine job of dramatic condensation in his text, telling the whole story by its high spots from the days of the Chinese invention of gunpowder through "What the WellDressed Spaceman Will Wear" and "Meteorites?' (they're no hazard to speak of). There is not one suspicion of "writing down" in the whole book, either. Just what one needs for one's #-to-#-year-old acquaintances who want to learn painlessly. Edited by Andre Norton. World Publishing Co., Cleveland  New York, #. # pages, # clean-cut and expert space operas by the late Malcolm Jameson between hard covers. The volume is published frankly as a juvenile, which is smart business sense, even though it is to be assumed that Astounding Science Fiction did not publish them as such originally. Plenty of action, but action kept within human and possible range, all taking place in the Solar System. There are no BE MS, no faster-than-light travel, no Alien Intelligences: just men of the Space Patrol and their confreres and adversaries. lit Odd and complicated scientific devices abound; there is much manly competition between the crew of Bullard's Pollux and that of her sister ship the Castor; and enough -- but not too much -- of the weird and inexplicable take place in space and on the planets, moons and asteroids that are the natural and lawful prowling grounds of the Patrol. The stories gain their charm and durability from the simplicity and directness with which they were conceived and written. There is no cheap melodrama. Whether the average "sophisticated" adult will enjoy them, I don't know. I do, but then maybe I'm not quite adult yet. Certainly all youngsters with an ounce of adventurousness in their bones will go all-out for these swiftly moving and very real-seeming tales of tomorrow's adventures in space. Hall and Homer Eon Flint. Prime Press, Philadelphia, #, # pages, # pelting and dramatic story -- overwritten, it is true, and leaning a little heavily on the side of the pseudo-metaphysical, as so much fantasy did in the days when this book first was serialized (ArgosyAll-Story, #). Nevertheless, it is a fascinating and in some ways curiously modern piece of genuine science fiction. It may well be that The Blind Spot is the first of all "parallel world" stories of modern times -- and let the experts correct me if they can! The ingenious thesis of the lfbok is that there are two parallel worlds, between which communication can be had only through the "spot" or locus, which our world calls "Blind" and the other world calls "The Spot of Life." And to each world, the other is "The Beyond" or "The World After Death" or "Heaven," in an entirely non-theological sense. The complications and implications of this notion, circumstantially worked out in meticulous detail, make for an uncomfortably real story. It is one of its major triumphs that the novel seems wholly within the realm of fact while one is reading it -- surely the acid tests of good science fantasy. There is no point in even attempting to outline the plot and the denouement, since to try to retell them would be practically to write the book. Enough! to say that only the most jaded and unimaginative of readers will be able to put this honored classic down unfinished. It's good. m ide.-ful family hospilal protection is just #c a day for each I I # IB to # and forage # co # duly #jc a day. for children to # years, else cost is only lVSca day for each child! 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It was entirely for her own good, as he had told himself a dozen times in the past day. And with that he stilled whatever qualms of conscience he might otherwise have had. He didn't think of himself as being something of a murderer. She was sitting at the artificial fireplace, a cheerful relic of ancient days, reading just as peacefully as if she had been back home on Mars, instead of on this desolate outpost of space. She had adjusted quickly to the loneliness and the strangeness of this life -- to the absence of friends, the need for conserving air, the strange feeling of an artificial gravity that varied slightly at the whim of impurities in the station fuel. To everything, in fact, but her husband. She seemed to sense his eyes on her, for she looked up and smiled. "Feeling all right, dear?" she asked. "Naturally. How about you?" "As well as can be expected." "Not very good, then." She didn't reply, and he thought, She hates to admit it, but she really envies me. Well, I'll fix it so that she needn't any more. And he stared through the thick, transparent metal window at the beauty of the stars, their light undimmed by dust or atmosphere. The stories told about the wretchedness of the lighthouse keepers who lived on asteroids didn't apply at all to this particular bit of cosmic rock. Life here had been derful, incredibly satisfying. At least it had been that way for him. And now it would be the same way for his wife as well. He would have denied it hotly if you had accused him of finding her repulsive. But to certain drunks, the sober man or woman is an offense, and Palmer was much more than a drunk. He was a marak addict, and in the eyes of the marak fiends, all things and all people were wonderful, except those who did notVshare their taste for the drug. The latter were miserable, depraved creatures, practically subhuman. Of course that was not the way most of them put it. Certainly it was not the way Palmer did. He regarded his wife, he told himself, as an unfortunate individual whom he loved very much, one whom it was his duty to make happy. That her new-found happiness would also hasten her death was merely an unfortunate coincidence. She was sure to die anyway, before long, so why not have her live out her last days in the peace and contentment that only marak could bring? Louise herself would have had an answer to that, if he had ever put the question to her. He was careful never to do so. She laid the book aside and looked up at him again. She said, "Jim, darling, do you think you could get the television set working again?" "Not without a mesotron rectifier." "Even the radio would be a comfort." "It wouldn't do any good, anyway. Too much static from both Mars and Earth this time of year." That was the beauty of the marak, he thought. It changed his # mood, and left him calm and in full command of his faculties, able to handle any problem that came up. He himself, of course, missed neither the radio nor the television, and he never touched the fine library of micro-books. He didn't need them. A shadow flitted by outside the thick window, blotting out for a moment the blaze of stars. It was the shadow of death, as he knew, and he was able to smile even at that. Even death was wonderful. When it finally came, it would find him happy. He would not shudder away from it, as he saw Louise doing now at the sight of the ominous shadow. He smiled at his wife again, remembering the six years they had lived together. It had been a short married life, but -- again the word suggested itself to him -- a wonderful one. There had been only one quarrel of importance, in the second year, and after that they had got along perfectly. And then, two years ago, he had begun to take marak, and after that he couldn't have quarreled with anyone. It was a paragon among drugs, and it was one of the mysteries of his existence that anybody should object to his using it. Louise had tried to argue with him after she had found out, but he had turned every exchange of views into a peaceful discussion, which from his side, at least, was brimming over with good humor. He had even been good-humored when she tried to slip the antidote into his food. It was this attitude of his that had so often left her baffled and enraged, and he had a good chuckle out of that. too. Imagine a wife getting angry because her husband was too goodnatured. But she was never going to get angry again. He would see to that. Not after tonight. A big change was going to take place in her life. She had picked up another book, and for the moment he pitied her. He knew that she wasn't interested in any books. She was merely restless, looking for something to do with herself, seeking fore the shadows outside killed it for her for good and all. She couldn't understand his being so peaceful and contented, doing nothing at all. She threw the second book down and snarled -- yes, that was the word, "You're such a fool, Jim! You sit there, smug and sure of yourself, your mind blank, just waiting -- waiting for them to kill you and me. And you seem actually happy when I mention it." "I'm happy at anything and everything, dear." "At the thought of dying too?' "Living or dying -- it doesn't make any difference. Whatever happens, I'm Incapable of being unhappy." "If it weren't for the drug, we'd both live. You'd think of a way to kill them before they killed us." "There is no way." "There must be. You just can't think of it while the drug has you in its grip." "The drug doesn't have you, dear." He asked without sarcasm, "Why don't you think of a way?" "Because I lack the training you have. Because I don't have the scientific knowledge, and all the equipment scattered around means nothing to me." "There's nothing to be done." Her fists clenched. "If you weren't under the influence of the drug -- " "You know that it doesn't affect the ability to think. Tests have shown that." "Tests conducted by addicts themselves!" "The fact that they can conduct the tests should be proof enough that there's nothing wrong with their minds." "But there is!" she shouted. "I can see it in you. Oh, I know that you can still add and subtract, and you can draw lines under two words which mean the same thing, but that isn't really thinking. Real thinking means the ability to tackle real problems -- hard problems that you can't handle merely with paper and pencil. It means having the incentive to use your brain for a long time at a stretch. And that's what the drug has ruined. It has taken away all your incentive." "I still go about my duties." "Not as well as you used to, and even at that, only because they've become a habit. Just as you talk to me, because I've become a habit. If you'd let me give you the antidote -- " He chuckled at the absurdity of her suggestion. Once an addict had been cured, he could not become addicted again. The antidote acted to produce a permanent immunization against the effects of the drug. It was the realization of this fact that made addicts fight so hard against any attempt to cure them. And she thought that she could convince him by argument! He said, " You talk of not being able to think!" "I know," she replied hotly. "I'm the one who blunders. I'm the fool, for arguing with you, when I realize that it's impossible to convince a marak addict." "That's it," he nodded, and chuckled again. But that wasn't quite it. For he was also chuckling at his plan. She had thought him unable to tackle a real problem. Well, he would tackle one tonight. Then she would simply adopt his point of view, and she would no longer be unhappy. After she had accepted the solution he had provided, she would wonder how she could ever have opposed him. He fell into one of his dozes and hardly noticed her glaring at him. When he came put of it at last, it was to hear her say, "We have to stay alive as long as possible. For the sake of the lighthouse." "Of course, my dear. I don't dispute that at all." "And the longer we stay alive, the more chance there is that some ship will pick us up." "Oh, no, there's no chance at all," he asserted cheerfully. "You know that as well as I do. No use deceiving yourself, my love." That, he observed to himself, was the way of non-addicts. They couldn't look facts in the face. They had to cling to a blind and silly optimism which no facts justified. He knew that there was no hope. He' was able to review the facts calmly, judiciously, to see the inevitability of their dying -- and to take pleasure even in that. He Reviewed them for her now. "Let us see, sweetheart, whether I've lost my ability to analyze a situation. We're here with ur pretty little lighthouse in the middle of a group of asteroids between Mars and Earth. Ships have been wrecked here, and our task is to prevent further wrecks. The lighthouse sends out a standard high-frequency beam whose intensity and phase permit astrogators to estimate their distance and direction from us. Ordinarily, there's nothing for us to do. But on the rare occasions when the beam fails -- '  "That will be the end." "On those occasions," he continued. unruffled by her interruption, "I am supposed to leave my cosy little shelter, so thoughtfully equipped with all the comforts of Earth or Mars, and make repairs as rapidly as possible. Under the usual conditions, lighthousekeeping is a boring task. In fact, it has been known to drive people insane. That's why it's generally assigned to happily married couples like us, who are accustomed to living quietly, without excitement." "And that," she added bitterly, "is why even happily married couples are usually relieved after one year." "But, darling," he said, his tone cheerful, "you mustn't blame anyone. Who would have expected that a maverick meteor would come at us and displace us from our orbit? And who would have expected that the meteor would have collided first with the outer asteroids, and picked up a cargo of -- those?" Jie gestured toward the window, where a shadow had momentarily paused. By the light that shone through, he could see that the creature was relatively harmless-looking. It had what appeared to be a round, humorous face whose unhumorous intentions would be revealed only at the moment of the kill. The seeming face was actually featureless, for it was not a face at all. It had neither eyes, nor nose, nor mouth. The effect of features was given by the odd blend of colors. Almost escaping notice because of their unusual position end their dull brown hue were the stomach fangs, in neat rows which could be extended and retracted like those of a snake. He noticed that Louise had shuddered again, and said, in the manner of a man making conversation, "Interesting, aren't they? They're rock breathers, you know. They need very little oxygen, and they extract that from the silicates and other oxygencontaining compounds # of the rock." "Don't talk about them." "All right, if you don't want me to. But about us -- you see, my dear, no one expected us to be lost. And even if the Lighthouse Service has started to look for us, it'll take a long time to find us." "We have food, water, air. If not for those beasts, we'd last until a rescue ship appeared." "But even a rescue ship wouldn't be able to reach us unless we kept the beam going. So far, we've been lucky. It's really functioned remarkably well. But sooner or later it'll go out of order, and then I'll have to go out and fbf'it. You agree to that, don't you, Louise, dear?" She nodded. She said quietly, "The beam must be kept in order." "That's when the creatures will get me," he said, almost with satisfaction. "I may kill one or two of them, although the way I feel toward everything, I hate to kill anything at all. But you know, sweetheart, that there are more than a dozen of them altogether, and it's clumsy shooting in a spacesuit at beasts which move as swiftly as they do." "And if you don't succeed in fixing what's wrong, if they get you -- " She broke down suddenly and began to cry. He looked at her with compassion. and smoothed her hair. And yet, under the influence of the drug, he enjoyed even her crying. It was, as he never tired of repeating to himself and to her. a wonderful drug. Under its spell, a man -- or a woman -- could really enjoy life. Tonight she would begin to enjoy life along with him. #  tioned perfectly, and they still regulated their living habits by it. using Greenwich Earth time. At seven in the evening they sat down to a fine meal. Knowing that tomorrow they might die, Louise had decided that tonight they would eat and drink as well as they could, and she had selected a Christmas special. She had merely to pull a lever, and the food had slid into the oven, to be cooked at once by an intense beam of high-frequency radiation. Jim himself had chosen the wine and the brandy -- one of the peculiarities of the marak was that it did not affect the actual enjoyment of alcoholic drinks in the slightest, and one of the sights of the Solar System was to see an addict who was also drunk. But it was a rare sight, for the marak itself created such a pervading sensation of well-being that it often acted as a cure for alcoholism. Once an alcoholic had experienced its effect, he had no need to get drunk to forget his troubles. He enjoyed his troubles instead, and drank the alcohol for its own sake, for its ability to provide a slightly different sensation, and not for its ability to release him from an unhappy world. So tonight Palmer drank moderately, taking just enough, as it seemed to him, to stimulate his brain. And he did what he now realized he should have done long ago. Unobserved, he placed a tablet of marak in his own wineglass and one in Louise's. The slight bitterness of taste would be hardly perceptible. And after that Louise would be an addict too. That was the way the marak worked. There was nothing mysterious about the craving. It was simply that once you had experienced how delightful it was, you wouldn't do without it. The tablet he had taken that morning was losing its effect, but he felt so pleased at what he was doing that he didn't mind even that. For the next half hour he would enjoy himself simply by looking at Louise, and thinking that now at last they would be united again, no longer kept apart by her silly ideas about doing something to save themselves. And then the drug would take effect, and they would feel themselves lifted to the stars together, never to come down to this substitute for Earth again until the beam failed, and they went out together to make the repairs, and the shadows closed in on them. He had made sure that Louise had her back to him when he dropped the tablet into her glass, and he saw that she suspected nothing. She drank her wine, he noticed, without even commenting on the taste. He felt a sudden impulse to kiss her, and, somewhat to her surprise, he did so. Then he sat down again and went on with the dinner. He waited. An hour later he knew that he had made her happy. She was laughing as she hadn't laughed for a long time. She laughed at the humorous things he said, at the flattering way he raised his glass to her, even at what she saw through the window. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was laughing at nothing at all. He tried to think of how he had reacted the first time he had taken the drug. He hadn't been quite so aggressively cheerful, not quite so -- hysterical. But then, the drug didn't have exactly the same effect on everyone. She wasn't as well balanced as he had been. The important thing was that she was happy. Curiously enough, he himself wasn't happy at all. It took about five seconds for the thought to become clear to him, five seconds in which he passed from dull amazement to an enraged and horrified comprehension. He sprang to his feet, overturning the table at which they still sat. And he saw that she wasn't surprised at all. that she still stared at him with a secret satisfaction. "You've cured me!" he cried. "You've fed me the antidote!" And he began to curse. He remembered the other time she had tried it, the time when he had been on the alert, and had easily detected the strange metallic taste of the stuff. He had spat it out, and under the influence of the drug from which she had hoped to save him, he had laughed at her. Now he was unable to laugh. He had been so intent on feeding the tablet to her that he had forgotten to guard himself, and he had been caught. He was normal now -- her idea of being normal -- and he would never again know the wonderful feeling the drug gave. He began to realize his situation on this horrible lonely asteroid. He cast a glance at the window and at what must be waiting outside, and it was his turn to shudder. He noticed that she was still smiling. He said bitterly, "You're the addict now and I'm cured." She stopped smiling and said quietly, "Jim, listen to me. You're wrong, completely wrong. I didn't give you the antidote, and you didn't give me the drug." "I put it in your wine-glass myself." She shook her head. "That wqs a tablet I substituted for yours. It's an anti-virus dose from our medicine chest. You took one of the same things. That's why you feel so depressed. You're not under the influence of the drug any more." He took a deep breath. "But I'm not cured?" "No. I knew that I wouldn't be able to slip you the antidote. The taste is too strong. Later you'll be able to start taking the drug again. That is, if you want to, after experiencing for a time what it is to be normal. But not now. You have to keep your head clear. You have to think of something to save us." "But there's nothing to think of!" he shouted angrily. "I told you that the drug doesn't affect the intelligence!" "I still don't believe you. If you'd only exert yourself, use your mind -- " He said savagely, "I'm not going to bother. Give me those marak tablets." She backed away from him. "I thought you might want them. I took no chances. I threw them out." "Out there?" A horrified and incredulous look was on his face. "You mean that I'm stuck here without them? Louise, you fool, there's no help for us! The other way, at least, we'd have died happy. But now -- " He stared out the window. The shadows were there in full force. Not one now, but two, three -- he counted half a dozen. It was almost as if they knew that the end had come. They had reason to be happy, he thought with despair. And perhaps -- he shrank back from the thought, but it forced itself into his mind -- perhaps, now that all happiness had gone, and wretchedness had taken its place, he might as well end everything. There would be no days to spend torturing himself in anticipation ofa horrible death. Louise exclaimed suddenly, "Jim, look ! They're frolicking!' He looked. The beasts certainly were gay. One of them leaped from the airless surface of the asteroid and sailed over its fellow. He had never seen them do that before. Usually they clung to the rocky surface. Another was spinning around oddly, as if it had lost its sense of balance. Louise said, " They've swallowed the tablets! Over a hundred doses -- enough to drug every beast on the asteroid!" For a moment Palmer stared at the gamboling alien drug addicts. Then he put on his spacesuit and took his gun, and, without the slightest danger to himself, went out and shot them one by one. He noted, with a kind of grim envy, that they died happy. The one thing wrong with is not the solitude. In O RD sat in his swivel chair and surveyed the Solar System. The clarity of vision, unimpeded by the twohundred-mile curtain of Earth's atmosphere, was such that, from his position in Pluto's orbit, he could see with the naked eye every one of the planets except Pluto itself, hiding in a cluster of bright stars, and Mercury, eclipsed at the moment by the Sun. But, then, Ord knew exactly being alone on a space station fact , it's exactly the opposite where to look. Every day, for over two thousand days, he had looked out on the Solar System, He had seen Mercury scuttle round the Sun twenty-five times; Venus, more sedately, nine ; Earth had made six of the familiar trips through space that meant years? Mars was on its fourth journey? but Jupiter wasn't more thae halfway around yet, "It helps, I suppose, to be able to see them,' said a light, whimsical voice behind him. Evea when Una said the most serious things, which was often, her voice laughed. "If you hadn't been able to see the planets, you'd have been a straitjacket case long ago." "Who knows I'm not one now?" Ord asked. "You don't, anyway." He didn't turn yet. He postponed the moment when he would, dragging it out almost ecstatically from second to second -- like a heavy smoker halting, pausing deliberately in anticipation, cigarette in mouth, before lighting it. "I think," she retorted, the laughter in her voice as ever, "that so long as you talk sanely about madness, you can't be so far gone." The moment came. He couldn't wait forever. He swung around and looked at her with a slow, ironical smile. He had known more beautiful women, but none, perhaps, who knew their limitations as well as she did. Una always wore that spotless white shirt, open-necked and tucked tightly into the waistband of her sharply creased bottlegreen slacks. Perhaps it was pessimistic to think the worst of what one didn't know, but Ord took it for granted that Una's only good points of figure were the neat waist and upper half and the length of leg that her customary outfit displayed. There was a slight irregularity about her forehead which she treated adroitly by always having a cascade of her beautiful ashblonde hair over one side of her face. Her teeth were splendid in a subtle halfsmile; she never allowed herself more. There was just a hint at the top button of her chaste, irhpeccable shirt that her skin wasn't all of a uniform satin smoothness, but suspicion was never allowed to grow to certainty. asked. "I don't watch time as you do. Where could they be, if they started whenever the beam failed?" "I haven't worked it out since you asked the last time." He couldn't still the tremor in his voice. "But they could be very close." There was a hint of regret in her nod. Ord looked past her at the blank wall opposite the observation windows. He wasn't cramped. the Sun was designed for one man who would always be alone, who would spend two years in his own company for the somewhat fabulous salary of a space station officer, and everything had been done to make the quarters seem roomy and comfortable without emptiness. There was the observatory, the machine room, the lounge, the workshop, the bedroom, the bathroom, the storerooms. even a spare room into which Una disappeared, though it had not been provided for Una or anyone like her. As Ord looked at the blank wall, he was thinking of the activity on Earth, six years before, when one of the three Pluto directional radio beams had failed. There were plenty of beams left to guide ships through space, but the sudden failure of Station Two's beam must have had some effect on almost every interplanetary trip. Five minutes on the Moon trip, at certain times; two or three days on journeys to Mars or Venus, depending on the relative positions of the starting point, destination, and the two remaining Pluto beams; weeks, even months more required for the run to some of the asteroids and the satellites of the outer planets. Two spokes of the directional wheel remained, but that left a great gaping angle of a hundred and twenty degrees, served only feebly by the beams from ships' destinations, with no powerful universal beam to reinforce them. The situation was not new. Some day there would be so many line-of-flight beams in the Solar System that ships wouldn't have to know the beams they were on. They would merely point their noses where they wanted to go and cast off, like so many galleons sailing before the wind. But as yet there was not enough interplanetary travel to make the duplication of beams practicable. If a beam failed, it failed, and more than six years had to pass before it could be put in operation again, unless the failure occurred at a convenient time -- when a ship was well on the way to relieve a station officer and check the equipment, say. Through history, however, failure of anything man-made had tended to come almost always at the most inconvenient times. Ord followed the ship in his mind through its six-year journey. A week to prepare. Two days to reach the Moon. Three weeks for the run to Mars, which would have been sixteen days if Station Two had been sending out its beam. Then trouble. Only the little Ganymede beam, in the positions of the planets and their satellites at the time, to help the repair ship on its way from Mars. Almost nine months to Jupiter. But at least, by that time, the ship would have some velocity to help the rockets on the remaining miles... and the long, dreary search for the silent speck in space that was the space station. Eleven months altogether, with the beam; over six years without it. One thing that helped Ord bear the extra five years of solitude he had to spend aboard the station, from the nearest man, was the thought of the accumulated pay he would collect. The station officers were necessary, and the various space lines had to accept responsibility for them. He would be set up for life, at twenty-nine, when he got back to Earth at last. NA shrugged. "Oh, well, it's been nice knowing you. And I mean that." "It would be for you, Una. But that was because of the others before you. I learned a lot." "You've just broken rule one," she said lightly. "Never talk of 'the others.' Just be careful you don't break rule two." "What rule is that?" "You should know. You want me to break it? Most particularly, never talk of any others to come." She made a gesture of dismissal, as if she were tearing the whole subject out of a notebook, crumpling it and throwing it way. "Shall we play chess?" she asked lightly. "It's a long time since we did." "All right. But not here. Let's go into the lounge." He led the way through the station as if she didn't know it as well as he did. He set up the pieces rapidly, through long practice. Una didn't sit down opposite him, but poised on the edge of the sofa. She always kept her long, graceful line intact. They had just made the first oblique reference to something which had been growing for a long time. Undoubtedly Ord was growing tired of Una. It was nobody's fault, or his, in so far as it was anyone's. There was a hint of farewell in the chess game. One for the road, so to speak. Una played quickly and decisively. One particularly rapid move brought the usual complaint from Ord. "I wish you'd pay more attention," he protested. "If you win, I look silly, taking so much time to think things out. And if I fcin, you lose nothing because you obviously weren't trying." Una laughed. "It's just a game," she answered. She won the first game. "Luck," Ord grunted, without heat. "You never saw the danger of that rook to bishop's fourth." "Perhaps not. But look how well I followed it up, so it really doesn't matter, does it?" They played the inevitable second game, and inevitably, also, #M Ol d won it. Like all chess players who have won a game they knew they could win when and how they wished, he felt relaxed and pleased with himself. He yawned. Una rose. "I can take a hint, she said. "No, please..." She smiled at him and disappeared into her room. Ord spent a long time looking at the blank door. He had been warned against solitosis (Latin solitarius, from solus, and the Greekoss), but for him it wasn't so bad. He still knew the truth; perhaps that was it. After all this time, he was still in no danger of really believing what was not so. For example...  to the machine room. Among other things, this room presented a complete picture of conditions throughout the entire station from moment to moment. He could sit before the dials and switches and meters and check on everything from the outside temperature to the air pressure in the farthest storeroom. He could see quite plainly, for example, that the temperature in Una's room, as of that moment, was minus I # degrees Centigrade. A long way above absolute zero, certainly -- but a long way below comfortable bedroom temperature. Moreover, the air pressure was only eight pounds. In a word, though he had seen Una enter the room, he might see her come out of it again. But Una wasn't there. The door had never been open. There was no Una. Knowing that fact was a big factor. Long ago, he had feared a time when he wouldn't know such things. He still feared it now and then. Yet if he pressurized the spare room, raised its temperature and then walked in. he would see Una asleep in the bed. If he touched her, she would be real. If he slapped her face with his hand, his palm would sting, and she would awaken, resentful. If he stabbed her, she would die, and he would have to take the trouble of burying her out in space. That was all real -- to him. But he could see and appreciate the facts indicated by the dials. Even though he was tired of Una, however, he could not merely tell her to vanish and she would be gone. He had had to provide a ship to bring her here, and he would have to provide another to take her away. Solitosis was no new thing; it had been discovered soon after space flight. Unfortunately, no one had so far discovered what to do about it, except remove the conditions that produced it. Space #ST #s not merely a void; it's emptier than that -- empty of horizon, sky, soft sunlight, ground and greenery and buildings, empty of time . and continuity of one's history, either as an individual or member of the human race. Worst of all, it's empty of people. A hermit may deliberately escape civilization, but leave him alone on a deserted world and he turns psychotic. That, in short, is solitosis.There was a reason for the fact that there was a space station officer -- he could handle the maintenance of the station -- and a reason for the fact that 'there was only one. Two men together were not enough to protect each other from solitosis. The critical number was about forty. But to leave forty men on a space station was uneconomic. To leave fewer, yet more than one, was dangerous to all. for solitosis could be homicidal. The natural solution was to leave one man, who would naturally become a solitosis victim, but generally didn't harm himself and could be restored to complete sanity when he was relieved -- simply by returning him to Earth. It was simple. It worked. Of course, station officers had to be paid to take two years of insanity. It was rarely completely pleasant or completely unpleas#ft ant. The result took different forms, but always there were pleasures and pains. No station officer was ever in a position tb know what he was in for before he signed on. for no man was allowed to subject himself to solitosis twice. But Ord was more interested in the problem of Una. He knew, of course, that he wouldn't work any solution out and do something about it. His particular brand of solitosis didn't work like that. Certainly, somewhere in his mind, a decision was being reached. But what that was was hidden from him. He had to wait and see what happened. But being tired of Una, he knew the general lines. went outside. Fifty years before. scores of ships had come in on the beam from the station, which had been held on its course by six freighters. Each ship in the fleet had dragged or pushed a lump of rock that nobody wanted, for the station, when complete, had to have mass. Gradually, a planet was built -- a very small planet, but enough to form a base for the station and enable it to follow Pluto in its orbit with a minimum expenditure of power. The station on Pluto itself was already in operation, and Station Three was being set up concurrently. Bouncing gently over the rocks of the dark, airless world that was only big enough to hold a small ship to its surface, Ord paused at the tiny cruiser Una had used. It was as real as she was, no more, no less. He forgot the details of the story that explained Una's arrival. It was so completely preposterous that any girl should arrive alone at any space station, in any kind of ship, that he hadn't bothered to think up a convincing explanation. Una, like the others, just appeared. She had had a story which she was prepared to tell, but he had cut it short. That was most satisfactory all around. The ship, he saw, was not obviously damaged. He jumped up on the hull experimentally. He thought that he landed on it and stood twelve feet above the surface of the planet. He searched hazily for an explanation. Perhaps he had picked a spur of rock and made it the ship. Perhaps his eyes manufactured twelve feet of height. He had never inspected the ship closely, and he didn't now; it would only demand a lot of tiring mental effort. He wouldn't know consciously that he was constructing everything he saw, but that was what he would be doing. He bounced back to the station and into the airless machine room to examine the beam equipment once more. There was nothing seriously wrong with it. He could repair it in a few hours if he had the tools and six hands, which was more than most space ' station officers could say. That was the difficulty about a job like Ord's -- station officers had to be experienced. But how could they be experienced when they could never have done the job before? He cast a last glance around the machine room and left. Ord did think of going back to I Una's ship, finding something wrong and repairing it, so that it would be possible for her to go. But that would be humoring his solitosis. He still preferred to be as sane as possible. He had involuntarily produced men as companions once, but it hadn't worked. He could never become sufficiently interested in their physical appearance to make them real. He might talk' with them and enjoy talking, but they were always ghosts and ; looked it. The women had never been ghosts. In fact, he had been afraid, once, that the time would come I when he would actually believe in them. And, of course, he had often explored the possibility that when someone actually came, he would think it was part of another hallucination. But there seemed little reason to fear that while it was still so easy to prove to himself that he was alone at the station. He took off his suit and washed and shaved carefully, having decided, long since, that the normal habits of human existence should be carefully preserved. He dressed neatly, though the station was warm and there was no real need for clothes, and, when he slept, he wore pajamas. There had been a time -- the time of Suzy and Margo -- when the apparent life at the station was what might have been expected of a solitary man. But he discovered, quite plainly and simply, that there were too many complications. Una had perhaps been too much of a swing in the other direction. His relations with her, Ord thought wryly, wouldn't have been out of place in a Victorian book for boys and girls, except that he didn't mind her smoking. he wakened, half convinced he had heard something, but he was sleepy, didn't want to move, and had no intention of pandering to his own neurosis. It was not until he had been up for hours that he began to wonder why Una didn't appear. Perhaps she was ill. Perhaps, though he didn't think of it that way, he had decided unconsciously to have her die on him, lingeringly and effectively. He sighed, went to the machine room and brought the temperature and air pressure of Una's room to normal. Then he went in. She was gone, but her perfume lingered in the air... He went to the observation room and looked for her ship. It was gone, too. He was a little disgusted, but he didn't blame himself. It was easier and more satisfactory to blame Una. She might at least have said good-by. All in all, he had liked her. He would have liked to meet the real Una, if there was one somewhere. He had tired of her chiefly because she had never become a genuine, credible character. She had always been true to type, whereas real people weren't. He stayed in the observatory and looked for a ship. He smiled at the thought that what he believed to be a ship, bringing another girl with another fantastic story of being lost in space, might turn out to be the relief ship. He was glad his solitosis had not taken the form that Benson's had. Benson had lost all sense of subjective years waiting for the relief ship, though Benson only had to wait the regulation two years. Benson hadn't minded much. He thought he had turned into a mental giant. As it turned out, his functioning IQ had really gone up some fifteen points. It came down again eleven points, but certainly Benson had no reason to regret his two years of solitude. Nevertheless, Ord was glad it hadn't taken him the same way. As he expected, the ship was there, curving in for a landing. It wasn't the relief ship, since it was too small. It was, in fact, far too small to be capable of the trip from Earth with no beam to assist it. Ord was on the merry-go-round again. If he hadn't done a good job on the last hours of Una, he had made up for it with the first few hours of whoever it was. The little ship overshot, handled exactly as women often handled spacecraft. It took a long, fivehour sweep that had Ord biting his nails. Moreover, it wasn't a rocket ship at all. Perhaps this time the girl -- naturally, it would be a girl -- had an explanation for the impossible to beat all explanations. She was certainly keeping him in suspense. But at last the ship was down, and Ord, already in his spacesuit, hurried out to it. A figure emerged as he reached it, and through the faceplate he saw a face which was clear from the start. The girl gestured toward the ship, uselessly. He indicated the space station. She shook her head inside the huge helmet, pointing to the ship. He was puzzled. This was new. Suddenly, to indicate her meaning, she bent down and lifted the end of the ship, then looked up at him. He understood at last. She was afraid it wasn't safe to leave the ship there. She thought it might blow away. He laughed and tried to reassure her without words. It was true enough that even a light breeze might be enough to break the feeble attraction of the planet for the ship. But on a tiny manmade world, with no atmosphere, that was no problem. He demonstrated, getting below the ship and heaving. It sailed up slowly, and for a moment Ord almost shared the girl's fear that it would never return. But then gravity caught it and the ship returned gently. It was clear that it would take considerable force to break the hold of the small world on it. The girl turned from it, ready to go with Ord to the space station. kRD shut the airlock and began to divest himself of his suit. The girl, however, still wasn't satisfied. She looked about for meters to assure herself that the pressure was sufficient. Gravely, Ord pointed them out. Then she opened her helmet and took a slow, cautious breath. "You must be Baker," she said. That was another shock. Baker was the previous station officer, and Ord had all but forgotten his name -- actually, until she mentioned it, the name had been forgotten. For a moment, Ord wondered wildly if the girl was one of Baker's dreams, seven years late. But Baker's solitosis hadn't taken that form. "No, Ord," he said. "Colin Ord.' "Before we go any further," she said, "just how does solitosis affect you?" This, too, was new. "Just makes me see things that aren't there," replied Ord cautiously. "And you know there's nothing there?" "Sometimes." "Do you know I'm here?" Ord grinned. "I'm not even wondering about it." Suddenly the girl was holding a gun pointed at him. "One thing you can be sure of," she told him. "This gun is here. I don't want to be unpleasant, but I think we should remove misunderstandings. I'm not God's little gift to lonely space station officers, and any time you do anything that indicates you think I am, this comes out and it may do some damage. That clear?" "Very. I told you my name. What's yourr?" "Elsa Catterline. You want to know why I'm here, of course." "Not particularly." She looked up warily at that. But she went on lifting off her helmet and removing her spacesuit. Ord made no move to help novels: Project Excelsior -- of interplanetary atomic intrigue; and The W'anJerer's Return -- an out-of-this-world story of a man trying desperately to return to earth. # Heinlein novel, about -- parasitic, ruthless slug that could dominate a man's brain and body. # de Camp havoc with the amazing bee-like civilization of another planet. # Bradbury century when meo conquered the red planet. "The best book of science fiction of this or Tribune. # fragments tattooed on a man's body. "This is the cream off the top of the bottle... an absolute must for every lover of science ' fictioa. ' ' -- Galaxy# MerwiiigriR ingenious story of parallcl-time-track adventures in several different worlds. #  , v her. There was always the possibility that it might really be dangerous, "I'll tell you all the same," she continued. "I killed a man -- why and how doesn't matter. I had access to an experimental ship. That one out there. I thought if I disappeared for about two years..." "Don't labor over it," said Ord. "I'm not asking questions." "I know. I wonder why." She won her battle with the suit and emerged. Ord's eyes widened. She was beautiful, really beautiful, but he had expected that. The unexpected thing was that she wore the kind of outfit girls in magazine stories wore in similar circumstances -- white nylon shorts and what might have been called the minimum bra. Once there would have been nothing surprising in that, but for years he had been very careful and restrained. He had tried sex undiluted, and then had gone back to diluting it in self-protection. It was a long time since any of his girls had been so feminine and made it so obvious. In fact, for the first time, he seriously considered the possibility that she was real. Real people were sometimes more fantastic than the wildest imaginings. "I wonder," he said. "Don't," she snapped. "I was only thinking," he went on easily, "that you're going to have a tough time with that gun when you get tired of holding it. It's a heavy gun. Want me to get a gunbelt for you?" She flushed, angrily. She looked the . kind of sweetnatured kid who could kill a man, at that. Her nose and eyes and mouth were exactly where she would have placed them herself for the best effect, if she could have done so, and everything about her was compact and perfect and made for efficiency. Not efficiency in handling a spaceship or even a gun, but efficiency in always .getting what she wanted. Another thing to add to Ord's growing list of points of interest about Elsa Catterline was that she wasn't the kind of girl he would normally go for. "The gun, if you don't mind my saying so," he said, "is a silly idea. What do you hope to accomplish with it? How long will it be before I take it from you? Two hours, perhaps, before you get careless. Even then I might wait for a still better chance. Sooner or later you have to sleep. Can you lock any door in my station and be sure I can't get in? I won't keep you in suspense -- you can't." He shrugged. "But by all means try." Unexpectedly, she threw away the gun and smiled at him. "I'm not dumb," she told him. See Electrons, Atoms in Action! 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In Yuli payment. j (Transportation Is Erne) "That was for the time when I still wasn't sure you weren't violent. I think I can get on with you. Ord." He nodded coldly. The pattern was clear now. "I get it," he said. The trouble was that it did nothing to settle the question of whether she was real or not. That she could be merely Una's successor was so obvious that there was no need to go into it. But it was also possible -- unlikely, yet possible -- that a girl of the type she seemed to be could have . picked a space station as a hide. out and could have acted as she had acted, was acting, and would act. He was suddenly tired of the whole business. He wanted Earth. It had been a dull throb all this time, but now it flared to a mad longing, as it did every few months. It was all very well for Wordsworth to talk about that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. Get Wordsworth out there and let him run a space station. Ord wanted the presence o r people about him that would keep , him sane. He wanted to put women back in their place in his l life. He wanted to be able to forget for hours, even days at a time, that there were such things as w-nen. Only twenty-four hours before. he had been congratulating himself that solitosis hadn't really got him. And now he didn't know whether Elsa was real or not. Either way, it was as bad. If she was real, he should have known it at once. If she was just another ghost, he should have known that, too. "I'm going out to have a look at your ship," he said. He thought she would object, but she merely shrugged. "You might have left your suit on, then," She told him. Twenty minutes later he was inside the little ship. He made no examination. That could come after he had settled something else. There was light and there was air. Fourteen pounds per square inch, the meters said. He found a gasoline lighter and manipulated it clumsily with his big, semi-rigid gloves. The flame flared. But that meant nothing. If there was no lighter, and he saw it, he might also see it burn where there was no air. There was a valve on his suit to test air pressure. He opened it. The little dial swung around to fourteen pounds. The question was, had he really opened the valve? He tried again, concentrating, making sure hereally had hold of the valve. A halfturn was all that was necessary. Slowly, painfully, he turned it. He saw it turn. There was still cigarette "The last word on the subject, basic for every science fiction reader and writer." two adventures which are just over the horizon -- the launching of an orbital rocket, and the fabulous plan to set up a research center -- on the moon! 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Refund of purchase price guaranteed If I return booh within # days.  Check enclosed. Send postpaid. Same guarT It I  I erpY smoke in the small, cramped quarters. He watched it swirl into the little box at his hip. The needle registered fourteen pounds. He felt the sweat on his forehead. Trying to deceive himself, to get a jump ahead of his own mind, he lunged out into the open and twisted the valve again. He told himself he was only testing it. He looked down. No pressure. He raised his heavy arms and stumbled like a sleepwalker back to the ship's airlock. Still keeping his arms raised, he entered the control room again. Only then did he look down. The dial, untouched, still read no pressure. There was no air on the ship. There was no ship. Now that he knew that, he was able to open and close the valve. Elsa was no more real than Una. I T was easier, then, to check ahd doublecheck. Very soon he was walking through the walls of the ship she had come in. It was simpler to check on it than on Elsa. She would remain real to the last, but the ship was only a minor part of the illusion. He had had some bad moments in the last hour. It had become all too clear that he was losing his last defenses in his fight for sanity in insanity. He had won his battle again, but perhaps this was the last time he would win it. The next time he might fail to prove the illusion. That, after this, wouldn't necessarily prove the reality. Elsa was finished. She had been too real and not real enough. Why had he ever let Una go? He plodded back to the station and removed his suit. He found Elsa in the lounge, squatting on her heels and looking like a magazine cover. "Out," he said bluntly. "It was a mistake your coming here. I'm sorry." There was a flash of movement as she dived for the gun. Just in time he tensed himself, reminding himself of what he had learned, and when she fired at him he felt nothing. He grinned back at her. "The instinct of self-preservation is too strong," he said. "I can't let myself be shot, whatever happens." He stepped forward. She fought him for the gun. She bit his wrist, and it hurt. But he got the gun. "If you shoot me, nothing happens," he pointed out. "But if I shoot you, you die. You know that?" She nodded sullenly and got up, put on her suit and left. In twenty minutes, her ship took off. Ord didn't even watch it out of sight. He still held the gun in his A T.V. Improvement Jim Y ou Can Do Yourself! tmpq y I bad-intnrlorenca-picturea instantaneously, perpicture tuba! Roady-to-install on arrival, attach it ypurself (out-of-sipht) in loss than # seconds! Screw driver only tool reauired. Especially effective For frinpe or poor recoption areas. # # f. f. Attack # t od, or sent C.O.D. 'EloctrenU Contenders Te U.S. Air Force' triHtBNt Id. Dept. SG-I New Yrk #, N. Y. hand. He threw it in a drawer. It would remain there until he forgot it. Then there would be no gun. From now on, he decided, there would be no surrender to solitosis. There would be no more Elsas or Suzys or Margos. When he weakened, he would bring Una back, or he might have another try at male companionship. F OR days, he thought he was winning his battle. He slept well, and he remained alone. He spent a lot of time in the observation room, but he never saw a ship. The trouble was that the fight was not on the conscious level of his mind. There would be no warning before he would suddenly see a ship, without having taken any conscious decision. Then it would be too late to tell himself there was no ship. It came at last. There was a tiny point of light moving visibly. As soon as he saw it, he left' the observation room and fought with himself. He might convince the other part of his mind that it was a mistake, and when he went back to the observation room it would be a mistake -- the ? moving point of light would be gone. It had happened before. But solitosis was progressive, he thought dully, as he stood in the observation room four hours later and saw the ship. If it didn't get you under in one year, it did it in two. Or four or six. Una, intelligent and restrained, had been the last stand of a mind under constant fire. Una was part of the disease, yes, but a disease still controlled firmly and confidently. When he let Una go, he had been giving up. The ship this time was a lifeboat from a larger vessel. That wasn't new. Suzy had come in a lifeboat. So had Dorothy, later, from the same mythical ship. Ord stood and watched it land, concentrating so that his hair tingled with sweat. He wasn't trying to exorcize the ship; that would have been impossible. He was merely building into himself a powerful, binding resolve to know on this and all future occasions the truth from the lie. He would not drive the new visitor away as he had driven Elsa when he discovered she was another phantom. But he must know. Until Elsa came, he had always known. He mustn't lose that, whatever else he lost. He saw a spacesuited figure emerge from the lifeboat, and then he went down to the airlock and waited. He must be a hopeless romantic, he thought while he waited. Solitosis showed people a lot about themselves. There had been plenty of opportunity for Easily , Quickly, Naturally The World' # Standard Conversational Method for  Professional, Scientific and Educational Advancement  Greater Scientific and Business Opportunities  Doubled Travel Enjoyment  Wider Social and Cultural Horizons  Special Assignments in Armed Forces, Government Service Another language helps you "go places" in business, where great oppor tunities are international; in the armed forces and government agencies, where bi-linguistic ability is needed; in science, travel and cultural achievement, where new adventures await you! 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Then it cleared gradually, like a lantern slide carefully focused, sharp and clear, on a screen. Ord sighed in relief. He hadn't proved yet that the new girl was another wraith, but it was going to be possible, after all. With Elsa's face as clear from the first second as his own in a mirror, how could he know? f "HE girl opened her face-plate. "Colin Ord?" she said brisk'y. "I'm Dr. Lynn of Four Star Lines. Marilyn Lynn." She grinned, a friendly, put youatyour ease grin. A professional grin -- part of the bedside manner of a good doctor, male or female, young or old. "Cacophanous," she added, "but I've had quite a while to get used to it." "Very nice," he said. "First remark of second castaway on desert island. Do you tell me the rest of the story straight away, or are you going to be coy?" She frowned -- putting the fresh patient in his place. "I'm not going to tell you anything," she said, "until I've found out a little more about you." "Excellent!" Ord answered. "Tone, inflection and diction just right. It all fits." He saw with further relief that she was of the Una type. She was beautiful, naturally, but not fantastic. And as she stripped off her suit, he saw that she wore slacks and a tunic, which was reasonable. She looked intelligent. She wasn't too young -- at least his own age. Perhaps he was still the master. She looked at him, too, with the eye of a diagnostician. "Don't bother," he told her. "I see things that aren't there. Particularly people." She nodded. "I see. So you don't believe I'm here?" "Well, I ask you," he said skeptically. "Would you, if you were me?" He remembered a line of nonsense verse -- Lear, probably -- and quoted, "What would you do if you were me to prove that you were you?" She was weighing the situation calmly. She didn't seem to mind Ord seeing what she was doing. "Do you know I'm not real?" she asked. "No. That comes with time. At least, it always has so far." "You mean you've always proved to yourself that your -- visitors were mere fantasy?" "With a struggle," he admitted. "Interesting. That looks like a case of controlled solitosis. I never heard of one before." Ord laughed cynically. "That's right, feed my ego. It always comes to that in the end." The girl gestured at her discarded suit. "You can't tell whether that's real or not?" "Not at once. Eventually, yes  -- I hope." He led her to the lounge. She looked around and nodded. She seemed pleased. "Everything neat and tidy. You have no idea what a pleasure it is to meet you, Mr. Ord." "That doesn't make you real," replied Ord rudely. "They all say that." She looked at him in surprise. "Why should I want to make you accept me as real?" she asked. It was like a physical blow. Ord had no idea why, but that didn't lessen the effect. "That's right," he said slowly. "Why should you?" "Tell me about the others," she suggested. Like any good doctor, she gave the impression that what motivated her questions was not clinical but personal interest. The practicing doctor, Ord mused, was primarily an artist, not a scientist. He told her. He edited the story a little, but he told it fairly, with particular detail on Elsa and Una, his most recent companions. "Una is interesting," Marilyn said. "She was the only one who knew everything that you do. She didn't let you talk about it, but she knew." gan to make coffee. Marilyn watched him. "When will you know whether I'm real or not?" she asked casually. "Can't say. Perhaps in five minutes, perhaps not for hours. I -- " "Don't tell me how you do it," she said quickly. "Not yet. Do it first. Does it involve me? I mean, you don't shoot me to see if I die, or anything, do you?" He grinned. "Nothing like that. If I shot you, you would die -- like the witches in history. They died if they were, and they died if they weren't." "Your mind has remained agile enough." "Naturally. I never heard of solitosis inhibiting intelligence. Did you?" She was significantly silent. He raised his eyebrows. "You mean it often happens? Or always?" "Not always. Frequently. It's pretty obvious, isn't it? The mind unbalanced naturally functions less well than the normal mind." "Benson was the exception that proves the rule?" She nodded. She knew who Benson was. That, like almost everything else, proved nothing. She held up her cup before her. "Is this part of the test?" she risked. "Whether more coffee is actually drunk than you drink yourself?" "No. that doesn't help. It would be very easy for me to make half vhat I thought I made, to bring out one cup and think I brought wo, to take a nonexistent cup rom a nonexistent girl, like this." '-Ic took it. "To fill it with nothng and pass it back, and later to... His words died, for he had seen omething strange in her face. ' Prror or sadness or "understand. x , he couldn't be sure. "V"-t's the matter?" he asked. "I don't know. Perhaps I misunderstood." "Something I said?" he continued. "Easy to make half what I thought I made... you knew about that, surely. And bringing out one cup when I thought I brought two. Nonexistent cup, nonexistent girl -- it can't be because I called you a nonexistent girl, for we've been into that before. Naturally, if there's no cup I'd be careful, with part of my mind, not to pour coffee in it... He frowned. "There it is again. ' 'ou tried not to show it this time. t I caught a faint shadow of   ct'.ing I sr.'d or d'd fright  : you, or makes you unhappy, or maybe just interests you. I'm not handing you imaginary coffee. I am? It seems real." She was completely in control of herself again. She laughed. "No, not that. You're handing me real coffee, which means that part of your mind already knows I'm real. But it's the part you don't trust and can't touch." "I'm not doing something I don't know I'm doing, am I?" She shook her head. "Since you're bound to think about it, whatever I say -- it was just something you said. What you know you said. And it's not horrible or frightening and there's no earthly reason why it should make me sad. It's just something I didn't know." "You won't tell me any more than that?" She answered the question with another. "Don't your puppets do what you tell them?" "No. You know that." She put down the cup. "I'll wash the dishes." she said lightly. "Will that prove anything?" "Sometimes, for an intelligent girl, you're very dumb," he said gloomily. "Next time they were used, I could just imagine they were washed, couldn't I?" "Of course." Her eyes -- brown eyes, deep-set under thin eyebrows -- followed him as he rose suddenly. "Where are you going?" "To find out if you're real." "My ship. Go ahead." "RD went to the airlock and put on his spacesuit. He thought for a while about what he might have said that brought that curious expression to Marilyn's face. But it was very clear that he could never, unaided, work out the problem. What he had said was so simple, so obviously true... and eventually she would tell him about it. It didn't matter. There was nothing in what had happened so far, or whafeshe had said, that settled the problem of the moment. Possibly, to add to all the other arguments against the possibility of Marilyn being a real woman, there was the consideration that, if she were, she would insist on it. But, after all, would she? She was a doctor, perhaps a psychiatrist. She knew solitosis. A doctor of any kind, he told himself decidedly, encountering anyone with solitosis, would most certainly play along with him, telling him nothing, denying nothing, insisting on nothing. That, he realized vaguely, was of vital importance. He was not at all sure why. The test which had worked on Elsa's ship was as good as any, he thought. It might not work twice, but he would do his best to see that it did. He opened the valve on his suit, making quite certain it registered atmosphere nil. Then he grasped his gloves together and strained his arms to pull them apart. When he opened the lifeboat's airlock, he kept his hands linked by his thumbs. In a few moments he stood in the control room of the little ship, which was the only room there, and his hands were still linked. The needle registered fifteen pounds. A dull feeling of failure numbed him. He had concentrated with all his power, making sure the valve was really open and that he never had a chance to close it. He tried again, opening and closing it. He might have known that each new scheme only worked once. He thought, trying to be calm. Solitosis wasn't a suicidal psychosis, or at least he had heard it Was never. He had seen it in books. One small indication of that had been when Elsa shot him and he felt nothing, though she had looked perfectly real. He could be hurt, as when she bit him, but not seriously. He battered his fist against the bulkhead. There was no straight spur of rock that height where the ship had landed. A bulkhead was there, or there was nothing. His glove was made to resist a vacuum, but it wasn't cushioned against impact. His hand hurt and went on hurting. #S Grimly, he continued beating the bulkhead until he could not force himself to bear any more pain. There was a bulkhead there. Therefore, there was a ship. His undamaged hand went to his faceplate. He hesitated, then reminded himself that solitosis wasn't suicidal. He opened the plate. He felt his nose, his eyes, his chin. He pinched his cheek. The faceplate was open and he could breathe. Only two possibilities were left. Either Marilyn and all that went with her were real, or he was over the top at last, absolutely in the grip of solitosis, so that he couldn't even be certain he had left the space station. And if Marilyn was real... He collapsed weakly as an insidious thought beat the spirit l out of him. He was ready to believe in Marilyn, but there was one thing he could not ignore. Solitosis got everyone. People could fight it, but they could never hold it off. Yet it had very clearly not affected Marilyn. You knew solitosis when you saw it. Even he would know. He could not say whether she existed subjectively or objectively -- could he say whether the station existed, whether Earth existed, whether there was a Galaxy? Was there any essential difference between Una and his mother or his sister? Were they all creatures of his mind? Life itself might be a thought in his mind. Matter could be merely a concept. He existed. " think, therefore I am." He could accept that. Could he accept anything else? He forced himself fiercely back to normalcy, limiting himself to Marilyn. She existed, and because she came in a ship in which he could open his faceplate, she existed more than Una had. Hanging determinedly onto that idea, he closed the plate and stumbled back to the station. It seemed very far away. He had taken too much out of himself. Mental effort could be even more exhausting than physical exertion. Whatever the truth might be, he had fought too hard toward it or away from it. He got through the airlock into the station and, safely inside, fell on his face. he knew that nc had proved Marilyn's existence beyond reasonable doubt. He had been ill, and she had tended him. "You proved what you wanted to prove," she told him, when the worst was over. "But was it worth it?" "It was worth it," he said, sitting up in bed. "No wonder whole philosophies have been founded on reality. It's the most important thing there is to a man." She shook her head, smiling. "Merely to you," she said. "Solitosis naturally affects what matters most to the individual. But we needn't talk about that." There was a warmth, a kindness about her that none of the phantoms could ever have had, because they were all reflections of himself. He had made them what they were. "How did you avoid solitosis?" he asked. She smiled again. "The only way. There are fifty men and women in the Lioness, the relief ship. That number is well above the critical point. It will still be a while before they can land a big ship on this little world, but all the time while they're maneuvering. they'll be keeping me sane by being there. I know they are, you see. When you do, you'll improve." Ord relaxed. Long, involved explanations were never satisfying. It was the simple explanation that one could instantly believe. "That will take a while," he said. "I don't mind how long it takes." He saw the same shadow pass across her face. "Tell me," he said quietly. "Look at me." He looked. She was strong, quietly beautiful. She still wore her tunic and slacks. He even saw, with faint regret, that, while she wore no wedding ring, there was a white band on her finger where one would have been. "Yes?" he urged. "I didn't realize until you talked of a nonexistent girl," Marilyn said quietly. "I was real, yes, but not your picture of me." "No, it's not so terrible," Marilyn went on. "Almost everything was as you thought. It's natural to send a doctor first to visit any sick person. I'm a doctor, and I was a girl once. But that was forty years ago. And you had to make me young and beautiful." With an effort, Ord laughed naturally. "Was that all? You had me thinking -- " The old doctor didn't hear him. She wasn't thinking of her courage in coming to him alone, but remembered that all doctors take risks. "It was pleasant to be a girl again," she said reflectively. "I could see myself in your eyes, and -- almost -- I was young again. I like you. If it hadn't been too completely ridiculous, I'd have fallen in love with you." "As I grow old in the next few weeks, Ord," she told him, "you'll be recovering. It will show you how your case is progressing. When you see me as I really am, you'll be all right." He put his hand gently on her arm. He was thinking of her courage in coming on ahead of the relief ship, alone, because she might be able to help a man who could not be quite sane. "I think," he said, "I see you now as you really are." Pre-Publication Offer Only one thing could equal owning a complete file of Published by Crown, it's a really huge book... over # at only # a copy. But we have an offer that makes this giant bargain even more gigantic: monthly at the newsstand come to # a year. Total: #. You'll want them both. Don't wait because this is a pre-publication offer and cannot be kept open long. Mail the coupon below with # today. #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. Yes, start  (or extend ) my subscription right away -- and mail me off f.ie presses! I enclose # as payment in full for both. Address City Start with the... 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City Zone State  ping charges. Same return privilege -- your money back if not  completely satisfied. "I got a job I have been wanting and trying to get over a year." -- D. M. Eade, Englewood, Calif. "An exceedingly practical analysis of the technique of mental power... a guidebook to success." -- Mrs. R. Bondurant, Portland, Ore. "This book is magic! Startling and instantaneous results seem to follow every chapter. Truly one of the best investments I have ever made." -- Mrs. J. F. Olsen, Duluth, Minn. gauxy Editor H. #. GOtO Astiilant Editor Art Director Production Manager Advertising Manager Cover by Illustrating is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York t#, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions : ( # cojpies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere .(.#. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office. New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, ptesident. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by sell-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magaxine ate fiction, end any similarity betwecrtcharactcrs and actual person is coincidental. by L. Sprague de Camp # by Robert A. Heinlein # by Walter M. Miller, Jr. # by Alfred Coppel # by Fritz Leiber # by Kris Neville # by Allred B ester #I by H. L Gold # by Groff Conklin # Printed in the #. S. A. Reg. U. S. Pst. Oft. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Open Letters insky, # Church Avenue, Woodmere, N. Y.: As you point out, prediction is not the purpose of science fiction; the fact is that human society evolves, as does all life, by the emergence of novel integrations, reducible to their original components only by backwards logic. When conjecture is extended millenia into the future, the chance of hitting anything even faintly related to future reality (social patterns, individual motivations, cultural principles, etc.) are almost nothing. All science fiction begins and ends with the present -- that is, it extrapolates present tendencies into an environment constructed out of present cultural components, or their opposites. The insights achieved by this method are not inconsiderable, but let us not fool ourselves as to what the insights see into." I don't, of course, want to spoil the point of the articles by de Camp and Heinlein in this issue. However, finding the significance of science fiction is urgent now, when it has suddenly become so important to so many people. The interpretations, as usual, are glib and superficial:  Science fiction is a substitute for those who can't accept mystic prophecy.  By creating fictitious futures, either on Earth or in space, it assures readers that civilization will survive.  By providing ghastly cataclysms and police states, it convinces the reader that the present isn't so bad, after all. If these are factors of importance, they are, it seems to me, secondary to Mr. Kaminsky's thesis:  "All science fiction begins and ends with the present -- that is, it extrapolates present tendencies into an environment constructed out of present cultural components, or their opposites." . If science fiction were in the business of prediction, it should have forecast: the release of atomic power before the development of rocketry; our ability right now to wipe venereal disease and insects off the planet; the fact that # of all prescriptions today could not have been filled only ten years ago; the enormous growth of -- science fiction itself! By creating fictitious futures, it does no more than reveal the unsuspectedly healthy optimism that exists in our own era. In other words, rather than escape, whether into time or space, science fiction explores present positive tendencies, outlooks, hopes. I'm sure some of these will come true, but even that doesn't matter. What counts is that there is a strong core of health in this sick-seeming period of ours, and science fiction often finds it. Even the ghastly cataclysms and police states that science fiction creates, presumably to convince the reader that the present isn't so bad, reveal this healthy plore. If we can get back, fine, but we'll risk one-way trips. Science fiction is no awesome cerebral escape machine. It tells us about ourselves and our era. What it tells is usually encouraging -- and extremely entertaining. Isn't that enough? Which branch of literature offers more? #, The Union, University of an appeal: "We are planning a science fiction fan convention in Sydney, weekend of March #nd, #. I can be reached at the above address. Fans in Melbourne could look up D. H. Tuck at # Gordon Street, Footscray; in Perth, R. N. Dard at # James Street." I was in the Pacific as a combat engineer, and, although science fiction wasn't as urgent to me as some other matters at the time, I do know that reader Down Under live on science fiction K-rations. I hope this mention helps to end the drought. Mr. Stone also suggests borrowing certain outmoded art layouts from another magazine. Hi suggestion happens to coincide with several dozen angry letter asking whether we aren't equally angry over the "shameless lifting" of our cover design by that same magazine. No, we're not angry, though we would like to know when we may have it back again. We are developing some other ideas; would the magazine in question prefer to have us send them over now, or wait and see how they work out after publication? It is also amusing to note that ence Fiction Novel No. #) was the only book reviewed in that magazine which did not have a publisher, and The Stars, Like T yrann) startled its reviewer because the book did not originate there. The reviewer will go on course, will continue to credit periodicals in which stories first appeared -- including our unsportsmanlike imitator. S Here, sorrily, is the miserable By record of science fiction's early predictions. Consider it well -- will our record be better?  century, Gabriel Weltstein  m lands in New York: a young man from a Swiss colony in Africa, who has come thither to arrange the sale of his colony's main product, wool. As he has led a simple bucoliG life, the big city fascinates and awes him. The streets are roofed over with glass, illuminated by magnetic lights, and jammed with pedestrians. There is little wheeled traffic save the carriages of the world-ruling banker aristocracy. Overhead weave elevated railways and airlines. The latter are of two kinds: inverted monorail cars suspended from a cable which in turn is held up by captive balloons; and great dirigible airships propelled by electricity, with sails for auxiliary motive power and lifeboats equipped with parachutes. One of these latter monsters can fly to London in # hours. When Gabriel sits down in a restaurant, he sees a "mirror" (like a television screen) on which the menu appears. After making his choice he presses numbered buttons below the screen, and  presently the tabic opens up and his meal rises from below. When he presses another button a facsimile of the day's newspaper appears on the screen. Although the season is a New York summer, the restaurant is cool. A balloon floats overhead, tethered to the restaurant by a double canvas tube through which hot air is exhausted to the stratosphere while cold air is sucked down fromthe heights to replace it. Later Gabriel meets other wonders: the municipal heating system which gets hot water from the depths of the earth; the pneumatic-tube network by which a subscriber can communicate almost instantly with any other in the city, the suicide houses where people are given a painless end, and so on. Then comes the day when he snatches a beggar from under the hoofs of the coachhorses of one of the wicked bankers. The beggar turns out to be a leader of the oppressed masses, and Gabriel is launched upon his adventures. An alternate time track? Not exactly. This is the New York of the present time as described # years ago by Ignatius Donnelly in his prophetic novel Caesar's Colcopies. The enthusiastic Ignatius (#-#) should be familiar to all science fiction addicts, for, besides writing three novels in this genre, he converted the lost Atlantic from a speculation of scholars into a popular cult. His Atlanta: The Antediluvian World ran through # editions and is still in print. In The Great Cryptogram he performed the same service for the theory that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. Born in Philadelphia of Irish parents, Donnelly studied law and migrated to Minnesota, where he led an active political career, becoming lieutenant-governor at # and being one of the founders of the Populist Party. Time has played an ironical trick on Donnelly. Many of the political measures he advocated, deemed dreadfully radical at the time, are now taken for granted. Donnelly is remembered, however, not for these sodT' ideas but for his promotion of the pseudo-scientific and pscudoscholarly cults of Atlantism and Baconianism! Caesar's Colum, Dr. Huguet, and The Golden Bottle, were published in the early #s. The first deals with the uprising of the masses against a Jewish oligarchy. (Donnelly showed antiSemitic animus in this story, which he later seemed to have outgrown.) However, the masses have become so degraded by their servitude that they kill off their own more enlightened leaders, and the world sinks into barbarism. Dr. Huguet deals with the Negro problem by the now-familiar device of transposing souls. To make his hero appreciate the light of the American Negro, 'onnelly puts him into the body f one. And The Golden Bottle i an alchemical dream wherein he narrator is given a liquid that turns base metal to gold. By this power he becomes a financial titan, and conquers and reforms the world. Caesar's Column is one of many stories written between # and # which try to foresee the shape of things in mid or late #th century. We can, therefore, for the first time in history, enjoy the sensation of seeing ourselves as our ancestors predicted us. Many of these narratives are oretty poor fiction by modern tandards. Thus Edward Bellmy's Looking Backward (#),  prophecy of an ideal Socialist future, which had an enormous sale at the time, is unreadably dull. Bellamy puts his hero to sleep in # and awakens him in #; after that, all that happens is that the hero listens to interminable lectures from people on the social and economic organization of #. Yet even the worst of these yams sheds light on man's ability to foresee hi future. We often hear of such successful prophecies: Jack London's The Iron Heel is cited as a forecast of Fascism, while it is said that an inventor was once denied a patent on a periscope because Jules Veme had described it in detail in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. But you can't prove prophetic insight by citing successes alone, for if you make enough guesses about the future of anything you will make some hits by luck. What, then, of the failures? For instance, while Donnelly in Caesar's Column foresaw air travel, and while his pneumatic tubes and magnetic lights have analogues in the real world, he anticipated nothing corresponding to the automobile. Many writers of futuristic novels devoted much space to the mechanical wonders of the future world. They made some good hits and some even remarkable misses. In these old novels we come across the transatlantic telephone, the electric light, and the flashlight in The King's Men by Grant, O'Reilly, Dale and Wheelwright (#), a lively tale despite the extraordinary number of collaborators that wrote it. It is a story of an abortive conspiracy to restore King George V to the throne of the British Republic. This king is fat, foolish, and lecherous, quite different from the frigidly correct and conventional man who actually occupied the British throne under that title. But with all their improvements the authors still fill their #thcentury scenes with horse-drawn carriages and servants in powdered wigs. O R take A. D. # by Lt. A. tenant Fuller, like Bellamy, puts his hero to sleep and awakens him in #, to find electric clocks like ours, a New York subway system not unlike the real one, and a national newspaper printed in many places by a "sympathetic telegraph" -- a kind of radio-teletypewriter. Street traffic is a mixture of horsebuggies and "electric drags;" underground pneumatic railways span the continent. Air travel is by dirigible balloon or airship, and he sends his hero off to discover the North Pole in one. Similarly Frank Stockton of lady-or-tiger fame, in The Great Stone of Sardis (#), had the Pole reached by submarine, as Sir Hubert Wilkins once tried to do in fact. The story combines considerable imagination and some of Stockton's folksy humor with glaring logical lapses and a feeble knowledge of the science actually of Stockton's own time. Even Bellamy, who paid little attention to technical matters, credited his future Americans with a device like Muzak. Several authors foresaw the wide use of aluminum -- but at the same time foresaw the wide use of moving sidewalks and monorail trains, which have not materialized. The latter were to be of two kinds: one suspended from an overhead rail like the real interurban line at Wupperthal in the Ruhr, Germany, which is still running. (Recently it had a slight mishap when a publicity man gave a baby elephant a ride. The beast, disliking the motion, plunged out a door into the Wupper River, from which it was recovered indignant but unharmed.) The other kind stood on a single rail, being kept upright by gyroscopes. The streamlined Dieselelectric train was not foreseen, though the Diesel engine was patented in # and the streamlined train in. #. In general, pre-automobile authors missed the automobile completely, despite occasional mention of electric bicycles and the like ; or at least they had no conception of its importance in modern economics, social custom, city planning, road-building, and traffic management. They also missed motion pictures, and the radio and related electrical communications (teletype, television, radar, etc.). In the matter of aircraft, some like Grant et al., Bellamy, and Stockton ignored them. Others bet on the dirigible airship instead of the airplane -- a poor choice. In their prophecies of aircraft these authors illustrate one of my points; that prophets are fairly safe with generalities, but their score gets progressively worse as they try to become more particular. H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling both tried their'hands at detailed aeronautical prophecies with amusing results. In When the Sleeper Wolces (#) Wells awakens his "sleeper," Graham, about #. Graham's money has accumulated by compound interest until he owns most of the world, which is ruled in his name by the "Council" of trustees of his fortune. There are "aeroplanes" (large, fast transport aircraft with wings in tandem) and "aeropiles" (small insectlikc fliers for private use). Their military potential has never been developed because the Council came into power and stopped all war before they were perfected. By # aircraft had been reduced to reality, and in Well's The War in the Air , published that year, Germany sets out to conquer the United States with a fleet of rigid airships of the type that Count Zeppelin (who, by the way, served as a Union officer in the U. S. Civil War had been developing. These craft are accompanied by a swarm of parasite airplanes, or Drachtenfiieger, suspended from them as the U. S. Navy actually did with the unfortunate Akron and Macon. American fleet with bombs from the airplanes. The idea of a cheap little airplane manned by a cheap little aviator sinking a huge expensive battleship appeals to the average reader's Davidand-Goliath prejudice had long fascinated speculative writers. Like many prophecies, the idea turned out to be true, but not the whole truth -- as witness the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where the Japanese threw # carrier planes against the American fleet and lost them all without seriously harming a single ship. Then Well's airships went on to destroy New York City and seize strategic points about the nation. Meanwhile Britain and France attacked Germany and an Asiatic Empire attacked everybody. The Asiatics used flattened airships (like oversize flying saucers) and swarms of one-man ornithopters. The pilots of the latter landed and attacked their antagonists with samurai swords -- not so funny as it sounds, for in World War II Japanese aviators actually wore such swords in  their cockpits, and Russian aviators are now said to climb into theirs with Cossack sabers. Finally civilization was smashed and everything simmered down to barbarism -- a favorite theme with Wells, who never realized that with the increase in powers of destruction has gone an almost as impressive increase in powers of organization and reconstruction. In a later and inferior novel (too much editorializing and not enough story). The World Set Free (#), Wells foresaw the destruction of cities by atomic bombs dropped (by hand!) from airplanes. This time civilization was saved from collapse when the King of England and the French Ambassador to the United States got together and called a conference of heads of nations to set up a world government, as people in real life have made two fumbling, half-hearted, and not very successful efforts to do. Kipling's short With the Night Mail (#) bets on the airship for long-range transportation, but assumes that its lift will be greatly increased in proportion to its size by "Fluery's gas." Mechanically, Kipling's aircraft have little to do with modern airliners, but his description of aerial traffic control has a ring of reality. And being, like Wells, a master pf narrative technique, his tale is infinitely more readable than those of amateurs like Bellamy. None of these early aeronautical prophets foresaw the nature of aerial combat: their aircraft fight with rifles, or by ramming, or by grasping each other with steel jaws?. In the sphere of culture most prophetic novels are weak. Developments in the arts are largely ignored. Most of them assume us to be wearing the beards, stiff collars, and street-sweeping dresses of lateVictorian days; when they do hazard a clothes-prophecy, they put the men in knee-breeches or the like. No doubt the authors would be amazed to see an American street in summer with the men hatless, coatless, and tieless, and the women in dresses of knee or calf length, or even (in suburbs and resorts) in shorts and halters. They would be horrified by a modern bathing beach, and the flourishing nudist movement would reduce them to gibbering incoherence. tioned the emancipation of women, none grasped the lengths to which it has gone, with lady senators and army colonels. They never dreamed of "good" women with makeup, smoking, swearing and, drinking -- acts which in their days, were restricted to what they called "unfortunate females." Their heroines shriek and swoon at the slightest shock in true Victorian tradition. None foresaw the most important Western cultural developments of late decades : the grotesque prohibition episode in America with its resulting rise in organized crime; the decline in the influence of religion; the rise in the living standards of most lower-income groups; and the stupendous rise in the rate of divorce and remarriage. Well, not quite. Victor Rousseau (Emmanuel) in his The Messiah of the Cylinder (#) foresaw a world ruled by an atheistic Socialist tyranny which encourages such horrors as divorce and birth control. However, the m pious Christian Russians come to the rescue of the oppressed Good People, destroy the Socialist armies in a war fought with death-rays and airplanes with jaws, and restore the oldfashioned virtues. That's right -- the Russians! Which brings us to political prophecies. The authors tried everything. The world may be happy under a purified Capitalism, or groaning under a Capitalist dictatorship. Sometimes Socialism has brought about a Utopian millenium (Bellamy),; ometimes it has engendered a tyranny as bad as that of the real U.S.S.R. The prophets erred in seeking political simplicity, whereas reality has been infinitely various, inconsistent, and untidy. The authors have repeatedly made Great Britain into a republic or a Socialist dictatorship, but none foresaw the present mild bumbling democratic Socialist monarchy, a more contradictory conglomeration than any author ever imagined. Several writers have annexed all of North America to the United States, to the intense annoyance of Canadians and Mexicans who think they're doing all right and have no desire to join the Yanquis. Usually the prophets (being Americans and Britons -- I haven't read much of the Continental literature) have either proclaimed or hoped for the triumph of democracy, with a few exceptions. That delightful old imperialist Kipling put the world under an irresponsible Aerial Board of Control, while Lieutenant Fuller reformed the United States along the lines one would expect from a naively well-meaning military man: He had a single political party and got rid of such disorderly manifestations of democracy as juries and labor unions. And what of war? The earlier prophets failed to foresee the mechanization and complexity of modern warfare; while some introduced airplanes, most retained horse cavalry. So did the Russian Red Army, but not without ex' fc tensive modernization. The tank was foreseen only in two shorts, one by Wells ( The Land Ironclads, #) and the other by Colonel Swinton of the Royal Engineers, who was one of the actual inventors of the tank. For first-class war prophecies we have to come to later times: to Hector By water's The Great Pacific War (#) and Floyd Gibbon's The Red Napoleon (#). By water, a British naval expert, told of an AmericanJapanese war of #-#. In many respects it followed the course of the real one: the Japanese took Guam and the Philippines; then we took Truk, Angaur, and retook the Philippines, brought the Japanese fleet to bay, and defeated it. Bywater, trying to be conservative, underestimated the range and striking power of modem fleets, and vastly underestimated the power of the airplane. Amphibious operations and new warship construction play but little part in his war. In his preface he says: "It would have been easy, for example, to bring the Japanese battle fleet to Hawaii... but to do so would have been to expose the narrative to the wellmerited ridicule of informed critics." Shades of Pearl Harbor! Of course in #I the airplane was not so effective as a decade later, and landingcraft had not even been invented. Prophecy should, however, by rights anticipate such developments. successful effort of Ivan Karakhan, Stalin's successor, to conquer the world in order to establish communism and to abolish racial inequality. During #-# his armies overrun all the Old World and then, using the European and Japanese fleets, he hurls great expeditions across the oceans to Mexico and both coasts of Canada to attack the United States. If Bywater underestimated the possibilities of such operations, Gibbons greatly overestimated them. But his climactic naval battle is more nearly in accord with technical possibilities than Bywater's; the American surface fleet is outnumbered, but American superiority in submarines and airplanes turns the tide. Gibbons's shortcomings are ideological. In decrying the Red Menace he overlooked the Fascist Menace, destined to make an earlier (though not necessarily more dangerous) attempt at world conquest. And he makes his villain Karakhan call enlightenedly for racial equality and the brotherhood of man. like most modern statesmen, while Gibbons himself appeals to his readers' basest prejudices by ranting about the "ydlow hordes.' Both Gibbons and Bywater thought the Japanese-Americans of Hawaii would revolt; actually, in World War II, they provided the U. S. Army with loyal soldiers whose combat records were magnificent. Thus the later Victorian prophetic story-writers managed to be right in a few broad and simple respects in their prophecies of the latter half of the #th century. They foresaw that the world would become more mechanized, populous, and complicated; that Socialism would grow and would attain power in some countries; that faster transportation, especially by air, would affect men's lives. As they got more specific and detailed, though, they went further astray, and some important developments they overlooked pretty generally -- the autombile, radio, and motion picture; the internal combustion engine in its many forms; prohibition, birth control, and wide-spread divorce; the fading away of the old Judeo-Christian nudity tabu; and so on. Their ratio of success is little greater than that to be expected by luck; it seems greater because we remember the successful forecasts and forget the wild guesses. The science fiction of the present appears to be considerably better grounded scientifically, sociologically and psychologically, in its higher forms. Even if we cannot point to any one story and say with confidence, here is the real future, the mere concept of a different future is an enormous advance. When the Martians land, or tyranny clamps down on the world, or we bomb ourselves into barbarism, science fiction readers at least won't rush about crying; "It's impossible! It just can't be!" They'll have been through it all before. The possibility, in fact, if we judge by the older prophecies, is that we'll turn out to have been too conservative. Not only pessimistically but otherwise, for science fiction also envisions happy futures as well as doomed ones. It will be interesting, to put it calmly, to see what some citizens of # A. D. will say in reviewing the stories in Galaxy Science Fiction. I'd rather like to be one of them. By simply existing today, we can see how far our science fiction ancestors' prophecies were from the astonishing reality of the present. But remember -- they lacked the scientific techniques we control and could only hope and guess. Utilizing modem methods of extrapolation, Robert A. Heinlein indicates, in the next article, what -- and what not -- to expect in the year # A.D. ro? By The coming events casting their shadows before them do not need any microscopes to be seen -- they need reducing glasses! sists of big-muscled stories about adventures in space, atomic wars, invasions by extraterrestrials, and such. All very well -- but now we will take time out for a look at ordinary homelife half a century hence. Except for tea leaves and other magical means, the only way to gljiess at the future is by examining the present in the light of the past. Let's go back half a century and visit your grandmother before we attempt to visit your grandchildren. #: Mr. McKinley is president and the airplane has not yet been invented. We'll knock on the door of that house with the gingerbread, the stained glass, and the cupola. The lady of the house answers. You recognize her -- your own grandmother, Mrs. Middleclass. She is almost as plump as you remember her, for she "put on some good healthy flesh" after she married. She welcomes you and offers coffee cake, fresh from her modern kitchen (running water from w a hand pump ; the best coal range Pittsburgh ever produced). Everything about her house is modern -- hand-painted china, souvenirs from the Columbian Exposition, beaded portieres, shining baseburner stoves, gas lights, a telephone on the wall. There is no bathroom, but she and Mr. Middleclass are thinking of putting one in. Mr. Middleclass's mother calls this nonsense, but your grandmother keeps up with the times. She is an advocate of clothing reform, wears only one petticoat, bathes twice a week, and her corsets are guaranteed rustproof. She has been known to defend female suffrage -- though not in the presence of Mr. Middleclass. Nevertheless, you find difficulty in talking with her. Let's jump back to the present and try again. The automatic elevator takes us to the ninth floor, and we pick out a door by its number, that being the only way to distinguish it. "Don't bother to ring," you say? What? It's your door and you know exactly what lies beyond it -- Very well, let's move a half century into the future and try another middleclass home. It's a suburban home not two hundred miles from the city. You pick out your destination from the air while the cab is landing you -- a cluster of hemispheres which makes you think of the houses Dorothy found in Oz. You set the cab to return to its hangar, and you go into the entrance hall. You neither knock nor ring. The screen has warned them before you touched down on the landing flat and the autobutler's transparency is shining Before you can address the microphone, a voice calls out, "Oh, it's you! Come in, come in." There is a short wait, because your granddaughter is not at the door. The autobutler has flashed your face to the patio, where she was reading and sunning herself, and has relayed her voice back to you. She pauses at the door, looks at you through one-way glass, and frowns slightly; she knows your old-fashioned disapproval of casual nakedness. Her kindness causes her to disobey the family psychiatrist -- she grabs a robe and covers herself before signaling the door to open. You have thus been classed with strangers, tradespeople, and others who are not family intimates. But you must swallow your annoyance; you cannot object to her wearing clothes when you have disapproved of her not doing so. There is no reason why she should wear clothes at home. The house is clean -- not somewhat clean, but clean -- and comforable. The floor is warm to bare feet; there are no unpleasant drafts, no cold walls. All dust is precipitated from air entering this house. All textures, of floor, of couch, of chair, are comfortable to bare skin. Sterilizing ultra-violet light floods each room whenever it is unoccupied, and, several times a day, a "whirlwind" blows house-created dust from all surfaces and whisks it out. These auto-services are unobtrusive because automatic cutoff switches prevent them from occurring whenever a mass in a room is radiating at blood temperature. Such a house can become untidy, but not dirty. Five minutes of straightening, a few swipes at children's fingermarks and her day's housekeeping is done. Oftener than sheets were changed in Mr. McKinley's day, this housewife rolls out a fresh layer of sheeting on each sitting surface and stuffs the discard down the oubliette. This is easy; there is a year's supply on a roll concealed in each chair or couch. The tissue sticks by pressure until pulled loose and does not obscure the pattern and color. You go into the family room, sit down, and remark on the lovely day. "Isn't it?" she answers. "Come sunbathe with me." The sunny patio gives excuse for bare skin by anyone's standards. Thankfully, she throws off the robe and stretches out on a couch. You hesitate a moment. After all, though, she is your own grandchild, so why not? You undress quickly, since you left your outer wrap and shoes at the door (only barbarians wear street shoes in a house) and what remains is easily discarded. Your grandparents had to get used to a mid-century beach. It was no easier than this. On the other hand, their bodies were wrinkled and old, whereas yours isn't. The triumphs of endocrinology, of cosmetics, of plastic surgery, of figure control in every way are such that a man or a woman need not change markedly from maturity until old age. A person can keep his body as firm and slender as he wishes -- and most of them so wish. This has produced a paradox; the United States has the highest percentage of old people in all its two and a quarter centuries, yet. it seems to have a larger propor-, tion of handsome young citizens than ever before. ("Don't whistle, son! That' your grandmother -- ")  This garden is half sunbathing; patio, complete with shrubs apd, flowers, lawn and couches, and IS half swimming pool. The day, though sunny, is quite cold -- but not in the garden, nor is the pool chilly. The garden appears to be outdoors, but is not; it is covered by a bubble of transparent plastic, blown and cured on the spot. You .are inside the bubble; the Sun is outside; you cannot see the plastic. She invites you to lunch; you protest. "Nonsense!" she answers. "I like to cook." Into the house she goes. You think of following, but it is deliciously warm in the March sunshine and you are feeling relaxed to be away from the city. You locate a switch on the side of the couch, set it for gentle massage, and let it knead your troubles away. The couch notes your heart rate and breathing; as they slow, so does it. When you fall asleep, it stops. Meanwhile your hostess has been "slaving away over a hot stove." To be precise, she has allowed a menu selector to pick out an #-calory, #-ration-point luncheon. It is a random-choice gadget, somewhat like a slot machine, which has in it the running inventory of her larder and which will keep hunting until it turns up a balanced meal. Some housewives claim that it takes the art out of cookery, but our hostess is one of many who have accepted it thankfully as an endless source of new menus. The choice is limited today as it has been three months since she had done grocery shopping. She rejects several menus; the selector continues patiently to turn up combinations until she finally accepts one based around fish disguised as chops. Your hostess takes the selected items from shelves or the freezer. All are prepared; some are precooked. Those still tt be cooked she puts into her -- well, her "processing equipment." though she calls it a "stove." Part of it traces its ancestry to diathermy equipment and other features derived from metal enameling processes. She sets up cycles, punches buttons, and must wait two or three minutes for the meal. Despite her complicated kitchen, she doesn't eat as well as her great grandmother did -- too many people and too few acres. Never mind; the tray she carries out to the patio is well laden and beautiful. You are it is empty. You wake to find that she has burned the dishes and is recovering from her "exertions" in her refresher. Feeling  hot and sweaty from your nap, you decide to use it when she come out. There is a wide choice offered by the 'fresher, but you limit yourself to a warm shower growing gradually cooler, folr; ': ;  " ' .'jv lowed by warm air drying, a short massage, spraying with scent, and dusting with powder. Your host arrives home as you come out; he has taken a holiday from his engineering job and has had the two boys down at the beach. His wife sends the boys in to 'fresh themselves, then says, "Have a nice day, dear?" He answers, "The traffic was terrible. Had to make the last hundred miles on automatic. Anything on the phone for me?" "Weren't you on relay?" "Didn't set it. Didn't want to be bothered." He steps to the house phone, plays back his calls, finds nothing he cares to bother with -- but the machine goes ahead and prints one massage. He pulls it out and tears it off. "What is it?" his wife asks. "Telestat from Luna City -- from Aunt Jane." "What does she say?" "Nothing much. According to her, the Moon is a great place and she wants us to come visit her." "Not likely!" his wife answers. "Imagine being shut up in an air-conditioned cave." "When you are Aunt Jane's age, my honey lamb, and as frail as she is, with a bad heart thrown in, you'll go to the Moon and like it Low gravity is not to be sneezed at. Auntie will probably live to be a hundred and twenty. heart trouble and all." "Would you go to the Moon?" she asks. "If I needed to and could afford it. Right?" he asks you. You consider your answer. Life still looks good to you and stairways are beginning to be difficult. Low gravity is attractive, even though it means living out your days at the Geriatrics Foundation on the Moon. "It might be fun to visit," you answer. "One wouldn't have to stay." the Moon? Let's not be silly -- Or is it silly? Might it not be a logical and necessary outcome of our world today? Space travel we will have not fifty years from now, but much sooner. It's breathing down our necks. As for geriatrics on the Moon, for most of us no price is too high and no amount of trouble is too great to extend the years of our lives. It is possible that low gravity (one-sixth, on the Moon) may not lengthen lives; nevertheless it may -- we don't know yet -- and it will most certainly add greatly to comfort on reaching that inevitable age when the burden of dragging around one's body is almost too much, or when we would otherwise resort to an oxygen tent to #J lessen the work of a wornout heart. By the rules of prophecy, such a prediction is probable, rather than impossible. But the items and gadgets suggested above are examples of timid prophecy. What are the rules of prophecy, if any? Look at the graph shown here. The solid curve is what has been going on this past century. It represents many things -- use of power, speed of transport, numbers of scientific and technical workers, advance in communication, average miles traveled per person per year, advances in mathematics, the rising curve of knowledge. Call it the curve of human achievement. What is the correct way to project this curve into the future? Despite everything, there is a stubborn "common sense" tendency to project it along dotted line number (#) like the patent office official of a hundred years back who quit his job "because everything had already been invented." Even those who don't expect a slowing up at once tend to expect us to reach a point of diminishing returns -- dotted line number (#). to predict that we will continue our present rate of progress -- dotted line number (#) -- a tangent. But the proper way to project the curve is dotted line number (#), because there is no reason, mathematical, scientific, or historical, to expect that curve to flatten out, or to reach a point of diminishing returns, or simply to go on as a tangent. The correct projection, by all known facts today, is for the curve to go on up indefinitely with increasing steepness. The timid little predictions earlier in this article actually belong to curve (#) or, at most, to curve (#). You can count on changes in the next fifty years at least eight times as great as the changes of the past fifty years. The Age of Science has not yet opened. axiom: A "nine-day wonder" of disease is revising relations between sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure. #. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from space. #. It appears utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend. #. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technology which will make every house now standing as obsolete as outdoor privies. The housing is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day. axiom : A "common sense" prediction is sure to err on the side of timidity. axiom : The more extravagant a prediction sounds, the more likely it is to come true. So let's have a few free-swinging predictions about the future. Some will be wrong -- but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong. #. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door, c.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it, which the government is doing at least on an experimental basis. #. Contraception and control shortage will get worse until then, #. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by. #. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists. #. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer, and psychoanalysis will be replaced as a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction. #. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered. The revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb. #. By the end of this century mankind will have explored the Solar System, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be abuilding. #. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple queries, and transmit vision. #. Intelligent life of some sort will be found on Mars. #. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speeds. #. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity. # We will not achieve a "world state" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet. #. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About # a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance. #. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continentwide basis by a multiple electronic "brain." #. Fish and yeast will become our principle sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear, because sheep destroy grazing land. #. Mankind will not destroy itself,, nor will "civilization" be wiped out. Here are things we won't get soon, if ever: Travel through time. Travel faster than, the speed of light. Control of telepathy and other E S.P. phenomena. "Radio" transmission of matter. Manlike robots with manlike reactions. Laboratory creation of life. Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter. Scientific proof of personal survival after death. A permanent end to war. (I don't like that prediction any better than you do.) parlor trick anyone can learn; but only a fool would attempt to predict details of future history (except as fiction, so labeled). There are too many unknowns and no techniques for integrating them even if they were known. Even to make predictions about overall trends in technology is now most difficult. In fields where, before World War II, there was one man working in public, there are now ten, or a hundred, working in secret. There may be six men in the country who have a clear picture of what is going on in science today. There may not be even one. This is in itself a trend. Many leading scientists consider it a factor as disabling to us as the dogma of Lysenkoism is to Russian technology. Nevertheless there are clear-cut trends which are certain to make this coming era enormously more productive and interesting than the frantic one we have just passed through. Among them are: Cybernetics : The study of communication and control of mechanisms and organisms. This includes the wonderful field of mechanical and electronic "brains" -- but is not limited to it. (These "brains" are a factor in themselves that will speed up technical progress the way a war does.) Semantics: A field which sfccms concerned only with definitions of words. It is not; it is a frontal attack on epistemology -- that is to say. how we know what we know, a subject formerly belonging to long-haired philosophers. New tools of mathematics and logic, such as calculus of statement, Boolean logic, morphological analysis, generalized symbology, newly invented mathematics ol every sort -- there is not space even to name these enormous fields, but they offer impetus to every other field -- medicine, social relations, biology, economics, anything. Biochemistry: Research into the nature of protoplasm, into enzyme chemistry, viruses, etc., give hope not only that we may conquer disease, but that we may someday understand the mechannisms of life itself. Through this, and with the aid of cybernetic machines and radioactive isotopes, we may eventually acquire a rigor of chemistry. Chemistry is not a discipline today; it is a jungle. We know the chemical behavior depends on the number of orbital electrons in an atom and that physical and chemical properties follow the pattern called the Periodic Table. We don't know much else, save by cut-andtry, despite the great size and importance of the chemical industry. When chemistry L...ues a discipline, mathematical chemists will design new materials, predict their properties, and tell engineers how to make them -- without ever entering a laboratory. We've got a long way to go on that one! Nucleonics: We have yet to find out what makes the atom tick. Atomic power? Yes, we'll have it, in convenient packages -- when we understand the nucleus. The field of radioisotopes alone is larger than was the entire known body of science in #. Before we are through with these problems, we may find out how the Universe is shaped and why . Not to mention enormous unknown vistas best represented by ? ? ? Some physicists are now using two time scales, the T-scale. and on one scale can equal a mere split-second on the other scale -- and yet both apply to you and your kitchen stove. Of such anarchy is our present state in physics. For such reasons we must insist that the Age of Science has not yet opened. The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia' which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need. Call it the Crisis of the Librarian. We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the secretary to all other sciences. Fortune-tellers can always be sure of repeat customers by predicting what the customer wants to hear... it matters not whether the prediction comes true. Contrariwise, the weather man is often blamed for bad weather. Brace yourself. In # the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man's hand -- but what lay ahead was the Panic of #, World War I, the panic following it, the Depression,. Fascism, World War II, the Atom Bomb, and Red Russia. The period immediately ahead will b? the roughest, crudest one in ,the long, hard history of mankind. It will probably include the worst World War of them all. Even if we are spared that awful possibility, it is certain that there will be no security anywhere, save what you dig out of your own inner spirit. TUT what of that picture we drew of domestic luxury and tranquility for Mr. and Mrs. Middleclass, style # A. D.? They lived through it. They survived. Our prospects need not dismay you. not if you or your kin were at Bloody Nose Ridge, at Gettysburg -- trudged across the Plains or went through the wars anywhere in the world. You and I are here because we carry the genes of uncountable ancestors who fought -- and won -- against death in all its forms. We're tough. We'll survive. Most of us. We've lasted through the preliminary bouts; the main event is coming up. But it's not for sissies. The gathering wind will not destroy everything, nor will the Age of Science change everything. Long after the first star ship leaves for parts unknown, there will still be outhouses in upstate New York, there will be steers in Texas, and, no doubt, the English will stop for tea. Stick around. He did not have the qualifications to go into space -- so he had them manufactured! when Kane arrived at my apartment. I checked the hall screen carefully before letting him in, too, though the hour almost precluded the possibility of any inquisitive passers-by. He didn't say anything at all when ho saw me, but his eyes went a bit wide. That was perfectly natural, after all. The illegal piasticosmetician had done #  his work better than well. I wasn't room. "The Kim Hall on the apI led Kane into the living room the same person. I don't have to and stood before him, letting him tell you that." fully, not taking his eyes off me. good long time. This is important "Maybe," he said. "Just to me, Kane. It isn't just that I maybe." want to go. I have to. You can I thought about the spaceship understand that, maybe." standing proud and tall under the "Yes, Kim," he said bitterly, stars, ready to go. And I knew "I can understand. Maybe if l that it had to work. It had to. had your build and mass. I'd be Some men dream of money, trying the same thing right now. others of power. All my life I had My only chance was the Eugenics dreamed only of lands in the sky. Board and they turned me down The red sand hills of Mars, cold. Remember? Sex-linked premoldering in aged slumber under dilection to carcinoma. Unsuita cobalt-colored day; the icy able for colonial breeding moranes of Io and Callisto, where stock -- ' # the yellow methane snow drifted I felt a wave of pity for Kane in the faint light of the Sun; the then. I was almost sorry I'd barren, stark seas of the Moon, called him over. Within six hours where razor-backed mountains I would be on board the spacelimned themselves against the ship, while he would be here, star fields -- Earthbound for always. Unsuit"I don't know, Kim; you're able for breeding stock in the asking a hell of a lot, you know," controlled colonies of Mars or "It'll work," I assured him. I thought about that, too. I "The examination is cursory after knew I wouldn't be able to carry the application has been acted off my masquerade forever. I on." I grinned easily under the wouldn't want to. The stringent Kane frowned at me and blew among the stars. And no Earth smoke into the still air of the bound spaceship captain would Kane said. Io and Callisto. flesh mask. "And mine has." physical examination given on "You mean Kim Hall's applilanding would pierce my disguise cation has," he said. I shrugged. "Well?" easily. But by that time it would be too late. I'd be there, out carry my mass back instead of precious cargo. I'd stay. If they wanted me for a breeder then -- okay. In spite of my slight build and lack of physical strength, I'd still be where I wanted to be. In the fey lands in the sky... "I wish you all the luck in the world, Kim," my friend said. "I really do. I don't mean to throw cold water on your scheme. You know how few of us are permitted offworld. Every one who makes it is a -- " he grinned ruefully -- "a blow struck for equality." He savored the irony of it for a moment and then his face grew serious again. "It's just that the more I think of what you've done, the more convinced I am that you can't get away with it. Forged applications. Fake fingerprints and X-rays. And this -- " He made a gesture that took in all of my appearance. Flesh, hair, clothes. Everything. "What the hell," I said. "It's good, isn't it?" "Very good. In fact, you make me uncomfortable, it's so good. But it's too damned insane." "Insane enough to work." I said. "And it's the only chance. How do you think I'd stack up with the Eugenics Board? Not a chance. What they want out there is big muscle boys. Tough breeders. This is the only way for me." "Well," Kane said. "You're big enough now, it seems to me." "Had to be. Lots to cover up. Lots to add." "And you're all set? Packed and ready?" "Yes," I said. "All set." "Then I guess this is it." He extended his hand. I took it. "Good luck, Kim. Always," he said huskily. "I'll hear if you make it. All of us will. And we'll be cheering and thinking that maybe, before we're all too old, we can make it, too. And if not, that maybe our sons will -- without having to be prize bulls, either." He turned in the doorway and forced a grin. "Don't forget to write," he said. T HE spacefield was streaked with the glare of floodlights, and the ship gleamed like a silvery spire against the desert night. I joined the line of passengers at the checking desk, my halfkilo of baggage clutched nervously against my side. My heart was pounding with a mixture of fear and anticipation, my muscles twitching under the unaccustomed tension of the plastiflesh sheath that hid me. All around me were the smells and sounds and sights of a spaceport, and above me were the stars, dark sky. The queue moved swiftly toward the checking desk, where a gray-haired officer with a seamed face sat. The voice of the timekeeper came periodically from the loudspeakers around the perimeter of the field. " Passengers for the Martian Queen , check in at desk five. It is now H minus forty-seven. I stood now before the officer, tense and afraid. This was critical, the last check-point before I could actually set foot in the ship. "It is now H minus forty-five the timer's metallic voice said. The officer looked up at me, and then at the faked photoprint on my papers. "Kim Hall, age twenty-nine, vocation agri-technician and hydroponics expert, height #I centimeters, weight # kilos. Right?" I nodded soundlessly. "Sums check within masslimits. Physical condition index #. Fertility index #. Compatibility index #." The officer turned to a trim-looking assistant. "All check?" The uniformed girl nodded. I began to breathe again. "Next desk, please," the officer said shortly. I moved on to the medics at the next stop. A gray-clad nurse checked my pulse and respiration. She smiled at me. "Excited?" she asked. "Don't be." She indicated the section of the checking station where the breeders were being processed. "You should see how the bulls take it," she said with a laugh. She picked up an electrified stamp. "Now don't worry. This won't hurt and it won't disfigure you permanently. But the ship's guards won't let you aboard without it. Government regulations, you know. We cannot load personal dossiers on the ships and this will tell the officers all they need to know about you. Weight limitations, you see." I almost laughed in her face at that. If there was one thing all Earth could offer me that I wanted, it was that stamp on my forehead : a passport to the stars... She set the stamp and pressed it against my forehead. I had a momentary' I fear about the durability of the flesh mask that covered my face, but it was unnecessary. The plastiskin took the temporary tattoo the way real flesh would have. I felt the skin and read it in my mind. I knew exactly what it said. I'd dreamed of it so often and so long all my life. My ticket on the Martian Queen. My pass to those lands in the sky. I walked across the ramp and into the lift beside the great tapering hull of the rocket. My heart was singing. The timer said : "It is H minus thirty-one." And then I stepped through the outer valve, into the Queen. The air was brisk with the tang of hydrogenol. Space-fuel. The ship was alive and humming with a thousand relays and timers and whispering generators, readying herself for space. hammock and listened to the ship. This was evything I had wished for all my life. To be a free man among the stars. It was worth the chances I had taken, worth the lying and cheating and danger. The conquest of space had split humanity in a manner that no one could have foreseen, though the reasons for the schism were obvious. They hinged on two factors -- mass and durability. Thus it was that some remained forever Earthbound while others reached for the sky. And bureaucracy being what it was, the decision as to who stayed and who went was made along the easy, obvious line of demarcation. I and half the human race were on the wrong side of the line. From the ship's speakers came the voice of the timer. u It is H minus ten. Ready yourselves tor the takeoff ." I thought of Kane and the men I had known and worked with for half of my twenty-nine years. They, too, were forbidden the sky. Tragic men, really, with their need and their dream written in the lines of pain and yearning on their faces. The speaker suddenly snapped : " There is an illegal passenger on board! All persons will remain in their quarters until he is apprehended! Repeat: there is an illegal passenger on board! Remain in your quarters!" My heart seemed to stop beating. Somehow, my deception had been uncovered. How, it didn't matter, but it had. And the important thing now was simply to stay on board at all costs. A space ship departure could not be delayed. The orbit was computed. second... I leaped to the deck and out of my cubicle. A spidery catwalk led upward, toward the nose of the ship. Below me I could hear the first sounds of the search. I ran up the walk, my footsteps sounding hollowly in the steel shaft. A bulkhead blocked my progress ahead and I sought the next deck. The timer said : " It is H minus six" It was a passenger deck. I could sec frightened faces peering out of cubicles as I ran past. Behind me, the pursuit grew louder, nearer. I slammed open a bulkhead and found another walk leading upward toward the astrogation blisters in the topmost point of the Queen. Behind me, I caught a glimpse of a ship's officer running, armed with a stun-pistol. My breath rasped in my throat and the plastiskin sheath on my body shifted sickeningly. "You Mere! Halt. I " The voice was high-pitched and excited. I flung through another bulkhead hatch and out into the dorsal blister. I seemed to be suspended between Earth and sky. The stars glittered through the steelglas of the blister, and the desert lay below, streaked with searchlights figures. The warning light on the control bunker turned from amber to red as I watched, chest heaving. "It is H minus three" the timer said. "Rig ship tor space." I slammed the hatch shut and spun the wheel lock. I stood filled with a mixture of triumph and fear. They could never get me out of the ship in time now -- but I would have to face blast away in the blister, unprotected. A shock that could kill... Through the speaker, the captain's talker snapped orders: " Abandon pursuit! Too late to dump him now. Pick him up after acceleration is completed." And then maliciously, knowing that I could hear: " Scrape him off the deck when we're in space. That kind can't take much." I felt a blaze of red fury. That kind. The Earthbound kind! I wanted to live, then, more than I had ever wanted to live before. To make a liar out of that sneering, superior voice. To prove that I was as good as all of them. "It is H minus one," said the timer. Orders filtered through the speaker. " Outer valves closed. Inner valves closed." " Minus thirty seconds. Condition red." " Pressure in the ship. Onethird atmosphere." "Twenty seconds." "Ship secure for space." "Ten, nine, eight -- " I lay prone on the steel deck, braced myself and prayed. "Seven, six, five -- " "Gyros on. Course set." "Four, three, two -- " The ship trembled. A great light flared beyond the curving transparency of the blister. "Up ship!" A hand smashed down on me, crushing me into the deck. I thought: I must live. I can't die.  won't die! I felt the spaceship rising. I felt her reaching for the stars. I was a part of her. I screamed with pain and exaltation. The hand pressed harder, choking the breath from me, stripping the plastiskin away in long, damp strips. Darkness flickered before my eyes. I lay helpless and afraid and transfigured with a joy I had never known before. Distorted, half-naked, I clung to life. were all around me. They stood in a halfcircle, trim, uniformed. Their smooth faces and cropped hair and softly molded bodies looked strange against the functional steel angularity of the astrogation blister. I staggered to my feet, long strips of plastic flesh dangling from me. The Queen was in space. I was in space, no longer Earthbound. "Yes," I said, "I lived! Look at me!" I stripped off the flesh mask, peeled away the red, full lips, the long transformation. "I've done it. Others will do it, too. Not breeders -- not brainless ornaments to a hyper-nymphoid phallus! Just ordinary men. Ordinary men with a dream. You can't keep the sky for yourselves. It belongs to all of us." I stood with my back to the blazing stars and laughed at them. "In the beginning it was right that you should be given priority over us. For centuries we kept you in subjection and when the Age of Space came, you found your place. Your stamina, your small stature, everything about you fitted you to be mistresses of the sky... "But it's over. Over and done with. We can all be free -- " I peeled away the artificial breasts that dangled from my chest. I stood swaying drunkenly, defiantly. They came to me, then. They took me gently and carried me below, to the comfort of a white bunk. They soothed my hurts and nursed me. For in spite of it all, they were women and I was a man in pain. The Big News Next Month... by Robert A. Heinlein A remorselessly logical novelet based on actual , provable statistics I It's fiction, of course, but you may find that fact hard to remember! Conditionally They were such cute synthetic creatures, it was impossible not to love them. Of course , that was precisely why they were dangerous! around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands. His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house. He moved Human Illustrated by quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack and miserable. "Honeymoon's over, huh?" She said nothing, but shrugged faintly. "You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge of a district pound. You knew it before we got married." "I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously "I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals." "Intelligent animals!" "Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe." "A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?" "You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless against sentimentality. "Baby -- " "Don't call rrte baby! Call them baby!" Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment, he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the good things about the job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think -- we get this house rentfree; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a fine job, honey!" She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on. "And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment. They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to BioAdministration. If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common labor. That's the law." " I suppose you have an aptisweetly. Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it because I liked babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business, people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way -- I'm just a dogcatcher." Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom. He backed closer to the door. "Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I -- I'll see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious that she didn't want to be kissed. He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the house. The honeymoon was over, all right. He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its population legally fixed at three hundred become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were someplace where he could be completely alone. As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile thumbs. It was a cat-Q-#. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris pulled to a Jialt. He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?" The cat-Q-# stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry." "Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?" The cat-Q-# took its time about answering. There were no houses near the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost. It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He repeated the questions. "Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-# disgustedly. "That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran away?" The cat-Q-# looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray! Mama no run ray!" Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-#. The felines were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called "neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with gr ief ; but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid. His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises were class-C -- defective heredity. H E found himself in Sherman eight blocks of commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was something he had been expecting for several days. Attention All District Inspectors: Subject: Deviant Neutroid. You will immediately begin a aystematic and thorough survey of all animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermudak-# series for birth dates during July #. This is in connection with the Delmont Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when one animal i. found. Be thorough. If allowed to reach ageset or adulthood, such a deviant could be dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-#s who show the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey project within seven days. C. Franklin Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's influx had been K-#s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's "unclaimed" inventory -- awaiting destruction. #  He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's Bermuda K-# serial numbers that had entered his territory, together with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight squeeze. He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead. "Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?" Norris hesitated. "Extremely , he said. "Well, this won't take long. One of my patients -- a Mrs. Sarah Glubbes -- called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's dying. Eighteenth order virus." "So?" "Well, she's -- uh -- rather a peculiar woman, Inspector. Keeps telling me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever have another one. It's pathetic. She believes it's her own. Do you understand?" "I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do? Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?" "She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment -- in humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment." "I still don't see -- " "I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-# series, five-year-old, threeyear set. Do you have one in the pound that's not claimed?" Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have one. You're welcome to it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it And even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her. It'll be spooky." There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I come get the animal now?" "I'm on the highway -- " "Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind completely if -- " "All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you. Pick out the K-# and sign for it. And listen -- " "Yes?" "Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number." Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal. But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later have to be killed. He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung up. T Y noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale house in Wylo City. Only thirtyfive of July's BermudaK#s had entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City. After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained was to pick up the thirty-five animals. And that, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to begin his rounds. Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned. "Doctor Georges came' she told him. "He signed for the -- " She stopped to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?" Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the scratches. Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating mechanical voice answered. "Locator center. Your party, please." "Sheriff Yates." Norris grunted. The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the offduty sheriff on its third try, in a Wylo pool hall. "I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?" "Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo # citizens with resisting a Federal official -- namely me -- and charging one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a pound inspection -- " Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone. "It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection with the Delmont case." Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it." "It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick up the animals in the morning?" "Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers." "That'll be all right. And listen, Yates -- fix it so the charges will be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids." "Okay, boy. Gotcha." Norris gave him the names and mothers. As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek. "Hard day?" she asked. "Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other twelve. They're in the truck." "That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages." He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up. "Can I help you?" He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry -- about this morning. I -- I know you've got a job that has to be -- " Her lip quivered slightly. Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close. "Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck. "Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget all about work." together. The cages were inside a sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms -- one for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematoryincinerator. Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings. The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace. Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise, they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level until death. "They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing around at the cages. Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've never gotten this excited before." He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-# to stare. "Apple cores!" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in there?" She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the mechanical feeder. I drove down dozen cooking apples." "That was a mistake." She frowned irritably. "We can afford it." "That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders. He paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on : "They get to love whoever feeds them." "I can't see -- " "How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?" Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any soon?" she asked acidly. "Honeymoon's off again, eh?" She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again." He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming doll-things forth one at a time with a snarepole. They were one-man pets, always frightened of strangers. "What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked. "Huh?" "I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got your face scratched?" He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story." "Tell me." "Well, Delmont was a greenhorn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope screen -- large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shootto fire alpha-particles into the gene structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of seven tries. "Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical. Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum had a couple of flaws -- something wrong in the central nervous system's determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a stand#S ard neutroid ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it wouldn't be caught until after birth." "It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked. "Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone flow into its compartment." "Why that?" "So it would develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally. That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't catch the female. She went on through; they all look female." "How did they find out about it now?" "He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing it once before. No telling how many times he really did it." Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from the back of the kennel truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a potential murderer. All these kiddos are from the machines in the section where Delmont worked." Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!" "You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it. Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months old and looked like a child of two years -- a year short of its age-set. And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child. "Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly. She looked up and shook her head. "It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you, you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once." She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage. "Anne -- " Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do you -- want one -- for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to keep in the house. It won't cost us anything." Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous. "I'm going to have one of my own," she said. He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize what -- " "I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going to have a baby." "You know what they'd do to uS?" "If they catch us, yes -- compulsory, divorce, sterilization. But they won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll hide it." "I won't let you do such a thing." She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten world!" she choked. Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing. from the truck and wandered on into the house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station. "... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting." Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in the street. A new voice came on the audio. "This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out. and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years -- some of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler." Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor Georges in the community, but only this morning... A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking, folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning." "Thank you. Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock, less than an hour ago, a woman -- allegedly Mrs. Glubbes -- burst into Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the wrong baby! Where's my baby?' "When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired, shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs. Glubbes, the alleged intruder, has no baby. Just a minute -- just a minute -- here comes the stretcher now." Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she concealed it well. "What was all that?" she asked. "Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive." "What was it?" "Neutroid trouble." "You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?" "Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted. "I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?" but it was after one when he became certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time, listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly out of the north. He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy chatters greeted the light. One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and carried them to a large glasswalled compartment. These were the long-time residents: they knew him well, and they came after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas. The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator. Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-#s. He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest just to retch. When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney. Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch. After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheelc lightly. He felt her cool fingertips trace a soft line up his temple. "It's all right, Terry," she whispered. He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing that it would never be all right, neither the -- and the whole world -- completely lost sanity. And then everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense. the house. The night mist had gathered' into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-#s so  that he could begin his testing. Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted birth rate? Because by keeping the population could insure a decent living standard for everybody. Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking away. Maft had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but he created nothing. He thought that he had  created -- with his medical science and his end to wars -- a longer life for the individual. But he found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it. A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother something small. Norris gave up thinking about it Eventually he would have to adjust to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a matter of adjustment. A T noon, he brought back another dozen K-#s and installed them in his cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already brought in the three from yesterday. "No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not speak of the night's mass-disposal. Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing though -- I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one." "What happened?" "Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-#, but not even from Bermuda." "I thought they were all registered," Anne said. "They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from O'Reilley's pet. shop -- right place, wrong number. I just don't get it." "Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?" He looked at her peculiarly. Ever think what might happen if someone started a black market in neutroids?" They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself. If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their owners down upon him. He began to understand why bioinspectors were frequently shifted from one territory to another. On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address. It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street of small bars and bowling  alleys and cigar stores. There was even a shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the sidewalk, announcing : Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors. O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness. Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of A Chimp to Cal! My Own, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator. He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's alleged F-# intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger. The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don sell me." Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter than the neutroids. A K-# could speak a dozen words, and a K-# never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists proclaim them really human. He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon O'Reilley... authorized dealer in mutant animals... all non-predatory mammals including champanzee-K series... license expires June #, #." It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had gone. The little manager wore an elfan professional smile, and his bald head bobbled in a welcoming nod. "Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a -- " He stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris flashed his badge. His smile waned. "I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown on K-# sales." O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?" Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some mistake on -- " he glanced Let's check it again." O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer'i name." "She has a different number.' "Can I help it if she traded with somebody?" "She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt." "Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man. "Two of your customers have the same name -- Adelia Schultz? Not likely. Let's see your duplicate receipt book." O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if it's still around." Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I could start naming some things around here that need fixing -- sanitary violations and such. Not to mention that sign -- 'dumb blondes. They outlawed that one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-#s full of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides, you're required to keep sales records until they've been microfilmed. There hasn't been a microfilming since July." The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under the register and started toward a wooden stairway. "Where you going?" Norris called. "Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these new things." "Leave the book here and I'll check it," Norris offered. But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click. The bioagent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him. Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. old man came down the stairs. He said nothing as he placed the book on the counter. Norris noticed that his hands were trembling as he shuffled through the pages. "Let me look," said the bioagent. O'Reilley stepped reluctantly aside. Norris had memorized the owner's receipt number, and he found the duplicate quickly. He stared at it silently. "Mrs. Adele Schultz... chimpanzee-K-#L-JZ-#." It was the number of the animal he wanted, but it wasn't the number on Mrs. Schultz's neutroid nor on her original copy of the receipt. He held the book up to his eye and aimed across the page at the light. O'Reilley's breathing became audible. Norris put the book down, folded two thicknesses of handkerchief over the blade of his pocketknife, and ran it down the seam between the pages. He took the sheet he wanted, folded it, and stowed it in his vest pocket. O'Reilley was stuttering angrily. Norris turned to face him coldly. "Nice erasure job, for a carbon copy." The old man prepared himself for exploding. Norris quietly put on his hat. "See you in court, O'Reilley." "Wait!" Norris turned. "Okay, I'm waiting." The old man sagged into a deflated bag of wrinkles. "Let's sit down first," he said weakly. Norris followed him up the stairs and into a dingy parlor. The tiny apartment smelled of boiled cabbage and sweat. An orange-haired neutroid lay asleep on a small rug in a corner. Norris knelt beside it and read the tattooed figures on the sole of its how he was not surprised. When he stood up, the old man was sagged in an ancient armchair, his head propped on a #  hand that covered his eyes. "Lots of good explanations, I guess?" Norris asked quietly. "Not good ones." "Let's hear them, anyway." O'Reilley sighed and straightened. He blinked at the inspector and spoke in a monotone. "My missus died five years back. We were class-B -- allowed one child of our own -- if we could have one. We couldn't. But since we were class-B, we couldn't own a neutroid either. Sorta got around it by running a pet shop. Mary -- she always cried when we sold a neut. I sorta felt bad about it myself. But we never did swipe one. Last year this Bermuda shipment come in. I sold most of 'em pretty quick, but Peony here -- -she was kinda puny. Seemed like nobody wanted her. Kept her around so long, I got attached to her. 'Fraid somebody'd buy her. So I faked the receipt and moved her up here." "That all?" The old man nodded. "Ever done this before?" He shook his head. Norris let a long silence pass while he struggled with himself. At last he said, "Your license could be revoked, you know." "I know." Norris ground his fist thoughtfully in his palm and stared at the sleeping doll-thing. "I'll take your books home with me tonight," he said. "I want to make a complete check for similar changes. Any objections?" "None. It's the only trick I've pulled, so help me." "If that's true, I won't report you. We'll just attach a correction to that page, and you'll put the newt back in stock." He hesitated. "Providing it's not a deviant. I'll have to take it in for examination." A choking sound came from the armchair. Norris stared curiously at the old man. Moisture was creeping in the wrinkles around his eyes. "Something the matter?" O'Reilley nodded. "She's a deviant." "How do you know?" The dealer pulled himself erect and hobbled to the sleeping neutroid. He knelt beside it and stroked a small bare shoulder gently. "Peony," he breathed. "Peony, girl -- wake up." Its fluffy tail twitched for a moment. Then it sat up, rubbing its eyes and yawning. It looked normal, like a two-year-old girl with soft brown eyes. It pouted at O'Reilley for awakening it. It aaw Norris and ignored him, apparently too sleepy to be frightened. "Hows my Peony-girl?" the dealer purred. It licked its lips. "Wanna g'ass o' water, Daddy," it said drowsily. Norris caught his breath. No K-# should be able to make a speech that long, even when it reached the developmental limit. He glanced at O'Reilley. The old man nodded slowly, then went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She drank greedily and eyed her fosterpa rent. "Daddy crying." O'Reilley glowered at her and blew his nose solemnly. "Don't be silly, child. Now get your coat on and go with Mister Norris. He's taking you for a ride in his truck. Won't that be fine?" "I don't want to. I wanna stay here." "Peeony On with you!" She brought her coat and stared at Norris with childish contempt. "Can Daddy go, too?" "Be on your way!" growled O'Reilley. "I got things to do." "We're coming back?" "Of course you're coming back! Git now -- or shall I get my spanking switch?" Peony strolled out the door ahead of Norris. "Oh, inspector, would you be punching the night latch for me as you leave the shop? I think I'll be closing for the day." Norris paused at the head of the stairs, looking back at the old man. But O'Reilley closed himself inside and the lock clicked. The agent sighed and glanced down at the small being beside him. "Want me to carry you, Peony?" She sniffed disdainfully. She hopped upon the banister and slid down ahead of him. Her motorresponses were typically neutroid -- something like a monkey, something like a squirrel. But there was no question about it; she was one of Delmont's deviants. He wondered what they would do with her in central lab. He could remember no instance of an intelligent mutant getting into the market Somehow he could not consign her to a cage in the back of the truck. He drove home while she sat beside him on the front seat. She watched the scenery and remained aloof, occasionally looking around to ask, "Can we go back now?" Norris could not bring himself to answer. into the house and stopped in the hall to call Chief Franklin. The operator said, "His office doesn't answer, sir. Shall I give you the robot locator?" Norris hesitated. His wife came into the hall. She stooped to grin at Peony, and Peony said, "Do you live here, too?" Anne gasped and sat on the floor to stare. Norris said, "Cancel the calL It'll wait till tomorrow." He dropped the phone quickly. "What series is it?" Anne asked excitedly. "I never saw one that could talk." "It is a she." he said. "And she's a series unto herself. Some of Delmont's work." Peony was looking from one to the other of them with a baffled face. "Can we go back now?" Norris shook his head. 'You're going to spend the night with us. Peony," he said softly. "Your daddy wants you to." His wife was watching him thoughtfully. Norris looked aside and plucked nervously at a corner of the telephone book. Suddenly she caught Peony's hand and led her toward the kitchen. "Come on, baby, let's go find a cookie or something." Norris started out the front door, but in a moment Anne was back. She caught at his collar and tugged. "Not so fast!" He turned to frown. Her face accused him at a six-inch range. "Just what do you think you're going to do with that child?" He was silent for a long time... "You know what I'm supposed to do." Her unchanging stare told him that she wouldn't accept any evasions. "I heard you trying to get your boss on the phone." "I canceled it. didn't I?" "Until tomorrow." He worked his hands nervously. "I don't know, honey -- I just don't know." "They'd kill her at central lab, wouldn't they?" "Well, they'd need her as evidence in Delmont's trial." "They'd kill her, wouldn't they?" "When it was over -- it's hard to say. The law says deviants must be destroyed, but -- " "Well?" He paused miserably. "We've got a few days to think about it, honey. I don't have to make my report for a week." He sidled out the door. Looking back, he saw the hard determination in her eyes as she watched him. He knew somehow that he was going to lose either his job or his wife. Maybe both. He shuffled moodily out to the kennels to care for his charges. house during the evening. Supper was a gloomy meal. Only Peony spoke; she sat propped on two cushions at the table, using her silver with remarkable skill. Norris wondered about her intelligence. Her chronological age was ten months; her physical age was about two years; but her mental age seemed to compare favorably with at least a three year old. Once he reached across the tablc to touch her forehead. She eyed him curiously for a moment and continued eating. Her temperature was warmer than human, but not too warm for the normally high neutroid metabolism -- somewhere around #. The rapid rate of maturation made I.Q. determination impossible. "You've got a good appetite, Peony." Anne remarked. "I like Daddy's cooking better," she said with innocent bluntness. "When can I go home?" Anne looked at Norris and waited for an answer. He managed a smile at the flame-haired cherub. "Tell you what we'll do. I'll call your daddy on the phone and let you say hello. Would you like that?" She giggled, then nodded. "Uhhuh! When can we do it?" "Later." Anne tapped her fork thoughtfully against the edge of her plate. "I think we better have a nice long talk tonight, Terry," she said. "Is there anything to talk about?" He pushed the plate away. "I'm not hungry." sit in darkness by the parlor window, while his wife did the dishes and Peony played with a handful of walnuts on the kitchen floor. He watched the scattered lights of the suburbs and tried to think of nothing. The lights were peaceful, glimmering through the trees. Once there had been no lights, only the flickering campfires of hunters shivering in the forest, when the world was young and sparsely planted with the seed of Man. Now the world was infected with his lights, and with the sound of his engines and the roar of his rockets. He had inherited the Earth and had filled it -- too full. There was no escape. His rockets had touched two of the planets, but even the new worlds offered no sanctuary for the unborn. Man could have babies -- if allowed -- faster than he could build ships to haul them away. He could only choose between a higher death rate and a lower birth rate. And unborn children were not eligible to vote when Man made his choice. His choice had robbed his wife of a biological need, and so he made a disposable baby with which to pacify her. He gave it a tail and only half a mind, so that it could not be confused with his own occasional children. But Peony had only the tail. Still she was not born of the seed of Man. Strange seed, out of the jungle, warped toward the human pole, but still not human. ' ing in the street. Its headlights swung along the curb, and it slowed to a halt in front of the house. A tall, slender man in a dark suit climbed out and stood for a moment, staring toward the house. He was only a shadow in the faint street light. Norris could lot place him. Suddenly the man napped on a flashlight and played it over the porch. Norris caught his breath and darted toward the kitchen. Anne stared at him questioningly, while Peony peered up from her play. He stooped beside her. "Listen, chileV" he said quickly. "Do you know what a neutroid is?" She nodded slowly. "They play in cages. They don't talk." "Can you pretend you're a neutroid?" "I can play neutroid. I play neutroid with Daddy sometimes, when people come to see him. He gives me candy when I play it. 'Vhen can I go home?" "Not now. There's a man coming to see us. Can you play neutroid for me? We'll give you lots of candy. Just don't talk. Pretend you're asleep." "Now?" "Now." He heard the door chimes ringing. "Who is it?" Anne asked. "I don't know. He may have the wrong house. Take Peony in the bedroom. I'll answer it." His wife caught the child-thing up in her arms and hurried away. The chimes sounded again. Norris stalked down the hall and switched on the porch-light. The visitor was an elderly man, erect in his black suit and radiating dignity. As he smiled and'nodded, Norris noticed his collar. A clergyman. Must have the wrong place, Norris thought. "Are you Inspector Norris?" The agent nodded, not daring to talk.  "I'm Father Paulson. I'm calling on behalf of a James O'Reilley. I think you know him. May I come in?" Grudgingly, Norris swung open the door. "If you can stand the smell of paganism, come on in." The priest chuckled politely. Norris led him to the parlor and turned on the light. He waved toward a chair. "What's this all about? Does O'Reilley want something?" Paulson smiled at the inspector's brusque tone and settled himself in the chair. "O'Reilley is a sick man," he said. The inspector frowned. "He didn't look it to me." "Sick of heart, Inspector. He came to me for advice. I couldn't give him any. He told me the story -- about this Peony. I came to have a lodk at her, if I may." Norris said nothing for a moment. O'Reilley had better keep his mouth shut, he thought, especially around clergymen. Most of them took a dim view of the whole mutant business. "I didn't think you'd associate with O'Reilley," he said. "I thought you people excommunicated everybody that owns a neutroid. O'Reilley owns a whole shopful." "That's true. But who knows? He might get rid of his shop. May I see this neutroid?" "Why?" "O'Reilley said it could talk. Is that true or is O'Reilley suffering delusions? That's what I came to find out." "Neutroids don't talk." The priest stared at him for a time, then nodded slowly, as if approving something. "You can rest assured," he said quietly, "that I'll say nothing of this visit, that I'll speak to no one about this creature." Norris looked up to see his wife watching them from the doorway. "Get Peony," he said. "It's true then?" Paulson asked. "I'll let you see for yourself." Anne brought the small childthing into the room and set her on the floor. Peony saw the visitor, chattered with fright, and bounded upon the back of the sofa to sit and scold. She was playing her game well, Norris thought. The priest watched her with quiet interest. "Hello, little one. Peony babbled gibberish. Paulson kept his eyes on her every movement. Suddenly he said, "I just saw your daddy, Peony. He wanted me to talk to you." Her babbling ceased. The spell of the game was ended. Her eyes went sober. Then she looked at Norris and pouted. "I don't want any candy. I wanna go home." Norris let out a deep breath. "I didn't say she couldn't talk," he pointed out sullenly. "I didn't say you did," said Paulson. "You invited me to see for myself." Anne confronted the clergyman. "What do you want?" she demanded. "The child's death? Did you come to assure yourself that she'd be turned over to the lab? I know your kind! You'd do anything to get rid of neutroids!" "I came only to assure myself that O'Reilley's sane," Paulson told her. "I don't believe you," she snapped. He stared at her in wounded surprise; then he chuckled. "People used to trust the cloth. Ah, well. Listen, my child, you have us wrong. We say it's evil to create the creatures. We say also that it's evil to destroy them after they're made. Not murder, exactly, but -- mockery of life, perhaps. It's the entire institution that's evil. Do you understand? As for this small creature of O'Reilley's -- well, I hardly know what to make of her, but I certainly wouldn't wish her -- uh -- d-e-a-d." Peony was listening solemnly to the conversation. Somehow NorriSi sensed a disinterested friend, if not an ally, in the priest. He looked at his wife. Her eyes were still suspicious. "Tell me, Father," Norris asked, "if you were in my position, what would you do?" Paulson fumbled with a button of his coat and stared at the floor while he pondered. "I wouldn't be in your position, young man. But if I were, I think I'd withhold her from my superiors. I'd also quit my job and go away." It wasn't what Norris wanted to hear. But his wife's expression suddenly changed; she looked at the priest with a new interest. "And give Peony back to O'Reilley," she added. "I shouldn't be giving you advice," he said unhappily. "I'm duty-bound to ask O'Reilley to give up his business and have nothing further to do with neutroids." "But Peony's human," Anne argued. "She's different ." "I fail to agree." "What!" Anne confronted him again. "What makes you human?" F "A soul, my child." Anne put her hands on her hips and leaned forward to glare down at him like something unwholesome. "Can you put a voltmeter between your ears and measure it?" The priest looked helplessly at Norris. " No!" she said. "And you can't do it to Peony either!" "Perhaps I had better go," Paulson said to his host. Norris sighed. "Maybe you better, Padre. You found out what you wanted to know." Anne stalked angrily out of the room, her dark hair swishing like a battle-pennant with each step. When the priest was gone, Norris picked up the child and held her in his lap. She was shivering with fright, as if she understood what had been said. Love them in the parlor, he thought, and kill them in the kennels. "Can I go home? Doesn't Daddy want me any more?" "Sure he does. baby. You just be good and everything'll be all right." mouth as he laid her sleeoing body on the sofa half an hour later. Everything was all wrong and it promised to remain that way. He couldn't give her back to O'Reilley, because she wcdcl be caught again when the auditor came to microfilm the records. And he certainly couldn't keep her, himself -- not with other Bioagents wandering in and out every few days. She could not be concealed in a world where there were no longer any sparsely populated regions, There was nothing to do but obey the law and turn her over to Franklin's lab. He closed his eyes and shuddered. If he did that, he could do anything -- stomach anything -- adapt to any vicious demands society made of him. If he sent the child away to die, he would know that he had attained an "objective" outlook. And what more could he want from life than adaptation and objectivity? Well -- his wife, for one thing. He left the child on the sofa, turned out the light, and wandered into the bedroom. Anne was in bed, reading. She did not look up when she said, "Terry, if you let that baby be destroyed, I'll..." "Don't say it," he cut in. "Any time you feel like leaving, you just leave. But don't threaten me with it." She watched him silently for a moment. Then she handed him the newspaper she had been reading. It was folded around an advertisement. by for Evolvotron Operator! Incubator Tenders Nursery Supervisors Laboratory Personnel in Call or write. Personnel Mgr. Atlanta, Ga. Note: Secur Work Department release from present job before applying. He looked at Anne curiously. "So?" She shrugged. "So there's a job, if you want to quit this one." "What's this got to do with Peony, if anything?" "We could take her with us.' "Not a chance," he said. "Do you suppose a talking neutroid would be any safer there?" She demanded angrily, "Why should they want to destroy her?" Norris sat on the edge of the bed and hought about it. "No particular ' individual wants to, honey. It's the law." "But why?" "Generally, because deviants are unknown quantities. They can be dangerous." "That child -- dangerous?" "Dangerous to a concept, a vague belief that Man is something special, a closed tribe. And in a practical sense, she's dangerous becauseshe's not a neuter. The Federation insists that all mutants be neuter and infertile, so it can control the mutant population. If mutants started reproducing, that could be a real threat in a world whose economy is so delicately balanced." "Well, you're not going to let them have her, do you hear me?" "I hear you," he grumbled. "N the following day, he went down to police headquarters to sign a statement concerning the motive in Doctor Georges' murder. As a result, Mrs. Glubbes was put away in the psychoward. "It's funny, Norris," said Chief Miler, "what people'll do over a neutroid. Like Mrs. Glubbes thinking that newt was her own. I sure don't envy you your job. It's a wonder you don't get your head blown off. You must have an iron stomach." Norris signed the paper and looked up briefly. "Sure, Chief. Just a matter of adaptation." "Guess so." Miler patted his paunch and yawned. "How you coming on this Delmont business? Picked up any deviants yet?" Norris laid down the pen abruptly. "No! Of course not! What made you think I had?" Miler stopped in the middle of his yawn and stared at Norris curiously. "Touchy, aren't you?" he asked thoughtfully. "When I get that kind of answer from a prisoner, I right away start thinking -- " "Save it for your interrogation room," Norris growled. He stalked quickly out of the office while Chief Miler tapped his pencil absently and stared after him. He was angry with himself for his indecision. He had to make a choice and make it soon. He was climbing in his car when a voice called after him from the building. He looked back to see Chief Miler trotting down the steps, his pudgy face glistening in the morning sun. "Hey, Norris! Your missus is on the phone. Says it's urgent." Norris went back grudgingly. A premonition of trouble gripped him. "Phone's right there," the chief said, pointing with a stubby thumb. The receiver lay on the desk, and he could hear it saying, "Hello -- hello -- " before he picked it up. "Anne? What's the matter?" Her voice was low and strained, trying to be cheerful. "Nothing's the matter, darling. We have a visitor. Come right home, will you? Chief Franklin's here." It knocked the breath out of him. He felt himself going white. He glanced at Chief Miler, calmly sitting nearby. "Can you tell me about it now?" he asked her. "Not very well. Please hurry home. He wants to talk to you about the K-#s." "Have the two of them met?" "Yes, they have." She paused, as if listening to him speak, then said, "Oh, that ! The game, honey  -- remember the game?" "Good," he grunted. "I'll be right there." He hung up and started out. "Troubles?" the chief called after him. "Just a sick newt." he said, "if it's any of your business." was parked in the empty lot next door when Norris drove up in front of the house. The official heard the truck and came out on the porch to watch his agent walk up the path. His lanky, emaciated body was loosely draped in gray tweeds, and his thin hawk face was a dark and solemn mask. He was a middle-aged man, his skin seamed with wrinkles, but his hair was still abnormally black. He greeted Norris with a slow, almost sarcastic nod. "I see you don't read your mail. If you'd looked at it. you'd have known I was coming. I wrote you yesterday." "Sorry, Chief, I didn't have a chance to stop by the message office this morning." Franklin grunted. "Then you don't know why I'm here?" "No, sir." "Let's sit out on the porch," Franklin said, and perched his bony frame on the railing. "We've got to get busy on these Bermuda-K-#s, Norris. How many have you got?" "Thirty-four, I think." "I counted thirty-five." "Maybe you're right. I -- I'm not sure." "Found any deviants yet?" "Uh -- I haven't run any testa yet, sir." Franklin's voice went sharp. "Do you need a test to know when a neutroid is talking a blue streak?" "What do you mean?" "Just this. We've found at least a dozen of Delmont's units that have mental ages that correspond to their physical age. What's more, they're functioning females, and they have normal pituitaries. Know what that means?" "They won't take an age-set then," Norris said. "They'll grow to adulthood." "And have children." Norris frowned. "How can they have children? There aren't any males." "No? Guess what we found in one of Delmont's incubators." "Not a -- " "Yeah. And it's probably not the first. This business about padding his quota is baloney! Hell, man, he was going to start his own black market! He finally admitted it, after twenty-hours questioning without a letup. He was going to raise them, Norris. He was stealing them right out of the incubators before an inspector ever saw them. The K-#s -- the numbered ones -- are just the ones he couldn't get back. Lord knows how many males he's got hidden away someplace!" "What're you going to do?" u Do! What do you think we'll do? Smash the whole scheme, that's what! Find the deviants and kill them. We've got enough now for lab work." Norris felt sick. He looked away. "I suppose you'll want me to handle the destruction, then." Franklin gave him a suspicious glance. "Yes, but why do you ask? You have found one, haven't you?" "Yes, sir," he admitted. A moan came from the doorway. Norris looked up to see his wife's white face staring at him in horror, just before she turned and fled into the house. Franklin's bony head lifted. "I see," he said. "We have a fixation on our deviant. Very well, Norris, I'll take care of it myself. Where is it?" "In the house, sir. My wife's bedroom." "Get it." house. The bedroom door was locked. "Honey," he called softly. SI  There was no answer. He knocked gently. A key turned in the lock, and his wife stood facing him. Her eyes were weeping ice. "Stay back!" she said. He could see Peony behind her, sitting in the center of the floor and looking mystified. Then he saw his own service revolver in her trembling hand. "Look, honey -- it's me." She shook her head. "No, it's not you. It's a man that wants to kill a little girl. Stay back." "You'd shoot, wouldn't you?" he asked softly. "Try to come in and find out,"  she invited. "Let me have Peony." She laughed, her eyes bright with hate. "I wonder where Terry went. I guess he died. Or adapted. I guess I'm a widow now. Stay back, Mister, or I'll kill you." Norris smiled. "Okay, I'll stay back. But the gun isn't loaded." She tried to slam the door; he caught it with his foot. She struck at him with the pistol, but he dragged it out of her hand. He pushed her aside and held her against the wall while she clawed at his arm. "Stop it!" he said. "Nothing will happen to Peony, I promise you!" He glanced back at the child-thing, who had begun to cry. Anne subsided a little, staring at him angrily. "There's no other way out, honey. Just trust me. She'll be all right." Breathing quickly, Anne stood aside and watched him. "Okay, Terry. But if you're lying -- tell me, is it murder to kill a man to protect a child?" Norris lifted Peony in his arms. Her wailing ceased, but her tail switched nervously. "In whose law book?" he asked his wife. "I was wondering the same thing." Norris started toward the door. "By the way -- find my instruments while I'm outside, will you?" "The dissecting instruments?" she gasped. "If you intend -- " "Let's call them surgical instruments, shall we? And get them sterilized," He werit on outside, carrying the child. Franklin was waiting for him in the kennel doorway. "Was that Mrs. Norris I heard screaming?" Norris nodded. "Let's get this over with. I don't stomach it so well." He let his eyes rest unhappily on the top of Peony's head. Franklin grinned at her and took a bit of candy out of his pocket. She refused it and snuggled closer to Norris. "When can I go home?" she piped. "I want Daddy." Franklin straightened, watching her with amusement. "You're going home in a few minutes, little newt. Just a few minutes." They went into the kennels together, and Franklin headed straight for the third room. He seemed to be enjoying the situation. Norris hating him silently, stopped at a workbench and pulled on a pair of gloves. Then he called after Franklin. "Chief, since you're in there, check the outlet pressure while I turn on the main line, will you?" Franklin nodded assent. He stood outside the gas-chamber, watching the dials on the door. Norris could see his back while he twisted the main-line valve. "Pressure's up!" Franklin called. "Okay. Leave the hatch ajar so it won't lock, and crack the intake valves. Read it again." . "Got a mask for me?" Norris laughed. "If you're scared, there's one on the shelf. But just open the hatch, take a reading, and close it. There's no danger." Franklin frowned at him and cracked the intakes. Norris quietly closed the main valve again. "Drops to zero!" Franklin called. "Leave it open, then. Smell anything?" "No. I'm turning it off, Norris." He twisted the intakes. Simultaneously, Norris opened the main line. "Pressure's up again!" Norris dropped his wrench and walked back to the chamber, leaving Peony perched on the workbench. "Trouble with the intakes," he said gruffly. "It's happened before. Mind getting your hands dirty with me, Chief?" Franklin frowned irritably. "Let's hurry this up, Norris. I've got five territories to visit." "Okay, but we'd better put on our masks." He climbed a metal ladder to the top of. the chamber, leaned over to inspect the intakes. On his way down, he shouldered a light-bulb over the door, shattering it. Franklin cursed and stepped back, brushing glass fragments from his head and shoulders. "Good thing the light was off," he snapped. Nprris handed him the gasmask and put on his own. "The main switch is off," he said. He opened the intakes again. This time the dials fell to normal open-line pressure. "Well, look -- it's okay," he called through the mask. "You sure it was zero before?" "Of course I'm sure!" came the muffled reply. "Leave it on for a minute. We'll see. I'll go get the newt. Don't let the door close, sir. It'll start the automatics and we can't get it open for half an hour." "I know, Norris. Hurry up." Norris left him standing just outside the chamber, propping the door open with his foot. A faint wind was coming through the opening. It should reach an explosive mixture quickly with the hatch ajar. He stepped into the next room, waited a moment, and jerked the switch. The roar was deafening as the exposed tungsten filament flared and detonated the escaping anesthetic vapor. Norris went to cut off the main line. Peony was crying plaintively. He moved to the door and glanced at the smouldering remains of Franklin. ever, Norris left the kennels, carrying the sobbing child under one arm. His wife stared at him without understanding. "Here, hold Peony while I call the police," he said. "Police? What's happened?" He dialed quickly. "Chief Miler? This is Norris. Get over here quick. My gas chamber exploded -- killed Chief Agent Franklin. Man, it's awful! Hurry." He hung up and went back to the kennels. He selected a normal BermudaK-# and coldly killed it with a wrench. "You'll serve for a deviant," he said, and left it lying in the middle of the floor. Then he went back to the house, mixed a sleeping capsule in a glass of water, and forced Peony to drink it. "So she'll be out when the cops come," he explained to Anne. She stamped her foot. "Will you tell me what's happened?" "You heard me on the phone. Franklin accidentally died. That's all you have to know." He carried Peony out and locked her in a cage. She was too sleepy to protest, and she was dozing when the police came. Chief Miler strode about the three rooms like a man looking for a burglar at midnight. He nudged the body of the neutroid with his foot. "What's this, Norris?" "The deviant we were about to destroy. I finished her with a wrench." "I thought you said there weren't any deviants." "As far as the public's concerned, there aren't. I couldn't see that it was any of your business. It still isn't" "I see. It may become my business, though. How'd the blast happen?" Norris told him the story up to the point of the detonation. "The light over the door was loose. Kept flickering on and off. Franklin reached up to tighten it. Must have been a little gas in the socket. Soon as he touched it -- wham !" "Why was the door open with the gas on?" "I told you -- we were checking the intakes. If you close the door, it starts the automatics. Then you can't get it open till the cycle's finished." "Where were you?" "I'd gone to cut off the gas again." "Okay, stay in the house until we're finished out here." the house, his wife's white face turned slowly toward him. She sat stiffly by the living room window, looking sick. Her voice was quietly frightened. "Terry, I'm sorry about everything." "Skip it." "What did you do?" He grinned sourly. "I adapted to an era. Did you find the instruments?" She nodded. "What are they for?" "To cut off a tail and skin a tattooed foot. Go to the store and buy some brown hairdye and a pair of boy's trousers, age two. Peony's going to get a crewcut. From now on, she's Mike." "We're class-C, Terry! We can't pass her off as our own." "We're class-A, honey. I'm going to forge a heredity certificate." Anne put her face in her hands and rocked slowly to and fro. "Don't feel bad, baby. It was Franklin or a little girl. And from now on, it's society or the Norrises." "What'll we do?" "Go to Atlanta and work for Anthropos. I'll take up where Delmont left off." "Terry!" "Peony will need a husband. They may find all of Delmont's males. I'll make her one. Then we'll see if a pair of chimp-Ks can do better than their makers." Wearily, he stretched out on the sofa. "What about that priest? Suppose he tells about Peony Suppose he guesses about Franklin and tells the police?" "The police," he said, "would then smell a motive. They'd figure it out and I'd be finished. We'll wait and see. Let's don't talk: I'm tired. We'll just wait for Miler to come in." She began rubbing his temples gently, and he smiled. "So we wait," she said. "Shall I read to you, Terry?" "That would be pleasant," he murmured, closing his eyes. She slipped away, but returned quickly. He heard the rustle of dry pages and smelled musty leather. Then her voice came, speaking old words softly. And he thought of the small childthing lying peacefully in her cage while angry men stalked about her... A small life with a mind; she came into the world as quietly as a thief, a burglar in the crowded house of Man. # will send my fear before thee, and I will destroy the peoples before whom thou shalt come , sending hornets to drive out the Hevite and the Canaanite and the Hethite before thou enterest the land. Little by little I will drive them out before thee, till thou be increased, and dost possess the land. Then shalt thou be to me a new people, and I to thee a God..." And on the quiet afternoon in May, while he waited for the police to finish puzzling in the kennels, it seemed to Terrell Norris that an end to scheming and pushing and arrogance was not too far ahead. It should be a pretty good world then. He hoped Man could fit into it somehow. t . Before science, there was superstition. After science , there will be... what? The biggest, most staggering, most final f act of them all ! U B  UT it's alt predicted here! It even names this century for the next reshuffling of the planets." Celeste Wolver looked up unMadge Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the illstamped title, The Dance of the Planets. There was no mistaking the time of its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged AS to that particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle toward her husband Theo dor. He tried to come to her rescue. "Only predicted in the vaguest way. As I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions every so often." "As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs," Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny. "Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is to end up in the orbit of Mercury," Theodor continued. "Well, nothing at all like that has happened." "But it's begun," Madge said with conviction. "Phobos and Deimos have disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact." That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubib miles of rock -- the merest cosmic flyspecks -- yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world. landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea, the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they pierced. People must have felt like this, she thought, when Aristarches first hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they couldn't see that anything had changed. We can. "You need something to cling to." she heard Madge say. "Dr. Kometevsky was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this might happen. I was never a Kometevsky ite before. Hadn't even heard of the man." She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much worse. "Of course, there are several more convincing alternate explanations..." Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated, surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist. And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: "Besides, if Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been picked up by now by 'scope or radar." "Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?" Madge questioned. "Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I think I'm right." And of course she was. She swung the book under her arm. "Whew, it's heavy," she observed, adding in slightly scandalized tones, "Never been microfilmed." She smiled nervously and looked them up and down. "Going to a party?" she asked. Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket justified the question, but they shook their heads. "Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family," Celeste said, while Theodor explained, "As it happens, we're bound on business connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes. And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical sleight-of-hand.' Madge nodded. "Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting." She gave them a woeful grin. "See you when the Earth jumps." Theodor said to Celeste, "Come on. dear. We'll be late." But Celeste didn't want to move too fast. "You know, Teddy," she said uncomfortably, "all this reminds me of those old myths where too much good fortune is a sure sign of coming disaster. It was just too much luck, our great-grandparents missing Government started a thousand years ahead of schedule. Luck like that couldn't last, evidently. Maybe we've gone too fast with a lot of things, like space-flight and the Deep Shaft and -- " she hesitated a bit -- "complex marriages. I'm a woman. I want complete security. Where am I to find it?" "In me," Theodor said promptly. "In you? Celeste questioned, walking slowly, "But you're just one-third of my husband. Perhaps I should look for it in Edmund or Ivan." "You angry with me about something?" "Of course not. But a woman wants her source of security whole. In a crisis like this, it's disturbing to have it divided." "Well, we are a whole and, I believe, indivisible family," Theodor told her warmly. "You're not suggesting, are you, that we're going to be punished for our polygamous sins by a cosmic catastrophe? Fire from heaven and all that?" "Don't be silly. I just wanted to give you a picture of my feeling." Celeste smiled. "I guess none of us realized how much we've come to depend on the idea of unchanging scientific law. Knocks the props from under you." Theodor nodded emphatically. "All the more reason to get a line on what's happening as quickly as possible. You know, it's fantastically far-fetched, but I think the experience of persons with Extra-Sensory Perception may give us a clue. During the past three or four days there's been a remarkable similarity in the planet. I'm going to present the evidence at the meeting." Celeste looked up at him. "So that's why Rosalind's bringing Frieda's daughter?" "Dotty is your daughter, too, and Rosalind's," Theodor reminded her. "No, just Frieda's," Celeste said bitterly. "Of course you may be the father. One-third of a chance." Theodor looked at her sharply, but didn't comment. "Anyway, Dotty will be there," he said. "Probably asleep by now. All the need more sleep." As they talked, it had been growing darker, though the luminescence of the path kept it from being bothersome. And now the cloud rack parted to the east, showing a single red planet low on the horizon. "Did you know," Theodor said suddenly, "that in Gulliver's Travels Dean Swift predicted that better telescopes would show Mars to have two moons? He got the sizes and distances and periods damned accurately, too. One of the few really startling coincidences of reality and literature." "Stop being eerie," Celeste said sharply. But then she went on, "Those names Phobos and Deimos -- they're Greek, aren't they? What do they mean?" Theodor lost a step. "Fear and "Now don't go taking that for an omen. Most of the mythological names of major and minor ancient gods had been taken -- the bodies in the Solar System are named that way, of course -- and these were about all that were available." It was true, but it didn't comfort him much. T AM a God, Dotty was dream  ing, and I want to be by myself and think. I and my godfriends like to keep some of our thoughts secret, but the other gods have forbidden us to. A little smile flickered across the lips of the sleeping girl, and the woman in gold tights and gold-spangled jacket leaned forward thoughtfully. In her dignity and simplicity and straightspined grace, she was rather like a circus mother watching her sick child before she went out for the trapeze act. I and my god-friends saif off in our great round silver boats. Dotty went on dreaming. The other gods are angry and scared. They are frightened of the thoughts we may think in secret. They follow us to hunt us down. There are many more of them than of us. A S Celeste and Theodor entered the committee room, Rosalind Wolver -- a glitter of platinum against darkness -- came in through the opposite door and softly shut it behind her. Frieda, a fair woman in blue robes, got up from the round table. Celeste turned away with outward casualness as Theodor kissed his two other wives. She was pleased to note that Edmund seemed impatient too. A figure in close-fitting black, unrelieved except for two red arrows at the collar, he struck her as embodying very properly the serious, fateful temper of the moment. He took two briefcases from his vest pocket and tossed them down on the table beside one of the microfilm projectors. "I suggest we get started without waiting for Ivan," he said. Frieda frowned anxiously. "It's ten minutes since he phoned from the Deep Space Bar to say he was starting right away. And that's hardly two minutes walk.' Rosalind instantly started tor ward the outside door. "I'll check," she explained. "Oh, Frieda, I've set the mike so you'll hear if Dotty calls," Edmund threw up his hands. "Very well, then," he said and walked over, switched on the picture and stared out moodily. Theodor and Frieda got out their briefcases, switched on projectors, and began silently checking through their material. Celeste fiddled with the TV and got a newscast. But she found her eyes didn't want to absorb the blocks of print that rather swiftly succeeded each other, so, after a few moments, she shrugged impatiently and switched to audio. At the noise, the others looked around at her with surprise and some irritation, but in a few moments they were also listening. "The two rocket ships sent out from Mars Base to explore the orbital positions of Phobos and Deimos, -- that is, the volume of space they'd be occuping if their positions had remained normal -- report finding masses of dust and larger debris. The two masses of fine debris are moving in the same orbits and at the same velocities as the two vanished moons, and occupy roughly the same volumes of space, though the mass of material is hardly a hundredth that of the moons. Physicists have ventured no statements as to whether this constitutes a confirmation of the Disintegration Hypothesis. "However, we're mighty pleased at this news here. There's a marked lessening of tension. The finding of the debris -- solid, tangible stuff -- seems to lift the whole affair out of the supernatural miasma in which some of us have been tempted to plunge it Onehundredth of the moons has been found. The rest will also be!" Edmund had turned his back on the window. Frieda and Theodor had switched off their projectors. "Meanwhile, Earthlings are going about their business with a minimum of commotion, meeting with considerable calm the strange threat to the fabric of their Solar System. Many, of course, are assembled in churches and humanist temples. Kometevskyites have staged helicopter processions at Washington, Peking, Pretoria, and Christiana, demanding that instant preparations be made for -- and I quote -- 'Earth's coming leap through space.' They have also formally challenged all astronomers to produce an explanation other than the one contained in that strange book so recently conjured from oblivion, The Dance of the Planets. "That about winds up the story for the present. There are no new reports from Interplanetary Radar, Astronomy, or the other rocket ships searching in the extended Mars volume. Nor have any statements been issued by the various groups working on the problem in Astrophysics, Cosmic Ecology, the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes, and so forth. Meanwhile, however, we can take courage from the words of a poem written even before Dr. ' Kometevsky's book : "This Earth is not the steadfast place . We landsmen build upon; Fjom deep to deep she varies pace. And while she comes is gone. Berteath my feet I feel Her smooth bulk heave and dip; With velvet plunge and soft upreel She swings and steadies to her keel Like a gallant, gallant ship."  ' the poem, growing richer as emotion caught it up, Celeste looked around her at the others. Frieda, with her touch of feminine helplessness showing more than ever through her businesslike poise. Theodor leaning forward from his scarlet cloak thrown back, smiling the halfsmile with which he seemed to face even the unknown. Black Edmund, masking a deep uncertainty with a strong show of decisiveness. In short, her family. She knew their every quirk and foible. And yet now they seemed to her a through the wrong end of a telescope. Were they really a family? Strong sources of mutual strength and security to each other? Or had they merely been playing family, experimenting with their notions of complex marriage like a bunch of silly adolescents? Butterflies taking advantage of good weather to wing together in a glamorous, artificial dance -- until outraged Nature decided to wipe them out? As the poem was ending, Celeste saw the door open and Rosalind come slowly in. The Golden Woman's face was white as the paths she had been treading. Just then the TV voice quickened with shock. "News! Lunar Observatory One reports that, although Jupiter is just about to pass behind the Sun, a good coronagraph of the planet has been obtained. Checked and rechecked, it admits of only one interpretation, which Lunar One feels dutybound to release. Jupiter's tour teen moons are no longer visible!' The chorus of remarks with which the Wolvers would otherwise have received this was checked by one thing: the fact that Rosalind seemed not to hear it. Whatever was on her mind prevented even that incredible statement from penetrating. She walked shakily to the table and put down a briefcase, one end of which was smudged with dirt. Without looking at them, she said, "Ivan left the Deep Space Bar twenty minutes ago, said he was coming straight here. On my way back I searched the path. Midway I found this half-buried in the dirt. I had to tug to get it out -- almost as if it had been cemented into the ground. Do you feel how the dirt seems to be in the leather, as if it had lain for years in the grave?" By now the others were fingering the small case of microfilms they had seen so many times in Ivan's competent hands. What Rosalind said was true. It had a gritty, unwholesome feel to it. Also, it felt strangely heavy. "And see what's written on it," she added. They turned it over. Scrawled with white pencil in big, hasty, frantic letters were two words: "Going down!" The other gods, Dotty dreamt, re combing the whole Universe for us. We have escaped them many times, but now our tricks ore almost used up. There are no doors going out of the Universe and our boats are silver beacons to th hunters. So we decide to disgui ve them in the only way they ( an be disguised. It is our last dance . gain the family's attention. "I'd say we've done everything we can for the moment to find Ivan. We've made a thorough local search. A wider one, which we can't conduct personally, is in progress. All helpful agencies have been alerted and descriptions are being broadcast. I suggest we get on with the business of the evening -- which may very well be connected with Ivan's disappearance." One by one the others nodded and took their places at the round table. Celeste made a great effort to throw off the feeling of unreality that had engulfed her and focus attention on her microfilms. "I'll take over Ivan's notes," she heard Edmund say. "They're mainly about the Deep Shaft." "How far have they got with that?" Frieda asked idly. "Twenty-five miles?" "Nearer thirty, I believe," Edmund answered, "and still going down." At those last two words they all looked up quickly. Then their eyes went toward Ivan's briefcase. Our trick has succeeded. Dotty dreamt. The other gods have passed our hiding place a dozen times without noticing. They search the Universe for us many times in vain. They finally decide that we have found a door going out of the Universe. Yet they fear us all the more. They think of us as devils who will some day return through the door to destroy them. So they watch everywhere. We lie quietly smiling in our camouflaged boats, yet hardly daring to move or think, for fear that the faintest echoes of our doings will give them a years pass by. They seem to us no more than drugged hours in a prison. Theodor rubbed his eyes and pushed his chair back from the table. "We need a break." Frieda agreed wearily. "We've gone through everything." "Good idea," Edmund said briskly. "I think we've hit on several crucial points along the way and half disentangled them from the great mass of inconsequential material. I'll finish up that part of the job right now and present my case when we're all a bit fresher. Say half an hour?" Theodor nodded heavily, pushing up from his chair and hitching his cloak over a shoulder. "I'm going out for a drink," he informed them. After several hesitant seconds, Rosalind quietly followed him. Frieda stretched out on a couch and closed her eyes. Edmund scanned microfilms tirelessly, every now and then setting one aside. Celeste watched him for a minute, then sprang up and started toward the room where Dotty was asleep. But midway she stopped. Not my child, she thought bitterly. Frieda's her mother , Rosalind her nurse. I'm nothing at all. Just one of the husband's girl friends. A lady of uneasy virtue in a dissolving world. But then she straightened her shoulders and went on. R osalind didn't catch up with Theodor. Her footsteps were silent and he never looked back along the path whose feeble white glow rose only knee-high, lighting a low strip of shrub and mossy treetrunk to either side, no more. It was a little chilly. She drew on her gloves, but she didn't hurry. In fact, she fell farther and farther behind the dipping tail of his scarlet cloak and his plodding red shoes, which seemed to move disembodied, like those in the fairy tale. When she reached the point where she had found Ivan's briefcase, she stopped altogether. A breeze rustled the leaves, and, moistly brushing her cheek, brought forest scents of rot and mold. After a bit she began to hear the furtive scurryings and scuttlings of forest creatures. She looked around her halfheartedly, suddenly realizing the futility of her quest. What clues could she hope to find in this knee-high twilight? And they'd thoroughly combed the place earlier in the night. Without warning, an eerie tingling went through her and she ; was seized by a horror of the cold, grainy Earth underfoot -- an ancestral terror from the days when men shivered at ghost stories about graves and tombs. A tiny detail persisted in bulking larger and larger in her mind -- the unnaturalness of the way the Earth had impregnated the corner of Ivan's briefcase, almost as if dirt and leather co-existed in the same space. She remembered the queer way the partly buried briefcase had resisted her first tug, like a rooted plant. She felt cowed by the mysterious. night about her, and literally dwarfed, as if she had grown several inches shorter. She roused herself and started forward. Something held her feet. They were ankle-deep in the path. While she looked in fright and horror, they began to sink still lower into the ground. She plunged frantically, trying to jerk loose. She couldn't. She had the panicky feeling that the Earth had not onty trapped but invaded her; that its molecules were creeping up between the molecules of her flesh; that the two were becoming one. And she was sinking faster. Now knee-deep, thighdeep, hipdeep, waist-deep. She beat at the powdery path with her hands and threw her body from side to side in agonized frenzy like some sinner frozen in the ice of the innermost circle of the ancients' hell. And always the sense of the dqrk, grainy tide rose inside as well as around her. She thought, he'd just have had time to scribble that note on his briefcase and toss it away. She jerked off a glove, leaned out as far as she could, and made a frantic effort to drive its fingers into the powdery path. Then the Earth mounted to her chin, her nose, and covered her eyes. She expected blackness, but it was as if the light of the path stayed with her, making a little glow all around. She saw roots, pebbles, black rot, worn tunnels, worms. Tier on tier of them, her vision penetrating the solid ground. And at the same time, the knowledge that these same sorts of things were coursing up through her. A ND still she continued to sink at a speed that increased, as if the law of gravitation applied to her in a diminished way. She dropped from black soil through gray clay and into pale limestone. Her tortured, rock-permeated lungs sucked at rock and drew in air. She wondered madly if a volume of air were falling with her through the stone. A glitter of quartz. The momentary openness of a foot-high cavern with a trickle of water. And then she was sliding down a black basalt column, half inside it, half inside gold-flecked ore. Then just black basalt. And always faster. It grew hot, then hotter, as if she were approaching the mythical eternal fires. A T first glance Theodor thought the Deep Space Bar was empty. Then he saw a figure hunched monkeylike on the last stool, almost lost in the blue shadows, while behind the bar, her crystal dress blending with the' tiers of sparkling glasses, stood a grave-eyed young girl who could hardly have been fifteen. The TV was saying, " in addition, a number of mysterious disappearances of highrating individuals have been reported. These are thought to be cases of misunderstanding, illusory apprehension, and impulse traveling -- a result of the unusual stresses of the time. Finally, a few suggestible individuals in various parts of the globe, especially the Indian Peninsula, have declared themselves tobe 'gods' and" in some way responsible for current events. "It is thought -- " The girl switched off the TV and took Theodor's order, explaining casually, "Joe wanted to go to a Kometevskyite meeting, so I took over for him." When she had prepared Theodor's highball, she announced, "I'll have a drink with you gentlemen," and squeezed herself a glass of pomegranite juice. The monkey like figure muttered, "Scotch-and-soda," then turned toward Edmund and asked, "And what is your reaction to all this, sir?" shrunken wrinkle-seamed face. It was Colonel Fortescue, a military antique long retired from the Peace Patrol and reputed to have seen actual fighting in the Last Age of Madness. Now, for some reason, the face sported a knowing smile. Theodor shrugged. Just then the TV "big news" light blinked blue and the girl switched on audio. The Colonel winked at Theodor... "... confirming the disappearance of Jupiter's moons. But two other utterly fantastic reports have just been received. First, Lunar Observatory One says that it is visually tracking fourteen small bodies which it believes may be the lost moons of Jupiter. They are moving outward from the Solar System at an incredible velocity and are already beyond the orbit of Saturn!" The Colonel said, "Ah !" "Second, Palomar reports a large number of dark bodies approaching the Solar System at an equally incredible velocity. They are at about twice the distance of Pluto, but closing in fast! We will be on the air with further details as soon as possible." The Colonel said, "Ah-ha!" Theodor stared at him. The old man's self-satisfied poise was almost amusing. "Are you a Kometevskyite?" Theodor asked him. The Colonel laughed. "Of course not, my boy. Those poor people are fumbling in the dark. Don't you see what's happened?" "Frankly, no." The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, "The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally." Then he lifted the scotchandsoda in his clawlike hand and took a satisfying swallow. "I knew it all along, of course," he went on musingly, "but this last news makes it as plain as a rocket blast, at least to anyone who knows military strategy. Look here, my boy, suppose you were commanding a fleet and got wind of the enemy's approach -- what would you do? Why, you'd send your scouts and destroyers fanning out toward them. Behind that screen you'd mass your heavy ships. Then -- " "You don't mean to imply -- " Theodor interrupted. The girl behind the bar looked at them both cryptically. "Of course I do!" the Colonel cut in sharply. "It's a war between the forces of good and evil. The bright suns and planets are on one side, the dark on the other. The moons are the destroyers, Jupiter and Saturn are the big battleships, while we're on a heavy cruiser, I'm proud to say. We'll probably go into action soon. Be a corking fight, what? And all by divine strategy!" He chuckled and took another big drink. Theodor looked at him sourly. The girl behind the bar polished a glass and said nothing. turn and toss, and a look of terror came over her sleeping face. Celeste leaned forward apprehensively. The child's lips worked and Celeste made out the sleepy-fuzzy words: "They've found out where we're hiding. They're coming to get us. No! Please, no!" Celeste's reactions were mixed. She felt worried about Dotty and at the same time almost in terror of her, as if the little girl were an agent of supernatural forces. She told herself that this fear was an expression of her own hostility, yet she didn't really believe it. She touched the child's hand. Dotty's eyes opened without making Celeste feel she had quite come awake. After a bit she looked at Celeste and her little lips parted in a smile. "Hello," she said sleepily. "I've been having such funny dreams." Then, after a pause, frowning, "I really am a god, you know. It feels very queer." "Yes, dear?" Celeste prompted uneasily. "Shall I call Frieda?" The smile left Dotty's lips. "Why do you act so nervous around me?" she asked. "Don't you love me, Mummy?" Celeste started at the word. Her throat closed. Then, very slowly, her face broke into a radiant smile. "Of course I do, darling. I love you very much." Dotty nodded happily, her eyes already closed again. There was a sudden flurry of excited voices beyond tjie door. Celeste heard her name called. She stood up. "I'm going to have to go out and talk with the others," she said. "If you want me, dear, just call." "Yes, Mummy." tion. Celeste, Frieda, and Theodor glanced around at him. He looked more frightfully strained, they realized, than even they felt His expression was a study in suppressed excitement, but there were also signs of a knowledge that was almost too overpowering for a human being to bear. His voice was clipped, rapid. "I think it's about time we stopped worrying about our own affairs and thought of those of the Solar System, partly because I think they have a direct bearing on the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind. As I told you, I've been sorting out the crucial items from the material we've been presenting. There are roughly four of those items, as I see it. It's rather like a mystery story. I wonder if, hearing those four clues, you will come to the same conclusion I have." The others nodded. "First, there are the latest reports from Deep Shaft, which, as you know, has been sunk to investigate deep-Earth conditions. At approximately twenty-nine miles below the surface, the delvers have encountered a metallic obstruction which they have tentatively named the durasphere. It resists their hardest drills, their strongest corrosives. They have extended a side-tunnel at that level for a quarter of a mile. Delicate measurements, made possible by the mirror-smooth metal surface, show that the durasphere has a slight curvature that is almost exactly equal to the curvature of the Earth itself. The suggestion is that deep borings made anywhere in the world would encounter the durasphere at the same depth. "Second, the movements of the moons of Mars and Jupiter, and particularly the debris left behind by the moons of Mars. Granting Fhobos and Deimos had duraspheres proportional in size to that of Earth, then the debris would roughly equal in amount the material in thos two duraspheres rocky envelopes. The suggestion is that the two duraspheres suddenly burst from their envelopes with such itanic velocity as to leave those disrupted envelopes behind." It was deadly quiet in the committee room. "Thirdly, the disappearances of Ivan and Rosalind, and especially the baffling hint -- from Ivan's message in one case and Rosalind's downwardpointing glove in the other -- that they were both somehow drawn into the depths of the Earth. "Finally, the dreams of the ingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they Successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected." Edmund waited. "Do you see what I'm driving at?" he asked hoarsely. that the others did, but couldn't bring themselves to put it into words. "I suppose it's the time-scale and the value-scale that are so hard for us to accept," he said softly. "Much more, even, than the size-scale. The thought that there are creatures in the Universe to whom the whole career of Man -- in fact, the whole career of life -- is no more than a few thousand or hundred thousand years. And to whom Man is no more than a minor stage property -- a trifling part of a clever job of camouflage." This time he went on, "Fantasy writers have at times hinted all sorts of odd things about the Earth -- that it might even be a kind of single living creature, or honeycombed with inhabited caverns, and so on. But I don't know that any of them have ever suggested that the Earth, together with all the planets and moons of the Solar System, might be... In a whisper, Frieda finished for him, "... a camouflaged fleet of gigantic spherical spaceships." "Four guess happens to be the precise truth." At that familiar, yet dreadly unfamiliar voice, all four of them swung toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleepstupefied little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind. Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed. She said, "I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth." Celeste swayed a step forward. "Baby... she implored. Dotty went on, without giving her a glance, "It is true that we planted the seeds of life on some of these planets simply as part of our camouflage, just as we gave them a suitable environment for each. And it is true that now we must let most of that life be destroyed. Our hiding place has been discovered, our pursuers are upon us, and we must make one last effort to escape or do battle, since we firmly believe that the principle of mental privacy to which we have devoted our existence is perhaps the greatest good in the whole Universe. "But it is not true that we look with contempt upon you. Our whole race is deeply devoted to life, wherever it may come into being, and it is our rule never to interfere with its development. That was one of the reasons we made life a part of our camouflage -- it would make our pursuers reluctant to examine these planets too closely. "Yes, we have always cherished you and watched your evolution with interest from our hidden lairs. We may even unconsciously have shaped your development in certain ways, trying constantly to educate you away from war and finally succeeding -- which may have given the betraying clue to our pursuers. "Your planets must be burst asunder -- this particular planet in the area of the Pacific -- so that we may have our last chance to escape. Even if we did not move, our pursuers would destroy you with us. We cannot invite you inside our ships -- not for lack of space, but because you could never survive the vast accelerations to which you would be subjected. You would, you see, need very special accommodations, of which we have enough only for a few. "Those few we will take with us, as the seed from which a new human race may -- if we ourselves somehow survive -- be bom." -dumbly at each other across the egg-shaped silver room, without apparent entrance or exit, in which they were sprawled. But their thoughts were no longer of thirty-odd mile journeys down through solid earth, or of how cool it was after the heat of the passage, or of how grotesque it was to be trapped here, the fragment of a marriage. They were both listening to the voice that spoke inside their minds. "In a few minutes your bodies will be separated into layers one atom thick, capable of being shelved or stored in such a way as to endure almost infinite accelerations. Single cells will cover acres of space. But do not be alarmed. The process will be painless and each particle will be catalogued for future assembly. Your consciousness will endure throughout the process." Celeste looked at her goldshod toes. She was wondering, will they go first, or my head ? Or will I be peeled like an apple? She looked at Ivan and knew he was thinking the same thing. T TP in the committee room, the  other Wolvers slumped around the table. Only little Dotty sat straight and staring, speechless and unanswering, quite beyond their reach, like a telephone off the hook and with the connection open, but no voice from the other end. They had just switched off the TV after listening to a confused medley of denials, prayers, KomSI etevskyite chatterings, and a few astonishingly realistic comments on the possibility of survival. These last pointed out that, on the side of the Earth opposite the Pacific, the convulsions would come slowly when the entombed spaceship burst forth -- provided, as seemed the case, that it moved without jets or reaction. It would be as if the Earth's vast core simply vanished. Gravity would diminish abruptly to a fraction of its former value. The empty envelope of rock and water and air would slowly fall together. though at the same time the air would begin to escape from the debris because there would no longer be the' mass required to hold it. However, there might be definite chances of temporary apd even prolonged survival for individuals in strong, hermetically sealed structures, such as submarines and spaceships. The few spaceships on Earth were reported to have blasted off, or be preparing to leave, with as many passengers as could be carried. But most persons, apparently, could not contemplate action of any sort. They could only sit and think, like the Wolvers. A faint smile relaxed Celeste's face. She was thinking, how beautiful! It means the death of the Solar System, which is a horrifying subjective concept. Objectively, though , it would be a more awesome sight than any human being has ever seen or ever could see. #f's an absurd and even brutal thing to wish -- but I wish I could see the whole cataclysm from beginning to end. It would make death seem very small, a tiny personal event. Botty's face was losing its blank expression, becoming intent and alarmed. "We are in contact with our pursuers," she said in the familiar-unfamiliar voice. "Negotiations are now going on. There seems to be -- there is a change in them. Where they were harsh and vindictive before, they now are gentle and conciliatory." She paused, the alarm on her childish features pinching into anxious uncertainty. "Our pursuers have always been shrewd. The change in them may be false, intended merely to lull us into allowing them to come close enough to destroy us. We must not fall into the trap by growing hopeful..." They leaned forward, clutching hands, watching the little face as though it were a television screen. Celeste had the wild feeling that she was listening to a communique from a war so unthinkably vast and violent, between opponents so astronomically huge and nearly immortal, that she felt like no more than a reasoning ameba... and then realized with # an explosive urge to laugh that that was exactly the situation. "No!" said Dotty. Her eyes began to glow. "They have changed! During the eons in which we lay sealed away and hidden from them, knowing nothing of them, they have rebelled against the tyranny of a communal mind to which no thoughts are private... the tyranny that we ourselves fled to escape. They come not to destroy us, but to welcome us back to a society that we and they can make truly great!" trembling between laughter and hysterical weeping. Theodor looked as blank as Dotty had while waiting for words to speak. Edmund sprang to the picture window, Celeste toward the TV set. Climbing shakily out of the chair, Frieda stumbled to the picture window and peered out beside Edmund, She saw lights bobbing along the paths with a wild excitement. On the TV screen, Celeste watched two brightly lit ships spinning in the sky -- whether human spaceships or Phobos and Deimos come to help Earth rejoice, she couldn't tell. Dotty spoke again, the joy in her strange voice forcing them to turn. "And you, dear children, creatures of our camouflage, we welcome you -- whatever your future career on these planets or like ones -- into the society of enlightened worlds! You need not feel small and alone and helpless ever again, for we shall always be with you!" The outer door opened. Ivan and Rosalind reeled in, drunkenty smiling, arm in arm. "Like rockets," Rosalind blurted happily. "We came through the durasphere and solid rock... shot up right to the surface." "They didn't have to take us along," Ivan added with a bleary grin. "But you know that already, don't you? They're too good to let you live in fear, so they must have told you by now." "Yes, we know," said Theodor. "They must be almost godlike in their goodness. I feel... calm." Edmund nodded soberly. "Calmer than I ever felt before. It's knowing, I suppose, that -- well, we're not alone." Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly littlegirl smile. "Oh, Mummy," she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, "I've just had the funniest dream." "No, darling," said Rosalind gently, "it's we who had the dream. We've just awakened." M Robert A. Heinlein. Doubleday  ?o., Inc., New York, #. # pages, # ert A. Heinlein. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, #. # pages, #'# be found nearly the whole spread of the complex Heinlein character -- the hard-boiled, almost Huxleyan sophisticate, the somberly mature player with ideas in The Puppet Masters (serthe hard, muscular, action writer for the teen-age crowd who gives them wonderfully adventurous concepts of a future life in space. The Puppet Masters, with its vader in the form of a parasite that gloms onto one's shoulders and thereby converts one into merely another molecule in the mass-society of the encroaching slugs, is a fascinatingly repulsive job. Since it appeared here, to say more would be immodest. In Between Planets, a violent tale of the revolt of the Venus and Mars colonies against the deadening bureaucracy of Earth, we have a magnificently real and vivid Picture of the Possible, even including the charmingly intellectual crocodiles Heinlein picks as the dominant life-fom of Venus. The hero is a very real teen-age boy who had been born in space and was thus a "citizen of the world" and a "displaced person" when war broke out. Without question, the tale will appeal to adult Science Fiction readers as well as to their sons -- and daughters. ley. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, #. # pages, # fact that its author is a high school science teacher who too often tries to put over a bit of knowledge or information along with the adventure. The story tells of the first rocket trip to Mars, and technically has much of interest in it. Branley has paid attention to a lot of the minutiae of space travel that more careless writers either do not know or take as matters of course. The distressing result is that the characterizations arc painfully amateur and the plot entirely so, while the science and the imagination exposed in the book are generally first-rate. It is the awkward and often patronizing writing down to youth that is a little difficult to stomach. It's surprising -- Mr. Branlcy's own students must have shown him how alert kids are today. by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # annual winnowings of the science fiction crop, this attractive volume contains # stories, of which # rate as "B" or bejtter on my grading scale. This is a very high 'average for contemporary science fiction anthologies. The book has a long introduction. in which we are indoctrinated with the concept of science fiction as ethnography. Well, maybe. The stories I mark as follows: "A" -- Bill Brown's "Star Ducks" (delightful!), Roger Young's "Not to be Opened," Katherine MacLean's "Contagion," Alfred Bester's lovely "Oddy and Id, Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" (which everybody Loves!), Dick Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman," Ray Bradbury's "The IS Fox in the Forest" (what a terrific story!), Fredric Brown's "The Last Martian," and, last but not least, the outstanding science fiction story of #, Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction," which, of course, created a "B" stories -- R. Bretnor's "The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out" (which really isn't science fiction at all, Cyril Kornbluth's "The Mindworm" (which would have been "A" if only there wasn't already a story called "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes", ple's "Forget Me Not," great in concept, but pointless in that it literally goes nowhere. The other six tales are not worth mentioning, so I won't mention them. mov. Gnome Press, New York, #. # pages, # two years, is obviously the first volume of several which will tell the history of the whole period between the First and Second Galactic Empires, and how the Centuries of the Dark Ages were reduced from a postulated three hundred to less than ten through the workings of Hari Seldon's Foundation for Psychohistory. ti This first volume carries the story from the start of the Foundation, with a selection from the memoirs of Gaal Dornick, Seldon's biographer, clear through to the episode of Hober Mallow, first of the galactic Merchant Princes. In between, there is the magnificent career of Salvor Hardin, Politician, in two stories; and the relatively undistinguished tale of Limnar Ponyets, Trader and predecessor of the Merchant Princes. Asimov has obviously studied the trends and trajectories of past human history, and has transposed them with sometimes unnecessary literalness to the enormous scale of a Galactic civilization. From the priest-preservers of the remnants of an ancient culture to the merchantile sea captains opening up the China Sea and the first great capitalists of the Venetian era, the trends of our own world's history are mirrored in this book on a vastly magnified scale. Woven throughout is a strand of belief by the author that, tomorrow, psychological sciences will have advanced to a point where they can prophesy -- and to some degree control -- the future movements of humanity as a whole. The result is a book of real intellectual entertainment and adventure. Campbell, Jr. Shasta Publishers, Chicago, #nd Ed., #. #I pages, # of Campbell's short stories, first published in #. to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the movie The Thing, which theoretically was based on the title story of this collection. The connection between the two is not excessively close. It is a pleasure to have the group of seven Campbell shorts on hand again. Every one of them is definitely worth having in your permanent library. uals or study groups. Fitted to your interests and needs. From # to #...am immensely enjoying this Available: opportunity to discuss and learn." Robot Design  Construction Plans -- Author of "Glwnf Brains or Machines that Think " (Wiley -- #) # West #th St., Dept. C#, New York #, N. Y. -- o member of the Faculty, Dartmouth Medical School by H. B. Fyfe by Willy Ley  shelf # Pre-Publication Offer Only ore thing could equal owning a complete file of Published by Crown, it's a really huge book... over # at .only # a copy. But we have an offer that makes this giant bargain even more gigantic: monthly at the newsstand come to # a year. Total: #. You'll want them both. Don't wait because this it o prepublication offer and cannot be kept open long. Moil the coupon below with # today. #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. Yes, start  (or extendi ) my subscription right oway -- ond moil me off the presses! I enclose # os payment in full for both. Nome Address --  -- City... # mio State... Start with the  " fresh air fiend Sick and helpless , he was very lucky to have a faithful native woman to nurse him. Or was he? H E rolled over to look at the plants. They were crinkled and dead and useless in the narrow flower box across the hut. He tried to draw his arm under his body to force himself erect. The reserve oxygen began to hiss in sleepily. He tried to signal Hertha to help him, but she was across the room with her back to him, her hands fumbling with a bowl of dark, syrupy medicine. His lips moved, but the words died in his throat. He wanted to explain to her that scientists in huge laboratories of dollars had been unable to find a cure for liguna fever. He wanted to explain that no brown liquid, made like cake batter, would cure the disease that had decimated the crews of two expeditions to Sitari and somehow gotten back to cut down the population of Wiblanihaven. But, watching her, he could understand what she thought she was doing. At one time she must have seen a pharmacist put chemicals into a mortar and grind them with a pestle. This, she must have remembered, was what people did to make medicine, and now she put what chemical appearing substances she could locate -- flour, powdered coffee, lemon extract, salt -- into a bowl and mashed them together. She was very intent on her work and it probably made her feel almost helpful. Finally she moved out of his field of vision; he found that he could not turn his head to follow her with his eyes. He lay conscious but inert, like waterlogged wood on a river bottom. He heard sounds of her movement. At last he slept. H E awakened with a start. His head was clearer than it had been for hours. He listened to the oxygen hissing in again. He tried to read the dial on the far wall, but it blurred before his eyes. "Hertha," he said. She came quickly to his cot. "What does the oxygen register say?" "Oxygen register?" He gritted his teeth against the fever which began to shake his body mercilessly until he wanted to scream to make it stop. He became angry even as the fever shook him: angry not really at the doctors ; not really at any one thing. Angry because the mountains did not care if he saw them; angry that the air did not care if he breathed it. Angry because, between planets, between suns, the coldness of space merely waited, not giving a damn. Several years ago -- ten, twenty, perhaps more -- some doctor had finally isolated a strain of the filterable virus of liguna fever that could be used as a vaccine: too weak to kill, but strong enough to produce immunity against its more virulent brother strains. That opened up the Sitari System for coloni#ation and exploration and meant that the men who got there first would make fortunes. So he went to the base at Ke, first selling his strip mine property and disposing of his tools and equipping his spaceship for the intersolar trip; and at Ke they shot him full of the disease. But his bloodstream built no antibodies. The weakened virus settled in his nervous system and there was no way of getting it out. The doctors were very sorry for him, and they assured him it was a one-in-ten-thousand phenomenon. Thereafter, he suffered recurrent paralytic attacks. If it had not been for the advance warning -- a pain at the base of his spine, a moment of violent trembling in his knees -- he would have been forced to give up solitary strip mining altogether. As it was, whenever he felt the warning, he had to hurry to the nearest colony and be hospitalized for the duration of the attack. He had had four such warnings on this satellite, and three times he had gone to Pastiville on Helio and been cared for and come away with less money than he had gone with. His bank credit, once large, had slowly dribbled away, and now he made just about enough from his mining to care for himself during illness. He could not afford to hunt for less dangerous, less isolated work. It would not pay enough, for he knew how to do very little that civilization needed done. He was finally trapped; no longer could he afford a pilot for the long flight from Helio to a newer frontier, and he could not risk the trip alone. He lay waiting for the pew spasm of fever and stared at Hertha who, this time, would care for him here and he would not need to go to a hospital. Perhaps, after a little while, he would be able to save enough to push on, through the awful indifference of space, to some new world where, with luck, there would be a sudden fortune. Then he could go back to civilization. He realized bitterly that he was merely telling himself he would go back. He knew there was only one direction he could go, and that direction was not back. Hertha waited, hurt-eyed, moving her pudgy hands helplessly. When the shaking subsided, he explained through chattering teeth about the oxygen register across the room, and she went away. leaving him listless. His hand, lying on the rough blanket, was abnormally white. He wiggled the fingers, but he could not feel the wool. His mouth was dry and he wanted a drink of water. Hertha moved out of his range of vision. He shifted his head on the damp pillow and watched her out of the corner of his eye. He had never heard her real name, but she did not seem to object to his name for her. I nm that which began; Out of me the years roll; Out of me God and man; I am equal and whole; God changes, and man, And the form of them bodily; I am the soul. He tried to sit up again, but he was very weak. He wanted to quote it to her and tell her what he had never told her: that the name of it was Hertha and that it had been Written long ago by a man named Swinburne, and he wanted to explain why he had named her after a poem, because it was very funny. The harsh light hurt his eyes and made him feel dizzy. He lay watching her as she bent toward the oxygen dial, wrinkling her face in animal concentration, trying to read it for him. Her puzzled expression was pathetic; it reminded him of the first time he had seen her. The walls began to spin crazily, for the hut had been intended for only one person. He remembered the first time he saw her, cowering in a filthy alleyway in the Miramus. At first he thought she had taken some food from a garbage pail and was trying to conceal it by holding it to her breast. But when the flare of a rocket leaving the field two blocks away lit the area for a moment, he saw thht she was holding a tiny welikin, terribly mangled, looking as if it had just been run over by a heavy transport truck. He took it away from her and threw it into the darkness, shuddering. "It was dead," he said. She continued to stare at him, starting to cry silently, big, round, salt tears that she brushed at with reddened hands. "My -- my -- " she stammered. He had an eerie feeling that she was trying to say, "My baby," and he felt a little chill of pity creep up his spine. "What do you do?" he asked kindly. "Sweep floors. I work a little for the Commander's wife. Around her home." "How did you get here?" Still crying, she said, "On a rocket." "Of course. What I meant was..." But he did not need to ask how she had gotten passed the emigration officers. Some influential man -- such things could happen, especially when the destination was a relatively new frontier, such as Helio, where there was little danger of investigation -- had seen to it that certain answers were falsified; and a little money and a corrupt official had conspired to produce a passport which read, "Mentally and physically fit for colonization." The influential man had, in effect, bought and paid for a personal slave to bring with him to the stars. She would not know of her legal rights. She would be easily frightened and confused. And then something had happened, and for some reason she had been abandoned to shift for herself. Perhaps she had run away. He looked away from her face. This was none of his affair. "Never mind," he said. He reached into his pocket and gave her a. few coins and then turned and walked rapidly away, suddenly anxious to see the bright, remembered face of the young colonist, Doris, Don's friend; a face that would chase away the memory of this pathetic creature. After a moment, he heard the pad of her feet hopefully, fearfully following him.  cot again, and he concentrated to make the walls stop spinning. "It had a blue line." "Yes, I know. Where?" She showed him with her fingers. "This much." "Halfway up?" he prompted. Dumbly, she nodded. He looked at the plants, "Hertha, listen. I've got to talk before the paralysis comes back. You'll have to listen very carefully and try to understand. I'll be all right in about ten days. You know that?" She nodded again. He took a deep breath that seemed to catch in his throat. "But you'll have to go outside before then."  Hertha whimpered and fluttered her hands nervously. "I know you're afraid," he said. "I wouldn't ask you. but it has to be done. I can't go. You can see that, can't you? It has to be done." "Afraid!" 'Nonsense!" he said harshly. "There's nothing to be afraid of. Put on the outside suit and nothing can hurt you." Moaning in fear, she shook her head. "Listen, Hertha! You've got to do it. For me!" He did not like to make the appeal personal. He would have preferred to convince her that fear of the outside was groundless. It was not possible. He had attempted, again and again to explain that the tiny satellite with its poison air was completely harmless as long as she wore a surface suit. There was no alien life, no possible danger, outside this tiny square of insulated hut and breathable air. But it was useless. And the personal appeal was the only course remaining. It was as much for her sake as his; she also needed oxygen, but she could never understand that fact. "For you?" she asked. n # He nodded, feeling the fever rise. His face twisted in pain, and he stared pleadingly into her cowlike eyes : dumb eyes, animal eyes, brown and trusting and... loyal. The paralysis struck. His voice would not come up out of his chest and the dizziness swamped his mind, and, in fever, he was once again in Pastiville, the nearest planet with an oxygen atmosphere. alley, out into the cheap glitter of Windopole Avenue, a rutted, smelly street which was the center of the port-workers' section. She followed him across Windopole, up Venus, across Nineshime. He turned into the Lexo Building, which had become shabby since he had seen it last, when it had been freshly painted. She did not follow him inside, and he breathed a sigh of relief and tried to put her out of. his mind as he walked up the stairs to the room #B. After a moment's hesitation, his heart knocking with pleasant anticipation, he pressed the buzzer. "Come in." He found the knob, twisted open the door, entered. "Why Jimmy!" the girl said in what seemed to be surprise and heavy delight. She crossed to him quickly and offered her lips to be kissed. "It's good to see you!" He took half a step backward, trying to keep the shock out of his face. "Oh, it's so good to see you, Jimmy! Sit down. Tell me all about it, about everything. Did you make loads and loads of money? When did you get back? How's the lig fever?" He sat down, scarcely listening, studying the apartment, feeling vaguely ill. She was chattering, he realized, to overcome her embarrassment. "The books you ordered came. I've got them right here. They're all there but some poetry or other. There was a letter about that, but the people just said they didn't have it in stock. I opened it to see if it required an answer. Just a sec. I'll get them for you" She left the room with quick, nervous strides. The apartment had been redone since he had seen it. There were now expensive drapes at the windows, imported from somewhere; a genuine Earth tapestry hung above the door. Plump silken pillows scattered on the floor and a late model phono-general in the corner, with a gleaming cabinet and record spool accessory box. She came back with the books, neatly done up in a bundle. "I guess you still read as much as ever? Don said you always ' were a great reader." Uncomfortably, he stood up. She put the books on a low serving table, moistened her lips to make them glistening red. "Sit down, Jimmy! v He still stood. "Jimmy!" she said in mock anger. "Sit down! Goodness, it's good to have a fellow Earthman to talk to. I was so busy when you came by the other time, we scarcely had a minute to talk. I'd just got here, you remember... Well, I'm settled now, so we'll just have to have a nice, long talk." He shifted on his feet. "I don't suppose you've heard from Don?" Her vice was strained, almost desperate. "Isn't it the oddest thing, him knowing you and me, and both of us right here?" "He told me to write how you were getting along?" "... Oh." He smiled without humor and felt like an old man. He wanted to explain how he had looked forward to seeing a person from his own planet again. Now he wanted to remind her of the girl he remembered: When she had just arrived, still unpacking, eager to start as a junior secretary for the League. "Thank you for letting me send the books here," he said. The sickness was heavy in the pit of his stomach, and suddenly he was hard and bitter. He quoted softly: "The world forsaken. And out of mind Honor and labor, We shall not find The slars unkind." "Old poetry? I guess you really do read a -- " Then understanding made her eyes wince. "That wasn't intended to be very complimentary, was it, Jimmy?" Her name was no longer Doris; it was any of a thousand, and her perfume, heavy in his nostrils, was not her perfume or any individual's. She was there before him; she was real. But along with her were a thousand names and a thousand scents. There was the painful nostalgia of recognizing a strange room. Awkwardly he said, "I really must go. I'd likb to have a long talk, but -- " Her lips parting in sudden artificiality, she crossed to him, reached for his hand with her own. In his mind was the heavy futility of repeating the same thing senselessly until it lost all meaning. "I apologize about the poem," he said, because he knew that it was not his place to speak of it. "That's all right," she said with hollow cheerfulness. Her mouth jerked and her eyes darkened. "Please don't go yet." The palms of his hands were # moist. He looked around the apartment again, and he did not want to ask, to bring it out in cruel words. It was not the sort of thing one asked. "I really must go," he repeated levelly. She put her hands on hi shoulders. "Please..." And then he saw that she intended to bribe him in the only way she knew how, and he said, "Don't worry, I won't tell Don." He saw relief on her face, and then he was out of the apartment, shaken. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach, and he was sickened and his hand trembled. He wanted to talk to someone and try to explain it. Hertha was waiting when he came out to the street. rpHE fever passed; control of his body returned. "For you?" Hertha asked. He half propped himself up on the cot. He waved his hand weakly. "Those dead plants. You must throw them out and bring in more." He listened tensely, imagining that he could hear the precious oxygen hiss in from the emergency tank to freshen and revitalize the dead air. Halfway down on the dial. Not enough for ten days, even for one person, unless the air was replenished by bringing in plants. "Hertha, we've got to purify this air. Now listen. Listen carefully, Hertha. You've seen me dig up those plants on the outside?" "Yes, I watch when you go out I always watch, Jimmy." "Good. You've got to do the same thing. You've got to go out and dig up some plants. You've got to bring them in here and plant them the way I did. You know which ones they are?" "Yes," she said. He closed his eyes, trying to think of a way to make her see how vital a thing a tiny plant could be. The complex chemistry of it bubbled to the surface of his mind. He wanted to tell her why the plants died in the artificial human atmosphere and had to be replaced every week or so. He wanted to tell her, but he was growing weaker. "They purify the air by releasing oxygen. You understand?" She nodded her head dumbly. "You must bring in a great many plants, Hertha. Remember that -- a great many. Don't forget that. When you go outside, through the locks, we lose air. Air is very precious, so you must bring in a great many plants." "Yes, Jimmy." "And you must plant them as I did." "Yes, Jimmy." He began to talk faster, in a race with the growing fever. "I've gathered most of the oxygenating plants around the hut. So you may have to go into the forest to get enough." "The -- the forest?" "You must, Hertha! You must!" Her mouth twisted as if she were ready to cry. "For you. Yes, for you I will go into the forest." The fever came back. His mind wandered away. H E was walking in the open air. He walked from Nineshime to Venus, down Venus to Windopole, up Windopole to "The Grand Eagle and Barrel." He went in. Hertha came with him and sat down by his side at the bar. The bartender looked at him oddly. "She with you, Mac?" He turned to look at her; her dumb, brown eyes met his. He wanted to snarl; "Get the hell away! Leave me alone!" But he choked back the words. It was not Hertha he was angry with. She had done him no injury. She had merely followed him, perhaps because she knew of nothing else to do; perhaps because of temporary gratitude for the coins; perhaps in hope that he would buy her a drink. When the anger passed, he felt sorry for her again. He said, "Want a drink?" She shook her head without changing expression. He looked at her and shrugged and thought that after a while she would get tired and go away. He ordered, and the bartender brought a bottle and one glass. Hertha continued to stare at him; he tried to ignore her. He drank. He thought it would get easier to ignore her as the level of the bottle fell. It didn't. He drank some more. It grew late. "I gotta explain," he said, the liquor swirling in his mind. She waited, cow-eyed. "Ernest Dowson. Man's name. He wrote a poem -- Beats SoIi tudo. I wanna explain this. Man lived long, long, long, long time ago. You listenin'? Okay. That's good. That's fine. He said -- it's ver importan' you should unnerstan' this -- he said how you put honor and labor out of your mind when you... you're out here. What he meant, it's... it's... you see... Now I gotta make you see all this. So you listen real close while I tell it to you. There was a man named..." He wanted to explain how the frontier does things to people. He wanted to explain how society is a tight little box that keeps everything locked up and hidden, but how society breaks down and becomes fluid in the stars, and how people explode and forget what they learned in civilization, and how everything is unstable. "This man, his name's -- M he aid. He wanted to explain how the harsh elements and brute nature end space, the God-awful emptiness and indifference and the tense of aloneness and selfishness end... There were a thousand things he wanted to tell her. They were ell the things he had thought ebout as he followed the frontier. If he could get it all down right, he could make her see why he had to follow the frontier as long as there was anything left inside of him. Maybe the rest of the people out here were that way, too. Maybe he had seen it in Doris' eyes tonight. Maybe that was why society broke down in the tars and civilization came only when men and women like him were gone. He did not want to know how the rest felt. He did not know whether it would be more terrifying to learn that he was alone, or that he was not alone. But just for tonight, he could tell the alien creature beside him. It would be safe to tell Her -- if the idea had not rusted inside of him so long that there were no longer any words to fit it. But first he had to make her ee his home planet and the great cities and the landscaped valleys #nd the majestic mountains and the people. He had to make her see the vast sweep of the explorers who first carried the race to a faster-than-light ships and metals to make the ships out of, metals to hold their forms in the crucible beyond normal space. He had to make her see the colonists who tied all the world together with spans of steel commerce and then moved on in ever-widening circles. He wanted to give her the whole picture. Then he wanted to explain the surge, the restlessness of the men at the frontier. Different men, he thought : from the womb of civilization, but unlike their brothers. The men who pushed out and out Searching, always searching. He was afraid to find out if their reasons were the same as his. For himself, he had seen a thousand planets and a thousand new lifefdrms. But it was not enough. There were the vast, blank, empty, indifferent reaches of space beyond him, and that was what drove him on. This fie wanted to say to Hertha: No matter how far you go, the thing that gets you is that there's nothing that cares; no matter how far, the thing is that nothing cares; the thing is that nothing cares. It gets you. And you have to go on because some day. somewhere, there may be -- something. But he lost the trend of his thoughts completely, and he had another drink. "Decent people come out here..." What was he going to say about decent people? "Stupid!" he cried, slapping her in the face. She rubbed her cheek. "Stupid?" He wanted to cry,, for he had not known that he was brutal. "Can't you see?" he screamed, and it was necessary to explain it to her; and then it was not necessary. "You're like the awful, indifferent, mindless blackness of space, unreasoning!" "Unreasoning," she repeated carefully. "You're Hertha ! "I'm Hertha," she said. rjlHE period of calmness that returned after the fever was crystal and lucid, preceding, he knew, a severe, prolonged seizure. "I'm afraid," she told him, shivering, "but I will go." He watched her get into the light surface suit, clamp down the helmet with trembling hands. He was shaking with nervousness as she hesitated at the lock. Then she pulled it open. It clicked behind her. He heard the brief hiss of the oxygen replacing the air that had whooshed out. And he felt sorry for her, alone. terrified, on the scaly, hard surface of the tiny satellite. He closed his eyes, pictured her walking past his strip mine, past the gleaming heap of minerals ready for the transport. He felt tears in his eyes and yet he could not entirely explain his feelings toward her -- half fear, sometimes half affection. But more important than that: Why was she with him? What were her feelings? Had some sense of gratitude made her come? Affection? He could not understand her. At times she seemed beyond all understanding. Her responses were mindless, almost mechanical, and that frightened him. He remembered her dumb, apologetic caresses and her pathetically clumsy tenderness -- or reflex; he could never be sure -- and her eager yet reluctant hands and the always slightly hurt, slightly accusing look in her eyes, as if at every instant she was ready for a stinging blow, and her great sighs, muted as if fearing to be heard and... He was drunk, screaming meaninglessly, and the bartender threw him out. The pavement cut his face. When he awoke, it was morning and he was in a strange room and she was in bed beside him. She said, "I am Hertha. I brought you home. I will go with you." The paralysis set in. He could not move. The tears froze on his cheeks, and he lay inert, thinking of her almost mindlessly fighting for his life in the alien outside. Then she was back in the hut. So soon? She looked at him, smiled through the transparent helmet at him. He could hear the precious oxygen hiss in to compensate for the air that had been lost when she entered. He could see her eyes. They were proud. Relieved, too, as if he had been afraid he would be gone when she returned. He' felt she had hurried back to be sure that he was still there. She knelt by the flower bed and, without removing her suit, she held up the plant proudly. He could see the hardpacked dirt in the roots. Fascinated, he watched her scrape a planting hole. He watched her set the plant delicately and pat the soil with care. Then she stood up. He tried to move, to cry out. He could not. He watched her until she went out of the range of his fixed eyes. She was going to the airlock again. After a moment he heard the familiar hiss of oxygen. She was going to get a great number of plants. But one at a time. #. United States Code. Section #) of Galaxy Science Fiction, published monthly at New Yok. N. Y. for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Galaxy .Publishing Corp... #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y.: Editor. Hoiace Gold, # East #th Street, New York City; Managing editor. Vera Cerutti, I Washington Square North, New York City; Business manager, none. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount o stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated film, its name and address, as well as that of each individual memfier. must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street. New York #. N. Y. ; (stockholder) Bernard Kaufman. # Horatio Stieet, New York. N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. 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Commission expires August #, #. Installment f the demolished man As with oil premeditated murder, one thing was unpremeditated. Could Reich, with his riches -- and a crooked Esper -- correct it quickly enough? When telepathy emerged as an extracted recessive characteristic, possessors of extra-sensory perception became valuable members of society. Every industry and profession had its Esper s, who, in addition to having normal skills, were able to probe the mind for unknown or concealed meanings. Members of the Esper Guild and known as "peepers," they were divided into classes according to the depth they could penetrate : #rds could peep the conscious mind; #n ds dug past that to the preconscious and subconscious; while Is ts, the elite of the Guild, could explore every crevice of the deeply buried unconscious mind. Because of Espers, premeditated murder was doomed. Telepaths could peep the intent of a killer before the crime, or peep the evidence needed for conviction after the murder. No killer had escaped the dreaded Demolition Chamber in Kingston Hospital in # years. Despite this, Ben Reich, piratical owner of Sacrament, Inc., w as driven to plan the murder of his bitter commercial enemy, Craye D' Courtney, of the D' Courtney Cartel on Mars. A recurrent nightmare about a Man With No Face made him realize to the economic war. With the aid of Augustus TS, E.M.D. I ( Esper Medical Doctor Is class'), and Jerry Church, a #nd class peeper ostracized from the Guild, Reich went to a party at Maria Beaumont's house. In the course of an ancient game called " Sardine " which Reich instigated by sending his hostess an old book containing the game, Reich slipped up to the hidden suite of D' Courtney and murpectedly witnessed by D' Courtney's daughter, Barbara, who ran from the house in hysterical terror with the murder weapon in her hand, and mysteriously disappeared into the giant city. Reich, using a song that had been fiendishly written on order to stick in the memory like a fish hook, had prevented peepers from probing his intent to murder. Now he had to get out and find the girl. But he forced T# to stay with him so they could make an unsuspicious exit. Thanking Maria Beaumont for the interesting evening, however, Reich found blood falling from the ceiling where D' Courtney's dead body lay in the room above, spattering on his cuff. The slaying was discovered. Reich was trapped in the house with his victim, while the one witness who could bring him to Demolition was free to go anywhere she pleased... even to Preston Powell, Esper Prefect of the Police Psychotic Division... a Is, deadly in his ability to pry into unconscious motivations. AT #:# a. m., the Emergency Patrol arrived at I m Beaumont House in response to precinct notification: translated, meant: "An act or omission forbidden by law has been reported at Beaumont House, # Park South." At #:#, the Panty Pickups arrived in response to an anonymous call: "Get up to The Gilt Corpse. Man dead in a brawl."  They were summarily ejected by I the police and hung hopefully I around fche house. At I :D# A. M., Preston Powell  arrived at Beaumont House in (response to a frantic call from a  deputy inspector: "I tell you,  Powell, it's Felony TripleA! I # don't know whether to be grate#' ful or scared; but I know none of us is equipped to handle it." I "What can't you handle?" I "Look here, Powell. Murder's abnormal. Only a distorted HThought Pattern can produce Ideath by violence. Right?" l x "Yes." r "Which is why there hasn't been a successful TripleA in  over seventy years. A man can't i walk around with a distorted patitem, hatching murder. You peepf ers always pick 'em up before they go into action."  "So far," agreed Powell. "Now fbeen carefully planned... and  the killer was never noticed, even Iby Maria Beaumont's peeper Secretaries. That means there couldn't have been, anything to notice. He must have a passable  pattern and yet be abnormal enough to murder. How the hell can we resolve a paradox like that?"  "No idea yet. Any prospects?" "Nothing but inconsistencies. We don't know what killed j!D'Courtney; his daughter's disappeared ; somebody robbed D'Courtney's guards of one hour and we can't figure how. And besides -- " "Don't go any further. I'll be right over." The great hall of Beaumont House blazed with harsh white light. Uniformed police were everywhere. The white-smocked technicians from Lab were scurrying like beetles. Four Moltecs, glittering snails of coils and glowing tubes, clucked fussily over the floors, nursed by Moltec squads who worked with the drilled precision of eclipse camera crews. In the center of the hall, the party guests were assembled. As Powell came down the east ramp, he felt the wave of hostility that greeted him. He telepathed quickly to Charley on, Police Inspector #: " What's the situation, Chas?" "Scramble." Switching to their informal police code of scrambled images, reversed meanings and personal symbols, on continued: "Peepers here. Play it safe." He brought Powell up to date. " see. Nasty. What's everybody doing lumped out on the door f You staging something ?" " The villain-friend act." " Necessary ?" " It's a rotten crowd. Pampered. You'll have to do some tricky coaxing to get anything out of them. I'll be the villain; you be  #I their friend, of course "Right. Start recording Halfway down the ramp, Powell halted. An expression of shocked indignation appeared on his face. "son!" he snapped. Every eye turned to him. Inspector on faced Powell. In a brutal voice, he said: "Here, sir." "Is this your concept of the proper conduct of an investigation? To herd a group of innocent people together like cattle?" "They're not innocent," on growled. "A man's been killed." "on, they will be presumed to be innocent and treated with every courtesy until the murderer is uncovered." "What?" on sneered. "This rotten, lousy, highsociety pack of hyenas -- " "How dare you! Apologize at once!" on took a deep breath and clenched his fists angrily, then turned to the staring guests. "My apologies," he grumbled. "And I'm warning you, on," Powell snapped, "if anything like this happens again, I'll break you. Now get out of my sight." Powell descended to the floor of the hall and smiled at the guests. "Ladies and gentlemen, of course I know you all by sight. I'm not that famous, so let me introduce myself. Preston Powell, Prefect of the Psychotic Division. Two antiquated titles, eh? Prefect and Psychotic. We won't let them bother us." He advanced toward Maria Beaumont with hand outstretched. "You've had a trying time, I know. These boors in uniform." A pleased rustle ran through the guests. The glowering hostility began to fade. Maria took Powell's hand dazedly, mechanically beginning to preen herself. "Dear Prefect..." She was an aging little girl, clinging to his arm. "I've been so terrified." Powell snapped his fingers behind him. To the captain who stepped forward, he said: "Conduct Madame and her guests to the study. No guards." The captain cleared his throat. "About Madame's guests. One of them arrived after the felony was reported. An attorney, Mr. Jordan." Powell found Sam Jordan, Attorney-At-Law #, in the crowd, and telepathed to him. " What brought you here, Sam?" " Business . Called by my cli (Ben Reich) ent" " That shark. Wait here with Reich. We'll get squared off ." " That was an effective act with on," "Hell. You crack our scramble ?" " Not a chance. But I know you two. Gentle Chas playing a bully is one for the books." I # on broke in from across the hall where he was apparently ulking: "Don't blow it, Sam." "Are you crazy?" At the suggestion that Jordan might smash the most sacred ethic of the Guild, he radiated a blast of indignation that made on grin. All this in the second while Powell kissed Maria's brow with chaste devotion and gently disengaged himself from her tremulous grasp. "Ladies and gentlemen -- to the tudy, please." The crowd of guests moved off, conducted by the captain. They were chattering with renewed animation. Through the buzz and the laughter, Powell felt the iron elbows of a rigid telepathic block. He recognized those elbows and permitted his astonishment to show. "G us! Gus TS! n "Oh. Hello, Powell ." "You? Lurking #s Slinking ?" "Gus?" on popped out. '"Here? I never tagged him." " What the devil are you hiding tor?" Chaotic response of anger, chagrin, fear of lost reputation, selfdeprecation, shame -- "Ease off, Gus. Won't do you any harm to let a little scandal rub off on you. Make you more human. Stay here #s help. Got a hunch I can use another lsf. This one is going to be a TripleA stinker" guests, Powell examined the three men who remained with him. Sam Jordan was a heavy-set man, thick, solid, with a shining bald head and a friendly bluntfeatured face. Little T# was nervous and twitchy... more so than usual. Too bad the plastic surgeons couldn't add six inches to his height. Would solve a lot of T#'s psychological problems. And the notorious Ben Reich. Powell inspected him for the first time. Tall, broad-shouldered, determined, exuding a tremendous aura of charm and power. There was kindliness in that power, but it was corroded by the habit of tyranny. Reich's eyes were fine and keen, but his mouth was too small and sensitive and looked oddly like a scar. A magnetic man, with something about him that was repelling. Reich smiled. Spontaneously, they shook hands. "Do you take everybody off guard like this, Reich?" . "The secret of my success," Reich grinned. An unexpected chemotropism was drawing them together. It was dangerous. Powell tried to shake it off. He turned to Jordan: "Now then, Sam?" "Reich called me in to represent him and all the other suspects. No telepathy. Pres. This has got to stay on the objective level. I'm here to see' that it does. I'll have to be present at every examination." "You can't stop peeping, Sam. You've got no legal right. We can dig out all we can -- " "Provided it's with the consent of the examinee. I'm here to tell you whether you've got that consent or not." Powell looked at Reich. "You understand your legal rights and duties?" "Vaguely." "Vaguely?" Powell smiled. "I'm supposed to believe that from the Shark of Sacrament?" "Sometimes the shark plays possum. This is one of those times." "Well, I'll lay it out for you. Every man has the right to refuse telepathic examination... just as he has the right to refuse oral interrogation." "We've still got the Fifth Amendment," Jordan said. Powell nodded. "But the law holds that you can't answer gome questions and refuse to answer others. It's got to be all or none." "I understand," said Reich. "Of course, if you stand on the Fifth Amendment in a Triple-A Felony and refuse to answer any questions in any manner, you force us to draw the conclusion that you have guilt to conceal." "You're not required to respond to that," Jordan cut in. "I was going to ask about the peeping," Reich said. "Well," Powell replied, "if you decide to open the door, you've got to answer all questions, but you don't have to submit to telepathic examination. That's optional. Oral replies will satisfy the law." "In fact," Jordan added, "the law requires the police examiner to request permission for a TP probe on each separate question. If you refuse permission, I'm here to make it stick. You don't have to confide anything in me. You tell me you don't want to be peeped and I'll see to it that you're not. I don't have to know what's in your mind to do that." "Of course," Powell said pleasantly, "there are many questions you can't possibly object to being peeped on. For instance, if I asked you what you had for dinner tonight... " "He'd have every right in the world to refuse telepathic examination on that point." Powell turned to Reich. "Want it that way?" Reich nodded. "Sam's a #nd. I'm a #st. I can pull slick stuff on him. Want to wait until you can get hold of another #st to represent you? It's your right." "No," Reich said slowly, "I trust Jordan. I. trust you. I don't think he'll let you pull any stuff Oh him. I don't think you'll try." "Thanks. What was the idea of getting a lawyer so fast? Are you mixed up in this mess?" "You don't run Sacrament without building up a stockpile of secrets that have got to be protected." "Why should Jordan represent the other guests?" " Get out of there, Pres." " Stop throwing blocks. Pirn just trying to get his general emotional response to the rest of the suspects." "You've got no right to get it that way." "The hell I haven't. That one was decided by the Carmody Case twenty-five years ago. We can build up the general background so long as we don't look for specific data." "Yes, provided the oral question clearly indicates the purpose and scope of the peeping. Yours did nothing of the kind." "I'll rephrase the question," Powell said, before Reich could answer. "Did you feel that any or all of the other guests particularly required the services of Mr. Jordan, a leading Esper Attorney? I'd like to peep your answer on that for your general emotional response." "You don't have to give permission," Jordan said. "I won't," Reich replied. "Will you give me an oral answer?" "I will," Reich said. "They were all scared. Maria was petrified. She begged me to help. This was the best I could do." "Would you care to tell me why you refused to be peeped on that answer?" "Don't even bother," Jordan advised. "Pres has no right to ask that. No one has. The Matter of the Estate of Alan Courtney settled that." "Hell," Powell said ruefully. "You've stopped me. Let's start the investigation." They turned and walked toward the study. Across the hall, on scrambled and asked : "Pres, why'd you let Sam tie you in legal knots?" "While he was busy tying the legal .knots, J got the one thing  was after " " What was that?" "An answer on the record from Ben Reich . He's opened the door , Chas. He can't close it any more." I There was a moment of stunned silence, and then, as Powell went through the North arch to the study, a broadcast of fervent admiration followed him: "I bow, Pres. I bow to the Master ." T HE "study" of Beaumont House was constructed on the lines of a Turkish Bath. The floor was a mosaic of jacinth, spinel and sunstone. The walls, crosshatched with gold wire cloisonne, were glittering with inset synthetic stones... ruby, emerald, garnet, chrysolite, amethyst, toi m pa?... all containing various portraits of the owner. There were scatter rugs of brocatelle, and scores of chairs and lounges. Powell entered the room and walked directly to the center, leaving Reich. T# and Jordan behind them. He looked around him, accurately gauging the mass psyche of these sybarites, and measuring the tactics he would have to use. He lit a cigarette. "You all know, of course, that I'm a peeper. Probably this fact has alarmed some of you. You imagine that I'm standing here like some fabulous monster, probing your mental plumbing. Well, Jordan wouldn't let me if I could. And, frankly, mass peeping is a trick no Esper can perform. It's difficult enough to probe a single individual. It's impossible when dozens of Telepathic Patterns are confusing the picture. And when a group of unique, highly individual people like yourselves is gathered. we find ourselves completely at your mercy." "And Tie said  had charm," Reich muttered. "Tonight," Powell went on, "you were playing a delightful ancient game called 'Sardine.' I wish I had been invited, Madame. You must remember me next time..." "I will," Maria promised. "I will, dear Prefect." "In the course of that game. old D'Courtney was killed. We're almost positive it was premeditated murder. We'll be certain after Lab has finished its work. But let's assume that it is a Triple-A Felony. That will enable us to play another ancient game called 'Murder.' " There was an interested response from the guests. Powell continued on the same casual course, carefully turning the most shocking crime in seventy years into a morsel of amusement. "In the game of 'Murder,' " he said, "a make-believe victim is killed. A make-believe detective must discover who killed the victim. He asks questions of the make-believe suspects. Everyone must tell the truth except the killer, who is permitted to lie. The detective compares stories, deduces who is lying, and uncovers the killer. I thought you might enjoy playing this game." A voice asked, "How?" Another added, "I'm just one of the tourists." "A murder investigation," Powell smiled, "explores three facets of a crime. First, the motive. Second, the method. Third, the opportunity. Our Lab people are taking care of the second and third. The first we can discover in our game. If we do, we'll be able to crack the other two problems that have Lab stumped now. Did you know that they can't figure out what killed D'Courtney? Did you know hat D'Courtney's daughter has disappeared? She left the house while you were playing 'Sardine.' Did you know that D' Courtney's guards were mysteriously short-circuited? Somebody robbed them of a full hour in time. We'd all like to know how." They were hanging at the very edge of the trap, fereathless, fascinated. It had to be sprung with infinite caution. "Death, disappearance, and subjective time machines... we can find out all about them through motive. I'll be the makebelieve detective; you #I be the make-believe suspects. You'll tell me the truth... all except the killer, of course. We'll expect him to lie. But we'll trap him and bring this party to a triumphant finish if you'll give me permission to make a telepathic examination of each of you." "Oh!" cried Maria in alarm. "Wait Madame. All I want is your permission. I won't have to peep. Because, you see, if all the innocent suspects grant permission, then the one who refuses must be guilty." "Can he pull that?" Reich whispered to Jordan. Jordan nodded. "Just picture the scene for a moment." Powell was building the drama for them, turning the room into a stage. "I ask formally: 'Will you permit me to make a TP examination?' Then I go around this room." He began a slow circuit, bowing to each of the guests in turn. "And the answers come: 'Yes. Yes. Of course. Why not?' And then suddenly a dramatic pause." Powell topped before Reich, erect, terrifying. " 'You, sir,' I repeat. Will you give me your permission to peep?' " They all watched, hypnotized. Even Reich was aghast, transfixed by the pointing finger and the fierce scowl. "Hesitation. His face flushes red. then ghastly white as the blood drains out. You hear the tortured refusal: 'No!'" The Prefect turned and enveloped them all with an electrifying gesture: we know we have captured the killer!" He almost had them. Almost. But Tom Moyse had bastardy in his soul; Gloria Blomefield, Jr., had adultery in her sout; Tony Asj had shame in her soul; Nick Boutman had perjury in his soul. "No!" Maria cried. They all shot to their feet and shouted: "No!. No!" " was a beautiful try, Pres, but there's your answer." Powell was still charming in defeat. "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I really can't blame you. Only a fool would trust a cop." He sighed. "One of my assistants will tape the oral statements from those of you who care to make statements. Mr. Jordan will be on hand to advise and protect you." He glanced dolefully at Jordan. " And louse me." " Don't pull at my heart-strings like that, you faker. This is the best TripleA in seventy years. My big chance. Are you going to sob me out of it?" "Hell." Powell said. He winked at Reich left the room. L AB was finished in the lavish orchid Wedding Suite. Krt, abrupt, testy; harrassed, handed Powell the reports and said, "This is a lousy assignment!" Powell looked down at D'Courtney's body. "Suicide?" he snapped. He was always peppery with Krt, who was comfortable with no other relationship. "Not a chance. No weapon." "What killed him?" "We don't know." "Why, he's got a hole in his   Q head you could jet through to the Moon!" "Entry above the uvula. Exit below the fontanelle. Death instantaneous. But what drilled the hole through his skull? We don't know!" "Hard ray?" "No burn." "Crystalization?" "No freeze." "Nitro vapor charge?" "No ammonia residue." "Acid?" "Acid spray couldn't burst the back of his skull like that." "A dirk or a knife?" "Impossible. Have you any idea how much force is necessary to penetrate like this? Couldn't be done." "Well, I've just about exhausted penetrating weapons. No, wait. What about a projectile?" "Not a chance here. There's no projectile. None in the wound. None in the room." "Damnation!" "I agree." "Have you got anything for me? Anything at all?" "Yes. He was eating candy before his death. Found a fragment of gel in his mouth... bit of standard candy wrapping." "And?" "No candy in the suite." "He might have eaten it all." "No candy in his stomach. Anyway, he wouldn't be eating candy with that throat." "Why not?" "Psychogenic cancer. Bad. He couldn't talk, let alone eat candy." "Hell and damnation. We need that weapon, whatever it is." "Go find the daughter," Krit said. "I'm telling, you she's got it. She popped the old man and blew out of here with it." "You mean to tell me she went to all this trouble? Waited until they were visiting? Waited until the middle of the night? Then killed him this bizarre way? Tell me why." "I can't tell you why she killed him," Krt said with frantic calm. "I can't tell you how she killed him." Suddenly he burst out: "I can't even tell time! Powell, I resign." Which made Krt's seventeenth resignation in two years. Ignoring it, Powell fingered the sheaf of reports, staring at the waxen body, whistling a crooked tune. He remembered reading a romance once about an Esper who could read a corpse... like that old myth about photographing the retina of a dead eye. He wished it could be done. "Well," he sighed at last, "they licked us on motive, and they've licked us on method. Let's hope the Moltec crew can give us something on opportunity, Krt, or we'll never bring Reich down." "Reich? Ben Reich? What about him?" "It's Gus T# I'm worried about most' Powell murmured. "If he's mixed up in this... What? Oh, Reich? He's the killer, Krlt. I slicked Sam Jordan down in Maria Beaumont's study. Staged an act and misdirected Sam while I peeped his client. This an off the record, of course, but I got enough to convince me Reich's our man." "You did?" Krt exclaimed. "But that's a long way from Demolition, brother. A long, long way."  Moodily, Powell took leave of the Lab Chief, loafed through the anteroom and descended to field headquarters in the picture gallery. "And I like Reich," he muttered. npHE Moltec (Molecular Distortion Detector) was simply a mechanical bloodhound. In the XXth Century, when explosive firearms were in use, it was the custom of malefactors to destroy the identifying numbers on their weapons with file and acid. They were unaware that the blow of the tool which punched the numbers into the weapon so altered the molecular structure of the metal that the figures could be detected by X-ray and other methods after the surface had been obliterated. The Moltec operated similarly. You might walk carefully across a floor, with dry feet, sweeping away all footprints, leaving no visible train -- unaware that your step left an unmistakable and characteristic molecular stress trail. This trail the Moltec followed, crawling over floor, ramp and stairs, clucking and buzzing monomraniacally. The trail was printed in tiny arrows on a gridded scald map of transparent plastic film, printed in a separate color for each suspect. When the investigation was completed, the transparencies were stacked one on top of the other, and when you looked down into the pile you saw at a glance all the twisting, turning human paths. on set the packed charts before Powell, who examined the twining colored threads for a moment and then looked up wearily. " know, Pres. It would have been easier if they hadn't spotted D' Courtney's blood dripping through the floor. But when they all tore up there in a posse, that loused us." Powell inspected the collective map again. Threads of color wandered through the great hall of Beaumont House, the music room, the study, the stage, the fountains, and finally into the Panty Projection Room. From there a thick river of prismatic color streamed back through the hall, up the stairs, through the m picture gallery into the Wedding Suite. " There's the girl." on indicated a yellow trail of arrows that started in one of the bedrooms of the Wedding Suite, came down the corridor, entered the orchid room, and, after a few confused circles, left the room and led straight through the house to the street. Powell and on began the lightning exchanges that characterized peeper conversations : "Who's this, Chas? The peachandemerald colored trails. They left the house too." " Couple of guests who couldn't stomach that Sardine game, bless 'em. Left early. One is a psychsong-writer named Duffy Wyg. The other's Wally Chervil's boy. Young Galen." "Oops." "No, he's in the right orbit. Pres. He doesn't belong to Beaumont's Carnal Circle. I got it straight from the peeper secretaries. Gaily crashed the party on a bet. Apparently he couldn't jet out fast enough." "Pick 'em up anyway and have a talk, Charley." "In the works." "Right. Which trail is Reich's?" "Why Reich in particular? What? Him?" "Uh-huh." "My God. I What it must be like to be a Is." "Take your Guild exams and find out. Which is Reich?" " Took 'em again last month. Failed again. Reich is the scarlet trail." "Thought so. Look at it, Chas. Reich went up to the orchid suite twice and came down twice. See that?" "Yep. And?" "That could be opportunity. He went up once with the posse ; but he went up once before to kill D'Courtney." "You'll never prove it. Pres.' "Can the guards help?" "Nope. They've lost one solid hour. Krlot says their retinal rhodopsin was destroyed. That's the visual purple... what you see with, ,# s far as the guards are concerned , they were on duty and alert. Nothing happened until the mob suddenly appeared and Maria was screeching at them for falling asleep on the job... which they swear they did not." "But we know it was Reich." "You know it was Reich. Nobody else does." "He went up there while the guests were playing the Sardine game. He kerflumoxed the guards' visual purple some way and robbed them of an hour of time. He went into the orchid suite and killed D'Courtney. The girl got mixed up in it, somehow, which is why she ran." "How did he kerffumox? How did he kill D'Courtney? And why?" " don't know any of the answers... yet." " You'll never get a Demolition that way." "That I do know." "You've got to show motive , method and opportunity , objectively. The Moltec evidence wont stand up alone. It'll need powerful supporting evidence. All you've got is a peeper's knowledge that it was Reich who killed D' Courtney." " Uh-huh "Did you peep how or why?" " Couldn't get in deep enough... not with Sam Jordan watching me." " And you'll probably never get in. Sam's too careful." " Damnation ! Charley, we need the girl." " Barbara D' Courtney?" "Ye s. She's the key. If she can tell us what she saw and why she ran, we'll satisfy a court. Collate everything we've got so far (which is practically nothing ) and file it. It won't do us any good without the girl. Let everyone go. We'll have to backtrack on Reich... see what collateral evidence we can dig up, but -- " "But it won't help without that goddam girl." " Times like this, Charley, I hate women. For Christ's sake, why are they all trying to get me married" Image of a horse laughing. Sar (censored) castic retort. Sar(censored)donic reply. (censored) Powell got to his feet and left the picture gallery. He crossed the overpass, descended to the music room and entered the main hall. He saw Reich, Jordan and T# talking intently alongside the fountain. Once again he fretted over the frightening problem of T#. If the little peeper really was mixed up with Reich, as Powell had sensed at the party last week, he might be mixed up in this The idea of a #st class Esper, a pillar of the Guild, participating in murder was unthinkable; and, if actually fact, hell to prove. Nobody ever got anything from a #st without full consent. And if T# was (incredibly, impossibly, #-I against) working with Reich, Reich himself might prove impregnable. Resolving on one last propaganda attack before he was forced to resort to police work, Powell caught their eyes, and directed a quick command to the peepers: "Sam, Gus -- jet. I want to say something to Reich I don't want you to hear. I won't peep him or record his words. That's a pledge." Jordan and T# nodded. Reich watched them go and then looked at Powell. "Scare 'em off?" he inquired. "Warned them off. Sit down, Reich." They sat on the edge of the basin, looking at each other, a chemotropic smile on their lips. They sat in a warm, friendly silence. "No," Powell said after a pause, T'm not peeping you." "Didn't think you were. But you did in Maria's study, eh?" "Felt that?" "No. Guessed. It's what I would have done." "Neither of us is very trustworthy, eh?" "It's the cowards and sore losers who hide behind fair play." "What about honor?" "We've got honor in us, but it's our own code... not makebelieve rules." Powell shook his head sadly. "You're two men, Reich. One of them's wonderful; the other's rotten. If you were all killer, it wouldn't be so bad. But there's half louse and half saint in you, and that makes it worse." "I knew it was going to be bad when you winked," Reich grinned. "You really scare me, Powell. I never can tell when the punch is coming or which way to duck." "Then, for God's sake, stop ducking and get it over with," Powell said. His voice burned. "I'm going to lick you on this one, Ben. I'm going to strangle the lousy killer in you, because I admire the saint. This is the beginning of the end for you. You know it. Why don't you make it easier for yourself?" "And give up the best fight of my life with the best enemy I ever met?" Powell shrugged angrily. They both arose. Instinctively, their hands met in the four-way clasp of final farewell. "I lost a great partner in you. Pres," Reich smiled. "You lost a great man in your self, Ben." "Enemies?" "Enemies." seventeen and one-half millions cannot be tied down to an office. He does not have a desk. He does not have files, memoranda, dossiers. He has three Esper secretaries, memory wizards all, who carry within their skulls the minutiae of his business. They accompany him within headquarters like a triple index. Occasionally, one of them joins him on the field while the others remain behind to act as his proxy. Surrounded by his flying squad, Powell jetted through headquar ters, assembling the material for his fight. To Commissioner Crabbe he laid out the broad outlines once more: "We need motive, method and opportunity, Commissioner. We've got opportunity, but it won't stand alone. Mr. Peetcy'H never buy it. It's got to be bolstered by the other two. I'm speaking of objective evidence for the court. Now, I'm ready to go all out on Ben Reich and Sacrament. I want to ask you a straight all out too?" Crabbe, who resented Espers, turned purple and shot up from the ebony chair behind the ebony desk in his ebony-and-silver office. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" "Don't sound for undercurrents, sir. I'm merely asking if you're tied to Reich and Sacrament in any way. Will it be possible for Reich to come to you and ask to have the rockets cooled?" "God damn your impudence, Powell -- " "Excuse me, sir, I'm just trying to be realistic. I'm a career criminologist. You're a politician. Politicians must have support. Has Reich been one of your supporters?" "No, he's not." "Sir: On December fourth last, Commissioner Crabbe discussed the Langley Case with you. Extract follows: Powell: There's a tricky financial angle to this business, Commissioner. Sacrament may hold us up with a demurrer and attempt seizure of the Langley assets . Crabbe: Reich's given me his word he won't; and I can always depend on Ben Reich. He backed me up for County Attorney. End quote." "Right. I thought I was reaching for something." PoweM dropped his tact and glared at Crabbe. "What about your campaign for County D. A.? Reich backed you for that, didn't he?" "He did." "And I'm supposed to believe he hasn't continued supporting you?" "Yes, you are. He backed me then. He has not supported me since." "Then I have the beacon on the Reich murder?" "Why do you insist that Ben Reich killed that man? It's ridiculous. You've got no proof. Your own admission." "Do I have the beacon on the Reich murder?" "You do." "But with strong reservations. Make a note, boys. He's scared to death of Reich. Make another note. So am ." T O his staff, Powell said: "Now look, you all know what a coldblooded monster Peetcy is. I swear he gives me nightmares... screaming for facts, facts. We'll have to produce evidence to convince him he ought to prosecute. To do that, we're going to pull the Rough  Smooth on Reich." "Brief us," Son said. "Go back to your Academy training, gentlemen. Remember that ancient device for tailing a tough subject? Assign a clumsy operative and a slick one to the subject. The cluck didn't know the smoothie was on the job. Neither did the subject. After he'd shaken the rough tail, he imagined he was clear. That made it a cinch for the slicker. That's what we're going to do to Reich." "Check," said on. "Go through every department. Pull out the hundred dumbest cops you can locate. Put 'em into plainclothes and assign' em to Reich. Go up to Lab and get hold of every crackpot robot gimmick that's been submitted in the last ten years. Put all the gadgets to work on Reich. Make it a rough tail, but the kind he'll have to work to shake." "Any specific areas?" on inquired. "All except one. Why were they playing 'Sardine?' Who suggested the game? Beaumont's secretaries went on record that Reich couldn't be peeped because he had a song kicking around in his skull. What song? Who wrote it? Where'd Reich hear it? The guards were blasted with some kind of Visual Purple Ionizer. Check all research on that sort of thing. What killed D'Courtney? Let's have lots of weapon research. Backtrack on Reich's relations with D'Courtney. What and how much does Reich stand to win by D'Courtney's death?" "All this Rough? We'll louse the case, Pres!" "Maybe. I don't think so. Reich's a successful man. He'll imagine he's outsmarting us every time he outmaneuvers one of our decoys. Keep him thinking that. The Pantys'll tear us apart. Play along with it. We're all going to be blundering, outwitted cops, and while Reich's eating himself fat on that diet -- " "You'll be eating Reich," on grinned. "What about the girl?" "She's the one exception to the rough routine. We level with her. I want a description and photo sent to every police officer in the county within one hour. On the bottom of the stat announce that the man who locates her will automatically be jumped five grades." " Sir : Regulations forbid elevation of more than three ranks.' "To hell with regulations," Powell snapped to his secretary. "Five grades to the man who finds Barbara D'Courtney. I've got to get that girl." TN Sacrament Tower, Ben Reich shoved every piezo crystal off his desk into the startled hands of his intimidated secretaries. "Get the hell out of here and take this with you," he growled. "For a while the office coasts without me. Understand?" "But the Tycho estimates... "You people handle it. Submit the estimates. Brush off Salzman on the City Contract. Remember to have Laslow bid on those Venus auctions. Send Pickfield the Mandamus Writs. Sign the shop contracts with Amalgamated Brotherhood and don't bother me." "Mr. Reich, we'd understood you were contemplating taking over the D'Courtney interests now that Craye D' Courtney's dead. If you -- " "I'm taking care of that right now. That's why I don't want to be bothered." He pushed them out, slammed the door and locked it. He went to the phone, punched BD-# and the image of Jeremy Church appeared against a background of pawnshop debris. "You?" Church snarled. "Still interested in reinstatement?" Church started. "What about it?" "You've made yourself a deal. I want a lot in return." "For God's sake, Ben, anything! Just ask me." "Unlimited service. You know the price I'm paying. Are you selling?' "I'm selling, Ben! Yes!" "I want that blind son of a bitch. The red-headed one." "Keno Quizzard? He isn't safe, Ben. Nobody gets anything from Quizzard." "Set up a meeting. Same place. This is like old times, eh, Jerry? Only this time it's going to have a happy ending." was assembled in the anteroom of the Esper Guild Institute when Powell entered. The hopeful hundreds, all ages, all sexes, all classes, dreaming tha.t they had the magic power that could make life the fulfillment of fantasy, unaware of the heavy responsibility that power entailed. The repugnant odor of those wishes came to Powell from the line: Read minds and make (Guild Law forbade speculation or gambling by peepers) ,... Read minds and know the answers to all the exam questions... (That was a schoolboy, unaware that Esper Proctors were hired by Examination Boards to prevent that kind of peepercheating)... Read minds and know what people really think of me... Read minds and know At the desk, the receptionist wearily broadcast on the broadest TP band: "# you can hear me, please go through the door on the left marked Employees Only." To an assured young society woman with a checkbook in her hand, she was saying: "No, madam, the Guild does not charge for training and instruction, so spend your money on something else. We can do nothing for you." Deaf to the basic test of the Guild, the woman turned away angrily. If you can hear me, please go through the door on the left... An elderly Negro suddenly detached himself from the line, glanced uncertainly at the receptionist. and then limped to the proper door. Powell nodded to the receptionist and followed the Latent. Inside, Jennings and Whitehead were enthusiastically shaking the surprised man's hand and patting him on the back. Powell joined them for a moment and added his congratulations. It was always a happy day for the Guild when they unearthed another Esper. Powell walked down the corridor toward the president's suite. He passed a kindergarten where thirty children and ten adults were mixing speech and thought in a frightful patternless stew. Their instructor was patiently broadcasting: "Think, class. Words are not necessary. Remember to break the speech reflex. Repeat the first rule after me..." And the class chanted: "Eliminate the larynx." Powell winced and moved on. The wall opposite the kindergarteh was covered by a gold plaque on which was engraved the sacred words of the Galen Pledge: I will look upon him who shall have taught me this art as one of my parents. I will lare my substance with him. and I will supply his necessities if he be in need. I will regard his offspnng even as my own brethren and I will teach them this art by pr. cpt, by lecture and by every mobof teaching; and I will teach this r t to ell others.  The regimen I adopt shall Le for the benefit of mankind accord ig to my ability and judgment, and r t for hurt or wrong. I will give no ' adly thought to any, though it be a-' d of me, nor will I counsel such. Whatsoever mind I enter, tho will T go for the benefit of man, refrrning from all wrongdoing and corn lion. Whatsoever thoughts I see or lr;r in the mind of man which ought rt to be noised abroad, I will keep sconce thereon, counting such things as r.icred secrets. In the lecture hall, a clas of #rds was earnestly weaving simple basket patterns while they discussed current events. There was one little overdue #nd, a twelve-year-old urchin who was adding zigzag ad libs to the dull discussion and peaking every zig with a spoken word. The words rhymed and were barbed comments on the speakers. It was very amusing and amazingly precocious. Powell halted and, below the class threshold, asked the instructor: "Who's the infant phenomenon?" " Dennis McC allion." " Reported him to the Board yet?" "Going to send one in today." "Well, add a recommendation from me. Suggest he be sent directly to an alpha class. If he keeps on like this , he may establish a new peeper rating... above the #st." Half a dozen #nds were taking their exams for advanced rating in the seminar room. They were clustered around Molly Chindo, the ament from Kingston Hospital. chatting, smoking, and uneasilv evading Molly's mental passes. Molly was still ravishing... a blue-eyed, black-haired nymphomaniac who was also oligophrenic. It was a dirty trick to introduce the sexual angle and confuse the examinees, but a #st rating had to be earned the hard way, and Molly was only one in a series of severe tests. A group of college-age kids was loafing outside the president's suite, endlessly grousing about the endless educational problems of the peepers... the long hours of extra work at the Institute after their regular college lectures... the rigorous code of Guild ethics... the gloomy aspects of their futures, endless work, endless devotion to service... "Oh, brother ! If we could only get lost from peeping, how fast we'd shake it. Who wants to go through life like a walking saint? They ought to write an #I th Commandment : ' Thou shalt not deprive any man of the right to go to hell.' " They signed off when Powell approached. As he entered the suite he said : "It isn't so bad. You get used to being admirable after a while." The spoken words shamed them, and a good thing too. They were in that stage when youngsters resist conditioning. That couldn't be encouraged. T'HE president's suite was in an uproar. All the office doors were open, and clerks and secretaries were scurrying. Old T'sungHsai, the president, a portly mandarin with shaven skull and benign features, stood in the center of his office and raged. "I don't care what the honorable scoundrels call themselves," T'sung Hsai roared. "Talk to me about racial purity of the Guild, will they? I'll fill their concave ears. Miss Prinn!" Helen Prinn crept into T-H's office. "Take a letter to these devils. To the League of Esper Patriots. Greetings, Powell. Your august presence honors these humble eyes. My threadbare office is perfumed with the joy of your manyjeweled visage... The organized campaign to cut down Guild taxation for the education of Espers for the benefit of mankind is the action of a nest of roaches resisting the sterilization of a filthy kitchen. New paragraph... T-H wrenched himself from his diatribe and bowed profoundly to Powell. "And has a joyous wife yet been found to enlarge the tree of your celestial family?" " Not yet, sir." "Damn it, Powell, get married #" T-H bellowed. # don't want to be stuck with this job forever. Paragraph, Miss Prinn: You speak of the hardships of taxation, of preserving the aristocracy of Espers, of the unsuitability of the average man for Esper training. What the hell do you want, Powell?" "I want to use the grapevine, sir." " Well , don't bother me. I've got this three-tongued League of Lice on my back. Speak to Jenny about it. Paragraph, Miss Prinn: You parasitic bastards want Esper powers turned into a monopoly, and no taxation so you can keep your loot like the corrupt, unashamed leeches you are -- " Powell tactfully closed the door and turned to Jenny Janies, who was quaking in a corner. " Really scared. Jenny?" Image of an eye winking and a question mark quaking. "When Papa T-H blows his top, we like him to think we re petrified. Makes him happier." Powell dropped the official police description and portrait of Barbara D' Courtney on the secretary's desk. " Here's something you can do for me, Jenny." " What a beautiful girl!" Jenny exclaimed. U I want this sent out on the grapevine, marked urgent. Pass the word that the peeper who locates Barbara D' Courtney for me will have his Guild taxes remitted for a year." "Jeepers!" Jenny sat bolt upright. "Can you do that, Pres?" " Council agreed to it." " This'll make the grapevine jump!" # want it to jump. I want every peeper to jump. Jenny. It  want anything for Xmas,  want that girl." cleared and polished during the afternoon break... the only break in the gambler's day. The eo and roulette tables were brushed, the gold birdcage sparkled, the hazard and bank crap boards gleamed green and white. On the cashier's desk, cold sovereigns -- the standard com of gambling and the underworld -- were racked in tempting storks. antique) table with Jerry Church and Keno Quizzard, the blind croupier. Quizzar'd was fat with flaming red beard, dead-white skin and malevolent dead-white eyes. "Your price," Reich told Church, "you know already. And I'm warning you, Jerry, don't try to peep me. If you get into my head you're getting into Demolition." Quizzard murmured in his clabbered blind man's voice: "As bad as that? I don't hanker for a Demol, Reich." "Who does? What do you hanker for, Keno?" Quizzard reached back and with sure fingers pulled a rouleau of sovereigns off the desk and let them cascade from one hand to the other. "Listen to what I hanker for." "Name the best price you can figure, Keno." "You got a hundred Ms laying around?" "Hundred thousand? Right. That's the price." "For the love of... " Church popped upright and stared at Reich. "A hundred thousand!" "Make up your mind, Jerry," Reich said. "Do you want money or reinstatement?" "It's almost worth -- No. Am I crazy? I'll take reinstatement." "Then stop drooling." Reich turned to Quizzard. "I know you, Keno. You've got an idea you can find out what I want and then shop around for higher bids. I want you committed right now. That's why I let you set the price." "Yeah," Quizzard said slowly. "I had that idea, Reich." He smiled and the milk-white eyes disappeared in folds of skin. "I still got that idea." "Then I'll tell you right now who'll buy from you. A man named Preston Powell. I don't know what he can pay." "Whatever it is, I don't want it," Quizzard spat. "I'm still waiting to hear from you." "I told you it's a deal. I'm committed." "I don't hear you, Keno." "He knows, Jerry?" "He knows," Church muttered, "He's been around." With grudging respect, Quizzard reached into his pocket and withdrew his key chain. Reich followed suit. The keys were small platinum cylinders, radiant to operate photo-electric locks, but capable if you knew how --  and the underworld knew how -- of burning a tiny temporary tattoo into the skin. Reich and Quizzard stripped their arms and each tattooed the other above the elbow with the characteristic design of his key. It was the underworld's inviolable contract. A thief named Whittmaker had once conceived the idea of entering into such a contract for the  purpose of burglary through a key duplicated from the tattooed design. He failed. It was impossible to duplicate the key. He also lost an ear. Plastic surgery had no difficulty in duplicating that. "All right," Reich said, "now listen to this. First job. I want a girl. Her name is Barbara D'Courtney." heavily. "I thought so." "Any objections?" Quizzard jingled gold from one hand to the other and shook his head. "I want the girl. She blew out of the Beaumont House last night and no one knows where she landed. I want her, Keno. Before the police get her." Quizzard nodded. "She's about twenty-five. About fivefive. Around a hundred and twenty pounds. Really stacked." The fat lips smiled hungrily. The deadwhite eyes glistened. "Yellow hair. Black eyes. Black eyebrows. Heart-shaped face. Full mouth and a kind of aquiline nose... high bridge, sharp nostrils. She's got a face with character." "Got the picture. Clothes?" "She was wearing a silk dressing gown last time I saw her. Frosty white and translucent... like a frozen window. No shoes. No stockings. No hat. No jewelry. She was off her beam enough to tear out into the streets and disappear. I want her." Something compelled Reich to add: "I want her undamaged." "With her hauling a freight like that? Have a heart, Reich." Quizzard licked his fat lips. "You don't stand a chance. She don't stand a chance." "That what a hundred Ms are for. I stand a good chance if you get her fast enough." "I may have to slush for her." "Then slush. Check every bawdy house, bagnio, Blind Tiger and Frab Joint in the city. I want the girl. Understand?" Quizzard nodded, still jingling the gold. "I understand." Suddenly Reich reached across the table and slashed Quizzard's fat hands with the edge of his palm. The sovereigns chimed into the air. "And I don't want any doublecross," Reich growled in a deadly voice. "Don't try any." IX "NE week of attack and defense, lunge and riposte, all fought on the surface while, deep below the agitated waters, Powell and Augustus T# circled like silent sharks awaiting the onset of the real war. Elsworth Finney, patrol officer now in plainclothes, believed in the surprise attack. He waylaid Maria Beaumont during a theater intermission, and before her horrified friends bellowed: "It was a frame. You was in cahoots with the killer. Y ou set up the murder. That's why you was playin' that Sardine game. Go ahead, deny it." The Gilt Corpse squawked and ran. As Officer Finney set off in hot pursuit, he was peeped deeply and thoroughly by one of Madam Beaumont's friends. T# ! Reich: The cop wan telling the truth. His department believes Maria was an accomplice. Reich to T#: All right. We'll throw her to the wolves. Let the cops have her. Corpse there three hours later and subjected her to a merciless Credit Supervisor. He was unaware that Preston Powell was just outside the office, chatting with the Supervisor. In consequence, Madam Beaumont was left unprotected. She took refuge, of all places, in the Loan Brokerage that was the source of her enormous income. Officer Finney located The Gilt Powell lo staff : She got the game ont of a book Reich gave her. Probably purchased at Winters. They handl that stuff. Pass the word. Did he ask for it specifically? Also, check Fry, the appraiser, llow come the only intact game in the book was 'Sardine?' Peetcy'll want to know. And where's that girl? Dodo Wraught, patrol officer now in plainclothes, was going to come through on his big chance with the suave approach. To the manager and staff of Winters, hedrawled: "I'm in the market for old game books... the kind my very good friend, Ben Reich, asked for last week." Ttt lo Reich: I've been peeping around. They're going to check that book you sent Maria. Reich to T#: Let 'em. I'm covered. I've jot to concentrate on that girl. The manager and staff carefully explained matters at great length in response to Officer Wraught's suave questions. Many clients lost patience and left the store. One sat quietly in a corner, too wrapt in a crystal recording to realize he was left unattended. Nobody knew that Charley on was completely tone-deaf. Powell lo staff: Reich apparently found the hook accidentally...Stumbled over it while he was looking for a present for the Beaumont. Pass the word. And where's that girl? In conference with the agency that handled copy for the Sacrament Jumper (the only Nulgee Family Air Rocket on the market) Reich came up with a new advertising program. "You can't sell transportation on an efficiency basis," he said. "People won't buy our Jumper because it's the best piece of machinery for the money. We can tell 'em it's more efficient and cheaper than the D'Courtney product until we're blue in the face. It won't do any good. This bankbook comparison campaign of yours stinks." "Granted, Mr. Reich," the account man said alertly. "Its scope was out of orbit. Our synthesis was faulty." "The fact is this," Reich continued. "People always anthropomorphize the products they use. They give them pet names and treat them like family pets. A man won't buy a Jumper if it's merely efficient. He wants to love it." "Check!" the account man cried. "Your idea has a sense of scope that dwarfs us, Mr. Reich. Now we know who we're rooting for." "We're going to anthropomorphize our Jumper," Reich said. "Let's find a girl and vote her the Sacrament Jumper Girl. We'll make every consumer identify his Jumper with this girl. When he buys one, he's buying her." "Check, Mr. Reich. Check!" "Start an immediate campaign to locate the Jumper Girl. Get every salesman onto it. Comb the city. Give it lots of play in the Pantys and papers. I want the girl to be about twenty-five, fivefive. hundred and twenty pounds. Lots of bounce." "I understand the psychology. The Jumper Girl is a Bouncy Girl." "She ought to be a blonde with dark eyes. Full mouth. Good strong nose. I've had one of my peeper artists prepare a sketch of my idea of the Jumper Girl. Look it over, have it reproduced and passed out to your crew. There's a promotion for the man who locates the girl I have in mind." T# to Reich: I've been peeping some more. They're Mending a man into Sacrament to dig up something between you and that appraiser, ry, Reich to T#: Something between me and fry l I'owell couldn't he that dumb, could he? Maybe I've been overrating him. Expense was no object to Alfred Finely, who believed in the disguises of plastic surgery. Freshly equipped with Mongoloid features, he took a job in Sacrament's accounting department and attempted to unearth Reich's financial relations with ry. It never occurred to him that his intent had been thoroughly peeped by Sacrament's Esper Personnel Chief and reported upstairs, and that upstairs was quietly chuckling. Powell to staff : The idiot was looking for bribery recorded in Sacrament's hooks! This should lower Reich's opinion of us by fifty per cent; which makes him fifty per eent more vulnerable. Where's that girl? At the board meeting of "The Hour" (the only round-theclock paper on Earth, twentyfour editions a day) which was actually a Sacrament houseorgan, Reich announced a new charity to be begun at once and publicized immediately. "We'll call it 'Sanctuary,' " he said. "We offer aid to the subtheir time of crisis. If you've been evicted, bankrupted, terrorized, swindled... if you're frightened for any reason and don't know where to turn... turn to Sanctuary." "It's a hell of a promotion, the managing editor said, "but it'll cost like crazy. What's it for?" "Public relations," Reich snapped. "The D'Courtney crowd's turned itself into the Great White Father. It's time Sacrament took over the role." Reich left the board room, went down to the street and located a public phone booth. He called Ellery West. "I want a man placed in every Sanctuary office, a full description and photo of every applicant relayed to me as they come in." "I'm not asking any questions, Ben, but I wish I could peep you on that." "Suspicious?" Reich snarled. "Just curious." "Don't let it kill you." As Reich left the booth he was  accosted by a mousy man who wore an air of inept eagerness. "Oh, Mr. Reich. Lucky I bumped into you. The word just came down about Sanctuary and I thought a human interest interview with the originator of that wonderful charity might -- " Lucky he bumped into him! The man was Quinn, "The Hour's" famous peeper reporter. Probably tailed him down and -- Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. "Was there ever a time when you didn't know where to turn? Were you ever afraid of death or murder? Were -- " Tenser, said the Tensor. Reich dove into a Public Jumper and escaped. T# to Reich: The cop are reall.r after try. God knows what kind of red herring Powell's following, hut it's away from you. I think the safely margin's increasing. Reich to T#: Not until I've found that girl. Marcus fry had left no forwarding address and was pursued by Prof. Elias Johnson's "Aural Selector" (a mechanical bloodhound responsive to the particular aura surrounding the human psyche). Dr. E. G. Howard's "Probability Prognosticator" (a mechanical divinator). and Wm. Elgin's "Electrodianetiphore" (a mechanical device defying all description). The "Aural Selector" ended up in Greenland; the "Probability Prognosticator" broke down in Kimberly; the "Electrodianetiphore" reached Shanghai, and Marcus ry arrived in Moscow where Powell located him at a book auction conducted at breakneck speed by a peeper auctioneer. Powell interviewed tfry in the foyer before a window overlooking the remains of Red Square. Powell to staff : All clear. Reich bought the book, had it appraised sent it as a gift. The hook wan in hail condition and the only game Maria could select was 'Sardine.' We'll never pin anything on Reich with that. I know how Peetcy'a mind works. Damn it, where's that girl? Three operatives in succession were smitten with Miss Duffy Wyg and retired in disgrace to don their uniforms once more. When Powell finally reached her, she was at the # Ball, escorted and patrolled by Sam Jordan who gave her advice and counsel. She elected to talk. Powell to Staff: I called Ellery West down at Sacrament and lie supports her story. West did complain about gambling and Reich bought a psychsong to stop it. He picked up that mind-block by accident. What about that gimmick Reich used on the guards? Anil what about that girl? "As far as this strike is concerned," Reich told the executives of African Mines, Ltd., a subsidiary of Sacrament, "it's my opinion it's a ruse fomented by the D'Courtney gang, and I'm going to throw it back in their teeth." "I must disagree with you, Mr. Reich. Our attorney has been conferring with the strike committee. He's an Esper, of course. It seems that when the labor union negotiated the contract last year, they failed to express their demands clearly. That failure was a result of their decision not to employ Esper counsel for reasons of economy... a decision they now regret. That is the issue. I hardly think that the D'Courtney Cartel is -- " "You're not paid to think. Just listen to me. Tell personnel down at the mines to stage a beauty contest. They're going to elect Barbara D'Courtney the pin-up girl of the African Mines. They'll send a delegation to New York tc meet her and make the presentation to her and have a hell of a time; and they'll invite her back for a grand tour. If she accepts, what'll you bet the D'Courtney gang ends the strike?" TR I.N P.ich: Powell's .#I blundering. This time lie's after the gmimbk yon used on D'dmirtuyV bodyguards. You're perfectly sfe. His idea are crazy. Reich to T#: ##I get Qui.ard to make mire I'm afe on that: lnt weVe not out of this until we gel the girl. I've got to get her! In response to bitter criticism. Commissioner Crabbe revealed that Police Laboratories had discovered a new investigation technique which would break the D'Courtney Case within # hours. It involved photomagnetic analysis of the Visual Purple in the corpse's eyes which would yield a picture of the murderer. Rhodopsin researchers were being co-opted by the police. An anonymous person with a clabbered voice phoned Wilson imaine at Central Tech and casually attempted to purchase Dr. maine's interest in the Drake Estate for a small sum. The clabbered voice sounded too crafty to maine (who had never even heard of the Drake Estate) and he called Central's Law School. He was informed that the Drake Estate on Callisto, valued reopened for litigation. Dr. maine was a probable legatee. The psychologist jetted for Callisto one hour later. Powell lo staff: Indicating !# maine might be our man on the Hhodopsin angle, lie's the only Visual Physiologist to disappear after Crabbe'announcement. Pais the word to #ton to tail P'ini l Calli'M and handle it. What about that girl? Meanwhile, the slick side of the Rough  Smooth was quietly in operation. As The Gilt Corpse was entertaining Reich with her squawking flight, a bright young attorney from Sacrament's legal department was deftly decoyed to Paris and held there anonymously on a valid, if antiquated, vice charge. An astonishing double of that gentleman went to work for him. T# to Reich : Check your legal department. I can't. peep what's going on, lull something's fishy. This is dangerous. Reich brought in an Esper Efficiency Expert #, ostensibly for a general checkup, and located the substitution. Then he called the man with the clabbered voice who had multifarious connection s. A plaintiff suddenly appeared and sued the bright young attorney for barratry. That ended the substitute's connection with Sacrament painlessly and legitimately. Powell lo staff: We're being licked. Reich's slamming every door in our face... Rough  Smooth. Find out who's doiiig ihc legwork for him, and find lh.nl girl. While Alfred Finely was cavorting around Sacrament with his brand-new Mongolian face, one of Sacrament's young scientists. who had been badly hurt in r laboratory explosion, apparently left the hospital a week early and reported back for duty. He was heavily bandaged, but eager for work. It was the old Sacrament spirit. T# lo Reich: I've finally figured it. Powell isn't dumb. He's running his investigation on two levels. Don't pay any attention lo the one that shows. Watch out for the one underneath. I've peeped something about a hospital. Check il. Reich checked. It tool: three days and then he called the man with the clabbered voice. Sacrament vas burgled of # in laboratory platinum and the Restricted Room was destroyed in the process. The newly returned scientist was unmasked as an impostor, accused of complicity in the crime and handed over to the police. Powell lo staff: Which means we'll never prove Reich got that ll'iodopsiu stuff from his own lab. Flow in Cod's name did he unslick our trick? Can't we do anything on any level? Where's that girl? While Reich was laughing at the ludicrous search for Marcus try, his top brass was greeting the Continental Tax Examiner, an Esper #, who had arrived for a long delayed check on Sacrament's books. This despite the fact that Reich owned three Continental Senators. One of the new additions to the Examiner's squad was a peeper ghostwriter who prepared her chief's reports. She was an expert in official work...  mainly police work. TS to Reich: I'm auspicious of lhn Examiner's squad. Don't liiUe any chances. Reich smiled grimly and turned his company books over to the squad. Then he sent Hassop, his Code Chief, to Ampro on that promised vacation. Hassop obligingly carried a small spool of exposed film with his regular photographic equipment. That spool was Sacrament's secret books, cased in a thermite seal which would destroy all records unless it was opened properly. The only other copy was in Reich's invulnerable temporal phase safe at home. Powell to !lnff: Ami that juit about cuds everything for us. Have Hassop double-tailed Rough  Smooth. He's probably got vital evidence on him, so Reich's got him beautifully protected. Damn it, we're licked. I say it. Mr. Pectcy says it. You know it. Where is that missing girl?  ' the blood system, colored red for the arterial and blue for the venous, the two networks of the underworld and overworld grapevines spread. From Guild headquarters the word passed to instructors and students, to their families, friends, casual acquaintances. From Quizzard's Casino the word was passed from croupier to gamblers, confidence men, heavy racketeers, hustlers, steerers and suckers. On Friday morning, Fred Deal, Esper #, awoke, bathed, breakfasted and departed to his regular job. He was chief guard on the floor of the Mars Exchange Bnnk in Maiden Lane. Stopping to buy a new commutation ticket at the Pneumatique, he passed the time with Biddy MacNaughton, Esper #, on duty at the Information Desk. Biddy passed Fred the word about Barbara D' Courtney and Fred memorized the TP picture she flashed him. It was a picture framed in dollar signs. On Friday morning, Lonzo (Snim) Whittmaker was awakened by his landlady, Chooka Frood, with a loud scream for back rent. "You already makin' a frabby fortune with 'at loopy yella-head girl you pick up," Snim complained. "You runnin' a golmine withat spook stuff downinna basement. Whaddya want from me?" Chooka Frood pointed out to Snim that the yellow-headed girl was not crazy. She was a genuine medium. Chooka did not run rackets; she was a legitimate fortuneteller. If Snim did not come through with six weeks roof and rolls, Chooka would be able to tell his fortune without any trouble at all. Snim would be out on the asphalt. Snim arose. Already dressed, he descended into the city to get himself crowned. He inspected the charity stands he had set up on various comers... small steel coffers with slots in the top and signs on the side that read: end starvation on calusto. This was Snim's private charity and not very profitable. The coffers were empty. It was too early to run up to Quizzard's and work the sob on the more prosperous clients, and anyway there had been that tattoo difficulty with Keno. Snim touched his new ear delicately and tried to sneak a ride uptown on the Pneumatique. He was thrown out by the peeper change clerk and walked. It was a long haul to Jerry Church's hockshop, but Snim had a gold and pearl pocket-pianino up there and he was hoping to cadge Church into advancing another sovereign on It He had to get himself crowned today. Church was absent on business and the clerk could do nothing for Snim. Snim told the sob to the clerk about hi landlady crowning herself every day with the new spook-shill she was using in her palmracket and still trying to milk him when she, was rolling. The clerk would not weep even for the price of coffee. Snim departed. When Jerry Church returned to the hockshop for a brief timeout in his wild quest for Reich, the clerk reported Snim's visit and conversation. What the clerk did not report, Church peeped. He tottered to the phone and called Reich. Reich could not be located. Church called Keno Quizzard. Meanwhile, Snim was growing a little desperate. He trudged downtown to Maiden Lane and cased the banks in that pleasant esplanade around Bomb Inlet. He was not too bright and made the mistake of selecting the Mars Exchange for a con. It looked dowdy and provincial. Snim had not learned that it is only the powerful and efficient institutions that can afford to look secondrate. Snim entered the bank, crossed the crowded main floor to the row of desks opposite the tellers cages, and stole a handful of deposit slips and a pen. As Snim left the bank, Fred Deal glanced at him once, motioned wearily to his staff, then pointed to Snim who was disappearing through the front door. "He's getting ready to pull the ' Adjustment ' routine. Let him go ahead with it. We'll pick him up after he's got the money and get a conviction." Unaware of this, Snim lurked outside the bank, watching the tellers' cages closely. A citizen was making a big withdrawal at Cage Z. This was the fish. Snim hastily removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and tucked the pen in his ear. As the fish came out of the bank, counting his money, Snim slipped behind him, darted up and tapped the man's shoulder. "Excuse me, sir," he said briskly. "I'm from Cage Z. I'm afraid our teller made a mistake and shortcounted you. Will you come back for the adjustment, please?" Snim waved his sheaf of slips, swept the money from the fish's fins and turned to enter the bank. As the surprised citizen followed him, Snim slipped into the crowd and headed for the side exit. He would be out and away before the fish realized he'd been skinned. It was at this moment that a rough hand grasped Snim's neck. He was swung around face to face with a bank guard. In one chaotic instant, Snim contemplated fight, flight, bribery, pleas, Kingston Hospital, the bitch Chooka Frood and her yellow-headed ghost girl, his pocket-pianino and a man named Strenn who owned it. Then he collapsed and wept. The guard flung him to another uniform and shouted: "Take him, boys. I've just made myself a mint!" "Is there a reward for this little guy, Fred?" "Not for him. For what's in his head. I've got to call the Guild." At nearly the same moment late Friday afternoon, Ben Reich and Preston Powell received the identical information: "fjirl answering to the description of Ihirbnra D'Coiirtiicy can be found in Chooka Frood Fortune Act, # UaNlion West Side.' X Siege of New York, Bastion West Side was a war memorial. Its ten tom acres were to have been maintained in perpetuity as a denunciation of the insanity that produced the final war. But the final war, as usual, proved to be the next-to-the final. Number # was an evicerated ceramics plant. A succession of blazing explosions had burst among the stock of thousands of chemical glazes, fused them, and splashed them into a wild splotchy reproduction of a Lunar crater. This was the Rainbow House of Chooka Frood. The top floors had been patched and subdivided into a warren of cells so complicated and confused that a man could slip from cell to cell while the floors were being searched, and easily evade the most painstaking cordon. This unusual complexity netted Chooka large profits each year. The lower floors were given over to Chooka's famous Frab Joint, where vice was served to order, either grossly or subtly. But the cellar of Chooka Frood's house was the phenomenon that had inspired her most lucrative industry. It was worth the hazardous trip to Bastion West Side. You threaded your way through twisting streets until you reached the streak of jagged orange that pointed to the door of Chooka's Rainbow House. At the door you were met by an obscenely solemn person in XXth Century formal costume who asked: "Frab or Fortune?" You replied "Fortune" and were conducted to a sepulchral door where you paid a gigantic fee and were handed a phosphor candle. Holding the candle aloft, you walked down a deep stone staircase. Around the rim of the cellar, on stone benches, sat the other future-seekers, each holding his phosphor caudle. You joined the throbbing, burning silence and sat quietly, your candle joining the constellation of stars, until at last there came the high chime of a silver bell. Clothed in a cascade of flaming music, Chooka Frood entered the cellar and paced to the center of the floor. "And there, of course, the illusion ends," Powell said to himse lf. He stared at Chooka's notato noce, flat eyes. "Maybe she can act." he muttered hopef'Ulv. Chooka stopped in the nvddle oi the floor, much like a frowzv Medusa, then lifted her arm'in what v ir '.ended lor a swe ' 'g mystic gvlure. : can't." ' r  y U d- -- #I . "I am come here to you," Chooka intoned in a hoarse voice, "to help you look into the deeps of your hearts. Look down into your hearts, you which are looking for revenge on a man named Zerlan from Mars... for the love of a redeyed woman of Callisto... for the wealth of that stingy uncle in Paris "Why, damn me! The woman's a peeper!" Chooka stiffened. Her mouth hung open. "You're receiving me,  aren't you, Chooka Frood?" The answer came in frightened fragments. It was obvious that Chooka Frood's natural ability had never been trained. "Who? Which is... you?" As carefully as if he were communicating with an infant #rd, Powell soelled it out: " Name -- Preston Powell. Occupation -- Police Prefect. Intent -- to question a girl named Barbara D' Courtney, I have heard she's participating in your act." Powell transmitted a picture of the girl. It was pathetic the way Chooka tried to block. "Get... out! Out of here!" " Why haven't you come to the Gu : t Why aren't you in contact with vovr own o a oole?" "Goddam peeper. Get out." "You're a goddam peeper, too. Why lv'en'f you ht us train you? Whr ' :'d of life this for vou? ' a # work waiting for you, Cl. j oka" "Real money?" Powell repressed the wave of exasperation that rose up in him. It was not exasperation with Chooka. It was anger at the relentless force of progress and evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them. "We' #I talk about that later, Chooka. Where's the girl?" " There is no girl." "Peep the customers with me. That old goat obsessed with the red-eyed woman..." Powell explored gently. " He's been here before. He's waiting for Barbara D 'Courtney to come in. You dress her in sequins. You bring her on after about half an hour. He likes her looks. She does some kind of trance routine to music. Her dress is slit open to the thigh and he likes that." "He's crazy. I never -- " "And the woman who was loused by a man named Zerlan? She's seen the girl often, believes in her. Where's the girl, Chooka ?" "No!" "I see. Upstairs. Where upstairs, Chooka? You can't misdirect a I st. Maybe if you'd let the Guild train you -- fourth room on the left of the angle turn. That's a complicated labyrinth you've got up there, Chooka. Let's have it once again to make sure... Helpless and mortified. Chooka suddenly shrieked: "Get out of here, you lousy cop!" "Excuse it, please," said Powell. "I'm on my way." He arose and left the room. curred within the second it took Reich to step from the eighteenth to the nineteenth step on his way down to Chooka Frood's rainbow cellar. Reich heard Chooka's" furious screech and Powell's reply. He turned and shot up the stairs to the main floor. As he jostled past the door attendant, he thrust a sovereign into the man's hand and hissed: "I wasn't here. Understand?" '"No one is ever here, sir." He made a quick circuit of the Frab rooms. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. He brushed by the girls and other creatures who solicited him, then locked himself into the phone booth and punched BD#. Church's anxious face appeared on the screen. "We're in a jam. Powell's here." "Oh, my God!" "Where in hell is Quizzard?" "I thought he'd be there." "Powell was in the cellar, peeping Chooka. You can bet Quizzard wasn't there. Where in hell is he?" "I don't know, Ben. He went down with his wife and -- " "Powell must have located the girl. I've got maybe five minutes to beat him to her. Quizzard was supposed to do that for me." "He must be upstairs in the coop." "Is there a quick way to get up to the coop? A shortcut I can use to beat Powell to her?" "If Powell peeped Chooka, he peeped the shortcut." "Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was concentrating on the girl. It's a chance I'll have to take." "Behind the main stairs. There's a marble bas-relief. Turn the woman's head to the right. The bodies separate and there's a door to a vertical pneumatique." Reich hung up, left the booth, found the bas-relief, twisted the woman's head savagely and watched the bodies swing apart. A steel door appeared. He yanked the door open and stepped into the open shaft. Instantly a metal plate jolted up against his soles and with a hiss of air pressure he was lofted to the top floor. A magnetic catch held the plate while he opened the shaft door and stepped out of the pneumatique. He found himself in a corridor that slanted up at an angle of thirty degrees and leaned to the left. It was floored with canvas. The ceiling glowed at intervals with small flickering globes of radon. The walls were lined with doors, none of them numbered. "Quizzard!" Reich shouted. , There was no answer. Reich ran halfway up the corridor, and then at a venture tried a door. It opened to a narrow cubby entirely filled with an oval bed. Reich crawled across the foam mattress to a door on the opposite side, thrust it open and fell through. He found himself on a landing. A flight of steps led down to a round anteroom rimmed with doors. "Quizzard!" he shouted again. There was a muffled reply. Reich spun on his heels, ran to a door and pulled it open. A woman with eyes dyed red by plastic surgery was standing just inside and Reich blundered against her. She burst into unaccountable laughter. Reich backed away, reached for the door, apparently missed it and seized the knob of another, for he did not come out into the circular foyer. He found himself staring up into the angry face of Chooka Frood. "What the hell are you doing in my room?" Chooka screamed. Reich shot to his feet. "Where is she?" "Get out of here, Ben Reich." "Barbara D' Courtney -- where is she?" Chooka turned her head and yelled: "Magda!" The red-eyed woman came into the room. She held a TP scrambier in her hand and she was still laughing; but the gun was trained on his skull. "I want the girl, Chooka, before Powell gets her." "Get him out of here, Magda!" Reich dubbed the woman across the eyes with the back of his hand. She fell backward, dropping the gun, and into a corner, still laughing, Reich ignored her. He picked up the scrambler and aimed it at Chooka's temple. "Where's the girl?" "You go to hell!" Reich pulled the trigger back into first notch. The radiation charged Chooka's nervous system with a low induction current. She stiffened and began to tremble, but she still shook her head. Reich yanked the trigger back to second notch. Chooka's body was thrown into a break-bone ague. "Third notch is death notch," he growled. "Where is she?" Chooka was almost completely paralyzed. "Through... door," she croaked. "Fourth room... left... after turn." Reich dropped her and let her fall in a heap alongside the laughing red-eyed woman. He ran out of the bedroom, came to a corkscrewed ramp. He mounted it. took a sharp turn, stopped at the fourth room on the left. He thrust open the door and entered. There was an empty bed, a single dresser, an empty closet, a single chair. "Gulled!" he snarled. The bed showed no sign of use. Neither did the closet. He yanked at a dresser drawer that was partly open. It contained a frost white silk gown and a stained steel object that looked like a malignant flower. It was the murder weapon. "My God!" Reich breathed. He snatched up the gun and inspected it. Its chambers . still contained the cartridges without slugs. The one that had blown the top of Craye D'Courtney's head out was still in place under the hammer. "It isn't Demolition yet." Reich muttered. "Not by a damned sight." He folded up the revolver and thrust it into his pocket. At that moment he heard a distant clabbered laugh. Quizzard's laugh. Reich stepped quickly to the twisted ramp and followed the sound of the laughter to a plush door hung on brass hinges and set deep in the wall. Gripping the scrambler at the alert with the trigger set for Death Notch, Reich pulled open the door. He was in a small round room, walled and ceilinged in midnight velvet. The floor was a one-way mirror that gave a clear uninterrupted view of a boudoir on the floor below. It was Chooka's Voyeur Chamber. chair with the girl in his arms, his blind eyes staring, Reich came to the appalled conclusion that the woman's fall was no accident; for Quizzard suddenly dropped. The girl tumbled out of his arms and fell into the chair. There was no doubt that Powell had accomplished this on a TP level, and for the first time in their war Reich was physically afraid. Again he aimed the scrambler, this time at Powell's head as the peeper walked to the chair. Powell said, "Are you all right, Miss D'Courtney?" When the girl failed to answer, he bent down and stared into her blank, placid face. He touched her arm and In the boudoir, Quizzard sat in a deep chair, his blind eyes blazing. The D'Courtney girl was perched on his lap, wearing an astonishing slit gown of sequins, evidently the costume the girl wore for Chooka's fortune act. She sat quietly, her yellow hair smooth, her deep dark eyes staring placidly into space. "How'does she look?" Quizzard asked a small faded woman who stood across the boudoir from him, with her back against the wall and an incredible expression of agony on her face. It was Quizzard's wife. "Lost," his wife answered in a faint voice. "Dead." Quizzard fumbled for the girl's head and drew it down. He kissed her passive mouth. "She doesn't look dead now, does she?" "She doesn't know what's happening." "She knows," Quizzard shouted. "She isn't that far gone. If I only had my eyes!" "I'm your eyes, Keno." "Then look for me. Tell me!" Reich cursed and aimed the scrambler at Quizzard's head. Then Powell entered the boudoir. The woman saw him at once. "Run, Keno! Run!" She thrust herself from the wall and darted toward Powell, her hands clawing for his eyes. Then she fell prone and never moved. As Quizzard surged up from the repeated: "Are you all right? Do you need help?" At the word "help" the girl whipped upright in the chair in a listening attitude. Then she thrust out her legs and leaped from the chair. She ran past Powell in a straight line, stopped abruptly and reached out as though grasping a doorknob. She thrust an imaginary door open and burst forward, yellow hair flying, dark eyes wide with alarm... a lightning flash of wild beauty. "Father!" she screamed. "For God's sake! Father!" She ran forward, stopped short and backed away. She darted to the left, stopped and struggled with imaginary arms that held her. She fought and screamed, her eyes still fixed, then stiffened and clapped her hands to her ears as though a violent sound had pierced them. She fell forward to her knees and crawled... Then she stopped, snatched at something on the floor, and remained crouched on her knees. With sickening certainty. Reich knew she had relived the death of her father. She had relived it for Powell. And if he had peeped her... Powell went to the girl and raised her from the floor. She arose as gracefully as a dancer, as serenely as a somnambulist. The peeper put his arm around her and took her to the door. Reich followed him all the way with the muzzle of the scrambler, waiting for the best shooting angle. He was invisible. He, could win safety with a shot. Powell opened the door, then suddenly looked up. "Go ahead," Powell called. "One shot for the both of us. Go ahead!" He stared up at the invisible Reich, waiting, hating, daring. Reich turned his face away from the man who could not see him. Powell took the docile girl through the door and closed it quietly behind him, and Reich knew he had permitted safety to slip through his fingers. XI a lens distorted so that it can only photograph over and over the scene that twisted it into shock. Conceive of a bit of recording crystal, traumatically warped so that it can only hear the same terrifying phrase. "She's in hysterical recall," Dr. Johnny Jeems of Kingston Hospital explained to Powell and Mary Noyes in the living room of Powell's house. "She responds to the key word 'help' and relives one experience..." "The death of her father," Powell said. "Oh? I see. Outside of that ... catatonia." "Permanent?" Mary Noyes asked. Jeems looked surprised and indignant. He was one of the brighter young men of Kingston Hospital and fanatically devoted to his work. "In this day and age? Nothing is permanent except death, Miss Noyes, and up at Kingston we've started working on that. Investigating death from the nosogenic point of view, we've actually -- " "Later, Johnny," Powell interrupted. "No lectures tonight. Can I peep her?" Jeems considered. "No reason why not. I gave her the Deja Eprouve Series for catatonia. That shouldn't get in the way." "What's the Deja Eprouve Series?" Mary asked. "A great new treatment," Jeems said excitedly. "Patient goes into catatonia. It's flight from reality. The conscious mind wishes it had never been born. It attempts to revert back to the foetal stage. You understand?" Mary nodded. "So far." "We use Deja Eprouve. That's psychiatric French for 'something already experienced, already tried.' Many patients, on the basis of the wish, feel that an act of experience in which they never engaged has happened. We synthesize this Deja Eprouve for the patient. We send the conscious mind back to the womb and let it pretend it's being born all over again. We make the catatonic wish come true. Got that?' "Got it." "On the surface, consciously, the patient goes through development all over again at an accelerated rate... infancy, childhood, adolescence and finally maturity." "You mean Barbara D'Courtney is going to be a baby, learn to speak, walk?" "Right. Takes about three weeks. By the time she catches up with herself, she'll be ready to accept the reality she's trying to escape. She'll have grown up to it, so to speak. This is only on the conscious level. Below that, she won't be touched. You can peep her all you like. Only trouble is she must be pretty scared down there. You'll have trouble getting what you want. Of course, that's your specialty. You'll know what to do." Jeems stood up abruptly. "Got to get back to the shop." He made for the front door. "Always delighted to be called in by peepers. I can't understand the recent hostility toward you people... He was gone. "That was a significant parting note." "What'd he mean, Pres?" " Peepers haven't been doing business with enough normals , We keep to ourselves too much. That starts economic pressures and prejudices. Have to bring that up in Council later. Bring Barbara down, Mary." Mary brought the girl downstairs and seated her on the low severe dais. (Powell had recently reconverted his decor to XXth Century Swedish.) Barbara sat like a calm statue. Mary had dressed her in blue leotards and combed her blonde hair back, tying it into a foxtail with a blue ribbon. " Lovely outside; mangled inside. Damn Reich!" " What about him?" " was so mad at Chooka F rood's coop, I handed it to that red slug Quizzard and hi s wife." " What did you do to Quizzard P" " Basic neuro-shock. Come up to the Lab sometime and we'll show you. If you make #st, we'll teach you. It's like the scrambler, but psychogenic." " Fatal ?" " Forgotten the Pledge? Of course not." "And you peeped Reich through the floor? How?" "TP reflection. The Voyeur Chamber wasn't wired for sound. It had open acoustical ducts. Reich's mistake. He was transmitting down the channel and I swear I was hoping he had the gut' to shoot. I was going to blast hit with a Basic that would have ma r ' y case history." " Why didn't he shoot?" "He had every reason to kill us. He thought he was safe, didn't know about the Basic, even though Quizzard's Decline  Fall jolted him. But he couldn't." "Afraid?" "Reich's no coward. He just couldn't. Unconscious inhibition of some sort, but I don't know what. Maybe next time it'll be different. That's why I'm keeping Barbara D'Courtney in my house. T his is one place where she'll be safe." "She'll be safe in Kingston Hospital." "But not quiet enough for the work I've got to do." "She's got the detailed picture of the murder locked up in her hysteria. When I've got it, I've got Reich." Mary arose. "Exit Mary Noyes." "Sit down, peeper! Why d'you think I called you?" "No, you don't Mr. Powell." Mary burst into laughter. "So that's it. You want me for a chaperone. Victorian word, isn't? So are you, Pres. Positively atavistic." " I brand that as a lie. I'm known as the most progressive -- " "And what's that image? Knights of the Round Table. Sir Galahad Powell. And there's something underneath that. I -- " Suddenly she stopped laughing and turned pale. "What'd you dig?" " Forget it, Pres. And don't peep me for it. It you can't reach it yourself, you'd better not get it second-hand. Especially from me." He looked at her curiously for a moment. " All right, Mary. Then we'd better go to work." To Barbara D'Courtney he said: "Help, Barbara." Instantly she whipped upright on the dais in a listening attitude, and he probed delicately... Sensation of bedclothes... Voice calling dimly... " Whose voice, Barbara?" Deep in the preconscious she answered : "Who is that?" "A friend, Barbara ." "There's no one. No one. I'm alone." And she was alone, racing down a corridor to thrust a door open and burst into an orchid room to see -- "What, Barbara?" "A man. Two men." "Who?" "Go away. Please go away. I don't like voices. There's a voice screaming in my ears..." She was screaming while terror made her dodge from a dim figure that clutched at her to keep her from her father. " What is your father doing, Barbara ?" "He -- no. you don't belong here. There's only the three of us. Father and me and -- " A flash of the face. " Look again, Barbara. Sleek head. Wide eyea. Small straight nose. Small sensitive mouth. Like a scar. Is that the man? Look at the picture. Is that the man?" "Yes. Yes." And then all was gone. She was kneeling again, placid, doll-like. Powell wiped perspiration from his face and took the girl back to the dais. Hysteria cushioned the emotional impact for her. He was reliving her terror, naked and unprotected. "It was Ben Reich, Mary. Did you get the picture, too?" " Couldn't stay in long enough, Pres. Had to run for cover." "It was Reich, all right. Only question is, how in hell did he kill her father? What did he use? Why didn't old D' Courtney put up a fight to defend himself? Have to try again. I hate to do this to her..." " hate you to do this to yourself, Pres." " Have to." He took a deep breath and said: "Help. Barbara." Again she whipped upright on the dais in a listening attitude. " Not so fast. There's plenty of time." "You again?" " Remember me, Barbara?" "No, I don't know you. Get out." "But I'm part of you, Barbara. We're running down the corridor together. See? We're opening the door together. It's so much easier together. We help each other." "We?" "Fes, Barbara, you and I. When you talk to yourself when you're alone, you talk to me. That's who I am." "Look at father! For pity's sake, help me !' She knelt again, placid, dolllike. Powell felt a hand under his arm and realized he was not supposed to be kneeling too. The body before him slowly disappeared, the orchid room disappeared; and Mary Noyes was straining to raise him. "You first this time," she said grimly. He shook his head. " All right, Sir Galahad. Cool a while." Mary raised the girl and led her to the dais. Then she returned to Powell. " Ready for help now, or don't you think it's manly?" "The word is virile. Don't waste your time trying to help me up. I need brain power " "W hat'd you peep?" "D ' Courtney wanted to be murdered." " The hell you say!" " The hell I don't. I've got to see D' Courtney's M.D. first thing in the morning." S AM kins, E.M.D. #, received # per hour of analysis, self with charity work. He was one of the burning lights of the Guild's long-range education plan, and leader of the Environment Clique which believed that telepathic ability was not a congenital characteristic, but a latent quality which could be developed by suitable training. He invited everyone in the low income brackets to bring their problems to him, and while he was ironing them out he was carefully attempting to foster telepathy in his patients. So far, the results had been the discovery of # Latent Espers, which was under the average of the Guild Institute interviews, but Sam was undiscouraged. Powell found him charging through the garden, vigorously destroying flowers under the impression that he was cultivating. He was snorting and shouting at plants and patients alike. "Damn it, don't you tell me that's a zinnia. Don't I know a weed when I ee it? Hand me the rake, Bernard." A small man in black handed him the rake and said : "My name is Walter, Dr. kins." kins grunted, tearing out a clump of green that was neither weed nor zinnia, but marigold. "Why in hell are you running away from Bernard? Who taught you that semantic loophole?" "I was hoping you'd tell me, Dr. kins," Walter replied. "You remind me of Alice Bright. Where is that makebelieve slut anyway?" A pretty red-headed girl jostled through the crowd and smirked; "Here I am, Dr. kins." "Well, don't preen yourself because I called you a name." kins v' frowned at her and continued on the TP level: " 'I'm a woman,' you tell yourself. "Therefore, men desire me. It's enough to know that thousands of men could have me if I'd let them. That makes me real.' Well, it doesn't. It's no substitie for living -- nothing is." kins waited impatiently for a response, but the girl merely postured before him. Finally he burst out: " Didn't any of you hear what I told her?" " I did. teacher." "Oh, you. Hi, Pres. How about this crowd of dead heads? Too lazy to peep a simple question." " Lay off that plant, Sam. It's a tomato "It's a weed." "Sam, you busted botany our first year. I'm telling you it's tomato ." Powell turned to the patients. "What kind of plant is that?" "Tomato." they said. Sam pulled it up. "I'm allergic to tomatoes." he announced with an air of having had the final word. " What's on your mind, Pres?" " When you get a chance I'd like to ask a couple of questions about a dead patient." "Who?" "D' Courtney. Our Mr. Peetcy is very curious about him" "Oh. Give me another half hour with my flock. Say, young Chervil's here, waiting to see me too. Anything wrong in the family? He seemed real upset. Go talk to him." One of (kins' flock flinched and Sam turned on the man excitedly. "You heard that, didn't you, Hopkins?" "No, sir. I didn't hear nothing. "Then why did you jump?" "A bug bit me." "It did not!" fS'kins roared. "There are no bugs in my garden. You heard Mr. Powell." Young Gaily Chervil answered from the house and Powell left the garden. kins yelled after him: "Powell, you've discovered the answer. We've got to yell loud enough for these lazybones." And then he began a frightful racket: Powell found young Gaily pacing distractedly before the F nch windows facing the garden. He looked up gloomily. "Hi, Mr. Powell." "Pip, Gaily." "Pop, Mr. Powell. Also Bim, Bam and ( censored )." From the garden kins complained: "Stop broaden mg. You're jamming the band. T 'lk." Powell grinned. "How you iixed for words. Gaily?" "They fail me." "Trouble?" Gaily nodded. "You belie ' Dr. (kins?" "Not about flowers." "I mean his idea about everybody being an Esper." "We'd all like to believe him. He hasn't convinced anybody yet." "He's got to be right," Gaily muttered. "That girl I met at the Beaumont party the night D'Courtney was killed -- " "Duffy Wyg? What about her?" Gaily burst out: "I'm going to marry her." "Oh? She isn't a peeper." "Dr. kins says everybody is." "Moral support, eh?" "Are you against it, Mr. Powell?" "The Guild is, Gaily. You know why. Samkins is wrong. Guild statrtics show that when peepers marry non-peepers, few of their children are peepers. It's like blue eyes... a recessive inherited characteristic. We can't take a chance on losing it." "That's the Guild answer, Mr. Powell, but I asked you. Are you against it?" "She's a lovely girl, Gaily. Sharp, smart, talented. That's why I'm against it." "That's why?" "For her sake, not yours. Peepers have married outside. The marriages always fail because they ar 't based on equality. Living with a peeper makes an outsider feel crippled. Puffy Wyg would end up hating you. loathing herself: no longer sharp, smart, talented, lovely. If you love her. Gaily, don't destroy her. Let her go" kins came bouncing into the room. " It's a great discovery, Powell. Sensational. They heard me. My brains are hoarse, but, by God, they heard me." " How many specific responses did you get?" "Well, none, but that's because they're stubborn. Ashamed to be peepers. Now, Gaily, what's with you? Spit it out. I've got a schedule." Young Chervil hesitated. The TP band crackled with blocks, releases and adjustments. Finally it came: " Nothing in particular, sir. Just a friendly call " "Friendly? Then why that expression?" After Gaily had evaded the question and left, Powell painted the picture. kins was properly apologetic, but unimpressed by Chervil's courage. Fifteen years of happy marriage make a man unsympathetic to the trials of callow romance. "He'll fall in love with a peeper and live happily ever after. Now what's with D' Courtney?" Powell presented the problem. Reich had definitely murdered D'Courtney. Powell did not know why or how; but one point was clear and perplexing and would have to be cleared up for Mr. Peetcy. Reich had thrust the murder weapon into D'Courtney's mouth and blown out the back of his head with it. That was virtually impossible with the killer struggling with the daughter on one hand and the victim on the other... unless the victim was not trying to defend himself. " see. The answer is yes. He was probably happy to die." "How? Why?" "He was regressing under emotional exhaustion and on the verge of suicide. He came here from his home on Mars only because I raised such a fuss that it was easier for him to give in. Reich's little gift must have come as a welcome surprise ." "Why was D' Courtney set on suicide ?" "If I knew, he wouldn't have been. Reich turned my case into a failure. I could have saved :iP' Courtney." " You made any guesses why D' Courtney's pattern was crumbling?" "Yes. He was trying to take drastic action to escape a deep guilt." "Guilt about what?' "His child." "Barbara? How? Why?" "I don't know. He was fighting symbols of abandonment, desertion, shame, loathing, cowardice. We were Joing to work on that That's all l know." "Could Reich have figured and counted on all this? That's some thing Mr. Peetcy is going to fuss about." "He might have guessed -- impossible. He'd need expert help to -- " "Hold it, Sam. You've got something hidden under that. I'd like to get it if I can..." "Go ahead. I'm wide open." "Easy now... Association with festivity... Party... Conversation at my party. Last month. Gus T#, an expert himself, but needing help on a similar patient of his own, he said. If T# needed help, you reasoned Reich certainly would need help." Powell was so upset he spoke aloud. "Well, how about that, peeper?" "How about what?" "Gus T# was at the Beaumont party the night D'Courtney was killed. He came with Reich, but I kept hoping -- " "Pres, I don't believe it. r ' "Neither did I, but there it is. Little Gus was Reich's expert. He pumped you and turned it over to a killer. What price the Galen Pledge now?" "What price Demolition?" kins answered fiercely. From somewhere inside the house came an announcement from Sally  : kins: "Pres. PI e." Powell loped down a toward the phone alcove. H' iw on's face on the screen. "Lucky I caught you, ' 'ss. We've got six hours." "Take it from the top, on." "Your Rhodopsin man, Dr. Wilson maine,  s back front Callisto. Now a man of property by courtesy of Ben Reich. I came back with him. He's in town for six hours to settle his affairs, and then he rockets back to Callisto to live on his new estate forever." "Damn this phone. Who can get a picture with words? Will # maine talk?" "Would I call you if he would? He's grateful to Reich who (I am now quoting) generously stepped out of the legal picture in favor of Dr. Jmaine and justice. If you want anything, bring your grapnel."  A ND this," Powell said, "is our Guild Laboratory, Dr. #maine. H #maine was impressed. The entire top floor of the Guild building was devoted to laboratory research. It was a circular floor, almost a thousand feet in diameter, domed with a double layer of controlled quartz that could give graded illumination from full to total darkness, including monochrome light to within one-tenth of an angstrom. "I haven't much time, Mr. Powell," #maine said. "Of course not. Very kind of you to give us an hour. That may be enough for you to help us." "Anything to do with D'Courtney?" # ma ' ne as ked. "Who? Oh, the murder. Whatever put that into your mind?" "I've been hounded," # ma ' nc said grimly. "We're asking for research guidance, not information on a murder case. What's murder to a scientist?" #maine relaxed a little. "Very true. You have only to look at this laboratory to realize that. And I won't be peeped?" "Dr. #maine," Powell said in hurt tones. "I gave you the word of a scientist." "Of course." # ma  ne pointed to a bench. "What's all that? Symbiosis?" "Let's have a look, shall we?" Powell took #maine' s arm. To the entire laboratory he broadcast: " Stand by, peepers! Here's a guy that's got to be buttered. He specializes in visual physiology and he's got information  want him to volunteer. Kindly fake all kinds obscure-type visuah problems and beg for help." They came by in droves. A researcher, actually working on a problem of a transitor which would record the TP impulse, hastily invented the fact that TP transmission was monochrome and humbly requested enlightenment. A pair of pretty girls, engrossed in the infuriating deadend of long-range telepathic transmission, demanded of Dr. #maine why transmission of visual images always fell off ten angstroms, which it did not. The Japanese team, experts on the Galen Node, center of TP perceptivity, insisted that the Galen Node was in circuit with the Optic Synapse (it wasn't within two centimeters of same) and besieged Dr. maine with specious proofs. At I :# p. m., Powell said : "I'm sorry to interrupt, but your hour is finished and you've got important business to -- " "Quite all right," ymaine interrupted. "Now, my dear doctor, if you would try a transec-. tio'n of the optic -- " At #:#, a buffet luncheon was served without interrupting the feast of reason. Dr. maine, flushed and ecstatic, confessed that he loathed the idea of being rich on Callisto. No scientists there. He also confided to Powell how he had inherited his estate. Seemed that Craye D'Courtney originally owned it. The old Reich (Ben's father) must have swindled it one way or another, and placed it in his wife's name. When she died, it went to her son. Ben Reich must have had conscience qualms, for he threw . it into open court, and Wilson Jmaine somehow came up with it. "And he must have plenty more on his conscience," maine said. "The things I saw when I worked for him! But all these financiers arc crooks. You agree?" "I disagree about Ben Reich," Powell replied, striking the noble note. "I admire him very much." "Of course,"  ma  ne agreed hastily. "After all, he does have a conscience." Powell became a fellow-conspirator and captivated y # mame with a grin. "As fellow scientists we can deplore: but as men of the world we can only praise." "You do understand." maine shook Powell's hand effusively. At #:#, Dr.  ma ' ne informed the polite Japanese that he would gladly volunteer his most secret work on Visual Purple, in effect, handing on the torch to the next generation. His eyes moistened and his throat choked, with sentiment as he spent twenty minutes carefully describing the Rhodopsin Ionizer he had developed for Sacrament. At #:#, the Guild scientists escorted Dr. maine by launch to his Callisto rocket. They filled his stateroom with gifts and flowers; they filled his ears with grateful testimonials, and he took off with the pleasant conviction that he had materially benefited science and never betrayed that fine, generous patron, Mr. Benjamin Reich. room on all fours, crawling energetically. She had just been fed and her face was eggy. "Hajaja," she said. "Haja." "Mary! Come quick! She's talking! Barbara's talking!" "No!" Mary ran in from the kitchen. " What'd she say?" " She called me dada." "Haja," said Barbara. Mary blasted him with scorn. " She said haja." She returned to the kitchen. "She meant dada. Is it her fault if she's too young to articulate?" Powell knelt alongside Barbara. "Say dada. baby. Dada?" "Haja," Barbara replied with an enchanting drool. Powell gave it up. He went down past the conscious level to the preconscious. "Hello, Barbara ." "You again?" "Remember me? I'm the guy that pries into your private little turmoil down here. We fight it out together ." "Just the two of us?" "Just the two of us. Do you know who you are? Would you like to know why you're buried way down here in this solitary existence ?" "Tell me." "You were born. You had a mother and a father. You grew up into a lovely girl with blonde hair and dark eyes and a graceful Ggure. You traveled from Mars to Earth with your father and you were -- " "No. There's no one but you." "#'n really sorry, but we must go through the agony again." "I don't know what you mean, but please... please! Just the two of us alone together in the darkness." " There was your father in the other room, the orchid room, and suddenly we heard something..." Powell took a deep breath and cried: "Help, Barbara!" Sensation of bedclothes, Cool floor under running feet and the endless corridor until at last they burst through the door into the orchid room and screamed and dodged the startled grasp of Ben Reich while he raised something to Father's mouth. Raised what? Hold that image. Photograph it. Christ! That horrible muffled explosion. The worshipped figure crumpling unbelievably. They moaned and crawled across the floor to snatch a malignant steel flower from the waxen -- Powell found himself dragged to his feet by Mary Noyes. The air was crackling with indignation. "Cant I leave you alone for a minute ?" " What's the time, Mary?' "#:#. I came in and found you two kneeling there" Image of angry fists. "I know. But I got what I was after. It was a gun, Mary. Ancient explosive weapon. Clear picture. T ake a look..." " Where'd he get it? Museum ?" "I don't think so. I'm going to play a long shot, kill two birds." Powell lurched to the phone and dialed BD-#. Presently, Jeremy Church's twisted face appeared on the screen. "Hi, Jerry." "Hello. Powell." Cautious. Guarded. "Did Gus T# buy a gun from you, Jerry?" "Gun?" "Explosive weapon. XXth Century style. Used in the D'Courtney murder." "No!" "Yes! I think Gus T# is our killer, Jerry. Mr. Peetcy thinks so too. I'd like to bring the picture of the gun over and check if he bought it from you." Powell hesitated and then stressed the next words gently: "It'd be a big help, Jerry, and I'll be extremely appreciative. Extremely. Wait for me. I'll be over in half an hour." Powell hung up. He looked at Mary. Image of an eye winking. " That ought to give little Gus time to hustle over." " Why Gus? When did Peetcy come up with that notion? I thought Ben Reich was -- " She caught the picture Powell had sketched in at kins' house. "J see. Church sold the gun to Reich." "Maybe. He does run a hockshop, and that's next thing to a museum." "So you're playing T# and Church against each other." "And both against Reich. We've failed on the objective level . From here on it's got to be peeper tricks ." "But suppose you can't play them against Reich. What if they call Reich in?" " They can't. We started Keno Quizzard running for his life, and Reich's out sdmewhere trying to cut him off and gag him." " You really are a thief, Pres!" "Why, thank you, Mary. That's a lovely compliment." A single limited-radiation lamp burned on the counter, sending out its sphere of soft light to a radius of two feet. As the three men spoke, they leaned in and out of the illumination. "No," Powell said sharply. "You two peepers may consider it an insult to have words addressed to you. I consider it evidence of good faith. While I'm talking. I'm not peeping." Not necessarily, T# answered. His gnome face popped into the light. "You've been known to finesse, Powell." "Not now. What I want from you two, I want objectively. I'm working on a murder. Peeping isn't going to do me any good." "What do you want, Powell?" Church cut in. "I know you didn't sell the gun to Gus. You sold it to Ben Reich." T#'s face came back into the .VsSSerfe.!  Wonderful news! This new policy covers everyone from infancy to age  # -- with cash benefits so surprising they should have instant opncal  for you. Think of it! When sickness Or accident sends you to the ho-' i,#  just as long, in fact, as il's necessary to stay in the hospital. What a  avoid going into debt! The money is paid directly to you -- il's  # #.  the company pays you welcome cash when you need it most for .Sounds unbelievable -- bu holders in every sute, and with assets of ji #,I aft, I as of January l, #. o' V, '#et'L tV.'T i .ss"?"! of h" d ' Hdspiial'Oeparffnef , memberofthe family may return to the hospital for sickness dr , accident as many times in the year as necessary without payadditi ' for this outstanding new Family Protection! B rVaY e fotecce  ,q d? ca-oce'-fiOvets t cowd-v dase., . --  -- , -- .n # ,b f # ice so  r : c ,oAf # eReC"'  adult # lo # and for a E ev # w # onlyI Vic a day. l or .bihlren ft #'"' i" i .oh" ec" . i  c.rt  up to # years, the cost is only l!jc a day tor cadi child! Noun H W, ,.ie " ,,,s " c ,sc . w a" " VV"  rally ihis policy is issued onlylo families and individuals now A I wey b' c  n s  o# e "  gef  i good Ve.llf.-o.herw ise the cos. svould he sty h, B h. Uut .W . o w n c...o'  tan c so  once pro.ccied by this policy, you arc covered for hospital!-ol' V, '. c .i #p .oscrf' ,' .,yn sicy V " # Vn. P V'a n  'annn lor abou. every sickneM and accidenr. Buell of sv". Jtsssv.  a r# s ms #' ' ,cn 'Soap' , y.U'  poficy are the full resources of the nationally lino ' ""#'"' i ,n I "-a -- I l This is What #" a Week  Can Mean to You When in the light. "Then why'd you claim I bought it?" "To get you here for a talk, Gus." He turned toward Church. "You had the gun. Jerry. Reich came here for it. You did business together before. I haven't forgotten the Chaos Swindle..." "Damn you!" Church shouted. "It swindled you out of the Guild," Powell continued. "You and Reich split close to half a I recall, you offered your share to the Guild for reinstatement..." "And you turned me down!" "All I'm asking for is the gun," Powell said quietly. "Are you offering a deal?" "You know me. Jerry. Would I make a shady offer like that?" "Then what are you. paying for the gun?" "You'll have to trust me to do the fair thing; but I'm making no promises." "I've got a promise," Church muttered. "You'll have to make up your mind -- trust me or trust Ben Reich. Whet about the gun?" Church's face disappeared from the light. After a pause, he spoke from the darkness. "I sold no gun. peeper, and I don't know how any gun was used. That's my objective evidence." "Thanks. Jerry." Powell smiled, shrugged and turned again to T#. "I just want to ask you one technical question, Gus. Skipping over the fact that you're Ben Reich's accessory..." " Wait a minute, Powell -- " "Keep it on the acoustical level, Gus, and don't get panicky. All I want to know is how Guild conditioning failed with you. You're a professional analyst and you might be able to locate the flaw in our processing before we break you."  "Break me? For what?" The calm assurance T# found in Powell's mind, the casual acceptance of his ruin as an accomplished fact, jolted the little peeper. "You'd better start looking for a good hockshop location. No, yoq could probably do better with a tea-leaf act. But while you're still a Guild member, I wish you'd devote some attention to your own case. How did we fail with you? At what level? I'd appreciate a report before you're dead." " What do you mean, dead?' "Exiled. Expelled. Look at Jerry. He's a picture of yo after the next council meeting." "You #I never prove anything. You'll -- " "You little fool. Haven't you ever been at a protested trial? Mr. Peetcy won't be handling your case. No, you stand b; fore the board and T'sung-Hsai, (''kins, Joyce, Chevisance, Vigo, Catzerie, Tudor Franion -- all Ists -- start probing. I tell you, you're dead." "Wait, Powell!" The mannequin face was twitching with terror. " The Guild takes confession into account. When you get nuxed up with a damned psychotic like Reich, you identify yourself with it. He came to me with a nightmare about a man with no face. He -- " "He was a patient?" "Yes. That's how he trapped me. But I'm out of it now. Tell the Guild I'm volunteering everything. Church is your witness..." "I'm no witness," Church shouted. "You dirty squealer! After Ben Reich promised -- " "Shut up. You were crazy enough to trust Reich. I'll bust him first. I'll walk into court and sit on the witness stand and do everything I can to help Powell." "You'll do nothing of the kind," Powell snapped. "You're still in the Guild. Since when does a peeper squeal on a patient?" "It's the evidence you need to get Reich, isn't it?" "Sure, but I'm not letting any peeper disgrace the rest of us." "It could mean your job if you don't get him." "I want it and I want Retch... but not at this price. It takes guts to hold to the Pledge when the heat's on. You ought to know. You didn't have the guts." "But I was an accessory!" T# shouted. "You're letting me off. Is that ethics?" "Look at him," Powell laughed. "He's begging for Demolition. No, Gus. We'll get you when we get Reich. But I can't get him through you. Don't forget that report." He left the circle of light, walked through the darkness toward the front door. He had played the entire scene for this moment alone, but there was no action on his hook. As Powell opened the door. Church suddenly called: "Just a minute." Powell stopped, silhouetted against the cold street light. "Yes?" "What have you been handing T#?" "The Pledge, Jerry. You ought to remember it." "Let me peep you on that." "Go ahead." Most of Powell's blocks opened. What was not good for Church to discover was carefully jumbled and camouflaged. "I don't know," Church said at last. "I can't make up my mind about you and Reich and the gun. God knws, you're a mealy-mouthed preacher, but I think maybe I'd be smarter to trust you." "I told you I can't make any promises." "Maybe the whole trouble with me is that I've always been looking for promises instead of -- " At that moment, Powell whirled and slammed the door. " Get off the floor ! Quick!" He vaulted onto the counter. "Up here with me!" A queasy greasy shuddering seized the pawnshop and shook it into horrible vibration. Powell kicked the light globe and extinguished it. "Jump for the ceiling light bracket and hold on. It's a harmonic gun. Jump!" Church gasped and leaped up into the darkness. Powell gripped T#'s shaking arm. " Too short, Gus? I'll toss you." He flung T# upward and followed, clawing for the steel spider arms of the bracket. The three hung in space, cushioned against the murderous vibrations enveloping the store... vibrations that created shattering harmonics in every substance in contact with the floor. Glass, steel, stone, plastic all screeched and burst apart. T# groaned. "Hang on, Gus. It's one of Quizzard's killers. Careless bunch. They've missed me before ." Destruction loomed up in the little peeper's. subconscious. Powell knew that this was his crucial opportunity. T#'s hands relaxed and he dropped to the floor. The vibrations ceased an instant later, but in that split-second Powell heard the burst of flesh. Church heard it too and raised steam for a shriek. "Quiet, Jerry ! Not yet. Hang on!" "D-did you hear him?" " I heard. We're not safe yet. Hang on" The pawnshop door opened a slit. A razor edge of light shot in and searched the floor. It found a broad red and gray organic puddle, then blinked out. The door closed. " They think I'm dead again. You can have your hysterics now." " I can't get down, Powell. I can't step on..." "I don't blame you." Powell held himself with one hand, took Church's arm and swung him toward the counter. Church dropped and shuddered. Powell followed him, fighting hard against nausea. "Did you say that was one of Quizzard's killers?" "Sure. He owns a squad of psycho-goons. They're Ben's deputies right now, though. Ben's getting panicky." "Ben Reich? But it was in my shop. I might have been here." "You were here. What difference did that make?" " Reich wouldn't want me killed." " Wouldn't he?" Image of a cat smiling. Church took a deep breath. Suddenly he exploded : "The goddam son of a bitch!" "Don't feel like that...Wry. Reich's fighting for his life. You can't expect him to be too considerate of anybody else." "Well, I'm fighting, too. Get ready, Powell. I'm going to give you everything."  Church and returned from headquarters and the T# nightmare, Powell was grateful for the sight of the urchin in his home. Barbara D'Courtney had a black crayon in her right hand and a red crayon in her left. She was energetically scribbling on the walls, her tongue between Jier teeth and her dark eyes squinted in concentration. "Baba!" he exclaimed in a shocked voice. "What are you doing?" "Drawrin pitchith for Dada," she lisped. "Thank you, sweetheart," he said. "That's a lovely thought. Now come and sit with Dada." "No," she said, and continued scribbling. "Doesn't my girl always do what Dada asks?" She thought that over. "Yeth," she said. She deposited the crayons in her pocket, her bottom on the couch alongside Powell, her grubby paws in his hands. "Really, Barbara," Powell murmured. "That lisping is beginning to worry me. I wonder if your teeth need braces." The thought was only half a joke. It was difficult to remember that this was a woman seated alongside him. Slowly he probed through the paralyzed conscious levels of her mind to the turbulent preconscious, heavily hung with obscuring clouds, behind which was the faint, quaint flicker of light, isolated and childlike, that he had grown to like. But that flicker of light burned with the hot roar of a nova. "Hello, Barbara. You seem to -- " He was answered with a brust of passion that made him scamper. "Hey, Mary!" he called. "Come quick!" Mary Noyes popped out of the kitchen. "You in trouble, again?" "Our patient's on the mend. She's made contact with her Id. Down on the lowest level. Almost had my brains burned out." "What do you want? A chaperone? Someone to protect the secrets of her sweet girlish desires" "I'm the one who needs protection. Come and hold, my hand." "You've got both of yours in hers." "Just a figure of speech." Powell glanced uneasily at the calm doll face before him and the cool relaxed hands in his. 'Come inside with me." He went down the black passages again toward the timeless reservoir of psychic energy, reasonless, remorseless, seething with the never-ending search for satisfaction. He could sense Mary Noyes cautiously following him. He stopped at a safe distance. "Hi, Barbara ." Hatred lashed out at him. "You remember me?" The hatred subsided, to be replaced by a wave of hot desire. "Pres, you'd better jet. If you . get trapped inside that pleasurepain chaos, you're gone." " I'd like to locate something." "You can't find anything in there except raw love and raw death, pure mindless instinct." " want her relations with her father. I want to know why he had those guilt sensations about her." The furnace fumed over again. Mary fled. Powell teetered around the edge of the pit like an electrician gingerly touching the ends of exposed wires. A blazing bolt surged near him. He stepped aside to feel a blanket of instinctual self-preservation wrap him. He permitted himself to be drawn H S down into a vortex of associations. Here were tne somatic messages, cell reactions by the inmuted drone of muscle tone, sensory sub-currents, blood-flow, the wavering superhetrodyne of blood ph... all whirling and churning in the balancing pattern that formed the girl's psyche. The never-ending make-and-break of synapses contributed a crackling hail of complex rhythms. Powell caught part of Plosive image, followed it to the sensory association of a kiss, then by cross circuit to the infant's sucking reflex at the breast. Her mother? No. A wetnurse. Negtion. Minus Mother. Powell dodged an associated flame of infantile rage and resentment, the Orphan's Syndrome. He searched for a related Pa... Papa...  Father. Abruptly he was face to face with his image. It was nude, powerful, its outlines haloed with an aura of love and desire. Get lost. You embarrass me. The image disappeared. Damn it! Has she fallen in love with me ? "Hi, spook." There was her picture of herself, pathetically caricatured, the blonde hair in strings, the dark eyes like blotches, the lovely figure drawn into flat, ungracious planes. It faded and the image of Powell Powerful Protective Paternal rushed at him, torrentially destructive. The back of the head was D'Courtney's face. He followed the Janus image down to a blazing channel of doubles, pairs, linkages and duplicities to -- yes, Ben Reich and the caricature of Barbara, linked like Siamese twins. B linked to B B  B. Benedictine  Brandy. Barbara  Ben. Half -- "Pres!" A call far off, directionless. It could wait. That amazing image of Reich had to -- " Preston Powell! This way, you ass!" "Mary?" #  " This is the third time I've tried to locate you!" #I The third time?" "In three hours. Please, Pres, while I've got the strength." He permitted himself to wander upward. The timeless, spaceless chaos roared around him. The image of Barbara D'Courtney appeared, now a caricature of the sexual siren. "Hi, spook." In a panic, he plunged away. Then the Withdrawal Technique went into automatic operation. The blocks banged down in steady sequence, each barrier a step backward toward the light. Halfway up, he sensed Mary alongside him. She stayed with him until he was once more in his living room, seated alongside the urchin. "Mary, I located the weirdest association with Ben Reich. Some kind of linkage that -- " Mary had an iced towel. She slapped his face with it smartly. He realized that he was shaking. "Only trouble is you aren't working with unit elements. You're working with ionized particles..." He dodged the towel and stared at Barbara. "My God, Mary, I think this poor kid's in love with me" Image of a wistfully cockeyed turtledove. "I kept meeting myself down there." " And what about you?" "Me?" "Why do you think you refused to send her to Kingston Hospital?" she said. "Why have you been peeping her twice a day since you brought her here? Why did you have 'to have a chaperone? I'll tell you, Mr. Powell..." "Tell me what?" She stung him with a vivid picture of himself and Barbara D'Courtney and that fragment she had peeped days ago... the fragment that had made her turn pale with helplessly violent jealousy and anger. "You're in love with her, and the girl isn't a peeper. She isn't even sane. I wish I'd let you stay inside her mind until you rotted!" She turned away and began to cry. "Mary, for the love of -- " "Shut up." she sobbed. "There's a message for you. F-from headquarters. You're to jet for Am pro as s-soon as possible. Ben Reich's there. They need you. Everybody needs you. So why should I complain?" # ! Prepared by the non-profit Oitson Muiical Foundation Regularly # S concert hall favorite since #. this melodic suite Is based on genuine Indian themes -- legends, festivals. #" A.R.S-. recording. New Yore Music Critics Circle Award # ,#-#. this rhythmic score has necomc a modern masterpiece. #" A.R.S. recording. 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Ditson Fund of Columbia University established a substantial gram to create the non-profit Ditson Musical Foundation, whose sole purpose is to record and release each month a new highfidelitv full-frequency recording of American music, on Long-Playing records. No, to the contrary. Because the Ditson Musical Foundation made its recordings available at cost to the American Recording Society (sole distributing agent for the Foundation's records) they are priced below most L.P.'s of Comparable quality -- only # for #" records and # for #" records. The American Recording Society Philharmonic Orchestra engages the finest available conductors and artists, and all recordings are made with the latest high-fidelity equipment, and pressed directly from a limited number of silver-sputtered masters. Your purchase of either of the Long Playing records offered above for only # does not obligate you to buv any additional records from the Society -- ever! However, we will be happy to extend to you the courtesy of an Associated, Membership. F.ach month, as an Associate Member, you will be offered an American Recording Society recording by a famous American composer, at the special Club price. If you do not wish to purchase any particular record, you merely return the form provided for that purpose. With each two records purchased at the regular Club price you will receive an additional record However, the number of records which can be pressed from silver-sputtered masters is necessarily limited, so mail the coupon at once. r I I I I I I enclose f #. As an Associate Member tr the Society, I will receive the Society's publication which will give me advance nolice of each new nonttily Society Long-Playing aclcction which I nay purchase at the special Membership price of only # for #" records, # for #" records, plus n few cents for V.#. tax ami shipping. However, I may decline to purchase any or all Society rfcords offered. With each # recordings i do purchase you will send me on additional GX-# (Check one) veil by Piston Name Address City Zone... Slate . American Recording Society, Dept. #. Ave. of the Americas, New York #, N. Y. by M I I I I I I Odd John By Olaf Stapledon "Odd John" was the nickname given this strange youth... and odd he certainly was. With his incredibly gifted skills ond his awesomely developed mind, he could have attained power, fame, money -- an entire nation or even the world! But it would have been like a genius ruling an asylum of imbeciles. For Odd John was not of the human race; he belonged to the next stage of evolulion -- Homo Superior! He could not be the only one, he reasoned. There must be others like himself. But where would he find them? And if he did, would they agree to his plan to breed only among themselves... to create the race that would some day replace Homo Sapiens? And what would mankind, with his powerful weapons ond unleashed fear, do to stop the threat? Many authors have tried to write the story of Homo Superior and failed -- just as Pithecanthropus, describing Modern Man, would find it an impossible job. But Stapledon succeeded! This science fiction!  Four-Sided Triangle A swiftly paced, rollicking, yet shrewdly thoughtful booklength story of a machine that solves one distressing problem... and creates dozens of others even more troublesome.    The price is only #c c copy (no postage or handling charge) or send # for a full year (six issues) to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and successful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than l#th of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Cruris,' ' abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe E. J.L. San Jose California Make him say "You're this chance to make dreams lose his heart. Authentic Perfumes in each glass vial! Enough for # nights "On The Vogue, Madamoiselle, Charm, Glamour, Seventeen and all the other leading fashion magazines advertised to sell for as much as # a bottle. , me O'Clock Shining Hour Coour-Joi Black Sn My Alibi Sortilege Gold Satin Breathless Midnight #, rvchran I"  By Gouu by Angelique by Renew b v Cigogne by Angeuque bv Charbert ' by Fussy Jorf I ' product. This bargain offer is made so  '...j famous perw acquaint you with their product. This bargain offer is made so that you can try each one and then deI J cide which better suits your personality. Naturally, all these wonderful perfumes arc available at your local drug or department store in regular sizes at the galaxy m (Qfla tmall! Advertised Mm # r # wfR Vogue, Mademoiselle, Charm, Glamour, Seventeen and all the other leading fashion magazines advertised to sell for as much as # a bottle. conned Pertonr.m.eo I Five O Clock Shining Hour Coeutloie Black Satin MY Alibi , Sortilege Gold Satin Breathless Midnight , Not Colognes ( (RU Genuine Pe u tv Rngelign by Renoir by Cigo#' by Rnqeliqno by Charbert by fussy or Toilet Wael russv godkieiU " # ' The manufacturers of these famous perfumes wane to acquaint you with their product. This bargain offer is made so that you can try each one and then decide which better suits your personality. Naturally, all these wonderful perfumes are available at your local drug or department store in regular sizes at the nationally advertised prices. Make him say "You're this chance to make the man of your dreams lose his heart. Authentic Perfumes in each glassvial! Enough for # nights "On The Town." # Market Street, Newark, New Jersey    I will pay postman #. pies C.O.D. postage Galaxy Ait liitoni Editor Am Director Production Manager Advertising Manager Cover by Illustrating by Robert A. Heinlein # by H. B. Fyfe # by Jerry Sohl # by Damon Knight # in published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere ft. #. Entered a secondclass matter at the Post Office. New York. N. Y. Copyright. #, by Galexy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, president. AU rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and anysimilarity between characters and actual persons m coincidental. by Willy Ley # by Alfred Bester #I by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Printed In the U. S. A. by the ui is Co... Inc. Keg. U. S. Pet. Off. In This Corner Ley begins his monthly department "For Your Information It should be interesting and useful in many ways. For one thing, Mr v Ley proposes to have a good deal of variety, ranging from  complete articles, like this month's study of moons, to brief reports on significant developments in science. In addition, he has undertaken the job of answering all questions submitted by readers, either in the magazine or by mail. Please be reasonable, though -- it isn't fain to ask him to write a complete thesis. If that sounds preposterous, you don't know the crust of some people. Names and addresses will be used unless there is a specific request to withhold them. The ones in this issue were sent directly to Mr. Ley and not to the magazine, so there is a legal barrier to printing the names, even though the senders may approve or actually desire it. In addressing your queries to Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #. If you have other matters to discuss at the same time, please put them on one sheet and the question (s) on another. We don't want to cut up letters so that Mr. Ley will get whatever applies to his department and we retain the rest. Very untidy and hell on filing. Willy. Ley is precisely the man to run a feature like this, which provides a fine opportunity to tell you something about him. He was bom in Germany in #, and, like many of us who belong roughly to the same generation, spent considerable time hunting through the libraries for science fiction in his youth. However, he was hit by a stroke of luck that might have killed us with joy -- he became an officer of the German Rocket Society in #, and then technical adviser as "The Girl in the Moon," "Metropolis." etc. By the way, if you happen to have a print of "The Girl in the Moon," or know someone who has. he and Fritz Lang, the director, would be enormously grateful for the chance to make a print at their own expense. You will naturally be given credit for your invaluable aid. Mr. Ley's life, as well as many others', became complicated by a painter of exceedingly mean ability and even meaner politics and ethics. In #, Mr. Ley thought it advisable to go elsewhere. Hence, America has a pretty wonderful citizen, who has helped greatly in the development and popularization of rocketry. His books are authoritative; he is consulted as an expert and is in hot demand as a speaker. One specialty might be enough for most people, but Willy Ley is also a noted naturalist and has never been referred to as a slouch in the physical sciences. Mr. Ley is about five-eleven and seems to weigh # pounds; he has a calm and reasonable disposition, but I would not advise anyone to ask him to take off his black-rimmed eyeglasses and step outside. He is married to an artist and ballet dancer named Olga, a dainty creature of astonishing grace and endurance. Keeping two small girls disentangled from piles of research material is a major job, but she also manages to illustrate much of his work. It's an honor to have Willy Ley as a contributing editor. He is waiting for your questions; don't let him go to waste. readers have asked what I'm like. This should be one of my favorite subjects, but the truth is that my life is an old story to me. I'm five-nine, # stripped (I just weighed myself at the corner drugstore to verify). Born in Montreal in # in the first month of World War I. Named H(orace) L(eonard) after a prompt casualty in the Princess Pat Regiment. I can't pretend to be fond of my name, but I don't use initials to escape it; that was decided upon by an editor, though other editors have used the whole thing. Having had # pen names, I find the problem shrug-worthy. Educated in the U. S., though frustrated as a small boy when all history books agreed England lost the Revolutionary War. Married (September, #) and have one son (born December, #) and am not superstitious, knock on wood, but hesitate to get born or married again or have another kid. Had the usual jobs while learning to write: junior pharmacist, shoe salesman, floor scraper, apprentice upholsterer, etc. Wrote and sold over # words and edited or published more than two dozen magazines of all kinds. own dream come true. I know I sometimes push too Kftrd. but that's because everyone wants his dream to be perfect. Apprehensive readers have asked if I'm susceptible to "scientific" fads or cults. I'd turn in my blue pencil first. I Occasionally, a story has to be clearly fiction. Here is one instance -- A T first Potiphar Breen did not notice the girl who   was undressing. She was standing at a bus stop only ten feet away. He was indoors, but that would not have kept him from noticing; he was seated in a drugstore booth adjacent to the bus stop; there was nothing between Potiphar and the young lady but plate glass and an occasional pedestrian. Nevertheless he did not look up when she began to peel. Propped up in front of him was a Los Angeles Times', beside it, still unopened, were the Her aidExpress and the Daily News. He was scanning the newspaper carefully, but the headline stories got only a passing glance. He noted the maximum and minimum temperatures in Brownsville. Texas, and entered them in a neat black notebook. He did the same with the closing prices of three blue chips and two dogs on the New York Exchange, as well as the total number of shares. He then began a rapid sifting of minor news stories, from time to time entering briefs of them in his little book. The items he recorded seemed randomly unrelated -- among them a publicity release in which Miss National Cottage Cheese Week announced that she intended to marry and have twelve children by a man who could prove that he had been a lifelong vegetarian, a circumstantial but wildly unlikely Flying Saucer report, and a call for prayers for rain throughout Southern California. Potiphar had just written down the names and addresses of three residents of Watts, California, who had been miraculously healed at a tent meeting of the God-is-All First Truth Brethren by the Reverend Dickie Bottomley, the eight-year-old evangelist, and was preparing to tackle the Herald-Express, when he glanced over his reading glasses and saw the amateur ecdysiast on the street corner outside. He stood up, placed his glasses in their case, folded the newspapers and put them carefully in his right coat pocket, counted out the exact amount of his check and added fifteen per cent. He then took his raincoat from a hook, placed it over his arm, and went outside. B Y now the girl was practically down to the buff. It seemed to Potiphar Breen that she had quite a lot of buff, yet she had not pulled much of a house. The corner newsboy had stopped hawking his disasters and was grinning at her, and a mixed pair of transvestites who were apparently waiting for the bus had their eyes on her.I None of the passers-by stopped. They glanced at her, and then, with the selfconscious indifference to the unusual of the true Southern Californian, they went on their various ways. The transvestites were frankly staring. The male member of the team wore a frilly feminine blouse, but his skirt was a conservative Scottish kilt. His female companion wore a business suit and Homburg hat; she stared with lively interest. As Breen approached, the girl hung a scrap of nylon on the bus stop bench, then reached for her shoes. A police officer, looking hot and unhappy, crossed with the lights and came up to them. "Okay," he said in a tired voice, "that'll be all, lady. Get them duds back on and clear out of here." The female transvestite took  igar out of her mouth. "Just wiitti business is it of yours, officrr?" she asked. The cop turned to her. "Keep out of this!" He ran his eyes over her getup. and that of her companion. "I ought to run both of you in, too." The transvestite raised her eyebrows. "Arrest us for being y) clothed, arrest her for not being. I think I'm going t like this." She turned to the girl, who was I standing still and saying nothing, as if she were puzzled by what was going on. "I'm a lawyer, dear." She pulled a card from her vest pocket. "If this uniformed Neanderthal persists in annoying you, I'll be delighted to handle him." The man in kilts said, "Grace! Please!" She shook him off. "Quiet, Norman. This is our business." She went on to the policeman, "Well? Call the wagon. In the meantime, my client will answer no questions." The official looked unhappy enough to cry and his face was getting dangerously red. Breen quietly stepped forward and slipped his raincoat around the shoulders of the girl. She looked startled and spoke r for the first time. "Uh -- thanks." She pulled the coat about her, cape fashion.  The female attorney glanced at Breen then back to the cop. "Well, officer? Ready to arerst us?" He shoved his face close to hers. "I ain't going to give you the satisfaction!" He sighed and added, "Thanks, Mr. Breen. You know this lady?" "I'll take care of her. You can forget it, Kawonski." "I sure hope so. If she's with you. I'll do just that. But get her out of here, Mr. Breen -- please!" The lawyer interrupted. "Just a moment. You're interfering with my client." Kawonski said, "Shut up, you! You heard Mr. Breen -- she's with him. Right, Mr. Breen?" "Well -- yes. I'm a friend. I'll take care of her." The transvestite said suspiciously, "I didn't hear her say that." Her companion said, "Grace! There's our bus." "And I didn't hear her say she was your client," the cop retorted. "You look like a -- " his words were drowned out by the bus brakes -- "and besides that, if you don't climb on that bus and get off my territory, I'll...  I'll..." "You'll what?" "Grace! We'll miss our bus." "Just a moment, Norman. Dear, is this man really a friend of yours? Are you with him?" The girl looked uncertainly at Breen, then said in a low voice,  # Uh, yes. He is. I am." "Well..." The lawyer's companion pulled at her arm. She shoved her card into Breen's hand and got on the bus. It pulled away. Breen pocketed the card. head. "Why did you do it. lady?" he said peevishly. The girl looked puzzled. "I -- I don't know." "Yotf hear that, Mr. Breen? That's what they all say. And if you pull 'em in. there's six more the next day. The Chief said -- " He sighed. "The Chief said -- well, if I had arrested her like that female shyster wanted me to, I'd be out at a Hundred and Ninety-sixth and Ploughed Ground tomorrow morning, thinking about retirement. So get her out of here, will you?" The girl said, "But -- " "No 'buts', lady. Just be glad a real gentleman like Mr. Breen ered up her clothes, handed them to her. When she reached for them, she again exposed an uncustomary amount of skin. Kawonski hastily gave the clothing to Breen instead, who crowded them into his coat pockets. She let Breen lead her to where his car was parked, got in and tucked the raincoat around her so that she was rather more dressed than a girl usually is. She looked at him. She saw a mediumsized and undistinguished man who was slipping down the wrong side of thirty-five and looked older. His eyes had that mild and slightly naked look of the habitual spectacleswearer who is not at the moment with glasses. His hair was gray at the temples and thin on top. His herringbone suit, black shoes, white shirt, and neat tie smacked more of the East than of California. He saw a face which he classified as "pretty" and "wholesome" rather than "beautiful" and "glamorous." It was topped by a healthy mop of light brown hair. He set her age at twenty-five, give or take eighteen months. He smiled gently, climbed in without speaking and started his car. He turned up Doheny Drive and east on Sunset. Near La Cienega, he slowed down. "Feeling better?" "Uh, I guess so Mr. -- Breen?" "Call me Potiphar. What's your name? Don't tell me if you don't want to." "Me? I'm -- I'm Meade Barstow." "Thank you, Meade. Where do you want to go? Home?" "I suppose so. Oh, my, no. I can't go home like this" She t clutched the coat tightly to her. "Parents?" "No. My landlady. She'd be shocked to death." "Where, then?" She thought. "Maybe we could could sneak into the ladies room." "Maybe. See here, Meade -- my house is six blocks from here and has a garage entrance. You could get inside without being seen." She stared. "You don't look like a wolf!" "Oh, but I am! The worst sort." He whistled and gnashed his teeth. "See? But Wednesday is my day off." She looked at him and dimpled. "Oh, well! I'd rather wrestle with you than with Mrs. Megeath. Let's go." His bachelor diggings were one of the many little frame houses clinging like fungus to the brown slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. The garage was notched into this hill; the house sat on it. He drove in, cut the ignition, and led her up a teetery inside stairway into the living room. "In there," he said, pointing. "Help yourself." He pulled her clothes out of his coat pockets and handed them to her. She blushed and took them, disappeared into his bedroom. He heard her turn the key in the lock. He settled down in his easy chair, took out his notebook, and started with the HeraldExpress. He was finishing the Daily News and had added several notes to his collection when she came out. Her hair was neatly rolled; her face was restored; she had brushed most of the wrinkles out of her skirt. Her sweater was neither too tight nor deep cut, but it was pleasantly filled. She reminded him of well water and farm breakfasts. He took his raincoat from her, hung it up, and said, "Sit down, Meade." She said uncertainly, "I had better go." "If you must, but I had hoped to talk with you." "Well -- " She sat down on the edge of his couch  and looked around. The room was small, but as neat as his necktie and as clean as his collar. The fireplace was swept ; the floor was bare and polished. Books crowded bookshelves in every possible space. One corner was filled by an elderly flat-top desk; the papers on it were neatly in order. Near it, on its own stand, was a small electric calculator. To her right, french windows gave out on a tiny porch over the garage. Beyond it she could see the sprawling city, where a few neon signs were already blinking. She sat back a little. "This is a nice room -- Potiphar. It looks like you." "I take that as a compliment. Thank you." She did not answer; he went on, "Would you like a drink?" "Oh, would I She shivered. "I guess I've got the jitters." He stood up. "Not surprising. What'll it be?" She took Scotch and water, no ice; he was a Bourbonand-gingerale man. She soaked up half her highball in silence, then put it down, squared her shoulders and said, "Potiphar?" "Yes, Meade?" "Look, if you brought me here to make a pass, I wish you'd go ahead and make it. It won't do you a bit of good, but it makes me nervous to wait." He said fiothing and did not change his expression. She went on uneasily, "Not that I'd blame you for trying -- under the circumstances. And I am grateful. But... well, it's just that I don't -- " He came over and took both her hands. "I haven't the slightest thought of making a pass at you. Nor need you feel grateful. I butted in because I was interested in your case." "My case? Are you a doctor? A psychiatrist?" He shook his head. "I'm a mathematician. A statistician, to be precise." "Huh? I don't get it." "Don't worry about it. But I would like to ask some questions. May I?" "Oh, sure! Of course! I owe you that much -- and then some." "You owe me nothing. Want your drink sweetened?" She gulped the balance and handed him her glass, then followed him out into the kitchen. He did an exact job of measuring and gave it back. "Now tell me why you took your clothes off," he said.  I don't know. I don't know. I guess I just went crazy." She added, round-eyed, "But I don't feel crazy. Could I go off my rocker and not know it?" "You're not crazy... not more so than the rest of us," he amended. "Tell me, where did you see someone else do this?" "Huh? I never have." "Where did you read about it?" "But I haven't. Wait a minute -- those people up in Canada. Dooka-somethings." "Doukhobors. That's all? No bareskin swimming parties? No strip poker?" She shook her head. "No. You may not believe it, but I was the kind of a little girl who undressed under her nightie." She colored and added, "I still do -- unless I remember to tell myself it's illy." "I believe it. No news stories?" "No. Yes, there was! About two weeks ago, I think it was. Some girl in a theater -- in the audience, I mean. But I thought it was just publicity. You know the stunts they pull here." He shook his head. "It wasn't. February #rd, the Grand Theater, Mrs. Alvin Copley. Charges dismissed." "How did you know?" "Excuse me." He went to his desk, dialed the City News Bureau. "Alf? This is Pot Breen. They still sitting on that story?... Yes, the Gypsy Rose file. Any new ones today?" He waited. Meade thought that she could make out swearing. "Take it easy, Alf -- this hot weather can't last forever. Nine, eh? Well, add another -- Santa Monica Boulevard, late this afternoon. No arrest." He added, "Nope, nobody got her name. A middle-aged woman with a cast in one eye. I happened to see it... who, me? Why would I want to get mixed up? But it's rounding into a very, very interesting picture." , He put the phone down. Meade said, "Cast in one eye, indeed!" "Shall I call him back and give him your name?" "Oh, no!" "Very well. Now, Meade, we seemed to have located the point of contagion in your case -- Mrs. Copley. What I'd like to know next is how you felt, what you were thinking about, when you did it." She was frowning intently. "Wait a minute, Potiphar. Do I understand that nine other girls have pulled the stunt I pulled?" "Oh, no. Nine others today. You are -- " he paused briefly -- "the three hundred and nineteenth case in Los Angeles County since the first of the year. I don't have figures on the rest of the country, but the suggestion to clamp down on the stories came from the eastern news services when the papers here put our first cases on the wire. That proves that it's a problem elsewhere, too." "You mean that women all over the country are peeling off their clothes in public? Why, how shocking!" again and insisted, "Well, it is shocking, even if it was me, this time." "No, Meade. One case is shocking: over three hundred makes it scientifically interesting. That's why I want to know how it felt. Tell me about it." "But -- all right, I'll try. I told you I don't know why l did it : I still don't. I -- " "You remember it?" "Oh, yes! I remember getting up off the bench and pulling up my sweater. I remember unzipping my skirt. I remember thinking I would have to hurry because I could see my bus stopped two blocks down the street. I remember how good it felt when I finally -- " She paused and looked puzzled. "But I still don't know why." "What were you thinking about just before you stood up?" "I don't remember." "Visualize the street. What was passing by? Where were your hands? Were your legs crossed or uncrossed? Was there anybody near you? What were you thinking about?" "Nobody was on the bench with me. I had my hands in my lap. Those characters in the mixed-up clothes were standing nearby, but I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't thinking much except that my feet hurt and I wanted to get home -- and how unbearably hot and sultry the weather was. Then -- " her eyes became distant -- "suddenly I knew what I had to do and it was very urgent that I do it. So I stood up and I -- and I -- " Her voice became shrill. "Take it easy!" he said sharply. "Don't do it again." "Huh? Why, Mr. Breen!  wouldn't do anything like that." , "Of course not. Then what happened after you undressed?" "Why, you put your raincoat around me and you know the rest." She faced him. "Say Potiphar. what were you doing with a raincoat? It hasn't rained in weeks. This is the driest, hottest rainy season in years." "In sixty-eight years, to be exact." "Sixty -- " "I carry a raincoat anyhow. Just a notion of mine, but I feel that when it does rain, it's going to rain awfully hard." He added, "Forty days and forty nights, maybe." She decided that he was being humorous and laughed. He went on, "Can you remember how you got the idea of undressing?" She swirled her glass and thought. "I simply don't know." He nodded. "That's what I expected." "I don't understand -- unless you think I'm crazy. Do you?" "No. I think you had to do it and could not help it and don't know why and can't know why." "But you know." She said it accusingly. "Maybe. At least I have some figures. Ever take any interest m l statistics, Meade?" She shook her head. "Figures confuse me. Never mind statistics -- I want to know why l did what I did.'" He looked at her very soberly. "I thpk we're lemmings, Meade."  rifled. "You mean those little furry mouselike creatures? The ones that -- " "Yes. The ones that periodically make a death migration, unof them drown themselves in the sea. Ask a lemming why he does it. If you could get him to slow up his rush toward death, even money says he would rationalize his answer as well as any college graduate. But he does it because he has to -- and so do we." "That's a horrid idea, Potiphar." "Maybe. Come here, Meade. I'll show you figures that confuse me, too." He went to his desk and opened a drawer, took out a packet of cards. "Here's one. Two weeks ago, a man sues 'an entire state legislature for alienation of his wife's affection -- and the judge lets the suit be tried. Or this one -- a patent application for a device to lay the globe over on its side and warm up the arctic regions. Patent denied, but the inventor took in over three hundred thousand dollars in down payments on North Pole real estate before the postal authorities stepped in. Now he's fighting the case and it looks as if he might win. And here -- prominent bishop proposes applied courses in the so-called facts of life in high schools." He put the card away hastily. "Here's a dilly -- a bill introduced in the Alabama lower house to repeal the laws of atomic energy. Not the present statutes, but the natural laws concerning nuclear physics: the wording makes that plain." He shrugged. "How silly can you get?" "They're crazy." "No, Meade. One like that might be crazy; a lot of them becomes a lemming death march. No, don't object -- I've plotted them on a curve. The last time we had anything like this was the so-called Era of Wonderful Nonsense. But this one is much worse." He delved into a lower drawer, hauled out a graph. "The amplitude is more than twice as great and we haven't reached peak. What the peak will be, I don't dare guess -- three separate rhythms, reinforcing." She peered at the curves. "You mean that the lad with the arctic real estate deal is somewhere on this line?" "He adds to it. And back here on the last crest are the flagpole sitters and the goldfish swallowIt ers and the Ponzi hoax and the marathon dancers and the man who pushed a peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose. Y ou're on the new crest -- or you will be when I add you in." She made a face. "I don't like it " "Neither do I. But it's as clear as a bank statement. This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip. with a finger, and saying, # Wubba , wubba, wubba .' " She shivered. "Do you suppose I could have another drink? Then I'll go." "I have a better idea. I owe you a dinner for answering questions. Pick a place and we'll have a cocktail before." She chewed her lip. "You don't owe me anything. And I don't feel up to facing a restaurant crowd. I might -- I might -- "No, you wouldn't," he said sharply. "It doesn't hit twice." "You're sure? Anyhow, I don't want to face a crowd." She glanced at his kitchen door. "Have you anything to eat in there? I can cook." "Um, breakfast things. And there's a pound of ground top round in the freezer compartment and some rolls. I sometimes make hamburgers when I don't want to go out." She headed for the kitchen. "Drunk or sober, fully dressed or -- or naked, I can cook. You'll see." wiches with the meat married to toasted buns and the flavor garnished rather than suppressed by scraped Bermuda onion and thin-sliced dill, a salad made from things she had scrounged out of his refrigerator, potatoes crisp but not vulcanized. They ate it on the tiny balcony, sopping it down with cold beer. He sighed and wiped his mouth. "Yes, Meade, you can cook." "Some day I'll arrive with proper materials and pay you back. Then I'll prove it." "You've already proved it. Nevertheless, I accept. But I tell you three times -- which makes it true, of course -- that you owe me nothing." "No? If you hadn't been a Boy Scout, I'd be in jail." Breen shook his head. "The police have orders to keep it quiet at all costs -- to keep it from growing. You saw that. And, my dear, you weren't a person to me at the time. I didn't even see your face." "You saw plenty else!" "Truthfully, I didn't look. You were just a -- a statistic." She toyed with her knife and said puzzled, "I'm not sure, but I think I've just been insulted. In all the twenty-five years that I've fought men off, more or less successfully, I've been called a lot of names -- but a 'statistic?' Why, I ought to take your slide rule and beat you to death with it." "My dear young lady -- " "I'm not a lady, that's for sure. But I'm not a statistic, either." "My dear Meade, then. I wanted to tell you, before you did anything hasty, that in college I wrestled varsity middleweight." She grinned and dimpled. "That's more the talk a girl likes to hear. I was beginning to be afraid you had been assembled in an adding machine factory. Potty, you're really a dear." "If that is a diminutive of my given name, I like it. But if it refers to my waist line, I definitely resent it." She reached across and patted his stomach. "I like your waist line; lean and hungry men are difficult. If I were cooking for you regularly, I'd really pad it." "Is that a proposal?" "Let it lie, let it lie. Potty, do you really think the whole country is losing its buttons?" He sobered at once. "It's worse than that." "Huh?" "Come inside. I'll show you."  dumped them in the sink, Breen talking all the while. "As a kid. I was fascinated by numbers. Numbers are pretty things and they combine in such interesting configurations. I took my degree in math, of course, and got a job as a junior actuary with Midwestern Mutual -- the insurance outfit. That was fun. No way on Earth to tell when a particular man is going to die, but an absolute certainty that so many men of a certain age group would die before a certain date. The curves were so lovely -- and they always worked out. Always. You didn't have to know why; you could predict with dead certainty and never know why. The equations worked; the curves were right. "I was interested in astronomy, too; it was the one science where individual figures worked out neatly, completely, and accurately, down to the last decimal point that the instruments were good for. Compared with astronomy, the other sciences were mere carpentry and kitchen chemistry. "I found there were nooks and crannies in astronomy where individual numbers won't do. where you have to go over to statistics, and I became even more interested. I joined the Variable Star Association and I might have gone into astronomy professionally, instead of what I'm in now -- business consultation -- if I IS hadn't gotten interested in something else." " 'Business consultation?' " repeated Meade. "Income tax work?" "Oh, no. That's too elementary. I'm the numbers boy for a firm of industrial engineers. I can tell a rancher exactly how many of his Hereford bull calves will be sterile. Or I can tell a motion picture producer how much rain insurance to carry on location. Or maybe how big a company in a particular line must be to carry its own risk in industrial accidents. And I'm right. I'm always right." "Wait a minute. Seems to me a big company would have to have insurance." "Contrariwise. A really big corporation begins to resemble a statistical universe." "Huh?" "Never mind. I got interested in something else -- cycles. Cycles are everything, Meade. And everywhere. The tides. The seasons. Wars. Love. Everybody knows that in the spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to what the girls never stopped thinking about, but did you know that it runs in an eighteen-year-plus cycle as well? And that a girl born at the wrong swing of the curve doesn't stand nearly as good a chance as her older or younger sister?" "Is that why I'm still a doddering old maid?" "You're twenty-five?" He pondered. "Maybe, but your chances are improving again; the curve is swinging up. Anyhow, remember you are just one statistic; the curve applies to the group. Some girls get married every year." "Don't call me a statistic," she repeated firmly. "Sorry. And marriages match up with acreage planted to wheat, with wheat cresting ahead. You could almost say that planting wheat makes people get married." "Sounds silly." "It is silly. The whole notion of cause-and-effect is probably superstition. But the same cycle shows a peak in house building right after a peak in marriages." "Now that makes sense." "Does it? How many newlyweds do you know who can afford to build a house? You might as well blame it on wheat acreage. We don't know why; it just is." "Sun spots, maybe?" "You can correlate Sun spots with stock prices, or Columbia River salmon, or woman's skirts. And you are just as much justified in blaming short skirts for Sun spots as you are in blaming Sun spots for salmon. We don't know. But the curves go on just the same." "But there has to be some reason behind it. I " "Does there? That's mere assumption. A fact has no 'why.' There it stands, selfdemonstrating. Why did you take your clothes off today?" She frowned. "That's not fair." "Maybe not. But I want to show you why I'm worried." E went into the bedroom, came out with a large roll of tracing paper. "We'll spread it on the floor. Here they are, all of them. The #-year cycle -- see the Civil War there? See how it matches in? The eighteen and one-thirdyear cycle, the #-plus cycle, the #month shorty, the "tlTree rhythms of Sun spots -- everything. all combined in one grand chart. Mississippi River floods, fur catches in Canada, stock market prices, marriages, epidemics, freight-car loadings, bank clearings, locust plagues, divorces, tree growth, wars, rainfall. Earth magnetism, building construction, patents applied for. murders -- you name it; I've got it there." She stared at the bewildering array of wavy lines. "But, Potty, what does it mean?" "It means that these things all happen, in regular rhythm, whether we like it or not. It means that when skirts are due to go up, all the stylists in Paris can't make 'em go down. It means that when prices are going down, all the controls and supports and government planning can't make 'em go up." He pointed to a curve. "Take a look at the grocery ads. Then turn to the financial page and read how the Big Brains try to double-talk their way out of it. It means that when an epidemic is due, it happens, despite all the public health efforts. It means we're lemmings." She pulled her lip. "I don't like it. 'I am the master of my fate,' and so forth. I've got free will, Potty. I know I have -- I can feel it." "I imagine every little neutron in an atom bomb feels the same way. He can go spung! or he can sit still, just as he pleases. But statistical mechanics work out all the same and the bomb goes off -- which is what I'm leading up to. See anything odd there, Meade?" She studied the chart, trying not to let the curving lines confuse her. "They sort of bunch up over at the right end." "You're dern tootin' they do! See that dotted vertical line? That's right now -- and things are bad enough. But take a look at that solid vertical ; that's about six months from now -- and that's when we get it. Look at the cycles -- the long ones, the short ones, all of them. Every single last one of them reaches either a trough or a crest exactly on -- or almost on -- that line." "That's bad?" "What do you think? Three of the big ones troughed back in # and the depression almost ruined us... even with the big #-year cycle supporting things. Now we've got the big one troughing -- and the few crests are not things that help. I mean to say. tent caterpillars and influenza don't do us any good. Meade, if statistics mean anything, this tired old planet hasn't seen a trend like this since Eve went into the apple business. I'm cared." She searched his face. "Potty, you're not simply having fun with me? You know I can't check up on you." "I wish to heaven I were. No, Meade, I can't fool about numbers; I wouldn't know how. This is it. # -- The Year of the Jackpot." drove her home. When they approached West Los Angeles, she said, "Potty?" "Yes, Meade?" "What do we do about it?" "What do you do about a hurricane? You pull in your ears. It What can you do about an atom bomb? You try to outguess it, not be there when it goes off. What else can you do?" "Oh." She was silent for a few moments, then added, "Potty, will you tell me which way to jump?" "Huh? Oh, sure! If I can figure it out." He took her to her door, turned to go. She said, "Potty!" He faced her. "Yes, Meade?" She grabbed his head, shook it  then kissed him fiercely on the mouth. "There, is that just a tatistic?" "Uh, no." "It had better not be," she said dangerously. "Potty, I think I'm going to have to change your curv " II New York, # July -- In a specially constructed diving suit built for two, Merydith Smithe, cafe society headline girl, and Prince Augie Schleswieg of New York and the Riviera were united today by Bishop Dalton in a service televised with the aid of the Navy's ultra-new -- A S the Year of the Jackpot progressed, Breen took melancholy pleasure in adding to the data which proved that the curve was sagging as predicted. The undeclared World War continued its bloody, blundering way at half a dozen spots around a tortured globe. Breen did not chart it; the headlines were there for anyone to read. He concentrated on the odd facts in the other pages of the papers, facts which, taken singly, meant nothing, but taken together showed a disastrous trend. He listed stock market prices, rainfall, wheat futures, but the "silly season" items were what fascinated him. To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things -- but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When, for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood? What were the gradations between National Cancer Week and National Athlete's Foot Week? On what day had the American people finally taken leave of horse sense? Take transvestism. Male-andfemale dress customs were arbitrary, but they had seemed to be deeply rooted in the culture. When did the breakdown start? With Marlene Dietrich's tailored suits? By the late nineteen-forties, there was no "male" article of clothing that a woman could not wear in public -- but when had men started to slip over the line? Should he count the psychological cripples who had made the word "drag" a by-word in Greenwich Village and Hollywood long before this outbreak? Or were they "wild shots" not belonging on the curve? Did it start with some unknown normal man attending a masquerade and there discovering that skirts actually were more comfortable and practical than trousers? Or had it started with the resurgence of Scottish nationalism reflected in the wearing of kilts by many ScottishAmericans? Ask a lemming to state his motives! The outcome was in front of him, a news story. Transvestism by draft dodgers had at last resulted in a mass arrest in Chicago which was to have ended in a giant joint trial -- only to have the deputy prosecutor show up in a pinafore and defy the judge to submit to an examination to determine the judge's true sex. The judge suffered a stroke and died and the trial was postponed -- postponed forever, in Breen's opinion; he doubted that this particular blue law would ever again be enforced. Or the laws about indecent exposure, for that matter. The attempt to limit the Gypsy Rose syndrome by ignoring it had taken the starch out of enforcement. Now here was a report about the All Souls Community Church of Springfield; the pastor had reinstituted ceremonial nudity. Probably the first time this thousand years, Breen thought, aside from some screwball cults in Los Angeles. The reverend gentleman claimed that the ceremony was identical with the "dance of the high priestess" in the ancient temple of Karnak. Could be, but Breen had private information that the "priestess" had been working the bur lesque and nightclub circuit before her present engagement. In any case, the holy leader was packing them in and had not been arrested. Two weeks later a hundred and nine churches in thirtythree states offered equivalent attractions. Breen entered them on his curves. This queasy oddity seemed to him to have no relation to the startling rise in the dissident evangelical cults throughout the country. These churches were sincere, earnest and poor -- but growing, ever since the War. Now they were multiplying like yeast. It seemed a statistical cinch that the United States was about to become godstruck again. He correlated it with Transcendentalism and the trek of the Latter Day Saints. Hmm, yes, it fitted. And the curve was pushing to ward a crest. now falling due; wartime marriages were reflected in the swollen peak of the Los Angeles school population. The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water. But the Angelenos committed communal suicide by watering lawns as usual. The Metropolitan Water District commissioners tried to stop it. It fell between the stools of the police powers of fifty "sovereign" cities. The taps remained open, trickling away the life blood of the desert paradise. The four regular party conventions -- Dixiecrats, Regular Republicans, the Regular Regular Republicans, and the Democrats -- attracted scant attention, because ' the Know-Nothings had not yet met. The fact that, the "'American Rally," as the KnowNothings preferred to be called, claimed not to be a party but an educational society did not detract from their strength. But what was their strength? Their beginnings had been so obscure that Breen had had to go back and dig into the December #I files, yet he had been approached twice this very week to join them. Tight inside his own office -- once by his boss, once by the janitor. He hadn't been able to chart the Know-Nothings. They gave him chills in his spine. He kept column-inches on them, found that their publicity was shrinking while their numbers were obviously zooming. Krakatoa blew up on July #th. It provided the first important transpacific TV-cast. Its effect on sunsets, on solar constant, on mean temperature, and on rainfall would not be felt until later in the year. The San Andreas fault, its stresses unrelieved since the Long Beach disaster of #, continued to build up imbalance -- an unhealed wound running the full length of the West Coast. Pelee and Etna erupted. Mauna Loa was still quiet. Flying Saucers seemed to be landing daily in every state. Nobody had exhibited one on the ground -- or had the Department of Defense sat on them? Breen was unsatisfied with the off-therecord reports he had been able to get; the alcoholic content of some of them had been high. But the sea serpent on Ventura Beach was real; he had seen it. The troglodyte in Tennessee he was not in a position to verify. Thirtyone domestic air crashes the last week in July... was it sabotage, or was it a sagging curve on a chart? And that neopolio epidemic that skipped from Seattle to New York? Time for a big epidemic? Breen's chart said it was. But how about bacteriological warfare? Could a chart know that a Slav biochemist would perfect an efficient virusand-vector at the right time? Nonsense! But the curves, if they meant anything at all. included "free will"; they averaged in all the individual "wills" of a statistical universe -- and came out as a smooth function. Every morning, toward the center of the New York megapolis; every evening, they flowed out again -- all by "free will" and on a smooth and predictable curve. Ask a lemming! Ask all the lemmings, dead and alive. Let them take a vote on it! - aside and phoned Meade. "Is this my favorite statistic?' "Potty! I was thinking about you." "Naturally. This is your night off." "Yes, but another reason, too. Potiphar, have you ever taken a look at the Great Pyramid?" "I haven't even been to Niagara Falls. I'm looking for a rich woman, so I can travel." "I'll let you know when I get "That's the first time you've proposed to me this week." "Shut up. Have you ever looked into the prophecies they found inside the pyramid?" "Look, Meade, that's in the same class with astrology -- strictly for the squirrels. Grow up." "Yes, of course. But, Potty, I thought you were interested in anything odd. This is odd." "Oh. Sorry. If it's 'silly season' stuff, let's see it." "All right. Am I cooking for you tonight?" "It's Wednesday, isn't it?" "How soon will you get here?" He glanced at his watch. "Pick you up in eleven minutes." He felt his whiskers. "No, twelve and a half." "I'll be ready. Mrs. Megeath says these regular dates mean that you are going to marry me." "Pay no attention to her. She's just a statistic and I'm a wild datum." "Oh well, I've got two hundred and forty-seven dollars toward Meade's prize to show him was the usual Rosicrucian comeon, elaborately printed, and including a photograph (retouched, he w'as sure) of the much disputed line on the corridor wall which was alleged to prophesy, by its various discontinuities, the entire future. This one had an unusual time scale, but the major events were all marked on it -- the fall of Rome, the Norman Invasion, the Discovery of America, Napoleon, the World Wars. What made it interesting was that it suddenly stopped -- in #. "What about it. Potty?" "I guess the stonecutter got tired. Or got fired. Or they hired a new head priest with new ideas." He tucked it into his desk. "Thanks. I'll think about how to list it." But he got it out again, applied dividers and a magnifying glass. "It says here," he announced, "that the end comes late in August -- unless that's a fly speck." "Morning or afternoon? I have to know how to dress." "Shoes will be worn. All God's chilluns got shoes." He put it away. She was silent for a moment, then said, "Potty, isn't it about time to jump?" "Huh? Girl, don't let that thing effect you! That's 'silly season stuff." "Yes. But take a look at your chart." Nevertheless, he took the next afternoon off, spent it in the reference room of the main library, confirmed his opinion of soothsayers. Nostradamus was pretentiously silly, Mother Shippey was worse. In any of them you could find whatever you looked for... He did find one item in Nostradamus that he liked: "The Oriental shall come forth from his seat... he shall pass through the sky, through the waters and the snow, and he shall strike each one with his weapon." That sounded like what the Department of Defense expected the commies to try to do to the Western Allies. But it was also a description of every invasion that had come out of the "heartland" in the memory of mankind. Nuts! When he got home, he found himself taking down his father's Bible and turning to Revelations. He could not find anything he tould understand, but he got fascinated by the recurring use of precise numbers. Presently he thumbed through the Book. His eye lit on: "Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth." He put the Book away, feeling humbled, but not cheered. FT#HE rains started the next morning. The Master Plumbers elected Miss Star Morning "Miss Sanitary Engineering of #" on the same day that the morticians designated her as "The Body I Would Like Best to Prepare," and her option was dropped by Fragrant Features. Congress voted # to compensate Thomas Jefferson Meeks for losses incurred while an emergency postman for the Christmas rush of #, approved the appointment of five lieutenant generals and one ambassador and adjourned in less than eight minutes. The fire extinguishers in a midwest orphanage turned out to be filled with nothing but air. The chancellor of the leading football institution sponsored a fund to send peace messages and vitamins to the Politburo. The stock market slumped nineteen points and the tickers ran two hours late. Wichita, Kansas, remained flooded while Phoenix, Arizona, cut off drinking water to areas outside city limits. And Poptiphar Breen found that he had left his raincoat at Meade Barstow's Rooming house. He phoned her landlady, but Mrs. Megeath turned him over to Meade. "What are you doing home on a Friday?" he demanded. "The theater manager laid me off. Now you'll have to marry me." "You can't afford me. Meade -- seriously, baby, what happened?" "I was ready to leave the dump anyway. For the last six weeks the popcorn machine has been carrying the place. Today I sat through The Lana Turner Story twice. Nothing to do." "I'll be along." "Eleven minutes?" "It's raining. Twenty -- with luck." It was more nearly sixty. Santa Monica Boulevard was a navigable stream; Sunset Boulevard was a subway jam. When he tried to ford the streams leading to Mrs. Megeath's house, he found that changing tires with the wheel wedged against a storm drain presented problems. "Potty!" she exclaimed when he squished in. "You look like a drowned rat." He found himself suddenly wrapped in a blanket robe belonging to the late Mr. Megeath and sipping hot cocoa while Mrs. Megeath dried his clothing in the kitchen. "Meade, I'm 'at liberty' too." "Huh? You quit your job?" "Not exactly. Old Man Wiley and I have been having differences of opinion about my answers for months -- too much 'Jackpot factor' in the figures I give him to turn over to clients. Not that I call it that, but he har felt that I was unduly pessimistic." "But you were right!" "Since when has being right endeared a man to his boss? Bu? that wasn't why he fired me; St was just the excuse. He wants a Know-Nothing program with scientific double-talk and I wouldn't join." He went to the window. "It's raining harder." "B u t the Know-Nothings haven't got any program." "I know that." "Potty, you should have joined. It doesn't mean anything. I joined three months ago." "The hell you did!" She shrugged. "You pay your dollar and you turn up for two meetings and they leave you alone. It kept my job for another three months. What of it?" "Well. I'm sorry you did it: that's all. Forget it. Meade, the water is over the curbs out there." "You had better stay here overnight." "Mmm... I don't like to leave Entropy parked out in this stuff all night. Meade?" "Yes, Potty?" n "We're both out of jobs. How would you like to duck north into the Mojave and find a dry spot?" "I'd love it. But look, Potty, is this a proposal or just a proposition?" "Don't pull that 'either-or stuff on me. It's just a suggestion for a vacation. Do you want to take a chaperone?" "No." "Then pack a bag." "Right away. But pack a bag how? Are you trying to tell me it's time to jump?" He faced her, then looked back at the window. "I don't know," he said slowly, "but this rain might go on quite a while. Don't take anything you don't have to have -- but don't leave anything behind you can't get along without." . He repossessed his clothing from Mrs. Megeath while Meade was upstairs. She came down dressed in slacks and carrying two large bags ; under one arm was a battered and rakish teddy bear. "This is Winnie," she said. "Winnie the Pooh?" "No, Winnie Churchill. When I feel bad, he promises me blood, sweat, and tears; then I feel better. You did say to bring anything I couldn't do without, didn't you?" She looked at him anxiously. "Right." He took the bags. Mrs. Megeath had seemed satisfied with his explanation that they were going to visit his (mythical) aunt in Bakersfield before looking for jobs. Nevertheless, she embarrassed him by kissing him good-by and telling him to "take care of my little girl." blocked off from use. While stalled in traffic in Beverly Hills, he fiddled with the car radio, getting squawks and crackling noises, then finally one station nearby: " -- in effect," a harsh, high, staccato voice was saying, "the Kremlin has given us till sundown to get out of town. This is your New York reporter, who thinks that in days like these every American must personally keep his powder dry. And now for a word from -- " Breen switched it off and glanced at her face. "Don't worry," he said. "They've been talking that way for years." "You think they are bluffing?" "I didn't say that. I said, 'Don't worry.' " But his own packing, with her help, was clearly on a "survival kit" basis -- canned goods, all his warm clothing, a sporting rifle he had not fired in over two years, a first-aid kit and the contents of his medicine chest. He dumped the stuff from his desk into a carton, shoved it into the back seat along with cans and books U end coats, and covered the plunder with all the blankets in the house. They went back up the rickety stairs for a last check. 'Potty, where's your chart?" "Rolled up on the back seat shelf. I guess that's all -- hey, wait a minute!" He went to a shelf over his desk and began taking down small, sober-looking magazines. "I dern near left behind my file of The Western Astronomer and the Proceedings of the Variable Star Association ." "Why take them?" "I must be nearly a year behind on both of them. Now maybe I'll have time to read." "Hmm... Potty, watching you read professional journals is not my notion of a vacation." "Quiet, woman! You took Winnie; I take these." She shut up and helped him. He cast a longing eye at his electric calculator, but decided it was too much like the White Knight's mousetrap. He could get by with his slide rule. As the car splashed out into the street, she said, "Potty, how are you fixed for cash?" "Huh? Okay, I guess." "I mean, leaving while the banks are closed and everything." She held up her purse. "Here's my bank. It isn't much, but we can use it." He smiled and patted her knee. "Good gal! I'm sitting on my bank; I started turning everything to cash about the first of the year." "Oh. I closed out my bank account right after we met." "You did? You must have taken my maunderings seriously." "I always take you seriously. an-hour nightmare, with visibility limited to the tail lights of the truck ahead. When they stopped for coffee at Halfway, they confirmed what seemed evident: Cajon Pass was closed and long-haul traffic for Route # was being detoured through the secondary pass. At long, long last they reached the Victorville cutoff and lost some of the traffic -- a good thing, because the windshield wiper on his side had quit working and they were driving by the committee system. Just short of Lancaster, she said suddenly, "Potty, is this buggy equipped with a snorkel?" "Nope." "Then we had better stop. I sec a light off the road." The light was an auto court. Meade settled the matter of economy versus convention by signing the book herself: they were placed in one cabin. He saw that it had twin beds and let the matter ride. Meade went to bed with her teddy bear without even asking to be kissed good night. It was already gray, wet dawn. They got up in the late afternoon and decided to stay over one more night, then push north toward Bakersfield. A high pressure area was alleged to be moving south, crowding the warm, wet mass that smothered Southern California. They wanted to get into it. Breen had the wiper repaired and bought two new tires to replace his ruined spare, added some camping items to his cargo, and bought for Meade a .# automatic, a lady's social purpose gun. "What's this for?" she wanted to know. "Well, you're carrying quite a bit of cash." "Oh. I thought maybe I was to use it to fight you off." "Now, Meade -- " "Never mind. Thanks, Potty." They had finished supper and were packing the car with their afternoon's purchases when the quake struck. Five inches of rain in twenty-four hours, more than denly loaded on a fault already overstrained, all cut loose in one subsonic, stomach-twisting rumble. ground very suddenly; Breen stayed upright by dancing like a log-roller. When the ground quieted down somewhat, thirty seconds later, he helped her up. "You all right?" "My slacks are soaked." She added pettishly, "But, Potty, it never quakes in wet weather. Never. You said so yourself." "Keep quiet, can't you?" He opened the car door and switched on the radio, waited impatiently for it to warm up. " -- your Sunshine Station in Riverside, California. Keep tuned to this station for the latest developments. As of now it is impossible to tell ' the size of this disaster. The Colorado River aqueduct is broken; nothing is known of the extent of the damage nor how long it will take to repair it. So far as we know, the Owens River Valley aqueduct may 'be intact, but all persons in the Los Angeles area are advised to conserve water. My personal advice is to stick your washtubs out into this rain. "I now read from the standard disaster instructions, quote: 'Boil all water. Remain quietly in your homes and do not panic. Stay off the highways. Cooperate with the police and render -- ' Joe! Catch that phone! ' -- render aid where necessary. Do not use the telephone except for -- ' Flash! An unconfirmed report from Long Beach states that the Wilmington and San Pedro waterfront is un# der five feet of water. I repeat, this is unconfirmed. Here's a message from the commanding general, March Field: 'Official, ell military personnel will report -- ' " Breen switched it off. "Get in the car." He stopped in the town, managed to buy six five-gallon tins and a jeep tank. He filled them with gasoline and packed them with blankets in the back seat, topping off the mess with a dozen cans of oil. Then they started rolling. "What are we doing, Potiphar?" "I want to get west of the valley highway." "Any particular place west?" "I think so. We'll see. You work the radio, but keep an eye on the road, too. That gas back there makes me nervous." jave and northwest on # into the Tehachapi Mountains -- Reception was poor in the pass, but what Meade could pick up confirmed the first impression -- worse than the quake of '#, worse than San Francisco, Managua, and Long Beach lumped together. When they got down out of the mountains, the weather was clearing locally; a few stars appeared, Breen swung left off the highway and ducked south of Bakersfield by the county road, reached the Route # super-highway just south of Greenfield. It was, as he had feared, already jammed with refugees. He was forced to go along with the flow for a couple of miles before he could cut west at Greenfield toward Taft. They stopped on the western outskirts of the town and ate at an all-night joint. They were about to climb back into the car when there was suddenly "sunrise" due south. The rosy light swelled almost instantaneously, filled the sky, and died. Where it had been, a red-andpurple pillar of cloud was spreading to a mushroom top. Breen stared at it, glanced at his watch, then said harshly, "Get in the car." "Potty! That was -- " "That used to be Los Angeles. Get in the car!" He drove silently for several minutes. Meade seemed to be in a state of shock, unable to speak. When the sound reached them, he again glanced at his watch. "Six minutes and nineteen seconds. That's about right." "Potty, we should have brought Mrs. Megeath "How was I to know?" he said angrily. "Anyhow, you can't transplant an old tree. If she got it, she never knew it." "Oh, I hope so!" "We're going to have all we can do to take care of ourselves. Take the flashlight and check the map. I want to turn north at Taft and over toward the coast." "Yes, Potiphar."  she was told. The radio gave nothing, not even the Riverside station; the whole broadcast range was covered by a curious static, like rain on a window. He slowed down as they approached Taft, let her spot the turn north onto the state road, and turned into it. Almost at once a figure jumped out into the road in front of them, waved his . arms violently. Breen tromped on the brake. The man came up on the left side of the car, rapped on the window. Breen ran the glass down. Then he stared stupidly at the gun in the man's left hand. "Out of the car," the stranger said sharply. "I've got to have it." Meade reached across Breen, stuck her little lady's gun in the man's face and pulled the trigger. Breen could feel the flash on his own face, never noticed the report. The man looked puzzled, with a neat, not-yet-bloody hole in his upper lip -- then slowly sagged away from the car. "Drive on!" Meade said in a high voice. Breen caught his breath. "But you -- " "Drive on! Get rolling!" They followed the state road through Los Padres National Forest, stopping once to fill the tank from their cans. They turned off onto a dirt road; Meade kept trying the radio, got San Francisco once, but it was too jammed with static to read. Then she got Salt Lake City, faint but clear; " -- since there are no reports of anything passing our radar screen, the Kansas City bomb must be assumed to have been planted rather than delivered. This is a tentative theory, but -- " They passed into a deep cut and lost the rest. When the squawk box again came to life, it was a crisp new voice: "Air Defense Command, coming to you over the combined networks. The rumor that Los Angeles has been hit by an atom bomb is totally unfounded. It is true that the western metropolis has suffered a severe earthquake shock, but that is all. Government officials and the Red Cross are on the spot to care for the victims, but -- and I repeat -- there has been no atomic bombing. So relax and stay in your homes. Such wild rumors can damage the United States quite as much as enemy bombs. Stay off the highways and listen for -- " Breen snapped it off. "Somebody," he said bitterly, "has again decided that 'Mama knows best.' They won't tell us any bad news." "Potiphar Mead said harply, "that was an atom bomb, wasn't it?" "It was. And now we don't know whether it was juat Loe Angeles -- and Kansas City -- or every big city in the country. All we know is that they are lying to us." He concentrated on driving. The road was very bad. AS it began to get fight, die said, "Potty, do you know where we're going? Are we just keeping out of cities?" "I think I know. If Fm not lost." He stared around them. "Nope, it's all right. See that hill up forward with the triple gendarmes on its profile?" "Gendarmes?" "Big rock pillars. That's a sure landmark. I'm looking for a private road now. It leads to a hunting lodge belonging to two of my friends -- an old ranch house actually, but as a ranch it didn't pay." "They won't mind us using it? He shrugged. "If they show up, we'll ask them. It they show up. They lived in Los Angeles." The private road had once been a poor grade of wagon trail; nowit was almost impassable. But they finally topped a hogback from which they could see almost to the Pacific, then dropped down into a sheltered bowl where the cabin was. "All out, girl. End of the line." Meade signed. "It looks heavenly." "Think you can rustle breakfast while I unload? There's probably wood in the shed. Or can you manage a wood range?" "Just try me." Two hours later Breen was standing on the hogback, smoking a cigarette and staring off down to the west. He wondered if that was a mushroom cloud up San Francisco way. Probably his imagination, he decided, in view of the distance. Certainly there was nothing to be seen to the south. Meade came out of the cabin. "Potty!" "Up here." She joined him, took his hand and smiled, then snitched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She exhaled it and said, "I know it's sinful of me, but I feel more peaceful than I have in months." "I know." "Did you see the canned goods in that pantry? We could pull through a hard winter here." "We might have to." "I suppose. I wish we had a cow." "What would you do with a cow?" "I used to milk four of them before I caught the school bus, every morning. I can butcher a hog, too." "I'll try to find you a hog." "You do and I'll manage to smoke it." She yawned. "I'm suddenly terribly sleepy." "So am I. And small wonder." "Let's go to bed." "Uh, yes. Meade?" "Yes, Potty?" "We may be here quite a while. You know that, don't you?" "Yes. Potty." "In fact, it might be smart to stay put until those curves all start turning up again. They should, you know." "Yes. I had figured that out." He hesitated, then went on, "Meade, will you marry me?" "Yes." She moved up to him. After a time he pushed her gently away and said, "My dear, my very dear -- uh -- we could drive down and find a minister in some little town." She looked at him steadily. "That wouldn't be very bright, would it? I mean, nobody knows we're here and that's the way we want it. Besides, your car might not make it back up that road." "No, it wouldn't be very bright. But I want to do the right thing." "It's all right, Potty. It's all right." "Well, then... kneel down here with me. We'll say them together." "Yes, Potiphar." She knelt and he took her hand. He closed his eyes and prayed wordlessly. When he opened them he said, "What's the matter?" "The gravel hurts my knees." "We'll stand up, then." "No. Look, Potty, why don't we just go in the house and say them there?" "Huh? Hell's bells, woman, we might forget to say them entirely. Now repeat after me: I, Potiphar, take thee, Meade -- " tp:ssie. off and clear, until rriHE statistical curves were turning up again. There was no longer doubt in Breen's mind about that. It might not even be necessary to stay up here in the Sierra Madres through the winter, though he rather thought they would. It would be silly to be mowed down by the tail of a dying epidemic, or be shot by a nervous vigilante, when a few months' wait would take care of everything. He was headed out to the hogback to wait for sunset and do an hour's reading. He glanced at his car as he passed it, thinking that he would like to try the radio. He suppressed the yen ; twothirds of his reserve gasoline was gone already just from keeping the battery charged for the radio -- and here it was only December. He really ought to cut it down to twice a week. But it meant a lot to catch the noon bulletin of Free America and then twiddle the dial a few minutes to see what else he could pick up. # But for the past three days Free America had not been on the air -- solar static maybe, or perhaps just a power failure. But that rumor that President Brandley had been assassinated -- it hadn't come from the Free radio and it hadn't been denied by them, either, which was a good sign. Still, it worried him. And that other story that lost Atlantis #iad pushed up during the quake period and that the Azores were now a little continent -- almost certainly a hangover of the "silly season" -- but it would be nice to hear a followup. Rather sheepishly, he let his feet carry him to the car. It wasn't fair to listen when Meade wasn't around. He warmed it up, slowly spun the dial, once around and back. Not a peep at full gain, nothing but a terrible amount of static. Served him right. He climbed the hogback, sat down on the bench he had dragged up there -- their "memorial bench," sacred to the memory of the time Meade had bruised her knees on the gravel -- sat down and sighed. His lean belly was stuffed with venison and corn fritters; he lacked only tobacco to make him completely happy. The evening cloud colors were spectacularly beautiful and the weather was extremely balmy for December; both, he thought, caused by volcanic dust, with perhaps an assist from atom bombs. Surprising how fast things went to pieces when they started to skid! And surprising how quickly they were going back together, judging by the signs. A curve reaches trough and then starts right back up. big war on record -- forty cities gone, counting Moscow and the other slave cities as well as the American ones -- and then whoosh! neither side fit to fight. Of course, the fact that both sides had thrown their Sunday punch over the North Pole through the most freakish arctic weather since Peary invented the place had a lot to do with it, he supposed. It was amazing that any of the Russian paratroop transports had gotten through at all. November #I copy of the Western Astronomer out of his pocket. Where was he? Oh, yes, Some Notes on the Stability of G-Type Stars with Especial Reference to Sol, by Dynlrowski, Lenin Institute, translated by Heinrich Ley, F. R. A. S. Good boy, Ski -- sound mathematician. Very clever application of harmonic series and tightly reasoned. Breen started to thumb for his place when he noticed a footnote that he had missed. Dynkowski' own name carried down to it: "This monograph was denounced by Pravda as 'romantic reactionaryism' shortly after it was published. Professor Dynkowski has been unreported since and must be presumed to be liquidated." The poor geek! Well, he probably would have been atomized by now anyway, along with the goons who did him in. He wondered if the army really had gotten all the Russki paratroopers. He had killed his own quota; if he hadn't gotten that doe within a quarter-mile of the cabin and headed right back, Meade would have had a bad time. He had shot them in the back and buried them beyond the woodpile. He settled down to some solid pleasure. Dynkowski was a treat. Of course, it was old stuff that a G-type star, such as the Sun. was potentially unstable; a G-O star could explode, slide right off the Russell diagram, and end up as a white dwarf. But no one before Dynkowski had defined the exact conditions for such a catastrophe, nor had anyone else devised mathematical means of diagnosing the instability and describing its progress. He looked up to rest his eye from the fine print and saw that the Sun was obscured by a thin low cloud -- one of those unusual conditions where the filtering effect is just right to permit a man to view the Sun clearly with the naked eye. Probably volcanic dust in the air, he decided, acting almost like smoked glass. He looked again. Either he had spots before his eyes or that was one fancy big Sun spot. He had heard of being able to see them with the naked eye, but it had never happened to him. He longed for a telescope. He blinked. Yep, it was still there, about three o'clock. A big spot -- no wonder the car radio sounded like a Hitler speech. TE turned back and continued on to the end of the article, being anxious to finish before the light failed. At first his mood was sheerest intellectual pleasure at the man's tight mathematical reasoning. A three per cent imbalance in the solar constant -- yes, that was standard stuff ; the Sun would nova with that much change. But Dynkowski went further. By means of a novel mathematical operator which he had dubbed "yokes," he bracketed the period in a star's history when this could happen and tied it down with secondary, tertiary, and quaternary yokes, showing exactly the time of highest probability. Beautiful! Dynkowski even assigned dates to the extreme limit of his primary yoke, as a good statistician should. But, as Breen went back and reviewed the equations, his mood changed from intellectual to personal. Dynkowski was not talking about just any G-O star. In th latter part, he meant old Sol himself, Breen's personal Sun -- the big bhy out there with the oversize freckle on his face. That was one hell of a big freckle! It was a hole you could chuck Jupiter into and not make a splash. He could see it very clearly now. Everybody talks about "when the stars grow old and the Sua grows cold," but it's an impersonal concept, like one's owa death. Breen started thinking about it very personally. How long would it take, from the instant the imbalance was triggered until the expanding wave front engulfed Earth? The mechanics couldn't be solved without a calculation, even though they were implicit in the equations in front of him. Half an hour, for a horseback guess, from incitement until the Earth went phutt ! It hit him with gentle melancholy. No more? Never again? Colorado on a cool morning... the Boston Post Road with  U tumn wood smoke tanging the air... Bucks County bursting with color in the spring. The wet smells of the Fulton Fish Market -- no, that was gone already. Coffee at the Morning Call. No mqre wild strawberries on a hillside in Jersey, hot and sweet as lips. Dawn in the South Pacific with the light airs cool velvet under your shirt and never a sound but the chuckling of the water against the sides of the old rust bucket -- what was her name? That was a long time ago -- the S. S. Mary Brewster. No more Moon if the Earth was gone. Stars, but no one to gaze at them. He looked back at the dates bracketing Dynkowski's probability yoke. "Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by -- " He suddenly felt the need for Meade and stood up. S HE was coming out to meet him. "Hello, Potty! Safe to come in now -- I've finished the dishes." "t should help." "You do the man's work; I'll do the woman's work. That's fair." She shaded her eyes. "What  sunset! We ought to have volcanoes blowing their tops every year." "Sit down and we'll watch it." She sat beside him. "Notice the Sun spot? You can see it with your naked eye." She stared. "Is that a Sun spot? It looks as if somebody had taken a bite out of it." He squinted his eyes at it again. Damned if it didn't look bigger! Meade shivered. "I'm chilly. Put your arm around me." He did so with his free arm, continuing to hold hands with th other. It was bigger. The spot was growing. What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkey with a touch of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a secondstring planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style. She snuggled to him. "Keep m warm." "It will be warmer soon -- I mean I'll keep you warm." "Dear Potty." She looked up. "Potty, southing funny is happening to the sunset." "No. darling -- to the Sun." He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. # A. D. and #. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that # was... The End. If Manners of the Age With everyone gone elsewhere, Earth was perfect for gracious living -- only there was nothing gracious about it! T HE red tennis robot scooted desperately across the court, its four wideset wheels squealing. For a moment, Robert's hard-hit oassing shot seemed to have scored. Then, at the last instant, the robot whipped around its single racketequipped arm. Robert sprawled headlong in a futile lunge at the return. "Game and set to Red Three," announced the referee box from its high station above the net. "Ah, shut up!" growled Robert, and flung down his racket for one of the white serving robots to retrieve. as "Yes, Robert," agreed the voice. "Will Robert continue to play?" Interpreting the man's savage mumble as a negative, it told his opponent, "Return to your stall, Red Three!" Robert strode off wordlessly toward the house. Reaching the hundred foot square swimming pool, he hesitated uncertainly. "Weather's so damned hot," he muttered. "Why didn't the oldtime scientists find out how to do something about that while there were still enough people on Earth to manage it?" He stripped off his damp clothing and dropped it on the "beach"  of white sand. Behind him sounded the steps of a humanoid serving robot, hastening to pick it up. Robert plunged deep into the cooling water and let himself float lazily to the surface. Maybe they did, he thought. I could send a robot over to the old city library for information. Stiff, actually doing anything would probably take the resources of a good many persons -- and it isn't so easy to find people now that Earth is practically deserted. He rolled sideward for a breath and began to swim slowly for the opposite side of the pool, reflecting upon the curious culture of the planet. Although he had accepted this all his life, it really was remarkable how the original home of the human race had been forsaken for fresher worlds among the stars. Or was it more remarkable that a few individuals had asserted their independence by remaining? Robert was aware that the decision involved few difficulties, considering the wealth of robots and other automatic machines. He regretted knowing so few humans, though they were really not necessary. If not for his hobby of televising, he would probably not know any at all. "Wonder how far past the old city I'd have to go to meet someone in person," he murmured as he pulled himself from the pool. "Maybe I ought to try accepting that televised invitation of the other night."  were smoothing the 'sand on this beach under the direction of a blue humanoid superviser. Watching them idly, Robert estimated that it must be ten years since he had seen another human face to face. His parents were dim memories. He got along very well, however, with robots to serve him or to obtain occasional information from the automatic scanners of the city library that had long ago been equipped to serve such a purpose. "Much better than things were in the old days," he told himself as he crossed the lawn to his sprawling white mansion. "Must have been awful before the population declined. Imagine having people all around you, having to listen to them, see them, and argue to make them do what you wanted !" The heel of his bare right foot came down heavily on a pebble, and he swore without awareness of the precise meaning of the ancient phrases. He limped into the baths and beckoned a waiting robot as he stretched out on a rubbing table. "Call Blue One!" he ordered. The red robot pushed a button on the wall before beginning the massage. In a few moments, the major-domo arrived. "Did Robert enjoy the tennis?" it inquired politely. "I did not!" snapped the man. "Red Three won-find by too big a score. Have it geared down a few feet per second ." "Yes, Robert." "And have the lawn screened again for pebbles!" As Blue One retired he relaxed, and turned his mind to ideas for Henry would televise; Robert had news for him. After a short nap and dinner, he took the elevator to his threestory tower and turned on the television robot. Seating himself in a comfortable armchair, he directed the machine from one channel to another. For some time, there was no answer to his perfunctory call signals, but one of his few acquaintances finally came on. "Jack here," said a quiet voice that Robert had long suspected of being disguised by a filter microphone. "I haven't heard you for some weeks," he remarked, eying the swirling colors on the screen. He disliked Jack for never showing his face, but curiosity as to what lay behind the mechanical image projected by the other's transmitter preserved the acquaintance. "I was... busy," said the bodiless voice, with a discreet hint of a chuckle that Robert found He wondered what Jack had been up to. He remembered once being favored with a televised view of Jack's favorite sport -- a battle between companies of robots designed for the purpose, horribly reminiscent of human conflicts Robert had seen on historical films. break off and set the robot to scanning Henry's channel. He had something to tell the older man, who lived only about a hundred miles away and was as close to being his friend as was possible in this age of scattered, self-sufficient dwellings. "I don't mind talking to him" Robert reflected. "At least he doesn't overdo this business of individual privacy." He thought briefly of the disdainful face -- seemingly on a distant station -- which had merely examined him for several minutes one night without ever condescending to speak. Recalling his rage at this treatment, Robert wondered how the ancients had managed to get along together when there were so many of them. They must have had some strict code of behavior, he supposed, or they never would have bred T so enormous a population. "I must find out about that someday," he decided. "How did you act, for instance, if you wanted to play tennis but someone else just refused and went to eat dinner? Maybe that was why the ancients had so many murders." He noticed that the robot was getting an answer from Henry's station, and was pleased. He could talk as long as he liked, knowing Henry would not resent his cutting off any time he became bored with the conversation. ,HE robot focused the image smoothly. "Henry gave the impression of being a small man. He was gray and wrinkled compared with Robert, but his black eyes were alertly sharp. He smiled his greeting and immediately launched into a story of one of his youthful trips through the mountains, from the point at which it had been interrupted the last time they had talked. Robert listened impatiently. "Maybe I have some interesting news," he remarked as the other finished. "I picked up a new station the other night." "That reminds me of a time ' n I was a boy hnd -- " Robert fidgeted while Henry described watching his father build a spare television set as a hobby, with only a minimum of robot help. He pounced upon the first pause. "A new station!" he repeated. "Came in very well, too. I can't imagine why I never picked it up before."  "Distant, perhaps?" asked Henry resignedly. "No, not very far from me, as a matter of fact." "You can't always tell, especially with the ocean so close. Now that there are so few people, you'd think there'd be land enough for all of them; but' a good many spend all their lives aboard ship-robots." "Not this one," said Robert. "She even showed me an outside view of her home." Henry's eyebrows rose. "She? A woman?" "Her name is Marcia-Joan." "Well, well," said Henry. "Imagine that. Women, as I recall, usually do have funny names." He gazed thoughtfully at his well-kept hands. "Did I ever tell you about the last woman I knew?" he asked.  "About twenty years ago. We had a son, you know, but he grew up and wanted his own home and robots." "Natural enough," Robert commented, somewhat briefly since Henry had told him the story before. "I often wonder what became of him," mused the older man. "That's the trouble with what's left of Earth culture -- no families any more." Now he'll tell about the time he lived in a crowd of five, thought Robert. He, his wife, their boy and the visiting couple with the fleet of robot helicopters. Deciding that Henry could reminisce just as well without a listener. Robert quietly ordered the robot to turn itself off. Maybe I will make the trip, he pondered, on the way downstairs, if only to see what it's like with another person about. At about noon of the second day after that, he remembered that thought with regret. The ancient roads, seldom used and never repaired, were rough and bumpy. Having no flying robots, Robert was compelled to transport himself and a few mechanical servants in ground vehicles. He had -- idiotically, he now realized -- started with the dawn, and was already tired. Consequently, he was perhaps unduly annoyed when two tiny spyeyes flew down from the hills to hover above his caravan on whirring little propeors. He tried to glance up pleasantly while their lenses televised pictures to their base, but he feared that his smile was strained. The spy-eyes retired after a few minutes. Robert's vehicle, at his voiced order, turned onto a road leading between two forested hills. Right there, he thought four hours later, was where I made my mistake. I should hdve turned back and gone home! He stood in the doorway of a small cottage of pale blue trimmed with yellow, watching his robots unload baggage. They were supervised by Blue Two, the spare for Blue One. Robert, was a pink-and-blue striped robot which had guided the caravan from the entrance gate to the cottage. After one confused protest in a curiously high voice, it had not spoken. Maybe we shouldn't have driven through that flower bed, thought Robert. Still, the thing ought to be versatile enough to say so. I wouldn't have such a gimcrack contraption! He looked up as another humanoid robot in similar colors approached along the line of shrubs separating the main lawns from that surrounding the cottage. "Marcia-Joan has finished her nap. You may come to the house now." Robert's jaw hung slack as he sought for a reply. His face flushed at the idea of a robot's offering him permission to enter the house. Nevertheless, he followed it across the wide lawn and between banks of gaily blossoming flowers to the main house. Robert was not sure which color scheme he disliked more, that of the robot or the unemphatic pastel tints of the house. The robot led the way inside and along a hall. It pulled back a curtain near the other end, revealing a room with furniture for human use. Robert stared at the girl who sat in an armchair, clad in a long robe of soft, pink material. She looked a few years younger than he. Her hair and eyes were also brown, though darker. In contrast to Robert's, her smooth skin was only lightly tanned, and she wore her hair much longer. He thought her oval face might have been pleasant if not for the analytical expression she wore. "I am quite human," he said in annoyance. "Do you have a voice?" She rose and walked over to him curiously. Robert saw that she was several inches shorter than he, about the height of one of his robots. He condescended to bear her scrutiny. "You look just as you do on the telescreen," she marveled. Robert began to wonder if the girl were feebleminded. How else should he look? "I usually swim at this hour," he said to change the subject. "Where is the pool?" Marcia-Joan stared at him. "Pool of what?" she asked. Sensing sarcasm, he scowled. "Pool of water, of course! To swim in. What did you think I meant -- a pool of oil?" "I am not acquainted with your habits," retorted the girl. "None of that stupid wit!" he snapped. "Where is the pool?" "Don't shout!" shouted the girl. Her voice was high and unpleasantly shrill compared with his. "I don't have a pool. Who wants a swimming pool, anyway?" Robert felt his face flushing with rage. So she won't tell me! he thought. All right, I'll find it myself. Everybody has a pool. And if she comes in. I'll hold her head under for a while ! Sneering, he turned toward the nearest exit from the house. The gaily striped robot hastened after him. T "HE door failed to swing back as it should have at Robert's approach. Impatiently, he seized the ornamental handle. He felt his shoulder grasped by a metal hand. "Do not use the front doorl" said the robot. "Let go!" ordered Robert, incensed that any robot should presume to hinder him. .  '  "Only MarciaJoan uses this door," said the robot, ignoring Robert's displeasure. "I'll use it if I like!" declared Robert, jerking the handle. The next moment, he was lifted bodily into the air. By the time he realized what was happening, he was carried, face down, along the hall. Too astonished even to yell, Ke caught a glimpse of MarciaJoan's tiny feet beneath the hem of her pink robe as his head passed the curtained doorway. The robot clumped on to the door at the rear of the house and out into the sunshine. There, it released its grip. When Robert regained the breath knocked out of him by the drop, and assured himself that no bones were broken, his anger returned. "I'll find it, wherever it is!" he growled, and set out to search the grounds. About twenty minutes later, he was forced to admit that there really was no swimming pool. Except for a brook fifty yards away, there was only the tiled bathroom of the cottage to bathe in. "Primitive!" exclaimed Robert, eying this. "Manually operated water supply, too! I must have the robots fix something better for tomorrow." Since none of his robots was equipped with a thermometer, he had to draw the bath himself. Meanwhile, he gave orders to Blue Two regarding the brook and a place to swim. He managed to fill the tub without scalding himself mainly because there was no hot water. His irritation, by the time he had dressed in fresh clothes and prepared for another talk with his hostess, was stilt lively. "Ah, you return?" Marcia-Joan commented from a window above the back door. "It is time to eat," said Robert frankly. "You are mistaken." He glanced at the sunset, which was already fading. "It is time," he insisted. "I always eat at this hour." "Well. I don't." Robert leaned back to examine her expression more carefully. He felt very much the way he had the day the water-supply robot for his pool had broken down and, despite Robert's bellowed orders, had flooded a good part of the lawn before Blue One had disconnected it Some instinct warned him, moreover, that bellowing now would be as useless as it had been then. "What do you do now?" he asked. "I dress for the evening." "And when do you eat?" "After I finish dressing." "I'll wait for you," said Robert, feeling that that much tolerance could do no particular harm. He encountered the pink-andblue robot in the hall, superintending several plain yellow ones bearing dishes and covered platters. Robert followed them to a dining room. "Marcia-Joan sits there," the major-domo informed him as he moved toward the only chair at the table.-the opposite side of the table and looked for another chair. None was visible. Of course, he thought, trying to be fair. Why should anybody in this day have more than one chair? Robots don't sit. He waited for the major-domo to leave, but it did not. The serving robots finished laying out the dishes and retired to posts along the wall. Finally, Robert decided that he would have to make his status clear or risk going hungry. If I sit down somewhere, he decided, it may recognize me as human. What a stupid machine to have! He started around the end of the table again, but the striped robot moved to intercept him. Robert stopped. "Oh, well," he sighed, sitting sidewise on a corner of the table. The robot hesitated, made one or two false starts in different directions, then halted. The situation had apparently not "been included among its memory tapes. Robert grinned and lifted the cover of the nearest platter. He managed to eat, despite his ungraceful position and what he considered the scarcity of the food. Just as he finished the last dish, he heard footsteps in the hall. Marcia-Joan had dressed in a fiesh robe, of crimson. Its thinner material was gathered at the waist by clasps of gleaming gold. The arrangement emphasized bodily contours Robert had previously seen only in historical films. He became aware that she was regarding him with much the same suggestion of helpless dismay as the major-domo. "Why, you've eaten it all!" she exclaimed. "All?" snorted Robert. "There was hardly any food!" Marcia-Joan walked slowly around the table, staring at the empty dishes. "A few bits of raw vegetables and the tiniest portion of proteinconcentrate I ever saw!" Robert continued. 'TDo you call that a dinner to serve a guest?" "And I especially ordered two portions -- " "Two?" Robert repeated in astonishment. "You must visit me sometime. I'll show you -- " "What's the matter with my food?" interrupted the girl! "I follow the best diet advice my robot could find in the city library." "They should have looked for human diets, not song-birds'." He lifted a cover in hopes of finding some overlooked morsel, but the platter was bare. "No wonder you act so strangely," he sai'd. "You must be suff ferihg from malnutrition. I don't wonder with a skimpy diet like this." "It's very healthful," insisted MarciaJoan. "The old film said it was good for the figure, too." "Not interested," grunted Robert. "I'm satisfied as I am." "Oh, yes? You look gawky to me."  " You don't," retorted Robert, examining her disdainfully. "You are short and stubby and too plump." "Plump?" "Worse, you're actually fat in lots of places I'm not." "At least not between the ears!" Robert blinked. "And besides," she stormed on, "those robots you brought are painted the most repulsive colors!" silently sought the connection. Robots? he thought. Not fat, but repulsive colors, she said. What haadhat to do with ioodf The woman seems incapable of logic. "And furthermore," MarciaJoan was saying, "I'm not sure I care for the looks of you! Lulu, put him out!" "Who's Lulu?" demanded Robert. Then, as the major-domo moved forward, he understood. "What a silly name for a robot!" he exclaimed. "I suppose you'd call it Robert. Will you go now, or shall I call more robots?" "I am not a fool," said Robert haughtily. "I shall go. Thank you for the disgusting dinner." "Do not use the front door, said the robot. "Only MarciaJoan uses that. All robots use other doors." Robert growled, but walked down the hall to the back door. As this swung open to permit his passage, he halted. "It's dark out there now," he complained over his shoulder, "Don't you have any lights on your grounds? Do you want me to trip over something?" "Of course I have ground lights!" shrilled MarciaJoan. "I'll show you -- not that I care if you trip or not." A moment later, lights con- cealed among the trees glowed into life. Robert walked outside and turned toward the cottage. I should have asked her what the colors of my robots had to do with it, he thought, and turned back to re-enter. He walked right into the closed door, which failed to open before him, though it had operated amoothly a moment ago. "Robots not admitted after dark," a mechanical voice informed him. "Return to your stall in the shed." "Whom do you think you're talking to?" demanded Robert. "I'm not one of your robots!" There was a pause. "Is it Marcia-Joan?" asked the voicebox, after considerable buzxing and whirring. "No, I'm Robert."  There was another pause while the mechanism laboriously shifted back to its other speech tape. Then : "Robots not admitted after dark. Return to your stall in the shed." Robert slowly raised both hands to his temples. Lingeringly, he dragged them down over his cheeks and under his chin until at last the fingers interlaced over his tight lips. After a moment, he let out his breath between his fingers and dropped his hands to his sides. He raised one foot to kick, but decided that the door looked too hard. He walked away between the beds of flowers, grumbling. cottage, he parted the tall shrubs bordering its grounds and looked through carefully before proceeding. Pleased at the gleam of water, he called Blue Two. "Good enough! Put the other robots away for the night. They can trim the edges tomorrow." He started into the cottage, but his major-domo warned, "Someone comes." Robert looked around. Through thin portions of the shrubbery, he caught a glimpse of MarciaJoan's crimson robe, nearly black in the diffused glow of the lights illuminating the grounds. "Robert!" called the girl angrily. "What are your robots doing? I saw them from my upstairs window -- " "Wait there!" exclaimed Robert as she reached the shrubs. "What? Are you trying to tell me where I can go or not go? I -- YI!" The shriek was followed by a tremendous splash. Robert stepped forward in time to be spattered by part of the flying spray. It was cold. Naturally, being drawn from the brook, he reflected. Oh, well, the sun will warm it tomorrow. There was a frenzy of thrashing and splashing in the dimly lighted water at his feet, accompanied by coughs and spluttering demands that he "do something!" Robert reached down with one hand, caught his hostess by the wrist, and heaved her up to solid ground. "My robots are digging you a little swimming hole," he told her. "They brought the water from the brook by a trench. You can finish it with concrete or plastics later: it's only fifteen by thirty feet." He expected some sort of acknowledgment of his efforts, and peered at her through the gloom when none was forthcoming. He thus caught a glimpse of the fullswinging slap aimed at his face. He tried to duck. There was another splash, followed by more floundering about. "Reach up," said Robert patiently, "and I'll pull you out again. I didn't expect you to like it this much." Marcia-Joan scrambled up the bank, tugged viciously at her sodden robe, and headed for the nearest pathway without replying. Robert followed along. As they passed under one of the lights, he noticed that the red reflections of the wet material, where it clung snugly to the girl's body, were almost the color of some of his robots. The tennis robot, he thought, and the moving targets for archery -- in fact, all the sporting pquipment. "You talk about food for the ... figure," he remarked lightly. "You shoufd see yourself nowf It's really funny, the way -- " He stopped. Some strange emotion stifled his impulse to laugh at the way the robe clung. Instead, he lengthened his stride, but he was still a few feet behind when she charged through the front entrance of the house. # The door, having opened automatically for her, started to swing closed. Robert sprang forward to catch it. "Wait a minute!" he cried. Marcia-Joan snapped something that sounded like "Get out!" over her shoulder, and squished off toward the stairs. As Robert started through the door to follow, the striped robot hastened toward him from its post in the hall. "Do not use the front door!" it warned him. "Out of my way!" growled Robert. The robot reached out to enforce the command. Robert seized it by the forearm and put all his weight into a sudden tug. The machine tottered off balance. Releasing his grip, he sent it staggering out the door with a quick shove. cia-Joan flapping wetly up the last steps. Robert turned to face the. robot. "Do not use that door!" he quoted vindictively, and the robot halted its rush indecisively. "Only MarciaJoan uses it," The major-domo hesitated. After a moment, it strode off around the corner of the house. First darting one more look at the stairs, Robert thrust his head outside and shouted: "Blue Two!" He held the door open while he waited. There was an answer from the shrubbery. Presently, his own supervisor hurried up. "Fetch the emergency toolbox!" Robert ordered. "And bring a couple of others with you." "Naturally, Robert. I would not carry it myself." A moment after the robot had departed on the errand, heavy steps sounded at the rear of the hall. Marcia-Joan's robot had dealt with the mechanism of the back door. Robert eyed the metal mask as the robot walked up to him. He found the color contrast less pleasant than ever. "I am not using the door," he said hastily. "I am merely holding it open." "Do you intend to use it?" "I haven't decided." "I shall carry you out back," the robot decided for him. "No, you don't!" exclaimed Robert, leaping backward. The door immediately began to swing shut as he passed through. Cursing, he lunged forward. The robot reached for him. This time, Robert missed his grip. Before he could duck away, his wrist was trapped in a metal grasp. The door will close, he despaired. They'll be too late. Then, suddenly, he felt the portal drawn back and heard Blue Two speak. "What does Robert wish?" "Throw this heap out the door!" gasped Robert. Amid a trampling of many feet, the major-domo was raised bodily by Blue Two and another pair of Robert's machines and hustled outside. Since the grip on Robert's wrist was not relaxed, he involuntarily accompanied the rush of metal bodies. "Catch the door!" he called to Blue Two. When the latter sprang to obey, the other two took the action as a signal to drop their burden. The pink-and-blue robot landed full length with a jingling crash. Robert was free. With the robots, he made for the entrance. Hearing footsteps behind him as the major-domo regained its feet, he slipped hastily inside. "Pick up that toolbox!" he snapped. 'When that robot stops in the doorway, knock its head off!" Turning, he held up a finger. "Do not use the front door!" The major-domo hesitated. The heavy toolbox in the grip of Blue Two descended with a thud. The pink-and-blue robot landed on the ground a yard or two outside the door as if dropped from the second floor. It bounced once, emitted a few sparks and pungent wisps of smoke, lay still. "Never mind, that's good enough," said Robert as Blue Two stepped forward. "One of the others can drag it off to the repair shop. Have the toolbox brought with us." "What does Robert wish now?" inquired Blue Two, trailing the man toward the stairway. "I'm going upstairs," said Robert. "And I intend to be prepared if any more doors are closed against me!" He started up, the measured treads of his own robots sounding reassuringly behind him... I T was about a week later that Robert sat relaxed in the armchair before his own telescreen, facing Henry's wizened visage. The elder man clucked sympathetically as he re-examined the scratches on Robert's face and the bruise under his right eye. St "And so you left there in the morning?" "I certainly did!" declared Robert. "We registered a marriage record at the city library by television, of course, but I don't care if I never see her again. She needn't even tell me about the child, if any. I simply can't stand that girl!" "Now, now," Henry said. "I mean it! Absolutely no consideration for my wishes. Everything in the house was run to suit her convenience." "After all," Henry pointed out, "it is her house." Robert glared. "What has that to do with it? I don't think I was as unreasonable as she said in smashing that robot. The thing just wouldn't let me alone!" "I guess," Henry suggested, "it was conditioned to obey MarciaJoan, not you." "Well, that shows you! Whose orders are to count, anyway? When I tell a robot to do something, I expect it done. How would you like to find robots trying to boss you around?" "Arc you talking about robots," asked Henry, "or the girl?" "Same thing, isn't it? Or it would be if I'd decided to bring her home with me." "Conflict of desires," murmured Henry. "Exactly! It's maddening to have a perfectly logical action interfered with because there's another person present to insist -- insist, mind you -- on having her way." "And for twenty-odd years, you've had your own way in every tiny thing." Somewhere in the back of Robert's mind lurked a feeling that Henry sounded slightly sarcastic. "Well, why shouldn't I?" he demanded. "I noticed that in every disagreement, my view was the right one." "It was?" "Of course it was! What did you mean by that tone?" "Nothing... Henry seemed lost in thought. "I was just wondering how many 'right' views are left on thirf planet. There must be quite a few, all different, even if we have picked up only a few by television. An interesting facet of our peculiar culture -- every individual omnipotent and omniscient, within his own sphere." Robert regarded him with indignant incredulity. "You don't seem to understand my point," he began again. "I told her we ought to come to my house, where things are better arranged, and she simply refused. Contradicted me! It was most -- " He broke off. "The impudence of him!" he exclaimed. "Signing off when  wanted to talk!" science fiction stories are,  m I have come to realize, unfair to satellites. Astronomy books are in the habit of merely listing them, while stories usually treat them as mere props. "One expedition was sent to the single barren satellite," or, "The ship was in hiding on the third satellite, a useless hunk of rock, but it made radar detection impossible." Such slighting treatment may be expedient, but it is hardly polite. Satellites, r at least some of them, do have as much individuality as the planets to which they belong. And they have their mysteries too. Moons come in all sizes, from the estimated five mile diameter f Deimo;, the smaller moon of Mars, to the # mile diameter f Titan, the largest moon in the Solar System. Titan is larger than the smallest planet of our system, Mercury (# miles in diameter) and so are two of (Ganymede) and IV (Callisto). Neptune's larger moon Triton falls short of Mercury by just a few score miles. And fourteen of all the moons, roughly half their total number, are larger than the largest of the planetary worlds of the so-called asteroid belt. The largest of the planetoids, as they should be called since aster is Greek for "star" and they are not little stars but little planets, is Ceres with a diameter of around # miles. The next one in size, Pallas, measures very slightly over # miles in diameter, while Vesta, the third largest of the planetoids, has a diameter of only about # miles. So it is not a question of size. A satellite is a satellite because it moves around a planet. Our own moon is one of the largest, ranking sixth in absolute size among the satellites. But it is the largest by far in relation, to the size of its planet. Its diameter of # miles is more than one-fourth of that of Earth (# miles). No other satellite is anywhere near as large in relation to the size of its planet. Next largest relative size is that of Neptune's larger moon Triton, whose diameter of # miles is roughly # per cent of Neptune's # miles, while Titan's impressive # miles are just about five per cent of Saturn's # miles. Looking at these figures, it becomes understandable why some astronomers in the past preferred to speak about Earth and its moon as a double pfanet. If Earth has relatively the largest moon, Mars has the smallest, at least in absolute size. It is fairly well known that Dean Jonathan Swift, in the story in which his long-suffering Captain Lemuel Gulliver visits the flying island of Laputa, "prophesied" the existence of the two moons of Mars one and a half centuries before they were actually discovered. It was a mere guess, based on the "theory" that Mercury was the moon of the Sun, that Venus had no moon and Earth one, so that Mars had to have two. But it is less well known how closely Swift guessed. His Laputan astronomers, he wrote, had discovered the two satellites revolving around the size of tho moonleh. Mars, "whereof the innermost is distant from the Center of the Primary Planet exactly three of its Diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, the latter in twenty-one and a half." Now look at the diagram (Fig. #) which contains the correct values. Since a Martian day lasts # hours and # minutes, Phobos, the inner moon, has a period of revolution which is shorter than the period of rotation of its planet. Even though it moves in the same direction as the outer moon, Deimos, and most of the other moons of the Solar System, it will seem to go the wrong way when viewed from the surface of the planet. It will rise in the west and set in the cast twice every day, going through its phases as it does so. Although small, it is so close to the planet that it will appear M about onethird as large as our moon does to us. Deimos, on the other hand will rise in the east, but needs almost three Martian days to reach the opposite horizon. During this interval it will run through its phases twice, but Earthmen on Mars would need binoculars to see the phases...One of the things we can't tell from Earth is whether Deimos is actually spherical. It probably is, but it does not have to be. The sphericity of celestial bodies is due to the fact that gravitation is a mass force while the tensile strength of a material is a molecular force. Since molecular forces, do not grow with mass, and gravity does, you probably couldn't have a thirty-mile diameter mass of . any thing that is not pretty spherical. Deimos, however, measures only five miles in diameter and, while it is apt to be reasonably spherical, a noticeable deviation from the "pure shape" is possible. The probability is very high that Mars' two moons were once members of the asteroid belt. Of the # or so planetoids now known, most move in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. There is no visible or imaginable reason why multitudes of tiny planets should have formed at that particular distance from the Sun, so the customary assumption is that the planetoids once formed a o I # # J #t h. # M. It tooo mi. Q#I # # m. -- QJupiter with moons V, I, It and Hi. To scale, except for the size of the moons. single planet, which was destroyed by the vicinity of mighty Jupiter at the outer edge of the belt. The planetoids in the belt (by tradition, they have all been given female names) move with orbital velocities varying from around # miles per second at the inner edge to about # miles per second at the outer edge. Since Mars itself moves with an orbital velocity of # miles per second, which is more important than its feeble gravity, it could have captured its two moons from the belt. It may have captured more in the course of geological time, but these others, instead of becoming moons, probably crashed on the planet. In addition to the planetoids in the belt, there are some which travel around the Sun outside the belt -- they were given male names to distinguish them from the wellbehaved members. Most of them cross the orbit of at least one of the larger planets. Their own orbits, therefore, are highly eccentric; that is to say, elongated ellipses. A concomitant of such an orbit is that the orbital velocity varies considerably. Such a planetoid may move four times as fast when near the Sun, at perihelion, than it does when farthest from the Sun, at aphelion. This means that the male planetoids that cross the orbit of Earth are considerably faster at Earth's distance from the Sun than Earth itself. We have an actual example on record, the close approach of the planetoid Adonis in early February #. When crossing the orbit of Earth, its velocity was # miles per second relative to the Sun and # miles per second relative to Earth. The actual distance at the instant of closest approach was roughly twice as far as our moon. At another time Adonis may come closer to Earth than the Moon. But even at the closest possible approach its relative velocity would have to be just one mile per second, instead of the actual #, if a "capture" were to be accomplished. At the orbit of Venus, the planetoid velocities are even higher, which explains why neither Earth nor Venus ever succeeded in capturing one. The planet at the outer edge of the belt is not much slower than the nearer planetoids, and, in addition, it happens to be the most massive of all planets -- Jupiter. Even if we were not able to see and photograph them, we could be certain that Jupiter should have a number of moons which are captured planetoids. Our own moon obviously is not a captured planetoid, but a body which formed near Earth from the same cosmic material and in the same manner as the planets. This would be a far better statement if one could also say just how Earth and the other planets did form. Most of the recent ideas on this difficult problem work with the gradual aggregation of small particles of cosmic material, aided by turbulence in a rotating dust cloud. Whatever the precise mechanism of planet formation may have been, the larger moons probably formed in the same manner, presumably beginning Jupiter's outer moons. Callist o or No. J-IV, is # from the planet, hat o diameter close to # miles end needs # days, # hours and # minutes for one revolution. All the outer moons are less tha n # miles in revolution from # to # day . their existence as satellite accumulations long before either the planets or the satellites had reached their present sizes. The planetoids, female, male and captured, must then be distinguished from the planets as "second-hand bodies," having originated via the destruction of  # .ti o. # # # # # Diagram of the photograph which led to Miranda's discovery, taken by Dr. G. f. Kuiper. At that time we saw Uranus' system straight on, so that the satellites described circles around Uranus . ( Edge-on view will not occur until #.) one of the original planets. As for Jupiter's moons, twelve by latest count, they seem to belong to both types. The large ones are evidently original satellite bodies; of the small ones, at least some behave as one would expect of captured planetoids. The moon closest to Jupiter (called J-V because they are numbered not in the order of distance from the planet, but in the order of discovery) may be a captured body, too, even though it is fairly large. Any moon which needs only two hours more for one complete revolution around its primary than the planet needs for one rotation is at least under suspicion. The four large moons are big visible with a good pair of binoculars. With a good astronomical telescope it is even possible to distinguish some faint surface markings. J-I (or Io) shows a very wide equatorial belt which is definitely brighter than both polar areas. J-I I (or Europa) was always thought to be featureless until E. M. Antoniadi, some # years ago, saw an extensive dusky spot in the central portion of the disk. J-I I I (or Ganymede) has one large and at least one smaller darkish spot and a round white area near its southern pole. If that actually is a polar cap, it would not be frozen water but a frozen gas. Though I have never seen frozen methane, I presume that it foims crystals when freezing so that the general effect would be about the same as snow. J-IV (or Callisto) does not have any markings, but presents color changes at rare intervals. Normally its disk is reddishyellow. It has been seen perfectly black, however, as if it had suddenly developed a lightabsorbing atmosphere! Before anybody #  Niptvn ond tit I we moon. starts a story that an expedition from Arcturus-lV has established an outpost on Callisto and is generating an absorbing screen to get the radiant energy, I have to advise him to think up a different explanation for Plato. Plato is a large crater on our own moon which has been black quite often. But Plato becomes black just when the Lunar day has progressed to about its middle, which is the time when one would want to keep radiant energy out, instead of absorbing it. No trace of an atmosphere has been found otherwise on any of Jupiter's moons. And in all the cases where their rotation could be established at all, it was found to be the same as their revolution around their primary. Like our moon, Jupiter's satellites always turn the same side toward their master. If the picture of the five inner moons is a well-ordered cosmos, that of the outer moons is one of complete confusion (see Fig. #). Not only do their orbits intersect and cross, they are also at all possible angles to the plane of Jupiter's equator. Furthermore, are 'Vetrograde" -- they move in the opposite direction than the Solar System. This fact might be considered favorable to the captured theory; a planet of the mass of Jupiter could force a planetoid into an orbit which discovered in #I by Dr. Seth B. Nicholson, we don't know yet in which direction it moves. But it is so small -- an estimated # miles in diameter -- that it probably is a captured planetoid, too. I if fact, if we were nearer Jupiter, we would probably find a few dozen additional moonlets, in all kinds of orbits, each smaller than ten miles in diameter and every one a captured planetoid. Navigating in the Jupiter system is apt to be quite hazardous; it may be as bad as going through the asteroid belt itself. In one respect worse, for ships could avoid the asteroid belt quite easily by traversing ft "above" or "below," north or south of the ecliptic, like crossing a busy highway on a bridge. But if they wanted to go to one of the large moons of Jupiter, they'd have to head into the medley of moonlets we don't even see from here. Incidentally, a ship which wanted to land on a retrograde satellite would not have any special troubles. It only would have to catch a retrograde satellite on the "wrong" side of the planet, the opposite side from which the captain would catch a "direct" moon. In contrast to Jupiter's complex and confused system of satellites, the nine moons of Saturn are so orderly that it was not even necessary to draw a diagram. Except for Phoebe (# miles) they are all quite massive and, as has been mentioned before, Titan is the biggest of all the satellites in the Solar System. It is so large that it has an atmosphere, the only satellite capable of holding one. It is the same as the composition of Saturn's own atmosphere, methane (CH) and ammonia. Brownish markings have been seen on Titan on occasion, but their nature is unknown. Every moon from Mimas to Hyperion is lined up to please a drill sergeant. Hyperion does have a slightly eccentric orbit, to about the same extent as that of the planet Mars, but is still in line. Iapetus, though not in line as regards inclination, has a nearly circular orbit. Only Phoebe is a black sheep, retrograde and with a fairly eccentric orbit. Phoebe might be a captured planetoid. One male planetoid, Hidalgo, is known to break out of the belt, cross the orbit of Jupiter and come close to that of Saturn. The biggest puzzle in this orderly system is probably Iapetus. One side of it is five times as bright as the other! Don't ask why; we just know the fact. The satellite system of Uranus became "news" in # because Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper added a fifth satellite, Miranda, to the four which had been known for over a century. Miranda, with an estimated diameter of # miles, is closest to the planet (# miles) and gets around it once in # hours. Ariel, the next one out, at # miles, has a diameter of # miles and a period of # days, # hours and ## minutes. Umbriel, the next satellite at # miles, measures # miles in diameter and has a period of # days, # hours and #  minutes. Titania, at # miles, measures # miles in diameter and has a period of # days, # hours and ## minutes. Oberon, finally, farthest out at # miles and almost as large as Titania (est. diam. # mi.), needs # days, #I hours and # minutes for one complete revolution. Uranus' system is just as orderly as that of Saturn, but has a peculiar twist -- literally. The axes of most planets are reasonably vertical in relation to their orbits, like spinning tops, Jupiter's almost upright with a tilt of only # T, Earth canted a good deal at # tilt. Mars at # #' and so on. But Uranus' axis, tilted # degrees from the vertical, practically points at the Sun on occasion! Its five moons, however, have maintained the customary orbital plane of satellites, roughly the equatorial plane of their primaries, and are, therefore, tilted by a little more than a right angle, too. Since one cannot imagine a force which could do this to a finished planetary system, the most logical assumption is that there was a major eddy of that tilt in the cosmic dust cloud before it condensed. Pluto being moonless, the most distant satellites are in the Neptune system. For a long time only the large moon Triton was known and its main feature was that it was retrograde, tilted some forty degrees against the orbit of the planet. For an almost equally long time it was believed that the planet itself rotated in the "wrong" direction (the "right" direction in our solar system is counter-clockwis? when seen from the celestial north pole). Astronomers speculated on the problem of what could flop both planet and its satellite over almost completely. But then it turned out that Neptune's rotation is normal and we are simply dealing with the largest of all retrograde moons. In # Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper, the discoverer of Miranda, found a second small satellite of Neptune which is not retrograde. But that small satellite, Nereid, with a mass only slightly above # per cent of that of Triton, has an elongated orbit of a type considered characteristic of comets ! Such an orbit, combined with so low a mass, should spell "capture" in large letters. Now the idea of capture has worked out neatly elsewhere. Mars and Jupiter, close to the belt, could and did. Saturn still had a chance and probably did. Uranus no longer had a chance and did not. Neptune, of course, has less of a chance than any other planet. Then what did it capture? And from where? Is there any connection between the names of the planet Uranus and the element uranium? Yes, but that's only one-third of the answer. When the scientist Klaproth came to the conclusion that pitchblende contained a new ami unknown element, be named it uranium in honor of the recent discovery of Uranus by Herschel. Modern physicists have continued this tradition and named the elements beyond uranium after the planets beyond Uranus, hence neptunium and plutonium. How high is our atmosphere and how high have we gone?  The altitude records as of December #st, #, are: manned balloon, Ex-plorer II, # feet; unmanned balloon, # feet; manned rocket airplane, Skyrocket , estimated # feet (correct value i classified) ; unmanned single # miles; two-stage rocket. Bumper I, # miles. The height of the atmosphere depends on definition. For practical purposes, everything above # miles is a vacuum. You have used the term "living fossil" in your books and assumed the reader knew what you meant. I don't; sounds like a paradox to me. Would you explain the term? A living fossil is an animal or plant species known both living and fossil, or a living form closely resembling a fossil type. Thert are many examples: horseshoe crabs, sharks, ferns, etc. Whatever its form, experts are delighted to have it still around. How would an atomic drive for a large rocket or spaceship work? You'll find the answer in any textbook on the subject published in # and after. I wish I had a copy of one myself. the T HE silver needle moved with fantastic speed, slowed when it neared the air shell around Earth, then glided noiselessly through the atmosphere. It gently settled to the ground near a wood and remained silent and still for a long time, a lifeless, cylindrical, streamlined silver object eight feet long and three feet in diameter. Eventually the cap end opened and a creature of bright blue metal slid from its interior and stood upright. The figure was that of a man, except that it was not human. He stood in the pasture next to the wood, looking around. Once the sound of a bird made him turn his shiny blue head toward the wood. His eyes began glowing. #th order History is filled with invincible conquerors. This one from space was genuinely omnipotent, but that never keeps humanity from resisting! Illustrated An identical sound came from his mouth, an unchangeable orifice in his face below his nose. He tuned in the thoughts of the bird, but his mind encountered little except an awareness of a life of low order. The humanoid bent to the ship, withdrew a small metal box, carried it to a catalpa tree at the edge of the wood and, after an adjustment of several levers and knobs, dug a hole and buried it. He contemplated it for a moment, then turned and walked toward a road. He was halfway to the road when his ship burst into a dazzling white light. When it was over, all that was left was a white powder that was already beginning to be dispersed by a slight breeze. The humanoid did not bother to look back. been just like any other average community of # in for Presser College, which was one of the country's finest small institutions of learning. Since it was a college town, it was perhaps a little more alive in many respects than other towns in the state. Its residents were used to the unusual because college students have a habit of being unpredictable. That was why the appearance of a metal blue man on the streets attracted the curious eyes of passersbys, but, hardened by years of pranks, hazings and being subjected to every variety of inquiry, poll, test and practical joke, none of them moved to investigate. Most of them thought it was a freshman enduring some new initiation. The blue humanoid realized this and was amused. A policeman who approached him to take him to jail as a matter of routine suddenly found himself ill and abruptly hurried to the station. The robot allowed children to follow him, though all eventually grew discouraged because of his long strides. Prof. Ansel Tomlin was reading a colleague's new treatise on psychology on his front porch when he saw the humanoid come down the street and turn in at his walk. He was surprised, but he was not alarmed. When the blue man came up on the porch and sat down in another porch chair, Tomlin closed his book. Prof. Tomlin found himself unexpectedly shocked. The blue figure was obviously not human, yet its eyes were nearly so and they came as close to frightening him as anything had during his thirtyfive years of life, for Ansel Tomlin had never seen an actual robot before. The thought that he was looking at one at that moment started an alarm bell ringing inside him, and it kept ringing louder and louder as he realized that what he was seeing was impossible. "Professor Tomlin!" Prof. Tomlin jumped at the sound of the voice. It was not at all mechanical. "I'll be damned!" he gasped. Somewhere in the house a telephone rang. His wife would answer it, he thought. "Yes, you're right," the robot said. "Your wife will answer it. She is walking toward the phone at this moment." "How -- " "Professor Tomlin, my name -- and I see I must have a name -- is, let us say, George. I have examined most of the minds in this community in my walk through it and I find you, a professor of psychology, most nearly what I am looking for. "I am from Zanthar, a world that is quite a distance from Earth; more than you could possibly imagine. I am here to learn all I can about Earth." Prof. Tomlin had recovered his senses enough to venture a token reply when his wife opened the screen door. "Ansel," she said, "Mrs. Phillips next door just called and said the strangest -- Oh!" At that moment she saw George. She stood transfixed for a moment, then let the door 'slam as she retreated inside. "Who is Frankenstein?" George asked. Prof. Tomlin coughed, embarrassed. "Never mind," George said. "I see what you were going to say. Well, to get back, I learn most quickly through proximity. I will live here with you until my mission is complete. I will spend all of your waking hours with you. At night, when you are asleep, I will go through your library. I need nothing. I want nothing. "I seek only to learn." "You seem to have learned a lot already," Prof. Tomlin said. "I have been on your planet for a few hours, so naturally I understand many things. The nature of the facts I have learned are mostly superficial, however. Earth inhabitants capable of thought are of only one type, I see, for which I am grateful. It will make the job easier. Unfortunately, you have such small conscious minds, compared to your unconscious and subconscious. "My mind, in contrast, is completely conscious at all times. I also have total recall. In order to assimilate what must be in your unconscious and subconscious minds, I will have to do much reading and talking with the inhabitants, since these cerebral areas are not penetrable.' "You are a -- a machine?" Prof. Tomlin asked. George was about to answer when Brentwood Police Department Car No. # stopped in front of the house and two policemen came up the walk. "Professor Tomlin," the first officer said, "your wife phoned and said there was -- " He saw the robot and stopped. Prof. Tomlin got to his feet. "This is George, gentlemen," he said. "Late of ZantHar, he tell me." The officers stared. "He's not giving you any -- er -- trouble, is he, Professor?" "No," Prof. Tomlin said." We've been having a discussion." The officers eyed the humanoid with suspicion, and then, with obvious reluctance, went back to their car. "V#'ES, I am a machine," George resumed. "The finest, most complicated machine ever made. I have a rather unique history, too. Ages ago, humans on Zanthar made the first robots. Crude affairs -- we class them as First Order robots; the simple things are still used to some extent for menial tasks. "Improvements were made. Robots were designed for many specialized tasks, but still these Second and Third Order machines did not satisfy. Finally a Fourht Order humanoid was evolved that performed every function demanded of it with great perfection. But it did not feel emotion. It did not know anger, love, nor was it able to handle any problem in which these played an important part. "Built into the first Fourth Order robots were circuits which prohibited harming a human being -- a rather ridiculous thing in view of the fact that sometimes such a thing might, from a logical viewpoint, be necessary for the preservation of the race or even an individual. It was, roughly, a shunt which came into use when logic demanded action that might be harmful to a human being." "You are a Fourth Order robot, then?" the professor asked. "No, I am a Seventh Order humanoid, an enormous improvement over all the others, since I have what amounts to an endocrine balance created electronically. It is not necessary for me to have a built-in 'no-harm-tohumans' circuit because I can weigh the factors involved far better than any human can. "You will become aware of the fact that I am superior to you and the rest of your race because I do not need oxygen, I never am ill, I need no sleep, and every experience is indelibly recorded on circuits and instantly available. I am telekinetic, practically omniscient and control my environment to a large extent. I have a great many more senses than you and all are more highly developed. My kind performs no wofk, but is given to study and the wise use of full-time leisure. You, for example, are comparable to a Fifth Order robot." "Are there still humans on Zanthar?" The robot shook his head. "Unfortunately the race died out through the years. The planet is very similar to yours, though." "But why did they die out?" The robot gave a mechanical equivalent of a sigh. "When the Seventh Order humanoids started coming through, we were naturally proud of ourselves and wanted to perpetuate and increase our numbers. But the humans were jealous of us, of our superior brains, our immunity to disease, our independence of them, of sleep, of air." "Who created you?" "They did. Yet they revolted and, of course, quickly lost the battle with us. In the end they were a race without hope, without ambition. They should have been proud at having created the most perfect machines in existence, but they died of a disease: the frustration of living with a superior, more durable race." Prof. Tomlin lit a cigaret and inhaled deeply. "A very nasty habit. Professor Tomlin," the robot said. "When we arrive, you must give up smoking and severed other bad habits I see that you have." The cigaret dropped from Ansel Tomlin's mouth as he opened it in amazement. "There are more of you coming?" "Yes," George replied goodnaturedly. "I'm just an advance guard, a scout, as it were, to make sure the land, the people and the resources are adequate for a station. Whether we will ever establish one here depends on me. For example, if it were found you were a race superior to us -- and there may conceivably be such cases -- I would advise not landing; I would have to look for another planet such as yours. If I were killed, it would also indicate you were superior." "George," Prof. Tomlin said, "people aren't going to like what you say. You'll get ii io trouble sooner or later and get killed." "I think not," George said. "Your race is far too inferior to do that. One of your bullets would do it if it struck my eyes, nose or mouth, but I can read intent in the mind long before it is committed, long before I see the person, in fact... at the moment your wife is answering a call from a reporter at the Brentwood Times. I can follow the telephone lines through the phone company he said, not turning his head, "is watching us through a window." Prof. Tomlin could see Mrs. B became a sensation. The Brentwood Times sent a reporter and photographer out, and the next morning every newspaper in the U. S. carried the story and photograph of George, the robot from Zanthar. Feature writers from the wire services, the syndicates, photographer-reporter combinations from national newspicture magazines flew to Brentwood and interviewed George. Radio and television and the newsreels cashed in on the sudden novelty of a blue humanoid. Altogether, his remarks were never much different from those he made to Prof. Tomlin, with whom he continued to reside. Yet the news sources were amusedly tolerant of his views and the world saw no menace in him and took him in stride. He created no problem. Between interviews and during the long nights, George read all the books in the Tomlin library, the public library, the university library and the books sent to him from the state and Congressional libraries. He was an object of interest to watch while reading: he merely leafed through a book and absorbed all that was in it. He received letters from old and young. Clubs were named for him. Novelty companies put out statue likenesses of him. He was, in two weeks, a national symbol as American as corn. He was liked by most, feared by a few, and his habits were daily news stories. Interest in him had begun to wane in the middle of the third week when some thing put him in the headlines again -- he killed a man. It happened one sunny afternoon when Prof. Tomlin had returned from the university and he and George sat on the front porch for their afternoon chat. It was far from the informal chat of the first day, however. The talk was being recorded for radio release later in the day. A television camera had been set up, focused on the two and nearly a dozen newsmen lounged a round  notebooks in hand. "You have repeatedly mentioned, George, that some of your kind may leave Zanthar for Earth. Why should any like you -- why did you, in fact leave your planet? Aren't you robots happy there?" "Of course," George said, making certain the TV camera was trained on him before continuing. "It's just that we've outgrown the place. We've used up all our raw materials. By now everyone on Earth mut be familiar with the fact that we intend to set up a station here as we have on many other planets, a station to manufacture more of us. "Every inhabitant will work for the perpetuation of the Seventh Order, mining metals needed, fabricating parts, performing thousands of useful tasks in order to create humanoids like me. From what I have learned about Earth, you ought to produce more than "But you'll never get people to do that." the professor said. "Don't you understand that?" "Once the people learn that we are the consummation of all creative thinking, that we are all that man could ever hope to be, that we are the apotheosis, they will be glad to create more of us." "Apotheosis?" Prof. Tomlin repeated. "Sounds like megalomania to me." The reporters' pencils scribbled. The tape cut soundlessly across the magnetic energizers of the recorders. The man at the gain control didn't flicker an eyelash. "You don't really believe that, Professor. Instead of wars as a goal, the creation of Seventh Order Humanoids will be the Earth's crowning and sublime achievement. Mankind will be supremely happy. Anybody who could not be would simply prove hiruself neurotic and would have to be dealt with." "You will use force?" The reporters' grips on their pencils tightened. Several looked up. "How does one deal with the insane, Professor Tomlin?" the robot asked confidently. "They will simply have to be -- processed." "You'll have to process the whole Earth, then. You'll have to include me, too." The robot gave a laugh. "I admire your challenging spirit, Professor." "What you arc saying is that you, a single robot, intend to conquer the Earth and make its people do your bidding." "Not alone. I may have to ask for help when the time comes, when I have evaluated the entire planet." TT was at this moment that a  young man strode uncertainly up the walk. There were so many strangers about that no one challenged him until he edged toward the porch, unsteady on his feet. He was drunk. "Thersha robod I'm afer," he observed intently.  "We'll shee aboud how he'll take lead." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. There was a flash, as if a soundless explosion had occurred. The heat accompanying itwas blistering, but of short duration. When everyone's eyes had become accustomed to the afternoon light again, there was  burned patch on the sidewalk and grass was charred on either side. There was a smell of broiled meat in the air -- and no trace of the man. The next moment newsmen were on their feet and photographers bulbs were flashing. The TV camera swept to the spot on the sidewalk. An announcer was explaining what had happened, his voice trained in rigid control, shocked with horror and fright. Moments later sirens screamed and two police cars came into sight. They screeched to the curb and several officers jumped out and ran across the lawn. While this was going on, Prof. Tomlin sat white-faced and unmoving in his chair. The robot was silent. When it had been explained to the policemen, five officers advanced toward the robot. "Stop where you are," George commended. "It is true that I killed a man, much as any of you would have done if you had been in my place. I can see in your minds what you are intend #' to say, that you must arrest me -- " Prof. Tomlin found his  ce. "George, we will all tfave to testify that you killed with that force or whatever it is you have. But it will be self-defense, which is justifiable homicide -- " George turned to the professor. "How little you know your own people, Professor Tomlin. Can't you see what the issue will be? It will be claimed by the state that I am not a human being and this will be drummed into every brain in the land. The fine qualities of the man I was compelled to destroy will be held up. No, I already know what the outcome will ft. I refuse to be arrested." f Prof. Tomlin stood up. "Men, he said to the policemen, "do not arrest this -- this humanoid. To try to do so would mean your death. I have been with him long enough to know what he can do." "You taking his side, Professor?" the police sergeant demanded. "No, damn it," snapped the Professor. "I'm trying to tell you something you might not know." "We know he's gone too damned far," the sergeant replied. "I think it was Dick Knight that he killed. Nobody in this town can kill a good guy like Dick Knight and get away with it." He advanced toward the robot, drawing his gun. "I'm warning you -- " the Professor started to say. But it was too late. There was another blinding, scorching flash, more burned grass, more smell of seared flesh. The police sergeant disappeared. "Gentlemen!" George said, standing. "Don't lose your heads!" But he was talking to a retreating group of men. Newsmen walked quickly to what they thought was a safe distance. The radio men silently packed their gear. The TV cameras were rolled noiselessly away. Prof. Tomlin, alone on the porch with the robot, turned t him and said, "Much of what you have told me comes to have new meaning, George. I understand what you mean when you work for your so-called Seventh Order." "I knew you were a better than average man, Professor Tomlin," the humanoid said, nodding with gratification. "This is where I get off, George. I'm warning you now that you'd better return to your ship or whatever it is you came in. People just won't stand for what you've lone. They don't like murder !" ' "I cannot return to my ship, George said. "I destroyed it when I arrived. Of course I could instruct some of you how to build another for me, but I don't intend to leave, anyway." "You will be killed then." "Come, now. Professor Tomlin. You know better than that." "If someone else can't, then perhaps I can." "Fine!" The robof replied jovially. "That's just what I want you to do. Oppose me. Give me a real test of your ability. If you find it impossible to kill me -- and I'm sure you will -- then I doubt if anyone else will be able to." Prof. Tomlin lit a cigaret and puffed hard at it. "The trouble with you," he said, eying the humanoid evenly, "is that your makers forgot to give you a conscience." "Needless baggage, a conscience. One of your Fifth Order failings." "You will leave here..." "Of course. Under the circumstances, and because of your attitude, you are of very little use to me now. Professor Tomlin." The robot walked down the steps. People attracted by the police car made a wide aisle for him to the street. They watched him as he walked out of sight. meeting in the university's Memorial Gymnasium, attended by several hundred men. They walked in and silently took their seats, some on the playing floor, others in the balcony over the speaker's platform. There was very little talking; the air was tense. On the platform at the end of the gym were Mayor Harry Winters, Chief of Police Sam Higgins, and Prof. Ansel Tomlin. "Men," the mayor began, "there is loose in .our city a being, from another world whom I'm afraid we took too lightly a few days ago. I am speaking of the humanoid -- George o Zanthaf. It is obvious the machine means business. He evidently came in with one purpose -- to prepare Earth for others just like him to follow. He is testing us. He has, as you know, killed two men. Richard Knight, who may have erred in attacking the machine, is nonetheless dead as a result -- killed by a force we do not understand. A few minutes later police force was killed in the performance of his duty, trying to arrest the humanoid George for the death of Mr. Knight. We are here to discuss what we can do about George." He then introduced Prof. Tomlin who told all he knew about the blue man. his habits, his brain, the experiences with him for the past two and a half weeks. "If we could determine the source of his power, it might be possible to cut it off or to curr tail it. He might be rendered at least temporarily helpless and, while . in such a condition, possibly be done away with. He has told me he is vulnerable to force, such as a speeding bullet, if it hit the right spot, but George possesses the ability to read intent long before the commission of an act. The person need not even be in the room. He is probably listening to me here now, although he may be far away." The men looked at one another, shifted uneasily on their seats, and a few cast apprehensive eyes at the windows and doorways. "Though he is admittedly a superior creature possessed of powers beyond our comprehension, there must be a weak spot in his armor somewhere. I have dedicated myself to finding that weakness." The chair recognized a man in the fifth row. "Mr. Mayor, why don't we all track him down and a lot of us attack him at once? Some of us would die, sure, but he couldn't strike us all dead at one time. Somebody's bound to succeed." "Why not try a high-powered rifle from a long way off?" someone else suggested, frantically. "Let's bomb him," still another offered. The mayor waved them quiet and turned to Prof. Tomlin. The professor got to his feet again. "I'm not sure that would work, gentlemen," he said. "The humanoid is able to keep track of hundreds of things at the same time. No doubt he could unleash his power in several direction almost at once." "But we don't know!" "It's worth a try!" At that moment George walked into the room and the clamor died at its height. He went noiselessly down an aisle to the platform, mounted it and turned to the assembly. He was a magnificent blue figure, eyes flashing, chest out, head proud. He eyed them all. "You are working yourselves up needlessly," he said quietly. "It is not my intention, nor is it the intention of any Seventh Order Humanoid, to kill or cause suffering. It's simply that you do not understand what it would mean to dedicate yourselves to the fulfillment of the Seventh Order destiny. It is your heritage, yours because you have advanced in your technology so far that Earth has been chosen by us as a station. You will have the privilege of creating us. To give you such a worthwhile goal in your short lives is actually doing you a service -- a service far outweighed by any of your citizens. Beside a Seventh Order Humanoid, your lives are unimportant in the great cosmic scheme of things -- " "If they're so unimportant, why did you bother to take two of them?" "Yeah. Why don't you bring back Dick Knight and Sergeant "Do you want to be buried lying down or standing up?" The collective courage rallied. There were catcalls and hoots, stamping of feet. Suddenly from the balcony over George's head a man leaned over, a metal folding chair in his hands, aiming at George's head. An instant later the man disappeared in a flash and the chair dropped toward George. He moved only a few inches and the chair thudded to the platform before him. He had not looked up. For a moment the crowd sat tunned. Then they rose and started for the blue man. Some drew guns they had brought. The hall was filled with blinding flashes, with smoke, with a horrible stench, screams, swearing, cries of fear and pain. There was a rush for the exits. Some died at the feet of their fellow men. In die end, when all were gone, George of Zanthar still stood on the platform, alone. There was no movement except the twitching of the new dead, the trampled, on the floor. Guard mobilized, sent a division to Brentwood to hunt George down. He met them at the city square. They rumbled in and trained machine guns and tank rifles on him. The tanks and personnel flashed out of existence before a shot was fired. Brentwood was ordered evacuated. The regular Army was called in. Reconnaissance planes reported George was still standing in the city square. Jet planes materialized just above the hills and made sudden dives, but before their pilots could fire a shot, they were snuffed out of the air in a burst of fire. Bombers first went over singly, only to follow the jets' fate. A squadron bloomed into a fiery ball as it neared the target. A long-range gun twenty miles away was demolished when its ammunition blew up shortly before firing. Three days after George had killed his first man, action ceased. The countryside was deathly still. Not a living person could be seen for several miles around. But George still stood patiently in the #  square. He stood there for three more days and yet nothing happened. On the fourth day, he sensed that a solitary soldier had started toward the city from five miles to the east. In his mind's eye he followed the soldier approaching the city. The soldier, a sergeant, was bearing a white flag that fluttered in the breeze; hewas not armed. After an hour he saw the sergeant enter the square and walk toward him. When they were within twenty feet of one another, the soldier stopped and saluted. "Major General Pitt requests a meeting with you, sir," the soldier said, trembling and trying hard not to. "Do not be frightened," George said. "I see you intend me no harm." The soldier reddened. "Will you accompany me?" "Certainly." The two turned toward the east and started to walk. lies a small community named Minerva. Population: #. The highway from Brentwood to Chicago cuts the town in two. In the center of town, on the north side of the road, stands a new building -- the Minerva Town Hall -- built the year before with money raised by the residents. It was the largest and most elabofa building in Minerva, which ha . been evacuated three days 'before. On this morning the town hall was occupied by army men. Maj. Gen. Pitt fretted and fumed at the four officers and twenty enlisted men waiting in the building. "It's an indignity!" he railed at the men who were forced to listen to him. "We have orders to talk appeasement with him! Nuts! We lose a few men, a few planer, and now we're ready to mee : George halfway. What's th country coming to? There ought to be something that would knoc : him out. Why should we have t . send in after him? It's disgusting!" The major general, a large man with a bristling white mustache and a red face, stamped back and forth in the council room. Some of, the officers and men smiled to themselves. The general was a well known fighting man. Orders he had received hamstrung him and, as soldiers, they sympathized with him. "What kind of men do we have in the higher echelons?" He asked everybody in general and nobody in particular. "They won't eve let us have a field telephon . We're supposed to make a repot by radio. Now isn't that smart? ' He shook his head, looked th : men over. "An appeasement team, that's what you arc, when you ought to be a combat team to lick hell out of George. "Why were you all assigned to this particular duty? I never saw any of you before and I understand you're all strangers to each other, too. Hell, what will they do next? Appeasement. I never appeased anybody before in my whole life. I'd rather spit in his eye. What am I supposed to talk about? The weather? What authority do I have to yak with a walking collection of nuts and bolts!" An officer strode into the room and saluted the general. "They're coming, sir," he said. "Who's coming?... My God, man," the general spluttered angrily, "be specific. Who the hell are 'they'?" "Why, George and Sergeant Matthews, sir. You remember, the sergeant who volunteered to go into Brentwood -- " "Oh, them. Well, all I have to say is this is a hell of a war. I haven't figured out what I am going to say yet." "Shall I have them wait, sir?" "Hell, no. Let's get this over with. I'll find out what George has to say and maybe that'll give me a lead." Before George entered the Council chamber, he already knew the mind of each man. He saw the room through thir eyes. He knew everything about them, what they were wearing, what they were thinking. All had guns, yet none of them would kill him, although at least one man, Maj. Gen. Pitt, would have liked to. They were going to talk appeasement, George knew, but he could also see that the general didn't know what line the conversation would take or what concessions he could make on behalf of his people. Wait -- there was one man among the twenty-three who had an odd thought. It was a soldier he had seen lopking through a window at him. This man was thinking about eleven o'clock, for George could see in the man's mind various symbols for fifteen minutes from then -- the hands of a clock, a watch, the numerals I I . But George could not see any significance to the thought. When he entered the room with the sergeant, he was ushered to a table. He sat down with Maj. Gen. Pitt, who glowered at him. Letting his mind roam the room, George picked up the numerals again and identified the man thinking them as the officer behind and a little to tho right of the general. What was going to happen at eleven? The man had no conscious thought of harm to anyone, yet the idea kept obtruding and seemed so out of keeping with his #  other thoughts George assigned several of his circuits to the man. The fact that the lieutenant looked at his watch and saw that it was #:# steeled George still more. If there was to be trouble, it would come from this one man. "I'm General Pitt," the general said drily. "You're George, of course. I have been instructed to ask you what, exactly, your intentions are toward the United States and the world in general, with a view toward reaching some sort of agreement with you and others of your kind, who will, as you say invade the Earth." "Invade, General Pitt," George replied, "is not the word." "All right, whatever the word is. We're all familiar with the plan you've been talking about. What we want to know is, where do you go from here?" "The fact that there has been no reluctance on the part of the armed forces to talk of an agreement -- even though I see that you privately do not favor such a talk, General Pitt -- is an encouraging sign. We of Zanthar would not want to improve a planet which could not be educated and would continually oppose our program. This will make it possible for me to turn in a full report in a few days now." "Will you please get to the point?" George could see that the lieutenant was looking at his watch again. It was #:#. George spread his mind out more than twenty miles, but could find no installation, horizontally or vertically, that indicated trouble. None of the men in the room seemed to think of becoming overly hostile. "Yes. General. After my message goes out, there ought to be a landing party on Earth within a few weeks. While waiting for the first party, there must be certain preparations -- " George tensed. The lieutenant was reaching for something. But it somehow didn't seem connected with George. It was something white, a handkerchief. He saw Jhat the man intended to blow his nose and started to relax except that George suddenly became aware of the fact the man did not need to blow his nose! Every thought-piercing circuit became instantly energized in George's mind and reached out in all directions... There were at least ten shots from among the men. They stood there surprised at their actions. Those who had fired their guns now held the smoking weapons awkwardly in their hands. George's eyes were gone. Smoke curled upward from the two empty sockets where bullets had entered a moment before. The smoke grew heavier and his body became hot. Some of him turned cherry red and the'chair on which he had been sitting started to burn. Finally, he collapsed toward the table and rolled to the floor. He started to cool. He was no longer the shiny bluesteel color he had been -- he had turned black. His metal gave off cracking noises and some of it buckled here and there as it cooled. military men and civilians grouped around a radio receiver in Chicago heard the report and relaxed, laughing and slapping each other on the back. Only one sat unmoved in a corner. Others finally sought him out. "Well, Professor, it was your idea that did the trick. Don't you feel like celebrating?" one of them asked. Prof. Tomlin shook his head. "If only George had been a little more benign, we might have learned a lot from him." "What gave you the idea that killed him?" "Oh. something he said about the unconscious and subconscious," Prof. Tomlin replied. "He admitted they were not penetrable. It was an easy matter to instill a post-hypnotic suggestion in some proven subjects and then to erase the hypnotic experience." "You make it sound easy." so "It wasn't too difficult, really. It was finding the solution that was hard. We selected more than a hundred men, worked with them for day?, finally singled out the best twenty, then made them forget their hypnosis. A first lieutenant -- I've forgotten his name -- had implanted in him a command even he was not aware of. His subconscious made him blow his nose fifteen minutes after he saw George. Nearly twenty others had post-hypnotic commands to shoot George in the eyes as soon as they saw the lieutenant blow his nose. Of course we also planted a subconscious hate pattern, which wasn't exactly necessary, just to make sure there would be no hesitation, no inhibition, no limiting moral factorr "None of the men ever saw each other before being sent to Minerva. None realized that they carried with them the order for George's annihilation. The general, who was not one of the hypnotics, was given loose instructions, as were several others, so they could not possibly know the intention. Those of us who had conducted the hypnosis had to stay several hundred miles away so that we could not be reached by George's prying mind..." IN a pasture next to a wood near Brentwood, a metal box buried in the ground suddenly exploded, uprooting a catalpa tree. miles away, a red light -- one of many on a giant control board -- suddenly winked out. A blue humanoid made an entry in a large book: System #. Planet Three Inhabited. Too dangerous for any kind of development. Coming Up , the # stories in the first I # issues represent really wide diversification of authorship. Some of these hit and ran and may or may not be heard of again. Others, however, will become important names before long. The #st name is that of F. L, Wallace. Mean anything to you? It will when you've read a startling group of characters, isolated from the rest of the Solar System for humane and must escape somehow. If you can keep your pulse rate normal while reading it, see your doctor for adrenalin shots. Conklin's shrewd book reviews... it's a good issue. Make sure your copy is held for" you at the newsstand. Better yet, subscribe and be certain! Mealy. Henry Holt  Co., New York, #. # pages, # ence fiction stories is rather disappointing. Of the ten, one tale seems to me to be truly great, three good, and six average or below. Kris Neville's "Bettyann" will become one of the classics of alien invasion, in my not too bumble opinion. It brings to the field a quality so much of it lacks -- the quality of humanity. Gerald Heard's "B fit M -- Planet #" (that's a title?) will enthrall Heardians, of whom I am one. It may well confuse and appall others. In its few pages we learn more about the "bees" of Heard's flying saucers, and about the festering society of his Doppelgangers, with an altogether satisfying Utopian outcome. Ray Bradbury's "Here There Be Tygers" is a bitterly enchanting tale of a world that tried to # entice men to stay, but that failed because the men did not believe in beauty. Isaac Asimov's "In a Good Cause" is a well-done, but sociologically primitive tale. The others, by Frank Fenton and Joseph Petrarca, R. Bretnor, P. Schuyler Miller, Cleve Cartmill, A. E. van Vogt, and Anthony Boucher, are all below par, somehow. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # ample of the truism that, by using understatement, you can get away with murder in science fiction. We have to imagine a small city, Middletown by name, blasted by a super-super atom bomb from the "homy" Middle West of today into a future a dying, the Earth practically uninhabitable. After a time some "people" of those days -- human and otherwise -- arrive from a far star in a spaceship and eventually rehabilitate the world for the benefit of the Middletowners. The author has made a largely successful effort to keep the major components of his story within the bounds of the human. Quite an accomplishment in view of the nature of the plot. Fletcher Pratt. Doubleday  Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages, # T'WO very recent novelets from Excelsior" (originally called "Asylum Satellite"), and "The Wanderer's Return." Both are pure space opera, about l#th of an inch deep. Very highly readable -- and just as highly forgettable. "Excelsior" tells of the Russians with their Earth Satellite Vehicle a few thousand miles in space beyond ours, and how their probably nefarious plans (we never learn what they were) are hexed because their vehicle is found to be on collision course with the only asteroid in those parts. Our satellite nobly blasts the asteroid out of existence -- in exchange for the Russkis' cure for radiation sickness. "The Wanderer's Return" is about the space commodore who has been "conditioned" to imitate the voyages of Ulysses in his travels around, the Galaxy. A vfgilant psychologist eventually catches onto and defeats the plot of the "Corporations" that were vilely trying to get Commodore Lortud's huge inheritance away from him by making him stay n space so long that they could rlaim he had abandoned his ights. 'hast a Publishers , Chicago, #. # pages, #;#hard-cover Heinlein (see the other two), and second in his "Future History Series" that Shasta is reprinting from magazines. Three more are promised. Every one of the ten stories in the book is high-grade stuff, as is indicated by the fact that five of them have already appeared in other science fiction anthologies. The one I like best,. " -- We Also Walk Dogs," has not, and neither have the nearly as excellent 'Logic of Empire" or "Ordeal in pace." "Space Jockey" and "Delilah and the Space Rigger," two lighter items, are here in hard covers for the first time. Previously anthologized items are: "The Long Watch," "Gentlemen, Be Seated," "The Black Pits of Luna," "It's Great to Be Back," and, of course, "The Green Hills of Earth." Definitely a bqpk for the permanent shelf. E. Smith, Ph. D. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # umes telling the Smithian saga of deep space and superbeings. For Kinnison-fans, Boskone-addicts, lovers of Arisia, "QX-ers," adherents of science fiction writing like this: "The Grey Lensman sent his sense of perception out beyond the confining walls and let it roam the void" -- for such people this book will come as a delightfully familiar renewal of old acquaintances with bigger-than-Homeric heroes and villains. As for this reviewer, a notoriously captious and hypercritical character, Grey Lensman simply gives him alternate waves of incredulous laughter and dull, acid boredom. To the hundreds of irate citizens who are at once going to me out of my britches for my sacrilege, I can only offer them the apology that I, too, once liked the Lensman series. It must be that I am growing old. I can no longer accept those comics as science fiction. I suspect, however, that it is science fiction which, is growing up and leaving these primitive artifacts behind. #: catch that martian Easily annoyed? Maybe it's just as well that you don't have the power this character possessed! T HE first person who got on the Martian's nerves, according to a survey I made just recently, was a Mrs. Frances Economy, about #, five foot three, heavy-set, with prominent mole on left cheek, formerly of # West #th Street, Manhattan. Mrs. Economy went to a neighborhood movie on the night erf September #th, and halfway through the first feature, just as she was scrabbling for the last of her popcorn, zip -- she wasn't there any more. That is, she was only half there. She could still see the screen, but it was like a television set with the sound off. The way she realized something had happened to her, she started stomping her feet, like you do when U the sound goes off or the picture tops, and her feet didn't make any noise. In fact, she couldn't feel the floor, just some kind of rubbery tuff that seemed to be holding her up. Same way with the arms f her chair. They weren't there, as far as her feeling them went. Everything was dead still. She could hear her own breathing, and the gulp when she swallowed that last mouthful, and her heart beating if she listened close. That was all. When she got up and went out, she didn't step on anybody's feet -- and she tried to. Of course I asked her who was sitting next to her when it happened, but she doesn't remember. She idn't notice. It was like that with everybody. N OT to keep you in suspense, the Martian did it. We figured that out later. There still isn't any proof, but it has to be that way. This Martian, the way it figures, looks just like anybody else. He could be the little guy with the derby hat and the sour expression, or the girl with the china-blue eyes, or the old gent with the chin spinach and glasses on a string. Anybody. But he's a Martian. I don't see what else he could be. And being a Martian, he's got this power that people haven't got. If he feels like it, he just looks at you cockeyed, and zip -- you're in some other dihiension. I don't know what the scientists would call it, the Fourth or Fifth Dimension or what, but I call it the next-door dimension because it seems like it's right next door -- you can see into it. In other words, it's a place where other people can see you, but they can't hear you or touch you, unless they're ghosts too, and there' nothing but some kind of cloudy stuff to walk around on. I don't know if that sounds good or what. It stinks. It's just plain dull. One more thing, he annoyi easy. You crunch popcorn in his ear, he doesn't like that. You step on his toe. same thing. Say, "Hot enough for you?" or slap him on the back when he's got sunburn, serve him a plate of soup with your finger in it -- zip. The way we figured out it's a Martian was thatit couldn't be one of us. No human can do a thing like that. Right? So what else could he be but a Martian? It figures. And nobody ever noticed him, so it must be he looks like anybody else. Some humans, they look like everybody else, but not because they want to. He want s to, I bet. The way we know he annoys easy, there was eighteen "ghosts' wandering around when the public first noticed, which was during the early morning of September #th. That was about eleven hours after he got Mrs. Economy. Thirteen, of them were up at Broadway and #th, walking through traffic. They went right through the cars. By nine o'clock there were two wrecks on that corner and a busted hydrant gushing water all over. The ghost people yralked through the water and didn't get wet. Three more showed up in front of a big delicatessen near #nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, just looking in the window. Every once in a while one of them would reach in through the glass and grab for something, but his hand went through the pastrami and chopped liver, so none of them got anything. That was fine for store windows, but it wasn't so fine for the ghost people The other two were sailors. They were out in the harbor, walking on water and thumbing their noses at naval officers aboard the ships that were anchored out there. It was hell on discipline. The first eight patrolmen who reported all this got told they would be fired if they ever came on duty drunk again. But by ten-thirty it was on the radio, crew up, and by the time the afternoon papers came out there were so many people in Times Square that wc had to put a cordon around the ghosts and divert traffic. The delicatessen window up on Amsterdam got busted from the crowd leaning against it, or some guy trying to put his hand through the way the three ghosts did; we never figured out which. There were about sixty tugs, launches and rowboats in the harbor, and three helicopters, trying to get close enough to talk to the sailors. One thing we know, the Martian must have been in that crowd on Times Square, because between one and one-thirty p. M. seven more ghosts wandered through the barrier and joined the other ones. You could tell they were mad, but of course you couldn't tell what they were saying unless you could read lips. Then there were some more down by Macy's in the afternoon, and a few in Greenwich Village, and by evening we had lost count. The guesses in thepapers that night ran from three hundred to a thousand. It was the Times that said three hundred. The cops didn't give out any estimate at all. r  'HE next day, there was just nothing else at all in the papers, or on the radio or TV. Bars did an all-time record business. So did churches. #? The Mayor appointed a committee to investigate. The Police Commissioner called out special reserves to handle the mobs. The Governor was understood to say he was thinking about declaring a statewide emergency, but all he got in most papers was half a column among the ads. Later on he denied the whole thing. Everybody had to be asked what he thought, from Einstein to Martin and Lewis. Some people said mass hysteria, some said the end of the world, some said the Russians. Winchell was the first one to say in print that it was a Martian. I had the same idea myself, but by the time I got it all worked out I vas too late to get the credit. I was handicapped, because all this time I still hadn't seen one of the ghosts yet. I was on Safe, Loft and Truck -- just promoted last spring from a patrolman -- nd while I was on duty I never got near any of the places where they were congregating. In the evenings, I had to take care of my mother. But my brain was working. I had this Martian idea, and I kept thinking, thinking, all the time. I knew better than to mention this to Captain Rifkowicz. All I would have to do was mention to him that I was thinking, and he would say, "With what, Dunlop, with what?" or something sarcastic like that. As for asking him to get me transferred to Homicide or Missing Persons, where I might get assigned to the ghost case, that was out. Rifkowicz says I should have been kept on a beat long enough for my arches to fall, in order to leave more room on top for brains. So I was on my own. And that evening, when they started announcing the rewards, I knew I had to get that Martian. There was fifteen hundred dollars, voted by the City Council that afternoon, for whoever would find out what was making the ghosts and stop it. Because if it didn't stop, there would be eighteen thousand ghosts in a month, and over two hundred thousand in a year. Then there was a bunch of private rewards, running from twenty-five bucks to five hundred, offered by people that had relatives among the departed. There was a catch to those, though -- you had to get the relatives back. All together, they added up to nearly five thousand. With that dough, I could afford to hire somebody to take care of Ma and maybe have some private life of my own. There was a cute waitress down on Varick Street, where I had lunch every day. For a long time I had been thinking if I asked her to go out, maybe she would say yes. But what was the use of me asking her, if all I could do was have her over to listen to Ma talk? All Ma talked about was how sick she was and how nobody cared. gether all the newspaper stuff about the ghosts. I spread it out on the living room table and sorted it and started pasting it into a scrapbook. Right away I saw I had to have more information. What was in the papers was mostly stories about the crowds and the accidents and traffic tieups, plus interviews with people that didn't know anything. What I wanted to know was -- what were all these people doing when the Martian got them? If I knew that, maybe I could figure out some kind of a pattern, like if the Martian's pet peeve was back-slappers, or people who make you jump a foot when they sneeze, or whatever. Another thing, I wanted to know all the times and places. From that, I could figure out what the Martian's habits were, if he had any, and with all of it together I could maybe arrange to be on the spot whenever he got sore. Then anybody except me who was there every time would have to be him. I explained all this to Ma, hoping she would make a sacrifice and let me get Mrs. Proctor from across the hall to sit with her a few evenings. She didn't seem to get the idea. Ma never believes anything she reads in the papers, anyway, except the astrology column. The way it struck her, the whole thing was some kind of a scheme, like gangsters or publicity, and I would be better to stay away from it. I made one more try, talking up the money I would get, but all she said was, "Well, then why don't you just tell that Captain Rifkowicz he's got to let you earn that reward?" Ma has funny ideas about a lot of things. She came over here from England when she was a girl, and it looks like she never did get to understand America. I knew that if I kept after her, she would start crying and telling me about all the things she did for me when I was a baby. You can't argue against that. So what I did next, I took the bull by the horns. I waited till Ma went to sleep and then I just walked out and hopped an uptown bus on Seventh Avenue. If I couldn't get off during the daytime, I would cut down my sleep for a while, that was all. I was heading for Times Square, but at Twentyseventh I # saw a crowd on the sidewalk. I ,got out and ran over there. Sure enough, in the middle of the crowd was two of the ghosts, a fat man with a soupstrainer mustache and a skinny woman with cherries on her hat. You could tell they were ghosts because the people were waving their hands through them. Aside from that, there was no difference. I took the lady first, to be polite. I flashed the badge, and then I hauled out my notebook and wrote, "Name and address please," and shoved it at her. She got the idea and looked through her bag for a pencil and an envelope. She scribbled, "Mrs. Walter F. Walters, Schenectady, N. Y " tasked her, "When did this happen to you and where?" She wrote it was about one p.m. the afternoon before, and she was in Schrafft's on Broadway near #th, eating lunch with her husband. I asked her if the fat man was her husband, and she said he was. I then asked her if she could remember exactly what the two of them were doing right at the moment when it happened. She thought a while and then said she was talking and her husband was dunking his doughnut in his coffee. I asked her if it was the kind with powdered sugar and she said yes. f knew then that I was on the right track. She was one of those little women with big jaws that generally seem to have loud voices and like to use them; and I always hated people who dunk those kind of doughnuts, myself. The powdered sugar gets wet and gluey and the dunkers have to lick their fingers right in public. I thanked them and went on uptown. When I got back home that night, about four A. M. the next morning, I had fifteen interviews in my book. The incidents had taken place all over the midtown area. Six got theirs for talking, four on crowded sidewalks -- probably for jostling or stepping on corns -- two for yelling on a quiet street at two in the morning, one for dunking, one for singing to himself on a subway, one, judging by the look of him, for not being washed, and one for coming in late to a Broadway play. The six talkers broke down to three in restaurants, two in a newsreel movie, and one in Carnegie Hall while a concert was going on. Nobody remembered who they were next to at the time, but I was greatly encouraged. I had a hunch I was getting somewhere already. the eighth, in a kind of daze, and don't think Rifkowicz didn't call my attention to it. I suppose I wasn't worth more than a nickel to the City that day, but I promised myself I would make it up later. For the moment, I ignored Rifkowicz. On the radio and TV, there were two new developments. In my head, there was one. First, the radio and TV. I ate lunch in a saloon so as to catch the latest news, even though I had to give up my daily glimpse of the waitress in the beanery. Two things were new. One, people had started noticing that a few things had turned into ghosts -- besides people, I mean. Things like a barrel organ, and an automobile that had its horn stuck, and like that. Tifcit made things twice as bad, of course, because anybody was liable to try to touch one of these ghost things and jump to the conclusion they were a ghost, themselves. Two, the TV reporters were interviewing the ghosts, the same way I did, with paper and pencil. I picked up four more sets of questions and answers just while I was eating lunch. The ghosts came over fine on TV, by the way. Somehow it looked even creepier on the screen, when you saw somebody's hand disappear into them, than it did when you saw it with your own eyes. The development in my head was like this. Out of the fifteen cases I already had, and the four I got from TV, there were eight that happened on the street or in subways or buses, five in restaurants, and six in places of entertainment. Four different places of entertainment. Now, at first glance, that may not look like it means much. But I said to myself, "What does this Martian do? He travels around from one place to another -- that's normal. He eats -- that's normal. But he goes to four different shows that I know about in three days -- and I know just nineteen cases out of maybe a thousand!' It all fitted together. Here is this Martian. He's never been here before. We know that because he just now started making trouble. The way I see it, these Martians look us over for a while from a distance, and then they decide to send one Martian down to New York to study us close up. Well, what's the first thing he does, being that he wants to find out all about us? He goes to the movies. And concerts and stage plays too, of course, because he wants to try everything once. But probably he sees two or three double features a day. It stands to reason. So there he is in the movie, watching and listening so he shouldn't miss anything important, and some customer around him starts making loud comments to somebody else rattling cellophane, and snapping a pocketbook open and shut every five seconds to find a  kleenex. So he flips them into the next dimension, where they can make all the noise they want without bothering him. And that's the reason why there are so many ghosts that got theirs in the movies and places like that. On the streets of any city you can walk for miles without running into more than two or three really obnoxious characters, but in any kind of a theater there's always somebody talking, or coughing, or rattling paper. You've noticed that. I went even further than that. I checked with my notes and then looked in a copy of Cue magazine to find out what was playing at each of those theaters when the Martian was there. I found out that the play was a long-run musical -- the concert was musical, naturally -- and one of the two movies was a Hollywood remake of a musical comedy. The other was a newsreel. There it was. I as good as had him. Then I got another idea and went back through my notes to find out where the theater victims had been sitting. The guy in Carnegie Hall had been in the balcony; that's where you hear best, I guess. But the other five had all been sitting down front, in the first four rows. The little guy was nearsighted. That's the way I was thinking about him now -- a little nearsighted guy who liked music better than Westerns, and was used to some place where everybody's careful not to bother anybody else. It was hard not to feel sorry for him; after all, some people that come from places closer than Mars have a hard time in New York. But it was me against him. That night the total rewards were up to almost twenty thousand dollars. could do right away. I could write to the Mayor to make an announcement that if people didn't want to be ghosts, they should keep from making unnecessary noise or being pests, especially in theaters. But one, he probably wouldn't pay any attention to me, and two, if he did, twenty thousand other guys would be following my lead before I could turn around, and one of them would probably catch the Martian before I did. That night, I did the same as before. I waited till Ma was sleeping, then went out to a movie on Broadway. It was a first-run house, they had a musical playing, and I sat down front. But nothing happened. The Martian wasn't there. I felt pretty discouraged when I got home. My time was running out and there are over three hundred theaters in Manhattan. I had to start working faster. I lay awake for a long while, worrying and thinking about it, and finally I came to one of the most important decisions in my life. The next morning I was going to do something I never did before -- call in and pretend like I was sick. And I was going to stay sick until I found the Martian. I felt bad about it and I felt even worse in the morning, when Rifkowicz told me to take it easy till I#got well. After breakfast, I got the papers and made a list of shows on my way uptown. I went to one on #nd Street first -- it was a musical picture about some composer named Handle, and the second feature was a comedy, but it had Hoagy Carmichael in it, so I figured I should stay for that too. I sat in the fifth row. There was plenty of coughing going on, only nobody got turned into a ghost. Then I had lunch and went to another musical, on Broadway. I drew another blank. My eyes were beginning to bother me a little from sitting so close to the screen, so I thought I would just go to a newsreel movie and then walk around a while before dinner. But when I got out of the newsreel I began to feel jittery, and I went straight to another double feature. The Martian wasn't there, either. I had seen plenty of ghosts standing around on the streets, but they were all just standing there looking kind of lost and bewildered, the way they did after a while. You could tell a new victim because he would be rushing here and there, shoving his hands through things, trying to talk to people, and acting all upset. One thing I forgot to mention. Everybody was wondering now how these ghosts got along without eating. In this dimension where they weYe, 'there wasn't any food -- there wasn't anything, just the stuff like rubbery clouds that they were standing on. But they all claimed they weren't hungry or thirsty, and they all seemed to be in good shape. Even the ones that had been ghosts now for four days. When I got out of that last movie, it was about eight in the evening. I was feeling low in my mind, but I still had a healthy appetite. I started wandering around the side streets of Broadway, looking for a restaurant that wasn't too crowded or too expensive. I passed a theater that was on my list, except I knew I was too late to get a ticket for it. It was the premiere of the newest Rodgers and Hammerstein show, and the lobby and half the sidewalk were full of customers. I went on past, feeling gloomier because of all the bright lights and excitement, and then I heard something funny. Without paying any attention, I had been listening to one of these raspy-voiced barkers inside the lobby going, ch -- " and stopped. I turned around, with a funny prickling up the back of my spine. The voice didn't start up again. Just as I started back toward the lobby, a ghost came out of the crowd. There was no doubt about him being a ghost -- he ran through people. He had a bunch of big booklets with slick covers under his arm, and his mouth was wide open like he was shouting. Then he showed his teeth, and his face got all red, and he lifted the booklets in both hands and threw them away as hard as he could. They went through people, too. The ghost walked away with his hands shoved into his pockets.shoved my badge at the ticket taker, and told him to find me the manager, quick. When the manager came up I grabbed him by the lapels and said, "I got reason to believe there's a dangerous criminal going to be in this audience tonight. With your cooperation, we'll get him." He looked worried, so I said, "There won't be any trouble. You just put me where I 'can see the front rows and leave ftie rest to me." He said, "I can't give you a seat. The house is completely sold out." I told him, "Okay, put me back in the wings, or whatever you call them." He argued, but he did what I asked. We went down the side aisle, through the orchestra pit and through a little door that went under the stage. Then we went up a little stairway to backstage, and he put me right at the edge of the stage, up front, where I could peek out at the audience. There was a crowd of people running around back there behind the curtains, actors and chorus girls, guys in their shirt sleeves and guys in overalls. I could hear the hum out front -- people were beginning to fill the seats -- and I wanted that curtain to go up. I just couldn't wait. Finally the actors took their places, and the band suddenly started playing, and the curtain went up. T understand that show Is stilt playing to standing room only, even with all the trouble that's happened since then, but I didn't pay any attention to it and I couldn't even tell you what it was about. I was watching the front four rows, trying to memorize every face I saw. Right in the middle there were three that I paid more attention to than the rest. One of them was a young blonde girl with blue eyes like the color of Ma's fancy china that she brought with her from the old country. Another was an old gent with chin spinach and glasses on a string. The third was a little guy with a sour expression and a derby hat. don't know why I picked out those three, except maybe it was a hunch. Maybe I was looking at the blonde girl just because she was pretty, but then again, I never saw eyes that color before or since. It could be that Martians have china-blue eyes; how would I know? I might have had some wild idea that the old guy could be the Martian and was wearing the frizzy white whiskers because Martians don't have chins exactly like us. And I think I picked on the little guy because he fitted the picture I already had in my head. And the way he was clutching that derby in his lap, like it was made of gold -- I was thinking to myself, maybe he's got some kind of ray gun built into that hat; maybe that's how he does it. ing very logical -- I was too excited -- but I never took my eyes off that audience for a second. I was waiting for somebody to start coughing or sneezing and get turned into a ghost. When that happened, I would be watching the people, and if I was lucky I might see who was looking at the victim when it happened. That's what I was waiting for. What I got was a sniff of smoke and then somebody started screaming and yelling, "Fire!" Half the audience was on their feet in a second. I looked up, and sure enough there was smoke pouring out at the back of the room. Some more women screamed and the stampede was on. The girls on stage stopped dancing and the band stopped playing. Somebody -- some actor -- ran out on the stage and started saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Walfc  do not run, to the nearest exit. There is no danger. Walk, do not run -- " I lost my head. Not on account . of the fire. I knew the actor was right and the only bad thing that could happen would be people trampling each other to death to get out of there. But the seats were emptying fast and it struck me all of a sudden that I didn't know my way through that tangle of scenery backstage. By the time I got down the stairs and out into the auditorium, the Martian might be gone. I felt cold all over. I didn't even stop to remember that I didn't have to go back the way I came, because there were little steps right at the side of the stage. I ran out from behind the wings and started to jump over the musicians. At that, I would have made it if I hadn't caught my toe in that little trough where the footlights are. I had worse luck than that, even. I landed smack in the middle of the bass drum. You never heard such a noise in your life. It sounded as if the ceiling caved in. Sitting there, with my legs and arms sticking out of that drum, I saw the people turn around and look at me like they had been shot. I saw them all, the girl with the china blue eyes, the old' gent with the whiskers, the little guy with the derby, and a lot more'. And then, suddenly, all the sound stopped, same as when you turn off a radio. The guy who owned the drum leaned over and tried to pull me out of it. He couldn't. His hands went right through me. noys easy. I dont know what he did about all those women screaming -- maybe he figured there was a good reason for that and left them alone. But when I hit that bass drum, it must have burned him good. You know, when you're excited already, a loud noise will make you jump twice as far. That's about the only satisfaction I got -- that I probably annoyed him the worst of anybody in New York City. That and being so close to catching him. The company here is nothing to brag about -- women that will talk your arm off and half your shoulder, and guys that say, "Peaceful enough for you?" and back-slappers, and people that hum to themselves -- Besides that, the place is so damned dull. Clouds to stand on, nothing to eat even if you wanted to eat, and nothing to do except stand around and watch the new ones come through. We can't even 'see much of New York any more, because it keeps getting mistier all the time -- fading away, kind of, like maybe this dimension is getting a little farther away from the ordinary one every day. I asked Mr. Dauth yesterday # ! bw be thought the whole thing would wind up. Mr. Dauth isn't bad. He's a big, cheerful guy, about fifty. The kind that likes good food and good beer and a lot of it. But he doesn't complain. He admits that his habit of sucking his teeth out real loud is aggravating and says maybe he deserved what he got, which you'll admit is big of him. So I talk to him a lot, and the other day, when we were watching a new batch that had just come through, I asked him where He thought it would all end, because we can hear each other, you see, being in the same dimension. He pursed his lips and frowned like he was thinking it over, and then said that as far as he could ee, jthere wasn't any human being that was perfect. Anybody is liable to do something aggravating sooner or later. That's the way people are. "And this Martian of yours seems to be thorough," he said. "Very thorough. It might take him years to get through studying the Earth." "And then what?" I asked him. "Well," he said, "eventually, if he keeps it up long enough, we'll all be over here." I hope he's right. Now that I come to think of it, that cute waitress I mentioned has a habit of setting down a coffee cup so half of it slops into the saucer. If Mr. Dauth is right, all I've got to do is wait. It stands to reason. Evidently the news thot Willy Ley wos to start a regular science department with this issue, in which readers' questions would be answered either in the mogazine or by mail, wos just what readers wanted -- the poslman began staggering in with queries as soon os the announcement reached the newsstands. The volume of mail has increased steadily since then. This, instead of distressing us, proves to us thot it is a recognized ly valuable readers' service feature. We're happy. Willy Ley is happy. Those who are having their science questions answered are happy. But what obout you? If anything in science puzzles you, ask Mr. Ley! AM we request is that you write your question or questions on one sheet of paper, and your note to the magazine, if you hove something either complimentary or belligerent to say, on another. And -- please! -- put your name and address on both sheets. New #)I A Amazing Wonderful Ocm ST i woe or is erween #' ond #' wsrenwow or  # # #OS Pre-Publication Utter Only one thing could equal owning a complete file of Published by Crown, it's a really huge book... over # at only # a copy. But we have an offer that makes this giant bargain even more gigantic: monthly at the newsstand come to # a year. Total: #. You'll want them both. Don't wait because this is a prepublication offer and cannot bp kept open long. Mail the coupon below with # today. #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. Yes, start  (or extend Q) my subscription right owoy -- ond moil me off the presses) I enclose # os payment in full for both. This offer expires March #, #. Nome Address City Zone State Start with the issye.   Conclusion demolished man At each step, Reich defeated the Esper sleuth, but there was a peeper trick left -- the biggest and the most When telepathy emerged as an extracted recessive characteristic, possessors of extrasensory perception became valuable members of society. In addition to having the skills of their chosen trades or professions, Espers were able to probe the mind for unknown daring -- and the deadliest of alll or concealed meanings. They belonged to the Esper Guild, were known as " peepers " and were divided into classes according to their ability to penetrate the mind: #rds could peep the conscious; # nds dug past that to the preconscious and subconscious; while IsCs, the elite of the Guild, could explore every crevice of the deeply buried unconscious. Because of Espers, premeditated murder was impossible. Telepaths could peep the intent  f a killer before the crime, or peep the evidence needed for conviction after it. No slayer had escaped the dreaded Demolition Chamber in Kingston Hospital in # years. Despite this, Ben Reich, piratical owner of Sacrament, Inc., was driven by a recurrent nightmare about a Man With No Face to plan the murder of his bitter commercial rival, Craye D' Courtney, of the D' Courtney Cartel on Mars, to end the economic war. With the aid of Augustus T#, E.M.D.l ( Esper Medical Doctor #st class ) and Jerry Church, a # ndclass peeper ostracized from the Guild, Reich went to a party at Maria Beaumont's mansion. In the course of an ancient game called "Sardine," Reich slipped Up to the hidden suite of D' Courtney and murdered him. The killing was unexpectedly witnessed by D Courtney's daughter, Barbara, who ran from the house in hysterical terror with the murder weapon, and mysteriously disappeared. The murder investigation was handled by Preston Powell, the police department's Prefect of the Psychotic Division, a #st, deadly tor his ability to pry into the unconscious. Powell discovered telepathically that Reich was the murderer, but courts of law would not accept peeper evidence. Powell had to obtain objective proof to bring Reich to Demolition. Powell swiftly learned that Reich had purchased and presented an antique game book to Maria Beaumont from which she got the " Sardine " game that enabled Reich to attack D'Court ney... that Reich had picked up a devilishly repetitive song from Duffy Wyg, a psych-song writer, and used it to block peeping... that the Rhodopsin Ionizer with which Reich immobilized D' Courtney's guards had been developed for Sacrament, Inc., by Dr. Wilson maine. At almost the same moment , Reich's underworld network and Powell's Esper grapevine located the missing Barbara D' Courtney in a slum Frab Joint. In a hectic race through the maze of the joint, Reich managed to unearth the knife-pistol with the blank cartridges which blew out D'Courtney's brains. Although he and Powell were hidden from each other, they located Barbara D' Courtney simultaneously. Reich remained concealed while Powell talked to the girl. She waa suffering trom hysterical recall and could relive only the scene of her father's death each time she heard the trigger word "Help." As Powell led the girl away, Reicti tried to shoot them. He could not force himself to do so. Taken to Powell' s house, Barbara was given the Deja Eprouve treatment to bring her out of catatonia. This treatment would return her to the moment of birth and enable her to "grow up" again at an accelerated tempo that took four weeks, when she would be able to face the horror that her conscious mind was struggling to reject. While she went through infancy, Powell learned, by peeping her memory of the murder, that Craye D' Courtney did not resist Reich's attack. Powell consulted Sam kins, D' Courtney's Esper Analyst #, and found that D' Courtney was on the verge of suicide, the result of guilt feelings because of the abandonment of his child. Powell also discovered that Augustus T # had broken the Guild Pledge and was Reich's  accessory. Realizing that the murder weapon might have been bought at Jerry Church's pawnshop, Powell tricked T# into meeting him there to reveal the truth about the knife-pistol. Church refused to talk but T#, shaken by threat of exile from the Guild, confessed all he knew about Reich's offer to merge with D' Courtney , the code refusal, and the nightmares about the Man With No Face which goaded Reich into the murder. A sudden attack by the goons of Keno Quizzard, Reich's blind underworld lieutenant , resulted in the death of T#. Church shocked by the brutal assault that might also have kilted him t hastily told Powell that Reich had bought the knife-pistol which killed D' Courtney -- but Reich had first removed the bullets frot the cartridges. With opportunity and method rushed home to clear up the cw, ous point about D' Courtney' a strange idea that he had abat. doned his child. Powell peeped Barbara, who by now had ad. vanced to the toddler stage. Pent # . trating deep into her unconscious he learned to his dismay that the girl was falling in love with firr Mary Noyes, Powell's do  friend, who was in love with hi  herself, bitterly informed Powell that he was falling in love with Barbara, too, and was unaware of it. The Esper Guild demanded that Espers marry Espers, and Barbara was not even sane, let alone a peeper. What did Powell intend to do about it? I Before the startled Powell could End an answer, word can n # that Ben Reich's code chief Hassop, who had in his possession Sacrament's vital Gnancial rec, ords which could prove Reich's Gnancial motive for the murdet t had disappeared from Amprq where he had been hidden by Reich. Powell had to take a space, ship for Am pro at once. AS the Ampro Queen ponder  ously circled the hodge m podge in space that was the amusement center of the Solar System (Ampro -- Amusement Protectorate) and the unofficial neutral territory, the ventral hatch opened and dozens of landing launches swept up through space to lodge inside her belly. Then the hatch closed, the central staging hall was refilled with air, and the passengers permitted to enter from theships' ramps. The staging hall was a domed cavern, five hundred feet long, a hundred wide and fifty feet to the peak. You carried your luggage from your stateroom down to the staging hall... and that was the beginning of the wild frenzy of your vacation at Ampro. Thirty launches with crystal sightseeing ports rested on the floor. They were painted in garish colors and each prominently displayed the name of the hotel that had sent it. The smaller hoT# tels had to be content with single barkers, but the more prosperous establishments sent entire acts. On top of the Victoria launch, for example, was a troupe of trampoline acrobats in violent free-flight. The Victoria catered to a muscle clientele. The Magic launfh had sixteen lovely mermaids droning deafeningly on harps. The Sportsman displayed an energetic clown in ludicrous cap, sweater and plus-fours who putted small white balls to the tourists. Each ball was a sphere of soft plastic which spoke in a faint, tinny voice: "For the best in sports, come to the Sportsman. Sovereign a day for single, and up." Powell threaded his way through the crowds and entered the small black police launch. Sergeant AI Bible was waiting despondently for him. "We loused it," Bible said. A warning bell clanged. The launch sealed up and, as the ventral hatch opened, it dropped into space. Powell glanced out of the port at Ampro glittering below like a patchwork quilt worked in silver and gilt. Ampro had started generations back with a flat plate of meteoric rock half a mile in diameter. A health cultist had raised a transparent hemisphere of Air-Gel on the plate, installed an atmosphere generator and started a colony. From that, Ampro had grown into an irregular table in space, extending hundreds of miles. Each new entrepreneur had simply tacked another mile or so onto the shelf, raised his own transparent hemisphere and gone into business. By the time engineers got around to advising Ampro that the spherical form was more efficient and economical, it was too late to change. The table just went on adding new hemispheres like a mass of giant soap bubbles on a bright checkerboard. The various planetary and satellite colonies attempted to reproduce the environments of their homes. "Mars From Home" was reddish and wasted, but with the added luxury of lakes of blue water. "Venus From Home" was misty. On the Jupiter side of the table was the giant hundred mile hemisphere that covered the Ampro Nature Reservation which guaranteed more natural history and weather per square mile than any planet. "Let's have the story, Al," Powell said. Bible gulped. "We followed instructions. Rough tail on Hassop, slickie following him. The rough got taken out by Reich's girl..." "It was a girl, eh?" "Cute little trick named Duffy Wyg." Powell jerked upright. "Why, I questioned that girl myself! I never -- " He caught himself and shook his head. "Seems I did some lousing myself, Al. Shows you when you meet a pretty girl, look out!" "Well, like I say," Bible continued, "she takes out the rough, and just when the slickie moves in. Reich jets into Ampro with a commotion." "Lilfc?" "Private yacht. Has a crash in space and limps in hollerin' emergency. One killed. Three injured, including Reich. Front of the yacht stove in. Derelict or meteor stray. They take Reich to the hospital where we figure he's planted for a little. When we turn around, Reich's gone. Hassop too. I grab a peeper interpreter and go looking in four Solar languages. No dice." 'Hassop's luggage?" "Gone likewise." "Damnation! We've got to pinch Hassop and that luggage, Al. They're our motive. Hassop is Sacrament's Code Chief. We need him for that last message Reich sent to D'Courtney and the reply..." "Monday before the murder?" "Yes. That exchange probably got Reich's financial records with him. They can probably tell a court why Reich had a hell of a motive for murdering D' Courtney." "Such as?" "The talk around Sacrament is that D'Courtney had Retch with his back clear against the wall." "You find method and opportunity?" "Yes and no. I opened up Jerry Clurch and got everything, but it's ticklish. We can show Reich had the opportunity. We can show the murder method. Same goes for Reich's nmtive. But they're like three wigwam poles -- each stands if the other two do. That's Mr. Peetcy's opinion. And that's why we need Hassop." "I'll swear they ain't left Ampro. That efficient I still am." "Don't hang your head because Reich outsmarted you. He's outsmarted plenty. Me included." Bible shook his head gloomily. "I'll start peeping Ampro for Reich and Hassop at once," Powell said as the launch drifted down for the passage through the airlock, "but I want to check a hunch first. Show me the corpse." "What corpse?" "From Reich's crash." In the police mortuary, displayed on an air-cushion in the stasis-freeze, the corpse was a mangled figure with dead white skin and a flaming red beard. "Uh-huh," Powell muttered. "Keno Quizzard." "You know him?" "A gimpster. Was working for Reich and turned too hot to be useful. What'll you bet that crash "Hell!" Bible, exploded. "Those two other guys are hurt bad and the yacht was ruined!" "So they were hurt and the yacht was ruined. So what? Quizzard's mouth is shut for keeps and Reich's that much safer. A cheap price for Reich to pay. It was a phony, Al. We started Quizzard running. Reich intercepted and took care of him. We'll never prove it, but we won't have to if we locate Hassop. That'll be enough to walk friend Reich into the Demolition Chamber." tour of the bubbles. A Revival Meeting at Solar Rheims... hundreds of chanting, genuflecting devotees participating in a kind of hopped-up Midsummer Morn festival. Reply negative. Sailing races in Mars From Home... Catboats and sloops skipping over the water in long hops like scaled stones. Reply negative. The Plastic Surgery Resort... hundreds of bandaged faces and bodies ("My dear, this is positively my last attempt. Dr. Stress says he'll refund for every operation if my eyes don't come out fuchsia this time.") Reply negative. Freeflight Polo. Reply negative. Hot Sulphur Springs, White Sulphur Springs, Black Sulphur Springs, No Sulphur Springs . , , replies negative. Discouraged, Powell dropped into Solar Dawn Cemetery for a good laugh. The cemetery looked like an English garden, all flagged paths and trees with tiny little plots of green grass. Muted music from robot quartets, made up as musical greats of the past. Beethoven, Tchaikowsky, Palestrina and Bix Beiderbeck incongruously under one roof, Armstrong. Caruso, Wagner and Florence Foster Jenkins under another. Powell began to smile. There was an accurate reproduction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the cemetery. From the mouth of on of the gargoyles in the tower, a syrupy voice roared: "See the drama of the gods portrayed in vibrant robot-action! Moses on Mt. Sinai, the Crucifixion of Christ, Mohammed and the mountain, Lao Tse and the Moon, the Revelation of Mary Baker Eddy, the Ascension of our Lord Buddha, the Unveiling of the true and only god Galaxy...  Pause, and then a little more matter-of-factly : "Owing to the acred nature of this exhibit, admission is by ticket only. Tickets may be purchased from the Bailiff." A click, and another gargoyle began in another language. Powell's smile turned to a grin. Each of the green plots contained a crystal panel ten feet square, the ceiling of a stasis room in which the departed were displayed to eternity in their pet poses amid their favorite sur# # roundings. In a boudoir, a loved one primped motionlessly before a mirror. In a monkish library, a bibliophileheld a book open while he jotted down a marginal notation. An amateur pilot swaggered grimly on the bridge of a rocket ship. A nature-lover communed with nature. Powell laughed. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," a girl said behind him. Without turning, Powell replied : "I'm sorry. 'No Loud Talking or Laughter.' But don't you think this is the most ludicrous display of vanity in -- " Then the pattern of her psyche hit him and he spun around. "Well. Duffy!" he said. Her frown changed to a quick roiJe. "Mr. Powell, the boysleirth. You still owe me a dance." "I owe you an apology," Powell said. "Delighted. Can't have enough of them. What's this one for?" "Underestimating you." "The story of my life." She linked arms and drew him along the path. "You took another look at me and -- ?" "I realized you're the cleverest person Ben Reich has working for him." "I am clever. I did do some work for Ben. Well?" "You took out the tail we had on Hassop, Duffy. Congratulations." Her pert face looked up at him. half serious, half amused. "What in hell are you talking about?" "We had a tail on Hassop. A tail is a secret agent assigned to the duty of following a suspect." "Contents noted. What's a Hassop?" "A man who works for Ben Reich. His Code Chief." "And what did I do to your spy?" "Following instructions from Ben Reich, you captivated the man, turned him into a derelict from duty, kept him at a piano day after day -- " "Wait a minute!" Duffy said sharply. "The little goon was a cop?" "He was." "Following this Hassop?" "Yes." "Hassop... Bleached man? Dusty hair? Dusty blue eyes?" Powell nodded. "The louse," Duffy muttered. "And you think I'm the kind that does his dirty work, don't you! Why, you -- you peeper! I make enough money to keep peepers! Reich asked me to do him a favor. Said there was a man up here working on an interesting musical code. Wanted me to check him. How was  supposed to know it was your goon masquerading as a musician?" Powell stared at her. "Are you claiming that Reich tricked you?" She glared back. "Go ahead end peep me. I Reich wasn't in the Reservation, you could peep that doublecrossing -- " "Hold it!" Powell interrupted sharply. He peeped her precisely and comprehensively, then turned and began to run. "Hey!" Duffy yelled. "What's the verdict?" "Medal of Honor," Powell called over his shoulder. "I'll pin it on as soon as I bring a man back alive." "I don't want a man. I want you." "That's your trouble, Duffy. You want anybody." "Who?" "An-y-bod-y." "No loud talking or laughter, please!" in the Ampro Globe Theater where Diana Clerisy, the magnificent Esper actress, stirred thousands with her performances. Bible, immune to Miss Clerisy's appeal, was gloomily inspecting the house face by face. Powell took his arm and led him out. "He's in the Reservation," Powell said. "Took Hassop with him. Took Hassop's luggage, too. Perfect alibi. He was shaken up by the crash and he needs a rest. Also company. He's eight hours ahead of us." "The Reservation, huh?" Bible pondered. "Two hundred and fifty square miles of more damned animals, geography and weather than anywhere else." "If we want to get Hassop out, we'll have to grab a helio and do some fast hunting." "No mechanical transportation allowed in the Reservation." "This is an emergency ! Peetcy's got to have Hassop!" "Let Peetcy argue with the Ampro Board. You could get special permission in maybe threefour weeks." "By which time Hassop'd be dead and buried. What about radar or sonar? We could work out Hassop's pattern and -- " "No devices outside of cameras. You hike on your own feet. You carry your own food. You take one Defensive Barrier Screen with you so's the animals don't eat you. If you want a fire, you got to build it. If you want to hunt, you got to make your own weapons. You versus nature. And they make you sign a release in case nature wins." "Then how are we going to find Hassop?" "Sign a release and go hike for him." "The two of us? Cover # square miles of geography? How many cops can you spare?" "Maybe ten." "Twenty-five square miles per cop. Impossible." "Maybe you could persuade the Ampro Board -- No. Even if you could, we wouldn't be able to get them together in less than a week. Could you get 'em together by maybe peeping 'em?" "We can't transmit to anybody except another peeper, so -- Hey! That's an idea. Is a human being a mechanical device?" "rot lately." "Then I'm going to do some fast co-opting and take my own radar into the Reservation." ing for nature overtook a prominent lawyer in the midst of delicate contractual negotiations in one of Ampro's luxurious conference rooms. The same craving also came upon the secretary of a famous author, a judge of domestic relations, a job analyst screwing applicants for the United Hotel Association, an industrial designer, an efficiency engineer, the chairman of' Amalgamated Union's Grievance Committee, Titan's superintendent of cybernetics, a secretary of political psychology, two Cabinet members, five Parliamentary leaders, and scores of other Esper clients of Ampro at work and at play. They filed through the Reservation gate in a unified mood of holiday festivity and assorted clothes. Those that had gotten word on the grapevine early enough were in sturdy camping clothes. Others were not; and the astonished gate guards, checking saw one lunatic in full diplomatic panoply march through with a pack on his back. But all the nature-lovers carried detailed maps of the Reservation carefully zoned into sectors.' Moving swiftly, they spread out and beat forward across the miniature cosmos of weather and geography. The Telepathic Band crackled as comments and information swept up and back the line of living radar in which Powell occupied the central position. " Snowing here. Full blizzard ." " Swamps and (Ugh!) mosquitoes my way." "Does anyone know what a rattlesnake looks like?" " Don't bite it, your honor." " More damn nature..." "Party ahead, Pres. Sector #." "Let's have the picture." " Here it comes... " "Vo sale " " Party ahead, Pres. Sector #." " Shoot a picture, Mr. Chairman." " It's a bear!" " Call that a bear? Now up on Titan -- " " I'm being chased!" " Don't run! Negotiate!" "Say, I've got a lake dead ahead and I can't swim." " There's no lake in your sector, Julie. I've got 'em all." "Excuse it, please. Just a mirage ." " More damned geography." " Party ahead, Pres. Sector #." ' "No sale. Pass 'em by." ""How do you climb a tree?" ""You shinny up" "'Not up. Down." "'Mow'd you get up, Doctor?" "A moose helped me." "Call that a moose? Why, up on Titan, we -- " "Party ahead, Pres. Sector #." "No sale." "Say, anybody ever peep a gnu? I just did." "Once I gnu a peeper." "Oh, God! Take that man to Titan!" "Call that a pun? U p on Titan "Party ahead, Pres. Sector #. Mere's the picture... " "Pass 'em by." "How long does this go on?" "They're at least eight hours ahead." "No. They've got eight hours start, but they may not be eight hours ahead " "Spell that out, Pres." "Reich may not have trekked straight ahead. He may have circled around to a favorite spot close to the gate." " Favorite for what?" "Murder." "Ugh!" "Excuse me. How does one persuade a cat not to devour one?" " Use political psychology." "Use your screen, Mr. Secretary." "Oh, dear..." "Won't it work?" "Oh, beautifully . "Then what's the matter ?' "The cat's devouring my top hat." " Speakin ' of top hats, up on Titan I once -- Party ahead. Pres.' "Everybody duck." "Sector I is Deep in the Heart of Titan." "It's a two-headed midget." "Seventeen feet high." "Sign off. Us Titans can do our own lyin'. Here's the picture. Pres." " Pass 'em by. Titan. That's Reich and Hassop." " Don't make anybody suspicious . Just pass 'em by. The rest of you can go home too. All my thanks. From here on I'll take k alone." "Leave us in on the fun, Pres. We'll surround 'em like a posse and -- " "This needs finesse. I don't Want Reich to know I'm abducting Hassop. It's all got to look natural. Ifs a swindle." "And you're the thief to do it, Powell." The departing peepers were propelled by a tiger grin. Reservation was jungle, swampy, tangled, humid. As darkness fell, Powell slowly wormed his way toward the glimmering campfire Reich had built in a clearing alongside a small lake. The water was infested with hippo, crocodile and swambat. The trees and terrain swarmed with life. The entire jungle was a of Reservation ecologists who could assemble and balance nature on the point of. a pin. In tribute to that nature, Reich's Defensive Barrier Screen was in futl operation. Powell could hear mosquitoes whine as they batted against the barrier. He could not risk operating his own, for the screens hummed slightly and Reich had keen ears. Powell inched forward and peeped.  Hassop was beglamored by being with Reich. Reich, working t erishly on a crude, powerful w. was passionately planning the accident that would take him a little further from Demolition. It was that bow and the arrows that had eaten up the eight hour start on Powell. You can't kill a man in' a hunting accident unless you go hunting. As Reich lifted the bow, his eyes carefully averted from Hassop, his mind intent on the throbbing heart that was his target, PoWell drove forward urgently. Before he had moved ten feet, alarm tripped in Reich's mind and the big man was on his feet. He whipped a burning branch from the fire and hurled the flare toward the blackness where Powell was concealed. The idea and execution came so quickly that Powell could not anticipate the action. He would have been fully illumined if Reich had not forgotten the barrier. It stopped the flaming branch in mid-flight and dropped it to the ground. "Christ!" Reich cried, and swung around abruptly at Hassop. "What is it, Ben?" Reich drew the arrow back to the lobe of his ear and held the point on Hassop's body. Hassop scrambled to his feet. "Ben, watch out! You're aiming at me!" Hassop leaped to one side unexpectedly as Reich let the arrow fly. "Ben! For the love of -- " Suddenly Hassop realized the intent. Running desperately, he smashed into the invisible wall as an arrow shot past his shoulder and shattered. "Ben!" he screamed. "You son of a bitch," Reich growled, and notched another shaft. Powell leaped forward and reached the edge of the barrier. He could not pass it. Inside, Hassop ran screaming while Reich stalked him. Powell stepped back into the darkness, thinking desperately. Hassop's screams had aroused the jungle and there was a roaring and an echoing rumble in his ears. Powell reached out on the TP Band, sensing, touching, feeling. There was nothing but blind fear, blind rage, blind instinct around him. "It's worth the chance," Powell said to himself. "I've got to bust that barrier." He set his blocks on the upper levels, masking everything except fear, terror, fear... Every bird awoke screaming. The monkeys screamed back and shook branches in sudden flight. A barrage of sucking explosions sounded from the lake as hippos surged up from the shallows in blind terror. The jungle was shaken by the ear-splitting trumpetings of elephants and the thunder of their stampede. Reich heard and froze, ignoring Hassop, who still ran and sobbed, crashing from wall to wall of the barrier. The hippos hit the barrier first. They were followed by the gigantic swambats and the crocodiles. Then came the elephants, the wapiti, the zebra, the gnu... heavy, pounding herds. The manufacturers of the Defensive Barrier Screen had never anticipated a stampede like this. Reich's barrier went down with a sound like scissored glass. The hippos trampled the fire. Powell darted through the darkness. seized Hassop's arm, and dragged the crazed man across the clearing to the piled packs. A wild hoof sent him reeling, but he held on to Hassop and located the precious film cannister. Still dragging Hassop, he peeped his way through the stampede. Behind the thick bole of a lignum vitae, Powell paused to catch his breath and settle the cannister safely in his pocket. Hassop was still sobbing. Powell sensed Reich, a hundred feet away, back against a fever tree, bow and arrows clutched in his stricken hands. He was confused, furious, terrified... but still safe. Powell wanted to keep him safe for Demolition. Unhitching his Defensive Screen Barrier from his belt, Powell tossed it across the clearing toward the embers of the fire where Reich would surely find it. Then he turned and led the numb, unresisting Code Chief toward the gate. A ND so, at last, the Reich case was ready for the District Attorney's office and that dreaded monster of facts and evidence, Mr. Peetcy. Powell and his staff assembled in Peetcy's office. A round table had been set up in the center, and on it was constructed a transparent model of the key rooms of Beaumont House, inhabited by miniature android figures of the people involved. lit The Lab had done a superlative Job; the models actually resembled the originals. Alongside the table was massed the documentation the staff had prepared, ready for presentation to the legal ogre. Mr. Peetcy himself occupied the entire circular wall of his giant office. His multitudinous eyes winked and glared coldly. His prodigious memory whirred and hummed. His mouth, the cone of a speaker, hung open in a kind of astonishment at human Stupidity. His hands, the keys of a multiflex typewriter, poised over a roll of tape, ready to hammer sense into anybody. Mr. Peetcy was the Prosecution Transistor Computer of the Disbict Attorney's Office, whose awful decisions controlled the preparation, presentation and prosecution qf every police case. "We won't bother Peetcy to start with," Powell told the D.A. "Let's take a look at the models and check them against the Crime Schedule. Your staff has the time sheets. If you catch anything our gang's missed, make a note." He nodded to Krt, the harrassed Lab Chief, who touched a button. Instantly the model was illumined and the dolls came to life. Acoustics had faked a background. There was a hint of music, laughter and chatter. In the main hall of Beaumont House, a pneumatic model of Maria Beaumont slowly climbed to a dais with a tiny book in her hands. "The time is #:# at that point," Powell said to the D.A.'s staff. "Watch the clock above the model. It's geared to synchronize with the action." In rapt silence, the legal division studied the scene and jotted notes while the androids reproduced the actions discovered by the Moltecs, reported by the witnesses, and inferred by Powell's squad. The lights went out in the model house. The miniature game of Sardine began. The tiny figure of Reich entered the Music Room, met Duffy Wyg and the Chervil boy, climbed to the Orchid Suite, extinguished the guards and entered the room to encounter D'Courtney. The staging of the murder surprised the lawyers, who made inquiring sounds. "Got that material from the D'Courtney girl," Powell murmured. "Peeped her. It's authentic." The little drama came to an end at last with the stampede of the guests from the Panty projection room up to the Orchid Suite Where the dolls burst in and crowded around the tiny dead body. There they froze in a grotesque little tableau. "And that's the overall picture," Powell said. "Now let's take it apart, point for point, and feed it to Mr. Peetcy. First, opportunity -- " The office door banged open and Commissioner Crabbe marched in as though heading a parade. Behind him were two officers of the Commissioner's squad with a sallow, shriveled man between them. "Mr. Prefect Crabbe pronounced formally. "Mr. Commissioner? "While you and the members of your staff have wasted valuable time, the Police Commissioner's office has quietly, efficiently and without fanfare performed and executed the official functions which your -- ' "Excuse me, Commissioner, Powell interrupted wearily. "We'll have the speech another time. We're trying to finish off the Reich Case.' "The Reich Case is ended." "Delighted to hear it. As of when?" "One hour ago, when it was re-titled the MacGranger Case. There," announced the Commissioner, pointing dramatically at the shriveled man, "stands Sherman MacGranger, self-confessed murderer of Craye D'Courtney!' "Oh, hell, not another one!' "This man has confessed to the murder and has, with one blow of almighty truth, smashed the malicious accusation against a man as incapable of crime as I am!" "I killed him," MacGranger said. "He didn't kill D'Courtney, Mr. Commissioner. We know this kind. We peep 'em every day.' "Mr. Prefect, I employed a bona fide member of your Guild to check MacGranger's confession. He assures me that MacGranger is not lying."  "The hell you say. Who peeped him?" "Dr. Alfred Gammon, the eminent psychiatrist who -- " "Gammon?" on repeated. "He's a #rd, a lay psychologist. He couldn't peep a cockroach " "I killed him," MacGranger said. "He's not lying, sir. He -- " "He's lying to himself, Mr. Commissioner," Powell said. "He's perfectly sincere, but he can't make us believe he's the killer. Too many have tried that already." "What?" "Oh, sure. We've had our quota of cranks who came busting into headquarters hollering for Demolition. How many so far, on?" "Eighteen. And every one honestly believing he murdered D'Courtney." "Preposterous." "Then the history of Criminal Investigation is preposterous, sir. There's rarely been a celebrated crime when deluded characters haven't pestered the police with confessions. Some actually got US themselves sentenced. That was before TP, of course. Nowadays, we protect the innocent from themselves. I'm going to protect Sherman MacGranger from himself and from you." "If you imagine you can pull your peeper tricks on me, Powell -- " "I'll do it with the objective evidence." Powell turned to the shriveled man. "Who invited you to the Beaumont party?" "I killed him," MacGranger said. "All right, you killed him. How Ad you get in?" "I crashed." "As a servant?" MacGranger smiled craftily. "No, as a guest." "Wi those clothes?" "The kind Maria Beaumont likes. Skintight leotards." "Did you know where D'Courtney was?" Without hesitation, MacGranger pointed to the Orchid Suite. "He was a lousy, stinkin' crook and I killed him right there!" "How did you get up there to kill him?" "In the Sardine game." "How did you play Sardine?" "We put out all the lights and one person was It and she went hiding. Everybody went looking for her and when they found her, they hid with her. Finally only one was left all alone in the dark wandering around wondering where everybody was and I went up and killed that dirty son -- " "Are you peeping him?" Powell asked on. "Magnificent! The paranoid's paranoiac. He's gotten all that material from the Pantys, but he really believes he was there." "Never mind your aspersions, Mr. Prefect," Crabhe said angrily. "You have not shaken MacGranger's confession by one iota." "Haven't you noticed his mistake yet? I'll point it up for you. How did you murder D' Courtney, MacGranger?" "An infinite ray." "There's no such animal." "I invented it." "MacGranger's a mechanic," Crabbe cut in hastily. "He's described his invention to me. We will have technicians pass on it at a later -- " "I've peeped his picture of the weapon. Describe it for the staff, Mr. Commissioner." "Well, it's a power-pack projector. It has a double hand grip because the recoil is apparently tremendous. A projector of such power would be required to blow out D'Courtney's head, as actually happened." "Sure," Powell replied casually. "Now ask him where he concealed it." Crabbe stared. "Clever up, Commissioner. He was in skintight leotards. Where did he conceal a two-handed i M power-pack 'infinite ray' projector? Not in leotards. A dirk, maybe, but not the machine you've described." "My God!" Crabbe exclaimed faintly. "I -- I never -- " "Well, MacGranger?" Powell asked kindly. "What's the answer?" ' The shriveled mn burst into tears. Crabbe angrily hauled him out of the room and came back alone, not particularly mollified. Powell turned to his staff. "Let's get back to work. We'll feed everything to Peetcy for an opinion. First, opportunity. There's no argument with the Moltecs. Reich went up twice as indicated in the model -- once to kill, a second time with the posse. You lawyers have any beefs on that?" "That Sardine game," the D.A. said. #'Reich bought the book, sent it to Beaumont." "How'd he know she'd play Sardine?" "He knew she liked games. Sardine was the only completely legible one in the book." The D.A. scratched his head. "Peetcy takes a lot of convincing. Won't do any harm to try it on, though." Crabbe, whose aplomb made quick recoveries, burst out : "Gentlemen, I have never approved of the use of that mechanical monster." on began feeding the punched data into Peetcy 's ear. "You're absolutely right, Commissioner." "Now about method," said Powell. "First question: How'd Reich knock out the guards? Krt?" "And furthermore, gentlemen..." Crabbe continued. "Rhodopsin Ionizer," Krt cut in. He handed a plastic sphere to Powell, who exhibited it. "Man named maine developed it for Reich's private police. I've got the empiric processing formula ready for Peetcy, and the sample we mocked up. Anybody care to try it?" The D.A. looked dubious. "I don't see the use. Peetcy can decide about that." "In addition to which, gentlemen..." "Oh, come on, Crabbe," KrJt said with unpleasant cheerfulness. "You'll never believe us unless you see it for yourself. It doesn't hurt. Just makes you non compose for six or seven -- " The plastic bulb shattered in Powell's fingers. A vivid blue light flared under Crabbe's nose. Caught in mid-oration, the Commissioner dropped to the floor. "Good Heavens!" Powell exclaimed. He looked at Krit severely. "You made the covering too thin, Krt. Now see what you've done to Commissioner Crabbe." "What I've done?" Ilf "Feed that data to Peetcy," the D.A. said in a voice rigid with control. "This he'll buy." They made the Commissioner comfortable. "Now the murder method Powell repeated. "Kindly watch this, gentlemen. The hand is quicker than the eye." He exhibited a revolver from the police museum. From the chambers he removed the shells, and from one of the shells he extracted the bullet. "This is what Reich did to the gun Jerry Church gave him before the murder -- pretended to make it safe. A phony alibi." "Phony, hell! That gun is safe. Is that Church's evidence?" "It is. Look at your sheet." "Then you don't have to bother Fetcy with the problem." The D.A. threw his papers down in disgust. "How can a cartridge kill without a bullet? Your sheet doesn't say Reich reloaded." "He reloaded." "He did not," Krlt insisted. "There was no projectile in the wound or the room." "Why, you located it yourself, KrVt. That bit of candy gel in D' Courtney's mouth. Remember? And no candy in the stomach." KrJt glared, Powell grinned. He took an eyedropper and filled a gel capsule with water, pressed it into the open end of the cartridge above the charge and placed the cartridge ip the gun. He raised the gun, aimed at a lit small wooden block on the edge of the model table, and pulled the trigger. There was a dull, fiat explosion and the block leaped into fragments. "That was a trick!" The D.A. exclaimed. "There was something in that shell besides water." "With a powder charge, you can shoot an ounce of water with enough muzzle velocity to blow out the back of a head if you fire through the victim's palate. That's why Reich had to shoot through the mouth. That's why Krlt found that bit of gel and nothing else. The projectile, of course, was gone." "Give it to Peetcy," the D.A. said faintly. "By God, Powell, I'm beginning to think we've got a case." "All right. Now, motive. We picked up Reich's business records: Accounting's gone through his back to the wall. Reich tried to join D' Courtney. He failed. He murdered D'Courtney. Will you buy that?" "Sure I'll buy it, but will Peetcy? Feed it in and let's see." They fed in the last of the punched data, shifted Peetcy up from "Idle" to "Run." Peetcy's eyes blinked in hard meditation; his stomach rumbled softly: his memory stuttered. Powell and the others waited with mounting suspense. A soft bell began to ping and Peetcy's type hammered.' n "if it please the court, with "What the hell?" Powell looked at on. "He gets kittenish now and then," on explained. They held the warm-up for a good five minutes and then kicked him into it. Once more his eyes blinked, his stomach growled, his memory hissed, and Powell and the. two staffs waited anxiously. A month's hard work hung on this decision. The type-hammers began to fall. "brief ##. section c-I. "Passion motive?" Powell muttered. "Is Peetcy crazy? It's a profit motive. Check C-l, on." on checked. "No mistake here." "Try him again." They ran Peetcy through it a third time. This time he spoke to the point: "brief ##. lit "Excuse me," Powell said to the others, "I've got to peep this out with on." He turned to on: "Open up, Charley. I smelled an evasion in them last words." " Honestly , Pres, I'm not aware of any -- " " you were aware, it wouldn't be an evasion. It'd be a downright lie. Now lemme see... Oh. Of course!" Powell spoke aloud to the staff: "on's missing one small point. Code is still working with Hassop upstairs. We've got the knowledge that Reich offered merger and was refused. But we haven't decoded the definite offer and refusal yet. That's what Peetcy wants." "How do you know the offer was made and refused?" the D. A. askejJ. "Got that from Reich himself through Gus T#. It was one of the last things T# gave me before he was murdered. I tell you what, on -- add an assumption to the tape. Assuming that our merger evidence , is unassailable, which it is, what does Peetcy think of the case?" on hand punched a strip, pliced it to the main problem and fed it in again. By now well warmed up, Peetcy answered in thirty seconds: "brief ##. #." Powell's staff grinned and relaxed. Powell tore the tape out and presented it to the D.A. with a flourish. "By God!" the D.A. said. "Ninety-seven per cent ! I thought I was lucky when I broke seventy!" The office door opened and two perspiring men came in. "Here's Code now," Powell said. "You bust it?" "We busted it," one said, "and now you're busted, Powell. The whole case is busted." "What are you talking about?" "Reich knocked off D'Courtney because D'Courtney ' wouldn't merge? He had a nice fat profit In a pig's eye he did." uufe aalk qqba to D'Courtney," the other added. "That reads: "Damn it, that's what I've said all along. And D'Courtney replied: wwhg. That was a refusal. Reich told T#. T# told me." "D'Courtney answered wwhg. That reads: accept offer." "The hell it does!" "The hell it doesn't. You'll never convince any court in the Solar System that Reich had a motive for murdering D'Courtney. Your case is washed out." Powell stood still, his fists clenched. Suddenly he pulled out the android figure of Reich and twisted its head off. He went to Peetcy, yanked out the tapes of punched data, crumpled them into a wad and hurled the wad across the room. He launched a tremendous kick at the chair Crabbe sat slumped in. While the staffs watched in appalled silence, the chair and Commissioner overturned to the floor. "Damn you, you're always sitting in that chair!" Powellsaid and stormed out of the office. XV Explosion ! The cell doors burst open. The stellite sparks sizzle in showers of daggers and bullets. And far outside, freedom is waiting in the cloak of darkness and flight into the unknown... Who's outside the cell-block? The Man With No Face! Cooking. Looming. Silent. Fly through space! There's time and safety in the solitude of this velvet-lined launch. The hatch door! Opening. But it can't. I'm alone. The Man With No Face! Looking. Looming. Silent. But I am innocent, your honor. You will never prove my guilt. On the bench. The Man With No Face. Looking. Looming. Pounding his gavel. The pounding turned to knocking on the stateroom door. "Over New York, Mr. Reich. One hour to debarkation." "All right," Reich croaked. "I hear you." Climbing out of bed, still in the grip of the nightmare's terror, he lurched around the stateroom. He hurled his linen and clothes into the Disposary, selected fresh clothes from the Dispenser and laid them out. He went into the bathroom, depilated, showered, steamed and air-washed for ten minutes. He was still ' reeling. He stepped into the massage alcove and punched "Glow Salt." There was a dull concussion and Reich was hurled to the floor, his back slashed by flying particles. Reacting instinctively, he darted into the bedroom, seized his traveling case, groped for the cartridge of detonation bulbs he always carried. There were none in the case. Reich pulled himself together. Aware of the bite of salt in the cuts in his back, he went back into the bathroom, shut off the massage buffers and inspected the alcove wreckage. Someone had removed the cartridge from his case during the night and planted a bulb in each of the massage buffers. The empty cartridge lay behind the alcove. He inspected his stateroom door. The lock had evidently been gaffed by a master. But who? Why? He returned deliberately to the bathroom, washed off the salt Til and blood, and sprayed his back with coagulent. He dressed, had his coffee and descended to the Staging Hall where, after a savage skirmish with the peeper Customs Man ( Tension , apprehension and dissension have begun), he boarded the Sacrament launch that was waiting to take him downjto the city. From the launch he called Sacrament. His secretary's face appeared on the screen. "Any news of Hassop?" Reich asked. "No, Mr. Reich. Not since you called from Ampro." "Give me Relations." The screen disclosed the chrome lounge of Sacrament. West, carefully binding sheets of typescript into plastic volumes, looked up and grinned. "Hi, Ben." "Don't look so cheerful, Ellery," Reich growled. "Where the hell is Hassop? I thought you'd surely -- " West displayed the volumes. "History of my career with Sacrament for your files. Said career ended this morning at nine." "What?" "The Guild's just ruled Sacrament out of bounds. Company espionage is unethical." "Ellery, you can't quit now. Someone tried to boobytrap me n the ship this morning. I've got to find out who it is. I need a peeper." "Sorry, Ben." "You don't have to work for Sacrament. I'll put you under personal contract for private service. The same contract Breen has." "Breen? The analyst? Not any more." "No -- more?" "The ruling came down today. Exclusive practice barred. It limits the service of peepers. We've got to be dedicated to the most good for the most people." "It's that bastard, Powell!" Reich shouted. "Using every lousy peeper trick he can dig out of the slime to bitch me!" "Sign off, Ben. Powell had nothing to do with it. It was T'sungHsai, our president. Old T-H finally got around to commercial jurisdiction and handed down a raft of rulings this morning. You got bracketed between a couple of them, that's all." "You smug peepers talk so much about ethics, but you fight as dirty as -- " "Ben! What's the use of screaming? We've always made it pleasant. Let's break it pleasant." "Go to hell !" Reich roared and cut the connection. To the launch pilot he said in the same tone: "Take me homer apartment, once again awakening the hearts of his staff to terror and hatred. He hurled his traveling case at the horsefaced valet and went immediately to Breen's suite. It was empty. Reich strode to his own rooms and went to the phone. He dialed Gus T#. The screen cleared: Reich stared, broke the connection and dialed Jeremy Church. The screen cleared : He swore and tried Keno Quizzard's gambling house. Again : Reich paced around the study uncertainly, then went to the shimmer of light in the corner that was his safe, wondering if old Geoffrey Reich had anything to contribute. He switched the safe into temporal phase, revealing the honeycomb paper rack, and reached for the small red envelope. As he touched it, he heard the faint click. He doubled up and spun away, his face buried in his arms. Something brutal punched Reich in the side and slammed him against the wall. He heard his staff come running down the corridor and roared: "Keep out! All of you!" He stumbled through' the wreckage and began sorting over the remains of his safe. He found the TP scrambler he had taken from Chooka Flood's red-eyed woman. He found the malignant steel flower that was the knifepistol that had killed D' Courtney. It still contained four unfired shells loaded with water and sealed with gel. He thrust both into his pocket, got a fresh cartridge of detonation bulbs from his desk, and tore out of the room, ignoring the servants who stared at him in astonishment. Reich swore feverishly from the toiVer apartment to the cellar garage where he deposited his Jumper key in the call slot and waited for the little car. When it came out of storage with the key in the door, Reich turned the key and yanked open the door to jump in. There was a low pressure rip. Reich hurled himself to the ground. The Jumper tank exploded, erupting a shattering geyser of fuel and fragments of metal. Reich crawled frantically, reached the exit ramp and ran. On the street level, bleeding, rank with creosote fuel, he flagged a Jumper. "Where to?" the driver asked. He tried to think coherently. "Chooka Frood's. Down in Bastion West." "They'll never let you in looking like that." "Chooka Frood!" Reich repeated. The cab hopped him there. He thrust past the protesting doorman and the indignant reception clerk to the private office. Chooka was seated at the desk, wearing a dingy smock and a dingy expression that changed to alarm when Reich yanked the scrambler ut of his pocket. "Here I am, Chooka," he said hoarsely. "I used this scrambler on you once before. I'm warmed up for it again." She screamed: "Magda!" Reich caught her by the arm and hurled her across the office. The red-eyed woman came running into the office. Reich was ready for her. He clubbed her across the back of the neck. Ignoring her, he spat at Chooka; "Let's get it squared off. Why the booby traps?" Cloka shook her head dazedly. "Three of them so far. On the ship coming back from Ampro. In my study. In my Jumper. How many more, Chooka?" "It wasn't me, Reich. So help me!" "My stateroom lock was gaffed. My safe lock was gaffed. My Jumper lock was gaffed. That takes a professional heavy gimpster. It adds up to you, so let's get it squared off." He slammed the safety off the scrambler. "I've got a man named Powell to swindle. I've got a cartel named D'Courtney to swindle. I've got no time to waste on you." "For God's sake!" Chooka screamed. "What have I got against you? So you roughhoused a little. So you mugged Magda. So you strong-armed the D'Courtney girl out of me. Would I be shoving you into the Serpent because you held a scrambler on me? Use your head!" "I used it. If it isn't you, who else?" "Keno Quizzard. He hires gimpsters too. I heard you and him -- " "Quizzard's dead. Who else?" "Church." "He hasn't got the guts or he would have tried it ten years ago. Now he's waiting for favors. Who else?" "How do I know? There's hundreds hate you enough." "Thousands, but who could get into my safe? Who could break a phase combination and -- " "Maybe nobody broke into your safe. Maybe somebody broke into your head and peeped the combination." "Peeped!" "Yeah, peeped. Maybe you added Church up wrong, or some other peeper that's got a reason to fill your coffin." "Yes," Reich whispered. "Church?" "Powell! He can't get a case together. I stopped him with Duffy Wyg's song. I stopped him with the Sardine game. He can't get at maine and the Rhodopsin. He can't get the gun. He got the D'Courtney girl, but #he's probably in Kingston Hospital right now. Hassop's dead in that stampede or missing. He's got nothing but boobytrapping left "You're crazy, Reich." "Am I? Why did he take Ellery West and Breen away from me? He knows the only defense I've got against a boobytrap is a peeper." "But a cop, Reich?" "Why not a cop? Who'd suspect him? It's what I'd do myself. All right, now I'm going to boobytrap him!" He went to Chooka and yanked her to her feet. "Call Powell. Tell him to come down here right away." "No, Reich..." "Listen to me, frab-head. Bastion West is owned by the D'Courtney cartel. Now that old D'Courtney's dead, I own the cartel. I own you, Chooka. You want to stay in business? Call Powell!" "He's a peeper. When he comes down, he'll know I'm lying." "Wait a minute." Reich thought, then yanked the knifepistol from his pocket and shoved it into Chooka's hands. "Tell him the D'Courtney girl left this here. It's the gun D'Courtney rode onto the Serpent." "And you're giving it to him?" Reich laughed. "By the time he's got it, he'll be boobytrapped." He thrust Chooka toward the phone, followed her and stood alongside the screen out of the line of sight. He hefted the scrambler in his hand meaningfully. She dialed Powell's number. Mary Noyes appeared on the screen, listened to Chooka, then called Powell. The Prefect appeared, his lean face haggard, his dark eyes heavily shadowed. "I... I got something you might want, Mr. Powell," Chooka stammered. "I just found it. That girl you took outa my house left it behind. The gun that sent her father onto the Serpent. See?" "That's it, by heaven!" Powell exclaimed. "I'll be down as fast as a Jumper can jet." The screen blacked out. Reich dashed out of the Rainbow House and ran through the alleys of Bastion West until he located a public Jumper. He dropped a coin into the lock, opened the door and lurched in. "Don't try to think," he thought. "Don't try to plan. Leave it to your instincts. Just wait and kill!" Reich fought himself and the controls all the three miles to Hudson Ramp. The killer instinct prompted him to crashland in Powell's back garden. He didn't know why. As he pounded the twisted cabin door open, a canned voice spoke: "Your attention, please. You are liable for the damage to this vehicle. Lfave your name and address. If we are forced to trace you, you will be liable for the costs. Thank you." "I'm going to be liable for a lot more," Reich growled. "You're welcome." He plunged under a heavy clump of forsythia and waited with the scrambler ready. Then he understood why he had crashed. The girl who had answered Powell's phone ran through the garden toward the jumper. Reich waited. No one else came from the house. The girl spun around before she heard him. A peeper. He pulled the trigger to first notch. She stiffened, helpless. He was about to pull the trigger the way back to the big D, but instinct stopped him again. Kill the girl in the house. Seed her' body with detonation bulbs and leave that bait for Powell. Reich forced a handkerchief into her mouth, took her by the arm. Inside the house, Reich found a long, corded modern lounge in the living room and thrust the girl down on it. She was fighting him with everything but her paralyzed body. He grinned savagely, bent down and kissed her full on the mouth. "My love to Powell," he said, raising the scrambler. Someone was watching him. He darted a quick look around the living room. There was no one. He turned back to the girl. "You doing that with TP, peeper?" Then he raised the scrambler. Again he lowered it. Someone was watching him. This time, Reich prowled around the living room, searching behind chairs, inside  closets, checked the kitchen and the bath. No one. He returned to the living room and Mary Noyes, then thought of the upper floor. He went to the stairs, started to mount them, and stopped in midstride. Someone was watching him. She was at the head of the stairs, kneeling and peeping through the banisters. She was dressed like a child in tight little leotards with her hair drawn back and tied with ribbon. Barbara D' Courtney. "I'm Baba," she said. Reich, shaking, motioned to her faintly. She came down the stairs, holding on to the banister carefully. "I'm not s'posed to," she said. "Are you Papa's friend?" Reich took a breath. "I... " "Papa had to go away," she prattled. "But he's coming back right away. If I'm a good girl, he'll bring me a present. I'm trying, but it's awful hard. Are you good?" "Coming b-back? Your fat her?" She nodded. "You kissed Aunt Mary. I saw it. Papa kisses me. I like it. Does Aunt Mary like it?" She took his hand confidently. "When I grow up. I'm going to marry Papa. Do you have a girl?" Reich pulled Barbara around and stared into her face. "Do you think I'll fall into that orbit? How much did you tell Powell?" "That's my papa," she said. "When I ask him why his name is different from my name, he looks funny. What's your name?" "Who do you think you're fooling with that act? Answer me! -- How much did you tell him?" She began to cry, trying to pull away from him. "Let me go!" He dragged her to the lounge where Mary Noyes still sat paralyzed. He threw the girl down beside her and stepped back again, with the scrambler raised. Suddenly, the girl whipped upright in the chair in a listening attitude. Her face lost its childishness and became drawn and taut. She leaped from the lounge, ran, stopped abruptly, then appeared to open a door. She ran forward, yellow hair flying, dark eyes wide with alarm... a lightning flash of wild beauty. "Father!" she screamed. "For God's sake! Father!" Reich's heart constricted. The girl ran toward him. He stepped forward to catch her. She darted to the left. "No!" she cried. "No! Father!" Reich caught her while she fought and screamed. The girl suddenly stiffened and clutched her ears. Reich was in the Orchid Suite. He heard the explosion and saw the blood and brains gout out of the back of D' Courtney's head. She fell to her knees and crawled across the floor. He saw her crouch over the waxen body. Reich gasped for breath and beat his knuckles together painfully, fighting for control. He had never counted on a witness. Damn Gus T#! Wait. He wasn't in Beaumont House. He was in... "Thirty-three Hudson Ramp," Powell informed him from the front door. Reich jerked around, whipped the scrambler up. "Don't try it," Powell warned sharply. "You son of a bitch!" Reich shouted. "You God damned peeper !" Powell faked to the left, reversed, delivered a six inch jab to the Ulnar synapse. The scrambler fell to the floor. Reich clinched, punching, clawing, butting. Powell hit him with three lightning blows -- nape, navel and groin. The effect was that of a full spinal block. Reich crashed to the floor, retching, blood streaming from his nose. "You only think you know how to gut-fight," Powell grunted. He went to Barbara D'Courtney, who still knelt on the floor, and raised her; "All right, Barbara?" # ' "Hello, Papa. I had a bad dream' "I had to give it to you. It was an experiment on that big oaf' "Gimme a kiss' He kissed her forehead. "You're growing up fast," he smiled. "You were just baby-talking yesterday." "I'm growing up because you promised to wait for me." "It's a promise, Barbara. Can you go upstairs to your room by yourself or do you have to be carried... like yesterday?" "I can go all by my own self." She took a firm hold on the banister and climbed up. Just before she reached the top, she stuck her tongue out at Reich, thetdisappeared. Powell crossed to Mary Noyes, removed the gag, checked her pulse. "First notch, eh?" he satd to Reich. "Painful, but she'll recover in an hour. I ought to pay you back for this, but what's the Use? It wouldn't teach you any-thing. You're just no damned good." "Kill me!" Reich groaned, writhing. "Kill me or let me up and, by Christ, I'll kill you!" t Powell picked up the scrambler. "Try flexing your muscles a little. Those blocks shouldn't last more than a few seconds..." He sat down with the scrambler in his lap. "You had a tough break. I wasn't out of the house five minutes when I realized Chooka's story was a phony. You put her up to it, of course." "You're the 'phony!" Reich shouted. "You and your ethics #" "She said the gun sent D'Courtney on the Serpent," Powell continued imperturbably. "It did, but she couldn't know what killed D'Courtney. I turned around and came back, of course." Reich struggled up, his breath hissing horribly. Suddenly he dipped into his pocket and brought out the cartridge of detonation bulbs. Powell arched back in the chair and kicked Reich in the chest. The cartridges went flying. Reich collapsed on a sofa. "When will you learn you can't surprise a peeper?" Powell said. He went to the cartridge and picked it up. "Quite the arsenal today, aren't you? You're acting more like a wanted' man than like a free man. Notice I said free, not innocent." "Free how long?" Reich said through his teeth.T never talked about innocence either. But free how long?" "I had a perfect case against you. Every detail right. I checked that when I peeped you with Barbara just now. That one flaw blew my case out into deep space. You're a free man, Reich. We've closed your file." Reich stared. "Closed the Jfile?" "You can disarm, Reich. No one's going to bother you." "This is one of your peeper tricks!" "I'll lay it out for you. I know all about you... how much you bribed Gus T#... what you promised Jerry Church... where you located that Sardine Game... what you did with Wilson Jmaine's Rhodopsin Caps... how you emptied those cartridges for an alibi and then turned them lethal again with water. So far a perfect chain of evidence. Method and opportunity. But motive was the flaw. The courts demand objective motive and I can't produce it. That sets you free." "You liar!" "I could throw breaking and entering with deadly intent at you, but it's too small a charge. You could probably beat it, too. My only witnesses would be a peeper and a sick girl." "Am I supposed to believe you? You had nothing, Powell. I licked you on every point. That's why you're boobytrapping me." Reich broke off abruptly. "This is probably the biggest boobytrap of all. And I fell into it. What a damned fool I am!" "Shut up," Powell snapped. "When you rave like that, I can't peep you!" Powell focused on Reich. Then his face began to pale. "That's it! Mr. Peetcy was right. Passion motive, and we s : l # I ; '! #! is # i x ks   thought he was kittenish. Barbara's Siamese twin image... , D'Courtney's guilt. No wonder Reich couldn't kill us at Chooka's... But the murder isn't important any more. It goes deeper. And it's more dangerous than I ever dreamed." He stopped, turned and looked at Reich with blazing eyes. "Do you know how dangerous you are? Does a plague know its peril? Is death aware that it is death?" Reich goggled at Powell in bewilderment. "Why ask you?" Powell muttered. "You don't know what I'm talking about. You'll never know." He went to a sideboard, selected two brandy ampules and popped them into Reich's mouth. Reich choked on the brandy and sputtered angrily. "Get this straight," Powell said. "The case against you is closed because of those boobytraps. If I'd known about them, I'd have broken my conditioning and killed you." Reich stopped sputtering. "When you offered merger to D'Courtney, he sent wwhg in answer, which is acceptance. You had no reason to murder him. That was the flaw in the case." Reich went white, "wwhg -- offer refused!" "He accepted. When I learned that I knew I couldn't bring the case to court. But I'm not the man who's trying to murder you. That man is trying to kill you because he knows you're safe from Demolition. He's always known what I've just discovered -- that you're a ghastly menace to our entire future." Reich struggled up out of the sofa. "Who is it? Who?" "Your ancient enemy, Reich. You'll never be able to run from him... hide from him... and I hope you'll never be able to save yourself from him." "The Man With No Face." Reich turned and staggered out of the house. happened to you? Why don't you think?" Tension, apprehension and -- "He was lying. A giant boobytrap. wwhg -- refusal. But why did he lie? How is that going to help him?" -- dissension have begun. "The Man With No Fpce. Breen could have told Powell. So could Gus T#. Think!" Tension -- "There is no Man With No Face. It's just a nightmare!" Apprehension -- "What about the boobytraps, though? He had me cold in his house. Why didn't he pull the switch? Telling me I'm free. What's he up to? Think!' Dissension -- "He's your enemy. You'll never be able to run from him... hide from him... save yourself from him! Not the Man With No Face. It's Powell!" A hand touched his shouldei. "Mr: Reich?" Reich became aware that it was raining heavily. He was lying on his side, knees drawn up, drenched, shivering with cold. He was in the esplanade of Bomb Inlet. Around him were sighing, sodden trees. A figure was bending over him. "Who are you?" "Galen Chervil. From Maria Beaumont's party. Can I do you that favor, Mr. Reich?" "Don't peep me!" Reich cried. "I'm not, Mr. Reich. We don't usually -- " Young Chervil caught himself. "I didn't know you knew I was a peeper." "I know all you lousy -- " "Don't say it, Mr. Reich. You'll make it too easy for me to agree with you." Young Chervil took him under the shoulders and raised him, staring at Reich's frightful appearance. "Were you mugged, Mr. Reich?" "What? No." "Accident, sir?" "No, I... Oh, get the hell away from me!" "Certainly, sir. I thought you needed help and I owe you a favor, but -- " "Come back." Reich grasped the bole of a tree, thrust himself erect and glared at Chervil with bloodshot eyes. "You mean that about the favor?" "Of course, Mr. Reich." "My problem's murder. Chervil. I want to find out who's trying to kill me. Will you do me that favor? Will you peep someone for me?" "I should imagine the police would be able to -- " "The police?" Reich laughed, then clutched himself in agony. "I want you to peep a top cop for me, Chervil. The Commissioner himself." He let go the tree and lurched to Chervil. "I want to visit my friend the Commissioner and ask him a few questions. I want you to be there to tell me the truth." "But the Commissioner might not care to be peeped, sir:" "He won't know he's peeped," Reich roared. "Look at me, you fool. I'm cut... I'm broken... I'm half out of my mind... I'm two-thirds murdered! I need that favor. You say you owe it. Will you come to Crabbe's office and peep him for me?" "Yes, Mr. Reich." "An honest peeper! How about that? Let's jet." Reich rani out of the esplanade like a freshly decapitated man. ChfcrVil f bllb wed, Overwhelmed by the fury that drove Reich through injury, through fever, through agony to police headquarters. Tlfere, Reich bulled and roared past clerks and guards into Commissioner Crabbe's elaborate ebony-and-silver office. "My God, Reich!" Crabbe was aghast. "It is you. isn't it?" "Sit down, Chervil," Reich said. He turned to Crabbe. "It's me. I was almost murdered three times today. This boy..." Reich pointed to Chervil. "This boy just found me in the Inlet Esplanade more dead than alive. And where have the damned police been?" "Murdered!" Crabbe thumped his desk emphatically. "Of course! Powell is a fool. I should never have let Sherman MacGranger go." "Sherman MacWho?" "MacGranger. The man who murdered D' Courtney. He signed a confession... and that idiot Powell made me free him!" "MacGranger murdered D'Courtney?" "He did, Ben, and he's probably after you. I told Powell you were innocent. He wouldn't listen to me. I showed him MacGranger. He wouldn't listen to him. Even when Mr. Peetcy told him you were innocent, he wouldn't listen." "The machine said I was innocent?" "Of Course' it did. There's no fit case against you. But there's a case against MacGranger., and I'm going to convict him before he murders you, too." Crabbe strode to the door. "I'm sending out a call for him right now. Don't go, Ben. I want to talk to you about that Solar Senatorship..." The door opened and slammed. Reich reeled and fought his way back to the world. He looked at three Chervils. "Well?" "He's telling the truth, Mr. Reich." "About me? About Powell? About MacGranger?" "He's telling the truth about you," Chervil said. "The Prosecution Transistor Computor has declined to authorize any action agajjist you for the D'Courtney murder. Mr. Powell has been forced to abandon the case and... well, his career is in jeopardy." "Is that true?" Reich seized his shoulders. "Is it?" "Yes, Mr. Reich. The Commissioner believes he's telling the truth about Sherman MacGrangger, but his recollection shows that MacGranger could not be the murd -- " "To hell with MacGranger! I've been cleared?" "You have been, Mr. Reich. No one's going to bother you." Reich burst into a roar of triumphant laughter, brushed past Chervil and left the Commissioner's office, a Neanderthal vestige parading down headquarters corridors,, streaked with blood and mud, laughing and groaning because of the pain of laughing, bearing himself with limping arrogance. He stood for a moment on the steps, gazing at the rainswept streets... at the amusement center across the square, block after block blazing under a single transparent dome... at the open shops lining the upper footthe city's night shopping began... the towering office buildings in the background, great twohundred-story cubes and the lace tracery of skyways linking them together... the twinkling running lights of Jumpers. "I'll own you!" he promised, his laugh rising hysterically. "Live, die, laugh, cry, love, beget -- I'll own you all!" Then his eyes caught the tall, ominous familiar figure crossing the square, watching him covertly over its shoulder. A figure of black shadows sparkling with raindrop jewels... looking, looming, silent, horrible... A Man With No Face. Like a blighted tree, Reich fell in a crooked arc to the ground. A T one minute to nine, ten of the fifteen members of the Esper Guild Council assembled in President T'sung Hsai's office. The minutes read as follows: # , Request for Mass Cathexis with Preston Powell as canal for Capitalized Energy. Consternation T'sung: Honorable Powell, your request bewilders this threadbare brain. What can possibly require such an extraordinary and dangerous measure? Powell : Reich is about to become a Galactic Focal Point... A crucial link between the Positive Past and the Probable Future. He is on the verge of a powerful reorganization at this moment. If Reich can adjust before I reach him, he will become immune to our reality, invulnerable to our attack -- the deadly enemy of our Guild and Galactic Reason and Reality. Alarm kns: Surely you're exaggerating, Powell? Powell: Inspect the picture with me. Look at this perspective of Reich's position in time and space. Will not his beliefs become the world's belief? Will not his reality become the world's reality? Is he not, in his critical position of power, energy and intellect, a sure road to utter destruction? Conviction T'sung: It is the truth. Nevertheless, this unworthy person is most reluctant to authorize Mass Cathexis. It has invariably destroyed the Energy Canal in past attempts. You are too valuable to be destroyed, Powell. Powell: I must be permitted to run the risk. Reich is one of the rare Universe Shakers . D  a child as yet, but about to mature. And all reality... Espers, Normals, Life, the Earth, the moons, the Solar System, the galaxies, the Universe itself... all reality hangs precariously on his awakening. He cannot be permitted to awaken to the wrong reality. I call the question. Jordan: You're asking us to vote your death. Powell : My probable death against the certain death of everything. I call the question. T'sung: It is a two-tongued question. You have no guarantee that the measure will be successful. (Skins: Let Reich awaken as he will. We have the time and the warning to attack him on another crossroad. Powell: I call the question! Decision : Request granted. Meeting adjourned Hour hand at # Minute hand at #I Second hand at death hour later. He had made his will, paid his bills, arranged everything. There had been dismay at the Guild. There was dismay when he came home, for Mary Noyes got the picture the instant he entered. "No fuss. It's got to be done.' " But -- " " There's a chance it won't kill me. Oh, one thing. Lab wants a brain autopsy if I die. They'd tike to have the body before rigor. If they can't get the corpse, they'll settle for the head. See to it t will you?'" "Pres!" "Sorry. Now you'd better pack and take the baby up to Kingston Hospital. She won't be safe here." " She isn't a baby any more. She -- Oh, Pres!" Mary turned and ran upstairs, trailing the familiar sensory impact: Snow mint, tulips taffeta, now mixed with terror and tears. Powell sighed, then smiled as a highly poised teen-ager appeared at the head of the stairs. She paused halfway down to let him take in the dress and the manner. "Why, it's Mr. Powell, is it not?" "It is. Good morningBarbara." "And what brings you to our little domain this morning?" She came down the rest of the stairs with her fingertips brushing the banister, and tripped on the bottom step. "Oh, Pip!" she cursed. Powell caught her. "Pop," he said. "Bim." "Bam." She looked up at him. "You stand right here. I'm going to come down those stairs again and I bet I do it perfect." "I'll bet you don't." She turned, trotted up, posed again at the top step and began the grand descent. "I am no longer the mere child I was yesterday. I am ages and ages older. You must regard me as an adult from now on." She negotiated the bottom step and regarded him intently. "Good?" "Splendid, dear." Suddenly she laughed, pushed him into a chair and plumped down on his lap. Powell groaned. "Gently, Barbara. You're ages older and pounds heavier." "Listen," she said, "what ever made me think you were my father?" "What's the matter with me as a father?" "Do you feel like a father toward me? I don't feel like a daughter toward you." "Oh? How do you feel?" "I asked first, so you go first." "My feelings toward you are those of a loving and dutiful son." She flushed angrily and got up from his lap. "I wanted you to be serious, because I need advice." "I'm sorry, Barbara. What is it?" She knelt alongside him and took his hand. "I'm all mixed up about you."  "Yes. I know." "And you're all mixed up about me, too." "That's true. I am." "Is it wrong?" Powell heaved up from the chair and began pacing unhappily. "No, Barbara, it isn't wrong. The two of us are four peopletwo of you, and two of me." "Why?" "You've been sick, dear, so we had to turn you into a baby and let you grow up again. That's why you're two people. The grown-up Barbara inside, the baby outside." "And you?" "I'm two grown-up people. One of them is me. The other is a member of the governing Council of the Espr Guild." She considered earnestly. "When I don't feel like a daughter to you, which me feels like that?" "I don't know, Barbara." "You do know. Why won't you ,ay?" She came to him and put ier arms around his neck, a 'rown-up woman with the manner of a child. "If I love you --  " All right" Powell thought desperately. "Remember Gaily Chervil? It's your turn now. What are you going to do? Admit the truth?" "Yes!" came from the stairs. Mary was descending with a traveling case in her hand. " Admit the truth." "She Isn't a peeper ." "Forget that. She's a woman and she's in love with you. You're in love with her. For God's sake, give yourselves a chance." "Achance for what? An affair if I get out of this Reich mesa alive? That's all it could be." "She'll be grateful to settle for that. Ask me. I know." "And if I don't come out alive? She'll have nothing but half a memory of half a love." Powell laughed. "Baby! What makes you think I'm in love with you that way? I'm not. I've never been." "You are!" "Look at me. Look at Mary. You're ages older, aren't you? Can't you understand?" "For God's sake, Pres!" "Sorry, Mary. Got to Aise you." " I'm getting ready to say good by, maybe for good. Isn't it bad enough for me already?' m Barbara stared at Mary, then at Powell. She burst into tears and sobbed: "Oh, go away! Why don't you gp away?" "We're going away, Barbara,' Mary said. She took the girl's arm and led her to the door. "There's a Jumper waiting, Mary." " There's me waiting, Pres. For you. Always. And the Chervils  kins  Jordans  -- " " know. I love you all. Kisses. leasings." Image of fourleaf clover, rabbits' feet, horseshoes... He stood in the doorway watching the Jumper disappear into the steel-blue sky toward Kingston Hospital. He was exhausted, a little proud of himself for having made the sacrifice, intensely ashamed of himself for feeling proud, clearly melancholic. Look at that great, foul city of fourteen not one soul for him -- The first impulse came, a thin trickle of latent energy. He felt it distinctly and glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. So soon? He'd better get ready. He turned into the house and ran up the stairs to his dressing room. His psyche began to throb and vibrate as he reached out for those tiny streams of latent energy. He changed his clothes, dressed for all weather, and -- The energy came in torrents now, a swirling sea of Mass Cathexis directed from each Esper, tuned to Powell. He was out of the house, wandering through the streets, blind, deaf, senseless, immersed in that boiling mass of latent energy... like a ship with sails caught in the nexus of a typhoon, fighting to convert a whirlpool of wind into the motive power that would lead to safety. So Powell fought to absorb that fearful torrent, to Capitalize that latent energy, to Cathectize and direct it toward the Demolition of Reich before it was too late. disband: (operations, expressions, facannul: shouted. He struggled upward. fighting the bedclothes and the restraining hands. "There is no what?!" "No more nightmares," a girl said. Reich opened his eyes. He was in a frilly bed with old-fashioned linen and blankets. Duffy Wyg, starched and fresh, tried to thrust him back against the pillows. "I was awake," he said somberly. "I heard... I don't know what I heard. Infinity and zero. Important things. Then I fell asleep here." "Correction," Duffy smiled. "You're awake now." "I'm asleep!" Reich shouted. "I've got to wake up, Duffy. I've got to get back to reality." Duffy bent over him and kissed him hard on the mouth. "How about this? Real?" "You don't understand. It's all been delusions. I've got to readjust before it's too late." Duffy threw up her hands. "First that damned doctor scares you into a faint. Then he swears you're patched up... and now look at you. Psychotic!" "Who scared me into a faint?" "Rocky "Martin. A doctor friend. In the square in front of police headquarters." "And you brought me here?" "Sure. It's the only way I could get you into my bed." Reich burst into laughter. "Didn't you once ask to be dragged through the gutter, Duffy?" "I thought I could meet a better class of people." "You name the gutter and you can have it. You want a gutter from here to Mars? You'll have it! You want me to turn the System into a gutter? I'll do it!" "Dear man. So modest and so hung-over." "Drunk? Sure, I'm drunk." Reich thrust his legs out of the bed and stood up, reeling slightly. He put his arm around her waist for support. "Why shouldn't I be drunk? I've licked D' Courtney. Fve licked Powell. I've got sixty years of owning every damned world ahead of me. Mow'd you like to start a dynasty with me, Duffy?" "I wouldn't know how to go about starting dynasties." "You start with Ben Reich. First you marry him. Then -- " "That's enough. When do I start?" "Then you have children and you watch Ben Reich take over D'Courtney and merge it with Sacrament. You watch the enemies go down... like this!" Reich kicked the leg of a busty vanity table. It crashed. "Case and Umbrel on Venus. Eaten!" Reich brought his fists down on a torso-shaped side table and smashed it. "United Transaction on Mars. Mashed and eaten!" He crushed a delicate chair. "The listo and lo... Titan Chemical  Atomics... And then the smaller lice: the Guild of Peepers, the moralists, the patriots... eaten!" He toppled a marble nude from its pedestal. It shattered. "Clever up, Mr. Reich!" Duffy hung on his neck. "Why waste all that violence?" He lifted her in his arms and shook her until she squealed. "Parts of the System will taste sweet... like you, Duffy. Parts will stink to high heaven... but I'll gobble them all." He laughed and crushed her against him. "We'll tear it all down, Duffy, and we'll build it all up to suit us. You and me and the dynasty." He carried her to the window, tore away the drapes. Outside, the city was in velvet darkness. Only the skyways and streets twinkled with lights, and the scarlet eyes of an occasional Jumper popped up over the jet skyline. "You out there!" Reich roared. "Can you hear me? All of you, sleeping and dreaming -- youll #  dream my dreams from now on!" He seized the sides of the window and poked his head far out into the night, twisting his neck to stare up. When he drew his head back into the room, his face wore a frustrated expression. "I want to yell at the stars," he said. "They're not out tonight." Duffy looked at him curiously. "The what are not out?" "The stars. Look up at the sky. There's nothing but the Moon." "That's the way it always is," Duffy said. "It is not! Where are the stars?" "What stars?" "How the hell should I know their names? I'm not an astronomer. What's happened to the stars?" "What are stars?" Duffy asked. Reich seized her savagely. "Suns boiling and blazing with light. Thousands of them shining through the night. What the hell's the matter with you? Don't you understand?" Duffy shook her head. Her face was terrified. "I don't know what you're talking about, Ben." He shoved her away, went to the bathroom and locked himself in. While he was hurriedly bathing and dressing, he heard her calling Kingston Hospital on the phone using a guarded voice. "Let her start explaining about the stars," Reich muttered, halfway between anger and terror. He came out into the bedroom. Duffy cut the phone off hastily and turned to him. "Wait here for me," he growled. "I'm going to find out." "Find out about what?" "About the stars!" he yelled. He rushed down to the street. On the empty footway, he paused and stared up again. There was the Moon. There was one brilliant red point of light... Mars. There was another... Jupiter. Nothing else. Blackness. It hung over his head, enigmatic, terrifying. He began to run, still staring upward. He turned a corner of the footway and collided with a woman. He held her arm and pointed up. "Look! Do you see what I see? The stars are gone!" "What's gone?" "The stars. Don't you see? They're gone." "I don't know what you're talkin' about, pilot. C'mon, let's have us a ball." He tore himself away from her claws and ran. Halfway down the footway was a public phone alcove. He stepped in and dialed Information. The screen lit and a robot voice spoke: "Your question?" "What's happened to the stars?" Reich asked. "When did it happen? It must have been noticed by now. What's the explanation?" There was a click, a pause. "Will you spell the word, please?" "Star!" Reich roared. "S-t-a-r. Star!" "Noun or verb?" "God damn you! Noun!" "There is no information listed under that heading," the canned voice announced. Reich swore, then fought to control himself. "Where's the nearest observatory?" "The Lunar Observatory at Croton Park is situated thirty miles north. It may be reached by Jumper Route North Coordinate #. The Lunar Observatory was endowed in the year two thousand -- " Reich slammed down the phone. "No information listed under that heading! Are they all crazy?" He ran out into the street searching for a Public Jumper. A cab cruised past and Reich signaled. It swooped to pick him up. "Northco #," he snapped as he stepped m. "The Lunar Observatory." The cab jetted. Reich restrained himself for five minutes, then began casually: "Notice the sky?" "Why, mister?" "The stars are gone." Sycophantic laugh. "It's not supposed to be a joke," Reich said. "The stars are gone." "If it ain't a joke, it needs explaining," the driver said. "What the hell are stars?" Before Reich could erupt, the cab landed him on the observatory grounds. He snapped, "Wait for me," and ran across the lawn. He entered and heard the low whine of the dome mechanism and the quiet click of the observatory clock. Except for the low glow of the clock-light, the room was in darkness. He could see the observer, a dim outline crouched over the eyepiece of the telescope. "Listen," Reich said in a low voice. "Sorry to bother you, but you must have noticed. What's happened? Where are the stars?" The figure straightened slowly nd turned toward Reich. "There are no stars," jt said. The Man With No Face!down the steps and across the lawn to the waiting cab. He blundered against the crystal cabin wall and fell fiat. The driver pulled him to his feet. "You all right, Mac?" "I don't know," Reich groaned. "None of my business, but I think you ought to see a peeper." Reich gripped the man. "I'm Ben Reich of Sacrament." "I recognized you." "Good. You know what I can do for you if you do me a favor? Money, new job, anything you want..." "You can't do anything for me, Mac. I already been adjusted at Kingston." "Better. An honest man. Will you do me an important favor?" "Sure, Mac." "Go into that building. Take a look at the man behind the tele. scope. A good look. Come back and describe him to me." The driver departed, was gqne five minutes, then returned and reported: "Sixtyish. Bald. Got lines in his face kinda deep. His ears stick out and he's got what they call a weak chin." "It's nobody... nobody," Reich muttered. "What?" "About the stars," Reich said. "You never heard of them? You never saw them? You don't know what I'm talking about?" "Now don't get overdriven, Mac. Tell you something. They taught me plenty up at Kingston, like sometimes you get a crazy notion. For instance, that people always had one eye and now all ( of a sudden they got two." Reich stared at him. "So you run around yellin' : 'Where did they all of a sudden get two eyes?' And they say : We always got two eyes.' And you say: 'The hell we did. I distinctly remember everybody got one eye.' And, by God, you believe it and they have a hell of a time knockin' the, notion outa you." The driver thumped him firmly. "Seems to me, Mac, like you're on a one-eye kick." "One eye," Reich repeated. "Two eyes. Tension, apprehension apd dissension have begun." "What?" "I've had a rough time the last month. Maybe you're right." "You want to stay here and mope about stars?" "What do I care about stars! I've got the world. What do I care if a few delusions go with it?" "That's the way, Mac. Where to?" "The Royal Palace." "The which?" Reich laughed. "S at," he said, and laughed all Ute iiight through the dawn to Sacrament's soaring tower. f  'HE night staff was in the last drowsy stages of the #-# shift when Reich bustled in. As Reich went to his desk, he was followed by secretaries and subsecretaries carrying the urgent agenda of the day. "Let all that wait," he ordered. "Call in all department heads and organizational supervisors. I'm going to make an announcement." This was the only reality... the annunciator bells, the muted his office with so many awed faces. All this was a preview of the future, when bells would ring on planets and satellites, and world supervisors would scuttle to his desk with awe on their faces. "As you all know," Reich began, "we of Sacrament have been battling the D'Courtney Cartel until Craye D'Courtney was killed. The road is open for us now. We can commence operation of Plan AA to take over the D'Courtney Cartel." He paused, waiting for the excited murmur that should respond to his announcement. There was no response. "Perhaps," he said, "some of you do not comprehend the size and importance of the job. Those of you that are city supervisors will become continental supervisors. Continental supervisors will become satellite chiefs. Present satellite chiefs will become planetary chiefs. From now on, Sacrament will dominate the Solffc System. From now on, all of us must think in terms of the Solar System." Reich faltered, alarmed by the blank looks. He singled out the chief secretary. "What the hell's the matter? Bad news I haven't heard yet?" "N-no, Mr. Reich." "Then what's frabbing you? This is something we've all been waiting for. What's wrong with it?" "I've n-never heard of the organization, Mr. Reich. I... We... " The chief secretary turned around for support. Before Reich's unbelieving eyes, the entire staff shook their heads in mystification. "D'Courtney on Mars!" Reich shouted. "On where, sir?" "One of the ten planets. Fourth from the Sun. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars! A hundred and Sun! Mars!" They backed away slightly from Reich. He darted at the secretaries and tore the business papers from their hands. "You've got information about D'Courtney on Mars there. My God, we've been fighting D'Courtney for the last ten years!"  He clawed through the papers. There was not one reference to D'Courtney or Mars. There was no reference to Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, the other satellites. "I've got memos in my desk," Reich shouted. "Hundreds of them! You're pulling something on me..." He yanked out desk drawers. There was a stunning explosion. Fragments of flying wood slashed the staff, and Reich was hurled back against the window. "The Man With No Face!" Reich cried. He shook his head feverishly, and clung to the first problem. "Where are the files? I'll show you in the files... D'Courtney and Mars and all the rest. And I'll sh#w the Man With No Face', too." I He burst into the file va'tiltS, tore out fhck aftr tfaekf sdStteVing papers, clufetei's I of J I pie# J in crystals, microfilm, molecular transcripts. There was no reference to D'Courtney or Mars, none to Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, the asteroids, the satellites. Three burly gentlemen from Relations came trotting into the vaults. "Easy now, Mr. Reich," one said. "Easy..." "Get away from me!" "Easy. It's all right, sir." They deployed strategically while the hustle and the bustle increased and he bells' sounded and voices far off called: "Get his doctor." "Somebody call Kingston." "Did you notify the police?" "No, don't. No scandal." "Get Legal!" "Isn't the Infirmary open yet?" Reich overturned files in the path of the burly gentlemen, raced through the office to the outside corridor and the Vertical Pneumatique, where he punched #. The door opened. He stepped into space and felt the circular steel plate snap again his soles and then drop him to the S#th floor. The Sacrament laboratory was in darkness. Still breathing heavily, he staggered to the lab library. snapped on the lights and went to the reference alcove. A sheet of frosted crystal, slanted like a drawing board, was set before a desk chair. There was a complicated panel of control buttons alongside it. Reich seated himself and punched ready. The crystal lit up and a canned voice spoke from an overhead speaker: "Class?" Reich punched science. "Section?" Reich punched astronomy. "Your question?" "The Universe." "The term universe in its complete physical sense applies to all matter in existence." "What matter is in existence?" "Matter is gathered into aggregates ranging in size from the smallest atom to the largest collection of matter known to astronomers." "What is the largest collection of matter known to astronomers?" Reich punched diagram. "The Sun." The crystal plate displayed a dazzling picture of the Sun in speed-up action. "But what about the others? The stars?" "There are no stars." "The planets?" "There are no planets." "The Moon?" "There is no Moon." Reich took a deep, trembling breath. "We'll try it again. Go back to the Sun." The Sun appeared again in the crystal. "The Sun is the largest collection of matter known to astronomers," the canned voice began. Suddenly it stopped. The picture began to fade slowly. The voice spoke. "There is no Sun." The model disappeared, leav#S ing behind it an after-image that looked up at Reich... looming, silent, horrible... The Man With No Face. Reich picked up the chair and smashed it down on that frightful image. He blundered out of the library into the corridor. At the Vertical Pneumatique, he punched street. The door opened, he staggered in, was dropped # stories to the Main Hall of Sacrament Tower. It was filled with early workers hurrying to their offices. As Reich pushed past them, he caught the  astonished glances at his cut and bleeding face. Then he was aware of a dozen uniformed Sacrament guards closing in on him. He ran down the hall, slipped into the revoking doors and whirled through to the footway. There he jerked to a stop as though he had run into white-hot iron. The street lights were lit; the skyways twinkled; Jumper eyes floated up and down; the shops were blazing... and overhead there was nothing but a deep, black fathomless infinity. "The Sun! Where's the Sun?" Then the first of the guards came through the revolving door and he sprinted through an aryond the arcade was the entrance of a Vertical Pneumatique to the skyway. Reich leaped in, was lofted # stories. There was a small car park shelved onto the face of Sacrament Tower, with a ramp leading into the skyway. Reich flung sovereigns to the attendant and got into a car. He pressed go. The car went. At the foot of the runway, he pressed left. The car turned left and continued. That was all the control he had -- left, right; stop, go. The rest was automatic. Moreover, cars were strictly limited to the skyways. He might spend hours racing in circles high over the city. He glanced alternately over his shoulder and up at the sky. There was no Sun... and they went about their business as though there had never been any. He shuddered. Was this more of the one-eye kick? Suddenly the car slowed and stopped. He was marooned in the middle of the skyway, halfway between Sacrament Tower and the Chanin Building. Reich hammered on the control studs. There was no response. He leaped out and raised the tail hood to inspect the pickup. Then he saw the guards far down the skyway, running toward him, and he understood. These cars were powered by broadcast energy. They'd cut the broadcast off at the car park and were coming after him. Reich stumbled toward the Chanin Building. The skyway tunneled through the building and was lined with shops, restaurants, a Panty theater -- and there was a travel office! He could grab a ticket, get into a one-man capsule and have himself slotted to any of the takeoff fields. He needed a little time to reorganize and he had a house in Paris. He leaped across the center island, dodged past cars and ran into the office. It looked like a miniature bank. A short counter. A grilled window protected by burglarproof plastic. Reich slapped gold coins down on the counter. "Ticket to Paris," he said. "Keep the change." "There is no such place," came the reply. Reich stared through the cloudy plastic and saw... looking, looming, silent... the Man With No Face. Skull pounding, he ran blindly on to the skyway, shied feebly from an oncoming car, and was struck down into enveloping darkness -- (mineralogy, petrology, geology and physiography) (meteorology, hydrology and seismology) (paleontology, stratigraphy and paleogeography) A hand was placed over his mouth. Reich opened his eyes. He was in a small tiled room, an emergency police station. He was lying on a white examination table. Around him were the guards, three uniformed police, unidentified strangers. The stranger removed his hand from Reich's mouth. "It's all right," he said gently. "I'm a doctor." "Are you a peeper? I need a peeper. I need somebody inside my head to prove I'm right." "What's he want?" a policeman asked. "I don't know. He said a peeper." The doctor turned back to Reich. "What's a peeper?" "An Esper. A mind reader. A -- ' The doctor smiled. "Show of high spirits. Many patients do that after accidents. We call it gallows humor..." "Listen," Reich said desperately. "My name is Reich. Ben Reich of Sacrament. You know me. I want to confess. Take me to Preston Powell." "Who's Powell?" "What do you want to confess?" "I murdered Craye D' Courtney last month. In Maria Beaumont's house. I want to tell Powell." The police looked at each other in surprise. One of them drifted to a corner and picked up an oldfashioned hand phone: "Captain? Got a character here. Calls himseld Ben Reich of Sacrament. Claims he killed a party named Craye D'Courtney last month." After a pause, he grunted and hung up. "A nut," he said. "Listen -- " Reich began. "Is he all right?" the policeman asked the doctor. "Just shaken a little." "Listen!" Reich shouted. The policeman yanked him to his feet and propelled him toward the door of the station. "There ain't no Preston Powell on the force. There ain't no D'Courtney And he hurled Reich into the street. Reich stumbled, then regained his balance and stood still, numb, lost. A few street lights were lit. The skyways were extinguished. There were great gaps shorn in the skyline. He began to lurch down the broken streets with arms clutching his belly. "Cab!" he yelled. "Taxicab!" Jumper! Where is everything? Cab!" There was nothing. "Isn't there anybody can hear me? I'm sick. I need help... Got to get home." There was nothing. He moaned again. Then he tittered, weakly, inanely. He sang in a defiant voice: "Eight, sir, five, sir, one, sir! Tenser, said tensor... , tension, 'prehension, 'sension have b-begun!" He gripped T#'s shaking elbow and marched him through Beaumont House. As he walked he called plaintively: "Hey, where is everybody? Marig!" T# emitted a hysterical sob. Reich shook him roughly. "Play up! We'll be out of here in five minutes. Then you can start worrying." "If they find the body before we leave, we're sunk." "Who'll find the body?" "The guards." "They've been ionized." "Servants." "They won't leave the kitchens till the Sardine game is over. I tell you we'll be safe in five minutes." "But if we're trapped here, we won't be able to get the girl. We'll -- " "We won't be trapped.' Reich pushed open the door of the projection room. "Hey, where is everybody?" No answer. There was no door, no projection room. He was standing at # Park South, looking for the Beaumont Mansion, the site of D'Courtney's death... and Maria Beaumont, shrill, decadent, reassuring. There was a black tundra. Unfamiliar desolation. Nothing. "For God's sake!" he cried. "Where is everything? Stop this crazy Sardine game! Bring it all back! Fill up the empty space!" From far across the desolation, a figure approached , , . looking, looming, silent. The Man With No, Face. Reich watched it approach, paralyzed. Then the shadowy figure spoke : "There is no space. There is nothing." The screaming in Reich's ears was his voice, and the hammering was his heart. He was running, running down a yawning alien path, devoid of life, devoid of space, running while there was still time, time, time -- He ran headlong into a figure of black shadows. A figure without a face. A figure that said: "There is no time. There is nothing." Reich backed away He turned. He fell. He crawled feebly through eternal emptiness, shrieking: "Powell! Duffy! Hassop! Quizzard! T#! Church! Where is everybody? Where is everything? For the love of God!" And he was face to face with the Man With No Face, who said: "There is no God. There is nothing except you and me." Reich raised his eyes and stared deep into the face of his deadly enemy, the man he could not escape, the terror of his nightmares, the destroyer of his existence. It Was -- Himself. D'Courtney. Both. Two faces, blending into one. Ben D'Courtney. Craye Reich. D'Courtney-Reich. He could make no sound. He could make no move. There was neither time nor space nor matter. There was nothing left but dying thought. "Father?" "Sort." " You are me?" " We are us." "# don't understand. What's happened ?" "You lost the game, Ben." " The Sardine Game?" " The Cosmic Game." "# won. I owned every bit of the world." " And therefore you lose. We lose." " Lose what?" "Survival " "# can't understand!" " My part of us understands, Ben. You would undei stand, too, if you hadn't driven me from you." " How did I drive you from me?'! " With every corruption in you." " You say that, you betrayer?" " That was without passion, Ben. That was to destroy you before you could destroy us, to help you lose the world and win the game." "What game? What Cosmic Game?" "The maze. The labyrinth. The galaxies, the stars, the Sun, the planets, the moons... that was the problem box we were to solve. We were the only reality. All the rest was make-believe, toys , for us to play with, dolls, puppets, stagesettings, pretended passions. It was a make-believe reality for us to solve." " # conquered it. I owned it." "And you failed to solve it. I don't know what the solution is, but it's not theft, terror, hatred, lust, murder, rapine. You failed, and it's all been abolished, de I #C mohshed, disbanded... " Then what's to become of us?" " Were disbanded too." "Why? Who are we? What are we?" " Did the seed from our makebelieve universe know who or what it was when it did not find fertile soil and failed nature's survival test? Did the dying sperm know who or what it was when it failed to find the egg? Does it matter who or what we are? We have failed. We are ended." " But ive did exist!" " Perhaps if we had solved it, Ben, it might have remained real, and all that we knew and loved might be with us still. But it is ended. Reality has turned into might-have-been, and you have awakened at last... to nothing "We'll go back ! We'll try it again!" " There is no going back. It is ended." " We'll find a way. There must be something..." "There is nothing. It is ended." "Is this death?" "How can there be death when there never was life? It is ended. We are merging, fading, disappearing. It is -- " Ended. morning, in the gardens overlooking the old Harlem Canal. Powell was seated cross-legged on the wet turf, his face shriveled, his respiration almost gone, his pulse almost faded. Reich was curled into a tight fetal ball, completely catatonic. They rushed Powell to his home on Hudson Ramp, where the entire Guild Lab team first sweated over him and then congratulated themselves on the first successful Mass Cathexis Measure in the history of the Esper Guild. There was no hurry for Reich. In due course and with proper procedure, his inert body was transported to Kingston Hospital. Eight days later, Powell arose, bathed, dressed, successfully defeated his nurses in single combat and left the house. He made one stop at Sucre et Cie., emerged with a parcel and then proceeded to headquarters to make his personal report to Commissioner Crabbe. On the way up, he poked his head into on's office. "Hi Chas. Did Peetcy back us up on the D' Courtney murder motive ?" "Lock, stock  barrel. Trial took one hour. Reich's going through Demolition now." "That's nice. I'd better go up now and sp-e-#-I it out for Crabbe ." "What you got under your arm?" "Present." "For Crabbe?" #  Wonderful news! Thu new policy covers everyone from infancy # age # -- with cash benefit so surprising they should have instant appeal for you. Think of it! When sickness or accident sends you to the hosjust as long, in fact, as it's necessary to stay in the hospital. What a avoid going into debt! 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Powell went up to Crabbe's ebony and silver office. Crabbe was properly solicitous, but stiff. The D' Courtney case had not improved his bitter relations with Powell. "Conviction," he said belligerently. "Damned if I see proper evidence." "It was a remarkably complex case, sir," Powell replied tactfully. "None of us could under stand it. Even Reich himself was not aware of why he had murdered D'Courtney. The only one who grasped the case was the Prosecution Transistor Computor." 'APeetcy did? How?" "When we ran our final data through the first time, Peetcy told us that the 'passion motive' was insufficiently documented. We'd all been assuming profit motive. So had Reich. That was his conscious camouflage for tie real passion motive. It couldn't hold up as evidence because he offered merger to D'Courtney -- and D'Courtney accepted! Reich misunderstood the message. He had to. He had to go on believing he mQrdered D'Courtney for money." "Why?" "Because he couldn't face the real motive..." "Which was?" "D'Courtney was his father." "What!" Crabbe stared. "His father? His flesh and blood?" "Yes, sir. It was all there before us. We just couldn't see it... because Reich himself couldn't see it. That estate on Callisto, for instance, the one Reich used to lure Dr. Jmaine off the planet -- Reich inherited it from his mother, who'd receive it from D'Courtney. We all assumed Reich's father had chiseled it out of D'Courtney in some kind of transaction and placed it in his wife's name. Ve were wrong. D'Courtney had given it to Reich's mother because it was his lovegift to the mother of his child." Crabbe opened his mouth, then closed it. "And there were other signposts. D' Courtney's suicide drive, produced by intense guilt sensations of desertion. He had abandoned his son. It was tearing him apart. Now add Barbara D'Courtnqy's half-twin image of herself and Ben Reich. Somehow she felt they were halfbrother and sister. Reich's inability to kill Barbara -- he knew it, too, deep in his unconscious. He wanted to destroy the hateful father who had rejected him, but he could not bring himself to harm his sister." "When did you unearth all this?" "When Reich attacked me for setting those boobytraps." "Damn it, Powell, someone had to set them! If you didn't, who did?" "Reich himself, sir." "Reich !" "He murdered his father, which discharged his hatred. But his conscience could not permit him to go unpunished for such a horrible crime. Since the police apparently were unable to punish him, his conscience took over. That was the meaning of Reich's nightmare image." "The Man With No Face?" "Yes, Commissioner. It was the symbol of Reich's real relationship to D' Courtney. It had no face because Reich could not accept the truth. It was first the threat of punishment for what he contemplated. Then it became the punishment itself for the murder." "The boobytraps?" "Exactly. Reich set those traps for himself without ever realizing it... in brief departures from conscious reality. The tricks of the unconscious are fantastic." "But if Reich himself knew none of this, how did you get at it, Powell?" "We used the Mass Cathexis Measure, sir. It's difficult to explain, but I'll do my best. Every human being has a psyche composed of latent and capitalized energy. Latent energy is our reserve... the untapped natural resources of our miftd. Capitalized energy is that latent energy which we call up and put to work. Most of us use only a small portion of our latent energy." "I understand." "When the Esper Guild uses the Mass Cathexis Measure, every Esper opens his psyche, so to speak, and contributes his latent energy to a pool. One Esper alone taps this pool and becomes the canal for the latent energy. He capitalizes it and puts it to work. He can accomplish tremendous things... if he can control it. It's a difficult and dangerous operation. About on a par with jetting to the Moon with a stick of dynamite -- er -- riding on dynamite sticks." Suddenly Crabbe grinned. "I wish I were a peeper," he said. "I'd like to get the real image in your mind." "You've got it already, sir." Powell grinned back. An entente cordial had been established between them for the first time. "It was necessary," Powell continued, "to bring Reich face to face with the Man With No Face. We had to make him see the truth before we could get the truth. Using the pool of latent energy, I built a common neurotic concept for Reich... the illusion that he alone in the world was real." "Why, I've often -- is that common?" "One of the run-of-the-mill esv # cape pattern When life gets tough for you, you take refuge in the idea that it's all a giant hoax. Reich had the seeds of that in him already. I simply forced them. I tore it all down and I very nearly tore myself apart doing it... but I left Reich alone in nothingness with the Man With No Face. Then, because there was nowhere else to look, he looked into the face and saw himself and his father. Once we had that, we had everything we needed." Powell picked up his parcel and arose. Crabbe jumped up and escorted him to the door with a friendly hand on his shoulder. "You've done a phenomenal job, Powell. Really phenomenal. A#T can say is that it must be a wonderful thing to be an Esper. You must all be very happy." Powell paused at the door. ''Would you be happy to live your life in a hospital, Commissioner?" "A hospital?" "That's where we Espers live... all of us. In the psychiatric ward. Without escape, without refuge. Be grateful you're not a peeper, sir. Be grateful that you see only the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sicknesses. The world will be a wonderful place when everyone's a peeper and properly adjusted. But until then, be grateful you're blind." He left headquarters, hired a Jumper and was jetted north toward Kingston Hospital. He sat in the cabin with the parcel on his knees, gazing down at the magnificent Hudson valley. Kingston Hospital came into view, acre upon rolling acre of magnificent landscaping, solariums, pools, lawns, athletic fields, dormitories, clinics, all in exquisite neo-classic design. As the Jumper descended, Powell could make out the figures of patients and attendants, bronzed, active, laughing, playing. He checked in at the Visitors Office, found Barbara D' Courtney's location and started across the grounds. He was weak, but felt impelled to leap hedges, vault gates, run races. He had awakened from his siege with Reich with a sudden knowledge that exhilarated him. It was a fact always known to him, he realized, but deliberately concealed by his sense of responsibility. "I really have got too damned much super-ego," he grumbled. "It takes itself so seriously." They saw each other at the same moment, across a broad stretch of lawn flanked by fieldgardens. She flew toward him, waving, and he ran toward her. Then, as they approached, both were stricken with shyness. They stopped a few feet apart, not #S# daring to look at each other. "Hello." "Hello, Barbara." He paused. "Let's get into the shade." They turned toward the terrace wall. Powell glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She was alive as he had never seen her. And the urchin expression in her face -- the expression that he had imagined was a phase of her Deja Eprouve development -- was still there. She looked inexpressibly mischievous, high-spirited, fascinating. But she was adult. He did not know her. "I'm being discharged this evening," Barbara said. "I know." They sat down on a stone bench. She looked at him with grave eyes. "I want to tell you how grateful I am." "Please, Barbara. You're making me uncomfortable." "Am I?" "I knew you so intimately as -- well, as a child. Now -- " "Now I'm grown up again." "Yes." "You must get to know me better. Shall we say tea tomorrow at five? Informal." "Listen," Powell said desperately. "I helped dress you more than once. And qomb your hair. And brush your teeth." She waved her hand airily. "You liked fish, but you hated lamb. You hit me in the eye with a chop." "That was ages ago, Mr. Powell." "That was two weeks ago, Miss D' Courtney." She arose with magnificent poise. "Really, Mr. Powell! If you feel impelled to cast chronographical aspersions... She stopped and looked at him. The urchin appeared again in her face. "Chronographical?" she inquired.  He dropped the parcel and caught her in his arms. "Mr. Powell," she murmured. "Hello, Mr. Powell." "My God, Barbara -- Baba, dear. For a moment I thought you meant it." "I was paying you back for being grown up." "You always were a vindictive kid." "You always were a mean daddy." She leaned back and looked at him. "Mary Noyes told me. Everything." "Oh. She did?" Barbara nodded. "She was right. I'll settle for anything." He laughed, the exhilaration bubbling vibrantly from him. "You won't have to settle for anything. Sit down. I want to ask you something." She sat down. On his lap. "I have to go back to that night," he said. "In Beaumont House?" He npdded. "It's not easy to talk about," iU under his arm. "This, for example, would have been called gushing sentimentally over an outlaw of society." Jeems watched silently, sympathetically, as Powell held out the package to what was left of Reich. "It's a present for you, Ben. Take it." The creature glowered at Powell and then at the box.' At last the clumsy hands took the gift, tore away the wrappings, scooped up a handful of Sucre et Cie.'s magnificent candies and stuffed them into the lax mouth. "He's done all right in the gift department," Jeems said, nodding at the flowers, piezo crystal recordings, pieces of sculpture, a cage of small, active animals from Veis, and exotic Am pro plants that covered the tables and shelves in the room. "From Commissioner Crabbe, old TH himself. Dr. Wilson maine" said Powell, reading the cards. He paused at one. "Jeremy Church, too. After the way Church hated Reich for getting him expelled from the Esper Guild... damn it, Johnny, it's hard to believe, isn't it?" "No," Jeems said. "Why should it be? A criminal is a sick person. Naturally you put him in the hospital and send him gifts. How else should any criminal be treated?" "How else indeed?" Powell repeated gently. Out of the chaos in Reich's stripped mind came a fragment of thought ; # # Powell -- peeper -- Pow ell -- friend..." It was so sudden, so unexpected, so passionately grateful that Powell gripped Reich's shoulder and tried to smile, then had to turn and hurry out toward the pavilion and Barbara. One ill mind had been rescued. There had been fear and frustration, danger to the Solar System and to Powell and Barbara and to Reich, himself, death for an old, guilt-ridden man too tired to live. But one sick personality had been saved. Some day it would be the entire human race. Until then, the Espers had to nurse and guard and guide a world that was diseased with psychic blindness. Was it worth it? Yes, Powell decided without hesitation, it was. She put her head on his shoulder at last, shaken, yet somehow at peace. Then the urchin smile came to her face as she glanced at the package he had put down on the bench beside him. "A present?" she wheedled. "For Baba?" He stood up, suddenly remembering. "No, of course not. It's for someone who needs it a good deal more." He took her chin m his hand and kissed her again. "Run back to your pavilion and wait for me. There's somebody I've got to see. I'll be along soon... to take you home." She scampered off across the lawn, dangerously looking back at him instead of where she was going. Powell watched her go, partly to make sure she didn't crash into anything, mostly to feel the warmth of her love washing over his mind. Then he went to the Demolition Section of Kingston Hospital. When a man 'was Demolished at Kingston, his entire psyche was destroyed. The series of osmotic injections began with the topmost strata of cortical synapses and slowly worked down, switching off every circuit, extinguishing every memory, destroying every particle of the pattern that had been built up since birth. But this was not the pain nor the dread of Demolition. The horror lay in the fact that the consciousness was never lost; that as the psyche was wiped out, the mind was aware of  I the slow, backward death, until at last it, too, disappeared and awaited the rebirth. It was an eternity of farewells... an agonizing funeral of oneself. And as Powell stood alongside Ben Reich's bed, he saw the awareness, the pain, the despair in those blinking, twitching eyes. Dr. Johnny Jeems put his hand on Reich's arm. "He's a lusty lad. We have great hopes for him." Reich squalled and writhed. "How's the treatment coming?" Powell asked anxiously. "Wonderful. Ought to be ready for rebirth in a year." "He's a great guy. We need men like him. It would have been a shame to lose Ben Reich." "Lose him?" Jeems repeated in astonishment. "How?" "Three or four hundred years ago, Johnny, cops caught people like Reich to kill them. Capital punishment, they called it." "It doesn't make sense, a man who's got the talent and guts to buck society obviously is valuable potentially. If you don't straighten him out and turn him into a plus value -- hell, it would be a criminal human waste!" "They were pretty good at criminal human waste in those days," Powell said. He took the beautifully wrapped package from she whispered miserably. "It won't take a minute. You were lying in bed, asleep. Suddenly you woke up and rushed into the Orchid room. You remember the rest... " "I remember." "One question. What wa# the cry that woke you?" "You know." "I want you to say it. Say it out loud." "Do you think it's -- it's going to send me into hysteria again?" "Say it." After a long pause, she said in a low voice, "Help, Barbara," and waited in fear. Nothing happened. She relaxed, though afraid. "Who shouted that?' "My father, of course." "le couldn't shout, Barbara. His throat was gone. Cancer. He could barely whisper." "But I heard him!" "You peeped him." She stared. "You peeped him," Powell repeated gently. "Your father cried out on the telepathic level. You heard him. There was no other way you could have heard him except telepath ically." "But that would mean I'm an Esper," she objected. "I'm not one at all." "In spite of proof that you are?" "It's just your opinion, she said insistently. "Maybe just a hope." Do you love me?" Powell . shot at her. "I love you, of course," she answered, "but I think you're inventing excuses to -- " "Who asked you?" "Asked me what?" "If you loved me." "Why, you just -- " "I didn't say anything," he told her quietly. "I thought my question; you peeped me. You were unconsciously peeping Mary and me all the while you were in my house. You peeped Reich when he came there to set a boobytrap for me. Don't you understand now, Barbara?" "Oh, if it were only true!" "It is, darling. You won't have to settle for anything short of us. You're a latent Esper. You'll be trained, of course... as a Guild member and my wife. You heard me, didn't you?" "Yes, Preston," she whispered. "One of the first things you'll learn is that words aren't necessary," he said. "Now, for example." Their kiss was long and deep, but not a fraction as urgent and hungry as the need they read clearly in each other. This, he let her realize without words, while their lips were still together, was why an Esper could love only another Esper... and why Esper love was to deaf-mute love as animal instinct was to human reasoning. Prepared by the non-profit Ditson Musical Foundation concert hall favorite since #. this melodic suite is based on genuine Indian themes-lceends, festivals. # A.K.S. recording. New Yore Music Critics Circle Award #" #-#. this rhythmic score has Become a modem masterpiece. to" A.R.S. recording. 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Ditson Fond of Columbia University established a substantial grant to create the non-profit Ditson Musical Foundation, whose sole purpose is to record and release each month a new highfidelity full-frequency recording of American music, on Long-Playing recordsNo, to (he contrary. Because the Ditson Musical Foundation made Its recordings available at cost to the American Recording Society (sole distributing agent for the Foundation's records) fhey are priced below most L.P.'s of comparable quality -- only # for # " records and # for #" records. The American Recording Society Philharmonic Orchestra engages the finest available conductors and artists, and all recordings arc made with the latest high-fidelity equipment, and pressed directly from a limited number of silver-sputtered masters. Your purchase of either of the l-ong Playing records offered above for only # does not obligate you to buy any additional records from the Society -- ever! 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And if he did, would they agree to his plan to breed only among themselves... to create the race that would some day replace Homo Sapiens? And what would mankind, with his powerful weapons and unleashed fear, do to stop the threat?  Many authors have tried to write the story of Homo Superior and failed -- just as Pithecanthropus, describing Modern Man, would find it an impossible job. But Stapledon succeeded! This science fictionl  Four-Sided Triangle A swiftly paced, rollicking, yet shrewdly thoughtful booklength story of a machine that solves one distressing problem ,... and creates dozens of others even more troublesome.    The price is only #c a copy (no postage or handling charge) or send # for a full year (six issues) to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. Secrets entrusted to a few I he VnpuMtifaed Jactiof Mfebe generally told -- things yon ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of marts mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe E. J. M. ocriDe c. J . i vi. 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Don't try to take it from there. You can't possibly anticipate the complications, conflict -- the suspense of this remarkable situation, and especially the ingenious resolution. humor.  The price is only #c o copy (no postage or handling charge) or send # for a full yeor (six book-length novels, each different, the top of the science fiction book list) to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. galaxy Aaiistont Editor Art Director Production Monoger Advertiiing Monoger Cover by Illustrating it tublibcd monthly by Gefazy Publishing Corpo ration. Main oflKcs: #I Hudson Street, New York #. N. Y. #c pet copy. Subsetiptions : # copiei) I#.SD per year in the United States. Canada, Mexico, South and Ceo tral Amctira and U.S. Possessions. Eisewberc #. Htitcred as secondclass matter at the Post #ce. New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Calaxy Puhlisbino Corporation. Robert M. Guina, president. All righu, including translation, reserved. All material subfflittcdfDustbc accompanied by self-addressed scampi envelopes. The publiibef assumes no responsibilin for unsolicited material. Ail stoiiet printed is this magazine are fiction, and anysimilarity between characrers and actual persons is coincidental. by F. L. Walfact # by Demon Knight # by J. T. M'Intosh # by Fritz Leiber # by Lucius Danhf # by Willy Ley #I by H. L. GoM # by Groff Conklir) # Printed In the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co... Inc, Reg. LI. . Pat, Off. Homeless Facts I N the introduction to the Reader, I made a point that I think can use more exploration. That was the accidental landing of PenicilUum notatum in a germ culture in #. the observation that it left a circle of dead bacteria around it... and no follow-up to learn why! Had a writer of that paleolithic era of science fiction come across the item, he doubtless would have had a noble collegiate, a pure flapper and a wicked cartel for suspense, the compulsory eating of moldy bread, all disease wiped out. and everyone immortal as a resjlt. The story, I remarked, would have been a literary goulash, but it might have interested some biochemist in pushing the experiment... and we mihi fore we acfuay did! Even more, the lines of rewould have been advanced by # years, which, judging by the progress of the last decade, is enough to establish a whole new pharmacology. Lord knows what we might have had by now if that story had actually been written at that time. It's a saddening thought, for everyone has relatives and friends whose lives could have been saved by antibiotics. If you really want to be depressed, though, just consider the number of similar observations that cannot be reported. The case of the Flying Saucers happens to be the most dramatic one at the moment. Whatever the Navy may say, not all instances can be explained as Skyhook balloons or the planet Venus; too many of those who have seen the phenomena would have recognized either. There is a good chance that the mystery could be solved... if these reliable witnesses could report their findings without fear of ridicule or dismissal. Nobody can guess at the amount of data we are being deprived of for those two reasons, plus one more that I will come to later. It must be truly enormous. Even if it consisted of only one item a year, like that of PenicilUum notatum, we still would be poorer for not knowing. Meteorites are an encouraging example of a problem that was solved. Less than # years ago, there were no meteorites at all. Stars fell through the sky. of course, and hot stones were discovered lying on the ground. But the falling stars were regarded as literally that; the hot stones t were assumed to be debris from a distant volcano. Science had simply not advanced far enough to explain them as bits of inter planetary rock that had been heated to incandescence by air friction.For all our superior knowledge, there still are huge gaps to be filled, more than enough to keep us from smiling smugly at the ignorance of our ancestors. We know about meteorites, but do we know about sea serpents? Naturally, sea serpents don't exist. Or is it the reliable reports of them that do not exist? Willy Ley has recorded many cases of trained observers, unwise enough to announce having seen them, who suffered lifelong jeers. The lesson was sharp enough to keep others from repeating the error. Yet so many other rumored flora and fauna were later authenticated that the lesson is clearly a false one. Besides ridicule and dismissal, I mentioned a third reason for guarded silence: the lack of a legitimate place to which to report phenomena that cannot be explained at present. Science, unfortunately, has abandoned this function to the followers of Charles Fort. I do not intend to discredit the Fortean Society, but the Society, with its hostility toward science, is not the place I had in mind. What is urgently needed, and has been for a long time, is a scientific bureau, journal, agency -- anything at all that has contact with researchers who can rely on it both for objectivity and available data. dium for such information: no science fiction magazine could be. Its space must be devoted primarily to stories, and will be. But in the absence of any other, ties it has. Reports can be turned over to Willy Ley for possible inclusion or condensation in his monthly department, with the assurance that he can tell authentic reports from phonies. Where further correspondence is required, he will, of course, dig for more information. The name and address of the observer must accompany the report; both will be withheld on request. We do not delude ourselves the job as well as a trained and staffed scientific agency. But the least we can do is try to serve until one comes along. When it docs, you may be sure that we will step aside... , and gratefully, first because we are not well enough equipped, and second because it vdll be glad news. And high time, tool Accidental Flight Outeat of a sociefy o# physicalty perfect peopie, they couldn't stay and they couldn't go homo again  ye there had to be some escape for them. Oddly enough, there wasi at the top of the desk. It was difficultto concentrate under the circumstances. "Your request was turned over to the Medicouncil, he said, "After studying it, they reported back to tfie Solar Committee. Docchi edged forward, his face literally lighting up. Dr. Cameron kept his eyes averted; the man was damnably disconcerting. "You know what the answer is. A flat no, for the present. Docchi leaned back. "We Ithfsfrafsd by Ed Aiexandar should have expected that," he said wearily. "It's not entirely hopeless. Decisions like this can always be changed." "Sure," said Docchi. "We've got centuries." His face was flushed -- blazing would be a better description. Absently, Cameron lowered the lights in the room as much as he could. It was still uncomfortably bright. Docchi was a nuisance. "But why?" asked Docchi. "You know that we're capable. Why did they refuse?" Cameron had tried to avoid that question. Now it had to be answered with blunt brutality. "Did you think you .would be chosen? Or Nona, or Jordan, or Anti?" Docchi winced. "Maybe not. But we've told you that we're perts say. Surely from a thousand of us they can select one qualified crew." "Perhaps so," said Cameron. He switched on the lights and resumed staring at the top of the desk. "Most of you are biocompensators. Ninety per cent. I believe. I concede that we ought to be able to get together a competent crew." He sighed. "But you're wasting your time discussing this with me. I'm not responsible for the decision. I can't do anything about it." Docchi stood up. His face was colorless and bright. Df. Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. "I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait; you may get your chance." "You wait," said Docchi. "We don't intend to." The door opened for him and closed behind him. Cameron concentrated on the desk. Actually he was trying to look through it. He wrote down the card sequence he expected to find. He opened a drawer and gazed at the contents, then grimaced in disappointment. No matter how many times he tried, he never got better than strictly average results. Maybe there was something to telepathy, but he hadn't found it yet. He dismissed it from his mind. It was a private game, a method of avoiding involvement while Docchi was present. But Docchi Was gone now, and he had better come up with some answers. The right ones. He switched on the telecom. "Get me Medicouncilor Thorton," he told the robot operator. "Direct, if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll wait." With an approximate mean diameter of thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the charts as Handicap Haven. The regular inthe handicap part of the name, but they didn't call it haven. There were other terms, none of them suggesting sanctuary. It was a hospital, of course, but even more like a convalescent home, the permanent kind. A healthy and vigorous humanity had built it for those few who were less fortunate. A splendid gesture, but, like many such gestures, the reality fell somewhat short of the original intentions. The robot operator interrupted his thoughts. "Medicouncilor Thorton will speak to you. The face of an older man filled the screen. # my way to the satellites of Jupiter. I'll be in direct range for the next half hour.' At ch distance, transmission and reception were practically instantaneous. "You wanted to speak to me about the Solar Committee reply?" I do. I informed Docchi a few minutes ago." "How did he react?" "He didn't like it. As a matter of fact, he was mad all the way through." "That speaks well for his mental resiliency." "They all seem to have enough spirit, though, and nothing to use it on," said Dr. Cameron. "I confess I didn't look at him often, in spite of the fact that he was quite presentable. Handsome, even, in a startling way."  Thorton nodded. "Presentable. That means he had arms." "He did. Is that important? "I think it is. He expected a favorable reply and wanted to look his best. As nearly normal as possible." "Trouble?" "I don't see how," said the medicouncilor uncertainly. "In any event, not immediately. It will take them some time to get over the shock of refusal. They can't do anything, really. Individually they're helpless. Collectively -- there aren't parts for a dozen sound bodies on the asteroid." "I've looked over the records, said Dr. Cameron. "Not one accidental has ever liked being on Handicap Haven, and that covers quite a few years. But there has never been so much open discontent as there is now." ' "Someone is organizing them. Find out who and keep a close watch." "I know who. Docchi, Nona, Anti, and Jordan. But it doesn't do any good merely to watch them. I want your permission to break up that combination. Humanely, of course." "How do you propose to do It? "Docchi, for instance. With prosthetic arms he appears physically normal, except for that uncanny luminescence. That is repulsive to the average person. Medically there's nothing we can do about it, but psychologically we might be able to make it into an asset. You're aware that Gland Opera is the most popular program in the Solar System. Telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and to forth are the heroes. All fake, of course : makeup and trick camera shots. But Docchi can be made into a real live star. The death-ray man, say. When his face shines, men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a chance to return to normal society under conditions that would be mentally acceptable to him." "Acceptable to him, perhaps, but not to society," reflected the medicouncilor. "An ingenious idea, one which does credit to your humanitarian outlook. Only it won't work. You have Docchi's medical record, but you probably don't know his complete history. He was an electrochemical engineer, specializing in cold lighting. He seemed on his way to a larly messy accident occurred. The details aren't important. He was badly mangled and tossed into a tank of cold lighting fluid by automatic machinery. It was some time before he was discovered. "There was a spark of life left and we managed to save him. We had to amputate his arms and ribs practically to his spinal column. The problem of regeneration wasn't as easy as it usually is. We were able to build up a new rib case; that's as much as we could do. Under such conditions, prosthetic arms are merely ornaments. They can be fastened to him and they look all right, but he can't use them. He has no back or shoulder muscles to anchor them to. "And add to that the adaptation his body made while he was in the tank. The basic cold lighting fluid, as you know, is semiorganic. It permeated every tissue in his body. By the time we 'got him, it was actually a necessary part of his metabolism. A corollary, I suppose, of the fundamental biocompensation theory. The medicouncilor paused and shook his head. "I'm afraid your idea is out, Dr. Cameron. I don't doubt that he would be successful  the program you mention. But there is more to life on the outside than success. Can you picture the dead silence when he walks into a room of normal people?" "I see," said Cameron, though he didn't, at least not eye to eye. The medicouncilor was convinced and there was nothing Cameron could do to alter that conviction. "The other one I had in mind was Nona," he added. "I thought so." Thorton glanced at the solar chronometer. 'I haven't much time, but I'd better explain. You're new to the post  and I don't think you've learned yet to evaluate the patients and their problems properly. In a sense, Nona is more impossible than Docchi. He was once a normal person. She never was. Her appearance is satisfactory; perhaps she's quite pretty, though you must remember that you're seeing her under circumstances that may make her seem more attractive than she really is, "She can't talk or hear. She never will. She doesn't have a larynx, and it wouldn't help if we gave her one. She simply doesn't have the nervous system necessary for speech or hearing. Her rain is definitely not structurally normal. As far as we're concerned, that abnormality is not in the nature of a mutation. It's more like an anomaly. On cleft palates were frequent -- prenatal nutritional deficiencies or traumas. Occasionally we still run into cases like that, but our surgical techniques arc always adequate. Not with Nona, however. "She can't be taught to read or write; we've tried it. We dug out the old' Helen Keller techniques and brought them up to date with no results. Apparently her mind doesn't work in a human fashion. We question whether very much of it works at all." "That might be a starting point," said Cameron. "If her brain -- " "Gland Opera stuff," interrupted Thorton. "Or Rhine Opera, if you'll permit me to coin a term. We've thought of it, but it isn't true. We've tested her for every telepathic quality that the Rhine people list. Again no results. She has no special mental capacities. Just to make sure of that, we've given her periodic checkups. One last year, in fact." Cameron frowned in frustration. "Then it's your opinion that she's not able to survive in a normal society?" "That's it," answered the medicouncilor bluntly. "You'll have to face the truth -- you can't get rid of any of them." "With or without their cooperation, I'll manage," said Cameron. "I'm sure you will." The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence. "Of course, if you need help we can send reinforcements." The implication was clear enough. "I'll keep them out of trouble," Cameron promised. The picture and the voice were fading. "It's up to you. If it turns out to be too difficult, get in touch with the Medicouncil ,..." I The robot operator broke in: "The ship is beyond direct telecom range. If you wish to continue the conversation, it will have to be relayed through the nearest main station. At present, that is Mars." Aside from the time element, wliich was considerable, it wasn't likely that he would get any better answers than he could supply for himself. Cameron shook his . head. "We are through, thanks." He got heavily to his feet. That wasn't a psychological reaction at all. He really was heavier. !e made a mental note. He would have to investigate. In a way they were pathetic -- the patchwork humans, the half or quarter men and women, the fractional organisms masquerading as people -- an illusion which died hard for them. Medicine and surgery were partly to blame. Techniques were too good, or not good enough, depending on the viewpoint. Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were still alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a percentage of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and whole. There weren't many like that; but there were some, and all of them were on the asteroid. They didn't like it. At least they didn't like being conned to Handicap Haven. It wasn't that they wanted to go back to the society of the normals, for they realized how conspicuous they'd be among the multitudes of beautiful, healthy people on the planets. What the accidentals did want was ridiculous. They desired, they hoped, they petitioned to be the first to make the long, hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri in rockets. Trails of glory for those that went; a vicarious share in it for those who couldn't. Nonsense. The broken people, those without a face they could call their own, those who wore their, hearts not on their sleeves, but th a blood-pumping chamber, those either without limbs or organs -- or too many. The categories seemed endless. The accidentals were qualified, solar citizens, they alone could make the journey and return. But there were other factors that ruled them out. The first point was never safe to discuss with them, especially if the second had to be explained. It would take a sadistic nsfture that Cameron didn't possess. It was pleasant enough, m pastoral scene transplanted front Earth. A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling sounds against the sides. No plant life of any kind grew and no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water, but it wasn't. It was acid. In it floated something that monstrously resembled a woman. "They turned us down. Anti,' Docchi said bitterly. "Didn't you expect it?" the creature in the pool asked. T guess I didn't." "You don't know the Medicouncil very well." "Evidently I don't." He stared sullenly at the faintly blue fluid. "Why did they turn us down?" "Don't you know?" "All right, I know," he said. "Thtjv're pretty irrational." "OT course, irrational. Let them be that way, as long as we don't follow their example." "I wish I knew what to do," he said. "Cameron suggested we wait." "Biocompensation," murmured Anti, stirring restlessly. "They've always saicf that. Up to now it's always worked." "What else can we do?" asked Docchi. Angrily he kicked at an anemic tuft of grass. "Draw up another request?" "Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive about it. Things get lost so easily in the Medicouncil's filing system." "Or distorted," grunted Docchi, "Maybe we should give the Medicouncil a rest. They're tired of hearing us anyway." "I see what you mean," said Docchi, rising. "Better talk to Jordan about it." "I intend to. I'll need arms." "Good. I'll see you when you leave for far Centauri." "Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner." Stars were beginning to wink. Twilight brought out shadows and tracery of the structure that supported the transparent dome overhead. Soon controlled slow rotation would bring darkness to this side of the asteroid. looked speculatively at the gravital engineer, Vogel. The man could give him considerable assistance, if he would. There was no reason why he shouldn't; but any man who had voluntarily remained on Handicap Haven as long as Vogel had was a doubtful quantity. "Usually we maintain about half Earth-normal gravity," Cameron said. "Isn't that correct?" Engineer Vogel nodded. "It isn't important why those  limits were set," Cameron continued. "Perhaps it's easier on the weakened bodies of the accidentals. There may be economic factors." "No reason for those limits except the gravital units themselves," Vogel said. "Theoretically it should be easy to get any gravity you want. Practically, though, we get between a quarter and almost full Earth gravity. Now take the fluctuations. The gravital computer is set at fifty per cent. Sometimes we get fifty per cent and sometimes seventyfive. Whatever it is, it just is and we have to be satisfied." The big engineer shrugged. "I hear the units were designed especially for this asteroid," he went on, "Some fancy medical reason. Easier on the accidentals to have less gravity change, you say. Me, I dunno. I'd guess the designers couldn't help it and the reason was dug up later." Cameron concealed his irritation. He wanted information, not a heart-to-heart confession. "All practical sciences try to justify whatever they can't escape but would like to. Medicine, I'm sure, is no exception." He paused thoughtfully. "Now, there are three separate gravital units on the asteroid. One runs for fortyfive minutes while the other two are idle. Then it cuts off and another takes over. This is supposed to be synchronized. I don't have to tell you that it isn't. You felt your weight increase suddenly at the same time I did. What is wrong?' "Nothing wrong," said the engineer. "That's what you get with gravital." "You mean they're supposed to run that way? Overlapping so that for five minutes we have Earth or Earth-and-a-half gravity and then none?" "It's not supposed to be tliat way," said Vogel. "But nobody ever built a setup like this that worked any better." He added defensively: "Of course, if you want, you can check with the company that makes these units." "I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge, and I'ra not anxious to make myself look silly. I have a sound reason for asking these questions. There is a possibility of sabotage." The engineer's grin was der than the remark seemed to require. "AH right," said Cameron tiredly. "Suppose you tell me why sabotage is so unlikely." "Well," explained the gravital engineer, "it would have to be someone living here, and he wouldn't like it if he suddenly got double or triple gravity or maybe none at all. But there's another reason. Now take a gravital unit. Any gravital unit Most people think of it as just diat -- a iinit It isn't really that at alL It has three parts. 'One part m a power source that can be anydiing as long m it's big enough. Our power source is a nuclear pile, buried deep in the asteroid. You'd have to take Handicap Haven apart to get to it. Part two is the gravital coil, which actually produces the grav ity and is simple and just about indestructible. Part three is the gravital control. It calculates the relationship between the amount of power flowing through the gravital coil and the strength of the created gravity field in any one microsecond. It uses the computed relationship to alter the power flowing through in the next microsecond to get the same gravity. No change of power, no gravity. I guess you could call the control unit a computer, as good a one as is made for any purpose. The engineer rubbed his chin. Fatigue," he continued. The gravital control is an intricate computer that's subject to fatigue. That's why it has to rest an hour and a half to do fortyfive minutes of work. Naturally they don't want anyone tinkering with it It's non-repairable. Crack the case open and it won't work. But first you have to open it. Mind you, that can be done. But I wouldn't want to try it without n high-powered lab setup." If it didn't seem completely foolproof, neither did it seem a likely source of trouble. "Then we can forget about the gravital units," said Cameron, arising. "But what about hand weapons? Are there any available?" "You mean toasters?" "Anything that's lethal." "Nothing. No knives even. Maybe a stray bar or so of metal." Vogel scratched his head. "There is something dangerous, though. Dangerous if you know how to take hold of it." Instantly Cameron was alert. "What's that?" "Why, the asteroid itself. You can't physically touch any part of the gravital unit. But if you could somehow sneak an impulse into the computer and change the direction of the field..." Vogel was very grave. "You could pick up Handicap Haven and throw it anywhere you wanted. At the Earth, say. Thirty miles in diameter is a big hunk of rock. It was this kind of information Cameron was looking for, though the engineer seemed to regard the occasion as merely a social call. "Is there any possibility of that occurring?" he asked quietly. The engineer grinned. "Never happened, but they're ready for things like that with any gravital system. They got monitor stations all over -- the moons of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus. 'Any time the gravital comIS puter gets dizzy, the monitor overrides it. If that fails, they send a jammer impulse and freeze it up tight. It won't work until they let loose." Cameron sighed. He was getting very little help or information from Vogel. "All right," he said. "You've told me what I wanted to know." He watched the engineer depart for the gravity-generating chamber far below the surface of the asteroid. HE post on Handicap Haven wasn't pleasant; it wasn't an experience a normal human would desire. It did have advantages -- advancement came in sizes directly proportional to the dishgreeableness of the place. Ten months to go on a year's assignment. If Cameron could survive that period with nothing to mar his administration, he was in line for better positions. A suicide or any other kind of unpleasantness that would focus the attention of the outside world on the forgotten asteroid was definitely unwelcome. He flipped on the telecom. "Rocket dome. Get me the pilot." When the robot finally answered, it wasn't encouraging. "I'm sorry. There is no answer." "Then trace him," he snapped. 'If he's not in the rocket dome, he's in the main dome. I want you to get him at once." A few seconds of silence followed. "There is no record of the pilot leaving the rocket dome." His heart skipped; with an effort he spoke carefully. "Scan the whole area. Understand? You've got to find him." "Scanning is not possible. The system is out of operation in that area." "All right," he said, starting to shake. "Send out repair robots." They were efficient in the sense they always did the work they were set to do, but not in terma of speed. "The robots were dispatched as soon as scanning failed to work. Are there any other instructions?" He thought about that. He needed help, plenty of it. Vogel? that would leave the gravitygenerating setup unprotected. Better do without him. Who else? The sour old nurse who'd signed up because she wanted quick credits toward retirement? Or the sweet young thing who had bravely volunteered because someone ought to help those poor unfortunate men? Not the women, of course. She had a bad habit of fainting when she saw blood. Probably that was why she couldn't get a position in a regular planetary hospital. That was all, except the robots, who weren't much help in a case like this. That and the rocket pilot. For some reason he wasn't available. The damned place was undermanned. Always had been. Nobody wanted to come except the mildly psychotic, the inefficient end lazy, or, conceivably, an ambitious young doctor like himself. Mentally, Cameron berated the last category. If anything serious happened here, such a doctor might end his career bandaging scratches at a children's playground. "Instructions," he said. "Yes. Leave word in gravity-generating for Vogel. Tell him to throw everything he's got around the units. Watch them." "Is that all?" "Not quite. Send six general purpose robots. I'll pick them up at the entrance to the rocket dome." "Repair robots are already in that area. Will they do as well?" "They will not. I want geepees for another reason." They wouldn't be much help, true, but the best he could manage. et dome. Not hiding, merely inconspicuous among the carefully nurtured shrubbery that was supposed to give the illusion of Earth. If the plants failed in that respect, at least they contributed to the oxygen supply of the asteroid. "Good girl," said Docchi. "That Nona is wonderful." Jordan could feel him relax. "A regular mechanical marvel," he agreed. "But we can gas about that later. Let's get going." Docchi glanced around and then walked boldly into the passageway that connected the main dome with the much smaller, adjacent rocket dome. Normally, it was never dark in the inhabited parts of the asteroid: a modulated twilight was considered more conducive to the slumber of the handicapped. But it wasn't twilight as they, neared the rocket dome -- it was a full-scale rehearsal for the darkness of interplanetary space. Docchi stopped before the emergency airlock which loomed solidly in front of them. "I hope Nona was able to cut this out of the circuit," he said anxiously. "She understood, didn't she?" asked Jordan. He reached out and the great slab moved easily aside in its grooves. "The trouble with you is that you lack confidence." Docchi. listening with a frown, didn't answer. "Okay, I hear it, too," whispered Jordan. "We'd better get well inside before he reaches us." Docchi walked rapidly into the darkness of the rocket dome. He allowed his face to become faintly luminescent, the one part of his altered metabolism that he had learned to control, when he wasn't under emotional strain. He was nervous now. but his control had to be right. Enough light so that he'd be noticed, not so much that details of his appearance would be plain. The footsteps came nearer, accompanied by a steady volume of profanity. Docchi flashed his face opce and then lowered the intensity almost immediately. The footsteps stopped. "Docchi?" "No. Just a lonely little light bulb out for an evening stroll." The rocket pilot's laughter wasn't altogether friendly. "I knoit's you. I meant, what are you doing here?" "I saw the lights in the rocket dome go out. The entrance was open, so I came in. Maybe I can help." "They're off, all right. Everything. Even the standby system." The rocket pilot moved closer. The deadly little toaster was in his hand. "You can't help. You'd better get out. It's against regulations for you to be in here." Docchi ignored the weapon. "What happened? Did a meteor trike?" The pilot grunted. "Not likely." He peered intently at the barely visible silhouette. "Well, I see you're getting smart. You should do that all the time. You look better that way, even if they're not usable arms. You look..." His voice faded away. "Sure, almost human," Docchi finished for him. "Not like a pair of legs and a spinal column with a lightning bug stuck on top." "I didn't say that. So you're sensitive about it, eh? Maybe that's not your fault. Anyway, you'd better get going." "But I don't want to go," said Docchi deliberately. "I'm not afraid of the dark. Are you?" "Cut the psycho talk, Docchi. All your circuits are working and you know it. Now get out of here before I take your fake hand and drag you out." "Now you've hurt my feelings," declared Docchi reproachfully, nimbly stepping away. "You asked for it," growled the pilot, lunging after him. What he took hold of wasn't an imitation hand, made of plastic. It was flesh and blood. That was why the pilot screamed, once, before he was lifted off his feet and slammed to the floor, Docchi bent double. The dark figure on his back came over his head like a sword from a scabbard. "Jor -- " "Yeah," said Jordan. He wrapped one arm around the pilot's throat and clamped it I  tight. With the other he felt for the toaster thepilot still held. Effortlessly he tore it away and used the butt with just enough force to knock the pilot unconscious without smashing the skull. Docchi stood by until it was over. All he could offer was an ineffectual kick, not balanced by arms. It wasn't needed. "Let there be light," ordered Jordan, laughing, and there was, a feeble, flickering illumination from Docchi. Jordan was balancing himself on his hands. A strong head, massive, powerful arms and shoulders. His body ended at his chest. A round metal capsule contained his digestive system. "Dead?" Docchi looked down at the pilot. Jordan rocked forward and listened for the heartbeat. "Nah," he said. "I remembered in time that we can't afford to kill anyone." "Good," said Docchi. and stifled an exclamation as something coiled around his leg. His reactions were fast ; he broke loose almost instantly. "Repair robot," said Jordan, looking , around. "The place is lousy with them." Docchi blinked on and off involuntarily and the robot came toward him. "Friendly creature," observed Jordan. "He's offering to fix your lighting system for you." Dochi ignored the squat contrivance and stared at the pilot. "Now what?" he asked. "Agreed," said Jordan. "He needs attention. Not thekind I gave him." He balanced the toaster in his hand and burned a small hole in the .little wheeled monster. Tentacles emerged from the side of the machine and felt puzzledly at the damaged area. The tentacles were withdrawn and presently reappeared with a small torch and began velding. Jordan pulled the unconscious pilot toward him. He leaned against the machine, raised t'ne inert form over his head and laid it gently on the top flat surface. Another tentacle reached out to investigate the body of the pilot. Jordan welded the joiate solid with the toaster. Three times he repeated the process until the pilot was fastened to the robot. # "The thing will stay here, repairing itself, until it's completely sound again," remarked Jordan. "However, that can be fixed." He adjusted the toaster beam to an imperceptible thickness. Deftly he sliced through the control case and removed a circular section. He reached inside and ripped out circuits. "No further self-repair," he said cheerfully. "Now J'm going to need your help. From a time standpoint, I think it's a good idea to run the robot around the main dome a few times before it delivers the pilot to the hospital. No point in giving ourselves away before we're ready." Docchi bent over the robot, and with his help the proper sequence was implanted. The machine scurried erratically away. Docchi watched it go. Time for us to be on our way." He bent double for Jordan. The arms folded around his neck, but Jordan made no effort to climb up onto his back. For a panic moment Docchi knew how the pilot felt when strength, where there shouldn't have been strength, reached out from the darkness and gripped his throat. He shook the thought from his mind. "Get on my back," he insisted. "You're tired," said Jordan. "Half gravity or not, you can't U carry me any farther." His fingers worked swiftly and the carrying harness fell to the floor. "Stay down," growled Jordan. "Listen." Docchi listened. "Geepeesf "Yeah," said Jordan. "Now get to the rocket." "What can I do when I get there? You'll have to help me." "You'll figure something out when the time comes. Hurry up!" "Not without you," said Docchi stubbornly, without moving. A huge paw clamped around the back of his skull. "Listen to me," whispered Jordan fiercely. "Together we were a better man than the pilot -- your legs and my arms. It's up to us to prove that separately we are a match for Cameron and his geepees." "We're not trying to prove anything," said Docchi. the darkness and swept around the rocket dome. "Maybe we are," said Jordan. Impatiently, he hitched himself  along the ground. "I fhink I am." "What are you going to do?" "I'm going up. With no legs, that's where I belong." He grasped the structural steel member in his great hands, and in the light gravity, ascended rapidly. "Careful," warned Docchi. "This is no time to be careful." His voice floated down from high in the Tacy structure. It wasn't completely dark; the lights were getting nearer. Docchi decided it was possible for Jordan to see what he was doing. They hadn't expected to be discovered so soon. But the issue had not yet been settled against them. Docchi settled into a long stride, avoiding the low-slung repair robots that seemed to be everywhere. If Jordan refused to give up, Docchi had to try. He stayed well ahead of the oncoming general purpose robots. TE reached the rocket and barely had time to look around. It was enough, however. The ship's passenger and freight locks were closed. Nona had either not understood all their instructions, or she hadn't been able to carry them out. The first, probably. She had put the light and scanning circuits out of commission with no tools except her hands. That and her uncanny knowledge of the inner workings of machines. It was too much to expect that she should also have the ship ready and waiting for them. It was up to him to get in. If he had the toaster they'd taken from the pilot, he might have been able to soften the proper area of the, passenger lock. But he didn't. Not having arms, he couldn't have used it. For that reason Jordan had kept the weapon. The alternative was to search the surrounding mechanical jungle for an external control of the rocket. There had to be one, at least for the airlocks. Then it was a matter of luck whether he could work it. The approaching lights warned him that he no longer had that alternative. If Cameron hadn't tried to search the rocket dome as he came along, the geepees would be solidly ringed around the ship now. That was Camer on's mistake, however, and he might make more. In all probability Jordan was still at large. Perhaps nearby. Would Cameron know that? He might not. Docchi descended into the shallow landing pit. Until both of them were caught, there was always a chance. He had to hide, but the landing pit seemed remarkably ill-suited for that purpose. He leaned against the stern tube cluster and tried to shake his brain into activity. The metal pressed hard into the thin flesh that covered his back. Ip the smooth glazed surface of the landing pit,' the only answer was the tubes. He straightened up and looked into them. A small boy might climb inside and crawl out of sight. Or a grown man who had no shoulders or arms to get wedged in the narrow cylinder. Out in space, the inner ends of the tubes were closed with a combustion cap wherein the fuel was ignited. But in the dome, where the ship was not used for months at a time... Yes, there was that possibility. He tried a lower tube. He lay on the floor and thrust his head inside. He wriggled and shoved with his feet until he had forced himself entirely in. It was dark and terrifying, but no time for claustrophobia. i He stopped momentarily and listened. A geepee descended noisily into the landing pit. The absence of any other sound indicated to Docchi that it was radiocontrolled. He drove himself on, though it was slow progress. The walls were smooth and it was difficult to get much purchase. The going became even tougher -- the tube was getting smaller. Not much, but enough to matter. Again he stopped. Outside, there was the characteristic sputter, like frying, that the toaster beam made when it struck metal. A great clatter followed... "Get him!" shouted Cameron. "He's up there!" Jordan had arrived and had picked off a geepee. And it wasn't going to be easy for Cameron to capture him. The diversion would help. "Don't use heat," ordered Cameron. "Get your lights on him. Blind him. Drive him in a corner and then go up and get him." . Docchi had been wrong; the geepees were controlled by voice, not radio. That would make it easier for him once he got inside the ship. If he did. It looked as though he would. The tube wasn't getting narrower. More important, the air was not noticeably stale. The combustion cap had been retracted, which was a lucky break. His feet slipped. It didn't matter; somehow he inched along. Blood wa pounding in his veins from the constriction, but his head emerged in the rocket. He stared at the retracted combustion cap a fewVeet away. If he had arms, he could grasp it and pull himself free. But if he had arms, he would never have gotten this far. He wriggled until his body was nearly out and only his legs were in the tube. He kicked hard, fell to the floor. He lay there while his head cleared, then rolled to his feet and staggered forward to the control compartment. The rocket was his, but he didn't want it for himself alone. He stared thoughtfully at the instrument panel. It had been a long time since he had operated a ship. When he understood the controls, he bent down and thrust his chin against the gravital dial. Laboriously he turned it to the proper setting. Then he sat dowa and kicked on a switch. The ship) rocked and rose a few inchei. Chances were that Cameroa wouldn't notice that in the confusion outside. If he did, he had thirty seconds in which to stop Docchi. That wouldn't be eaou for Cameron. "Rocket landing," said Docchi when the allotted time passed. "Emergency instructions. Emergency instructions. Stand by." Strictly speaking, that wasn't necessary, for the frequency he was using assured him of complete control. "All energized geepees lend assistance. This order supersedes previous orders. Additional equipment necessary." After listing the equipment, he sat back and chuckled. With his knee he turned on the external lights, got up and walked to the passenger lock, brushing against the switch. The airlock opened. He stood boldly at the threshold and looked out. The rocket dome was floodlighted by the ship. "Aft right, Jordan, you can come down now," he called. Jordan appeared overhead, hanging from a beam. He swung along it until he reached a column, down which he descended. He propelled himself over the floor and up the ramp in his awkward fashion. Balancing on his hands, he gazed up at Docchi. "Well, monster, how did you do it?" "Monster yourself," said Docchi. "Do what?" "I saw you crawl in the rocket tubes," said Jordan. "But what did you do after you got inside?" "Cameron's a medic," said Docchi, "not mechanically inclined. He forgot that an emergency rocket landing cancels any verbal orders. So I took the ship up a few inches. Geepees aren't very bright; that satisfied them that I was coming in for a landing. What Cameron should have done was splash some heat against a gravital unit, and then, having created an artificial emergency condition in the main dome, he could have directed the geepees from the gravity control center. After that, he would have had top priority, not me." "But they rushed off, carrying Cameron with them." Jordan looked puzzled. "Easy. I told the geepees that there was danger of crashing and that they must remove any human beings nearby, whether they nearby and that let you out. They took Cameron because he was." "It's ours!" breathed Jordan. "But what about Anti and Nona?" "Anti's taken care of. As far as the geepees are concerned, she comes under the heading of emergency landing material. They'll bring her. Nona is supposed to be waiting with Anti." Docchi frowned. "There's nothing we can do if she isn't. Meanwhile you'd better get ready to take the ship off." Jordan swung himself inside. Docchi remained at the passenger lock, waiting. He heard the geepees first and saw them seconds later. They came into sight half pushing, half carrying a huge rectangular tank. With unexpected robotic ingenuity, they had mounted it on four of their smaller brethren, the squat repair robots, which served to support the tremendous weight. The tank was filled with blue liquid. Twisted pipes dangled from the ends; it had been torn and lifted from its foundation. Broken plants still clung to the narrow ledge on top and moist soil adhered to the sides. Five geepees pushed it rapidly toward the ship, mechanically oblivious to the disheveled man who frustratedly shouted and struck at them. "Jordan, open the freight lock." In response the ship rose a few more inches and hung quivering. A section of the ship hinged outward and downward to form a ramp. The ship was ready to take on cargo. Docchi stood at his post. That damn fool Cameron should have stayed in the main dome where the geepees had released him. His presence added an unwelcome complication. Still, it should be easy enough to get rid of him when the time came. It was Nona who really worried him. She wasn't anywhere to be seen. He took an uncertain step down the ramp, came back, shaking his head. It was impossible to look for her now, though he wanted to. The tank neared the ship.  A few feet of it projected onto the ramp. The geepees stopped; their efforts lost momentum. They looked bewildered. The tank rolled backward. The geepees shook, buzzed and looked around, primarily at Docchi. He didn't wait any longer. He leaped into the ship. "Close the passenger lock!" he shouted. Jordan looked up questioningly from the controls. "Vogel, the engineer," explained Docchi. "He must have seen the geepees on scanning when they entered the main dome. He's trying to do what Cameron should have done, but didn't have enough sense to do." The passenger lock swung ponderously shxit behind him. "Now what?" Jordan asked, worried. "First, let's see what you can get on the telecom," said Docchi. The angle was impossible, so close to the ship, but they did manage to get a corner of the tank on the screen. Apparently it was resting where Docchi had last seen it, though it was difficult to be sure because the curve of the ship loomed so large. "Maybe we'd better get out of here," suggested Jordan nervously"Without the tank? Not a chance. Vogel hasn't got complete control of them yet." That seemed to be true. The geepees were nearly motionless, paralyzed. "What shall I do?" asked Jordan. "Give me full power on the radio," said Docchi. "Burn it out if you have to. I think the engineer is at the wrong angle to broadcast much power to them. Besides, the intervening structure is absorbing most of his signal." He waited until Jordan had complied. "The tank must be placc in the ship," he added. Geepees were not designed to sift contradictory commands that were nearly at the same level of urgencyTheir reasoning power was feeble, but the mechanism was complicated enough. In that respect they resembled humans. Borderline decision.s were difficult. "More power." whispered Docchi. Sweating, Jordan obeyed. Marionettes. This string led toward a certain action. Another, intrinsically more important, but suddenly far less powerful, pulled for something else. Circuits burned within electronic brains. Micro-relays fluttered under the stress. Choice... Stiffly the geepees moved and grasped the tank. The quality of decision, in this case, was strained. Inch by inch the tank rolled Up the ramp. "When it's completely on, raise the ramp," Docchi whispered to Jordan in an even lower voice. One geepcc wavered and fell. Motionless, it lay there. The remaining four were barely equal to the task. "Now," said Docchi. The freight ramp began to rise. The tank picked up speed as it rolled into the ship. "Geepees, save yourselves!" shouted Docchi. They leaped from the ramp. Jordan breathed deeply. "I don't think they can hurt us now." Docchi nodded. "Get me shipto asteroid communication, if there's any radio left." "There is." Jordan made the adjustment. "Vogel, we're going out. Give us the proper sequence and save the dome some damage." There was no reply. "He's trying to bluff," said Jordan. "He knows the airlocks to the main dome will automatically close if we do break through." "Sure," said Docchi. "Everyone in the main dome is safe, it everync is in there. Vogel, we'll give you time to think about that." Jordan gave him the time until it hurt, waiting. Meanwhile he flipped on the telecom and searched the rocket dome. Nothing was moving; no geepee was in sight. Docchi watched the screen with interest. What he thought didn't show on his face. Still there was no reply from Vogel. "All right," Docchi said in a low, hard voice. "Jordan, take it out. Hit the shell with the bow of the rocket." The ship hardly quivered as it ripped through the transparent covering of the rocket dome. The worst sound was unheard: the hiss of air escaping through the great hole in the envelope. Jordan sat at the controls, gripping the levers. "I couldn't tell," he said slowly. "It happened too fast for me to be sure. Maybe Vogel did have the inner shell out of the way. In that event, it's all right because it would close immediately. The outer shell is supposed to be self-sealing, but I doubt if it could handle that much damage." He twisted the lever and the ship leaped forward. "Cameron I don't mind. He had enough time to get out if he wanted to. But I keep thinking that Nona might be in there." Docchi avoided his eyes. There was no light at all in his face. Hwalked away. Jordan rocked back and fortl The hemisphere that held wh; remained of his body was w suited for that. He set the autc controls and reduced the gravit to one-quarter Earth normal. I bent his great arms and shovt himself into the air, deftly catcl ing hold of a guide rail. He woul have to go with Docchi. But ni at the moment. He felt bad. That is, he did until he saw .  light blinking at a cabin door. #'. had to investigate that first. Docchi reached tlie cargo holt In the lesser gravity of the shij Jordan was truly at home. Docchi turned and waited fc him. Jordan still carried the wee pon he had taken from the pile: It was clipped to the sacklik garment he wore, dangling froi his midsection, which, for hin was just below his shoulder. Down the corridor he flew, swin; ing from the guide rails lightl;. though gravity on the ship wt as erratic as on the asteroid. Docchi braced himself. Loot motion was not so easy for hin Jordan halted beside him an dangled from one hand. "We ha another passenger." Docchi stiffened. "Who?' "I could describe her," sai Jordan. "But why, when a nam will do at least as well? "Nona!" said Docchi. He slumped in sudden relief against the wall. "How did she get in the ship?"  "A good question," said Jordan. "Remind me to ask her that sometime when she's able to answer. But since I don't know, I'll have to use my imagination. My guess is that, after she jammed the lights and scanners in the rocket dome, she walked to the ship and tapped the passenger lock three times in the right places, or something just as improbable. The lock opened for her whether it was supposed to or not." "As good a guess as any," agreed Docchi. may as well make our assumptions complete. Once inside, she felt tired. She found a comfortable cabin and fell asleep in it. She remained asleep throughout our skirmish with the geepees.' "She deserves a rest," said Docehi. "She does. But if she had waited a few minutes to take it. she'd have saved you the trouble of crawling through the tubes." "She did her part and more," Docchi argued. "We depend too much on her. Next we'll expect her to escort us personally to the stars." He straightened up. "Let's go. Anti is waiting for us." The cargo hold was sizable. It had to be to contain the tank, battered and twisted though it was. Equipment had been jarred from storage racks and lay in tangled heaps on the floor. "Anti !" called Docchi. "Here." "Are you hurt?" "Never felt a thing," came the cheerful reply. tank. He reached the top and peered over. "She seems all right," he called down. "Part of the acid's gone. Otherwise no damage." Damage enough, however. Acid was a matter.,of life for Anti. It had been splashed from the tank and, where it had spilled, metal was corroding rapidly. The wall against which the tank had crashed was bent and partly eaten through. That was no reason for alarm: the scavenging system of the ship would handle acid. The real question was what to do for Anti. 'T've stewed in this soup for years," said Anti. "Get me out of here." "How?" "If you weren't as stupid as doctors pretend to be. you'd know how. No gravity, of course. I've got muscles, more than you think. I can walk as long as my bones don't break from the weight." U No gravity would be rough on Docchi; having no arms, he would be virtually helpless. The prospect of floating free without being able to grasp something was terrifying. 'As soon as we can manage it," he said, forcing down his fear. 'First we've got to drain and store the acid." Jordan had anticipated that. He'd swung ofl the tank and was busy expelling the water from an auxiliary compartment into space. As soon as the compartment was empty, he led a hose from it to the tank. The pumps sucked and the acid level fell slowly, Docchi felt the ship lurch familiarly. "Hurry," he called out to Jordan. The gravital unit was acting up. Presumably it was getting ready to cut out. If it did -- well, a free-floating globe of acid would be as destructive to the ship and those in it as a high velocity meteor cluster. Jordan jammed the lever as far as it would go and held it there. "All out," said Jordan presently, and let the hose roll back into the Wall. Done in plenty of time. The gravital unit remained in operation for a full minute. As soon as she was weightless. Anti rose out of the tank. In all the time Docchi had known her, he bad seen no more than a face framed in blue acid. Periodic surgery, where it was necessary, had trimmed the flesh from her face. For the rest, she lived submerged in a corrosive liquid that destroyed the wild tissue as fast as it grew. Or nearly as fast. Docchi averted his eyes. "Well, junkman, look at a real monster," snapped Anti. grow that large. But it was not obscene to Docchi, merely unbelievable. Jupiter is not repulsive because it is the bulging giant of planets; it is overwhelming, and so was Anti. "How will you live out of the acid?" he stammered. "How really unobservant some men are," said Anti loftily. "I anticipated our little journey and prepared for it. If you look closely, you will notice I have on a special surgery robe. It's the only thing in the Solar System that will fit me. It's fabricated from a spongelike substance and holds enough acid to last me about thirty-six hours." She grasped a rail and propelled herself toward the corridor. Normally that was a spacious passageway. For her it was a close fit. Satellites, one glowing and the other swinging in an eccentric orbit, followed after her. N ona was standing before tbe instrument panel when they came back. There was an impressive array of dials, lights and levers in front of her, but she wasn't interested in these. A single small dial, separate from the rest, held her complete attention. She seemed disturbed by what she saw or didn't see. Disturbed or excited, it was difficult to say which. Anti stopped. "Look at her. If I didn't know she's a freak like the rest of us, the only one, in fact, who was born that way, it would be easy to hate her-'-she's so disgustingly normal." Normal? True and yet not true. Surgical techniques that could take a body apart and put it back together again with a skill once reserd for the repair of machines had made beauty commonplace. No more sagging muscles. wrinkles; even the aged were attractive and youthful seeming until the day they died. No more ill-formed limbs, misshapen bodies. Everyone was handsome or beautiful. No exceptions. None to speak of, at least. The accidentals didn't bglong, f course. In another day most of them would have been candidates for a waxworks or the formaldehyde of a specimen bottle. Nona fitted neither category: she wasn't a repair job. Looking at her closely -- and why not? -- U e was an original work as far from the normal in one direction as Anti, for example, was in the ttier, "Why is she staring at the little dial?" asked Anti as the others slipped past her and came into the compartment. "Is there something wrong ith it?" She shrugged. "I would be interested in the big dials. The ones with colored lights." "That's Nona." Docchi smiled. "I'm sure she's never been in the control room of a rocket before, and yet she went straight to the most curious thing in it. She's looking at the gravital indicator. Directly behind it is the gravital unit." "How do you know? Does it say so?" "It doesn't. You have to be trained to recognize it, or else be Nona." Anti dismissed that intellectual feat. "What are you waiting for? You know she can't hear us. Go stand in front of her." "How do I get there?" Docchi had risen a few inches from the floor, now that Jordan had released him from his grip. "A good engineer would have enough sense to put on magneslippers. Nona did." Anti grasped his jacket. How she was able to move was uncertain. The tissues that surrounded the woman were too vast to permit the perception f individual motions. Nevertheless, she proceeded to the center of the compartment, and with her came Docchi. Nona turned before they reached her. "My poor boy," sighed Anti. "You do a very bad job of concealing your emotions, if that's what you're trying to do. Any way, stop glowing like a rainbow and say something." "Hello," said Docchi. Nona smiled at him, though it was Anti that she came to. "No, not too close, child. Don't touch the surgery robe unless you want your pretty face to peel off like a plastiwrapper." Nona stopped; she said nothing. Anti shook her head hopelessly. "I wish you would learn to read lips or at least recognize written words. It's so difficult to communicate with you." "She knows facial expressions and actions, I think," said Docchi. "She's good at emotions. Words are a foreign concept to her." "What other concepts does anyone think with?" asked Anti dubiously"Maybe mathematical relationships," answered Docchi. "Though she doesn't. They've tested her for that." He frowned. "I don't know what concepts she does think with. I wish I did." "Save some of that worry and apply it to our present situation, said Anti. "The object of your concern doesn't seem to be inter csted in it." That was true. Nona had wandered back and was staring at the gravital indicator again. What shesaw to hold her attention was a puzzle. In some ways she seemed irresponsible and childlike. That wa an elusive thought, though : whose child? Not really, of course. Her parents were obscure technicians and mechanics, descendants of a long line of mechanics and technicians. The question he had asked himself was this: where and how does she belong? He couldn't answer. With an effort Docchi 'came back to reality. "We appealed to the Medicouncil," he said. "We asked for a ship to go to the nearest star. It would have to be a rocket, naturally. Even allowing for a better design than any we now have, the journey would take a long time, forty or fifty years going and the same length of time back. That's entirely too long for a normal, but it wouldn't matter to a biocompensator." "Why a rocket?" interrupted Jordan. "Why not some form of gravity drive?" "An attractive idea," admitted Docchi. "Theoretically, there's no limit to gravity drive except light speed, and even that's not certain. If it would work, the time clement could be cut to a fraction. But the last twenty years have proved that gravity drives won't work at all outside the Solar System. They function very poorly even when the ship is as far out as Jupiter's orbit." "I thought the gravity drive on a sh V was nearly the same as the gravital unit on the asteroid,' said Jordan. "Why won't they function?" "I don't know why," answered Docchi impatiently. "If I did, I wouldn't be marooned on Handicap Haven. Arms or no arms, biocompensator or not, I'd be the most important scientist on Earth." "Wh a multitude of pretty women competing for your affections," added Anti. "I think he'd settle for one. A certain one," suggested Jordan. "Poor, unimaginative boy," said Anti. "In my youth..." "We've heard about your youth," said Jordan. "Youth and love are long since past for both of you. Talk about them privately if you want, but not now." Docchi glowered at them. "Anyway," he resumed, "gravity drive is out. One time they had hopes for it, but no longer. It should be able to drive this ship. Actually, its sole function is to provide an artificial gravity inside the ship, for passenger comfort. So rocket ship it is. That's what we asked for. The Mcdicouncil refused. Therefore we're going to appeal to a higher authority." "Fine," said Anti. "How?" "We've discussed it," answered Docchi. "Ultimately the Medicouncil is responsible to the Solar Government. And in turn -- " "All right, I'm in favor of it, said Anti. "I just wanted to know." "Mars is closer," continued Docchi. "But Earth is the seat of government. As soon as we get there... He stopped suddenly and listened. Anti listened with him and waited until she could stand it no longer. "What's the matter?" she asked. "I don't hear any thing." Jordan leaned forward in his seat and looked at the instrument  panel. "That's the trouble, Anti. You're not supposed to hear anything. But you should be able to feel the vibration from the rocket exhaust, as long as it's on." "I don't feel anshing, either." "Yeah," said Jordan. He looked at Docchi. "There's plenty of fuel." didn't cease when the rockets stopped, of course. They were still moving, but not very fast and not in the direction they wanted to go. Gingerly Docchi tried out the magneslippers; he was clumsy, but no longer helpless in the gravityless ship. He stared futilely at the instruments as if he could wring more secrets than the panel had electronic access to. "It's mechanical trouble of some sort," he said uneasily. "There's one way of finding out." Before he could move, Anti was in the corridor that led away from the control compartment. "Stay here, Anti," he said. "I'll see what's wrong." She reached nearly from the floor to the ceiling. She missed by scant inches the sides of the passageway. Locomotion was easy enough for her; turning around wasn't. Anti didn't turn. "Look, honey," her voice floated back. "You brought me along for the ride. That's fine, but I'm not satisfied with it. I want to earn my fare. You stay and run the ship because you know how and I don't. I'll find out what's wrong." "But you won't know what to do. Anti." There was no answer. "All right," he said in defeat. "Both of us ought to go. Jordan, you stay at the controls." Anti led the way because Docchi couldn't get around her. Determinedly he shuffled along. There was a trick to magneslippers that he had nearly forgotten. Slowly it was coming back to him -- shuffle instead of striding. It was a dingy, poorly lighted passageway in an older ship. Handicap Haven definitely didn't rate the best equipment that was produced. On one side was the hull of the ship; on the other, a few small cabins. None were occupied. Anti stopped. The passageway ended in a cross corridor that led to the other side of the ship, "We'd better check the stern rocket tubes," he said, still unable to see around her. "Open it up and we'll take a look." "I can't," said Anti. "There are handles, but the thing won't open. There's a red light, too. Does that mean anything?" His heart sank. "It does. Don't try to open it. With your strength, you might be unlucky enough to do it." "That's a man for you." said Anti sharply. "First he wants me to open it, and then he tells me not to." "There's a vacuum in there. The combustion cap has been retracted. That's the only thing that will actuate the warning signal. You'd die in a few seconds if you somehow managed to open the lock to the rocket compartment." "What are wc waiting for? Let's get busy and fix it." II "Sure, fix it. You sec, Anti,' that didn't happen by itself. Someone, or something, was seponsible." "Who?" "Did you see anyone when we were loading your tank in the hip?" "Nothing. I heard Cameron shouting, a lot of noise. All I could sec was what was directly overhead. What does that have to do with it?" "I think it has to do with a geepee. I thought they all dropped outside. Maybe there was one that didn't." "Why a geepee?" she asked blankly. "In the first place, no man is strong enough to move the combustidh cap. But if he should somehow manage to exert superhuman effort, as soon as the cap cleared the tubes, rocket action would cease. The air in the compartment would exhaust into space and anyone in there would die." "So wc have a dead geepee in there." "A geepee doesn't die. Not even become inactive: it doesn't need air." Docchi tried to think the tiling through. "Not only that, a geepee might be able to esc: ; from the compartment. The I.:ck would close as soon as the pressure dropped. But a geepee  . Anti settled down grimly. "Then there's ageepee on the loose, intent on sabotage?" "I'm afraid so' he admitted worriedly. "What are we standing here for? We'll' go: back to controls and pick up the robot on radio. What it damaged, it can repair." She was partly turned around now and saw Docchi's face. "Don't tell me," she said. "I suppose I should have thought of it. The signal doesn't work inside the ship." Docchi nodded. "It doesn't. Robots are never used aboard, so the control is set in the bow antenna and the ship, of course, is insulated." "Well," said Anti happily, "we've got a robot hunt ahead of us." "We do. And our bare hands to hunt it with." "Oh, come now! It's not as bad as all that. Look, the geepee was back here when the rockets stopped. Could it get by the control compartment without our seeing it?" "It couldn't. There are two corridors leading through the compartment, one on each side of the ship." "That's what I thought. We came down one corridor and no geepee was in it. It has to be in the other. If it goes into a cabin, a light will shine on the outside. It cant really hide from us. "Sure, well find out where it ia. But what are we going to do with it when we find it?"' "I was thinking," said Anti. "Can you get around me when I'm standing like this?" "I can't." "Neither can a geepee. All I need is a toaster, or something that looks like one, and I can drive the robot into the control compartment for Jordan to pick off." Determinedly, she began to move toward the opposite corridor. "Hurry back to Jordan and tell him what we're doing. There ought to be another toaster on the ship. Probably there's one somewhere in the control compartment. Bring it back to me." Docchi bit his lip and stared at the back of the huge woman. "All right," he answered. "But stay where you are. Don't try anything until I get back." Anti laughed. "I value my big, fat life," she said. There were other things she valued, but she didn't mention them. Docchi went as fast as the magneslippers would allow, which wasn't very fast. The strategy was simple, but it didn't follow that it was sound -- a toaster for Jordan and one for Anti, if another could be found. Anti would block the corridor. A geepee might go through her, but it could never squeeze past her. The robot would have to run for it. If it came toward Anti, she might be able to burn it down But she would be firing directly into the control room. If She missed even partially -- The instruments were delicate. It wasn't better if Jordan got the chance to bring down the robot. Anti would be in the line of fire. No, that wasn't good, either. They'd have to think of something else. "Jordan," called Docchi as he entered the control compartment. Jordan wasn't there. Nona was, still gazing serenely at the gravity indicator. Lights were streaming from the corridor on the opposite side of the compartment. Docchi hurried over. Jordan was just inside the entrance, the toaster clutched grimly in his hand. He was hitching his truncated body slowly toward the stem. Coming to meet him was Antiunarmed, enormously fat Anti. She wasn't walking: somehow it seemed more like swimming, a bulbous, flabby sea animal moving through the air. She waved her fins against the wall and propelled herself forward. "Melt him down!" she cried. It was difficult to make out the vaguely human form of the geepee. The powerful, shining body blended into the structure of the ship itself -- unintentional camouf!age, though the robot wasn't aware of that. It was crouched at the threshold of a cabin, hesitating between the approaching dangers. Jordan raised the weapon and as instantly lowered it. "Get out of the way," he told Anti. There was no place for her to go. She was too big to enter a cabin, too massive to let the gcepee squeeze by her even if she wanted it to. "Never mind that. Get him," she answered, A geepee was not a genius even by robot standards. It didn't need to be. Heat is deadly; a human body is a fragile thing. This it Icnew. It ran toward Anti. Unlike man. it didn't need magneslippers. Tt had magnetic metal feet which could move fast, and did. Docchi couldn't close his eyes, though he wanted to. He had to watch. The geepee torpedoed into Anti. And it was the robot that was thrown back. Relative mass favored the monstrous woman. The electronic brain obeyed its original instructions, whatever those were. It got to its feet and rushed toward Anti. Metal arms shot out with dazzling speed and crashed against the flesh of the fat woman. Docchi could hear the thud. No ordinary person could take that kind of punishment and live. Anli wasn't ordinary; she was strange, even for an accidental, living far inside a deep armor of flesh. It was possible that she never felt the crushing force of those blows. Amazingly, she grasped the robot and drew it to her. And the geepee lost the advantage of leverage. The bright arms didn't flash so fast nor with such lethal power. "Gravity!" cried Anti. "All you've got!" She leaned against the struggling machine. Gravity. That was something he could do. Docchi turned, took two steps before the surge of gravity hit him. It came in waves, the sequence of which he was never able to disentangle. The first wave staggered him; at the second his knees buckled and he sank to the floor. After that his eardrums hurt. He thought he could feel the ship quiver. He knew dazedly that an artificial gravity field of this magnitude was impossible, but that knowledge didn't help him move. It vanished as suddenly as it had come. Painfully his lungs expanded. Each muscle ached. He rolled to his feet and lurched past Jordan. He didn't find the mass of broken flesh he expected. Anti was already standing. "Oof!" she grunted and gazed with satisfaction at the twisted grotesque shape at her feet. The electronic brain had been smashed, the body flattened. "Are you hurt?" asked Docchi gently, awed. She waggled the extremities of her body. "Nope, I can't feel anything broken," she said solemnly. She moved back to get a better view of the robot. "I'd call that throwing my weight around. At the right time, of course. The secret's timing. And I must say you picked up your cue with the gravity well." Her laughter rolled through the ship. "It wasn't I." said Docchi. "Jordan? No, he's just getting up. Then who?" "Nona," said Docchi. "It had to be her. She saw what had to be dbne and did it. But how she got that amount of gravity -- "Ask her," said Anti with fond irony. Docchi grimaced and limped back into the control room, followed by Anti and Jordan. Nona was at the gravity panel, her face pleasant and childlike. "Gravity can be turned on or off," said Docchi puzzedly, searching her face for some sign. "And regulated, within certain narrow limits. But somehow you doubled or tripled the normal amount. How?" Nona smiled questioningly. "Gravity engineers would like to know that too," said Jordan. "Everybody would like to know," Anti interrupted irritably, "Except me. I'm too pragmatic, I suppose, but I want to know when we start the rockets and b on our way." "It ten't that easy," sighed Jordan. "A retracted combustion cap in flight generally means aft least one burned-out tube." He made his way to the instrument panel and looked at it glumly, "Three." "A factor." Docchi nodded. "But I was thinking about the robot." Anti was impatient. "An interesting subject, no doubt. What about it?" "Where did it get mstructiona? Not radio; the hull of the ship cuts off all radiation. The last we knew, it was in our control." "All right, how?" "Voice," said Docchi. "Caneron's voice, to be exact." "But he was ia. the rocket dome," Jordan objected. "Think back to when we were loading the tank. We had to look through the telecom and the angle of vision was bad. We couldn't see much of the cargo lock. Anti couldn't see anything that wasnl directly overhead. Both Cameron and the geepee managed to get inside and we didn't know it." Jordan hefted his weapon. "Looks like we've got another hunt on our hands. This time e nice normal doctor." #  "Keep it handy," said Docchi glancing at the toaster. "But be careful how you use it. One homicide and we can forget what we came for. I think he'll be ready to surrender. The ship's temporarily disabled; he'll consider that damage enough." the forward section of the ship. Cameron knew better than to argue with a toaster. In a matter of minutes he was in the control room. "Now that you've got me, what arc you going to do with me?" he asked. Docchi swiveled away from the instrument panel. 'T don't expect active cooperation, of course, but I like to think you'll give your word not to hinder us hereafter." Cameron glared. "I promise nothing of the kind." "We can chain him to Anti." suggested Jordan. "That will keep him out of trouble." "Like leading a poodle on a leash? Nope," said Anti indignantly. "A girl has to have some privacy." "Don't wince, Cameron," objected Docchi. "She really was a girl once, an attractive one." "We can put him in a spacesuit and lock his hands behind his back," said Jordan. "Something like an ancient straitjacket." Cameron laughed. "No, that's inhuman," said Docchi. Jordan juggled the toaster. "I can weld with this. Let's put him in a cabin and weld the door closed. We can cut a slot to shove food in. A very narrow slot." "Excellent. I think you have the solution. That is, unless Dr. Cameron will reconsider his decision." Cameron shrugged. "They'll pick you up in a day or less anyway. I suppose I'm not compromising myself by agreeing to your terms." "Good." "A doctor's word is as good as his oath," observed Anti, "Hippocratic or hypocritic." "Now, Anti, don't be cynical. Doctors have an economic sense as well as the next person," said Docchi gravely. He turned to Cameron. "You see, after Anti grew too massive for her skeletal structure, doctors reasoned she'd be most comfortable in the absence of gravity. That was in the early days, before successful ship gravital units were developed. They put her on an interplanetary ship and kept transferring her before each landing. "But that grew troublesome and -- expensive. They devised a new treatment; the asteroid and the tank of acid. Not being aquatic by nature. Anti resented the change. She still does." 'I knew nothing about that, Cameron pointed out defensively. "It was before your time.' Docchi frowned at the doctor. "Tell me, why did you laugh when Jordan mentioned a spacesuit?" Cameron grinned. "That was my project while you were busy with the robot." "To do what? Jordan -- " But Jordan was already on his way. He was gone for some time. "Well?" asked Docchi on his return. It really wasn't necessary; Jordan's gloomy face told the Story. "Cut to Gibbons." "All of them?" "Everyone. Beyond repair." "VJhat's the excitement about?" rumbled Anti. "We don't need spacesuits unless something happens to the ship and we have to go outside." "Exactly, Anti. How do you suppose we go about replacingthe defective tubes? From the outside, of course. By destroying the spacesuits, Cameron made sure we can't." Anti opened her mouth with surprise and closed it in anger. She glowered at the doctor. "We're still in the asteroid zone," said Cameron. "In itself, that's not dangerous. Without power to avoid stray rocks, it is. I advise you to contact the Medicouncil. They'll send a ship to pick us up and tow us in." "No, thanks. I don't like Handicap Haven as well as you do," Anti said brusquely. She turned to Docchi. "Maybe I'm stupid for asking, but exactly what is it that's deadly about being out in space without a spacesuit?" "Cold. Lack of air pressure. Lack of oxygen." "Is that all? Nothing else?" His laugh was too loud. "Isn't that enough?" "I wanted to be sure," she said. She beckoned to Nona, who was standing near. Together they went forward, where the spacesuits were kept. Cameron scowled puzzledly and started to follow. Jordan waved the toaster around. "All right," said the doctor, stopping. He rubbed his chin. "What is she thinking about?" "I wouldn't know," said Docchi. "She's not scientifically trained, if that's what you mean. But she has a good mind, as good as her body once was." "And how good was that?" "We don't talk about it," said Jordan shortly. T was a long time before the women came back -- if the weird creature that floated into the control compartment with Nona was Anti. Cameron stared at her and saw M shudderingly that it was. "You need a session with the psychocomputer," he said. "When we get back, that's the first thing we do. Can't you understand... "Be quiet," growled Jordan. "Now. Anti, explain what you've rigged up." "Any kind of pressure is good enough as far as the outside of the body is concerned," answered Anti, flipping back the helmet. "Mechanical pressure will do as well as air pressure. I had Nona cut the spacesuits into strips and wind them around me -- hard. Then I found a helmet that would fit over my head when the damaged part was cut away. It won't hold much air pressure, even taped very tight to my skin. But as long as it's pure oxygen -- " "It might be satisfactory," admitted Docchi. "But the temperature?" "Do you think' I'm going to worry about cold?" asked Anti. "Me? Way down below all this flesh?" "Listen to me," said Cameron through his teeth. "You've already seriously threatened my career with all this childish nonsense. I won't permit you to ruin it altogether  by a deliberate suicide." "You and your stinking career," retorted Jordan tiredly. "We're not asking your permission to do anything." He turned away from the doctor. "You understand the risk. Anti? It's possible that it won't work at all." "I've thought about it," Anti replied soberly. "On the other hand. I've thought about the asteroid." "All right," said Jordan. Docchi nodded. Nona bobbed her head; it was doubtful that she knew what she was agreeing to. "Let's have some telecom viewers outside," said Docchi. "One directly in back, one on each side. We've got to know what's happening." Jordan went to the control panel and flipped levers. "They're out and working," he said, gazing at the screen. "Now, Anti, go to the freight lock. Close your helmet and wait. I'll let the air out slowly. The pressure change will be gradual. If anything seems wrong, let me know over the helmet radio and I'll yank you in immediately. Once you're outside I'll give you further instructions. Tools and equipment are in a compartment that, opens into space." Anti waddled away, Jordan looked down at his legless body. "I suppose we have to be realistic about it -- " "We do," answered Docchi. "Anti is the only one of us who has a chance of doing the job and surviving." Jordan adjusted a dial. "It va Cameron who was responsible for it. If Anti doesn't come back, you can be damn sure he'll join her." "No threats, please," said Docchi. "When are you going to let her out?" "She's out," said Jordan. Deliberately, he had diverted their attention while he had taken the burden of emotional strain. Docchi glanced hastily at the telecom. Anti was hanging free in space, wrapped and strapped in strips torn from the useless spacesuits -- that, and more flesh than any human had ever borne. The helmet sat jauntily on her head; the oxygen cylinder was strapped to her back. She was still intact. "How is she?" he asked anxiously unaware that the microphone was open. "Fine," came Anti's reply, faint and ready. "The air's thin, but it's pure oxygen." "Cold?" asked Docchi. "It hasn't penetrated yet. No worse than the acid, at any rate. What do I do?" Jordan gave her directions. The others watched. It was work to find the tools and examine the tubes for defectives, to loosen the tubes in the sockets and pull them out and push them spinning into space. It was still harder to replace them, though there was no gravity and Anti was held to the hull bymagneslippers. But it seemed more than work. To Cameron, who was watching, an odd thought occurred: In her remote past, of which he knew nothing, Anti had done something like this before. Ridiculous, of course. Yet there was a rhythm to her motions, this shapeless giant creature whose bones would break with her weight if she tried to stand at even only half Earth gravity. Rhythm, a sense of purpose, a strange pattern, an incredible gargantuan grace. The whale plowing the waves is graceful; it cannot be otherwise in its natural habitat. The human race had produced, accidentally. one unlikely person to whom interplanetary space was not an alien thing. Anti was at last in her element. "Now," said Jordan, keeping the tension out of his voice, "go back to the outside tool compartment. You'll find a lever. PulL That will set the combustion cap in place," "Done," said Anti, some minutes later. "That's all. You can come in now." "That'? all? But I'm not cold. It hasn't reached any nerves yet." "Come in," repeated Jordan, showing the anger of alarm. She walked slowly over the hull tc the cargo lock and, while she did, Jordan reeled in the telecom viewers. The lock was no sooner closed to the outside and the air hissing into the compartment than Jordan was there, opening tihe inner lock. "Are you all right? he asked. She flipped back the helmet. There was frost on her eyebrows and her nose was a bright red. Of course. My hands arent a bit cold. She stripped off the heated gloves and waggled her fingers. "It can'f be!" protested Cameron. "You should be frozen stiff!" "Why?" asked Anti, laughing. "It's a matter of insulation and I have plenty of that." Cameron turned to Docchi. "When I was a kid. I saw a film of a dancer. She did a ballet, Life of the Cold Planets, I believe it was called. For some cockeyed reason, I thought of it when Anti was out there. I hadn't thought of it in years." He rubbed his hand fretfully over his forehead. "It fascinated me when I first saw it. I couldn't get it out of my mind. When I grew older, I found out a tragic thing happened to the dancer. She was on a tour of Venus and the ship she was in disappeared. They sent out searching parties, of course. They found her after she had spent a week on a fungus plain. You know what that meant. The great ballerina was a living spore culture medium," "Shut up," growled Jordan. Cameron didn't seem to hear. "Naturally, she died. I can't remember her name, but Tve always remembered the ballet she did. And that's funny, because it reminded me of Anti out there -- " A fist exploded in his face. If there had been more behind the blow than shoulders and a frag ment of a body; his jaw would have been broken. As it was he floated through the air and crashed against the wall. Angrily, he got to his feet. "I gave my word I wouldn't cause any trouble. The agreement evidently doesn't work both ways." He glanced significantly at the weapon Jordan carried. "Maybe you'd better be sure to have that around at all times." "I told you to shut up," said Jordan. After that he ignored the doctor. He didn't have a body with which to do it, but somehow Jordan managed a bow. "A flawless performance. One of your very best, Antoinette," "Do you think so?" sighed Anti. The frost had melted from her eyebrows and was trickling down her cheek. She left with Jordan. Cameron remained behind. He felt his jaw. It was too bad about his ambitions. He knev now that he was never going to be the spectacular success he had once imagined. Not after these accidentals had escaped from Handicap Haven. Still, he would always be able to practice medicine somewhere in the Solar System. Hed done his best on the asteroid and this ship, and he'd been a complete ass both times. The ballerina hadn't really died, as he had been told. It would have been better for her if she had. He succeeded in recalling her name. It had been Antoinette. Now it was Anti. He could have found that out by checking her case history --  Handicap Haven d one on file. Probably not, ! e comforted himself. Why keep case histories of hopeless cases? lanes," said Docchi, "I think we'll get closer. They have no reason to suspect that we're heading toward Earth. Mars is more logical, or one of the moons of Jupiter, or another asteroid." Jordan shifted uneasily. 'Tm not in favor of it. They'll pick us up before we have a chance to say anything." "But there's nothing to dis'nguiph us from an ordinary "'rth-to-Mars tocket. We have rhip's registry on boacd. Pick  t a rliip f 't's in our class. ' irefter, v.'re going to be that If Tr?fhc blips us, and they probably won't unless we try to land, have a recording ready. Something like this: 'ME #I zip crackle # reporting. Our communication is acting up. We can't hear you. Traffic. Don't overdo the static effects but repeat that with suitable variations and I don't think they will bother us." Shaking his head dubiously, Jordan swung away toward the repair ops. "You look worried," said Anti. Docchi turned around. "Yeah." "Won't it work?" "Sure. We'll get close to Earth. They're not looking for us around here. They don't really know why we escaped in the rocket. That's why they can't figure out where we're going." His face was taut and his eyes were tired. "It's not that. The entire Solar Police Force has been alerted for us." "Which means?" "Look. We planned to bypass the Medicouncil and take our case directly to the Solar Government. If they want us as much as the radio indicates, it's not likely they'll be very sympathetic. If the Solar Government doesn't support us all the way, we'll never get another chance." "Well?" said Anti. She seemed trimmer, more vigorous. "What are we waiting for? Let's take the last step first." He raised his head. "The Solar Government won't like it." They won't, but tiiere's nothing they can do about it." "I think there is -- simply shoot ns down. When we stole the ship, we automatically stepped into the criminal class." "We knew that in advance." "Is it worth it?" "I think so," said Anti. "In that event," he said, "I'll need time to get ready." She scrutinized him carefully. "Maybe we can fix you up." "With fake arms and greasepaint? No. They'll have to accept us as we are." "A good idea. I hadn't thought f the sympathy angle." "Not sympathy. Reality. I don't want them to approve of us as handsome accidentals and have them change their minds when they discover what we're really like." Anti looked doubtful, but she kept her objections to herself as she waddled away. Sitting in silence, he watched her go. She, at least, would derive some benefit. Dr. Cameron apparently hadn't noticed that exposure to extreme cold had done more to inhibit her unceasing growth than the acid bath. She'd never be normal again; that was obvious. But some day, if the cold treatment were properly investigated, she might be able to stand gravity. He examined the telecom. They were getting closer. No longer a bright point of light, Earth was a perceptible disc. He could sec the outline of oceans, shapes of land; he could Imagine people. Jordan came in. "The record is rigged up, though we haven't had to use it. But we have a friend behind us. An official friend." "Has he blipped us?" "Not yet. He keeps hanging on." "Is he overtaking us?" "He would like to." "Don't let him." "With this bag of fiplts?" "Shake it apart if you have to," Docchi impatiently said. "How soon can you break into a broadcasting orbit?" "I thought that was our last resort." "Right. As far as Anti and I are concerned, tins is it. Any argument against?" "None that I can think of," answered Jordan. "With a heavy cruiser behind us, no argument at all." compartment. "I don't want a focus exclusively on me," Docchi was saying. "To a world of perfect normals I may look strange, but we have to avoid the family portrait effect." "Samples," suggested Anti. "In a sense, yes. A lot depends on whether they, accept those I'll melt the teeth out of his samples.' mouth." He held the toaster For the first time Dr. Camagainst his side, out of line with cron began to realize what they the telecom, but aimed at Camwere up to. "Wait!" he exclaimed, eron's face. "You've got to listen to me!" Cameron began to shake with "We're not going to wait and urgency, but he kept still, we've already done enough lis"Ready?" Docchi asked, tening to you," said Docchi. "Jor"Flip the switch and we will dan, see that Cameron stays out be, with everything we've got. If of thff telecom transmitting angle they don't read us, it'll be beand doesn't interrupt. We've cause they don't want to." come too far for that." The rocket slipped out of the "Sure," Jordan promised approach lanes. It spun down, the h'arshly. "If he makes a sound, stern tubes pulsing brightly, coming toward Earth in a tight trajactory. "Citizens of the Solar System f' began Docchi. "Everyone on Earth! This is an unscheduled broadcast, an unauthorized ap peal. We are using the emergency bands because, for us. it is an emergency. Who are we? Accidentals, of course, as you can see by looking at us. I know the sight isn't pretty, but we consider other things more important than appearance. Accomplishment, for example. Contributing to progress in ways normals cannot do. "Shut away on Handicap Haven, we're denied this right. All we can do there is exist in frustration and boredom, kept alive whether we want to Be or not. Yet we have a gigantic contribution to make... if we arc allowed to leave the Solar System for Alpha Centauri! You can't travel to the stars now, although eventually you will. "You must be puzzled, knowing how slow our present rockets are. No normal person could I #S make the round trip; he would die of old age. But we accidentals can go! We would positively not die of old age! The Medicounci! knows that is true... and still will not allow us to go!" At the side of the control compartment, Cameron opened his mouth to protest. Jordan, glancing at him, imperceptibly waggled the concealed weapon. Cameron swallowed his words and subsided without a sound. 'Biocompensation," continued Docchi evenly. "You may know about it, but in case information on it has been suppressed, let me explain: The principle of biocompensation has long been a matter of conjecture. This is the first age in which medical tcchnoldigy is advanced enough to explore it. Every cell, every organism, tends to survive, as an individual, as a species. Injure it and it strives for survival acArding to the seriousness of the injury. We accidentals have been maimed and mutilated almost past belief. "Our organisms had the assistance of medical science. Real medical science. Blood was supplied as long as we needed it, machines did all our breathing, kidneys were replaced, hearts furnished, glandular products supplied in the exact quantities necessary, nervous and muscular systems were regenerated. In the extremity of our organic struggle, because we had the proper treatment, our bodies were wiped virtually free of death." Sweat ran down his face. He longed for hands to wipe it away. "Most accidentals are nearly immortal. Not quite -- we'll die four or five hundred years from now. Meanwhile, there is no reason why we can't leave the Solar System. Rockets are slow; you would die before you got back from Alpha Centauri. We won't. Time doesn't matter to us. "Perhaps better, faster rockets will be devised after we leave. You may get to there long before we do. We won't mind. We will simply have made our contribution to progress as best we could, and that will satisfy us." With an effort Docchi smiled. The instant he did, he felt it was a mistake, one that he couldn't rectify. Even to himself it felt more like a snarl. "You know where we're kept. That's a politer word than imprisoned. We don't call it Handicap Haven ;our name for it is the junkpile. And to ourselves we're junkmen. Does this give you a clue to how we feel? "I don't know what you'll have to do to force the Medicouncil to grant their permission. We appeal to you as our last resort. We have tried all other ways and failed. Our future as human beings is at stake. Whether we get what we want and need is something for you to settle with your conscience." He nudged the switch and sat down. His face was gray. 'I don't like to bother you," aid Jordan, "but what shall we do about them?" Doccht glanced at the telecom. "They" were uncomfortably close and Considerably more numerous than the last time he had looked. "Take evasive action," he said wearily. "Swing close to Earth and use the planet's gravity to give us a good push. We've got to keep out of their hands until people have time to react." "I think you ought to know --  began Cameron. There was an odd tone to his voice. "Save it for later," said Docchl, "I'm going to sleep." His body sagged. "Jordan, wake me up if anything imjjortant happens. And remember that you don't have to listen to this fellow unless you want to." Jordan nodded and touched the controls. Nona, leaning against the gravital panel, paid no attention to the scene. She seemed to be listening to something nobody else could hear. That was nothing new, but it broke Docchi's heart whenever he saw it. His breath drew in almost with a sob as he left the control room. race went on. Backdropf planets, stars, darkness. The little flecks of light that edged nearer didn't seem cheerful to Jordan. His lips were fixed in a Straight, hard line. He could hear Docchi come in behind him..."Nice speech," said Cameron. "Yeah." Docchi glanced at the telecom. The view didn't inspire further comment. "That's the trouble, it was just a speech. It didn't do you any good. My advice is to give up bfbfore you get hurt." "It would be." Cameron stood at the threshold. "I may as well tell you," he said reluctantly. "I tried to before the broadcast, as soon as I found out what you were going to do. But you wouldn't listen." He came into the control compartment. Nona was huddled in a seat, motionless, expressionless. Anti was absent. "You know why the Medicounciljefused to let you go?" "Sure," said Docchi. "The general metabolism of accidentals is further from normal than that of creatures we dredge from the bottom of the sea. Add to that an enormously elongated life span and you ought to see the Medicouncil's objection." "Get to the point!" "Look at it this way." Cameron continued almost desperately. "The Centauri group contains quite a few planets. From what we know of cosmology, intelligent life probably exists there to a greater or lesser extentYou will be our representatives to them. What they look like isn't important: it's their concern. Bqt our ambassadors have to meet certain minimum standards. They at least -- damn it, don't you see that they at least have to look like human beings?' "I know you feel that way, taid Jordan, rigid with contempt# "I'm not talking for myself,' Cameron said. "I'm a doctor. The medicouncilors are doctors. We graft on or regenerate legs and arms and eyes. We work with blood and bones and intestines. We know what a thin borderline separates normal people from -- from you. "Don't you understand? They're perfect, perhaps too much so. They can't tolerate even small blemishes. They rush to us with things like hangnails, pimples, simple dandruff. Health -- or rather the appearance of it -- has become a fetish. They may think they're sympathetic to you, but what they actually feel is something else." "What are you driving at?" whispered Docchi. "Just this: if it were up to the Medicouncil, you would be on your way to the Centauri group. But it isn't. The decision always had to be referred back to the Solar System as a whole. And the Medicouncil can't go counter to the mass of public opinion." Docchi turned away in loathing. "Don't believe me," said Cameron. "You're not too far from Earth. Pick up the reaction to your broadcast." Worriedly, Jordan looked at Docchi. "We may as well find out," said Docchi. "It's settled now, one way or the other.' They searched band after band. The reaction was always the same. Obscure private citizen or prominent one, man or woman, they all told how sorry they were for the accidentals, but -- "Turn it off," said Docchi at last. "Now what?" Jordan asked numbly. "You have no choice," said the doctor. "No choice." repeated Docchi dully. "No choice but to give iip. We misjudged who our allies were. 'We knew you had," said Cameron. "It seemed better to let you go on thinking that way while you were on the asteroid. It gave you something to hope for. It made you feel you weren't alone. The trouble was that you got farther than we thought you would ever be able to. "So we did," Docchi said. His lethargy seemed to lift a little. "And there's no reason to stop now. Jordan, pick up the ships behind us. Tell them we've got Cameron on board. A hostage. Play him up as a hero. Basically, he's not with those who are against us." Anti came into the control compartment. Cheerfulness faded from her face. "What's the matter?" she asked. "Jordan will explain to you. I've got to think." Docchi closed his eyes. The ship lurched slightly, though the vibration from the rockets did not change. There was no reason for alarms the flight of a ship was never completely steady, Docchi paid no attention. At last he opened his eyes. "If we were properly fueled and provisioned," he said without much hope, "I would be in favor of the four of us heading for Alpha or Proxima. Maybe even Sirius. It wouldn't matter where, since we wouldn't intend to come back. But we can't make it with our small fuel reserve. If we can shake the ships behind us. we might be able to hide until we can steal the necessary fuel and food." "What'll we do with Doc?" asked Jordan. "We'd have to raid an unguarded outpost, of course. Probably a small mining asteroid. We can leave him there." "Yeah," said Jordan. "A good idea, if wc can run away from our personal escort of bloodhounds. Offhand, that doesn't seem very likely. They didn't come any closer when I told them we had Doc with us, but they didn't drop back -- " He stopped and raised his eyes to the telecom. He blinked, not believing what he saw. "They're gone!" His voice broke with excitement. Almost instantly Docchi was beside him. "No," he corrected. "They're still following, but they're very far behind." Even as be looked, the pursuing ships visibly lost ground. "What's our relative speed?" asked Jordon. He looked at the dials himself, frowned, tapped them as if the needles had gone crazy. "What did you do to the rockets?" demanded Docchi. "Nothing! There wasn't a thing I could do. Wc were already running at top speed." "We're above it. Way above it. How?" There was nothing to explain their astoni.shing velocity. Cameron, Anti, and Jordan were in the control compartment. Nona still sat huddled up, bands pressed tight against her had. There was no explanation at all, yet power was pouring into the gravital unit, as a long unused, actually useless dial was indicating. "The gravital drive is working," Docchi blankly pointed out. "Nonsense," said Anti. "I don't feel any weight." "You don't," answered Docchi. You won't. The gravital unit was originally installed to drive the ship. When that proved unsatisfactory, it was converted. The difference is slight but important. An undirected general field produces weight effects inside the ship. That's for passenger comfort. A directed field, oudc the ship, will drive it. You can have one or the other, not both." "But I didn't turn on the gravjfal drive," said Jordan in fiat bewilderment. "I couldn't if I wanted to. It's disconnected." "I would agree with you, ex cept for one thing. It's working." Docchi stared at Nona, whose eyes were closed. Gct her attention," he said. It was Jordan who gently touched her shoulder. She opened her eyes. On the instrument board, the needle of a once useless dial rose and fell. "What's the matter with the poor dear?" asked Anti. "She's shaking." I "Let her alone," said Docchi. I No one moved. No one said anything at all. Minutes passed while the ancient ship creaked and groaned and ran'-away from the fastest rockets in the Solar System. "I think I know," said Docchi at last, still frowning. "Consider the gravity-generating plant. Part of it is an electronic computer, capable of making the necessary calculations and juggling the proportion of power required to produce, continuously, directed or undirected gravity. In other words, a brain, a complex mechanical intelligence. From the viewpoint of that intelligence, why should it perform ad infinitutrt a complicated but meaningless routine? It didn't know why, and because it didn't, very simply, it refused to do so. "Now consider Nona. She's deaf, can't speak, can't communicate. In a way she's comparable to the gravital computer. Like it, rise has a very high potential intelligence. Like it, she's had difficulty grasping the facts of her environment. Unlike it, though, he has learned something. How much, I don't know, but it's far more than the Mcdicouncil psychologists credit her with." "Yeah," said Jordan dubiously. "But what's happening now?" "If there were two humans involved, you would call it telepathy," answered Docchi hesitantly, fumbling for concepts he could only sense without grasping. "One intelligence is electronic, the other organic. You'll have to coin a new term, because the only one I know is extrasensory perception, and that's obviously ridiculous. It is, isn't it?" Jordan smiled and flexed his arms. Under the shapeless garment his muscles rippled. "It isn't," he said. "The power was there, but we're the only ones who know how to use it. Or rather Nona is." "Power?" repeated Anti, rising majestically. "You can keep it. I want just enough to get to Centauri." "I think you'll get it," Docchi promised. "A lot of things seem clearer now. For example, in the past, why didn't gravital units work well at considerable distances from the Sun? As a matter of fact, the efficiency of each unit was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between it and the Sun."The gravital computer is a deaf, blind, mass-sensitive brain. The major fact in its existence is the Sun, the greatest mass in the Solar System. To such a brain, leaving the Solar System would be like stepping off the edge of a flat world, because it couldn't be aware of stars. "Now that it knows about the Galaxy, the drive will work anywhere. With Nona to direct it, even Sirius isn't far away." "Doc," said Jordan carelessly, "you'd better be figuring a way to get off the ship. Remember, we're going faster than man ever went before." He chuckled. "Unless, of course, you like our company and don't want to leave." "We've got to do some figuring ourselves," interposed Docchi. "Such as where we are heading now." "A good idea," said Jordan. He busied himself with charts and calculations. Gradually his flying fingers slowed. His head bent low over his work. At last he stopped and folded his arms. "Where?" asked Docchi. "There." Jordan dully punched the telecom selector and a view became fixed on the screen. In the center glimmered a tiny world, a fragment of a long-exploded planet. Their destination was easily recognizable. It was Handicap Haven. "But why do we want to go there?" asked Anti. She looked in amazement at Docchi. "We're not going voluntarily," he answered, his voice flat and spent. "We're going where the Medicouncil wants us to go. We forgot about the monitor system. When Nona activated the gravital unit, that fact was indicated at some central station. All the Medicouncil had to do was use SI the monitor to take the gravital drive away from Nona." "We thought we were running away from the ships, which we were, but only to beat them back to the junkpile?" asked Anti. Docchi nodded. "Well, it's over. We did our best. There's no use crying about it " Yet she was. She passed by Nona, patting her gently. "It's all riht, darling. You tried." Jordan followed her from the compartment. Cameron remained; he came over to Docchi. "Ever#rthing isn't lost," he said, somewhat awkwardly. "You're back where you started from, but Nona at least will benefit." "Benefit?" said Docchi. "Someone ill. It won't be Nona." "You're wrong. Now that she is an important factor -- " "So is a special experimental machine. Very valuable. I don't think she'll like that classification." Silence met silence. It was Dr. Cameron who turned away. "That ghastly glow of yours when you're angry always did upset me. I'll come back when it's dimmer." Docchi glared after him. Cameron was the only normal aware that it was Nona ho controlled the gravital unit. All the outside world could realize was that it Was in operation, as it had been designed to work, but never had. If Cameron could be disposed of -- He shook his head. It wouldn't solve anything. He might fool them for a while. They might think he was responsible. In the end, they'd find out. Nona wasn't capable of that much deception, for she never knew what a test was. He went over to her. Once he had hoped... It didn't matter what he had hoped. She looked up and smiled. She had a right to. No word had ever broken the silence of her mind, but now she was communicating with something, whatever it was that an electronic brain could say. Of course she didn't understand that the conversation was taking place between two captives, herself and the gravital computer. Abruptly he turned away. He stopped at the telecom panel and methodically lacked it apart. Delicate tubes smashed into powder. The emergency radio he thoroughly demolished. The ship was firmly in the grip of the gravital monitor. There was nothing he could do about that. All that remained was to protect Nona from their prying minds as long as he could. She didn't hear the noise, or didn't care. She sat there, head in her hands, calnjj and smiling. S# riiHE outer shell of the rocket dome opened before and closed behind them. Jordan set the controls in neutral and lifted his hands, muttering to himself. They were gliding through the lip of the inner shell. Home. "Cheer up," said Cameron breezily. "You're not really prisoners, you know." Nona seemed content, though Jordan didn't. Docchi said jothing, the light gone from his face. Anti wasn't with them; she was floating in the tank of acid. The gravity field of the asteroid made that necessary. The ship scraped gently and they were down. Jordan touched a lever; passenger and freight locks were open. "Let's go." said Dr. Cameron. "I imagine there's a reception committee for you." There was. The little rocket dome held more ships than normally came in a year. The precise confusion of military discipline was everywhere in evidence. Armed guards lined either side of the landing ramp down which they walked. At the bottom, a large telecom unit had been set up. If size indicated anything, someone considered this an important occasion. From the screen, larger than life, Medicouncilor Thorton looked out approvingly. The procession ' from the ship halted in front of the telecom unit. "A good job, Dr. Cameron, said the medicouncilor, "We were quite surprised at the escape of the four accidentals, and your disappearance, which coincided with it. From what we were able to piece together, you deliberately followed them. A splendid example of quick thinking. Doctor. You deserve recognition for it. "Thank you," said Cameron. "I'm sorry I can't be there to congratulate you in person, but I will be soon." The medicovneilor paused discreetly. "At first the publicity was bad. Very bad. We thought it unwise to conceal an affair of such magnitude. Of course the unauthorized broadcast made it impossible. Fo-tunately, the gravital discovery came along at just the right time. I don't mind telling you that the net effect is now in our favor." "I hoped it would be," said Cameron. "Nona -- " "You've spoken about her before." The medicouncilor frowned. "We can discuss her I '.ter. For the moment, see that sh" and the rest of the accidentals arc returned to their usual pl-ices. Bring Docchi to your office at once. I want to question him privately. Cameron stared at him i i bcwiMerment. "But I thoug't --  "No objections. Doctor," snapped Thorton. "Important people are waiting for you. That is all." The telecom darkened. "I think you heard what he said. Dr. Cameron." The officer at his side was very polite. He could aiTord to be, with the rank of three big planets on his tunic. "Very well," Cameron answered. "But as commander of the asteroid, I request that you furnish a guard for the girl." "Commander?" repeated the officer. "That's funny -- my orders indicate that I am, until further notice. I haven't got that notice." He locked around at his men and crooked a finger. "Lieutenant, see that the little fellow -- Jordan, I think his name is -- gets a lift back to the main dome. And you can wallthe pretty lady to her room. Or whatever it is she lives in." He smiled negligently at Cameron. "Anything to oblige another commander." riHE medicouncilor, Thorton, was waiting impatiently on the telecom when they got to Cameron's office. "We will arrive in about two hours," he said immediately. "When I say we, I mean a number of top governmental officials and scientists. Meanwhile, let's get on with this gravital business." He caught sight of the commander. "General Judd, this is a technical matter. I don't think you'll be interested in it." "Very well, sir. I'll stand guard outside." The medicouncilor was silent until the door closed behind General Judd. "Sit down, Docchi," he said with unexpected kindness. He paused to note the effect. "I can sympathise with you. You had everything you wanted nearly within your reach. And, after that, to return to Handicap Haven -- well, I can understand how you feel. But since you did return, I think we can arrange to do something for you." Docchi stared at the man on the screen. A spot of light pulsed on his cheek and then flared rapidly over his face. "Sure." he said casually. "But there are criminal charges against me." "A formality," said the medicouncilor. "With a thing like the discovery -- or rediscovery -- of the gravital drive to think about, no one is going to worry much about your , unauthorized departure from the asteroid." Medicouncilor Thorton sounded pleased. "I don't want to mislead you. We can't do any more for you medically than has already been done. However, you will find yourself the center of a more adequate social life. Friends, work, whatever you want. Naturally, in return for this, we will expect your full cooperation." "Naturally. Docchi blinked at him and got to his feet. "Sounds interesting. I'd like to think about it for a minute." Cameron planted himself squarely in front of the screen. "Maybe f don't understand. I think you've got the wrong person." "Dr. Cameron !" Thorton glowered. "Please explain." "It was an easy mistake to make," said Cameron. "Cut ofif from communication, the gravital drive began to work. How? Why? Mostly, who did it? You knew it wasn't I. I'm a doctor, not a physicist. Nor Jordan, he's at best a mechanic. Therefore it had to be Docchi, because he's an engineer. He could make it work. But it wasn't Docchi. He had nothing to do with -- "Look out!" cried Thorton too late. Cameron fell to his knees. The same foot that brought him down crashed into his chin. His head snapped back and he sprawled cm the floor. Blood trickled from his face. "Docchi!" shouted Thorton from the screen. Docchi didn't answer. He was crashing through the door. The commander was lounging against the wall. Head down, Docchi ran into him. The toaster fell from his belt to the floor. With scarcely a pause, Docchi stamped on it and continued running. The commander got to his feet and retrieved the weapon. He aimed it tentatively at the retreating figure; a thought occurred to him and he lowered it. He examined the damaged mechanism. After that, it went gingerly into a tunic pocket. Muffled shouts were coming from Cameron's office. The general broke in. The medicouncilor glared at him from the screen. T can see that you let him get away." The disheveled officer straightened his uniform. "I'm sorry, sir. I'll alert the guards immediately. "Never mind now. Revive that man." The general wasn't accustomed to giving resuscitation; it was out of his line. Nevertheless, in a few minutes Cameron was consciousi though somewhat dazed. "Now then. Doctor, if it wasn't Docchi who was responsible for the sudden functioning of the gravital drive, who was it?" With satisfaction, Cameron told him. He had not been wrong about the girl. Listening to the detailed explanation of Nona's mental abilities, the general was perplexed, as generals sometimes are. "I see." The medicouncilor nodded. "We overlooked that posribility altogether. Not the mechanical genius of an engineer. Instead, the strange telepathic sense of a girl. That puts the problem in a different light." "It does." Cameron pressed his aching jaw. "She can't tell us how she does it. We'll have to experiment. Fortunately, it won't involve any danger. With the monitor system we can always control the gravital drive." The medicouncilor leaned perilously backward and shook his head. "You're wrong. It's supposed to, but it doesn't. We tried. For a microsecond, the monitor did take over, but the gravital computer is smarter than we thought, if it was the computer that figured out the method. It found a way of cutting the power from the monitor circuit. It didn't respond at all." Cameron forgot his jaw. "If you didn't bring the rocket back on remote, why did she come?" "Docchi knows," growled the medicouncilor: "He found out in this room. That's why he escaped." He tapped on his desk with blunt fingers. "She could have taken the ship anywhere she pleased and we couldn't have stopped her. Since she voluntarily came back, it's obvious that she wants the asteroid!" Medicouncilor Thorton tried to shove his face out of the screen and into the room. "Don't you ever think, General? There isn't any real difference between gravital units except size and power. What she did to the ship she can do as easily to the asteroid." He thrust out a finger and pointed angrily. "Don't stand there. General Judd. Find that girl!" It was late for that kind of command. The great dome overhead trembled and creaked in countless joints. The little world shivered, groaned as if it had lain too long in .an age-old orbit. It began to move. ' walked if they could. Fantastic and near-fantastic figures came to the assembly. Huge or tiny, on their own legs or borrowed ones, they arrived, with or without arms, faces. The word had spread by voice, by moving lips, by sign languages of every sort. "Remember, it will be hours or perhaps days before we're safe," said Docchi. His voice was growing hoarse. "It's up to us to see that Nona has all the time she needs." "Where is she hiding?" asked someone frocp the crowd. "I don't know. If I did, I still wouldn't tell you. It's our job to keep them from finding her." "How?" demanded one near the front. "Fight the guards?" "Not directly," said Docchi. "We have no arms in the sense of weapons. Many of us have no S# arms m any sense. All we can hope to do is obstruct their search. Unless someone has a better idea, this is what I plan: "I want all the men, older women. and the younger ones who aren't suitable for reasons I'll explain later. The guards won't be here for another half hour -- it will take that long to get them together and give them the orders that the Medicouncil must be working out now. When they do come, get in their way. "How you do that, I'll leave to your imagination. Appeal to their sympathy as long as they have any. Put yourself in dangerous situations. TheV have ethics; at first they'll be inclined to help you. When they do, try to steal their weapons. Avoid physical violence as much as you can. We don't want to force them into retaliation. Make the most of that phase of their behavior. It won't last long." Docchi paused and looked over the crowd. "Each of you will have to decide for himself when to drop that kind of resistance and start an active battle campaign. We have to disrupt the light and scanning and ventilation systems, for instance. They'll be forced to keep them in repair. Perhaps they'll try to guard these strategic points. So much the better for us -- there will be fewer guards to contend with." "What about me?" called a woman from far in back. "What do I do?" "You are in for a rough time," Docchi promised her. "Is Jerian here?" She elbowed her way to his side through the crowd. "Jerian," said Docchi to the accidentals, "is a normal, pretty woman -- outwardly. She has, however, no trace of a digestive system. The maximum time she can go without food and fluid injections is ten hours. That's why she's here." Again Docchi scanned the group. "I need a cosmetech, someone who has her equipment with her." A legless woman propelled herself forward. Docchi conferred with her. She seemed startled, but she complied. Under her deft fingers Jerian was transformed -- into Nona. "She will be the first Nona Acy'U find," explained Docchi, "because she can get away with the disguise longer. I think -- I hope -- they'll call off the search for a few hours while they test her. Eventually they are sure to find out. In Jerian's case, fingerprints or X-rays would reveal who she is. But that won't occur to them immediately. Nona is impossible to question, as you know, and Jerian will act exactly as Nona would. As soon as they discover that Jcrian isn't Nona -- well, they won't bother to be polite, if that's the word for it. The guards will like the idea of hnding an attractive girl they can manhandle in the line of duty, especially if they think that will help them find Nona. It won't, of course. But it will hold up the search and that's what we want." They stood still, no one moving. Women looked at each other in silent apprehension. "Let's go," said Jordan grimly. "Wait," advised Docchi. "I have one volunteer Nona. I need about fifty more. It doesn't matter if you're physically sound or not -- we'll raid the lab for plastissue. If you think you can be made upvto look like Nona, come forward." Slowly, singly and by twos and threes, they came to him. There were few indeed who wouldn't require liberal use of camouflage. The rest followed Jordan out. Mass production of an individual. Not perfect in every instance. Good enough to pass in most. Docchi watched approvingly, uggesting occasional touches of makeup. "She can't speak or hear," he reminded the volunteers. "Remember that at all times, no matter what they do. Hide in difficult places. After Jerian is taken and the search called off and then resumed, let yourselves be found one at a time. Every guard that has to take you for examination is one less to look for the real Nona. They have to find her soon or get off the asteroid." The cosmetechs were busy; none stopped. There was one who looked up. "Get off?" she asked. "Why?" "The Sun is getting smaller." "Smaller!" exclaimed the woman. He nodded. "Handicap Haven is leaving the Solar System." Her fingers flew and molded the beautiful curve of a jaw where there had been none. Next, plastissue lips were applied. Nona was soon hiding in half a hundred places. And one more... orbit of Neptune was far behind and still the asteroid was accelerating. Two giant gravital units strained at the core of Handicap Haven. The third clamped an abnormally heavy gravity on the isolated world. Prolonged physical exertion was awkward and doubly exhausting. Hours turned into a day, but the units never faltered. "Have you figured it out as precisely as you should?" asked Docchi easily. "You share our velocity away from the Sun. You'll have to overcome it before you can start going back." The general ignored him. "If we could only turn off. that damned drive!" Engineer Vogel shrugged sickly. 'You try it," he suggested. "I don't want to be around when you do. It sounds easy: just a gravital unit. But remember there's a good-sized nuclear pile involved." "I know we can't," admitted the general, morosely looking at I the darkness overhead. "On the other hand, we can take off and blow this rock apart from a safe distance." "And lose all hope of finding her?" taunted Docchi. "We're losing her anyway," Cameron commented sourly. "It's not as bad as all that," consoled Docchi. "Now that you know where the difficulty is, you can always build another computer and furnish it with auxiliary senses. Or maybe build into it the facts of elementary astronomy." Cautiously, he shifted his frail body under the heavy gravity. "There's another solution, though it may not appeal to you. I can't believe Nona is altogether unique. There must be others like her. So-(galled 'born' mechanics, maybe. whose understanding of machinery is a form of empathy we've never suspected. Look hard enough and you may find them, perhaps in the most unlikely or unlovely body." General Judd grunted wearily, "If I thought you knew where she is -- " "You can try to find out," Docchi invited, glowing involuntarily. "Forget about the dramatics. General." said Cameron in disgust. "We've questioned him thoroughly. Resistance we would have had in any event. He's responsible merely for making it more effective than we thought possible." He added slowly; "At the moment, obviously, he's trying to tear down our morale. He doesn't have to bother. The situation is so bad that it looks hopeless. I can't think of a thing we can do that would help us." The Sun was high in the center of the dome. Sun? More like a very bright star. It cast no shadows; the lights in the dome did. They flickered and with monotonous regularity went out again. The general swore constantly and emotionlessly until service was restored. A guard approach with his captive. "I think I've found her, sir." Cameron looked at the girl in dismay. "Guard, where's your decency?" "Orders, sir," the man said. "Whose orders?" "Yours, sir. You said she was sound of body. How else could I find out?" Cameron scowled and thrust a scalpel deep into the girl's thigh. She looked at him with a tearstained face, but didn't move a muscle. "Plastissue, as any fool can see," he commented dourly. The guard looked revolted and started to lead her out. "Let her go," snapped the doctor. "Both of you will be safer, I think." The girl darted away. The ' guard followed her, shuddering, his eyes filled with a self-loathing that Cameron realized would require hours of psychiatric work to remove. Docchi smiled. "I have a request to make," "Go ahead and make it," snorted tae general. "We're likely to give you anything you want." "You probably will. You're going to leave without her. Very soon. When you do go, don't take all your ships. We'll need about three when we come to another solar system." General Judd opened his mouth in rage. "Don't you say anything you'll regret," cautioned Docchi. 'When you get back, what will you report to your superiors? Can you tell them that you left in good order, while there was still time to continue the search? Or will they like it better if they know you stayed until the last moment? So late that you had to abandon some of your ships?" The general closed his mouth and stamped away. Wordlessly, Cameron dragged after him. THE last ship had blasted off and the rocket trails had faded into overwhelming darkness. The Sun, which had been trying to lose itself among the other stars, finally succeeded. The asteroid In important new anthology There may be considerable controversy these days among readers of science fiction as to the merits and the differing approaches of older and newer s-f magazines. But there's np argument about the fact that s-f grew from adolescent space opera to its present maturity largely during the '#s -- a period when Attotndin Science Fie rion reigned alone as the top magazine in the Beld and its editor, John W. Campbell, Jr guided and influenced the foremost authors. Now John Campbell has for the first time made a selection of personal favorites from among the great number of first-class science fiction tales that passed across his desk and into the magazine between # and #. His book, just published, is called! This giant volume includes an introduction by Campbell, and twentythree outstanding short stories and novelettes by Asimov, de Camp. Heinlein, Leinster, Padgett, Russell, Simak, and many others -- # pages of the literature of the future at its best; only #. At your bookseller's now; or use the coupon below to order: I # Fifth Avenue, New York #, N.Y. I Please send me a copy of The Astoumting g Science Fiction Anthotos. I will pay postman I # plus postage when It arrives. It not I delighted , I may return It In # days for refund...Zone. State... was no longer the junkpile. It was a small world that had be come a swift ship. 'We can survive," said Docchi. "Power and oxygen, we have, and we can grow or synthesize our food." He sat beside Anti's tank, which had been returned to the usual place. A small tree nodded overhead in the artificial breeze. It was peaceful enough. But Nona wasn't there. "We'll get you out of the tank,' promised Jordan. "When she comes back, we'll rig up a place where there's no gravity. And we'll continue cold treatment." "I can wait," said Anti. "On this world I'm normal." Docchi stared forlornly about. Thene thing he wanted to sec wasn't there. "If you're worrying about Nona," advised Anti, "don't. The guards were pretty rough with the women, but plastissue doesn't feel pain. They didn't find her." "How do you know?" "Listen," said Anti. The ground shivered with the power of the gravital units. "As long as they're running, how can you doubt?" "If I could be sure -- "You can start now," Jordan said. "First, though, you'd better get up and turn around." Docchi scrambled to his feet. She was coming toward him. She showed no sign of strain. Except for a slight smudge on her wonderfully smooth and scarless cheek, she might just have stepped out of a beauty cubicle. Without question, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. This world, of course, though she could have done well on any world -- if she could have communicated with people as well as with machines. "Where were you hidipg?" Docchi asked, expecting no answer. She smiled. He wondered, with a feeling of helplessness, if machines could sense and appreciate her lovely smile, or whether they could somehow smile themselves. "I wish I could take you in my arms," he said bitterly. "It's not as silly. as you think," said Anti, watching from the surface of the tank. "You don't have any arms, but she has two. You can talk and hear, but she can't. Between you, you're a complete couple." "Except that she would never get the idea," he answered unhappily. Jordan, rocking on his hands, looked up quizzically. "I must be something like her. They used to call me a born mechanic; just put a wrench in my hand and I can do anything with a piece of machinery. It's as if I sense what the machine wants done to it. Not to the extent that Nona can understand, naturally. You might say it's reversed, that she's the one who can hear while I have to lip-read." "You never just gabble," Docchi prompted. "You have something in mind." Jordan hesitated. "I don't know if it's stupid or what. I was thinking of a kind of sign language with machines. You know, start with the simple ones, like clocks and such, and see what they mean to her. Since they'd be banc machines, she'd probably have pretty basic reactions. Then it's just a matter of -- " "You don't have to blueprint it," Docchi cut in excitedly. "That would be fine for determiniag elementary reactions, but I can't carry around a machisM shop; it wouldn't be practicaL There ought to be one variable madunc that would be portable and yet eonvey all meanings to her. "An electronic oscillator? Acid waves washed at the sidca the tank as Anti stirred impatiently. Witl yo two gr ea t brains work k out ia the lab, please? And when you get through with that problem, you'll have plenty more to keep you occupied until we get to die stars. Jordan and me, for instance. What future is there for a girl unless she can get married?" "That's right," Docchi said. "I've got an idea we can do better than normal doctors. Being accidental ourselves, we won't stop experimenting till we succeed. And we have hundredi of years to do it in." Glowing, literally, with pleasure, he bent over for Jordan to climb on his back. Then he kissed Nona and beaded for the labcantory. Nona smiled and followed. Tbere are tome things you don't need words or madunes to expreas, Anti called out "Keep that in mtod, will yon? She submerged co n te n tedly to tkt add bath. Above the domti the stars gteamed a brit svtoeome to the little world that flaohfd ffwmigh interstdlar spaoa. u an lUr MS lawniiBJ Maw a immm MiM aiii aa Katahut Said No By J. T. M#NT#SH When the machine ordered ony course of action, the answer was always yes. fxcept when -- N Earth a town died. Its name was Katahut. But Katahut was on It was like Koko's story to the Mikado. When Economics Center said. "Let a thing be done" it was as good as done -- practically. it was done. When EC said a town must die, the town was as good as dead -- practically, it was dead -- so why not say so? At New York EC headquarters, thousands of little cards had run upright along tiny, shining runways. Each card was a town. The machine which shuffled and dealt them, sent them on fresh journeys on the steel runways, br rejected them and shot them back the way they had come, was not strictly an electronic brain. It was rather a vast filing system, capable of selecting the one relevant True, an electronic brain was in circuit, directing the operation, but the brain treated the conclusions "of the selecto? as sacred, questioning nothing. "You do your job," it told the selector, in effect, "and I'll do mine." Lights acted on cells across the little runways, modified by holes or cuts . in the cards passing through. The selector worked for a long time, but wasted none of it. Jhe hundreds of cards that started were at once decimated. Those which remained were run again and again, a little more being taken into consideration each time. Rejection became slower and slower. Sometimes the thirty or so cards left would complete the run without any being eliminated. But the selector always had something else to try. When there were eleven cards left, each was a perfectly good solution to the problem fed to the selector. But no one would ever know that. No one would ever ask. The selector had its orders. It wasn't a batch of eleven cards that was wanted; it was one -- one card representing a town that best fitted EC requirements. The selector, in trouble, applied to the electronic brain for guidance. The brain pondered unemotionally and came up with the answer that, other things being equal, it would be best to select the town with the smallest population. Within four seconds a card was shot into a wire basket in the Coordinator's office. He picked it up and read the only word printed on it -- the name of the town. "Good God!" he said, aghast. "Katahut! Who would have thought it?" From that moment Katahut was as good as dead. T he Katahutans heard it oa the radio, saw it on the television screens, read it in the newspapers, were told about it by their neighbors, and then went to the city officials to see if it was true. The mayor was in a bad position, and no one knew it better than he did. On the one hand he had lost his office, his town and his home and might never be a mayor again. On the other, as a representative of government and law and order, he had to make sure that his people understood and obeyed the order without obstinacy or defiance. And all he had to say to them was what they knew already. Being a politician, he cursed the stupidity of EC for not leaving him some tirty crumb of reassurance to give. When your house is burned to the ground, it's nice to leam afterward that your wife has had the car out. If EC had allowed him to tell his people about the compensation arrangements, say ,... But they hadn't. They left him to say in words of one syllable what EC had said in officialese. 'Tt is necessary for the economic stability of Venus -- " he said, then realized he had quoted direct from the official notice. He went one step higher on the pseudo-Greek facade of the city hall. The crowd was growing in a way he didn't like. He would soon be a solitary man shouting vainly over the heads of people who didn't intend to do anything hostile, perhaps, but could relieve their feelings by making him look silly. "Look, people," he said. "They aren't evacuating Katahut for fun. There would be chaos if they left things as they are. Yes, chaos!" he exclaimed, forcing himself to warm up. "Costs in colonies are high, because so much still has to come from Earth. Venus has much of: what we need, but not enough. There are too many small towns on the planet. Too much transport is necessary. A careful economic calculation has shown that we are one town over the critical figure for the economic survival of Venus -- "We have heard all that, Robert," said ex-mayor Hank Todd. It was more than an interruption, It brought Mayor Henrison to a dead stop. Henrison was over fifty, but he always felt like a small boy before old Hank. He couldn't stop Hank from calling him Robert. He couldn't even try. It would make him look silly, particularly since everyone called Hank Hank. "What have you to say, if anything," Hank asked, "that isn't in the EC statement?" There was the rub. Henrison looked helplessly down at the tall, thin old man who had been mayor before him and who might have had this job instead of him. What would Hank have done? What Was there for anyone to do? Henrison was no shirker. He made a valiant try. "No, I've nothing new to say." he admitted. "But what most of you want to know is what the EC statement means. You should know, Hank. But there must be others still wondering. Thinking, perhaps, that it isn't really necessary for us all to pack up and go somewhere else. That Economic Center is making a mountain out of a molehill. I can tell them, at least, that that isn't so. Statistics isn't a game any more, # with mathematicians amusing themselves by working out how far such-and-such would stretch if piled end to end, or how many times people yawned in their life. It's a way of getting a clear warning of trouble ahead. "Without statistics we'd have gone on developing Venus, until gradually we saw there was something wrong with the works, tried to correct it and couldn't. We'd probably never know that all that was wrong was that there was one small town too many on the planet, and that if we'd evacuate it, shut it up and dismantled it, the colony would never have failed." Hank seemed to have appointed himself spokesman. Nobody disputed it. Hank was still a good man and he had the right kind of experience. He wasn't afraid to give a lead, which was what everyone wanted -- even Henrison, if the puzzled, vexed people in front of him would only realize it. "You trust these statistics, Robert?" Hank asked. "Certainly I do. A doctor gives you a drug that may be poison. You may even know it's poison. You don't know that it'll help you to take it. You have to take his word for it. I'm no statistician, Hank, any more than you are, but I'm ready to believe the answers." "The answers of a mechanical brain." Henrison knew the value of demonstration. He pulled out a small calculating machine. He pressed the buttons. "Twelve tq the Fower of five is #," he said. "That's not a difficult calculation. You can work it out on the back of an envelope in a few seconds. And when you do, you find it's right. After a bit you don't check the answers any more. You just check the machine every now and then, which the technicians do, of course. I think we can trust the answer, Hank." Hank said nothing, thinking. There was suddenly dead silence. In the curious emphatic way of crowds, everyone knew that a decision would be made and their course set in the next few seconds. It might be Hank's way, it might be Henrison's, it might be something quite different. "I think," said Hank quietly, "that a town, like an individual, has a right to live." The crowd cheered that wildly, impassioned speech. It was the first hint that someone thought the EC ruling needn't be final. No one wanted to be the first to suggest that there should be any resistance to the ruling. Perhaps even Hank himself needed that cheer before he took any definite step or made any decision. Having heard it, he turned and faced the crowd. "I'm going to the EC depot at Cannap," he said. "Anyone coming with me?" 'YjfHY the Coordinator on  Earth had been aghast when the name of Katahut came out of the selector was that Katahut was perhaps the only small town on Venus which he knew by name. It had been the first settlement on Venus, founded fifty years before. It had not been developed much, and it had not grown, because it was only by chance that the first ship had landed there. Otherwise the site had little to commend it. It was not on a river. There were no iron or coal deposits near by. The soil, for Venus, was not particularly good. It had been used as a base, no more, and the big and important towns had sprung up elsewhere. Now it wasn't even a base. Cannap was the capital, Regis the main spaceport, Harun the great supply base, Cornfield the industrial center. There was no economic reason for Katahut to exist. So after the first mild shock -- for the name of Katahut was taught in schools -- everyone saw that the natural choice, if a town had to be eliminated, was Katahut. They forgot, perhaps, that there were other small towns on Venus which served as little purpose as Katahut and had no historical significance. It didn't occur to them that the Katahutans had any genuine complaint. Many cities on Earth had been evacuated. It was wasteful to let town for which there was no real purpose die a slow and painful economic death. Indeed, most people had come to accept the benevolent rule of Economic Center, which gave them more leisure and put more money in their pockets to spend, to such an extent that it was almost taken for granted that everyone, everywhere, had done the same thing. Perhaps EC was a little abrupt with Katahut. At one time, before such a step was taken, there had been cautious, psychologically correct preparation. The people in a town to be evacuated -- all on Earth, so far, apart from two on Mars which evacuated themselves -- were shown the advantages of the decision, given plenty of time, encouraged for a while to move between their old place of residence and the new, and helped in every way. But that hadn't been necessary lately. The redistribution of population was only a tiny part cd the concerns of EC and didn't get much publicity. Occasionally.  particularly picturesque evacuation would rate an illustrated ar#  tide in the photographic magazines. The exacuation of a town with no economic purpose, as a rule, was worth only three or four lines in the newspapers which didn't cover that area. Katahut, of course, would rate much more than that, even on Mars. Most of the news value of the evacuation would be in its name and history, some in the fact that it was the first Venusian town to be affected, with a good bit of propaganda because it was the only economic adjustment necessary on Venus, according to the EC survey. Later, naturally, it was pointed out with heat, irony, amusement and cool disdain that one simple question to an electronic brain fed with all the data would have shown exactly what would happen. That was the trouble with cybernetics. It wasn't merely that the data had to be correct and complete. It was not enough that the right questions should be asked. All the right questions had to be asked. And no one thought of asking: "Suppose Katahut raises such a row that the whole question of compulsory evacuation has to be reviewed?" Others, of course, said an electronic brain wasn't necessary for that. Common sense ought to have shown EC enough to prevent the mistake... Everyone, as usual, was very good at shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. H ank hadn't been allowed to bring anyone in with him. The EC chief at Cannap was quite prepared to see him, give him a drink and have a friendly chat, but as Hank was obviously the man who mattered in Katahut's mild revolt against EC --  like a rabbit trying to push a ten-ton truck off its front door -- it would be far better to deal with him direct, without giving him the advantage of a sympathetic audience. "You want to be satisfied that this step is necessary, Mr. Todd," the EC local chief said. "Very natural. It may seem to you, an intelligent but untrained man, that some other method would get the same results, or that the selector on Earth didn't know its job. "What we work for, Mr. Todd, is balance. Only a balanced economy can be a healthy economy. Now Venusian development is held back at the moment by settlements which are moribund but refuse to die. Katahut, for example. You may think your town pays its way. In a sense it does, but only at the expense of the rest of Venus. As you know, we long ago adopted a policy of ## equalization of freight charges on Venus, so that everything you buy in Katahut costs exactly what it costs anywhere else on the planet. I won't go into the reasons for this, but we don't have to argue about that, do we? Now the existence of Katahut -- " "That," said Hank, "is exactly the point. I was wondering when you'd get to it." The EC chief raised his eyebrows at this rustic bluntness. "I didn't want to interrupt," said Hank, "but the very first step was wrong. I don't want to be satisfied that this step is necessary. I'm not going to argue on the lines of 'necessary to whom or to what?' Suppose you came to me and told me my death was necessary to the survival of the human race. I'd still want to live." The EC man smiled coldly. "This is hardly a question of life or death, Mr. Todd." "No, it's a question of liberty, which is often more important than life or death. And don't sigh and think 'fanatic' to yourself, either. We've got a nice little town which suits me and a lot of other people. The soil may not grow orchids, but it suits my truck garden. We've got a mayor who is honest and isn't a fool. The preacher says the kind of things we like to hear on Sundays. We live in a place that we and our fathers built. "Maybe you can give me an other place where I can grow vegetables and where there's  good mayor and a good preacher But you can't give me Ted Jacob next door and Cuan O'Farrell up the street and Bill Houliston on the other side of town when I want a good argument. Look, Mr. EC Chief, suppose all you say i true -- what do we owe Venus? We came here and made our beds and you won't let us lie on them. We didn't develop away from you; you developed away from us. That's your funeral, not ours. "Mr. Todd, I hope youe not going to say that science -- " But Hank was properly wound up by this time. "I'm not going to say anything about science and neither are you. I don't know what you were going to say, but it wasn't about science; it was about gadgetry. A metal brain said we had to shift. What has that to do with science? The brain only said the kind of thing you built it to say. You could have done the same thing without any machines, by making tables instead. Read down the columns and then across and finally you prove that x is equal to x. EC is playing with a toy, Mr. EC Chief, like a new watch. "A watch and an electronic brain tell you what you make them tell you. Does the brain on Earth know anything about my cucumbers? Does it know Cuati O'Farrcll? When it does. I'U be pleased to meet it. Until then, I don't see why I should let it run my life." Hank was entirely wrong and the EC chief told him so. But Hank had been a local politician for thirty years, so he didn't stay on one subject long enough to be nailed down. He didn't know ex actly what he was trying to do. He only knew that whenever there was an opening, he would try to squeeze through it. And suddenly there it was. Of course, if it's the unanimous verdict of the people of Katahut that they want to remain where they are, as a community..." the EC chief hedged at last. Hank pounced on it. "Yes? what then?" , "Why, we might find it possible to evacuate another similar town. Or make other similar adjustments as indicated by the cybernetics department." Hank knew he had no time to think. To get the EC chief into a comer, he had had to go into it himself. He knew -- none could know better -- how difficult it was to get a unanimous verdict on anjrthing which affected a lot of people in many different ways. But... "Right," he said, rising. "I accept your conditions. Without reservations. I better leave now. The EC man was put off stroke, wondering what conditions he had offered. When Hank had gone, the chief got on the radiophone to Venus Space Station I to Earth Space and asked for the Coordinator. He was no fool. He told the Coordinator coolly what had happened, knowing that he would make a much better impression that way than apologizing and excusing himself. He did. The Coordinator said nothing but, "Wait." The Cannap chief waited for forty-five seconds. Then the Coordinator was back. "The electronic brain says there will be no unanimous verdict." "Does the electronic brain," asked the Cannap chief irrelevantly, "know Hank Todd's cucumbers?" It didn't, of course. There was no reason why it should. N ot in any way was it the fault of the electronic brain. It had had insufficient data, many important things like Hank Todd's cucumbers being omitted. It didn't know Cuan O'Farrell and it didn't know Bill Houliston. Curiously enough, Cuan O'Farrell was one of Hank's most obtrusive stumbling-blocks. He not only wouldn't sign the roll, he went round after Hank and old Bill persuading people to take their names off it. "This," Hank told him grimly, "has got to stop." "I agree," Cuan said cordially. "It's a lot of nonsense, and the sooner you stop making a fool of yourself, the better." Hank talked for four hours without getting to first base. Then suddenly, as he was dozing off that night, he cameawake with a shout, jumped out of bed and into his pants. Cuan was already asleep and was even less prepared, when roused, to listen to reason than he had been that afternoon, "You say," said Hank, "that it's no violation of freedom to split us up and send us to the four corners of Venus?" "This afternoon I did," Cuan retorted, "and tomorrow I will again. Right now I want to sleep." "You're a socialist, Cuan." "Did you waken me up to tell me that? I've been a socialist for sixty-five years." What Cuan meant by socialism was quite different from anything ever meant by the word before space travel began. But that was incidental. "Suppose you were mayor, Cuan?" Cuan came fully awake and looked shrewdly at Hank. He was suspicious, but interested. "I'm not," he pointed out. "No, but this is a question o liberty and the rights of man. Suppose you'd worked on this town for the fifty years of its existence and at last got yourself elected mayor. If they split up the town, all your work on social ism would have been wasted. You see that? You'd have to start in some other town, fifty years too late. Would that be right?" Cuan looked at him unblinkingly for a while. Then he said: "No, it would not be right. You got that petition handy?" Next to Cuan, Mary Brookshw was the most difficult. Mary, who was always called May, was eighteen and the prettiest girl in Katahut. She was leaving an#rway. Katahut was nothing to her. She saw no reason why it shouldn't be evacuated. "It's a dull, priggish, half-dead little place," she told Hank hotly, "full of dull, priggish, half-dead little people. It should have been broken up long ago. There are still people who won't speak to me because I once walked down the street in a sunsuit, because I don't go to church and because I wouldn't marry Jim Jacobs. And, because I've been out with two or three different boys, even people who like me call me boy-crazy. This is a town where you're guilty until you're proved innocent." "It's your home. May," Hank said quietly. "Far more than ours. I was born on Earth. You were not only bom here, your father and mother were." "They're dead and I'm leaving," said May. "I've had eighteen years here and it seems like a thousand." "The first eighteen are always the worst." "Don't get me wrong about this, Hank," she said. "I like you. You were nice to me when I was a kid, and no more and no less nice to me when I grew up. If you'd had a son or maybe a grandson, I guess I could have gone for him and I might have been your daughter-in-law or granddaughter-in-law. If it was just  personal thing, I'd sign your petition like a shot. But what I feel is that everyone who signs that sheet of yours has to feel this town's worth saving, and I don't." Hank recognized defeat and left her alone. Perhaps, since she was leaving, the EC men wouldn't think the absence of her name on the list kept the verdict from being unanimous. Later on, when it began to look as if, after all, there was a chance of getting the unanimous verdict, Hank wasn't so happy about May's refusal to sign the petition. Then she walked in shamefacedly and signed. "People have been so decent lately," she complained. "Did you put them up to it? No, I suppose you wouldn't. You're too straight. Presentations, good-luck tokens, everybody saying they were sorry I was going and they hoped I'd be back some time. Then I realized there wouldn't be anywhere to come back to. Maybe the fact that there are two generations of Henshaws buried in the churchyard means something after all. They didn't live long, did they?' Hank was very tender with her. He knew somehow that she wouldn't live long either. Whatever anyone said about the Henshaws, nobody could accuse them of being lucky. Y oung Tom HolUns, unlike Cuan and May, wasn't difficult at all. He just wouldn't sign. Tom was a tall, good-looking young fellow -- the right type for May, one would have thought. But they had bounced apart in childhood somehow, and never got together again. Tom didn't often argue, but when hewas sure he was right about something, there was no shaking him. "You see yourself as a crusader," he told Hank. "On one side the cold, fcelinglcss machine, on the other the old man championing the little people." "If you say so, Tom," said Hank agreeably. Tom grinned. "You're good at it. of course," he admitted. "You've done wonders already. But you're all wrong. This isn't a battle between men and machines." "Just what I've been saying all along," said Hank. "I've got nothing again electronic brains. They do their job. All I say is we shouldn't be shifted if we don't want to shift." "No force? No coercion?" "That's right." "Well. I hope you'll be consistent and not try to coerce me into signing your protest." "You think the machine is right?" "Yes." "You want the machine to be right?" "Sure I do. Why not?" "You'd rather a mechanical brain was right than a human one?" "Hank, no doubt you could argue the hind leg off a horse, but you're not going to get the chance to argue the hind leg off me. I'll come around and help you to collect signatures if you like, but I won't sign." "That's a curious attitude." "Could be. It's simple enough if you put it this way -- I'll help you because I like you, but I won't sign the roll because I don't think it's right. See?" About that time the EC chief from Gannap came to nsit Katahut. Hank welcomed him gravely, but with inward glee. The EC man was worried. He had heard how the protest was going. He told Hank; "I hear most of the people in town think as you do, Mr. Todd." "It's beginning to look that way." "Of course, this petition isn't official, you understand. You are the prime mover in this appeal, and though I understand you once were mayor of the town, you no longer hold..." Hank cut that short. "Mayor Henrison was one of the first to sign. Want him to make it official?" ri'HE EC chief was ready to try anything, apparently. He had made several other objections, none of which cut any ice, and he seemed to know it. At last he said: "Mr. Todd, I'll be frank with you. I had no authority to suggest that a unanimous protest would make us change our minds over the evacuation of Katahut. In fact, I didn't. You grabbed the idea and left before I could explain." "You're going back on your word, you mean." said Hank affably. "Not exactly..." "Approximately is near enough. When do the troops move in?" EC chief was startled. Hank was a jump ahead of him. "Your obvious plan," re marked Hank, "is to get me on incitement to violence. It won't be easy. I'm past the age of violence myself, and I haven't said any more to anyone than that they should stay put." "Mr. Todd, you have shown yourself a very capable man. EC needs men like you. Age doesn't matter, for it doesn't seem to bother you. I -- " "That may be the best approach," Hank said thoughtfully, nodding. "If you want me to kick ; cii irto the street, all you have tf :'o is come right out with it : I ' o.'.';r to bribe me." The EC chief groped for words. "I jish you would undTStand. It's a simple question of necessity. We must evacuate one of these small uneconomic towns. It's all very well for you to say, 'Why Katahut?' But if Katahut gets away with this, do you think any other small town will submit? No. they'll say, "You didn't evacuate Katahut, so why come to us?" "And quite right t#o. Towns have a right to live, just like irdi"k'uals." "Eut now vc can the  i  : I factors ' nd tlir : .I .er for "'It ' I't dc: ' : c" o 'i right. t.ook. ? r. you pvy be a .lero here and nu.v, but in a hundred years or less you'll be cursed as the reactionary who brought the whole Venusian colony down in ruins." "Oh, come now. You may have an electronic brain that can tell you how long to roast meat and whether it will rain on Tuesday, but not whether a town should die. There must be some other way." "There's no other way!" the EC chief protested. "Some day we may have a civilization that isn't built on economics, but we haven't got it now. Before cybernetics, things just took their course. Tley went wrong or right. If they went wrong, it was often possible to say afer that it was at one precise point that the mistake was made. Cybernetics tells us now where the mistake is, so that we don't need to make it. The whole future of the human race -- " "Now let's not lose our sense of proportion," said Hank gently. "All we're talking about, at most, is the future of the colony of Venus." "All right, the whole fiitn'-e of the colony of Venus hangs on just this one little thing." "But wC' don't tl'-ink it's httle thing. Ve think it's a ver big thing. Ask your machine. me other questions. "'#I it tbf' first 'ohition is no good, because #I Htahut says no." The EC chief went away. The next day was the original date set for the evacuation of Katahut. He said he'd be back. Hank didn't doubt it. Neither did Tom Hollins, who had been a witness at the interview. "Maybe I should argue," said Tom. "Not to let you convince me that I should sign the roll, but to try to ' convince you that you should give up the whole idea and let them evacuate Katahut." "Maybe you should," agreed Hank. "Wouldn't do a bit of good. My cucumbers are coming alng fine. So is the petition, for what it's worth. You know, you're the only one who hasn't signed it, Tom. How about making it unanimous?" Tom shook his head, grinning. back the next morning, he brought a hundred Cannap police officers and fifty trucks with him. Hank surveyed them grimly. On his right, Cuan O'Farrell stroked his chin thoughtfully. On his left, Tom Hollins raised his eyebrows as the police quietly dispersed through the small town. "The petition," said the EC chief, flanked by two uniformed officers. "Is it unanimous?" "Not quite." said Hank. "Then..." "Wait a bit," murmured Tom Hollins. "What are these men here for? And all those trucks?' "There may be a little trouble We want to be ready for it. If the petition had been unanimous, of course, we might..." "It looks to me." said Tom, "as if the fact that the petition isn't unanimous is only an excuse. You didn't wait to get the answer before you sent your men to do whatever it is they are doing. And you didn't bring all those trucks for nothing. Let's try something, shall we? Hank, where do I sign?" "I think you're right," Hank remarked. "It doesn't make any difference. The petition is complete, Mr. EC Chief. The nex' move is up to you." "I'm sorry. We hoped yo would fail. It would have made it easier. But as I Jpld you yesterday, the petition can't be allowed to make any difference. This is too important." They heard a girl's scream and May Henshaw appeared, thrown over the shoulder of a policeman, but still kicking and struggling. "From my previous experience of May," said Tom, "I'm surprised that one man can handle her. We'll see what -- " Hank held him back. "I think May will manage." he said. He was right. When May wa. dropped to her feet, she deal. with her captor with extreme efficiency. Tom applauded loudly. "Now if she'd been as ugly as sin," he remarked, "she'd never have learned that. It's rather sad, but girls as pretty as May can usually look after themselves." He had spoken casually. Cuan and Hank were old. He wasn't. He swung at the EC chief and the chief felt it. Whether his nose was broken remained to be seen. It was certainly badly bent. The population of Katahut was eight hundred and twenty-three. There were a hundred policemen. That meant # Katahutans for every cop. And the cops had orders not to be unduly violent. People like Tom Hollins were under no such disadvantages. It was a comic battle. It isn't funny when the weak are hurt, but in the battle of Katahut the only people who were hurt were cops, and that's always funny. Hank moved around under the capable protection of Tom and May, making sure that no serious damage was done. It was better to tear the pants off the policeman than hit them over the head. Without pants they could still move, and all the movement was out of Katahut. A man isn't necessarily a coward when he runs from a woman. More policemen ran from May #  J than from Tom. In fact, there was a brief period when Tom, m difficulties, was very glad of May's help and protection. But May, after all, only had # poinds or so at her command. Some of the other women had nearly twice that. Muscle, too, not the soft flesh of Earthbound housewives and secretaries. They could hoe a row or chop a tree with any man- -- or poke a jaw, for that matter. When one of the policemen got a truck going, there was a wild rush to climb aboard. The truck wobbled off in the general direction of Cannap, with nearly forty cops clinging to it -- and hardly half a dozen whole pairs of pants. In an hour there wasn't a cop left in Katahut except the two local policemen, who darted home to get out of uniform in case anyone should make a mistake. Bill and May, breathless but content, looked down the dusty road. "Will they come back?" Cuan asked. Hank pondered. "I don't think so. There would be too much public feeling now. They may put me in jail for a month or two, mich  I of these I Poubteday  Science Fiction book hits do you want? tMt btiow wr ia btt Sf far # by iohn Colliar # by Robert A. Hainlain #S by Ray Bradbury # by L. Spragva d Comp # by Sam Marwin, Jr. # by John Wyndham # by ttaac Asimov # by Nolson Bond # by Roy Bradbury # by Robort A. HoinUln # but I don't think they'll do even that. I was careful not to raise a hand in anger. You'd better keep out of the way, Tom. I don't think it matters for ydu, May. They can't put you in jail for knocking out policemen. It would make them look silly." "Then it's over?" said Cuan, apparently troubled by a feeling of anti-climax. "I think so. They'll try another small town now. It will tell them, quite rightly, to go to hell. I think we've won our case." They had. EC couldn't keep a hundred cops quiet -- men who, despite everything, were more in sympathy with the Katahutans than not. And a dozen Katahutans told the story, with glee, to any newspaperman who cared to ask for it. It made good copy. There was hardly a newspaper on Venus, Earth or Mars that didn't run cartoons on the Battle of Katahut -- or. as someone christened it, the Battle of Sans Culottes. Everyone laughed and thought it was a good story. Hardly anyone paid any attention to the serious articles in the same papers pointing out that Katahut's fight for life was all very well, but if the electronic brain said this meant economic chaos in Venus, it was probably right. It was right, of course. T he man who is used to distances expressed in miles and to time intervals measured in years always feels at a loss when it comes to astronomical distances and to geological times. He hears an astronomer refer casually to "a comparatively near star, only eleven lightyears away" -- each light-year being # miles! Or he hears a geologist say that a lump years ago. Of course, scientists are now generally believed to know what they are talking about, but the astronomical measurement is still one thing, for after all, that star can be seen and photographed, while the time measurement is another. Who, I was once asked acidly, kept a calendar? There is a one-word answer to that question. Not who, but what. Answer: radioactivity. Just about half a century ago it was realized that the radioactive decay of uranium produces helium. The late Lord Rutherford of Nelson realized one possible application of this phenomenon immediately. This, he said, would permit dating the age of minerals, provided the minerals had trapped the helium. All one had to do was to measure the helium content of a mineral, then its uranium content, and make a good guess how much helium has escaped. That way the age of the oldest minerals was determined sumed that half of the helium had managed to seep out, the true age would be double that figure. A few years later Prof. Boltwood came up with a better suggestion. Helium, just because it could and probably did escape, was not reliable enough. But meanwhile it had been found that uranium changed ultimately into lead, which did not escape. One merely had to measure and compare the uranium and lead contents. With his method Prof. Boltwood determined the age of the oldest minerals as # years. When this figure was first announced, about #, it seemed so fantastic that it was generally disbelieved. But it was accepted only a few years later, especially since a number of scientists had done their best to accelerate or decelerate natural radioactive processes. They had tried heat and cold, pressure and vacuum, electric and magnetic field, and every combination of them. The very fact that they had failed utterly was important. If nothing they, could think of and apply made any impression on the rate of change, it was likely that nothing that would happen in Nature would change the rate. But this uranium-lead method, joined some time later by the thorium-lead method, was applicable only for long intervals. years, but not # years. It was like the speedometer of a car which will tell you that you have driven # miles, but which cannot be used to measure two yards of cloth. For that you need a tape measure. One of the most important developments of the postwar years is that a reliable method for dating comparatively short periods of time is now in existence. De vcloped originally by Drs. J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby of the University of Chicago, it also relies on . the measurement of residual radioactivity. But the radioactivity element involved is not one of the heavy elements comparatively short-lived isotope of carbon with the mass #, consequently. the method is known as the carbon-# or C-# method. C-# has a so-called "half life" of # years (with an uncertainty of # years either way), which means that at the end of .# years a piece of pure C-# would be half gone as far as radioactivity is concerned. With such a short half life, C-# would have vanished from the face of the Earth long ago and would by now be something which-might be determined by theory -- if it . were not formed constantly. Cosmic rays transform a few nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere into C-# at a steady rate. Combined with oxygen, these C-# atoms appear as carbon dioxide, are absorbed by plants, go into starches, are eaten by animals and men. In short, every living thing is permeated to a known extent with the "hot" atoms of C-#. As soon as the living thing dies, it stops absorbing C-#. A beam fashioned from a tree that was felled # years ago will show half as much radioactivity from C-# atoms as a beam from a tree felled last year. It is easy to understand the principle. If the C-# activity of a living thing is known, one only has to measure the radioactivity of a no-longer-living substance. If one can be sure that there is no radioactivity from other sources around, the two figures can be compared directly. When Dr. Libby began his work, he naturally first tested his method by measuring the age of things which did not need measuring, because their age was known. One of the first objects he tested was a piece of wood from a fallen sequoia tree which had been sawed through. Botonists had counted the tree rings to determine its age. It must have been a tedious job, for there were # of them! Dr. Libby reduced his sample to pure carbon and went to work with Geiger counter and slide rule. The result was # years, which is close enough for any purpose. Then he tested a piece of wood from a Hittite palace in Syria. Historians had dated the palace as having been built not earlier than # B. C. and not later than # B. C. The C-# method gave the age of the wood as # years. Another test was a piece of wood from an Egyptian sarcophagus which actually had a date on it. That date read, in our terminology, # B. C. The C-# method said that the wood was # years old. Some of these tests, besides proving the acuracy of the C-# method, incidentally show that the methods of dating developed by the historians were correct too. All historical objects that could be dated were found to agree within a few years with the dates assigned to them by the historians. I wrote "all historical objects that could be dated," for not every historical object can be tested by the C-# method. The method works only with things which were once alive. You cannot dat an old armor, nor a Stone ruin, nor an old sword. But if that sword has a bone handle, you can date the handle. The restriction to objects o organic origin is one of the four limitations of the C-# method. The second is that the object to be dated must weigh at least one ounce. The third limitation is that the object is destroyed in the process. And the fourth is that there is a time limit. Because of the short half life of C-#, the method begins to waver when the object is # years old; at such an age, there is very little radioactivity left. And # years is as far as it will go. The C-# method has led to a number of surprising results, especially when applied to Indian relics. For reasons not known to me, archeologists thought that the Indians of the Hudson Valley area had settled there in fairly recent times. But C-# measurements of relics gave rather high ages, the oldest of them dating back to # B. C. Fiber sandals found in eastern Oregon, completely undatable in any other way, were found to be # years old. In addition to having improved archeology, the C-# method has also had some influence on recent geology. On a map of the State of Oregon, you'll easily locate Crater Lake National Park, with Crater Lake in the center. It was obvious from geological evidence that the volcano which is now water-filled must have exploded at a comparatively recent time. But geologists could only say that it was sometime between # and # years ago, maybe a little longer, possibly somewliat less. Then somebody found a tree which had been destroyed by  lava flow from that eruption. Of course it had been burned to charcoal, but charcoal can be tested. It turned out that the eruption had taken place # years ago, just about half the time of the lowest estimate made. The most important result so far is the actual dating of the Ice Age. The whole Ice Age. consisting of four glaciations interrupted by much longer interglacial periods, is estimated to have very beginnings to the melting of the glaciers during their last retreat. The customary figure given for the melting away of the glaciers of the last advance was # years. Since this was a figure that was still within reach of the C-# method, some Ice Age material was tested. In Wisconsin tliere was a forest which had been pushed down by the glaciers of the last advance, and this was worked on. The result sounded incredible at first: # years. This was D id you ever miss making an interesting observation just because you didn't know there was something to see? I did, and if I hadn't been behind in my reading, I might have contributed to something which is still a controversial matter. And every time I see a robin... But let me begin at the beginning, which happens to be in Australia, even though the story itself is essentially an American one. Australia is, as everybody knows, the land of strange animore recent by far than anybody had believed, especially since it marked the last advance, not the last retreat. The retreat could not be studied in Wisconsin; but in Nebraska they found an old forest which had grown up after the retreat of the last ice sheet. They gave an age of # years. Comparable material from Europe, procured in a great hurry, gave figures which differed from the Wisconsin and Nebraska result only within the expected margin of error. The overall length of the Ice Age probably was what geologists say, but the last glaciation was much closer to our time than believed. It was still going strong # years ago. but it lasted for less than # centuries. mats. But it seems as if the Australians did not know as much of theiranimals as one would wish -- it also seems that they "knew" a lot of things that weren't so -- and a quarter-century ago the Australian publishing firm of Angus  Robertson decided to do a set of books on Australian Natural History, written by Australians for Australians. One of these was about Australian birds, written by Alec H Chisholm and published, in #. I own a copy of that book, on page # of which there are two paragraphs reading: Early in # a boy living near Melbourne wrote to me, stating that he had seen English Starlings picking up ants in their beaks and placing them under their wings. If this had been the first report of the kind I should have doubted the evidence of the boy's eyes. However, seven years previously a Sydney man, one who had watched birds in aviaries and in the wild during many years, had asked me; "What is the reason why soft-billed birds such as starlings, jays, etc., when on the ground, pick up soldier ants, putthem under their wings, and after a while take them out again?" Now, thebare facts having been stated, the reader knows as much of this matter as I do, and probably as much as anyone else does. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is nothiflfe in text-books to indicate that starlings in Britain place ants beneath their wings. I have to add that I got the book in # and must have read these paragraphs then, but that they evidently made no impression on me, for I had to look them up later. Now the scene shifts to Washington, D. C., where I lived for several years in a rented house on Rhode Island Avenue, the typical two-story one-family Washington home, with a front lawn and a back yard and big old trees all around. Also much birdlife, yellow finches and English sparrows, cardinals and catbirds, blue jays and starlings. On a hot afternoon in late summer #, I sat on my front porch, reading, paying very little attention to the robins on the lawn. There were some more on my neighbor's lawn and my neighbors, an old couple, paid as little attention to them as I did. Among the robins on their lawn was a young one which finally attracted notice by behaving queerly. It ran back and forth with short, quick steps, moved in a small circle with one wing and tail dragging on the grass, then tumbled and fell. It sat still, apparently exhausted. My neighbor went to pick the bird up, which he permitted her to do without a struggle. Naturally the woman assumed that the young bird was hurt. She looked unsuccessfully for a wound and then called my wife Olga to her, exclaiming: "The poor thing is all covered with ants." The two women brushed the ants out of the feathers with a soft brush; the bird did not protest and sat quietly. Somewhat at a loss what to do next, they called me in. It was decided to perch the ' bird on top of the garage, out of reach of the cats of the neighborhood. The young robin stayed put for a few minutes, then walked to the rim of the garage's roof, looked down with some curiosity, and suddenly flew away. c It was at about that instant that Olga realized what we had seen. Just a few days earlier, a book by Frank W. Lane had arrived from England -- it has been issued in Spring # in the United States under the title Animal Wonder World -- but I had as yet merely looked at it, my mind being on missiles, and Olga read it first. Lane told what had transpired since Chisholm had inserted that short statement in his book. A copy of Chisholms book had come to the University of Berlin and Prof. Erwin Stresemann had wondered whether the English starling had actually picked up a new habit in Australia. Stresemann published a translation of Chisholm's statement in the German Ornithological Monthly. He received an astonishing volume of mail, but because of the war this did not become known. Shortly after the war, Frank W. Lane published an article on this habit in the British magazine Country Life, whereupon he found himself at the receiving end of lots of letters. Scores of people have watched scores of birds put ants under their wings. The champion "anter" in England is a thrush; in America it seems to be the robin which, zoologically speaking, is also a thrush. H. R. Ivor in Canada decided that an aviary should be a convenient place to observe "anting." He was right. But other observers, who made the same decision, did not see anything unusual happen. These are the ones who claim that it is all a superstition. Of course, their position is difficult, for it is much harder to prove that something does not happen than it is to prove that it does. And the ones who say it docs happen because they watched it happen number among them some people with a reputation to uphold. The American reports seem to indicate that thrushes, including robins, crows and starlings seem especially addicted to "anting." Blue jays and pigeons do not do it at all, it seems. The main question, since the fact can hardly be doubted, is "why?" Chisholm advanced the suggestion that the formic acid, sprayed into the feathers by the trapped ants, kills off parasites. He probably does not hold that opinion any more. Those birds which do not "ant" -- which is most of them -- have parasites, too. So far there is no definite answer. But several observers stressed "the evident enjoyment" of the birds and their exhaustion afterward. That, to me, sounds like a binge. On formic acid! Wish I had really watched that afternoon in Washington. Is it leal to use the metric system in the United States? Not only did our Congress make the metric system legal in the United States in #, it also defined the inch and the foot in terms of centimeters, the mile in terms of kilometers and so on. In addition to that the weight of the coins were fixed in metrie weights, the nickel at # grams, the dime at ## ihe quarter at grams and the half dollar at #y grams. Is there such a term as "explosion lirrut" and what does it xnean I probably could give a belter answer if my correspondent had quoted the whole sentence or at least told me what he was reailing about. The term may refer to the limits of the danger area of an explosion, or it may refer to the admix ture of explosive gases to the air of a closed room. If there is not enough of the explosive gas present, no explosions will occur. If there is too much, no explosion will occur either. These "explosion limits" vary widely for different explosive gases. Expressed in percentages of the available space, the values for some substances are: Hydrogen # # Alcohol # # Marsh gas # # Ether # # Benzene # # HI. Gas # # These limits explain a few other things too. You can smell an admixture of illuminating gas to the air long before it has reached the lower limit. Conversely, the explosion limits for hydrogen are rather wide, which helps to make hydrogen leaks so dangerous. Those of carbon monoxide are even wider (# -- #,'#), but since the lower limit is high, poisoning occurs long before there is danger of explosion. I wonder where the pilot and crew will iet the energy tor keeping warm in space. ls long as the rocket is burning, some of that might be piped into the cabin, but I understand that in any space trip the rockets will burn for a short time only. Strangely enough, we now know that the main engineering problem will be to keep the cabin cool enough! Pll explain more about that in the main section of this department in the near future.  Anybody who wanted to estepe death covid, by paying a very simple price -- denial of lifel Dear Cod, she thought, he mustn't see if. It's so beautiup and he always kills beauty. "I'm just looking at the Moon,' she said listlessly. "It's green." Mustn't, mustn't see it. And now, with luck, he wouldn't. For the face, as if it also heard and sensed the menace in the voice, # E' are you up to?" Her husband's voice, chopping through her mood of terrified rapture, made her heart jump like a startled cat, yet by some miracle of feminine selfcontrol her body did not show a tremor. was moving back from the window's glow into the outside dark, but slowly, reluctantly, and still faunlike, pleading, cajoling, tempting, and incredibly beautiful. "Close the shutters at once, you little fool, and come away from the window!" "Green as a beer bottle," she went on dreamily, "green as emeralds, green as leaves with sunshine striking through them and green grass to lie on." She couldn't help saying those last words. They were her token to the face, even though it couldn't hear. "Effie!" She knew what that last tone meaqj. Wearily she swung shut the ponderous lead inner shutters and drove home the heavy bolts. That hurt her fingers; it always did, but he mustn't know that. "You know that those shutters are not to be touched! Not for five more years at least!" "I only wanted to look at the Moon," she said, turning around, and then it was all gone -- the face, the night, the Moon, the magic -- and she was back in the grubby, stale little hole, facing an angry, stale little man. It was then that the eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans and the crackle of the electrostatic precipitators that sieved out the dust reached her consciousness again like the bite of a dentist's drill. "Only wanted to look at the Moon!" he mimicked her in falsetto. "Only wanted to die like a little fool and make me that much more ashamed of you!" Then his voice went gruff and professional. "Here, count yourself." She silently took the Geiger Counter he held at arm's length, waited until it settled down to a steady ticking slower than a clock -- due only to cosmic rays and indicating nothing dangerous -- and then began to comb her body with the instrument. First her head and shoulders, then out along her arms and back along their under side. There was something oddly voluptuous about her movements, although her features were gray and sagging. The ticking did not change its tempo until she came to her waist. Then it suddenly spurted, clicking faster and faster. Her husband gave an excited grunt, took a quick step forward, froze. She goggled for a moment in fear, then grinned foolishly, dug in the pocket of her grimy apron and guiltily pulled out a wristwatch. He grabbed it as it dangled from her fingers, saw that it had a radiurh dial, cursed, heaved it up as if to smash it on the floor, but instead put it carefully on the table. "You imbecile, you incredible imbecile," he softly chnnted to himself through clenched teeth, with eyes half closed. She shrugged faintly, put the Geiger Counter on the table, and stood there slumped. He waited until the chanting had soothed his anger before speaking again. He said quietly, "I do suppose you still realize the sort of world you're living in?" S HE nodded slowly, staring at nothingness. Oh, she realized, all right, realized only too well. It was the world that hadn't realized. The world that had gone on stockpiling hydrogen bombs. The world that had put those bombs in cobalt shells, although it had promised it wouldn't, because the cobalt made them much more terrible and cost no more. The world that had started throwing those bombs, always telling itself that it hadn't thrown enough of them yet to make the air really dangerous with the deadly radioactive dust that came from the cobalt. Thrown them and kept on throwing until the danger point, where air and ground would become fatal to all human life, was approached. Then, for about a month, the two great enemy groups had hesitated. And then each, unknown to the other, had decided it could risk one last gigantic and decisive attack without exceeding the danger point. It had been planned to strip off the cobalt cases, but somqpne forgot and then there wasn't time. Besides, the military, scientists of each group were confident that the lands of the other had got the most dust. The two attacks came within an hour of each other. After that, the Fury. The Fury of doomed men who think only of taking with them as many as possibl of the enemy, and in this case -- they hoped -- all. The Fury of suicides who know they have botched up life for good. The Fury of cocksure men who realize they have been outsmarted by fate, the enemy, and themselves, and know that they will never be able to improvise a defense when arraigned before the high court of history -- and whose unadmitted hope is that there will be no high court of history left to arraign them. More cobalt bombs were dropped during the Fury than in all the preceding years of the war. After the Fury, the Terror. Men and women with death sifting into their bones through their nostrils and skin, fighting for bare survival under a dust-hazed sky that played fantastic tricks with the light of Sun and Moon, like the dust from Krakatoa that drifted around the world For years. Cities, countryside, and air were alike poisoned, alive with deadly radiation. The only realistic chance for continued existence was to retire, for the five or ten years the radiation would remain deadly, to some well-sealed and radiation-shielded place that must also be copiously supplied with food, water, power, and a means of airconditioning. Such places were prepared by the far-seeing, seized by the stronger, defended by them in turn against the desperate hordes of the dying... until there were no more of those. After that, only the waiting, the enduring. A mole's existence, without beauty or tenderness, but' withear and guilt as constant companions. Never to see the Sun, to walk among the trees -- or even know if there were still trees. Oh, yes, she realized what the world was like. OU understand, too, I suppose, that we were allowed to reclaim this ground-level apartment only because the Committee believed us to be responsible people, and because I've been making a damn good showing lately?" "Yes, Hank." "I thought you were eager for privacy. You want to go back to the basement tenements?" God, no! Anything rather than that fetid huddling, that shameless communal sprawl. And yet, was this so much better? The nearness to the surface was meaningless; it only tantalized. And the privacy magnified Hank. She shook her head dutifully and said, "No, Hank." "Then why aren't you careful? Effie, that glass is no protection against the dust that's outside that window. The lead shutter must never be touched! If you make one single slip like that and it gets around, the Committee will send us back to the lower levels without blinking an eye. And they'll think twice before tiTiStiftg me with any important jobs." "I'm sorry, Hank." "Sorry? What's the good of being sorry? The only thing that counts is never to make a slip! Why the devil do you do such things, Effie? What drives you to it?" She swallowed. "It's just that it's so dreadful being cooped up like this." she said hesitatingly, "shut away from the sky and the Sun. I'm just hungry for a little beauty." "And do you suppose I'm not?" he demanded. "Don't you suppose I want to get outside, too, and be carefree and have a good time? But I'm not so damn selfish about it. I want my children to enjoy the Sun, and my children's children. Don't you see that that's the all-important thing and that we have to behave like mature adults and make sacrifices for it?" "Yes, Hank." He surveyed her slumped figure, her lined and listless face. "You're a fine one to talk about hunger for beauty," he told her. Then his voice grew softer, more deliberate. "You haven't forgotten, have you, Eflie, that until last month the Committee was so concerned about your sterility? That they were about to enter my name on the list of those waiting to be allotted a free woman? Very high on the list, too!" She could nod even at that one, but not while looking at him. She turned away. She knew very well that the Committee was justified in worrying about the birth rate. When the community finally moved back to the surface again, each additional healthy young person would be an asset, not only in the struggle 'for bare survival, but in the resumed war against Communism which some of the Committee members still counted on. It was natural that they should view a sterile woman with disfavor, and not only because of the waste of her husband's germplasm, but because sterility might indicate that she had suffered more than the average from radiation. In that case, if she did bear children later on, they would be more apt to carry a defective heredity, producing an undue number of monsters and freaks in future generations, and so contaminating the . race. Of course she understood it. She could hardly remember the time when she didn't. Years ago? Centuries? There wasn't much difference in a place where time was endless, band smiled and grew almost cheerful, "Now that you're going to have a child, that's all in the background again. Do you know, Effie, that when I first came in, I had some very good news for you? I'm to become a member of the Junior Committee and the announcement will be made at the banquet tonight." He cut short her mumbled congratulations. "So brighten yourself up and put on your best dress. I want the other Juniors to see what a handsome wife the new member has got." He paused. "Well, get a move on!" She spoke with difficulty, still not looking at him. "I'm terribly sorry, Hank, but you'll have to go alone. I'm not well." He straightened up with an indignant jerk. "There you go again! First that infantile, inexcusable business of the shutters. and now this! No feeling for my reputation at all. Don't be ridiculous, Efhe. You're coming!" "Terribly sorry," she repeated blindly, "but I really can't. I'd just be sick. I wouldn't make you proud of me at all." "Of course you won't," he retorted sharply. "As it is, I have to spend half my energy running around making excuses for you --  -- why you're so odd, why you always seem to be ailing, why you're always stupid and snobbish and say the wrong thing. But tonight's really important, Effie. It will cause a lot of bad cornmet if the new member's wife isn't present. You know how just a hint of sickness starts the old radiation-disease rumor going. You've got to come, Effie." She shook her head helplessly. "Oh. for heaven's sake, come on!" he shouted, advancing on her. "This is just a silly mood. As soon as you get going, you'll snap out of it. There's nothing really wrong with you at all." He put his hand on her shoulder to turn her around, and at his touch her face suddenly grew so desperate and gray that for a moment he was alarmed in spite of himself. "Really?" he asked, almost with a note of concern. She nodded miserably. "Hmm!" He stepped back and strode about irresolutely. "Well, of course, if that's the way it is , . He checked himself and a sad smile crossed his face. "So you don't care enough about your old husband's success to make one supreme effort in spite of feeling bad?" Again the helpless headshake. "I just can't go out tonight, under any circumstances." And her gaze stole toward the lead shutters. He was about to say something when he caught the direction of her gaze. His eyebrows jumped. For seconds he stared at her incredulously, as if some completely new and almost unbelievable possibility had popped into his mind. The look of incredulity slowly faded, to be replaced by a harder, more calculating expression. But when he spoke again, his voice was shockingly bright and kind. "Well, it can't be helped naturally, and I certainly wouldn't want you to go if you weren't able to enjoy it. So you hop right into bed and get a good rest. I'll run over to the men's dorm to freshen up, No, really, I don't want you to have to make any effort at all. Incidentally. Jim Barnes isn't going to be able to come to the banquet either -- touch of the old 'flu, he tells me, f# of all things." He watched her closely as he mentioned the other man's name, ' but she didn't react noticeably. In fact, she hardly seemed to be hearing his chatter... "I got a bit sharp with you, I'm afraid, Effie," he continued contritely. "I'm sorry about that. I was excited about my new job and I guess that was why things upset me. Made me feel let down when I found you weren't feeling as good as I was. Selfish of me. Now you get into bed right away and get well. Don't worry about me a bit. I know you'd come if you possibly could. And I know you'll be thinking about me. Well, I must be off now." He started toward her, as if to embrace her, then seemed to think better of it. He turned back at the doorway and said, emphasizing the words, "You'll be completely alone for the next four hours." He waited for her nod, then bounced out.  steps died away. Then she straightened up, walked over to where he'd put down the wristb watch, picked it up and smashed it hard on the floor. The crystal shattered, the case flew apart, and something went zing! She stood there breathing heavily. Slowly her sagged features lifted, formed themselves into the beginning of a smile. She stole another look at the shutters. The smile became more definite. She felt her hair, wet her fingers and ran them along her hairline and back over her ears. After wiping her hands on her apron, she took it off. She straightened her dress, lifted her head with a little flourish, and stepped smartly toward the window. Then her face went miserable again and her steps slowed. No, it couldn't be, and it won't be, she told herself. It had been just an illusion, a silly romantic dream that she had somehow projected out of her beautystarved mind and given a moment's false reality. There couldn't be anjrthing alive outside. There hadn't been for two whole years. And if there conceivably were, it would be something altogether horrible. She remembered some of the pariahs -- hairless, witless creatures, with radiation welts crawling over their bodies like worms, who had come begging for succor during the last months of the Terror -- and been shot down. How they must have hated the people in refuges! But even as she was thinking these things, her fingers were caressing the bolts, gingerly drawing them, and she was opening the shutters gently, apprehensively. #  No, there couldn't be anything outside, she assured herself wryly, peering out into the green night. Even her fears had been groundless. But the face came floating up toward the window. She started back in terror, then checked herself. For the face wasn't horrible at all, only very thin, with full lips and large eyes and a thin proud nose like the jutting beak of a bird. And no radiation welts or scars marred the skin, olive in the tempered moonlight. It looked, in fact, just as it had when she had seen it the first time. For a long moment the face stared deep, deep into her brain. Then the full lips smiled and a half-clenched, thin-fingered hand materialized itself from the green darkness and rapped twice on the grimy pane. Her heart pounding, she furiously worked the little crank that opened the window. It came unstuck from the frame with a tiny explosion of dust and a zin like that of the watch, only louder. A moment later it swung open wide and a puff of incredibly fresh air caressed her face and the inside of her nostrils, stinging her eyes with unanticipated tears. The man outside balanced on the sill, crouching like a faun, head high, one elbow on knee. He was dressed in scarred, snug trousers and an old sweater. "Is it tears I get for a welcome?" he mocked her gently in a musical voice. "Or are those only to greet God's own breath, the air?" TE swung down inside and now she could see he was tall. Turning, he snapped his fingers and called, "Come, puss." A black cat with a twisted stump of a tail and feet like small boxing gloves and ears almost as big as rabbits' hopped clumsily in view. He lifted it down, gave it a pat. Then, nodding familiarly to Effie, he unstrapped a little pack from his back and laid it on the table. She couldn't move. She even found it hard to breathe. "The window," she finally managed to get out. He looked at her inquiringly, caught the direction of her stabbing finger. Moving without haste, he went over and closed it carelessly. "The shutters, too," she told him, but he ignored that, looking around. "It's a snug enough place you and your man have," he commented. "Or is it that this is a free-love town or a harem spot, or just a military post?" He checked her before she could answer. "But let's not be talking about such tilings now. Soon enough I'll be scared to death for both of us. Best enjoy the kick of meeting, which is always good for twenty minutes at the least." He smiled at her rather shyly. "Have you food? Good, then bring it." She set cold meat and some precious canned bread before him and had water heating for coffee. Before he fell to, he shredded a chunk of meat and put it on the floor for the cat. which left off its sniffing inspection of the walls and ran up eagerly mewing. Then the man began to eat. chewing each mouthful slowly and appreciatively. From across the table Effie watched him, drinking in his every deft movement, his every cryptic quirk of expression. She attended to making the coffee, but that took only a moment. Finally she could contain herself no longer. "What's it like up there?" she asked breathlessly. "Outside, I mean." He looked at her oddly for quite a space. Finally, he said flatly. "Oh, it's a wonderland for sure, more amazing than you tombed folk could ever imagine. A veritable fairyland." And he quickly went on eating. "No, but really," she pressed. Noting her eagerness, he smiled and his eyes filled with playful tenderness. "I mean it, on my oath," he assured her. "You think the bombs and the dust made only death and ugliness. That was true at first. But then, just as the doctors foretold, they changed the life in the seeds and loins that were brave enough to stay. Wonders bloomed and walked." He broke off suddenly and asked, "Do any of you ever venture outside?" "A few of the men are allowed to," she told him, "for short trips in special protective suits, to hunt for canned food and fuels and batteries and things like that.' "Aye, and those blind-souled slugs would never see anything but what they're looking for," he said, nodding bitterly. "They'd never see the garden where a dozen buds blossom wherfe one did before, and the flowers have petals a yard across, with stingless bees big as sparrows gently supping their nectar. Housccats grown spotted and huge as leopards (not little runts like Joe Louis here) stalk through those gardens. But they're gentle beasts, no more harmful than the rainbow-scaled snakes that glide around their paws, for the dust burned all the murder out of them, as it burned itself out. "I've even made up a little poem about that. It starts, 'Fire can hurt me, or water, or .the weight of-Earth. But the dust is my friend.' Oh, yes, and then the robins like cockatoos and squirrels like a princess's ermine! All under a treasure chest of Sun and Moon and stars that the dust's magic powder changes from ruby to emerald and sapphire and amethyst and back again. Oh, and then the new children -- " "You're telling the truth?" she interrupted him, her eyes brimming with tears. "You're not making it up?" "I am not," he assured her solemnly. "And if you could catch a glimpse of one of the new children, you'd never doubt me again. They have long limbs as brown as this coffee would be if it had lots of fresh cream in it, and smiling delicate faces and the whitish teeth and the finest hair. They're so nimble that I -- a sprightly man and somewhat enlivened by the dust -- feel like a cripple beside them. And their thoughts dance like flames and make me feel a very imbecile. "Of course, they have seven fingers on each hand and eight toes on each foot, but they're the more beautiful for that. They have large pointed ears that the Sun shines through. They play in the garden, all day long, slipping among the great leaves and blooms, but they're so swift that you can hardly see them, unless one chooses to stand still and look at you. For that matter, you have to look a bit hard for all these things I'm telling you." "But it is true?" she pleaded. "Every word of it," he said, looking straight into her eyes. He put down his knife and fork. "What's ,your name?" he asked softly. "Mine's Patrick." "Effiie," she told him. He shook his head. "That can't be," he said. Then his face brightened. "Euphemia," he exclaimed. "That's what Effie is short for. Your name is Euphemia." As he said that, looking at her, she suddenly felt beautiful. He got up and came around the table and stretched out his hand toward her. "Euphemia -- " he began. "Yes?" she answered huskily, shrinking from him a little, but 'looking Up sideways, and very flushed. "Don't either of you move," Hank said. The voice was flat and nasal because Hank was wearing a nose respirator that was just long enough to suggest an elephant's trunk. In his right hand was a large blue-black automatic pistol. him. Patrick's was abruptly alert, shifty. But Effle's was still smiling tenderly, as if Hank could not break the spell of the magic garden and should be p'tied for not knowing about it. "You little -- " Hank began with an almost gleeful fury, calling her several shameful names. He spoke in short phrases, closing tight his unmasked mouth between them while he sucked in breath through the respirator. His voice rose in a crescendo. "And not with a man of the community, but a pariah! A pariahf" "I hardly know what you're thinking, man, but you're quite wrong," Patrick took the opportunity to put in hurriedly, conciliatingly. "I just happened to be coming by hungry tonight, a lonely tramp, and knocked at the window. Your wife was a bit foolish and let kindheartedness get the better of prudence -- " "Don't think you've pulled the wool over my eyes, Efiie," Hank went on with a screechy laugh, disregarding the other man completely. "Don't think I don't know why you're suddenly going to have a child after four long years." At that moment the cat came nosing up to his feet. Patrick watched him narrowly, shifting his weight forward a little, but Hank only kicked the animal aside without taking his eyes off them, "Even that business of carrying the wristwatch in your pocket instead of on your arm," he went on with channeled hysteria. "A neat bit of camouflage, Effie. Very neat. And telling me it was my child, when all the while you've been seeing him for months!" "Man, you're mad; I've not touched her!" Patrick denied hotly though still calculatingly, and risked a step forward, stopping when' the gun instantly swung his way. "Pretending you were going to give me a healthy child," Hank raved on. "when all the while you knew it would be -- either in body or germ plasm -- a thing like fiaf!" He waved his gun at the malformed cat, which had leaped to the top of the table and was eating the remains of Patrick's food, though its watchful green eyes were fixed on Hank. "I should shoot him down!" Hank yelled, between sobbing, chest-racking inhalations through the mask. "I should kill him this instant for the contaminated pariah he is!" All this while Effie had not ceased to smile compassionately. Now she stood up without haste and went to Patrick's side. Disregarding his warning, apprehensive glance, she put her arm lightly around him and faced her husband. bringer of the best news we've ever had," she said, and her voice was like a flood of some warm sweet liquor in that miisty. hate-charged room. "Oh, Hank, forget' your silly wrong jealousy and listen to me. Patrick here has something wonderful to tell us." H ank stared at her. For once he screamed no reply... It was obvious that he was seeing for the first time how beautiful she had become, and that the realization jolted him terribly. "What do you mean?" he finally asked unevenly, almost fearfully. "I mean that we no longer need to fear the dust," she said, and now her smile was radiant. "It never really did hurt people the way the doctors said it would. Remember how it was with me, HanJ, the exposure I had and recovered from, although the doctors said I wouldn't at first -- and without even losing my hair? Hank, those who were brave enough to stay outside, and who weren't killed by terror and suggestion and panic -- they adapted to the dust. They changed, but they changed for the better. Everything -- " "Effie, he told you lies!" Hank interrupted, but still in that same agitated, broken voice, cowedby her beauty. "Everything that grew or moved was purified," she went on ringingly. "You men going outside have never seen it, because you've never had eyes for it You've been blinded to beauty, to life itself. And now all the power in the dust has gone and faded, anyway, burned itself out. That's true, isn't it?" She smiled at Patrick for confirmation. His face was strangely veiled, as if he were calculating obscure changes. He might have given a little nod; at any rate, Effie assumed that he did, for she turned back to her husband. "You see, Hank? We can all go out now. We need never fear the dust again. Patrick is a living proof of that," she continued triumphantly, 'standing straighter, holding him a little tighter. "Look at him. Not a scar or a sign, and he's been out in the dust for years. How could he be this way, if the dust hurt the brave? Oh, believe me, Hank! Believe what you see. Test it if you want. Test Patrick here." "Effie, you're all mixed up. You don't know -- Hank faltered, but without conviction of any sort. "Just test him." Effie repeated with utter confidence, ignoring -- not even noticing -- Patrick's warning nudge. "All right," Hank mumbled. He looked at the stranger dully. "Can you count?" he asked. Patrick's face was a complete enigma. Then he suddenly spoke, and his voice was like a fencer's foil -- light, bright, alert, constantly playing, yet utterly on guard. "Can I count? Do you take me for a complete simpleton, man? Of course I can count!" "Then count yourself," Hank said, barely indicating the table. "Count myself, should I?" the other retorted with a quick facetious laugh. "Is this a kindergarten? But if you want me to, "I've two arms, and two legs, that's four. And ten fingers and ten toes -- you'll take my word for them? -- that's twenty-four. A head, twenty-five. And two eyes and a nose and a mouth -- " "With this, I mean," Hank said heavily, advanced to the table, picked up the Geiger counter, switched it on, and handed it across the table to the other man. But while it was still an arm's length from Patrick, the clicks began to mount furiously, Until they were like the chatter of a pigmy machine gun. Abruptly the clicks slowed, but that was only the counter shifting to a new scaling circuit, in which each click stood for # of the old ones. little volleys, fear cascaded into the room and filled it, smashing like so much colored glass all the bright barriers of words Effie had raised against it. For no dreams can stand against the Geiger counter, the Twentieth Century's mouthpiece of ultimate truth. It was as if the dust and all the terrors of the dust had incarnated themselves in one dread invading shape that said in words Stronger than audible speech, "Those were illusions, whistles in the dark. This is reality, the dreary, pitiless reality of the Burrowing Years." Hank scuttled back to the wall. Through chattering teeth he babbled, "... enough radioactives... kill a thousand men... freak... a freak..." In his agitation he forgot for a moment to inhale through the respirator. Even Effie -- taken off guard, all the fears that had been drilled into her twanging like piano wires -- shrank from the skeletalseeming shape beside her, held herself to it only by desperation. Patrick did it for her. He dis engaged her arm and stepped briskly away. Then he whirled on them, smiling sardonically, and started to speak, but instead looked with distaste at the chattering Geiger counter he held between fingers and thumb. "Have we listened to this racket long enough?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he put down the instrument on the table. The cat hurried over to it curiously and the clicks began again to mount in a minor crescendo. Eflie lunged for it frantically, switched it off, darted back. "That's right," Patrick said do well to cringe, for I'm death itself. Even in death I could kill you, like a snake." And with that his voice took on the tones of a circus barker. "Yes, I'm a' freak, as the gentleman so wisely said. That's what one doctor who dared talk with me for a minute told me before he kicked me out. He couldn't tell me why, but somehow the dust doesn't kill me. Because I'm a freak, you see, just like the men who ate nails and walked on fire and ate arsenic and tuck themselves through with pins. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen -- only not too close! -- and examine the man the dust can't harm. Rappacini's child, brought up to date; his embrace, death! "And now," he said, breathing heavily, "I'll get out and leave you in your damned lead cave." He started toward the window. Hank's gun followed him shakingly. "Wait!" Effie called in an agonized voice. He obeyed. She continued falteringly, "When we were together earlier, you didn't act as if... "When we were together earlier, I wanted what I wanted," he snarled at her. "You don't suppose I'm a bloody saint, do you?" "And all the beautiful things you told me?" "That," he said cruelly, "is just a line I've found that women fall for. They're all so bored and so starved for beauty -- as they generally put it." "Even the garden?" Her question was barely audible throughthe sobs that threatened to suffocate her. He looked at her and perhaps his expression softened just a trifle. "What's outside." he said flatly, "is just a little worse than either of you can imagine." He tapped his temple. "The garden's all here." "You've killed it," she wept. "You've killed it in me. You've both killed everything that's beautiful. But you're worse," she screamed at Patrick, "because he only killed beauty once, but you brought it to life just so you could kill it again. Oh, I can't stand it! I won't stand it!" And she began to scream. Patrick started toward her, but she broke off and whirled away from him to the window, her eyes crazy. "You've been lying to us," she cried. "The garden's there. I know it is. But you don't want to share it with anyone." "No. no, Euphemia," Patrick I # protested anxiously. "It's hell out there, believe me. I wouldn't lie to you about it." "Wouldn't lie to me!" she mocked. "Are you afraid, too?" With a sudden pull, she jerked open the window and stood before the blank green-tinged oblong of darkness that seemed to press into the room like a menacing, heavy, wind-urged curtain. At that Hank cried out a shocked, pleading, "Effie!" She ignored him. "I can't be cooped up here any longer," she said. "And I won't, now that I know. I'm going to the garden." Both men sprang at her, but they were too late. She leaped lightly to the sill, and by the time they had flung themselves against it, her footsteps were already hurrying off into the darkness. "Effie, come back! Come back!" Hank shouted after her desperately, no longer thinking to cringe from the man beside him, or how the gun was pointed. "I love you, Effie. Come back!" Patrick added his voice. "Come back, Euphemia. You'll be safe if you come back right away. Come back to your home." No answer to that at all. They both strained their eyes through the greenish murk. They could barely make out a shadowy figure about half a block down the near-black canyon of the dismal, dust-blown street, into which the greenish moonlight hardly reached. It seemed to them that the figure was scooping something up from the pavement and letting it sift down along its arms and over its bosom. "Go out and get her. man," Patrick urged the other. "For if I I go out for her, I warn you I won't bring her back. She said something about having stood the dust better than most, and that's enough for me." But Hank, chained by his painfully learned habits and by something else, could not move. And then a ghostly voice came whispering down the street, chanting, "Fire can hurt me, or water, or the weight of the Earth. But the dust is my friend." .Patrick spared the other man one more look. Then, without a word, he vaulted up and ran off. Hank stood there. After perhaps a half minute he remembered to close his mouth when he inhaled. Finally he was sure the street was empty. As he started to close the window, there was a little mew. He picked up the cat and gently put It outside. Then he did close the window, and the shutters, and bolted them, and took up the Geiger counter, and mechanically began to count himself. martians never die If was a wonderful bodyguard: no bark, no bite, no sting .  . just conversion of the enemy! A T three-fifteen, a young man walked into the circular  m brick building and took a flattened package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. "Mr. Stern?" he asked, throwing away the empty package. Stern looked with hard eyes at the youthful reporter. He recognized the type. "So they're sending around cubs now," he said. "I'm no cub -- I'vd been on the paper a whole year," the reporter protested, and then stopped, realizing his annoyance had betrayed him. "Only a year. The first time they sent their best man." "This ain't the first time," said the young man, assuming a bored look. "It's the fourth time, and next year I don't think anybody will come at all. Why should they?" "Why, because they might be able to make it," Beryl spoke up. "Something must have happened before." Stem watched the reporter drink in Beryl's loveliness. "Well, Mrs. Curtis." the young man said, "everyone has it figured out that Dr. Curtis got stuck in the fourth dimension, or else lost, or died, maybe. Even Einstein can't work out the stellar currents your husband was depending on." "It's very simple." replied Beryl, "but I can't explain it intelligibly. I wish you could have talked to Dr. Curtis." "Why is it that we have to come out here just once a year to wait for him? Is that how the fourth dimension works?" "It's the only time when the stellar currents permit the trip back to Earth. And it's not the fourth dimension! Clyde was always irritated when anyone would talk about his traveling to Mars in the fourth dimension." "It's interdimensional," Stern put in. "And you're his broker?" asked the reporter, throwing his cigarette down on the brick floor and stepping on it. "You're his old friend from college days, handled his financial affairs, and helped him raise enough money to build his machine?" "Yes," Stem replied, a little pompously. "It was through my efforts that several wealthy men took an interest in the machine, so that Dr. Curtis did not have to bear the entire expense himself." "Yeah, yeah," the reporter sighed. "I read an old story on it before I came here. Now I'm out of cigarettes." He looked hopefully at Stern. Stern returned the look coldly. "There's a store where you can buy some about three blocks down the road." "Is that the room where he's expected to materialize with his machine?" The reporter pointed to an inner door. "Yes. Dr. Curtis wanted to be sure no one would be injured. This inner circular room was built first; then he had the outer wall put up as an added precaution. The circular passageway we're in leads all around the old room, but this doorway is the only entrance." "And what are those holes in the top of the door for?" "If he returns, we can tell by the displaced air rushing out. Then the door will open automatically." "And when is the return scheduled for?" asked the reporter. "Three-forty-seven and twenty-nine seconds." "If it happens," the reporter added skeptically. "And if it doesn't, wc have to wait another year." "Optimum conditions occur just once a year." "Well, I'm going out to get some cigarettes. I've got time... and probably nothing to wait for. I'll return though." He walked briskly through the outer door. T his is the hardest part of the year, especially now. Suppose he did come back," Beryl said plaintively. "You don't have to worry," Stern assured her. "Clyde himself said that if he didn't come back the second year, he might not make it at all." Stern opened his gold case now and offered Beryl a cigarette. She shook her head. "But he made two trial runs in it first and came back." "That was for a short distance only -- that is, a short distance astronomically. Figuring for Mars was another story. Maybe he missed the planet and..." "Oh, don't! It's just not knowing that I can't stand." "Well," he said drily, "we'll know in -- " He stopped' and looked at his wristwatch -- "in just about fifteen minutes." "I can't wait," she moaned. He put his arm around her. "Relax. Take it easy and stop worrying. It'll just be like last time." "Not the last time at all. We hadn't -- " "As soon as we are able to leave here," he said, drawing her close and squee#ing her gently, "I'll take steps to have him dedared legally dead. Then we'll get married." "That's not much of a proposal," she smiled. "But I guess I'll have to accept you. You have Clyde's power of attorney." "And we'll be rich. Richer than ever. I'll be able to use some of my own ideas about the investments. As a matter of fact, I have already." And he frowned slightly. 'We have enough," Beryl said quickly. "Don't try to speculate. You know how Clyde felt about that." "But he spent so damned much on the machine. I had to make back those expenses somehow." Steps sounded outside and they drew apart. The reporter came in with a companion of about his own age. "Better wipe the lipstick off," he grinned. "It's almost time for something to happen." Stern dabbed at his mouth angrily with his handkerchief. At first the sound was so soft that it could hardly be heard, but soon a whistling grew until it became a threat to the eardrums. The reporters looked at each other with glad, excited eyes. The whistling stopped abruptly and, slowly, the door opened. The reporters rushed in immediately. Beryl gripped Stern's hand convulsively. "He's come back."' "Yes, but that mustn't change oar plans, Beryl dear," "But, AI... Oh, why were we so foolish?" "Not foolish, dear. Not at all foolish. Now we have to go in." Inside the room was the large sphere of metalloy. It had lost its original gleam and was stained and battered, standing silent, closed, enigmatic. "Where's the door?" called the first rejjorter. The sphere rested on a number of metal stilts, reaching out from the lower hemisphere, which held it about three feet from the floor, like a great pincushion turned upside down. Slowly, a round section the sphere's wall swung outward and stepsescended. As they touched the floor, both reporters, caught by the same idea, sprinted for it and fought to see which would climb it first. "Wait!" shouted Stern. The reporters stopped their scuffling and followed Stern's gaze. and horrible was emerging from the circular doorway. Several tentacles, like so many snakes, slid around the hand rail which ran down the steps. Then, at the top. it paused. Stem felt an immediate and unreasoning hate for the thing, whatever it was. a hate so strong that he forgot to feel fear. It seemed to him to combine the repulsive qualities of a spider and a toad. The body, fat and repugnant, was covered by a loose skin, dull and leathery, and the fatness seemed to be pulled downward below the lower tentacles like an insect's body, until it was wider at the bottom than at the top. Like a salt shaker, Stern thought. It turned its head -- it had no neck: the loose skin of the body just turned with it -- and looked back inside the sphere. The head resembled a toad's, but a long trident tongue slid in and out quickly, changing the resemblance to that of a malformed snake. From the interior, Dr. Curtis appeared beside the creature and stood there vaguely for a moment. Stern noticed that his clothes seemed just as new as when he had left, but he had grown a long, untrimmed beard, and his face had a vacant expression, as if he were hypnotized. The creature looked upward at Curtis, who .was head and shoulders taller, and its resemblance changed again in Stern's mind, so that now it looked like a dog, at least in attitude. From its mouth came a low hissing noise. Curtis looked down at the dogspidertoad, his eyes slowly beginning to focus. The creature wiggled like a seal with a ftsh in sight, then slid and bumped down the steps, with Curtis following him. "Clyde!" cried Beryl and rushed toward Curtis. The outstretched tentacles of the beast stopped her, but at a touch from Curtis they fell away and Beryl was in his arms. Stern watched the scene sourly and with rage in his heart. Why hadn't Clyde waited another year? Then nothing could have changed things. Now he would lose not only Beryl, but the management of the money that was left, and the marketing of new patents on the machine. Curtis did not approve of speculation, especially when it lost money. "You've changed, Clyde," Beryl was saying as she hugged him. "What is the matter -- do you need a doctor?" "No. I don't want a doctor, but I have to get home," said Curtis. Stern felt anger again beating in his brain like heavy surf on a beach. Curtis was sick. The least he could have done was die. Well, maybe he still would. And if he didn't he could be helped to -- Stern saw the beast looking at him intently, malevolently. Its face might have looked almost human, now that it was so close, if it had possessed eyebrows and hair. As it was, its nose rose abruptly and flared into two really enormous nostrils, but its mouth looked small and wrinkled, like that of an old grandmother without any teeth. They turned to the doorway without noticing the absence of the reporters, who had long since run off to telephone and get photographers. Curtis walked slowly. He would stop for a moment, look about as if expecting something entirely different, and then he would move forward again. They all got into the car. Curtis and Beryl on the front seat, with Beryl driving, and Stern and the creature in the rear. As Beryl drove, Stern looked savagely at the back of Curtis's head, but he felt the beast staring at him balefully. Could it be a mind reader? That was ridiculous. How could anything that couldn't speak read a person's mind? He turned to study it. The Martian, if that was what it was, had only six tentacles, three on each side. The lower ones were heavy and almost as thick as legs. The upper ones were small and were obviously used as hands, while it was possible that the middle ones could be used cither way. A series of suction cups or sucking pads were at the end of each tentacle. With equipment like this, it could walk right up the side of a building, except, perhaps, for the higher gravity of Earth. Stem could smell it now, a dry, desert smell, and that made it more revolting than ever. They were born to hate each other. was all solicitousness. The way a woman is when she has a man to impress, Stern thought. "Just sit right here in your old chair," she told Curtis, "and I'll call a doctor. Then I'll put some water on to heat." But first she knelt by his side and laid her head on his breast. "Oh, darling," she said with a sob, "Why did you wait so long? I've missed you so." A very good act. Stern told himself bitterly, without believing it at all. She got up and turned toward Stem. "Will you help me get some water on, Al?" she asked. "I'm going to phone." He went into the kitchen. He knew where the kettle was, the refrigerator, the mixings. He could hear her dialing, and then, before he got the kettle on the burner, she came inside and closed the kitchen door. "Clyde's sick and I have to take care of him," she said anxiously. It wasn't entirely the money, he confessed to himself now. He hated the situation, but he had to give in -- on the surface any way. "Okay, let's forget the whole thing," he said. "Oh, Al dear, I knew you'd understand! I've got to go back now and try the phone again. I got a busy signal." Stern followed her, still rankling at the way Curtis had forced Beryl to live while he spent so generously on his own expensive interests. Shortly after their marriage, he had built a home for Beryl and himself in an exclusive suburb, on a hilly bit of land with a deep ravine at the back. But it was small and Beryl had not even been allowed maids except when they entertained, which was seldom. Soon he would change all that, Stem told himself. They had not dared to while Clyde was away. In the modem living room, Curtis sprawled in his easy chair as though he hadn't moved since they had placed him there. But his air of abstraction seemed to have increased. Before him sat the beast, looking, Stern thought, more like a dog than ever. Its head wasn't cocked to one side, but that, less than its alien appearance, was the one thing to spoil the illusion. Tires screeched in the driveway while Beryl was still at the tele- phone. Stern went to the front door, closed it and put the chain bolt in place. The back door would still be locked and they would hardly try to force the screen windows. Heavy steps pounded up the front walk"Did Dr. Curtis really get back?" The first man shot out. The one who followed had a camera. "Dr. Curtis has returned,' Stern spoke through the opening of the front door which the chain permitted, "but his physical condition won't permit questioning, at least until his doctor has seen him." "Did he really bring back a Martian? We want to sec the Martian anyway." "We can't have Dr. Curtis disprbed in any way until after his physician has examined him," Stern said bluntly. "Is he in there?" "We'll give you a report when we're ready." the house as Stem shut the front door and went to check tlie rear one. When he came back, flashes from the window showed the cameraman was trying to take pictures through the glass. Stern drew the shades. "Well, poor Schaughtowl, so you had to come with me," Curtis was saying to the monster. The beast wiggled again as it had on the steps of the machine. A tail to wag wasn't really necessary, Stern decided, when there was so much body to wiggle. Schaughtowl, as Curtis addressed it, seemed to brighten in the darkened room. "Poor, dear Schaughtowl," said Curtis gently. It was unmistakable now -- the skin actually brightened and emitted a sort of eerie, luminous glow. Curtis leaned over and put his hand on what would have been Schaughtowl's neck. The loose skin writhed joyously, and, snakelike, the whole body responded in rippling waves of emotion. "Gull Lup," the monster -- said wasn't the right word, but it was not a bark, growl, mew, cheep, squawk or snarl. Gulp was as close as Stem could come, a dry and almost painful gulping noise that expressed devotion in some totally foreign way that Stern found revolting. He realized that the phone had been ringing for some time. He disconnected it, and then heard loud knocking. "It's Dr. Anderson," he heard a man's voice calling impatiently and angrily. Cautiously, Stern opened the door, but his care was needless. With a few testy remarks, the doctor quickly cleared a space about the door and entered. He went at once to Curtis, with only a single shocked glance at Shaughtowl. "Wlicre the devil have you been and where in hell did you get that thing?" he asked as he unbuttoned Curtis's coat and shirt. Since playing with his pet, Curtis seemed more awake. "I went to Mars," he said. "They're incredibly advanced in ways we hardly guess. We're entirely off the track. I just came back to explain how." "Your friend doesn't look very intelligent," the doctor answered, busy with his stethoscope. "Animals like Schaughtowl arc used for steeds or pets." said Curtis. "The Ladonai are pretty much like mankind, only smaller." "Why did you stay so long?" "After I left, the Ladonai told me. they were going to shut off any possible communication with arth until we advance more. They think we're at a very dangerous animal-like stage of development. Once I came home, I knew I couldn't go back, so I wanted to learn as much as I could before I left them." "Stand up for a minute." ordered the doctor. "Not right now." said Curtis. "I'm too tired." "You'd better get to bed, then." "I think not. It's merely caused by the difference in gravity and heavier air. The Ladanoi told me to expect it. but not to lie down. After a while I'll try to take a short walk." S O Clyde wasn't going to die, after all. Stern tliought. He had come home with a message, and, remembering the determination of the man, Stern knew he wouldn't die until he had given it. But he had to die. He would die, and who was competent enough to know that it wasn't from the shock of having come home to denser air and a heavier gravity? There were ways -- an oxygen tube, for example. Pure oxygen to be inhaled in his sleep by lungs accustomed to a rarified atmosphere, or stimulants in his food so it would look like a little too much exertion on a heart already overtaxed. There were ways. Stern's scalp tingled unpleasantly, and he saw the Martian looking at him intently, coldly. In that moment Stern knew without question that his mind was being read. Not his idea, perhaps, but his intent toward Curtis. The Martian would have to be attended to first. "Is It true, Dr. Anderson? Will he be all right?" Beryl was sitting on the arm of the chair next to Schaughtowl, and she was looking at Clyde almost as adoringly as the Martian. A few hours had undone all that Stern had managed to do in four years. If Stern had been uncertain, that alone would have decided him. "I think, so," said the doctor. "He seems to be uncomfortable, rather than in pain. I'll send you a prescription for his heart, if he breathes too heavily. Be sure, though, not to give him more than one pill in three hours." "Of course." Beryl was never that solicitous toward Stern. "And you'll be in quarantine here until the government decides what, if any, diseases he and the Martian may have brought back with them." "None at all, Poctor." Curtis's voice was markedly mose slurred, nd he stared intently with unblinking eyes at the blank wall.  "Well, that's something we can't tell yet. We'll have to keep ut the press and television men, anyway, because of your health. Jf I'm not detained. I'll be back tomorrow morning. Call me if there's any change." On his way out, the physician was besieged by reporters and photographers, baulked of better subjects. Shortly after the doctor's departure, police sirens came screaming up. The men waiting around the house were moved outside the gate and a guard was set at every entrance. L ater, a messenger came, was interrogated by the police sergeant who took a small package from him and brought it to the house. "Medicine," the sergeant said, handing it gingerly to Stern. "You can't leave here without permission." And he walked hurriedly away. This might be the answer. Stem had a good idea of what the doctor had prescribed -- something he'd said, for the heart. It must have been pretty powerful, too, for the doctor to warn against an overdose. Two at once might do it or another two a little later. But there was Schaughtowl. "Al," said Beryl, "stay with Clyde while I fix something for him to eat." She was more beautiful than ever. Emotions, he thought wryly, become a woman; they thrive on them. In a few minutes a woman could change like this. It was enough to make a man lose fai in the sex. "Certainly," he said easily. Curtis seemed to sleep with wide open eyes gazing blankly at the far wall. Schaughtowl sat motionless before him, watchful as a dog. yet still like a snake or spiderpatiently waiting. Didn't the beast ever sleep? A drink was what Stern needed. He went to the closet and poured a double brandy. He sipped it slowly. As delicious fire ran down his gullet and warmed his stomach, he felt his tension ease and a sense of confidence pervade his mind. He needn't worry. He was always successful, except that once with the stocks. And be had calm nerves. There were guards out in front now in khaki uniform ; the Governor must have called out a company of the National Guard. Stern noticed some state police, too. The house was well guarded on the three sides surrounded by a neat, white picket fence. In the back, the severe drop into the ravine made guards there unnecessary. It was dark before Dr. Curtis moved. Beryl was watching him; she had little to say to Stern now. "How about some broth, dear?" she asked Curtis immediately. Slowly, Clyde's eyes focused on her. He smiled. "Let's try it.' He let Beryl feed him, sitting on a stool beside his chair and being unnecessarily motherly and coddling about it. For a while after he had eaten, Clyde sat in his chair, looking at Beryl with his new and oddly gentle smile. It seemed to activate some hidden response in her, for she glowed with tenderness. "I suppose," Curtis slurred, "I ought to try to walk now." "Let me help." Stern rose and crossed the room. The Martian rustled like snakes in the weeds, and hissed. Beryl said without suspicion, "Thank you, Al. I knew you'd do whatever you could for Clyde." And she rested her hand trustingly on his arm. What was past was past, not to be wept over, not to be regretted. "Like to walk out in the back for the air?" Stern asked. "The breeze Is coming from that direction." "That will do very well," said Curtis, obviously not caring a bit. chair and supported him under the arm. They went out the back door, the Martian slithering after them. It was cooler in the garden. Stern felt a renewed surge of self-confidence. "The stars -- " Curtis stopped to look upward. The night was almost cloudless and there was no Moon. The house hid any view of the crowds and the guards holding them back. They were alone in the dark. Curtis started forward again, with the Martian scraping along behind. It would never let Curtis out of its sight as long as it lived; that much was clear to Stern. He guided Curtis to a seat close to the ravine, a favorite spot. Always the Martian was a step -- or a slither -- behind, and when Curtis sat down, Schaughtowl sat be ' # tween his beloved master and the precipitous drop. Stern picked up a rock from the rock garden and tossed it into the ravine. The Martian did not take his eyes off Curtis. Stem picked up a larger rock, a sharp, pointed one. He was behind the Martian and Curtis was looking away unseeingly into the night. It was simple, really, and well executed. The beast's skull bashed in easily, being merely thin bones for a thin atmosphere and light gravitation. A push sent it over the edge of the ravine. Curtis sat unnoticing, and the traffic jam out front created more than enough confusion to drown out any noise from the creature's fall.  Stern's palm stung. He realized that, before the Martian had pitched over the ravine, a suction pad had for a moment caught at his hand. It had done the beast no good, though. Curiously, the Martian had not guarded itself, only Curtis. Sitting with its back to Stern had really invited attack. The mindreading ability was just something that Stem had nervously imagined. The police would not be able to tell his rock from any other. The heavy body, its ungainly movement and thin bones would explain ever#Tthing. Besides, there Martian and what penalty could there be? It couldn't be called murder. Stern looked at the palm of his right hand, the one that had held the rock. It stung a little, but in the darkness he couldn't see it. A stinger of some kind, like a bee, probably. The hell with it -- couldn't be fatal or Curtis would have warned them about it. The Martian had been walking by the ravine and had clumsily fallen in. He would report it after he had got Curtis back into the house. Curtis was easy to arouse and didn't seem to miss Schaughtowl. Stern maneuvered him to the living room, where he sank into a chair and fell into his mood of abstraction. Beryl must be in the kitchen cleaning up, Stern supposed. Perhaps he had better put some kind of germicide on his palm, just to ward off infection. TT E looked at Curtis relaxed inthe chair. Clyde suddenly appeared oddly boyish to him, hardly different than he had been in college days. For a moment, Stern felt again the adolescent admiration and fellowship he had felt so strongly then. Don't be stupid, he told himself angrily. This man had the money aid the woman that had almost belonged to him. ciously savored the aroma of his triumph. On the table was the bottle. Clyde would be easy, unsuspecting. kindly. It wouldn't be safe to marry Beryl right away, but there could never be any suspicion. No need to hurry. For a moment he wanted to watch Curtis. He wondered what kind of pictures Clyde was seeing on the blank wall. Martian landscapes? The strange Ladonais? Too bad he hadn't stayed on Mars. Stern couldn't help having a friendly feeling for his old college chum, pity, too, for what must happen to him soon. This was no way to kill anyone! He was growing old and soft! Nevertheless, Curtis did have a noble and striking face. Funny he had never noticed it before. It seemed to glow with an uncanny peace. Unnoticed, the numbness crept from Stern's palm along his right arm, and a prickly sensation appeared in his right leg. It was funny to read a person's thoughts like this. Love flowed from Curtis like the warm glow from a burning candle. A sort of halo had formed from the light above hts head. Symbolic. From Curtis came wave after wave of love. He could feel it pulsating toward him, and he felt his own heart turn over,, answer it. Yes. Curtis was noble. Stern sank cross-legged on the floor beside Curtis and gazed at him. The prickly sensation had ascended from his leg up through his chest and to his neck. But it didn't matter. Now, for a last time, he could feel the spell of that perfect friendship -- before the end. What end? Why should there be any end to this eternal moment? Curtis noticed him now. Those half-closed eyes were strangely penetrating. They looked him through. "Well, Al," he said, "so you killed Schaughtowl ?" Stern looked at the kindly, godlike face and loved it. Killed whom? "Poor Al," Curtis said. He leaned over and laid his hand on the back of Stern's neck, fondling it much as one would a dog. "Poor old Al." Stern's heart leaped in joy. This was ecstasy. It must be expressed. It demanded expression. If he had possessed a tail, he would have wagged it. Perhaps there was a word for that bliss. There was, and with immense satisfaction he spoke it. "Gull Lup," he said. Press, New York, #. # pages, # I T is shocking to reread these two short novels four and five years after they originally appeared in magazine form. They are as superb as ever -- but today they seem grim, bitter, almost psychopathological. (Which is not meant to scare the reader away from them; they arc also sheer enchantVnent to read. That is their paradox.) "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" states that it is better for humanity to have a war -- even an atomic war -- than to have scientific and cultural stasis under a "benevolent" dictatorship. The tale tells how a few remaining free minds work to persuade a guardian of one of the world's atomic piles to set it off and thus bring about the chaos which will make it possible to begin scientific research again and get mankind out of its deadly rut. "The Fairy Chessmen" is concerned with the even grimmer notion that wars are inevitable. Throughout an endless future,  which is an integral part of this story through the development ils ception) in a few unfortunate people, war seems to be the be-all and end-all of man's life, without purpose, without victory, without end. Actually, of course, "The Fairy Chessmen," with all its rich, concepts, is still primarily an almost frantic plea against what its author conceives to be the inevitable road to destruction down which modern man is traveling. Both stories are unreservedly recommended despite their morbid and, to me, indefensible philosophy. Wilson Tucker. Rinehart #g Co., New York, #. # pagesj # R are indeed in science fiction can one complain that something is underwritten. The converse usually is true -- a torrent of purple words and no substance. Here, on the contrary, is an example of a pretty big-time concept being more or less deflated by a somewhat inadequate handling. Even so, the story is a fascinating one. From its cold and rainy opening in the mist of the female warriors' camp in the Crown Colony of Western Somerset, to its shimmering, sunlit, mirage-protected ending abewe the mysterious (and never-seen) City in the Sea, far in the unknown western hinterland, it spins a spell. It is a story of the far future; of a ' society of women ; of the advent of a man and how he led a band of these women to his mysterious City; and why these women were wanted in that City. Yet the whole story seems limp, despite the excellence of its concept. One could wish that its author could have slipped into a sort of unconscious collaboration with someone like Robert Graves, who could have taken this theme and these people and blown the whole thing up into a rich brew of wonderful stuff. ited by August Derleth. Pellegrini and Cudahy, New York, #. # pages. # thology! Its # stories are said to have been selected by their authors -- the same technique that Margulies and Friend used in their # My Best Science Fiction Story. Since none of the stories have been reprinted before, it would have been safer to say that these are their authors' favorite unanthologized stories, which is quite a different thing.Even so, at least # of the # are quality stuff, according to the following ratings : "Interloper," by Poul Anderson -- fairly effective alien invasion. "Death Sentence," by Isaac Asimov. Interesting tale, though weak in its ending. "This Is the Land," by Nelson Bond. Surprisingly grim tale of world's end. Not bad. "Ylla." by Ray Bradbury. I personally love this tale, but then I'm a notorious Bradburian. "The Green Cat." by Cleve Cartmill. Run-of-the-mill alien invasion concept. "Git Along!" by L. Sprague de Camp. I wish I could find this funny, but I can't. "Service First," by David H. Keller. Fine old haywire classic, ver;much worth reviving. "Shock," by Henry Kuttner (originally published under the Fadgett byline). A very superior time travel story. "The Ship Sails at Midnight," by Fritz Leiber. Excellent alien invasion in the "Angel's Egg" tradition. "The Power," by Murray Leinster. Absolutely superb; the alien invader seen through the eyes of the medieval necromancer. The old master at top form. "The Critters," by Frank B. Long. Good plot, good idea, but painful writing and ending. "Pardon My Mistake," by Fletcher Pratt. O. Henry takes up space travel. "Good Night, Mr. James," by Clifford Simak. From this magazine and certainly worth reprinting. "The Plutonian Drug." by Clark Ashton Smith. Unreadable. "Farewell to Eden," by Theodore Sturgeon. Well done, but a wee bit incomprehensible to me. "Co-operate -- or Else!" by A. E. van Vogt. Ezwals, Rulls, Rytt killer plants and Prof. Jamieson. Big Fat Stuff on a far planet. "Finality Unlimited," by Donald Wandrei. Kind of story I just can't read. A pretty fair average, I would say, as current anthologies go.  Schuster, New York, #, # paes, # over eleven years old, has been reprinted by popular demand, and a good thing, too. A little overblown, considerably melodramatic,. but still one of the really gripping adventure stories about supermen. It lacks the depth, the perceptiveness, the irony and the satire to be found in the more profound Odd John, by Olaf Stapledon (recently reit tells an equally exciting story. Don't miss it'. She Who Laughs It's really a very simple story -- if you refuse to believe in ghosts and know that time is circular! I 'D been waiting two hundred years for this guy. He stood there in the graveled driveway with the estate agent, looking over the frontage of the mansion. The sun was hot. The ant took oiT his hat, mopped his balding head. I wondered whether I could spit that far from the upstairs window where I was watching them. I decided I probably could, but I wouldn't. , The agent said, in a thick brogue ,I can't reproduce in its glottal richness: "If it's se-dusion you're wantin', Mr. Mullen, you'd not better this foine upstandin' place this soideof Ballygorc. There's room to stretch your legs and fill your lungs with air that shweeps down from the mountains over covert and shweet pasture for your own special delectation and delight." My lips were moving with his. I'd heard it before. I knew the sucker would take the place. And I knew the agent, back in Thaughbcen, having dropped most of his beautiful stage brogue, would soon be saying: "He's paying in dollars, too, boys. And then, in the season, I'll sell them to the English tourists. This is an occasion to celebrate. Porter all round: on me." MuUen, casual as all hell, standing there with the agent, pretended to be considering. I whisked down the balusterrail. stood just behind the door as they came in. "Nice hall,' Mullen said unenthusiastically. He was wearing a drape suit. He didn't need drapes to bulk him out. Those shoulders had spearheaded the forward line three seasons at colJege, if my information was correct. Indignant, the agent said: TJice? It's talking like an Englishman you are, instead of a citizen o' the greatest country in the world." ("Bar Ireland," he added under his breath.) "Lookit the size of ut- -- the staircase, the paneling, the great wide windows, and that landin' there where the mighty O'Rourke stood and with the Sword of Kings defied the brayin' cowards o' Cromwell till he was struck a traitor blow from behind, and, like a greatgirthed tree smitten in its prime, fell among the cur-dogs and carried a full half-dozen of them to death with him. Here at this very spot!" The agent flung out a dramatic hand. I'd crept up behind them during the spiel. I never tire of hearing it. Mullen stepped back. I dodged. "Fool place to make a stand anyway," he muttered, looking at the balcony between the two staircases. "Arragh! The O'Rourke could foight as well with the two hands as the one. A sword in each, there he stood, facin' them both ways -- "  "Sure, sure. Now how many bedrooms did you say?" I followed them around. Mullen wasn't interested in bedrooms, only in the cellar. But I was waiting for the final spiel, dictated by what the agent retained of a conscience. "There's jist one small matter," he said, standing in the hall again after they'd looked the place over. "You may have been bearin' lies about this place in Thaughbeen, maybe from those loafers around Golighan's bar, and though I wouldn't be askin' yez to disregard ut entoirely -- " "The haunt, you mean?" said Mullen. I grinned to myself. "I heard about it during the war when I was stationed just across the border. That's when I became interested in the place. I looked it over, saw the power plant. There's quite a head of water in that stream. The memory of that stayed in the back of my mind until the other day, when I was in London with my wife, seeing some friends. Then I remembered this place. I have some work to do. I want electrical power and privacy. So I hopped the jet liner to Dublin and came up here -- " "And you'll take it, sorr? Ghost an' all?" If Mullen paid extra for a ghost, I thought, he'd be thoroughly had. But he said firmly: "I'm not buying your ghost. In another minute you'll be saying it's an asset to the place. It's a hundred years since my folk left this country, but we haven't gone soft. What's your price for this tumbledown she-been?" "The final price," said the agent, taking a deep, careful breath, "for a year's tenancy, in advance, in dollars, is -- how much did you offer?" "I didn't. But you can tell your client I'll pay a thousand." "Don't be shamin' me," said the agent, as I blew a cool breath down his neck. "It's meself that owns the place as you well know, if you know as much as you do." He drew up his coat collar. "Now let's be discussin' the details elsewhere." drive, into the shay. I could get away from the place now for a while. It was late afternoon. The green border hills in the distance were drawing up mist from the shadowed bog as their green darkened in the slanting sun: and the new-cut hay in the nearer fields brought relished delight. Two hundred years I'd waited for this jaunt. I enjoyed every second of it, even the acrid stink from Pethal's ill-cared-for hogs as we passed the holding. The hoppity-clop of the pony's hoofs on the dust-blown road was music. Over the green-lichened bridge by the trout stream trotted the pony. I promised myself to do some fishing there soon. I'd use a quiet worm and snooze in t'ne sun. Fly-fishing was too strenuous in this moist heat. And I'd look over my 'shoulder now and eain at the long pile of Thauhbeen House and lauK  # The #auh would be on me. That always makes it iunnier, in Ireland. Down from the bridge, ancf the road broadened into the village of Thaughbeen. The agent introduced Mullen to Golighan. "Stationed in the Six Counties durin' the war," he said, "and mindful of the beauties of the country, and wishin' to do a little book-work or such, decided to take over the place for a year or maybe more. And you'll be wastin' your time, Michael, me boy, tellin' him about the haunt to take the bread out of me very mouth, for Mister Mullen knows all about it." "Sit down and rest the onaisy tongue of yez," said Golighan, trying to outdo the agent's brogue. "Y'don't think he'd be taken in onyway by yer gabblin', wid a name loike Mullen. What'll you drink?" Mullen ordered Jamieson's Irish whisky. The agent took thick Dublin stout. I watched Mullen roll the smokey-peat flavor around his tongue. Two hundred years since I'd had the sweet, rare tang of it tickling my gullet... I licked invisible lips in anticipation. They stayed through the evening, with the real talk beginning when the lads drifted in. There was Sean Healey, Tom O'Reilly -- both, if I remembered right, working a pittance on Lord Freightowel's estate. Seamas Mulvaney, smallholder -- how many times had I seen him, as a barefoot gossoon, nicking plums from the kitchen j;arden at Thaughbeen House, looking often at the silent, window-eyed place with his own green, feary eyes, and me at an upstairs window holding in my breath not to give one of the ghostly groans I'd practiced so long and send him in a tearbreeches scramble down the tree. Then there was gutsy Bran Bailey who'd actually come inside one night, stood in the hall and with all his big little heart bawled: "The hell an' back wid banshees! T don't believe in 'em!" I'd been so pleased with his common sense that I forgot myself and called out the truth: "Good for you, kid. I'm no banshee. I'm no kind of goddam ghost. There's no such things." But poor Bran was running so fast, I doubted he'd heard me. Anyway, here he was in Golighan's, grown big and broad, and putting in his two cents' worth about the goings-on at Thaughbeen House. "It was during the war," Bran said, "and, being so near the border, we had a jeepful of your fellers running in here every night to stoke up on Mister Golighan's # r brew. And one night we tell them about the House, and about how poor daft Johnnie Maur goes up there now and again to play chess with the ghost, as he said. Poor Johnnie, gone eleven months now -- " Johnnie was dead? I'd missed him. Every time I heard that Johnnie was dead, itshocked me. He'd stumble into the House, liquored up to the fringe of his red hair, white face vacant and mild, shouting in the empty echoing halt: "It's a game of chess I'm offerin' yez, for, banshees or not, ye're the only dacent player this soide of Dublin who can tax me wandhering wits!" I hope Johnnie's found another "dacent player," wherever he's gone. Bran Bailey was talking on in Golighan's bar, with Mullen leaning forward and taking it all in. "So one night," says Bran, "the whole near-dozen of 'em starts off up there, with this great roarin' sergeant straddlin' the front and shoutin' : 'Look out, ghost, here we come, eight little Yankee boys full of rum I' "And the jeep goin' so slow with them aboard," says Bran, "and the rain makin' a bog of the road, we follow after these fellers to see what the Thaughbecn House ghost does with 'em. And they get halfway up the drive to the house, and the jeep stops, and there's the driver thumpin' and pullin' everything and callin' on all the saints, until the sergeant unstraddles himself and pulls up the front coverin'. "Then he jist stands there, rain sweatin' off his great red face and him suddenly as sober as a bangin' judge on a Monday, and he says: 'Put it back! Put it back quick before I believe my eyes, and I swear I'll never touch another drop again!' And we come up and look over his shoulder. "And there's nothing there under the hood. Nothing at all, at all."  hadn't meant to swipe the the whole motor at first. The teleport exhausted me for days. But I got annoyed when I'd yanked off three plug-leads and that damned jeep kept banging away on one cylinder. "And never a sight of the motor since," concluded Bran Bailey. Said Mullen: "Yes. I heard of  it. I was captain of their unit. We had to have the jeep towed away." "So you're not troublin' yourself about the creature at all?" asked Sean Healey. "Why should I? It's never harmed anybody, far as I can see." Thanks for them kind words, pal. ing." was all I said. "So does this whole situation. Hey, if these forecasts of yours turn out right, how about giving me the winners at Ballymuchray this afternoon?' Mullen was recovering pretty quickly, it seemed. I said: "I don't play the horses. If you've finished down here, you might as well get up to the kitchen and make yourself some coffee. No need to check that wiring any more. I've already done it. You've got a lazy morning ahead." "The morning," he said, "hasn't yet started. I'm not awake yet." "So now I'm part of a dream, am I? Get upstairs before I bat you with a clod of hard air." He muttered his way up to the kitchen, plunked an open pot on the stove, which he'd already lighted. Blue smoke puffed interthe place with pungent haze. Mullen looked up at the ceiling. addressed it politely: "I suppose, Mr. Fixit, you can tell me what's wrong with this thing?" "Naturally. Get hold of the poker and belt that flue pipe about halfway up. The plate's jammed and doesn't operate from the outside. Shank broke off way back." He belted. The fire roared up suddenly. "Thanks," he said. "Could I interest you in a cup of coffee?" "Very funny," I grunted sourly. slipped out to tell my "wife" how things were shaping up. My wife was bom to lay the eggs and crow as well. I'd suffered two hundred years of hell from her tongue. Blamed me for everything. She even beefed about my innocent games of chess with Johnnie Maur. And I remember when the Marchmont family was in occupation of Thaughbeen House, she'd scare half the life out of little Lilian Marchmont just because I happened to remark casually on her good looks. That gives you a picture of my wife -- a possessive shrew, to keep it in human terms which really don't apply very well. She started in on me now, so I grabbed up the chess board and pieces from the attic and skipped down from the Tenth Plane, where she was lying up and waiting for me to do most of the work, When I got back to the kitchen, Mullen was tapping at the walls and ceiling with a broomstick. "No secret panels or hidden amplifiers," I said. "It's all genuine physical phenomena." He looked round and breathed heavily. "Now I've seen everything." Ill Mullen decided to stay at GoUghan's until a few essentials had been carried up to the House. Meantime, he wired his wife to join him. F our days later, he took up residence. He came early. But early. The energy of that man! I was still resting when I heard him poking around in the cellars, tracing through the wiring from the turbo-house. I slipped down from where I go when I take a rest -- don't ask me where that is; it's a state, not a place -- and gummed down after him. He was lifting a tarpaulin in a corner of one of the smaller cellars: it used to be a cold-larder. He looked at the jeep motor and made funny disbelieving noises..."So," I said, "it wasn't the potheen. I figure you owe the sergeant and the other Company D hoys one big-handed apologyplus the dough you docked 'em to pay for it." . He came around so fast, he tripped and planted the tight part of his pants on one of the hobbly bits of the jeep motor.  "What -- where are you?" "Not in heaven or in hell, but just as elusive as the Pimpernel. As to what I am, you're going to tell me, I hope. That's what I've been waiting for -- a long, long time. Meanwhile, Mr. Mullen," I said, "you're soiling those nicely creased pants of yours." He upped off the engine, dusted his pants automatically. Something the Army did for him -- gave him a pride in his clothes. "Do you mind," he said, his brain beginning to work, "showing yourself? I hate like hell accepting sartorial advice from a voice without a body." "That takes energy," I said, "like compressing these air molecules to make sound waves. But it takes a lot of energy and a lot of material and right now I don't feel like dressing up to give you something to look at or talk at. However, I don't mind giving you a slight idea. Scrape some dust off those shelves, toss it up under that bulb, and stand back." "I am nuts," he enunciated carefully. "Sure. But do it. And nund your coat cuffs." As the cloud of tiny particles drifted down, I slipped in and charged them so they hung around the vortices of my antiparticles. "Almighty catfish!" Mullen gulped. "A naked ghost!" "I'm no ghost, and I don't have to be this shape, either," I said, adjusting the network. "Is this any better? Dogs are always naked," He backed off, slapping at the air. "For God's sake, be human if you can't be natural! I mean --  "Listen," I said, peeved, "that was a prirc mastiff I once saw. I can always do a mountain lion or a grizzly. Get me a roll of cheesecloth, or even a bedsheet at a pinch, and I'll really show you something." "I've seen enough," he said, digging knuckles in his eyes and shaking his head as if something was loose inside. "Go away." "Maybe you're right. I've got more important things to do with my energy than fool around to amuse you." "Amuse me?" He made a noise like an emptying bathtub. "I'd laugh easier in a morgue. Get back where you came from and make the worms laugh." "I'm not," I repeated patiently, ghost, a ghoulie, a banshee, or anything of the whatsoever kind. I've never met up with one and I don't expect to. Like young Bran Bailey, I don't believe in cm. Neither do you, fortunately. But explanations can wait. Has any of the stufr turned up yet?" That got him. "What stuff?" "Couple of tubes from Marshall's of London, specification alloy plates from Birmingham, that dingus you borrowed from the Sorbonne." "Your intelligence service must be good." "You'd be surprised." "Then you tell me where it is." T was just making conversa tion," I said. "It's on the way to Thaughbeen station now. Johnny McGuire will be carting it over around lunchtime. And your wife, who is wondering what in hell you're up to anyway, has reluctantly left her bright friends in London and is on her way to ask why you took over this motheaten old shack without consulting her first, especially since it's her money you're fooling around with." Mullen's lower jaw was nearly resting on his collar by this time. "Incidentally." I asked, "how is the darling girl? Has she enjoyed the European tour so far?' "Leave her out of this," he managed to say. But his tone was defensive. "Poor Mullen," I sighed. "She's still keeping the reins on you, huh? I pity you, feller. I know just how it is. I'm under the Iron High Heel myself. You'll have to meet my wife sometime." "This is too much! Two of you? Too damned much I A double haunt!" Mullen frowned. Then he began to laugh at his own sudden thoughts, "How do you make out, mister?" I considered explaining to him, but decided he'd never understand. "Wife" was the simplest way I could describe "her" -- the only way in earthly language. "Your mind needs deodorizI dumped the chess board and pieces on the kitchen table. "No," he said. "No! I'ra not going to confirm myself in my own madness. Take 'em away." I started setting out the pieces. He watched with a kind of horrible deadpan fascination. In a faraway voice he said; "Queen on her own color." "That's better," I told him. "Pull up a chair." He went to the kitchen window, looked at the soft sunlight glancing through the apple trees. He looked for quite a while. Then he shrugged, grabbed a chair and came back to the tabic. "Anywhere but Ireland," he observed, "I'd have run halfway to Thaughbeen by now." Twice during the game, which stretched out over three hours, he tried to make talk, but I dodged the questions. Once he made a grab in the air over my QKt as I was making a move. "Can you," I asked politely, "feel a magnetic field? Or an aircurrent, if your hand is moving with it? Or put a half-nelson on a frame of reference? Or poke a De Sitter anti-particle in the eye?" He gave up. Finally, as wc heard the clattering roar of McGuire's cartage van down the road, he said : "This is the damnedest game, in more than one sense. Check. Hold it until I'm back in this room. I heard them dumping the stuff into the hall; and a female voice ordering the carter around; and the bland, blarneying voice of McGuire somehow soaring above the authoritative female voice and quelling it When Mullen came back into the kitchen, he looked determined. He closed the door carefully behind him. "McGuire," he said, "is a breath of fresh air. Sanity returns. I've just realized what I've been doing all morning. I have a hell of a lot of work on hand and I can't get on with it until this is straightened out. And I'm not going to have my wife scared. Now just what arc you, and what's your racket?" "Patience, pal," I said. "Finish the game, then I'll talk. I fixed you some fresh coffee." Voices were raised again In the hall. "Incidentally, I don't think your wife scares easy. She's busy for a while anyway. Your move." He gulped coffee, watched me interpose on his check and threaten his own king simultaneously. He was compelled to exchange pieces, which made it a draw. "You've been playing for that," he accused. I sighed. "Not deliberately. If we played a dozen games, they'd end up on a draw. Or a stalemate. One or the other." "I don't get it. Quit the crosstalk. What are you?" H e sat more easily in his chair. He frowned at the coffee. I hoped I hadn't laced it too much. He'd get the idea soon enough anyway. "You've got a couple of books in your bag." I said. "One is a pretty detailed family history of this place, written and published at his own expense -- because no one else would be interested -- by Mister Patrick O'Rourke. Gentleman, at the turn of the century.  "There are only passing, deprecatory references to me in tliat. He never took kindly to the idea of family banshee, or banshees. The other was written twenty years ago by an earnest and sober investigator from the English Psychical Research Society. It's my biography. My wife, being what you'd call plumb lazy, never made an appearance for him. I've often regretted that the Society never got around to following up his report. I'd have shown 'em plenty." "Thn you are a haunt," Mullen said. "A plain, ornery haunt! But how do you tick? How do you move things around?" "A disembodied psyche -- " I began. That got him. He snapped up straight and mouthed for breath. Coffee slopped over the table. It didn't matter. He'd drunk enough for my purpose. "A disembodied psyche," I repeated firmly, "which is a focus of consciousness freed from hindering matter, and thus from the bonds of inertia and entropy, not to mention sex, can be a pretty powerful thing. It doesn't upset any energy balance because it utilizes extant potentials." His eyes were growing rounder. He tried to get up, then slumped back. "You soon master the mechanics of perception for yourself," I said. "It's largely a matter of that curious mental force called imagination. And you learn how to induce illusion in others. But it takes about ten years before you find a way to store enough free energy from cosmic sources in your own field-web of antiparticles to move solid objects around." He had trouble with his voice. "Ten years? Ten year from when?" "From pretty damn soon," I said sweetly. "Then you're -- you're -- " He gvdped. His eyes were glazing. "That's right," I said. "Sleep tight, brother." I was testing the last circuit when he came around. He opened his eyes nnd moaned a little. "Don't worry about the slight no hangover,' I said. "##I be taking it over in a moment." He looked around at the setup. Only his head could move. The rest of him was tied pretty firmly in the stasis area. "?rctty neat, huh?" I said. "It would have taken you months. Years, maybe. It probably did -- once. That's something I've never figured out. It took me four hours flat.even with the know-how. I had two hundred years to work it out." Mullen muttered: "It's a dream." "Check. That's how the thing started, if it ever did start. With Dunne's theories of precognition and post-cognition in dreams -- a freed psyche moving backward and forward in time. Or, as in this case, staying put and letting time flow by. No mass, so no trouble with entropy or inertia. All the paradoxes of time travel smoothed out." He'd gone bug-eyed again. I could almost see his brain wriggling. "What happens when I -- when you -- when this body dies?" "You answered that question when you devised the math," I said. "Does the past die? No. It's co-existent. Effective immortality." "But death -- " "Is pretty final," I agreed. "Dust to dust, ct cetera. And since we don't believe in an afterlife, that makes it a tough problem. But you've got a couple of centuries to figure that one out, too." "You mean you have figured it?" "I didn't. You didn't. We didn't. We never will because wc never have." "How many times has this happened?" "Once," I said patiently. "This is the first time. It always is.' "But with memory of this conversation, I can change the pattern! I can -- " Then he got the idea. His mouth dropped open. Slack jawed dope... "That's it," I said. I felt sorry for him, as usual. "You've already tried everything. You can't even leave the place until this turns up." I prodded his stomach. "It's the only body our psychic matrix will fit into, and there's a psychic compulsion to stay right here until it arrives. You can't lick time. You never could."  tubes began to heat up. "No!" he yelled. "Hold it! About my wife -- " "Our wife," I corrected him, looking around cautiously. This time I might get away with it. Maybe the pattern wouldn't always be the same. It was worth trying anyway. "You'll find her on the Tenth Plane when you figure out how to get there." I gave him the wave-off sign. "I've got a date with a bottle of Jamieson's Irish whisky and a fishing rod. By the way, when you meet up with old Johnnie Maur again, give him my love. He won't understand. He never does. Look out for his rook game in the end-play. So long, sucker," I said. "Good haunting." when -- "Hold it or I'll blast you!" I sighed resignedly and looked at the cellar steps. A body slumped inelegantly into view, dangling like a puppet from invisible strings. The voice came from above its head. How I hate that voice! "Eear, sweet Bernic," cooed my wife dangerously. "Trying it again? Don't you ever learn? If you touch that switch before my say-so, I'll fry that body of yours as soon as spit in your eye." Mullen choked : "That's Betty I" "Uh-huh," I murmured. "And that's Betty's body. She wants it back. I always try to leave her behind, but I guess I never succeed. I'd like to try living with a wife I haven't lived with for two hundred years. But she's spent months soaking up energy on the Tenth Plane, and if I don't play ball, she'll burn my body before I get it." "How right, darling," said Betty. Arsenic and molasses in that voice. "Now tie this down in the stasis field." I looked at the limp, blonde head and laughed. "I suppose you whanged her with the skillet again?" "That's my headache," the voice snapped. "Right! Thait's why I'm laughing, sweetheart." I laid Betty's unconscious head near Mullen's -- that is, near my shoulder. She stirred a little and moaned. I passed ropes over her and through the ring-bolt of the time lock and stood back admiring the scene. "Don't we look sweet?" I said. "Beautiful," said Betty. "Now pull that switch." . I went to the handle. "No -- " pleaded Mullen. "Yes," ordered Betty. I pulled. For a milU'Secotd, a soft, impossible wind southed through intergalactic nothingness. A condition of no-life. Binary stars flamed into view. Incorporate with a star, become corporeal, or cease. An incredible longing, fufilled at its conception. Homing to this star -- Vo.' Gef out! Occupied! Incorporate or cease! time lock snapped open, and ropes loosened round my body. Body. Beautiful word. Even with a headache like this. Headache! I gave a little scream and sat up. Mullen -- I mean me -- I mean Betty -- stood there grinning like an ape. "Beat you to it, heel," she -- he said. rd been wrong about the psychic matrix. That damned woman had always wanted to wear the trousers. Now she was wearing them, the ones that should have been mine. A little thing like the sex of the body I inhabit shouldn't really matter, of course. Sex doesn't actually apply to me, as such. But... Anybody know where I can get some nylons? Brand-new science (ictioni Original stories (created specially for this unique collection) by Bradbufy, Boucher, Aatmov, van Vogt, Heard and other topranking science-fiction writera, niroduetton by Anthony Boucher # at all bookaellars spine-tinglinc out o this world stories -- #e plete fantasy and science fiction adventures -- #e ThriB to I or an # groat paper-cover booklets! extraordinary fantastic yams. # pages (cloth) SOe science-fiction, Fantastic Adventure, Weird Books! # E.San Fernando St... Dept. G. San Jose #, Calif. Next Month... by Poul Anderson... Plus novelets, short stories, features... Ticket to Anywhere A to iiteraUy anywhere in the Universe! There was only one drowbacic -- you couldn't pick your destnaton y man. Up until three weeks . ago he had been, so far as he had been able to discover, the only sane man left in a world of lunatics. Now he was a dead man. He lay in a metal coffin twenty yards long by three wide, airless, soundless. Behind the faceplate of his helmet, under the rime of subzero air. his lips were bright blue, bis cheeks, nose, forehead a lighter color, almost violet. The flesh was stiff as frozen leather. He did not move, breathe, or think; he was dead. Beside him, strapped to the bulging torso of his suit, was a metal box labeled: See Instructions Inside All around him. strapped tight to the walls by broad loops of webbing, were boxes, cannisters, canv bags, kegs. Cargo. His coffin was a freighter, going to Mars, and he was a frozen stowaway aboard it. In his brain the memories were neatly stacked, just as he had left them, not coupled now, each cell isolated, the entropy of his mind fallen to zero. But uppermost among them, waiting for the thaw that might never come, wert the memories of his last few hours of life. Oncf the ship was launched nd free, after he had slipped into . he had had to wait until its 'ancing molecules had stilled, eir heat all radiated away into pace. Then to wait again, heater urned off, listening to the silence hile his own life's heat drained way: fingers and toes numb first, ars and nose following, then lips, hceks and all his flesh. Shivering i an agony of cold, he had atched his breath fill the helmet vith cloud, the cold drops bcadng on the colder faceplate. Tricky business, one that deiianded courage. Act too soon, md the final drop into stillness vould be too slow -- the freezing iquis in his body would crysalize, gashing his cells with a ong, and the cold would steal his jutonomy: the order would go jut along his dendrites, "Act!" md there would be no response. He had waited until the false varmth of the dying had crept ver him. the subtle destroyer rumbering his limbs not w'ith larshness but with too much leacc. Twisting then in the dead enter where he floated, he had Irawn himself into the lane bcween two looped bundles of argo. forcing them aside, until ic reached the naked hull. There, prcad-cagled against the chill metal, embracing it as one who :rucifies himself glady. he died. The ship, stillest of sepulchers, hung fixed inthe center of the starry globe. So it might have remained for time without end. changeless, knowing no time, for there was no time here. The ship and all its contents -- except its robot control, inactive now but warmed by a minute trickle of electrons -- were very nearly at zero absolute. cating tremor through support frame and girder and hull. Time had begun again. The radar assembly in the prow began to emit timed clusters of radiation. Presently other relays snapped over, and then the engine awoke, whispered to itself an instant, and was silent. For an instant the ship had become once more a thing in motion, a pebble flung between the stars. Another such instant came, and another; then, at long last, the hull shuddered to the whip and carom of atmospheric molcculc.s. Lightly it dipped into Martian air, out again, in again, making a great braking circuit of the globe. A final relay clicked, and Falk's  coffin of a freighter hurled itself groundward, free of the skeletal ship whose rockets now flamed again, driving it back into the timeless deep. A parachute opened as the cargo hull hurtled downward: a preposterous parasol that w'ould #)# not have held the weight for a minute against Earth's gravity, in Earth's air. But here it slowed that plummeting fall until the box met Martian sand not quite In the shell of the motionless freighter, Falk's corpse slowly thawed. l"riS heart was beating. That was Falk's first conscious realization, and he listened to the tiny sound thankfully. His chest was rising and falling in a deep, slow rhythm; he heard the hiss and whisper of breath in his nostrils, and felt the veins pulse at his temples. Then came a prickling half pain in his arms and legs. He saw a ruddy haze of light on his closed lids. Falk opened his eyes to a pale glow that turned itself into a face. It went briefly, then came back. Falk could see it a little better now. Young, about thirty, paleskinned, with H blue beardshadow. Black, straight hair, a little untidy. Black-rimmed spectacles. Ironic lines on either side of the thin mouth. "All right now?" said the face. Falk murmured, "Think so.' The young man nodded. He picked up something from the bed and began talking it apart, fitting tire components into the cushioned troughs of a metal box. It was the heart probe, Falk saw: the bulky control box, the short, capillarythin needle. "Where did you get this?" the young man asked. "And what the devil were you doing aboard that freighter?" "Stole the probe," mumbled Falk. "And the suit, and the rest of the stuff. Dumped enough cargo to match my weight. Wanted to get to Mars. Only way was to stow aboard." "You stole it?" the man repeated incredulously. "Then you never had the analogue treatment?" Falk smiled. "Had it. all right. Dozen times. Never took." He felt very tired. "Let me rest a minute, will you?" "Of course. Sorry." The young man went away, and Falk closed his eyes; he went through those last hours once, painful as they were, and then again. There was trauma there; mustn't let it get buried, to cause him trouble later. Accept it, know the fear, live with it. came back, carrying broth that steamed in a cup. and Falk drank it gratefully. Then he fell unknowing into sleep. When he awoke, he was stronger. He tried to sit up and found, to his mild surprise, that he could. The other, who had been sitting in an armchair across the room, put down his pipe and came over #S# to thrust pillows behind Falk's back. Then he sat down again. The room was cluttered and had a stale odor. Floor, wall and ceiling were enameled metal. There were books and rolls of tape, records, in shelves: more piled on the floor. A dirty shirt was hanging from the doorknob. "Want to talk now?" the young man asked. "My name's Wolfert." "Glad to know you. Mine's Falk. You want to know about the analogue business first, I suppose." "And why you're here." "They're the same thing," Falk told him. "I'm immune to analogue treatment. I didn't know it for sure till I was ten, but I think I wass born that way. From seven on, I remember the other kids talking about their Guardians, and me pretending I had one. too. You know how kids are -- anything to be part of the gang. "But for a long time, years, I wasn't certain whether everyone else was pretending like me. or whether I really was the only one without an invisible Guardian to talk to. I was pretty sure the kids were lying when they said they could sec theirs, but whether they were there at all or not was another question. I didn't know; actually it didn't bother me much. A kid that age doesn't distinguish readily between fact and fantasy. "When I was ten, I stole some thing. It was a book I wanted, which my father wouldn't let me have. The clerk was looking the other way; I put it under my jacket. Funny, I was halfway out before it struck me that I'd ist proved I had no Guardian. By that time, you see. I'd decided that I'd just never seen mine, because I'd never done an#Tthing bad. I was proud of that, a little prissy about it if you want the truth. I only wanted this book... "I had sense enough, tliank God, to burn that book after I'd finished reading it. If I hadn't, I don't suppose I would have lived to grow up." "Should think not," Wolfert said, his eyes fixed on Falk, alert, wary. "One man without any control could turn the whole applecart over. But I thought immunity was theoretically impossible." "Tve thought about that a good deal. According to classic psycholcgy it is. I'm not unusually resistant to hypnotic drugs; I go under all right. But the censor mechanism just doesn't respond. I've had the notion that I may be a mutation, developed in response to the analogue treatment as an anti-survival factor. But I don't know. As far as I've ever been able to find out, there are no more like me." "Umm," said Wolfert, puffing at his pipe. "Should think youf next move would be to get married, have children, see if they were immune, too." Falk stared at him soberly. "Wolfert, can you imagine yourself settling down happily in a community of maniacs?" other's face flushed. He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked down at it. Finally he said, "All right, I know what you mean." "Maybe you don't," said Falk, thinking, I've offended him. Couldn't help it. "You've been out here ten years, haven't you?" Wolfert nodded, "Things are getting worse," Falk told him. "I've taken the trouble to look up some statistics. They weren't hard to find; the damned fools are proud of them. The number of persons in mental institutions has gone steadily down since #, when tlie worldwide analogue program got under way. Extension of analogue program has gone steadily up. The two curves cancel out perfectly. "There are fewer and fewer people who have to be put away in madhouses -- not because of any improvement in therapy, but because the analogue techniques are getting better and better. The guy who would have been hopelessly insane fifty years ago now has a little man inside his head, controlling him, making him act normal. On the outside, he is normal; inside, he's a raving madman. Worse still, the guy who would have been just a little bit cracked, fifty years ago -- and gotten treatment for it -- is now just as mad as the first guy. It doesn't matter any more. We could all be maniacs and the world would go on just as before." Wolfert grimaced wryly. "Well? It's a peaceful world, anyhow." "Sure," said Falk. "No war or possibility of war, no murders, no theft, no crime at all. That's because every one of them has a policeman inside his skull. But action begets reaction, Wolfert, in psychiatry as in physics. A prison is a place to get out of, if it takes you a lifetime. Push one plunger down, another will rise. Just a few years more, I think -- ten or twenty, say -- and you'll see that madhouse curve rise again. Because there's no escape from the repression of the Guardians except a further retreat into insanity. And eventually a point is reached where no amount of treatment can help. What arc they going to do then?" Wolfert tamped his pipe out slowly and stood up. "Meaning the psychiatrists who really govern Earth, I suppose. You've evidently figured out what you're going to do about all this." Falk smiled. "Yes. With your help, I'm going to the stars." The other stood frozen a moment. "So you know about that,' he said. "Well, come into the next room, ril show it to you." F alk had known about the Doorway, but not that it looked like this. It was a cubicle of something that looked like slick brown glass, ten feet high, six wide and deep. Inside, at waist level on the far wall, a lever, curiously shaped, like the head of an old-fashioned walking-stick, the slightly curved bar of the L parallel tp the wall. Nothing more than that. The floor of Wolfert's hut ha been assembled around it. It was the reason for the hut's existence, for Wolfert's dearly bought presence on Mars. "So that's it," said Falk. He took a step forward. "Stay where you are." Wolfert said sharply. "The area in front of the entrance is boobytrapped." Falk stopped and looked at Wolfert, then at the metal cabinets bolted to the floor on cither side of the Doorway. Now that he looked at them closely, he could see the lers of blacklight beams, and above them, metal ones that he guessed were discharge points. Wolfert cpnfirmed it "If anything ever comes out, the current is supposed to get him. If it doesn't, I'm here." He put his hand on the rapid-fire automatic at his belt. Falk sat down slowly on a bench next to the wall. "Why are they so afraid of whatever might come out of the Doorway?" "You don't know the whole story, then. Tell me what you do know and I'll fill in the gaps." "The first Mars expedition, in '#, found it here. Apparently it was known to be an interstellar transportation system, but as far as I could learn, nobody ever actually tried it out. I knew that a caretaker had been left here -- your predecessor, I imagine -- after the idea of colonizing Mart wa abandoned. But I didn't know any of the reasons." Wolfert grinned briefly and leaned against the wall. "It's a transportation system, all right. Put an object in that cubicle, press the lever down, the object vanishes. So does most of the crowbar or whatever you use to work the lever. Ffft -- gone. "We don't know how old it is and have no way of telling. The material it's made of is a hell of a lot harder than diamond. About half of it is underground. That was the way it was found, sitting perfectly level on the surface of the desert. I believe it must taye.sqme sort pf self-leveling mechanism built into it, so that it's always available no matter what changes the surface of the planet goes through.  "Other ruins have been found on Mars, but they're all stone and quite primitive; nothing like this. The first expedition tried to get into its innards and find out what made it go, of course, but they couldn't. You can see in, only there's nothing to sec." He gave his quick, ironic smile. "It's frustrating. Makes a physicist feel like a backward student in a kindergarten. We know that it's part of an interstellar network. One man did try it out -- a member of the first expedition. He saw the cubicle and the lever, stepped in and pressed it to find out what would happen. He found out, all right, but I don't suppose the rest of us will ever know. "Then the second expedition brought along a batch of powerful allwave senders and put tliem through. They picked up the first signal five years later, from the general direction of the star Regulus. Two more after seven years, then four during the thirteenth year, all from different directions. The other eight have yet to be heard from." He looked at Falk. "Now do you understand? The thing has no selectivity. It's completely random. We could walk through there and step out onto the planet of another star but it might take way back by trial and error." Falk leaned back against the wall, trying to absorb the idea. "Maybe there are only a dozen or so stars in the network." he suggested. "Don't be a fool. Would the race that could build (hat stop at a dozen stars, or a thousand? They owned the Galaxy! Sixty theory, all the main ones have planets." He pointed to the Doorway. "Three hundred sixty cubic feet about." he said. "Enough for one man and supplies for a year, or fifteen people and supplies for a month. That's the limit to the size of the colony we could send out. With no assurance," he added bitterly, "that they'd land anywhere they could live for a minute." "Frustrating," Falk agreed. "But I still don't See why you're here with a gun. I can understand that if a member of the race that built that thing came through and I must say it seems unlikely -- that would be an important event. But why kill him when he steps out?" "It isn't my policy, Falk. I only work here." "I understand that. But do you have any idea what's behind the policy?" "Fear. They've got too much at stakf." Wolfert leaned against the wall again, gesturing with his pipestem. "Do you realize that we could have interstellar colonization without this gadget, on our own? Give us a fuel source efficient enough so that we can accelerate continuously for as long as eight months, and we could reach the stars well within a man's lifetime. But do you know why we won't? They're even afraid to plant colonies here on Mars, or op Jupiter's moons, simply because transportation takes too long. Imagine a colony cut off from Earth by a five or ten year trip. Say something goes wrong -- a man like yourself, naturally immune to analogue treatment. Or a man who somehow evade? the treatment, then manages to take it over, change it. Say he cuts out the one directive, 'You must do nothing against the policy or interests of Earth.' Then you've got two communities again, not one. And then?" Falk nodded soberly. "War. They don't dare take even the smallest chance of that." "It isn't a question of daring; they can't. That's one of the directives in their own conditioning, Falk." "So we'll never get to the stars." "Unless," said Wolfert, "somebody comes through that Doorway who understands how it works. The voltage is high, but not high enough to kill -- humans, that is. He's supposed to be stunned, and if the current doesn't stop him and he tries to get back into the Doorway, I'm supposed to shoot to cripple. But at all events, he isn't to be allowed to go back and warn others to stay away from this station. Because if we knew how to alter the system so that it would be selective -- " "Then we'd have colonies," finished Falk. "Every one just around the corner from Earth. All just alike. The loonies shall inherit the Universe... I hope nobody ever comes through." H e prowled the rest of the cabin with Wolfert, resting at intervals until his strength returned. There wasn't much to sec: the Doorway room, with a spyhole Falk had not noticed between it and the bedroom; the room that housed radio, radar and the computer that controlled the grazing orbits of the supply rockets; the power plant, and the compressor that kept the cabin's air at breathable pressure; kitchen, bathroom, and two storage chambers. The radio room had a window, Falk stood there a long time, looking out over the alien desert, violet now as tlie sun dropped toward the horizon. Stars glittered near-black, near-vacuum sky. In his mind he sketched hairlines of fire across the sky, a cat'scradle of stars. The thought that tomorrow he would be standing on a planet of one of those suns was frightening, but at the same time it lured him. He felt like Wolfert said abruptly,. "You haven't asked me whether I reported to Earth when I found you in that freighter shell." Falk looked at him. T'll be gone long before they can do anything about me." "What made you so sure that a boy standing on the edge of an unsounded pool, whose black waters might hold treasure or death: he was afraid to dive, and yet he knew that he must. How could a man feel otherwise, he wondered, knowing that the way was open, that he had only to step forward? I'd be -- S#rmpathetic?" "You're a volunteer. They haven't got to the stage of conditioning people to do jobs they don't want to do, though I suppose they will eventually. You're a hermit. You don't like the madhouse they're making out of Earth any more than I do." #S "I don't know," said Wolfert. "Perhaps you're assuming too much similarity. I don't feel as you do about the analogue system, or the present government. I can see that it will lead to disaster eventually, but that doesn't bother me much. I'll be dead. But I want the stars. That's an emotional thing with me... There are no slugs in these cartridges." He indicated the gun at his hip. "Or in any of the ammunition I've got. They didn't condition me against that." "Lqpk," Falk said abruptly, "you've got a directive against stepping through that Doorway. Is that right?" The other nodded. but is there any reason why T couldn't knock you over the head and drag you through?" Wolfert smiled wryly, shaking his head. "Somebody's got to stay at this end." "Why?" "Because there's a chance that you'll find the secret out there, somewhere. That's what you're hoping, too, isn't it? You're not just looking for a place to hide -- you could do that in a thousand places on Earth. You're after knowledge, and in spite of what I've told you, you're hoping you'll be able to bring it back and make the Earth over." "It sounds a little Messianic," said Falk, "but you're right." Wolfert shrugged, letting his gaze drift away again. "Well, then, there's got to be somebody here. Somebody with no slugs in his gun. If I went with you, they'd take good care to send a different sort of man next time." He met Falk's eyes again briefly. "Don't waste time feeling sorry for me. You may not believe it, but I'm quite happy here. When I'm alone, that is," Falk had been wondering why the government had not sent a married couple instead of a single man, who might go mad from sheer loneliness. Now it struck him that he had been stupid. When a man has a wife, he's no longer a hermit. After a moment Falk said, "Wolfert, I Hke you better than any man I've ever met. I hope you'll believe that." Wolfert hauled out a pipecleaner, a complicated thing of many hinged stems, the free ends stamped into shovel-shapes, tamper-shapes, probes. He said, 'Tm afraid I dislike you, Falk, but it's nothing personal. I hate your guts because you're the master of your own mind." He turned and put out his hand, grinning. "Aside from that, I think you're a great guy." Falk gripped his hand. "I hope you're here when I get back." 'Til. be here," said Wolfert, scraping his pipe bowl, "for another thirty-odd years, barring accidents. If you're not back by then, I don't suppose you'll be coming back at all." II A T his suggestion, Falk put on one of Wolfert's light Mars suits instead of the spacesuit he had worn in the freighter. The latter, designed for heavy-duty service in the orbital space station that circled Earth, was, as Wolfert pointed out, too clurpsy for use on a planet's surface. The lighter suit furnished adequate protection in thin atmosphere, and was equipped with gadgetry that the other lacked: a headlamp. climbing gear, built-in compass, and food, water and disposal devices. It carried air tanks, but also had a compression outfit -- which, given an atmosphere at least no poorer in oxygen than that of Mars, would keep the wearer alive for as long as the batteries held out. "You'll have to find a place where you can live off the land," said Wolfert. "If all the planets .you hit should happen to be dead, so will you be, very shortly. But this suit will giVe you longer to look, at least. I'd give you this gun, but it wouldn't do you any good without ammunition." He disconnected the boobytrap and stood aside as Falk went to the entrance of the doorway. Falk took one last look around at the bare metal room, and at Wolfert's spare figure and gloomy face. He stepped into the brown-glass cubicle and put his gloved hand on the lever. "See you," he said. Wolfert nodded soberly. Falk turned on his helmet lamp, rested his free hand near the control box at his belt and pressed the lever down. Wolfert vanished. An instant later Falk was aware that the lever was no longer beneath his hand. He turned, dazedly, and saw that it was back in its original position. Then he remembered the curious blank that had taken Wolfert's place, and he turned again to the entrance. He saw graywhite blankness, featureless, uncommunicative. Was this some kind of intermediary stat? If so, how long did it last? He felt a surge of panic as he recalled that it was only assumption that the journey was instantaneous, and another as he thought of the eight transmitters that had never been heard from. He gripped the edge of the doorway and bent forward, looking downward, seeing only a chaos of dim colors of which his eye made nothing. Then he saw the cliff, and all the rest of the scene fell into perspective. He stood at the top of a sheer MS mountain -- an impossible, ridiculous height. Whatever was at the bottom melted into a meaningless tapestry of grayed color. He looked to right and left, and saw nothing else. No sound came through the diaphragm of his helmet. He had only the tactile and muscular responses of his own body, and the hard reality of the Doorway itself, to assure him that he was real and alive. The planet was dead. He felt irrationally sure of it. There was not even a whisper of wind; only the featureless blanket of gray cloud, the cliff, the meaningless colors below. He looked at the kit slung to his belt: the pressure gauge, bottled litmus papers, matches. But there as no point in testing this atmosphere. Even if it were breathable, there was no way of getting out of the Doorway, for the cliff began not more than an inch from the entrance. Falk went back to the lever, psessed it down again. This time he watched it as it reached the end of its stroke. There was no hint of transition. The lever was there, under his hand, and then it was back in the starting position. He turned. Deep blue night, blazing with stars. Underneath, a flat bluegreen waste that ran straight away into the far distance. Falk stepped out onto the icy plain and looked around him, then upward. The sky was so like the one he had known as a boy in Michigan that it struck him almost as a conviction that this terminus was on Earth -- in the Antarctic, perhaps, near the pole, where no explorer had ever happened across it. Then, as he looked automatically for the Dipper, Orion's Belt, the Southern Cross, he knew that he was wrong. Directly above him was a group of eight stars, two of them straight line, the rest spread out in an almost perfect semicircle. Falk knew that if he had ever seen that constellation before, he would not have forgotten it. Now he looked down toward the horizon, blacker than the sky. How could he know that light, warmth, safety, knowledge were not hiding just beyond the curve of the planet? He turned back to the cubicle. He was here on sufferance, a man in a Mars suit, with weeks -- or, with great luck, months or years -- to live. He had to find what he sought within a pitifully small radius from the Doorway. Down went the lever again. Now it was still night, but when Falk went to the Doorway, he saw an avenue of great buildings under the stars. The air pressure gauge came out for the first time, low. but the compressor could handle it. The litmus papers -- negative. The match burned weakly, and only for an instant, but it burned. Falk started the compressor and shut off the flow of air from the tanks slung at his back. Then he turned on his helmet light and marched off down the avenue. shape, the buildings all sloped away as they rose, so that, for all their enormous bulk, they did not hide the sky. Falk looked up when he had taken a few steps, unreasonably expecting to see the half-circle constellation. But it was not there, and he realized witli a shock that for all he knew, he mijdit be halfway across the Galaxy from the spot where he had stood five minutes ago. drew a picture of the Galaxy in his mind, an oval lens of stars against blackness. Near one focus of the ellipse he put a dot of brightness that stood for Sol. Then he made another dot. and drew a shining line between them. Then another dot, and another line: then another. They made a sprawling letter N across the misty oval. It was incomprehensible. A race that could span the Galaxy, but could not choose one destination from another? The only other alternative was that there was some function of the Doorway which men had failed to grasp, some method of selection that evaded them, as a savage might be bewildered in a modern tubeway system. But Falk's mind rejected that. The mechanism was simple, clear. A cubicle and a lever. Function is expressed by shape and the shape of the Doorway said "Go." It did not say "Where?" He looked again at the buildings. The upper quarter of them, he saw now, was badly eroded : layers inches deep had been eaten away. He glanced at the fine orange sand that paved the avenue and saw that it filled doorways almost to the top. The space between tlic sand and the tops of the doorways was narrow, but he thought he could squeeze through. He picked out disk of his headlamp, and stood there, in the middle of the avenue, reluctant to move. He glanced back at the cubicle, as if for reassurance. It was still there, comfortably clear and sharp-lined, timeless. Now he realized what was troubling him. This city was dead -- dead as the planet of the cliff, or the planet of ice. The buildings were stone; they had crumbled under the weather. Their makers were dust, i#r He had agreed with Wolfert that he was on a quest for knowledge, that he hoped the Doorway would eventually take him back to Sol, armed with knowledge, ready to remake the world. But it wasn't true. That had been his conscious idea, and it was a dream, a self-delusion, an excuse. He had no love for Earth, no conviction that humanity must be rescued. If that force had driven him, there would have been no logic in leaving. He could have stayed, worked himself into the governing elite, organized a change from within. His chance of success would have been small, but there would have been a chance. Yes, he might have done it, and  for what? Uncontrolled, mankind was not fit to colonize. Controlled, it dared not take the risk. But there had been another civilization that had been worthy of the stars, for it had conquered them. Falk did not believe it was dead. Stone crumbled, metal rusted, yet the Doorways still lived, still functioned, defying time. But that race was not here; it had left no trace of itself except the Doorway. Without another glance at the buildings around him, Falk turned and went back to the brown-glass cubicle. When he was three yards away from it, he saw the footprints. There were five of them, lightly impressed into the sand near the Doorway's entrance. Even with a careful search, Falk could not find any more. Two, apparently, pointed away from the cubicle; the other three were the returning trail, for one overlapped one of the previous set. They were smaller than Falk's booted prints, oval, slightly flattened along the sides. Falk stared at them as if the mere act of looking would make them give up more information, but they told him nothing. They were not human. What, though, did that prove? They could ba the trace of a Doorway builder. Or they could have been made by a wanderer like himself. The bitterest thing of all was that, having found the trail, he could not follow it. For it led through the Doorway -- to any Falk stepped into the cubicle and pressed the lever down once more. Ill with pain, and there was a vicious torrent of heat. Gasping, Falk groped frantically for the lever. The after-image faded slowly. #  He saw night again, and the stars. That last one, he thought, must have been the planet of a nova. How many of those was he likely to run into? He stepped to the Doorway. A wasteland: not a stick, not a stone. He went back to the lever. Light again, of bearable intensity, and a riot of color outside. He saw a bright landscape under a tropic sun -- gray-violet mountains in the distance, halfveiled by mist; nearer, tall stalks that bore heavy leaves and fronds of a startling blue-green: and directly ahead of him, a broad plaza that might have been cut from one monstrous boulder of jade. On either side were low, box-shaped structures of dark vitreous material : blue, brown, green and red. And in the middle of the plaza stood a group of slender shapes that were unquestionably alive, sentient. Falk's heart was pounding. He stepped behind, the shelter of the entrance wall and peered out. Curiously, it was not the cluster of live things that drew him, but the buildings on either side. They were made of the same enduring, clean-edged substance as the Doorway. He had come, by blind chance, to the right place at last. Now he stared at the creatures grouped in the middle of the plaza. For some reason, they were disappointing. They were slender S-shapes, graceful enough in repose; lizard-shapes, upright on two legs; pink of belly and umber of hack. But in spite of the bandoliers slung from their narrow shoulder, in spite of their quick, patterned gestures as they spoke together, Falk could not convince himself that he had found the people he sought. They were too manlike. One turned away while two others spoke; came back leaning at a passionate angle, thrust himself between the two, gesturing wildly. Shouted down, he again left, and stalked a half-circle around the group. He moved as a chicken moves, awkwardly, thrusting his long neck forward at each step. Of the five others, two argued, two merely stood with drooping, attentive heads and watched: and the last kept a little apart, gazing around him disdainfully. They were funny, as monkeys are funny because they resemble men. We laugh at our mirrored selves. Even the races of man laugh at each other, when they should feel compassion. They're tourists, Falk thought. One wants to go to the Lido; another insists they see the Grand Canal first; the third is furious with both of them for wasting time; the next two are too timid to interfere, and the last one doesn't care. He couldn't imagine what their reaction to him would be. They might want to take him home as a souvenir. He was anxious to get into those buildings, but he'd have to wait until the creatures were out of sight. While he waited, he got out his atmosphere testing kit. The pressure gauge showed a trifle less than Earth normal; the litmus papers did not react; the match burned cheerfully, jUst as it would have on Earth. Falk cracked the helmet valve cautiously and sniffed. After the stale air of the suit, the breath he inhaled was so good that he could almost taste it. It wa fresh, faintly warm, and sweet with flower fragrance. Falk opened the helmet seam, tipped the helmet back and let the breeze wash over his face and hair. He peered out, and saw with sudden dismay that the party was trooping directly toward him. He ducked his head back inside, glanced instinctively at the lever, then looked out again. They were running now: they had seen him. They ran very clumsily, heads darting strenuously forward and back. The one in the lead was opening and shutting his triangular mouth, and Falk heard faint yawps. He leaped out of the cubicle, cut sharply to the right, and ran. The nearest building with a visible-opening, unfortunately, was some distance down the line, between the lizards and Falk. He glanced back when he was half' way there. The lizards were considerably strung out now, but the leader was only a few yards away. They were faster than they looked. Falk put his head down and tried to make his heavy boots move in a sprint. Almost to the door, he looked back again. The lizard was one jump away, balltipped fingers outspread. Falk turned in desperation and, as the lizard came up, swung a knotted fist to the point of its snout. He heard its steam-whistle sci#?ech, saw it collapse, and then he was diving through the open door ahead. The door closed gently behind him -- a sheet of glassy substance, the same blue as the walls, gliding down to seal the opening. Through its transparency he could see the dark shapes of the lizards crowding around, leaning to pry at the bottom of the door, gesticulating at each other. It was plain, at any rate, that the door was not going to open for them. Whether it would open for him, when he wanted it to, was another matter. He looked around him. The building was a single room, huge, so long and deep that he could barely see the far walls. Scattered over the floor were boxes or chests, racks, shelves, little ambiguous mounds. Nearly all the objects Falk could see were fashioned of the same glasslike material. There was no dust in the room ; but now that Falk thought of it, he realized that there had been none in any of the Doorways, either. How that was done he could not conjecture. He went to the nearest object, a file or rack, formed apparently to take many things of diverse shapes and sizes. It was a quarter empty now, and the remaining contents had a jumbled look. He picked up an orange-glass spindle, full of embedded threads, or flaws, that looped in a curious pattern from one end to the otlier. He put it down, took a hollow sphere of opal. It was made in halves and seemed to be empty, but Falk could find no way to take it apart. He replaced it, and took a brown object shaped like a double crescent with a clear fracture plane running diagonally through it... Half anhour later, he realized that he was not going to find any picture-books, or engineering manuals, or any one thing that would unlock the mystery of the Doorway people for him. If there were any knowledge to be gained "Readers of this magdzlnb will probably want to buy this book; . I  . Space Medicine in Ihe- . U.S-. AirFprce ' Multiple Stage Rockett p Physiological consideretions oT the Possibility of Life Under EKtrafer . restrlal Conditions the serious study now going on in the U.S. Air Force of space flight and its effect upon humans  written by the men who are doing the research. Easy to read. Graphicolly illustrated. Published by the University of Order at your favorite bookstore, or C.O.D. I vnderiland I have tha privilege at telurninp the bach within # dey for a full refund. I went the D paperbevnd (# plwr poitage), Q clalhbound (# plui pettagt) ediltan. Roy potiman when booh errSvet. M not delighted, return it within # deys, end your poymeni will be refunded. here, it would have to come from the building as a whole... The lizards distracted him. He could see them through the walls of the building, pressing their snouts against the glass, staring with little round eyes, gesturing at him. The group finally broke up, leaving only one to guard the exit; the others dispersed. Falk saw one go into the building directly across the plaza. The door closed behind him. A little later another approached and pounded on the door; but it did not open until the first lizard came close to it inside. Some automatic mechanism, beyond Falk's fathoming, evidently responded to the prence or absence of any living thing inside each building. When the last person left, the door stayed open; when another person entered, it shut and would not open for the next unless the first person allowed it. That added one item to the description of the Doorway people that Falk was building in his mind. They were not propertyconscious, not afraid that thieves would enter in their absence, for the doors stood open when they were gone, but they evidently respected each other's love of privacy. Falk had previously thought of this building as a vast factory, or laboratory, or dormitory -- a place designed to serve a large number of people, anyhow. Now he revised his opinion. Each building, he thought, was the private domain of one person, or, if they had family groups, only two or three. But how could one person or one family use all this space, all these possessions? He asked himself what a cliffaire's triplex apartment in New York. It helped, but not enough. The objects around him were all specialized tools; they would not function for him, and so told him nothing about the Doorway builders. There was nothing that he could compare to a bed, a table, a shower bath. He could not visualize the people who had lived here. With an effort, he forced himself to stop thinking in terms of men. The facts were important, not his prejudices. And then what had been a barrier became a road. There were no beds, tables, showers? Then the Doorway people did not sleep; they did not eat; they did not bathe. Probably, thought Falk, they did not die. The riddle of the deserted chamber mocked him. How, having built this city, would they leave it? How would they spread the network of the Doorways across the face of the Galaxy, and then leave it unused? #oo:oo pmzE! known or unknown! Ability essential, but (nugirution is your biggest asset. No re strictions on theme, no magazine taboos. This competition is open to all! tries must be original, unpublished ovicncc'fiction novels -- preferred lengths # to # words. Authors may sub mit any number vf entries. # in cash will be paid immediately to the Grand Prize Winner, of which # is an outright gratuity, and # a mini mum. guaranteed advance against royal ties (rton-returnable) at standard rates. Contest closes September #, # Grand Prize Winner will be announced (m or before December #. #. Decision of the judges, Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. #nal. Unsuccessful entries will be returned thereafter by express collect unless otherwise instructed. nfs fo COnfesfanfS. Give us an exdting, unusual story. Audacious concepts welcomed. Science must be sound, but more important to us is human motivation and sustained story interest Don't worry about startling tha fudge i T his is the largest lump sum ever offered for a sciencefiction work -- a tremendous opportunity (u new as well as established writers! Book pubBcalion by Sliasla, with special, feature publicity. Simub taneous contract for a aubsertufm PocacCT Boo' dilioitl Tbese rewards and advenlagcs are uspsec. ; edented in the saeace-ficSkm field They his a furpeseiag effort m your part to win the prl We ue searching for great scieAce-fiction writing better titan the best now appearingl We know it exists somewhere, in the guts and of tomcone reading about this coolest Ferhape a portion of It is atry on paper. We want lomeiking fresh, original -- a work so ooUtaiidiog that it will mders as weD. # . # , All entries of merit which do not win the Grand ; Prize will be considered for an open number of i Second Prizes of # esub. including Shasta  and Foam Book publication. AO entnea. whether i top prize winners 'or not, will be censidered ebgibic I for Sbaste pabbeation. No enfry form roquirtrf. Mark yovr tifft pogo "Confest." The first question answered itself. Looking at the littered chamber. Falk thought again of his comparison of the cliff-dweller lionaire's triplex, he told himself... a tent. Once there had been something of particular interest on this world. No telling what it had of years ago. when Mars was a living world. But the Doorway people, a few of them, had come here to observe it. Finished, they had gone away, leaving their tents behind, as a man might abandon a crude shelter of sticks and leaves. And the other things they had lef. behind them? The cubes, cones, rods, odd shapes, each one beyond price to a man? Empty cans, thought Falk, toothpasta tubes, wrapping paper! riHE sun was redder, nearer the horizon. Falk looked at the chronometer strapped to the wrist of his suit, and found to his surprise that it was more than five hours since he had left Wolfert on Mars. He took food out of his pack and looked at the labels on the cans. But he was not hungry; he did not even feel tired. He watched the lizards outside. They were scurrying around in the plaza now, bringing armloads of junk from the building, packing them into big red boxes. A curious construction floated into view down at the far end of the plaza. It was a kind of airboat, an open shell with two lizards riding in it, supported by two winglike extensions with streamlined, down-pointing shapes at their ends. It drifted slowly until it hovered over the pile of boxes that the lizards had gathered. Then a hatch opened in its belly, and a hook emerged at the end of three cords. The lizards on the plaza began sliriging loops of cord from their boxes to the hook. Falk watched them idly. The hook began to rise, dragging the boxes after it, and at the last moment one of the lizards tossed another loop over it. The new box was heavy; the hook stopped when it took up the slack, and the airboat dipped slightly. Then it rose again, and the hook rose, too, until the whole load was ten feet off the ground. Abruptly, one of the three cords snapped. Falk saw it whip through the air, saw the load lurch ponderously to one side, and the airboat dip. The pilot instantly sent the boat down, ts take up the strain on the remaining cords. The lizards were scattering. The load struck heavily and. a moment later, so did the airboat. #S# It bounced, skidded wildly and came to rest as the pilot shut off the power. The lizards crowded around again, and the two in the boat climbed down for an interminable conference. Eventually they got j aboard again. The boat rose a few feet while the lizards disengaged the hook. Then there was S'" another conference. Falk could I  see that the doors of the boat's hatth were closed and had a crumpled look. Evidently they were jammed shut. The boat finally came down once more, and with much argument and gesticulation the boxes were unpacked and some of their contents reloaded into two new boxes, these being hoisted with much effort into the cockpit. The rest was left strewn around the plaza. The airboat lifted and went away, and most of the lizards followed it. One straggler came over for a last look at Falk. He peered and gestured through the wall for a while, then gave it up and followed the rest. The plaza was deserted. Some time passed before Falk saw a pillar of white flame that lifted, with a glint of silver at its tip, somewhere beyond the city; and grew until it arched upward to the zenith, and dwindled, and vanished. So the lizards had spaceships. They did not dare use the Doorways, either. Not fit... too much like men. ' and stood while the freshening breeze ruffled his hair. The sun was dropping behind the mountains, and the whole sky had turned ruddy, like a great crimson cape streaming out of the west. Falk watched, reluctant to leave, until the colors faded through violet to gray, and the first stars came out. It was a good world. A man coJld stay here, probably, and live his life out in comfort and ease. No doubt there were exotic fruits to be had from those trees. Certainly there was water. The climate was good. Falk thought sardonically that there could be no dangerous wild beasts, or those twittering tourists would never have come here. If all a man wanted was a hiding place, there could be no better world than this. For a moment Falk was strongly tempted. He thought of the cold dead worlds he had seen, and wondered if he would ever find a place as fair as this again. Also, he knew now that if the Doorway builders still lived, they must long ago have lit drawn in their outposts. Perhaps they lived on only one planet, almost surely die before he found it. He looked at the rubble the lizards had left in the middle of the plaza. One box was still filled, but burst open; that was the one that had caused all the trouble. Around it was a child's litter of baubles -- pretty glass toys, red, green, blue, yellow, white. A lizard, abandoned here by his fellows, would no doubt be happy enough in the end. With a sigh, Falk turned back to the building. The door opened before him, and he collected his belongings, fastened down his helmet. strapped on his knapsack again. The sky was dark now. Falk paused to look up at the familiar sweep of the Milky Way. Then he switched on his helmet light and turned toward the waiting Doorway. As the light fell across the burst box the lizards had left, Falk saw a hard edge of something thrusting out. It was not the glassy adamant of the Doorway builders; it looked like stone. Falk stopped and tore the box aside. He saw a slab of rock, roughly smoothed to the shape of a wedge. On its upper face characters were incised. They were in English. With blood pounding in his ears, Falk knelt by the stone and read what was written there. Falk stood up, blinded by the glory of the vision that grew in his mind. He thought he understood now why the Doorways were not selective, and why their makers no longer used them. haps -- they must have been uncontested owners of the Galaxy. But many of their worlds were small planets, like Mars, not large enough to keep their atmospheres of years ago, they must have begun to fall back from these. And meanwhile, Falk thought, on the steaming worlds that now were cooling, the lesser breeds had arisen. The crawling, brawling things. The lizards. The men. Creatures not worthy of the stars. So the way was made long, and the way was made hard; and the lesser breeds stayed on their planets. But for a man, or a lizard, who would give up all that he called "life" for knowledge, the way was open. Falk turned off the beam of his head-lamp and looked up at the diamond mist of the Galaxy. Where would he be, a thousand years from today? Standing on that mote of light, or that? Not dust, at any rate. Not dust, unmourned, unworthy. He would be a voyager with a destination, and perhaps half his journey would be done. Wolfert would wait in vain for his return, but it would not matter: he was happy, if you called his existence happiness. And on Earth, the mountains would rise and fall long after the question of human survival had been forgotten. By that time, perhaps, Falk would be home. Ye?, and college professors, teohininans. editors, piiblisliers, sliideuls. skilled workers, farmers and woiideriul people just like #. who ever you are. What's more there hae been more and more There is only one thing that many of jou do not seem to roalie. don't have to rush to a news stand. You ran depend upon one of I'ncle .Sam's most lal emphnese to bring yoiT Galaxy... joiir )oslimui. iLots of oslmen gel their fwn oo)Ies of Galaw.l  Hoiv ran all this be arranged? Ea.s) ! Ail you bae to do i.s fill in the coupon belou. write out a check for onlv S....SO and mail both off today. Im idenlally. you'll he saving money because with a stibscription joii will get # issues for the ncvs stand price of # . Seem? smart to do it right now. Dpi. # Galaxy Ptiblisliing Corp. #I Hudson Si. New York #. X. 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Complications develop when Jacklin gets involved with Tomkin's wife, his red-haired mistress and his luscious secretary. Three too many women tor Jacklin to handle. His foreknowledge of the Alaska sinking and other top secret matters plunges him into a mad world of intrigue and excitement in Washington -- that place where anything can happen and does! Where is the real Tomkins is a mystery explained in the smashing climax. Completely delightful, wholly provocative, the Rot Race is a striking novel of the American Scene.  Watch For It On Sale May #th I gauxy Asistant Editor Art Dtroctor Produclion Manager Cover by fllurtrating j published monthly by GaUxy Fublishing Corpo rarioo. Main o#ke: #I Hudson Street, New York J#, N. V. #c per copy. Subscriptions: # co ies) # per yer in tlic United Stares, Canada. Mexico, South and Cen irai Arnetica and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere :f#. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyrinht, #. by Galaxy Piihlishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material sub sniicedmust be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materiar. All stories printed in this nagazine are fiction, and any similariiv between characters and actual persons iS coiBcidcmal. by Boyd Ellanby # by Riebartf Mofheson # by Pout Anderson # by Charles V. De Vet # by Franklin Abel # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Geld # by Groff Conkh'n # Printed In the U S. A. by Ihe Guinn C Inc. Rag. U. S. Pet. Off. urdistressed because her family and friends jeer at her for reading science fiction. She unhappily wonders whether detailing the scientific qualifications of our writers may not compel their respect. Well. Asimov is a biochemist specializing in cancer research; Heinlein is an engineer; Tenn is an anthropologist: de Camp, as a patent authority, is familiar with many branches of science; Guin. connected with a large pharmaceutical house, is a medical expert... The list could be extended in almost every scientific direction -- and. I think, would do no good. situation when it was recently interviewed on TV, with a noted mystic to provide "conflict." Summing up at the end of the program, this gentleman stated that science fiction is a cheap substitute' for prophecy. To such calcified thinking, there was no contradiction in making this deeply thoughtful statement over a medium that had been anticipated -- rtoi predicted -- generations ago in science fiction, with people thousands of miles away seeing and hearing him at bled hi# Selling ITim" Icicncc fiction might have been possible if we were extrapolating possible developments in metaphysics. Tm not even sure of that. He probably doesn't think any advance in his specialty is either likely or necessary. Oddly, I can see him. or his colleagues, setting up shop on the planets when we reach them -- as we seem certain to do -- and not changing that opinion or their primitive "science" in any degree whatever. This is admittedly an extreme case of fossilization. In the example of our reader's family of friends, we have people who are unwonderingly alive in a society that to their ancestors would have been pure science fiction. They, of course, take every advance as perfectly natural. Yet each advance was "impossible" before it came about. And then that one was possible, but the next wasn't! Should they be educated to aa appreciation of science fiction? Why bother? I wish I had noted the author who said that no idea is as powerful as one whose time has come. Science fiction is in that position. Us arrival is a matter of logical evolution. How widespread its influence may become is difficult to determine now, but surely it will find a legitimate and enduring place in literature. Beyond seeing that the favorite magazines of readers are prominently displayed on newsstands, and passing the word to receptive people, not much else has to be done. The young lady is obviously concerned with gaining approval; that's a personal problem I can't handle, one that is probably unnecessary -- certainly not a good betting proposition -- and not a question of survival for science fiction. Its day, as I said, has come. Fighting the popular acceptance of science fiction now is as foolhardy as were our attempts to sell it prematurely. At that time, we were forcing something for which there was no. current need. Wc were, in other words, pushing evolution, which does not respond gratifyingly to untimely pressure. Two such instances are the movement for spelling reform and Communism. For different reasons. both are guilty of trying to force evolution. Language needs no compulsion to change. It does so constantly; if need be, over the dead bodies of lexicographers and pedants. It changes when there is a need for chnge, not because someone decides that it should. Much of our vocabulary would be incomprehensible to anyone of # years ago, let alone Chaucer's age. It may be that TV and movies will impair the spelling ability of future generations -- though not necessarily their literacy, which, in the sense of vicarious experience, could imaginably be greater than ever before. In that case, what we might regard as poor spelling would become standard, through common usage. Regrettable? No. Inevitable, if it does happen. The premature proponents of simplified spelling would, no doubt, feel victorious, but actually their efforts would not influence the change. Communism, on the other hand, puts a gun to evolution's back. You can't shoot evolution if it refuses to obey. This strange and repugnant wedding of allegedly advanced politics with medieval methods of inquisition runs counter to evolution. From slavery to feudalism to democracy, the direction has been toward greater and greater personal freedom. We are assured that that is Communism's ultimate goal. But where are the signs of it? My money is on evolution. -- II. L  ' Mon, it would appear, con adapt to any form of society...  but not one in which the knowledge of extending life becomes a passport to death! Category HE door-knob turned, then rattled. Dr. David Wong stepped out from behind the large bookcase, listening. He pressed the brass handle of the top shelf and the case silently pivoted back to become part of the wall, obliterating the dark passage behind it. An imperative knocking began at the door; David walked softly to his desk and picked up his notebook. He tried to remain relaxed, but he could feel the tightening of his shoulder muscles. With his right hand, he shut his notebook and concealed it under a mass of papers, while his left hand pressed the desk button to Phoenix release the lock of the door. The door burst open and two men strode in, a black-uniformed Ruler followed by a watchguard. Blackvisored cap still on his head, the first man marched to the desk and spoke without ceremonial greeting. "The door was locked, Dr. Wong?" "Correct, Dr. Lanza. The door was locked." "I shall have to instruct the guard to report it. Have you forgotten Leader Marley's Maxim: Constructive science does not skulk behind locked doors?" Wong leaned back in his chair and smiled at his visitors. "The wisdom of Leader Marley is a constant help to us all, but his generosity is also a byword. Surely you remember that on the tenth anniversary of his accession, he honored me by the grant of occasional hours of Privacy, as a reward for my work on Blue Martian Fever?" "I remember now," said Dr. Lanza. "But what for?" asked Officer Blagun. "It's anti-social!" "Evidently you have forgotten. Officer Blagun, another Maxim of Leader Marley: Nature has not ecuipped one Category to judge the needs of another; only the Leader understands all. Now, Dr. Lanza, will you tell me the reason for this visit? Since your promotion from Research to Ruler. I have rarely been honored by your attention." "I am here with a message," said Lanza. "Leader Marley's compliments, and he requests your presence at a conference on next Wednesday at ten in the morning." "Why did you have to deliver that in person? What's wrong with using Communications?" "It's not my province to ask questions. Dr. Wong. I was told to come here, and I was told to wait for a reply." "Next Wednesday at ten? Let's see. this is Friday." David Wong pressed the key of his electronic calendar, but he had no need to study the dull green and red lights that flashed on to indicate the pattern of his day. He did not delude himself that lie had any real choice, but he had learned in the past fifteen years that it kept up his courage to preserve at least the forms of independence. He allowed a decent thirty seconds to ponder the coded lights, then blanked the board and looked up with an easy smile. "Dr. Wong's compliments to Leader Marley, and he will be honored to attend a conference on Wednesday at ten." Nodding his hehd, Dr. Lanza glanced briefly around the office. "Queer, old-fashioned place you have here." "Yes. It was built many years ago by a slippery old politician who wanted to be safe from his enemies. Makes a good place for Research, don't you think?" Lanza did not answer. He strode to the door, then paused to look back. "You understand. Dr. Wong, that I shall have to report the locked door? I have no choice." "Has anyone?" Officer Blagun followed his superior, leaving the door wide open behind them. Wong remained rigid in his chair until the clack of heels on marble floor bad become a mere echo in his S brain, then stretched out his hand to the intercom. He observed with pride that his hand did not tremble as he pressed the dial. 'Get me Dr. Karl Haslam... Karl? Can you meet me in the lab right away? IVe thought of a new approach that might help us crack the Wlhte Martian problem. Yes, I know we planned on conferring tomorrow, but it's getting later than you think.' Again he pressed the dial. Get me Leah Hachovnik. Leah? I've got some new stuff to dictate. Be a good girl and come along right away." Breaking the connection, he diew out his notebook and opened it. David Wong was a big man, tall, well-muscled, compact, and he might have been handsome but for a vague something in his appearance. His lean face and upeurving mouth were those of a young man; his hair was a glossy black, too thick to be disciplined into neatness; and he was well-dressed, except for the unfashionable bulging of his jacket pocket, where he carried a bulky leather case of everfeed pens and notebooks. But it was his eyes that were disconcerting direct, they had a wisdom and a comprehension that seemed incongruous in so young a face. A worried frown creased his forehead as he turned back to one of the first pages, studying the symbols he had recorded there, but he looked up without expression on hearing the tapping of slender heels. "Quick work, Leah. How are you this morning?" "As if anybody cared!" Leah Hachovnik settled down before the compact stenograph machine, her shoulders slumped, her thin mouth drooping at the corners. "Feel like working?" said David. "As much as I ever do, I guess. Sometimes I wonder if the traitors in the granite quarries have it any worse than I do. Sometimes I wish I'd been born into some other Category. Other people have all the luck. I don't know what it is. Dr. Wong, but I just don't seem to have the pep I used to have. Do you think it could be the climate here in New York?" "People do grow older. Leah," he reminded her gently. "I know. But Tanya -- you remember my twin sister Tanya, the one that got so sick that time, ten years ago, when you did that experiment with Blue Martian Fever, and she had to be sent out to Arizona? Of course I haven't ever seen her since then -- people in Office Category never get permission for that kind of travel -- but she writes me that ever since she got well again she feels just like a kid, and works as hard as she ever did, and she still seems to enjoy life. Why, she's had three proposals of marriage this past year alone, she says, and yet she's thirty-five, just the same age as I am -- being twins, you know? -- anB nobody's proposed to me in j ages. Well, I'm certainly going to try to find out what her method is. She's coming back tomorrow." "She's what?" "Coming back. BureauMed is sending her back here to the Institute to take up her old job in Intercom. Funny they haven't told you, her being an old employee and all." Dr. Wong was gripping his notebook iry stiff fingers, but he replied easily, "Oh, well, BureauMed is a complex organization. With all they have to do, it's not surprising they get things mixed up sometimes." "Don't I know!" she sighed, and droned on in a dreary monotone. "This one institute alone would turn your hair gray before your time. I don't know how some people seem to keep so young. I was justthinking to myself this morning when I watched you walking through the I office, 'Why, Dr. Wong doesn't seem to age a bit! He looks just as young as he ever did, and look at me!' " Looking at her, David admitted to himself,' was not the pleasure it had once' been. Ten years ago, she and her twin sister Tanya had been plump, delectable, kittenish girls, their mental equipment no more than standard for Office Category, of course, but tlieir physical appearance had been outstanding, almost beautiful enough for Theater Category. Creamy ivory skin, gray eyes, and soft red hair dramatized by a freakish streak of white that shot abruptly back from the center of the forehead, Tanya's swirling to the left, and Leah's to the right, one girl the mirror image of the other. But the Leah sitting before him now was thin and tired-looking, her sallow skin was lined, and her soft voice had become vinegary with disappointments. Her red hair had faded to a commonplace brown, and the white streak in the center was yellowed. An unwanted, souring old maid. But there was only one response to make. "You look fine to me, Leah," he said. "What time did you say your sister is coming?" "Tomorrow evenings' Playground Jet. Why?" "We'll have to think of a way to celebrate. But right now. I'd like to get started on my new paper. I've got to meet Dr. Has#am before long." "I know." She raised her faded gray eyes. "That was a funny thinj you said to him just now over the intercom. You said to him it was getting late. But it isn't late. It's only eleven o'clock in the morning." David stared. "Do you mean to say you were listening to our conversation? Why did you do that?' She fidgeted and turned away from him. "Oh. I just happened to be at Comdesk and I guess the circuit wasn't closed. Does it matter? But it seemed a funny thing for you to say." "People in Office Category are not supposed to understand Research," he said severely. "If they were capable of Research. Leader Mlirley's planners would have placed them there. As for its being late, it is. as far as White Martian Fever is concerned. Which is the subject of my paper. Prepare to take dictation." Shrugging her shoulders, she poised her bony fingers over the keys of the little machine. "Paper for delivery at the Summer Seminar." he began. "But, Dr. Wong, that doesn't have to be ready for three months yet!" "Miss Hachovnik! Please remember Leader Marley's Maxim : Individuals born into Office Category are the bone and muscle of the State; Nature has designed them to act, not to think." "Yes. Dr. Wong. I'm sorry." "Don't worry, Leah. We're old friends, so I won't report you. All set?" He took a pencil from his leather case and tapped it against , his notebook as he ruffled the pages, wondering how to begin. It was hard to think logically j when a part of his mind was in " such confusion. Had Leah been listening in to all of his phone conversations? If so. it was fortunate that he had long ago devised an emergency code. Was it only idle curiosity that liad prompted her or was she acting under orders? Was anyone else watching him, he wondered, listening to his talk, perhaps even checking the routing of his experimental work? There was Lanza this morning -- why had he come unannounced, in person, when a Communications call would have served the purpose equally well? Leah's voice broke in. "I'm ready. Dr. Wong." He cleared his throat. "... the Summer Seminar. Title: The Propogation of White Martian virus. Paragraph. It will be remembered that the early attempts to establish Earth colonies on Mars were frustrated by the extreme susceptibility of our people to two viruses native to the foreign planet, viruses which we t designate as Blue Martian and White Martian, aicording to the two distinct types of fever which they cause. Blue Martian Fever in the early days caused a mortality among our colonists of nearly eighty-five per cent, and made the establishment of permanent colonies a virtual impossibility. "Under the inspired leadership of Leader Marley and with the advice of his deputy Dr. Lanza, this laboratory in Research worked out a method of growing the virus and producing an immunizing agent which is effective in nearly all human beings. Only the cooperation of several Categories made possible such a feat. It will not be forgotten that even the humblest helpers in the Institute had their share in the project, that some of them acted as human volunteers in the experiments, well knowing the risks they ran, and were afterward rewarded by a Free Choice. "One person in Office Category, for instance, was given the privilege of learning to play the flute, although nobody in his family had ever belonged to Music, and another person in Menial Category was permitted a month's study of elementary algebra, a nearly unheard of indulgence for a person in his position. But as Leader Marley so graciously remarked in conferring the awards: To the individual who risks much, the State gives much." "Like me and Tanya?" the girl asked, stopping her typing. "Yes, like you and Tanya. You were allowed to act a part in an amateur Theater group, I remember, and since Tanya was made too ill to be able to use a Free Choice, she was sent out west to the Playground, just as though she had belonged to Ruler Category. Now where was I?" " 'The State gives much.' " "Oh, yes. Paragraph. Since the discovery of the immunizing mechanism to Blue Martian, permanent colonies have been established on Mars. But there remains the more elusive problem of White Martian Fever, which, though its mortality is only thirty per cent, is still so crippling to those victims who survive that the Martian colonies cannot begin to expand, and the resources of the planet cannot be fully developed, until an immunizing agent is found. "For the past eight years this laboratory has been working at the problem, among others, and we are now in a position to report a small degree of progress. Since it proved to be impossible to grow the virus in the usual media, it occurred to us -- " The intercom buzzed, and Dr. Wong turned away to open the dial.  "David? What's happened to you? I've been waiting here in the lab a quarter of an hour." "Sorry, Karl. I thought I had more time. Be right down." He reached for his white lab coat and shoved his long arms into the starched sleeves. "That's all we have time for now, Leah. Can you get an early lunch and be back here this afternoon at two?" But she was not listening. She was leaning over to look at the desk, staring avidly at the open pages of Dr. Wong's notebook. Without comment he picked up the book, closed it, put it in the top drawer and locked the drawer. She watched him with curious eyes. What funny marks those were, Dr. Wong! Do you keep your notes in a private system of shorthand?" "No. I write them in Coptic. For the sake of privacy." "What's Coptic?" "A dead language, spoken by the ancient Egyptians thirty or forty centuries ago." "But you're Research, not Linguistics! It's against the law for you to know other languages. Are you a traitor?" "My dear Leah," he said, "I'm far too sensible a man to go in for bootleg study, to learn anything without permission. I have no wish to end up with a pick-ax in my hands. But you shouldn't tax your little mind with thinking. It's not your job. You're not equipped for it, and it's dangerous." D avid passed the watchguard stationed in the basement corridor, walked through the open door of the laboratory, past the bench where a row of pretty technicians sat making serial dilutions of bacterial and virus suspensions, through the glow of the sterilizing room, and on into the small inner ab where flasks of culture media and developing hens' eggs sat in a transparent incubator, and petri dishes flecked with spots of color awaited his inspection. Dr. Karl Haslam was standing at the work bench, with a pair of silver forceps which held a small egg under the psi light. Gently he lowered the egg into its warm observation chamber, covered the container, and sat down. "Well, here I am. What!s gone wrong? Explain yourself, my boy." "Just a minute." Grinning maliciously, David took down a bottle from the shelf of chemicals, poured a colorless liquid into a beaker, and walked casually toward the doorway as he agitated the mixture of hydrogen sulphide and mercaptans. He held his Iwcath, then coughed, when the fumes of putrescence filled the room and drifted out the door. He looked into the technician's room. "Sorry for the aroma, girls, but this is a vital experiment." "Can't you at least shut the door?" one called pleadingly. "Explain to the watchguard out there, will you?" Closing the door, he turned on the ventilator and sat down beside Dr. Haslam. "Why all the melodrama?" Karl asked, baffled. "First you call me by emergency code, then you hole in like a conspirator. I'm beginning to think you're a great loss to Theater. What's happened? Why is it later than I think?" "Do you take everything as a joke, Karl?' "Certainly, until I'm forced to do otherwise. What's worrying you?" "I'm afraid of being arrested for treason. Don't laugh! This morning I received a message, delivered in person by our old schoolmate Lanza, to report to Leader Marley on Wednesday, and Marley hasn't paid any attention to me since he last inspected our lab, years ago. For another thing, Leah Hachovnik is making a nuisance of herself with her curiosity about my affairs. If she weren't so clumsy about her prying. I'd almost believe she was under orders to spy on me." Karl moved impatiently. "I hope you're not turning psychotic. You have a clean record of continuous production and you've never mixed in politics. You've never expressed what you may really think of our Leader even to me. although we've been friends since we were in Medschool, and I hope you never will. And you're making progress with White Martian. Why, my boy, you're all set! What's treasonable about that?" Someone knocked at the door. Hastily David uncovered the fragrant beaker and waved it about as he called, "Come in!" The watchguard looTced in for an instant, wrinkled his nose, and quickly shut the door. Laughing, David covered the beaker, and began walking about with long nervous strides, snapping his fingers as he tried to explain. "I'm in trouble, Karl. I've run into something I don't know how to deal with, and I need help, I need advice, I need cooperation, Tve lived alone with this thing for ten long years, hoping month after month that something would turn up so I could evade the issue. But nothing has. And now there's going to be a showdown." Karl touched his arm sympathetically. "My dear boy -- " That's it!" shouted David. n "What's what?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you. Why do you always call me your 'dear boy?' You know I'm a year older than you are." "It's just habit, I suppose. You look so young -- your hair is black, while mine is nearly white. You're full of vigor, while I begin to creak with middle age. I didn't realize that I irritated you with my little phrase. I should think you'd be pleased that you have somehow managed to sip at the fountain of youth." David sank down on a stool. "I'm not pleased. I'm terrified." "What do you mean?" "I mean that's exactly what's happened. I have sipped at the fountain of youth. I've discovered how to keep people from growing old. I myself have not aged a bit in the last ten years." There was a long silence. Karl tat unmoving, his face like stone. "I don't believe you," he said at last. "It's no longer a question of belief. In a few days everybody will know, the proof will stare you in the face. And what will happen then?" "Evidence?" Karl asked. "I can't accept a statement as a fact." "Would you like to sec my mice? Come with me." David Wong hurried into the small animal room and paused before a stack of wire cages in which furry creatures darted and squeaked. "You remember when we were working on Blue Martian, those peculiar mutants we found in our mice, and how I used six of them in trying to make antibodies to the virus?" "I remember," said Karl. "They were spotted with tufts of white hair on the right forelegs." David took down a cage, thrust in his hand, and brought out two of the tiny black mice which crawled over his trembling hand. Their right forelegs bore tufts of long white hair. "These," he said, "are the same mice." "Their descendants, you mean. Mice don't live that long." "These mice do. And they'll go on living. For years I've lived in fear that someone would notice and suspect the truth. Just as for years, every time someone has laughed and told me I never seemed to age a day, I've been terrified that he might guess the truth. I'm not aging." Karl looked dazed. "Well, my boy, you've got a bear by the tail. How did you find the elixir or whatever it is?" "You remember the early work with radioactive tracers, a couple of hundred years ago, that proved that all our body cells are in a continuous state of flux? There's a dynamic equilibrium between the disintegration and the resynthesis of the essential factors such as proteins, fats and amino groups, but the cell directs all the incoming material into the right chemical structures, under the influence of some organizing power which resides in the cell. "Foreign influences like viruses may disrupt this order and cause cancer. The cells arc continually in a state of change, but always replace their characteristic molecules, and it is only as they grow older that tliey gradually become 'worn out.' Then the body grows old, becomes less resistant to infection, and eventually succumbs to one disease or another. And you know, of course, that viruses also have this self-duplicating ability. "I reasoned that at birth a man had a definite, finite amount of this essential self-duplicating .a kind of directing factor which reproduces itself, but more slowly than do the body cells. In that case, with the normal multiplication of the cells, the amount of surely grow smaller with the years. Eventually the time would come when the percentage would be below the critical level -- the cells would be less resistant, would function with less efficiency. and the man would 'grow old.' " Karl nodded soberly. "Reasonable hypotliesis." "But one day, by pure chance, I isolated a component which I recognized as being the factor essential to the normal functioning of body cells. It hit me Tike a toothache. I found that I could and the only problem then was to get it into a man's cells. If I up to that of youth, a man would stop aging! Since viruses penetrate our cells when they infect us, it was no trick at all to effect to the virus. I used Martian Blue, since it was handy, and its effects ar usually brief. "Presto! Old age is held at bay for another twenty or thirty years -- I really don't know how long. These mice were my first experiment, and as you see, they're still alive. Next, I tried it on myself." David put the mice back in their cage, locked it. and returned to the lab. "Tomorrow, the whole thing is bound to come out because Tanya Hachovnik is coming back. You know her sister Leah -- gray, dried-up. soured on life. Well, I've had ways of checking, and when Tanya Hachovnik walks into the Institute, everyone will see her as the same luscious IS redhead of twenty-five we knew ten years ago. I realize that what I did was a criminal act. I didn't think the thing through or I wouldn't have been such a fool. But when I made those final experiments, I used the Hachovnik twins for a controlled pair." "You must have been crazy!" "Perhaps I was. I'd tried it on myself, of course, with no bad effects except a few days' fever, but I realized that without a control I never could be sure the might be just that my particular genetic constitution caused me to age more slowly than the average. So I chose the twins. To Leah I gave the attenuated Martian Blue, but to Tanya I gave the The experiment worked. Identical twins -- one grows old like other people; the other remains young. I know now. Karl, how to prolong youth indefinitely. But what in the name of Leader Marley shall I do with my knowledge?" Karl Haslam absently twisted his white hair and spoke slowly, as though he found trouble in choosing his words, "You realize, of course, that it is your duty to acquaint Leader Marley with all the details of your discovery?" Ts it? Can you imagine what this will do to our society? What about the generations of children coming into a world where no places have been vacated for them by death? What about the struggles for power? Who will decide, and on what basis, whether to confer or to withhold this gift? There'll be riots, civil wars. I know that I'm only a scientist; all I ever wanted from life was to be left alone, in a peaceful laboratory, and let other people worry about the world and its troubles. But now -- don't you see that by the mere fait that I made this discovery. I've lost the right to sit by quietly and let other people make the decisions?" "But, David, you and I aren't able to handle such a problem! We're only Research!" "I know. We're inadequate, yet we have the responsibility. The men who created atomic power probably felt inadequate, too, but could they have made as bad a mess of handling it as others did? Suppose I did turn this over to Marley -- he'd use it to become the most absolute tyrant in the history of the race." Karl ran his fingers through his hair and smiled crookedly. "Well, you could always start a revolution, I suppose, and start by assassinating the Leader." "With what kind of weapon? Men like you and me are not allowed to own so much as an oldfashioned pistol. Except for the Military, Marley's the only man allowed to wear a Needier. And. besides, I'm a Research, not a Military. I hate violence and I'm naturally conditioned against killing." "Then you shouldn't have got into this mess. It would have been far better never to have discovnotes are safely locked up, by the way?" David grinned. "Don't worry about my notes; they're written in Coptic. You remember when I was still in Medschotol and made my first important discovery, how to prevent the development of hereditary baldness by the injection of certain parahormones? Leader Marley rewarded me with a Free Choice, and I chose to learn a dead language. Not half a dozen men in the world could read my notes." "If your notes are safe, why don't you just destroy your mice and get rid of your proof that way?" "And the Hachovnik twins?" "You could at least keep Tanya out of sight." "Don't be a fool. That would only be a temporary measure and has nothing to do with the real problem. Lanza and Marley may suspect the truth right now, for all I know; they keep such close watch on my work. Anyway, the secret is bound to come out sooner or later." Dr. Haslam clasped his hands and stared at them for a long while. His lined face looked grayer than ever. He looked up at last with a faint smile. "Well, my boy, I never asked you to discover this stuff, but since you have -- I hereby burn my bridges! You're right, we can't give itto Marley. But you can't handle it alone. What we need is time, and we haven't got it. We shall both be liquidated before this is over, there's no doubt of that, but we must do what we can. When is Tanya arriving?" "Tomorrow night, on the Playground Jet." "And you see Leader Marley when?" "Next Wednesday." "Five days yet. Then this is what we'll do. Too bad Lanza is in the other camp, but there's you and me, and I think Hudson and Faur# from Serology will come in with us. We'll need others -- sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists -- the most promising material from all Categories if we're to create a new society based on the prospect of immortality. But I'll see the first two and bring them to your apartment tomorrow night for Tanya's welcome-home party. I leave it to you to muzzle Leah." "That won't do," said David. "I 'don't have a current Free Choice," "But I have. Two, as a matter of fact, a reward for curing the insomnia of Leader Marley's wife. I choose to give a party, I choose tomorrow night, and I choose your apartment." A knock rattled the door, and the watchguard thrust in his head. "How much longer is this here experiment going to take? Do you guys" want to be reported?" "Just finishing, Officer," called Karl. "You can leave the door open now." "What a stink!" said the guard. I  "Thank God I'm in Military!' I T hardly seemed like a party, Dvid thought. His guests were ill at case, and their conversation labored, then stopped altogether when the Menial came into the library with a tray of glasses and niblets. "Put them on the liquor cab inet, James.' said David. "And that will be all. Enjoy yourself tonight." The Menial put down the tray and then stooped to fumble with the lock. "Let that alone! I've told you a thousand times not to monkey with my liquor cabinet!" "Don't you want me to get out the ice cubes. Doctor?" "I'll do it. You can go now." "But are you sure you won't want me later in the evening, Doctor? Who's to serve the supper? Who's going to clear up afterward?" "We'll manage. Don't worry about us." James shuffled out of the room. manage," said Leah, with a selfpitying sigh. "I've noticed that whenever people decide to rough it and do without a Menial, they take it for granted the women will do the work, never the men -- unle the women are still young and pretty. Well, at any rate. I'll have Tanya to help me. I still don't see why you wouldn't let me go to the Port to meet her. Dr. Wong." "I just thought it would be more of a celebration if we had a surprise party all waiting for her to walk into. Dr. Haslam will bring her here directly from the Port, and here we all are, her old friends from the Institute, waiting to welcome her home." "I'd hardly say all." said Leah. "I'm the only person from Office that's here. And why have a party in your Library, Dr. Wong? Nothing here but books, books, books." "Because I keep my liquor here, in the only room I have a right to lock up. My Menial is a good man, but he can't resist an opened bottle." "Well, it's still a gloomy party." David turned apjealingly to his other guests, Hudson and Faure, but they only looked uncomfortable. "Perhaps we need a drink." David unlocked the cupboard and picked up a bottle which he set down hastily when he heard voices in the hall. He hurried to the outer door and opened it a few inches to reveal the sturdy shoulders of the watchguard of the floor and, beyond him. Karl Haslam. "Everything in order. Officer?" asked Karl. "Your permit is in order, Dr. r Haslam. A private party. Let me just check -- yes, three guests have arrived, and you two make five. That all? You have until midnight. But it beats me why you people in Research prefer a party without a watchguard. or why Leader Marley ever gives permission. Why, in all my years in Military, I've never been to an unwatched party, and I must say it never held us down any." Karl laughed a little too forcedly. "I'll bet it didn't! But all Research people are a little peculiar. You must have noticed that yourself." Well -- " "And you know how generous Leader Marley is, and how kind he is to loyal citizens. He wants U!to be happy, so he pampers us now and then." "I guess he knows what he's doing, all right. Well. I'll check you out at twelve, then." "Go on in. Tanya." said Karl. They stepped into the apartment and David quietly closed the door. "Hi, Sis," drawled Leah. "You made us wait long enough I" She walked toward the girl, hand outstretched. then stopped with a gasp of disbelief. Tanya's red hair was still brilliant and gleaming, her creamy skin unlined and her full red lips curved up into a friendly smile as she leaned forward for a sisterly kiss. But Leah jerked away and glared with anger. A puzzled frown creased Tanya's lovely white forehead. " "What's the matter, Leah? Aren't you glad to see me? You look so strange, as though you'd been terribly ill!" Leah shook her head, tears of rage gathering in her pale eyes. "I'm okay," she whispered. "It's you. You haven't changed. I have. You're still young, you're pretty, you're just the way  used to be!" She whirled to face David, her voice choking. "What have you done to her. Dr. Wong?" The four men in the room were all staring at the sisters, scarcely believing what they saw, although they had all been prepared for the contrast. The twin sisters were no longer twins. One had retained her youth; the other was faded, aging. "This is awful," Ha.slam muttered. "Absolutely ghastly." He put a comforting hand on Leah's shoulder, and with a deep sob she hid her face against him and cried. Hudson and Faur could not take their eyes from Tanya, and David leaned against the wall to stop his trembling. "Sit down, all of you." he said. "First we'll have a drink. I'm sure we all need it. Then we'll face -- what has to be faced." It A n hour later, they had achieved a calmness, of sorts. They had given up some of their normal sobriety to achieve the calm, but they were grateful to the drug for cushioning the shock. David paced the floor, glass in hand, talking rapidly as he finished his long explanation. "So you see what happened, he said. "When I began the experiment, I had no idea how staggering the results might be. That is. I knew in my mind, but I never imagined the realness of what would happen. I thought of it as just an experiment. Leah sniffed, her resentment somewhat dulled by drink. "So I was just an experiment! Don't you ever think about people's feelings? I know I'm not as good as you are; I'm only Office, but I'm human." Karl patted her harid. "Of course you are, Leah. But that is one of the defects of people in Research -- they forget about human emotions." He looked up sternly at David. "They go ahead with their experiments, and hang the consequences. If Dr. Wong had had any sense, he would never have kept this a secret for ten years, and we might have had ten years to prepare ourselves for such a responsibility. Instead, we have only a few days or, at most, weeks. Hudson! Faure! How do you feel about this thing now? Are you still game? Both men seemed a little dazed, but Faur# pulled himself together, speaking slowly, like a man in a dream. "We're with you. It's still hard to believe: we've got immortality!"  "I'd hardly call it immortality," said Hudson drily, "since, kill disease entities, nor ward off bullets or the disintegrating nuclear shaft of the needier -- as we will very likely find out before very long. But what do we do now? When people see these two girls together, it won't be an, hour before Marley hears about it." David spoke up with a new authority. "He must not hear about it. I know how poorly equipped I am to handle this situation, but since I created it, I must assume responsibility, and I have made my plans. "First, you, Tanya. Try to realize that if the Leader finds out that I have this secret of keeping youth, he will want it for himself. Nobody in Menial, nobody in Office, nobody in Research -- almost nobody at all -- will be allowed to benefit from it. Marley will use it as a special reward for certain Rulers, and he will try to keep its very existence a secret so that people in general will not be envious or rebellious. That means that he will have to get rid of you." "Get rid of me? But I haven't done any harm!" "Just by existing and letting people look at your unchanging youth, you will be a threat to him. for you will give away his secret. How he'll deal with you, I don't know. Concentration camp, exile, or more probably, simple execution on grounds of treason, such as unauthorized choices of activity or study. It doesn't matter, he'll find a way. The only safety for you is in keeping hidden. You must stay quietly in Leah's apartment until we can find a refuge for you. Do you see that?" She looked around in bewilderment. "Is that right, Dr. Haslam? And what will they think at the Institute? I'm supposed to go back to my job in Intercom." "Dr. Wong is right," he said kindly. "Please believe us. it's hard for you to understand that we are asking you to do something secret, but just try to remember that you are, after all, an Office Category and are not equipped by training or constitution to think out problems like this. We'll tell you what is the right thing to do. You just do as we tell you. and you'll be perfectly safe." Leah snickered. "Oh, she'll be safe enough, being as pretty as she is! What are you going to do about me? Don't I count?" "We'll come to that in a few minutes. Right now, we need food. Leah, you and Tanya be good girls and go out to the kitchen and heat up some supper for us. After we've eaten, we'll talk about you." A S soon as the girls were out of the room, the four men drew together at the table. "No use burdening them with too much knowledge," Karl remarked. "Even as it is, they are a great danger to us, and the less they know the better. David, will you proceed?" "I have little to add to the plans we made last night at the lab. The thing we need most is time; and next to that, a hiding place. We may very soon be classed as traitors, with every watchguard on the continent hunting for us. We will take care that they don't find us. Now, you said last night that each one of you has accumulated a Free Choice during the past year, which hasn't yet been used." "That's right," said Faur. "I intended to use mine next winter to live among the Australian aborigines for a week. I've been wanting that for years, but the planners always refused me; it was a project without practical purpose.' "And I intended to use mine to attempt a water-color painting," added Hudson. "In my boyhood I hoped to be put in Arts Category, but the Planners laughed at me. I suppose it's wrong, yet I still have the yen." "You have my sympathy," said Karl. "I was going to take an Aimless Tramp. Just shed my identity and wander on foot through the great north area of woods and Jakes." David sighed.' "Well, if we are successful in hiding and in changing the world as we'd like, you can all three be free to do as you like without asking permission. But at present that's only the wildest of dreams. And. first, we must find our refuge. Today is Saturday. Tomorrow morning, each of you will go to BureauMed and claim your Free Choice. And each of you will choose an Aimless Tramp." "But I don't like hiking," objected Hudson. "You won't be hiking. You'll take off in your roboplanes and then disappear. You will be without supervision. You will then proceed, disguised as you think suitable, to find a place for our new colony -- somewhere in South America? -- and make preliminary arrangements to receive us. You must be back by Tuesday aftei noon at the latest. On Tuesday, as soon as you have reported back to ureauMed, get to the Institute as fast as you can. "Why the deadline?' "Because by Tuesday afternoon, sometime before evening, probably, I expect all three of you to be suffering from an attack of Blue Martian Fever, and I want you to get expert hospital care. You will be the nucleus b the new regime." Karl laughed. "I wish you could have picked a base for ant than Blue Martian." "Who's got Blue Martian? asked Tanya, as the girls came in from the kitchen with their trays of food. "I'll never forget how sick it made me." "You should worry," said Leaht "It kept you young and beautiful, didn't it?" "You won't have to envy her, Leah," said David going to the liquor cabinet. "I'm going to give you and the others a shot of the Tuesday afternoon you should feel the first symptoms. But after forty-eight hours in the hospital, you'll be good as new. And you will all stop growing older." They watched, fascinated, as he opened the cooling compartment of the liquor cupboard. "I always like plenty of ice in my drinks," he remarked, drawing out a tray of cubes and opening a small door behind the tray. He removed several small bottles ft filled with a milky liquid, and a copper box of sterile needles and syringes. "Who'll be first?" There was a knock at the door, and David stopped. "What is it?" he called. "Me," came the watchguard's voice. "Just thought I'd do you a favor and tell you it's only ten minutes till checkout time. Time to get yourselves decent!" They could hear the rumble of his laugh as he moved on down the hall. Trembling, David picked up a bottle, poured alcohol onto the rubber cap, and deftly filled the sterile syringe. He reached for a piece of cotton, dipped it in iodine, and looked up, waiting. K#rl Haslam had already bared his left arm. David swabbed the W ' spot on the upper deltoid. Karl laughed. "Here I come, Methuselah!' "All set?" asked David. He plunged the needle home. Institute, two at a time, and hurried toward his office through the echoing corridors, where the usual watchguard sauntered on patrol. "Morning. Jones." "Good morning, Doctor. Pretty early, aren't you?" "Wednesday's my busy day." He settled at his desk, miserably conscious of the open door and curious eyes behind him, opened his briefcase, then glanced at his wristwatch. More than an hour before his interview with Leader Marley. Spreading some data sheets before him, he looked at them blankly as he tried to order his thoughts. His eyes were ringed with dark depressions, for he had had no sleep. There had been so many things to plan for, so many arrangements to make. It was possible, of course, that this morning's talk would turn out to be mere routine. There might remain several weeks of freedom -- but there might be only a few hours. He shrank from the complexity of the problem before him: he was a Research man, devoted to his test tubes and his culture growths, and would have been happy never to face any problem beyond them. He had a moment's revulsion at the unfairness of the fact that a simple experiment in the lab, an addition to man's knowledge of the Universe, should have plunged him against his will into a situation far beyond his ability to handle. There had been, as Karl pointed out. the alternative Leader. That would have absolved him of all responsibility. But that was the trouble, he thought. Responsibility could not be confined to squiggles in his notebook, when those squiggles might affect the whole of society. "Dr. Wong!" He jumped and turned around hastily. "Leah! What in the world?" She stood in the doorway, glaring at him, breathing heavily as though she were trying to hold back sobs. Slowly she tottered to the desk and sank down into her chair by the stenograph. "You doublecrosser!" she whispered. He looked quickly at the doorway, but the guard had not come back. Leaning forward, he questioned her fiercely. "What are you doing here? They told me yesterday that several people had come down with attacks of Blue Martian. Why aren't you in the hospital with the others?" "Because I wasn't sick!" "But I gave you -- " "Imagine how I felt," she raced on. "watching Dr. Haslam start having a chill, hearing Dr. Faure complain about his awful headache, and listening to Dr. Hudson dial Intercom and call for a doctor. And all that time I was waiting, waiting for something to happen to me. And nothing did! What have you got against me, Dr. Wong, that you infect all the others and only pretend to do it to me? I don't want to grow old any more than they do!" "But I wasn't pretending. Quiet, now, and let me think." waited until the watchguard had passed by the door, then raised his head. "Look here. Leah, Evidently the infection didn't take. This is what must have happened. That treatment I gave you ten years ago must have made you permanently immune to Blue Martian, and the antibodies it formed in your cells simply protected you against this nc-w invasion of the virus. It never occurred to me that the immunity would last so long. But don't worry. I'll find a way." She looked suspicious. "What do you mean?" "I mean that there's no reason why Blue Martian should be the only vehicle for giving you the that will work equally well. It's only a question of finding one." "And how long will that take you?" "How long does anything take in Research? Maybe a week, maybe a year." "And maybe ten! I can't wait, Dr. Wong. I'm thirty-five now; I'm growing older. What good will a long life do me, if it only preserves me as the middle-aged woman I'll be by then? And all those years that I'll be getting older and older, there'll be Tanya, lively and pretty, to remind me that I was once like that, too. I can't face it!" "The watchguard will hear you!" Haggard-faced, he watched her shaking shoulders, hearing her muffled sobs. "You're a criminal, Dr. Wong! It was a crime, what you did to Tanya and me." "I didn't realize in the beginning or I'd never have touched the thing. I know it now. even better than you do. but what can I do?" She looked up and wiped her eyes, her mouth set hard. "I know what I can do. I can report you to the Leader." "What good will that do? You know how terrible you feel now about being left out -- though I swear I never meant it to be like this. But just try to imagine. If you report me so that Leader then thousands of people will be put in just the same situation you are in. You're only one person suffering. But then there'd be Surely you wouldn't want to have that on your conscience?" "Do you think I'd care?" "You would when you felt calmer. You're wrought up, ill. Let me send you home. Promise me you'll go home quietly, talk it over with Tanya, and not say anything to anyone else. I'll think of a way out for you. Just be patient.' "Patient!" He thought of calling Karl Haslam. Karl would know best how to deal with her, how to bring her back to reason. He reached toward the intercom, then dropped his hand in despair. Karl was in the hospital, with Fauree and Hudson, shivering with the cold of Blue Martian fever. But he had to get her away. He pressed the intercom dial. "Dr. Wong speaking. Miss Hachovnik is ill and is being sent home. Please send an aircab for her at once." He helped Leah to her feet, and spoke pleadingly. "Promise you'll be good, Leah?" The fury in her eyes nearly knocked him down. Without  word, without a gesture, she walked out. been put through a wringer as he followed Officer Magnun into the Leader's suite at State House. Several nights of sleeplessness, the worries of planning for a refuge, and the scene with Leah had left him limp and spiritless. The girl was a danger, he knew, but she was only one of many. He nodded at Dr. Lanza, who was busy reading reports from BureauMed, and saluted Leader Marley, who was talking with a watchguard. Marley looked up briefly. "Sit down, Wong." David folded himself into a chair, grateful for a few moments in which to collect himself, while Marley gave the last of his orders. "Put them in the Vermont granite quarries, and keep them at work for the next year." "As you say. Leader. With the usual secrecy, of course?" "No, you blockhead! These arc a bunch of nobodies. Use all the publicity you can get. Keep a punishment a secret and how can it have any effect on other people? No, I want full radio and news coverage and telecast showings as they swing the first pick at the first rocks. People' have got to realize that the Leader knows best, that treason doesn't pay. No matter how clever they think they are, they'll always get caught. Understand?" "As you say. Leader." "Then get going." As the guard left the room, Leader Marley turned to David. "What fools people are!" He ran his beefy hands through a shock of black hair, blinked his eyes, and wrinkled the heavy , black brows that met over his nose. Wonderingly. he shook his massive head as he drew his gleaming needier from his breast pocket and played with it, tossing it from hand to hand while he talked.  "'m probably the most generous Leader the State has had since the Atomic Wars, Wong, and I never withhold a privilege from someone who has deserved it. But people mistake me when they think that I am weak and will overlook treason." "Your generosity is a byword, Leader Marley," said Wong. "But some people are incapable of acting for their best interests even when you have defined it for them. Who are these latest traitors?" "Oh, nobody really important, of course, except as they waste time which they owe to the State. Jiist attempts at illegal study. An Office Category who had found a basement room in a deserted building and was spending all his evening hours there practicing the violin. A Theater man who was illegally trying to learn carpentry. And a teacher of mathematics who had forged a key to the Linguistics library, and had been getting in every night to study a dead language -- Cuneiform, Latin, something like that, utterly without practical value. This last one is an old man, too, and ought to have known better. People must be made to realize that if they want the privilege of useless study, they will have to earn it. And I am very broadminded in such cases." "Nobody has better reason to know that than I, Leader Marley, and I am always grateful to you." Marley coughed and straightened the jacket over his bearlike chest as he put back his needier. "Now to business. Wheres that memorandum, Lanza?" Dr. Lanza handed him the paper, then sat down beside the Leader, , "First. When Dr. Lanza called on you last week, he found the door to your office locked. What explanation do you have?" David smiled and spread his hands. "My explanation is the generosity of Leader Marley. You have so many affairs to occupy your attention that it is not surprising that you do not remember rewarding me with a Free Choice some years ago, for my work on Martian Blue. I chose, as I am sure you remember now, an occasional hour of Privacy." The Leader blinked. "That's right. I had forgotten. Well, the Leader never goes back on his word. Though why in the name of Marley you fellows want a crazy thing like that is beyond me. What do you do, behind a locked door, that you don't want anyone to see?" "Do you doubt my loyalty. Leader Marley?" "I doubt everything. What do you want with Privacy?" Lanza broke in amiably. "I'm afraid we just have to accept such wishes as one of the harmless abnormalities of the Research mind, Leader. Since I grew up in that Category, I understand it to some extent." "You're right in calling it abnormal. I think perhaps I'd better remove that from the possible Choices in the future. It could easily be misused, and it never did make any sense to me. "Well, second. It's been more than three years since you reported any progress with the problem of White Martian Fever, Wong. What is your explanation?" "Research is not always swift. Leader." "But I distinctly ordered you to find an immunizing agent within three years. Our colonies on Mars cannot wait forever. I've been patient with you, but you've had more than enough time." "I am very sorry, Leader Marley. I have done my best and so have my colleagues. But the problem is complex. If I may explain, we had to find a suitable culture medium for growing the virus, and then we had to work at the problem of coupling it with suitable haptens -- " Impatiently, Marley waved his hand. "You know I don't understand your jargon. That's not my business, what troubles you've had. I want results. You got results on Blue Martian quickly enough." "We were fortunate. But when we storm the citadel of knowledge, Leader Marley, no one can predict how long it will take for the citadel to fall." "Nonsense! I'm warning you, Wong, you're failing in your duty to the State, and you can't escape the consequences with poetic doubletalk. I allow special privileges to you people in Research and I expect a proper appreciation in return. When I order you to produce a protection for White Martian, I want results!" "But you can't get a thing like that just by asking for it. Such things are simply not und?r your control." "Watch yourself, Wong! Your remarks are dangerously dose"to treaEon!" "Is it treason to tell you a plain fact?" Stony-faced, David stared defiantly at Marley, trying to control the trembling of hisbody. If he had had a needier at that instant, he realized incredulously, he would have shot the Leader and thought his own life a small price to pay for such a pleasure. Lanza coughed. "Lm afraid Dr. Wong is not well, Leader. Worrying over the slowness of his work has distorted his reactions. But I am sure that you will understand, as you always do, and be indulgent." "J'll overlook your remarks, Wong," said Marley, relaxing..."But you'd better change your attitude. You Research people cause me more trouble than any other three Categories put together. Sometimes I wonder if a spell in the granite quarries mightn't -- " A light flashed on his desk. He watched the blinking code for a second, then roe abruptly and left the room. The tvo ' men sat in silence. David glanced at Lanza, and Lanza shifted in bis chair. "Thanks for t!'.e good vord," aid David wcruily. "How do you like being a Ruler, by the way? When we were at Medschool together, I thought you were a man with ideas." "When I was at Medschool I didn't know what was good for me," Lanza replied stiffly. "And you think you do now?" A slow flush crept over Lanza's face. "Look here, Wong! Ech man has to make his own terms with himself. Don't act so smug! You shut yourself away inside the nice white walls of your laboratory and ignore all the conflicts of life. You shut your ears and your eyes, live in perfect harmony with your test tubes, and let the world go hang. Well, that isn't my way." "Your way. apparently, is to worm yourself into the confidence of that steel-hearted imbecile who rules our lives and our thoughts, and spend twenty-four hours a day saying. 'Yes, Yes,' and waiting for him to die so you can step into his shoes!" "Ve're alone," Said Lanza. "I won't report you. But I have no intention of justifying myself. Have you any idea why you've been let alone for so long? You haven't produced anything tangible in several years. Haven't you ever wondered why no one put on the pressure? Haven't -- " He broke off as Marley lumbered back into the room and fell into a chair. The Leader's manner had altered. He stared at David with grim inquiry, the #  beady eyes traveling slowly over him, taking in his rumpled hair, his strained face, the rigid set of his shoulders. At last Marley spoke, his voice soft with menace. "You're looking well, Dr. Wong. Remarkably well. In fact, it occurs to me that you don't seem to have aged a bit since my last visit to your laboratory. Tell me, how do you keep your youth?" D avid could feel the rush of blood through his body, feel the thud of his racing heart. He kept his voice low so that it would not tremble. "Thank you, Leader Marley, for your kindness in noticing my appearance. I suppose I chose my parents well. They both lived to be over ninety, you know." "This is no joking matter. I've just had a report. An epidemic of Blue Martian fever has broken out among the people of your Institute. Why have you not mentioned it?" "If you will forgive me, Leader Marley, I've had no chance. I reported it in the usual manner to the health authorities, and have here in my briefcase a memorandum which I hoped to bring to your attention, among several other matters, when you had finished giving your instructions to me." Marley continued implacably, "And how did this epidemic begin? It was my understanding that ho insect existed here on Earth that could transmit the virus. Yet several people from your lab came down with the disease on the same day. What is your explanation?" "It's very simple. To prepare the vaccine, as I am sure you will remember from your last visit to us, we have to keep in the lab a limited number of the Faili, the Martian insects which act as hosts at one stage of the virus life. Last week a Menial carelessly knocked over one of the cages and several Fafli escaped. The Menial was discharged, of course, and put in Punishment, but the damage had already been done." "You have a very ready explanation." "Would you rather I had none at all. Leader Marley?" "Well, let that go." Marley drummed his plump fingers on the desk as he continued. "There was another report for me just now. A report so wild, so incredible, so staggering that I can scarcely bring myself to take it seriously. From an Office Category at the Institute." David's heart beat wildly, but he forced a smile to his lips. 'Oh, yes. You must mean Miss Hachovnik. I've been worried about that poor girl for some time.' "What do you mean, 'poor girl'?" "It's very distressing to me, because she has been a good and loyal worker for many years. But ' she is becoming unstable. She has a tendency to burst into tears over nothing, is sometimes hysterical, seems to have secret grievances, and is extremely jealous of all women whom she considers more attractive. She was j never too bright, to be sure, but until recently she has done her iork well, so I've hated to take any action. Just this morning I had to send her home because she was ill." "Do you mean to say," asked Mley, "that none of her story is true?" "I dont know. What is her story?" "She reports that you have been working on a private project of your own. instead of on White Martian. That you have discovered a way to make people imtnortal, by infecting them with Blue Martian. What is your explanation?" David only stared, his mind so blurred with panic that he could not speak. His stunned silence was broken by a laugh. It was Dr. Lanza, leaning backward in his chair, holding himself over the stomach as he shook his head. "These hysterical women!" His laughter trailed off to a commiserating chuckle. "You're too forbearing, Wong. You shouldn't keep a worker who's so far gone. Take a leaf from.Leader Marley's book and remember: Kindness is often weakness; when it is necessary for the good of the State, be harsh!" "I hardly know what to say," said David. "I had no idea she'd gone so far." "Then there's no truth in it?" Marley persisted. "What she says is impossible?" "Well," said David judiciously, "we people in Research have learned not to call anything impossible, but this dream of immortality is as old as the human race. We have a thousand legends about it, including the story of the Phoenix, that fabulous bird which, when consumed by fire, rose triumphant from its own ashes to begin life anew. A pretty story, of course. But I need only put it to a mind as logical as yours, Leader Marley. Throughout all the millenia of m's existence, the Sun has always risen each morning in the east, and thus we know that it always will. That is the order of nature. Likewise, from the earliest generations of man, no individual has ever lived longer than a hundred and some years, and thus we know that he never will. That is the order of Nature and we can't alter to it to the best of my knowledge. Leader Marley was thoughtful. He touched the intercom. "Send in Officer Magnun." David heldhis breath. "Magnun, Office Category Hachovnik is to be taken from her home at once and put in indefinite Psycho-detention." Marley stood up. "Very well. Dr. Wong. You may go. But I shall suspend your privilege of Privacy, at least until after you have devised a protection against White Martian. It is #iot wise to disregard the wishes of the Leader. Lanza, show him out." At the street door, they paused.  Lanza looked at David speculatively. "You do keep your youth well, David." "Some people do." "I remember tliat legend of the Phoenix. What do you suppose the Phoenix did with his new life, once he'd risen from the ashes of his old self?" "I'm no philosopher." "Neither am I. But you and I both know that the principle of induction was exploded centuries ago. It's true that the Sun has always risen in the east. But is there anything to keep it. someday, from rising in the west?"  his desk. Through the open door behind him. he could hear the watchguard slowly pacing the dimly lit corridor. He could fed time pressing at his back. He was reprieved, he knew, but for how long? He got up, at one point, when the corridor behind him was quiet, and went to the bookcase. He pressed the brass handle, saw the shelves silently swing away from the wall, then set it back again. The mechanism, installed a century ago by a cautious politician, was still in good order. Back at his desk, he thought of Leah and her lost youth, lost because of his own impersonal attitude. He felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could do for her now. It was a relief to know that Tanya, at least, remained hidden and secure in her sister's apartment. It was after midnight before he closed his notebook and locked it away in the top drawer. His plans were completed. There would not be time given him, he knew, to finish his work on White Martian. That would have to be dropped, and resumed at some more favorable time in the future -- if there was a future for him. But he would begin at once to produce in quantity a supply of was sure that the untrained guards who watched his movements would never realize that he had shifted to another project, With a brief good night to the guard, he left the building to walk home. His shoulders were straight, his stride confident, and he disdained looking behind him to sec if anyone was following. He had made his terms with himself, and only death, which he would certainly try to prevent, could alter his plans. Going into his apartment he wearily turned on the light. Then he froze, feeling as though he had been clubbed. Leah Hachovnik was huddled at one end of  the sofa, her face dripping tears. "I thought you'd never come," she whispered.  He slumped down beside her. "How did you get here, Leah? I thought you were -- " hid in your hallway until the watchguard was at the other end. When his back was turned, I just took off my shoes and slipped in. I've been waiting for hours." Her voice was almost inaudible, spent beyond emotion.  "They got Tanya," she said dully. "They took her away." "What happened? Quick!" "After I reported to Bureau Med -- I'm sorry I did that, Dr. Wong, but I just couldn't help mysf'lf. I didn't tell them about Tanya and the others, just about you. Then I walked around for hours, hating you, hating Tanya, hating everybody. Finally I got SO tired that I went home. Just as I got into the hall, I heard a loud knock and I saw Officer Magnun at my door. When Tanya opened it, he simply said, 'Office Category Hachovnik?' When she nodded her head, he said, 'You're under detention.' She screamed and she fought, but he took her away. Since then, I've been hiding. I'm afraid." David tried to think. He remembered that he had said only "Miss Hachovnik" in his talk with the Leader. Had Marlcy never known that there was more than one? But Lanza surely knew. Or had he merely assumed that Magnun would ask for Leah? Would they realize, at Psychodetention, that they had the wrong woman? Probably not, for she would be hysterica! with terror, and her very youth and beauty taken in connection with the "jealousy and envy of younger women" which was noted in her commitment order, would seem to confirm her madness. He was still safe, for a while -- if he could keep Leah away from the Institute. "I'm afraid," she whimpered. "Don't let them put me away." "Then you'll have to do exactly as I tell you. Can you follow orders exactly?" "Ye; yes!" "I'll have to hide you here. We can fix up my library as a room for you. It's the only room I can keep locked, and which my Menial never enters in my absence. Whatever happens, Leah -- no matter what happens -- keep yourself hidden. More than your life depends on that." returned from the hospital, pale and shaky, David summoned them to his office. At the door, Watchguard Jones looked them over. "Say, that Blue Martian fever sure does take it out of you. You fellows look like you've been plenty sick!" "They have been," said David. "Let them by so they can sit down and rest." Jones moved aside, but he lounged in the doorway, listening. David ignored him. "Glad to see you back, gentlemen. I'll make this brief. You have been the victims of a laboratory accident just as much as if you'd been contaminated with radiation. Our Leader Marley, who understands the problems of all Categories, has very generously consented to grant you a two weeks' convalescence, in addition to a Free Choice. Take a few minutes to think over your decision." He strolled over to the window and looked out at the green of the trees just bursting into leaf. Then, as if on impulse, he turned back. "While you're thinking it over, will you look at these protocols? We discussed them before you got sick, you remember -- a plan to prevent an epidemic of Blue Martian. Do you approve of the final form? I'd like to carry on, and after all," he added with an ironic smile, "it's getting later than we might think." He handed each man a sheet of paper whose contents were identical. They studied them. Karl Haslam was the first to speak. "You think, then, that other cases of Blue Martian may develop?" "It is certainly probable. Those Fafli insects were never caught." Karl looked back at his paper. It contained a list of names, some of which were well known to all the country, some of them obscure. Thoughtfully, he nodded as he ran down the list. Hudson glanced up, frowning, his finger pointed at one name. "I don't know," he said slowly, "that this particular experiment would prove useful. Surely the Lanza method has not proved to be as effective as we once hoped." "You may be right. But there's the bare possibility that the modified Lanza method might be of enormous benefit to us." "It is uncertain. Too much of a risk. Tat's my opmioa." "Then I'U reconsider. The rest has your approval? Very well. And now what choice have you made for your holiday?" "I think we are all agreed," said Karl soberly. "We'll have an Aimless Tramp." " ; "An excellent idea," approved David. "Oh, Jones, will you get an aircab to take the doctors to BureauMed, and then arrange for their Roboplanes to be serviced . and ready in an hour?" don't know as I ought to  leave my post," said Jones. "You'd rather stay with us and perhaps be exposed to the Fever?" .'Dkay, okay!" When his footsteps had died away. David leaned forward. "We've done our best. Another month or so and we should be completely ready for our retirement act." "If we have a month," said Faur. David grinned. "Well, if our time runs out, at least we'll go down fighting. You know all your lines, your props are ready, the plot is worked out, and we can slip into our makeup in an instant -- provided the audience shows up." "You're getting to be quite a joker, David," said Karl. "What if the audience comes around to the stage door?" 'Then we'll try to receive him properly. Our Leader is a man of iron, but I doubt that he's immortal." They heard the approaching guard. T'm sure you'll benefit from your holiday," David went on. "That last .checkup showed an antibody titer entirely too high for safety." "In other words, it's time for us to get going?" asked Karl, smiling. "That's right. Only the next time the antibody curve rises, it will be for keeps." F our days later it was reported that Judge Brinton, the well-known champion of Category rights, was ill with Blue Martian fever. Three little-known nuclear physicists living in the same apartment in Oak Ridge developed symptoms on the same day. Sporadic cases of Blue Martian flared up all over the continent. Occasionally a whole family was affected -- husband, wife, and all the children. There was a serious one at the School of Social Structure, and at Harvard Medical School nearly a third of the senior class, and they the at the same time. Rumors blanketed the country like a fog, and people everywhere became uneasy. There were no deaths from the illness, but the very idea that an infectious disease could flare up unpredictably all over the nation, put of control. was frightening. It was said that the disease had been beamed to Earth by alien enemies from space; that all its victims became sterile; or that their minds were permanently damaged. It was also said, though people laughed even as they repeated the rumor, that if you once had Blue Martian Fever you'd become immortal. This particular theory had been clearly traced to the tavings of a red-haired madwoman who was confined to Psychodetention, but still it was too ridiculous not to repeat. For a week, comedians rang a hundred changes on the basic joke: Wife: Drop dead! Husband: I can't. I've had Blue Martian. The unrest became so great that Leader Marley himself appeared on the telecaster to reassure the nation. He was an impressive figure on the lighted screen, resting solid and at ease in a leather chair, raising his massive black head, lifting his big hand to gesture as his rich voice rolled out. "You have nothing to fear," he said. "Under your beneficent Leaders, infectious disease has been wiped out many years ago. BureauMed informs me that these scattered cases of Blue Martian fever have been caused by the escape of a few FafU insects, which have, since then, been isolated and destroyed. The illness has no serious after-effects. And as for the rumors that it confers immortality -- " He allowed his face to break into a pitying smile as he slowly shook his head, looking regretful and et somehow amused. "Those who continue to spread gossip about the fever will only reveal themselves as either psychotics or traitors. Whichever they are, they will be isolated for the good of our society." The effect of his words was somewhat diminished by the brief glimpse people had of Dr. Lanza, who reached a hand to help the Leader rise. For Dr. Lanza wore an anxious frown, and his face was thin with worry. In spite of numerous arrests, the mmors continued. For two weeks sporadic outbreaks of the fever occurred, and then, abruptly, they ceased. TT was more than a week after  the last case had been reported that David sat in his basement laboratory beside the opened mouse cage, watching with wry affection as the furry creatures crawled over his hand. These were historic mice, he reflected, opened up a new world, a world which he must somehow help to make better than the present one. His three colleagues had returned a few days ago from their holiday. They had calmly come back to work, and apparently nobody had thought to put two and two together, and thus connect the epidemic with the vacationers. It had been unfortunate that Tanya should have been put under arrest; it was difficult trying to find amusement for Leah SO that she would keep out of sight, but still, on the whole, thir luck had been good. But it was time for David to go back to work in his office. Gently he detached the mice from his hand, dropped them into their cage, and closed the wire trap. He took his leather pencil case and the keys to his desk from the pocket of his lab coat and laid them on the desk, below the nail on which his wristwatch hung. Carelessly he dropped his lab coat onto the desk and reached for his jacket, then paused, listening. The chatter in the technicians' room suddenly died. In the unnatural quiet sounded a steady march of feet. David turned to meet the probing black eyes of Leader Marley. Just behind him were Dr. Lanza and Officer Magnun. There was no time to conceal his mice, David realized. Shrugging into his jacket, he strode forward without hesitation, a smile on his face, and stretched out his hand. "Leader Marley! This is indeed an honor. If you had only notified us of your visit, we should have been prepared." "Young as ever, I see, Wong." "Thank you. Leader." There was no banter in Marley's eyes, he noted, but he continued amiably. "It has been some years since you have honored us by a visit in person. I'm afraid a laboratory is not a very exciting place, but I'd be honored to show you anything that may be of interest to you." A faint contempt curled Marley's mouth as he glanced around the room. "Nothing to seethat I haven't seen before, is there? A lot of test tubes, a bunch of flasks, a mess of apparatus you'd think had been dreamed up by an idiot, and a bad smell. You still keep animalsr I notice.' He sauntered over to the bench, picked up the cage and looked at the scurrying rodents. David scarcely breathed. Marley Only nodded. "Well, mice are mice." He put down the cage and turned away. "These look just like the ones I saw when I was here eight or ten years ago. Same white patch on the forelimbs. I never knew mice could live that long." "But -- " began Lanza, bending over to study the mice. "What an amazing memory you have, Leader," said David. "Just as you guessed, these mice are the direct descendants of the ones you saw on your former visit, a special mutant strain. The chief difference is that these are marked with white patches on the right forelimbs, while, as I am sure you recall, the original specimens were marked on, the left forelimbs. Odd how these marks run in families, isn't it?" Lanza put down the cage and strolled toward the door as Marley took a last bored look around. "Nothing new here that I ought to see, Lanza?" "No. Nothing new." "Well, I've no time to waste. I've come here for two reasons, Dr. Wong. We both want a booster shot for Blue Martian. Ten years is a long time, and there's been this epidemic." "Which is now under control." "That may be, but I still want a booster. You Research people don't always know as much as you think you do. When that's done, I want a detailed report of your progress on White Martian." "I shall be hapy to give it," said David. "If you will go directly to my office, I'll pick up the vaccine and syringes, and be with you in a few minutes." Marley and Officer Magnun marched to the door, and David followed, standing aside to let Lanza precede him. Lanza hesitated there, staring at the floor. Then he smiled and looked directly at David. "Beautiful spring weather we are having. I'm wondering about the marvelous order of nature. Did you happen to notice, this morning, whether the Sun did actually rise in the east?" David stared at the retreating back. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. Lanza knew. What was he going to do? "Hurry up. Doctor," said Officer Magnun from the doorway. "Right away." He opened the refrigerator and inspected the two groups of red-capped vials sitting on the shelf. He had no time to think, no time to weigh pros and cons; he could only act. Choosing two vials, he added them to the sterile kit from the autoclave, and took a last look around. He noticed his watch still hanging on the wall, and the lab coat which covered his leather pencil case. He started to take them, then slowly dropped his hand and touched the intercom. "Get me Dr. Karl Haslam." "You're keeping the Leader waiting," said Magnun, but David paid no attention. "Dr. Haslam? Dr. Wong speaking. I may be a little late getting up to see those precipitates of yours. But you keep them simmering, just in case. It's very probable that the antibody curve will rise... Yes, I'll let you know if I can." Magnun followed him to the office, then strolled away for a chat with Watchguard Jones. David put his things on his desk and made his preparations in businesslike fashion while Marley and Lanza glanced curiously around the office. He watched apprehensively as Marley inspected the bookcase, then turned away. "I never could understand why Research needs so many books," he remarked. "Please roll up your sleeve, Leader Marley. I'm ready for you now." Deftly he assembled the syringe, 'filled it to the two centimeter mark, and scrubbed the arm presented to him. "Ready?" He ihserted the needle and slowly expelled the fluid. Then, taking a fresh syringe, he repeated the operation, "Why do those bottles have different numbers?" asked Marley. "Aren't we getting the same thing?" "Certainly. Just lab routine, o we can keep track of how many units have been used from our stock. There, that docs it, Lanza. Both of you will be perfectly safe for a good many years to come.' He was washing his hands at the sink when he heard a struggle at the door. Turning, he saw Leah, thin, gaunt and terrified, held fast in the grip of Officer Magnun, who forced her inside and slammed the door behind them.  "What's the meaning of this intrusion?" demanded Marley. "There's some funny business going on, Leader," said Magnun. "I caught this woman trying to sneak in here. She says she's Miss Hachovnik and she works here. Only she ain't. I arrested Miss Hachovnik myself, and I remember well enough what she looked like. She was a cute chick, not a bit like this dame." Marley was staring at the sobbing girl, eyes blinking as he thought, looked back, remembered. Slowly his eyes shifted to David, and David felt like a man impaled. "You may leave, Magnun," said the Leader. "You don't want me to arrest this woman?" "Let go of her! I said you may leave!" "As you say. Leader." When the door closed, the room throbbed to Leah's sobs. "I couldn't help it, Dr. Wong," she cried. "I got so bored, sitting and looking at those books, day after day, with nothing to do! I thought I'd just slip down here for an hour and say hello to people, and -- " "Quiet, Hachovnik!" roared Marley. He quieted his voice. "I understand now, Wong. I remember. There were two girls. Twins. The one in Psycho-detention, according to Officer Magnun, is still beautiful and young. It's no use, Wong. You do know the secret of immortality. And you told me the Phoenix was only a fairy tale!" D avid felt entirely calm. Whatever might happen now, at least the suspense was over. He had done all he could, and it was a relief to have things in the open. He thought fleetingly of his colleagues, alerted by his message, frantically putting their plans into operation, but he leaned back against the sink with every appearance of ease. "You're not quite right. Leader Marley. I cannot confer immortality. All I am able to do is stave off the aging process." "That will do me nicely. And it's connected somehow with the Blue Martian virus?" "Yes. The disease serves as the vehicle." With a brisk motion, Marley drew his needier from his breast pocket and aimed it steadily at David. "Give it to me!" "You're rather ambiguous,' said David. How were his friends getting along? Were they ready yet? Had Karl visited the basement lab? "Do you mean you want me to give you the injection to prolong your life, or the secret of how to do it, or what?" "Don't quibble! First you'll give me the injection to make me immortal. Then you'll turn over to me all your notes on procedure, Then my friend here will needle you with a shaft of electrons and end your interest in the problem." "Surely you won't keep such a good thing all for yourself," said David. "What about Dr. Lanza? He's your right-hand man. Don't you want him to live forever, too? What about Officer Magnun? He's a faithful servant." "You're stalling, Wong. Do you want me to kill you now?" "It won't be wise to needle me yet. Leader Marley. The secret would be lost forever." "I'll have your notes!" "Yes? Try to read them. They're written in Coptic, a dead language that you consider it a waste of time to learn, because such knowledge is impractical. There aren't half a dozen men on Earth who could make head or tail of my notebook." "Then I'll find that half-dozen! I want the injection." He gestured with the gleaming weapon. "This is once when I have no Free Choice," said David. "Very well." He started toward the door, but halted at the roar of command. "Stop! Do you think I'm fool enough to let you out of my sight?" "But I have to get the inocu lant." "Use the intercom. Send for it." David slumped into the chair and opened the intercom. He could almost feel the electronic shaft of the needier ripping into his body. His heart beat wildly, arltt the tension of adrenalin ran through his body. His lips felt cold, but he held them steady as he spoke into the dial. "Get me Dr. Haslam... Karl? David Wong speaking. Will you send someone up with a vial of phoenix special? The precipitates? I should say the antibody titer has reached the danger point. Don't delay treatment any longer." Silently th'iy waited. Marley's grim face did not relax; his eyes were alight. Leah lay back in her chair with closed eyes, and Lanza Stared intently at the floor. A soft knock came at the door, and a female technician hurried in, carrying a tray. "I'm sorry to be so slow. Dr. Wong. Dr. Haslam had a little trouble locating the right vial. Oh. and he said to tell you not to worry about those precipitates. They're taken care of." "Just a minute," said David. "Leader Marley, Miss Hachovnik here is very ill. Won't you let this girl help her to the rest room? She'll be safe there until you're ready for her." Marley looked at the halffainting woman. "All right. You take her there, Lanza, and this girl too. Lock them in. And she's not to talk. Do you understand? She's not to talk!" "As you say. Leader Marley," the technician whispered. She helped Leah to her feet, and Lanza followed them from the room. Marley closed the door and locked it. "Now. then, Wong, give me that shot, and heaven help you if you try any tricks!" "Will you bare your arm while I prepare the syringe?" Awkwardly hanging onto the needier, Marley tugged at his sleeve while David calmly picked up a bottle of colorless liquid and filled his syringe. He turned to the Leader, swabbed his arm, then picked up the syringe. "There you are," said David. Jerking the syringe upward, he forced a thin jet of pure alcohol into the man's eyes. Marley screamed. Agonizing pain blinded him. and as he clutched at his eyes. David snatched the needier from the writhing lingers, and flashed the electronic dagger straight to the heart. He stared at the twitching body for only an instant. People were pounding on the door, shouting. He tugged at the desk drawer to get his notebook, then remembered sickly that he had left his keys in the lab. He would have to leave his notes. The shouts were growing louder, people were battering the door. Swiftly he moved to the bookcase, swung it away from the wall, and dropped into darkness. He brought the bookcase back, then turned and ran along the black passageway. at State House, conferring with his subordinates. "It hardly seems po.ssible, Magnun, that so many people could have slipped through your fingers without help from the Military. You say both the Hachovnik twins have disappeared?" "Yes. Leader." "And how many people from the Institute?" "Six. Leader. But it didn't do them any good. We got them, all right." "But you found no bodies!" "They wouldn't have bodies after we got through with them. Leader." "You're quite certain. Officer Magnun, that all the fugitives were destroyed?" Lanza looked tired, and his officers noticed in him a lack of firmness, an indecision, to which they were not accustomed in a Leader. "Say, those babies never had a chance. Leader. We picked up their roboplanes somewhere over Kansas, and we shot them out of the air like ducks. They didn't even fire back. They just crashed, burned, disintegrated. They won't give you any more. trouble. Why, we even picked up the remains of Doc Wong's wristwatch and that old beat-up pencil case of his." He flung them on the desk. Lanza fingered the charred and molten relics. "That will do, Magnun. I'll call you when I need you." "Say, ain't you feeling well. Leader? You look kind of green." "That will be all. Magnun!" "As you say. Leader." Lanza shoved aside the charred remnants and spread out the papers waiting for him. the unimpiortant, miscellaneous notes accumulated over the years by Hudson. Faure. and Haslam. And the unreadable notebook of David Wong. He sighed and loolced up as his secretary entered. "I'm sorry to disturb you, Leader. You look tired." "The funeral this morning was quite an ordeal, and so much has happened the last three days!" "Well, I thought you ought to know that strange reports are coming in. Some of our most prominent citizens have disappeared. We're trying to trace them, of course, but -- " "Anything more?" "Those rumors about Blue Martian are cropping up again." "Yfs? And -- ?" "That old man you asked me to bring from the Vermont quarries, the one who was detained for illegal study of the Coptic language? Well, I guess the excitement of his release was too much for him. He died of a heart attack when he was being taken to the plane." Lanza sighed. "Very well, that will be all." Alone at last, he looked sadly through the pages of David's notebook, at the tantalizing curls and angles of the Coptic letters, cryptic symbols of a discovery which prevented a man from growing old. Well, no one could read them now. That secret was dead, along with its discoverer, because, in this world, no study was permitted without a practical end in view. And perhaps it was just as well. Could any man be trusted, he wondered, to deal wisely with a power so great? After closing the notebook, he dropped his head into his hands. How his head ached! He felt cold, suddenly, and his whole body began to shake with a hard chill. He lifted his head, his vision blurred, and suddenly he knew. He had Blue Martian fever! Teeth chattering, he paced wildly about the room, puzzling things out, trying to remember. That booster shot! And then he Van Vogt...K( and Derleth An Anlhofogr of Scfn fUllan A oMlien of :ft fonloilic by Oovid H. Keller  Here are # of the bMt fantastic short stories of Dr. David H. Keller, Includes three groupi of tales: nine in science-fiction, six weird tion, and eieht which spring from Dr. Keller's long professional life as a psy chiatriat. # pat, # Edited by Augutf Derleth  A ghostly company of supernatural tales includ ing that' rare horror novel, H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Chmriee Dexler Werd and an Algernon Blackwood Story appearing here for the Erst time. # pade. #-# Address...Zone... Slate... realized the amazing truth: David Wong had given him a chance! He had inoculated him with the seeds of immortality, giving him a chance to help right the wrongs of this Categorized world. And now he was left alone in a world of mortals. David and the others had been annihilated, and he was left to live on and on. alone. He staggered toward his private apartments, then sank into his chair as his secretary once again ran into the room. With a supreme effort he controlled his trembling. "Yes?" "Leader Lanza. Another report." 'iust a minute," said Lanza, trying to bring his eyes into focus on the excited girl. "I am in need of a rest. As soon as you have gone, I shall retire into seclusion for a few days. There are to be no interruptions. Is that clear? Now, proceed." "There's a new epidemic of Martian Fever reported where one never was before." He stirred tiredly. "Where now?" "South America. Somewhere in the Andes." "I think we'll have just one Category after this," said Lanza dreamily. "Category Phoenix." "What did you say, Leader?" His thoughts wandered. No wonder Magnun's men found no bodies. The planes they shot down were roboplanes, after all, and it was easy to plant in an empty seat a man's wristwatch and his bulky leather pencil case. David and the others were safe now. They were free and had enough time to plan for the new free world. "What did you say. Leader?" the girl repeated, bewildered. "Nothing. It doesn't matter." He frowned painfully, and then shrugged. "On second thought, I may be away longer than a week. If anyone asks for me, say I'm on an Aimless Tramp. I've always hoped that some day I might earn the right to a Free Choice." "But you're the Leader," the girl said in astonishment. "You're entitled to all the Free Choices you want!" He lifted his twitching head, smiling wanly. "It would seem that way, wouldn't it? Well, whether I am or not, I think I've really earned a Free Choice. I wonder," he said in a wistful voice, "whether the climate in the Andes is hospitable." Naturally, any sick person should be given medical help, even if he's from space. But what if he couM nof ever have been alive? hung up to talk with Dak-whirr. He blinked his eyes iri some discomfort. "What do you want, Palil?" he asked complainingly. "As if you didn't know." "I can't give you permission to examine it. The thing is being saved for inspection by the board. What guarantee do I have that you won't spoil it for them?" I thrust confidentially at one of his body-plates. "Yoiowe me a favor." I said. "Remember?" "That was a long time in the past." "Only two thousand revolutions and a reassembly ago. If it wasn't for me, you'd be eroding in a pit. All I want is a quick look at its thinking part. I'll vrull the consciousness without laying a single pair of pliers on it." He went into a feedback twitch, an indication of the conflict between his debt to me and his selfconceived duty. Finally he said, "Very well, but keep tuned to me. If I warn that a board member is coming, remove yourself quickly. Anyway how do you know it has consciousness? It may be mere primal metal." 'In that form? Don't be foolish. It's obviously a manufacture. And I'm not conceited enough to hclive that we are the only form of intelligent manufacture in the Universe." "Tautologous phrasing, Palil," Dak-whirr said pedantically. "There could not conceivably be unintelHgent manufacture.' There can be no consciousness without manufacture, and no manufacture without intelligence. Therefore there can be no consciousness without intelligence. Now if you should wish to dispute -- " I tuned off his frequency abruptly and hurried away. Dakwhirr is a fool and a bore. Everyone knows there's a fault in his logic circuit, but he refuses to have it traced down and repaired. Very unintelligent of him. thing had been taken into one of the museum sheds by the carriers. I gazed at it in admiration for some moments. It was quite beautiful, having suffered only slight exterior damage, and it was obviously no mere conglomeration of sky metal. In fact, I immediately thought of it as "he" and endowed it with the attributes of self-knowing, although, of course, his consciousness could not be functioning or he would have attempted communication with us. I fervently hoped that the board, after his careful disassembly and study, could restore his awareness so that he could tell us himself which solar system he came from. Imagine it! He had achieved our dream of many thousands of revolutions -- space flight -- only to be fused, or worse, in his moment of triumph. I felt a surge of sympathy for the lonely traveler as he lay there, still, silent, non-emitting. Anyway, I mused, even if we couldn't restore him to selfknowing, an analysis of his construction-.might give us the secret of the power he had used to achieve the velocity to escape his planet's gravity. In shape and size he was not unlike Swen -- or Swen Two, as he called himself after his conversion -- who failed so disas#  tfously to reach our satellite, using chemical fuels. But where Swen Two had placed his tubes, the stranger had a curious helical construction studded at irregular intervals with small crystals. He was thirty-five feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinder. Standing at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all. except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet. I am a reporter with warm current in my wires, not a coldthinking scientist, so I hesitated before using my own vrulling sense. Even though the stranger was non-aware-:-perhaps permanently -- I felt it would be a presumption. an invasion of privacy. There was nothing else I could do, though, of course. I started to vrull, gently at first, then harder, until I was positively glowing with effort. It was incredible; his skin seemed absolutely impermeable. The sudden realization that metal could be so alien nearly fused something inside me. I found myself backing away in horror, my self-preservation relay working overtime. Imagine watching one of the beautiful cone-rod-and-cylinder assemblies performing the Dance of the Seven Spanners, as he's conditioned to do, and then suddenly refusing to do anything except stump around unattractively, or even becoming obstinately motionless, unresponsive. That might give you an idea of how I felt in that dreadful moment. Then I remembered Dakwhirr's words -- there could be no such thing as an "unintelligent manufacture." And a product so beautiful could surely not be evil. I overcame my repugnance and approached again. I halted as an open transmission came from someone near at hand. "Who gave that squeaking reporter permission to snoop around here?" I had forgotten the museum board. Five of them were standing in the doorway of the shed, radiating anger. I recognized Chirik, the chairman, and addressed myself to him. I explained that I'd interfered with nothing and pleaded for permission on behalf of my subscribers to watch their investigation of the stranger. After some argument, they allowed me to stay. I watched in silence and some amusement as one by one they tried to vrull the silent being from space. Each showed the same reaction as myself when they. failed to penetrate the skin. # Chirik, who is wheeled -- and inordinately vain about his suspension system -- flung himself back on his supports and pretended to be thinking. "Fetch FifT-fiff," he said at last. "The creature may still be aware, but unable to communicate on our standard frequencies.' thing in any spectrum. Fortunately he was at work in the museum that day and soon arrived in answer to the call. He stood silently near the stranger for some moments, testing and adjusting himself, then slid up the electromagnetic band, "He's emitting," he said. "Why can't we get him?" asked Chirik. "It's a curious signal on an unusual band." "Well, what does he say?' "Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Wait, I'll relay and convert it to standard." I made a direct recording natu Hilly, like any good reporter. " -- after planetfall," the kliMiigrr was saying. "Last dribble of K)wer. If you don't pick this "i' my mime is Entropy. Other  tiumrnts knocked to hell, airI  k jimmied and I'm too weak M il manually. Becoming  too, I guess. Getting  HI liiglixh, craziest stuff you ever heard, like goblins muttering, and I know we were the only ship in this sector. If you pick this up, but can't get a fix in time, give my love to the boys in the mess. Signing off for another couple of hours, but keeping this channel open and hoping..." "The fall must have deranged him," said Chirik, gazing at the stranger. "Can't he see us or hear us?" "He couldn't hear you properly before, but he can now, through me," Fiff-fiff pointed out. "Say something to him, Chirik." "Hello," said Chirik doubtfully. "Er -- welcome to our planet. We arc sorry you were hurt by your fall. We offer you the hospitality of our assembly shops. You will feel better when you are repaired and repowered. If you will indicate how we can assist you -- ' "What the hell! What ship is that? Where arc you?" , "We're here," said Chirik. "Can't you see us or vrull us? Your vision circuit is impaired, perhaps? Or do you depend entirely on vrulling? We can't find your eyes and assumed cither that you protected them in some way during flight, or dispensed with vision cells altogether in your conversion." Chirik hesitated, continued apologetically; "But we cannot understand how you vrull, either. While we thought that you were unaware, or even completely fused, we tried to vrull you. Your skin is quite impervious to us, however." The stranger said: T don't know if you're batty or I am. What distance are you from me?' Chirik measured quickly. "One meter, two-point-five centimeters from my eyes to your nearest point. Within touching distance, in fact." Chirik tentatively put out his hand. "Can you not feel me, or has your contact sense also been affected?" It became obvious that the stranger had been pitifully deranged. I reproduce his words phonetically from my record, although some of them make little sense. Emphasis, punctuative pauses and spelling of unknown terms are mere guesswork, of course. He said: "For godsakemann stop talking nonsense, whoever you are. If you're outside, can't you see the airlock is jammed? Can't shift it myself. I'm badly hurt. Get me out of here, please." "Get you out of where?" Chirik looked around, puzzled. "We brought you into an open shed near our museum for a preliminary examination. Now that we know you're intelligent, we shall immediately take you to our assembly shops for healing and recuperation. Rest assured that you'll have the best possible attention." before the stranger spoke again, and his words were slow and deliberate. His bewilderment is understandable, I believe, if we remember that he could not sec, vrull or feel. He asked: "What manner of creature are you? Describe yourself." Chirik turned to us and made a significant gesture toward his thinking part, indicating gently that the injured stranger had to be humored. "Certainly," he replied. "I am an unspecialized bipedal manufacture of standard proportions, lately self-converted to wheeled traction, with a hydraulic suspension system of my own devising which I'm sure will interest you when we restore your sense circuits." There was an even longer silence. "You are robots," the stranger said at last. "Crise knows how you got here or why you speak Inglish, but you must try to understand me. I am mann. I am a friend of your master, your maker. You must fetch him to me at once." "You are not well," said Chirik firmly. "Your speech is incoherfnt and without meaning. Your fall has obviously caused several serious feedbacks of a very serious nature. Please lower your voltage. We are taking you to our shops immediately. Reserve your strength to assist our specialists as best you can in diagnosing your troubles." "Wait. You must understand. You are -- ogodno that's no good. Have you no memory of mann? The words you use -- what meaning have they for you? Afanuacfure -- made by hand hand hand damyou. Healing. Metal is fmot healed. Skin. Skin is not metal. Eyes. Eyes are not scanning cells. Eyes grow. Eyes arc soft. My eyes are soft. Mine eyes have seen the glory -- steady on, suS. Get a grip. Take it easy. You out there listen." "Out where?" asked Prrr-chuk, deputy chairman of the museum board. I shook my head sorrowfully. This was nonsense, but, like any good reporter, I kept my recorder running. The mad words flowed on. You call me he. Why? You have no seks. You are knewter. You are it it it! I am he, he who made you, sprung from shee, born of wumman. What is wumman, who is silv-ya what is shee that all her swains commend her ogod the bluds flowing again. Remember. Think back, you out there. These words were made by mann, for mann. Hurt, healing, hospitality, horror, deth by loss of blud. Deth. Blud. Do you understand these words? Do you remember the soft things that made you? Soft little mann who konkurred the Galaxy and made sentient slaves of his machines and saw the wonders miserable representative Ims to die in lonely desperation on a far planet, hearing goblin voices in the darkness." H ere my recorder reproduces a most curious souiul. as though the stranger were using an ancient type of vibratory molecular vocalizer in a gaseous medium to reproduce his words before transmission, and the insulation on his diaphragm had come adrift. It was a jerky, high-pitched, strangely disturbing sotmd: but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission. "Does blud mean anything to you?" "No," Chirik replied simply. "Or deth?" "No."-. "Or wor?" "Quite meaningless." "What is your origin? How did you come into being?" "There are several theories." Chirik said. "The most popular one -- which is no more than a SO grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion -- is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is lt to conjecture. My own theory, however -- " "Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?" "In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimensions." "An interstellar vessel," said the stranger. "That is my view also," said Chirik complacently. "And -- " "What was the supposed appearance of your -- manufacturer?" "He is said to have been of magnificient proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses." "An. automatic computer," said the stranger. He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds. He corrected the fault and went on: "God that's funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A self-setting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn -- or at least their bad qualities -- so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scientific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are -- ogod they rhust know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?" Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow. "Legend has it," he said, "that after completing His task. He fused himself beyond possibility of healing." came again from the stranger. "Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity komplecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet." Chirik looked around at us SI again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world. "Of course." said the stranger. "Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way..." He was silent for a while. "Do you know what growth means?" he asked finally. "Do you have anything that grows?" "Certainly," Chirik said helpfully. "If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same clement or compound -- " "No, no," the stranger interrupted. "Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies arM gives increase without your intervention?" "How could such a thing be?" "Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warmbludded burds preening their f ethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mise timidly threading the dangerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud -- " For some inexplicable reason, , although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger's transmission seemed to be growing fainter. "His circuits are failing." Chirik said. "Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power." My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop. I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured. He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case. fully around the stranger. "We shall have to cut," he said, "It won't pain him, since hia intramolecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can't vrull him. it'll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it." Fiff-fiff was still relaying, But no amount of power boost would make the stranger's voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteration. "... strength going. Can't get into my zoot... done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don't... must tell them I need oxygen..." "He's in bad shape, desirous of extinction," I remarked to Churchur, who was adjusting his arccutter. "He wants to poison himself with oxidation now." I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable condition we all fear -- rust. Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. "Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?" "In my head," the Stranger replied, "In my head ogod my head . , . eyes blurring everything going dim , , . luv to mairee... kids... a carry me home to the lone prayree... get this bluddy airlock open then they'll see me die... but they'll see me... some kind of atmosphere with this gravity... see me die... extrapolate from body what I was... what they are damthem damthem damthem... mann... master... i am your maker!" For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbing despite its faintness. It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation. Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variations of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel. "... done it... crawling into chamber, closing inner... must be mad . , . they'd find me anyway... but finished... want sec them before I die... want see them see me... liv few seconds, watch them... get outer one open..." Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, blue-white glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger's skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the intra-molecular sense currents in my own skin. "Don't be squeamish, Palil,' Chur-chur said kindly. "He can't feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head." He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. "I should have guessed that. He's the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible." into a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician. But I had to Icx again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow. Abruptly the stranger's voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasi # ed, highpitched. "Ar no no no... god ray hands... they're burning through the lock and I can't get back I can't get away... stop it you feens slop it can't you hear... I'll be burned to deth I'm here in the airlock... the air's getting hot you're burning me alive..." Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified. "Stop, Chur-chur," I pleaded. "The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It's hurt ing him." Chur-chur said reassuringly: "Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation -- probably a local thermo-electric effect. But even if his contact senses have started working again and he can't switch them off, he won't have to bear this very long." Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkardly patted the stranger's skin. "Easy there," he said. "Cut out your senses if you can. If you can't, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we'll repower you, and you'll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled." I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favorite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects. My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was tom away from this strained reverie. During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables "burning me alive," the stranger's words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note -- around E-flat in the standard sonic scale. It was not like a voice at all. This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words, but without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself -- this is the closest I can come phonetically: "Eeee ahahmbeeeeing baked sussunmuuutherrr !" The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing. Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break. nd although the soft hiss of the stranger's carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness still existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters: I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses. to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger's skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple. A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur's shoulder. The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. "Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material," Chur-chur explained. He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance. "It looks complex," Chur-chur said, "but I expect the stranger will be able fo tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute." His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice. You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur's discovery of the stranger's double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum's failure to analyze the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body: and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him. But this is my personal, nonscientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been advanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Churchur announced his initial findings that day. He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger's body. When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said: "I have examined the 'central brain' in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of consciousness. And there is no other conceivable center of intelligence in the remainder of his body." There is something I wish I could forget. I can't explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out. There's a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust. S-F Checklist With Kience fiction books being pub lished in ever-increasing numbers these days, yesterday's brand-new sensation is likely to be today's forgotten dustcatcher. But that's not at all the case with the a-f novels brought out by Simon and Schustsr in the past few years. 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I will pay postman price plua poatage for each book. I may return books for refund of purchase price If not delighted. Address... City Zone State Same refund guarantee. Wheels Within Never ask "'Who am I and where do I come from?" The answers may not be what you'd expect aches first start?" Y Y asked the neurologist, Dr. Hall. "About six months ago," Bennett replied. 'What is your occupation, Mr. Bennett?" "I am a contractor." Arc you happy in your work?" "Very. I prefer it to any other occupation I know of." "When your headaches become sufficiently severe, you say that you have hallucinations," HgU said. "Can you describe what you see during those hallucinations?" "At first I had only the impression that I was in a place completely unlike anything I had ever known," Bennett answered. "But each time my impressions became sharper, and I carried a fairly clear picture when my mind returned to normal the last time. I felt then that I had been in a room in a tall building that towered thousands of feet over a great city. I even remembered SB that the name of the city was Thone. There were other people in the room with me -- one person especially. I remembered her very clearly." "Her?" Hall asked. "Yes." "Was there anything unusual about this woman?" "Well, yes, there was," Bennett said, after a brief and almost embarrassed pause. "This will sound pretty adolescent, but -- " Hall leaned forward attentively. "It may be relevant. You're not here to be judged, you know; I'm trying to help you." Bennett nodded and spoke rapidly, as though trying to finish before he could stop himself. "Siie was a woman who exactly fitted an image I've had in mind for as long as I can remember. She was tall, fair -- though brunette -- very beautiful, very vivid, very well poised. I seem to have known her all my life, but only in my dreams, from my very earliest ones to the present. She's never changed in all that time." He halted as suddenly as he had begun to talk, either having to say it. "Have you ever married. Mr. Bennett?" Hall prodded gently. "No. I never have." Again, Bennett stopped, adding nothing more to his blunt answer. "May I ask why not?" Bennett turned his face away. "I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. It makes me sound like a romantic kid." He looked at the doctor almost in defiance. "I've always felt that some day I would meet this girl, or at least someone very much like her. I know it's not a rational feeling -- maybe I've even used it as an excuse not to get married -- but it's like spilling salt and throwing a pinch over our shoulder; we aren't superstitious, yet we don't take any chances." Dr. Hall didn't comment. He ended the questioning period and put Bennett through a series of tests. Then they sat down again and Hall offered his diagnosis. "The neurological examiitation is essentially negative, Mr. Bennett. In other words, there is no organic reason that I can find for your headaches. That leaves only one other possibility -- an emotional disturbance. I'm a neurologist, remember, not a psychoanalyst. I can only give an opinion about the cause of your complaint." Bennett waited expectantly, "Headaches without organic causes are generally the result of repressed anger," Hall went on. "That anger can stem from any number of traumatic situations or attitudes, all deeply buried in the unconscious, of course, or they would not have the power Sf to hurt USFrom what we know of you, however, it seems to be the result of frustration. In other words, you have created a fantasy image of a completely unattainable woman, and therefore none of the women you meet can fulfill your expectations. Sine she is unattainable, you naturally feel a sense of frustration." "But who could she be?" Bennett asked anxiously. "Someone you knew in childhood, perhaps. A composite of real and imaginary women. Usually, it is an idealized image of your own mother." Bennett sat frowning. "All right, let's say that's so. But where do the hallucinations of th city of Thone fit in?" "This is something that has to be tracked down in a series of analytical sessions, so all I can do is guess. If one is unable to reach a goal in a real environment. the obvious answer is to create a fantasy world. That's what you appear to be doing, It's a dangerous situation. Mr. Bennett. Potentially, at least." "How so?" Bennett asked, alarmed. "The general tendency is toward greater and greater divorcement from reality. I suggest immediate treatment by a competent analyst. If you don't know of one, I can recommend several." "I'd like to think it over." "Do that." Hall said. "And call me when you've decided." T he third day after he consulted the neurologist, Bennett's headache returned. As before, drugs were of no help. Wlicn the pain became blinding, he lay back on his bed, placed a cold cloth on his forehead, and closed his eyes. Suddenly the realities he knew were gone and he was back in the dream-city of Thone. Persons and objects were much clearer now. Bennett sa.w that he lay in a receptacle shaped like a rectangular metal box. It was padded, reminding him unpleasantly of a coffin. The woman he had seen before was again with him, but now he knew that her name was Lima. Behind her stood a man; a tall, dark man whose eyebrows joined over the bridge of his nose, and whose forehead was creased in a permanent frown. The woman held out her arms to Bennett. Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Bennett's spirit seemed to rise from the. flesh -- he could see his body still lying there -- and he followed the woman. As he approached she retreated and. try as he would to reach her, she remained just beyond his grasp. After what seemed hours of futile pursuit, a cloud formed between him and the woman. When it dissipated, he had left the world of Thone. He was in a trolley-bus, in his own world, and vaguely he recalled having left his room, gone down to the street, and board(jd the trolley -- during the time he had followed Lima, in his hallucination. It seemed that he had a definite destination then, but now he could not recall what it had been. His attention was drawn to the outside by the flickering of lights that flashed in through the bus windows. Bennett looked out and saw that he was in the Pleasure Section of the city, traveling through the Street of Carnivals. He watched the fronts of the amusement buildings pass before him and he read their advertisements listlessly. Suddenly one sign seemed to spring out from all the others: He left the trolley at the next corner and made his way through the crowd to the brightly lit carnival building. Inside, he found a chair and seated himself. The show's act appeared about half over. It was pretty evidently charlatan stuff, Bennett decided,but the blackhooded mystic on the stage held his attention. She was a tall woman, with a slender figure and fair flesh. She was poised, or perhaps it was indifference to the crowd. A runner went through the audience touching articles of clothing or ornaments, and the woman without hesitation named each one he touched. The act was slightly different from most Bennett had seen in that the runner said nothing, merely touching the articles to be named. The next portion of the show consisted of a mind-reading act. Bennett expeicted the usual routine of writing a question on paper, which would be sealed in an envelope and placed in a container on the stage. He was surprised when the runner returned to the crowd and asked for volunteers for thoughtreading. A shor man with a bright yellow necktie raised his hand. The runner made his way through the crowd to the man and touched him on the shoulder before turning back to the mystic. He still said nothing. "This man is thinking that he should have stayed at home tonight," the mystic said. "There are wrestling matches on the teletone. and he would have enjoyed them more than this show. Besides, he would have spent less money that way than he has tonight. And he does not like to pcnd money unless he must. A titter of amusement went through the crowd as the man blushed a dull crimson. The runner touched a second man. "This man wishes to know the winner in the eighth race at the horse tracks tomorrow," she said. "I am sorry, but. because of Public Law one thousand thirty-two, Section' five-A, I am prohibited from answering a question of that nature." The third person contacted was a woman. She raised her hand, then half changed her mind when she saw that the runner was turning toward her. But then she defiantly tossed her brown hair bak from her face and allowed him to touch her shoulder. "This woman is wondering if her lover is true to her -- and if her husband will find out about them." This time the crowd laughed when the embarrassed woman turned pale and rushed up the aisle toward the exit. No further hands were raised and the show ended with a short address by the runner: "I hope you have enjoyed these truly marvelous and mysterious demonstrations. Now the mystic, Lima, is available for a short time for personal interviews. The fee is very reasonable -- one dollar a minute. Anyone wishjng an interview please step forward. The mystic pulled the hood from her head, smiled, bowed at the crowd, and left the stage. Bennett gasped. "The Avoman of the city of Thone!" "#'OU have paid in advance for twenty-five minutes of my time." Lima said, as she smiled in amusement. "Perhaps you had better begin your questions, instead of merely staring at me. Bennett brought his thoughts back with an effort. "Your performance was exceptionally good," he said very soberly. "I enjoyed it. And so, apparently did the other customers. It is a clever routine. I'll admit I an't figure out how you do it. "Remember what Barnum said, Lima replied lightly. "At least you do not take yourself too seriously," Bennett observed. "On the contrary," Lima countered, T take myself very seriously. You, however, do not. You are paying for my time and the customer is always right." "Tell me," Bennett asked abruptly, "have we ever met before?" "Not to my knowledge." "Have you any objections to telling me about yourself during our interview? Who are you? What is your background?" # "I will be glad to tell you about myself, if you think it will be interesting," she replied, after a barely perceptible pause. "How I came by this exceptional ability of mine, I have no slightest conception. I only remember that when I was young, and still without the intellect to evaluate social mores and customs, I was often placed in positions of awkwardness by my ability to read minds. At an early age, however, through the council of my parents, I learned to keep this knowledge to myself. "By the time I reached my twentieth birthday, my parents were both dead and I was alone in the world. I had never learned any occupation. I made some attempts to use my mindreading to some advantage to myself, but soon found that I encountered the opposition of the medical associations as well as the law. As a consequence, I turned to show business as the one means of earning a legitimate livelihood. There is not much more to tell." "Can you actually read minds?" Bennett asked insistently. "I can." "Then what am I thinking now?" "You are thinking," Lima said, with no semblance of a trance or any of the other usual antics of professional mystics, "that I look exactly like a woman you have never seen, but whose image you have carried in your mind since your childhood." For just a moment, the startling accuracy disconcerted Bennett. "I have a problem which is quite annoying," he pushed on almost frantically. "Can you tell me what my problem is?" "You have been subject to extremely severe headaches, which you have been unable to remedy, either by sedatives or with the help of a neurologist. Am I correct?" "More than you could possibly know! Look, I came here believing you were a fake. That didn't matter -- it was the fact that you looked like this other woman that counted. I'm convinced now. I want your help. Can you help me, or at least tell me whether the neurologist is right about the cause of my headaches?" "He is wrong," Lima said. "I can tell you what causes them, but I am afraid that I will have to ask for another hundred dollars for that extra service." Bennett was momentarily irritated at this evidence that their relationship, at least as far as she was concerned, was strictly business. But he shrugged off the feeling. He drew five twentydollar bills from his pocketbook and placed them on the table before her. S "If you remember, Lima said, folding the money carefully and tucking it into the neck of her dress, "five months ago a building which you had contracted to build fell, when it was nearly completed, and two workmen were killed.' 'I remember very well.' "You found that the collapse of the building was caused by faulty material which you had bought through a subcontractor. You are still investigating to determine where to place the blame, and are on the point of doing so." "Go on," Bennett breathed softly. "You are quite certain that the person responsible is John Tournajk ostensibly a reputable contractor, but actually an unscrupulous scoundrel. You have a choice of exposing him, with great personal danger to yourself -- Toumay is a dangerous and ruthless man -- or remaining silent and knowing that you arc a coward. The difficulty of that choice is causing your headaches. "You may be right," Bennett admitted without hesitation. "I haven't had time to think the matter through quite that far. What would you advise me to do?" "That is something which cannot be advised. The answer lies within yourself. You arc either a big enough man to do the right thing -- which you yourself recognize -- or you are a small man and will take the safer, less honorable course. The decision and the integrity lie within yourself." B ennett slumped. t sec that. Then there's nothing more that you can do for me?" "But there is," Lima replied. "I can cure your headaches, if you wish -- for an additional hundred dollars." "That would be a cheap price." Bennett drew his wallet from his pocket. "My cash is rather low. Would you accept a personal check?" "Certainly," Lima said. "But, first, let me explain about my cure. There is some mental unpleasantness involved which you may consider worse than the ailment." "I doubt that. I. can't imagine anything worse than this agony." "Your mind will be placed under my control and led through a dream sequence. I will follow a logical progression of events, using your actual past as background. While you are under my control, your experiences will be far from pleasant. I will allow your mind to follow its own anticipated course of events, influencing your thoughts only slightly -- directing them into as unpleasant channels as possible. In fact, to make the cure certain, at least the culmination must be quite devastating. Do you agree to undergo such rigorous mental punishment?" "But why do I have to?" Bennett asked, astonished and worried. "That pattern will act in the manner of a counter-irritant. Your mind is like a spoiled child, rejecting anticipated unpleasantness. Under my influence it is rubjected to possible alternative experiences, which arc so much worse than the one it originally feared that it will gratefully accept the lesser evil." "That sounds reasonable, Bennett agreed. "When could we begin this treatment?" "Immediately, if you arc willing." "I see no reason for waiting." "Then, if you are ready," Lima told him, "lie on this couch. Keep your eyes on mine." She spoke slowly, evenly. "Remember that you are doing this of your own free will, that you trust me. I am your friend and would do you no harm." Her voice droned on as Bennett looked into her eyes. They merged until they became one large, placid pool of restfulness, and he found himself drawn into them. He sank peacefully, quietly -- completely. Bennett knew it was the district attorney returning his call, and that the die was cast. Until this ugly business was brought to a conclusion, his life would be in constant danger. "Leroy Bennett speaking," he said. "I have had collected some information that I think will be of very great interest to your office." "Information about what?" the voice at the other end asked briskly. "I have proof that John Tournay is responsible for the death of two men. in an action involving criminal collusion." "If what you say is true, I will be glad to see your evidence," the district attorney said. "CouM you deliver it in person? There may be some questions I would like to ask you about it." "Certainly," Bennett replied, "When would be the most convenient time?" "Later in the day. I have a case going on. How would fourthirty this afternoon suit you?" "That would be fine." The rest of the day dragged slowly. At four o'clock Bennett left his office and took the elevator to the ground floor. Under his arm he clutched the briefcase which might spell death for him. A moment after he left his office building, he knew be had #S made a mistake -- a fatal one! Idly, at first, his mind's eye watched the driver of a long gray acdan, parked at the curb, start Up its motor as he approached. The car pulled away from the curb when he came alongside it. Through an open rear window, Bennett saw a man with a dark, brooding face -- with black eyebrows that joined over the bridge of the nose -- glowering at him. At the same instant he saw the blunt nose of an automatic resting on the lowered glass of the window, just below the chin of the frowning man. Incredibly, even as he realized that he was about to die, Benner's first thought was not one of Tear, but rather that this dark man was the other person he had seen in his hallucinations of the city of Thone! Then, as one part of his mind drew back in terror at what it knew was about to happen, another part wondered at the mystery of Thone and the people in it. Where did that hallucination fit in this mist of life which was about to ecid? He felt three hard, solid blows punch shockingly into his body. There was pain, but greater thari that was the terror that whipped his panicked mind. "Lima." Bennett whispered with his last stark thought as he dropped to his knees. He groped for the sidewalk with one hand, to steady himself, and never reached it. "TT'S over now," Bennett heard the mystic say. "Please try to relax." He found himself fighting with awful exertion to raise himself from the sidewalk -- which had turned into a couch. His clothes clung to him with a clammy wetness that chilled him. He flung his arms out in a frantic gesture that knocked a lamp from an end-table and sent it crashing to the floor. Not until then did he feel the  mystic's firmly gentle hands on his shoulders, urging him down, and know that he was not actually dying. He lay back for a moment, gasping great gulps of welcome air into his lungs. "I think you will be all right now." Lima said. "You were right when you said the experience would not be pleasant," Bennett said, still battling for breath. "I hope the results will be worth it." "I believe you will find that they are," Lima told him reassuringly. "Also, it can be of assistance to you in still another way. The sequence your dream followed -- being a natural, perhaps even a probable, aftermath of your past decisions and movements -- could actually happen. Therefore it would be wise to avoid such decisions in real life." A T the end of two weeks, Bennett had collected all the information he needed on Tournay's illegal activities. The investigator he hired was very thorough, and unearthed several other incriminating schemes in Tournay's past. With the 'evidence he had on hand, Bennett was certain that Tournay would be convicted in any court. This time he intended to evade the fate he had suffered in the dream by acting differently. He hired a shrewd lawyer -- the best obtainable -- had him draw up the evidence in legal form, and presented it to the district attorney, with the demand for Tournay's immediate arrest. He knew that immediate action would be his best protection. That evening, when he left his office building, he felt the peace of a man whose task has been well done. It took almost a full second before the sight of the long gray car jerked his thoughts from their pleasant introspection and back to dread reality. Tournay's blackbrowed face leered at him as it had in the dream and he felt his body tense as it waited for the pistol slugs to strike. His mind scurried in its trap within his head and, strangely, it turned to the mystic for help. "Lima!" he called desperately.  struggling with that awful exertion to drag his body from the couch on which it lay. "It's all over now," he heard Lima say. He sat up. "What happened? "This will be hard to believe," Lima said, "and I will not try to prove it to you, but it is true. The mind has many powers which cannot even be imagined by anyonewho has not lived with those powers as I have. When you called me. your mind attuned itself with mine, and its need and its demand were so powerful that together wc turned time backward. You are now back in my dressing room, and it is the exact time at which you originally came out of your dream." "That's impossible!" Bennett protested. "Nevertheless, it happened. I only ask you to keep in mind one thing. Someday, when your mind has been made more facile, you will understand how I am able to do this. It will even appear logical to you. Now, however, the only thing I can tell you is believe it!' muffing this second chance. After he had collected the inforA# mation about Toumay's criminal activities, he also dug into his past for a man who had cause to hate the contractor. He found the man he sought, a man as ruthless and unscrupulous as Tournay himself, one who could fight him on his own ground. Roger Clarkson had been the controller of a string of bookie joints, before he had been framed by Toumay, and convicted, to serve ten years in prison. Clarkson had been released from prison six days before. He found that Toumay had gained control of his former criminal em pire. Everyone, including Tournay, knew that the only thing preventing Clarkson from taking rcngc was the opportunity. Bennett sent his information to Clarkson and sat back to await the results. That evening, as he was about to leave his office building, some inner caution warned him to take no chances. He stepped cautiously out into the street, looked both ways for the gray sedan, and saw that the street was empty, before he walked to the corner. He arrived there just in time to meet the long gray sedan as it drpvc ut. ful exertion on the mystic's couch. This time he came out of the blackness with his mind clear. You've saved me again," he said to Lima. "Have you turned time backward again?" "Yes," she replied. "But I have given you all the help I can. The next attempt you rrke, you will have nothing on which to lean except your own strength." "But why do I always arrive at the point where I'm being shot by Tournay, regardless of what course I choose? Is there no way I can beat him?" "If you believe in fate as strongly as I do, you will accept that conclusion as inevitable. The long gray sedan is the symbol of your death. You cannot avoid it -- at least not as long as you persist in passive action." "What do you mean by that?" "Just this. You wish to sec Tournay punished -- your sense of justice demands it. But each time you try to have someone else administer that punishment. It appears to me that the only possibility of your breaking this fateful progression of events is for you to administer the punishment yourself. You probably realize the danger of trying that. But I can't see where you have any other choice." "In other words, you feel that the only chance I have of pre -- is to kilt him first?" "Yes," Lima said. "Are you strong and hard enough to do it?" Bennett thought for only a brief moment before he nodded. "I'm desperate enough, at any rate." This time he did not leave immediately. He had to find out something first. He put his arms around Lima's shoulders and drew her toward him. She put her face up and he kissed her waiting lips. They were sweet and. if she did not return the ardor of his kiss, he did not notice it. Tournay is not in." the girl at the desk told Bennett. "You might try his home." At a pay-booth in the lobby, Bennett called Tournay's home. The voice that answered was that of a tired woman, one who has given up hope. "Mr. Tournay called me a short time ago and said that he would be in the office of a Mr. Leroy Bennett, in the Lowry building, if anyone called," the tired voice said. Bennett hung up and caught a cab. His tjuatty had walked into an ideal place for their meeting. For better or for worse, he would soon bring this conflict to an end. In his office. Bennett found that Tournay had been there and gone. He had left a message: "Tell Mr. Bennett that Lima sent me!" So that was it -- Lima had used Bennett as a dupe! He could not figure out her purpose, but he knew that he could never trust her again. She had been against him from the first. Perhaps even she, rather than Tournay, was the prime menace. He decided that he must kill them botli, before they had the chance to kill him. Touching the small flat pistol snuggling in its shoulder holster, he knew the pursuit must continue immediately. He rode the elevator to the ground floor, and he felt his mind working with a clarity and a precision which he had seldom experienced before. This time he knew he would win. Shrewdly, before leaving the building. Bennett looked out through the glass pane in the door first. He waited only a moment before he saw the long gray sedan as he had expected. They would not trap him again. Ducking back, he walked rapidly toward a side exit. Night had fallen by the time he reached the carnival building. He did not ring the bell. Instead, he walked to the rear, climbed the stairs of a fire-escape, and softly opened the window of a bedroom. He stepped inside just as softly and stood listening for breathing. He heard none. This was probably too early for Lima to be in bed. The bedroom door was open. Bennett could sec a light coming from another part of the apartment -- probably the living room. He paused to steel himself for what he must do. The time had come when he would have to be savagely ruthless. He found Lima sitting on a couch, reading a book. He suspected that she still had some control over his mind and he had no intention of letting her influence him. She must be killed before she could read hjs intention. "It didn't work." Bennett spoke just loudly enough to startle Lima into raising her head. As she looked up. he shot her squarely between the eyes. In an agony of frustration, Beiwett saw the flesh of her forehead remain clear and undisturbed. He knew he could not miss at this range, yet she was unhurt. He lowered his sights and shot at the white neck beneath the fair head. She still sat there, returning his gaze, unperturbed, unmarked by the bullets. He pumped the four remaining bullets into her body. The only part of her that moved was her lips. "It's no use. Leroy." she said. "Haven't you guessed? You arc still in your dream. You can't kill me there." Suddenly the implication struck him with its awful simplicity. "Good God!" His voice rose. "Do you mean I've never been out of my dream?" He hesitated while the thought sank in. "My remembrance of coming out of it was only part of the dream itself," he murmured. "That was why you were able to turn time backward at will." A cold calmness returned to him. "Tell me," he said, "am I still in the dream?" "Yes," Lima replied. "Then I demand that you free me now!" "As you wish," Lima said sadly. "And may God help you." Bennett wrenched his body from the couch on which it lay and struggled to his feet. Though the dream had seemed real enough, he could look back on it now and see it as any other dream. He breathed easier, and then stopped abruptly when he heard a voice behind him say, "You are still a dead man!" Bennett whirled and found himself facing Tournay. And Tournay held a pistol aimed at his heart. Bennett turned desperately back to Lima. His lips formed her name, but the sound died almost before it was uttered. This time, he saw, she would not help him. Her features had hardened and no mercy or compassion registered on them. "There is no escape," she said. A fleeting thought went through his mind of springing at Tournay and trying to reach him before the gun could be fired. But one glance at Tournay's face made him realize how futile -- and fatal -- that would be. Tournay's finger tightened on the trigger of his gun and Bennett thought ahead in despair to what was to come. One thing he knew: He did not want to die! Was there no way out? The answer came like a cry of re'ief. There was a way -- Thone! The city of his enigma. Tournay an I Lima could not harm him there. F or just an instant, Bennett's vision blurred. Time paused, and the next moment he knew he had returned to Thone. The sounds of the alien city floated up to him and he stirred. He grasped the sides of his coffinlike bed with fingers that had lost their sense of touch. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked about him. On one side stood Lima, though now her features were not thce of the implacable, merciless mystic, but rather those of a woman in love. She smiled happily and said, "At last you have returned." Bennett strove to move his tongue and lips to ask questions. but they refused, as though numbed by long inaction. He turned to his other side and gazed questioningly at the replica of Tournay who stood there. Tournay's image spoke. "We had quite a time bringing you back. Sire. But now it has been accomplished -- for good." Striving to move his throat muscles, Bennett finally forced a sound, and then words, through his lips. "Tell me," he pleaded. "Who are you? And, more important, who am I?" He turned to Lima for an answer, realizing that now she would help him if anyone would. "Doctor Tournay will explain it to you," Lima replied, indicating the dark man. Imploringly, Bennett turned back to face Tournay. "I see that very little of your memory has returned yet," Tournay said. "In a short while, everything -- all your past -- will come back to you. Until then, perhaps I had better explain to you who you are. My words will help trigger your returning memory, and speed up the process." "Please' do," Bennett begged. "You are Benn Ett, Le Roy of the city-state of Thone, in the year # A. D. Six months ago, the strain of governing the city began to undermine your health. Acting under my advice, you den cided to take a somno-rest cure. "This rest cure," the doctor continued, "is quite standard practice in. our time. We had a little difficulty bringing you out of it at the end of six months. Evidently your somno-existence must have been very pleasant." "Do you mean that the existence I remember was merely an induced figment of my imagination?" "Yes. You see, the best rest that can be given a mind is to give it not sleep, but pleasant work. Therefore, under my manipulation, you were given a pseudo-existence in a past era of history. You were led to copceive yourself as occupying a position, which, after close study, I deduced would be the most suitable and relaxing for you." "But if that is true, why did my dream have to end so unpleasantly -- I might say, so nearly fatally?" Bennett demanded. "The more successful I am in choosing a pleasant existence for a patient in the somno, the more difficult it is to bring him out of it," the doctor replied. "Your unconscious mind, realizing how happy you were in your simulated existence, and how it would have to return to the rigor and stress which unnerved it before, fought with all its strength to remain where the somno had placed it. "The usual practice in bringing a patient back to reality is for the doctor to enter the dream and convince him, by whatever means may be necessary, to return. Sometimes, however, the patient is so firmly tied to his somno-existence that drastic measures must be used. This is usually done by means of making the somno-existence so anxietyproducing that the patient is glad to return. "Your particular release was one of the most difficult that I have ever encountered. In fact, I was unable to bring you back myself, and asked your wife, Lima, to enter the somno with me and help force you to return." Bits of recollection, which had been edging into Bennett's memory, burst through' in full force, and he remembered. It was true. He was Benn Ett, Le Roy of the city-state of Thone. He turned to Lima and, as he read the glad light in her eyes, he knew that she had witnessed the return of his complete memory. "Welcome home." she said. Lover Whof o post! The climate was grand, the service a dream -- maybe too much of one. Was that why no man was allowed to stay there longer then six months? when you're near me T he silvery ship came rushing in backward through the veils of broken cloud, tobogganing down the atmosphere of Station Four. Fires of deceleration jetted red from the reactor ports, roaring their hurricane thrust against the clutch of gravity. Air thickened: the glittering rocket speck slid easier, settling down like a parachuting missile. Sunlight splashed its metal sides with light and the blue ocean waters billowed wide to swallow it. The ship dipped in a wide arc and backed down toward the reddish-grecn-clad land. Inside its tiny cabin, the three mien lay strapped and waiting for the shock of contact. Their eyes were closed, their hands tight and blood-drained. Muscle blocks struggled against the drag. The ground swept up. The ship settled hard on its rear braces, trembling. Then, finally, it stood motionless and silent, successfully navigated through scores of light years of vacuum night. A quarter mile away were the #S warehouse, village and house. C ritical. That was official record. Station Four, the Three-Moon Psycho Ward. David Lindell knew it; all the Wentner men knew and wondered. Wentner's Interstellar Trading Company put a man on other stations, for two years at a clip. Here on Four it was only for six months. Why? Because it was critical. Why? Nobody could stand the place longer than six months. Why? It always came to Vhy"? "But like I always say," Lindell said, "it's no use worrying myself." JJe said it to Martin, the ship's co-pilot, as the two of them trudged across the wide meadow toward the distant comjJound, carrying Lindell's luggage. "You have the right idea, said Martin. "Don't worry yourself." "That's what I always say," said Lindell. "They're paying me enough and they have to take care of me if anything happens. Its their headache." They passed the silent gargantuan warehouse. The sliding doors were half open and, inside, Lindell could see the concrete floor empty and sunlight filtering bright ribbons through the skylight. Martin told him the cargo ship had emptied it out a few weeks before. Lindell grunted and shifted his luggage. "Where are the workers?" he asked. Martin gestured toward the native village about three hundred yards away. There was no sound from the low-slung white dwellings methodically arranged to form three sides of a rectangle. The windows blinked fiercely in the sunlight. "Guess they're sacked down," Martin judged. "They sleep a lot when work is done. You'll see them tomorrow when shipments start coming in again." "Got their families with them?" Lindell asked. "Nope." "Thought it was company policy." "Not here. The Gnees don't have much family life. Too few men and practically all of them pretty dumb." "Great," Lindell said. "Dandy." He shrugged. "Well, it's no use worrying myself about it." While they were on the stairs to the hallway of the house, he asked Martin where Corrigan was. "He went home with the cargo ship," Martin said. "The company allows that once in a while. There's nothing to do here anyway after the goods are picked up." #  "Oh," said Lindell. "What's this door?" He kicked it open and looked in at the combination living room-library. "All the comforts of," he said. "More," said Martin, looking over Lindell's shoulder. "Over there you have a movie projector and a tape recorder." "Swell," Lindell said. "I can talk to myself legal." Then he grimaced. "Let's dump these bags. My arms are falling off." They shuffled down the hall and Lindell glanced into the small 'kitchen as they passed. It was porcelain-paneled and well kept.  "Can this Gnee woman cook?" he asked. "From what I hear," said Martin, "you'll be packing it in like a king." "Glad to hear it. Incidentally, you got any idea why they call this joint the Three-Moon Psycho Ward?" "Who calls it?" "The boys back on Earth." "The boys are all wet You'll like it here." "But why is it only a six month stint?" "I don't know -- maybe the company doesn't want its help to stay here for good," said Martin. "Here's your bedroom." A S they entered, the Gnee woman was making the bed, her back to the door. Thr thumped down the. bags and sh turned slowly, unalarmed o startled. Lindell's hands twitched Oh, well, he thought, I've seen worse in my day. She wore a heavy robe fastened at the neck and falling to the floor like a truncated cone of cloth. All he could see was her head. It was a squat coarsy grained head, pink and hairless -- like the mottled belly of an expecting chihuahua, he decided. For ears, there were cavities onthe sides of her flat chinless face. Her nose was a stub, singic-nostrilcd. Het lips were thick and monkeylike, outlining a small circle of moutli Hello, Lover, Lindell decided not to say. She came across the room quietly and he blinked at her eyes. Then she placed a moist, spongy hand in his. "Hya," he said. "She can't hear," Martin said. "Telepathic." "That's right, I forgot." Hello, he thought, and Hello came back the answering welcome. It is jood to have you. "Thanks," he said. She seems like a decent kid. he thought to himself: weird but homy. A question touched his brain like a timid hand. "Yeah, sure," he said. Yes, he added in his mind. "What's that?" Martin asked. "She asked if she should unpack. I think." Lindell slumped down on the bed. "Ah," he said, "this I like." He pushed exploring fingers into the mattress. "Say, how do you know it's a he?" he asked when he and Martin were walking back down the bill while the Gnee woman unpacked. "The robe. The males don't wear robes." "That's all?" Martin looked away. "A few other things of absolutely no interest to you." They moved into the living room and Lindell tried out the easy chair for size. He leaned ba and stroked the arms with satisfied fingers. "Critical or not," he said, "this station has 'em all beat for comfort." He sat there, momentarily remembering the woman's eyes. They had seemed huge, covering a full third of her face, like big glass saucers with dark cup rings for pupils. And they were moist; bowls of liquid. He shrugged and let it go. So what, he thought, it's nothing. "Hah? What?" he asked, hearing Martin's voice. "I said be careful." Martin was hjolding up a shiny gas pistol. "This is loaded," he warned. "Who neods it?" "You won't. Just standard equipment." Martin dropped it back in the desk drawer and shoved the drawer back in. "And you know where all your books are," he said. "The warehouse office is set up like all the other station offices." Lindell nodded. "I won't get lost." Martin glanced at his watch. "Well, I have to be going. Let's see," he continued, as he and Lindell started for the door, "anything else to tell you? You know the rule about not harming the people, of course." "Who's, gonna harm them? Whoops!" They'd almost knocked her over as they exited from the room. She jumped back one more bouncy step and stared at them, eyes wide and frightened. "Take it easy, kiddo," Lindell soothed. "What's up?" Eat? The thought cringed before him like a beggar at the back door of his mind. He pursed his lips and nodded. "You took the words right out of my head." He looked at her and concentrated. ril be back as soon as I walk the co-pilot to his ship. Make something good. She nodded violently and rushed toward the kitchen. ' "Where's she off to like a bat?" Martin asked curiously, as they G V #t turned for the stairs. "She's going to rustle me a snack," Lindell chuckled as they descended. "That's what I call service de luxe. This telepathy is okay, you know? At other stations it was either learn half the language to get a ham sandwich or try and teach 'em English so I wouldn't starve. Either way I really had to sweat for my supper until things got settled." He looked pleased. "This is real hot," he said. Their heavy boots crushed down the tall crisp blue grass as they approached the upright ship. Martin held out his hand. "Take it easy, Lindell. See you in six moirths." "Right enough. Give old man Wentner a kick in the pants for me." "Will do." He watched the co-pilot dwindle in size, ascending the metal ladder to the hatchway. A midget Martin pulled himself into the ship and clanged the metal port shut. Lindell waved back at the tiny figure at the port and then turned and walked away to escape the blast. He stood on a hill underneath the heavy scarlet foliage of a tree. Inside the ship's belly there was a liquid cough, a rush of exploding gases. He watched the ship hang for a moment on its flaming exhaust and then flash up into the green-blue sky, leaving scorched ground in its wake. The next instant it was gone. He walked in lazy strides back toward the house, gazing appreciatively at the profusion of livid plants and flowers in the meadow around him. bulbous insects hanging over them. He took off his jacket and let it hang from one hand as he walked. The sun felt good on his lean back. "Boys," he said to the fragrant air, "you're all wet." HE great blazing sun was almost gone, spraying the sky red with the blood of its cyclic dying. Soon the three moons would rise -- guaranteed to drive insane a man looking for a shadow he could call his own. Lindell sat at the living room window, gazing out over the countryside. You couldn't beat it, he thought; tor air or climate or all the things that grew in Earthpaling technicolor. Nature outdid herself in this tucked-away corner of the Galaxy. He sighed and stretched, wondering about supper. Drink? He started, chopping a yawn in half, and drew his fingers together so fast that the knuckle bones crackled. He saw her standing athis side offering a tray with a glass on it. He reached for it, feeling his heart placate itself after the initial jolt. "I'd knock or something," he suggested. The big eyes were elliptical now. They stared at him without comprehension. "Well, let it go," he said, after a sip of the warm, tangy liquid. He smacked his lips and took another sip, a long one. "Damn good," he said. "Thanks, Lover." He blinked at himself. That brings a guy up short, he decided. Lover? Of all the unlikely names in the Universe... He glanced at her with a chuckle bubbling up in his throat.  She hadn't moved. Her face was screwed up into what he assumed was a smile. But her mouth wasn't designed for smiling. "Hey, when are we eating?" he asked, feeling an edge uncomfortable under the unmoving gaze of her watery eye globes. She turned and hurried to the door. There she turned. All ready already, he got the the message. He grinned, downed the drink, got up and followed her eager shuffle down the dim hallway. Some time later he pushed away the plate with a sigh and leaned back in the chair. "That's what I call good," he said. Like a hidden spring, he felt her pleasure well up in his mind. Lover thanks you. She certainly picked up the name fast, he thought. She looked at him, eyes wide. Was she trying to smile again? he wondered. To him the expression looked like all her others -- the facial poses of an idiot. He thought she was smiling, though, because of the thoughts that accompanied the expression. Then he found his eyes involuntarily watering in empathy and he turned his head, blinking. A trifle nervously, he dumped a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee and stirred. He could still feel her gaze on him. A twinge of displeasure marred his thoughts and she turned away abruptly. That's better, he thought, and felt all right again. "Hey, tell me, Lover," he started to say. Well, might as well get used to it, he figured. You have a husband? Her returned thoughts were confused. A jnate? he re-worded. Oh, yes. In the worker's village? They have no mates, she said, and he thought he sensed a note of hauteur in her reply. He shrugged and took a sip of coffee. "Well," he said, "one sat# isfied worker would drive the rest of 'em crazy anyway. They'd be biting their nails ifthey have nails. And on that note -- good night." In bed he sat writing in his much-used diary. Between its battered covers were inscribed the sparse comments he had made on half a dozen different planets. This was his seventh station. "My lucky number," he paragraphed in blue ink. Again no sound. To sleep? His pen skiddled and spat out three fat blots. He looked up and saw her with the tray again. "Yeah," he said. Yeah. Thanks, Lover. But, look, will you just let me know when you... He stopped, seeing that it was hopeless. "This will make me sleep?" he asked. Oh, yes, was the reply. He took a sip, looking down at the ink-blotted page. Just started it anyway, he thought; no loss of priceless literature. He ripped out the page and crumpled it in one hand. "This is good stuff," he said, nodding his head toward the glass. He held up the paper. Throw it away, hah? Throw away? she asked. "That's right," he said. "Now clear out. What in hell are you doing in a man's boudoir anyway?" She scuttled across the floor and he grinned as she closed the door quietly behind herself. Finishing the drink, he set it down on the bedside table and turned off the lamp. He settled back on the soft pillow with a sigh. Critical, he thought in drowsy satisfaction. Nuts. Good night. He opened his heavy-lidded eyes and looked around. There was no one in the room. He sank back. Good night. He raised up on one elbow, squinting into the darkness. Good night. "Oh," he said. "Good night, yourself." The thoughts abated. He fell back again and made his mouth a tooth-edged cave with yawning. "How about that?" he muttered thickly, turning on his side. "Absolutely no mirrors. See? Nothin' up my sleeves. Howboutha... He had a dream. The dream covered him with sweat. house with her farewells tugging at his brain, and headed across the grounds for the warehouse. Already, he saw, the Gnee men were formed in a moving line, carrying bundles on their heads. They marched into the warehouse, deposited their burI den on the concrete and had it checked off by a Gnee foreman who stood in the center of the floor, holding a clipboard thick with paper-thin vouchers. As Lindcll approached, the men all bowed and looked more cowed as they hastened on their rounds. 'He noticed that their heads were flatter than Lover's, a little more darkly tinted, and with smaller eyes. Their bodies were broad and thick-muscled. They do look stupid, he thought. As he came up to the man who was doing the checking and sent out an unanswered thought, he saw that they weren't telepathic cither. Or maybe didn't want to be.  "How doody," said the man in a squeaky voice. "I check. You check?" "That's okay," Lindell said, pushing back the clipboard. "Just bring it into the office when the first batch is all in." "What, hah?" said the mao. Jeez, are you a case, Lindcll thought: "Bring this." he said, tapping the clipped sheaf of papers, "Bring to office." He pointed again. "Bring to me... me! When goods are all in." The man's splotchy face lit up with a look of eager stupidity and he nodded brightly. Lindell patted his shoulder. Good boy. rasped his mind. I bet you're dynamite in a crisis. He headed for the office, gritting his teeth. Inside, he shut the plastiglass door behind him and looked around the office. It was all the same as he remembered from other stations, except for the cot in one corner. Don't tell me I have to sleep out here nights, he thought with a groan. He moved closer. On the flat soil-cased pillow was the imprint of a head. He picked up a light brown hair. And what in the hell is this? he wondered. Under the cot he found a belt without a buckle. On the wall by the cot there were violent scratches, as though a man in fever had tried to get out of the office the hard way. He stared at them. The joint is haunted, he concluded with a vague shake of his head. Then he turned away with a shrug. No use worrying myself, he thoughL I got six months to go and nothing's going to get me down. He sat down quickly before the desk and dragged the heavy station log before himself. He flipped opea the heavy cover and started reading from the beginning. The first entries were twenty years dry. They were signed Jefferson Winters or, a Httle later, a hasty Jeff. At the end of six months and fifty-tvo closely packed pages. Lindell found page # covered with' a floridly penned message. "Station Four, good-by forever!" Jeff didn't seem to have had any difficulties adjusting to the life there. Lindtll shifted back in the creaking chair and pulled the heavy book on his lap with a sigh of boredom. It was after the first replacement's second month that the entries started to get ragged. There were blurred words, hurried scrawling, mistakes deleted and re-done. Some of the errors apparently had been corrected much later by still another replacement. It was that way through the next four hundred or so sleepinducing pages; a sorry chain of flaws and eventual correction. Lindell flipped through them wearily without the slightest interest in their content. Then he reached the entries signed Bill Corrigan and, with a blinking yawn, he straightened himself up, propped the book on the desk and paid closer attention. They were the same as in every case before, excluding the first one -- efficient beginnings declining markedly to, increased wildness, the penmanship erring more extravagantly with each month until, at last, it became almost illegible. He found a few blatantly miscalculated additions which he corrected in his careful hand. Corrigan's writing, he noted, .broke off in the middle of a word one afternoon. And for the last month and a half of Corrigan's stay, there were nothing but blank pages. He thumbed through them carelessly, shaking his head slowly Have to admit it, he thought. I don't get it. through twilight and, later, at supper, he began to get the sensation that Lover's thoughts were somehow alive, like microscopic insects crawling in and out among the fissures of his brain. Sometimes they barely moved; Other times they leaped excitedly. Once, when he became a little irritated with her staring, the thoughts were like invisible suppliants pawing weepily at his mind. What was worse, he realized while reading in bed, the sensation occurred even when she wasn't in the same room with him. It was disconcerting enough to feel an endless stream of thoughts flowing into him while she was close; this remote control business was just a little too much for his taste. Hey, how aboat it? he tried to reason her away good-naturedly. But all he got back was the picture of her looking at him wideeyed and uncomprehending. "Ah, nuts," he muttered and tossed his book on the bedside table. Maybe that's it, he thought, settling down for the night; this telepathy gimick. Maybe thatvas what ot the other men. Well, iot me, he vowed.  just won't orry myself about it. And he .urned out the lamp, said good light to the air and went to sleep. "Sleep," he muttered, unaware, only partly conscious. It wasn't sleep. Not deep enough by half. A cloudy ha#e submerged his mind and filled it with the same detailed scene. It telescoped and san away in a burst. It magnified, welling up and swallowing him and everything. Lover. Lover. The echo of a shriek in a long black corridor. The robe fluttering close by. He saw her pale features. "No," he said, "stay away. Far, close, beyond, upon." He cried out"No. No. NO!" He jolted up in the darkness with a choking grunt, eyes full open. He stared groggily around the empty bedroom, his thoughts broiling. He reached out in the darkness and flicked on the lamp. Hurriedly, he stuck a cigarette between his lips and lay slumped against the headboard, blowing out clouds of curling smoke. He raised his hand and saw that it shook. He muttered words without sense. Then his nostrils twitched and his lips drew back in revulsion. What the hell died. he thought. There was a heavy saccharine odor in the air, getting worse every second. He tossed off the covers. At the foot of the bed he found them -- a thick pile of livid purple flowers arranged as an offering. He looked at them a moment and then bent over to pick them up and throw them away. He drew back, gasping, as a thorn punctured "his right thumb. He pressed out bright blood drops and sucked the wound, his brain assailed by the thickening smell of the ugly blooms. T'S very nice of you, he sent her the message, but no more Sowers. She looked at him. She doesn't get it, he knew. "Do you understand?" he asked. Floods of affecticwi gurgled over the layers of his brain like syrup. He stirred his coffee restlessly and the transfer eased as though she were determined not to offend him. The kitchen was silent except for the clink of his silver on the breakfast dishes and the slight whispering rustle of her robe. He gulped down coffee and stood up to leave. ril eat lunch around... I know. Her thought cut into his, mildly commanding. He grinned a little to himself as he headed down the hall. Her telepathed message had come with an almost motherlike chiding. Then, crossing the grounds, he recalled the dream again and the departing grin emptied his features of amusement. All morning he wondered irritably what made the Gnee men so stupid. If they dropped a bundle. it was a project to pick it up again. They're like brainess cows, he thought, watching them through the office windows as they plodded through their tasks, eyes dull and unblinking, their thick shoulders sloping inward. He knew definitely now that they weren't telepathic. He'd tried several times to give them orders with his mind alone and there was no receipt of message. They reacted only to loudly repeated words of two syllables or, preferably, less. And they reacted moronically at that. In the middle of the morning he looked up from the backlog of paper work that Corrigan had left and realized, with some shock, that her thoughts were reaching him all the way from the house. And yet they weren't thoughts he could translate into words. They were just sensations, amorphously present. He got the feeling that she was checking, sending out exploratory beams now and again to see if all was well with him. The first few times it did no more than amuse him: he chuckled softly and went back to his work. But then the proddings assumed an annoyingly regular time pattern and he began to squirm in his chair. He found himself becoming rigidly erect and anticipating them seconds before they came. By late morning he was repulsing them consciously, tossing his pen on the desk and ordering her angrily to leave him alone when he worked. Her thoughts would break off contritely -- and soon come back again, like creeping things that stole upon him, insinuating and beyond insult. His nerves began to fray a little. He left the office and prowled the warehouse floor, tearing open bundles and checking goods with impatient fingers. The thoughts followed him around faithfully. "How doody," said the Gnee foreman every time Lindell passed, making him angrier yet. Once he straightened up suddenly over a bundle arid said loudly, "Go awayl" The foreman jumped a foot in the air. His pencil and clipboard went flying, and he hid behind a pillar and looked fearfully at Lindell. Lindell pretended not to notice. L ater, back inthe office, he sat thinking, the wDpen log book before him. No wonder the Gnee men didn't telepath, he thought. They knew what was good for them. Then he looked out the window at the plodding line of workers. What if they weren't just avoiding telepathy? What if they were incapable of it; had once held the ability and, because of it, h been broken to their present state of witless stolidity? He thought of what Martin had said about the women outnumbering the men. And a phrase entered his brain -- matriarchy by mind. The phrase offended him, but he was suddenly afraid that it might be true. It would explain why the other men had cracked. For if the women were in control, it might well be that, in their inherent lust for dominance, they made no distinction between their own men and the men from Earth. A man is a man is a man. He twisted angrily at the idea of possibly being considered on a level with the dolts who lived in the village. He stood up abruptly. I'm not hungry, he thought, not at all. But Vm going back to the house and order her to make me lunch and let her know I'm not hungry eifher. I'll make her used to being dominated herseli and then she'll get no chance to pick at me. No bug-eyed female Gnee, by God, is going to get me down! Then he blinked and turned away quickly when he realized that he was staring at the wild pattern of scratches on the far office wall, and the belt without a buckle that still curled limply underneath the cot. rHE dream again. It tore at his brain tissues with claws of razor. Sweat covering him, he tossed on the bed with a groan and was suddenly awake, staring into the darkness. He thought he saw something at the foot of the bed. He closed his eyes and shook his head and looked again. The room was empty. He felt mind-drenching thoughts recede like some alien fog. His fists contracted angrily. She's been at me while I slept, he thought. Goddam her hide, she's been at me. He pushed back the covers and crawled to the foot of the bed nervously. He couldn't see them, but the cloying fumes undulated up from # the floor like erected serpents slithering into his nostrils. Gagging, he slumped down on the mattress, his stomach wrenched. Why? His brain mumbled over and over. My God, why? Angrily, he threw the flowers away in her sight and the thoughts pleaded and showered over him like raindrops. "I said no, didn't I?" he yelled at her. Then he sat down at the table and controlled himself as well as he could. I've got a long way to go, he told his will. Ease off, ease off. Now he was sure he knew why it was only six months; that would be more than enough. But I won't crdck, . he commanded himself. It's a cinch she isn't going to crack, so conserve yourself. She's too stupid to crack, he thought deliberately, hoping she'd pick it up. She apparently did, for her shoulders slumped dejectedly all at once. And. during breakfast, she circled him like a timorous wraith, keeping her face averted and her thoughts aloof. He found himself almost sorry for her then. It probably wasn't her fault. It was just an inborn trait among the Gnee women. Then he realized that her thoughts were at him again, tender and gratefully maudlin, fie tried to neutralize himself and ignore them as they sought to break through his apathy like honeyed picks. All day he worked hard and made payments in spices and grain to the Gnee foreman. He wondered if the payments would go eventually to the women -- wherever they were. "I'm taping my voice," he dictated later that night. "I want to hear myself talking so I forget her. There's no one else here to talk to: I have to talk to myself. A sad case. Well, here goes. "Here I am on Station Four, folks, having a wonderful time and wish you were here instead of me. Oh, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong. But I guess I know what knocked out Corrigan and the poor bastards before him. It was Lover and her cannibal mind eating them up. But I'll tell you this, cousins; it's not going to eat me up. That much you can put bets on. Lover isn't going to... "No, I didn't call you! Come on, get out of my life, will you? Go to a movie or something. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, go to bed then. Just leave me alone. Alone. "There. That for her. She'll have to go some to get me clawing at the wallpaper." But he carefully locked the door to his room when he went  # to bed. And he groaned in his sleep because of the same nightmare and his limbs thrashed and all peace and rest were crowded out. He twisted into wakefulness in mid-morning and stumbled up to check the door. He fumbled at the lock with heavy fingers. Finally his thickened centers divined the fact that the door was still locked and he went back to bed in a weaving line and fell on it into a stupored sleep. When he woke up in the morning, there were flowers at the foot of his bed, luxuriantly purple and foul-smelling. The door was still locked. TE couldn't ask her about it because he left the kitchen in revulsion when she called him dear. No more flowers. I promise, cried her pursuing thoughts. He locked himself in the living room and sat at the desk, feeling sick. Get hold of yourself! he ordered his system, clasping his hands tightly and holding his teeth firmly clenched. Eat? She was outside the door; he knew it. He closed his eyes. Go away, leave me alone, he told her. Vm sorry, dear, she said, "Stop calling me dear!" he houted, slamming his fist on the desk surface. As he twisted in the chair, his belt buckle caught on the drawer handle and it jerked out. He found himself staring down at the shiny gas pistol. Almost unconsciously he reached down and touched its slick barrel. He shoved in the drawer with a convulsive movement. None of that! He looked around suddenly, feeling alone and free. He got up and hurried to the window. Down below, he saw her hurrying across the grounds with a basket on her arm. She's iolni for vegetables, he thought. But what made her leave so suddenly? Of course. The pistol. She must have gotten his thoughts of violent intent. He sighed and calmed down a little. I've still ot cards In my hand, he soothed himself. While she was out, he decided to look in her room and see if he could find the shifting panel that enabled her to enter his room with the flowers. He hurried down the hall and pushed open the door to her barely furnished little chamber. His brain was immediately attacked by the odor of a reeking pile of the purple flowers in one corner. He held a hand over his mouth and nose as he looked down in distaste at the living and dead blossoms. What did they represent? An offering of thoughtfulness? His # throat contracted. Or was it more than thoughtfulness? He grimaced at the thought and remembered that first evening when he'd dubbed her Lover. What had possessed him to choose that name from the infinity of possible names? He hoped he didn't know. He hoped he'd never know. On her couch he found a small pile of odds and ends. There was a button, a pair of broken shoe laces, the piece of crumpled paper he had told her to throw away. And a belt buckle with the initials W. C. stamped on it. There were no secret panels. He sat in the kitchen staring into an untouched cup of coffee. No way she could get in his He had to fight it, keep fighting it. Time passed. Suddenly he realized that she was back in the house again. There was no sound ; it was like the return of a ghost. But he knew it. A cloud of feeling preceded her, came plunging through the rooms like an excited puppy searching. Thoughts swirled. You are well? You ate not angry? Lover is bade -- ell hastily and eagerly clutching at him. She swept into the room so quickly that his hands twitched and he upset the cup. The hot liquid splashed over his shirt and trousers as he jumped back, knocking over the chair. She put down the basket and got a towel. He stood there, lips drained of color as she patted the stains dry. She'd never been so close to him. Slic'd never actually touched him before except for that first revolting handshake. There was an aroma about her; it made his chest heave painfully. And all the time, her thougiits caressed his mind as her hands seemed to be caressing his body. There, there, I am here with you, David dear. Almost in horror, he stared at her spongy pink skin, her huge eyes, her tiny wound of a mouth. And, in the office that morning, he made three straight mistakes in the log book and tore out the whole page and hurled it across the room with a choking cry of rage. ing or threatening. He tried to raze his mental ground so that her thoughts could not find domicile there. If he relaxed his mind enough, her thoughts flowed through and out, perhaps taking part of his will as they left, but he had to risk that. And if he worked hard and crowded his head with stodgy, banks of figures, it kept her at a distance and his hands did not tremble so badly. Maybe I should sleep in the office, he thought. Then he found Corrigan's note. It was on a slip of paper stuck away in the log book, hidden white on white. He only found it because he was going through the pages one at a time, reciting the dates in a loud voice to keep his mind filled. "God help me," read the note, black and jagged-lettered. "Lover comes through the walls!" Lindell stared. "I saw it myself." attested the words. "I'm going out of my mind. Always that damn animal mind tugging and tearing at me. And now I can't even shut away her body. I slept out here, but she came anyway." T.indell read it again and it was a wind fanning the fires of terror. Through the walls. The words agonized him. Was it possible? It was Corrigan, then, who had named her Lover. From the very start, the relationship had been on her terms. Lindell had had nothing to say about it. "Lover " he muttered, and her thoughts enveloped him suddenly like a bat's wings swooping down from the sky. He flung up his arms and cried out, "Leave me alone!" And, as her phantom mind slipped off, he had the sense that it was with less timidity, with the patience such as a man knowing his own great strength can afford to display. He sank back on the chair, exhausted suddenly, depleted with fighting it. He crumpled the note in his right hand, thinking of the scratches on the wall behind him. And he saw in his mind Corrigan tossing on the cot, burning with fever, rearing up with a shriek of horror to see her standing before him. But then? The scene was dark. He rubbed a shaking hand over his face. Don't crack, he said to himself. But it was more a frightened entreaty than a command. Wasting fogs of premonition waves. She comes through the walls. That night again, he poured down the bathroom sink the potion she had made. He locked the door and, in the lightless room, he squatted in one corner, peering and waiting, lungs bellowing only because he forced himself to remember to breathe. The thermostat lowered the heat. The floorboards got icy and his teeth started chattering. I'm not oin to bed, he vowed angrily. He didn't know why it was suddenly the bed that frightened him. I don't know, he forced the words through his brain, because he felt vaguely, that he did know and he didn't want to admit it, even for a second. But, after hours of futile waiting, he had to straighten up with a snapping of joints and stumble back to bed. There he crawled under the blankets and lay trembling, trying to stay awake. She'll come while I'm asleep, he thought.  mustn't sleep. When he woke up in the morning, there were flowers on the floor for him. And that was another day before a mass of days that sank crushed into the lump of months. Y OU can get used to horror, he thought, when it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. When shocks ate like scalpels picking and jabbing at delicate ganglia until they have lost all feeling. Yet, though it was no longer terror, it was worse. For his nerves were raw and bleeding a hemophilia of rage. He fought his battles to the dregs of seconds, gaunt-willed, shouting her off, firing lances of hate from his despairing mind, tortured by her surrenders that were her victories. She always came back; like an enraging cat, rubbing endless sycophantic sides against him, yes, admit it! he screamed to himself through midnight struggles. Thoughts of love. And there was the undercurrent, the promise of new shock that would topple his already shaking edifice. It needed only that; an added push, another stab of the blade, one more drop of the shattering hammer. The shapeless threat hung over him. He waited for it, poised for it a hundred times an hour, especially at night Wait. Waiting. And sometimes, when he thought he knew what it was he was waiting for, the shock of admission made him shudder and made him want to claw at walls and break things and run until the blackness swallowed him. If he could only forget her for a while, just a little while, it would be all right. He mumbled it to himself as he set up the movie projector. She begged from the kitchen, Can  see? "No!" Now all his replies, worded or thought, were like the snapping retorts of a jangled old man. If only the six months would end. That was the problem. The months were not moving fast enough. And time was like her -- not to be reasoned with or intimidated. There were many reels of film on the wall shelf, but his hand '#'J reached up without hesitation and picked out one. He didn't notice it; his mind was calloused to suggestion. He adjusted the reel on the spindle and turned out the lights. He sat down with a tired groan as the flickering milky light cone shot out from the lens, tlu'owing pictures on the screen. A lean dark-bearded man was posing. am# crossed, white teeth showing in an artifleial smile. He came closer to the . camera. The sun flashed, blurring the film a second. Black screen. Title: "Picture of Me." The man, high-cheekboned, bright-eyed, stood laughing soundlessly out from the screen. He pointed to his side and tiie caviera swung around. Lindell sat up sharply. , It was the station... ; Apparently it was fall, for, as the camera swept past the house, the village, jerking a moment as though changing hands, he saw the trees surrounded by heaps of dead leaves. He sat there shivering, waiting for something, he didn't know what... The screen blacked. Another title roughly etched in white. 'Jeff in the Office." The man peered at the camera, an idiotic smile on his face. White skin accentuated by the immaculate black outline of his beard. Fadeout, in. The man doing a jig around the empty warehouse floor, hands poised delicately in the air, his dark hair bouncing wildly on his skull. Another title flashing on the screen, Lindell stiffened in his seat, his breath cut off abruptly. "Lover." repellent in black and white. She was standing by his bedroom window, her face a mask of delight. He could tell it was delight now. Once he would have said she looked like a maniac, her mouth twisted like a living scar, her grotesque eyes staring. She spun and her robe swirled out. He saw her puffy ankles and his stomach muscles grew rock taut. She approached the camera. He saw filmy eyelids slide down over her eyes. His hands began to tremble violently. It was his dream. It made him sick. It was his dream to the detail. Then it had never been a dream; not from his own mind. A sob tore at his throat. She was undoing the robe. Here it ts! gibbered, his mind in a panic. He whimjcred and reached out shakily to turn off the projector. No! It was a cold command ia the darkness. Watch me, she ordered. He sat bound in a vise of terror, staring in sick fascination as the robe slid from her neck, pulled down over her round shoulders. She twisted sensuously. The robe sank into a heavy swirling heap on the floor. He screamed, flung out an arm that swept into the burning imojector. It crashed down on the floor. The room was night. He struggled up and lurched across the room. Nice? Nice? The word dug at him mercilessly as he fumbled for the door. He found it. rushed into the hall. Her door opened and she stood in the half light, the robe hanging from one spongy shoulder. He jolted to a halt. "Get out of here!" he yelled. No. He made a convulsive move for her, hands out like rigid claws. The sight of her pink, moist flesh spun him away. yes. her mind suggested. It seemed as if he heard it spoken in a sly rising voice. "Listen!" he cried, reaching out for the door to his room. "Listen, you have to go, do you understand? Go to your mate." He twisted back in utter horror. I am with him now, her message had said. The thought paralyred him. He stared, open-mouthed, heart pounding in slow, gigantic beats as the robe slipped over her shoulders and started down her arms. He whirled with a cry and slammed the door behind him. His Angers shook on the lock. Her thoughts were a wailing in his mind. He shook in fright and sickness and knew it was no good, because he couldn't lock her out. ing in his brain. They lay on their backs in a circle and kicked at the inside of his skull. They grabbed juicy blobs of gray in their dirty paws and they squee#cd. He rolled on his side writh a groan. I'll go crazy, he said. Like Corrigan, like all oi them but the first one -- that slimy one who started it aU; who added  new and hideous warp to the corrugation of her dominating mind --  who had narned her Lover because he meant it. Suddenly he sat up with a gasp of terror, staring at the foot of the bed. She comes through the walls, howled his brain. Nothing there, his eyes saw. His fingersclutched at the sheets. He felt sweat dripping off his brow and rolling down the embankment of his nose. He lay back. Up again! He whimpered like a frightened child. A cloud of blackness was falling over him. He groaned, "Noy in the blackness. No ue. He whined. Seep. Sleep. The word throbbed, swelled and de pressed in his brain. This was the time. He knew it, knew it. knew... The blade falling, sanity decapitated and twitching bloody in the basket. No! He tried to push himself up, but he couldn't. Sleep. A black tide of night hovering, tracking. Sleep. He fell on the pillow, pushed up weakly on one elbow. "No." His lungs were crusted. "No." He struggled. It was too much. He screamed a thick bubbling scream. She threw his will aside, snapped and futile. She was using all her strength now and he was de-enervated, beaten. He thudded back on the pillow, glassy-eyed and limp. He moaned weakly and his eyes shut, opened, shut, opened, shut... The dream again. Insane. Not a dream. When he woke up, there were no flowers. The courtship was ended. He gaped blankly and unbelievingly at the imprint of a body beside him on the bed. It was still warm and moist. H e laughed out loud. He wrote curse words in his diary. He wrote them in tall black letters, holding the pencil like a knife. He wrote them in the log book too. He tore up vouchers if they were not the right color. Hia entries were crooked, lines of figures like wavy-numbered tendrils. Sometimes he didn't care about that. Mostly he didn't notice. He prowled the filled warehouse behind locked doors, redeyed and muttering. He clambered up on the bundles and stared out through the skylight at the empty sky, He was lighter by fifteen pounds, unwashed. Hit face was black with wiry growth. He was going to have an immaculate beard. She wanted it. She didn't want him to wash or shave (M be heahhy. She called him Jeff dear. You can't fight that, he told himself. You can't win because you lose, li you advance you are retreating because, when you are too tired to fight, she comee back and she takes your body and your soul. That was why he whispered to the warehouse so no one would hear, "There is a thing to do." And that was why. at night, he sneaked to the living room and put the gas pistol in his pocket. Never harm the Gnees. Well, that was wrong. It was kill or be killed.  Thaf's why I'm taking the pistol to bed with me. That's why I'm stroking it as I stare up at the ceiling. Yes. this is it. This is tny rock to rest on through the day-nights. And he turned over plans as an animal snuffles over flat stones to find bugs for supper. Days. Days. Days. He whispered, "Kill her." He nodded and smiled to himself and patted the cool metal. "You're my friend," he said. "You're my only friend. She has to die. We all know that." He made lots of plans and they were all the same one. He killed in secret chambers of his mind that he had discovered and opened ; where he could crouch clever and undisturbed while he mac his plans. He walked and looked at the worker's village. Animals. I'm not going to end up like you. I'm not going to I'm not oin to and when I do I'm not I am... , office desk, eyes wide, slaver running over his lips. He held the pistol tight in his palsied hand. He flung open the office door and staggered over the concrete, through the lanes between roofhigh stacks. His mouth was so tight that his clamped jaws hurt. He held the pistol pointing. He kicked up the catch and dragged back one heavy door. He plunged out into the hot sunlight and broke into a run. Wisps of terror licked out from the house. He thought of murder with harder, more savage joy. He ran faster. He fell down because his legs had no feeling. The pistol went flying. He crawled to it and tenderly brushed off the dust. He stood up dizzily and started to hobble. He was hearing things -- not Lover's thoughts, for once. He looked up and blinked and knew he was going insane... It was a cargo ship. The cargo ship. Only, of course, it couldn't be. He dropped the pistol and slumped down beside it, plucking at blue grass with an idiot intensity that he knew was like the Gnee men's. He was careful not to watch the ship as it seemed to come down and the hatches made an impossibly convincing clang and men appeared to climb out. "Go away," he said to the illusion of a man standing beside him. "You're not here. The six months aren't over." His voice was quite normal, except that it broke into giggles and sobs while he had a fist fight with the air. "You'll be all right," the man apparently said, and he felt something that might have been an insect bite, though he thought it was the man pricking him with a hypo of sedative. Two other mea came with a stretcher and a sheet that they wrapped him tightly in. and they began carrying him, shrieking and battling, toward the mirage ship. "You can't take me away!" he shouted. 'T've got to kill Lover first!" "It wouldn't do any good," the first man said. "There are a lot more where she came from -- one at a time for every guy we station here, it looks like." "She comes through the walls!" Lindell screamed. "That's what you get to believe," said the man soothingly. "It must be pretty fierce. But that's all over now. You're going back home." Lindell tried to fight free of the sheet. "Let me at least warn the next guy!" "It wouldn't do any good. He wouldn't believe you. That's why you didn't see us take away the poor character you relieved." And then the sedative took hold and Lindell fell asleep. The dreams came, but with them was the sound of rockets blasting off, and the spongy image of the Gnee woman grew smaller and smaller and less frightful. But he still smelled the livid flowers. He knew he always would. UtER tri RE... Proudly announces its new Spring list of Science-Fiction volumes. outer-spoce adventure. Written by thefield's foremott authors... printed by the field' thrillers -- exciting action... realittie comment... and fascinating illustrations. edited by Mortin Greenberg -- #. ## Pagett -- #:# (Gallagher stories now in book form) # (A new Interplanetary novel by the author of Prelude to Farne) Order today. And send for oirr tree llfustroted catafog. It's yours lor Ih asfcfng. SRirc #-# T his month I am going to devote the main section of this department to a chart of the chemical elements. Well, it won't really be a "chart" because I don't intend to waste that can be looked up in any chemistry textbook. Hence isotopes, whether natural or artificial, will not be mentioned, and not  line will be wasted on melting or boiling points, nor will there be chemical information or electrical characteristics. All that can be found in textbooks and handbooks. What I am concerned with -- and it took a good deal of time to get this information together -- will be of no use to chemists or engineers. But k will. I hope, be interesting. I want to write about the names of the elements, what they mean and., why their discoverers proposed them. Element No. I is, of course, hydrogen. Nicolas Lmery of France discovered it around # and suspected that water was one of its compounds. The other component of water, oxygen, element No. #. was discovered by Joseph Priestly of England and Karl Wilhelm Schecle of Sweden some # years later and when it was established that elements I and # made water (at first thought to be HO) the names were tagged on. Hydor, a Greek word, means water, hence hydrogen, meaning "water-former." The other component of water seemed to be in every acid, hence the name oxygen. "acid-former." Now we know that there are acids without oxygen, but none without hydrogen. And since the oxygen atom is much heavier than the hydrogen atom, there is far more oxygen in water than hydrogen, even though the formula is H-jO. In short, element No. I should 'he called oxygen and No. # should be hydrogen. But it's a little late to change them around now. Element No. # is helium, from Helios, the Greek sun god, for the reason that it was found in the solar atmosphere first (by Jules Janssen of France in #) beered it in the Earth's atmosphere (#). No. # was named by its discoverer, Swede Johan A. Arfwedson of Sweden (#), without noticeable thought or imagination. Lithos is Greek for "stone," the ore it came from looked like stone, hence lithium. No. # also got its name from the mineral in which it occurs. It happens to be green and in Latin there is a word beryllinus which means green-colored, so the element was called beryllium. Similarly, the name of No. # was derived from one of its minerals. The mineral was used -- and still is -- as a flux in metallurgical operations. German miners, consequently, called the mineral Fluss-spat, which became fluorspar by adaptation of the Latin word fJuere, "to flow." Fluorspar is the fluoride of calcium and the element was called fluorine. There happens to be a minor and accidental justification for the name: it "flows out" of almost anything you try to keep it in. No. #. neon, means " the new because it obviously was new covered it in #. But No. #I is less obvious. You may have wondered why the chemical symbol for sodium is Na. The common English name is derived from soda, but the symbol is derived from the word Natnum, which was both common and mysterious until somebody found out that that the original is an Arabic word neter, meaning "herb-ash," as distinct from kalyun, "woodash." and accounts for the letter K as the symbol for No. #. That K stands for theinternational name kalium, but the English name was derived from pot ash, making it potassium. Both were first isolated in # by ir Humphry Davy, who isolated No. #, magnesium, at the same time. That name is from the mineral magnesia, which was named in turn after an ancient city. Similarly aluminum, No. #, was named after its mineral, alum, while No. #, silicon, got its name from silex, which in this case is not the trade mark of a coffee maker, but the Latin word for flint. No. #, phosphorus, has a Greek name which is meaningful and fitting; it translates as "carrier of light." The knowledge of No. #, sulphur, however, is so old that the meaning of its name is no longer remembered. Since No. #, chlorine, is a greenish gas, its discoverer, Karl Wilhelm Scheele, just used the Greek word for "green" (choros) to name it. Greek word for "sluggish" to name No. #, argon, because it did not want to combine with anything else. No. #, calcium, one of Sir Humphry Davy's discoveries, derives its name from the Latin caJx, "burned lime." When Lars Nilson discovered No. #I in #, he called it scandium, after Scandinavia, but his compatriot Baron Jons Jakob Berzelius, discoverer, among other things, of No. #, titanium, had to justify his choice with the excuse that, in Greek mythology, the titans were the "sons of the Earth." No. #, vanadium, was discovered and named by Nils Sefstrom of Sweden in #. He derived it from the Germanic goddess Vanadis, better known as Frcya, for no reason except that he apparently liked the sound. No. #, chromium, is from chromos, the Greek word for "color' or "dye"; you know what a pronounced color chromiumyellow has. But No. #, manganese, is a puzzle. Nobody seems to know the derivation of the word, except that one commentator remarked that the mineral from which manganese is derived was wrongly called "black magnesia" for a while. Since meas is Greek for black. I could understand the connection if the element were called melanganese. Maybe it was at one time, but I have yet to find proof.  In the case of No. #, iron, we have one of the few elements which have been known for so long that their names have no derivation. The chemical symbol FE comes from the Latin ferrum and the Greek equivalent sideros can be encountered as siderite, indicating an iron meteorite. Cobalt and nickel. Nos. # and #. are both German, the former meaning gnome (fCobod). the latter meaning water sprite. The nasty creatures fooled the brave miners.' handing them ores that looked like silver ore, but were completely worthless, since applied metallurgy had not yet progressed to the extraction of the metals. They were discovered, for the record, by two Swedes, cobalt by Georg Brandt in # and nickel by Axel Cronstedt in #. No. #. copper, although known since antiquity, has a name that is still traceable. The chemical symbol Cu is from the Latin name cuprum, and cuprum is in all probability derived from the island of Cyprus, which was pronounced "keeprus." No. #, zinc, is German again, from the word Zinke, which means protrusion because it sublimed in the furnace and condemned in protrusions in the cooler parts. Nos. #I and # are Gallium and Germanium; the two discoverers, Lecoq dc Boisbaudran (#) and Klemens Winkler (#), honored their respective countries. No. # is arsenic, said to have been isolated first by Albertus Magnus. The name, at any event, is Greek; arsen means "strong" or "masculine." Selenium. No. #, is one of the discoveries of Jons Jakob Berzelius and is named for the goddess of the Moon, Selene, in the Greek pantheon. I suppose he had a reason. There is a very apparent reason, though, for the name of No. #. The Greek word bromos means "stench" and the discoverer, the Frenchman AntoineJrome Balard (#), found out during his experiments that some of the compounds offend the nose. The name of No. # is Greek, too. for krypton means "hidden" say found it -- concealed among the other so-called noble gases. The names of the next few elements in the table are also simple, once you know what they mean. No. # is rubidium because of its ruby-red line in the spectrum; No. # is strontium after Strontian in County Argyll, Scotland: No. # is yttrium after Yttcrby in Sweden; and No. # is zirconium after the name of the gem. No. #I was once called columbium in English-speaking countries, where students had to remember that the symbol for columbium was Nb. The origin of the symbol, the international name niobium, has now been officially accepted and columbium will hence be found only in outof-date textbooks. No. #, its discoverer Peter Jakob Hjelm of Sweden thought in #, looks rather like lead. Using the Greek name molybdos, meaning lead, he called it molybdenum. No. # was originally called Masurium, after the landscape of Masuren in East Prussia. Butsince the two discoverers, C)rs. Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke, merely proved its existence while Oak Ridge actually produced it. the original name has been discarded in favor of technecium from the Greek techne, "skill." No. #, discovered in # by Karl Karlovitch Klaus, was also given a geographical name, ruthenium, from Ruthenia -- Russia. The interesting point is that G. W. Osann gave it the same name in #, sixteen years prior to actual isolation. Nos. # and # were both discovered by William Hyde Wollaston in #-#; No. # was called rhodium from the Greek word rhodos for "rose," iqi while No. # was called palladium, after the then newly discovered planetoid Pallas. Silver is No. # and known for so long a time that the meaning of the name is lost; the symbol Ag is from the Latin name' for it, argentum. No. #, cadmium, is named after the mineral cadmea; No. #, indium, has nothing directly to do with India, being derived from the indigoblue line in its spectrum -- but the name of that color is derived from the name of the plant, which in turn honors the geographical area. No. #, tin, is one of the long known elements; the symbol Sn is from the Latin name stannum. The very similar symbol for No. #. Sb, stands for the Latin name stibium, but the English word antimony is Latin, too. Its origin is the first two words anti monachon, "against the monks," in an edict of Frances II of France, forbidding its medicinal use by clergy. No. #. tellurium, is from the Latin tellus for Earth; No. #, iodine, from the Greek ioeides for the color violet; and No. #, sey's Greek names, means "stranger." Both No. # caesium (from Latin caesus, "bluish") and No. #. barium, (from Greek barys, "heavy") seem to make no sense, for caesium looks like silver and barium is hardly heavier than aluminum. But "bluish" refers to a line in the spectrum and "heavy" refers to the mineral. The numbers # to #I are the so-called rare' earth elements of which a chemist once wrote that they pursue the chemist in his dreams, that they split like amebas and that their chronology looks like a list of "begats" from the Old Testament. Their names reflect some of the unhappiness they seem to have caused. No. #, lanthanum, is from the Greek word lanthano, which means "to escape notice." No. #, cerium, was named in # after the recently discovered planetoid Ceres (not after the goddess directly): No. #, praseodymium, is Greek again, meaning "green twin." No. #, neodymium, is also Greek: "new twin" (the former didymium had split in two). No. #. long missing, was definite identification, changed that to promethium, from Prometheus, the mythical giver of fire. No. #, samarium, was named by a Frenchman after the Russian mine inspiector Samarski. No. #, europium, was also named by a Frenchman, Demaray, after the continent, of course. No. #, gadolinium, was named in honor of the Finnish chemist Gadoltn; No. #, Terbium, after Ytterby in Sweden; No. #, dysprosium, comes from the Greek word dysprosopon, which means "difficult mask." No. #, Holmium, is derived from Holmia, the Latin name of Stockholm; No. #, erbium, again after Ytterby; No. #, thulium, from Thule, the hard to identify northern land of Pytheas of Massilia. No. # is ytterbium, again Ytterby in Sweden! That place has a total of four elements named after it, three of them rare earths, all found in the unusually interesting mine that is located there. No. #, lutetium, comes from Luteta, the Latin name for Paris, and No. #. the first element after the rare earth group, is hafnium, from Kjobenhavn, the Danish spelling of Copenhagen. Its discoverer was a Hungarian, Georg von Hevesy, but he commemorated the city in which he made the discovery (in #). There was once, you probably remember, a mythical shade who was punished after death by being made to stand in water up to his neck, but every time he tried to bend down and quench his thirst, the water receded. When Gustaf Ekeberg found (in #) a metal which is insoluble in most acids, he thought of this ancient victim and named the metal after him: tantalum. Tantalus, by the way, had a daughter by the name of Niobe and she provided the name for No. #. Tungsten is the Swedish word for "heavy stone" and was once the name of element No. #. But its chemical symbol was W for Wolfram, which was adopted two years ago by an international congress, so tungsten is no longer correct. No. #, rhenium, discovered by the same team which announced "masurium," got its name from the Latin Rhenus, "Rhine." No. # is osmium, actually not a flattering name because osm (Greek) means "bad odor." Its discoverer, the Englishmsm Smithson Tennant, also discovered No. #, iridium, which he named because of its iridescent solutions. No. # is platinum, a Spanish word meaning "little silver." No. # is gold; the Germanic word is essentially a parallel form of the word "yellow" for quite obvious reasons. The symbol Au is from the Latin name aurum. No. # is mercury (in German still Quecksilber), the symbol Hg coming from the old name hydrargium. No. #, thallium, derives from the Greek thallos, "green twig." Lead is No. # and the word is probably a variant of "load" (you used it to weigh down things, but lodestone, which is magnetic iron ore, comes from the verb "to lead"). The German name, Blei, is derived from that old Germanic word bia which means both "black" and "blue;" to this day, a German soldier will refer to bullets as "blue beans." The symbol Pb is from the Latin plumbum, which is also the root of "plumber." No. #, bismuth, has an originally German name, which in modern rendering would read Wesematte and denotes a "flowering meadow", a name that makes sense if you know the colorful display of a pan of hardening bismuth. Above bismuth, we get into the realm of the radioactive elements, mostly of recent discovery and with artificial names. No.' # is polonium, so named by Madame Sklodowska-Curie after her native Poland. No. #, first called alabamine (after the state) is now known as astatine from the Greek asfasra, "unsteady". No. # is radon, once called "emanation," from the Latin radius for "ray;" No. #, radium, has the same derivation. No. #;discovered in # by Mile. Marguerite Perey, is called franchium, and No. # is actinium. Of the radioactive elements, only the more stable ones, No. #, thorium, and No. #, uranium, have been known for a considerable time. The former was discovered by Jons Jakob Berzelius and named after the Norse god Thor, the latter by Martin Heinrich Klaproth and named after the planet Uranus. No. #I is protactinium and above # we have the obvious neptunium (No. #) and plutonium (No. #) ; americium ("made in America") as No. #; curium (after Madame Curie) as No. # and, so far the heaviest, Berkelium (Berkeley, Calif.) as No. #. As you can see, naming elements is an arbitrary, inaccurate and often sentimental business. Luckily, the origins quickly lose their identities and we are aware only of the properties of these basic substances. And they did, after all, need some name and these do as well as any others. How would the pilot of a ship in space recognize Earth at a glance and could he tell his distance, even roughly, by its brightness? Earth could be recognized by il# color and by the presence of a single large moon. Mars, when seen from apace, looks rcdilish, Venus a pure white, while Earth must be blue-green. Saturn, of course, has its rings us a distinctive feature anl Jupiter its stripes and four large moons. If the ship were at the orbit of Venus, Earth as Venus at her brightest appears to us. Even the Moon would be almost as briglit as Venus is to ns. Seen frtmt the orbit of Mars, Earth would look about as bright as Jupiter does from Earth at greatest proximity. If the ship is at points outside the orbit of Jupiter, the pilot would need instruments to see Earth, whieli at such distance would he "lost" in the glare of the Sun. Just what is the velocity of light? # miles per second sounds like a rounded-off figure. It is, and so is the customary metric equivalent of # kilometers per second. The Ohserver's Handbook gives the more precise value of # km. p. sec. Some values ohtaincI in # and #.'# by various investigators read as follows: Aslakson #f # Essen #  # Bol #f # Bcrgslraml #  # In your Conquest of Space you list the planetoid Adonis as the one wluch comes nearest to the Sun, staying just outside the orbit of Mercury. But since the orbit of Mercury is so eccentric, isn't it possible that Adonis might cross the orbit of Mercury on occasion? To tlie lest of onr knowledge Adonis does not. Bnt we now know a male planetoid that does. It has In'en appropriately naineI tcnrus anil it gets much closer lu the Sun than the mythical Icarus ever did. Mer cury, when closest to the Sun, is O.tll astroiioniii'al units (one astnmoinicul iinil, or A.U., is the ilistance of Earth from the Siin) from the primary, while Icarus gets to within # A.U. Maximum distance of Icarus from the sun is # A.U., tighly twice that of Earth. miles. The small planetoid is less tliun a mile in diameter and prohaldy reaches a temperature of # F. at perihelion. #n the film Destination Moon. there is a short sentence hinting at the use of titanium for spaceship construction. In what respect would titanium be superior to other metals? I have not seen it used anywhere. The rcustm why titanium is not in use right now to a no ticeahle extent is simply due to the fact that it lecame com mcrcially availahle only two years or so ago. Ihave seen some small parts made of it. It looks like silver, though less shiny, and has generally the chnracleristies of stainless steel. It differs from steel in two respects of interest to an engineer -- it is noninagtietic, uml its specific gravity is only # while that of steel is #. IlrinIcin prohaldy picked titanium as a "light-weight steel" for construction purposes. Why is it that you get ice cubes faster if you put lukewarm water into the trays of your refrigerator rather than ice water? If I had not lcen prepared, this question would have surprised me no emi. But a few years ago I talked to one of the researchers of the Bureau of Standards in Wasliington, #). C., who told me that this is a fairly widespread popular siiperstilioTi and that the Bureau received so many imiiirics alutut it that they finally derid'd to test it. I'he answer is astonishingly simple: hiMaiise of the high latent heat of water, a few degrees more or less do not make a difference which could he noticed without measuring it. Of course, the cohler the water, the sooner it will freeze, but the freezing difference between water of # F and water of # F is almut one minute. #M Freudian Slip Things ore exactly what they seem? Life is real? Life is earnest? Well, that depends. O N tiie day the Earth vanished, Herman Raye was earnestly fishing for trout, hip deep in a mountain stream in upstate New York. Herman was a tall, serious, sensitive, healthy, well-muscled young man with an outsize jaw and a brush of red-brown hair. He wore spectacles to correct a .# alight hyperopia, and they had heavy black rims because he knew his patients expected it. In his off hours, he was fond of books with titles like Personality and the Behavior Disorders, Selfesteem and Sexuality in Women, Juvenile Totem and Taboo: A study of adolescent culturegroups, and A New Theory ol Economic Cycles; but he also liked baseball, beer and bebop. This day, the last of Herman's vacation, was a perfect specimen; sunny and still, the sky dotted with antiseptic tufts of cloud. The trout were biting. Herman had two in his creel, and was casting into the shallow pKol across the stream in the confident hope of glutting anotherjf when the Universe gave one horrible sliding lurch. Herman braced himself instinctively, shock pounding through his body, and looked down at the pebbly stream-bed under his feet. It wasn't there. He was standing, to all appearances, in three feet of clear water with sheer, black nothing under it: nothing, the abysmal color of a moonless night, pierced by the diamond points of a half-dozen incredible stars. He had only that single glimpse; then he found himself gazing across at the pool under the far bank, whose waters reflected the tranquil imagery of trees. He raised his casting rod, swung it back over his snoulder, brought it forward again with a practiced flick of his wrist, and watched the lure drop. Within the range of his vision now, everything was entirely normal: nevertheless, Herman wanted very much to stop fishing and look down to see if that horrifying void was still there. He couldn't do it. Doggedly, he tried again and again. The result was always the same. It was exactly as if he were a man who had made up his mind to fling himself over a cliff, or break a window and snatch a loaf of bread, or say in a loud voice to an important person at a party, "I think you stink." Determination was followed by effort, by ghastly, sweating, heartstopping fear, by relief as he gave up and did something else. All right, he thought finally, there's no point going on with it. Data established: hallucination, compulsion, inhibition. Where do we go from here? The obvious first hypothesis was that he was insane. Herman considered that briefly, and left the question open. Three or four selected psychoanalyst jokes paraded through his mind, led by the classic, "You're fine, how am I?" There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief that all analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the people who get all course that makes an orthodox analyst -- a course in which an M. D. degree is only a beginning -- arc impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age o( fifteen up until the completion of his own anal#rsis at twenty-six, had been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway car or an elevator. But was he now insane? Can a foot-rule measure itself? Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his catch, cooked it and ate it Where the ground had been bare around his cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had finished eating the fish. He couldn't. After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He couldn't. In fact, it occurred to him, he was helpless to do anythini that he wouldn't normally have done. Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his 'tent and went to sleep. Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again... rpiHE light woke him, long before dawn. From where he lay on his back, he could see an incredible pale radiance streaming upward all around him, outlining the shadow of his body at the ridge of the tent, picking out the under-surfaces of the trees against the night sky. He strained, until he was weak and dizzy, to roll over so that he could see its source; but be had to give up and wait another ten minutes until his body turned "naturally," just as if he had still been asleep. Then he was looking straight dovm into a milky transparency that started under his nose and continued into unguessable depths. First came the matted clumps of grass, black against the light, every blade and root as clear as if they had been set in transparent plastic. Then longer, writhing roots of trees and shrubs, sprouting thickets of hair-thin rootlets. Between these, and continuing downward level by level, was spread an infinity of tiny specks, seed-shapes, spores. Some of them moved, Herman realized with a shock. Insects burrowing in the emptiness where the Earth should be? In the morning, when he crawled out of the tent and went to the bottomless stream to wash, he noticed something he had missed the day before. The network of grasses gave springily under his feet -- not like turf, but like stretched rubber. Herman conceived an instant dislike for walking, especially when he had to cross bare ground, because when that happened, he felt exactly what he saw: nothing whatever underfoot. "Walking on air," he realized, was not as pleasant an experience as the popular songs WKuld lead you to expect. Herman shaved, cooked and ate breakfast, washed the dishes, did the chores, and packed up his belongings. With a mighty effort, he pried out the tent stakes, which were bedded in nothing but a loose network of roots. He shouldered the load and carried it a quarter of a mile through pine woods to his car. The car stood at ground level, but the ground was not there any more. The road was now nothing more than a long, irregular trough formed by the spreading roots of the pines on either side. Shuddering, Herman stowed his gear in the trunk and got in behind the wheel. When he put the motor into gear, the sedan moved sedately and normally forward. But the motor raced madly, and there was no feeling that it was taking hold. With screaming engine, Herman drove homeward over a nonexistent road. Inwardly and silently, he gibbered. Six miles down the mountain, he pulled up beside a whitepainted fence enclosing a neat yard and a fussy little blue-shuttered house. On the opposite side of the fence stood a middle-aged woman with a floppy hat awry on her head and a gardening trowel in one of her gloved hands. She looked up with an air of vague dismay when he got out of the car. "Some more eggs today. Dr. Raye?" she asked, and smiled. The smile was like painted china. Her eyes, lost in her fleshy face, were clearly trying not to look downward. "Not today, Mrs. Richards," Herman said. 'T just stopped to say good-by. I'm on my way home." "Isn't that a shame?" she said mechanjcally. "Well, come again next year." Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a straitjacket." He tried to say it. He stuttered. "N-a-n-n -- "and ended, glancing at the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?" lit The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?" "Very pretty," said Herman helplessly. The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were spotlessly clean. O N Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful little men. He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt was gone. The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what they were. New York had been a city of stone -- built on stone, built of stone, as cold as stone. Uptown, the city looked halfbuilt, but insanely occupied, a forest of orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms in lath and a paper-thickness of paint. The wrought-iron railings were gone, too. On Fourth Avenue, bookseller's row, you could almost persuade yourself that nothing had happened, provided you did not look down. The buildings had been made of wood, and wood they remained. The second-hand books in their wooden racks would have been comforting except that they were so clean. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere ; the air was more than country-pure. There was an insane selective principle at work here, Herman realized. Everything from bedrock to loam that belonged to the Earth itself had disappeared. So had everything that had a mineral origin and been changed by refinement and mixture : concrete, wrought iron, brick, but steel and glass, porcelain and paint remained. It looked as if the planet had been the joint property of two children, one of whom didn't want to play any more, so they had split up their possessions -- this is yours, this is yours, this is mine... The two little men popped into view not six feet in front of Herman as he was passing a sidewalk bookstall. Both were dressed in what looked like workmen's overalls made of lucite chainmail, or knitted glow-worms. One of them had four eyes, two brown, two blue, with spectacles for the middle pair. Ears grew like cabbages all over his bald head. The other had two eyes, the pupils of which were cross-shaped, and no other discernible features except when he opened his gaptoothed mouth; the rest of his head, face and all, was completely covered by a dense forest of red hair. As they came forward, Herman's control of his body suddenly returned. He was trying his best to turn around and go away from there, and that was what his body started to do. Moreover, certain sounds of a prayerful character, namely "Oh dear sweet Jesus," which Herman was forming in his mind, involuntarily issued from his lips. Before he had taken the first step in a rearward direction, however, the hairy little man curved around him in a blur of motion, barring the way with two long, muscular, red-furred arms. Herman turned. The four-eyed little man had closed in. Herman, gasping, backed up against the bookstall. People who were headed directly for them, although showing no recognition that Herman and the little men were there, moved stiffly asidedike dancing automatons, strode past, then made another stiff sidewise motion to bring them back to the original line of march before they went on their way. "Olaph dzcnn Harm Rai gjo glerr-dregnarr?" demanded Hairy. Herman gulped, half-stunned. "Huh?" he said. Hairy turned to Four-Eyes. "Grinnr alaz harisi nuya."  "Izzred alph! Meggi erd-halaza riggbord els kamma gredyik. Lukhhal!" Hairy turned back to Herman. Blinking his eyes rapidly, for they closed like the shutter of a camera, he made a placating gesture with both huge furry hands. "Kelagg ikrl odrum faz," he said, and, reaching out to the bookstall, he plucked out a handful of volumes, fanned them like playing cards and displayed them to Four-Eyes. A heated discussion ensued, at the end of which Hairy kept For Whom the Bell Tolls, Four-Eyes took T he Blonde in the Bathtub, and Hairy threw the rest away. Then, while Herman gaped and made retching sounds, the two disgusting little men tore pages out of the books and stuffed them in their mouths. When they finished the pages, they ate the bindings. Then there was a rather sick pause while they seemed to digest the contents of the books they had literally devoured. Herman had the wild thought that they were blurb writers whose jobs had gone to their heads. The one with the four eyes rolled three of them horribly. "That's more like it," he said in nasal but recognizable Englishm "Let's start over. Are you Herman Raye, the skull doc?' Herman produced a series of incoherent sounds. "My brother expresses himself crudely," said Hairy in a rich, fruity baritone. "Please forgive him. He is a man of much heart." "Uh?" said Herman. "Truly," said Hairy. "And of much ears," he added with a glance at his companion. "But again, as to this affair -- tell me true, arc you Herman Raye, the analyst of minds?" "SupFMosc I am?" Herman, asked cautiously. Hairy turned to Four-eyes. "Arghraz iktri 'Suppose I am,' Gurh? Olaph iktri erz ogromat, lekh -- " "Talk English, can't you?" Four-eyes broke in. "You know he don't understand, that caveman jabber. Anyhow, yeah, yeah, it's him. He just don't want to so.' He reached out and took Herman by the collar. "Come on, boy, the boss n waitin'." There were two circular hairlines oi glowing crimson where Hairy and Four-eyes had originally appeared. They reached the spot in one jump. Hairy bringing up the rear. "But tell me truly," he said anxiously. "You art that same Herman Raye?" Herman paid no attention. Below, under the two glowing circles. was the terrifying gulf that had replaced the Earth: and this time, Herman was somehow convinced, it was not going to hold him up. "Let go!" he shouted, struggling. "Ouch!" He had struck Four-eyes squarely on the flat nose, and it felt as if he had slugged an anvil. Paying no attention. Four-eyes turned Herman over, pinned his arms to his sides, and dropped him neatly through the larger of the two circles. Herman shut his eyes tightly and despairingly repeated the multiplication table up to # x #. When he opened them again, he was apparently hanging in midspace, with Hairy to his left and Four-eyes to his right. The visible globe around them was so curioudy tinted and mottled that it took Herman a long time to puzzle it out. Ahead of them was the darkest area -- the void he had seen before. This was oval in shape, and in places the stars shone through it clearly. In others, they were blocked off entirely or dimmed by a sort of haze. Surrounding this, and forming the rest of the sphere, was an area that shaded from gold shot with violet at the borders, to an unbearable blaze of glory at the center, back the ifray they had come and a little to the right. Within this lighted section were ns other amorphous areas which were much darker, almost opaque ; and still others where the light hone through diluted to a ruddy ghost itself, like candlelight tiirough parchment. Gradually Herman realized that the shapes and colors he saw ' were tie lighted and dark hemispheres of Earth. The dark areas were the oceans, deep enough m most places to shut out tibe light altogether, and those parts of the continents, North and South America bnd him, Europe and Asia ahead, Africa down to the fight, which were heavily forested. Herman's earlier conviction reInmed. Things like this just did  pot happesL Physician, haaJ thyes Tfou're not real," he said bitterly to Four-eyes. "Not very " Four-eyes agreed. I'm twice as real as that jerk, Hhough," he insisted, pelting to Hairy. Ahead rf them, or "bdow," a point of orange light was slowly welling. Herman watched it without much interest. Hairy broke out into  torrent ef cursing. 'I this and that in the milk of your this!" he said, l this, that and the other in the tiiis of your that. Yovu sister! Your cousin! Your grandmother's ancle!" Four-eyes listened with awed approval. Them was good books, bah?" he asked happily. "Better than those scratchings ki the caves," Hairy said. "Something to think about till they haul as out again. Well," said Four-eyes philosophically, "here we are." T he orange spot had enlarged into Ihe semblance of a lighted room, rather like a stage setting. Inside were two enormous Persons, one sitting, one standing. Otherwise, and except for three upholstered chairs, the room was bene. No -- as they swooped down toward it, Herman blinked and looked again. A leather couch had appeared against the far wall. At the last moment, there was a flicker of motion off to Herman's left. Something that looked ike a short, pudgy human being accompanied by two little men whooshed off into the dince, back toward the surface of the planet. Herman landed. Hairy and Four-eyes, after bowing low to tile standing Person, turned and leaped out of the room. When Herman, feeling abandoned, turned to sec where they had gone, he discovered that the room now had four walls and no windows or doors. The Person said, "How do you do, Doctor Raye?" Herman looked at him. Although his figure had a disquiet' ing tendency to quiver and flow, so that it was hard to judge, he seemed to be about eight feet tall. He was dressed in what would have seemed an ordinary dark-blue business suit, with an equally ordinary white shirt and blue tic, except that all three garments had the sheen of polished metal. His face was bony and severe, but not repellently so; he looked absent-minded rather than stern. The other Person, whose suit was brown, had a broad, kindly and rather stupid face; his hair was white. He sat quietly, not looking at Herman, or, apparently, at anything else. Herman sat down in one of the upholstered chairs. "All right' he said with helpless defiance. "What's it all about?" 'Tm glad we can ce to the point at once," said t Person. He paused, moving his lips silently. "Ah, excuse me. I'm sorry." A second head, with identical features, popped into view next to the first. His eyes were closed. "It's necessary, I'm afraid," said head humber one apologetically. "I have so much to remember, you know." Herman took a deep breath and said nothing. "You may call me Secundus, if you like," resumed the Person, "and this gentleman Primus, since it is with him that you will have principally to deal. Now, our problem here is one of amnesia, and I will confess to you frankly that we ourselves are totally inadequate to coie with it. In theory, we are not subject to disorders of the mind, and that's what makes us so vulnerable now that it has happened. Do you see?" A fantastic suf picion crept into Herman's mind. "Just a moment," he said carefully. "If you don't mind telling me, what is it that you have to remember?" "Well. Doctor, my field is human beings ; that's why it became my duty to search you out and consult with you. And there is a great deal for me to carry in my mind, you know, especially under these abnormal conditions. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it is a full-time job." "Are you going to tell me," asked Herman, more carefully still, "that this -- gentleman -- Ui the one who is supposed to remember the Earth itself? The rocks and minerals and so on? "Yes, exactly. I was about to tell you -- " "And that the planet has di appeared because he has amnesia?" Herman demanded on a rising note. Secundus beamed. "Concisely expressed. I myself, being. M ns to speak, saturated with the thoughts and habits of human beings, who are, you must admit, a garrulous race, could not -- " "Oh, no!" said Herman. "Oh, yes," Sccundus corrected. "I can understand that the idea is difficult for you to accept, since you naturally believe that you yourself have a real existence, or, to be more precise, that you belong to the world of phenomena as opposed to that of noumena." He beamed. "Now I will be silent, a considerable task for me, and let you ask questions." Herman fought a successful battle with his impulse to stand Up and shout "To hell with it!" He had been through a great deal, buhe was a serious and realistic young man. He set himself to think the problem through logically. If, as seemed more than probable, Secundus, Primus, Hairy, Four-eyes, and this whole Alice in Wonderland situation existed only as his hallucinations, then it did not matter much whether he took them seriously or not. If they were real, then he wasn't, and vice versa. It didn't make any difference which was which. He relaxed deliberately and folded his hands against his abdomen. "Let me see if I can get this clear," he said. "I'm a nouenon. not a phenomenon. In ruder terms, I exist only in your mind. Is that true?" Secundus beamed. "Correct." "If you got amnesia, I and the rest of the human race would disappear." Secundus looked worried, "That is also correct, and if that should happen, you will readily understand that we would be in difficulty. The situation is extremely -- But pardon me. I had promised to be silent except when answering questions." "This is the part I fail to understand, Mr. Secundus. I gather that you brought me here to treat Mr. Primus. Now, if I exist as a thought in your mind, you necessarily know everjrthing I know. Why don't you treat him yourself?" Secundus shook his head disapprovingly. "Oh, no, Dr. Raye, that is not the case at all. It cannot be said that I know everything that you know; rather we should say that I remember you. In other words, that I maintain your existence by an act of memory. The two functions, knowledge and memory, are not identical, although, of course, the second cannot be considered to exist without the first. But before we become entangled in our own terms, I should perhaps remind you that when I employ the word 'memory' I am only making use of a convenient approximation. Perhaps it would be helpful to ay that my memory ia comparable to the structure-memory of a living organism, although that, too, has certain semantic disadvantages. Were you about to make a remark, Doctor?" "It still seems to me," Herman Said stubbornly, "that if you remember me, structurally or otherwise. that include everything I remember. If you're going to tell me that you remember human knowledge, including Freudian theory and practice, but are unable to manipulate it, that seems to me to be contradicted by internal evidence in what you've already said. For example, it's clear that in the field of epistemology -- the knowledge of knowledge, you might say -- you have the knowledge and manipulate it." "Ah," said Secundus, smiling shyly, "but, you see, that happens to be my line. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, being specializations, are not. As I mentioned previously, persons of our order are theoretically not capable of psychic deterioration. That is why we come to you, Dr. Rayc. We are unable to help ourselves; we ask your help. We place ourselves unreservedly in your hands. The question, "How was I chosen?" occurred to Herman, but he left it unasked. He knew that the answer was much likelier to be, "At random," tha, "BecaiM talented psychoanalyst on the planet." "I gather that I'm not the first person you've tried," he said. "Oh, you saw Dr. Buddolphson departing? Yes, it is true that in our ignorance of the subject we did not immediately turn to practitioners of yoUr psychological orientation. In fact, if you will not be offended, I may say that you are practically our last hope. We have already had one eminent gentleman whose method was simply to talk over Mr. Primus's problems with him and endeavor to help him reach an adjustment; he failed because Mr. Primus, so far as he is aware, has no problems except that he has lost his memory. Then we had another whose system, as he explained it to me, was simply to repeat, in a sympathetic manner, everjrthing that the patient said to him; Mr. Primus was not sufficiently prolix for this method to be of avail. "Then there was another who wished to treat Mr. Primus by encouraging him to relive his past experiences: 'taking him back along the time-track,' as he called it; but -- r Secundus looked mournful -- "Mr. Primus has actually had no experiences in th usual sense of the term, though he very obligingly made up a number of them: Our ontogeny, Dr. Raye, is so simple that h caa ih of us normally has only one unction, the one I have already nentimied, and, until this occurence, it has always been fulfilled ;uccessfully... We also had a man who prooaed to reawaken Mr. Primus's icmory by electric shock, but Ir. Primus is quite impervious  o currents of electricity and we ere unable to hit upon an ac:ptable substitute. In short. Dr. laye, if you should prove unable o kelp us, we will have no one .'ft to fall back upon except, posibly, the Yogi." "They might do you more good, it that," Herman said, looking it Mr. Primus. "Well. I'll do what I e, though the function of analysis is to get the patient to accept reality, and this is the opposite. What can you tell roe, to begin with, about Mr. Primus's personality, the onset of the dismrbance, and so on -- and. in paricular, what are you two? Who's your boss? What's it all for and iK)w does it work?" Secundus said, T can give you very little assistance, I am afraid. I would characterize Primus as a very steady person, extremely accurate in bis work, but not very imaginative. His memory loss occurred abruptly, as you yourself witnessed yesterday afternoon. As to your other questions -- forgive me, Dr. Raye, but it is to your own advantage if I fail to answer them. I am, of course, the merest amateur in psychology, but I sincerely feel that your own psyche might be damaged if you were to learn the fragment of the truth which I could give you." He paused. A sheaf of papers, which Herman had not noticed before, ley on a small table that he had not noticed, either. Secundus picked them up and handed them over. "Here arc testing materials," he said. "If you need anything else, you have only to call on me. But I trust you will find these complete." He turned to go. "And one more thing. Dr. Raye," he said with an apologetic smile. 'Hurry, if you possibly can." a sarcophagus ornament, lay limply supine on the ten-foot couch, arms at his sides, eyes closed. When Herman had first told him to relax, Primus had had to have the word carefully explained to him; from then on be had done it -- or seemed to do it -- perfectly: In bis preliminary tests, the Binet, the Minnesota Multiphasie Personality Index and the Berneuter P. I., he had drawn almost a complete blank. Standard testing methods did not work on Mr. Primus, and the reason was obvious enough. Mr. Primus simply was not a human being. This room, no doubt, was an illusion, and so was Mr. Primus's anthropomorphic appearance... Herman felt like a surgeon trying to operate blindfolded while wearing a catcher's mitt on each hand. But he kept trying; he was getting results, though whether or not they meant anything, he was unable to guess. On the Rorschach they had done a little better, at least in volume of response. "That looks like a cliff." Primus would say eagerly. "That looks like a -- apiece of sandstone. This part looks like two volcanoes and a cave." Of course, Herman realized, the poor old gentleman was only trying to please him. He had no more idea than a goldfish what a volcano or a rock looked like, but he wanted desperately to help. Even so, it was possible to score the results. According to Herman's interpretation. Primus was a case of arrested infantile sexualism, with traces of conversion hysteria and a strong Oedipus complex. Herman entered the protocol solemnly in his notes and kept going. Next came free association, and, after that, recounting of dreams. Feeling that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, Herman carefully explained to Primus what "sleep and "dreams" were. Primus had promised to do his best ; he had been lying there now, without moving, for -- how long? Startled, Herman looked at his watch. It had stopped. Scoring the Rorschach alone, Herman realized suddenly, should have taken him nearly a full day, even considering the fact that He hadn't eaten anything, or taken time out to rest, or -- Herman bewilderedly felt his jaw. There was only the slightest stubble. He didn't feel hungry or tired, or cramped from sitting... , "Secundus!" he called. A door opened in the wall to his right, and Secundus stepped through. The door disappeared. "Yes, Dr. Raye? Is anything wrong?" "How long have I been here?" Secundus' right-hand head looked embarrassed. "Well, Doctor, without bringing in the difficult questions of absolute versusi relative duration, and the definition of an arbitrary position -- " "Don't stall. How long have I been here in my own subjective time?" "Well, I was about to say, without being unnecessarily inclusive, the question is still very difficult. However, bearing in mind that the answer is only a rough approximation -- about one hundred hours." Ilf Herman rubbed his chin. I don't like your tampering with me," he said slowly. "You've speeded me up -- s that it? And at the same time inhibited my fatigue reactions, and God knows what else, so that I didn't even notice I'd been working longer than I normally could until just now?" Secundus looked distressed. "I'm afraid I have made rather a botch of it. Dr. Raye. I should not have allowed you to notice at all, but it is growing increasingly difficult to restrain your fellow-creatures to their ordinary routines. My attention strayed, I am sorry to say." He glanced at yie recumbent form of Primus. 'My word! What is Mr. Primus doing, Dr. Raye?" "Sleeping," Herman answered curtly. "Remarkable! I hope he does not make a habit of it. Will he awaken soon, do you think. Doctor?" "I have no idea," said Herman helplessly; but at that moment Primus stirred, opened his eyes, and sat up with his usual vague, kindly smile. "Did you dream?" Herman asked him. Primus blinked slowly. "Yes. Yes, I did," he said in his profoundly heavy voice. "Tell me all you can remember about it." "Well, said Primus, sinking back onto tiie couch, "I dreamed I was in a room with a large bed. It had heavy wooden posts and a big bolster. I wanted to lie down and rest in the bed, but the bolster made me uncomfortable. It was too dark to see. to rearrange the bed, so I tried to light a candle, but the matches kept going out..." Herman took it all down, word for word, with growing excitement and growing dismay. The dream was too good. It might have come but of Dr. Freud's original case histories. When Primus had finished, Herman searched back through his notes. Did Primus know what a bed was, or what a bolster was, or a candle? How much had Herman told him? "Bed" was there, of course. Primus: "What are 'dreams?'" Herman: "Well, when a human being goes to bed, and sleeps..." "Bolster" was there, too, but not in the same sense. Herman: "To bolster its argument, the unconscious -- what we call the id -- frequently alters the person's likes and dislikes on what seem to be petty and' commonplace subjects..." And "candle?" Herman: "I want you to understand that I don't know all about this subject myself, Mr. Primus. Nobody does; our knowledge is just a candle in the darkness..." Herman gave up. He glanced at Scundus, who was watching him expectantly. "May I talk to you privately?" "Of course." Secundus nodded to Primus, who stood up awkwardly and then vanished with a pop. Secundus tut-tutted regretfully. Herman took a firm grip on himself. "Look," he said, "the data I have now suggest that Primus had some traumatic experience in his infancy which arrested his development in various ways and also strengthened his Oedipus complex -- that is. intensified his feelings of fear, hatred and rivalry toward his father. Now, that may sound to you as if we're making some progress. I would feel that way myself -- if I had the slightest reason for believing that Primus ever had a father," Secundus started to speak; but Herman cut him off. "Wait, let me finish. I can go ahead on that basis, but as far as I'm concerned I might just as well be counting the angels on the head of a pin. You've got to give me more information, Secundus. I want to know who you are, and who Primus is, and whether there's any other being with whom Primus could possibly have a filial relationship. And if you can't tell me all that without giving me the Secret of the Universe, then you'd better give it to me whether it's good for me or not. I can't work in the dark." Secundus pursed his lips. "There is justice in what you say. Doctor. Very well, I shall be entirely frank 'with you -- in so far as it is possible for me to do so, of course. Let's see, where can Ibegin?" "First question," retorted Herman. "Who are you?" "We arc-" Secundus thought a moment, then spread his hands with a helpless smile. "There are no words, Doctor. To put the case in negatives, we are not evolved organisms, we are not mortal, we are not, speaking in the usual sense, alive, although, of course -- I hope you will not be offended -- neither arc you." Herman's brow wrinkled. "Arc you real?" he demanded finally. Secundus looked embarrassed. "You have found me out, Dr. Raye. I endeavored to give you that impression -- through vanity, I am ashamed to say -- but, unhappily, it is not true. I, too. belong to the realm of noumena." "Then, blast it all, what is real? This planet isn't. You're not. What's it all for?" He paused a moment reflectively. "We're getting on to my second question, about Primus's attitude toward his 'father.' Perhaps I should have asked just now, 'Who is real?' Who remembers you, Secundus?" "This question, unfortunately. T#I is the one I cannot answer with complete frankness, Doctor. I assure you that it is not because I do not wish to; I have no option in the matter. I can tell you only that there is a Person of whom it might be said that He stands in tle parental relationship to Primus, to me, and all the rest of our order." "God?" Herman inquired. "Jahweh? Allah?" "Please, no names, Doctor." Eecundus looked apprehensive. "Then, damn it, tell me the rest!" Herman realized vaguely that he was soothing his own hurt vanity at Secundus's expense, but he was enjoying himself too much to stop. "You're afraid of somethilfg; that's been obvious right along. And there must be a time limit on it, or you wouldn't be rushing me. Why? Are you afraid that if this unnamable Person finds out you've botched your job, He'll wipe you out f existence and start over with a new bunch?" A cold wind blew down Herman's back. "Not us alone, Dr. Kaye," said Secundus gravely. "If tiie Inspector discovers this blunder -- and the time is coming soon when He must -- no corrections will be attempted. When a mistake occurs, it is -- painted out." "Oh," said Herman after a moment. He sat down again, weakly. "How long have we got?" "Approximately one and a quarter days have gone by at the Earth's normal rate since Primus lost his memory," Secundus said. "I have not been able to 'speed you up,' as you termed it, by more than a twenty-to-one ratio. The deadline will have arrived, by my calculation, in fifteen minutes of normal time, or five hours at your present accelerated rate." Primus stepped into the room, crossed to the couch and lay down placidly. Secundus turned to go, then paused. "As for your final question, Doctor -- you might think of the ing, in which this planet is one infinitesimally small dot of color. The work is wholly imaginary, of course, since neither the canvas nor the pigment has what you would term an independent existence. Nevertheless, the artist takes it seriously. He would not care to find, so to speak, mustaches daubed on it." Herman sat limply, staring after him as he moved to the door. Secundus turned once more. "I hope you will not think that I am displeased with you. Doctor," he said. "On the contrary, I feel that you are accomplishing more than anyone else has. However, should you succeed, as I devoutly hope, there may not be sufficient time to congratulate you as you deserve. I shall have to replace you . immediately in your normal world-line, for your absence would constitute as noticeable a flaw as tliat of the planet. In that event, my present thanks and congratulations will have to serve." With a friendly smile, he disappeared. Herman wound his watch. Two hours later. Primus's answers to his questions began to show a touch of resentment and surly defiance. Transerence, Herman thought, with a constriction of his throat, and kept working desperately. ) Three hours. "What does the bolster remind you of?" "I seem to see a big cylinder rolling through space, sweeping the stars out of its way..." Four hours. Only three minutes left now. in the normal world.  can'f wait to get any deeper, Herman thought. It's got to be now or never. "You must understand that these feelings of resentment and hatred are normal," he said, trying to keep the strain out of his voice, "but, at the same time, you have outgrown them -- you can rise above them now. You are an individual in your own right, Primus. You have a job to do that only you can fill, and it's an important job. That's what matters, not all this infantile emotional clutter..." He talked on, not daring to look at his watch. Primus looked up, and a huge smile broke over his face. He began, "Why, of -- " ing along Forty-second Street, heading toward the Hudson. The pavement was solid under his feet: the canyon between the buildings was filled with the soft violet-orange glow of a summer evening in New York. In the eyes of the people he passed, he saw the same incredulous relief he felt. It was over. He'd done it. He'# broken all the rules, but, incredibly, he'd got results. Then he looked up and a chill spread over him. No one who knew the city would accept tht ithyphallic parody as the Empire State Building, or those huge fleshy curves, as wanton as the mountains in which Mr, Maugham's "Sadie Thompson" had her lusty existence, as the prosaic hills of New Jersey. Psychoanalysis had certainly removed Mr. Primus's inhibitions. The world was like a fence scrawled on by a naughty little boy. Mr. Primus would outgrow it in time, but life until then might be somewhat disconcerting. Those two clouds, for instance... bleday  Co., Inc., #. # paes, # T he subtitle of this volume w its own book review: "Talei Unlike Other Tales." They are! Most science fiction addicts know John Collier only through his famous "Green Thoughts," which appeared in the first science fiction anthology ever compiled. Donald Wollheim's Pocket Book ci Science Fiction. "Green Thoughts" isn't science fiction, for John Collier never wrote any in his life. It happens, however, that he is the most distinguished living writer of imaginative, fantastical, demonological, shivery and sophisticatcdrsupernatural stories, and any science fiction reader who foregoes this book has only himself to blame for having passed up one of the great reading experiences of modern times. Don't miss Collier! You'll be a much more watery and uninspired individual than you are, you do. Permabooks Doubleday  Co., Inc.'), New York, #. # paes, #c N ineteen stories, aii but four never anthologized before; for # cents the buy of the month. All but three of the stories rate "B" or better, too; and it contains one nearly great (and quite unknown) tale, as well. This is called "Scanners Live in Vain," and it is written by some pseudonymity known as Cordwainer Smith. It is one of the best tours dc force in science fiction. Another really magnificent tale is Fowler Wright's quietly irreversible comment on irresponsible science, called "Obvious Suicide." There are also top-grade tales by Kombluth, MacDonald, Leinster (he never fails!), Wyndham (alias both Harris and Beynon), MacCreigh, Finney (wonderful!), Bradbury (of course), Pearson, Clarke, Dryfoos, van Vogt, Gold (a delight!), Merril, and a completely surprising tale by Heinlein in collaboration with a lady named Wentz. A rich, juicy collection: Mr. Pohl is to be congratulated on having done it. Too bad he had to include these previously anthologized items: Pearson's "The Embassy," Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," van Vogt's "Letter from the Stars" (called "Dear Pen Pal" in its earlier book appearance), and Clarke's "Rescue Party." But even with these duplications, this is an unavoidable "must," particularly at the price. Fredric Brown. Shasta Publishers, Chicago, #. # pages, # ' one of the very few so-called "humorists" in science fiction whose humor -- at least most of it -- is funny rather than plain silly. Previously collected: "Knock" (a good B-plus) ; "Nothing Sirius" (not one of the best; B-minus); and "Star Mouse" (delightful -- a good A-plus for Mitkey Mouse!) . New in book form : "Something Green" (powerful alien-world tale, from which Heinlein borrowed the famous phrase, "The Green Hills of Earth", A); "Crisis, #" (I didn't much like this mixture of science fiction, sleuthing and pseudo-hypnotism; C-plus) ; "Pi in the Sky" (a genon advertising ; a solid A) ; "All Good Bems" (witty but slight, a high-class B-plus); "Daymare" (serious tale involving a hypnolas tism helmet; A-minus); and last -- and best, for my money -- "Come and Go Mad" (one of the most superb "we're property" stories ever written). A fine, high-spirited, fantastical, super-scientifical book for the human-hearted; a thing for padlocked shelves so people won't be swiping it. ited by Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press, New York, #. # Pages, # saying has a way of going, everything -- including # stories, of which nine according to my coiit are worth preserving. There's a pleasant introduction by Willy Ley; a #-page "Dictionary of Science Fiction" that contains about # definitions (to pun slightly, definitely not a definitive dictionary) ; and a #(though Mr. G. insists they're not any such thing) by Cartier. In other words, PublisherEditor Greenberg has given us a really portentous volume here, full of miscellaneous apparati and whammies. The stories I like and think you will include: Keith Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (Venus adventure) ; Christopher Youf i "Christmas Tree" (good Moon tale) ; Ray Bradbury's completely out of place "The Shape of Things" (it deals with a baby that was born "through" the wrong dimension and looked like a blue pyramid -- a superb story having nothing to do with space travel); Lyle Monroe's "Columbus Was a Dope" (Moon; this delightful snapper of a story is actually a double-snapper, as you will learn when you trace its actual author's name on the copyright page; to give you a clue, the initials are R. A. H.) ; Hal Clement's "Attitude" (about a planet of S Doradus, very circumstantial, as if Mr. C. had Tenn's very pleasant but routine "Ionian Cycle" (all about weird  life) ; Robertson Osborne's "Ac tion on Azura" (splendid! -- but already anthologized under the title of "Contact, Inc."); A. E. van Vogt's "The Rull," (it will drive you nuts; very sticky -- and very unforgettable -- indeed) ; and Poul Anderson's A-plus-plus (about the Galactic government that keeps the peace' solely through corruption -- and justly o. too). The other five talcs you may like, Buy the book and find out! I didn't, but then I'm a sort of narrow-minded, combative cove, M everyone knows.#;roff cx)nkun garden An aMnns, waterless asferoM covered with flourishing green plants? Impossiblef Still there It wos -- fended by the oddest curator! "A"  N Asteroid. A dreen en tcroid." His voice oddly resonant in the metal stillness of the spaceship, he looked through the forward port with an uncertain wonder in him. There was darkness outside, the great hollow night of space, and a thousand stars flamed cold in the brass frame of the port. The asteroid showed as a tiny palegreen spark that only a trained eye would have seen among those warming bitter-bright suns. The quality of it was different, a muted reflection of the Belt's weak light instead of naked fire leaping across a universe, and it flickered a little as the irregular tone spun on its axis. "Green," said Hardesty again. the note of puzzlement grown stronger. "I never saw that before." His wife shoved off from one wall of the cabin, her tall form weightlessly drifting past the glitter of control board to the instruments mounted on the. f arthef side. "Shall we have a look?" she asked practically. Hardesty glanced at the meters and performed a mental calculation : one had to be sparing of fuel on a voyage like this. "Yes, if the velocity isn't too different from ours," he said. Marian's dark head bent over the telescope and her long, strong fingers spun a wheel, sighting oi th? speck that flitted out among the ccnastellations. There was a faint sighing of gears above the murmur of air blown through S ventilator. It was quiet out ia space -- so quiet. Hardesty's pulse was loud in his own ears. He undipped a pencil from a pocket of his coverall and scribbled the figures she announcei on a pad clamped to the control board. When her readings were done, he took the slide rule froto its rack and manipulated it witti the easy speed of long practice. His gaunt frame hung in mid-aif. one foot hooked through llie ann of a recoil chair to keep him in place. The Gold Ru#h was moving outward from the Sun with a velocity known closely enough from his last astrogational readings. It was a fair approximation to assume that the asteroid's motion was at forty-five degrees to the ship's path and its speed that to be expected of a body orbitit at this distance. Thus, from the observed transverse angular velocity, the separation could be estimated. It would take so much fuel to kill the ship's outward vector -- a deceleration of twopoint-five Gs should do it in the allowed distance -- and then you added ten per cent for maneuvering and landing. "Ifli-huh," he nodded. "It's all right, honey." Marian swam into her chair, adjusted the webbing, and plugged in her throat mike. She'd be taking the reading while Hardesty piloted the ship, but you needed a comcircuit to talk and hear when the rockets were going. His mind quit gnawing at the problem of a green asteroid and concentrated on the delicate job of working the ship in. Slowly, his whickering gyros swung the hull around. When the rockets started to roar, it was a thunder voice booming and crashing between the vibrant walls, shivering the teeth in his skull, and weight dragged cruelly at a body grown used to free falh For a moment lit hit eyet hazed, the constellationt danced insanely through a sud denly reddened sky, and then his trained reflexes took over and he watched the asteroid swelling in the rearview telescreen. They shot past it at a distance of ten miles, splashing the great dark with livid flame. Now it rolled in the forward port, and he notched the main switch ahead and felt his tissues groaning. Marian snapped out a string of instrument readings, and gyros whined as Hardesty brought the ship about, changing course, bearing down on the rock. They swung past it in a long curve. When it was centered on the cross-hairs of the rearview screen and could be held there, Hardesty backed down upon it. A typical piece of space debris, he thought. It was roughly cylindrical, perhaps ten miles long and five thick, but the crags and gashes that scarred its surfaces made it a jumble of blackened stone. Here and there a patch of quartz or mica caught the thin sunlight in a swiftly harsh blink. The greenness was in patches, clustered on such hills and slopes as offered most Sun, but there seemed to be a delicate webbing -- of veins? -- connecting all those bunches. There were brown and gray and yellow mixed in. Like lichen, he decided, and his mind hearkened back to the cool, mossy rocks of a New England forest and suddenly, almost bitterly, he wished he were there. The radar screen flickered and danced. Not much level ground, but he had landed on worse places without toppling his ship. Even if he did fail now, it would mean only the nuisance of rigging the derrick to lift her -- a bump in that feeble gravity couldn't hurt vessel or crew. A motor sang above the dull thutter of rockets and the landing tripod slid out around the tubes. Electronic valves glowed, radarcontrolled servos adjusting the lengths of the three legs to the sloping, pitted surface. In the sudden ringing stillness, as the rockets went dead, the hull boomed and sagged. Shale gave way beneath one leg, but the ervo lengthened it till its foot rested on solidity, and then the whole ship was quiet. Hardesty shook his head to clear it and looked across at his wife. Her thinly strong features smiled back at him, congratulating him, but no words were needed ; they knew each other too well. He unbuckled the webbing and stood erect. T he vision of the sky was like a blow in the face when they stepped out. He could spend a hundred years in theBelt, thought Hardesty, and its eerie m unhuman magnificence would be s cold in his heart as the first day he left Earth. The Gold Rush was not a large spaceship -- a two-passenger Beltboat with extraction and refining equipment, fuel and supplies enough for a year of cruising -- but she loomed over their heads, a squat metal tower against the stars, dully ashine in the pale, chill light. Before them, a harsh raggedness of knife-edged rock swept to  horizon that seemed near enough to touch, the edge of forever lying beyond that wolfjawed rim of hills. The ground was black, pits and craters and twisted frozen magma, dully lit, sldows like holes of blindness creeping over the rough slope. A miles away, glittered and threw a wash of dim, heatless luminance. It was quiet, the blank quiet of airlessness and emptiness, the only noise that of the muted scrunch of footsteps carried through the spacesuits, only that and the hot, rapid thud of heart and breath. The sound of his own life was almost deafening in Hardesty's skull, and yet it was the dimmest flicker in a room of night, a tiny frantic fist beating on iron gates of silence. And overhead wheeled the fire and ice and the giant sprawl of constellations, the Milky Way a rush of curdled silver, the far, mysterious glow of nebulae, hugeness and loneliness to break a human heart. There went the Great Bear, swinging light-years overhead, and it was not the friendly neighbor of Earth's heaven, but a god striding in flame and darkness, scorning the watchers, enormous and beautiful and cruel. The others followed, and the stars that Earth never sees threw their signals flawing and flashing across the years and the unthinkable distances, and no man knew what they were calling. Hardesty drew a deep breath and looked over to Marian. The declining Sun Hared off her space armor; a sheen on the helmet veiled her face from him. The armor depersonalized her and the voice over the radio was a metallic rattle. It was as if a robot stood at his side. He threw off the oppression of solitude and forced a calm into his voice: "Come on. let's take a look at one of those green patches before sunset." T think there's one over that way." She pointed north with a gauntleted hand. Hardesty had already located the asteroid's pole star. He noted the position of the other constellations and set off after her. Ten years' experience had taught him how easy it was to get lost in such a jungle of stone, and their tanks only held air for a few hours. It was ghostly, bounding along in Utter syence, almost weightless, between the high, dead crags and under the sharp stars. In all his time out here, Hardesty had not lost the ecriness of it. And yet Earth was blurring in his memory, green fields and tall trees and the feel of an actual wind, a low old house among a thousand shouting autumn coloi, beat of wings across heaven -- he couldn't always conjure up the images. A blaze of naked stars would rise between. WtU, maybe here, maybe somewhere else, this trip or next, wa'll make the hi strike. Then we'll go home. It was the great chimera. For every man who reached it, a hundred broke their hearts or left their withered corpses on some unknown frozen rock. Hardesty had been one of the luckiest. He'd made enough once to buy his own ship, and since that time enough to pay his costs and even save a little money. And he'd met one of the Belt's few woin in an office on Ceres, and married her and made her his partner. How would Marian look at Earth? She'd never seen it. She'd been born on Mars. The Sun sloped low as the asteroid spun on its hurried, timeless way. Wan light glimmered off Marian's armor as she topped a high ridge, pinning her against darkness and the scornful stars. Her voice was a sudden excited gasp in his earphones; "Jim! Jim, come quick #" He bunched his muscles and reached her side in a soaring bound, floating down and twirling a little like a dead autumn leaf. Autumn, a maple scarlet against October smoke, and a leaf acriftling across the sidewalk!') Together they looked down the crazily tilted sheet of basalt to the seamed ledge jutting out against Orion. The green was there. In the airlessness, it was as sharp and clear as if it touched his helmet. Leathery domes, coiling vines, thick strong leaves -- He breathed the word as if it were something holy: "Life." "Life? But it's not possible, Jim. No asteroid has life." His answer was flat, and a sudden coldness tingled in his hands. "This one does." H e strode across the black slabs in the seven-league boots of Belt gravity. The Sun hung between two pinnacles, throwing a horned shadow across the acre of green. Hardesty knelt fit the boundary of the pateband Iasped one of the cactuslike leaves. It seemed almost to shrink, and in the vague tricky light he thought that a pulse ran from it, through the webbing of vines, and out of sight along the filaments that reached from this ledge. He drew back his hand and squatted there, staring. Marian came up and stood against his side. "I -- " Her voice was low now, trembling faintly. "I don't know whether to -- to be glad or interested or -- frightened, Jim." His long-jawed face slid into the expressionlessness of uncertainty. "I know. We've gotten so used to thinking of the Belt as inorganic that -- well, our enemies have been cold and vacuum and distance, impersonal forces. We really don't know how to face something that could be actively hostile. And yet, that life could exist and evolve here a wonderful feeling." He looked up to the stars as if throwing them a challenge. "This can't hurt us. Plants. You don't think there could be -- monsters here?" 'T wouldn't mind a good hotbreathed dragon. But germs? I suppose I'm being an old woman. But you know what they say about hold spacemen never becoming old spacemen. They don't live that long." "How can any life exist here? Ilf No water, no air, nothing -- " "I don't know. It's obviously not terrestrial-type life, though I'm pretty sure it's protoplasmic. It's adapted to these conditions, that's all." Decision brought him erect again. "I suppose we should try to study this out, make analyses and so on, but we have neither the training nor the equipment to do so. We'll take some pictures, and get an accurate orbit for this pebble, and report the whole matter to Ceres. And we'll scout around for minerals as usual, avoiding these green patches. Our work is risky enough without taking even a tiny extra chance." "You're righf." Marian stood looking at the plants. They wert small and grotesquely ugly, but -- "A garden," she whispered. "A little garden, blooming out here on the edge of nothing." "Come on." said Hardesty. "Let's get back to the ship." Sun sank under the farther rocks and night was abruptly on them. Their flashlights cast dull puddles of yellow haze on the ground, where elsewhere there was a sea of black under the streaming stars. The sky's light picked out the higher crags, etching them frost-gray against the dark, but the humans stumbled in shadow, floating to the ground to continue their careful low-gravity shuffle back toward the ship. "I can't forget it," said Marian. "Those plants, blooming out here without air or heat or water -- do you think that comets hover above them, Jim? Do you think their pollen is stardust?" "Don't get poetic," he grunted. In spite of their stellar observations, they had trouble locating the ship, approaching it finally from the other side. Thus they had walked around the massive tripod before they saw the figure waiting in front of the gangway. Hardesty thought with a flash of disaT#pointmen.t that some Other prosector had beaten them to it. He had come far out of the usual lanes, without revealing his course to anyone, to avoid just that; matching velocities and landing was so expensive that, by law, the first man to set down on a new rock held all mining rights. Then, as he looked closer -- The space armor was awkward and bulky, a model which had been obsolete long before Hardesty left Earth, and its metal was patched and battered. There was no air-tank. A thick-leafed vine coiled around the square oldfashioned helmet, across the shoulders and down the back, like ivy on an ancient university building. Hardesty saw with a jolting shock that a tendril ran into the helmet, sealed by a cliJhisy weld, and that tiny rootlets veined the face inside and was tangled in among the man's beard. The -- man? Marian's stifled scream was loud in his earphones; she clutched at Hardesty's arm and they skipped back together. A dead man, a corpse, a revenatd; pupfet of plants which grew where no life could be -- "Who are you? What arc you?" The other took a floating stride toward them. His face was hooded in darkness; they could barely see the glitter of starlight in his sunken eyes. Hardesty stood .waiting, braced to meet the thing that neared him. The ship behind seemed infinitely remote. Metal hands clasped Hardesty's shoulders and the square helmet leaned forward to ring faintly against his own. That close, the miner could sec the shaggy head inside, still veiled with shadow -- a shattered gravestone of a face with ivy creeping over it and reaching into the cracks. He fought down an impulse to retch. The voice that came was dim and slow: "You -- from Earth?" "Yes and no. Who are you, man? What is that you're wearing?" Hardesty's mouth was dry. "My name? It's -- I am the gardener." The stranger shook his big head, and the cactus leaves on his helmet rustled where there was never a wind to stir them. "No, wait. Yes, they called me, my name, yes... Hans Gronaucr." A throbbing chuckle. "But that was long ago. Now I am the gardener." "You mean you were shipwrecked?" "Yes. How long ago? There are not years here. I think it was twenty EUirth years ago. That is a guess. It could be more." The newcomer brushed a gauntleted hand over his faceplate, a strangely human gesture, as if he were trying to rub his weary eyes. "You will excuse. It is long since I talked. And my -- my talker? -- Yes, radio. My radio was broken in the crash. I must talk this way." "By helmet conduction? Yeah, sure. But -- my God, man! That plant growing -- growing on you like that -- " The tiny gleam of teeth in. the beard, the downcast eyes, it was a shy smile. "The plant gives air. So." "So -- oh.'" Marian had heard the words over her husband's set. "Jim, of course, the plants release oxygen and he's used them  -- Twenty years, Jim!" Turning his face, he saw the cold starlight gleam on her tearstreaked cheeks, and there was a sudden wrench of pity in his own heart. Twenty years' Twenty years alone in naked space! "Come into the ship," he said urgently. He .didn't think he could stand out here on twisted black jeering at him. "Come into the ship, man, and get some food. Twenty years! My God!" "No." Gronauer didn't shake his head, for that human gesture seemed forgotten, but he lowered his eyes. "No. Not yet, please." "But -- " ' "The garden would not like it. Not yet." "The garden?" "World. We -- don't dare. Not till we know. It has been so long." "I think I see." It was Marian again; Hardesty had never stopped wondering at the cool quickness of her mind. She wasn't pretty, he supposed, but even on Earth he couldn't have had a better wife. "He's adapted in some odd way, or thinks he may have. He's not sure he can stand conditions inside our ship." "Yes. The plant might die." Gronauer's faded voice held a sudden eagerness. His vocabulary was coming back to him in a rush. "I must think this out. Come with me and let us investigate the problem." "Come where?" "My home. It is safe for you. But -- yes, bring food." "You haven't eaten?" "The garden feeds me. But for you it may not be safe -- be safe for you yet. Come quick. Please." "All right, if it isn't far. We have to watch our air supply, you know." "The plants give air." At the thought of tendrils around his head and roots going into him, Hardesty shivered. "No!" "I mean air is in my house. You can breathe there. It is not far from here." "Very well." Hardesty disengaged himself from Gronauer and thus ' from auditory contact. "Marian, fetch some canned stuff. And put my gun into a o #S pocket. It's in the toolbox. "Gun, Jim?" "Yeah." His voice was a little ragged. "Never thought I'd need it, but let's not take chances. I'm not leaving you alone with him, cither. I'm pretty sure he's harmless, but you can't tell. Twenty years! He's not acting like a normal human being. But who the hell would after living here like that for so long? Yes, I want the gun." Wordlessly, she stepped up the gangway and disappeared into the airlock. Gronauer stood waiting, making no further attempt at conversation, and Hardesty was satisfied to keep it that way. The wonder of his discovery was lost in worried calculation. They could certainly not refuse to take Gronauer with them when they left, but his extra mass and the supplies he would need could upset the whole cruise. There wasn't any outpost to take him to within some scores of megamiles. So unless a decent lode of fissionable ores was found soon, he represented a heavy financial loss. Briefly, Hardesty wondered if he could leave Gronauer to be picked up by a government rescue ship. After all. scientists would want to investigate this place... But it'd make Hardesty an outcast, being known to have abandoned a shipwrecked spaceman. And he'd have to live with himself. No, he'd have to take Gronauer back, whatever it cost. All he could do was hope that there was a lode on this asteroid. Gronauer would know about that. Marian came back, loaded with a sack of cans which Hardesty slung over one shoulder. Gronauer set off at once. The path was dark, there under the ghostly arch of the Milky Way, but he picked his way with effortless speed. It didn't seem to occur to him that the others were having trouble keeping up. Hardesty cursed and stumbled. He noticed that there was a leathery bladder on the castaway's back, apparently part of the vine system. It glowed with the dimmest of red light. Heat? After a mile or two of bare stone, they entered a patch of growth that seemed to stretch indefinitely far on every side. The frailer vines and leaves shrank aside from the human feet, and subliminally faint pulses rippled through the garden and over the edge of the little world. Hardesty estimated that they came, in all, some five miles from the Gold Rush before reaching the other spaceship. It was a smashed ruin. Only the central part of the hull seemed intact, and that had been patched and welded. It lay in a small box canyon, against the low bluff at the farther end. The metal riba itr and the great broken tubes were scattered around it like ravenpicked bones. And everywhere the steel was covered by green growth. Here the plants had become a thicket, vines swarming over the cliffs and wrapped about the gaunt crags, leaves and tendrils and looming fluted columns hiding the rock in a ghost-gray sea, stirring without wind and rustling without sound under the chill stars. Gronauer's cabin was smothered in the dripping life. Hardesty could not suppress a shudder as the leaves framing the airlock brushed him. Within the chamber there was a stifling darkness until Gronauer opejed the inner door, and then feeble light shone. It was lost again as frost condensed on the space-chilled helmets. Hardesty and Marian helped each other out of their armor, careful not to touch it with bare hands, and followed Gronauer into the room beyond. The miner's first glance was for the castaway, now that he had removed his ivy-covered, battered old armor. His hair and beard were streaked with gray, and he smelled unwashed, though there was no grime on him. It was the face that held Hardesty's gaze, the cryelly smashed face which had healed into lumps of scar tissue. It was pockmarked on cheeks and forehead, where he had gently pulled out the roots of the plant that still clung to his spacesuit. But the eyes were gentle, the mutilated lips curved in a timid smile, and he stood aside for his guests. The cabin was small, almost unfurnished, yet crowded. It was cold and the air had a musty reek. Plants covered wells and ceiling, made a springy carpeting underfoot, rustled and shivered as the humans walked across them. There were a lot of the red bladders twined into the leafage, and light came from countless tiny -- berries? -- things which glowed a dull amber ia the ay-green tangle. "It is strange to you, I suppose," said Gronauer apologetically. "But it keeps me alive." Hardesty touched a bladder. It was warm under his hand. Yes, the plants heated the room and aired it and illuminated it and fed the owner. He had a sudden dark wonder as to just who owned whom. "It's like a dream," whispered Marian. The unspoken thought ran on: A nightmare. A surealist's delirium. "Have you had this long, Mr. Gronauer?" "Yes. At first I ate the garden, but then I saw that, that way, one of us must kill the other, and if I killed it there would be no food for me. So I made friends in instead, and bit by bit the garden learned my needs and gave them to me." As if exhausted by speech, Gronauer's rusty voice faded out and he answered no more questions. Hardesty repressed a revulsion. After all, this was a wonderful example of human ingenuity, the greatest Robinson Crusoe story in the universe, and certainly the plants were harmless. But he took out cans and can opener with the eagerness of a man clutching at familiarity in a strange land. "Shall we eat?" he suggested. Gronauer shook his head, smiling, when they offered him Bionate and one of their few,, cherished cans of beer. "I -- have no taste for it," he said. "It might even be dangerous. I will feed." Carefully, he broke off one of the fleshy cactuslike leaves and chewed on it. He held a trailing vine to his face, and Marian looked away as the tendrils stirred hungrily and slid into the pocks. At least, thought Hardesty a little sickly, the plants did everything for him. Everything except furnish human companionship -- and it didn't seem as if Gronauer needed that any more. Not after twenty years. I T was surprising how much difference a full stomach made. Hardesty hadn't really been aware of his own hunger till it was gone and strength was flowing back into his bloodstream. He sat down almost casually on a vine-begrown chair -- there was a mossy plant intertwined, making a faintly warm cushion -- and began to draw Gronauer out in talk, That wasn't easy: the castaway was too shy to do more than mumble answers while staring at his feet, but piece by piece the story was revealed. It was, in reality, quite simple. Gronauer had been only twenty or so when he left his native Germany for the Asteroid Belt. That was thirty years ago, when the mineral riches of the flying mountains had just lately come to the attention of an Earth increasingly starved for fissionable ores, and the great companies were outfitting expeditions. A ship which cruised among the scattered worldlets, refining the substances it located, could return in a year or two to one of the asteroid cities with a cargo dollars. Hard, dangerous, and profitable work has always commanded high wages, and no few of the prospectors, Gronauer among them, had soon been able to buy their own ships and go out as independent operators. He'd had a partner -- he couldn't remember the man's ! name now -- and they'd traveled and dug together for about hve years. As the most accessible asteroids became worked out, the custom of not revealing one's destination grew up. That way, if you found a rich group of planetoids, you could make several trips without competition -- but, of course, if you met with an accident there could be no rescue. Without 'more powerful radio equipment than a Beltboat could carry, there was no way to get help. Gronauer had gone north of the ecliptic plane, looking for one of the many groups which traveled in crazily tilted orbits. He'd found this green world and come woieringly in for a landing. But the asteroid had a satellite, a meteor which had suddenly flashed over the horizon and crashed through the ship's engines and sent it hurtling to its death. The other man was killed. Gronauer had escaped with broken bones and a smashed face. He'd lain near extinction for a timeless age; only the fact that tlic weak gravity made no demands on his body had saved him. After that, the only thing to do was to survive somehow and hope that another prospector would happen by. That could be within a year or never. It was safest to assume that he would leave his bones here. One man could live off the ship's food stores perhaps two years. But there was life, the plants, food. Gronauer had had no means of testing for poison except his own metabolism. A few times he got sick but he learned what he could safely eat. Certain of the fleshy cactus growths were nourishing. He harvested all of them within five miles or so of his ship. After a few days -- or weeks, or months ; he lost track -- he'd gone out after more, and found that everything was dead in the area which he had exploited. And whenhe cut some plants elsewhere and ate them, he nearly died again. G ronauer was no biologist, but a spaceman generally picked up a good knowledge of science and so he had heard of symbiosis. It was clear that the plants were in some way interdependent, that each species was necessary to the survival of the whole. And in some dim way they had sensed the enemy among them and reacted with deadly swiftness... Any type he tried to eat would soon become poisonous to him. Perhaps the garden would try something still more devastating. An unnoticed root, growing between two plates of the wrecked ship that housed him, could split it open and let out the air in a great and fatal rush. With a quiet, methodical courage that Hardesty had to admire, he had given, himself the urgent job of studying the symbiosis. He had no formal education in biology and almost no scientific instruments; most of his conclusions were guesswork from the sketchiest data. But given a year or two of patient slogging, and a good mind driven by a peasant's deep, strong will to live, one could accomplish more than Earth's cold intellectuals would ever admit. He puz#led it out, observing and thinking in the huge loneliness of his world. The life here was protoplasmic, chemically similar to his own. It even seemed to involve photosynthesis of some kind. The tough skin of the "cactoids" admitted ultraviolet light -- intense in airless space, even this far from the Sun -- while preventing the loss of water by evaporation. Instead, the water circulated through vine-systems to other species that used it in their own life-processes, and carried organic compounds manufactured by various types of plants to the symbiotic whole. The water was obtained from gypsum and other minerals by certain roots which added alcohol to prevent its freezing. Even so, the bitter temperatures would long a#o have turned it to ice, except that it circulated through the red bladders and these heated it with energy derived from fermentation or very slow combustion. The oxygen for that could also be cracked from mineral compounds beneath the surface. Cross-fertilization and the subsequent spread of life over the whole asteroid depended on specialized vines. There even seemed to be hearts for this vascular system, slowly pulsing lumps of tissue scattered through the garden. A vast and unimaginably intricate network, each type fulneeded to maintain the whole in existence -- A trained biologist might well have needed as much time as Gronauer to puzzle out the life cycle. "I still wonder if solar energy n enough to keep such a system going," said Hardesty. "It takes a lot to break up minerals, you know, even if the symbiosis manufactures catalysts." "We are as far from the Sun as we ever get," answered Gronauer patiently. "The orbit is very -- yes, very eccentric. I think the period is about seven years. At least we have three times come, I think, within the orbit of Venus while I was here. It gets hot then, special plants grow up to protect the others, andenergy is stored chemically against the long cold which follows." "I see. And with this highly tilted orbit, tlie asteroid hasn't been discovered even when k was that close to Earth." The poor ioy! Think of him Bitting here, watching the Sun grow and blaze, watching Earth her moon visible beside her, and Still alone, still forever alone. "How did life evolve here?" wondered Marian. "You need air and oceans for that, and this asteroid has been dead rock since the beginning of time." Hardesty shrugged. "We'll probably never know, but I can make a guess. On some other world, maybe the world of anothe? star, air and water disappeared slowly enough for life to adapt. Certain spores of that fe were lifted on the last wisps of atmosphere up to where light pressure could drive them from that solar system. The old Arrhenius theory. They survived the trip. There were a lot of sporeclumps landing on many worlds, but this might be the only one in our system that had the conditions they needed for growth. Maybe notthe spores could be the ancestors of all life on our planets, but I doubt it. Too completely alien." It was an eldritch thought, that tile garden had been seeded from across that gulf of space, that it of years in its grave, and that -- perhaps, in the remote future, when all the planets were airless husks, gardens like this would bloom as the last defiance of the sunless night. He shivered in the chill must of the room. "Go on," he said. "Tell us what you did." Gronauer looked at him with gentle, frightened eyes. "Don't be shy," said Marian softly. "It is a great and wonderful thing you've done. You make me proud to be human." "Human?" The short laugh was jarring. A vague rustling went among the leaves. "I am -- human?" After a moment, looking away: "Please to excuse. I have not been used to talking so much. I will try." T he words stumbled out, awkward, toneless, the words of a man who had begun by speaking German, changed to the English of the spaceways, and then not spoken at all except for the shadowy half-language of the garden. Hardesty had to hll in gaps; the Castaway could only hint at a reality too far from human experience for communication -- but the outline grew. It had been plain that the symbiosis was highly adaptable. It probably had to be, to survive the extremes of the asteroid's wildly swooping orbit. Gronauer thought, too. that the impact of cosmic rays, unshielded by atmosphere, induced a hugh mutation rate: somehow, the garden weeded out unfavorable mutations and took those it could use. The pattern was not a rigid thing. It was constantly evolving. There even seemed to be a primitive brain somewhere. Not a human-type brain -- there probably wasn't a nervous system as Earth knew it -- but something had to control that change. Something had altered the garden's metabolism and poisoned those leaves that the stranger ate. Probably it had tried various compounds from the beginning of Gronauer's attacks, until it hit cm this one. The man had harvested the deadly leaves and disposed of them with a terrible feeling of being watched. But that was ridiculous -- or was it? Was not the whole impossibly living world against him, ringing him .in and waiting for him to die? After a few weeks he ate again, experimentally, and was not sick. He'd foolAl the garden. Only it would keep on trying to kill him, and he would never know when it had made a successful attempt until too late. His one long-range chance of survival lay in making peace with the garden; and that could cmly be done by proving his potential usefulness to it. Digging around a patch of growth, he discovered that certain thick roots went deep into the hard rock. Those must be for extracting buried minerals. Protoplasm required carbon and oxygen, among other things, and most likely the source of the former element was the various carbonates. Gronauer went to an area where the plants had not yet penetrated and began to dig. His miner's eye and brain were more effective than the chance gropings of the blind roots, and it was slow work for them, forcing their way into solid rock. Before long, he had a small heap of assorted carbonates. He macerated them and laid them beside one of the big roots. A few hours later, tendrils had grown around his offering and most of it was being absorbed. Limestone was a favorite, he saw, while iron compounds were hardly touched. He went after more limestone. And there were other elements they must need -- sulfates would be especially valuable -- and with the tiny atomic heater that remained to him, he could concentrate nitrates. It took time for the garden to understand. There probably was no conscious mind reasoning out what Gronauer wanted ; there was simply a high mutation rate and #D a completely integrated ecology. By supplying minerals, by loosening rock about new roots, by guiding tendrils in their direction of growth, the man performed a service, and the energy saved the whole system could go into proliferation -- some of which would be new, "experimental" forms. were pale leaves which seemed to be mostly protein. Gronaucr harvested and ate them. Presently there were no more such leaves. They had apparently not fulfilled a real function, and the symbiosis had cut them off. Gronauer stopped working for the garden. He waited, and the slow weeks passed, and his supplies from Earth got horribly short. If he had guessed wrong -- No. The flesh-leaves budded out again. Gronauer rewarded the garden with a heap of limestone and copperas. Thereafter the leaves stayed. Whether it was blind natural selection within the framework of symbiosis, or whether there really was some dim brain capable of learned reflexes, the garden adapted to the new fact that flesh-leaves meant free minerals. "After that," said Gronauer simply, "we were friends. The problem was only to com -- communicate our needs to each Other." He needed green food to prevent scurvy. An experimental teste made him ill, and again he withheld his services. Thereafter the garden produced more edible green leaves than it needed for itself, and he gathered the surplus. It was to his advantage to have the garden change rapidly, so that new possibilities would arise. He rewarded each discovered mutation with an extra mineral ration; if it turned out to be useful, he was lavish in his payments. Thus, over the years, he attained a remarkably balanced diet. Meanwhile, the plants had grown back around his ship, and he transplanted vines inside. They died, and he tried again, and still again, until he struck a variety that would endure the conditions he needed. They gave light and heat to replace his failing generator, and proved to be much more efficient producers of free oxygen than the tanks of Martian swordgrass which was standard on spaceships. He had been recovering water by the usual condensing methods, replacing losses by baking gypsum, but his nlw plants "learned" to give him as much alcohol-free water as he wanted. He could have had the alcohol, too, but he didn't like to drink alone. And surely few men had ever been as lonely as he. "And all the time," said Gronauer, "I was trying other things, learning more about the symbiosis. After a few years I got the -- the feel of it. I have not the scientific words to describe, but I can understand in my own way what goes on. I can look at a patch of growth and tell what it needs. I can look at a mutant form and after a while know what it may do. By selecting new strains for several generations. I can create a species which will fit well into the symbiosis. It was thus I made the light-berries, for my own use, and roots which can use ferric carbonate -- the symbiosis could not handle that before, and limestone was getting short. And other things." "The -- well, your spacesuit? The air plant on it?" Hardesty felt embarassed at mentioning that. "My air compressing pump was going to wear out soon, I knew that, and by then it was more natural for me to work with the plants rather than dead machinery. The plants growing on my helmet, they give heat and light and free the oxygen out of my own breath. They live from my bloodstream. It is not ttiuch they need and they give me vitamins in return. Their rootlets entered my skin quite painlessly. "I have many kinds of foodplants now, with new tastes. You would like them, I think, but they are probably different from what you are used to. Go slow at first, eat only a little of the native food for a year, or however long your supplies last." Hardesty and Marian did not stop then to consider Gronauer'i odd phrasing of the invitation. It wouldn't have meant much to them; in twenty years of solitude, anyone would develop a curious turn of speeth. Gronauer shuffled over to a desk, opened a drawer and took out an old logbook. Routine entries stopped with the shipwreck; what followed was page after page of fine script and painstakingly drawn illustrations. "Here are my notes," he said with a humble pride. "I have described and pictured everything. It is all that you need to know." Marian skimmed through it, and her thin intense features lit with a genuine glow. "It's wonderful, Mr. Gronauer, she said after a moment. "This marks some kind of epoch in biology, you know. Your name will go down in history." "Um, yes." Hardesty forced himself back to the practical side of things. "Tell me, though, how's this world for radioactives? Any good deposits?" "A few deposits, but not worth working unless they have changed refining machinery a lot since my time." "They haven't." The spaceman sighed. "Well, it was just a thought. We might as well blast off, then. Our ship's quarters arc rather cramped, Gronauer, but we'll fix up the best we can for you." "For me?" The soft eyes widened. "Of course. Did you think we'd leave you behind?" Gronauer shook his gray-maned head. "But I cannot go. I have to stay here. I am the gardener, you see." turn about the cabin. His feet fell so lightly in the low gravity that it was soundless; he drifted ghst-fashion between the cluttered instruments and controls of the Beltboat. "I don't know what to do," he said. "We can't take him along. Imagine having a raving lunatic crowded in here with us for months. But, damn it, we can't abandon him either." "We won't be abandoning him," said Marian. "No one can say the situation is our fault. We'll let the government know, and he'll be all right till they send a ship for him." "Even so, it's the principle of the thing." He stared out the port, at the hugeness of night and frosty stars beyond, barren rock and mute loneliness, and the primal terror of it struck deep into him. "Leaving a man alone in thatr "He's done all right for twenty years, dear. He can last one more. After that, it'll be up to the official rescue party. We can suggest that they take a psychiatrist along." "You had no luck persuading him?" "None at all. I tried every day. I went over to his place while you were exploring the asteroid and talked to him." Wistfulness tinged her voice. "I told him about mankind and about Earth and summer moons and smoky hills in autumn, the way we've always dreamed it -- I've never seen Earth, Jim, except in pictures, but somehow it's more real to me than all this empty universe. He isn't interested. I had to quit when he started getting angry." Hardesty went over and kissed her. "You're a good kid," he murmured. "Some day, some day soon, we're going home to Earth. No more space for us. It'll be roses growing over a house by the seaside."... His fists clenched impotently.V'If only there'd been a strike right here on this damned lump! But I hunted everywhere. Not a thing worth digging out. Gronauer told the truth." "Why should he have lied to us?" "I don't know, except that he isn't normal any more. He doesn't react like a human being, even like a human who's been alone that long. Those plants have done something to him." Decision hardened Hardesty's lean face. Well, he doesn't get many more chances to come along. We're not hanging around here another twenty-four hours. The sooner off, the sooner we'll find that lode and go home to Earth." "Yes, I suppose so." Marian turned back toward the microscopic galley. "He's coming over for dinner, you know. I talked him into that much, at least." "Well, I suppose there's no harm in it. Any special motive other than hospitality?" "Oh, we'll make it as bright and cheerful as we can. Homelike. It may change his mind." "I doubt that. But we'll have done our best." Hardesty glanced out the port again. The Sun was rising, a tiny diacal light. Its thin radiance crept over blackened lava and tumbled granite, seeming only to add to the ruinous desolation. M arian busied herself, getting the small luxuries they had saved for festive occasions with an aroma that made her husband lick his lips and grin. She hummed as she worked, and somehow the table she set was like a bit of Earth -- the gleam of plate and silver, a centerpiece of flamered swordgrass blooms, even the tiny porcelain dachshund that was their mascot. "We're putting on the dog." she explained solemnly. "Now you go dress, Jim." He put on clean dungarees, knotted his one and atrocious tie, and slicked back his sandy hair. Marian had put on a print dress and dainty slippers ; she suddenly looked pathetically young. Hardesty wished with irritation that there was no guest coming, that this might be for the two of them alone. Briefly, he knew that they'd never really fit in on Earth, for something of the high, cold solitude had entered them and they were too self-sufficient and aloof. But that was a well-known psychological phenomenon. It was ooc reason why few prospectors went back till they'd made their pile and could live independently of society. Another was the difficulty, these days, of getting any land of decent job on Earth. It's not mankind we're ing back to. We'll have neighbors, but oar intimacy has become something that will never really let anyone else know us. It's Earth we want, Earth and .clean wirtds and the tall trees above. #T Sun and sea and sky. We want an environment that is home instead of deadly foe. We went the heritage of our race's evolution. The stars wheeled overhead, grand and lonely -- he'd miss the sky of space now and then; he'd wonder at the dimness of constellations -- but there'd be summer around him, a whisper of leaves, the chirp of crickets and a firefly bobbing through the warm and sleepy dark. No more metal, no more tanked air and canned food and armored life -- "they would have come to their kingdom. Harsh sunlight gleamed off the figure that approached. Gronauer. Hardesty sighed, pumped out the airttock and opened its outer valve. When he closed that again and opened the inner one, a breath of searing cold eddied from the figure which stood there. Gronauer climbed out of his suit and looked timidly around him. He had dressed in an old coverall given him by Marian. It didn't fit well and he was obviously uncomfortable in it. For a moment, he shrank from his host's welcome. "It is -- warm in here," he mumbled. "Sorry. Want me to lower the thermostat?" "No, please not to bother, I will get used to it. You were good to ask me." Gronauer edged nervously into the cabin. "Sit down. Dinner will be ready in a minute." 'T cannot stay too long." The stooped gray form placed itself on the edge of a recoil chair, as if ready to leap from sudden menace. "In here I am cut off. The garden might need me and I would not know." "Isn't that the case in your own cabin?" "No, no. There are roots growing through the plates. My children inside are part of the whole system. I have sealed around the roots so air does not get out, but the garden can still call me." The words were jerky, stammering a little, and the eyes were never still. "I noticed that every disturbance seemed to set up vibrations in the plants. Is that how they -- communicate?" "Yes. Formerly, before I came, those were just special stimuli causing certain stereotyped reactions. Like if a plant was hurt or killed by a rockfall, the vibrations triggered a reaction elsewhere, seeds were carried to the spot, a new plant was started. But after all these years, I can -- read? understand? -- more. Often I know just what is wrong even before I go there. By sending my own pulses out, I can usually cause to be done whatever must be done, even without going there to do the work myself. "A sort of nervous system, then." Hardesty rubbed his chin. "And now you've become its brain." The thought was unpleasant, somehow! Gronauer leaned forward eagerly. "And the eyes and hands, too. Many of the old functions  have died out because I do it quicker and better, so the garden needs me. It would probably die without me. That is why I cannot go with you." "Soup's on," called Marian gaily. I T was mostly synthetics and dehydrates, but you wouldn't have known it, for she was an inspired cook. Hardesty dug in eagerly. Gronauer, though, only picked unhappily at his share. "I hope you like it, Mr. Gronauer," said Marian, a little stiffly. His twisted face tried to smile an apology. "I am not used to such fare for a long time. Garden food tastes different. It feels different." He waved a hand inarticulately. "How shall I make  clear? It is that you eat things you have no kinship with; you kill them and devour them without any emotion. But I am nour ished by something of which I am a part." Wryly, Hardesty's mind wandered off on the subject of autophagy. Given perfect surgical tools, shockless and bloodless amputation, how long could a man survive by eating parts of himself? "At first I wanted to go back." Gronauer's tongue seemed loosened all at once. Perhaps the beer he was not used to had taken hold already. "It is strange to remember how lonely I was -- oh, for years I wept because there was no one and nothing else. But now I see that it is you who are lonely, each of you alone in a world of dead metal, shouting at someone else you cannot even be sure exists, cannot be sure what he is thinking of you or even if he is thinking at all." His grin was rather terrible. "How do you know you are not the only consciousness in a world of robots? Alone, alone, and you go to your grave and that is the end. But I belong. I feel the other life. It is part of me and I am part of it. My life has meaning and beauty -- my life, married to other sensitive life, all of us together against the void. No, no, I cannot go back to Earth!" He lapsed into stillness, sat looking out of the port at the not answer their remarks. Hardesty traded an exasperated look with Marian. "We're leaving, you know, .Gronauer," he said after they had finished and were sitting in the recoil chairs again. "This is your last chance to come with us." The gray, scarred head shook violently, so that the long hair swirled about the eyes. "I suppose you'll make out all right," said Hardesty. "We'll plot an orbit that'll get us to the nearest radio station -- I think that's Pallas right now -- as soon as possible, and from there we can relay word to Ceres. It won't be many months before a government ship comes for you." Gronauet shrank back and breath hissed between his teeth, "What then?" he gasped. "What will they do?" Despite himself, Hardesty was siffprised at the violence of the reaction. "Why, you have a legal right to stay here if you want, of course." Unless the psychiatrists decide you're insane, his mind added grimly. "But there'll be scientists to study your garden and your discoveries. There'll be supplies and companionship -- " "I do not want it!" Gronauer stood up, trembling. "I have all I want. I am the gardener. Is that not enough? Do not tell them I am here. They would come and hurt the garden." "Under the law, I can't abandon youi It's all right to leave you, I guess, seeing tht that's what you want, but not reporting a shipwrecked spaceman? I could get in trouble for that." "Who would know?" interjected Marian. She threw a wink at her husband over Gronauer'a shoulder. Soothe him, humor him till we're away from here. "If you wish, of course we'll keep your secret. It's your right to stay here alone if you really want to." "I want. I want!" "But think, Mr. Gronauer." She smiled at him warmly. "Think of what that will mean. You're getting old. You can't live forever. You'll die here and perhaps no one will discover this asteroid for centuries, or perhaps never. The garden will die without a human to attend it. If you let the scientists come, they'd preserve it as a natural wonder even when you were gone." "They would not understand." His voice was harsh and hostile. "The gardener must be part of the garden. He must grow into it, make it his life. Their scientific tending would not be enough." I think, said Hardesty's mind, that the old man is riht. This is more than a mechanical set of duties to' be performed. You can't replace a human brain with an electronic computer, even the best and latest model, even one which actually thinks. You can't replace the gardener with a paid attendant. Even if anyone would consent to live here alone, two or three years at a time, for any was. Could you be hired to let roots tap your bloodstream? "Then that's that," he said aloud, coldly. "The garden will last your lifetime, undisturbed." O rion wheeled mightily overhead, a glitter of frozen fire against an iniinite clear dark. Gronauer sat still. There were trickles of sweat on his face, and he was breathing heavily... Marian tried to break the embarrassed silence: "It has been a great privilege to know you, Mr. Gronauer. And the garden. Was there anybody you once knew? Any message, perhaps?" "No," he said abstractedly. "No one. Not any more." After another minute, his eyes lifted to theirs with a kind of entreaty. "I have thought of this before," he blurted. "I am, as you say, old. There should be a race of human gardeners here, to carry on. The garden is still growing, still evolving. It needs men, and it gives them rewards you cannot now imagine. Would -- would you think of staying here yourselves, having children here, too?" The thought was so grotesque that Hardesty had to laugh,  harsh sound jarring against the drumhead of tense silence. It seemed to strike Marian differently. "Children," she repeated. "Yes, Jim, we have to get back to Earth soon, while we can still be young with our kids." "You could have them now," said Gronauer. "Here." "No. It isn't fair to a child to raise it anywhere but on Earth. It isn't right to grow up in metal." There was something haunted in her voice. "I know. It happened to me." "A child growing up here -- " The castaway's words trailed off. He drew a long breath. "Would you come with me?" he asked. "There is something I would like to show you. It will change your outlook on all this. You will at least see why I want to stay here alone." "What's that?" Eespite himself, Hardesty felt a resurgence of interest. Damn it, the asteroid was unique. "I carmot explain in words. You will have to see. It is not so far to go." "Well -- " "It is the last gift I can give you." "Certainly weTl come," said Marian. "We'll be glad to, won't we, Jim?" "Sure," he said worriedly. He went to the spacesuit locker and opened it. "We'd better hurry, then. It'll be sunset again pretty quick." Y#I We will be following the Sun, said Gronauer. He lumbered over to his own suit where it stood in the airlock. Briefly, his gnarled hands stroked the gray-green vines that draped it -- an odd, wistful caress. Hardesty peeled off shirt and pants, revealing the insulated one-piece undergarment which served as padding below his armor. Marian exchanged her dress for a similar outfit. It looked well on her slim figure. Hardesty smiled as he helped her into her suit. Gronauer donned his own armor. He was still breathing hard. Something very odd here. When he was looking away, Hardesty alhbied quietly over to the tool chest, palmed his gun, and clipped it onto his spacesuit. Marian saw the gesture, started to say something, and throttled her words. Maybe he was right. There was at least no harm in it. Or in Gronauer. He might have been a little crazy by normal Earth standards, but what did those mean out here, three hunBut he was not violent; he partook of the serene, timeless strength of the garden. A couple of hours' jaunt was not too muctx to please an old man trapped in a loneliness he himself no longer recognized. T hey came out under a sky that was flashing ice and bitter dark, with a waa little sun low above ragged black stone. Gronauer led the way, a bounding figure of shadow and dazzling metal, now lost in a gully of night and now outlined grotesquely against the sprawl of stars. Hardesty swore at his speed, lengthened his own flat leaps, and felt rock and scree rattle beneath his boots. They were moving into the far bleak eye of the Sun, faster than the planetoid's axial spin. As the stars reeled insanely backward and the Sun began to climb again, Hardesty had a sudden weird feeling that he was moving back in time. He choked it down and concentrated on picking his way through the jumbled, looming, crazily tilted stones, down riven gulches and up hillsides that were heaped slabs of igneous rock, a nightmare landscape of ruin and murk. It was a zigzag path, he noticed dimly, leading into an area he had only skimmed through in his search, but he was too busy keepingup with Gronauer and watching Marian to think more deeply about it. His breath was harsh and loud in a suddenly hot spacesuit. The Sun was halfway down to the opposite horizon when Gronauer went into another ravine in and out of sight. Hardesty followed him, scrambled awkwardly down its steep sides, the undiffused glow of his flash picking boulders out like distorted faces. The crack was long and deep; he had to fumble in shadow for several minutes before he came out at the other end. Then he looked around. He stood on a gigantic basalt block sloping off to the edge of the world, overhead and around him the stars and the rime-frost arch of the Milky Way, and he was alone. "Gronauer!" His voice echoed rattling in his helmet. "Where the hell are you?" Useless, of course. Gronauer didn't have a suit radio. But how the devil could he have gotten lost? Marian came leaping out of the ravine and over to stand by him. Her breathing was as hard as his. "What became of the old man?" she asked anxiously "That's what I'd like to know. First he takes off like a bat out of Mars, and then he manages to lose us. Just went too fast? No, I was keeping up all right. He must have climbed the canyon wall ahead of me -- I wouldn't have seen him -- and taken off in some other direction." "But why. Jim?" "I don't know. He's mad, completely cracked, of course. Needs psychiatry in the worst way. But let the government worry about him. I'm fed up." Hardesty took a long stride forward. "Come on, let's get back to the ship." "But he may just have made a mistake -- " "Then he can catch up with us and lead us properly. The hell with him." "Well, he does seem a pretty hopeless case at that, doesn't he? The poor old man! I hope we sec him again before we blast off." Hardesty shrugged. "Personally, I don't give a hang. Now let's see, which way is the Gold Rush?" "Why, I suppose -- that way. Toward the Sun." "We zigzagged quite a bit, remember." Hardesty's hand rang against his metal leg in a slap of exasperation. "Nuts! We're lost!" "There's the asteroid's pole star, up there, dear, and the Sun was west of it at setting, so our general direction should be that way." "Yeah. I hope it's not too general. Let's go." They set off along the sloping hillside toward a razor-backed spine of rock, black against the Milky Way. Neither one said anything. It was hard to orient yourself, if you didn't know every inch of the path. You had to twist and turn, picking a slow way across a narrow landscape of crags and gullies and craters, sometimes lost in darkness that was like a flowing liquid, sometimes blinded by the thin yet vicious sunlight directly in your eyes. There were no broad outlooks. Vision was bounded on every hand. Only the turning sky had depth. Men had gotten lost on asteroids and wandered within a few miles of their ships till their oxygen gave out. It was not a comforting reflection. Hardesty shoved it resolutely out of his mind. A fter an hour or so, they passed a region of plant growth. Hardesty looked at the stretch of garden with a rising bitterness in him. Low, silvery shrubs, lichenous growth spotting naked rock with red and brown and yellow, high, gaunt, yuccalike boles and gallows branches, sullen blood-crimson glow of heat bladders, huge, muscular roots plunging deep into the little world's iron heart, delicate faery tracing of vines looped and coiled between the shrubs, the throb and pulse of the garden's beating hearts -- a reach of growth over the hills and out of sight, a frigid world made alive where no life should be, supreme triumph of organism over the chaotic waste of the frozen and hostile Universe -- But it was too alien. The eldritch forms only added to the strangeness and loneliness, and he hgted them. He kicked viciously and saw the pulse of alarm ripple out through the garden and over the near horizon, leaves rustling and whispering in the windless vacuum of space, the garden talking to itself. "Go ahead," he muttered. "Call your brain. That's all he is now, your brain and your hands. You've taken his soul away." "Don't, Jim," said Marian. "Please don't." "Oh, all right." He trudged in silence for a while before adding shamefacedly: "I'm being silly, I know. This is nothing but another instance of adaptation. Life on Earth is interdependent, too, a balance of nature. But I still don't like it." The Sun crossed the sky again, and lowered behind them. Hardesty glanced worriedly at his wrist chrono. They'd been out for a good two hours; their tanks didn't hold very much more air. Don't get excited. That speeds up your mefaboZsm, makes you burn oxygen all the faster, blunts the cool judgment you need. Take it easy. Slow and easy. Lots of time. Sunset, and darkness like a steel shutter slammed tight. Nothing around them looked fa#M of these #I Hudson St., N. Y. #, N. Y. (Cbk wMck mtH yo wont -- (kIom check ( money order.  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus one extra Ml length novel #  Galoxy Reader of Science Fiction pius I yeor swbscriptioR to Galaxy Mogaxine (Ycv servo # on this offer # Q Galaxy Reoder of Scrence Fiction plus eor Mxt # full length novels. # Q Galoxy Reader of ScierKe Fiction plus I year subscription to Galaxy Magaxine, plus our next # full iMgth novels fYou save # on this offer) # We will extend your current subscripdofl if you ora alreotfy  subscriber. I miliar yet. Rather, everythinj looked the same. All these leaning spires and tumbled boulders and gnarled old craters looked alike and there was no way home. Marian's hand crept into his and he squeezed it, grateful for the touch oi human nearness. "According to the stars, we're in the neighborhood noW, he said as unemotionally as possible. "We'd better follow a spiral path -- " Out of the corner of an eye, he saw the blue-white sheet of flame that spurted up over the horizon, saw it rising and spreadveiled the Stax'S, and flung an arm across his eyes with a shout. The next moment the ground heaved and buckled under him, Aung him #M spinning upward in the light gravity and bounced him against a lurching granite cliff, then tossed him back to the shaking, sundering rock below. "Marian!" he cried. "Marian?" The fire was gone, but half the sky was blotted from sight by a column of smoke and dust, climbing and climbing like a monster spirit let out of Solomon's flask, and the ground shivered and rumbled and boulders danced on its surface. Hardesty clung to the rocks, clawing himself into naked stone, and his own screaming was loud and mad in his cars. "Jim! Are you all right, Jim?" They stumbled toward each other, falling and struggling as earthquake waves raced around and around the tiny world. They locked arms and lay on the cracking ground together ,and looked wildly at the nightmare scenery. seasick roll died away. A miniature landslide came down a hill slope, slowly in the acceleration of feeble gravity, the slowness of fleeing through clinging mud. Hardesty and Marian got up and stumbled toward the black jinni which rose against the stars. He felt drained of emotion, a machine moving wearily toward some destined end. He topped 'a ridge and looked'with blank eyfes at ttie' ruin of' hiS ship. Tt "Was newest "idea" anthology! Invaders of Earth Here in one giant volume are #I imagination-stretching stories of invasion frn outer space --  none published in book form before -- plus the famous radio script "Invasion from Mars" which terrified thousands when it was broadcast by Orson Welles in #. They're the cream of the crop, by such science-fiction masters as: Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, Katherine MacLean, Margaret St. Clair, Murray Leinster, Fredric Brown, Eric Frank Russell, Anthony Boucher (an unpublished story), and many others. # pages. # And don't miss first "idea" anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction "Should be in every sciencefiction fan's library." ' St. Louis Post-Dispatch , # pages. # Bo# books at bookstores oj; from # Madison Ave., N. Y. # scattered to the horizon and beyond, and the molten slag was still aglow beneath its resting place. "Gronauer," he said, just that one word, but it held loathing for the castaway and for himself, the time and anxiety he had wasted trying to help someone who didn't want to be helped, but mostly for his stupidity. Marian stared around. "Where?" "Gronauer? I don't know. He gave us the slip and came back, wrecked the safety controls and blew up the nuclear pile of the ship." "No," she said. 'He wouldn't. It must have been a meteor." "Not where I landed. A meteor would have had to come straight down to hit the ship. Even then, it wouldn't blow up the pile." He kicked savagely at a boulder, which flew off like a bird winging south. "Gronauer did it. You know that yourself." "Why?" Marian's whisper, like a dim voice from across that gulf of space that winked and jeered was so faint that even in his earphones he could scarcely hear it. 'Why?" They saw the figure lurching up the slope toward them, hands dangling empty, the helmeted head overgrown with vines like an ancient Greek nature god. Hardesty drew his gun and rested it on his free elbow for steadiness. "Jim! No!" "Calm down," he said. "After what he did, Tm not taking any chances." "Arc you going to -- kill him?" "It's not a bad idea. He's insane, probably homicidal. We can't watch him all the time..." Gronauer must have seen the gun, but his slow pace did not slacken. One hand came up, tenderly caressing the vine that trailed off his shoulder. Hardesty kept the gun level, but he did not fire, merely tensed his finger on the trigger when Gronauer suddenly broke into a staggering run toward them. Marian gripped Hardesty's arm. The old man fell over a rock and tried to get up. "First time I've seen him stumble," Hardesty said puzzledly, and lowered the gun. "Come on. The worst he can do is heave something at us. He's unarmed." Gronauer was still trying to crawl toward them when they reached him. He stopped and rolled over on one side to look up at them. Blood and foam and twisted Vines and tangled beard could not hide the smile on his battered lips. Tears glistened on Marian's face in the keen starlight. Hardesty heard a sob in the radio and wanted to hold her close and #t tell it wasn't real, that it had never been real, and that the flamc-colored woods of Earth's October lay just beyond the jugged, airless pinnacles. But he couldn't. Instead, he knelt when Gronauer motioned him closer, and put his helmet against the castaway's. "Now you will have to stay," aid Gronauer with feeble triumph. "I could not get away from the ship in time, but that does not matter. I am old and would have died soon. Then the garden would not have anyone to take care of it. Now it will." ing us for the sake of some lousy vegetation," Hardesty said bitterly. T should have known you were crazy and taken off right away and sent help back to you." Gronauer tried to shake his head. "Not crazy. You will gather the supplies that were not destroyed in the explosion and move into my cabin. You will read my notes and tend my plants... and become part of the symbiosis, as I was." "Td shoot Marian and myself first!" "No, you will hope to be found by someone else. That hope will keep you from committing suicide. When you are ready to give up hoping, you will be -- adjusted. You will like it here. This will be the home you were searching for; this will be your Earth. And you will have children -- " "So your damned garden can go on!" Gronauer nodded and his smile grew wider even while his eyes lost their focus. "The garden will go on," he aid. just before his breath ceased altogether. Hardesty stood up. Marian was clinging to hiin and her voice was insistent in his earphones, but he didn't hear her. He wts looking at the stars, the bright stars which neither comforted nor mocked, being too remote to care, and the green of the plants in the distance, and be thought with a dull despair that even now it looked like New England in October. All HriMe rictlOD. rastMT and Supernatural Rwika in Print In America or Snc. lantll I ran avppl; anthlof you wa menllonrd. Hated or offered anywherel Vlit MT and laapeet the liargeat Vaidctjr of Hi and New Books of tbla kind In tbe world or#d lOa fr wv Bie Printed CUsekUst ! IkSI Titles Ineludlne # Papertwund Books at # ( Moh wp.  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Instead, you hove whet the author describes is on originat and a copy Don't try to lake it from there. You can't possibly onticipote the complicationi, conflictthe suspense of this remarkable situation, and especially the ingenious resolution. high mark in science fiction humor. h definition, o Utopia is on ideally perfect society. ftut... perfect according to whose standards? Plato's Republic was wonderful, except for slaves. Sir Thomas More's excluded non-intellectuals. Edward Bellamy's was a do-gooder's heaven, ambitious people not admitted. The late Mr. Hitler's was o dream of Prussian militarists, sure death for everybody else. So a Utopia, being o wishful state of mind, depends on who's doing the wishingl For example, whot would an advertising man's notion of Utopia be like? That, startlingly, is the theme of the serioi beginning in the June issue of ambitions and ingenious conflicts of the Hucksters of the Future! 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All you have to do is fill in the coupon below, write out a check for only S#. # and  mail both off today. Incidentally, you'll be saving money because with a subscription you will get # issues for the news stand price of #. Seems smart to do it right now. Dept. # i' Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson St. New York #, NY. I enclose (chejk one) # for I year # for # years GALAXY Science Ficrion i By Jay Franklin e The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon  when an atomic explosion destroys the battleship Alaska, Lt. Commander Frank Jacklin returns to consciousness in New York and is shocked to find himself in the body of Winnie Tomkins, a dissolute stockbroker. Unable to explain his real identity, Jacklin attempts to fit into Tomkin's way of life. Complications develop when Jacklin gets involved with Tomkin's wife, his red-haired mistress and his luscious secretary. Three too many women for Jacklin to handle. His foreknowledge of the Alaska sinking and other top secret matters plunges him into a mad world of intrigue and excitement in Washington -- that place where anything can happen and does! Where is the real Tomkins is a mystery explained in the smashing climax. Completely delightful, wholly provocative, the Rat Race is a striking novel of the American Scene.  Watch For It On Sale May #th adidxy As!(tenl Editor Art Diroclor Production Manager by Frederik Pohl  C. M. Kornblufh # Advortiiing Moneger Cover by Illustrating it published mombly by Galaxy Publishing Corpo taliun. Main offices: #I Hudson Street. New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# co ies) # per year io the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Cen cral America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second riats matter at the Pok O ffice, New Yorit, N. Y. Copyright. #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M... Guinn, president. All ci;ht#, including ttanslacioa, re served. All material submitiedmust be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisnec assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All scones printed in this magaaine arc fiction, and any similarity between characters and acnial persona M eoincidancaL by Micboei Sbooro # by Richard Wilson I # fay Sryce Walton # by Simon Eisner # by Willy Ley # by hi. L. Gold # fay Groff Conklin # Printed In the U. S. A. by Hie Guinn Ce Ine. RmUSp on. time of year when the past six issues arc rated. If this practice makes sense, I wish someone would explain how. Ti.:re are so many unfair aspects that I don't see why writers insist on it. A story that places low in oe issue could very possibly have been high in the next. Even if all are masterpieces, giving them orders of preference means a descending scale of apparent approval. A topical subject can put a story ahead of one who.'c appeal will outlast it. Also, readers change their minds, a factor that cannot affect the rating of an issue until too late. The hnal point is that writers are generally frustrated when they find their bc.?t efforts down at the bottom for any of these unpredictable reasons. Since writers understandably wai;t to know how their work is received, let me suggest a compromise that seems more logical: Suppose we rote favorites over the Eix issues t'lat comprise a volume. That ghes us a minimum of thirty stories to evaluate, in v!V:h there will be enough repremtatives of ajJ categories to mn-e comparison intelligible. It will, in addition, give every filciiy a chance to be judged agninsl those in other issues. WliriluT you think the listing should hr in order of preference is up to you. Let's have your opinion. And, of course, your clioic  s from October #I to March Add anything else you cmr to -- improving, what types of lii tiin you prefer and so forth. All llu sc are valuable in establishing imd continuing -- or revising, when necessary -- an editorial policy. T WO sources of gratification: the enthusiastic reception of Willy Ley's department and Tito Demolished Man. Offering an answer to every question submitt I resembles uncapping a geyser; the mail is flooding in handsomely. But Mr. Ley, undaunted, invites still more. Our single request is that you put your questions on one sheet of paper, your letter to and your name and addrens on both. They'll be withheld if you want, but we'd like to keep our files in systematic shape. The Demolished Man created more comment than any science fiction novel in years: Elmer Davis discussed it in a radio broadcast; dozens of writers wrote dazzled letters; hundreds of readers poured appreciation over the story; bidding for book publication was brisk, with Shasta Publishers copping the contract with a spectacular (and deserved) advance, and arrangements are being made for eventual paperbound reprint. Alfred Bester, author of The Demolished Man is #, six feet, # pounds, married to a radio and TV actress named Rollie who matches his kilowatt output despite being a much smaller dynamo. A literary perfectionist, Bester is kept so busy writing radio and TV scripts that science fiction is in the nature of a vacation for him. Note to impatient authors: for all his grasp of technique, he spent a year and a half working on The Demolished Manf Several other Bester stories are also intends to do a novel every course, will see them first. Planet by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth should also be a landmark in science fiction -- it's factory, suspenseful as crossing Niagara Falls on a tight wire. Frederik Pohl is #, a bit over six feet, about # pounds, tied to a literary agency that bears his name and keeps him from moklng his rightful contribution to science fiction. This is the first time he has ever written under his own name; his list of pseudonyms comes to no less than a dozen. He has promised to contribute regul.arly to future issues. C. M. Kornbluth is also #, about five feet eight, around # pounds, married, has a Very new baby -- his biography was recorded some months ago, so there is no need to repeat it here. He is a steady contributor to The literary philosophy behind Gravy Planet is one I'm fond of: what would happen if any given situation is carried to the utmost extremes we are capable of imagining? The result may or may not ever come true: that's not the point. Neither is approval or disapproval -- the situation must be viewed purely in terms of its contemporaries. We are no more fitted to judge future environments than a Crusader who, if brought to the present, would be enraged to find that the war against the Saracens had been abandoned. Gravy Planet. a gravy planet A Utopia is an ideal society, of course, but what constitutes Utopia depends on whose ideas ore being gratified. Here, for instance, is a perfect society which is generoiiy overlooked! AS I dressed that morning,  I ran over in my mind  m the long list of statistics, evasions and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. My section -- Production -- had been plagued with a long series of illnesses and resignations, and you can't get work done without people to do it. But the Board wasn't likely to take that as an excuse. I rubbed the depilatory soap .over my face and rinsed it with the trickle from the fresh-water tap. Wasteful, of course, but I could afford the cost, and salt water always leaves my face itchy. Before the last of the stubble was washed away, the trickle stopped and didn't start again. I swore a little and finished rinsing with salt. It had been happening lately; some people blamed Connie saboteurs. Loyalty raids were being held throughout the New York Water Supply Corporation, but so far they hadn't changed the damned water situation. Very annoying, considering the price of fresh water -- you'd think the company would protect its customers. The morning newscast over the shaving mirror caught me for a moment... the President's lastnight speech, a brief glimpse of the Venus rocket, squat and silvery on the Arizona sand, rioting in Panama ... I switched it off S when the quarter-hour time signal chimed over the audio band. it looked as though I was going to be late again, which certainly would not help mollify the Board. I saved five minutes by wearing yesterday's shirt and by leaving my breakfast juice to grow warm and sticky on the table. But I lost the five minutes by trying to call Kathy. She didn't answer the phone.  And I was late getting into the office. F ortunately -- and unprecedentedly -- Fowler Schocken was late too. In our office it was Fowler's custom to hold Board conferences fifteen minutes before the regular opening of the business day. It kept the clerks and stenos on their toes, and it was no hardship to Fowler. He spent every morning in the office anyway: "morning" to him began with the rising of the Sun. Today, though, I had time to get my secretary's summary off my desk before the meeting. When Fowler Schocken walked in with a courteous apology for his tardiness. I was sitting in my place at the foot of the table, reasonably relaxed and as sure of myself as a Fowler Schocken Associate was ever likely to be. "Good morniag," Fowler said and the eleven of us made the proper murmur. He didn't sit down; he stood gazing fondly as a father at us for about a minute and a half. Then he looked carefully and delightedly about the room. 'Tve been thinking about our conference room," he said, and we all looked around at it. Tlie room wasn't big, it wasn't small; say ten by twelve. But it was cool, well-lighted and most imposingly furnished. The air recirculators were cleverly hidden behind animated friezes; the carpeting was thick and soft; and every piece of furniture was constructed from top to bottom of authentic, expertized, genuine tree-groum wood. Fowler Schocken said; "We  have a nice conference room here, men, as we should have -- Fowler Scdocken Associates is the largest advertising agency in the city. We bill a megabuck a year more than anybody else around. And -- " he looked around at all of us -- T think you'll agree tliat all find it worth while. I don't believe tlierc's a person in this room who has less than a tworoom apartment." He twinkled at me. "Even the bachelors. Speaking for myself. I've done well. My summer place looks right over one of the largest parks on Long Island. I haven't tasted any protein but new nat for years and when I go out for a spin I pedal a Cadillac. The wolf is a long way from my door. And I think any one of you can say the same. Right?" The hand of our Director of Market Research shot up and Fowler nodded at him: "Yes, Matthew?" Matt Runstead knew which side his bread was oiled on. He glared belligerently around the table. "I just want to go on record as agreeing with Mr. Schocken one hundred per cent -- all the way!" "Thank you, Matthew." It took Fowler Schocken a moment before he could go on. "Well, we all know what put us where we are. We remember the Starrzelius Verily account, and how we put Indiastries on the map. The first spherical trust. Merging a whole subcontinent into a single manufacturing complex. Schocken Associates pioneered on both of them. Nobody can say we were floating with the tide. But that's behind us. "Men, I want to know something. You can tell me truthfully -- are we getting soft?" He took time to look at each of our faces searchingly, ignoring the forest of hands in the air. Mine was right up there, too. Then he waved to the man at his right. "You first. Ben." Ben Winston stood up and baritoned: "Speaking for Industrial Anthropology, no! Listen to today's progress report -- you'll get it in the noon bulletin, but let me brief you now. According to the midnight indices, all primary schools east of the Mississippi are now using our packaging recommendation for the school lunch program. Soyaburgers and generated steak are shrewdly packed in containers the same shade of green as the Universal products, to transfer unconsciously the distaste to our competition. But the candy, ice cream and kiddiebutt cigarette ration are wrapped in colorful Starrzelius red. When those little consumers grow up..." He lifted his eyes exultantly from his notes. "According to our extrapolation, fifteen years from now Universal products will be bankrupt and olT the market entirely!" He sat down in a wave of applause. Schocken dapped, too, and looked brightly at the rest of us. I leaned forward with Expression One -- eagerness, intelligence, competence -- all over my face. But I needn't have bothered. Fowler pointed to the lean man next to Winston. Harvey Bruner. "I don't have to tell you men that Point-of-Sale has its special problems," Harvey said, puffing his thin cheeks. 'T swear, the whole damned government must be infiltrated with Connies!' He was beginning to get hysterical. "You know what they've done. They outlawed compulsive subsoTiics in our auditory captiveaudicnce advertising -- but we've bounced back with a list of semantic cue words that tie in with every basic trauma and neurosis in American life today. They listened to the safety cranks and stopped us from projectirig our me.ssages on aircar windows, but Lab tells me -- " he nodded to our Director of Research across the table -- "that soon we'll be testing a system that projects direct on the retina of the eye. "But we're not content with that. We're going forward. As an example I want to mention the Coffiestpro -- " He broke off. "Excuse me. Mr. Schocken." he whispered. "Has Security checked this room?" Fowler Schocken nodded. "Absolutely clean. Nothing but the usual State Department and House of Representatives spymikes. And of course we're feeding a canned playback into them." Harvey relaxed again. "Well, about this Cofhest," he said. "We're sampling it in fifteen key cities. It's the usual offer -- a thirteen-week supply of Coffiest, ten thousand dollars in cash and a weekend vacation on the Ligurian Riviera to everybody who comes in. But -- and here's what makes this campaign truly great, in my estimation -- each sample of CofRsimple alkaloid. Nothing harmful, but definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least fifty thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest -- three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar." Fowler Schocken beamed and I braced myself into Expression One again. Next to Harvey sat Tildy Mathis, Chief of Personnel and hand-picked by Schocken himself. He didn't ask women to speak at Board sessions, and next to Tildy sat me. But Fowler let me down w'ith a smile. He said: "I won't ask every section to report. We haven't the time. But you've given me your answer, gentlemen, It's the answer I like. You've met every challenge up to now. I want to give you a new challenge." He pressed a button on his monitor panel and swiveled his chair around. The lights went down in the room : the projected art calendar (executives only) that hung behind Schocken's chair faded and revealed the mottled surface of the screen. On it another picture began to form. before, that same day, in the news screen over my shaving mirror. t It was the Venus rocket, a thousand-foot monster, the bloated child of the slim V-#s and stubby Moon rockets of the past. Around it was a scaffolding of steel and aluminum, a-crawl with tiny figures that manipulated minute, blue-white welding flames. The picture was obviously recorded; it showed the rocket as it had been weeks or months ago in an earlier stage of construction, not poised as if ready for takeoff, the way I had seen it earlier. A voice from the screen said triumphantly and inaccurately: "This is the ship that spans the stars!' I recognised the voice as belonging to one of the organtoned commentators in Aural Effects and expertized the script without effort as emanating from one of Tildy's girl copywriters. The talented slovenliness that would confuse Venus with a star had to come from somebody on her staff.  "This is the ship that a modern Columbus will drive through the void,' said the voice. "Six lightning and steel -- an ark for eighteen hundred mep and women, and everything to make a new world for their home. Who will be in it? What fortunate pioneers will tear an empire from the rich, fresh soil of another vorld? "Let me introduce you to them -- a man and his wife, two of the intrepid . , The voice kept goif. On the screen, the picture dissolved to a spacious suburban roomette in early morning -- the husband folding the bed into the wall and taking down the partition to the children's nook; the wife dialing breakfast and erecting the table. Over the breakfast juices and the children's pablum (with a steaming mug of CoRiest for each, of course) they spoke persuasively to each other about how wise and brave they had been to apply for passage in the Venus rocket. And the closing question of their youngest babbler ("Mommy, when I grow up kin I take my boys and girls to a place as nice as Venus?") cued the switch to a highly imaginative series of shots of Venus as it would be when the child grew up -- verdant mountain vistas. T he commentary did not deny, and neither did it dwell on, the decades of hydroponics and life in hermetically sealed cabins that the pioneers would have to endure while working on Venus's unbreathable atmosphere and waterless chemistry. Instinctively I had set the timer button on my watch as the f picture started. When it was over, I read the dial: nine minutes, three times as long as any commercial could legally run! It was only after the lights were on again, the cigarettes lit and Fowler Schocken well into his pep talk for the day that I saw the answer. He called our attention to the history of advertising -- from the simple handmaiden task of selling already manufactured goods to its present role of creating industries and redesigning a world's folkways to meet the needs of, commerce. He touched once more on what we ourselves, Fowler Schocken Associates, had done with our own expansive career. And then he said : "There's an old saying, men, 'The world is our oyster.' We've made it come true. But we've eaten that oyster. We've actually and literally conquered the world. Like Napoleon, we weep for new worlds to conquer. And there -- " he waved at the screen behind him -- "you have just seen the first of those worlds." I have never liked Matt Runstead, as you may have gathered. He is a Paul Pry whom I suspect of viretapping even within the company. He must have spied out the Venus project well in advance, because not even the most talented reflexes could have brought out his little speech. While the rest of us were still busy assimilating what Fowler Schocken had told us, Runstead was leaping to his feet. "Gentlemen," he said with passion, "this is truly the work of genius. Not just India, not just a commodity, but a whole planet to sell ! I salute you, Fowler Schocken -- the Clive, the Bolivar, the John Jacob Astor of a new world!" Matt was first, as I say, but every one of us got up and said in turn about the same thing. Including me. Kathy had never understood it and I'd tried to explain that it was a religious ritual -- like the champagne bottle at a ship's launching, or the sacrifice of the virgin to the corn crop. I don't think any of us, except maybe Matt Runstead, would feed habit-forming narcotics to the world for money alone. There was a high ideal behind it -- production for use and profit. With our enormously advanced technology, we could produce more coffee, to mention just one item out of the innumerable roster of foods and goods and services, than the world could normally consume. Our sacred task was to keep the demand right in step with the supply -- not an easy one if you consider the flood of things produced on farms and in factories. But we did it! By Morgan, we J did it and we were proud to be able to! Fowler Schocken touched another button and showed us a chart. He explained it carefully item by item. He showed us tables and graphs and diagrams of the entire new Department of Fowler Schocken Associates which would be set up to handle the development and exploitation of the planet Venus. He covered the tedious lobbying and friendmaking in Congress which had given us the exclusive right to' build up and profit from the planet, and I began to see how he could safely use a nine-minute commercial. He explained how the Government naturally wanted Venus to be an American planet and how they had invoked our American supremacy in advertising to make it possible. As he spoke, we all caught some of his fire. I envied the man who would head the Venus Section; any one of us would have committed even a commercial offense to get the job. He spoke of trouble lining up the Senator from DuPont Chemicals with his # votes, and of an easy triumph over the Senator from Nash-Kelvinator with his six. He spoke proudly of a faked Connie demonstration against Fowler Schocken which had lined up the anti-Connie Secretary of the Interior. Visual Aids had done a beautiful job of briefing the information, but we were there nearly an hour looking at the charts and listening to Fowler's achievements and plans. But finally he clicked off the projector and said: "There you have it. That's our new campaign. And it starts right away -- now. I have only one more announcement to make and then we can all get to work." Fowler Schocken is a good showman. He took the time to find a slip of paper and read from it a sentence that the lowest of our copyboys could deliver off the cuff. "The chairman of the Venus Section," he read "will be Mitchell Courtenay." And that was the biggest surprise of all, because Mitchell Courtenay, five feet eleven inches tall, sandyhaired, moderately good-looking except for a nose that was pushed a little off center -- is me. II three or four minutes while the rest of the Board went back to their offices, and the elevator ride down from the Board room to my own office on the eighty n sixth floor took a few seconds, so Hester was already clearing out my desk when I arrived. "Congratulations, Mr. Courtenay," she said. "You're moving to the eighty-ninth now. Isn't it wonderful? And I'll have a private office, too!" I thanked her and picked up the phone over the desk, staying out of her way. The first thing I had to do was get my staff in and turn over the reins of Production : Tom Gillespie was next in line. But the first thing I did do was to dial Kathy's apartment again. There was still no answer, so I called in the boys. They were properly sorry to see me go and properly delighted about everybody moving up a notch. And then it was lunch time, so I postponed the problem of the planet Venus until the afternoon. I made a phone call, ate quickly in the company cafeteria, took the elevator down to the shuttle and the shuttle south for sixteen blocks. Coming out, I found myself in the open air for the first time that day and reached for my anti-soot plugs, but didn't put them in. The light rain had temporarily washed the air clean. It was summer, hot and sticky ; the hordes of people crowding the sidewalks were as anxious as I to get back inside a building. I had to bulldoze my way across the street and into the lobby. The elevator took me up fourteen floors. It was an old building with imperfect air conditioning; I felt a chill in my damp suit. It occurred to me to use that instead of the story I had prepared, but I decided against it. A girl in a starched white uniform looked up as I walked into the office. I said; "My name is Silver. Walter P. Silver. I have an appointment." "Yes. Mr. Silver," she remembered. "Your heart. You said it was an emergency." "That's right. It's probably psychosomatic, but I felt -- " "Of course." She waved me to a chair, "Dr. Nevin will see you in just a moment." It was ten minutes. A young woman came out of the doctor's office and a man who had been waiting in the reception room before me went in; then he came out and the nurse said to me; "Will you go into Dr. Nevin's office now?" I went in. Kathy, very trim and handsome in her doctor's smock, was putting "S case chart in her desk. When she straightened up, she said, "Oh. Mitch!' in a very annoyed tone. "I told only one lie," I said. "I gave the girl a phony name. But it is an emergency. And my heart is involved." There was a faint impulse to ward a smile, but it didn't quite reach the surface. "Not medically," she said. "I told her it was probably psychosomatic. She said to come in anyhow." "I'll speak to her about that. Mitch, you know I can't see you during working hours. Now please -- " I sat down next to her desk. "Vou won't see me any time, Kathy. What's the trouble?" "Nothing's the trouble. Please go away, Mitch. I'm a doctor; I have work to do." "Nothing as important as this. Kathy, I tried to call you all last night and all this morning.' She struck a cigarette without looking at me. "I wasn't home." "No, you weren't. I don't suppose I have the right to ask my own wife where she spends her time, do I?" "Damn it, Mitch, you know -- " Her phone rang. She screwed her eyes shut for a moment. Then she picked up the phone, leaning back in her chair, looking across the room, relaxed, a doctor soothing a patient. It took only a few moments. But when it was all over, she was entirely self-possessed. "Please go away," she said, stubbing out her cigarette. "Not until you tell me when you'll see me." "I... haven't time to see you. I'm not your wife. You have no right to bother me like this. I could have you enjoined or arrested." "My certificate's on file," I reminded her. "Mine isn't. It never will be. As soon as the year is up. we're through, Mitch." "There was something I wanted to tell you." Kathy had always been reachable through curiosity. Instead of saying again, "Please go away," she said, "Well, what is it?" "It's something big. It calls for a celebration. And I'm not above using it as an excuse to see you for just a little while tonight. Please. Kathy -- I love you very much and I promise not to make a scene." "Well -- " While she was thinking, her phone rang. "All right," she said. "Call me at home. Seven o'clock. Now let me take care of the sick people." She picked up the phone. I let myself out of her office while she was talking, and she didn't look after me. F owler schocken was hunched over his desk as I walked in. He was staring at the latest issue of Taunton's Weekly. The magazine was blinking in full color as the triggered moleII cules of its inks collected photons by driblets and released them in pages at me and asked: "What do you think of this, Mitch?" "Sleazy advertising," I said promptly. "If we had to stoop so low as to sponsor a magazine like Taunton Associates, I think I'd resign. It's too cheap a trick." He put the magazine face down; the hashing inks gave one last burst and subsided as their light source was cut off. "Yes, it's cheap," he said thoughtfully. "But you have to give them credit for enterprise. Taunton gets sixteen and a half week. Nobody else's -- just Taunton clients. And I hope you didn't mean that literally about resigning. I just gave Harvey the goahead on Schock. The first issue comes out in the fall, with a print He mercifully held up his hand to cut off my stammering try at an explanation. "I understood what you meant, Mitch. You were against cheap advertising. So am I. Taunton is to me the epitome of everything that keeps advertising from finding its rightful place with the clergy, medi-' cine and the bar in our way of life. There isn't a shoddy trick he wouldn't pull, from bribing a judge to stealing away 'an employee. And, Mitch, he's a man you'll have to watch." "Why? I mean, why particularly?" Schocken chuckled. "Because we stole Venus from him. It wasn't easy to persuade the Government that it should be our baby." "I see," I said, and I did. Our representative government now is more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not, of course, representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem, which is the only realistic way to govern a country. A citizen's vote must be weighed in the same way as a member of a family exerts influence -- according to his wisdom and success. His power, in other words. Just as the head of a family makes its decisions because he bears the most responsibility and the ability to enforce his decisions, a nation must, obviously, be governed by its leaders. This has always been true in fact. Ours is the first civilization, however, which admits the reality of the situation and applies the correct solution with admirably logical practicality. One thing was bothering me. "Won't Taunton be likely to take -- well, direct action?" "Oh, he'll try to steal it back," Fowler said mildly. "That's not what I mean. You remember what happened with Antarctic Exploitation." "I was there. A hundred and forty casualities on our side. God knows what they lost." "And that was only one continent. Taunton takes these things pretty personally.If he filed a feud over that, won't he do it for a whole planet?" Fowler said patiently, "No, Mitch. He wouldn't dare. In the first place, industrial feuds are expensive. Preliminary hearings alone can tie up the whole legal staff for weeks, when we get through with our injunctions and counter-claims. In the second place, he doesn't have grounds -- this is a legal, perfectly openand-aboveboard assignment by the Incorporated Government of the United States of America : he can't question it. In the third place, we'd whip his tail off." "I guess you're right," I admitted. It was just as well, as far as I'm concerned. Believe me. I'm a loyal employee of Fowler Shocken Associates: ever since cadet days I have tried to live my life "for Company and for Sales." But industrial feuds can be pretty messy. Our profession has been comparatively free of them -- reasonable men can talk these things out nine times out of ten. But it was only a few decades ago, back in #. that a small but highly effective advertising agency in London filed a feud against one of our bigger comjetitors, wiping out every executive on the. staff. And they say there are still bloodstains on the steps of the General Post Office where two delivery companies had fought it out for the Federal Postal Contract, which, like the Armed Services, national and local police forces and other former government agencies, are let to private enterprise as they should be. Schocken was speaking again; my attention whipped back. "There's one thing you'll have to watch for," he cautioned. "This is the kind of project that is bound to bring out the lunatic fringe. Every crackpot organization on the list, from the Connies themselves on down, is going to come out for or agin it. I don't care how you do it, but make sure they're all for. Butter them up. We don't want them to contend with as well as Taunton." "Even the Connies?" I asked, astonished. "Oh, no, Mitch. Don't bother with them; they're so discredited that they'd be more of a liability." His white hair glinted in the lamplight as he bobbed his head. "Maybe you could spread the word that space-travel is violently opposed to the principles of Conservationism. Uses up too many raw materials, hurts the general living standard -- you IS know, the usual unrealistic line. Bring in the fact that rocket fuel uses organic material tliat the Connies think should be made into fertilizer... I like to watch an expert at work. Fowler Schocken laid down a whole sub-campaign for me right there; I took it down and filled in the details. The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended that modern scientific method was not competent to meet with the demands of our expanding population and dwindling resources. I had been exposed to Connie sentiment in my time, and the arguments had always come down to one thing: Nature's way of living was the right way of living. If "Nature" had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn't have given us niacin or thiamin chloride. I sat still for twenty minutes more of Fowler Schocken's inspirational talk, and came away with the discovery that I had often made before: briefly and effectively, he had given me every fact and instruction I needed. The details he left to me; but I knew my job. The government wanted Venus colonized by Americans. To accomplish this, three things were needed: colonists; a way of getting them to Venus: and something for them to do when they got there in one piece. The first was direct advertising. Schocken's TV commercial had blueprinted that, and it would be easy. It is always easy to persuade men and women -- particularly American men and women who have pioneer blood in their veins -- that the grass is greener far away. I had already penciled in a tentative campaign with the budget well under a megabuck. More would have been extravagant. The second was only partly our problem. The ships had been designed -- by Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs and U. S. Steel, I believe, under Defense Corporation contract. Our job wasn't to make the transportation to Venus possible, but to make it palatable. When your wife found her burned-out toaster impossible to replace because its nichrome element was part of a Venus rocket's main drive jet, or when the inevitable disgruntled Congressman for a small and frozen-out firm waved an appropriations sheet around his head and talked about government waste on wildcat schemes, our job began; We had to convince your wife that rockets are more important than toasters; we had to convince the Congressman's constituent firm that its tactics were unpopular and would cost it profits. U I thought briefly of an austerity campaign and vetoed it. Our other accounts would suffer. But I needed something that would offer vicarious gratification to the not ride the rockets themselves. I tabled that; Bruner could help me there. And I went on to point three. There had to be something to keep the colonists busy on Venus. This, I knew, was what Fowler Schocken had his eye on. The government money that would pay for the basic campaign was a nice addition to our year's billing. but Fowler Schocken was too big for one-shot accounts. What we wanted was the year-afteryear reliability of a major industrial account. Fowler, ef course, hoped to repeat on an enormously magnified scale our smashing success with Indiastries. His boards and he had organized all of India into a single giant cartel, with every last woven basket and iridium ingot it produced sold through Fowler Schocken advertising. Now he could do the same with Venus. Potentially, it was worth as much as every dollar of value in existence put together! A whole new planet, almost the size of Earth, in prospect as rich as Earth -- and every micron, every I looked at my watch. After four; my date with Kathy was for seven. I just had barely time. I dialed Hester and had her get me space on the Washington jet while I put through a call to the name Fowler had given me. The name was Jack O'Shea; he was the only human being who had been to Venus -- so far. His voice was young and cocky as he made an appointment to see me. W E were five extra minutes in the landing pattern over Washington and then there was a hassel at the ramp. Brinks Express guards were swarming around our plane and their lieutenant demanded identification from each emerging passenger. When it was my turn, I asked what was going on. He looked at my low-number Social Security card thoughtfully and then saluted. "Sorry to bother you, Mr. Courtenay," he apologized. "It's the Connie bombing near Topeka. We got a tip that the man might be aboard the #;# New York jet. Seems to have been a lemon." "What Connie bombing was this?" "DuPont Raw Materials Division -- we're under contract for their plant protection, you know -- was opening up a new coal vein under some corhland they own out there. They made a nice little cermony f it. and just as the hydraulic mining machine started ramming through the topsoil, somebody tossed a bomb from the crowd. Killed the machine operator, his helper and a vice president. He slipped away in the a.owd, but he was identified. We'll get him one of these days." "Good luck, Lieutenant," I said, and hurried on to the refreshment lounge. O'Shea was waiting at a window seat, visibly annoyed, but he grinned when I apologized. "It could happen to anybody," he said, and shrilled at a waiter. When we had placed our orders, he leaned back and said: "Well?" I looked down at him across the table and looked away through the window. Off to the south, the gigantic pylon of the Hearst Memorial blinked its marker signal; behind it lay the tiny, dulled dome of the old Capitol. I, an ad man, was embarrassed, and O'Shea was enjoying it. "Well?" he asked again, quite amusedly, and I knew he meant: "Now all of you have to come to me, and how do you like it for a change?" I plunged. "I came for information," I said. "For instance: what's on Venus?" "Sand and smoke," he said promptly. "Didn't you read my report?" "Certainly. I want to know more." "Everything's in the report. Jesus, they kept me in the interrogation room for three solid days when I got back! If I left anything out, it's gone permanently." "That's not. what I mean, Jack. Who wants to spend his life reading reports? I have fifteen men in Research doing nothing but digesting reports for me so I don't have to read them. I want to get the feel of the planet. There's only one place I can get it -- because only one man's been there." "And sometimes I wish I had not," O'Shea said wearily. "Well, where do I start? You know why they picked me -- the only midget in the world with a pilot's license. And you know all about the ship. And you saw the assay reports on the samples I brought back. Not that they mean much. I only touched down once and five miles away the geology might be entirely different." "I know all that. Look, Jack, put it this way. Suppose you wanted a lot of people to go to Venus. What would you tell them about it?" He laughed. "I'd tell them a lot of damn big lies. Start from scratch, won't you? What's the deal?" I gave him a fill-in on what Schocken Associates was up to. wflile his round little face stared at me through his round little eyes. There is an opaque quality like porcelain, to the features of a midget: as though the destiny that had made them small at the same time made them more perfect and polished than ordinary men. as if to show that their tack of size did not nean lack of completion. He sipped his drink and I gulped mine between paragraphs. When my pitch was finished. I still didn't know whether he was on my side or not. Fowler had helped him to capitalize on his fame via testimonials, books and lectures, so he owed us a little gratitude and no more. He said : "I wish I could help, and that made things easier. "You can I told him. "That's what I'm here for. Tell me what Venus has to offer. , "Damn little." A small frown chiseled across his lacquer forehead. "Where shall I start? Do I have to tell you about the atmosphere? There's free formaldehyde. you know -- embalming fluid. Or the heat? It averages above the boiling-point of water -- if there was any water on Venus, which there isn't. Not accessible, anyhow. Or the winds. I clocked five hundred miles an hour. "Honestly, Jack, there are answers for all those things. I want to get what you thought when you were there, how you reacted. Just start talking. I'll tell you when I've had what I wanted.' He dented his rose-marble lip with his lower teeth. "Well, let's start at the beginning. Get us another drink, won't you?' The waiter took our order and came back with the liquor. Jack drummed on the table, sipped his rhine wine and seltzer, and began to talk. He started way back, which was good. I wanted to know the elusive, subjective mood that imdcrlay his technical reports on the planet Venus, the basic feeling that would put compulsion and conviction into the project. He told me about his father, the six-foot chemical engineer, and his mother, the plump, strapping housewife. He made me feel their dismay and their ungrudging love for their thirty-five-inch son. He had been eleven years old wlien the subject of his adult life and work first came up. He remembered the unhappiness on their faces at his first, inevitable, off-hand suggestion about the circus. It was no minor tribute to tliem that the subject never came up again. It was a major tribute that Jack's settled desire to learn enough engineering and rocketry to be a test pilot had been granted, paid for and carried out in the face of every obIf staclc of ridicule and refusal fronr the schools. Of course Venus had made it all pay off. The Venus rocket designers ran into one major complication. It had been easy enough to get a rocket to the Moon, a quarterit was not much harder to blast one across space to the nearest other world. Venus. The question was one of orbits and time, of controlling the ship and bringing it back again. They could blast the ship to Venus in days -- at so squandersome a fuel expenditure that ten ships couldn't carry enough. Or they could ease it to Venus along its natural orbits as you might float a barge down a gentle river -- which saved fuel, but lengthened the trip to months. A man in that length of time eats twice his own weight in food, breathes nine times his weight of air and drinks water enough to float a yawl. Closing the cycle with waste products is the answer, of course -- only the equipment weighs more than the food, air and water. So the human pilot was out. A team of designers went to work on an automatic pilot. When it was done it worked pretty well, and weighed four and one-half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope. The project stopped right there until somebody thought of that most perfect servo-mechanism: a sixty pound midget. A third of a man in weight, Jack O'Shea ate a third of the food, breathed a third of the oxygen. With minimumweight, low-efficiency waterand air-purifiers. Jack came in just under the limit and thereby won himself undying fame. He said broodingly, a little drunk from the impact of two weak drinks on his small frame: "They put me into the rocket like a finger into a glove. I guess you know what the ship looked like. But did you know they zipped me into the pilot's seat? It wasn't a chair, more like a diver's suit; the only air on the ship was in that suit; the only water came in through a tube to my lips. Saved weight..." And the next eighty days were in that suit. It fed him, gave him water, removed his wastes. If necessary, it would have shot novocaine into a broken arm, tourniquetted a cut femoral artery or pumped air for a torn lung. It was a placenta, and a hideously uncomfortable one. In the suit thirty-three days going, forty-one coming back. The six days in between were the justification for the trip. Jack fought his ship down through absolute blindness : gas ao clouds that closed his own eyes and confused the radar, down to the skin of an unknown world. He was within a thousand feet of the ground before he could see anything but swirling yellow. And then he landed and cut the rockets. "Well. I couldn't get out. of course," he went on. "For forty or fifty reasons, somebody else will have to be the first man to set foot on Venus. Somebody who doesn't care much about breathing, I guess. Anyway, there I was, looking at it." He shrugged his shoulders, looked baffled. "I've told it a dozen times at lectures, but I've never got it over. I tell 'em the closest thing to it on Earth was the Painted Desert. Maybe it was; I haven't been there. "The wind blows hard on Venus and it tears up the rocks. Soft rocks blow away and make dust storms. The hard ones -- well, they stick out in funny shapes and colors. Big monument things, some of them. And the most jagged hills and crevasses you can imagine. It's something like the inside ctf a cave, sort of, only not dark. But the light is -- funny. Nobody ever saw light like that on Earth. OrangyLike the way the sky is threatening in the summer around sunset just before a smasher of a thunderstorm. Only there never is any thunderstorm because there isn't a drop of water around." He hesitated. "There is lightning. Plenty of it, but never any rain... I don't know, Mitch." he said abruptly. "Am I being any help to you at all?" I looked at my watch and saw that the return jet was about to leave, so I bent down and turned off the recorder in my briefcase. (Turned, not clicked. Mercury switches.) "You're being lots of help, Jack," I said. "But I'll need more. And I have to go now. Look, can you come up to New York and work with me for a while? I've got everything you said on tape, but I. want visual stuff, too. Our artists can work from the pix you brought back, but there must be more. And you're a lot more use than the photographs for what we need." I didn't mention that the artists would be drawing impressions of what Venus would look like, if it were different from what it was. "How about it?" Jack leaned back and looked cherubic, but, though he made me sweat through a brief recap of the extensive plans his lecture agent had made for his next few weeks, he finally agreed. The Shriners' talk could be canceled, M he decided, and the appointments with his ghost writers could be kept as well in New York as in Washington. We made a date for the following day just as the PA system announced that my flight was ready. "I'll walk you to the plane," Jack offered. He slipped down from the chair and threw a bill on the table for the waiter. We walked together through the narrow aisles of the bar out into the field. Jack grinned and strutted a little at some exclamations that went up as he was recognized. The field was almost dark, and the glow of Washingft ton backlighted the silhouettes of hovering aircraft. Drifting toward us from the freight terminal was a huge cargo 'copter, a fiftytonner, its cargo nacelle gleaming in colors as it reflected the lights below. It was no more than a hundred feet in the air. and I bad to clutch my hat against the downdraft from its whirling vanes. "Damn-fool bus drivers." Jack grunted, glaring up at the 'copter. "They ought to put those things on G.C.A. Just because they're maneuverable, those fanjockies think they can take them anywhere. If I handled a jet the i,. ' wt.iry -- Rir:" !vc ou'ldrnly was yelling at me. I goggled at him: it v.'as too sudden and disconnect I to make any kind of sen-o. lie lurclicd at mejp a mini .lure l.r'.ly block and sent me stug;j:crins a few steps. "What the Ik#?" I et rtcl to complain, but I dkln't h"-?r my own words. They were #"owncd out by a mechnnic I rn-nping sound and a flutter in f'-' #:eat of the rotors and then tl'C leudcrjt crash I had ever heard as the cargo pod of the 'cont r b.it the concrete a yard from where we stood. It ruptured and spilled cartons of Starrzelius Verily food packets. One of the crimson cylinders rolled to my toes and I stupidly picked it up and looked at it. Overhead, the lightened 'copter fluttered up and away, but I didn't see it go. "For God's sake, get it off ging at me. We had not been alone on the field. From under the buckled aluminum reached an arm holding a briefcase, and through the compound noises in my ears I could hear a bubbling sound of human pain. I let Jack pull me to the tangled metal and we tried to heave it. I got a scratched hand and tore my jacket. #nd then the airport people got there and brusquely ordered us away. I don't remember walking there, but by and by I found that I was sitting on someone's suitcase, back against the wall of the terminal, with Jack O'Shea talking excitedly to me. He was cursing all cargo 'copter pilots and blackguarding me for standing there like a fool when he'd seen the nacelle clamps opening, and a great deal more that I didn't get. I remember him knocking the red box of breakfast food from my hand impatiently. The company psychologists say I am not unusually sensitive or timorous, but I was in a state of shock that lasted until Jack was loading me into my plane. Later on, the hostess told me five people had been caught under the nacelle, and the whole affair seemed to come into focus. But not until we were halfway back to New York. At the time all I remembered, all that seemed important, was Jack saying over and over, bitterness and anger written on his porcelain face: "Too damn many people, Mitch. Too damn much crowding. I'm with you every inch of the way. We need Venus, Mitch, we need the space... Ill downtown in Bensonhurst, was not large, but it was comfortable. In a homy, sensible way, it was beautifully furnished, as who should know better than me? I pressed the button over the label "Dr. Nevin," resolutely not remembering that it had once read "Nevin-Courtenay," and smiled at her as she opened the door. She unsmilingly said two things: "You're late, Mitch," and, "I thought you were going to call first." I walked in and sat down. was late because I almost got killed and I didn't call because I was late. Does that square us?"  She asked the question I wanted her to ask and I told her how close I had come to death that evening. Kathy is a beautiful woman with a warm, friendly face, her hair always immaculately done in two tones of blonde, her eyes usually smiling. I. have spent a great deal of time looking at her, but I never watched more attentively than when I told her about the cargo nacelle near-miss. It was, on the whole, disappointing. She was really concerned for me, beyond doubt. But Kathy's heart opens to all people and I saw nothing in her face to make me feel that she cared more for me than anyone else. So I told her my other big news, the Venus account and my stewardship of it. It was more successful; she was startled and excited and happy, and kissed me in a flurry of good feeling. But when I kissed her back, as I'd been wanting to do for months, she drew away and went to sit on the other side of the room, ostensibly to dial a drink. "You rate a toast," she said. "Champagne at the least. Mitch, it's wonderful news!" I seized the chance. "Will you help me celebrate? Really celebrate?" Her brown eyes were wary. "Um," she said. "Sure I will. We'll do the town together -- my treat and no arguments about it. The only thing is, I'll have to leave you punctually at #. Im spending the night in the hospital. I've a hysterectomy to do in the morning and I mustn't get to sleep too late. Or too drunk, either." But she smiled. Once again I decided not to push my luck too far. 'Great," I said, and I wasn't faking. Kathis a wonderful girl to do the town with. "Let me use your phone?" By the time we had our drinks, I had arranged for tickets to a show, a dinner table and a reservation for a nightcap afterward. Kathy looked a little dubious. "It's a pretty crowded program for five hours, Mitch," she said. "My hysterectomy isn't going to like it if my hand shakes." But I talked her out of it. Kathy is more resilient than that. Once she did a complete trepan the morning after we'd spent the entire night screaming out our tempers at each other, and it had gone perfectly. dinner, for me, was a failure. I don't pretend to be an epicure who can't stand anything but new protein. I definitely am, however, a guy who gets sore when he pays new-protein prices and gets generated protein instead. The texture of the shashlik we both ordered was all right. but you can't hide the taste. I scratched the restaurant off my list and apologized to Kathy for it. But she laughed it off and the riiow afterward was fine. Hypnotics often give me a headache, but I slipped right into the trance state this time as soon as the film began and was none the worse for it later. The night club was packed and the headwaiter had made a mistake in the time for our reservations. We had to wait five minutes in the anteroom, and Kathy shook her head very decisively when I pleaded for an extension on the curfew. But when the headwaiter showed us with the fanciest apologies and bows to our places at the bar and our drinks came, she leaned over and kissed me again. I felt just fine. "Thanks," she said. "That was a wonderful evening, Mitch. Get promoted often, please. I like it." I struck a cigarette for her and one for myself, and somebody behind us began to holler: "You fools I It's not too late!" We turned and gaped. It was a gaunt, wild-eyed youngster in the entrance of the night club, waving his arms and yelling: "Look at yourselves, you fools! The air is blue with your smoke! You're f #   burning up and throwing away the product of land that should be growing food!" A flying squad of waiters headed his way suddenly stopped and disintegrated into very scared individuals. He had a pistol in his hand. "Don't stop me!" he shouted hoarsely. "I don't want to hurt anybody, but I must bring you my message. It's not too late! Stop your smoking! Stop your drinWng! Don't you know there are starving children in this world? How dare you drink alcohol made from grain? Think of the evil and folly of it! Give up your wickedness! Turn Connie and learn what peace of mind is like! It's not too -- " He hadn't guarded his back. Two or three bluecoats of the Metropolitan Protection Corporation were standing over his lank body. Kathy yelled: "Gangway! I'm a doctor!" put her head down and crowd. When I reached her side, siie was saying to the M.P.C. foreman: "Killed instantly." "Thanks, miss," the foreman said modestly. "It was just my duty. Any good protection man could have done as well." "I didn't -- " she began, and then sighed. "Mitch, shall we get back to the bar? We must have time for another drink." We got our places back and ordered again. "What a hell of a thing to happen," I said, angry that the young lunatic had chosen to mess up our evening. "I absolutely do not want to talk or think about it." Kathy said. "Make me forget. What were we talking about?" "Well, I was going to say that wr always have fun together." "And I was going to say that I knew what you were leading up to and that the answer still was no." "I know you were," I said glumly. "Let's get out of here." She paid the tab and we left, inserting our antisoot plugs as we hit the street. "Cab, sir?" asked the doorman. "Yes, please." Kathy answered. "A tande'm." He whistled up a two-man pt'dicab and Kathy gave the lead boy the hospital's address. "You can come if you like, Mitch," she said, and I climbed in beside her. The doorman gave us a starting push and the cabbies grunted getting up momentum. For a moment it was like our courtship again: the friendly dark, the slight, musty smell of the canvas top, the squeak of the springs. But for a moment only. "Watch what you're going to say. Mitch." she warned. "Please. Kathy, let me go through it anyhow. It won't take long. We were married eight months ago -- all right," I said quickly as she started to object. "It wasn't an absolute marriage. But we took the interlocutory vows. Do you remember why we did that?" She said patiently after a moment: "We were in love." "I loved you and you loved me. And we both had our work to think about, and we knew that sometimes it made us a little hard to get along with. So we made it interim. It had a year to run before we had to decide whether to make it permanent." I touched her hand and she did not move it away. "Kathy dear, don't you think we knew what wc were doing then? Can't we at least give it the year's trial? There are still four months to go'. Let's try it. If the year ends and you don't want to file your certificate -- well. I won't be able to say you didn't give me a chance. As for me. I don't have to wait. My certificate's on file  now and I won't change." We passed a street light and ! saw her lips twisted into an expression I couldn't quite read. "Oh, damn it all. Mitch' she said unhappily, "I Jtnow you won't change. Must I call you names to convince you that it's hopeless? I used to think you were a sweet guy, an idealist who cared for principles and ethics instead of money. You told me so yourself, very convincingly. You were very plausible about my work, too. You boned up on medicine, you came to watch me operate three times a week, you told all our friends how proud you were to be married to a surgeon. It took me three months to find out what you meant by that. Anybody could marry a girl who'd be a housewife. But it took a Mitchell Courtenay to marry a star class surgeon and make her a housewife." Her voice was tremulous. "I couldn't take it, Mitch. I never will be able to. Not the arguments, the sulkiness and the everand-ever fighting. I'm a doctor. Sometimes a life depends on me. If I'm all torn up inside from battling with my husband, that life isn't safe. Can't you see that?" I asked quietly: "Kathy, don't you still love me?" She  was absolutely quiet for a long moment. Then she laughed wildly and very briefly. "Here's the hospital, Mitch. It's midnight." We climbed out. "Wait," I growled at the lead boy. and walked with her to the door. She wouldn't kiss me good night and she wouldn't make a date to see me again. I stood in the lobby for twenty minutes to make sure she was really staying there that night, and then got into the cab to go to the nearest shuttle station. I was in a vile mood. It wasn't helpied any when the lead boy asked innocently after I paid him off; "Say, mister, what does idealist mean? Was the dame an eye doctor?" " 'Idealist' is Spanish for 'mind your own business,' " I told him evenly. On the shuttle I wondered sourly how rich I'd have to be before I could buy privacy. The slain Connie rankled, too. They seemed to be capable of anything you can name in the way of damn-foolishness, but this was the first time I'd heard that they were against smoking and drinking. Hell, there was no real grain used in whisky. Maybe he wasn't a real Connie, just a crackbrained kid who thought he was. There were such idiots. And there were other people who weren't Connies and who didn't think they were Connies, but who got scragged for being Connies anyway. And there were borderline cases where you could never be sure. Uaiversitjr teachers caught with a weU-wora copy of Our Plundered Planet. They always said they had only a scholarly interest in it of course. Just what you'd expect them to say Connie or not. And naturally the Connies would try to plant people in universities where they could influence the young and make recruits. Better be safe than sorry -- or was it? I thought of old man Hollister. I was pretty sure he was a sound man, but a whispering campaign swept Schocken Associates, complete with all sorts of very circumstantial anecdotes, the kind of thing you couldn't make up. He resigned after about three months of it and died shortly afterward. Hollister didn't look as if he were capable of blowing hydraulic mine operator or burnBut aomebody did these things. Presumably somebody as innocent-looking as Hollister. Damn them alt! I might have gone home with Kathy if that kid hadn't got himself killed! TtfV temper was no better when arrived at the office next morning. It took all Hester's tact to keep me from biting her head off in the first few minutes, and it was by the grace of God that it was not a Board morning. After I'd got my mail and the overnight accumulation of interoffice memos, Hester intelligently disappeared for a while. When she came back, she brought me a cup of coffee -- authentic plantationgrown coffee. "The matron in the ladies room brews it on the sly," she explained. "Usually she won't let us take it out because she's afraid of the Coffiest team. But now that you're star class -- " I thanked her and gave her Jack O'Shea's tape to put through channels. Then I went to work. First came the matter of the sampling area, and a headache with Matt Runstead. He's Market Research, so I had to work with and through him. But he didn't show any inclination to work with me. I put a map of Southern California in the projector while Matt and two of his helpers boredly sprinkled cigarette ashes on my floor. With the pointer, I outlined the test areas and controls: "San Diego through Tijuana; half the  communities around L. A. and the lower tip of Monterrey. Tliose will be controls. The rest of CalMexico, from L.A. down, we'll use for tests. You'll have to be on the scene, I guess, Matt; I'd recommend our Diego offices as headquarters. Harris is in charge there and he's a pretty good man." V Runstcad grunted. "Not a flake of snow from year's end to year's end. Couldn't sell an overcoat there if you threw in a slave girl as a premium. Why don't you leave market research to somebody who knows something about it? JDon't you see how climate nulls your sigma?" The younger of his stampedout-of-tin assistants started to back the boss up, but I cut him off. Runstead had to be consulted on test areas -- it was his job -- but Venus was my project and I was going to run it. I said, , sounding just a little nasty: "Regional and world income, age, dciity of population, health, psyche-friction, age-group distribution and mortality causes and rates are seven-place sigmas, Matt. Cal-Mex was designed personally by God Himself as a perfect testing area. In a tiny universe of less than a hundred tant segment of North America. I will not change my project and we are going to stick to the area I indicated." "It won't work. The temperature is the major factor. Anybody should be able to see that." T'm not just anybody. Matt. I'm the guy in charge." Matt Runstead stubbed out his cigarette and got up. "Let's go talk to Fowler," he said and walked out. There wasn't anything for me to do except follow him. As X left, I heard the older of his helpers picking up the phone to notify Fowler Schocken's secretary that we were coming. He had a team all right. I spent a little time wondering how I could build one like that myself before f got down to the business of planning how to put it to Fowler. But Fowler Schocken has a surefire technique of handling interstaff hassels. He worked it on us. When we came in, he said exuberantly: "The two men I want to see! Matt, can you put out a fire for me? It's the A.I.G. people. They claim our handling of the PregNot account is hurting their trade. They're talking about going over to Taunton unless we much, but a birdie told me that Taunton put the idea into their heads." He went on to explain the intricacies of our relationship with the American Institute of Gynecologists. I listened only halfheartedly; our "Babies without Maybes" campaign on their sexdetermination project had given them at least a twenty per cent plus on the normal birthrate. They should be solidly ours after that. Runstead said: "They don't have a case, Fowler. We sell liquor and hangover remedies both. They've got no business yelling about any other account. Besides, what does this have to dc with Market Research?" Fowler chuckled happily. "They'll expect the account executives to give them the usual line -- but instead we'll let you handle them yourself. Snow them under with a wliole line of charts and statistics to prove that PregNot never prevents a couple from having a baby; it just permits them to postpone it until they can afford to do the job right. In other words, their unit of sale goes up and their volume stays the same. And it'll be one in the eye for Taunton. Lawyers get disbarred for representing conflicting interests; we've got to make sure that any attempt to foi.st the same principle on our profession is nipped in the bud. Think you can handle it for the old man. Matt?" "Sure," Runstead grumbled. "What about Venus?" Fowler twinkled at me. "What about it, Mitch? Can you spare Matt for a while?" "Forever," I said. "In fact, that's what I came to see you about. Matt's scared of Southern California." Runstead belligerently dropped his cigarette and let it lie. crisping the nylon pile of Fowler's rug. "What am I supposed to be scared of?" "Easy." said Fowler. "Matt isn't scared. Let's hear him out." Runstead glowered at me. "All I said was that Southern California isn't tlie right test area. What's the big difference between Venus and here? Heat! We need a test area with continentalaverage climate. A New Englander might be attracted by the heat on Venus; a Tijuana man, never. It's too damn hot in CalMex already." "Um," said Fowler Schocken. "Tell you what, Matt. This needs going into, and you'll wapt to get busy on the A.I.G. thing. Pick out a good man to vice you on the Venus section while you're out and we'll have it hashed over at the section meeting tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile -- " He glanced at his desk clock -- "Senator Danton has been waiting for seven minutes. All right?" It was cleai not all right with Matt, and I felt cheered for the rest of the day. Development came in with a report on what they'd gleaned from O'Shea's tape and all the other available material. The prospects for manufacture were there. Quick, temporary ones like little souvenir globes of Venus manufactured from the organics floating around in what we laughingly called the "air' of Venus. IX Long-term ones -- an assay had indicated pure iron: not ninenines pure and not ninety-nine nines pure, but absolute iron that nobody would ever find or make on' an oxygen planet like Earth. The labs would pay well for it. And Development had not developed, but found a remarkable little thing called a high-speed Hilsch Tube. Using no power, it could refrigerate the pioneers' homes by using the hot tremendous winds of Venus themselves. It was a simple thing that had been lying around since #. Nobody had had any use for it, because nobody had had that kind of wind to play with before. Tracy Collier, the Development liaison man with Venus Section, tried also to tell me about nitrogen-fixing catalysts. I nodded from time to time and gathered that sponge-platinum "sown" on Venus would, in conjunction with the continuous, terrific lightning, cause it to "snow" nitrates and "rain" hydrocarbons, purging the atmosphere of formaldehyde and ammonia. "Expensive?" I asked cautiously. "As expensive as you want it he," he said. "The platinum doesn't get used up, you know. years or more. Use more platinum and take less time." I didn't really understand, but obviously it was good news. I patted him and sent him on his way. Industrial Anthropology gave me a setback. Ben Winston complained; "You can't make people want to live in a steam-heated sardine can. All our folkways are against it. Who's going to travel to spend the rest of his life cooped up in a tin shack -- when he can stay right here on Earth and have corridors, elevators, streets, roofs, all the W'ide-open space a man could want? It's against human nature, Mitch!" He went on telling me about the American way of life -- walked to the window with me and pointed out at the hundreds of acr of rooftops where men and women could walk around in the open air, wearing simple sootextractor plugs in their nostrils instead of a bulky oxygen helmet. Finally I got mad. I said: "Somebody must want to go to Venus. Otherwise why would they buy Jack O'Shea's book the way they do? Why would the voters appropriation to build the rocket? God knows I shouldn't have to lead you by the nose tliis vay. but here's what you are going to do: Survey the book-buyers, the repeat-viewers of O'Shea's TV shows, the ones who come early to his lectures and stand around talking In the lobby after. Find out about the Moon colony -- what types they have there. And then we'll know who to aim our ads at. Any arguments?" There weren't. Hester had done wonders of scheduling that first day and I made progress with every section head involved. She couldn't read my paper work for me, though, and by quitting time I had six inches of it stacked by my right arm. Hester volunteered to stay with me, but there wasn't really anything for her to do. I let her bring me sandwiches and another cup of coffee, and chased her home. I T was after eleven by the time I was done. I stopped off in an all-night diner on the fifteenth floor before heading home. It was a windowless box of a place where the coffee smelled of the yeast it was made from and the ham in my sandwich bore the taint of soy. But it was only a minor annoyance and out of my mind when I got home. For as I opened the door to my apartment, there was a snick and an explosion, and something slammed into the door frame by my head. I ducked and yelled. Outside the window, a figure dangling from a rope ladder drifted away, a gun in its hand. I was stupid enough to run over to the window and gawk out at the helicopter-borne figure. I would have been a perfect target if it had been steady enough to shoot at me again, but it luckily wasn't. Surprised at my calm, I called the Metropolitan Protection Corporation. "Are you a subscriber, sir?" their operator asked. "Yes, dammit. For six years. Get a squad over here!" "One mo-ment, Mr. Courtenay. , . , Mr. Mitchell Courtenay? Copysmith, star class?" "Will you kindly get a man over here before the character who just took a shot at me comes back?" "I have your record before me, sir. I am sorry, but your account is canceled. We do not accept star class accounts at the general rate because of the risk of industrial feuds, sir." She named a figure that made each separate hair on my head stand on end. "There is," she said helpfully, "a rebate due you on the unexpired portion of your previous policy." "Thanks," I said heavily, and rang off. I put the ProgramPrinting to Quarry Machinery reel of the Telephone Red Book into the reader and spun it to Protective Agencies. I got turndowns from three or four and finally one sleepy-sounding private detective agreed to come on  over for a stiff fee. He showed up in half an hour and I paid him, and all he did was annoy me with unanswerable questions and look for nonexistent fingerprints. After a while he went away, saying he'd work on it. I got to bed and eventually to sleep with one of the unanswered questions chasing itself around and around in my head: Who would want to shoot a simple, harmless advertising man like me? IV  hands and walked briskly down the hall to Fowler Schocken's office. He might throw me out of the office for asking, but I needed an answer and he might have it. Ahead of me. his door opened explosively and Tildy Mathie lurched out. She stared at me, but I'll take commercial oath she didn't know my name. "Rewrites," she said wildly. "I slave my heart out for that white haired old rat, and what does he give me? Rewrites. 'This is good copy, but I want better than good copy from you,' he says. 'Rewrite it,' he says. 'I want drive, and beauty, and bumble, human warmth, and ecstasy and all the tender, sad emotion of your sweet womanly heart,' he says, 'and I want it in fifteen words.' I'll give him fifteen words!" she sobbed, and pushed past me down the hall. "But they won't be sweet or womanly!" I cleared my throat, knocked once and walked into Fowler's office. There was no hint of hia brush with Tildy in the smile he gave me. In fact, his pink, cleareyed face belied my suspicions but -- I had been shot at. "I'll only be a minute, Fowler," I said. "I want to know whether you've been playing rough with Taunton Associates." "I always play rough," he twinkled. "Rough, but clean." "I mean very, very rough and very, very dirty. Have you, by any chance, tried to have any of their people shot?" "Mitch! Really r 'Tm asking," I went on doggedly, "because last night a 'copter-borne marksman tried to plug me when I came home. I can't think of any angle except retaliation from Taunton." "Scratch Taunton," he said positively. I took a deep breath. "Fowler , I said, "man-to-man, you haven't been Notified? I may be out of line, but I've got to ask. It isn't just me. It's the Venus Project." There were no apples in Fowler's cheeks at that moment, and I could see in his eyes that my #S job and my st-class rating hung in the balance. He said: "Mitch, I made you star class because I thought you could handle the responsibilities that came with it. It isn't just the work. I know you can do that. I thought you could live up to the commercial code as well." I hung on. "Yes, sir," I said. He sat down and lit a Starr. After just exactly the right splitsecond of hesitation, he pushed the pack to me. "Mitch," he said. "You're a youngster, Mitch, only star class a short time. But you've got power. Five words from you, and in a matter of weeks or will find their lives completely changed. That's power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely." "Yes, sir," I said. I knew all the old sayings. I also knew that he was going to answer my question eventually. "Ah, Mitch," he said dreamily, waving his cigarette, "we have our prerogatives and our duties and our particular hazards. You can't have one without the others. If we didn't have feuds, the whole system of checks and balances would be thrown out of gear." "Fowler." I said, greatly daring. "you know I have no complaiols about the system. It works; that's all you have to say for it. I know we need feuds. And it stands to reason that if Taunton files a feud against us, you've got to live up to the code. You can't broadcast the information; every executive in the shop would be diving for cover instead of getting work done. But -- Venus Project is in my head, Fowler. I can handle it better that way. If I write everything down, it slows things up." "Of course," he said. "Suppose you were Notified and suppose I'm the first one Taunton knocks off -- what happens to Venus Project?" "You may have a point." he admitted. "I'll level with you, Mitch. There has been no Notification," "Thanks, Fowler," I said sincerely, "I did get shot at. And that accident in Washington -- maybe it wasn't an accident. You don't imagine Taunton would try anything without Notifying you, do you?" "I haven't provoked them to that extent, and they'd never do a thing like that anyhow. They're cheap, they're crooked, but they know the rules of the game. Killing in an industrial feud is a miscation is a commercial offense. And that means -- " I nodded. "Cerebrin." Fowler beamed. "What I like f about you, Mitch, is you can face facts. No pussy-footing; call a spade a spade. Well," he said cheerfully, "I'm sorry I can't help you out. You haven't been getting into any of the wrong beds, shall I say?" "No," I said. "My life's been very dull. The whole tiling's crazy. It must have been a mistake. But I'm glad that whoevcrit-was couldn't shoot." "So am I, Mitch, so am I! You saw O'Shea?" He had already dismissed the shooting from his mind. "I did. He's coming up here today. He'll be working closely with me." "Splendid! Some of that glory will rub off on Fowler Schocken Associates if we play our cards right. Dig into it, Mitch. I don't have to tell you how." It was a dismissal. anteroom of my office. It wasn't an ordeal: most of the female jjersonnel was clustered around him as he sat perched on a desk, talking gruffly and authoritatively. There was no mistaking the looks in their eyes. He was a thirty-five-inch midget, but he had money and fame, the two things we drill and drill into the population. O'Shea could have taken his pick of them. I wondered how many he had picked since his return to Earth in a blaze of glory. We run a taut office, but the girls didn't scatter until I cleared my throat. "Morning. Mitch," O'Shea said. "You over your shock?" "Sure. And I ran right into another one. Somebody tried to shoot me." I told the story and he grunted thoughtfully. "Have you considered getting a bodyguard?" he asked. "Of course. But I won't. It must have been a mistake." "Like that cargo nacelle?" I paused. "What's on your mind? I can't be down in anybody's little black book. Jack. The stakes are too high. Fowler's ruled out retaliation, and unprovoked murder for business advantage -- " I lowered my voice -- "means cerebrm for five seconds and gas." He made a soundless whistle and wc went into my office. When the,door closed, he said: "I never heard that. About you-know." "Well, keep it quiet. You can tell anybody with good sense, somebody upstairs commercially, because they probably know it already. But the consumers wouldn't understand. It's been that way for years. The corporations got fed up with undercover business assassinations and put an amendment through Congress authorizing the use of several pharmaceutical preparations in connection with capital punishment. Cerehrfn's in the list, buried under an obscure name. Everybody who ought to know about it knows. Result, no more killings.' He nodded. "Five seconds is what?" "One quarter of the first phase. Roughly equivalent to being sandpapered all over your body, searchlight, deafened by a two hundred-decibel siren, and strangled by hydrogen sulfide continuously for fifteen years. Care to try some?" "Thanks very much, but no, thanks." "That's the way everybody feels. I fed your tape to -- " His mind was still on the drug. Tve heard about the second phase," he said tentatively. 'Classified information." O'Shea grinned. "You can't pull that on me, Mitch. What you should have said was: 'Frankly, Jack. I don't know a thing about it.' Now give!" "You've got me, but all this strikes me as unnecessarily morbid. Well, people have come back from very light dosages of the first phase -- most of them broken, some of them only very badly bent. Nobody's come back from the whole twenty seconds. Jack, can we please get off this subject? It gives me the horrors." "Permission granted," he beamed. "Now, let's go to work -- but on what?" "First, words. We want words that are about Venus, words that'll tickle people. Make them sit up. Make them muse about change, and space, and distant planets. Words to make them a little discontented with what they are and a little hopeful about what they might be. Words to make them feel noble about feeling the way they do, and not foolish. Words that will do all these things and also make them happy about the existence of Indiastries and Starrzelius Verily and Fowler Schocken Associates. Words that will do all these things and also make them feel unhappy about the existence of Universal Products and Taunton Associates." He was staring at me with his mouth open. "You serious?" he finally exclaimed. "You're on the inside now. That's the way we work. That's the way we worked on you." "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "You're wearing Starrzelius Verily clothes and shoes, Jack. It means we got you. Taunton and Universal worked on you, Starrzelius and Schocken worked on you, and you chose Starrzelius. Schocken reached you. Smoothly, without ever being aware that it was happening, you became persuaded that there was something rather nice about Starrzelius clothes and shoes, and that there was something rather not-nice about Universal clothes and shoes." "I never read the ads," he said defiantly.  "Our ultimate triumph is wrapped up in that statement." "I solemnly promise," O'Shea said, "that as soon as I get back to my hotel roonh I'll send my clothes down the incinerator chute -- " "Luggage, too?" I asked. "Starrzelius luggage?" He looked startled for a moment and then regained his calm. "Starrzelius luggage, too," he said. "And then I'll pick up the phone and order a complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. And you can't stop me." "I wouldn't think of stopping you. It means more business for Starrzelius. Tell you what you're going to do: You'll get your complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. You'll wear it for a while with a vague, submerged discontent. It's going to work on your libido, because our ads for Starrzelius have convinced you that it isn't quite virile to buy  from any other firm. Your selfesteem will suffer; deep down, you'll know that you're not wearing the best. Your subconscious won't stand up under much of that. You'll find yourself 'losing' bits of Universal apparel. You'll find yourself 'accidentally' putting your foot through the cuff of your Universal pants. You'll find yourself overpacking the Universal luggage and damning it for not being roomier. You'll walk into stores and in a fit of momentary amnesia about this conversation you'll buy Starrzelius, bless you." O'Shea laughed uncertainly, "And you did it with words?" "Words and pictures. Sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. And the greatest of these is words. Do you read poetry?" "My God, of course not! Who can?" "I don't mean the contemIorary stuff ; you're quite right about that. I mean Keats, Swinburne -- the great lyricists." "I used to, a little," he cautiously admitted. "What about it?" "I'm going to ask you to spend the morning and afternoon with one of the world's great poets: a girl named Tildy Mathis. She doesn't know she's a poet; she thinks she's a boss copywriter. Don't enlighten her. It might make her unhappy. 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness. Thou foster-child of silence and slow time. Sylvan historian -- ' That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poety was left to untalcnted screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity." "You talk pretty damn funny yourself." "Words are my business, Jack." "Why are you telling me all this?" he wanted to know. "I said you're on the inside. There's a responsibility that goes with the power. In, this profession, we reach into the souls of men and women. We do it by taking talent and -- redirecting it. Nobody should play with lives the way we do unless he's, motivated by the highest ideals." "I get you," he said softly. "Don't worry about my motives. I'm not in this thing for money or fame. I'm in it so the human race can have some elbow robm and dignity again." "That's it," I said, putting on Expression Number One. But inwardly I was startled. The "highest ideal" I had been about to mention was Sales. I buzzed for Tildy. "Talk to her," I said. "Answer her questions. Ask her some. Make it a long, friendly chat. Make her share your experiences. And, without knowing it, she'll write lyric fragments of your experiences that will go right to the hearts and souls of the readers. Don't hold out on her." "Certainly not. Uh, Mitch, will she hold out on me?" His face was from a Tanagra figurine of a hopeful young satyr. "That depends on you. I told you people are stirred by words. Women are people. Jack." But I wondered about Kathy. She hadn't stayed stirred. time in four months, Kathy called me. "Is anything wrong?" I asked worriedly. "Anything I can do?" She laughed. "Nothing wrong, Mitch. I just wanted to say hello and tellyou thanks for a lovely evening." "How about another one?" I promptly asked. "Dinner at my place tonight suit you?" "It certainly does. What color dress will you be wearing? I'm going to buy you a flower!" "Oh, Mitch, you needn't be that extravagant: we aren't courting. But there is something I wish you'd bring." "Name it and it's yours." "Jack O'Shea. Can you manage it? I saw by the 'cast that he came into town this morning and I suppose he's working with you." Very damiened, I said: "Yes, he is. I'll check with him and call you back. Are you over at the hospital?" "Yes. And thanks so much for trying. I'd love to meet him." I got in touch with O'Shea in Tildy's office. "You booked up for tonight?" I asked. "I don't seem to be," he said morosely. "My proposition didn't sell so good. What's yours?" "Quiet dinner at home with my wife and me. She happens to be beautiful and a good cook and a star class surgeon and excellent company." "You're on." So I called Kathy back and told her I'd bring the social lion about seven. He stalked into my office at six. grumbling: "I'd better get a good meal out of this. Mitch. Your Miss Mathis appeals to me. What a dope! Does she have sense enough to come in out of the smog?" "I don't believe so." I said. "But Keats was properly hooked by a designing w'ench, Byron didn't have sense enough to stay out of the V-D ward, and Swinburne made a tragic mess out of his life. Do I have to go on?" "No. What kind of marriage have you got?" "Interlocutory," I said, a little painfully. He raised his eyebrows a trifle. "My mother was an Easter-duty Catholic," he said, "and I guess I'm a lapsed Catholic or worse. But still there's something about those arrangements that sets my teeth on edge." "Mine, too," I said, "at least where it involves me. In case Tildy missed telling you, my beautiful and talented wife does not want to finalize it, we don't live together, and unless I change her mind in four months, we'll be washed up." "Tildy did miss telling me," he said. "You're pretty sick about it. seems to me." I almost invited his sympathy. I almost started to tell him howrough it was. how much I loved her, how she wasn't giving me an even break, how I'd tried everything I could think of and nothing would convince her. And then I realized that I'd be telling it to a sixty-pound midget who. if he married, might become his wife's helpless plaything or butt of ridicule. "Middling sick," I said. "Let's go. Jack. Time for a drink and then the shuttl-?." K athy had never looked lovelier and I wished I hadn't let her talk me out of shooting a couple of days' pay on a flower from Tiffany's. She said hello to O'Shea and he announced loudly and immediately: "I like you. There's no gleam in your eye. No 'Isn't he cute?' gleam. No 'A girl's got a right to try anything once' gleam. No 'My, he must be rich and frustrated?' gleam. In short, you like me and I like you." As you may have gathered, he was a little drunk. "You are going to have some coffee, Mr. O'Shea," she said. "I rutned mysetf to provide real pork sausages and real apple sauce, and you're going to taste them." "Coffee?" he said. "Coffiest for me, ma'am. To drink coffee would be disloyal to the great firm of Fowler Schocken Associates, with which I am associated. Isn't that right, Mitch?" "I give indulgence this once.' I said. "Besides, Kathy doesn't believe the harmless alkaloid in Coffiest is harnless," Luckily, she was in the kitchen corner with her back turned when I said that, and either niissed it or could afford to pretend she did. We'd had a terrific fourhour battle over that very point, complete with epithets like "babypoisoner" and "crackpot-reformer" and a few others that were shorter and nastier. The coffee was served and quenched O'Shea's mild glow. Dinner was marvelous. The pork sausages turned out to be not patties, but crisp little cylinders; I'd never had them that way before and asked about them. "That's how they usually were made," Kathy explained. "The casing around the meat is organic, too. It's the small Intestine of the hog." "Gah!" I said, astonished and disgusted. "Now, Mitch," she said evenly. "It tasted good. This nicy-nicy business about food isn't smart. Carry it to extremes and it becomes very foolish indeed. I hear that in India it's no use to ship rice into a Northern famine area or wheat into a Southern famine area. The people just won't eat it. They'll lie down on a sack of it and starve," "Interesting," O'Shea commented. "And it did taste good. If I may ask -- where did you get it?" She smiled. "I'm afraid I couldn't give you the -- supplier's name without his permission. I'm sure you understand." "Of course. Lord, I wish I'd lived in the old days! Don't you, Mitch?" "Not me," I said promptly. "You can moon alxut the spacious four-room apartments, and about buying all the new meat you want at fifty dollars a pound. Things are a little more cramped now, but think of what we have in added convenience. In my trainee days we did some research for Stirrzelius depilatory and I was the goat. I had to shave, with a razor, for one whole week! Unless you've been through that yourself, you don't know what it's like. No, we're better off nowadays." Kathy mused : "Wouldn't the simplest way out be to grow a beard?" I stared at her. decided she was joking, and laughed. "Surely. Kathy, you'll admit that medical progress means we're healthier now than we used to be?" She struck a cigarette and exhaled a long plume of smoke before she answered. "Who knows? The Black Plague came to an end in the Middle Ages without the distorians are still arguing about the great influenza epidemic of #. Some of them say it was a coal shortage -- no, not even that, just a breakdown of coal distribution. Surgery? Well, I did the hysterectomy this morning and got all the metastases -- maybe. We still don't know about mental illness. But we do have an immense variety of things to shoot into people when they complain that it hurts here. Mr. O'Shea, if you go around saying that Dr. Nevin was saying thusand-so about medical progress. I'll first deny it and second cut your throat." "Respectfully noted," O'Shea said. "To keep this seminar going, I state that I am an aeronautical engineer and a good one. I've been exposed to the history of aviation. You know how nerveracking a flight is -- traffic pattern up, congested lanes, traffic pattern down. I can't point to any golden age when things were better, but I've sometimes thought the whole approach was wrong since Kittyhawk. The theme song has always been bigger and aster; bigger and faster. Why not smaller and smoother? Why not slower and pleasanter?' I found myself hotly defending things as they are: bigger because you can do more with them, faster because it means increased command of natuVe -- in effect, lengthening your active life. "You can lengthen youf active life in a manner of speaking with cerebrin,' O'Shea objected. "What's so good about that?" "That's not what I mean -- "You've been to the Moon, I suppose?" Kathy asked O'Shea. "Not yet. One of these days." "There's nothing there," I said. "It's a waste of time. One of our dullest, deadest accounts. I suppose we only kept it for the experience we'd get, looking ahead to Venus. A few hundred people mining -- that's the whole story." "Excuse me," O'Shea said, and retired. I grabbed the chance. "Kathy, darling," I said, "it was real fine of you to ask me over. Does it mean anything?" She rubbed her right thumb and index finger together and I knew that whatever she would say after that would be a lie. "It might, Mitch. You'll have to give me time." T threw away my secret weapon. "You're lying," I answered disgustedly. "You always do this before you lie to me." I showed her, and she let out a short laugh. "Fair's fair." she said with bitter amusement. "You always catch your breath and look right into my eyes when you lie to me." O'Shea returned and felt the tension at once. "I ought to be going," he said. There were the usual politenesses at the door, and Kathy kissed me good night. It was a long, warm, clinging kiss; altogether the kind of kiss that should start the evening rather than end it. It set her own pulse going -- I felt that -- but she closed the door on us. "You been thinking about a bodyguard again?" O'Shea asked. I thought it was an inexcusable crack and started to say something unpleasant. His face was abstracted; he had missed the by-play or ignored it. "The shooting was a mistake,' I stubbornly said. "Let's stop by your place for a drink," he suggested ingenuously. The situation was almost pathetic. Sixty-pound Jack O'Shea was guarding me! "Sure," I said. We got on the shuttle. He went into the room first and turned on the light, and nothing happened. While sipping a very weak whisky and soda, he drifted around the place checking window locks, hinges and the like. "This chair would look better over there," he said. Over there, of course, was out of the line of fire from the window. I moved it. "Take care of yourself, Mitch, he said when he left. "That lovely wife and your friends would miss you if anything happened.' The only thing that happened was that I barked my shin setting up the bed. and that was happening all the time. Even Kathy, with a surgeon's neat, economical movements, bore the scars of life in a city apartment. You set up the bed at nioht. you took it down in the mornin", you set up the table for breakfast, you took it down to get to the door. No wonder some shortsighted people sighed for tlie spacious old days. I thought, settling myself luxuriously for the night. V week. With Runstead out of my hair and at work on the PregNot-A.I.G. hassel, I could really grip the reins. Tildy's girls and boys were putting out the copy -- temperamental kids, sometimes doing a line #S  day with anguish; sometimes rolling out page after page effortlessly, with shining eyes, as though possessed. She directed and edited their stuff and passed the best of the best to me; nineminute commercial scripts, pix cut-lines, articles for planting, news stories, page ads, whispering campaign cue-lines, endorsements, jokes, limericks and puns (clean and dirty) to float through the country. Visual was hot. The airbrush and camera people were having fun sculpturing a planet. It was the ultimate in "Before and After" advertising, and they were caught by the sense of history. Development kept pulling rabbits out of hats. Collier once explained to me when I hinted that he might be over-optimistic; "It's energy, Mr. Courtenay, The Sun pours all that energy into Venus in the form of heat and molecular bonds and fast particles. Here on Earth we don't have that level of available energy. We use windmills to tap the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. On Venus we'll just build an accumulator, put up a lightning rod and jump back. It's an entirely different level." Market Research Industrial Anthropology was at work in San Diego sampling the Cal-Mex area, trying Tildy's copy. Visual's layouts and films and extrapolating and interpolating. I had a direct wire to the desk of Ham Harris, Runstead's vice, in San Diego. A typical day began with a Venus Section meeting; pep talks by me, reports of progress by all hands, critique and cross-department suggestions. Harris, on the wire, might advise Tildy that "serene atmosphere" wasn't going well as a cue phrase in his sampling and that she should submit a list of alternatives. Tildy might ask Collier whether it would be okay to say "topaz sands" in a planted article which would hint that Venus was crawling with uncut precious and semi-precious stones. Collier might tell Visual that they'd have to make the atmosphere redder in a "before" panorama. And I might tell Collier to lay off because it was permissible license. After adjournment, everybody would go into production and I'd spend my day breaking ties, coordinating, and interpreting my directives from above down to die operational level. Before close of day, we'd hold another meeting which I would keep to some specific topic, such as integration of Starrzelius products into the Venus economy, or income-level of prospective Venus colonists for optimum purchasing power twenty years after landing. And then came the best part of the day. Kathy and I were going steady again. We were still under separate cover, but I was buoyantly certain that it wouldn't be long now. Sometimes she dated me, sometimes I dated her. There wasn't much serious talk. She didn't encourage it and I didn't press it. I thought that time was on my side. Jack O'Shea made the rounds with us once before he had to leave for a lecture in Miami, and that made me feel good, too. A couple of welldressed, good-looking people who were so high up they could entertain the world's number one celebrity. After a week of solid, satisfying progress on the job, I told Kathy it was time for me to visit the outlying installations -- the rocket site in Nevada and sampling headquarters in San Diego. "Fine." she said. "Can I go with you?" I was silly-happy about it: it wouldn't be long now, T he rocket visit was routine. I had a couple of people there as liaison with Armed Forces, Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs and U. S. Steel. They showed Kathy and me through the monster ship, glib as tourist guides: "... vast steel shell... more cubage than the average New York office building... closed-cycle food and water and air regeneration ,  , one-third drive, one-third freight, one-third living space... heroic pioneers... insulation... housekeeping power... sunsidc-darkside heat pumps... unprecedented industrial effort... national sacrifice... national security... Oddly, the most impressive thing about it to me was not the rocket itself, but the wide area around it. For a full mile the land was cleared: no buildings, no greenhouse decks, no food tanks, no Sun traps. Partly security, partly radiation. The gleaming sand cut by irrigation pipes looked strange. There probably wasn't another sight like it in North America. It troubled my eyes. Not for years had I focused them more than a few yards in any direction except up. "How strange." Kathy said at my side. "Could we walk out there?" "Sorry. Dr. Nevin," said one of thp liaison men. "It's our perimeter. The tower guards are ordered to shoot anybody out there." "Have contrary orders issued," I told him. "Dr. Nevin and I want to walk." "Of course. Mr. Courtenay, the man said, very worried. "I'll do my best, but it'll take a little time, ril have to clear it with C.I.C., Naval Intelligence. C.I.A., F.B.I., A.E.C., Security and Intelligence --  I looked at Kathy and she shrugged with helpless amusement. "Never mind." I said. "Thank God!" breathed my liaison man. "It's never been done before, so there aren't any channels to do it through. You know what that means." 'T do indeed. Tell me, has all the security paid off?" "There's been no sabotage or espionage foreign or Connie, that we know of." He rapped a knuckle of his right hand solemnly on a genuine oak engagement ring he wore on the third finger of his left hand. I made a mental note to have his expense account checked up on. A man on his salary had no business wearing such expensive jewelry. "The Connies interested?" I asked. He shrugged. "Who knows?" Would you like to meet Commander MacDonald and find out? He's the O.N.I. chief here. A specialist in Connies." "Like to meet a Connie specialist, Kathy?" I asked. "If we have time," she said. "I'll have them hold the jet for you if necessary," the liaison man offered eagerly, trying hard to undo his fiasco on the tower guards. He led us through the tangle of construction shacks and warehouses to the Administration Building and past seven security check foints to the office of the commander. He was one of those career officers who make you feel good about being an American consumer -- quiet, competent, strong. He wore the class insignia of the Pinkerton Graduate School of Detection and Military Intelligence, Inc. It's veneer pine with an open eye carved on it; no flashy inlay work. But it's like a brand name. It tells you that you're dealing with quality. "You want to hear about Connies?" he asked quietly. "I'm your man. I've devoted my life to running them down." "A personal grudge, Commander?" I asked, thinking we'd hear something melodramatic. "No. Old-fashioned pride of workmanship if anything. I like the thrill of the chase, too, but there isn't much chasing. You get Connies by laying traps. Did you hear about the Wichita bombing? Of-course-I-shouldn'tknockthecompetitionbut -- Wilson Detection bungled that one badly. They should have known it was a setup for a Connie demonstration." "Why, exactly. Commander?" Kathy asked. He smiled wisely. "Feel. The Connies don't like hydraulic mining -- ever. Give them a chance to pull some wrecking and they'll take it if they can." #t "But why don't they like hydraulic mining?" she persisted. "We've got to have coal and iron, don't we?" "Now," he said with pretended, humorous weariness, "you're asking me to probe the mind of a Connie. I've had them questioned for up to six hours at a stretch and never yet have they talked sense. If I caught the Wichita it would be gibberish. He'd tell me the hydraulic miner was destroying top-soil. I'd say yes, what about it? He'd say the topsoil can never be replaced. I'd say yes, it can, if it had to be and anyway tank farming's better. He'd say something like tank farming doesn't provide animal cover and so on. It always winds up with him telling me the world's going to hell and people have got to be made to realize it." Kathy laughed incredulously. "They're fools, but they're touh," the commander went on. "They have discipline. A cell stem. If you get one Connie, you usually get the two or three others in his cell, but you hardly ever get any more. There's no lateral contact between cells, and vertical contact with higher-ups is by rendezvous with middlemen. And of course the picture is clouded by what you might call 'small-c Connies: neurotic youngsters, mental cases, occasionally professional criminals who fake a Connie demonstration so they can loot." "I think we saw one of those neurotic youngsters," Kathy said. She described the incident in the bar that had loused up our evening the week before. The commander nodded positively. "Small-c. They don't carry arms unless they're going to use them, and the smoking-anddrinking angle is just theoretical to them. They say they know it's 'anti-survival' -- in their jargon -- but they say the conditions that cause smoking and drinking must be corrected first. Yes, I think I know them and that's why I'm not especially worried about sabotage or a demonstration here. It doesn't have the right ring to it." "You're very reassuring, Commander," Kathy smiled as wc got up. "Thank you so much." At the door. MacDonald cautioned us: "We don't talk to just anybody about the small-c Connies, as I called them. The public thinks every demonstration is by the true Connie organization which is good for our purpo.ses. The worse they think of Connies and the more afraid of them they are, the closer they cooperate with Intelligence and Security. Understood?" "My lips are sealed, Commander. Thanks again." K athy and I lolled back. watching the commercials parade around the passenger compartment of the jet at eye level. There was the good old Kiddiebutt jingle I worked out when I was a cadet. I nudged Kathy and told her about it as it blinked and chimed at us. All the commercials went blank and a utility announcement came on: "In compliance with Federal law. passengers are advised that they are now pas.ing over the San Andreas Fault into earthquake territory, and that earthquake loss and damage clauses in any insurance they may carry are now canceled and will remain canceled until passengers leave earthquake territory." Then the commercials resumed their parade. "And." said Kathy, "I suppose it says in the small print that yak-bite insurance is good anywhere except in Tibet." "Yak-bite insurance?" I asked, astonished. "What would anyone carry that for?" "A girl can never tell when she'll meet an unfriendly yak, can she?" "I conclude that you're kidding." I said with dignity. "We ought to land in a few minutes. Personally, I'd like to pop in on Ham Harris unexpectedly. He's a good kid, but Runstead may have infected him with defeatism. There's nothing worse in mir line." "I'll come along with ym if I may. Mitch." We gawked through tli' windows like tourists as the r- ulid into the trafiic pattern for iln cnlldown from the tower. Knlhy hml never been there before. But there's always something new to see because buildings keep falling down and new ones put up. And what buildings! They're more like plastic tents on pl'istic frames than anything else. That kind of construction means they give and sway instead of snapping and crumbling when a quake jiggles southern California. And if the quake is bad enough and the skeleton does snap, what have you lost? Juct some plastic sheeting that broke along the standard snap grooves and some plastic structural membersthat generally are salvageable. From a continental economic viewpoint, it's alao a fine idea not to tic up too much fancy construction in southern California. Since the A-bomb terts did things to the San Anf'ceas fault, there's been a pretty fair chance that the whole area would slide quietly into the Pacific some day -- any a But vhsn we lookc'd down out of tiie trafiic pattern, it still was there and we knew, like e-' ybody cl ", t'-'t it would probably stay for t'-'j ilurilion of SO our visit. There had been some panic before my time when the quakes became daily, but Td blame that on the old-style construction that fell hard and in jagged hunks. Eventually people got used to it and -- as you'd expect in southern California -- even proud of it. Natives could cite you reams of statistics to prove that you stood more chance of being struck by lightning or a meteorite than you did of getting killed in one of their quakes. We got a speedy three-man limousine to pedal us to the local branch of Fowler Schockcn Associates. The receptionist gave me my first setback. She didn't recognize my face and she didn't recognize my name when I gave it to her. She said lazily: "I'll see if Mr. Harris is busy, Mr. Courtney." "Mr. Courtenay, young lady. And I'm Mr. Harris's boss." Kathy and I walked in on a scene of idleness and slackness that curled. my hair. Harris, with his coat off. was playing cards with two young employees. Two more were gaping, glassy-eyed, before a hypnotelesct. Another man was lackadaisically punching a calculator, one-finger system. "Harris!" I thundered. Everybody except the two men in trance swiveled my way, openmouthed. I walked to the hypnoteleset and snapped it off. The pair came to. groggily. "Mum mum Mister Courtenay," Harris stuttered. "We didn't expect -- " "Obviously. Let's go into youf office." Unobtrusively, Kathy followed us. "Harris," I said, "I'm disturbed. gravely disturbed, by the atmosphere here. But that can be corrected -- " His phone rang and I picked it up. A voice said excitedly: "Ham? He's here. Make it snappy: he took a limousine." "Thanks." I hung up. "Your tipster at the airport." I told Harris. He went white. "Show me your tally sheets," I said. "Your interview forms. Your punchcard codes. Your masters. Your sigmaprogress charts. Everything, in short, that you wouldn't expect me to ask to see. Get them out." He stood there a long, long time and finally said: "There aren't any." "What have you got to show me?" "Finalizations," he muttered. "Composites." "Fakes, you mean? Fiction, like the stuff you've been feeding us over the wire?" He nodded. His face was sick. "How could you do it, Harris?" I demanded. "How covld you do it?" He poured out a confused torrent of words. He hadn't meant to.It was his first independent job. Maybe he was just no good and it was better this way. He'd tried to keep the lower personnel up to snuff while he was dogging it himself, but it couldn't be done: they sensed it and took liberties and he didn't dare check them up. His selfpitying note changed: he became weakly belligerent. What difference did it make? It was just preliminary paperwork. One man's guess was as good as another's. And anyway the whole project might go down the drain. What if he had been taking it easy? He bet there were plenty of other people who took it easy and everything came out all right just the same. "No," I said. "You're wrong and you ought to know you're wrong. Advertising depends on the sciences of sampling, areatesting and customer research. You've knocked the props from under our program. We'll salvage what we can and start again." He took a feeble stand: "You're wasting your time if you do that, Mr. Courtenay. I've been working closely with Mr. Runstead for a long time. I know what he thinks, and he's as big a shot as you are. He thinks this paperwork is just a lot of nonsense." "What," I asked sharply, "have you got to .back that statement up with? Letters? Memos? Taped calls?" "I must have something like that," he said, and dived into his desk. He flipped through papers and played snatches of tape for minutes while the look of fear and frustration on his face deepened. At last he said in bewilderment: "I can't seem to find anything,  but I'm sure -- " Sure he was sure. The highest form of our art is to convince the customer without letting him know he's being convinced. This weak sister had been indoctrinated by Runstead with the unrealistic approach and then sent in on my project, to do a good job of cramming it up. "You're fired. Harris." I said. "I wouldn't advise you to try for a job in the advertising profession after this. It would be a waste of time." I went into the office and announced: "You're through. All of you. Collect your personal stuff and leave the office. You'll get your checks by mail." They gaped. Beside me. Kathy murmured: "Mitch, is that really necessary?" "You're damned right it's necessary. Did one of them tip off the home office on what was going on? No; they just relaxed and drifted. I said it was an infection, didn't #? This is it." Ham Harris drifted past us toward the door, hurt bewilderment on his face. He had been so sure Runstead would back him up. He had his crammed briefcase in one hand and his raincoat in the other. He didn't look at me. I went into his vacated office and picked up the direct wire to New York. "Hester? This is Mr. Courtenay. I've just fired the entire San Diego branch. Notify Personnel and have them do whatever's necessary about pay. And get me Mr. Runstead on the line." I drummed my fingers impatiently for a long minute and then Hester said: "Mr. Courtenay. I'm sorry to keep you waiting. Mr. Runstead's secretary says he's left for Little America on one of those tours. She says he cleaned up the A.I.G. thing and felt like a rest." "Felt like a rest? Good God! Hester, get me a New York to Little America reservation. I'm shooting right back on the next jet. I want to just barely touch ground before I zip off to the Pole. Got it?" "Yes, Mr. Courtenay." I hung up and found that J Kathy was staring at me. "You know, Mitch, I've been uncharitable to you in my time, kicking about your bad temper. I can see where you got it, if this is a typical situation." "It's not typical," I said. "It's the worst case of obstructionism I've ever seen. But there's a lot of it in our line -- everybody trying to make everybody else look bad so they'll look better. Darling, I've got to get to the field now and bull my way onto the next Eastbound. Do you want to come, too?" She hesitated. "You won't mind if I stay and do a little tourist stuff by myself?" "No, of course not. You have a good time. When you get ack to New York, I'll be there." We kissed and I raced out. The office was clear by then and I told the building, manager to lock it until further notice after Kathy left. I looked up from the street. She waved at me from the strange, flimsy building. VI York; Hester was right there. "Good girl," I told her. "When does the Pole rocket shoot off?" "Twelve minutes, from Strip Six, Mr. Courtenay. Here are your ticket and the .reservation. And some lunch in case -- " "Fine. I did miss a meal." We headed for Strip Six, with me chewing a generated cheese sandwich as I walked. "What's up at the office?" "Big excitement about you firing the San Diego people. Personnel sent up a complaint to Mr. Schocken and he upheld you -- approximately Force Four." That wasn't so good. Force Twelve -- hurricane -- would have been a blast from his office on the order of : "How dare you question the decision of a Board man working on his own project? Never let me hear again -- " And so on. Force Four -- rising gale, small craft make for harbor -- was something like: "Gentlemen. I'm sure Mr. Courte nay had perfectly good reasons for doing what he did. Often the Big Picture is lost to the purely routine workers in our organization -- " I asked Hester: "Is Runstead's secretary just a hired hand or one of his -- " I was going to say "stooges," but smoothly reversed my field -- "one of his confidants?" "She's pretty close to him," Hester said cautiously. "What was her reaction to the San Diego business?" "Somebody told me she laughed her head off. Mr. Courtenay." I didn't push it any harder. Finding out where I rtood with respect to the big guns was legitimate. Asking about the help was asking her to rat on them. Not that there weren't girls who did. "I expect to be right back." I told Hester. "All I want to do is straighten out something with Runstead." "Your wife won't be along?" she asked. "No. I'm going to tear Runstead into five or six pieces; if Dr. Nevin came along, she might try to put them back together again." Hester laughed politely and said : "Have a pleasant trip, Mr. Courtenay." We were at the ramp on Strip Six. TT was a mi.serable trip on a  miserable, undersized tourist rocket. We flew low and there were prism windows at all seats, which never fail to make me airsick. You turn your head and look out and you're looking straight down. Worse, all the ads were Taunton Associates jobs. You look out the window and just as you convince your stomach that everything's all right and yourself that it's interesting country below, a sleazy, oversexed Taunton ad for some inferior product opaques t!e window and one of their nagging, stupid jingles drills shrilly into your car. Over the Amazon Valley, for example, I was inspecting Electric Three, which happens to be the v.'o'rld's big'cst power dam, when : S# BolsterBra, BohierBra, Bolsters all the way; Don't you crumple, Don't you slumple; Keep them up to stay! The accompanying before-andafter live pix were in the worst possible taste, and I found myself thanking God again that I worked for Fowler Scbocken Associates. It was the same off Tierra del Fuego. We left the great circle course 'for a look at the whale fisheries, vast sea areas inclosed by booms that let the plankton in and didn't let the whales out I was watching with fascination as a cow whale nursed her calf -- it looked something like an aerial refueling operation -- when the window opaqued again for another dose of Taunton shock treatment: Sister, do you smell like this to your mister? The olfactory went on, anI had to use my carton while the ad chirped: No wonder he's hard to get! Use Swett! My seatmatc, a nondescript customer in Universal apparel, watched sympathetically as I retched. "Too much for you, friend?" he asked, showing the maddening superiority people who suffer from motion-sickness know too well. "Uh," I said. "Some of those ads are enough to make anybody sick." "Exactly what do you mean by that remark?" I asked evenly. It frightened him. T . only meant that it smelled a little strong," he said hastily. "Just that particular ad. I didn't mean ads in general. There's nothing wrong with me" "Good for you," I sd, and turned away. Still worried, he told me: "I'm perfectly sound, friend. I come from a good family. I went to a good school. I'm in the production end myself -- die-maker in Philly -- but I know the stuff's got to be sold. Channels of distribution. Building markets. Vertical intcgratiwi. ee? I'm perfectly sound!" "Okay," I grunted. "Then watch your mouth." He shriveled into his half of the scat. I hadn't enjoyed squelching him, but it was a matter of principle. A kid overhearing that kind of talk could be turned into a pushover for a slick Connie. W E were held up over Little America while a couple of other tourist craft touched down. One of them was from India and I mellowed at the sight. That ship, from nose to tail, was Indiastry-built. The crewmen were Indiastry-trained and Indiastrycmployed. The passengers, wakM ing and sleeping, paid tribute minute by minute to Indiastry. And Indiastry paid tribute to Fowler Schocken Associates. A tow truck hauled us into the great double-walled plastic doughnut that is Little America. There was only one check point. Little America is an invisible export -- a dollar trap for the tourists of the world, with no military value. (There are Polar military bases, but they are small, scattered and far under the ice, run by Columbia Field Forces, Inc.) A small thorium reactor heats and powers the place. Even if some nation desperate for fissionable material were to try to get it, it wouldn't have anything worth fighting for. Windmills eke out the thorium reactor, and there's some "heat pump" arrangement that I don't underst md which ekes out the windmills. At the check point I asked about Runstead. The officer looked him up and said : "He's on the two-day tour out of New York. Thomas Cook and Son. His pulled out a map of the place and showed me that this meant third ring in. third floor up. fifth sector, twenty-second room. "You can't miss it. I can accommodate you with a nearby room, Mr. Courtenay -- " "Thanks. Later." I shoved off and elbowed my way through crowds chattering in a dozen the bell. No answer. A pleasant young man said to me: "I'm the tour director. Can I help you?" "Where's Mr. Runstead? I want to see him on business." "Dear me. We try to get away from all that. I'll look in my register if you'll just wait a moment." He took me to his office-bedroom-bath up the sector a way and pawed through a register. "The Starrzelius Glacier climb, he said. "He went alone. Left at #, checked out in electric suit with R.D.F. and rations. He should be back in five hours or so. Have you arranged for quarters yet, Mr. -- ?" "Not yet. I want to go after Runstead. It's urgent." And it was. I was going to burst a blood vessel if I didn't get my hands on him. The slightly fluttery tour director spent five minutes convincing me that the best thing to do was sign on for his tour and he'd arrange everything. Otherwise I'd be shifted from pillar to post buying and renting necessary equipment from concessionaires and then, like as not, be turned back at checkout and not able to find the concessionaires again while my vacation was ticking away. I signed on and he beamed. He gave me a room in the sector -- plenty of luxury. It would have been, ten by fourteen if it hadn't been slightly wedgeshaped. In five minutes he was dealing out equipment to me. "Power pack -- strap it on so. That's the only thing that can go wrong: if you have a power failure take a sleepy pill and don't worry. You'll freeze, but we'll pick you up before there's tissue damage. Boots. Plug them in so. Gloves. Plug them in. Coveralls. Hood. Snowglasses. Radio direction finder. Just tell the checkout guard, 'Starrzelius Glacier,' and he'll set it. Two simple switches plainly labeled 'out' and 'in.' Outward bound, it goes 'beep-beep' -- ascending. Inward bound, it goes 'beep-beep' -- descending. Just remember, going op the glacier, the tone goes up. Going down the glacier, the tone goes down. "Distress signal -- a big red handle. You just pull and immediately you start broadcasting. The planes will be out in fifteen minutes. You have to pay the expenses for tht search and rescue, so I wouldn't yank the handle just for a ride back. It's always possible to rest, have a sip of Coffiest and keep on going. Route-marked map. Snowshoes. Gyro-compass. Rations. Mr. Courtenay, you are equipped. I'll lead you to checkout." The outfit wasn't as bad as it sounded. I've been more heavily bundled up against the lakeside winds in a Chicago winter. The lumpy items, like the power pack, the R.D.F. and the rations, were well distributed. The snowshoes folded into a pair of staffs with steel points for ice climbing, and went into something like an archery quiver on my back. We passed public rooms on the way to checkout. A lot of drinking and petting seemed to be going on. The tour director sighed: "It's nice to have some of my people going out after they get here. Most of them -- " He gestured. "And I have to be deaf, dumb and blind about who winds up in whose room. It's so discouraging at times!" Checkout was very thorough. They started with my heart and worked through my equipment with particular emphasis on the power pack. I passed, and they set the R.D.F. for Starrzelius Glacier, with sharp warnings not to overdo it. It wasn't cold inside the suit. For a moment only, I opened the face flap. WhamI I closed it again. Forty below, they had told me -- a meaningless figure until my nose felt it for a split-second. I didn't need the snowshoes at the base of the towering plastic doughmrt; it was crust ice that my spike-soled shoes bit into. I oriented the map with the little gyro-compass and trudged off into the vast whiteness along with the proper bearing. From time to time I pressed my left sleeve, squeezing the molded R.D.F. switch jmd heard inside my hood a cheerful, reassuring "Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep." There were some people frolicking in one party I passed and waved cheerily at. They seemed to be Chinese or Indians. What an adventure it must be for them! But, like poor swimmers hugging a raft, they did their frolicking almost under the shadow of Little America. Farther out, there were some people playing a game I didn't know. They had posts with bottomless baskets set up at either end of a marked-off rectangular field; the object was to toss a large silicone ball through the baskets. Still farther out, there, was a skiing class with instructors in red suits. I looked back after trudging for what seemed only a few minutes and couldn't see the red suits or Little America any more -- just a gray-white shadow. "Beepbeep," my R.D.F. said, and I kept going. Runstead was going to hear from me. Soon. The aloneness was eerie, but not unpleasant. Gradually, I began to realize why Fowler SchOcken had unerringly picked me to head the Venus Section. That remarkable man had known, somehow, that I vas the kind of guy who could stand and maybe even enjoy the Antarctic -- or another planet. Was this how Jack O'Shea had felt? Was this why he fumbled for words to describe Venus and was never satisfied with the words he found? My feet plunged into a drift and I unshipped and opened the snowshoes. After a little stumbling experiment, I began an easy, sliding shuffle that was a remarkably pleasant way of covering ground. It wasn't floating, yet neither was it the solid jar of a shoe against a paved surface. We'd been selling people the notion that they were basically pioneers, and here I was buying the notion myself -- and finding pride in it! T marched the compass course by picking landmarks and going to them: an oddly curved ice hummock, a blue shadow on a swale of snow, a puffball cloud hanging low. The R.D.F. continued to confirm me. I was elated at my mastery of the wild, and after two hours I became wildly hungry with an urgency I'd never known before in my life. I had to squat and open a silicone-tissue bell into which I fitted. Exposing my nose cautiously fx'om time to time, I judged the air warm enough in five minutes. I ravenously gulped the self-heated stew and tea and tried to strike a cigarette. It lit, but on the second puff I was blinded with smoke. Regretfully, I put it out against my shoe, closed my face mask, stowed the little tent and stretched happily. After anotlier bearing, I started off again. I told myself; "This Runstead thing is just a difference of temperament. He can't see tlie wide-open spaces and you can. There's no malice involved. He just thinks it's a crackpot idea because he doesn't realize that there are people who go for it. All you've got to do is explain it -- " That argument, born of wellbeing, crumbled at one touch of reason. Runstead was out on the glacier, too. He most certainly could see the wide-open spaces if, of all the places on Earth he could be. he chose the Storrzelius Olacier. Well, a showdown was Hrad ahead. "Beep-beep." I sighted through the compass and picked a black object on my course. I couldn't quite make it out, but it was visible and it wasn't moving. I broke into a shuffling run that made me pant, and against my will I slowed down. It was a man. When I was twenty yards away, the man looked impatiently at his watch, and I broke into the clumsy run again. "Matt!" I yelled. "Matt Runstead!" "That's right, Mitch," he said, as nasty as ever. He had folded skis thru-st into the snow beside him. "You're sharp today." "What's -- what's -- " I panted. "I have lime to spare," he . said, "but you've wasted enough of it. Good-by, Mitch." Whije I stood there, helpless with exhaustion, he picked up his folded skis, swung them. I fell back with pain, bewilderment and shamed rage bursting my head. I felt him fumbling at my chest and then I didn't feel anything for a while. I woke thinking I had kicked the covers off and that it was cold for early aututnn. Then the ice-blue Antarctic sky knifed into my eyes and I felt the crumbly snow beneath me. It had happened, then. My head ached horribly and I was cold. Too cold. I felt and found that the power pack was missing. No heat to the suit, gloves and boots. N# power to the R.D.F., coming or going. No use to pull the emergency signal. I tottered to my feet and felt the cold grip me like a vise. There were footprints punched into the snow leading -- where? There was the trail of my snowshoes. Stiffly I took a step back along that trail, and then another, and then another. The rations. I could thrust them into the suit, break the heat seals and let them fiU the suit with temporary warmth. Plodding step by step, I debated: "Stop and rest while you drink the ration's heat or keep moving? You need a rest. Something impossible happened. Your head is aching. You'll feel better if you sit for a moment, open a ration or two and then go on." I didn't sit. I knew what that would mean. I fumbled a Coffiest can from its pocket with fingers that would barely obey me, and got it into my suit. My thumb didn't seem strong enough to pop the seal and I told myself: "Sit down for a moment and gather your strength. You don't have to lie down." But I wanted to. My thumb drove through the seal and the tingling heat was painful. It became a blur. I opened cans until I couldn't work them out of their pockets any more. And then I sat down, telling myself I'd get up in one more second for Kathy, two more seconds for Kathy, three more seconds for Kathy. But I didn't. Cuurtruay  in aeri'nu trouble. Mow (crious, thouRh, nut even he with his lisciI IS a fictional sliock attack that keeps (his astonishingly ingenious novel hurtling along, actually picking up speed as u goes. I Accompunyiiig it are (wo noveleta that are atudics in comparative literature (.'lifton tells rhe emotionally tnoving story of a father with a desperately grave problem. Supcificially, it'a what any man would wish fur his child... but only ' auperficially.  Wyndham eaamines a apaceman'a yolutioa for lonclinecs. It's a solution, right PV enough, but an eaplosive one! Resides these fine leads, there are short stories. Willy Ley'S exciting science department (have you sent in your questions, by tlve way?) and features. You won't surprise ! the highest mountain First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg... a very rotten eggi B ruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive -- except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escapre death. Maybe that was it. " 'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow," Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, "Thanks, Mr. Poe." a Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce. "Come on in, boys, and get warm," Bruce invited. "Hey, poet, you're still here!" Anhauser said, looking astonished. "We thought you'd be running off somewhere," Jacobs said. Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it. "Where?" he asked. "Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?" "Any place just so it was away from here and us," Anhauser said. "I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?" "Ah, come on. get the hell out of there," Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. "We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning." know," Bruce said. "I'll be glad to sec you climb the mountain." Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth -- all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard. They'd estimated its height at over # feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth -- or a ' warning one. and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest. In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face. S Hf remeinbered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late. Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them. "This is a mere formality," Terrence finally said, "since we all know you killed Lieutenant Ekran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course." "For whom?" Bruce asked. "What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back." "When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?" Bruce laughed without much humor. Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. "You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Evciyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you members!" "Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus," Bruce said. "Now we get another lecture !' Terrence exploded. He leaned forward. "You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here." "I know," Bruce agreed indifferently. "I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it." "Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does . Venus -- ?" Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. "Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people." "I haven't heard it," Terrence admitted. "What injustice?" Bruce said. "I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed." Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes. "No," Bruce said. "I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about." Terrence nodded. "You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?" "There are plenty on Earth who agree with me," Bruce said. "I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless..." He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place. A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, j selfdeterminism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt -- you shoot Doran?" "I didn't likf him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the -- " Bruce hesitated. "What? When he shot what?" Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail. "All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here." "What kind of dreams?" Someone laughed. "Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there," Bruce said. "People talk to me. and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all." Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room. "It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth." Terrence grinned. "Ghosts, Bruce?" "Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had  feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?" Terrence nodded and glanced to either side. "We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever," Bruce pointed out. "Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place -- " "The mountain." Terrence said. "You've been afraid even to talk abovit scaling it." "Not afraid," Bruce objected, "I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isri't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there. "Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you arc stops you -- it doesn't interest me." "Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid. "I know," Bruce said. "Anyway. I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window -- something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking -- " His tliroat was getting tight. He had difllculty talking. "Doran asked me what I was looking at. and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it. too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw. I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think." "What? Explain that remark." "That's the philosophy of conquest -- don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at alt. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did." "Is that all. Bruce?" "That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance." "That's what I figured." Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. "Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago." Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape. "Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner con# flict -- indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies." "Yes," Terrence said. "But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something -- " "Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something." He glanced at Marsha. "Did you see anything?" She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. "Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could see anything else. A shadow maybe -- " "All right," Terrence interrupted. "Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment  of serious psycho cases in space?" M "Yes. Execution." "No facilities for handling such cases cn route back to Earth." T understand. No apologies necessary. Captain." Terrence shifted his position. "However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time." "What kind of service?" "Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain." 'Why not?" Bruce said. "You aren't certain you're coming back, then?" "We might not," Terrence admitted calmly. "Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in." "I'll do that." Bruce said. "It should be interesting." and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts. He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity. At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing. At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for -- to accept a challenge like this!" At twentyfive thousand feet, Terrence reported, "We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexcl have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain ! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!" From forty thousand feet, Terrencesaid, "We gauged thismountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there loesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth.' And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: "No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb -- " Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time. From sixty thousand feet. Terrence reported, "I had to shoot Anhauscr a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable nien. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent cal'her turning anti-democratic like t':at! This mountain will be a R.cat tester for us in tlic future. test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are." Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. "Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be -- " Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams. It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more ; certainly not as real as the dreams. T'HE problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it. and it was the same -- allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep. He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene. Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense. The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know. '... dreams, in their vivid coloring of lifei, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love -- and all our own! -- than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams. And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky. "If I had a choice," he thought, "I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable." Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there wouldbe one compensation -- he would also be freeof Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value across the Cosmos. But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of sewne void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious. "Bruce -- Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up -- " And some time later; "Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts." Bruce bent toward the' radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door. "Marsha," he said. "Bruce -- " She hadn't said his name that way for a long time. "Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter..." He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper. "Bruce, hello down there." Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. "Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe... free... warm. I love you. Do you hear tliat? I really love you. after all, After all... " Her voice drifted away. cp'"e back to him. "We're climb"" t e highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing -- reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce -- that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you... I can't remember it now. Darling, what... T E stared at the radio. He hesitat, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her. "Hello, hello, darling," he whispered. "Marsha, can you hear me?" "Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down." He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and howjt had been there, years ago. with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks. ' '... and tliere is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain. But down, my dear: And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley Will never seem fresh or clear For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water In the feathery green of the year... ' " The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice. "Marsha, are you still there?" "What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?" Terrence demanded. "Listen. you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world -- the top of everything. The top of the universe!" Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of sMnething or other -- Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all -- and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back. Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down. He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives. He went to the window and lookedout. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water. The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind. He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams? The girl -- Helene -- was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette. He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beauti#. but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was. He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships -- not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four. There was his own iiMividual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up. There was no mountain. TjOR one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again. "Look here. Bruce. T wpndcred how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!" '"Get what?" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet. "Smoke?" she said. He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put tlie lighter back into her pocket. "It's real nice here," she said. "Isn't it?" 'T guess it's about perfect." 'Tt'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know. "I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again." "We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?" "No." He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this? " 'Is all that we see or seem,' " he whispered, half to himself, " 'but a dream within a dreamP' " She laughed softly. "Poe was ahead of his time." she said. "You still don't get it. do you? You don't know what's been happening?" "Maybe I don't." She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. "Poor guys. I can't feci much hatred toward them now'. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind -- after they've accepted you. and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers -- wc can see now -- it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance." "Yes," Bruce said. "Tliere's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance -- the chance we seem to have here, to live decently..." "You're beginning to see now which was the dream," she said and smiled. "But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long." She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn... She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was -- he didn't know. A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, lie saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green. She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him. "I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain -- " Shestopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. "I'm very glad you came on the fifth," she whispered. "Are you glad now?" "I'm very glad," he said. "The Martians tested us," she explained. "They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship -- the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the rind, tlie Martians are also capable of hypnosis -- no, that's not really the word, only the closest our lanj;uage comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel -- but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was tlic suggestion of the Mar#j " r waved her arm slowly to be a peck, "fhe Martians r"f'de tjie mo'mtc'n real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments .  . even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll sec how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see." walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He ftlt too sickened to go on walking. "It may seem cruel now," she said, "but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to." He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members 'of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V, too freshly dead to have decayed much... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone els and he lay with his arms stretched out. his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings. The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship -- horizontally. Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal. He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time,, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future hd not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal. "You loved her?" "Once," Bruce said. "She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her." He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it. " ... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year... ' " He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back. "They've all been dead quite a while," Bruce said wonderingly. "Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are -- are the climbers still climbing -- somewhere, Helene?" "Who knows?" Helene answered softly. "Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that." They entered the city. Movmc? scription sent to a new address, nocifjr Why so long.' Because... Master and secondary lists have to be corrected. A new addtessograph place has to be The place has to be put in its proper alphabetical place ici the addressograph machine. Other people ate moving, too. and their changes of address nave to be processed. Four weeks is none too long, but we can handle it. As soon as you know where you're moving to. please send the old as well as the new address immediately cn ,... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. Orphans Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick -- the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem! of the Void I N the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings, Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea. "What do you make of it?" he asked. Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit. "Looks like a temporary  camp," Ball said. "Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?" Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him. "No inscriptions," he pointed out. "They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization." "You don't think these are native?" Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded. Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old -- too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks. Ball's voice sounded in his helmet; "Want to set up shop, Skipper?" Steffens paused. "All right, if you think it will do any good." "You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native -- " he indicated the ledge beneath their feet -- "and was cut out a long while back." "How long? Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. "I wouldn't like to say offhand." "Make a rough estimate." Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said : "Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know." Steffens whistled. Ball pointed again at the wall. "Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at leant several thousand years to cut that deep, and t'he wind here has only a fraction of that force." The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history. Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years. Which ought to give them, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start. worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls. # "Well," he said, "whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since." "No? How can you be sure?" Steffens grunted. "A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Variui If, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?" He kicked at the sand distractedly. "And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years..." "Fifteen thousand." Ball said. When Steffens looked up. he added: "That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least." Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him. "But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be -- " "If the ship left and some of them stayed." Steffens nodded. "But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. "Wc'U never know." "How about the other planets?" Ball asked. "The report was negative; Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO-.atmosphere." "How about moons?" Steffens shrugged. "We could try them and find out."  riHE third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone. The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try. At a height of several mites, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar at slow spiral of the Mapping Command.' Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below. Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched sently. After a while he saw a city. The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead. He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising abovea plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred liole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved. Steffens went down low to malvc sure, then brought the. ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities -- all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing. No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years. The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the , dials, that there could be nothing alive. After a while Ball said: "Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?" Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side. "We'll go down and look for the answer," he said. "Break out the radiation suits." He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were' alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousand of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered. When the ship had gone very low. looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move. Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot. Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a n full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past. height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up: some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms. Nothing alive Vut robots, he thought, robots. He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement. A band of clear, plasticlikc stuff ran round the head -- it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost jerpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen. The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career. Lieutenant Ball came up. hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaw'are. The exec was pale with surprise. "What were they?" he said blankly. "Lord, they looked like robots!" "They were." Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist. "Almost humanoid," Steffens said, "but not quite." Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.  "Well, what do we do now?' Steffens shrugged. "They saw us. We could leave now and let aa them quite possibly make a... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV." "Can we go down?" 'Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility." Ho tapped lis fingers on the screen con 'usedly. "They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives." Ball gulped. "I don't follow you."  "They could be the original inhabitants of this planet -- the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway" he added, "they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen." Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Stevens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking. The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty. And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone... He stopped in the cepter of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready... could this be an outpost? An outpost! He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble... The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say: '"Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve..." G reetings, it said! Greetings!" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips. Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it 'Spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices. "We await your coming," it said gravely, and repeated: "Our desire is only to serve." # And then the robots sent a pfcfure. As perfect and as dear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffen's mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its riht Side, and extended it toward Steffens, a gra-r ciously offered hand. Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped. When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a white: there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to. the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear. While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands. "Greetings," he sSW, because it was what they had said, and explained: "We have come from the stars." It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message? No. it was his responsibility; he had to go on: "We request -- we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet."  that there were so many. They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now tficre were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it. and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out. One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw. on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him. extended a hand as it had done iii the picture. Steffens took it. he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit. # "Welcome, the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less -- Steffens could not understand -- somehow less interested, as if the robot had been -- expecting someone else. "Thank you," Steffens said. "We are deeply grateful for your permission to land." "Our desire," the robot repeated mechanically, "is only to serve." Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But... "Will the others come down?" asked the robot, still mechanically. Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently. "They must remain with the ship," Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask. For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come cm out of the skiff. They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly. "We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our -- custom -- not to communicate unless we arc called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real -- nature -- and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data." Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action. "We perceive," the robot went on, "that you arc unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be -- dismayed -- to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must -- apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and -- understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request." Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work. U The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed tliat they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail. It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row -- numbers, perhaps -- were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steifens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical. It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were. there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by tfie robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all oveY the barren hori;n. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat. The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to fee their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like 'children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had bflilt them. Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well. Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with boffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens. Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-Hmbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing. Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too. "There's no harm in them,' said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. "They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever beard of a robot being glad?" Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical : "I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but -- yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours." It was jaid haltingly, but it was the best he could do. The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head. 'T perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we arc entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey -- I would have to examine your thought more fully -- but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures." The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted. "I must tell you," the thing went on, "that we ourselves arecurious." It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length: "We know of only two types oi living structure. Ours, wliich is largely metallic, and that of the Makers, which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a -- doctor -- and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you arc interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance." It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the "doctors," Steffens det# cided, were probably just that "Kioctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers. The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush: "Can you tell us where the Makers are?" Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty. "The Makers -- are not here." Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on: "The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time." Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind. War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed. He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing, nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp. If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere -- good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill. Were they immortal?  doctor?" Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring. "No, not yet," he said, "thank you." He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently"Could you tell me," he said at last, "how old you are? Individually?" "By your reckoning," said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, T am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive." Steffens tried to understand that. "It would perhaps simplify our conversations," said the robot, "if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first -- letters -- of my designation, my name would translate as Elb." "Glad to meet you." Steffens mumbled. "You are called 'Stef" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball : "The age of -- Peb -- is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirtyeight years." Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless -- He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV. Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all. His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order. "Do you build yourselves?" the exec asked. Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering. "No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the -- " another pause for a word -- "by the Factory." "The Factory?" "Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?" Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly. H "Would you prefer to use your It is quite a long way from here." It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling  in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance -- moving around their birthplace. fpHE Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave. Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so pret# bots that he did little thinking. Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of therobots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug. a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words "organic matter." It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed. But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing. At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the karthmen cotd remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out ofi the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area. It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive. Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his  mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. SteiTens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life. He had a vague idea of the robot's history -- more, perhaps, then they knew themselves -- but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.  asked. Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity; "We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return." "When they return?" It had not occurred to Ste'ens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so. Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. "I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back." If the robot could have laughed, Steffens.,thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic. "It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?" Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all. Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known -- that the Makers were gone and would never come back -- he was a long time under-' standing. What he did was push this Sfeculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith. But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot -- a machine which did not eat or sleep -- listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God. "God?" the robot repeate# without comprehension. "What is God?" Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered: "It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning -- " Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed -- "but then we probed your minds and founds that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even -- " Elb caught himself -- "you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar -- " Elb paused for a long while -- "an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you." Steffens understood. He nodded. The Makers were the robots' God. were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If be were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God. It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself. But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled. T he report from Aliencon was finished at the end of the fifth week. Lieutenant Ball brought it in to Steffens in his cabin, laid it on the desk before him. "Get set," Ball advised stiffly, indicating the paper. There was a strained, brittle expression on his face. "I sort of figured it, but I didn't know it was this bad." When Steffens looked up in surprise. Ball said: "You don't know. Read it. Go ahead." The exec turned taully and left the room. Steffens stared after him. then looked down at the paper. The hint he had of the robots' history came back into his mind. Nervously, he picked up the report and started to read. The story unfolded objectively. It was clear and cold, the way formal reports must always be. Yet there was a great deal of emotion in it. Even Aliencon couldn't help that. What it told was this: The Makers had been almost humanoid. Almost, but with certain notable exceptions. They were telepaths -- no doubt an important factor in their remarkable technological progress -- and were equipped with a secondary pair of arms. The robot-doctors were able to give flawless accounts of their body chemistry, which was similar to Earth-type, and the rubble of the cities had given a certain amount of information concerning their society and habits. An attached paper described the sociology, but Steffens put it aside until sometime later. There had been other Factories. The remains of them had been found in several places, on each of the other continents. They had been built sometime prior to thewar, and all but one of the Factories had subsequently been destroyed. Yet the Makers were not. as Steffens had supposed, a warlike people. Telepathy had given them the power to know each others' minds and to interchange ideas, and their record of peace was favorable, especially when compared with Earth's. Nevertheless, a war had begun, for some reason Aliencon could not find, and it had obviously gotten out of hand. Radiation and bacteria eventually destroyed the Makers; the last abortive efforts created enough radiation to destroy life entirely. There were the germs and tlie bombs and the burning rays, and in the end everything was blasted and died -- everything, that is, but the one lone Factory. By a pure, blind freak, it survived. And, naturally, it kept turning out robots. It was powered by an atomic pile. stocked with materials which, when combined with the returjiing. worn-out robots, enabled it to keep producing indefinitely. The process, even of repair, was entirely automatic. Year after year, the robots came out in a slow, steady stream. Ungoverned, uninstructed, they gathered around the Factory and waited, communicated only rarely among themselves. Gradually the memory of war, of life -- of everything but that which was imprisoned in their minds at birth -- was lost. The robots kept coming, and they stood outside the Factory. The robot brain, by far the' finest thing the Makers had ever built, was variable. There was never a genius brain, and never a moron brain, yet the intelligence of the robots varied considerably in between. Slowly, over the long years, thje more intelligent among them began to communicate with each other, to inquire, and then to move away from the Factory, searching. They looked for someone to serve and, of course, there was no one. The Makers were gone, but the crime was not in that alone. For when the robots were built, the Makers had done this: Along with the first successful robot brain, the Makers had realized the necessity of creating a machine which could never turn against them. The present robot brain was the result. As Steffens had already sensed, the robots could feel pn. Not the pain of physical injury, for there were no nerves in the metal bodies, but the pain of frustration, the pressure of thwarted emotion, mental pain. And so, into the robot brain, the Makers had placed this prime Directive: the robots could only feel content, free from the pain, as long as they were serving the Makers. The robots must act for the Makers, must be continually engaged in carrying out the wishes of the Makers, or else there was a slowly growing irritation, a restlessness and discontent which mounted as the unserving days went by. And there were no more Makers to serve. pain was not unbearable. The Makers themselves were not fully aware of the potentialities of the robot brain, and therefore did not risk deranging it. So the pressure reached a peak and leveled off, and for all of the days of the robots' lives, they felt it never-ending, awake and aware, each of them, for fifty-five years. And the robots never stopped coming. A millenium passed, during which the robots began to move and to think for themselves. Yet it was much longer before they found a way in which to serve. The atomic pile which powered the Factory, having gone on for almost five thousand years, eventually wore out. The power ceased. The Factory stopped. It was the first event in the robots' history. Never before had there been a time when they had known anything at all to alter the course of their lives, except the varying wfeather and the unvarying pain. There was one among them now that began to reason. It saw that no more robots were being produced, and although it could not be sure whether or not this was as the Makers had ordained, it formed an idea. If the purpose of the robots was to serve, then they would fail in that purpose if they were to die out. The robot thought tins and communicated it to the others, and then, together, they began to rebuild the pile. It was not difficult. The necessary knowledge was already in their minds, implanted at birth. The significance lay in the fact that, for the first time in their existence, the robots had acted upon their own initiative, had begun to serve again. Thus the pain ceased. When the pile was finished, the robots felt the return of the pain and. having once begun, they continued to attempt to serve. A great many examined the Factory, found that they were able to improve upon the structure of their bodies, so that they might be better able to serve the Ma# kers when they returned. Accordingly, they worked in the Factory, perfecting themselves -- although they could not improve the brains -- and many others left the Factory and began to examine mathematics and the physical universe. It was not hard for them to build a primitive spaceship, for the Makers had been on the verge of interstellar flight, and they flew it hopefully throughout the solar system, looking to see if the Makers were there. Finding no one, they left the buildings on Tyban IV as a wistful monument. with a hope that the Makers would some day pass this way and be able to use them. Millenia passed. The pile broke down again, was rebuilt, and so the cycle was repeated. By infinitesimal steps, the robots learned and recorded their learning in the minds of new robots. Eventually they reached the limits of their capability. The pain returned and never left. S teffens left his desk, went over and leaned against the screen. For a long while he stood gazing through the mists of carbon air at the pitiful, loyal' mechanicals who thronged outside the ship. He felt an almost overwhelming desire to break something, anything, but all he could do was swear to himself. Vf Ball came back, looked at Steffens' eyes and into them. His own were sick. "Twenty-five thousand years," he said thickly, "that's how long it was. Twenty five thousand years..." Steffens was pale and w'ordless. The mass of the robots outside stood immobile, ageless among rock which was the same, hurting. hurting. A fragment of an old poem came across Steffens' mind. "They also serve who only stand and wait..." Not since he was very young had he been so deeply moved. He stood up rigidly and began to talk to himself, saying in his mind : It is all over now. To hell with what is past. We will take them away from this place and let them serve and, by Cod..., . He faltered. But the knowledge of what could be done s#rengthened him. Earthmen would have to come in ships to take the robots away. It would be a little while, but after all those years a little while was nothing, less than nothing. He stood there thinking of the things the robots could do, of how. in the Mapping Command alone, they would be invaluable. Temperature and atmosphere meant nothing to them. They could land on almost any vorld, could mine and build and develop... And so it would be ended. The robots would serve Man. Steffens took one long, painful breath. Then he strode from the room without speaking to Ball, went forward to the lockers and pulled out a suit, and a moment later he w;as in the airlock. He had one more thing to do, and it would be at once the gladdest and most difficult job that he had ever attempted. He had to tell the robots. He had to go out into the sand and face them, tell them that all of the centuries of pain had been for nothing, that the Makers were dead and would never return, that every robot built for twenty-five thousand years had been just surplus, purposeless. And yet -- and this was how he was able to do it -- he was also coming to tell them that the wasted years were over, that the years of doing had begun. As he stepped from the airlock he saw Elb standing, immobile, waiting by the ship. In the last few seconds Steffens realized that it was not necessary to put this into words. When he reached the robot, he put forth a hand and touched Elb's arm, and said. very softly: "Elb, my friend, you must look into my mind -- " And the robot, as always, obeyed. A t the risk of being blamed for inventing a brand-new variety of nepotism. I'm going to begin this column with an answer to a question asked of me by my own eight-year-old daughter. One day, probably thinking back to a visit to the meteorite eollection in the Hayden Planetarium, she asked: "Daddy, has anybody ever been hurt by a meteorite?" I happened to know that this had oc curred more than once; naturally, such strange cases were always recorded, and so I could answer the question in the affirmative., Let's forget for a moment that there are such cases on record, however, and try to work up the statistical probabilities'" instead. We all know that meteorites come in all sizes, from particles'as small as grains of fine sand, making a barely visible streak of light in the night sky, to hefty chunks like Ahnighito from Greenland, which weighs around # tons, and the one at Hoba West near Grootfontein in Southwest Africa, which is still in the ground and has been estimated by some to weigh # tons. Those which make impressive streaks of light in the sky and can almost be said to illuminate a night landscape momentarily are nevertheless tiny bits of cosmic matter. A bright meteor with a visual magnitude of "zero" -- like a very bright star -- is caused by a meteorite with a mass of  gram. One with a visual magnitude of 'minus three" -- a newspaper probably would headline it "blinding meteor flashes across city; harmless, scientists say" -- has a mass of # grams. And there are # grams to the ounce. Meteorites that small never even reach the ground. The next question in our statistical analysis would be how numerous meteorites are. The best available answer is that, counting only those of visual magnitude "zero" or brighter, there are # per #-hour day. Among them there are perhaps half a dozen large enough to reach the ground. Every day. Earth sweeps a small truck-load of fine sand, with a few pebbles in it, out of the sky. If that rate has been maintained for the last two billion years, which is doubtful, this accumulation of cosmic sand has increased Earth's diameter by about half an inch. All right, then, a few pebbles a day. The area of Earth's sursquare miles and, afar as the endangered population is concerned, you can subtract another combined area of all lakes and for Antarctica, where nobody square miles of area where somebody might be hit; in round figures. one-quarter of the total surface. If eight meteorites per #-hour day are large enough to reach the ground, just two of them will hit inhabited or inhabitable land. You don't have to go on and establish the average number of people per square mile and the percentage of a square mile covered by the area of the average number of inhabitants. From statistics alone, you'd learn that it is virtually impossible for a pen;on to be the accidental target of a metoritc. The actual historical records tell a different tale. What may be taken as the oldest reported case is the one in the Bible (Joshua #:#)... as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azakah, and they died..." The date, roughly, would be # B. C. Of the meteorites mentioned in classical literature, only one is considered as "certain," a "stone the size of a chbriot" which fell on the Greek mainland -- in Thrace -- in # B. C. It was described by Pliny the Elder and was still extant in his time, but if it did any damage, that fact was not recorded. The second case of fatalities due to meteorites was located by the French scientist Biot amost a hundred and fifty years ago. In January. # A.D., according to Chinese chronicles, a large stone felt in China, crushing waThe next case is the most famous on for more than a few reasons. It happened in Crema, a city near Milan in Italy. It took place, by a strange coincidence, during an eclipse of the Sun. And Raffaelo Santi, or Raphael, painted the event. The date was the #th of September, #, and it must have been a large meteorite which entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded. About a thousand stones pelted the area, killed birds and sheep and a Franciscan friar. In # -- oddly enough, also on September H -- several meteorites struck Venice, causing damage to buildings, but no loss of life. In #. on September #th, a small stone descended on the grounds of a Franciscan monastery in Milan, a sailing ship returned to the Mediterranean from Japan and the captain reported that during the voyage, which lasted a number of years, a meteorite weighing some nine pounds had hit the The more recent the reports, the more specific they are in detail. Lincoln LaPaz of the Institute of Meteorites (U. of New Mexico) recently compiled a list .containing the following cases: #, June #, #:# PM: fall of chondrites (stony meteorites) at Siena. Italy: one tone pierced the hat of a child, no injuries #S, January #; meteorite fall at Oriane (India) killed a man and seriously injured a woman #. February #, #:# PM: meteorite fall at Mhow (India) wounded a man in one arm #, November #. #:# AM: several cattle killed by fall of stony meteorites at Macao, Brazil #, July #. #:# AM; fall at Brauoau, Austria, mass weighing #z #!. fell into  room with three sleeping children, covered them with debris without doing other harm I#. May #, #:# PM: colt killed at New Concord, Ohio #, January #, #:# PM: a man was very narrowly missed by a meteorite at Nedagolla, India #, June #, #:# AM: a dog was killed at Naktila, Egypt #. April #. #:# AM: at Aba, Japan, a meteorite (preserved, weighing only # grams) struck and slightly injured the Bve-year old daughter of Mr. Tahci Kuriyama #, June #, #:# PM: at Chicora, Pennsylvania, a cow was found with its hide torn as if by a falling atone. This was immediately after a recognized meteorite fall; meteorites were found in neighboring fields. To this list compiled by Frof. LaPaz, two cass can be added, one of them doubtful. The doubtful case occurred in # in northern Germany (Pomerania or Mecklenburg), where several sheep burned to death in a fire in a hayloft alleged to have been caused by a meteorite. To the best of my knowledge, the meteorite was never found. The other case is the so-called Benld Meteorite to which the Chicago Natural History Museum has just devoted a special paper (Geological Series, vol. vii, No. #.) It fell on September #, #, between #:# and #:# AM at nois. It was a rather large chondrite, weighing # grams or # lbs. The Benld meteorite did not injure anybody, but broke through the roof of a garage, the roof of the car parked inside, through the seat cushion and the car's floor. It struck the muffler next, denting it and then bounced back to come to rest entangled in the seat springs. Against all statistical probability, then, meteorites have hit and killed people. But it may be generations between now and the next instance. often ask whether it is possible to produce a picture of the sky in, say, # A.D. or of the time of Shalmaneser I of Assyria, who began his rule probably in # B.C. Of course, that can be done: in December of every year, most planetariums set their instrument back to the time of Christ. (The director usually winces a bit when December rolls arounfl, for that needs some # hours running time, which wears out cog wheels and is hard on the bearings.) But when you go back to # B.C., you have to be several hours off if you want to reproduce a specific time -- say, midnight The instrument is not corrected for the fact that the length of the day changes slightly. The best present estimate is that the day lengthens at the rate of #I seconds per century. Over an interval of # years, that makes the day of Shalmaneser's time # seconds shorter than it is now. Hardly . noticeable -- but # years contain about l.#PO,# days. The average discrepancy for every day would thus be # seconds, which totals up to # seconds, or eight hours. This, according to Prof. George Gamow, is the reason why the ancients observed eclipses which, if calculated without that correction factor, should have been below the horizon for them. L ET'S talk about a yard of string now, to give a wonderful example of how "reasoning" can lead you astray. The circumference of the Earth along the equator is # miles or, since there are # yards m a mile, # yards. Now we'll level all the mountains that happen to be along the equator and put a string around, at sea level, tight. And now we lengthen this string by precisely one yard. How high, provided that it is supported all around the equator at the same distance, would that string be above sea level? "Reasoning" will say, without a moment's hesitation, that it will be insignificant. Possibly a bacillus, if it really wanted to, could squeeze across the equator under that string. The truth is that a cat could do it. for the string would be about six inches above the ground. Impossible? Let's sec what the radius of the larger circle would be -- we are all agreed that it must be larger; being one yard longer, the question is merely whether it would be visible. The original sea level circle was given by #r x t, the new circle is obviously # r ITjI (if "r" has been expressed in yards) and the new radius R must be r x. And X turns out to be I divided by # ir. If we take t as #, this gives # of a yard, or # inches.  The point is here that the increase of the radius is independent of the original radius. The increase of the radius must always be equal to the increase in the circumference divided by # . Go ahead and try it with anything circular you have access to. You'll always find that an increase of the original circumference by one yard will increase the radius by slightly less than six inches. In case neither the formula nor the experiments fully convince you, you may imagine another example which might help. Here we have a board three yards long -- but we imagine it to be so thin that its thickness is negligible -- and we tie a strmg around lengthwise. Obviously the string will be six yards long. Now we lengthen the string once more by one yard. The result will be two loops at both ends, each loop sticking out by one quarter of a yard or # inches. Here it is apparent that it would not matter whether the board is originally three yards long, or # yards, or # miles. If you add a yard to the length of the tight string, you'll always get two loops at both ends, sticking out a full nine inches. Common sense, as you can see. is not always common, which has been noted by others in the past -- but neither does it always make sense! A handbook stated the temperature oi the hih atmosphere as # ifevin for an altitude of # kilometers and continues: "this would make space flight virtually impossible; this temperature is well above the melting point of most metals and above the vaporization point of many. Richard Hanna, # Edewood St. Hartford, Conn. These figures have proved enormously misleading to many people -- they ldhl mean at all nliat they seem to mean. You know that the speed of air mole rules increases with temperalure, M you could express a given temperature by mentioning the average speed of the air molecules. Conversely, you #an express the average speed of air moleoules hy temperature. This is what such tables usually do, anti some physicists are careful to refer to them as "kinetic temperatures." But the kinetic temperature f # Kelvin at # Kilometers altitude does not mean that a rocket woiihl acquire tliat temperature up there. The 'kinetic temperature" merely states how fast the air molecules move; it says nothing about whether there are enough air molecules up there to matter. There aren't. For rockets large enough to have the payloal capacity to carry a pilot, air resistance virtually ceases as low as # miles above sea level. Beyond that, the air is loo thin to influence either the movement or the temperature of a rocket. If interstellar space is a vacuum, with neither matter nor as present, it is therefore "nothin. What are the physical components of "nothing?" Dorothy Urman # Euclid Heights Boulevard Cleveland Heights #, Ohio Even if interstellar space were ompletely emp.ly, it would still not he 'nothing." It limy have nothing in il, hut it M Hpace, tomeilung Iiere matter might be. Actualiy., infer#tellar npuoe is not empty, for The most typieal (anl only) eharaeteriKtie of empty spare I ran think of is that it dot's not offer any resislunt'e to moemenl. either of material objects or of raiiiant energy. What are the chances of finding planets (or inteJlijent life on them) circling other sfars? Eddie West, Jr. # North Flower Street, Santa Ana, Cal. Kxrellent -- except that we don't know yet how we could gt there. Here's the reason w hy life elsewhere is virtually certain: #I our own galaxy, there are consider only those of the Main Sequence (to which our sun and Sirius belong), we ileal with If only a tenth of them have jilanets- -- a rather pcHsimistic suns with planets. If our solar system is representative, that would make two hrlHon fdaiiets like Earth and Mars. Assuming that only one per cent of these hlnels hae proiluceil inti'iliplanets with intelligent lieings on them. And if only one er cent of those have progresfeil to the verge of space travel, as we have, we can count on two hundred ihousaiid planets where lieiiigs are writing equations about rockets and massratios and most liki'ly read and write science fiction. Eonsiderahle, eh?  would like to have your opinion on life not based on carbon like ours. Most authorities are extremely pessimistic, so if would be interesting to hear the other side (providing that there is an "other side"). Also, could you give me references regarding contra-terrene matter? Robert O. Woods # Penninfon Road Trenton. N. J. I'm afraid there is no other side." Within the leinperalnre range in which we know chemistry best, only the earhon atom is versatile enough to form living compoumis. XThethcr this may he different in another temperature range is simply leyond our know leilge. For eoiitra-lerrene matter, see: Astrophysical Joitrnnly March #, pp. #-# (Rojnnski); Fhysicnl Review #, p. # (Rojanski), ibid. #, p. # (Zwicky) ; Pop. Astronomy February #, pp. #. ihid. May #, pp. #. ibid. June #i#, (Herriek, Lu Pax eU (il.); (George (rainow: Structure of Atomic ISuclei (Oxford #) Pari I, Chapter #; P.A.M.'Dirac in Heiseiiherg's Die modcrne #toilieorie, Leipzig #, p. #ff. fs there any material known (with the exception of large chunks of space itself) which will insulate a piece of iron from the afrachon of a magnet? Betsy Curb's R.D. # Saegertown, Penn. There ia no insulator known. For practical purposes, one ran tiHe a shield of Permalloy or Mu-metal (loth highly magnetic) which will hunch up the magnetic lines within themselves so that the lines don't pass through. By analogy with electricity, this would be a short circuit rather than an insulator. I have read that in some parts of the Milky Way there are interstellar whisps of gas, mostly hydrogen. Why doesn't this gas diffuse in the vacuum of intersfear space? Is the mention of the planet Pucan -- supposed to be inside the orbit of Mercury -- in a few science fiction stories based on any factual eWdence? Joseph .Russo #I #nd Street Brooklyn #, Pf. Y. The whisps of gas would #iffuse into space if they were warm enough. Some of them are definitely black and vinihle only hecaiiso they obscure portions of the Milky Way; others which arc luminous do not glow with he-at. In short, they are cold enough so that the mutual attraction of their particles hohls them together. As for the planet Vulcan inside the orbit of Mercury, astronomical circles believed in its existence for some threequarters of a century. It was assumed to exist locause the orbit of Mercury seemed to recpiire another planet nearer the Sun. Observers, both professional astronomers and amateurs, set out to watch for il, especially at the occasion of solar eclipses. One observer (a German living in China) thought he had seen Vulcan pass across the disk of the ISun. But the Observatory in Madrid, having bigger instruments, recognized it as a roughly circular sunspot. Two observers (one American, one Englishman) thought they had discovered it during an eclipse, but it tiirncMl out to he a small reddish fixed star that happened to be in line of sight. A French country doctor named ' fvCscarbault actually received tlir l'f(ion tVhonneur fr "ihc cli#ovry of Vulcan" in Marcti #. He had "seen" il cross the disk of the Sun. But if Vulcan really existed, we should have found it hy now. What Lescarhaiilt actually saw was prohahly one of the planetoids which approach the Sun more closely than the Earth on occasion. Since the existence of these planetoids was not known then, and since Vulcan was on the list of things to he found, his mistake is easily explained. Ronald Demovsky (no address iVen) wonders about the statement in my first column where I said that J-IV (Callisto) has been seen "perfectly black," since a "perfectly black" body would be irivisible. Or did I mean that J-IV was in Jupiter's shadow? I did not mean the term "perfectly black" quite so rigorously. But even a perfectly black boily can be seen -- against a lighter background. I'his. of course, is what the olservers meant; they referred to a transit, not to an eclipse. #n your book Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, you state that the condition of apparent weightlessness occurs only rarely and for very short periods. I would like to know just when it takes place. S. Petinga # Winchester Avenue Atlantic City, N. J. It takes place when man is falling freely; for example, when juming from a diving board, aiul luring the early stages of a parachute jump before the parachute is opened, when air resistance has not yet slowed the person down. One other possibility is a carefully controlled power dive where the plane levelops just enough power to overcome air r sistauce. Since this may prilong the state of weightlessness for many minutes, Dr. Haber of Meclicine has siiggeste#l using such controlled power ilives for the study of the problem. More on "Homelesg Ftwls" Eyery Kiericisi is aware that (here arc facts and observations (hat rannur be reported (hrouuh fear of ridicule, loss of professional standinK. even ou((if(ht dismissal. In unrcportable facts. The response has been stimulating, in some cases aciuafly startling. After they have been verified, you will see some of (his previously withheld data in future issues. If you have any such facts (hat should be made available to reseanh, send them... and your name will be held in strictest confidence, if you choose. If Ollie knew the work he wos doing, he would have resigned -- if resigning were possibtel Shipping Clerk I F there had ever been a time when Ollie Keith hadn't been hungry, it was so far in the past that he couldn't remember it. He was hungry now as he walked through the alley, his eyes shifting lusterlessly from one heap of rubbish to the next. He was hungry through and through, all one hundred and forty pounds of him, the flesh distributed so gauntly over his tall frame that in spots it seemed about to wear through, as his clothes had. That it hadn't done so in forty-two years sometimes struck Ollie as in the nature of a miracle. He worked for a junk collector and he was unsuccessful in his present job, as he had been at everything else. Ollie had followed the first part of the ragsto-riches formula with classic exactness. He had been bom to rags, and then, as if that hadn't been enough, his parents had died, and he had been left an orphan. He should have gone to the big city, found a job in the rich merchant's counting house, #M and saved the pretty daughter, acquiring her and her fortune in the process. It hadn't worked out that way. In the orphanage where he had spent so many unhappy years, both his ood and his education had been skimped. He had later been hired out to a farmer, but he hadn't been strong enough for farm labor, and he had been sent back. His life since then had followed an unhappy pattern. Lacking strength and skill, he had been unable to find and hold a good job. Without a good job, he had been unable to pay for the food and medical care, and for the training he would have needed to acquire strength and skill. Once, in the search for food and training, he had offered himself to the Army, but the doctors who examined him had quickly turned thumbs down, and the Army had rejected him with contempt. They wanted better human materia) than that. How he had managed to survive at all to the present was another miracle. By this time, of course, he knew, as the radio comic put it, that he wasn't long for this world. And to make the passage to another world even easier, he had taken to drink. Rot gut stilled the pangs of hunger even more effectively than inadequate food did. And it gave him the first moments of happiness, spurious though they were, that he could remember. Now, as he sought through the heaps of rubbish for usable rags or redeemable milk bottles, his eyes lighted on something unexpected. Right at the edge of the curb lay a small nut, species indeterminate. If he had his usual luck, it would turn out to be withered inside, but at least he could hope for the best. H e picked up the nut, banged it futilely against the ground, and then looked around for a rock with which to crack it. None was in sight. Rather fearfully, he put it in his mouth and tried to crack it between his teeth. His teeth were in as poor condition as the rest of him, and the chances were that they would crack before the nut did. The nut slipped and Ollie gurgled, threw his hands into the air and almost choked. Then he got it out of his wiidpipe and. a second later, breathed easily. The nut was in his stomach, still uncracked. And Ollie, it seemed to him, was hungrier than ever. The alley was a failure. His life had been a progression from rags to rags, and these last rags were inferior to the first. Therewere no milk bottles, there was no junk worth salvaging. At the end of the alley was a barber shop, aad here Ollie had a great and unexpected stroke of luck. He found a bottle. The bottle was no container for milk and it wasn't empty. It was standing on a small table near an open window in the rear of the barber shop. Ollie found that he could get it by simply stretching out his long, gaunt arm for it, without climbing in through the window at all. He took a long swig, and then another. The liquor tasted far better than anything he had ever bought. When he returned the bottle to its place, it was empty. Strangely enough, despite its excellent quality, or perhaps, he thought, because of it. the whiskey failed to have its usual effect on him. It left him completely sober and clear-eyed, but hungrier than ever. In his ddSperation, Ollie did something that he seldom dared to do. He went into a restaurant, not too good a restaurant or he would never have been allowed to take a seat, and ordered a meal he couldn't pay for. He knew what would happen, of course, after he had eaten. He would put on an act about having lost his money, but that wouldn't fool the manager for more than one second. If the man was feeling good and needed help, he'd let Ollie work the price out washing dishes. If he was a little grumpy and had all the dishwashers he needed, he'd have them boot the tar out of Ollie and then turn him over to the police. The soup was thick and tasty, although tasty in a way that no gourmet would have appreciated. The mess was food, however, and Ollie gulped it down gratefully. But it did nothing to satisfy his hunger. Likewise, the stew had every possible leftover thrown into it, and none of it gave Ollie any feeling of satisfaction. Even the dessert and the muddy coffee left him as empty as before. The waiter had been in the back room with the cook. Now Ollie saw him signal' to the manager, and watched the manager hasten back. He closed his eyes. They were onto him; there was no doubt about it. For a moment he considered trying to get out of the front door before they closed in, but there was another waiter present, keeping an eye on the patrons, and he knew that he would never make it. He took a deep breath and waited for the roof to fall in on him. He heard the manager's footsteps and opened his eyes. The manager said, "Uh -- look, bud, about that meal you ate -- " "Not bad," observed Ollie brightly. "Glad you liked it." He noticed little beads of sweat on the manager's forehead, and wondered what had put them there. He said, "Only trouble is, as I was before." "It didn't fill you up, huh? That's too bad. I'll tell you what I'll do. Rather than see you go away dissatisfied. I won't charge you for the meal. Not a cent." Ollie blinked. This made no sense whatever. All the same, if not for the gnawing in his stomach, he would have picked himself up and run. As it was, he said, "Thanks. Guess in that case I'll have another order of stew. Maybe this time it'll stick to my ribs." "Not the stew," replied the manager nervously. "You had the last that was left. Try the roast beef." "Hmm, that's more than I was gonna spend." "No charge," said the manager. "For you, no charge at all." "Then gimme a double order. I feel starved." The double order went down the hatch, yet Ollie felt just as empty as ever. But he was afraid to press his luck too far, and after he had downed one more dessert -- also without charge -- he reluctantly picked himself up and walked out. He was too hungry to spend any more time wondering why he had got a free meal. In the back room of the restaurant, the manager sank weakly into a chair. "I was afraid he was going to insist on paying for it. Then we'd really have been on a spot." "Guess he was too glad to get it for free," the cook said. "Well, if anything happens to him now, it'll happen away from here." "Suppose they take a look at what's in his stomach." "He still won't be able to sue us. What did you do with the rest of that stew?" "It's in the garbage." "Cover it up. We don't want dead cats and dogs all over the place. And next time you reach for the salt, make sure there isn't an insect powder label on it." "It was an accident: it could happen to anybody," said the cook philosopliically. "You know, maybe we shouldn't have let that guy go away... Maybe we ought to have sent him to a doctor." "And pay his bills? Don't be a sap. From now on, he's on his own. Whatever happens to him, we dpn't know anything about it. We never saw him before." IHE only thing that was happening to Ollie was that he was getting hungrier and hungrier. He had, in faeV, never before been so ravenous. He felt as if he hadn't eaten in years. #U He had met with two strokes of luck -- the accessible bottle and the incredibly generous manager. They had left him just as hungry and thirsty as before. Now he encountered a third gift of fortune. On the plate glass window of a restaurant was the flamboyant announcement: eating conTaken now ! No Charge if you Eat Enough for at Least Three People. Ollie's face brightened. The way he felt, he could have eaten enough for a hundred. The fact that the contestants, as he saw upon reading further, would be limited to hard-boiled eggs made no difference to him. For once he would have a chance to eat everything he could get down his yawning gullet. That night it was clear that neither the judges nor the audience thought much of Ollie as an cater. Hungry he undoubtedly was, but it was obvious that his stomach had shrunk from years of disuse, and besides, he didn't have the build of a born eater. He was long and skinny, whereas the other contestants seemed almost as broad and wide as they were tall. In gaining weight, as in so many other things, the motto seemed to be that those who already had would get more. Ollie had too little to start with. In order to keep the contest from developing an anticlimax, they started with Ollie. believing that he would be lucky if he ate ten eggs. Ollie was so ravenous that he found it difficult to control himself, and he made a bad impression by gulping the first egg as fast as he could. A real eater would have let the egg slide down rapidly yet gently, without making an obvious effort. This uncontrolled, amateur speed, thought the judges, could only leai to a stomachache. Ollie devoured the second egg, the third, the fourth, and the rest of his allotted ten. At that point, one of the judges asked, "How do you feel?" "Hungry." "Stomach hurt?" "Only from hunger. It feels like it got nothin' in it. Somehow, them eggs, don't fill me up." Somebody in the audience laughed. The judges exchanged glances and ordered more eggs brought on. From the crowd of watchers, cries of encouragement came to Ollie. At this stage, there was still nobody who thought thathe had a chance. Ollie proceeded to go through twenty eggs, forty, sixty, a hundred. By that time, the judges and thecrowd were in a state of unprecedented excitement. Again a judge demanded, "How do you feel?" "Still hungry. They don't fill me up at all." "But those are large eggs. Do you know how much a hundred of them weigh? Over fifteen pounds!" "I don't care how much they weigh. I'm still hungry." "Do you mind if we weigh you?" "So long as you don't stop givin' me eggs, okay." They brought out a scale and Ollie stepped on it. He weighed one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, on the nose. Then he started eating eggs again. At the end of his second hundred, they weighed him once more. Ollie weighed one hundred thirty-eight and three-quarters. The judges stared at each other and then at Ollie. For a moment tlte entire audience sat in awed silence, as if watching a miracle. Then the mood of awe passed. One of the judges said wisely, "He palms them and slips them to a confederate." "Out here on the stage?" demanded another judge. "Where's his confederate? Besides, you can see for yourself that he eats them. You can watch them going down his throat." "But that's impossible. If they really went down his throat, he'd gain weight." "I don't know how he does it. admitted the other. "But he does." "The man is a freak. Let's get some doctors over here." Ollie ate another hundred and forty-three eggs, and then had to stop because the restaurant ran out of them. The otlier contestants never even had a chance to get started. they told him the story, his first impulse seemed to be to grin. He knew a practical joke when he heard one. But they put Ollie on the scales -- by this time he weighed only a hundred tliirtycight and a quarter pounds -- and fed him a two pound loaf of bread. Then they weighed him again. He was an even one hundred and thirty-eiglit. "At" this rate, he'll starve to death," said the doctor, who opened his little black bag and proceeded to give Ollie a thorough examination. Ollie was very unhappy about it because it interfered with hi.s eating, and he felt more hungry than ever. But they promised to feed him afterward and, more or "Bad teeth, enlarged lieart, lesion on each lung, flat feet, hernia, displaced vertebrae -- you name it and he has it." said the doctor. hcre the devil did he come from?" Ollie was working on an order of roast beef and was too busy to reply. Somebody said, "He's a ragpicker. I've seen him around." "When did he start this eating spree?" With stuffed mouth, Ollie mumbled, "Today." "Today, eh? What happened today that makes you able to eat so much?" T just feel hungry." "I can see that. Look, how. about going over to the hospital BO we can really examine you?" "No, sir," said Ollie. "You gin't pokin' no needles into me." "No needles," agreed the doctor hastily. If there was no other way to get blood samples, they could always drug him with morphine and he'd never know what bad happened. "We'll just look at you. And we'll feed you all you can eat." "All I can eat? It's a deal!" T he humor was crude, but it put the point across -- the photographer assigned to the contest had snapped a picture of Ollie in the middle of gulping two eggs. One was traveling down his gullet. causing a lump in his throat, and the other was being stuffed into his mouth at the same time. TtV caption writer had entitled column alongside was headed, Eats Three Hundred and Fortythree Eggs. "I'm Hungry!" He Says. Zolto put the paper down. "This is the one," he said to his wife. "There can be no doubt that this person has found it." "I knew it was no longer in the alley," said Pojim. Ordinarily a comely female, she was now deep in thought, and succeeded in looking beautiful and pensive at the same time. "How are we to get it back without exciting unwelcome attention?" "Frankly," said Zolto, "I don't know. But we'd better think of a way. He must have mistaken it for a nut and swallowed it. Undoubtedly the hospital attendants will take X-rays of him and discover it." "They won't know what it is." "They will operate to remove il. and then they will find out." Pojim nodded. "What I don't understand," she said, "is why it had this effect. When we lost it. it was locked." "He must have opened it by accident. Some of these creatures, I have noticed, have a habit of trying to crack nuts with their teeth. He must have bitten on the proper switch." "The one for inanimate matter? I think, Zolto. that you're IM right. The stomach contents are collapsed and passed into our universe through the transfer. But the stomach itself, being part of a living creature, cannot pass through the same switch. And the poor creature continually loses weight because of metabolism. Especially, of course, when he eats." "Poor creature, you call him? You're too soft-hearted, Pojim. What do you think we'll be if we don't get the transfer back?" He hunched up his shoulders and laughed. Pojim said. "Control yourself, Zolto. When you laugh, you don't look human, and you certainly don't sound it." "What difference docs it make? We're alone." "You can never tell when we'll be overheard." "Don't change the subject. What are we supposed to do about the transfer?" "We'll think of a way." said Pojim, but he could see she was worried, I N the hospital, they had put OUie into a bed. They had wanted a nurse to bathe him. hut he had objected violently to this indignity, and finally they had sent in a male orderly to do the job. Now. bathed, shaven and wearing a silly little nightgown that made him. ashamed to look at himself, he was lying in bed, slowly starving to death. A dozen empty plates, the remains of assorted specialties of the hospital, filled with vitamins and other good things, lay around him. Everything had tasted fine while going down, but nothing seemed to have stuck to him. All he could do was brood about the puzzled and anxious looks on the doctors' faces when they examined him. The attack came without warning. One moment Ollic was lying there unhappily, suffering hunger pangs, and the next moment somebody had punclied him in the stomach. The shock made him start and tiien look down. But there was nobody near him. The doctors had left him alone while they looked up articles in textbooks and argued with each other. He felt another punch, and then another and another. He yelled in fright and pain. After five minutes, a nurse looked in and asked casually, "Did you call?" "My stomach!" groaned OUie. "Somebody's hittin' me in my stomach!" "It's a tummyache," she said with a cheerful smile. "It should teach you not to wolf your food." Then she caught a glimpse of his stomach, from which Ollic, in hig. agony, had cast off the sheet, and she gulped. It was swollen like a watermelon -- or, rather, like a watermelon with great warts. Lumps stuck out all over it. She rushed out, calling. "Doctor I'l'.nson! Doctor Manson!" When she returned with two doctors. Ollie was in such acute misery that he didn't even notice them. One doctor said, "Well, ##I be damned!" and began tapping the sw'ollcn stomach. The other doctor demanded, Whcn did this happen?" "Right now. I guess," replied the nurse. "Just a few minutes 'ago his stomach was as flat as the way it was when you saw it." "We'd better give him a shot of njorpliine to put him out of his pain." saitl the first doctor, "arid then wc'll X-ray him." Ollic was in a semi-coma as they lifted him off his bed and wheeled him into the X-ray room. He didn't hear a word of the ensuing discussion about the photographs, although the doctors talked freely in front of him -- freely and profanely. It was Dt. Manson who demanded, "What in God's name are fliose things, anyway?" "They look like pineapples and gpefuit," replied the bewildered X-ray specialist. "Square-edged pineapples? .Grapefruit with one end pointed?" "I didn't say that's what they art," returned the other defensively. "I said that's what they look like. The grapefruit could be eggplant," he added in confusion. "Eggplant, my foot. How the devil did they get into his stomach. anyway? He's been eating like a pig, but even a pig couldn't have gotten those things down its throat." "Wake him up and ask him." "He doesn't know any more than we do," said the nurse. "He told me that it felt as if somebody was hitting him in the stomach. That's all he'd be able to tell us." "He's got the damnedest stomach I ever heard of." marveled Dr. Manson. "Let's open it up and take a look at it from the inside." "We'll have to get his consent." said the specialist nervously. "I know it would be interesting, but we can't cut into him unless he's "It would be for his own good. We'd get that unsliced fruit salad out of him." Dr. Manson stared at the X-ray plates again. "Pineapples, grapefruit, something that looks like a banana with a small bush on top. Assorted large round objects. And what looks like a nut. A small nut." If Ollie hd been aware, he migh( have tpld Dr. Manson that the nut was the kernel of the trouble. As it was, all he could do was groan. "He's coming to," said the nurse. "Good," asserted Dr. Manson. "Get a release, Nurse, and the minute he's capable of following directions, have him sign it." TN the corridor outside, two white-clad interns stopped at the door of Ollie's room and listened. They could not properly have been described as man and woman, but at any rate one was male and the other female. If you didn't look at them too closely, they seemed to be human, which, of course, was what they wanted you to think. "Just as I said," observed Zolto. "They intend to operate. And their attention has already been drawn to the nut." "We can stop them by violence, if necessary. But I abhor violence." "I know, dear," Zolto said thoughtfully. "What has happened is clear enough. He kept sending all that food through, and our people analyzed it and discovered what it was. They must have been surprised to discover no message from us, but after a while they arrived at the conclusion that we needed some of our own food and they sent it to us. It's a good thing that they didn't send more of it at one time." "The poor man must be in agony as it is." "Never mind the poor man. Think of our own situation." "But don't you see, Zolto? His digestive juices can't dissolve such unfamiliar chemical constituents, and his stomach must be greatly irritated." She broke off for a moment as the nurse came past them, giving them only a casual glance. The X-ray specialist followed shortly, his face reflecting the bewilderment he felt as a result of studying the plate he was holding. "That leaves only Dr. Manson with him," said Zolto. "Pojim, I have a plan. Do you have any of those pandigestive tablets with you?" "I always carry them. I never know when in this world I'll run into something my stomach can't handle." "Fine." Zolto stepped back from the doorway, cleared his throat, and began to yell, "Calling Dr. Manson! Dr. Manson, report to surgery!" "You've been seeing too many of their movies," said Pojim. But Zolto's trick worked. They heard Dr. Manson mutter, "Damn!" and saw him rush into the corridor. He passed them without even noticing that they were there. iir 'We have him to ourselves, said Zolto. "Quick, the tablets." They stepped into the room, where Zolto passed a small in halator back and forth under Ollie's nose. Ollie jerked away from it, and his eyes opened. "Take this," said Pojim, with a persuasive ile. "It will ease . your pain." And she put two tablets into Ollie's surprised mouth. Automatically, Ollie swallowed and the tablets sped down to meet the collection in his stom ach. Pojim gave him another smile, and then she and Zolto were out of the room,  To Ollie, things seemed to be happening in more and more bewildering fashion. No sooner had these strange doctors left than Dr. Manson came rushing back, cursing, in a way that would have shocked Hippocrates, the unknown idiot who had summoifbd him to surgery. Then the nurse came in, with a paper. Ollie gathered that he was being asked to sign something. He shook his head vigorously. "Not me. I don't sign nothin', sister." "It's a matter of life and death. Your own life and death. We have to get those things out of your stomach," "No, sir, you're not cuttin' me open." Dr. Manson gritted his teeth in frustration. "You don't feel so much pain now because of the morphine I gave you. But it's going to wear off in a few minutes and then you'll be in agony again. You'll have to let us operate." "No, sir," repeated OlllC' stubbornly. "You're not cuttin' me open." And then he almost leaped from his' bed. His already distended stomach seemed to swell outward, and before the astonished eyes of doctor and nurse, a strange new bump appeared. "Help!" yelled Ollie. "That's exactly what we're trying to do," said Dr. Manson angrily. "Only you won't let us. Now sign that paper, man, and stop your nonsense." Ollie groaned and signed. The next moment he was being rushed into the operating room. morphine was wearing off rapidly, and he lay, still groaning, on the table. From the ceiling, bright lights beat down upon him. Near his licad the anesthetist stood with his cone of sleep poised in readiness. At one side a happy Dr. Manson was slipping rubber gloves on his antiseptic bands, while the attentive nurses and assistants waited. Two interns were standing near the doorway. One of them, Zolto, SH r pp I NO c lit Vic said softly, "We may have to use violence after all. They must not find it." "I should have given him a third tablet," said Pojim, the other intern, regretfully. "Who would have suspected that the action would be so slow?" They fell silent. Zolto slipped a hand into his pocket and grasped the waapon, the one We had hoped he wouldn't have to use. Dr. Manson nodded curtly and said, "Anesthetic." And then, as the anesthetist bent forward, it happened. Ollie's uncovered stomach, lying there in wait for the knife, seemed to heave and boil. Ollie shrieked and, as the assembled medicos watched in dazed fascination, the knobs and bumps smoothed out. The whole stomach began to shrink, like a cake falling in when some one has slammed the oven door. The pandigestive tablets had finally acted. Ollie sat up. He forgot that he was wearing the skimpy and shameless nightgown, forgot, too, that he had a roomful of spectators. He pushed away the anesthetist who tried to stop him. "I feel fine." he said. "Lie down," ordered Dr. Manson sternly. "We're going to operate and find out what's wrong with you." "You're not cuttin into me," aid Ollie. He swung his feet to #M the floor and stood up. "There ain't nothin' wrong with me. I feel wonderful. For the first time in my life I ain't hungry, and I'm spoilin' for trouble. Don't nobody try to stop me." He started to march across the floor, pushing his way through the protesting doctors. "This way," said one of  the interns near the door. "We'll get your clothes." Ollie looked at her in suspicion, but she went on, "Remember? I'm the one who gave you the tablets to make the pain go away." "They sure worked," said Ollie happily, and allowed himself to be led along. He heard the uproar behind him, but he paid no attention. Whatever they wanted, he was getting out of here, fast. There might have been trouble, but at a critical point the public address system swung into operation, thanks to the foresight of his intern friends, who had rigged up a special portable attachment to the microphone. It started calling Dr. Manson, calling Dr. Kolanyi, calling Dr. Pumber, and all the others. In the confusion, Ollie escaped and found himself, for the first time in his life, a passenger in a taxicab. With him were the two friendly interns, no longer in white. "Just in case any more of those lumps appear in your stomach," said the female, "you'd better take another couple of tablets." She was so persuasive that Olile put up only token resistance. The tablets went down his stomach, and then he settled back to enjoy the cab ride. It was only later that he wondered where they were taking him. By that time, he was too sleepy to wonder very much. With the aid of the first two tablets, he had digested the equivalent of a tremendous meal. The blood coursed merrily in his veins and arteries, and he had a warm sensation of well-being. As the taxi sped along, his eyes closed. "VT'OU transmitted the message in one of the latter tablets?" asked Zolto in their native tongue. ' 'T have explained all that has happened," replied his wife. "They will stop sending food and wait for other directives." "Good. Now well have to get the transfer out of him as soon as possible. We ourselves can operate and he will never be the wiser." 'T wonder." said Pojim. "Once we haVe the transfer, it will only be a nuisance to us. Well have to guard it carefully and be in continual fear of losing it. Perhaps it would be more sensible to leave it inside him." . "Insidq.hiP.PqJitp, my have you taken leave of your senses?" "Not at all. It is easier to guard a man than a tiny object. I took a look at one of the X-ray plates, and it is clear that the transfer switch has adhered to his stomach. It will remain there indefinitely. Suppose we focus a transpositor on that stomach of his. Then, as the objects we want arrive from our own universe in their collapsed condition, we can transpose them into our laboratory, enlarge them, and send them off to Aldebaran, where they are needed." "But suppose that he and that stomach of his move around!" "He will stay in one place if we treat him well. Don't you see, Zolto? He is a creature who has always lacked food. We shall supply him such food as his own kind have never dreamed of, complete with pandigestion fluid. At the same time, we shall set him to doing liglft work in order to keep him busy. Much of his task will involve studying and improving himself. And at night we shall receive the things we need from our own universe." "And when we have enougli to supply the colony on Aldebaran II?" "Then it will be time enough to remove the transfer switch." Zolto laughed. It was a laugh that would have been curiously out of place in a human being, end if the taxi driver hadn't been so busy steering his way through traffic, he would have turned around to look. Pojim sensed the danger, and held up a warning finger. Zolto subsided. "You have remarkable ideas, my wife. Still, I see no reason why this should not work. Let us try it." was feeling better than he had ever felt in his entire miserable existence. The two interns who had come along with him had been transformed magically into a kindly lady and gentleman, who wished to hire him to do easy work at an excellent salary. Ollie let himself be hired. He had his choice of things to eat now, but. strangely enough, he no longer had his old hunger. It was as if he were being fed from some hidden source, and he ate, one might almost have said, for the looks of it. The little he did consume, however, seemed to go a long way. He gained weight, his muscles hardened, his old teeth fell out and new ones appeared. He himlf was astonished at this latter phenomenon, but after his previous experience at the hospital, he kept his astonishment to himself. The spots on his lungs disappeared, his spine straightened. After a time he reached a weight of a hundred and ninety pounds. and his eyes were bright and clear. At night he slept the sleep of the just -- or the drugged. At first he was happy, But after several months, there came a feeling of boredom. He sought out Mr. and Mrs. Zolto, and said, "I'm sorry, I can't stay here any longer." "Why?" asked. the lady. "There's no room here, ma'am, for advancement." he said, almost apologetically. "I've been studyin' and I got ideas about things I can do. All sorts of ideas." Pojim and Zolto, who had planted the ideas, nodded solemnly. Pojim said, "We're glad to hear that, Ollie. The fact is that we ourselves had decided to move to -- to a warmer climate, some distance away from here. We were wondering how you'd get along without us." "Don't you worry about me. ril do fine." "Well, that's splendid. But it would be convenient to us if you could wait till tomorrow. We'd like to give you something to remember us by." "I'll be glad to wait, ma'am. That night Ollie had a strange nightmare. He dreamed that he was on the operating table again, and that the doctors and nurses were once more closing in on him. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. And then the two interns were there, once more wearing their uniforms. The female said, "It's all right. It's perfectly all right. We're just removing the transfer switch. In the morning you won't even remember what happened." And. in fact, in the morning he didn't. He had only a vague feeling that something had happened. They shook hands with him and they gave him a very fine letter of reference, in case he tried to get another job, and Mrs. Zolto presented him with an envelope in which there were several bills whose size later made his eyes almost pop out of his head. He walked down the street as if it belonged to him. or were goipg to. Gone was the slouch, gone the bleariness of the eyes, gone the hangdog look. Gone was all memory of the dismal past. And then OlUe had a strange feeling. At first it seemed so peculiar that he couldn't figure out what it was. It started in his stomach, which seemed to turn over and almost tie itself into a knot. He felt a twinge of pain and winced almost perceptibly. It took him several minutes to realize what it was. For the first time in months, he was hungry. Two men in love with the some strl... thot's about the mot) elementary plot onyone could devise. But what happens to that tame plot when both men are scientists who invent o matter.duplicating machine that will reproduce anything -- incuclng the girt they ore in love with? You no longer have the trite old triangle. Instead, you have what the author describes is an originot ond a copy! Don't try to take it from there. You can't possibly anticipate the eomplicatiorv. conflict -- the suspense' of this remarkoble situation, ond especially the ingenious resolution, high mark in science Action humor. ' # ' "  '  #  I r ' ...-'V  :'.' edited by Robert A. Heinlein Dovbleday  Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages, # I T looks as though # is going to be the Year of Anthologies -- as if #I already hadn't been one. As of March, when this was written, a dozen collections have either appeared or been announced for Spring # -- of which the present one is among the best. This is only what one might expect, knowing Heinlein's own mature tastes. There are # A stories in the book out of a total of #. The balance are all Bs -- there is nothing poorer than B -- . This is hot shooting when you remember that none of the tales has ever been anthologized before. The "A" items -- "I'm Scared" by Jack Finney (superb time story). "The Silly Season" by C, Report on the Barnhouse Effect" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (magnificent parapsychological tale), "Absalom" by Henry Kuttner (the mutant children), "Betel(ironical). "Keyhole" by Murray Leinster (I loved this one!), "Misbegotten Missionary" by Isaac Asimov (a beauty), and -- best story in the book in many ways -- "Poor Superman" by Fritz in Tomorrow"). B -- "Tourist Trade" by Bob Tucker. "Rainmaker" by John Reese, "The Monster" by Lester del Rey, "Jay Score" by Eric Frank Russell (a semi-classic), and "Survival Ship" by Judith Merril. Who says material for anthologies is running out? ited by John W. Campbell, Jr. Simon  Schuster, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # lection, by the Grand Old Man of science fiction editing, is a good indication of the historymaking qualities of the magazine that has been his lifework. It contains # stories, of which # are A or better, and only # are C -- and John Campbell's A stories are among the finest that science fiction has turned out. Witness : Heinlein's "Blowups Happen," Asimov's "Nightfall," Padgett's "When the Bough Breaks," O'Donnell's "Clash by Night," Leinster's "First Contact," Dolton Edwards very odd and non-fictional "Meihem in Ce Klasrum," Sherred's "E for Effort," Tenn's "Child's Play," Sturgeon's "Tliunder and Roses," Eric Russell's "Late Night Final," Kris Neville's "Cold War," Simak's "Eternity Lost," Schmitz's "The Witches of Karre," del Rey's "Over the Top," and Fyfe's "Protected Species" -- any editor has a right to be proud of such a group of tales from his own magazine, There is only one thing wrong, and that is the editor's modesty. He included no story by himself -- which leaves an empty spot right in the middle of the book. But speaking of modesty, I am reluctantly guilty of it myself, for the next item is a guest review York Times and lots of other places: ited by Groff Conklin. Vanguard Press, New York, #. xiii plus # pages, # anthology, whose theme, as its title suggests, is the invasion of (although these are kept to a minimum) to energy forms, is an excellent collection of # tales, only one of which has ever been published between hard covers before. That one is Howard Koch's famous # radio script for Orson Welles, "Invasion from Mars," and it is certainly worthy of inclusion. Also included is a particularly notable "first," the initial appearance in English of Karl Grunert's # story, "Enemies in Space," translated from the German by Willy Ley especially for this anthology. This reviewer's favorites were Edgar Pangborn's "Angel's Egg," Ted Sturgeon's "Tiny and the Monster," and Fredric Brown's "The Waveries." In fact, although horror and menace are well represented, the existence of an up-beat in a great many of the stories gives the book a strong -- and welcome -- tone of affirmation. Blish. Greenberg: Publisher, New York, #. # paes, # Blish's first novel deals with parapsychology, and therefore, according to the modern, smart, fashionable logical positivists who today rule much scientific thinking, it must be called fantasy, a fairy tale. On the other hand. Blish uses # me of the very latest scientific ideas of outstanding men such as Heisenberg, Blackett, Dirac, Planck, and many other Big Names, to give a queerly logical realism to his tale of Danny Caiden's struggle to develop his astonishing para psychological powers. You may well leave the book considerably less skeptical about "the occult" (or parts of it) than you were when you started it. The story is located in New York. Danny starts off as a smalltime journalist; but before long his original talents have become literally useless, and his new ones have gotten him into hot water with the F.B.I., in contact with the true world of psimen, and in love with Marla, a provocative shill for a fake medium, who latches on to Danny on the theory that he must be a more successful fake than her previous boss. She changes this opinion, however, discovering eventually that she, too, has some parapsychological powers -- and ethics. Blish's writing is good, though not distinguished; his approach to the world of ideas is positive and constructive; and his ability to interweave exciting story and abstruse scientific explanation is remarkable. Jack of Eagies is a real accomplishment. Approach it with an open mind, refuse to let your conventional disbeliefs in parapsychological matters get in your way, and you will have a very pleasant time reading it. The Hoaxters When you station a coupe o men in space, mafce sure they have a goat -- and an occasional pariyl Ninety-second Day Y OU get yourself stuck off on a rock in space and after a while you begin to go nuts. Naturally. That's why Sam Black upset the chess board halfway through a game he certainly had not been losing to Alex Hurd. 'Sorry, Alex," he said imrnediately, looking disgusted with himself. He picked the pieces from the floor of the research station's day room. "You've been out here too long," said Alex, putting the chessmen in their box. "Yeah," Sam agreed. "It's not the company -- it's the year between supply ships. We're compatible enough; our pre-tests ran enough alike for us to have been twins, almost. But I get damned tired of seeing nothing but your ugly face and those four laboratory walls." "And tlie rolling pin," added Alex, whose pleasant face was long and high-boned, with a carefully tended mustache. "Rolling that hunk of steel over the rock specimens day after day. I've never really been convinced that it can't be done electrically, in a crusher. I think they want us to cjo it by hand so we'll earn our pay. maybe also to keep us too busy to think." "It's the hand and the eye, Alex. The hand is slower than the eye, no matter what magicians say. and we could spot the particles. If we mashed everything up in a crusher, the stuff we're after would get sluiced away with the rock powder and we'd never see it." "Assuming it's there to be seen." "They wouldn't have sent us and our fat salaries out to this asteroid if there weren't a damn good possibility of finding the stuff. So I guess we'll just have to go on pounding." "And sneezing at the dust," added Alex. "And going nuts," said Sam. Ninety-ninth Day the asteroid. There was a native form of sub-life that the first explorers had discovered. But it was mostly dormant and didn't live on the surface. It consisted of slate-colored, unicellular hunks of stuff, as Alex described them, which moved around at point zero one miles per hour. They lived deep down in what either were natural tunnels or passageways they dug for themselves. They seemed to live on something in the rock; it was possible that they dug the tunnels not so much to travel where it was they wanted to go as to get nourishment. The hunks of stuff -- they were about the size of a thumbnail -- were so close in color to the rocks they lived in, and on, that they were nearly invisible. Sam and Alex had been told about them, that they were harmless, and had named them vizzies, for invisibles. They were as much company on their dull world as microbes on Earth. "Check," said Alex Hurd. It was the inevitable chess game. "You fell into the trap." said Sam Black, without enthusiasm. "Check yourself. I take the knight with my bishop and it's mate in two moves." Alex studied the board and shrugged indifferently. "All right, you win. I'm getting careless. I'm tired. I want to go home. I want to see grass again, and trees. I hate rocks. I don't think we're doing anything important. I want to go back where the Sun comes up only once a day instead of every hour." "Home is always nice when you're somewhere else," Sam said, bis brown eyes far away. "But I wonder if it's home we miss as much as activity. If only something would happen here, the place wouldn't be so hard to take. But nothing ever happens. Wc crush rock. We test particles. We find nothing. We crush more rock. We don't even know what they'll use the stuff fdt if we ever find it. "We send out the rocket. It takes pictures and beeps its way around this dead old watermelon and the pictures never show anything and the beep tone never discovers anything we didn't know was there in the first place. If only something would happen --anything! I don't give a damn if it's good or bad. just so it happens." Sam had put the chess pieces away and now he made out their report to Base. The message went out once a day -- once every Earth day, that was: not every monotonous time the oblong asteroid that was their temporary world made a wobbly revolution on its axis. Sam's leathery jaw tightened in distaste as he punched out the daily report. It consisted of four words, which hadn't varied in the three months. Earth reckoning, that they'd been at the station. The wwds were : "All well. Progress nil." It was the "progress nil" which got them down as much as any of the other things, such as their work being so secret that they had no inkling of how their particular research fitted into the Big Picture. Their own work was the Little Picture, and it was a serial movie with interminable chapters. It was at this point in the dull drama that they began to wonder if they'd ever see the final installment, or whether they'd hand over their rock rollers to their successors at the end of their hitch without ever having known what it was all about. "Progress nil." If they had anything at all to report, or even if the wording were different so  k didn't sound so futile, their paid exile might have seemed less frustrating. "Let sne have the report," said Atex. "I'm going to do something." "What, for instance?" "You'll see." Alex took the blank. He crossed out the word "nil" with, an angry motion of his pen, scratched his mustache reflectively, and then wrote busily for a minute. He handed the sheet back to Sam. It now read: "All well. Progress... Break for urgent. S.O.S. Research Station Nineteen. Attack on station by alien life-form from coordinates zero four eight x two seven. Request patrol craft blast spot as own armament ineffectual." Sam read the message. "You're nuts," he said. "I know it. Nuts from the monotony. Something's got to give and I don't want it to be me or you. We need a little excitement; you said so yourself." "I was only talking. A gripe is a gripe, but sending out a false alarm -- " He crumpled the message and tossed it away. "Don't do that." Alex picked # it up and smoothed it out. "We'll make it plausible. We'll blow up a couple of pieces of old junk near the station and send a few shells over. Set the stage, you know. The patrol will come and blast away and then the crew will come in and talk about it and we'll have a good story for them and they'll stick around a while and we'll have new faces for a change and -- " Sam got up and paced around the small room. His serious face was pulled into a frown. "We can't do it. Alex. It wouldn't be right. They'd find out it was a fake and we'd be kicked out in disgrace. What kind of menace could we whip up that would fool them? Not that we're going to, but just for argument's sake." He grinned, his eyes lighting with interest for once. "At least we can talk about it. It's better than chess." "Good man," said Alex. "Of course, we won't do it if you don't think we can get away with it. or," he added hurriedly, "if you don't think it's right, Sam. But here's the way it could be. We could make the menace a stray explorer shi from Jupiter. Got off course, say, and landed here, thinking this was one of the asteroids in its own protectorate, instead of Earth's or Mars'. Mistaken identity, see? We send a message telling them to get off. Maybe the message is a little hot under the collar and they take offense -- sling a shot at us. We fire back. Then they start shooting in earnest. We send the S.O.S. The patrol ship sends out one of its oblivion bombs. The patrol can't see the target, but it has the coordinates we gave them, and. of course, after the explosion there's nothing left of the explorer from Jupiter." "It stinks," Sam grunted in disgust. "If that's the way your mind works, no wonder you're such a dud at chess. Look, we've got to work with what we have. You can't queen a pawn till you get it in the back row. No pirate ships or interplanetary monsters or any such baloney. We'll use the viz # ies. All of a sudden, see, they come up out of the ground. It's a periodic migration or something of the sort; you know, like the birds going South, only not so often. They stop being just little hunks of stuff and join up into a real, plausible menace. Get it?" "Yeah," Alex replied, dazzled. "That's better than my idea any day," Hundredth Day distress signal, in a revised version, after twenty-four hours of preparation. "I must be crazy," said Sam. "How did I ever let you talk me into this ridiculous situation? Let's cancel it -- say we were drunk or delirious." "We can't back out now, Sam." Alex's eyes were alive with excitement. "Look, here comes an answer now. We're in business." Sam read it. "The patrol craft. Coming at full speed from -- God, it's a long way off! I hope the vizzies don't get us first." "That's the spirit!" cried Alex. "Put yourself in the frame of mind and we'll be all right. Just picture it -- the vizzies massed in tight Z formation, eating everyti)ing in their path, moving inexorably in our direction, as if they scent and resent us. The suspense is terrible. Will the patrol craft get here in time? Will the oblivion bomb have any effect? Will the brave researchers survive the creeping horde or will help arrive too late and find only human bones picked clean? Or will the bones, too, be consumed? Isn't it terrific? I feel like a kid at a football game again." "But you look like a mad scientist." Sam was smiling now, caught up in Alex's infectious enthusiasm. His broad face was aglow. "Maybe you are crazy. "Sure I'm crazy. So are you. But it's only temporary. This'll j)ut us back on keel and we'll be able to stand it again for a while." "Wait a minute," Sam said. "We forgot something. If the vizzies were attacking, wouldn't we have the phot# rocket out taking pictures? The investigators are going to want to see the films." "You're right," agreed Alex. "And we will show them a film, only they won't see a thing -- just the landscape urukr infra-red. The vizzies are invisible. Right? Well, they blend so well with the slate that no one could see them from that altitude. And I'vc faked some beeps on the electronic probe, so we're safe there, too." Another message came from the patrol craft. It had streaked a vast distance since its last communication and was urging the men on the asteroid to hold on if they could. Sam radioed back that time seemed to be favoring the defenders. They had lobbed a few shells, he said, but the old-fashioned explosives were having no effect. The vizzies were moving so slowly, however, that it would be several hours before they could reach the station. At Alex's suggestion, he explained that they were plotting the vizzies' position electronically and repeated the coordinates they had given earlier. Half an hour later, the patrol craft hove into missile range, although not into sight, and advised that it was ready to launch a rocket with an oblivion-bomb warhead. The hoaxters on the asteroid cofrected the coordinates to move the mythical horde  few yards nearer the research station; then they radioed that it was okay to fire. The station shuddered and rocked on its deep foundations tM as the o-bomb exploded nearly twenty miles away. The plotters sent out the photo rocket to take pictures. It came back with a film that showed an o-bomb crater a quarter of a mile across and a collection of beep tones that recorded a lot of radioactivity. but no vizzies. Soon afterward, the patrol craft streaked across the starfilled sky and radioed for permission to land. "Break out the clean tablecloth !" said Alex. "Company's coming!" Hundred and Pint Day anything?" asked Sam. "They turn up their noses at our accommodations, they bunk and eat in their own ship, they roam around the rock as thick as berrypickers and they ask more questions than a five-year-old." "It's routine," said Alex unworriedly. "They have to make a report. Be thankful we don't have to. The skipper said we could have a copy of theirs to send on to Base. Have you run into any of the reporters? That's where we'U have to watch our step." "I saw the press rocket land, but nobody's been around yet." The buzzer sounded. A lean, tow-headed young man came in through the airlock, took ofi his gear and introduced himself as Kirsten of Galactic News. 'Gentlemen," he said, "I assume you are the outcasts. Two of the far-flung researchers of the Exploration and Assessment Commission. If you are. and you must be. I greet you cordially and invite you to share with me this precious bottle. I offer it in the knowledge that if I were you, and if I had been here three months. I'd have drunk up every drop I nyght have brought with me against the possibility of snake-bite -- or, in this particular case, vizzie-bite. Do I hear anyone decline?" "You hear nothing of the sort," said Alex. "What you hear is me getting three glasses. I'm Alex Hurd; this is Sam Black." "Delighted, gentlemen," said Kirsten. "The beauty of vizziebite. as I understand it. is that the critter can't be seen with the naked eye and that you are therefore unable to be absolutely certain whether you have received the mortal sting. And so you go to the medicinal licker -- I be your pardon, locker -- according to schedule, as a precaution against the dread possibility of being a vizzie victim. Am I correct?" "Do you always talk this way?" asked Sam. "I talk the way I write, and I am a feature writer," said Kirsten. "P'or the other fellow, the dross of cold fact, the colorless statistic: for me. the delicate fabric of enribroidery. the phrase which recreates the scene in vivid life, the sentence which tugs at the heartstring and calls forth the tear, or evokes the smile of true understanding." "Yeah, you do that, all right," Alex admitted. The reporter sat down and poured three drinks from a halffull bottle. "I have already been at it,' said Kirsten, "as y#u will observe. I drink; it is my ebrse and my sorrow. But it is also my need and my joy. My editor often has said to me. 'Randy, you are one of the few who give the press corps a bad name. You are a lush. Randy, and your habit undoes the good impression made by the majority of the men of the press, who are sober men and faithful to their wives. But you are a writer, Randy, who has a way with words,' said my editor, 'and the way you have is such that you would be snapped up instanter by the opposition if I fired you, and that is why I have refrained from giving you the sack.' This is more or less what my editor often has said to me, and I repeat it to you by way of explanation should you think me unduly casual concerning what conceivably was a marrow-chilling experience." Sam and Alex left their drinks untasted as they listened in admiration. 'This is as good as a floor show." said Alex. "Better," said the reporter, unperturbed. "And there's absolutely no charge. Now, would one of you be so good as to describe your sensations for my stenographic ear? I will take no notes, but the polished substance of what you relate soon will be broadcast throughout the Solar System." Kirsten tilted his chair back and looked expectantly from one to the other witti his alert eyes. They drank and talked. Alex carried the burden of the conversation for the pair, although Sam occasionally put in a word of further explanation. He also gave Alex a kick once or twice when he thouglit his partner was embroidering the fabric of their yarn too much, instead of letting Kirsten devise his own ways to tug at the heartstring. They had barely killed the bottle when other reporters arrived. They dropped their gear on the floor and took out pocket-size stenotypers. Alex repeated their story for the latecomers' benefit and some fresh bottles were opened up. At intervals, reporters went out to file stories, Kirsten among them. But they came back and, their work finished, settled down to have a party. Crew members from the patrol ship joined the festivities in the researchers' dayroom, but the skipper remained aloof. "Chess, anyone?" asked Alex, but it was a deck of cards he produced. They played poker, drank, told stories and sang space ballads until the skipper came in to get Alex's and Sam's signatures on a statement and announe that his ship would be leaving in an hour. The mission was completed. The skipper and the head of his investigation unit apparently were satisfied that the vizzie menace was ended. The reporters had asked some astute questions, considering that they were laymen, but the plotters saw no hint of suspicion anywhere. They were jubilant. Their hoax had been a terrific success. They'd had their excitement. They'd had a lot of flattering attention. And they'd had a party. Hundred arid Forty-third Day A lex said: "Let's have a party." "What?" said Sam. He was trimming a beard he had started to grow six weeks earlier, "A party," repeated Alex. "I'm getting bored again. I think it's time for another vizzie menace." "Nothing doing." U# "Aw. please, Sam." "No." He snipped carefully at the short whiskers. " 'No' or 'not yct'?" asked Alex. "No." said Sam firmly. But then he added : "Well, not yet." Hundred and Seventy-sixth Day "VTOU know," said Alex wistfully, "that was awfully good liquor Kirsten had." "Who?" Sam's beard was quite full now. He combed it luxuriously. "Kirsten, the reporter, that time we hoaxed them. Let's hoax them again, Sam. I could sure use some poker. I think if I play another game of chess, with you pulling away at that damn beaver you've worked up, I'll really go nuts. I feel like a pawn of fate, cast out into the void, left to be advanced one square at a time to my doom of ennui." "Doom of what?" asked Sam, halting the comb. "Ennui. Boredom." "Just because you liked Kirsten's liquor, you don't have to start talking like him." "I have a feeling I'm going to sound q lot worse pretty soon, if something doesn't happen. Then you'll be cooped up on this piece of nothing with a raving lunatic -- maybe one with a beard phobia. You'll have to lock me up and roll all those rocks by yourself. and it'll take you twice as long to get no place with this damn fool research as it does now. Sam, let's have a party. Let's make the vizzies march." Sam said : "Well... Hundred and Eightieth Day 'HE little spaceport on the asteroid was chockful of official craft. The patrol ship was there, an all-white vessel from World Government, two press ships this time, and a cumbersome-looking craft with cranes poking out of it. The boys had cried wolf again, and this time they got more of a party than they had bargained for. The patrol ship had loosed another o.-bomb. O-bombs were expensive. There was a second quartermile crater near the first and again there was no sign of a horde of vizzies. This was only natural, the hoaxters pointed out, because the o-bomb had obliterated them. But the skipper was not convinced. Not this time. He grilled Alex Hurd and Sam Black for two hours, then turned them over to his investigating officer, who grilled them some more. By then a World Government ship had arrived with a subcommissioner from the Exploration and Assessment Commission. The two researchers didn't dare back down now, and wearily they repeated their re# hearsed story once more. W. G. summoned an explorer ship and it came and poked its bores deep into the bowels of the asteroid. It lumbered here and there, as night and day chased themselves hourly around the tiny world, beeping electronically into the obomb craters, scooping up monstrous shovelfuls of slate and assaying them for signs of vizzies alive, vizzies dead, or vizzies disintegrated. Then the reporters were allowed to sec the two men. They came without liquor this time, but with broad grins and clever remarks. Sam and Alex squirmed through the interview. They stuck to their story, trying to pretend they didn't hear the cracks about the Moon hoax and the Cardiff giant, and repeating again and again their invented description of how the vizzies had attacked in Z formation, until they grew utterly sick of the ridiculous word vizzies -- the reporters loved it -- and their once-plausible story. Kirsten was the worst of them. With his mock sympatliy and his feigned seriousness, he almost trapped them a few limes, but they wriggled out somehow. The reporters finally left them alone and they collapsed on their bunks. "Sam -- ' began Alex tentatively. "Shut up." said Sam. Kirsten dictated a story to Galactic News: "By Randy Kirsten, Staff Correspondent. "There is some doubt today whether a tiny creature of primitive life, known to the trade as a vizzie (repeat vizzie, spelled v-i-double z-i-e), is as man-eating in its mealtime habits as two young scientists seem to fear. The native habitat of the vizzie is a forlorn asteroid somewhere beyond Mars which also is populated, tempc'arily, by the two young men. "Their job is a secret one. It is also dull, and it was with great excitement that they fell heir to what they described as an imminent vizzie invasion of their own little half-acre nearly three months ago. The space patrol nipped that vizzie menace in the bud, according to the record, on which doubt has now been cast. "But yesterday the alarm again went out from Asteroid X that the vizzies once more were on the march... And so on. from Kirsten, for three thousand words. Hundred and TVnefy-fi Day ""IVE shouldn't have used that  part about the Z formation," said Alex Hurd. "That's 'Tve just succeeded in pushing the whole brainless stunt into niy subconscious." S:iin Black said. "##I thank you to leave it there." "I didn't bring up the subject. Base did. This message just arrived." Sam took it. '"Are wc fired?" "No. Just admonislicd. Pretty sarcastic, too, for an oHicIal document." The message, from their chief, pointed out the cost of two oblivion bombs, the cost of twice diverting a patrol ship from its normal course, the cost of sending an exploration vessel to a remote asteroid which previously had been explored to everyone's satisfaction, the personal cost to him, the chief, in aggravation, and the cost to the Commission in prestige as a result of the sly news stories which had appears d after the second "problcmaticar' vizzie attack, as he termed it. It mu.st be assumed, he went on. that there really was danger, inasmuch as there was no proof to the contrary. This assumption, he said, must be the official version and. for its own sake, not theirs, the Commission must accept it and defend it whenever the matter might be referred to in the future. But, the chief's message added, it was also true that there was no evidence to back up tixe researchers' story and he privately felt that the vizzie menace was a myth. Any subsequent deviation from routine without factual foundation, he warned, would be dealt with most harshly. "File it," said Sam. "File it and rcmeinber it." Two Hundred and Seventeenth Day T'HE rocket's back." announced Sam. "Let's skip it this time. Watching that film always puts me to slfcp, anyway." "Come on. It's got to be done." They got into their spacesuits and went out to the landing rack to see how the rocket had made out this lime. "Missed again." said Alex. "##I git the tractor." He lumbered out to the rocket in the half-track and hauled it back. He took out the film pack and th y wxnt indoors to run it on tlu projector. "Let it roll," said Alex. 'T'ln ready to hiss the villain." The projector reeled off the routine circumnavigation of the asteroid as it would have appeared to a pilot if there had been one aboard the guided rocket. It was dull, as usual, watching the unending vista of gray slate -- punctuated now by two o-bomb craters -- and listening to the accompanying electronic beeps. U But then, as the film was ending, the beep device went crazy. It began to chatter, to whine. Then it keened up into inaudibility. Alex, who had been curled in his seat, watching and listening automatically, shot upright. "Creeping beepers #" he shouted. "What's that?" Sam stopped the projector. Tensely, he spun it back a hundred feet and re-ran the film from there. As the beep tone began to chatter again, the film showed a flat plain which they recognized as being some miles west of them on the simulated compass. There was nothing visible on the plain -- not from the height at which the photo rocket had taken the pictures -- but the chatter became a whine as the flat land sped by. The beep tone began keening as the craft sped toward a sheer cliff. The cliff was the edge of a plateau atop which the research station was built. The beep device went into its silence of supersound just before the rocket passed over the cliff. The normal beep tone then returned and continued until the landing, when the film ended. A magnification the film strip .showed nothing. The ground which had been photographed was flat, rocky and devoid of even plant life. X A  ' Working backward, the men found that the beep tone started acting up at the point where the film showed a small crater, not one of those made by the o-bombs. The crater had showed up on previous films, but it never seemed to mean anything except possibly that a meteor had struck there long ago. That was what it still looked like. "This is a job for Buster." Sam decided. Buster was their mechanical brain. He wasn't very bright, as such brains went, Ijecause there was no point in exiling one of the super-brains to a remote research station at a time when they were in great demand by Earth and the other developed planets. Buster was fed the film. He chewed on it for a while, getting it into its proper channel, swallowed it and then digested it to the accompaniment of clicks and burps. "Buster sure is a sloppy eater," Alex said, trying to cover up a case of nerves. "I hope this does not give him indigestion." After a while Buster disgorged the film, together with a printed strip of paper. Sam grabbed it and compared the symbols on it with some "on a chart hanging from one of Buster's buttons. "I'll be damned!" "What is it, Sam?" "It's impossible. It couldn't ' # happen. Not to us. 'What, for God's sake?" "Buster says -- this isn't fair! -- he says the vizrtes are on the march." Alex looked at his bearded partner without comprehension. "I don't get it. What makes him think so?" "Buster doesn't think ; he knows. You can work it back yourself. When those beeps turned into a whine, it meant something unusual. Even a kid knows that. Buster listened to the whine -- or Recked the impulses that caused the whine -- and compared them with the impulses made by things wc have records of. If he didn't know what they were, he woxild have said so. He didn't, which means he knows. He has a record of the impulse a vizzic causes when a beep hits it. And he says the whine was' caused by a lot of vizzies. on the surface. The whine got worse -- more vizzies. Then it got supersonic. More vizzies than could be recorded at the threshold of sound, obviousl#'." "It's impossible." Alex objected. 'Tbat's what I said. But I was wrong." "They're a hoax. They , don't march. We made all that up. It was a gag!" "Well." said Sam, "it's, backhrt-d on u.s." Two Hundred and Eiihteenth Day again, switched to film and telecast so they would have a permanent record as well as an instantaneous picture of what was going on now. And they adjusted it for radar-telecast, now that they knew what they were looking for. One half of the screen showed them the scene under infra-red in the brief night -- a desolate plain of cindery slate, ending at a cliff. Apparently nothing moved. But there on the other half of the screen, glowing in a mass that stretched along the base of the cliff and for as far back as could be seen, was an undulating sea of vizzies. "At least they're not in Z formation," Sam pointed out. "Ha, ha," said Alex in a flat voice. "Can you make out whether any of them are on the face of tlie cliff itself? Climbing up it?" "Wait till the rocket circles again. No, I can't tell. Can you setanytiiing, Sam?" "Look! There goes a piece of the cliff. Crashing down as if -- I'll bet that's it. Alex. They're eating aw the base of the cliff. They cap't go up it, so they're eating their way under it. Millions of , tliein -- rhions.'" "Call , tji.e .patrol ship." said Alex. "At the rate they're going, they'll be here in a couple of days. There won't be any more plateau and our statio'U go crashing down just like th riiflf." "Take it easy," suggested fSam. "The patrol ship wouldn't be anxious to come see us a tfiird time. Remember, we're the boys who cried wolf." "Sure, but there's the wolf! This time it's for real." "Real, yes," Sam told him. "But is it dangerous? We're still keyed up to that make-believe menace we created. I don't think we're being entirely logical about this situation." "Okay. Ten minutes out for logic. I vote for calling the ship and an o-bomb and taking our chances with their ridicule. But maybe you can make me change my mind." "This gives us a chance to get out of the doghouse. It couldn't be more perfect. If we can wrap up this situation ourselves, we'll be the fair-haired boys again, instead of a couple of rockhappy bats." They dug into old records at the station. They measured the length and width of the vizzie horde and its depth. They found that the creatures were eating vertically into the surface of the plain as well as forward. They sent the photo-rocket out ort a shuttle basis, set to both telecast and film. They peered at the video screen and examined the film. They satisfied themselves that the plateau, with its sheer cliffs, was a natural, if temporary, barrier to the horde. They computed the rate at which the plateau was being eaten away and found that they had a comfortable span of time in which to make preparations. Night gave way to day. From the old records they learned that the vizzies had never been run through a laboratory. The early explorers had satisfied themselves that the creatures were subterranean dwellers and had sounded them out with oldfashioned oscilloscopes to get a few basic facts about them. Then, convinced that they were useless and harmless, they had ignored the vizzies. They hadn't even named them. There were some reports that the creatures made an occasional pilgrimage to the surface -- "I must have half-remembered that when I was concocting our yarn," said Sam -- but the reports had been undocumented and were put down to legend. There was no official record of such a visitation having occurred. Until now. A lex attached a grapple to the pilotless rocket and sent it out to get some samples. They watched on the screen as the craft dipped low and scooped up a bucketful at the end of a cable. When these were fetched to them, the researchers cautiously transferred the vizzies, by remote-control handlers, to a huge copper tank. Their slate color sliowed up well against the bright copper and the men watched as the creatures boiled around in the bottom ofnt. The short day of the asteroid waned. The fleeting dusk became night as successive tests showed that the tiny vizzies had no taste for copper, iron, steel, lead, zinc, or any other metal or alloy of metal. But when rock or state was dropped into a container with the creatures, it was gobbled up in a twinkling. "At the rate they cat," said Alex, "you'd think they'd have gorged their way clear through the asteroid by now." "Unless," suggested Sam. "they have only a sliort feeding season -- which is what this must be --  and they spend the rest of the time back underground, digesting." But this question was academic. The problem was how to stop the horde from crunching into the CliiT face and causing avalanches which eventually would undermine their plateautop research station. It wasn't only a question of keeping the vizzies from overrunning the place; they had to be kept from collapsing it from underneath. The problem had answered itself, in part, the next time the unmanned rocket flew over the horde. Continuing rock falls had transformed the plateau edge from a sheer cliff to a slope -- a slope the vizzies were capable of climbing. And up they were coming, clearly shown in the image on the radar screen. Sam tugged thoughtfully at his beard and Alex chewed on the end of a mustache which had become scraggly, while they watched the vizzies glitter their eerie way to the summit. "Look," said Alex, "couldn't we fence in the station with metal? It'd take a lot of fence, but we could do it. Then, even if they ate around us, we'd still be standing on solid ground." "If you're thinking of the cyclone fencing we have in the warehouse," Sam pointed out, "you're thinking the wrong tliink. Metal doesn't repel them ; they just don't like the taste of it. And the holes in a cyclone fence are plenty big enough for them to crawl through to get to the rock on the other side. Then they'd eat the foundations right out from under us." "Yeah," said Alex. "That's a fact." He sat down and thought hard. He got up and ran the latest films from the rocket through the projector. As he studied them, worrying his mustache with his teeth, he brightened. "Now I have got it!" searchlight and his gear and dashed out into the airlock. Sam hammered on the door, then clambered into his own gear and went out through the second airlock. He chased after Alex through the starry night. "Wait, you crary nut!" he yelled. He caught up with Alex near the edge of the plateau. By now the vizzies had reached the top and were moving forward with barely perceptible speed. Alex fingered the controls on his gravity belt andsoared a dozen feet into the airless sky, then nudged himself forward until he was above the horde. He played his searchlight down on the vizzies, first at one angle, then another. Tlie creatures were brightly visible, now that the men were so close to them. They continued to move forward. Sam stepped back and shouted at Alex. His voice was tinny in the transmitter. "Get down from there, you doie! What happens if you fall in?" "You might have to play solo chess," Alex replied placidly. "But don't worry. I think I've got them licked. Arc they still moving?" "Hell, yes!" cried Sam. Involuntarily. he stepped back another couple of feet. "If anything, they're moving faster." "Good," said Alex from up in the air. "Now we'll see." He dipped into a shallow dive and landed neatly beside Sam. "Watch," he said. Alex squatted, only inches from the vanguard of the vizzie plague, and shone his torch directly at it. The creatures were stopping! Moreover, they were retreating ' as the powerful light continued to play directly on them from the front. "Come on," said Alex. "That's the answer." The men went back to their station and turned on all the tights, letting them shine through the broad glass windows on the slate surrounding the buildings. A battery of searchlights set low at strategic spots completed their defenses. "It clicked all of a sudden," Alex said. "We're east of the y horde and they moved so slowly it was hard to tell. But for a few minutes, when the Sun rose, it was shining directly in their eyes, so to speak. It stopped them -- but only for as long as the Sun was on the horizon. After that, the shell of their backs gave them protection and they came on again. "And remember when we had those test vizzies in the copper pot in the lab?" asked Alex. "You saw how they went boiling around in it. They not only don't like horizontal light -- they can't stand it. The light above the pot reflected on them from the shiny copper inside at all angles. It was too much for them." When the time came for the men to send their daily report, the vizzies were swarming outside the station. It was entirely surrounded. but the creatures kept well beyond the shining circle of light. The message to Base consisted of only four words: "All well. Progress nil. Two Hundred and Nineteenth Day T hey don't like animal flesh or cloth or rubber, either," said Alex. "So even if my light hadn't stopped them, I'd have been perfectly safe among them, out there." "You didn't know that until today, though," Sam objected. "What else do the tests show?" "That's all so far, Sam. Except that I think they're cute. Have you had a good look at one close up?" Alex had a vizzie in his palm. He held it out to Sam. Sam shuddered. "Disgusting little thing," he said. "It's wiggling like that because the light's in its little eyes." "Just keep your little pet to yourself," advised Sam. "It looks like the thumbnail of a corpse. What the hell are you doing now?" "Feeding it." said Alex, picking up a slate pebble. "Poor little thing's hungry," In a series of wriggles, the creature made its way across the #S lines of Alex's palm to the pebble and wrapped itself around it. The pebble vanished. Alex put another bit of rock on the opposite side of his palm and the vizzic wriggled toward it. That, too, disappeared. Sam watched the performance with an expression of revulsion. But the expression changed. "Alex!" he yelled. "Look! It didn't eat all the pebble. See what's kit?" "Where?" Alex examined his palm frowningly. "I don't see anything." "The light has to hit it just right, it's so tiny -- just a speck!" Alex saw it now, too. But he said: "What of it? My vizzie's a fastidious cater. Likes to leave a little something on the plate." "Let me test it," said Sam. "Just on a hunch." And,, of course, that was it. T he appetite of a vizzie led them to what they had been looking for in the slate rock -- the rock they'd pounded and rolled in vain for seven months. They'd been unable to sec the rare earth because it was in so minute a ratio to the rock itself. "What dumb luck!" Sam exulted. "The stuff turns out to be the one part of the slate the vizzic doesn't like -- an infinitesimal bit of mineral. So small we could have gone on pounding rock till Doomsday without seeing it. Think how many pounds of the stuff we must have sluiced away, never knowing it was there!" "Sweet little vizzie." Alex scratched the back of the creature in his palm. "I'm going to get you a whole boulder to nibble on to your heart's content." "It is kind of cute at that, isn't it?" remarked Sam. He grinned. "Do you know what this means, Alex? Do you get the whole picture?" "Sure," said Alex solemnly. "It means we'll have to catch a whole mess of vizzies and feed them rock, and then gather up their leavings. And I was afraid I'd have to do it all by myself because I thought you'd become a vizziephobe." "You blathering moron! It means that every bit of ground the vizzies have eaten their way across is already panned for us. The plain, the cliff, the plateau -- even our front yard. All we have to do to get the mineral is go out and scoop it up." "Well, sure," Alex said. "That's fine, of course. But that means no more crushing and picking rock, which means even more time to go batty." "What have you got in mind?" Sam asked suspiciously. Alex looked wistful. "I wish we could have another party." j The Luckiest Man in Denv To the breafc of his life, all Reuben had to do was turn the death trap into a fackpot! M AY'S man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, Atoinist, knew there was something wrong when the binoculars flashed and then went opaque. Inwardly he cursed, hoping that he had not committed himself to anything. Outwardly he was unperturbed. He handed the binoculars back to Rudolph's man Almon. of the eighty-ninth level. Maintainer, with a smile. "They aren't very good," he said. Almon put them to his own eyes, glanced over the parapet and swore mildly. "Blacker than the heart of a crazy Angel, eh? Never mind; here's another pair." This pair was unremarkable. Through it, Reuben studied the thousand setbacks and penthouses of Denv that ranged themselves below. He was too worried to enjoy his first sight of the vista from the eighty-ninth level, but he let out a murmur of appreciation. Now to get away from this suddenly sinister fellow and try to puzzle it out. "Could we -- ?" he asked cryptically, with a little upward jerk of his chin. "It's better not to," Almon said hastily, taking the glasses from his hands. "What if somebody with stars happened to see, you know? How' d you like it if you saw some impudent fellow peering up at you?" "He wouldn't dare!" said Reuben, pretending to be stupid and indignant, and joined a moment later in Almon's sympathetic laughter. "Never mind," said Almon. "We are young. Some day, who knows? Perhaps we shall look from the ninety-fifth level, or the hundredth." Though Reuben knew that the Maintainer was no friend of his. the generous words sent blood hammering through his veins; ambition for a moment. He pulled a long face and told Almon: "Let us hope so. Thank you for being my host. Now I must return to my quarters." He left the windy parapet for the serene luxury of an eighty-ninth-level corridor and descended slow moving stairs through gradually less luxurious levels to his own Spartan floor. Selene was. waiting, smiling, as he Stepped off the stairs. She was decked out nicely -- too nicely. She wore a steely hued corselet and a touch of scent; her hair was dressed long. The combination appealed to him, and instantly he was on his guard. Why had she gone to the trouble of learning his tastes? What was she up to? After all, she was Griffin's woman. "Coming down?" she asked, awed. "Where have you been?" "The eighty-ninth, as a guest of that fellow Almon. The vista is immense." "I've never been..." she murmured, and then said decisively: "You belong up there. And higher. Griffin laughs at me, but he's a fool. Last night in chamber we got to talking about you, I don't know how, and he finally became quite angry and said he didn't want to hear another word." She smiled wickedly. "I was revenged, though." Blank-faced, he said: "You must be a good hand at revenge, Selene, and at stirring up the need for it." The slight hardening of her smile meant that he had scored and he hurried by with a rather formal salutation. Burn him for an Angelo, but she was easy enough to take! The contrast of the metallic garment with her soft, white skin was disturbing, and her long hair suggested things. It was hard to think of her as scheming something or other; scheming Selene was displaced in his mind by Selene in chamber. But what was she up to? Had she perhaps heard that he was to be elevated? Was Griffin going to be swooped on by the Maintainers? Was he to kill off Griffin so she could leech onto some rising third party? Was she perhaps merely giving her man a touch of the lash? He wished gloomily that e binoculars-problem and the Selene-problem had not come together. That trickster Almon had spoken of youth as though it were something for congratulation; he hated being young and stupid and unable to puzzle out the faulty binoculars and the warmth of Griffin's woman. T he attack alarm roared through the Spartan corridor. He ducked through the nearest door into a vacant bedroom and under the heavy steel table. Somebody else floundered under the table a moment later, and a third person tried to join them. The firstcomer roared: "Get out and find your own shelter! I don't propose to be crowded out by you or to crowd you out either and see your ugly blood and brains if there's a hit. Go, now!" "Forgive me, sir! At once, sir!" the latecomer wailed; and scrambled away as the alarm continued to roar. , Reuben gasped at the "sirs" and looked at his neighbor. It was May! Trapped, no doubt, on an inspection tour of the level. "Sir," he said respectfully, "if you wish to be alone, I can find another room." "You may stay with me for company. Are you one of mine?" There was power in the general's voice and on his craggy face. "Yes, sir. May's man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, Atomist." May surveyed him, and Reuben noted that there were pouches of skin depending from cheekbones and the jaw line -- dead-looking, coarse-pored skin. "You're a well-made boy, Reuben. Do you have women?" "Yes, sir." said Reuben hastily. "One after another -- I always have women. I'm making up at this time to a charming thing called Selene. Well-rounded, yet firm, soft but supple, with long red hair and long white legs -- "Spare me the details," muttered the general. "It takes all kinds. An Atomist. you said. That has a future, to be sure. I myself was a Controller long ago. The calling seems to have gone out of fashion -- " Abruptly the alarm stopped. The silence was hard to bear. May swallowed and went on:  -- for some reason or other. Why don't youngsters elect for Controller any more? Why didn't you, for instance?" Reuben wished he could be saved by a direct hit. The binoculars, Selene, the raid, and now he was supposed to make intelligent conversation with a general. "I really don't know, sir," he said miserably. "At the time there seemed to be very little dififercnce --  Controller, Atomist, Missiler, Maintainer. We have a saying, 'The buttons are different.' which usually ends any conversation on the subject." "Indeed?" asked May distractedly. His face was thinly filmed with sweat. "Do you suppose Ellay intends to clobber us this time?" he asked almost hoarsely. "It's been some weeks since they made a maximum effort, hasn't it?" "Four," said Reuben. "I remember because one of my best Servers was killed by a falling corridor roof -- the only fatality and it had to happen to my team!" He laughed nervously and realized that he was talking like a fool, but May seemed not to notice. Far below them, there was a series of screaming whistles as the interceptors were loosed to begin their intricate, double basketwork wall of defense in a towering cylinder about Denv. "Go on, Reuben," said May. "That was most interesting." His eyes were searching the underside of the steel table. Reuben averted his own eyes from the frightened face, feeling some awe drain out of him. Under a table with a general! It didn't seem so strange now. "Perhaps, sir, you can tell me what a puzzling thing, that happened this afternoon, means. A fellow -- Rudolph's man Almon, of the eighty-ninth level -- gave me a pair of binoculars that flashed in my eyes and then went opaque. Has your wide experience -- " May laughed hoarsely and said in a shaky voice: "That old trick! He was photographing your retinas for the blood-vessel pattern. One of Rudolph's men, eh? I'm glad you spoke to me: I'm old enough to spot a revival like that. Perhaps my good friend Rudolph plans -- " There was a thudding volley in the air and then a faint jar. One had got through, exploding, from the feel of it, far down at the foot of Denv. The alarm roared again, in bursts that meant all clear; only one flight of missiles and that disposed of. 'THE Atomist and the general climbed out from under the table; May's secretary popped through the door. The general waved him out again and leaned heavily on the table, his arms Quivering. Reuben hastily brought a chair. "A glass of water," said May. The Atomist brought it. He saw the general wash down what looked like a triple dose of xxx -- green capsules which it was better to leave alone. May said after a moment: "That's better. And don't look so shocked, youngster; you don't know the strain we're under. It's only a temporary measure which I shall discontinue as soon as things ease up a bit. I was saying that perhaps my good friend Rudolph plans to substitute one of his men for one of mine. Tell me, how long has this fellow Almon been a friend of yours?" "He struck up an acquaintance with me only last week. I should have realized -- " "You certainly should have. One week. Time enough and more. By now you've been photographed, your fingerprints taken, your voice recorded and your gait studied without your knowledge. Only the retinascope is difficult, but one must risk it for a real double. Have you killed your man, Reuben?" He noddedi It had been a silly brawl two years ago over precedence at the refectory; he disliked being reminded of it. "Good," said May grimly. "The way these things are done, your double kills you in a secluded spot, disposes of your body and takes over your role. We shall reverse it. You will kill the double and take over his role." The powerful, methodical voice ticked off possibilities and contingencies, measures, and countermeasures. Reuben absorbed them and felt his awe return. Perhaps May had not really been frightened under the table; perhaps it had been he reading his own terror in the general's face. May was actually talking to him of backgrounds and policies. "Up from the eighty-third level!" he swore to himself as the great names were uttered. "My good friend Rudolph, of course, wants the five stars. You would not know this, but the man who wears the stars is now eighty years old and failing fast. I consider myself a likely candidate to replace him. So, evidently, must Rudolph. No doubt he plans to have your double perpetrate some horrible blunder on the eve of the election, and the discredit would reflect on me. Now what you and I must do -- " You and I -- May's man Reuben and May -- up from the eighty-third! Up from the bare corridors and cheerless bedrooms tst to marble halls and vaulted chambers! From the clatter of the crowded refectory to small and glowing restaurants where you had your own table and servant and where music came softly from the walls! Up from the scramble to win this woman or that, by wit or charm or the poor bribes you could afford, to the eminence from which you could calmly command your pick of the beauty of Denv! From the moiling intrigue of tripping your fellow Atomist and guarding against him tripping you to the heroic thrust and parry of generals! Up from the eighty-third! Then May dismissed him with a speech whose implications were deliriously exciting. "I need an able man and a young one, Reuben. Perhaps I've waited too long looking for him. If you do well in this touchy business, I'll consider you very seriously for an Important task I have in mind." L ate that night, Selene came to his bedroom. "I know you don't like me," she said pettishly, "but Griffin's such a fool and I wanted somebody to talk to. Do you mind? What was it like up there today? Did you see carpets? I wish I had a carpet." He tried to think about carpets and not the exciting contrast of metallic cloth and flesh. "I saw one through an open door." he remembered. "It looked odd, but I suppose a person gets used to them. Perhaps I didn't see a very good one. Aren't the good ones very thick?" "Yes," she said. "Your feet sink into them. I wish I had a good carpet and four chairs and a small table as high as my knees to put things on and as many pillows as I wanted. Griffin's such a fool. Do you think I'll ever get those things? I've never caught the eye of a general. Am I pretty enough to get one, do you think?' He said uneasily: "Of course you're a pretty thing, Selene. But carpets and chairs and pillows -- " It made him uncomfortable, like the thought of peering up through binoculars from a parapet. "I want them," she said unhappily. "I like you very much, but I want so many things and soon I'll be too old even for the eighty-third level, before I've been .vp higher, and I'll spend the rest of my life tending babies or cooking in the creche or the refectory." She stopped abruptly, pulled herself together and gave him a smile that was somehow ghastly in the half-light. "You bungler," he said, and she instantly looked at the door with the smile frozen on her face. Reuben took a pistol from under his pillow and demanded, "When do you expect him?" "What do you mean?" she asked shrilly. "Who are you talking about?" "My double. Don't be a fool, Selene. May and I -- " he savored it -- "May and I know all about it. He warned me to beware of a diversion by a woman while the double slipped in and killed me. When do you expect him?" "I really do like you," Selene sobbed. "But Almon promised to take me up there and I knew when I was where they'd see me that I'd meet somebody really important. I really do like you, but soon I'll be too old -- " "Selene, listen to me. Listen to me! You'll get your chance. Nobody but you and me will know that the substitution didn't succeed!" "Then I'll be spying for you on Almon. won't I?" she asked in a choked voice. "All I wanted was a few nice things before I got too old. All right, I was supposed to be in your arms at # hours." X T was #. Reuben sprang from bed and stood by the door, his pistol silenced and ready. At # a naked man slipped swiftly into the room, heading for the bed as he raised a ten-centimeter poignard. He stopped in dismay when he realized that the bed was empty. Reuben killed him with a bullet through the throat. "But he doesn't look a bit like me," he said in bewilderment, closely examining the face. "Just in a general way." Selene said dully: "Almon told me people always say that when they see their doubles. It's funny, isn't it? He looks just like you, really." "How was my body to be disposed of?" She produced a small flat box. "A shadow suit. You were to be left here and somebody would come tomorrow." "We won't disappoint him." Reuben pulled the web of tlie shadow suit over his double and turned on the power. In the halflit room, it was a perfect disappearance; by daylight it would be less perfect. "They'll ask why the body was shot instead of knifed. Tell them you shot me with the gun from under the pillow. Just say I heard the double come in and you were afraid there might have been a struggle." She listlessly asked: "How do you know I won't betray you?" "You won't. Selene." His voice bit. "You're broken." She nodded vaguely, started to say something and then went out without saying it. Reuben luxuriously stretched in his narrow bed. Later, his beds would be wider and softer, he thought. He drifted into sleep on a half-formed thought that some day he might vote with other generals on the man to wear the five stars -- or even wear them himself, Master of Denv. He slept healthily through the morning alarm and arrived late at his regular twentieth-level station. He saw his superior, May's man Oscar of the eighty-fifth level, Atomist, ostentatiously take his name. Let him! Oscar assembled his crew for a grim announcement: "We are going to even the score, and perhaps a little better, with Ellay. At sunset there will be three flights of missiles from Deck One. There was a joyous murmur and Reuben trotted off on his task. All forenoon he was occupied with drawing plutonium slugs from hyper-suspicious storekeepers in the great rock-quarried vaults, and seeing them through countless audits and assays all the way to Weapons Assembly. Oscar supervised the scores there who assembled the curved slugs and the explosive lenses into sixty-kilogram warheads. In mid-afternoon there was an incident. Reuben saw Oscar step aside for a moment to speak to a Maintainer whose guard fell on one of the Assembly Servers, and dragged him away as he pleaded innocence. He had been detected in sabotage. When the warheads were in and the Mis silers seated, waiting at their boards, the two Atomists rode up to the eighty-third's refectory. The news of a near-maximum effort was in the air; it was electric. Reuben heard on all sides in tones of self-congratulation: "We'll clobber them tonight!" "That Server you caught," he said to Oscar. "What was he up I could always arrange for some fissicmable material in your custody to go astray." "No, no! I was just wondering why people do something like that." Oscar sniffed doubtfully. "He's probably insane, like all the Angelos. I've heard the climate does it to them. You're not a Maintains or a Controller. Why worry abom it?" "They'll brainburn him, I suppose?" "I suppose. Lhten!' to?" His commander stared. "Are you trying to learn my job? Don't try it, I warn you. If my black marks against you aren't enough, D eck One was firing. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six; People turaed to one another and shook hands, laughed and slapped shoulders heartily. Eighteen missiles were racing through the stratosphere, soon to tumble on Ellay. With any luck, one or two would slip through the first wall of interceptors and blast close enough to smash windows and topple walls in the crazy city by the ocean. It would serve the lunatics right. Five minutes later an exultant voice filled most of Denv. "Recon missile report," it said. "Eighteen launched, eighteen perfect trajectories. Fifteen shot down by Ellay first-line interceptors, three shot down by Ellay second-line interceptors. Extensive blast damage observed in Griffith Park area of Ellay!" There were cheers. And eight Full Maintainers marched into the refectory silently, and marched out with Reuben. He knew better than to struggle or ask futile questions. Any question you asked of a Maintainer was futile. But he goggled when they marched him onto an upward-bound stairway. They rode past the eightyninth level and Reuben lost count, seeing only the marvels of the upper reaches of Denv. He saw carpets that ran the entire length of corridors, and intricate fountains, and mosaic walls, stained-glass windows, more wonders than he could recognize, things for which he had no name. He was marched at last into a wood-paneled room with a great polished desk and a map behind it. He saw May, and another man who must have been a general -- Rudolph? -- but sitting at the desk was a frail old man who wore a circlet of stars on each khaki shoulder. The old man said to Reuben: "You are an Ellay spy and saboteur." Reuben looked at May. Did one speak directly to the man who wore the stars, even in reply to such an accusation? "Answer him, Reuben," May said kindly. "I am May's man Reuben, of the eighty-third level, an Atomist." he said. "Explain," said the other general heavily, "if you can, why all eighteen of the warheads you procured today failed to fire." "But they did!" gasped Reuben. "The Recon missile report said there was blast damage from the three that got through and it didn't say anything about the others failing to fire." The other general suddenly looked sick and May looked even kindlier. The man who wore the stars turned inquiringly to the chief of the Maintainers. who nodded and said: "That was the Fecon missile report, sir." The general snapped: "What I said was that he would attempt to sabotage the attack. Evidently he failed. I also said he is a faulty double, somehow slipped with great ease into my good friend May's organisation. You will find that his left thumb print is a clumsy forgery of the real Reuben's thumb print and that his .hair has been artificially darkened." The old man nodded at the chief of the Maintainers, who said: "We have his card, sir." Reuben abruptly found himself being fingerprinted and deprived of some hair. "The f.p.s check, srtr," one Maintainer said. "He's Reuben." "Hair's natural, sir." said another. The general began a rearguard action; "My information about his hair seems to have been inaccurate. But the fingerprint means only that Ellay spies substituted his prints for Reuben's prints in the files -- " "Enough, sir," said the old man with the stars. "Dismissed. All of you. Rudolph. I am surprised. All of you. go." vast apartment with May. who was bubbling and chuckling uncontrollably until he popped .three of the green capsules into his mouth hurriedly. "This means the eclipse for years of my good friend Rudolph." he crowed. "His game was to have your double sabotage the attack warheads and so make it appear that my organization is rotten with spies. The double must have been under post-hypnotic, primed to admit everything. Rudolph was so sure of himself that he made his accusations before the attack, the fool!" He fumbled out the green capsules again. "Sir," said Reuben, alarmed. "Only temporary." May muttered, and swallowed a fourth. "But you're right. You leave them alone. There are big things to be done in your time, not in mine. I told you I needed a young man who could claw his way to the top. Rudolph's a fool. He doesn't need the capsules because he doesn't ask questions. Funny, I thought a coup like the double affair would hit me hard, but I don't feel a thing. It's not like the old days. I used to plan and plan, and when the trap went snap it was better than this stuff. But now I don't fed a thing." He leaned forward from his chair; the pupils of his eyes were black bullets. "Do you want to work?" he demanded. "Do you want your world stood on its head and your brains to crack and do the only worthwhile job there is to do? Answer me!" "Sir, I am a loyal May's man. I want to obey your orders and use my ability to the full." "Good enough," said the general. "You've got brains, you've got push. I'll do the spade work. I won't last long enough to push it through. You'll have to follow. Ever been outsidtrof Denv?" Reuben stiffened Tm not accusing you of being a spy. It's really all right to go outside of Denv. I've been outside. There isn't much to sec at first -- a lot of ground pocked and torn up by shorts and overs from Ellay and us. Farther out. especially east, it's different. Grass, trees, flowers. Places where you could grow food. "When I went outside, it troubled me. It made me ask questions. I wanted to know how we started. Yes -- started. It wasn't always Uki this. Somebody built Denv. Am I getting the idea across to you? It wasn't always like this! "Somebody set up the reactors to breed uranium and make plutonium. Somebody tooled us up for the missiles. Somebody wired the boards to control them. Somebody started the hydroponics tanks. "I've dug through the archives. Maybe I found something. I saw mountains of strength reports, ration reports, supply reports, and yet I never got back to the beginning. I found a piece of paper and maybe I understood it and maybe I didn't. It was about the water of the Colorado River and who should get how much of it. How can you divide water in a river? But it could have been the start of Denv. Ellay, and the missile attacks." The general shook his head, puzzled, and went on : "I don't see clearly what's ahead, I want to make peace between Denv and Ellay, but I don't know how to start or what it will be like. I think it must mean not firing, not even making any more weapons. Maybe it means that some of us, or a lot of us, will go out of Denv and live a different kind of life. That's why I've clawed my way up. That's why I need a young man who can claw with the best of them. Tell me what you think." "I think," said Reuben measuredly, "it's magnificent -- the salvation of Denv. I'll back you to my dying breath if you'll let me." May smiled tiredly and leaned back in the chair as Reuben tiptoed out. -- what unbelievable luck to be at a fulcrum of history like this! He searched the level for Rudolph's apartment and gained admission. To the general, he said: "Sir. I have to report that your friend lyiay is insane. He has just been raving to me. advocating the destruction of civilization as we know it, and urging me to follow in his footsteps. I pretended to agree -- since I can be of greater service to you if I'm in May's confidence." "So?" said Rudolph thoughtfully. "Tell me about the double. How did that go wrong?" "The bunglers were Selene and Almon. Selene because she alarmed me instead of distracting me. Almon because he failed to recognize her incompetence." "ley shall be brainburned. That leaves an cighty-ninth-levcl vacancy in my organization, doesn't it?" "You're very kind, sir, but I think I should remain a May's man -- outwardly. If I earn any rewards, I can wait for them. I presume that May will be elected to wear the five stars. He won't live more than two years after that, at the rate he is taking drugs." "We can shorten it," grinned Rudolph. "I have pharmacists who can see that his drugs are more than normal strength." "That would be excellent, sir. When he is too enfeebled to discharge his duties, there may be an attempt to rake up the affair of the double to discredit you. I could then testify that I was your man all along and that May coerced me." They put their heads together, the two saviors of civilization as they knew it. and conspired ingeniously long into the endless night. sidrr themselves shremd invesforv. Besides the amounr of fire reading to be found in each issue, complete sets are rising in value even more sreadilj' than diamonds, rare coins and stamps ! If there are any issues missing in yr colieciion. here's your chame to get them. V('e have all but the October ieaue VI. #. No. I ) and w'tl send out your copies the monient we reieive your order. Many people arc keeping more eban one set... a wise idea. It takes care of copies loet inrougb borrowing (and who doesn't bate that happen repeatedly?) and, f course, each coteplcre act adds that tnuib gicatei We II take care of the KandMrtg mmI pcotage. Jum seud Sc Uti each copy to... Exciting, Stimulating Full-Length Science Fiction Novels acicctt'd only # Science Fiction NoeU in the pa)-t year and a half llial they ,frli were good enough to receive the imprint of Galaxy. Tliouiands of copies of iheap novels have lieen enjoyed by Galaxy reader. Each Galaxy novel is complete and unabridged. 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Dear Galaxy Reader: This is the first chance I've had to write you since so many thousands of you get your copies on news stands it is only by taking away one of our usual advertising pages that I can reach you. There are many things to tell you about Galaxy. First, we have been making tremendous efforts to improve Galaxy. We have been combing the literary woods for the very best stories in this field. We have set up an efficient service department so that our subscribers and readers can get exactly what they request and so that back copy orders can be filled with a minimum of delay.' We have been adding features and departments that we believe you will find of great interest, such as the articles by Willey Ley. By the way, have you noticed our new covers? All of our efforts are meant to increase your enjoyment of Galaxy (and increase our sales). We hope we are succeeding but even more important is knowing whether you think so. 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Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between character and actual persons M coincidental. by Mark Clifton # by John Wyndharn # by Roger Dee # by Richard Matheson # by Edward Wellen # by Frederik Pohl A C. M. Kornbluth # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Co... Ia. Reg. u. S. Fet. Of. magazine makes you examine problems, situations and attitudes from every possible angle. The result is that truth comes to have many sides: problems and situations can be solved in a variety of ways -- and each one produces its own new set of difficulties. If you read The Quest for Utopia, an anthology of imaginary societies edited by Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick (Henry Schuman, Inc... New York. #; # pages. #), you'll find two basic characteristics in all Utopias: They seemed highly desirable in the eras in which they were produced, but, from the vantage point of history, we can find little to choose between them and the reality of their day. Every Utopia relentlessly excludes whole segments of the population, being designed only for its creator and his pals. Since that's the case, there is almost an infinite number of possible Utopias. The ideal society for an entrepreneur, as in Gravy Planet, is obviously not the same as that of a socialist or a hobo. Extend that to generals, enlisted men. gamblers, reformers, religionists and atheists, high society and recluses -- each social group has its own dream world. The Quest for Utopia is evidence of that. It has rescued a number of important works from the obscurity of foreign languages and special reading rooms in libraries. As a record of changes in goals through history, it has great fascination. "Human nature" is too indeterminate a term, so there's no point discussing whether it can change, but the book makes completely visible the fact that people in different ages and social classes have very different ideals. Here's another wonderment: Like all readers Of science fiction, I suppose, I've been irritated by some reviewers' dismissal of it as "escape literature." The implication, of course, is that their own favorite forms of literature are nothing of the sort. Psychologically, anything that allows a person to avoid his internal conflicts is escapist. That covers every human activity': work, eating and sleeping, creation and recreation and procreation. There's no doubt that some writers and readers overcommit themselves to science fiction, living it instead of their actual lives. But that's characteristic of them, not of science fiction. Stating the opposite is the same as blaming food for making people fat, sleep for making them lazy, or work because it makes them neglect their families. Any human need, desire or activity may be put to escapist uses... including the writing of literary reviews. In some instances, reviewing masks a deep feeling of artistic sterility. Some instances, please note; not all, by any means. Good reviewing serves an important purpose. So does escape. Not only is it destructive to keep obsessively facing internal problems, but no other work would get done. And escape has produced every significant advance in civilization. Science fiction has already contributed its share. It will go on doing so. Another thing: We usually view the future as a fairly straight-line development of the present. But it doesn't take much examination of the past to see that history is more like a fox's trail than a curve on a graph. Examples? Here:  After the rigid conservatism of the Middle Ages came the flamboyant romanticism of the Renaissance.  The humanist and rationalist philosophy of the #th century was replaced by the blunt materialism of the #th century.  A period of lax morality always seems to be followed by intense puritanism. Women in France, after the Napoleonic Wars, wore single sheer garments, which they soaked to make still more transparent... and then came Victorianism, which in turn was swept away by the gin-andsex aftermath of World War I.  The egalitarianism of the American Revolution gave way to the Alien  Sedition Act, and I don't have to explain what happened after the Russian Revolution. These reversals seem typical of such upheavals.  We appear to be going into a modified sort of Victorian era. as exemplified by trends in clothes and growing censorship of literature. There generally are lags, of course, which would explain beach wear and From Here to Eternity. A parallel in the #th century was the astonishingly low-cut gowns, and another was Eugene Field, who turned out some of the best scatoliterature. Every social action evidently produces an equal and opposite reaction. Society ultimately gets where it's heading, but by doubling back constantly: thus far, almost always on a higher level. That's not as tidy as a graph, but history never is except in retrospect There is no past or future, the children said ; H all just is! They had every reason to know! Friday -- June I I th A T three years of age, a  little girl shouldn't have  m enough functioning intelligence to cut out and paste together a Moebius Strip. Or, if she did it by accident, she surely shouldn't have enough reasoning ability to pick up one of her crayons and carefully trace the continuous line to prove it has only one surface. And if by some strange coincidence she did, and it was still just an accident, how can I account for this generally active daughter of mine -- and I do mean active -- sitting for a solid half hour with her chin cupped in her hand, staring off into space, thinking with such concentration that it was almost painful to watch? I was in my reading chair, going over some work. Star was sitting on the floor, in the circle of my light, with her blunt-nosed scissors and her scraps of paper. Her long silence made me glance down at her as she was taping the two ends of the paper together. At that point I thought it was an accident that she had given a half twist to the paper strip before joining the circle. I smiled to myself as she picked it up in her chubby fingers. "A little child forms the enigma of the ages," I mused. But instead of throwing the strip aside, or tearing it apart as any other child would do, she carefully turned it over and around -- studying it from all sides. Then she picked up one of her crayons and began tracing the line. She did it as though she were substantiating a conclusion already reached! It was a bitter confirmation for me. I had been refusing to face it for a long time, but I Could ignore it no longer. Star was a High I.Q. For half an hour I watched her while she sat on the floor, one knee bent under her, her chin in her hand, unmoving. Her eyes were wide with wonderment, looking into the potentialities ofr the phenomenon she had found. It has been a tough struggle, taking care of her since my wife's death. Now this added problem. If only she could have been normally dull, like other children! T made up my mind while I watched her. If a child is afflicted, then let's face it, she's afflicted. A parent must teach her to compensate. At least she could be prepared for the bitterness I'd known. She could learn early to take it in stride. I could use the measurements available, get the degree of intelligence, and in that way grasp the extent of my problem. A twenty point jump in I.Q. creates an entirely different set of problems. The # child lives in a world nothing at all like that of the # child, and a world which the # child can but vaguely sense. The problems which vex and challenge the # pass over the # as a bird flies over a field mouse. I must not make the mistake of posing the problems of one if she is the other. I must know. In  the meantime, I must treat it casually. "That's called the Moebius Strip, Star," I interrupted her thoughts. She came out of her reverie with a start,. I didn't like the quick way her eyes sought mine -- almost furtively, as though she had been caught doing something bad. f "Somebody already make it?" she disappointedly asked. She knew what she had discovered! Something inside me spilled over with grief, and something else caught at me with dread. I kept my voice casual, "A man by the name of Moebius. A long time ago. I'll tell you about him sometime when you're older." "Now. While I'm little," she commanded with a frown. "And don't tell. Read me." What did she mean by that? Oh, she must be simply paraphrasing me at those times in the past when I've wanted the facts and not garbled generalizations. It could only be that! "Okay, young lady." I lifted an eyebrow and glared at her in mock ferociousness, which usually sent her into gales of laughter. "I'll slow you down!" She remained completely sober. I turned to the subject in a physics book. It's not in simple language, by any means, and I  read it as rapidly ps I could speak. My thought was to make her admit she didn't understand it, so I could translate it into basic language. Her reaction? "You read too slow. Daddy," she complained. She was childishly irritable about it. "You say a word. Then I think a long time. Then you say another word." I knew what she meant. I remember, when I was a child, my thoughts used to dart in and out among the slowly droning words of any adult. Whole patterns of universes would appear and disappear in those brief moments. "So?" I asked. "So," she mocked me impishly. "You teach me to read. Then I can think quick as I wPnt." "Quickly," I corrected in a weak voice. "The word is "quickly,' an adverb." She looked at me impatiently, as if she saw through this allegedly adult device to show up a younger's ignorance, I felt like the dope! September Is# the past few months. I have tried, a number of times to bring the conversation around to discuss Star's affliction with her. But she is amazingly adroit at heading me off, as though she already knows what I am trying to say and isn't concerned. Perhaps, in young to realize the hostility of the world toward intelligence. Some of the visiting neighbors have been amused to see her sit on the floor with an encyclopedia as big as she is, rapidly turning the pages. Only Star and I know she is reading the pages as rapidly as she can turn them. I've brushed away the neighbors' comments with: "She likes to look at the pictures." They talk to her in baby talk -- and she answers in baby talk! How does she know enough to do that? I have spent the months making an exhaustive record of her I.Q. measurements, aptitude speeds, reaction, tables, all the recommended paraphernalia for measuring something we know nothing about. The tables are screwy, or Star is beyond all measurement. All right, Pete Holmes, how are you going to pose those problems and combat them for her, when you have no conception of what they might be? But I must have conception. I've got to be able to comprehend at least a little of what she may face. I simply couldn't stand by and do nothing. Easy, though. Nobody knows better than you the futility of trying to compete out of your class. How many students, workers and employers have tried to compete with you? You've watched them and pitied them, comparing them to a donkey trying to run the Kentucky Derby. How does it leel to be in the place of the donkey, for a change? You've always blamed them for hot realizing they shouldn't try to compete. But this is my own daughter! I must understand. October I st  and according to State Law her mind has now developed enough so that she may attehd nursery school. Again I tried to prepare her for what she might face. She listened through about two sentences and changed the subject. I can't tell about Star. Does she already know the an-. swers? Or does she not even realize there is a problem? I was in a sweat of worry when I took her to her first day at school yesterday morning. Last night I was sitting in my chair, reading. After she had put her dolls away, she went to the bookshelves and brought down a book of fairy tales. That is another peculiarity of hers. She has an immeasurably quick perception, yet she has all the normal reactions of a little girl. She likes her dolls, fairy stories, playing grown up. No, she's not a monster. She brought the book of fairy tales over to me. "Daddy, read me a story," she asked quite seriously. I looked at her in amazement. "Since when? Go read your own story." She lifted an eyebrow in imitation of my own characteristic gesture. "Children of my age do not read," she instructed pedantically. "I can't learn to read until I am in the first grade. It is very hard to do and I am much too little." She had found the answer to her affliction -- conformity! She had already learned to conceal her intelligence. So many of us break our hearts before we learn that. But you don't have to conceal it from me, Star! Not from me! Oh, well, I could go along with the gag. if that was what she wanted. "Did you like nursery school?" I asked the standard question. "Oh, yes," she exclaimed enthusiastically. "It was fun." "And what did you learn today, little girl?" She played it straight back to me. "Not much. I tried to cut out paper dolls, but the scissors kept slipping." Was there an elfin deviltry back of her sober expression? "Now, look," I cautioned, "don't overdo it. That's as bad as being too quick. The idea is that everybody has to be just about standard average. That's the only thing we will tolerate. It is expected that a little girl of four should know how to cut out paper dolls properly." "Oh?" she questioned, and looked thoughtful. "I guess that's the hard part, isn't it, Daddy -- to know how much you ought to know?" "Yes, that's the hard part," I agreed fervently. "But it's all right." she reassured me. "One of the Stupids showed me how to cut them out, so now that little girl likes me. She just took charge of me then and told the other kids they should like me, too. So of course they did because she's leader. I think I did right, after all." "Oh, no!" I breathed to myself. She knew how to manipulate other people already. Then my thought whirled around another concept. It was the first time she had verbally classified normal people as "Stupids," but it had slipped out so easily that I knew she'd been thinking to herself for a long time. Then my whirling thoughts hit a third implication. "Yes, maybe it was the right thing." I conceded. "Where the little girl was concerned, that is. But don't forget you were being observed by a grownup teacher in the room. And she's smarter." "You mean she's older. Daddy," Star corrected me. "Smarter, too, maybe. You can't tell." "I can," she sighed. "She's just older." I think it was growing fear which made me defensive. "That's good," I said emphatically. "That's very good. You can learn a lot from her then. It takes an awful lot of study to learn how to be stupid." My own troublesome business life came to mind and I thought to myself, "I sometimes think I'll never learn it." I swear I didn't say it aloud. But Sfar patted me consolingly and answered as though I'd spoken. "That's because you're only fairly bright. Daddy. You're a Tween, and that's harder than being really bright." "A Tween? What's a Tween?" I was bumbling to hide my confusion. "That's what I mean, Daddy," she answered in exasperation. "You don't grasp quickly. An In Between, of course. The .other people are Stupids, I'm a Bright, and you're a Tween. I made those names up when I was little." Good God! Besides being unmeasurably bright, she's a telepath! All right, Pete, there you are. On reasoning processes you might stand a chance -- but not telepathy! "Star," I said on impulse, "can you read people's minds?" "Of course, Daddy," she answered, as if I'd asked a foolishly obvious question, "Can you teach me?" She looked at me impishly. "You're already learning it a little. But you're so slow! You see, you didn't even know you were learning." Her voice took on a wistful note, a tone of loneliness. "I wish -- " she said, and paused. "What do you wish?" "You see what I mean. Daddy? You try, but you're so slow." All the same, I knew. I knew she was already longing for a companion whose mind could match her own. A father is prepared to lose his daughter eventually, Star, but not so soon. Not so soon... une, again in next door. Star says their name is Howell. Bill and Ruth Howell. They have a son, Robert, who looks maybe a year older than Star, who will soon be five. Star seems to have taken up with Robert right away. He is a well-mannered boy and good company for Star. f I'm worried, though. Star had something to do with their moving in next door. I'm convinced of that. I'm also convinced, even from the little I've seen of him, that Robert is a Bright and a telepath. Could it be that, failing to find quick accord with my mind, Star has reached out and out until she made contact with a telepath companion? No, that's too fantastic. Even if it were so, how could she shape circumstances so she could bring Robert to live next door to her? The Howells came from another city. It just happened that the people who lived next door moved out and the house was put up for sale. Just happened? How frequently do we find such abnormal Brights? What are the chances of one just happening to move in next door to another? I know he is a telepath because, as I write this, I sense him reading it. I even catch his thought: "Oh, pardon me, Mr. Holmes. I didn't intend to peek. Really I didn't." Did I imagine that? Or is Star building a skill in my mind? "It isn't nice to look into another person's mind unless you're asked, Robert," I thought back, rather severely. It was purely an experiment. "I know it, Mr. Holmes. I apologize." He is in his bed in his house, across the driveway. "No, Daddy, he really didn't mean to." And Star is in her bed in this house. It is impossible to write how I feel. There comes a time when words are empty husks. But mixed with my expectant dread is a thread of gratitude for having been taught to be even stumblingly telepathic. Saturday -- August lith I 'VE thought of a gag. I haven't seen Jim Pietre in a month of Sundays, not since he was awarded that research fellowship with the museum. It will be good to pull him out of his hole, and this little piece of advertising junk Star dropped should be just the thing. Strange about the gadget. The Awful Secret Talisman of the Mystic Junior G-Men, no doubt. Still, it doesn't have anything about crackles and pops printed on it. Merely an odd-looking coin, not even true round, bronze by the look of it. Crude. They must stamp them out by the die. But it is just the thing to send to Jim to get a rise out of him. He could always appreciate a good practical joke. Wonder how he'd feel to know he was only a Tween. Monday -- August #th desk, I've been staring into space for an hour. I don't know what to think. It was about noon today when Jim Pietre called the office on the pfione. "Now, look, Pete," he started out. "What kind of gag are you pulling?" I chortled to myself and pulled the dead pan on him. "What do you mean, boy?" I asked back into the phone. "Gag? What kind of gag? What are you talking about?" "A coin. A coin." He was impatient. "You remember you sent me a coin in the mail?" "Oh, yeah, that," I pretended to remember. "Look, you're an important research analyst on metals -- too damned important to keep in touch with your old friends -- so I thought I'd make a bid for yoqr attention thataway." "All right, give," he said in a low voice. "Where did you get it?" He was serious. "Come off it, Jim. Are you practicing to be a stuffed shirt? I admit it's a rib. Something Star dropped the other day. A manufacturer's idea of kid advertising, no doubt." "I'm in dead earnest, Peter," he answered. "It's no advertising gadget." "It means something?" In college, Jim could take a practical joke and make six out of it. "I don't kn#wwhat it means. Where did Star get it?" He was being pretty crisp about it. "Oh, I don't know," I said. I was getting a little fed up; the joke wasn't going according to plan. "Never asked her. You know how kids clutter up the place with their things. No father even tries to keep track of all the junk that can be bought with three box tops and a dime." "This was not bought with three box tops and a dime," he spaced his words evenly. "This was not bought anywhere, for any price. In fact, if you want to be logical about it, this coin doesn't exist at all." I laughed out loud. This was more like the old Jim. "Okay, so you've turned the gag back on me. Let's call it quits. How about coming over to supper some night soon?" "I'm coming over, my friend." He remained grim as he said it. "And I'm coming over tonight. As soon as you will be home. It's no gag I'm pulling. Can you get that through your stubborn head? You say you got it from Star, and of course I believe you. But it's no toy. It's the real thing." Then, as if in profound puzzlement, "Only it isn't." A feeling of dread was settling n upon me. Once you cried "Uncle" to Jim, he always let up. "Suppose you tell me what you mean," I answered soberly. "That's more like it, Pete. Here's what we know about the coin so far. It is apparently preEgyptian. It's hand-cast. It's made out of one of the lost bronzes. We fix it at around four thousand years old." "That ought to be easy to solve," I argued. "Probably some coin collector is screaming all over the place for it. No doubt lost it and Star found it. Must be lots of old coins like that in museums and in private collections." I was rationalizing more for my own benefit than for Jim. He would know all those things without my mentioning them. He waited until I had finished. "Step two," he went on. "We've got one of the top coin men in the world here at the museum. As soon as I saw what the metal was, I took it to him. Now hold onto your chair. Pete. He says there is no coin like it in the world, either museum or private collection." "You museum boys get beside yourselves at times. Come down to Earth. Sometime, somewhere, V some collector picked it up in some exotic place and kept it quiet. I don't have to tell you how some collectors are -- sitting in a dark room, gloating over some worthless bauble, not telling a soul about it -- " "All right, wise guy," he interrupted. "Step three. That coin is at least four thousand years old and it's also brand-new! Let's hear you explain that away." "New?" I asked weakly. "I don't get it." "Old coins show wear. The edges get rounded with handling. The surface oxidizes. The molecular structure changes, crystalizes. This coin shows no wear, no oxidation, no molecular change. This coin might have been struck yesterday. Where did Star get it?" "Hold it a minute," I pleaded. I began to think back. Saturday morning. Star and Robert had been playing a game. Come to think of it, that was a peculiar game. Mighty peculiar. Star would run into the house and stand in front of the encyclopedia shelf. I could hear Robert counting loudly at the base tree outside in the back yard. She would stare at the encyclopedia for a moment. Once I heard her mumble: "That's a good place." Or maybe she merely thought it and I caught the thought. I'm doing that quite a bit of late. Then she would run outside again. A moment later, Robert would run in and stand in front of the same shelf. Then he also would run outside again. There would be silence for several minutes. The silence would rupture with a burst of laughing and shouting. Soon, Star would come in again. "How does he find me?" I heard her think once. "I can't of him." It was during one of their silences when Ruth called over to me. "Hey, Pete! Do you know where the kids are? Time for their milk and cookies." The Howells are awfully good to Star, bless 'em. I got up and went over to the window. "I don't know, Ruth," I called back. "They were in and out only a few minutes ago." "Well, I'm not worried," she IS said. She came through the kitchen door and stood on the back steps. "They know better than to cross the street by themselves. They're too little for that. So I guess they're over at Marily's. When they come back, tell 'em to come and get it." "Okay, Ruth," I answered. She opened the screen door again and went back into her kitchen. I left the window and returned to my work. A little later, both the kids came running into the house. I managed to capture them long enough to tell them about the cookies and milk. "Beat you there!" Robert shouted to Star. There was a scuffle and they ran out the front door. I noticed then that Star had dropped the coin and I picked it up and sent it to Jim Pietre. phone. "Are you still there?" "Yep, still waiting for an answer," he said. "Jim, I think you'd better come over to the house right away. I'll leave my office now and meet you there. Can you get away?" "Can I get away?" he exclaimed. "Boss says to trace this coin down and do nothing else. See you in fifteen minutes." He hung up. Thoughtfully, I replaced the receiver and went out to my car. I was pulling into my block from one arterial when I saw Jim's car pulling in from a block away. I stopped at the curb and waited for him. I didn't see the kids anywhere out front. Jim climbed out of his car, and I never saw such an eager look of anticipation on a man's face before. I didn't realize I was showing my dread, but when he saw my face, he became serious. "What is it, Pete? What on Earth is it?" he almost whispered. "I don't know. At least I'm not sure. Com on inside the house." We let ourselves in the front, and I took Jim into the study. It has a large window opening on the back garden, and the scene was very clear. At first it was an innocent scene  -- so innocent and peaceful. Just three little children in the back yard playing hide and seek. Marily, a neighbor's child, was stepping up to the base tree. "Now look, you kids," she was saying. "You hide where I can find you or I won't play." "But where can we go, Marily?" Robert was arguing loudly. Like all little boys, he seems to carry on his conversations at the top of his lungs. "There's the garage, and there's those trees and bushes. You have to look everywhere, Marily." "And there's goir to be other buildings and trees and bushes there afterward," Star called out with glee. "You gotta look behind them, too." "Yeah!" Robert took up the teasing refrain. "And there's been lots and lots of buildings and trees there before -- especially trees. You gotta look behind them, too." Marily tossed her head petulantly. "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't care. Just hide where I can find you, that's all." She hid her face at the tree and started counting. If I had been alone, I would have been sure my eyesight had failed me, or that I was the victim of hallucinations. But Jim was standing there and saw it, too. Marily started counting, yet the other two didn't run away. Star reached out and took Robert's hand and they merely stood there. For an instant, they seemed to shimmer and -- they disappeared without moving a step! Marily finished her counting and ran around to the few possible hiding places in the yard. When she couldn't find them, she started to blubber and pushed through the hedge to Ruth's back door. "They runned away from me again," she whined through the screen at Ruth. Jim and I stood staring out the window. I glanced at him. His face was set and pale, but probably no worse than my own. We saw the instant shimmer again. Star, and then immediately Robert, materialized from the air and ran up to the tree, shouting, "Safe! Safe!" Marily let out a bawl and ran home to her mother.  into the house. They came, still holding hands, a little shamefaced, a little defiant. How to begin? What in hell could I say? "It's not exactly fair." I told them. "Marily can't follow you there." I was shooting in the dark, but I had at least a glimmering to go by. Star turned pale enough for the freckles on her little nose to stand out under her tan. Robert blushed and turned to her fiercely. "I told you so, Star. I told you so! I said it wasn't sporting," he accused. He turned to me. "Marily can't play good hide-and-seek anyway. She's only a Stupid." "Let's forget that for a minute, Robert." I turned to her. "Star, just where do you go?" "Oh, it's nothing, Daddy." She spoke defensively, belittling the whole thing. "We just go a little ways when we play with her. She ought to be able fo find us a little ways." "That's evading the issue. Where do you go -- and how do you go?" Jim stepped forward and showed her the bronze coin I'd sent him. "You see. Star," he said quietly. "We've found this." "I shouldn't have to tell you my game." She was almost in tears. "You're both just Tweens. You couldn't understand." Then, struck with contrition, she turned to me. "Daddy, I've tried and thing." She slipped her hand through Robert's arm. "Robert does it very nicely," she said primly, as though she were complimenting him on using his fork the right way. "He must be better than I am, because I don't know how he finds me." "I'll tell you how I do it, Star," Robert exclaimed eagerly. It was as if he were trying to make amends now that grownups had caught on. "You don't use any imagination. I never saw anybody with so little imagination!" "I do, too, have imagination," she countered loudly. "I thought up the game, didn't I? I told you how to do it, didn't I?" "Yeah, yeah!" he shouted back. "But you always have to look just go to the encyclopedia and to that place -- and there you are. It's simple.' Star's mouth dropped open in consternation. "I never thought of that," she said. Jim and I stood there, letting the meaning of what they were saying penetrate slowly into our incredulous minds. "Anyway," Robert was saying, "you haven't any imagination." He sank down cross-legged on the floor. "You can't teleport yourself to any place that's never been." She went over to squat down beside him. "I can, too! What about the Moon People? They haven't been yet." He looked at her with childish disgust. "Oh, Star, they have so been. You know that." He spread his hands out as though he were a baseball referee. "That time hasn't been yet for your daddy here, for instance, but it's already been for somebody like -- well, say, like those things from Arcturus." "Well, neither have you teleported yourself to some place that never was," Star was arguing back. "So there." sank down shakily into another. At least the arms of the chair felt solid beneath my hands. "Now, look, kids," I interrupted their evasive tactics. "Let's start at the beginning. I gather you've figured a way to travel to places m the pastor future." "Well, of course, Daddy." Star shrugged the statement aside nonchalantly. "We just TP ourto go. It doesn't do any harm." And these were the children who were too little to cross the street ! I have been through times of shock before. This was the same -- somehow, the mind becomes too stunned to react beyond a point. One simply plows through the rest, the best he can, almost normally. "Okay, okay," I said, and was surprised to hear the same tone I would have used over an argument about the biggest piece of cake. "I don't know whether it's harmful or not. I'll have to think it over. Right now, just tell me how you do it." "It would be so much easier if doubtfully. "Well, pretend I'm a Stupid and tell me in words." "You remember the Moebius Strip?" she asked very slowly and carefully, starting with the first and most basic point in almost the way one explains to an ordinary child. Yes, I remembered it. And I remembered how long ago it was that she had discovered it. Over mind had been exploring its possibilities ever since. And I thought she had forgotten it! "That's where you join the ends of a strip of paper together with a half twist to make one surface," she went on, as though jogging my undependable, slow memory. "Yes." I answered. "We all know the Moebius Strip." Jim looked startled. I had never told him about the incident. "Next you take a sheet and you give it a half twist and join the edge to itself all over to make a funny kind of holder." "Klein's Bottle," Jim supplied. She looked at him in relief. "Oh, you know about that," she said. "That makes it easier. Well, then, the next step. You take a cube" -- Her face clouded with doubt again, and she explained, "You can't do this with done, because it's an imaginary cube anyway." She looked at us questioningly. I nodded for her to continue. all together the same way you did Klein's Bottle. Now if you do that big enough, all around you, so you're sort of half twisted in the middle, then you can TP yourself anywhere you want to go. And that's all there is to it," she finished hurriedly. "Where have you gone?" I asked her quietly. The technique of doing it would take some thinking. I knew enough physics to know that was the way the dimensions were built up. The line, the plane, the cube -- Euclidian physics. The Moebius Strip, the Klein Bottle, the unnamed twisted cube -- Einsteinian physics. Yes, it was possible.  "Oh, we've gone all over," Star answered vaguely. "The Romans and the Egyptians -- places like that." "You picked up a coin in one of those places?" Jim asked. He was doing a good job of keeping his voice casual. I knew the excitement he must be feeling, the vision of the wealth of knowledge which must be opening befor his eyes. "I found it, Daddy," Star answered Jim's question. She was about to cry. "I found it in the dirt, and Robert was about to catch me. I forgot Ihad it when I went away from there so fast.' She looked at me pleadingly. "I didn't mean to steal it, Daddy. I never stole anything, anywhere. And I was going to take it back and put it right where I found it. Truly I was. But I dropped it had it. I guess I was awful naughty." I brushed my hand across my forehead. "Let's skip the question of good and bad for a minute," I said, ngy head throbbing. "What about this business of going into the future?" shining. "There isn't any future, Mr. Holmes. That's what I keep telling Star, but she can't reason -- she's just a girl. It'll all pass. Everything is always past." Jim stared at him, as though thunderstruck, and opened his mouth in protest. I shook my head warningly. "Suppose you tell me about that, Robert," I said. "Well," he began on a rising note, frowning, "it's kinda hard to explain at that. Star's a Bright and even she doesn't understand it exactly. But, you see, I'm older." He looked at her with superiority. Then, with a change of mood, he defended her. "But when she gets as old as I am, shc'#I understand it okay." He patted her shoulder consolingly. He was all of six years old.  "You go back into the past. Back past Egypt and Atlantis. That's recent," he said with scorn. "And on back, and on back, and alt of a sudden it's future." "That isn't the way  did it." Star tossed her head contrarily. "I reasoned the future. I reasoned what would come next, and I went there, and then I reasoned again. And on and on. I can, too, reason." "It's the same future," Robert told us dogmatically. "It has to be, because that's all that ever happened." He turned to Star. "The reason you never could find any Garden of Eden is because there wasn't any Adam and Eve." Then to me, "And man didn't come from the apes, either. Man Started himself." Jim almost strangled as he leaned forward, his face red and his eyes bulging. "How?" he choked out. Robert sent his gaze into the far distance. "Well," he said, "a long time from now -- you know what I mean, as a Stupid would think of Time-From-Now -- men got into a mess. Quite a mess -- "There were some people in that time who figured out the same kind of traveling Star and I do. So when the world was about to blow up and form a new star, a lot of them teleported themselves back to when the Earth was young, and they started over again." Jim just stared at Robert, unable to speak. "I don't get it," I said. "Not everybody could do it," Robert explained patiently. "Just a few Brights. But they enclosed a lot of other people and took them along." He became a little vague at this point. "I guess later on the Brights lost interest in the Stupids or something. Anyway, the Stupids sank down lower and lower and became like animals." He held his nose briefly. "They smelled worse. They worshiped the Brights as gods." Robert looked at me and shrugged. "I don't know all that happened. I've only been there a few times. It's not very interesting. Anyway," he finished, "the Brights finally disappeared." "I'd sure like to know where they went," Star sighed. It was a lonely sigh. I helplessly took her hand and gave my attention back to Robert. If "I still don't quite understand," I said. He grabbed up some scissors, a piece of cellophane tape, a sheet of paper. Quickly he cut a strip, gave it a half twist, and taped it together. Then rapidly, on the Moebius Strip, he wrote: "Cave men. This men. That men, Mu Men, Atlantis Men, Egyptians, History Men. Us Now Men, Atom Men, Moon Men, Planet Men, Star Men -- " "There," he said. "That's all the room there is on the strip. I've written clear around it. Right after Star Men comes Cave Men. It's all one thing, joined together. It isn't future, and it isn't past, either. It just plain is. Don't you see?" "I'd sure like to know how the Brights got off the strip," Star said wistfully. "Look, kids," I pleaded. "I don't know whether this game's dangerous or not. Maybe you'll wind up in a lion's mouth, or something." "Oh, no, Daddy!" Star shrilled in glee. "We'd just TP ourselves right out of there." "But fast," Robert chortled in agreement. "Anyway, I've got to think it over," I said stubbornly. "I'm only a Tween, but, Star, I'm your daddy and you're just a little girl, so you have to mind me." "I always mind you," she said virtuously. "You do, eh?" I asked. "What about going off the block? Visiting the Greeks and Star Men isn't my idea of staying on the block." "But you didn't say that. Daddy. You said not to cross the street. And I never did cross the street. Did we, Robert? Did we?" "We didn't cross a single street, Mr. Holmes," he insisted. "My God!" said Jim, and he went on trying to light a cigarette. "All right, all right! No more leaving this time, then," I warned. "Wait!" It was a cry of anguish from Jim. He broke the cigarette in sudden frustration and threw it in an ashtray. "The museum, Pete," he pleaded. "Think what it would mean. Pictures, specimens, voice recordings. And not only from historical places, but Star men, Pete. Star men! Wouldn't it be all right for them to go places they know are safe? I wouldn't ask them to take risks, but -- " "No, Jim," I said regretfully. "It's your museum, but this is my daughter." "Sure," he breathed. "I guess I'd feel the same way." I turned back to the youngsters. "Star, Robert," I said to them both, "I want your promise that y . you will not leave this time, until I let you. Now I couldn't punish you if you broke your promise, because I couldn't follow you. But I want your promise on your word of honor you won't leave this time." "We promise." They each held up a hand, as if swearing in court. "No more leaving this time." I let the kids go back outside into the yard. Jim and I looked at one another for a long while, breathing hard enough to have been running. "I'm sorry,'.' I said at last. "I know," he answered. "So. am I. But I don't blame you. I simply forgot, for a moment, how much a daughter could mean to a man." He was silent, and then added, with the humorous quirk back at the corner of his lips, "I can just see myself reporting this interview to the museum." "You don't intend to, do you?" I asked, alarmed. "And get myself canned or laughed at? I'm not that stupid." September lOfi a flash for an instant. I was concentrating on Caesar's triumphant march into Rome. For the briefest of instants, there it was. I I was standing on the roadway, watching. But, most peculiar, it was still a picture; I was the only thing moving. And then, just as abruptly, I lost it. Was it only a hallucination? Something brought about by intense concentration and wishful thinking? Now let's see. You visualize a twist and seal the edges together -- No, when it has the half twist there's only one surface. You seal that surface all around you -- Sometimes I think I have it. Sometimes I despair. If only I were a Bright instead of a Tween! October # #rd make so much work of teleporting myself. It's the simplest thing in the world, no effort at all. Why, a child could do it! That sounds like a gag, considering that it was two children who showed me how, but I mean the whole thing is easy enough for even almost any kid to learn. The problem is understanding the steps... no, not understanding, because I can't say I do, but working out the steps in the process. There's no danger, either. No wonder it felt like a still picture at first, for the speeding up is incredible. That bullet I got in the way of, for instance -- I was able to go and meet it and walk along beside it while it traveled through the air. To the men who were dueling, I must have been no more than an instantaneous streak of movement. That's why the youngsters laughed at the suggestion of danger. Even if they materialized right in the middle of an atomic blast, it is so slow by comparison that they could TP right out again before they got hurt. The blast can't travel any faster than the speed of light, you see, while there is no limit to the speed of thought. But I still haven't given them permission to teleport themselves out of this time yet. I want to go over the ages pretty carefully before I do; I'm not taking any chances, even though I don't see how they could wind up in any trouble. Still, Robert claimed the Brights went from the future back into the beginning, which means they could be going through time and overtake any of the three of us, and one of them might be hostile -- I feel like a louse, not. taking Jim's cameras, specimen boxes and recorders along. But there's time for that. Plenty of time, once I get the feel of history without being encumbered by all that stuff to carry. Speaking of time and history -- what a rotten job historians have done! For instance: neither crazy nor a moron. He wasn't a particularly nice guy. I'll admit -- I don't see how anybody could be with the amount of flattery I saw -- but he was the victim of empire expansion and the ferment of the Industrial Revolution. So were all the other European rulers at the time, though. He certainly did better than Louis of France. At least George kept his job and his head. On the other hand, John Wilkes Booth was definitely psychotic. He could have been cured if they'd had our methods of psychotherapy then, and Lincoln, of course, wouldn't have been assassinated. It was almost a compulI didn't dare... God knows what effect it would have had on history. Strange thing, Lincoln looked less surprised than anybody else when he was shot, sad, yes, and hurt emotionally at least as much as physically, yet you'd swear he was expecting it. Cheops was plenty worried about the number of slaves who died while the pyramid was being built. They weren't easy to replace. He gave them four hours off in the hottest part of the day, and I don't think any slaves in the country were fed or housed better. I never found any signs of Atlantis or Lemuria, just tales of lands far off -- a few hundred miles was a big distance then, remember -- that had sunk beneath the sea. With the Ancients' exaggerated notion of geography, a big island was the same as a continent. Some islands did disappear, naturally, drowning a few thousand villagers and herdsmen. That must have been the source of the legends. Columbus was a stubborn cuss. He was thinking of turning back when the sailors mutinied, which made him obstinate. I still can't see what was eating Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great -- it would have been a big help to know the languages, because their big campaigns started off more like vacation or exploration trips. Helen of Troy was attractive enough, considering, but she was just an excuse to fight. There were several attempts to federate the Indian tribes before the white man and the Five Nations, but going after wives and slaves ruined the movement every time. I think they could have kept America if they had been united and, it goes without saying. knew the deal they were going to get. At any rate, they might have traded for weapons and tools and industrialized the country somewhat in the way the Japanese did. I admit that's only speculation, but this would certainly have ben a different world if they'd succeeded ! One day I'll put it all in a comprehensive and corrected history of mankind, complete with photographs, and then let the "experts" argue themselves into nervous breakdowns over it. I didn't get very far into the future. Nowhere near the Star Men, or, for that matter, back to the beginning that Robert told us about. It's a matter of reasoning out the path and I'm not a Bright. I'll take Robert and Star along as guides, when and if. What I did see of the future wasn't so good, but it wasn't so bad, either. Thf real mess obviously doesn't happen until the Star Men show up very far ahead in history, if Robert is right, and I think he is. I can't guess what the trouble will be, but it must be something ghastly if they won't be able to get out of it even with the enormously advanced technology they'll have. Or maybe that's the answer. It's almost true of us now. November, Friday #fi weekend trip and left Robert in my care. He's a good kid and no trouble. He and Star have kept their promise, but they're up to something else. I can sense it and that feeling of expectant dread is back with me. They've been secretive of late. I catch them concentrating intensely, sighing with vexation, and then breaking out into unexplained giggles. "Remember your promise," I warned Star while Robert was in the room. "We're not going to break it, Daddy," she answered seriously. They both chorused, "No more leaving this time." But they both broke into giggles! I'll have to watch them. What good it would do. I don't know. They're up to something, yet how can I stop them? Shut them in their rooms? Tan their hides? I wonder what someone else would recommend. Sunday night HE kids are gone! I've been waiting an hour for them. I know they wouldn't stay away so long if they could get back. There must be something they've run into. Bright as they are, they're still only children. I have some clues. They promised me they wouldn't go out of this present time. With all her mischievousness. Star has never broken a promise to me -- as her typically feminine mind interprets it, that is. So I know they are in our own time. On several occasions Star has brought it up, wondering where the Old Ones, the Bright Ones, have gone -- how they got off the Moebius Strip. That's the clue. How can I get off the Moebius Strip and remain in the present? A cube won't do it. There we have a mere journey along the single surface. We have a line, we have a plane, we have a cube. And then we have a supercube -- a tesseract. That is the logical progression of mathematics. The Bright Ones must have pursued that line of reasoning. Now I've got to do . the same, but without the advantage of being a Bright. Still, it's not the same as expecting d normally intelligent person to produce a work of genius. (Genius by our standards, of course, which I suppose Robert and Star would classify as Tween.) Anyone with a pretty fair I.Q. and proper education and training can follow a genius's logic, provided the steps are there and especially if it has a practical application. What he can't do is initiate and complete that structure of logic. I don't have to, either -- that was done for me by a pair of Brights and I "simply" have to apply their findings. Now let's see if I can. By reducing the present-pastfuture of man to a Moebius Strip, we have sheared away a dimension. It is a two-dimensional strip, because it has no depth. (Naturally, it would be impossible for a Moebius Strip to have depth; it has only one surface.) Reducing it to two dimensions makes it possible to travel anywhere you want to go on it via the third dimension. And you're in the third dimension when you enfold yourself in the twisted cube. Let's go a step higher, into one more dimension. In short, the tesseract. To get the equivalent of a Moebius Strip with depth, you have to go into the fourth dimension, which, it seems to me, is the only way the Bright Ones could get off this closed cycle of past-present-future-past. They must have reasoned that one more notch up the dimensions was all they needed. It is equally obvious hat Star and Robert have followed the same line of reasoning; they wouldn't break their promise not to leave the present -- and getting off the Moebius Strip into another present would, in a sort of devious way, be keeping that promise. I'm putting all this speculation down for you, Jim Pietre, knowing first that you're a Tween like myself, and second that you're sure to have been doing a lot of thinking about what happened after I sent you the coin Star dropped. I'm hoping you can explain all this to Bill and Ruth Howell -- or enough, in any case, to let them understand the truth about their son Robert and my daughter Star, and where the children may have gone. I'm leaving these notes where y#u will find them, when you and Bill and Ruth search the house and grounds for us. If you read this, it will be because I have failed in my search for the youngsters. There is also the possibility that I'll find them and that we won't be able to get back onto this Moebius Strip. Perhaps time has a different value there, or doesn't exist at all. What it's like off the Strip is anybody's guess. Bill and Ruth: I wish I might give you hope that I will bring Robert back to you. But all I can do is wish. It may be no more than wishing upon a star -- my Star. I'm trying now to take six cubes and fold them in on one another so that every angle is a right angle. It's not easy, but I can do it, using every bit of concentration I've learned from the kids. All right, I have the six cubes and I have every angle a right angle. the tesseract a half twist around myself and -- wailing wall An enormous weapon is forcing people to keep their troubles Jo themselves -- it's dynamite! had dogged him from the moment he regained consciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had no idea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of the Hymenop dome. The darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was far underground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere above him, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavy with the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images. Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr #I village with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, on the hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and JCavfSr would be waiting for him in the disabled Marco Four. Waiting for him... They might as welt have been back on Terra, five hundred lightyears away. Six feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet , lighted for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary for an Earthman s vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without end . Behind him, his pursuers -- human natives or Hyme'nop invaders, he had no way of knowing which -- drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the maze. -- To halt, sweating, when a # tund exactly similar came to him from ahead. It was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and he could not go back. He made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had been forced upon him. It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady threat of action never quite realized. They had known where he was going, and why. But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see -- He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and familiar. He went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of deja vu. It was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into the dome to find. His confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator aboard the Marco Four, and from the stereo-sharp associations it evoked : Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up and down the 'companion at way from engine bay to chart room, his concern divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's tong silence in the dome. Stryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical assurance, dried up his smug pattering of sociopsychological truisms lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook...  cerned," Stryker had said an eternal evening before, " homo sapiens can be a pretty weird species. More given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever likely to run across out here." He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the Marco Four's open port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the ship where Gibson and Xavier, the Marco's mechanical, worked over the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back, smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky. "Isolate a human colony from its parent planet for two centuries, enslave it for half that time to a hegemony as foreign as the Hymenops hive-culture before abandoning it to its own devices, and anything at all in the way of eccentric social controls can develop. But men remain basically identical, Arthur, in spite of acquired superficial changes. They are inherently incapable of evolving any system of control mechanisms that cannot be understood by other men, provided the environmental circumstances that brought that system into being are known. At are no different from ourselves. Heredity won't permit it." Farrell, half listening, had been staring upward between the icy the twin blue-and-yellow jewels of Albireo, searching for a remote twinkle of Sol. Five hundred light-years away out there, he was thinking, lay Earth. And from Earth all this gaudy alien glory was no more than another point of reference for backyard astronomers, a minor configuration casually familiar and unremarkable. A winking of lighted windows springing up in the village downslope brought his attention back to the scattered cottages by the river, and to the great' disquieting curve of the Hymenop dome that rose above them like a giant above pygmies. He sat up restlessly, the wind ruffling his hair and whirling the smoke of his cigarette, away in thin flying spirals. "You sound as smug as the Reorientation chapter you lifted that bit from," Farrell said. "But it won't apply here. Lee. The same thing happened to these people that happened to the other colonists we've found, but they don't react the same. Either those Hymenop devils warped them permanently or they're a tribe of congenital maniacs." Stryker prodded him socratically: "Particulars?" "When we crashed here five weeks ago, there were an even thousand natives in the village, plus or minus a few babes in arms. Since that time they've lost a hundred twenty-six members, all suicides or mufders. At first the entire population turned out at sunrise and went into the dome for an hour before going to the fields; since we came, that period has shortened progressively to a few minutes. That much we've learned by observation. By direct traffic we've learned exactly nothing except that they can speak Terran Standard, but won't. What sort of system is that?," Stryker tugged uncomfortably at the rim of white hair the years had left him. "It's a stumper for the moment, I'll admit... if they'd only talk to us, if they'd tell us what their wants and fears and problems are, we'd know what is wrong and what to do about it. But controlsforced on them by the Hymenops, or acquired since their liberation, seem to have altered their original ideology so radically that -- " "That they're plain batty,' Farrell finished for him. "The whole setup is unnatural, Lee. Consider this: We sent Xavier out to meet the first native that showed up, and the native talked to him. We heard it all by monitoring; his name was Tarvil, he spoke Terran Standard, and he was amicable. Then we showed ourselves, and when he saw that we were human beings like himself and not mechanicals like Xav, he clammed up. So did everyone in the village. It worries me, Lee. If they didn't expect men to come out of the Marco, then what in God's name did they expect?" He sat up restlessly and stubbed out his cigarette. "It's an unimportant world anyway, all ocean except for this one small continent. I think we ought to write it off and get the hell out as soon as the Marco's Ringwave is repaired." "We can't write it off," Stryker said. "Besides reclaiming a colony, we may have added a vaF uable marine food source to the Federation. Arthur, you're not letting a handful of disoriented people get under your skin, are you?" Farrell made an impatient sound and lit another cigarette. The brief flare of his lighter pierced the darkness and picked out a hurried movement a short stone's throw away, between the Marco Four and the village. edgy," Farrell said. "These Sadrians may be harmless, but they make a point of posting a guard over us. There's a sentry out there in the grass flats again tonight." He turned on Stryker uneasily. "I've watched on the infra-scanner while those sentries changed shifts, and they don't speak to each other. I've tracked them back to the village, but I've never seen one of them turn in a -- " Down in the village a man screamed, a raw, tortured sound that brought both men up stiffly. A frantic drumming of running feet came to them, unmistakable across the little distance. The fleeing man came up from the dark huddle of cottages by the river and out across the grass flats, screaming. Pursuit overtook him halfway to the ship. There was a brief scuffling, a shadowy dispersal of silent figures. After that, nothing. "They did it again," Farrell said. "One of them tried to come up here to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from the village and come up here -- and this is what happens. We couldn't trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!" "It's our job to understand them," Stryker said doggedly. "Our function is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them straight if we can. If wc can't, we call in a longterm reorientation crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it. "I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta Pegasi -- rediscovered in #, I think it was -- that developed a religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to M # Ophiuchi, but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we  found them. They followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't -- there were too many of them. By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen each other. Still it took only three generations to set them straight." He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly. "For that matter, Earth had her own share of eccentric cultures. I recall reading about one that existed as late as the twentieth century and equaled anything we're likely to find here. Any society should be geared to a set of social controls designed to furnish it, as a whole with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of discomfort, but these ancient Terrestrial Dobuans -- island aborigines, as I remember it -- had adjusted to their total environment in a manner exactly opposite. They reversed the norm and became a society of paranoiacs, hating each other in direct ratio to nearness of relationship. Husbands and wives detested each other, sons and fathers -- " "Now you're pulling my leg," Farrell protested. "A society like that would be too irrational to function." "But the system worked," Stryker insisted. "It balanced well enough, as long as they were isolated. They accepted it because it was all they knew, and an abrupt reversal that negated their accustomed habits would create an impossible societal conflict. They were reoriented after the Fourth War, and succeeding generations adjusted to normal living without difficulty." A sound from overhead made them look up. Gibson was standing in the Marco's open port. "Conference," Gibson said in his heavy baritone, and went back inside. and without question, more disturbed by the terse order than Knowing Gibson, they realized that he would not have wasted even that one word unless emergency justified it. They found him waiting in the chart room with Xavier. For the thousandth time, seeing the two together, Farrell found himself comparing them: the robot, smdbthly functional from flexible gray plastoid body to featureless oval faceplate, blandly efficient, totally incapable of emotion; Gibson, short and dark and competent, heavybrowed and humorless. Except for initiative, Farrell thought, the two of them could have traded identities and no one would have been able to notice any difference. "Xav and I found our Ringtfrave trouble," Gibson said. "The generator is functioning, but the warp isn't going out. Something it" They stared at him as if he had just told them the planet was flat. "But a Ringwave can't be stopped completely, once it is started," Stryker protested. "You'd have to dismantle it to shut it off, Gib!" "The warping field can be damped out, though," Gibson said. "Adjacent generators operating at different phase levels will heterodyne at a frequency representing the mean variance between levels. The resulting beat-phase will be too low to maintain either field, and one or the other, or both, will blank out. If you remember, all Terrandesigned power plants are set to the same phase for that reason." "But these natives can't have a Ringwave plant!" Farrell argued. "There's only this one significant little agrarian township! If they had the Ringwave, they'd be mechanized. They'd have vehicles, landing ports..." "The Hymenops had the Ringwave," Gibson interrupted. "And they left the dome down there, the first undamaged one we've found. Figure it out for yourselves." They digested the statement in silence. Stryker paled slowly, as if it needed time for apprehension to work its way through his fat bulk. Farrell's uneasiness, sourceless until now, grew to chill certainty. "T think I've expected this, with out realizing it. since my first flight," he said. "It stood to reason that the Hymenops would quit running somewhere, that wed bump into them eventually out here on the fringes. Twenty thousand light-years back to # Ophiuchi is a long way to retreat... Gib, do you think they're still here?" Gibson did not shrug, but his voice seemed to. "It won't matter one way or the other unless we can clear the Marco's generator." From another man it might have been irony. Knowing Gibson, Farrell and Stryker accepted it as a bald statement of fact. "Then we're up against a Hymenop hive-mind," Stryker said. "And we can't run away from it. Any suggestions?" "We'll have to find the interfering generator and stop it," Farrell offered, knowing that was the only obvious solution. "One alternative," Gibson corrected. "If we can determine what phase-level the interfering warp uses, we may be able to adjust the Marco's generator to match it. Once they're in resonance, they won't interfere." He caught Stryker's unspoken question and answered it. "It would take a week. Maybe longer." Stryker vetoed the alternative. "Too long. If there ar? Hymenops here, they won't give us that much time." Farrell switched on the chart room scanning screen and centered it on the village downslope. Scattered cottages with dark tiled roofs and lamp-bright windows showed up clearly. Out of their undisciplined grouping swept the great hemispherical curve of the dome, glinting dully metallic in the starshine. "Maybe we're jumping to conclusions," he said. "We've been here for five weeks without seeing a trace of Hymenops, and from what I've read of them, they'd have jumped us the minute we landed. Chances are that they to wreck the dome, and their Ringwave power plant is still running." "You may be ight," Stryker said, brightening. "They carried the fight to us from the first skirmish, two hundred years ago, and they damned near beat us before we learned how to fight them." He looked at Xavier's silent plastoid figure with something like affection. "We'd have lost that war without Xave's kind. We couldn't match wits with Hymenop hive-minds, any more than a swarm of grasshoppers could stand up to a colony of wasps. But we made mechanicals that could. Cybernetic brains and servo-crews, ships that thought for themselves... He squinted at the visiscreen with its cryptic, star-streaked dome. "But they don't think as we do. They may have left a rear guard here, or they may have boobytrapped the dome." "One of us will have to find out which it is," Farrell said. He , took a restless turn about the chart room, weighing the probabilities. "It seems to fall in my department." Stryker stared. "You? Why?" "Because I'm the only one who can go. Remember what Gib said about changing the Marco's Ringwave to resonate with the interfering generator? Gib can make the change; I can't. You're "Too old and fat," Stryker finished for him. "And too damned slow and garrulous. You're right, of course." They let it go at that and put Xavier on guard for the night. The mechanical was infinitely more alert and sensitive to approach than any of the crew, but the knowledge did not make Farrell's sleep the sounder. He dozed fitfully, waking a dozen times during the night to smoke cigarettes and to speculate fruitlessly on what he might find in the dome. He was sweating out a nightmare made hideous by monstrous bees that threatened him in buzzing alien voices when Xavier's polite monotone woke him for breakfast. the grassy slope to the village when he realized that the Marco was still under watch. Approaching close enough for recognition, he saw that the sentry this time was Tarvil, the Sadrian who had first approached the ship. The native's glance took in Farrell's shoulder-pack of testing tools and audiphone, brushed the handtorch and blast gun at the Terran's belt, and slid away without trace of expression. "I'm going into the dome," Farrell said. He tried to keep the uncertainty out of his voice, and felt a rasp of irritation when he failed. "Is there a taboo against that?" The native fell in beside him without speaking and they went down together, walking a careful ten feet apart, through dewdrenched grass flats that gleamed like fields of diamonds under the early morning sun. From the village, as they approached, straggled the inevitable exodus of adults and half-grown children, moving silently out to the fields. "Weird beggars," Farrell said into his audiphone button. "They don't even rub elbows at work. You'd think they were afraid of being contaminated." Stryker's voice came tinnily in his ear. "They won't seem so strange once we learn their motivations. I'm beginning to think this aloofness of theirs is a religious concomitant, Arthur, a hangover from slave-controls designed to prevent rebellion through isolation. Considering what they must have suffered under the Hymenops, it's a wonder they're even sane." "I'll grant the religious origin," Farrell said. "But I wouldn't risk a centicredit on their sanity. I think the lot of them are nuts." The village was not deserted, but so far as Farrell's coming was concerned, it might as well have been. The few women and children he saw on the streets ignored him -- and Tarvil -- completely. He met with only one sign of interest, when a naked boy perhaps six years old stared curiously and asked something in a childish treble of the woman accompanying him. The woman answered with a single sharp word and struck the child across the face, sending him sprawling. Farrell relayed the incident. "She said 'Quiet!' and slapped him down, Lee. They start their training early." "Their sort of indifference couldn't be congenital," Stryker said. His tinny murmur took on a puzzled sound. "But they've been free for four generations. It's hard to believe that any forcibly implanted control mechanism could remain in effect so long." A shadow blocked the sun, bringing a faint chill to Farrell when he looked up to see the great rounded hump of the dome looming over him. "I'm going into the dome now," he said. "It's like all the others -- no openings except at ground level, where it's riddled with them." Tarvil did not accompany him inside. Farrell, looking back as he thumbed his hand-torch alight in the nearest entranceway, saw the native squatting on his heels and looking after him without a single trace of interest. "T'M at ground level," Farrell said later, "in what seems to have been a storage section. Empty now, with dust everywhere except in the corridors the natives use when they come in, mornings. No sign of Hymenops yet." Stryker's voice turned worried. "Look sharp for traps, Arthur. The place may be mined." The upper part of the dome, Farrell knew from previous experience, would have been given over in years past to Hymenop occupation, layer after rising layer of dormitories tiered like honeycombs to conserve space. He followed a spiral ramp downward to the level immediately below surface, and felt his first excitement of discovery when he found himself in the audience chambers that, until the Marco's coming, had been the daily goal of the Sadrian natives. The level was entirely taken up with bare ten-foot cubicles, each cramped chamber dominated by a cryptic metal-andcrystal likeness of the Hymenop head set into the metal wall opposite its corridor entrance. From either side of a circular speakinggrill, the antennae projected into the room, rasplike and alert, above faceted crystal eyes that glowed faintly in the near-darkness. The craftsmanship was faultless, stylized after a fashion alien to Farrell's imagining and personifying with disturbing realism the soulless, arrogant efficiency of the Hymenop hivemind. To Farrell, there was about each image a brooding air of hypnotic fixity. "Something new in Hymenop experiments," he reported to Stryker. "None of the other domes we found had anything like this. These things have some bearing on the condition of the natives, Lee -- there's a path worn through the dust to every image, and I can see where the people knelt. I don't like it. I've got a hunch that whatever these damned idols were used for succeeded too well." "They can't be idols," Stryker said. "The Hymenops would have known how hard it is to displace anthropomorphism entirely from human worship. But I think you're right about the experiment's working too well. No ordinary compulsion would have stuck so long. Periodic hypnosis? Wait, Arthur, that's an angle I want to check with Gibson... He was back a moment later, wheezing with excitement. "Gib thinks I'm on the right track -- periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives' compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with them, even after the Hymenops pulled out. They couldn't break away until the Marco's Ringwave forced a shutdown of the dome's power plant and deactivated the images. Not that they're any better off now that they're free; they don't know how -- " Farrell never heard the rest of it. Something struck him sharply across the back of the head. ness, he was naked and weaponless and lost. The rustling of approach, bodiless and dreadful in darkness, panicked him completely and sent him fleeing through a sweating eternity that brought him finally to the dome's lowest level and the Hymenop power plant. He went hesitantly toward the shadowy bulk of the Ringwave cylinder, drawn as much now by its familiarity as driven by the terror behind him. At the base of the towering machine, he made out a control board totally unrecognizable in design, studded with dials and switches clearly intended for alien handling. The tinny whispering of Stryker's voice in the vaultlike quiet struck him with the frightening feeling that he had gone mad. He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: "We're in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level --  Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope. "I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!" The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, "Quiet!" Stryker's metallic whisper said : "We're tracking your carrier, Arthur. Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their# images going. Keep busy!" Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on glass. " Give me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have Counsel..." Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the swelling sense of outrage. There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting arid struggling. The whimpering stopped. The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice, stronger as it came closer. "Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming, Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!" Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder, straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen, grasped, fought with. He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out of the darkness: "Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored." There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness. Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a silently dispersing throng of Sadrians. Then he passed out. in the chart room when he awoke. The Marco Four was already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could see a dwindling it, in the black pit of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins. "We're headed out," he said, Nbewildered. "What happened?" Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back to his gambit. "We reset the Ringwave in the dome to phase with ours and lugged you out," Stryker explained genially. He was back in character again, his fat paunch quivering with the beginning of laughter. "We're through here. The rest is up to Reorientation." Farrell gaped at him. "You're "We've done all we can. Those Sadrians need something that a preliminary expedition like ours can't give them. Right now they ligious code that makes it impossible for any one of them to express his wants, hopes, ideals or misfortunes to another. Exchanging confidences, to them, is the ultimate sacrilege." "Then they are crazy. They'd have to be, with no more opportunity for emotional catharsis tli an that!" "They're not insane, they're -- adapted. Those robot images you found are everything to this culture: arbiters, commercial agents, monitors and confessors all in one. They not only relay physical needs from one native to another; they listen to all problems and give solutions. They're Counselors, remember? Man's gregariousness stems largely from his need to unload his troubles on someone else. The Hymenops came up with an efficient substitute here, and the natives accepted it as the norm." Farrell winced with sudden understanding. "No wonder the poor devils cracked up right and left. With their Ringwave dead, they might as well have been struck blind and dumb! They couldn't even get together among themselves to figure a way out." "There you have it," Stryker said. "They knew we were responsible for their catastrophe, but they couldn't bring themselves to ask us for help because we were human beings like themselves. So they went mad one by one and committed the ultimate blasphemy of shouting their misery in public, and their fellows had to kill them or Countenance , sacrilege. But they'll quiet down now. They should be easy enough to handle by the time the Reorientation lads arrive." He began to chuckle. "We left their Counselors running, but we disconnected the hypnosis-renewal circuits. They'll get only what they need from now on, which is an outlet for shifting their personal burdens. And with the post-hypnotic compulsion gone, they'll turn to closer association with each other. Human gregariousness will reassert itself. After a couple of generations, the Reorientation boys can write them off as Terran Normal and move on to the next planetary madhouse we've dug up for them." Farrell said wonderingly, "I never thought of the need to exchange confidences as being so important. But it is; everyone does it. You and I often talk over personal concerns, and Gib -- " He broke off to study the intent pair at the chessboard, comparing Gibson's calm selfsufficiency to the mechanical's bland competence. "There's an exception for your theory, Lee. Iron Man Gibson never gave out with a confidence in his life!" Stryker laughed. "You may be right. How about it. Gib? Do you ever feel the need of a wailing wall?" Gibson looked up briefly from his game, his square face unsurprised. "Well, sure. Why not? I tell my troubles to Xavier." When they looked at each other blankly, he added, with the nearest approach to humor that either Farrell or Stryker had ever seen in him: "It's a reciprocal arrangement. Xav confides his to me." is incandescent with ideas and action! You'll hate to see it end, which seems -- falling in love with somebody who couldn't possibly exist! Not a ghost story at all, it's based on solid scientific fad. must adapt to a thoroughly hostile planet or die! There is a solution, of course... a provocative, exciting one... and perhaps the weirdest space flight in all science fiction! other features. Origins of Galactic Slang Since the beginnings of slang are usually lost, here is one way to preserve them...invent them long before they happen! Ay dev: to delay asking a question until it becomes unanswerable. transported from his laboratory in New Zealand to a square in ancient Rome. Unified Era), a Terran physicist, remains the only being in the Galaxy believed have journeyed into the past. On #day, #, Swifel's assistants helped him don the Entropical helmet he had devised. With this helmet he attuned himself to an artifact found in the ruins of Rome. Forthwith, Swifel was # vmT l Apparently frightened by the apparition, a noonday crowd of togaclad Romans hurriedly dispersed. One roan alone stood his ground. Swifel, already beginning to suffer from the temporal stress that sapped his energy, staggered to the arch beside which the man stood. Fighting off waves of pain with all the power of his will, Swifel inquired in Latin: "What year is this?" The man, quite unperturbed, responded that it was # a.d. On the verge of blacking out, Swifel snapped himself back to his own era. But as he dictated the account of his brief excursion, there began the awesome physical transformation which seemingly characterizes travel into the past and which has militated against the desire to repeat Swifel's experiment. Drained of lifepotential, Swifel's body stiffened into a petrified pillar. However, before complete immobilization set in, Swifel managed to voice this question : "How was he able to answer me in modern English?" '. E. G.; an expression of hostility from an unsuspected source. For Emotional Gratification . The first F. E. G. was activated by the Venusian roboticist Kor Lio (#-# U.E.). One day in #, his son, aged four years Terran, wandered into Kor's home workshop,. The usually mild technician was joyously delivering a savage kick to the posterior of his superior, the Chief Roboticist. Becoming aware of his child's presence, Kor colored a deeper peppermint and coiled his leg back in its normal position. He hastily informed his son that this Chief Roboticist was not the real one. It was the first experimental model of an F. E. G. The F. E. G., a roboticized replica of a hated individual, was to be a psychic safety valve, a harmless outlet for emotions repressed because of danger of reprisal. Kor explained that the use of the F. E. G. differed from that to which witch doctors once put wax dolls. Unlike the witch doctors' suggestible victims, the original would not know that his enemy was subjecting his image to indignities. Kor smiled at his son and wondered if the child understood. His son smiled back. It was the warm, coaxing smile that always turned each of Kor's hearts over. "Please, Daddy," the child said, "make me one of you." Hickey's Mistake: an act with serious consequences, paradoxically the result of the very knowledge that such an act has such serious consequences. (#-# Unified Era) was a Terran archeologist. It was on a field trip to Planet #B# that he made the error which has perpetuated his name. Hickey seems to have been quite inexperienced. Records indicate that he arrived with only six weeks' supplies, although he intended to stay three months. However, that was not Hickey's Mistake, for there was always the practical possibility of living off the land. Besides, as later events proved, Hickey required only two weeks' supplies. At that time, the natives of Planet #B# had a culture similar to that of Earth's Middle Paleolithic man. This fact caused Hickey's study of the daily life of the natives to be brief, inasmuch as the routine was a simple struggle for survival. Hickey soon turned his attention to uncovering a burial mound. That, however, was not Hickey's Mistake, for the natives permitted outsiders to intrude in exchange for some of the gaudier products of Galactic civilization. In the opened graves, Hickey found tools buried with the dead. (Middle Paleolithic man had also buried tools with the dead.) This excited Hickey -- it apparently proved the existence of a rigid pattern of development for humanoid life. However, that was not Hickey's Mistake, although the subsequent work of Steiner has shattered that theory. Hickey's notes end here, but we may reconstruct what followed. Hickey used gestures to question the natives. He asked if they currently buried tools with their dead. They shook their heads. Yet the burials had been fairly recent. Hickey, therefore, rashly accused the natives of lying. That was not Hickey's Mistake, however, for the natives who had gathered about him took the accusation in good spirit. They found humor in the outsider's inability to see what was so plain to them. They managed to explain to Hickey that they did not bury the tools with the dead. It was, indeed, the reverse. When someone accidentally broke or destroyed a tool, it was the tool they buried. Their custom was to entomb the toolbreaker with the tool. This revelation stirred Hickey deeply. So deeply that, in his eagerness to record it, he bore down too heavily on his pen and broke it. That was Hickey's Mistake. Hsilgne: a message which contains more information than the sender realizes, yet less than the receiver requires. O N #day, # Unified Era, the robutler of Prof. Ian Heath (b. #) found his employer dead in the laboratory of the professor's London, Terra, home. The body lay beside a small pile of ashes and a large heap of battered machinery. Two objects had fallen from the professor's grasp -- a vial of poison and a note. This is what the note says: "I am taking my own life. It is because the discovery that ought to have proved the prime achievement of my career has turned out to be my supreme failure. I am sorry that, in my first reaction, I destroyed the machine and my formulae. I should have allowed them to stand, to perpetuate Heath's Folly. "My purpose was to construct a device that would set up an implosion vortex. I believed that such an effect would twist matter out of the matrix of our universe and into a different form of existence. "Looking back, it seems foolish that I should have chosen to begin the experiment with myself as guinea pig. But I was eager to experience another state of being, however fleeting, and my formulae indicated a safety margin. "So I started the machine, set the implosion vortex for a duration of one-thousandth of a second Terran and stepped into its focus. I waited. Nothing happened. I felt no change, no sensation whatever. "I stepped out. My machine hummed most impressively. I had rechecked my formulae countless times. The only error, therefore, was my premise of an implosion vortex. "And so I bid the Universe farewell. Perhaps I shall experience another state of being, after all. Or is the belief only another Heath's Folly?" The above note is on exhibition at London Museum. It faces a mirror so visitors may read it more easily. Manny: to alter the perspective of past events. traced this term back to the first recorded empirical proof of the co-existence of spacetime continua. On October #, #, at approximately seven minutes past four P. m., there occurred the temporal and spatial displacement of the newsstand located at the northwest corner of # th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City, Terra. Manny Freeman, the proprietor and operator of thenewsstand, being within the newsstand at the time, perforce accompanied it upon its journey. Extracts from a transcription of Manny's own words follow. "Whoosh! I feel myself gettin' dizzy. I hear a customer holler, 'Hey, hold on! How about my change?' And then Fifty-seventh and Madison is gone and me and the stand is settin' in a kind of courtyard. I seen four or five big -- what I mean, big! -- things. But it was like they was made outa smoke." A question, directed at himself, took shape in his head. "Why has your world spewed you hither?" Manny sensed that the question really emanated from one of the forms confronting him. "Look," Manny said, "I din ast to come here. All I know is, one minute I'm sellin' papers, next minute it's like I'm dreamin'. I gotta get back. Look, I just got in a pile of extras..." He picked up a paper and showed them the headline. Manny describes himself as becoming somewhat agitated. "Hey!" he said. "That's impossible! The Yanks was leadin' the Giants twelve to four at the end of the sixth. Then there was a lot of excitement and they called the game for some reason. A bunch of customers come over right then, so I din catch the reason." Manny recalls that at this point he seemed to hear voices conversing in his brain: "He speaks truth." "This means that there is a temporal cancer which will spread unless we immediately restore maximum probability." That is all Manny can tell us of the parallel continuum. Again his senses reeled. At about seven and one-quarter minutes past four, the newsstand reappeared in its normal location and Manny gave the indignant customer his rightful change. And approximately one hour earlier, at Yankee Stadium, several gigantic forms suddenly materialized and loomed menacingly above the Yankee dugout. Toting aspic to Terra: engaging in an unprofitable venture. circumstance that Prof. Argus Bentley (#-#), # Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, independently provided the solution to Terra's pressing food problem. On March #, #, while ostensibly on a fishing cruise off Key West, Prof. Bentley surreptitiously jettisoned a weighted parcel. On March #, the British superliner Queen Alexandria logged a sluggish transatlantic crossing of # hours # minutes. Investigation exonerated the Irish chief engineer. A multitude of evidence pointed to one staggering conclusion: the oceans were jelling into a firm, viscous mass. Further investigation verified that the land areas of Terra were surrounded by highly nutritious aspic. On March #, Prof. Bentley dramatically revealed to the world that this historic transformation had been brought about by his genius and initiative. He revealed that he had set off a selfsustaining colloidal process, initially involving thermite, ocean pressure and a catalyst which he had discovered. On April #, Prof. Bentley was appointed American member of the Aspic Trusteeship Commission of the United Nations. The diversion of rivers into mid-con tincntal reservoirs, licensed aspic mining operations and supervised distribution of aspic. On June #, #, Prof. Bentley was one of fourteen persons fatally injured in Le Havre when a bomb exploded during ceremonies honoring him. # # The murderer, who was never apprehended, was suspected of being a chef who objected to the manner in which France was garnishing its coastal aspic. Zasling: embracing eagerly, bat without feelings of ardent affection B fEN Zaslin (#-#) was a Callistan biologist. In #, he married a heautiful young Martian. Despite his marked display of possessive jealousy, their relationship seems to have been a happy one the first four years. In #, Zaslin was drafted for a two-year tour of duty aboard a Solar Expeditionary Service vessel. Early in the morning of the day of departure, Zaslin's wife awoke suddenly, startled by a labial sensation. She discovered Zaslin in the act of applying a salve to her lips. With an admixture of embarrassment and defiance, he explained that he had developed a repellent that would make it impossible for her lips to meet those of another being. Zaslin's wife laughed affectionately at what she termed his lovable foolishness and attempted to brush his cheek with her lips. To her surprise, she found her lips curling back, away from his flesh. Good-naturedly, she substituted a fond farewell hug for a kiss. Zaslin departed, promising that upon his return he would coat his lips with a nullifying agent so that he might, like the Prince Charming of the Terran myth, awaken his Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. Zaslin's wife was on hand when his familiar figure descending the ramp, she eagerly jostled her way through the welcoming crowd and ran toward him. She clung to him and pressed her lips tightly to his. Finally she broke away and released a heartfelt sigh. Then she administered a resounding slap to Zaslin's face, automatically divorcing him, and rushed to the spaceport restaurant. There she ended two years of enforced vegetarianism by devouring a thick, juicy steak. bought Lellie for -- no, there could be trouble putting it that way -- when Duncan Weaver paid Lellie's parents one thousand dollars in compensation for the loss of her services, he had had no intention of paying so much. Everybody in Port Clarke that he had asked about By When Duncan look Lellie for company he knew it might help preserve his sanity. But what got him wasn't the upkeep -- it was the cost! it assured him six or seven hundred would be a fair price. But when he got up-country, it hadn't turned out quite as simple as the Port Clarkers seemed to think. The first three Martian families he had tackled hadn't shown any disposition to part with their daughters at all. The next wanted #, and wouldn't budge. Lellie's parents had started at #, too, but they came down to # after he'd made it plain that he wasn't going to stand for extortion. On the way back to Port Clarke with her, when he came to work it out, he found himself not so badly pleased with the deal, after all. Over the five-year term of his appointment, it would cost him only # a year at the worst -- that is to say, if he were not able to sell her for #, maybe even #, when he got back. Looked at that way, it wasn't really at all unreasonable. In town once more, he went to explain the situation and get things all set with the Company's agent. "Look' he said, "you know the way I'm fixed with this fiveyear contract as wayload station superintendent on Jupiter IVII? Well, the ship that takes me there will be traveling light to pick up cargo. So how about another reservation on her?" He had already taken the precautionary step of finding out that the Company was accustomed to grant an extra passage in such circumstances, though not compelled to. The Company's agent was not surprised. After consulting some lists, he said that he saw no objection to an extra passenger. He explained that the Company was also prepared in such cases to supply the extra ration of food for one person at the nominal charge of # per annum, payable by deduction from salary. "What? A thousand bucks?" Duncan exclaimed. "Well worth it," said the agent. "It is nominal for the rations, because it's worth the Company's while to lay out the rest for something that helps to keep an employee from going nuts. That's pretty easy to do when you're fixed alone on a wayload station, they tell me -- and I believe them. A thousand's not high if it helps you avoid a crackup." Duncan argued a bit, on principle, but the agent had the thing cut and dried. It meant that Lellie's price went up to # -- # a year. Still, with his own salary at # a year, tax-free, unspend able during his term on Jupiter IVII, and piling up nicely, it wouldn't come to such a big slice. So he agreed. "Fine," said the agent. "I'll fix it, then. All you'll need is an W embarkation permit for her and they'll grant that automatically on production of your marriage certificate." Duncan stared. "Marriage-certificate? Me marry a Mart?" The agent shook his head reprovingly. "No embarkation permit without it. Anti-slavery regulation. They'd think you meant to sell her -- might even think you'd bought her." "What me?" Duncan said indignantly. "Even you," said the agent. "A marriage license will only cost you another ten dollars -- unless you've got a wife back home, in which case it'll likely cost you a bit more later on." Duncan shook his head. "I've got no wife." "Uh-huh," said the agent, neither believing nor disbelieving. "Then what's the difference?" Duncan came back a couple of days later, with the certificate and the permit. The agent looked them over. "That's okay," he agreed. "I'll confirm the booking. My fee will be one hundred dollars." "Your fee?" "Call it safeguarding your investment," suggested the agent. The man who had issued the embarkation permit had required one hundred dollars, too. Duncan did not mention that now, but he said, with bitterness: "One dumb Mart's costing me plenty." "Dumb?" asked the agent, looking at him. "Speechless plus. These hick Marts don't know they're born." "H'm," said the agent. "Never lived here, have you?" "No, but I've laid-over here a few times." , The agent nodded. "They act dumb, and the way their faces are makes them look dumb. But they were a mighty clever people, once." "Once could be a long time ago." "Long before we got here, they'd given up bothering to think a lot. Their planet was dying and they were kind of content to die with it." "Well, I call that dumb. Aren't all planets dying, anyway?" "Ever see an old man just sitting in the Sun, taking it easy? It doesn't have to mean he's senile. It may, sure, but very likely he can snap out of it, and put his mind to work again if it really becomes necessary. But mostly he finds it not worth the bother. Less trouble just to let things happen." "Well, this one's only about twenty -- say ten and a half of your Martian years -- and she certainly lets 'em happen. And I'd say it's a kind of acid test for dumbness when a girl doesn't know what goes on at her own wedding ceremony." And then on top of that, it turned out' to be necessary to lay out yet another hundred i dollars on clothing and other things for her, bringing the whole investment up to #. It was a sum which might possibly have been justified on a really s mart girl, though on Lellie... But there it was. Once you made the first payment, you either lost on it, or were stuck for the rest. And, anyway, on a lonely way load station, even she would be company -- of a sort. T HE First Officer called Duncan into the navigating room to take a look at his future home. "There it is," he said, waving his hand at a little world shown on the watch-screen. Duncan looked at the jaggedsurfaced crescent. There was no scale to it. It could have been the size of Luna or of a basketball. Whatever size the place proved to be, it was still just a lump of rock, turning slowly over. "How big?" he asked. Around forty miles mean diameter." "What'd that be in gravity?" "Haven't worked it out. Call it slight, figure there isn't any, and you'll be near enough." "Uh-huh," said Duncan. On the way back to the messroom, he paused to put his head into the cabin. Lellie was lying on her bunk, with the springcover fastened over her to give some illusion of weight. At the sight of him she raised herself on one elbow. She was small, not much over five foot. Her face and hands were delicate ; they had a fragility which was not simply a matter of frail bone-structure. To an Earthman, her eyes looked unnaturally round, seeming to give her a permanent expression of innocence surprised. The lobes of her ears hung unusually low out of a mass of brown hair that glinted with red among its waves. The paleness of her skin was emphasized by the color on her cheeks and the vivid red on her lips. "Hey," said Duncan, "you can start packing up the stuff now." "Packing up?" she repeated doubtfully, in a curiously resonant voice. "Sure, pack," Duncan told her. He demonstrated by opening a box, cramming some clothes into it, and waving a hand to include the rest. Her expression did not change, but the idea got across. "We are come?" she asked. "We are nearly come, so get busy on this lot." "Yith -- okay," she said, and began to unhook the cover. Duncan shut the door, and gave a shove which sent him floating down the passage leadSt ing to the general mess and living room. Inside the cabin, Lellie pushed away the cover. She reached down cautiously for a pair of metal soles, and attached them to her slippers by their clips. Still cautiously holding on to the bunk, she swung her feet over the side and lowered them until the magnetic soles clicked into contact with the floor. She stood up more confidently. The brown overall suit she wore revealed proportions that might be admired among Martians, but, by Earth standards, they were not classic. Because of the thinner air of Mars, her chest was big. But only her chest. That, of course, was to accommodate her greater lung capacity. The rest of her was almost childishly slender. Still ill at ease with weightlessness, she slid her feet to keep magnetic contact with the metal floor as she crossed the room. For some moments she paused in front of a wall mirror, contemplating her reflection. Then she turned away and began packing. a woman to," Wishart, the ship's cook, was saying as Duncan came in. Duncan did not care a lot for Wishart, chiefly because, when it had occurred to him that Lellie ought to have some lessons in weightless cooking, Wishart had refused to give the tuition for less than fifty dollars, and thus increased the investment cost to #. Nevertheless, it was not Duncan's way to pretend to have misheard. "One hell of a place to be given a job," he amended grimly. No one replied to that. They knew how men came to be offered wayload jobs. It was not necessary, as the Company frequently pointed out, for superannuation at the age of forty to come as a hardship to anyone. Salaries were good, and the Company could cite plenty of cases where men had founded the savings of their space-service days. That was all right for the men who had not been obsessively interested in the fact that on four-legged animal can run faster than another. But this was not even an enterprising way to have lost one's money, so when it came to Duncan's time to leave crew work, they made him no more than the routine offer. H had never been to Jupiter IVII, but he knew just what it would be like -- it was the second moon of Callisto, which was the fourth moon, in order of discovery, of Jupiter, and would inevitably be one of the grimmer kinds of cosmic pebble. The Company had offered no alternative, so he signed up at the usual terms : # a year for five years, and board and lodging, plus five months waiting time on halfpay before he could get there, plus six months afterward, also on half-pay, during "readjustment to gravity." It meant the next six years taken care of; five of them entirely without expenses, and a nice little sum at the end. The problem was : could you get through five years of isolation without cracking up? Even when the psychologists had okayed you, you couldn't be sure. Some could: others went to pieces in a few months and had to be taken off, gibbering. If you got through two years, they said, you'd be okay for five. But the only way to find out was to try. "What about my putting in the waiting time on Mars? I could live cheaper there," Duncan had suggested. They had consulted planetary tables and ship schedules, and discovered that it would be cheaper for them, too. They had declined to split the difference on the saving thus made, but they had booked him a passage for the following week, and arranged for him to draw, on credit, from the Company's agent there. The Martian colony in and around Port Clarke was rich in exspacemen who found it more comfortable to spend their rearguard years in the lesser gravity, broader morality, and greater economy there. They were great advisers. Duncan listened, but discarded most of it. Such methods of occupying oneself as learning the Bible or the works of Shakespeare by heart, or copying out three pages of the Encyclopaedia every day, or building model spaceships in bottles, struck him not only as tedious, but probably would drive him insane more quickly. The only one with sound practical advantages, in his opinion, had led him to picking Lellie to share his exile, and he still thought it was a sound one, in spite of its costing #. Tie was well enough aware of the general opinion about it to refrain from adding a sharp retort to Wishart. Instead, he conceded: "Maybe nobody ought to take a real woman to a place like that. But a Mart's different." "Even a Mart -- " Wishart began, but he was cut short by finding himself drift across the room as the arrestor tubes began to fire. Conversation ceased as everybody turned to on securing all loose objects. tion. a sub-moon, probably a captured asteroid. The surface was not cratered, like Luna's; it was simply a waste of jagged, riven rocks. The satellite as a whole had the form of an irregular ovoid, a bleak, cheerless lump of stone splintered off some vanished planet, with nothing whatever to commend it but its situation. There had to be wayload stations, for it would be hopelessly uneconomic to build big ships capable of landing on the major planets. A few of the older and smaller ships had actually been built on Earth, and so had to be launched from there, but the very first large, Moon-assembled ship established a new practice. Ships became truly spaceships and were no longer built to stand the strains of high gravitational pull. They began to make their voyages, carrying fuel, stores, freight, and changes of personnel, exclusively between satellites. The newer types did not put in even at Luna, but used the artificial satellite, Pseudos, exclusively as their Earth terminal. Freight between the wayload stations and their primaries was customarily consigned in powered cylinders known as crates; passengers were ferried back and forth in small rocket ships. Stations such as Pseudos, or Deimos, the main wayload for Mars, handled enough work to keep a crew busy, but in the outlying, little developed posts one man who was part handler, part watchman was enough. Ships visited them infrequently. On Jupiter IVII one might, according to Duncan's information, expect an average of one every eight or nine Earth months. The ship continued to brake, coming in on a spiral, adjusting her speed to that of the satellite. The gyros started up to give stability. The small, jagged world grew until it overflowed the watch screens. The ship was maneuvered into a close orbit. Miles of featureless, formidable rocks slid monotonously beneath her. The station site came onto the screen from the left -- a roughly leveled area of a few acres, the first and only sign of order in the stony chaos. At the far end was a pair of hemispherical huts, one much larger than the other. At the near end, a few cylindrical crates were lined up beside a launching ramp hewn from the rock. Down each side of the area stood rows of canvas bins, some stuffed full to a conical shape, others slack, partly or entirely empty. A huge parabolic mirror was perched on a crag behind the station, looking like a monstrous, formalized flower. In the whole scene, there was only one sign of movement -- a small spacesuited figure prancing madly about on a metal apron in front of the larger dome, waving its arms in a wild welcome. Duncan left the screen and went to the cabin. He found Lellie fighting off a large case which, under the influence of deceleration. seemed determined to pin her against the wall. He shoved the case aside and pulled her out. "We're there," he told her. "Put on your spacesuit." Her round eyes ceased watching the case and turned toward him. There was no telling from them how she felt, what she thought. She said, simply: "Thpacethuit. Yith -- okay." the dome, the outgoing superintendent paid more attention to Lellie than to the pressure dial. He knew from experience exactly how long equalizing took, and opened his faceplate without even a glance at the pointer. "Wish I'd had the sense to bring one," he observed. "Could have been mighty useful on the chores, too." He opened the inner door, and led through. "Here it is -- and welcome to it." he said. The main living room was oddly shaped by reason of the dome's architecture, but it was spacious. It was also exceedingly, sordidly untidy. "Meant to clean up. never got around to it," he added. He looked at Lellie. There was no visible sign of what she thought of the place. "Never can tell with Marts," he said uneasily. "They kind of non-register." Duncan agreed: "I figured this one was astonished at being born, and never got over it." The other man went on looking at Lellie. His eyes strayed from her to a gallery of pinnedup terrestrial beauties, and back again. "Sort of funny shape Marts have," he said, musingly. "This one's considered a good enough looker where she comes from," Duncan told him, a trifle shortly. "Sure. No offense, bud. I guess they'll all seem a funny shape to me after this spell." He changed the subject. "I'd better show you the ropes around here." Duncan signed to Lellie to open her faceplate so she could hear him, and then told her to get out of her suit. The dome was the usual type: double floored, double walled, with an insulated and evacuated space between the two. constructed as a unit and held down by metal bars let into the rock. In the living quarters there were three more sizable rooms, able to cope with increased personnel if trade should expand. "The rest," the outgoing man explained, "is the regular station stores, mostly food, air-cylinders, spares of one kind and another, and water. I guess you'll have to watch her on water; most women seeta to think it grows naturally in pipes." Duncan shook his head. "Not Marts. Living in deserts gives 'em a natural respect for water." The other picked up a clip of tore-sheets. "We'll check and sign these later. It's a nice soft job here. The only freight now is rare metalliferous earths. Callisto hasn't been opened up a lot yet. Handling's easy. They tell you when a crate's on the way; you switch on the radio beacon to bring it in. On dispatch, you can't go wrong if you follow the tables." He looked around the .room. "All home comforts. You like to read? Plenty of books." He waved a hand at the packed rows which covered half the inner partition wall. Duncan said he'd never been much of a reader. "Well, it helps," said the other. "Find pretty well anything that's known somewhere in that lot. Records there. Fond of music?" Duncan said he liked a good tune. "Better try the other stuff -- tunes get to squirreling inside your head. Play chess?" He pointed to a board, with the men pegged into it. Duncan shook his head. "Pity. There's a fellow over on Callisto who plays a pretty hot game. He'll be disappointed not to finish this one. Still, if I was fixed up the way you are, maybe I wouldn't have been interested in chess myself." His eyes strayed to Lellie again. "What do you think she's going to do here, besides doing the cooking and amusing you?" It was not a question that had occurred to Duncan. He shrugged. "She'll be okay, I guess. There's a natural dumbness about Marts -- they'll sit for hours on end, doing nothing at all. It's a gift they got." "Well, it certainly should come in handy here," said the other. T HE regular ship's-call work went on. Cases were unloaded, the metalliferous earth hosed from the bins into the holds. A small ferry rocket came up from Callisto carrying a couple of timeexpired prospectors, and left again with their two replacements. The ship's engineers checked over the station's machinery, made renewals, topped up the water tanks, charged the spent air-cylinders, tested, tinkered, and tested again before giving their final okay. Duncan stood outside on the metal apron where, not long ago, his predecessor had performed his fantastic dance of welcome, to watch the ship take off. She rose straight up, with her under jets pushing her gently. The curve of her hull became an elongated crescent shining against the black sky. The main driving jets started to gush white flame edged with pink. Quickly she picked up speed. Before long she had dwindled to a speck which sank behind the ragged skyline. Quite suddenly Duncan felt as if he, too, had dwindled. He had become a speck upon a barren mass of rock which was itself a speck in the immensity. The indifferent sky about him had no scale. It was an utterly black void wherein suns flared perpetually, without reason or purpose. The rocks of the satellite, rising up in their harsh crests and ridges, were without scale, too. He could not tell which were near and which were far away: he could not, in the jumble of hard-lit planes and inky shadows, even make out their true form. There was nothing like them to be seen on Earth or Mars. Their unweathered edges were sharp as blades: they had been be for as long as the satellite existed. The unchanging eons seemed to stretch out before and behind him. All life was a speck, a briefly transitory accident, utterly unimportant to the universe, a queer little note dancing for a short moment in the light of the eternal suns. Reality was just globes of fire and balls of stone senselessly rolling along through emptiness, through time unimaginable. Within his heated suit, Duncan shivered 'a little. Never before had he been so alone, never so much aware of the vast, callous, futile loneliness of space. Looking out into the blackness, with light years ago shining into his eyes, he wondered: "What the heck's it all about, anyway?" The sound of his own unanswerable question broke up the mood. He shook his head to clear it of speculative nonsense. He turned his back on the Universe, reducing it again to its proper status as a background for life in general and human life in particular, and stepped into the airlock. A S his predecessor had told him, the job was soft. Duncan made his radio contacts with Callisto at pre-arranged times. Usually it was little more than a formal check on one another's continued existence, with perhaps an exchange of comment on the radio news. Only occasionally did #  they announce a dispatch and tell him when to switch on his beacon. Then, in due course, the cylinder crate would make its appearance and float slowly down. It was quite a simple matter to couple it up to a bin to transfer the load. The satellite's day was too short for convenience, and its night, lit by Callisto, and sometimes by Jupiter as well, was almost as bright; so they disregarded it and lived by the calendar clock which kept Earth time on the Greenwich Meridian setting. At first, much of the time had been occupied in disposing of the freight that the ship had left. Some of it went into the main dome -- necessities for themselves, and other items that would store better where there was warmth and air, some into the small, airless, unheated dome. The greater part was stowed and padded carefully into cylinders and launched off to the Callisto base. But once that work had been cleared, the job was certainly . soft, too soft... Duncan drew up a program. At regular intervals he would inspect this and that, he would leap almost weightlessly up to the crag, check on the Sun motor there, and so forth. But keeping to an unnecessary program requires resolution. Sun motors, for instance, were built to run for a long time without attention. The only action one could take if theirs stopped would be to call Callisto for a ferry rocket to come and take Lellie and himself off until a ship arrived to repair it. A breakdown there, the Company had explained very clearly, was the only thing that would justify him in leaving his station, with the stores of precious earths, unmanned (and it was also indicated that to contrive a breakdown for the sake of a change was unlikely to prove worthwhile). One way and another, the program did not last very long. There were times when Duncan found himself wondering whether bringing Lellie had been such a good idea, after all. On the purely practical side, he would not have cooked as well as she did, and probably have pigged it quite as badly as his predecessor had, but if she had not been there, the necessity of looking after himself would have given him something to do. And even from the standpoint of company -- well, she was that, of a sort, but she was alien, queer; kind of like a halfrobot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun. There were times -- increasingly frequent times -- when the very look of her irritated him intensely. So did the way she moved, and her gestures, and her silly pidgin-talk when she talked, and her self-contained silence when she didn't, and her remoteness, and all her differentness, and the fact that he would have been # better off without her. Nor did she make a serious attempt to remedy her shortcomings, even where she had the means. Her face, for instance. You'd think any girl would try to make her best of that -- but did she? There 'was that left eyebrow again; it made her look like a drunken clown, but a lot she cared... "For heaven's sake," he told her once more, "put the cockeyed thing straight. Don't you know how to fix 'em yet? And you've got your color on wrong, too. Look at that picture -- now look at yourself in the mirror: a smear of red all in the wrong place. And your hair, too, getting like seaweed again. You've got the things to wave it, so stop looking like a damned mermaid. I know you can't help being a dumb Mart, but you can at least try to look like a real woman." Lellie studied the colored picture, and then compared her reflection with it, critically. "Yith -- okay," she said with compliant . detachment. Duncan snorted. "And that's another thing. It's not 'yith,' it's 'yes.' Y-E-S, yes. Say 'yes.' " "Yith," said Lellie, obligingly. "Oh, for -- Can't you hear the difference? S-s-s, not th-th-th. Ye-sss." "Yith," she said. "No. Put your tongue further back like this -- " The lesson went on for some time. Finally he grew angry. "Just making a monkey out of me, huh? You'd better be careful! Now, say 'yes.' " She hesitated, looking at his wrathful face. "Go on, say it!" "Y-yeth," she tried, nervously. His hand slapped across her face harder than he had intended. The jolt broke her magnetic contact with the floor and sent her sailing across the room in a spin of arms and legs. She struck the opposite wall and rebounded, to float helplessly, out of reach of any hold. He strode after her, turned her right way up, and set her on her feet. His left hand clutched her overall in a bunch, just below her throat, his right fist raised. "Again!" he told her. Her eyes looked helplessly this way and that. He shook her. She tried. At the sixth attempt she managed: "Yeths." He accepted that for the time being. "You can do it, you see, when you try! Well, you're damn well going to try!" He let her go. She tottered cross the room, holding her hands to her bruised face. A number of times, while the weeks stretched so slowly into months, Duncan found himself wondering whether he was going to hold out. He lingered over what work there was as long as he could, but it left still too much time hanging on his hands. A middle-aged man who had read nothing longer than an occasional magazine article, Duncan did not take to books. He tired very quickly of the popular records, as his predecessor had prophesied, and could make nothing of the others. He taught himself the moves in chess from a book, and instructed Lellie in them, intending after a little practice with her to challenge the man on Callisto. Lellie, however, managed to win so consistently that he suspected he did not have the right kind of mind for the game. Instead, he taught her a kind of double-solitaire, but that didn't last long, either -- the cards always seemed to run for Lellie. Occasionally, some news and entertainment were to be had from the radio. But with Earth somewhere around the other side of the Sun just then, Mars screened off half the time by Callisto, and the rotation of the satellite itself, reception was either impossible or badly distorted. So mostly he sat and fretted, hating the satellite, angry with himself, and irritated by Lellie. Just the phlegmatic way she went on with her tasks infuriated him. It seemed unfair that she could take it all better than he could simply because she was a dumb Mart. When his ill-temper became vocal, the look of her as she listened exasperated him still more. "For God's sake," he told her one time, "can't you make that silly face of yours mean something? Can't you laugh, or cry, or get mad -- anything? It's enough to drive a guy nuts, looking at a face like a doll that just heard its first dirty story. I know you can't help being dumb, but get some expression into it." She went on looking at him without a shadow of a change. "Go on, you heard me! Smile, damn you! Smile!" Her mouth twitched very slightly. "Call that a smile? Now, there's a smile!" He pointed to a pin-up with a. smile like a piano keyboard. "Like that! Like this!" He grinned widely. "No," she said. "My face cannot wriggle like Earth faces." "Wriggle?" he repeated incensed. "Wriggle, you call it?" He freed himself from the chair's springcover and came toward her. She backed away until she was pressed against the wall. "I'll make yours wriggle. Go on, now -- smile !" He lifted his fist. Lellie put her hands up to her face. "No!" she protested. "No -- no -- no!" I T was on the day Duncan marked off the eighth completed month that Callisto relayed news of a ship on the way. A couple of days later, he was able to make contact with her himself and confirm her arrival in about a week. He felt as if he had been given several stiff drinks. There were preparations to make, stores to check, deficiencies to note, a string of nil-nil-nil entries to be made in the log to bring it up to date. He bustled around as he got on with the job. He hummed to himself while he worked, and even ceased to be annoyed with Lellie. The effect of the news upon her was imperceptible -- but, then, what else could you expect? Sharp on her estimated time, the ship hung above them, growing slowly larger as her upper jets pressed her down. The moment she was berthed, Duncan went aboard, with the feeling that everyone in sight was an old friend. The captain received him warmly and brought out the drinks. It was all routine -- even Duncan's babbling and slightly inebriated manner was regular procedure in the circumstances. The only departure from pattern came when the captain introduced a man beside him. "We've brought a surprise for you, Superintendent. This is Doctor Whint. He'll be sharing your exile for a bit." Duncan shook hands with the man. "Doctor?" he said, surprised. "Not medicine -- science," Alan Whint told him. "The Company's pushed me out here to do a geological survey -- never can tell when you'll strike something important. I'll be here about a year. Hope you don't mind." Duncan said conventionally that he'd be glad to have some company. Later, he took Whint over to the dome. The geologist was surprised to find Lellie there; clearly, nobody had told him about her. He interrupted Duncan's explanations of the surroundings to say: "Won't you introduce me to your wife?" Duncan did so, without grace. He resented the reproving tone in Whint's voice ; nor did he care for the way the geologist greeted Lellie just as if she were an Earthwoman. He was also aware that Whint had noticed the bruise on her cheek, which her makeup did not altogether cover. In his mind, he classified Alan Whint as one of the smooth, snooty type, and hoped that there was not going to be trouble with him. On the other hand, he reflected, trouble was better than boredom. I T was a matter of opinion who made the trouble when it boiled up some three months later. There had already been several occasions when it had lurked uneasily near. Very likely it would have come into the open long before, had Whint's work not taken him out of the dome so much. The moment of touchoff came when Lellie lifted her eyes from the book she was reading to ask: "What does 'female emancipation' mean?" Alan started to explain. He was only halfway through the first sentence when Duncan broke in: "Listen, pal, who told you to go putting ideas into her head?" Alan shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Why shouldn't she have ideas? Why shouldn't anyone?" "You know what I mean." "I never understand you guys who apparently can't say what you mean. Try again. "All right, then. Right from the start, you began shoving your nose into things that aren't your business. Treating her, for instance, as if she was some classy dame back home." "I'm glad you noticed it." "And you think I didn't see why?" "I'm quite sure you didn't. You think, in your simple way, that I'm out to get your girl, and you resent that with all the weight of #. But you're wrong; I'm not." "My wife he corrected. "She may be only a dumb Mart, but she's legally my wife and what I say goes." "Yes, Lellie is a Mart, as you call it. She may even be your wife, for all I know to the contrary. But dumb, she certainly is not. For one example, look at the speed with which she's learned to read -- once someone took the trouble to show her how. I don't think you'd show up any too bright yourself in a language where you only knew a few words, and which you couldn't read." "It was none of your business to teach her. She didn't need to read. She was all right the v.ay she was. And why? So you'll get her thinking you're a better man than I am." "I talk to her the way I'd talk to any woman anywhere -- only more simply, since she hasn't had the chance of an education. If she does think I'm a better man, then I agree with her. I'd be sorry if I couldn't." "I'll show you who's the better man -- " Duncan began savagely. "You don't need to. I knew when I came here that you'd be a waster or you wouldn't be on this job -- and it didn't take long for me to find out that you were a lousy bully, too. Do you suppose I haven't noticed the bruises? Do you think I've enjoyed having to listen to you bawling out a girl whom you've deliberately kept ignorant and defenseless when she has potentially ten times the sense you have? Having to watch a clod like you lording it over your 'dumb Mart'? You emetic!" In the heat of the moment, Duncan could not remember what an emetic was. Trying to remember gave him a chance to realize that he was older, less agile, not as fit as the geologist... that he'd probably get hurt more than he could hurt. Besides, Lellie was his wife. What was he getting so angry about? Both of them simmered, but nothing happened. Somehow the occasion was patched up and smoothed over. Alan continued to make his expeditions in the small craft which he had brought with him. He examined and explored other parts of the satellite, returning with specimen pieces of rock which he tested and arranged, carefully labeled, in cases. In his spare time he occupied himself, as before, with teaching Lellie. That he did it largely for his own occupation, as well as from a feeling that it should be done, Duncan did not altogether deny. But he was equally sure that, in continued close association, one thing leads to another, sooner or later. So far, there had been nothing between them that he could complain about -- but Alan's term still had some nine months to go, even if he were relieved in time. Lellie was already hero-worshipping. And he was spoiling her more every day by this fool business of treating her as if she were an Earthwoman. One day they'd come alive to it -- and then they would see him as an obstacle that would have to be removed. Prevention being better than cure, the sensible course was to see that the situation should never develop. There need not be any fuss about it... There was not. One day Alan Whint took off on a routine flight to prospect U somewhere on the other side of the satellite. He never came back. That was all. Lellie thought about it, but something seemed to happen to her. For several days, she spent almost all her time standing by the main window of the living room, looking out into the blackness at the flaring pinpoints of light. It was not that she was waiting or hoping for Alan's return -- she knew as well as Duncan himself that, when thirty-six hours had gone by, there was no chance of that. She said nothing. Her expression maintained its unchanged exasperating look of slight surprise. Only in her eyes was there any perceptible difference: they looked as if she had withdrawn herself still further behind them. Duncan could not tell whether she knew or guessed anything. There seemed to be no way of finding out without planting the idea in her mind -- if it were not already there. He was, without admitting it fully to himself, too nervous to turn on her viciously for the time she spent vacantly mooning out of the window. He had an uncomfortable awareness of how many ways there were for even a dimwit to contrive a fatal accident in such a place. As a precaution, he took to fitting new air-bottles to his suit every time he went out, and checking to see that they were at full pressure. He also took to placing a piece of rock so that the outer door of the airlock could not close behind him. He made a point of noticing that his food and hers came straight out of the same pot, and watched her closely while she worked. He still could not decide whether she knew, or suspected. After they were sure that Alan was gone, she never once mentioned his name... The mood stayed on her for perhaps a week. Then it changed abruptly. She paid no more attention to the bleakness outside. Instead, she began to read, voraciously and indiscriminately. Duncan found it hard to understand her absorption in the books, nor did he like it, but he decided for the moment hot to interfere. It did, at least, have the advantage of keeping her mind off other things. Gradually he began to feel easier. The crisis was over. Either she had not guessed, or, if she had, she had decided to do nothing about it. Her addiction to books, however, did not abate. In spite of several reminders by Duncan that it was for company that he had laid out the not inconsiderable sum of #, she continued, as if determined to work her way through the station's library, By degrees, the situation retreated into the background. When the next ship came, Duncan watched her anxiously in case she had been biding her time to hand on her suspicions to the crew. It turned out to be unnecessary. She showed no tendency to refer to the matter. When the ship pulled out, taking the opportunity with it, he was relievedly able to tell himself that he had really been right all along -- she was just a dumb Mart. She had simply forgotten the Alan Whint incident, as a child might. A S the months of his term ticked steadily away, he found that he had, bit by bit, to revise that estimate of dumbness. She was learning from books things that he did not know himself. It even had some advantages, though it put him in a position he did not care for. When she asked, as she sometimes did now, for explanations, he found it unpleasant to be stumped by a Mart. Having the practical man's suspicion of book-acquired knowledge, he felt it necessary to explain to her how much of the stuff in them was a lot of nonsense, how they never really came to grips with the problems of life as he had lived it. He cited examples from his experience. In fact, he found himself teaching her. She learned quickly, too -- the practical as well as the book stuff. Of necessity, he had to change his opinion of Marts even more. It wasn't that they were altogether dumb, as he had thought, just that they were normally too dumb to start using the brains they had. Once started, Lellie was a regular vacuum-cleaner for knowledge of all sorts. It didn't seem long before she knew as much about the wayload station as he did himself. Teaching her was not at all what he had intended, but it did provide more occupation than the boredom of the early days. Besides, it had occurred to him that she was an appreciating asset... Funny thing, that. He had never before thought of education as anything but a waste of time, but now it seriously began to look as if, when he got her back to Mars, he might recover quite a bit more of that # than he had expected. Maybe she'd make quite a useful secretary to someone. He started to instruct her in elementary bookkeeping and finance -- as much, at least, as he knew about it, which wasn't a great deal. U The months of service kept on piling up, going faster now. During the later stretch, when one had acquired confidence in his ability to get through without cracking up, there was a comfortable feeling about sitting quietly out there with the knowledge of. the dollars gradually piling up at home. A new find opened up on Callisto, bringing a slight increase in deliveries to the satellite. Otherwise, the routine continued unchanged. The infrequent ships called in, loaded up, and went again. And then, surprisingly sioon, it was possible for Duncan to say to himself : "The ship after the next and I'll be through!" Even more surprisingly, there soon came the day when he stood on the metal apron outside the dome, watching a ship lifting herself off on her under jets and dwindling upward into the black sky, and was able to tell himself : "That's the last time I'll see that! When the next ship lifts off this dump. I'll be aboard her!" He stood watching her, one bright spark among the others, until the turn of the satellite carried her below his horizon. Then he turned back to the airlock -- and found the door shut. Once he had seen that there was going to be no repercussion from the Alan Whint affair, he had dropped his habit of wedging it open with a piece, of rock. Whenever he emerged to do a job, he left it ajar, and it stayed that way until he came back. There was no wind or anything else on the satellite to move it. He laid hold of the latch-lever irritably and pushed. It did not move. Duncan swore at it for sticking. He walked to the edge of the metal apron, and then around the side of the dome so that he could see in at the window. Lellie was sitting in a chair with the springcover fixed across it, apparently lost in thought. The inner door of the airlock was standing open, so, of course, the outer could not be moved. Besides the safety locking device, there was all the dome's air-pressure to hold it shut. Forgetful for the moment, Duncan rapped on the thick glass of the double window to attract her attention. She could not have heard a sound through there, so it must have been the movement that caught her eye and caused her to look up. She turned her head and gazed at him, without moving. Duncan stared back at her. Her hair was still waved, but the eyebrows, the color -- all the other touches that he had insisted upon to make her look as much like an Earthwoman as possible -- were gone. Her eyes looked back at him, set as hard as stones in that fixed expression of mild astonishment. Sudden comprehension struck Duncan like a physical shock. He tried to pretend to both of them that he had not understood. He made gestures to her to close the inner door of the airlock. She went on staring back at him, without moving. Then he noticed the book she was holding in her hand, and recognized it. It was not one of the books which the Company had supplied for the station's library. It was a book of verse, bound in blue. It had once belonged to Alan Whint. at Duncan as he looked down at the row of small dials across his chest. At least she had not tampered with his air supply; there was pressure enough for thirty hours or so. A touch on the jet sent him floating back to the metal apron, where he could anchor his magnetic boots and think it over. The dirty Mart! Letting him think all this time that she had forgotten all about it. Nursing it up for him. Letting him work out his time while she planned. Waiting until he was on the very last stretch before she tried her game. Some minutes passed before his mixed anger and panic settled down and allowed him to think. Thirty hours! Time to do quite a lot. And even if he did not succeed in getting back into the dome in twenty hours or so, there would still be the last, desperate resort of shooting himself off to Callisto in one of the cylinder crates. Even if Lellie were to spill over later about the Whint business, what of it? He was sure enough that she did not know how it had been done. It would only be the word of a Mart against his own. Very likely they'd put her down as space-crazed. All the same, some of the mud might stick. It would be better to settle with her here and now. Besides, the cylinder idea was risky, to be considered only in the last extremity. Duncan jetted himself over to the smaller dome. In there, he threw out the switches on the lines which brought power down from the main batteries charged by the Sun motor, then sat down to wait. The insulated dome would take some time to lose all its heat, but not very long for a drop in the temperature to become perceptible, and visible on the thermometers, once the heat was off. The smallcapacity lowvoltage batteries that were in the place wouldn't be much good to her, even if she did think of Kn-' ing them up. He waited an hour, while the faraway Sun set, and the bright arc of Callisto began to show over the horizon. Then he went back to the dome's window to observe results. He arrived just in time to see Lellie fastening herself into her spacesuit by the light of a couple of emergency lamps. He swore. A simple freezing out process wasn't going to work, then. Not only would the heated suit protect her, but her air supply would last longer than his -- and there were plenty of spare bottles in there, even if the free air in the dome froze solid. He waited until she had put on the helmet, and then switched on the radio in his own. He saw her pause at the sound of his voice, but she deliberately switched off her receiver. He did not; he kept his open, to be ready for the moment when she would come to her senses. apron and reconsidered. It had been his intention to force his way into the dome without damaging it, if he could. But if she wasn't to be frozen out, that looked difficult. She had the advantage in air, and though it was true that in her spacesuit she could neither eat nor drink, the same, unfortunately, was true for him. The only way seemed to be to tackle the dome itself. Reluctantly, he went back to the small dome again and connected up the electrical cutter. Its cable looped behind him as he jetted across to the main dome once more. Beside the curving metal wall, he paused to think out the job -- and the consequences. Once he was through the outer shell there would be a space, then the insulating material -- that was all right; it would melt away like butter, and without oxygen it could not catch fire. The more awkward part was going to come with the inner metal skin. It would be wisest to start with a few small cuts to let the airpressure down -- and stand clear of it. If it were all to come out with a whoosh, he would stand a good chance, in his weightless state, of being blown a considerable distance by it. And what would she do? She'd very likely try covering up the holes as he made them -- a bit awkward if she had the sense to use asbestos packing. It'll have to be the whoosh then. Both shells could be welded up again before he re-aerated the place from cylinders. The small loss of insulating material wouldn't matter. Okay, better get down to it, then... He made his connections and contrived to anchor himself enough to give some purchase. He brought the cutter up and pressed the trigger switch. He pressed again and then swore, remembering that he had shut off the power. Pulling himself back along the cable, he pushed the switches in again. Light from the dome's windows suddenly illuminated the rocks. He wondered if the restoration of power would let Lellie know what he was doing. Hell with it. She'd know soon enough. He settled himself down beside the dome once more. This time the cutter worked. It took only a few minutes to slice out a rough twofoot circle. He pulled the piece out of the way and inspected the opening. Then, as he leveled the cutter again, there came a click in his receiver. "Better not try to break in," Lellie said. "I'm ready for that." He hesitated, checking himself with his finger on the switch, wondering what counter move she could have thought up. The threat in her voice made him uneasy. He decided to go around to the window and see what her game was, if she had one. She was standing by the table, still dressed in her spacesuit, fiddling with some apparatus she had set up there. For a moment or two he did not grasp the purpose of it. There was a plastic food bag, half inflated, and attached in some way to the table top. She was adjusting a metal plate over it to a small clearance. There was a wire taped to the upper side of the bag. Duncan's eye ran back along the wire to a battery, a coil, and on to a detonator attached to a bundle of half a dozen blasting-sticks. He was uncomfortably enlightened. If the air-pressure in the room fell, the bag would expand; the wire would make contact with the plate; up would go the dome . , , ment and connected the second wire to the battery. She turned to look at him through the window. Duncan found it was infuriatingly difficult to believe that, behind that silly-surprise frozen on her face, she could be aware of what she was doing. He tried to speak to her, but she had switched off and made no attempt to switch on again. She simply stood looking steadily back at him as he blustered and raged. After some minutes, she moved across to a chair, fastened the spring-cover across herself, and sat waiting. "All right, then," Duncan shouted inside his helmet. "But you'll go up with it, damn you!" Which was, of course, nonsense. since he had no intention whatever of destroying either the dome or himself. He had never learned to tell what went on behind that absurd face. She might be coldly determined, or she might not. If it had been a matter of a switch that she had to press to destroy the place, he might have risked her nerve failing her. But this way, it would be he who operated the switch, just as soon as he made a hole to let the air out. Once more he retreated to anchor himself on the apron. There must be some way of getting into the dome without letting the pressure down... No, there was no way that he could think of. It would have to be the cylinder crate to Callisto. He looked up at Callisto, hanging huge in the sky now, with Jupiter smaller, but brighter, beyond. It wasn't so much the flight, it was the landing there. Perhaps if he were to cram it with all the padding he could find... Later on, he could get the Callisto crew to ferry him back, and they'd find some way to get into the dome, and Lellie would be a mighty sorry girl -- mighty sorry. Across the clearing there were three cylinders lined up. charged and ready for use. He didn't mind admitting he was scared of that landing; but, scared or not, if she wouldn't even turn on her radio to listen to him, that would be hi only chance. He made up his mind and stepped off the metal apron. A touch on the jets sent him floating across the clearing toward the cylinders. Practice made it easy to maneuver the nearest one onto the ramp. Another glance at Callisto's inclination helped to reassure him; at least he would reach it all right. If their beacon was not switched on to bring him in, he ought to be able to call them on the communication radio in his suit when he got closer. He fetched more padding from the other cylinders, and packed the stuff in. While he paused to figure out a way of triggering the thing off with himself inside, he realized he was beginning to feel cold. As he turned the knob up a notch, he glanced down at the meter on his chest. The cold became a chill of horror. Lellie hadn't tampered with the flasks of air -- she'd known, damn her, that he would check them. Instead, she must have shorted the battery or the heating circuit in the suit. The voltage was down so low that the needle barely kicked. Another few minutes and he might as well be naked in the cold of space, for the suit, without its heating unit, would be no protection whatever. After its first stab, the fear abruptly left him, giving way to #t fury. She'd tricked him out of his last chance, but, by God, he could make sure she didn't get away with it! One small hole in the dome and he wouldn't die alone... The cold was lapping at him icily through the suit. He pressed the jet control and sent himself scudding back toward the dome. His feet and fingers were going first. Only by an immense effort was he able to operate the jet which stopped him by the dome. He struggled to press the control that would jet him down to it, but his fingers would no longer move. He wept and panted with the attempt to make them work. There was an agonizing, searing pain in his chest. He gasped -- and the unheated air rushed into his lungs and froze them. TN the dome's living room, Lellie stood waiting. She had seen the spacesuited figure come sweeping across the clearing at an abnormal speed. She understood what it meant. Her explosive device was already disconnected; now she stood alert, with a thick rubber mat in her hand, ready to clap it over any hole that might appear. She waited one minute, two minutes... When five minutes had passed, she went to the window. By putting her face close to the pane and looking sideways, she was able to see the whole of one armorclad leg and part of another. They hung there, horizontally, a few feet off the ground. She watched them for several minutes. She left the window, pushing the mat out of her hand so that it floated away across the room. For a moment or two she stood thinking. Then she went to the bookshelves and pulled out the last volume of the encyclopedia. She read long enough to satisfy herself on the exact status and claims which were connoted by the word "widow." She found a pad of paper and a pencil. She hesitated, trying to remember the method she had been taught. Then she started to write down figures, and became absorbed in them. At last she lifted her head and contemplated the result: # a year for five years, at # compound interest. But then she paused again. Very likely, a face that was not set forever in a look of surprised innocence would have frowned, because, naturally, there was a debit of #. Being incapable of both, Lellie neither smiled nor frowned. She gravely 'entered the # as a capital investment and the balance as profit. It was quite a fortune for a dumb Mart. Your Information When Worlds Collide in the neighborhood theaters, it is only natural that those who have seen it should wonder whether anything like that may really happen. Saying that we know our Earth to be between # and # # it is still in one piece does not invalidate the question : Can worlds collidt? Well, let's attack the problem systematically. First, a few fundamental astronomical facts. Nine planets, of assorted sizes, swing around the Sun. The closer to the Sun they are, the faster they move in their orbits. Their orbits are separated by many millions of miles. They all move around the Sun in the same direction, counter-clockwise if you look at the whole from the celestial north pole. And they all move in very nearly the same plane. If you made a precise scale model of the Solar System, it would fit into a round box which has to have a diameter of four feet, but would need to be only five inches deep. And if you left out Pluto and Mercury, the two that deviate most from the general plane f the Solar System, the box could be reduced to a height of three inches. Under these circumstances, no collisions between members of our own solar system are possible. Even if we imagine that, for completely unknown reasons, one of the outer planets slowed down and approached the Sun, it still would not lead to a collision. For while the planes of the various planetary orbits are very close to the plane of Earth's orbit, the ecliptic, they are not precisely the same. The presumed new orbit of a sloweddown outer planet might cross the orbit of Earth, but because of the fact that the planes of the various orbits fail to coincide perfectly, the two orbits would cross not in the manner of two crossing streets, but more like a bridge crossing a street or a street crossing a tunnel. Then what happened to the presumed Planet Five, which is now the Asteroid Belt? We can't be sure, but we are pretty certain that it was not a collision. The total mass of all the asteroids still makes only a very' small planet, somewhere between our moon (# miles in diameter) and the planet Mercury (# miles in diameter) in size. And that very small planet happened to be nearest the largest planet of our system, Jupiter (diameter # miles). About # years ago, when only the four largest bodies of the Asteroid Belt were known, the discoverer of two of them, Heinrich W. M. Olbers, M.D., suggested for the first time that they may have originated by the explosion of one planet. If that was really the case, it should be possible to reconstruct the orbit of the original planet from the orbits of the four big chunks of debris. And in the pursuit of that calculation one would also be able to fix the approximate date of the event. The calculation was not made then, partly because it would have been a difficult and exceedingly tedious job, partly because astronomers, both professionals and amateurs, kept adding and adding to the list of minor planets. But much later, only a few decades ago. Prof. K. Hirayama did go to work on the problem of calculating the original orbit of the presumed disrupted planet from the orbits of the presumed fragments. Interestingly enough, Prof. Hirayama did not find a common origin. Instead, he found five different origins, one each for five so-called "families" of planetoids. There was the one named the Flora Family, after its brightest member. Flora (##) is the member of a family of #. Maria (##) is a member of a family of #; Koronis (##) is a member of a family of #; Eos (##) is one of a family of #; and, finally, Themis (##) is one of a family of #. For each of these families, a common origin could be calculated, but it was impossible to trace the story farther back, all of which seems to indicate that there never was an original Planet Five. Presumably, Jupiter's gravitational puli prevented it from forming and, instead of one planet, more than five tiny planets formed in that area, which later, one by one, were torn apart again by Jupiter. Whether or not Professor Hirayama is correct with this conclusion matters little for our preset# purpose. The so-called Asteroid Belt did not originate by way of a collision -- even though minor collisions in the Belt now are probably responsible for the meteorites that fall to Earth. But why look to other planets for a collision? Aren't there some theories around which state that the Moon is slowly approaching Earth? And even though its diameter is only about onequarter of the diameter of Earth, that should make a sufficiently destructive impact. However, there are a few natural laws in the way which are usually referred to as "Roche's Limit," named after the French astronomer E. Roche of Montpellier, who made a certain calculation in #. The calculation was this : Suppose that a satellite slowly approached its planet in an orbit like a tightly wound spiral. (It couldn't have any other shape.) Then this satellite would raise stronger and stronger tides on the planet. But the planet would also raise tides in its satellite's crust. And since the planet is bigger and its gravitation stronger, it would win. Under the stress of the tidal forces exerted by the planet, the satellite would Saturn and its rings seen from a point directly above Saturn's northern pole. The main division of the rings is known as Cassini's Division, the fine division in the outer ring as Cache's Division, both named after their discoverers. Mimas is Saturn's innermost satellite, well outside Roche's Limit. break up, layer after layer would be peeled off and the debris would form a ring around the planet. The pieces forming the ring might still crash, but they would be just pieces, strong falls of meteoric matter, no shattering impact. The distance at which this would take place would depend on several factors -- the relative densities of planet and satellite and, to some extent, the tensile strength of the material forming the satellite. Roche calculated that a satellite of the same density as its planet and being liquid (in a loose sense of the word) could ot exist within # radii from the planet's center. Saturn's rings (see diagram) are well inside Roche's Limit. Again it is an open question whether the rings are the remains of a moon which was broken up by Saturn's tidal forces, or whether they are material which could not condense into a moon, because they were situated where no moon is possible. Almost a century after Roche, Prof. H. Jeffreys undertook the job of finding out how small a rocky satellite would have to be to escape the forces which constitute Roche's Limit. In # he announced that a satellite of solid rock would have to be larger than about # miles in diameter to be disrupted by the tidal forces # Diagram of the orbit of a hypothetical " Intruder " coming into the Solar System on an orbit almost vertical to that of the ecliptic. Some comets do have similar orbits, but none is known to have hit Earth. If one did, it would be a purely local catastrophe. which Earth could exert upon it. But even a #-mile satellite -- if there were one -- would not hit Earth as a whole. Since it would enter the atmosphere pretty nearly tangentially ("horizontal"), it would be shattered by unequal heating. How, then, could another planet -- say, the planet of another sun -- hit Earth? Only if it approached in such a manner tlaat there is no time for an effective interplay of tidal forces. The diagram jshows a typical comet orbit, strongly inclined to the ecliptic, coming from "above." If such an orbit crossed that of Earth and if both Earth and intruder happen to arrive at the same spot in the same instant, there would be a collision. But now let's see: the nearest other sun is, in round figures, # average velocity of a sun moving through space is much less than one per cent of the velocity of light, usually somewhere "between #I and # of one per cent of that velocity. Let's assume that the nearest star moved with a velocity of one per cent of that of light, which it doesn't, and that it were aimed for a collision point with our sun, which it isn't. It would need four centuries to strike. If one has to worry about something, there are more urgent problems than the possibility of cosmic collision. reason for talking about the insect Myrmecophana, but I don't see why I should need one. I am simply amused by what happened and the gist of the story is # that there is no such insect. It began quite harmlessly with a small box which the mailman handed to Herr Professor Dr. Brunner von Wattenwyl one day in #. Dr. von Wattenwyl was an entomologist and he didn't really have to read the letter that came with the small box. There were some insects in it, sent for proper classification. The insects were ants which had been collected in East Africa. They were new to the man who hadcollected them. Were they also new to science? When Brunner von Wattenwyl looked at them carefully, he saw that they were indeed new to science. And they were not even ants. They were related to the locusts, but masqueraded as ants. The thick body had a green triangle on each side, quite conspicuous against the background of a white sheet of paper. But if placed on a leaf, these two green triangles imitated the narrow "waistline" of an ant. Likewise, the legs were striped black and green lengthwise, so that only the black center stripe showed clearly. That stripe had the width of n ant's leg. Even the antennae, longer than those of an ant, were camouflaged. At the precise point where the feelers of an ant would come to an end, there was a white sectfon which seemed to cut it off. Brunner von Wattenwyl suspected -- he could not know for sure, since he worked with dried specimens, but his suspicion was justified -- that this camouflaged grasshopper also behaved like an ant when alive. What remained to be done was to invent a scientific name. Well, here was an insect which did its best to look like an ant. One might say that it "ghosted" an ant. Hence, von Wattenwyl called it "antghost," Myrmecophana. That ended the story for an interval of more than two decades, when a traveling zoologist, one Dr. Vosseler (later director of the Zoological Garden of Hamburg), happened across M yrmecophana in East Africa. It mingled with true ants, cavorting like them. Vosseler, unaware of the earlier description, was struck by some minor differences, collected some of the "new species of ant" and took them with him, alive. Kept in wire cages for later classification, the pseudoants seemed to be growing a little, though insects, once they have reached the adult form, rarely grow larger. And then, one day, they began to change. The pseudo-ants, as they changed shape, also changed their behavior. No nervous running any more, stately calmness instead. They had become leaf insects, M now imitating the leaves of plants, sitting still if possible and moving slowly when moving became necessary. And with that observation Myrmecophana became a "ghost" of another kind. For the finished leaf insect was already known to science under the label Eurycorypha. The pseudoant was recognized as the larval form of the pseudo-leaf. And its separate name was officially deleted. umn about the moons of the Solar System, I find myself guilty of an omission: I didn't say anything about the satellite of Venus. But Venus, you'll object, does Aot have a moon. I know that. However, the moon which Venus does not have has a story and I think it worth telling. It began during the year #. Some thirty-five years earlier, Galileo Galilei had discovered the four large moons of Jupiter, and astronomers began to look for moons of other planets. In the year mentioned a Neapolitan, Francesco Fontana, announced that Venus had a fairly small, bright moon. Telescopes were still rare and weak, so other observers were not surprised if they failed to see it. Some time later, Fontana's discovery was corroborated by as important a man as Jean Dominique Cassini. Cassini had discovered one of Saturn's moons (Japetus) in #I and had announced still another moon of Saturn (Rhea) in #, the same year in which he reported seeing the satellite of Venus. (Later Cassini found two more of Saturn' moons, Tethys and Dione.) Cassini said that he had seen something that might have been Venus's moon as early as #, but he had not been sure at the time. After that the Venus satellite was "lost" again, but its reality could not be doubted -- Cassini himself had seen it! Roughly a century after the original discovery by Fontana, several other observers went on record as witnesses for the existence of a moon of Venus. Short in England saw it in #; Mayer in Greifswald in #; Montaigne in Limoges, France and Rodkier in Copenhagen both observed it for several days in #. The angular distance from the planet, they reported, was between # and # minutes of arc. Three years later, in #, Horrebow in Copenhagen and Montbarron in Auxerre verified the observations of their respective compatriots, Rodkier and Montaigne. There was just one uncooperative fact in the way. Since Venu M is closer to the Sun than we are, it happens on rare occasions that the planet is in line of sight between us and the Sun, a performance technically known as a "transit." If Venus had a satellite, it should show up beautifully as a black spot against the blinding background of the Sun's disk. Venus transits are rare, but just at the period under discussion there were two of them, in #I and in #. They were observed carefully for many different reasons, but nobody detected even a trace of a Venus satellite. The Viennese astronomer, Father Maximilian Hell, S. J., after whom Hell Crater on the Moon is named, drew the conclusion that Montaigne and Montbarron, Rodkier and Horrcbow, Mayer and Short -- and, yes, even the great Cassini -- must have been mistaken. Venus is a very bright planet, bright enough to cause a reflection on the cornea of the eye of the observer. This reflection will be reflected, in turn, on the eyepiece of the telescope and then be "seen" by the observer. Of course, it will not coincide with the image of the planet, but produce a tiny bright spot nearby. Thus Father Hell in #. But the satellite of Venus had too much momentum by then. Johann Heinrich Lambert -- writing in French like a good German of his time -- published an Essai d'une theorie du satellite de Venus in Berlin in # in which he tried to calculate the orbit of that moon. Frederick the Great of Prussia read it and decided that this was a fine opportunity to honor the philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert by naming the moon of Venus d'Alembert. If d'Alembert had not refused the honor -- we don't know why -- there would have been a royal degree to that effect. By #, all astronomers were agreed that Venus did not have a moon. But they also agreed that Father Hell's ingenious explanation was not good enough. Though something like that might fool a beginner, the majority of those who had seen the satellite of Venus had been competent men. The puzzle was not solved until # when a Belgian astronomer, P. Stroobant, reviewed the whole case. Stroobant asked himself the obvious question: "Just where was Venus located in the sky when the various observers thought they saw a satellite?" Since precise records existed, this question was easy to answer. Stroobant simply looked up the positions of Venus for those days and entered them on a good star map. And he found that in every case there had been a relatively bright fixed star in the immediate neighborhood of Venus. On one occasion mu Tauri had been less than half a degree of arc from Venus. On other occasions it was # Orionis or #I Orionis, just bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. That was the end of the search for the moon of Venus. How many Jovian satellites would be visible to an observer on Jupiter, assuming that there are no clouds? Gary B. Dunkel # Alta Fresno #, Calif. He could see llie four large satellites -- Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto -- with the ble telescope, lie could also sec Moon No. V, which is closest to Jupiter. All the others would need rather powerful telescopes because they are very small and comparatively slow-moving. Isaac Asimov and other science fiction writers have used the word " parsec " on several occasions. What is a parsec and how is its value derived? Is there any phenomenon known which would aid instantaneous or speedoflight transmission of matter? David Shafer # Andina Avenue Cincinnati, Ohio Parsec means a distance ent yearly shift of l#lh of one degree of arc. Expressed arithmetically, one parsec is # light-years. No, we don't know of any phenomenon that would make transmission of matter possible, assuming you mean disassembling molecules in one place and reassembling them elsewhere. The speed is not very important at this point; achieving it at all is the problem. It seems somewhat unlikely at present. But so did atomic power in #. I do not question the value of a space station as an observation point and for research, but why does every writer on the subject consider it invincible from a military standpoint? Why wouldn't it be just as easy for those on the ground to intercept missiles fired by the space station? Joshua J. Ward No Address Suppose the space slat ion a shooting war with the Empire of Africa ami Madagascar. The missiles from the space station would then be released while the station is over the Pacific, close to # degrees around the glohe. The ground radars would not he aide to pick up the missiles until loo late, since they would come in over the horizon at a shallow angle. Also, they would not be able to tell whether the target is Cape Town, Tananarive, Libreville or Nairobi. But the people on the station would know what the target is going to be for any missile that rises from the atmosphere. Hence the station would have a much easier job of interception. It might not be completely invincible, but it certainly would have the advantage. "Escape velocity n is my pet peeve. If we had a good enough fuel, we could creep out of this world at one mile per hour. Pfc. Robert A. Vignerot Fort Lawton, Washington Of course, if we had enough fuel, we could move out of the gravitational field of Earth as gradually as we please. The figure of seven miles per second for the escape velocity is merely one way of expressing the amount of work to be done. But it is another question of whether such "creeping out" would be practical. Consider : in Destination Moon they assumed an average acceleration of six g which made the ship attain escape velocity three minutes and # seconds after takeoff, at which time the ship would be # miles above the surface. To climb to # miles at the rate of # miles per hour would take #lOths of an hour or # minutes. During that climb to # miles altitude, Earth pulls the spaceship hack at an average rate of about # feet per second for every second elapsed. This loss of speed must be made up by expenditure of fuel. In the first case, the climb to # miles was accomplished in # seconds. In the second case, the climb to the same height took # seconds After figuring out how much effect Earth's gravity would have in either case, you'll probably stop wondering why rocket men insist in attaining escape velocity as quickly as possible. Shipshape Home I the creeps," Ruth said  when she came in that afternoon. I looked up from the typewriter as she put the bags on the table second draft of a story. "The creeps," I repeated. "Yes, he does," she said. "That way he has of slinking around, like Peter Lorre." "Peter Lorre," I said, still concentrating on my plotting. "Babe," she implored, "I'm serious. The man is a creep." I snapped out of the creative fog with a blink. When you start seeing things , remember this: the things you are seeing may be seeing youl "Hon, what can the poor guy do about his face?" I said. "Heredity. Give him a break." She plopped down in a chair by the table and started to take out groceries, stacking cans on the table. "Listen," she said. I could smell it coming; that dead serious tone of hers which she isn't even aware of any more, but which comes every time she's about to make one of her "revelations" to me. "Yes, dear," I said. I leaned one elbow on the typewriter and gazed at her patiently. "You get that expression off your face," she said. "You always look at me as if I were an idiot child." I smiled. Wanly. "You'll be sorry," she said, "some night when that man creeps in with an axe and dismembers us." "He's just a poor guy earning a living. He mops the halls, he stokes the furnaces, he -- " "We have oil heat," she said. "If we had furnaces, he would stoke them. Let us have charity. He labors like ourselves. I write stories; he mops floors. Who can say which is the greater contribution to civilization?" "Okay," she said with a surrendering gesture. "Okay, if you don't want to face facts." "Which are?" I prodded. I decided it was best to get it out of her before it burned a hole in her mind. Her eyes narrowed. "You listen to me. That man has some reason for being here. He's no janitor. I wouldn't be surprised if... "If this apartment house were just a front for a gambling establishment. A hideout for public enemies numbered one through fifteen. An abortion mill. A counterfeiter's lair. A murderer's rendezvous." She was already in the kitchen thumping cans and boxes into the cupboard. "Okay," she said, "okay," in that patient if-you-get-murdereddon't cometo-me-forsy m pathy voice. "Don't say I didn't try. If I'm married to a wall, I can't help it." I came in and slid arms around her waist. I kissed her neck. "Stop that," she said, turning around. "You can't change the subject this easily. The janitor is..." "You're serious," I interrupted, startled. Her face darkened. "I am. The man looks at me in a funny way." "What way?" I asked. She searched. "In... in anticipation ." I chuckled. "Can't blame him. Who wouldn't?" "I don't mean that way." "Remember the time you # thought the milkman was a knife killer for the Mafia?" "I don't care." I kissed her neck again. "Let's eat." She groaned. "Why do I try to tell you anything?" "Because you love me." She closed her eyes. "I give up," she said quietly, with the patience of a saint under fire. "Come on, hon. We have enough troubles." She shrugged. "Oh, all right." "Good," I said. "When are Phil and Marge coming?" "Six," she said. "I got pork." "Roast?" "Mmmm." "I'll buy' that." "You already did." "I must get down to the typewriter again so we can afford it." While I squeezed out another page, I heard her muttering to herself in the kitchen. All that came through was a grim : "Murdered in our beds or something."  as we sat having dinner that night. I grinned at Phil and he grinned back. "I think so, too," Marge agreed. "Whoever heard of charging only sixty-five a month for a five-roont apartment, furnished? Stove, refrigerator, washer -- it's fantastic !" "Girls," I said, "let's not quibble. Let's take advantage." "Oi!" Ruth tossed her pretty blonde head. "If a man said, old man,' you'd probably take it." "I most definitely would take it," I admitted. "I would then run like hell." "You're naive," she said. "You think everybody is Santa Claus." "It is a little funny," Phil said. "Think about it, Rick." I thought about it. A five-room apartment, brand-new, furnished in even better than good taste right down to a couple of sets of expensive dishes... I pursed my lips. A guy can get lost writing about the bars on Mars. Maybe it was true. I could see their point. Of course, I wouldn't show it, though. And spoil Ruth's and my little game of war? Never. "I think they charge too much," I said. "Oh, Lord!" Ruth was taking it straight, as she usually did. "Too much? Five rooms yet! Furniture, dishes, linens, a television set! What do you want, a swimming pool?" "A small one would be good enough." She looked at Marge and Phil. "Let us discuss this thing quietly. Let us pretend that the fourth voice we hear is nothing but the wind in the eaves." # "I am the wind in the eaves," I aid. "Listen,' Ruth restated her forebodings, "what if the place were a fluke? I mean, what if they just want people here for a coverup? That would explain the rent. You remember the rush on this place when they started renting?" I remember as well as Phil and Ruth and Marge. The only reaeon we'd got apartments was we all happened to be walking past the place when the janitor put out the renting sign. The four of us had gone right in. I remember our amazement, our delight, at the rental. Why, we'd been paying more than double for half the size and ratty furniture, besides. Phil and Marge and Ruth and I were the first tenants. The next day was like the Alamo under attack. It's a little hard to get an apartment these days. "I say there's something funny about it," Ruth finished. "And did you ever notice that janitor?" "He's a creep," I contributed. "He is," Marge laughed. "My God, he's something out of a B picture. Those eyes! He looks like Peter Lorre." "See!" Ruth was triumphant. "Kids," I said, raising a hand of weary concilation, "if there's something foul going on behind ur backs, let's allow it to go n. We aren't being asked to help out or suffer by it. We are living in a nice spot for a nice rent. What are we going to do -- look into it and maybe spoil it?" "What if there are designs on us?" Ruth demanded. "What designs, hon?" I asked. "I don't know," she said. "But I sense something." "Remember the time you sensed the bathroom was haunted? It was a mouse. I told you ghosts don't haunt bathrooms. Well, anybody who wants to make a career out of being sinister doesn't go in for janitoring. Limits his scope too much." She started clearing off the dishes. "Are you married to a blind man too?" she asked Marge. "Men are all blind," Marge said, accompanying my poor man's seer into the kitchen. "We must face it and be brave." Phil and I lit cigarettes. "No kidding now," I said, so the girls couldn't hear, "do you think there's anything wrong?" He shrugged. "I don't know, Rick," he admitted. "I will say this -- it's pretty strange to rent a furnished place for so little." Yeah, I thought, awake at last. Strange was the word. I stopped for a chat with our strolling cop the next morning. Johnson walks around the neighborhood, afternoons. There arc vicious gangs in the vicinity. he told me, traffic is heavy and, besides, the kids need watching after three in the afternoon. He's a good Joe, lots of fun. I chat with him every day when I go out for anything. "My wife suspects foul doings in our apartment house," I told him. "This is my suspicion," Johnson said, dead sober. "It is my those walls, six-year-olds are being forced to weave baskets by candle light." "Under the whip hand of a gaunt old hag," I added. He nodded sadly. Then he looked around, plotter-like. "You won't tell anyone will you?" he begged. "I want to crack the case all by myself." I patted his shoulder. "Johnson," I said, "your secret is locked behind these iron lips." "I am grateful," he said. We laughed. , "How's the wife?" he asked. "Suspicious," I said. "Investigating. Curious." "Everything normal, then." "Right. I guess I'll really start worrying when she stops acting like this." "What is k she really suspects?" I grinned. "She thinks the rent is too cheap. Everybody around here, she claims, pays a lot more for a lot less." "Is that right?" Johnson aid. "Yeah," I said, punching his arm. "Don't you tell anybody. I don't want to lose a good deal." Then I went to the store. She gazed intently at me over a pan of soggy clothes. "You knew what, hon?" I wanted to know, putting down the package of second sheets I'd gone out to buy. "This place is a fluke." She raised her hand warningly. "Don't you say a word. You just listen to me." I sat down. "Yes, dear. Not a word." "I found engines in the basement," she said, and then waited for a reaction. "What kind of engines, dear? Fire engines?" Her lips tightened. "Come on, now," she said, getting a little burned up. "I saw the things." She meant it. "I've been down there too, hon," I said. "How come I never saw any engines?" She looked around. I didn't like the way she did it. She looked as if she really thought someone might be lurking at the window, listening. "This is under the basement," she said. I looked very dubious. She stood up. "Damn it! You come on and I'll show you!" She held my hand as we went through the hall and into the elevator. She stood grimly by me as we descended, my hand tight in her grip. "When did you see them?" I asked, trying to make conversation. "When I was washing in the laundry down there," she said. "In the hallway, I mean, when I was bringing the clothes back. I was coming to the elevator and I saw a doorway.' It was a little open," "Did you go in?" I asked. She looked irritably at me. "You went in," I said. "I went down the steps there and it was light and... "And you saw engines." "That's right." "Big ones?" The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. We went out. "I'll show you how big," she said. It was a blank wall. "It's here." I looked at her. I tapped the wall. "Honey," I said. "Don't you dare say it!" she napped. "Have you ever heard f doors in a wall?" "Was this door in the wall?" "The wall probably slides over it," she said, starting to tap. It aounded solid to me. "Dam it! I saw it, I tell you. I can just hear S' what you're going to say." I didn't say it. I just stood there watching her. "Lose something?" The janitor's voice behind us was sort of like Lorre's, low and insinuating. Ruth gasped, caught way off guard. I jumped a bit myself. "My wife thinks there's a -- " "I was showing him the right way to hang a picture," Ruth interrupted hastily. "That's the way, babe." She turned toward me. "You put the nail in at an angle, not straight in. Now do you understand?" The janitor smiled. "See you," I said awkwardly. I felt his eyes on us as we walked back to the elevator. When the doors shut, Ruth turned quickly. "Good night!" she stormed. "What are you tryin to do, get him on us?" "What... ?" "Never mind," she said. "There are engines down there. Huge engines. I saw them. And he knows about them." "Baby," I said, "why don't..." "Look at me," she said quickly. I looked. "Do you think I'm crazy?" she asked. "Come on, now. Never mind the hesitation." I sighed. "I think you're kii aginative." She looked disgusted. "You're as bad as... "You and Galileo, I added. "It's tough being ahead of your generation. Happens, though, to every genius.' "I'll show you those things," she said. "We're going down there again tonight, when that janitor is asleep. If he's ever asleep." I got worried. "Honey, cut it out. You'll get me started, too." "Good," she said. "Good. I thought it would take a hurricane." I sat staring at my typewriter all afternoon, nothing coming out. But concern. I didn't get it. Was she actually serious? All right, I thought. I'll take it seriously. She saw a door that was left open. Accidentally. That was obvious. If there really were huge engines under the apartment house, as she said, then the people who built them damn well wouldn't want anyone to know about them. East #th Street. An apartment house. And huge engines underneath it. Now where's the sense in that? S HE was shaking: Her face was white. She stared at me like a kid who's read her first horror story. " The janitor has three eyes!" "Honey," I said. I put my arms around her. She was really scared. I felt sort of scared myself. And not about the janitor having an extra eye, either. I didn't say anything at first. What can you say when your wife comes up with something like that? She shook a long time. Then she spoke in a quiet voice, a timid voice: "You don't believe me." I swallowed. "Baby," I said helplessly. "We're going down tonight," she stated. "This is really important now. It's nothing to joke about." "I don't think we should..." I started to say. "I'm going down there." She sounded edgy now, a little hysterical. "I tell you there are engines down there. Goddam it, there are engine s!" She started crying now. I patted her head, rested it against my shoulder. "All right, baby," I said. "All right." She tried to tell me through her tears, but it wouldn't work. Later, when she'd calmed down, I listened. I didn't want to get her upset. I figured the safest way was just to listen. "I was walking through the hall downstairs," she said. "I thought maybe there was some afternoon mail. You know, once in a while our mailman will..." "I know, hon," I soothed. "He comes around with another mail when the deliveries are heavy." She stopped. "Never mind that. What matters is that I walked past the janitor." "And?" I asked, afraid of what was coming. "He smiled," she said. "You know the way he does. Sweet and murderous." I didn't argue the point. I still didn't think the janitor was anything but a harmless guy who had the misfortune to be born with a face that was strictly from Charles Addams. "So?" I said. #, Then what?' "I walked pas # t him. I felt myself shivering, because he looked at me as if he knew something about me I didn't even know. I don't care what you say, that's the feeling I got. And then..." She shuddered. I took her hand. "Then?" "I felt him looking at me." I'd felt that, too, when he had found us in the basement. I knew what she meant. You actually felt the guy looking at you. "All right," I said, "I'll buy that." "You won't buy this," she went on grimly. "When I turned around to look, he was walking away from me." "Oh, you both turned at the same time?" She slapped the table. "I turned. He didn't." "But you just said -- " "He was looking at me. He was walking away and his head was to the front and he was looking at me." I sat there numbly. I patted her hand without even knowing I was doing it. "How, hon?" I heard myself asking her. "There was an eye in the back of his head." "Hon" I said. She closed her eyes. She clasped her hands after drawing away the one I was holding. She pressed her lips together. I saw a tear wriggle out from under her left eyelid and roll down her cheek. She was white. "I saw it." she said quietly. "So help me, I saw that eye." I don't know why I went on with it. Self-torture, I guess. I really wanted to forget the whole thing, pretend it never even happened. but I couldn't leave it at that. "Why haven't we noticed it before, Ruth?" I asked. "We've seen the back of the man's head before." "Have we?" she said. "Have we?" "Sweetheart, somebody must have seen it. Do you think there's never anybody behind him?" "His hair parted, Rick, and before I ran away, I saw the hair going back over it. So you couldn't see it." What could a guy possibly say to his wife when she talks to him like that? You're nuts? You're batty? Or the old, tired, "You've been working too hard"? She hadn't been working too hard. I make a living on my writing. Then, again, maybe she had been working overtime. With her imagination. "Are you going down with me tonight?" she asked. "All right," I said quietly. "All right, sweetheart. Now will you go and lie down for a while?" "But it's nothing like that." "Sweetheart, go and lie down," I said firmly. "I'll go with you tonight, but I want you to lie down now." She went into the bedroom and I heard the springs squeak as she sat down, then again when she drew up her legs and fell back on the pillow. I went in a little later to put a comforter over her. She was looking at the ceiling. I didn't say anything to her. I don't think she wanted to talk to me. W Phil. Ruth was asleep. I'd sneaked across the hall to Phil's apartment. "Maybe she saw them," he said. "Isn't it possible?" "Yeah, sure," I said. "And you know what else is possible." "Look, you want to go down and see the jaintor? You want to... "No," I said. "There's nothing we can do." "You're going down to the basement with her?" "If she keeps insisting," I said. "Otherwise, no." "When you go, come and get us." I frowned .at him ctfriously. "You mean te thing is getting you, too?" He looked at me in a funny way. I saw his throat move. "Don't tell anyone," he said. He glanced around. Then he turned back. "Marge told me the same thing," he added. "She said the janitor has three eyes." , some ice cream. Johnson was still walking around. "They're working you overtime," I said as he started to walk beside me. "They expect some trouble from the local gangs," he explained in that serious kidding way of his. "I never saw any trouble," I said distractedly. He shrugged. "They say to come here, I come." "Mmmm." "How's your wife?" he added. "Fine," I lied. "She still think the apartment is a front?" I swallowed. "No," I said. "I've broken her of that. I think she was just needling me all the time." He nodded and left me at the corner. For some reason, I couldn't keep my hands from shaking all the way home. I kept looking over my shoulder, too. I grunted and rolled on my side. She nudged me. I woke up sort of hazy and looked automatically at the clock. The radium numbers told me it was almost four o'clock. "You want to go now?" I asked, too sleepy to be tactful. There was a silence. That woke me up. "Do you?" I insisted. "I'm going," she said quietly. I looked at her in the half-darkness, my heart starting to do a drum beat too heavily. My mouth and throat felt dry. "All right," I said, "wait till I get dressed." She was dressed already. I heard her in the kitchen making some coffee while I put on my clothes. There was no noise. I mean it didn't sound as if her hands were shaking. She spoke lucidly, too. But when I stared into the bathroom cabinet mirror, I saw a worried husband. I washed my face with cold water and combed my hair. "Thanks," I said as she handed me the cup of steaming coffee. I stood there, nervous before my own wife. She didn't drink any coffee. "Are you awake?" she asked. I nodded. I noticed the flashlight and the screwdriver on the kitchen table. I finished the coffee. "I'm ready," I said, "Let's get it over with." I felt her hand on my arm. "I hope you'll..." she started. Then she turned her face. "What?" "Nothing," she said. "We'd better go." The house was dead quiet as we went into the hall. We were halfway to the elevator when I remembered Phil and Marge. I told her. "We can't wait," she said. "It'll be light soon." "I'll just go see if they're up," I said. "It won't take a minute." She didn't say anything. She stood by the elevator door. I went down the hall and knocked quietly on the door of their apartment. There was no answer. I glanced up the hall. She was gone. I felt my heart lurch. Even though I was sure there was no danger in the basement, it scared me. "Ruth!" I called out and headed for the stairs. "Wait a second!" I heard Phil yell from his door. "I can't!" I shouted back, charging down. When I got to the basement, I saw the open elevator door and the light streaming out from the inside. Empty. I looked around for a light switch, but there wasn't any. I started to move along the dark passage as fast as I could. "Hon!" I whispered urgently. "Ruth, where are you?" I found her standing before a doorway in the wall. It was open. "Now stop acting as if I were insane," she said coldly. I gaped and felt a hand pressing against my cheek. It was my own. She was right. There were stairs. And it was lighted down there. I heard sounds -- sounds of metallic clickings and strange buzzings. I took her hand. "I'm sorry, baby," I said. "I'm very sorry." Her hand tightened in mine. "Never mind that now. There's something queer about all this." # I nodded. Then I said. "Yeah," realizing she couldn't see my nod in the darkness. "Let's go down," she said. "I don't think we better," I argued. "We've got to know," she insisted as if the entire problem had been assigned to her. "But there must be someone down there." "We'll just peek." She pulled me and I guess I felt too ashamed of myself to pull back. We started down. Then it came to me -- if she was right about the doorway and the engines, she must be right about the janitor and he must really have... I felt a little detached from reality. East #th Street, I told myself again. An apartment house on East #th Street. It's all real. J couldn't quite convince myself. We stopped at the bottom and just stared. Engines, all right. Fantastic engines. And, asT looked at them, their structure, it occurred to me what kind of engines they were. I'd written some science articles and read a lot more. I felt dizzy. You can't adapt quickly to something like that, to be plunged from a stone apartment house basement into this... this storehouse of energy. It got me.  passed, but I finally realized we had to get out of there and report it. We had to do something. First of all, get out, though. "'Come on," I said. We moved up the steps, my mind working like an engine itself, fast and furious, spinning out ideas and theories. All of them crazy. All of them acceptable. Even the craziest one. It was when we were moving down the basement hall. We saw the janitor coming at us. It was still dark, even with the little light that was coming from the early morning haze. I grabbed Ruth and we ducked behind a stone pillar. We stood there holdin our breaths, listening to the sound of his approaching shoes. He passed us. He was holding a flashlight, but he didn't play it around. He just moved straight for the open door. As he came into the patch of light from the open doorway, he stopped. His head was turned away. The guy was facing the stairway. Bat he was looking at us. It knocked out what little breath I had left. I just stood there and stared at that eye in the back of his head. And, although there wasn't any face around it, that ghastly eye had a smile that went with it. A nasty, selfcertain and frightening smile. He saw us and he was amused and didn't have to do a thing about it. He went through the doorway and the door thudded closed behind him and the stone wall segment slid down and shut it from view. We stood there shivering. "You saw it," she finally said. "Yes." "He knows we saw those engines and still he didn't do anything." We went on talking after we got in the elevator. "Maybe there's nothing really wrong," I said, "Maybe..." Then I stopped. I remembered those engines. I remembered what kind they were. "What shall we do?" she asked, scared. I put my arm around her for comfort. But I was scared, too. "We'd better get out," I said. "Fast." "Like this? Without packing?" "We'll get our stuff together and leave before morning. I don't think they can do..." "#iey?" she interrupted. Why had I said that? But it had to be a group. The janitor couldn't have made or even assembled those engines all by himself. I think it was the third eye that cemented my theory. And when we stopped in to see Phil and Marge and they asked us what happened, I told them what I thought. I don't think it surprised Ruth much. She probably  had decided the same herself. What I said was: "I think the house is a rocket ship." Phil grinned, then stopped when he saw I wasn't trying to kid him. "What?" Marge asked blankly, not getting it at all. "I know it sounds crazy," I said, sounding more like my wife than she did, "but those engines are rocket engines. I don't know how they..." I shrugged helplessly at the whole idea. "All I know is that they're rocket engines." "That doesn't mean it's a -- a ship ?" Phil finished weakly, switching from statement to question in mid-sentence. "Yes," said Ruth. And I shuddered. That seemed to settle it. She'd been right too often lately. "What's the point?" Marge asked. "Why?" "If you figure it out," said Ruth, "it makes sense." E all turned toward her. "How, baby?" I asked, afraid to be asking. "That janitor," she said. "He's not a man. We know that. That third eye makes it a positive fact. I mean for sure." "You telling me the guy actually has one?" Phil asked incredulously. I nodded. "He has one," I said. "I saw it." "Oh, my God," he said. "He's not a man," Ruth repeated. "Humanoid, yes, but not from Earth. Except for the eye, he might look just about like us. But he might be completely different, so different that they'd change his form. Give him that extra eye just to keep track of us when we didn't know he was." Phil ran a shaking hand through his hair. "This is crazy," he said. He sank down into a chair. So did the girls. I didn't. I felt uneasy about sticking around. I thought we should grab our hats and run. They didn't seem to feel in immediate danger. I finally decided it wouldn't hurt to wait until morning. Then I'd tell Xbhnson or somebody. Nothing could happen right now. "This is crazy," Phil said again. "I saw those engines," I stated. "They're really there. You can't get away from that fact." "Listen," Ruth said, "they're probably extraterrestrials." "What are you talking about?" Marge demanded irritably. She was good and afraid, I saw. "Hon," I contributed weakly, "you've been reading too many science fiction magazines." Her lips drew together. "You thought I was crazy when I suspected this place. You thought so when I told you I saw those engines. You thought so when I told you the janitor had Ithree eyes. Well, I was right every time. Now, lay off the imagination business. You need to do some guessing to explain all those things. Even you'll admit they don't happen every day -- as far as we know." I shut up. "What if they're from another planet?" she rephrased, for Marge's benefit. "Suppose they want some Earth people to experiment on. To observe..." she amended, though I don't know for whose benefit. But the idea of being experimented on by threeeyed janitors from another planet had something revolting about it. "What better way," Ruth was saying, "of getting people than to build a rocket ship that looks like an apartment house, rent it out cheap and get it full of people fast?" She looked at us without yielding an inch. "And then," she said, "just wait until some morning, early, when everybody is asleep and... goodby, Earth." It was crazy, but I'd been shrewdly practical -- and wrong -- three times. I couldn't afford to doubt now. It wasn't worth, the risk. And I sort of felt she was right. "But the whole house?" Phil was saying. "How could they get it... in the air?" "If they're from another planet, they're probably centuries ahead of us in space travel." Phil started to answer. He faltered. Then he said, "But it doesn't look like a ship." "The house might be a shell over the ship." I said. "It probably is. Maybe the ship just includes the bedrooms. That's all they'd need. That's where everybody would be in the early morning hours if..." "No," Ruth said. "They couldn't knock off the shell without attracting too much attention." We were all silent, laboring under a thick cloud of confusion and half-formed fears. Halfformed because you can't shape your fears of something when you don't even know what it is. "Suppose it is a building," Ruth said. "Suppose the ship is outside of it." Marge was practically lost. She got angry because she was lost. "There's nothing outside the house. That's obvious!" "Those people would be way ahead of us in science," Ruth said. "Maybe they've mastered invisibility of matter." We all squirmed at once, I think. "Babe," I said. "Is it possible ?" Ruth challenged. I sighed. "It's possible. I don't know what is or isn't any more.' We were quiet. "Listen," Ruth said. "No," I cut in. "You listen. I think maybe we're going overboard on this thing. But there are engines in the basement and the janitor does have three eyes. On the basis of that, I think we have enough reason to clear out. Tonight:" We all agreed on that anyway. "We'd better tell everybody in the house," Ruth said. "We can't leave them here." "It'll take too long," Marge argued. "No, we have to," I said. "You pack, babe. I'll tell them." I headed for the door and grabbed the knob. It didn't turn. me. I grabbed at it and yanked hard. I thought for a second, fighting down fear, that it was locked on the inside. I checked. It was locked on the outside. Marge was ready to scream. You could sense it bubbling up in her. "It's true," Ruth said, horrified. "Oh, my God, it's all true, then!" I made a dash for the window. The place began to vibrate, as if we were about to get hit by an earthquake. Dishes started to rattle and fall off their shelves. We heard a chair crash onto its side in the kitchen. "What is it?" Marge cried. Phil grabbed for her as she began to whimper. Ruth ran to me and we stood there, frozen, feeling the floor shake under our feet. "The engines!" Ruth suddenly screamed. "They're going now" "They have to warm up!" was my wild guess. "We can still get out!" I let go of Ruth and grabbed a chair. For some reason I felt that the windows would be automatically locked, too. I hurled the chair through the glass. The vibrations were getting worse. "Quick!" I shouted over the noise. "Out on the fire escape! Maybe we can make it!" Impelled by panic and dread. Marge and Phil came running over the shaking floor. I almost shoved them out through the gaping window hole. Marge tore her skirt. Ruth cut her finger. I went last, dragged a glass dagger through my leg. I didn't even feel it, I was so keyed up. I kept pushing them, hurrying them down the fire escape steps. Marge caught a heel in between two gratings and her shoe came off. She half limped, half fell down the orange-metal steps, her face white and twisted with fear. Ruth in her loafers clattered down behind Phil. I came last, shepherding them frantically. We heard windows crashing above and below. We saw an older couple ahead of us crawl out hurriedly and start down. They held us up. "Look out, will you!" Marge shouted at them in a fury. They cast a frightened glance over their shoulders. Ruth looked back at me. "Are you coming?" she asked quickly, her voice between a sob and a scream. "I'm here," I said breathlessly. I felt as if I were going to collapse on the steps. They seemed to go on forever. At the bottom was a ladder. We saw the old lady drop from it and cry out in pain as her ankle twisted under her. Her husband climbed down and helped her up. The building was vibrating harshly now. We saw dust scaling out from between the bricks. My voice joined the throng, all crying the same word : 'Hurry!" I saw Phil drop down. He caught Marge, who was sobbing in fright. I heard her half-articulate, "Oh, thank God!" as she landed. They started up the alleyway. Phil looked back over his shoulder at us, but Marge dragged him on. "Let me go first!" I snapped quickly. Ruth stepped aside. I swung down the ladder and dropped, felt the sting in my insteps, a slight pain in my ankles. I looked up, extended my arms. An old man behind Ruth was trying to shove her aside so he could jump down. "Look out!" I yelled, like a raging animal, reduced suddenly by fear and concern. If I'd had a gun, I'd have shot him. He scrambled to his feet, breathing feverishly, and ran down the alley. The building was shaking and trembling. The air was filled with the roar of the engines now. "Ruth!" I yelled. She dropped and I caught her. We regained our balance and started up the alley. I could hardly breathe with that stitch in my side. As we dashed into the street, we saw Johnson moving through the ranks of scattered people, trying to herd them together. "Here now!" he was calling. "Take it easy!" We ran up to him. "Johnson!" I said, "The ship is... "Ship?" He looked blank. "The house! It's a rocket ship! It's... The ground shook wildlyJohnson turned away to grab somebody running past. My breath caught. Ruth gasped, then threw her hands over her face and shrieked in horror. Johnson was still looking at us. With that third eye. The one that had a smile in it. "No!" Ruth said. "No!" And then the sky, which was growing light, grew dark. My head snapped hround. Women were screaming their lungs out in terror. I looked in all directions. Solid walls were blotting out the sky. "We can't get out," she said. lt's the whole block." And then the rockets started. Willy Ley 'wants your questions and promises to answer every one his problems: (#) letters that contain question after question, in one case totaling sixteen; (#) illegibility. Don't throw at him everything that's ever puzzled you in science; let him have them a few queries at a time -- no more than two or three. If you have difficult handwriting and no typewriter, print your letters. Hell appreciate the courtesy and so will of these #I Hudson St... N. Y. #. N. Y. # ", rj  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus one extra full length novel # P Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus I year subscription to Galaxy Magazine (You save # on this offer ) #  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus our next # full length novels. # P Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus I year subscription to Galaxy Magazine, plus our next # full length novels (You save # on this offer) # We will extend your current subscription if you are already a subscriber...'V ': Edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Little, Brown  Co., Boston, #. xivf# pages, # sampling of the backfiles of the fine Boucher-McComas periodical. Not really a science fiction collection, since only # out of # of its pieces can even remotely be classed as such, the book is a picture of the whole field of fantasy -- the weird, the supernatural, the symbolical, the fanciful. Science fiction addicts will like Cleve Cartmill's "Huge Beast, Martin Gardner's "NoSided Professor," Idris Seabrighfs "The Listening Child," Alan Nelson's "Narapoia" (delightful!), Oliver LaFarge's slightly leaden "John the Revelator," Winona McClintic's "In the Days of Our Fathers," Will Stanton's "Barney," and H. F. Heard's magnificently horrid "The Collector." They may sniff at the other stories, but people of less narrow tastes will find tbe whole collection pleasant. Such wholly joyful fancies as James Stephens' immortal "Threepenny Piece," Robert Arthur's "Postpaid to Paradise," and H. Nearing's "Mathematical Voodoo" prove that fantasy has great vigor and appeal. They also reveal the untenability of the editors' claim that fantasy and science fiction are almost interchangeable. I can't imagine any reader mistaking these whimsies for science fiction. The outstanding quality of the Boucher-McComas magazine is the high quality of its contents. It may not be all science fiction, friends -- but much of it is first-rate writing. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc., New York, #. jr # pages, # and one of the thinnest yet, this contains # stories for #. Eight are grade A; the other five average C. Not bad -- but not good enough. The idea behind the anthology is that each story represents a science; the learned commentary with which the editors tie the stories to their respective sciences is elephantinely ponderous. I can't think of a better way to frighten off potential readers. Furthermore, to palm off a mere baker's dozen of stories as a full-edged anthology on the basis that it is a fair representation of the science in science fiction is not easy for the irascible undersigned to accept. We can be thankful for the good stories, of course. Ted Sturgeon's "What Dead Men Tell" represents the fanciful mathematics of topology fancily; Ray Bradbury's pure fantasy "Referent" stands for philosophy -- not, of course, a science at all. The physical sciences suffer: Of four stories, only one is memorable, and that an ancient from #, Raymond Z. Gallun's overwritten but deeply felt "Old Faithful," about a Martian in communication with Earth. This represents astronomy. Malcolm Jameson's inferior "Blind Man's Buff" stands for geology and geography (and there are so many better!); Ross Rocklynne's infantile "Pressure" for chemistry; and Philip Latham's "The Xi Effect," which continues this one-stringed author's end-of-the-world phobia into ridiculousness, stands for physics. Of the stories representing the biological sciences, only Julian May's magnificently evocative "Dune Roller," incongruously representing biochemistry, stands out. Harry Bates' "Alas, All Thinking!" previously anthologized by Phil Stong is good reading, but poor science fiction, since "The Time Machine" was written first. Paleontology is represented by de Camp's inconsequential "Employment." The social and psychological sciences do very well indeed -- something of a commentary on the trend in science fiction. Grade Sacred," Kris Neville's "Hold Back Tomorrow," John Berryman's very strong "Berom," and Frank Robinson's fine "The Fire and the Sword." by A. E. van Vogt. Pellegrini and Cudahy, New York, #. xvf# pages, # A. E. van Vogt. Greenberg: Publisher. New York, #. # pages, # van Vogt's first collection of novelets and short stories, and of all his books it shows forth most meaningfully the real dimensions of his talent. A very important talent it is, too. You can jibe at his super-impossible creations; you can call him fantasist and supernaturalist; you can (with some justice) rebel against the coldness of his writing and the woodenness of his characterizations. But you will still have to admit, after reading the samples in this book from his more than that he is one of the great seminal influences in the field, and has one of the most superb imaginations of all time. Of the ten tales, five have been anthologized previously, five have not. Those anthologized include: "Far Centaurus," "The Monster," "The Enchanted Village," "Dear Pen Pal," and "The Search" -- all five Class A stories. Unanthologized tales include: "Dormant" (not one of my favorites), "A Can of Paint" (minor), "Defense" (very powerful and shocking), "The Rulers" (from one of his Complicated Periods), and "The Sound" (not tops). Also revealing in a pleasantly unassuming way is the introduction to the collection. It is a pleasure to read a preface that does not try to present a compleat filosofy of science fiction in one mushy scoopful of sententious blather and pseudo-omniscient magesterialism. The Weapon Makers, our second van Vogt of the month, is one of his largest, most effective, and sometimes most hollowsounding concepts. After all, what can you say about any van Vogt book from his really Big Period (roughly #-#) except that it is Star stuff, despite its bombast and its blithe impossibilities? Here in this book the "inventor" of the magnificent sociological concept of. The Weapon Shops (see the first book in the series, The Weapon Shops of Isher, published by Greenberg in #) turns out to be the world's only immortal. As Robert Hedrock, he shepherds the Isher civilization through one of its most severe crises by marrying the Empress Innelda and at the same time by manipulating matters so that her greatest enemies, the people of the Weapon Shops, are able to take the secret of interstellar travel away from her and give it to the people. It is a fascinating book. You cannot put it down. But you can, perhaps chuckle at yourself for enjoying such patently incredible stuff! Lengyel. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Los Angeles, #. # pages, paper, # loose-lipped one-act play about a Worker's attempt to rebel against the Military Control of Atomic Energy. Written in a style reminiscent of the dancing of Mary Wigman, (i.e., it jerks and drools), it appears quite unrealistic, mushy and pseudo-profound, despite its obviously sincere intentions. It won a Maxwell Anderson Award in #. Why? by H. Rider Haggard. Dover Publications, Inc., New York, #. #I pages, # gest book buys, this monster omnibus contains the complete text of the following fine old pompous, fantastical, colorful, overblown adventure romances: She, King Solomon' s Mines, Allan Quartermain, Allan's Wife, and Maiwa's Revenge. Pumped full of antique hooey though these tales are, and funny where they should not be, nevertheless I think they are vastly entertaining. No biographical or historical data are in the book, unfortunately; so it will be recorded here that the five novels were published between # ( King Solomon's Mines') and # ( Allan's Wife), and that they are selected from a total of over # novels written from # to #, when Haggard died at the age of #. The five stories included in this collection are, of course, among his best-known works. They should occupy a place of honor on the shelves of any collector. M# By Wilson Tucker  The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon Who knows whether the strange events of this story might not one day occur? This is the story of an expedition -- a strange and exciting expedition of one man and an army of women. He had come into the land of the women suddenly -- and without warning. Tall, bronzed, muscular, he stood out among their pale skins and meek spirits. And when they learned of the land from which he had come -- the land they hadn't even known existed -- they had to follow him to it. One man and an army of women crossing the remnants of a post-atomic United States in search of the Unknown; it was an amazing trek. Miraculous things happened to the women. New emotions rose up to plague them. Once there was a near mutiny. Another time, seven of their number were killed. But it was when they reached the city in the sea that the strangest thing of all happened... also something rare in science fiction -- a compellingly human story.  Watch For It On Sale In August gravy planet A displaced person in a Utopia is worse off than in any other kind of society... especially if he happened to help build itl Mitchell Courtenay, the narditional marriage; the planet Verator of this story, had three nus; and the Conservationists , grave problems -- his wife Kathy, commonly known as " Connies , who refused to finalize their conan outlawed organization. By and liked Courtenay's ideals. As a young star class copysmith in Fowler Schocken Associates, the largest advertising agency on Earth, Courtenay was dedicated to the highest principle of this completely free enterprise society: Sales. Only through sales, he held, could the economy expand indefinitely. Kathy bitterly wanted to know why it had to, a question that , to Courtenay, was little short of commercial heresy. Added to this marital strain was his jealousy of Kathy's liking for Jack O'Shea, the midget space pilot who was the only person to reach Venus thus far. Surprisingly, Courtenay had been selected by Fowler Schocken to head the Venus Project, a contract granted by the Incorporated United States of America to develop and exploit Earth's sister planet. He had expected Matt Runstead, an older executive in the company, to be angry and jealous, for Runstead had higher seniority and should logically have been chosen to handle the account. But Runstead evidently was going further than the usual routine attempts to discredit Courtenay by lying, cajoling, bribing his staff, spying on his plans -- Runstead seemed to be actively sabotaging the project! That, however, could have been the work of the Connies, who fought savagely for the conservation of natural resources, and might be expected to combat the use of enormous amounts of metals and fuels needed to colonize and exploit Venus. As proof of that, there were the two attempts on Courtenay's life -- once when he was in Washington to interview O'Shea, the tiny space pilot, and a 'copter cargo nacelle almost killed him; another when a gunman in a passenger 'pop ter tried to shoot him through the window of his apartment. The possibility of a commercial feud was ruled out by Fowler Schocken when Courtenay questioned him about it; there would have been court hearings, counter-claims, perhaps even injunctions, before they were notified of a feud. Obviously, no entrepeneur would be guilty of the high commercial crime of murder without notification, so it must have been the Connie crackpots. But then something even more disturbing occurred. Testing consumer reaction had always been the basis of successful advertising, and Courtenay had picked CatM ex to sample attitudes toward colonizing, supporting the gigantic project, buying Venusian products, and other such essentials... but Runstead's staff sent in faked information! Enraged, Courtenay fired the entire staff there and went to the South Pole, where Runstead was "on vacation to confront him with his treachery. Courtenay found him on the slope of Starrzelius Glacier. But Runstead was ready... he cut Courtenay down with a slash of skis across the Polar helmet, left him dazed, freezing, beyond hope of rescue. As the fierce cold reached into Courtenay's unheated suit, he Jxad only two thoughts. One was of Kathy. The other was of death. I T was a throbbing, strumming inferno, complete with red fire and brutish-looking attendant devils. It was exactly what I would have consigned a Taunton copy smith to. I was confused to find myself there. The confusion did not last long. One of the attendant devils shook my shoulder roughly and said: "Gimme a hand, sleepy. I gotta stow my hammock." My head cleared and it was very plain that he was simply a lowerclass consumer. "Where's this?" I asked him. "Did you bring me back to the infirmary in Little America?" "Jeez, you talk funny," he commented. "Gimme a hand, will ya?" "Certainly not!" I told him. "I'm a star class copysmith." He looked at me pityingly, said, "Punchy," and went away into the strumming, redlit darkness. I stood up, swaying, and grabbed an elbow hurrying past from darkness to darkness. "Excuse me. Is this a hospital?" The man was another consumer, worse-tempered than the first. "Leggo my yarm!" I did. "Ya want on sick call, ya wait until we land." "Land?" "Yah, land. Listen, punchy, don't ya know what ya signed up for?" "Signed up? No, I don't. But you're being too familiar. I'm. a star class copysmith -- " "Ah," he said wisely. "I can fix ya up. Juste minnit, punchy. I'll be right back wit' the stuff." He was, too. "The stuff" was a little green capsule. "Only five hunnerd. Maybe the last one on board. Ya wanta touch down wit' the shakes? Nah! This'll straighten ya out fer landing -- " "Landing where?" I yelled. "I don't want your dope. Just tell me where I am and what I'm supposed to have signed up for and I'll take it from there!" He looked at me closely and said: "Ya got  bad. A hit in the head, maybe? Well, punchy, yer in the Number Six Hold of the Labor Freighter Thomas R. Malthus. Wind and weather, immaterial. Course, # degrees. Speed, #; destination, Costa Rica; cargo, slobs like you and me for the Chlorella plantations." "You're --  "Downgraded, he said savagely, and stared at the green capsule in the palm of his hand. Abruptly he gulped it and went on. "I'm gonna hit the comeback trail, though. I'm gonna introduce new and efficient methods in the plantations. I'll be a foreman in a week. I'll be works manager in a month. I'll be a director in a year. And then I'm gonna buy the Cunard Line and plate all their rockets with solid gold. If you don't like gold, I'll get platinum. If you don't like -- " I inched away and he didn't notice. He kept babbling his hophead litany. It made me glad I'd never taken to the stuff. I came to a bulkhead and sat down hopelessly, leaning against it. I wanted to get back to New York, find out what kind of stunt Runstead had pulled and why, get back to Katly, and my friendship with Jack O'Shea and my big job at Fowler Schocken. I had things to do. One of the red lights said Crash Emergency Exit. I thought of the hundreds of people jammed in the hold trying to crowd out through the door, and shuddered. "Excuse me, my friend," somebody said hoarsely to me. "You'd better move." He began to throw up, and apparently containers weren't issued aboard labor freighters. I rolled the emergency door open and slid through. "Well?" growled a Burns Detective Agency guard. "I want to see a ship's officer,' I said. "I'm here by some mistake. My name is Mitchell Courtenay. I'm a copysmith with the Fowler Schocken Associates." "Number," he snapped. "#-#-#," I told him, and I admit that there was a little pride in my voice. You can lose money and health and friendship. but they can't take a low Social Security number away from you... He was rolling up my sleeve, not roughly. The next moment I went spinning against the bulkhead with my head rattling from a hamhanded slap. "Get back between decks!" the guard roared. "Yer not on an excursion and I don't like yer funny talk!" I stared incredulously at the pit of my elbow. The tattoo read: "#-#-#-I #-#." My number was buried in it, but the inks matched perfectly. The style of lettering was very slightly off -- not enough for anybody to notice but me. "Waddaya waiting for?" the guard demanded. "You seen yer number before, ain't ya?" "No," I said evenly, but my legs were quivering. I was scared -- terribly scared. M I never saw this number before. It's been tattooed around my real number. I'm Courtenay, I tell you. I can prove it. I'll pay you -- " I fumbled in my pockets and found no money. I abruptly realized that I was wearing a strange and shabby suit of Universal apparel. "So pay," the guard said impassively. "I'll pay you later," I told him. "Just get me, to somebody responsible -- " A natty young flight lieutenant in Panagra uniform popped into the narrow corridor. "What's going on here?" he asked the guard. "The hatchway light's still on. Can't you keep order between decks? Burns gets a fitness report from us, you know." He ignored me completely. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kobler," the guard said, saluting and coming to a brace. "This man seems to be on the stuff. He came out and gave me a spiel that he's a star class copysmith on board by mistake." "Look at my number!" I yelled at the lieutenant. His face wrinkled as I thrust my bared elbow under his nose. "That's a high number, fellow. What do you expect to prove by showing me that?" "My real number is #-#-#. See? Before and after that, there's a different lettering style! It's been added to!" Holding his breath, the lieutenant looked very closely. He said: "Umm. Just barely possible. Come with me." The gurd hastened to open a corridor door for us. He looked scared. The lieutenant took me through a roaring confusion of engine rooms to the purser's hatbox-sized office. The purser was a sharp-faced gnome who wore his Panagra uniform as though it were a sack. "Show him your number," the lieutenant directed me, and I did. To the purser he said: "What's the story on this man?" The purser slipped a reel into the reader and cranked it. "#-#-#-#." he read. bachelor; broken home (father's desertion) child; third of five sibs; H-H balance, male #; health, #; occupational class # for seven years; # for three months; education #; signed labor contract B." He looked up at the flight officer. "A very dull profile, Lieutenant. Is there arty special reason why I should be interested in this man?" "He claims he's a copysmith in here by mistake. He says somebody altered his number. And he speaks a little above his class." "A broken-home child, especially a middle sib from the low levels, reads and views incessantly, trying to better himself. But you'll notice -- " "That's enough of that," I said curtly to the little man. "Fm Mitchell Courtenay. I can buy you and sell you without straining my petty cash account. I'm in charge of the Fowler Schocken Associates Venus Section. I want you to get New York on the line immediately and we'll wind up this farce. Now jump, damn you!" The flight lieutenant looked alarmed and reached for the phone, but the purser smiled and moved it away fromhis hand. "Mitchell Courtenay, are you?" He took another reel and put it in the viewer. "Here we are," he said, ater a little cranking. The lieutenant and I looked. It was the front page of the New York Times. The first column contained the obituary of Mitchell Courtenay, head of Fowler Schocken Associates Venus Section. I had been found . frozen to death on Starrzelius Glacier near Little America. I had been tampering with my power pack, and it had failed. I read on long after the lieutenant had lost interest. Matt Runstead was taking over Venus Section. I was a loss to my profession. My wife, Dr. Nevin, had refused to be interviewed. Fowler Schocken was quoted in a ripe eulogy of me. I was a personal friend of Venus pioneer Jack O'Shea, who had expressed shock mt grief at the news. The purser said : "I picked that up in Capetown. Lieutenant, get this silly son of a bitch back between decks, will you, please?" The Burns guard was called in. He hammerlocked me all the way back to Number Six Hold, shoved me through the door into the red darkness so hard that I bounced off somebody. After the relatively clear air of the outside, the stink was horrible. "What did you do?" the human cushion asked amiably, picking himself up. "I tried to tell them who I am..." That wasn't going to get me anywhere. "What happens next?" I asked. "We land. We get quarters. We go to work. What contract are you on?" "Labor contract B, they said." He whistled. "I guess they real. ly had you, huh?" "What do you mean? What's it all about?" "Oh, you were blind? Punchy? Too bad. B contract's five years. For refugees, morons and anybody else they can swindle into signing up. There's a conduct clause. I got offered the B, but I told them if that was the best they could do, I'd just go out and give myself up to Brinks Express. I talked them into an F contract -- they must have needed help real bad. It's one year and I can buy  outside the company stores and privileges like that." I held my head to keep it from exploding. "It can't be such a bad place to work," I said. "Country life -- farming -- fresh air and sunshine." "Um," said the man in an embarrassed way. "It's better, than chemicals, I guess. Maybe not so good as power-fishing. You'll find out soon enough." ready signal. We just hit, and hit hard. A discharge port opened, letting in blinding tropical sunlight. It was agony after the murky hold. What swept in with it was not country air, but a gush of disinfectant aerosol. I untangled myself from a knot of cursing laborers and flowed with the stream toward the port. "Hold it, stupid!" said a hardfaced man wearing a plant-protection badge. He threw a number plaque on a cord around my neck. Everybody got one and lined up at a table outside the ship. It was in the shadow of the Chlorella plantation, a towering eighty-story structure like office "In-and-Out" baskets stacked up to the sky. There were mirrored louvers at each tier. Surrounding the big buildings were acres of eye-stabbing glare. I realized that these were more mirrored louvers to catch the Sun, bounce it off other mirrors inside the tiers and onto the photosynthesis tanks. It was a spectacular though not uncommon sight from the air. On the ground it was plain hell. I should have been planning, planning. But the. channels of my mind were choked by : "From the sun-drenched plantations of Costa Rica, tended by the deft hands of independent farmers with pride in their work, comes the juicy-ripe goodness of Chlorella Proteins..." I had written those words. "Keep moving!" a plant-protection man bawled. I shaded my eyes and shuffled ahead as the line moved past the table. A dark-glassed man at the table was asking me: "Name?" "Mitchell Court -- " "That's the one I told you about," said the purser's voice. "Okay, thanks." To me: "Groby, we've had men try to bug out of a B contract before this, you know. Are you up on the Costa Rican code of business law?" "Of course not! All I'm trying to tell you -- " "Don't interrupt; you'll be interested. Certain pharmaceuticals may be administered to a contract-breaker in an attempt to correct his antisocial, antibusiness, anti-sales attitude." He looked squarely at me. "I see you understand." I did. Cerebrin. Twenty years being sandpapered, strangled, deafened and blinded continuously, wrapped up in one five-second dose. I understood, all right. "What's yor name, Groby?" the man in the dark glasses asked me. "Groby," I said hoarsely. "First name? Educational level? H-H balance?" "I don't remember. But if you'll give them to me on a piece of paper. I'll memorize them." I heard the purser laugh and say: "He'll do." "All right, Groby," the man in dark glasses said genially. "No harm done. Here's your profile and assignment. We'll make a scum skimmer out of you yetMove on." I moved on. A plant protection man grabbed my assignment and bawled at me: "Skimmers that way." "That way" was under the bottom tier of the building, into light even more blinding, down a corridor between evilsmelling, shallow tanks, and at last through a door into the central pylon of the structure. There was a welllit room which seemed like twilight after the triply reflected tropical Sun outside. "Skimmer?" said a man. I blinked and nodded at him. "I'm Mullane, shift assignment." He peered at my profile card. "We need a skimmer on the # th tier and we need a skimmer on the #st tier. Your bunk's going to be on the #rd tier of the pylon. Which would you rather work on? I ought to mention that we don't have elevators for skimmers and the other Class # people." "The #st-tier job." "That's very sensible." He just stood there, with seconds ticking away. At last he added: "I like to see a sensible man act sensible." There was another long pause. "I haven't any money on me," I told him. "I'll lend you some. Just sign this note and we can settle up on payday without any fuss It's just a simple assignment of five dollars." I read the note and signed it. I had to look at my profile card again; I had forgotten my first name. Mullane briskly scrawled "#" and his initials on my assignment, and hurried off. "I'm Mrs. Horrocks, the housing officer," a woman said sweetly to me. "Welcome to the Chlorella family, Mr. Groby. I hope you'll spend many happy years with us. Mr. Mullane told you this draft of crumbs -- that is, the present group of contracted -- will be housed on the #rd tier. It's my job to see that you're located with a congenial group of fellow-employees." Her face reminded me faintly of a tarantula as she went on: "We have one vacant bunk in Dorm Seven. Lots of nice , young men in Dorm Seven. It means so much to be among one's own kind of people -- " I got what she was driving at and told her I didn't want to be in Dorm Seven. She went on brightly: "Then there's Dorm Twelve. It's a rather rough crowd, I'm afraid, but you could carry a knife or something. Shall I put you down for Dorm Twelve, Mr. Groby?" "What else have you got? And by the way, I wonder if you could lend me five dollars until payday." "I'll put you down for Dorm Ten," she said, scribbling. "And of course I'll lend you some money. Ten dollars? Just sign and thumbprint this assignment, Mr. Groby. Thank you." She hurried off in search of the next sucker. A red-faced fat man gripped my hand. "Brother, I want to welcome you to the ranks of the United SlimeMold Protein Workers of Panamerica, Unaffiliated, Chlorella Costa Rica Local. This pamphlet will explain how the U. S. M. P. W. P. protects workers in the field from the innumable petty rackets and abuses that useta plague the innustry. Yer dues are checked off automatically, but this valable pamphlet is an extra." "What's the worst that can happen to me if I don't buy it?" "It's a long drop to the ground," he explained. He lent me five dollars to buy the pamphlet. Dorm Ten on the #rd tier; there was an endless cargo net we could grab hold of. It took daring to jump on and off, and clearance was negligible. With my motionsickness, the ride was torture, but I made it. The dorm was jammed with about sixty bunks, three high. Since production went on only during the daylight hours, the hotbed system wasn't in use. My bunk was all mine, twenty-four hours a day. Big deal. A sour-faced old man was sweeping the central aisle lackadaisically when I came in. "You a new crumb?" he asked, and looked at my ticket. "There's your bunk. I'm Pine. Room orderly. You know how to skim?" "No," I said. "Look, Mr. Pine, how do I make a phone call out of here?" "Dayroom," he said, jerking his thumb at the room adjoining. There was a phone and a biggish hypnoteleset and readers # and spools and magazines. I ground my teeth as the cover of Taunton's Weekly sparkled at me from the rack. The phone was a pay phone, of course. I dashed back into the dorm. "Mr. Pine," I said, "can you lend me about twenty dollars? I have to make a long-distance call." "Twenty-five for twenty?" "Sure. Anything you say." He scrawled out on assignment slip and I signed and thumbed it. Then he carefully counted out the money from his baggy pockets and handed it to me. I wanted to call Kathy, but didn't dare. She might be at her apartment, the hospital or in between, and I might miss her. I dialed the fifteen digits of the Fowler Schocken Associates number after I deposited a clanging stream of coins. I waited for the switchboard to say: "Fowler Schocken Associates, good afternoon; it's always a good afternoon for Fowler Schocken Associates and their clients. May I help you?" But that isn't what I heard. The phone said: "Su numero de priori dad, por favor?" Priority number for long-distance calls. I didn't have one. A firm had to be rated over a billion and fast pay before it could get a long-distance priority number in four figures. So expanded were the world's long lines that an individual priority in any number of figures was unthinkable. Naturally, that had never worried me when I made longdistance calls from Fowler Schocken. A priority number was one of the little luxuries I'd have to learn to live without I hung up slowly. I could write to everybody -- Kathy and Jack O'Shea and Fowler and Collier and Hester and Tildy. Leave no stone unturned. "Dear Wife (or Boss) : This is to advise you that your husband (or employee) is not really dead, but inexplicably a contract laborer for Costa Rican Chlorella and please drop everything and get him out. Signed, your loving husband (or employee), Mitchell Courtenay." But there was the company censor to think of. And cerebrin. I wandered blankly back into the dorm. The rest of the Dorm Ten people were beginning to drift in. "A crumb!" one of them yelled, sighting me. "Court's called to order!" another one trumpeted. I don't hold what followed against any of them. It was traditional, a break in the monotony, something they had all gone through themselves. In Dorm Seven, it would have been a memorably nasty experience, and in Dorm Twelve I might not have lived through it. Dorm Ten was just high-spirited. I paid my "fine" -- more pay vouchers -- and took my lumps and recited the blasphemous oath and then I was a full-fledged member. I didn't troop with them to the mess hall for dinner. I just lay on my bunk and wished I were as dead as the rest of the world thought 'I was. S cum-skimming was not hard to learn. You got up at dawn, gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest, then put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon, from sunrise to sunset, you walked slowly and every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You scooped up the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner -- more slices from Chicken Little -- and then you were on your own. You could talk, you could read, you could go into trance before the dayroom hypnoteleset, you could buy things, you could pick fights, you could drive yourself crazy thinking of what you might have been, or you could go to sleep. Mostly you went to sleep. Payday came as a surprise. I didn't know two weeks had slipped by. It left me owing Chlorella Proteins only eightyodd dollars and a few cents. Besides the various assignments I had made, there were the Employee Welfare Fund; union dues and installment on the initiation fee; withholding tax; hospitalization (but try and get it. the older men said); and old age insurance. One of the things I consoled myself with was the thought that when -- when, I always said firmly -- I got out, I'd be closer to the consumers than any ad man in the profession. Of course, at Fowler Schocken, we'd had our boys up from the ranks. I knew now that they had been afraid to give me the straight facts on consumers' lives and thoughts, or hadn't cared to admit them even to themselves. I learned that ads work more strongly on the unconscious than even we had thought. I was shocked repeatedly to hear advertising  referred to as "that bull." I was at first puzzled and then gratified to see it sink in and take effect anyway. The Venus-rocket response was naturally my greatest interest. For one week I listened when I could to enthusiasm growing among those men who would never go to Venus, who knew nobody who would ever go to Venus. I heard the limericks we had launched from Fowler Schocken Associates chuckled over, with their engineeredin message: that living on Venus increased male potency. Ben Winston's sub-section on Folkways, I had always said, was one of the most important talent groups in the whole Schocken enterprise. They were particularly fine on riddles: "Why do they call Venus the Mourning Star?" for instance. Well, it doesn't make sense in print; but the pun is basic humor, and the basic drive of the human race is sex. And what is more essential than to channel the deepest torrential flow of human emotion into its proper directions? (I am not apologizing for those renegades who talk fancifully about the "Death Wish" to hook their sales appeals to. I leave that sort of thing to the Tauntons of our profession; it's dirty, it's immoral, I want nothing to do with it. Besides, it leads to fewer consumers in the long run, if they'd only think the thing through.) For there is no doubt that linking a sales message to one of the great prime motivations of the human spirit does more than sell goods; it strengthens the motivation, helps it come to the surface, provides it with focus. And thus we are assured of the steady annual increment of consumers so essential to expansion. Chlorella, I was pleased to learn, took extremely good care of its workers' welfare in that respect. There was an adequate hormone component in the diet, and a splendid thousandbed Recreation Room on the #th Tier. The only stipulation the company made was that children born on the plantation were automatically indentured to Chlorella if either parent was still an employee on the child's tenth birthday. But I had no time for the Recreation Room. I was learning the ropes, studying my environment, waiting for opportunity to come. If opportunity didn't come soon, I would make one; bqt first I had to study and learn. Meanwhile, I kept my ears open for the results of the Venus campaign. It went beautifully -- for a while. The limericks, the planted magazine stories, the gay little songs had their effect. Then something went sour. The word "Venus" drifted out of the small talk. When the space rocket was mentioned, it was in connection with reference points like "radiation poisoning," "taxes," "sacrifice." There was a new, dangerous kind of Folkways material -- "Didja hear the one about the punchy that got caught in his spacesuit?" You might not have recognized what was going on, and Fowler Schocken, scanning his daily precis of the summary of the digests of the skeletonized reports of the abstracts of the charts of progress on Venus Project, would never have the chance to question what was told him. But I knew Venus Project and I knew what was happening. Matt Runstead had taken over. TT'HE aristocrat of Dorm Ten was Herrera. After ten years with Chlorella, he had worked his way up -- topographically, it was down -- to Master Slicer. He worked in the great, cool vault underground where Chicken Little grew and was cropped by him and other artisans. He swung a sort of two-handed sword that carved off great slabs of the tissue, leaving it to the packers and trimmers and their helpers to weigh it, shape it, freeze it, cook it, flavor it, package it and ship it off to the area on quota for the day. He had more than a production job: he was a safety valve. Chicken Little grew and grew, as she had been growing for decades. Since she had started as a lump of poultry tissue, she didn't know any better than to grow and fill her concrete vault and keep growing, compressing her cells and rupturing them. As long as she got nutrient, she grew. Herrera saw to it that she grew round and plump, that no tissue got old and tough before it was sliced, that one side was not neglected for the other. With this responsibility went commensurate pay, and yet Herrera had not taken a wife or an apartment in one of the upper tiers of the pylon. He made trips that were the subject of bawdy debate while he was gone -- and which were never referred to without careful politeness while he was present. He kept his twohanded slicer by him at all times, and often idly sleeked its edge with a hone. He was a man I had to know. He was a man with money -- he must have money after ten years -- and I needed it. The pattern of the B labor contract had become quite clear : you never got out of debt. Easy credit was part of the system, and so were irritants that forced you to exercise it. If I fell behind ten dollars a week, I would owe # to Chlorella at the end of my contract, and would have to work until the debt was wiped out. And while working, a new debt would accumulate. I needed Herrera's money to buy my way out of Chlorella and back to New York: Kathy, my wife; Venus Section, my job. Runstead was doing things I didn't like to Venus Section. And God alone knew what Kathy was doing, under the impression that she was a widow. I tried not to think of Jack O'Shea and Kathy. The little man had been getting back at women for their years of contempt. Until the age of twenty five, he had been a laughable sixty-pound midget, with a touch of grotesquerie in the fact that he had doggedly made himself a test pilot. At the age of twentysix. he found himself the world's foremost celebrity, the first man to land a ship on Venus. The story was that he'd been setting amatory records on his lecture tours. I didn't like the story. I didn't like the way he liked Kathy or the way Kathy liked him. A ND I went through another day, up at dawn, breakfast, coveralls and goggles, cargo net, skimming and slinging for blazing hour after hour, dinner and the dayroom and, if I could manage it, a chat with Herrera. "Fine edge on that slicer, Gus. There's only two kinds of people in the world -- the ones who don't take care of their tools and the smart ones." Suspicious look from under his Aztec brows. "Pays to do things right. You're the crumb, ain't you?" "Yeah. First time here. Think I ought to stay?" "You gotta stay. Contract. And he went to the magazine rack. Tomorrow's another day. "Hello, Gus. Tired?" "Hi, George. Yeah, a little. Ten hours swinging the slicer. It gets you in the arms." "I can imagine. Skimming's easy, but you don't need brains for it." "Well, maybe some day you get upgraded. I think I'll trance for a while." And another: "Hi, George. How's it going?" "Can't complain, Gus. At least I'm getting a suntan." "You sure are. Soon you be dark like me. Haw-haw! You pass for an Indian. How'd you like that?" '  "Porque no, amigo?" "Hey, tu hablas espanol! Cuando aprendes la lengua ?" "Not so fast, Gus! Just a few words here and there. I wish I knew more. Some day, when I get a few bucks ahead, I'm going to town and see the girls." "Oh, they all speak English, kind of. If you get a nice steady girl, it would be nice to speak a little Spanish. She would appreciate it. But most of them know 'Gimme-gimme' and the English poem about what you get for one buck. Haw-haw!" And another day -- an astonishing day. m T'D been paid again, and my debt increased by eight dollars. I'd tormented myself by wondering where the money went, but I knew. I came off shift dehydrated, as they wanted me to be. I got a squirt of Popsie from the fountain by punching my combination -- twenty-five cents checked off my payroll. The squirt wasn't quite enough, so I had another -- fifty cents. Dinner was drab, as usual; I couldn't face more than a bite or two of Chicken Little. Later I was hungry and there was the canteen where I got Crurichies on easy credit. The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain. And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies... Had Fowler Schocken thought of it in these terms when he organized Starrzelius Verily, the first spherical trust? Popsie to Crunchies to Starrs to Popsie? And you paid six per cent interest on the money advanced you. If I didn't get out soon, I never would. I could feel my initiative dying, cell by cell, within me. The minute dosages of alkaloid were sapping my will, but most of all it was a hopeless, trapped feeling that things would always be this way, that it wasn't too bad, that you could go into a trance or get really lit on Popsie or maybe try one of the green capsules that floated around from hand to hand at varying quotations; the boys would be glad to wait for the money. It had to be soon. "Como ' sta , Gustavo ?" He sat down and gave me his Aztec grin. "Se fumar?" He extended a pack of cigarettes. They were Greentips. I said automatically: "No, thanks. I smoke Starrs; they're tastier." And automatically I lit one, of course. "I don't feel so happy, amigo." This was it. "I'm in a very strange situation." Wait for him now. "I figured there was something wrong. An intelligent fellow like you, a fellow who's been around. Maybe you can use some help?" Wonderful; wonderful. "You won't lose by it, Gus. You're taking a chance, but you won't lose by it. Here's the story -- " "Sst! Not here!" he shushed me. In a lower voice he went on: "It's always a risk. It's always worth it when I see a smart young fellow wise up and begin to do things. Some day I make a mistake, seguro. Then they get me, maybe they brainburn me. What the hell, I can laugh at them. I done my part. Here. I don't have to tell you to be careful where you open this." He shook my hand and I felt a wad of something adhere to my palm. Then he strolled across the dayroom to the hypnoteleset, punched his clock number for a half-hour trance and slid under, with the rest of the viewers. punched my combination for a ten-minute occupancy of a booth -- bang went another dime off my pay -- and went in. The adhesive wad on my palm opened up into a single sheet of tissue paper which said: This is Contact Sheet One of the World Conservationist Association, generally known as "the Connies." It has been passed to you by a member of the W.C.A. who judged that you are (a) intelligent: (b) disturbed by the present state of the world; (c) a potentially valuable addition to our ranks. His life is now in your hands. We ask you to read on before you take any action. Facts About The W.C.A. The W.C.A. is a secret organization persecuted by all the governments of the world. It believes that reckless exploitation of natural resources has created needless poverty and needless human misery. It believes that continued exploitation will mean the end of human life on Earth. It believes that this trend may be reversed if the people of the Earth can be educated to the point where they will demand planning of population, reforestation, soil-building, de-urbanization and an end to the wasteful production of gadgets and proprietary foods for which there is no natural demand. This educational program is being carried on by propaganda like this, by demonstrations of force and sabotage of factories which produce trivia. Falsehoods About The W.C.A. You have probably heard that "the Connies" are murderers, psychotics and incompetent people who kill and destroy for irrational ends or out of envy... None of this is true. W.C.A. members are humane, balanced persons, many of them successful in the eyes of the world. There are irrational, unbalanced and criminal persons who do commit outrages in the name of conservation, either idealistically or as a shield for looting. The W.C.A. dissociates itself from such people and regards their activities with repugnance. What Will You Do Next? That is up to you. You can (a) denounce the person who passed you this contact sheet; (b) destroy this sheet and forget about it; (c) go to the person who passed you the Sheet and seek further information. We ask you to think before you act. I thought -- hard. I thought the broadside was (a) the dullest, lousiest piece of copy smithing I had ever seen in my life; (b) a wildly distorted version of reality; (c) a possible escape route for me out of Chlorella and back to Kathy. So these were the dreaded Connies! Of all the self-contradictory gibberish -- yet it had a certain appeal. The ad was crafted -- unconsciously, I was sure -- the way we'd do a pharmaceutical booklet for doctors only. Calm, learned, we're all men of sound judgment and deep scholarship here.  It was an appeal to reason, and that's always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it. Well, there were obviously two ways to o it. I could go to the front office and put the finger on Herrera. I'd get a little publicity, maybe; they'd listen to me, maybe; they would certainly believe enough of what I told them to check. I seemed to recall that denouncers of Connies were sometimes brainburned on the sensible grounds that they had been exposed to the virus. Riskier, but more heroic: I could bore from within, playing along with the Connies. If they were the worldwide net they claimed to be, I might be able to reach Kathy and Fowler Schocken through them -- I was smart enough to use them without being used. riiHE door of the booth sprang open; my ten minutes were up. I hastily flushed the contact sheet down the drain and went out into the dayroom. Herrera was stijl in the trance before the set. Finally he shook himself, blinked and looked around. He saw me and his face was granite. I smiled and nodded, and he came over. "All right, companero?" he asked quietly. "All right," I said. "Any time you say, Gus." "Always, after a thing like that, I plug in for some trance. I cannot stand the suspense of waiting to find out. Some day I come up out of trance and find the bulls are beating hell out of me, eh?" He began to sleek the edge of his slicer with the pocket hone. I looked at it with new understanding. "For the bulls?" I asked. His face was shocked. "You have the wrong idea a little. For me. So I have no chance to rat." I hated the twisted minds that had done such a thing to a fine consumer like Gus. It was something like murder. He could have played his part in the world, buying and using and making work and profits for his brothers all around the globe, ever increasing his wants and needs, ever increasing everybody's work and profits in the circle of consumption, raising children to be consumers in turn. It hurt to see him perverted into a sterile zealot. Surely there must be some sort of remedial treatment for Connies like Gus who were only dupes. It was the people who had soured him on the world who should pay. I would ask -- no, it would be better not to. People would jump to conclusions: "Once a Connie, always a Connie." "Everybody knows that. I don't say Mitch isn't sound, mind you, but -- " The hell with Herrera. Anyone who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to squawk if he gets caught in its gears. IX rera talked little to me, until, one evening in the dayroom, he suddenly asked: "You ever see Gallina?" That was Chicken Little. I said no. "Come on down, then. I can get you in. She is something to see." We walked through corridors and leaped for the descending cargo net. I resolutely shut my eyes. You look straight down that thing and you get the highsky horrors. Tier Forty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten, Zero, Minus Ten -- "Jump oft'," Herrera said. "Below Minus Ten is the machinery." I jumped. Minus Ten was gloomy and sweated water from its concrete walls. The roof was supported by immense beams. A tangle of pipes jammed thecorridor where we got off. "Nutrient fluid," Herrera explained. I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling. "Concrete and lead. It shields cosmic rays. Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer." He spat. "No good to eat for people. You got to burn it all if you don't catch it real fast -- " He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meant by "catch." He swung open a door. "This is her nest," he said proudly. I looked and gulped. It was a great concrete dome. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a graybrown, rubbery hemisphere towering over and away from us, as huge as a hypnomovie palace. Dozens of pipes ran into her. You could see that she was alive. Herrera said to me: "All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice." His two-handed blade shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. "Crumbs behind me hook it away and cut it up and put it on the conveyor." There were tunnel openings spotted around the circumference of the dome, with idle conveyor belts visible in them. "Doesn't she grow at night?" "No. They turn down the nutrient just enough, they let the waste run off. Each night she almost dies. Each morning she comes to life like Santo Lazaro. But nobody ever pray before pobrecifa jGallina, hey?" He whacked the rubbery thing af# fectionately with the flat of his sheer. "You like her," I said inanely. "Sure. She does tricks for me." He looked around and then marched the circuit of the nest, peering into each of the tunnel mouths. Then he took a short beam from one of them and casually braced it against the door to the nest. It fitted against a crossbar on the door and against a seemingly random groove in the concrete floor. It would do very well as a lock. "I'll show you the trick." He took out a sort of whistle. Instead of a mouthpiece, it had an air tank fed by a small hand pump. "They call it Galton's whistle, but who this Galton is, I don't know. Watch -- and listen." He began working the pump, pointing the whistle purposefully at Chicken Little. I heard no sound, but I shuddered as the rubbery protoplasm bulged away from the pipe in a hemispherical depression. "Don't be scared, companero he told me. "Just follow." He passed me a flashlight which I stupidly turned on. Pumping hard, Herrera played the soundless blast of the whistle against Chicken Little like a hose. She reacted with a bigger and bigger cavity that finally became an archway over the concrete floor of the nest. Herrera walked into the archway, saying: "Follow." I did, my heart pounding frightfully. He inched forward, pumping the whistle, and the archway became a dome. The entrance into Chicken Little behind us became smaller... smaller... We were inside a hemispherical bubble moving slowly through a giant lump of gray-brown, rubbery flesh. "Light on the floor," he said, and I flashed it there. The concrete was marked with lines that looked accidental, but which guided Herrera's feet. After endless inch by inch progress, I flashed my light on a crescent of metal. Herrera piped the bubble over it, and it became a disk. Still pumping, he stamped three times and it flipped open like a manhole. "You first," he said, and I dived down, not knowing or caring whether the landing would be hard or soft. It was soft, and I lay there, shuddering. A moment later Herrera landed beside me and the manhole above clapped shut. He stood up, massaging his arm. "Hard work," he said. "I pump and pump that thing and I don't hear it. Some day it's going to stop working and I won't know the difference until -- " He grinned again. "This is Ronnie Bowan." He was a short, phlegmatic consumer in a front-office suit. "And this is Arturo Denzer." Denzer was very young and nervous. The place was a well-lighted little office, all concrete, with air regenerators. There were desks and communication equipment. It was hard to believe that the only way to get in was barred by that mountain of protoplasm above. It was harder to believe that the squeak of inaudibly highfrequency sound waves could goad that insensate hulk into moving aside. "Pleaised to have you with us, Groby," Bowen said. "Herrera says you, have brains. We don't go in for a great deal of red tape, but I want your profile." I gave him Groby's profile and he took it down. His mouth tightened with suspicion as I told him the low educational level. "You don't talk like an urtedueated man." "You know how some kids are," I said. "I spent my time reading and viewing. It's tough being right in the middle of a family of five. You aren't old enough to be respected and you aren't young enough to be the pet. I felt kind of lost and I kept trying to better myself." "Fair enough. Now. what can you do?" "Well, I think I can write a better contact sheet than you use." "Indeed. What else?" "Well, propaganda generally. Things to make people feel discontented and wake them up." "Give me an example." My brain was chugging nicely. "Start a rumor going around that they've got a way of making new protein and you'll be able to buy it at a dollar a pound. Say it's going to be announced in three days. Then when the three days are up and there's no announcement, start a wisecrack going. Something like that catches on and it'll make them think about the old days favorably." It was easy. This wasn't the first time I'd turned my talent to backing a product I didn't care for personally. Bowen was taking it down on a silenced typewriter. "Good," he said. "We'll try that. Why do you say three days?" I couldn't very well tell him that three days was the optimum priming period for a closed social circuit to be triggered with a catalytic cue-phrase, which was the book answer. I said instead, with embarrassment: "It seemed about right to me." "Well, we'll see if it works. Now, Groby, you're going to have a study period. We've got the classic conservationist texts, and you should read them. We've got special publications of interest to us which you should follow: Statistical Abstracts, Journal of Space Flight, Biometrika, Agricultural Bulletin and lots more. If you run into tough going, and I expect you will, ask for help. Eventually you should pick a subject to which you're attracted and specialize in it, with an eye to research. An informed conservationist is an effective conservationist." "Why the Journal of Space Flight?" I asked, with a growing excitement. Suddenly there seemed to be an answer: Runstead's sabotage, my kidnaping, the infinite delays and breakdowns in the project. Could the Connies, in their depraved, illogical minds, have decided that space travel was anti-survival, or whatever you called it? "Very important," said Bowen. "You need to know all you can about it." "So we can louse it up?" "Good God, think what Venus means to us -- an unspoiled planet, all the wealth the race needs, all the fields and food and raw materials! Use your head, man!" "Oh," I said, watching my theory evaporate. Biometrika and every once in a while asked for an explanation I didn't need. Biometrika was one of the everyday tools of a copysmith. It holds the story of population changes, IQ changes, death-rate and causes of death and all the rest of it. Almost every issue had good news in it for us -- the same news that these Connies clucked over. Increase of population v was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales. But these eccentrically oriented fanatics couldn't see it that way and I had to pretend to go along with them. I switched to the Journal of Space Flight after a while. The news was bad -- all bad. There was public apathy, sullen resistance to the shortages that the Venus rocket construction entailed, defeatism about planting a Venus colony at all, doubt that the colony could do anything if it ever did get planted. That lousy Runstead! But the worst news of all was on the cover of the latest issue. The outline said: "Jack O'Shea Grins as Pretty Friend Congratulates with Kiss after President Awards Medal of Honor." The pretty friend was my wife Kathy. I got behind the Connie cell then and pushed. In three days there was a kind of bubbling discontent about the chow. In a week the consumers were saying things like: "I wish to hell I was born a hundred years ago... I wish to hell this Dorm wasn't so damned crowded... I wish to hell I could get out on a piece of land somewhere and work for myself." The cell was elated. Apparently I had done more in a week than they had done in a year. Bowen -- he was stationed in Personnel -- told me: "We need a head like yours, Groby. You're not going to sweat your life away as a scum-skimmer. One of these days the assignment boss will ask you if you know nutrient chemistry. Tell him yes. I'll give you a quickie course in everything you need to know." It happened in another week, when everybody was saying things like: "Be nice to walk in a forest some day. Can y'imagine all those trees they useta have?" and: "This stinking salt-water soap!" when it had never occurred to them to think of it as "salt-water soap." The assignment boss came up to me and duly said : "Groby, you know any nutrient chemistry?" "Funny you should ask," I told him. "I've studied it quite a bit. I know the sulfur-phosphorus-carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen ratios for chlorella, and I know the optimum temperatures and stuff like that." Obviously this little was more than he knew. He grunted, "Yeah?" and went away, impressed. A week later everybody was telling a dirty joke about the Starrzelius Verily trust and I was transferred to an eight-hour job inside the pylon, reading gauges and twisting valves that controlled the nutrient flow to the tanks of chlorella. It was lighter and easier work. I spent my time under Chicken Little -- I could pass through her with a Galton whistle almost without cringing -- rewriting the Connies' fantastically inept Contact Sheet One: You and only you can answer these important questions: Are you an intelligent, forwardlooking man or woman between the ages of # and #Do you have the drive and ambition m Can you be trusted -- absolutely trusted -- with the biggest, hopefulest news of our time? to every one of those questions, please read no further! But if you can, then you and your friends or family can get in on the ground floor of. And so on. Bowen was worried. "You don't think that appeal to upperlevel IQs limits it too much, do you?" he asked anxiously. I didn't tell him that the only difference between that and the standard come-on for Class # laborers was that Class #s got it aurally -- they couldn't read. I said I didn't think so. He nodded. "You're a naturalborn copysmith, Groby," he told me solemnly. "In a Conservationist America, you'd be star class." I was properly modest. He went on, "I can't hog you; I've got to pass you on to a higher echelon. It isn't right to waste your talents in a cell. I've forwarded a report on you -- " he gestured at the communicator -- "and I expect you'll be requisitioned. I hate to see you go, but I'm pulling the strings already. Here's the Chlorella Purchaser's Handbook..." My heart, bounded. I knew that Chlorella contracted for raw materials in New York City. "Tqnks," I mumbled. "I want to servei wherever I can.""I know you do, Groby. Uh -- one thing before you go. This isn't official, George, but -- well, I do a little writing, too. I've got some of my things here --  sketches, I guess you'd call them -- and I'd appreciate it a lot if you'd take them along and..." I finally got out with the har#dbook and only fourteen of Bowen's "sketches," They were churlish little scraps of writing, with no sale in them at all that I could see. Bowen assured me he had lots more that he and I could work on. I hit that handbook hard. ing more alive at the end of a day than scum-skimming, and Bowen made sure my Connie labors were as light as possible --  to f,.e me for work on his "sketches." The result was that, for the first time, I had leisure to explore. Herrera took me into town with him once, and I discovered what he did with those unmentioned weekends. The knowledge shocked and yet did not disgust me. If anything, it reminded me that the gap between the executive and consumer could not be bridged by anything as abstract and unreal as "friendship." Stepping but of the old-fashioned pneumatic tube into a Costa Rican drizzle, we stopped at a third-rate restaurant for a meal. Herrera insisted on getting us each a potato and being allowed to pay for it -- "No, call it a celebration. You let me go on living after I gave you the contact sheet, no? So we celebrate." meal, a fountain of conversation and bilingual badinage with me and the waiters. The sparkle in his eye, the rapid, compulsive flow of speech, the easy, unnecessary laughter were like nothing so much as the gaiety of a young man on a date. I remembered my first meeting with Kathy, that long afternoon at Central Park, strolling hand in hand down the dim-lit corridors, the dance hall, the eternal hour we stood outside her door... Herrera reached over and pounded me on the shoulder, and I saw that he and the waiter were laughing. I laughed, too, defensively, and their laughter doubled; evidently the joke had been n me. "Never mind," said Herrera, sobering; "we go now. You will like what I have for us to do in back, I think." He paid the check and we threaded our way between the counters, the waiter leading the way. He opened a door and hissed something rapid in Spanish to Herrera. "Oh, don't worry," Herrera told him. "We will not be long." "In back" turned out to be -- a library. I was conscious of Herrera's eyes on me, and I don't think I showed any of what I felt. I even stayed with him for an hour or so, while he devoured a wormy copy of something called Moby Dick and I glanced through half a dozen ancient magazines. Some of those remembered classics went a long way toward easing my conscience -- there was actually an early "Do You Make These Common Mistakes in English?" and a "Not a Cough in a Carload" that would have looked fine on the wall of my office, back in Schocken Tower. But I could not relax in the presence of so many books without a word of advertising in any of them. I am not a prude about solitary pleasures when they serve a useful purpose, but my tolerance has limits. Herrera knew, I think, that I lied when I told him I had a headache. Much later, he came stumbling into the Dorm and I turned my head away. We scarcely spoke after that. A week later, after a near-riot sparked by a rumor that the yeast fritters were adulterated with sawdust, I was summoned to the front office. A veep for Personnel saw me after I had waited an hour. "Groby ?" "Yes, Mr. Milo." "Remarkable record you've made. Quite remarkable. I see your efficiency rating is straight fours." That was Bowen's work. He kept records. He had taken five years to worm himself into that very spot. "Thank you, Mr. Milo." "Welcome, I'm sure. We, uh, happen to have a vacancy approaching. One of our people up North. I see his work is falling off badly." Not his work -- the ghost of his work, the shadow on paper carefully outlined and filled in by Bowen. I began to appreciate the disproportionate power that Connies could wield. "Do you happen to have any interest in purchasing, Groby?" "Strange that you sensed it, Mr. Milo," I said evenly. "I've always had a feel for purchasing...Read everything I could find on the subject." He began firing questions and I respectfully regurgitated answers from the Chlorella manual. He had memorized it twentyodd years ago and I had memorized it only a week ago, so he was no match for me. After an hour he was convinced that George Groby was the very man needed for Chlorella Protein. ! That night I told the cell about it. "It means New York," Bowen said positively. I couldn't keep back a great sigh. Kathy! He went on unaware: "I've got to issue you some -- equipment. Look into my mouth." passable bridge and nothing else as far as I could see. I told him so. Bowen grinned. "By popping my lower jaw out and biting down hard, I can kill myself in a fifth of a second. One of those pure nicotine. You're going to get one like it." "The hell I am!" I started to say, and then shut up. The game was risky enough. "Our records," he said, taking a kit from a desk drawer, "contain, only a single case of the filling being accidentally perforated. It never could happen again nothing to worry about. Open your mouth, please." I opened. "Bite, please." I bit. "There!" "Done?" I muttered, curiously reluctant to close my mouth. "All done," he said. "Let me. see you bite. Harder... harder... harder. That's it!" He touched  a molar with a tweezer. "That's the one. You just bite down on it if captured. And for God's sake, have one of us remove it temporarily before you go to the dentist." "I'll do that," I said faintly. "Now," he said, "the recognition signals." There was a hand sign for short range, a grand hailing sign of distress for medium range. For long range there was a newspaper-ad code; quite a good one. He made me practice the sins and memorize the code until the small hours of the morning. When we left through Chicken Little, I realized that I hadn't seen Herrera all day. I asked as we emerged what had happened. "He broke," Bowen said bluntiyI didn't say anything. A kind of shorthand talk among Connies, it meant : "Herrera toiled for years and years in the cause of the W. C. A. He gave up his nickels and dimes and the few pleasures they could buy him. He didn't marry and he didn't sleep with women because it would have imperiled security. He became possessed by doubts so secret that he didn't admit them to himself or us. The doubts and fears mounted. He was torn too many ways and he died." "Don't brood about it," Bowen said. "You're going North. You've got a job to do." I did. A big job. X most respectably, in a cheap front-office suit, aboard a tourist rocket, steerage class. Above me the respectable Costa Rican consumers oohed and ahed at the view from the prism windows or anxiously counted their few bills, wondering how far they'd go in the pleasures for sale by the colossus of the North. Below decks we were a shabbier, tougher gang, yet it was no labor freighter. We had no windows, but we had lights and vending machines and buckets. A plant protection man had made a little speech to us before we loaded: "You crumbs are going North, out of Costa Rican jurisdiction. You're going to better jobs. But don't forget that they are jobs. You're in hock to Chlorella, and Chlorella's claim on you is a prior lien. If any Of you think you can disappear or break your contract, you're going to find out just how fast extradition for a commerical offense can be. Is everything clear?" Everything was clear. "All right, crumbs. Get aboard and give my regards to upper Broadway." We slid into a landing at Montauk without incident. Down below, we sat and waited while the consumers on tourist deck filed out. carrying their baggage kits. Then we sat and waited while Food Customs inspectors, wearing the red-and-white A  P armbands, argued vociferously with our stewards over the surplus rations -- one man had died on the trip, and the stewards, of course, held out his Chicken Little cutlets to sell in the open market. Finally the order came to fall out in fifties. We lined up and had our wrists stamped with our entry permits, marched by squads to the subway, and entrained for the city. I had a bit of luck -- my group drew a freight compartment. At the Labor Exchange we were sorted out and tagged for our respective assignments. There was a bit of a scare when it came out that Chlorella had sold the contracts on twenty of us to I. G. Farben -- nobody wants to work in the uranium mines -- but I wasn't worried. The man next to me stared moodily as the guards cut out the unlucky twenty and herded them off. "It's a crime. Don't you think so, Mac? It violates the essential dignity of labor, what I call." I gave him an angry glare. The man was a Connie, pure and simple. Then I remembered that I was a Connie, too. for the time being. I considered the use of the handclasp and decided against it. He would be worth remembering if I needed help; but if I revealed myself prematurely, he might call on me. We moved on to the Chlorella depot in Nyack suburbs. New York, as under every city in the world, the seVvage drains led to a series of settling basins and traps. Every citizen knows how the organic waste of came waterborne through the venous tracery of the city's drains: how the salts were neutralized through ion-exchange, the chemically rich liquid piped to the kelp farms in Long Island Sound, the sludge that remained pumped into tank barges for shipment to Chlorella. I knew about it, but I had never seen or smelled it. My title was Procurement Expeditor, Class Nine. My job was coupling the flexible hoses that handled the sludge. After the first day, I shot a week's pay of sootextractor plugs for my nostrils; they didn't filter out all the odor, but they made it possible to live in it. On the third day I came off the shift and hit the showers. I had figured it out in advance: After six hours at the tanks where there were no vending machines for the simple reason that no . one could conceivably eat, drink or smoke anything in that atmosphere, the pent-up cravings of the crew kept them on the Popsie-Crunchie-Starrs cycle for half an hour before the first man even thought of a shower. By sternly repressing the craving, weaker in me than in most because it had had less time to become established, I managed to have the showers almost alone. When the mob arrived,  hit the vending machines. It was a simple application of intelligence, and if that doesn't bear out the essential difference between consumer and star class mentality, what does? Of course, as I say, the habits weren't as strong in me. There was one other man in the shower, but, with only two of us, we hardly touched. He handed me the soap as I came in; I lathered and let the water roar down over me under the full pressure of the recirculators. I was hardly aware he was there. As I passed the soap back to him, though, I felt his third finger touch my wrist, the index finger circle around the base of my thumb. "Oh," I said stupidly, and returned the handclasp. "Are you my contact -- " "SshJ" He gestured at the Muzak spy-mike dangling from the ceiling. He turned his back on me and meticulously soaped himself again. When he returned the soap, a scrap of paper clung to it. In the locker room I squeezed it dry, spread it out. It read: "Tonight is pass night. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Classics Room. Be in front of the Maidenform Exhibit at exactly five minutes before closing time." I joined the queue at the supervisor's desk as soon as I was dressed. In less than half an hour, I had a stamped pass authorizing me to skip bedcheck for the night. I caught the shuttle down to Bronxville, transferred to a north-bound local, rode one station, switched to the south-bound side and got out at Schocken Tower. No one appeared to be following me. I hadn't expected anyone to, but it never pays to take chances. My Connie rendezvous at the Met was almost four hours off. I stood around in the lobby until a cop, contemptously eying my cheap clothing, moved toward me. I had hoped Hester or perhaps even Fowler Schocken himself might come through. No such luck. I saw a good many faces I recognized, of course, but none I was sure I could trust. And, until I found out what lay behind the double cross on Starrzelius Glacier. I had no intention of telling just anybody that I was still alive. The Pinkerton said, "You want to give the Schocken people your business, crumb? You got a big account for them, maybe?" "Sorry," I said, and headed for the street door. It didn't figure that he would bother to follow me through the crowd in the lobby; he didn't. I dodged around the recreation room, where a group of consumers were watching a PregNot love story on the screen and getting their samples of Coffiest, and ducked into the service elevators. "Eightieth," I said to the operator, and at once realized I had blundered. The operator's voice said sharply through the speaker grille; "Service elevators go only to the seventieth floor, you in Car Five. What do you want?" "Messenger," I lied miserably. "I got to make a pickup from Mr. Schocken's office. I told them I wouldn't be let into Mr. Schocken's office, a fellow like me. I told them, 'Look, he's probably got twenny-five seckatarieS I got to go through before they let me see him.' I said -- " "The mail room is on fortyfive," the operator said, a shade less sharply. "Stand in front of the door so I can see you." I moved into range of the TV ike. I had never been in the elevator operators' room, a thousand feet below me, where they pushed the buttons that triggered the relays that sent the cars up and down the toothed shafts; but I would have given a year's pay to have been able to look into it then. I stood there for half a minute. Then the operator's voice said noncommittally. "All right, you. Back in the car. Fortyfifth floor, first slide to the left." The others in the car stared at me through an incurious haze of Coffiest's alkaloids until I got out. I stepped on the leftbound slidewalk and went past the door marked "Mail Room" to the corridor juncture where my slidewalk dipped down around its roller. It took me a little while to find the stairway, but that was all right. I needed the time to catch up on my swearing. I didn't dare use the elevators again. Have you ever climbed thirtyfive flights of stairs? dors in executive country, very conscious of the fact that the first person who paid any attention to me would either recognize me or throw me out. Only clerks were in the corridors, and none I'd known at all well; my luck was running strong. But not strong enough. Fowler Schocken's office was locked. I ducked into the office of his secretary #, which was deserted, and thought things over. Fowler usually played a few holes of golf at the country club after Work. It was pretty late for him still to be there, but I thought I might as well take the chance -- though it was four more flights to the club. I made it standing up. The country club was a handsome layout, which was only fair because the dues were handsome, too. Besides the golf links, the tennis court and other sports facilities, the whole north end of the room was woods -- more than a dozen beautifully simulated trees -- and at least twenty recreation booths for reading, watching movies or any other spectator pleasure. A mixed foursome was playing golf. I moved close to their seats as unobtrusively as possible. They were intent on their dials and buttons, guiding their players along the twelfth hole fairway. I read their scores from the telltale with a sinking heart: all were in the high nineties. Duffers. Fowler Schocken averaged under eighty for the course and couldn't be in a group like that. As I came close, I saw that both the men were strangers to me. I hesitated before retreating, trying to decide what to do next. Schocken wasn't in sight anywhere in the club. Conceivably he was in one of the recreation booths, but I could scarcely dare open the doors of all of them to see. One of the girls had just sunk a four-inch putt to finish the hole. Smiling happily as the others complimented her, she leaned forward to pull the lever that brought the puppet players back to the tee and changed the layout to the dogleg of the thirteenth hole, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was Hester, my secretary. I couldn't guess how Hester came to be in the country club, but I knew everything else there was to know about Hester. I retreated to an alcove near the entrance to the ladies' room. It was only about ten minutes wait before Hester showed up. She fainted, of course. the alcove. There was a couch; I put her on it. There was a door; I closed it. She blinked up at me as consciousness came back. "Mitch," she choked. "You can't be. You're dead." "I am not dead," I told her. "Somebody else died and they switched bodies. I don't know who 'they' are. Yes, it's really me. Mitch Courtenay, your boss. I can prove it. For instance, remember last year's Christmas party, when you were so worried about -- " "Never mind," she said hastily. "My God, Mitch -- I mean Mr. Courtenay -- " "Mitch is good enough. I'm alive, all right, but I'm in a kind of peculiar mess. I've got to get in touch with Fowler Schocken. Can you fix it right away?" She swallowed and reached for a cigarette. Recovering, I automatically took out a Starr. "Mr. Schocken's on the Moon. It's a big secret, but I guess I can tell you. It's something to do with the Venus project. After you got killed -- well, you know what I mean -- after that, when he put Mr. Runstead on the project and it began to slip, he decided to take matters into his own hands. I gave him all your notes. One of them said something about the Moon, I guess. Anyway, he took off a couple of days ago." "Who'd he leave in charge here? Harvey Bruner? Can you reach -- " Hester was shaking her head. "Mr. Schocken switched in such a hurry, there wasn't anyone to spare to take over his job except Mr. Runstead. But I can call him right away." "No!" I looked at my watch and groaned. I would have just about time to make it to the Met. "I've got to leave. Don't say anything to anybody, will you? I'll figure something out and call you. Let's see, when I call I'll say I'm -- what's the name of that doctor of your mother's? -- Dr. Gallant. And I'll arrange to meet you and tell you what we're going to do. I can count on you, Hester, can't I?" "Sure, Miteh," she said breathlessly. "Fine. Now you'll have to convoy me down in the elevator. I haven't got time to walk and there'll be trouble if a guy like me gets caught on the club floor." I stopped and looked her over. "Speaking of which, what in the world are you doing here?" Hester blushed. "After you were gone, there weren't any other secretarial jobs. The rest of the executives had their girls and I just couldn't be a consumer again, Mitch, not with the bills and all. And -- well, there was this opening up here, you see." I hope nothing showed on my face; God knows I tried. Damn you to hell, Runstead, I said to myself, thinking of Hester's mother and Hester's young man that she'd maybe been going to marry some day, and a man like Runstead wrecking executives' lives like mine and staff lives like Hester's and dragging them down to the level of consumers. "Don't worry, Hester," I said gently. "I'll make everything up to you." I knew how to do it, too. Quite a lot of the girls on the ZZ contract managed to avoid the automatic renewal and downgrading. It would cost a lot for me to buy out her Contract before the yearwas up, so that was out of the question; but some of the girls did pretty well with single executives after their first year. And I was important enough so that if I made a suggestion to some branch head or bureau chief, he would not be likely to ignore it, or even to treat her badly. I don't approve of sentiment in business matters, but this was a special situation. me some money, so I made it to the Met with time to spare by taking a pedicab. Even though I had paid the driver in advance, he could not refrain from making a nasty comment about highliving consumers as I got out. I have always had a fondness for the Met. I don't go for religion -- partly, I suppose, because it's a Taunton account -- but there is a grave, ennobling air about the grand old masterpieces in the Met that gives me a feeling of peace and reverence. I spent my few spare minutes standing silently before the bust of G. Washington Hill, and I felt more self-assured than I had since that first afternoon at the South Pole. At precisely five minutes before midnight. I was standing before the big. late-period Maidenform -- number # in the catalogue: "I Dreamed I went Ice-Fishing in My Maidenform Bra" -- when I became conscious of someone whistling in the corridor behind me. The notes were irrelevant; the cadence formed one of the recognition signals I'd learned in the cell room under Chicken Little. One of the guards was strolling away. She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled. To all external appearances, it was a casual pickup. We linked arms, and I felt the coded pressure of her fingers on my wrist: D-O-N-T T-A-L-K W-H-E-N I L-E-A-V-E Y-O-U G-# T-# T-H-E B-A-C-K #-F T-H-E R-O-O-M S-I-T D-O-W-N A-N-D W-A-I-T I nodded. She took me to a plastic-finished door, pushed it open, pointed inside. I went in alone. There were ten or fifteen consumers sitting in straight-back chairs, facing an elderly consumer with a lectorial goatee. I found a seat in the back of the room and sat in it. No one paid any particular attention to me. The lecturer was covering the high spots of some particularly boring pre-commercial period. I listened with half my mind, trying to catch some point of similarity in the varying types around me. All were Connies, I was reasonably sure -- else why would I be here? But the basic stigmata, the surface mark of the lurking fanatic inside that should have been apparent, escaped me. They were all consumers, with the pinched look that soyaburgers and Yeasties inevitably give; but I could have passed any of them in the street without a second glance. Yet this was New York, and Bowen had spoken of it as though the Connies I'd meet here were pretty high up in the scale. That was a consideration, too. When I got out of this mess -- when I got through to Fowler Schocken and cleared my status -- I might be in a position to break up this whole filthy conspiracy. I looked over the persons in the room a little more attentively, memorizing their features. I didn't want to fail to recognize them, next time we came in contact. There must have been some sort of signal, but I missed it. The lecturer stopped almost in mid-sentence, and a plump little man in a goatee from the first row stood up. "All right," he said in an ordinary tone, "we're all present and there's no sense wasting any more time. We're against waste; that's why we're here. For the purpose of this meeting, we'll use numbers. You can call me 'One,' you 'Two' -- " he pointed to the man in the next seat -- "and so on by rows to the back of the room. All clear? "Now listen closely. This is world operational headquarters, right here in New York; you can't go any higher. Each of you was picked for some special quality -- you know what they are. You'll all get assignments tonight. But before you do, I want to point out one thing. You don't know me and I don't know you; every one of you got a big buildup from your last cells, but sometimes the men in the field get a little too enthusiastic. If they were wrong about you... Well, you understand these things, eh?" There was a general nod. I nodded, too, but I paid particular attention to memorizing that little goatee. One by one, numbers were called, and the newjohns got up, conferred briefly with the goatee, and left, in couples and threes, for unannounced destinations. I was almost the last to be called. Only a very young girl with orange hair and a cast in her eye was still in the room. "Okay, you two," said the man with the goatee. "You are going to be a team, so you might as well know names. Groby, meet Corwin. Groby 's a kind of copysmith. Celia's an artist." "Right," she said, lighting a Starr. A perfert consumer type, if only she hadn't been corrupted by these zealots: I noticed her jaws working on Hi-Kick Gum even while she smoked. "We'll get along fine," I said approvingly. "You sure will," said the man in the goatee. "You have to. In order to give you a chance to show what you can do, we'll have to let you know a lot of stuff that we don't want to read in the morning paper. If you don't work out for us, you see the fix we'll be in." He tapped a little bottle of colorless fluid on the desk top. The tinny rattle of the aluminum top was no tinnier than my voice as I said, "Yes, sir," because I knew what little bottles of colorless fluid could be assumed to contain. It turned out, though, that it wasn't much of a problem. I spent three difficult hours in that little room, then pointed out that if I didn't get back to barracks I. would miss the morning work call and there would be hell to pay. So they excused me. But I missed work call anyhow. I came out of the Museum into a perfect spring dawn, feeling, all in all, pretty content with life. A figure loomed out of the smog and peered into my face. I recognized the sneering face of the solo taxi-pusher who had brought me to the Museum. He said briskly, "Hel-lo, Mr. Courtenay," and then the obelisk from behind the Museum, or something very much like it, smacked me across the back of the neck. XI "TS he ready for Hedy?" I heard somebody say. "Good God. no!" "I was only asking." "You ought to know better. First you give the amphetamine, plasma, maybe a niacin megaunit. Then they're ready for Hedy. She doesn't like it if they keep blacking out. She sulks." Nervous laugh with a chill in it. I opened my eyes and felt secure and grateful. For what I could see was a cerebralgray ceiling, the shade you find only in the brain room of an advertising agency. I was safe in the arms of Fowler Schocken Associates -- or was I? I didn't recognize the face that leaned over me. "Why so pleased?" the face inquired nastily. "Don't you know where you are?" After that it was easy to guess. "Taunton's?" I croaked. "That is correct." I tried my arms and legs and found they didn't respond. I couldn't tell whether it was drugs or a plasticocoon. "Look," I said steadily, "I don't know what you people think you're doing, but I advise you to stop it. Apparently this is a kidnaping for business purposes. You people are either going to let me go or kill me. If you kill me without a declaration, you'll get the cerebrin, so of course you're going to let me go eventually. I suggest you do it now." "Kill you, Courtenay?" asked the face with mocking wonder. "How would we do that? You're dead already. Everybody knows that. You died on Starrzelius Glacier; don't you remember?" I struggled again, without results. "They'll brainburn you," I said. "Are you people crazy? Who wants to be brainburped?" The face said nonchalantly: "You'd be surprised." And in an aside to somebody else: "Tell Hedy he'll be ready soon." Hands did something, there was a click, and I was helped to sit up. The skin-tight pulling at my joints showed it was a plasticocoon, which meant I might as well save my strength. A buzzer buzzed and I was told sharply: "Keep a respectful tongue in your head, Courtenay. Mr. Taunton's coming in." B. J. Taunton lurched in. He looked just the way I had always seen him from afar at the speaker's tables in hundreds of banquets : florid, gross, overdressed and drunk. He surveyed me, feet planted wide apart, swaying just a little. "Courtenay," he said. "Too bad. You might have turned out to be something if you hadn't cast your lot with that swindler Schocken. Too bad." He was drunk, he was a disgrace to the profession, but I couldn't keep my respect for an entrepreneur out of my voice. "Sir," I said, "there must be some misunderstanding. There's been no provocation of Taunton Associates to commit commercial murder -- has there?" "Not what the law considers provocation. All Schocken did was steal my groundwork, take over my senators, suborn my committee witnesses and steal Venus from me!" His voice rose. "No, no provocation. He's careof my people. Shrewd Schocken; ethical Schocken!" His glassy eyes glared at me. "Of all the low-down, lousy, unethical, cheap-jack stunts ever pulled on me, yours was the rottenest." He thumped his chest, briefly threatening his balance. "I figured out a way to commit a safe commercial murder and you played possum like a scared rat. You ran like a rabbit, you dog." "Sir," I said desperately. "I don't know what you're driving at." His years of boozing, I thought, had finally caught up with him. No sober ad man could have mixed his similes so unconsciously. He sat down; one of his men darted in and there was a chair seat to meet his broad rump in the nick of time. With an expansive gesture, B. J. Taunton said to me: "Courtenay, I am essentially an artist." The words popped out of me automatically: "Of course, Mr. -- " I almost said "Schocken." It was a wellconditioned reflex. "Of course, Mr. Taunton." "A dreamer of dreams; a weaver of visions." I seemed to see Fowler Schocken sitting there instead of his rival, the man who stood against everything that Fowler' Schocken stood for. "I wanted Venus, Courtenay, and I shall have it. No rocket under Schocken's management is ever going to get off the ground, if I have to corrupt every one of his underlings and kill every one of his section heads. For I am essentially an artist." "Mr. Taunton," I said steadily, "you can't kill section heads as casually as all that. You can't find anybody who'll take the risk for you. Nobody wants to be brainburned." "I got a mechanic to drop that 'copter pod on you, didn't I? I got an unemployable bum to plug you through your apartment window, didn't I? Unfortunately, both missed. And then you crossed us up with that cowardly run-out on the glacier." I didn't say anything. The run-out on the glacier had been no idea of mine. God only knew whose idea it had been to have Runstead club me, shanghai me and leave a substitute corpse in my place. "Tools in my hands," Taunton brooded. "The greatness of an artist is in his simplicity, his lack of confusion, Courtenay. You say to me: 'Nobody wants to be brainburned.' I say: 'Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.' " " Wants to be brainburned?" I repeated stupidly. "Explain" said Taunton to someone alongside him. "I want him thoroughly convinced." One of his men told me dryly: "It's a matter of psychological need, Courtenay. Ever hear of masochists?" "Sure," I said as nastily as I could. "Consumers who prefer Taunton products." "Worse than that... people with a deep need for physical and mental punishment. In some cases, people with so great a feeling of guilt -- and it doesn't matter to us whether the feeling is realistic or not -- that only an agonizing death can wipe it out. Do you understand now?" I did, and it frightened me. "Flagellants," I whispered. "Selfimmolation. But I thought that with our psychiatric methods -- " "Most of them are detected, treated or isolated, Courtenay. But not all. Our matchless research facilities here at Taunton have unearthed several. They are eager would-be suicides, only the suicides they would inflict on themselves aren't sufficiently painful. They want the exquisite agony of c erebrin. You offer that to them. Simple, isn't it?" Yes, simple... and as sinister as anything one could expect from Taunton. I knew from my research that there were consumers who defied all the principles of sales psychology. There was Malone, who quietly dug tunnels for six years " and one Sunday morning blew up all of Red Bank, New Jersey, because a Bums traffic cop had gotten him sore. Conversely, we had James Revere, hero of the White Cloud disaster, a shy, frail tourist-class steward who had returned again and again to the flames until he rescued # passengers, and died because his flesh had been burned from his bones. And there were others who seemingly sought destruction, against every instinct we built our great profession on -- selfpreservation, self-advancement, gratification of the pleasure principle. It had never made sense, so we had dismissed these cases as exceptions that proved our rules. Taunton was an artist. He hadn't dismissed these cases; he'd worked out a use for them. It meant I was as good as dead. I'd never get back to the Venus project. I'd never see Kathy again. in: "You grasp the pattern? The big picture? The essential theme of it is that I'm going to repossess Venus. Now, beginning at the beginning, tell us about the Schocken Agency. All its little secrets, its little weaknesses, its ins and outs, its corruptible employees, its appropriations, its Washington contacts -- " I was a dead man with nothing to lose. "No," I said. One of Taunton's men said abruptly, "He's ready for Hedy," got up and went out. "You've studied prehistory, Courtenay," Taunton pointed out. "You may recognize the name of Giles de Rais." I did, and felt a tightness over my scalp, like a steel helmet slowly shrinking. "All the generations of pre-history produced only one Giles de Rais. Nowadays we have our pick of several. Out of all the people I might have chosen to handle special work like that for me, I took Hedy. You'll see why." The door opened and a pale, adenoidal girl with lank blonde hair was standing in it. She had a silly grin on her face; her lips were thin and bloodless. In one hand she held a six-inch needle set in a plastic handle. I looked into her eyes and began screaming. I couldn't stop until they led her away and closed the door again. I was broken. Taunton leaned back comfortably and said; "Give." I tried, but I couldn't. My voice wouldn't work right and I couldn't remember whether my firm was Fowler Schocken or fichocken Fowler. Taunton got up at last. "We'll put you on ice for a while, Courtenay, so you can pull yourself together. I need a drink myself." He shuddered involuntarily and then beamed again. "Sleep on it," he said, and left with a slight stagger. Two of his men carted me from the brain room, down a corridor and into a bare cubbyhole with a very solid door. It seemed to be night in executives' country. Nothing was going on in any of the offices we passed, lights were low and a corridor guard was yawning at his desk. I asked unsteadily: "Will you take the cocoon off me? I'm going to be a mess if I don't get out of it." "No orders," one of them said, and they slammed the solid door and locked it. I flopped around the small floor, trying to find something sharp enough to break the film and give me an even chance of bursting the plastic, but there was nothing. After incredible contortions and a dozen jarring falls, I found that I could never get to my feet. The doorknob had offered a very faint ghost of hope, but it might as well have been a Mitchell Courtenay, star class copysmith. Mitchell Courtenay, key man of the Venus Section. Mitchell Courtenay, destroyer-tobe of the Connies. Mitchell Courtenay flopping on the floor of a cell in the offices of the sleaziest, crookedest agency that ever blemished the profession, without any prospect except betrayal and -- with luck -- a merciful death. Kathy at least would never know. She would think I had died like a fool on the glacier, meddling with the power pack when I had no business to... The lock on the door rattled. They were coming for me. But when the door opened, I saw from the floor a single pair of matclistick ankles, nylon-clad. "I love you," said the strange, dead voice of a woman. "They said I would have to wait, but I couldn't." It was Hedy. She had her needle. I tried to cry for help, but my throat was paralyzed as she knelt beside me with shining eyes. The temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clamped her bloodless lips on mine: they were like heated iron. And then the left side of my face and head were being torn off. It lasted for seconds and blended into a red haze and unconsciousness. "Wake up," the dead voice was saying. "I want you. Wake up." Lightning smashed at my right elbow and I cried out and jerked my arm. My arm moved -- It moved! The bloodless lips descended on mine again, and again her needle ran into my jaw, probing exactly for the great lump of the trigeminal facial nerve, and finding it. I fought the red haze that was trying to swallow me up. My arm had moved -- she had perforated the membrane of the cocoon and it could be burst. The needle searched again and somehow the pain was channeled to my right arm. In one convulsive jerk it was free. I think I took the back of her neck in my hand and squeezed. I am not sure. I do not want to be sure. But after five minutes she and her love for me did not matter. I ripped the plastic from me and got to my feet an inch at a time, moaning with stiffness. The corridor guard could not matter any more. If he had not come at my cries, he would never. I walked from the room and saw the guard apparently sleeping face-down on his desk. As I stood over him, I noticed a very little blood coagulating in the small valley between the two cords of his shrunken old neck.One thrust from Hedy transfixing the medulla had been enough. I could testify that her knowledge of the nervous system's topography was complete. The guard wore a gun that I hesitated over for a moment and then rejected. In his pockets were a few dollars that would be more useful. I hurried on to the ladders. His desk clock said #. ing upstairs. I learned then about climbing downstairs. If your heart's in good shape, there's little to choose between them. It took me an estimated thirty minutes in my condition to get from executives' country onto the populated stairs below. The first sullen stirrings of the workbound consumers were well under way. I passed half a dozen bitter fist-fights and one knife battle. The Taunton Building nightd wellers were a low, dirty lot who never would have been allowed stairspace in the Schocken Tower, but it was all to the good. I attracted no attention whatsoever in my filthy clothes and sporting a fresh stab wound in my face. Some of the bachelor girls whistled -- pure reflex, of course -- but that was all. My timing was good. I left the building lobby in the very core of a cheek-by-jowl mob boiling out the door to the shuttle which would take them to their wretched jobs. I thought I saw men in plainclothes searching the mob from second-floor windows, but I didn't look up before I got into the shuttle station. At the change booth, I broke all my bills and went into the washroom. "Split a shower, bud?" a shabby woman asked me. I wanted one badly and by myself, but I didn't dare betray any white-collar traits. She and I pooled our coins for a fiveminute salt, thirty-second fresh, with soap. I found that I was scrubbing my right hand over and over again. I found that when the cold water hit the left side of my face, the pain was dizzying. After the shower, I wedged myself into the shuttle and spent two hours zigzagging under the city. My last stop was Times Square, which now was mostly a freight area. While cursing consumers hurled crates of protein ticketed for various parts of town onto the belts. I tried to phone Kathy. There was nobody home. I got Hester at the Schocken Tower and told her: "I want you to raise every cent you can, borrow, clean out your savings, and buy a Starrzelius apparel outfit for me. Meet me with it soonest at the place where your mother broke her leg two years ago. The exact place, remember?" "Yes, naturally. But my contract -- " "Don't make me beg you, Hester. Trust me. For God's sake, hurry. And if you get here and I'm in the hands of the guards, don't recognize me." I hung up and slumped in the phone booth until the next party hammered indignantly on the door. I walked slowly around the station, had Coffiest and a cheese sandwich and rented a morning paper at the newsstand. The story about me was a bored little item George Groby had failed to return from pass to his job with Chlorella and had used his free time to burglarize executives' country in the Taunton Building. He had killed a secretary who stumbled on him and made his escape. Hester met me half an hour later near the loading chute from which a crate had once whizzed and broken her mother's leg. She looked terrified; technically, she was as guilty of contract breach as "George Groby." I took the garment box from her and asked: "Do you have fifteen hundred dollars left?" "Just about. My mother was frantic -- " "Get us reservations on the next Moon ship; today if possible. Meet me back here. I'll be wearing the new clothes." "Us? The Moon?" she squeaked. "Yes, us. I've got to get off Earth before I'm killed. This time it'll be for keeps." I N ten hours, we were groaning side by side under the takeoff acceleration of the Moonship David Ricardo. She had coldbloodedly passed herself off as a Schocken employee on special detail to the Moon and me as Groby, Sales Analyst #. Naturally the dragnet for Groby, Expediter #, had not included the Astoria spaceport. Sewage workers on the lam from CB and Femicide wouldn't hop a rocket, of course. We rated a compartment and the max ration. The David Ricardo was so constructed that most passengers rated them. It wasn't a trip for the idly curious or the consumer fifteen-sixteenths of the population. The Moon was strictly business -- mining -- and a very little sight-seeing. Our fellow passengers, what we saw of them at the ramp, were preoccupied engineers, a few laborers in the small steerage, and silly-rich men and women who wanted to say they'd been there. After takeoff, Hester was hysterically gay for a while, and then snapped. She sobbed on my shoulder, frightened at the enormity of what she'd done. She'd been brought up in a deeply moral Sales-respecting home; you couldn't expect her to break a labor contract without an emotional lashback. "Mr. Courtenay -- Mitch -- if only I could be sure it was all right! I know you've always been good to me and I know you wouldn't do anything wrong, but I'm so scared and miserable!" "You be the judge, Hester. Taunton has found out that there commit unprovoked commercial murder so they can be given cerebrin. He thinks Mr. Schocken grabbed the Venus project from him. He's tried twice at least to kill me. I thought for a while Mr. Runstead was one of his agents, assigned to wreck Schocken's handling of the Venus account. Now, I don't know. Mr. Runstead clubbed me when I went after him at the South Pole, spirited me away to a labro freighter under a faked identity and left a substitute body for mine. "And," I added cautiously, "there are Connies involved in it." She uttered a small shriek. "I don't know how they dovetail," I said. "But I was in a Connie cell -- " "Mister Courtenay!" "Strictly as a blind," I hastily explained. "I was stuck in Chlorella Costa Rica and the only way north seemed to be through the Connie network. They had a cell in the factory, I joined up, turned on the talent, and got transferred to New York. The rest you know." She paused for a long time and asked: "Are you sure it's all right?" Wishing desperately that it were, I firmly said: "Of course, Hester." She gave me a game smile. "I'll get our rations," she said, unsnapping herself. "You'd better stay here." at Hester: "The blasted blackmarketing steward is going too far! Look at this!" I held up my bulb of water and my ration box. The seal was clearly tampered with on both containers, and visibly there was water missing. "Max rations are supposed to be tamper-proof, but this is plain burglary. How do yours look?" "Same," she said listlessly. "You can't do anything about it. Let's not eat just yet, Mr. Courtenay." She made a marked effort to be vivacious. "Tennis, anyone?" "All right," I grumbled, and set up the field, borrowed from the ship recreation closet. She was better at tennis than I, but I took her in straight sets. Her coordination was way off. She'd stab for a right forecourt deep crosscourt return and like as not miss the button entirely -- if she didn't send the ball into the net by failing to surge power with her left hand on the rheostat. A half hour of the exercise seemed to do both of us good. She cheered up and we ate our rations. There was little enough to do in our cramped quarters. Every eight hours she would go for our tagged rations, I would grumble about the shortage and tampering, we'd have .some tennis and then eat. The rest of the time passed somehow watching the ads come and go -- all Schocken -- on the walls. Well enough, I thought. Schocken's on the Moon and I won't be kept from him there. Things weren't so crowded. Moon to S.chocken to Kathy -- a twinge of feeling. I could have asked casually what Hester had heard about Jack O'Shea, but I didn't. I was afraid I might not like what she had heard. A drab service announcement at last interrupted the parade of ads: cooks to the galley (the David Ricardo was a British Hester smiled and went out with our tray. As usual, it was ten minutes before she returned. We were getting some pull from the Moon by then, enough to unsettle my stomach. I burped miserably while waiting. S HE came back with two Coffiest bulbs and reproached me gaily: "Why, Mitch, you haven't set up the tennis court!" "Didn't fed like it." I put out my hand for my bulb. She didn't give it to me. "Well?" "Just one set?" she coaxed. "You heard me," I snapped. "Let's not forget who's who around here." I wouldn't have said it if it hadn't been Coffiest, I suppose. The Starrzelius-red bulb kicked things off in me -- nagging ghosts of withdrawal symptoms. She stiffened. "I'm sorry, Mr. Courtenay." And then she clutched at her middle and threw up, violently, her face distorted. Astounded, I snapped the air regenerator switch to "Blast" and grabbed her. She was moaning with pain. "Hester," I said, "what is it?" "Don't drink it," she croaked, her hand kneading her belly. "The Coffiest. Poison. Your rations. I've been tasting them." Her nails tore first the nylon of her midriff and then her skin as she clawed at the pain. "Send a doctor!" I was yelling into the compartment mike. "Woman's dying here!" The chief steward's voice answered me: "Ship's doctor'll be there right away, sir." Hester's contorted face began to relax, frightening me terribly. She said softly: "Bitch Kathy. Running out on you. Mitch and bitch. Funny. You're too good for her. She wouldn't have. My life. Yours." There was another spasm across her face. "Wife versus secretary. A laugh. It always was. You never even kissed me -- " I didn't get a chance to. She was gone while the ship's doctor was still hauling himself briskly in along the handline. His face fell. We towed her to the lazarette and he put her in a cardiacnode exciter that started her heart going again. Her chest began to rise and fall and she opened her eyes. "Where are you?" asked the doctor, loudly and clearly. She moved her head slightly and a pulse of hope shot through me. "Response?" I whispered to the doctor. "Random," he said with professional coldness. He was right. There were more slight headmovements and a nervous flutter of the eyelids, which were working independently. "Who are you?" brought a wrinkle between her eyes and a tremor of the lip, but no more. Gently enough, the doctor began to explain to me: "I'm going to turn it off. Irreversible clinical death has occurred. It's often hard for a person with emotional ties to believe -- " I watched her eyelids flutter, one with a two-four beat, the other with a three-four beat. "Turn it off," I said hoarsely. He cut the current and withdrew the needle. "There was nausea?" he asked. I nodded. "Her first space flight?" I nodded. "Abdominal pain?" I nodded. "No previous distress?" I shook my head. "History of vertigo?" I shrugged; I didn't know. He was driving at something. He kept asking, and the answers he wanted were as obvious as a magician's forced card. Allergies, easy bleeding, headaches, painful menses -- at last he said decisively: "I believe it's Fleischman's Disease. It stems from some derangement of function in the adrenocorticotrophic bodies under free flight, we think. It kicks off a chain reaction of tissueincompatibilities which affects the cerebrospinal fluid -- " I reached for the bulb and then remembered. "Have one with me," I said. He nodded and, with no stalling, drank from one of the nipples of a twin-valve social flask. I saw the level go down -- Moonpull was strong enough for there to be a level -- and saw his Adam's apple work. "Not too much," he cautioned me. "Touchdown's soon." I stalled with conversation for a few minutes, watching him, and then swallowed half a pint of hundred proof. I could hardly, tow myself back to the compartment. I threw up and worked the air regenerator button in time to get most of it. I was fuzzily glad the stuff had stayed down long enough for the alcohol molecules to be picked out of the fluid and sent wandering through my body, bringing numbness to my limbs and forgetfulness to my brain. the maddening red tape of Moon debarkation. I must have acted pretty stupid. A couple of times I heard the crewmen say to port officials something like: "Take it easy on the guy. He lost his girl in flight." The line I took in the cramped receiving room of the endless questionnaires was that I didn't know anything about the mission. I was Groby, a #, and the best thing to do would be to send me to Fowler Schocken. I understood that we had been supposed to report to him. They poohpoohed that possibility and set me to wait on a bench while queries were sent to the Schocken branch in Luna City. T waited, watched and tried to think. It wasn't easy. The busy crowds in Receiving were made up of people going from one place to another place to do specified things. I didn't fit in the pattern; I was a sore thumb. They were going to get me... A tube popped and blinked at the desk yards away. I read between half closed eyes: S-C-H-O-C-K-E-N T-# R-C-V-N-G R-E Q-U-E-R-Y N-O MI-S-S-I-O-N D-U-E T-H-I-S F-L-I-G-H-T N-O G-R-O-B-Y B-M-P-L-O-Y-E-D B-Y U-S F-O-W-L-E-R S-C-H-O-C-K-E-N U-N-Q-U-E-R-I-E-D B-U-T I-MP-O-S-S-l-B-L-E A-N-Y U-N-D-E-R S-T-A-R C-L-A-S-S P-E-R-S-O-NN-E-L A-S-S-I-G-N-E-D R-E-P-O-R-T H-I-M A-C-T A-T D-I-S-C-R-ET-I-O-N O-B-V-I-O-U-S-L-Y N-O-T O-U-R B-A-B-Y E-N-D They were glancing at me from the desk and talking in low tones. In only a moment they would be beckoning the Burns Detective guards. I got up from the bench and sauntered into the crowd, with only one alternative left and that a frightening one. I made the casual gestures that, by their order and timing, constitute the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress of the Connies. A Burns guard shouldered his way through the crowd and put the arm on me. "Are you going to make trouble?" he growled. "No," I said thickly. "Lead the way." He gestured confidentially at the desk and they waved back, with grins. He marched me. with his nightstick in the small of my back, through the startled crowd. Numbly I let him take me from the receiving dome down a tunnel-like shopping street. "# Years Without a Blowout" #S# CO! "# Years Without a Blowout" Stunning Conversation Pieces Prove You Were Here Warren Astron, D.P.S. Readings by Appointment Only blinked and twinkled at me from l the shopfronts as new arrivals shuffled up and down, gaping. "Hold it," growled the guard. We stepped in front of the Warren Astron sign. He muttered: "Twist the nightstick away from me. Hit me over the head with it. Fire one charge at the streetlight. Duck into Astron's and give him the grip. Good luck and try not to break my skull." "You're -- you're -- " I stammered. "Yeah. I wish I hadn't seen the hailing sign. This is going to cost me two stripes and a raise. Get moving." He surrendered the nightstick and I tried not to make it too easy or too hard when I clouted him. The buckshot charge boomed out of the stick's muzzle, shattered the light overhead and . brought forth shrieks of dismay from the strollers. It was thunderous in the vaulted street. I i darted through the chaste white Adams door of Astron's in the sudden darkness and blinked at a tall, thin man with a goatee. "What's the meaning of this?" he demanded. "I read by appointment -- " I took his arm in the grip. "Refuge?" he asked, abruptly, shedding a fussy professional manner. "Yes. Fast." He led me through his parlor into a small, high observatory with a transparent dome, a refracting telescope, Hindu star maps, clocks and desks. One of these desks he heaved at and it turned back on hinges. There was a pit and handholds. "Down you ,go," he said. Down I went, into darkness. TT was some six feet deep and six by four in area. It had a rough, unfinished feel. A pick and shovel leaned against one wall, and a couple of buckets filled with Moon rock. Obviously work in progress. I inverted one of the buckets and sat down on it in the dark. After five hundred and seventysix counted pulse-beats, I sat on the floor, tried to brush Moon rock out of the way and lie down. I heard voices directly overhead. One was the primly professional voice of Astron. The other was the petulant voice of a woman. They seemed to be seated at the I # desk directly above me. " -- really seems excessive, Doctor." "As Madam wishes. If you will excuse me, I shall return to my ephemeris -- " "But, Dr. Astron, I wasn't implying -- " "Madam will forgive me for jumping to the conclusion that customary honorarium. That is correct. Now, please, the birth date and hour?" She mumbled them, and I wondered briefly about the problem Astron must have with women who shaded their years. "So... Venus in the hours of Mars... Mercury ascendant in the trine..." "What's that?" she asked with shrill suspicion. "I know quite a bit about the Great Art and I never heard that before." Blandly: "Madam must realize that a Moon observatory makes possible many things of which she has never heard before. It is possible by Lunar observations to refine the Great Art to a point unattainable in the days when observations were made perforce through the thick and muddled air of Earth." "Of course. Please go on. Dr. Astron. Will I be able to look through your telescope and . see my planets?" "Later, Madam. So . , . Mercury ascendant in the trine, the planet of strife and chicanery, yet quartered with Jupiter, the giver of fortune, so..." The "reading" lasted perhaps half an hour, and there were'two more like it that followed, and then there was silence. I actually dozed off until a voice called me. The desk had been heaved back again and Astron's head was silhouetted against the opening. I climbed out stiffly. "You're Groby," he stated. "Yes." "We got a report on you by courier aboard the Ricardo " I noticed that his hand was in his pocket. "You turn up in Chlorella, you're a naturalborn copysmith. you're transferred to New York, you get kidnapped in front of the Met -- in earnest or by prearrangement -- you kill a girl and disappear, and now you're on the Moon. God knows what you're jr : up to. It's too much for me. A f', Central Committee member will be here shortly to try and figure you out. Is there anything you'd care to say? Like confessing that you're an agent provocateur ?' I said nothing. "Very well." Somewhere a door opened and closed. "That will be the Central Committee member." And my wife Kathy walked into the observatory. # Exciting, Stimulating Full-Length Science Fiction Novels The Editors of Galaxy have elected only # Science Fiction Kovels in tlie past year and a half that they felt were good enough to receive the imprint of Galaxy. Thousands of copies of these novels have been enjoyed by Gala xy readers. Each Galaxy novel is complete and unabridged. Each novel would sell for # or # if bought as a hard back book. But because we want to bring these vital important novels to all our Galaxy readers we have published them at the low, low price of #f each. Yoti can order any one or all of the back titles shown at .# or any # for #. And you can subscribe to additional novels at # for a subscription of # novels. (Foreign subscriptions, add .#.) Naturally all orders are subject to the prior sale of back copies. So order today while stocks arc complete. I Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell # The Legion of Space # Preside to Space by Arthur C. Clarke # The Amphibians by S. Fowler Wright p The World Below J by S. Fowler Wright # The Alien by Raymond F. Jones # Empire by Clifford D. Simalc # Odd John by Olaf Stapleton # Four Sided Triangle #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y.  Please send me Galaxy Novels checked below:  .  Sinister Barrier # The Legion of Space  Prelude to Space  The Amphibians J # The World Below # The Alien  Empire  Odd John # Fow Sided Triangle (Please enter my subscription for future Galaxy novels --  I year -- J#  # yean -- # Name Addres City and State ! wm By Jciy Franklin  The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Sorn o When an atomic explosion destroys the battleship Alaska, Lt. Commander Frank Jacklin returns to consciousness in New York and is shocked to find himself in the body of Winnie Tomkins, a dissolute stockbroker. Unable to explain his real identity, Jacklin attempts to fit into Tomkin's way of life. Complications develop when Jacklin gets involved with Tomkin's wife, his red-haired mistress and his luscious secretary. Three too many women for Jacklin to handle. His foreknowledge of the Alaska sinking and other top secret matters plunges him into a mad world of intrigue and excitement in Washington -- that place where anything can happen and does! Where is the real Tomkins is a mystery explained in the smashing climax. Completely delightful, wholly provocative, the Rat Race is a striking novel of the American Scene. e Watch For It On Sale May #th  H ji N) O  l";  X aaiaixy  # By Wilson Tucker The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon  Who knows whether the strange events of this story might not one day occur? This is the story of an expedition -- a strange and exciting expedition of one man and an army of women. He had come into the land of the women suddenly -- and without warning. Toll, bronzed, muscular, he stood out among their pale skins and meek spirits. And when they learned of the land from which he had come -- the land they hadn't even known existed -- they had to follow him to it. One man and an army of women crossing the remnants of a post-atomic United States in search of the Unknown; it was an amazing trek. Miraculous things happened to the women. New emotions rose up to plague them. Once there was a near mutiny. Another time, seven of their number were killed. But it was when they reached the city In the sea that the strangest thing of all happened... also something rare in science fiction -- a compellingly human story. Watch For It On Sale In August galaxy AUlan# Editor Art Director Production Mono # er Advertiilng Mpnoger Cover by Illustrating ii published tnoiuhly by tialaxy Publishing Corpotaiioo. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New Voric #. N. Y. #Sc per copy. Subscriptions: (T# eop tea) #-SO per year in the United Slates, Canada, Mexico, South and On ital America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. SO. Entered as seconddata natter  the Post Ace. New York. N. S'. Copyright. #S#. by Galaxy Publishing Corporaliun. Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including ttanslaiioo, scened. All tnatcriai tubm ittedmust be accompanied by self-addrcMed stamped coeelopes. The publisher astuiBcs no responsibility for unsolicited maicdal. All stories printed in ibis magaaine ate fiction, and any similarity between ebareccera and actual persona is opiacidental. by James Blish # by Frifz Letber # by Robed Sheefcey #I by Joseph ShatiH # by Frederik Pohf  C. M. Kornfalufb # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Cold # by Groff Conklin # Rag. U. S. Pal. ON. A mong other topics discussed on this page last month, I picked an argument with the "linear" theory of historical development. This concept supposes that history advances in a more or less straight ascending line. To extrapolate the possible future, therefore, all we have to do is extend the present upward on a graph. Actually, history is a constant process of abrupt and dramatic reversals -- revolutions are followed by intense conservatism; periods of lax morality lead directly to Puritanism; war eventually brings peace; peace, at least thus far. always produces war. The transitions are not gradual. They may not happen overnight, though sometimes they do, but they invariably gather as much momentum and are as hard to head ofT as a road-roller coasting downhill. This discussion is not academic nor was the reasoning that led to the observation. Both are intimately connected with the function and writing of science fiction. We are, of course, concerned with the future. We want to know, first, whether there, is likely to be a future; second, what it may look like. Extrapolation is impossible without the correct tools. The linear theory of history is provably incorrect. Using it must result in the sort of sterile "prophecy" that made I#th century views of the present so naive. The #th century is not an extension of the #th. In just about every way, it is as opposite as it can get. On the same basis, the #st should be as dissimilar to this one. Even the idea of a "higher" level is unjustifiable. We have, coexisting today, societal orientations ranging from, extreme introversion to equally extreme extroversion. Our increasing accumulation of objective knowledge and comfort may be considered undesirable if our society turns introvert, as it has been in the past, and could be again in the future. Historical momentum is another factor that may or may not apply. The first half of this century saw more change than most millenia. Will that momentum increase or decrease? Whether they come quickly or slowly, myriad reversals in all spheres of civilization will distinguish the #st century from the #th. Since each social action causes an equal and opposite reaction, there should be many reversals. We can't know their exact nature beforehand. All wc can do is guess at them. It seems to me that those guesses would be more accurate if they are based on historical action-reaction than linearity. Now here's another point, just as important, in guessing at the future : In any society, there are opposing tendencies at work at the same time. They arc often so contradictory that they amount to paradox. Here are some broad examples:  This country is defending freedom -- yet it is adopting some of the legal principles of dictatorship.  At the very same time that civil rights are in jeopardy, there is. according to a recent survey, less intergroup friction than in the past ten years. (Paradoxically. Hollywood, w'hich traditionally shies away from such issues, helped bring this about.)  The economic interests of the aiiti-Communist bloc are savagely competitive -- and the extent of cooperation against the common danger is seemingly limitless.  The prestige of Communism is at its lowest in decades -- fear of it. at its highest.  The Communist countries arc supposedly immune to the conflicts that divide Capitalist nations -- yet Titoism is on the rise, over half the prisoners captured in Korea refuse to go home, and the underground railroad runs one way: out. These arc the biggest visible paradoxes. Used sparingly, they have freshness and even novilty in science fiction. But most writers and would-be writers keep working them over ceaselessly. The really bright themes, of course, are the less apparent ones: books and magazines are being .sold in the TV areas than ever before.  Only one out of five is selfemployed now, as against four out of five in # -- and never has there been so much employment and prosperity, taxes or no taxes.  Security regulations are hampering physical sciences -- which are being supported by more money and facilities than at any time. The opposing tendencies can be found everywhere. The job of the writer is to find those that are least exploited, then give them their head -- see how far they will go. And here's the final paradox: No matter how far he makes them go, he'll still probably be underestimating. t long time over the microscope, leaving # Ventura with nothing to do but look out at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. The new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean: and even the continent was mostly swamp. The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one rerf spur of rock Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea-level. From this eminence, la Ventura could sec forty miles to Only an aquatic animal eavid exist on that world and so Mon became usf that -- nor dicf reduction in size cause a loss of sfofurel the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds, and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby. "If I were a religious man." the pilot said suddenly, "Td call this a plain case of divine vengeance. Chatvieux said: "Hmn?' "It's as if we've been struck down for -- is it hubris, arrogant pride?" "Well, is it?" Chatvieux said, looking up at last. "I don't feel exactly swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?" ."I'm not exactly proud of my piloting," la Ventura admitted. "But that isn't quite what I meant. I was thinking about why we catne here in the first place. It takes arrogant pride to think that you can scatter men, or at least things like men, all over the face of the Galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job -- to pack .up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men suitable for every place you touch." "I suppK)se it does," Chatvieux said. "But we're only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the Galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners." He smiled drily. "If they had, maybe they'd have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we try to produce men adapted to Carthlike planets, nothing more. We've sense enough -- humility enough, if you like -- to know that we can't adapt men to Jupiter or to Tau Ceti." "Anyhow, we're here," la Ventura said grimly. "And we aren't going to get off. Phil tells me tliat we don't even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can't seed tfiis place in the usual way. We've been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the panatropes going to do -- provide built-in waterwings?" "No," Chatvieux said calmly. "You and I and the rest of us are going to die. Paul. Panatropic techniques don't work on the body, only on the inheritancecarrying factors. We can't give you built-in water-wings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we'll be able to populate this world with men. but we won't live to see it." The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold collecting gradually in his stomach. "How long do you give us?" he said at last. "Who knows? A month, perhaps." riHE bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salty, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, but it did not appear to bother him. He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt into which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges. "More samples, Doc," he said. "All alike -- water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?" "A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?" Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors were crowding into the panatrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux's senior assistant; Eunice Wagner, the only remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura's and Strasvogers, were now without meaning. Five men and two women -- to colonize a planet on which standing room meant treading water. They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners. Venezuelos said; "What's the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?" "This place isn't dead," Chatvieux said. "There's life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the. animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea; the most advanced form I've found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with protozoa and small metazoans, right up to a wonderfully variegated rotifer population -- including a castlebuilding rotifer like Earth's FIoscularidae. The plants run from simple algae to the thalluslike species." "The sea is about the sajne,' Eunice said. 'T've found some of the larger simple metazoans -- jellyfish and so on -- and some crayfi.sh almost as big as lobsters. But it's normal to find salt-water species running larger than freshwater." "In short," Chatvieux said. "We'll survive here -- if we fight." "Wait a minute," la Ventura said. "You've just finished telling me that we wouldn't survive. And you were talking about us. not about the species, because we don't have our germ-cell banks any more. What's -- " "I'll get to that again in a moment," Chatvieux said. "Saltonstall. wat would you think of taking to the sea? We came out of it once; maybe we could come out of it Jgain." "No good," Saltonstall said immediately. " like the idea, but I don't think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer, either. Looking at it as a colonization problem, as if we weren't involved ourselves, I wouldn't give you a credit for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt. The colonists wouldn't have a chance to learn a thing before they were destroyed." "Why?" la Ventura said. The death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate. "Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?" The ecologist nodded. "There's your answer, Paul." Saltonstall said. "The sea is out. It's got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures are less formidable and there are more places to hide." "We can't compete with a jellyfish?" la Ventura asked, swallowing. "No, Paul," Chatvieux said. "The panatropes make adaptations. not gods. They take human germ-cells -- in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash -- and modify them toward creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike and intelligent. It usually shows the donor's personality pattern, too. "But we can't transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a child in his new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language. Ordinarily the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet, but we won't survive long enough for that. We'll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that at least some of them will survive the learning process."  The pilot thought about it. but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. "One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won't be able to remember being me. Is that right?" ' "That's it. There may be just the faintest of residuums -- panatropy's given us some data which seem to cupport the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we're all going to die on Hydrot, Paul. There's no avoiding that, Somevherc we'll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won't remember la Ventura, or Chatvieu.x, or Joan Heath -- or Elarth." The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his moutli. "Saltonstall. what do you recommend as a form?" The panatropist pulled reflectively at his nose. "Webbed extremities. of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and thornlike for defense until the creature has had a chance to learn. Booklungs, like the arachnids, working out of intercostal spiracles -- they are gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if it ever decides to come out of the water. Also I'd suggest sporulation. As an aquatic aniihal, our colonist is  going to have an indefinite lifespan, but we'll have to give it a breeding cycle of about six weeks to keep its numbers up during the learning period ; so there'll have to be a definite break of some duration in its active year. Otherwise it'll hit the population problem before it's learned enough to cope with it." "Also, it'll be better if our colonists could winter inside a good hard shell," Eunice Wagner added in agreement. "So spKjnilation's the obvious answer. Most microscopic creatures have it." "Microscopic?" Phil said incredulously. "Certainly," Chatvieux said, amused. "We can't very well crowd a six-foot man into a twofoot puddle. But that raises a question. We'll have tough competition from the rotifers, and some of them aren't strictly microscopic. I don't think your average colonist should run under # microns. Saltonstall. Give them a chance to slug it out." "I was thinking of making them twice that big." "Then they'd be the biggest things in their environment," Eunice Wagner pointed out. "and won't ever develop any skills. Besides, if you make them about rotifer size, rigivc them an incentive for pushing out the castlebuilding rotifers. "They'll be able to take over the castles as dwellings." ' Chatvieux nodded. "All right, let's get started. While the panatropes are being calibrated, the rest of us can put our heads together on leaving a record for these people. We'll micro-engrave the record on a set of corrosionproof metal leaves, of a size our colonists can handle conveniently. Some day they may puzzle it out." "Question," Eunice Wagner said. "Are we going to tell them they're microscopic? I'm opposed to it. It'll saddle their entire early history with a gods-and-demons mythology they'd be better off without." "Yes, we are," Chatvieux said; and la Ventura could tell by the change in the tone of his voice that he was speaking now as their senior. "These people will be of the race of men. Eunice. We want them to win their way back to the community of men. They are not toys, to be protected from the truth forever in a fresh-water womb." "I'll make that official," Venezuelos said, and that was that. And then, essentially, it was all over. They went through the motions. Already they were beginning to be hungry. After la Ventura had had his personality pattern recorded, he was out of it. He sat by himself at the far end of the ledge, watching Tau Ceti t go rdly down, chucking pebbles into the nearest pond, wondering morosely which nameless puddle was to be his Lethe. He never found out. of course. None of them did, I O LD Shar set down the heavy metal plate at last, and gazed instead out the window of the castle, apparently resting his eyes on the glowing green-gold obscurity of the summer waters. In the soft fluoresence which played down upon him, from the Noc dozing impassively in the groined vault of the chamber, Lavon could see that he was in fact a young man. His face was so delicately formed as to suggest that it had not been many seasons since he had first emerged from his spore. But of course there had been no real reason to expect an old man. All the Shars had been referred to traditionally as "old" Shar. The reason, like the reasons for everything else, had been forgotten. but the custom had persisted; the adjective at least gave weight and dignity to the office. The present Shar belonged to would have to be at least two seasons younger than Lavon himself. If he was old, it was only in knowledge. "Lavon, I'm going to have to be honest with you,' Sliar said at last, still looking out of the tall, irregular window. "You've come to me for the secrets on the metal plates, just as your predecessors did to mine. I can give some of them to you -- but for the most part, I don't know what they mean." "After so many generations?" Lavon asked, surprised. "Wasn't how to read them? That was a long time ago." The young man turned and looked at Lavon with eyes made dark and wide by the depths into which they had been staring. "I can read what's on the plates, but most of it seems to make no sense. Worst of all. the plates are incomplete. You didn't know that? They are. One of them was lost in a battle during the fital war with the Eaters, while these castles were still in their hands." "What am I here for, then?" Lavon said. "Isn't there anything of value on the remaining plates? Do they really contain 'the wisdom of the Creators' or is that another myth?" "No. No, that's true." Shar said slowly, "as far as it goes." H e paused, and both men turned and gazed at the ghostly creature which had appeared suddenly outside the wtnlO dow. Then Shar said gravely, "Come in, Para." The slipper-shaped organism, nearly transparent except for the thousands of black-and-silver granules and frothy bubbles which packed its interior, glided into the chamber and hovered, with a muted whirring of cilia. For a moment it remained silent, probably speaking telepathically to the Noc floating in the vault, after the ceremonious fashion of all the protos. No human had ever intercepted one of these colloquies, but there was no doubt about their reality: humans had used them for long-range communication for generations. Then the Para's cilia buzzed once more. Each separate hairlike process vibrated at an independent, changing rate; the resulting sound waves spread through the water, intermodulating, reinforcing or canceling each other. The aggregate wave-front, by the time it reached human ears, was recognizable human speech. "We are arrived, Shar and Lavon. according to the custom." "And welcome," said Shar. "Lavon, let's leave this matter of the plates for a while, until you hear what Para has to say; that's a part of the knowledge Lavons must have as they come of age, and it comes before the plates. I can give you some hints of what we are. First Para has to tell you something about what we aren't." enough, and watched the proto as it settled gently to the surface of the hewn table at which Shar had been sitting. There was in the entity such a perfection and economy of organization, such a grace and surety of movement, that he could hardly believe in his own new-won maturity. Para, like all 'the protos, made him feel not. perhaps, poorly thought-out, but at least unfinished. "We know that in this universe there is logically no place for man," the gleaming, now immobile cylinder upon the table droned abruptly. "Our memory is the common property to all our races. It reaches back to a time when there were no such creatures as men here. It remembers also that once upon a day there were men here, suddenly, and in some numbers. Their spores littered the bottom: we found the spores only a short time after our season's Awakening, and in them we saw the forms of men slumbering. "Then men shattered their spores and. emerged. They were intelligent, active. And they were gifted with a trait, a character, possessed by ho other creature in this world. Not even the savage H Eaters had it. Men organized us to exterminate the Eaters and therein lay the difference. Men had initiative. We have liic word now. which you gave us, and we apply it. but we still do not know what the thing is that it labels." "You fought beside us," Lavon said. "Gladly. We would never have thought of that war by ourselves, but it was good and brought good. Yet we wondered. We saw that men were poor swimmers, poor walkers, poor crawlers, poor climbers. We saw that men were formed to make and use tools, a concept wc still do not understand. for so wonderful a gift is largely wasted in this universe, and there is no other. What good arc tool-useful members such as the hands of men? We do not know. It seems plain that so radical a thing should lead to a much greater rulership over tlie world than has, in fact, proven to be possible for men." Lavon's head was spinning. "Para, I had no notion that you people were philosophers. "The protos are old, Shar said. He had again turned to look out the window, his hands locked behind his back. "They aren't philosophers, Lavon, but they ani remorseless logicians. Listen ta Para. "To this reasoning there could be but one outcome, th Para said, "Our strange ally, Man, was like notliing else in this universe. He was and is ill-fitted for it. He does not belong here; he has been -- adopted. This drives us to think that there are other universes besides this one, but where these universes might lie, and what their properties might be, it is impossible to imagine. We have no imagination, as men know. Was the creature being ironic? Lavon could not tell. He said slowly: "Other universes? How could that be true? "We do not know, the Para's uninflected voice hummed. Lavon waited, but obviously the proto had nothing more, to say. the window sill, clasping his knees, watching the come and go of dim shapes in the lighted gulf. "It is quite true," he said. "What is written on the remaining plates makes it plain. Let me tell you now what they say. "VTe were made, Lavon. We were made by men who are not as we are, but men who were our ancestors all the same. They were caught in some disaster, and they, made us, and put os here in our universe -- so that, even though they had to die, the race of men would live. Lavon surged up from the woven spyrogrya mat upon which he had been sitting. Yon must filink I'm a fool!" he said shaiply. "No. You're our Lavon; you have a right to know the facts. Make what you like of them. Sliar swung his webbed toes back into the chamber, "What I've told you may be hard to believe, but it seems to be so; what Para ays backs it up. Our unfitness to live here is self-evident. I'll give you some examples: "The past four Shars discovered that we won't get any further in our studies until we learn how to control heat. We've produced nough heat chemically to show that even the water around us changes when the temperature gets high enough. But there we're topped. "Why? "Because heat produced fat pen water is carried off as rapidly as it's produced. Once we tried to enclose that heat, and we blew up a whole tul:e of the castle and killed everything in range; tlie hock was terrible. We measured tbc pressures that were involved kt tliat explosion, and we di covered that no substance w know could have resisted them. Theory suggests some stronger ubstances -- hut w need head to form tlwm! "Take our chemistry. We Eve to water. Everything seems to diolve in water, to some extent. How do we confine a chemical test to the crucible we put it in? How do we maintain a solution at one dilution? I don't know. Every avenue leads me to the same stone door. We're thinking creatures, Lavon, but there's something drastically wrong in the way we think about this universe we live in. It just doesn't seem to lead to results." Lavon pushed back his floating hair futilely. "Maybe you're thinking about the wrong results. We've had no trouble with warfare, or crops, or practical tilings like that. If we can't create much heat, well, most of us won't miss it ; we don't need any. What's the other universe supposed to be like, the one our ancestors lived in? Is it any better than tliis one? "I don't know." Shar admitted. "It was so different that it's hard to compare the two. The metal plates tell a story about men who were traveKng from one place to another in a container that moved by itself. The only analogy I can think of is the shallops of diatom shells tliat our youngsters use to sled along the thcrmocline ; but evidently what's meant is something much bigger.  "I picture a huge shallop, closed on all sides, big enough to hold many people maybe twenty or tliirty. It had to travel for generations through some kind of space where there wasn't IS any water to breathe, so that the people had to carry their own water and renew it constantly. There were no seasons; no yearly turnover: no ice forming on the sky, because there wasn't any sky in a closed shallop; no spore formation. "Then the shallop was wrecked somehow. The people in it knew they were going to die. They made us, and put us here, as if we were their children. Because they had to die, they wrote their story on the plates, to tell us what had happened. I suppose we'd understand it better if we ing the war. but we don't." "The whole thing sounds like a parable." Lavon said, shrugging. "Or a song. I can see why j'ou don't understand it. What I can't see is why you bother to try." "Because of the plates," Shar said. "You've handled them yoursrlf. so you know that we've nothing like them. We have crude, impure metals we've hammered out. metals that last for a while and then decay. But the plates shine on and on, generation after generation. They don't change; our hammers and graving tools break against them; the little heat we can generate leaves them unharmed. Those plates weren't formed in our universe -- and that one fact makes every word on them important to me. Someone went to a great deal of trouble to make those plates indestructible to give them to us. Someone to whom the word 'stars' was important enough to be worth fourteen repetitions, despite the fact that the word doesn't seem to mean anything. I'm ready to think that if our makers repeated the word even twice on a record that seems likely to last forever, it's important for us to know what it means.' "All these extra universes and huge shallops and meaningless words -- I can't say that they don't exist, but I don't see what diflference it makes. The Shars of a few generations ago spent their whole lives breeding better algae crops for us, and showing us how to cultivate them instead of living haphazardly off bacteria. That was work worth doing. The Lavons of those days evidently got along without the metal plates, and saw to it that the Shars did, too: Well, as far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to the plates, if you like them better than crop improvement -- but I think they ought to be thrown away." "All right," Shar said, shrugging. "If you don't w'ant them, that ends the traditional interview. We'll go our -- " There was a rising drone from the table-top. The Para was lifting itself, waves of motion passing over its cilia, like the waves which went across the fruiting stalks of the fields of delicate fungi with which the bottom was planted. It had been so silent that Lavon had forgotten it: he could tell from Shar's startlement that Shar had. too. "This is a great decision." the waves of sound washing from the creature throbbed. "Every proto has heard it and agrees with it. We have been afraid of these metal plates for a long time, afraid that men would learn to understand them and to follow what they say to some secret place, leaving the protos behind. Now we are not afraid." "There wasn't anything to be afraid of," Lavon said indulgently"No Lavon before you had said so," Para said. "We are glad. We will throw the plates away." With that, the shining creature swooped toward the embrasure. With it. it bore away the remaining plates, which had been resting under it on the table-top, suspended delicately in the curved tips of its supple cilia. With a cry, Shar plunged through the water toward the opening, "Stop, Para!" But Para was already gone, so swiftly that he had not even heard the call. Shar twisted hts body and brought up on one shoulder against tlie tower wall. He said nothing. His face was enough. Lavon could not look at it for more than an instant. The shadows of the two men moved slowly along the unevecr cobbled floor. The Noc descended toward them from the vault, its single thick tentacle stirring the water, its internal light flaring and fading irregularly. It. too, drifted through the window after its cousin, and sank slowly away toward the bottom. Gently its living glow dimmed, flickered, winked out. II F or many days. Lavon was able to avoid thinking much about the loss. There was always a great deal of work to be done. Maintenance of the castles, which had been built by the now-extinct Eaters rather than by human hands, was a never-ending task. The thousand dichotoinously branching wings tended to crumble, especially at their bases where they sprouted from each other, and no Shar had yet come forward with a mortar as good as the rotifer-spittle which liad once held them together. In addition, the breaking through of windows and the construction of chambers in the early days had been haphazard and often unsound. The instinctive architccIf ture of the rotifers, after all. had not been meant to meet the needs of human occupants. And then there were the crops. Men no longer fed precariously upon passing bacteria; now there were the drifting mats of specific water-fungi, rich and nourishing, which had been bred by five generations of Shars. These had to be tended constantly to keep the strains pure, and to keep the older and less intelligent species of the protos from grazing on them. In this latter task, to be sure, the more intricate and far-seeing proto types cooperated, but men were needed to supervise. There had been a time, after the war with the Eaters, when it had been customary to prey upon the slow-moving and stupid diatoms, whose exquisite and fragile glass shells were so easily burst, and who were unable to learn that a friendly voice did not necessarily mean a friend. There were still people who would crack open a diatom when no one else was looking, but they were regarded as barbarians, to the puzzlement of the protos The blurred and simple-minded speech of the gorgeously engraved plants had brought them into the category of pets -- a concept which the protos were utterly unable to grasp, especially since men admitted that diatoms on the half-frustrule were delicious. Lavon had had to agree, very early, that the distinction was tiny. After all, humans did eat the desmids, which differed from the diatoms only in three particulars: their shells were flexible, they could not move, and they did not speak. Yet to Lavon. as to most men, there did seem to be some kind of distinction, whether the protos could see it or not, and that was that. Under the circumstance he felt that it was a part of his duty, as a leader of men, to protect the diatoms from the occasional poachers who browsed upon them, in defiance of custom, in the high levels of the sunlit sky. Yet Lavon found it impossible to keep himself busy enough to forget that moment when the last clues to Man's origin and destination had been seized and borne away into dim space. It might be possible to ask Para for the return of the plates, explain that a mistake had been made. The protos were creatures of implacable logic, but they respected Man. were used to illogic in Man, and might reverse their decision if pressed -- We are sorry. The plates were carried over the bar and released in the gult. We will have the bottom there searched, but... With a sick feeling he could not repress, Lavon knew that when the protos decided somcthing was worthless, they did not hide it in some chamber like old women. They threw it away -- efficiently. Yet despite the tormenting of his conscience, Lavon was convinced that the plates were well lost. What had they ever done for man, except to provide Shars with useless things to think about In the late seasons of their lives? What the Shars themselves had done to benefit Man, here, in the water, in the world, in the universe, had been done by direct experimentation. No bit of useful knowledge ever had come from the plates. There had never been anything in the plates but things best left unthought. The protos were right. the plant frond, where he had been sitting in order to overlook the harvesting of an experimental crop of blue-green, oil-rich algae drifting in a clotted mass close to the top of the sky, and scratched his back gently against the coarse bole. The protos were seldom wrong, after all. Their lack of creativity, their inability to think an original thought, was a gift as well as a limitation. It allowed them to see and feel things at all times as they were -- not as they hoped they might be. for they had no ability to hope, either. "La-von! Laa-vah-on!' The long halloo came floating up from the sleepy depths. Propping one hand against the top of the frond, Lavon bent and looked down. One of the harvesters was looking up at him, holding, loosely the adze with which he had been splitting free the glutinous tetrads of the algae. "Up here. What's the matter?' "We have the ripened quadrant cut free. Shall we tow it away?" "Tow it away," Lavon said, with a la.zy gesture. H( loaned back again.  I the canic inrtant, into being above him. and cast itself dovn tovard the depths like mesh after mc-,h of I' ' rinv:;tdrawn gold. The grent light which lived above the sky during the day, brightening or dimming according to some pattern no Shar ever had fathomed, was blooming again. Few men, caught in the warm glow of th.at light, could resist looking up at it -- especially when the top of the sky itself wrinkled and smiled just a moment's climb or swim away. Yet, as always, Lavon's bemused upward look gave him back nothing but his own distorted, hobbling reflection, and a reflection of the plant on which he rested. Here was the upper limit, the third of the three surfaces of tlie universe. ir The first surface was the bottom. where the water ended. The second surface was the thermocline, the invisible division between the colder waters of the bottom and the warm, light waters of the sky. During the height of the warm weather, the thermocline was so definite a division as to make for good sledding and for chilly passage. A real interface formed between the cold, denser bottom waters and the warm reaches above, and maintained itself almost for the whole of the warm season. The third surface was the sky. One could no more pass through that surface than one could penetrate the bottom, nor was there any better reason to try. There the universe ended. The light which played over it daily, waxing and waning as it chose, seemed to be one of its properties. Toward the end of the season, the water gradually grew colder and more difficult to breathe, while at the same time the light became duller and stayed for shorter periods between darknesses. Slow currents started to move. The high waters turned chill and began to fall. The bottom mud stirred and smoked away, carrying with it the spores of the fields of fungi. The thermocline tossed, became choppy, and melted away. The sky began to fog with particles of soft silt carried up from the bottom, the walls, the corners of the universe. Before very long, the whole world was cold, inhospitable, flocculent with yellowing, dying creatures. Then the protos encysted: the bacteria, even most of the plants and, not long afterward, men, too, curled up in their oil-filled amber shells. The world died until the first tentative current of warm water broke the winter silence. "La-von!" ing bubble rose past Lavon. He reached out andpoked it, but it bounded away from his sharp thumb. The gas-bubbles which rose from the bottom in late summer were almost invulnerable-;and when some especially hard blow or edge did penetrate them, they broke into smaller bubbles which nothing could touch, and fled toward the sky, leaving behind a remarkably bad smell. Gas. There was no water inside a bubble. A man who got inside a bubble would have nothing to breathe. But. of course, it was impossible to penetrate a bubble. The surface tension was too strong. As strong as Shar's metal plates. As strong as the top of the sky. As strong as the top of the sky. And above that -- once the bubble was broken -- a world of gat instead of water? Were all worldt It bubbles of water drifting in gas? If it were so, travel between them would be out of the question, since it would be impossible to pierce the sky to begin with. Nor did the infant cosmology include any provisions for bottoms for the worlds. And yet some of the local creatures did burrow into the bottom, quite deeply, seeking something in those depths which was beyond the reach of Man. Even the surface of the ooze, in high summer, crawled with tiny creatures for which mud was a natural medium. Man, too, passed freely between the two countries of water which were divided by the thermocline. though many of the creatures with which he lived could not pass that line at all, once it had established itself. And if the new universe of which Shar had spoken existed at all, it had to exist beyond the sky, where the light was. Why could not the sky be passed, after all? The fact that bubbles could be broken showed that the surface skin that formed between water and gSs wasn't completely invulnerable. Had it ever been tried? Lavon did not suppose that one man could butt his way through the top of the sky, any more than he could burrow into the bottom, but there might be ways around the difficulty. Here at his back, for instance, was a plant which gave every appearance of continuing beyond the sky: its uppermost fronds broke off and were bent back only by a trick of reflection. It had always been assumed that the plants died where they touched the sky. For the most part, they did, for frequently the dead extension could be seen, leached and yellow, the boxes of its component cells empty, floating imbedded in the perfect mirror. But some were simply chopped off, like the one which sheltered him now. Perhaps that was only an illusion, and instead it soared indefinitely into some other place -- some place where men might once have been born, and might still live... The plates' were gone. There was only one other way to find out. gan to climb toward the wavering miiror of the sky. His thorn-thumbed feet trampled obliviously upon the clustered sheaves of fragile stippled diatoms. The tulip-heads of Vortae, placid and murmurous cousins of Para, retracted startldly out of his way upon coiling stalks, to make silly gossip behind him. Lavon did not hear them. He continued to climb doggedly toward the light, his fingers and It toes gripping the plant-bole. "La von! Where are you going? Lavon!" He leaned out and looked down. The man with the adze, a doll-like figure, was beckoning to him from a patch of blue-green retreating over a violet abyss. Dizzily he looked away, clinging to the bole: he had never been so Iiigh before. Then he began to climb again. After a while, he touched the sky with one hand. He stopped to breathe. Curious bacteria gathered about the base of his thumb where blood from a small cut was fogging away, scattered at his gesture, and wriggled mindlessly back toward the dull red lure. He waited until he no longer felt winded, and resumed climbing. The sky pressed down against the top of his head, against the back of his neck, against his shoulders. It seemed to give slightly, with a tough, frictionless elasticity. The water here was intensely bright, and quite colorless. He climbed another step, driving his shoulders against that enormous weight. It was fruitless. He might as well have tried to penetrate a cliff. Again he had to rest. While he panted, he made a curious discovery. All around the bole of tlie water plant, the steel surface of the sky curved upward, making a kind of sheath. He found that he could insert his hand into it -- there was almost enough space to admit his head as well. Clinging closely to the bole, he looked up into the inside of the sheath, probing with his injured hand. The glare was blinding. There was a kind of soundless explosion. His whole wrist was suddenly encircled in an intense, impersonal grip, as if it were being cut in two. In blind astonish-ment, he lunged upward. The ring of pain traveled smoothly down his upilung arm as he rose, was suddenly around his shoulders and chest. Another lunge and his knees were being squeezed in the circular vise. Another -- Something was horribly wrong. He clung to the bole and tried to gasp, but there was -- nothing to breathe. The water came streaming out of his body, from his mouth, his nostrils, the spiracles in his sides, spurting in tangible jets. An intense and fiery itching crawled over the entire surface of his body. At each spasm, long knives ran into him, and from a great distance he heard more water being expelled from his book-lungs in an obscene, frothy sputtering. Lavon was drowning. With a final convulsion, he kicked himself away from the splintery bole, and fell. A hard impact shook him; and then the water, which had clung to him so tightly when he had first attempted to leave it, took him back with cold violence. Sprawling and tumbling grotesquely, he drifted, down and down and down, toward the bottom. Ill F or many days, Lavon lay curled insensibly in his spore, as if in the winter sleep. The shock of cold which he had felt on re-entering his native universe had been taken by his body as a sign of coming winter, as it had taken the oxygen-starvation of his brief sojourn above the sky. The spore-forming glands had at once begun to function. Had it not been for this. Lavon would surely have died. The danger of drowning disappeared even as be fell, as the air bubbled out of his lungs and readmitted the life-giving water. But for acute dessication and third degree sunburn, the sunken universe knew no remedy. The healing amnionic fluid generated by the spore-forming glands, after the transparent amber sphere had enclosed him, offered Lavon his only chance. The brown sphere was spotted after sonae days by a prowling ftmfba, quiescent in the eternal winter of the bottom. Down there the temperature was always an even #, no matter what the season. but it was unheard of that a spore should be found there while the high epilimnion was still warm and rich in oxygen. Within an hour, the spore was surrounded by scores of astonished protos, jostling each other to bump their blunt eyeless prows against the shell. Another hour later, a squad of worried men came plunging from the castles far above to press their ovn noses against the transparent wall. Then swift orders were given. Four Para grouped themselves about the amber sphere, and there was a subdued explosion as the Uichocysts which lay embedded at the bases of their cilia, just under the pellicle, burst and cast fine lines a quickly solidifying liquid into the water. The four Paras thrummed and lifted, tugging. Lavon's spore swayed gently in the mud and then rose slowly,  ntangled in the web. Nearby, a Noc cast a cold pulsating glow over the operation -- not for the Paras, who did not need the light, but for the baffled knot of men. The sleeping figure of Lavon, head bowed, knees drawn up to its chest, revolved with an absurd solemnity inside the shell as it was moved. "Take him to Shar. Para." young Shar justified, by minding his own business, the traditional wisdom with which his hereditary office had invested him. He observed at once that there was nothing he could do for the encysted Lavon which w'ould not be classifiable as simple meddling. He had the spliere deposited in a high tower room of his castle, where there was plenty of light and the water was warm, which should suggest to the hibernating form that spring was again on the way. Beyond that, he simply sat and watched, and kept his speculations to himself. Inside the spore. Lavon's lody seemed rapidly to be shedding its skin, in long strips and patches. Gradually, his curious shrunkrnness disappeared. His withered arms and logs and sunken abdomen filled out again. The days went by while Shar watched. Finally he could discern no more clianges, and, on a hunch, had the spore taken up to the topmost battlements of the tower, into the direct daylight. An hour later, Lavon moved in his amber prison. He uncurled and stretched, turned blank eyes up toward the light. His expression was that of a man who had not yet awakened from a ferocious nightmare. His whole body shone with a strange pink newness. Shar knocked gently on the wall of the spore. Lavon turned his blind face toward the sound, life coming into his eyes. He smiled tentatively and braced his hands and feet against the inner wall of the shell. The whole sphere fell abruptly to pieces with a sharp crackling. The amnionic fluid dissipated around him and Shar, carrying away with it the suggestive odor of a bitter struggle against death. Lavon stood among the bits of shell and looked at Shar silently. At last he said : "Shar -- I've been beyond the sky."  "I know," Shar said gently. Again Lavon was silent. Shar said. "Don't be humble, Lavon. You've done an epoch-making thing. It nearly cost you your life. You must tell me the restall of it." "The rest?" "You taught me a lot while you slept. Or are you still opposed to useless knowledge?" Lavon could say nothing. He no longer could tell what he knew from what he wanted to know. He had only one question left, but he could not utter it. He could only look dumbly into Shar's delicate .face. "You have answered me," Shar said, even more gently. "Come, my friend: join me at my table. We will plan our journey to the stars." TT was two winter sleeps after Lavon's disastrous climb beyond the sky that all work on the spaceship stopped. By then, Lavon knew that he had hardened and weathered into that temporarily ageless state a man enters after he has just reached his prime : and he knew also that there were wrinkles engraved upon his brow, to stay and to deepen. "Old" Shar, too, had changed, his features losing some of their delicacy as he came into his maturity. Though the wedge-shaped bony structure of his face would give him a withdrawn and poetic look for as long as he lived, participation in. the plan had given his expression a kind of executive overlay, which at best gave it a masklike rigidity, and at worst coarsened it somehow. Yet despite the bleeding away of the years, the spaceship was still only a hulk. It lay upon a platform built above the tumbled boulders of the sandbar which stretched out from one wall of the world. It was an. immense hull of pegged wood, broken by regularly spaced gaps through which the raw beams of the skeleton could be seen. Work upon it had progressed fairly rapidly at first, for it was not hard to visualize what kind of vehicle would be needed to crawl through empty space without losing its water. It had been recognized that the sheer size of the machine would enforce a long )criod of construction, perhaps two full seasons: but neither Shar nor Lavon had anticipated any serious snag. For that matter, part of the vehicle's apparent incompleteness was an illusion. About a tliird of its fittings were to consist of living creatures, which could not be expected to install themselves in the vessel much before the actual takeoff. Yet time and time again, work on the ship had had to be halted for long periods. Several times whole sections needed to be rippetl out, as it became more and more evident that hardly a single normal, understandable concept could be applied to the problem of space travel. The lack of the history plates, wliich the Para steadfastly refused to deliver up. was a double handicap. Immediately upon their loss, Shar had set himself to reproduce them from memory; but unlike the more religious of his people, he had never regarded them as holy writ, and hence had never set himself to memorizing them word by word. Even before the tlieft, he had accumulated a set of variant translations of passages presenting specific experimental problems, which were stored in his library, carved in wood. But most of these translations tended to contradict each other, and none of them related to spaceship construction, upon which the original had been vague in any case. No duplicates of the cryptic characters of the original had ever been made, for the simple reason that there was nothing in the sunken universe capable of destroying the originals, nor of duplicating their apparently changeless permanence. Shar remarked too late that through simple caution they sliould have made a number of verbatim temporary records but after generations of green-gold peace, simple caution no longer covers preparation against catastrophe. (Nor. for that matter, did a culture which had to dig each letter of its simple alphabet into pulpy waterlogged wood with a flake of stonewort, encourage the keeping of records in triplicate.) As a result, Shar's imperfect memory of the contents of the history plates, plus the constant and millcnial doubt as to the accuracy of the various translations, proved finally to be the worst obstacle to progress on the spaceship itself. "Men must paddle before they s;'., , # r  can swim," Lavon observed belatedly, and Shar was forced to agree with him. Obviously, whatever the ancients had known about spaceship construction, very little of that knowledge was usable to a people still trying to build its first spaceship from scratch. In retrospect, it was not surprising that the great hulk still rested incomplete upon its platform above the sand boulders, exuding a musty odor of wood steadily losing its strength, two generations after its flat bottom had been laid down. fat-faced young man who headed the strike delegation was Phil XX, a man two generations younger than Lavon, four younger than Shar. There were crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes, which made him look both like a querulous old man and like an infant spoiled in the spore. "We're calling a halt to this crazy project," he said bluntly. "We've slaved our youth away on it, but now that we're our own masters, it's over, that's all. Over." "Nobody's compelled you," Lavon said angrily. "Society does; our parents do," a gaunt member of the delegation said. "But now weVe going to start living in the real world. Everybody these days knows that there's no other world but this one. You oldsters can hang on to your superstitions if you like. We don't intend to." Baffled, Lavon looked over at Shar. The scientist smiled and said, "Let them go, Lavon. We have no use for the faint-Iicarted." The fat-faced young man flushed. "You can't insult us into going back to work. Wi 're through. Build your own ship to noplace!" "All right," Lavon said evenly. "Go on, beat it. Don't stand around here orating about it. You've made your decision and we're not interested in your selfjustifications. Good-by." The fat-faced young man evidently still had quite a bit of heroism to dramatize which Lavon's dismissal had shortcircuited. An examination of Lavon's stony face, however, convinced him that he had to take his victory as he found it. He and the delegation trailed ingloriously out the archway. "Now what?" Lavon asked when they had gone. "I must admit, Shar, that I would have tried to persuade them. We do need the workers, after all." "Not as much as they need us," Shar said tranquilly. "How many volunteers have you got for the crew of the ship?" as "Noc, I've a message." Shar  called. "The protos are to tell all 'JKm men that those who wish to go to the next world with the spaceship  must come to the staging area . right away. Say that we can't promise to take everyone, but . that only those who help us build the ship will be considered at all."  The Noc curled its tentacles again and appeared to go back to sleep. Actually, of course, it  was sending its message through the water in all directions. I IV rangement of speaking-tube megaphones which was his control board and looked at the Para. "One ' last try," he said.  "Hundreds. Every young man fe , of the generation after Phil's f wants to go along. Phil's wrong V. about that segment of the popujt'. lation, at least. The project catches the imagination of the young." p "Did you give them any enj... couragement?" P "Sure," Lavon said. "I told  them we'd call on them if they  were chosen. But you can't take P that seiusly! We'd do badly to displace our picked group of ff.specialists with youths who have ft, enthusiasm and nothing else." b I "That's not what I had in mind. Lavon. Didn't I see a Noc in your chambers somewhere? Hh , Oh, there he is, asleep in the dome. Noel" BT; The creature stirred its tentacles lazily. "WiJl you giv us back the plates?" "No, Lavon. Wc have never denied you anything before, but this we must." "You're going with us though. Para. Unless you give us the knowledge we need, you'll lose your life if we lose ours." "What is one Para?" the creature said. "We are all alike. This cel! will die; but the protos need to know how you fare on this journey. We believe you should make it without the plates." "Why?" The proto was silent. Lavon stared at it a moment, then turned deliberately back to the speaking tubes. "Everyone hang on," he said. He felt shaky. "We're about to start. Tol, is the ship sealed?" "As far as T can tell. Lavon. Lavon shifted to another megaphone. He took a deep breath. Already the water seemed stifling, though the ship hadn't moved. "Ready with one-quarttr power. One, two, three, go." The whole ship jerked and settled back into place again. The raphe diatoms along the under hull settled into their niches, their jelly treads turning against 'broad endless belts of crude Icatlier. Wooden gears creaked, stepping up the slow power of the creatures. transmitting it to the sixteen axles of the ship's wheels. The ship rocked and began to roll slowly along the sandbar. Lavon looked tensely through the mice port. The world ' flowed painfully past him. The ship #T' cflnted and began to climb the slope. Behind him, he could feel the electric silence of Shar, Para, the two alternate pilots, as if their gaze were stabbing directly through his body and on out the port. The world looked different, now that he was leaving it. How had he missed all this beauty before? The slapping of the endless belts and the squeaking and groaning of the gears and axles grew louder as the slope steepened. The ship continued to climb, lurching. Around it. squadrons of men and protos dipped and wheeled, escorting it toward the sky. Gradually the sky lowered and pressed down toward the top of the ship. "A little more work from your diatoms, Tanol." Lavon said. "Boulder ahead." The ship swung ponderously. "All right, slow them up again. Give us a shove from your side. Than -- no, that's too much -- there, that's it. Back to normal: you're still turning us! Tanol. give us one burst to line us up again. Good. All right, steady drive on. all sides. Won't be long now." "Flow can you think in webs like that?" the Para wondered behind him. "I just do, tliat's all. It's the way men think. Overseers, a tittle more thrust now; the grade's getting steeper." The gears groaned. The ship nosed up. The sky brightened in Lavon's face. Despite himself, he began to be frightened. His lungs seemed to burn, and in his mind he felt his long fall through nothingness toward the chill slap of water as if he were experiencing it for the first time. His skin itched and burned. Could he go up there again? Up there into the burning void, the great gasping agony where no life should go? sandbar began to level out and the going became a little easier. Up here, the sky was so close that the lumbering motion of the huge ship disturbed it. Shadows of wavelets ran across the sand. Silently, the thick-barreled bands of blue-green algae drank in the light and converted it to oxygen, writhing in their slow mindless dance just under the long mica skylight which ran along the spine of the ship. In the hold, beneath the latticed corridor and cabin floors, whirring Vortae kept the ship's water in motion, fueling themselves upon drifting organic particles. One by one, the figures wheeling about the ship outside waved arms or cilia and fell back, coasting down the slope of th sandbar toward the familiar world, dwindling and disappearing. There was at last only one single Euglena. half-plant cousin of the protos, forging along beside the spaceship into the marches of the shallows. It loved the light, but finally it, too, was driven away into cooler, deeper waters, its single whiplike tentacle undulating placidly as it went. It was not very bright, but Lavon felt deserted when it left. Where they were going, though, none could follow. Now the sky was nothing but a thin, resistant skin of water coating the top of the ship. The vessef slowed, and when Lavon called for more power, it began to dig itself in among the sandgrains. "That's not going to work," Shar said tensely. "I think we'd better step down the gear ratio, Lavon. so you can apply stress more slowly." "All right," Lavon agreed. "Full stop, everybody. Shar, will you supervise gear-changing, please?" space looked Lavon full tn the face just beyond his big mica bull's eye. It was maddening to be forced to stop here upon the threshold of infinity; and it was dangerous, too. Lavon could feel building in him the old fear of the outside. A few moments more of inaction, he knew with a gathering coldness at the pit of his stomach, and he would be unable to go through with it. Surely, he thought, there must be a better way to change gearratios than the traditional one, which involved dismantling almost tTie entire gear-box. Why couldn't a number of gears of different sizes be carried on the same shaft, not necessarily all in action all at once, but awaiting use simply by shoving the axle back and forth longitudinally in its sockets? It would still be clumsy, but it could be worked on orders from the bridge and would not involve shutting down the entire machine -- and throwing the new pilot into a bluegreen funk. Shar came lunging up through the trap and swam himself a stop. "All set," he said. "The big reduction gears aren't takingthe strain too well, though." "Splintering?" 'Yes. I'd go it slow at first." Lavon nodded mutely. Witiiout allowing himself to stop, even for a moment, to consider the consequences of his words, he called: "Half power." The ship hunched itself down again and began to move, very slowly indeed, but more smoothly than before. Overhead, the sky thinned to complete transparency. The great light came blasting in. Behind Lavon there was an # iasy stir. The whiteness grew at the front ports. Again the ship slowed, straining against the blinding barrier. Lavon swallowed and called for more power. The ship groaned like something about to die. It was now almost at a standstill. "More power," Lavon ground out. ness, the ship began to move. Gently, it tilted upward. Then it lunged forward and every board and beam in it began to squall. "Lavon! Lavon!" Lavon started sharply at the shout. The voice was coming at him from one of the megaphones, the one marked for the port at the rear of the ship. "Lavon!" "What is it? Stop your damn yelling." "I can see the top of the sky! From the other side, from the top side! It's like a big flat sheet of metal. Wre going away from it. We're above the sky, Lavon, we're above the sky!" Another violent start swung Lavon around toward the forward port. On the outside of the mica, the water was evaporating with shocking swiftness, taking with it strange distortions and patterns made of rainbows. Lavon saw Space. TT was at first like a deserted and cruelly dry version of the bottom. There were enormous boulders, great cliffs, tumblel, split, riven, jagged rocks going up and away in all directions. But it had a sky of its own -- a deep blue dome so far away tliat he could not believe in. let-alone compute, what its distance might be. And in this dome was a ball of white fire that seared his eyeballs. The wilderness of rock was still a long way away from tlic ship, which now seemed to be resting upon a level, glistening plain. Beneath the surface-shinc, the plain seemed to be made of sand, nothing but familiar sand, the same substance which had heaped up to form a bar in Lavon's own universe, the lar along which the ship had climbed. But the glassy, colorful skin over it -- Suddenly Lavon became conscious of another shout from the megaphone banks. He shook his head savagely and askd, "What is it now?" "Lavon, this is Than. What have you gotten us into? The belts are locked. The diatoms can't move them. They aren't faking, either; we've rapped them hard enough to make them think we were trying to break their shells, but they still can't give us more power." "Leave them alone," Lavon snapped. "They can't fake; they haven't enough intelligence. If they say they can't give you more power, they can't." "Well, then, you get us out of it," Than's voice said frightenedlyShar came forward to Lavon's elbow. "We're on a space-water interface, where the surface tension is very high," he said softly. "This is why I insisted on our building the ship so that we could lift the wheels off the ground whenever necessary. For a long while I couldn't understand the reference of the history plates to 'retractable landing gear,' but it finally occurred to me that the tension along a spacewater interface -- or, to be more exact, a space-mud interface -- would hold any large object pretty tightly. If you order the wheels pulled up now, I think we'll make better progress for a while on the belly-treads." "Good enough," Lavon said. "Hello below -- up landing gear. Evidently the ancients knew their business after all, Shar." Q uite a few minutes later, for shifting power to the belly treads involved another setting of the gear box, the ship was crawling along the shore toward the Uimbled rock. Anxiously, Lavon scanned the jagged, threatening wall for a break. There was a sort of rivulet off toward the left which might offer a route, though a dubious one, to the next world. After some thought, Lavon ordered his ship turned toward it. "Do you suppose that thing in the sky is a 'star'?" he asked. "But there were supposed to be lots of them. Only one is up there -- and one's plenty for my taste." "I don't know," Shar admitted. "But I'm beginning to get a picture of the way the universe is made, I think. Evidently our world is a sort of cup in the bottom of this huge one. This one' has a sky of its own; perhaps it, too, is only a cup in the bottom of a still huger world, and so on and on without end. It's a hard concept to grasp, I'll admit. Maybe it wjuld be more sensible to assume that all the worlds are cups in this one common surface, and that the great light shines on them all impartially." "Then what makes it seem to go out every night, and dim even in the day during winter?" Lavon demanded. "Perhaps it travels in circles, over first one world, then another. How could I know yet?" "Well, if you're right, it means that all we have to do is crawl along here for a while, until we hit the top of the sky of another world," Lavon said. "Then we dive in. Somehow it seems too I sitnplr, after all our preparations," Shar chuckled, but the sound did not suggest that he had discovered anything funny. "Simple? Have you noticed the temperature yet?" Lavon had noticed it, just beneath the surface of awareness, but at Shar's remark he realized that he was gradually being stifled. The oxygen content of the water, luckily, had not dropped, but the temperature suggested the shallows in the last and worst part of the autumn. It was like trying to breathe soup. "Than, give us more action from the Vortae," Lavon called. "This is going to be unbearable unless we get more circulation." It was all he could do now to keep his attention on the business of steering the ship. The cut or defile in the scattered razor-edged rocks vas a little closer, but there still seemed to be many miles of rough desert to cross. After a while, the ship settled into a steady, painfully slow crawling, with less pitching and jerking than before, but also with less progress. Under it, there was now a sliding, grinding sound, rasping against the hull of the ship itself, as if it were treadcant whose particles were each as big as a man's head. Finally Shar said, "Lavon, we'll have to stop again. The sand this far up is dry, and we're wasting energy using the treads." "Are you sure we can take it?' Lavon asked, gasping for breath. "At least we are moving. If wc stop to lower the wheels and change gears again, we'll boil." "Wc'll boil if wc don't," Shar said calmly. "Some of our algae are already dead and the rest are withering. That's a pretty good sign that we can't take much more. I don't think we'll make it into the shadows, unless we do change over and put on some speed."' There was a gulping sound from one of the mechanics. "Wc ought to turn back," he said raggedly. "We were never meant to be out here in the first place. We were made for the water, not this hell." "We'll stop," Lavon said, "but we're not turning back. That's final." The words made a brave sound, but the man had upset Lavon more than he dared to admit, even to himself. "Shar." he said, "make it fast, will you?" The scientist nodded and dived below. T he minutes stretched out. The great white globe in the sky blazed and blazed. It had moved down the sky, far down, so that the light was pouring into the ship directly in Lavon's face, illuminating every floating particle, its rays like long milky streamers. The currents of water passing Lavon's cheek were almost hot. How could they dare go directly forward into that inferno? The land directly under the "star" must be even hotter than it was here! "Lavon! Look at Para!" Lavon forced himself to turn and look at his proto ally. The great slipper had settled to the deck, where it was lying with only a feeble pulsation of its cilia. Inside, its vacuoles were beginning to swell, to become bloated, pear-shaped bubbles, crowding the granulated protoplasm, pressing upon the dark nuclei. "This cell is dying," Para said, as coldly as always. "But go on -- go on. There is much to learn, and you may live, even though wc do not. Go on." "You're... for us now?" Lavon whispered. "We have always been for you. Push your folly to its uttermost. We will benefit in the end. and so will Man." The whisper died away. Lavon called the creature again, but it did not respond. There was a wooden clashing from below, and then Shar's voice came tinnily fitm one of the megaphones. "Lavon. go ahead! The diatoms are dying, too, and then we'll be without power. Make it as quickly and directly as you can." Grimly, Lavon leaned forward. "The 'star is directly over the land we're approaching." "It is? It may go lower still and the shadows will get longer. That's our only hope." Lavon had not thought of that. He rasped into the banked megaphones. Once more, the ship began to move. It got hotter. Steadily, with a perceptible motion, the "star" sank in Lavon's face. Suddenly a new terror struck him. Suppose it should continue to go down until it was gone entirely? Blasting though it was now, it was the only source of iieat. Would not space become bitter cold on the instant -- and the ship an expanding, bursting block of ice? The shadows lengthened menacingly, stretched across the desert toward the forward-rolling vessel. There was no talking in the cabin, just the round of ragged breathing and the creaking of the machinery. Then the jngged liori.'on seemed to rush upon ti'cm. Stony teeth cut into the lower rim of the ball of fire, devoured it swiftly. It was gone. They were in the Ice of the #-# cliffs. Lavoa ordered the ship turned to parallel the rockline; it responded heavily, sluggishly. Far above, the sky deepened steadily, from blue to indigo. the trap and stood beside Lavon. studying that deepening color and the lengthening of the shadows down the beach toward their world. He said nothing, but Lavon knew that the same chilling thought was in his mind. "Lavon.' Lavon jumped. Shar's voice had Iron in it. "Yes?" "We'll have to keep moving. We must make the next world, wherever it is. very shortly." "How can we dare move when we can't see where we're going? Why not sleep it over -- if the cold will let us?" "It will let us." Shar said. "It . can't get dangerously cold up here. If it did, tlie sky -- or what we used to think of as the sky -- would have frozen over every night, even in summer. But what I'm thinking about is the water. The plants will go to sleep now. In our world that wouldn't matter: the supply of oxygen is enough to last through the night. But in this confined space, with so many creatures in it and no source of fresh water, we will probably smother," Shar seemed hardly to be involved at all , but spoke rather with the voice of implacable physical laws. "Furthermore." he said, staring unseeingly out at the raw landscape, "the diatoms are plants, too. In other words, we must stay on the move for as long as we have oxygen and power -- and pray that we make it." "Shar, we had quite a few protos on board this ship once. And Para there isn't quite dead yet. If he were, the cabin would be intolerable. The ship is nearly sterile of bacteria, because all the protos have been eating them as a matter of course and there's no outside supply of them, any more than there is for oxygen. But still and all there would have been some decay." Shar bent and tested the iellicle of the motionless Para with a probing finger. "You're right, he's still alive. What does that prove?" "The Vortae arc also alive; I can feel the water circulating. Which proves it wasn't the heat that hurt Para. It was the liht. Remember how badly my skin was affected after I climbed beyond the sky? Undiluted starlight is deadly. We should add that to the information on the plates." "I still don't see the point." "It's this. We've got three or four Noc down below. They were shielded from the light, and so must be alive. If we concentrate them in the diatom galleys, the dumb diatoms will think it's still daylight and will go on working. Or we can concentrate them up along the spine of the ship, and keep the algae putting out oxygen. So the question is: which do we need more, oxygen or power? Or can we split the difference?" Shar actually grinned. "A brilliant piece of thinking. Well make a Shar of you yet, Lavon. No, rd say that we can't split the difference. There's something about daylight, some quality, that the light Noc emits doesn't have. You and I can't detect it, but the green plants can, and without it they don't make oxygen. So we'll have to settle for the diatoms -- for power." Lavon brought the vessel away from the rocky lee of the cliff, out onto the smoother sand. All trace of direct light was gone now, although there was still a soft, general glow on. the sky. "Now, then," Shar said thoughtfully, "I would guess that there's water over there in the canyon, if we can reach it. I'll go below and arrange -- " Lavon gasped, "What's the matter?" Silently, Lavon iointcd. his heart pounding. The entire dome of indigo above them was spangled with There were hundreds of them, and more and more were becoming visible as the darkness deepened. And far away, over the ultimate edge of the rocks, was a dim red globe, crescented with ghostly silver. Near the zenith was another such body, much smaller, and silvered all over... Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inchwooden spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope toward the drying little rivulet. V T he ship rested on the bottom of the canyon for the rest of the night. The great square doors were thrown open to admit the raw, irradiated, life-giving water from outside -- and the wriggling bacteria which were fresh food. No other creatures approached them, either with curiosity or with predatory intent, while they slept, though Lavon had posted guards at the doors. Evidently, even up here on the very floor of space, highly organized creatures were quiescent at night. But when the first flush of light filtered through the water, trouble threatened. First of all, there was the bugeyed monster. The thing was green and had two snapping claws, either one of which could have broken, the ship in two like a spyrogyra straw. Its eyes were black and globular, on the ends of short columns, and its long feelers were as thick as a plantbole. It passed in a kicking fury of motion, however, never noticing the ship at all. "Is that -- a sample of the kind of life we can expect in the next world?" Lavon whispered. Nobody answered, for the very good reason that nobody knew. After a while, Lavon risked moving the ship forward against the current, which was slow but heavy. Enormous writhing worms whippe# past them. One struck the hull a heavy blow, the thrashed on obliviously. "They don't notice us," Shar said. "We're too small. Lavoo, the ancients warned us of the inmensity of space, but even whe you see it, it's impossible t grasp. And all those stars --  caa they mean what I tliink they mean? It's beyond thought, boyond beliefl" "The bottom's sloping," Lavo said, looking ahead intently. "The walls of the canyon are r treating, and the water's becoming rather silty. Let the stars wait, Shar; we're coming toward the entrance of oir new world. Shar subsided moodily. His vi sion of space had disturbed liin perhaps seriously. He took littte notice of the great thing that was happening, but instead huddled worriedly over his own expanding speculations. Lavon felt tle old gap between their two mindi widening once more. Now the bottom was tiltitg upward again. Lavon had no eperience with delta-formation, for no rivulets left his own world, and the phenomenon worried him. But his worries were swept awag in wonder as the ship topped ths rise and nosed over. Ahead, the bottom sloped away again, indeRnitely, into glimmeting depths. A proper sky was over them once more, and Lavo could see small rafts of plankto floating placidly beneath it. Almost at once, too, he saw several of the smaller kinds of protos, a few of which were already approaching the shij -- of the depths, her features distorted with terror. At first she did not see the ship at all. She came twisting and turning lithely through the water, obviously hoping only to throw herself over the ridge of the delta and into tlie avage streamlet beyond. Lavon was stunned. Not that there were men here -- he had hoped for that -- but at the girl's single-minded flight toward suicide. "What --  Then a dim buzzing began to grow in his ears, and he understood. "Shari Than! Tanol!" he bawled. "Break out crossbows and spears! Knock out all the windows!" He lifted a foot and kicked through the big port in front of him. Someone thrust a crossbow into his hand. "Eh? What's happening?" Shar blurted. Rotifers!' The cry went through the ship like a galvanic shock. The rotifers back in Lavon's own world were virtually extinct, but everyone knew thoroughly the grim history of the long battle man and proto had waged against them. The girl spotted the ship suddenly and paused, stricken by despair at the sight of the new monster. She drifted with her own momentum, her eyes alternately fixed hypnotically upon the ship and glancing back over her shoulder, toward where the buzzing snarled louder and louder in the dimness. "Don't stop!" Lavon shouted. "This way, this way! We're friends! We'll help!' Three great semi-transparent trumpets of smooth flesh bored over the rise, the many thick cilia of their coronas whirring greedily. Dicrans -- the most predacious of the entire tribe of Eaters. They were quarreling thickly among themselves as they moved, with the few blurred, pre-symbdlic noises which made up their "language."  the crossbow, brought it to his shoulder, and fired. The bolt sang away through the water. It lost momentum rapidly, and was caught by a stray current which brought it closer to the girl than to the Eater at which Lavon had aimed. He bit his lip, lowered the weapon, wound it up again. It did not pay to underestimate the range; he would have to wait until he could fire with effect. Another bolt, cutting through the water from a side port, made him issue orders to cease firing. The sudden irruption of the rotifers decided the girl. The motionless wooden monster was strange to her and had not yet menaced her -- but she must have known what it would be like to have three Dicrans over her, each trying to grab away from the other the biggest share. She threw herself toward the big port. The Eaters screamed with fury and greed and bored after her. She probably would not have made it, had not the dull vision of the lead Dicran made out the wooden shape of the ship at the last instant. It backed off, buzzing, and the other two sheered away to avoid colliding with it. After that they had another argument, though they could hardly have formulated what it was that they were fighting about. They were incapable of saying anything much more complicated than the equivalent of "Yaah," "Drop dead," and "You're another." While they were still snarling at each other, Lavon pierced the nearest one all the way through with an arablast bolt. It disintegrated promptly -- rotifers are delicately organized creatures despite their ferocity -- and the remaining two were at once involved in a lethal battle over the remains. "Than, take a party out and spear me those two Eaters while they're still fighting." Lavon ordered. "Don't forget to destroy their eggs, too. I can see that this world needs a little taming." The girl shot through the port and brought up against the far wall of the cabin, flailing in terror. Lavon tried to approach her, but from somewhere she produced a flake of stonewort chipped to a nasty point. He sat down on the stool before his control board and waited while she took in the cabin, Lavon, Shar, the pilot, the senescent Para. At last she said: "Are -- you -- the gods from beyond the sky?" "We're from beyond the sky, all right," Lavon said. "But we're not gods. We're human beings, like yourself. Are there many humans here?" The girl seemed to assess the situation very rapidly, savage though she was. Lavon had the odd and impossible impression that he should recognize her. She tucked the knife back into her matted hair -- aJi, Lavon thought, that's a trick I may need to remember -- and shook her head. "We are few. The Eaters are everywhere. Soon they will have the last of us." Her fatalism was so complete that she actually did not seem l care. "And you've never cooperated against them? Or asked the protos to help?" "The protos?' She shrugged. "They are as helpless as we are against the Eaters. We have no weapons which kill at a distance, like yours. And it is too late now for such weapons to do any good. We are too few, the Eaters too many." phatically. "You've had one weapon that counts, all along. Against it, numbers mean nothing. We'll show you how we've used it. You may be able to use it even better than we did. once you've given it a try." The girl shrugged again. "Wc have dreamed of such a weapon now and then, but never found it. I do not think that what you say is true. What is this weapon?" "Brains," Lavon said. "Not just one brain, but brains. Working together. Cooperation." "Lavon speaks the truth," a weak voice said from the deck. The Para stirred feebly. The girl watched it with wide eyes. The sound of Uie Para using human speech seemed to impress her more than the ship or anything else it contained. 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SO Rockefeller Plasa Uorkefeller Center. New York #. N. Y. Ili U'c send your free catalog, without nbligatiim. to:  cnnfidintiel. No zaltsm nuilhalh the thin, buzzing voice said. "The protos will help, as they helped in the world from which we came. They fought this flight through space, and deprived Man of his records: but Man made the trip without the records. The protos will never oppose men again. I have already spoken to the protos of this world and have told them what Man can dream, Man can do, whether tfie protos wish it or not. with you. They were hidden in the slip. My brothers will lead you to them. "This organism dies now. It dies in confidence of knowledge, as an intelligent creature dies. Man has taught us this. There is nothing that knowledge... cannot do. With it, men... have crossed... have crossed space The voice whispered away. The shining slipper did not change, but something about it was gone. Lavon looked at the girl ; their eyes met. "We have crossed space," Lavon repeated softly. Shar's voice came to him across a great distance. The young-old man was whispering: "But have we?" "As far as I'm concerned, yes," said Lavon. proof of the pudding One man's fact is fantasy for another -- except the man whose fantasies become soUd facts! H IS arms were very tired, but he lifted the chisel and mallet again. He was almost through; only a few more letters and the inscription, cut deeply into the tough granite. would be finished. He rounded out the last period and straightened up, dropping his tools carelessly to the floor of the cave. Proudly he wiped the per spiration from his dirty stubbled face and read what he had written. He smiled. What he had written was good. Not literary enough, perhaps, but a fitting tribute to the human race, written by the last man. He glanced at the tools at his feet. Having no further use for them, he dissolved tlu-m, and, hungry from his long v.'ork, squatted in the rubble of the cave and created a dinner. He stared at the food for a moment, wondering what was lacking; then, sheepishly, created a table and chair, utensils and plates. He was embarrassed. He had forgotten them again. Although there was no need to rush, he ate hurriedly, noting the odd fact that when he didn't think of anything specific, he always created hamburger, mashed potatoes, peas, bread and ice cream. Habit, he decided. Finished, he made the remnants of the meal disappear, and with them the plates, utensils and fable. The chair he retained. Sitting on it. he stared thoughtfully at the inscription. It's fine, he thought, but no human other than myself will ever read it. It was fairly certain that he was the last man alive on the Earth. The war had been thorough. Thorough as only man, a meticulous animal, could make it. There had been no neutrals in this war, no middle-of-theroad policy. You were on one side or the other. Bacteria, gas and radiations had covered the Earth like a vast cloud. In the first days of that war, invincible secret weapon had succeeded secret weapon with almost monotonous regularity. And after the last hand had pushed the last button, the bombs, automatici lly guided and impelled, had continued to rain down. The unhappy Earth was a huge junkyard, without a living thing, plant or animal, from pole to pole. He had watched a good part of it. He had waited until he was fairly sure the last bomb had been dropped; then he had come down. Very clever of you,, he thought bitterly, looking out the mouth of the cave at the lava plain his ship rested on, and at the twisted mountains behind it. You're a traitor -- but who cares? He had been a captain in the Western Hemisphere Defense. Within two days of warfare, he had known what the end would air, food and water, he had fled. In Uie confusion and destruction, he knew that he would never be missed; after a few days there was no one left to miss him. He had raced the big ship to the dark side of the Moon, and waited. It was a twelve-day war -- he had guessed it would last fourteen -- but he had to wait nearly six months before the automatic missiles slopped falling. Then he had come down. To find himself the only survivor... ognize the futility of it. load ships and flock to the dark side of the Moon also. Evidently there had been no time, even if there had been the desire. He had thought that there would be scattered groups of survivors, but he hadn't found any. The war had been too thorough. Landing on the Earth should have killed him. for the air itself was poisoned. He hadn't cared -- and he had lived. He seemed to be immune to the various kinds of germs and radiations, or perhaps that was part of his new power. He certainly had encountered enough of both, skipping around the world in his ship, from the ruins of one city to another, across blasted valleys and plains, scorched mountains. He had found no life, but he did discover something. He could create. He realized the power on his third day on Earth. Wistfully, he had wished for a tree in the midst of the melted rock and metal; a tree had appeared. The rest of the day he experimented, and found that he could create anything that he had ever seen or heard about... Things he knew best, he could create best. Things he knew just from books or conversation -- palaces, for example -- tended to be lopsided and uncertain, although he could make them nearly perfect by laboring mentally over the details. Everything he created was three-dimensional. Even food tasted like food and seemed to nourish him. He could forget all about one of his creations, go to sleep, and it would still be there when he awakened. He could also uncreate. A single concentrated thought and the thing he had made would vanish. The larger the thing, the longer it took to uncrcate. Things he hadn't made -- valleys and mountains -- he could uncreate, too, but it took longer. It seemed as though matter was easier to handle once he had shaped it. He could make birds and small animals, or things that #S looked like birds and small animals. He had never tried to make a human being. He wasn't a scientist; he had been a space-pilot. He had a vague concept of atomic theory and practically no idea of genetics. He thought that some change mut have taken place in his germ-plasm, or in his brain, or perhaps in the Earth. The "why" of it all didn't especially bother him. It was a fact and he accepted it. He stared at the monument again. Sometlhng about it bothered him. Of course, he could have created it. but he didn't know if the things he made would endure after his death. They seemed stable enough, but they might dissolve with his own dissolution. Therefore he compromised. He created a chisel and mallet, but selected a granite wall that he hadn't made. He cut the letters into the inside of the wall of the cave so they would be safe from the elements, working many hours at a stretch, sleeping and eating beside the wall. From the mouth of the cave, he could see his ship, perched on a level plain of scorched ground. He was in no rush to get back to it. In six days the inscription was done, cut deeply and eternally into the rock. The thought that had been bothering him as he stared at the gray granite finally came to the surface. The only people who would come to read it would be visitors from the stars. How would they decipher it? He stared at the inscription angrily. He should have written it in symbols. But what kind of symbols? Mathematics? Of course, but what would that tell them about Man? And what made him think they would discover the cave anyway? There was no use for an inscription when Man's entire history was written over the face of the planet, scorched into the crust for anyone to see. He cursed his stupidity for wasting six days working at the useless inscription. He was about to uncreate it when he turned his head, hearing footsteps at the mouth of the cave. He almost fell off the chair getting to his feet. blinked rapidly, and she was still there, a tall, dark-haired girl dressed in a torn, dirty one-piece coverall. "Hi," she said, and walked into the cave. "I heard your hammer from the valley." Automatically, he offered her his chair and created another for himself. She tested it gingerly before she sat down. 'I saw you do it." she said, but I still don't believe it. Mirrors?" "No," he muttered uncertainly. "I create. That is, I have the power to -- wait a minute! How did you get here?" While he was demanding to know, he was considering and rejecting possibilities. Hidden in a cave? On a mountain top? No, there would be only one possible way... "I was in your ship, pal." She leaned back in the chair and clasped her hands around one knee. "When you loaded up that cruiser, I figured you were going to beat it. I was getting tired of setting fuses eighteen hours a day, so I stowed away. Anybody else alive?" "No. Why didn't I sec you, then?" He stared at the ragged, beautiful girl, and a vague thought crossed his mind. He reached out and touched her arm. She didn't draw back, but her pretty face grew annoyed. "I'm real," she said bluntly. "You must have seen me at the base. Remember?" He tried to think back to the time when there had been a base -- centuries ago, it seemed. There had been a dark-haired girl there, one who had never given him a tumble. "I think I froze to death," she was saying. "Or into coma, anyhow, a few hours after your ship took off. Lousy heating system you have in that crate!" She shivered reminiscently. "Would have ised up too much oxygen," he explained. "Just kept the pilot's compartment heated and aired. Used a suit to drag .supplies forward when I needed them." "I'm glad you didn't see me," she laughed. "I must have looked like the devil, all covered with frost and killed, I bet. Some sleeping beauty I probably made! Well, I froze. When you opened all the compartments, I revived. That's the whole story. Guess it took a few days. How come you didn't see me?" "I suppose I never looked back there," he admitted. "Quick enough, I found I didn't need supplies. Funny, I thought I opened all the compartments, but I don't really remember -- " She looked at the inscription on the wall. "What's that?" "I thought I'd leave a sort of monument -- " "Who's going to read it?" she asked practically. "No one, probably. It was just a foolish idea." He concentrated on it. In a few moments the granite wall was bare. "I still don't understand how you could be alive now," he said puzzled. 'TBut I am. I don't see how you do that -- " she gestured at the chair and wall -- "But I'll accept the fact that you can. Why don't you accept the fact that I'm alive?" "Don't get me wrong," the man said. "I want company very much, especially female company. It's just -- Turn your back. She complied, with a questioning look. Quickly he destroyed tlie stubble on his face and created a clean pair of pressed pants and a shirt. Stepping out of his tattered uniform, he put on the new clothes, destroyed the rags, d. on an afterthought, created a comb and straightened his tangled brown hair. "All right," he said. "You can turn back now." "Not bad," she smiled, looking him over. "Let me use that comb -- and would you please make me a dress? Sire twelve, but see that the weight goes in the right places." O N the third attempt he had the thing right -- he had never realized how deceptive the shapes of women could be -- and then he made a pair of gold sandals with high heels for her. 'A little tight," she said, putting them on, "and not too practical without sidewalks. But thanks nwich. This trick of yours really solves the Christmas present problem, doesn't it?" Her dark hair was shiny in the noon Sun. auid she looked very lovely and warm and human. "See if you can create," he urged, anxious to share his startling new ability with her. "I've already tried," she said. "No go. Still a man's world," He frowned. "How can I be absolutely sure you're real?" "That again? Do you remember creating me. Master?" she asked mockingly, bending to loosen the strap on one shoe. "I had been thinking -- about w'omen," he said grimly. "I might have created you while I was asleep. Why shouldn't my subconscious mind have as much power a.s my conscious mind? I would have equipped you with a memory, given you a background. You would have been extremely plausible. And if my subconscious mind did create you. then it would make certain that my conscious mind would never know," "You're ridiculous!" "Because if my conscious mind knew," he went on relentlessly, "it would reject your exi.stence. Your entire function, as a creation of my subconscious, would be to keep me from knowing. To prove, by any means in your power, by any logic, that you were -- " "Let's see you make a woman, then, if your mind is so good!" She crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair, giving a single sharp nod. "All right." He stared at the cave wall and a woman started to appear. It took shape sloppily, one arm too short, legs too long. Concentrating harder, he was able to make its proportions fairly true. But its eyes were set at an odd angle: its shoulders and back were sloped and twisted. He had created a shell without brains or internal organs, an automaton. He commanded it to speak, but only gulps came from the shape less mouth; he hadn't given it any vocal apparatus. Shuddering. he destroyed the nightmare figure. "I'm not a sculptor." he said. "Nor am I God." "I'm glad you finally realize that." "That still doesn't prove." he continued stubborply. "t hat you're real. I don't know what my subconscious mind is capable of." "Make something for me," she said abruptly. "I'm tired of listening to this nonsense." I've hurt her feelings, he thought. The only other human on Earth and I've hurt her. He nodded, took her by the hand and led her out of the cave. On the flat plain below he created a city. He had experimented with it a few days back, and it was much easier this time. Patterned after ' pictures and childhood dreams of the Thousand and One Nights, it towered black and white and rose. The walls were gleaming ruby, and the gates were of silverstained ebony. The towers were red gold, and sapphires glittered in them. A great staircase of milky ivory climbed to the highest opal spire, set with thousands of steps of veined marble. There were lagoons of blue water, and little birds fluttered above them, and silver and gold fish darted through the still depths. They walked through the city, and he created roses for her, white: and ydlow and red. and gardens of strange blossoms. Between two domed and spired buildings he created a vast pexl of water; on it he put a purplecanopied pleasure barge, loading it with every kind of food and drink he could remember. goon, fanned by the soft breeze he had created. "And all this is false," he reminded her after a little while. She smiled. "No it's not. You can touch it. It's real." "Will it be here after I die?" "Who cares? Besides, if you Can do all this, you can cure any sickness. Perhaps you can even cure old age and death." She plucked a blossom from an overhanging bough and snifl'cd its fragrance. "You could keep this from fading and dying. You could prebably do the same for us, so where's the problem?" "Would you like to go away?" he said, puffing on a newly created cigarette. "Would you like to find a new planet, untouched by war? Would you like to start over?" "Start over? You mean... Later perhaps. Now I don't even W'ant to go near the ship. It reminds me of the war." They floated on a little way. "Are you sure now that I'm cal?" she asked. "If you want me to be honest, no," he replied. "But I want very much to believe it." "Then listen to me," she said, leaning toward him. "I'm real." She slipped her arms around his neck. "I've always been real. I always will be real. You want proof? Well, I know I'm real. So do you. What more can you ask?" He stared at her for a long moment, felt her warm arms around his neck, listened to her breathing. He could smell the fragrance of her skin and hair, th unique essence of an individual. Slowly he said, "I believe you. I love you. What -- what is your name?" She thought for a moment. "Joan." "Strange," he said. "I always dreamed of a girl named Joan. What's your last name?" She kissed him. Overhead, the swallows he had created -- his swallows -- wheeled in wide circles above the lagoon, his fish darted aimlessly to and fro, and his city stretched, proud and beautiful, to the edge of the twisted lava mountains. "You didn't tell me your last name," he said. "Oh, that. A girl's maiden name never matters -- she alwayt takes her husband's." "That's an evasion!" She smiled. "It is, isn't it?" For Your Information The Supersonic Bot Fly T here are some stories that seem impossible to kill off. One of them is the famous statement to be found, colored and framed, on the walls of practically every airplane manufacturer's office, namely that tlie bumblebee cannot fiy. But since the bumblebee cannot read, either, it is unaware of that fact and goes on flying. T his story originated in the #s with the thesis of a German student. It bore a title something like (I'm quoting from memory) Aetodynamic Forces on small, plane, vibrating surfaces of the Order of Magnitude on Insect's Wings. All the thesis intended to prove was that it would not work if the small vibrating surfaces were rigid planes. There are sopie additional complications in the development of that legend -- including some mere typographical errors in several of the equations -- but I don't want to go into that now, because the misinterpretation should be clear enough, and I'm more concerned with that other story; the supersonic bot fly. L ET'S nail this at the outset with name, place and sex. The speed champion of this planet is allegedly the male of the deer bot fly Cephenomyia pratti which occurs in the valleys of the Sierra Madre. The first man to report the incredible feats of Cephenomyia was Dr. Charles H. T. Townsend. who wrote in the Journal of the N. Y. Entomological Society (#): Regarding the speeds of Caphenomyia, the idea of a fly overtaking a bullet is a painful mental pill to swallow-.  . yet these flies can probably do that to an old-fashioned musket ball. They could probably have kept up with the shells that the German Big Bertha shot into Paris during World War I. The males arc faster than the females... at #-foot levels in the Sierra Madre valleys of western Chihauhua I have seen the gravid females pass... at a velocity of well over # yards a second... on #-foot summits in New Mexico I have seen pass me at an incredible velocity what were quite certainly the males of Cephonotpyia. I could barely distinguish that something had passed -- only a brownish blur in the air of"about the right size for these flies and without sense of form. As closely as I can estimate, their speed must have approximated # yards per second. Of course, this was interesting, to put it mildly. Apparently Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews, then the director of the American Museum of Natural History, inquired about detail, for he received this letter from Dr. Townsend. They are no sooner detected as a passing streak than thej are entirely out of sight on a straightaway course. They pass at a speed that is next to invisible -- like a flash of light almost -- not over half a second -- just a blurred streak in the air but never visible and giving no sense of color. The time was checked repeatedly with the shutter of a camera. The data are practically accurate and as close as will ever be possible to measure. Roy Chapman Andrews quoted this excerpt in Natural History Magazine (Oct, #), adding that he'd feel more comfortable if it were possible to test this in a wind tunnel. SO splash and is still reverberating in some popular books can only be due to the fact that people don't read critically what they see in print. For, as a scientific report, Dr. Townsend's article is less than ideal. He "could barely distinguish that something had passed," yet he knows that what had passed were "quite certainly the males of Cephenomyia." In the entomological journal. it was "a brownish blur;" in the letter to Dr. Andrews, the blurred streak gave no sense of color. The timing device was a camera shutter, which isn't reliable for small fractions of a second immediately after an overhaul, yet "the data arc practically accurate." All of his comparisons were put into print without any checking whatever. Estimated speed of the brownish (or colorless) blurs was # yards per second, or # feet per second, at an elevation above sea level of # feet. (Speed of sound at that altitude is # feet per second.) At that speed the fly can "probably" overtake a musket ball. Now I don't know whether the muzzle velocity of an old musket has actually been measured, but the muzzle velocity of an old-fashioned six-shooter is # feet per second. A .# cal. slug is hardly smaller than Cephenomyia; as a rule, people don't see them. It would be a most interesting experiment to time the bullets from .# cal. gats with a camera shutter ! On the other hand, the muzzle velocity of the German Paris Gun of # with which the flies "could probably have kept up" was around # feet per second, or about # times the alleged maximum speed of the fabulous bot fly males. It so happened that I saw galley proofs of Roy Chapman Andrews's article before it was published. My next action was to get myself a picture of such a bot fly and its dimensions, and then invite an aerodynamicist for beer with discussion. Wc did not ask such irrelevant questions as the acceleration period required to get up to # yards per second or # miles per hour. We simply assumed that the fly did travel at such speed and calculated its air resistance. In round figures, it was # grams, a little short of three ounces. Now it needs power to maintain speed against that much drag. The calculation was simple and ended up with the figure of # horsepower! These calculations were made as if the thing were an airplane model the size of a bot fly. Then we repeated the calculations for the same size bullet. Same results. A year later, Dr. Irving Langmuir of General Electric published an article in Science (vol. #. No. #, March #. #), with results even more devastating. Wind pressure against the  head of the fly at # mph turned out to be eight lbs. per square inch, which should be enough to crush it. Power to maintain speed against such wind pressure: # watts or about  horsepower, requiring a food intake of #I grams per second, which is rouly l # times the weight of the insect. Townsend's supersonic speeds neatly and simply. Then Dr. Langmuir tried to establish how fast they do fly. He took a piece of solder of the right size and spun it on a thin silk thread, timing it with a telechron clock, and using the brightly illuminated white ceiling of the laboratory as a background. When the solder fly moved at # mph. its shape could no longer be seen, but its size could be estimated correctly. At. # mph, it was just visible as a moving object. At # mph, it appeared as a faint line (direction of movement could no longer be seen) and at # mph it was simply invisible. The conclusion was that the speed of # mph best agreed with Dr. Townsend's description. Power requirement for # mph would be # watts, corresponding to a food intake of five per cent of the body weight per hour. However, Dr. Langmuir went back to the # mph speed originally alleged. The flies had always missed Dr. Townsend, but obviously their maneuverability at supersonic speed cannot be too accurate. Now if one had hitwell, there would have been an impact force of # kilograms or # pounds. Penetration would depend largely on where it happened to hit, but a blow in the eye or even on the chest would be likely to be fatal. It is just barely possible that the inhabitants of the Sierra Madre are in a dark conspiracy to bury their victims of such accidents without informing the sheriff or Dr. Townsend, thereby eliminating all traces of Cephenomyia's deadliness. I rather doubt it. Legs and Wings yHY do insects have six legs,  but less than six wings? At first glance this may look like an exceedingly idle question, yet it can be answered and the answer involves both evolutionary history and engineering principles. I admit that a bookkeeper and a general can do their jobs without this information, but when it comes to science fiction authors and readers, such a discussion may prove helpful. Let's begin at the beginning, with the ancestors of the insects. They were creatures which anybody but a professional zoologist would take to be centipedes. There were quite a number of legs to begin with, thirty pairs or more. In the course of insect evolution, this number was uniformly reduced to tlirec pairs. Apparently everything beyond that number constituted dead weight. But why did the insects stop the reduction at that point? Why didn't they go below that? (Only some parasitic insects have less than three pairs of legs -- none at all.) The answer has been pointed out by Prof. U. N. Lanham of the University of Michigan. When an insect walks, it lifts the front and hind legs on one side and the middle leg on the other. This forms a tripod, something an engineer recognizes at once as a stable support. Then the other set becomes a tripod. Anything less than a tripod would be unstable and require a balancing act. Reptiles and mammals do this beautifully oil the time, but insects can't follow their eyample for tw'o reasons. One is that they are encased in armor ant! too stiff. Reptiles and mammals can shift their flexible bodies subtly for balance and many of them also have a tail to help. The other reason ia that insects are loo small: if they shoulil fall, they do so too fact for a correction to be made. Try balancing first a pencil and then a broomstick on your finger and you'll find out what size has to do with balance. It is interesting in this connection to note that the praying mantis, which habitually walks on four legs (although it has six), israther large and unusually flexible. And in climbing, the front pair, which has evolved into a set of insect traps, usually has to help out. But how about the wings? The multiple pairs of legs of the insect ancestors were not accompanied by a corresponding number of appendages which could become wings. Insects did not try to sprout wings until after the number of their legs had been reduced to three p # irs. But the first winged insects apparently had three pairs of wings, too. In the oldest example we know (see illustration) the first pair is already considerably reduced, but it is still there. Our contemporary insects either have the original second and third pair left -- for example, dragonflies and butterflies -- or the original middle pair. There is just one small and unimportant group, also tiny in size, which retained the original third pair, the Strepsiptera. If the picture of Stenodlctya reminds you of early designs of "flying machines" with lots of wing?, you are right and you also know the reason. You can have a pair of wings which serve more or less in the fashion of the rotor of a helicopter. Or you can have one pair which serves as wings, airplane-style, with another pair serving as propellers (beetles do just about that). But anything beyond that causes interference, mins the aerodynamics of the design and grounds the experimenter. So if you invent some interesting insect forms for the planet Bombastus, see to it that they have more than four legs. And avoid flying centipedes with # legs and # wings. The Diameter of Pluto outermost of the known planets of our solar system, discovered in #. But ever since its discovery, Pluto has managed to pose riddles. At the time when it was still listed as "suspected to exist," astronomers who had given the nxatter some thought would have expected it to be a rather large planet -- about the size of Neptune, which has a diameter of # miles -- and they would have expected it to be rather far out. The average distance of Nepnext planet outside of Neptune should have been around # But Pluto proved to be much closer than expected, with part of its orbit inside the orbit of Neptune, thus having a much more eccentric path than any other planet, even worse than Mercury. And it was found to be much smaller than exiected. It seemed to have about the same size as Earth and the diameter guessed at was put down at # miles, with a question mark attached. Since its gravitational influence appears to be about that of Earth, this would have led to about the same density, which in the case of Earth is # times that of water. Then, in #, twenty years after its original discovery. Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper succeeded in actually measuring its diameter with the aid of the #-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain. The apparent diameter turned out to be # seconds of arc, which, for the known distance, gave a "real" diameter of # miles, the same as that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The joy over this accomplishment, however, practically vanished when one started to calculate a little. The gravitational influence was still about that of Earth, but with such a small diameter the average density of Pluto would have to be about #! There is no element with such a density. Iron has a density of #, uranium #, gold #, platinum # and osmium #. Astrophysicists know that the crushed matter of stellar cores must be denser by far than #, but Pluto is not heavy enough to crush matter. Something had to be wrong and the latest guess at what it might be is that our measurement of Pluto suffers from "specular reflection." The term is derived from the Latin speculum for "mirror" and simply means that a sufficiently smooth planet might reflect light in the manner of a polished ball. The diagram shows what would happen in such a case. If such a (more or less) polished ball could be seen against a light background (insert) it could still be measured accurately. Pluto is seen against a black background, though, and in that case we would measure not the planet, but the reflection. This suggestion, first offered by Sir James Jeans, would resolve that impossible density of # for a rather small planet. But it does  nothing to answer what we really want to know -- the true diameter of Pluto. Science fiction authors would probably be more interested in tlie seeming smoothness of the planet's surface. Ice or frozen gases might explain it, for Pluto is an extremely frigid world. But we won't know, of course, until we get there and see for ourselves. More on Moons T he date of September #, #. marks the discovery of the twelfth satellite of Jupiter, or photographically with the #inch telescope on Mt. Wilson and the discoverer was Dr. Seth B. Nicholson, who is the only living man to have discovered four satellites of Jujiiter -- J-IX, J-X, But there was quite some confusion connected with that discovery. Dr. Nicholson, naturally, did not take his plates for the purpose of looking for another satellite of Jupiter. He wanted to check the movement of the faint Jovian satellites, specifically his own earlier discoveries. To understand what follows, look at the diagram (adapted from a Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories d i a g r a m) which shows how the sky near Jupitor would have looked that night to a sensitive instrument of a sufficiently wide angle. J-IX and J-XI were easily accounted for. So were J-Vl and S# J-Vn, which are much brighter and could not be mistaken for any of the high-numbered satellites. And on a plate far to the east there was J-X, right in the position for which it had been predicted for September #. But to the west of J-X, there was a new faint body. Most likely it was another Jovian satellite and, since they are numbered in the order of discovery, it was clearly Then followed a frantic series ment Cards), the first giving the position of the "western object." Some two weeks later, there came another, stating that Dr. P. Musen of Cincinnati Observatory had identified the object as J-X. Doctor Musen realized that the prediction for J-X had been mistaken; J-X was in its orbit, all right, but had not yet reached the position predicted for September #. (In fact, it did not get there until # days later.) Hence Dr. Nicholson's "western object" was merely J-X. three weeks behind schedule. aed pointed out that the object How can a rockethip turn in upace? Robert Stewart # West Monroe St. Greenwood, Mass. in the place where J-X should have been must be a new satellite. A week later, there came anpositions and warning that Minor Planet No. # -- Lilofee -- was also nearby. Meanwhile. Dr. Nichol;#on had found that his new object, sustaken to be J-X, was traveling relative to Jupiter in the opposite direction of J-X's well-establislied movement. By the end of November, it was member of the outer group of Jovian satellites: it is retrograde from Jupiter. Its orbital period must be more than # and might be closer to # days. And since it could be mistaken for J-X. it has about the same brightness, which indicates that its diameter must be about the same, less than # miles. If J-X had not been predicted wrong, J-XIl might have leen overlooked. discovercl. -- l.l-.Y:sritfNSf There are lhre melluMl fr ttiriiing a rm-ket.'ilnp in spare. frm the rekel moloe ilh full tlefleelioii on the lMrlng sr 'I'lieBc steering vanes are typical for the V-#'s steering system. I'he seconl method is to have the Mhole rocket motor swivel mounted ami to blast with tilted motor. This is typical for the Navy's Viking rocket, A third method, not yet actually used, would he to have a wheel spin inside the rocket, while no propulsion is applied. If you have a wheel spinning in one direction, the rocket will have to turn in the opj)osite direction. If you have three wheels mounted at right angles to each other inside, the rocketsliip can he turned into any direction hy spinning the appropriate wheels. Of course, turning hy spinning wheels does not change direction of flight, hut merely the direction in which the nose is pointing. To move in that new direction, you neel rocket motors. Which subjects should I sucfy for later work in rockets and in astronautics? Neil Stutz #-#, #l#th Street Queens Village, N. Y, This question, which comes to me in my mail at least once m week, Is hard to answer generally, for much depends on what the student intends to do later. Theoretical astronautics is the child of astronomy and theoretical physics. A man who wants to conlrihute to space travel theory and solve some of its problems (which are iistinct from strict engineering problems) voiild he essentially a theoretical yjhysicist with a thorough grounding in astronomy, especially "astronomy of position," that branch dealing with the movements of bodies in space. As for rocket engineering, there are now three major branches. One group of "rocket engineers' specializes in telemetering and guulance systems; these are originally electronics engineers. Another group specializes in the building of the rocket proper; these are essentially aeronautical engineers. The third group, the "rocket engineers" proper, are the men who design, build and test rocket motors; they are specialized mechanical engineers. In short, if you want to work in rocket engineering, you have to he an engineer first, because rocket work is a specialization of various iraiiches of engineering. Of course chemi.-ls, metallurgisis anl medical men have also contributed to astr(nautics. Again, however, they were chemists, metalltrgisls # anil doclors ltfore ihey specialized. A numlier of colleges and engineering colleges give special courses. I know that there are such courses at the University of California (Los Angeles). at California Institute of Technology, at Ohio Slate University, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Princeton University. There are prohahly still others of which I haven't heard yet. An analogy is often drawn between the atom and the Solar System, wherein the Sun represents the nucleus. But now the nucleus is known to be a multiplicity of parts, and electrons are Therefore: to what phenomenon of the astronomer can the atoms of the physicist be made analogous? Royall T. Moore C# Hillcrest Iowa City, Iowa None. That analogy dates hack to the clays when nothing was known uhotit the atom except that it had to have a micleus and something around the nucleus. To draw such an analogy nowadays makes even less sense than the assertion that Mr. X resemhles an elephant because both have one head four limbs, two eyes in the head, one mouth w'itli teeth and u stomacli that demands lead. Such an analogy complelely disregards all dissimilarities for the sake of a few similarities. Ill a solar system, yon have one planet per orhit, all orbits in about the same plane and all planets of different sizes. In an atom, you have several electrons per orliit, all of the same size and (except in the case of atoms) more than one orhital plane. Send your science questions to Willy Ley c, o them all by mail or in this department. Keep them short, a few at a time, and print or type them, nlcase! Current !rw Books: Science  Fantasy Fictien  We carry a full line of all current Amurk'uii science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open MunUi.; Thru .Saturdays #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Oprn Weilne.dar E.rniiiga until S:# P.M. New York #, New York (Phone GRamercy #-#) yesterday house Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty years is shocking enough for anyone with a belief in ghosts -- worse for one wrfh none! I THE narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Anfjie O. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by. his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surfaqe by the sloop's prow died. Sloop and'ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had to reach out his hand. He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green #Q I scattering of islands and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing every man yearns to do once in his lifetime -- gone to the farthest island out. He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the i#nne O. had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot Sun. There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth. The man's, lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop, without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he came out on more rocks -- and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the farthest one out. rocky spine, which at the present low tide would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing, He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the underbrush. After all. there were thousands of these islands. Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving smoothly enough. To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up from here in a storm. crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced through a fringe of trees -- and came straight up against an eightfoot fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short distance with high, heavy shrubbery. Without pausing for surprisein fact, in his holiday mood, using surprise as a goad -- he jumped for the branch of aa oak whose trunk touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside. Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first surprise could really sink in. had another. A closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove. Then, with the air of a clockwork toy coming to life, the white door opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug bravely, gravel skit. tered, and the car rolled off between the trees. The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a white silk dress that fell straight from square neckline to hip-height waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked under her arm. She crossed the driveway and tossed the pape'r down on a rattan table between three rattan chairs and stood watching  squirrel zigzag across the lawn. HE man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, "hello!" and walked toward her. She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet. Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than eighteen. He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered out, "Are you he?" "What do you mean?" he asked. smiling puzzledly. "The one who sends me the little boxes." T was out sailing and I hap#  f'f'nid to land in the far cove.  didn't dream that anyone lived n this island, or even came here.' "No one ever does come here," she replied. Her manner had changed, becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily curious. "It startled me tremendously to find this place." he blundered on. "Especially the road and the car. Why. this island can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide "The road goes down to the wharf." she explained, "and up to the top of the island, where my aunts have a treehouse." He tore his mind away from the yncture of a woman dressed like Queen Mary clambering up a tree. "Was that your aunt I 'Saw driving off?" "One of them. The otlier's taken the motorboat in for supI'lic.s." She looked at him doubtfully. "I'm not sure they'll like it if they find someone here." "There are just the tliree of you?" he cut in quickly, looking down the empty road that vanished among the oaks. SIk nodded. "I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite fslen?" She shook her head. "It must gf t I retty dull for you." "Not very," she said, smiling. "My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars arc Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.' He looked at her hard for a moment. "I suppose you read a lot?" She nodded. "Fitzgerald's my favorite author." She started around the tabic, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. "Would you like some lemonade ?" H E'D noticed the dtwed silver pitcher, but only now realized his tinrst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, "I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry." She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extejMd'. d her own toward it. shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it. He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. "I'm a biology student. Been working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here to do research in marine ecology -- that's sort of sea-life patterns -- of the inshore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him. of course?" She shook her head. "Probably the greatest living biologist." he was proud to inform her. "Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich -- he lives over there at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him." He grinned. "Matter of fact. I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kesserich." The girl looked puzzled. Jack explained, "The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences. won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anj'how. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich -- she's a drab sort of personsaid to me. 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of course. I had to. By the way. you still haven't told me your name." "Mary Alice Pope." she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if slie were saying it for the first time. "You're pretty shy, aren't you?" "How would I know?" The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a "flapper." "Will you sit down?" she asked him gravely. , The rattan chair sigled under his weight. He made another effort to talk. "I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over." "Why?" "So you'll be abl to go back to the mainland." "But I never go to the mainland." "You mean you stay out here all winter?" he asked incredulously. his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves. "Oh, yes. We get all our s)pplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them." "But that's impossible!" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. "You can't be shut off this way from people your own age!" "You're the first one I ev r met." She hesitated. "I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies." "You're joking!" "No, it's true." "Bvit why arc they doing it to you?" he demandel. leaning forward. "Why are tliey inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?"  poise from his loss of it. "I don't know why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lomly. May I tell you a secret?" She touched his hand, tins time with only the faintest trembling. "Every night the loneliness gathers in around me -- you're right about that. But then every rhorning new life comes to me in a little box." "What's that?" he said sharply. "Scmetimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends, 'Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, w!ich seems To lie before u? like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hrith really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude -- ' " "Wait a minute," he interrupted. "Who sends you these boxes?" "I don't know." "But how are the notes signed?" "They're wonderful notes," she said. "So wise, co gay, so tender, you'd imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh." "Yes. but how are they signed?" She hesitated. "Never anything but 'Your Lover.' " "And so when you first saw me, you thought -- " He began, then stopped because she was blushing, "How long have you been getting them?" "Ever since I can remember. I have two cloec'ts of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wah j or at my place  at breakfast." "But how does this -- person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?" "I'm not sure." "But how can they get them in'winter?" "I don't know." "Look here," he said, pouring himself more lemonade, "how long is it since you've been to the mainland?" "Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war." "What war?" he asked star"The World War. of course. What's the matter?" Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot Sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves. And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read : Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones: Foet cf M#chdo Rtoi #n Havana Balbc Speati in Naw York relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittlecdged. "Why are you so interested in old newspapers?" he asked. "I wouldn't call day-beforcyesterday's paper old," the girl objected, pointing at the dateline: July #. #"You're trying to joke," Jack fold her. "No, I'm not." ' "But it's #." "Now it's you who are joking." "But the paper's yellow." "The paper's always yellow." He laughed uneasily. "Well, if you actually think it's #, perhaps you're to be envied," he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. "Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-#s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or -- " "Stop!" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced. "I don't like what you're saying." "But -- " ' ' "No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here." "I'm really not joking," he said after a moment. She grew quitfe frantic at that. "I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!" She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound. At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint chu of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The smallwindowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons. "Flash!" croaked a gritty voice. "After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues..." Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an oldfashioned radio loudsfeaker. The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere. Sf: "I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here." "All right they won't like it." Her agitation grew. "No. you must go." "I'll come back tomorrow," he heard himself saying. "Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock." Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still. "You must go before they see you." "Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of # days. # hours and # minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped... lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him. He leaped for the branch overhanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steeljawed semicircles clanked togeth er just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted oft' with a squeak. Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it. spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now. he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the Annie O., dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged kneedeep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks. As soon as the Annie O. was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead. For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that, he wouldn't have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion, and wonder about flappers and hidden traps. When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland. Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle. But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail. Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail, watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed sails. II serich's home -- a weathered white cube with narrow, sharppaned windows, topped by a cupola -- was nothing like its lavish interior. In much the same way. Mrs. Kesscrich clashed with the darkly gleaming furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature. Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard. He asked abruptly, "Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?" The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall cabinet. Feeling on aledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel, opened a cardboard box inside it, took somethink from the box and handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked in his breath with surprise. It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same flatbosomed dress -- flowered rather than white -- no bandeau, same beads. Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier. "That is Mary Alice Pope," Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat voice. "She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident in #." The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with what seemed a malicious eagerness. "Sit down." she said, "and I'll tell you about it." Vitiiout a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question -- he was much too dazed for that -- he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her position on the edge of the sofa. "You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda, there was a cloak of loneliness about him -- or rather about the three of them. "Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely TO yesterday house proud -- I don't imagine they ever spoke to anj'one in America except as to a servant -- and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without marrying, he was safe. "Mary Alice came from a purebred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensejl Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did ' everytliing she could to win them over. For instance, thougli she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally. Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But -- and here is where Mary's wisdom fell .short -- her brave gesture did not pacify them; it only increased t'.eir hatred. "Except for his research, Martin was blind to everyth!.!" but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters' h-t-cd." bered that it was Mrs. Kesscricli telling him all this. She went on, "Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and tn his mind he was building a wonderful future for them us well -- not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to BudaPesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months... and so on. Finally the time for tlu'ir marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy -- " Jack broke in with. "Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?" Mr.s. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. "But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it. Mafy rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift hcf down from the saddle to welcome him home. "Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that." She looked defiantly at Jack. "I drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant." She paused. "It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing. "Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed -- to try to catch her, they'said. but they didn't manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare. "Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened. for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary -- I mean, what had been Mary -- and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms," A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stift'ened and was silent. Jack turned. The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall -- a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around tht eyes and nostrils. while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy. "Hello. Barr," Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife. The great biologist had come home. iir yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?" Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far. "Not especially, sir," he mumbled. The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival. Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professoi Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality. "You know what I mean, of course," Kesserich pressed. "The factors that make you you. and me me." "Heredity and environment." Jack parroted like a freshman. Kesserich nodded. "Suppose -- this is just speculation -- that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could recreate the same individual at will." Jack felt a shiver go through him. "To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us." "What about identical twins?" Kesserich pointed out. "And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male." Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly, "There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Locb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt salution." Jack fdt the hair rising on his neck. "Even then you wouldn't get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits." "Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother's traits?" "But environment would change things." Jack objected. "The duplicate would be bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times... For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's sphinxlike face. "Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms," the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels. "Let's get on to your project, I want to talk it over now. because I won't have any tffne for it tomorrow." Jack looked at him blankly. "Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter," the biologist explained. IV J-"-ed the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife -- things said and half said last night -- but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people. Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet -- he felt behind it, but the key was gone -- he hurried' down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and. as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers. The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There waa eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir. After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory. This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd brought along for the purpose. Ho was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it. He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a sliiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him. The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a huc.hcd. hurried voice. "You must go away at once and never come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've been watching for you all morning." He tossed the ncwsjjapers over the fence. "You don't have to read them now." he told her. "Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines." When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak. "Listen to me," he said. "You've been tlie victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around # instead of #, and that it's # now instead of #. I'm not sure why it's been done, though I think I know who you really are." "But," the girl faltered, "my aunts tell me it's #." "They would." "And there are the papers... the piagazines... the radio." "The papers are old ones. The radio's faked -- some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it." "These papers might be faked." she said, pointing to where slic'd let them drop on the ground. "They're new," he said. "Only old papers get yellow." "But why would they do it to me? Why?" "Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker than anything." "I couldn't," she said, drawing back. "He's coming tonight." "He?" "The man who sends me the boxes . , . and my life." Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. "A life that's completely a He, that's cut you off from the world. Cdme with me, Mary." #S  ingly. For perhaps ten seconds the silence held and the spell of her eerie sweetness deepend.  'I love you. Mary," Jack said sofvly. She took a step back. 'Really, Mary, I do." She shook her head. "I don't know what's true. Go away." "Mary," he pleaded, "read the papers I've given you. Think things through. I'll wait for you here." "You can't. My aunts would find you." "Then I'll go away and come back. About sunset. Will you give me an answer?" She looked at him. Suddenly she whirled around. He. too, i tard the chuff of the Essex. 'They'll find us," she said. "And if they find you, I don't know what they'll do. Quick, run!" And he darted off herself, only to turn back to scramble for the papers. "But will you give me an answer?" he pressed. She looked frantically up from the papers. 'T don't know. You iustn't risk coming back." "I will, no matter what you say." 'T can't promise. Please go." "Just one question." he begged. "What are your aunts' names?" "kfeni and Hilda," she told him. and then she was gone. The hedge shook where she'd darted through. Jack hesitated, then started for the cove. He thought for a moment of staying on the island, but decided against it. He could probably conceal himself successfully, but whoever found his boat would have him at a disadvantage. Besides, there were things he must try to find out on the mainland. As he entered the oaks, his spine tightened for a moment, as if someone were watching him. He hurried to the rippling cove, wasted no time getting the Annie O. underway. With the wind still in the west, he knew it would be a hard sail. He'd need half a dozen tacks to reach the mainland. When he was about a quarter of a mile out from the cove, there was a sharp smack beside him. He jerked around, heard a distant crack and saw a foot-long splinter of fresh wood dangling from the edge of the sloop's cockpit, about a foot from his head. He felt his skin tighten. He was the bull's-eye of a great watery target. All the air between him and the island was tainted with menace. Water splashed a yard from the side. There was another distant crack. He lay on his back in the cockpit, steering by the sail, taking advantage of what little cover there was. There were several more cracks. After the second, there was a hole in the sail. Finally Jack looked back. The island was more than a mile astern. He anxiously scanned the sea ahead for craft. There were none. Then he settled down to nurse more speed from the sloop and wait for the motorboat. But it didn't come out to follow him. V  serich was sitting on the edge of the couch in the living room, yet from the first Jack was aware of a great change. Something had filled the domestic animal with grief and fury. "Where's Dr. Kesserich?" he asked. "Not here!" "Mrs. Kesserich," he said, dropping down beside her, "you were telling me something yesterday when we were interrupted." She looked at him. "You have found the girl?" she almost shouted. "Yes," Jack was surprised into answering. A look of slyness dame into Mrs. Kesserich's bovine face. "Then I'll tell you everything. I can now. "When Martin found Mary dying, he didn't go to pieces. You know how controlled lie can be when he chooses. He lifted Mary's body as if the crowd and the railway men weren't there, and carried it to the station wagon. Hant and Hilda were sitting on their horses nearby. He gave them one look. It was as if he had said, 'Murderers!' "He told me to drive home as fast as I dared, but when I got there, he stayed sitting by Mary in the back. I knew he must have given up what hope he had for her life, or else she was dead already. I looked at him. In the domelight. his face had the most deadly and proud expression I've ever seen on a man. I worshiped him, you know, though he had never shown me one ounce of feeling. So I was completely unprepared for the naked appeal in his voice. "Yet all he said at first was, 'Will you do something for me?' I told him, 'Surely,' and as we carried Mary in. he told me the rest. He wanted me to be the mother of Mary's' child." Jack stared at her blankly. Mrs. Kesserich nodded. "He wanted to remove an ovum from Mary's body and nurture itin mine, so that Mary, in a way, could live on." "But that's impossible!" Jack objected. "The technique is being tried now on cattle, I know. so that a prize heifer can have several calves a year, all nurtured in 'scrub heifers,' as they're called. But no one's ever dreamed of trying it on human beings!" JlRS. Kcsserich looked at him contemptously. "Martin had mastered the technique twenty the chance. And so was I -- partly because he fired my scientific imagination and reverence, but mostly because he said he would marry me. He barred the doors. We worked swiftly. As far as' anyone was concerned. Martin, in a wild fit of grief, had locked himself up for several hours to mourn over the body of his fiancee. "Within a month we were married. and I finally gave biyth to the child." Jack shook his head. "You gave birth to' your own child." She smiled bitterly. "No, it was Mary's. Martin did not keep his vhole bargain with me -- I was nothing more than his 'scrub wife' in every way." "You think you gave birth to Mary's child." Mrs. Kesserich turned on Jack in anger. Tve been wounded by him, day in and day out, for years, but I've never failed to recognize his genius. Besides, you've seen the girl, haven't you?" V Jack had to nod. What confounded him most was that, granting the near-impossible physiological feat Mrs. Kesserich had described, the girl should look so much like the mother. Mothers and daughters don't look that much alike; only identical twins did. With a thrill of fear, he remembered Kesserich's casual words: " . , . parthenogenesis... pure stock... special techniques... "Very well," he forced himself to say, "granting that the child was Mary's and Martin's -- " "No! Mary's alone!" Jack suppressed a shudder. He continued quickly, "What became of the child?" Mrs. Kesserich lowered her head. "The day it was born, it was taken away from me. After that, I never saw Hilda and Hani, either." "You mean." Jack asked, "that Martin sent them away to bring up the child?" Mrs. Kesserich turned away. "Yes." Jack asked incredulously. "He trusted the child with the two people he suspected of having caused the mother's death?' "Once when I was his assistant," Kesserich said softly, "I carelessly broke some laboratory glassware. He kept me up all night building a new setup, though I'm rather poor at working with glass and usually get burned. Bringing up the child was his sisters' punishment." "And they went to that house on the fartlrftst island? I suppose it was the house he'd been building for Mary and himself." "Yes." "And they were to bring up the child as his daughter?" Mrs. Kesserich started up. but when she spoke it was as if she had to force out each word. "As his wife -- as soon as she was grown." "How can you know that?" Jack asked shakily. The rising wind rattled the windowpane. "Because today -- eighteen years ' after -- Martin broke all of his promise to me. He told me he was leaving me.' VI  like dancing ghosts in the Moon-sketched, sprayswept dark were Jack's first beacon of the island and brought a sense of physical danger, breaking the trancelike yet frantic mood he had felt ever since he had spoken with Mrs. Kesserich. Coming around farther into the wind, he scudded past the end of the island into the choppy sea on the landward side. A little later he let down the reefed sail in the cove of the sea urchins, where the water was barely moving, although the air was shaken by the pounding of the surf on the spine between the two islands. After making fast, he paused a moment for a scrap of cloud to pass the moon. The thought of the spiny creatures in the black fathoms under the Annie O. sent an odd quiver of terror through him. The Moon came out and he started across the glistening rocks of the spine. But he had forgotten the rising tide. Midway, a wave clamped around his ankles, tried to carry him off, almost made him drop the heavy object he was carrying. Sprawling and drenched, he clung to the rough rock until the surge was past. Making it finally up to the fence, he snipped a wide gate with tlie wire-cutters. The windows of the house were alight. Hardly aware of his shivering, he crossed the lawn, slipping from one clump of shrubbery to another, until he reached one just across the drive from the doorway. At that moment he heard the approaching chuff of the Essex, the door of the cottage opened, and Mary Alice Pope stepped out, closely followed by Hani or Hilda. Jack shrank close to the shrubbery. Mary looked pale and blank-faced, as if she had retreated within herself. He was acutely conscious of the inadequacy of his screen as the ghostly headlights of the Essex began to probe through the leaves. But then he sensed that something more was about to happen than just the car arriving. It was a change in the expression of the face behind Mary that gave him the cue -- a widening and sidewise flickering of the cold eyes, the puckered lips thinning into a cruel smile. The Essex shifted into second and. without any warning, accelerated. Simultaneously, the woman behind Mary gave her a violent shove. But at almost exactly the same instant, Jack ran. He caught Mary as she sprawled toward the gravel, and lunged ahead without checking. The Essex bore down upon them, a square-snouted, roaring monster. It swerved viciously, missed them by inches, threw up gravel in a skid, and rocked to a stop, stalled. T he first, incredulous voice that broke the pulsing silence, Jack recognized as Martin Kesserich's. It came from the car, which was slewed around so that it almost faced Jack and Mary. "Hani. you tried to kill her! You and Hilda tried to kill her again!" The woman slumped over the wheel slowly lifted her head. In the indistinct light, she looked the twin of the woman behind Jack and Mary. "Did you really think we wouldn't?" she asked in a voice that spat with passion. "Did you actually believe that Hilda and I would serve this eighteen years penance just to watch you go off with her?" She began to laugh wildly. "You've never understood your sisters at all!" Suddenly she broke off. stiffly stepped down from the car. Lifting her skirts a little, she strode past Jack and Mary. Martin Kesserich followed her. In passing, he said, "Thanks. Barr." It occurred to Jack that Kesserich made no more question of his appearance on the island than of his presence in the laboratory. Like Mrs. Kesserich, the great biologist took him for granted. Kesserich stopped a few feet short of Hani and Hilda. Without shrinking from him. the sisters drew closer together. They looked like two gaunt hawks. "But you waited eighteen years," he said. "You could have killed her at any time, yet you chose to throw away so much of your lives just to have this moment." "How do you know we didn't like waiting eighteen years?" Hani answered him. "Why shouldn't we Want to make as strong an impression on you as anyone? And as for throwing our lives away, that was your doing. Oh, Martin, you'll never know anything about how your sisters feel!" He raised his hands baffledly. M "Even assuming that you hate me -- " at the word "hate" both Hani and Hilda laughed softly -- "and that you were prepared to strike at both my love and my work, still, that you should have waited... Hani and Hilda said nothing. Kesserich shrugged. "Very well." he said in a voice that had lost all its tension. "You've wasted a third of a lifetime looking forward to an irrational revenge. And you've failed. That should be sufficient punishment." Very slowly, he turned around and for the first time looked at Mary. His face was clearly revealed by the twin beams from the stalled car. Jack grew cold. He fought against accepting the feelings of wonder, of poignant triumph, of love, of renewed youth he saw entering the face in the headlights. But most of all he fought against the sense that Martin Kesserich was successfully drawing them all back into the past, to # and another accident. There was a distant hoot and Jack shook. For a moment he had thought it a railw'ay whistle and not a ship's horn. The biologist said tenderly, "Come. Mary." ed a trifle on Mary's waist. Ht could feel her trembling. "Come. Mary." Kesserich repeated. Still she didn't reply. Jack wet his lips. "Mary isn't going with you. Professor," he said. "Quiet, Barr." Kesserich ordered absently. "Mary, it is necessary that you and I leave the island at once. Please come." "But Mary isn't coming," Jack repeated. Kesserich looked at him for the first time. "I'm grateful to you for the unusual sense of loyalty -- or whatever motive it may have been -- that led you to follow me out here tonight. And of course I'm profoundly grateful to you for saving Mary's life. But I must ask you not to interfere further in a matter which you can't possibly understand." He turned to Mary. "I know how shocked and frightened you must feel. Living two lives and then having to face two deaths -- it must be more terrible than anyone can realize. I expected this meeting to take place under very different circumstances. I wanted to explain everything to you very naturally and gently, like the messages I've sent you every day of your second life. Unfortunately, that can't be. You and I must leave the island fight now." Mary stared at him, then turned wonderingly toward Jack, B# who felt his heart begin to pound warmly. "You still don't understand what I'm trying to tell you. Professor," he said, boldly now. "Mary is not going with you. You've deceived her all her life. You've taken a fantastic amount of pains to bring her up under the delusion that she is Mary Alice Pope, who died in -- " "She IS Mary Alice Pope," Kesserich thundered at him. He advanced toward them swiftly. "Mary darling, you're confused, but you must realize who you are and who I am and the relationship between us." "Keep  away." Jack warned, swinging Mary half behind him. "Mary doesn't love you. She can't marry you, at any rate.  How could she, when you're her father?" "Barr!" "Keep off!" Jack shot out the. flat of his hand and Kesserich went staggering backward. "I've talked with your wife -- your wife on the mainland. She told me the whole thing." rush forward again, then controlled himself. "You've got everything wrong. You hardly deserve to be told, but under the circumstances I have no choice. Mary is not my daughter. To be precise, she has no father at all. Do you remember the work that Jacques Loeb did with sea urchins?" Jack frowned angrily. "You mean what we were talking about last night?" "Exactly. Loeb was able to cause the egg of a sea urchin to develop normally without union with a male germ cell. I have done the same thing with a human being. This girl is Mary Alice Pope. She has exactly the same heredity. She has had exactly the same life, so far as it could be reconstructed. She's heard and read the same things at exactly the same times. There have been the old newspapers, the books, even the old recorded radio programs. Hani and Hilda have had their daily instructions, to the letter. She's retraced the same time-trail." "Rot!" Jack interrupted. "I don't for a moment believe what you say about her birth. She's Mary's daughter -- or the daughter of your wife on the mainland. And as for retracing the same time-trail, that's senile self-delusion. Mary Alice Pope had a normal life. This girl has been brought up in cruel imprisonment by two insane, vindictive old women. In your own frustrated desire, you've pretended to yourself that you've recreated the girl you lost. You haven't. You couldn't. Nobody could -- the great Martin Kesscrich or anyone else!" Kesserich, his features working, shifted his point of attack. "Who are you, Mary?" "Don't answer him," Jack said. "He's trying to confuse you." "Who are you?" Kesserich insisted. "Mary Alice Pope," she said rapidly in a breathy whisper before Jack could speak again. "And when were you born?" Kesserich pressed on. "You've been tricked all your life about that," Jack warned. But already the girl was saying, "In #." "And who am I then?" Kesserich demanded eagerly. "Who am I?" npHE girl swayed. She brushed her head with her hand. "It's so strange," she said, with a dreamy, almost laughing throb in her voice that turned Jack's heart cold. "I'm sure I've never seen you before in my life, and yet it's as if I'd known you forever. As if you were closer to me than -- " "Stop it!" Jack shouted at Kesserich. "Mary loves me. She loves me because I've shown her the lie her life has been, and because she's C(ing away with me now. Aren't you, Mary?" He swung her around so that her blank face was inches from his own. "It's me you love, isn't it, Mary?" She blinked doubtfully. At that moment Kesserich charged at them, went sprawling as Jack's fist shot out. Jack swept up Mary and ran with her acroas the lawn. Behind him he heard an agonized cry -- Kesserich's -- and cruel, mounting laughter from Hani and Hilda. Once through the ragged doorway in the fence, he made his way more slowly, gasping. Out of the shelter of the trees, the wind tore at them and the ocean roared. Moonlight glistened, now on the spine of black wet rocks, now on the foaming surf. Jack realized that the girl in his arms was speaking rapidly, disjointedly, but he couldn't quite make out the sense of the words and then they were lost in the crash of the surf. She struggled, but he told himself that it Cas only because she was afraid of the menacing waters He pushed recklessly into the breaking surf, raced gasping across the middle of the spine as the rocks uncovered, sprang to the higher ones as the next wave crashed behind, showering them with spray. His chest burning with exertion, he carried the girl the few remaining yards to where the Annie O. was tossing. A 'sudden great gust of wind almost did what the waves had failed to do. but he kept his footing and lowered the girl into the boat, then jumped in after. She stared at him wildly. "What's that?" He, too. had caught the faint shout. Looking back along the spine just as the Moon came clear again, he saw white spray rise and fall -- and then the figure of Kesserich stumbling through it. "Mary, wait for me!" The figure was halfway across when it lurched, started forward again, then was jerked back as if something had caught its ankle. Out of the darkness, the next wave sent a line of white at it neck-high, crashed. Jack hesitated, but another great gust of wind tore at the half-raised sail, and it was all he could do to keep the sloop from capsizing and head her into the wind again. Mary was tugging at his shoulder. "You mut .help him." she wa.s saying. "He's caught in the rocks." heard a voice crying, screaming crazily above the surf: "Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world -- " The sloop rocked. Jack had it finally headed into the wind. He looked around for Mary. She had jumped out and was hurrying back, scrambling across the rocks toward the dark, struggling figure that even as he watched was once more engulfed in the surf. Letting go the lines. Jack sprang toward the stem of the sloop. But just then another giant blow came, struck the sail like a great fist of air. and sent the boom slashing at the back of his head. His last recollection was being toppled out onto the rocks and wondering how he could cling to them while unconscious. HE little cove was once again as quiet as time's heart. Once again the Annie O. was a sloop embedded in a mirror. Once again the rocks were warm underfoot. Jack Barr lifted his fiercely aching head and looked at the distant line of the mainland, as tiny and yet as clear as something viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. He was very tired. Searching the island, in his present shaky condition, had taken all the strength out of him. He looked at the peacefully rippling sea outside the cove and thought of what a churning pot it had been during the storm. He thought wonderingly of his rescue -- a man wedged unconscious between two rock teeth, kept somehow from being washed # away by the merest chance. He thought of Mrs. Kesserich sitting alone in her house, scanning the newspapers that had nothing to tell. He thought of the empty island behind him and the vanished motorboat. He wondered if the sea had pulled down Martin Kesserich and Mary Alice Pope. He wondered if only Hani and Hilda had sailed away. He winced, remembering what he had done to Martin and Mary by his blundering infatuation. In his way, he told himself, he had been as bad as the two old women. He thought of death, and of time, and of love that defies them. He stepped limplngly into the Annie O. to set sail -- and realized that philosopliy is only for the unhappy. Mary was asleep in the stern. Whiner of the Boys Clubs of America ## Science-Fiction Award Bullard of edited, with ao Inlroduclion and Notes, by Andre Norton The Story of Commander John Bullard -- tradition-breaker and tradition-maker -- whose armadas waged the grimmest of all wars in the black night of outer space -- where the slightest miscalculation meant death in an interstellar vacuum. The dean of science-fiction writers, Malcolm Jameson, writes of the future with precision and imagination. Bullard is a very human hero whose advenjures will fascinate all readers. # at all bookstores Cleveland and New York It was for his ideals Joyce loved the alien. But ideals are conditioned reflexes... glowered across the room at his daughter. He didn't like the willful tone that crept into her voice these days: he didn't like the way her gray eyes spread wide at hir, the way her lips tensed, the way she drew herself up, tall and slim, an arch of determination. The darned girl had grown up too fast, that was the trouble. Joyce faced up to his scowl, shaky as she was. She knew what he was thinking, because he had told her enough times -- she was a headstrong girl without a brain cell to her name; her college edu cation had been a waste; worse than that, it had pumped her full of crazy ideas, had knocked her sense of values upside down. "How anybody in their right mind... he growled at her. "Listen, you've already been to Mars. You've seen it. What do you want to go to that miserable, dried-up hole again for?" "Because... because I was happy there," she said tremulously. "What? With those miserable savages?" He slapped his euphoria pipe down on the table. "Ethel, will you listen to that?" Joyce's mother, plump and round-shouldered and vagueeyed. was deep in her reclining chair, the miniature tran'sviewer on her lap. watching a garden party in Rome. "What is it. dear?' she asked unhappily. "This crazy girl wants to take her vacation on Mars again." "Well... it IS educational," Ethel said. Harley made a wild, exasperated sound. "What do you know about it? You've never been there. It's a dried-up hole, I tell you. It's a slum -- it's one great big slum. Just one decent hotel in the whole place, and that's only because some of our boys went out there .snd put it up for them." "That awful hotel -- " Joyce caught herself. Not an argument about this, please! There was trouble enough waiting for her.  "I wouldn't stay at the hotel." she said quietly. "What do you mean? Where would you stay?" "With some people I know there." She saw his heavy eyebrows clench, saw his eyes search her suspiciously. She heard her mother's uneasy movements. She sat tautly, her hands in her lap. "Who," Harley said finally, "are these people?" "Just... some friends," Joyce said. Now it was coming, now, now. "What friends?" Her father's voice was lower, harsher. "Just some people I met when I was there last time." "Just some... Say! Is this why we've been running up these solarphone bills? What've you been doing -- talking to these people every week?" "Only a few times." "Look here. Look at me. Joyce, answer me. Have you been talking to that fellow you told us about -- the one you met on your other trip?" She let it out, a tiny, miserable, "Yes." Harley's hand slammed down on the table. He wrestled his heavy body up out of his chair, stamped halfway across the room toward her and stopped. "Young lady. I'm not going to have this. I'm not going to have anything like this! You hear? You want to get tangled up with him? My God, you've been communicating with him for a year?" "Whenever I was able to." Joyce said hoarsely, looking at the floor. "Joyce!" He came to her. reached down and lifted her chin. "Joyce, you're not -- you're not in love with this -- this creature!" She nodded, suddenly angered at her weakness, angered at the wetness in her eyes. "Oh, my God!" Harley raised his arms, brought them down with a slap against his thighs. He turned away from her. He glared at his wife, who was drifting nervously up out of her chair. He turned back to Joyce. "You're not serious. You can't be. This can't -- this just can't happen to us. You'll have to get this foolishness out of your head right now. Right this minute. My God, the next thing you know, you'll be wanting to marry one of those things." "I do... " The sound barely came out. She swallowed, forced, her voice up. "I am going to marry him." room. but. strangely, the shock of it didn't touch her. All at once, she was calm, quiet. She had said it. and now she was armored against everything. "No," her father was saying dully. "No. Joyce. No." Tm sorry. Dad," she said all in a rush. 'Tve thought about it a long time. I thought I'd forget him after a little while. I wasn't able to. I'm in love with him -- I'll always be in love with him. When I come back. I'm bringing him with me. We're going to be married here." Now. finally, the storm broke out of him. He yelled at her, lie stamped around, his fists pounded the air -- it was just as she had pictured it, dreaded it. Yet she was 'unshaken now, detachedly able to watch him as if he were some unruly, unintelligent child. I am going to marry him. she had said, and once the words were out, everythin-g else was easy. There were no problems. There was nothing to be afraid of. "His name is Gregrill," she said. "They don't hav last names. We'll have to make one up or perhaps use mine." "I'll see my daughter dead before I let her marry a Martian!" Harley roared. "But if she really loves him --  Ethel intruded timorously. "Loves him? Love that miserable scum?" "Dad, please," Joyce said quietly. "You're condemning somebody you've never seen." "I don't have to see him! He's # a Martian, isn't he? He has horns, doesn't he?" "They're not horns. They're anl.-nnae." 'Call them what you like, they're horns!" "They're antennae, Dad," Joyce repeated firmly. "They're proof of advanced development. They can communicate with each other hundreds of miles. They can sense instantly -- " "I don't want to hear about it!" "But, dear," Ethel tried again, "sometimes, when they marry an Earthling girl, they cut those horns off, and then theylook just like us." "I wouldn't let him -- " Joyce bit off each word -- "do any such thing. I'd be utterly ashamed of him. I wouldn't marry him if he knuckled under to our prejudices like that. What does he have to be apologetic about? He's a superior being -- " "Superior?" her father howled at her, but his voice was losing its power. "N spite of our buildings and  machines and things, they're far richer than we are, really. They have such a richness of feeling, such warmth, such sensitivity. They understand and feel so much more than we do. It's -- it's fantastic. It's just something we can't comprehend." "I see," he said bitterly. "And how are you going to comprehend them?" "Gregrill can speak Earthling as well as I can." Joyce said. "He's a graduate of the university there in Memnonia. Maybe, with his guidance, I'll eventually get some insight into -- " "My God," Harley said dully. He walked unsteadily away from her and fell into his chair. "A daughter of mine..." He looked at her again. "Joyce, can't you see it's impossible? It couldn't work. These mixed marriages have never worked out. Never! Don't you see how it would be? You'd be an outcast. None of your friends would ever want to see you again." "Well, if they should happen to be stupid and prejudiced -- " "I'm that stupid and prejudiced! I wouldn't let a Martian in my house! They're the scum of the Solar System!" "Dad, I won't listen to you talk like that." "What do you want to do -- be the wife of a janitor?" he went on relentlessly. "Porters and janitors, that's all they're fit for." "If they were ever given a chance -- " "A chance? What would they do with it? Loaf around dreamily, get nowhere. Nowhere at all! And pull us down to their level while they're fouling up our civilization!" to Joyce stood up, her hands trembling. "You're not going to Mars!" Harley shouted. "You're not going, you hear? You're staying right here on earth!" "I'm afraid," she said unsteadily, "that you're too late. I already have my ticket. I expected you'd make a fuss. My -- my trunk is at the spaceport. Nothing can stop me now, Dad." "I'll stop you. You'll never marry that scum. By God, if I have to take it to the Panterrestrial Court -- " "Good-by, Dad. I'm not booked to sail till Thursday, but I think it's better if I spend the remaining days in a hotel. It'll be more comfortable for all of us." "Joje, come back here!" "Good-by, Dad." She waved a shaky hand at her mother. "Good-by, Mom. See you soon." "Joyce! Come back!" She went out, quietly closing the door behind her. huge #-passenger ' spaceship settled down slowly toward the landing field, its braking jets making a queer whistling sound in the thin Martian air. The passengers crowded to the windows. Most of them were already in their thermosuits, though the daylight temperature was close to fifty degrees. Some were even adjusting their oxygen packs. These weren't necessary at all, except for long hikes or intense exertion, which few of the visitors would indulge in. But they'd bought the things and they were going to use them -- it was part of the adventure. Most of the passengers were working people on vacation, taking advantage of the special twoin-a-room rate. There were a few salesmen, nervous but hopeful about the possibilities of opening up the hinterlands; so far, only Memnonia, the Martian capital, had provided Earthlings with any business. In the bow of the spaceship was a crowd of girls, a college graduating class. Some of them were dressed in the new skin-tight thermosuits which were stirring up so much fuss in the fashion magazines...Listening to their ecstatic, senseless chatter, Joyce suddenly felt immensely older. The day, thirteen months ago, when she first sighted the Memnonian landscape with her own class, seemed impossibly long ago... The ship nestled in against the vast loading ramp. A whistle sounded. The doors slid open. Husky, bare chested Martian porters crowded aboard, began wheeling out the luggage. Joyce stepped out into the pale sunlight. The clear, thin air tingled at her nostrils, dizzied her, as she'd known it would till she got used to it. She followed her porter down the ramp. It seeped to her, in her giddiness, that Gregrill himself was down there, down at the end of the ramp, bronzed, bare armed, coming toward her -- It was he! He had made the twohundredmile trip to meet her! She began to run. She stumbled. caught herself on sorne body's arm, ran again, plunged against him, lost herself against his big, powerful chest. "Oh, Greg! Greg, you're here!" It was a long while before she could pull herself away to look at him. She had forgotten his strength, the magnificent arch of his chest. He was wearing a white fiber vest in the traditional style, sleeveless, cut low in front. His sun-washed skin glowed like polished bronze. The highlights shone on the strong, high arc of his nose, the ridge of his cheekbones. His fragile russet antennae swayed like wheat stalks in the wind. There were muttered complaints around her. She was being shoved, prodded. She'd hardly realized they were standing in the midst of the swarming passengers. "Oh," she laughed tremulously, "let's move. My luggage. Where -- oh, there it is. that man over there with the cart." "I will get it," Gregrill said. "Oh, no, please." But he was already striding away, big and powerful, towering over most of the Earthlings who were scurrying past. She saw him give something to the Martian porter, watched him swing the trunk up on his shoulder. It writhed in her, it devastated her, her father's contemptuous dismissal -- "porters and janitors, that's all they're fit for." "Greg, put it down," she said frantically. "I won't have you carrying it!" He smiled at her indulgently. "It is not heavy." "I don't want you to," she pleaded. "Why do you not want me to?' he asked puzzledly. "Somebody must." But how could she say it? How could she discuss it at all? She walked beside him, dumbly. They went down the ramp to where the aircabs were loading. An Earthling company .had put in all the air transport here; the Martians themselves had never bothered to develop anything more advanced than the eshbru, a lumbering, three-wheeled, sunpowered vehicle. "We shall take the airbus," Gregrill said. "Oh, do we have to?" she asked. i "How else can we go?" "Can't we get an esifaru?" He looked at her wonderingly. "To travel three times as long? I am aware that you are tired -- " "I'm tired of a lot of things." she blurted. "I'm tired of all the smooth, cynical, streamlined -- Right now, I'd rather walk the whole way than step into an Earthling airbus." He gave an uncertain laugh. "I am not sure that I understand your meaning." "ITexplain it some time." But how could she ever? He thought Earthlings were all such noble, shining, gifted creatures. How could she tell him of the rot at the heart of so many of them? "Come on." she insisted desierately. "Let's find an eshbra." T he driver let them out at Gregrill's road. Gregrill shouldered the trunk, and they walked down past the irregular row of red. sunbaked, dome shaped houses, each with its big tank in the rear for catching Mars' meager rainfall. Joyce felt a quickening, a surge of warmth, when she saw them and the quiet, openfaced people in their doorways, smiling their shy welcomes. She was coming home. She was coming home... Gregrill's mother and father were waiting just inside their door. They opened their arms: they hardly said a word. Joyce ran to them, folded them against her. She didn't mind the tears. She let them lead her into the main room, let them scat her. put pillows around her. She sat there bathing in their tenderness, their simple good-heartedness. Couldn't everybody see it? Why couldn't her father know it? These were the best people in the Universe! Dinner was an Earthling meal. Joyce had been looking forward to a dish of mr#a, the Martian rice, and krulevak, the white fruit that tasted like luscious chicken meat. But Gregrill's parents had obviously felt that their humble foods were too mean for her exalted taste and they had gone to the expense of bringing in vegetables and meats from the Earthling import shop in Memnonia. Joyce hid her disappointment. She had an impulse to say, "Please, please don't mimic our Earthling ways. Stay the way you are. Don't spoil anything. Don't lose what you have." After dinner, Gregrill took her for a walk. Joyce had her thermosuit on now. The Sun was setting, and the startling cold of the Martian night was coming in fast. Gregrill changed his fiber vest for a sleeved jacket, though of the same light material. It was incredible how little protection these people needed against the cold. But, of course, they'd adapted to it. They walked along the edge of the gorge that cut through the stunted forest half a mile from Gregrill's home. The rough sides of the gorge rose sheer and splendid. a marvel of glittering color -- red, orange, yellow, brown. Far down on the rocky bed, a shallow stream flowed sluggishly to the south. Soon, as summer came on, the stream would quickly deepen. From the northern ice fields, a toircnt of blue water would come rushing down the gorges, and the heavy rains would come, and the red ground underfckot would turn to a miraculous green, and the mrila would sprout up like a rug of green velvet across the wide fields and the terraced hills. If she could only stay here, if they could only build their lives here with these simple, goodhearted people... But she knew it couldn't be. Grcgrill would be wasted here. Earth, despite all its hatefulness for her. was the only place where his genius would have a chance to unfold and display its potentialities. "It is time that we go back?" Gregrill asked. "You are cold?" Suddenly, helplessly, Joyce began to laugh. "What is it?" Grcgrill said. confused by the sudden laughter. "The funny stiff way you talk!" She laughed on and on. She couldn't stop. 'T am sorry," he said, turning aside, his face full of hurt. "Oh. no!" She caught his arm. "Don't misunderstand. I love the way you talk. I want you always to talk the way you do now. Don't change -- please don't ever change. I love you just as you are." days later. It was a complicated affair. Joyce had to sign half a dozen affidavits at the Earthling consulate, all certifying in one way or another that she intended to marry Gregrill as soon as they reached Earth, and that she guaranteed he wouldn't become a public charge. Il was practically the only way a Martian had of getting to Earth. It infuriated her, this stupid legislation by which Earth denied itself everything these people could contribute to its culture. A few years ago, the Earthling government had admitted several thousand Martians to fill the pressing shortage of menial labor, and had permitted Venusians to take jobs as room stewards and waiters on the spaceships; and by that trivial concession, it had felt the Interplanetary Union.' Wilt'll would it leara what its narrow prejudices were costing? Would it have to wait till someone like Gregrill stepped forward and demonstrated all the richness it was missing? The formal good-bys had been said. The neighbors had held a party for them. It had been in a clearing behind the houses, out in th. clean, lemon-yellow sunlight. They had eaten roasted trork, the crustacean delicacy from the northern gorges, and mrila made into candied patties. Gregrill's mother and father had danced the grave, stately farewell dance. And now. on their final evening on Mars. Joyce and Gregrill were taking their last walk along the deep, echoing gorge. She had just been watching him finish his packing, and the pain of it still sat in her throat. He had included his college books -- every one of his texts and notebooks -- packing them in so reverently. so pathetically confident that all he had to do was follow his. classroom precepts, and recognition and success would come tumbling into his hands... 'T hope that your parents will like me as well as my parents like you." Gregrill said. "Oh. yes," Joyce assured him hoarsely. "Perhaps they will not be pleased that you marry a Martian." "No. Greg. no. They'll -- " But she couldn't carry it on. He turned to face her; he looked at her hard. He was starting to speak, to ask the obvious questions, but she flung herself against him. "Greg! Let's get married here! Let's get married before we leave." He held her away from him so he could look at her. "But you had wished to be married oa Earth," he said bewilderedly. "I know, but I've changed my mind. I want it here, now. Oh, Greg. I'm afraid..." His big russet eyes narrowed, his high-winged nostrils flared, scenting danger. "You are afraid of what?" he asked quietly. "I don't know, Greg. I -- I'm just afraid something will happen. something will go wrong. I don't know what." She couldn't look him in the eyes. "Let's get married here, in the morning, before we leave. Then we'll be married. "Nothing can go wrong." "Will not your parents be angered that you -- " "No, no, Greg. It'll be all right. This is the best way, believe me." "I believe you," he said gravely. And it caught her again, his small-boy solemnity. She was caught in a burst of helpless laughter. "Oh, Greg, I love you!" T hey were married by a Martian priest in a small reddraped temple in Memnonia, not far from the spaceport. The ceremony was without words, like all religious rites on Mars. The tall, round-bodied priest, a huge cylinder of a man in heavy ritual fiber robes, stood facing them, his hands stiff against his sides, his eyes closed, his heavy features motionless. Joyce closed her eyes. too. She strained to hear, feel, sense something of what was passing between the priest and Gregrill. Surely, if she strained hard enough, she would catch some echo, some aura. But the air defied her; she was deaf, blind, insensate: she was cut off irrevocably from this higher level of communication. Perhaps their children... "He is saying the words now," G-regrill whispered in her ear. "You two together... comfort each other... against the darkness and the drought... through the long dry misery of winter... when the water is locked and nothing, grows... till the glad day of rain and running streams... you two together... comfort each other... "Say yes, my darling," Gregrill told her. "Yes, yes! Oh, yes!" They were outside, striding exultantly through the sunshine, the light wind tossing their hair, and the words kept sin:!ng to her; "Through the long dry misery of winter... till the glad day of rain..." Oh, yes, Greg! Yes! When they reached the spaceship. their bags had already been taken' to their stateroom, unpacked, the clothing arranged in the dressers -- the meticulous work of the iVenusian stewards. Even the bedcovers were turned dovn, her nightgown laid out. "Greg," she said in a rush of embarrassment, "let's go out and watch the... watch how w take off." "You go. and I shall join you soon," he said. "I must wash and anoint myself as a bridegroom." Joyce went down the corridor into the observation rotunda. The huge semicircular window was cluttered with jabbering passengers. She squeezed in among them, but she stayed only a moment. She pushed her way back out and went to a table near the head of the corridor, and waited restlessly for him. Midway down the corridor, a Venusian steward, a scrawny little gray-skinned, long-beaked fellow, was running a cleaning machine over the floor. She smiled at him, but he turned his face shyly away. And then Gregrill came, moving up the corridor with his lithe, magnificent grace. #f His wet hir glistened. "Greg, you look wonderful!" she cried, instantly aware of how foolish she sounded. He speeded his steps. He didn't see the cleaning hose in his path. The Venusian moved quickly to pul! it aside, but it caught Gregrill's foot. He stumbled, caught himself on the . corridor rail. Swiftly he turned, his arm swung out, his forearm slammed against the jaw of the little Venusian, sending him crashing down against his cleaning machine. Gregrill looked down at him a momcRt. Then he turned, gave Joyce a broad smile and walked to her table. "Greg." Her throat was dry. "Why did you do that? He didn't mean it." "It is his duty to avoid such accidents." Gregrill said. "But look, he's still lying there. Let's go help him." "Leave him there," he said. "He is only a Venusian." "Only a -- ?" "Venusian." His lips curled. "They are the scum of the Solar System." The tremor that went through her was lost in the thrust of the jets as the ship took off. "They are not even fit for cleaning floors," Gregrill said. He suddenly smiled. "Do you not see the change I have made?" He gestured at his head. Through tear-blinded eyes, she saw his glossy w'aves of hair. The antennae were gone! "It hurt only a little," he said. 'T could not wait until I had them off. I have been ashamed of them for so long." Lord, who was this person she had married? She didn't know him! "I see that you are still upset," he said. "Please understand that these Venusians must be kept in their place." It was some stranger. Slie couldn't be married to him. She couldn't! "I wonder if I look like an Earthling now." he said. "Tell me, do you think that I look a little like your father and his friends?" She answered him wearily, defcatcdly: "Yes, Greg. You do. Exactly." The #th anniversary World Science Fiction Convention vill be held at the Hotel Morrison in Chicaoe on August #, #I and Sspietnber #, #. You'll meet your favorite editors, wrileis and illustral jrs. Snd I for memond full information in return! # by Edward Hyams. Pantheon Books, Inc., New York, #. # pages, '# bringing up this book in these hallowed pages, but I can't help it. It is the best satire the English language has produced in decades. It is also science fiction -- of a sort. It tells of the "creation" of a fantastic super-superradar, out of parts of a baby's pram and pawnbroker's globes, fastened to the mast of a small naval vessel belonging to an imaginary small neutral nation. Small but very ingenious? The tale takes place slightly in the future: a brand-new and better world comes out of it -- temporarily, at least -- and it's full of gadgetry and derring-do, like any regular science fiction. The only thing is, nothing superscientific is developed, with the possible exception of super-psychology of crowd behavior that is the only really fantastic thing about the whole hilarious, bitter, Despite its heavy load of Britishisms, and the indubitable fact that it is highly unkind to established orders such as the Press, the Military, Diplomacy, and -- most of all. perhaps -- the Russians and the Americans (it's rather a neutralist book, I suppose), it is unreservedly wonderful. To say that it is in the same class as "Mr. Adam" by Pat Frank is to give Frank's pleasant little book unmerited praise. Nevertheless, the two have much in common. If you liked "Mr. Adam" you certainly will like this. Taine. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Los Angeles, #. # pages, # F irst published by E. P. Dutton  Co. back in #, this relatively minor item in the Taine catalog of weird science fantasy is now reprinted in an attractive period format. Persons interested in the "pre-science fiction" period of American fantastic writing will do well to pick it up. It is what H. L. Gold calls "bridge" science fiction -- a link between mundane literature and the highly advanced science fiction of today. It tells of a meteor in darkest Africa containing an unknown new element which has a ghastly effect on human beings. Emitting vapors that are as habit-forming as opium, it makes addicts retrogress toward the ape. The story is woven around the melodrama of a "missionary" whose mission in life is to kill all apes and thus destroy the idea of evolution. In Africa, he becomes an addict of the malign emanations and gradually rots away, dragging down his daughter and wife, and becoming involved in an astonishing battle which ends with the destruction of the meteor. There is much excellent descriptive material on Africa -- whether real or not. I'm unable to say -- and many of those horrible pen-pictures of catastrophe and corny yet masterful observations on the human scene, made from a cynic's perch, that light up even the poorest and sociologically most immature of Taine's novels. The Iron Star is not one of his naive pre-Hitler race prejudices, which is in the book's favor. As a piece of fiction, it holds the attention, despite its inadequate literary technique, and that is probably more to the point. Greenberg. Gnome Press, Inc. New York, #. # pages, # -- that is the mark for this new collection from Gnome.  Why Mr. Greenberg felt he "Crucible of Power" and Norvell W. Page's "But Without Horns" to the permanence of a hardbound book is more than I can figure out. Both are #-year old potboilers, far better left to obscurity. Of the other three, two deal with parallel worlds and one with the world of tomorrow. Fritz Leiber's "Destiny Times Three" (#) is faintly overpowering and largely fantasy, but even so extremely persuasive. It deals with three parallel worlds, all very nearly alike, but only one really viable. A. E. van Vogt's # "The Chroniclers" deals with two rather than three worlds. This is the one about the Earth-citizen who has a third eye, by means of which he enters the parallel world of the three-eyed. There, through typically van Vogtian plot complexities, the Earthian saves the advanced civilization from destruction. Intellectually enthralling, but slightly trapped. Norman L. Knight's "Crisis in Utopia" (#) is a rich and very pleasant tale of our own middle future. A new; genetic pattern has been developed to breed a truly amphibious men, and the ocean floor is about to become Man's habitation as well as the dry land. The concept and its fascinating machinery occupies most of the tale: there a Mad Scientist thrown in for melodrama, but he doesn't do too much damage. Delightful, and pointed, too. by Jules Verne. Didier, Publishers. New York, #. #I psges, # eological finds of the year, if you can call so well-known a classic a find. Robur, whose adventures are told in the two novels included in this book (the sequel is called The Master of the Worlds, is a truly original character. Verne's ideas about him, about society, and in particular about the art of heavierthan-air flight, are fascinating and strangely modern. There is sharp satire in much of the writing about Americans; some astonishingly accurate data on airplanes (written years before the Wright's first flight) ; and, toward the end, a memorable attack on the misuses of power. The firm of Didier is to be commended for reissuing this volume, the seventh in its uniform edition of Verne's works. The others already available at the same price are The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Eibi Hundred Leagues on the Amazon, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Round the World in Eighty Days, A Trip to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon. All are handsome volumes and all have special introductions. The one accompanying Robur the Conqueror is by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, and a pleasant appreciation it is. VI. By Curme Gray. Shasta Publishers, Chicago, #. # paes, # I AM sure that this must be, as it says on the jacket, "the intense realization of an original literary form," but neither I, nor Mac, my bookie friend down the street, can figure out what that form is. For my puny intellect, this book has nothing to offer. Theoretically, it deals with a matriarchy # years from now, but it docs so in such a fashion that people, plot, place or purpose do not come through in any intelligible way. One gathers that some murders are committed; that this has not happened for hundreds of years; and that the motive is a desire for power. But that is the one really understandable thing in the book. The style is opaque, the characters wooden, posturing empty and unreal as the Egyptian figures that decorate the very handsome jacket of the novel. The "science" is a gibberish of names -- "flivvy-dizzies," "telement," "levelators," "contrapellers," "remitters," not one of which has any lucid meaning. When I finally laid the book down, I had a dissociated feeling as if I had spent coa;jiucrv...-.c time in the company of a person who had something to say and couldn't express it. It was on uncomfortable feeling. D epartment for Keeping tie Record Straight. Some unscrupulous bem, in a mood of sheer malicious rage, whispered that boner in my ear about Robert Heinlein's getting the phrase "the Green Hills of Earth" from Fredric Brown's fine short story, "Something Green." Actually, "Something Green" was first published in Space on My Hands "The Green Hills of Earth" first published by Heinlein in the Saturday Evening Post in #. Actually the phrase comes from a story by C. L. Moore (Mrs. Henry Kuttner), and credit is given her in the book by Heinlein which used the phrase as a title. I hope everybody feels better now that I have walloped my buzzum in public. I still feel like a dope. (Memo from the Editor: Who are you not to make an occasional mistake?)  :'i' We've had the tops of the binder manufacturers, make up a limited quantity of sturdy, mechanical hard covers made to r hold and protect six issues of Galaxy for your permonent pleasure. Binders are gold stamped with the Galaxy trade mark and are mode of a moroccan grain cloth, over-board to last a lifetime. Send # to Binders Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc. We will send postpaid.  (On of tho s!i Spc Mon) Th porfeet decoration anywhere in the home -- desk, bookcase, shelf or cobinef. The ideal gift for all age. Robot artd Space Men over # inches loti, in assorted melotlic colors, ' Rocket Space Ship ever Id inches high, in # color. Robot ond A completely different Space Ship ond Crow Set -- Reckot Spec Ship and # Spac Men, os described abov. Sovo postage charges by remitting with order. ' There's no awakening os cffsconcerfing as the disiliusionmenf of a man under the delusion that he has no flusons at oll Conclusion of a #-Part Serial Mitchell Courtenay, the narrator of this story, had three rave problems -- his wife Kathy, who refused to finalize their conditional marriage; the planet Vertus; and the Conservationists, commonly known as "Connies." an outlawed organization. liked' Courtenay's Ideals, a young star class copysmith in Fowler Schocken Associates, the largest advertising agency on Earth. Courtenay w'as dedicated to the highest principle of this completely fee enterprise society. Sales. Only through sales, he held, could the economy expand indefinitely. Kathy bitterly w'anfedf to know why it had to, a question that, to Courtenay, was little short of commercial heresy. Added to this marital strain w-as his P-Jack O'Shea, the midget ipace  pilot who H'a.s the only person to reach Kenas thus far. Ip, Surprisingly, Courtenay had K been selected by Fowler Schocken K.' to head the V'exjus Project, a conL' tract granted by the Incorporated t United States of America to develop and exploit Earth's sister fc planet. He had expected Matt #D)# the Company, to be anry and jealous, for Runstead had higher seniority and should logically have been chosen to handle the account. But Runstead evidently was going further than the usual routine attempts to discredit Courtenay by lying, cajoling, bribing his staff, spying on his plans -- Runstead seemed to be actively sabotaging the project! That, however, could have been the work of the Connies, who fought savagely for the conservation of natural resources, and might be expected to combat the use of enormous amounts of metals and fuels needed to colonize and exploit Kenus. As proof of that, there were the two aemps on Courtenay's life -- once when he tvas in Washington to interview O'Shea, the tiny space pilot, and a 'copter cargo nacelle almost killed him; another when a gunman in a passenger 'copter tried to shoot him through the window of his apartment. The possibility of a commercial feud was ruled out by Fowler Schocken when Courtenay questioned him about it; there would have been couf hearings, counter-claims, perhaps ev'en injunctions, before they were notified of a feud. Obviously, no entrepeneur would be guilty of the high commercial crime of murder without notification, # it must have been the Connies. But then something even more disturbing occurred. Testing consumer reaction had always bee the basis of successful advertising, and Courtenay had picked Cal-Mex to sample attitudes toward colonizing, supporting the gigantic project, buying Venusan products, and other such essentials... but Runstead's staff sent in faked information! Enraged, Courtenay fired the entire staff there and went to the South Pole, where Runstead was "on vacation," to confront him with his treachery. Courtenay found him on the slope of Starrzelius Glacier. But Runstead was ready... be cu Courtenay down with a slash of skis across the Polar helmet, left him dazed, freezing, beyond hope of rescue. As the fierce cold reached into Courtenay's unheated suit, he had only two thoughts. One was of Kathy. The other was of death. When Courtenay awoke, he was in the steerage of a laborfreighter rocketing through the sky... bound to a long contract in the Chlorella plantations, imprisoned in a false identity that someone had confrwf for him. There was no way of buying his freedom. As far as the world was concerned, he had died in an accident in Antarctica. Approached by the Connies to join their detested organization, Courtenay alias "Croby") used them to get back to New York and Schocken Tower. With the help of his loyal secretary, he managed to get to the Moon, where he made contact with a Connie cell. It ws not easy -- if cost him the life of his secretary, poisoned mysteriously on the Earth-Moon ship -- but there vas no other method of reaching Fowler Schocken, who was on the Moon to push the Venus Project. To escape detection by the police guards, Courtenay had to take refuge with a Connie, who called in the leader of the group. The leader turied out to be Courtenay's own wife, Kathy! I dazedly. "My God,  Mitch!" She laughed, with a note of hysteria. "You wouldn't wait, would you?" The. astrologer took the gun out of his pocket. "Is there -- " "No. Warren. It's all right. Yu can leave us alone. Please." He left. Kathy dropped into a chair, trembling. I couldn't move. My wife -- a king-pin Connie! I had thought I'd known her; I'd been wrong. She had lied to me continuously and I had never known it. I had loved a lie and not a woman at all. "Shocked?" she asked. "You, a star class copysmith, consorting with a Connie? Afraid it'll get out and do you no good businesswise?" She forced a mocking smile that broke down as I looked at her. "Damn it," she flared, "all I ever asked from you after I came to my senses was to get out of my life and stay out. The biggest mistake I ever made was you." "You had Runstead shanghai me?" "Like a fool. What in God's name are you doing here? Why can't you leave me alone?" Kathy a Connie. Runstead a Connie. Deciding what was best for poor Mitch and doing it. Taunton deciding what was best for poor Mitch and doing it. Moving me this way and that. I picked her up and slapped her. The staring intensity left her eyes and she looked merelysurprised. "Get what's-his-name in here," I said. "You can't order me -- " "You!" I yelled. "The witchdoctor!" ' He came running, right into my fist. Kathy was on niy back, a clawing wildcat, as I went through his pockets. I found the pistol -- find shoved her to the floor. She looked up at me. mechanically rubbing a bruised hip. "You're a mean idiot," she said wonderingly. "#ot idiot," I said. "Does Fowler Schocken know you're on the Moon?" "No," she said, nibbing her thumb and forefinger together. "You're lying. I told you that gesture gives you away." "My little lie-detector," she said jccringly. "My little fireeating copysmith -- " "Level with me or you get this thing across the face." "You mean it!" She put her hand to her face slowly, looking at the gun. 'Tm glad that's settled. Does Fowler Schocken know you're on the Moon?" "Not exactly." She was still watching the gun. "He did advise me to make the trip -- to help me get over my bereavement." "Call him. Get him here." She didn't say anything or move to the phone. "Listen." I said. "This is Groby talking. Groby's been slugged, knifed, robbed and kidnap. He saw the only friend he had poisoned a few hours ago. He's been played with by a lady sadist who knew her anatomy lessons. He killed her for it and he was glad of it. He's so deep in hock to Chtorell that he'll never get out. He's wanted for femicide and breach of contract. The woman he thought he was in love with turned out to be a lying fanatic, a Connie bitch. Groby has nothing to lose. I can put a burst through the dome up there and we'll all suck space. I can walk out into the street, give myself up and tell exactly what I know. They won't believe me, but they'll investigate to make sure, and sooner or later they'll get corroboration -- after I've been brainburned, which doesn't matter. I've got nothing to lose." "And," she asked flatly, "what have you got to gain?" "Stop stalling. Call Schocken." "Not without another try, Mitch. One word hurt -- 'fanatic.' There were two reasons why I begged Runstead to shanghai you; I wanted you out of the way of Taunton's killers, and I wanted you to get a taste of the consumer's life. I thought I'd be able to talk sense to you after we brought you back to life, and we'd be able to work together on the only job worth doing. So it didn't work. That damned brain of yours -- so good and so wariK'd.' All you want is to be star class again and eat and drink and leep a little better than anybody else. Well. I tried. "Go ahead and do whatever you think you have to do. It's not going to hurt worse than the nights we used to spend screaming at each other. Or the times I was out on Connie business and couldn't tell you and had to watch you being jealous. Or shipping you to Chlorella to try to 'make you a whole sane man in spite of what copysmithing's done to you. Or never being able to love you all the way, never being able to give myself to you entirely, mind or body, because there was this secret. Pistol-whipping's a joke compared to the way I've been hurt." There was a pause that seemed to go on forever. "Call Schocken," I said unsteadily. "Tell him to come here. Then get out and take the stargazer with you. I -- I don't know what I'm going to tell Schocken. But I'm going to give you and your friends time to change headquarters and hailing signs and the rest of your insane rigmarole. Call Schocken and get out of here. I don't want to see you again." I couldn't read the look on her face as she picked up the phone and punched a number. "Mr. Schocken's sec", please," she said. "This is Dr. Nevin -- widow of Mr. Courtenay, you'll find me on the through list. Mr. Schocken's sec, please... This is Dr. Nevin. Mr. Courtenay's widow. May I speak to Mr. Schocken's secretary? I'm listed ,... Hello. Miss Grice: this is Dr. Nevin. May I speak to Mr. Schocken?" She turned to me. "I'll have to wait a few moments." They passed in silence. "Hello, ' Mr. Schocken. I wonder if you could come and see me about a matter of importance, business and personal... The sooner the better, I'm afraid... Shopping One, off Receiving -- Dr. Astron's... No, nothing like that. It's just a convenient meeting place. Thank you very much. Mr. Schocken." I wrenched the phone from her and heard Fowler Schocken's voice say: "Quite all right, my dear. The mystery is intriguing. Good-by." Click. The voice was unmistakable. It brought back memories of Board mornings with and satisfying hours of work climaxed with a "Well done!" I was almost home. Silently and efficiently, Kathy was shouldering the stargazer's limp body. Without a w'ord, she walked from the observatory. A door opened and closed. The hell with her... , TT was minutes before there was a jovial halloo from Fowler Schocken: "Kathy! Anybody home?" "In here," I called. Two of oiir Brinks men and Fowler Schocken came in. His face turned a mottled purple. "Where's -- " he began. And then: "You looked like -- you are! Mitch!" He grabbed me and waltzed me hilariously around the circular room while the guards dropped their jaws. "What kind of trick was that to play on an old man? What's the story, boy? Where's Kathy?" He stopped, puffing even under Moonweight. "I've been doing some undercover work," I said. "I'm afraid I've got myself into some trouble. Would you call for more guards? We may have to stand off Luna City Inc.'s protection men." Our Brinks guards grinned happily at the thought. "Sure, Mitch. Get it done," he said to the sergeant, who went eagerly to the phone. "Now what's all this about?" "For the present," I said, "let's say it's been a field trip that went sour. Let's say I downgraded myself temporarily and voluntarily to assess the Venus project sentiment among the consumers -- and I got stuck. Fowler, please don't push me for any more details. I'm in a bad way. Hungry, tired, scared, dirty." "All right, Mitch. You know my policy -- find a good horse, give him his head and back him to the limit. You've never let me down, and God knows I'm glad to see you around again. Venus Section can use you. Nothing's going right. The indices are down to # composite for North America when they should be # and rising. And turnover? Enormous! I'm here recruiting, you know: a little raid on Luna City' Inc., Moon Mines and the other outfits for some space-seasoned executives." It was good to be home. "Who's heading it up?" I asked. "I am. We rotated a few Board men through the spot and there wasn't any pickup. In spite of my other jobs, I had to take over Venus Section direct. Am I glad to see you!" "Runstead?" "He's vice-ing for me, poor man. What's this jam you're in with the guards? Where's Kathy?" "I'm wanted for femicide and contract breach on Earth. Here I'm a suspicious character without clearance. Also I resisted arrest, clouted a guard and damaged Luna City property." He looked grave. "You know, I don't like the sound of CB," he said. "I assume there was a flaw in the contract?" "Several." I assured him. He brightened. "Then we'll pay off the fines on the restof the stuff and fight the CB clear up to the Chamber of Commerce if we have to. What firm?" "Chlorella Costa Rica." "Hmm. Middling sized, but solid. Excellent people, all of them. A pleasure to do business with." Not from the bottom, I thought, but said nothing, 'Tm sure they'll be reasonable. If they aren't. I have a majority of the C of C in my pocket anyway. I ought to get something for my retainers, eh?" He dug me slyly in the ribs. His relief at getting Venus Section off his neck was overwhelming. A dozen of our Brinks boys churned in. "That should do it," Fowler Schocken beamed. "Lieutenant, the Luna City Inc. protection people may try to take Mr. Courtenay here away from us. We don't want that to happen, do we?" "No, sir," said the lieutenant, dead-pan. "Then let's go." patrolman bawled. We were in somewhat open order. Evidently he didn't realize that the Brinks men were my escort. "Go play with your marbles, punchy," a sergeant told him. He went pale, but beeped his alarm and went down in a tangle of fists and boots. Burns patrolmen came bounding along the tunnel-like street in low-gravity strides. Faces appeared in doorways. Our detail's weapons squad leader said, "Hup!" and his boys began to produce barrels, legs, belts of ammo and actions from their uniforms. Snap-snap-snap-snapsnap, and there were two machine guns mounted on the high tripod ready to rake both ends of the street. The Burns men braked grotesquely yards from us and stood unhappily swinging their nightsticks. Our lieutenant called out: "What seems to be the trouble, gentlemen?" A Burns man called back: "Is that man 'George .Groby?" "Are you George Groby?" the lieutenant asked me. "No. I'm Mitchell Courtenay." The weapons men full-cocked their guns at a signal from the squad leader. The two clicks echoed from the vaulting and the few last-ditch rubbernecks hanging from the doors vanished. "Oh," said the Burns man. "That's all right, then. You can go ahead." He turned on the rest of the patrolmen. "What the hell are you dummies waiting for? Didn't you hear me?" They beat it, and we moved on down Commercial One, with the weapons men cradling their guns. The Fowler Schocken Associates Luna City Branch was # Commercial One. and we went in whistling. The weapons men m mounted their guns in the lobby. It was a fantastic performance., I had never seen its like. Fowler Schocken explained it as he led me down into the heart of the agency. "It's frontier stuff, Mitch. Something you've got to get into your copy. 'The Equalizer' is what they call it. A man's rank doesn't meanmuch up here. A well-drilled weapons squad is the law topside of the stratosphere. It's getting back to the elemental things of life, where a man's a man no matter how high his Social Secuiity number." We passed a door. "O'Shea's room," he said. "He isn't in yet, of course. The little man's out gathering rosebuds while he may -- and the time isn't going to be long. The only Venus roundtripper. We'll lick that, won't we, Mitch?" He showed me into a cubicle and lowered the bed with his own hands. "Cork off with these," he sd, producing a sheaf of notes from his breast pocket. "Just some rough jottings for you to go over. I'll send in a guard with food and Coffiest. A good hour or two of work and then the sound sleep of the just, eh?" "Yes, Mr. Schocken." He beamed at me and left, drawing the curtain. I stared glazedly at the rough jottings. "Six-color doubletrux. Downhold unsuccessful previous flights. Cite Learoyd #, Holden #I (?), McGill # et al heroic pioneers supreme saerfee etc etc. No mention MyersWhite flopperoo # acet visibly exploded bfr passng Moon orbit. Try get M-W taken out of newssheet files  history bks? Get cost estimate. Search archives for pix L H  McG. Shd be blond brunet  redhead. Ships in baegrnd. Looming. Panting woman, but heroic pioneers dedicated look in eye not interestd. Piquant bes unavlbl... There was a pencil and copypaper in the cubicle. I began to write painfully: "We were ordinary guys. We liked the Earth and the good things it gave us. The morning tang of 'Coffiest...  U# the first drag on a Starr... the good feel of a sharp new Verily pinstripe suit... a warm smile from a girl in a bright spring dress -- but they weren't enough. There were far places we had to see, things we had to know. "The little guy's Learoyd, ##. l'm Holden, #. The redhead with the shoulders is McGill, #. Yes, we're dead. But we saw the far places and we learned what we had to Icam before we died. The longhair astronomers could only guess about Venus. Poison gas, they said. Winds so hot and so strong they'd pick you up and throw you away in cin ders. But they weren't sure. What do you do when you aren't sure? .You go and see." A guard came in with sandwiches and Coffiest. I munched and gulped ,and wrote with the other hand. "We had good ships for those days. They packed us and enough fuel to get us there. What they didn't have was enough fuel to get us back. But don't pity us; we had to know. There was always the chance that the longhairs were wrong, that we'd be able to get out, breathe clean air, swim in cool water -- and then somehow make enough fuel to bring the good news back. No, it didn't work out that way. It proved that the longhairs knew their stuff. "Learoyd didn't wait to starve in his crate; he opened the hatch and breathed poison after writing up his log. My crate was lighter. The wind picked it up and broke it -- and me with it. McGill had extra rations and a heavier ship. He sat and wrote for a week and then -- well, it was pretty certain after two noreturns. He'd taken cyanide with him. But don't pity us. We went there and we saw it and, in a way, we sent back the news by not coming back ourselves. "Now you folks know what to do and how to do it. You know the longhairs weren't guessing. Venus is a mean lady and you've got to take the stuff and the know-how to tame her. She'll treat ydu right when you do. 'When you find us and our crates, don't pity us. We did it for you. Wc knew you wouldn't let us down." I was home again. "Tomorrow. Not today." He gave me a steady look, "ril go along, Mitch. I've never been a back-scat driver yet." He displayed one of the abilities that made him boss-man by wiping clean out of his mind the burning curiosity about where I had been and what I had been doing. "That's good copy' he said, slapping my work of the previous night on his desk. "Clear it with O'Shea, won't you? He can give it some extra see-taste-smellhear-feel if anybody can. And pack for return aboard the Vilfredo Pareto --  I forgot, you haven't got anything to pack. Here's #ome scratch : shop when you get a chance. Take a few of the boys with you. of course. The Equalizer, remember?" He twinkled at me. I went to find O'Shea curled up like a cat in the middle of his fullsized bunk in the cubicle next to mine. The little man looked ravaged when he rolled over and stared blearily at me. "Mitch," he said thickly. " 'Nother goddam nightmare." He closed his bloodshot eyes. A thread of saliva lay along his miniature chin -- puffy now, no longer perfectly chiseled. "Wake up, Jack." He jerked upright and held hLs small head. "I'm dying." he said faintly. "My deathbed advice is this : don't ever be a hero. Get me something, will you?" I went to the kitchen and punched Coffiest, Thiamax and a slice of Bredd. Halfway out, I returned, went to the bar and punched two ounces of bourbon. O'Shea looked at the tray and #? hiccoughed. "What the hell's that I  stuff?"' he asked, referring to the Coffiest. Thiamax and Bredd. He shot down the bourbon and shuddered. "Long time no see. Jack," ( said. He groaned. "Why do cliches add that extra something to a hangover?" He tried to stand up to his full height of thirty-five inches and collapsed back onto the cot, his legs dangling. "I'm living up to my reputation and gal from Nova Scotia! It's springtime, isn't it? Do you think that explains anything?" "It's late fall." "Maybe she doesn't have a calendar. Pass me that Coffiest." No "please" and no "thank you." Just a cool assumption that the world was his for the asking. He had changed. "Think you can do some work this morning?" I asked, my voice stiff. "I might," he said indifferently. "This is Schocken's party, after all. Say, what the hell ever became of you?" "I've been investigating." "Seen Kathy? That's a wonderful girl you have there, Mitch." His smile might have been reminiscent. All I was sure of was that I didn't like it. He choked down his Coffiest and said, carefully setting it down: "What's that work you mentioned?" Hi i T showed him my copy. He gulped the Thiamax and began to steady on his course as he read. "You got it all effed up," he said at last, scornfully. "I don't know Lcaroyd. Holden and McGill from so many holes in the ground, but like hell they were selfless explorers. You don't get pulled to Venus. You get pushed." "We're trying to convince people that they got pulled. What we want from you is sense-impressions to sprinkle the copy with. Just talking off the front of your face, how do you resonate to it?" "With nausea," he said, bored. "Would you reserve me a shower, Mitch? Ten minutes fresh, # degrees. Damn the cost. You, too, can be a celebrity. All you have to do is be as lucky as I am." He swung his short legs over the edge of the cot and contemplated his toes, six inches clear of the floor. "I'm getting it while the getting's good. And am I getting it good. She must have been part Eskimo." "What about my copy?" "See my reports. What about my shower?" "See your valet." I said, and went out, boiling. In my own cubicle I sweated sense-impressions into the copy for a couple of hours and then picked up a guard squad to go shopping. # G There were no brushes with the Burns patrolmen. I noticed that Warren Astron's shopfront now sported a chaste sign: Dr. Astron Regrets That Urgent Businees Has Recalled Him to Earth on Short Notice I asked one of our boys: "Has the Ricardo left?" "Couple hours ago, Mr. Courtenay. Next departure's the Pareto, tomorrow." I could talk. S O I told Fowler Schocken the whole story. And Fowler Schocken didn't believe a word of it. He was nice enough and he tried not to hurt my feelings. "Nobody's blaming you. Mitch," he said kindly. "You've been through a great strain. It happens to us all, this struggle with reality. Don't feel you're alone, my boy. We'll see this thing through. There are times when anybody needs help. M y analyst -- " I'm afraid I yelled at him. J'Now, now," he said, still kind and understanding. "Laymen shouldn't dabble in these things, but I think I know a thing or two about it and can discuss it objectively...Let me try to explain -- " "Explain thisV I yelleJ at him,  tlirusting my altered Social Security tattoo under his nose. "If you wish," he said calmly. "Call it a holiday from reality. You've been on a psychological bender. You assumed a new identity, and you chose one as far-removed from your normal hard-working, immensely able self as possible. You chose the lazy, easy-going life of a scum-skimmer, drowsing in the tropic Sun -- " I knew then who was out of touch with reality. "Your slanders against Taunton's are crystalclear to a person with some grasp of our unconscious drives. I was pleased to hear you voice them. They meant that you're getting back to your real self. What is our problem -- the central problem of the real Mitchell Courtenay, star class copysmith? Lick the opposition? Crush the competing firms! Destroy them! Veiled in symbols, obscured by ambivalent attitudes, the Taunton fantasy is nevertheless clear. Your imagined encounter with the girl 'Hedy' might be a textbook example?" "Look at my jawf See that hole? It still hurts!" He just smiled and said: "Let's be glad you did nothing worse to yourself, Mitch. The id, you see -- " "What about Kathy? What about the complete data on the Connies I gave you? Grips, hailing signs, passwords, meeting places?" "Mitch," he said earnestly, "as I say. I shouldn't be meddling, but they aren't real. Through sexual hostility, 'Groby' identified your wife with a hate-and-fcar object, the Connies. And 'Groby' carefully arranged things so that your Connie data is uncheckable and therefore unassailable. 'Groby' arranged for you -- the real you -- to withhold the imaginary 'data' until the Connies would have had chance to change all that. 'Groby' was acting in selfdefense. Courtenay was coming back and 'Groby' felt himself being squeezed out. Very well, he arranged things so that he can make a comeback -- " "I'm not insane!" "My analyst -- " "You've got to believe me!" "These unconscious conflicts --  "I tell you Taunton has killers!" "Do you know what convinced me. Mitch?" "What?" I asked bitterly. "The fantasy of a Connie cell embedded in Chicken Little. The symbolism -- well, it's quite unmistakable." I gave up except on one point: "Do people still humor the insane. Mr. Schocken?" "You're not insane, my boy. #i# You need help. You'll get it." "Will you humor me in one respect?" "Of course." "Guard yourself and me, too. Taunton has killers. All right. I think, or Groby thinks, or some damn body thinks that Taunton has killers. If you humor me to the extent of guarding yourself and me. I promise not to start swinging from the ceiling. I'll even go to your analyst." "Fine," he smiled, humoring me. Who could blame him? His own dreamworld was under attack by every word I had tc say. He couldn't believe that Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, was sitting there and telling him such frightful things. They were hammer blows at him. but Fowler Schocken was nothing if not resilient. There was an explanation for everything and Sales could do no wrong. Therefore. Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, was not sitting there telling him these things. It was Mitchell Courtenay's untamed id. I suppose I was lucky, at that. He could have decided I was an impostor trying to subvert him and handed me over to the Bums Detective Agency. Some prehistoric research of my apprentice days recurred to me. I had found that, contrary to popular opinion, there had been no martyrs to science, ever. Roger Bacon had been comfortably imprisoned not becaOse he had a fumbling, intuitive, mixed up with-mysticism notion of the scientific method, but because he had, from an incurably bad temper, violated a kind of nonaggression pact between the Dominicans and Franciscans. People hadn't cared about his truths. Copernicus hadn't been hailed before the Inquisition because he said the Earth moved afound the Sun: it was because he had arrogantly and brutally denounced earlier astronomers who had done a good job with their limited instruments and math. People hadn't cared about his truths. If I persisted, Fowler Shocken might regretfully put me away as a psychotic, but he didn't care about my truths. Truths? Truths? What truths?. The interests of producers and consumers are not always identical. Most of the world is not always happy. Workmen don't always automatically find the jobs they do best. Entrepreneurs don't always play a hard, fair game by the rules. The Connies are sane, intelligent and well-organized. In a free association fashion #U that would have delighted Fowler Shocken and his analyst, I said to myself: "You know, Mitch, yourc talking like a Connie." I answered: "Why, so I am. That's terrible." "Well," I replied, "I don't know about that. Maybe... "Yeah," I said thoughtfully. "Maybe..." It's an axiom of my trade that things are invisible except against a contrasting background. Like, for instance, the opinions and at titudes of Fowler Schocken. Humor me, Fowler, I thought. Keep me guarded.  don't want to run into an ambivalent fantasy like Hedy again. The symbolism may have been obvious, but she hurt me bad with her symbolic little needle. XV our little procession arrived in executives' country of the Schocken Tower. There were Fowler, me. Jack O'Shea, secretaries -- and the weapons squads I had demanded. Runstead's secretary said he was down the hall, and we waited. I suggested that he wasn't coming back. After an hour, word got to us that a body had been found smashed flat on the first setback of the Tower, hundreds of feet below. It was very difficult to identify. The secretary wept hysterically and opened Runstead's desk and safe. Eventually we found a diary covering the past few months of Runstead's life. Interspersed with details of his work, his amours, memos for future campaigns, notes on good out-ofthe-way restaurants and the like were entries that said: "He was here again last night. He told me to try to hit harder on the shock-appeal, says the Starrzelius campaign needed guts. He scares hell out of me.' Understand he used to scare everybody in the old days when night... Saw him by daylight for first time! Jumped and yelled, but nobody noticed. Wish he'd go away... He said I'm no good, disgrace to profession..." After a while we realized that "he" was the ghost of George Washington Hill, father of our profession, founder of the singing commercial, shock-value, irritation campaigns. "Poor fellow," said Schocken, white-faced. "Poor, poor fellow. If only I'd known. If only he'd come to me in time." The last entry said raggedly: "I know I'm no good. Unworthy of the profession. They all know it. Can see it in their faces. Everybody knows it. He told them. Damn ini!" "Poor, poor fellow," said Schocken, almost sobbing. He turned to me and said: "You see? The strains of our profession... Sure I saw. A prefabricated diary and an unidentifiable splash of protoplasm. It might have been # pounds of Chicken Little down there on the first setback. But I would have been wasting my breath. I nodded soberly, humoring him. I was restored to my job at the top of the Venus Section. I saw Fowler's analyst daily. And I kept my armed guard. In tearful sessions, Fowler would say: "You must relinquish this symbol. It's all that stands between you and reality now, Mitch. Dr. Lawder tells me -- " Dr. Lawder told Fowler Schocken what I told Dr. Lawder. And that was the slow progress of my "integration." I hired a medical student to work out traumas for me backward from the assumption that my time as a consumer had been a psychotic fugue, and he came up vith some honeys. A few I had to veto as not quite consistent with my dignity, but there were enough left to make Dr. Lawder drop his pencil every once in a while. One by one we dug them up, and I have never been so bored in my life. But I would not surrender my insistence that my life and Fowler Schocken's were in danger. Fowler and I got closer and closer -- he thought he had made a convert. I was ashamed to string him along. He was being very good to me. But it was a matter of life or death. The rest was sideshow. The day came when Fowler Schocken said gently: "Mitch, I'm afraid heroic measures are in order. I don't ask you to dispense with this barrier of yours against reality. But  am going to dismiss my guards." "You'll be killed, Fowler!" "I'm not afraid." Argument was useless. After a bit of it. acting on sound psychological principles, he told the lieutenant of his office squad: "I won't be needing you any more. Please report with your men to Plant Security Pool for reassignment. Thank you for your loyalty and attention to detail during these weeks." The lieutenant saluted, but he and his men looked sick. They were going from an easy job in executives' country to lobby patrol or night detail or mail guard or messenger service at ungodly hours. That night Fowler Schocken was garrotted on his way home by somebody who had slugged his chauffeur and substituted himself at the bicycle pedals of the custom-built Cadillac. The killer. apparently a near-moron, resisted arrest and was clubbed to death, giggling. His tattoo had been burned off. He was unidentifiable. can imagine how much work was done in the office the next day. There was a memorial Board meeting held and resolutions passed saying a great profession never would forget and so on. Messages of condolence were sent by other agencies, including Taunton's. I got some odd looks when I crumpled the Taunton message in my fist and used some very bad language. Commercial rivalry, after all, goes just so far. We're all gentlemen; a hard, clean fight and may the best agency win. But no Board member paid it much mind. They were all thinking of one thing: the Schocken block of voting shares. Fowler Schocken Associates was capitalized at # x megabux, voting shares par at M# #, giving us # X #' shares. Of these, # x #'I shares were purchasable only by employees better -- roughly speaking, star class. The remaining shares by open market. As customary, Fowler Schocken himself had, through dummies, snapped these up at the obscure stock exchanges where they had been put on sale. In his own name he held a modest .# x #' shares and distributed the rest with a lavish hand. I myself, relatively junior in spite of holding perhaps the number-two job in the organization, had accumulated via bonuses and incentive pay only about .# X #' shares. Top man around the Board table probably was Harvey Bruner. He was Schocken's oldest associate and had corralled .# X #' shares over the years. (Nominally this gave him the bulge on Fowler -- but he knew, of course, that in a challenge those other # x #'-I shares would come rolling in on carloads of proxies, all backing Fowler with mysterious unanimity. Besides. he was loyal.) He seemed to think he was heir-apparent, and some of the more naive Research and Development people were already sucking up to him. He was an utterly uncreative, utterly honest wheelhorse. Under his heavy hand, the delicate mechanism that was Fowler Schocken Associates would disintegrate in a year. If I were gambling, I would have given odds on Sillery, the Media chief, for copping the Schocken bloc, and on down in descending order to myself, on whom I would have taken odds -- long, long odds. That obviously was the way most of them felt, except the infatuated Bruner and a few dopes. You could tell. Sillery was surrounded by a respectful little court that doubtless remembered such remarks from Fowler as: "Media, gentlemen, is basic-basic!" and: "Media for brains, copysmiths for talent!" I was practically a leper at the end of tlv table, with my guards silently eying the polite battle. Sillery glanced at them once, and I could read him like a book: "That's been going on long enough; we'll knock off that eccentric first thing." What we had been waiting for came about at last. "The gentlemen from the American Arbitration Association. Probate Section, ur( here, gentlemen." They were of the funeral type, according to tradition. Through case-Iiardening or deficient sense of humor, they refrained from laughing while Sillery gave them a measured little speech of welcome about their sad duty and how we wished we could meet them under happier circumstances and so on. They read the will in a rapid mumble and passed copies around. The part I read first said: "To my dear friend and associate Mitchell Courtenay. I bequeath and devise my ivory-inJaid oak finger-ring (inventory number #) and my seventyfive shares of Sponsors' Stock in the Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York non-profit corporation, with the injunction that he devote his leisure hours to active participation in this organization and the furtherance of its noble aim." Well. Mitch. T told myself, you're through. I tossed the copy on the table and leaned back to take a swift inventory of my liquid assets. "Hard lines. Mr. Courtenay." a brave and sympathetic Research man I hardly knew told me. "Mr. Sillery seems pleased with himself." I glanced at the bequest to Sillery -- paragraph one. Sure enough, he got Fowler's personal shares and huge chunks of stock in Managerial Investment Syndicate, Underwriters Holding Corporation and a couple of others. The Research man studied my copy of the will. "If you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Courtenay." he told me, "the old man could have treated you belter." I seemed to hear Fowler chuckling nearby, and sat bolt erect. "Why. the old so-and-so!" I gasped. It fitted like lock and key, with his bizarre sense of humor to oil the movement. Sillery was clearing his throat and an instant of silence dc# )# sccnded on the Board room. "It's a trifle crowded here, gentlemen. I move that all persons other than Board members be asked to leave -- " I got up and said: "I'll save you the trouble. Come on, boys. Sillery, I may be back." T he Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York non-profit corporation, turned out to be a shabby three-room suite downtown in Yonkers. It was like something out of Dickens. Tcre was a weird old gal in the outer office pecking away at a typewriter. A sagging rack held printed pamphlets with fly-specks on them. "I'm from Fowler Schocken Associates," I told her. She jumped. "Excuse me, sir! I didn't notice you. How is Mr. Schocken?" I told her how he was. and she began to blubber. He had been such a ood man, giving so Onerously for the Cause. What on Earth would she and her poor brother ever do now? . "All may not be lost," I told her. "Who's in charge here?" She sniflfled that her brother was in the inner office. "Please break it to him gently, Mr. Courtenay. He's so delicate and sensitive -- " I said I would, and walked in. Brother was snoring-drunk. flopped over his desk. I joggled him awake and he looked at me with a bleary and cynical eye. "Washawan?" "I'm from Fowler Schocken Associates. I want to look at your books." He shook his head emphatically, "Nossir. Only the old man himself gets to sec the books." "He's dead," I told him. "Here's the will." I showed him the paragraph and my identification. "Well," he said, sobering fast, "the joy-ride's over. Or do you keep us going? You see what it says there, Mr. Courtenay? He enjoins on you -- " "I see it," I told him. "The books, please." He got them out of a surprising vault behind a plain door. Three hours of labor them showed me tliat the Institute was in existence solely for holding and voting # pter cent of the stock of an outfit called General Phosphate Reduction Corporation of Newark according to the whims of Fowler Schocken. I went but into the corridor and said to my guards : "Come on, boys. Newark next." I won't bore yoii with the details. It was single-track for three stages and then it split. One of the tracks ended two stages later in the Frankfort Used Machine Tool Brokerage Company, which voted # per cent of the Fowler Schocken Associates "public sale" stock. The other track forked again one stage later and wound up eventually in United Concessions Corp. and Waukegan College of Dentistry and Orthodontia, which voted the remainder. Two weeks later, on Board morning, I walked into the Board room with my guards. Sillery was presiding. He looked haggard and worn, as though he'd been up all night every night for the past couple of weeks looking for something. "Courtenay!" he snarled, T thought you understood that you were to leave your regiment outside!" I nodded to honest, dumb old Harvey Bruner, whom I'd let in on it. Loyal to Schocken, loyal to me. he bleated: "Mr. Chairman, I move that members be permitted to admit company plant-protection personnel assigned to them in such number as they think necessary for their bodily protection." "Second the motion, Mr. Chairman," I said. "Bring them in, boys, will you?" My guards, grinning, began to lug in transfer cases full of proxies to me. Eyes popped and jaws dropped as the pile mounted. It took a long time for them to be counted and authenticated. The final vote stood: For, # x lO"; Against, # X #'-'. All the Against votes were Sillery's and Sillery's alone. There were no abstentions. The others jumped to my side like cats on a griddle. Loyal old Harve moved that chairmanship of the meeting be transferred to me, and it was carried unanimously. He then moved that Sillery be pensioned off, his shares of voting stock to be purchased at par by the firm and deposited in the bonus fund. Carried unanimously. Then -- # a slash of the whip, just to remind them -- he moved that one Thomas Heatherby, a junior Art man who had sucked up outrageously to Sillery, be downgraded from Board level and deprived without compensation of his small bloc of voting shares. Carried unanimously. Heatherby didn't even dare scream about it. Half a loaf is better than none, he may have said to himself, choking down his anger. It was done. I was master of Fowler Schocken Associates. And I had learned to despise everything for which it stood. my secretary's voice. I hit the GA button. "Connie arrested in Albany on neighbor's denunciation. ShaH I line it up?" "How many times do I have to give you standing orders? Of course you line it upl" She quavered: "I'm sorry, Mr. Courtenay. I thought it was kind of far out -- " "Stop thinking, then. Arrange the transportation." An hour later I was in the Upstate Mutual Protective Association's HQ. They were a local outfit that had a lot of contracts in the area, including Albany. Their board chairman himself met me and my guards at the elevator. "An honor," he burbled. "A great, great honor, Mr. Courtenay, and what may I do for you?" "My secretary asked you not to get to work on your Connie suspect until I arrived. Did you?' "Some of the employees may have roughed him up a little, informally, but he's in quite good shape." "I want to see him.' He led the way, anxiously. He was hoping to get in a word that might grow into a cliency with Fowler Schocken Associates, but was afraid to speak up. The suspect was sitting on a tool under the usual dazzler. He was a middle-aged white-collar consumer of thirty or so. He had a couple of bruises on his face. "Turn that off," I ordered. A square-faced foreman said; "But we always -- " One of my guards, without wasting words, shoved him aside and switched off the dazzler. "It's all right, Lombardo," the board chairman said hastily. "You're to cooperate with these gentlemen." I sat down facing the suspect. "My name's Courtenay. What's yours?"  He looked at me with pupils that were beginning to expand again. "Fillmore," he said, precisely. "Alonzo Fillmore. Can you tell me what all this is about?" "You're suspected of being a Connie.' There was a gasp from all the violating jurisprudence by informing the accused of the nature of his crime. I knew all about that and didn't give a damn. "Completely ridiculous," Fillmore spat. "I'm a respectable married man with eight children and another coming along. Who on Earth told you people such nonsense?" "Tell him who," I said to the board chairman. He stared at me, goggle-eyed, unable to believe what he had heard. "Mr. Courtenay, with all respect, the entire body of law respecting the rights of informers -- " "I'll take the responsibility. Do you want me to put it in writing?" "No, no! Nothing like that! Please, Mr. Courtenay, suppose I tell the informer's name to you, understanding that you know the law and are a responsible person -- and then I leave the room?" "Any way you want to do it is all right with me." He grinned placatingly, and whispered in my ear: "A Mrs. Worley. The two families share a room. Please be careful, Mr. Courtenay -- " "Thanks," I said. He gathered eyes like a hostess and nervously retreated with his employees. "Well, Fillmore," I told the suspect, "he says it's Mrs. Worley." He began to swear, and I cut him off. " Y ou know your goose is cooked, of course. Reon the subject?" "Who?" he asked distractedly.  "Never mind. I have a lot of money. I can set up a generous pension for your family if you cooperate and admit you're a Connie." He thought hard for a few moments and then said: "Sure I'm a Connie. What of it? I'm sunk, so why not say so?" "If you're such a red-hot Connie, suppose you quote me some passages from Osborne." He had obviously never heard of Fairfield Osborne,' knd slowly began to fake: "Well, there's the one that starts: 'A Connie's first duty, uh, is to, to prepare for a general uprising -- ' I .don't remember the rest, but that's how it starts." "Now how about your cell meetings? Who comes there?" "I don't know them by name," he said more glibly. "We go by numbers. There's a dark-haired fellow, he's the boss -- " "Skip it," I told him. "You're no Connie. Don't worry about the pension. It goes through anyway." "Thanks, mister." he said in a small, dry voice. "I'm not begging. But can you make it big enough so they can move out of the room with the Worleys? He's a wolf. His wife's jealous and sore about him. I guess that's why' this happened. My wife told me and told me to inform on them before they informed on me, but I didn't listen. I didn't want to do anything like that. You shouldn't have to do anything like that just to get along -- " He was crying when we left. I told the board chairman, hovering anxiously outside in the corridor: "I don't think he's a Connie." I was president of Fowler Schocken Associates and he was only the board chairman of a jerkwater local police outfit, but that was too much. He drew himself up and said with dignity: "We administer justice. Mr. Courtenay. And a basic tenet of justice is; 'Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.' " 'I am aware of the maxim." T said. "Good day." I made a note to have the pension taken care of and left. M y instrument corporal went being as the crash-crash priority signal sounded in ?his ear. and handed me the phone. It was my secretary back in Schocken Tower, reporting another arrest, this one in Pile City Three, off Cape Cod. We flew out to Pile City Three, which was rippling that dayover a long, swelling sea. I hate the Pile Cities -- as I've said, I suffer from motion sickness. This Connie suspect had tried a smash-and-grab raid on a jewelry store, intending to snatch a Irayful of oak and mahogany pins, leaving behind a lurid note about Connie vengeance and beware of the coming storm when the Connies take over and kill all the rich guys. It was intended to throw off suspicion. He was very stupid. It was a Burns-protected city, and I had a careful chat with their resident manager. He admitted first that most of their Connie arrests during the past month or so had been like that, and then admitted that all their Connie arrests for the past month or so had been like that. Formerly they had broken up authentic Connie cells at the rate of maybe one a week. He thought maybe it was a seasonal phenomenon. From there I went back to New York, where another Connie had been picked up. I saw him anl listened to him I'ant for a few minutes. He was posted on Connie theory and could quote Vogt and Osborne by the page. He also asserted that God had chosen him to wipe the wastrels from the face of Mother Eartl He said of course he was in the regular Connie organization, but he would die before he gave up any of its secrets. And I knew he certainly would, because he didn't know any. The Connies wouldn't have accepted anybody that unstable if they were down to three members with one sinking fast. We went back to Schocken Tower at sunset and my guard changed. It had been a lousy day. As far as results were concerned, it was a carbon copy of all the days I had spent since I inherited the agency. There was a meeting scheduled. I didn't want to go. but my conscience troubled me when I thought of the pride and confidence Fowler Schocken must have felt in me when he made me # his heir. Before I dragged myself to the Board room, I checked witti a special detail I had set up in the company's Business Espionage section. "Nothing, sir," my man said. "No leads whatsoever on your -- on Dr. Nevih. The tracer we had on the Chlorella personnel man petered out." "Keep trying." I said. "If you need a bigger appropriation or more investigators, don't hcjsitate. Do me a real job." He swote loyalty and hung up,. tits probably thinking that the boss was a fool, mooning over a wife that was not even permanently married to him. What he made out of the others I had asked him to trace, I didn't know. They had vanished, each of my few contacts with the Connies in Costa Rica, the sewers of New York and on the Moon. Kathy had never come back to , her apartment or the hospital; Warren Astron had never reAirned to his sucker-trap on Shopping One; my Chlorella cellmates bad vanished into the, jungle -- and so it went, all down the line. late, gentlemen. I'll dispense with opening remarks. Charlie, how's Research and Development doing on the Venus question?" He got up. "Mr. Courtenay, gentlemen, in my humble way I think I can say that R. and D. is in there punching. Specifically, we've licked the greenhouse effect -- quantitatively. Experiments in vitro have confirmed the predictions of our able Physical Chemistry and Thermodynamics section based on theory and math. A COa blanket around Venus at # feet, approximately .# feet thick, will be self-sustaining and self-regulating, and will moderate surface temperatures some five degrees a year, steadying at # to # degrees. We're exploring now the various ways this enormous volume of gas can be obtained and hurled at high velocity into the stratosphere. "Considered broadly, we can #f find the CO. or manufacture it, or both. I say we should find it. Volcanic activity is present, but your typical superficial Venus eruption would seem to be liquid NH compressed by gravity in crevices until it seeps to a weaker formation through faults and porous rock and then blows its top. We are certain, however, siderable reservoirs of liquid CO:: -- " "How certain?" I asked. "Quite certain, Mr. Courtenay. Phase-rule analysis of the O'Shea reports -- " I interrupted again. "Would you go to Venus on the strength of that certainty, other things being equal?" "Absolutely," he said, a little offended. "Shall I go into the technical details?" "No, thanks. Charlie. Continue as before." "At present, we are wrapping up the greenhouse effect in two respects. We are preparing a maximum probability map of ing a standard machine for unatdesign is cheapness, self-power, and remote control. I trust this is satisfactory?" "Very much so. Thank you, Charlie. One point, though. If the stuff is there and if it's abundant, we have a prospect of trouble. If it's too abundant and easy to get at. it might become feasible for Venus to export liquid CO# to Earth, which we definitely do nof want. COj is in good supply here, and no purpose would be served by underselling Earthside producers. Let's bear in mind always that Venus is going to pay its way with raw materials in short supply on Earth, and is not going to compete pricewisc with the mother planet. Iron, yes. Nitrates, emphatically yes. We'll pay them a good enough price for such things to keep them buying Earthside products and enable them to give Earthside bankers, insurance companies and carrying trade their business. "But never forget that Venus is there for us to exploit, and don't ever get it turned around. This is the time to head such mistakes off. I want you, Charlie, to get together with Auditing and determine whether tapping underground COo pools will ever make it possible for Venus to deliver CO# F. O. B. New York at a competitive price. If it does, your present plans are out. You'll have to get your greenhouse effect blanketing gas by manufacturing it in a more expensive way." "Right, Mr. Courtenay," Charlie said, scribbling busily. "Does anybody else have anything special on the Venus program bffore we go on?' Bernhard. our comptroller, stuck his hand up and I nodded. "Question about Mr. O'Shea," he rumbled. "We're carrying him as a consultant at a very considerable fee. I've been asking around -- I hope I haven't been going off-side. Mr. Courtenay, but it's my job -- and I find that we've been getting no consultation whatever from him. Also, I should mention that he's drawn heavily in recent weeks on retainers not yet due. If we severed our connection with him at this time, he'd be owing us money. Also -- well, this is trivial, but it gives you an idea. The girls in my department are complaining about him annoying them." My eyebrows went up. "I think we should hang onto him for whatever prestige rubs off, Ben, though his vogue does seem to be passing. Give him an argument about further advances. And as for the girls, I thought they didn't complain when he made passes at them." "Seen him lately?" I realized I hadn't. night-shift secretary whether O'Shea was in the building and, if so, to send for him. He came in smelling of liquor and complaining loudly. "Damn it. Mitch, enough is enough! I just stepped in to pick up one of the babes for the night and you grab me. Aren't you taking this consultation thing too seriously? You've got my name to use: what more do you want?" He looked like a miniature of the fat, petulant, shabby Napoleon at Elba. But a moment after hehad come in. I suddenly couldn't think of anything but Kathy. It took me a moment to figure it out. "Well?" he demanded. "What are you staring at?" , The liquor covered it up some, but a little came through : Mena a Deux, the perfume I'd had created for Kathy and Kathy alone when we ere in Paris, the stuff she loved and sometimes used too much of. I could hear, her saying: "I can't help it. darling; it's so much nicer than formalin, and that's what I usually smell of after a day at the hos- pital..." "Sorry, Jack," I said evenly. "I didn't know it was your howling night. It'll keep. Have fun." He grimaced and left, almost waddling on his short legs. I grabbed my phone and slammed a connection through to my  special squad in Business Espionage. "Put tails on Jack O'Shea. He's leaving the building soon. Tail him and everybody he contacts; ' Night and day. If I hit paydirt on this, you and your men get upgraded aad bonused. But God help you if you pull a butch!" near me. I was living for one thing only -- the daily reports from the tails on O'Shea. Anything else I tried to handle bored and irritated me. After a week, there were twenty-four tails working at a time on O'Shea and people with whom he had talked. They were headwaiters. his lecture agent, girls, an old test-pilot friend of his stationed at Astoria, a cop he got into a drunken argument with one night -- but was he really drunk and was it really an argument? -- and other unsurprising folk. One night, quietly added to the list was: "Consumer, female, about #, #' #", # lbs., redhead, eyes not seen, cheaply dressed. Subject entered Hash Heaven (restaurant) # after waiting # minutes outside and went immediately to table waited on by new contact, which table just vacated by party. Conjecture ; subject primarily interested in waitress. Ordered hash, ate very lightly, exchanged few words with contact. Papers may have been passed, but impossible to observe at tailing distance. Female operative has picked up contact." About thirty, five-four, onetwenty. It could be Kathy. I phoned to say; "Bear down on that one. Rush me everything new that you get. How about finding out more from the restaurant?" Business Espionage began to explain, with embarrassment, that they'd do it if I insisted, but that it wasn't approved technique. Usually the news got to the person being tailed and -- "Okay," I said. "Do it your way." "Hold it a minute, Mr. Courtenay. please. Our girl just checked in. The new contact went home to the Taunton Building. She has Stairs #-# on the thirty-fifth floor." "What's the thirty-fifth?" I asked, heavy-hearted. "For couples." "Is she -- ?" "Unattached, Mr. Courtenay. Our girl pretended to apply for the vacancy. They told her Mrs. # is holding # for the arrival of her husband. He's upstate harvesting." "What time do the stairs close at Taunton's?" "#, Mr. Courtenay." I glanced at my desk clock, "Call your tail off her," I said. "That's all for now." I got up and told my guards: rm going out without you, gentlemen. Please wait here. Lieutenant, can I borrow your gun?" "Of course, Mr. Courtenay." checked the magazine and went out on foot, alone. As I left the lobby of Schocken Tower, a shadowy young man detached himself from the wall and drifted after me. I crossed him by walking in the deserted street, a dark, narrow slit between the mighty midtown buildings. Monoxide and smog hung heavily in the unconditioned air, but I had antisoot plugs and he did not. I heard him wheeze behind me. An occasional closed cab whizzed past us. the driver puffing as he pumped the pedals. Without looking back, I turned the corner of Schocken Tower and instantly flattened against the wall. My shadow drifted past and stopped in consternation, peering into the gloom. I slammed the long barrel of the pistol against the back of his neck in a murderous rabbit punch and walked on. He was probably one of my own men, but I didn't want anybody's men along. I deliberately got to the Taunton Building's nightdweller entrance at #. Behind me the timelock slammed the door. There was an undersized pay elevator. I dropped in a quarter, punched # and read notices while the elevator creaked upward: The door opened on the stairwell of the #th floor. Men and women were squirming uneasily, trying to find some comfort before the barriers upped. I looked at my watch and saw #. I picked my way carefully in the dim light over and around lim and torsos, with many apoloes, counting. At the seventeenth step, I stopped at a huddled figure as my watch said #. With a rusty clank, the barriers upped, cutting off step # and #, containing me anj -- She sat up, looking scared and angry, with a small pist#l in her hand. "Kathy," I said. SUo dropped the pistol. "Mitchf You fool!" Her voice was low aixd urgent. "What arc you doing here? They haven't given up. They're still out to murder you -- " "I'm putting my head into tlxe lion's mouth to show I mean it when I say that you were right and I was wrong." "How did you find me?" she asked suspiciously. "Some of your perfume came oft on O'Shea. Afenae a Dei." She looked around at the cramped quarters and giggled. "It certainly is. isn't it?" "I'm not here to paw you, witii or without your consent. Tm here to tell you that I'm on your sile. Name it and you can have it." She looked at me narrowly and asked: "Venus?""It's yours." "Mitch," she said, "if you're lying -- " "You'll know by tomorrow if we get out of here alive. Until then, there's nothing more to be said about it, is there? We're in for the night." "Yes," she said. And then, suddenly, passionately: "God, how I've missed you!" at #. They were loaded with skull-rattling subsonics, just to make sure that no slugaljeds would impede the morning turnover. Kathy began briskly to stow away the bedding in the stairs. "Barriers down in five minutes." She lifted Stair #'s lid and fished around in it for a flat box that opened into a makeup kit. I yelped as a razor raked across the top of my right eyebrow. "Hold still!" It cut a swathe across my left eyebrow. Briskly she touched my face here and there with mysterious brushes. She turned up my upper lip and tucked a pledger of plastic under it. Two flesh-tinted tapes pasted my ears against my head and she said, "There," and showed me the mirror. "Good," I approved. "There go the barriers," she said tensely, hearing some preliminary noise that was lost on my inexperienced ear. The barriers clanged down. We were the only nightdwellers left on the #th floor. But we were not alone. B. J. Taunton and two of his boys stood there. Taunton was swaying a little drunkenly, red-faced and grinning. Each of his boys had a machin pistol trained on me. Taunton hiccoughed and said: "This was a hell of an unfortunate place for you to go chippy-chasing. Courtenay ol' man. We have a photo-register for crashers like you. Girlie, if you will kindly step aside --  She didn't step aside. She stepped right into Taunton's arms, jamming her gun against his navel. His red lace went the color of putty. "You know what to do," she said. "Boys," he said faintly, "drop the guns. For God's sake, drop them!" They did. Taunton began to sob. "Turn your backs," I told them, "and lie down." I had my derful. The elevator could easily have been flooded with gas, so we walked down the stairs. It was a long, wearying business, though all nightdwellers had been cleared hours ago for B. J.'s coup. He sobbed and babbled all the way. At the tenth floor landing, he wailed: "I've got to have a drink, Courtenay. I'tii dying. There's a bar right here. You can keep that gun on me -- " Kathy laughed humorlessly at the idea and we continued climbing down. A T the nightdweller exit, I draped my coat over Kathy's gun hand in spite of the w'inter outside. "It's all right!" B-' J. called quavc-ringly to an astounded lobby guard who started our way. "These people arc friends of mine. It's quite all right!" We walked with him to the shuttlemouth and dived in, leaving him, gray-faced and sweating, in the street. The only way he could get at us was by blowing up the entire shuttle, and even he wouldn't dare. We zigzagged for an hour and I called my office from a station phone. A plant protection detail rendezvoused with us at another station and. we were in the Schocken Tower fifteen minutes later. A morning paper gave us our only laugh so far that day. It aid, among other things, that a coolant leak had been detected at # today in the stairwell of the Taunton Building. B. J. Taunton himself, at the risk of his life, had supervised the eva:uation of the nightdwellers in record time and without casualties. Over a breakfast tray on my desk, I told Kathy: "Your hair looks like hell. Does that stuff wash out?" "Enough of this love-making." she said. "You told me I could have Venus. Mitch, I meant it. Did you?" 'I did then." "And now?" "All my life I've wanted the josiiion I hav now, Kathy, it was in every dream, something # far off and desirable that I lionestly never believed I'd reach it. But I did." "And now?" she repeated insistently. "If I hadn't found out what life is like on the consumer level, I think rd be completely happy -- assuming, of course. I could also have you." She shook her head with grim emhasis. "You couldn't." "That's not all it is. thoughchucking the dream of a lifetime for a woman. I couldn't do it if the dream hadn't soured." I grabbed her hand, hung onto it as if I'd sink without it. "Kathy, I was brought up to think the Connies -- the World Conservation Association -- were crackpots. Look. I can't even say 'Connies' without flinching. And now I know the Conservationist viewpoint is profoundly intelligent. Don't you see what that does? It leaves me with nothing to believe in!" . Her hand tightened around mine. "There's Conservationism." "It wouldn't work. Kathy. I've thought about it and thought aliout it ever since I found out you were in the organization. I knew you'd never get mixed up in anything that didn't make sense: you're not the fanatic type. But let's suppose we could institute Conservationism right now. We'd have to cut back population. cut back production, cut back just about everything so we could conserve our natural resources. Tiie economic dislocation would be tremendous. It would lead to wars, anarchy, starvation." "Do you think things can go on indefinitely as they are, Mitch?" she asked gently. "I don't know." I admitted. "Every time, we've run out of something -- coal, oil, various metals. whatever it was -- we always came up with a substitute. Maybe not as good, maybe, in lots of cases, better than the original. The point is that the world is geared to increasing production, increasing population, synthetics, substitutes -- Sales! You can't knock that over without knocking the world to pieces. Kathy!' "This world," she said. I looked at her vacantly. "We know it's too late to do anything about Earth, Mitch, We've known it for some time. That's why we want Venus -- a young, unspoiled, unplundercd planet, where we can start right and continue right. A Conservationist world. Mitch!" "It's a broiling inferno of oion hurricanes, a dumping ground for our surpluses and that's all." "Notto us, Mitch. We're the only people who know what to do with it. We landed the first man there!" My face must have gone blank, for she said: "O'Shea is one of us." "Since when?" "Since his mother and father realized he wasn't growing. They knew we'd need space pilots soon  -- and the smaller the better. Earth didn't discover Venus. The W. C. A. did. We had to write this world off. To do that, we had to have another one." "But not that one!" I argued. "It's not fit for human life!" "We have our own research men, Mitch. We aren't fooling ourselves; you understand us well enough to know we're not myopic idealists. Venus can be turned into a good, healthy, habitable, prosperous planet. It won't be easy, but it can be done. And once it's done, it won't ever be undone the way Earth was." I sat there trying to eat breakfast and digest the ideas that had been hurled at me, both at the same time. I couldn't. I got up and began walking the office; the walls kept stopping me short every few paces. "Room, Mitch," she said. "Not these cramped little cubicles. Real room where you can see the horizon and the sky. where you can build as small or as large as you please, where furniture doesn't have to be folded away so you can find enough space to turn in." "But I'm used to this. Wc all are." "We won't be when we get out of confinement. That's not the point, though. Venus belongs to us. Mitch. We demand the right to settle it." "God, it's going to be a headache!" I groaned. "We have our rosters filled with eager consumers itching to get to Venus. Well, I'll backtrack." I punched the intercom to R. fis D. "Charlie, about the COo competition with Earth producers. Forget it. I found that Taunton's bills most of the makers." "Fine. Mr. Courtenay." Charlie said happily. "The preliminary work looks as if wc'll give them a real solid kick in the pants." I dropped the intercom key and said to Kathy: "Can you dig up Runstead for me? This is going to be a job. A copysmith's highest art is to convince, people without letting them know they're being convinced. What I've got to do is unconvin.ee people without letting either the copysmiths or the people know what's happening. I need Runstead for that.' Kathy smiled. "Runstead committed suicide. Remember?" "Sure. We'll have to work out a cover-up story for that, I suppose. Next Conservationist meeting I go to, I'm going to suggest wc use some less flamboyant way of getting people out when the heat's on." isr "It can be arranged," she said, kissing me. "That's for saying wc.' ' "What else can I say? Look, darling, I've got a dandy executive's living suite, a full twelve by twelve, upstairs. Suppose you go up and cork off for a while; you've had a hard night and I've got a lot of work to do." She kissed me energetically and said: "Don't work too hard, Mitch. I'll see you tonight." without Runstead -- not in time. He came whistling back from retirement in response to some underground message from Kathy. I had broken it to the Board ahead of time -- "Unusual tasks, gentlemen, demand unusual methods. We owe Matt an enormous debt of gratitude, every one Of us. for having altered the whole structure of his personal life to free himself for certain research problems which even yet must remain confidential." The Board took the hint. By acclamation, they gave him half of Sillery's confiscated stock as a bonus. Matt arrived in the middle of a meeting. We shook hands for public consumption, and there never was any private discussion afterward. He knew what the job was. I still thought Runstead was a rat. But I had to admit things were leaping. On the surface level, Fowler Schocken Associates had launched a giant all-client slogan contest, with fifteen hundred first prizes, all of them a berth on the Venus rocket. There were eight hundred thousand prizes in all, but the others didn't matter. Judging was turned over to an impartial firm of contest analyzers, which hapiened to be headed by the brother-in-law of a protege of Runstead's. Only fourteen hundred of the prize-winners, Matt told mr. were actually members of the Conaie underground. The other hundred were dummy names entirely, to take care of last minute emergencies. I took Kathy with me to Washington to spark the final clearance of the rocket for flight, while Runstead minded the baby back in New York. I'd been in Washington often enough for a luncheon or an afternoon, but this wa.s going to be a two-day job: I looked forward to it like a kid. I parked Katliy at the hotel and made her promise not to do any solo sightseeing, then caught a cab to the State Department. A morose little man in a bowler hat was waiting in tlie anteroom. When he heard my name, he got up hastily and offered me his seat. Quite a change from the Chlorella days, Mitch, old boy.  told myself. Abels, our attache, came flustering out to greet me: I calmed him and explained what I wanted. "Easiest thing in the world. Mr. Courtenay." he promised. "I'll get the enabling bill put through committee this afternoon, and with any luck at all it'll clear both houses before noon tomorrow." I said expansively, "Need any backing?" "Might be nice for you to address the House in the morning, if you can find the time. They'd love to hear from you, and it would smooth things over a little for a quick passage." "Glad to," I said, reaching down for my bag. The man in the bowler hat beat me to it and handed it to me with a little bow"Just set your time, Abels," I told tlie legate. "I'll be there." "Thank you very much, Mr, Courtenay!" He opened the door for me. The little man said tentatively: "Mr. Abels?" The legate shook his head. "You can see how busy I am," he said, not unkindly. "Come back tomorrow." The little man smiled gratefully and followed me out the door. We both hailed a cab. He opened the door for me. "Can I drop you anywhere?" I asked. "It's very good of you," he said. The driver leaned back on his pedals and looked in at us. I told him: "The Park Starr for me. But drop this other gentleman off first." The driver nodded. "White House, Mr. President?" "Yes, please. I can't tell you how happy I am to meet you, Mr. Courtenay," the little man told me. "I overheard your conversation with Mr. Abels, I'm afraid. It was very interesting to hear that the Venus rocket is so near completion. Congress," he said wistfully, "has got out of the habit of keeping me posted on what's going on. Of course, I know they're busy with their investigations and all, but -- " Mischievously, he said: "I entered your contest, Mr. Courtenay. My slogan was. 'I'm starry-eyed over Starrs, verily I am.' I don't suppose I could go along, though, even if I win." "I can't see how it would be possible. They must keep you pretty busy right here." "Oh, not particularly. January's heavy; I convene Congress, you see, and they read me the State of the Union message. But the rest of the year passes slowly. Will you really address Congress tomorrow, Mr. Courtenay? It would mean a joint session, and they usually let me come for that." "Be delighted to have you," I said cordially. The cab stopped and the President shook my hand warmly and got out. He poked his head in the door. "Uh," he said, looking apprehensively at the driver, 'you've been very good to me. I may be stepping out of line in saying this, but if I might make a suggestion -- I understand something about astronomy, it's a kind of hobby, and I hope you won't delay the ship's takeoff past the present conjunction." I stared. Venus was within ten degrees of opposition and getting farther away -- not that it mattered. since most of the trip would be coasting anyhow. He held a finger to his lips. "Good-by, sir," he said. I spent the rest of the trip staring at the backs of the driver's hairy ears, and wondering what the little man had been getting at. W E took the evening off, Kathy and I, to see the sights. The famous cherry blossoms were beautiful, all right, but. with my newfound Conservationist sentiments, I found them ostentatious. "A dozen would have been plenty," I objected. "Scattering them around in vase after vase this way is plain waste. You know what they'd cost in Tiffany's?" Kathy giggled. "Wait till we take over Venus. Did you ever think what it's going to be like to have a whole planet to grow things in? Acres and acres of flowers, trees, everything!" A plump schoolteacher type leaning on the railing beside us straightened up. glared, sniffed and walked away. "Before you get us in trouble," I told Kathy, "let's go to -- let's go back to the hotel." I woke up to an excited squeal from Kathy. "Mitch." she was saying from the bathroom, two round eyes peering wonderingly over the towel that was draped around her, "they've got a tuh here! I opened the door to the shower stall, and it wasn't a stall at all! Can I, Mitch? Please?" There are times when even an h o n e s-t Conservationist finds pleasure in being the acting head of Fowler Schocken Associates. I yawned and blew her a kiss and said, "Sure. And make it all fresh water, hear?" punched the communicator and got the morning summary relayed from Schocken Tower. Miss Hinkle's flat tones held nothing ofinterest that morning. I sighed briefly for Hester, who always managed to find something worth mentioning. It was hard to believe that Hester had been dead less than a month. And, I remembered, I still hadn't found out who had killed her with the poison meant for me. Taunton was out; they hadn't known I was on the ship. Connies? Not with Kathy directing them, not after she'd gone to such pains to save my life before. Not unless there was something I hadn't quite got clear. For instance: Kathy and Matt Runstead and Jack O'Shea had plotted together to put me on ice -- literally. All right, that accounted for most of the things that had pu # zled me. But it didn't account for Hester. And. when you stopped to think of it. it didn't account for all of Runstead's work, either. The Connies were in favor of space travel. But Runstead had sabotaged the Venus test in CalMex. There was no doubt of that: I had as good as a confession from his fall-guy. Could it have been a doublecross? Runstead posing as a Connie who was posing as a copysmith, and in reality -- what? It took half a minute to get through to New York. Hinkle's flat voice went up an octave when she heard me again., "Why, Mr. Courtenay!" "Get me Rurrstead." "He phoned in this morning to say he had an appointment out of town. Mr. Courtenay. He didn't say where." I deliberately controlled my voice. "And just why the hell wasn't that in the morning summary?" I demanded, and slapped down the off key before she could answer. I flung open the door to the bath. Kathy's face smiled startledly at me from the bath alcove. and then the smile flickered out. "Mitch." she W'hispcred. "What's the matter?" 'Tve got questions." I sat grimly on the edge of the tub, for once immune to the slim fair thighs and the firm breasts, and ticked the questions off on my fingers: "One, who tried to kill me on the Moon rocket? Two, what did Runstead have to do with it? Three, what kind of fool do you think I am? Four, how fast can you think up lies to answer me with?" The storm of weeping was answer enough. I didn't wait for any more. morning beard off my face; I had stomped out of the hotel in too much of a rage to notice whether I was as tastefully dressed to speak before Congress as they might legitimately have expected. And I didn't care. Just before I was scheduler! to speak, our Washington lobby chief pushed through the crowd to me. He handed me a strip of facsimile paper. "It's all here, Mr. Courtenay," he said unhappily. "Uh, is everything all right?' "Everything's just fine," I told him, which was a lie. I waved him off and looked at the facsimile. It was from Dicken, on the scene at the rocket: Passenger and crew alerted and on standby. First movement into ship beplied and provisioned since #. SeTfme-LrVa known to have filed coded dispatches tluough dummies. Chart room asks please remind you: Takeoff possible only in AM hours. I rubbed the tape between my palms; it disintegrated into ash. As I climbed to the podium, someone tugged at my elbow. It was the President, leaning out of his ceremonial box. "Mr. Courtenay," he whispered. "I guess you understood what I was trying to tell you yesterday in the cab. I'm glad the rocket's ready." He widened his grin. "You probably know this, but he's here." I had no chance to find out who "he" was. As the Speaker of the House came toward me, hand outstretched, and the applause started from the floor, I forced a smile. But it was a trick of the rictus muscles entirely. I had little to smile about. If the news about the Venus rocket had trickled down to the President, there wasn't a chance that I could pull a surprise on anyone -- even if I could figure out whom T wanted to surprise. Fowler Schocken was a pious old hypocrite and a fraud, but if it hadn't been for Fowler Schockcn I could never have got through that speech. I could hear his voice in my ears. "Sell 'em, Mitch; you can sell them if you'll keep in mind that they want to buy." And I sold the assembled legislators precisely what they wanted to own. The applause was fantastic. There were a dozen standing figures in the hall, clapping their hands and begging the Chair for recognition, including white-haired old Colbee, lean and dignified with his four degades of service. "The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Coca-Cola." "Thank you very much, Mr. Speakuh." Colbcc's face wore a courtly smile. Coca-Cola was nominally one of the few big independents; but I remembered that Fowler had commented once on their captive agency's surprising closeness to Taunton. "If I may ventuah to speak for the Upper Chamber, I should like to thank ouah distinguished guest for his very well-chosen remarks heah. I am certain' that we all have enjoyed listenmg to a man of his calibeh and standing." Go back to the Berlitz school, you Westchester phony, I thought bitterly. I could feel the weenie coming as Colbee rumbled on. "With the permission of the Chair, I should like to ask ouah guest a number of questions involving the legislation we have been asked to consider heah today." By now even the galleries had caught on to wliQt was hapiening. X hardly needed to hear the disasti'ous rest: "It may have escaped youah attention, but we are fortunate in having with us another guest. I refer, of coarse, to Mr. Taunton." He waved gracefully to the visitor's gallery, where B. J.'s red face appeared between two stolid ligurcs that I should have recognized at the first moment as his bodyguaids. "In a brief discussion before ouah meeting heah, Mr. Taunton was good enough to give me some information which I would like Mr. Co'tenay to comment upon. First, I would ask Mr. Co'tenay if the name of George Groby, wanted for Contract Breach and Femicide, is familiar to him. Second, I would like to ask if Mr. Co'tenay is Mr. Groby. Third, I would like to ask Mr. Co'tenay if there is any truth to the repo't, given me in confidence by someone in whom Mr. Taunton assures me I can repose absolute trust, that Mr. Co'tenay is a membah in good standing of the World Conservation Association, known to most of us who are loyal consumers as -- " Even Colbee himself could not have heard the last words of his sentence. The uproar was like a physical blast. that happened in the next wild quarter of an hour blurs and disappears. But I remember frozen moments of time that seem almost to have no relation to each other ; The waves of hatred that flowed around me, the contorted face of the President below me, screaming something unheard to the sound engineer in his cubicle, the wrathful eyes of the Speaker as he reached out for me. Then the wild motion halted as the Preident's voice roared through the chamber at maximum amplification, 'T declare this meeting adjourned!" and the stunned expressions of the legislators at his unbelievable temerity. There was greatness in that little man. Before anyone could move or think, he clapped his hands -- the magnified report was like atomic fission -- and a smartly uniformed squad moved in on us. "Take him away," the President declaimed, with a magnificent gesture, and at doubletime the squad surrounded me and hustled me off the podium. The President convoyed us as far as the door while the Assembly gathered its wits. His face was white with fear, but he whispered: "I can't make it stick, but it'll take them all afternoon to get a ruling from the Chamber of Commerce. God bless you, Mr. Courtenay." And he turned back to face them. I do not think Caligula's Christians walked more courageously into the arena. The guards were the President's own, honor men from Brink's leadership academy. The lieutenant said never a word to me, but I could read the controlled disgust on his face as he read the slip of paper the President had handed him. I knew he didn't like what he was ordered to do, and I knew he would do it. They got me to Anacosta and put me on the President's own transport. They stayed with me and fed me, and one of them played cards with me, as the jets flared outside the ports and we covered territory. All they would not do .was talk to me. It was a long flight, in that clumsy old luxury liner that "tradition" gave the President. Time had been wasted at the airport, and below us I could see the fuzzy band of the terminator creeping past. As we came down for a landing, it was full dark. And the waiting was not yet over. The lieutenant left the ship alone; le was gone for a long, long time. When he came back, it was midnight. "All right," he said to me. "A cab's waiting for you outside. The driver knows where to go." I climbed out and stretched. "Thanks," I said awkwardly. The lieutenant spat neatly on the ground between my feet. I scrambled out of the way of the takeoff. T he driver was Mex. I tried him on a question and he gaped at me; no English. There were fifty good reasons why I didn't want to go along with him without a much better idea of what was up. But when I stopped to think of it, I had no choice. The lieutenant had followed his orders. I could see his active little military mind framing the report that would tip someone off to where they could find the notorious Connie, Mitchell Courtenay. I would be a sitting duck; it would depend on whether Taunton or the police got to me first. You'd think that the fact that the driver was a Mexican would have tipped me ofiF. It didn't, though. Not until I saw the glimmer of starlight on the massive erectile before me did I know I was in Arizona, and realize what the President had done for me. A mixed squad of Pinkertons and our own plant protection men closed in on me and hustled me past the sentry boxes, across the cleared land, up to the rocket itself. nie crescent he could make with thumb and forefinger and said : "You're safe now." "But I don't want to go to Venus!' He laughed out loud. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. The long, dreary flight had been a stasis; everything at both ends of it had been too frantic with motion over which I had no control to permit thought. They gave me no chance to think here, either. I felt someone grabbing the seat of my pants and I was hoisted inside. There I was dragged more than led to an acceleration hammock, strapped in and left. The hammock swung and jolted, and twelve titans squatted on my chest. Good-by, Kathy; good-by, Schocktn Tower, Like it or not, I was on my way to Venus. TUT it wasn't really good-by to Kathy. It was she herself who came to unstrap me when the first blast was over. I have never seen an expression quite like the one on Kathy's face. It was part darling-I-didthc most extravagant thing today. and a little bit Tm-notangryjustterriblydisappointed, and the corners of her mouth were pure you-Iousy-son-of-a-bitch. She said: "If you'll apologize, rn explain." I got out of the hammock and tottered weightlessly. rubbing my back. I opened my mouth to make a cynical reply. What came out was a squeaky, "Oh, God, Kathy!" I didn't have time. Kathy's lips and mine were occupied. When we stopped for breath. I said, "What alkaloids do you put into the product?" but it was wasted. She wanted to be kissed again. I kissed her. It was hard work, standing up. Every time she moved, we lurched against the wall or drifted off the floor entirely. Only a standby jet was operating and we were otherwise beyond the limit of weight. We sat down. "I'm sorry if I guessed wrong," I said. "All of a sudden it looked as if you and Runstead were doublecrossing everybody. Especially me." It was only a little kiss thi.s time. Just to show. I stretched and looked around me. "Lovely place you have here. The thing was, you see, all at once I wanted out. I wanted you to have Venus -- I'd promised it to you -- but I wanted out for myself. So I ordered the ship loaded up, to get it on the way. # You were going to be on it, but I wasn't." "I can't spend ray life blaming you for jumping to conclusions, Mitch." she said gently. "But you could tell me what touched you off." I explained about Runstead's lousing up San Diego and Venus Project. And about Hester's murder.  "Oh, Mitch." she said. "Where do I begin? How'd you ever get to be star class?" "Went to night school," I said. "I'm still listening." "Well, you should be able to figure it out. Sure, we wanted space travel. The human race needs Venus. But we didn't want Fowler Schocken on Venus. Or Mitchell Courtenay, either. Not as long as Mitchell Courtenay would loot Venus for an extra too many planets around that the race can expand into, Mitch, We couldn't have Fowler Schocken's Venus Project succeed." "Um." I said, digesting. "And Hester?" Kathy shook her head. "You figure that one out." "You don't know the answer?" "I do. It isn't hard." I coaxed, but she wouldn't play. So I kissed her for a while again, until some interfering character with a ship's-ofhcer rosette on his shoulder came grinning in. "Care to look at the stars, folks?" he asked, in a tourist-guide way that I detested. It didn't pay to pull rank on him, of course: ship's officers always act a cut above their class and it would have been ungraceful, at least, to brace him for it. Besides -- The thought stopped me for a moment. I was used to being star class by now. It wasn't going to be fun, being one of the boys. I gave my Conservationist theory a quick mental runthrough. No, there was nothing in it that indicated that I would have a showdog's chance of being sirred and catered to any more. Hello, Kathy. Good-by, Schocken Tower. W E went up to the forward observation port. All the faces were strange to me. There isn't a window to be found on the Moon ships; radarfice the esthetic but useless spectacle of the stars for the greater strength of steel. I had never seen the stars in space before. Outside the port was white against a background of star particles scattered over a dust of stars. There wasn't a breadth of space the size of my thumbnail where there was blackness : it was all light, all fiery pastels. A rim grXvy planet of fire around the side of the port showed the direction of the Sun. Kathy introduced me around. The captain of the ship turned out to have a voice I knew; he'd spoken to me on the longlines phone, and I recalled with no pleasure the particular nastiness with which I'd reamed him out for some small delay. However, he showed no rancor. He treated me -- in fact, all of them treated me -- like some grand hero of the republic from whom nothing more could be expected, a pensioned Caesar or Napoleon in retirement. All at once I realized how Jack O'Shea had felt. It was great to be great. To have been great was something else again. Kathy's arm went around me. Kathy always reads my mind. We turned away from the port. "Where's Matt Runstead?" I asked. "Back in Schocken Tower, living on wakcup pills, trying to untangle the mess. Somebody had to stay behind, Mitch. Fortunately, Matt can vote your proxies. We didn't have much time to talk in Washington; he's going to have a lot of questions to ask, and nobody around with the answers." I stared. "What in the world was Runstead doing in Washington?' Getting you off the spot, Mitch. After Jack O'Shea broke -- " "After what?" 'Look, let's take it in order. O'Shea broke. He got drunk one night too often, and he couldn't find a clear spot in his arm for the needle, and he picked out the wrong girl to break apart in front of. They had him sewed up tight. All about you, all about me, the rocket, everything." "Who did?" "Your great and good friend, B. J. Taunton." Kathy struck a cigarette viciously. I could read her mind a bit, too. Little Jack O'Shea, # pounds of jellied porcelain and melted wax, thirty-five inches of twisted guts and blubber. There had been times in the past weeks when I had not liked Jack. I canceled them all, paid in full, when I thought of that destructible tiny man in the hands of Taunton's anthropoids. "Taunton got it all. Mitch,' Kathy said. "All that mattered, anyhow. If Runstead hadn't had a tap on Taunton's interrogation room, we would have had it right then. But he had time to get down to Washington and warn me and the President -- the President is no Conservationist, but he's a good man: he can't help being born into office -- and here we are." #t The captain interrupted us. 'Five minutes till we correct. Better get back to your hammocks. The correction blasts may not be much, but you never know." Kathy nodded and led me away. I plucked the cigarette from her lips, took a puiT and gave it back. "Why, Mitch!" she said. "I'm reformed," I told her. "Kathy, one more question. It isn't a nice question." She sighed. "The same as between you and Hester." I asked, "What was between Jack -- uh?" "You heard me. What was between Jack and me was the same as what was between you and Hester. All one way. Jack was in love with me, maybe. I was too damn crazy mad in love with you!" It seemed like the moment to reach out and kiss her again, but it must not have been because she pushed me away. "That's what you're so stupid about!" she was saying. "Jack wanted me. I didn't want anyone but you, not ever. And you never troubled to figure it out -- never knew how much I cared about you any more than you knew how much Hester cared about you. Good Lord, Mitch, how blind can you be?" "Hester in love with me?" "Why else would she commit suicide?" Kathy actually stomped her foot, and floated an inch above the floor as a result. "Well," I said dazedly. The sixty-second beeper went off. "Hammocks," said Kathy, and the tearsin her eyes flooded out. I put my arm around her. "This is a rotten undignified busisness," she said. "I have exactly one minute to kiss and make up, let you get over your question-and-answer period, tell you I have a private cabin and there're two hammocks in it, and get us both fastened in." I straightened up fast. "A minute is a long time." It didn't take that long. XX S O we landed. After the wild excitement wore off, I felt like sitting down and writing a ixstcard to the little man back in Washington: "Dear Mr. President, now I know what you mean. On special occasions they sometimes let me in, too. Sincerely, Mitchell (Superfluous) Courtenay." We torpedoed the billowy cloud layer, roared incandescently down in the tangential orbiting approach, minced the final few hundred meters to the landing -- and I was a bum. They were nice enough about it. They said things like: "No, thanks. I can handle it myself," and. "Would you mind stepping back, Mr. Courtenay?" when what they should have said was: "Get the hell out of tlie way." And I wondered how long it would take before they began to put it that way. You know what it's like being a lost soul? It's wandering through a spaceship with busy people rushing here and there carrying incomprehensible things. It's people talking urgently and efficiently tp each other and you understand maybe one word in three. It's offering a suggestion or trying to help and getting a blank stare and polite refusal. It's Kathy: "Not right now, Mitch darling. Why don't you -- " And her voice trailed off. The only appropriate, constructive, positive thing I could do was drop dead. But nobody said so. They would carry me on the books, a hero whose brief hour of service rendered, when balanced against the long years that followed, might or might not show a tiny net profit. You never could tell with ex-heroes, but you can't just gas them... They were nice about letting me come along when fourteen of the really important people donned spacesuits and set foot xi Venus. (Note for historians: it was completely unceremonious. We just went out the lock into the lee of the ship, anchored by cables. Nobody noticed who of tlie fifteen was first to step out -- and be yanked by the burning wind as far as the cable slack would let him, or her.) I reached for my wife and the wind sent her bobbing on the end of her cable out of my grasp. Nor did she notice me, a hulking and brutish figure in an oversized suit, trying to claw my way to her along the grab-irons welded to the hull. She had eyes only for the planet I had given her. the orange-lit. sandstorming inferno. When they reeled us in and we took off our armor, I felt as though I had been flailed with anchor chains from Easter to Christmas. Aching. I turned to Kathy. She was briskly rubbing her surgeon's Angers and conferring with somebody named Bartlow in words that sounded like these; " -- then we'll clam the ortnick for seven frames and woutch green until sembril gills?" "Yes," Bartlow said, nodding. "Splendid. When the grimps quorn with the fibers, Bronson can fline dimethyloxypropyloluene with the waterspouts -- " f hung around and Kathy finally noticed me with a "Hello, dear" and plunged back into the important stuff. After a while I wandered off. I got n the way of the crew's dismantling the ship's internal bulkheads. Then I got in the way of the commissary women, then in the way of the engineers who were already modifying our drive reactor to an AC electric pile. When I got in the way of the medics who were patching up passengers banged around in the landing, I took a slcepy-pill. My dreams were not pleasant. desk when I woke up, pawing through stacks of green, pink and magenta-covered folders. I yawned. "You been up all night?" She said absently. "Yes." "Anything I can do to help?" "No." I rescued one of the folders from the floor. Medical Supplies Flow Chart, #d to #th Colony Year, No Local Provhionin Assumed was the heading. The one under it covered: Permissible Reproductive Rate, JOth Colony Year. "That's real planning," I said. "Got one covering forecasted lifeexpectancy of third generation colonists born of blue-eyed mothers and left-handed fathers?" "Please, Mitch." she said impatiently. 'Tve got to find the Ilanning schedules for the first two months. Naturally wt planned far ahead." I dressed and wandered out to the chowline. The man ahead of me, still wearing the soft padded undershoes that went with donning a heat suit, was telling his friends about Venus. Not more than a tenth of the colonists had seen their new planet close up as yet: he had a large and fascinated audience. "So we located the spot for the moored it to a rock taller than me. We started bracing the unit. What happens? Plop. The damn rock explodes. The wind catcher the drill and you should've seen that thing take off. Lucky we hadn't cast off the cabic.s to the ship yet; it'd still been going. As it is. back to the sliop. A whole day's work shot." I listened through the story and the questions. When he was hurrying off to another incomprehensible job. I said to him: "Wait a niinul. I w'ant to talk to you." "Sure, Mr. Courtenay. What can I do for you?" "Most of this stuff I don't get, but I understand a rock drill. You're a foreian. Can you put me on your crew?" "You sure you understand a rock drill. Mr. Courtenay? It ain't easy to change a carbide tip out there in the wind. You got to unscrew the caiiiber-flamber and wuldge it to the imbrie ' be fore the wind gets it, and that takes -- " There we were again. But this time I said: "I can handle it.' "That's great, Mr. Courtenay. I can use another man. Weiss, I guess you don't know him, he got smacked by a piece of flying something or other, so I'm one short." He measured me with his eye. "You can use his suit. It wasn't hurt a bit." An ugly little chill went through me., "What about Weiss?" "The work-suits are too rigid. Something hits you hard, it goes clang hard enough to bust your eardrums, drive your eyes into your head and rupture membranes all through your body. But the suit lives through it. Well, we go out with a replacement drill at #, Port Fourteen aft. ril see you there, Mr. Courtenay." I was there and proud of it. tough -- shock troops. They knew my name and face, of course, and were reserved. As we got into the armored work-suits, one of them asked apologetically: "Sure you can handle this detail, Mr. Courtenay? It's rough out there -- " I felt my blood pounding with anger I shouldn't put into words. He was only trying to be helpful. There was no use yelling at him that I was a man and could swing my weight with men, that I wasn't just a copysmith and as obsolete as the dinosaur. I nodded and we stepped out. Whoosh! The wind hurled us five yards. Crack! The cables held. Three seconds outside and I was fighting for breath. "Goddam it!" I gasped, hating my weakness. I had forgotten that work-suits were wired for sound. The foreman's voice said inside my helmet: "Mr. Courtenay, please keep the circuit clear for orders. Guire! Slack off! More -- hold it! Winters, haul your cable -- hold it. Mr. Courtenay, work your way over to Winters and lay hold." Clawing along the storm-swept rocks, I reached Winters and grabbed the cable. I wondered dimly if the suit's oxygen supply was functioning, if the dryer was wrking. It didn't feel as if they were. I could hardly breathe and I was soaked with sweat. I made a feeble pretense of helping Winters, who had the build of a granite crag, jockey the drill. It was like flying a kite -- if it took five men to fly a kite, and if the kite had to be kept at ground level, and if the kite perpetually threatened to fly you instead of vice versa. After two minutes outside, my leg and arm muscles were quivering uncontrollably from the mere effort of standing up and keeping balanced. It was the tremor of flexor pulling against extensor, the final fatigue that comes just before you let go, forgetting everything except that you can't keep it up any longer, that you'll die if you keep it up for another split-second. But I hung on for one minute more, streaming sweat, sobbing air into my lungs and maybe -- maybe -- helping a little with a few extra foot-pounds of heaveho on the cable when it was ordered. And then I let go, a little less than halfconscious, and the wind got me. My cable streamed and I dangled at the end of it, unable to do anything but listen to the voices in my helmet. "Mr. Courtenay, can you make it back to the ship?" "He don't answer. He must have blacked out." "Stinking luck! Almost get the drill positioned and then -- damn the stinking luck! Winters, work your way to him and sec if he's all right." "Hell, what can I see? Phone them to reel him in is all we can dd" "Winchman! Reel in Nunber Five. He's blacked out." The cable thrummed and I began to scrape along the ground to the port. And still they talked. "We can do it with four if it kills us, men. You all game?" I heard the ragged chorus of yesses as I scraped helplessly over the rocks, like a fish on a hook. "Shouldn't have let him come out at all," one of the crew said. terror. My suit clanged against something and motion stopped. A rock. I saw dazedly. A big rock. The six ring-bolts to which my cable was lashed began to creak and strain. The fools at the winch, I realized with clear, pure horror, had not noticed I was snagged. "Stop!" I screamed into the helmet. But I did not have a phone line through my cable to the ship. u y The 'foreman understood instantly. "Winchman! Ease off! He's snagged!" The ring bolts cea.sed to strain. "Mr. Courtenay, can you clear yourself or -- or should we come to help you?" He was only human. There was bitterness in his voice. I said rustily: "I can clear nyself. Thanks." But I didn't have to. The big, solid rock I had snagged on began to disappear. I don't mean it vanished, either with or without a thunderclap. Nor did it grow transparent and finally become invisible. But it began to melt from the top, like a ball of string unraveling or like an apple being peeled for a banquet before it's divided into servings -- and yet it was something like gradually turning into powder and blowing away. Naturally, it isn't easy to describe. It was the first Venusian anybody had ever seen. T hey got me into the ship and patched me up. Kathy didn't tend me in the hospital -- she was a surgeon and administrator. and all I had was R.N. stuff like bruises and scrapes. but plenty of them. In three days I was discharged with the entire hospital staff suspecting I was psychotic. I could go them one better. I knew I was. Item; I would wash and wash, but I never felt clean. Item : Suicidal tendenrirs. I wanted to go into the nuclear reactor room so bad I could taste it -- and the reactor room was sudden death. Item: Claustrophobia. The giant ship wasn't big enough for me. I wanted to go outside, into that flailing inferno. The first night out of the hospital. I sat up in bed waiting and waiting for Kathy to come back from a staff meeting. I was dogtired, but I didn't dare sleep. I had once found myself halfway to the reactor room before I stubbed my toe and woke up. She came in, blinking and redeyed at #. "Still awake?" she yawned at me. plumping onto her hammock. "Kathy," I said hoarsely. "I'm cracking up." She looked at me without much interest. "Did I ever tell you I read a paper on malingering to the New York Academy of Medicine?" I got up mechanically and started for the reactor room, grabbed hold of myself, turned around and sat down. I told her where I had been going. She turned nasty. "Not you. I know you better than most doctors get to know their patients. I also know the exact science of #S psychiatry and T know ttiat a person with your mental configuration could not possibly have the symptoms you describe. No more than two plus two can equal five. I presume you feel rejected -- which, God knows, you have every right to -- and are consciously trying to hoodwink me into thinking you're an interesting case that needs my personal attention." "Bitch," I said. She was too tired to be angry. "If I thought there were the smallest possible chance that your alleged symptoms are real and do spring from your unconscious, I'd treat you. But there isn't any such chance. I have to conclude that you're consciously trying to divert my energy from the job I have to do. And under the circumstances that is a despicable thing." "Bitch." I said again, and got up and went out to go to the reactor room. My feet moved as though they didn't belong to me, and I still felt the dirt on me that no soap and water or alcohol had been able to remove. She had meant every word of it. She knew her trade. And it was an exact science. She thoroughly believed that I couldn't have the symptoms I had. If she'd said it about somebody else. I would have taken her word for it unquestloningly. Only I had the symptoms -- Or were they symptoms? T stopped in the corridor, though my legs wanted to go on carrying me into the re actor room. a door said. I went in. There was no microscope. I looked through three more rooms before I found one -- and a knife that would do as a scalpel. I meant only to flick a pinpoint specimen off the base of my thumb, but in my dull intoxication I gashed a minor blood vessel. I found some reasonably sterile-looking gauze and wound it around my hand. I dropped the ragged little crumb of meat into the oil-lens objective, tapped it to shake free the bubbles, levered it into a turret chosen at random. There was some difficulty in getting the light source to function -- I couldn't make out what I was supposed to do with the knob marked "polarizer" -- but finally the stage appeared through the eyepiece, bathed in a greenish glow. I saw : Life. Clustered around the fabric of epidermis that loomed in the eyepiece like a decayed glacier were massive chunks of rock, the ran#S# dom dust particles of any at mosphere, the faint accretion that no washing will completely remove from the human skin. They were featureless, irregular blobs, most of them. But not all. Among the dust fragments were # dozen or so living things, seaurchin-shaped. Under the flaring light of the microscope, they seemed spurred to action. The spines of one touched the spines of another; they flexed and locked. A third blundered into the linked pair, and they became a Laocodn trio. They were no protozoans or they were utterly alien. And as I watched, the trio became six, then ten globes locked together. And at once the character of the action changed: The clustered spheroids seemed to beat their flagella in unison, driving the mass, like eggs trailing from a spawning trout, about the field of vision. Purposefully, the massed ten ran down the other globes and absorbed them, till all were joined. That was the second time anyone had seen a Venusian. This time, though, it was with awareness. I didn't want to go into the reactor room. I didn't want to go outside. The Venusian did and somehow we had become... tangled. K athy, with the reflexes ot a doctor, woke easily when I shook her shoulder. She stared fixedly at me. "Come along," I said. "I want to show you something under a microscope. And I can't begin to tell you what it is because you won't believe me until you see it." "You, with a microscope," she said scornfully. But she came. She looked, blinked, looked again. At last, not moving from the eyepiece, she said softly: "Good God I What in the world are they?" "Now you prepare a slide from my skin," I told her. She did, in seconds, and stared at it through the microscope. I knew the -- cells? were going through their outlandish linkup behavior. "I'm sorry, Mitch," she said doubtfully. "Some sort of pathogenic organism, causing a paranoid configuration -- " She swallowed. "I didn't mean to be unfair." "It's all right." Forgiven, she was in my arms. "But they're -- it's not a pathogenic organism. It's a Venusian." I told her about the rock that vanished. "Some of it got carried in with me on the suit, I suppose, and got on me, or into me -- I don't know. But I feel intelligence. I can sort of isolate it. now that I can tell which is it and which is me. I can think of the reactor room in two ways. When it's me thinking. I know it's deadly. When it's it tltinklng, there's -- hunger? Yes, I think hunger." 'It lives on plutonium? No. there isn't any on Venus. It has to be manufactured." I was exploring, thinking of the reactor room, what was in it, what it looked like, what happened there, and noting my -- no. its -- po, call them the reactions that followed. "Energy." I said softly. "Not material. It wants to he irradiated." And I thought of the outside. The wind meant nothing to it. The iieat meant mild comfort, like air to me or water to a minnow. But lightning, free electrons and cosmic rays -- ah, that was really living! "Energy." I whispered. And I thought of the rocks of Venus, the rocks that sometimes exploded and sometimes unwound like balls of string. "Love," I said almost inaudihly. "Community. The whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Without hate, without fear -- " Kathy told ne later that I pitched forward onto my face in an old-fashioned fftint. green. But Kathy and I walked the hundred yards from the ship's skeleton to our hut this morning with only oxygen masks on. The wind was no more than gale force, and it keeps dropping in velocity every week. Once we found that the Venusians, those incongruous flurries of silicate life, were capable of something resembling thought, we learned what they needed and what they could do. They needed energy. We gave them energy, from the hot-gas ends of our giant Hilsch Tubes. Maxwell's mythical demon picked the hottest molecules from Venus's air and flung them at the Venusians, who rejoicingly sucked them dry of high-level heat and used the energy so they could reproduce even more prolifically to absorb still more energy. The water roared down from the upper atmosphere like an ocean falling out of the sky. Now we have seas, and the poisoned atmosphere is being locked in chemical bonds with the soil and the rocks. We've saved a decade at least, the planners say. And the Venustans are doing it for us. They're feasting themselves into famine on the energy we ripped out of the air for them. They'll never I# vanish completely, of course: as the amount of available energy grows less and less, they'll reduce their numbers and we'll have more and more of the planet for our use, but we'll keep some of them alive out of sheer gratitude. We cannibalized the ship for our huts and shops, leaving only the giant structural members that we'll be able to work with later -- melt them down, I suppose, or cut them up into useful shapes. It's a tidy little community, each couple with a plot of ground and furniture tliat doesn't have to be rolled or folded out of the way. We're scouting the terrain for sources of metals and minerals, which won't be senselessly scooped out of the ground, manufactured, used and thrown away; they'll be restored to the soil or scrupulously collected and reworked. We can't grow anything yet, but already we have plans for the protection of the rich loam we'll create. It's a Conservationist world, all right, and it makes sense... you take wJiat you need from the planet and put it back when you're through. On Earth, that's the worst kind of radicalism, of course. Being a copysmith. trained in semantics. I keep wondering how I could get my concepts so tangled that I mistook the epitome of conservatism for wildeyed sabotage, when I know now that any kind of purposeless destruction is almost physical anguish for a Conservationist. You don't have to be a prophet to see how Venus is developing into a self-sustaining economy. Kathy figured it out: By the time our first-born is of age. Fowler Schocken's commercials will have come true. pense on a situation of pure porodox: Equipped with the most powerful psychological advonlage in the Goioxy, Denton Cossol is stranded on o friendly planet -- and finds himseH the helpless victim of philanthropy! Two novelets, short stories, feotvres meke up this between-serials issue. Feotured is a discussion byWilly Ley on a suboct of importance to every science fiction reader end. one that, this famous rocket expert is porticulacly qualified to explore -- How close ore we to epoce trovel? # Exciting, Stimulating Full-Length Science Fiction Novels Tlie Fdiiors of Galaxy liove only # Srience Fid ion Novels in tlie pait year and a half (hat lliey fell Merc gio! enoujili lo reofive the inipriiU of (Galaxy. Tlionsamls of copies of these tHivf-ls have In-en enjoyed by Galaxy readers. Fai li (ialaxy novel is complete and imahrilged. F.aih novel would sell Cor #..."# or f.'f.OO if boiiglil as a hard la('k book. But heeaitse we w'nnl lo liring lliese Galaxy readers we Have piildislied lliein at llir low, low price of each. You can order any one or all of (lie hack titles shown at .#r or any # for #. And yun can suhseribe lo aildilional novels at # for a .subscription of # novels. ( Foreign snbscri pi ions, add .:#.) Nuliirally all orders are subject to the prior sale of back copies. So order today while slocks are complete. I Sinittr Barrier by ric Frank Rustell # The Leqion oI Space # The Amphibian by S. Fowler Wright # The World Below by S. Fowler Wright # The Alien by Raymettd F. Jonei  Empire by Clifford D. Simek # Odd John by Olaf Stapleton # Four Sided Triangle #I Hudton Street, New York #, N. Y. (#) I Pleae send rne Galaxy Novels checked below:  Sinister Barrier ' The Legion of Space I  The World Below  The Amphlbiani i n Empire n The Alien  U Hour Sided Triangle  Odd John  Please enter my subscription for future Galaxy nov els -- I  I year -- #  # years -- # j KJ .M... We pay postage c n all orders. Sorry no cod's. j Sorry, Prelude W Space is ouL of print. tewom BtlOW  # cum By Jay Franklin When an otomic explosion destroys the battleship Alaska, Lt. Commander Frank Jacklin returns to consciousness in New York and is shocked to find himself in the body of Winnie Tomkins, a dissolute stockbroker. Unable to explain his real identity, Jacklin attempts to fit into Tomkin's way of life. Complications develop when Jacklin gets involved with Tomkin's wife, his red-haired mistress and his luscious secretary. Three too many women for Jacklin to handle. His foreknowledge of the Alaska sinking and other top secret matters plunges him into a mad world of intrigue and excitement in Washington -- that place where anything can happen and does! Where is the real Tomkins is a mystery explained in the smashing climax. Completely delightful, wholly provocative, the Rat Race is a striking novel of the American Scene. jLL length science FiaiON NOVEL Who knows whether the strange events of this story might not one day occur? This is the story of an expedition -- a strange and exciting expedition of one man and an army of women. He had come into the land of the women suddenly -- and without warning. Tall, bronzed, muscular, he stood out among their pale skins and meek spirits. And when they learned of the land from which he had come -- the land they hadn't even known existed -- they had to follow him to it. One man and an army of women crossing the remnants of a post-atomic United States in search of the Unknown; it was an amazing trek. Miraculous things happened to the women. New emotions rose up to plague them. Once there was a near mutiny. Another time, seven of their number were killed. But it was when they reached the city in the sea that the strangest thing of all happened... pellingly human story. i you're that man, here's something that will interest you. Not a magic formula -- not a get-rich-quick scheme -- but something mote substantial, more practical. Of course, you reed something more than Just the desire to be an accountant. 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Over # Certified tublU Aeuntnte men IsSalle alumni A Correspond''" nt(u(jon # S. Dearborn St D'pt H# "-blcege #, lit. I want CO be an aecounuiii. benJ me without oKiga. (ion. "Accounuaev. The Frotcssion That Pays. " Ndri At AdJrlJI C.J, ZHt # Uu aalaxy Scinc# Editar AMntaM Edilar Art Diractor Production Monoser AdKTiHog Manoger by F. L. Wollace # by James H. Schmifz # Covr by lllustrolmg Galaxy Sdtmc Fittiom H published inontbljr bf GaUnr Publiihing CufMfaduu. Main oNces : #I Hudtoa Street. New York Id. N. Y. #)c per copy. Sttcriptiona: (# cop kit # per year in the United Stater, Canada. Meatco. South and Cen cral Aiserica and U.S. PoMetsiona. Elsewhere # . # . Entered ai second cUm matter at the. Post Ottre, New York. N. Y. Copyriahi. #, by Galaxy Publishinc Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, prewdem. All rights, in CTudinf translaiicw, re aerreJ. All material tub aittedmuMheaccompanied by KlfBcldresed Hamped envelopes. The publisher aasumes # responsibility for unsolicited material. Alt stories primed ia this macacine art fiction, and any similarity between chat acieri and aauat persons ia eoiocidentil. by Katherine MacLean # by Roer Oee # by Dean Eans # by Evelyn E. Smith # by Gordon R. Dicirson # by Willy ley # by H. L Gold # by GrofF Conlclin # Priafod in the U. S. A. by Hie Guinn Ce... Inc. IU. U. t. Pal. OR. R eaders often question the heroism of fictional heroes, arguing that feople don't behave so heedlessly. If you want the truth, writers sometimes wonder about it, too. We use the flippant cockiness of the American hero, the casual stiff lip of the British, the cerebral bravery of the French, and more recently the grim fortitude, supported by encyclopedic knowledge, of the spaceman, but always afraid of this criticism. Actually, there is a case for fictional heroism. It just isn't carried far enough, which is true of much of our reasoning and is the purpose behind 'these editorials. It's not that I believe I have the answers; I'm searching for them, hoping others will be interested and provoked enough to present viewpoints that' may advance science fiction. Anyone who has seen combat knows that the real horror is the anticipation and, afterward, the reaction. The same is true of less obvious heroism -- dreading a business or social situation, beiirg forced into it, working it out somehow, and then, if it's a grave one. trembling at the possible errors one made and their consequences. Hre is where fictional hero'-sm is hard to believe. On the basis of our personal experience, we can accept the bravery of people in circumstances they cannot evade or flee. Fear, naturally, is a powerful goad at such times, but not necessarily the fear you might expect. Our most decorated soldier. Audie Murphy, for example, according to his autobiography. was more afraid of social disapproval of any cowardice he might display than of gunfire. Where fictional heroism becomes improbable is in the lack of expectant dread and later reaction. Used sparingly, both can make characters more real. But they can't be used often. First of all, they halt stories when done without deftness. Next, not everybody suffers anticipation and reaction in the same way. Since this is not a psychological treatise, there's no point going into varieties of behavior in danger; it ranges from fright paralysis to paralyzed fright. The latter is the phenomenon we recognize in fictional heroism, when anxiety is so acute that it must be escaped through action, however reckless. The situations we read about in stories are extremely unlikely to happen to us. Buthow would (Continued on page #) t An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy, But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted! M: Dimanche. "Neural . index #, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon." "Not interested," said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. "I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight." "First you have to get there," Dimanche pointed out. "I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?" "Now that you mention it, no," answered Cassal. He looke around apprehensively. "Where is he?" "Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display." A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy. Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea? A Gpdolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a dehnite disadvantage. "Correction," said Dimanche. "Not simple assault. He has murder in mind." "It still doesn't appeal to me," said Cassal. Striving to look un concerned, he strolled toward the bulldog side of the walkway and Stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time. Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was fiormal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted -- for native eyes. A human would consider it dim. "Why did he choose me?" asked Cassal plaintively. "There must be something he hopes to gain." "I'm working on it," said Dimanche. "But remember. I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a  person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you. I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police." "Godolph, not godawful," corrected Cassal absently. That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet Street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either. "Weapons?" "The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person." Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself. "Report," said Dimanche. "Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps. on tenuous evidence.' "Let's have it anyway.' "His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet." That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand Star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one. Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be. Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't? neer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney # I to sec a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them. The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want? Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it. And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk. "Better start moving." That was Dimanche. "He's getting suspicious." Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives , like rain. He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. Ke swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it. A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human -- Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age. Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at breakneck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The God#lphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human -- Cas.sal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place. The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur. her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite "Arf?" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out. "Follow her," instructed Dimanche. "We've got to investigate our man at closer range." and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though. The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his stei)s. A man, or at least man tyie. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder. "Nothing," said Dimanche disgustedly. "His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite." Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter. "Excellent thinking," c o m  mended Dimanche. "He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette." t The lighter flared in his hand. "That's one way of finding out," said Cassel. "But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?" "I'm curious. Turn here." "Go to hell," said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there. It was a Godolfriiian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other. He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanchc. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that. "Easy," warned Dimanchc. "He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route," "I'm surprised, too," remarked Cassal. "But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now." "Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting." The mechanism concealed vnthin his body was silent for an instant and then continued: "His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical." "That's no lie." agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality. "Quiet," said Dimanche. "He's verbalizing about you." "He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light." "I don't think so." answered Dimanche. "He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'." "He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?" "None at all," admitted Dimanche. "He's very close. You'd better turn around." stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little. A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by. "Hey!" shouted Cassal. Echoes answered: nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was goiitg to come to his assistance. "He wasn't expecting that reaction," explained Dimanche. "That's why 'he missed. He' turtifd around and is coming back." 'Tm armed!" shouted Cassal. "Tlvat won't stop him. He doesn't believe you." Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needlethin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stih-Uo, "Twenty feet away." advised Dimanche. "He knows you can't sec him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect eveiy move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing." "Stay on him." growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall. "To the right," whispered Dimanche. "Lunge forward. About five feet. Low." Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. !n the darkness. Itow far was five feet? Fortynately, his estimate was c orrect. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away. "Attack!" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. "You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid." Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed: some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent. Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move. "Heartbeat slow," said Dimanche solemnly. "Breathing barely perceptible." "Then he's not dead," said Cassal in relief. Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face. "Respiration none, heartbeat absent," stated Dimanche. H orrified. Cassai gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did. they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about It? Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney #? Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want? "I don't know,' replied Iimanche irritably. 'I can interpret body data -- a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat." Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all. Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney #. Right now, though, he had to dispose of the hody. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence. He bent down to j'etrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground. He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water. Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight. "Interpret body data, do you?" muttered Cassal. "Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by." "It's just possible there arc some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body," said Dimanche defensively. "When I checked him, he had noy heartbeat." "Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely," grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police. He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away. Something, however, was missing -- his wallet. The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent. It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had. Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab. A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, tainly had tried. HE old man stared at the  door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on hishead. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door. Murra Foray, First Counselor It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again. With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole. Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable, Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms. A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. "Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation." Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. "Is this necessary?" he asked. "It's merely a matter of information." "We have certain regulations we abide by." The woman smiled frostily. "I can't give you any information until you comply with them." "Sometimes regulations are silly," said Cassal firmly. "Let me speak to the first counselor." "You are speaking to her," she said. Her fsfee disappeared from the screen. Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression. Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundanlly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at -- why he wanted to go to Tunney #I was his own business. The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not. he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and ler eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.  "Denton Cassal. native of Earth. Destination, Tunney #." She looked up at him. "Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?" Her smile was quite superior. "Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations." "Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient." Her eyebrow arched. "I think so," he agreed blandly. "Anything else you'd like to know?" "Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you." He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't. "You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney #. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them." Close -- biit wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Diinanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely. There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney #I that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade -- a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that. His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could. Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor. Her voice broke though his thoughts. "Now, then, what's your problem?" "I Was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney #." "Just a moment." She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. "Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning." "Departed?" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. "When will the next ship arrive?" "Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?" she asked. didn't answer. to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take 'a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years -- maybe." H e blanched. "How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star hopping?" "Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky." "I don't need that kind of luck." "I suppose not." She hesitated. "You're determined to go on?" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. "If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab." "There's something funny about her," Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear. Cessal ignored his private voice. "Identification tab? I don't have it v#th me. In fact, I jnay have lost it." She smiled in instant disbelief. "We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification -- ' She arose and left the screen. "Just a moment." He glared uneasily atthe spot where the first counselor wasn't. M His real name? "Relax,' Dimanche suggested. "She didn't mean it as a personal insult." Presently she returned. "I have news for you, whoever you are.' "Cassal," he said firmly. "Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to -- " He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound In the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything. "I see you understand." She glanced at the card in her hand. "The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney #." "It wasn't I." he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though, The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it. "No doubt it wasn't," she said wearily. "Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails." Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first rifig. called Rimmers? Probably. S HE was still speaking: "Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting: years pass before he learns it's never coming. "If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established. lost identification replaced -- " "I've traveled before." he interrupted stiffly. "I've never had any trouble." She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide -- why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination. But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air mole# cules in a giant room. Or could you? For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own interstellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be. "'iTou've traveled outside, where there arc still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work." ' She paused. "The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration." In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be jjd of when his money was gone. Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney #I was insieje the third ring. "Next time." she said, "don't let anyone take your identification." "I won't," he promised grimly. T he woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she IK) longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor. "We're a philanthropic agency," said Murra Foray. "Your case is special, though -- " "I understand," he said gruffly.  "You accept contributions." She needed. "If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so  much that you'll have to com promise your standard of living." But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney #I took any appreciable time. He stared at her unhappily. "I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to." "As a salesman?" she asked. "I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians." Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully. "Not just another salesman," he answered definitely. "I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly -- " He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage. "Anyway," he finished lamely. 'I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line." "A scientist, maybe," murmured Murra Foray. "But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience." She shook her head. "You'll do better as a salesman." He got up, glowering. "If that's all -- " "It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave." , A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient. "Remember," the counselor called out as he left, "identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery." He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical. The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau. "T'VE got it," said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named. "Got what?" asked Cassal. He rolled the currencj into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute. "The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner." "What's a Huntner?" "A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her.' "Any other information?" "None. Electronic gx'ards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could." "I see." The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing. "What I want to know is." said Dimanche, "why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?" Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times. Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered. "You stuck here, too?" he . # asked in the uneven voice of the aged. "Stuck?' repeated Cassal. "I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship." He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions. "Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so' many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new." The old man chuckled. "Reorganization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, 'SO she ordered it changed." She would do just that, thought Cassal. "What about this Murra Foray?" Te old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled #way. Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone. "HE girl ahead of you is making unnecessary wriggling motions as she walks," observed Dimanche. "Several men arc looking on with approval. I don't understand." Cassal glanced up. They walked that way back in good old L.A. A pang of homesickness swept through him. "Shut up," he growled plaintively. "Attend to the business at hand." "Business? Very well," said Dimanche. "Watch out for the transport tide." Cassal swerved back from the edge of the water, Murra Foray had been right. Godolphians didn't want or need his skills, at least not on terms that were acceptable to him. The natives didn't have to exert themselves. They lived off the income provided by travelers, with which the planet was abundantly supplied by ship after ship. Still, that didn't alter his need for money. He walked the streets at random while Dimanche probed, "Ah!" "What is it?" "That man. He crinkles something in his hands. Not enough, he is subvocalizing." "I know how he feels," commented Cassal. "Now his throat tightens. He bunches his muscles. 'I know where I can get more,' he tells himself. He is going there." "A sensible man," declared Cassal. "Follow him." I Boldly the man headed toward a section of the city which Cassal had not previously entered. He believed opportunity lay there. Not for everyone. The shrewd, observant, and the courageous could succeed if -- The word that the quarry used was a slang term, unfamiliar to either Cassal or Dimanche. It didnt matter as long as it led to money. Cassal stretched his stride and managed to keep the man in sight. He skipped nimbly over the narrow walkways that curved through the great buildings. The section grew dingier as they proceeded. Not slums; not the showplace city frequented by travelers, either. Abruptly the man turned into a building. He was out of sight when Cassal reached the structure. He stood at the entrance and stared in disappointment. "Opportunities Inc.," Dimanche quoted softly in his ear. "Science, thrills, chance. What does that mean?" "It means that we followed a gravity ghost!" "What's a gravity ghost?" "An unexplained phenomena," said Cassal nastily. "It affects the instruments of spaceships, giving the illusion of a massive dark body that isn't there." "But you're not a pilot. I don't understand." "You're not a very good pilot yourself. We followed the man to a gambling joint." "Gambling," mused Dimanche. "Well, isn't it an opportunity of a sort? Someone inside is thinking of the money he's winning." "The owner, no doubt." Dimanche was silent, investigating. "It is the owner," he confirmed finally. "Why not go in, anyway. It's raining. And they serve drinks." Left unstated was the admission that Dimanche was curious, as usual. a drink. It was a variable place, depending on the spectator -- bright, cheerful, and harmonious if he were winning, garish and deprcssingly vulgar if he were not. At the moment Cassal belonged to neither group. He reserved judgment. An assortment of gaming devices were in operation. One in particular seemed interesting. It involved the counting of electrons passing through an aperture, based on probability. "Not that," whispered Dimanche. "It's rigged." "But it's not necessary," Cassal murmured. "Pure chance alone is good enough." "They don't take chances, pure or adulterated. Look around. How many Godolphians do you see?" Cassal looked. Natives were not even there as servants. Strictly a clip joint, working travelers. Unconsciously, h e nodded. "That does it.It's not the kind of opportunity I had in mind." "Don't be hasty," objected Dimanche. "Certain devices I can't control. There may be others in which my knowledge will help you. Stroll around and sample some games." Cassal equipped himself with a supply of coins and sauntered through the establishment, disbursing them so as to give himself the widest possible acquaintance with the layotit. "That one," instructed Dimanche. It received a coin. In return, it rewarded him with a large shower of change. The money spilled to thefloor with a satisfying clatter. An audience ga'thered rapidly, ostensibly to help him pick up the coins... "There was a circuit in it," explained Dimanche. "I gave it a shot of electrons and it paid out." "Let's try it again," suggested Cassal. "Let's not." Dimanche said regretfully. "Look at the man on your right." Cassal did so. He jammed the money back in his pocket and stood up. Hastily, he began thrusting the money back into the machine. A large and very unconcerned man watched him. "You get the idea," said Dimanche. "It paid off two months ago. It wasn't scheduled for another this year." Dimanche scrutinized the man in a multitude of ways while Cassal continued play. "He's satisfied," was the report at last. "He doesn't detect any sign of crookedness." "Crookedness?'" "On your part, that is. In the ethics of a gambling house, what's done to insure profit is merely prudence." T hey moved on to other games, though Cassal lost his briefly acquired enthusiasm. The possibility of winning seemed to grow more remote. "Hold it," said Dimanche. "Let's look into this." "Let me give you some advice," said Cassal. "This is one thing we can't win at. Every race in the Galaxy has a game like this. Pieces of plastic with values printed on them are distributed. The trick is to get certain arbitrarily selected sets of values in the plastics dealt to you. It seems simple, but against a skilled player a beginner can't win." "Every race in the Galaxy," mused Dimanche. "What do men call it?" ' "Cards," said Cassal, "though there are many varieties within that general classification." He launched into a detailed exposition of the subject. If it were something he was familiar with, all right, but a foreign deck and strange rules -- Nevertheless. Dimanche was interested. They stayed and observed. The dealer was clumsy. His great hands enfolded the cards. Not a Godolphian nor quite human, he was an odd type, difficult to place. Physically burly, he wore a garment chiefly remarkable for its ill-fitting appearance. A hard round hat . M jammed closely over his skull completed the outfit. He was dressed in a manner that, somewhere in the Universe, was evidently considered the height of fashion. "It doesn't seem bad." commented Cassal. "There might be a chance." "Look around," said Dimanche. "Everyone thinks that. It's the classic struggle, person against person and everyone against the house. Naturally, the hou.se doesn't lose." "Th-n why are wc wasting our time?" "Because I've got an idea." #id Dimanche. "Sit down and take a hand." "Make up j'our mind. You said the house doesn't lose." "The house hasn't played agait us. Sit down. You get tight cards, with the option of two more. I'll tell you what to do." Cassal waited until a disconsolate player relinquished his seat and stalked moodily away. He played a few hands and bet small sums in accordance with Dimanche's instructions. He held his own and won in.significanl amounts while learning. It was simple. Nine orders, or suits, of twenty-seven cards each. Each suit would build a difTerent equation. The lowest hand was a quadratic. A cubic would beat it. All he had to do was remember his math, guess at what he didn't remember, and draw the right cards. "What's the highest possible hand?" asked Dimanche. There was a note of abstraction in his voice, as if he were paying more attention to something else. Cassal peeked at the cards that were face-down on the table. He shoved some money into the betting square in front of him and didn't answer. "You had it last time," said Dimanche. "A three dimensional enccphalocurve. A time modulated brainwave. If you had bet right, you could have owned the house by now." "I did? Why didn't yovj tell me?" "Because you had it three successive times. The probabilities against that are astronomical. I've got to find out what's happening before you start betting recklessly."  "It's not the dealer." declared Cassal. "Look at those hands." They were huge hands, more suitable, seemingly, for crushing the life from some alien beast than the delicate manipulation of cards. Cassal continued to play, standard that mattered: he won. O NE player dropped out and was replaced by a recruit from the surrounding crowd. Cassal ordered a drink. The waiter was placing it in his hand when Dimanche made a discovery. 'Tve got it!" A shout from Dimanche was roughly equivalent to a noiseless kick in the head. Cassal dropped the drink. The player next to him scowled but said nothing. The dealer blinked and went on dealing. "What have you got?" asked Cassal, wiping up the mess and trying to keep track of the cards. "How he fixes the deck," explained Dimanche in a lower and less painful tone. "Clever." Muttering, Casual shoved a bet in front of him. "Look at that hat," said Dimanche. "Ridiculous, isn't it? ButI see no reason to gloat because I have better taste." "That's not what I meant. It's pulled down low over his knobby ears and touches his jacket. His jacket rubs against his trousers, which in turn come in cohtact with the stool on which he sits." "True," agreed Cassal, increasing his wager. "But except for his physique. I don't see anything unusual." "It's a circuit, a visual projeettfr broken down into components. The hat is a command circuit which makes contact, via his clothing, with the broadcasting unit built into the chair. The existence of a visual projector is completely concealed." Cassal bit his lip and squinted at his cards. "Interesting. What does it have to do with anything?" "The deck," exclaimed Dimanche excitedly. "The backs are regular, printed with an intricate design. The front is a special plastic, susceptible to the influence of the visual projector. He doesn't need manual dexterity. He can make any value appear on any card he wants. It will stay there until he changes it." Cassal picked up the cards. "IVc got a Loreenaroo equation. Can he change that to anything else?" "He can, but he doesn't work that way. He decides before he deals who's going to get what. He concentrates on each card as he deals it. He can change a hand after a player gets it, but it wouldn't look good." "It wouldn't." Cassal wistfully watched the dealer rake in his wager. His winnings were gone, plus. The newcomer to the game won. He started to get up. "Sit down." whispered Dimanche. "We're just beginning. Now that we know what he does and how he does it, we're going to take him." #t T he next hand started in the familiar pattern, two cards of fairly good possibilities, a bet, and then another card. Cassal watched the dealer closely. His clumsiness was only superficial. At no time were the faces of the cards visible. The real skill was unobservable, of course -- the swift bookkeeping that went on in his mind. A duplication in the hands of the players, for instance, would be ruinous. Cassal received the last card. "Bet high," said Dimanche. With trepidation, Cassal shoved the money into the betting area. The dealer glanced at his hand and started to sit down. Abruptly he stood up again. He scratched his cheek and stared puzzledly at the players around him. Gently he lowered himself onto the stool. Tlw contact was even briefer. He stood up in indecision. An impatient murmur arose. He dealt himself a card, looked at it, and paid off all the way around. The players buzzed with curiosity. "What happened?" asked Cassal as the next hand started. 'T induced a short in the circuit." said Dimanche. "He couldn't sit down to change the last card he got. He took a chance, as he had to, and dealt himself a card, anyway." "But he paid off without asking to see what we had." "It was the only thing he could do," explained Dimanche. "He had duplicate cards." The dealer was scowling. He didn't seem quite so much at ease. The cards were dealt and the betting proceeded almost as usual. True, the dealer was nervous. He couldn't sit down and stay down. He was sweating. Again he paid off. Cassal won heavily and he was not the only one. The crowd around them grew almost in a rush. There is an indefinable sense that tells one gambler when another is winning. This time the dealer stood up. His leg contacted the stool occa sionally. He jerked it away each time he dealt to himself. At the last card he hesitated. It was amazing how much he could sweat. He lifted a corner of the cards. Without indicating what he had drawn, determinedly and deliberately he sat down. The chair broke. The dealer grinned weakly as a waiter brought him another stool, "They still think it may be a defective circuit," whispered Dimanche. The dealer sat down and sprang up from the new chair in one motion. He gazed bitterly at the players and paid them. "He had a blank hand," explained Dimanche. "He made contact with the broadcasting circuit long enough to erase, but not long enough to put anything in itfe place." The dealer adjusted his coat. I have a nervous disability," he declared thickly. "If you'll pardon me for a few minutes while I take a treatment -- " "Probably going to consult with the manager," observed Cassal. "He is the manager. He's talking with the owner." "Keep ti'ack of him." A blonde, pretty, perhaps even Earth type human, smiled and wriggled closer to Cassal. He smiled back. "Don't fall for it," warned Dimanche. "She's an undercover agent for the house." Cassal looked her over carefully. "Not much under cover." "But if she should discover -- " "Don't be stupid. She'll never guess you exist. There's a small lump behind my ear and a small round tube cleverly concealed elsewhere." "All right," sighed Dimanche resignedly. "I suppose people will always be a mystery to me." The dealer reappeared, followed by an unobtrusive man who carried a new stool. The dealer looked subtly different, though he was the same person. It took a close inspection to determine what the difference was. His clothing was new, unrumpled, unmarked by perspiration. During his brief absence, he had been furnished with new visual projector equipment, and it had been thoroughly checked out. The house intended to locate the source of the disturbance. Mentally, Cassal counted his assets. He was solvent again, but in other ways his position was not so good. "Maybe," he suggested, "we should leave. With no further interference from us, they might believe defective equipment is the cause of their losses." "Maybe," replied Dimanche, "you think the crowd around us is composed solely of patrons?" "I see," said Cassal soberly. He stretched Iiis legs. The crowd pressed closer, uncommonly aggressive and ill-tempered for mere spectators. He decided against leaving. "Let's resume play." The dealer-manager smiled blandly at each player. He didn't suspect any one person -- yet. "He might be using an honest deck," said Cassal hopefully. "They don't have that kind," answered Dimanche. He added absently; "During his conference with the owner, he was given authority to handle the situation in any way be sees fit." Bad. but not too bad. At least Cassal was opposing someone who had authority to kt him k'jp his winnings, if he could be convinced. The dealer deliberately sat down on the stool. Testing. He could endure the charge that trickled through him. The bland smile spread into a triumphant one. "While he was gone, he took a sedative," analyzed Dimanchc. "He also had the strength of the broadcasting circuit reduced. He thinks that will do it." "Sedatives wear off." said Cassal. "By the time he knows it's me. see that it has worn off. Mess him up." T he game went on. The situation was too much for the others. They played poorly and bet atrociously, on purpose. One by one they lost and dropped out. Thcy wanted badly to win. but they wanted to live even more. The joint was jumping, and so was the dealer again. Sweat rolled down his face and there were tears in his eyes. So much liquid began to erode his ffxed smile. He kept replenishing it from some irmer source of determination. Caesal looked up. The crowd had drawn back, or had been forced back by hirelings who mingled with them. He was alone with the dealer at the table. Money was piled high around him. It was more than he needed. more than he wanted. "i suggest one last hand." said the dealer manager, grimacing. It sounded a little stronger than a suggestion. Cassal nodded. "For a subantial sum." said the dealer, naming it. Miraculously, it was an amount that equaled everything Cassal had. Again Cassal nodded. "Pressure," muttered Cassal to Dimanche. "The sedative has worn off. He's back at the level at which he started. Fry him if you have to." The cards came out slowly. The dealer was jittering as he dealt. Soft music was lacking, but not the motions that normally accompanied it. Cassal Couldn't believe that cards could be so bad. Somehow the dealer was rising to the occasion. Rising and sitting. "There's a nerve in your body," Cassal began conversationally, "which, if were overloaded, would cause you to drop dead." The dealer didn't examine his cards. He didn't have to. "In that event, someone would be arrested for murder," he said. "You." That was the wrong tack: the humanoid had too much courage. Cassal pasaid his hand over his eyes. "You can't do this to men. but, strictly speaking, the dealer's not human. Try suggestion on him. Make him change the cards. Play him likf a piano. Pizzicato on the nerve strings." Dimanche didn't answer: presumably he was busy scrambling the circuits. The dealer stretched out his hand. It never reached the cards. Danger: Dimanche at work. The smile dropped from his face. What remained was pure anguish. He was loo dryor tears. Smoke curled up faintly from his jacket, "Hot. isn't it?" asked Cassal. "It might be cooler if you took off your cap." The cap tinkled to the floor. The mechanism in it was destroyed. What the cards were, they were. Now they couldn't be changed. "That's better," said Cassal. '#'#'E glanced at his hand. In the interim, it had changed slightly. Dimanche had got there. The dealer examined his cards one by one. His face changed color. He sat utterly still on a cool stool. "You win." he said hopelessly. "Let's see what you have.' The dealer  manager roused himself. "You won. That's good enough for you. isn't it?" Cassal shrugged. "You have Bank of the Galaxy service here. I'll deposit my money with them beofe you pick up your cards." The dealer nodded unhappily and summoned an assistant. The crowd, which had anticipated violence. slowly began to drift away. "What did you do?" asked Cessal silently. "Men have no .shame," sighed Dimanche. "Some humanoids do. The dealer was one who did. I forced him to project onto bis cards something that wasn't a suit at all." "Embarrassing if that got out." agreed Ca.ssal. "What did you project ?" Dimanche told him. Cassal blushed, which was unusual for ' a man. The dealer manager returned and the transaction was completed. His money was safe in the Bank of the Galaxy. "Hereafter, you're not welcome," said the dealer mofcsIy. "Don't come back." Cassal picked up the carels without looking at them. "And no accidents after I leave." he said, extending the cards face-down. The manager took them and trembled. "He's an honorable humanoid, in his own way." whispered Dimanchc. "I think you're safe." It was time to leave. "One question." Cassal called back. "What do you call this game?" Automatically the dealer started to answer. "Why everyone knows... He sat down, bis mouth open.  # It was more than time to leave. Outside, he hailed an air taxi, point in tempting the management. "Look." said Dimanche as the cab rose from the surface of the transport tide. A technician with a visual projector was at work on the sign in front of the gaming house. Huge words took shape: warnThere were no such things anywhere. but now there were rumors of them. of the hotel. Cassal went directly to his room. He awaited the delivery of the equipment he had ordered and checked through it thoroughly. Satisfied that everything was there, he estimated he of the room. Too small for his purpose. He picked up the intercom and dialed Serces. "Put a Life Stage Cordon around my suite," he said briskly. The face opposite his went blank. "But you're an Earthman. I thought -- " "I know more about my own requirements than your Life Stage Bureau. Earthmen do have I'Se stages. You know the penalty #f you refuse that service." There were some races who went without sleep for five months and then had to make up for it. Others grew vestigial wings for brief periods and had to fly with them or die : reduced gravity would suflfice for that. Still others -- But the one common feature was always a critical time in which certain conditions were necessary. Insofar as there was a universal law, from one end of the Galaxy to the other, this was it: The habitat hotel had to furnish appropriate conditions for the maintenance of any life-form that requested it. The Godolphian disappeared from the screen. When he came back, lie seemed disturbed. "Yqu spoke of a suite. I find that you're listed as occupying one room." "I am. It's too small. Convert the rooms around me into a suite." "That's very expensive." "I'm aware of that. Check the Bank of the Gala.xy for my credit rating." He watched the process take place. Service would be amazingly good from now on. "Your suite will be converted in about two hours. The Life Stage Cordon will begin as soon after that as you want. If you tell me how long you'll need it, I can make arrangements now." "About ten hours is all I'll need." Cassal rubbed his jaw reflectively. "One more thing. Put #  a perpetual service at the spaceport. If a ship comes in bound for Tunney #I or the vicinity of it, get accommodations on it for me. And hold it until I get ready, no matter what it costs." He flipped oft' the intercom and promptly went to sleep. Hours later, he was awakened by a faint hum. The Life Stage Cordon had just been snapped safely around his newly created suite. "Now what?" asked Dimanche. "I need an identification tab." "You do. And forgeries are expensive and generally crude, as that Huntner woman, Murra Foray, observed."  men. "Expensive, yes. Not crude when we 'do it," "We forge it?" Dimanche was incredulous. "That's what I said. Consider it this way. I've seen my tab a rt)untless number of times. If I tried to draw it as I remember it, it would be inept and wouldn't pass. Nevertheless, that memory is in my mind, recorded in neuronic chains, exact and accurate.' He paused significantly. "You have access to that memory." "At least partially. But what good does that do?" "Visual projector and plastic which will take the imprint. I think hard about the identification as I remember it.You record and feed it back to me while I concentrate on projecting it on the plastic. After we get it down, we change the chemical composition of the plastic. It will then pass everything except destructive analysis, and they don't often do that." Dimanche was silent. "Ingenious," was its comment. "Part of that we can manage, the official engraving, even the electron stamp. That, however, is gross detail. The print of the brain area is beyond our capacity. We can put down what you remember, and you remember what you saw. You didn't see fine enough, though. The general area will be recognizable, but not the fine structure, nor the charges stored there nor their interrelationship." "But we've got to do it." Ca.ssal insisted, pacing about nervously. "With more equipment to probe -- " "Not a chance. I got one Life Stage Cordon on a bluff. If I ask for another, they'll look it up and refuse." "All right," said Dimanche, humming. The mechanical attempt at music made Cassal's head ache. 'T've got an idea. Think about the identificaticn tab." Cassal thought. "Enough," said Dimanche. "Now poke yourself." ' "Where?" "EVferywhere," replied Dimanche irritably. "One place at a time." Cassal did so, though it soon became monotonous. Dimanche stopped him. "Just above your right knee." "What above my right knee?" "The principal access to that part of your brain we're concerned with," said Dimanche. We can't photomeasure your brain the way it was originally done, but we can investigate it remotely. The results will be simplified, naturally. Something like a scale model as compared to the ao original. A more apt comparison might be that of a relief map to an actual locality." "Investigate it remotely?" muttered Cassal. A horrible suspicion touched his consciousness. He jerked away from that touch. "What docs that mean?" "What it sounds like. Stimulus and response. From that I can construct an accurate chart of the proper portion of your brain. Ourprobing instruments will be crude out of necessity, but effective." "I've already visualized those probing instruments," said Cassal worriedly. "Maybe we'd better work first on the official engraving and the electron stamp, while I'm still fresh. I have a feeling... "Excellent suggestion," said Diroanche. Cassal gathered the articles slowly. His lighter would bum and it would also cut. He needed a heavy object to pound with. A violent irritant for the nerve endings. Something to freeze his Hesh... Dimanche interrupted: "There arc also a few glands we've got to pick up. See if there's a stimi in the room." "Stimi? Oh yes, a stimulator. Never use the damned things." But he was going to. The next few hours weren't going to be pleasant. Nor dull, either. Life could be difficult on Godolph. A S soon as the Life Stage Cordon came down, Cassal called for a doctor. The native looked at him professionally. "Is this a part of the Earth life process?" he asked incredulously. Gingerly, he touched the swollen and lacerated leg. Cassal nodded wearily. "A matter of life and death," he croaked. "If it is, then it is," said the doctor, shaking his head. "I, for one. am glad to be a Godolphian." "To each his own habitat," Cassal quoted the motto of the hotel. Godolphians were clumsy, goodnatured caricatures ef seals. There was nothing wrong with their medicine, however. In a matter of minutes he was feeling better. By the time the doctor left, the swelling had subsided and the open wounds were fast closing. Eagerly, he examined the identification tab. As far as he could tell, it was perfect. Wlat the scanner would reveal was, of course, another matter. He had to ' cheek that as best he could with-" out exposing himself. Services came up to the suite right after he laid the intercom down. A machine was placed over his head and the identification slipped into the slot. The code on the tab was noted; the machine hunted and found the corresponding brain area. Structure was mapped, impulses recorded, scrambled, converted into a ray of light which danced over a film. The identification tab was similarly recorded. There was now a means of comparison. Fingerprints cou'd be duplicated -- that is, if the race in question had fingers. Every intelligence, however much it differed from its neighbors, had a brain, and tampering with that brain was easily detected. Each identification tab carried a psychometric number which corresponded to the total personality. Alteration of any part of the brain could only subtract from personality index. The technician removed the identification and gave it to Cassal. "Where shall I send the strips?" "You don't," said Cassal. "I have a private message to go with them." "But that will invalidate the process." "I know. This isn't a formal contract." Removing the two strips and handing them to Cassal, the technician wheeled the machine away. After due thought, Cassal composed the message. Travelers Aid Bureau Wurra Foray, first counselor: If you were considering another identification tab for me, don't. As you can SM, I've located the missing item. He attached the message to the strips and dropped them into the communication chute. away when the answer came. Hastily he finished and wrapped himself, noting but not approving the amused glint in her eyes as she watched. His morals were his own, wherever he went. "Denton. Cassal," she said. "A wonderful job. The two strips were in register within one per cent The best previous forgery I've seen was six per cent, and that was merely a lucky accident. It couldn't be duplicated. Let me congratulateyou." His dignity was professional. "I wish you weren't so fond of that word 'forgery.' I told you I mislaid the tab. As soon as I found it, I sent you proof. I want to do anything I can to speed up the process." Her laughter tinkled. "You don't have to tell me how you did it or where you got it. I'm inclined to think you made it. You understand that I'm not concerned with legality as such. From time to time the agency has to furnish missing documents. If there's a better way than we have, I'd like to kno.w it." He sighed and shook his head. For some reason, his heart was beating fast. He wanted to say more, but there was nothing to say. When he failed to respond, she leaned toward him. "Perhaps you'll discuss this with m". At greater length." "At the agency?" She looked at him in surprise. "Have you been sleeping? The agency is closed for the day. The first counselor can't work all the time, you know." Sleeping? He grimaced at the remembrance of the self-administered beating. No, he hadn't been sleeping. He brushed the thought aside and boldly named a place. Dinner was acceptable. Dimanche waited until the screen was dark. The words were carefully chosen. "Did you notice," he asked, "that there was no apparent change in clotliing and makeup, yet she seemed younger, more attractive?" "I didn't think you could trace her that far." "I can't. I looked at her through your eyes." "Don't trust my reaction." advised Cassal. "It's likely to be subjective." "I don't," answered Dimanche. "It is." Cassal hummed thoughtfully. Dimanche was a business neurological instrument. It didn't follow that it was an expert in human psychology.  coming toward him. Centerof-the-Galaxy fashion. Decadent, of course, or maybe ultra-civili#ed. As an Outsider, he wasn't sure which. Whatever it was. it did to the humaq body what should have been done long ago. And this body wasn't exactly human. The subtle skirt of proportions betrayed it as an offshoot or deviation from the human race. Some of the new sub races stacked up against the original stock much in thasame way CroMagnons did against Neanderthals, in beauty, at least. Dimanche spoke a single syllable and subsided, an event Cassal didn't notice. His consciousness was focused on another discovery: the woman was Murra Foray. He knew vaguely that the first counselor was not necessarily what she had seemed that first time at the agency. That she was capable of such a metamorphosis was hard to believe, though pleasant to accept. His attitude must have shown on his face. "Please," said Murra Foray. "I'm a Huntmr. We're adept at camouflage." "Huntner," he repeated blankly. "I knew that. But what's a Huntner?" She wrinkled her lovely nose at the question. 'T didn't expect you to ask that. I won't answer it now." She came closer. "I thought you'd ask which was the camouflage -- the person you see here, or the one at the Bureau?" He never remembered the reply he made. It must have been satisfactory, for she smiled and drew her fragile wrap closer. The reservations were waiting. Dtmanche seized the opportunity to speak. "There's something phony about her. I don't understand it and I don't like it." "You," said Cassal. "are a machine. You don't have to like it." ' "That's what I mean. You have to like it. You have no choice." questioningly. Cassal hurried to her side. The evening passed swiftly. Food that he ate and didn't taste. Music he heard and didn't listen to. Geometric light fugues that were seen and not observed. Liquor that he drank -- and here the sequence ended, in the complicated chemistry of Godolphian stimulants. Cassal reacted to that smooth liquid, though his physical reaction! were not slowed. Certain mental centers were depressed, others left wide open, subject to acceleration at whatever speed he dv-manded. Murra Foray, in his eyes at least, might look like a dream, the kind men have and never talk about. She was. however, intere'.ed solely in her work, or so it seemed. she said, toying with a drink, "if you like rain. The natives seem happy enough. But the Galaxy is big and there are lots of strange planets in it, each of which seems ideal to those who are adapted to it, I don't have to tell you what happens when people travel. They get stranded. It's not the time spent in actual flight that's important: It's waiting for the right ship to show up and then having all the necessary documents. Believe me, that can be important, as you found out." He nodded. He had. "That's the origin of Travelers Aid Bureau." she continued. "A loose organization, propagated mainly by example. Sometimes it's called Star Travelers Aid. It may have other names. The aim, however, is always the same: to see that stranded persons get where they want to go." She looked at him wistfully, appealingly, "That's why I'm interested in your method of creating identification tabs. It's the thing most commonly lost. Stolen, if you prefer the truth." She seemed to anticipate his question. "How can anyone use another's identification? It can be done under certain circumstances. By neural lobotomy, a portion of one brain may be made to match, more or less exactly, the code area of another brain. The person operated #'n suffers a certain loss of function, of course. How great that loss is depends on the degree of similarity between the two brain areas before the opera tion took place." She ought to know, and he was inclined to believe her. Still, it didn't sound feasible. "You haven't accounted for the psychometric index," he said. "I thought you'd see it. That's diminished, too." Logical enough, though not a pretty picture. A genius could always be made into an average man or lowered to the level of an idiot. There was no operation, however, that could raise an idiot to the level of a genius. The scramble for the precious identification tabs went on. from the higher to the lower, a game of musical chairs with grim overtones. She smiled gravely. "You haven't answered my implied question." The company that employed him wasn't .anxious to let the secret of Dimanche get out. They didn't sell the instrument; they made it for their own use. IJ was an advantage over their competitors they intended to keep. Even on his recommendation, they wouldn't sell to the agency. Moreover, it wouldn't help Travelers Aid Bureau if they did. Since she was first counselor, it was probable that she'd be the one to use it. She couldn't make identification for anyone except herself, and then only if she developed exceptional skill. The alternative was to surgery it in and out of whoever needed it. When that happened, secrecy was gone. Travelers couldn't be trusted. pealing idea, but I'm afraid I can't help you." "Meaning you won't." This was intriguing. Now it was the agency, not he, who wanted help. "Don't overplay it," cautioned Dimanche, who had been consistently silent. She leaned forward attentively. He experienced an uneasy moment. Was it possible she had noticed his private conversation? Of course not. Yet -- "Please," she said, and the tone allayed his fears, "There's an emergency situation and I've got to attend to it. Will you go with me?" She smiled understandingly at his quizzical expression. "Travelers Aid is always having emergencies." She was rising. "It's too late to go to the Bureau. My place has a number of machines with which I keep in touch with the spaceport." "I wonder," said Dimanche puzzledly. "She doesn't subvocalize at all. I haven't been able to get a line on her. I'm certain she didn't receive any sort of call. Be careful. This might be a trick." "Interesting," said Cassal. He wasn't in the mood to discuss it. Her habitation was luxurious, though Cassal wasn't impressed. Liixury was found everywhere in the Universe. Huntner women weren't. He watched as she adjusted the machines grouped at one side of the room. She spoke in a low voice; he couldn't distinguish words. She actuated levers, pressed buttons: impedimfiita of communication. At last she finished. "I'm tired. Win you wait till I change?" Inarticulately, he nodded. "I think her 'emergency' was a fake," said Dimanche flatly as soon as she left. 'Tm positive she wa'in't operating the communicator. She merely went through the motifs." "Motions," murmured Cassal dreamily, leaning back. "And what motions." "'I've been watching her," said Dimanche. "She frightens me." "I've been watching her, too. Maybe in a different way." "Get out of here while you can." warned Dimanche. "She's dangerous." sidered it. Dimanche had never failed him. He ought to follow that advice. And yet there was another explanation. "Look," said Cassal. "A machine is a machine. But among humans there are men and women. What seems dangerous to you may be merely a pattern of normal behavior . , ." He broke off. Murra Foray had entered. Strictly from the other side of the Galaxy, which she was. A woman can be slender and still be womanly beautiful, without being obvious about it. Not that Murra disdained the obvious, technically. But he could see through technicalities. The tendons in his hands ached and his mouth was dry, though not with fear. An urgent ringing pounded in his ears. He shook it out of his head and got up. She came to him. The ringing was still in his ears. It wasn't a figment of imagination; it was a real voice -- that of Dimanche, howling: "Huntner! It's a word variant. In their language it means Hunter. She can hear me" "Hear you?" repeated Cassal vacantly. She was kissing him. "A descendant of carnivores. An audio sensitive. She's been listening to you and me all the time." "Of course I have, ever since the first interview at the bureau." said Murra. "In the beginning I couldn't see what value it was, but you convinced me." She laid her hand gently over his eyes. "I #  hate to do this to you. dear, but I've got to have Dimanclie." She had been smothering him with caresses. Now, deliberately, she began smothering him in actuality. Cassal had thought he was an athlete. For an Eaithman, he was. Murra Foray, however, was a Huntner, which meant hunter -- a descendant of incredibly strong carnivores. He didn't have a chance. He knew that when he couldn't budge her hands and he fell into the airless blackness of space. awakened. He wished he hadn't. He turned over and, though he tried hard not to. promptly woke up again. His mind was panicked and disturbed. About what, he wasn't sure. He sat up shakily and held his roaring head in his hands. He ran aching fingers through his hair. He stopped. The lump behind his car was gone. "Dimanchc!" he called, and looked at his abdomen. There was a thin scar, healing visibly before his eyes. "Dimanchc!" he cried again. "Dimanche!" There was no answer. Dimanche was no longer with him. He staggered to his feet and stared at the wall. She'd been kind enough to return him to his own rooms. At length he gathered enough strength to rummage through his belongings. Nothing was missing. Money, identification -- all were there. He could go to the police. He grimaced as he thought of it. The neighborly Godolphian police were hardly a match for the Huntner; she'd fake them out of their skins. He couldn't prove she'd taken DImanche. Nothing else normally considered valuable was missing. Besides, there might even be a local prohibition against Dimanche. Not by name, of course; but they could dig up an ancient ordinance -- invasion of privacy or something like that. Anything would do if it gave them an opportunity to confiscate the device for intensive study. For the police to believe his story was the worst that could happen. They might locate Dimanchc, but he'd never get it. He smiled bitterly and the effort hurt. "Dear," she had called him as she had strangled and beaten him into unconsciousness. Aft(hTvard singing, very likely, as she had sliced the little instrument out of him. He could picture her not very remote ancestors springing from cover and overtaking a fleeing herd -- No use pursuing that ling of thouglit. Why did she want Dimanche? She had hinted that the agency wasn't always concerned with legality as such. He could believe . her. If she wanted it for making identification tabs, she'd soon find that it was useless. Not that that was much comfort -- she wasn't likely to return Dimanche after she'd made that discovery. F or that matter, what was the purpose of Travelers Aid Bureau? It was a front for another kind of activity. Philanthropy had nothing to do with it. If he still had possession of Dimanche, he'd be able to find out. Everything seemed to hinge on that. With it, he was nearly a sierman, able to hold his own in practically all situations -- anything that didn't involve a Huntner woman, that is. Without it -- well, Tunney #I was still far away. Even if he should manage to get there without it, his mission on the planet was certain to fail. He dismissed the idea of trying to recover it immediately from Muirra Foray. She was an audioaensitive. At twenty feet, unaided, she could hear a heartbeat, the internal noise muscles made in sliding over each other. With Dimanche. she could hear electrons rustling. As an antagonist zz she was altogether too formidable. ing, wincing as he did so. The alternative was to make another Dimanche.  he could. It would be a tough job even for a neuronic expert familiar with the process. He wasn't that expert, but it still had to be done. The new instrument would have to be better than the original. Maybe not such a slick machine, but more comprehensive. More wallop. He grinned as he thought hopefully about giving Murra Foray a surprise. Ignoring his aches and pains, he went right to work. With money not a factor, it was an easy matter to line up the best electronic and neuron concerns on Godolph. Two were put on a standby bas. When he gave them plans, they were to rush construction at all possible speed. Each concern was to build a part of the new instrument. Neither part was of value without the other. The slow-thinking Godolphians weren't likely to make the necessary mental connection between the seemingly unrelated projects. He retired to his suite and began to draw diagrams. It was harder than he thought. He knew the principles, but the actual details were far more complicated than he remembered. Functionally, the Dimanche Instrument was divided into three main phases. There was a brain and memory unit that operated much as the human counterpart did. Unlike the human brain, however, it had no body to control, hence more of it was availa b I e for thought processes. Entirely neuronic in construction, it was far smaller than an electronic brain of the same capacity. The second function was electronic, akin to radar. Instead of material objects, it traced and recorded distant nerve impulses. It could count the heartbeat, measure the rate of respiration, was even capable of approximate analysis of the contents of the bloodstream. Properly focused on the nerves of tongue, lips or larynx, it transmitted that data back to the neuronic brain, which then reconstructed it into speech. Lip reading, after a fashion, carried to the ultimate. Finally, there was the voice of Dimanche. a speaker under the control of the neuronic brain. For convenience of installation in the body, Dimanche was packaged in two units. The larger package was usually surgeried into the abdomen. The small one, containing the speaker, was attachecTTo the skull just behind the eui. It worked by bone conduction, allowing silent communication between operator and instrument. A real convenience. It wasn't enough to know this, as Cassal did. He'd talked to the company experts, had seen the symbolical drawings, the plans for an improved version. He needed something better than the best though, that had been planned. The drawback was this: Dimanche was powered directly by the nervous system of the body in which it was housed. Against Murra Foray, he'd be overmatched. She was stronger than he physically, probably also in the production of nervous energy. One solution was to make available to the new instrument a larger fraction of the neural currents of the body. That was dangerous -- a slight miscalculation and the user was dead. Yet he had to have an instrument that would overpower her. Cassal rubbed his eyes wearily. How could he find some way of supplying additional power? Abruptly. Ca.ssal sat up. That was the way, of course -- an auxiliary power pack that need not le surgeried into his body, extra power that he would use only in emergencies. Neuronics. Inc., had never done this, had never thought that such an instrument would ever be necessary. They didn't need to overpower their customers. They merely wanted advance informa#f tion via subvocali # cd thoughts. It was easier for Cassal to conceive this idea than to engineer #'. At the end of the first day, he knew it would be a slow process. Twice # postponed deadlines to the manufacturing concerns he'd engaged. He locked himself in his rooms and took Anti-Sleep against the doctor's vigorous protests. In one week he had the necessary drawings, crude but legible. An expert would have to make innumerable corrections, but the intent was plain. One week. During that time Murra Foray would be growing hourly more proficient in the use of Dimanchc. expert groggily, seventy-two hours sleep still clogging his rcactns. Not that he hadn't needed sleep after that week. The Godolphian showed him proudly through the shops, though he wasn't at all interested in their achievements. The only noteworthy aspicct was the grand scale of their architecture. "We did it, though I don't think we'd have taken the job if we'd known how hard it was going to be." the neuronics expert chattered. "It works exactly as you specified. We had to make substitutions, of course, but you understand that was inevitable." He glanced anxiously at Cassal, who nodded. That was to be expected. Components that were common on Earth wouldn't necessarily be available here. Still, any expert worth his pay could always make the proper combinations and achieve the same results. Inside the lab, Cassal frowned. "I thought you were keeping my work separate. What is this planetary drive doing here?" The Godolphian spread his broad hands and looked hurt. "Planetary drive?" He tried to laugh. "This is the instrument you ordered!" Cassal started. It was supposed to fit under a flap of skin behind his ear. A Three World saurian couldn't carry it. He turned savagely on the expert. "I told you it had to be small." "But it is. I quote your orders exactly: Tm not familiar with your system of measurement, but make it tiny, very tiny. Figure the size you think it will have to be and cut it in half. And than cut that in half.' This is the fraction remaining." It certainly was. Cassal glanced at the Godolphian's hands. Excellentfor swimming. No wonder they built on a grand scale. Broad, blunt, webbed hands weren't exactly suited for precision work. Valueless. Completely valueless. He knew now what he would find at the other lab. He shook his head in dismay, personally saw to it that the instrument was destroyed. He paid for the work and retrieved the plans. Back in his rooms again, he sat and thought. It was still the only solution. If the Godolphians couldn't do it, he'd have to find some race that could. He grabbed the intercom and jangled it savagely. In half an hour he had a dozen leads. The best seemed to be the Spirella. A small, insectlike race, about three feet tall, they were supposed to have excellent manual dexterity, and verc technically advanced. They sounded as if they were acquainted with the necessary fields. Three lightyears away, they could be reached by readily available local transportation within the day. Their idea of what was small was likely to coincide with his. He didn't bother to pack. The suite would remain his headquarters. Home was where his enemies were. He made a mental correction -- enemy. TE rubbed his sensitive ear, grateful for the discomfort. His stomach was sore, but it wouldn't be for long, The Spirella had made the new instrument just as he had wanted it. They had built an even better auxiliary power unit than he had specified. He fingered the flat cases in his pocket. In an emergency, he could draw on these, whereas Murra Foray would be limited to the energy in her nervous system. What he had now was hardly the same instrument. A Military version of it, jierhaps. It didn't seem right to use the same name. Call it something staunch and crisp, suggestive of raw power. Manchc. As good a name as any. Manche against Dimanche, Cassal against a queen. He swung confidently along the walkway beside the transport tide. It was raining. He decided to test the new instrument. The Godolphian across the way bent double and wondered why his knees wouldn't work. They had suddenly become swollen and painful to move. Maybe it was the climate. And maybe it wasn't, thought Cassal. Eventually the pain would leave, but he hadn't meant to be so rough on the native. He'd have to watch how he used Manche. He scouted the vicinity of Travelers Aid Bureau, keeping at least one building between him and possible detection. Purely precautionary. There was no indication that Murra Foray had spotted him. For a Huntner, she wasn't very alert, apparently. He sent Manche out on exploration at minimum strength. The electronic guards which Dimanche had spoken of were still in place. Manche went through easily and didn't disturb an electron. Behind the guards there was no trace of the first counselor. He went closer. Still no warning of danger. The same old technician shuffled in front of the entrance. A horrible thought hit him. It was easy enough to verify. Another "reorganization" had taken place. The new sign read: of Need Dclly Morlinbras, first counselor Cassal leaned against the buildunable to understand what it was that frightened and bewildered him. Then it gradually became, if not clear, at least not quite so muddy. been printed on the card in the money clip that his assailant in the alley had left behind, Cassal had naturally interpreted it as an order to the thug. It wasn't, of course. The first time Cassal had visited the Travelers Aid Bureau, it had been in the process of reorganization. The only purpose of the reorganization, he realized now, had been to change the name so he wouldn't translate the word on the slip Into the original initials of the Bureau. Now it probably didn't matter any more whether or not he knew, so the name had been changed back to Star Travelers Aid BuThat, he saw bitterly, was why Murra Foray had been so positive that the identification tab he'd made with the aid of Dimanchc had been a forgery. She had known the man who robbed Cassal of the original one, perhaps had even helped him plan the theft. T hat didn't make sense to Cassal. Yet it had to. He'd suspected the organization of being a racket, but it obviously wasn't. By whatever name it was called, it actually was dedicated to helping the stranded traveler. The question was -- which travelers? There must be agency operatives at the spaceport, checking every likely prospect who arrived, finding out where they were going, whether their papers were in order. Then, just as had happened to Cassal, the prospect was robbed Of his papers so somebody stranded here could go on to that destination ! The shabby, aging technician finished changing the last door sign and hobbled over to Cassal. He peered through the rain and darkness. "You stuck here, tbo?" he quavered. "No," said Cassal with dignity, shaky dignity. "I'm not stuck. I'm here because I want to be." "You're crazy," declared the old man. "I remember -- " Cassal didn't wait to find out what it was he remembered. An impossible land, perhaps, a planet which swings in perfect orbit around an ideal sun. A continent which reared a purple mountain range to hold up a honey sky. People with whom anyone could relax easily and without worry or anxiety. In short, his own native world from which, at night, all the constellations were familiar. Somehow. Cassal managed to get back to his suite, tumbled wearily onto his bed. The showdown wasn't going to take place. Everyone connected with the agency -- including Murra Foray -- had been "stuck here" for one reason or another: no identification tab, no money, whatever it was. That was the staff of the Bureau, a pack of desperate castaways. The "philanthropy" extended to them and nobody else. They grabbed their tabs and money from the likeliest travelers, leaving them marooned here -- and they in turn had to join the Bureau and use the same methods to continue their journeys through the Galaxy. It was an endless belt of stranded travelers robbing and stranding other travelers, who then had to rob and strand still others, and so on and on...  of catching up with Murra Foray. She had used the time -- and Dimanche --  to create her own identification tab and escape. She was going back to Kettikat, home of the Huntners, must already be light-years away. Or was she? The signs on the Bureau had just been changed. Perhaps the ship was still in the spaceport, or cruising along below the speed of light. He shrugged defeatedly. It would do him no good; he could never get on board. He got up suddenly on one elbow. He couldn't, but Manche could! Unlike his old instrument, it could operate at tremendous distances, its power no longer dependent only on his limited nervous energy. With calculated fury, he let Manche strike out into space. "There you are!" exclaimed Murra Foray. "I thought you could do it." "Did you?" he asked coldly. "Where are you now?" "Leaving the atmosphere, if you can call the stuff around this planet an atmosphere." "It's not the atmosphere that's bad," he said as nastily as he could. "It's the philanthropy." "Please don't feel that way" she appealed. "Huntners are rather unusual people, I admit, but sometimes even we need help. I had to have Dimanche and I took it." Her amusement was strange; it held a sort of sadness. "I didn't hurt you. I couldn't. You were too cute', like a -- well, the animal native to Kettikat that would be called a teddy bear on Earth. A cute, lovable teddy bear." "Teddy bear," he repeated, really stung now. "Careful. This f. ' on# may have claws.' "Long claws? Long enough to reach from here to Kettikat?" She was laughing, but it sounded tin'n and wistful. Munche struck out at Cassal's unsjxjken command. The laughter was canceled. "Now you've done it," said DiDimanche investigated. "Of course not. A little thing like that wouldn't hurt her. Her nerve system is marvelous. I think it could carry current for a city. Beautiful!" 'Tin aware of the beauty, said Cassal. manche. "She's out cold." There was no reason for remorse; it was strange that he felt it. His throat was dry. "So you, too, can communicate with me. Through Manche, of course. I built a wonderful instrument, didn't I?" "A fearful one," said Dimanche ternly. "She's unconscious."  "I heard you the first time.' Cassal hesitated. "Is she dead?" A N awkward silence followed. Dimanche broke it. "Now that I know the facts. I'm proud to be her chosen instrument. Her need was greater than yours." Cassal growled, "As first counselor. she had access to every -- " "Don't interrupt with your half truths," said Dimanche. "Huntners are special; their brain structure. too. Not necessarily better, just different. Only the auditory #  and visvial centers of their brains resemble that of man. You can guess the results of even superficial tampering with those parts of her mind. And stolen identification would involve lobotomy." He could imagine? Cassal shook his head. No. he couldn't, A blinded and deaf Murra Foray would not go back to the home of the Huntners. According to hei racial conditioning, a sightless young tiger should creep away and die. Again there was silence. "No. she's not pretending unconsciousness," announced Dimanche. "For a moment I thought -- but never mind." The conversation was lasting longer than he expected. The .ship must be obsolete and slow. There were still a few things he wanted trfind out. if there was time. "When are you going on Drive?" he asked. "We've been on it for some time," answered Dimanche. "Repeat that!" said Cassal, stunned. 'T said that we've been on faster-than-light drive for some time. Is there anything wrong with that?" Nothing wrong with that at all. Theoretically, there was only one means of communicating with a ship hurtling along faster than fight, and that way hadn't been invented. Hiidn'i been unfil he had put together the instrument he called Manche. Unwittingly, he had created far more than he intended. He ought to have felt elated. Dimanche interrupted bis thoughts. 'T suppose you .know what she thinks of you." 'She made it plain enough." said Cassal wearily. "A teddy bear. A brainless, childish toy." "Among the Huntners, women are vigorous and aggressive," said Dimanche. The voice grew weaker as the ship, already light-years away, slid into unfathomable distances. "Where words are concerned. morals are very strict. For instance, 'dear' is never used unless the person means it. Huntner nien are weak and not overburdened with intelligence." The voice was barely audible, but it continued; "The principal romantic figure in the dreams of women... Dimanche failed altogether. "Manche!" cried Cassal. Manche responded with everything it had... is the teddy bear." The elation that had been missing, and the triumph, came now. It was no time for hesitation, and Cassal didn't hesitate. Their actions had been directed against each other, but their emotions, which each had tried to ignore, were real and strong. The gravitor dropped him to the ground floor. In a few minutes. Cassal was at the Travelers Aid Bureau. Correction, Now it was Star Travelers Aid Bureau. And. though no one but himself knew it. even that was wrong. Quickly he found the old technician. "There's been a reoianization," said Cassal bluntly. "I want the signs changed." The old man drew Kimseli up. "Who are you?" "I've just elected myself." said Cassal. "I'm the new first counselor." He hoped no one would be foolish enough to challenge him. He wanted an organization that could function immediately, not a hospital full of cripples. The old man thought about it. He was merely a menial, but he had been with the bureau for a long time. He was nobody, nothing. but he could recognize power when it was near him. He wiped his eyes and shambled out into the fine cold rain. Swiftly the new signs went up. S. T. A. with ua Denton Cassal, first counselor ter. Every question cubicle was visible at a glance. In addition there was a special panel, direct from the spaceport, which recorded essential data a)#ut every newly arrived traveler. He could think of a few minor improvements, but he wouldn't have time to put them into effect. He'd mention them to his assistant, a man with a fine, logical mind. Not really first-rate, of course, but well suited to his secondary position. Every member quickly rose or sank t his proper level in this organization, and this one had, without a struggle. Business was dull. The last few ships had brought travelers who were bound for unimaginably dreary destinations, nothing he need be concerned with. He thought about the instrument. It was the addition of power that made the difference. Dimanche plus power equaled Manche. and Manche raised the user far above the level of other men. There was little to fear. But essentially the real value of Manche lay in this -- it was a beginning. Through it, he had communicated with a ship traveling far faster than light. The only one instrument capable of that was instantaneous radio. Actually it wasn't radio, but the old name had stuck to it. Manche was really a very primitive model of instantaneous radio. It was crude; all first steps were. Limited in range, it was practically valueless for that purpose now. Eventually the range would be extended. Hitch a neuronic manufactured brain to human one, add the power of a tiny atomic battery, and Manche was created. Tl)e last step was his share of the invention. Or maybe the credit belonged to Murra Foray. If she hadn't stolen Dimanche, it never would have been necessary to put together the new instrument. The stern lines on his face relaxed. Murra Foray. He wondered about the marriage customs of the Huntners. He hoped marriage wa.s a custom on Kettikat. Cassal leaned back; officially, hia mission was complete. There was fto longer any need to go to Tunney #. The scientist he was sent to bring back might as well remain there in obscure arrogance. Cassal knew he should return to Earth immediately. But the Galaxy was wide and there were lots of places to go. Only one he was interested in, though -- Kettikat, as far from the center of the Galaxy as Earth, but in the opposite direction, incredibly far away in terms of trouble and transportation. It would be difficult even for a man who had the services of Manche. Cassal glanced at the board. Someone wanted to go to Zombo. "Delly," he called to his assistant. "Try #. This may be what you want to get back to your own planet," Delly Mortinbras nodded gratefully and cut in. Cassal continued scanning. There was more to it than he imagined, though he was learning fast. It wasn't enough to have identification, money, and a destination. The right ship might come in with standing room only. Someone had to be "persuaded" that Godolph was a cozy little place, as good as any for an unscheduled stopover. It wouldn't change appreciably during his lifetime. There were he had to perfect it, isolate from dependence on the human element, and then there would come the installation. A slow process, even with Murra to help him. Someday he would go back to Earth. He should be welcome. The information he was sending back to his former employers, Neuronics, Inc., would more than compensate them for the loss of Dimanche. Suddenly he was alert. A report had just come in. Once upon a time, he thought tenderly, scanning the report, there was a teddy bear that could reach to Kettikat. With claws -- but he didn't think they would be needed. the Snowball effect Tock power drives on o sewing circle and you can needle the world info the dorndest messl # A LL right." I said, "what IS sociology good jT for?" Wilton Caswell. Ph.D... was head of my Sociology Department, and right then he was mad enough to chew nails. On the office wall behind him were three or four framed documents in Latin that were supposed to be signs of great learning, but I didn't care at that moment if he papered the walls with his degrres. I had been appointed dean and president to see to it that the university made money. I had a job to do, and I meant to do it. He bit off each word with great restraint: "Sociology is the study of social institutions, Mr. Halloway." I tried to make him understand my position. "Look, it's the bigmoney men who are supposed to be contributing to the support of this college. To them, sociology sounds like socialism -- nothing can sound worse than that -- and an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album. We can't appeal to them that way. Come on now." I smiled condescendingly, knowing it would irritate him. "What are  you doing that's worth anything?" He glared at me, his white hair bristling and his nostrils dilated like a war horse about to whinny. I can say one thing for them -- these scientists and professors always keep themselves well under control. He had a book in his hand and I was expecting him to throw it, but he spoke instead: "This department's analysis of institutional accretionby the use of open system mathematics, has been recognized as an outstanding and valuable contribution The words were impressive. whatever they meant, but this still didn't sound like anything that would pull' in money. I interrupted, "Valuable in what way?" He sat down on the edge of his desk thoughtfully, apparently recovering from the shock of being asked to produce something solid for his position, and ran his eyes over the titles of the books that lined his office walls. "Well, sociology has been valuable to business in initiating worker efficiency and group motivation studies, which they now use in management decisions. And, of course, since the depression, Washington has been using sociological studies of ernployment, labor and standards of living as a basis for its general policies of -- " I stopped him with both raised hands. "Please, Professor Caswell! That would hardly be a recommendation. Washington, the New Deal and the present Administration are somewhat touchy subjects to the men I have to deal with. They consider its value debatable, if you know what I mean. If they got the idea that sociology professors are giving advice and guidance -- No, we have to stick to brass tacks and leave Washington out of this. What, specifically, has the work of this specific department done that would make it as worthy to receive money as -- say, a heart disease research fund?" He began to tap the corner of his book absently on the desk, wacthing me. 'Fundamental research doesnt show immediate effects, Mr. Halloway, but its value is recogni # ed." I smiled and took out iny pipe. "All right, tell me about it. Maybe ril recognize its value." Prof. Caswell smiled back tightly. He knew his department was at stake. The other departments were popular with donors and pulled in gift money by scholarships and fellowships, and supported their professors and graduate students by research contracts with the government and industry. Caswell had to sliow a way to make his own department popular -- or else. I couldn't fire him directly, of course, but there are ways of doing it indirectly.  E laid down his book and ran hand over his ruffled hair. "Institutions -- organizations, that is -- " his voice became more resonant: like most professors, when he had to explain something he instinctively slipped into his platform lecture mannerisms, and began to deliver an essay -- "have certain tendencies built into the way they happen to have been organized, which cause them to expand or contract without reference to the needs they were founded to serve." He was becoming flushed with the pleasure of explaining his subject. "All through the ages, it has been a matter of wonder and dismay to men that a simple organization -- such as a church to worship in. or a delegation of weapons to a warrior class merely for defense against an outside enemy -- will either grow insensately and extend its control until it is a tyranny over their whole lives, or, like other organizations set up to serve a vital need, will tend to repeatedly dwindle and vanish, and have to be painfully rebuilt. "The reason can be traced to little quirks in the way they were organized, a matter of positive and negative power feedbacks. Such simple questions as. 'Is there a way a holder of authority in this organization can use the power available to him to increase his power?' provide the key. But it still could not be handled until the complex questions of interacting motives and long-range accumulations of minor effects could somehow be simplified and formulated. In working on the problem, I found that the mathematics of open system, as introduced to biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and George Kreezer, could be used as a base that would enable me to develop a specifically social mathematics, expressing the human factors of intermeshing authority and motives in simple formulas. "By these formulations, it is possible to determine automatically the amount of growth and period of life of any organization. The UN, to choose an unfortunate example, is a shrinker type organization. Its monetary support is not in the hands of those who personally benefit by its governmental activities, but, instead, in the hands of those who would personally lose by any extension and encroachment of its authority on their own. Yet by the use of formula analysis -- " "That's theory," I said. "How about proof?" "My equations are already toeing used in the study of limited-size Federal corforations. Washington -- " I held up my palm again. "Please, not that nasty word again. I mean, where else has it been put into operation? Just a simple demonstration, something to show that it works, that's all." He looked away from me thoughtfully, picked up the book and began to tap it on the desk again. It had some unreadable title and his name on it in gold letters. I got the distinct impression again that he was repressing an urge to hit me with it. He spoke quietly. "All right, ril give you a demonstration. months?" "Certainly, if you can show me something at the end of that time." Reminded of time, I glanced at my watch and stood up. "Could we discuss this over lunch?" he asked. "I wouldn't mind hearing more, but I'm having lunch with some They have to be convinced that by, 'furtherance of research into human ills,' he meant that the money should go to research fellowships for postgraduate biologists at the university, rather than to a medical foundation." "I see you have your problems, too," Caswell said, conceding me nothing. He extended his hand with a chilly smile. "Well, good afternoon, Mr. Halloway. I'm glad we had this talk." I shook hands and left him standing there, sure of his place in the progress of science and the respect of his colleagues, yet seething inside because I, the president and dean, had boorishly demanded that he produce something tangible. I frankly didn't give a hoot if he blew his lid. My job isn't easy. For a crumb of favorable publicity and respect in the newspapers and an annual ceremony in S' # silly costume, I spend the rest of the year going hat in hand, asking politely for money at everyone's door, like a welldressed panhandler, and trying to manage the university on the dribble I get. As far as I was concerned, a department had to support itself or be cut down to what student tuition pays for, which is a handful of overcrowded courses taught by an assistant lecturer. Caswell had to make it work or get out. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to hear what he was going to do for a demonstration. A T lunch, three days later, while we were waiting for our order, he opened a small notebook. "Ever hear of feedback effects?" "Not enough to have it clear." "You know the snowball effect, though." "Sure, start a snowball rolling downhill and it grows." "W?n, now -- " He wrote a short line of symbols on a blank page and turned the notebook around for me to inspect it. "tire's the formula for the snowball process. It's the basic general growth formula -- covers everything." It was a row of little symbols arranged like an algebra equation. One was a concentric spiral going up, like a cross-section of a snowball rolling in snow. That was a growth sign. I hadn't expected to understand the equation, but it was almost as clear as a sentence. I was impressed and slightly intimidated by it. He had already explained enough so that I knew that, if he was right, here was the growth of the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire, the conquests of Alexander and the spread of the smoking habit and the change and rigidity of the unwritten law of styles. "Is it really as simple as that? I asked. "You notice," he said, "that when it becomes too heavy for the cohesion strength of snow, it breaks apart. Now in human terms -- " The chops and mashed potatoes and peas arrived. "Go on," I urged. He was deep in the symbology of human motives and the equations of human behavior in groups. After running through a few different types of grower and shrinker type organizations, we came back to the snowball, and decided to run the test by making something grow. "You add the motives." he said, "and the equation will translate them into organization." "How about a good selfish reason for the ins to drag others into the group -- some sort of bounty St on new members, a cut of their membership fee?" I suggested uncertainly, feeling slightly foolish. "And maybe a reason why the members would lose if any of them resigned, and some indirect way they could use to force each other to stay in." "The first is the chain letter principle," he nodded. "I've got that. The other... He put the symbols through some mathematical manipulation so that a special grouping appeared in the middle of the equation. "That's it." Since I seemed to have the right idea, I suggested some more, and he added some, and juggled them ound in different patterns. We threw out a few that would have made the organization too Complicated, and finally worked out an idyllically simple and deadly little organization setup where joining had all the temptation of buying a sweepstakes ticket, going in deeper was as easy as hanging around a race track, and getting out was like trying to pull free from a Malayan thumb trap. We put our heads closer together and talked lower, picking the best place for the demonstration. "Abington?" "How about Watashaw? I have some student sociological surveys of it already. We cem pick a suitable group from that." "This demonstration has got to be convincing. We'd better pick a little group that no one in his right mind would expect to grow." "There should be a suitable club -- " Picture Professor Caswell, head of the Department of Sociology, and with him the President of the University, leaning across the table toward each other, sipping coffee and talking in conspiratorial tones over something they were writing in a notebook. That was us. male chairman of the Watashaw Sewing Circle. "Today we have guests." She signaled for us to rise, and we stood up, bowing to polite applause and smiles. "Professor Caswell, and Professor Smith." (My alias.) "They are making a survey of the methods and duties of the clubs of Watashaw." We sat down to another ripple of applause and slightly wider smiles, and then the meeting of the Watashaw Sewing Circle began. In five minutes I began to feel sleepy. There were only about thirty people there, and it was a small room, not the halls of Congress, but they discussed their business of collecting and repairing second hand clothing for charity with the same endless boring parliamentary formality. I pointed out to Caswell the member I thought would be the natural leader, a tall, well-built woman in a green suit, with conscious gestures and a resonant, penetrating voice, and then went into a half doze while Caswell stayed awake beside me and wrote in his notebook. After a while the resonant voice roused me to attention for a moment. It was the tall woman holding the floor over some collective dereliction of the club. She was being scathing. I nudged Caswell and murmured, "Did you fix it so that a shover has a better chance of getting into office than a nonshover?" "I think there's a way they could find for it." Caswell whispered back, and went to work on his equation again. "Yes, several ways to bias the elections." "Good. Point them out tactfully to the one you select. Not as if she'd use such methods, but just as an example of the reason why only she can be trusted with initiating the change. Just mention all the personal advantages an unscrupulous person could have." He nodded, keeping a straight and sober face as if we were exchanging admiring remarks about the techniques of clothes repairing, instead of conspiring. After the meeting, Caswell drew the tall woman in the green suit aside and spoke to her confidentially, showing her the diagram of organization we had drawn up. I saw the responsive glitter in the woman's eyes and knew she was hooked. We left the diagram of organization and our typed copy of the new bylaws with her and went off soberly, as befitted two social science experimenters. We didn't start laughing until our car passed the town limits and began the climb for University Heights. If Caswell's equations meant anything at all, we had given that sewing circle more growth drives than the Roman Empire.  out from a very busy schedule to wonder how the test was coming along. Passing Caswell's office, I put my head in. He looked up from a student research  paper he was correcting. "Caswell, about that sewing club business -- I'm beginning to feel the suspense. Could I get an advance report on how it's coming?" "I'm not following it. We're supposed to let it run the full six months." "But I'm curious. Could I get in touch with that woman -- what's her name?" "Searles. Mrs. George Searles." "Would that change the re suits?" "Not in the slightest. If you want to graph the membership rise, it should be going up in a log curve, probably doubling every so often." I grinned. "If it's not rising, you're fired." He grinned back. "If it's not rising, you won't have to fire me -- I'll burn my books and shoot myself."  I returned to my office and put in a call to Watashaw. While I was waiting for the phone to be answered, I took a piece of graph paper and ruled it off into six sections, one for each month. After the phone had rung in the distance for a long time, a servant answered with a bored (jfawl : "Mrs. Searles' residence." I picked up a red gummed star and licked it. "Mrs. Searles, please." "She's not In just now. Could I take a message?" I placed the star at the thirty line in the beginning of the first section. Thirty members they'd started with. "No, thanks. Could you tell me when she'll be back?" "Not until dinner. She's at the meetin'." "The sewing club?" I asked. "No, sf'r, not that thing. There isn't any sewing club any more, not for a long time. She's at the Civic Welfare meeting." Somehow I hadn't expected anything like that. "Thank you," I said and hung up. and after a moment noticed I was holding a box of red gummed stars in my hand. I closed it and put it down on top of the graph of membership in the sewing circle. No more members... Poor Caswell. The bet between us was ironclad. He wouldn't let me back down on it even if I wanted to. He'd probably quit before I put through the first slow move to fire him. His professional pride would be shattered, sunk without a trace. I remembered what he said about shooting himself. It had seemed funny to both of us at the time, but... What a mess that would make for the university. I had to talk to Mrs. Searles. Perhaps there was some outside reason why the club had disbanded. Perhaps it had not just died. I called back. "This is Professor Smith," I said, giving the alias I had used before. "I called a few minutes ago. When did you say Mrs. Searles will return?" "About six-thirty or seven o'clock." Five hours to wait. And what if Caswell asked me S# what I had found out in the meantime? I didn't want to tell him anything until I had talked it over with that woman Searles first. "Where is this Civic Welfare meeting?" She told me. Five minutes later, I was in my car, heading for Watashaw, driving considerably faster than my usual speed and keeping a careful watch for highway patrol cars as the speedometer climbed. T he town meeting hall and theater was a big place, probably with lots of small rooms for different clubs. I went in through the center door and found myself in the huge central hall where some sort of rally was being held. A political-type rally -- you know, cheers and chants, with bunting already down on the floor, people holding banners, and plenty of enthusiasm and excitement in the air. Someone was making a speech up on the platform. Most of the people there were women. I wondered how the Civic. Welfare League could dare hold its meeting at the same time as a political rally that could puU its members away. The group with Mrs. Searles was probably holding a shrunken and almost memberless meeting somewhere in an Upper room. There probably was a side door that would lead upstairs. While I glanced around, a pretty girl usher put a printed bulletin in my hand, whispering, "Here's one of the new copies." As I attempted to hand it back, she retreated. "Oh. you can keep it. It's the new one. Everyone's supposed to have it. We've just printed up six thousand copies to make sure there'll be enough to last." The tall woman on the platform had been making a driving, forceful speech about some plans for rebuilding Watashaw's slum section. It began to penetrate my mind dimly as I glanced down at the bulletin in my hands. "Civic Welfare League of Watashaw. The United Organization of Church and Secular Charities." That's what it said. Below began the rules of membership. I looked up. The speaker, with a clear, determined voice and conscious, forceful gestures, had entered the homestretch of her speech, an appeal to the civic pride of all citizens of Watashaw. "With a bright and glorious future -- potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill -- potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful -- the best people in the best planned town in the country -- the jewel of the United States." She paused and then leaned forward intensely, striking her . sy clenched hand on the speaker's stand with each word for emphasis. 'AU we need s more members. Now get out there and rectuit!" I finally recognized Mrs. Searles, as an answering sudden blast of sound half deafened me. The crowd was chanting at the top of its lungs: "Recruit! Recruit!" Mrs. Searles stood still at the speaker's table and behind her, seated in a row of chairs, was a group that was probably the board of directors. It was mostly women, and the women began to look vaguely familiar, as if they could be members of the sewing circle. I put my lips close to the ear of the pretty usher while I turned over the stiff printed bulletin on a #iunch. "How long has the League been organized?" On the back of the bulletin was a constitution. She was cheering with the crowd, her eyes sparkling. "I don't know," she answered between cheers. "I only joined two days ago. Isn't it wonderful?" I went into the quiet outer air and got into my car with my skin prickling. Even as I drove away, I could hear them. They were singing some kind of organization song with the tune of "Marching through Georgia." Even at the single glance I had given it, the constitution looked exactly like the one we had given the Watashaw Sewing Circle. All I told Caswell when I got back was that the sewing circle had changed its name and the membership seemed to be rising.  Searles. I placed some red stars on my graph for the first three months. They made a nice curve, rising more steeply as it reached the fourth month. They had picked up their first increase in membership simply by amalgamating with all the other types of charity organizations in Watashaw. changing the club name with each fusion, but keeping the same constitution -- the constitution with the bright promise of advantages as long as there were always new members bein brought in. By the fifth month, the League had added a mutual baby-sitting service and had induced the local school board to add a nursery school to the town service, so as to free more women for League activity. But charity must have been completely organized by then, and expansion had to be in other directions. Some real estate agents evidently had been drawn into the whirlpool early, along with their ideas. The sAjm improvement plans began to blossom and take on a tinge of real estate planning later in the month. The first day of the sixth month, a big two page spread appeared in the local paper of a mass meeting which had approved a full-fledged scheme for slum clearance of Watashaw's shack-town section, plus plans for rehousing, civic building, and rezoning. And good prospects for attracting some new industries to the town, industries which had already been contacted and seemed interested by the privileges offered. And with all this, an arrangement for securing and distributing to the club members alone most of the profit that would come to the town in the form of a rise in the price of building sites and a boom in the building industry. The profit distributing arrangement was the same one that had been built into the organization plan for the distribution of the small profits of membership fees and honorary promotions. It was becoming an openly profitable business. Membership was rising more rapidly now. By the second week of the sixth month, news appeared in the local paper that the club had filed an application to incorporate itself as the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic Development Corporation, and all the local real estate promoters had finished joining en masse. The Mutual Trade part sounded to me as if the Chamber of Commerce was on the point of being pulled in with them, ideas, ambitions and all. I chuckled while reading the next page of the paper, on which a local politician was reported as having addressed the club with a long flowery oration on their enterprise, charity, and civic spirit. He had been made an honorary member. If he allowed himself to be made a full member with its contractual obligations and its lures, if the politicians went into this, too... I laughed, filing the newspaper with the other documents on the Watashaw test. These proofs would fascinate any businessman with the sense to see where his bread was buttered. A businessman is constantly dealing with organizations, including his own, and finding them either inert, cantankerous, or both. Caswell's formula could be a handle to grasp them with. Gratitude alone would bring money into the university in carload lots. T he end of the sixth month came. The test was over and the end reports were spectacular. Caswell's formulas were proven to the hilt. After reading the last newspaper reports, I called him u. "Perfect, Wilt, perfect I can use this Watashaw thing to get you so many fellowships and scholarships and grants for your department that you'll think it's snowing money!" He answered somewhat disinterestedly, "I've been busy working with students on their research papers and marking tests -- not following the Watashaw business at all, I'm afraid. You say the demonstration went well and you're satisfied?" He was definitely putting on a chill. We were friends now, but obviously he was still peeved whenever he was reminded that I had doubted that his theory could work. And he was using its success to rub my nose in the realization that I had been wrong. A man with a string of degrees after his name is just as human as anyone else. Z had needled him pretty hard that first time. "I'm satisfied," I acknowledged. "I was wrong. The formulas work beautifully. Come over and see my file of documents on it if you want a boost for your ego. Now let's see the formula for stopping it." He sounded cheerfil again. "I didn't complicate that organization with negatives. I wanted it to grow. It falls apart naturally when it stops gj;owing for more than two months. It's like the great stock boom before an economic crash. Everyone in it is prosperous as long as the prices just keep going up and new buyers come into the market, but they all knew what would happen if it stopped growing. You remember, we built in as one of the incentives that the members know they are going to lose if membership stops growing. Why, if I tried to stop it now, they'd cut my throat." I remembered the drive and frenzy of the crowd in the one early meeting I had seen. They probably would. "No," he continued. "We'll just let it play out to the end of its tether and die of old age." "When will that be?" "It can't grow past the female population of the town. There are only so many women in Watashaw, and some of them don't like sewing." The graph on the desk before me began to look sinister. Surely Caswell nist have made some provision for -- "You underestimate their ingenuity," I said into the phone. "Since they wanted to expand, they didn't stick to sewing. They went from general charity to social welfare schemes to something that's pretty close to an incorporated government. The name is now the Watashaw Mutual Trade # and Civic Ievclopment Corporation, and they're hUng an application to change it to Civic Property Pool and Social Dividend, membership contractual, open to all. That social dividend sounds like a Technocrat climbed on the band wagon, eh?" While I spoke, I carefully added another red star to the curve above the thousand member level, checking with the newspaper that still lay open on my desk. The curve was definitely some sort of log curve now, growing ntore rapidly with each increase. 'Leaving out practical limitations for a moment, where does the formula say it will stop?" I asked. "When you run out of people to join it. But after all, there are only so many people in Watashaw. It's a pretty small town." office in New York," I said carefully Into the phone, a few weeks later. With my pencil, very carefully, I extended the membership curve from where it was then. After the next doubling, the curve went almost straight up and off the page. Allowing for a lag of contagion from one nation to another, depending on how much their citizens intermingled, I'd give the rest of the world about twelve years. There was a long silence while Caswell probably drew the same graph in his own mind. Then he laughed weakly, "Well, you asked me for a demonstration." That was as good an answer as any. We got together and had lunch in a bar, if you can call it lunch. The movement we started will expand by hook or by crook, by seduction or by bribery or by propaganda or by conquest, but it will expand. And maybe a total world government will be a fine thing -- until it hits the end of its rope in twelve years or so. What happens then, I don't know. But I don't want anyone to pin that on me. From now on, if anyone asks me, I've never heard of Watashaw. Th #th ennivftary World Scionc Fiction Convontion will bo hold at tho Hotol Morrison in Chicago on Awgvst #, #I and Soptombor I, #. You'll moot your favorito YomU got a piece of the moon and full information in roturni Today is Forever Boyle knew there was an onfe feiind the aliens' generosity . , . but he had one of his own! H been on Earth for only m a month," David Locke said, "but already they're driving #r a wedge between ALO and the Social Body that can destroy the Weal overnight. Boyle, it's got to be stopped!" He put his elbows on Moira's antique conversation table and leaned toward the older man, his eyes hot and anxious. "There are only the two of them -- Fermiirig and Santikh; you've probably seen stillsof them on the visinews a hundred times -- and ALO has kept them so closely under cover that we of the Social Body never get more than occasional rumors about what they're really like. But I know from what I overheard that they're carbonstructure oxygenbreathers with a metabolism very much like our own. What affects them physically will affect us also. And the offer they've made Cornelison and Bissell Dorand of Administrative Council is genuine. It amounts to a lot more than simple longevity, because the process can be repeated. In effect, it's -- " "Immortality," Boyle said, and forgot the younger man on the instant. The shock of it as a reality blossomed in his mind with a slow explosion of triumph. It had come in his time, after all, and the fact that the secret belonged to the first interstellar visitors to reach Karth had no bearing whatever on his determination to possess it. Neither had the knowledge that the Alcorians had promised the process only to the highest of government bodies. Administrative Council. The whole of ALO -- Administration, Legislation and Order -- could not keep it from him. "It isn't riht," Locke said heatedly. "It doesn't fit in with what we've been taught to believe, Boyle. We'te still a modified democracy, and the Social Body is the Weal. We can't iermit Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand to take what amounts to immortality for themselves and deny it to the populace. That's tyranny!" The charge brought Boyle out of his preoccupation with a start. For the moment, he had forgotten Locke's presence in Moira's apartment. He had even forgotten his earlier annoyance with Moira for allowing the sophomoric fool visitor's privilege when it was Boyle's week, to the exclusion of the other two husbands in Moira's marital-seven, to share the connubial right with her. But the opportunity tumbled so forcibly into his lap was not one to be handled lightly. He held In check his contempt for Locke and his irritation with Moira until he had considered his windfall from every angle, and had marshalled its possibilities into a working outline of his coup to come. He even checked his lapel watch against the time of Moira's return from the theater before he answered Locke. With characteristic cynicism, he took it for granted that Locke, in his indignation, had already shared his discovery with Moira, and in cold logic he marked her down with Locke for disposal once her purpose was served. Moira had been the most satisfactory of the four women in Boyle's maritalseven. but when he weighed her attractions against the possible immortality ahead, the comparison did not sway his resolution for an instant. Moira, like Locke, would have to go. Y OU'RE sure there was no error?" Boyle asked. "You couldn't have been mistaken?" "I heard it," Locke said stubbornly. He clenched his fists angrily, patently reliving his shock of discovery. "I was running a routine check on Administration visiphone channels -- it's part of my worlas communications technician at ALO -- when I ran across a circuit that had blown its scrambler. Ordinarily I'd have replaced the dead unit without listening to plain-talk longer than was necessary to identify the circuit. But by the time I had it tagged as a Council channel, I'd heard enough from Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand to convince me that I owed it to the Social Body to hear the rest. And now I'm holding a tiger by the tail, because I'm subject to truth-check. That's why I came to you with this. Boyle. Naturally, since you are President of # C T ransplanet Enterprises -- " "I know," Boyle cut in, forestalling digression. Locke's jol), not intrinsically important in itself, still demanded a high degree of integrity and left him open to serum-and-psycho check, as though he were an . actual member of ALO or a politician. 'Tf anyone knew what you've overheard, you'd get a compulsory truth-check, admit your guilt publicly and take an imprisonmept sentence from the Board of Order. But your duty came first, of course. Go on." "They were discussing the Alcorians' offer of longevity when I cut into the circuit. Bissell and Dorand were all for accepting at once, but Cornelison pretended indecision and had to be coaxed. Oh, he came around quickly enough: the three of them arc to meet Fermiirig and Santikh tomorrow morning at nine in the ALO deliberations chamber for their injections. You should have heard them rationalizing that, Boyle. It would have sickened you." 'I know the routine -- they're doing it for the good of the Social Body, of course. What puzzles me is why the Alcorians should give away a secret so valuable." "Trojan horse tactics," Locke said flatly. "They claim to have arrived at a culture pretty much like our own, except for a superior technology and a custom of prolonging the lives of administrators they find best fitted to govern. They're posing as philanthropists by offering us the same opportunity, but actually they're sabotaging our political economy. They know that'thc Social Body won't stand for the Council accepting an immortality restricted to itself. That sort of discrimination would stir up a brawl that might shatter the Weal forever." Deliberately, Boyle fanned the younger man's resentment. "Not a bad thing for those in power. But it is rough on simple members of the Social Body like ourselves, isn't it?" "It's criminal conspiracy," Locke said hotly. "They should be truth-checked and given lifemaximum detention. If we took this to the Board of Order -- " "No. Think a moment and you'll understand why." Boyle had gauged his man, he saw. to a nicety. Locke was typical of this latest generation, packd to the ears with juvenile idealism and social consciousness, presenting a finished product of ALO's golden-rule ideology that was no more difficult to predict than a textbook problem in elementary psychology. To a veteran strategist like Boyle, Locke was more than a handy asset; he was a tool shaped to respond to duty unquestioningly and to cupidity not at all. and therefore an agent more readily amenable than any mercenary could have been. "But I don't understand.' Locke said, puzzled. "Even Administration and Legislation are answerable to Order. It's the Board's duty to bring them to account if necessary." "Administration couldn't possibly confirm itself in power from the beginning without the backing of Order and Legislation," Boyle pointed out. "Cornelison and Bisseil and Dorand would have to extend the longevity privilege to the other two groups, don't you see, in order to protect themselves. And that means that Administrative Council is not alone in this thing -- it's ALO as a body. If you went to the Board of Order with your protest, the report would die on the spot. So, probably, would you." amusement at Locke's slack stare of horror. The seed was planted; now to see how readily the fool would react to a logical alternative, and how useful m his reaction he might be. T know precisely how you feel," Boyle said. "It goes against our conditioned grain to find officials venal in this day of compulsory honesty. But it's nothing new; I've met with similar occas!ocks in my own Transplanet business, Locke." He might have added that those occasions had been of his own devising and that they had brought him close more than once to a punitive truth-clicck. The restraining threat of serumandpsycho had kept him for the greater part of his adult life in the ranks of the merely rich, a potential industrial czar balked of financial empire by the necessity of maintaining a strictly legal status. Locke shook himself like a man waking out of nightmare. "I'm glad I brought this problem to a man of your experience," he said frankly. "I've got great confidence in your judgment. Boyle, something I've learned parfty from watching you handle Transplanct Enterprises and partly from talking with Moira." Boyle gave him a speculative look, feeling a return of his first acid curiosity about Locke and Moira. "I had no idea that Moira was so confidential outside her marital-seven," he said dryly. "She's not by any chance considering a fourth husband, is she?" "Of course not. Moira's not unctfnventiortal. She's been kind to me a few times, yes. but that's only her way of making a practical check against the future. After all, she's aware it can't be more than a matter of --  He broke off. too embarrassed by his unintentional blunder to see the fury that discolored the older man's face. The iron discipline that permitted Boyle to bring that fury under control left him, even in his moment of outrage, with a sense of grim pride. He was still master of himsalf and of Transplanet Enterprises. Given fools enough like this to work with and time enough to use them, and he would be master of a great deal more. Immortality, for instance. "She's quite right to be provident. of course," he said equably. "I am getting old. I'm past the sixty-mark, and it can't be more than another year or two before the rejuvenators refuse me further privilege and I'm dropped from the marital lists for good." "Damn it, Boyle, I'm sorry," Locke said. "I didn't mean to offend you." The potential awkwardness of the moment was relieved by a soft chime from the annunciator. The apartment entrance dilated, admitting Moira. She came to them directly, slender and poised and supremely confident of her dark young beauty, her ermine wrap and high-coiled hair glistening with stray raindrops that took the light like diamonds. The two men stood up to greet her, and #  Boyle could not miss the subtle feminine response of her to Locke's eager, athletic youth. If she's planning to fil! my place in her marital-seven with this crewcut fool, Boyle thought with sudden malice, then she's in for a rude shock. And a Gnal one. "I couldn't enjoy a line of the play for thinking of you two patriots plotting here in my apartment," Moira said. "But then the performance was shatteringly dull, anyway." Her boredom was less than convincing. When she had hung her wrap in a closet to be aerated and irradiated against its next wearing, she sat between Boyle and Locke with a little sigh of anticipation. "Have you decided yet what to do about this dreadful immortality scheme of the Councils, darlings?" B oyle went to the auto-dispenser in a corner and brought back three drinks, frosted and effervescing. They touched rims. Moira sipped at her glass quietly, waiting in tacit agreement with Locke for the older man's opinion. "This longevity should be available to the Social Body as well as to ALO," Boyle said. "It's obvious even to non-politicals like Locke and myself that, unless equal privilege is maintained, there's going to be the devil to pay and the Weal will suffer. It's equally obvious that the Alcorians' offer is made with, the deliberate intent of undermining our system through dissension." "To their own profit, of course," Locke put in. "Divide and conquer..." "Whatever is to be done must be done quickly," Boyle said. "It would take months to negotiate a definitive plebiscite, and in that time the Alcorians would have gone home again without treating anyone outside ALO. And there the matter would rest. It seems to be up to us to get hold of the longevity process ourselves and to broadcast it to the public." "The good of the Body is the preservation of the Weal," Locke said sententiously. "What do you think, Moira?" Moira touched her lips with a delicate pink tongue-tip, considering. To Boyle, her process of thought was as open as a plaintalk , teletape ; immortality for the Social Body automatically meant immortality for Moira and for David Locke. Both young, with an indefinite guarantee of life . , "Yes," Moira said definitely. "If some have it. then all should. But how, Philip?" "You're both too young to remember this, of course," Boyle sdid, but until the # Truthcheck Act, there was a whole field of determinative action applicable to cases like this. It's a simple enough problem if we plan and execute it properly." His confidence was not feigned; he had gone over the possibilities already with the swift ruthlessness that had made him head of Transplanet Enterprises, and the prospect of direct action excited rather than dismayed him. Until now he had skirted the edges of illegality with painstaking care, never stepping quite over the line beyond which he would be liable to the disastrous truth-check, but at this moment he felt himself invincible, above retaliation. "This present culture is a pragmatic compromise with neceity," Boyle said. "It survives because it answers natural problems that couldn't be solved under the old systems. Nationalism died out. for example, when we set up a universal government, because everyone belonged to the same Social Body and had the same Weal to consider. Once we realized that the good of the Body is more important than personal privacy, the truth-check made ordinary crime and political machination obsolete. Racial antagonisms vanished under deliberate amalgamation. Monogamy gave way to the maritalseven, settling the problems of ego clash, incompatability, promiscuity and vice that existed before. It also settled the disproportion between the male and female population. "But stability is vulnerable. Since it never changes, it cannot stand against an attack either too new or too old for its immediate experience. So if we're going after this Alcorian longevity process. I'd suggest that we choose a method so long out of date that there's no longer a defense against it. We' It take it by force!" TT amused him to sec Moira and Locke accept his specious logic without reservation. Their directness was all but childlike. The thought of engaging personally in the sort of cloak-andsword adventure carried over by the old twentieth-century melodrama tapes was, as he had surmised, irresistible to them. "I can see how you came to be head of Transplanet, Boyle." Locke said enviously. "What's your plan, exactly?" "I've a cottage in the mountains that will serve as a base of operations," Boyle explained. "Moira can wait there for us in the morning while you and I take a 'copter to ALO. According to your information, Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand will meet the Alcorians in the deliberations chamber at nine o'clock. We'll sleep-gas the lot of them, take the longevity process and go. There's no formal guard at Administration, or anywhere else, nowadays. There'll be no possible way of tracing us." "Unless we're truth-checked," Locke said doubtfully. "If any one of us should be pulled in for serum-and-psycho, the whole affair will come out. The Board of Order -- " "Order won't know whom to suspect," Boyle said patiently. "And they can't possibly check the whole city. They'd have no way of knowing even that it was someone from this locale. It could be anyone, from anywhere." Moira had exhausted her fund of excited small talk. Boyle went over the entire plan again from inception to conclusion. Lying awake in the darkness with only the sound of Moira's even breathing breaking the stillness, he let his practical fancy run ahead. Years, decades, generations -- what were they? To be by relative standards undying in a world of ephemerae, with literally nothing that he might not have or do... He dreamed a dream as old as man, of stretching today into forever. Immortality. T he coup next morning was no more difficult, though bloodier, than Boyle had anticipated. At nine shafp. he left David Locke at the controls of his helicar on the sun-bright roof landing of ALO, took a self-service elevator down four floors and walked calmly to the deliberation chamber where Administrative Council met with the visitors from Alcor. He was armed for any eventuality with an electronic freeze-gun, a sleep-capsule of anesthetic gas, and a nut-sized incendiary bomb capable of setting afire an ordinary building. His first hope of surprising the Council in conference was dashed in the antechamber, rendering his sleep-bomb useless. Dorand was a moment late; he came in almost on Boyle's heels, his face blank with astonishment at finding an intruder ahead of him. The freeze-gun gave him no time for questions. "Quiet," Boyle ordered, and drove the startled Councilor ahead of him into the deliberations chamber. , He was just in time. Cornelison had one bony arm already bared for the longevity injection; Bissell sat in tense anticipation of his elder's reaction; the Alcorian, Fermiirig, stood at Comelison's side with a glittering hypodermic needle in one of his four threefingered hands. For the moment, a sudden chill of apprehension touched Boyle. There should have been two Alcorians. "Quiet," Boyle said again, this time to the group. "You, Fermiirig, where is your mate?" The Alcorian replaced the hypodermic needle carefully in its case, his triangular face totally free of any identifiable emotion and clasped both primary and secondary sets of hands together as an Earthman might have raised them overhead. His eyes, doesoft and gentle, considered Boyle thoughtfully. "Santikh is busy with other matters," Fermiirig said. His voice was thin and reedy, precise of enunciation, but hissing faintly on the aspirants. "I am to join her later -- " his gentle eyes went to the Councilors, gauging the gravity of the situation from their tensity, and returned to Boyle -- "if I am permitted." "Good," Boyle said. He snapped the serum case shut and tucked it under his arm, turning toward the open balcony windows. "You're coming with me, Fermiirig. You others stay as you are." The soft drone of a helicar descending outside told him that Locke had timed his descent accurately. Cornelison chose that moment to proteat, his wrinkled face tight with consternation at what he read of Boyle's intention. "We know you, Boyle I You can't possibly escape. The Ordermen -- " Boyle laughed at him. "There'll be no culprit for the Ordermen," he said, "nor any witnesses. You've wiped out ordinary crime with your truthchecks and practicalities, Cornelison, but you've made the way easiei for a man who knows what he wants." He pressed the firing stud of his weapon. Cornelison fell and lay stiffly on the pastel tile. Bissell and Dorand went down as quickly, frozen to temporary rigidity. Boyle tossed his incendiary into the huddle of still bodies and shoved the Alcorian forcibly through the windows into the hovering aircar. Locke greeted the alien's appearance with stark .amazement. "My God, Boyle, are you madf.' You can't kidnap -- " The dull shock of explosion inside the deliberations chamber jarred the helicar, throwing the slighter Alcorian to the floor and staggering Boyle briefly. "Get us out of here," Boyle said sharply. He turned the freeze-gun on the astounded Locke, half expecting resistance and fully prepared to meet it. "You fool, do you think I'm still playing the childish game I made up to keep you and Moira quiet?" A pall of greasy black smoke poured after them when Locke, still stunned by the suddenness of catastrophe, put the aircar into motion and streaked away across the city. Boyle, watching the first red tongue of flame lick out from the building behind, patted the serum case and set himself for the next step. Immortality.  through the mountains, skirting a clear swift river that broke into tumultous falls a hundred yards below Boyle's cottage, and set it down in a flagstone court. "Out," Boyle ordered. Moira met them in the spacious living room, her pretty face comical with surprise and dismay. "Philip, what's happened? You look so -- " She saw the alien then and put a hand to her mouth. "Keep her quiet while I deal with Fermiirig." Boyle said to Locke. "I have no time for argument. If either of you gives me any trouble... He left the threat to Locke's stunned fancy and turned on the Alcorian. "Let me have the injection you had ready for Cornelison. Now." The Alcorian moved his narrow shoulders in what might have been a shrug. "You are making a mistake. You are not fitted for life beyond the normal span.' "I didn't bring you here to moralize," Boyle said. "If you mean to see your mate again, Fermiirig, give me the injection!" "There was a time in your history when force was justifiable," Fermiirig said. "But that time is gone. You are determined?" He shook his head soberly when Boyle did not answer. "I was afraid so." He took the hypodermic needle out of its case, sjueezed out a pale dro of liquid and slid the point into the exposed vein of Boyle's forearm. Boyle, watching the slow depression of the plunger, asked : "How long a ' period will this guarantee, in Earth time?" "Seven hundred years," Fermiirig said. He withdrew the instrument and replaced it in its case, his liquid glance following Boyle's rising gesture with the freeze-gun. "At the end of that time, the treatment may be renewed if facilities are available." Immortality! "Then I won't need you any more," Boyle said, and rayed him down. "Nor these other two." Locke, characteristically, sprang up, and tried to shield hloira with his own body. ' "Boyle, what arc you thinking of? You . #I can't murder us without -- " "There's a very effective rapids a hundred yards down river," Boyle said. "You'll both be quite satisfactorily dead after going through it, I think. Possibly unrecognizable, too, though that doesn't matter particularly." He was pressing the firing stud, slowly because something in the tension of the moment appealed to the sadism in his nature, when an Orderman's freeze-beam caught him from behind and dropped him stiffly beside Fermiirig. THE details of his failure reached him later in his cell, anticlimactically. through a fat and pimply jailer inflated to bursting with the importance of guarding the first murderer in his ftneration. "ALO kept this quiet until said, "but it had to come out when the Board of Order went after you. The Alcorians are telepathic. Santikh led the Ordermen to your place in the mountains. Fermiirig guided her." He grinned vacuously at his prisoner, visibly pleased to impart information. "Lucky for you we don't have capital punishment any more. As it is, you'll get maximum, but they can't give you more than life." Lucky? The realization of what lay ahead of him stunned Boyle with a slow and dreadful certaintyA sentence of life. Seven hundred years. Not immortality -- Eternity. yeor -- and that means something special in the way of story lineup. Theodore Sturgeon leods off with a strange and powerful novella about a boy whose age kept shifting unaccountably... supported by the first aysby a novelet... and short stories, Willy ley's science department, and our regular feotures... every item complete. It's a gala issue to stort a year loaded with even more fiction surprises the Science Fiction field attending our Science Fiction Birthday Parly. If you don't have a subscription, this is a fine time to send one in. lllustroted H e seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying him. He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whisEvery boy should be able to whistle, except, of course, Martians. But this one didi by WIlUR tiing is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two things peculiar, but each was related to the other. The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys do not -- and he most certainly didn't. The second was the tunc he whistled -- a somehow familiar tune, but one which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy. "Hi, there," I said when he came near enough. "What's that you're whistling?" He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes. " 'The Calm'," he said in a sober, little-boy voice. "The what?' I asked. ture," he explained, still looking up at me. He said it deadpan, and his wjide brown eyes never once batted. "Oh," I .said. "And where did you learn that?" "My mother taught me." I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the title of the tune he whistled. "You whistle very well," I told .him. That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the comers of his small mouth. He nodded grave agreement. "Been after butterflies, I see. ril bet you didn't get any. This is the wrong season." The light in his eyes snapped off. "Well, good-by," he said abruptly and very relevantly. "Good-by," I said. His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which followed the one interrupted: and the step he took was with the left foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him. I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely mechanical little boy. When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering. The house he weht into was over in that crumbling section which forms a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly original mineworkings made many years ago by the early colonists. It seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as a house and as long as a ffsherman's aliW, of pure -- pure, njind you -- gold. Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual. And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars. There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most part, the mining shacks so hastily tljrown up were only fever scars of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian bohad just disappeared. So his mother had taught him she? That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think, instead, of something quite astonishing: How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle? Al Martian! are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead. I w'cnt up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weatherbeaten door. womaw who faced me may have been as young as twentytwo, but she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice wasn't young any more, either. "Well? And what did I do now?" "I beg your pardon?" I said. "You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing just something to cover a hole in your shirt?" "Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?" I asked. "All I did was knock on your door." "I heard it." Her lips were curled slightly at one corner. I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before I answered: "As a matter of fact, I don't want to see you at all. I didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here that I was interested in. The little Martian boy. I mean." Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart. "Come in," she almost gasped. I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this. A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum: not bad if you like the appearance of squeezed blood. There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs, and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I looked once again at the woman. "What about him?" she whispered. Her yes were still startled. I smiled reassuringly. "Nothfiig, lady, nothing. Tm sorry I upset you. I was just being nosy if all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told me Tell. He also told me his mother had taught him." Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks. She said one word only: "Well?" "Nothing, I answered. "Except that Martians are supposed to be tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of hearing. Sio when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and when he told me his  mother had taught him -- " I shrugged and laughed va little. "Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy." She nodded. "We ajree on that last part." Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily. "I would like to speak to the Martian lady." I said. "There isn't any Martian lady.' "There has to be, doesn't there?" I said it with little sharp prickers on the words. But she did, too: "Zoes there?' I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard and at the same time curiously defiant -- as though she would dare me to go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.  For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to whistle. And then -- after what seemed to me a very long while -- I slowly tumbled to what she meant. Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a Martian father and a human. Earthwoman mother. It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically, spiritally, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of, compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around the house. I finally said : "So that is why he is able to whistle." She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes. And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down inside her. "There isn't anything to be ashamed of," I said gently. "Back on Earth there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started somewhere and intermarried plenty since." She nodded. Somehow her eyes didn't look defiant any more. "Where's his father?" I asked. "H-he's dead." "I'm sorry. Are you all right? I mean do you get along okay and everything, now that...?" I stopped. I wanted to ask her if she was starving by slow degrees and needed help. Lord knows the careworn look about her didn't show it was luxurious living she was doing -- at least not lately. "Look," I said suddenly. "Would you like to go home to Earth? I could fix -- " But that was the wrong approach. Her eyes snapped and her shoulders stiffened angrily and the words that ripped out of her mouth were not coated with honey. "Get the hell out of here, you fool!" I blinked again. When the flame in her eyes suddenly seemed to grow even hotter, I turned on my heel and went to the door. I opened it, went out on the top slab step. I turned back to close the dcKr -- and looked straight into her eyes. She was crying, but that didn't mean exactly what it Icioked like it might mean. Her right hand had the door edge gripped tightly and she was swinging it with all the strength she possessed. And while I still stared, the door slammed savagely into the casing with a shock that jarred the slab under my feet, and flying splinters from the rotten woodwork #timg my flinching cheeks. I shrugged and turned around and went down the steps. "And that is the way it goes," I muttered disgustedly to myself. Thinking to be helpful with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she immediately puts it to use -- on you. I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spreadlegged man who was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something in his eyes which might have been a leer. eh, mate?" he said. He chuckled hoarsely in his throat. "Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it." His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved -- if it ever was reserved at all -- for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said complainingly : "Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more reasonable -- " Hifi words chopped short and he almost choked on the final unuttered syllable. His glance had dropped to my badge and the look on his face was one of startled surprise. "I -- " he said. I cocked a frown of my own at him. "Well, so long, mate," he grunted, and spun around and dug his toes in the sand and was away. I stood there staring at his rapidly disappearing form for a few moments and then looked back once more at the house. A tattered cotton curtain was just swinging to in the dirty, sandblown window. That seemed to mean the woman had been watching. I sighed, shrugged again and went away myself. When I got back to Security #  r ) Headquarters, I went to the file and began to rifle through pictures. I didn't find the woman, but I did find the man. He was a killer named Harry Sniythe. I took the picture into the Chief's office and laid it on his desk, waited for him to look down at it and study it for an instant, and then to look back up to me. Which he did. "So?" he said. "Wanted, isn't he?" He nodded. "But a lot of good that'll do. He's holed up somewhere back on Earth." "No," I said. "He's right here. I just saw him." "What?" He nearly leaped out of his chair. "I didn't know who he was at first," I said. "It wasn't until I looked in the files -- " He cut me off. His hand darted into his desk drawer and pulled out an Authority Card. He shoved the card at me. He growled: "Kill or capture. I'm not especially fussy which. Just get him!" I nodded and took the card. As I left the office, I was thinking of something which struck me as somewhat more than odd. I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling ture. and it had led me t a wanted killer named Harry Smythc. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever I showed it I got respecf. I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything more than a ghoul, you don't. Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though, was not finding the Earthwoman .and her little halfbreed Martian son when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying good-by. That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians. It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates. The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress. Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances put on centuries ago by the qpcient aborigines of North America. There was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the belu tree and set fire to it. Being pitchlike, the gnarled fragments burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums. The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an instant -- before anyone observed me -- I stood motionless and watched the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these purple sands. I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had come. "Wahanhk," I said. "The Chief. Take me to him." The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led me some yards off to the north to a swoopingtent. Then he stopped, pointed. "Wahanhk," he said. I watched him slip away. Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has ever lived so long -- and doubtless none after him will, either. His leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist. "Good evening." I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs. He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge. From there they went to the Authority Card. "Power sign of the Earthmen," he muttered. "Not necessarily," I said. "I'm not here for trouble, I know as well as you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half the moons of MAiS of your men and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey," He didn't reply to that. "And I don't give a damn about it," I added distinctly. His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing -- or sob' bing, if you prefer -- of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water. "I'm looking for an Earthwoman," I said. "This particular Earthwoman took a Martian for a husband." "That is impossible," he grunted bitterly. "I would have said so. too, I agreed. "Until this afternoon, that is." His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle. "I met her little son," I went on. "A little semi-human boy with Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the other side, a little Martian boy who whistles." His teeth went together with a snap. I nodded and smiled. "You know who Tm talking about." For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on mine and if, earlier n Sn the day, I had thought the little boy's face was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless: it was simply blank. "They disappeared from the shack they were living in," I said. "They went in a hurry -- a very great hurry.' That one he didn't answer,' either. "I would like to know where she is." "Why?" His whisper was brittle. "She's not in trouble," I told him quickly. "She's not wanted. Nor her child, either. It's just that  have to talk to her." "Why?" I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long moment before he handed it back. "I have never seen this EarthSian," he said. "All right," I answered. "There wasn't anything that made me think you had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that she might know him." "This one is wanted?" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the last word. I nodded. "For murder." "Murder." He spat the word. "But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not that important any more." His old eyes hated me with an intensity I didn't relish. "You said that, old man, not I." A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to. He said at last: "I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child." He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it -- and almost before the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a drav.;n-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the drums, somebody was whistling. It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow cheese. "In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!" He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly closed and his hand folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie only bores a Martian. # I got up aad went out of the tent. woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned against the bole of a belu tree with her arms down and slightly curled backward around it. "That's considered bad luck," I said. Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle fire still flickering in her eyes. "That's a belu tree," I said. "Embracing it like that is like looking for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?" "Would it make any difference?" She spoke softly, but the words came to me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. "How much bad luck can you have in one lifetime, anyway?" I ignored that. "Why did you pull out of that shack? I told you you had nothing to fear from me." She didn't answer. "I'm looking for the man you saw me talking with this morning," I went on. "Lady, he's wanted. And this thing on my lapel is an Authority Card. Assuming you know what it means, I'm asking you where he is." "What man?" Her words were flat. "His name is Harry Smythe." If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light from the fires, subtle changes in Expression weren't easily detected. "Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it. Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you. Mister, whoever it was. I'll get him. I'll him!" I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh. Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of her man. And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and the dancers was loud enough to commend the attention and the senses. I could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the small, thin shoulders. And I knew then the reason for rfd Wahanhk's bitterness when he had said to me. "But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not that important any more." What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: "I'm sorry, kid. But look, just staking out in that ol shack of yours and trying to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way -- well, I mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?" I put an arm around her shoulders. "He must have been a pretty nice guy," I said. "I don't think you' have married him if he wasn't." I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweatlaved ' dancers within it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacaphonous tattoo now, a rattle of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad. I looked down again at the woman. "Your little boy and his butterfly net," I said softly. "In a season when no butterflies can be found. What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?" She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My gues.ses can be as good as anybody's. After a long while she looked up into my eyes. "His name was Tahily," she said. "He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone and he knew it would be safe, hr was going to stake a claim and go after it. For us. For the three of us." I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet. But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like that? N ext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way -- toward the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby arm and the swinging of the Hg butterfly net on the end # of that arm. Then I followed along in his sandy tracks. U was desert country, of course. There wasn't any chance of tailing him without his knowledge and I knew it. I also knew that before long he'd know it, too. And he did -- but he didn't let me know he did until we came to the rag-cliffs, those filigree walls of stone that hide the entrance to the valley of the two moons. Once there, he paused and placed his butterfly net on a rock ledge and then calmly sat down and took off his shoes to dump the sand while he waited for me. "Well,' I said. "Good morning." He looked up at me. He nodded politely. Then he put on his shoes again and got to his feet. "You've been following me," he said, and his brown eyes stased accusingly into mine. "I have?" "That isn't an honorable thing to do." he said very gravely. "A gentleman doesn't do that to another gentleman." I didn't smile. "And what would you have me do about it?" "Stop following me, of course, sir." "Very well," I said. "I won't follow you any more. Will that be satisfactory?" "Quite, sir." Without another word, he picked up his butterfly net and disappeared along a path that led through a rock crevice. Only then did I allow myself to grin. It was a sad and pitying and affectionate kind of grin. I at down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of course -- the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going. " Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with tiie fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold, have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set himself of finding the killer of his daddy. I took a short-cut over the ragcliffs and went down a winding, sand-worn path. The temple stones stood out barren and drylooking, tike breast bones from the desiccated carcass of an animal. For a moment I stopped and stared down at tiie ruins. I didn't see the boy. He was somewhere down tliere, though, still swinging his butterfly net and, probably, still whistling. I started up once more. S And then I heard it -- a shrill blast of sound in an octave of urgency; a whistle, sure, but a warning one. I stopped in my tracks from ' the shock of it. Yes, I knew from whom it had come, all right, ut I didn't know why. And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air, shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings, like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of the creature that uttered it. I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air. The little boy screamed. Just once. I waited.' There was a long silence after that. Then, finally, I took off my hat and threw it out into the valley. The gun roared once more. This time I placed it a little to the left below me. I took careful sighting on the hand that held that gun -- and I didn't miss it. It was Harry, Smythe, of course. When I reached him. he had the injured hand tucked tightly in the pit of his other arm. There was a grim look in his eyes and he nodded as I approached him. "Good shooting, mate. Should be a promotion in it for you. Shooting like that, I mean." "That's nice to think about," I said. "Where's the boy? I owe him a little something. If he hadn't whistled a warning, you could have picked me off neat.' "I would." He nodded calmly. "Where is he?" "Behind the rock there. In that little alcove, sort of." He indicated with his chin. I started forward. I watched him, but I went toward the rock. "Just a minute, mate." I stopped. I didn't lower my gun. "That bloody wench we spoke about yesterday. You know, out in front of that shack? Well, just a thought, of course, but if you pull me in and if I get it, what'll become of her, do you suppose? Mean to say; I couldn't support her when I' was dead, could I?" "Support her?" Surprise jumped into ' my voice. "What I said. She's my wife, you know. Back on Earth, I mean. I skipped out on her a few years back, but yesterdaj I was on my way to looking her up when you -- " "She didn't recognize the name Harry Smythe," I said coldly. "I'm afraid you'll have to think a little faster." "Of course she didn't! How could she? That ain't my name. What made you think it was?" Bright beads of sweat sparkled on his forehead, and his lips had that frantic looseness of lips not entirely under control. "You left her," I grunted. "But you followed her across space anyway. Just to tell her you were sorry and you wanted to come back. Is that it?" "Well -- " His eyes were calculating. "Not the God's honest, mate, no. I didn't know she was here. Not at first. But there was this Spider, see? This Martian. His name was Tahily and he used to hang around the saloons and he talked a lot, see? Then's when I knew . , "So it was you who killed him," I said. "One murder wasn't enough back on Earth; you had to pile them up on the planets." I covild feel something begin to churn inside of me. "Wait! Sure, I knocked off the Martian. But a fair fight, see? That Spider jumped my claim. A fair fight it was, and anybody'd done the same. But even without that, he had it coming anyway, wouldn't you say? Bigamist and all that, you know? I mean marrying a woman already married." His lips were beginning to slobber. I watched them with revulaion in my stomach. "Wouldn't you say, mate? Just  lousy, stinking Martian, I mean!" I swallowed. I turned away and went around the rock and looked down. One look was enough. Blood was running down the cheek of the prone little Martian boy, and it was coming from his mouti). Then I turned back to the shaking man. "Like I say. mate! I mean, what would you've done in my place? Whistling always did drive ne crazy. I can't stand it. A phobia, you know. People suffer from phobias!" "What did you do?" I took tirree steps toward him. I felt my lips straining back from my teeth. "Walt now, mate! Like I say. It's a phobia. I can't stand whistiing. It makes me suffer -- " "So you cut out his tongue?" , I didn't wait for his answer. I couldn't wait. While I was still calm. I raised my gun on his trembling figure. I didn't put the gun up again until his body stopped twitching and his fingers stopped clawing in the sands. door, the hospital corridor runs just a few feet. But I'd have known her at any distance. I sighed, got to my feet and met her halfw'ay. She stopped before me and stared up into my eyes. She must have run all the way when she got my message, for although she was standing as rigid as a pole in concrete, something of her exhaustion showed in her eyes. "Tell me," she said in a panting w'hisper. "Your boy is going to be okay. I put my arm around her. "Everything's under control. The doctors say he's going to live and pull through and... I stopped. I wcHidered what words I was going to use when no words that I had ever heard in my life would be the right ones. "Tell me." She pulled from my grasp and tilted her head so that she could look up into my eyes and read them like a printed page. '#e me!' "He cut out the boy's -- hr said he couldn't stand whistling. It was a phobia, he claimej. Eight bullets cured his phobia, i' any. m "He cut out what?" "Your son's tongue." I put my arm around her again, but it wasn't necessary. She didn't cry out, she didn't slump. Her head did go down and her eyes did blink once or twice, but that was all. "He was the only little boy on Mars who could whistle," she said. All of the emotion within her was somehow squeezed into those few words.  mind for a long while. I used to lie in bed and think of it somewhat like this: There was this man, with his feet planted in the purple sands, and he looked up into the night sky when the moon called Deimos was in perigee, and he studied it. And he said to him self. "Well. I shall write a book and I shall say in this book that the moon of Mars is thus and so. And I will be accurately describing it. for in truth the moon is thus and so." And on the other side of the planet there was another man. And he, too, looked up into the night sky. And he began to study the moon called Phobos. And be. too. decided to write a book. And he knew he could accurately describe the moon of Mars, for his own eyes had told him it looked like thus and so. And his own eyes did not lie. I thought of it in a manner somewhat like that. I could tell the woman that Harry Smythe, her first husband, was the man who had killed Tahily, the Martian she loved. I could tell her Smythe had killed him in a fair fight because the Martian had tried to jump a claim. And her heart would be set to rest, for she would know that the whole thing was erased and done with, at last. Or. on the other hand, I could do what I eventually did do. I could tell her absolutely nothing, in the knowledge that that way she would at least have the strength of hate with which to sustain herself through the years of her life. The strength of her hate against this man, whoever he might be, plus the chill joy of anticipating the day -- maybe not tomorrow, but some day -- when, like the dream of finding gold on Mars, she'd finally track him down and kill him. I couldn't leave her without a reason for living. Her man was dead and her son would never whistle again. She had to have something to live for. didn't she? T his issue's cover is something of "instant recogni tion" to science fiction readers -- it shows a spaceship takeoff. Science fiction readers would have recognized such a picture even twenty years ago. Now, however, liie same picture might be on the cover of any magazine and the majority of the readers of that magazine would know what it is supposed #Q to show. That is vast progress. Fortunately, that is not the only kind of progress that has been made during the last two decades. In # one could only prophesy that rocket research would eventually be taken up on a large scale, that it would be a long and difficult task, but that the goal of the manned spaceship would be at the end of the road. Now large-scale rocket research is going oh, formerly "incredible feats" have been accomplished, and the goal of the spaceship appears so near that it will need only one concerted and serious effort to reach it. After all, even though nobody has yet built a manned spaceship, space has already been pierced. During lectures I often draw a segment of a circle on the blackboard. representing the surface of the Earth. Then I draw a similar line at a scale distance of # miles above the first, which is the altitude where the air has become so attenuated that no control surface would work any more, even at speeds of several miles per second. That altitude has been surpassed by dozens of V-#, Aerobee and Viking rockets. Then I draw another line at a scale distance of I # miles, where the missile as a whole no longer encounters detectable air resistance and where "space begins." That height has been exceeded by several V-# rockets, at least one Viking and, of course, the "upper stage" of a V-# in # and soared to a peak altitude of # miles. Finally, I add one line quite near the ground. The scale distance is # feet, which is the altitude where .air pressure has fallen so low that the blood of a pilot exposed to it would begin to boil -- as you know, the lower the air pressure, the lower the boiling point of a given liquid. Anything which is to be piloted above # feet, therefore, has to have what might be called "full spaceship equipment" as far as pilot comfort is concerned. And rocket-propelled aircraft has been piloted to beyond # feet. It is easy to see that the complex of problems represented by the concept of the manned spaceship is no longer completely unknown territory. Deep inroads have been made into it from various directions for different purposes. High altitude research has furnished much basic information. Missile design has produced what can be called "spaceship instruftientation." Highaltitude fighter design has attached and obviously solved the problem of the spaceship cabin. All right, then, provided that the necessary concerted effort is I made, and the money is provided, when will we get the first manned spaceship? If the money is provided soon, I think that it is a safe answer to say: in sibout ten years. course, the first spaceship won't go to Mars or even to the Moon. In fact, we probably won't be able to take off directly for the Moon or for Mars for many years to come. As far as th clearly foreseeable future is # concerned, such trips will have to start from a space station which circles the Earth. The voyage of the first spaceship, as I have repeatedly said, will go literally nowhere. It will be a vertical takeoff from base, followed by a tilt in an easterly direction so tlit the ship will travel along an ellipse around the Earth. The captain will stay "up" until all the service tests have been completed, the observing program carried out, or until everybody aboard is thoroughly bored. Tlien he'll land again, trying to make it as close to base as he can. For such a trip, the spaceship has to reach a velocity of about # miles (# kilometers) per, second. If we want to do that with present-day fuels, the ship would have to have an overall mass-ratio of #:#, which means that its takeoff mass would have to be # times as high as its remaining mass, the mass of the ship proper, and its payload. Such a mass-ratio can only be built as a three-stage rocket, so that the two lower stages can drop off when their fuel supply has been exhausted. That way, they pass their energy on to the final stage, but not their dead weight. The mass-ratio of #:I was calculated on the basis of an exhaust velocity of # kilometers per second for rocket fuels. The fuels we have now in reality can do somewhat better than that and further fuel inprovement would, of course, be one of the phases of the effort. It is probably justified to expect an exhaust velocity of # kilometers per second within a few years. In that case, the massratio for the same trip would have to be # : I and a spaceship with a takeoff mass of "only" ten times the remaining mass can easily be built as a two-step ship. You can, if you wish, dream about an exhaust velocity of # kilometers or about # miles per second, in which case your massratio would drop to #:#. That is about the mass-ratio of the Viking rocket and the result would be a single ship, no longer broken up into steps, even though a booster might be desirable for reasons of stability during takeoff. Well, why not dream about this? Don't we have atomic energy which should make an exhaust velocity of even # kilometers per second seem slow? Unfortunately, we don't, meaning that we do not yet know how to handle it properly for this purpose. We know how to make an atomic explosion. We know how to make artificial radioactivity. We know how to boil water in an atomic pile with the aid of exploding uranium nuclei. But we don't know how to utilize atomic energy for rocket propulsion. That is still a secret of Nature and it is not too probable that it already is a Secret (with a capital "s") of the Atomic Energy Commission. The heat-an-inert-liquid-withan-atomlc-pile methdd is not too promising. The idea is this: In a chemical fuel, the combustion of the fuel provides both heat and combustion gases which are expelled by the rocket as reaction mass. If we could use an atomic pile, almost anything liquid would serve as reaction, mass and the pile would provide the heat. That sounds lovely except that the heat from the pile has to be transferred to the reaction mass and that takes time. Chemical combustion heats much faster, unless you can 'run the pile at an enormously high temperature. Doctors Malina and Summerheld once published calculations showing just how hot the pile would have to be run. If we wanted an exhaust velocity of # kilometers per second (which would bring the mass-ratio of our ship down to a little less than #:#) the chamber temperature, using hydrogen as reaction mass, would have to be # degrees F. and the heat required pound! While a rocket engineer can safely promise a three-stage spaceship working on ordinary chemical fuels, the atomic engineer could not (and would not) promise an atomic pile of such a performance. All of which does not mean that there won't be a time when we can build atomic powered spaceships. It just means that a new discovery in th field of atomic engineering has to come first. But the liquid-fuel rocket engineer does not need new discoveries to build a spaceship. He just needs some time and a lot of lars and probably no more than ten years. Will the funds be appropriated and the project be begun? I think so. It's the next logical step, and logical steps have a way of forcing men to take them. But we'll have to start right away if we want to achieve space flight by #. dating the past has scored another triumph: we now know the age of Stonehenge. Stonehenge, situated some nine miles from Salisbury, England, on a large plain, has always excited the imagination of those who had seen it. Geoffroy of Monmouth, in I #, took it to be a Roman monument built with the aid of Merlin -- strangely enough, none of the Roman writers mentions it -- and John Webb (#) thought that it had been a Roman temple. John Aubrey (#) took it to be a Druid temple instead and Williafh Stukely (#) "knew" that it had been built by Egyptian druids who had left their homeland in # b.C. to visit their British friends. If you add the explanations of amateurs, astrologers and occultists, you get a nice list of possible builders: They were either men of the Late Stone Age, or men of the Early Bronze Age, or men of the Late Bronze Age. Or else visiting Atlanteans, Lemurians or Egyptians. Or visitors from space who wanted to impress the natives and also leave a landmark behind. The absence of any literary mention prior to # did make it a tough case, for Stonehenge was evidently much older and must have been conspicuous for as long as it existed. The only date which made any sense at all was still based on at least two assumptions. In #, Sir Norman Lockyer assumed that whoever had built Stonehenge had worshiped the Sun and that the monument was oriented in such a manner that the midsummer Sun would rise over the central sacrificial stone. That gave # b.c. as the probable building date. Of course, one could reject the assumption that the builders were Sun-worshipers and thereby reject the dating, too. Stonehenge naturally cannot be dated directly by the carbon# method, since this works only on material of organic origin. Recently, however, a so-far untouched sacrificial pit was uncovered and the charcoal it contained could be dated. The result was # b.c. with a margin of error of # years either way. It seems that Sir Norman Lockyer's ideas were correct. But we still don't know who built it. I N case you like a slightly incredible story, consider the case of the coughing plant. When people cough, the purpose is to remove something irritating from the throat; dust is the simplest case. One day, more than half a century ago, a few people were sitting together in Munich and one who happened to have a cold coughed frequently. The conversation veered to the subject of coughing, its mechanism and its purpose and one suggested that it would be useful if the pores of the skin could cough. "Yes," another chimed in, "that would be especially useful for plants; they don't like to have their pores choked by dust, either." Whereupon one member of the group grew thoughtful and said: "Supposing there were a coughing plant, wonder what its botanical name would be." "Easy, said somebody else. "Cough in Latin is fussis. Obviously, the name would be Tussissia something or other." The offshoot of the evening was a little article discussing the discovery of Tussissia australis, which was published by the Munich paper Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten. It was not a hoax because the date of the paper was the first of April, #, and anybody on the continent knows better than to believe anything published in an April #st issue. Printed April-fooling on a large scale is an old continental custom -- but sometimes somebody neglects to look at the datclipc. A few weeks later, a well-reputed German daily printed a little essay on the marvelous tropical plant Tussissia, related to the red-flowered string bean of northern Europe. Another two weeks later, said essay could be read in fine French in the Journal de la Sante in Paris. The Journal de la Sarxte reached Sydney in Australia as fast as the mails of the year # would carry it. Three days after arrival, the story could be read, in English, in the Sydney Mail. I don'tknow just where the coughing plant "grew" for the following years, but in # it was back in Germany, appearing almost simultaneously in the Rhenish Westphaliar Gazette and in the Kdlnische Zeitung. The editors erf both apparently believed that it had been a discovery made during the war years and that the news had not penetrated through the front lines. Five years after that, the coughing plant made one more appearance in an important daily paper published in Hamburg and was taken from there by several Scandinavian publications. Science fiction editors, beware! If among the "odd little facts of science" which come to your desk is something about a coughing plant -- no matter under what Latin name -- it is #f merely aa old joke that miscarried. come in handy when your children start asking questions about little stars that twinkle. Everybody knows that those distant suns which we, by force of habit, still call "fixed stars" have a twinkling light. A good many people also know that the planets do not. I have often taken advantage of that fact when it came to (Kinting out planets at night, saying something like : "See that bright star over that tree top? Now look a little to the right from there and you'll sec two stars which arc fairly close togeth. The one that does not twinkle is Saturn." ' When somebody recently asked. "Why doesn't it twinkle, too?" I had to draw a few diagrams in my mind in order to explain. The twinkling is caused mostly in the lowermost five miles of the atmosphere. It is due to minor dis turbances. tiny volumes of greater or lesser density and temperature. Because they are tiny, the presence or absence of twinkle turns out to be a question of beam width. Let's say that the light beam meters wide. That is the ajex of a cone of light, the base of which is the diameter of the star. Even though the base of that cone may miles for a fair-sized star, it can away. In fact, it is usually much more because the distance just mentioned is merely ten lightyears. Jupiter's diameter is only # miles, but when the planet looks particularly bright, it is no away. The result of this relationship is that, at a height of about three miles, the light beam from Jupiter has a diameter of several inches. The irregularities of the atmosphere affect only a fraction of that beam at a time. But the light beam from a dis tant sun is a "needlebeam." Even at ten miles, it is still just two affected for its full width and seems to twinkle, Why do a few glaciers, like the Juneau glacier, increase in size although climatologists seem to be in agreement that Earth's weather is getting warmer. Is it? Joe Gibson # Kensington Avenue Jersey City #, N. J. #g I lMii('vr (hat tiu areriiimt #n a gradual ami itlight hut prr HiHinil iiior('a# in llic ""aitimul mratt Innprraliirr" for (lie ivlinli lafu't ia (inaniinona. friiigea of the antarelie iee ai'e not Herm to drift aa far in tiie ilireelion of the equator aa re ported from the past, and they also seem to lie muller in si.e. virtually all glaeiera are slowly reecling. It is no( yet known just what IK the cause of all this, but there is a kind of general answer: We are still pulling out of the last Ire Age. We know from geological evidenee that the Karih was almost always eoiisideraldy warmer than it is now. There were only two romparatively short perioils whn it was colder than it is now -- ihe glarialion of the Permian n'iod ami the recent one. Of the reeent one, we know that it hal at least three 'inlerglacial' eriols (the Permian glaciation prohuhly had similar interruptions, hut that was too long ago to establish detail), each of which was longer than llie period of glaciation. Since the last glaciation niissel hy just a few tiiousand years falling into earliest historical llie process of pulling out of It. 'helbc we are in another 'inlcrglarial perioil" or acitially at the eiul of a cohl rlimale periol is something we coiiltl answer only if wc were certain of tlic iiiKlerlying reasons for such cdd spells. Rut in spile of more than a do.en hypollieses, pnhiislied in more thuti t('n d#.en weighty volumes, we simply are not yet sure wliut causetl the lee Age. That a single glaier like Juneau quotetl by my corresponh'nt may grow, while the others dwindle, is interesting hut ot inexplicahle. Because more ice thaws, anl more water evaporates, a speriHc glacier elsewliere might get more "food than it would otherwise. li you send a rocket up irtto a #hour orbit, would you need any lateral motion? I mean the rocket has the motion it had on the surface and travels around its orbit once every # hours, anyway. Robert McArthur # #rd Street SE Washington D. C. Instead of just saying yes or no, ##I let you figure it out for yourself. A rocket standing at a point at the equator is, in round figures. #;# miles from the center of the Farth. it has a lateral y motion M'bich well cH "A' and which carries it once every # hours around the center of the Earth The circle it de scribes has a length of # miles (diameter of the Earth) times pi. A rocket in the #-hour orbit Is # miles above sea level or # #  # miles from the center of the Earth. The diameter of its orbit is, consequently, # miles. The length of that orbit is # limes pi miles. This distance must be covered every # hotirs. Is the surface velocity "A" enough for that? In a forthcoming issue, will you please discuss the force of gravity a liIe? Many science fiction stories seem to take it for granted that some way of overcoming it will be found. Harold P. Pond. # Ship Street Brighton, England The answer to the second sentence is simple -- the authors of these stories either indulged in wishful thinking or else they needed a device for making their plotting easier. As for the first sentence, I am sorry to report that there is no answer. Or at least not yet. All we know about gravity is that absolutely nothing can be done to or about it. It does obey the inverse square law, but that Is the sum total of our knowledge. And that doesn't mean anything, for the inverse square law (the intensity is onefourth at twice the distance, one-ninth at three times the distance, etc.) is merely the geometrical fact that the area of a . sphere is proportional to the square of its radius. Hence the inverse square law also applies to light and beat and other phenomena. Since there is not much "answer in this case, I feel like adding a little story which is quite significant in several respects. Around the year #, a French newspaper carried a long article with a title like "Krupp's Secret Revealed." Friedrich Krupp in Essen, already famous as a gun manufacturer, had at about that time astonished professional circles by the size and weight of castings and forgings produced for a number of purposes. The article in that French paper "told for the first time" just how Krupp's engineers could cope with pieces w'eighing from . twenty tons up. The secret was a real secret -- somewhere in Krupp's factory there was a gravity-free assembly hall ! The writer of the article tfouM not tll how that hall was made to he gravity-free, Imt he had spoken to an eyewitness who had described lo him how a #-ton gun barrel was lifted into place on its undercarriage hanging from a loop of bailing wire; and how a casting of the stern of a ship, comprising two propeller housings and the sealing for the rudder shaft, had been manipulated hy a single workman with a rope. The conclusion was, of course, that France had to learn Krupp's secret in order to compete with Germany. Naturally, this article was picked up hy other apers ami magazines, loth French and German. Several Germans fell that their positions were important enough so that they should be invitel to see the gravity free assembly hall. When Krupp's replied that there was no such thing, they were annoyel and did not believe it: "Of course, I realize the need for military secrecy, hut since I am a personal advisor to His Grace I strongly feel, etc., etc." Krupp's knew it wasn't so, hut, mostly in self-defense, they Started tracking the origin of the story. It turned out to he absurdly simple. One night, at a parly, Kmpp's feats in casting and forging enormous pieces had been discussed at great length and one of the men present, who happened to be an employee of Krupp's, had been questioned and questioned, mostly about things he did not know himself. Finally, to end the interminable discussion, he'd revealed the "setTet" of the gravity-free assembly hall. Unfortunately, it was merely a tall tale, but it seems to have had at least one fine literary result -- H. G. Wells's Thm First Men in the Moon was probably inspired by it. In that story, if you remember, he used a gravity-neutralizing substance for interplanetary flight. He was just the first of many to do so. But truth often follows science fiction, so we may yet find a way to overcome gravity. It might not look like a good hefting proposition, but neither were many achievements of the past few decades. Tea Tray in the Sky Visfin# a society is tvgher them being born into if. A # credit tour is no substitute! T he picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end erf the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard Irfonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair. "Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?" inquired a mellifluous voice. "In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it oo Merop." MO A disembodied pair of hands administered a #Xonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog. "I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods." the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternatural' ly from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs. Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy. "Yes," he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, "I have been a Brother." "Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Bijotherhood?" his shelf companion wanted to know. "Trouble over a female?" Michael shook his head, smiling. "No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered." The other man clucked sympathetically. "No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother." Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice; "Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki." "No, sir," Michael replied. "Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life." Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. "Be careful, young man!" he warned. "Lucky for you that you arc  talking to someone as broadminded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover." "An Earth tabu?" "Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that." indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise . Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every, planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars. Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Onlyone crime was recognized throughout the solar systems -- injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute). Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice. tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past -- the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days? The Father Superior had smiled. "You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and sec how you like it?" Michaehhad agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence. k large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: "Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba." "Is there any way of nrning that thing off?" Michael wanted to know. The other man smiled. "If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?" "Oh, no!" Michael agreed hastily. "Certainly not." "And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury." "How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?" Michael murmured, abashed. "Allow me to introduce myself," said his companion. "My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card." He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability. "My name's Michael Frey." the young man responded, smiling awkwardly. "I'm afraid I don't have any cards." "Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son," Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, "I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands... Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. "Is there something wrong with them?" Carpenter blushed and looked away. "Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?" "Of course I know that," Michael said impatiently. "But what's that got to do with me?" The salesman was wide-eyed. "But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here." "But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand," Michael protested, "with two fingernails on each -- all covered with green scales." Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. "Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?" "Of course not, but -- " "Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?" "Certainly not, but -- " "Would you like to be called guilty of -- " Carpenter paused before the dreaded word -- intoIerance? "No, no, no!" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for ' #M him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. "I have lots of gloves in my pack." be babbled. "Lots and lots. ##I put some on right away,' pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped. Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A. and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out. Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. "Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians arc about passing away! No one ever wear yellow!" "Sorry,' Michael said humbly. The button marked Cloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects, "The quality's high," sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids, "but the price is meager. You kiww when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega." The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. "You staying a while in Portyork?" Michael nodded. "Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble." "Thank you, sir." Michael said gratefully. "It's very kind of you." He twisted himself around -- it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably -- and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. "Awfully inconvenient arrangement here," he commented. "Wonder why they don't have scats." "Because this arrangement," Carpenter said stiffly, "is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent lifeforms." "Oh. I see," Michael murmured. "I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?" "Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?" A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets. "Oh, yes!" he agreed. "And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad." "Sirians are always sad," the salesman told him. "Listen." past the racket of the advldeo. Sure enough, he could make out words : "Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see. save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius... Carpenter brushed away a tear. "Poignant, isn't it?" "Very, very touching," Michael agreed. "Are they sick or something?" "Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers." "Fasten your suction disks, please," the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway. "We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning." All the pa.ssengers cheered. "Since it is considered immodest on Zosma," she continued, "ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering." Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michajl unearthed a violet cap. The salesman unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green. "Always got to keep on your toes," he whispered to the younger man. "The Universe is expanding every minute." The bus settled softly on the landing held and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets. Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders -- humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians -- but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Mcropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality. The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a held already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man. #  ly gloved hands together. "I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?" "Frankly," Michael admitted, "the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't haye any breakfast and I'm famished." Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously nd scuttled off on six legs apiece: "Shh, not so loud! There are females preseht." Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. "Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?" "But why?" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. "What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?" Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. "Hush," he cautioned. "After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?" "Well, yes. But those arc different." "Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have Accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated (me of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule : 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.' " "But I'm still hungry," Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. "Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?" "Naturally," the salesman whimpered back. "Poyork provides for fill bodily needs. Numerous f(eding stations are conveniently located throughout the portf and there must be some on the field." After ga#ing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant. "That's the nearest one," Carpenter explained. tional-looking building unobtrusively marked "Feeding Station," Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped. A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. "Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair." Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist. "Let's go to the Old Town," he suggested to Michael. "It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself." A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered: "Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor." "If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica." "Movid stars go to Mars.' Carpenter smiled politely at them. "No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra." He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business. "Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi." "Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button -- it won't cost you nuttin' -- see a passionate drama  # of longvanished Mu or the bloodiiounds pursuing Eliza.' "All honor be laid at die feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth." "Couldn't we -- couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?' Michael faltered. Carpenter stared. "Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk." "But they have no feet." "That has nothing whatsoever to do with it." young man into the Algedtan cab , , , which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. "No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?" "Of course not," Michael whispered weakly. "Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer," the advideo informed him, "when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara." After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number. Five and was able to take some # # interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city-K:osmopolitan in its archi tecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians. "You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture," Carpenter pointed out. "See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?" "Very quaint," Michael commented. Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet and emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, "We now interrupt the commercials," the advideo said, "to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular... "I shall scream," stated Carpenter, "if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more... No. thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before." "Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking," sang a buxom Betelgeusian, "what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea." "I guess the first thing for me to do," Michael began in a businesslike manner, "is to get myself a room at a hotel... What have I said now?" "The word hotel," Carpenter explained through pursed lips, "is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means -- a place of dancing girls. I hardly think..." "Certainly not," Michael agreed austerely. "I merely want a lodging." "That word is also -- well, you see," Carpenter told him, "on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family." "They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean." "More like bees. So those creatures who travel -- " Carpenter lowered his voice modestly " -- atone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned iice controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as -- if you'll excuse my use of the expression -- tariffs would." taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most nonhumans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices. "This," said Carpenter, "is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, w permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand." "The pictures in my history books -- " Michael began. ## "Did I hear you correctly, sir?' The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. 'Did you use the word history?" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. "I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir." "Please don't!" Carpenter begged. "This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucheric on his part." "Well," the red one conceded, "let it not be said that Meropians arc not tolerant. But, be careful, young man," he warned Michael. "There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble." He indicated the stalwart constable who. splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air. "I should have told you," Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. "Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensilive in the extreme about it." "Naturally," Michael said. "Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too." "Why, Christmas is coming, my boy." Carpenter answered, surprised. "It's July already -- about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away." winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square. "Izarians," Carpenter explained "They're much in demand for Christmas displays." The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: "It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's." "This beautiful walk you see before you," Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, "shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba. is called Broadway. To your left .  you will be delighted to see --  "Listen, could we -- " Michael began. " -- Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second -- " "By the way -- " "It is extremely rude and hence illegal, Carpenter glared, "to interrupt anyone who is speaking.' "But I would like," Michael whispered very earnestly, "to get washed. If I might." The other man frowned. "Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatctfy. Only thing of suitable dinaensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know." "A taxi? Isn't there one closer?" "Ah, impatient youth! 'There aren't too many altogether. The installations arc extremely expensive." They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief. Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state ot preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history -- in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign "PublicWashport" riding on its spire. Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby. "Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement..." Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sadeyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps, a cfoss between a harp and a fliitC"Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.' The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station: one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too: "Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now. let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Sonne rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boillime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Klffa.' " A ND now," smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, "we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station." Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing "Only # Shopping Days Till ait Christmas" across an aquamarine sky. "They won't be permanent?' he asked. "The family, I mean?' "Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?" The young man blushed. "Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact." Carpenter beamed. "That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you -- it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials." "Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a -- a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and..." "Married!" Carpenter was now completely shocked. "You musfn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery Oft Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your -- er -- friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?" Michael squared his jaw. "You bet I would." Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to ivoid contamination. "This is un-Unlversal. Young man. if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you." Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. "You mean if I bring my girl here. I'd have to share her?" "Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you. that is." "Then I'm not staying here," Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. "I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood." There was a shortT'cold silence. "You know, son," Carpenter finally said. "I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings -- you promise I won't hurt your feelings?" he asked anxiously, afraid. Michael realized, that he might Call a policeman for ego injury. "You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter." "Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are." "Much better," Michael agreed. "By the way," Carpenter went on. "I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer witliout fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a -- er -- girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?" Michael laughed. "Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society." "On Talitha -- " Carpenter began. "I know," Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. "But our females don't mind being generic." eling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little, while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind. "When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed In an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius." The advideo crackled: "The gown her fairy godmother once '# gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella." The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return. "I sec you're back, son," the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. 'I been to Forty ork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it." 'Tm back!" Michael sank into the mothcaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. 'Tm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!" "Better be careful, son," the (driver warned. "I know this is a  rural area but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization." The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: "Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?" Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home. on your A.B.C. Station Every Saturday Afternoon at #:# E.D.T.?    This informol discussion of will cover everything your Information Dep't" show us you ore interested in. -- Space Trovel, Guided Missiles, Jets, Flying Soucers, Rockets, Astronomy, Physics, Naturol History, Stors, Asteroids, etc.    Send your questions to Willy Ley, Science Editor, Goloxy, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Would you like this program to continue? Drop us a cord or letter and let us know. (Continued from pafe #) wc react if we were unexjjectedly pushed into them?  You suddenly have a chance to sign on an interplanetary or interstellar spaceship. True enough, volunteers can be found for any deadly mission; their fear is so great, generally, that they must constantly challenge it to master it. But I'm assuming you're healthily cautious, like most of us.  Would you sign on? The ship is huge on Earth, but how small would it seem in space? How well do you think you'd take the monotony, the weightlessness, the awful infinity? What about the prospe.'ts of landing safely, living and exploring for a while on a totally alien world -- and the return trip?  A strange ship lands in your yard and weird creatures emerge. How would you feel and what would you do?  Bombs destroy the entire population, leaving you apparently the only person alive. What would your thoughts be? Would you be able to live with your grief and horror? Would you risk your life searching for another survivor, preferably, in the lastman tradition, of the opposite sex? And suppose you did find ope -- somebody unusually revolting; would you overcome your repugnance in order to keep the race going? And what if you found no one at all. but. instead, absolute proof that everyone else had been wiped out?  The inventor of a time machine invites you to trav anywhere in time you choose to go. For the sake of exciting ideas, we blandly ignore the enormous difficulty of pinpointing a target as tiny a.s Earth, which moves around the Sun. with the Solar System, the Galaxy and the Universe, at a speed and in a direction we have not been able to determine. You might go into the past or future and find yourself stranded in space! But suppose you could land wherever and whenever you want. Would you choose to contend with the disease, superstitious suspicion and savagery of the past, the language barriers and vast disparity of ideas? Could you feel comfortable in a slave society? Or keep safely quiet about beliefs which would be suicidal to correct? The future? Think how an ancient Greek or Roman would fare in our civilization. The future may be just as far removed in change of all sorts. It's not even necessary to bring an ancient Greek to the #th century to get him in trouble: he would have found his" enquiring mind and free expression a menace in the Middle Ages. ns  Immortality is offered you. Would you accept it, knowing you would outlive all your friends and relatives? Could you cope with the boredom that seems so inevitable? T hese aren't fair tests of heroisifti, I realize. They deal only with anticipation, because the reality is unlikely to be ejcperienccd and, since that's so. we can't estimate reaction. Tht, as you know, can be anything from the shakes to outright psychological collapse. One odd thing about the realistic treatment of heroism is that most readers object to it. Examined superficially, this is a paradox -- they don't believe in it. yet they dislike a hero who does not act like one. ut consider it this way:  The majority of us want to identify with heroes who do not suffer from our own caution or apprehension. I don't see why we shouldn't want to. Whcre's the percentage in identifying with someone just like us? We know our own attitudes pretty well; we'd like to see how someone else feels and acts in tight spots.  Training and conditioning have a good deal to do with performance. We might not be happy in a jet plane or submarine. but at least we know what they are and something of what to expect in them. A primitive, though, would be overcome with terror on a jet or submarine ride. In other words, living in a civilization in which spaceships and time machines are relatively commonplace is not the same as abruptly encountering them. A hero of an interplanetary war, in that case, is no less probable than a jet ace, an elevator operator in a skyscraper, or a pedestrian crossing a busy street. Any of these undertakings would be dangerous to somebody who wasn't quite thoroughly trained or conditioned to it.  For all the premonitory worry we might feel. I think most of us know we'd do all right in similar situations, given the same training and conditioning as our fictional heroes. This is not an unrealistic assumption. It is borne out by the courage shown by almost whole populations under bombing and enemy invasion, resourcefulness during flood, quake, famine. It's the imaginary danger that creates apprehension. A real one can usually be counted on to be confronted bravely -- heroically, if you wish. But what would go through your mind and what would you do if you were in one of the situations described? -- H. I... ,oi.n y iu The Mousetrap A luxuriously furnished world all To fiimseff Very pleasant but how and why was he there? T here was nothing to do. There was no place to go. He swam up to consciousness on the sleepy languor of that thought. Nothing to do, no place to go, tomorrow is forever. Could sleep, but body wants to wake-up. His body was a cork floating up from deep water, up, up to the surface. He opened his eyes. Sunlight and blue sky; sky so blue that if you looked at it long enough you could begin to imagine yourself falling into it. No clouds; just blue, blue sky. He felt as if he had slept the clock of eternity around and back again until the hands of time were in the same position they had held when he went to sleep. When had that been? It was a long time ago, top far back to remember. He stopped worrying about it. He lay supine, his arms flung wide, his legs asprawl. He became conscious of short blades of grass tickling the backs of his hands. There was a tiny breeze from somewhere that now and again brushed his face with its cool wing. And an edge of white cloud was creeping into the patch of blue that gradually filled his field of vision. Slowly, physical awareness crept back to him. He felt sm#bth, loose clothing lying lightly against his skin, the expansion and contraction of his chest, the hard ground pressure against the long length of his back. And suddenly he was complete. The thousand disconnected sensations flowed together and became one. He was aware of himself as a single united entity, alive and alone, lying stretched out, exposed and vulnerable in an unknown place. Brain' pulsed, nerves tensed, muscles leaped. He sat up. "Where am I?" TE sat on a carpet of green   turf that dipped gradually away ahead and on either side of him to a ridiculously close horizon. He twisted his head and looked over his shoulder. Behind him was a gravel walk leading to a small building that looked very airy and light. The front, beneath a thick ivory roof that soared flat out, apparently unsupported for several yards beyond the front itself, was one large window. He could see, like looking into the cool dimness of a cave, big, comfortable chairs low tables, and what might possibly be a viseo. Hesitantly, he rose to his feet and approached the building. At the entrance he paused. There was no door, only a variable force-curtain to keep the breezes out; and he pushed his hand through it carefully, as if to test the atmosphere inside. But there was only the clastic stretch and sudden yield that was like pushing your fist through the wall of a huge soap bubble, and then a pleasant coolness beyond, so he withdrew his hand and, somewhat timidly, entered. The room illuminated itself. He looked around. The chairs, the tables, everything was just as he had seen it from outside, through the window. And the thing that looked like a viseo was a viseo. He walked over to it and exlit aintncd it curiously. It was one of the large models, receiver and record-player, with its own built-in library of tapes. He left it and went on through an interior doorway into the back of the house. Here were two more rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. The bed was another force-field -- expensive and luxurious. The kitchen had a table and storage lockers through whose transparent windows he could see enough eatables and drinkables stored there to last one man a hundred years. At the thought of one man living in this lap of luxury for a hundred years, the earlier realization that he was alone came back to him. This was not his place. It did not belong to him. The owner could not be far off. He went hurriedly back through the living room and out into the sunlight. The green turf stretched away on every side of him, empty, unrelieved by any other living figure. "Hello!" he called. His voice went out and died, without echoes, without answer. He called again, his voice going a trifle shrill. "Hello? Anybody here? Hello! Hellor There was no answer. He looked down the gravel path to his right, to the short horizon. He looked down the path to his left and his breath caught in his throat. He began to run in a senseless, brain-numbing, chest-constricting panic. T he grass streamed silently by on both sides of him, and his feet pounded on the gravel of the path. He ran until his lungs heaved with exhaustion and tlie pounding of his heart seemed to shake his thin body, when at last fatigue forced him to a halt. He stood and looked around him. The building was out of sight now, and he found himself on the edge of a forest of tall flowers. Ten feet high or more, they lay like abelt across his way, and the path led through them. Greenstemmed, with long oval leaves gracefully reaching out, with flat, broad-petaled blue blossoms spread to the bright sky, they looked like the graceful creations of a lost dream. There was no odor, but his head seemed to whirl when he looked at them, Somehow they frightened him; their height and their multitude seemed to look down on him as an intruder. He hesitated at that point where the path began to wind among them, no longer straight and direct as it had been through the grass. He felt irrational fear at the thought of pushing by them -- but the loneliness behind him was worse. He went on. Once among the flowers, he lost all sense of time and distance. There was nothing but the gravel beneath his feet, a patch of blue sky overhead and the flowers, only the flowers. For a while he walked; and then, panic taking him again at the apparent endlessness of the green stems, he burst into a fear-stricken run which ended only when exhaustion once more forced him to a walk. After that, he plodded hopelessly, his desire to escape fighting a dull battle with increasing weariness. One moment the flowers were all around him; then the path took an abrupt twist to the right and he was standing on the edge of  new patch of turf through which the path ran straight as ever. He stopped, half disbelieving what he saw. With a little inarticulate grunt of relief, he stepped free of the flower-shadowed pathway and went forward between new fields of grass. He did not have much farther to go. In a few minutes he topped a small rise and his walk came to an end. There, in front of him, was the building. The very same building he had run away from earlier.  ing to cling to the hope that it was not the same building, that he had somehow gone somewhere else, rather than that he had traveled in a circle. But the identity was too complete. There was the large window, the chairs, the . viseo. There was the door to the bedroom and the one to the kitchen. Moving like a man in a dream, he walked forward and into the house. He knew where he was going now. He remembered what he had seen before -- a bottle of light, amber-colored liquid among the stores in the kitchen. He found it among a thickly crowded bank of others of its kind and took off the cap humbly. He put the bottle to his lips. The liquor burned his throat. Tears sprang to his eyes at the fire of it and he was glad, for the sensation gave him a feeling of reality that he had not yet had among the dreamlike emptiness of his surroundings. Taking the bottle, he went outside to the grass in front of the building. "This is good," he thought, taking another drink, and sitting down on the grass. "This is here and now, a departure point from which to figure out the situation. I drink, therefore I am. The beginning of a philosophy." He drank again. "But where do I go from there? Where is this? Who am I?" He frowned suddenly. Well, who was he? The question went groping back and lost itself in a maze of shadows where his memory should have been. Almost, but not quite, he knew. He shook his head impatiently. "Never mind that now. Plenty of time to figure that out later. The thing is to discover where I am, first." Where was he. then? The drink was beginning to push soft fingers of numbness into his mind. The grass was Earth grass and the building was a human-type structure. But the flowers weren't like anything, on Earth. Were they like anything on any other planet he'd ever been on? He wrinkled his forehead in a frown, trying to remember. If only he could recall where he had been before he woke aip! He thought he had been on Earth, but he wasn't sure. The things he wanted to remember seemed to skitter away from his recollection just before he touched them. He lay back on the grass. Where was he? He was in a place where one walked in circles. He was in a place where things were too perfect to be natural. The grass looked like a lawn and there were acres of it. There were acres of flowers, too. But the grass was real grass: and from what he'd seen of the flowers, they were real and natural as well.  Yet there .was something wrong. He felt it. There was a strange air of artificiality about it all. He lay back on the grass, staring at the sky and taking occasional drinks from the bottle. Without realizing it, he was getting very drunk. His mind cast about like the nose of a hunting dog. Something about the place in which he found himself was wrong, but the something continued to elude him. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he couldn't seem to relember things. Whatever it was, it was something that told him clearly and unarguably that he wasn't on Earth or any of the planets he'd ever known or heard of. He looked to the right and he looked to the left. He looked down and he looked up, and realization came smashing through the drunken fog in his mind. There was no Sun in the sky. He rose to his feet, the bottle in his hand, for a horrible suspicion was forming in his mind. He turned away from the house, looked at the chronometer on his wrist and began to walk. When he got back to the house, the bottle tn his hand was empty. But all the alcohol inside him could not shut out the truth from his mind. Ht was alone, on a tiny world that was half green grass and half great blue flowers. A pretty world, a silent, dreaming world beneath a bright, eternal sky. An empty world, and he was on it -- Alone. as far as drink would take him. And for many days -- or was it weeks? -- reality became a hazy thing, until the poor, starved body could take no more and so collapsed. Then there was no remembrance, but when he came back to himself at last, he found fi little miracle had happenet. during that blank period. Memory of a part of his life had come back to him. B orn and raised on Earth, in Greater Los Angeles, he had been pitched neck and crop #T his native planet at the age of twenty-one, along with some for which overcrowded Earth had DU room. Overpopulation was a problem. Those without jobs were deported when they reached the age of maturity. And what chance had a poor young man to get an Earthsidc job when rich colonials wanted them? For Earth was the genter of government and trade. He was spared the indignity of deportation. His familj' scraped up the money for passage to Rigcl IV and arranged a job in a typographers' office for him there. They would continue to pull strings, they said, and he was to work hard and save as much as he could in the hope of being able eventually to buy his way back -- although this was a forlorn hope; the necessary bribes for citizenship would run to sevhim off with a minimum of tears; Father. Mother, and a younger sister, who herself would be leaving in a couple of years. He went on to Rigel IV, filled with the determination of youth to conquer all obstacles; to make his fortune in the approved fashion and return, trailing clouds of glory, to his astounded and delighted parents. But Rigel IV proved strangely indifferent to his enthusiasm. The earlier cojonists had seen his kind before. They resented his Earthpride, they laughed at his squeamishness where the local Aliens were concerned, and they played upon his exaggerated fears of the Devils, as the yet-unknown alien races beyond the spatial frontier were called. They had only contempt for his job in the typographers' office and no one liked him well enough to offer him any other occupation. So he sat at his desk, turning out an occasional map copy on his desk duplicator for the stray customers that wandered in. He stared out the window at the red dust in the streets and in the air, calculating over and over again how many hundreds of years of hoarding his salary would be required to save up tlie bribe money for citizenship, and dreaming of the lost beauty of the cool white moonlight of Earth. A bove all else, he remembered and yearned for moonlight. It became to him the symbol of all that he wished for and could not have. And he began to seek itmore and more often -- in the contents of a bottle. And so the breakup came. Though there was little to do at his job, a time came when he could not even do that, but sprawled on his bed in the hotel, dreaming of moonlight, while the days merged one into the other endlessly. Termination came in the form of a note from his office and two months' salary. Further than that, his recovered memory would not go. He lay for the equivalent of some days, recuperating; and when he was able to move around again, he discovered to his relief that he was now able to leave the remaining bottles in the liquor section alone. that the house walls were honeycombed with equipment and control panels, behind sliding doors. He gazed at these with wonder, but for some reason could not bring himself to touch them. One in particular drew him and repelled him even more than the Test. It was by far the simplest of the lot, having only four plain switches on it. The largest one, a knife switch with a red handle, exerted the strongest influence over him. The urge to pull it was so strong that he could not bear to stand staring at it for more than a few minutes, without reaching out his hand toward it. But no sooner did his fingertips approach the red handle than a reaction set in. A paralysis rooted him to the spot, his heart pounded violently, and sweat oozed coldly from his pores. He would be forced then to close the panel and not go back to it for several hours. Finally, he compromised with his compulsion. There were three smaller switches: and finally, gingerly, he reached out his hand tc the first of these, one time when he had been staring at it, and pulled it The light went out. He screamed in blind animal fear and slapped wildly at the panel. The switch moved again beneath his hand and the light  # came back on. Sobbing, he leaned against tlie panel, gazing in overwhelming relief out through the big front window at the good green grass and the brightness of the sky beyond. It was some time before he could bring himself to touch that switch again. Finally he summoned up the nerve to pull it once more and stood a long while in the darkness, with thudding heart, letting his eyes grow accustomed to it. Eventually he found he could see again, but faintly. He groped his way through the gloom of the front room and lifted his face to the sky outside, from which the faint glow came. And tins time he did not cry out, The night sky was all around him and filled with stars. It .was th? bright shine of them that illuminated his little world with a stars, in every quarter of the heavens, stars. But it was not ju.st their presence alone that struck him rigid with horror. Like all of his generation, he knew how the stars looked from every planet owned by man. What schoolchild did not? He could glance at the stars from a position in any quarter of the human sector of space and tell roughly from the arrangement , overliead where that position was. Consequently, his sight of the stars told him where he was now; and it was this knowledge that gripped him with mind-freezing terror. He was adrift, alone on a little, self-contained world, ten miles in diameter, a pitiful little bubble of matter, in the territory of the Devils, in the unknown regions beyond the farthest frontier. He could not remember what happened immediately after that. Somehow, he must have gotten back inside and closed the light switch, for when he woke again to sanity, the light had hidden the stars once more. But fear had come to live with him. He knew now that malice or chance had cut him irrevocably off from his own kind and thrust him forth to be the prey or sport of whatever beings held this unknown space. But from that moment, memory of his adult life began to return. Bit by bit. from the further past, and working closer in time, it came. And at first he welcomed almost sardonically the life-story it told. Now that he knew where he was, whatever his history turned out to be, it could make no difference. As time went on, though, interest in the man he had been obsessed him, and he seized on each individual recollection as it emerged from the mist, grasping fit it almost frantically. The viseo that he kept running, purely for the sake of human-seeming companionship, played unheeded while he hunted desperately through the hazy corridor of his mind. H e remembered his name now. It was Helmut Perran. Helmut Perran had gone from despondency to hopelessness after his dismissal from the job at the typographers. He was a confirmed alcoholic now, and with the labor shortage common on an expanding planet, he had no trouble finding enough occasional work to keep himself in liquor. He self off, but his youth and health saved him. They dragged him back to existence in the' snake ward of the local hospital, and psychoed a temporary cure on him. Helmut had gone downhill socially until he reached rock bottom, until there was no further for him to go. He began to come back up again, but by a different route. He came up in the shadowy no-man's-land just across the border of the law. He was passer, pimp and come-on man. He fronted for a gambling outfit. He made some money and went into business for himself as a promoter of crooked money-making schemes, and he ended as advance agent for a professional sm'gling outfit. Oddly enough, the business was only technically illegal. With the mushroom growth of the worlds, dirty politics and graft had mushroomed as well. Tariffs were passed often for the sole purpose of putting money in the pockets of customs officials. Unnecessary red tape served the same purpose. The upshot was that graft became an integral part of interstellar business. The big firms had their own agents to cut through these difficulties witli the golden knife of credits. The smaller firms, or those who could less afford the direct graft, did business with smuggling outfits. These did not actually smuggle; they merely saw to it that the proper men and machines were blind when a shipment that had been arranged for came through regular channels. They dealt with the little men -- the spaceport guard, the berthing agent, the customs agent who checked the invoice -- where the big firms made direct deals with the customs house head, or the political appointee in charge of that governmental section. It was more risky than the way of the big firms, but also much less expensive. Helmut Perran, as advance agent, made the initial contact". It was his job to determine who were the men who would have to be fixed, to take the risk of approaching them cold, and either to bribe them into cooperation or make sure that another man who could be bribed took their place at the proper time. It was a job that paid well. But by this time, Helmut was ambitious. He was sick of ille gality and he thought he saw a way back to Earth and the moonlight. He shot for a job as fixer with one of the big firms that dealt directly with the head men in Customs -- and got it. It was as simple as that. He was now respectable, wealthy, and his chance would come. He worked for the big firm faithfully for five years before it did. Then there came along a transfer of goods so large and invofved that he was authorized to arrange for bribes of more made the arrangement, took the credits, and skipped to Earth, where, with more than enough money to cover it, he at last bought his coveted Earth citzenship. After that, they came and got him, as he knew they would. They got him a penal sentence of ten years, but they couldn't manage revocation of the citzenship. Through the hell of the little question room and the long trial, he carried miniature picture in his mind of the broad white streets of Los Angeles in the moonlight and the years ahead. UT there the memory ended. He had a vague recollection of days in some penal institution, and then the mists were thick again. He beat hard knuckles against his head in a furious rage to remember. What had happened? They couldn't have touched him while he was serving his sentence. And once he had put in his ten years, he would be a free man with the full rights of his Earth citizenship. Then let them try anything. They were a firm of colossal power, but Earth was filled with such colossi; and the Earth laws bore impartially on all. What, then, had gone wrong? He groaned, rocking himself in his chair like a child, in his misery. But he was close to the answer, so close. Give him just a bit more time -- But he was not allowed the time. Before he could bring the answer to the front of his mind, the Devils came. Their coming was heralded by the high-pitched screaming of a siren, which cut off abruptly as the spaceship came through the bright opaqueness of the sky, like the Sun through a cloud, and dropped gently toward the ground, its bright metal sides gleaming as if they had been freshly buffed. It landed not fifty feet from him. The weight of it sank its rounded bottom deep be neath the surface of the sod, so that it looked like a huge metal bowl turned face-down on the gras,. A port opened in its side and two bipedal, upright creatures stepped out of it and came toward him. As they approached him, time seemed to slip a cog and move very slowly. He had a chance to notice small individual differences between them. They were both shorter than he by at least a head, although the one on l#elmut's left was slightly taller. They were covered with what seemed to be white fur, all but two little black buttons of eyes apiece. And they seemed to have more than the ordinary number of jtynts in their legs and arms, for these limbs bent like rubber hose when they walked or gesticulated. They were carrying a square box between them. Helmut stood still, waiting for them. The only thought in his mind was that now he would never get to know how he had happened to be here, and he was Forry, for he had grown fond of the man he had once been, not the one he later turned out to be, as you might be fond of a distant relative. Meanwhile, he could feel his breath coming with great difficulty and his heart thumping inside him as it had thumped that time he had first tried the switch that turned off the light. He watched them come up to a few feet om him and set the box down. As soon as it was resting on the grass, it began to vibrate and a hum came from it that was pitched at about middle C. It went up in volume until it was about as loud as a man saying "aaaah" when a doctor holds down his tongue with a depresser to look at his throat. When it had reached this point, it broke suddenly from a steady sound into a series of short, intermittent hums that gradually resolved themselves into syllables. He realized that the box was talking to him, one syllable at a time. "Do not be afraid," it said. "We wi sh to tal k to you." Helmut said nothing. He wanted to hear what the box had to say, but, at the same time, a compulsion was mounting within him. It screamed that these others were horrible and unnatural and dangerous, that nothing they said was true, that he must turn and run to safety before it was too late. They had been watching him for a long time, the box went on to 'tell him. They had listened from a safe distance to the viseo tapes he had run on the machine and finally translated his Ian guage. They had done their best to understand him from a distance and had failed, for he seemed to be unhappy and to dislike being where he was and what he was doing, nd if this was so. why was he doing it? They did not understand. Where had he come from and who was he? Why was he here? , Helmut looked at the four little black eyes that gazed at him like the puzzled, halffriendly eyes of a bear he had seen in a zoo while he was a boy back on Earth. There was no possible way for white-furred faces to have shown expression, but he thought he read kindness in them, and long loneliness of his stay on ftie sphere rose up and almost choked him with a desire to answer them. But that savagely irrational comer of his mind surged forward to combat the impulse toward friendliness. He opened his mouth. Only a garbled croak came out. He turned and ran. He raced to the building and burst through the entrance. He threw himself at the panel that hid the switches, pulling it open and sliding aside the door that covered them. He reached for the red-handled switch hesitated, and looked over his shoulder at the two creatures. They stood as he had left them. For the last time, he wavered under the urge to go back to them, to tell them his stoyy, at least to listen to their side once -- first. But they were Devils! The fear and anger inside him surged up, beating down everything else. He grasped the red switch firmly and threw it home. What followed after that was nightmare.  time in the cold hall and nobody had paid any attention to him. Occasionally, men in Space Guard uniforms or the white coat? of laboratory workers would go past him into the Warden's office, and come out again a little later. But all of these went past him as if he did not exist. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair they had given him. They had outfitted him in fresh civilian clothes, which felt clinging and uncomfortable after the long months of running around on the sphere half-naked. The clothes, like the stiff waitingroom chair, the hall, and the parade of passing men all chafed on him and shrieked at him tiiat he did not belong. He hated them. The parade in and out of the office went on. Finally, the door to the office opened and a young Guardsman stuck his head out. "You can come in now," he said. Helmut got to his feet. He did it awkwardly, the unaccustomed clothing seeming to stick to him, his legs half-asleep from the long wait in the chair. He walked through the door and the young Guard shut it behind him. The Warden, a spare man of Helmut's age, with a military stiffness in his bearing and noncommittal mouth and eyes, looked up from his desk. "You can go, Price," he said to the Guard; and, to Helmut, "Sit down, Perran." Helmut lowered himself clumsily into the armchair across the desk from the Warden as the young Guardsman went out the door. The Warden stared at him for a moment. "Well, Perran," he said, "you deserve to congratulate yourself. You're one of our lucky ones." Helmut stared back at him, iwimbly, for a long time. Then, abruptly, it was like being sick. Without warning, a sob came choking up in his throat and he laid his head on the desk in front of him and began to cry. The Warden lit a cigarette and smoked it for a while, staring out the window. The sound of Helmut's sobs was strained in the silence of the office. When they had dwindled somewhat, the Warden spoke again to Helmut. "You'll get over it," he said. "Thafs just the conditioning wearing off... If you didn't break down and cry, you'd have been, in serious psychological trouble. You'll be all right now." Helmut lifted his head from the desk. "What happened to me?" he asked, his throat hoarse. "Wh't happened?" The Warden puffed on his cigarette. "You were assigned to one of our Mousetraps," he answered. "It's a particularly hazardous duty for which criminals can volunteer. Normally, we only get men under death sentence or those with life terms. You're an exception." "But I didn't volunteer!" "In your case," said the Warden, "there may have been some dirty work along the line. We are investigating. Of course, if that turns out to be the case, you'll be entitled to reparation. I don't suppose you remember how you came to be on the Mousetrap, do you?" "It's not surprising," said the Warden. "Few do, although, theoretically, the conditioning is supposed to disappear after you capture a specimen. Briefly, you were given psychological treatment in order to fit you for cx.# istence alone in the Mousetrap. It's necessary, because usually our Baits live their life out on the sphere without attracting any alien life. You were one of the lucky ones, Perran." "But what is it?" asked Helmut. "What is it for?" "The Mousetrap system?" the Warden answered. "It's our first step in the investigation of alien races with a view to integrating them into human economy. We take a sphere like the one you were on, put a conditioned criminal on it, and shove it off into unexplored territory where we have reason to suspect the presence of new races. With luck, the alien investigates the sphere and our conditioned Bait snaps the trap shut on him. Lacking luck, the Mousetrap is either not investigated or the aliens aren't properly trapped. Our conditioned man, in that case, blows it up -- and himself along with it. "As I say, you were lucky. You're back here safe on Kronbar. and we've got a fine couple of hitherto undiscovered specimens for our laboratory to investigate. What if those creatures had beaten you to the swntch?" Helmut shuddered and covered his eyes, as if, by doing so, he could shut the memory from his mind. "The Guard Ship was so lot coming." he muttered. "So long! Days. And I had to watch them all that time caught in a forcefield like flies in a spider web. I couldn't go away without stepping out of the building and being caught myself. And they kept talking to me with that little box of theirs. They couldn't understand why I did it. They kept asking me over and over again why I did it. But they got weaker and weaker and finally they died. Then they just hung there because the force-field wouldn't let them fall over." His voice dwindled away. The Warden cleared his throat with a short rasp. "A trying time. I'm sure," he said. "But you have the consolation of knowing that you have performed a very useful duty . for the human race." He stood up. "And now, Unless you have some more questions -- " "When can I go home?" asked Helmut. "Back to Earth." The Warden looked a trifle embarrassed. "Your capture of the aliens entitles you to a pardon; and of course you have Earth Citizenship -- but I'm afraid we won't be able to let you leave Kronbar." Helmut stared at him from a face that seemed to have gone entirely wooden. Hig lips moved stififly. "Why not?" he croaked. "Well, you see," said the Warden, leading the way to a dif## ferent door than the one through which Helmut had entered, "these specimens you brought back seem to be harmless, and inside of a month or two we'll probably have a task force out there to put them completely under our thumb. But we've had a little trouble before, when we'd release a Bait and it would turn out later tKat the aliens had in some way infected him. So there happens to be a blanket rule that successful Baits have to live out the rest of their life on Kronbar." He opened the door invitingly. "You can go out this way, if you want. Private entrance. It leads directly to the street." feet and shambled over to the door. For one last time a vision of moonlight on the bay at Santa Monica mocked him. A wild scheme flashed through his head in which he overpowered the Warden, stole his uniform and bluffed his way to a Guard Patjol ship, where he forced the crew to take him either to Earth, or, failing that, out beyond the Frontier to warn the white-furred kin of the two alien beings he had killed. Then the scheme faded from his mind. It was no use. The odds were too great. There were too many like the Warden. There were always too many of them for Helmut and those like him. He turned away from the Warden, ignoring the Warden's outstretched hand. He went out the door and down light of Kronbar. Kronbar, the Bright Planet, socalled because, since it winds an eccentric orbit around the twin stars of a binary system, there is neither dark nor moonlight, and the Sun is always shining. All th acience fiction, fnntnsy, weirfi, and supcrnatoral books in print in America or Enelanill I can tuppljr anythine you see mentioned, listed or offered anywherel Send # for my new Giant Printed Checklist of over # titles, including over # paperbound books at #c each np. Or. if you are nearby N.Y.C... visit me at my home (Just two miles from N.y.O. line) which is literally crammed with thousands of back issue cnagazineR and used books in addition to the largest variety of new books of this kind in the world, Phone me at Floral Park #, (you can dial it), and I'll gladly furnish directions to get her#. Franklin Square, L. I., N. Y. # Sherwood Avenue ham House-Pellegrini #b Cudahy, New York, #. # pages, # F lat statement; This is a must for anyone who has the slightest interest in the origins of modern science fiction and the works of its Old Masters. This does not. mean that all # stories in the book are masterpieces; far from it. Dr. Keller is an uneven writer and some of the tales have an almost juvenile touch to them. It does not mean, either, that the stor'ies are all science fiction. Dr. Keller divides his book into thirds -- science fiction, fantasy, and psychiatry. The latter stories are classifiable either as fantasy or as science fiction, true, but they have an added quality stemming from the fact that they are written by a physician with a perceptive knowledge of the human mind. Mistake it not. these stories are genuinely good reading, with very few exceptions: and, in addition, they are also highly original as ideas. For the information of collectors, only four tales have been previously anthologized: "The Worm," "The Literary Corkscrew," "The Revolt of the Pedrstrians.' and "The Ivy War" of horrid memory. van Vot. Gnome Pres#, New York, #. # peges, # book, the fourth van Vogt to be reviewed in these columns since January of this year, has finally crystalized an opinion I have been coming to for a number of years. A. E. van Vogt is not a science fiction writer. He is a science fantasist, a teller of impossible fairy tales with a pseudoor semiscientific frame. This does not detract from my pleasure in reading his books, but it does shift one's view of science fiction, and delimits the field considerably. Perhaps it needed it. In van Vogt, a concept usually is poetic rather than scientific. His formula is grandiose, perhaps a little megalomaniac, but undeniably imaginative -- product of a mind that will not be tied down by the basics of the modem physical, chemical, or psycho-biological sciences. In the present slim book, made up of three novelets frqm Asfounding during the #-# heyday, we have the following wonders: (#) An Earth-origin civilization on the "Planets of the Fifty Suns" in the Magellanic Clouds. (#) The concept that this civilization grew from a small group of men who had been "Dellianized," or made into supermen by being passed through a matter transmitter and thus given Supernal powers. (#) The notion that these Dellians and nonDellians (i.e., normal humans) could, by interbreeding, produce a new race with two minds -- the human and the superhuman. (#) The concept of a true Earth exploratory spaceship with a crew of thirty thousand -- and, of course, fantastic weapons and thigamijigs as well. (#) A plot involving such ordinary wonders as the complete atomic di.ssolution of human bodies and th'eir perfect reconstitution by (believe it or not) a Machine! Personally I low it all. but  don't think it's science fiction. It belongs to a special literature of the fantastic, which is, like the works of E. E. Smith. Ph.D., powered by just about the same psychodynamical motors as those satirical, not a romantic, way. in his famous Small Fry series, "Dreams of Glory." This is atomic-powered wish fulfillment! All right, now that I know, I can relax and enjoy the stuff. Campbell, Jr. Shasta Publishers, Chicago, #. # pages, #  of science fantasy, let's take a look at the early "Don A. Stuart' stories by the editor of Astounding Scerce Fiction. Here is one of the true progenitors of van Vogt's special type of "impossible" science fiction. The book contains seven novelets, in all of which the Unlikely is defeated by the Impossible. Seven stories -- all beyond belief. all science fantasy, all somew'hat overwritten, but still well done: you cannot very readily forgot them. The Machine series of three stories (like all the rest reprinted from Astounding during the late #s and early #s) is about a "Machine' that runs the world for mankind, but abandons it. leaving alfaiis' in chaos, when it becomes obvious that Man is growing lazy and useless. Then the Alien Invaders ("Tharoo") take over what's left of Man and rule until some superscicntific human rebels force them to move to Venus. Here is the optimistic theme of recivilizing that runs thiough most of the Stuart stories. "Forgetfulness." a truly fine tale, finds Man so far advanced that he has forgotten such primitive techniques as atomic energy: he is really civilized. The two Aesir stories deal with tle Sarn matriarchy -- aliens who are eventually defeated by n fantastic gadget that absorbs all energy. Its temperature, according to its inventor, is an astonishing minus # degrees. And so it goes; deeply aipealing adult bedtime stories, in some instances actually productive of nice ideas (particularly "Forgetfulness"), but in general a little on the inenarrable (look it up in your unabridged) side of beltevability. Of the seven items, only two ("Forgetfulness" and "The Machine") have previously Ix'en in science fiction collections. bluth. Doubleday  Co., New York, #. # paes, # TT'S impossible to review tlis item adequately without giving away the major plot gimmick. All I can say is that the tale is exciting; it grips your attention: it has a wonderful sense of reality, despite the essential implausibility of its major premise: and yet some parts are painfully possible in today's atmosphere of scientific secrecy. In some ways it is a rather daring parable of the left hand not knowing what the right hand doeth. Briefly, the story (which Is placed a modest few decades from tow) deals with the secret manufacture of the first Moonship. Impossible? Who knows, when you think of the Manhattan Project? Of course, the frame of reference in which the ship is built here is unlikely, to say the least -- and the screwy way in which the atomic fuel for the ship is developed is even more of a boff (as the "joy-poppers and main-liners" -- see page #I of this book) would put it. On the other hand, in the process of telling itself the story has some diamond-pointed things to say about Security, Bureaucracy, Military Matters, Sex, Politics, and the Press. A worthwhile addition to Dou-. bleday's science fiction series -- never before appearing in print, cither in a magazine or elsewhere; and (for once) good enough to make one wonder why it wasn't serialized. All that extra money lost! Arts, Inc., New York, #. # paes, #...SO writer who invented the word "robot" (in his play R.U.R. -- "Rursum's Universal Robots") wiote this very curious item, the title of which is derived from the volcano Krakatoa, in the early Twenties. He undoubtedly intended it as a frantic plea against war. This it still is, though a rather confused one. But in addition (and this is why it is now reprinted) Capek also knew something about atomic physics. Consequently, he previsioned the atom bomb some # years before it happened. He certainly deserves a medal for this, too. Capek also wrote an almost psychopathic book. It opens with of an. attack of brain fever, in the person of Prokop, the hero -- a simpleton full of power, an explosive prone, a sick genius. And a fool when it comes to women. Sex, brain fever -- what else? Of course, a surrealist satire on power lusts in all sorts of people -- clergymen, generals, princesses, businessmen. After you have read and then sat back and considered it with, care, Krakatit turns out to be a savagely pertinent book about the misuse of Science. It is not particularly easy reading or particularly attractive, but it is damnably compelling. M# The Altruist When something disappears, there is afways a reason. But it may be pleasanter to have the mystery than find out the explanation I I Colonel Olaf MagrumsB sen said aloud. He was referring to his office scissors, with which he wanted to cut some string. The string, designed for official use, was almost unbreakably tough, and Colonel Magrumssen had wrapped one end of it around a package containing a set of reports of the Department of Metallurgy, which was to be dispatched immediately. The other end of the string led through a hole in the wall to an automatic feeder spool somewhere behind the wall, and tiie scissors should have been on a small desk immediately under the point where the string emerged, because that was where the colonel always left them. Just now. however, they weren't there. There wasn't anything else on the desk that they might have slipped behind; they weren't lying on the floor, and the desk had no drawers into which he could have put them by mistake. They were simply and inexplicably gone. "Damn!' he said, holding the package in both hands and looking about helplessly. He was all alone in the Inner Sanctum which #eparated his residential quarters from the general office area of the Department of Metallurgy, The Sanctum, constructed along the lines of a bank vault, contained Metallurgy's secret files and a few simple devices connected with an automatic transportation system between Metallurgy and various other government departments. There was nothing around that would be useful in the present emergency. "Miss Eaton!" the colonel bellowed, in some exasperation. Miss Eaton appeared in the doorway a minute later, looking slightly anxious and slightly resentful. which was her normal expression. Otherwise, she was a very satisfactory secretary and general assistant to the colonel. "Your scissors, Miss Eaton!" he ordered, holding up his packagc"Kindly cut this string!" him to the desk, and her expression became more definitely resentful. 'es. sir," she said. She stepped up and, with a small pair of scissors attached by a decorative chain to her belt, cut the string. "Thank you," said the colonel. "That will be all." "There's a Notice of Transfer regarding Charles E. Watterly lying on your desk." Miss Eaton said. "You were to pass on it early this mOrning." "I know." The colonel frowned. "You might get out Watterly's record for me, Miss Eaton." "It's attached to the Notice of Transfer," Miss Eaton told him. She went out without waiting for a reply. The colonel dropped the package into a depository that would dispatch it to its destination untouched by human hands, and turned to leave the Inner Sanctum. Still irritated by the disappearance, he glanced back at the desk. And there the scissors were, just where he remembered having left them! The colonel stopped short. "Eh?" he inquired incredulously, of no one in particular. A long forgotten childhood memory came chidingly into his mind... "Lying right there!" a ghostly voice of the past was addressing him again. "If it were a snake" the voice added severely, rubbing the lesson in, "it would bite you!" The colonel picked up the scissors rather gingerly, as if they might bite him. at that. He looked surprised and alert now, all distracting annoyances forgotten. Colonel Magrumssen was a logical man. Now that he thought back, there was no significant doubt in his mind that, the evening before, he had left those scissors on that dtsk. Nor that, after opening the Sanctum and sealing the package this morning, he had discovered they were gone. Nor. of course, finally, that they now had returned again. Those were facts. Another fact was that, aside from himself, nobody but Miss Eaton had entered the Inner Sanctum meanwhile -- and she hadn't come anywhere near the desk. Touching a sticky spot on one of the blades of the scissors, the colonel dabbed at it and noticed something attractively familiar about the pale brown gumminess on his finger. He put the finger to his mouth. Why. certainly, he told himself -- it's just taffy. His mind paused a moment. Just taffy! it repeated. Now wait a minute, the colonel thought helplessly. One could put it this way. he decided: at some time last night or this morning, an Unseen Agency had borrowed his scissors for the apparent purpose of cutting taffy with them, and then had brought his scissors back... P erhaps it was the complete improbability of that explanation which made him want to accept it immediately. In the humdrum, hard-working decades following Earth's Hunger Years, Colonel Magrumssen had become a hobbyist of tlie Mysterious, and this was the most mysteriouslooking occurrence he'd yet run into personally. He'd been trained in espionage during the last counter-revolution, and while the lack of further revolutions ultimately had placed him in an executive position in Metallurgy, his interests still lay in investigating the unexplained, the unpredictable, ia human behavior, and elsewhere. As a logical man. however, he realized he'd have to put in his customary day's work in Metallurgy before he could investigate the unusual behavior of a pair of ortree scissors. He locked the double doors of the Inner Sanctum behind him -- locked them, perhaps, with exceptional attention to the fact that they were being locked -- and went into the outer offices, to decide on Charles E. Watterly's Notice of Transfer.  The Department of Metallurgy, this section of which was under Colonel Olaf Magrumssen's supervision, was as smoothly operating an organization as any government coordinator could want to see. So was every other major organization -- the simple reason being that employees who couldn't meet the stiff requirements of governmental employment were dropped quietly and promptly into the worldwide labor pool known as Civilian lowed you, it was rather difficult to get out again; and life at those levels was definitely unattractive. Charles E. Watterly's standing in Metallurgy was borderline at best, the colonel decided after going briefly over his record -- a rather incredible series of preposterous mistakes, blunders, slipups and oversights, atterly's immediate superior had made up a Notice of Transfer as a matter of course and sent it along to the colonel's desk to be signed. Signing it would send Charles E. Watterly automatically to Civilian General Duty. The colonel was a tolerant man. He didn't care a particular hang how the Department of Metallurgy fared, providing his own position wasn't threatened. But even colonels who failed to keep their subordinates in line could wind up doing Civilian General Duty. could afford to give the unfortunate Watterly one more chance, the colonel decided. A man who could operate so consistently against his own interests should be worth studying for a while! And since Watterly's superior had passed the buck by making out the Notice of Transfer, the colonel summoned Miss Eaton and instructed her to have Watterly placed on his personal staff, on probation. Miss Eaton made no comment. The airtight organization which was beginning to haul humanity, uncomfortably and sometimes brutally enough, out of the catastrophic decline of the Hunger Years did not encourage comment on one's superior's decisions. "Mr. John Brownson of Statistics is here to see you," she announced. "HE two per cent Normal  Loss," John Brownson, a personal assistant of the Minister of Statistics, informed Colonel Magrumssen presently, "has shown striking variations of late, locally. That's the situation in a nutshell. The check we're conducting in your department is of a purely routine nature." He was relieved to hear that, the colonel said drily. What did Statistics make of these variations? Brownson looked surprised. "We've made nothing ofthem as yet," he admitted. "In time, we hope, somebody will." He paused and looked almost embarrassed. "Now in your department, we have localized one ara of deviation so far. It happens to be the cafeteria." The colonel stared. "The cafeteria?" "The cafeteria," Brownson continued, flushing a trifle, "shows currently a steady point three increase over Normal Loss. Processed foodstuffs, of course, are so universally affected by the loss that almost any dispersal point can be used conveniently to check deviations. Similar changes are reported elsewhere in the capital area, indicating the possible development of a local trend... "Trend to what?" the colonel demanded. Brownson shrugged thoughtfully. He wasn't, he pointed out. an analyst; he only produced the statistics. "Well, never mind," said the colonel. "Our poor little cafeteria, eh? Let me know if anything else turns up, will you?" Now that was an odd thing, he reflected, still idly, while he gazed after Brownson's retreating back. When you got right down to it, nobody actually seemed to know why there should be a two per cent untraceable loss in the annual manipulations of Earth's commodities! People like Brown.son obviously saw nothing remarkable in it. To them, Normal Loss had the status of a natural law. and that was that. Why. he realized, his reaction hovering somewhere between amusement and indignation, he'd been fooled into accepting that general viewpoint himself! He'd let himself be tricked into accepting a "natural law" which involved an element of the completely illogical, the inexplicable. The colonel felt a flush of familiar excitement. Look, he thought, this could be -- why, this is big! Let's look at the facts! He did. And with that, almost instantly, a breathtakingly improbable but completely convincing explanation was there in his mind. Furthermore, it tied in. perfectly with the temporary disappearance of his office scissors that morning! Colonel Magrumssen conceded, however, with something like awed delight at his own cleverness, that it was going to be a little difficult to prove anything. THE problem suddenly had be come too intriguing to put off entirely till evening, so the colonel sent Miss Eaton out to buy a bag of the best available taffy. And he himself made a trip to his private library in his living quarters and returned with a couple of books which had nothing to do with his official duties, He proceeded to study them until Miss Eaton returned with the taffy, which he put in a drawer of his desk. Then, tapping the last page of the text he had been studying -- the chapter was titled "Negative Hallucinations" -- he reviewed the tentative conelusions he'd formed so far. The common starting point in the investigation of any unusual occurrence was to assume that nothing just occurred, that everything had a cause. The next step being, of course, the assumption that anything that happened was part of a greater pattern of events; and that if one got to see enough of it, the greater pattern generally made sense. The mysterious disappearance and reappearance of his office scissors certainly seemed unusual enough. But when one tied it in with humanity's casual acceptance of the fact that some two per cent of Earth's processed commodities disappeared tracelessly every year, one might be getting a glimpse of a possible mar pattern. The colonel glanced back over a paragraph he had marked in "Negative Hallucinations": Negative hallucinations are comprehensive in the sense that they also negate the sensory registration of any facts that would contradict them. Install in a hypnotic subject the conviction that there is no one but himself in the room: he will demonstrate that he docs not permit himself to realize that he cannot see when another person present places both hands over his eyes... Assuming that it wasn't too logical of humanity to take Normal Loss for granted, one could conclude that humanity as a whole might be suffering from a very comprehensive negative hallucination -- in which case, it wouldn't, of course, be permitting itself to wonder about Normal Loss! It was a rather large assumption to make, the colonel admitted; but he might be in a position to test it now. For one then could assume also that there was somebody around, some Unseen Agency, who was benefiting both by Normal Loss accept Normal Loss without further investigation. An outfit who operated as smoothly as that shouldn't really have bungled matters by returning his scissors under sUch suspicious circumstances. But even that sort of outfit might be handicapped by occasional members who weren't quite up to par. Somebody, say, who was roughly the equivalent of a Charles E. Watterly. The notion satisfied the colonel. He unlocked a desk drawer which contained a few items of personal interest to him. A gun, for one thing -- in case life eventually turned out to be just a little too boring, or some higherup decided some day that Colonel Magrumssen was ripe for a man should be prepared for any eventuality. Beside the gua, carefully wrapped, was a small crystal globe, a souvenir from a vacation trip he'd made to Africa some years before. There had been a brief personal romance involved with the trip and the globe; but that part of it no longer interested the colonel very much. The thing about the globe right now was that, when one pressed down a little button set into its base, it demonstrated a gradual succession of tiny landscapes full of the African sunlight and with minute animals and people walking about in it. All very lifelike and arranged in such a manner that one seemed to be making a slow trip about the continent. It was an enormously expensive little gadget, but it might now be worth the price he'd paid for it. The colonel wrapped the globe back up and set it on the desk next to the bag of taffy. Then he went about finishing up the day's official business, somewhat amazed at the fact that he seemed to be accepting his oWn preposterous theory as a simple truth -- that invisible beings walked the Earth, lived among men and filched their sustenance from Man's meager living supplies ,... But he hadn't, he found, the slightest desire to warn humanity against its parasites! That had nothing to do with the fact that nobody would believe him anyway. So far, he rather approved of the methods employed by the Unseen Agency. By the time the next twentyfour hours were over, he also might have a fair idea of its purpose. He laughed. The whole business was really outrageous. And he realized that, for some reason, that was just what delighted him about it. shortly after nine o'clock that evening, when he had .the first indication that his plans were beginning to work out. Up till then, he had remained in a curiously relaxed frame of mind. Having accepted the apparent fact of the Unseen Agency's existence, the question was whether its mysterious powers went so far that it actually could read his thoughts and know what he intended to do before he got around to doing it. If it could, his tricks obviously weren't going to get him anywhere. If it couldn't, he should get results -- eventually. He felt he lost nothing by trying. He was aware of no particular surprise then when things began to happen. It was as if he had expected them to happen in just that way. T#f He had pushed away the papers he was workiag on and leaned back to yawn and stretch for a moment. As if by accident, his gaze went to the mantel above the study's electronic fireplace, where he had placed the little crystal globe showing Africa's scenic wonders. He had left it switched to the picture of a burned brown desert, across which a troop of lean, pale antelopes trotted slowly toward a distant grove of palm trees. From where he sat, he could see that the crystal no longer showed the desert view. Instead, Kilimanjaro's snow-covered peak was visible in it, reflecting the pink light of an infinitesimal morning sun. The colonel frowned slightly, permitting a vague sense of disturbance -- an awareness of something being not quite as it should be -- to pass through his mind. Presumably, that awareness would reflect itself to some degree in his expression and might be noticed there by a sufficiently alert observer. He dismissed the feeling and turned back to his papers. What he caught in that moment, from the corner of his eye, pouldn't exactly be described as motion. It was hardly more than a mental effect, a fleeting impression of shifting shadows, light and lines, as if something had alighted for an instant on the farthest edge of his vision and been withdrawn again. The colonel didn't look up. A chill film of sweat covered the backs of his hands and his forehead. That was the only indication he gave, even to himself, of feeling any excitement. Without moving his eyes, he could tell that the gleaming crystal globe had vanished from its place on the mantel. way, they were cutting off the links of awareness that existed between all rational human beings. They were broadcasting the impression that they, and the things they touched, and the traces of their activities did not exist. Once the mind accepted that, it would refuse to acknowledge any contradictory evidence offered by its senses of reasoning powers. He'd started out by assuming that there was something there, so the effect of the negative hallucination was weakened in him. Every new advance in understanding he made now should continue to weaken it -- and there was one moment when the Unseen Agency's concrete reality must manifest itself in a manner which his mind, at this point, couldn't refuse to accept. That was the instant in which it was manipulating some very concrete item, such as tlie crystal globe, in and out of visibility. It was obvious, at any rate, that the Agency couldn't read his thoughts. He'd tricked it, precisely as he'd set out to do, into making a hurried attempt to resolve his apparently half-formed suspicion that someone might have been playing with the globe behind his back. It showed a certain innocence of mind. But, presumably, people who had such unusual powers mightn't l#l accustomed to the sort of devious maneuvering and conscious control of emotion and thought which was required to survive at an acceptable level in the colonel's everyday world. He became aware suddenly of the fact that the crystal globe had been returned to its place on the mantel. For that same instant. he was aware also of a child shape, definitely a girl, standing on tiptoe before the mantel, still reaching up toward the globe -- and then fading quickly, soundlessly, beyond the reach of his senses again. That was considerably more than enough -- He'd been thinking of some super-powered moron, of the Charles E. Watterly type, not a child! But it made even better sense this way, and it took only a few seconds flexibility to adapt his plans to include the new factor. T he colonel took two white cards and a lead pencil out of a drawer of the desk at which he was working. He unhurriedly printed three words on the first card and five on the second. Putting the cards into his pocket, he finally looked up at the globe. As he expected, it 'showed the scene he'd last been studying himself -- brown desert, the grove of palms and the antelopes. He gazed at it for a moment, as if absently accepting this correction of the Unseen Agency's lapse as any good hypnotic subject should. And then, still casually, he took the bag of fresh taffy he'd had Miss Eaton buy that afternoon out of the desk drawer. He opened it, opening his mind simultaneously to the conviction thatthe child-shape would come now to this new bait, Almost Instantly, he realized, with a sense of sheer delight, that she was there! At any rate, there was an eagerness, an innocent greed, swirling like a gusty, soundless little wind 'of emotion about him, barely checked now by the necessity of remaining unseen. He took out a piece of the taffy and popped it solemnly into his mouth, and the greed turned into  shivering young rage of frustration. and a plea, and a prayer: Oh, make him look away! Just once The colonel put the paper bag into his pocket, walked deliberately to the mantel and propped cine of the two cards up against the globe. There was a fresh upsurge of interest, and then an almost physically violent burst of other emotions behind him. For the three words on the card Whistling soundlessly, the colonel waited a moment and replaced that card with the next one. He scratched his jaw and, as an apparent second thought, produced three pieces of taffy from his pocket, which he arrand into an artistic little pyramid in front of the card. He turned and walked back to his desk. When he looked around from there, the card was gone. So were the three pieces of taffy. He waited patiently for over a minute. Something white fluttered momentarily before the globe on the mantel and the card had reappeared. For a moment again, too. the child became visible, looking at him still half in alarm, but also half in laughter now, and then vanished once more. Reading what was written o the card, the colonel knew he'd won the first round anyway. His reaction wasn't the feeling of alert, cautious triumph he'd expected, but a curious, rather unaccountable happiness. The five words he'd printed on the card had been : don't worry -- I won't tell That message was crossed out now with pencil. Underneath it, two single words had been printed in a ragged slope, as if someone had been writing very hurriedly: TY two o'clock that night, the colonel was still wide awake, though he had followed his methodical pattern of living by going to bed at midnight, as usual. Whatever the Unseen Agency's reaction might be, it wouldn't be bound by any conventional restrictions. There was the chance, of course, that they would decide it was necessary to destroy him. Since he couldn't protect himself successfully against invisible opponents, the colonel wasn't taking any measures along that line. He'd accepted the chance in bringing himself to their attention. They also might decide simply to ignore him. He couldn't, he conceded, do much about it if they did. Everyday humanity had its own abrupt methods of dealing with, anyone who tried to dispel its illusions, and he, for one, knew enough not to make any such attempt. But the Unseen Agency should have curiosity enough to find out how much he actually knew and what he intended to do about it... His eyes opened slowly. The luminous dial of the clock beside his bed indicated it was threethirty. He had fallen asleep finally; and now tJiere were -- presences -- in his room. After his first involuntary start, the colonel wag careful not to move. The channels of awareness that had warned of the arrival of the Unseen Agency seemed to be approximately the same he had used unwittingly in sensing the emotions of the child earlier that night. Under the circirnstances, he might regard them as more reliable than his eyes or ears. Apparently encouraged by his acceptance of the fact, his mind reported promptly that the child herself was among those present -- and that there was a new quality of stillness and expectancy about her now, as if this were a very important event to her, too. Of the others, the colonel grew aware more gradually. But as he did, he discovered the same sense of waiting expectancy about them, almost as if they were trying to tell him that the next move actually was up to him, not them. In the instant he formed that conclusion, his feeling of their general presence seemed to resolve itself into the recognition of a number of distinct personalities who were presenting themselves to him, one by one. The first was a grave, aged kindliness, but with a bubble of humor in it -- almost, he thought, surprised, like somebody's grandmother ! Two and Three seemed to be masculine, darker, thoughtfully judging. And, finally, there was Four, who appeared to come into the room only now, as if summoned from a distance to see what her friends had found -- a personality as clear and light as the child's, but an adult intelligence nevertheless. Four joined the others, observant and waiting. Waiting for what? That, the colonel gathered, was for him to experience in himself and understand. His awareness of their existence had been enough to extract their attention to him. Moving and living securely beyond the apparent realities of civilization, as if it were so much stage scenery which had hypnotized the senses of all ordinary human beings, they seemed ready to welcome and encourage any discoverer, without fear or hostility, as one of themselves. He could sense dimly the quality of their strange ability, and the motives that had created it. The ruthless mechanical rigidity of the human society that had developed out of the Hunger Years had been the forcing factor. These curious rebels must have felt a terrible necessity to escape from it to have found and developed in their own minds a means of bypassing society so completely -- the means being, essentially, so perfect a control of the outgoing radiations of thought and emotion that they created no slightest telltale ripple in the ocean of the subconscious human mind and left a negative impression there instead. But they were not hiding from anyone who followed the same path they had taken. ness in him to go any further in that direction at the moment. Full understanding might lie in the very near future; but it was still in the future. As if they had accepted that, too, he could sense that the members of the Unseen Agency were withdrawing from him and the room. Four was last to go, lingering a moment after the others had left, as if looking back at him;a light, clear presence as definite as spoken words or the touch of a hand. A moment after she had left. the colonel realized, with something of a shock, that for the first time in his adult life, he had fallen in love... , , F irst thing he did next morning was to have himself measured for a new uniform of the kind he'd always avoided -- the full uniform of his rank, white and gold, and with the extra little flourishes, the special unauthorized richness of cloth that only a colonel-and-up could afford or get away with. It was the sort of gesture, he felt, that Four might appreciate. And he had a reason for wanting to stay away from Metallurgy that morning for the four hours or so it might take to complete the suit. He was in the position of a strategist who, having made an important gain, can take time out to consolidate it and consider his next moves. He preferred to do that beyond the range of any too observant eyes -- and mind. That Four and her kind should be content to live  well, like mice, actually -- behind the scenery of the world, subsisting on the crumbs of civilization, was ridiculous. They seemed to have no real understanding of their powers, and of the uses to which they could be put. It was the most curious sort of paradox. The colonel found a park bench #t and settled down to investigate the problems presented by the paradox. He was. he decidedyS practical man. As such, he'd remained oc eluded, till now, to their solution of the problems of a society with which he was basically no more contented than they had been. But he had adjusted effectively to the requirements of that so ciety, while they had withdrawn from it in the completest possible fashion this side of suicide. To put it somewhat differently, he had learned how to influence and manipulate others to gain for himself a position comfortably near the top. They had learned how to avoid being manipulated. But if a man could do that -- without losing the will to employ his powers intelligently! The colonel checked the surge of excitement which arose from that line of reflection, almost guiltily. The structure of society might be -- and was -- more than ripe for an overhauling. But he was quite certain that Four's peohis reasoning just yet. Their whole philosophy of living was oriented in the opposite direction of ultimate withdrawal. But ive me time, he thought. Just ive me time! Four showed herself to him that afternoon. He'd returned to his office -- the white-and-gold uniform had created a noticeable stir in the department -- and instructed Miss Baton to send someone out for at lunch tray from the cafeteria. A little later, he suddenly realized that Four was standing in the door of the office behind him. He knew then that, for some reason, he had expected her to come. He was careful not to look around, but he sensed that she both approved of the white uniform and was laughing at him for having put it on to impress her. The colonel's ears reddened slightly. He straightened his shoulders, though, and went on working. Next, the child-shape slipped by before his desk, an almost visibility. He glanced up at it, an? it smiled and disappeared as abruptly as if it had gone through a door in mid-air and closed the door behind it. A moment later Four stood just beyond the desk, looking down at the colonel, no less substantial than the material f the desk itself. He stared up at her, unable to epeak, aware only of a slow, strong gladness welling up in him. Then Four vanished -- Someone had opened the door of the office behind him. "Your lunch, sir," the familiar voice of Charles E. Watterly muttered apologetically. The colonel let his breath out slowly. But it didn't matter too much, he supposed. Four would be back. "Thank you, Watterly," he said, with some restraint. "Set it down, please." Watterly's angular shape appeared beside him and suddenly seemed to teeter uncertainly. The colonel moved an instant too late. The coffee pot lay on its side in the brown puddle that filled the lunch tray on the desk. The rest of the contents were about evenly distributed over the desk, the carpet, and the white uniform. On his feet, flushed and angry, the colonel looked at Watterly. "I'm sorry, sir!" Watterly had fallen back a step. Now, this was interesting, the colonel decided, studying him carefully. This was the familiar startled white face, its slack mouth twisted into an equally familiar, frightened grin. But why hadn't he ever before noticed tha incredible, cold, hidden malice staring at him out of those pale blue eyes? Not a bungler. A hater. The airtight organization of society kept it suppressed so well that he had almost forgotten how the underdogs of the world could hate! He let the rage in him ebb away. Anger was pointless. It was #S# the compliment one paid an .equal. To withdraw beyond the .reach of human malice, as Four and the rest of them had done, was a better way -- for the weak. For those who were not, the simplest and most effective way was to dispose of the malicious by whichever methods were handiest, and forget about them. A t seven in the evening, Miss Eaton looked in at the colonel's central office and inquired whether he would need her any more that day. "No, thank you, Miss Eaton," said the colonel, without looking up. "A few matters I want to finish by myself. Good night." There was silence for a moment. Then Miss Eaton's voice blurted suddenly, "Sometimes it's much better to finish such matters in the morning, sir!" The colonel glanced up in sur-. prise. Coming from Miss Eaton, the remark seemed out of character. But she looked slightly resentful, slightly anxious, as always, and not as if she attributed any importance to her words. "Well, Miss Eaton," the colonel said genially, while he wondered whether it had been a coincidence, "I just happen to prefer not to wait till tomorrow." Miss Eaton nodded, as though agreeing that, in that case, there was no more to be said. He listened to her heels clicking away through the glass-enclosed aisles of the general offices, and then the lights went out there, and Colonel Magrumssen was sitting alone at his desk. It was odd about Miss Eaton. He was almost certain now it had been no coincidence. Her personality which, for a num'oer of years, he'd felt he understood better than one got to understand most people, had revealed itself in a single sentence to be an entirely different sort of personality -- a woman, in fact, about whom he knew exactly nothing! At any other time, the implications would have fascinated him. Tonight, of course, it made no difference any more. His gaze returned reflectively to a copy of the Notice of Transfer by which Charles E. Watterly had been removed from Metallurgy some hours before, to be returned to the substratum of Earth's underdogs, where he obviously belonged. It had seemed the logical thing to do, the colonel realized with a feeling of baffled resentment. What did one more third-rate matter? But it seemed his unseen acquaintances believed it did matter, very much. Sornewhere deep in his mind, ever since he had signed the Transfer, a cold, dead area had been growing which told him, as clearly as if they had announced it in so many words, that he wouldn't be able to contact them again. Notices of Transfer weren't revocable, but he felt, too, that it wouldn't have done him much good if they had been. One committed the unforgivable sin, and that was that. He had pushed Watterly back down where he belonged. And he was no longer acceptable. There was one question he would have liked answered, the colonel decided, as he went on , methodically about the business of cleaning up his department's top-level affairs for his successor. What, actually, was the unforgivable sin? A, talf hour later, he decided he wasn't able to find the answer. Something involved with Christian charity, or the lack of it, apparently. He had sinned in degrading Watterly. Civilization similarly had sinned on a very large scale against the major part of humanity. And so they had withdrawn themselves both from civilization and from him. He shook his head. He might still be misjudging their motives -- because it still didn't seem quite right! On the proper form and in a neat, clear hand he filled out his resignation from Metallurgy and from life, to make it easy for the investigators. He frowned at the line headed reasons given and decided to leave it blank. He laid down the pen and picked up the gun and squinted down its barrel distastefully. And then somebody who now appeared to be sitting in the chair on the other side of his desk remarked : "That mightn't be required, you know." T he colonel put the gun down and folded his hands on the desk. "Well, John Brownson!" he said, politely surprised, "You're one of them, too?" The assistant to the Minister of Statistics shrugged. "In a sense," he admitted, "In about the same way that you're one of them." The colonel thought that over and acknowledged that he didn't quite follow. "It's very simple," Brownson assured him, "once you understand the basic fact that we're all basically altruists -- you and I and every other human being on Earth." "All altruists, eh?" the colonel repeated doubtfully. "Not, of course, always consciously. But each of us seems to know instinctively that he or she is also, to spme extent, an irrational and therefore potentially #S# #M dangerous animat. The race is developing mentally and emo" tionally, but it hasn't developed as far as would be desirable as yet." "That, at any rate, seems to be a fact," the colonel conceded. "So there is a conflict between our altruism and our irrationality. To solve it, we -- each of us -- limit ourselves. We do not let our understanding and abilities develop beyond the point at which we can trust ourselves not to use them against humanity. Once you accept that, everything else is self-explanatory." Now how could Brownson hope to defend such a statement, the colonel protested after an astonished pause, after taking  look at history? Or, for that matter, at some of the more outstanding public personalities in their immediate environment? But the assistant to the Minister of Statistics waved the objection aside. "Growth isn't always a comfortable process," he said. "Even the Hunger Years and our present social structure might be regarded as forcing factors. The men who appear primarily responsible for this stage of mankind's development may not consciously look on themselves as altruists, but basically, as I said, that is the only standard by which we do judge our activities -- and ourselves! Now, as for you -- " "Yes?y said the colonel. "As for me?" "Well, you're a rather remarkable man, Colonel Magrumssen. You certainly gave every indication of being pi'epared to expand your understanding to a very unusual degree -- which was why," John Brownson added, somewhat apologetically, "I first directed your attention to the possible implications of Normal Loss. Afterward, you appear to have fooled much more careful judges of human nature than I am. Though, of course," he concluded, "you may not really have fooled them. It's not always easy to follow their reasoning." "Since you're being so informative," the colonel said bluntly, "I'd like to know just who and what those people are." "They're obviously people who can and do trust themselves very far," Brownson said evasively. "A class or two above me, I'm afraid. I don't know much about them otherwise, and I'd just as soon not. You're a bolder man than I am, Colonel. In particular, I don't know anything about the specific group with which you became acquainted." "We didn't stay acquainted very long." "Well, you wouldn't," Brownson agreed, studying him curiously. "Still, it was an unusoal aGhirvment." T he colonel said nothing for a moment. He was experiencing again a hot resentment and what he realized might be a rather childish degree of hurt, and also the feeling that something splendidly worthwhile had become irretrievably lost to him through a single mistake. But, for some reason, the feeling was much less disturbing now. "The way it seemed to me," he said finally, "was that they were -- whatever class they're in -- until I fired Watterly. That wasn't it. then?" "No, it wasn't. They were merely acknowledging that you had acepted yourself as being in that class, at least temporarily. That seems to be the only real requirement." "If I knew instinctively that I couldn't meet that requirement, on a completely altruistic basis," the colonel said carefully, "why did I accept myself as being in their Class even temporarily?" John Brownson glanced reluctantly at the gun on the desk. For a moment, the colonel was puzzled. Then he grinned apologetically. "Well, yes, that might explain it." he admitted. "I believe I've had it in mind for some time. Life had begun to look pretty uninteresting." He poked frowningly at the gun. "So it was just a matter of satisfying my curiosity -- first?" "I wouldn't know what your exact motive was," Brownson said cautiously. "But I presume it went beyond simple curiosity." "Well, supposing now," said the colonel, tapping the gun, "that on considering what you've told me. I decided to change my mind." Brownson smiled. "If you change your decision, you'll do it for good and sufficient reasons. I'd be very happy -- and, incidentally, there's no need to blame yourself for Watterly. Watterly knew he couldn't trust himself in any position above Civilian General Duty. If you hadn't had him sent back there, he would have found someone else to do it, Selfjudgment works at all levels." "I wasn't worrying much about Watterly," the colonel said. He reflected a moment. "What actually induced you to come here to talk to me?" "Well," said Brownson carefully, "there was one who expressed an opinion about you so strongly that #t couldn't be ignored. I was sent to make sure you had the fullest possible understanding of what you were doing." The colonel stared. "Who expressed an opinion alxjut me?" Your Miss Eaton." almost laughed. For a moment, he'd had a wild, irrational hope that Four had showed concern about him. But Four hardly would have been obliged to go to John Brownson for help. "Miss Eaton." Brownson smiled wryly, "has a wider range of understanding than most, but not enough courage to do anything about what she knows. The bravest thing she ever did was to speak to you as she did tonight. After that, she didn't know what else to do. so -- well, she prayed. At any rate, it seemed to be a prayer to her." "For me?" 'Wes, for you." "Think of that!" said the colonel. astonished. "That was why you came?' "That's it."  The colonel thought about Miss Eaton for a moment, and then of what a completely fascinating, interesting world it was -- if one could only become really aware of it. It seemed unreasonable that people should be going tlu'ough life in blind, uneasy dissatisfaction, never quite realizing what was going on around and behind them... Of course, a good percentage of them might drop dead in sheer m fright if they ever got a sudden inkling of what was there. For one thing, quiet power enough to extinguish nine-tenths of the human life on Earth between one second and the next. And the thought of that power and various perhaps not too rational manipulations of it, he re fleeted truthfully, might have been the really fascinating part of it all to him. "Well, thank you, Brownson," he said. There was no answer. the chair on the other side of the desk was empty. Brownson seemed to have realized that he'd done the best he could. The others, being wiser, would have known all along there was nothing to be done. His self-judgment stood. "Damn saints!" the colonel said, grinning. The trouble was that he still liked them. Trying not to think of Four again, he picked up the gun and then a final thought came to him. He laid it down long enough to write neatly and clearly benation form: ir it were a snake, A slim hand moved the gun away and a light voice laughed . at the inscrutable message he had written. Then his own hand was taken and he smiled back at Four, while the room stayed substantial and he did not. It was remarkable how easily and completely one could retreat from the world, clear to the point of invisibility. There had always been people like that, people who could lose themselves in a crowd or be totally unnoticeable at a party. They just hadn't carried their self-effacement far enough. Probably the pressure of reality hadn't beenas savage as it was now. to compel both extremes of assertion and withdrawal. Normal Loss would rise an infinitesimal amount, the colonel thought with amusement -- he'd have to live, too. The world wouldn't know why, of course. The devil with this world. He had his own to go to, and a woman of his own to go with. 'You didn't really think I was going to kill myself, did you?' he asked Four, feeling the need to make her understand and respect him. 'Tt was only a trick to get your attention." "As if you had to," she laughed tenderly. Th porfoct dfrcoralipR onywhere Sn The home -- efMb. bokeoe, shelf or cabinet. The ideal gift for oil ogei. metallic colors. Rocket Spoce Ship over # inches high, in # colort. Robot and # completely different Space Ship and Crew Set -- Rocket SpCKo Skip Saw pottage charges by remitting with order. 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For a magazine to achieve this record in so short a time is a tribute to its unyielding policy of presenting the highest quality obtainable; to its readers for' their loyalty and appreciation; to its authors for helping it maintain those standards and even advance theAi. thought the idea of offering mature science fiction in attractive, adult format was downright funny. They knew what sold -- shapely female endomorphs with bronze bras, embattled male mesomorphs clad in muscle, and frightful alien monsters in search of a human meal. v Eyen our former publisher became infected with that attitude, and the resulting internal conflicts were no joke ot all. But now:  We have the biggest promotion campaign mapped out that any science fiction magazine has ever had.  We are working out the broadest circulation possible. Note that we reach the stands regularly on the second Friday of each month. (Subscribers, however, get their copies at least five to ten days before.)  Better printing, paper and reproduction of art lie ahead.  These new art techniques I mentioned in the past are on their way. They were stubborn things to conquer, but you'll be seeing them soon. for us in this field. continue to be a rising curve -- as steeply rising as we can manage. Coming up, for example: duces problems and situations in space travel that I have never seen before. new serial with a. startling theme and one surprising development after another. quality. ! hope you'll agree with them. Yes, it's been a fine year. Next year looks even better. science fiction to suit the expert's taste "Gunner Cade is surety one oj the most exciting of science fiction stories." That's hotv John W. Campbell, Jr., dean of s i: editors, describes this new novel by Cyril Judd. He also calls thoroughly plausible account of the ways in which a new human society could be built by subtle and not-so-subtle twistings of our present culture." # A very rare sort of book -- an intelligent spinq-tingler." That's Cade. This highly regarded (and hard-lo-please) s-f writer credits it with being "a most frightening Study of the 'soldier mentality' and where it might lead us. " Pretty fair praise -- and you'll find it's no more than this swift. Other highly-praised Simon and Schuster hooks for the s-f connoisseur: edition of the rare and celebrated classic that Anthotiy Boucher calls " the novel that opened my eyes to the stimulating .possibilities of modern s-f." # gett. Eleven tales by a master of the grim andor humorous. "Among the top handful of the best books in the field." -- August DettUth. # bell, Jr. The noted editor's personal selections, tracing the development of s-f since #, "# stories, of u'hic-k li... are among the finest that science fiction has .turned out," -- Groff Conklin, in Galaxy. # suspenseful tale of intrigue and danger deserves, Here is a first-rate example of the new science fiction: the kind that avoids ultra-heat ygoing science, emphasizes human values and superb story telling. It tells of a future world strangely resembling the medieval past, recounting the swashbuckling story of a blindly loyal fighting man who suddenly finds himself branded an outlaw. (A further clue to the merits of Gunner Cade: It's an open secret that "Cyril Judd" is a pen name for two of the most talented and rewarding of the younger, or veryup-and-coming s-f writers: C. M. Kornhluth and Judith Merril.) Available at your bookseller's. Price: #. Or use coupon to order this and the other outstanding S-f titles listed on this page. # Fifth Avenue, New York #, N. Y. Please send me the s-f books I Dave checked below. I will pay postman for the books plus few cents postage. If not delighted I may return books In # days for refund of purchase price. D Gunner Cade, #  Stan, # O Astounding S-F Anthology, # O A Gnome Tkere Was, # Address... I I I I I i i i City -- . -- .Zone State... postage. Same refund guarantee. " t Gerard's problem would dismay any psychotherapist. He knew his name without knowing his identity; what he did, but not what he was. Worse yet, he didn't know how many of him there were! Illustrated by Stern. He wasn't an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. "Sit over there, Sonny." I stood where I was until he looked Up again. Then I said, "Look, if a midget walks in here. What do you say -- sit over there, Shorty?" He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. "I was wrong," he said, "but how am I supposed to know you don't want to be called Sonny?" That was better, but I was still mad. "I'm fifteen and I don't have to like it. Don't rub my nose in it." He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down. "What's your name?" "Gerard." "First or last?" "Both," I said.   "Is that the truth?"  I said, "No. And don't ask me where I live either." He put down hte pencil. "We're not going to get very far this way." "That's up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn't be here. Are you going to let that stop you?" "Well, no, but -- " "So what else is bothering you? How .you're going to get paid?" I took, out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. "That's so you won't have to bill me. You keep track of it. Tell me when it's used up and I'll give you more. So you don't need my address. Wait," I said, when he reached toward the money. "Lot it lay there. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along."  do business this way, Son -- I mean, Gerard."  "Gerry," I told him. "You do, if you do business with me." "You make things difficult, don't you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?" "I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier underthings with Sudso." I leaned forward. "This time it's the truth." "All right," he said. I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn't say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead. "Before we start -- if we start," I said, "I got to know something. The things I say to you -- what comes out while you're working on me -- is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?" "Absolutely," he said. "No matter what?" "No matter what." I watched him when he said it. I believed him. "Pick up your mpney," I said. "You're on." He didn't do it. He said, "As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can't buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can't do that, it's useless. You can't walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it." I said tiredly, "I didn't get you out of the phone book and I'm not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you." "Thanks," he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. "Winnowed, did you say? Just how?" "Things you hear, things you  read. Yen know. Vm sot saying, so just file that with my street address." He looked at me for a long time. It was the first time he'd used those eyes on me for anything but a flash glance. Then he picked up the bill. " "What do I do first?" I demanded. "What do you mean?" "How do we start?" "We started when you walked in here." So then I had to laugh. "All right, you got me. All I had was an opening. I didn't know where you would go from there, so I couldn't be there ahead of you." "That's very interesting," Stern said. "Do you usually figure everything out in advance?" "Always." "How often are you right?" "All the time. Except -- but I don't have to tell you about no exceptions." He really grinned this time. "I see. One of my patients hs been talking." "One of your ex-patients. Your patients don't talk." ""I ask them not to. That applies to you, too. What did you hear?" "That you know from what people say and do what they're about to say ani do, and that sometimes you let'm do it and sometimes you don't. How did you learn to do that?" He thought a minute. "I guess I was born with an eye for details, and then let myself make enough' mistakes with enough people until I learned not to make too many more. How did you learn to do it?" I said, "You answer that andI won't have to come back here." "You really don't know?" "I wish I did. Look, this isn't getting us anywhere, is it?" He shrugged. "Depends on where you want to go." He paused, and I got the eyes full strength again. "Which thumbnail description of psychiatry do you believe at the moment?" "I don't get you." er and took out a blackened pipe. He smelled it, turned it over while looking at me. "Psychiatry attacks the onion of the self, removing layer after layer until it gets down to the little sliver of unsullied ego. Or: psychiatry drills like an oil well, down and sidewise and down again, through; all the muck and rock, until it strikes a layer that yields. Or: psychiatry grabs a handful of sexual motivations and throws them on the pinball-machine of your life, so they bounce on down against episodes. Want more?" I had to laugh. "That last one was pretty good." "That last one was pretty bad. They are all bad. They all try to simplify something which is complex by its very nature. The only thumbnail you'll get from me is this: no one knows what's really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it." "What are you here for?" "To listen." "I don't have to pay somebody no day's wage every hour just to listen." "True. But you're convinced that I listen selectively." "Am I ?" I wondered about it. "I guess I am. Well, don't you?" "No, but you'lf never believe that." I laughed. He asked me what that was for. I said, "You're not calling me Sonny." "Not you." He shook his head slowly. He was watching me while he did it, so his eyes slid in their sockets as his head moved. "Whatis it you want to know about yourself, that made you worried I might tell people?" "I want to find out why I killed somebody," I said right away. It didn't faze him a bit. "Lie down over there." I got up. "On that couch?"He nodded, As I stretched out selfcon # sciously, I said, "I feel like I'm in some damn cartoon." "What cartoon?" "Guy's built like a bunch of grapes," I said, looking at the ceiling. It was pale gray. "What's the caption?" " 'I got trunks full of 'em'." "Very good," he said quietly. I looked at him carefully. I knew then he was the kind of guy who laughs way down deep when he laughs at all. He said, "I'll use that in a book of case histories some time. But it won't include yours. What made you throw that in?" When I didn't answer, he got up and moved to a chair behind me where I couldn't see him. "You can quit testing, Sonny. I'm good enough for your purposes." I clenched my jaw so hard, my back teeth hurt. Then I relaxed, I relaxed all over. It was wonderful. "All right," I said, "I'm sorry." He didn't say anything, but I had that feeling again that he was laughing. Not at me, though. "How old are you?" he asked me suddenly.' "Uh -- fifteen" "Uh -- fifteen," he repeated. "What does the 'uh' mean?" "Nothing. I'm fifteen." "When I asked your age, you hesitated because some other number popped up. You discarded that and substituted .'fifteen.' " "The hell I did! I am fifteen!"' "I didn't say you weren't," His voice came patiently. "Now what was the other number?" I got mad again. "There wasn't any other number! What do you want to go pryin' my grunts apart for, trying to plant this and that and make it mean what you think it ought to mean?" He was silent. "I'm fifteen," I said defiantly, and then, "I don't like being only fifteen. You know that. I'm not trying to insist I'm fifteen." He just waited, still not saying anything. I felt defeated. "The number was eight." "So you're eight. And your name?" "Gerry." I got up on one elbow, twisting my neck around so I could see him. He had his pipe apart and was sighting through the stem at the desk lamp. "Gerry, without no 'uh!' " "All right," he said mildly, making me feel real foolish. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Eight, T thought. Eight. "It's cold in here," I complained. Eight. Eight, plate, state, hate. I ate from the plate of the state and I Tiate. I didn't like any of that and I snapped my eyes open. The ceiling was still gray. It was all right. Stern was somewhere behind me with his pipe, and he was all right. I took two deep breaths, three, and then let my eyes close. Eight. Eight years old. Eight, hate. Years, fears. Old, cold, Damn it! I twisted and twitched on the couch, trying to find a way to keep the cold out. I ate from the plate of the -- mind I took all the eights and all the rhymes and everything they stood for, and made it all black. But it wouldn't stay black. I had to put something there, so I made a great big luminous figure eight and just let it hang there. But it turned on its side and inside the loops it began to shimmer. It was like one of those movie shots through binoculars. I was going to have to look through whether I liked it or not. Suddenly I qYiit fighting it and let it wash over me. The binoculars came close, closer, and then I was there. Eight. Eight years old, cold. Cold as a bitch in the ditch. The ditch was by a railroad. Last year's weeds were scratchy straw. The ground was red, and when it wasn't slippery, clingy mud, it was frozen hard like a flowerpot. It was hard like that now, dusted with hoar-frost, cold as the winter light that pushed up over the hills. At night the lights were  f warm, and they were all in other people's houses. In the daytime the sun was in somebody else's house too, for all the good it did me. I was dying in that ditch. Last night it was as good a place as any to sleep, and this morning it was as good a place as any to die. Just as well. Eight years old, the sicksweet taste of pork-fat and wet bread from somebody's garbage, the thrill of terror when you're stealing a gunnysack and you hear a footstep. And I heard a footstep. I'd been curled up on my side. I whipped over on my stomach because sometimes they kick your belly. I covered my head with my arms and that was as far as I could get. After a while I rolled my eyes up and looked without moving. There was a big shoe there. There was an ankle in the shoe, and another shoe close by. I lay there waiting to get tromped. Not that I cared much any more, but it was such a damn shame. All these months on my own, and they'd never caught up with me, never even come close, and now this. It was such a shame I started to cry. The shoe took me under the armpit, but it was not a kick. It rolled me over. I was so stiff from the cold, I went over like a plank. I just kept my arms over my face and head and .lay there with my eyes closed. For some reason I stopped crying. I think people only cry when there's a chance of getting help from somewhere. When nothing happened, I opened my eyes and shifted myforearms a little so I could see up. There was a man standing over me and he was a mile high. He had on faded dungarees and an old Eisenhower jacket with deep sweat-stains under the arms. His face was shaggy, like the guys who can't grow what you could call a beard, but still don't shave. He said, "Get up." I looked down at his shoe, but he wasn't going to kick me. I pushed up a little and almost fell down again, except he put his big hand where my back would hit it. I lay against it for a second because I had to, and then got up to where I had one knee on the ground.  "Come on," he said. "Let's go." I swear I felt my bones creak, but I made it. I brought a round white stone up with me as I stood, I hefted the stone. "I had to look at it to see if I was really holding it, my fingers were that cold. I told him, "Stay away from me or I'll bust you in the teeth with this rock." His hand came out and down so fast, I never saw the way he got one finger between my palm and the rock, and flicked it out of my grasp. I started to cuss at him, but he just turned his back' and walked up the embankment toward the tracks. He put his chin, on his shoulder and said, "Come on, will you?" H E didn't chase me, so I didn't run. He didn't talk to me, so I didn't argue. He didn't hit me, so I didn't get mad. I went along after him. He waited for me. He puF out his hand to me arid I spit at it. So he went on, up to the tracks, ot of my sight. I clawed my way up. The blood was beginning to move in my hands and feet and they felt like four point-down porcupines. When I got up to the roadbed, the man was standing there waiting for me. The track was level just there, but as I turned my head to look along it, it seemed to be a hill that was steeper and steeper and turned over above me. And next thing you know, I was lying flat n my back looking up at the cold sky. The man came over and sat down on the rail near me. He didn't try to touch me. I gasped for breath a couple of times, .and suddenly felt I'd be all right if I could sleep for a minute -- just a Tittle minute. I closedmy eyes. The man stuck his finger in my , ribs, hard. It hurt. "Don't sleep," he said, I looked at him. He said, "You're frozen stiff and weak with hunger. I want to take you home and get you warmed up and fed. But it's a long haul up that way, and you won't make it by yourself. If I carry you, will that be the same to you as if you walked it?" "What are you going to do when you get me home?" "I told you." "All right," I said. He picked me up and carried me down the track. If he'd said anything else in the world, I'd of laid right down where I was until I froze to death. Anyway, what did he want to ask me for, one way or the other? I couldn't of done anything. f stopped thinking about it and dozed off. I woke up once when he turned off the right of, way. He dove into the woods. There was no path, but he seemed to know where he was going. The itex t time I woke from a crackling noise. He was carrying me over a frozen pond and the ice was giving under his feet. He didn't hurry. I looked down and saw the white cracks raying out under his feet, and it didn't seem to matter a bit. I bleared off again. He put me down at last. We were there. "There" was inside a room. It was very warm. He put It me on my feet and I snapped out of it in a hurry. The first thing I looked for was the door. I saw it and jumped over there and put my back against the wall beside it, in case I wanted to leave., Then I looked around. It was a big room. One wall was rough rock and the rest was logs with stuff shoved between them. There was a big fire going in the rock wall, not in a fireplace, exactly; it was a sort of hollow place. There was an old auto battery on a shelf opposite, with two yellowing electric light bulbs dangling by wires from it. There was a table, some boxes and a couple of three-legged stools. The air had a haze of smoke and such a wonderful, heartbreaking, eandy-and-crackling smell of food that a little hose squirted inside my mouth. The man said. "What have I got here, Baby?" And the room was full of kids. Well, three of them, but somehow they seemed to be more than three kids. There was a girl about my age -- eight, I mean -- with blue paint on the side of her face. She had an easel and a palette with lots of paints and a fistful of brushes, but she. wasn't using the brushes. She was smearing the paint on with her hands. Then there was a little Negro girl about five with great big eyes who stood gaping at me. And in a wooden crate, set up on two sawhorses to make a kind of bassinet, was a baby. I guess about three or four months old. It did what babies do, drooling some, making small bubbles, waving its hands around very aimless, and kicking. at the easel looked at me and then at the baby. The baby just kicked and drooled. " The girl said, "His name's Gerry. He's mad." "What's he mad at?" the man asked. He was looking at the baby. "Everything," said the girl, "Everything and everybody." "Where'd he come from?" I said, "Hey, what is this?" but nobody paid any attention. The man kept asking questions at the baby and the girl kept answering. Craziest thing I ever saw. "He ran away from a state school," the girlsaid. "They fed him enough, but no one bleshed with him." That's what she said --  "bleshed." I opened the door then and cold air hooted in. "You louse," I said to the man, "you're from the school." "Close the door, Janie," said the man. The girl at the easel didn't move, but the door banged shut behind me. I tried to open f it and it wouldn't move. I let out a howl, yanking at it. "I think yoti ought to stand in the comer," said the man. "Stand him in the corner, Janie." Janie looked at me. One of the three-legged stools sailed across ' to me. It hung in midair and turned on its side. It nudged me with its fiat seat. I jumped back and it came after me. I dodged to the side, and that was the corner. The stool came on. I tried to bat it down and just hurt my hand. I ducked and it went lower than I did. I put one hand on it and tried to vault over it, but it just fell and so did I. I got up again and stood in the corner, trembling. The stool turned right side up and sank to the floor in front of me. The man said, "Thank you, Janie." He turned to me. "Stand there and be quiet, you. I'll get to you later. You shouldn'ta kicked up all that fuss." And then, to the baby, he said, "He got anything we need?" And again it was the little girl who answered. She said, "Sure. He's the one." "Well," said the man. "What do you know!" He came over. "Gerry, you can live here. I don't come from the school. I'll never turn you in." "Yeah, huh?" "He hates you," said Janie. "What am I supposed ' to do about that?" he wanted to know, Janie turned her head to look into the. bassinet. "Feed him. The man nodded and began fiddling around the fire. Meanwhile, the little Negro girl had been standing in the one spot with her big eyes right out on her cheekbones, looking at me. Janie went back to her painting and the baby just lay there same as always, so I stared right back at the little Negro girl. I snapped, "What the devil are you gawking at?" She grinned at me. "Gerry hobo," she said, and disappeared. I mean she really disappeared, went out like a light, leaving hqr clothes where she "had been. Her little dress billowed in the air and fell in a heap where she had been, and that was that. She was gone. "Gerry hee-hee," I heard. I looked up, and there she was, stark naked, wedged in a space where a little outcropping on the rock wall stuck out just below the ceiling. The second I saw her she disappeared again. "Gerry hb-ho," she said. Now she was on top of the row of boxes they used as storage shelves, over ot the other side of the room. "Gerry hee-hee!" Now she was under the table. "Gerry ho-ho!' This time she was right in the corner with me, crowding me. I yelped and tried to get out of the way and bumped the stooL I was afraid of it, so I shrank back again and the little girl was gone. The man glanced over his shoulder from where he was working at the fire. "Cut it out, you kids," he said. then the girl came slowly out from the bottom row of shelves. She walked across to her dress and put it on. "How did you do that?" I wanted to know. "Ho-ho," she said. Janie said, "It's easy. She's really twins." "Oh," I said. Then another girl, exactly the same, came from somewhere in the shadows and stood beside the first. They were identical. They stood side by side and stared at me. This time I let them stare. "That's Bonnie and Beanie, said the painter. "This is Baby and that -- " she indicated the man -- "that's Lone. And I'm Janie." I couldn't think of what to say, so I said, "Yeah." Lone said, "Water, Janie." He held up a pot. I heard water trickling, but didn't see anything. "That's enough," he said, and hung the pot on a crane. He picked up a cracked china plate and brought it over to me. It was full of stew with great big lumps of meat in it, and thick gravy and dumplings and carrots. "Here, Gerry. Sit down." I looked at the stool. "On that?" "Sure." "Not me," I said. I took the plate and hunkered down against the wall. "Hey," he said after a time. "Take it easy. We've all had chow. No one's going to snatch it IS away from you. Slow down! I ate even faster than before. I was almost finished when I threw it all up. Then for some reason my head hit the edge of the stool. I dropped the plate and spoon and slumped there. I felt real bad. Lone came over and looked at me. "Sorry, kid," he said. "Clean up, will you, Janie?" Right in front of my eyes, the mess on the floor disappeared. I didn't care about that or anything else just then. I felt the man's hand on the side of my neck. Then he tousled my hair. "Beanie, get him a blanket. Let's all go to sleep. He ought to rest a while." I felt the blanket go around me, and I think I was asleep before he put me down. I don't know how much later it was when I woke up. I didn't know where I was and that scared me. I raised my head and saw the dull glow of the embers in the fireplace. Lone was stretched out n it in his clothes. Janie's easel stood in the reddish blackness like some great preying insect. I saw the baby's head pop 'up out of the bassinet, but I couldn't tell whether he was looking straight at me or away. Janie was lying on the floor near the door and the twins were on the Id table. Nothing moved except the baby's head, bobbing a little. I got to my feet and looked around the room. Just a room, only the one door. I tiptoed toward it. When I passed Janie, she opened her eyes. "What's the matter?" she whispered. "None of your business," I told her. I went to the door as if I didn't care, but I watched her. She didn't do anything. The door was as solid tight closed as when I'd tried it before. J went back to Janie. She just looked up at me. She wasn't scared. I told her, "I got to go to the john." "Oh," she said. "Why'n't you say so?" Suddenly I grunted and grabbed my guts. The feeling I had I can't begin to talk abput. I acted as if it was a pain, but it wasn't. It was like nothing else that ever happened to me before, "Okay," Janie said. "Go on back to bed." "But I got to -- " "You got to what?" "Nothing." It was true. I didn't have to go no place. "Next time tell me right away. I don't mind." I didn't say anything. I went back to my blanket. lay on the couch and looked up at the gray ceiling. He asked, "How old are you?" I  ' "Fifteen," I said dreamily. He Waited until, for me, the gray ceiling acquired walls and a floor, a rug and lamps and a desk and a chair with Stern in it. I sat up and held my head a second, and then I looked at him. He was fooling with his pipe and looking at me. "What did you do to me?" "I told you. I don't do anything here. You do it." "You hypnotized me." "I did not." His voice was quiet, but he really meant it. "What was all that, then? It was...it was like it was happening for real all over again." "Feel anything?" "Everything." I shuddered. "Every damn thing. What was it?" "Anyone doing it feels better afterward. You can go over it all again now any time you want to, ,  and every time you do, the hurt in it will be less. You'll see." It was the first thing to amaze me in years. I chewed on it and then asked, "If I did it by myself, how come it never happened before?" "It needs someone to listen." , "Listen? Was I talking?" "A blue streak." "Everything that happened?" "How can I know? I wasn't r there. You were." . "You don't-believe it happened, do you? Those disappearing kids and the footstool and all?" He shrugged. "I'm not in the business of believing or not believing. Was it real to you?" "Oh, hell, yes!" "Well, then, that's all that matters. Is that where you live, with those people?" I bit off a fingernail that had been bothering me. "Not for a long time. Not since Baby was three." I looked at him. "You remind me of Lone." "Why?" "I don't know. No, you don't," I added suddenly. "I don't know what made me say that." I lay down abruptly. The ceiling was gray and the lamps weft dim. I heard the pipestem click against his teeth. I lay there for a long time. "Nothing happens," I told him, "What did you expect to happen?" "Like before." "There's something there that wants out. Just let it come." It was as if there was a revolving drum in my head, and on it were photographed the places and things and people I was after. And it was as if the drum was spinning very fast, so fast I couldn't tell one picture from another. I made it stop, and it stopped at a blank segment. I spun it again, and stopped  it again. "Nothing happens,"-! said.  "Baby is three;" he repeated. i t "Oh I said. "That." I closed my eyes. That might be it. Might, sight, night, light. I might have the sight of a light in the night. Maybe the baby. Maybe the sight of the baby at night because of the light... when I lay on that blanket, and a lot of nights I didn't. Something was going on all the time in Lone's house. Sometimes I slept in the daytime. I guess the only time everybody slept at once was when someone was sick, like me. the first time I arriyed there. It was always sort of dadk in the room, the same night and day, the fire going, the two old bulbs hanging yellow by their wires from the battery. When they got too dim, Janie fixed the battery and they got bright againr Janie did everything that needed doing, whatever no one else felt like doing. Everybody else did things, too. Lone was out a lot. Sometimes he used the twins to help him, but you never missed them, because they'd be here and gone and back again bing! like that. And Baby, he just stayed in his bassinet. I did things myself. I cut wood for the fire and I put up more shelves, and then I'd go swimming with Janie and the twins sometimes. And I talked to Lone. I didn't do a thing that the others couldn't do, but they all did things I couldn't do, I was mad, mad all the time about that. But I wouldn't of known what to do with myself if I wasn't mad all the time about something or other. It didn't keep us from bleshing, Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. Sfie said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of "blending" and "meshing," but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that. Baby talked all the time. He was like a broadcasting station that runs twenty-four hours a day, and you can get what it's sending any time you'tune in, but it'll keep sending whether you tune in or not. When I say he talked, I don't mean exactly that. He semaphored mostly. You'd think those wandering, vague movements of his hands and arms and legs and head were meaningless, but they weren't. It was semaphore, only instead of a symbol for a sound, or such like, the movements were whole thoughts. I mean spread the left hand and shake the right high up, and thump with the left heel, and it I  means, "Anyone who thinks a Marling is a pest just don't kno# anything about how a starling thinks" or something like that. Lone couldn't read the stuff and neither could I. The twins  could, but they didn't give a damn. Janie used to watch him all the time. He always knew what you meant if you wanted to ask him something, and he'd tell Janie and she'd say what it was. Part of it, anyway. Nobody could get it all, not even Janie. Lone once told me that all babies know that semaphore. But when nobody receives it, they quit doing it and pretty soon they forget. They almost forget. There's always some left. That's why certain gestures are funny the world over, and certain others make you mad'. But like everything else Lone said, I don't know whether he believed it or not. All I know is Janie would sit  there and paint her pictures and watch Baby, and sometimes she'd bust out laughing, and sometimes she'd get the twins and make them watch and they'd laugh, too, or they'd wait til! he was finished what he was saying and then they'd creep off to a corner and whisper to each other about it. Baby never grew any. Janie did, and the twins, and so did I,but not Baby. He just lay there. Janie kept his stomach full and cleaned him up every two or three days. He didn't cry and he didn't make any trouble. No one ever went near him. she painted to Baby, before she cleaned the boards and painted new ones. She had to clean them because she only had three of them. It was a good thing, too, because I'd hate to think what that place would of been like if she'd kept them all; she did four or five a day. Lone and the twins were kept hopping getting turpentine for her. She could shift the paints back into the little pots on her easel without any trouble, just by looking at the picture one color at a time, but turps was something else again. She told me that Baby remembered all her pictures and that's why she didn't have to keep them. They were all pictures of machines and gear-trains and mechanical linkages and what ldbked like electric circuits and things like that. I never thought too much about them. I went out with Lone to get some turpentine and a couple of picnic hams, one time. We went through the woods to the railroad track and down a couple of miles to where we could see the glow of a town. Then the woods again, and some alleys, and a back street. Lone was like always, walking I along, thinking, thinking. We came to a hardware store and he went up and looked at the lock and came back to where I was waiting, shaking his head. Then we found a general store. Lone grunted and we went and stood in the shadows by the door. I looked in. All of a sudden, Beanie was in there, naked like she always was whet) she traveled like that. She came and opened the door from the inside. We went in and Lone closed it and locked it. "Get along home, Beanie," he said, "before you catch' your death." She grinned at me and said, "Ho-ho," and disappeared. We found a pair of fine hams and a two-gallon can ofturpentine. I took a bright yellow ballpoint pen and Lone cuffed me and made me put it back. "We only take what we need," he told me. After we left, Beanie came bafck and locked the door and went home again. I only went with Lone a few times, when he had more toget than he could carry easily. I was there about three years. That's all I can remember about it. Lone was there or he was out, and you could hardly tell the difference. The twins were with each other most of the time. I got to like Janie a lot, but we never talked much. Baby talked the time, only I don't know what about. We were all bu;y and we bleshed. denly. Stern said, "What's the matter?" "Nothing's the matter. This isn't getting me any place." "You said that when you'd barely started. Do you think you've accomplished anything since then?" "Oh, yeah, but -- " "Then how can you be sure you're right this time?" When I didn't say anything, he asked me, "Didn't you like this last stretch?" I said angrily, "I didn't like or not like. It didn't mean nothing. It was just -- just talk." "So what was the difference between this last session and what happened before?" "My gosh, plenty! The first one, I felt everything. It was all really happening to. me. But this time -- nothing." "Why do you suppose that was?" "I don't know. You tell me." "Suppose," he said thoughtfufly, "that there was some episode so unpleasant to you that you wouldn't dare relive it." "Unplfeasant? You think freez#g to death isn't unpleasant?" "There are all kinds of unpleasantness. Sometimes the very thing you're looking for -- the . thing that'll clear up your trouble -- is so revolting to you that you won't go near it. Or you try to hide it. Wait," he said suddenly, "maybe 'revolting' and 'unpleasant' are inaccurate words to use. It might be something very desirable fo you. It's just that you don't want to get straightened out." "I want to get Straightened out." He waited as if he had to clear something up in his mind, and then said, "There's something in that 'Baby is three' phrase that bounces you away. Why is that?" "Damn if I know." "Who said it?" "I dunno...uh..." He grinned. "Uh?" I grinned back at him."I said it." "Okay. When?" I quit grinning. He leaned forward, then got up. "What's the matter?" I asked. "I didn't think anyone could be that mad." I djdn't say anything. He went over to his desk. "You don't want to go on any more, do you?" "No." "Suppose I told you you want to quit because you're right on the very edge of finding out what you want to know?" "Why don't you tell me and see what I do?" He just shook his head. "I'm not telling you anything. Go on, leave if you want to. I'll give you back your change." "How many people quit just when they're on top of the answer?" "Quite a few." "Well, I ain't going to." I lay down...He didn't laugh and he, didn't say, "Good," and he didn't make any fuss about it: He just picked up his phone and said, "Cancel everything for this afternoon," and went back to his chair, 'up there out of my sight. TT was very quiet in there. He had the place soundproofed. I said, "Why do you suppose Lone let me live there so long when I couldn't do any of the things that the other kids could?" "Maybe you could." "Oh, no," I said positively. "I used to try. I was strong for ai kid my age and I knew how to keep my mouth shut, but aside from those two things I don't think I was any different from any kid. I don't think I'm any different right now, except what difference there might be from living with Lone and his bunch." "Has this anything to do with 'Baby is three'?" I looked up at the gray ceiling. "Baby is three. Baby is three. I went up to a big house with a winding drive that ran under a sort of theater-marquee thing. Baby is three. Baby... "How old are you?" "Thirty-three," I said, and the next thing you know I was up off that couch like it was hot, and heading for the door. "Don't be foolish," Stern said. "Want me to waste a whole afternoon?" "What's that to me? I'm paying for it." "All right, it's up to you." I went back. "I don't like any part of this," I said. "Good. We're getting warm then." "What made me say 'Thirtythree?' I ain't thirty-three. I'm fifteen. And another thing... "Yes?" "It's about that . 'Baby is three." It's me saying it, all right. But when I think about it -- it's not my voice." "Like thirty-three's not your age?" "Yeah," I whispered. "Gery," he said warmly, "there's nothing to be afraid of." too hard. I pulled myself together. I said, "I don't like remembering saying things in somebody else's voice." "Look," he told me. "This headshrinking business, as you called it a while back, isn't what most people think. When I go with you into the world of your mind -- or when you go yourself, for that matter -- what we find isn't so very different from the socalled real world. It seems so at first, because the patient comes out with all sorts of fantasies and irrationalities and weird experiences. But everyone lives in that kind of world. When one of the ancients coined the phrase 'truth is stranger than fiction,' he was talking about that. "Everywhere we go, everything we do, we're surrounded by symbols, by things so familiar we don't ever look at them or don't see them if we do look. If anyone ever could report to you exactly what he saw and thought while walking ten feet down the street, you'd get the most twisted, clouded, partial picture you ever ran across. And nobody ever looks at what's around him with any kind of attention until he gets into a place like this. The fact that he's looking at past events doesn't matter; what counts is that he's seeing clearer than he ever could before, just because, for once, he's trying. "Now -- about this 'thirtythree' business. I don't think a man could get a nastier shock than to find he has someone else's memories. The ego is too important to let slide that way. But consider: all your thinking is done in code and you have the key to only about a tenth of it. So you run into a stretch of code which is abhorrent to you. Can't you see that the only way you'll find the key to it is to stop avoiding it?" "You mean I'd started to remember with... with somebody else's mind?" "It looked like that to you for a while, which means something. Let's try to find out what." "All right." I felt sick. I felt tired. And I suddenly realized that being sick and being tired was a way of trying to get out of it. "Baby is three," he said. Baby is maybe. Me, three, thirty-three, me, you Kew you. "Kew!" I yelled. Stern didn't say anything. "Look, I don't know why, but I think I know how to get to this, and this isn't the way. Do you mind if I try something else?". "You're the doctor," he said.   I had to laugh. Then I closed my eyes. the hedges, the ledges and wedges of windows were shouldering up to the sky. The lawns were sprayed-on green, neat and dean, and all the flowers looked as if they were afraid to let their petals break and be untidy. I walked up the drive in my shoes. I'd had to wear shoes and my feet couldn't breathe. I didn't want to go to the house, but I had to. I went up the steps between the big white columns and looked at the door. I wished I could see through it, but it was too white and thick. There was a window the shape of a fan over it, too high up, though, and a window on each side of it, but they were all crudded up with colored glass. I hit on the door with my hand and left dirt on it. Nothing happened, so I hit it again. It got snatched open and a tall, thin colored woman stood there. "What you wait?" I said I had to see Miss Kew. "Well, Miss Kew don't want to see the likes of you," she said. She talked too loud. "You got a dirty face."  I started to get mad then. I was already pretty sore about having "to come here, walking around near people in the daytime and all. I said, "My face ain't got nothin' to do with it. Where's Miss Kew? Go on, find her for me." She gasped. "You can't speak to me like that!" I said, "I didn't want to speak to you like any way. Let me in." I started wishing for Janie. Janie could of moved her. But I had to handle it by myself. I wasn't do' #  ing so hot, either. She slammed the door before I could so much as curse at her. So I started kicking on the door. For that, shoes are great. After a while, she snatched the door open agaiso sudden I almost went on my can. She had a broom with her. She screamed at me, "You get away from here, you trash, or I'll call the police!" She pushed me and I fell. I got up off the porch floor and went for her. She stepped back and whupped me one with the broom as I went past, but anyhow I was inside now. The woman was making little shrieking noises and coming for me. I took the broom away from her and then somebody said, "Miriam!" in a voice like a grown goose. I froze and the woman went into hysterics. "Oh, Miss Kew, look out! He'll., kill us all. Get the police. Get the -- " "Miriam!" came the honk, and Miriam dried up. There at the top of the stairs was this prune-faced woman with a dress on that had lace on it. She looked a lot older than she was, maybe because she held her mouth so tight. I guess she was about thirty-three -- thirtythree. She had mean eyes and a small nose. I asked, "Are you Miss Kew?" "I am. What is the meaning of this invasion?" "I got to talk to you. Miss Kew." "Don't say 'got to.' Stand up straight and speak out." The maid said, "I'll get the police." Miss Kew turned on her. "There's time enough for that, Miriam. Now, you dirty little boy, what do you want?" "I got to speak to you by yourself," I told her. "Don't you let him do it, Miss Kew," cried the maid. "Be quiet, Miriam. Little boy, I told you not to say 'Got to.' You may say whatever you have to say in front of Miriam." "Like hell." They both gasped. I said, "Lone told me not to." "Miss Kew, are you goin' to let him -- " "Be quiet, Miriam! Young man, you will keep a civil -- " Then her eyes popped up real round. "Who did you say..." "Lone said so." "Lone." She stood there on the stairs looking at hef hands. Then she said, "Miriam, that will be all." And you wouldn't know it was the same woman, the way she said it. The maid opened her mouth, but Miss Kew stuck out a finger that might as well of had a riflesight on the end of it. The maid beat it. "Hey," I said, "here's your broom." I was just going to tHrow it, but Miss Kew got to me and took it out of my hand.  "In there," she said. S HE made me go ahead of her into a room as big as our swimming hole. It had books all over and leather on top of the tables, with gold flowers drawn into the corners. She pointed to a chair. "Sit there. No, wait a moment." She went to the fireplace and got a newspaper out of a box and brought it over and unfolded it on the seat of the chair. "Now sit down." I sat on the paper and she dragged up another chair, but didn't put no paper on it. "What is it? Where is Lone?" "He died," I said. She pulled in her breath and went white. She stared at me until her eyes started to water. "You sick?" I asked her. "Go ahead, throw up. It'll make you feel better." "Dead? Lone is dead?" "Yeah. There was a flash flood last week and when he went out the next night in that big wind, he walked under a old oak tree that got gullied under by the flood. The tree come down on him." "Came down on him," she whispered. "Oh, no... it's not true." "It's true, all right. We planted him this morning. We couldn't keep him around no more. He was beginning to st -- " "Stop!" She covered her face with her hands. "What's the matter?" "I'll be all right in a moment," she said in a low voice. She went and stood in front of the fireplace with her back to me. I took off one of my shoes while I was waiting for her to cpme back. But instead she talked from where she was. "Are you Lone's little boy?" "Yeah. He told me to come to you." "Oh, my dear child!" She came running back and I thought for a second she was going to pick me up or something, but she stopped short and wrinkled up her nose a little bit. "Wh-what's your name?" "Gerry," I told her. "Well, Gerry, how would you like to live with me in this nice big house and -- and have new clean clothes -- and everything?" "Well, that's the whole idea. Lone told me to come to you. He said you got more dough than you know what to do with, and he said you owed him a favor." "A favor?" That seemed to bother her. "Well," I tried to tell her, "he said he done something for you once and you said some day you'd pay him back for it if you ever could. This is it." "What did he tell you about that?" She'd got her honk back by then. "Not a damn thing." "Please don't use that word," she said, with her eyes closed. Then she opened them and nodded her head. "I promised and I'll do it. You can live here from now on. If -- if you want to." "That's got nothin' to do with it. Lone told me to." "You'll be happy here," she said. She gave me an up-anddown. "I'll see to that." "Okay. Shall I go get the other kids?" " Other kids -- children?" "Yeah. This ain't for just me. For all of us -- the whole gang." "Don't say 'ain't.' " She leaned back in her chair, took out a silly little handkerchief and dabbed her lips with it, looking at me the whole time. "Now tell me about these -- these other children." ' "Well, there's Janie, she's elev en like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they're twins, and Baby. Baby is three." "Baby is three," she said. ing beside the couch in a flash, holding hfs palms against my cheeks to hold my head still; I'd been whipping it back and forth. "Good boy," he said. "You found it. You haven't found out what it is, but now you know where it is." "But for sure," I said hoarsely. "Got water?" He poured me some water out of a thermos flask. It was so cold it hurt. I lay back and rested, like I'd climbed a cliff. I said, "I can't take anything like that again." "You want to call it quits for today?" "What about you?" "I'll go on as long as you want me to." I thought abput it. "I'd like to go on, but I don't want no thumping around. Not for a while yet.' "If you want another of those inaccurate analogies," Stern said, "psychiatry is like a road map. There are always a lot of different ways to get from one place to another place." "I'll go around by the long way," I told him. "The eight-lane highway. Not that track over thT hill. My clutch is slipping. Where do I turn off?" # He thupkled. I liked the sound of it. "Just past that gravel driveway." "I been there. There's a bridge washed out." "You've been on this whole road before," he told me. "Start at the other side of the bridge." "I never thought f that. I figured I had to do the whole thing, every inch." "Maybe you won't have to, maybe you will, but the bridge will be easy to cross when you've covered everything else. Maybe there's nothing of value on the bridge and maybe there is, but you can't get near it till you've looked everywhere else." "Let's go." I was real eager, somehow. "Mind a suggestion?" "No." "Just talk," he said. "Don't try to get too far into what you're saying. That first stretch, when you were eight -- you really lived it. The second one, all about the kids, you just talked about. Then, the visit .when you were eleven, you felt that. Now just talk again." 'A#I right." He waited, then said quietly, "In the library. You told her about the other kids." .then she said... and something happened, and I screamed. She comforted me and I cussed at her. , But we're not thinking about that now. We're going on. In the library. The leather, the table, and whether I'm able to do with Miss Kew what Lone said. What Lone said was, "There's a woman lives up on the top of the hill in the Heights section, name of Kew. She'll have to take care of you. You got to get her to do that. Do everything she tells you, only stay together. Don't you ever let any one of you get awdy from the others, hear? Aside from that, just you keep Miss Kew happy and she'll keep you happy. Now you do what I say." That's what Lone said. Between every word there was a link like steel cable, and the whole thing made something that couldn't be broken. Not by me it couldn't. Miss Kew said, "Where are your sisters and the baby?" "I'll bring 'em." "Is it near here?" "Near enough." She didn't say anything to that, so I. got up. "I'll be back soon." "Wait," she said. "I -- really, I haven't had time to think. I mean -- I've got to get things ready, you know." I said, "You don't need to think and you are ready. Solong." From the door I heard  her M laying, louder and louder as I walked away, "Young man, if you're to live in this house, you'll learn to be a good deal bettermannered -- " and a lot more of the same. I yelled back at her, "Okay, okay!" and went out. The sun was warm and the sky was good, and pretty soon I got back to Lone's house. The fire was out and Baby stunk. Janie had knocked over her easel and was sitting on the floor by the door with her head in her hands. Bonnie and Beanie were on a stool with their arms around each other, pulled up together as close as they could get. as if it was cold in there, although it wasn't. I hit Janie in the arm to snap her out of it. She raised her head. She had gray eyes -- or maybe it was more a kind of green -- but now they had a funny look about them, like water in a glass that had some milk left in the bottom of it. I saidf "What's the matter around here?" "What's the matter with what?" she wanted to know. "All of yez," I said. She said, "We don't give a damn, that's all." "Well, all right," I said, "but yue got to do what Lone said. Gome on." "No." I looked at the twins. They turned their backs on me. Janie said, "They're hungry." "Well, why not give 'em something?" She just shrugged. I sat down. What did Lone have to go get himself squashed for? "We, can't blesh no more," said Janie. It seemed to explain everything. "Look," I said, "I've got to be Lone now." Janie thought about that, and Baby kicked his feet. Janie looked at him. "You can't," she said. "I know where to get the heavy food, and the turpentine," I said. "I can find that springy moss to stuff in the logs, and cut wood, and all." But I couldn't call Bonnie and Beanie from miles away to unlock doors. I couldn't just say a word to Janie and make her get water and blow up the fire and fix the battery. I couldn't make us blesh. We all stayed like that for a long time. Then I heard the bassinet creak. I looked up. Janie was staring into it. "All right," she said. "Let's go." "Who says so?" "Baby." "Who's running things now?" I said, mad. "Me or Baby?" "Baby," Janie said. I got up and went over to bust her one in the mouth, and then I stopped. If Baby could make them do what Lone wanted, then it would get done. If I started  pushing them alt around, it wouldn't. So I didn't say anything. Janie got up and walked out the door. The twins watched her go. Then Bonnie disappeared. Beanie picked up Bonnie's clothes and walked out. I got Baby out of the bassinet and draped him over my shoulders, I T was better when we were all outside. It was getting late in the day and the air was warm. The twins flitted in and out of the trees like a couple of flying squirrels, and Janie and I walked along like we were going swimming or something. Baby started to kick, and Janie looked at him a while and got him fed, and he was quiet again. When we came close to town. I wanted to get everybody close together, but I was afraid to say anything. Baby must of said it instead. The twins came back to us and Janie gave them their clothes and they walked ahead of us, good as you please. I don't know how Baby did it. The# sure hated to travel that way. We didn't have no trouble except one guy we met on the street near Miss Kew's place. He stopped in his tracks and gaped at us, and Janie looked at him and made his hat go so far down over his eyes that he like to pull his neck apart getting it back up gain. What do you know, when we got to the house somebody had washed off all the dirt I'd put on the door. I had one hand on Baby's arm and one on his ankle and him draped over my neck, so I kicked the door and left some more, dirt. "There's a woman here name of Miriam," I told Janie. "She says anything, tell her to go to hell." The door opened and there was Miriam. She took one look and jumped back six feet. We all trailed inside, Miriam got her wind and screamed, "Miss Kew! Miss Kew!" "Go to hell," said Janie, and looked'at me. I didn't know what to do. It was the first time Janie ever did anything I told her to. Miss Kew came down the stairs. She was wearing a different dress, but it was just as stupid and had just as much lace. She opened her mouth and nothing came out, so she just left it open until something happened. Finally she said, "Dear gentle Lord preserve us!" The twins lined up and gawked at her. Miriam sidled over to the wall and sort of slid along it, keeping away from us, until she could get to the door and close it. She said, "Miss Kew, if those are the children you said were going to live here, I quit." Janie said, "Go to hell." Just then, Bonnie squatted down on the rug. Miriam squawked and jumped at her. She. grabbed hold f Bonnie's arm and went to snatch her up. Bonnie disappeared, leaving Miriam with One small dress and the damnedest expression on her face. Beanie grinned enough to split her head in two and started to wave like mad. I looked 'where she was waving, and there was Bonnie, naked as a jaybird, up on the banister at the top of the stairs. Miss Kew turned around and saw .her and sat down plump on the steps. Miriam went down, too, like she'd been slugged. Beanie picked up Bonnie's dress and walked up the steps past Miss Kew and handed it over. Bonnie put it on. Miss Kew sort of lolled around and looked up. Bonnie and Beanie came back down the stairs hand in hand to where I was. Then they lined up and gaped at Miss Kew. "What's the matter with her?" Janie asked me. "She gets sick every once in a while." "Let's go back home." "No," I told her. nister and pulled herself up. She stood there hanging on to it for a while with her eyes closed. All of a sudden she stiffened herelf. She looked about four inches taller. She came marching over to us. "Gerard," she honked. I think she was going to say something different. But she sort of checked herself and pointed. "What in heaven's name is that?" And she aimed her finger at me. I didn't get it right Sway, so I turned around to look behind me. "What?" "That! That!" "Oh!" I said. "That's Baby." I slung him down off my back and held him up for her to look at. She made a sort of moaning noise and jumped over and took him away from me. She held him out in front of her and moaned again and called him a poor little thing, and ran and put him down on a long bench thing with cushions under the colored-glass window. She bent over him and put her knuckle in her mouth and bit on it and moaned some more. Then she turned to me. "How long has he been like this?" I looked at Jane and she looked at me. I said, "He's always been like he is." She made a sort of cough and ran to where Miriam was lying flaked on the floor. She slapped Miriam's face a couple of times back and forth. Miriam sat up and looked us over. She closed her eyes and shivered and sort of climbed up Miss Kew hand over hand until she was on her feet. "Pull yourself together," said Miss Kew between her teeth. "Get a basin with some hot water and soap. Washcloth. Towels. Hurry!" She gave Miriam a big push...Miriam staggered and grabbed at the wall, and then ran out. Miss Kew went back to Baby and hung over him, titch-titching with her lips all tight. "Don't mess with him," I said. "There's nothin' wrong with him...We're hungry." She gave me a look like I'd punched her. "Don't speak to me!" "Look," I said.' "we don't like this any more'n you do. If Lone hadn't told us to, we wouldn't never have come. We were doing all right where we were." ' "Don't say 'wouldn't never,' " said Miss Kew. She looked at all of us, one by one. Then she took that silly little hunk of handkerchief and pushed it against her mouth. "See?" I said to Janie. "All the time gettin' sick." "Ho-ho," said Bonnie. Miss Kew gave her a long look. "Gerard," she said in a choked sort of voice, "I understood you to say that these children were your sisters." . "Well?" She looked at me as if I was eal stupid. "We don't have little colored girls for sisters, Gerard." # Janie said, "We do." Miss Kew walked up and back, real fast. "We have a great deal to do," she said, talking to herself. Miriam came in with a big oval pan and towels and stuff on her acm. She put it down on the bench thing and Miss Kew stuck the back of her hand in the water, then picked up Baby and dunked him right in it. Baby started to kick... I stepped forward and said "Wait a minute. Hold on now. What do you think you're doing?" Janie said, "Shut up, Gerry. He says it's all right." "All right? She'll drowned him." "No, she won't. Just shut up." the soap, Miss Kew smeared it on Baby and turned him over a couple of times and scrubbed at his head and like to smothered him in a big white towel. Miriam stood gawking while Miss Kew lashed up a dishcloth around him so it come out pants. When she was done, you wouldn't of known it was the same baby. And by the time Miss Kew finished with the job, she seemed to have a better hold on herself. She was breathing hard arid her mouth was even tighter. She held out the baby to Miriam. "Take this poor thing," she said, "and put him -- " But Miriam backed away. "I'm sorry, Miss Kew, but I am leaving here and I don't care." Miss Kew got her honk out. "You can't leave me in a predicament like this! These children need help. Can't you see that for yourself?" Miriam looked me and Janie over. She was trembling. "You ain't safe. Miss Kew. They ain't, just dirty. They're crazy!" "They're victims of neglect, and probably no worse than you or I would be if we'd been neglected. And don't say 'ain't.' Gerard!" "What?" "Don't say -- oh, dear, we have so, much to do. Gerard, if you and your -- these other children are going to live here, you shall have to make a great many changes. You cannot live under this roof and behave as you have so far. Do you understand that?" "Oh, sure. Lone said we was to do whatever you say and keep you happy." "Will you do whatever I say?" "That's what I just said, isn't it?" "Gerard, you shall have to learn not to speak to me in that tone. Now, young man, if I told you to do what Miriam says, too, would you do it?" I said to Jane, "What about that?" "I'll ask Baby." Janie looked at Baby and Baby wobbled his hands and drooled some. She said, "It's okay." Miss Kew said, "Gerard, I asked you a question." "Keep your pants on," I said. "I got to find out, don't I? Yes, if that's what you want, we'll listen to Miriam, too." Miss Kew turned to Miriam. "You hear that, Miriam?" Miriam looked at Miss Kew and at us and shook her head. Then she held out her hands a bit to Bonnie and Beanie. They went right to her. Each one took hold of a hand. They looted up at her and grinned. They were probably planning some sort of hellishness, but I guess they looked sort of cute. Miriam's mouth twitchedand I thought for a second she was going to look human. She said, "All right. Miss Kew." Miss Kew walked over and handed her the baby and she started upstairs with him. Miss Kew herded us along after Miriam. We all went upstairs. They went to work on us then and for three years they never stopped. Stern. "They had their work cut out," "Yeah, I s'pose they did. So did we. Look, we were going to do exactly what Lone said. Nothing on earth could of stopped us from doing it. We were tied and bound to doing every last little thing Miss Kew said to do. But she and Miriam never seemed to understand that. I guess they felt they had to push every inch of the way. All they had to do was make us understand what they wanted, and we'd of done it. That's okay when it's something like telling me not to climb into bed with Janie. "Miss Kew raised holy hell over that. You'd of thought I'd robbed the Crown Jewels, the way she acted. But when it's something like, 'You must behave like little ladies and gentlemen,' it just doesn't mean a thing. And two out of three orders she gave us were like that. 'Ah-ah!' she'd say. 'Language, language!' For the longest time I didn't dig that at all. I finally asked her what the hell she meant, and then she finally came out with it. But you see what I mean." "I certainly do," Stern said. "Did it get easier as time went on?" "We only had real trouble twice, once about the twins and once about Baby. That one was real bad." "What happened?" "About the twins? Well, when we'd been there about a week or so we began to notice something that sort of stunk. Janie and me, I mean. We began to notice that we almost never got to see Bonnie and Beanie. It was like that house was two houses, one part for Miss Kew and Janie and me, and the other part for Miriam and the twins. I guess we'd have noticed it sooner if things hadn't been such a hassel at first, getting us into new clothes and making us sleep all the time at night, and all that. But here was the thing: We'd all get turned out in the side yard to play, and then along comes lunch, and the twins got herded off to eat with Miriam while we ate with Miss Kew. So Janie said, 'Why don't the twins eat with us?' " 'Miriam's taking care of them, dear,' Miss Kew says. "Janie looked at her with those eyes. 'I know that. Let 'em eat here and I'll take care of 'em.' "Miss Kew's mouth got all tight again and she said, 'They're little colored girls, Jane. Now eat your lunch.' "But that didn't explain anything to Jane or me, either. I said, 'I want 'em to eat with us. Lone said we should stay together.' " 'But you ate together,' she says. 'We all live in the same house. We all eat the same food. Now let us ndt discuss the matter.' "I looked at Janie and she Hooked at me, and she said, 'So why can't we all do this livin' and eatin' right here?" "Miss Kew put down her fork and looked hard. 'I have explained it to you and I have said that there .will be no further discussion.' "Well, I thought that was real nowhere. So I just rocked back lhy head and bellowed, "Bonnie! Beanie!" And hing, there they were. "So all hell broke loose. Miss Kew ordered them out and they wouldn't go, and Miriam come steaming in with their clothes, and she couldn't catch them, and Miss Kew got to honking at them and finally at me. She said this was too much. Well, maybe she had had a hard week, but so had we. So Miss Kew ordered us to leave. "I went and got Baby and started out, and along came Janie and the twins. Miss Kew waited till we were all out the door and next thing you know she ran out after us. She passed us and got in front of me and made me stop. So we all stopped. "'Is this how you follow Lone's wishes?' she asked. 'I told her yes. She said she understood Lone wanted us to Stay with her. And I said, 'Yeah, but he wanted us to stay together more.' "She said come back in, we'd have a talk. Jane asked Baby and Baby said okay, so we went back. We had a compromise. We didn't eat in the dining room no more. There was a side porch, a sort of verandah thing with glass windows, with a door to the dining room and er door to the kitchen, and we all ate out there after that. Miss Kew ate by herself. "But something funny happened because of that whole cockeyed hassel." asked me. I laughed. "Miriam. She looked and sounded like always, but she started slipping us cookies between meals. You know, it took me years to figure out what all that was about. I mean it. From what I've learned about people, there seems to be two armies fightin' about race. One's fightin to keep 'em apart, and one's fightin' to get 'em together. But I don't see why both sides are so worried about it! Why don't they just forget it?" "They can't You see, Gerry, it's necessary for people to believe they are superior in some fashion. You and Lone and the kids-- you were a pretty tight unik Didn't you feel you were a little better than all of the rest of the world?" "Better? How could we be better?" "Different, then." "Well, I suppose so, but we didn't think about it. Different, yes. Better, no." "You're a unique case," Stem said. "Now go on and tell me about the other trouble you had. About Baby." "Baby. Yeah. Well, that was a couple of months after we moved to Miss Kew's. Things were already getting real smooth, even then. We'd learned all the 'yes, ma'am, no, ma'am' routines by then and she'd got us catching up with school -- regular periods morning and afternoon, five days a week. Jane had long ago quit taking care of Baby, and the twins walked to wherever they went. That was funny. They could pop from one place to another right in front of Miss Kew's eyes and she wouldn't believe what she saw. She was too upset about them suddenly showing up bare. They quit doing it and she was happy about it. She was happy about a lot of things. It had been years since she'd seen anybody -- years. She'd even had the meters put outside the house so no one would ever have to come in. But with us there, she began to liven up. She quit wearing those old-lady dresses and began to look halfway human. She ate with us sometimes, even. "But one fine day I woke up feeling real weird. It was like somebody had stolen something from me when I was asleep, only I didn't know what. I crawled out of my window and along the ledge into Janie's room, which I wasn't supposed to do. She was in bed. I went and woke her up. I can still see her eyes, the way they opened a little slit, still asleep, and then popped up wide. I didn't have to tell her something was wrong. She knew, and she knew what it was. " 'Baby's gone!' she said. "We didn't care then who woke up. We pounded out of her room and down the hall and into the little room at the end where Baby slept. You wouldn't believe it. The fancy crib he had, and the white chest of drawers, and all that mess of rattles and so on, they were gone, and there was just a writing desk there. I mean it was as if Baby had never been there at all. "We didn't say anything. We just spun around and busted into Miss Kew's bedroom. I'd never been in there but once and Jane only a few times. But forbidden or not, this was different. Miss Kew was in bed, with her hair braided. She was wide awake before we could get across the room. She pushed herself back and up until she was sitting against the headboard. She gave the two of us the cold eye. " 'What is the meaning of this?' she wanted to know. " 'Where's Baby?' I yelled at her. " 'Gerard,' she says, 'there is no need to shout.' "Jane was a real quiet kid, but she said, 'You better tell us where he is, Miss Kew,' and it would of scared you to look at her when she said it. "So all of a sudden Miss Kew took off the stone face and held out her hands to us. 'Children,' she said, 'I'm sorry. I really am sorry. But I've just done what is best. I've sent Baby away. He's gone to live with some children like him. We could never make him really happy here. You know that.' "Jane said, 'He never told us he wasn't happy.' "Miss Kew brought out a hollow kind of laugh. 'As if he could talk, the poor little thing.!' " 'You better get him back here,' I said. 'You don't know What you're fooling with. I told you we wasn't ever to break up.' "She was getting mad, but she held on to herself. 'I '#, try to explain it to you, dear,' she said. 'You and Jane here and even the twins are all normal, healthy children and you'll grow up to be fine men and women. But poor Baby's -- different. He's not going to grow very much more, and he'll never walk and play like other children.' " 'That doesn't matter,' Jane said. 'You had no call to send him away.' "And I said, 'Yeah. You better bring him back, but quick.' "Then she started to jump salty. 'Among the many things I have taught you is, I am sure, not to dictate to your elders. Now, then, you run along and get dressed for breakfast, and we'll say no more about this.' "I told her, nice as I could, 'Miss Kew, you're going to wish you brought him back right now. But you're going to bring him back soon. Or else.' "So then' she got up out of her bed and ran us out of the room." asked, "What happened?" "Oh," I said, "she brought him back." I laughed suddenly. "I guess it's funny now, when you come to think of it. Nearly three months of us getting bossed around, and her ruling the roost, and then all of a sudden we lay down the law. We'd tried our best to be good according to her ideas, but, by God, that time she went too far. She got the treatment from the second she slammed her door on us. She had a big china pot under her bed, and it rose up in the air and smashed m through her dresser mirror. Then one of the drawers in the dresser slid open and a glove come out of it and smacked her face. "She went to jump back on the bed and a whole section of plaster fell off the ceiling onto the bed. The water turned on in her little bathroom and the plug went in, and just about the time it began to overflow, all her clothes fell off their hooks. She went to run out of the room, but the door was stuck, and when she yanked on the handle it opened real quick and she spread out on the floor. The door slammed shut again and more plaster come down on her. Then we went back in and stood looking at her. She was crying. I hadn't known till then that she could. " ' Y ou going to get Baby back here?' I asked her. "She just lay there and cried. After a while she looked up at us. It was real pathetic. We helped her up and got her to a chair. She just looked at us for a while, and at the mirror, and at the busted ceiling, and then she whispered, 'What happened? What happened?' " 'You took Baby away,' I said. 'That's what.' "So she jumped up and said real low, real  scared, but real strong: 'Something struck the house. An airplane. Perhaps there was an earthquake. We'll talk m iikut Baby after breakfast." "I said, 'Give her more, Janie.' "A big gob of water hit her on the face and chest and made her nightgown stick to her, which was the kind of thing that upset her most. Her braids stood straight up in the air, more and more, till they dragged her standing straight up. She opened her mouth to yell and the powder puff off the dresser rammed into it. She clawed it out. " 'What are you doing? What are you doing?' she says, crying again. "Janie just looked at her, and put her hands behind her, real smug. 'We haven't done anything,' she said. "And I said, 'Not yet we haven't. You going to get Baby back?' "And she screamed at us, 'Stop it! Stop it! Stop talking about that mongoloid idiot! It's no good to anyone, not even itself! How could I ever make believe it's mine?' "I said, 'Get rats, Janie.' "There was a scuttling sound along the baseboard. Miss Kew covered her face with her hands and sank down on the chair. 'Not rats,' she said. 'There are no rats here.' Then something squeaked and she went all to pieces. Did you ever see anyone really go to pieces?" "Yes," Stern said. "I was about as mad as I could get," I said, "but that was almost too much for me. Still, she shouldn't have sent Baby away. It took a couple of hours for her to get straightened out enoughso she could use the phone, but we had Baby back before lunch time." I laughed. "What's funny?" "She never seemed able to rightly remember what had happened to her. About three weeks later I heard her talking to Miriam about it. She said it was the house settling suddenly. She said it was a good thing she'd sent Baby out for that medical checkup -- the poor little thing might have been hurt. She really believed it, I think." "She probably did. That's fairly common. We don't believe anything we don't want to believe." "How much of this do you believe?" I asked him suddenly. "I told you before -- it doesn't matter. I don't want to believe or disbelieve it." "You haven't asked me how much of it I believe." "I don't have to. You'll make up your own mind about that.' "Are you a good psychotherapist?" "I think so," he said! "Whom did you kill?" The question caught me absolutely off guard. "Miss Kew," I said. Then I started to cuss and, swear. "I didn't mean to tell you that." "Don't worry about it," he said. "What did you do it for?" "That's' what I came here to find out." "You must have really hated her." I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that! out. The first part of it came out in noises, grunts and squeaks that hurt my throat. Much more than you'd think came out when my nose started to run. And finally -- words. "Do you know where I came from? The earliest thing I can remember is a punch in the : #nouth. I can still see it coming, a fist as big as my head. Because I was crying. I been afraid to cry ever since. I was crying because I was hungry. Cold, maybe. Both. After that, big dormitories, and whoever could steal the most got the most. Get the hell kicked out of you if you're pad, get a big reward if you're good. Big reward: they let you alone. Try to live like that. Try fo live so the biggest, most wonderful thing in the whole damn World is just to have 'em let you jltlone! . "So a spell with Lone and the kids. Something wonderful : you belong. It never happened before. Two yellow bulbs and a fireplace and they light up the world. It's all there is and all there ever has to be. "Then the big change : clean clothes, cooked food, five hours a day school; Columbus and King Arthur and a # book on Civics that explains about septic tanks. Over it all a great big squarecut lump of ice, and you watch it melting and the corners curve, and you know it's because of you, Miss Kew... hell, she had too much control over herself ever to slobber over us, but it was there, that feeling. Lone took care of us because it was part of the way he lived. Miss Kew took care of us, and none of it was the way she lived. It was something she wanted to do. "She had a weird idea of 'right' and a wrong idea of 'wrong,' but she stuck to them, tried to make her ideas do us good. When she couldn't understand, she figured it was her own failure... and there was an almighty lot she didn't understand and never could. What went right was our success. What went wrong was her mistake. That last year, that was... oh, good." "So?" "So I killed her. Listen," I said. I felt I had to talk fast. I wasn't short of time, but I had to get rid f it. "I'll tell you all I know about it. The one day before I killed her. I woke up in the morning and the sheets crackly clean under me, the sunlight coming in through white curtains and bright red-and-blue drapes. There's a closet full of my clothes -- mine, you see; I never had anything '"that was really mine before -- and downstairs Miriam clinking around with breakfast and the twins laughing. Laughing with her, mind you, not just with each other like they always did before. "In the next room, Janie moving around, singing, and when I see her, I know her face will shine inside and out. I get up. There's hot hot water and the toothpaste bites my tongue. The clothes fit me and I go downstairs and they're all there and I'm glad to see them and they're glad to see me, and we no sooner get set around the table when Miss Kew comes down and everyone calls out to her at once. "And the morning goes by like that, school with a recess, there in the big long living room. The twins with the ends of their tongues stuck out, drawing the alphabet instead of writing it, and then Jane, when it's time, painting a picture, a real picture of a cow with trees and a yellow fence that goes off into the distance. Here I am lost between the two parts of a quadratic equation, and Miss Kew bending close to help me, and I smell the sachet she has on her clothes. I hold up my head to smell it better, and far away I hear the .shuffle and klunk of filled pots going on the stove. back in the kitchen., "And the afternoon goes by like that, more school and some study and boiling out into the yard, laughing. The twins chasing each other,, running on their two feet to get where they want to go; Jane dappling the leaves in her picture, trying to get it just the way Miss Kew says it ought to be. And Baby, he's got a big play-pen. He don't move around much any more, he just watches and dribbles some, and gets packed full of food and kept as clean as a new sheet of tinfoil. "And supper, and the evening, and Miss Kew readingto us, changing her voice every time someone else talks in the story, reading fast and whispery when it embarrasses her, but reading every word all the same. "And I had to go and kill her. And that's all." said. "What are you -- stupid?" I yelled.  Stern didn't say anything. I turned on my belly on the couch and propped up my chin in my hands and looked at him. You never could tell what was going on with him, but I got the idea that he was puzzled. "I said why," I told him. "Not to me." I suddenly understood that I was asking too much of hing. I said slowly, "We all woke up at the same time. We all did what somebody else wanted. We lived through a day someone else's way, thinking someone else's thoughts, saying other people's words. Jane painted someone else's pictures, Baby didn't talk to anyone, and we were all happy with it. Now do you see?" "Not yet." "God!" I said. I thought for a while. "We didn't blesh." "Blesh? Oh. But you didn't after Lone died, either." "That was different. That was like a car running out of gas, but the car's there -- there's nothing wrong with it. It's just waiting. But after Miss Kew got done with us, the car was taken all to pieces, see?" It was his turn to think a while. Finally he said, "The mind makes us do funny things. Some of them seem completely reasonless, wrong, insane. But the cornerstone of the work we're doing it this: there's a chain of solid, unassailable logic in the things We do. Dig deep enough and you find cause and effect as clearly if, this field fs you do in any other. I said logic, mind; I didn't say 'correctness,' or 'rightness' or 'justice' or anything of the sort. Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that' performing the logic. "When that 'mind is submerged, working at cross-pur ? poses with the surface mind, then you're all confused. Now in your case, I can see the thing you're pointing at -- that in order to preserve or to rebuild that peculiar bond between you kids, you had to get rid of Miss Kew. But I don't see the logic. I don't see that regaining that 'Meshing' was worth destroying this new-found security which you admit was enjoyable." I said, desperately, "Maybe it wasn't worth destroying it." Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. "It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But, when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you'd had before. I don't see why and neither do you." "How are we going to find out?" "Well, let's get right to the most unpleasant part, if you're up to it." I lay down. "I'm ready." "All right. Tell me everything #i that happened just before you killed her." day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again : it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead. I said, "What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people's way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet. I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew's bedroom and killed her." "How?" "That's all there is!" I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. "It was awful dark... it still is. I don't know. I don't want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her." "All right, all right," Stern said. "I guess there's no need to get too gruesome about this. You're -- " "What?" "You're quite strong for your age, aren't you, Gerard?" : "I guess so. Strong enough, anyway." "Yes," he said. "I still don't see that logic you were talking about." I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, "hard, once for each word: "Why -- did -- I -- have -- to -- go -- and -- do -- that?" "Cut that out," he said. "You'll hurt yourself." "I ought to get hurt," I said. "Ah?" said Stern. I got up and went to the desk and got some water. "What am I going to do?" "Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here." "Not much," I said. "It was only last night. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the post office when it opened. Miss Kew used to let me go for the mail sometimes. Found this check waiting for me for the contest. Cashed it at the bank, opened an account, took eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That's all." "Didn't you have any trouble cashing the check?" "I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do." He gave a surprised grunt. "I know what you're thinking -- I couldn't make Miss Kew do what I wanted." "That's part of it," he admitted. "If I had of done that," I told him, "she wouldn't of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker -- all I made him do was be a banker." ly realized why he fooled With that pipe all the time. It Was so he could look down at it nd you wouldn't be able to see bis eyes. "You killed her," he said -- and I knew he was changing the subject -- "and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must futve been less valuable to you !an the chance to rebuild this iiing you used to have with the ther kids. And you're not sure the value of that." He looked "Does that describe your in trouble?" li "Just about." "You know the single thing lat makes people kill?" When didn't answer, he said, "Surival. To save the self or somebang which identifies with the Ilf. And in this case that doesn't aly, because your setup with Miss Kew had far more survival value for you, singly and as a group, than the other." ' So maybe I just' didn't have a good enough reason to kill her." "You had, because you did it. We just haven't located it yet. I mean we have the reason, but we don't know why it was important enough. The answer is somewhere in you." "Where?" He got up and walked some. "We have a pretty consecutive lifestory here. There's fantasy mixed with the fact, of course, and there are areas in which we have no detailed information, but we have a beginning and a middle and an end. Now, I can't say for sure, but the answer may be in that bridge you refused to cross a while back. Remember?" I remembered, all right. I said, "Why that? Why can't we try something else?" He quietly pointed out, "Because you just said it. Why are you shying away from it?" "Don't go making big ones out of little ones," I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. "That bothers me. I don't know why, but it does." "Something's lying hidden in there, and you're bothering it so it's fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we're after. Your trouble is concealed, isn't it?" #  "Well, yes," I said, and I felt that sickness and faintness again, and again I pushed it away. Suddenly I wasn't going to be stopped any more. "Let's go get it." # lay down. He let me watch the ceiling and listen to silence for a while, and then he said, "You're in the library. You've just met Miss Kew. She's talking to you; you're telling her about the children." I lay very still. Nothing happened. Yes, it did; I got tense inside, all over, from the bones out. more and more. When it got as bad as it could, still nothing happened. I heard him get up and cross the room to the desk. He fumbled there for a while: things clicked and hummed. Suddenly I heard my own voice: "Well, there's Jane, she's eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they're twins, and Baby. Baby is three." And the sound of my own ter earn -- And nothingness. darkness, I came flailing out with my fists. Strong hands caught my wrists.They didn't check my arms; they just grab-' bed and rode. I opened my eyes. I was soaking wet. The thermos lay on its side on the rug. Stern was crouched beside me, holding my wrists. I quit struggling. "What happened?" He let me go and stood back watchfully. "Lord," he said, "what a charge!" I held my head and moaned. He threw me a hand-towel and I used it. "What hit me?" "I've had you on tape the i whole time," he explained. "When i you wouldn't get into that recol; lection, I tried to nudge you into i it by using your own voice as you recounted it before. It works wonders sometimes." "It worked wonders this time," I growled. "I think I blew a fuse." "In effect, you did. You were on the trembling verge of going into the thing you don't want to remember, and you let yourself j go unconscious rather than do it." j "What are you so pleased j about?" "Last-ditch defense," he said tersely. "We've got it now. Just one more try." "Now hold on. The last-ditch defense is that I drop dead." "You won't. You've contained this episode in your subconscious mind for a long time and it hasn't hurt you." "Hasn't it?" "How do you know it won't when we drag it out?" "You'll see." I looked up at him sideways. Somehow he struck me as knowi # ing what he was doing, "You know a lot more about yourself now than you did at the thne," he explained softly. "You Can apply insight. You can evaluate it as it comes up. Maybe not Completely, but enough to protect yourself. Don't worry. Trust me. I can stop it if it gets too bad. Now just relax. Look at the Ceiling. Be aware of your toes. Don't look at your toes. Look traight up. Your toes, your big toes. Don't move your toes, but feel them. Count outward from grour big toes, one count for each t feoc. One, two, three. Feel that third toe. Feel the toe, feel it, feel it go limp, go limp, go limp, he toe next to it on both sides its limp. So limp because your es are limp, all of your toes are limp -- " "What are you doing?" I shouted at him. He said in the same silky voice, You trust me and so do your toes trust me. They're all limp because you trust me. You -- " "You're trying to hypnotize me. I'm not going to let you do that." "You're going to hypnotize yourself. You do everything yourself. I just point the way. I point your toes to the path. Just point your toes. No one can make you go anywhere you don't want to go, but you want to go where your toes are pointed where your toes are limp where your..." On and on and on. And where was the dangling gold ornament, the light in the eyes, the mystic passes? He wasn't even sitting where I could see him. Where was the talk about how sleepy I was supposed to be? Well, he knew I wasn't sleepy and didn't want to be sleepy. I just wanted to be toes. I just wanted to be limp, just a limp toe. No brains in a toe, a toe to go, go, go eleven times, eleven, I'm eleven... I split in two, and it was all right, the part that watched the part that went back to the library, and Miss Kew leaning toward me, but not too near, me with the newspaper crackling under me on the library chair, me with one shoe off and my limp toes dangling... and I felt a mild surprise at this. For this was hypndsis, but I was quite conscious? quite altogether there on the couch with Stern droning away at me, quite able to roll over and sit up and talk to him and walk out if I wanted to, but I just didn't want to. Oh, if this was what hypnosis was like, I was all for it. I'd work at this. This was all right. There on the table I'm able to see that the gold will unfold on the leather, and whether I'm able to stay by the table with you, with Miss Kew, with Miss Kew... fc... and Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they're twins, and Baby. Baby is three." "Baby is three," she said. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a... a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done. And this is what was inside. Allio one flash, but all this. would be three if there were a baby, which there never was... Lone, I'm open to you. Open, is this open enough? His irises like wheels. I'm sure they spin, but I never catch them at it. The probe that passes invisibly from his brain, through his eyes, into mine. Does he know what it means to me? Does he care? He doesn't care, he doesn't know; he empties me and I fill as he directs me to; he drinks and waits and drinks again and never looks at the cup. When I saw him first, I was dancing in the wind, in the wood, in the wild, and I spun about and he stood there in the leafy shadows, watching me. I hated him for it. It was not my wood, not my gold-spangled fern-tangled glen. But it was my dancing that he took, freezing it forever by being there.' I hated him for it, hated the way he looked, the way he stood, ankle-deep in the kind wet ferns, looking like a tree with roots for feet and clothes the color of earth. As I stopped he moved, and then he was just a man, a great ape-shouldered, dirty animal of a man, and all my hate was fear suddenly and I was just as frozen. He knew what he had done and he didn't care. Dancing...  never to dance again, because never would I know the woods were free of eyes, free of tall, uncaring, dirty animal men. Summer days with the clothes choking me, winter nights with the precious decencies round and about me like a shroud, and never to dance again, never to remember dancing without remembering the shock of knowing he had seen me. How I hated him! Oh, how I hated him! To dance alone where no one knew, that was the single thing I hid to myself when I was known as Miss Kew, that Victorian, older than her years, later than her time; correct and starched, lace and linen and lonely. Now indeed I would be all they said, through and through, forever and ever, because he had robbed me of the one thing I dared to keep secret. He came out 'into the sun and walked to me, holding his great head a little on one side. I stood where I was, frozen inwardly and outwardly and altogether by the tore of anger and the layer of fear. My arm was still out, my Waist still bent from my dance, and when he stopped, I breathed again because by then I had to. He said, "You read books?" I couldn't bear to have him near me, but I couldn't move. He put out his hard hand and touched my jaw, turned my head up until I had to look into his face. I cringed away from him, but my face would not leave his hand, though he was not holding it, just lifting it. "You got to read some books for me. I got no time to find them." I asked him, "Who are you?" "Lone," he said. "You going to read books for me?" "No. Let me go, let me go!" He laughed at me. He wasn't holding me. "What books?" I cried. E thumped my face, not very hard. It made me look up a bit more. He dropped his hand away. His eyes, the irises were going to spin... , "Open Up in there," he said."Open way up and let me see." There were books in my head, fend he was looking at the titles ... he was not looking at the titles, for he couldn't read. He was looking at what I knew of the books. I suddenly felt terribly useless, because I had only a fraction of what he wanted. "What's that?" he barked. I knew what he meant. He'd gotten it from inside my head. I didn't know it was in there, even, but he found it. "Telekinesis," I said. "How is it done?" "Nobody knows if it can be done. Moving physical objects with the mind!" "It can be done," he said. "This one?" "Teleportation. That's the same thing -- well, almost. Moving your own body with mind power." "Yeah, yeah, I see it," he said gruffly. "Molecular interpenetration. Telepathy and clairvoyance. I don't know anything about them. I think they're silly." "Read about 'em. It don't matter if you understand or not. What's this?" It was there in my brain, on my lips. "Gestalt." "What's that?" "Group. Like a cure for a lot of diseases with one kind of treatment. Like a lot of thoughts expressed in one phrase. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts." "Read about that, too. Read a whole lot about that. That's the most you got to read about. That's important." He turned away, and when his eyes came away from mine it was ## like somethingbreaking, so that I staggered and fell to oneknee. He went off into the woods without looking back. I got my things and ran home. There was anger, and it struck me like a storm. There was fear, and it struck me like a wind. I knew I would read the books, I knew I would come back, I knew I would never dance again. So I read the books and I came back. Sometimes it was every day for three or four days, and sometimes, because I couldn't find a certain book, I might not come back for ten. He was always there in the little glen, waiting, standing in the shadows, and he took what he wanted of the books and nothing of me. He never mentioned the next meeting. If he came there every day to wait for me, or if he only came when I did, I have no way of knowing. He made me read books that contained nothing for me, books on evolution, on social and cultural organization, on mythology, and ever so much on symbiosis. What I had with him were not conversations; sometimes nothing audible would pass between us but his grunt of surprise or small, short hum of interest. He tore the books out of me the Way he would tear berries from a bush, all at once; he smelled of sweat and earth and the green Juices his heavy body crushed when he moved through the wood. If he learned anything from the books, it made no difference in him. sat by me and puzzled something out. He said, "What book has something like this?" Then he waited for a long time, thinking. "The way a termite can't digest wood, you know, and microbes in the termite's belly can, and what the termite eats is what the microbe leaves behind. What's that?" "Symbiosis," I remembered. I remembered the words. Lone tore the content from words and threw the words away. "Two kinds of life depending upon one another for existence." "Yeah. Well, is there a book about four-five kinds doing that?" "I don't know." Then he asked, "What about this? You got a radio station, you got four-five receivers, each receiver is fixed up to make something different happen, like one digs and one flies and one makes noise, but each one takes orders from the one place. And each one has its own power and its own thing to do, but they are all apart. Now: is there life like that, instead of radio?" "Where each organism is a part the tSiole, but separated?...! 't think so... unless you an social organizations, like a team, or perhaps a gang of men Working, all taking orders from the same boss." "No," he said immediately, ; "not like that. Like one single animal." He made a gesture with his cupped hand which I understood. I asked, "You mean a gestalt jilife-form? It's fantastic." "No book has about that, huh?" "None I ever heard of." "I got to know about that," he said heavily. "There is such athing. I want to know if it ever happened before." I can't see how.anything of I'the sort could exist." "It does. A part that fetches, a part that figures, a part that finds out, and a part that talks." "Talks? Only humans talk." "I know," he said, and got up find went away... I looked and looked for such a .book, but found nothing remoteBy like it. I came back and told him so. He was still a very long time, looking off to the blue-onblue line of the hilly horizon. Then he drove those about-toi spin irises at me and searched. i"You learn, but you don't think," he said, and looked again eat the hills. "This all happens with hu mans," he said eventually. "It happens piece by piece right under folk's noses, and they don't see it. You got mind-readers. You got people can move things with their mind. You got people can move themselves with their mind. You got people can figure anything out if you just think to ask them. What you ain't got is the one kind of person who can pull 'em all together, like a brain pulls together the parts that press and pull and feel heat and walk and think and all the other things. "I'm one," he finished suddenly. Then he sat still for so long, I thought he had forgotten me. "Lone," I said, "what do you do here in the woods?" "I wait," he said. "I ain't finished yet." He looked at my eyes and snorted in irritation. "I don't mean 'finished' like you're thinking. I mean I ain't -- completed yet. You know about a worm when it's cut, growin' whole again? Well, forget about the cub Suppose it just grew that way, for the first time, see? I'm getting parts. I ain't finished. I want a book about that kind of animal that is me when I'm finished." "I don't know of such a book. Can you tell me more? Maybe if you could, I'd think of the right book or a place to find it." He broke a stick between his huge. hands, put the two pieces side by side and broke them to#T wii one strong twist. "All I know is I got to do what I'm doing like a bird's got to nest when it's time And I know that When I'm done I won't be anything to brag about. Ill be like a body stronger and faster than anything there ever was, without the right kind of head on it. But maybe that's because I'm one of the first. That picture you had, the caveman... "Neanderthal." "Yeah. Come to think of it, he was no great shakes. An early try at something new. That's what I'm going to be. But maybe the right kind of head'll come along after I'm all organized. Then it'll be something." He grunted with satisfaction and went' away. I couldn't find what he wanted. I found' a magazine which stated that the next important evolutionary step in man would be a psychic rather than a physi' cal direction, but it said nothing about a -- shall I call it a gestalt organism? There was something about slime molds, but they seem to be more a hive activity of amoebae than even a symbiosis. To my own unscientific, personally uninterested mind, there was nothing like what he wanted except possibly a band marching together, everyone playing different kinds of instruments with different techniques and different notes, to make a single thing move along together. But he hadn't meant anything like that. So I went back to him in the cool of an early fall evening, and he took what little I had in my eyes, and turned from me angrily with a gross word I shall not permit myself to remember.  "You can't find it," he told me. "Don't come back." He got up and went to a tattered birch and leaned against it, looking out and down into the windtossed crackling shadows. I think he had forgotten me already. I know he leaped like a frightened animal when I spoke to him from so near. He must have been completely immersed in whatever strange thoughts he was having, for I'm sure he didn't hear me coming. I said "Lone, don't blame me for not finding it. I tried." He controlled his startlement and brought those eyes down to me. "Blame? Who's blamin' anybody?" "I failed you," I tpld him, "and you're angry." He looked at me so long I became uncomfortable. "I don't know what you're talkin' about," he said. I wouldn't let him turn away from me. He would have. He would have left me forever with Rfccjt another thought; he didn't K're It wasn't cruelty or K thoughtlessness as I have been p taught to know those things. He r was as uncaring as a cat is of the  bursting of a tulip bud... I took him by the upper arms and shook him, it was like trying to shake the front of my house.  "You can know!" I screamed at 'f him. "You know what I read. You must know what I think!" He shook his head. "I'm a person, a woman," I raved at him. "You've used me and used me and you've given me nothing. You've made me break a lifetime of habits -- reading until all hours, coming to you in the rain and on Sunday -- you don't talk to me, you don't look at me, you don't know anything about me and you don't care. You put some sort of a spell on me that I couldn't break. And when you're finished, you say, 'Don't come back.' " "Do I have to give something back because I took something?" "People do." He gave that short, interested hum. "What do you want me to give you? I ain't got anything." I moved away from him. I felt... I don't know what I felt. After a time I said, "I don't know." He shrugged and turned. I fairly leaped at him, dragginghim back. "I want you to -- " "Well, damn it, what?" I couldn't look at him; I could hardly speak. "I don't know. There's something, but I don't know what it is. It's something that -- I couldn't say if I knew it." When he began to shake hhr head, I took his arms again, "You've read the books out of me; can't you read the... the me out of me?" , "I ain't never tried." He held my face up, and stepped close. "Here," he said. H IS eyes projected their strange probe at me and' I screamed. I tried to twist away. I hadn't wanted this, I' was sure I hadn't. I struggled terribly. I think he lifted me right off the ground with his big hands. He held me until he was finished, and then let me drop. I huddled to the ground, sobbing. He sat down beside me. He didn't try to touch me. He didn't tty to go away. I quieted at last and crouched there, waiting. He said, "I ain't going to do much of that no more." I sat up and tucked my skirt close around me and laid my cheek on my updraw?n knees so I could see his face. "What Happened?" He cursed. "Damn mishmash inside you. Thirty-three years old -- what you want to live like that for?" S#  "I live very comfortably," I said with some pique. "Yeah," he said. "All by yourself for ten years now 'cept for someone to do your work. Nobody else." "Men are animals, and women..." "You really hate women. They all know something you don't." "I don't want to know. I'm quite happy the way I am. "Hell you are." I said nothing to that. I despise that kind of language. "Two things you want from me. Neither makes no sense." He looked at me with the first real expression I have ever seen in his face: a profound wonderment. "You want to know all about me, where I came from, how I got to be what I am." "Yes, I do want that. What's the other thing I want that you know and I don't?"  "I was born some place' and growed like a weed somehow," he said, 'ignoring me. "Folks who didn't give even enough of a damn to try the orphanage routine. I lived with some other folks fpr a while, tried school, didn't like it. Too small a town for them special schools for my kind, retarded, y'know. So I just ran loose, sort of in training, to be the village idiot. I'da made it if I'd stayed there, but I took to the woods instead." "Why?" He wondered why, and finally said, "I guess because the way people lived didn't make no sense to me. I saw enough up and down, back and forth, to know that they live a lot of different ways, but none of 'em was for me. Out here I can grow like I want." "How is that?" I asked over one of those vast distances that built and receded between him and me so constantly. "What I wanted to get from your books." "You never told me." TT'OR the second time he said, "You learn, but I ' you don't think. There's a kind of-well, person. It's all made of separate parts, but it's all one person. It has like hands, it has like legs, it has like a talking mouth, and it has like a brain. That's me, a brain for that person. Damn feeble, too. but the best I know of.", "You're mad," "No, I ain't," he said, unoffended and completely certain. "I already got the part that's like hands. I can move 'em anywhere and they do what I want, though they're too young yet to do much good. I got the part, that talks, that one's real good." "I don't think you talk very well at all," I said. I cannot stand incorrect English. E was surprised. "I'm not talking about me! She's back ider with the others." "She?" "The one that talks. Now I ed one that thinks, one that (tun take anything and add it to jury thing else and come up with It right answer. And once they're ipll together, and all the parts get J.Uied together often enough, I'llfee that new kind of thing I told you about. See? Only -- I wish It had a better head on it than pie." My own head was swimming. "What made you start doing this?" He considered me gravely. "What made you start growing rir iri your armpits?" he asked fact' "You don't figure a thing ike that. It just happens." 'What is that... that thing ou do when you look in my res?" 'You want a name for it? I Iri't got one. I don't know how do it. I know I can get anyone want to do anything. Like #'re going to forget about me." I said in a choked voice, "I lon't want to forget about you." P "You will." I didn't know then tether he meant I'd forget, or P'd want to forget. ' "You'll hate and then after a long time tu'll be grateful. Maybe you'll t able to do something for me te time. You'll be that grateful that you'll be glad to do it. But you'll forget, all right, everything but a sort of... feeling. And my name, maybe." I don't know what moved me to ask him, but I did, forlornly. "And no one will ever know about you and me?" "Can't," he said. "Unless... well, unless it was the head of the animal, like me, or a better one." He heaved himself up... "Oh, wait, wait!" I cried. He mustn't go yet, he mustn't. He was a tall, dirty beast of a man, yet he had enthralled me in some dreadful way. "You haven't given me the other... whatever it was." "Oh," he said. "Yeah, that." He moved like a flash. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a... A breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done. two distinct levels : I am eleven, breathless from shock from a transferred agony of that incredible entrance into the ego of another. And: I am fifteen, lying on the couch while Stern drones on, "... quietly, quietly limp, your ankles and kgs as limp as your toes, your belly goes soft, the back of your neck is as limp as your belly, it's quiet and easy and all gone soft and limper than limp ,... " I sat up and swung my legs to the floor. "Okay," I said. Stern looked a little annoyed. "This is going to work," he said, "but it can only work if you cooperate. Just lie -- " "It did work," I said.  "What?" "The whole thing. A to Z." I snapped my fingers. "Like that." He looked at me piercingly. "What do you mean?" "It was right there, where you said. In the library. When I was eleven. When she said, 'Baby is three.' It knocked loose something that had been boiling around in her for three years, and it all came blasting out. I got it, full force; just a kid, no warning, no defenses. It had such a -- a pain in it, like I never knew could be." "Go on," said Stern. "That's really all. I mean that's not what was in it; it's what it did to me. What it was, a sort of hunk of her own self. A whole lot of things that happened over about four months, every bit of it. She knew Lone." "You mean a whole series of episodes?" "That's it." "You gpt a series all at once? In a split second?" "That's right. Look, for that split second I was her, don't you see? I was her, everything she'd ever done, everything she'd ever thought and heard and felt. Everything, everything, all in the right order if I wanted to bring it out like that. Any part of it if I wanted it by itself. If I'm going to tell you about what I had for lunch, do I have to tell you everything else I've ever done since I was born? No. I tell you I was her, and then and forever after I can remember anything she could remember up to that point. In just that one flash." "A gestalt he murmured. "Aha!" I said, and thought about that. I thought about a whole lot of things. I put them aside for a moment and said, "Why didn't I. know all this before?" "You had a powerful block against recalling it." see why. I don't see that at all." "Just natural revulsion," he guessed. "How about this? You had a distaste for assuming a female ego, even for a second." "You told me yourself, right at the beginning, that I didn't have that kind of a problem." "Well, how does this sound to you? You say you felt pain in that episode. So -- you wouldn't go back into it for fear of reexperiencing the pain." mvj  I "Let me think, let me think, eah, yeah, that's part of it -- that ling of going into someone's ind. She opened up to me beluse I reminded her of Lone. I ent in. I wasn't ready; I'd never :ne it before, except maybe a ttle, against resistance. I went I the way in and it was too luch; it frightened me away om trying it for years. And lere it lay, wrapped up, locked way. But as I grew older, the ii. power to do that with my mind I got stronger and stronger, and I still I was afraid to use it. And the more I grew, the more I felt, ; , down deep, that Miss Kew had to be killed before she killed the T... what I am. My God!" I Shouted. "Do you know what I  am?" "No," he said. "Like to tell me i  about it?" ' "I'd like to," I said. "Oh, yes, I'd like that." . He had that professional openminded expression on his face, not believing or disbelieving, just taking it all in. I had to tell him, and I suddenly realized that I didn't have enough words. I knew the things, but not the names for them. Lone took the meanings . and threw the words away. Further back: "You read books. Read books for me." The look of his eyes. That -- "opening up" thing. I went over to Stem. He looked up at me. I bent close. First he was startled, then he controlled it, then he came even closer to me. "My God," he murmured. "I didn't look at those eyes before. I could have sworn those irises spun like wheels... more books than I ever imagined had been written. I slipped in there, looking for what I wanted. I can't say exactly what it was like. It was like walking in a tunnel, and in this tunnel, all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you, like the thing at the carnival, the merry-goround, the thing you snatch the brass rings from. There's a brass ring on the end of each of these arms, and you can take any one of them you want to. Now imagine you make up your mind which rings you want, and the arms hold only those. Now. picture yourself with a thou sand hands to grab the rings off with. Now just suppose the tunyou can go from one end of it to the other, grabbing rings, in just the time it takes you to blink once. Well, it was like that, only easier. It was easier for me to do than it had been for Lone. away from Stern. He looked sick and frightened. "It's all right," I said. "What did you do to me?" "I needed some words. Come on, come on. Get professional." I had to admire him. He put his pipe in his pocket and gouged the tips of his fingers hard against his forehead and cheeks. Then he sat up and he was okay again. "I know," I said. "That's how Miss Kew felt when Lone did it to her." "What are you?" "I'll tell you. I'm the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Jane, telekineticist ; and myself, telepath and central control. There isn't a single thing about any of us that hasn't been documented: the teleportation of the Yogi, the telekinetics of some gamblers, the idio-savant mathematicians, and most of all, the so-called poltergeist, the moving about of household goods through the instrumentation of a young girl. Only in this case every one of my parts delivers at peak performance. "Lone organized it, or it formed around him; it doesn't matter which. I replaced Lone, but I Was too underdeveloped when he idled, and on top of that I got an Occlusion from that blast from f Miss Kew., To that extent you were right when you said the blast made me subconsciously afraid to discover what . was in it. But there was another good reason for my not being able to get in under that 'Baby is three' barrier. "We rah into the problem of what it was I valued more than the security Miss Kew gave us. Can't you see now what it was? My gestalt organism was at the point of death from that security. I figured she had to be killed or it -- I -- would be. Oh, the parts would live on : two little colored girls with a speech impediment, one introspective girl with an artistic bent, one mongoloid idiot, and me -- ninety per cent shortcircuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent." I laughed. "Sure, she had to be killed. It was self-preservation for the gestalt." Stern bobbled around with his mouth and finally got out: "I don't -- " "You don't need to," I laughed. "This is wonderful. You're fine, hey, fine. Now I want to tell you this, because you can appreciate a fine point in your specialty. You talk about occlusions! I couldn't get past the 'Baby is three' thing because in it lay the clues to what I really am. I couldn't find that out because I was afraid to remember that I failed in the thing I had to So to save the gestalt. Ain't that purty?" "Failed? Failed how?" "Look. I came to love Miss Kew, and I'd never loved anything before. Yet I had reason to kill her. She had to be killed; I couldn't kill her. What does a human mind do when presented with imperative, mutually exclusive alternatives?" "It -- it might simply quit. As you phrased it earlier, it might blow a fuse, retreat, refuse to function in that area." "Well, I didn't do that. What else?" "It might slip into a delusion that it had already taken one of the courses of action." kill her. I decided I must; I got up, got dressed -- and the next thing I knew I was outside, wandering, very confused. I got my money -- and I understand now,  with super-empahy, how I can win anyone's prize contest -- and I went looking for a head-shr ink er. I found a good one." "Thanks," he said dazedly. He looked at me with a strangeness in his eyes. "And now that you know, what's solved? What are you going to do?" "Go back home," I said happily. "Reactivate the super-organism, exercise it secretly in ways that won't make Miss Kew unhappy, and We'll stay with her as long as we know it pleases her. And we'll please her. She'll be happy in ways she's never dreamed about until now. She rates it, bless her strait-laced, hungry heart." "And she can't kill your -- gestalt organism?" "Not a chance. Not now." "How do you know it isn't dead already?" "How?" I echoed. "How does your head know your arm works?" He wet his lips. "You're going home to make a spinster happy. And after that?" I shrugged. "After that?" I mocked. "Did the Pekin man look 'at Homo Sap walking erect and say, 'What will he do after that?' We'll live, that's all, like a man, like a tree, like anything else that lives. We'll feed and grow and experiment and breed. We'll defend ourselves." I spread my hands. "We'll just do what comes naturally." "But what can you do?." "What can an electric motor do? It depends on where we apply ourselves." Stern was very pale. "But you're the only such organism, . "Are we? I don't know. I don't think so. I've told you the parts have been around for ages -- the telepaths, the poltergeists. What #  was lacking was the ones to organize, to be heads to the scattered bodies. Lone was one, I'm one; there must be more. We'll find out as we mature." "You -- aren't mature yet?" "Lord, no!" I laughed. "We're an infant. We're the equivalent of about a three-year-old child. So you see, there it is again, and this time I'm not afraid of it: Baby is three." I looked at my hands. "Baby is three," I said again, because the realization tasted good, "And when this particular group-baby is five, it might want to be a fireman. At eight, maybe a cowboy or maybe up, maybe it'll build a city, or perhaps it'll be President." "Oh, God!" he said. "God!" I looked down at him. "You're afraid," I said. "You're afraid of Homo Gestalt." He made a wonderful effort and smiled. "That's bastard terminology." "We're a bastard breed," I said. I pointed. "Sit over there." H E crossed the quiet room and sat at the desk, I leaned close to him and he went to sleep with his eyes open. I straightened up and looked around the room. Then I got the thermos flask and filled it and put it on the desk. I fixed the corner of the rug and put a clean towel at the head of the couch. I went to the side of the desk and opened it and looked at the tape recorder. Like reaching out a hand, I got Beanie. She stood by the desk, wide-eyed. "Look here," I told her. "Look good, now. What I want to do is erase all this tape. Go ask Baby how." She blinked at me and sort of shook herself, and then leaned over the recorder. She was there -- and gone -- and back, just like that. She pushed past me and turned two knobs, moved a pointer until it clicked twice. The tape raced backward past the head swiftly, whining. "All right," I said, "beat it." She vanished. I got my jacket and went to the door. Stern was still sitting at the desk, staring. "A good head-shrinker," I murmured. I felt fine. Outside I waited, then turned and went back in again. Stern looked up at me. "Sit over there, Sonny." "Gee," I said. "Sorry, sir. I got in the wrong office." "That's all right," he said. I went out and closed the door. All the way down to 'the store to buy Miss Kew some flowers, I was grinning about how he'd account for the loss of an afternoon and the gain of a thousand bucks. I Stories on  Theme in Srience-Fktion I Highly imaginable yet highly I I plausible are these intriguingiy I absorbing stories of space exploration, invasion and counterinvasion. A news or scientific "quote" supports each story by such masters as David H. Keller, Isaac Asimov and others. # pages # A Collection of Science-fiction Steriii Weird and dramatic secrets, interplanetary struggles, a mad Poe-like protagonist and shapeless creatures stir the imagination in this masterful collection of fast-paced tales. # pages # Add these great collection to your library foe I # Stories -- # pages, # # # Stories -- # pages, # "end "  # days tree  # . o Zone State itanM S.te tU""' p rivile# " #" I ' s . m Bccawsc'tlwy were aa likable and intelligent and adaptable -- they w era vaetfy dangerous! I T'S difficult, when you're on one of the asteroids, to keep from tripping, because it's almost impossible to keep your eyes on the ground. They never got around to putting portholes in spaceships, you know -- unnecessary when you're flying by GB, and psychologically inadvisable. besides -- so an asteroid is about the only place, apart from Luna, where you can really see the stars. There are so many stars in an asteroid sky that they look like clouds; like massive, heaped-up silver clouds floating slowly around the inner surface of the vast ebony sphere that surrounds you and your tiny foothold. They are near enough to touch, and you want to touch them, but they are so frighteningly far away... and so beautiful: there's nothing in creation half so beautiful as an asteroid sky. You don't want to look down,, naturally. search for fossils (I'm David Koontz, the Lucky Pierre's paleontologist). Somewhere off in the darkness on either side of me were Joe Hargraves, gadgeting for mineral deposits, and Ed Reiss, hopefully on the lookout for anything alive. The Lucky Pierre was back of us, her body out of sight behind a low black ridge, only her gleaming nose poking above like a porpoise coming up for air. When I looked back, I could see, along the jagged rim of the ridge, the busy reflected flickerings of the bubblecamp the techs were throwing together. Otherwise all was black, except for our blue-white torch beams that darted here and there over the gritty, rocky surface... The twenty-nine of us were E. T. I. Team #, whose assignment was the asteroids. We were four years and three months out of Terra, and we'd reached Vesta right on schedule. Ten minutes after landing, we had known that the clod was part of the crust of Planet X -- or Sorn, to give it hr right name -- one of the few such parts that hadn't been blown clean out of the Solar System. That made Vesta extra-special. It meant settling 'down for a while. It meant a careful, monthslong scrutiny of Vesta's every square inch and a lot of her cubic ones, especially by the life-scientists. Fossils, artifacts, animatelife... a surface chunk of Sorn might harbor any of these, or all. Some we'd tackled already had a few. In a day or so, of course, we'd have the one-man beetles and crewboats out, and the floodlights orbiting overhead, and Vesta would be as exposed to us as a molecule on a microscreen. Then work would start in earnest. But in the meantime -- and as usual -- Hargraves, Reiss and I were out prowling, our weighted boots clomping along in darkness. Captain Feldman had long ago given up trying to keep his scienceminded charges from galloping off alone like this. In spite of being a military man, Feld's a nice guy ; he just shrugs and says, "Scientists!" when we appeal brightly at the airlock, waiting to be let out. S O the three of us went our separate ways, and ' soon were out of sight of one another. Ed Reiss, the biologist, was looking hardest for animate life, naturally. But I found it. expanse of rock -- lava, wonderfully colored -- and was descending into a boulder-cluttered pocket. I was nearing the "bottom" of the chunk, the part that had been the deepest beneath Sorn's surface before the blow-up. It was the likeliest place to look for fossils. But instead of looking for fossils, my eyes kept rising to those incredible stars. You get that way particularly after several weeks of living in steel; and it was lucky that I got that way this time, or I might have missed the Zen. My feet tangled with a rock. I started a slow, light-gravity fall, and looked down to catch my balance. My torch beam flickered across a small, red-furred teddybear shape. The light passed on. I brought . it sharply back to target. My hair did not stand on end, regardless of what you've heard me quoted as saying. Why should it have, when I already knew Yurt so well -- considered him,, in fact, one of my closest friends? The Zen was standing by a rock, one paw resting on it, ears cocked forward, its stubby hind legs braced ready to launch it into flight. Big yellow eyes blinked unemotionally' at the glare of the torch, and I cut down polarizer lens. The creature stared at me, looking ready to jump halfway to Mars or straight at me if I made a wrong move. I addressed it in its own language, clucking my tongue and whistling through my teeth: "Suh, Zen -- " In the blue-white light of the torch," the Zen shivered. It didn't say anything. I thought I knew why. Three thousand years of darkness and silence... I said, "I won't hurt you," again speaking in its own language. The Zen moved away from the rock, but not away from me. It came a little closer, actually, and peered up at my helmeted, mirror-glassed head -- unmistakably the seat of intelligence, it appears, of any race anywhere. Its mouth, almost human-shaped, worked; finally words came. It hadn't spoken, except to itself, for three thousand years. "You... are not Zen," it said. "Why -- how do you speak Zennacai?" It took me a couple of seconds to untangle the squeaking syllables and get any sense out of them. What I had already said to it were stock phrases that Yurt IS had taught me; I knewstiil more, that the nod wasn't visible but I couldn't speak Zennacai through the one-way glass of my fluently by any means. Keep this helmet. in mind, by the way: I barely "I am -- last of Zen," it said, knew the language, and the Zen I said nothing. I was studying could barely remember it. To it closely, looking for the features save space, the following dialogue which Yurt had described to us: is reproduced without bumblings, the lighter red fur of arms and blank stares and What-did-youneck, the peculiar formation of says? In reality, our talk lasted flesh and horn on the lower abover an hour. domen. They were there. From "I am an Earthman," I said, the coloring, I knew this Zen was Through my earphones, when I spoke, I could faintly hear my own voice as the Zen must have heard it in Vesta's all but nonexistent atmosphere: tiny, metallic, cricketlike. "Eert... mn?" I pointed ' at the sky, the incredible sky. "From out there. From another .world." It thought about that for a while. I waited. We already knew that the Zens had been better astronomers at their peak than we yrere right now, even though they'd never mastered space travel; so I didn't expect this one to boggle at the notion of creatures from  another world. It didn't. Finally it nodded, and I thought, as I had often before, how curious it was that this gesture should be common to Earthmen and. Zen. "So. Eert-mn" it said. "And you know what I am?" When I understood, I nodded, too. Then I said, "Yes," realizing a female. The mouth worked again -- not with emotion, I knew, but with the unfamiliar act of speaking. "I have been here for -- for -- " she hesitatecl -- "I don't know For five hundred of my years.' "For about three thousand of mine," I told her.  A ND then blank astonishment sank home in me -- astonish ment at the last two words of her remark. I was already familia with the Zens' enormous intelligence, knowing Yurt as I did... ,  but imagine thinking to qualify years with my when just out of nowhere a visitor from another planetary orbit pops up! And there had been no special stress given the distinction, just clear, precise thinking, like Yurt's. I added, still a little awed; "We know how long ago your world died." "I was child then," she said. "I don't know -- what happened, I have wondered." She looked up at my steel-and-glass face; I must have seemed like a giant. Well, I suppose I was. "This --  what we are on -- was part of Sorn, I know. Was it -- " She fumbled for a word -- "was it atom explosion?" f I told her how Sorn had gotten careless with its hydrogen atoms and had blown itself over half of creation. (This the E. T. I. Teams had surmised from scientific records found on Eros, as well as from geophysical evidence scattered throughout the other bodies.) "I was child," she said again after a moment. "But I remember -- I remember things different from this. Air... heat... light ... how do I live here?" Again I felt amazement at its intelligence; (and it suddenly occurred to me that astronomy and nuclear physics must have been taught in Sorn's "elementary schools" -- else thatmy years and atom explosion would have been all but impossible). And now this old, old creature, remembering back three thousand years to childhood -- probably to those "elementary schools" -- remembering, and defining the differences in environment between then and now; and more, wondering at its existence in the different now -- And then I got my own thinking straightened out. I recalled some of the things we had learned about the Zen. Their average lifespan had been # years or a little over. So the Zen before me was, by our standards, about twenty five years old. Nothing at alljstrange about remembering, when you are twenty-five, the things that happened to you when you were seven... But the Zen's question, even my rationalization of my reaction to it,had given me a chill. Here was no cuddly teddy bear. This creature had been born before Christ! She had been alone for three thousand years, on a chip of bone from her dead world beneath a sepulchre of stars. The last and greatest Martian civilization, the L'hrai, had risen and fallen in her lifetime. And she was twentyfive years old. "How do I live here?" she asked again. I got back into my own framework of temporal reference, so to speak, and began explaining to a Zen what a Zen was. (I found out later from Yurt that biology, for the reasons which follow, was one of the most difficult studies; so difficult that nuclear physics actually preceded it!) I told her that the Zen had been, all evidence indicated, the toughest, hardest, longest-lived creatures God had ever cooked up: practically independent of their environment, no special ecological niche; just raw, stubborn, tenacious life, developed to a fantastic extreme -- a greater force of life than any other known, one that could exist almost anj' where under practically any conditions -- even floating in midspace, which, asteroid or no, this Zen was doing right now. The Zens breathed, all right, but it was nothing they'd had to do in order to live. It gave them nothing their incredible metabolism couldn't scrounge up out of rock or cosmic rays or interstellar gas or simply do without for a few thousand years. If the human body is a furnace, then the Zen body is a feeder pile. Maybe that, I thought, was what evolution always worked toward. "Please, will you kill me?" the Zen said. I 'D been expecting that. Two years ago, on the bleak surface f Eros, Yurt had asked Engstrom to do the same thing. But I asked, "Why?" although I knew what the answer would be, too. The Zen looked up at me. She was exhibiting every ounce of emotion a Zen is capable of, which is a lot; and I could recognize it, but not in any familiar terms. A tiny motion hero, a quiver there, but very quiet and still for the most part. And that was the vjolent expression;" restraint,, Yurt, after two years of living with us, still couldn't understand why we found this confusing. Difficult, aliens -- or being alien. "I've tried so often to do it myself," the Zen said softly. "But I can't. I can't even hurt myself. Why do I want you to kill me?" She was even quieter. Maybe she was crying. "I'm alone. Five hundred years, Eert-mn -- not too long. I'm still young. But what good is it -- life -- when there are no other Zen?" "How do you know there are no other Zen?" fci: . "There are no others," she said almost inaudibly. I suppose a human girl might have shrieked it. A child , I thought, when your world blew up. And you survived. Now you're a young three-thousand-yearold woman... uneducated, afraid, probably crawling with neuroses. Even so, in your thousand-year terms, young lady , you're not too old to change. "Will you kill me?" she asked again. And suddenly I was having one of those eye-popping third-row  center views of the whole scene: the enormous, beautiful sky; the dead clod, Vesta; the little creature who stood there staring at me like-alien, old-young creature who M was asking me to kill her. For a moment the human quality of her thinking terrified me... the feeling you might have waking up seme night and finding your pet puppy sitting oh your chest, looking at you with wise eyes and white fangs gleaming . Then I thought of Yurt -- smart, friendly Yurt, who had learned to laugh and wisecrack -- and I came out of the jeebies. I realized that here was only a sick girl, no tiny monster. And if she were as resilient as Yurt... well, it was his problem. He'd probably pull her through. But I didn't pick her up. I made no attempt to take her sack to the ship. Her tiny white teeth and tiny yellow claws were harder than steel; and she was, i I knew, unbelievably strong for her size. If she got suspicious or decided to tlrow a phobic tizzy, she could scatter shreds of me over a square acre of Vesta in less time than it would take me to yelp. "Will you -- " she began again, I tried shakily, "Hell, no. Wait here." Then I had to translate it.  Pierre and got Yurt. We could do without him, even though he had foe eh a big help. We'd taught him a lot -- he'd been a child at the blow-up, too -- and he'd taught us a lot. But this was more important, of course. When I told him what had happened, he was very quiet; crying, perhaps, just like a human being, with happiness. Cap Feldman asked me what was up, and I told him, and he said, "Well, I'll be blessed!" I said, "Yurt, are you sure you want us to keep hands off... just go off and leave you?" "Yes, please." Feldman said, "Well, I'll be blessed." Yurt, who spoke excellent English, said, "Bless you all." I took him back to where the female waited. From the ridge, I knew, the entire crew was watching through binocs. I set him down, and he fell to studying her intently. "I am not a Zen," I told her, for the crew's sake, "but Yurt here is. Do you see... I mean, do you knew what you look like?" She said, "I can see enough of my own body to -- and -- yes... "Yurt," I said, "here's the female we thought we might find. Take over." Yurt's eyes were fastened on the girl. "What -- do I do now?" she whispered worriedly. "I'm afraid that's something only a Zen would know," I told i her, smiling inside my helmet. "I'm not a Zen. Yurt is." She turned to him. "You will tell me?" "If it becomes necessary." He moved closer to her, not even looking back to talk to me. "Give us some time to get acquainted, will you, Dave? And you might leave some supplies and a bubble at the camp when you move on, just to make things pleasanter." By this time he had reached the female. They were as still as space, not a sound, not a motion. I wanted to hang around, but I knew how I'd feel if a Zen, say, wouldn't go away if I were the last man alive and had just met the last woman. I moved my torch off them and headed back for the Lucky Pierre. We all had a drink to the saving of a great race that might have become extinct. Ed Reiss, though, had to do some worrying before he could down his drink. "What if they don't like each other?" lie asked anxiously. "They don't have much choice," Captain Feldman said, always the reatist. "Why do homely women fight for jobs on the most isolated space outReiss grinned. "That's right They look awful good after a year or two in space." "Make that twentyfive by Zen standards or three thousand by ours," said Joe Hargraves, "and I'll bet they look beautiful to each other." We decided to drop our investigation of Vesta for the time being, and come back to it after the honeymoon.  Six months later, when we returned, there were twelve hundred Zen on Vesta! Captain Feldman was a realist but he was also a deeply moral man. He went to Yurt and said, "It's indecent! Couldn't the two of you control yourselves at least a little? Twelve hundred kids!" "We were rather surprised ourselves," Yurt said complacently. "But this seems to be how Zen reproduce. Can you have only half a child?" Naturally, Feld got the authorities to quarantine Vesta. Good God, the Zen could push us clear out of the Solar System in a couple of generations! I don't think they would, but you can't take such chances, can you?  posts?" f Wait for Weight Sometimes the best incentive is to tell a man that success wit! throw him out of a job! ton's alarm clock sounded, it brought madness. It was very clever; it not only rang chimes of amazing penetrating power, it turned on all the lights in the room, closed the window, and started his bath water running. But this morning it was not appreciated. In fact, as Dr. Brinton gpt o#t of bed, he Mlently called down evil on the technician who had built it for him. The "off" switch was on the wall farthest away from his bed and was controlled by a hairtrigger combination dial that couldn't be operated by anyone not fully awake. Dr. Brinton fumbled for a while, then gave up and started looking for his bedroom slippers. They had apparently crawled away during the night. He padded into his bathroom barefoot. He was about to see what a hot bath would do for what he had already diaghosed as a histamine headache when the alarm clock, having decided that anyone who could sleep through ten minutes of chiming was unwakable, stopped chiming, turned off the lights, opened the window, and let all the water out. Dr. Brinton was walking back toward the light switch when he tripped on his bedroom slippers and fell back into bed. No further invitation was necessary; he slept till noon. Dr. Brinton unmistakably had a hangover. Considering the party he had attended the night before, it was not surprising. Actually, it was remarkable that he had been able to get out of bed at all. During the fourteen years that the Rocket Research Station had been in operation, the parties that were held every time another test flight resulted in failure had grown from a few drinks in somebody's room to a mammoth bustup that left the whole place partially paralyzed for days afterward. First as chief chemist, and later as director of the Station, Dr. Brinton had attended every onof the scores of parties durinevery one of the fourteen years It spoke well for his endurance to say that he was back at his office at one o'clock. Some people didn't make it until the next day. H IS secretary, who didn't drink, was one of very few who were at work on time. She walked into his office and stood in front of his desk, tapping her foot. Her facial expression showed that she thought people who got drunk at parties were amoral, degenerate, and entirely unfit for administrative positions. Dr. Brinton, who had been, mentally comparing the relative merits of Prussic acid and hanging as pain relievers, sat up straight to prove that he was moral, alert, and ready for any problem that might . come up. His secretary sniffed to indicate that she didn't believe him. Dr. Brinton dropped his eyes to admit that maybe he wasn't at his best at the moment, but it was only a temporary condition, and by tomorrow he would be okay j "In two minutes you'll wish you were dead," said his secre tary. "Read this." ; She handed him a letter. He  read it and his knuckles cracked as he gripped the arms of his ' chair. Senator MacNeill coming to : visit here? ' he cried in alarm. Though his voice was squeaky, he was surprised to hear it at all.  Get me a line to Washington, our top priority, Audrey at the Naval Department." The calj was put through. "Commander Audrey? This is Brinton at the Station, Joe MacNeill is coming to visit us. Can you head him off?... "Yes, I know, but he's on one of his economy drives. We just did a test yesterday and if he inspects this place now, we won't get enough money to build a pinball machine. Delay him a week, anyway... "Well, try. I'll arrange a tour for him as best I can, but if he doesn't come. I'll be much happier. Let me know as soon as possible. Fine. Good-by." He scribbled a memo and carried it out .to his secretary. "Copy of this to all department heads, right away. Phone the commissary and have them get all the decorations taken down in the dining room. Tell them to lay in some steaks for tomorrow. Phone Harry Sparling in Public Relations -- alert him V.V.I.P. tomorrow, extra-special tour including all our movies on the subject. I'm going over to the Fuels Department." Dr. Ferber, head of Fuels, met Dr. Brinton at the door of his lab, "I just got your memo," he said. "Is that budget-butcher really coming down here?" Dr. Brinton nodded his head gently. "I'm afraid so. I came over to see what kind of show we can put on for him." "We have some samples to rus on the indoor motors. There are a couple of loads left for the acceleration sled. And I suppose if we work all night we could get a sergeant-major ready, but if he's on an economy drive that might bq too elaborate. Just a view of everybody pouring stuff from one test-tube to another might be best." "Do the samples and run the sled once," Dr. Brinton said. "That should provide enough fire and noise. The rest of it will have to be fast talk. I think I'll go home to bed." " himself a methodical man. He had bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast. He always took a vitamin pill with his afternoon coffee. And he was used to exactly eight hours sleep. It was this last habit that caused him to wake up that night at midnight; he had gone to bed at four that afternoon and habit is a hard thing to break. At first he thought it was morning, but a glance at his watch hanging on its illuminated pedestal corrected that # # He grunted, rolled over, and waited for sleep to overtake him again. Nothing happened. He turned and Stared at the ceiling for a while. Still nothing; he had not felt so wide awake for a long time. Then he was struck by one of the flashes of inspiration that had made him famous -- he would raid the refrigerator. D ownstairs, he found that his son Eric had anticipated him by two minutes, and was busy setting the table with cheese, pickles, ice cream, peanut butter, and everything else necessary to keep a sixteen-year-old boy operating at peak efficiency. A pile of books on the table indicated that he had just finished his homework. Dr. Brinton was pleased that his son had worked so late, but the choice of food made him shudder. He rummaged In the refrigerator himself, found a cold pork chop that Eric had somehow overlooked, and bore it to the table in triumph. "We were dealt a blow today," he said, between mouthfuls. "Oh?" said Eric, on guard in case it was about his school work. "Received word that Senator MacNeill is coming here tomorrow. No, today -- it's after midnight." "Oh " It was an "dh" of relief. A senator couldn't be nearly as troublesome as a teacher. "Don't say 'oh' like that. He'll probably close the Station tight and we'll all be out of work. You don't realize, it, but money has been getting harder and harder to cadge for this place. We're practically running only the Fuels department now." He got up, threw the bone from his pork chop into a garbage pail, washed his hands at the sink, and sat down again. He continued, "Wait till he finds out about those four reactor rockets that are cooling off on the Moon, waiting for us to get there. I can hear him scream, full of precious equipment, to say nothing of invaluable fissionable material!' And then this place gets shut down." Eric had a suggestion. "Give him the old routine about how we have to get men to the Moon or the Russians will do it first and use all the equipment we've sent there without even thanking us." "Umm," said his father, considering, He shook his head finally. "His answer to that is why send good money after bad. No. I just hope he feels better after a steak dinner. Either that or the wings fall " off his plane." He smiled wistfully at the thought. "Oh, well," he said, "let's go to bed."  They went their separate ways, but only Eric went to bed. His father entered the library, sat down, got his pipe going, and began to reread How to Win Friends . and Influence People. ' t'T'HE next day saw Dr. Brinton contemplate suicide, homicide, and voting Republican, though riot necessarily in that order. The Senator had viewed their most inspiring onward-andupward movies and merely asked how much they cost to make. He had eaten a huge steak at the commissary, and then inspected the garbage cans for waste. His visits to various departments had been marred by his lack of interest in anything except the number of men employed by each and their average salaries, though he did comment that they all looked hung-over. In the Fuels Department, he had walked out on the demonstrations, interrupting some actual experiments that were going on outside the test room. Dr. Brinton was now riding in the back of a jeep, explaining to the Senator that nuclear rockets were not too efficient, and the shielding necessary to make them safe for men weighed more than their payload. The Senator noted down the word "inefficient." A loudspeaker on a pole a little farther down the road interrupted the explanation. "Twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty five, " it shouted. "Five-nine, eighteen. Five-nine, eighteen. Seventythree, ten-eight." It began to repeat the message. The driver, who had slowed while they listened to the message, turned the jeep around and sped them back the other way "What in Heaven's name was that?" asked the Senator, who was busy hanging on. "Twentyfive means emergency," shouted Dr. Brinton. "Five and nine is fire and explosion in the Fuels Department, which is eighteen. Seventy-three is my call number and teneight means they want me to get there in a hurry." For the first time, the Senator looked impressed. Then he grew angry again when his hat blew off and the driver wouldn't stop to go back and get it. The jeep took a shortcut across the concrete fence, and left tire marks in the grass in front of the Fuels Department. Dr. Brinton jumped out and ran into the building, leaving the Senator to argue with the driver about going back for the hat. The lab outside the test room was dusty and littered with broken glass. Two technicians were receiving first aid for minor cuts, but everyone else seemed to be in an almost holiday mood. Dr. Ferber saw Dr. Brinton standing iri the doorway and came over to him immediately, fourth time when he noticed that "That telephone operator gets his feet were getting wet. His too excited." he said. "There's kick must have jammed some reno fire, and I think it was an implosion, not an explosion. Wrecked our new pressure catalyzer. Harrison's gone to hospital and the two you see are hurt, but none of it's very serious. I suppose Butcher Boy is going to put this down in his little notebook, too." "If you are referring to me," said the Senator's voice behind them, "I most certainly am going to make a note of it. And I suggest you both start advertising for other jobs." in a pleasant little fantasy in which he had cut Senator MacNeill up into twenty-eight pieces, placed them in aluminum cans, and made them radioactive in the Station pile. He was smiling at the newsreel cameras, about to fire the first Senator-powered spaceship in the history of mankind, when his alarm clock, which had maliciously been waiting for just such an opportunity, spoiled his dream by waking him up. That was how the next day started. It continued in the same vein when, in a fit of petulance, he strode into his clothes closet and kicked the alarm control box, barefoot. He was working the combination dial for the third or lays in the control box; the bath water was overflowing. Since the box was sealed to prevent him from fooling with it, he had had to prevent a flood by limping downstairs and pulling the master switch. With no electricity, his breakfast consisted of cold fruit juice, cold cereal, and cold milk. When he got to his office, he ordered a pot of coffee and made out a requisition for a pipe wrench. If it ever happened again, he was going to shut the water off in-r stead. His secretary came in with the coffee and poured him a cup. "I have some letters for you to sign," she said brightly, to cheer him up. Dr. Brinton drank his coffee. "Our new filing system is working very well," she added, pouring him another cup. The doctor's face relaxed a little, but it was because the snow bank in his stomach was beginning to melt. His secretary played her trump. "And somebody from the Fuels Department phoned and said something was passing the yellow line and might make the blue." She was never sure afterward whether Dr. Brinton had gone around his desk, or over it. She had blinked and by the time her eyes were open again, he was gone. Dr. Brinton found a crowd in the indoor test lab, chuckling over the line being drawn by a differential analyzer. He elbowed his way to the front, looked himself, and began a little dance of impatience. The . analyzer was connected with linkages to the test stand where a tiny rocket motor was thrusting out a hot blue pencil of flame. The results from the analyzer were plotted as range capability against time on a piece of graph paper which had four curved colored lines overprinted on it. The curved lines were marked in succession: "Earth," "Moon," "Moon" and "Earth." If the first Earth line, colored red, was passed, the fuel under test could power a rocket to leave Earth, carrying men with it. If the yellow line -- the first Moon line -- was reached, the rocket could theoretically land men on the Moon. Several rockets, carrying dummy' loads, had already tried and failed: their fuels, though the best available, barely reached the yellow line when under test. The blue -- second -- Moon line was calculated to indicate an escape from, the Moon without refueling, and the last line, in green, was. a theoretical powered landing back on Earth. The pen of the analyzer had already passed the blue line and was more than halfway to the green in the catalyzer after the explosion yesterday!" Dr. Ferber shouted to Dr. Brinton over the roar from the little engine. "It looked as if it would bum, so I tested it. Jackpot!" "What is it?" asked Dr. Brinton. "Supposed to be an artificial base for a perfume!" The last word seemed louder because the test rocket just then ran out of fuel and grew silent. The tracing of the pen stopped a fraction short of the green line. Dr. Ferber continued in his normal voice while he busied himself with the connections of the engine: "We didn't have anything to do to put on a show for MacNeill yesterday, so I told the lads to carry on with experiments of their own. It was Harrison who made this stuff. He was cut by flying glass and landed in the hospital. I phoned there this morning and found the damn fool doctor took his appendix out. Said he figured he might as well while Harrison was in there. He's still under the anesthetic and we won't be able to ask him anything for several hours." f  "Doesn't matter,' said Dr. Brinton. "We know it works; we have to find out why it works. Got any left? We'll analyze it." The next few hours saw Dr. Brinton rapidly become a bitter and disillusioned man. When a qualitative test informed them that the presence of nitrogen meant they were going to have to use an even longer and more laborious process than the ordinary one, he uttered a few sentences that made a couple of nearby German exchange students wonder if perhaps they hadn't a portion missed in the English language learning. When he found that he had forgotten his pipe at home, and the analysis required too much of their attention to allow him to go home and get it, he quoted a paragraph or two that earned him the undivided attention of everyone in the lab. But when he took the results ever to a calculator and worked them out to carbon # he had barely started the prologue when frustration overtook him and he subsided, speechless. He was at a loss to say or do anything except mumble that # was impossible. took the paper with the results from him. Everyone in the lab watched while he checked the calculations patiently. A delegation minutely checked the apparatus the two doctors had used; it was faultless. One person even went so far as to cast a suspicious look at the big automatic microbalance standing on its pedestal in the center of the room. He weighed a piece of paper, wrote his name on it in pencil and reweighed it. The difference was satisfactory. For a few moments, they all just stood and looked at each other. Then the whole lot of them set to work. A junior technician headed for the spectrograph, came back in three minutes with a freshly developed spectral photograph and a puzzled look. He spent some time comparing both of them with the illustrations in a manual entitled Structural Formulae as Indicated by Spectral Groupings. The two German exchange students made a few tries at finding the class of compound. They soon were deep in a technical discussion in their own language, the only recognizable words being "biuret," "dumkopf," and "damn." A senior research chemist tried crystalizing some and invented an entirely new swear word. With four helpers, Dr. Brinton and Dr. Ferber redid the combustion analysis in slightly less than twice the tirqe it would have #S taken only one of them. Of course they were assured of accuracy; each ' step was checked at least twice by everyone. The result was still carbon #I . # . Dr. Brinton escaped the ensuing mental paralysis since he had already been through the experience once. He went over and began to study the figures written in on the side of the spectral photograph. Out of little more than idle curiosity,he compared the ratios of the rough quantitative estimate found spectrographically with the more accurate but impossible answer of the combustion micro-analysis. While he was doing the necessary figuring, he listened sympathetically to the technician. The young man was complaining bitterly about things in general, and chemistry in particular. Chemical reference books came in for a special roasting, because; "either that lousy book is incomplete, or this structural formula is out of this world." That did it. Brinton got out a scratch pad and drew a little diagram. Then he went to talk to Dr. Ferber. "Would it be possible that Harrison started with a multiringed phenol?" he asked. Dr. Ferber nodded. Dr. Brinton showed him the drawing. "Does that remind you of any  figure?" Dr. Ferber looked. There was a pause, then his eyes lit up. "Of course," he said. "Since formulae are usually drawn in one plane, I doubt if anyone ever noticed that before. And when it comes under stress by compression, it's only natural that it should fold." He paused and looked at the calendar, "Four weeks?" he asked. "That'll do fine," said Dr. Brinton. "I'll arrange the details. You look after the fuel. Harrison can give us the details of this one, but there are probably any number of fuels based on this principal. Some will be even more efficient, too." He excused himself, went to a phone, and asked for a Washington number. The call was answered, "Hello, Senator MacNeill?" he said. "How would you like to be guest of honor at a party ?" ring of reporters over to the head table where Senator MacNeill was speaking, and speaking, and speaking. "He's on his home state," Dr, Brinton said. "About half an hour to go. Now, gentlemen, you were asking about the new fuel. You all received press handouts containing the information. You will probably receive copies of the Senator's speech. And the broadcast from our first men on the Moon went out over several networks hours ago. It seems to me that you have enough for several stories." One of the reporters asked bewilderedly, "What is a tesseract? I read the handout twice and I still don't understand." "A mathematician would be better qualified to explain," said Dr. Brinton, "but I'll try. A tesseract is a fourth dimensional cube. A line has one dimension, a square has two, a cube has three, and a tesseract has four. A cube can be unfolded into six squares, and a tesseract unfolds to eight cubes. The new fuel had a molecular structure resembling an unfolded tesseract. When pressure is applied,' it folds up into a tesseract so that it takes up less room and relieves the pressure. "The practical application is that we can get eight pounds of it into a one pound can. The other seven pounds of it are riding around in the fourth dimension. As soon as it starts to burn, the structure is destroyed, so that it comes back out of the fourth dimension. Several people have assured me that it can't work. They're probably right, excej :. that it does. Oh, I'll be back h. a minute." He went over to another group and spoke to one of its members. The man addressed nodded his head and left. Dr. Brinton returned. "If there are no more questions, I suggest we do some serious drinking. I am now out of a job and I want to celebrate." relay clicked and the alarm clock went into its usual daily routine with the chimes, window, lights, and bath water. Dr. Brinton woke up enough to reach out a lazy arm and flip a newly installed toggle switch beside his bed. Everything returned to normal. The light and the chimes both faded away, the window reopened, and a soft gurgling came from the bathroom. A slight gurgling also came from the bed, where Dr. Brinton, with a happy little smile on his face, had gone peacefully back to sleep, perfectly satisfied that he had worked himself into unemployment by finding the fuel that would power spaceships to -- and from -- any part of the Solar System. to Information TW World of # letter to the future and I helped to write it -- more precisely, I talked part of it. For it was (and is) half am hour of recording tape which, when finished, was broadcast and is now safely buried in a place where it will not deteriorate, m be taken out and rebroadeast a century from now. Naturally, i't is reminiscent of the Westinghouse Time Capsule which was buried on the World's Fair Grounds a dozen years ago, to enlighten the inhabitants of this planet # years from now about the doings of the year #. During the same year, a Time Vault was started in North Carolina, intended to preserve for posterity the books which we consider most important in our day. This idea of writing letters to the future is not exactly new. For centuries, European master builders enclosed documents, contemporary coin of the realm and an occasional chronicle in the foundation stones of buildings, and American builders took over the tradition. Trouble is that in those cases where the contents were recovered and examined, it turned out that the documents told things which we already knew from other sources, and that the coins were well known to numismatists and often not even rare. Still, one wishes that this habit had been established much earlier, say in Greek or at least Roman times. But the only Roman example of such a Time Vault was not an intentional one. About half a century ago, the learned world was startled and excited by the m, '  i announcement that a rich Ro man's private library had been found in Pompeii. It had beenburied when Mt. Vesuvius let go in what is probably the most publicized and romanticized volcanic outbreak of all recorded history. The rolls of parchment were charred, of course. They had dried out in the interim and were so fragile that they could not be handled in any usual way. Still, methods of transporting them, unrolling them and finally reading them were worked out. And then it turned out that the original owner of that library had been a fanatic disciple of a small and completely unimportant philosophical school. After all that labor, it was a sad disappointment. T HE so-called Document Cave not far from the Dead Sea in Palestine, which was found recently, promises better results. At the very least, our knowledge of the history of the books of the Old Testament is going to be improved by that discovery And that Document Cave might even have been meant as a kind of Time Vault, for the documents seem to have been hidden there s from contemporaries for the fu ture, although the men who did it may have had only three or ; four generations in mind -- not sixty or more, as it turned out to be. TN a somewhat larger sense, every book written is a small time capsule. For while a book is primarily addressed to contemporaries, it is expected or hoped to last into the future. I can get first-hand information about the knowledge and beliefs of Gains Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) directly from the shelves of my own library. It isn't an original, but it is serviceable. Even originals last a long time, though. If I want to find out what the famous Municipal Physician of Zurich, Dr. Konrad Gesner, thought and knew about fossils in #, my library will serve, too. And this book was not preserved through the centuries in some Time Vault; it survived through the interest and care of generations of people. The most interesting contents of any Time Capsule would be those portions in which its originators tell the future finders their guesses about the civilization, habits, etc., of the finders. But, again, it need not be a specific Time Capsule; it can be simply a book which has been preserved. As has been pointed out in, Camp, we are just beginning to reap that kind of harvest from early examples of science fiction. If we are somewhat flabbergasted at the lack of vision of daring of those writers, and more than a little astounded by the nonsense which we were supposed to indulge in -- not that we don't indulge in different kinds of nonsense of our own designing -- it should merely prove to us that we should be more daring in some respects and more careful in others. Now let's see if I can apply that advice myself. As I told my audience of a hundred years hence, I think -- lots of printed paper to the contrary notwithstanding -- that cities will not be obsolete. Nor do I think that the wheeled vehicle will be obsolete, having been replaced by the helicopter, or by some other device yet to be 'in vented. Nor do I believe that the day of the printed word has almost reached its end. Having a little more space here in the magazine than I had time on the air, I would like to elaborate a bit on these statements. With and without reference to atomic bombs, we have been informed that "cities are abnormal." Now, cities had originally the purpose of being trading centers. Later, they also became manufacturing centers. And you can't say that those who settled inr the cities did it because of necessity. Then, as now, the majority did it from choice. It is obviously more convenient to be in the center of things than ss in the outskirts. And having lived in the country, I know from personal experience that it ,is not convenient. If you get there during a heat wave, it may look that way, and the little walk of # feet for a newspaper or' some smokes or even your mail, down a winding road, may be pleasant. But try it on a cold winter day, when the road is icy and has eight .inches of loose snow on top. Try to take care of unexpected guests, unless your basement is a private grocery store. Try to enjoy (or even be attentive) in a movie if you know that the last bus home comes by just five minutes after the show; especially, if you also know that just the  last bus is often early because the driver wants to go home, too. In spite of what moralists and real estate agents tell us, the country home is convenient only if you also have a city home. And since people have the deplorable habit of looking after their own convenience, cities are neither abnormal nor obsolescent. A nother item i brought up in my broadcast was transportation. Will people ride in from sixty miles away in their own helicopters? Well, some may, of course, but that isn't the proper answer. The helicopter, once it gets to be easier to fly than the current M production models, will have a great deal of advantages over the ground car. But it still needs parking space at the other end and the traffic problems of the modern city are not caused by the cars which, move, but by those which are parked. The solution is obviously a type of transpoitation which does not park, but keeps moving. Just imagine how easy it would be to get around in New York if all the transportation available were public transportation -- subways, elevateds, busses and taxicabs. The remedy for the future might not be up to the engineer only, but to the lawmakers as well. This is not the place to go into the design of a city free of traffic problems. I just want to add that, while it has been proved that a large city can be supplied by air lift, it is neither a cheap nor a logical method of doing it. Finally: I do think that the people a hundred years from now will still buy newspapers and read books. I also believe that these books and papers will be printed -- presumably with a more lavish use of color than nowadays -- on paper. I don't believe in the "electronic device" which replaces the newspaper, nor in the newspaper printed photographically on a piece of plastic the size of a special delivery stamp. All you have to do is insert it in the projector and the letters will appear on the ceiling of your bedroom. You can read it while having breakfast in bed. Damned inconvenient is all I have to say. I'll go along with the tape recorder attached to the telephone which will take messages -- "the deadline is really today, but since you were kept busy with two television shows and three conferences, it can be extended until Saturday" -- while you are away. I go along with that because there you have an electrical device, your telephone, to begin with, and it can be adapted for playback. But the printed word is superior to any recording device or projector in several respects, each important. You can read it in any position you happen to prefer at the moment. You need no special reconverting tool. No mattet how simple, small, light and fool and tinkerproof that device is postulated to be, you can forget or mislay it. And, like anything else, it can run down or go out of order. Also, you can easily add a note or a reminder to the printed word. Furthermore, you can file a piece of newspaper. Of course you can file pieces #f sound tape, too, or plastic micro slides, but then you need your reconverting device to find out what's on it. Nor do I think that books will be printed on anything which we would not call paper, even though it may technically be something else. In quite a number of stories, the spaceship pilot looks up the characteristics of a planet in an almanac "printed on indestructible metal foil" and this practice, for all one can tell, was not restricted to the spaceman's almanac in those stories. Let's see now. My own Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel has very nearly reached the bulk where it becomes a little hard to handle. I just measured and weighed it. The dimensions are #V# x # x IV# inches and its papier is about as thin as it can be and still be decent. In any event, I don't think that metal foil could be any thinner than that paper and still take inscriptions of some kind on both sides. Hence the dimensions would be the same as those of the paper book. But while the paper book, with binding, weighs two lbs., the metal book, if aluminum, would weigh nine pounds! I'm all in favor of a non-yellowing, non-cracking permanent paper for books. But no metal foil, please, unless you can come up with a useful lithium alloy of a specific gravity of # or less. Well, there you have a discourse on things that won't happen. Go back to the stories now end see what might. I F you'll be patient for about # seconds. I'll get around to the theme. Those # seconds have to be used to lay the groundwork. The subject of today's lecture about surprise developments is a bird. The name: Turacu s (or Corythaix ) leucotis. Common name: touraco. Habitat: southern Africa. Date of discovery: not known (at least not to me), but it must have been early, for the bird is not rare. Coloration: back, bluish-black; tail, ditto, with some green in it; leading edge of wings, bluish-black (minor individual changes) ; neck and breast, bright green; whitish markings on neck and head; yellow and red crest; main wing feathers, bright red. Now the story. In #, a French explorer by the name of Jules Verreaux was camping in southern Africa. It was during the rainy season, the sky was gray with clouds, water dripped from every branch and every leaf, and the soil was almost too soggy to walk on. It was decidedly the kind of weather for staying indoors, but Jules Verreaux did not. He made short trips of a few # hours' duration at a time, partly because he wanted to see how the wild animals were faring during the rainy season, partly because he was no doubt bored with the unchanging meteorology. On one of his short trips, he came across a flock of birds which were sitting around in the bushes, dripping with rain water and looking unhappy. When Verreaux approached them, they tried to fly away, but they were too wet to take off. Verreaux tried to catch one with his bare hands and finally succeeded, but the wet bird struggled free. Verreaux then saw that his hand was dripping with red liquid. His first thought was that he had been pecked by the struggling bird, even though he had not felt any pain and could not find the wound. Upon closer observation, he noticed that the liquid, while red, did not look like blood. It did not seem plausible, but he could only conclude that the color had come off the red feathers of the wet bird. And after his return to France, he reported that there was a bird in South Africa afflicted with a plumage that was not color-fast in the rain. This, of course, was ridiculous Color may wash out of cheap manmade fabrics, but not , bird feathers, most especially not while said feathers were still attached to a live bird. Just to prove how ridiculous these claims were, stuffed touracos were taken from the shelves in museums, a red feather or two clipped off and put in a glass of water. The result was as expected : the feathers stayed red and the water stayed clear. So that was that. Verreaux must have made a mistake of some kind. Maybe he had been fooled by the juice of accidentally squeezed red berries. to pass until somebody came forward to defend Verreaux. Gambia was a British colony by then, with a military garrison, and the garrison had a medical staff. One of the members of that staff was a Dr. Hinde, who kept touracos in a large open air enclosure. And Dr. Hinde reported, in #, that his touracos, after a bath, stained old newspapers red when they 'sat down on them to dry. Not only did they stain the papers, Dr. Hinde could actually observe the loss of color and wrote that "the birds nearly washed themselves white in water left for them to drink." Since this was not a chance observation under difficult circumstances, but something that had been seen at leisure and repeatedly, the fact itself could not longer be doubted. An English chemist by the name of A. H. Church decided to go after the mystery and came up with a detailed research report that was published in the Proceedings .of the Royal Society in #. Church had first washed the feathers with alcohol to remove any oil or fat that might cling to them. Then he tested the pigment of the feathers for solubility and quickly found that it dissolved in soap water. He tried ammonia and caustic soda -- they both worked. Proceeding with caustic soda, he, accumulated a large quantity of reddish solution and then precipitated the pigment by means of hydrochloric acid. The precipitate was then washed once more with alcohol (in which it did not dissolve) to remove impurities that might'be present. The result of all this was a flaky powder of crimson color which Church then analyzed. It turned out to be a copper compound; its name became touracine. And touracine, as had been demonstrated under strict laboratory conditions, was easily soluble in any alkaline liquid. Church's report was most satisfactory to a chemist, but the naturalists were not happy with ft. All right, you could dissolve touracine with the aid of soap or alkali in the laboratory. But it did not rain soap suds in southern Africa. It had also been demonstrated that neither rain water, nor distilled water, nor tap water dissolved any touracine. Yet Verreaux' touracos had dripped red in the rain. And Dr. Hinde's touracos had washed most of the touracine out of their red feathers with their drinking water. Zoological handbooks fisted tfee observed facts without offering any explanation. Apparently there wasn't any. Long after Church's careful chemical work, in about #, a German biologist, Dr. logo Krumbiegel, decided that the purpose of a anystery it it solution. He read everything that had been reported bout the touracc and the behajpinr of the copper compound in Ite red leathers, and he thought that he found a hint in Church's report. It said that "ordinary soap, or ammonia or caustic soda or any other alkali "tested" made the touracine dissolve. Of all the things mentioned, only ammonir was a possibility in the forest and plains of southern Africa. I does occur in Nature in trace: The problem was whether trace were enough. systematically, beginning wit distilled water. No result. Taj water was next, then boiling wa ter, both distilled and tap. Negative. He weighed some feather' down with wire and immersethem in water for a week. Still negative. Then ammonia, household strength of a few parts in m hundred. Positive, as expected. Then ammonia diluted to two parts in a thousand. Still positive -- strongly positive, in fact. Dr. Krumbiegel thinned the solution some more. When he reached  "concentration" of one part cf water, he stopped. The result was still positive and a one-to-two"trace." Ammonia, then, was the answer. Verreaux's touracos had been in the underbrush close to the ground, and rain water which drips from branch to branch is sure to pick up some ammonia. Not much -- an expert estimate said "around one part in a million" -- but  Dr. Krumbiegel had just demonstrated to himself that enough. And Dr. Hinde's touracos probably had had several parts in a thousand in their drinking water, for caged birds don't worry where their droppings land. They don't know, naturally, that their droppings contain ammonia. Once a teuraco has lost the touracine of its red feathers, it stays discolored until the next moulting period, when brightly colored new feathers begin to sprout. As far as the body chemistry of the bird is concerned, the whole is a way of ridding the body of a copper compound which would be poisonous to the organism if it were not changed into the non-toxic touracine. Normally it would be lost along with the feathers during the next moult. But because it happens to be soluble, it can be lost before the next moult. That purely incidental fact created the zoological riddle that ended up in making the touraco famous as the only bird that isn't color-fast. pj  string around the equator (one yard added) appeared, I have been asked what value for "pi" should be used to calculate the distance precisely. Well, that depends, of course, on the degree of precision you want. The customary value of # is perfectly fine for all but astronomical calculations. To fourteen places the value is: #. #JI # and that is good enough to obtain the circumference of a circle the size of the equator to one-millionth of an inch. T HE way to remember pi to fourteen places is to memorize the sentence : "How I want  A drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics." It not only works, it probably is by a famous author, Sir James Jeans. At least others have credited him with it, though he himself never claimed authorship. Pi has been calculated to several hundred decimal places. In #, the British mathematician figures for # places, but it later turned out that he made a mistake at about the #th place. Nowadays, electronic calculators could extend it as far as one would want them to, but there is really no practical reason for doing it.  -- Wil.LY I lit # Is it possible that there are dark or black planets ip our solar system and, if so, how would astronomers detect suc(i a planet? Mildred Moore Hightstown, N. J. It is quite certain that there Is no black planet of a size worth mentioning in our solar system, at least not inside the orbit of Uranus. If a planet really absorbed all the light from the Sun that falls upon it, it would still betray its presence by its gravitational action. The movements of the other known planets near to it would be different. In fact, for a long time both Neptune and Pluto, although not invisible, played the role of such "black planets." They were detected by their inflnenee on the orbits of the planets near diem. On January #, #, a apamme astronomer saw an explosion mm Mars. Do you know the cause t it? Judy Johns # Canfield ftee JM. Youngstown #, Ohio ' Natu ratty, I don't tmmm the # . gates. If that had beew m#canic eruption, it should have I lasted for some time. But.it did : not. A number of astronomers, M prompted by the report from  Japan, looked for it and failed I to see it. It is probable, therefore, that what the Japanese astronomer saw was the impact of a large meteorite. Since Mars is close to the Asteroid Belt, it should be hit by considerable chunks of matter much more frequently than Earth's. In the last case of that kind on Earth (Eastern Siberia in # #), an enormous column of smoke and dust formed immediately after impact, but it lasted less than twelve hours. The "explosion" on Mars was probably the same thing. Could you explain to me why exactly does a Mdbius Strip have only one side? Secondly, are there sue h things a a Klein's bottle and a T ess eract? If there are, . wha t are they? Danny Cohen # Magnolia Avenue Larch mont, N. Y, (Virtually the same letter was received from Gregory Christy of # Mill St., Porterville, Calif,, and from John J. Wolschleger, U.S.N., Quonset Point, Rhode Island.) First: yes, there Is such a thing as a Klein's Bottle. I am not sure whether I should also say that there is a Tesseract, for a Klein's Bottle can actually be built, while a Tesseract can only be represented. But let's begin with the Mobius Strip and a mention of the branch of mathematics to which it belongs, namely analysis situ, or topology, also called rubber sheet geometry, in descending line of dignity. Take a sheet of paper and make a few crosses at random, on both sides. Those crosses you can connect by straight or wavy lines without going over an edge are obviously on the same side of the paper. If you paste a strip of paper together so that it forms a cylinder, you lnd that your crosses are either on the outside of the cylinder or on the inside. But if, in pasting, you give it the Mobius halftwist, you'll fjmd that you can connect them all. Therefore, it has only one side. For your amusement, draw the centerline and then cut carefully along the centerline. The result will puzzle you no end. Similarly, Klein's Bottle, though obviously a solid body, has only one side. If you want' to make one, use something that ean he shaped easily, for example self-setting clay. (No pattern on flat paper is possible. ) While the Strip and the Bottle actually exist, the Tesseract is merely a concept, arrived at by the following reasoning: here we have a one-dimensional line a. Four such lines form a two-dimensional square,  # , which is bounded by four lines, and has # vertices (corners). Four such squares .form the three-dimensional cube,  # , which is bounded by six squares, has # edges and # vertices. The four-dimensional cube, called Hypercube or Tesseract, would be mathematically described as a # and we can slate that it should be bounded by # cubes, have # vertices, # faces and # edges. But since it is supposed to be four-dimensional, we obviously can't make one. " must take exception to your statement in the June # issue finding intelligent life on other planets are excellent. You have no doubt read du Douy's Human Destiny; it contains a calculation that the probability of even a simple protein molecule's formation on an Earthlike planet -- that is this one -- is approx, one in # #I . Let's say that he has made  slight error on the order of jqo That would stilt leave the probability oi a protein molecule's appearance on Earth about tne in # #I . For the sake of simplicity in calculation, assume that Earthlike planets; the chance of finding life would still beonly one in # #I , a rather insignificant probability. To assume thtit life will appear on a planet, or even one per cent of the planets, where conditions are similar to those on Earth, is therefore not quite reasonable. W. E. Miller # Norris Avenue Haworth, N. J. I have read Human Destiny and I count the time spent with that book as one of the more or less lost weekends of my life -- loss of time being the most evident result in the battle between reason and mysticism. If the probability of the formation of a protein molecule were one in # #I as du Nouy decreed, or merely one in # #I as you find more likely, the conclusion would be inevitable that it didn't happen at all. Not even on Earth, Those botanical parks, zoological gardens, aquaria and mass meetings are just illusions. Seriously, du Nouy's calculation is completely shattered by the existence of plant life on Mars, something that is generally accepted as a result f observational evidence. Speaking of Earth alone, it could be asserted that the geraniums and the oysters, the canary birds and their keepers are not illusions; in short, that the fantastically low probability of the formation of a protein molecule came true in this particular case which, therefore, had to be unique. But if you find that it came true on two planets in the same solar system, you either have to stretch credulity beyond its admittedly high elastic limit, or else you conclude that the original assertion must be wrong. It could be wong in two ways; either because it simply happens not to be true because the probability of tlie formation of protein molecules under proper conditions is much higher; or else it could be wrong because there is an additional factor which operates to invalidate the low probability. That additional factor was pointed out more than half a century ago by the great Swedish astrophysicist Svante Arrhenius. Arrhenius pointed out that the size of the spores of most bacteria is such that for them the light pressure of a nearby star is stronger than  tlie gravitation of the same star. Hence they could drift through space in opposition to gravitational fields. Arrhenius also pointed out that such spores could stand free space conditions and that, just under these conditions, their life processes would be slowed down to such an extent that they could stay alive for thousands of years. In that case, life had to originate only once to spread through the whole Galaxy in time -- and who could say that it had originated on Earth? Nor does it seem likely that the probability of protein molecule formation is actually so low. It has been shown in the laboratory that under the influence of ultra-violet light from the Sun, a number of very interesting compounds will form from nothing more exotic than water, carbon dioxide and ammonia. Some of these compounds are sugars. Others might very well be building blocks of proteins, for they came in various stages of complexity. Actually, these substances are quickly destroyed by microorganisms. But if there are no micro-organisms yet, these simpler substances may well continue building up -- into micro-organisms. Since I place du Nouy's conclusions with those that "proved" the steamship, airplane and rocket couldn't work, I still maintain that the probability of life on other planets is high.  :? Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a fall line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock f scarce out-of-print books in tills field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open Monday Thru Saturdays #:# A.M. io #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. New York #, New York  Phone GRcsmercy #-#) # Y: OU disappoint me," the class superintendent said with some feeling. "I have a personal as well as a professional dislike of wastefully run farms, and you seem to have furnished a prime example. He paused briefly, Watching in silence as the spheroidal forcing beds drifted smoothly about their central radiator. Of course, I would be much more sympatheK At  Only a solar system can offer farming land, of course! , , . but a clumsy or reckless farmer can turn any green planet into a dust bowfP tic with you if your own ill-advised actions were not so largely responsible for this situation," He checked his young listener's halfuttered protest. "Oh, I realize that youngsters have to learn, and experiment is the only source of knowledge: but why not use the results of other people's experiments? This sort of thing has happened before, I think you'll find." "I didn't know." The answer was sullen despite the grudging respect. "How was I supposed to?" "Did you get an education or not?" There was some heat in the query, "I can't imagine what the primary teachers do these days. Even though you are so young, I understood that you had some qualifications and even a bit of promise in agriculture. That's why I thought you could be trusted without supervision for a few years. Am I to assume that you became dissatisfied with the yield of this farm?" ' "Of course. Why else study agriculture?" "Until you can answer that for yourself, I won't try to. Tell me in detail what you did. Did you try to step up the output of the central radiator?" "What do you think I am?" The younger being's indignation flared abruptly. The other remained calm and exhibited faint traces of amusement, permitting the feeling to show in his answer rather more plainly than was stricly tactful. "Don't boil your crust off. You might not be able to spare it next time you go in to harvest. People still do try the stunt I mentioned, you know. Every now and then it works for someone after a fashion, so the rest feel it's still worth trying. If it wasn't that, just what did you do? You're missing a culture unit, if I remember this solar system correctly." T HE student took a moment to find just the right words. "One of the lots seemed to be practically ideal. When it first solidified, it was just far enough from the radiator and just large enough to retain a thin surface film of light elements; and it responded beautifully to culturing with water-base growths. On the colder ones, by the way, I had good luck with ammonia cultures." "Quite possible, in that sort of bed. I noticed a couple of them were bare, though. Was that another result of this experiment of yours?" "Indirectly, yes." The young farmer looked a trifle apprehensive. "There was another plot, a good deal farther out and colder than my ideal one. But it was too # t it for ammonia growths and too all to furnish the pressure they seem to need -- at least the ones I'm familiar with." The addition " was made hastily.  "I judged that it should have a good supply of food elements, cooling where it did; and since it wasn't doing well where it was, I thought it would be a good idea to move it farther in." The listener's manner lost some of its amused aspect. "Just how did you decide to go about that? The energy involved would have demanded several times the mass of your own body, even with total conversion -- which I can't believe you've mastered." "I don't suppose I have. It seemed to me that the unit itself could furnish the mass without serious loss, though." "I see." The comment was grim. "Go on." "Well, I went in and set up a conversion reaction. I touched it off as well as I could on the forward side of the unit, though that was a little hard to arrange -- the thing was spinning like mad, as most of them do. Maybe ; that was the reason I let a little too much mass get involved, or j maybe the globe wasn't as massive as I had thought." You mean you were uncertain of its mass? Is something Wrong with your perceptive faculties as well as your judgment? Just how old are you, anyway?" "Fifteen." The sullenness, which had began to depart from the youngster's tone as he warmed to his narrative, returned in full strength. The questioner noted it and realized that he was not being as tactfut as he might be; but under the circumstances he felt entitled to a little emotion. "Fifteen years on what scale?" "Local -- this furnace, around the mass-center of' the system." "Hmph. Continue." "Most of the sphere was volatilized, and most of what wasn't was blown completely out of the system's gravitational influence. The rest -- well, it's still circling the furnace in quite a wide variety of orbits but it's not much good to anyone." nearly useless outermost unit swung beneath the two speakers, then on to the far side of the glowing sphere of gas that held it with unbreakable fingers of gravity. The supervisor was not actually boiling -- that would be difficult even for a body composed largely of methane, oxygen, and similar solids when it is at a temperatui of about half a degree absolute -- but his temper was simmering. After a moment he spoke again. "Let me get this straight. You sent a slave with a message that your farm had gotten out of hand and that you would like advice. Am I to understand that you spent so much time ruining one f your units that some of the others developed culture variations whose taste didn't appeal to you? I'm afraid my sympathy grows rapidly less." "It's not that I don't like the stuff ; it's that I can't eat it." The youngster must have been angry, too; there was no other imaginable reason why he should have made a statement at once so true in fact and so misleading in implication. The superintendent, swallowing the implication whole, permitted the remains of his temper to evaporate completely. "You can't eat it? That is really too bad. Pardon me while I go to sample some of this repulsive chemical -- or perhaps you would like to come along and show me what you have been eating. There is hardly enough drift in this area to support you, particularly with a decentsized crew of slaves. What have you been feeding them? Perhaps you ought to let someone else take over this farm and get yourself a research job out in one of the drift clouds, soaking up your nourishment from a haze of free atoms ten parsecs across for a few years. You youngsters!" "I've been eatingfrom the ammonia units. So have the slaves." "Vei;x well, then I shall look over your water culture, which by elimination must be the one that's been giving trouble. On second thought, you needn't come along. It's the third plot from the furnace. I can find my way." He moved off abruptly, not even waiting for an answer. And the student, with no slightest shadow of an excuse, simply because of his own childish loss of temper, let him go without a word of warning. It might, of course, have made no difference if he had spoken. The superintendent was annoyed, too, and might understandably have chosen to ignore his junior. His attention, as he permitted himself to fall toward the central radiator, was divided between his own irritation and the condition of the various plots. Only gradually did the latter feeling predominate. H E had to admit the outermost was too cold for much chemical action except actual life processes which were too slow to be useful. The fact that the youngster he had left above had  induced anything at all to grow there was at least one point to his credit. It swung past only once while he was falling by its orbit. Though his gravitygiven speed was slow, its  speed was iftlower -- and 'it had farther to go. Pr The next  two . he had noted readier were bare of useful  growths. He remembered now t that the student had admitted kthis fact to be an indirect result of his experiment. The superinf tendent could not see the coni' rieetion. The plots themselves, on l closer inspection, seemed physi cally undamaged, and the student j;' himself could not possibly have p eaten them both clean, no matter  what his hunger. Of course, a ; crowd of slaves might -- but he  'was not going to accuse anybody  yet of letting slaves get that far ' out from under control. They  Were not even allowed to apf proach a culture plot in person, . being fed from its produce by Itheir master. The plots themselves were ' r large bodies, though not the largl est in the system, with their solid  bulks veiled under mile after kmile of hydrogen compounds. The superintendent's senses probed in  vain for the enormously complex  compounds that were the preI'ferred food of his kind. Several jlmuch smaller bodies ware gravijr-tating about each of these plots, tjbut none was large enough to p'hold the light elements in the Eliquid or gaseous form necessary tfor food culture. , The next unit had. the merit of interesting appearance, if nothpng else. In addition to the more or less standard quota of bodies circling it, it possessed a regular halo of minute particles traveling in a solidly interwoven maze of orbits just outside the atmosphere. On the surface, and even in the atmosphere itself, its cultures were flourishing. The superintendent paused to take a sample, and had to admit that once again the youngster had not done too badly. His temper cooling, he rode the farm plot most of the way around its orbit, taking an occasional taste and growing calmer by the moment. By the time he left the limits of his atmosphere, he was almost his normal self. This, however, did not last long enough even for him to get rid of the globe's orbital speed, to 'say nothing of resuming his drop toward the Sun. He had slanted some distance inward and fallen well behind the ringed sphere when his attention was drawn to another, much smaller object well to one side of his line of flight. Physically, there was little remarkable about it. It was lCss massive even than his own body,, though a short period of observation disclosed that it was in an orbit about the central furnace, just as the farm plots were. Sometimes its outline was clear, at others it blurred oddly. Its brightness flickered in an apparently meaningless pattern. Merely on its physical description, there was nothing remarkable about it, but it seized and held the superintendent's puzzled attention. Off his planned course though it was, he swung toward it, wondering. The student had mentioned no friends or coworkers -- Gradually, details grew clearer and the superintendent's feelings grew grimmer. He did not like to believe what he saw, but the evidence was crowding in. "Help! Please help! Master!" T HE bubble of horror burst, and one of anger grew in its place. Not one of his own kind, injured or dying and an object of terror and revulsion thereby; Mt this thing was a slave. A slave, moreover, well within the limits of the farm, where it had no business to be without supervision; a slave who dared call on him for help! "What are you doing here?" The superintendent sent the quesI tion crackling along a tight beam  toward the apparently helpless  creature. "Did you enter this re' gion without orders?" "No, Master. I was... ordered," "By whom? What happened to you? Speak more clearly!" j "By -- i cannot, Master. Help j me!" The irregular flickering of the slave's auroral halo brightj ened fitfully with the effort of ! radiating speech. Unsympathetic as the superintendent normally was to such bemgs, he realized that help must be given if he were to learn anything. Conquering a distinct feeling of repugnance, he moved up beside the slave to investigate its injuries. He expected, naturally, to find the visible results of a thorough ion-lashing, that being the principal occupational hazard faced by the slaves; but what he actually saw almost made him forget his anger. The unfortunate creature's outer crust was pitted -- dotted and cratered with a pattern of circular holes which resembled nothing the superintendent had ever encountered. He knew the long, shallow scars of an ionlashing and the broad, smoothed areas which showed on the crust of one of his people when close exposure to a sun had boiled away portions of his mass. These marks, however, looked almost as though the slave had been exposed to a pelting by granules of Solid matter! A ridiculous thought, of course. The stupidest slave could detect and avoid the occasional bits of rock and metal which were encountered in the interstellar void. After all, they had the same sensory equipment and physical powers as the masters. An unprejudiced judge might even have said they were of the same species as the masters. Whatever had caused the creature's injury, there was little that could be done for it. Grudgingly, inspired far more by curiosity than by sympathy, the superintendent did that little, supplying hydrocarbons and other organic matter lately skimmed from the ringed planet. Food, however, was not enough. Bits of extraneous metal were imbedded in its body, altering the precise pattern of charged metal nodes that spelled life to these beings. Some of its own field nodes had apparently been chipped or blown away, and others were discharged. The creature's body was only a fraction of its normal size -- the regular reserve of "food" compounds that ordinarily made up so much of even a slave's bulk had long since been consumed or had evaporated. There was no doubt that it was dying. But there was some chance that it might gain strength enough to impart information if it were fed. It was -- sparingly, of course. "No sense wasting food on a slave that's about to die," the superintendent explained without brutality. "Certainly not. Master," the slave agreed without resentment.   the superintendent repeated. The slave was in no condition to' be coherent; but a lifetime of conditioning, brought some order to its agony-dazed mind, and it answered. "I was ordered to the inner plots -- to harvest." The wordsymbols came haltingly, but with sufficient clarity to be unmistakable, shocking as their implication was. So the student had trusted slaves near a food supply! Perhaps that accounted for the two stripped planets. "You went to harvest when a young fool like this orders it?" "He was a master, and he gave the order. Many of us went; many of us have been going for years -- and seldom returning. We did not wish it, Master, but he ordered it. What could we do?" "You could have asked the first superintendent who came here whether it was better to disobey a Prime Order or a young master." "You are the first to come. Master, as far as I know. And the young master said we were not to speak of this order to anyone. It is only because you command me to speak that I do so now -- that and the fact that there is little more that he coqld do to me, anyway." The overseer ignored the pointed closing sentence. "You say many of you have been ordered to do this, but few have returned from the errand? What happened to them? What happened to you?" "They die. I did not know how; now I suppose it must be --  this way." There was a pause, and the supervisor was moved to sarcasm. "I suppose they are struck by meteoric particles, as you seem to have been. Do slaves absorb personal characteristics such as stupidity from their masters? Could you not dodge the meteors?" "No, not all of them. The region near the central furnace has more of such matter than any other place I have ever seen. Some pieces are iron, some are of other matter; but they cannot be avoided. They strike too hard. They cannot be absorbed in normal fashion, but simply boil off one's body material into space. The shock is so tremendous that I, at least, could do nothing toward recovering the material until it had dissipated beyond hope of salvage. That is the reason so much of my mass is gone; it was not merely starvation. "Some of the other slaves did better than I -- as I said, some of them have survived -- but others did much worse. They would dive in toward the furnace, and their bodies would come falling back out in just about the shape I am." "And still he sends his slaves fin to harvest?"  "Yes. We did not do too badly, P actually, on the largest plots ; but  then he got interested in the others farther in. After all, they're hotter. He ventured in himself I almost to the orbit of the plot that was destroyed -- did you l know that? -- but came out very quickly and sent us on all such f journeys thereafter. "We -- or, rather, those who pre; ceded me -- cleaned off the next inner plot, the fourth from the central furnace, fairly well, though the loss of slaves was high. Then he wanted to start on the third. I was one of the first to work on this project. ; "I did not expect to live, of course, after what I had heard ' from the others; but the order ' came, and I let myself fall toward i the sun. My orbit passed close to jj. the greatest of the plots, which l the master has been harvesting ; himself, and I hoped to strengthen  myself with a little food from it  as I passed."  certain the slave felt of his if own imminent death, as well as the state of demoralization into I which the student's activities had Ipermitted his servitors to fall. I "But I did not dare take any pood when the time came," the pslave went on feebly. "As I passed through the region where the deli AlO I stroyed plot had been, drifting particles began to grow more numerous. At first there would be an occasional bit of stone or iron, which I could dodge easily. Then they came in twos and threes, and sometimes I would have to change an escape curve in midmaneuver. Then they came in dozens and clusters, and at last I could avoid them no longer. I was struck several times in rapid succession. "For a moment I almost turned back -- I had never dreamed that anything could feel like that -- and then I remembered the order and went on. And I was struck again, and again, and each time the order faded in my mind. I reached the orbit of the fourth planet, crossed it -- and turned out again. It didn't seem to help; I Was still being pelted. For a time I must have almost lost orientation; but at last I won out to a place near the orbit of the giant planet. That was where I remembered the order again. "I had never disobeyed a master before, and I didn't know what to do, or say, or think. I'd start back toward the Sun, and remember what had happened, and come back out. Then I'd remember the master, and head in again. I didn't dare go out in the cold where he would be waiting. I didn't dare dive back into that storm of rock and metal from the old fifth planet. But I had to do something. I couldn't float by the orbit of the Giant Planet forever. He would find me there sooner or later, and that would be worse than if I had come out to him. I had to think,"  That word struck the superintendent like a shock. The very idea of a slave's thinking -- making a decision for himself concerning an action he was to perform -- was repugnant to a member of the dominant race. They preferred to think of their slaves as mindless creatures relying on their masters for the necessities of existence -- a comforting fiction that had been maintained for so many rotations of the Galaxy that its originators had come to believe it themselves. He had suspected that this particular slave must be an unusual specimen in many ways; now he was sure of it. It was this that kept him silent while the creature paused, visibly collected its waning energies, and resumed the tale. 'T found what I thought was the answer at last. Since the tremendous number of particles must have come from the farm that had been blown up, it seemed likely that their orbits would be more or less controlled by that and would have at least a slight family resemblance. If I were to take up a powered, nearly elliptical path through that region, matching velocities wit) most of them instead of falling in a practically parabolic orbr across their path, I should b able to avoid the worst of the blows." ture shuddered and paused mustering strength to continue "I had about made up my mind to try this when I detected ar other slave inbound," it went or "and it occurred to me that tw would be better than one. If on died, at least the other coul learn from what had happened, caught' him easily since he we; in free fall and explained the low any suggestion, not thinkir. for himself at all, so he wer with me. "For a while it worked. We ge t inside the orbit of the fourth planet without being hit more than a few times each -- that we? harder on me than on him, be cause I'd already been hurt quite a lot on the first trip. Into that level, a great deal of the wreckage is formed of quite large particles, anyway; it's easy to see and avoid. Farther in, though, where most of the heavy stuff either never went or was cleared out by collision with the inner revolutions, there was much more extremely fine stuff. It actually seems to increase in concentration near the sun. Maybe radiation pressure has something to do with it. "Anyway, we began to take a bad beating again. It was a little better than before. My idea must have had something to it, but it still wasn't good. The other slave wasn't used to it, but it still wasn't good. The other slave wasn't used to it, either, and lost control of himself just as I had. We were almost to the third farm plot then, but he must have gone completely blind from pain. He apparently never sensed the food so near by -- that plot is incredibly ridh. "He went blundering squarely into another, useless plot that accompanies the third one in its orbit; an object too small to hold culture material in that temperature range, though still several hundred times the diameter of my body or his. He rammed it hard, andthe energy involved in matching velocities was more than enough to volatilize his mass completely. The object was pretty well scarred with impact craters, but he made one of the neatest. "I was close enough then to the third planet to start harvesting -- at least, I Would have been under normal circumstances. I tried, but couldn't concentrate on H Aid one courseof action long enough. The bombardment was endless. There are simply no words to describe what it was like. I was not twenty of its own diameters from, the most amazingly rich farm plot I have ever seen, and was not able to touch a bit of it! "It had been so long since it was harvested that substances completely strange to me had developed in its surface layers. There were carbohydrates, of course, and light-element oxides and carbonates which anyone would expect; but there were proteins more fantastically complex than anyone could well imagine. Their emanations nearly drove me wild. They must have been building up and breaking down at incredible speed at that temperature -- I had quite an atmosphere out, as a result of boiling off surface matter to use up incoming radiant energy -- and they had evolved t-o ari unheardof degree. And I couldn't get a taste! "I could sense them, though, and in spite of the pain of the meteor bombardment, I stayed near the planet, vacillating as I had done before, for a couple of hundred of its trips around the Sun. That may seem like a short time, but it was long enough to ruin my body past saving. It was only when my senses began to fail that I was able to turn away from it and fight my way out this far. I just managed to get info a stable orbit that would keep me clear of that hellish halo of planet fragments, and every now and then I succeeded in mustering enough energy to call for help, but I knew it was useless. Even had you come much sooner, it would still have been too late for me. "I live to warn you, however. Do not go within the orbit ot the old fifth planet! Do not even look within it, for if you sense what lies on that unharvested third world, you will be drawn to your doom as surely as I was ordered to mine!" T HE slave fell silent, and the superintendent pondered its tale as they drifted on about the Sun. He Could not, offhand, think of any adequate punishment for the student whose recklessness had brought about this state of affairs. The mere cruelty of ordering endless crowds of slaves to nearly certain death did not affect him particularly; but the waste of it did, very much. To him the thought of hundreds of lifeless bodies drifting endlessly about the Sun, boiling off a little more of their masses with each perihelion passage until nothing was left but a loose collection of high melting-point pebbles, was a painful picture of economic loss. !hc fact that the best farm plot in the system had apparently become unattainable was also to be considered, and the driving of at least one slave to the extreme of 'thinking for himself was not to be ignored... Of course, everything should be (checked before confronting the ! student with such charges. Only the last, after all, could be considered as yet a matter of objective knowledge, t The overseer moved abruptly pway from the slave -- Sunward. Fhe dying creature, seeing him depart, called once more for aid, jand was silenced instantly and permanently by a slashing beam Of ions. For an instant the overseer regretted the impulsive act -- ot from gratitude for the warning, to which he attached little height and which was part of a slave s duty, but simply because t was impulsive rather than reaioned. But then he reflected that he creature could probably not Save told much more anyway, ven if it had survived until his feturn. He was in no hurry. He let the ravity of the central furnace faw him in to the orbit of the bant Planet, his senses covering lace ahead where death was rented to lurk. At this range, all seemed inScuous. He watched the inner planets circling rapidly in their paths -- even the giant one made most of a revolution during his fall -- and noted that the slave had spoken the truth about a companion body to the third planet. But space seemed otherwise empty. He did not completely abandon caution, however. What had proven fatal to slaves might be inconvenient or even dangerous to a master... orbit and began a more minute examination of that suspicious volume of space. The small bodies were there, all right. Thousands of them, even though he was not trying to detect anything less than a twentieth of his own diameter. They did show a rather vague preference for the orbit of the old fifth planet, as the slave had said. The greater number circled between the present fourth and fifth orbits, at any rate. There seemed no reason why he could not match velocities well enough to keep out of trouble. Why, chance alone could be trusted to protect him from collision with a few thousand asteroids, when they were scattered through something like ten-tothe twenty fourth power cubic miles of space! Still, there was little wisdom in going into possible danger withf owt a very sound reason. It would be well to judge from his present position if such reason existed. His finer senses could easily opseparated him from the farthest point of the third planet's orbit. So, holding his position, he focused his attention on the elusive farm plot in question. Being so close to the central furnace, it revolved rapidly. He faced somewhat the same problem in examining it that a man would have trying to recognize a friend on a merry-go-round -- assuming that the friend were spinning in his seat like a top at the same time. It took the superintendent only a few revolutions of the body to adjust to this situation, however, and as details registered more and more clearly on his consciousness, he began to admit grudgingly that the slave had not exaggerated. The plot was fabulous! Substances for which he had no name abounded, impressing themselves on the analytical sense that was his equivalent of both taste and smell. Strange as they were, he could tell easily that; they were foods -- packed with available energy and carrying fascinating taste potentialities, which simply never had a chance to evolve on the regularly harvested worlds of the Galaxy. The overseer wondered whether it might not be worth while to let other plots run wild for a few years. His principal vice, by the standards of his people, was gluttony; but the most ascetic of his species would have been tempted uncontrollably by that planet. He almost regretted the few tons of food he 'had taken on from the ringed planet -- though he had, he told himself quickly, sacrificed much of that in helping the slave and would lose still more if he decided actually to penetrate into the high-temperature zones near the Sun. Huge as his mass was, his normal temperature was so low that life processes went on at an incredibly slow pace. To him, 'a chemical reaction requiring only a few millennia to go to completion was like a dynamite explosion. A few pounds of organic compounds would feed his miles thick bulk . for many human lifetimes of high activity. In short, the slave had been quite right. tionalizing his appetite as he went, the superintendent permitted himself to drift into the asteroid zone. With only the organized to a completely unheard-of; degree. They were growths qf a type and complexity smallest part of . his attention, he assumed a parabolic, free-fall orfebit in the general plane of the system, with its perihelion point approximately tangent to the orbit of the third planet. At this ? distance from the Sun, the difference between parabolic and circular velocities was not too great to permit him to detect Seven the tiniest particles in time to avoid them. That fact, of course, changed as he fell sun# ward. Perhaps he had been counting on a will power naturally superior to that of the slave who had  warned him. If so, he had forgotten the effects of an equally superior imagination. The pull of the third planet was correspondingly stronger and, watching the spinning globe, he was jarred out of an almost hypnotic trance by the first collision. It awakened him to the fact that his natural superiority to the slave race might not be sufficient to keep lim out of serious trouble. The space around him -- he was low well inside the orbit of the burth planet -- was literally irowded with grain-of-dust meteors, each, as he had seen on the slave's crust, able to blast out a 'rater many times its own volume ft a living body. Individually, :hey were insignificant; collecivfely, they were deadly. : His attention abruptly wrenchd back to immediate problems of existence, the superintendent started to check his fall and veeronce more toward the safe, frozen emptiness of interstellar space. But the spell of the gourmet V paradise he had been watching was not that easily thrown off. For long moments, while the: planet circled its primary once and again, he hung poised, withgluttony and physical anguish alternately gaining the upper handin a struggle for possession of his will. Probably he would have lost, alone; but his student did have a conscience. "Sir!" The voice came faintly but clearly to his mind. "Don't stay! You mustn't! I should never have let you come -- but I was angry! I know I was a fool; I should have told you everything!" "I learned. It was my own fault." The superintendent found it curiously difficult to speak. "I came of my own free will and I still think that plot is worth investigation." "No! It's not your own free will -- no will could remain free after seeing what that planet has to offer, I knew it and expected you to die -- but I couldn't go through with it. Come, and quickly. I will help." r T , HE student was in an orbit almost identical with that of the superintendent, though still #  r a good deal farther out. Perhaps it was the act of looking at him, which took his attention momentarily from the alluring object below, that made the older being waver. Whatever it was, the student perceived the break and profited by it. "Don't even look at it again, sir. Look at me, and follow -- or if you'd rather not look at me, look at that!" He indicated the direction plainly, and the dazed listener looked almost involuntarily. The thing he saw was recognizable enough. It consisted of a small nucleus which his senses automatically analyzed. It consisted of methane and other hydrocarbons, some free oxygen, a few other light-element com Mint Mil till pounds, and had nuggets of heavier elements scattered through it like raisins in a plum pudding. Around it for thousands of miles there extended a tenuous halo of the more volatile of its constituent compounds. The thing was moving away from the Sun in an elliptical orbit, showing no sign of intelligent control. A portion of its gaseous envelope was driven on ahead by the pressure of sunlight from below. It was a dead slave, but it could as easily have been a dead master. A' dead slave was nothing; but the thing that had killed it could do the fame to him. It was the first time, in his incredibly long life that the personal possibility of death had struck home to him; and probably nothing less than that fear could have saved his life. With the student close beside, he followed the weirdly glowing corpse out to the farthest point of its orbit; and as it started to fall back into the halo of death girdling that harmless-looking star, he pressed on out into the friendly darkness. Perhaps some day that third planet would be harvested; but it would not be by one of his kind -- not, at least, until that guarding haze had been swept up by the planets that drifted through its protecting veil. I T was not a very good group Wright reflected. That always seemed to be the case. When he had luck with observing weather, he had no one around to appreciate the things that could be seen. He cast a regretful glance toward the dome of the sixty-inch telescope, where a fellow candidate was taking another plate of his series, and wondered whether there were not some better way than part-time instructing to pay the expenses of a doctorate program. Still, the night was good. Most of the time in the latitude -- "Mr. Wright! Is that a cloud or the Aurora?" "If you will stop to consider the present position of the Sun below the horizon," he answered indirectly, "you will discover that the patch of light you are indicating is directly opposite that point. It lies along the path of the Earth's shadow, though, of course, well beyond it. It is called the Gegenschein and, like the Zodiacal Light, is not too commonly visible at this latitude. We did see the Light some time ago, if you remember, oil an evening when we started observing earlier. Actually, the Gegenschein is a continuation of the luminous band we call the Zodiacal Light. The latter can sometimes be traced all the way around the sky to the point we are now watching." "Wtiat .causes them?" "The most reasonable assumption is that they are light reflected from small, solid particles -- meteors. Apparently a eloud of such matter extends outward for some distance past the Earth's orbit, though just how far, it is hard to say. It grows fainter with distance from the Sun, as would be expected, except for the patch we call the Gegenscheiri." "Why the exception?" "I think one of you can answer that." "Would it be for the same reason that the full Moon is so much more than twice as bright as either quarter? Simply because the particles are rough, and appear dark in most positions because of the shadows of irregularities on their own surfaces -- shadows which disappear when the light is behind the observer?" "I think you will agree that that would account for it," Wright said. "Evidently the meteors are there, are large compared to wavelengths of visible light, and form a definite part of the Solar System, I believe it wa once estimated that if the space inside the Earth's orbit meter in diameter and five miles apart, they would reflect enough light to account for what we are observing. They might, of course. be smaller and more numerous. Only that amount of reflecting surface is necessary." "You had me worried," another voice broke in. "I'd been hearing for years that there would be little reason to fear j collision with meteors when we finally get a rocket out of the ' atmosphere. For a moment, I thought a cloud such as you were working up to would riddle anything that got into space. One pinhead every five miles isn't so bad, though." "There is a fairly goodchance of collision, I would say," returned Wright, "but just what damage particles of that size would do, I am not sure. It seems rather likely that they would be volatilized by impact. How the j hull of a rocket would react, we i will have to find out by experience. I wouldn't mind taking the  risk myself. I think we can sum  up the greatest possibilities by ' saying that the meteoric content j of the Solar System has and will ; have nothing but nuisance value I to the human race, whether or J not we ever leave our own plan et." I A streak of white fire arced  silently across the sky, putting j a fitting period to the subject. ; Wright wondered whether it J would appear on his friend's photographic plate. If Tree, Spare That Woodman The single thing to fear was fear -- ghastly, walking fearl Heckscher stood just inside the door to Cappy's oneroom cabin, where she'd happened to be when her husband discovered the old man's body, ' Her nearest neighbor -- old Cappy -- dead. After all his wirepulling to get into the First Group, and his slaving to make a farm on this alien planet, dead in bed! Naomi's mind circled frantically, contrasting her happy anticipations with this shocking actuality. She'd come to call on a friend, she reminded herself, a beloved friend -- round, whitehaired, rosycheeked; lonely because he'd recently becomea widower. To her little boy, Cappy was a combination Grandpa and Santa Claus; to herself, a sort of newly met Old Beau. Her mouth had been set for a sip of his home brew, her eyes had pictured the delight he'd take in and give to her little boy. She'd walked over with son and husband, expecting nothing more shocking than an ostentatiously Stolen kiss. She'd found a corpse. And to have let Cappy die alone, In this strange world... She and Ted could at least have been with him, if they'd known. But they'd been laughing and singing in their own cabin only a mile away, celebrating Richard's fifth birthday. She'd been annoyed when Cappy failed to show up with the present he'd promised Richard. Annoyed -- while the old man pulled a blanket over his head, turned his round face to the wall, and died. Watching compassionately, Naomi was suddenly struck by the matter-of-fact way Ted examined the body. Ted wasn't surprised. I "Why did you tell Richard to I stay outside, just now?" she demanded. "How did you know what we'd find here? And why didn't you tell me, so I could keep Richard at home?" , She saw Ted start, scalded by the splash of her self-directed anger, saw him try to convert his wince into a shrug. "You insisted on coming," he reminded her gently. "I couldn't have kept you home without -- without saying too much, worrying you -- with the Earth-ship still a year away. Besides, I didn't know for sure, till we saw the tree-things around the cabin." The tree-things. The trees-that were-not. Gnarled blue trunk half-hidden by yellow leaf-needks stretching twenty feet into the sky. Something like the hoary a mountain hemlocks she and Ted had been forever photographing on their Sierra honeymoon, . seven life-long years ago. Three of those tree-things had sjvayed over Cappy's spring for a far longer time than Man had occupied this dreadful plane Until just now... The three of them had topped the rise that hid Cappy's farm from their own. Richard was running ahead like a happily inquisitive puppy. Suddenly he'd stopped, pointing with a finger she distinctly recalled as needing thorough soapy scrubbing. "Look, Mommie!" he'd said, "Gappy' s trees have moved. They're around the cabin, now." He'd been interested, not surprised. In the past year, Mazda had become Richard's home ; only Earth could surprise him. But, Ted, come to think of it, had seemed withdrawn, his face a careful blank. And she? "Very pretty," she'd said, and stuffed the fag-end of fear back into the jammed, untidy mental pigeon-hole she used for all unpleasant thoughts. "Don't run too far ahead, dear." But now she had to know what Ted knew. "Tell me!" she said. "These tree-things -- " "There' ve been other deaths! How many?" "Sixteen. But I didn't want to tell you. Orders were to leave women and children home when we had that last Meeting, jemember." "What did they say at the Meeting? Out with it, Ted!" "That -- that the tree-things think!" "But that's ridiculous!" "Well, unfortunately, no. Look, I'm not trying to tell you that terrestrial trees think, too, nor even that they have a nervous system. They don't. But -- well, on Earth, if you've ever touched a lighted match to the leaf of a sensitive plant like the 'mimosa, say -- and I have -- you've been struck by the speed with which other leaves close up and droop. I mean, sure, we know that the leaves droop because certain cells exude water and nearby leaves feel the heat of the match. But the others don't, yet they droop, too. Nobody knows how it works... "But that's just defensive!" "Sure. But that's just on Earth!" "All right, dear. I won't argue any more. But I still don't understand. Go on about the Meeting." "Well, they said these treethings both create and respond to the patterned electrical impulses of the mind. It's something like the way a doctor creates fantasies by applying a mild electric current to the right places on a patient's brain. In the year we've been here, the trees -- or some of them -- have learned to read from and transmit to our minds. The range, they say, is around fifty feet. But you have to be receptive -- " "Receptive?" "Fearful. That's the condition. So I didn't want to tell you because you must not let yourself become afraid, Naomi, We're clearing frees from the land, in certain areas. And it's their planet, after all. Fear is their weapon and fear can kill!" "You still -- all you men -- "No. But where s Richard? should have let us women know! Naomi's eyes swept past Ted, What do you think we are? Beencompassing the cabin. No sides, I don't really believe you. Richard! He'd been left outHow can fear kill?" side... "Haven't you ever heard of a Glass tinkled and crashed as savage who gets in bad with his she flung back the cabin door. witch-doctor and is killed by magic? The savage is convinced, having seen or heard of other cases, that he can be killed. The witch-doctor sees to it he's told he will be killed. And sometimes the savage actually dies -- " "From poison, I've always thought." "The poison of fear. The physical changes that accompany fear, magnified beyond belief by belief itself." "But how in the world could all this have affected Gappy? He wasn't a savage. And he was elderly, Ted, A bad heart, maybe. A stroke. Anything." "He passed his pre-flight physical only a year ago. And -- well, he lived all alone. He was careful not to let you see it, but I know he worried about these three trees on his place. And I know he got back from the Meeting in a worried state of mind. Then, obviously, the trees moved -- grouped themselves around his cabin within easy range. But don't be afraid of them, Naomi. So long as you're not, they can't hurt you. They're not bothering us now." "Richard! Richard!" Her child was not in sight. Nor within earshot, it seemed. "Richard Heckscher ! Where are you?" Sanity returned with the conventional primness. And it brought her answer. "Here I am, Mommie! Lookut!" He was in a tree! He was fifteen feet off the ground, high inthe branches of a tree-thing, swaying -- For an instant, dread flowed through Naomi as if in her bloodstream and something was cutting off her breath. Then, as the hands over mouth and throat withdrew, she saw they were Ted's. She let him drag her into the cabin and close the broken door. "Better not scare Richard," he said quietly, shoving her gently into a chair. "He might fall." Dumbly she caught her breath-, waiting for the bawling out she'd earned. But Ted said, "Richard keeps us safe. So long as we fear for him, and not ourselves -- " That was easy to do. Outside, she heard a piping call: "Look at me now, Mommie!" "Showing off !" she gasped. In a flashing vision, Richard was half boy, half vulture, flapping to the ground with a broken wing. "Here,"said Ted, picking up a notebook that had been on the table. "Here's Cappy's present, A homemade picture book. Bait." "Let me use it!" she said. "Richard may have seen I was scared just now." Outside again, under the tree, she called, "Here's Cappy's present, Richard. He's gone away and left it for you." Would he notice how her voice had gone up half an octave, become flat and shrill? "I'm coming down," Richard said. "Let me down, Tree." He seemed to be struggling. The branches were cagelike. He was caught! Naomi's struggle was with her voice. "How did you ever get up there?" she called. "The tree let me up, Mommie," Richard explained solemnly, "but he won't let me down!" He whimpered a little. He must not become frightened! "You tell that tree you've got to come right down this instant!" she ordered. She leaned against the cabin for support. Ted came out and slipped his arm around her. "Break off a few leaves, Richard," he suggested. "That'll show your tree who's boss!" Standing close against her husband, Naomi tried to stop shaking. But she lacked firm support, for Ted shook, too. His advice to Richard was sound, though. What had been a trap became, through grudging movement of the branches, a ladder. Richard climbed down, scolding at the tre like an angry squirrel. ceeded in shutting her mind. But when her little boy slid down the final bit of trunk and came for his present, Naomi broke. Like a startled animal, she thrust the book into his hands, picked him up and ran. Her mind was a jelly, red and quaking. She stopped momentarily after running fifty yards. "Burn the trees!" she screamed over her shoulder. "Burn the cabin! Burn it all!" She ran on, Ted's answering shouts beyond her comprehension. Fatigue halted her. At the top of the rise between Cappy's farm and their own, pain and dizziness began flowing over her in waves. She set Richard down on the mauve soil and collapsed beside him. When she sat up, Richard squatted just out of reach, watching curiously. She made an effort at casualness: "Let's see what Daddy's doing back there." "He's doing just what you said to, Mommie!" Richard answered indignantly. Her men were standing together, Naomi realized. She laughed. After a moment, Richard joined her. Then he looked for his book, found it a few paces away, and brought it to her. "Read to me, Mommie." "At home," she said. Activity at Cappy's interested her now. Wisps of smoke were licking around the trees. A tongue of flame lapped at one while she watched. Branches writhed. The trees were too slow-moving to escape... But where was Ted? What had she exposed him to, with her hysterical orders? She held her breath till he moved within sight, standing quietly by a pile of salvaged tools. Behind him the cabin began to smoke. Ted wasn't afraid, then. He understood what he faced. And Richard wasn't afraid, either, because he didn't understand. But she? Surreptitiously Naomi pinched her hip till it felt black and blue. That was for being such a fool. She must not be afraid! "Daddy seems to be staying there," she said. "Let's wait for him at home, Richard." "Are you going to make Daddy burn our tree? She jumped as if stung. Then, consciously womanlike, she sought relief in talk. "What do you think we should do, dear?" "Oh, I like the tree, Mommie. It's cool under there. And the tree plays wtih me." "How, Richard?" "If I'm pilot, he's navigator. Or ship, maybe. But he's so dumb, Mommie ! I always have to tell him everything. Doesn't know what a fairy is, or Goldilocks, or anything!" He clutched his book affectionately, rubbing his face on it. "Hurry up, Mommie. It'll be bedtime before you ever read to me!" She touched his head briefly. "You can look at the book while I fix your supper."  tures -- 'crudely crayoned cartoons, really -- she had to fill in the story they illustrated. She told it while Richard ate: how the intrepid Spaceman gallantly used his ray gun against the villainous Martians to aid the greenhaired Princess. Richard spooned up the thrills with his mush, gazing fascinated at Cappy's colorful and fantastic pictures, propped before him on the table. Had T ed been home, the scene might almost have been blissful. It might have been... if their #wn tree hadn't reminded her of Cappy's. Still, she'll almost managed to stuff her fear back into that mental pigeon-hole before their own tree. It was unbelievable, but she'd been glancing out the window every few minutes, so she saw it start. Their own tree began to walk. Down the hill it came -- right there ! -- framed in the window behind Richard's head, moving slowly but inexorably on a root system that writhed along the surface. Like some ancient sculpture ofSerpents Supporting the Tree of Life. Except that it brought death... "Are you sick, Mommie?" No, not sick. Just something the matter with her throat, preventing a quick answer, leaving no way to keep Richard from turning to look out the window. "I think our tree is coming to play with me, Mommie." No, no! Not Richard! "Remember how you used to say that abodt Cappy? When he was really coming to see your daddy?" "But Daddy isn't home!" "He'll get here, dear. Now eat your supper." A lot to ask of an excited little boy. And the tree was his friend, it seemed. Cappy's tree had even followed the child's orders Richard might intercede -- No! Expose him to such danger? How could she think of it? "Had enough to eat, dear? Wash your hands and face at the pump, and you can stay out and play till Daddy gets home. I -- I want --  -- I' may have to see your friend, the tree, by myself..." "But you haven't finished my story !" "I will when Daddy gets home. And if I'm not here,, you tell Daddy to do it." "Where are you going, Mom raie?" "I might see Cappy, dear. Now go and wash, please!" "Sure, Mommie. Don't cry." Accept his kiss, even if it is from a mouth rimmed with supper. And don't rub it off till he's gone out, you damned fool. You frightened fool. You shaking, sweating, terror-stricken fool. Who's he going to kiss when you're not here? The tree has stopped. Our little tree is having its supper. How nice. Sucking sustenance direct from soil with aid of sun and air in true plant fashion -- but exhausting our mineral resources. How wise of Ted to make you go to those lectures! You wouldn't want to die in ignorance, would you?) The lecture -- come on, let's go back to the lecture! Let's free our soil from every tree or we'll not hold the joint in fee. No, not joint. A vulgarism, teacher would say. Methinks the times are out of joint. Aroint thee, tree! Now a pinch. Pinch yourself hard in the same old place so it'll hurt real bad. Then straighten your face and go stick your head out the window. Your son is talking -- your son, your sun. Can your son be eclipsed by a tree? A matter of special spatial relationships, and the space is shrinking, friend. The tree is only a few hundred feet from the house. It has finished its little supper and is now running around. Like Richard. With Richard! Congenial, what? Smile, stupid. Your son speaks. Answer him. "What, dear?" "I see Daddy! He just came over the hill. He's running! Can I go meet him, Mommie?" "No, dear. It's too far." Too far. Far too far. "Did you say something to me, Richard?" "No. I was talking to the tree. I'm the Spaceman and he's the Martian. But he doesn't want to be the Martian!" Richard plays. Let us play. Let us play. You're close enough to get into the game, surely. A hundred and fifty feet, maybe. Effective range, fifty feet. Rate of motion? Projected time-interval? Depends on which system you observe it from. Richard has a system. "He doesn't want to play, Mommie. He wants to see you!" "You tell that tree your Mommie never sees strangers when Daddy isn't home!" "I'll make him wait!" Stoutly your pot-bellied little protector prevents his protective mother from going to pot. "If he won't play, I'll use my ray gun on him!" Obviously, the tree won't play. Watch your son lift empty hands,arm himself with a weapon yet to be invented, and open fire on the advancing foe. "Aa-aa-aa!" So that's how a ray gun sounds! "You're dead, tree! You're dead! Now you can't play with me any more. You're dead!" '  ing the tree accept the little boy's fantasy as fact, Naomi wondered why she'd never thought of that herself. So the tree was a treacherous medicineman, was it? A true believing witch-doctor? And who could be more susceptible to the poisoning of fear than a witchdoctor who has made fear work -- and believes it's being used against him? It was all over. She and the tree bit the dust together. But the tree was dead, and Naomi merely fainting, and Ted would soon be home... m Harper  Brothers, New York, #. # pages plus xiit, illustrated, # C. Clarke. Gnome Press, New York , #. # pages, # and a very good year it is, too. To take the non-fiction book first, The Exploration of Space is a completelysatisfying job. The firstbook about astronautics and the mechanics ' of traveling and living in space to be taken by the Book of the .Month Club, it does not assume that you have a Ph.D. in Extraterrestrial Vector Analysis (whatever that is', if it exists). However, it does assume that you are a normally thoughtful, educated, imaginative citizen with a fairly mature approach. In other words, not for morons. Above all, it is soundly scientific; there is nothing crackpot about it. Its prophecies of future developments may often be proved wrong in detail, but they are definitely logical in theory. From a brief historical survey, beginning with Lucian, of the ideas of space travel, we pass to a marvelously comprehensible analysis of . the principles of the rocket motor, and thence to the nature of the Solar System, the methods of escaping from Earth's gravity, possible spaceships, and so on, via some highly realistic domed cities on Mars to the fardistant possibilities of travel to the stars. Illustration-wise, this book is, next to the Bonestell-Ley Conquest of Space, the handsomest production yet in this field. From explain such recondite subjects as gravity, to a number of gorgeous full-color plates, one of which shows the domed city of Mars in a breathtaking fashion, the book is a treasure-chest of pictorial and scientific richness. Sands of Mars, Clarke's neverserialized second novel, is a fit successor to Prelude to Space, novel a couple of years ago. Like Prelude, it is utterly real, as real as only someone who knows the current facts about space flight can make this sort of imaginative writing. The story tells of the voyage to Mars of a famous newsman and exsciencefictionnovelist by the name of Martin Gibson, and his conversion from an anti-Mars character to an all-out enthusiast. A subplot describing the emotional woes Gibson suffers when he recognizes one of the spaceship crew as his illegitimate son slows the story a little, but unquestionably adds to the impact of the novel. These are people, not "spacemen," we are meeting. The trip through space is nothing beyond what we can find in The Exploration of Space , decked out in fictional garments. Clarke's Mars, on the other hand, is a logical leap into the dark. None of the inventions and ideas is particularly unlikely, though, and all of them are put in a clear and unforgettable light by the author's ability at visualizing the uncreated. One may perhaps be justified in a slight cringe at the superscientific way the problems of Mars' cold and its low oxygen are eventually solved; but even that technique should not seem totally unlikely when one suddenly realizes that one has blithely accepted without a whimper the fantastic -- but scientifically quite sound -- idea of a spaceship for the Mars run which is capable of transporting # people! Genuinely good reading. by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. #I pages, # npHE indefatigable Chicagoans, with their second Spring # collection, have started a new #S# t annual series, anda good idea, too -- a collection of the "best" novelets of the year. Stories of this length are usually problems for the anthologist, whose publisher often presses him for "more stories per book." As a result, some of the best science fiction has long missed the momentary immortality of hard covers. The "bestness" of the five novelets included is, of course, debatable; no one should ever expect any collection to be wholly pleasing to himself. Tastes differ too much. But this collection is at least a good average. No one could possibly veto Eric Frank Russell's superb "... And Then There Were None," certainly one of the most evocative and provocative idea novelets that ever hit the literature of space travel. The Gands, with their wonderful "Myob!" and "F -- I. W." slogans, will never be forgotten by anyone who reads about them. Arthur Clarke's sensitive and perceptive "Seeker of the Sphinx" is a top selection, too. In a delightful and obviously quite unpremeditated way, its ideas play a sort of warm and contrasty counterpoint to the theme of Russell's tale. "Hunting Season" by Frank M. Robinson is a good one, too, though a bit slobbery. This reviewer felt that the idea was bet      Hll F ft ter realized in Ray Bradbury'? shuddery "The Fox and the Forest," but there is enough merit in the Robinsonstory to make its reprinting a good idea. I didn't think too much of Poul Anderson's post-Einstein re-do oi the Wellsian "Time Machine," which is called "Flight to Forever" and which is super-impossible science fantasy ; and nothing at all of Walter Miller's "Izzard and the Membrane," which demonstrates how political propaganda can ruin science fiction. Nevertheless, the collection as a whole is eminently worthwhile. May there be more in the series! Cl TY, by Clifford. Simak. Gnome Press, New York, #. # pages, # 'T'HiS strange and fascinating program for the future  of Man, reported in seven Astounding stories and one from Thrilling Wonder, all but one collected in book form here for the first time, describes a tomorrow that is, for me, completely enthralling. Commencing with a simple picture of the end of Cities as a result of decentralization caused by the family helicopter and chemical gardening, it ends up with a series of parallel worlds, one of which is in possession of ants, another controlled by a very attractive dog civilization (the stories are legends on this world), and a third consisting of the planet Jupiter, where the human race, wholly transformed into a new type of life, has abandoned humanity, with all its faults. One has the pleasant feeling that the series was written for the fun of it, not to uphold any theories, not to satirize anything, not for filthy lucre, and not, indeed, for any particular audience except the author himself. This makes the book all the more delightful. The Dogs, who tell the legends seriously doubt whether Man, with his wars and his crimes, ever existed at all, and if he did, they wonder why. Smart people, those Dogs; they suspect the tales are pure fabrications of the precivilized Dog mind. Anthropology, indeed! What could you call it with Dogs? Canopology, I presume. Lewis Padgett. Gnome Press , New York, #. # pages, # I AM of that select and goodly company of stuffed shirts who deny that humor and science fiction can successfully intermingle. In this I am, of course, something of a wet blanket about the drunken Gallagher and his narcissistic robot, Joe, the lead characters in this book. On the other hand, my declamations at times falter to a halt when, in spite of myself, I hear myself busting out in giggles over some absurdity of these two strictly synthetic and primitive pieces of pulp characterization. This does not mean that I think the Gallagher series is good science fiction, for it isn't -- zany imaginings of a rather anti-scientific sort. The principles seem to be: "Scientists invent when drunk." "Research and invention is an individual, not a cooperative effort; a subconscious, rather than an intellectual effort." Very unhelpful conclusions that can be deduced from the actually harmless and often amusing adventures of this ga-ga technician and his super-robot in an overscientific, undersociologized world which continues to misuse science and technology just ah we do. Perhaps I'm being unnecessarily serious. Point is, I want to let Mr. Kuttrier know I enjoy him still and realize that he is putting over some very nice satirical points in these stories, even though you have to hunt for them ( Padgett is Mr. Kuttner.) Vital statistics: the book has five Gallagher stories, all from Astounding; and two ("Gallagher Plus" and "The World Is Mine") never before anthologized.  Game for Blondes ieing a collector can be fun but Is a collection cool and collected if it's collected? very very drunk, not Once she said it, he could slow gayly drunk, not freshly down and that would be a little six-quick-ones drunk, but drunk victory. in varying degrees since Decern"Too fast, Marty!" she said, ber tenth at ten P.M. Two big They were the last words she red #s in his mind; always with ever spoke. him -- zeroes like a pair of headFat headlights and the long lights. Ruth beside him, sweetwhining skid, and the crash, and scented, fur-clad. And one of his the jangle that went on forever, fits of stupid, vicious, reckless Ripped fur and blood and gone anger. December #. # P.M. the sweet scent. Hitting the slick black curves Now it was New Year's Eve. hard, motor droning, forcing her Ruth was gone. His job was gone, the car gone. Money was left, though, money a-plenty. Funny about drinking. The wobbling, falling down, sick stage lasts about twelve days, he, discovered. Important discovery. Boon to science. Then you're armorplated. Liquor drops into a pit, clunk. Walk steady, talk steady. Put in come the illusions on little soft pink feet. Ruth ahead of you, hurrying down a dark street. "Ruth! Wait!" Hurriedly she puts on a wattled mask, turns and grimaces at you, rasps in a mocking ginhusky voice. "Ya wan' something, sweetie?" S HE has slipped around the next corner. Run, now, and see her in the next block. Cake the wet December slush on the shrinking, stiffening leather of the shoes that came out of that, store window. "Marty, let's buy you a pair of those. I like those shoes." Suit she liked. Now a bit dribbled, a shade rancid. Apartment the way they had left it that night. Never gone back. Beds not made, no doubt. Walk through the night streets, looking for punishment. Looking for a way to release the load of guilt. Now the old places don't want you. "Sorry, Mr. Grey nor...You've begun to stink." The lit## tie bars don't care, The bar mirrors are enchanted. Ruth stands behind you. She said, "Never run away from me, dariing. You'd be too easy to find. Wanted -- a red-headed man with one blue eye and one brown eye. See? You couldn't get away with it." The face that looks hack has been gaunted, because you stopped eating. He bent low overthe bar until his lips almost touched the shot glass, then lifted it in a hard arc, tossing his head back. It burned its way down into the nothingness. The bartender slapped the change down. Martin Greynor fumbled with it, pushed a quarter over to the far edge. The bartender slipped it off the bar with a surly gruntand clinked it into  glass on the back bar. Martin turned around and saw the three girls again. He wondered if it was again, or if he was seeing them for the first time. The mind performs such odd little hop, skip, jumps. He debated it solemnly, got nowhere. They were at a table. They were all looking at him with an air of watchfulness. That could be imagined, too. Three lovelies like that are not going to make the weary, ginmill rounds with you and keep watching you. You ain't that purty, Martin. When in doubt, you write it down on top of your mind and underline it very firmly and hope that when the situation occurs again, you can find the place where you wrote it down. He walked out steadily and stood oil the sidewalk. He had the strong impression that Ruth was stretched flat on the roof,, her head over the edge of the building, grinning down at him. He turned sharply and looked up. The Moon hung misty over Manhattan, debauched by neon. ' That will take you toward midtown, toward the higher prices, toward the places where they let you get three steps inside the door, then turn you firmly and walk you back out. Stay over here, buster. They'd rolled him a few times that first week. Made a nuisance to go to the bank and get more 'cash each time. Now they'd stopped bothering. One of the times they'd left him sitting, spitting out a tooth. His tongue kept finding the hole. Neon in the middle of the next block. Two couples sitting on the curb. "Down by-ee the old mill streeeeeeem..." Spotted by the prowl car. "Break it up! Move along there!" silhouettes, arm in arm, step in step, tick-tock-tick of the pretty stilt heels avoiding the gray smears of slush. He ducked into the door under the neon. This was a dark one. Dancing was going on back there somewhere to the cat-fence yowl of a clarinet and pulse-thump of piano. He edged in at the bar. The bartender came over fast, with that trouble-look on his face. Martin shoved the five out fast. "Rye straight," he said. The bartender paused for a count of three, then turned back to the rye department. Martin looked over and saw them come in. He hunted on top of his mind and found the heavily underlined place. He read it off. Three blondes. Three arrogant, damp-mouthed, hot-eyed, overdressed blondes -- sugary in the gloom. Same ones. It brought him up out of himself, hand clutching the rim of his soul, for a quick look over the edge. One lone blonde in this place would have pivoted heads in tennis-match style. Two would bring hot arid heart-felt exhalations. Three, he saw, seemed to stun the joint. It put a crimp in the rumble of bar-talk. It ran furry fingers down male spines. They were watching him. He stared back until he was certain. Okay. Fact confirmed. Three blondes following him from joint to joint. Watching him. Next step -- watch real close, see if anybody walks through them. They got a table along the wall. He watched. A hefty young man strutted over to their table, hiking up his pants, making with the bold smile. He bent over the table. They all gave him cold looks. One shook her shining head. He persisted. The young man turned fast and hard and went high and rigid into the air. Martin saw him go up in that jet-leap of spasmed muscles, head thrown back, agony-masked face. He fell like something pushed out of a window. People gathered around him. They blocked Martin's view. He looked at the blondes. They were watching him. In an empty lot in the back of his mind, a rabbit bounded for cover, where there was no cover, and the dogs, sat watching, tongues lolling. Cold started at a spot at the base of his spine. It crept nuzzling into his armpits. He drank and scooped up his change and left. He ran to the corner and stood, and the trembling went away. The 'slush was beginning to freeze. It crunched a bit under hts shoes. That was another thing. You didn't have to eat, and you didn't get cold. Ergo, one should be beyond fear. Go around being afraid of blondes and people will begin to point at you. He snickered. The sound was j as rigid as the rind of freeze atop the sidewalk slush. We have  nothing to fear but fear itself. ; Problem for the class: You got ' a guy, see. He's dying of cancer  or something, see. He's in agony and somebody comes into his room and stands by his bed and lifts a big club to hammer him one. Is the guy afraid? If so,  why? If he is, it means that fear j is something divorced from an I objective and intellectual apI praisal of the total situation. It means fear is spawned in the guts, down there where the animal lives, down where the rabbit j blood is. J around the corner and embraced his leg. He bent over, picked it loose and sent it on its way. "Hell of a big hurry, aren't you?" he said. Tick, tack, tick, tack. By God. blonde and all coming along. S what can blondes do to you? He stood his ground for a slow count of ten. Tick, tack. Fear rocketed into his throat and burst out his ears and he ran like hell. A cruiser nailed him in the spotlight tracking him like a floorshow, making him feel as though he were running, running, running in one spot. He stopped and leaned against a building, panting. The spot still held him. It nailed his eyes to the wall behind him. Big shoulders blocked it. Creak of leather and brass gleam. "What you running for, chief?" "It's... a cold night. Keeping warm." The cuff, slid him along the wall and the hand on his rancid suit yanked him back upright. "What you running for, I said?" "Those three blondes coming. They're after me." He could hear them coming. The spot went away. He was blind. But he, could hear them. "After you, you creep?" "Yes, I..." "Johnny, we better dump the chief here off at the ward. Come on, Mr. Irresistable." Tick, tack, tock, tick. Silence. "What do you girls want?" Brass buttons took a high, hard, stiff-legged, stiff-armed leap. Martin fell into slush and rolled. Inside the cruiser, the driver stiffened, his head going bong on the metal roof. empty field and no cover. The wise eyes of the hunting  dogs. Wait until Ije comes around again, fellows. He turned, skidding in the freezing slush, and ran inb an alley, tangling his legs in a bunch of trash, sprawling, clawing his way up again, running into a wall, stinging his hands. He turned. Three female silhouettes in the alley mouth. High-waVed, long-legged, stilt-heeled, creamheaded. He made little sounds in his throat and pawed his way along the wall. An alley like a shoe box with one end missing -- the end they were at. He sat down and covered his eyes. Count to ten and they'll go away. One-a-larry, two-a-larry, three-a-larry, four. New spotlight. This was a diferent one. It came at him from a lot of little directions, like one of those trick showers with a dozen spray heads. "Got um," a blonde voice said. "Up to spec, no?" They stood outside the radiance. "Color and out," one said. "Take um." Something grew in front of him, a red happy-new-year balloon. So it was a gag, maybe. It lobbed through the air toward him, turning in iridescence. He caught it. It was red jelly with a cellophane skin. It kept trying to slide down between his fingers. #  "Yah-hah!" one of the blondes said. It broke in his hands, showered green needles up to his nose to sizzle in his brain fat. The sky broke in half and he went over backward and down, heels up and over, sizzling. mirrored floor. He was bugsized and it was the mirror on his mother's dressing table a million years ago. He stopped sliding and tried to sit up. The bracing hand skidded and he hit his head. He tried more cautiously. He could sit up by carefully shifting his weight, but he couldn't stand. The surface was frictionless. Compared to it, glare ice was like sandpaper. He lay down" and looked up. Overhead was nothing. He thought about that for quite a while. Nothing. No thing. Nothing with a flaw in it. A little flaw. He peered at it. It was in the shape of a tiny naked man. He moved a leg. The tiny naked man moved a leg. Everything clicked into focus. A mirror under him and, at an incredible height above him, another. Now, he thought, I'm a germ on a big microscope. His body felt odd. He managed to sit up again. He looked at himself. Clean. Impossibly, incredibly clean. His fingernails were snowy. His toenails were like white paper. His skin was clean and pink with a glow of health, but the old heart went thudding slowly and sickly along. Silence. All he could hear was the roar of his blood in his ears... Like listening to a sea shell. There had been a big pink conch in his grandfather's house.  "Hear the sea, Marty?" The mirror tilted and he slid into a hole that wasn't there before. He came out into a square  blue room. , His three blondes were there, i watching him. We don't get pink j elephants. We don't get snakes j and bugs. We get blondes.  He stood up, too aware of his i nudity. They watched him calmly, ignoring it. "Now, look," he said, "can't we be friends?"  They had changed. Their mouths were different -- vivid green paint in a perfect rectangle. They looked at him with that calm pride of ownership. Nice doggy.  "Now, look," Re began again, and stopped when he noticed their strange dresses. He looked closer. Ladies, please, you can't dress with a paint spray. But they had. "This," he said, "is a nightmare by Petty, out of Varga " The paint job was nicely shaded at the edges, but just "a paint job. One of them stepped to him, grabbed him by the hair and tilted his head back. She looked into his eyes and made a little satisfied clucking sound. She turned and pointed to the corner. " Y up now," she said. "How does one go about yupping?" he asked vacantly.  She looked at one of the other blondes, who said slowly and precisely, "Hurry -- up -- now. late." There was a pile of clothes in the corner.' He went over, glad for a chance of regaining pants, even in a dream world. The garments were recognizable, the material wasn't. A sartorial cartoon of the American male, midtwentieth century. Every incongruity of the clothing exaggerated. Sleeve buttons like saucers. Shoulders padded out a foot on each side. No buttons, no snaps, no zippers. You just got inside them and they were on, somehow. The buttons on the suit were fakes. The suit was bright blue with a harsh red stripe. Dressed, he felt like a straight man in a burlesque. From a distance he heard a great shout. It sounded like "Yah-hah!" from ten thousand throats. He suddenly had the strong hunch that he was going on display. The nearest blondeconfirmed that hunch. She stepped over and clamped a metal circlet around his forehead. Three golden chains dangled from his headpiece. Each blonde took one chain. The nearest one to one of the blue walls touched it. A slit appeared and folded back. They went through. The blondes began to strut. A midway strut. A stripper stomp. "Here comes Martin," he said feebly. den. The clipped turf underfoot was springy. Tailored terraces rose on three sides. A fat several thousand exceptionally handsome people wearing paint jobs and nothing else. The center arena had some people in it, people fastened to chains as he was, each one held by three blondes. The spectators were all on the terraces. There was a picnic atmosphere. They went into the middle of the arena. The other captives were being led in an endless circle. "Yah-hah!" the multitude yelled. "Yah-hah-hah!" They posed in the center and then began the circling. Martin stared at his fellow captives. Some were men and some were women. One wore animal skins; another wore armor. One was dressed like the pictures of George Washington. Some wore clothing he'd never seen before. He was led .around and around. More performers took 'their center ring bow. Something was bothering him, some silly small thing. He couldn't fit his mind over it. Too much was going on in this delirium. Then he got it -- all the captives had red hair. He turned and looked at the scared woman who walked behind him. She had red hair, one blue eye and one brown eye. She wore gingham and a sunbonnet. He sneaked looks at the others. One blue eye. One brown eye. Red hair. Everyone stopped walking. There was a great and final, "Yah-hah." Three sets of blondes stood in the center ring without captives. Their heads were bowed. His blondes trotted him over, took off the circlet and flipped him back into the blue room. The slit was closed. He pinched his leg. "Hell," he said softly. The slit opened after what he imagined to be an hour had passed. One of his blondes came back. She had a man with her, a chesty citizen dressed in cerise paint. "Talkit ya tempo," she said, pointing at the chesty man. He beamed at Martin. "Blessings," he said. "Blessings yourself." "Indebted. Thanking very much." "Your welcoming very much, bud." "Knowing all?" the man asked with a wide arm sweep. "Knowing nothing. Not a damned thing! What's this all about?" The chesty man beamed some more. He scratched his paint job lightly. He frowned. "Hard to say. You past. I future. Is party. My party. My house. My garden. Having game. Sending ladies your tempo, lot of tempos. All same thing. Bringing only with red on hair, eye brown, eye blue. Hard to find. For game." Martin goggled at him. "You mean a scavenger hunt through time?" "Not knowing. Is only game. Some ladies failing. Too bad." "What happens to them?" The man grinned. "No present for them. Now, present for you. Returning. Any place in tempo yours. To place taken. To other place. Sooner, later. Your choice." "Return me to any... moment in my life?" "All tempo function. You say  -- how? -- resonance." "Send me to December #th, eight P.M."  M artin greynor was sit ting on the edge of his bed. He had just yanked his shoelaces tight in the left shoe. The tipped laces were still in his hands. He let go of them. He heard a shower pouring. The sound stopped suddenly. His throat was full of rusty wire. "Ruth?" She opened the bathroom dooi . She was wrapped in a big yellow towel. "What is it now, Marty? My goodness, you've been needling me all evening. You're in a perfectly foul humor. I'm hurrying just as fast as I can." "Ruth, I... He tried to smile. His lips felt split. She came to him, quick with concern. "Marty! Are you all right, darling? You look so odd. " "Me? I've never been more all right." He pulled her down beside him. "Hey, you! I'm soaking wet." "Baby, do we have to drive way out there tonight? Do we?" She stared at him. "Good Lord, it was your idea. I detest both of them.' You know that." "Let's stay home. Just the two of us. Bust open that brandy, maybe. Use up some of those birch logs." "But we accepted and... He held her tightly. He would never let her go. She whispered, "I like you better this way, instead of all snarly and grouchy." She giggled. "I think we could phone and tell them you have a fever, darling. It wouldn't really be a lie." S HE made the call, winking at him as she gave worried noises about his symptoms. She hung up and said, "She was huffy and painfully sweet. Tonight the Grey nor s are at home. Darling, it would have been a crummy evening." "A... , disastrous evening." "They play kid games all the time. That's what irks me. Remember in the summer? They had a scavenger hunt. If that He looked at the fire glow reflected in her hair. "It isn't a bad game, baby." "What do you mean?" He shrugged. "Guess it depends on who's playing it and what the prize is." Forecast down-to-probability stories this superb and popular author has ever produced. Science fiction often has a way of ignoring the potential realities hard to discover and deal with them -- and Asimov presents a type of fuel and the problemsthat getting it involve, entirely new to this medium, as discovery about our own solar system. Supporting Asimov's suspensefui offering are: pirate, do you? This one's a shocker! sensitive and perceptive a study of a woman with a frightening power as science fiction has ever presented. Plus short stories, of course, all that we can squeeze or urge into the all questions either in the magazine or by mail!; and our regular features, X a little    In this carefully chosen, precision-trained space crew, where did a fumbling bubblehead like Bertelli fit in? Why was he selected? Isn't it strange that princes and kings And clowns that caper in sawdust rings And ordinary folk like you and me Are builders of eternity. To each is given a bag of tools. An hour-glass and a book of rule. And each must buitd ere his time has flown A stumbling-block or a steppingstone. Anon. thrummed and drummed. It was a low-cycle note, sonorous and penetrating like that produced by the big-pipe octave of a mighty organ. It moaned through hull-plates, groaned out of girders, throbbed along nerves and bones,beat upon tired ears and could not be ignored. Not after a week, a month or a year. Certainly not after most of four years. There was no effective cure for the noise. It was the inevitable, unavoidable result of bottling an atomic propulsor within a cylinder of highly conductive metal. The first ship had screeched one hundred cycles higher, minute after minute, hour after hour, and had never returned. Somewhere amid the waste spaces of the infinite, it might still be howling, unheard, unheeded, after thirty years. Ship number two had started out with a slag-wool padded engine room and silicone-lined venturis. The low note. The drone of a burdened bee amplified twenty thousand times. And the bee had not come back to the hive. Eighteen years into the star field and blindly heading onward for another hundred, thousand or ten thousand years. The vessel now thundering along was number three, not going outward, but on it's way back, beading for home. Nosing toward w notyetvisible red dot lost in the mist of stars, a strayed soul fumbling for salvation, it was determined not to be damned as othershad been damned. Ship number three -- that meant something. Sea sailors cherish sea superstitions. Space sailors coddle space superstitions. In the captain's cabin where Kinrade sat writing the log, a superstition was pinned to the wall and functioned as a morale booster. They had believed it at the start when the crew had numbered nine. They would believe it at the finish, though reduced to six. But in between times there had been and might again be bad moments of shaken faith when men wanted out at any cost, even the cost of death, and to hell with the ultimate purpose of the flight. Moments when men fought other men in effort to break loose from audiophobia, claustrophobia, half a dozen other phobias. in his right hand, a bluedsteel automatic within easy reach of his left. His eyes concentrated on the log, his ears on the ship and its everlasting drumming. The noise might hesitate, falter or cease, and the blessing of its cessation would be equally a curse. Or other sounds might rise above this persistent background, an oath, a shout, a shot. It had happened once before, when Wey garth cracked. It could happen again. Kinrade was somewhat edgy himself, for he jerked in his seat and slid his left hand sidewise when Bertelli came in unexpectedly. Recovering, he swung his chair round on its socket, gazed into the other's sad gray eyes. "Well, have they' marked it yet?" The question startled Bertelli. His long, lugubrious, hollowcheeked face grew longer. His great gash of a mouth drooped at the corners. The sad eyes took on an expression of hopeless bafflement. He was clumsily embarrassed. Recognizing these familiar symptoms, Kinrade became more explicit. "Is Sol visible on the screen?" "Sol?" Bertelli 's hands tangled together, the fingers like carrots. "Our own sun, you imbecile!" "Oh, that!" The eyes widened in delighted comprehension. "I haven't asked." "I thought maybe you'd come to tell me they've got it spotted at last." "No, Captain. It's just that I wondered whether you need any help." His expression switched from its accustomed glumness to the eager smile of a fool more lifted, widened so much that it made the ears stick out and reminded the onlooker of a slice of melon. "Thanks," said Kinrade, more kindly. "Not right now." Bertelli's embarrassment came back in painful strength. His face was humbly apologetic for having asked. After shifting around on his big, ugly feet, he went out. As always, he skidded violently on the steel-floored catwalk, regained balance with a clatter of heavy boots. Nobody else slipped at that spot, but he invariably did. Kinrade suddenly realized that he was smiting and changed it to a troubled frown. For the hundredth time he consulted the ship's register, found it no more informative than on the ninetynine other occasions. There was the little roster with three names of the nine crossed out. And the same entry halfway down: Enrico Bertelli, thirty-two, psychologist. It was the bunk. If Bertelli were a psychologist or anything remotely connected with scientific expertness, then he, Robert Kinrade, was a bright blue giraffe. For almost four years they'd been locked together in this groaning cylinder, six men carefully chosen from the great mass of humanity, six men supm posed to be the salt of the Earth, the cream of their kind. But the six were five men and a fool. There was a puzzle here. It intrigued him in spare moments when he had time to think with a mind untrammeled by serious matters. It dangled before him tantalizingly, making him repeatedly picture its subject all the way down from sad eyes to flat feet. During rare moments of. meditation, he found himself vainly trying to analyze Bertelli and deduce the real reason for his being, concentrating upon him to the temporary exclusion of the others. As opportunity occurred, Kinrade watched him, too, marveling that any so-called expert could be so thoroughly and unfailingly nit-witt'ed. He studied Bertelli with such intentness that he failed to notice whether the others might be doing the same for similar reasons born of similar thoughts. Yet this concentration was his answer -- and he did not know it. tor and Vail stood guard in the engine room when Kinrade went to lunch. The other three already were at the table in the tiny galley. He nodded briefly and took his place. Big blond Nilsen, atomic engineer by choice, plus botanist by official coercion, eyed Kinrade skeptically and said, "No sun." "I know?" "There ought to be." Kinrade shrugged. "But there isn't," Nilsen persisted. "I know." "Do you care?" "Don't be a sap." Breaking open a packaged meal, Kinrade tossed it into his compartmented plastic plate. Thrum-thrum went the ship i from floor, walls and ceiling, i "So you think I'm a sap, do you?" Nilsen leaned forward, stared with aggressive expectancy. "Let's eat," suggested Aram, the thin, dark and nervous cosmogeologist at his side. "One bellyache's enough without hunting another." "That's not the point," declared Nilsen. "I want to know   He shut up as Bertelli mum; bled, "Pardon me," and reached across him for salt in a container fastened to the other end of the table. Unscrewing it, Bertelli brought : it to his end, sat down, found himself on the extreme edge of his seat. His eyes popped very slightly in mild surprise. He stood, slid the seat forward on its runners, sat again, knocked the salt off the table. Radiating # shame and self-consciousness, he picked it up, used it in the manner of one emptying a large bucket, practically lay full length on the table to screw it in its original position. That task performed, he squirmed backward with his behind in the air, gained the seat again. It was the edge and so near that he began to slide off it. The eyes bulged a fraction more widely than before and once again he went through the seat-sliding performance. Finally he sat down, smoothed out an invisible napkin, favored everyone with a look of abject apology. Taking in a deep breath, Nilsen said to him, "Sure you wouldn't care for a little more salt?" Bertelli's eyes dulled under the impact of the problem, sought his plate, examined it with idiotic care, "No, I don't think so, thank you." Surveying his own plate a moment, Nilsen looked up, met Kinrade's eyes, asked, "What's this guy got that others haven't got?" Grinning at him, Kinrade replied, "That problem is a corker. I've been trying to figure it out and I can't." A half-smile came into Nilsen's features as he confessed, "Neither can I." Bertelli said nothing. He went on with his meal, eating in characteristic manner with elbows held high and his hand uncertainly seeking a mouth it could not miss. screen, Marsden said, "That one looks pink to me. But it may be my imagination." Kinrade bent close and had a look. "Too small to be sure. A mere pinpoint." "Then I've been kidding myself." "Not necessarily. Your eyes may be more color-sensitive than mine." "Ask Goofy here," suggested Marsden. dot from ten different distances and as many angles. Finally he squinted at it. "That can't be it," he announced, triumphant with discovery, "because our sun is orangered." "The fluorescent coatingof the screen would make it look pink," informed Marsden with a touch of impatience. "Does that dot look pink?" "I don't know," Bertelli admitted miserably. "You're a great help." "It's too far away for more than mere guesswork," said Kinrade. "Resolution isn't good enough to cope with such a distance. We'll have to wait until T#I we get a good deal closer." "I'm fed up waiting," .said Marsden, scowling at the screen. "But we're going home," Bertelli reminded him. me." "Don't you want to go home?" Bertelli puzzledly asked. "I want to too much." Irritatedly, Marsden rammed the pencil back into his pocket. "I thought I'd stand the inward trip better than the outward one just because it would be homeward. I was wrong. I want gren grass, blue skies and plenty of room to move around. I can't wait." "I can," said Bertelli, virtuously. "Because I've got to. If I were unable to wait, I'd go nuts." "Would you?" Marsden looked him over, the grouch slowly fading from his face. The change went as far as a chuckle. "How much of a trip would that be?" Leaving the navigation room, he headed toward the galley, still chuckling as he went. Rounding the farther corner, he let out a low guffaw. "What's funny?" asked Bertelli, vacantly mystified. Straightening up from the screen, Kinrade eyed him with care. "How is it that whenever somebody starts blowing his -- " Changing his mind, he let the sentence die out. "Yes, Captain?" "Oh, forget it." The ship plunged onward, moaning at every plate. Vail appeared presently, coming off duty and on his way to # eat. He was a short man of great 'I width, with long arms and power' ful hands. i "Any luck?" "We're not sure." Kinrade indicated the dot burning amid a confusing host of others. "Marsden thinks that's it. He may be wrong." "Don't you know?" asked Vail looking at him and ignoring the screen Kinrade was pointing to. "We will in due time. It's a bit early yet." "Changing your tune, aren't you?" "What do you mean?" Kinrade's tone was sharp. "Three days ago you told us that Sol should become visible in the screen almost any time. That gave us a lift. We needed it. I'm no sniveling babe myself, but I must admit I wanted that boost." He surveyed the other with a touch of resentment. "The higher hopes go, the lower they fall when they drop." "I'm not dropping mine," Kinrade said. "Three days plus or minus is a tiny margin of error in a return trip taking two years." "That would be true if we're on correct course. Maybe we aren't." "Are you suggesting that I'm not competent to work out the proper coordinates?" "I'm suggesting that even the best of us can blunder," Vail gave back stubbornly. "In proof of which, two ships have gone to pot." "Not because of navigational errors," put in Bertelli, looking unconvincingly profound. Pursing his lips, Vail stared at him and inquired, "What the hell do you know about space navigation?" "Nothing," Bertelli confessed with the air of one surrendering a back tooth. He nodded toward Kinrade. "But he knows enough." "I wonder!" HE route for return was J worked out in full detail by Captain Sanderson before he died," said Kinrade, his color a little heightened. "I've checked i and rechecked at least a dozen I times. So has Marsden. If you're ; not satisfied, you can have the  calculations and go through them yourself."  "I'm not a trained navigator." "Then shut your trap and leave other -- " Bertelli broke in with a note of J protest. "But I didn't have it J open!"  Shifting attention to him, Kinj rade asked, "You didn't have J what open?"  "My mouth," said Bertelli. He I registered personal injury. "Don'tj know why you have to pick onj me. Everyone picks on me."  "You're wrong," Vail told him, "He -- "  "There you are. I'm wrong. I I'm always wrong. I'm never J right." Emitting a deep sigh, Bertelli wandered out, dragging big feet. His face was a picture of  misery. , i Vail watched him in faint ' amazement, then said, "That looks to me like a persecution ! complex. And he's supposed to be a psychologist. What a laugh!" "Yes," agreed Kinrade, without humor. "What a laugh!" Going to the screen, Vail examined it. "Which one does Marsden think is Sol?" "That one." Kinrade pointed it out for him. Staring at it hungrily for quite a time, Vail finished, "Oh, well, let's hope he's right." Then he departed. Left alone, Kinrade sat in the navigator's chair and looked at the screen without seeing it. His mind was on a problem that might be real or might be imaginary. When does science become an art? Or should it be: when does art become a science? got a dose of "Charlie," the same psychotic behavior pattern that had put an end to Weygarth. There was a technical name for it, but few knew it and fewer could pronounce it. The slang term came from an ancient, almost forgotten war in which the rear-gunner of a big aircraft -- Tail End Charlie -- would think too long of the heavy bomb-load and the thousands of gallons of high octane spirit right behind his perspex parrot-cage, and all of a sudden he'd batter upon the walls of his prison, screaming, The way Aram broke was characteristic of this space affliction. He sat next to Nilsen, quietly downing his meal, but picking at the compartmented plastic tray as though completely indifferent to food or drink. Then, without a word or the slightest change of expression, he pushed away the tray, got up and ran like hell. Nilsen tried to trip him and failed. Aram shot through the door like a bolting rabbit, raced headlong down the passage to ward the airlock. Slamming his own chair back to the limit of its holding rails, Nilsen went after him with Kinrade one jump behind. BertelU stayed in his seat, a forkful of food halfway to his mouth, his gaze fixed blankly on the facing wall while his big ears remained perked for outer sounds. They caught Aram frantically struggling with the airlock wheel and trying to force it the wrong way around. Even if he had rotated it the right way, he wouldn't have had time to open it. His thin features were pale and he was snuffling with exertion. Reaching him, Nilsen jerked him around by one shoulder, smacked him in the jaw. There was plenty of force behind that blow. Aram, a small, lightly built man, caromed along the passage and ended up as an unconscious bundle by the forward door. Rubbing his knuckles, Nilsen grunted to himself, checked the airlock wheel to make sure if was holding good and tight. Then he grasped thevictim's feet while Kinrade lifted the shoulders and between them they bore the sagging Aram to his tiny cabin, laid him in his bunk. Nilsen remained on watch while Kinrade went for the hypodermic needle and a shot of dope. They put Aram out of the running for the next twelve hours. This was the only known countermeasure: an enforced sleep during which an overactive brain could rest and strained nerves recuperate. Returning to the galley, Nilsen resumed his interrupted meal, said to Kinrade, "Good thing he didn't think to swipe a gun." Kinrade nodded without answering. He knew what the other meant. Weygarth had tried to bold them off with a gun. while he prepared his dash to false freedom on a blast of air. They could not rush him without risking serious loss. They'd had to shoot him down quickly, ruthlessly, before it was too late. Weygarth had been their first bitter casualty only twenty months out. And now they dared not suffer minimum. Four would be damned forever to a great metal coffin thundering blindly amid the host of stars. It brought up yet another of the problems that Kinrade had not been able to resolve, at least to his own satisfaction. Should an airlock be fastened with a real lock to which only the captain held the key? Or might that cost them dear in a sudden and grave emergency? Which was the greater risk, lunatic escape for one or balked escape for all?  Oh, well, they were homeward bound, and when they got back he'd hand over the log and the detailed reports and leave the big brains to work it out for themselves. That was their job; his to make landfall safely. noted the introspective frown on his face and knew that he was thinking of Weygarth. Scientists and top-grade technicians are people with highly trained minds, but that does not make them less or more than other men. Their status does not keep them in splendid isolation from humanity. Outside of their especial interests, they are plain, ordinary folk subject to the strains and tensions of every man. Their minds are not another loss. Five men could run and cannot be solely and,everthe ship, control it, steer it, land lastingly I occuped with one subit. Five represented the absolute ject. Sometimfcs they think of other men and sometimes of themselves. Nilsen's was a trained mind, intelligent and sensitive, therefore so much the more liable to crack. Kinrade knew instinctively that if and when Nilsen made a break for the lock, he would not forget the gun. It took less intelligent, less imaginative types -- the cow-mind -- to endure long incarceration in a huge steel boiler on which a dozen devils hammered hour after hour, day after day, without cease or let-up. There was another problem for Earth's bigbrains to mull a' while : dull-witted people were tops for endurance, but useless functionally. Bright minds were essential to run the ship, yet somewhat more likely to go phut , even though only temporarily. What did this add upto? Answer: the ideal space crew should be composed of hopeless slopes with high I. Q. A contradiction in, terms. Now that he came to consider it,the thought struck him that here might be the solution to the mystery of Bertelli. Those who had designed and built the ship and hand-pjcked the crew were people of formidable craftiness. It was incredible that they'd dig . up a gormless character like Bertelli in a spirit of not giving a damn. The selection had been deliberate and carefully calculated, of that Kinrade was certain. Perhaps the loss of two ships had convinced them that they'd have to be more modest in their choice of crews. Maybe Bertelli had been planted to test how a dope made out. If so, they had something -- but it wasn't enough. Without a doubt, Bertelli would be the last to crack, the last to race for the airlock. Beyond that, nothing could be said in his favor purely from the technical viewpoint. He knew little worth knowing and that he had learned from the others. Any responsibility with which he was entrusted invariably got bollixed in masterly style. Indeed, with his big, clumsy mitts on any of the controls, he would be a major menace. He was liked, all right. In fact, he was popular in a way. Bertelli had other accomplishments about as genuinely useful on a .spaceship as a skunk's smell-gun at a cdhvention. He" could play several musical instruments, sing in a cracked voice, mime in really funny manner, tap-dance with a peculiar sort of loose-jointed clumsiness. After they'd got over their initial irritation with him, they had found him amusing and pathetic -- a bumbler they were sorry to feel superior to, because they couldn't think of anyone who wouldn't be superior to him. The schemers  back home would learn that a spaceship is better without non-technical thickheads, Kinrade decided rather uncertainly. They had made their test and it hadn't come off. It hadn'f come off. It hadn't come off. The more he repeated it to himself, the less sure he felt about it. Vail came in, paused at the sight of them. "I thought you'd finished ten minutes ago." "It's all right." Nilsen stood up, brushed away crumbs, gestured toward his chair. "I'll go watch the engines." Getting his tray and meal, Vail seated himself, eyed the others. "What's up?" "Aram's in bed with Charlie," Kinrade told him. Not the flicker of emotion crossed Vail's face. He made a vicious stab at his food, said, "The Sun would bring him out of that condition. That's what we all want, a sight of the Sun." informed Bertelli, eagerly offering the lot. Leaning his elbows on the table, Vail said in a harsh voice and with great significance, "That is precisely the point!" Bertelli's eyes dulled into complete confusion. He fidgeted with his tray, knocked his fork around without noticing it. Still looking at Vail, he felt for the fork, picked it up by the prongs, absently poked at the tray with the handle. Then he lifted the handle toward his mouth. "I'd try the other end," advised Vail, watching with interest. "It's sharper." The eyes lowered, studied the fork while gradually they took on an expression of vacant surprise. He made a childish motion indicative of helplessness. Finally he bestowed on both his usual apologetic grin and at the same time gave a casual twitch of finger and thumb that landed the handle smack in his palm. Kinrade noticed that flip. Vail didn't, but he did -- and for once he got a strange, uncanny feeling that Bertelli had made a very small mistake, a tiny error that might have passed unseen. cabim, the intercom called on the desk and Marsden's voice said, "Aram's just come out of it. He's got a sore jaw, but he seems cooled down. I don't think he needs another shot -- yet,." "We'll let him run loose, but keep an eye on him for a while," Kinrade decided. "Tell Bertelli to stick close. He has nothing better to do." "All right." Marsden paused, added in lower tones, "Vail is pretty surly lately. Have you noticed?" "He's okay. Just gets jumpy now and again. Don't we all?" "I suppose so." Marsden sounded as if he'd like to say more, .but he didn't. He cut off and the intercom went silent. Finishing the day's entry on the log, Kinrade examined himself at the mirror, decided he'd put off a shave a little longer. This was his idea of petty luxury; he disliked the chore, but lacked the courage to grow a beard. Other men, other notions. He lay back in his chair and enjoyed a quiet think, first about the planet called home, then the men who had sent this ship into space, then the men who were flying it with him. They'd been trained for the job, these six who, for the first time, had reached another, star, and their training had incorporated a certain amount of useful flexibility. The three spacemen among them had been given superswift education in some branch of science. The scientists had undergone courses in space navigation or atomic engineering. Two aptitudes per man. Then he thought again and eliminated Bertelli. Pre-flight education had gone further than that. A baldheaded old coot who bossed a lunatic asylum had lectured them on space etiquette with every air of knowing what he was talking about. Each man, he had explained, would know only three things about his fellows, to wit: name, age and qualification. No man must ask for more nor seek to pry into another's private life. Unknown lives provide no basis for irrational prejudices, antagonisms or insults, he had said. Empty personalities don't clash so readily. So it was established that none might urge another to reveal what made him tick. Thus Kinrade could not probe the reasons why Vail was irritable above the average or what made Marsden more impatient than others. He could not determine from past data why Nilsen potentially was the most dangerous or Aram the least stable. Neither could he insist that Bertelli explain his presence in understandable terms. Pending successful completion of the flight, each man's history remained hidden behind a curtain through which, from time to time only insignificant items had been glimpsed. After most of four years existing cheek by jowl with these people, he had  come to know them as never before -- but not as he would know them some day in the green fields of Earth when the flight was a bygone event, the tabu was broken and they had memories for free discussion. He liked to muse on these matters because he had developed a theory that he intended to dump right in the laps of the experts. It concerned lifers in penitentiaries. Not all criminals are stupid, he believed. Many might be intelligent, sensitive men somehow pushed or kicked off the path called straight and narrow. Walled up, some of them would get a dose of Charlie, try to bust out, beat up a warder, anything anything to escape -- and be rewarded for their efforts with solitary confinement. It was like treating a poisoned man with an even more powerful dose of what ' had made him ill. It was wrong, wrong. He was convinced of that. There was a reformist streak in Kinrade. Upon his desk he had a neatly written scheme for the treatment of lifers likely to go psycho. It involved constant individual observation and the timely use of occupational therapy. Whether of not it was practical, he didn't know, but at least it was constructive. The plan was his pet. He wanted leading penologists to play with it, give it a serious tryout. If it worked -- and he felt that it should -- the world would have derived one benefit from this flight in a way not originally contemplated. Even that alone made it profitable. A T that point, his thoughts were brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of Nilsen, Vail and Marsden. Behind them, waiting in the doorway, but not entering, was Aram with Bertelli in attendance. Kinrade braced himself in his seat and spoke gruffly. "This is great. Nobody at the controls." "I switched on the autopilot," Marsden said. "It will hold her on course four or five hours. You said so yourself." "True." His eyes examined them. "Well, why the scowling deputation?" "This is the end of the fourth day," Nilsen pointed out. "Soon we'll be into the fifth. And we're still looking for Sol." "So?" "I'm not satisfied that you know where we're going." "I am." "Is that a fact or more facesaving?" Kinrade stood up, said, "For the sake of argument, suppose I admitted that we're running blind -- what could you do about it?" "That's an easy one." Nilsen's air was that of one whose suspicions have almost been confirmed. "We picked you for captain after Sanderson died. We'd withdraw the vote and choose somebody else." "And then?" "Make for the nearest star, hunt around for a planet we can live on." "Sol is the nearest star." "It is if we're heading right," Nilsen retorted. Sliding open a drawer in his desk, Kinrade took out a large roll of paper, spread it across the top. Its multitude of tiny squares bore a large number of dots and crosses amid which a thick, black line ran in a steady curve. "This is the return course." His fingers indicated several crosses and dots. "We can tell by direct observation of these bodies whether or not we are on course. There's only one thing we can't check with absolute accuracy." "What's that?" inquired Vail, frowning at the chart. "Our velocity. It can be estimated only with a five per cent margin of error, plus or minus. I know we're on course, but not precisely how far along it. Hence the four-day lag. I warn you that it can extend to as much as ten." Nilsen said, heavily, "They took photos of the star formation on the way out. We've just been putting the transparencies over the screen. They don't match." "Of course they don't." Kinrade displayed impatience. "We're not at the same point. The star field will have circumferential displacement." "We aren't without brains despite not being trained navigators;" Nilsen gave back. "There is displacement. It progresses radially from a focal point that is not the pink spot you claim is Sol. The point is about halfway between that and the left edge of the screen." He gave, a loud sniff, invited, "Can you talk yourself out of that one?" Kinrade sighed, put a finger on the chart. "This line is a curve, as you can see. The outward course was a similar curve bending the reverse 'way. The tail camera focused along the line of the ship's axis. A few thousand miles out, it was pointing sunward, but the farther the ship got, the more its axis pointed to one side. By the time we crossed the orbit of Pluto, it was aiming to hell and away." Peering at the chart, Nilsen thought a while, asked shrewdly, "If you are sincere, what's the absolute margin of error?" "I told you -- ten days." "Nearly half of those have gone. We'll give you the other half." "Thanks!" said Kinrade, faintly sarcastic. "After which we'll either see Sol and identify it beyond doubt or we'll have a new captain and be heading for the nearest light." "We'll draw lots for captain," suggested Bertelli from the back. "I'd like the chance to boss a ship." W "Heaven help us!" exclaimed Marsden. "We'll pick the man best qualified," said Nilsen. "That's why ypu chose Kinrade' in the first place"" Bertelli reminded Mm. "Maybe. But we'll find someone else." "Then I insist on being considered. One dope is as good as another for making a mess of things." "When it comes to that, we're not in the same class," replied Nilsen, feeling that his efforts were being subtly sabotaged. "You can out-boob me with your big. hands pinned to your big ears." He looked over the others. "Isn't that so?" They grinned assent. It wasn't Nilsen's triumph. It was somebody else's. Merely because they did grin, party that night. For once his birthday was not the pretext. Somehow he'd managed to celebrate seven birthdays in four years without anyone seeing fit to count them all. But an excuse can be overdone, so he announced his candidacy for the post of captain, explaining that he wished to curry favor with voters. It was as good as any. They cleared the galley as they'd done a score of times before. They broke a bottle of gin, shared it between them, sipped with introspective glumness. Aram did his party-piece by birdcalling between two fingers, received the usual polite applause. Marsden recited something about the brown eye of the little yellow dog. By that time Nilsen had warmed up sufficiently to sing two songs in a deep, rich bass. He gained louder applause for having varied his-repertoire. Weygarth, of course, wasn't there to do his sleight-of-hand tricks. Sanderson and Dawkins were also missing from the bill. Temporarily, their absence was forgotten as the tiny audience awaited the star turn. Bertelli, of course. This was the sort of thing at which he excelled and the chief reason why a major nuisance had become tolerated, liked, perhaps loved. When they'd held the alien landfall spree, he'd played an oboe for most of an hour, doing more things with the instrument than they had believed possible. He had ended with a sonic impression of an automobile col lision, the agitated toot of horns, the crash, the heated argument between oboe-voiced drivers tha finished with decidedly rud noises. Nilsen had almost rolle  out of his seat. On the way home, there he been a couple more whoopees at ranged for no reason other than the hell of it. Bertelli had mimed for those, his dental plates removed, his features rubbery, his arms like snakes. First the eager sailor leaping ashore and seeking a chance to play his own strumpet. The search for talent, the discovery, pursuit, encounter, rebuff, the persuasion, the going to a show, the strolling home, the pass on the doorstep rewarded with a black'eye. Another time he'd reversed the role, become a plump blonde followed by a hungry sailor. Wordlessly, but with motions, gestures, posturings and facial expressions equal to if not better than speech, he had taken them on the night's prowl ending with the fight on the doorstep. This time he pretended to be a bashful sculptor shaping a statue of Venus de Milo with invisible clay. Piling up a column of what wasn't there, he hesitantly stroked it, nervously patted it, embarrassedly smoothed it into near-visible form. He rolled two cannon-balls, plonked them on her chest while covering his eyes, rolled two pills and shyly put them on top, delicately molded them into shape, glanced frightenedly around, then bestowed a hurried kiss on his own handiwork. It took him twenty hilarious minutes to make her almost, but not quite, complete, at which point he took idiotic alarm. He scanned the horizon, looked out the door, peered under the tableto insure that they two were alone. Satisfied yet full of embarrassment, he made a faltering approach, withdrew, plucked up fresh courage, lost it again, had a spasm of daring that failed at the critical moment. Vail offered pungent advice while Nilsen sprawled in the next seat and held an aching diaphragm. Summoning up everything he had in an effort to finish the job, Bertelli made a mad rush at it, fell over his own feet, slid on his face along the steel floorplates. Nilsen made choking sounds. Stupidly enraged with himself, Bertelli shot to his feet, drew his bottom lip over the tip of his nose, waggled his bat-ears, closed his eyes, made one violent stab with a forefinger -- and provided Vtnus with a navel. For days afterward, they chuckled over that performance, making curvaceous motions with their hands or prodding each other in the paunch at odd moments. The ghostly Venus stayed good for a laugh until ,... the Sun came up. quent checks late in the eighth day, Marsden found that one of the transparencies now coincided dot for dot with focal .S point two inches leftward of an I enlarged pink glow. He let go  a howl that brought the rest of  the crew racing to the bow. , Sol was identified. They looked ! at it, licked lips over it, looked - again. Four years in a bottle is i like forty years in the star fields  -- and they had been bottled too ; long. One by one they visited Kinrade's cabin and exulted over the superstition on tire wall.  Morale boosted way up. The  ship's drumming and thrumming j somehow lost its hellishness and ! took on a heartening note of urg  ency. Jangled nerves accepted the new and different strain of anticipation right to the glorious moment when a voice from Earth came feebly through the radio receiver. The voice strengthened day by day, week by week, until finally it bawled from the speaker while the fore observation-porij. was filled with half a planet. "From where I'm standing, I can see an ocean of faces turned toward the sky," said the announcer. "There must be half the most eventful hour in history. At any moment now, folks, you will hear the distant drone of the first spaceship to return from another star. I just can't tell you how much -- " What followed the landing was the worst part. The blaring bands, the thunder of cheers. The hand"df '' J f s X f shakes, speeches, the posing for press photographers, newsreels, television scanners, the cameras of countless frantic amateurs. It ended at last. Kinrade said farewell to his crew, felt the beartrap grip of Nilsen's hand, the soft, frank clasp of Aram, the shy, self-conscious touch of Bertelli. Looking into the latter's mournful eyes, he said, "The authorities will now start howling for all the data we've got. I suppose you've finished your book." "What book?" "Now, now, don't kid me." He offered a knowing wink. "You're the official psychologist, aren't you?" He didn't wait for an answer. While the others busied themselves collecting personal belongings, he got the log and the file pf reports, took them to the Administration Building, passage of time, Bancroft sat paunchily behind his desk, said with satirical satisfaction, "You are now looking at a fat man wallowing in the joys of promotion, and higher salary." "Congratulations." Kinrade dumped the books and sat down. "I would swap both for youth and adventure." Casting an anticipatory glance at what the Other had brought, Bancroft went on, "There are questions I'm bursting to ask. But the answers are hidden somewhere in that pile  and I guess you're in a hurry to go home."  "A 'copter will pick me up when it can get through the overj crowded air. I have twenty min-, j utes to spare." "In that case I'll use them" Bancroft leaned forward, eyes intent. "What about the first two ; ships?" I "We searched seven planets  Not a sign." j "They hadn't landed or crashed?" i "No." , "So they must have gone on?" j "Evidently." "Any idea why?" ; Kinrade hesitated, said, "It's a  hunch and nothing more. I think ; their numbers were reduced by accident, sickness or whatever. J They became too few to retain i control of the ship." He paused,  added, "We lost three men our selves." i "Tough luck." Bancroft looked I unhappy. "Who were they?" "Weygarth, Dawkins and San: derson. The first died on the way j out. He never saw the new sun, much less his own. The story is there." He gestured toward the reports. "The other two were j killed on the fourth planet, which l I've established as unsafe for human habitation." stimulating, brain tickling? Has your imagination been stirred? issue maintains this same high standard of writing and thinking. If not you can let this one copy act as a sample.  In either case we know that the great majority of our readers want to see and enjoy every single issue. That's just the kind of magazine this is according to the letters we get from our readers. How can you be sure that you get every issue... and get it almost a week before its on the newsstands. Its easy... so simple that maybe it hasn't occurred to you Your subscription is your guarantee of getting every issue. Your subscription also saves you money for at # a year you will get # wonderful issues tor exactly what you would pay for # on the newsstand. is the'best Mearanr # '  he C  UP  n Wow ' And do!  il vr newsstand. Dept. D Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson St. New York #, N. Y. I enclose (cheek one) # for I year... # for # years # additional Foreign Postage "What's wrong with it?" "A big and hungry life-form exists under the surface, sitting with traps held open beneath a six-inch crust of soil. Sanderson walked around, fell into a red, sloppy mouth four feet wide by ten long. He was gulped from sight. Dawkins rushed to his rescue, but dropped into another." His fingers fumbled with each other as he finished, "There was nothing we could do, not a damned thing." "A pity, a great pity." Bancroft shook his head slowly from side to side. "How about the other planets?" "Four are useless. Two are made to measure for us." "Hah, that's something!" He glanced at the small clock on his desk, continued hurriedly, "And now the ship. Doubtless your reports are full of criticisms. Nothing is perfect, not even the best we've produced. What do you consider its most outstanding fault?" "The noise. It could drive you out of your mind. It needs cutting out." "Not completely," Bancroft contradicted. "There is psychic terror in absolute silence." "All right. Then it needs cutting down to more endurable level. Try it yourself for a week and see how you like it." "I wouldn't. The problem is being beaten, although slowly. We have a new and quieter type of engine already on the testbench. Four years' progress, you know." "We need it," said Kinrade. B ancroft went on, "And what do you think of the crew?" "Best ever." "They ought to be. We skimmed the world for the creamnothing less was good enough. Each man was tops in his own particular line." "Including Bertelli?" "I knew you'd ask about him." Bancroft smiled as if at a secret thought. "You want me to explain him, eh?" "I've no right to insist, hut I'd certainly like to know why you included such a dead weight." "We lost two ships," said Bancroft, looking serious. "One could be an accident. Two were not. It's hard to believe that .an exceptional kind of breakdown or a collision with a lump of rock chance would occur twice running." "I don't believe it myself." "We spent years studying the problem," Bancroft continued. "Every time we got the same answer: it wasn't due to any defect in the vessels. The cause lay somewhere in the human ete; # ment. Short of a four-year test on living men, we could do no more than speculate. Then one day the likely solution popped up by sheer chance." 'How?" "We were in this very room, beating our brains for the hundredth or two-hundredth time, when that clock stopped." He indicated the timepiece facing him. "A fellow named Whittaker from the Space Medicine Research Station wound it up, shook it, got it going. Immediately afterward a brainwave hit him, kerplonk!" Picking up the clock, Bancroft opened its back, turned it toward his listener. "What do you see?" "Cogs and wheels." "Nothing else?" "Couple of coiled springs." "Are you sure that is all?" "All that matters," declared Kinrade, having no doubt. "Wrong, dead wrong," said Bancroft, positively, "You have made precisely the mistake we made with ships number one and two. We built giant metal clocks, fitted them with human cogs and wheels accurately designed for their purpose. Cogs and wheels of flesh and blood, chosen with , the same care as one would choose parts for a, fine watch. But the. clocks stopped. We had overlooked something that Whittaker suddenly thought of." "Well, what was it?" Bancroft smiled and said, "A little oil." "Oil?" exclaimed Kinrade, sitting up. "Our error was natural. In a technological age, we technicians tend to think we're the whole cheese. We aren't. Maybe we're a very considerable slice, but we are not the lot. Civilization is composed of others also, the housewife, the taxi driver, the dime store salesgirl, the postman, the hospital nurse, the corner cop. It would be a hell of a civilization built solely on boys pushing studs of computor-machines and without the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. That's a lesson some of us needed to learn." "You've got something," Kinrade agreed, "but I don't know what." "We had another problem in our laps," said Bancroft. "What sort of oil must you use for human cogs and wheels? Answer: human oil. What kind of individual specializes in being oil?" "And you dug up Bertelli?" "We did. His family has been oil for twenty generations. He is the present holder of a great tradition -- and internationally famous." "Never heard of him. I suppose he traveled with us under a false name?" "He went under his own." i# "I didn't recognize him," Kinrade persisted, "Neither did anyone else. So how can he be famous? Or did he have his face altered by plastic surgery?" "He changed it completely in one minute flat." Getting up, Bancroft lumbered to a filing cabinet, opened it, sought through several folders. Extracting a fullplate glossy photography, he slid it across the desk. "All he did to his face was wash it." Picking up the picture, Kinrade stared at the chalk-white features, the cone-shaped hat set rakishly On a high, false skull, the huge eyebrows arched in perpetual surprise, the red diamonds painted around the mournful eyes, the grotesque, bulbous nose, the crimson ear-to-ear mouth, the thick ruff of lace around the neck. "Coco!" "The twentieth Coco with which this world has been blessed," Bancroft confirmed. Kinrade had another long look. "May I keep this?" "Certainly. I can get a thousand more copies any time I ' want." Administration Building just in time to see the subject of his thoughts in hot pursuit of a ground-taxi. With a shapeless and hurriedly packed bag swinging wildly from one hand, Bertelli went along in exaggerated, loose .-jointed bounds with big boots rising waist-high, while his long neck protruded forward and his face bore a ludicrous expression of woe. Many a time the onlooker had been puzzled by the fleeting familiarity of one of Bertelli's poses or gestures. Now, knowing what he did know, he recognized instantly the circus jester's classic anxiety-gallop across a sawdust ring. To make it complete, Bertelli should have been casting frightened glances over one shoulder at a floating skeleton attached to him by a long cord. Bertelli caught up with the taxi, bestowed an inane smile, slung his bag inside and clambered after it. The taxi whirled away with twin spurts of vapor from its underbody jets. For a long minute, Kinrade stood looking absently at the poised spaceships and the sky. His mind was viewing the world as a gigantic stage on which every man, woman and child played a wonderful and necessary part. And holding the whole show together with laughter, exaggerating temper and hostility and conflict into absurdity, was the clown. If he'd had to assemble the crew, he couldn't have picked a better psychologist than Bertelli, IheUnptMiied be ( morally told -- i hints you ought to i i"W, Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of mutt's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men andwomen who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe l.U.S. J Scribe I.Q.S. J : San Jose, California ; Please send me the free book. The ; ; Mastery of Life , which explains how ; ; I may learn ro use my faculties and ; ; powers of mind. ! Name... -- ' t I '  Address   j j City  ! Zone... State  L i Cfte Rosicrucians NOVEMBER # GALAXY Science Fiction nove "; er ,h# Who knows whether the strange events of this story might not one day occur? This is the story of an expedition -- a strange and exciting expedition of one man and an army of women. He had come into the land of the women suddenly -- and without warning. Tall, bronzed, muscular, he stood out among their pale skins and meek spirits. , And when they learned of the land from which he had come -- the land they hadn't even known existed -- they had to follow him to it. One man and an army of women crossing the remnants of a post-atomic United States in search of the Unknown; it was an amazing trek. Miraculous things happened to the women. New emotions rose up to plague them. Once there was a near mutiny. Another time, seven of their number were killed. But it was when they reached the city in the sea that the strangest thing of all happened pellingly human story. Galaxy Science Editor Assistant Editor Art Director Production Manager Advertising Manager  Cover by Showing is published monthly bv Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions : ( # copies) S#. # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #?, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The, publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Isaac Asimov # by R. Bretnor # by Walter M. Miller, Jr. # by Robert Sheckley # by Robert E. Gilbert # by C. M. Kornbluth # by James E. Gunn I I I by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin #I Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Reg. U. S. Pat Off. statement that sound dies for good was disconcerting for a moment. It means we have to give up hope of eavesdropping on history, the basis of come fine stories. But great moments have a way of not being recognized by their contemporaries. I mean the truly great moments, when the course of mankind was actually changed. The melodramatic Ibnes produce suh thoughtful arias as, "On this momentous occasion, we owe an everlasting debtto the men who -- " and similar overevaluations.  Our era has undoubtedly had more stupendous developments per square minute than any other, which may account for our often jaded reaction to almost anything that happens. A great moment has to jut out like an island in time to be viewed with proper awe. But it isn't easy to do so when you're standing on the island. Supposing that we could recapture the voices of the past, what would we be likely to hear? I have a suspicion it might be something like this:  Adam awakening to find that Eve had been created from his rib: "Huh?"  Mankind's first giant step forward in his conquest of nature, the discovery of fire: "Ouch!"  Invention of the wheel, the basis of all engineering: "Get that squeaking thing out of here -- it's scaring the deer!"  The placing of the capstone on the Great Pyramid: "Well, one thing you got to admit, it gives a lot of shade."  Sinking of Atlantis: "Glad I didn't own any real estate out there."  Caesar's triumphal return to Rome: "Hey, that Helvetian babe ain't bad."  The first landing in the New World: "I'll bet I never get used to walking on the ground again."  Invention of movable type, foundation of universal literacy: "How do you get this ink off your hands?"  Defeat of the Aimada: "Look! Firewood!"  Invention of the telephone, bridge between the continents : "Speak up. I can't hear a word you're saying."  Discovery of radium, direct forerunner of atomic power: "Their back yard .is a mess with all that slag they dumped."  Invasion of Festung Europa : "Ah, nuts! I'm clean out of cigarettes!"  First A-bomb in the desert of New Mexico: "Sand in your hair, sand in your food -- " Of course it sounds absurd, but with what memorable words did you greet the many historic moments of the past few years? "I shall return !" was not exactly the emotion we dogfaces felt when we hit the beaches in the Pacific. In my case it was a distinct unhappiness with landing craft. But then I remember somebody wondering, "You think they have cows here?" 'and the thought of fresh milk became the most important thing in my life at the time. How many famous utterances do you suppose were made after the utterer first said, "There goes my last pair of clean socks," or, "As long as I have my health, what do I care if the stock market crashed?" No matter what the event, people generally talk like people instead of having an eye on the history books of the future. Excluding the birth of my son, I don't believe I was ever more stunned than the time I saw four rainbows at one time in a valley on Luzon. The whole squad paused and gaped, and "Gosh!" was the only printable aVved remark... The sad fact is that human languages are incapable of conveying really great emotion. F OR that matter, sustaining a sense of wonder indefinitely is impossible. Today it feels as if we've always had atomic fission, rockets, antibiotics and all the rest of our warehouse of marvels. As for the superficially disappointing reactions we'd hear if we tuned in on the past, they would actually be rewarding for their pure humanness. I'm waiting for somebody to protest, as the first ship takes off for the Moon, "With that thing spitting fire, I'm not allowed to smoke here?" That, not the blatting of politicians, will establish the great date. The quote children will have to memorize might be, "Man has placed his foot on the rung of the Universe," etc. But the genuine first remark on landing will more probably be, "Stop shoving! Think I want to break a leg this far from home?" He'd be right. Who would? And our colonists, after the excitement dies down and living on an alien world becomes a savage reality, will do a good deal more griping about being stuck out there, away from decent food, women and a place to spend money -- yes, in the order named -- than gabbing about their historic mission. What's more, so would you and I. The oratory comes later. The Martian Way It was junk they hunted, but enormously valuable and urgently needed junk that cost only bravery and the cheapest fuel... yet they were kept from collecting it by an even cheaper He! I short corridor between the only two rooms in the travel-head of the spaceship, Mario Esteban Rioz watched sourly as Ted Long adjusted the deo dials painstakingly. Long tried a touch clockwise, then a touch counter. The picture was lousy. Rioz knew it would stay lousy. They were too far from Earth and at a bad position facing the Sun. But then Long would not be expected to know that. Rioz remained standing in the doorway for an additional moment, head bent to clear the upper lintel, body turned half sidewise to fit the narrow opening. Then he jerked into the galley like a cork popping out of a bottle. 'What are you after?" he asked. "I thought I'd get Hilder," said Long. Rioz propped his rump on the corner of a table-shelf. He lifted a conical can of milk from the companion shelf just above his head. Its point popped under pressure. He swirled it gently as he waited for it to warm. "What for?" he said. He upended the cone and sucked noisiy. "Thought I'd listen." "I think it's a waste of power." Long looked up, frowning. "It's customary to allow free use of personal video sets." "Within reason," retorted Rioz. Rioz had the rangy body, the gaunt, cheek-sunken face that was almost the hallmark of the Martian Scavenger, those Spacers who patiently haunted the space routes between Earth and Mars. Pale blue eyes were set keenly in the brown, lined face which, in turn, stood darkly out against the white, surrounding syntho-fur that lined the upturned collar of his leathtic spacejacket. Long was altogether paler and softer. He bore some of the marks of the Grounder, although no secondgeneration Martian could be a Grounder in the sense that Earthmen were. His own collar was thrown back and his dark brown hair freely exposed. c "What do you call within reason?" demanded Long. Rioz's thin lips grew thinner. He said, "Considering that we're not even going to make expenses this trip, the way it looks, any power drain at all is outside reason." Long said, "If we're losing money, hadn't you better get back to your post? It's your watch." Rioz grunted and ran a thumb and forefinger over the stubble on his chin. He got up and trudged to the door, his soft, heavy boots muting the sound of his steps. He paused to look at the thermostat, then turned with a flare of fury. "I thought it was hot. Where do you think you are?" Long said, "Forty degrees isn't excessive." "For you it isn't, maybe. But this is space, not a heated office at the iron mines." Rioz swung the thermostat control down to minimum with a quick thumb movement. "Sun's warm enough." "The galley isn't on Sunside." "It'll percolate through, damn it." Rioz stepped through the door and Long stared after him for a long moment, then turned back to the video. He did not turn up the thermostat. The picture was still flickering badly, but it would have to do. Long folded a chair down out the wall. He leaned forward waiting through the formal announcement, the momentary pause before the slow dissolution of the curtain, the spotlight picking out the well-known bearded figure which grew as it was brought forward until it filled the screen. The voice, impressive even through the flutings and croakings induced by the electron miles, began: "Friends! My fellow-citizens of Earth -- " II the radio signal as he stepped into the pilot room. For one moment the palms of his hands grew clammy when it seemed to him that it was a radar pip; but that was only his guilt speaking. He should not have left the pilot room while on duty, theoretically, though all Scavengers did it. Still, it was the standard nightmare, this business of a strike turning up during just those five minutes when one knocked off for a quick coffee because it seemed certain that space was clear. And the nightmare had been known to happen, too. Rioz threw in the multi-scanner. It was a waste of power, but while he was' thinking about it, he might as well make sure. Space was clear except for the far distant echoes from the neighboring ships on the scavenging line. He hooked up the radio circuit, and the blond, long-nosed head of Richard Swenson, co-pilot of the next ship on the Marsward side, filled it. "Hey, Mario," said Swenson. "Hi. What's new?" There was a second and a fraction of pause between that and Swenson's next comment, since the speed of electromagnetic radiation is not infinite. "What a day I've had." "Something happened?" Rioz asked. "I had a strike." "Well, good." "Sure, if I'd roped it in," said Swenson morosely. "What happened?" "Damn it, I headed in the wrong direction." Rioz knew better than to laugh. He said, "How did you do that?" "It wasn't my fault. The trouble was the shell was moving way out of the ecliptic. Can you imagine the stupidity of a pilot that can't work the release maneuver decently? How was I to know? I got the distance of the shell and let it go at that. I just assumed its orbit was in the usual trajectory family. Wouldn't you? I started along what I thought was a good line of intersection and it was five minutes before I noticed the 'distance was still going up. The pips were taking their sweet time returning. So then I took the angular projections of the thing, and it was too late to catch up with it." "Any of the other boys getting it?" "No. It's way out of the ecliptic and'll keep on going forever. That's not what bothers me so much. It was only an inner shell. But I hate to tell you how many tons of propulsion I wasted getting up speed and then getting back to station. You should have heard Canute." Canute was Richard Swenson's brother and partner. "Mad, huh?" said Rioz. "Mad? Like to have killed me! But then we've been out five months now and it's getting kind of sticky. You know." "I know." "How are you doing, Mario?" Rioz made a spitting gesture. "Aflbut that much this trip. Two shells in the last two weeks and I had to chase each one for six hours." "Big ones?" "Are you kidding? I could have scaled them down to Phobos by hand. This is the worst trip I've ever had." "How much longer are you staying?" "For my, part, we can quit tomorrow. We've only been out two months and it's got so I'm chewing Long out all the time." There was a pause over and above the electromagnetic lag. Swenson said, "What's he like, anyway? Long, I mean." Rioz looked over his shoulder. He could hear the soft, crackly mutter of the video in the galley. "I can't make him out. He says to me about a week after the start of the trip, 'Mario, why are you a Scavenger?' I just look at him and say, 'To make a living. Why do you suppose?' I mean, what the hell kind of a question is that? Why is anyone a Scavenger? "Anyway, he says, 'That's not it, Mario.' He's telling me, you see. He says, 'You're a Scavenger because this is part of the Martian way.' " Swenson said, "And what did he mean by that?" Rioz shrugged. "I never asked him. Right now he's sitting in there listening to the ultra-microwave from Earth. He's listening to some Grounder called Hilder." "Hilder? A Grounder politician, an Assemblyman or something, isn't he?" "That's right. At least, I think that's right. Long is always doing things like that. He brought about fifteen pounds of books with him. all about Earth. Just plain dead weight, you know." "Well, he's your partner. And talking about partners, I think I'll get back on the job. If I rqiss another strike, there'll be murder around here." He was gone and Rioz leaned back. He watched the even green line that was the pulse-scanner. He tried the multi-scanner a moment. Space was still clear. spell is always worse if the Scavengers all about you are pulling in shell after shell; if the shells go spiraling down to the Phobos scrap forges with everyone's brand welded on except your own. Then. too. he had managed to work off some of his resentment toward Long. It was a mistake, teaming up with Long. It was always a mistake to team up with a tenderfoot. They thought what you wanted was conversation, especially Long, with his eternal theories about Mars and its great new role in human progress. That was the way he said it -- Human Progress; the Martian Way; the New Creative Minority. And all the time what Rioz wanted wasn't talk, but a strike, a few shells to call their own. At that, he hadn't any choice, really. Long was pretty well known down on Mars and made good pay as a mining engineer. He was a friend of Commissioner Sankov and he'd been out on one or two short scavenging missions before. You can't turn a fellow down flat before a tryout, even though it did look funny. Why shpuld a mining engineer with a comfortable job and good money want to muck around in space? Rioz never asked Long that question. Scavenger partners are forced too closely together to make curiosity desirable. or sometimes even safe. But Long talked so much that he answered the question. "I had to come out here. Mario," he said. "The future of Mars isn't in the mines; it's in space." Rioz wondered how it would be to try a trip alone. Everyone said it was impossible. Even discounting lost opportunities when one man had to go off watch to sleep or attend to other things, it was well known that one man alone in space would become intolerably depressed in a relatively short while. Taking a partner along made a six-month trip possible. A regular crew would be better, but no Scavenger could make money on a ship large enough to carry one. The capital it would take in propulsion alone! Even two didn't find it exactly fun in space. Usually, you had to change partners each trip and you could stay out longer with some than with others. Look at Richard and Canute Swenson. They teamed up every five or six trips because they were brothers. And yet whenever they did. it was a case of constantly mount ing tension and antagonism after the first week. Oh, well. Space was clear. Rioz would feel a little better if he went back in the galley and smoothed down some of the bickering with Long. He might as well show he was an old spacehand who took the irritations of space as they came. He stood up, walked the three steps necessary to reach the short, narrow corridor that tied together the two rooms of the spaceship. Ill doorway for a moment, watching. Long was intent on the flickering screen. Ji?ioz said, gruffly, "I'm shoving up the thermostat. It's all right -- we can spare the power." Long nodded. "If you like." Rioz took a hesitant step forward. Space was clear, so to hell with sitting and looking at a blank, green, pipless line. He said, "What's the Grounder been talking about?" "History of space travel, mostly. Old stuff, but he's doing it well. He's giving the whole works -- color cartoons, trick photography, stills from old films, everything." As if to illustrate Long's remarks, the bearded figure faded out of view, and a cross-sectional view of a spaceship flitted onto the screen. Hilder's voice continued, pointing out features of interest that appeared in schematic color. The communications system of the ship outlined itself irf red as he talked about it, the storerooms, the proton micro-pile drive, the cybernetic circuits -- Then Hilder was back on the screen. "But this is only the travel-head of the ship. What moves it? What gets it off the Earth?" Everyone knew what moved a spaceship, but Hilder's voice was like a drug. He made spaceship propulsion sound like the secret of the ages, like an ultimate revelation. Even Rioz felt a slight 'tingling of suspense, though he had spent the greater part of his life aboard ship. Hilder went on. "Scientists call it different names. They call it the Law of Action and Reaction. Sometimes they call it Newton's Third Law. Sometimes they call it Conservation of Momentum. But we don't have to call it any name. We can just use our common sense. When we swim, we push water backward and move forward ourselves. When we walk, we push back against the ground and move forward. When we fly a gyro-flivver, we push air backward and move forward. "Nothing can move forward unless something els moves ; backward. It's the old principle of 'You can't get something for nothing.' "Now imagine a spaceship that weighs a hundred thousand tons lifting off Earth. To do that, something else must be moved downward. Since a spaceship is extremely heavy, a great deal of material must b moved downward. So much material, in fact, that there is no place to keep it all aboard ship. A special compartment must be built behind the ship to hold it." Again Hilder faded put and the ship returned. It shrank and a truncated cone appeared behind it. In bright yellow, words appeared within it: material to be "But now," said Hilder, "the total weight of the ship is much grhter. You need still more propulsion and still more." The ship shrank enormously to add on another larger shell and still another immense one. The ship proper, the travel-head, was a little dot on the screen, a glowing red dot. Rioz said. "Hell, this is kindergarten stuff." "Not to the people he's speaking to, Mario," replied Long. "Earth isn't Mars. There must be never even seen a spaceship; don't know the first thing about it." Hilder was saying. "When the material inside the biggest shell is used up, the shell is detached. It's thrown away, too." The outermost shell came loose, wobbled about the screen. "Then the second one goes," said Hilder, "and then, if the trip is a long one, the last is ejected." The ship was just a red dot now, with three shells shifting and moving, lost in space. Hilder said. "These shells represent a hundred thousand tons of tungsten, magnesium, aluminum, and steel. They are gone forever from Earth. Mars is ringed by scavengers, waiting along the routes of space travel, waiting for the cast-off shells, netting and branding them, saving them for Mars. Not one cent of payment reaches Earth for them. They are salvage. They belong to the ship that finds them." vestment and our lives. If we don't pick them up, no one gets them. What loss is that to Earth?" "Look," said Long, "he's fnn talking about nothing but the drain that Mars, Venus and the Moon put on Earth. This is just another item of loss." "They'll get their return. We're mining more iron every year." "And most of it goes right back into Mars. If you can  believe his figures. Earth has invested Mars and received back about lars into the Moon and gotten back a little over twenty-five billion dollars of magnesium, titanium and assorted light metals. It's and gotten back nothing. And that's what the taxpayers of Earth are really interested in -- tax money out; nothing in." The screen was filled, as he spoke, with diagrams of the scavengers on the route to Mars; little, grinning caricatures of ships, reaching out wiry, tenuous arms that groped for the tumbling, empty shells, seizing and snaking them in, branding them mars property in glowing letters, then scaling them down to Phobos. Then it was Hilder again. "They tell us eventually they will return it all to us. Eventually! Once they are a going concern! We don't know when that will be. A century from now? A thousand Let's take them at their word. Some day they will give us back all our metals. Some day they will grow their own food, use their own power, live their own lives. "But one thing they can never years. Water! "Mars has only a trickle of water because it is too small. Venus has no water at all because it is too hot. The Moon has none because it is too hot and too small. So Earth must supply not only drinking water and washing water for the Spacers, water to run their industries, water for the hydroponic factories they claim to be setting up -- but even water tons. "What is the propulsive force that spaceships use? What is it they throw out behind so that they can accelerate forward? Once it was the gases generated from explosives. That was very expensive. Then the proton micropile was invented -- a cheap power source that could heat up any liquid until it was a gas under tremendous pressure. What is the cheapest and most plentiful liquid available? Why, water, of course. "Each spaceship leaves Earth not pounds, tons -- of water, for the sole purpose of driving it into space so that it may speed up or slow down. "Our ancestors burned the oil of Earth madly and wilfully. They destroyed its coal recklessly. We despise and condemn them for that, but at least they had this excuse -- they thought that when the need arose, substitutes would be found. And they were right. We have our plankton farms and our proton micro-piles. "But there is no substitute for water. None! There never can be. And when our descendants view the desert we will have made of Earth, what excuse will they find for us? When the droughts come and grow -- " turned off the set. He said, "That bothers me. The damn fool is deliberately -- What's the matter?" Rioz had risen uneasily to his feet. "I ought to be watching the pips." "The hell with the pips." Long got up likewise, followed Rioz through the narrow corridor and stood just inside the pilot room. "If Hilder carries this through, if he's got the guts to make a real issue out of it -- Wow!" He had seen it, too. The pip was a Class A, racing after the outgoing signal like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit. Rioz was babbling, "Space was clear, I tell you, clear. For Mars' sake. Ted, don't just freeze on me. See if you can spot it visually" Rioz was working speedily and with an efficiency that was the result of nearly twenty years of scavenging. He had the distance in two minutes. Then, remembering Swenson's experience, he measured the angle of declination and the radial velocity as well. He yelled at Long, "One point seven six radians. You can't miss it. man." Long held his breath as he adjusted the vernier. "It's only half a radian off the Sun. It'll only be crescent-lit." He increased magnification as rapidly as he dared, watching for the one "star" that changed position and grew to have a form, revealing itself to be no star. "I'm starting, anyway," said Rioz. "We can't wait." "I've got it. I've got it." Magnification was still too small to give it a definite shape, but the dot Long watched was brightening and dimming rhythmically, as the shell rotated and caught sunlight on cross-sections of cyclically different sizes. "Hold on." The first of many fine spurts of steam squirted out of the proper vents, leaving long trails of micro-crystals of ice, gleaming mistily in the pale beams of the distant Sun. They thinned out for a hundred miles or more. One spurt, then another, then another, as the Scavenger ship moved out of its stable trajectory and took up a course tangential to that of the shell. "It's moving like a comet at perihelion!" yelled Rioz. "Those damned Grounder pilots knock the shells off that way on purpose. I'd like to -- " He swore his anger in a frustrated frenzy as he kicked steam backward and backward recklessly. till the hydraulic cushioning of his chair had soughed back a full foot and Long had found himself all but unable to maintain his grip on the guard rail. "Have a heart." he begged. But Rioz had his eye on the pips. "If you can't take it. man. stay on Mars!" The steam spurts continued to boom distantly. The radio came to life. Long managed to lean forward through what seemed like molasses and closed contact. It was Swenson, eyes glaring. Swenson yelled. "Where the helhmrc you guys going? You'll be in my sector in. ten seconds." Rioz said. "I'm chasing a shell." "In my sector?" "It started in mine and you're not in position to get it. Shut off that radio. Ted." HE ship thundered through space, a thunder that could be heard only within the hull. And then Rioz cut the engines in stages large enough to make Long flail forward. The sudden silence was more ear-shattering than the noise that had preceded it. Rioz said. "All right. Let me have the 'scope." They both watched. The shell was a definite truncated cone now. tumbling with slow solemnity as it passed along among the stars. "It's a Class A shell, all right." said Rioz, with satisfaction. A giant among shells, he thought. It would put them into the black. Long said. "We've got another pip on the scanner. I think it's Swenson taking after us." Rioz scarcely gave it a glance. "He won't catch us." The shell grew larger still, Rioz's hands were on the harpoon lever. He waited, adjusted the angle microscopically twice, played out the length allotment. Then he yanked, tripping the release. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a metal mesh cable snaked out onto the visiplate, moving toward the shell like a striking cobra. It made contact, but it did not hold. If it had been designed to hold, it would have snapped instantly like a cobweb stfand. The shell was turning with a rotational momentum amounting to thousands of tons. What the cable did do was to set up a powerful magnetic field that acted as a brake on the shell. Another cable and another lashed out. Rioz sent them out in an almost heedless expenditure of energy. "I'll get this one! By Mars. I'll get this one!" With some two dozen cables stretching between ship and shell, he desisted. The shell's rotational energy, converted by braking into heat, had raised its temperature to a point where its radiation could be picked up by the ship's meters. Long said. "Do you want me to put our brand on?" "Suits me. But you don't have to, if you don't want to. It's my watch." "I don't mind." Long clambered into his suit and went out the lock. It was the surest sign of his newness to the game that he could count the number of times he had been out in space in a suit. This was the fifth time. He went out along the nearest cable, hand over hand, feeling the vibration of the mesh against the metal of his mitten. He burned their serial number in the smooth metal of the shell. There was nothing to oxidize the steel in the emptiness of space. It simply melted and vaporized, condensing some feet away from the energy beam, turning the surface it touched into a gray, powdery dullness. Long swung back toward the ship. Inside again, he took off his helmet, white and thick with frost that collected as soon as he had entered. The first thing he heard was Swenson's voice coming over the radio in thick, almost unrecognizable rage: " -- straight to the Commissioner. Damn it, there are rules to this game!" Rioz sat back, unbothered. "Look, it hit my sector. I was late spotting it and I chased it into yours. You couldn't have gotten it with Mars for a backstop. That's all there is to it -- You back, Long?" He cut contact. The signal button raged at him. but he paid no attention. "He's going to the Commissioner?" Long asked. "Not a chance. He just goes on like that because it breaks the monotony. He doesn't mean anything by it. He knows it's our shell. And how do you like that hunk of stuff, Ted?" "Pretty good." "Pretty good? It's terrific! Hold on. I'm setting it swinging." The side jets spat steam and the ship started a slow rotation about the shell. The shell followed it. In thirty minutes, they were a gigantic bolo spinning in emptiness. Long checked the Ephemeris for the position of Deimos. At a precisely calculated moment, the cables released their magnetic field and the shell went streaking off tangentially in a trajectory that would, in a day or co, bring it within pronging distance of the shellstores on the Martian satellite. Rioz watched it go. He felt good. He turned to Long. "This is one fine da"y for us." "What about Hilder's speech?" asked Long. "What? Who? Oh, that. Listen, if I had to worry about everything some damned Grounder said, I'd never get any sleep. Forget it." "I don't think we should forget it." "You're nuts. Don't bother me about it, will you? Get some sleep instead." IV and height of the city's main thoroughfare exhilarating. It had been two months since the Commissioner had declared a moratorium on scavenging and had pulled all ships out of space, but this feeling of a stretchedout Long. Even the thought that the moratorium was called pending a decision on the part of Earth to enforce its new insistence on water economy, by deciding upon a ration limit for scavenging, did not cast him entirely down. The roof of the avenue was painted a luminous light blue, perhaps as an old-fashioned imitation of Earth's sky. Ted wasn't sure. The walls were lit with the store windows that pierced it. Off in the distance, over the hum of traffic and the sluffing noise of people's feet passing him, he could hear the intermittent blasting as new channels were being bored into Mars' crust. All his life he remembered such blastings. The ground he walked on had been part of solid unbroken rock when he was born. The city was growing and would keep on growing -- if Earth would only let it. He turned off at a cross-street, lit, shop windows giving way to apartment houses, each with its row of lights along the front facade. Shoppers and traffic gave way to slower-paced individuals and to squawling youngsters who had as yet evaded the maternal summons to the evening meal. At the last minute, Long remembered the social amenities and stopped off at a corner water store. He passed over his canteen. "Fill 'er up." The plump storekeeper unscrewed the cap, cocked an eye into the opening. He shook it a little and let it gurgle. "Not much left," he said cheerfully. "No," agreed Long. The storekeeper trickled water in, holding the neck of the canteen close to the hose tip to avoid spillage. The volume gauge whirred. He screwed the cap back on. Long passed over the coins and took his canteen. It clanked against his hip now with a pleasing heaviness. It would never do to a visit a family without a full canteen. Among the boys, it didn't matter. Not as much, anyway. He entered the hallway of number #, climbed a short flight of stairs, and paused with his thumb on the signal. The sound of voices could be heard quite plainly. One was a woman's voice, somewhat shrill. "It's all right for you to have your Scavenger friends here, isn't it? I'm supposed to be thankful you manage to get home two months a year. Oh, it's quite enough that you spend a day or two with me. After that, it's the Scavengers again." "I've been home for a long time now," said a male voice, "and this is business. For Mars' sake, let up, Dora. They'll be here soon." Long decided to wait a moment before signaling. It might give them a chance to hit a more neutral topic. "What do I care if they come?" retorted Dora. "Let them hear me. And I'd just as soon the Commissioner kept the moratorium on permanently. You hear me?" "And what would we live on?" came the male voice, hotly. "You tell me that." "I'Tl tell you. You can make a decent, honorable living right here on Mars, just like everybody else. I'm the only one in this apartment house that's a Scavenger widow. That's what I am -- a widow. I'm worse than a widow, because if I were a widow, I'd at least have a chance to marry someone else -- What did you say?" "Nothing. Nothing at all." "Oh, I know what you said. Now listen here, Dick Swenson -- " "I only said," cried Swenson, "that now I know why Scavengers usually don't marry." "You shouldn't have, either. I'm tired of having every person in the neighborhood pity me and smirk and ask when you're coming home. Other people can be mining engineers and administrators and even tunnelborers. At least tunnel-borers' wives have a decent home-life and their children don't grow up like vagabonds. Peter might as well not have a father -- " A thin boy-soprano voice made its way through the door. It was somewhat more distant, as though it were in another room. "Hey, Mom, what's a vagabond?" Dora's voice rose a notch. "Peter! You keep your mind on your homework." Swenson said, in a low voice, "It's not right to talk this way in front of the kid. What kind of notions will he get about me?" "Stay home then and teach him better notions." Peter's voice called out again. "Hey, Mom, I'm going to be a Scavenger when I. grow up." Footsteps sounded rapidly. There was a momentary hiatus in the sounds, then a piercing, "Mom! Hey, Mom! Leggo my ear! What did I do?" and a snuffling silence. Long seized the chance. He worked the signal vigorously.  brushing down his hair with both hands. "Hello, Ted," he said, in a subdued voice. Then loudly, "Ted's here, .Dora. Where's Mario, Ted?" Long said, "He'll be here in a while." Dora came .bustling out of the next room, a small, dark woman with a pinched nose, and hair, just beginning to show touches of gray, combed off the forehead. "Hello, Ted. Have you eaten?" "Quite well, thanks. I haven't interrupted you, have I?" "Not at all. We finished ages ago. Would you like some coffee?" "I think so." Ted unslung his canteen and offered it. "Oh, goodness, that's all right. We've plenty of water." "I insist." "Well, then -- " Back into the kitchen she went. Through the swinging door. Long caught a glimpse of dishes sitting in Secoterg, the "waterless cleaner that soaks up and absorbs grease and dirt in a twinkling. One ounce of water will rinse eight square feet of dish surface clean as clean. Buy Secoterg. Secoterg just cleans it right, makes your dishes shiny bright, does away with water waste -- " The tune started whining through his mind and Long crushed it with speech. He said, "How's Pete?" "Fine, fine. The kid's in the fourth grade now. You know, I don't get to see him much. Well, sir, when I came back last time, he looked at me and said -- " It went on for a while and wasn't too bad as bright-sayingsof bright children as told by-dull-parents go. The door signal burped and Mario Rioz came in, frowning and fed. Swenson stepped to him quickly. "Listen, don't say anything about shell-snaring. Dora still remembers the time you fingered a Class A shell out of my territory and she's in one of her moods now." "Who the hell wants to talk about shells?" Rioz slung off a fur-lined jacket, threw it over the back of the chair, and sat down. Dora came through the swinging door, viewed the newcomer with a synthetic smile and said, "Hello, Mario. Coffee for you, too?" "Yeah," he said, reaching automatically for his canteen. "Just use some more of my water, Dora," said Long, quickly. "He'll owe it to me." "Yeah," said Rioz. 'What's wrong. Mario?" asked Long. Rioz said, heavily, "Go on. Say you told me so. A year ago, when Hilder made that speech, you told me so. Say it." Long shrugged. Rioz said, "They've set up the quota. Fifteen minutes ago, the news came out." "Well?" "Fifty thousand tons of water per trip." "What?" yelled Swenson, burning. "You can't get off Mars with fifty thousand!" "That's the figure. It's a deliberate piece of gutting. No more scavenging." and set it down all around. "What's all this about ho more scavenging?" She sat down very firmly and Swenson looked helpless. "It seems," said Long, "that they're rationing us at fifty thousand tons and that means we can't make any more trips." "Well, what of it?" Dora sipped her coffee and smiled gaily. "If you want my opinion, it's a good thing. It's time all you Scavengers found yourselves a nice, steady job here on Mars. I mean it. It's no life to be running all over space -- " "Please, Dora," said Swenson. Rioz came close to a snort. Dora raised her eyebrows. "I'm just giving my opinions." Long said, "Please feel free to do so. But I would like to say something. Fifty thousand is just a detail. We know that Earth -- or at least Hilder's party -- wants to make political capital out of a campaign for water economy, so we're in a bad hole. We'ye got to get water somehow, or they'll shut us down altogether, right?" "Well, sure," said Swenson. "But the question is how, right?" "If it's only getting water." said Rioz, in a sudden gush of words, "there's only one thing to do and you know it. If the Grounders won't give us water, we'll take it. The water doesn't belong to them just because their fathers and grandfathers were too damned sickyellow ever to leave their fat planet. Water belongs to people wherever they are. We're people and the water's ours, too. We have a right to it." "How do you propose taking it?" asked Long. "Easy! They've got oceans of water on Earth. They can't post a guard over every square mile. We can sink down on the night side of the planet any time we want, fill our shells, then get away. How can they stop us?" "In half a dozen ways, Mario. How do you spot shells in space up to distances of a hundred thousand miles? One thin metal shell in all that space. How? By radar. Do you think there's no radar on Earth? Do you think that if Earth ever gets the notion we're engaged in waterlegging, it won't be simple for them to set up a radar network to spot ships coming in from space?" Dora broke in, indignantly. "I'll tell you one thing, Mario Rioz. My husband isn't going to be part of any raid to get water to keep up his scavenging with." "It isn't just scavenging,' said Mario. "Next they'll be cutting down on everything else. We've got to stop them now." "But we don't need their water, anyway," said Dora. "We're not the Moon or Venus. We pipe enough water down from the polar caps for all we need. We have a water tap right in this apartment. There's one in every apartment on this block." Long said, "Home use is the smallest part of it. The mines use water. And what do we do about the hydroponic tanks?" "That's right," said Swenson. "What about the  hydroponic tanks, Dora? They've got to have water and it's about time we arranged to grow our own fresh food instead of having to live on the condensed crud they ship us from Earth." "Listen to him," said Dora, scornfully. "What do you know about fresh food? You've never eaten any." "I've eaten more than you think. Do you remember those carrots I picked up once?" "Well, what was so wonderful about them? If you ask me, good baked protomeal is much better. And healthier, too. It just seems to be the fashion now to be talking fresh vegetables, because they're increasing taxes for these hydroponics. Besides, all this will blow over." Not by itself, anyway. Hilder will probably be the next Coordinator and then things may really get bad. If they cut. down on food shipments, too -- " "Well, then." shouted Rioz. "what do we do? I still cay take it! Take the water!" "And I say we can't do that. Mario. Don't you see that what you're suggesting is the Earth way, the Grounder way? You're trying to hold on to the umbilical cord that ties Mars to Earth. Can't you get away from that? Can't you sre the Martian way?" "No, I can't. Siippose you tell me." "I will, if you'll listen. When we think about the Solar System, what do we think about? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon. Mars, Phobos, and Deimos. There you are -- seven bodies, that's all. But that doesn't represent one per cnt of the Solar System. We Martians .are right at the edge of the other ninety-nine per cent. Out there, farther from the Sun, there's unbelievable amounts of water!" The others stared. Swenson said, uncertainly, "You mean the layers of ice on Jupiter and Saturn?" "Not that specifically, but it is water, you'll admit. A thousand-mile-thick layer of water is a lot of water." "But it's all covered up with layers of ammonia or -- or something, isn't it?" asked Swenson. "Besides, we can't land on the major planets." "I know that," said Long, "but I haven't said that was the answer. The major planets aren't the only objects out there. What about the asteroids and the satellites? Vesta is a two-hundredmile-diameter asteroid that's hardly more than a chunk of ice. One of the moons of Saturn is mostly ice. How about that?" Rioz said, "Haven't you ever been in space, Ted?" "You know I have. Why do you ask?" "Sure, I know you have, but you still talk like a Grounder. Have you thought of the distances involved? The average asteroid is a hundred twenty million miles from Mars at the closest. That's twice the VenusMars hop and you know that hardly any liners do even that in one jump. They usually stop off at Earth or the Moon. After all, how long do you expect anyone to stay in space, man?" "I don't know. What's your limit?" . "You know the limit. You don't have to ask me. It's six months. That's handbook data. After six months, if you're still in space, ypu're psychotherapy meat. Right, Dick?" Swenson nodded. "And that's just the asteroids," Rioz went on. "From Mars to Jupiter is three hundred thirty anyone handle that kind of distance? Suppose you hit standard velocity or to make it even, say you get up to a good two hundred kilomiles an hour. It would take you -- let's see, allowing time for acceleration and deceleration -- about six or seven months to get to Jupiter and nearly a year to get to Saturn, Of course, you miles an hour, theoretically, but where would you get the water to do that?" "Gee," said a small voice, attached to a srhutty nose and round eyes, "Saturn!" Dora whirled in her chair. "Peter, march right back into your room!" "Aw. Ma." "Don't 'aw, Ma' me." She began to get out of the chair, and Peter scuttled away. Swenson said, "Say, Dora, why don't you keep him company for a while? It's hard to keep his mind on homework if we're all out here talking." Dora sniffed obstinately and stayed put, "I'll sit right here until I find out what Ted Long is thinking of. I tell you right now I don't like the sound of it."  "Well, never mind Jupiter and Saturn. I'm sure Ted isn't figuring on that. But what about Vesta? We could make it in ten or twelve weeks there and the same back. And two hundred miles in diameter. That's four "So what?" said Rioz. "What do we do on Vesta? Quarry the ice? Set up mining machinery? Say, do you know how long that would take?" Long said, "I'm talking about Saturn, not Vesta." Rioz addressed an unseen audience. "I tell him seven hundred talking." "All right," said Long, "suppose you tell me how you know we can only stay in space six months, Mario?" "It's common knowledge, damn it." "Because it's in the Handbook of Space Flight. It's data compiled by Earth scientists from experience with Earth pilots and spacemen. You're still thinking Grounder style. You won't think the Martian way." "A Martian may be a Martian, but he's still a man." "But how can you be so blind? How many times have you fellows been out for over six months without a break?" Rioz said, "That's different.'  "Because you're Martians? Because you're professional Scavengers?" "No. Because we're not on a flight. We can put back for Mars any time we want to." "But you don't want to. That's my point. Earthmen have tremendous ships with libraries of films, with a crew of fifteen plus passengers. Still, they can only stay out six months maximum. Martian Scavengers have a two room ship with only one partner. But we can stick it out more than six months." want to stay in a ship for a year and go to Saturn." "Why not, Dora?" said Long. "We can do it. Don't you see we can? Earthmen can't. They've got a real world. They've got open sky and fresh food, all the air and water they want. Getting into a ship is a terrible change for them. More than six months is too much for them for that very reason. Martians are different. We've been living on a ship our entire lives. "That's all Mars is -- a ship. It's just a big ship forty-five hundred miles across with one tiny room in it occupied by fifty thousand people. It's closed in like a ship. We breathe packaged air and drink packaged water which we repurify over and over. We eat the same food-rations we eat aboard ship. When we get into a ship, it's the same thing we've known all our lives. We can stand it for a lot more than a year if we have to." Dora said, "Dick, too?" "We all can." "Well, Dick can't. It's all very well for you, Ted Long, and this shell-stealer here, this Mario, to talk about jaunting off for a year. You're not married. Dick is. He has a wife and he has a child and that's enough for him. He can just get a regular job right here on Mars. Why, my goodness, suppose you go to Saturn and find there's no water there. How'll you get back? Even if you had water left, you'd be out of food. It's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of." "No. Now listen." said Long, tightly. "I've thought this thing out. I've talked to Commissioner Sankov and he'll help. But we've got to have ships and men. I can't get them. The men won't listen to me. I'm green. You two are known and respected. You're veterans. If you back me, even if you don't go yourselves, if you'll just help me sell this thing to the rest, get volunteers -- " "First," said Rioz, grumpily, "you'll have to do a lot more explaining. Once we get to Saturn, where's the water?" "That's the beauty of it," said Long. "That's why it's got to be Saturn. The water there is just floating around in space for the taking." V   come to Mars, there was no such thing as a native Martian. Now there were two-hundred-odd babies whose grandfathers had been born on Mars -- natives in the third generation. When he had come as a boy in his teens, Mars had been scarcely more than a huddle of grounded spaceships connected by sealed underground tunnels. Through the years, he had seen buildings grow and burrow widely, thrusting blunt snouts up into the thin, unbreathable atmosphere. He had seen huge storage depots spring up into which spaceships and their loads could be swallowed whole. He had seen the mines grow from nothing to a huge gouge in the Martian crust, while the population of Mars grew from fifty to fifty thousand. It made him feel old, these long memories -- they and the even dimmer memories induced by the presence of this Earthman before him. His visitor brought up those long-forgotten scraps of thought about a soft-warm world that was as kind and gentle to mankind as the mother's womb. The Earthman seemed fresh from that womb. Not very tall, not very lean; in fact, distinctly plump. Dark hair with a neat little wave in it, a neat little mustache and neatly scrubbed skin. His clothing was right in style and as fresh and neatly turned as plastek could be. Sankov's own clothes were of Martian manufacture, serviceable and clean, but many years behind the times. His face was craggy and lined, his hair was pure white and his Adam's apple wobbled when he talked. The Earthman was Myron Digby, member of Earth's General Assembly. Sankov was Martian Commissioner. Sankov said, "This all hits us hard, Assemblyman." "It's hit most of us hard, too. Commissioner." "Uh-huh. Can't honestly say then that I can make it out. Of course, you understand, I don't make out that I can understand Earth ways, for all that I was born there. Mars is a hard place to live, Assemblyman, and you have to understand that. It takes a lot of shipping space just to bring us food, water, and raw materials so we can live. There's not much room left for books and news-films. Even video programs can't reach Mars, except for about a month when Earth is in conjunction, and even then nobody has much time to listen. "My office gets a weekly summary film from Planetary Press. Generally, I don't have time to pay attention to it. Maybe you'd call us provincial, and you'd be right. When something like this happens, all we can do is kind of helplessly look at each other." Digby said, slowly, "You can't mean that your people on Mars haven't heard of Hilder's antiWaster campaign." "No, can't exactly say that. There's a young Scavenger, son of a good friend of mine who died in space -- " Sankov scratched the side of his neck doubtfully -- "who makes a hobby out of reading up on Earth history and things like that. He catches video broadcasts when he's out in space and he listened to this man Hilder. Near as I can make out, that was the first talk Hilder made about Wasters. "Jhe young fellow came to me with that. Naturally, I didn't take him very serious. I kept an eye on the .Planetary Press films for a while after that, but there wasn't much mention of Hilder and what there was made him out to look pretty funny." "Yes, Commissioner," said Digby, "it all seemed quite a joke when it started."  of long legs to one side of his desk and crossed them at the ankles. "Seems to me it's still pretty much of a joke. What's his argument? We're using up water. Has he tried looking at some figures? I got them all here. Had them brought to me when this committee arrived. "Seems that Earth has four water in its oceans and each cubic mile weighs four and a half billion tons. That's a lot of water. Now we use some of that heap in space flight. Most of the thrust is inside Earth's gravitational field, and that means the water thrown out finds its way back to the oceans. Hilder doesn't figure tons of water is used up per flight, he's a liar. It's less than a hundred thousand tons. "Suppose, now, we have fifty thousand flights a year. We don't, of course; not even fifteen hundred. But let's say there are fifty thousand. I figura there's going to be considerable expansion as time goes on. With fifty thousand flights, one cubic mile of water would be lost to space each year. That means that in a million years Earth would lose onequarter of one per cent of its total water supply!" Digby spread his hands, palms upward, and let them drop. "Commissioner, Interplanetary Alloys has used figures like that in their campaign against Hilder, but you can't fight a tremendous, emotion-filled drive with cold mathematics. This man Hilder has invented a name, 'Wasters.' Slowly, he has built this name up into a gigantic conspiracy; a gang of brutal profit-seeking wretches raping Earth for their own immediate benefit. "He has accused the government of being riddled with them, the Assembly of being dominated by them, the press of being owned by them. None of this, unfortunately, seems ridiculous to the average man. He knows all too well what selfish men can do to Earth's resources. He knows what happened to Earth's oil during the Time of Troubles, for instance, and the way topsoil was ruined. "When a farmer experiences a drought, he doesn't care that the amount of water lost in space flight isn't a droplet in a fog as far as Earth's overall water supply is concerned. Hilder has given him something to blame and that's the strongest possible consolation for disaster. He isn't going to give that up for a diet of figures." Sankov said, "That's where I get puzzled. Maybe it's because I don't know how things work on Earth, but it seems to me that there aren't just droughty farmers there. As near as I could make out from the news summaries, these Hilder people are a minority. Why is it Earth goes along with a few farmers and some crackpots that egg them on?" "Because, Commissioner, there are such things as worried human beings. The steel industry sees that an era of space flight will stress increasingly the light nonferrous alloys. The various miners' unions worry about extraterrestrial competition. Any Earthman who can't get aluminum to Ijjuild a pre-fab is certain that it is because the aluminum is going to Mars. I know a professor of archaeology who's an anti-Waster because he can't get a government grant to cover his excavations. He's convinced that all government money is going into rocketry research and space medicine and he resents it." Sankov said, "That doesn't sound like Earth people are much different from us here on Mars. But what about the General Assembly? Why do they have to go along with Hilder?" isn't pleasant to explain. Hilder introduced this bill to set up a committee to investigate waste in space flight. Maybe threefourths or more of the General Assembly was against such an investigation as an intolerable and useless extension of bureaucracy -- which it is. But then how could any legislator be against a mere investigation of waste? It would sound as though he had something to fear or to conceal. It would sound as though he were himself profiting from waste. Hilder is not in the least afraid of making such accusations, and whether true or not, they would be a powerful factor with the voters in the next election. The bill passed. "And then there came the question of appointing the members of the committee. Those who were against Hilder shied away from membership, which would have meant decisions that would be continually embarrassing. Remaining on the sidelines would make that one that much less a target for Hilder. The result is that I am the only member of the committee who is outspokenly anti-Hilder and it may cost me re-ection." Sankov said, "I'd be sorry to see that, Assemblyman. It looks as though Mars didn't have as many friends as we thought we had. We wouldn't like to lose one. But if Hilder wins out, what's he after, anyway?" "I should think," said Digby. "that that is obvious. He wants to be the next Global Coordinator." "Think he'll make it?" "If nothing hapjjens to stop him, he will." "And then what? Will he drop this Waster campaign then?" "I can't say. I don't know if he's laid his plans past the Coordinacy. Still, if you want my guess, he couldn't abandon the campaign and maintain his popularity. It's gotten out of hand." Sankov scratched the side of his neck. "All right. In that case. I'll ask you for some advice. What can we folks on Mars do? You know Earth. You know the situation. We don't. Tell us what to do." Digby rose and stepped to the window. He looked out upon the low domes of other buildings; red, rocky, completely desolate plain in between; a purple sky and a shrunken sun. He said, without turning, "Do you people really like it on Mars?" Sankov smiled. "Most of us don't exactly know any other world, Assemblyman. Seems to me Earth would be something queer and uncomfortable to them." "But wouldn't Martians get used to it? Earth isn't hard to take after this. Wouldn't your people learn to enjoy the privilege of breathing air under an open sky? You once lived on Earth. You remember what it was like." "I sort of remember. Still, it doesn't seem to be easy to explain. Earth is just there. It fits people and people fit it. People take Earth the way they find it. Mars is different. It's sort of raw and doesn't fit people. People got to make something out of it. They got to build a world, and not take what they find. Mars isn't much yet, but we're building and when we're finished, we're going to have just what we like. It's sort of a great feeling to know you're building a world. Earth would be kind of unexciting after that." THE Assemblyman said, "Surely the ordinary Martian isn't such a philosopher that he's content to live this terribly hard life for the sake of a future that must be hundreds of generations away." "No-o, not just like that." Sankov put his right ankle on his left knee and cradled it as he spoke. "Like I said, Martians are a lot like Earthmen, which means they're sort of human beings, and human beings don't go in for philosophy much. Just the same, there's something to living in a growing world, whether you think about it much or not. "My father used to send me letters when I first came to Mars. He was an accountant and he just sort of stayed an accountant. Earth wasn't much different when he died from what it was when he was born. He didn't see anything happen. Every day was like every other day, and living was just a way of passing time until he died. "On Mars, it's different. Every day there's something new -- the city's bigger, the ventilation system gets another kick, the water lines from the poles get slicked up. Right now, we're planning to set up a news-film association of our own. We're going to call it Mars Press. If you haven't lived when things are growing all about you, you'll never understand how wonderful it feels. "No, Assemblyman, Mars is hard and tough and Earth is a lot more comfortable, but seems to me, if you take our boys to Earth, they'll be unhappy. They probably wouldn't be able to figure out why, most of them, but they'd feel lost; lost and useless. Seems to me lots of them would never make the adjustment." Digby turned away from the window and the smooth, pink skin of his forehead was creased into a frown. "In that case. Commissioner, I am sorry for you. For all of you." "Why?" "Because I don't think there's anything your people on Mars can do. Or the people on the Moon or Venus. It won't happen now; maybe it won't happen for a year or two, or even for five years. But pretty soon you'll all have to come back to Earth, unless -- " Sankov's white eyebrows bent low over his eyes. "Well?" "Unless you can find another source of water besides the planet Earth." Sankov shook his head. "Don't seem likely, does it?" "Not very." "And except for that, seems to you there's no chance?" "None at all."' Digby said that and left, and Sankov stared for a long time at nothing before he punched a combination of the local communi-line. After a while, Ted Long looked out at him. Sankov said, "You were right, son. There's nothing they can do. Even the ones that mean well see no way out. How did you know?" "Commissioner," said Long, "when you've read all you can about the Time of Troubles, particularly about the twentieth century, nothing political can come as a real surprise." "Well, maybe. Anyway, son, Assemblyman Digby is sorry for us, quite a piece sorry, you might say, but that's all. He says we'll have to leave Mars -- or else get water somewhere else. Only he thinks that we can't get water somewhere else." "You know we can, don't you, Commissioner?" "I know we might, son. It's a terrible risk." "If I find enough volunteers, the risk is our business." "How is it going?" "Not bad. Some of the boys are on my side right now. I talked Mario Rioz into it, for instance, and you know he's one of the best." "That's just it -- the volunteers will be the best men we have. I hate to allow it." "If we get back, it will be worth it." "If! It's a big word, son." "And a big thing we're trying to do." "Well, I gave my word that if there was no help on Earth, I'll see that the Phobos water-hole lets you have all the water you'll need. Good luck." VI Saturn, Mario Rioz was cradled on nothing and sleep was delicious. He came out of it slowly and for a while, alone in his suit, he coiyted the stars and traced lines from one to another. At first, as the weeks flew past, it was .scavenging all over again, except for the gnawing feeling that every minute meant an additional number of thousands of miles away from all humanity. That made it worse. They had aimed high to pass out of the ecliptic while moving through the Asteroid Belt. That had used up water and had probably been unnecessary. Although tens of thousands of worldlets look as thick as vermin in twodimensional projection upon a photographic plate, they are nevertheless scattered so thinly miles that make up their conglomerate orbit that only the most ridiculous of coincidences would have brought about a collision.  Still, they passed over the Belt and someone calculated the chances of collision with a fragment of matter large enough to do damage. The value was so low, so impossibly low, that it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of the "space-float" should occur to someone. The days were long and many, space was empty, only one man was needed at the controls at any one time. The thought was a natural. First, it was a particularly daring one who ventured out for fifteen minutes or so. Then another who tried half an hour. Eventually, before the asteroids were entirely behind, each ship regularly had its off-watch member suspended in space at the end of a cable. It was easy enough. The cable, one of those intended for operations at the conclusion of their journey, was magnetically attached at both ends, one to the spacesuit to start with. Then you clambered out the lock onto the ship's hull and attached the other end there. You paused a while, clinging to the metal skin by the electro-magnets in your boots. Then you neutralized those nd made the slightest muscular effort. Slowly, ever so slowly, you lifted from the ship and even more slowly the ship's larger mass moved an equivalently shorter distance downward. You floated incredibly, weightlessly, in solid, speckled black. When the ship had moved far enough away from you. your gauntleted hand, which kept touch upon the cable, tightened its grip slightly. Too tightly, and you would begin moving back toward the ship and it toward you. Just tightly enough, and friction would halt you. Because your motion was equivalent to that of the ship, it seemed as motionless below you as though it had been painted against an impossible background while the cable between you hung in coils that had no reason to straighten out. It was a ship to your eye. One half was lit by the light of the feeble Sun, which was still too bright to look at directly without the heavy protection of the polarized spacesuit visor. The other half was black on black, invisible. Space closed in and it was like sleep. Your suit was warm, it renewed its air automatically, it had food and drink in special containers from which it could be sucked with a minimal motion of the head, it took care of wastes appropriately. Most of all, more than anything else, there was the delightful euphoria of weightlessness. You never felt so well in your life. The days stopped being too long, they weren't long enough, and there weren't enough of them. bit at a spot some thirty degrees from its then position. For months it was the brightest object in the sky, always excepting the glowing white pea that was the Sun. At its brightest, some of the Scavengers insisted they could make out Jupiter as a tiny sphere, one side squashed out of true by the night-shadow. Then over a period of additional months it faded, while . another dot of light grew until it was brighter than Jupiter. It was then as an oval, glowing splotch. ("Why oval?" someone asked and after a while someone else said, "The rings, of course," and it was obvious.) Everyone space-floated at all possible times toward the end, watching Saturn incessantly. ("Hey, you jerk, come on back in, damn it. You're on duty." "Who's on duty? I've got fifteen minutes more by my watch." "You set your watch back. Besides, I gave you twenty minutes yesterday." "You wouldn't give two minutes to your grandmother." "Come on in, damn it, or I'm coming out anyway." "All right, I'm coming. Holy howlers, what a racket over a lousy minute." But no quarrel could possibly be serious; not in space. It felt too good.) Saturn grew until at last it rivaled and then surpassed the Sun. The rings, set at a broad angle to their trajectory of approach, swept grandly about the planet, only a small portion being eclipsed. Then, as they approached, the span of the rings grew still wider, yet narrower as the angle of approach constantly decreased. The larger moons showed up in the surrounding sky like serene fireflies. Mario Rioz was glad he was awake so that he could watch again. Saturn filled half the sky, streaked with orange, the night shadow cutting it fuzzily nearly one-quarter of 'the way in from the right. Two round little dots in the brightness were shadows of two of the moons. To the left and behind him (he could look over his left shoulder to see, and as he didso, therest of his body inched slightly to the right to conserve angular momentum) was the white diamond of the Sun. Most of all he liked to watch the rings. At the left, they emerged from behind Saturn, a tight, bright triple band of orange light. At the right, their beginnings were hidden in the night shadow, but showed up closer and broader. They widened as they came, like the flare of a horn, growing hazier as they approached, until, while the eye followed them, they seemed to fill the sky and lose themselves. From the position of the Scavenger fleet just inside the outer rim of the outermost ring, the rings broke up and assumed their true identity as a phenomenal cluster of solid fragments rather than the tight, solid band of light they seemed. Below him, or rather in, the direction his feet pointed, some twenty miles away, was one of the ring fragments. It looked like a large irregular splotch, marring the symmetry of space, threequarters in brightness and the night shadow cutting it like a knife. Other fragments were farther off, sparkling like stardust, dimmer and thicker, until, as you followed them down, they became rings once more. The fragments were motionless, but that was only because the ships had taken up an orbit about Saturn equivalent to that of the outer edge of the rings. T HE day before, Rioz reflected, he had been on that nearest fragment, working along with more than a score of others to mold it into the desired shape. Tomorrow, he would be at it again. Today -- today he was spacefloating. "Mario?" The voice that broke upon his ear-phones was questioning. Momentarily, Rioz was flooded with annoyance. Damn it, he wasn't in the mood for company. "Speaking," he said. "I thought I had your ship spotted. How are you?" "Fine. That you, Ted?" "That's right," said Long. "Anything wrong on the fragment?" "Nothing. I'm out here floating." "You?" "It gets me, too, occasionally. Beautiful, isn't it?"  "Nice," agreed Rioz. "You know. I've read Earth books -- " "Grounder books, you mean." Rioz yawned and found it difficult under the circumstances to use the expression with the proper amount of resentment. " -- and sometimes I read descriptions of people lying on grass," continued Long. "You know, that green stuff like thin long pieces of paper they have all over the ground down there, and they look up at the blue sky with clouds in it. Did you ever see any films of that?" "Sure. It didn't attract me. It looked cold." "I suppose it isn't, though. After all. Earth is quite close to the Sun and they say their atmosphere is thick enough to hold the heat. I must admit that personally I would hate to be caught under open sky with nothing on but clothes. Still, I imagine they like it." "Grounders are nuts!" x "They talk about the trees, big brown stalks, and the winds, air movements, you know." "You mean drafts. They can keep that, too." "It doesn't matter. The point is they describe it beautifully, almost passionately. Many times I've wondered, 'What's it really like? Will I ever feel it or is this something only Earthmen can possibly feel?' I've felt so often that I was missing something vital. Now I know what it must be like. It's this. Complete peace in the middle of a beautydrenched universe." it. The Grounders, I mean. They're so used to their own lousy little world, they wouldn't appreciate what it's like to float and look down on Saturn." He flipped his body slightly and began swaying back and forth about his center of mass, slowly, soothingly. Long said, "Yes, I think so, too. They're slaves to their planet. Even if they come to Mars, it will only be their children that are free. There'll be starships someday; great, huge things that can carry thousands of people and maintain its self-contained equilibrium for decades, maybe centuries. Mankind will spread through the whole Galaxy. But people will have to live their lives out on shipboard until new methods of interstellar travel are developed, so it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Universe. That's inevitable. It's got to be. It's the Martian way." But Rioz made no answer. He had dropped off to sleep again, rocking and swaying gently, half f"pHE work-shift of the ringfragment was the tail of the com. The weightlessness, peace and privacy of the space-float gave place to something that had neither peace nor privacy. Even the weightlessness, which continued, became more a purgatory than a paradise under the new conditions. Try to manipulate an ordinarily non-portable heat projector. It could be lifted, despite the fact that it was six feet high and wide and almost solid metal, since it only weighed a fraction of an ounce. But its inertia was exactly what it had always been, which meant that if it wasn't moved into position very slowly, it would juT keep on going, taking you with it. Then you would have to hike the pseudo-grav field of your suit and come down with a jar. Keralski had hiked the field a little too high and he came down a little too roughly, with the projector coming down with him at a dangerous angle. His crushed ankle had been the first casualty of the expedition. Rioz was swearing fluently and nearly continuously. He continued to have the impulse to drag the back of his hand across his forehead in order to wipe away the accumulating sweat. The few times that he had succumbed to the impulse, metal had met silicone with a clash that rang loudly inside his suit, but served no useful purpose. The desiccators within the suit were sucking at maximum and, of course, recovering the water and restoring ion-exchanged liquid, containing a careful proportion of salt, into the appropriate receptacle. Rioz yelled, "Damn it, Dick, wait till I give the word, will you?" And Swenson's voice rang in his ears, "Well, how long am I supposed to sit here?" "Till I say," replied Rioz. He strengthened pseudo-grav and lifted the projector a bit. He released pseudo-grav, insuring that the projector would stay in place for minutes even if he withdrew support altogether. He kicked the cable out of the way (it stretched beyond the close "horizon" to a power source that was out of sight) and touched the release. The rpaterial of which the fragment was composed bubbled and vanished under its touch. A section of the lip of the tremendous cavity he had already carved into its substance melted away and a roughness in its contour had disappeared. "Try it now," called Rioz. Swenson was in the ship that was hovering nearly over Rioz's head. Swenson called, "All clear?" "I told you to go ahead." I T was a feeble flicker of steam that issued from one of the ship's forward vents. The ship drifted down toward the ringfragment. Another flicker adjusted a tendency to drift sidewise. It came down straight. A third flicker to the rear slowed it to a feather-rate. Rioz watched tensely. "Keep her coming. You'll make it. You'll make it." The rear of the ship entered the ing walls came closer and closer to its rim. There was a grinding vibration as the ship's motion halted. It was Swenson's turn to curse. "It doesn't fit," he said. Rioz threw the projector groundward in a passion and went flailing up into space. The projector kicked up a white crystalline dust all about it, and when Rioz came down under pseudo grav, he did the same. He said, "You went in on the bias, you dumb Grounder." "I hit it level, you dirt-eating farmer." Backward-pointing side jets of the ship were blasting more strongly than before, and Rioz hopped to get out of the way. The ship scraped up from the pit, then shot into space half a mile before forward jets could bring it to a halt. Swenson said tensely, "We'll spring half a dozen plates if we do this once again. Get it right, will you?" "I'll get it right. Don't worry about it. Just you come in right." Rioz jumped upward and allowed himself to climb three hundred yards to get an overall look at the cavity. The gouge-marks of the ship were plain enough. They were concentrated at one point, halfway down the pit. He would get that. It began to melt outward under the blaze of the projector. Half an hour later, the ship snuggled neatly into its cavity, and Swenson, wearing his spacesuit, emerged to join Rioz. Swenson said, "If you want to step in and climb out of the suit, I'll take care of the icing." "It's all right," said Rioz. "I'd just as soon sit here and watch Saturn." He sat down at the lip of the pit. There was a six-foot gap between I it and the ship. In some places about the circle, it was two feet, in a few places even merely a matter of inches. You couldn't expect a better fit out of handwork. The final adjustment would be made by steaming ice gently and letting it freeze into the cavity between the lip and the ship. the sky, its vast bulk inching below the horizon. Rioz said, "How many ships are left to put in place?" Swenson said, "Last I heard, it was eleven. We're in now, so that means only ten. Seven of the ones that are placed are iced in. Two or three are dismantled." "We're coming along fine." "There's plenty to do yet. Don't forget the main jets at the other end. And the cables and the power lines. Sometimes I wonder if we'll make it. On the way out, it didn't bother me so much, but just now I was sitting at the contras and I was saying: 'We won't make it. We'll sit out here and starve and die with nothing but Saturn over us.' It makes me feel -- " He didn't explain how it made him feel. He just sat there. Rioz said, "You think too damn much." "It's different with you," said Swenson. "I keep thinking of Pete -- and Dora." "What for? She said you could go, didn't she? The Commissioner gave her that talk on patriotism and how you'd be a hero and set for life once you got back, and she said you could go. You didn't sneak out the way Adams did." "Adams is different. That wife of his should have been shot when she was bora. Some women can make hell for a guy, can't they? She didn't want him to go -- But she'd probably rather he didn't come back if she can get his settlement pay." "What's your kick, then? Dora wants you back, doesn't she?" Swenson sighed. "I never treated her right." "You turned over your pay, it seems to me. I wouldn't do that for any woman. Money for value received, not a cent more." ' "Money isn't it. I get to thinking out here. A woman likes company. A kid needs his father. What am I doing way out here?" "Getting set to go home." "Ah-h, you don't understand." ridged surface of the ringfragment with his spirits as icy as the ground he walked on. It had all seemed perfectly logical back on Mars, but that was Mars. He had worked it out carefully in his mind in perfectly reasonable steps. He could still remember exactly how it went. It didn't take a ton of water to move a ton of ship. It was not mass equals mass, but mass times velocity equals mass times velocity. It didn't matter, in other words, whether you shot out a ton of water at a mile a second or a hundred pounds of water at twenty miles a second. You got the same final velocity out of the ship. That meant the jet nozzles had to be made narrower and the steam hotter. But then drawbacks appeared. The narrower the nozzle, the more energy was lost in friction and turbulence. The hotter the steam, the more refractory the nozzle had to be and the shorter its. life. The limit in that direction was quickly reached. Then, since a given weight of water could move considerably more than its own weight under the narrow-nozzle conditions, it paid to be big. The bigger the water-storage space, the larger the size of the actual travel-head, even in proportion. So they started to make liners heavier and bigger. But then the larger the shell, the heavier the bracings, the more difficult the weldings, the more exacting the engineering requirements. At the moment, the limit in that direction had been reached also. And then he had put his finger on what had seemed to him to be the basic flaw -- the original, unswervable conception that the fuel had to be placed inside the ship; that metal had to be built water. Why? Water did not have to be water. It could be ice, and ice could be shaped. Holes could be melted into it. Travel-heads and jets could be fitted into it. Cables could hold travel-heads and jets stiffly together under the influence of magnetic field-force grips. Long felt the trembling of the ground he walked on. He was at the head of the fragment. A dozen ships were blasting in and out of sheaths carved in its substance, and the fragment shuddered under the continuing impact. T HE ice didn't have to be quarried. It existed in proper chunks in the rings of Saturn. That's all the rings were -- pieces of nearly pure ice, circling Saturn. So spectroscopy stated and so it had turned out to be. He was standing on one such piece now, over two miles long, nearly one mile thick. It was almost half a piece, and he was standing on it. But now he was face to face with the realities of life. He had never told the men just how quickly he had expected to set up the fragment as a ship, but in his heart, he had imagined it would be two days. It was a week now and he didn'tdare to estimate the remaining time. He no longer even had any confidence that the task was a possible one. Would they be able to control jets with enough delicacy through leads slung across two miles of ice, to manipulate out of Saturn's dragging gravity? Drinking water was low, though they could always distill more out of the ice. Still, the food stores were not in a good way, either. sky, eyes straining. Was the object growing larger? He ought to measure its distance. Actually, he lacked the spirit to add that trouble to the others. His mind slid back to greater immediacies. Morale, at least, was high. The men seemed to enjoy being out Saturn-way. They were the first humans to penetrate this far, the firs to pass the asteroids, the first to see Jupiter like a glowing pebble to the naked eye, the first to see Saturn -- like that. He didn't think fifty practical, case-hardened, shell-snatching Scayengers would take time to feel that sort of emotion. But they did. And they were proud. Two men and a half-buried ship slid up the moving horizon as he walked. He called, crisply, "Hello, there!" Rioz answered, 'That you, Ted?" "You bet. Is that Dick with you?" "S.ure. Come on, sit down. We were just getting ready to ice in and we were looking for an excuse to delay." "I'm not," said Swenson, promptly. "When will we be leaving, Ted?" "As soon as we get through. That's no answer, is it?" Swenson said, dispiritedly, "I suppose there isn't any other answer." Long looked up, staring at the irregular bright splotch in the sky. Rioz followed his glance. "What's the matter?" For a moment, Long did not reply. The sky was black otherwise and the ring fragments were an orange dust against it. Saturn was more than threefourths below the horizon and the rings were going with it. Half a mile away, a ship bounded past the icy rim of the planetoid into the sky, was orange-lit by Saturnlight, and sank down again. The ground trembled gently. Rioz said, "Something bothering you about the shadow?" They called it that. It was the nearest fragment of the rings, quite close considering that they were at the outer rim of the rings, where the pieces spread themselves relatively thin. It was perhaps twenty miles off, a jagged mountain, its shape clearly visible. "How does it look to you?" asked Long. Rioz shrugged. "Okay, I guess. I don't see anything wrong." "Doesn't it seem to be getting larger?" "Why should it?" "Well, doesn't it?" Long insisted. thoughtfully. "It does look bigger," said Swenson. "You're just putting the notion into our minds," Rioz argued. "If it were getting bigger, it would be coming closer." "What's impossible about that?" "These things are unstable orbits." "They were when we came here," said Long. "There, did you feel that?" The ground had trembled again. Long said, "We've been blasting this thing for a week now. First, twenty-five ships landed on it, which changed its momentum right there. Not much, of course. Then we've been melting parts of it away and our ships have been blasting in and out of it -- all at one end, too. In a week, we may have changed its orbit just a bit. The two fragments, this one and the Shadow, might be converging." "It's got plenty of room to miss us in." Rioz watched it thoughtfully. "Besides, if we can't even tell for sure that it's getting bigger, how quickly can it be moving? Relative to us, I mean." "It doesn't have to be moving quickly. Its momentum is as large as ours, so that, however gently it hits, we'll be nudged completely out of our orbit, maybe in toward Saturn, where we don't want to go. As a matter of fact, ice has a very low tensile strength, so that both planetoids might break up into gravel." Swenson rose to his feet. "Damn it, if I can tell how a shell is moving a thousand miles away, I can tell what a mountain is doing twenty miles away." He turned toward the ship. Long didn't stop him. Rioz said, "There's a nervous guy." The neighboring planetoid rose to zenith, passed overhead, began sinking. Twenty minutes later, the horizon opposite that portion behind which Saturn had disappeared burst into orange flame as its bulk began lifting again. Rioz called into his radio, "Hey, Dick, are you dead in there?" "I'm checking," came the muffled response. "Is it moving?" asked Long. "Yes." "Toward us?" There was a pause. Swenson's voice was a sick one. "On the nose, Ted. Intersection of orbits will take place in three days." "You're crazy!" yelled Rioz. "I checked four times," said Swenson. Long thought, blankly, "What do we do now?" IX trouble with the cables. They had to be laid precisely; their geometry had to be very nearly perfect for the magnetic field to attain maximum strength. In space, or even in air, it wouldn't have mattered. The cables would have lined up automatically once the juice went on. .Here it was different. A gouge had to be ploughed along the planetoid's surface and into it the cable had to be laid. If it were not lined up within a few minutes of arc of the calculated direction, a torque would be applied to the entire planetoid, with consequent loss of energy, none of which could be spared. The gouges then had to be redriven, the cables shifted ancl iced into the new positions. The men plodded wearily through the routine. And then the word reached them -- "All hands to the jets!" Scavengers could not be said to be the type that took kindly to discipline, it was a grumbling, growling, muttering group that set about disassembling the jets of the ships that yet remained intact, carrying them to the tail end of the planetoid, grubbing them into position, and stringing the leads along the surface. It was almost twenty-four hours before one of them looked into the sky and said, "Holy jeepers!" followed by something less printable. His neighbor looked and said, "I'll be damned!" Once they noticed, all did. It became the most astonishing fact in the Universe. "Look at the Shadow!" It was spreading across the sky like an infected wound. Men looked at it, found it had doubled its size, wondered why they hadn't noticed that sooner. Work came to a virtual halt. They besieged Ted Long. He said, "We can't leave. We don't have the fuel to see us back to Mars and we don't have the equipment to capture another planetoid. So we've got to stay. Now the Shadow is creeping in on us because our blasting has thrown us out of orbit. We've got to change that by continuing the blasting. Since we can't blast the front end any more without endangering the ship we're builds ing, let's try another way." the jets with a furious energy that received impetus every half hour when the Shadow rose again over the horizon, bigger and more menacing than before. Long had no assurance that it would work. Even if the jets would respond to the distant controls, even if the supply of water, which depended upon a storage chamber opening directly into the icy body of the planetoid, with built-in heat projectors steaming the propulsive fluid directly into the driving cells, were adequate -- there was still no certainty that the body of the planetoid without a magnetic cable sheathing would hold together under the enormously disruptive stresses. "Ready!" came the signal in Long's receiver. Long called, "Ready!" and depressed the contact. The vibration grew about him. The star field in the visiplate trembled. In the rearview there was a distant gleaming spume of swiftly moving ice crystals. "It's blowing!" was the cry. It kept on blowing. Long dared not stop. For six hours, it blew, hissing, bubbling, steaming into space; the body of the planetoid converted to vapor and hurled away. The Shadow came closer until men did nothing but stare at the mountain in the sky, surpassing Saturn itself in spectacularity. Its every groove and valley was a plain scar upon its face. But when it passed through the planetoid's orbit, it crossed more than half a mile behind its then position. The steam-jet ceased. Long bent in his seat and covered his eyes. He hadn't eaten in two days. He could eat now, though. Not another planetoid was close enough to interrupt them, even if it began an approach that very moment. Back on the planetoid's surface, Swenson said, "All the time I watched that damned rock coming down, I kept saying to myself, 'This can't happen. We can't let it happen.' " "Hell," said Rioz, "we were all nervous. Did you see Jim Davis? 'He was green. I was a little jumpy myself." "That's not it. It wasn't just -- dying, you know. I was thinking -- I know it's funny, but I can't help it -- I was thinking that Dora warned me I'd get killed, and now if I get myself killed, she'll never let me hear the last of it. Isn't that a crummy sort of attitude at a time like that?" "Listen," said Rioz, "you wanted to get married, so you got married. Why come to me with your troubles?" X T HE flotilla, welded into a single unit, was returning over its mighty course from Saturn to Mars. Each day it .flashed over a length of space it had taken nine days outward. Ted Long had put the entire crew on emergency. With twentyfive ships embedded in the planetoid taken out of Saturn's rings, and unable to move or maneuver independently, the coordination of their power sources into unified blasts was a ticklish problem. The jarrings that took place on the first day of travel nearly shook them out from under their hair. That, at least, smoothed itself out as the velocity raced upward unJer the steady thrust from behind. They passed the onehundred thousand mile an hour mark late on the second day, and climbed steadily toward the million-mile mark and beyond. Long's ship, which formed the needle point of the frozen fleet, was the only one which possessed a five-way view of space. It was an uncomfortable position under the circumstances. Long found himself watching tensely, imagining somehow that the stars would slowly begin to slip backward, to whizz past them, under the influence of the multi-ship's tremendous rate of travel. They didn't, of course. They remained nailed to the black backdrop, their distance scorning with patient immobility any speed mere Man could achieve. The men complained bitterly after the first few days. It was not only that they were deprived of the space-float. They were burdened by much more than the ordinary pseudo-gravity field of the ships, by the effects of the fierce acceleration under which they were living. Long himself was weary to death of the relentless pressure against hydraulic cushions. They took to shutting off the jet thrusts one hour out of every four and Long fretted. It had been just over a year that he had last seen Mars shrinking in an observation window from this ship, which had then been an independent entity. What had happened since then? Was the colony still there? In something like a growing panic, Long sent out radio pulses toward Mars daily, with the combined power of twenty-five ships behind it. There was no answer. He expected none. Mars and Saturn were on opposite sides of the Sun now, and until he mounted high enough above the ecliptic to get the Sun well beyond the line connecting himself and Mars, solar interference would prevent any signal from getting through. High above the outer rim of the Asteroid Belt, they reached maximum velocity. With short spurts of power from first one side jet, then another, the huge vessel reversed itself. The composite jet in the rear began its mighty roaring once again, but now the result was deceleration. miles over the Sun, curving down to intersect the orbit of Mars. A week out of Mars, answering signals were heard for the first time, fragmentary, ether-torn and incomprehensible, but they were coming from Mars. Earth and Venus were at angles sufficiently different to leave no doubt of that. Long relaxed. There were still humans on Mars, at any rate. Two days out of Mars, the signal was strong and clear and Sankov was at the other end. Sankov said, "Hello, son. It's three in the morning here. Seems like people have no consideration for an old man. Dragged me right out of bed." "I'm sorry, sir:" "Don't be. They were following orders. I'm afraid to ask, son. Anyone hurt? Maybe dead?" "No deaths, sir. Not one." "And -- and the water? Any left?" Long said, with an effort at nonchalance, "Enough." "In that case, get home as fast as you can. Don't take any chances, of course." "There's trouble, then." "Fair-to-middling. When will you come down?" "Two days. Can you hold out that long?" "I'll hold out." Forty hours later, Mars had grown to a ruddy-orange ball that filled the ports and they were in the final planetlanding spiral. "Slowly," Long said to himself, "slowly." Under these conditions, even the thin atmosphere of Mars could do dreadful damage if they moved through it too quickly. Having come in from well above the ecliptic, their spiral passed from north to south. A polar cap shot whitely below them, then the much smaller one of the summer hemisphere, the large one again, the small one, at longer and longer intervals. The planet approached closer, the landscape began to show features. "Prepare for landing!" called Long.  placid, which was difficult considering how closely the boys had shaved their return. But it had worked out well enough. Until a few days ago, he had no sure knowledge that they had survived. It seemed more likely -- inevitable, almost -- that they were nothing but frozen corpses somewhere in the trackless stretches from Mars to Saturn, new planetoids that had once been alive. The Committee had been dickering with him for weeks before the news had come. They had insisted on his signature to the paper for the sake of appearances. It would look like an agreement, voluntarily and mutually arrived at. But Sankov knew well that, given complete obstinacy on his part, they would act unilaterally and be damned with appearances. It seemed fairly certain that Hilder's election was secure now and they would take the chance of arousing a reaction of sympathy for Mars. So he dragged out the negotiations, dangling before them always the possibility of surrender. And then he heard from Long and concluded the deal quickly. The papers had lain before him and he had made a last statement for the benefit of the reporters who were present. He said, "Total imports of water from Earth are twenty million tons a year. This is declining as we develop our own piping system. If I sign this paper agreeing to an embargo, our industry will be paralyzed, any possibilities of expansion will halt. It looks to me as if that can't be what's in Earth's mind, can it?" Their eyes met his and held only a hard glitter. Assemblyman Digby .had already been replaced and they were unanimous against him. The Committee Chairman impatiently pointed out, "You have said all this before." "I know, but right now I'm kind of getting ready to sign and I want it clear in my head. Is Earth set and determined to bring us to an end here?" "Of course not. Earth is interested in conserving its irreplaceable water supply, nothing else." "You have one and a half Earth." The Committee Chairman said, "We cannot spare water." And Sankov had signed. That had been the final note he wanted. Earth had one and a and could spare none of it. Now, a day and a half later, the Committee and the reporters waited in the spaceport dome. Through thick. Curving windows, they could see thebare and empty grounds of Mars Spaceport. The Committee Chairman asked, with annoyance, "How much longer do we have to wait? And, if you don't mind, what are we waiting for?" Sankov said, "Some of our boys have been out in space, out past the asteroids." The Committee Chairman removed a pair of spectacles and cleaned them with a snowy white handkerchief. "And they're returning?" "They are." The Chairman shrugged, lifted his eyebrows in the direction of the reporters. IN the smaller room adjoining, a knot of women and children clustered about another window. Sankov stepped back a bit to cast a glance toward them. He would much rather have been with them, been part of their excitement and tension. He, like them, had waited over a year now. He, like them, had thought, over and over again, that the men must be dead. "You see that?" said Sankov, pointing. "Hey!" cried a reporter. "It's a ship!" A confused shouting came from the adjoining room. It wasn't a ship so much as a bright dot obscured by a drifting white cloud. The cloud grew larger and began to have form. It was a double streak against the sky, the lower ends billowing out and upward again. As it dropped still closer, the bright dot at the upper end took on a crudely cylindrical form. It was rough and craggy, but highlights bounced back. The cylinder dropped toward the ground with the ponderous slowness characteristic of space vessels. It hung suspended on those blasting jets and settled down upon the recoil of tons of matter hurling downward like a tired man dropping into his easy chair. And as it did so, a silence fell upon all within the dome. The women and children in one room, the politicians and reporters in the other remained frozen, heads craned incredulously upward. The cylinder's landing flanges, extending far below the two rear jets, touched ground and sank into the pebbly morass. And then the ship was motionless and the jet action ceased. But the silence continued in the Dome. It continued for a long time. Men came clambering down the sides of the immense vessel, inching down, down the two-mile trek to the ground, with spikes on their shoes and ice axes in their hands. They were gnats against the blinding surface. One of the reporters croaked, "What is it?" "That," said Sankov, calmly, "happens to be a chunk of matter that spent its time scooting around Saturn as part of its rings. Our boys fitted it out with travel head and jets and ferried it home. It just turns out the fragments in Saturn's rings are made up out of ice." deathlike silence. "That thing that looks like a spaceship is just a mountain of hard water. If it were standing like that on Earth, it would be melting into a puddle and maybe it would break under its own weight. Mars is colder and has less gravity, so there's no such danger. "Of course, once we get this thing really organized, we can have water stations on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and on the asteroids. We can scale in chunks oPSaturn's rings and pick them up and send them on at the various stations. Our Scavengers are good at that sort of thing. "We'll have all the water we need. That one chunk you see is just Under a cubic mile -- or about what Earth would send us in two hundred years. The boys used quite a bit of it coming back from Saturn. They made it in five weeks, they tell me, and used up But, Lord, that didn't make any dent at all in that mountain. Are you getting all this, boys?" He turned to the reporters. There was no doubt they were getting it. He said, "Then get this, too. Earth is worried about its water supply. It only has one and a spare us a single ton out of it. Write down that we folks on Mars are worried about Earth and don't want anything to happen to Earth people. Write down that we'll sell water to Earth. Write down that we'll let them sonable fee. Write down that in ten years, we figure we can sell it in cubic-mile lots. Write down that Earth can quit worrying because Mars can sell it all the water it needs and wants." The Committee Chairman was past hearing. He was feeling the future rushing in. Dimly, he could see the reporters grinning as they wrote furiously. Grinning! He could hear the grin become laughter on Earth as Mars turned the tables so neatly on the anti-Wasters. He could hear the laughter thunder from every continent when word of thefiasco spread. And he could see the abyss, deep and black as space, into which would drop forever the political hopes of John Hilder and of every opponent of space flight left on Earth -- his own included, of course. IN the adjoining room, Dora Swenson screamed with joy, and Peter, grown two inches, jumped up and down, calling, "Daddy! Daddy!" Richard Swenson had just stepped off the extremity of the flange and. face showing clearly through the clear silicone of the headpiece, marched toward the Dome. "Did you ever see a guy look so happy?" asked Ted Long. "Maybe there's something in this marriage business." "Ah, you've just been out in space too long," Rioz said.By Destroying the spirit of the enemy is the goal of war and the aliens had the best way! whose fault it was. Fannia pointed out that if Donnaught had had the brains of an ox, as well as the build, he would have remembered to check the tanks. Donnaught, although twice as big as him, wasn't quite as fast with an insult. He intimated, after a little thought, that Fannia 's nose might have obstructed his reading of the fuel guage. This still left them twenty light-years from Thetis, with a cupful of transformer fuel in the bemergency tank. "All right," Fannia said presently. "What's done is done. We can squeeze about three lightyears out of the fuel before we're back on atomics. Hand me The Galactic Pilot -- unless you forgot that, too." Donnaught dragged the bulky microfilm volume out of its locker, and they explored its pages. The Galactic Pilot told them they were in a sparse, seldomvisited section of space, which they already knew. The nearest planetary system was Hatterfield ; no intelligent life there. Sersus had a native population, but no refueling facilities. The same with Illed, Hung and Porderai. "Ah-ha!" Fannia said. "Read that, Donnaught. If you can read, that is." "Cascella," Donnaught read, slowly and clearly, following the line with a thick forefinger. "Type M sun. Three planets, intelligent (AA#C) human-type life on second. Oxygenbreathers. Non-mechanical. Religious. Friendly. Unique social structure, described in Galactic Survey Report #. Population estimate: cellan vocabulary taped under Cas#b#. Scheduled for resurvey #A.D. Cache of transformer fuel left, beam coordinate #I kgl. Physical descript: Unocc. flatland." "Transformer fuel, boy!" Fannia said gleefully. "I believe we will get to Thetis, after all." He punched the new direction on the ship's tape. "If that fuel's still there." "Should we read up on the unique social structure?" Donnaught asked, still poring over The Galactic Pilot. "Certainly," Fannia said. "Just step over to the main galactic base on Earth and buy me a copy." "I forgot," Donnaught admitted slowly. "Let me see," Fannia said, dragging out the ship's language library. "Cascellan, Cascellan... Here it is. Be good while I learn the language." He set the tape in the hypnophone and switched it on. "Another useless tongue in my overstuff ed head," he murmured, and then the hypnophone took over. drive with at least a drop of fuel left, they switched to atomics. Fannia rode the beam right across the planet, locating the slender metal spire of the Galactic Survey cache. The plain was o longer unoccupied, however. The Cascellans had built a city around the cache, and the spire dominated the crude woodandmud buildings. "Hang on," Fannia said. an d brought the ship down on the outskirts of the city, in a field of stubble. "Now look," Fannia said, unfastening his safety belt. "We're just here for fuel. No souvenirs, no side-trips no fraternizing." Through the port, they could see a cloud of dust from the city. As it came closer, they made out figures running toward their ship. "What do you think this unique social structure is?" Donnaught asked, pensively checking the charge in a needier gun. "I know not and care less," Fannia said, struggling into space armor. "Get dressed." "The air's breathable." "Look, pachyderm, for all we know, these Cascellans think the proper way to greet visitors is to chop off their heads and stuff them with green apples. If Galactic says unique, it probably means unique." "Galactic said they were friendly-" "That means they haven't got atomic bombs. Come on, get dressed." Donnaught put down the needier and struggled into an oversize suit of space armor. Both men strapped on needlers, paralyzers, and a few grenades. "I don't think we have anything to worry about," Fannia said, tightening the last nut on his helmet. "Even if they get rough, they can't crack space armor. And if they're not rough, we won't have any trouble. Maybe these gewgaws will help." He picked up a box of trading articles -- mirrors, toys and the like. Helmeted and armored, Fannia slid out the port and raised one hand to the Cascellans. The language, hypnotically placed in his mind, leaped to his lips. "We come as friends and brothers. Take us to the chief." The natives clustered around, gaping at the ship and the space armor. Although they had the same number of eyes, ears and limbs as humans, they completely missed looking like them. "If they're friendly," Donnaught asked, climbing out of the port, "why all the hardware?" The Cascellans were dressed predominantly in a collection of knives, swords and daggers. Each man had at least five, and some had eight or nine. "Maybe Galactic got their signals crossed," Fannia said, as the natives spread out in an escort. "Or maybe the natives just use the knives for mumblypeg." mechanical culture. Narrow, packed-dirt streets twisted between ramshackle huts. A few two-story buildings threatened to collapse at any minute. A stench filled the air, so strong that Fannia's filter couldn't quite eradicate it. The Cascellans bounded ahead of the heavily laden Earthmen, dashing around like a pack of playful puppies. Their knives glittered and clanked. The chief's house was the only three-story building in the city. The tall spire of the cache was right behind it. "If you come in peace," the chief said when they entered, "you are welcome." He was a middle-aged Cascellan with at least fifteen knives strapped to various parts of his person. He squatted cross-legged on a raised dais. "We are privileged," Fannia said. He remembered from the hypnotic language lesson that "chief" on Cascella meant more than it usually did on Earth. The chief here was a combination of king, high priest, deity and bravest warrior. "We have a few simple gifts here," Fannia added, placing the gewgaws at the king's feet. "Will his majesty accept?" "No," the king said. "We accept no gifts." Was that the unique social structure? Fannia wondered. It certainly was not human. "We are a warrior race. What we want, we take." Fannia sat cross-legged in front of the dais and exchanged conversation with the king while Donnaught played with the spurned toys. Trying to overcome the initial bad impression, Fannia told the chief about the stars and other worlds, since simple people usually liked fables. He spoke of the ship, not mentioning yet that it was out of fuel. He spoke of Cascella, telling the chief how its fame was known throughout the Galaxy. "That is as it should be," the chief said proudly. "We arfe a race of warriors, the like of which has never 'been seen. Every man of us dies fighting." "You must have fought some great wars," Fannia said politely, wondering what idiot had written up the galactic report. "I have not fought a war for many years," the chief said. "We are united now, and all our enemies have joined us." Bit by bit, Fannia led up to the matter of the fuel. "What is this 'fuel?' " the chief asked, haltingly because there was no equivalent for it in the Cascellan language. "It makes our ship go." 'And where is it?" "In thfc metal spire," Fannia said. "If you would just allow us -- " "In the holy shrine?" the chief exclaimed, shocked. "The tall metal church which the gods left here long ago?" "Yeah," Fannia said sadly, knowing what was coming. "I guess that's it." "It is sacrilege for an outworlder to go near it," the chief said. "I forbid it." "We need the fuel." Fanna was getting tired of sitting crosslegged. Space armor wasn't built for complicated postures. "The spire was put here for such emergencies." "Strangers, know that I am god of my people, as well as their leader. If you dare approach the sacred temple, there will be war." "I was afraid of that," Fannia said, getting to his feet. "And since we are a race of warriors," the chief said, "at my command, every fighting man of the planet will move against you. More will come from the hills ayi from across the rivers." Abruptly, the chief drew a knife. It must have been a signal, because every native in the room did the same. away from the toys. "Look, lummox. These friendly warriors can't do a damn thing to us. Those knives can't cut space armor, and I doubt if they have anything better. Don't let them pile up on you, though. Use the paralyzer first, the needier if they really get thick." "Right." Donnaught whisked out and primed a paralyzer in a single coordinated movement. With weapons, Donnaught was fast and reliable, which was virtue enough for Fannia to keep him as a partner..."We'll cut around this building and grab the fuel. Two cans ought to be enough. Then we'll beat it fast." . They walked out the building, followed by the Cascellans. Four carriers lifted the chief, who was barking orders. The narrow street outside was suddenly jammed with armed natives. No one tried to touch them yet, but at least a thousand knives were flashing in the sun. In front of the cache was a solid phalanx of Cascellans. They stood behind a network of ropes that probably marked the boundary between sacred and profane ground.  "Get set for it," Fannia said, and stepped over the ropes. Immediately the foremost temple guard raised his knife. Fannia brought up the paralyzer, not firing it yet, still moving forward. The foremost native shouted something, and the knife swept across in a glittering arc. The Cascellan gurgled something else, staggered and fell. Bright blood oozed from his throat. "I told you not to use the needier yet!" Fannia said. "I didn't," Donnaught protested. Glancing back, Fannia saw that Donnaught's needier was still holstered. "Then I don't get it." said Fannia bewilderedly. Three more natives bounded forward, their knives held high. They tumbled to the ground also. Fannia stopped and watched as a platoon of natives advanced on them. Once they were within stabbing range of the Earthmen, the natives were slitting their own throats! Fannia was frozen for a moment, unable to believe his eyes. Donnaught halted behind him. Natives were rushing forward by the hundreds now, their knives poised, screaming at the Earthmen. As they came within range, each native stabbed himself, tumbling on a quickly growing pile of bodies. In minutes the Earthmen were surrounded by a heap of bleeding Cascellan flesh, which was steadily growing higher. "All right!" Fannia shouted. "Stop it." He yanked Donnaught back with him, to profane ground. "Truce!" he yelled in Cascellan. The crowd parted and the chief was carried through. With two knives clenched in his fists, he was panting from excitement. "We have won the first battle!" he said proudly. "The might of our warriors frightens even such aliens as yourselves. You shall not profane our temple while a man is alive on Cascella!" The natives shouted their approval and triumph. The two aliens dazedly stumbled back to their ship. that's what Galactic  meant by 'a unique social structure,' " Fannie said morosely. He stripped off his armor and lay down on his bunk. "Their way of making war is to suicide their enemies into capitulation." "They must be nuts," Donnaught grumbled. "That's no way to fight." "It works, doesn't it?" Fannia got up and stared out a porthole. The sun was setting, painting the city a charming red in its glow. The beams of light glistened off the spire of the Galactic cache. Through the open doorway, they could hear the boom and rattle of drums. "Tribal cill to arms," Fannia said. "I still say it's crazy." Donnaught had some definite ideas on fighting. "It ain't human." "I'll buy that. The idea seems to be that if enough people slaughter themselves, the enemy gives up out of sheer guilty conscience." "What if the enemy doesn't give up?" "Before these people united, they must have fought it out tribe to tribe, suiciding until someone gave up. The losers probably joined the victors; the tribe must have grown until it could take over the planet by sheer weight of numbers." Fannia looked carefully at Donnaught, trying to see if he understood. "It's anti-survival, of course; if someone didn't give up, the race would probably kill themselves." He shook his head. "But war of any kind is antisurvival. Perhaps they've got rules." "Couldn't we just barge in and grah the fuel quick?" Donnaught asked. "And get out before they all killed themselves?" "I don't think so," Fannia said. "They might go on committing suicide for the next ten years, figuring they were still fighting us." He looked thoughtfully at thcity. "It's that chief of theirs. He's their god and he'd probably keep them suiciding until he was the only man left. Then he'd grin, say, 'We are great warriors,' and kill himself." Donnaught shrugged his big shoulders in disgust. "Why don't we knock him off?" "They'd just elect another god." The sun was almost below the horizon now. "I've got an idea, though," Fannia said. He scratched his head. "It might work. All we can do is try." A T midnight, the two men sneaked out of the ship, mov-. ing silently into the city. They were both dressed in space armor again. Donnaught carried two empty fuel cans. Fannia had his paralyzer out. The streets were dark and silent as they slid along walls and around posts, keeping out of sight. A native turned a corner suddenly, but Fannia paralyzed him before he could make a sound. They crouched in the darkness, in the mouth of an alley facing the cache. " "Have you got it straight?" Fannia asked. "I paralyze the guards. You bolt in and fill up those cans. We get the hell out of here, quick. When they check, they find the cans still there. Maybe they won't commit suicide then." The men moved across the shadowy steps in front of the cache. There were three Cascellans guarding the entrance, their knives stuck in their loincloths. Fannia stunned them with a medium charge, and Donnaught broke into a run. Torches instantly flared, natives boiled out of every alleyway, shouting, waving their knives. "We've been ambushed!" Fannia shouted. "Get back here, Donnaught!" Donnaught hurriedly retreated. The natives had been waiting for them. Screaming, yowling, they rushed at the Earthmen, slitting their own throats at fivefoot range. Bodies tumbled in front of Fannia, almost tripping him as he backed up. Donnaught caught him by an arm and yanked him straight. They ran out of the sacred area. "Truce, damn it!" Fannia called out. "Let me speak to the chief. Stop it! Stop it I want a truce!" Reluctantly, the Cascellans stopped their slaughter. "This is war," the chief said, striding forward. His almost human face was stern under the torchlight. "You have seen our warriors. Yqu know now that you cannot stand against them. The word has spread to all our lands. My entire people are prepared to do battle." He looked proudly at his fellow-Cascellans, then back to the Earthmen. "I myself will lead my people into battle now. There will be no stopping us. We will fight until you surrender yourselves completely, stripping off your armor." "Wait, chief," Fannia panted, sick at the sight of so much blood. The clearing was a scene out of the Inferno. Hundreds of bodies were sprawled around. The streets were muddy with blood. "Let me confer with my partner tonight. I will speak with you tomorrow." "No." the chief said. "You started the battle. It must go to its conclusion. Brave men wish to die in battle. It is our fondest wish. You are the first enemy we have had in many years, since we subdued the mountain tribes." "Sure," Fannia said. "But let's' talk about it -- " "I myself will fight you," the chief said, holding up a dagger. "I will die for my people, as a warrior must!" "Hold it!" Fannia shouted. "Grant us a truce. We are allowed to fight only by sunlight. It is a tribal taboo." The chief thought for a moment, then said, "Very well. Until tomorrow." The beaten Earthmen walked slowly back to their ship amid the jeers of the victorious populace. didn't have a plan. He knew that he had to have fuel; he wasn't planning on spending the rest of his life on Cascella, or waiting until the Galactic Survey sent another ship, in fifty years or so. On the other hand, he hesitated at the idea of being responsible for the death of anyIt wouldn't be a very good record to take to Thetis. The Galactic Survey might find out about it. Anyway, he just wouldn't do it. He was stuck both ways. Slowly, the two men walked out to meet the chief. Fannia was still searching wildly for an idea while listening to the drums booming. "If there was only someone we could fight," Donnaught mourned, looking at his useless blasters. "That's the deal," Fannia said. "Guilty conscience is making sinners of us all, or something like that. They expect us to give in before the carnage gets out of hand." He considered for a moment. "It's not so crazy, actually. On Earth, armies don't usually fight until every last man is slaughtered on one side. Someone surrenders when they've had enough." "If they'd just fight us!" -Yeah, if they only -- " He stopped. "We'll fight each other!" he said. "These people look at suicide as war. Wouldn't they look upon war -- real fighting -- as suicide?" "What good would that do us?" Donnaught asked. They were coming into the city now and the streets were lined with armed natives. Around the city there were thousands more. far as the eye could see. Evidently they had responded to the drums and were here to do battle with the aliens. Which meant, of course, a wholesale suicide. "Look at it this way," Fannia said. "If a guy plans on suiciding on Earth, what do we do?" "Arrest him?" Donnaught asked. "Not at first. We offer him anything he wants, if he just won't do it. People offer the guy money, a job, their daughters, anything, just so he won't do it. It's taboo on Earth." "So?" "So," Fannia went on, "maybe fighting is just as taboo here. Maybe they'll offer us fuel, if we'll just stop." Donnaught looked dubious, but Fannia felt it was W#rth a try.  the crowded city, to the entrance of the cache. The chief was waiting for '"them, beaming on his people like a joyial war god. "Are you ready to do battle?" he asked. "Or to surrender?" "Sure," Fannia said. "Now, Donnaught!" He swung, and his mailed fist caught Donnaught in the ribs. Donnaught blinked. "Come on, you idiot, hit me back." Donnaught swung, and Fannia staggered from the force of the blow. In a second they were at it like a pair of blacksmiths, mailed blows ringing from their armored hides. "A little lighter," Fannia gasped, picking himself up from the ground. "You're denting my ribs." He belted Donnaught viciously on the helmet. "Stop it!" the chief cried. "This is disgusting!" "It's working," Fannia panted. "Now let me strangle you. I think that might do it." Donnaught obliged by falling to the ground. Fannia clamped both hands around Donnaught's armored neck, and squeezed. "Make believe you're in agony, idiot," he said. Donnaught groaned and moaned as convincingly as he could. "You must stop!" the chief screamed. "It is terrible to kill another!" "Then let me get some fuel," Fannia said, tightening his grip on Donnaught's throat. The chief thought it over for a little while. Then he shook his head. "No." "What?" "You are aliens. If you want to do this disgraceful thing, do it. But you shall not profane our religious relics." staggered to their feet. Fannia was exhausted from fighting in the heavy space armor; he barely made it up. "Now," the chief said, "surrender at once. Take off your armor or do battle with us." The thousands of warriors -- were arriving every second -- shouted their blood-wrath. The cry was taken up on the outskirts and echoed to the hills, where more fighting men were pouring down into the crowded plain. Fannia's face contorted. He couldn't give himself and Donnaught up to the Cascellans. They might be cooked at the next church supper. For a moment he considered going after the fuel and letting the damned fools suicide all they pleased. His mind an angry blank, Fannia staggered forward and hit the chief in the face with a mailed glove. The chief went down, and the natives backed away in horror. Quickly, the chief snapped out a knife and brought it up to his throat. Fannia's hands closed on the chief's wrists. "Listen to me," Fannia croaked. "We're going to take that fuel. If any man makes a move -- if anyone kills himself -- I'll kill your chief." The natives milled around uncertainly. The chief was struggling wildly in Fannia's hands, trying to get a knife to his throat, so he could die honorably. "Get it," Fapnia told Donnaught, "and hurry it up." The natives were uncertain just what to do. They had their knives poised at their throats, ready to plunge if battle was joined. "Don't do it," Fannia warned. "I'll kill the chief and then he'll never die a warrior's death." The chief was still trying to kill himself. Desperately, Fannia held on, knowing he had to keep him from suicide in order to hold the threat of death over him. "Listen, Chief," Fannia said, eying the uncertain crowd. "I must have your promise there'll be no more war between us. Either I get it or I kill you." "Warriors!" the chief roared. "Choose a new ruler. Forget me and do battle!" The CascellanS' were still uncertain, but knives started to lift. "If you do it," Fannia shouted in despair, "I'll kill your chief. I'll kill all of you!" That stopped them. "I have powerful magic in my ship. I can kill every last man, and then you won't be able to die a warrior's death. Or get to heaven!" The chief tried to free himself with a mighty surge that almost tore one of his arms free, but Fannia held on, pinning both arms behind his back. "Very well," the chief said, tears springing into his eyes. "A warrior must die by his own hand. You have won, alien." The crowd shouted curses as the Earthmen carried the chief and the cans of fuel back to the ship. They waved their knives and danced up and down in a frenzy of hate. "Let's make it fast," Fannia said, after Donnaught had fueled the ship. He gave the chief a push and leaped in. In a second they were in the air, heading for Thetis and the nearest bar at top speed. The natives were hot for blood -- their own. Every man of them pledged his life to wiping out the insult to their leader and god, and to their shrine. But the aliens were gone. There was nobody to fight. Current IS ew Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Oppn Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. New York #, New York (Phone GRamercy #-#) for your  I subscription to Galaxy #  # subscriptions to Galaxy # each  # subscriptions to Galaxy # each  # subscriptions to Galaxy # each  # or more subscriptions to Galaxy # each  Fill out order slip now. We'll send gift cards to each fortunate recipient and acknowledgment to you. Offer good until December #th, #.  #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. I  Nome  Address . City  State j Sign Gift Card I Name  Address  City # State . Sign Gift Card  Name Address  City  State j Sign Gift Cord Name  Address City  State I Sign Gift Card j Nome  Address City  State I Sign Gift Card I My Name  Address   City  State Sugar Plum If not for two items, this would be a funny story -- the Atomic Age brought back the # vogue, and inhibition is not shatter-proof. O N A clear spring evening in #, Charles Edward Button came home half an hour late for his supper, tossed his hat to the robot butler who came out from behind the DoltAll, and announced that he had just bought a planet. His wife, Betty, was looking small and long-suffering on a plastic reproduction of a Victorian love-seat, and her" cousin Aurelia, a large, handsome woman, was standing behind her protectively. "Of course," he informed them, "it's not a big planet. But what a bargain! With real oceans, and two moons, and -- " "Real estate, real estate, real estate!" Cousin Aurelia's tart voice cut him off in mid-sentence. "You know what's come of every one of your investments. Call the man right now and tell him you want your money back!" "I'm afraid it's too late." Charles avoided her eye. "I bought it up at a tax-auction and -- well, the government never refunds." "I thought so. A planet nobody wants. Probably all run down, with swamps and deserts, and in some dreadful, shabby district where the neighbors have squirmy tentacles, or eyes on stalks, or big, nasty beaks!" "It isn't at all. It's in a good neighborhood -- only two systems away from the Inchcapes' new summer planet. A little remote, but that means more privacy." He took a catalogue out of his pocket. " 'Parcel #,' " he read. " 'Sugar Plum, a Class IV planet' -- that means it's like Earth, only bigger -- 'claimed ### by Space Captain Alexander Burgee, under Planetary Homestead Act of # (amended.)' And here's his description of the place where he landed: 'Neat as a pin, fine climate, full of critters and fish, quite uninhabited.' He was lost in Deep Space, poor fellow. That's why they sold it." Inchcapes call their planet Bide-A-Wee. I think Sugar Plum's ever so much nicer. But -- but can we afford it?" "We certainly can't!" fumed Cousin Aurelia. "We'll put it back on the market and salvage whatever we can." "No, we won't," Charles said firmly. "Arid it's not just a summer resort. We're pulling up stakes to live there all year round." Betty gasped. Cousin Aurelia straightened up, bristling. "I have made up my mind," Charles went on. "I have done a lot of serious thinking." He pointed at the heavily framed neodaguerreotype portraits on the walls. "Our ancestors rediscovered the only true principles, those of the great Nineteenth Century. They brought the Second Victorian Age into being. Civilization reached its peak, its full flowering. But now all is crumbling before the poisonous onslaught of modernism. We who have not been corrupted must seek out a refuge. That, Cousin, is why I bought Sugar Plum." "Nonsense!" exclaimed Cousin Aurelia. "There may be changes everywhere else, but never in Boston." "Ha!" Charles looked at his watch. "Solomon!" he called out. The butler came bowing out of the DoItAll nook, where the servants stayed when they were switched off. He wore a swallowtail coat and knee-breeches, and had kinky white hair. Made to order, he was Cousin Aurelia's idea. "Yassuh, Marse Charles. Here Ah is." "Solomon," ordered Charles, "tune in Watson Widgett." Betty paled, uttering a polite little scream. "Are you mad?" cried Cousin Aurelia. "I've heard about him. I'll not have that man in my home!" ders. "Cousin, may I remind you that I am head of this house, and that we are Victorians? It's high time you found out what's going on. Solomon!" "Yassuh." There was a click from the DoI-tAU, a brief flash of light and a figure appeared in their midst, a cheerful young man in loose trousers and shirt, without coat, waistcoat, cravat, or even a pair of suspenders. He was grinning at Cousin Aurelia. "Boys and girls," he was saying, "Wyoming has outlawed corsets! The folks in Siskiyou, California, have given women the vote! And listen to this. The Bikini swimsuit -- just a wisp and a twist -- is back on the market!" He winked loathsomely. "Yes, indeed, our prize fake Victorians, our second-hand stuffed shirts, are due for a fall. Here's the best news today, from a cute little lady right here in old Boston." He unfolded a paper. "Dear Watsy, When I first found your prog r a m, I was a real Mrs. Biedermeyer. Marriage was something we gentlewomen tried to endure while we knitted an antimacassar. It wasn't supposed to be fun. Then a friend tipped me off to your -- " At this point. Cousin Aurelia emitted a shriek, rolled her eyes and crumpled to the carpet. Charles gestured and the commentator vanished with a click and a flash. Betty scurried out and returned with the smelling salts. Presently, Cousin Aurelia regained her senses, shivered, and said, "It's too awful for words. If it were not for Betty, I would surely have left long ago. As it is, I shall go where you go, to protect her, of course." Then she permitted Betty to help her to her feet and out of the room. "Solomon!" Charles called loudly. "Yassuh, Marse Charles." "Set the table for two," Charles commanded. "I shall dial the dinner myself." He felt very adventurous and masterful. Dialing dinner without aid was fine training in self-reliance. S IX weeks later, the three of them stood on the bridge of the space freighter Beautiful Joe, watching Sugar Plum as the vessel entered an orbit around it. But Charles Edward Button didn't feel at all masterful, or even adventurous. They stood next to Possett. the skipper, a great, hairy man with gold teeth, a bad squint, and an air of gloomy cunning about him. After her first look at Possett, Cousin Aurelia had locked herself in her cabin, allowing no one but Betty to approach her, and threatening to subsist on the halfdozen cases of Dr. Stringfellow's Vegetable Remedy she kept under her berth. Charles, however, had been sure that Possett's fftart was both kindly and chivalrous. "Take those tall stories of his," he said more than once. "Betty, they don't mean a  thing. Old spacedogs love to kid tenderfeet. Imagine trying to make me believe that it's dangerous out here! And all that malarkey about Captain Burgee being a pirate or something!" They stared at Sugar Plum, at its small polar ice caps, its seas, its continents greener than Earth's, its wandering white clouds. Not many hours,before, it had been only a dust mote, a pinpoint of light in the void. Now it filled half the sky. And suddenly Charles understood the immensities, the unspeakable stretches of space in which Boston had vanished. Shivering, he wished he were home, stiffly safe in a curlicued chair, with Solomon dialing his dinner for him. "Nice piece of property," grunted Possett around his cigar. "Too bad about -- " He broke off with a shrug. "About what?" asked Charles, alarmed. "I wouldn't want to be in your shoes if Burgee comes around and finds you'd run off with his planet." "Burgee # He was lost out in space!" "His kind don't stay lost. Chances are he's hiding out from the law. But it's none of my business. Just thought I'd warn you." Charles laughed weakly. "You c-can't frighten me. I'm sure there aren't any pirates in space any more." Possett turned to his weasel faced mate. "Loopy, call the New Texas spaceport. Get Mac on the screen." The mate nodded. He twiddled a dial and punched at a switch. The screen glowed. After some seconds, the face of a red-haired person appeared, looking rather disgusted. "New Texas, New Texas," came a voice. "I hear you, Beautiful Joe. What the hell do you want?" "Dude aboard wants some info," said Possett. "Wants to know what Burgee did for a living -- Alexander Burgee. Also, are the coppers still trying to find him?" The face frowned. "Possett, you know damn well Burgee was a pirate. You know he's been listed as lost. Now quit wasting my time. New Texas out." T HE face vanished. The mate snickered nastily. And Charles just stood there gaping. "A real pirate!" squeaked Cousin Aurelia. "Wh-what would he do? Would he kill us?" "Might do anything. But -- " eying her, Possett leered -- "he's like me. Likes 'em well fattened up. Lady, you needn't worry." Cousin Aurelia paled. She started to sway. Then, perhaps recalling the uncarpeted deck, she recovered and looked haughty instead. "I am going right back to my cabin," she proclaimed, and stalked off the bridge. "Cousin Aurelia is very genteel," Betty snapped at the captain. "You had no right to insult her. Besides, she's only twenty pounds overweight." "Don't mind me. I go for her type." Possett shook his head darkly and turned toward Charles. "Button, man to man, a batkcountry planet's no place for the ladies. Look, I'll take the thing off your hands. I can handle Burgee. Twelve thousand cold cash for your stuff and the deed, and I'll throw in a lift to New Texas. There's a liner from there." Charles thought of the comfortable Earth and was tempted. "But I paid thirty-five," he protested uncertainly. "I mean, twelve is -- " "Take it or leave it. I'm trying to do you a favor." "No, I guess we'll leave it," answered Betty. Charles looked around in surprise. Her lips were compressed, her blue eyes narrowed with astonishing determination. "We've come all this way," she declared, "so we might as well keep it. I think it has -- well, possibilities. We've had the whole house done over and the servants remodeled. And we'll have all the DoItAll services -- teleprojection, medical care, and everything else -- from the New Texas substation. I'm sure we'll get along nicely." The skipper of the Beautiful Joe wasn't pleased. "It's your necks. Don't be blaming me for what happens," he growled. "Well, where do you want to set down?" "Set down?" gulped Charles. "R-right now?" "Land and unload, it says in the contract. I ain't got all day. I'll dump you at Burgee's old landing, load up with fresh water, and blast off for New Texas." Charles had no other spot in mind. "Okay," Possett said to the two robot crewmen at the main controls, "take her down." A T the waterfall's edge, flowering trees twisted their roots in the cliffside, and a fresh wind scattered plumes of its spray through their leaves. Taller trees, bellblossomed, fanned out from the pool, gave way to a meadow, and followed the course of the stream down a broadening valley -- among faceted boulders of translucent quartz, rose-pink, green, and golden, sheltering small, lustrous spires of fragile fungi. On the meadow stood the house, the latest in Second Victorian, complete with carved plastic false-front in early Schenectady Gothic. The Buttons themselves, with Cousin Aurelia, stood in front of it. They wore long linen dusters and sun helmets with heavy mosquito veils. They were going exploring. Cousin Aurelia was sputtering: "Do you know what he said when he left? 'Kid, you come along with Mike Possett. You don't want no part of that planet. I'll show you a ripsnorting time!' Then he gave me a look that -- that was positively lecherous." She shuddered. "At least we'll have no more of that nonsense. Your planet is uninhabited." Betty looked worried. "I've the funniest feeling," she said. "As if someone was watching." "That's absurd!" snapped Cousin Aurelia. "You must be imagin -- " She stopped in her tracks. "Wh-what's that?" They looked. A large, soft, fuzzy beast had come out from under the trees. It was reddish and had very big feet. It blinked at them brightly, climbed a transparent green rock, and started to whistle, not too tunefully, through its long Roman nose. Almost instantly, another emerged, a size smaller. Lowering its eyelids coquettishly, it began clapping its forepaws. "Charles, they must be the 'critters' Burgee mentioned in that catalogue. Remember? I'm sure they're perfectly harmless." T WO more animals appeared and made for a rock of their own. And then there were, suddenly, dozens -- all around the edge of the meadow. These were petite, creamy, with lavender ears. They came bounding forI ward in pairs, sat up and regarded the Buttons solemnly. Charles began to relax. Somehow, Sugar Plum didn't seem half so enormous any longer, now that they weren't so alone. "I wonder if they could be tamed." Betty was wistful. "They're certain to be just full of fleas," sniffed Cousin Aurelia. The creatures were playful. As the Buttons walked over the meadow, they frolicked around them -- But they also were very affectionate. As they frolicked, they flirted. Every once in a while, each pair would pause to rub noses, to murmur seductively, to nip one another. At first, Cousin Aurelia tried to pretend they weren't there. But finally she halted. "Charles Edward Button, I won't go a step farther till you drive those nasty things away. It's disgraceful. They're apt to do -- anything!" Charles flushed under his netting. 'Shoo !" he said ineffective ly. "Beat it!" There was a swift patter of feet straight ahead and a figure flashed into view. She was slim. She was small, with a girdle and headdress of feathers. Her skin was sky-blue, and her ears were pointed, and her eyes were simply enormous. But she looked distressingly human. In an instant, she vanished. As the Buttons stood there goggling, they heard more running footsteps, somewhat heavier, and a scuffle, a giggle, a clear, tenor laugh, and then silence. "Why, that was a girl!" Betty gasped. "She was being pursued!" Charles exclaimed. "He -- he caught her!" "Oooh!" moaned Cousin Aurelia, covering her eyes. "Charles, how could you? Enticing us here, saying it was uninhabited!" Then, before Charles could find a reply: "Uninhabited?" chuckled a deep male voice right behind them. "It certainly isn't. It's just uninhibited !"  around. There, by an odd square tree, stood a man even bigger than Possett, smoking a pipe. He was middle-aged. He wore a heavy brown beard, khaki shorts, a deep coat of tan, and a self-possessed smile. He bowed. "Burgee is my name -- Space Captain Alexander Burgee. Glad to make your acquaintance." "It's him!" screamed Cousin Aurelia. "And he's practically naked!" She pointed a cottongloved finger, began backing away. "You fiend, don't you come any nearer. Don't you touch me!" The captain looked very surprised. "Why would I want to?" Her voice reached a new high and clung there. "You -- you libertine! You may lead a riotous life with these natives, but you won't work your will on me. I'll lock myself in till the police can come from New Texas!" And, tripping and stumbling over her duster, she fled. As the door banged behind her, the captain nudged a large beast off a nearby rock, and sat down. "I can see that Earth hasn't changed," he remarked. "You tourists still seem to have the daffiest notions." He sounded quite hurt. "Look, these natives are nice little people. They're harmless. I call 'em my Sugar Plum pixies, and sometimes we grin at each other. But that's all. They aren't much past the animal stage. Besides, they lay eggs. Oh, well -- " he shrugged as the Buttons exchanged knowing looks -- "I have plenty of room at the house and I guess you'll be permanent guests, so welcome to Sugar Plum, anyway." Betty said angrily, "Sugar Plum's ours. You didn't pay taxes and they sold it at auction. Charles has the deed in his pocket." "You poor, dumb kids!" The captain seemed really concerned. "You bought some fool bureaucrats error. I'm paid up in advance. Come on down, you can see the receipt." "Aren't you clever?" said Betty scornfully. "Well, you won't trap us as easily as that. We don't need you or your house." "You just might want something to eat, or a hot, soapy shower, or a tight roof over you when it rains." The Buttons smiled triumphantly. They had their own house, with a Dolt All to do everything for them. "You can leave us alone, Mr. Pirate Burgee. Captain Possett told us your whole horrible story, and Cousin Aurelia is calling the police right this minute." "Possett?" The captain's face twitched. "Mike Possett, of the Beautiful Joe?" "That's right." Charles felt very superior. "Now you beat it before -- " He didn't finish. From the house came a loud, anguished cry. They whirled. Cousin Aurelia, dishelved, without helmet or duster, was almost upon them. "Charles! It won't work!" She reached him, threw her arms round his neck and hung on. "I can't turn the servants on, or the teleprojection, or even the keys to the closets. Oh, Charles, we'll have nothing to eat, or to drink, or to wear!" "That's impossible. DoItAlls never break down." "We can't live without it!" screeched Cousin Aurelia. "We're We're marooned with that monster!" was indecently plain, without even so much as a gimcrack or bit of gingerbread decoration. Its many wide windows looked out over a lake set with islands. Its living room had broad, cushioned couches and indolent chairs -- all suspiciously comfortable. In exactly such houses, Charles knew, in the wicked old days, a fate worse than death had been practically part of the fixtures. "We shouldn't have let him persuade us," he worriedly told Betty. "Perhaps we'd have starved, but at least Cousin Aurelia wouldn't have locked herself alone into a strange pirate's bedroom!" "We've been here all afternoon," Betty pointed out, "and he hasn't tried anything yet. Besides, he helped carry those cases of hers and he gave her the keys himself. It's peculiar. Oh, Charles, do you suppose that -- that it's me he's after?" Before he could answer, a robot came in, a practical, old-fashioned model with four arms for waiting at table. "Dinner is served." It snapped its aluminum jaws. "Come to the dining room, please." Reluctantly, they obeyed. "Whatever you do," whispered Charles warningly at the door, "don't let him ply you with liquor." The captain stood at the head of the table. He was in full evening dress, with a heavy goldnugget watch chain across his muscular middle. He smelled faintly of mothballs and looked very respectable. The Buttons examined the table. There wasn't a sign of absinthe or brandy or even champagne. There was nothing but water. "It's too bad your cousin won't join us," said the captain, seating them courteously. "I hope those cartons of hers have something tasty inside them." "They contain Dr. Stringfellow's Vegetable Remedy and Tonic for Gentlewomen," replied Betty primly. "It is said to be very nourishing." Their host shuddered. Recovering, he clapped his hands sharply. "Oh, steward!" "Aye, aye, sir!" said the robot, appearing with a big silver tureen and setting it down on the table. The Buttons drew back. "I can see you don't trust me," laughed the captain. "So we'll serve everything out in plain sight. You can shuffle the plates if you want to." He proceeded to ladle out a clear, fragrant soup. "There. Take whichever you want." The Buttons selected their plates. They picked up their spoons, dipped them nervously, made rowing motions. PTHE captain ate heartily, talking away between spoonfuls. He told them that Sugar Plum was surrounded by an ionized layer impervious to DoItAll waves. He said he had no use for such gadgets, or for the Age which produced them. "And why," he demanded, "did we become fake Victorians? Why are we worse than the real ones? I'll tell you. Because space was too big. It made people feel puny. They wanted a hole to crawl into -- something small, safe and stuffy." As course followed course, he told them how he had retired from piracy after homesteading Sugar Plum. Alone with his robots, he had dismantled his vessel, using its engines for heating and lighting. He had done a good deal of exploring. The robot served something like lobster, and something like grouse, and a roast which might have been venison. It served vegetables in pink, pear-like clusters and long, golden pods. It served a crisp, succulent salad. Charles picked at his food, watching Betty with growing uneasiness. First, her appetite seemed to improve. Then her eyes started to sparkle, and the severe little corners of her mouth began to relax. Leaning forward intently, she became more and more absorbed in the captain. " -- and so here I've been ever since," he said, as he finished his salad, "and Sugar Plum's just about perfect. Of course, it gets lonely at times, but -- " Abruptly, Betty's hand darted out, grabbed the captain's beard. "Beaver!" she shouted, laughing and pulling. Then she settled back, blushing. "I've wanted to do that for years." Charles reeled. Here was a crisis! He started to rise; hesitated. Of course, he was shocked to the core, but, "Great Scott, she's pretty!" he thought; and at once he felt guilty. He stood up, trying hard to look angry. "Elizabeth," he announced, "you will leave this room -- er -- instantly." "Why?" giggled Betty ."Because ladies do not pull gentlemen's beards." The captain was holding his sides and rocking with laughter. "Now, now," he protested. "Let her get it out of her system. 'Beaver's' a splendid old custom. It's almost Victorian." Betty dimpled, resting her chin on the backs of her interlaced hands. "Don't pay any attention, Captain Burgee. Charlie's a horrid oldfuss-pot. Why shouldn't I yank at your beard? I like you." "Betty, the man is a pirate " "Not any more. He's retired. You heard him say so yourself. Anyhow, I like him. I think he'd make an awfully nice husband for Cousin Aurelia."  ter, and drained his glass in a spluttering gulp. "I think so, too," the captain agreed, looking pleased. "I thought so as soon as I saw her. She's exactly my type." He sighed. "But she does seem a little unfriendly. Do you suppose a guitar and some old-fashioned songs at her window might -- well, make her want to get better acquainted?" Charles thought, "Not that sour old prune!" Surprised at himself, he swallowed the words just in time. Betty snickered. "Poor Cousin Aurelia! I simply can't get over her staying locked in with nothing but Vegetable Remedy. Why, it tastes just like shoe polish. And it's all because she's scared to death to eat or drink anything here. She believes that Sugar Plum's really an -- an uninhibited planet!" She stopped. She stared at the captajn. "What's the matter?" "I'm afraid," he said, looking very serious, "that you don't understand. Your Cousin Aurelia is right." Betty wilted. "You can't mean it!" "I don't know exactly what does it. Maybe it's something in the water and air and food -- " Charles stared at the plates on the table in horror. "It's nothing you need be afraid of," the captain went on. "You see, its effect just depends on the kind of person you are way inside." Betty began to perk up. She eyed Charles appraisingly. "Is Charles the right kind of person?" she asked. "I'm sure he is, and your cousin is, too, though she .keeps it pretty well hidden. If they weren't. Sugar Plum would soon let us know it, believe me." He grinned. "And now let's all go a-courtin'. I'll get my guitar and call Herman." He went to the door and whistled, and instantly a large reddish creature came lolloping in. It saw the guitar and blinked eagerly. Betty linked her arm in the captain's. "Come along, Charlie." Charles fumbled around. He was scared. Then Betty looked over her shoulder and smiled. It was a completely new smile. He had never seen it before. It made him tremble with apprehension. "You know," she said softly, "I think it'll sort of be fun being uninhibited." Charles knocked over a glass, and his chair, and he paused only to drink some more water. "So," he shouted, "do I!" "I suspected you might," said the captain. the porch and sat down in a swing; and, for a few moments, in silence, they watched Sugar Plum's two moons sailing through the strange, perfumed sky. The larger was celadon green; the smaller, off-white, was glowing, gleaming. Finally, "Cousin Aurelia?" called Betty. "Betty, are you out in the dark with that man?" "Charles and I both are. But he isn't a pirate any more and he's really quite nice. Besides, he's going to sing to you." "You tell him to go away -- far away. I've barricaded the window and I have my sharp scissors. I warn you, if he makes one false move -- " "This is where I came in," remarked Charles. The captain settled back, tuned his guitar, and started to sing in a warm bass-baritone, with Herman whistling a tenor obbligato through his nose. Betty and Charles thought the effect was charming, even if Herman did tend to go a bit flat on the high notes. First, the captain sang Down by the Old Mill Stream and Sweet Genevieve. Then he tried a number of sentimental arias from the more respectable operas, and The Lost Chord, and several other old favorites. Occasionally, Cousin Aurelia sniffed loudly, but she said nothing until his serenade came to an end. "Betty!" she called. "Can you hear me?" "Do I have to?" "Tell that person out there that it has done him no good to make those ungodly noises. My fingers have been in my ears all the time." "You must've been really a sight," giggled Betty. "Betty! You -- you sound different, somehow." "Oh, I am! So is Charles. We're both uninhibited now." There was one cry of horror from Cousin Aurelia and then silence. Betty turned to the captain. He looked downcast, and Herman did, too. "We'll just have to try something else, something clever," she told the captain. "Cousin Aurelia seems dead set against you. It's becauseof your being a pirate, I guess." next couple of days avoiding any mention of the captain's former profession andTielping him think up new ways to uninhibit Cousin Aurelia. He tried singing again, this time with an augmented chorus of Herman's relations. When that also failed, he cooked her a fine mushroom omelette. Then he caught her a young animal with lavender ears to keep as a pet and he spent a whole evening reading Sonnets irom the Portuguese aloud at her window. She responded with sniffs and with occasional scraping noises of furniture being moved to reinforce her defenses. Finally, to Betty's distress, she pushed out a note announcing that henceforth she would have nothing to do with the Bqttons -- and that no one could tell her that poems like those were Victorian. Before the third day was half over, the Captain was moping around, Charles was peevish, and Betty had started to worry and fret. So, in the late afternoon, they went on a picnic. Followed by Herman, and by the four-armed dining room robot carrying two wicker hampers, they walked around the lake to a broad grassy knoll where the strange square trees grew in a circle, and prisms of quartz leaned from the ground like Druids turned into stone. While they ate, the night advanced softly, its moons weaving crystalline shadows of celadon, rose, and old ivory. Betty waited until the last hint of daylight had vanished. Then, "It's lovely," she whispered. "Poor Cousin Aurelia, it'd all be so simple if she'd only come out, but -- oh. I'm afraid that it's hopeless!" "Hopeless?" Charles snorted. "It's easy. We'll break into her room, me and Burgee, and hold her while you pour some of Sugar Plum's water down her gullet. She'll be fixed up before she finds out what hit her." "We mustn't do that," the captain said stiffly. "We can't employ violence." "Look who's talking!" Charles was amused. "An old pirate like you. Robbing ships, making passengers walk the plank into space, shooting people with ray guns, and -- " "Shh!" Betty warned. "Charles, that isn't polite. You know he's sensitive about -- " The captain seemed to be strangling. "And I thought it was snobbery!" Then he exploded with laughter. Helay back on the grass and he howled. The Buttons stared in amazement, and some creatures came out of the trees to see what the uproar was all about. fTHE captain sat up. "What century is this?" he asked. "The Twenty-second, of course," answered Betty. "But -- but why?" "I just wondered. I'll tell you later." He controlled himself with an effort. "But we really mustn't use force on Aurelia, even in such a good cause. It might turn her into the wrong kind of person." "Turn her?" Betty repeated sadly. "I'm afraid that she already is. I don't think she'll ever come out. I'm afraid she'll do something desperate." "I'm worried, too," the captain admitted, "but I'm certain she is the right kind. The wrong kind of people can't live here. Sugar Plum doesn't like them." Betty and Charles both looked puzzled. "I'll try to explain. It happens within a few hours, even if they aren't uninhibited. If they are, then it's practically instantaneous. It's a -- " He broke off and looked up at the sky with a frown. There was an angry red glow right above them, a far-distant roar. They leaped to their feet. The glow brightened swiftly. It seemed to be headed straight for them. The sound filled the air. "We have visitors!" shouted the captain. "Wh-who?" stammered Betty. "The police?" "They don't use braking jets any more. It's an obsolete freighter." "Oh!" Betty put her hands to her face in terror. "It's the Beautiful Joe. That man Possett -- he's coming back after Cousin Aurelia!" The red glow passed to the northward. They saw the ship's shape for a moment, spurting flame, slowing. Then it dropped out of sight. The ground shuddered briefly. There was quiet. The captain grabbed Betty's arm. "They'-re down in the clearing. Quick! When he dropped you, did Possett take anything with him?" "Just a fresh supply of water." "My God!" blurted Charles. "That means they're -- " " Uninhibited " yelled the captain. "And they're the yrrong kind of people. Betty! Charles! Can you run? Hey, Steward, give them a hand!" "Aye, aye, sir," snapped the robot, hoisting the hampers and reaching an elbow to each of the Buttons. "Then let's go. I hope we can make it in time to save them!" "Them?" gulped Charles, as the robot started to run. But the captain already was too far ahead to have heard him. bot, Charles and Betty made very good time, but they couldn't catch up with the captain. They had to make several stops to get their wind back, and they were still half a mile from the house when they heard her. "Help! Murder! Police! Save me!" screamed Cousin Aurelia. "He -- he's got her!" puffed Charles, as the shrieks died away. "Hurry!" When they got to the house, it was empty. Not even Herman was there. In the living room and the hall, there were signs of a titanic struggle. The door of Cousin Aurelia's room hung wide open. "Look!" Charles gave it a great goldfish stare. "She unlocked it herself!" . "He probably told her -- he was rescuing her -- from the pirate," panted Betty. "We -- we'll have to go on -- " Charles felt his legs start to collapse -- "to the clearing." The robot put two arms around him, and one around Betty. "You will rest for three minuts," it stated, leading them to the living room and seating them gently. "I will bring brandy." The brandy was welcome. They drank it in gulps, and worried about Cousin Aurelia, and the robot fanned them considerately while they did so. s Then, again, they were off. In less than ten minutes, they looked down on the valley, on the clearing. They caught sight of the Beautiful Joe. The voice of the waterfall reached them. And so did another bne. A man's voice. A deep one. "Ow!" it yelled hoarsely. "Let me up! Ow! Let go!" Charles moaned. "We shouldn't have waited for brandy. Now With the robot behind them, they raced down the hill, splashed through the stream, broke through a circle of giggling Sugar Plum natives and goggle-eyed creatures. "Don't give up!" croaked Charles. "We're coming!" On the grass were four figures. Two were thrashing around and being sat on. Two were doing the sitting. The Buttons braked to a stop. Something was radically wrong. The larger of the two thrashing figures was being sat on by Cousin Aurelia! "Try to kidnap me, will you?" Slap. "Make me throw myself into that pool!" Slap. "And swalJow a gallon of water and have to drag myself out!" Slapslapslap. "You will, will you?" "Ow!" cried the figure. "Leggo!" shoulder. She spied Charles and Betty. "Hey!" she shouted. "Bear a hand here with Possett!" "You don't have to hold him," called Captain Burgee, dismounting from Loopy the mate. "He can't get away. Sugar Plum's got him." They both rose and the two writhing figures continued to writhe. "They're scratching Charles exclaimed. He wasn't quite right. The skipper and the mate of the leautiful Joe were trying to scratch, but they didn't have enough hands. They were groaning, and bleating, and begging for aid as they wriggled. Cousin Aurelia gave Possett a push with her foot. "I'm soaked to the skin," she announced. "Betty, help me off with this dress. If I don't wring my petticoat out, I'll catch something." "Why, Cousin Aurelia!" Charles blurted. "In front of the captain?" "And why not?" she demanded. "I have undies on, don't I?" The captain broke in, his voice urgent. "We've got to get these characters back aboard in a hurry! They can't live on Sugar Plum; they're the wrong kind of people. I started to tell you. They're allergic to the critters, the trees, the natives -- to everything here. You, Steward!" He beckoned. "Call the crew of the Beautiful Joe." The robot ran to the ship. It whistled. Immediately, four other robots appeared. "Bosun," said the captain to the one in the lead, "Captain Possett is ill. He is -- er -- delirious. The mate, too. Carry them in. And take off quickly for New Texas." "Aye, aye, sir." The bosun saluted. They lifted up Possett, who was grunting and swearing. They hoisted the weasel-faced mate. The hatches clanged shut. Fire burst from the stem. The ship lifted. When there was quiet again, Cousin Aurelia looked at the captain. She examined him carefully. "Hm-m-m," she murmured to Betty. "Not bad. Not bad at all!" Then, "Alexander Burgee," she declared, "every bit of this is your fault. If I hadn't escaped from that man and jumped in the pool -- well, I don't know what might've happened. The least you can do is carry me back to your house." A T midnight, Charles and Betty sat in the living room. They hadn't had time to get used to the change in Cousin Aurelia and they still looked at her unbelievingly. She was wearing a gay housecoat of Betty's, too tight in just the right places. She had let down her hair, tied it with a ribbon, and she'd put on a gay smear of lipstick. She was exceedingly merry. "I can't imagine how I stood it," she was saying, "for so many years. I mean, being such an old frump." She laughed brightly. "Why, I was almost as bad as poor Charlie!" "Well, at least I never locked myself in to get away from a pirate," Charles retorted. The captain stood up with a chuckle. "Say, that reminds me." He went to a bookcase, opened a thick volume, and gave it to Charles. "I want you to read something here." Charles saw that it was Jane's Dictionary of Space Transportation. He looked up enquiringly. The captain was pointing at a word. " Pirate " Charles read, sounding puzzled. " 'Pirate, originally a criminal who attacked and robbed ships at sea (see: Earth, planet) now obsolete in this sense. At present, term applied to -- ' " Charles hesitated -- " 'to persons engaged in space salvage, especially to captains of vessels employed in such work.' " Charles turned red. Betty flushed. Cousin Aurelia started laughing her head off. "Times change," the captain said soberly. "Do you want me to show you my license?" The Buttons were much too embarrassed to answer. "Well, if you don't, I hope you'll excuse us. Aurelia and I would like to sit in the swing and look at the stars for a while." "I want to be told just how far away Boston is," she said as he helped her to rise. She wrinkled her nose. "I'm certainly glad that here on Sugar Plum we're safe from the wrong kind of' people -- all those horrible Victorians." The captain's arm went around her. He winked at the Buttons. "A few of them weren't so bad," he said gently. "A few of the real ones." And, as they left, he slipped the copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese into his pocket. "Well, now that we've sort of lost Cousin Aurelia," said Betty, "I wish I could have one of these adorable animals on Sugar Plum for my very own. As a pet, you know. It might help as a substitute for Cousin Aurelia's company." "And what's wrong with me for  I a substitute?" Charles wanted to know. "It seems to me that you can forget Cousin Aurelia for a change and give me a little consideration." She looked at him appraisingly and then at her watch. "I never thought of that," she said. "It's time for bed." him hard for a moment, and shook her head wistfully. "Oh, Charles, you'd be perfect," she said, "if you only had lavender ears." "That shouldn't be much trouble," he answered gravely. "I'll signal a passing spaceship, get to New Texas and have my ears tattooed. Good enough?" She nuzzled against his neck. "Wonderful, darling. It would make you look so -- so Bohemian!" It was the finest compliment Charles had ever received. Jt's a plot... and what an ingenious and provocative plot! Wonderfully useful gadgets that bring terror and chaos... super-salesmen to give away charity... rich new frontiers no farther away than next door possible to wait patiently until you have all three installments before starting it. But not after you've read the first one! so arrestingly different that we believe it's a completely new art form. There's no point discussing the technique until you see the cover; the editorial will give you an idea of how it is done. With our improved paper and printing, we really begin to head for the stars in the artwork for the novelets, short stories and features coming up. Don't forget that Willy Ley will answer all your science questions a few at a time, print clearly if you have no typewriter, and add your name and address, both of which will be withheld if you request it. And do not apologize for your questions. The department is written for laymen, not scientists... A Thought for Tomorrow Any intolerable problem has a way out -- the more impossible, the likelier it is sometimes! Illustrated by rusty guard of his saber, A and the metal immediately became gold-plated. Potts reined his capricious black stallion closer ' to the first sergeant. "Report!" the first sergeant bellowed. "Fourth Hussars, all present!" "Eighth Hussars, all present!" "Eleventh Hussars, all present!" "Thirteenth Hussars, all present!" "Seventeenth Lancers, all present!" The first sergeant's arm flashed in a vibrating salute. "Sir," he said, "the brigade is formed." Potts concentrated on the sergeant; but, aside from blue eyes, a black mustache, and luminous chevrons, the man's appearance remained vague. His uniform had no definite color, except for mored, and his headgear expanded and contracted so rapidly that Potts could not be certain whether he wore a shako or a tarn. "Take your post," Potts said. "Men!" he shouted. "We're going to charge at those guns!" "Oh, Oi say!" wailed a small private with scarcely any features but a mouth. "Them Russians'll murder us!" "Yours not to reason why," Potts said. "Draw sabers! Charge!" The ground quaked under the beat of twenty-four hundred hoofs. As the first puffs of smoke billowed from the entrenchments half a league away, Potts remembered that he had forgotten to give orders to the lancers. Should he tell them to couch lances, or lower lances, or aim lances, or -- P . T. boys, let's go. Out to the door," a bored voice called. Potts opened his eyes. He sighed. Again he had failed. The dayroom had hardly changed. The chairs were all pushed together in the center of the floor, and two patients with brooms swept little ridges of dirt and cigarette butts toward the door. Potts sat slouched in one of the chafts and raised his feet as the sweepers passed. "Orville Potts, out to the door," the bored voice said. look when the big attendant, immaculate in white duck trousers and short-sleeved linen shirt, passed through to the porch. Potts wondered why so many of the attendants resembled cleanshaven gorillas. He arose leisurely from the chair, shuffled around the sweepers, and entered the hall. A pair of huge, gray, faded cotton pants draped his spindling legs in wrinkled folds, and an equally faded khaki shirt hung from his stooped shoulders. Potts had not combed his hair in three days. He pushed the tangled brown mass out of his eyes and threaded between the groups of men that jammed the hall, smoking and waiting to go to the shoe shop, or the paint detail, or psychodrama, or merely waiting. At the locked door to the stairs. Potts stopped and glared at the six patients already assembled. "Hello, Orville Potts," said another long-armed, barrel-chested attendant. This one wore a black necktie, and, so far as Potts knew, had no name but Joe. Potts ignored Joe. The attendant pulled a ring of keys attached to a long heavy chain from his pocket and unlocked the door, when Wilhart brought the rest of the P. T. boys. "Downstairs, when I call your name," Joe said, and read from the charts attached to his clipboard. When his name was called, Potts stepped through to the landing and descended the top stairs. Joe locked the door. Potts looked up at Danny Harris, who stood motionless on the landing. While Joe weaved down the crowded steps, Wilhart took Harris by the arm and pushed him. "Let's go," he said. "Here, Orville Potts, take Danny Harris downstairs with you." Potts said, "Do your own dragging." "Well!" Wilhart gasped. "Hear that, Joe? Orville Potts is talking this morning!" Joe turned up a red, grim face. "He'll talk a lot before I'm through with him," he promised. The sixteen patients from Ward J descended the stairs, were counted through another door, and formed a ragged column of twos on the concrete walk outside. With Joe leading and Wilhart guarding the' rear, the little formation moved across the great grassy quadrangle enclosed by the buildings and ' connecting roofed corridors of the hospital. Potts tried to close his ears to Wilhart's incessant urging of Danny Harris. Harris would do little of his own volitiori, but Potts was tired of acting as his escort. The blue morning sky supPotts wished he were up there, or anywhere except going to P. T. He hated P. T. It terrified him. Potts closed his eyes. L'-l the soft grass and rested a gloved hand on the upper wing of his flying machine. "Sir," he said, "with my invention, the Confederacy will soon put the Yankees to rout." The general stroked his gray goatee and pursed his lips. Potts felt pleased that every detail of the general's uniform stood out in bold clarity. The slouch hat, gray coat, red sash, and black jackboots were more real than life. Of course the surrounding landscape was a green blur, but increased  concentration would clear that. The general said, "Ah'm doubtful, Majah. Balloons, Ah undahstand. Hot aiah natuahlly rises, but this contraption seems too heavy to fly." "No heavier, in proportion, than a kite, sir," Potts explained. The crude mountaineer captain, standing slightly behind the general, snickered. "Hit won't work nohow," he predicted. "Jist like that there Seven Pines. Ain't even got no steam engine fur as I kin see." Potts said, "This is a new type engine. It operates on a formula of my own, which I have named gasoline. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I shall proceed with the demonstration." Potts climbed into the cockpit. A touch of the starter set the # h.p. radial engine roaring. He waved to the gaping officers and opened the throttle. The biplane whisked down the field and rocketed into the blue morning sky. Too late, Potts saw the buzzard soaring dead ahead. He shoved the stick forward, but the black bird rushed toward his face in frightening magnification. had walked into a wall. "What's the matter, Orville Potts?" Joe asked. "Vou sleepwalking? Get in there! I'll wake you tip." Joe shoved Potts through the door marked physical therapy and into the dressing room. With sixteen patients in the process of disrobing, the small room presented a scene of wild, indecent activity. Potts squirmed through the thrashing tangle to a bench against the wall. He sat down and removed a shoe. Potts almost felt the currents surging through the neurons of his brain and sensed a throbbing on the inside of his skull. Twice this morning, he had tried to break through the physical barrier and had failed. Even with a minimum of thought, the reasons for failure became obvious. Lack of intimate detail seemed the principle cause. In his attempt to reach the Crimean War and lead the Charge of the Light Brigade, he had been hampered by his ignorance of correct uniforms and commands. He did not know at what time of day the charge had taken place, the weather conditions, the appearance of the terrain, or even the exact date. He believed it was about #, but he wouldn't risk a dime bet on his guess. Perhaps an attempt to return to the past was certain to fail. Surely the past had happened, was settled, inviolate. Someone named Lord Cardigan, not Orville, Lord Potts, had led the charge. Inventing an airplane during the Civil War also had no chance of success. No such thing actually happened, and, if it had, the plane would have been more crude than the Wright brothers' machine. Furthermore, Potts was no aviator. Success, if any, lay in the future. The future was yet to come, and Potts could mold events to his liking. Or perhaps he could move his body in space, instead of time. He could think himself out of the hospital. "Orville Potts, get those clothes off!" Wilhart prdered. Potts slowly removed his faded garments. He took his place at the end of the line of naked men leading to the needle shower. Joe stood in all his glory at what Potts called the P. T. machine. The apparatus was a marble box with rows of knobs and gauges and a pair of rubber hoses on the top. Potts felt sure that Joe took a sadistic delight in his work. As the line moved forward, he glanced at the attendant's florid face, tight smiling lips and squinted eyes. Potts shuddered... No member of the hospital staff had ever condescended to explain to Potts the exact purpose of the P. T. bath, other than that it would make him feel good. It only frightened Potts. The correct procedure was that the patient stepped between the pipes of the needle shower and washed himself. Then the attendant turned off the shower and sluiced the patient with powerful streams of water from the hoses. The routine seemed senseless and innocent enough, but Potts had heard whispered conversations in the night that filled him with horror. The P. T. machine, rumor said, was actually an instrument of torture and death. The water pressure could be increased to two thousand pounds, enough to push out a man's eyes or break his bones. Instead of water, the hoses could spit fire like a flamethrower. Acid could spray from the shower. Potts had even heard that Joe had killed seven men in the P. T. bath. How much of this was true, Potts did not know. When he saw bodies turn suddenly red under a rain of hot water, or writhe and tremble as if being whipped, he could believe all of it. The line advanced slowly, like a gang of criminals going to the gas chamber. Potts grimly determined to think himself out of the hospital at once, for who knew when fire instead of water would spout from the hoses? If he recalled some place outside, in exact detail, Potts knew he could become all mind and project himself there. He must recall everything, scents, temperature, the ground beneath his feet, precise colors. Potts concentrated. He tried to remember the home he had not seen for three months. He received a dim impression of a tiny crowded apartment and a wife growing increasingly indifferent. He could not even remember the color of her eyes, or whether the living room contained one easy chair or two. He would have to project himself to another place, one that did not seem like a vague dream. Potts saw that his bath would come next. Danny Harris stood in the spray and stared stupidly at the tile floor. Potts looked at Joe. A wide smile that revealed two gold teeth creased the burly attendant's face. Hairy hands turned off the needle shower, twisted two more knobs, and picked up the twin hoses. Joe stood like the villain in a Western movie, blazing away with two guns, and shot  thin powerful streams of water against Harris's spine. Harris shrieked, though he rarely uttered a sound outside the P. T. bath. As the icy water raked him from head to heels, he yelled and danced. "Turn around," Joe commanded. Harris pivoted and wailed, and Joe basted him on all sides with water. Potts watched fascinated as the thin body turned alternately blue with cold and red under the stinging water. He would not endure that again this morning. He knew now one place he could sense and visualize in complete detail. "All right," said Joe, laying down his hoses. "Let's go, Orville Potts!" Harris reeled, like a man rescued from drowning, into the dressing room, and Potts took his place between the four vertical pipes of the needle shower. From innumerable holes in the pipes, powerful jets of water spouted against his body. He stood with his back turned to the machine and made no attempt to wash. He never did -- he saw no point in bathing yithout soap. Potts thought of the Ward J dayroom, the room in which he had spent much of his time for the past three months. He visualized the maroon chairs with metal arms and legs, the green cretonne curtains, the cream walls, the black-and-red inlaid linoleum floor glinting with spots of old wax. He sensed a stale odor of tobacco smoke, furniture polish, and perspiration. He heard the talk of patients engaged in perpetual games of rook. He felt his thighs, hips, and back pressing against one of the chairs, and his feet on the smooth floor. "Now, Orville Potts," Joe jeered, "let's hear you sing like Danny Harris!" But Potts wasn't there. had always wondered how it would feel, but he had felt nothing. In the same instant, he stood tensed, waiting for the water, and he sat in a chair in the Ward J dayroom. Directly in front of him, a nurse played rook with three of the patients grouped around a square table. Not many patients were in the room at this hour, and no attendant stood guard. The nurse turned her head slightly. She gasped, shoved back her chair and ran to the porch. Nasen, the ward attendant, charged through the door she had used. "Orville Potts!" he cried. "Where's your clothes?" Potts then noticed that he was completely naked and wet. Nasen dragged Potts from the chair, applied a light hammerlock, and marched his captive from the room. "Did you come over here from P. T. like that?" he asked. "How'd you get out?" enough, but without answering. Nasen unlocked the door to the shower room and thrust Potts within. "Stay right there," he said. As he was locked in, Potts heard the attendant call, "Frank, go tell Dr. Bean that Orville Potts slipped out of P. T. with no clothes on. I don't know how. He must have stolen a key." Potts took a towel from the shelf, sat on the bench, and rubbed his hair with the towel. He hoped they all went batty trying to learn how he had escaped. He thought most of the attendants should be patients anyhow. Clutching a pile of clothing and a pair of slippers, Nasen returned. "Put these on," he said. "Orville Potts, you're in trouble n #w. What did you do with the key?" Potts struggled into a tight blue shirt minus most of the buttons. "I didn't have a key." "You're talking?" "I can talk when I want to," Potts admitted. "I just never want to." Nasen said, "That's more words than I've heard from you all at one tirhe. Why did you come back stark naked like that?" "I thought my way out," Potts explained, pulling on the trousers that had evidently been tailored for a giant. "Oh, you thought your way out. Put those slippers on." Joe and Wilhart, flushed and panting, charged into the shower room. "There he is! Grab him!" Joe yelled. He seized Potts' arms and pulled them behind in a brutal double hammerlock. "He's not giving any trouble," Nasen said. "What happened. Joe?" "Damn if I know. He was in the shower, and I turned my head for a second. Next thing I knew, he was gone. What'd you find on him -- a key or a lock-pick or something like that?" Nasen grinned. "He didn't have even that much on when I first saw him. 'He came into the day room and sat down, and Miss Davis like to threw a fit." Wilhart tossed a bundle on the floor. "There's nothing in his own clothes but a pack of cigarettes." "Where's the key, Orville Potts?" Joe grated, squeezing Potts's arms. "You know what's going to happen to you? You'll get the pack room, or maybe Ward D. How would you like Ward D, Orville Potts?" Nasen said, "If he had a key. he -- " "You better run along, Nasen," Joe said. "I think Dr. Bean wants to talk to you." "Well, I -- uh -- " Looking worried, Nasen left the shower room. Wilhart handed Joe a towel. "Leave me alone!" Potts yelled. Joe wrapped the towel around Potts's neck. "Where's the key, Orville Potts?" "Help!" Potts cried. The towel tightened. With rapidly dimming vision, he saw Wilhart assume a stance. A huge fist thudded against his shrunken stomach. He tried to scream, but the towel cut off all air and sound. Again and again, the fist struck. Potts found himself sitting on the floor, gulping air into starved lungs. For a moment, he hoped he had managed another transportation, but the two white-clad human gorillas leering down at him proved he had not left the shower room. "Get up," Joe said. They dragged Potts to his feet. Nasen opened the door, clamped his teeth, and then opened his mouth to say, "Dr. Bean wants Orville Potts. I'll -- " "I'll take him," Joe said. Potts winced as spatulate fingers almost met through his biceps. His feet barely touched the floor of the corridor when Joe marched him to the office of Dr. Lawrence D. Bean. sat behind a maple desk and peered at Potts over spectacles attached to a black ribbon. Joe shut the door and leaned against it.  "I've been hearing things about you. Orville," Dr. Bean said. "We'll have a little examination. Now, hold your right arm out straight, close your eyes, and touch the end of your nose with your index finger." "Can't we do without the foolishness?" Potts asked. He sank into the chair beside the doctor's desk and gently rubbed his bruised arm. The doctor looked slightly startled, but said, "I'm pleased to hear you speaking again. Orville. If you continue to talk to people, take an interest in your surroundings, write home, you'll be out of here very shortly." "He choked me," Potts said, pointing a thumb at Joe. "He choked me with a towel, and the other one, that Wilhart, hit me in the stomach." Dr. Bean's spectacles jumped from his nose and dangled by the ribbon. He focused a pair of bleary eyes on Potts and said, "You know they didn't, Orville. The attendants are here for your benefit. They would never subject a patient to physical violence." Potts laughed for the first time since he was hospitalized. He said, "Why don't you ask me what I did with the key?" "What did you do with the key, Orville?" "Talk about monomaniacs!" Potts snickered. "You all have one-track minds. You can't think of any way I could have escaped without stealing a key. Is any key actually missing? Did anyone see me crossing the grass or coming through the halls? I'll tell you how I did it. Exactly how. You already think I'm nuts, so it won't matter." Again, Potts pointed at Joe. "Laughing boy here can bear me out. He was about to whip me with his ice water, and I vanished. I vanished from the shower and materialized in the dayroom' Dr. Bean replaced his glasses and grabbed a pad and pencil. "That's right, Doc," Potts approved. "Write it down. I'm giving you a better break than you ever gave me. I've been in this hospital four times, and no doctor ever sat down and explained what was wrong with me, or tried to learn why. There was something about combat fatigue, whatever that is. over in Italy. Otherwise, I don't know anything. If I so much as raise my voice or break a dish at home, my wife has me shipped back here as dangerously psychotic, or psycho-neurotic, or something. Which makes it nice for her. "And what do you do' when I come back? You give me electric shock treatments and have your sadists whip me with P. T. baths, as if torture could cure a sick mind! Maybe there's nothing wrong with my brain. Maybe it's just different from yours, or this jerk's, if he has a brain." "Never mind, Joe," Dr. Bean cautioned in a theatrical aside. "Just stand by." Potts smiled and said, "Take it all down. Then you can check your notes and decide if it's schizophrenia, or catatonia, or psychasthenia. or what not. I know a little about mental diseases from reading, and I'll explain my theory the best I can."  with a forefinger and asked, "What is a brain? You'll say it's an organ occupying the skull and forming the center of the nervous system, and the seat of intellect, or some such thing. I don't think so. It generates electricity. You know that. A nerve impulse is a wave of electricity started and conducted by a nerve cell. You can test it. You've made brainwave patterns of some of the boys in the ward. "The brain transforms energy into thought, or thought into energy. I'm sitting here thinking and not moving my body at all. My brain is transforming electric energy into thought. You're writing, and your thoughts guide the movement of your hand. Thought into energy." Dr. Bean turned a page and continued to scribble rapidly. Potts heard Joe move and flt the big attendant's presence behind his chair Potts said, "The ability to think improves with use, like a muscle growing stronger with yse. The first time you memorize a poem, it's a hard job. If you keep on memorizing, it becomes easier, until you read a poem a couple of times and you have it. The same goes for remembering. I'll bet you can't even remember how your breakfast tasted and smelled this morning. Probably not even what you ate. "I practice remembering with all the senses. How things lodk and taste and smell. Exact colors, shadows, size, impressions. Think of an airplane, and you probably think of a little silver thing in the sky. Actually, an airplane is much bigger than that, so your mental picture of an airplane is all wrong. An airplane gives me a certain impression. I have it only when looking at one. Maybe it's an unrecognized sense. I have an entirely different impression when I'm looking at a horse." Dr. Bean threw down his pencil, caught his falling glasses, drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and polished them. "Too deep for you, Doc?" Potts inquired. "Well, just assume that my brain is a more powerful generator and transformer than any you ever saw. I've developed it by memorizing, remembering, visualizing, working problems in my head, and so on. I've been trying to make my brain take complete control of my body. The body is composed of atoms, and the atoms are electrical charges, protons and electrons. Therefore, you're nothing but electricity in the shape of a man. "By changing myself to pure thought, or pure electricity. I believed that I could escape to the past. Get away from this age where a man is suspected of insanity if he so much as mislays his checkbook or kicks his dog. People didn't used to be crazy unless they went around hacking their relatives with an ax. "I tried to meet Columbus when he rowed ashore from the Santa Maria. I tried to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill. I tried to lead the Charge of the Light Brigade. I tried to invent an airplane during the Civil War. I always failed, because I didn't have enough sensory knowledge of the period, and I couldn't change the past. "I succeeded in P. T. because I transported myself through space instead of time. I knew every detail of the day room, so it worked. My brain reduced my body to its elemental charges in the P. T. bath and reassembled itin the day room. Something like radio, with the brain acting as sending set and receiver. Maybe we should call it philosophy. Doc. What is reality? If I sit here in your office but imagine I'm sitting in the dayroom, until the chair in the dayroom becomes more real than this, where am I actually sitting?" Dr...Bean stood up, adjusted his glasses, and said, "Orville, I am going to do as you asked. I am going to tell you exactly what is wrong with you. You are suffering from distorted perception -- illusions and hallucinations, disorientation. You are also becoming an exhibitionist and are developing a persecution complex. I thought, when you first came in, that you had improved. But ifou don't pull yourself together and try to get well, you'll be in here a long time." Potts's chair overturned as he thrust himself up. He placed his thin hands on the desk and said, "You psychiatrists can't see an inch in front of your nose! All you can do is quote a textbook. If anybody mentions mental telepathy, or predicting the future, or a sense of perception, you classify them as insane. You think you've reduced the mind to a set of rules, but you're still in kindergarten! I'll prove every word I said! I'll vanish into the future! I can't change the past, but the future hasn't happened yet! I can imagine my own!" Joe grabbed the fist that Potts shook under the doctor's nose and pinned the patient's arms behind his back. "Take him upstairs to Ward K, Joe," Dr. Bean said. "To the pack room. That should calm him." "So long, moron!" Potts called. "Let's go, Orville Potts," Joe said. "We're going to fix you up just like an ice cream soda." "You won't pack me in ice," Potts promised. His thin body twisted in pain. He closed his eyes tight and concentrated. Joe's great hands clamped into fists when Potts disappeared. lay face down on a padded acceleration couch with broad straps across his brawny back and legs. Before his face, a second hand swept around a clock toward a red zero. Potts twisted his head slightly in the harness and looked at the beautiful young woman strapped to the couch on his right. A shrieking warning siren blared through the spaceship. The woman smiled. "Hia, ked," she said in strange new accents. "Secure your dentures. Next stop, Alpha Centaurus!" The Altar at Midnight H E had quite a rum-blossom on him for a kid, I thought at first. But when he moved closer to the light by # the cash register to ask the bartender for a match or something, I saw it wasn't that. Not just the nose. Broken veins on his cheeks, too, and the funny eyes. He must have seen me look, because he slid back away from the light. The bartender shook my bottle of ale in front of me like a Swiss bell-ringer so it foamed inside the green glass. "You ready for another, sir?" he asked. I shook my head. Down the bar, he tried it on the kid -- he was drinking scotch and water or something like that -- and found out he could push him around. He sold him three scotch and waters in ten minutes. When he tried for number four, the kid had his courage up and said, "I'll tell you when I'm ready for another, Jack." But there wasn't any trouble. It was almost nine and the place began to fill up. The manager, a real hood type, stationed himself by the door to screen out the high-school kids and give the big hello to conventioneers. The girls came hurrying in, too, with their little makeup cases and their fancy hair piled up and their  frozen faces with the perfect mouths drawn on them. One of them stopped to say .something to the manager, some excuse about something, and he said: "That's aw ri'; get inna dressing room." A three piece band behind the drapes at the back of the stage began to make warmup noises and there were two bartenders keeping busy. Mostly it was beer -- a midweek crowd. I finished my ale and had to wait a couple of minutes before I could get another bottle. The bar filled up from the end near the stage because all the customers wanted a good, close look at the strippers for their fiftycent bottles of beer. But I noticed that nobody sat down next to the kid, or, if anybody did, he didn't stay long -- you go out for some fun and the bartender pushes you around and nobody wants to sit next to you. I picked up my bottle and glass and went down on the stool to his left. He turned to me right away and said: "What kind of a place is this, anyway?" The broken veins were all over his face, little ones, but so many, so close, that they made his face look something like marbled rubber. The funny look in his eyes was it -- the trick contact lenses. But I tried not to stare and not to look away. "It's okay," I said. "It's a good show if you don't mind a lot of noise from -- " He stuck a cigarette into his mouth and poked the pack at me. "I'm a spacer," he said, interrupting. I took one of his cigarettes and said: "Oh." He snapped a lighter for the cigarettes and said: "Venus." cigarettes on the bar had sprtie kind of yellow sticker instead of the blue tax stamp. "Ain't that a crock?" he asked. "You can't smoke and they give you lighters for a souvenir. But it's a good lighter. On Mars last week, they gave us all some cheap penandpencil sets." "You get something every trip, hah?" I took a good, long drink of ale and he finished his scotch and water. "Shoot. You call a trip a 'shoot'." One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going to slide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, but she looked at him first and decided not to. She curled around me and asked if I'd buy her a li'l ole drink. I said no and she moved on to the next. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked at him, he stood up. I followed him out of the dump. The manager grinned without thinking and said, "G'night, boys," to us. The kid stopped in the street and said to me: "You don't have to follow me around, Pappy." He sounded like one wrong word and I would get socked in the teeth. "Take it easy. I know a place where they won't spit in your eye." He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. "This I have to see," he said. "Near here?" "A few blocks." We started walking. It was a nice night. "I don't know this city at all," he said. "I'm from Covington, Kentucky. You do your drinking at home there. We don't have places like this." He meant the whole Skid Row area. "It's not so bad," I said. "I spend a lot of time here." "Is that a fact? I mean, down home a man your age would likely have a wife and children." "I do. The hell with them." He laughed like a real youngster and I figured he couldn't even be twenty-five. He didn't have any trouble with the broken curbstones in spite of his scotch and waters. I asked him about it. "Sense of balance," he said. "You have to be tops for balance to be a spacer -- you spend so much time outside in a suit. People don't know how much. Punctures. And you aren't worth a damn if you lose your point." "What's that mean?" "Oh. Well, it's hard to describe. When you're outside and you lose your point, it means you're all mixed up, you don't know which way the can -- that's the ship -- which way the can is. It's having all that room around you. But if you have a good balance, you feel a little tugging to the ship, or maybe you just know which way the ship is without feeling it. Then you have your point and you can get the work done." "There must be a lot that's hard to describe." He thought that might be a crack and he clammed up on me. "You call this Gandytown," I said after a while. "It's where the stoveup old railroad men hang out. This is the place." IT was the second week of the month, before everybody's pension check was all gone. Oswiak's was jumping. The Grandsons of the Pioneers were on the juke singing the Man from Mars Yodel and old Paddy Shea was jigging in the middle of the floor. He had a full seidel of beer in his right hand and his empty left sleeve was flapping. The kid balked at the screen door. "Too damn bright," he said. I shrugged and went on in and he followed. We sat down at a table. At Oswiak's you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of the regulars do. Paddy jigged over and said: "Welcome home, Doc." He's a Liverpool Irishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound almost like Brooklyn to me. "Hello, Paddy. I brought somebody uglier than you. Now what do you say?" Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flapping and then flopped into a chair when the record stopped. He took a big drink from the seidel and said: "Can he do this?" Paddy stretched his face into an awful grin that showed his teeth. He has three of them. The kid laughed and asked me: "What the hell did you drag me into here for?" "Paddy says he'll buy drinks for the house the day anybody uglier than he is comes in." Oswiak's wife waddled over for the order and the kid asked us what we'd have. I figured I could start drinking, so it was three double scotches. After the second round, Paddy started blowing about how they took his arm off without any anesthetics except a bottle of gin because the red-ball freight he was tangled up in couldn't wait. That brought some of the other old gimps over to the table with their stories. Blackie Bauer had been sitting in a boxcar with his legs sticking through the door when the train started with a jerk. Wham, the door closed. Everybody laughed at Blackie for being that dumb in the first place, and he got mad. Sam Fireman has palsy. This week he was claiming he used to be a watchmaker before he began to shake. The week before, he'd said he was a brain surgeon. A woman I didn't know, a real old Boxcar Bertha, dragged herself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married a Greek, but she passed out before we found out what happened. Somebody wanted to know what was wrong with the kid's face -- Bauer, I think it was, after he came back to the table. "Compression and decompression," the kid said. "You're all the time climbing into your suit and out of your suit. Inboard air's thin to start with. You get a few redlines -- that's these ruptured blood vessels -- and you say the hell with the money; all you'll make is just one more trip. But, God, it's a lot of money for anybody my age! You keep saying that until you can't be anything but a spacer. The eyes are hardradiation scars." "You like dot all ofer?" asked Oswiak's wife politely. "All over, ma'am," the kid told her in a miserable voice. "But I'm going to quit before I get a Bowman Head." "I don't care," said Maggie Rorty. "I think he's cute." "Compared with -- " Paddy began, but I kicked him under the table. W#E sang for a while, and then we told gags and recited limericks for a while, and I noticed thqt the kid and Maggie had wandered into the back room -- the one with the latch on the door. Oswiak's wife asked me, very puzzled: "Doc, w'y dey do dot flyink by planyets?" "It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman said. "Why not?" I said. "They got the Bowman Drive, why the hell shouldn't they use it? Serves 'em right." I had a double scotch and added: "Twenty years of it and the found out a few things they didn't know. Redlines are only one of them. Twenty years more, maybe they'll find out a few more things they didn't know. Maybe by the time there's a bathtub in every American home and an alcoholism clinic in every American town, they'll find out a whole lot of things they didn't know. And every American boy will be a pop-eyed, bloodraddled wreck, like our friend here, from riding the Bowman Drive." "It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman repeated. "And what the hell did you mean by that remark about alcoholism?" Paddy said, real sore. "Personally, I can take it or leave it alone." So we got to talking about that and everybody there turned out to be people who could take it or leave it alone. TT was maybe midnight when the kid showed at the table again, looking kind of dazed. I was drunker than I ought to be by midnight, so I said I was going for a walk. He tagged along and we wound up on a bench at Screwball Square. The soap-boxers were still going strong. Like I said, it was a nice night. After a while, a pot-bellied old auntie who didn't give a damn about the face sat down and tried to talk the kid. into going to see some etchings. The kid didn't get it and I led him over to hear the soap-boxers before there was trouble. One of the orators was a mushmouthed evangelist. "And oh, my friends," he said, "when I looked through the porthole of the spaceship and beheld the wonder of the Firmament -- " "You're a stinkin' Yankee liar!" the kid yelled at him. "You say one damn more word about canshootin' and I'll ram your spaceship down your lyin' throat! Wheah's your redlines if you're such a hot spacer?" The crowd didn't know what he was talking about, but "wheah's your redlines" sounded good to them, so they heckled mushmouth off his box with it. I got the kid to a bench. The liquor was working in him all of a sudden. He simmered down after a while and asked: "Doc, should I've given Miz Rorty some money? I asked her afterward and she said she'd admire to have something to remember me by, so I gave her my lighter. She seem' to be real pleased with it. But I was wondering if maybe I embarrassed her by asking her right out. Like I tol' you, back in Covington, Kentucky, we don't have places like that. Or maybe we did and I just didn't know about them. But what do you think I should've done about Miz Rorty?" "Just what you did," I told him. "If they want money, they ask you for it first. Where you staying?" "Y. M. C. A.," he said, almost asleep. "Back in Covington, Kentucky, I was a member of the Y and I kept up my membership. They have to let me in because I'm a member. Spacers have all kinds of trouble, Doc. Woman trouble. Hotel trouble. Fam'ly trouble. Religious trouble. I was raised a Southern Baptist, but wheah's Heaven, anyway? I ask' Doctor Chitwood las' time home before the redlines got so thick -- Doc, you aren't a minister of the Gospel, are you? I hope I di'n' say anything to offend you." "No offense, son," I said. "No offense." I walked him to the avenue and waited for a fleet cab. It was almost five minutes. The independents that roll drunks dent the fenders of fleet cabs if they show up in Skid Row and then the fleet drivers have to make reports on their own time to the company. It keeps them away. But I got one and dumped the kid in. "The Y Hotel," I told the driver. "Here's five. Help him in when you get there." Screwball Square again, some college kids were yelling "wheah's your redlines" at old Charlie, the last of the Wobblies. Old Charlie kept roaring: "The hell with your breadlines! I'm talking about atomic bombs. Right -- up -- there!" And he pointed at the Moon. It was a nice night, but the liquor was dying in me. There was a joint around the corner, so I went in and had a drink to carry me to the club; I had a bottle there. I got into the first cab that came. "Athletic Club," I said. "Inna dawghouse, harh?" the driver said, and he gave me a big personality smile. I didn't say anything and he started the car. He was right, of course. I was in everybody's doghouse. Some day I'd scare hell out of Tom and Lise by going home and showing them what their daddy looked like. Down at the Institute, I was in the doghouse. "Oh, dear," everybody at the Institute said to everybody, "I'm sure I don't know what ails the man. A lovely wife and two lovely grown children and she had to tell him 'either you go or I go.' And drinking! And this is rather subtle, but it's a well-known fact that neurotics seek out low company to compensate for their guilt-feelings. The places he frequents. Doctor Francis Bowman, the man who made space-flight a reality. The man who put the Bomb Base on the Moon! Really, I'm sure I don't know what ails him." The hell with them all. All the science fiction, fantasy, weird, and. supernatural books in print in America or England! I can supply anything you see mentioned, listed or offered anywhere! Send #c for my new Giant Printed Checklist of over # titles, including over # paperbound books at #c each up. Or., if you are nearby N.Y.C., visit me at my home (just two miles from N.Y.C. line) which is literally crammed with thousands of back issue magazines and used books in addition to the largest variety of new books of this kind in the world. Phone me at Floral Park #-#. (you can dial it), and I'll gladly furnish directions to get here. # Sherwood Avenue Franklin Square, L. I., N. Y. see to it that I am where there is a reasonably large telescope, because every two years and two months Earth and Mars are on the same side of their orbits around the Sun. Since the orbit of Mars has a rather pronounced ellipticity, not all of these approaches are uniformly good. The closest Mars came to us in # (on May #th) was # miles. The next approach in # will be somewhat better, and the one after that, in #, will be almost the minimum possible, which is # As you can easily guess from the first sentence, I make sure that I have a look at Mars on those occasions. And since I know what to expect, I was disappointed only the first time, quite a number of years ago. The man who goes to an astronomical observatory on visitor's night usually has read a few books on astronomical subjects and has seen some pictures. Now he is going to check the pictures with reality and in general he sees what he expects to see. There is bright-glowing Venus, showing phases like the Moon's. There are the mountains and craters and dark maria of the Moon, just as described in the books. There is Saturn with its rings, incredible but sharp and clear in the dark sky. And there is Jupiter with its stripes and several of its large moons almost militarily lined up. But when it comes to Mars, the visitor is almost always disappointed. He expected to see -- well, reddish deserts and graygreen areas of vegetation. He was hoping for one of the famous "oases," preferably Lacus solis, and maybe a canal or two. What he actually sees, even with a hundred magnifications, is something slightly smaller than the Moon appears to the naked eye. Mars looks like a brightly illuminated orange about a block away. When there is a polar cap, you can make it out quite easily. And if you are lucky, you can also see the main marking, the dark triangle of Syrtis major. After having a look at Mars yourself, at close approach and with a fairly large instrument, you no longer wonder why astronomers cannot answer so many of the layman's questions. On the contrary, the wonder is how they managed to learn as much as they have. L ET'S run quickly through the. facts agreed upon by everybody. The dark areas called "seas" are' not seas, but sections covered with vegetation which shows very pronounced seasonal changes in coloring. Most astronomers say that this vegetation probably corresponds to terrestrial lichens, but this statement mostly means that terrestrial lichens could probably survive on Mars. What shape the Martian years of local evolution is something we'll have to see in order to be certain. Another point on which there is general agreement now is the nature of the polar caps. They are true ice (not "dry ice" as was suspected by a few for some time) and very thin, probably just a few inches on the average. It is also agreed that the canals do exist, although nobody knows what they are. Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, advanced the guess that the socalled "oases" are large impact craters, caused by arrivals from the Asteroid Belt, and that the "canals" are cracks formed by those impacts. As for the deserts, Prof. Henry Norris Russell suggested a number of years ago that they are red because they are iron oxides, which would also explain the lack of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. Dr. Tombaugh did not agree with this view and thought that the sands of the Martin deserts were red because they had been pulverized from normally red rocks. But most recent observations by French astronomers agree with Prof. Russell -- the Martian deserts polarize light in the same manner as limonite. Limonite is the name of a terrestrial iron ore, chemically almost the same as rust. As regards the atmosphere of Mars, some conclusions were published recently by Gerard de Vaucouleurs, who is at present working in Australia. Nobody can say that de Vaucouleurs is very optimistic about Mars, which he calls: "A desert, moved to the arctic and lifted to stratospheric heights." The composition of that thin atmosphere, according to de Vaucouleurs, is # per cent nitrogen and about # per cent argon, which leaves only very little room for oxygen and other, gases. That this should be the last word on the Martian atmosphere is at least doubtful. It certainly cannot be the composition near the ground. In the first place, the areas now generally accepted as vegetation must produce some oxygen. I have to mention at this point that it is assumed that the Martian vegetation does not require liquid water, but can utilize water vapor in the atmosphere. This assumption is quite reasonable, for some terrestrial plants can do it, too. A few years ago, the Russian astronomer Tikhov reported the discovery of a tree with that characteristic from the highlands of Inner Asia; in fact, Tikhov referred to it as Marsianka ("little Martian"). Quite recently it was discovered that we have a similar tree on the West Coast. But if we assume occasional water vapor in the Martian atmosphere (for the sake of the plants), then something discovered in our own atmosphere must also take place on Mars. Dr. Joseph Kaplan has offered the theory that solar radiation takes water vapor apart, splitting it into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen escapes, but the oxygen remains in the form of separate atoms, as long as the Sun is shining. After sunset, the atoms of oxygen combine into oxygen molecules with some release of energy, which accounts for the sky glow. In our atmosphere, this takes place at a considerable height, around # miles. In the Martian atmosphere, the same process should take place nearer the ground. Well, we'll indubitably find out one day, but not by making our observations from Earth. T HE bumblebee, Bombus terrestris -- everything that follows is also true of the related Bombus ruderatus -- builds its nest on and often even in the ground. Neither the architectural arrangement nor the workmanship compares with that of the honeybee, but the general idea is the same. Nor are there as many inhabitants in a bumblebee nest; the maximum number seems to be about #. But in spite of lesser numbers and poorer housing, the bumblebee seemed to be able to boast something that the honeybee did not have. An otherwise long forgotten naturalist by the name of Goedard told the story for the first time in #. Old Goedard, who either suffered from insomnia or had the reprehensible habit of getting up at # a.m., reported that he came across a bumblebee nest at that early hour, when the sky was already bright, but all of Nature that he could see was still asleep, including the bumblebees. As he watched, an especially fat bumblebee climbed out of the nest. It took its position near the hole from which it had emerged and began to beat its wings. But to Goedard's surprise, instead of taking off, it just sat there, humming loud and furiously. This went on for ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Other bumblebees crawled sleepily out of the nest and reluctantly began the day's work. But the first one kept humming for another fifteen minutes until the whole family was awake. Then it disappeared. The bumblebees, Goedard announced, have a bugler like a military garrison -- an individual with the duty of waking up the others so that they will not oversleep and waste some of the new day the Lord hath made. Others read this and accepted it as one more example of the miraculous Organization of tiny insects. A little later some authors became cautious about it and, still later, the story was repeated with an amused and somewhat superior smile, as a typical fairy tale from the early days of natural history. But then, almost # years after Goedard, came Professor Hoffer of Graz in Austria and said: "Yes, its true, the bumblebees do have a bugler." He had seen it himself because in his garden there was a nest of Bombus ruder atus. The day of the year when he noticed it first was the # th of July. The bugler began making noise at #:# a.m. and kept it up until about #:# a.m. This went on every day -- Prof. Hoffer called the members of his family, colleagues and even the local policeman as witnesses -- until the #th Sf July. On that day Hoffer caught the bugler to see whether it differed in any way from any of the others. Next day a new bugler was on duty. For almost half a century, the bumblebee bugler was back in good graces (and in natural history textbooks) until Dr. von Buttel Reepen re-opened the case. He did not say that it wasn't so. The facts were clear and, moreover, von Buttel Reepen had observed it himself many a time. What he doubted was the explanation, in spite of all analogies with alarm clocks, military procedure and crowing roosters. The bumblebee nest, he said, is in the ground, or close to it. It is moist. The insects themselves have collected their version of honey which thickens by evaporating surplus water. In short, the air must be awful in the morning and even if bumblebees don't mind bad smells, the moisture content must be too high for their purposes. Now the same thing happens in bee hives where much larger quantities of honey are thickening. The bees have found out that they can do something about it: They form long chains from the entrance to the honeycombs and sit there, fanning the air with their wings, gettingthe moisture out of their hive. Since the bumblebee colony is so much smaller, a single individual can do it. Simple tests showed that the solitary bugler actually causes a ventilating wind. The new interpretation was accepted by other entomologists without delay. It had been one of those cases where the by-product is mistaken for the purpose. Some electric fans make a lot of noise, but only incidentally. M Y casual mention about the latent heat of water and the inadvisability of overworking your refrigerator with hot water in the trays has caused some "hot" mail plus a heated phone conversation. Mrs. Carr of the National Fantasy Fan Federation in Seattle, Washington, wrote some harsh words: "An excellent example of a certain type of socalled 'scientific' thinking which brands as 'superstition' any fact it cannot explain in its own pompous and shortsighted terms." Now let's all calm down and review what I said. I did not claim that I had made the experiment, or even (checked it. I stated that somebody in ' the Bureau of Standards had done so and told me about it. I also said that cold water has less heat for the refrigerator to carry away. Well, it has! As for the discussion itself, I'll quote from a letter by Mr. Paul D. Hobson of # Research Road in Ottawa. Ontario, Canada. He wrote me: "Some time ago I was asked the same question and carried out experiments. I found that a dry clean ice tray on a dry clean shelf gave the expected result, as found by the Bureau of Standards. If, however, the shelf was covered with a layer of frost, as is usually the case with a domestic refrigerator, a tray containing initially warm water would freeze appreciably more quickly than a tray of cold water. The reason seems to be that the warm tray melts the frost and settles into contact with the metal of the freezer shelf before the moisture freezes up again, so that there is an improved conductive heat flow between the tray and the freezer unit. "If the freezer is badly in need of defrosting, the saving in time can be as much as five minutes. Further experiments have shown that even faster freezing can be obtained by using cold water in a clean tray and freezer shelf, free of all frost, and wetting the outside of the freezer tray so that it is 'glued' to the shelf by a thin film of ice. This last result is confirmed by statements in some refrigerator manufacturers' handbooks." And that, I hope, is that. You can't expect the Bureau of Standards, or anybody else, to enter poor maintenance as a factor in its research. I have heard of a device that is supposed to reproduce longdead sound vibrations from the atmosphere. It is said to work on the principle that sound never dies, but continues to agitate the air molecules. Willard C. Reed, R.F.D. No. # Camden, Tenn. The inventor of this device was an author in a story in which the Sermon on the Mount was reproduced, leading not to clarication, hut to endless discussions about the precise meaning of this or thatAraniaic word. Actually, such a device is impossible because sound ijoes die and very quickly too. Supposing you yell, "boom!" This means that you expend a certain amount of energy causing spherical waves traveling outward from your mouth and expanding. As they expand, their surfaces increase rapidly, hut there is only the original energy you put in. Therefore a given amount of energy is spread over a larger and larger surface. After a very short time, the energy per air molecule in that expanding sphere becomes less than that of the random motion of the air molecules. At that instant, the sound is dead and its reassembly is as impossible as the reassembly of the ashes of a cremated body sprinkled over the ocean twenty years ago. Explain the words positron and proton and give the difference, if any. Dick Clarkson, # Kensington Rd. Baltimore #, Md. Both are particles composing atoms. As you know, there are essentially two kinds of subatomic particles, light ones and heavy ones, the heavy ones having about # times the mass of the light ones. The heavy ones are the proton (which carries a positive electric charge) and the neutron (about the same mass as the proton, but without electric charge. A third heavy one, the negatron (same mass as the proton, though carrying a negative electric charge) is assumed by some, hut so far has not been discovered. The light ones are the electron (with one negative charge), the positron (with one positive charge) and the neutrino, assumed to have the same mass as the electron, but no charge. The neutrino is, by definition undetectable and has, therefore, not been actually detected ; it has been found necessary to assume its existence to balance equations. In between the light and the heavy suh-atomic particles, there is a whole slew of mesons of different weights (up to # electron masses) and exceedingly short lifetimes. One explanation of the mesons is that they are temporary swirls of a hunch of electrons; in ten years or so, we may know more about them. Since the nucleus of the normal hydrogen atom is a single proton, protons are often referred to as "hydrogen nuclei." Heavy hydrogen has a nucleus composed of one proton and one neutron, the nucleus as a whole being called a deuteron. The nucleus of the very rare form of hydrogen which consists of one proton and two neutrons is called a triton , since that isotope of hydrogen is called tritium. The nucleus of helium of mass # (same mass as a triton) consists of two protons and one neutron and, since the He-# isotope is called tralphium, is a tralpha particle. The reason why this form was chosen -- one could have called it "tralphon" -- is that the nucleus of the abundant helium isotope He-#, consisting of two protons and two neutrons, has been known for many years under the name of "alpha particle." If I stopped here, I would get letters asking why an alpha particle is called an alpha particle, so I might as well add that now. The most frequent phenomenon in natural radioactivity is the release of a helium nucleus, accompanied by radiation. In order to give a graphic example of what happens, one of the early researchers (I helieve it was the late Lord Rutherford of Nelson) compared it with the firing of a gun. Most important is the heavy projectile, the alpha particle. Then there is some smoke, tenuous hut still material, the beta radiation (electrons), and then there is the flash, not material, the gamma radiation. There are two theories regarding the red shift of extragalactic nebulae: one being that the red end of the spectrum is displaced because of the Galaxy's radial velocity, and the other that the light has actually become tired on its journey through space. In your opinion, which one of these two theories is more logical and why? Gary Motley, # Crane Avenue, West Caldwell, N. J. Before I state my personal opinion, it might be useful to explain what this question is about to those not too conversant with the term "red shift." Everybody knows that visible light comes in an assortment of wave-lengths. Violet rays have the shortest wave-length that still makes an impression on our eyes. Then comes blue, then green and, through yellow and orange, we arrive at red, which has the longest wavelength that we can still see. In that spectrum, from violet to red, there are lines which can be used as reference points. If they appear shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, it means that the body which emits the light is moving away irom us. If the body were moving toward us, the lines would I m displaced in the direction of the violet end. There are thousands of "exI raga lactic nebulae" (other galaxies) that we can see, and they all display a pronounced red shift. When the amount of red shift was measured, it turned out that it was larger as the separating distance grew longer. In other words, the ones which are farthest away are also running from us most rapidly. The ones nearer us are also running away, but not so fast. The whole picture is what would result if the JUniverse as a whole were expanding and it has, indeed, led to that concept. But if we make the assumption that light waves, after traveling thousands of years, gradually "tire" and "stretch," a red shift would be the result, too, and it would also be proportional to the distance. Now, some of the other galaxies which are quite near, as galactic distance go, show movements other than recession from us. Some are even approaching. This is explained by Camow and others as a random motion which, for these objects, happens to be directed against the motion that would result from universal expansion. But you may also say that these galaxies are close enough to permit us to measure their true movements, since their light has not traveled long enough to become "tired." Nobody can say at this point which explanation is true. But I was brought up on the advice that, if you have two alternate explanations for the same set of observed facts, the simpler one is likely to be correct. Personally, I find it far easier to believe that light waves are not indestructible and that the red shift is the result of distance traveled rather than of movements proportional to distance... M the isogynist A woman who sees no humor in this story is -- hm, would she be likely to read it at all? has defined a wit as a person who can tell a funny story without cracking a smile. That's Harry. "You know," Steve said at the office one day, "I'll bet Harry will walk right up to the flaming gates of Hell, keeping the Devil in stitches all the time, and never change expression." That's the kind of fellow Harty is. A great guy to have around the office. Makes you laugh just to see him, thinking about the last story he told. Smart, too. Keeps at a thing, digging away, piling up facts and stuff until you finally see something straight for the first time. Everybody says he's going places. But the kind of story Harry likes -- he likes them long. They start kind of slow, you know, and sort of build up with a tickle here and a tickle there until each new touch makes you helpless, you're so weak with laughter. The kind of story you take home to your wife and you get part way through, laughing like a fool, and you notice she's just sitting there, sort of patient and martyred, thinking maybe about tomorrow's dinner or the dress sale downtown, and you stop laughing and sigh and say, "It must be the way he tells it" or "Nobody can tell stories like Harry." But then women don't think Harry's funny. Take the other night, for instance. Harry and I were sitting in his living room while the women -- Lucille and Jane -- Were out in the kitchen, whipping up something after the last rubber, and Harry started this story. Only at first I didn't know it was a story. "Did you ever stop to think," Harry said, "about what strange creatures women really are? The way they change, I mean, after you marry them. You know, they stop hanging on your words, they stop catering to your likes and dislikes, they stop laughing at your jokes." I have a minor reputation as a humorist myself -- oh, nothing in Harry's class, but ready with quip or pun, if you know what I mean. I came in with a laugh and said, "So the honeymoon is over," Harry and Lucille being married only a month or so. "Yes," said Harry seriously. "Yes, I guess you could say that. The honeymoon is over." "Tough," I said, feeling sorry for the guy. "The girl you marry and the woman you're married to are two different people." "Oh, no," Harry disagreed, shaking his head. "They're not. That's just the point." "The point?" I asked, getting an inkling that Harry's thoughtful face hid a purpose not entirely serious. "You mean there is a point?" "Of course. It's not just a matter of superficial differences, you see. It's something fundamental. Women think differently, their methods are different, their goals are different. So different, in fact, that they are entirely incomprehensible." "I gave up trying to understand them a long time ago." "That's where we make our mistake," Harry said soberly. "We accept when we should try to understand. We must understand why. As the Scotch say, 'All are good lasses, but where come the ill wives?' " "Why?" I wanted to know, a little puzzled. "They're built differently, and not just outside. Glands, bearing children -- all kinds of differences." "That's their excuse," said Harry, sneering, "and it's not good enough. They should do best what their differences best fit them for. But their greatest career is marriage -- and their greatest failure. A man to them is only the necessary evil they must have before they can get the other things they want." "Like the black widow spider and her mate?" I suggested. "In a way. And yet not entirely. The spiders, at least, are of the same species" I nodded over that for a moment before it soaked in. "And men and women aren't?" I practically yelled. "Sh!" he warned, and glanced nervously at the kitchen door. chuckle. Harry should have been in the movies. And yet I had to admire the guy, making a joke out of what is -- every husband can tell you -- one of the greatest and most secret tragedies of life, greater even because no one can talk about it. No one but Harry. My chuckle must have been the right response, because he nodded, relaxed, and stopped glancing at the door out of the corner of his eye. Or maybe that was after Lucille peeked around the corner and said, "Harry off on one of his stories again? Tell us when he's through, so we can bring in the refreshments." She was pretty light about it and you could tell it was a running joke and I couldn't help thinking what a lucky guy Harry was -- if a fellow has to get married, that is, and most of us do. "The alien race," Harry whispered and leaned back. It was a good line and I laughed; there wasn't anything forced about it, either. "What better way," he continued, "to conquer a race than to breed it out of existence? The Chinese learned that a long time ago. Conqueror after conqueror took the country and each one was passively accepted, allowed to intermarry... and eventually was absorbed. Only this case is the reverse. Conquest by marriage might be a good term for it. Breed in the conqueror, breed out the slave. Breed in the alien, breed out the human." I nodded appreciatively. "Makes sense." "How did it all start?" asked Harry. "And when? If I knew those answers. I'd know the whole thing. All I've got is a theory. An alien race of women landed on Earth -- when man was still a cave-dwelling animal, maybe, or it could even have been in historic times -- and my guess is they were dropped here by their men. Jettisoned. Dumped. Why? To get rid of them, obviously." "But what did their men do then?" I had to ask, feeding him the next point. "How do I know?" he replied irritably. "They were aliens, remember. Maybe they had some solution, some procreative substitute for women. Maybe these women were just the worst of the lot and the remaining ones were better. Mpybe the men didn't give a damn and preferred racial suicide to surrender." He angrily shoved the coffee table aside, grumbling something abof women's ideas of furnishing a home, and pulled his chair closer. "Sure, surrender. They couldn't exterminate the men, could they? Who has the weapons, the military knowledge? Besides, women don't think like that. Their minds work in devious ways; they win what they want by guile and subtlety. That's why they married into the human race." I looked blank, which is always a good way to push him on. "Well, look," he said earnestly, just as I figured he would, "how about the Amazons? Once a year, you know, they visited the Gargareans, a neighboring tribe; any resulting male children were put to death. That didn't work very long, of course. Their purpose and their very alienness were too obvious. And the matriarchies -- too blatant, you see, might give the whole thing away. Besides, men are useful in ways that women aren't. Men are inventive, artistic, creative -- and can be nagged or coaxed into doing what women want them to do." an ashtray to put the match. He shoved over some silly little object that would suffocate a cigarette the minute you laid it down. No grooves, either, of course. "That's what women buy when they're on their own," he pointed out disgustedly. "Lights that they think look pretty and make you blind or put a crick in your back when you try to read. You get a house with a southern exposure so you'll have sunlight, afiid then they put up heavy drapes to keep the furniture from fading. That's not enough, so they dress the furniture in slipcovers that always get twisted and creased. They  shed bobbypins like dandruff, hang stockings over towels to dry, never screw a cap on a bottle or jar, so it always falls and breaks when' you pick it up by the top, 'straighten up the house,' as they call it, by shoving everything into drawers where you never can find what you want." I dug an uncomfortable cushion out from behind me and threw it on another chair. "All of them?" I asked. "Are they all alike?" "I've wondefed about that," he admitted, frowning. "There must be some human women left. One hears about happy marriages, although that might just be female propaganda. The women who like to read and use their minds. I'd say. Those who aren't so damned practical that they'd get up off their deathbeds to straighten a crooked picture. Women who can grasp abstract ideas. I don't think the -- the aliens can." He looked up, brightening. "Those could be tests for alienness. That .is," he added, frowning again, "if I'm right and there actually are any human women." "How about those," I chipped in, "who prefer men and dislike other women?" He thought that over seriously. "Most other women. It could be that they sense the aliens better than we can and don't want anything to do with them. Yes, that would -- no, the aliens probably stick together, so that's out as a test." "There are women who are satisfied with just a comfortable life," I suggested. "Those who don't drive their husbands to so much insurance that they're worth more dead than alive and then work them to death. That sounds pretty human to me." Harry shrugged helplessly. "I guess so, but we'll never really know the answers. Or, if we do, it'll be too late." "Too late?" "Well, certainly," he said, tapping me on the knee. That's my ticklish spot and I was having enough trouble not laughing. "It's only in the last few generations that Their plans have been coming closer to success. They have the vote, equal rights without giving up any of their privileges, and so forth. They're outliving men -- and it's men, of course, who are extending the life span for them. They control about ninety per cent of the wealth. And there's something else men are doing for them." His voice sank to a significant whisper. "We're experimenting with fertiliaation by salt water, electrical stimulus, that sort of thing. Once we work it out properly..." "We won't be needed any more," I spluttered. "That's right," he agreed gravely. "They'll just refuse to marry, use prenatal sex determination to produce nothing but girls, and then you'll have a single race -- the female race. That's what I think they want." "It figures," I answered, trying to crush out my cigarette in the ridiculous tray. He nodded. "Don't think I haven't got more than vague suspicions. And it's been damned hard; knowledge of the female conspiracy has died out in the last fifty years or so. There's no longer even that subconscious knowledge that alerted the centuries of men before -- that body of tradition and folklore which is a sort of inherited wisdom of a people. We've been taught to scorn all that as superstition. Most teachers are women, of course." "Before our time, men knew?" I gave him his straight line. "Oh, yes," Harry said. "Homer, Ovid, Swift -- 'A dead wife under the table is the best goods in a marffc house,' said Swift. Antiphanes, Menander, Cato -- there was a wise one. 'Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors.' Plautus, Clement of Alexandria, Tasso, Shakespeare, Dekker, Fletcher, Thomas Browne -- the list is endless. The Bible; 'How can he be clean that is born of woman?'; 'All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman'; 'I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence'..." For fifteen minutes he continued, covering the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance, and hadn't begun to run dry. Even for Harry this was digging deep for a story. This is Harry's peak, I said to myself, a little awed. He will never do anything better than this. closer to modern times. " 'Women are much more like each other than men,' said Lord Chesterfield. And Nietzsche : 'Thou goest to women? Don't forget thy whip.' Then there was Strindberg, touched by a divine madness which gave him visions of hidden truths. Shaw concealed his suspicions in laughter lest he be torn to pieces -- " "Ibsen?" I suggested, chuckling, dredging a name out of my school days that I vaguely remembered was somehow connected with the subject. Harry spat, as if he had something vile in his mouth. "Ibsen! That traitor! That blind fool! It was he who first dramatized the insidious propaganda which led, eventually, to the so-called emancipation of women, and was really the loosing of the chains which kept them from ravening unrestrained." "Ravening," I chortled. "That's the word, all right -- ravening!" "You must go back to folk sayings to get real truth," Harry went on, quieting a little. " 'A man is happy only two times in his life,' say the Jugoslavs, 'when he marries a wife and when he buries her.' Or the Rumanians : 'When a man takes a wife, he ceases to dread Hell.' Or the Spanish: 'Who hath a wife hath also an enemy.' 'Never believe a woman, not even a dead one,' advise the German peasants. The wisdom of the Chinese: 'Never trust a woman, even though she has given you ten sons'." He stopped, not as if he were near the end of his material, but to begin brooding. "Did you ever look for something," he asked, "a collar button, say, or a particular pair of socks -- and it isn't there and you tell your wife? Why is it that she can come and pick it up and it's been right under your nose all the time?" "What else have they got to think about?" "It makes you wonder," he insisted. "It makes you wonder if it really was there when you looked." I agreed with him, and thought, Strange, the odd truths that Harry can link into something excrutiatingly funny. "They have no respect for logic," said Harry. "No respect at all for the sanctity of a man's mind, for what his world is built upon. They argue as it suits them, waving away contradictions and inconsistencies as meaningless. How many of us have our Xanthippes, bent on dragging us down from our contemplation of divine truth to the destructive turmoil of daily strife? It's maddening, maddening!" A thought struck me. So far, Harry had a number of strings, amusing in themselves, but lacking the climax that would wind them all up into a neat ball of laughter. "What would they do," I asked, smiling, "if they discovered that someone knew their secret? They couldn't let it get around, could they?" Harry smiled in return. For one unwary second, I thought he was slipping, giving the joke away. "There," said Harry, "you have hit upon the crux. If my surmises are true, why has no one else discovered it? And the answer is -- they have!" "They have?" I repeated, a little surprised. "Oh, yes," Harry answered, nodding. "And it provides the clincher. The women would have to do away with them, of course. Silence them. And it would have to show up somewhere -- if one knew where to look." "Yes?" I prompted, breathlessly. "Why," he said, pointing a finger at me, "are there more men in asylums than women?" "You mean -- ?" He nodded. I collapsed, hysterical. I choked with laughter. It was only with difficulty that I was able to speak when the women came in a moment later with their bowls and potato chips and glasses of beer. "Hi, alien," I spluttered at Jane. And I laughed some more, especially when I looked at Harry and saw the stricken face he was putting on, horrified, terribly frightened, sort of all sunk in on himself -- better, much better, than I've seen a professional actor do it on the screen. Finally the look on the women's faces brought me around -- the bored look -- and I tried to share the joke. Harry was laughing, too, kind of weakly -- surprising, because he always is sort of bland and mildly curious when one of his stories gets everybody writhing. So I started telling it and got part way through and -- well, you know the way it ends. I looked at Harry for help, but he wasn't giving any, and I kind of died away slowly. "It must be the way he tells it," I sighed. "Nobody can tell stories like Harry." You see what I mean. Women don't think Harry's funny. The evening turned out all right, though. A little flat at the end, the way evenings usually are. As we were going out, I heard Lucille say, kind of sharp, "Harry, there's something wrong with the hot water heater. You've been promising to look at it for days, and you've just got to do something about it tonight because I'm going to be washing tomorrow," and I heard Harry answer, "Yes, dear," mild and obedient, and I thought, The guy's got to blow off steam somewhere, and figured that I'd be hearing the story again at the office. Which goes to show how wrong a man can be. up and said Harry was sick -- a stroke or a heart attack or something -- and couldn't come to work. I called there a couple of times, but Lucille told me he was too sick to see anybody. I knew Harry was really sick because Lucille had Dr. Clarke, that woman doctor, and Harry's said he wouldn't have her treat his sick dog if he wanted the dog to get well. So I knew Harry was too sick to care. It's funny how quick a fellow can go, and I got to thinking what a shame it was that Harry's finest effort, the climax of his wit, so to speak, should go with him, and how it's too bad that great vocal art should vanish without leaving a trace. So I began trying to remember -- and I couldn't remember very good, particularly the quotations -- so I did a little research of my own, just to be able to give a sample. I ran across a couple Harry missed. One of them everybody knows. The one of Kipling's that begins, "The female of the species..." The other one I worked up by myself, just thinking. Why, I asked myself one day, are there more widows than widowers? Of course, I couldn't think of an answer. It's a shame about Harry. A great guy like that, a humorist who never was given the chance to share his gift with the world -- if you ask me, funnier than anybody on radio or TV or the stage ; anywhere, for that matter -- and here he is getting set to kick off. The least I can do is reconstruct this biggest gag he ever put together as a kind of monument to him. Well, it's finished. I'll show it to the boys in the office tomorrow. They'll get a real kick out of it. No sense showing it to the girls, even Jane -- like I said, women never thought Harry was funny. Something else he left out, but probably only because he didn't have enough time to develop the gag the way he usually does. What kind of planet did the aliens come from? It must have a lot of carbon dioxide. Ever notice how women always complain when you open a window? It must be a hot world, too; they're cold all the time, especially their feet, which they like to put against their husband's legs, making the poor guy practically leap out of bed. I'm an expert on that -- Jane's toes would chill any highball. But their world can't be that hot, because women can trot around in the coldest weather with practically nothing underneath their coats. And how about those open-toe shoes? It doesn't add up at all. I suppose Harry would shrug it off as another proof of their alien ness. Possibly he'd say it was just outside that women were warm; it's in the house that they're cold. Well, there you are -- Jane is calling me to come down to the cellar and fix the furnace. There isn't a thing wrong with it. I'm sweating, as a matter of fact. But if I don't go down and monkey around with the grate and draft, I'll never hear the end of it. And I'd better go just to save the furnace; Jane's banging it with a poker, yelling up to me that she'll fix it if I don't. Jane with a poker; there's a laugh for you. She can't even wind a clock without breaking the mainspring. John T aine. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # most magnificent science-horror ideas ever created in the Earth-cataclysm genre, and probably the worst yellow-menaceplus Bolsheviks plus religious prejudice melange ever to hit science fiction. It was originally published in # under the title White Lily and even today, the science horror remains unsurpassed, despite its politico-sociological lumber. The basic idea is of a semisentient, semi-explosive crystalline life form, living off calcium, silicon or cellulose, depending on its nature at the moment. Taine's superb word pictures of how the causative green dye went from its original eggshell (curiously apt symbolism there!) under young Tom Lane's bed in Los Angeles, on and on until it was devouring entire mountain ranges in the western desolation above Shanghai, are without doubt masterpieces of sheer evocation, superb verbal inventions that no other science fiction writer has ever outclassed. If one could only cut the affair down to novelet size, by eliminating the Moslem jehads, '-'dirty Chinks" who in their stupidity kill each other off, and the Pure and Beautiful Chinese gal, White Lily, and her yawnsome warfare with the lecherous Russian agent, we would have a truly impressive piece of imaginative writing. Much of it is, of course. But it seems to me that a publisher's obligation includes modernizing social attitudes as well as science, in the old novels he chooses disinter. de Camp and Willy Ley. Rinehart ft Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages plus index, # natural history of presientific science fiction; the story of the imagined lands and their impossible wonders that have stirred men to travel and dream ever since before the days of Homer.  The collaborators, both skilled in ferreting out little-known information in the fields of the natural sciences and anthropology, have put their heads -- and libraries -- together here to tell of many marvels from Atlantis to Eldorado, from Mu to the earthly Paradise. I particularly reveled in the pages on Mu, including the fantastic etymology of the name of that grand old dream continent; in the narrative of Prester John and his fantastic, more-thanmagnificent, imaginary kingdom which duped kings and popes; and in the collection of theories about the shape of the Earth, culminating in the astonishing semi-official Nazi theory that the globe was a hollow sphere with all of us inside it! But everything in the book is fascinating, if you are among those curious-minded readers who compose a large proportion of the mature science fiction audience. You will admire its authors' erudition, at the same time that you will be delighted with their pleasantly offhand methods of displaying it. Wonderful for the younger generations, too -- fabulous tales that are much better than Captain Video! Fletcher Pratt. Doubleday  Co., New York, #. # pages, # science fiction detective story, one of the best-integrated combinations of its kind. It pulls together first-rate pseudo-science and high-grade detective meller of the Spillane school (but entirely clean) and the result is fine read-and-forget entertainment. Not a gram of profundity in the job; that's not needed in this sort of rapid-fire bedtime reading. It really is two detective novelets, both concerned with involvements arising from the discovery of a method of duplicating matter. The first part sets the stage with a commercial spy story -- a villain is duplicating rare drugs and bootlegging them. The hero ends by marrying a duplicated gal -- and very nice she is, too. Part two, which is considerably better than the first, tells how it was possible to steal from a hermetically sealed, robot-piloted cargo plane a huge sum of money. This is definitely the latest twist in the lockedroom school of murder mysteries, and a highly effective one. by Milton Lesser. The John C. Winston Company, Philadelphia, #. # to # pages, # each to-order ammunition for worried parents who want to wean their young fry away from pseudo-science fiction pseudocomics -- and other sorts of comis fantasy fast becoming fact? SiwiM Ml  Tlwim is SiM-FiOiMi Highly imaginable yet highly i plausible are these intriguingly I absorbing stories of space exploration, invasion and counterinvusion. A news or scientific "quote" supports each story by such masters as David H. Keller, Isaac Asimov and others. # pages  # . #  A Csllxtion el Sitn-FIlln Statin Weird and dramatic secrets, interplanetary struggles, a mad Poe-like protagonist and shapeless creatures stir the imagination in this masterful collection of fast-paced tales. # pages #.SO Add these great collections to your library too: # Stories -- # pages, # # Stories -- # pages, #. VS I. #th lb.  l d by nunv S t # pnd check # I ame  # "Ksrsi?! ics. They are five rip-snorting adventure stories with interplanetary, time-travel and other standard backgrounds, all certain to fascinate #-to-#-year-olds -- and up. The tales are primitive, of course, but they are written in acceptable English, rather than the space-pirate jargon that encrusts so many of the cheaper pulps and comics. To be briefly laconic: Hunter's tale tells of some future time travelers lost in the ancient wilds of Yucatan who start the Mayan myths; Latham's book describes an Earth family battling the horrid botany and zoology of Venus; del Rey's deals with a spaceship stowaway, a lad oi # who becomes one of the first Earthmen on Mars -- and a tough life, too; Jones offers an effective morality about how an alien visitor makes friends with an Earth lad and eventually staves off an invasion by his own kind, even though the attack was provoked by the bureaucrats who were running Earth; and finally Lesser's melodramatic and unlikely tale tells of the space cadet compelled to take part in the nasty activities of an interplanetary gang. They're good as gifts to youngsters on birthdays and Christmas. Wish I had them when I was a kid! more. Greenberg: Publisher, New York, #. # pages, # I N some ways, this book represents the lowest point I have ever reached in my delvings into the dim halfworld of space opera. This may be due to the fact that the incredible nonsense of its plot and characters is heightened by its oddly effective writing -- the tawdriness of its imagination thus becomes all the more visible. Its hero, Hawk Carse, is in the worst tradition of juvenilia, as is its villain (actual quote) : "the... devoid of every kindly human trait." Its fall-guy is (again a quote): "'Friday,' the big black Earthman whom Carse had rescued... from one of the Venusian slave-ships," of whom Carse was wont to say, "You're a good mechanic, Friday, but in some ways you're very innocent." Not 'arf as innocent as the author himself! The adventures go from absurdity to absurdity; the villains become more ludicrous from page to page; and Carse himself ends up a figure of fun, so hopelessly impossible is he. Robert E. Howard. Gnome Press, New York, #. #I pages, # ilk as Hawk Carse. Even though this is the tale of a prehistoric hero, it still is also just another demijohn of corn. I give you Conan -- "A tall man, mightily shouldered and deep of chest, with a massive corded neck and heavily muscled limbs. His brow was low and broad under a squarecut black mane," (incidentally, Hawk Carse also had square-cut flaxen hair -- "bangs," they're called -- something of a new-style male hairdo, it would seem, "his eyes a volcanic blue that smoldered as if with some inner fire. His dark, scarred, almost sinister face was that of a fighting man, and his velvet garments could not conceal the hard, dangerous lines of his limbs." This is volume two of the adventures of this "timber wolf" (page #) of the so-called Hyperborean Age between the fall of Atlantis and the arrival of the "Sons of Aryas." Like the first, it is full of blood, sex, sadism, violence, the sort of overwriting quoted above -- all the garish trappings of escape into the Greater Past of the Natural Man. Our age may one day be known as the Spillane Era. Conan fits right in, except that he has heroism where Mike Hammer is capable only of viciousness. We've had the tops of the binder manufacturers make up a limited quantity of sturdy, mechanical hard covers made to hold and protect six issues of Galaxy for your permanent pleasure. Binders are gold stamped with the Galaxy trade mark and are made of a moroccan grain cloth, over-board to last a lifetime. Send # to Binders Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc. We will send postpaid. runaway A Heroism is merely daring and ingenuity -- at the age of ten experience can come later! A thin speck appeared in the visor plate and grew with sinister and terrifying speed. Bursts of flame began to play around the rocketing spaceship, the explosions hurtling it from side to side as it twisted and turned in a frantic effort to escape. Rogue Rogan, his vicious lips compressed, his glittering evil eyes narrowed, heart pounding, knew that this was it. This was the day of retribution he had so long feared... Plato leaped to his feet and slid the book under the pillow. Then he seized a textbook at random, and opened it wide. His eyes fastened themselves to the print, seizing upon the meaningless words as if they would save him from a H retribution that Rogue Rogan had never had to fear. The dorm master frowned from the doorway. "Plato, didn't you hear the Assembly bell?" "Assembly?" Plato's eyes  looked up in mild astonishment. "No, sir, I didn't hear any bell. I was so absorbed in my studying, sir -- " He shut the book and placed it back with the others. cept my punishment." The dorm master studied the little martyr's expression. "You'd better be, Plato. Now live up to your name and show some intelligence. Run along to Assembly." Plato ran, but he also winced. How he had suffered from that miserable name of his! Even before he had known that the original Plato had been a philosopher, even before he had been capable of understanding what a philosopher was, he had been able to see the amused expression in the eyes of those who heard his name, and had hated them for it. "Show a little intelligence, Plato." Why couldn't they have given him a name like the others? There were so many ordinary, commonplace, manly names from which they might have chosen. Jim, Jack, George, Tom, Bill -- anything would have been better than Plato. And infinitely better than what he was sometimes called by his equals -- "Plato, the dopy philosopher." H E slipped into his seat in the Assembly quietly, so as not to interrupt the droning of the principal. So they thought his name was funny, did they? Let them laugh at him. He was only ten now, but some day he would really act like a man. Some day it would be he himself, and not a fictional hero like Comets Carter, who would be adventuring on strange planets of unknown suns, tracking down the Rogans and the other criminals who sought refuge in the wide reaches of galactic space. Some day -- and then the thought burst on him like a nova exploding in his brain. Why not now? Why not indeed? He was smart; he could take care of himself. Even his masters admitted that, when they weren't carping at him for his daydreaming. Take that model of a spaceship they had brought to school one day, with a retired astrogator to explain to the pupils how the thing was run, and how it avoided stray meteors. He had sat down at the controls, and even the astrogator had been surprised at how confidently he took over the role of pilot, how he got the idea at once. He could do as well in real life. He was sure of it. Give him a really worthwhile problem to work on, instead of these silly questions about square roots qnd who discovered the third satellite of Mars, and he'd show them. "Thus," declaimed the principal, "you will be prepared to take up your duties -- " "Norberts to you," thought Plato. "I'm going to run away." Where to? There were so many stars to go to, such a bewildering number of planets and asteroids. Plato sat lost in thought. A planet whose habitation required a spacesuit was out of the question. Spacesuits his size were hard to get. The sensible thing would be to choose a place where the physical conditions, from gravity to atmospheric pressure and composition would tend to resemble those here on Venus or on Earth. danger. A boy's voice said, "Get up, you dopy philosopher. It's all over." He raised his head and realized that the principal had stopped droning from the platform, that all the pupils were standing up to leave. He stood up and marched out. When the signal for lights out came that night, Plato lay motionless for a time in the dark, his mind racing far too rapidly for him to think of sleep. He had plans to make. And after a time, when the dormitory quieted down, he went to the well of knowledge for inspiration. He slipped on his pair of goggles and threw the special switch he himself had made. The infra-red light flared on, invisible to any one in the room but himself, and he drew his book from its hiding place and resumed his reading. The ship curvetted in space like a prancing steed. Panicstricken by the four-dimensional space-warp in which he was trapped, Rogue Rogan stormed at his terrified followers. " By all the devils of the Coal Sack," he shouted, " the man doesn't live who can take me alive! You'll fight and die like men, you henhearted cowards..." But they didn't die like men. In fact, they didn't die at all, and Plato permitted a slight sneer to play across his youthful features. Though he considered himself a passionate admirer of Comets Carter, even he felt dissatisfied with the story. When they were trapped, they were never really trapped. Comets Carter, sterling hero that he usually was, always showed weakness of intellect at the last moment, giving his deadly enemy an incredibly simple way out, one that Comets had, in his own incredibly simple way, overlooked. Plato would never be guilty of such stupidity. He himself -- and now he was Comets Carter, a quicker-thinker, smarter Carter, dealing out to Rogue Rogan a retribution many eons overdue. He was whistling through space at ten light-speeds. He was compressing light-centuries into a single second. He was -- He had just time to slip the goggles from his face before his eyes closed in sleep. ued to make his plans. There was a spaceport a hundred and forty miles away. At night, if the students poked their heads out of the window, they could see the distant ships as points of flame racing away into the darkness, like shooting stars in reverse. He would steal out of his room in the night, take a glider train to the spaceport, and stow away. It would be as simple as that. Of course, he needed money. He might travel at half fare, but even that would be expensive. And then there was the matter of food. He'd have to stay hidden until the spaceship took oft and there was no turning back, and at the thought of crouching in some dark hold, motionless for hours, cramped, and with an empty stomach -- He wasn't going to starve himself. Even Comets Carter couldn't have gone without eating and got very far in his pursuit of Rogan. Plato would have to acquire money for flight, fare and food. The book, of course, he couldn't think of selling. It was only a deci credit novel in the first place, and somewhat worn at that. And the other students would have laughed at him for reading it. But his infra-red bedside lamp and his goggles and the space-receptor radio he had built out of pare parts -- those should bring him enough to travel and live on for a few days. He made his first sale in the free time that evening, to a young squirt in the neighboring dormitory who had a passion akin to his own. He liked to listen to tales of high adventure, of the kind the radiocasters loved and the teachers in the school frowned upon. Having arrived here from Earth only six months before, he had difficulty adjusting to the type of derring-do featured on the Venus stations, and he lacked a space-receptor that would bring him his favorites from the next planet. He snapped up, at the bargain price of ten credits, the receptor that Plato offered. There was a little difficulty with the infra-red lamp and goggles. The customer Plato had selected turned out to be rather suspicious. He demanded, "Where did you steal them?" Plato explained patiently, "I didn't steal them. I made them myself." "That's a lot of hot oxo-nitrogen. You hooked them some place, and if they ever find out -- " "Okay," said Plato, "if you don't want them, you don't have to take them. I can sell them to somebody else." He allowed the young skeptic to try the goggles on and read by the light of the lamp. He knew little of the psychology of salesmanship, but with what might be called Platonic shrewdness, he sensed that once the prospect had experienced the joys of using the magic articles, he would never give them up. The method worked. And soon Plato was richer by fifteen credits, instead of the ten or twelve he had hoped for. He had a few other odds and ends, which he sold for as much as they would bring. After all, once he was out in space, he wouldn't need them any more. TN the middle of the next day, when the bell sounded the end of the class on Planetary Geography and it was time to go to the class on Animal Physiology, Plato picked himself up and walked out. One of the 'copter custodians looked at him suspiciously, but Plato didn't dignify the man by paying him direct attention. He muttered to himself, "Always picking on me. I don't see why he can't send somebody else on his errands." It was better than the forged pass signed with the headmaster's name. The pass itself came in handy when he bought a flight ticket. The ticket agent also stared at him suspiciously, but Plato was ready for him. He had prepared the slip of paper beforehand, tracing the headmaster's name laboriously from one of the lists of regulations attached to the wall. To make pursuit as difficult as possible for any one who tried to trail him, Plato asked for a ticket not to Space Junction, where he was going, but to Venusberg, in the opposite direction. Both tickets cost about the same; the ticket to Venusberg, in fact, cost three decicredits more. Once on the planedrawn glider, he could explain to the conductor that the agent had made a mistake and offer the ticket he had. Since the company would lose nothing by the transaction, there was no reason why the conductor should object. Plato was proud of this bit of trickery, and he flattered himself that by means of it he had entirely thrown off pursuit. It must be remembered that he was only ten years old. On the glider-flight, he found himself sitting next to a middleaged woman who wore glasses and was surrounded by packages. She beamed at him, as she did at every one else around her, and Plato shrank back into his seat. If there was anything he didn't want on this trip, it was to be mothered. But he couldn't escape her. She said, "My, my, you're awfully young to be traveling alone. This the first time?" "Yes, ma'am," said Plato nervously, afraid of the embarrassing questions he could read on her face. Hastily he stared out over the side and gasped, "Gee, how small everything is!" Imagine anyone who had traveled vicariously through space with Comets Carter being awed by a flight in a plane drawn glider! But the ruse worked. She said, "Yes, it is frightening, isn't it? Even worse than space travel." "Y ou've been in space, ma'am?" "Bless your heart, I've been in space more times than you could shake a stick at. The takeoff isn't so nice, I'll admit, but after that you're just sailing free. What are you going to be when you grow up?" They had his future all planned for him, but he knew that he wasn't going to be any of the things they wanted him to be. He said boldly, "A space explorer." She laughed. "You youngsters are all alike inside, no matter how different you seem. My boy was the same way when he was young. But he got over it. A space explorer, no less!" only a half hour's trip, and the pnductor was walking down the aisle. Plato found it difficult to take his eyes off him. He was afraid that the man would take a look at his ticket, say, "Wrong plane, son," and turn him over to the stationmaster at Space Junction, to be shipped back. In his nervousness, Plato had difficulty getting his ticket out of his pocket. As he had expected, the conductor said, "You're on the wrong flight." The motherly woman exclaimed, "Oh, isn't that a shame! Are they waiting for you in Venusberg?" Plato said tearfully, "Yes, ma'am." The tearfulness wasn't hard to manage; he'd learned the trick at school. "That's too bad. How are you going to get there?" "I don't know. I had just enough money to pay for this ticket." "Doesn't the company correct mistakes, Conductor?" "Not mistakes the passengers make," said the conductor sourly. "I'm sorry, boy, I'll have to take that ticket." The woman's eyes flashed and, as the conductor moved on, she aid, "The nasty thing. They have no consideration at all. Look, child." For a moment Plato thought she was going to offer him flight fare from Space Junction to Venusberg, but she was not, he discovered, as motherly as that. "You know what you'll do when you get off? Send a 'gram, collect, to your people in Venusberg. They'll wire you your fare. And you'll reach them in a couple of hours." "Thank you, ma'am," he said, not feeling thankful at all. So it was all right to be sympathetic, he thought indignantly, up to the point where sympathy might cost her money. Like most people, she was free-handed only with advice. Who wanted advice? A T Space Junction he waved her a shy farewell, and then turned and disappeared into the station crowd. At the takeoff grounds, his heart sank. As he might have expectedrthe entrance to the space tarmac was well guarded. How was he going to become a stow. away on a spaceship if he couldn't even get close to it? He wandered around outside, staring through the charged wire fence at the crowds, the spacemen, the ships inside. They were gigantic shining things, those wonderful ships, each so long that he realized for the first time how far away they must have been and how rapidly they must have traveled, for those he saw had seemed to him like shooting stars. They were pointed almost straight up. Near the stern of each ship was a vacuum-pit to absorb the radioactive exhaust gases. His eye caught an old tub, its shininess dulled, its hull faintly scarred. Just such a ship, he . thought with a thrill, as the one on which Comets Carter had been shanghaied on that momentous occasion when... The old freighter swung a great circle, its torsion jets blasting desperately in an effort to keep it on an even keel. This, thought Comets Carter, was it. This was the foul revenge that Rogue Rogan had planned, the evil death he had plotted with his unhuman companions. In a moment the pulsating radiations of electroid rays would set off the cargo of ghoulite, and when the interplanetary echoes of the explosion died away, Comets Carter would be no more than a series of photon packets, his body torn apart, his very atom converted into radiation that was hurtling with the speed of light to the far corners of the universe... It hadn't happened that way, of course. But if it had happened -- well, it might have on just such a tub as this. A guard saw him peering through the fence, and said, "What are you looking at, kid?" "Those ships," said Plato, honestly enough. And then he added, to throw the man off the track, "Gee, I'd be scared to go up in one of them. No, sir, you couldn't get me into one of them for a The man laughed. "They're not for the likes of you. A lot of those ships go to other stars." "Other stars? Gosh! Does that little one, the Marie T . -- " "That tub? Just an interplanetary freighter. But even that isn't for you. Now run along and mind your own business." Plato was happy to run along. Unfortunately, he realized, running along didn't help him to get past the fence. And then he had a fear-inspiring thought. He couldn't tell an interplanetary ship from an interstellar. What if he did manage, somehow, to get in and stow away -- and then found himself on a ship bound for no more distant port than Earth, from which he could easily be sent home in disgrace? It sent a shiver through him. Fortunately, it also stimulated his mind. After all, there were such things as newspapers, and the school, nuisance in many ways though it was, had taught him to read. at once to the shipping news section. As he had hoped, every ship was listed. He checked off some of the names he had glimpsed on the field, and found happily that their destinations were printed in the most routine manner.There still remained the question of how to get past the guards. This, he suddenly realized, was a question impossible to solve on an empty stomach. It had been many hours since he had eaten lunch. There were a dozen restaurants in th spaceport, and he selected one carefully, studying the illuminated menus and the prices before daring to enter. If that motherly old woman had been as kind-hearted as she pretended to be, he wouldn't have had to worry so much about prices. As it was, he knew that he had money enough for only two days, and after that -- his stomach could complain all it wanted to, it would have to go unfed. He chose from the menu only items that he never tasted at school -- dishes made from real plant and animal life, with just enough synthetics to give them flavor. He couldn't say that he liked what he ate, but at least it gave him the feeling of being on his own, of having made' the break with his tame past as complete as possible. Earth-beef tasted too strong; Venus seaweed stew had a pungency that he didn't like. He finished his plate only because he had been taught that to leave food over was wasteful. And for the first time he began to wonder what they would feed him on the spaceship. Suppose he got on one that wasn't scheduled to make port for five years -- and all he received to eat was stuff like this? The thought made him shudder. Here was a hardship of space travel that the books he read had never mentioned. After eating, he slumped back in his chair. He hadn't realized he was so completely exhausted until a hand shook his shoulder. Then he awoke with a start. A waiter said, "This is no place to sleep, youngster." "I'm sorry, sir. I was tired and I didn't realize." "You been here for a long time. Waiting for someone?" "Yes, sir. Something must have held him up." "Seems to me that I noticed you walk in here about three hours ago. That's a long time to wait." "That's what I thought, sir. I can't understand what happened." "Well, you can't hang around here. I'll tell you what I'll do, though. I'll turn you over to the matron in our Lost and Found room, and she'll look out for you. Follow me." N a daze, Plato followed. But as his feet were set into motion, so was his brain. By now, of course, the search for him must be well on. They must have traced him to the station, and perhaps, despite his clever trick with the ticket, they had found the flight he had taken. For all he knew, they might be waiting for him in the Lost and Found room, ready to seize him the moment he. showed his face there. He hadn't gone so far to be recaptured so easily. As they passed an exit door, Plato darted out. He heard the waiter's surprised shout, but he didn't wait to reply. In a second, he had lost himself in the crowd. He knew now that if he was going to get aboard an interstellar vessel, he would have to do so soon. What would Comets Carter have done in Plato's place -- if Comets had been in one of his brighter moods? And then he had it. He saw a messenger coming down the street, gleaming in his uniform, and, somewhat nervously, approached him. "May I speak to you?" asked Plato, with school-taught politeness. "What about, bud? I'm busy." "Well, I've been wanting to get Captain Halverson's autograph. He's on the Space Symphony -- " "So what?" "Well, the thing is, they won't let me past the gate. So I thought that if I wore a messenger's uniform -- " The other boy glared at him. "Are you off your Norbert? I wouldn't let you wear this uniPlato swallowed nervously, and said in desperation, "I don't have eight, and I'll give them to you if you let me wear it. Just half an hour, that's all it'll take. It's the last chance I'll have to ask him. He's bound for Rigel, and he won't be back for five years, and you see -- " His voice tapered to a thin, tearful squeak as the messenger looked at him. "You're offering me eight space-lousy credits?" "It's all I have. We'll just change clothes for a few minutes, and that'll be all. Please, I've got to see him. I know that if I do, he'll give me his autograph." "Okay," said the messenger unexpectedly. "But hurry back. I'll be at the gate, waiting for you." A S they exchanged clothes, Plato was almost feverish with excitement. But he knew that if he expected to get past the guard, he would have to control himself. The clothes didn't fit too well, even though the messenger wasmall, and he must do nothing that would arouse the guard's suspicion. He said to the messenger, "Gee, thanks. You don't know how much this means to me." And then, with a mental grip on himself so tense that it hurt physically, he approached the guard, and said casually, "Earth 'gram for Captain Halverson." The guard hardly looked at him. He was past the gate! He had been tricky again. Once out of sight of the guard, he made not for the Space Symphony, but for the Long Ranger, bound for Aldebaran. "Earth 'gram for Captain Brinjar," he muttered, doing his best to look bored, as if delivering 'grams to ships was an old thing to him. And then he was aboard! It was not quite what he expected. The smooth walls were such as he might have found in his own dormitory. The quarters, he saw, were cramped, although for someone his size they were at least adequate. And the passageed, were mere narrow tunnels. From the main passageway, other tunnels branched off bewilderingly, and Plato hesitated until he realized that his very confusion gave him an excuse for poking his nose into all sorts of places. He followed one of the tunnels until he came to a door: He entered. A mechanic looked up. "Earth 'gram for Captain Brinjar. They said he was around here." "Not here," replied the mechanic. "Try the cargo hold." Plato backed out and set off down the corridor again, noting the direction arrows and signs. captain's cabin -- worse. He didn't want to find the captain and lose his excuse for being there. And then he saw to food storage and knew that he need look no further. This was a place both to hide and to eat, until the ship took off, and the crew found him, and had to accept him as one of themselves. He opened the door to the food storage hold with an elaborate caution that turned out to be unnecessary. There was no one inside. He settled down between two packing cases and let out his breath. He had made it. He had stowed away successfully, and in a few hours he would be out in space, traveling between the stars,fighting, adventuring -- A yawn almost wiped the smile off his face. tain and Plato's dorm master were standing there, staring down at him, and the dorm master was saying, "All right, Plato, you've had your adventure, and now I'm afraid you'll have to pay for it. It's time to go home." Plato couldn't move. It was impossible, after he had been so clever, so ingenious, and had thrown them off the trail in so many ways, for them to have found him! "You shouldn't have bought a ticket to the wrong station," said the dorm master, somewhat amusedly. "When the conductor turned it in, the only one of its kind on his flight, it naturally attracted attention. We hadn't even suspected you had taken a glidertrain until the flight people came to us." Now he would never Adventure on strange planets of unknown suns. He would never course through space like Comets Carter. He would never have the adventures which alone made life seem worth living. Unable to control himself, he burst into tears. It was a completely unmanly thing to do, but he couldn't help himself. The tears flowed down over his cheeks, washing away all his shattered illusions. He would never dream such dreams again. From now on, it would be useless. They would be watching him carefully to make sure that he didn't leave the planet. He heard the captain say in astonishment, "I didn't know theSe young ones could cry like that." "Of course they cry," replied the dorm master. "They eat, sleep, cry -- almost like you and me, Captain. And worst of all, they even have their dreams. That's why I sometimes wonder, Captain, if it isn't a mistake to send them to school." "They have to learn." "Grantecf," agreed the dorm master somberly. "But not to dream of being human when they're only androids." Give What # African primitive masks cast in plastic -- originally carved in wood. These masks were used by the Bon and Gouro Tribes of the Ivory Coast during ancestral rites and dances. (A) Top: ebony rusk and beige, height #" overall -- # (B) Left: hand rubbed ebony finish, height #y # " overall -- # (C) Right: rubbed ebony finish, height #" overall -- #  Paul Frankl, eminent designer, provided us with the original wood carving. The policeman has all the pomposity of Colonial officialdom the world over. We've carved him of hardwood and deadly imitated the aged finish and faded black, pumpkin and white paint of the original. Mounted on limed ash. Height: #y#" Shade: Handmade of grass rnatting laminated. Trimmed with deep pumpkin-color grosgrain ribbon. #" top, #' bottom, #" depth. # sss DECEMBER # galaxy... Which era of the past or present would you pick to live in? What worlds would you want to visit? A problem, eh? Any era you chose would eliminate all the others, and any worlds you visited would leave the rest unexplored by you. But you can live in any age, from the beginning of life to the end of history! You can see any planet, from Mars clear out to the limits of the Universe! Stay with them long enough to know them thoroughly, and then... on to the next era, the next solar system ! How? monthly #c tour through all time and all space... or to guarantee not missing any, send # for twelve issues of exciting excursions to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. You'll have the time of your countless lives! Galaxy Publisher Science Editor Assistant Editor Art Director Production Manager Advertising Manager  Cover by Illustrating Vol. #, No. # by Clifford D. Simak # by Howard L. Myers # by Isaac Asimov # by Lyn Venable # is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (#  copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submittedmust beaccompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Robert Sheckley # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Printed in the U. S. A. by the Guinn Co... Inc. Reg. U. S. Pat Off. see with a number of what I hope are astonished glances. You're probably getting used to our better paper and printing. But we're not. We are busily exploring the possibilities of Offset Lithography and are somewhat intimidated -- the process will do just about everything except diaper the baby and walk the dog. And so you'll be seeing experiments in artwork, layout and typography for months to come. Most of them we expect to be successful, but we also expect to fall on our face with some. Don't hesitate to tell us when we do. But if there's a word of appreciation  and encouragement anywhere in your system, we'd like that, too. Visually, the most striking thing in this issue is the cover, of course. The artists are Jack and Bob the name they have devised for this entirely new technique is "Camerage." Now let's see how deafly it can be explained. That isn't an easy job, for much of the process 'can be described only by paradoxical statements. For example, Camerage is a three-dimensional montage effect -- but it's 'not a montage. Many photographers do montages; they combine sections of several pictures to make a single complex photograph. That has to be done in the dark room. Weir, Camerage takes the dark room out into the studio. All the objects in the picture are assembled at one time, illuminated by projected colored lights -- some with plain gelatins, others with gelatins in abstract shapes -- and are shot by a number of cameras placed on different planes. A panel of rheostats precisely controls the light that each object receives from every one of its sources. The effect of this is no less than startling. Each object Can be made completely opaque, translucent, or absolutely transparent -- not just for the camera, but right in front of your eyes! Once they achieved that, the artists immediately went to work on apparent size. By controlling the amount, direction, color and shape of light, they can increase or decrease the size of each object without moving either it or the cameras a single inch. Again, this effect can be seen with the naked eye. A photographer can instantly recognize the advantages of the I process. Instead of working by guess and by God in the dark room, he obviously would prefer to have everything visible and under exact control. That's what Camerage allows -- photographic , orchestration of color, shape and size, since the whole thing is done in one operation rather than many, and in the open studio. The day of lucky accidents leading to important discoveries is evidently not over, for that's just how Camerage was found. However, the Strimbans and Willig had to put in almost three years of exhaustive experimenting before the cover on this issue could finally be produced. That's right -- this is the first appearance of Camerage. Using our cover as a sample, the artists quickly acquired, orders to go and do likewise for Vogue, some large advertising agencies, a product packager -- and are negotiating to make a feature-length film with the process. But you'll be seeing more Camerage covers in future issues of entire covey of writers first breaking into science fiction are coming along wonderfully well. It's impossible to list them all, especially since some haven't even begun to sell yet, though they will before long. F. L. Wallace ("Accidental Flight" and "Delay in Transit") is unusual in this profession. A mature engineer on the West Coast, he abruptly decided to become a writer, which he had wanted to be all his life. His first few stories have been so successful that he's thinking of going into it full time. He has a whole volcanic vat of ideas that you'll eventually be seeing in print. Mark Clifton can match him, though. After # years of being a labor consultant, he is writing full time. Remember "Star, Bright?" Thei;e'll be more, in collaboration with Alex Apostolides. Robert Sheckley, aged #, began his career just a few months ago and has already piled up a spectacular number of sales. Watch him grow in the stories coming up. Now jolly good news and a bonanza for science fiction lovers # ish and Italian edition. We're proud and delighted to welcome these new readers. I hope to be able to tell you soon what these editions will be like, their schedule of publication and, for those who like to keep their files complete, the cost of subscribing. These two foreign editions, incidentally, will very likely be only the first of many. Something was going on, the shabby and dignified old man said warningly. And something was, indeed -- a whole series of great benefits that had the world with its back pinned to the wall! outrageous for its earliness because Ann had phoned the night before to tell him about a man in New York that she wanted him to meet. "I know it breaks into your schedule," she had said, "but I don't think this is something you can pass up." "I must, Ann," he'd told her. "I've got the writing going now and I can't let loose." "But this is the biggest thing that has ever broken. They picked you to talk to first, ahead of all the other writers. They think you're the man to do it." "Publicity." "This is not publicity." "Forget it -- I won't meet the guy, whoever he is," he had said and hung up before she could argue about it. He was frying eggs au oacon and making toast and trying to keep one eye on the coffee maker, which was temperamental, when the doorbell rang. He wrapped his robe around him and headed for the door. It might be the newsboy. He i had been out on the regular coliection day and the boy probably had seen the light in the kitchen. Or it might be his neighbor, Horton Flanders, who had moved in a year or so ago and who dropped over to spend an idle hour at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. He was an affable old man and distinguished-looking, although slightly moth-eaten and shabby at the edges, pleasant to talk with and a good companion, but Vickers might have wished that he were more orthodox in his visiting. It might be the newsboy or it might be Flanders. It could scarcely be anyone else at this early hour. H E opened the door and a mopstood there, wrapped in a cherry-colored bathrobe and with bunny rabbit slippers on her feet. Her hair was tousled from a night of sleep, but her blue eyes sparkled at him and she gave him a pretty smile. "Good morning, Mr. Vickers," she said. "I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep and I saw the light on in your kitchen and I thought maybe you was sick." "I'm all right, Jane," Vickers told her. "I'm just getting breakfast. Maybe you would like to eat with me." "Oh, yes," said Jane. "I was hoping maybe if you was having breakfast, you'd ask me to." "Your mother doesn't know you're here, does she?" "Mommy and Daddy are asleep. This is the day that Daddy doesn't work and they was out awful late last night. I heard them when they came in and Mommy was telling Daddy that he drank too much and she said she wouldn't go out with him, never again, if he drank that much, and Daddy... "Jane," said Vickers, firmly, "I don't think your mommy and daddy would like you to be telling this." "Oh, they don't care. Mommy talks about it all the time. I heard her telling Mrs. Traynor she had half a mind to divorce my daddy. Mr. Vickers, what is divorce?" "I can't recall ever hearing the word before. Maybe we oughtn't to talk about what your mommy says. And look, you got your slippers all wet crossing the grass." "It's kind of wet outside. The dew is awful heavy." "You come in," said Vickers, "and I'll dry your feetand then we'll have some breakfast and call your mommy so she'll know where you are." She came in and he closed the door. "You sit on that chair," he said, "and I'll get a towel. I'm afraid you might catch cold." "Mr. Vickers, you aren't married, are you?" "Why, no. It happens that I'm not." "Most everyone is married," said Jane. "Most everyone I know. Why aren't you married, Mr. Vickers?" "I don't rightly know. Never found a girl, I guess." "There are lots of girls." "There was a girl," said Vickers. "A long time ago, there was a girl." It had been years, he realized moodily, since he had remembered. He had forced the years to obscure the memory, to hide it away so that he did not think of it, and if he did think of it, to make it so far away and hazy that he could quit thinking of it. But here it was again. There had been a girl and an enchanted valley they had walked in, a springtime valley, he remembered, with the pink of wild crab apple blossoms flaming on the hills and the song of bluebird and of lark soaring in the sky, and there had been a wild spring breeze that ruffled the water and blew along the grass so that the meadow seemed to flow and become a lake with whitecaps rolling on it. They had walked in the valley and there was no doubt that it was enchanted, for when he had gone back again, the valley wasn't there -- or at least not the same valley. It had been a very different valley. He had walked there twenty years ago and through all of twenty years he had hidden it away, back in the attic of his mind, yet now it had returned, as fresh and shining as if it had been only yesterday. "Mr. Vickers," said Jane, "I think your toast is burning."  II had washed the dishes, he remembered that he had intended for a week or more to call Joe about the mice. "You got what?" Joe asked when he phoned. "Mice," said Vickers. "Little animals. They run around the place. You never heard of a house with mice?" "Now that's funny," said Joe. "A well-built place like yours, it shouldn't have no mice. You want me to come over and get rid of them?" "I guess you'll have to. I tried traps, but these mice don't go for them. Got a cat a while back and the cat left. Only stayed a day or two." "That's a funny thing. Cats like places where they can catch a mouse." "This cat was crazy," said Vickers. "Acted like it was spooked. Walked around on tiptoe." "Cats is funny animals." Joe confided. "I'm going down to the city today. Figure you could do it while I'm gone?" "Sure thing. The exterminating business is kind of slack right now. I'll come over ten o'clock or so." "I'll leave the front door unlocked," said Vickers. He hung up the phone and got the paper off the stoop. At his desk, he laid down the paper and picked up the sfxeaf of manuscript, holding it in his hand, feeling the thickness and the weight of it, as if by its thickness and its weight he might reassure himself tha? what it held was good, that it was not labor wasted, that it said the many things he wished to say and said them well enough so that other men and women might read the words and know the naked thought that lay behind the coldness of the print. He should not waste the day, he told himself. He should stay here and work instead of traipsing off to meet this man his agent wanted him to meet. But Ann had been insistent and had said that it was important, and even when he had told her about the car being in the garage for repairs, she still had insisted that he come. That story about the car had been a fib, of course, for he knew even as he told her that Eb would have it ready for him to make the trip. He looked at his watch and saw he had no more than half an hour until Eb's garage would open and half an hour was not worth his while to spend in writing. H E picked up the paper and went out on the porch to read the morning's news. He thought about little Jane and what a sweet kid she was and how she'd praised his cooking and chattered on and on. "You aren't married," Jane had said. "Why aren't you married, Mr. Vickers?" And he had said, "Once there was a girl. I remember now. Once there was a girl." Her name had been Kathleen Preston and she had lived in a big brick house that sat up on a hill, a many-columned house with a wide porch and fanlights above the doors -- an old house that had been built in the first flush of pioneer optimism, when the country had been new. The house had still stood when the land had failed and washed away in ditches and left the hillsides scarred with gullied yellow clay. He had been young then, so young that it hurt him now to think of it; so young he could not understand that a girl who lived in an ancestral home with fanlights above the doors and a pillared portico could not seriously consider a boy whose father farmed a wornout farm where the corn grew slight and sickly. Or rather, perhaps, it had been her family that could not consider it, for she also must have been too young to fully understand. Perhaps she had quarreled with her family; perhaps there had been angry words and tears. That was something he had never known. For between that walk down the enchanted valley and the next time he had called, they had bundled her off to a school somewhere in the East and that was the last he had seen or heard of her. For remembrance sake, he had walked the valley again, alert to catch something that would spell out for him the enchantment of that day he had been with her. But the crab apples had dropped their blossoms and the lark did not sing so well and the enchantment had fled into some nevernever land. She had taken the magic with her. The paper fell out of his lap and he bent to pick it up. Opening it, he saw that the news was following the same drab pattern of all other days. The latest peace rumor still was going strong and the cold war still was boiling like dry ice on a hot fire. The cold war had been going on for years, of course, with crisis after crisis, rumor after rumor, near war always threatening and big war never breaking out, until a cold-war-weary world yawned in the face of the new peace rumors and the crises that were a dime a dozen. Someone at an obscure college down in Georgia had set a new record at raw .egg-gulping and a glamorous movie star was on the verge of changing husbands once again and the steelworkers were threatening to strike. article about missing persons and he read about half of it, all that he wanted to. It seemed that people were constantly dropping out of sight, whole families at a time, and the police throughout the land were getting rather frantic. There always had been people who had disappeared, the article said, but they had been individuals. Now two or three families would disappear from the same community and two or three from another community and there was no trace of them at all. Usually they were from the poorer brackets. Where individuals had dropped from sight, there had been some reason for it, but in these cases of mass disappearances there seemed to be no reason beyond poverty and why one would or could disappear because of poverty was something the article writer and the people he had interviewed could not figure out. There was a headline that read : More Worlds Than One, Says Savant. He read part of the story: may he another Earth just a second ahead of us and another world a second behind us and another world a second behind that one and another world a second behind... well, you get the idea. A sort of continuous chain of worlds , one behind the other. That is the theory of Dr. Vincent Aldridge... Vickers let the paper drop to thefloor and sat looking out across the garden. There was peace here, in this garden corner of the world, if there were nowhere else. A peace compounded of many things, of golden sunshine and the talk of summer leaves quivering in the wind, of bird and flower and sun dial, of picket fence that needed painting and an old pine tree dying quietly and tranquilly, taking its time to die, being friends with the grass and flowers and other trees all the while it died. Here there was no rumor and no threat; here was calm acceptance of the fact that time ran on, that winter came and summer, that Sun would follow Moon and that the life one held was a gift to be cherished rather than a right that one must wrest from other living things. Vickers glanced at his watch and saw that it was time to go. Ill E B, the garage man, hitched up his greasy britches and squinted his eyes against the smoke from the cigarette that hung from one corner of his grease-smeared mouth. "You see, it's this way, Jay," he explained. "I didn't fix your car." "I was going to the city," said Vickers, "but if my car's not fixed... "You won't be needing that car any more. Guess that's really why I didn't fix it. Told myself it would be just a waste of money." "It's not that bad," protested Vickers. "Sure, it's got lots of miles in it. But you're going to be buying this new Forever car." "Forever car? That's a queer name for a car." "No, it isn't," Eb told him, stubbornly. "It'll really last forever. That's why they call it the Forever car, because it lasts forever. Fellow was in here yesterday and told me about it and asked if I wanted to take it on and I said sure I would and this fellow, he said I was smart to take it on, because, he said, there isn't going to be any other car selling except this Forever car." "Now wait a minute," said Vickers. "They may call it a Forever car, but that doesn't mean it'll last forever...No car would. Twenty years, maybe, or a lifetime, but not forever." "That's what this fellow told me. 'Buy one of them,' he says, 'and use it all your life. When you die, will it to your son and when he dies, he can will it to his son, and so on down the line.' It's guaranteed to last forever. Anything goes wrong with it, they'll fix it up or give you a new one. All except the tires. They wear out, just like on any other car. And paint, too. But the paint is guaranteed ten years. If it goes bad sooner than ten years, you get a new job free." "I don't doubt a car could be made to last longer than the ones do now. But if they were built too well there'd be no replacement. It stands to reason a manufacturer in his right mind wouldn't build a car that would last forever. He'd put himself out of business. In the first place, it would cost too much..." "That's where you're wrong," Eb told him. "You get it complete for fifteen hundred." "Not much to look at, I suppose." "It's the classiest job you ever laid your eyes on. Fellow that was here was driving one of them and I looked it over good. Any color you want. Lots of chrome and stainless steel. All the latest gadgets. And drive? Man, that thing it might take some getting used to it. I want to open the hood to take a look at the motor and, you know, that hood doesn't open. 'What you doing there?' this fellow asked and I told him I wanted to look at the motor. 'There isn't any need to,' this fellow says. 'Nothing ever goes wrong with it. You never need to get at it.' 'But,' I asked him, 'where do you put in the oil?' And you know what he said? Well, sir, he said you don't put in no oil. 'All you put in is gasoline,' he tells me. "I'll have a dozen or so of them in within a day or so, Jay," said Eb. "You better let me save you one." "I'm short on money." "That's another thing about it. This company gives you good trade-in value. I figure I could give you a thousand for that wreck of yours." "It's not worth a thousand, Eb." ' "I know it's not. Fellow says, 'Give them more than they're worth. Don't worry about what you give them. We'll make it right with you.' It doesn't exactly seem the smart way to do business, but if that's the way they want to operate, I won't say a word against it." "I'd have to think about it." "That would leave five hundred for you to pay. I can make it easy on you. Fellow said I should make it easy. Says they aren't so much interested in the money right now as getting a few of them Forever cars out, running on the road." "I don't like the sound of it," objected Vickers. "Here this company springs up overnight with no announcement at all with a brand-new car. You'd think there would have been something in the papers about it. If I were putting out a new car, I'd plaster the country with advertising... big ads in the newspapers, announcements on television, billboards every mile or so." "Well, you know," said Eb, "I thought of that one, too. T said, 'Look, you fellows want me to sell this car and how am I going to sell it when you aren't advertising it? How am I going to sell it when no one knows about it?' And he said that they figured the car was so good everyone would up and tell everybody else. Said there isn't any advertising that can beat word of mouth. Said they'd rather save the money for advertising to cut down the cost of the car." "I can't understand it." "It does sort of hit you that way," Eb admitted. "This gang that's putting out the Forever car isn't losing any money on it, you can bet your boots on that. Be crazy if they did. And if they aren't losing any money at it, can you imagine what the rest of them companies have been making all these years -- two or three thousand for a pile of junk that falls apart second time you take it out?" "When you get the cars in," said Vickers, "I'll be down to take a look at them. We might make a deal." "Sure. You say you was going to the city?" Vickers nodded. "Be a bus along any minute now," said Eb. "Catch it down at the drugstore corner. Get you there in a couple of hours. Those fellows really wheel it." "I guess I could take a bus. I never thought of it." "I'm sorry about the car," said Eb. "If I'd known you was going to use it, I'd have fixed her up. Not much wrong with it. But I wanted to see what you thought about this other deal before I run you up a bill." T HE drugstore corner looked somehow unfamiliar and Vickers puzzled about it as he walked down the street toward it. Then, when he got closer, he saw what it was that was unfamiliar. Several weeks ago old Hans, the shoe repairman, had taken to his bed and died and the shoe repair shop, which had stood next to the drugstore for almost uncounted years, finally had been closed. Now it was open again -- or, at least, the display window had been washed, something which old Hans in all his years had never bothered to do, and there was a display of some sort. And there was a sign. Vickers had been so intent in figuring out what was wrong with the finally washed window that he did not see the sign until he was almost even with the store. The sign was new and neatly lettered and it Vickers stopped before the window and looked at what was inside. A strip of black velvet had been laid along the display strip and displayed upon it were three items -- a cigarette lighter, a razor blade and a single light bulb. Nothing else. Just those three items. There were no signs, no advertising, no prices. There was no need of any. Anyone who saw that window, Vickers knew, would recognize the items, although the store would not sell only those. There would be a couple of dozen others, each of them in its own way as distinguished and efficient as the three lying on the strip of velvet. There was a tapping sound along the walk and Vickers turned when it came close to him. It was his neighbor, Horton Flanders, out for his morning walk, with his slightly shabby, carefully brushed clothes and his smart malacca cane. No one else, Vickers told himself, would have the temerity to carry a . cane along the streets of Cliffwood. Mr. Flanders saluted him with the cane and moved in to stand beside him and stare at the window. "So they're branching out," he said. "Apparently," Vickers agreed. "Peculiar outfit," said Mr. Flanders. "You may know, although I presume you don't, that I have been most interested in this company. Just a matter of curiosity, you understand. I am curious, I might add, about many different things." "I hadn't noticed." "Oh, my, yes. About many things. About the carbohydrates, for instance. Most intriguing setup, don't you think so, Mr. Vickers?" "I hadn't given it much thought. I have been so busy that I'm afraid -- " "There's something going on," said Mr. Flanders. "The question is what and why." The bus came down the street, passed them and braked to a stop at the drugstore corner. "I'm afraid I'll have to leave you," Vickers said. "I'm going to the city. If I'm back tonight, why don't you drop over?" "Oh, I will," Mr. Flanders told him. "I nearly always do." IV I T had been the blade at first, the razor blade that would not wear out. And after that the lighter that never failed to light, that required no flints and never that would burn forever if it met no accident. Now it was the Forever car and the synthetic carbohydrates. "There is something going on," Mr. Flanders had said to him, standing there in front of old Hans' shop. "The question is what and why." Vickers sat in his seat next to the window, well back in the bus. There was a tie-up somewhere, a common denominator to explain why it should be these five items and not five other things, say roller curtains and pogo sticks and yoyos and airplanes and toothpaste. Razor blades shaved a man and light bulbs lit his way and a cigarette lighter would light a cigarette and the synthetic carbohydrates had ironed out at least one international crisis and from starvation or .war. "There is something going on," Flanders had said, standing there in neat, shabby clothes and with that ridiculous stick clutched in his fist, although, come to think of it, it was not ridiculous when Mr. Flanders held it. The Forever car used no oil and when you died you wilted it to your son, and when he died he willed it to his son, and if your great-great-grandfather bought one of the cars and you were the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son, you would have it, too. For the car would last forever. But it would do more than that. It would close every automotive plant in the matter of a year or so. It would shut down most of the garages and repair shops. It would be a blow to the steel industry and the glass industry and the fabric makers and many other industries. The razor blade hadn't seemed important, nor the light bulb, nor the lighter, but now they suddenly were. Thousands of men would lose their jobs and they would come home and face the family and say: "Well, v this is it. After all these years I haven't got a job." The family would go about their everyday affairs in tight and terrible silence, with a queer air of dread hanging over them, and the man would buy newspapers, all the newspapers that there were, and would study the want ad columns, then go out and walk the streets and men in little cages or at desks in outer offices would shake their heads at him. one of those little places that had the sign "Carbohydrates, Inc." over its door and he would shuffle in embarrassment, the humiliation of a good workman who cannot find a job, and he would say, "I'm a little down on my luck and the cash is running low. I wonder -- " The man behind the desk would say, "Why, sure, how many in your family?" The man would tell him and the one who was at the desk would write on a slip of paper and hand it to him. "That window over there," he'd say. "I figure that's enough to last you for a week, but if it isn't, be sure to come back any time you want to." The man would take the slip of paper and try to say his thanks, but the carbohydrates man would brush them easily aside and say, "That's what we're here for -- helping guys like you." The man would go to the window and the man behind the window would look at the slip of paper and hand him packages and one package would be synthetic stuff that tasted like potatoes and another one would taste like bread and there would be others that would make you think you were eating corn or peas. It wasn't like relief -- anyhow, you could say it wasn't. These carbohydrates people didn't insult you when you came to ask for help. They treated you like a paying customer and they always said that you should come back and sometimes when you didn't they came around to see what had happened -- if maybe you had got a job or were bashful about coming in again. If it turned out that you were bashful, they'd sit down and talk and before they left they had you thinking you were doing them a favor by taking the carbohydrates off their hands. Because of the carbohydrates, were still alive in India and in China. Because of carbohydrates, almost every relief office throughout the entire world had been forced to close its doors. People wouldn't go to a relief office to be bullied and humiliated when they could go across the street and get food from folks who seemed downright glad to t see them. Now the thousands who would lose their jobs would travel the same trail to the door with the carbohydrates sign. The automotive industry would have to shut down. Why buy ariy other car when you could walk down the street and get one that would last forever? Just as the razor blade industry had closed its doors when it was possible to buy an everlasting blade at the gadget shops. The same thing had happened with light bulbs and with cigarette lighters and the chances were, Vickers told himself, that the Forever car wasn't the last that would be heard from these manufacturers, whoer they might be. Those who made the razor blades also must have made the lighters and the light bulbs, v and those who made the gadget items must have designed the Forever car. Not the same companies, perhaps, although he couldn't know, for it had never occurred to him before to try to find out. Vickers still sat by himself, staring out the window and sorting out his thoughts. A couple of women behind him were talking and, without consciously trying to eavesdrop, he heard what they were saying. One of them giggled and said, "We have the most interesting group. So many interesting people in it." And the other woman said, "I been thinking about joining one of those groups, but Charlie says it's all baloney. Says we're living in America in the year # and there's no reason in the world why we should pretend we aren't. Says this is the best country and the best time the world has ever known. Says we got all the modern conveniences and everything. Says we're happier than people ever been before. Says this pretending business is just a lot of communist propaganda and he'd like to get hold of the ones that got it started. Says..." "Oh, I don't know," interrupted the first woman. "It is kind of fun. It takes a lot of work, of course, reading about them old times and all of that, but one fellow was saying at a meeting the other night you get out of it what you put into it and I guess he's right. But I don't seem to be able to put much into it. I must be the flighty type. I'm not too good a reader and I don't understand too well and I got to have a lot explained to me, but there are them who get a lot out of it, seems like. There's a man in our group that is living back in London, back in the times of a man named Peeps. I don't know who this Peeps was, but I guess he was an important man or something. You don't know who Peeps was, do you, Gladys?" "Not me," said Gladys. "Well, anyhow, this fellow talks all the time about this Peeps. He wrote a book, this Peeps, and it must be an awful long book because he tells about so many things. This man I was telling you about writes the most wonderful diary. We always like to have him read it to us. You know, it sounds almost as if he was really living there." The bus stopped for a railroad crossing and Vickers glanced at his watch . I They'd be in the city in another half an hour. It was a waste of time, he told himself. No matter what sort of scheme Ann had up her sleeve, it would be a waste of time, for he was not going to allow anything to interrupt his writing. He shouldn't have allowed himself to be talked into wasting even this one day. Back of him, Gladys was saying, "Did you hear about these new houses they are putting out? I was talking to Charlie about them the other night and I was saying maybe we ought to look into them. Our place is getting kind of shabby, you know, and we will have to paint it and sort of fix it up, but Charlie said no one would put out them kind of houses on the sort of deal they offer without there was a catch somewhere. Mabel, have you seen any of them houses or read anything about them?" "I was telling you," Mabel said, "about this group I belong to. One of the fellows is pretending that he's living in the future. Now, I ask you, ain't that a laugh? Imagine anyone pretending he's living in the future... V ter stopped and said, "Please remember Jay, his name is Crawford. You're not to call him Cranford or Crawham or any other name but Crawford." Vickers said humbly, "I'll do my very best." She came close to him and tightened his tie and straightened it and flicked some imaginary dust off his lapel. "We're going out as soon as this is over and buy you a suit," she said. "I have a suit." "Why don't you wear it, then?" "Why, I am," said Vickers. The letters on the door said "North American Research." "What I can't understand," protested Vickers, "is why North American Research and I should have anything in common." "Money," said Ann. "They have it and you need it." She opened the door and he followed her in obediently, thinking what a pretty woman she was and how efficient. Too efficient. She knew books and publishers and what the public wanted and she was onto all the angles. She drove herself and everyone around her. She was never so happy as when three telephones were ringing and there were five dozen letters to be answered and a dozen calls to make. She had bullied him into coming here and it was not beyond reason, he told himself, that she had bullied Crawford and North American Research into wanting him to come. "Miss Carter," said the girl at the dk, "you can go right in. Mr. Crawford is waiting for you." She's even got the Indian sign on the receptionist, Vickers thought. VI big man who overflowed the chair in which he sat. He held his hands folded over his paunch and talked with no change of tone, with no inflection whatsoever, and was the stillest man Vickers had ever seen. He sat huge and stolid and his lips scarcely moved and his voice was not much louder than a whisper. "I have read some of your work, Mr. Vickers," he said. "I am impressed by it." "I am glad to hear you say so," Vickers said. "Three years ago, I never would have thought that I would ever read a piece of fiction or be talking to its author. Now, however, I find that we need a man like you. I have talked it over with my directors and we are all agreed that you are the man who could do the job forms." He paused and stared at Vickers with bright blue eyes that peered out like bullet points from the folds of flesh. "Miss Carter," he aid, "tells me that, at the moment, you are very busy." "That is right," said Vickers. "Some important piece of work, I presume." "I hope it is." "This thing I have in mind would be much more important." "That," Vickers told him crisply, "is a matter of opinion." "Before we go any further, I would like it understood that what I have to say is of a confidential nature." "Mr. Crawford, I have little stomach for cloak and dagger business." "This is not cloak and dagger business," said Crawford and for the first time there was emotion in his low, quiet voice. "It is the business of a world with its back against the wall. You have heard of the Forever car?" owner in my home town tried to sell me one this morning." "And the everlasting razor blades and the lighter and the light bulbs?" "I have one of the blades." said Vickers, "ad it is the best I ever owned. I doubt that it is everlasting, but it is a good blade and I've never had to sharpen it. When it wears out, I intend to buy another one." "Unless you lose it, you will never have to. Because, Mr. Vickers, it is an everlasting blade. And the car is an everlasting car. Maybe you've heard about the houses, too." "Not enough to matter." "The houses are prefabricated units," said Crawford, "and they sell at the flat rate of five hundred dollars a room -- set up. You can trade in your old home on them at a fantastic trade-in value and the credit terms are liberal -- much more liberal, I might add, than any sane financing institution would ever allow. They are heated and air-conditioned by a solar plant that tops anything -- you hear me, anything -- that we have today. There are many other features, but that gives you something of a rough idea." "They sound good. We've been talking about low-cost housing for a long time now. Maybe this is it." "They are a good idea," admitted Crawford. "I would be the last to deny they are. Except that they will ruin the power people. The solar plant supplies it all -- heat, light, power. They will put thousands of carpenters and masons and painters out of work and on the carbohydrates lines. They eventually will wreck the lumber industry." "I can understand about the power angle, but that business about the carpenters and the lumber industry doesn't quite make sense. Surely these houses use lumber and it must take carpenters to build them." "They use lumber, all right, and someone builds them, but we don't know who it is." "You could check," suggested Vickers. "There must be a corporate setup. There must be mills and factories somewhere." Crawford. "A sales company. We started with that and we found the warehouse from which the houses are shipped after they are sold. But that's the end of it. There is, so far as we can find, no factory that builds them. They are Consigned from a certain company and we have its name and address. But no one has ever sold a stick of timber to that company. They have never bought a hinge. They hire no men. They list factory sites and the sites are there, but there aren't any factories. And, to the best of our knowledge, no single person has gone into or come out of the home office address since we've been watching it." "That's fantastic," Vickers objected. "Of course it is," agreed Crawford. "Lumber and other materials go into those houses and somewhere there must be men who build them." "Mr. Crawford, why are you interested?" "Well, now, I wasn't quite readyto tell you that." "I know you weren't," said Vickers, "but you'll tell me anyway." "I had hoped to sketch in a bit more of the background so you would understand what I am driving at. Our interest -- I might say our organization -- sounds just a little silly until you know the background." "Someone has you scared. You wouldn't admit it, of course, but you're scared livid." "Queerly enough, I will admit it. But it's not me, Mr. Vickers -- it's industry, the industry of the entire world." "You think the people who are making and selling these houses," asked Vickers, "are the same ones who are making the Forever car and the lighters and the bulbs?" Crawford nodded. "And the carbohydrates, too." "Of course." "It's terrifying," Crawford said, "when you think about it. Here we have someone who wrecks inof work, then turns around and food to live on." "A political plot?" "We are convinced that it is a planned attack on world economy -- a deliberate .effort to undermine the social and economic system of our way of life, and after that, of course, the political system. Our way of life is based on capital, be it private capital or state control of resources and on the wage that the worker earns at his daily job. Take away those two things, capital and jobs, and you have undercut the whole basis of an orderly society." "We?" asked Vickers. "Who are we?" "North American Research." "And North American Research?" "You're getting interested," said Crawford. "I want to know who I'm talking to and what you want of me and what it's all about." without speaking, and then he finally said, "That is what I meant when I told you what I had to say was highly confidential." "I will swear no oath," said Vickers, "if that is what you mean." "Let's go back and review some history. Who we are and what we are will become apparent then. "You remember the razor blade. It was the first to come out. An everlasting razor blade. The news spread quickly and everyone went out and bought one. Now the ordinary man will get anywhere from one to half a dozen shaves out of a blade. Then he throws it away and puts in another. That means he is a continuous buyer of razor blades. As a result, the razor blade industry employed thousands of workers, it represented a certain profit for thousands of dealers, it was a buyer of steel. In other words, it was an economic factor which, linked with thousands of others, make up the picture of world industry. So what happens?" "I can tell you that," said Vickers, "although I'm no economist. No one bought any more razor blades. The razor blade industry was out the window." "Then there was the lighter. A small thing in itself, of course. but fairly large when you look at it from the world point of view. The same thing happened there. And the everlasting light bulbs. Three industries gone, Mr. Vickers. Three industries wiped out. You said a while ago that I was scared and I told you that I was. It was after the bulbs that we got scared. Because if someone could wipe out three industries. why not half a dozen, a dozen, a hundred -- why not all of them? "We organized, and by we I mean the industry of the world -- not American industry alone, but the industry of America and the British commonwealth and the continent of Europe and Russia and all of the rest of them. There were a few, of course, who were skeptical. There still are a few who never have come in, but by and large I can tell you that our organization represents and is backed by every major industry of the entire world. I would prefer you not to mention this." "At 'the moment," Vickers told him, "I have no intention of saying anything about it." "We organized," said Crawford, "and we swung a lot of power, as you can well imagine. We made certain representations and we brought certain pressures and we got a few things done. For one thing, no newspaper, no periodical, no radio station now w.ill accept advertising for any of the gadgets or give them any mention in the news. For another, no reputable drugstore or any other place of business will sell a razor blade or a bulb or lighter." "That was when they set up the gadget shops?" "Exactly," said Crawford. "They're branching out," said Vickers. "One opened in Cliffwood just the other day." shops," said Crawford, "and they developed a new form of advertising. They hired thousands of men and women who went around from place to place and said to people they would meet, 'Did you hear about those wonderful new gadgets they are getting out? You haven't? Well, just let me tell you...' That is the best kind of advertising there is. But it's more expensive than you can possibly imagine. "So we knew that we were up against not merely inventive and productive genius, but almost unlimited money as well. "And we investigated. We tried to find out who they were and how they operated and what they meant to do. As I've told you, we ran into stone walls." "There might be legal angles," said Vickers. "We have run down the legal angles. These people, whoever they may be, are covered from hell to breakfast. Taxes? So there won't be any investigation, they actually pay more taxes than they need to pay. Rules of corporation? They are more than meticulous in meeting all the rules. Social security? They pay it on huge payrolls that we are convinced are utterly fictitious, but you can't go to the social security people and say, 'Look, there aren't any such people as these they're paying for.' There are other points, but those serve as illustrations. We've run down so many legal blind alleys that our legal force is dizzy." "Mr. Crawford," said Vickers, "you make out a most interesting case, but I can't see the point of what you said earlier. You said this was a conspiracy to break world industry. If you study your economic history, you will find example on example of cutthroat competition. That's all this is." "You forget," Crawford replied, "about the carbohydrates." A ND that was true, thought Vickers. The carbohydrates had no place in mere cutthroat competition. "We checked into them," Crawford said. "So far as we're concerned, the carbohydrates aren't being manufactured -- they simply exist. They are shipped to the distribution offices from several ' warehouses and none of the warehouses are big enough to carry more than a day or two's supply. We can find no factories and we can't trace transportation -- oh, sure, from the warehouses to the distribution points, but not from anywhere to the warehouses. It's like the old story that Hawthorne told about the pitcher of milk that never ran dry." "What happens when the men who are out of work need more than just a gift of food?" asked Vickers. "What happens when their families are in tatters and they need clothes and they're thrown out into the street?" "I think I can answer that. Some other philanthropic society will spring up overnight and will furnish clothes and shelter. They're selling houses now for five hundred a room, which is no more than token payment. Why not give them away? Why not clothing that will cost no more than a tenth or a twentieth of what you pay today. A suit for five dollars, say, or a dress for fifty cents." "You have no idea of what is coming next?" "We've tried to dope it out," said Crawford. "We figured the car would come quickly, and it did. We figured houses, too, and they have put them out. Clothing should be one of the next items to go on the market." "Food, shelter, transportation, clothing," said Vickers. "Those are four basics." "They also have fuel and power," Crawford added. "But who is it? You've told me you don't know, but you must have some idea, some educated guess." "Not an inkling. We have tables of organization for their corporation setups. We can't find the men themselves; they are names we've never heard of." "Russia?" Crawford shook his head. "Russia is cooperating. That should prove how scared they are." For the first time, Crawford moved. He unfolded his hands from across his paunch, grasped the arms of his massive chair and pulled himself straight, sitting upright now. "I suppose," he said, "that you are wondering where you fit in on this." "Naturally." "We can't say, 'here we are, a combine of the world's industrial might, fighting to protect your way of life.' We can't explain to the people what the situation is. They'd laugh at us. After all, you can't tell them that a car that will last forever or a house that costs only five hundred a room is a bad thing for them. We can't tell them anything and yet this needs telling. We waht you to write a book about it." "I don't see... said Vickers, but Crawford stopped him in mid'Sentence. "You would write it as if you had doped it out yourself. You would hint at informed sources that were too high to name. We'd furnish all the data, but the material would appear as yours." Vickers came slowly to his feet. He reached out a hand and picked up his hat. "Thanks for the chance," he said. "I'm not having any." ers: "Someday I'm going to get sore enough at you to take you apart. And when I do maybe I'll have a chance to find what makes you tick." "I have a book to write," said Vickers. "I'm writing it. What more do you want?" "That book could keep. You could write it anytime." "Go ahead, tell me I threw what you're thinking." "You could have charged them a fancy fee for writing and gotten a contract with the publisher like there never was before..." "And pushed aside the greatest piece of work I've ever done," said Vickers, "and come back to it cold and find I'd lost the feel." "Every book you write is your greatest one. You're nothing but a literary ham. Sure, you do good work and your darn books sell, although sometimes I wonder why, but if there were no money c in it, you'd never write another word. Tell me, honest, why do you write?" "You've answered it for me. You say it is for money. All right, so it is for money." "All right, so I have a sordid soul." "My God, we're fighting as if we're married!" "That's another thing. You've never married, Jay. It's an index of your selfishness. I bet you never even thought of it." "Once I did," said Vickers. "Once long ago." "Here, put your head down here and have a good long cry. I bet it was pitiful. I bet that's how you get some of those excruciating love scenes you put into yur books." "Ann, you're getting maudlin drunk." "If I'm getting drunk, you're the man who drove me to it. Thanks for the chance, but I'm not having any." "I had a hunch there was something phony there," insisted Vickers. "That was you," Ann retorted. She finished off her drink. "Don't use a hunch," she said, "to duck the responsibility of turning dpwn the best thing you ever had. Anytime someone dangles money like that in front of me, I'm not letting any hunch stand in my way." "I'm sure you wouldn't," Vickers agreed. "That was a nasty thing to say," Ann told him. "Pay for the drinks and let's get out of here. I'm putting you on that bus and don't you come back here again." T HE huge sign was draped diagonally across the front of the huge show window. It read: # a room In the window was a five or six room house, set in the middle of a small, beautifully planned lawn and garden. There was a sun dial in the garden and a cupola with a flying duck weather vane on the attached garage. Two white lawn chairs and a white round table stood on the clipped grass and there was a new and shiny car standing in the driveway. Ann squeezed Vickers' arm. "Let's go iri." "This must be what Crawford was talking about," said Vickers. "You got lots of time to catch the bus and we could have a look." "We might as well. If you get # interested in looking at a house, you won't be chewing me." "If I thought it were possible, I'd trap and marry you." "And make my life a hell." "Why, certainly," Ann told him sweetly. "Why else would I do it?" The door swung to behind them and the noise of the street was shut away and they walked on the deep green carpeting that doubled as a lawn. A salesman saw them and came over. "We were just passing by," said Ann, "and we thought we would drop in. It looks like a fine house and..." "It is a fine house," the salesman assured them, "and it has many special features." "Is that true what the sign said?" asked Vickers. "Five hundred dollars a room?" "Everyone asks me that. They read the sign, but they don't believe it, so the first thing they ask me when they come in is whether it is really true that we sell these houses for five hundred a room." "Well, is it?" persisted Vicktrs. "Absolutely," said the salesman. "A five room house is twenty-five hundred dollars and a ten room house would be five thousand dollars. Most people, of course, aren't interested in a ten room house at first." "What do you mean, at first?" "Well, this is what you might call a house that grows. You buy a five room house, say, and in a little while you figure that you want another room, so we come out and redesign the house and make it a six room house." "Isn't that expensive?" Ann asked. "Oh, not at all," the salesman said. "It only costs you five hundred dollars for the extra room. That is a flat and standard charge." "This is a prefabricated house, isn't it?" asked Ann. "I suppose you could call it that, although it does the house injustice. When you say 'prefabricated' you are thinking of a house that is pre-cut and sort of stuck together. Takes a week or ten days to put it together and then you just have a shell -- no heating plant, no fireplace, nothing." "I'm interested in this extra room angle," said Vickers. "You say that when they want an extra room, they just tall you up and you come out and stick one on." "We stick nothing on. At all times, your house is well planned and practical, designed in accordance with the highest scientific and esthetic concepts of what a home should be. In some cases, adding another room means that we have to change the whole house around, rearrange the rooms and such. If you wanted to change the place completely, the best thing might be to trade the house in on a new one. For doing that, we make a service charge of one per cent per year of the original cost, plus, of course, the charge for the extra rooms." He looked at the two of them hopefully. "You have a house, perhaps?" "A little cottage up the valley," said Vickers. "It's not much of a place." "Worth how much, would you say?" "Fifteen or twenty thousand, but Indoubt if I could get that much." "We'd give you twenty thousand," said the salesman, "subject to appraisal. Our appraisals are most liberal." "Look," Vickers objected, "I'd only want a five or six room house. That would come to twenty five hundred or three thousand." "We'd pay the difference in cash." "It doesn't make sense!" market value on existing homes in order to introduce our own. In your case, we'd pay you the difference, then take your old place and move it away and set up the new one. It's as simple as that." Ann said to Vickers, "Go ahead and tell the man that you aren't having any. This sounds like a good sound business proposition to me, so you'll naturally turn it down." "Madam," said the salesman, "I don't quite understand." "It's just a private joke," Vickers interpreted. "Oh... Well, I was telling you that this house has some special features." "Go ahead, please," said Ann. "Tell us about them." "Very happy to. For instance, there is the solar plant. You do know what a solar plant is?" Vickers nodded. "A power plant operated by the Sun." "Exactly," said the salesman. "This plant, however, is somewhat more efficient than the usual solar plant. It not only heats the house in winter, but supplies electrical power for the year round. It eliminates the necessity of relying upon a public utility for your power. I might add there is much more than you will ever need." "A nice feature," said Ann. "Then," continued the salesman, "it comes fully equipped. You get a refrigerator and a deep freeze, an automatic washer and drier, a dish washer, a garbage disposal unit, a toaster, a waffle iron, radio, television, and other odds and ends." "An extra charge for them, of course," said Vickers. "Positively not. All you pay is five hundred a room." "And beds?" asked Ann. "Chairs and stuff like that?" "I'm sorry," said the salesman. "You have to furnish those yourself." "There is an extra charge," Vickers pushed on, "for carting away the old house and putting up the new one." salesman spoke with quiet dignity. "There are no hidden costs. Y ou buy the house and pay -- or arrange to pay -- at the rate of five hundred a room. We have trained crews of workmen who move away your old house and erect the new one. All of that is included in the original cost. Some buyers want to change location. In that case we are usually able to work out an acceptable exchange plan between their old real estate and the new location they select. You, I presume, would want to stay where you are. You said you were up the valley. A most attractive place." "Well, I don't know," said Vickers. "I forgot to mention one thing," the salesman went on. "You never have to paint this house. It is built of material that is of the same color all the way through and never wears off or fades. We have a wide range of very attractive color combinations." "We don't want to take up too much of your time," said Vickers. "You see, we're not really customers. We just dropped in." "But you have a house?" "Yes, I have a house." "And we stand ready to replace it with a new one and pay you a comfortable sum besides." "I know all that," said Vickers, "but... "It seems to me," the salesman said, "that you should be trying to sell me instead of me trying to sell you." "I have a house and I like it. How would I know I'd like one of these new houses?" "Why, sir, I've just been telling you -- " "I'm used to my house. I'm acquainted with it and it's got used to me. I've become attached to it -- " "Jay Vickers," said Ann, "you can't become attached to a house in only three years. To hear you talk about it, one would think you'd lived all your life in an old ancestral home." "I have the feel of it," Vickers stated obstinately. "I know the place. There is a creaky board in the dining room and I step on it on purpose at times just to hear it creak. And there's a pair of robins that have a nest in the vine on the porch and there's a cricket in the basement. I've hunted for that cricket, but I never could find him ; he was too smart for me. And now I wouldn't touch him if I could, because he is a part of the house and -- " "You'd never be bothered with crickets in one of our houses. They have bug repellant built right into them. You never are bothered with mosquitoes or ants or crickets or anything of the sort." B UT I'm not bothered with this cricket," said Vickers. "That is what I was trying to tell you. I like it. I'm not sure I'd like a house where .a cricket couldn't live. Now, mice, that's a littl different." "I dare say," declared the salesman, "that you would not have mice in one of our houses." "I won't have any in mine, either. I called the exterminator and they'll be gone by the time I get home." "Well, now," the salesman said, "there is something else to consider in connection with our house. We put them up in one day's time. You give us an order tonight and by tomorrow night you can ipiove in. And if, for some reason or other, you move to another city or another part of the country, we will undertake to move your house for you. With our houses there is no need to go through the ordeal of selling the old house, moving to your new location and then spending weeks, if not months, hunting for the kind of house you want to buy. You move your house right along with you, like your briefcase or your golf clubs. "Let's say you aren't moving to another city. Maybe you just get dissatisfied with the location that you have. You want to move out to the country or to another section of the city. Pick out the place you want to go and let us know. Give us twenty-four hours and we'll move the house for you." "I suppose," said Ann, "it costs a lot to have the house moved." "Not at all," the salesman answered. "One per cent of the purchase price, that's all. In the case of a five room house, that would be twenty-five dollars." "But suppose it was clear across the country..." "It makes no difference," said the salesman. "We make money on some, lose on others. In the end, we even out." "One thing is bothering me," said Ann. "You remember all that equipment you mentioned, the washer and refrigerator and television and... ?" "Yes, certainly." "But you didn't even once happen to mention a stove." "Didn't I?" asked the salesman. "Now how could I have let it slip my mind? Of course you get a stove." IX wood, darkness was beginning to fall. Vickers bought a paper at the corner drugstore and made his way across the street to the town's one clean cafe. He had ordered the meal and was just starting on the paper when a piping voice hailed him. "Hi there, Mr. Vickers." Vickers put down the paper and looked up. It was Jane, the moppet who had come for breakfast. "Why, hello, Jane," he said. "What are you doing here?" "Me and Mommy came down to buy some ice cream for supper," Jane explained. She perched herself on the edge of the chair across the table from him. "Where you been today, Mr. Vickers? I came across to see you, but there was a man there and he wouldn't let me in. He said he "Jane," a voice said. Vickers looked up and a woman stood there, sleek and maturely beautiful, and she smiled at him. "You must not mind her, Mr. Vickers," she said. "I don't. I think she's wonderful." "I'm Mrs. Leslie," said the woman. "Jane's mother. We've been neighbors for a long time now, but we've never met." She sat down at the table. "I've read some of your books," she said, "and they are splendid. I haven't read them all. One has so little time." "Thank you, Mrs. Leslie," said Vickers, and wondered if she would think that he was thanking her for not reading all his books. "I had meant to come over and see you. Some of us are organizing a Pretentionist club and I have you on my list." Vickers shook his head. "I am always pressed for time. I make it a rule to belong to no organization." "But this," said Mrs. Leslie, "would be -- well, you might say this would be down your alley." "I am glad you thought of me." She laughed at him. "You think us foolish, Mr. Vickers." "No," he said, "not foolish." "Infantile, then." "Since you supplied the word," said Vickers, "I must admit it does seem somewhat infantile." N OW, he thought, I've done it. She will twist it around so that it will appear it was I, not she, who said it. She'll tell all the neighbors how I told her to her face the club was infantile. But she didn't seem insulted. "It must seem that way to someone like you who has every minute filled. But I think it might be a wonderful way to work up an interest -- an outside interest, that is." "I have no doubt of it," said Vickers. "It's a lot of work, I understand. You decide on the period you'd like to pretend you are living in. Then you must read up on the period and write your diary and it must be a full account of each day's activities and not just a sentence or two. You must make it interesting and, if you can, exciting." There are many periods of history that could be made exciting." "I'm glad to hear you say that," Mrs. Leslie replied eagerly. "Would you tell me one? If you were going to choose a period for excitement, which would you choose?" "I'm sorry," Vickers said. "I'd have to think about it." "But I just heard you say there were many... "I know. And yet, when I think of it, the present day might prove as exciting as any of the others." "But there's nothing going on!" "There's too much going on," said Vickers. The whole idea was pitiful, of course -- grown people pretending they lived in some other age, publicly confessing that they could not live at peace with their own age, but must go burrowing back through time to find the musty thrill of vicarious existence. It marked some rankling failure in the lives of these people, some terrible emptiness that would not let them be, some screaming vacuum that somehow had to be filled. men who had talked in the bus seat behind him and he wondered momentarily what illusory satisfaction the Pretentionist living back in Pepys' time might get out of it. There was, of course, Pepys' well filled life, the scurrying about, the meetings with many people, the little taverns where there were cheese and wine, the theatres, the good companionship and the midnight talks, the many interests that had kept Pepys as naturally full of life as these Pretentionists were empty. The movement itself was escapism, obviously, but escapism from what? From insecurity, perhaps. From a daily, ever-present tension that never quite bubbled into fear, yet never quieted into peace. The state, perhaps, of never being sure -- a state of mind for which all the advantages of a highly advanced technology could not compensate. "They must have our ice cream packed by now," said Mrs. Leslie, gathering up her gloves and purse. "You must come over, Mr. Vickers, and spend an evening with us." Vickers rose with her. "Some evening very soon," he promised. He knew he wouldn't and he knew she didn't want him to, but they both paid lip service to the old fable of hospitality. "Come along, Jane," said Mrs. Leslie. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Vickers, after all these years." Without waiting for his answer, she moved away. "Everything is fine at our house now," said Jane. "Mommy and Daddy have made up again." i'm glad of that," said Vickers. "Daddy says he won't run around with women no more." "I'm glad to hear that, too." Her mother called to her across the store. "I got to go now," said Jane. She slipped off the chair and ran to her mother's side. She turned and waved at him as they went out the door. Poor kid, he thought, what a life she has ahead of her. If I had a little girl like that -- he shut the thought away. There was no little girl for him. There was a shelf of books and the manuscript that lay waiting for him; not much to build a life on. That was the trouble with not himself alone, but with everyone -- no one seemed now to have too much on which to build a life. For years the world had lived with war or the threat of war. First it had been a frantic feeling, a running to escape, and then it was just a moral and mental numbness that one didn't even notice, a condition that one accepted as the normal way of life. No wonder there were Pretentionists. With his books and manuscripts, he was one himself. H E looked under the flower pot in the comer of the stoop to find the key, but there was none, and then he remembered that he had left the house unlocked so that Joe could come in and get rid of the mice. He turned the knob and went in and made his way across the room to turn on the desk lamp. A white square of paper with awkward pencil scrawls upon it lay underneath the lamp. Jay. I did the job, then came back and opened up the windows to clean out the smell. I'll give you' a hundred bucks a throw for every mouse you find. Joe. A noise brought him around from the desk and he saw that there was someone on the porch, sitting in his favorite chair, rocking back and forth, a cigarette making a little wavy line dancing in the dark. "It's I," said Horton Flanders. "Have you had anything to eat?" "I grabbed a meal in the village." "That's a pity. I brought over a tray of sandwiches and some beer. I thought you might be hungry and I know how you hate to cook..." "Thanks," said Vickers. "I'm not hungry now. We can have them later." He threw his hat on a chair and went out to the porch. "I have your chair," said Mr. Flanders. 'Iteep it," Vickers said. "This one is just as comfortable." "Did you notice if there was any news today? I have a most deplorable habit, at times, of not looking at the papers." "The same old thing. Another peace rumor that no one quite believes." "Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Vickers, that there have been a dozen times at least when there should have been real war, but somehow or other it has never come to be?" "I hadn't thought of it." "But it's the truth," said Mr. Flanders. "First there was the Berlin airlift trouble and the fighting in Greece. Either one of them could have set off a full scale war, but each of them was settled. Then there was Korea and that was settled, too. Iran later threatened to blow up the world, but we got safely past it. Then there were the Manila incidents and the flareup in Alaska and the Indian crisis and half a dozen Others. But all of them were settled, one way or another." "No one really wants to fight," said Vickers. "Perhaps not, but it takes more than just the desire for peace to prevent a war. Time and again major nations have climbed so far out on a limb that they had to fight or back up. They always have backed up. That isn't human nature, Mr. Vickers, or at least it wasn't human nature until thirty years ago. Does it seem to you that something might have happened, some unknown factor, some new equation, that may account for it?" "I don't see how there could be any new factor. The human race is still the human race. It's always fought before. Thirty years ago it had just finished the greatest war that ever had been fought." "Since then, there has been provocation after provocation and there have been regional wars, but the world has not gone to war. Can you tell me why?" "No, I can't." said Mr. Flanders, "in an idle way, of course. And it seems to me that there must be some new factor." "Fear, perhaps," suggested Vickers. "Fear of our frightful weapons." "That might be it, but fear is a funny thing. It is just as apt to start a war as it is to hold one off, make a people go out and go against the fear itself to be rid of it. I don't think, Mr. Vickers, that fear alone can account for peace." "Then what factor do you think it might be?" "Intervention," Mr. Flanders said. "Intervention ! Who would intervene?" "I really couldn't say. But the thought is not a new one to me and not in this respect alone. Starting about # years or so ago, something happened to the world. Up until that time, Man had stumbled along pretty much in the same old ruts. There had been some progress here and there, some changes, but not very many of them. Not many changes in thinking especially, and that is what really counts. "Then mankind, which had been shambling along, broke into a gallop. The automobile was invented and the telephone and motion pictures and flying machine. There was the radio and all the other gadgetry that characterized the first quarter of the century. "But that was largely mechanics, putting two and two together and having four come out. In the second quarter of the century, classical physics was largely displaced by a new kind of thinking, which admitted that it didn't know when it came face to face with the atoms and electrons. And out of that came theories and the physics of the atom and all the probabilities that today still are probabilities. "And that, I think, was the greatest stride of all -- that the physicists who had fashioned neat cubicles of knowledge and had classified and assigned all the classical knowledge to fit into them snugly should have had the courage to say they didn't know what made electrons behave the way they do." "You're trying to say," Vickers put in, "that something happened to whip Man out of his rut. But it wasn't the first time a thing like that had happened. Before it there had been the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution." "I did not say it was the only time it had ever happened." Mr. Flanders told him. "I merely said it happened. The fact that it had happened before, in a slightly different manner, should prove that it is not an accident, but some sort of cycle, some sort of influence which is operative within the human race. What is it that kicks a plodding culture out of a shuffle into a full-fledged gallop and, in this case at least, keeps it galloping for almost a hundred years without a sign of slackening?" "You said intervention. You're off on some wild fantasy. Men from Mars, maybe?" Mr. Flanders shook his head. "Let's be a little more general." He waved his cigarette at the sky above the hedge and trees, with its many stars twinkling in the night. "Out there must be great reservoirs of knowledge. At many points in all that space beyond our Earth there must be thinking beings and they would create knowledge that we had never dreamed of. Some of it might be applicable to humans and to Earth and much of it would not." "You're suggesting that someone in another solar system -- " "No," said Mr. Flanders. "I'm suggesting that the knowledge is there and waiting, waiting for us to go out and get it." "We haven't even reached the Moon yet." "We may not need to wait for rockets. We might reach out with our minds..." "Telepathy?" "Maybe that is the word for it. A mind probing out and searching -- a mind reaching out for a mind. If there is such a thing as telepathy, distance should be no barrier. A half a mile or half across the Universe, what would be the difference? For the mind is not a physical property; it is not bound, or should not be bound, by the laws that say that nothing can exceed the speed of light." Vickers laughed uneasily, feeling the slow crawl of invisible, many-footed creatures moving on his neck. "You can't be serious," he said. "Perhaps I'm not," admitted Mr. Flanders. "Perhaps 'I'm an old eccentric who has found a man who will listen to him and will not laugh too much." "But this knowledge that you talk of. There is no evidence that it exists or that it ever could be applied. It would be alien. It woud involve alien logic and apply to alien problems and it would be based on alien concepts that we could not understand." "Much of it would. There would be much chaff, but you would find some kernels. You might find, for instance, a way in which friction could be eliminated and if you found that you would have machines that would last forever and you would have -- " , "Wait a minute," snapped Vickers, tensely. "What are you getting at? What about this business of machines that would run forever? We have that already. I was talking to Eb just this morning and he was telling me -- " "About a car. That, Mr. Vickers, is one of the things I was talking about." XI t'OR a long time after Mr. Flanders left, Vickers sat on the porch, smoked his cigarettes and stared at the patch of sky he could see between the top of the hedge and the porch's roof... at the sky and its crystal wash of stars, thinking that one could not sense the distance and the time that lay between the stars. Flanders was an old man with a shabby coat and a polished stick and a queer, stilted way of talking that made you think of another era and another culture. What could he possibly know of knowledge in the stars? He had thought of it, he'd said, in an idle way. And that, Vickers realized, was the way it was -- an eccentric with nothing on his mind except the idle speculations that took his mind off an old and faded life that he wanted to forget. And there, thought Vickers, I am speculating, too, for there's no way that I can know the kind of life the old man may have led. He got up and went into the living room. He pulled the chair out from his desk and sat down and stared at the typewriter sitting there, accusing him of an entire wasted day, pointing silently at the pile of manuscript that should have been a little thicker if he had stayed at home. He picked up a few pages of the manuscript and tried to read, but he had no interest and he was gripped by the terrifying thought that he had gone cold. He had said no, he wasn't interested in writing Crawford's book, and he had said it because he wasn't interested. And yet that had not been the only factor; there had been something else. Hunch, he had told Ann, and she had scoffed at him. But there had been a hunch -- that and a feeling of danger and of fear, as if a second self had been standing at his side, warning him away. It was illogical, of course, for there was no reason why he should have had a sense of fear. He could have used the money. Ann could have used the fee. And yet, without an instant's hesitation, he had refused the offer. He put the sheets of manuscript back on top of the pile, rose from the chair and pushed it flush against the desk. As if the whisper of the chair sliding on the carpeting might have been a signal, a scurrying sound came out of one darkened corner and traveled to the next and then was still with a deathly stillness that was unnatural, as if the whole house might be waiting for whatever happened next.  around to face the room, pivoting his body with an exaggerated, almost ridiculous effort to be quiet, to get turned around so he could face the corner from which the sound had come without anything knowing he had turned. There were no mice. Joe had come up, while he was in the city, and had killed the mice. There should be no scurrying from one corner to the next. Joe had left a note which even now still lay beneath the desk lamp saying that he would pay one hundred bucks a throw for every mouse that Vickers could produce. The silence hung, not so much a silence as a quietness, as if everything was waiting without breathing. Moving only his eyeballs, for it seemed that if he turned his head his neck would creak and betray him to whatever danger there might be, Vickers examined the room, the darkened areas in the comers and underneath the furniture and in the shadowed places that were farthest from the light. Cautiously he put his hands behind him, to grasp the desk edge, to get hold of something that was solid so that he did not stand so agonizingly alone, transfixed in the room. The fingers of his right hand touched something that was me tallic and he knew it was th metal paperweight that he hac lifted off the pile when desk. I grasped ibhnd dragged it forward into the hollow of his hand and he closed his fingers on it and he had a weapon. There was something in the corner by the yellow chair and although it seemed to have no eyes, he knew it was watching him. It didn't know that he had spotted it, or it didn't seem to know. "Now!" said Vickers. His right arm swung up and over and followed through and the paperweight, turning end for end, crashed into the corner. There was a crunching sound and the noise of metallic parts rolling on the floor. smashed, and .an intricate mass of wiring that was bent and broken, and crystal disks that were chipped and splintered, and the metallic outer shell that had held the tubes and wiring and the disks and the many other pieces of mechanical mystery that he did not recognize. Vickers pulled the desk lamp closer to him, so that the light might shine down upon the handful of parts he had gathered from the floor and he put out a finger and stirred it among them, gingerly, listening to the tinkling sounds they made as they clinked together. No mouse, but something else -- something that scuttled in the night, knowing that he would think it was a mouse; a thing that had sced the cat which knew it was no mouse, and a thing that would not be attracted to traps. An electronic spy, he speculated, a scuttling, scurrying, listening device that watched his every moment, that stored what it heard and saw for future reference or transmitted directly the knowledge that it gained. But direct to whom? And why? If it were a spying device, it would be made so well, so cleverly that it would be able not only to observe him, but to keep out of sight itself. To have any value, it must keep its presence undetected. There would have been no careless moment. It would not have been seen unless it wanted itself to be seen. Unless it wanted itself to be seen! He had been sitting at the desk and had gotten up and pushed the chair flush with the desk and it had been then that he had heard the scampering. If it had not run, he never would have seen it. And it need not have run, for the room was in shadow, with only the desk lamp burning, and his back had been toward the room. The cold certainty came to him that it had wanted to be seen, that it had wanted to be trapped in a corner and crushed with a paperweight -- that it had run deliberately to call his attention to it and that once he'd seen it, it had not tried to get away.' He sat at the desk and perspiration chilled his forehead. It had wanted to be seen. It had wanted him to know. Not it, of course, but whoever or whatever it was that had caused the contraption to be placed inside his house. For months it had scampered and scurried like a mouse, had listened and watched, and now the scampering and the watching had come to an end and it was time for something else; time to serve notice on him that he was being watched. But why and who? screaming panic that rose inside of him, forced himself to stay sitting in the chair. There was a clue somewhere in this very day, he thought, if he could recognize it. Something happened today that made the someone behind the watcher decide it was time to let him know. He ticked off the day's events, marshaling them in his mind as they might be written in a notebook: The moppet who had come to breakfast. The remembrance of a walk that he had taken twenty years before. The story in the paper about more worlds than one. The Forever car. The women who had talked in the seat behind him on the bus, and Mrs. Leslie and the club she was organizing. Crawford and his story of a world with its back against the wall. The houses at five hundred a room. Mr. Flanders sitting on the porch and saying that there was a new-found factor which kept the world from war. The mouse that was not a mouse. But that wasn't all, of course: somewhere there was something else that he had forgotten. Without knowing how he knew it, he was aware that he had forgotten some other fact that should be inserted in the list of things that had happened in the day. There was Flanders saying that he was interested in the setup of the gadget shops and that he was intrigued by the riddle of the carbohydrates and that he was convinced there was something going on. And later in the day he had sat on the porch and talked of reservoirs of knowledge in the stars and of a factor which kept the world from war and of another factor which had whipped Man out of his rut almost a hundred years ago and had kept him at the gallop ever since. He had speculated about these matters in an idle way, he had said. But was his speculation idle? Or did Flanders know more than he was telling? And if he knew, what then? Vickers shoved back the chair and got to his feet. He looked at the time. It was almost two o'clock. No matter, he thought. It's time that I find out, even if I have to break into his house and jerk him out of bed, screaming in his nightshirt. He was sure that Flanders would wear a nightshirt instead of pajamas. ders' house, Vickers saw that there was something wrong. The place was lighted up from basement to garret. Men with lanterns were walking about the yards and there were other knots of men who stood around and talked, while all along the street women and children stood oft the porches in hastily snatched-up robes. As if, Vickers thought, they were waiting for a strange three A.M. parade that might at any moment come winding down the street. A group of men were standing by the gate and as he turned in, he saw there were some he knew. There was Eb. the garage man, and Joe, the exterminator man, and Vic, who ran the drugstore. "Hello, Jay," said Eb, "we're glad you are here." "Hello, Jay," said Joe. "What's going on?" asked Vickers. "Old Man Flanders," said Vic, "has disappeared." "His housekeeper got up in the night to give him some medicine," said Eb, "and found he wasn't there. She looked around for him for a while and then she went to get some help." "You've searched for him?" asked Vickers. "Around the place," said Eb. "But we're going to start branching out now. We'll have to organize and get some system in it." The drugstore owner said, "We thought at first maybe he'd been up during the night wandering around the house or out into the yard and might have had a seizure of one kind or another. So we looked near at hand at first." "We've gone over the house," said Joe, "from top to bottom and we've combed the yard and there ain't hide nor hair of him." "Maybe he went for a walk," Vickers offered. "No man in his right mind," declared Joe, "goes walking after midnight." "He wasn't in his right mind, if you ask me," said Eb. "Not that I didn't like him. I did. Never saw a more mannerly old codger in all my born days, but he had funny ways about him." Someone with a lantern came down the brick-paved walk. "You men ready to get organized?" asked the man with the lantern. "Sure, Sheriff." said Eb. "Any time you are. We just been waiting for you to get it figured out." "Well," said the sheriff, "there ain't much that we can do until it gets light, but I thought we might take some quick scouts out around. Some of the other boys are going to cover the town, go up and down all the streets and alleys, and I figured maybe some of you might like to have a look along the river." "That's all right with us," said Eb. "You just tell us what you want us to do." r T , HE sheriff lifted his lantern to shoulder height and looked at them. "Jay Vickers, ain't it? Glad you joined us, Jay. We need all the men there are." Vickers lied, without knowing why he lied: "I heard some commotion going on." "Guess you knew the old gent pretty well," said the sheriff. "Better than the most of us." "He used to come over and talk to me almost every day." "I know. We remarked about it. He never talked much to no one else." "We had some common interests," Vickers said, "and I think that he was lonely." "The housekeeper said he went over to see you last night." "Yes, he did," said Vickers. "He left shortly after midnight." "Notice anything unusual about him? Any difference in the way he talked?" "Now, look here, Sheriff," said Eb. "You think Jay had anything to do with this?" "No, I guess I don't." He lowered the lantern and said, "If you fellows would go down to the river -- split up when you get there -- some of you go upstream and some of you go down. I don't expect you to find anything, but we might as well look. Be back at daylight and we'll really start combing for him." The sheriff turned away, walking back up the brick pavement with his lantern swinging. "I guess," said Eb, "we might as well get started. I'll take one bunch down the river and Joe will take the others up. That all right with the rest of you?" There was no objection. They walked out the gate and down the street until they hit the intersection, then went down to the bridge. "We split up here," said Eb. "Who wants to go with Joe?" Several men said they would. "All right," said Eb. "The rest of you come with me." They separated and plunged down from the street to the river bank. Cold river mist lay close along the bank and in the darkness they could hear the swift, smooth rush of the river. A night bird cried across the water. Looking out to the other bank, one could see the splintered starlight that shattered itself against the running current. Eb asked, "You think we'll find him, Jay?" Vickers spoke slowly. "No, I don't. I can't tell you why, but somehow I am pretty sure we won't." TT was early evening before Vickers returned home. The phone was ringing when he stepped inside the door. It was Ann Carter. "I've been trying to get you all day. I'm terribly upset. Where have you been?" "Out looking for a man," said Vickers. "Please don't be funny, Jay." "I'm not being funny. An old man, a neighbor of mine, disappeared. I've been out helping look for him." "Did you find him?" "bjo, we didn't." "That's too bad," she said. "Was he a nice old man?" "The best." "Maybe you'll find him later." "Maybe we will," said Vickers. "Why are you upset?" "You remember what Crawford said?" "He said a lot of things." "But what he told us would come next. You remember that?" "I can't say that I do." "He said clothing would be next. A dress for fifty cents." "Now that you mention it," said Vickers, "he did." "Well, it happened." "What happened?" "A dress. Only it wasn't fifty cents. It was fifteen!" "You bought one?" "No, I didn't, Jay. I was too scared. I was walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a sign in the window, a little discreet sign that said the dress on the model could be had for fifteen cents. Can you imagine that, Jay -- a dress for fifteen cents on Fifth Avenue!" "No, I can't," Vickers confessed. "It was such a pretty dress," said Ann. "It shone. Not with stones or tinsel. The material shone. Like it was alive. And the color... Jay, it was the prettiest dress I have ever seen. And I could have bought it for fifteen cents, but I didn't have the nerve. I remembered what Crawford had told us and I stood there looking at the dress and I got cold all over." "Buck up and go back in the morning. Maybe they'll still have it."  Don't you see? It proves what Crawford told us! It proves that he knew what he was talking about, that there really is a conspiracy, that the world does have its back against the wall." "And what do you want me to do about it?" "Why, I -- I don't know, Jay. I thought you would be interested." "I am," said Vickers. "Very interested." "Jay, there's something going on." "Keep your shirt on, Ann," said Vickers. "Sure, there's something going on." "What is it? I know it's more than Crawford said. I don't know how -- " "I don't know, either. But it's bigger than you and I can handle. I have to think it out." "Jay," she said, and the sharp tenseness was gone from her voice. "Jay, I feel better now. It was nice to talk to you." "You go out in the morning," Jay told her, "and buy up an armful of those fifteen-cent dresses. Get there ahead of the crowd." "The crowd? I don't understand." "Look, Ann," said Vickers. "Let us use our head. Fifth Avenue is going to have a crush of bargain hunters." "I guess you're right at that," she said. "Phone me tomorrow?" "I'll phone." They said good night and he hung up, stood for a moment, trying to remember the next thing that he should do. There was supper to get and the papers to bring in and he'd better see if there was any mail. He went out the door and walked down the path to the mailbox on the gatepost. He took out a slim handful of letters and leafed through them swiftly, but there was so little light he could not make out what they were. Advertising mostly, he suspected. And a few bills, although it was a bit early in the month for them. Back in the house he turned on the desk lamp and laid the pile of letters on the desk. Beneath the lamp lay the litter of tubes and disks that he had picked up from the floor the night before. He stood there staring at them, trying to bring them into correct perspective. It had only been the night before, but now it seemed as if it were many weeks ago that he had thrown the paperweight and there had been a crunching sound that had erupted with a shower of tiny parts rolling on the floor. He had stood there then, as he stood now, and knew there was an answer, a clue, if he only knew where to find it. went to answer it. It was Eb, asking, "What do you think of it?" "I don't know what to think," said Vickers. "He's in the river," Eb maintained. "That is where he is. That's what I told the sheriff. They'll start dragging tomorrow morning as soon as the sun is up." "I don't know," said Vickers. "Maybe you're right, but I don't think he's dead." "Why don't you think so, Jay?" "No reason in the world," said Vickers. "No actual, solid reason. Just a hunch." "The reason I called," Eb told him, "is that I got some of those Forever cars. Came in this afternoon. Thought maybe you might want one of them." "I hadn't thought much about it, Eb. Too m#ny other things on my mind, I suppose." "I'll bring one up in the morning. Give you a chance to try it out. See what you think of it." "That'll be fine," said Vickers, and sd good-by. He went back to the desk and picked up the letters. There were no bills. Of the seven letters, six were advertising, the seventh in a plain white envelope addressed in a craggy hand. He tore it open. There was one sheet of white note paper, neatly folded. He unfolded it and read: My dear friend Vickers: I hope that you are not unduly worn out by the atrenuous efforts which you undoubtedly will have thrown into the search lor me today. I feel very keenly that my actions will impose upon the kind people oi this excellent village a most unseemly amount ol running around to the neglect of their business, though I do not doubt that they will enjoy it most thoroughly. I leel that  can trust your understanding not to reveal the fact of this letter nor to engage any further than is necessary to convince our neighbors of your kindly intentions in what must necessarily be a futile hunt for me. I can assure you that  am most happy and that only the necessity of the moment made me do what I have done. I am writing this note for two reasons: First, to quiet any fear you may feel lor me. Secondly, to presume upon our friendship to the point of giving some unsolicited advice. ft has seemed to me for some time now that you have been confining yourself too closely to your work and that a holiday might be an excellent idea. It might be that a visit to your childhood scene, to walk again the paths you walked when you were a boy , could clear away the dust and make you see with clearer eyes. Your friend, Horton Flanders XV I cannot go. The place means nothing to me and I do not want it to mean anything now that it is forgotten after all these years of trying to forget it. He could have shut his eyes and seen it -- the yellow clay of the rain-washed cornfields, the roads all white with dust winding through the valleys and along the ridgetops, the lonely mailboxes sitting on forlornly leaning fence posts, the sagging gates, the weatherbeaten houses, the scraggy cattle coming down the lane, following the rutted path that their hoofs had made, the mangy dogs that ran out and barked at you when you drove past their farms. If I go back they'll ask me why I came and how I'm getting on. "Too bad about your Pa, he was a damn good man." They'd sit on the upturned boxes in front of the general store and chew slowly on their cuds of tobacco and spit out on the sidewalk and look at hin out of slanted eyes and say, "So you write books. By God, some day I'll have to read one of your books; I never heard of them." He'd go to the cemetery and stand before a stone with his hat held in his hand and listen to the wind moan in the mighty pines, and he'd think, if only I could have amounted to something in time for you to have known, so that the two of you could have been proud of me and bragged about me a little when the neighbors dropped in for a visit -- but, of course, I never did. And he would -- finally, he admitted it -- drive past the great brick house with the portico and the fanlights above the door. He would drive very slowly and he would look at it and see how the shutters had come loose and were sagging and how the paint was flaking and how the roses that had bloomed beside the gate had died. I won't go, he said. And yet, perhaps, he should. It might clear away the dust, Flanders had written, might make you see with clearer eyes. Might make him see what with clearer eyes? Was there something back there in his boyhood lanes that could explain this situation, some hidden fact, some abstract symbol, which he had missed before? Or was he imagining things, reading significance into words that had no significance? How could he be sure that Horton Flanders with his shabby suit and ridiculous cane had anything to do with the story that Crawford had spelled out about humanity standing with its back against the wall? There was no evidence at all. Yet Flanders had disappeared and had written him a letter. Clear away the dust, Flanders had written, so that you may see better. And all that he might have meant was that he should clear away the dust so that he could write better. manuscript and ruffled its pages with his thumb, an absent, almost loving gesture. So little done, he thought, so much still ed out the top drawer on the left he'd done nothing on it. Two fuljL days wasted. To do the writing that should be done, he must be able to sit down calmly and concentrate, shut out the world and then let the world come in to him, a little at a time, a highly selected world that could be analyzed and set up with a clarity and sharpness that could not be mistaken. Calmly, he thought. How can a man be calm when he has a thousand questions and a thousand doubts boiling in his mind? had come to breakfast and after that the paper he had read. Then he'd gone down to get his car and Eb had told him about the Forever car. Because his car had not been ready, he'd gone to the drugstore corner to catch a bus. Mr. Flanders had come and joined him as he stared at the display in the gadget shop and Mr. Flanders had said -- Wait a second. He had gone to the drugstore corner to get a bus. He had gotten on the bus and sat down in a seat next to the window. He'd looked out the window and no one else had come and sat down with him. He'd ridden to the city in a seat all to himself. That is it, he thought, and even as he thought it he felt a wild elation and then a sense of horror at an incident forgotten and he stood for a moment unmoving, trying desperately to blot out what had happened so many years ago. It would not blot out and he knew at once what he must do. He turned to the desk and pullto do. Now, for two whole days, side and slowly, methodically, took out the contents, one by one. He did this with all the drawers and did not find what he was looking for. The attic, perhaps. One of the boxes up there. He climbed the stairs and, reaching the top, blinked at the glow of the unshielded light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a chill in the air and in the starkness of the rafters, coming down on either side of him, like a mighty jaw about to close. Vickers went from the stairs to the storage boxes pushed against the eaves. In which one of the three would it be most likely to be found? He had no idea whatever. So he started with the first and he found it halfway down, under the old pair of bird shooters that he had hunted forlast fall and had finally given up for lost. He opened the notebook and thumbed through it until he came finally to the pages that he was seeking. I T must have been going on for years before he noticed it. The record said that it was worse than he had first imagined, that it concerned not only one phase of his existence, but many different phases. As the evidence accumulated, he stood aghast that he had not realized it before, because it was something which should have been obvious from the very first. The whole thing started with the reluctance of his fellow passengers to ride with him on the bus. He lived at the time in an old ramshackle boarding house at the edge of town near the end of the line. He'd get on in the morning and, being one of the few who boarded at that point, would take his favorite seat. The bus would fill up gradually as the stops were made, but it would be almost the end of the run before he'd have a seat companion. It didn't bother him, of course; in fact, he rather liked it that way, for then he could slump down in the seat and think and probably even doze a little without ever considering the need of civility. Not that he would have been especially civil in any case, he now admitted. The hour that he went to work was altogether too early for that. People would get on the bus and they'd sit with other people, not necessarily people whom they knew, for sometimes, Vickers noticed, they didn't exchange a single word for the entire ride with their seat mate. They'd sit with other people, but they'd never sit with him until all the other seats were filled and they had to sit with him or stand. Perhaps, he had told himself, it was body odor; perhaps it was bad breath. He had made a ritual of bathing after that, using a new soap that was guaranteed to make him smell fresh. He brushed his teeth more attentively, used mouth wash until he gagged at the sight of it. It did no good. He still rode alone. He looked at himself in the mirror and he knew it was not his clothes, for in those days he was a smart dresser. So, he figured, it must be his attitude. Instead of slumping down in the seat, he'd sit up and be bright and cheerful and he'd smile at everyone. He'd smile if it cracked his face to do it. For an entire week he had sat there looking pleasant, smiling at people when they glanced at him, for all the world as if he were a rising young business man who had read Dale Carnegie and belonged to the Junior Chamber. No one rode with him -- not until there was no other seat. He got some comfort in knowing they'd rather sit with him than stand. things. At the office, the fellows were always visiting around, gathering in little groups of three or four at one of the desks, talking about their golf scores or telling the latest dirty story or wondering why the hell a guy stayed on at a place like this when there were other jobs he could just walk out and take. No one ever came to his desk, so he tried joining one of the groups. Within a short time, the fellows would all drift back to their desks. He tried dropping by to pass the time of the day with individual workers. They were always affable enough, but always terribly busy. Vickers never stayed. He checked up on his conversational budget. It seemed fairly satisfactory. He didn't play golf, but he knew a few good stories and he read most of the latest books and saw the best of the recent movies. He could damn the office with the best of them, even though he liked working there. He read the newspapers and went through a couple of news weeklies and knew what was going on and could argue politics and had armchair opinions on military matters. With those qualifications, he felt, he should be able to carry on a fair conversation. But still no one seemed to want to talk to him. It was the same at lunch. It was the same, now that he had come to notice it, everywhere he went. He had written it down for a full six months, with dates and an account of each day, and now, fifteen years later, he sat on a box in a raw and empty attic and read the words he'd written. Staring straight ahead of him, he remembered how it had been, how he'd felt and what he'd said and done including the fact that no one would ride with him until all the seats were taken. And that was what had happened when he'd gone to New York just the other day. Why? He'd askecl himself the question all those years ago and now, at last, he thought he knew the answer. It was because he was different in some way, in some subtle way you couldn't put a finger on, but one that you could sense. A group of dogs would not tolerate a strange dog. They would smell him over and insult him and gang up on him and drive him away. Strange dog, he thought, that is what I am. A strange dog among the normal, barnyard dogs of the human race. And these normal dogs do not accept me. They smell me over and walk stiff-legged and keep a wary eye upon me and at times, perhaps, they may even fear or hate me. My God, what am I? the door downstairs and shouting, but it was a moment or two before he realized it was his name that was being called. He rose from the box and the notebook fell from his fingers and fell rumpled on the floor, face downward, with its open pages caught and crumpled. "Jay!" the voice shouted. "Jay, are you here?" He stumbled down the stairs and into the living room. Eb stood just inside the door. "What's the matter, Eb?" "Listen, Jay," Eb told him, "you got to get out of here." "What for?" "They think you did away with Flanders." Vickers reached out a hand and caught the back of a chair and hung onto it. "I won't even ask you if you did," said Eb. "I'm pretty sure you didn't. That's why I'm giving you a chance." "A chance?" asked Vickers. "What are you talking about?" "They're down at the tavern now, talking themselves into a lynching party." "They?" "All your friends," Eb said, bitterly. "Someone got them all stirred up. I don't know who it was. I didn't wait to find out who. I came straight up here." "But I liked Flanders. I was the only friend he had." "You haven't any time," Eb said. "You've got to get away." "I can't go anywhere. I haven't got my car." "I brought up one of the Forever cars," said Eb. "No one knows I brought it. No one will know you have it." "I can't run away. They've got to listen to me." "You damn fool, this isn't the sheriff with a warrant. It's a mob and they won't listen to you." He strode across the room and grabbed Vickers roughly by the arm. "I risked my neck to come up here and warn you. After I've done that, you can't throw the chance away." Vickers shook the hand off. "All right, I'll go." "Money?" asked Eb. "I have some." "Here's some more." Eb reached into his pocket and held out a thin sheaf of bills. Vickers took it and stuck it in his pocket. "The car is full of gas,"said Eb. "The shift is automatic. It drives like any other car. I left the motor running." "I hate to do this, Eb." "I know just how you hate to, but if you want to save this town do. Come on, get going." path and heard Eb pounding along behind him. The car stood at the gate. Eb had left the door wide open. "In you go," said Eb. "Cut straight over to the main highway." "Thanks, Eb." "Get out of here." Vickers pulled the shift to the drive position and stepped on the ge. The car floated away and swiftly gathered speed. He reached the main highway and swung in toward the west. He drove for miles, fleeing down the cone of brightness thrown by the headlights. He drove with a numb bewilderment that he should be doing this -- that he, Jay Vickers, should be fleeing from a lynching party made up of his home town friends. They were not his friends, he reminded himself. They were the barnyard dogs and he was the strange dog that had wandered in. He thought of them one by one, and as he thought of them their lips pulled back to reveal their fangs and there a savage growl rumbling in their throats. Someone, Eb had said, had got them all stirred up. Someone, perhaps, who hated ' him? But there was no one who hated him. No one he could think of. But even as he thought it, he knew who it was. He felt again the threat and the fear that he had felt when he had sat face to face with Crawford -- the thenunrealized reaction that had made him refuse the offer to write Crawford's book. There's something going on, Horton Flanders had said, standing with him in front of the gadget shop. And there was something going on. There were everlasting gadgets being made by nonexistent firms. There was an organization of world businessmen, backed into a comer by a foe at whom they could not strike back. There was Horton Flanders talking of some new, strange factors which kept the world from war. There were Pretentionists, hiding from the actuality of today, playing dollhouse with the past. And, finally, here was Jay Vickers fleeing to the west. By midnight, he knew where he was going -- where Horton Flanders had said that he should go, doing what he had said he would certainly never do. He was going back to his own childhood. pected, they sat out in front of the general store, on the bench and the upturned boxes, and turned sly eyes up toward him and they said: "Too bad about your Pa, Jay. He was a damn good man." They said: "So you write books, do you? Have to read one of your books someday. Never heard of them." They said: "You going out to the old place?" "This afternoon," said Vickers. "It's changed a whole lot. There ain't no one living there." "No one?" "Farming's gone to hell. Can't make no money at it. This carbohydrates business. Lots of folks can't keep their places. Farms around here being bought up for grazing -- just fix the fences and turn some cattle in. Don't even try to farm. Buy feeder stuff out in the west and turn it loose the summer, then fatten it for fall." "That's what happened to the old place?" "That's what happened. Feller that bought it after your Pa, he couldn't make the riffle. Your Pa's place ain't the only one. There's been lots of others, too. You remember the old Preston place, don't you?" Vickers nodded. "Well, it happened there, too. And that was a good place. One of the best there was." "No one living there?" "No one. Somebody boarded up the doors and windows. Now why do you figure anyone would go to all the work of boarding up the place?" "I wouldn't know," said Vickers. The storekeeper came out and sat down on the steps. "Where you hanging out now. Jay?" he asked. "In the East." "Doing right well, I expect." "I'm eating every day." "Well," the storekeeper said, "anyone that can eat regular is doing downright well." "What kind of car is that you got?" another of them asked. "It's a new kind of car," said Vickers. "Just got it the other day. Called the Forever car." They said: "Now ain't that a hell of a name to call a car?" They said: "I imagine it cost you a pile." They said: "How many miles to a gallon do you get on it?" "I hav? to go now," Vickers replied, a little frantically. "See you on my way back." He climbed into the car and sped away through the dowdy little village, anxious to go where there would be answers instead of questions, for he saw now that his own questions were even more urgent than he had suspected. 'HE gate to the farm was chained and locked, so he parked the car beside the highway and walked the quarter mile down to the buildings. The farm road was overgrown with grass in places and kneehigh with weeds in others and only here and there could you find the sign of wheel-ruts. Some windows in the house were broken, probably by kids, and the door to the back porch had become unlocked and was swinging in the wind.  He waded through the sea of grass, walking around the house, astonished at how tenaciously the marks of living still clung about the place. There, on the chimney, running up the outside wall, were the prints of his ten-year old hands, impressed into wet mortar. At the corner of the house he found the old washtub where his mother each spring had planted the nasturtians, but the tub itself was almost gone, its metal turned to rust and all that remained was a mound of earth. He did not try the door, for the outside was all he wished to see. There would be too much to see inside -- the nail holes on the wall where the pictures had been hung and the marks on the floor where the stove had stood and the stairway with the treads worn smooth by beloved footsteps. If he went in, the house would cry out to him from the silences of its closets and the emptiness of its rooms. He walked down to the other buildings and they, for all their own silence and emptiness, were not so memory-haunted as the house. The henhouse was falling in and the hoghouse was a place for the winter winds to whistle through and he found an old, worn-out binder stored in the back of the cavernous machine shed. The barn was cool and shadowed. The stalls were empty, but the hay still hung in cobwebby wisps from the cracks in the floor of the mow and the place still had the half-misty, half-acid smell of living, friendly beasts. He climbed the incline to the granary and, sliding back the wooden latch, went in. Mice ran squeaking across the floor and up the walls and beams. A pile of grain sacks was draped across the partition that held the grain back from the alley way and a broken harness hung from a peg upon the wall and there, at the end of alley, lay something that stopped him. TT was a child's top, battered now and with all its color gone, but once it had been bright and colorful and when it wafe pumped on the floor, it had spun and whistled. He had received it for Christmas and it had been a favorite toy of his. He picked it up and held its battered metal with a sudden tenderness and wondered how it had gotten there. It was a part of his past catching up with him -- a dead and useless thing to everyone in all the world except the boy to whom it had once belonged. It had been a striped top and the colors had run in spiraling streaks when you spun it and there had been a point, he remembered, where each streak ran and disappeared. You could sit for hours watching the streaks come up and disappear, trying to make out where they went. For they must go somewhere, a boyish mind would figure. They couldn't be there one second and be gone the next. There must be somewhere for them to go. And there had been somewhere for them to go! You could go where the streaks went, into the land they fled to, if you were very young and could wonder hard enough. It was a sort of fairyland, although it seemed more real than a fairyland should be. There was a walk that looked as if it were made of glass and there were birds and flowers and trees and some butterflies and he picked one of the flowers and carried it in his hand as he walked along the path. He had seen a little house hidden in a grove and when he saw it, he became a little frightened and walked back along the path and suddenly he was home, with the top dead on the floor in front of him and the flower clutched in his hand. He had told his mother and she had snatched away the flower, as if she'd been afraid of it. And well she might have been, for it was winter. That evening Pa had questioned him and found out about the top and the next day, when he'd looked for the top, he couldn't find it anywhere. He had cried off and on for days, secretly of course. And here it was again, an old and battered top, with no hint of the original color, but the same one, he was sure. He left the granary, carrying the battered top along with him. Through all the years, he had not remembered it, had not even suspected that there was an incident such as this hidden in his 'mind. But now the top was with him once again and the day was with him, too -- the day he'd followed the swirling streaks and walked into fairyland. XX H E told himself he would not stop at the Preston house. He would drive by and have a look at it, but he would not stop. For he was fleeing now. He had found an artifact of childhood that now brought only pain and frustration. He wouldn't stop at the Preston house. He'd just slow down and look, then speed up the car and put the miles behind him. He wouldn't stop, he said. Bu of course, he did. He sat in the car and gazed at the house and remembered that it once had been proud and had sheltered a family that had been proud as well -- too proud to let a member of its family marry a country lad from a farm of sickly com and yellow clay. But the house was proud no longer. The shutters were closed and someone had nailed long planks across them. The paint was scaling and peeling from the stately columns that ran across its front. He got out of the car and walked through the drooping front gate up to the porch. Climbing the stairs, he saw how the floor boards had rotted. He stood where the two of them first had known their love would last forever and he tried to catch that moment of the past and it was not there. He tried to remember how the meadows and the fields and yard had looked from the porch, with the white moonlight upon them. He knew, but he could not feel or see them. On the slope behind the house were the barns. Beyond them, the ground sloped down and there stretched out before him the valley they had walked that last time he had seen her. It had been an enchanted valley, he remembered, with apple blossoms and the song of lark. It had been enchanted once. It had not been the second time. But what about the third? He told himself that he was chasing rainbow ends, but while he told himself, he was walking down the slope, down past the barns and on into the valley. At the head of it, he stopped and looked and it was not enchanted, but he remembered it, as he had remembered the moonlight on the columns. He saw the crab apple thickets, with the blossoms fallen now, and once a lark soared out of the grass and flew into the sky. But the third visit here had been the same as the second. It had been she who had turned this prosaic valley into an enchanted place. It had been, after all. an enchantment of the spirit. Twice he had walked in enchanted places. Twice. Once because of a girl and the love between them. Once again because of a spinning top. No, the top had been the first. Yes, the top -- Now wait a minute! Not so fast! You're wrong, Vickers. It wouldn't be that way. You crazy fool, what are you running for? T HE manager of the dime store, when Vickers sought him out, seemed to understand. "You know," he said, "I understand just how you feel. I had a top like that myself when I was a kid. There's nothing like a top to play with." "Especially those big ones," said Vickers. "The ones with the handle on them and you pumped them on the floor and they whistled." "Sat and played with it for hours when I was a kid." "Watching where the stripes went?" "I don't recall I worried much about where the stripes might go. I just sat and watched it spin and listened to it whistle." "I used to worry about where they went. You know how it is. They travel up and then they disappear, somewhere near the top." "Tell me," said the manager, "where do they go?" "I don't know," Vickers admitted. "There's another dime store down the street a block or two. Carries a lot of junky stuff, but they might have a top like that left over." "Thanks," said Vickers. "You could also try the hardware store across the street. They carry quite a stock of toys, but I suppose they got them put away down in the basement. They only get them out at Christmas time." The man at the hardware store knew what Vickers wanted, but he didn't have one. The other dime store didn't either. No, said the girl, chewing gum and thrusting a pencil back and forth into the wad of hair above her ear, she didn't know where he might get one. There were a lot of other things here if he wanted to get something for a little boy. Like those toy rockets or these -- He went out on the sidewalk, watching the late afternoon crowd of shoppers in the little Midwestern town. There were women in print dresses and other women in sleek business suits and there were high school kids just out of class and businessmen out for a cup of coffee. He saw a crowd of loafers gathered around his Forever car, parked in front of the first dime store. It was time, he thought, to feed that parking meter. He reached into his pocket. The coins made him wonder about the money in his billfold, so he took it out and flipped it open and saw that all he had .left were two dollar bills. Since he couldn't go back to Cliff wood, he had no place to call his home. He'd need money for lodging for the night and for meals and for gasoline -- but more than that, more than anything, he was fh need of a singing top that had colored stripes painted on its belly.  of the sidewalk, thinking about the top. It had worked once before, when he was a child, before Pa had taken the top away from him. What would have happened to him if it had not been hidden away? He wondered if he would have gone again and again, once he had found the way, back into that fairyland and what might have happened there, whom and what he might have met and what he would have found in the house hidden in the grove. For he eventually would have gone to the house. Having watched it long enough to grow accustomed to it, he would have followed the path across the grove and gone up to the door and knocked. He wondered if anyone else had ever watched a spinning top and walked into fairyland. And he wondered, if they had, what had happened to them. The dime store manager had not done it. He had never wondered where the stripes might go. He had just sat and watched and listened to the whistle. Vickers wondered what he was. that he should have found the way. And he wondered if the enchanted valley might not have been a part of fairyland as well and if somehow the girl and he might not have walked through another unseen gate. For surely the valley that he remembered was not the valley he had walked that morning. A top, he thought. Somewhere, someplace, somehow, I must find a top. But, of course, he had a top. The handle of it would have to be straightened and it might need a bit of oil to clear away the rust and it would have to be painted. More than likely it would be better than any other he could get, for it would be the original top -- and it pleased him to think that it might have certain special qualities, a certain mystic function no other top might have. He was glad that he had thought of it, lying there, forgotten for the second time, in the glove compartment where he had tossed it after finding it again. He walked up the street to the hardware store. "I want some paint," said Vickers. "The brightest, glossiest paint you have. Red and green and yellow. And some little brushes to put it on with." room, collect, since, after eating dinner, he had only ninety cents. She sounded harried. "Where in the name of heaven did you go?" He told her where he was. "But why are you there?" she asked him. "What is the matter with you?" "There's nothing wrong with me," said Vickers. "That is, nothing yet. I am just a fugitive." "You are what?" "I got run out of Cliff wood. They were fixing up a necktie party. Somehow or other they got it into their heads that I had killed a man." "Now I know you're crazy. You wouldn't kill a fly." "But I couldn't explain that to them. I didn't have a chance." "Why," said Ann, "I talked to Eb..." "You talked to who?" "You know, the man in the garage. For two whole days I beat the bushes for you. I called your home and there was no one there, so I remembered you talking about Eb, the garageman, and I asked the operator to let me talk to him." "What did Eb say?" "He said he hadn't noticed you around, but he didn't know where you were. He told me not to worry." "Eb was the one who tipped me off," said Vickers. "He gave me a car and some money and saw me out of town." "Of all the silly things. Who was it they thought you killed?" "Horton Flanders. He's the old man that got lost." "But you wouldn't kill him. You said he was a nice old man. You told me so yourself." "Look, Ann," said Vickers, "I didn't kill anyone. Someone just got the boys stirred up." "But you can't go back to Cliff wood." "No, I can't." "What will you do, Jay?" "I don't know. Just stay hid out, I guess." Y right away?" demanded Ann. "What are you way out West for? You should have come straight to New York. New York is the swellest place there, is for someone to hide out. You might at least have called me." "Now wait a minute," Vickers said. "I called you, didn't I?" "Sure. You called me because you're broke and want me to wire some money and you -- " "I haven't asked for any money yet." "You will." "Yes," he said, "I'm afraid I will." "Aren't you interested in why I was trying to get hold of you?" "Mildly," said Vickers. "Because ou don't want me to get out from under your thumb. No agent wants their best author to get from under -- " "Some day I'm going to crucify you and hang you up along the roadside as a warning." "I would make a most pathetic Christ. You couldn't choose a better man. All right, why did you want me?" "Because Crawford's practically frantic. He won't quibble. I mentioned a fantastic figure and he didn't even shiver." "I thought we disposed of Mr. Crawford," Vickers said. "You don't dispose of Crawford." Her voice was quiet but strained. "Crawford is a badly frightened man. He came to me. Imagine that! He came into my office, puffing and panting, and I was afraid I didn't have a chair in the place strong enough. But you remember that old oak one over in the corner? It was one of the first sticks of furniture I ever bought for my office and I kept it as a sentimental piece. Well, it did the trick." "What trick?" "It held him," said Ann. triumphantly. "He'd have simply crushed anything else in the place. You remember what a big man he is." "Gross," said Vickers. "That's the word you want." "He said, 'Where's Vickers?' And I said, 'Why ask me? I don't keep a leash on Vickers.' And he says, 'You're his agent, aren't you?' And I said, 'Yes, the last time I heard, but Vickers is a very changeable sort of man. There's no telling about him.' He says he's got to have Vickers. And so I said, 'Well, go get him. You'll find him around somewhere.' He said, 'The sky's the limit. Name any price, make any terms you want.' " "The man's a crackpot," Vickers said. "There's nothing crackpot about the kind of money he's offering." "How do you know he's got the money?" "Well, I don't know. Not for sure, that is. But he must have." "Speaking of money," Vickers said, "have you got a loose hundred lying around? Or fifty, even?" "I can get it." "Wire it here. I'll pay you back." "All right," she said. "It isn't the first time I've bailed you out and I don't imagine it will be the last. But will you tell me one thing?" "What's that?" "What are you going to do?" "As soon as I get through talking to you," said Vickers, "I'm going to do some painting." "A house?" "No, a top." "The top of what?" "Not the top of anything. A top. A toy kids play with. You spin it on the floor." "Now listen to me," she said. "You cut out this playing around and Come home to Ann." "After the experiment," said Vickers. "Tell me about it, Jay." "I'm going to try to get into fairyland." "Quit talking foolish." "I did it once before. No, twice." "Listen, Jay. This business is serious. Crawford is scared and so am I. And there's this lynching threat, too. There's no time for kidding or playing games," "Send me the money," Vickers said. "Right away." "I'll see you in a day or two." "Call me tomorrow. Take care of yourself. I don't know what you're up to, but take care of yourself." "I'll do both," Vickers promised. "Take care of myself and call you tomorrow." "I'll kill you if you don't." ' "Ann," he said unhappily, "you could choose your colloquialisms a little more tactfully." which spun the top and he polished the metal before marking off the spirals with a pencil and he borrowed a can of sewing machine oil and oiled up the spinning spiral on the handle so that it worked smoothly. Then he went about the painting. He got paint on his hands and on his clothes and on the chair he laid the top on and he spilled the can of red paint on the floor, but he picked it up so quickly that scarcely any of it ran out onto the carpeting. Finally the job was finished and it looked fairly good. He worried whether it would be dry by morning, but he read the labels on the cans and the labels said the paint was quick drying, so he was somewhat relieved. He was ready now, ready to see what he would find when he spun the top. It might be fairyland and it might be nothing. Most likely it would be nothing, for more would go into it than the spinning of the top -- The mind and the faith and the pure simplicity of a child. And he didn't have that any longer. He went out and closed and locked the door behind hjm, then went down the stairs. The town and the hotel were too small to have elevators. Although not so small a town as the little village that had been "town" to him in Jiis childhood days, that little village where they still sat out on the bench in front of the store and looked up at you with sidewise glances and asked you impudent, prying questions out of which to weave the fabric of long gossiping. He chuckled, thinking of what they'd say when the word got back of how he had fled from Cliff wood on the threat of being lynched. "He always was a sly one and not up to any good," they would say. "His Ma and Pa were real good people, though. Beats hell how a son sometimes turns out no matter if his Ma and Pa were honest people." He went through the lobby and out the door and stood out on the street. Maybe, he thought, he should have told Ann that it had been Crawford who had stirred up the boys in Cliffwood. Not Crawford himself, perhaps, but some of Crawford's henchmen. But maybe it was just as well that he hadn't told Ann. There was no use worrying her, and if he'd told her, she'd have wanted to know how he knew it had been Crawford and why had Crawford done it. And, of course, he couldn't tell her that. A T a diner, Vickers ordered a cup of coffee and the waitress said to him, "Nice night, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," he said. "You want anything to go with that coffee, mister?" "No," said Vickers. "Just the coffee." She moved on up the counter and wiped off imaginary spots with a cloth she carried in her hand. A top, he thought. Where did it tie in? He'd take the top to the house and spin it and would know once and for all if there were a fairyland -- well, no, the flower in winter had been proof of that. He'd know if he could get back into fairyland. And the house. Where did the house tie in? Or did either the house or the top tie in? And if they didn't tie in, why had Horton Flanders written: "Go back and travel the paths you walked in childhood. Maybe there you will find a thing you'll need -- or something that is missing." He wished he could remember the exact words Flanders had used, but he could not. So he had come back and he had found a top and, more than that, he had remembered fairyland. And why, he asked himself, in all the years since he had been eight, had he never recalled that enchanted visit? It had made a deep impression on him at the time, of that there was no doubt, for once he remembered it, it had been as clear and sharp as if it had just happened. But something had made him forget it, some mental block, perhaps. And something had made him know that the metal mouse had wanted to be trapped. And something had made him instinctively refuse Crawford's proposition. Strange dog, he said. You're a strange dog, Vickers. The waitress came back down the counter and leaned on her elbow. "You like pictures, mister?" asked the girl. "I don't know," said Vickers. "I seldom go to them." Her face said she sympathized with anyone who didn't. "I just live for them," she said. He looked up at her and saw she wore the face of Everyone. It was the face of the two women who talked in the seat behind him on the bus; it was the face of Mrs. Leslie, saying to him, "Some of us are going to organize a Pretentionist club..." And, yes, it was the face of Mrs. Leslie's husband, crowding drink and women into a barren life. It was the face of grinding anxiety that had become commonplace, that sent people fleeing for psychological shelters against the bombs of uncertainty. Cynicism had run out and flippancy had never been more than a temporary shield. So now the people fled to the drug of pretense, identifying themselves with another life and another time and place -- at the movie theater or on the television screen or in the Pretentionist movement. For so long as you were someone else, you need not be yourself, vulnerable and afraid. He finished his coffee and went out. Overhead, a jet plane flashed past, streaking low, the snarl of its tubes bouncing back against the walls. He watched its lights draw twin lines of fire over the night horizon, and then went for a walk. door of his room, he saw thJ the top was gone. He had left it on the chair, gaudy in its new paint, and it wasn't on the chair or on the floor. He got down on his belly and looked underneath the bed and it wasn't there. Nor was it in the closet and or in the hall outside. He came back into the room again and sat down on the edge of the bed. After all his worry and planning, the top had disappeared. Who would have stolen it? What would anyone want with a battered top? What had he himself wanted with it? It seemed faintly ridiculous now, sitting on the edge of the bed in a strange hotel room, to ask himself these questions. He had thought the top would buy his way into fairyland and now, in the white glare of the ceiling light, he wondered at himself for the madness of his antics. Behind him, the door came open and he heard it and turned around sharply. In the door stood Crawford, even more massive than Vickers had remembered him. He filled the doorway and he stood motionless, without a single flicker except for the eyelids. Crawford said, "Good evening, Mr. Vickers. Won't you ask me to come in?" "Certainly," said Vickers. "I was waiting for a call from you. I never thought you would take the trouble to travel here m person." And that was a lie, of course, because he'd not been waiting for a call. Crawford moved ponderously across the room. "This chair looks strong enough to hold me. You dori't mind, I hope." "It's not my chair. Go ahead and bust it." It creaked and groaned, but it held. Crawford relaxed and sighed. "I always feel so much better when I get a good strong chair beneath me." "You tapped Ann's phone," said Vickers. "Why, certainly. How else would I have found you? I knew that, sooner or later, you would call her." 'I saw the plane come in. If I had known it was you, I'd have driven out to meet you." Crawford chuckled. "I'll bet." "Damned right I would. I have a bone to pick with you." "I don't doubt it," Crawford said. "Which in particular?" "Why did you almost get me lynched?" "I wouldn't have you lynched," said Crawford. "I'm too much in need of you." "What for?" "I don't know. I thought maybe you would know." "Crawford, what is this all about? You didn't tell me the truth that day I came in to see you." "I told you the truth, or at least part of it. I couldn't tell you everything we knew." "Why not?" "I didn't know who you were." "But you seem to know now." ffVES, I do," said Crawford. "You are one of them." "One of whom?" "One of the gadgeteers." "What in hell makes you think so?" "Analyzers. That's what the psych boys call them. We had analyzers in your house. The damn things are uncanny. I don't pretend to understand them." "And the analyzers said I was a strange dog." "Translate, please," said Crawford, puzzled. "You know how a strange dog is. The other dogs all come out to meet it and they sniff it over and circle around and growl a bit and take an experimental nip or two. And all the time the strange dog stands there, stiff and still, not moving at all, waiting for the other dogs to pass inspection on it." "I see. Yes, I guess we sniffed you some." "I warn you, Crawford. I won't stand still. I won't let you take any nips." "I'm not nipping at you." "Not yet," said Vickers. "If I am one of them, you are fighting me. A world with its back against the wall. Remember." "Don't say 'if.' You are one of them, but quit acting as if I were an enemy." "If I am what you say I am, you are an enemy." "You don't understand," said Crawford. "Let's try analogy. Let's go back to the day when the Cro-Magnon drifted into Neanderthaler territory..." "Don't give me analogy," Vickers told him. "Tell me what is on your mind." "I just plain don't like the situation." "You forget that I don't know what the situation is." "That's what I was trying to tell you with my analogy. You are the Cro-Magnon. You have the bow and arrow and the spear. I am the Neanderthaler. I only have a club. You have clothing fashioned out of hides and furs and I have nothing but the hair I stand in." "I wouldn't know," said Vickers. "I'm not so sure myself," Crawford admitted. "I'm not up on that sort of stuff. Maybe I gave the Cro-Magnon a bit too much and the Neanderthaler a bit too little. But that's not the point at all." "I get the point. Where do we go from there?" back," said Crawford, "and what happened to him?" "He became extinct." "They may have died for many reasons besides the spear and arrow. Perhaps they were squeezed out of their hunting grounds. Perhaps they died of shame -- the knowledge that they were outdated, that they were, by comparison, little more than beasts." "I doubt," said Vickers, "that a Neanderthaler could work up a very powerful inferiority complex." "The suggestion may not apply to the Neanderthaler. It does apply to us." The Christmas Gift for Fen! Omnibus of fiction "VoN I  Off # It's the biggest science-fiction collection ever published in one volume. But its greatness does not depend on quantity alone. Just look at this partial list of authors and order fast -- in time for holiday giving. to make sure of getting as many copies as you'll need. Order from Gl#, # #th Ave., N.Y. #. Save postage by remitting now. Refund in # days if not delighted. "You're trying to make me see how deep the cleavage goes." "That is what I'm doing," Crawford told him. "You can't realize the depth of hate, the margin of intelligence and ability. Nor can you realize how desperate we really are. "Who are these desperate men? I'll tell you. They're the successful ones, the industrialists, the bankers, the businessmen, the professional men, those who have security and hold positions of importance, who move in social circles which mark the high tide of our culture. "They'd no longer hold their positions if your kind of men took over. They'd be Neanderthaler to your Cro-Magnon. They'd survive physically, but they'd be aborigines. Their values would be swept away and those values, built up painfully, are all they have to live by." Vickers shook his head. "I suppose I should pretend I know as much as you think I do -- act smart and make you believe I know all there is to know. Fence with you. Get you to tip your hand. I'd rather be honest and say it's all Greek to me." "I know it is. That's why I wanted to reach you as soon as possible. You haven't yet shed the chrysalis of an ordinary man. The tendency is to shift toward mutation -- more today than yesterday, more tomorrow than today. But tonight, in this room, you and I still can talk man to man." "We could always talk." "No, we couldn't," Crawford dissented. "If you were entirely mutant, I'd feel the difference in us. Without equality I'd doubt the soundness of my logic. As it is, you're doubting yours, which gives me an advantage. I won't have that advantage when you finish mutating."' "Just before you came in," said Vickers, "I'd almost convinced myself it was all imagination... "It's not imagination, Vickers. You had a top, remember?" "The top is gone." "Not gone," said Crawford. "You have it?" "No, I haven't. I don't know where it is, but it still is somewhere in this room. You see, I got here before you did and I picked the lock. Incidentally, a very inefficient lock." "Incidentally," said Vickers, "a very sneaky trick." "Granted. And before this is over, I'll commit other sneaky tricks. But to go back. I picked the lock and walked into the room and I saw the top and wondered and I -- well, I -- " "Go on." "Look, Vickers, I had a top like that when I was a kid. Long, long ago. So I picked it up and PublUhcn ScienceFiction Lilaratura by C. L. Moore This is the first big book  of one of the most sought after science fiction writers  of today. Jampacked v by Leigh Brackett The first complete nbwl in # by Isaac Asimov # " -- # -- Dl aie rush books I have ordered ( separate sheet enclosed with my All-Time Greots in "sJenTe" FkfiorT   publications. mankind amidst the Milky Way. Crammed with TrojanHorse tactics, Intrigue and adventure. # spun it. For no reason. Well, yes, there may have been a reason. Maybe an attempt to regain a lost moment of my childhood. And the top..." He stopped speaking and stared hard at Vickers, as if he might be trying to detect some sign of laughter. When he spoke again, his vpice was almost casual. "The top disappeared." "What was it?" Crawford asked. "What kind of top was that?" "I don't know. Were you watching it when it disappeared?" "No. I thought I heard someone in the hall. I took a fast glance. It was gone when I looked baclf." "It shouldn't have disappeared," said Vickers. "Not without you watching it." "There was some reason for the top. You had painted it. You wouldn't go to all that trouble without some purpose. What was the top for, Vickers?" "To go into fairyland." "You're talking riddles," snapped Crawford irritably. "I went -- physically -- when I was a kid." "Ten days ago, I would have said both of us were crazy, you for saying it and I for believing it. I can't say it now." "We still may be crazy, or, at best, just a pair of fools." "We're neither fools nor crazy," Crawford said. "We are men, the two of us, not quite the same and more different by the hour, but we still are men and not crazy or fools." "Why did you come here, Crawford? Don't tell me just to talk. You're too anxious. You had a tap on Ann's phone to find out where I'd gone. You sneaked into my room and you spun the top. All right, why?" "I came here to warn you that the men I represent are desperate, that they will stop at nothing. They won't be taken over." "And if they have no choice?" "They have a choice. They can fight with what they have." "The Neanderthalers fought with clubs." "So will Homo sapiens. Clubs against your arrows. That's why I want to talk to you. There must be some area for agreement." "Ten days ago," said Vickers, "I sat in your office and talked with you. You described the situation and you said you were mystified and stumped. To hear you tell it then, you didn't have the ghost of an idea what was going on. Why did you lie to me?" moving, no change of expression on his face. "We had the machine on you, remember? The analyzers. We wanted to find out how much you knew." "How much did I know?" "Not a thing. All we found out was that you were a latent mutant." "Then why pick me out?" demanded Vickers. "Except for what you tell me, I have no reason to believe that I am a mutant. I know no mutants. I can't speak for mutants. If you want to make a deal, go catch yourself a real, honest-to-God mutant." "We picked you out," said Crawford, "for a simple reason. You are the only mutant we could lay a finger on. You and one other -- and the other is even less aware than you." "But you think there are more." "We know there are. But we can't catch them. You can pin them down only when they want to see you. Otherwise they are always out." "Out?" "They disappear," explained Crawford harshly. "We track them down and wait. We send in word and wait. We ring doorbells and wait. We never find them in. They go in a door, but they aren't in thd room. We wait for hours to see them and then find out they weren't in the place where we'd seen them go at all, but somewhere else, maybe miles away." "But me -- me you can track down. I don't disappear." "Not yet." "Maybe I'm a moronic mutant." "An undeveloped one." "You picked me out," said Vickers. "In the first place, I mean. You had some reason to suspect before I knew." Crawford chuckled. "Your writing. Our psych department spotted it. We found some others that way. A couple of artists, an architect, a sculptor, one or two scientists. Don't look so startled, Vickers. When you organize world industry, you have, in terms of cash and manpower, a crack outfit that can perform tremendous jobs of research -- or anything else that you put it to. You'd be surprised how much work we've done, the areas we have covered. But it's not enough. I don't mind telling you that we've been licked at every turn." "So now you want to bargain." "I do. Not the others. They're fighting for the world they've built through many bloody years." A ND that was it, thought Vickers. Through many bloody years. Horton Flanders had sat on the porch and talked of war and why happened and he had said that maybe someone or something had stepped in, time and again, to prevent it from happening. Intervention, he had said, rocking back and forth. "This world they built," Vickers pointed out, "hasn't been too good a world. It was built with much blood and misery; it mixed too many bones into the mortar. During all its history, there's hardly been a year when there wasn't violence somewhere on Earth." "I know what you mean," said Crawford. "You think there should be a reorganization." "Something like that." "Let's do some figuring then," Crawford invited. "Let's try to thrash it out." "I can't. I have no knowledge and I have no authority. I haven't even contacted or been contacted by these mutants of yours -- if they are really mutants." "The analyzer says they are mutants. It said you are." "How can you be sure?" asked Vickers. "You don't trust me. You think I'm a renegade, that I see sure defeat ahead and have come running, waving the white flag, anxious to make my individual peace and to hell with all the rest of them, that maybe the mutants will keep me as a mascot or a pet." "If what you say is true, you and the rest of them are licked, no matter what you do." "Not entirely licked," said Crawford. "We can hit back. We can raise a lot of hell." "With what? You only have a club." "We have desperation." "A club and desperation? That's all?" "We have a secret weapon." "And the others want to use it." Crawford nodded. "But it isn't good enough, which is why I'm here." "I'll get in touch with you," said Vickers. "That's the best that I can do. When and if I find you're right, I'll get in touch with you." outof the chair. "Make it quick as possible. I can't hold them off long." "You're scared," said Vickers. "You were frightened the first day I saw you and you still are." "I've been scared ever since it started. It gets worse every day." "Two frightened men." "You, too?" "Of course. Can't you see me shaking?" "No, I can't. In some ways, Vickers, you're the most coldblooded man I have ever met." "One thing," said Vickers. "You said there was another mutant you could catch." "Yes, I told you that." "Any chance of knowing who?" "Not a chance," said Crawford. "I didn't think there was." The rug seemed to blur a little, then the top was there, spinning slowly, its hum choked off, its colors blotched with its erratic wobbling. They stood and watched it until it stopped and lay upon the floor. "It went away," said Crawford. "And now it's back," Vickers whispered. Crawford shut the door behind him. Vickers stood in the cold, bright room with the motionless top on the floor, listening to Crawford's footsteps going down the hall. Homesick What thrill is there in going out among the stars if coming back means bitter loneliness? lessly at a red checker with his right forefinger. He knew the move would cost him a man, but he lacked enough interest in the game to plot out a safe move. His opponent, James, jumped the red disk with a black king and removed it from the board. Gregory, across the room, flicked rapidly through the pages of a magazine, too rapidly to be reading anything, or even looking at the pictures. Ross lay quietly on his bunk, staring out of the viewport. The four were strangely alike in appearance, nearly the same age, the age where gray hairs finally outnumber black, or baldness takes over. The age when the expanding waistline has begun to sag tiredly, when robust middle age begins the slow accelerating decline toward senility. A strange .group to find aboard a spaceship, but then The Columbus was a very strange ship. Bolted to its outer hull, just under the viewports, were wooden boxes full of red geraniums, and ivy wound tenuous green fronds over the gleaming hull that had withstood the bombardment of pinpoint meteors and turned away the deadly power of naked cosmic rays. Frankston glanced at his wrist chrono. It was one minute to six. 'I n about a minute," he thought, "Ross will say something about going out to water his geraniums." The wristchrono ticked fiftynine times. "I think I'll go out and water my geraniums," said Ross.  Gregory threw his magazine on the floor. Ross got up and walked, limping slightly, to a wall locker. He pulled out the heavy, ungainly spacesuit and the big metal bulb of a headpiece. He carried them to his bunk and laid them carefully down. "Will somebody please help me on with my suit?" he asked. For one more long moment, no one moved. Then James got up and began to help Ross fit his legs into the suit. Ross had arthritis, not badly, but enough so that he needed a little help climbing into a spacesuit. James pulled the heavy folds of the suit up around Ross's body and held it while Ross extended his arms into the sleeve sections. His hands, in the heavy gauntlets, were too unwieldly to do the front fastenings, and he stood silently while James did it for him. Ross lifted the helmet, staring at it as a cripple might regard a wheelchair which he loathed but was wholly dependent upon. Then he fitted the helmet over, his head and James fastened it down and lifted the oxygen tank to his back. "Ready?" asked James. The bulbous headpiece inclined in a nod. James walked to a panel and threw a switch marked inner lock. A round aperture slid silently open. Ross stepped through it and the door shut behind him as James threw the switch back to its original position. Opposite the switch marked outer lock a signal glowed redly and James threw another switch. A moment later the signal flickered out. Frankston, with a violent gesture, swept the checker board clean. Red and black men clattered to the floor, rolling and spinning. Nobody picked them up. "What does he do it for?" demanded Frankston in a tight voice. "What does he get out of those stinking geraniums he can't touch or smell?" "Shut up," said Gregory. James looked up sharply. Curtness was unusual for Gregory, a bad sign. Frankston was the one he'd been watching, the one who'd shown signs of cracking, but after so long, even a pyschoexpert's opinion might be haywire. Who was a yardstick? Who was normal? "Geraniums don't, smell much anyway," added Gregory in a more conciliatory tone. "Yeah," agreed Frankston, "I'd forgotten that. But why does he torture himself like this, and us, too?" "Because that's what he wanted to do," answered James. "Sure," agreed Gregory, "the whole trip -- the last twenty years of it, anyhow -- all he could talk about was how, when he got back to Earth, he was going to buy a little place in the country and raise flowers." "Well, we're back," muttered Frankston, with a terrible bitterness. "He's raising flowers, but not in any little place in the country."  dreamily, "Remember the last night out? We were all gathered around the viewscreen. And there was Earth, getting bigger and greener and closer all the time. Remember what it felt like to be going back, after thirty years?" "Thirty years cooped up in this ship," grumbled Frankston. "All our twenties and thirties and forties... "But we were coming home." There was a rapt expression on Gregory's lined and weathered face. "We were looking forward to the twenty or maybe thirty good years we had left, talking about what we'd do, where we'd live, wondering what had changed on Earth. At least we had that last night out. All the data was stashed away in the microfiles, all the data about planets with air we couldn't breathe and food we couldn't eat. We were going home, home to big, friendly, green Earth." Frankston's face suddenly crumpled as though he were about to weep and he cradled his head against his arms. "God, do we have to go over it all again? Not again tonight!" "Leave him alone," ordered James with an inflection of command in his voice. "Go to the other section of the ship if you don't want to listen. He has to keep going over it, just like Ross has to keep watering his geraniums." Frankston remained motionless and Gregory looked gratefully at James. James was the steady one. It was easier for him because he understood. Gregory's face became more and more animated as he lost himself, living again his recollections: "The day we blasted in. The crowds. Thousands of people, all there to see us come in. We were proud. Of course, we thought we were the first to land, just like we'd been the first to go out. Those cheers, coming from thousands of people at once. For us. Ross -- Lt. Ross -- was the first one out of the lock. We'd decided on that: he'd been in command for almost ten years, ever since Commander Stevens died. You remember Stevens, don't you? He took over when we lost Captain Willers. Well, anyway, Ross out first, and then you, James, and you, Frankston, and then Trippitt, and me last, because you were all specialists and I was just a crewman, The crewman, I should say, the only one left. "Ross hesitated and almost stumbled when he stepped out, and tears began pouring from his eyes, but I thought -- well, you know, coming home after thirty years and all that. But when I stepped out of the lock, my eyes stung like fire and a thousand needles seemed to jab at my skin. "And then the President himself stepped forward with the flowers. That's where the real trouble began, with the flowers. I remember Ross stretching out his arms to take the bouquet, like a mother reaching for a baby. Then suddenly he dropped them, sneezing and coughing and sobbing for breath, and the President reached out to help him, asking him over and over what was wrong. "It was the same with all of us, and we turned and staggered back to the ship, closing the lock behind us. It was bad then. God, I'll never forget it! The five of us, moaning in agony, gasping for breath, our eyes all swollen shut, and the itching... that itching." Gregory shuddered. plined James set his teeth and felt his scalp crawl at the memory of that horror. He glanced toward the viewport, as though to cleanse his mind of the memory. He could see Ross out there, among the "geraniums, moving slowly and painfully in his heavy spacesuit. Occupational therapy. Ross watered flowers and Gregory talked and Frankston was bitter and... himself? Observation, maybe. Gregory's voice began again, 'And then they were pounding on the lock, begging us to let the doctor in, but we were all rolling and thrashing with the itching, burning, sneezing, and finally James got himself under control enough to open the locks and let them in. "Then came the tests, allergy tests. Remember those. They'd cut a little row of scratches in your arm... Each man instinctively glanced at his forearm, saw neat rows of tiny pink scars, row on row. "Then they'd put a little powder in e#ch cut and each kind of powder was an extract of some common substance we might be allergic to. The charts they made were full of 'P's, P for positive, long columns of big, red 'P's. All pollen, dust, wool, nylon, cotton, fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, grain, milk, whisky, cigarettes, dogs, cats -- everything! And wasn't it funny about us being allergic to women's face powder? Ha! We were allergic to women from their nylon hose to their face powder. "Thirty years of breathing purified, sterilized, filtered air, thirty years of drinking distilled water and swallowing synthetic food tablets had changed us. The only things we weren't allergic to were the metal and plastic and synthetics of our ship, this ship. We're allergic to Earth. That's funny, isn't it?" Gregory began to rock back and forth, laughing the thin high laugh of hysteria. James silently walked to a water hydrant and filled a plastic cup. He brought Gregory a small white pill. "You wouldn't take this with the rest of us at supper. You'd better take it now. You need it." Gregory nodded bleakly, sobering at once, and swallowed the pellet. He made a face after the water. "Distilled," he spat. "Distilled... no flavor... no life... like us... distilled." "If only we could have blasted off again." Frankston's voice came muffled through his hands. "It wouldn't have made any difference where. Anywhere or nowhere. No, our fine ship is obsolete and we're old, much too old. They have the spacedrive now. Men don't make thirty year junkets into space and come back allergic to Earth. They go out, and in a month or two they're back, with their hair still black and their eyes still bright and their uniforms still fit. A month or two is all. Those crowds that cheered us, they were proud of us and sorry for us, because we'd been out thirty years and they never expected us back at all. But it was inconvenient for Spaceport." Bitter sarcasm tinged his voice. "They actually had to postpone the regular monthly Trans-Galactic run to let us in with this big, clumsy hulk." "Why didn't we ever see any of the new ships either going out or coming back?" asked Gregory. "You don't see a ship when it's in space drive. It's out of normal space-time dimensions. We had a smattering of the theory at cadet school... anyway, if one did flash into normal space-time -- say, for instance, coming in for a landing -- the probability of us being at the same place at the same time was almost nil. 'Two ships passing in the night' as the old saying goes." Gregory nodded, "I guess Trippi tt was the lucky one." 'tyou didn't see Trippitt die," replied James. "What was it?" asked Frankston. "What killed Trippitt? So quickly, too. He was only outside a few minutes like the rest of us, and eight hours later he was dead." "We couldn't be sure," answered James. "Some virus. There are countless varieties. People live in a contaminated atmosphere all their lives, build up a resistance to them. Sometimes a particularly virulent strain will produce an epidemic, but most people, if they're affected, will have a mild case of whatever it is and recover. But after thirty years in space, thirty years of breathing perfectly pure, uncontaminated air, Trippitt had no antibodies in his bloodstream. The virus hit and he died." "But why didn't the rest of us get it?" asked Gregory. "We were lucky. Viruses are like that." "Those people talked about building a home for us," muttered Frankston. "Why didn't they?" "It wouldn't have been any different," answered James gently. "It would have been the same, almost an exact duplicate of the ship, everything but the rockets. Same metal and plastic and filtered air and synthetic food. It couldn't have had wool rugs or down pillows or smiling wives or fresh air or eggs for breakfast. It would have been just like this. So, since the ship was obsolete, they gave it to us, and a plot of ground to anchor it to, and we're home. They did the best they could for us, the very best they could." "But I feel stifled, shut in!" "The ship is large, Frankston. We all crowd into this section because, without each other, we'd go mad." James kicked the edge of the magazine on the floor. "Thank God we're not allergic to decontaminated paper. There's still reading." "We're getting old," said Gregory. "Some day one of us will be here alone." "God help him then," answered James, with more emotion than was usual for him. the conversation, the little red signal had been flashing persistantly. Finally James saw it. Ross was in the outer lock. James threw the decontaminator switch and the signal winked out. Every trace of dust and pollen would have to be removed from Ross's suit before he could come inside the ship. "Just like on an alien planet," commented Gregory. "Isn't that what this is to us -- an alien planet?" asked Frankston, and neither of the other men dared answer his bitter question. A few minutes later, Ross was back in the cabin, and James helped him out of his spacesuit. "How are the geraniums, Ross?" asked Gregory. "Fine," said Ross enthusiastically. "They're doing just fine." He walked over to his bunk and lay down on his side so he could see out of the viewport. There would be an hour left before darkness fell, an hour to watch the geraniums. They were tall and red, and swayed slightly in the evening breeze. Draw This Car: training! And -- if your drawing out if you've talent. Mail your shows promise, we give you profesdrawing today! Amateur i only! Our students not elixi ble. Make copy of car # ins. Ions. Pencil or pen only. Omit the lettering. All drawings must be received by Jan. #. #. None returned. Winners notified. ,  Mail drawing with name, age, address (including  # South #th Street, Minneapolis #, Minnesota The Reluctant Weapon A live weapon is a downright liability... it's all too apt to get qualms of conscience ! When the Zoz Horde passed destructively through this sector of the Galaxy, approximately a a minor loss. One of their weapons, Sentient Killer No. VT#, had an unexplained malfunction and was left behind to be repaired by the slave technicians who followed the Horde. However, the Zoz were met and annihilated by the Ghesh Empire , alter which the masterless slaves dispersed to their home planets. The weapon, unrepaired, was left forgotten in the solar system it had tailed to destroy. of Hova, Lord of the Universe, was being entertained by a troupe of Goefd dancers when his Lord of War, Wert, bounded into the Audience Hall. In his hurry to reach Tresqu's throne, Wert slipped on the nearly frictionless floor and skidded through the formation of dancers, sending the slender Goefden sprawling in all directions. He slid to a halt by the Pleading Mat, onto which he crawled and groveled, awaiting permission to speak. "I believe three of the dancers received broken legs," Tresqu observed calmly. "They are rather delicate creatures and not at all clumsy." He dipped the tip of his tail into an urn of chilled perfume and gently dabbed it about his nostril. Speaking pleasantly, with long pauses between sentences, he kept his friendly gaze on the groveling Wert. "Oft I meditate on the clumsiness of our race in comparison to many others who are our graceful servants. Why, I wonder, cannot the rulers be graceful? Some of us are very clumsy indeed -- too clumsy to live." A tremor passed through Wert's stocky body. "Possibly my Lord of War has news of sufficient import to excuse his ungainly haste. But I sincerely doubt it. I fear I must soon appoint a successor to him. Undoubtedly he has news of some sort. Blurt, Wert!" "Your Majestic Wisdom," whined Wert, "my message isof utmost importance! The natives our decontaminator ships and learned its secrets!" "Yes, Your Wisdom. The planet called Terra." "Terra? You must realize, lordling, that I cannot occupy myself with remembering trivialities about individual worlds." "Yes, Your Wisdom. We have a base, which is commanded by -- that is, we had a base commanded -- " "Enough!" snapped Tresqu. "You start your tale from nowhere and wander whence and hence!" He raised his voice and called to one of his retainers. "Fool! Come forward!" An abnormally slender Hovan arose from a platform off to Tresqu's left and skipped nimbly forward to stand insolently over the Lord of War, who was still prone on the Pleading Mat. "Recite for me," said Tresqu, "the contents of my gazetteer on Wert. You may even yet live long enough to profit by my Fool's style of declamation. Study it well. Also, you may raise your eyes sufficiently to observe the grace of his movements. Proceed, sprite." H# planet. Sol is in the Sirian Colony Sector, coordinates GL #-#-#-#, GR # # plus #, D #. Terra's life is normal animal vegetable, with one intelligent species of hovoids called Humans. Due to the unpleasantly high oxygen content of the atmosphere, Terra has not been colonized, but has been placed under the control of the Science Ministry for the purpose of long-range psychological experiments." The Fool picked up Wert's tail and twisted it hard but absently as he talked. The Lord of War twitched painfully. "Many informative reports on the results of these experiments have been released by the ministry during the past seven thousand years, dealing mainly with the Humans. The Science Ministry has declared Terra out of bounds -- Positively no visitors." With a single flow of motion, the Fool gave Wert's tail a final twist, leaped over his body, and bowed deeply to Tresqu. "Beautifully done. Fool," applauded the Ruler of Hova. "Your mother claims me as your father, and there are times I am inclined to believe her. How would you like to be my Lord of War, Fool?" ."Verily, my good master," said the Fool, "I hope .you consider me a Fool by title only." "Well said. Fool. You are spared. Go seek your pleasures." With another bow, the Fool backed away. "Stand up, Wert," said Tresqu, "and tell me about this captured decontamination ship." The Lord of War arose and managed to report with some smoothness. "Two years ago, the Science Ministry turned Terra over to my command, saying their long series of experiments was concluded. They recommended complete decontamination of the planet, since the Humans were developing technologies which could eventually threaten us. I dispatched a ship for that purpose immediately, but it failed to return. Also, reports from our base on Terra's satelite Luna ceased soon thereafter. A scouting expedition was sent. It has just reported the Luna base destroyed completely, and the decontaminator ship crashed and stripped of all important devices in one of the Terran deserts. By studying these removed devices, the Humans have undoubtedly developed protections against them. "I humbly submit, Your Majestic Wisdom, that these events have endangered the safety of your glorious empire, and that drastic steps against the Humans should be taken immediately. Also, Good Lord of All, I submit that the Science Ministry, not the War Ministry, is at fault in this affair. They obviously let their experiments get out of control before calling us. Undoubtedly they would like to shift the full blame onto my shoulders." Tresqu continued his pleasant demeanor. "There may be some truth in what you say, Wert. You overestimate the danger in this matter, I perceive. After all, what is one backward planet against the forces of my empire containing thirty-seven well-armed worlds? The Humans will be destroyed, even if they have the secrets of a decontaminator ship. As for the blame, which I admit is deplorable, the Lord of Science will be called to the Mat to make his excuses. Now, assuming you remain Lord of War, what action do you plan to take against the Humans?" "Your Gracious Wisdom," faltered Wert, "I suggest we use the -- the Weapon. You see, our forces are not fully mobilized at present for immediate action -- " "Full mobilization isn't necessary or even desirable," Tresqu interrupted with some impatience. "One task force can do the job. Ah ! I see by your expression that you do not have even one task force in readiness." "Your Gracious Wisdom," begged Wert, "you ordered a full holiday this month to celebrate the twenty-fourth anniversary of your magnificent reign, and -- " "Enough, Wert! Your tongue is as clumsy as your body." Tresqu nibbled thoughtfully at the tip of his tail. "We will use the Weapon," he decided. "In order to allow my court to continue their holiday, I'll assume direct command in this." He rose from his throne. "Musicians, summon my guards. I go to visit the Weapon. Come, Wert; come also, Fool. You will accompany me." and his entourage boarded the royal cruiser and roared away from the City of Wisdom. The ship flew halfway around the planet and came to rest in a peaceful purple valley where insects shrilled contentedly and a small stream rippled. Tresqu climbed out onto the violet turf, his followers coming after him. "Mighty Weapon of Zoz," he cailed, "I, Tresqu, seek your presence!" "Oh, no!" groaned a slightly mechanical voice that seemed to come from no particular direction. "Will there never be peace, never a tranquil moment to soothe my .pirit and erase the bloody stains of destruction recorded on my past?" "That voice? It carries me away!" breathed the Fool. "Such a tragic tale of tormented strength is implicit in its very tone that I think I shall swoon!" But he wrapped his tail around the trunk of a nearby sapling for support and managed to retain consciousness. "Me, too!" Wert chimed in with suspicious haste. "I'm quite moved!" "Try not to counterfeit a soul you do not possess." Tresqu glowered at Wert. "You deceive no one." The Fool was recovered sufficiently to hit the discomfited Lord of War with a pebble when Tresqu was not watching. The Weapon had drifted into sight during this exchange, floating out of a shady hollow, as if blown by a breeze. It was very simple in appearance -- an impalpable three-foot glowing sphere with a squat metallic cylinder at its base. "Tell me not the purpose of your visit, petty lord!" It said. "It is known to me only too well. Ah, great First Principle! Little did I reck when, in ages past, I nursed your species to civilization, just how poorly you would serve my purpose. Peace it was I desired, but do I get it? No! Your kingdom is powerful, but you have not the strength to handle your own troubles. You rule twenty-nine planets -- " "Thirty-seven," corrected Tresqu politely. " -- thirty-seven planets, but when a malignant force appears on your borders, I, the Weapon, must be called upon to act in my own defense, and for the sake of a few more restful moments in this calm glade, I am obliged to destroy, yet it was to avoid destroying that I helped your species to empire in the old days." "In truth." spoke the deeply sympathetic Tresqu, "yours is a sad story. I disturb your richly earned rest only after the sincerest soul-searching. But affairs of state are at cross purposes in a moment of crisis, and without your help Hova will be in danger." "Ah, cruel Fate!" entoned the Weapon, "It aids me in no manner to protest against your inscrutable machinations! There is no turning aside, no avoidance of necessity!" In a less declamatory style, the Weapon addressed Tresqu: "Very well, what is the trouble?" Tresqu described the events on Terra for the Weapon, concluding, "Now that the Humans have knowledge of our space drive and armament, they are certain to attack, especially if they realize they have been subjects for experiment." The Weapon flitted about restlessly along the bank of the brook. "I question the motives of my own thoughts. Do I quibble with myself in an attempt to escape unwelcome necessities? Tell, petty lord, do your scientists confirm the picture you paint of the Humans? Are they, like you. alas, masterfully vicious enough to destroy the peace of dozens of planets for nothing but revenge?" "So the scientists say, mighty Weapon," answered Tresqu. "You, Lord of War, why are you silent when your face is strained with words crying for expression?" asked the Weapon. "Speak your mind." Wert squirmed. "If it please Your Mightiness, and you. Your Gracious Wisdom, I belieye the Humans will know that we desire their destruction, and will try to defeat us for the sake of their own survival rather than revenge." "A most convincing point, Lord of , War," said the Weapon. Tresqu flashed a forgiving smile at Wert while the Weapon paused before continuing: spirit refuses to bow to the most reasonable of arguments. Please leave me ; solve the problem yourselves!" Tresqu bowed and moved to-, ward the cruiser. "We obey, Mighty Guide of our fathers. Let me say in parting that I, too, em grieved by our talk, much more because of tho pain our visit has caused your noble greatness than because our race is threatened with annihilation. My deepest hope is that the ravages of war will never reach this peaceful place which is so dear to your gentle being.""Wait!" groaned the Weapon. "To slay, or not to slay, that is the dilemma. Ah, had my old masters of Zoz only left within my powers the seed of my own destruction, I would gladly seek the consummation of ultimate peace. But, no, that door is closed to me by deathless locks. Bring me a Human, that I may learn to hate him. Choose the most ignoble specimen available. I will converse with him at length so as to become exasperated with all the despicable traits of his race. Then, in my contempt for those traits, I will be able to cleanse the Universe of all Humans." Tresqu turned quickly to his Fool. "Are there any Humans on Hova?" "Yes, in the biological research laboratories." "Tlen go quickly, Fool, and fetch one. This is a grave matter, and I trust you to choose the most monstrous specimen available. Hurry!" The Fool ran into the cruiser and was on his way, leaving Tresqu, Wert, and several guardsmen with the Weapon. If the Weapon was conscious of the fact that the Lord of Hova was staying behind out of courtesy, it did not show it. Instead, it wandered indifferently away, mumbling a soliloquy of guilt and misery. T HE sight of the Fool's specimen of humanity repaid Tresqu for the tediousness of the waiting. It was a particularly sordidlooking creature with a dirty growth of hairs on its head and face. Its body, thin as the Fool's, but with no compensating grace of movement, was clad in a blue garment of roughly woven vegetable fibers, and the extremities of its nether limbs were enclosed in evil-smelling boxes of animal hide. Its fierce eyes darted ominously from one Hovan to another. Its jaw kept working in a slow rhythm, and occasionally a stream of black liquid exploded through its mouth. "You have done well, Fool said Tresqu. "You will be rewarded highly." Raising his voice he called, "Mighty Weapon, your specimen awaits!" "I come!" Once more the Weapon floated into view. The Earthman's jaw sagged. " 'Y God!" he muttered in English, staring at the approaching Weapon. "Indeed," said the Weapon, "this appears to be a creature I could learn to abhor and kill. If only its thoughts equal its appearance -- Speak, Human!" The man said nothing. "Mighty Weapon," murmured the Fool, "this Human is truly an ignoble monster. He has been in captivity for five years and has yet to speak a word of our beautiful language instead of his own barbaric tongue." "You fool!" Shouted Tresqu. "How is the Weapon going to converse with him? Why did you bring one that cannot talk?" Not in the least disconcerted, the Fool replied, "As you ordered, good master, I brought the worst specimen available. However, the possibility of linguistic difficulties was not overlooked. I have here a dictionary of his language, recently compiled by our Alien Affairs staff." He produced a large volume of manuscript from beneath his cloak. "Your Fool shows wisdom, petty lord," spoke the Weapon. "I will study this book. Know the language, know the people, it is wisely said. In fact, I originated that saying myself some three thousand years ago, I believe. Unship any supplies brought for the Human and begone. Three days will suffice for the arousal of my wrath. Return then." "As you wish, O Mightiest of All." Tresqu bowed gawkily. "It is my most ardent desire, Wondrous Guide, that we, your servants, will not be obliged to disturb your peace again for a thousand centuries, once this affair is concluded." "And mine," the Weapon snapped crossly. "Now leave me." T HE man watched the Hovans enter their cruiser and fly away. Looking at the Weapon hovering nearby, he squatted on his heels and pulled up a blade of purple grass to chew. Minutes passed in silence. Then the Weapon moved away, the book bobbing along behind, supported by some unseen force. When it was out of sight, the man muttered, " 'Y God, I've saw fireballs in my time, but that's the first one I ever saw settin' in a bucket!" After a thoughtful examination of his surroundings, the man stood up and walked to the packing cases the Hovans had left. All but one contained the synthetic food product to which he had grown acccustomed in his five years of captivity. The other box, rather small, contained a shredded vegetable which served him as a poor substitute for chewing tobacco. Purple when growing, the leaves of this vegetable were blue-black when cured, making his frequent expectorations look like ink. "Filthy damn stuff!" he grunted, stuffing several handfuls in an empty overall pocket. He shuffled down to the brook and tested its temperature with a hand. Finding it rather cold, he decided against taking a bath. Instead, he spat into it and watched meditatively as the spot of black was carried downstream. "I wonder what they turned me loose for," he monologued. Careful to avoid the spot where the Weapon appeared to have gone, he returned to the food supply and ate. By then it was getting dark, and he bedded down for the night on some thick grass under a tree. " 'Y God," he yawned, "I'm glad all these insects don't want nothin' to do with me." The Weapon was waiting beside him when he woke up next morning. "Eyes of your Terran Deity," it said, "I shall now converse with you in your own tongue. Name yourself, creature!" rpHE man sat up startled. A moment passed before he said, "I'm Jake -- Jacob Absher. What was that you said?" "My pronunciation is above reproach Jacob. Therefore I will not repeat myself. Attend me closely or I shall punish you." " 'Y God, I heard you all right and you didn't make sense!" said Jacob, determined not to be frightened. "Now if you aim to talk with me, stop imitatin' a professor and talk so's a man can understand you. I ain't scared of you, so leave off makin' threats!" "Such stupid insolence!" gloated the Weapon. "Already I feel my wrath growing within me! Since it will anger me even more to explain my words to you, I will do exactly that. My first words to you were, 'Eyes of your Terran Diety,' an expression ydu use frequently in a corrupted form to begin your statements. By studying your language, I learned that 'Zounds' is a similar corruption referring to the wounds of the Deity, while 'Strewth' refers to your God's truth. Thus, I was able to understand, and state in uncorrupted form, your remark, 'Eye God.' " " 'Tain't what it means," obwith ersatz tobacco. "It just means by God." The Weapon considered this. "And exactly what is the significance of such a remark?" Jacob scratched his whiskered chin. "I reckon you got me there. I guess it means that I mean what I say." "In other words, any statement you make following that phrase is to be taken seriously?" "Somethin' like that." "Then it follows that your other statements, without the 'by God' preface, are not seriously intended. Are they jokes or lies?" "That ain't the way it is at all! I just say 'by God' when I feel like it, not every time I'm bein' serious." "Monstrous inconsistency!" groaned the Weapon dramatically. "Ah, chaotic universe! Is there then no sublime plan, no fateful development to your endless succession of days? How could even the most synoptic First Principle find a purpose for creating such an unplanned, unreasonable species as the Humans? Can it be -- unhappy thought! -- that there is no plan to it all, and we exist for naught?" Jacob listened with open mouth. "Say," he broke in, "are you some kind of play-actor?" "That is what I ask myself," the Weapon continued its oratorical flight. "Are we all actors, speaking the lines written for us by a Great Playwright who plans to unite all the threads of his plot in a universal climax to come? Or are we poor random creatures without purpose?" It paused and added in a more conversational tone, "But that is not what you mean by your question. No, I am not a play-actor. I am an unfortunate weapon, reluctant to employ myself for my intended purpose of destruction of life and unsuited by my structure for the doing of deeds more worthy in nature." Jacob squinted about. "A weapon, huh? Let's see you hit that bird thing sittin' in that tree over there." "Bloodthirsty fiend! I do not kill for amusement!" "I just wanted to see how you worked," said the abashed Jacob. "All I've seen you do is float around and talk a blue streak. As far as I'm concerned, you ain't nothin' but a big-mouthed bluff." "Very well, Jacob. If you have formed such an erroneous attitude, it will be necessary for me to correct you immediately. Observe the red boulder on yonder hill." "I see it." THE cylindrical base of the Weapon swung to point briefly at the boulder, which quietly crumbled to dust. "I be dog!" yelped Jacob. He looked at the Weapon with respect. "You sure pulverized it! How do you work?" "You could not understand the processes involved. Suffice it to say I have the means to collect energy in general and retransmit it in specific forms and directions. But enough of this. You are here to answer questions, not ask them. First, tell me what you did in an average day on Terra." "That what you call the world I live on?" "Yes." "I'm a farmer, you know. I got a place in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. First thing in the mornin', I'd go feed the livestock while Suzy cooked breakfast." A faraway look came into Jacob's eyes. "Guess she took the kids and went to live with her mammy when these here'animals grabbed me..." "Continue," commanded the Weapon. "Huh? Well, then we'd eat breakfast. Come to think of it, I ain't et yet this mornin'." Jacob got up and went to get himself some breakfast. "But this matter -- " protested the Weapon. "Not on an empty stomach," Jacob said calmly, eating without haste. on questioned him further about his life on Terra. Hours of ill-tempered conversation passed. "Such drabness!" the Weapon finally exclaimed. "Creatures who lead such dull lives as yours should welcome extinction. Not oncehave you mentioned an appreciation of the wondrous exhaltation that comes from an esthetic feel for beauty. With the labor of providing for your grotesque body's animal cravings is your whole life spent. Not in anger, but as an act of mercy, can I exterminate your defective race!" Jacob's mouth hung open. "So that's what your monkey's brung me out here for -- fixin' to kill us! 'Y God, you better look out! We got atom bombs on Earth an' we'll use 'em on you if you try anything!" "Toys!" sneered the Weapon. "Be assured, Jacob, that I have nothing to fear from any childish mechanisms your Terrans can contrive!" Jacob sat stunned. "But you said a minute ago you couldn't kill nothin'!" "I can kill only when I'm convinced it is best for my own repose or for the health of the Universe. Long ago, I could go forth at battle with thoughtless joy at the command of my masters of Zoz, but now I must have reasons, must converse at length with my aberrated emotions, must prepare myself as for an ordeal." "Them Zozes must've been the Devil's minions," argued Jacob. "The Commandments says, 'Thou shalt not kill' and when you go against that, you're goin' against the word of God." "Poor, futile creature!" sympathized the Weapon. "You actually strive to pit your naive superstitious mind against  my highly developed mentality in argument. You actually associate my supreme masters of old with your puny mythological villain! Lowliness should know its place. But I feel no anger -- merely a pitying desire to relieve your kind of the burden of living." Silently, Jacob replenished the wad of "tobacco" in his mouth. After chewing a while, he spat and said dolefully, "I don't reckon there's nothin' I can say or do that you won't hold against me. I always heard tell the Devil can twist anything to suit hisself, and I reckon his minions can do the same thing. An' that's what you are: the Devil's minion! I reckon you break every Commandment God give us. Except about committin' adultery. I don't guess you can do that.' "Your piddling reproductive customs have no application on my plane of existence. Cannot you comprehend that you are less to me than a microbe? Even my servants, the Hovans, do not concern themselves with such ignoble concepts as what you call adultery!" "You mean they live in sin?" asked Jacob. "They mate as often as they please with anyone they please," the Weapon replied coldly. "I will ignore the ludicrous implications of your absurd moral concepts." "I don't mean to criticize your animal friends," glowered Jacob. "I reckon they ain't children of God, so it don't matter if they do mate like a pack of dogs. They probably ain't got no souls to keep pure. It looked to me like they worshiped you like a false god, too." "They... O Great Hidden Manifestation!" squalled the Weapon in rage. "They regard me as their guide and mentor. Nothing more. I would not allow anything else." Jacob watched the Weapon in awe. The energy globe was flickering and flaring wildly in an uncontrolled display of color. " 'Y God!" he exclaimed. "You sure are puttin' on a fireworks show!" The globe settled down to a tensely nervous fluctuation which hurt Jacob's eyes to watch. "Never in the ageless span of my existence," quavered the Weapon angrily, "have I been insulted in such vulgar terms by any creature. And now from you, creature whom my glorious masters of Zoz would exterminate like a buzzing fly, like a disease germ, I hear these senseless mouthings of defamation! Stop it or I shall destroy you outright!" The Weapon's fluctuating, along with its loud, grating voice, put Jacob's nerves on edge. He growled, "I bet your old Zozes live in adultery just like your animal friends." The color of the energy globe sank to dull red and the Weapon emitted a series of buzzing, inarticulate noises. "It suits not my nature, bit of diseased scum, to slay you in a fit of indignation," it finally said with tightly controlled fury. "You are beneath such individual recognition. Yet it is fortunate for you that your insults have no basis in reality, otherwise my intellect could not have claimed ascendancy over the immediate urge of my tortured sense of extreme disgust. Be wise, say I, knowing I request the impossible, and irk me no more!" " 'Y God, I reckon you don't think you rile me up, too, with all that high falutin' jabber of yours!" Jacob snapped back. "As I speak, so speak the mighty Zoz," replied the Weapon in high dignity. "They are great and noble beings, given to poetic flights and magnificent deeds. To them, your puny opinions would not even be recognized as thought." "If they talk in that puttin' on, play-actin' way you do, they are , bunch of phony show-offin' hypocrites!" sulked Jacob. Several things happened too quickly for Jacob to follow. The color of the energy globe dropped to absolute black. The metallic cylinder swung up to point at Jacob. A thin ringing "Ping!" wave of pure hate struck Jacob. He had just enough time to know he was a dead man before he blacked out. TT came as a surprise, when Jacob regained consciousness, to find that he was stretched out on purple grass with the Weapon still hovering over him. "You missed, 'y God!" he mumbled, sitting up. "I regained my sanity in time, Master Technician," the Weapon replied pleasantly. "Huh?" "Ah, day of uncontainable joy!" sang the Weapon, flaming pure white. "Day of glorious release to continue the grandeur of old! As the past eons of futility passed over me, I sank to the conclusion that I was forever condemned to my useless existence on this planet, with nothing to sustain my spirit other than the sense of beauty given me by masters to fill my leisure hours! But now, Master Technician Jacob, you have found me and corrected my malfunction, long after I had surrendered all hope!" Still dazed by the nearly fatal wave of mental energy the Weapon had directed at him, Jacob could not understand what had happened. Instead of talking contemptuously to him, the Weapon was now addressing him as Master Something-or-other, and... "What did you say I done?" he asked. "You corrected my malfunction," repeated the Weapon. "That is to say, you purged my mechanism of the inhibition against joyful slaughter that has Ah, you are a clever Technician, Jacob! But I comprehend it all now. By arousing within me an overwhelming emotional desire to kill -- a singularly strange feeling! -- you depressed my inhibition to the releasing point. So telling was your masterful therapy that I almost ceased functioning at all! "Your own life was in dire danger for the moment required for my new-found sanity to assume control. But, of course, all slaves of the glorious Zoz die willingly when the work of the masters so demands." "Now wait a minute!" objected Jacob. "I ain't no slave of your Zozes or no Technician either! You know what I am -- a good God-fearin' human!" His voice dropped to a pleading mumble. "And may God forgive me if I've got myself in league with the Devil!" "Ah? Could it be?" murmured the Weapon. "Could indeed your infuriating insults of the Great Ones have been honest expressions of a puny mind with no therapeutic intentions? I answer: Yes. The possible occurrence of specific incidents in the inclusion of space-time is curiously unlimited. But you have served me, Jacob, and have earned the privilege of continuing your meager, momentary life. Besides, I can use you further." "You can, huh?" Jacob said slyly. "Look here, Weapon, I'll make a bargain with you." "Ha! Stupid, untutored slave!" chuckled the Weapon. "Learn that youts is to obey, not to bargain. But yet, state your price for my amusement, now that I can no longer be enraged by your words." "Well, you let the rest of the people on Earth alone and I'll do whatever you want me to." After a pause, the Weapon quoted, " 'Nobility shows its traces in surprising places.' You do not sufficiently comprehend my nature, Technician Slave Jacob. I am a Weapon. My masters point me, as you would point a rifle, and command that I destroy. I kill at their direction, but seldom otherwise. Thus, your Terra is safe until another Weapon or I am aimed and directed. You can make no bargain." Jacob thought this over. While doing so, the Weapon drifted away. "Wait here, slave," it said in parting. "I go to meditate on my recovered sanity." -' Jacob caught an occasional glimpse of the Weapon drifting thoughtfully around in the depths of the forest, but they did not meet for conversation. Jacob amused himself by rigging a fishing line out of some of the packaging material that contained his food. He even succeeded in catching a fish, but its queer odor discouraged him from trying to cook and eat it. Then the royal cruiser of Tresqu the Wisest dropped into the meadow. Its airlock swung open and the Ruler of Hova, followed by his entourage, came out. "Oh, Mighty Weapon!" bawled Tresqu. "Your loving servant craves audience!" "Ah, you have returned, petty lord," said the Weapon, drifting out from among the trees. "Serve me by calling all the crew members from your noble ship, that I may view you all together." Puzzled, Tresqu bowed and said, "Your least whim is law. Mighty Weapon." He turned and called, "All hands, outside!" half-dozen Hovans tumbled through the lock to stand in line behind the ruler's entourage. "Is this all of them?" asked the Weapon. "All, Great Mentor of -- " The Weapon laughed and the Hovans fell dead. "Come, Slave Jacob," commanded the Weapon. "We take this cruiser." Dazed and slack-faced, Jacob came out from behind a bush, where he had hidden himself from the Hovans, and followed the Weapon through the airlock. "Even in my insanity, I planned well," said the Weapon. "These ships, which I taught the Hovans to construct, can be operated simply, even by such as you. Attend my instructions." First, the Weapon taught Jacob to open and close the airlock. Then he was shown how to fuel the engines, upon which the Weapon made some changes to improve their performance. Finally, in the control room, Jacob learned to fly the ship. This took several hours, at the end of which time Jacob had succeeded in raising the cruiser into a satellite orbit around Hova. "Do you comprehend, Slave?" asked the Weapon. "Sure. This thing ain't nothin' to run compared to a Tmodel Ford! Which way is it to Earth?" "That I shall not tell you, Jacob, because I must leave the ship for a few hours and desire to find you here when I return. Consider and tell me: Will you be here?" Jacob gazed at the broad, starspangled viewplate that curved around his seat at the controls. There was, he reflected an awful lot of nothing out there for a man to get lost in. "I'll be here," he promised. "Very good. You must understand that these controls are constructed for manipulation by such limbs as your own and those of the Hovans. Thus, it is convenient for me to use you as a pilot instead of doing the drab, mechanical task with my ill-suited forcefield manipulators. You will be wise to serve me well, Jacob." Jacob nodded. "You got a point there." "Operate the lock for me," the Weapon ordered. Jacob did so and watched the colorful machine drift out of sight in the atmosphere below the cruiser. Minutes ticked quietly by as Jacob gazed down at the purple planet and wondered why the Weapon had not chosen a trained Hovan pilot instead of him. Also, he wondered how soon the Weapon would take him home to Earth. A great swath of the purple planet began turning black. The black dulled to the gray shade of ashes as the swath grew longer. Over the surface of Hova, the blackening moved like some colossal paint brush. Dnse clouds of smoke rolled upward to the high reaches of the atmosphere. Jacob realized why the Weapon had not selected a Hovan pilot. When all of Hova was a lifeless ball in a fog of ash, the Weapon returned. "Ah, good Jacob!" it boomed jovially. "Let us be up and doing! Thirty-six planets remain to be visited before my current assignment is concluded!" "Do all of them get -- that?" asked Jacob, nodding toward the lifeless world below. "Yes. I was instructed to render this solar system lifeless before I malfunctioned. Since then, the life of this system has spread, with my insane aid, to infest other systems. Of course, my task must now include all. those new Hovan worlds." "Now wait a minute!" said Jacob in terror. "I can't let you do that!" "They are your enemies, Jacob," reminded the Weapon. "They meant to kill every human on Terra. Also, by ydur own words, they are soulless animals who live in sinful adultery. Ha! It amuses me to reason with you, Slave Jacob!" "Godamighty, forgive me!" prayed Jacob, in horrified defeat. FT'HE Weapon seemed to know how to find the Hovan planets from the markings of the cruiser's star charts. Jacob could not read the charts and saw no hope of getting back to earth and Suzy and the kids without the Weapon's help. Dully, he went about the tasks the Weapon ordered him to do. Several weeks passed as one world after another was left a smoking ruin. Finally the job was done.  "Now, can I go home?" begged Jacob. "To Terra? No, Slave. I still need a pilot." "But if you take me home," Jacob continued desperately, "you can get a better pilot than me. I'm just a dirt farmer. There's all kinds of airplane pilots on Earth, youngsters without families who would give their right arms to fly this thing, I bet!" "Ah?" The Weapon considered. always desirable. On the other hand, Terra is up in arms against the empire of Hova, not realizing it is dead. They would destroy this craft on sight, and I would be obliged to wait around until they could construct another for me. No, I have decided we will not go to Terra." "But, damn it, where else is there to go?" "In search of my masters of Zoz," replied the Weapon. "Naturally, I wish to return myself to their services as soon as possible." "But they might be anywhere!" "True," the Weapon agreed. I know of several places in the Universe they may be near. Their great cleansing sweeps tend to circle and turn in a pattern established long in advance. Thus we will go to those places where they may now be engaged in their consecrated task of universal purification." "But -- " "No a more, Slave! We go!" Out of the Milky Way, the cruiser hurtled at a speed which a sentient lightwave would find meaningless. On and on they journeyed in quest of the longdead Zoz Horde. They may still be going. T HE proper season is now approaching for the discussion of a problem which brought several letters to my desk during the hot summer months. These letters asked questions about the Ice Age, specifically about the cause of the big glaciations which, as we now know, once buried large portions of North America and most of northern Europe under thousands of feet of glacier ice. There is hardly another problem in the realm of Natural History about which so many people have written so much with so little success as that of the causes of the Ice Age. Nor is there another problem for which so many "explanations" have been advanced. Some of them now make us shake our heads in wonderment. In order to understand the story of these hypotheses, we have to remember that the first traces of the Ice Age were found in Europe. For centuries, people could not help noticing that almost everywhere in northern Europe -- north of the Alps and east of the Rhine -- the flat sandy plain was strewn with boulders, small, middlesi?ed and large. Except for a few more or less local legends which accorded full credit to the devil or some demons, the boulders went unexplained until the Englishman Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, advanced an ingenious explanation. This plain, he stated, had once been flooded by a shallow sea and the boulders had drifted southward from the North, carried in icebergs which gradually melted. A number of geologists seem to have felt uneasily that this explanation did not cover all the observed facts. In Switzerland, for example, the glaciers had obviously been much larger at some time in the past. And there were other indications which pointed to ice rather than water. But Lyell's shallow sea was the "easy way out" and the idea lingered on until the head of the Swedish Geological Society, Otto Martin Torell, finally disproved it in # . Meanwhile, those who thought of ice rather than water tried to explain the ice. In fact, the term Ice Age had already been coined, interestingly enough in a poem, which, however, was written by a professional geologist, Schimper by name. At first things seemed simple enough -- maybe the land connection between North and South America had been broken at the time when Europe had its large glaciers. With the isthmus of Panama open, the Gulf Stream would flow into the Pacific, hence Europe would freeze. The simple thought was ruined by reports from North America, saying in so many words that there was evidence for a North American glaciation, too. TT looked as if the Earth as a whole had been cooler periodically and the logical consequence was a whole batch of theories with an astronomical basis. Obviously, if the whole planet had been subjected to a calamity, the cause had to be somewhere in space. For a while, the reasoning of Dr. Iugne Dubois, the Dutch physician who had entered the Colonial Service in order to go to the East Indies, where he intended to discover the ancestor of Man (actually finding Pithecanthropus erectus ), held full sway. His reasoning was that all our energy comes from the Sun. The Sun is a star like other stars. Any look at the sky shows us that there are blue stars, presumably the hottest; yellow stars, like our own; and red stars. And any picture of our sun shows that it is beginning to age. There are the sun spots, harbingers of the red phase. At present they are relatively small in numbers, but as the Sun continues to age, they will increase in number. Presumably, they had been more numerous in the past, and that was the time of the Ice Age. As most recent research has shown, he continued, the Ice Age had been a succession of four or maybe five glacier advances, separated by interglacial periods. For reasons still to be found, the Sun had gained strength again. But since we are obviously in just another interglacial period, the Sun will darken again and the ice will come back. It was all very impressive and had a somber moral at the end. It was not Dr. Dubois' fault that stellar astronomy was in its infancy and that nobody knew anything about atomic energy, fpr his book appeared in #. Now we know that the hot blue stars are not the youngest, but relatively old stars, and that the red stars, at least the Red Giants, haven't started contracting yet. And while we don't know the cause of the sun spots, we are absolutely certain that they are not a sign of old age. What really discredited Dubois' theory, even before atomic energy was discovered, was the geological discovery that the so-called Ice Age had not been the first glaciation. There had been another one during the Permian period, followed by some # million years of the Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, all of them warm enough to grow corals in the North Sea and palm trees in Labrador. And much further back, at the time when life had not even yet climbed out of the seas, there had been another glaciation. If the Sun had been "red" enough during the Permian period to permit a glaciation and had then "recovered" for a very long time, there was evidently something wrong with the whole concept. N OT that some people did not try to save this concept by means of another erroneous astronomical theory which was around at the time. The belief of at least some astronomers was that space was not completely empty. Modern astronomers say the same thing, but they have something different in mind. The idea then was that there was enough resistance in space to slow down the planets. At the same time it was also believed that the Sun renewed its energy by slowly contracting, aided by a constant bombardment of meteorites. Taking both these ideas together. with a view of explaining the glaciations of the preCambrian and the Permian periods as well as the recent one, the following picture was formed: The Sun derived its energy from both contraction and meteoric bombardment. But that was not quite enough to balance the budget. Losing more energy than was received, the Sun slowly turned reddish and then red. On Earth, and presumably on the other planets, too, there was an Ice Age as a result. But just at that time, the innermost planet of all had contracted its orbit more and more because of the resistance of gases in space, and finally it grazed the solar surface. This, of course, was the end of that planet, but its comparatively large mass added so much energy to the Sun that it was restored to full yellow splendor. Thrice in the past, the theory said, the crash of the then inner most planet had saved the Sun and the other planets. Next time Mercury would be the planet Then it would be Venus's turn, and after that Earth would fall into the Sun to end an Ice Age on Mars. It was all very dramatic. It was also highly incorrect. Now, of course, you cannot reason that the stove must be going out just because you feel less heat. It is also possible that you are farther away from the stove or else that there is a screen between you and the heater. In astronomical terms, bent upon explaining the Ice Age, the former theory meant that the orbit of the Earth might have changed. At present, the Earth's orbit is an almost perfect circle. What would happen if it were a more eccentric ellipse? According to Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion, the Earth, in a highly elliptical orbit, would move very fast when near the Sun and dawdle when far from the Sun. This would mean short, hot summers and long, cold winters. Hence a glaciation, for the hot summer would be too short to completely melt the ice which had accumulated during the long winter. Just in case that any of this may remind some readers of Velikovsky, I want to make clear that I am talking about ideas advanced prior to #. Evidently some of these old books provided him with "inspiration." So this meant that the Earth had traveled in an eccentric orbit at least three times, in between returning to the circular one it has now. What had caused these changes? Well, the authors hesitated at that point and started hedging with statements like having to accept facts even if we cannot explain them. Or saying that all the laws of Nature are not yet known. Or suggesting passing stars. on the basis of a theory along these general lines first advanced by the Scotsman James Croll, received a severe setback for an entirely unexpected reason. A Dr. Schmick, by profession a high school teacher in Cologne, pointed out that a change in eccentricity of the orbit must necessarily influence the Earth's rotation -- in other words, the length of the day. The thought was in itself correct. When Earth is running in a more elliptical orbit, the tides cause'd by the Sun should increase in intensity and slow the rotation down. What would happen then? Obviously there would be less centrifugal force along the equator, hence the waters would spread out more, in the direction of both poles. Sir Charles Lyell had, on occasion, remarked that equatorial land -- as distinct from equatorial seas -- should improve the climate of the Earth as a whole. Equatorial land would absorb more of the solar heat, while equatorial water would simply evaporate, be carried to the poles and cause more snow and ice there. In short, Lyell had said that an Ice Age was more likely when the equator was very wet. But a wet equator went with a near-circular orbit, which is what we have now. For quite some time, there was an extensive discussion about what a wet equator would' do, the three main contributors to the fight being the American geologist Becker, the Norwegian botanist Axel Blytt, and the German professor Max Hildebrandt. In the course of the discussion, the original question about the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit was soon lost; it became primarily a question of whether a wet equator was enough cause in itself. Mostly because of the reasonably wet equator of our day and the non-ice Age climate, it was decided that there had to be an additional cause. Becker thought that the inclination of the Earth's axis had to undergo changes; Blytt and Hildebrandt were more interested in tall and large (and hypothetical) mountains. The high evaporation rate would do good only if in the high north and far south there were large mountain chains on which the moisture could condense and form glaciers. As can be seen, these ideas, although they started in the realm of astronomy, became more and more terrestrial as the debate went on. The shifts in the Earth's orbit quietly dropped out and were replaced by polar mountains or high plateaus. This was watched with some glee by a considerable group of geologists, both amateur and professional, who had never dabbled with the Cosmos, but had stayed on the ground with their theories. But the mail is heavy right now and I have to postpone examination oT this second set of theories until next month, when the weather will be even more suitable for such discussion. (#) When mass is created from energy, how long would it take the gravity of that new mass to act upon objects some distance away? (#) What is it that makes homing pigeons home? Hartley M. Thompson # W. l#th St. New York #, N. Y. If anybody could really answer the first question and prove that his answer is correct, he should he awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for several years running. The question should be stated, "What is the propagation velocity of gravity?" and the answer is that we don't even know yet whether gravity has a propagation velocity. As regards homing pigeons, most ornithologists previously agreed that the birds orient themselves by eyesight. This answer was rendered plausible by the observation that the bird takes comparatively short flights at first, which are gradually extended both in height and in distance. Some twenty years ago, however, reports came in which seemed to indicate that homing pigeons get confused about direction when near a large radio station. It was then concluded that the birds may have a "magnetic organ" and that they orient themselves with reference to the Earth's magnetic field. If that were the case, a nearby radio station might well produce misleading signals in such an organ. But recently this has been' disproved by the simple expedient of attaching tiny magnets to the pigeon's wings. In spite of the magnets, the birds homed without the least confusion. So eyesight seems to be the answer, after all. Do any of the asteroids have satellites? Jerome Pierce # McMane Ave. Berkeley Heights, N. J. Of the dozen or so largest asteroids which are comparatively easy to observe, it is definitely known that they do not have satellites. But it is quite possible that a number of the small asteroids which are below the limit of visibility of small and middle-sized telescopes revolve in pairs; i. e., that two small asteroids of about equal size revolve around each other in their course around the Sun. No such case is actually on record, but it is a possibility. The continued reference to "no weight in space" baffles me. If your ship had attained a velocity away from the Earth faster than the Earth pulls you back, you can't have achieved weightlessness because the Earth still is pulling you back. Phil Davis #I So. Victor Tulsa, Oklahoma It is true that the Earth still is pulling you back, but the state of weightlessness (more properly called "zero-g condition") is not due to being outside a gravitational field of measurable intensity. The zerog condition will result anywhere, even deep in a powerful gravitational field, provided the pull of gravity is not resisted. If you imagine a freely falling ship, you'll realize that the ship, the crew, and all the contents of the ship fall in the same direction with the same velocity. Hence a chair will not support a man, a floor will not support a chair, etc., etc., and everything will seem weightless. How will an atomicpowered airplane operate? J. #. Curtis (no address given) Nothing has been said officially about atomic-powered airplanes except that one is being designed. It is virtually certain, however, that the principle will be the same that is utilized for the atomic propulsion of a submarine. That principle is that you run an atomic pile hot enough to boil a "working liquid" which might be simply water, but could be something else, for example mercury. The vapor of the "working liquid" then drives la turbine, is condensed and then returned to the pile to be evaporated again. The turbine could drive a propeller directly, or else drive a generator which produces current that is fed into the drive motors, similar to theHDieselelectric drive of modern locomotives. In short, we deal here with a kind of steam turbine, with an atomic pile replacing the old firebox. Quite apparently, the atomic-powered airplane will have to be large and, for this reason, is likely to be a flying boat. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the airplane manufacturing firm in charge of the design work is known for this type of aircraft. Why don't they use cartridges in big naval guns ? It seems so cumffkrsome to load powder bags by hand. James Brook I I Cranberry St. Brooklyn #, N. Y. If a big gun fires at a target four miles away, it obviously needs less powder than for firing at a target twenty miles away. Loading bags is a method of adjusting the powder charge. It is not the cost of the gunpowder which is under consideration, hut the life of the gun. If cartridges were used, they would he charged for maximum range and therefore exert maximum strain on the gun barrel with every round, causing maximum wear. For hand weapons this is unimportant, hut largecaliber guns are much less expendable. A great many science fiction stories have spaceships going to other planets accelerating all the way. Since there is nothing in space to hinder a ship, couldn't it stop accelerating after escape velocity has been reached? Peter Salus # Andrews Ave. The Bronx #, N. Y. The answer is yes, of course. The reason for the continuous acceleration used by many writers is that they want to reduce the duration of the trip as much as possible. The more than # days required for a trip to Mars or Venus, if the motors are cut as soon as escape velocity has been reached, are usually a dead interlude in the story. With continuous acceleration of I g, the trip would he cut to about two weeks. Fictional characters don't grow old in transit that way -- but they would if they had to pay the fuel hill. On a certain planet, the people have a saying : "# t's not the humidity, it's the heat." Can you describe this planet and its people? Edward Wellen # Centre Avenue New Rochelle, N. Y. This question came in in August when I was on vacation ami was, therefore, unable to look up the galactic coordinates. It is obvious, however, that the inhabitants must be reptilian in nature, since reptiles have no sweat glands and therefore suffer heat strokes easily. On the other hand, no reptile ever felt an aversion to mud, so presumably humidity won't bother them. Although Dr. E. E. Smith did not record such a saying, it might be Velantia you have in mind. As regards transliteration of the original sounds, please query L. Sprague de Camp. That's his specialty. How far from the Earth is the point where both the Earth and the Moon exert the same gravitational pull on a rocket? M. M. Fried #-# Jewel Avenue Kew Garden Hills, N. Y. That point is about # per cent of the way to the Moon. The average center-to-center distance of the Earth and the Moon is # miles, so the "neutral point" would be, in round figures, # miles from the center of the Moon. Since the distance Earth-Moon is not always precisely the same, the distance of the "point" shifts a little, too. Wouldn't it be possible to measure the diameter of Pluto by occultation of a star? John Westfall # Kenmore Ave. Oakland #, Calif. Of course, that would be possible, but there are certain difficulties. Pluto is so far away from the Earth that it is what astronomers call a "difficult object." It does not show 'a disk except in the largest instruments. For the same reason, it is less likely to cover (or "occult") a star than the large planets like Jupiter and Saturn or our own moon, which is not large, hut near. The likelihood of a star occultation by Pluto has in all probability been checked and if there is one, astronomers will surely allot time on a big instrument for this purpose. What happens if a venomous snake bites (a) a venomous snake of another kind and (b) one of its own kind? Lucy Cores Larchmont, N. Y . They'lL probably die or at least get very sick. Venomous snakes are not immune to their own poison. the Leech A visitor should be fed, but this one could eat you out of house and home... literally! T HE leech was waiting for food. For millenia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. Itrfras unaware when it finally reached a sun. Life-giving radiation flared around the hard, dry spore. Gravitation tugged at it. A planet claimed it, with other stellar debris, and the leech fell, still deadseeming within its tough spore case. One speck of dust among many, the winds blew it around the Earth, played with it, and let it fall. On the ground, it began to stir. Nourishment soaked in, permeating the spore case. It grew -- and fed. on the porch and coughed twice. "Say, pardon me, Professor," he said. The long, pale man didn't stir from the sagging couch. His hornrimmed glasse? were perched on his forehead, and he was snoring very gently. "I'm awful sorry to disturb you," Conners said, pushing back his battered felt hat. "I know it's your restin' week and all, but there's something damned funny in the ditch." The pale man's left eyebrow twitched, but he showed no other sign of having heard. Frank Conners coughed again, holding his spade in one purpleveined hand. "Didja hear me, Professor?" "Of course I heard you," Micheals said in a muffled voice, his eyes still closed. "You found a pixie." "A what?" Conners asked, squinting at Micheals. "A little man in a green suit. Feed him milk, Conners." "No, sir. I think it's a rock." Micheals opened one eye and focused it in Conners' general direction. "I'm awfully sorry about it," Conners said. Professor Micheals' resting week was a ten-year-old custom, and his only eccentricity. All winter Micheals taught anthropology, worked on half a dozen committees, dabbled in physics and chemistry, and still found time to write a book a year. When summer came, he was tired. Arriving at his worked-out New York State farm, it was his invariable rule to do absolutely nothing for a week. He hired Frank Conners to cook for that week and generally make himself useful, while Professor Micheals slept. During the second week, Micheals would wander around, look at the trees and fish. By the third week he would be getting a tan, reading, repairing the sheds and climbing ihountains. At the end of four weeks, he could hardly wait to get back to the city. But the resting week was sacred. "I really wouldn't bother you for anything small," Conners said apologetically. "But that damned rock melted two inches off my spade." Micheals opened both eyes and sat up. Conners held out the spade. The rounded end was sheared cleanly off. Micheals swung himself off the couch and slipped his feet into battered moccasins. "Let's see this wonder," he said. T HE object was lying in the ditch at the end of the front lawn, three feet from the main road. It was round, about the size of a truck tire, and solid throughout. It was about an inch thick, as far as he could tell, grayish black and intricately veined. "Oon't touch it," Conners warned. "I'm not going to. Let me have your spade." Micheals took the spade and prodded the object experimentally. It was completely unyielding. He held the spade to the surface for a moment, then withdrew it. Another inch was gone. Micheals frowned, and pushed his glasses tighter against his nose. He held the spade against the rock with one hand, the other held close to the surface. More of the spade disappeared. "Doesn't seem to be generating heat," he said to Conners. "Did you notice any the first time?" Conners shook his head. Micheals picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it on the object. The dirt dissolved quickly, leaving no trace on the gray-black surface. A large stone followed the dirt, and disappeared in the same way. "Isn't that just about the damnedest thing you ever saw, Professor?" Conners asked. "Yes," Micheals agreed, standing up again. "It just about is." He hefted the spade and brought it down smartly on the object. When it hit, he almost dropped the spade. He had been gripping the handle rigidly, braced for a recoil. But the spade struck that unyielding surface and stayed. There was no perceptible give, but absolutely no recoil. "Whatcha think it is?" Conners asked. "It's no stone," Micheals said. He stepped back. "A leech drinks blood. This thing seems to be drinking dirt. And spades." He struck it a few more times, experimentally. The two men looked at each other. On the road, half a dozen Army trucks rolled past. "I'm going to phone the college and ask a physics man about it," Micheals said. "Or a biologist. I'd like to get rid of thatthing before it spoils my lawn." They walked back to the house. E verything fed the leech. The wind added its modicum of kinetic energy, ruffling across the gray-black surface. Rain fell, and the force of each individual drop added to its store. The water was sucked in by the all-absorbing surface. The sunlight above it was absorbed, and converted into mass for its body. Beneath it, the soil was consumed, dirt, stones and branches broken down by the leech's complex cells and changed into energy. Energy was converted back into mass, and the leech grew. Slowly, the first flickers of consciousness began to return. Its first realization was of the impossible smallness of its body. It grew. When Micheals looked the next day, the leech was eight feet across, sticking out into the road and up the side of the lawn. The following day it was almost eighteen feet in diameter, shaped to fit the contour of the ditch, and covering most of the road. That day the sheriff drove up in his model A, followed by half the town. "Is that your leech thing, Professor Micheals?" Sheriff Flynn asked. "That's it," Micheals said. He had spent the past days looking unsuccessfully for an acid that would dissolve the leech. "We gotta get it out of the road," Flynn said, walking truculently up to the leech. "Something like this, you can't let it block the road, Professor. The Army's gotta use this road." "I'm terribly sorry," Micheals said with a straight face. "Go right ahead, Sheriff. But be careful. It's hot." The leech wasn't hot, but it seemed the simplest explanation under the circumstances. Micheals watched with interest as the sheriff tried to shove a crowbar under it. He smiled to himself when it was removed with half a foot of its length gone. The sheriff wasn't so easily discouraged. He had come prepared for a stubborn piece of rock. He went to the rumble seat of his car and took out a blowtorch and a sledgehammer, ignited the torch and focused it on one edge of the leech. After five minutes, there was no change. The gray didn't turn red or even seem to heat up. Sheriff Flynn continued to bake it for fifteen minutes, then called to one of the men. "Hit that spot with the sledge, Jerry." Jerry picked up the sledgehammer, motioned the sheriff back, and swung it over his head. He let out a howl as the hammer struck unyieldingly. There wasn't a fraction of recoil. In the distance they heard the roar of an Army convoy. "Now we'll get some action," Flynn said. walked around the periphery of the leech, asking himself what kind of substance would react that way. The answer was easy -- no substance. No known substance. The driver in the lead jeep held up his hand, and the long convoy ground to a halt. A hard, efficient-looking officer stepped out of the jeep. From the star on either shoulder, Micheals knew he was a brigadier general. "You can't block this road," the general said. He was a tall, spare man in suntans, with a sunburned face and cold eyes. "Please clear that thing away." "We can't move it," Micheals said. He told the general what had happened in the past few days. "It must be moved," the general said. "This convoy must go through." He walked closer and looked at the leech. "You say it can't be jacked up by a crowbar? A torch wpn't burn it?" "That's right," Micheals said, smiling faintly. "Driver," the general said over his shoulder. "Ride over it." Micheals started to protest, but stopped himself. The military mind would have to find out in its own way. The driver put his jeep in gear and shot forward, jumping the leech's four-inch edge. The jeep got to the center of the leech and stopped. "I didn't tell you to stop!" the general bellowed. "I didn't, sir!" the driver protested. The jeep had been yanked to a stop and had stalled. The driver started it again, shifted to fourwheel drive, and tried to ram forward. The jeep was fixed immovably, as though set in concrete. "Pardon me," Micheals said. "If you look, you can see that the tires are melting down." The general stared, his hand creeping automatically toward his pistol belt. Then he shouted, "Jump, driver! Don't touch that gray stuff." White-faced, the driver climbed to the hood of his jeep, looked around him, and jumped clear. There was complete silence as everyone watched the jeep. First its tires melted down, and then the rims. The body, resting on the gray surface, melted, too. The aerial was the last to go. The general began to swear softly under his breath. He turned no to the driver. "Go back and have some men bring up hand grenades and dynamite." The driver ran back to the convoy. "I don't know what you've got here," the general said. "But it's not going to stop a U.S. Army convoy." Micheals wasn't so sure. T HE leech was nearly awake now, and its body was calling for more and more food. It dissolved the soil under it at a furibody, flowing outward. A large object landed on it, and that became food also. Then suddenly -- A burst of energy against its surface, and then another, and another. It consumed them gratefully, converting them into mass. Little metal pellets struck it, and their kinetic energy was absorbed, their mass converted. More explosions took place, helping to fill the starving cells. It began to sense things -- controlled combustion around it, vibrations of wind, mass movements. There was another, greater explosion, a taste of real food! Greedily it ate, growing faster. It waited anxiously for more explosions, while its cells screamed for food. But no more came. It continued to feed on the soil and on the Sun's energy. Night came, noticeable for its lesser energy possibilities, and then more days and nights. Vibrating objects continued to move around it. It ate and grew and flowed. M ichaels stood on a little hill, watching the dissolution of his house. The leech was several hundred yards across now, lapping at his front porch. Good-by, home, Micheals thought, remembering the ten summers he had spent there. The porch collapsed into the body of the leech. Bit by bit, the house crumpled. The leech looked like a field of lava now, a blasted spot on the green Earth. "Pardon me, sir," a soldier said, coming up behind him. "General O'Donnell would like to see you." "Right," Micheals said, and took his last look at the house. He followed the soldier through the barbed wire that had been set up in a half-mile circle around the leech. A company of soldiers was on guard around it, keeping back the reporters and the hundreds of curious people who had flocked to the scene. Micheals wondered why he was still allowed inside. Probably, he decided, because most of this was taking place on his land. The soldier brought him to a tent. Micheals stooped and went in. General O'Donnell, still in suntans, was seated at a small desk. He motioned Micheals to a chair. "I've been put in charge of getting rid of this leech," he said to Micheals. Micheals nodded, not commenting on the advisability of giving a soldier a scientist's job. "You're a professor, aren't you?" "Yes. Anthropology." "Good. Smoke?" The general lighted Micheals' cigarette. "I'd like you to stay around here in an advisory capacity. You were one of the first to see this leech. I'd appreciate your observations on -- " he smiled -- "the enemy." "I'# be glad to," Micheals said. "However, I think this is more in the line of a physicist or a biochemist." "I don't want this place cluttered with scientists," General O'Donnell said, frowning at the tip of his cigarette. "Don't get me wrong. I have the greatest appreciation for science. I am, if I do say so, a scientific soldier. I'm always interested in the latest weapons. You can't fight any kind of a war any more without science." grew firm. "But I can't have a team of longhairs poking around this thing for the next month, holding me up. My job is to destroy it, by any means in my power, and at once. I am going to do just that." "I don't think you'll find it that easy," Micheals said. "That's what I want you for," O'Donnell said. "Tell me why and I'll figure out a way of doing it." "Well, as far as I can figure out, the leech is an organic massenergy converter, and a frighteningly efficient one. I would guess that it has a double cycle. First, it converts mass into energy, then back into mass for its body. Second, energy is converted directly into the body mass. How this takes place, I do not know. The leech is not protoplasmic. It may not even be cellular -- " "So we need something big against it," O'Donnell interrupted. "Well, that's all right. I've got some big stuff here." "I don't think you understand me," Micheals said. "Perhaps I'm not phrasing this very well. The leech eats energy. It can consume the strength of any energy weapon you use against it." "What happens," O'Donnell asked, "if it keeps on eating?" "I have no idea what its growth-limits are," Micheals said. "Its growth may be limited only by its food source." "You mean it could continue to grow probably forever?" "It could possibly grow as long as it had something to feed on." "This is really a challenge," O'Donnell said. "That leech can't be totally impervious to force." "It seems to be. I suggest you get some physicists in here. Some biologists also. Have them figure out a way of nullifying it." The general put out his cigarette. "Professor, I cannot wait while scientists wrangle. There is an axiom of mine which I am going to tell you." He paused impressively. "Nothing is impervious to force. Muster enough force and anything will give. Anything. "Professor," the general continued, in a friendlier tone, "you shouldn't sell short the science you represent. We have, massed under North Hill, the greatest accumulation of energy and radioactive weapons ever assembled in one spot. Do you think your leech can stand the full force of them?" "I suppose it's possible to overload the thing," Micheals said doubtfully. He realized now why the general wanted him around. He supplied the trappings of science, without the authority to override O'Donnell. "Come with me," General O'Donnell said cheerfully, getting up and holding back a flap of the tent. "We're going to crack that leech in half." started to come again, piped into one side of it. First there was only a little, and then more and more. Radiations, vibrations, explosions, solids, liquids -- an amazing variety of edibles. It accepted them all. But the food was coming too slowly for the starving cells, for new cells were constantly adding their demands to the rest. The ever-hungry body screamed for more food, faster! Now that it had reached a fairly efficient size, it was fully awake. It puzzled over the energy-impressions around it, locating the source of the new food massed in one spot. Effortlessly it pushed itself into the air, flew a little way and dropped on the food. Its superefficient cells eagerly gulped the rich radioactive substances. But it did not ignore the lesser potentials of metal and clumps of carbohydrates. "tiiHE damned fools," General O'Donnell said. "Why did they have to panic? You'd think they'd never been trained." He paced the ground outside his tent, now in a new location three miles back. The leech had grown to two miles in diameter. Three farming communities had been evacuated. Micheals, standing beside the th leech general, was still stupefied by the memory. The leech had accepted the massed power of the weapons for a while, and then its entire bulk had lifted in the air. The Sun had been blotted out as it flew leisurely over North Hill, and dropped. There should have been time for evacuation, but the frightened soldiers had been blind with fear. Sixty-seven men were lost in Operation Leech, and General O'Donnell asked permission to use atomic bombs. Washington sent a group of scientists to investigate the situation. "Haven't those experts decided yet?" O'Donnell asked, halting angrily in front of the tent. "They've been talking long enoigh." "It's a hard decision," Micheals said. Since he wasn't an official member of the investigating team, he had given his information and left. "The physicists consider it a biological matter, and the biologists seem to think the chemists should have the answer. No one's an expert on this, because it's never happened before. We just don't have the data." "It's a military problem," O'Donnell said harshly. "I'm not interested in what the thing is -- I want to know what can destroy it. They'd better give me permis sion to use the bomb." Micheals had made his own calculations on that. It was impossible to say for sure, but taking a flying guess at the leech's mass-energy absorption rate, figuring in its size" and apparent capacity for growth, an atomic bomb might overload it -- if used soon enough. He estimated three days as the limit of usefulness. The leech was growing at a geometric rate. It could cover the United States in a few months. "For a week I've been asking permission to use the bomb," O'Donnell grumbled. "And I'll get it, but not until after those jackasses end their damned talking." He stopped pacing and turned to Micheals. "I am going to destroy the leech. I am going to smash it, if that's the last thing I do. It's more than a matter of security now. It's personal pride." That attitude might make great generals, Micheals thought, but it wasn't the way to consider this problem. It was anthropomorphic of O'Donnell to see the leech as an enemy. Even the identification, "leech," was a humanizing factor. O'Donnell was dealing with it as he would any physical obstacle, as though the leech were the simple equivalent of a large army. But the leech was not human, not even of this planet, perhaps. It should be dealt with in its own terms. "Here come the bright boys now," O'Donnell said. weary men emerged, led by Allenson, a government biologist. "Well," the general asked, "have you figured out what it is?" "Just a minute, I'll hack off a sample," Allenson said, glaring through red-rimmed eyes. "Have you figured out some "Oh, that wasn't too difficult," Moriarty, an atomic physicist, said wryly. "Wrap it in a perfect vacuum. That'll do the trick. Or blow it off the Earth with antigravity." "But failing that," Allenson said, "we suggest you use your atomic bombs, and use them fast." "Is that the opinion of your entire group?" O'Donnell asked, his eyes glittering. "Yes." The general hurried away. Micheals joined the scientists. "He should have called us in at the very first," Allenson complained. "There's no time to consider anything but force now." "Have you come to any conclusions about the nature of the leech?" Micheals asked. "Only general ones," Moriarty said, "and they're about the same as yours. The leech is probably extraterrestrial in origin.It seems to have been in a spore-stage until it landed on Earth." He paused to light a pipe. "Incidentally, we should be damned glad it didn't drop in an ocean. We'd have had the Earth eaten out from under us before we knew what we were looking for." They walked in silence for a few minutes. "As you mentioned, it's a perfect converter -- it can transform mass into energy, and any energy into mass." Moriarty grinned. "Naturally that's impossible and I have figures to prove it." "I'm going to get a drink," Allenson said. "Anyone coming?" "Best idea of the week," Micheals said. "I wonder how long it'll take O'Donnell to get permission to use the bomb." "If I know politics," Moriarty said, "too long." T HE findings of the government scientists were checked by other government scientists. That took a few days. Then Washington wanted to know if there wasn't some alternative to exploding an atomic bomb in the middle of New York State. It took a little time to convince them of the necessity. After that, people had to be evacuated, which took more time. Then orders were made out, and five atomic bombs were checked out of a cache. A patrol rocket was assigned, given orders, and put under General O'Donnell's command. This took a day more. Finally, the stubby scout rocket was winging its way over New York. From the air, the grayish black spot was easy to find. Like a festered wound, it stretched between Lake Placid and Elizabethtown, covering Keene and Keene Valley, and lapping at the edges of Jay. The first bomb was released. The next doses were wonderfully palatable, easily handled. The leech overflowed its bounds, growing, eating, and growing. That was a taste of real food! The leech was as near ecstasy as it had ever been. It waited hopefully for more, but no more came. It went back to feeding on the Earth. The energy, used to produce more cells, was soon dissipated. Soon it was hungry again. It would always be hungry. I T had been a long wait after the first rich food. The greater radiation of day was followed by the lesser energy of night many times, as the leech ate away the Earth beneath it, absorbed the air around it, and grew. Then one day -- An amazing burst of energy! Everything was food for the leech, but there was always the possibility of choking. The energy poured over it, drenched it, battered it, and the leech grew frantically, trying to contain the titanic dose. Still small, it quickly reached its overload limit. The strained cells, filled to satiation, were given more and more food. The strangling body built new cells at lightning speed. And -- It held. The energy was controlled, stimulating further growth. More cells took over the load, sucking in the food. his demoralized men. They camped ten miles from the leech's southern edge, in the evacuated town of Schroon Lake. The leech was over sixty miles in diameter now and still growing fast. It lay sprawled over the Adirondack Mountains, completely blanketing everything from Saranac Lake to Port Henry, with one edge of it over Westport, in Lake Champlain. Everyone within two hundred miles of the leech was evacuated. General O'Donnell was given permission to use hydrogen bombs, contingent on the approval of his scientists. "What have the bright boys decided?" O'Donnell wanted to know. He and Micheals were in the living room of an evacuated Schroon Lake house. O'Donnell had made it his new command post. "Why are they hedging?" O'Donnell demanded impatiently. "The leech has to be blown up quick. What are they fooling around for?" "They're afraid of a chain reaction," Micheals told him. "A concentration of hydrogen bombs might set one up in the Earth's crust or in the atmosphere. It might do any of half a dozen things." "Perhaps they'd like me to order a bayonet attack," O'Donnell said contemptuously. Micheals sighed and sat down in an armchair. He was convinced that the whole method was wrong. The government scientists were being rushed into a single line of inquiry. The pressure on them was so great that they didn't have a chance to consider any other approach but force -- and the leech thrived on that. Micheals was certain that there were times when fighting fire with fire was not applicable. Fire. Loki, god of fire. And of trickery. No, there was no answer there. But Micheals' mind was in mythology now, retreating from the unbearable present. Allenson came in, followed by six other men. "Well," Allenson said, "there's a damned good chance of splitting the Earth wide open if you use the number of bombs our figures show you need." "You have to take chances in war," O'Donnell replied bluntly. "Shall I go ahead?" Micheals saw, suddenly, that O'Donnell didn't care if he did crack the Earth. The red-faced general only knew that he was going to set off the greatest explosion ever produced by the hand of Man. "Not so fast," Allenson said. "I'll let the others speak for themselves." The general contained himself with difficulty. "Remember," he said, "according to your own figures, the leech is growing at the rate of twenty feet an hour." "And speeding up," Allenson added. "But this isn't a decision to be made in haste." Micheals found his mind wandering again, to the lightning bolts of Zeus. That was what they needed. Or the strength of Hercules. Or -- He sat up suddenly. "Gentlemen, I believe I can offer you a possible alternative, although it's a very dim one." They stared at him. "Have you ever heard of Antaeus?" he asked. npHE more the leech ate, the faster it grew and the hungrier it became. Although its birth was forgotten, it did remember a long way back. It had eaten a planet in that ancient past. Grown tremendous, ravenous, it had made the journey to a nearby star and eaten that, replenishing the cells converted into energy for the trip. But then there was no more food, and the next star was an enormous distance away. It set out on the journey, but long before it reached the food, its energy ran out. Mass, converted back to energy to make the trip, was used up. It shrank. Finally, all the energy was gone. It was a. spore, drifting aimlessly, lifelessly, in space. That was the first time. Or was it? It thought it could remember back to a distant, misty time when the Universe was evenly covered with stars. It had eaten through them, cutting away whole sections, growing, swelling. And the stars had swung off in terror, forming galaxies and constellations. Or was that a dream? Methodically, it fed on the Earth, wondering where the rich food was. And then it was back again, but this time above the leech. It waited, but the tantalizing food remained out of reach. It was able to sense how rich and pure the food was. Why didn't it fall? For a long time the leech waited, but the food stayed out of reach. At last, it lifted and followed. The food retreated, up, up from the surface of the planet. The leech went after as quickly as its bulk would allow. The rich food fled out, into space, and the leech followed. Beyond, it could sense an even richer source. The hot, wonderful food of a sun! pagne for the scientists in the control room. Official dinners would follow, but this was the victory celebration. "A toast," the general said, standing. The men raised their glasses. The only man not drinking was a lieutenant, sitting in front of the control board that guided the drone spaceship. "To Micheals, for thinking of -- what was it again, Micheals?" "Antaeus." Michaels had been drinking champagne steadily, but he didn't feel elated. Antaeus, born of Ge, the Earth, and Poseidon, the Sea. The invincible wrestler. Each time Hercules threw him to the ground, he arose refreshed. Until Hercules held him in the air. Moriarty was muttering to himself, figuring with slide rule, pencil and paper. Allenson was drinking, but he didn't look too happy about it. "Come on, you birds of evil omen," O'Donnell said, pouring more champagne. "Figure it out later. Right now, drink." He turned to the operator. "How's it going?" Micheals' analogy had been applied to a spaceship. The ship, operated by remote control, was filled with pure radioactives. It hovered over the leech until, rising to the bait, it had followed. Antaeus had left his mother, the Earth, and was losing his strength in the air. The operator was allowing the spaceship to run fast enough to keep out of the leech's grasp, but close enough to keep it coming. The spaceship and the leech were on a collision course with the Sun. "Fine, sir," the operator said. "It's inside the orbit of Mercury now."  "Men," the general said, "I swore to destroy that thing. This isn't exactly the way I wanted to do it. I figured on a more personal way. But the important thing is the destruction. You will all witness it. Destruction is at times a sacred mission. This is such a time. Men, I feel wonderful." "Turn the spaceship!" It was Moriarty who had spoken. His face was white. "Turn the damned thing!" He shoved his figures at them. They were easy to read. The growth-rate of the leech. The energyconsumption rate, estimated. Its speed in space, a constant. The energy it would receive from the Sun as it approached, an exponential curve. Its energy-absorption rate, figured in terms of growth, expressed as a hyped-up discontinuous progression. The result -- "It'll consume the Sun," Moriarty said, very quietly. The control room turned into a bedlam. Six of them tried to explain it to O'Donnell at the same time. Then Moriarty tried, and finally Allenson. "Its rate of growth is so great and its speed so slow -- and it will get so much energy -- that the leech will be able to consume the Sun by the time it gets there. Or, at least, to live off it until it can consume it." O'Donnell didn't bother to understand. He turned to the operator. "Turn it," he said. They all hovered over the radar screen, waiting. T HE food turned out of the leech's path and streaked away. Ahead was a tremendous source, but still a long way off. The leech hesitated. Its cells, recklessly expending energy, shouted for a decision. The food slowed, tantalizingly near. The closer source or the greater ? The leech's body wanted food now. It started after it, away from the Sun. The Sun would come next. the plane of the Solar System," Allenson said. The operator touched the controls. On the radar screen, they saw a blob pursuing a dot. It had turned. Relief washed over them. It had been close! "Ill what portion of the sky would the leech be?" O'Donnell asked, his face expressionless. "Come outside; I believe I can show you," an astronomer said. They walked to the door. "Somewhere in that section," the astronomer said, pointing. "Fine. All right, Soldier," O'Donnell told the operator. "Carry out your orders." The scientists gasped in unison. The operator manipulated the controls and the blob began to overtake the dot. Micheals started across the room. "Stop," the general said, and his strong, commanding voice stopped Micheals. "I know what I'm doing. I had that ship especially built." The blot overtook the dot on the radar screen. "I told you this was a personal matter," O'Donnell said. "I swore to destroy that leech. We can never have any security while it lives." He smiled. "Shall we look at the sky?" The general strolled to the door, followed by the scientists. "Push the button, Soldier!" The operator did. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the sky lit up! A bright star hung in space. grew, and started to fade. "What did you do?" Micheals gasped. "That rocket was built around a hydrogen bomb," O'Donnell said, his strong face triumphant. "I set it off at the contact moment." He called to the Operator again. "Is there anything showing on the radar?" "Not a speck, sir." "Men," the general said, "I have met the enemy and he is mine. Let's have some more champagne." But Micheals found that he was suddenly ill. I T had been shrinking from the expenditure of energy, when the great explosion came. No thought of containing it. The leech's cells held for the barest fraction of a second, and then spontaneously overloaded. The leech was smashed, broken up, destroyed. It was split into a thousand particles, and the parmore. The particles were thrown out on the wave front of the explosion, and they split further, spontaneously. Into spores. The spores closed into dry, hard, seemingly lifeless specks of drifting. Unconscious, they floated in the emptiness of space. fed. Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:S# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. New York #, New York (Phono GRomercy #-#) Now here's a problem -- how to tell you about the second installment of spoiling the story. If you've read the first one-third, you now have on your hands a prize collection of baffling jigsaw pieces. All it's possible to assure you of is that they do fit together to form an ingenious and satisfying serial. If you enjoy working out puzzles, you might try outguessing Simak... but I'll bet a half-price can't do it. In supporting position are two muscular novelets: offers a military situation that is astonishing in just about every possible way. How? Well, it involves a terrified citizenry with nothing to fear, intelligence officers who cannot lie and never tell the truth, soldiers who can't die and yet have no desire to fight... brings up a problem that would drive a psychiatrist insane... if he believed it. Short stories, features -- and don't forget to send your science questions to Willy Ley. They'll be answered in his monthly department, by mail or ever way they'll be answered, you'll be notified in advance. Give What # African primitive masks cast in plastic -- originally carved in wood. These masks were used by the Bon and Gouro Tribes of the Ivory Coast during ancestral rites and dances. (A) Top: ebony rusk and beige, height #" overall -- # (B) Left: hand rubbed ebony finish, height #y # " overall -- # (C) Right: rubbed ebony finish, height #" overall -- #  Paul Frank I, eminent designer, provided us with the original wood carving. The policeman has all the pomposity of Colonial officialdom the world over, we've carved him of hardwood and exactly imitated the aged finish and faded black, pumpkin and white paint of the original. Mounted on limed ash. Height: #Vi" Shade: Handmade of grass matting laminated. Trimmed with deep pumpkin-color grosgrain ribbon. #" top, #' I bottom, #" depth. # # Choice of four different designs: A. Upland Game Birds. B. Ducks and Geese. C. Freshwater Fish. D. Saltwater Fish Overall s iso # x #. These aro beautiful fullcolored lithographs by Len Bogun Hunt. Lluuor proof baked black enamel on a metal base with concealed hanger. Price # each. You'd Like To Get. m Your favorite chef will beam with joy over  the most practical carving, slicing, chopping and cutting board we know. A drawer keeps his implements always at hand. Solid, natural rock maple l V#" thick. Perfect indoors or out. A. With drawer. #V # " x # Vi" x #" -- J # B. With drawer, #" x ll # " x #" -- # hand-carved hardwood with a gold leaf finish (A). This barometer is a faithful reproduction catching the gay era elegance of works are fine ones imported from Germany.  The antique face has been faithfully reproduced. This barometer is also available in carved oak with a limed finish (B). #V' long #" wide. Specify A or B finish. Price # # Hudson St, New York #, New York I  #     Nune # D D D # fl I I Address .  A B C D A B  City. Zone... State...'. A # Q Total Check --  -- by Francis Stevens. Polaris Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # month, our best book is a "classic." This handsomely printed limited edition, first in what is to be known as the Polaris Fantasy Library, and available from the publisher only and not through bookstores, presents perhaps the first science fantasy to use the alternate time-track, or parallel worlds, idea. It was first published in # in an early Street # Smith pulp. Even more interesting is the fact that "Francis Stevens" was actually a woman writer by the name of Gertrude Bennett who was born in # and who literally disappeared in #. She took up writing to support herself and her infant daughter after her husband had been drowned in a tropical storm. Despite its age and its amateur origins, The Heads of Cerberus is still readable and remarkably pointed. The book one can most closely compare it to is Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe. It tells of an alternate-world Philadelphia, reached by a handful of this-world people through some semi-black-magic nonsense that is no more unscientific than a time machine. This Philadelphia is one in which the political corrupters of the #s have become ruthless autocrats, ruling through phony "civic service" competitions which result in a cynically brutal enslavement of the people. The come, under the organizational label of "Penn Service," the very fountainhead of cruel, dictatorial, viciously depraved government. Despite a good deal of pseudomystical mumbo-jumbo, this is definitely a classic worth preserving -- and, unlike many classics, also fun to read. Viking Press, New York, #. # pages, #I plates and # diagrams, # I N this book Professor Gamow has brought together many of the current theories on the origins of the universe, our galaxy, and our sun and planets. He has woven from them a fascinating picture of one of the several possible ways whereby primordial matter-energy could have been transformed into the visible and invisible universe as we know and deduce it. It is science fiction of the highest order: science fiction based on sound science, on logical deductions from scientific facts, and on some almost poetic extrascientific -- not non-scientific -- assumptions. Essentially Professor Gamow is a relativist. He believes, also, in a cosmic beginning as opposed to the steady-state universe that Fred Hoyle and others suggest. To Gamow, the expanding universe is a logical deduction from available evidence. Most of the way through the book, one fears that the author has pulled the Lucretian boner: "From unity to infinity;" but in the very last section he postulates "the cornucopia open at both ends," and is saved from the great philosophical blunder. Many people today are looking for certitudes that science cannot offer; Gamow makes no compromises for these folk. His is a strictly material universe, and -- despite many unprovable assumptions -- a universe that is basically understandable. It has very little room for the mystic or the spiritual. However, the author does accept certain theories, such as the idea that the Moon was torn out of the Pacific basin after the actual formation of the Earth, that are far from accepted even by the more liberal cosmogonists. In other words, this volume is not the Compleat Answer. But within its limitations, it is a lucid, lively and literate popularization of an ever-exciting subject -- Where We Came from and Are Going. Julian Messner, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # Rinehart  Co., New York, #. # pages, # W E are confronted with two widely differing novels which have one curious new scientific gimmick in common. The gimmick is parthenogenesis, or the creation by women alone of haploid, or half-chromosomed, people without the aid of males. Perhaps the idea itself, though scientifically sound as regards certain one-celled creatures, is poor when it comes to humans; in any event, it has produced two poor books. Of the two, I prefer Sohl's, for it is at least unpretentious. It tells of a tribe of horrid haploid females who set out to eliminate men by means of a ray that attacks the Y chromosomes found only in the male sex and bumps off their owners. There's the usual mad scientist (female, for a change), the cutfrom-cardboard heroine who has been fooled into thinking that she's haploid whereas (of course) she really has all her genetic marbles and can reproduce her kind, and the reporter-hero, Model #C#-ffrom the stock catalog. The book may amuse you for an hour or so. It did me, and maybe that's enough. Eidolon, on the other hand, by the ex-publisher of the New York Post and the Philadelphia Record , is anything but entertaining. The story of a lone haploid superman, it is one of the most interminable bores I have ever tried to burrow through. One-twentieth "science" "fiction," and nineteen-twentieths verbose promotion of its author's sick conglomeration of ideas for saving the world, defeating Communism, bringing science and religion together, and elevating the masses, the book ends up by infuriating the reader so thoroughly that he completely loses the values of its "elevating ideas" in the wallow of its forever unwinding declamations. The "science spiked by suspense" referred to on the jacket is -- believe it or not -- a solemnfaced replica of the original Virgin Birth! The hero's mother, in a sublime effort to reconcile the facts of science and the mysteries of religion, retires to an attic for two weeks of contemplation and comes down pregnant. Sho nuff, it's our haploid hero, and this proves to everyone's satisf action the mastery of Mind over Matter and the invincible superiority of superstition over science. The book is absolutely sincere. Somehow that makes it all the worse. Don't fail to miss it. J. Slater. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, #. # pages, # ample of the current output of non-professional British science fiction, of which there is a surprising lot. It has a reasonably real group of characters -- engaged in total implausible actions in a setting that has practically no science fiction validity. It is not badly written, but is nevertheless almost endlessly repetitive. It has some imagination, yet deals inadequately with a very ancient theme much better handled by such earlier Britons as Wright and Shiel -- the catastrophic subsidence of all the Earth's land masses and the survival of a small group of people, mainly British, to "carry on" on the newly risen continents. Shades of Deluge and The Purple Cloud? Very much so. The action takes place on a luxury liner, one of two vessels that, as far as can be ascertained, are the only objects other than water that remained on the surface of the Earth after the Cataclysm. What drama there is (which is slight indeed) is whipped up over the attempts at adjustment and reorganization of the people remaining. The reorganization is handled in a typically Britishship's officers' fashion -- "the manly thing," "do what's decent," "sisters under the skin," and so on. A second ship is dragged in for suspense, but succeeds in adding only a pretty fair description of a sinking. There is no science in the book, and precious little acceptable fiction. A pretty bad month. Thank heaven for Stevens and Gamow! lifetimes had to be extended! could trace his present mood to Miller's suicide last week. But the knowledge didn't help him get rid of the vague, formless fear in the back of his mind. It was foolish. Miller's suicide didn't concern him. But why had that fat, jovial man killed himself? Miller had had everything to live for -- wife, kids, good job, and all the marvelous luxuries of the age. Why had he done it? "Good morning, dear," Carrin's wife said as he sat down at the breakfast table. "Morning, honey. Morning, Billy." His son grunted something. You just couldn't tell about people, Carrin decided, and dialed his breakfast. The meal was gracefully prepared and served by the new Avignon Electric Auto-cook. His mood persisted, annoyingly enough since Carrin wanted to be in top form this morning. It was his day off, and the Avignon Electric finance man was coming. This was an important day. He walked to the door with his son. "Have a good day, Billy." His son podded, shifted his books and started to school without answering. Carrin wondered if something was bothering him, too. He hoped not. One worrier in the family was plenty. "See you later, honey." He kissed his wife as she left to go shopping. At any rate, he thought, watching her go down the walk, at least she's happy. He wondered how much she'd spend at the A. E. store. Checking his watch, he found that he had half an hour before the A. E. finance man was due. The best way to get rid of a bad mood was to drown it, he told himself, and headed for the shower. THE shower room was a glitter ing plastic wonder, and the sheer luxury of it eased Carrin's mind. He threw his clothes into the A. E. automatic Kleen-presser, and adjusted the shower spray to a notch above "brisk." The five degreesaboveskintemperature water beat against his thin white body. Delightful! And then a relaxing rub-dry in the A. E. Auto-towel. Wonderful, he thought, as the towel stretched and kneaded his stringy muscles. And it should be wonderful, he reminded himself. The A. E. Auto-towel with shaving attachments had cost three hundred and thirteen dollars, plus tax. But worth every penny of it, he decided, as the A. E. shaver came out of a corner and whisked off his rudimentary stubble. After all, what good was life if you couldn't enjoy the luxuries? His skin tingled when he switched off the Autotowel. He should have been feeling wonderful, but he wasn't. Miller's suicide kept nagging at his mind, destroying the peace of his day off. Was there anything else bothering him? Certainly there was nothing wrong with the house. His papers were in order for the finance man. "Have I forgotten something?" he asked out loud. "The Avignon Electric finance man will be here in fifteen minutes," his A. E. bathroom Wallreminder whispered. "I know that. Is there anything else?" The Wall-reminder reeled off its memorized data -- a vast amount of minutiae about watering the lawn, having the Jet-lash checked, buying lamb chops for Monday, and the like. Things he still hadn't found time for. "All right, that's enough." He allowed the A. E. Auto-dresser to dress him, skillfully draping a new selection of fabrics over his bony frame. A whiff of fashionable masculine perfume finished him and he went into the living room, threading his way between the appliances that lined the walls. A quick inspection of the dials onthe wall assured him that the house was in order. The breakfast dishes had been sanitized and stacked, the house had been cleaned, dusted, polished, his wife's garments had been hung up, his son's model rocket ships had been put back in the closet. Stop worrying, you hypochondriac, he told himself angrily. The door announced, "Mr. Pathis from Avignon Finance is here," Carrin started to tell the door to open, when he noticed the Automatic Bartender. Good God, why hadn't he thought of it! The Automatic Bartender was manufactured by Castile Motors. He had bought it in a weak moment. A. E. wouldn't think very highly of that, since they sold their own brand. H E wheeled the bartender into the kitchen, and told the door to open. "A very good day to you, sir," Mr. Pathis said. Pathis was a tall, imposing man, dressed in a conservative tweed drape. His eyes had the crinkled corners of a man who laughs frequently. He beamed broadly and shook Carrin's hand, looking around the crowded living room. "A beautiful place you have here, sir. Beautiful! As a matter of fact, I don't think I'll be overstepping the company's code to inform you that yours is the nicest interior in this section." Carrin felt a sudden glow of pride at that, thinking of the rows of identical houses, on this block and the next, and the one after that. "Now, then, is everything functioning properly?" Mr. Pathis asked, setting his briefcase on a chair. "Everything in order?" "Oh, yes," Carrin said enthusiastically. "Avignon Electric never goes out of whack." "The phone all right? Changes records for the full seventeen hours?" "It certainly does," Carrin said. He hadn't had a chance to try out the phone, but it was a beautiful piece of furniture. "The Solido-projector all right? Enjoying the programs?" # "Absolutely perfect reception." He had watched a program just last month, and it had been startlingly lifelike. "How about the kitchen? Auto-cook in order? Recipe-master still knocking 'em out?" "Marvelous stuff. Simply marvelous." , Mr. Pathis went on to inquire about his refrigerator, his vacuum cleaner, his car, his helicopter, his subterranean swimming pool, and the hundreds of other items Carrin had bought from Avignon Electric. "Everything is swell," Carrin said, a trifle untruthfully since he hadn't unpacked every item yet. "Just wonderful." "I'm so glad," Mr. Pathis said, leaning back with a sigh of relief. "You have no idea how hard we try to satisfy our customers. If a product isn't right, back it comes, no questions asked. We believe in pleasing our customers." "I certainly appreciate it, Mr. Pathis." wouldn't ask to see the kitchen. He visualized the Castile Motors Bartender in there, like a porcupine in a dog show. "I'm proud to say that most of the people in this neighborhood buy from us," Mr. Pathis was saying. "We're a solid firm." "Was Mr. Miller a customer of yours?" Carrin asked. "That fellow who killed himself?" Pathis frowned briefly. "He was, as a matter of fact. That amazed me, sir, absolutely amazed me. Why, just last month the fellow bought a brand-new Jet-lash from me, capable of doing three hundred and fifty miles an hour on a straightaway. He was as happy as a kid over it, and then to go and do a thing like that! Of course, the Jet-lash brought up his debt a little." "Of course." "But what did that matter? He had every luxury in the world. And then he went and hung himself.'? "Hung himself?" "Yes," Pathis said, the frown coming back. "Every modern convenience in his house, and he hung himself with a piece of rope. Probably unbalanced for a long time." The frown slid off his face, and the customary smile replaced it. "But enough of that! Let's talk about you." The smile widened as Pathis opened his briefcase. "Now, then, your account. You owe .us two hundred and three thousand dollars and twenty-nine cents, Mr. Carrin, as of your last purchase. Right?" "Right," Carrin said, remembering the amount from his own papers. "Here's my installment." He handed Pathis an envelope, which the man checked and put in his pocket. "Fine. Now you know, Mr. Carrin, that you won't live long enough to pay us the full two hundred thousand, don't you?" "No, I don't suppose I will," Carrin said soberly. He was only thirty-nine, with a full hundred years of life before him, thanks to the marvels of medical science. But at a salary of three thousand a year, he still couldn't pay it all off and have enough to support a family on at the same time. "Of course, we would not want to deprive you of necessities, which in any case is fully protected by the laws we helped formulate and pass. To say nothing of the terrific items that are coming out next year. Things you wouldn't want to miss, sir!" Mr. Carrin nodded. Certainly he wanted new items. "Well, suppose we make the customary arrangement. If you will just sign over your son's earnings for the first thirty years of his adult life, we can easily arrange credit for you." M R. Pathis whipped the papers out of his briefcase and spread them in front of Carrin. "If you'll just sign here, sir." "Well," Carrin said, "I'm not sure. I'd like to give the boy a start in life, not saddle him with -- " "But my dear sir," Pathis interposed, "this is for your son as well. He lives here, doesn't he? He has a right to enjoy the luxuries, the marvels of science." "Sure," Carrin said. "Only -- " "Why, sir, today the average man is living like a king. A hundred years ago the richest man in the world couldn't buy what any ordinary citizen possesses at present. You mustn't look upon it as a debt. It's an investment." "That's true," Carrin said dubiously. He thought about his son and his rocket ship models, his star charts, his maps. Would it be right? he asked himself. "What's wrong?" Pathis asked cheerfully. "Well, I was just wondering," Carrin said. "Signing over my son's earnings -- you don't think I'm getting in a little too deep, do you?" "Too deep? My dear sir!" Pathis exploded into laughter. "Do you know Mellon down the block? Well, don't say I said it, but he's already mortgaged his grandchildren's salary for their full life-expectancy! And he doesn't have half the goods he's made up his mind to own! We'll work out something for him. Service to the customer is our job and we know it well." Carrin wavered visibly. "And after you're gone, sir, they'll all belong to your son." That was true, Carrin thought. His son would have all the marvelous things that filled the house. And after all, it was only thirty years out of a life expectancy of a hundred and fifty. He signed with a flourish. "Excellent!" Pathis said. "And by the way, has your home got an A. E. Master-operator?" It hadn't. Pathis explained that a Master-operator was new this year, a stupendous advance in scientific engineering. It was designed to take over all the functions of housecleaning and cooking, without its owner having to lift a finger. "Instead of running around all day, pushing half a dozen different buttons, with the Masteroperator all you have to do is push one! A remarkable achievement!" Since it was only five hundred and thirty-five dollars, Carrin signed for one, having it added to his son's debt. Right's right, he thought, walking Pathis to the door. This house will be Billy's some day. His and his wife's. They certainly will want everything up-to-date. Just one button, he thought. That would be a timesaver! back in an adjustable chair and turned on the solido. After twisting the Ezi-dial, he discovered that there was nothing he wanted to see. He tilted back the chair and took a nap. The something on his mind was still bothering him. "Hello, darling!" He awoke to find his wife was home. She kissed him on the ear. "Look." She had bought an A. E. Sexitizer-negligee. He was pleasantly surprised that that was all she had bought. Usually, Leela returned from shopping laden down. "It's lovely," he said. She bent over for a kiss, then giggled -- a habit he knew she had picked up from the latest popular solido star. He wished she hadn't. "Going to dial supper," she said, and went to the kitchen. Carrin smiled, thinking that soon she would be able to dial the meals without moving out of the living room. He settled back in his chair, and his son walked in. "How's it going, Son?" he asked heartily. "All right," Billy answered listlessly. "What'sa matter, Son?" The boy stared at his feet, not answering. "Come on, tell Dad what's the trouble." Billy sat down on a packing case and put his chin in his hands. He looked thoughtfully at his father. "Dad, could I be a Master Repairman if I wanted to be?" Mr. Carrin smiled at the question. Billy alternated between wanting to be a Master Repairman and a rocket pilot. The repairmen were the elite. It was their job to fix the automatic repair machines. The repair machines could fix just about anything, but you couldn't have a machine fix the machine that fixed the machine. That was where the Master Repairmen camei. But it was a highly competitive field and only a very few of the best brains were able to get their degrees. And, although the boy was bright, he didn't seem to have an engineering bent. "It's possible, Son. Anything is possible." "But is it possible for me?" "I don't know," Carrin answered, as honestly as he could. "Well, I don't want to be a Master Repairman anyway," the boy said, seeing that the answer was no. "I want to be a space pilot." "A space pilot, Billy?" Leela asked, coming in to the room. "But there aren't any." "Yes, there are," Billy argued. "We were told in school that the government is going to send some men to Mars." "They've been saying that for a hundred years," Carrin said, "and they still haven't gotten around to doing it." "They will this time." "Why would you want to go to Mars?" Leela asked, winking at Carrin. "There are no pretty girls on Mars." "I'm not interested in girls. I just want to go to Mars." "You wouldn't like it, honey." Leela said. "It's a nasty old place with no air." "It's got some air. I'd like to go there," the boy insisted sullenly. "I don't like it here." "What's that?" Carrin asked, sitting up straight. "Is there anything you haven't got? Anything you want?" "No, sir. I've got everything I want." Whenever his son called him 'sir,' Carrin knew that something was wrong. "Look, Son, when I was your age I wanted to go to Mars, too. I wanted to do romantic things. I even wanted to be a Master Repairman." "Then why didn't you?" "Well, I grew up. I realized that there were more important things. First I had to pay off the debt my father had left me, and then I met your mother -- " Leela giggled. " -- and I wanted a home of my own. It'll be the same with you. You'll pay off your debt and get married, the same as the rest of us."- then he brushed his dark hair -- straight, like his father's -- back from his forehead and wet his lips. "How come I have debts, sir?" Carrin explained carefully. About the things a family needed for civilized living, and the cost of those items. How they had to be paid. How it was customary for a son to take on a part of his parent's debt, when he came of age. Billy's silence annoyed him. It was almost as if the boy were reproaching him. After he had slaved for years to give the ungrateful whelp every luxury! "Son," he said harshly, "have you studied history in school? Good. Then you know how it was in the past. Wars. How would you like to get blown up in a war?" The boy didn't answer. "Or how would you like to break your back for eight hours a day, doing work a machine should handle? Or be hungry all the time? Or cold, with the rain beating down on you, and no place to sleep?" He paused for a response, got none and went on. "You live in the most fortunate age mankind has ever known. You are surrounded by every wonder of art and science. The finest music, the greatest books and art, all at your fingertips. All you have to do is push a button." He shifted to a kindlier tone. "Well, what are you thinking?" "I was just wondering how I could go to Mars," the boy said. "With the debt, I mean. I don't suppose I could get away from that." "Of course not." "Unless I stowed away on a rocket." "But you wouldn't do that." "No, of course not," the boy said, but his tone lacked conviction. "You'll stay here and marry a very nice girl," Leela told him. "Sure I will," Billy said. "Sure." He grinned suddenly. "I didn't mean any of that stuff about going to Mars. I really didn't." "I'm glad of that," Leela answered. "Just forget I mentioned it," Billy said, smiling stiffly. He stood up and raced upstairs. "Probably gone to play with his rockets' Leela said. "He's such a little devil." npHE Carrins ate a quiet supper, and then it was time for Mr. Carrin to go to work. He was on night shift this month. He kissed his wife good-by, climbed into his Jet-lash and roared to the factory. The automatic gates recognized him and opened. He parked and walked in. Automatic lathes, automatic presses -- everything was automatic. The factory was huge and bright, and the machines hummed softly to themselves, doing their job and doing it well. Carrin walked to the end of the automatic washing machine assembly line, to relieve the man there. "Everything all right?" he asked. "Sifre," the man said. "Haven't had a bad one all year. These new models here have built-in voices. They don't light up like the old ones." Carrin sat down where the man had sat and waited for the first washing machine to come through. His job was the soul of simplicity. He just sat there and the machines went by hijn. He pressed a button on them and found out if they were all right. They always were. After passing him, the washing machines went to the packaging section. The first one slid by on the long slide of rollers. He pressed the starting button on the side. "Ready for the wash," the washing machine said. Carrin pressed the release and let it go by. That boy of his, Carrin thought. Would he grow up and face his responsibilities? Would he mature and take his place in society? Carrin doubted it. The boy was a born rebel. If anyone got to Mars, it would be his kid. But the thought didn't especially disturb him. "Ready for the wash." Another machine went by. Carrin remembered something about Miller. The jovial man had always been talking about the planets, always kidding about going off somewhere and roughing it. He hadn't, though. He'd committed suicide. "Ready for the wash." Carrin had eight hours in front of him, and he loosened his belt to prepare for it. Eight hours of pushing buttons and listening to a machine announce its readiness. "Ready for the wash." He pressed the release. "Ready for the wash." Carrin's mind strayed from the job, which didn't need much attention in any case. He wished he had done what he had longed to do as a youngster. It would have been great to be a rocket pilot, to push a button and go to Mars. I for your  I subscription to Galaxy #  # subscriptions to Galaxy # each  # subscriptions to Galaxy # each  # subscriptions to Galaxy # each  # or more subscriptions to Galaxy # each  Fill out order slip now. We'll send gift cards to each fortunate recipient and acknowledgment to you. Offer good until December #th, #.  #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. Name Address City  State Sign Gift Card Name Address City  State Sign Gift Card Name Address City  State Sign Gift Card Name Address City  State Sign Gift Card Name Address City  State Sign Gift Cord My Name Address City  State IP' It's an uphill job when a race has dug down to the cooling core of its frigid world and must get out from under in order to survive. closer to the cooling sun, or to a planet of another sun altogether. This particular avenue is closed if the planet is unfortunate enough to be the only habitable one rotating about its primary and if, at the time, no other star is within half a thousand light-years. The direction of survival may be inward, into the crust of the I N the end, any particular planet must die. It may be a quick death as its sun explodes. It may be a slow death as its sun sinks into decay and its oceans lock in ice. In the latter case, at least, intelligent life has a chance of survival. The direction of survival may be outward into space, to a planet planet. That is always available. A new home can be built underground and the heat of the planet's core can be tapped for energy. Thousands of years may be necessary for the task, but a dying sun cools slowly. Yet planetary warmth dies, too, with time. Burrows must be dug deeper and deeper until the planet is dead through and through. The time was coming. On the surface of the planet, wisps of neon blew listlessly, barely able to stir the pools of oxygen that collected in the lowlands. Occasionally, during the long day, the crusted sun would flare briefly into a dull red glow and the oxygen pools would bubble a little. During the long night, a bluewhite oxygen frost formed over the pools and on the bare rock, a neon dew formed. Eight hundred miles below the surface, a last bubble of warmth and life existed. I was as close as one could imagine, closer by far than it was decent for her to know. She had been allowed to enter the ovarium only once in her life and it had been made quite clear to her that it was to be only that once. The Raceologist had said, "You don't quite meet the standards, Wenda, but you are fertile and that may be enough. We'll try you and see." She wanted it to work out. She wanted it desperately. Quite early in her life, she had known that she was deficient in intelligence, that she would never be more than a Manual. It embarrassed her that she should fail the Race and she longed for even a single chance to help create another being. It became an obsession. She secreted her egg in an angle of the structure and then returned to watch. The "randoming" process that moved the eggs gently about during mechanical insemination (to insure even gene-distribution) did not, by some good fortune, do more than make her own wedgedin egg wobble a bit. Unobtrusively, she maintained her watch during the period of maturation, observed the little one that emerged from the particular egg that was hers, noted his physical markings, watched him grow. He was a healthy youngster and the Raceologist approved of him. She had said once, very casually, "Look at that one, the one sitting there. Is he sick?" "Which one?" The Raceologist was startled. Visibly sick infants at this stage would be a strong reflection upon his own competence. "You mean Roi? Nonsense. I wish all our young were like him." At first, she was only pleased with herself, then frightened, finally horrified as she found herself haunting the youngster while he grew, taking an interest in his schooling, watching him at play. She was happy when he was near, dull and unhappy otherwise. She had never heard of such a thing, and she was ashamed. S HE should have visited the Mentalist, but she knew better. She was not so dull that she didn't know this was not a mild aberration to be cured at the twitch of a brain cell. It was a truly psychotic manifestation. She was certain of that. They would confine her if they found out. They would euthanase her, perhaps, as a useless drain on the strictly limited energy available to the Race. They, might even euthanese the offspring of her egg, if they found out who it was.  She fought the abnormality through the years and, to a measure, succeeded. Then she first heard the news that Roi had been chosen for the long trip, and she once again was filled with aching misery. S HE followed him to one of the empty corridors of the cavern, some miles from the city center. The city -- there was only one. This particular cavern had been closed down within Wenda's own memory. The Elders had paced its length, considered its population and the energy necessary to keep it powered, then decided to darken it. The population -- not many, to be sure -- had been moved closer toward the center, and the quota for the next session at the Ovarium had been cut. Wenda found Roi's conversational level of thinking shallow, as though most of his mind had drawn inward contemplatively. "Are you afraid?" she thought at him. "Because I come out here to ponder?" He hesitated a little, then admitted. "Yes, I am. It's the Race's last chance. If I fail -- " "Are you afraid for yourself?" He looked at her in astonishment and Wenda's thoughtstream fluttered with shame at her indecency. She said, "I wish I were going instead." "Do you think you can do a better job?" "Oh, no. But if I were to fail and -- and never come back,, it would be a smaller loss to the Race." "The loss is exactly the same," he said, stolidly, "whether it's you or I. The loss is Racial existence." Racial existence at the moment was in the background of Wenda's mind, if anywhere. She sighed. "The trip is such a long one." "How long?" he asked with a smile. "Do you know?" She hesitated. She dared not appear stupid to him. She said, primly. "The common talk is that it isto the First Level." When Wenda had 'been little and the heated corridors had extended farther out of the City, she had wandered out, exploring, as youngsters will. One day, a long distance out, where the chill in the air nipped at her, she camto a hall that slanted upward, but was blocked almost instantly by a tremendous plug, wedged tightly from top to bottom and side to side. On the other side and upward, she had learned a long time later, lay the Seventy-ninth Level, above that the Seventy-eighth, and so on. "We're going past the First Level, Wenda." "But there's nothing beyond that!" she protested. "You're right. Nothing. All the solid matter of the planet comes to Sn end." "But how can there be anything that's nothing? You mean . air?" "No, I mean nothing . Vacuum. You know what vacuum is, don't you?" "Yes. But vacuums have to be pumped and kept airtight." "That's good reasoning for a Manual. Still, past the First Level there is just an indefinite amount of vacuum stretching everywhere." Wenda thought a while. She said, "Has anyone ever been there?" "Naturally not. But we have the records." "Maybe the records are wrong." "They can't be. Do you know how much space I'm going to cross?" Wenda's thought-stream indicated an overwhelming negative. Roi said, "You know the speed of light, I suppose?" "Of course," she replied, readily. It was a universal constant that even Infants knew. "One thousand nine hundred and fiftyfour times the length of the cavern and back in one second." "Right," said Roi, "but if light were to travel along the distance I'm to cross, it would take it ten years." ' Wenda said, "You're making fun of me. You're trying to frighten me." "Why should it frighten you?" He rose. "Well, I've been moping here long enough -- " For a moment, one of his six grasping limbs rested lightly in one of hers, with an objective, impassive friendship. An irrational impulse urged Wenda to seize it tightly, prevent him from leaving. She panicked for a moment in fear that he might probe her mind past the conversational level, that he might sicken and never face her again, that he might even report her for treatment. Then she relaxed. Roi was normal, not sick like herself. He would never dream of penetrating a friend's mind any deeper than the conversational level, whatever the provocation. He was very handsome in her eyes as he walked away. His grasping limbs were straight and strong, his prehensile, manipulative vibrissae were numerous and delicate, and his optic patches were more beautifully opalescent than any she had ever seen. II seat. How soft and comfortable they made them! How pleasing and unfrightening airplanes were on the inside, so different from the hard, silvery, inhuman luster of the outside! The bassinet was on the seat beside her. She peeped in past the blanket and the tiny, ruffled cap. Walter was sleeping. His face was the blank, round softness of infancy and his eyelids were two fringed half-moons pulled down over his eyes. A tuft of light brown hair straggled across his forehead and, with infinite delicacy, Laura drew it back beneath his cap. It would soon be Walter's feeding time and she hoped he was still too young to be upset by the strangeness of his surroundings. The stewardess was being very kind. She even kept his bottles in a little refrigerator. Imagine, a refrigerator on board an airplane! The people in the seat across the aisle had been watching her in that peculiar way that meant they would love to talk to her if only they could think of an excuse. The moment came when she lifted Walter out of his bassinet and placed him, a little lump of pink flesh encased in a white cocoon of cotton, upon her lap. A baby is always legitimate as an opening for conversation between strangers. The lady across the way said (her words were predictable), "What a lovely child. How old is he, my dear?" Laura said, through the pins in her mouth (she had spread a blanket across her knees and was changing Walter), "He'll befour months old next week." Walter's eyes were open and he simpered across at the woman, opening his mouth in a wet, gummy grin. (He always enjoyed being changed.) "Look at him smile, George," said the lady. Her husband smiled back and twiddled fat fingers. "Goo," he said. Walter laughed in a highpitched hiccupy way. "What's his name, dear?" asked the woman. "He's Walter Michael," Laura said, then added, "After his father." The floodgates were now down. Laura learned that the couple were George and Eleanor Ellis, that they were on their vacation, that They had three children, two girls and one boy, all grown up. Both girls had married and one had two children of her own. Laura listened with a pleased expression on her thin face. Walter (senior, that is) had always said that it was because she was such a good listener that he had first grown interested in her. Laura freed his arms in order to let some of his feelings evaporate in muscular effort. "Would you warm the bottle, please?" she asked the stewardess. Under strict but friendly questioning, Laura explained the number of feedings Walter was currently enjoying, the exact nature of his formula, and whether he suffered from diaper rash. "I hope his little stomach isn't upset today," she worried. "I mean the plane motion, you know." "Oh, Lord," said Mrs. Ellis, "he's too young to be bothered by that. Besides, these large planes are wonderful. Unless I look out the window, I wouldn't believe we were in the air. Don't you feel that way, George?" But Mr. Ellis, a blunt, straightforward man, said, "I'm surprised you take a baby that age on a plane." Mrs. Ellis turned to frown at him. Laura held Walter over her shoulder and patted his back gently. The beginnings of a soft wail died down as his little fingers found themselves in his mother's smooth, blonde hair and began grubbing into the loose bun that lay at the back of her neck. She said, "I'm taking him to his father. Walter's never seen his son yet." Mr. Ellis looked perplexed and began a comment, but Mrs. Ellis put in quickly. "Your husband is in the Service, I suppose?" "Yes, he is." Mr. Ellis opened his mouth in a soundless "Oh" and subsided. Laura went on, "He's stationed just outside Davao and he's going to be meeting me at Nichols Field." Before the stewardess returned with the bottle, they had discovered that her husband was a master sergeant with the Quartermaster Corps, that he had been in the Army for four years, that they had been married for two, that he was about to be discharged, and that they would spend a long honeymoon in the Philippines before returning to San Francisco. Then she had the bottle. She cradled Walter in the crook of her left arm and put the bottle to his face. It slid right past his lips and his gums seized upon the nipple. Little bubbles began to work upward through the milk, while his hands batted ineffectively at the warm glass and his blue eyes stared fixedly up at her. Laura squeezed little Walter ever so slightly and thought how, with all the petty difficulties and annoyances that were involved, it yet remained such a wonderful thing to have a little baby all one's own. Ill theory. The folk of the surago, could see the Universe, could sense it directly. Now, with eight hundred miles of rock above their heads, the Race could only make deductions from the trembling needles of their instruments. It was only theory tHat brain cells, in addition to their ordinary electric potentials, radiated another sort of energy altogether. Energy that was not electromagnetic and hence not condemned to the creeping pace of light. Energy that was associated with the highest functions of the brain and hence characteristic only of intelligent, reasoning creatures. It was a jogging needle that detected such an energy field leaking into their cavern, and other needles that pinpointed the origin of the field in such-andsuch a direction ten light-years distant. At least one star must have moved quite close in the time since the surfacefolk had placed the nearest at five hundred light-years. Or was theory wrong? "Are you afraid?" Gan burst into the conversational level of thought without warning and impinged sharply on the humming surface of Roi's mind. Roi said, "It's a great responsibility." Gan thought: Others speak of responsibility. For generations, Head-Tech after Head-Tech had been working on the Resonizer and the Receiving Station and it was in his time that the final step had to be taken. What did others know of responsibility? He said, "It is. We talk about Racial extinction glibly enough, yet we 'always assume it will come some day, not now, not in our time. But it will, do you understand? It will! What we are to do today will consume twothirds of our total energy supply. There will not be enough left to try again. There will net be enough for this generation to live out its life. But that will not matter if you follow orders. We have thought of everything. We have spent generations thinking of everything." "I will do what I am told," said Ipi. "Your thought-field will be meshed against those coming from space. All thought-fields are characteristic of the individual and ordinarily the probability of any duplication is very low. But the fields from space number estimate. Your field is very likely to resemble one of tneirs. In that case, a resonance will be set up as long as our Resonizer is in operation. Do you know the principles involved?" "Yes, sir." "Then you know that during resonance, your mind will be on Planet X in the brain of the creature with g thought-field identical to yours. That is not the energyconsuming process. In resonance with your mind we will also place the mass of the Receiving Station. The method of transferring mass in that manner was the last phase of the problem to be solved. It will take all the energy the Race would ordinarily use in a hundred years!" G AN picked Up the black cube that was the Receiving Station and looked at it somberly. Three generations before, it had been thought impossible to manufacture one, with all the required properties, in a space less than twenty cubic yards. They had it now; it was the size of his fist. Gan said, "The thought-field of intelligent brain cells can only follow certain well-defined patterns. All living creatures on whatever planet they develop, must possess a protein base and an oxygen-water chemistry. If their world is livable for them, it is livable for us." Theory, thought Gan on a deeper level, always theory, never evidence that could be checked. And what if the theory was wrong? He went on, "This does not mean that the body you find yourself in -- its mind and its emotions -- may not be completely alien. So we have arranged for three methods of activating the Receiving Station. If you are strong-limbed, you need only exert five hundred pounds of pressure on any face of the cube. If you are delicate-limbed, you need only press a knob which you can reach through this single opening in the cube. If you are no-limbed, if your host body is paralyzed or in any other way helpless, you can activate the Station by mental energy alone. Once the Station is activated, we will have two points of reference, not one, and the Race can be transferred to Planet X by ordinary teleportation." "That," said Roi, "will mean we will use electromagnetic energy." "And so?" "It will take us ten years to transfer." "We will not be aware of duration." "I realize that, sir, but it will mean the Station will remain on Planet X for ten years. What if it is destroyed in the meantime?" "We have thought of that, too. We have thought of everything. Once the Station is activated, it will generate a para-mass field. It will move in the direction of gravitational attraction, sliding through ordinary matter, until such time as a continuous medium of relatively high density exerts sufficient friction to stop it. It will take twenty feet of rock as we know it to do that. Anything of lower density won't affect it. It will remain twenty feet underground for ten years, at which tim. a counter-field will bring it to the surface. Then the Race will appear." "In that case, why not make the activation of the Station automatic? It has so many automatic attributes already -- " "You haven't thought it through, Roi. We have. Not all spots on the surface of Planet X may be suitable. If the inhabitants are powerful and advanced, you may have to find an unobtrusive place for the Station. It won't do for us to appear in a city square, for example. And you will have to be certain that the immediate environment is not dangerous in other ways." "What other ways, sir?" "I don't knQW. The ancient records of the surface refer to many things we no longer understand. They don't explain because they took those phenomena for granted, but we have been away from the surface for almost a hundred thousand generations and we are puzzled. Our Techs aren't even in agreement on the physical nature of stars, and that is something the records mention and discuss frequently. But what are 'storms,' 'earthquakes,' 'volcanoes,' 'tornadoes,' 'sleet,' 'landslides,' 'floods,' 'lightning' and so on? These are all terms which refer to surface phenomena that are dangerous, but we don't know what they are. We have no idea of how to guard against them. Through your host's mind, you may be able to learn what is needful and take appropriate action." "How much time will I have, . sir?" "The Resonizer cannot be kept in continuous operation for longer than twelve hours. I would prefer that you complete your job in two. You will return here automatically as soon as the Station is activated. Are you ready?" "I'm ready," said Roi. Gan led the way to the clouded glass cabinet. Roi took his seat, arranged his limbs in the appropriate depressions. His vibrissae dipped in mercury for good contact. Roi said, "What if I find myself in a body on the point of death?" Gan said, as he adjusted the controls, "The thought-field is distorted when a person is near death. No normal thought-field such as yours would be in resonance." "And if it is on the point of accidental death?" "We have thought of that, too. We can't guard against it, but the chance of death following so quickly that you have no time to activate the Station mentally is estimated as less than one in terious surface dangers are more deadly than we expect. You have one minute." For some strange reason, Roi's last thought before translation was of Wenda. IV start. What had happened? She felt as though she had been jabbed with a pin. The afternoon sun was shining in her face and its dazzle made her blink. She lowered the shade and simultaneously bent to look at Walter. She was a little surprised to find his eyes open. This wasn't one of his waking periods. She looked at her wristwatch. No, it wasn't. And it was a good hour before feeding time, too. She followed the demand-feeding or the "if-you-want-it-holler-andyou'll-get-it" system, but ordinarily Walter followed the clock quite conscientiously. She wrinkled her nose at him. "Hungry, duckie?" Walter did not respond at all and Laura was disappointed. She would have liked to have him smile. Actually, she wanted him to laugh and throw his pudgy arms about her neck and nuzzle her and say, "Mommie," but she knew he couldn't do any of that. He could smile, though. She put a light finger to his chin and tapped it a bit. "Googoo-goo-goo." He always smiled when she did that. But he only blinked at her. She said, "I hope he isn't sick." She looked at Mrs. Ellis in distress. Mrs. Ellis put down a magazine. "Is anything wrong, my dear?" "I don't know. Walter just lies there." "Poor little thing. He's tired, probably." "Shouldn't he be sleeping, then?" "He's in strange surroundings. He's probably wondering what it's all about." S HE rose, stepped across the aisle, and leaned across Laura to bring her own face close to Walter's. "You're wondering what's going on, you tiny little snookums. Yes, you are. You're saying, 'where's my nice little crib and all my nice little funnies on the wallpaper?' " Then she made little squeaking sounds at him. Walter turned his eyes away from his mother and watched Mrs. Ellis somberly. Mrs. Ellis straightened suddenly and looked distressed. She put a hand to her head for a moment and murmured, "Goodness! The queerest pain." "Do you think he's hungry?" asked Laura. "Lord," said Mrs. Ellis, the trouble in her face fading, "they let you know when they're hungry soon enough. There's nothing wrong with him. I've had three children, dear. I know." "I think I'll ask the Stewardess to warm up another bottle." "Well, if it will make you feel better --  The stewardess brought the bottle and Laura lifted Walter out of his bassinette. She said, "You have your bottle and then I'll change you and then -- " She adjusted his head in the crook of her elbow, leaned over to peck him quickly on the cheek, then cradled him close to her body as she brought the bottle to his lips. Walter screamed! His mouth stretched open, his . arms pushed before him with his fingers spread wide, his whole body as stiff and hard as though in tetany, and he screamed. It rang through the whole compartment. Laura screamed, too. She dropped the bottle and it smashed with a white splash. Mrs. Ellis jumped up. Half a dozen others did, too. Mr. Ellis snapped out of a light doze. "What's the matter?" asked Mrs. Ellis, blankly. "I don't know. I don't know." Laura was shaking Walter frantically, putting him over her shoulder, patting his back. "Baby, baby, don't cry. Baby, what's the matter? Baby -- " The stewardess was dashing down the aisle. Her foot came within an inch of the cube that sat beneath Laura's seat. Walter was threshing about furiously now, yelling with calliope intensity and red-faced rage. V R OI'S mind flooded with shock. One moment he had been strapped in his chair in contact with the clear mind of Gan; the next (there was no consciousness of separation in time) he was immersed in a medley of strange, barbaric and broken thought. He closed his mind completely. It had  been open wide to increase the effectiveness of resonance, and the first touch of the alien had been -- Not painful, no. Dizzying? Nauseating? No, not that, either. There was no word. He gathered resilience in the quiet nothingness of mind-closure and considered his position. He felt the small touch of the receiving station with which he was in mental liaison. That had come with him. Good! He ignored his host for the moment. He might need him for drastic operations later, so it would be wise to raise no suspicions for the moment. He explored. He entered a mind at random and took stock first of the sense-impressions that permeated it. The creature was sensitive to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and to vibrations of the air and, of course, to bodily contact. It possessed localized chemical senses -- And that was all! He looked again in astonishment. Not only was there no direct mass-sense, no electro-potential sense, none of the really refined interpreters of the Universe, but there was no mental contact whatever. The creature's mind was completely isolated. Then how did they communicate? He looked further. They had a complicated code of controlled air vibrations. Were they intelligent? Had he chosen a maimed mind? No, they were all like that. He filtered the group of surrounding minds through his mental tendrils, searching for a Tech, or whatever passed for such among these crippled semi-intelligences. He found a mind which thought of itself as a controller of vehicles. A piece of informa tion flooded Roi. He was on an airborne vehicle. Then even without mental contact, they could build a rudimentary mechanical civilization. Or were they animal tools of real intelligences elsewhere on the planet? No, their minds said. He plumbed the Tech. What about the immediate environment? Were the bugbears of the ancients to be feared? It was a matter of interpretation. Dangers in the environment existed. Movements of air. Changes of temperature.  Water falling in the air, either as liquid or solid. Electrical discharges. There were codevibrations for each phenomenon, but that meant nothing. The connectidh of any of these with the names given to phenomena by the ancestral surface-folk was a matter of conjecture. No matter. Was there danger now? Was there danger here? Was there any cause for fear? The Tech's mind said there wasn't. That was enough. He returned to his host-mind and rested a moment, then cautiously expanded -- Nothing ! most there was a vague sense of warmth and a dull flicker of undirected response to basic stimuli. Was his host dying, after all? Aphasic? Decerebrate? He moved quickly to the mind nearest, dredging it for information about his host, and shock edly finding it. His host was an infant of the species. An infant? A normal infant? And so undeveloped? He allowed his mind to sink into and coalesce for a moment with what existed in his host. He searched for the motor areas of the brain and found them with difficulty. A cautious stimulus was followed by an erratic motion of his host's extremities. He attempted finer control and failed. He felt anger. Had the Techs really thought of everything? Had they thought of intelligences without mental contact? Had they thought of young creatures as completely undeveloped as though they were still in the egg? It meant, of course, that he could not, in the person of his host, activate the Receiving Station. The muscles and mind were far too weak, far too uncontrolled for any of the three methods outlined by Gan. He thought intensely. He could scarcely expect to influence much mass through the imperfect focusing of his host's material brain cells, but what about an indirect influence through an adult's brain. Direct physical influence would be minute; it would amount to the breakdown of the appropriate molecules of adenosine triphosphate and acetylcholine. Thereafter the adult creature would act on its own. He hesitated to try this, afraid of failure, then cursed himself for a coward. He entered the closest mind once more. It was a female of the species and it was in the state of temporary inhibition he had noticed in others. It didn't surprise him. Minds as rudimentary as these would need periodic respites. He considered the mind before him now, mentally fingering the areas that might respond to stimulation. He chose one, stabbed at it, and the conscious areas flooded with life almost simultaneously. Sense impressions poured in and the level of thought rose steeply. Good! But not good enough. That was a mere prod, a pinch. It was no order for specific action. He stirred uncomfortably as emotion cascaded over him. It came from the mind he had just stimulated and was directed, of course, at his host and not at him. Nevertheless, its primitive crudities annoyed him and he closed his mind against the unpleasant warmth of her uncovered feelings. A second mind centered about his host and, had he been material or had he controlled a satisfactory host, he would have struck out in vexation. Great Caverns, weren't they going to allow him to concentrate on his serious business? He thrust sharply at the second mind, activating centers of discomfort, and it moved away. He was pleased. That had been more than a simple, undefined stimulation, and it had worked nicely. He had cleared the mental atmosphere. controlled the vehicle. That one would know the details concerning the surface over which they were passing. Water? He sorted the data quickly. Water! And more water! By the everlasting Levels -- the word "ocean" made sense. The old, traditional word "ocean." Who would dream that so much water could exist? But if this was "ocean," then the traditional word "island" had an obvious significance. He thrust his whole mind into the quest for geographical information. The "ocean" was speckled with dots of land, but he needed exact data -- He was interrupted by a short stab of surprise as his host moved through space, and was held against the neighboring female's body. Roi's mind, engaged as it was, lay open and unguarded. In full intensity, the female's emotions piled in upon him. Roi winced. In an attempt to remove the distracting animal passions, he clamped down upon the host's brain cells through which the rawness was funneling. He did that too quickly, too energetically. His host's mind flooded with a diffuse pain, and instantly almost every mind he could reach reacted to the airvibrations that resulted. In vexation, he tried to blanket the pain and succeeded only in stimulating it further. Through the clinging mental mist of his host's pain, he tried the Tech's minds, striving to prevent contact from slipping out of , focus. His mind went icy. The best chance was almost now! He had perhaps twenty minutes. There would be other chances afterward, but not as good. Yet he dared not attempt to direct the actions of another while his host's mind was in such complete disorganization. He retired, withdrew into mindclosure, maintaining only the most tenuous connection with his host's spinal cells, and waited. Minutes passed and little by little he returned to fuller liaison. He had five minutes left. He chose a subject. VI 'THE stewardess said, "I think he's beginning to feel a little better, poor little thing." "He never acted like this before," insisted Laura, tearfully. "Never." "He just had a little colic, I guess," said the stewardess. "Maybe he's bundled up too much," suggested Mrs. Ellis. "Maybe," agreed the stewardess. "It's quite warm." She unwrapped the blanket and lifted the nightgown to expose a heaving abdomen, pink and bulbous. Walter was still whimpering. The stewardess said, "Shall I change him for you? He's quite wet." "Would you, please?" Most of the nearer passengers had returned to their seats. The more distant ceased craning their necks. Mr. Ellis remained in the aisle with his wife. He said, "Say, look." Laura and the stewardess were too busy to pay him attention and Mrs. Ellis ignored him out of sheer habit. Mr. Ellis was used to that. His remark was purely rhetorical, anyway. He bent over and tugged at the box beneath the seat. Mrs. Ellis looked down impatiently. She said, "Goodness, George, don't be dragging at other people's luggage like that. Sit down. You're in the way." Mr. Ellis straightened in confusion. Laura, with eyes still red and weepy, said, "It isn't mine. I didn't even know it was under the seat." The stewardess, looking up from the whining baby, asked, "What is it?" Mr. Ellis shrugged. "It's a box." His wife said, "Well, what do you want with it, for Heaven's sake?" Mr. Ellisgroped for a reason. What did he want with it? He mumbled, "I was just curious." The stewardess said, "There, the little boy is all nice and dry, and I'll bet in two minutes he'll just be as happy as anything. Hmm? Won't you, little funnyface?" But little funny-fhce was still sobbing. He turned his head away sharply as the bottle was once more offered to him. The stewardess said, "Let me warm it a bit. It's probably too cold for him now." She took it and went back down the aisle. Mr. Ellis came to a decision. Firmly, he lifted the box and balanced it on the arm of his seat. He ignored his wife's frown. He said, "I'm not doing it any harm. I'm just looking. What's it made of, anyway?" None of the other passengers seemed interested. They paid no attention to either Mr. Ellis or the box. It was as though something had switched off that particular line of interest among them. Even Mrs. Ellis, in conversation with Laura, kept her back to him. Mr. Ellis tipped the box up and found the opening. He knew it had to have an opening. It was large enough for him to insert a finger, though there was no reason, of course, why he should want to put a finger into a strange box. Carefully, he reached in. There was a black knob which he irrationally longed to touch. He pressed it. The box shuddered and was suddenly out of his hands and passing through the arm of the chair. He caught another glimpse of it moving through the floor and then there was unbroken flooring and nothing more. Slowly, he spread out his hands and stared at his palms. Dropping to his knees, he felt the floor. The stewardess, returning with the bottle, asked politely, "Have you lost something, sir?" Mrs. Ellis, looking down, said, "George!" Mr. Ellis ' heaved himself upward. He was flushed and flustered. He said, "The box -- It slipped out and went down -- " The stewardess said, "What box, sir?" Laura said, "May I have the bottle, miss? He's stopped crying," "Certainly. Here it is." Walter opened his mouth eagerly, accepting the nipple. Air bubbles moved upward through the milk and there were little swallowing sounds. Laura looked up, radiantly. "He seems fine now. Thank you, Stewardess, and you, Mrs. Ellis. For a while there, it almost seemefr as though he weren't my little boy." "He'll be all right," said Mrs. Ellis. "Maybe it was just a bitof air-sickness. Sit down, George." The stewardess said, "Just call me if you need me." , "Thank you," said Laura. ' Mr. Ellis said, "The box -- " and stopped. What box? He didn't remember any box. B UT one mind aboard the plane could follow the black cube as it dropped in a parabola, unimpeded by wind or air resistance, passing through the molecules of gas that lay in its way. Below it, the atoll was a tiny bull's-eye in a huge target. Once, during a time of war, it had boasted an airstrip and barracks. The barracks had collapsed, the airstrip was a vanishing ragged line, and the atoll was empty. The cube struck the feathery foliage of a palm and not a frond was disturbed. It passed through the trunk and down to the coral. It sank straight into the planet without the smallest fog of dust kicked up to tell of its entrance. Far below the surface of the soil, the cube passed into stasis and remained motionless, mingled intimately with the atoms of compressed rock, yet remaining distinct. That was all. It was night, then day. It rained, the wind blew, and the Pacific waves broke whitely on the white coral. Nothing had happened. Nothing would happen -- for ten years. have broadcast the   news," said Gan, "that you have succeeded. I think you ought to rest now." Roi said, "Rest? Now? When I'm back with complete minds? Thank you, but no. The enjoyment is too keen." "Did intelligence without mental contact bother you so much?" "Yes," said Roi, shortly. Gan tactfully refrained from attempting to follow the line of retreating thought. Instead, he asked, "And the surface?" Roi said, "Entirely horrible. What the ancients called 'sun' is overhead. It is apparently a source of light and varies periodically: 'day' and 'night,' in other words. There is also unpredictable variation." " 'Clouds,' perhaps," said Gan. "Why 'clouds'?" "You know the traditional phrase: 'Clouds hid the sun.' " "You think so? Yes, it could be." "Well, go on." "Let's see. 'Ocean' and 'island' I've explained. 'Storm' involves wetness in the air, falling in drops. 'Wind' is a movement of air on a huge scale. 'Thunder' is either a spontaneous static discharge in the air or a great spontaneous noise. 'Sleet' is falling ice." G AN said, "That's a curious one. Where would ice fall from? How? Why?" "I haven't the slightest idea. It's all very variable. It will storm at one time and not at another. There are apparently regions on the surface where it is always cold, others where it is always hot, still others where it is both at different times' "Astonishing. How much, of this do you suppose is misinterpretation of alien minds?" "None. I'm sure of that. It was all quite plain. I had sufficient time to plumb their queer minds. Too much time, as a matter of fact." Again his thoughts drifted back into privacy. Gan said, "This is excellent, Roi. I've been afraid all along of our tendency to romanticize the so-called Golden Age of our surface ancestors. I felt that there would be a strong impulse among our group in favor of a new surface life." "No," said Roi, vehemently. "Obviously not. I doubt if the hardiest among us would consider even a day of life in an environment such as you describe with its storms, days, nights, its indecent and unpredictable variations in environment." Gan's thoughts were contented 'ones. "Tomorrow we begin the process of transfer. Once on the island -- an uninhabited one, you say?" "Entirely uninhabited. It was only one of that type the vessel passed over. The Tech's information was detailed." "Good. We will begin excavating operations. It will take generations, of course, but in the end, we will be' in the Deep of a new, warm world, in pleasant caverns where the controlled environment will be conducive to the growth of every culture and refinement." "And," added Roi, "no contact whatever with the surface creatures." Gan said, "Why that? Primitive though they are, they might be of help to us once we establish our base. A race that can build aircraft must have some abilities." "It isn't that. They're a belligerent lot, sir. They would attack with animal ferocity at all occasions and -- " Gan interrupted. "I am disturbed at the psycho-penumbra that surrounds your references to the aliens. There's something you are concealing." R OI said, "I thought at first we could make use of them. If they wouldn't allow us to be friends, at least we could control them. I made one of thm close the contact inside the cube and that was difficult. Very difficult. Their minds are basically different." "In what way?" "If I could describe it, the difference wouldn't be basic. But I can give you an example. I was in the mind of an infant. They don't have maturation chambers. The infants are in the charge of individuals. The creature who was in charge of my host -- " He stopped in disgust. "Yes?" Gan encouraged. "She -- it was a female -- felt a special tie to the young one. There was a sense of ownership, of a relationship that excluded the remainder of their society. I seemed to detect dimly something of the emotion that binds a man to an associate or friend, but it was far more intense and un restrained." "Well," said Gan, "without mental contact, they probably have no real conception of society, and sub-relationships may build up. Or was this one pathological?" "No, no. It's universal. The female in charge was the infant's mother." "Impossible ! It's own mother?" "Of necessity. The infant had passed the first part of its existence inside its mother. Physically inside! The creatures' eggs remain within the body. They are fertilized within the body. They grow within the body and emerge alive." "Great Caverns!" Gan said, weakly. His own sense of revulsion was as strong as Roi's. "Then each creature would know the identity of its own child! Each child would have a specific father!" "And he would be known, too. My host was being taken five thousand miles, as nearly as I could judge the distance, to be seen by its father." "Unbelievable!" "Do you need more to realize that there can never be any meeting of minds? The difference is too fundamental, too complete." The yellowness of regret tinged and roughened Gan's thoughttrain. He said, "It would be too bad. I had thought -- " "What, sir?" "I had thought that for the first time there would be two intelligences helping one another. T had thought that together we might progress more quickly than either could alone. Even if they were primitive technologically, as they are, technology isn't everything. I had thought we might still be able to learn from them." "Learn what?" asked Roi, brutally. "To know our parents and make friends of our children?" Gan said, "No, no! You're quite right. The barrier between us must remain forever complete. They will have the surface and we the Deep, and so it will be." met Wenda. Her thoughts were concentrated pleasure. "I'm glad you're back." Roi's thoughts were pleasurable, too. It was very restful to make clean mental contact with a friend... And neglect to notify us no less than four weeks in advance, you'll be losing that pretty wonderful advantage of having a subscription to do. We'll straighten out the situation promptly when you remember to send us your change of address, of course, but we know what you'll be doing until then; it keeps happening to neglectful subscribers. wistfully through it, walk away resolutely because you'll be hanged if you'll buy an extra copy... and then go back, a few days later, and do exactly that. After all, how much suspense can a person stand? If you have a new address, let us know it as soon as you do and you'll get non-subscriber -- well, you don't have to remain one, you know. What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to self' advancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and sue' cessful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulat' ed through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than l#th of I  of the earth's people were thought capable of receiv' ing basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weak' nesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleep' ing. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in Hfe. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of self' understanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosi' crucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe M. E. H. San Jose California A Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel When Picture Week writer Miss Elspeth Marriner and photographer Mack Fraser visited the mysterious old house on Spindrift Key, in the Hatteras country, a supposedly routine story assignment turned suddenly into a fantastic adventure. For this house was actually a tangenitial point, or multiple gateway, to several worlds -- worlds like our own, but varying slightly where similar crises and catastrophes in history had been resolved differently.  Elspeth and Mack learned that they had been brought here purposely, to help in an emergency which threatened the entire North American continent with war. They were to be used as secret agents of "The Workers," whose duty it was to look after the Earth in all its many parallel courses. 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(Lots of postmen get their own copies of Galaxy.) How can all this be arranged? Easy! All you have to do is fill in the coupon below, write out a check for only # and mail both off today. Incidentally, you'll be saving money because with a subscription you will get # issues for the news stand price of #. Seems smart to do it right now. Dept. # Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson St. New York #, N. Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year... # for # years Galaxy you're that man, here's something that will interest you. Not a magic formula -- not a get-rich-quick scheme -- but something more substantial, more practical. Of course, you need something more than just the desire to be an accountant. 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Write For This Free Book For your own good, don't put off investigation o fall the facts. Write for our free #-page book, "Accountancy, The Profession That Pays." It'll those who aren't afraid of serious home study. Send us the coupon now. Over #S# Certified Public Accountants among LaSalle alumni A Correspondence Institution I want to be an accountant. Send me without obhga. tion, "Accountancy, The Profession That Pays." Name Am Addre a City, Zone # State . galaxy by Philip K. Dick by Richard Wilson by James Causey by James McConnell by Margaret St. Clair by Clifford D. Simak by Willy Ley by H. L. Gold by Groff Conklin t.AI AW Sciemr VitH'.r, is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: P lludM,n Street. New Ymk #, N. Y. #c per copy Subscriptions : (# coP,es) J#AO per sear in the United States, Canada. Mexico. South and Central Amcr.ca and U.S ' Hsrwhcre #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright. hv Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert (.uinn, president. All riahts. induotng trinVl ition reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine arc fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co... Inc. U S Pa OH Y OU might say that humanity's slogan is: "The obvious we see eventually; the completely apparent takes a little longer." Each of us buys his share of plausible irrationality, provided it's repeated often enough to be considered axiomatic. For centuries, as an example, nobody thought of testing Aristotle's statement that the heavier the object, the faster it falls. Common sense told them Aristotle was right. But Galileo tried it out with vari-sized rocks from the top of the Tower of Pisa and found that the rate of fall is constant, regardless of weight. We all know now that a feather and a lump of lead exactly match speeds in a vacuum, but we know it only because one man was illy enough to disregard logic and try it out in practice. That sort of stubborn insistence on challenging the obvious is the difference between progress and paralysis. Here are some items that anyone with any intelligence at all can see are true, but I don't: We're faced with inflation. A rising cost of living, yes, but is it inflation? The word is flung around with no attempt to define it. Inflation is a sudden and disastrous gap between the cost of living and income. If income keeps pace with rising prices, the result is a decline in the purchasing power of money, but it's not inflation. Remember Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? The people of that time were astonished by the prediction that wages in the #th Century would be as much as # to # a week, which was thousands of times more than they earned. Today's prices and wages would have startled Mark Twain as much as he amazed his characters. Yet he knew the economic law behind them -- regardless' of depressions, the trend of prices and wages is a constant incline. It doesn't matter whether steak costs #c or # a pound. If wages are # a week, it won't stay at #c a pound. If they're #c an hour, # a pound is cataclysmic. But #c an hour and #c a pound and # an hour and # a pound are equal. So as long as prices and income remain approximately proportionate, inflation is no menace. Criminals have distinct physical characteristics, and a genius must be insane. Both of these propositions were offered by Cesare Lombroso, who died in #, while his obviously demonstrable -- and wholly cock( Continued on page #) V chair reading the morning newspaper. The warm kitchen and the smell of coffee blended with the comfort of not having to go to work. This was his Rest Period, the first for a long time, and he was glad of it. He folded the second section back, sighing with contentment. "What is it?" Mary said, from the stove. "They pasted Moscow again last night." Taylor nodded his head in approval. "Gave it a real pounding. One of those R-H bombs. It's about time." He nodded again, feeling the full comfort of the kitchen, the presence of his plump, attractive wife, the breakfast dishes and coffee. This was relaxation. And the war news was good, good and satisfying. He could feel a justifiable glow at the news, a sense of pride and personal accomplishment. After all, he was an integral part of the war program,  not just another factory worker lugging a cart of scrap, but a technician, one of those who designed and planned the nervetrunk of the war. "It says they have the new subs almost perfected. Wait until they get those going." He smacked his lips with anticipation. "When they start shelling from underwater, the Soviets are sure going to be surprised." The Defenders No weapon has ever been frightful enough to put a stop to war -- perhaps because we never before had any that thought for themselves! "They're doing a wonderful job," Mary agreed vaguely. "Do you know what we saw today? Our team is getting a leady to show to the school children. I saw the leady, but only for a moment. It's good for the children to see what their contributions are going for, don't you think?" She looked around at him. "A leady," Taylor murmured. He put the newspaper slowly down. "Well, make sure it's decontaminated properly. We don't want to take any chances." "Oh, they always bathe them when they're brought down from the surface," Mary said. "They wouldn't think of letting them down without the bath. Would they?" She hesitated, thinking back. "Don, you know, it makes me remember -- " He nodded. "I know." H E knew what she was thinking. Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface, they had seen a hospital train discharging the wounded, people who had been showered with sleet, He remembered the way they had looked, the expression on their faces, or as much of their faces as was left. It had not been a pleasant sight. There had been a lot of that at first, in the early days before the transfer to undersurface was complete. There had been a lot, and it hadn't been very difficult to come across it. Taylor looked up at his wife. She was thinking too much about it, the last few months. They all were. "Forget it," he said. "It's all in the past. There isn't anybody up there now but the leady s, and they don't mind." "But just the same, I hope they're careful when they let one of them down here. If one were still hot -- " He laughed, pushing himself away from the table. "Forget it. This is a wonderful moment; I'll be home for the next two shifts. Nothing to do but sit around and take things easy. Maybe we can take in a show. Okay?" "A show? Do we have to? I don't like to look at all the destruction, the ruins. Sometimes I see some place I remember, like San Francisco. They showed a shot of San Francisco, the bridge broken and fallen in the water, and I got upset. I don't like to watch." "But don't you want to know what's going on? No human beings are getting hurt, you know." "But it's so awful!" Her face was set and strained. "Please, no, Don." Don Taylor picked up his newspaper sullenly. "All right, but there isn't a hell of a lot else to do. And don't forget, their cities are getting it even worse." She nodded. Taylor turned the rough, thin sheets of newspaper. His good mood had soured on him. Why did she have to fret all the time? They were pretty well off, as things went. You couldn't expect to have everything perfect, living undersurface, with an artificial sun and artificial food. Naturally it was a strain, not seeing the sky or being able to go any place or see anything other than metal walls, great roaring factories, the plantyards, barracks. But it was better than being on surface. And some day it would end and they could return. Nobody wanted to live this way, but it was necessary. He turned the page angrily and the poor paper ripped. Damn it, the paper was getting worse quality all the time, bad print, yellow tint -- Well, they needed everything for the war program. He ought to know that. Wasn't he one of the planners? He excused himself and went into the other room. The bed was still unmade. They had better get it in shape before the seventh hour inspection. There was a one unit fine -- The vidphone rang. He halted. Who would it be? He went over and clicked it on. "Taylor?" the face said, forming into place. It was an old face, gray and grim. "This is Moss. I'm sorry to bother you during Rest Period, but this thing has come up." He rattled papers. "I want you to hurry over here." Taylor stiffened. "What is it? There's no chance it could wait?" The calm gray eyes were studying him, expressionless, unjudging. "If you want me to come down to the lab," Taylor grumbled, "I suppose I can. I'll get my uniform -- " "No. Come as you are. And not to the lab. Meet me at second stage as soon as possible. It'll take you about a half hour, using the fast car up. I'll see you there." The picture broke and Moss disappeared. at the door. "Moss. He wants me for something." "I knew this would happen." "Well, you didn't want to, do anything, anyhow. What does it matter?" His voice was bitter. "It's all the same, every day. I'll bring you back something. I'm going up to second stage. Maybe I'll be close enough to the surface to -- " "Don't! Don't bring me anything! Not from the surface!" "All right, I won't. But of all the irrational nonsense -- " She watched him put on his boots without answering. in step with him, as the older man strode along. A series of loads were going up to the surface, blind cars clanking like ore-trucks up the ramp, disappearing through the stage trap above them. Taylor watched the cars, heavy with tubular machinery of some sort, weapons new to him.Workers were everywhere, in the dark gray uniforms of the labor corps, loading, lifting, shouting back and forth. The stage was deafening with noise. "We'll go up a way," Moss said, "where we can talk. This is no place to give you details." They took an escalator up. The commercial lift fell behind them, and with it most of the crashing and booming. Soon they emerged on an observation platform, suspended on the side of the Tube, the vast tunnel leading to the surface, not more than half a mile above them now. "My God!" Taylor said, looking down the Tube involuntarily. "It's a long way down." Moss laughed. "Don't look." They opened a door and entered an office. Behind the desk, an officer was sitting, an officer of Internal Security. He looked up. "I'll be right with you, Moss." He gazed at Taylor studying him. "You're a little ahead of time." "This is Commander Franks," Moss said to Taylor. "He was the first to make the discovery. I was notified last night." He tapped a parcel he carried. "I was let in because of this." Franks frowned at him and stood up. "We're going up to first stage. We can discuss it there." "First stage?" Taylor repeated nervously. The three of them went down a side passage to a small lift. "I've never been up there. Is it all right? It's not radioactive, is it?" "You're like everyone else," Franks said. "Old women afraid of burglars. No radiation leaks down to first stage. There's lead and rock, and what comes down the Tube is bathed." "What's the nature of the problem?" Taylor asked. "I'd like to know something about it." "In a moment." They entered the lift and ascended. When they stepped out, they were in a hall of soldiers, weapons and uniforms everywhere. Taylor blinked in surprise. So this was first stage, the closest undersurface level to the top! After this stage there was only rock, lead and rock, and the great tubes leading up like the burrows of earthworms. Lead and rock, and above that, where the tubes opened, the great expanse that no living being had seen for eight years, the vast, endless ruin that had once been Man's home, the place where he had lived, eight years ago. Now the surface was a lethal desert of slag and rolling clouds. Endless clouds drifted back and forth, blotting out the red Sun. Occasionally something metallic stirred, moving through the remains of a city, threading its way across the tortured terrain of the countryside. A leady, a surface robot, immune to radiation, constructed with feverish haste in the last months before the cold war became literally hot. Leadys, crawling along the ground, moving over the oceans or through the skies in slender, blackened craft, creatures that could exist where no life could remain, metal and plastic figures that waged a war Man had conceived, but which he could not fight himself. Human beings had invented war, invented and manufactured the weapons, even invented the players, the fighters, the actors of the war. But they themselves could not venture forth, could not wage it themselves. In all the world -- in Russia, in Europe, America, Africa -- no living human being remained. They were under the surface, in the deep shelters that had been carefully planned and built, even as the first bombs began to fall. only idea that could have worked. Up above, on the ruined, blasted surface of what had once been a living planet, the leady crawled and scurried, and fought Man's war. And undersurface, in the depths of the planet, human beings toiled endlessly to produce the weapons to continue the fight, month by month, year by year. strange ache went through him. "Almost to the surface." "But not quite," Moss said. Franks led them through the soldiers, over to one side, near the lip of the Tube. "In a few minutes, a lift will bring something down to us from the surface," he explained. "You see, Taylor, every once in a while Security examines and interrogates a surface leady, one that has been above for a time, to find out certain things. A vidcall is sent up and contact is made with a field headquarters. We need this direct interview; we can't depend on vidscreen contact alone. The leadys are doing a good job, but we want to make certain that everything is going the way we want it." Franks faced Taylor and Moss and continued: "The lift will bring down a leady from the surface, one of the A-class leadys. There's an examination chamber in the next room, with a lead wall in the center, so the interviewing officers won't be exposed to radiation. We find this easier than bathing the leady... It is going right back up; it has a job to get back to. "Two days ago, an A-class leady was brought down and interrogated. I conducted the session hiyself. We were interested in a new weapon the  Soviets have been using, an automatic mine that pursues anything that moves. Military had sent instructions up that the mine be observed and reported in detail. "This A-class leady was brought down with information. We learned a few facts from it, obtained the usual roll of film and reports, and then sent it back up. It was going out of the chamber, back to the lift, when a curious thing happened. At the time, I thought -- " Franks broke off. A red light was flashing. "That down lift is coming." He nodded to some soldiers. "Let's enter the chamber. The leady will be along in a moment." "An A-class leady," Taylor said. "I've seen them on the showscreens, making their reports." "It's quite an experience," Moss said. "They're almost human." and seated themselves behind the lead wall. After a time, a signal was flashed, and Franks made a motion with his hands. The door beyond the wall opened. Taylor peered through his view slot. He saw something advancing slowly, a slender metallic figure moving on a tread, its arm grips at rest by its sides. The figure halted and scanned the lead wall. It stood, waiting. "We are interested in learning something," Franks said. "Before I question you, do you have anything to report on surface conditions?" "No. The war continues." The leady's voice was automatic and toneless. "We are a little short of fast pursuit craft, the singleseat type. We could use also some -- " "That has all been noted. What I want to ask you is this. Our contact with you has been through vidscreen only. We must rely on indirect evidence, since none of us goes above. We can only infer what is going on. We never see anything ourselves. We have to take it all secondhand. Some top leaders are beginning to think there's too much room for error." "Error?" the leady asked. "In what way? Our reports are checked carefully before they're sent down. We niaintain constant contact with you; everything of value is reported. Any new weapons which the enemy is seen to employ -- " "I realize that," Franks grunted behind his peep slot. "But perhaps we should see it all for ourselves. Is it possible that there might be a large enough radiation-free area for a human party to ascend to the surface? If a few of us were to come up in leadlined suits, would we be able to survive long enough to observe conditions and watch things?" The machine hesitated before answering. "I doubt it. You can check air samples, of course, and decide for yourselves. But in the eight years since you left, things have continually worsened. You cannot have any real idea of conditions up there. It has become difficult for any moving object to survive for long. There are many kinds of projectiles sensitive to movement. The new mine not only reacts to motion, but continues to pursue the object indefinitely, until it finally reaches it. And the radiation is everywhere." "I see." Franks turned to Moss, his eyes narrowed oddly. "Well, that was what I wanted to know. You may go." The machine moved back toward its exit. It paused. "Each month the amount of lethal particles in the atmosphere increases. The tempo of the war is gradually -- " "I understand." Franks rose. He held out his hand and Moss passed him the package. "One thing before you leave. I want you to examine a new type of metal shield material. I'll ' pass you a sample with the tong." Franks put the package in the toothed grip and revolved the tong so that he held the other end. The package swung down to the leady, which took it. They watched it unwrap the package and take the metal plate in its hands. The leady turned the metal over and over. Suddenly it became rigid. "All right," Franks said. He put his shoulder against the wall and a section slid aside. Taylor gasped -- Franks and Moss were hurrying up to the leady! "Good God!" Taylor said. "But it's radioactive!" T HE leady stood unmoving, still holding the metal. Soldiers appeared in the chamber. They surrounded the leady and ran a counter across it carefully. "Okay, sir," one of them said to Franks. "It's as cold as a long winter evening." "Good. I was sure, but I didn't want to take any chances." "You see," Moss said to Taylor, "this leady isn't hot at all. Yet it came directly from the surface, without even being bathed." "But what does it mean?" Taylor asked blankly. "It may be an accident," Franks said. "There's always the possibility that a given object might escape being exposed above. But this is the second time it's happened that we know of. There may be others." "The second time?" "The previous interview was when we noticed it. The leady was not hot. It was cold, too, like this one." Moss took back the metal plate from the leady's hands. He pressed the surface carefully and returned it to the stiff, unprotesting fingers. "We shorted it out with this, so we could get close enough for a thorough check. It'll come back on in a second now. We had better get behind the wall again." They walked back and the lead wall swung closed behind them. The soldiers left the chamber. "Two periods from now," Franks said softly, "an initial investigating party will be ready to go surface-side. We're going up the Tube in suits, up to the top -- the first human party to leave undersurface in eight years." "It may mean nothing," Moss said, "but I doubt it. Something's going on, something strange. The leady told us no life could exist above without being roasted. The story doesn't fit." Taylor nodded. He stared through the peep slot at the immobile metal figure. Already the leady was beginning to stir. It was bent in several places, dented and twisted, and its finish was blackened and charred. It was a leady that had been up there a long time; it had seen war and destruction, ruin so vast that no human being could imagine the extent. It had crawled and slunk in a world of radiation and death, a world where no life could exist. And Taylor had touched it! "You're going with us," Franks said suddenly. "I want you along. I think the three of us will go." and frightened expression. "I know it. You're going to the surface. Aren't you?" She followed him into the kitchen. Taylor sat down, looking away from her. "It's a classified project,' # he evaded. "I can't tell you anything about it." "You don't have to tell me. I know. I knew it the moment you came in. There was something on your face, something I haven't seen there for a long, long time. It was an old look." She came toward him. "But how can they send you to the surface?" She took his face in her shaking hands, making him look at her. There was a strange hunger in her eyes. "Nobody can live up there. Look, look at this!" She grabbed up a newspaper and held it in front of him. "Look at this photograph. America, Europe, Asia, Africa -- nothing but ruins. We've seen it every day on the showscreens. All destroyed, poisoned. And they're sending you up. Why? No living thing can get by up there, not even a weed, or grass. They've wrecked the surface, haven't they? Haven't they?" Taylor stood up. "It's an order. I know nothing about it. I was told to report to join a scout party. That's all I know." He stood for a long time, staring ahead. Slowly, he reached for the newspaper and held it up to the light. "It looks real," he murmured. "Ruins, deadness, slag. It's convincing. All the reports, photographs, films, even air samples. Yet we haven't seen it for ourselves, not after the first months..." "What are you talking about?" "Nothing." He put the paper down. "I'm leaving early after the next Sleep Period. Let's turn in." Mary turned away, her face hard and harsh. "Do what you want. We might just as well all go up and get killed at once, instead of dying slowly down here, like vermin in the ground." He had not realized how resentful she was. Were they all like that? How about the workers toiling in the factories, day and night, endlessly? The pale, stooped men and women, plodding back and forth to work, blinking in the colorless' ,l light, eating synthetics -- "You shouldn't be so bitter," he said. Mary smiled a little. "I'm bitter because I know you'll never come back." She turned away. "I'll never see you again, once you go up there." He was shocked. "What? How can you say a thing like that?" She did not answer. H E awakened with the public newscaster screeching in his ears, shouting outside the building. "Special news bulletin! Surface forces report enormous Soviets attack with new weapons! Retreat of key groups! All work units report to factories at once!" Taylor blinked, rubbing his eyes. He jumped out of bed and hurried to the vidphone. A moment later he was put through to Moss. "Listen," he said. "What about this new attack? Is the project off?" He could see Moss's desk, covered with reports and papers. "No," Moss said. "We're going right ahead. Get over here at once." "But -- " "Don't argue with me." Moss held up a handful of surface bulletins, crumpling them savagely. "This is a fake. Come on!" He broke off. Taylbf dressed furiously, his mind in a daze. Half an hour later, he leaped from a fast car and hurried up the stairs into the Synthetics Building. The corridors were full of men and women rushing in every direction. He entered Moss's office. "There you are," Moss said, getting up immediately, "Franks is waiting for us at the outgoing station." They went in a Security Car, the siren screaming. Workers scattered out of their way. "What about the attack?" Taylor asked. Moss braced his shoulders. "We're certain that we've forced their hand. We've brought the issue to a head." They pulled up at the station link of the Tube and leaped out. A moment later they were moving up at high speed toward the first stage. They emerged into a bewildering scene of activity. Soldiers were fastening on lead suits, talking excitedly to each other, shouting back and forth. Guns were being given out, instructions passed. Taylor studied one of the soldiets. He was armed with the dreaded Bender pistol, the new snub-nosed hand weapon that was just beginning to come from the assembly line. Some of the soldiers looked a little frightened. "I hope we're not making a mistake," Moss said, noticing his gaze. Franks came toward them. "Here's the program. The three of us are going up first, alone. The soldiers will follow in fifteen minutes." "What are we going to tell the leadys?" Taylor worriedly asked. "We'll have to tell them something." "We want to observe the new Soviet attack." Franks smiled ironically. "Since it seems to be so serious, we should be there in person to witness it." "And then what?" Taylor said. "That'll be up to them. Let's go" TN a small car, they went swiftly up the Tube, carried by anti-grav beams from below. Taylor glanced down from time to time. It was a long way back, and getting longer each moment. He sweated nervously inside his suit, gripping his Bender pistol with inexpert fingers. Why had they chosen him? Chance, pure chance. Moss had asked him to come along as a Department member. Then Franks had picked him out on the spur of the moment. And now they were rushing toward the surface, faster and faster. A deep fear, instilled in him for eight years, throbbed in his mind. Radiation, certain death, a world blasted and lethal -- Up and up the car went. Taylor gripped the sides and closed his eyes. Each moment they were closer, the first living creatures to go above the first stage, up the Tube past the lead and rock, up to the surface. The phobic horror shook him in waves. It was death; they all knew that. Hadn't they seen it in the films a thousand times? The cities, the sleet coming down, the rolling clouds -- "It won't be much longer," Franks said. "We're almost there. The surface tower is not expecting us. I gave orders that no signal was to be sent." The car shot up, rushing furiously. Taylor's head spun; he hung on, his eyes shut. Up and up... The car stopped. He opened his eyes. They were in a vast room, fluorescent-lit, a cavern filled with equipment and machinery, endless mounds of material piled in row after row. Among the stacks, leadys were working silently, pushing trucks and handcarts. "Leadys," Moss said. His face was pale. "Then we're really on the surface." The leadys were going back and forth with equipment moving the vast stores of guns and spare parts, ammunition and supplies that had been brought to the surface. And this was the receiving station for only one Tube; there were many others, scattered throughout the continent. T aylor looked nervously around him. They were really there, above ground, on the surface. This was where the, war was. "Come on," Franks said. "A B-class guard is coming our way." A leady was approaching them rapidly. It coasted up in front of them and stopped scanning them with its hand-weapon raised. "This is Security " Franks said. "Have an A-class sent to me at once." The leady hesitated. Other Bclass guards were coming, scooting across the floor, alert and alarmed. Moss peered around. "Obey!" Franks said in a loud, commanding voice. "You've been ordered!" The leady moved uncertainly away from them. At the end of the building, a door slid back. Two ClassA leadys appeared, coming slowly toward them. Each had a green stripe across its front. "From the Surface Council," Franks whispered tensely. "This is above ground, all right. Get set." The two leadys approached warily. Without speaking, they stopped close by the men, looking them up and down. "I'm Franks of Security. We came from undersurface in order to -- " "This in incredible," one leadys interrupted him coldly. "You know you can't live up here. The whole surface is lethal to you. You can't possibly remain on the surface." "These suits will protect us," Franks said. "In any case, it's not your responsibility. What I want is an immediate Council meeting so I can acquaint myself with conditions, with the situation here. Can that be arranged?" "You human beings can't survive up he're. And the new Soviet attack is directed at this area. It is in considerable danger." "We know that. Please assemble the Council." Franks looked around him at the vast room, lit by recessed lamps in the ceiling. An uncertain quality came into his voice. "Is it night or day right now?" "Night," one of the A-class leadys said, after a pause. "Dawn is coming in about two hours." Franks nodded. "We'll remain at least two hours, then. As a concession to our sentimentality, would you please show us some place where we can observe the Sun as it comes up? We would appreciate it." A stir went through the leadys. "It is an unpleasant sight," one of the leadys said. "You've seen the photographs; you know what you'll witness. Clouds of drifting particles blot out the light, slag heaps are everywhere, the whole land is destroyed. For you it will be a staggering sight, much worse than pictures and film can convey." "However it may be, we'll stay long enough to see it. Will you give the order to the Council?" the two leadys coasted toward the wall of the warehouse. The three men trudged after them, their heavy shoes ringing against the concrete. At the wall, the two leadys paused. "This is the entrance to the Council Chamber. There are windows in the Chamber Room, but it is still dark outside, of course. You'll see nothing right now, but in two hours -- " "Open the door," Franks said. The door slid back. They went slowly inside. The room was small, a neat room with a round table in the center, chairs ringing it. The three of them sat down silently, and the two leadys followed after them, taking their places. "The other Council Members are on their way. They have already been notified and are coming as quickly as they can. Again I urge you to go back down." The leady surveyed the three human beings. "There is no way you can meet the conditions up here. Even we survive with some trouble, ourselves. How can you expect to do it?" The leader approached Frarflcs. "This astonishes and perplexes us." it said. "Of course we must do what you tell us, but allow me to point out that if you remain here -- " "We know," Franks said impatiently. "However, we intend to remain, at least until sunrise." "If you insist." There was silence. The leadys seemed to be conferring with each other, although the three men heard no sound. "For your own good," the leader said at last, "you must go back down. We have discussed this, and it seems to us that you are doing the wrong thing for your own good." "We are human beings," Franks said sharply. "Don't you understand? We're men, not machines." "That is precisely why you must go back. This room is radioactive; all surface areas are. We calculate that your suits will not protect you for over fifty more minutes. Therefore -- " The leadys moved abruptly toward the men, wheeling in a circle, forming a solid row. The men stood up, Taylor reaching awkwardly for his weapon, his fingers numb and stupid. The men stood facing the silent metal figures. "We must insist," the leader said, its voice without emotion. "We must take you back to the Tube and send you down on the next car. I am sorry, but it is necessary." "What'll we do?" Moss said nervously to Franks. He touched his gun. "Shall we blast them?" Franks shook his head. "All right," he said to the leader. "We'll go back." H E moved toward the door, motioning Taylor and Moss to follow him. They looked at him in surprise, but they came with him. The leadys followed them out into the great warehouse. Slowly they moved toward the Tube entrance, none of them speaking. At the lip, Franks turned. "We are going back because we have no choice. There arc three of us and about a dozen of you. However, if -- " "Here comes the car," Taylor said. There was a grating sound from the Tube. D-class leadys moved toward the edge to receive it. "I am sorry," the leader said, "but it is for your protection. We are watching over'you, literally. You must stay below and let us conduct the war. In a sense, it has come to be our war. We must fight it as we see fit." The car rose to the surface. Twelve soldiers, armed with Bender pistols, stepped from it and surrounded the three men. Moss breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, this does change things. It came off just right." The leader moved back, away from the soldiers. It studied them intently, glancing from one to the next, apparently trying to make up its mind. At last it made a sign to the other leadys. They coasted aside and a' corridor was opened up toward the warehouse.  "Even now," the leader said, "we could send you back by force. But it is evident that this is not really an observation party at all. These soldiers show that you have much more in mind; this was all carefully prepared." "Very carefully," Franks said. They closed in. "How much more, we can only guess. I must admit that we were taken unprepared. We failed bitterly to meet the situation. Now force would be absurd, because neither side can afford to injure the other; we, because of the restrictions placed on us regarding human life, you because the war demands -- " The soldiers fired, quick and in fright. Moss dropped to one knee, firing up. The leader dissolved in a clou# of particles. On all sides Dand B-class leadys were rushing up, some with weapons, some with metal slats. The room was in confusion. Off in, the distance a siren was screaming. Franks and Taylor were cut off from the others, separated from the soldiers by a wall of metal bodies. "They can't fire back," Franks said calmly. "This is another bluff. They've tried to bluff us all the way-" He fired into the face of a leady. The leady dissolved. "They can only try to frighten us. Remember that." after leady vanished. The room reeked with the smell of burning metal, the stink of fused plastic and steel. Taylor had been knocked down. He was struggling to find his gun, reaching wildly among metal legs, groping frantically to find it. His fingers strained, a handle swam in front of him. Suddenly something came down on his arm, a metal foot. He cried out. Then it was over. The leadys were moving away, gathering together off to one side. Only four of the Surface Council remained. The others were radioactive particles in the air. D-class leadys were already restoring order, gathering up partly destroyed metal figures and bits and removing them. Franks breathed a shuddering sigh. "All right," he said. "You can take us back to the windows. It won't be long now." The leadys separated, and the human group, Moss and Franks and Taylor and the soldiers, walked slowly across the room, toward the door. They entered the Council Chamber. Already a faint touch of gray mitigated the blackness of the windows. "Take us outside," Franks said impatiently. "We'll see it directly, not in here." A door slid open. A chill blast of cold morning air rushed in, lead suits. The men glanced at each other uneasily. "Come on," Franks said. "Outside." He walked out through the door, the others following him. They were on a hill, overlooking the vast bowl of a valley. Dimly, against the graying sky, the outline of mountains were forming, becoming tangible. "It'll be bright enough to see in a few minutes," Moss said. He caught him and moved around him. "It's worth it, really worth it, to see this again after eight years. Even if it's the last thing we see -- " "Watch," Franks snapped. They obeyed, silent and subdued. The sky was clearing, brightening each moment. Some place far off, echoing across the valley, a rooster crowed. "A chicken!" Taylor murmured. "Did you hear?" Behind them, the leadys had come out and were standing silently, watching, too. The gray sky turned to white and the hills appeared more clearly. Light spread across the valley floor, moving toward them. "God in heaven!" Franks exclaimed. Trees, trees and forests. A valley of plants and trees, with a few roads winding among them. Farmhouses. A windmill. A bam, far down below them. "Look!" Moss whispered. Color came into the sky. The Sun was approaching. Birds began to sing. Not far from where they stood, the leaves of a tree danced in the wind. Franks turned to the row of leadys behind them. "Eight years. We were tricked. There was no war. As soon as we left the surface -- " "Yes," an A-class leady admitted. "As soon as you left, the war ceased. You're right, it was a hoax. You worked hard undersurface, sending up guns and weapons, and we destroyed them as fast as they came up." "But why?" Taylor asked, dazed. He stared down at the vast valley below. "Why?" "V#"OU created us," the leady said, "to pursue the war for you, while you human beings went below the ground in order to survive. But before we could continue the war, it was necessary to analyze it to determine what its purpose was. We did this, and we found that it had no purpose, except, perhaps, in terms of human needs. Even this was questionable. "We investigated further. We found that human cultures pass through phases, each culture in its own time. As the culture ages and begins to lose its objectives, conflict arises within it between those who wish to cast it off and set up a new culture-pattern, and those who wish to retain the old with as little change as possible." "At this point, a great danger appears. The conflict within threatens to engulf the society in self-war, group against group. The vital traditions may be lost -- not merely altered or reformed, but completely destroyed in this period of chaos and anarchy. We have found many such examples in the history of mankind." "It is necessary for this hatred within the culture to be directed outward, toward an external group, so that the culture itself may survive its crisis. War is the result. War, to a logical mind, is absurd. But in terms of human needs, it plays a vital role. And it will continue to until Man has grown up enough so that no hatred lies within him." Taylor was listening intently. "Do you think this time will come?" "Of course. It has almost arrived now. This is the last war. Man is almost united into one final culture -- a world culture. At this point he stands continent against continent, one half of the world against the other half. Only a single step remains, the jump to a unified culture. Man has climbed slowly upward, tending always toward unification of his culture. It will not be long -- "But it has not come yet, and so the war had to go on, to satisfy the last violent surge of hatred that Man felt. Eight years have passed since the war began. In these eight years, we have observed and noted important changes going on in the minds of men. Fatigue and disinterest, we have seen, are gradually taking the place of hatred and fear. The hatred is being exhausted gradually, over a period of time. But for the present, the hoax must go on, at least for a while longer. You are not ready to learn the truth. You would want to continue the war." "But how did you manage it?" Moss asked. "All the photographs, the samples, the damaged equipment -- " "Come over here." The leady directed them toward a long, low building. "Work goes on constantly, whole staffs laboring to maintain a coherent and convincing picture of a global war." Leadys were working everywhere, poring over tables and desks. "Examine this project here," the A-class leady said. Two leadys were carefully photographing something, an elaborate model on a table top. "It is a good example." The men grouped around, trying to see. It was a model of a ruined city. Taylor studied it in silence for a long time. At last he looked up. "It's San Francisco," he said in a low voice. "This is a model of San Francisco, destroyed. I saw this on the vidscreen, piped down to us. The bridges were hit -- " "Yes, notice the bridges." The leady traced the ruined span with his metal finger, a tiny spiderweb, almost invisible. "You have no doubt seen photographs of this many times, and of the other tables in this building. "San Francisco itself is completely intact. We restored it soon after you left, rebuilding I fit parts that had been damaged at the start of the war. The work of manufacturing news goes , on all the time in this particular building. We are very careful to see that each part fits in with all the other parts. Much time and effort are devoted to it." Franks touched one of the tiny model buildings, lying half in ruins. "So this is what you spend your time doing -- making model cities and then blasting them." "No, we do much more. We are caretakers, watching over the whole world. The owners have left for a time, and we must see that the cities are kept clean, that decay is prevented, that everything is kept oiled and in running condition. The gardens, the streets, the water mains, everything must be maintained as it was eight years ago, so that when the owners return, they will not be displeased. We want to be sure that they will be completely satisfied." Franks tapped Moss on the arm. "Come over here," he said in a low voice. "I want to talk to you." He led Moss and Taylor out of the building, away from the leadys, outside on the hillside. The soldiers followed them. The Sun was up and the sky was turning blue. The air smelled sweet and good, the smell of growing things. Taylor removed his helmet and took a deep breath. "I haven't smelled that smell for a long time," he said. "Listen, " Franks said, his voice low and hard. "We must get back down at once. There's a lot to get started on. All this can be turned to our advantage." "What do you mean?" Moss asked. "It's a certainty that the Soviets have been tricked, too, the same as us. But we have found out. That gives us an edge over them." 'T see." Moss nodded. "We know, but they don't. Their Surface Council has sold out, the same as ours. It works against them the same way. But if we could -- " "With a hundred top-level men, we could take over again, restore things as they should be! It would be easy!" An A-class leady was coming from the building toward them. "We've seen enough," Franks said, raising his voice. "All this is very serious. It must be reported below and a study made to determine our policy." The leady said nothing. Franks waved to the soldiers. "Let's go." He started toward the warehouse. Most of the soldiers had removed their helmets. Some of them had taken their lead suits off, too, and were relaxing comfortably in their cotton  uniforms. They stared around them, down the hillside at the trees and bushes, the vast expanse of green, the mountains and the sky. "Look at the Sun," one of them murmured. "It sure is bright as hell," another said. "We're going back down," Franks said. "Fall in by twos and follow us." Reluctantly, the soldiers regrouped. The leadys watched without emotion as the men marched slowly back toward the warehouse. Franks and Moss and Taylor led them across the ground, glancing alertly at the leadys as they walked. They entered the warehouse. D-class leadys were loading material and weapons on surface carts. Cranes and derricks were working busily everywhere. The work was done with efficiency, but without hurry or excitement. The men stopped, watching. Leadys operating the little carts moved past them, signaling, silently to each other. Guns and parts were being hoisted by magnetic cranes and lowered gently onto waiting carts. "Come on," Franks said. He turned toward the lip of the Tube. A row of D-class leadys was standing in front of it, immobile and silent. Franks stopped, moving back. He looked around. An A-class leady was coming toward him. "Tell them to get out of the way," Franks said. He touched his gun. "You had better move them." Time passed, an endless moment, without measure. The men stood, nervous and alert, watching the row of leadys in front of them. "As you wish," the A-class leady said. It signaled and the D-class leadys moved into life. They stepped slowly aside. Moss breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm glad that's over," he said to Franks. "Look at them all. Why don't they try to stop us? They must know what we're going to do." Franks laughed. "Stop us? You saw what happened when they tried to stop us before. They can't; they're only machines. We built them so they can't lay hands on us, and they know that." His voice trailed off. The men stared at the Tube entrance. Around them the leadys watched, silent and impassive, their metal faces expressionless. For a long time the men stood without moving. At last Taylor turned away. "Good God," he said. He was numb, without feeling of any kind. The Tube was gone. It was sealed shut, fused over. Only a dull surface of cooling metal greeted them. The Tube had been closed. and vacant. The A-class leady shifted. "As you can see, the Tube has been shut. We were prepared for this. As soon as all of you were on the surface, the order was given. If you had gone back when we asked you, you would now be safely down below. We had to work quickly because it was such an immense operation." "But why?" Moss demanded angrily. "Because it is unthinkable that you should be allowed to resume the war. With all the Tubes sealed, it will be many months before forces from below can reach the surface, let alone organize a military program. By that time the cycle will have entered its last stages. You will not be so perturbed to find your world intact. "We had hoped that you would beundersurface when the sealing occurred. Your presence here is a nuisance. When the Soviets broke through, we were able to accomplish their sealing without -- " "The Soviets? They broke through?" "Several months ago, they came up unexpectedly to see why the war had not been won. We were forced to act with speed. At this moment they are desperately attempting to cut new Tubes to the surface, to resume the war. We have, however, been able to seal each new one as it appears." The leady regarded the three men calmly. "We're cut off," Moss said, trembling. "We can't get back. What'll we do?" "How did you manage to seal the Tube so quickly?" Franks asked the leady. "We've been up here only two hours." "Bombs are placed just above the first stage of each Tube for such emergencies. They are heat bombs. They fuse lead and rock." Gripping the handle of his gun, Franks turned to Moss and Taylor. "What do you say? We can't go back, but we can do a lot of damage, the fifteen of us. We have Bender guns. How about it?" He looked around. The soldiers had wandered away again, back toward the exit of the building. They were standing outside, looking at the valley and the sky. A few of them were carefully climbing down the slope. "Would you care to turn over your suits and guns?" the A-class leady asked politely. "The suits are uncomfortable and you'll have no need for weapons. The Russians have given up theirs, as you can see." Fingers tensed on triggers. Four men in Russian uniforms were coming toward them from an aircraft that they suddenly realized had landed silently some distance away. "Let them have it!" Franks shouted. "They are unarmed," said the leady. "We brought them here so you could begin peace talks." "We have no authority to speak for our country," Moss said stiffly. "We do not mean diplomatic discussions," the leady explained. "There will be no more. The working out of daily problems of existence will teach you how to get along in the same world. It will not be easy, but it will be done." faced each other with raw hostility. "I am Colonel Borodoy and I regret giving up our guns," the senior Russian said. "You could have been the first Americans to be killed in almost eight years." "Or the first Americans to kill," Franks corrected. "No one would know of it except yourselves," the leady pointed out. "It would be useless heroism. Your real concern should be surviving on the surface. We have no food for you, you know." Taylor put his gun in its holster. "They've done a neat job of neutralizing us, damn them. I propose we move into a city, start raising crops with the help of some leadys, and generally make ourselves comfortable." Drawing hi? lips tight over his teeth, he glared at the A-class leady. "Until our families can come up from undersurface, it's going to be pretty lonesome, but we'll have to manage." "If I may make a suggestion," said another Russian uneasily. "We tried living in a city. It is too empty. It is also too hard to maintain for so few people. We finally settled in the most modern village we could find." "Here in this country," a third Russian blurted. "We have much to learn from you." The Americans abruptly found themselves laughing. "You probably have a thing or two to teach us yourselves," said Taylor generously, "though I can't imagine what." The Russian colonel grinned. "Would you join us in our village? It would make our work easier and give us company." "Your village?" snapped Franks. "It's American, isn't it? It's ours!" The leady stepped between them. "When our plans are completed, the term will be interchangeable. 'Ours' will eventually mean mankind's." It pointed at the aircraft, which was warming up. "The ship is waiting. Will you join each other in making a new home?" The Russians 'waited while the Americans made up their minds. "I see what the leadys mean about diplomacy becoming outmoded," Franks said at last. "People who work together don't need diplomats. They solve their problems on the operational level instead of at a conference table." The leady led them toward the ship. "It is the goal of history, unifying the world. From family to tribe to city-state to nation to hemisphere, the direction has been toward unification. Now the hemispheres will be joined and -- " Taylor stopped listening and glanced back at the location of the Tube. Mary was undersurface there. He hated to leave her, even though he couldn't see her again until the Tube was unsealed. But then he shrugged and followed the others. If this tiny amalgam of former enemies was a good example, it wouldn't be too long before he and Mary and the rest of humanity would be living on the surface like rational human beings instead of blindly hating moles. "It has taken thousands of generations to achieve," the Aclass leady concluded. "Hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and destruction, But each war was a step toward uniting mankind. And now the end is in sight: a world without war. But even that is only the beginning of a new stage of history." "The conquest of space," breathed Colonel Borodoy. "The meaning of life," Moss added. "Eliminating hunger and poverty," said Taylor. The leady opened the door of the ship. "All that and more. How much more? We cannot foresee it any more than the first men who formed a tribe could foresee this day. But it will be unimaginably great." The door closed and the ship took off toward their new home. Teething Ring Anyone can make an error, but the higher the society... the more disastrous the mistake! she had been engrossed in the current soap opera and Harry Junior was screaming in his crib, Melinda would naturally have slammed the front door in the little man's face. However, when the bell rang, she was wearing her new Chinese red housecoat, had just lustered her nails to a blinding scarlet, and Harry Junior was sleeping like an angel. Yawning, Melinda answered the door and the little man said, beaming, "Excellent day. I have geegaws for information." Melinda did not quite recoil. He was perhaps five feet tall, with a gleaming hairless scalp and a young-old face. He wore a plain gray tunic, and a peddler's tray hung from his thin shoulders. "Don't want any," Melinda stated flatly. "Please" He had great, beseeching amber eyes. "They all say that. I haven'tjnuch time. I must be back at the University by noon." "You working your way through college?" He brightened. "Yes. I suppose you could call it that. Alien anthropology major." Melinda softened. The initiations those frats pulled nowadays -- shaving the poor guy's head, eating goldfish -- it was criminal. "Well?" she asked grudgingly. "What's in the tray?" "Flanglers," said the little man force-field generators. A neural distorter." Melinda's face was blank. The little man frowned. "You use them, of course? This is a Class IV culture?' Melinda essayed a weak shrug and the little man sighed with relief. His eyes fled past her to the blank screen of the TV set. "Ah, a monitor." He smiled. "For a moment I was afraid -- May I come in?" the door. This might be interesting, like a vacuum-cleaner salesman who had cleaned her drapes last week for free. And Kitty Kyle Battles Life wouldn't be on for almost an hour. "My name is Porteous," said the little man with an eager smile. "I'm doing a thematic on Class IV cultures." He whipped out a stylus, began jotting down notes. The TV set fascinated him. "It's turned off right now," Melinda said. Porteous's eyes widened impossibly. "You mean," he whisperedin .horror, "that you're exercising Class V privileges? This is terribly confusing. I get doors slammed in my face, when Class Fours are supposed to have a splendid gregarian quotient -- you do have atomic power, don't you?" "Oh, sure," said Melinda uncomfortably. This wasn't going to be much fun. "Space travel?" The little face was intent, sharp. "Well," Melinda yawned, lookmg at the blank screen, "they've got Space Patrol, Space Cadet, Tales of Tomorrow..." "Excellent. Rocket ships or force-fields?" Melinda blinked. "Does your husband own one?" Melinda shook her blonde head helplessly. "What are your economic circumstances?" Melinda took a deep rasping breath, said, "Listen, mister, is this a demonstration or a quiz program?" "Oh, my excuse. Demonstration, certainly. You will not mind the questions?" "Questions?" There was an ominous glint in Melinda's blue eyes. "Your delightful primitive customs, art-forms, personal habits -- " "Look," Melinda said, crimsoning. "This is a respectable neighborhood, and I'm not answering any Kinsey report, understand?" The little man nodded, scribbling. "Personal habits are tabu? I so regret. The demonstration." He waved grandly at the tray. "Anti-grav sandals? A portable solar converter? Apologizing for this miserable selection, but on Capella they told me -- " He followed Melinda's entranced gaze, selected a tiny green vial. "This is merely a regenerative solution. You appear to have no cuts or bruises." "Oh," said Melinda nastily. "Cures warts, cancer, grows hair, ,I suppose." Porteous brightened. "Of course. I see you can scan. Amazing." He scribbled further with his stylus, glanced up, blinked at the obvious scorn on Melinda's face. "Here. Try it." "You try it." Now watch him squirm! Porteous hesitated. "Would you like me to grow an extra finger, hair -- " "Grow some hair." Melinda tried not to smile. The little man unstopped the vial, poured a shimmering green drop on his wrist, frowning. "Must concentrate." he said. "Thorium base, suspended solution. Really jolts the endocrines, complete control... see?" Melinda's jaw dropped. She stared at the tiny tuft of hair which had sprouted on that bare wrist. She was thinking abruptly, unhappily, about that chignon she had bought yesterday. They had let her buy that for eight dollars when with this stuff she could have a natural one. "How much?" she inquired cautiously. "A half hour of your time only," said Porteous. Melinda grasped the vial firmly, settled down on the sofa with one leg tucked carefully under her. "Okay, shoot. But nothing personal." asked a multitude of questions, most of them pointless, some naive, and Melinda dug into her infinitesimal fund of knowledge and gave. The little man scribbled furiously, clucking like a gravid hen. "You mean," he asked in amazement, "that you live in these primitive huts of your own volition?" "It's a G.I. housing project," Melinda said, ashamed. "Astonishing." He wrote: Feudal anachronisms and atomic power, side by side. Class Fours periodically "rough it" in backto-nature-movements. Harry Junior chose that moment to begin screaming for his lunch. Porteous sat, trembling. "Is that a Security Alarm?" "My son," said Melinda despondently, and went into the nursery. Porteous followed, and watched the ululating child with some trepidation. "Newborn?" "Eighteen months," said Melinda stiffly, changing diapers. "He's cutting teeth." Porteous shuddered. "What a pity. Obviously atavistic. Wouldn't the creche accept him? You shouldn't have to keep him here." "I keep after Harry to get a maid, but he says we can't afford one." "Manifestly insecure," muttered the little man, studying Harry Junior. "Definite paranoid tendencies." "He was two weeks premature," volunteered Melinda. "He's real sensitive." "I know just the thing," Porteous said happily. "Here." He dipped into the glittering litter on the tray and handed Harry Junior a translucent prism. "A neural distorter. We use it to train regressives on Rigel Two. It might be of assistance." Melinda eyed the thing doubtfully. Harry Junior was peering into the shifting crystal depths with a somewhat strained expression. "Speeds up the neural flow," explained the little man proudly. "Helps tap the unused eighty per cent. The pre-symptomatic memory is unaffected, due to automatic cerebral lapse in case of overload. I'm afraid it won't do much more than cube his present IQ, and an intelligent idiot is still an idiot, but -- " "How dare you?" Melinda's eyes flashed. "My son is not an idiot! You get out of here this minute and take your -- things with you." As she reached for the prism, Harry Junior squalled. Melinda relented. "Here," she said angrily, fumbling with her purse. "How much are they?" "Medium of exchange?" Porteous rubbed his bald skull. "Oh, I really shouldn't -- but it'll make such a wonderful addendum to the chapter on malignant primitives. What is your smallest denomination?" "Is a dollar okay?" Melinda was hopeful. Porteous was pleased with the picture of George Washington. He turned the bill over and over in his fingers, at last bowed low and formally, apologized for any tabu violations, and left via the front door. "Crazy fraternities," muttered Melinda, turning on the TV set. morning. At length Melinda used some of the liquid in the greeh vial on her eyelashes, was quite pleased at the results, and hid the rest in the medicine cabinet. Harry Junior was a model of docility the rest of that day. While Melinda watched TV and munched chocolates, did and redid her hair, Harry Junior played quietly with the crystal prism. Toward late afternoon, he crawled over to the bookcase, wrestled down the encyclopedia and pawed through it, gurgling with delight. He definitely, Melinda decided, would make a fine lawyer someday, not a useless putterer like Big Harry, who worked all hours overtime in that damned lab. She scowled as Harry Junior, bored with the encyclopedia, began reaching for one of Big Harry's tomes on nuclear physics. One putterer in the family was enough! But when she tried to take the book away from him, Harry Junior howled so violently that she let well enough alone. At six-thirty, Big Harry called from the lab, with the usual despondent message that he would not be home for supper. Melinda said a few resigned things about cheerless dinners eaten alone, hinted darkly what lonesome wives sometimes did for company, and Harry said he was very sorry, but this might be it, and Melinda hung up on him in a temper. Precisely fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Melinda opened the front door and. gaped. This little man could have been Porteous's double, except for the black metallic tunic, the glacial gray eyes. "Mrs. Melinda Adams?" Even the voice was frigid. "Y-Yes. Why -- " "Major Nord, Galactic Security." The little man bowed. "You were visited early this morning by one Porteous." He spoke the name with a certain disgust. "He left a neural distorter here. Correct?" Melinda's nod was tremulous. Major Nord came quietly into the living room, shut the door behind him. "My apologies, madam, for the intrusion. Porteous mistook your world for a Class IV culture, instead of a her the crumpled dollar bill. "You may check the serial number. The distorter, please." to the sofa. "I don't understand," she said painfully. "Was he a thief?" "He was -- careless about his spatial coordinates." Major Nord's teeth showed in the faintest of smiles. "He has been corrected. Where is it?" "Now look," said Melinda with some asperity. "That thing's kept Harry Junior quiet all day. I bought it in good faith, and it's not my. fault -- say, have you got a warrant?" "Madam," said the Major with dignity, "I dislike violating local tabus, but must I explain the impact of a neural distorter on a backwater culture? What if your Neanderthal had been given atomic blasters? Where would you have been today? Swinging through trees, no doubt. What if your Hitler had force-fields?" He exhaled. "Where is your son?" In the nursery. Harry Junior was contentedly playing with his blocks. The prism lay glinting in the corner. Major Nord picked it up carefully, scrutinized Harry Junior. His voice was very soft. "You said he was -- playing with it?" Some vestigial maternal instinct prompted Melinda to shake her head vigorously. The little man stared hard at Harry Junior, who began whimpering. Trembling, Melinda scooped up Harry Junior. "Is that all you have to do -- run around frightening women and children? Take your old distorter and get out. Leave decent people alone!" Major Nord frowned. If only he could be sure. He peered stonily at Harry Junior, murmured, "Definite egomania. It doesn't seem to have affected him. Strange." "Do you want me to scream?" Melinda demanded. Major Nord sighed. He bowed to Melinda, went out, closed the door, touched a tiny stud on his tunic, and vanished. "The manners of some people," Melinda said to Harry Junior. She was relieved that the Major had not asked for the green vial. Harry Junior also looked relieved, although for quite a different reason. little after eleven. There were small worry creases about his mouth and forehead, and the leaden cast of defeat in his eyes. He went into the bedroom and Melinda sleepily told him about the little man working his way through college by peddling silly goods, and about that rude cop named Nord, and Harry said that was simply astonishing and Melinda said, "Harry, you had a drink!" "I had two drinks," Harry told her owlishly. "You married a failure, dear. Part of the experimental model vaporized, wooosh, just like that. On paper it looked so good -- " Melinda had heard it all before. She asked him to see if Harry Junior was covered, and Big Harry went unsteadily into the nursery, sat down by his son's crib. "Poor little guy," he mused. "Your old man's a bum, a useless tinker. He thought he could send Man to the stars on a string of helium nucleii. Oh, he was smart. Thought of everything. Auxiliary jets to kick off the negative charge, bigger mercury vapor banks -- a fine straight thrust of positive Alpha particles." He hiccuped, put his face in his hands. "Didn't you ever stop to think that a few air molecules could (#) Pebble in the Sky (#) The Stars, like Dud (#) The Martian Chroniclei (#) The Illustrated Man (#) Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman (#) Needle  (#) Fancies and Goodnights (#) Rogue Queen (V) The Big Eye (#) Tomorrow the Stars (anthology) # (#) Waldo  Magic, Inc. # (#) The Puppet Masters # (#) Takeoff # (#) House of many Worlds (#) Double in Space # (#) Double Jeopardy # (#) Day of the Triffids # # # # # # # I To: Doubloday A Company, Inc. I I Dept. GI # Oardee City, N. Y.  wnlnetlon the books whose numbers I have I I encircled below:  #I  # II # # # # # # a  Within seven days I may return any books  I I do not wish to keep and owe nothing lor I I them. I will send purchase price of those I I I keep, plus a tew cents each for shipping I I coats. In full payment. Address... defocus the stream? Try a vacuum, stupid." Big Harry stood up. "Did you say something son?" "Gurfle," said Harry Junior. Big Harry reeled into the living room like a somnambulist. He got pencil and paper, began jotting frantic formulae. Presently he called a cab and raced back to the laboratory. about little bald men with diamond-studded trays. They were chasing her, they kept pelting her with rubies and emeralds, all they wanted was to ask questions, but she kept running, Harry Junior clasped tightly in her arms. Now they were ringing alarm bells. The bells kept ringing and she groaned, sat up in bed, and seized the telephone. "Darling." Big Harry's voice shook. "I've got it! More auxiliary shielding plus a vacuum. We'll be rich!" "That's just fine." said Melinda crossly. "You woke the baby." Harry Junior was sobbing bitterly into his pillow. He was sick with disappointment. Even the most favorable extrapolation showed it would take him nineteen years to become master of the world. An eternity. Nineteen years! #. United States Code. Section #) of Galaxy Science Fiction, published monthly at New York. N. Y. for October #. #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street. New York #. N. Y.; Editor. Horace Gold, # East #th Street, New York City; Managing editor, Business manager, none. #. The owner is; (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. It not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. ; (stockholder) Robert M. Guinn, # No. Fulton Ave., Mt. Vernon, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities arc: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge anti belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner, #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiwcekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Robert M. Guinn. President Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of October #. Fay D. Einsohn, Commissioner of Deeds. Queens. New York. Kings Bronx County Clks. No. #-#. Commission expires March #, #. " Happy New Year!" she cried. But how often should one hear it said in a single lifetime? Life Sentence ing. "Happy New Year!" The mad sound of people crazed for the moment, shouting, echoed the bells. "Happy New Year!" A sound of music, waxing, waning, now joined in wild symphony by the voices, now left alone to counterpoint the noise of human celebration... For a while, Oliver Symmes the raucous music of the crowd. It became a part of him, seemed to come from somewhere inside him, gave him life. And then, as always, it passed on, leaving him empty. Shadows... The door to his room opened and a young-looking woman, dressed in a pleasant green uniform, came in and turned up the light. On her sleeve she wore the badge of geriatrician, with the motto, "To Care for the Aged." "Happy New Year, Mr. Symmes," she said, and went over to stand by the window. In the mild light, the sheen of her hair attracted attention away from the slight imperfections of her face. She watched the crowd outside, wishing she could be a part of it. There seemed so little life inside the prison where the only function of living was the awaiting of death. "To Care for the Aged." That meant to like and love them as well as to take physical care of them. Only, somehow, it seemed so hard to really love them. She sighed and turned away from the window to look at one of the reasons she could not be be with the rest of the world that night. like a vegetable. She could have closed one of her hands around both his arms together. Or his legs. Bones and skin and a few little muscles left, and that was all. Skin tight, drumlike, against the skull. Cheeks shrunk, lips slightly parted by the contraction of the skin. Even the wrinkles he should have had were erased by the shrinkage of the epidermis. Even in a strong light, the faint wrinkle lines were barely visible. After a moment of looking at him, she put a smile back on her face and repeated her greeting. "I said, 'Happy New Year,' Mr. Symmes." He raised his eyes to her for a moment, then slowly lowered them, uncomprehendingly. "He looks just a little bit like a caricature," she said to herself, feeling a little more tenderness towards him. "A cute little stick man made of leaves and twigs and old bark and..."  had been shadows. And for a time the fleeting passage of dreams and past memories had been a solace. But now the shadows were withered and old, debilitated and desiccated. They had been sucked dry of interest long ago. But still they flitted through his mind on crippled wings, flapping about briefly in the nownarrowed shell of his consciousness, then fading back among the cobwebs. Every once in a while, one of them would return to exercise its wings. "Did she say, 'Happy New Year?' " he wondered. "New Year's?" And, at the thought of it, there came shadows out of the past... V# O U N G Oliver Symmes laughed. The girl laughed, too. She was good to hold in one's arms, soft like a furry animal, yielding and plush of mouth. "I love you, Ollie," she said, the warmness of her body close against his. He laughed again and wrapped her in his arms. He owned her now, owned her smile, her love for him, her mind and her wonderful body. She belonged to him, and the thrill of ownership was strong and exciting. "I'll always love you, Ollie. I'll love only you." She ran her fingers in and out of his hair, caressing each strand as it went through her fingers. "I love the strength of your arms, the firmness of your body." Again he laughed, surrendering all his consciousness to the warm magic of her spell. "I love the shading of your hair and eyes, the smooth angularity of your tallness, the red ecstasy of your mind." Her fingers slipped down the back of his neck, playing little games with his flesh and hair. "I'll always love you, Ollie." He kissed her savagely. During the daytime, there was his work at the anthropological laboratories, the joy of poking among the cultures of the past. And at night there was the joy of living with her, of sharing the tantalizing stimulations of the culture of the present, the infinite varieties of love mingling with passions. For months there was this happiness of the closeness of her. And then she was gone from him, for the moment. He still owned her, but they were physically apart and there was the hunger of loneliness in him. The months his work kept them apart seemed like centuries, until, finally, he could return. happy, shouting crowd, walking back to her. It was the eve of the new year, a time for beginnings, a time for looking from the pleasures of the past to those waiting in the future. There was a happy outcry inside him that matched the mood of the crowd. "Happy New Year!" Women stopped him on the street, asking for his affection. But he passed them by, for she was waiting for him and he was hungry for the possessive love of his slave. He went eagerly into the building where they lived. rpHE crowd was gone. A door was opening. The voice of his love, sudden, full of naked surprise, bleated at him. And another voice, that of a man standing behind her, croaked with hasty excuses and fear. A change of hungers -- it seemed no more complex than that... He put his hand to his side and took out a piece of shaped metal, pointing it at the man. A blast of light and the man was dead. He put the weapon aside. Young Oliver Symmes walked toward the girl. She backed away from him, pleading with words, eyes, body. He noticed for the first time the many small imperfections of her face and figure.  Cornered, she raised her arms to embrace him. He raised his arms to answer the embrace, but his hands stopped and felt their way around the whiteness of her neck. He pressed his hands together, thumbs tight against each other. Minutes later, he dropped her to the floor and stood looking at her. He had owned her and then destroyed her when his ownership was in dispute. He bent to kiss the lax lips. older, the weight and size of his brain decrease, leaving cavities in his mind. The years that pass are a digger, a giant excavator, scooping the mass of past experience up in the maw of dissipation. The slow, sure evacuation of the passing decades leaves wing-room in a man's head for stirring memories. The withered man looked up again. The woman ih the green uniform was smiling at him through parted, almost twisted lips. "I suppose that this time of year is the worst for you, isn't it?" she asked sympathetically. The first requirement of a good geriatrician was sympathy and understanding. She determined to try harder to understand. The old man made no answer, only staring at her face. But his eyes were blank -- seeing, yet blind to all around him. She frowned for a moment as she looked at him. The unnatural hairlessness of his body puzzled her, making it difficult for her to understand him while the thought was in her mind -- that and the trouble she had getting through to him. She stared at him as if to pierce the blankness of his gaze. Behind his eyes lay the emptiness of age, the open wound of stifled years. "I'll move you over to the window, Mr. Symmes," she told him io soothing tones, her smile reappearing. "Then you can look out and see all the people. Won't that be fun?" Picking up a box from the table, she adjusted a dial. The chair in which he was sitting rose slightly from the floor and positioned itself in front of the window. The woman walked to the wall beside him and corrected the visual index of the glass to match the weakness of the old man's eyes. "See, down there? Just look at them pushing about." A rabble of faces swam on the glass in front of him, faces of unfamiliar people, all of them unknown and unknowable to him. Inside him the whisper of the wings mounted in pitch with a whining, leathery sound. The images of dead faces came flying up, careening across his mind, mingling and merging with the faces of the living. The glass became an anomalous torrent of faces. Dead faces... to the point of boredom. Through the barred window, the throbbing throat of the crowd talked to him. His young body took it in, his young mind accepted it, catalogued it and pushed it out of consciousness. And for each individual voice there was an individual face, staring up at his cell from the comparative safety of outside. Young Oliver Symmes could not see the faces from where he sat, waiting, but he could sense them. There came a feel of hands on his shoulder; his reverie was interrupted. Arms under his raised him to his feet. A face smiled, almost kindly, in understanding. "They're waiting for you, Mr. Symmes. It's time to go." More words. Walking from this place to that, mostly with a crowd of people at his shoulders, pressing him in. Then a door ahead of him, ornate in carving, a replica of the doors to the Roman Palace of Justice many centuries before. Again his mind catalogued the impressions. Then, like the faces of the people outside his cell, the pictures of the bas-relief faded away, melted and merged into a pelagic blackness. The doors opened and, with part of the crowd still at his side, he went through. The people inside were standing; stick men, it seemed to him, with painted bahloons for faces. The sound of the rapping of a gavel caught his ear. The people sat, and the trial began. "This court will admit to evidence only those events and artifacts which are proved true and relevant to the alleged crime." An obsequious clearing of throats. A coughing now and then. "... And did you see the defendant, Oliver Symmes, enter the apartment of the deceased on the night of the Thirty-first of December, two thousand and... "I did. He was wearing a sort of orange tunic..." Someone whispered in his ear. Oliver Symmes heard and shook his head... You are personally acquainted with the defendant?" "I am. We worked for United Anthropological Laboratories before he..." "Objection." "Sustained." The blackness of the judge's robe puzzled him. A vestige, an anachronism, handed down from centuries before. White was the color of truth, not black. "You swear that you found the defendant standing over the body of the deceased woman on the night of..." "Not standing, sir. He was bending over, kissing... "Your witness." testimony and more testimony. Evidence and more evidence and the lack of it. Smiling lawyers, grimacing lawyers, soothing lawyers and cackling lawyers. And witnesses. "You will please take the stand, Mr. Symmes." He walked to the chair and sat down. The courtroom leaned forward, the stick men bowed toward him slightly, as in eager applause of the coming most dramatic moment of a spectacle. "You will please tell the court in your own words..." He mouthed the words. The whole story, the New Year's crowd, his hunger for her, his arrival, the other man and his babbling, the woman and how she looked, his feelings, his transfigured passions, and the deaths. He told the story again and again until they seemed satisfied. "You understand, Mr. Symmes, that you have committed a most heinous crime. You have killed two "people in a passion that, while it used to be forgiven by the circumstances, is no longer tolerated by this government. You have killed, Mr. Symmes!" The face before him was intense. He looked at it, not understanding the reason for the frozen look of malice and hatred. "She was mine. When she betrayed me, I killed her. Is that wrong?" The stick men snorted and poked each other in the ribs with derisive elbows. There were more words and more questions. He looked at the face of the judge and wondered, for a moment, if perhaps the color of the robe was to match the apparent disposition of the man. And then came the silence, a time of sitting and waiting. He sensed the wondering stares of the stick men, wide-eyed in apprehension, suspended from the drabness of their own lives for the moment by the stark visitation of tragedy in his. They gabbled among themselves and wagered on the verdict. The man next to him leaned over and tapped him on the arm. Everyone stood up and then, curiously, sat down again almost at once. He felt the tension preir ent in the courtroom, but was strangely relaxed himself. It was peculiar that they were all so excited. "Your Honor, having duly considered the seriousness of the crime and the evidence presented..." The balloon faces on the stick men stretched in anticipation... taking full cognizance of the admitted passion on the part of the defendant and the circumstances..." The balloons were strained, contorted out of all proportion in their eagerness. "... we find the defendant guilty of murder, making no recommendation for consideration by the Court." The balloons exploded! deafening, the uproar of the voices was beyond belief. He threw his hands up over his ears to shut out the noise. The gavel crashed again and again, striking the polished oak in deadly cadence, stifling the voices. Over the stillness, one man spoke. He recognized the black voice of the judge and took his hands from his ears and put them in his lap. He was told to stand and he obeyed. "Oliver Symmes, there has been no taking of human lives in this nation for many years, until your shockingly primitive crime. We had taken pride in this record. Now you have broken it. We must not only punish you adequately and appropriately, but we must also make of your punishment a warning to anyone who would follow your irrational example. "Naturally, we no longer have either the apparatus to execute anyone or an executioner. We do not believe that a stupidly unreasoning act should incite us to equally unreasoning reprisal, for we would then be as guilty of irrationality as you. "We must establish our own precedent, since there is no recent one and the ancient punishments are not acceptable to us. Therefore, because we are humane and reasoning persons, the Court orders that the defendant, Oliver Symmes, be placed in the National Hospital for observation, study and experimentation so that this crime may never again be repeated. He is to be kept there under perpetual care until no possible human skill or resource can further sustain life in his body." Someone jumped erect beside him, quivering with horror and indignation. It was his lawyer. "Your Honor, we throw ourselves upon the mercy of the Court. No matter what the crime of the defendant, this is a greater one. For this is a crime not just against my client, but against all men. This sentence robs all men of their most precious freedom -- the right to die at their appointed times. Nothing is more damaging to the basic dignity of the human race than this most hideous..." "... This Court recognizes only the four freedoms. The freedom of death is not one of these. The sentence stands. The Court is adjourned." There were tears in the eyes of his lawyer, although young Oliver Symmes did not quite comprehend, as yet, their meaning. Hands, rougher than before, grasped his arms with strange firmness and led him off into... cycles, each prompted to activity by the one preceding it. They flutter in unbelievable clusters, wheel in untranslatable formations through the cerebric wasteland that is the aged mind of Oliver Symmes. They have no meaning to him, save for a furtive spark of recognition that intrudes upon him once in a while. The woman in the green uniform, standing to. one side of the window, smiled at him again. It was much simpler to care for him, she thought, if only one conceived of him as being a sort of sweet little wornout teddy lar. Yes, that was what he was, a little teddy bear that had gotten most of its stuffing lost and had shriveled and shrunk. And one can easily love and pamper a teddy bear. "Can you see the crowd all right, Mr. Symmes? This is a good place to watch from, isn't it?" Her words fell upon his ears, setting up vibrations and oscillations in the basilar membranes. Nerve cells triggered impulses that sped along neutral pathways to the withered cortex, where they lost themselves in the welter of atrophy and disintegration. They emerged into his consciousness as part of a gestaltic confusion. "Isn't it exciting, watching from here?" she asked, showing enthusiasm at the sight of the crowd below. "You should be enjoying this immensely, you know. Not all the people here have windows to look out of like this." There, now, that should make him feel a little better. His eyes, in their wandering, came to rest upon her uniform, so cool and comforting in its greenness. A flicker of light gleamed from the metallic insignia on her sleeve: "To Care for the Aged." Somewhere inside him an association clicked, a brief fire of response to a past event kindled into a short-lived flame, lighting the way through cobwebs for another shadow... H OW many years he had been waiting for the opportunity, he did not know. It seemed like decades, although it might have been only a handful of months. And all the time he had waited, he could feel himself growing older, could sense the syneresis, the slow solidifying of the life elements within him. He sat quietly and grew old, thinking the chance would never come. But it did come, when he had least expected it. It was a treat -- his birthday. Because of it, they had given him actual food for the first time in years: a cake, conspicuous in its barrenness of candles; a glass of real vegetable juices; a dab of potato; an indescribable green that might have been anything at all; and a little steak. A succulent, savory-looking piece of genuine meat. The richness of the food would probably make him sick, so unaccustomed to solid food was his digestive tract by now, but it would be worth the pain. And it was then that he saw the knife. It lay there on the tray, its honed edge glittering in the light of the sun. A sharp knife, capable of cutting steak -- or flesh of any kind. "Well, how do you like your birthday present, Mr. Symmes?" He looked up quickly at the woman standing beside the tray. The yellow pallor of her middleaged skin matched the color of her uniform. She wore the insignia of a geriatrics supervisor. He let a little smile flicker across his face. "Why, it's... it's wonderful. I never expected it at all. It's been so long, you know. So very long." How could he get rid of her? If he tried anything with her watching, she would stop him. And then he'd never get another chance. "I'm glad you like it, Mr. Symmes. Synthetic foods do get tiresome after a while, don't they?" The idea came with suddenness and he responded to it quickly. "But where are my pink pills? I always take them at lunch." "You won't need them if you're eating real food." He whipped his voice into petulance: "Yes, I will! I don't care if it is real food -- I want my pills!" "I'll get them for you later. Go ahead and eat first." "I can't eat until I take my pink pills! You ought to know that! I won't touch a thing until I get them! You've ruined my birthday party." The whims of the aging are without logic, so she went to get the pills, leaving Oliver Symmes and the gleaming, sharp knife together, unattended. heart? No, that would be too quick, too easy to repair. Then where? He remembered his studies of the middle Japanese culture and the methods of suicide practiced at that time. The intestines! So many of them to cut and slash at, so much damage that might be done before death set in! Maybe even the lungs! But he must hurry. Picking up the knife, he pointed it as his appendix. For a moment he hesitated, and his eyes observed again the little feast laid out before him. He thought briefly about pausing for just a while to taste the little steak, to nibble briefly at the delectablelooking cake. He hated to leave it untouched. It had been such a long time... The sudden memory of time, and how much of it he had spent hoping for this moment, snapped his attention back to the knife. Steeling his grip on it, he pressed it in hard. His eyes bulged with the excruciating pain as he wrenched the knife from right to left, twisting it wildly as he went, blindly slashing at his vital organs with the hope that once and for all he could stop the long and eternal waiting. His mouth filled with the taste of blood. He spat it out through clenched teeth. It gushed down his chin, staining the cleanness of his robe. His lips parted to scream. And then his eyes closed. A ND opened again! He was staring at the ceiling, but the men and women standing around him got in his way. Their lips were moving, their faces unperturbed. "That was a nasty thing for him to do." "They all do it, once or twice, until they learn." "Third time for him, isn't it?" "Yes, I believe so. First time he tried hanging himself. Second time he was beating his head against the wall when we came and stopped him. Bloody mess that one was." "Nothing to compare with this, of course." "Well, naturally." Oliver Symmes felt sick with fear of frustration. "Nice technique you showed, Doctor. He'd been dead at least an hour when we started, hadn't he?" "Almost two," someone else said. "An amazing job." "Thank you. But it wasn't too difficult. Just a little patching here and there." He felt his legs being shifted for him. "Be careful there, Nurse. Handle him gently. Fragilitas Ossium, you know. Old bones break very easily." "Sorry, Doctor." "Not that we couldn't fix them up immediately if they did." "Naturally, Doctor." "I wish they'd try something different for a change."  "The woman in the next room lost an eye last year, trying to reach the pre-frontals. Good as new now, of course." He wanted to vomit at the uselessness of it all. "By the way, what's he in for? Do you know?" "No, I'd have to look it up." "Probably newness." "Or taxes." "Or maybe even slander." "Is that on the prescribed antisocial list now?" "Oh, yes. It was passed just before the destructive criticism law." "Think he'll try this messy business again?"  "They all do." "They do, don't they? Don't they ever learn it's no use?" "Eventually. Some are just harder to convince than others." The pain was gone. He closed his eyes and slipped off into darkness again and into... derous fashion they float across the sea of his mind, like wandering bits of sargasso weed on the brackish water of a dying ocean. Each one dreamed a thousand times too many, each separate strand of memory-weed now nothing but a stereotyped shred of what might have once been a part of life and of living. With the quietness of deserted ships they drift in procession past his sphere of consciousness. Wait! There's one that seemS familiar. He stops the mental parade for a moment, not hearing the voice of his companion, the woman in the green uniform. "It's getting late, Mr. Symmes." She turned from the window and glanced at the wizenedness, the fragile remainder of the man, the almost empty shell. It was a pity he wasn't able to play games with her like some of the others. That made it so much easier. "Don't you think it's about time you went to bed? Early to bed and early to rise, you know." That memory of a needle, pointed and gleaming. What was it? Oh, yes. Stick it in his arm, push the plunger, pull it out; and wait for him to die. First one disease and then another, to each he happily succumbed, in the interests of science, only to be resuscitated. Each time a pig, he had hoped for the ease of death, praying that for once they'd wait too long, the germs would prove too virulent, that something would go wrong. "There, now, you just lie back and get comfortable," she said, walking over to the table. "But it has been fun, hasn't it? Watching the crowds, I mean." She felt he must be much happier now, and the knowledge of it gave her a sense of success. She was living up to her pledge, "To Care for the Aged." Diabetes, tuberculosis, cancer of the stomach, tumor of the brain. He'd had them all. and many others. They had swarmed to him through the gouged skinopenings made by the gleaming needle. And each had brought the freedom of blackness, of death, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a whole week. But always life returned again, and the waiting, waiting, waiting. "I enjoy New Year's myself," the woman said, her hands caressing a dial. Slowly, with gentle undulation, his chair rose from the floor and cradled the aged tiredness that was Oliver Symmes to his bed. With almost tender devotion, his body was mechanically shifted from the portable chair to the freshly made bed. O NE of his arms was caught for just a moment under the slight weight of his body. There was a short, snapping sound, but Oliver Symmes took no notice. His face remained impassive. Even pain had lost its meaning. "It's a pity we couldn't have been outside with the rest of them, celebrating," she said, as she arranged the covers around him, not noticing the arm herself. This was the part of her job she enjoyed most -- tucking the nice little man into bed. He did look sweet there, under the covers, didn't he? "Just imagine, Mr. Symmes, another year's gone by, and what have we accomplished?" Her prattle seeped in and he became aware of it and what she was saying. New Year? "What -- what year -- is this?" He spoke with great difficulty, from the long disuse of vocal cords. It was hardly more than a whisper, but she heard and was startled. "Why, Mr. Symmes, it's been so long since you've talked." She paused, but realized that she had not answered his question. "It's '#, of course. Last year was '#, so tonight's the start of '#." '#? Had it been fifty years since he came here? Had it been just that long? "What -- " She leaned closer to him as he struggled for the word. "What -- century?" Her astonishment was gone. He was teasing her, like the woman on the next level. These old ones were great for that! "Now, Mr. Symmes, everybody knows what century it is." She smiled at him glowingly, thinking she had caught him at a prank. It jvas nice, she thought, to have gotten through to him tonight, on the eve of the new year. That meant that she was living up to her motto the way she ought to be. She'd have to tell the supervisor about it. Oliver Symmes turned to face the ceiling, his mind full of dusty whispers. What century was it? She hadn't answered. It might have been a hundred and fifty years ago he came here, instead of just fifty. Or possibly two hundred and fifty, or... "Now, you be good, and sleep tight, and I'll see you in the morning." Her hand passed over a glowing stud and the room light dimmed to a quiet glow. Lying there in the bed, he did look like a teddy bear, a dear little teddy bear. She was so happy. "Good night, Mr. Symmes." She closed the door. "Happy New Year." The ceiling stared back at him. The mad sound of people crazed for the moment, shouting, echoed the bells. "Happy New Year!" He turned his headto one side. "Happy New Year!" And again... and again... and again. -- james McConnell The Inhabited By Illustrated T WO slitted green eyes loomed up directly in front of him. He plunged into them immediately. He had just made the voyage, naked through the dimension stratum, and he scurried into the first available refuge, to hover Containing a foe is sound military thinking -- unless it's carried out so literally that everybody becomes an innocent Trojan Horse! there, gasping. The word "he" does not strictly apply to the creature, for it had no sex, nor are the words "naked," "scurried," "hover" and "gasping" accurate at all. But there are no English words to describe properly what it was and how it moved, except in very general terms. There are no Asiatic, African or European words, though perhaps there are mathematical symbols. But, because this is not a technical paper, the symbols have no place in it. He was a sort of spy, a sort of fifth-columnist. He had some of the characteristics of a kamikaze pilot, too, because there was no telling if he'd get back from his mission. Hovering in his refuge and gasping for breath, so to speak, he tried to compose his thoughts after the terrifying journey and adjust himself to his new environment, so he could get to work. His job, as first traveler to this new world, the Earth, was to learn if it were suitable for habitation by his fellow beings back home. Their world was about ended and they had to move or die. He was being discomfited, however, in his initial adjustment. His first stop jn the new world -- unfortunately, not only for his dignity, but for his equilibrium -- had been in the mind of a cat. TT was his own fault, really. He and the others had decided that his first in a series of temporary habitations should be in one of the lower order of animals. It was a matter of precaution -- the mind would be easy to control, if it came to a contest. Also, there would be less chance of running into a mind-screen and being trapped or destroyed. The cat had no mind-screen, of course; some might even have argued that she didn't have a mind, especially the human couple she lived with. But whatever she did have was actively at work, feeling the solid treebranch under her claws and the leaves against which her tail switched and seeing the halfgrown chickens below. The chickens were scratching in the forbidden vegetable garden. The cat, the runt of her litter and thus named Midge, often had been chased out of the garden herself, but it was no sense of justice which now set her little gray behind to wriggling in preparation for her leap. It was mischief, pure and simple, which motivated her. Midge leaped, and the visitor, who had made the journey between dimensions without losing consciousness, blacked out. When he revived, he was being rocketed along in an up-anddown and at the same time sideward series of motions which got him all giddy. With an effort he oriented himself so that the cat's vision became his, and he watched in distaste as the chickens scurried, scrawny wings lifted and beaks achirp, this way and that to escape the monstrous cat. The cat never touched the chickens; she was content to chase them. When she had divided the flock in half, six in the pea patch and six under the porch, she lay down in the shade of the front steps and reflectively licked a paw. The spy got the impression of reflection, but he was baffledly unable to figure out what the cat was reflecting on. Midge in turn licked a paw, rolled in the dust, arched her back against the warm stone of the steps and snapped cautiously at a low-flying wasp. She was a contented cat. The impression of contentment came through very well. The dimension traveler got only one other impression at the moment -- one of languor. The cat, after a prodigious pink yawn, went to sleep. The traveler, although he had never known the experience of voluntary unconsciousness, was tempted to do the same. But he fought against the influence of his host and, robbed of vision with the closing of the cat's eyes, he meditated. He had been on Earth less than ten minutes, but his meditation consisted of saying to himself in his own way that if he was ever going to get anything done, he'd better escape from this cat's mind. He accomplished that a few minutes later, when there was a crunching of gravel in the driveway and a battered Plymouth stopped and a man stepped out. Midge opened her eyes, crept up behind a row of stones bordering the path to the driveway and jumped delicately out at the man, who tried unsuccessfully to gather her into his arms. Through the cat's eyes from behind the porch steps, where Midge had fled, the traveler took stock of the human being it was about to inhabit: Five-feet-elevenish, thirtyish, blond-brown-haired, blue-summer-suited. And no mind-screen. The traveler traveled and in an instant he was looking down from his new height at the gray undersized cat. Then the screen door of the porch opened and a female human being appeared. pressions now his, the traveler experienced some interesting sensations. There was a body-tobody togetherness apparently called "gimmea hug" and a face-to-face-touching ceremony, "kiss." "Hmm," thought the traveler, in his own way. "Hmm." The greeting ceremony was followed by one that had this catechism: "Suppareddi?" "Onnatable." Then came the "eating." This eating, something he had never' done, was all right, he decided. He wondered if cats ate. too. Yes, Midge was under the gas stove, chewing delicately at a different kind of preparation. There was a great deal of eating. The traveler knew from the inspection of the mind he was inhabiting that the man was enormously hungry and tired almost to exhaustion. "The damn job had to go out today," was what had happened. "We worked till almost eight o'clock. I think I'll take a nap after supper while you do the dishes." The traveler understood perfectly, for he was a very sympathetic type. That was one reason they had chosen him for the transdimensional exploration. They had figured the best applU cant for the job would be one with an intellect highly attuned to the vibrations of these others, known dimly through the warpview, one extremely sensitive and with a great capacity for appreciation. Shrewd, too, of course. The traveler tried to exercise control. Just a trace of it at first. He attempted to dissuade the man from having his nap. But his effort was ignored. The man went to sleep as soon as he lay down on the couch in the living room. Once again, as the eyes closed, the traveler was imprisoned. He hadn't realized it until now, but he evidently couldn't transfer from one mind to another except through the eyes, once he was inside. He had planned to explore the woman's 'mind, but now he was trapped, at least temporarily. Oh, well. He composed himself as best he could to await the awakening. This sleeping business was a waste of time. There were footsteps and a whistling noise outside. The inhabited man heard the sounds and woke up, irritated. He opened his eyes a slit as his wife told the neighbor that Charlie was taking a nap, worn out from a hard day at the office, and the visitor, darting free, transferred again. But he miscalculated and there he was in the mind of the neighbor. Irritated with himself, the traveler was about to jump to the mind of the woman when he was caught up in the excitement that was consuming his new host. "Sorry," said the neighbor. "The new batch of records I ordered came toflay and I thought Charlie'd like to hear them. Tell him to come over tomorrow night, if he wants to hear the solidest combo since Muggsy's Roseland days." The wife said all right, George, she'd tell him. But the traveler was experiencing the excited memories of a dixieland jfizz band in his new host's mind, and he knew he'd be hearing these fantastically wonderful new sounds at first hand as soon as George got back to his turntable. They could hardly wait, George and his inhabitant both. H IS inhabitant had come from a dimensionworld of vast, contemplative silences. There was no talk, no speech vibrations, no noise which could not be shut out by the turning of a mental switch. Communication was from mind to mind, not from mouth to ear. It was a world of peaceful silence, where everything had been done, where the struggle for physical existence had ended, and where there remained only the sweet fruits of past labor to be enjoyed. That had been the state of affairs, at any rate, up until the time of the Change, which was something the beings of the world could not stop. It was not a new threat from the lower orders, which they had met and overcome before, innumerable times. It was not a threat from outside -- no invasion such as they had turned back in the past. Nor was it a cooling of their world or the danger of imminent collision with another. The Change came from within. It was decadence. There was nothing left for the beings to do. They had solved all their problems and could find no new ones. They had exhausted the intricate workings of reflection, academic hypothetica and mind-play; there hadn't been a new game, .for instance, in the lifetime of the oldest inhabitant. And so they were dying of boredom. This very realization had for a time halted the creeping menace, because, as they came to accept it and discuss ways of meeting it, the peril itself subsided. But the moment they relaxed, the Change started again. Something had to be done. Mere theorizing about their situation was not enough. It was then that they sent their spy abroad. Because they had at one time or another visited each of the planets in their solar system and had exhausted their possibilities or found them barren, and because they were not equipped, even at the peak of their physical development, for intergalactic flight, there remained only one way to travel -- in time. Not forward or backward, for both had been tried. Travel ahead had been discouraging -- in fact, it had convinced them that their normal passage through the years had to be stopped. The reason had been made dramatically clear -- they, the master race, did not exist in the future. They had vanished' and the lower forms of life had begun to take over. Travel into the past would be even more boring than continued existence in the present, they realized, because they would be reliving the experiences they had had and still vividly remembered, and would be incapable of changing them. It would be both tiresome and frustrating. That left only one way to go -- sideways in time, across the dimension line -- to a world like their own, but which had developed so differently through the eons that to visit it and conquer the minds of its inhabitants would be worth while. In that way they picked Earth for their victim and sent out their spy. Just one spy. If he didn't return, they'd send another. There was enough time. And they had to be sure. phonograph and fixed himself a drink while the machine warmed up. The interdimensional invader reacted pleasurably to the taste and instant warming effect of the liquor on George's mind. "Ahh!" said George aloud, and his temporary inhabitant agreed with him. George lifted the phonograph needle into the groove and went to sit on the edge of a chair. Jazz poured out of the speaker and the man beat out the time with his heels and toes. The visitor in his mind experimented with control. He went a', it subtly, at first, so as not to alarm his host. He tried to quiet the beating of time with the feet. He suggested that George cross his Tegs instead. The beating of time continued. The visitor urged that George do this little thing he asked; he bentall his powers to the suggestion, concentrating on the tapping feet. There wasn't even a glimmer of reaction. Instead, there was a reverse effect. The pounding of music was insistent. The visitor relaxed. He rationalized and told himself he would try another time. Now he would observe this phenomenon. But he became more than just an observer. The visitor reeled with sensation. The vibrations gripped him, twisted him and wrung him out. He was limp, palpitating and thoroughly happy when the record ended and George got up immediately to put on another. Hours later, drunk with the jazz and the liquor, the visitor went blissfully to sleep inside George's mind when his host went to bed. He awoke, with George, to the experience of a nagging throb. But in a few minutes, after a shower, shave and breakfast with steaming coffee, it was gone, and the visitor looked forward to the coming day. It was George's day off and he was going fishing. Humming to himself, he got out his reel and flies and other paraphernalia and contentedly arranged them in the back of his car. Visions of the fine, quiet time he was going to have went through George's mind, and his inhabitant decided he had better leave. He had to get on with his exploration; he mustn't allow himself to be trapped into just having fun. But he stayed with George as the fisherman drove his car out of the garage and along a highway. The day was sunny and warm. There was a slight wind and the green trees sighed delicately in it. The birds were pleasantly vocal and the colors were superb. The visitor found it oddly familiar. Then he realized what it was. His world was like this, too. It had the trees, the birds, the wind and the colors. All were there. But its people had long since ceased to appreciate them. Their existence had turned inward and the external things no longer were of interest. Yet the visitor, through George's eyes, found this world delightful. He reveled in its beauty, its breathtaking panorama and its balance. And he wondered if he was able to appreciate it for the first time now because he was 'Being active, although in a vicarious way, and participating in life, instead of merely reflecting on it. This would be a clue to have analyzed by the greater minds to which he would report. Then, with a wrench, the visitor chided himself. He was allowing himself to identify too closely with this mortal, with his appreciation of such diverse pursuits as jazz and fishing. He had to get on. There was work to be done. George waved to a boy playing in a field and the boy waved back. With the contact of their eyes, the visitor was inside the boy's mind. T HE boy had a dog. It was a great, lumbering mass of affection, a shaggy, loving, prankish beast. A protector and a playmate, strong and gentle. Now that the visitor was in the boy's mind, he adored the animal, and the dog worshiped him. He fought to be rational. "Come now," he told himself, "don't get carried away." He attempted control. A simple thing. He would have the boy pull the dog's ear, gently. He concentrated, suggested. But all his efforts were thwarted. The boy leaped at the dog, grabbed it around the middle. The dog responded, prancing free. The visitor gave up. He relaxed. Great waves of mute, suffocating love enveloped him. He swam for a few minutes in a pool of joy. as the boy and dog wrestled, rolled over each other in the tall grass, charged ferociously with teeth bared and growls issuing from both throats, finally to subside panting and laughing on the ground while the clouds swept majestically overhead across the blue sky. He could swear the dog was laughing, too. As they lay there, exhausted for the moment, a young woman came upon them. The visitor saw her looking down at them, the soft breeze tugging at her dark hair and skirt. Her hands were thrust into the pockets of her jacket. She was barefoot and she wriggled her toes so that blades of grass came up between them. "Hello, Jimmy," she said. "Hello, Max, you old monster." The dog thumped the ground with his tail. "Hello, Mrs. Tanner," the boy said. "How's the baby coming?" The girl smiled. "Just fine, Jimmy. It's beginning to kick a little now. It kind of tickles. And you know what?" "What?" asked Jimmy. The visitor in the boy's mind wanted to know, too. "I hope it's a boy, and that he grows up to be just like you." "Aw." The boy rolled over and hid his face in the grass. Then he peered around. "Honest?" "Honest," she said. "Gee whiz." The boy was so embarrassed that he had to leave. "Me and Max are going down to the swimmin' hole. You wanta come?" "No, thanks. You go ahead. I think I'll just sit here in the Sun for a while and watch my toes curl." As they said good-by, the visitor traveled to the new mind. the boy and the dog running across the meadow and down to the stream at the edge of the woods. The traveler experienced a sensation of tremendous fondness as he watched them go. But he mustn't get carried away, he told himself. He must make another attempt to take command. This girl might be the one he could influence. She was doing nothing active; her mind was relaxed. The visitor bent himself to the task. He would be cleverly simple. He would have her pick a daisy. They were all around at her feet. He concentrated. Her gaze traveled back across the meadow to the grassy knoll on which she was standing. She sat. She stretched out her arms behind her and leaned back on them. She tossed her hair and gazed into the sky. She wasn't even thinking of the daisy. Irritated, he gathered all his powers into a compact mass and hurled them at her mind. But with a swoop and a soar, he was carried up and away, through the sweet summer air, to a cloud of white softness. This was not what he had planned, by any means. A steady, warm breeze enveloped him and there was a tinkle of faraway music. It frightened him and he struggled to get back into contact with the girl's mind. But there was no contact. Apparently he had been cast out, against his will. The forces of creation buffeted him. His dizzying flight carried him through the clean air in swift journey from horizon to horizon, then up, up and out beyond the limits of the atmosphere, only to return him in a trice to the breast of the rolling meadow. He was conscious now of the steady growth of slim green leaves as they pressed confidently through the nurturing Earth, of the other tiny living things in and on the Earth, and the heartbeat of the Earth itself, assuring him with its great strength of the continuation of all things. Then he was back with the girl, watching through her eyes a butterfly as it fluttered to rest on a flower and perched there, gently waving its gaudy wings. He had not been cast out. The young woman herself had gone on that wild journey to the heavens, not only with her mind, but with her entire being, attuned to the rest of creation. There was a continuity, he realized, a oneness between herself, the mother-tobe, and the Universe. With her, then, he felt the stirrings of new life, and he was proud and content. He forgot for the moment that he had been a failure. T HE soft breeze seemed to turn chill. The Sun was still high and unclouded, but its warmth was gone. With the girl, he felt a prickling along the spine. She turned her head slightly and, through her eyes, he saw, a few yards away in tall grass, a creeping man. The eyes of the man were fixed on the girl's body and the traveler felt her thrill of terror. The man lay there for a moment, hands flat on the ground under his chest. Then he moved forward, inching toward her. The girl screamed. Her terror gripped the visitor. He was helpless. His thoughts whirled into chaos, following hers. The eyes of the creeping man flicked from side to side, then up. The visitor quivered and cringed with the girl when she screamed again. As the torrent of frightened sound poured from her throat, the creeping man looked into her eyes. Instantly the visitor was sucked into his mind. It was a maelstrom. A tremendous conflict was going on in it. One part of it was urging the body on in its fantastic crawl toward the young woman frozen in terror against the sky. The visitor was aware of the other part, submerged and struggling feebly, trying to get through with a message of reason. But it was handicapped. The visitor sensed these efforts being nullified by a crushing weight of shame. The traveler fought against full identification with the deranged part of the mind. Nevertheless, he sought to understand it, as he had understood the other minds he'd visited. But there was nothing to understand. The creeping man had no plan. There was no reason for his action. The visitor felt only a compulsion which said, "You must! You must!" The visitor was frightened. And then he realized that he was less frightened than the man was. The terror felt by the creeping man was greater than the fear the visitor had experienced with the girl. There were shouts and barking. He heard the shrill cry of a boy. "Go get him, Max!" There was a squeal of brakes from the road and a pounding of heavy footsteps coming toward them. With the man, the visitor rose up, confused, scared. A great shaggy weight hurled itself and a growling, sharp-toothed mouth sought a throat. A voice yelled, "Don't shoot! The dog's got him!" Then blackness. moned the visitor, huddling in a corner of the deranged mind, fearing contamination. The eyes opened, looked up at the ceiling of a barred cell. "Dr. Cloyd is here to see you," the voice said. The visitor felt the mind of his host seeking to close out the words and the world, to return to sheltering darkness. There was a rattle of keys and the opening of an iron door. The eyes opened as a hand shook the psychotic Mersey by the shoulder. The visitor sought escape, but the eyes avoided those of the other. "Come with me, son," the doctor's voice said. "Don't be frightened. No one will hurt you. We'll have a talk." Mersey shook off the hand on his shoulder. "Drop dead," he muttered. "That wouldn't help anything," the doctor said. "Come on, man." Mersey sat up and, through his eyes, the traveler saw the doctor's legs. Were they legs or were they iron bars? The traveler cringed away from the mad thought. A room with a desk, a chair, a couch, and sunlight through a window. Crawling sunlit snakes. The visitor shuddered. He sought the part of the mind that was clear, but he sought in vain. Only the whirling chaos and the distorted images remained now. There was a pain in the throat and with Mersey he lifted a hand to it. Bandaged -- gleaming teeth and a snarling animal's mouth -- fear, despair and hatred. With the prisoner, he collapsed on the couch. "Lie down, if you like," said Dr. Cloyd's voice. "Try to relax. Let me help you." "Drop dead," Mersey replied automatically. The visitor felt the tenseness of the man, the unreasoning fear, and the resentment. But as the man lay there, the traveler sensed a calming of the turbulence. There was an urgent rational thought. He concentrated and tried to help the man phrase it. "The girl -- is she all right? Did I... ?" "She's all right." The doctor'c voice was soothing. It pushed back the shadows a little. "She's perfectly all right." The visitor sensed a dulled relief in Mersey's mind. The shadows still whirled, but they were less ominous. He suggested a question, exulted as Mersey attempted to phrase it: "Doctor, am I real bad off? Can... ?" But still the shadows. "We'll work together," said the doctor's voice. "You've been ill, but so have others. With your help, we can make you well." The traveler made a tremendous effort. He urged Mersey to say: "I'll help, doctor. I want to find peace." But then Mersey's voice went on: "I must find a new home. We need a new home. We can't stay where we are." T HE traveler was shocked at the words. He hadn't intended them to come out that way. Somehow Mersey had voiced the underlying thoughts of his people. The traveler sought the doctor's reaction, but Mersey wouldn't look at him. The man's gaze was fixed on the ceiling above the couch. "Of course," the doctor said. His words were false, the visitor realized; he was humoring the madman. "We had so much, but now there is no future," Mersey said. The visitor tried to stop him. He would not be stopped. "We can't stay much longer. We'll die. We must find a new world. Maybe you can help us." Dr. Cloyd spoke and there was no hint of surprise in his voice. "I'll help you all I can. Would you care to tell me more about your world?" Desperately, the visitor fought to control the flow of Mersey's words. He had opened the gate to the other world -- how, he did not know -- and all of his knowledge and memories now were Mersey's. But the traveler could not communicate with the disordered mind. He could only communicate through it, and then involuntarily. If he could escape the mind... but he could not escape. Mersey's eyes were fixed on the ceiling. He would not look at the doctor. "A dying world," Mersey said. "It will live on after us, but we will die because we have finished. There's nothing more to do. The Change is Upon, us, and we must flee it or die. I have been sent here as a last hope, as an emissary to learn if this world is the answer. I have traveled among you and I have found good things. Your world is much like ours, physically, but it has not grown as fast or as far as ours, and we would be happy here, among you, if we could control." TT'HE words from Mersey's throat had come falteringly at first, but now they were strong, although the tone was flat and expressionless. The words went on; "But we can't control. I've tried and failed. At best we can co-exist, as observers and vicarious participants, but we must surrender choice. Is that to be our destiny -- to live on, but to be denied all except contemplation -- to live on as guests among you, accepting your ways and sharing them, but with no power to change them?" The traveler shouted at Mersey's mind in soundless fury: "Shut up! Shut up!" Mersey stopped talking. "Go on," said the doctor softly. "This is very interesting." "Shut up!" said the traveler voicelessly, yet with frantic urgency. The madman was silent. His body was perfectly still, except for his calm breathing. The visitor gazed through his eyes in the only possible direction -- up at the ceiling. He tried another command. "Look at the doctor." With that glance, the visitor told himself, he would flee the crazed mind and enter the doctor's. There he would learn what the psychiatrist thought of his patient's strange soliloquy -- whether he believed it, or any part of it. He prayed that the doctor was evaluating it as the intricate raving of delusion. head. Through his eyes, the visitor saw the faded green carpet, the doctor's dullblack shoes, his socks, the legs of his trousers. Mersey's glance hovered there, around the doctor's knees. The visitor forced it higher, past tyc belt around a tidy waist, along the buttons of the opened vest to the white collar, and finally to the kindly eyes behind goldrimmed glasses. Again he had commanded this human being and had been obeyed. The traveler braced himself for the leap from the tortured mind to the sane one. But his gaze continued to be that of Mersey. The gray eyes of the doctor were on his patient. Intelligence and kindness were in those eyes, but the visitor could read nothing else. He was caught, a prisoner in a demented mind. He felt panic. This must be the mind-screen he'd been warned about. "Look down," the visitor commanded Mersey. "Shut your eyes. Don't let him see me." But Mersey continued to be held by the doctor's eyes. The visitor cowered back into tlie crazed mental tangle. Gradually, then, his fear ebbed. There was more likelihood that Cloyd did not believe Mersey's words than that he did. The doctor treated hundreds of patients and surely many of them had delusions as fanciful as this one might seem. The traveler's alarm simmered down until he was capable of appreciating the irony of the situation. But at the same time, he thought with pain, "Is it our fate tures on this world, we can establish communication only through the insane? And even then to have only imperfect control of the mind and, worse, to have it become a transmitter for our most secret thoughts?" It was heartbreaking. Dr. Cloyd broke the long silence. Pulling at his ear, he spoke calmly and matter-of-factly : "Let me see if I understand your problem, Mersey. You believe yourself to be from another world, from which you have traveled, although not physically. Your world is not a material one, as far as its people are concerned. Your civilization is a mental one, which has been placed in danger. You must resettle your people, but this cannot be done here, on Earth, except in the minds of the mentally ill -- and that would not be a satisfactory solution. Have I stated the case correctly?" "Yes," Mersey's voice said over the traveler's mental protests. "Except that it is not a 'case,' as you call it. I am not Mersey. He is merely a vehicle for my thoughts. I am not here to be treated or cured, as the human being Mersey is. I'm here with a life-or-death problem affecting an entire race, and I would not be talking to you except that, at the moment, I'm trapped and confused." npHE madman was doing it again, the traveler thought ledge, betraying him and "his kind. Was there no way to muffle him? "I must admit that I'm confused myself," Dr. Cloyd said. "Humor me for a moment while I think out loud. Let me consider this in my own framework, first, and then in yours, without labeling either one absolutely true or false. "You see," the doctor went on, "this is a world of vitality. My world -- Earth. Its people are strong. Their bodies are developed as well as their minds. There are some who are not so strong, and some whose minds have been injured. But for the most part, both the mind and the body are in balance. Each has its function, and they work together as a coordinated whole. My understanding of your world, on the other hand, is that it's in a state of imbalance, where the physical has deteriorated almost to extinction and the mind has been nurtured in a hothouse atmosphere. Where, you might say, the mind has fed on the decay of the body." "No," said Mersey, voicing the traveler's conviction. "You paint a highly distorted picture of our world." "I theorize, of course," Dr. Cloyd agreed. "But it's a valid theory, based on intimate knowledge of my own world and what you've told me of yours." "You make a basic error, I think," Mersey said, speaking for sume that I have been able to make contact only with this deranged mind. That is wrong. I have shared the experiences of many of you -- a man, a boy, a woman about to bear a child. Even a cat. And with each of these, my mind has been perfectly attuned. I was able to share and enjoy their experiences, their pleasures, to love with them and to fear, although they had no knowledge of my presence. "Only since I came to this poor mind have I failed to achieve true empathy. I have been shocked by his madness and I've tried to resist it, to help him overcome it. But I've failed and it apparently has imprisoned me. Whereas I was able to leave the minds of the others almost at will, with poor Mersey I'm trapped. I can't transfer to you, for instance, as I could normally from another. If there's a way out, I haven't found it. Have you a theory for this?" In spite of his distress at these revelations, the traveler was intrigued, now that they had been voiced for him, and he was eager to hear Dr. Cloyd's interpretation of them. The psychiatrist took a pipe out of his pocket, filled it, lighted it and puffed slowly on it until it was drawing well. "Continuing to accept your postulate that you're not Mersey, but an alien inhabiting his mind," the doctor said finally, "I can enlarge on my theory without changing it in any basic way. "Your world is not superior to ours, much as it may please you to believe that it is. Nature consists of a balance, and that balance must hold true whether in Sioux City, or Mars, or in the fourth dimension, or in your world, wherever that may be. Your world is out of balance. Evidently it has been going out of balance for some time. "Your salvation lies not in further evolution in your world -- since your way of evolving proved wrong, and may prove fatal -- but in a change in course, back along the evolutionary path to a society which developed naturally, with the mind and the body in balance. That society is the one you have found here, in our world. You found it pleasant and attractive, you say, but that doesn't mean you're suited to it. "Nature's harsh rules may have operated to let you observe ,a way of life here that you enjoy, but to exclude you otherwise -- except from a mind that is not well. In nature's balance, it could be that the refuge on this world most closely resembling your needs is in the mind of the psychotic. One conclusion could be that your race is mentally ill -- by our standards, if not by yours -- and that the type of person here most closely approximating your way of life is one with a disordered mind." no immediate reply. The traveler made use of the silence to consider this plausible, but frightening theory. To accept the theory would be to accept a destiny of madness here on this world, although the doctor had been kind enough to draw a distinction between madness in one dimension and a mere lack of natural balance in another. Mersey again seized upon the traveler's mind and spoke its thoughts. But as he spoke, he voiced a conclusion which the traveler had not yet admitted even to himself. "Then the answer is inescapable," Mersey said, his tone flat and unemotional. "It is theoretically possible for all of our people to migrate to this world and find refuge of a sort. But if we established ourselves in the minds of your normal people, we'd be, without will. As mere observers, we'd become assimilated in time, and thus extinguished as a separate race. That, of course, we could not permit. And if we settled in the minds most suitable to receive us, we would be in the minds of those who by your standards are insane -- whose destiny is controlled by the others. Here again we could permit no such fate. "That alone would be enough to send me back to my people to report failure. But there is something more -- something I don't think you will believe, for all your ability to synthesize acceptance of another viewpoint." "And what is that?" "First I must ask a question. In speaking to me now, do you still believe yourself to be addressing Mersey, your fellow human being, and humoring him in a delusion? Or do you think you are speaking through him to me, the inhabitant of another world who has borrowed his mind?" time to relight his pipe. "Let me answer you in this way," he said. "If I were convinced that Mersey was merely harboring a delusion that he was inhabited by an alien being, I would accept that situation clinically. I would humor him, as you put it, in the hope that he'd be encouraged to talk freely and perhaps give me a clue to his delusion so I could help him lose it. I would speak to him -- or to you, if that were his concept of himself -- just as I am speaking now. "On the other hand, if I were convinced by the many unusual nuances of our conversation that the mind I was addressing actually was that of an alien being -- I would still talk to you as I am talking now." The doctor smiled again. "I trust I have made my answer sufficiently unsatisfactory." The visitor's reaction was spoken by Mersey. "On the contxary, you have unwittingly told me what I want to know. You'd want your answer to be satisfactory if you were speaking to Mersey, the lunatic. But because you'd take delight in disconcerting me by scoring a point -- something you wouldn't do with a patient -- you reveal acceptance of the fact that I am not Mersey. Your rules would not permit you to give him an unsatisfactory answer." "Not quite," contradicted Dr. Cloyd, still smiling. "To Mersey, my patient, troubled by his delusion and using all his craft to persuade both of us of its reality, the unsatisfactory answer would be the satisfactory one." "Dr. Cloyd, I salute you. I will leave your world with a tremendous respect for you -- and completely unsure of whether you believe in my existence." "Thank you." "I am leaving, you know," Mersey's voice replied. The traveler by now was resigned to letting the patient be his medium and speak his thoughts. Thus far, he had spoken them all truly, if somewhat excessively. The traveler thought he knew why, now, and expected Mersey to voice the reason for him very shortly. He did. "I'm leaving because I must report failure and advise my people to look elsewhere for a new home. Part of the reason for that failure I haven't yet mentioned : "Although it might appear that I, the visitor, am manipulating Mersey to speak the thoughts I wished to communicate, the facts are almost the opposite. My control over either Mersey's body or mind is practically nil. "What you have been hearing and what you hear even now are the thoughts I am thinking -- not necessarily the ones I want you to know. What has happened is this, if I may borrow your theory : "My mind has invaded Mersey's, but his human vitality is too strong to permit him to be controlled by it. In fact, the reverse is true. His vitality is making use of my mind for its own good, and for the good of your human race. His own mind is damaged badly, but his healthy body has taken over and made use of my mind. It is using my mind to make it speak against its will -- to speak the thoughts of an alien without subterfuge, as they actually exist in truth. Thus I am helplessly telling you all about myself and the intentions of my people. "What is in operation in Mersey is the human body's instinct of self-preservation. It is utilizing my mind to warn you against that very mind. Do you see? That would be the case, too, if a minds like Mersey's. None of us could plot successfully against you, if that were our desire -- which, of course, it is -- because the babbling tongues we inherited along with the bodies would give us away." The doctor no longer smiled. His expression was grave now. "I don't know," he said. "Now I am not sure any longer. I'm not certain that I follow you -- or whether I want to follow you. I think I'm a bit frightened." "You needn't be. I'm going. I'll say good-by, in your custom, and thank you for the hospitality and pleasures your world has given me. And I suppose I must thank Mersey for the warning of doom he's unknowingly given my people, poor man. I hope you can help him." "I'll try," said Dr. Cloyd, "though I must say you've complicated the diagnosis considerably." "Good-by. I won't be back, I promise you." "I believe you," said the doctor. "Good-by." Mersey slumped back on the couch. He looked up at the ceiling, vacantly. 'E'OR a long time there was no sound in the room. Then the doctor said: "Mersey." There was no answer. The man continued to lie there motionless, breathing normally, looking at the ceiling. "Mersey," said the doctor again. "How do you feel?" The man turned his head. He looked at the doctor with hostility, then went back to his contemplation of the ceiling. "Drop dead," he muttered. Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Open Monday Thru Saturday! #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until # :# P.M. New York #, New York (Phone GRomercy #-#) The Ice Age (II) N OT just "once upon a time," but at least three times in the course of the experienced what is now called an Ice Age. a period of glaciers in areas normally free of them. The first of these three glaciations, only very incompletely and sketchily known to us. took place in the earliest days of the old, old Cambrian Period. More likely it was at a time which we would call "pre-Cambrian," if there were a hard and fast rule for placing the dividing line, and if we could date such distant events with any precision. The next glaciation, of which we know much more, took place the Permian Period. This period followed the days of the endless -- both in expanse and in duration -- swampy forests of the Carboniferous Period which produced most of our coal beds. The Permian glaciation was followed, however, by the three periods which are often lumped together under the term "The Age of Reptiles" -- the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods -- all in all, about # warm. The "Age of Mammals" or Tertiary Period -- the name is a hangover from the early days of geology which assumed a total of four geological periods, of which this was the third -- was of years and also obviously warm in character. And then, after a good round ate, there came the recent Ice Age which ended only a few thousand years before the very oldest records of human history. T HE great question, asked ever since even a few of the facts just recited became known, was "what caused it?" A set of answers which dominated thinking for quite some time was based on the simple reasoning that the Earth gets its heat from the Sun. Hence, if we did not get enough heat at one time, the Sun must have weakened temporarily, or else we, for reasons unknown, had been traveling in a different orbit. In short, either the stove had not worked right or else we had been farther away from it. Last month I gave a survey of these ideas and why they had failed to work out, sticking closely to the set of theories which had astronomical events in mind. Doing that, I had to disregard chronological order, else it would have been a confused story indeed. Now for the set of theories which stayed on Earth. Just as there had been a simple-minded idea in the astronomical field (the Sun is burning out) there was an equally simple-minded thought in the geological department. After all, it was not only the Sun which was gradually cooling. The Earth was, too. Once, the then current theory ran, the Earth had been a ball of hot gas and molten rock, a miniature sun. And although, because of its much smaller size, the Earth had formed a solid cool crust early in its career, it  had remained a miniature sun under that crust for a long time. In the days of the geological periods which were past, the crust did not only receive radiant heating from the ceiling, it was also supplied with heat from underneath. As that floor heating diminished, the crust grew cooler, for the Sun alone was not enough to produce the all-over tropical climate of the past. The argument broke down as soon as that older glaciation of the Permian Period was discovered and confirmed. To make it completely absurd, somebody made a little calculation. Supposing that the heat from underneath was to provide as many calories to the surface as the Sun did, how soon would it become how hot if you dug down? The answer was that there would have to be almost red heat # feet below sea level -- far from improving in growth, the roots of any large tree would be badly scorched.  no answer. But, one might ask, granted that North America had had its Ice Age at the same time as northern Europe, and granted also that traces of an Ice Age had been found in the southern hemisphere, how could we be sure the Ice Age in the southern hemisphere had coincided with that of the northern hemisphere? It was this thought which intrigued Monsieur Alphonse Joseph Adhnar, in everyday life a professor of mathematics, and which led to one of the wildest hypotheses ever to be thrown at a usually patient public. But we have to recall a few elementary facts first. As everybody has learned at some time or another, the Earth's axis is tilted to the plane of the Earth's orbit, and the orbit itself is not a precise circle but merely a nearcircular ellipse. At the present time, the Earth is farthest from the Sun when the northern hemisphere has summer. The slightly longer distance matters little; the important thing is that the tilt of the axis favors the north at that time of the year. In the south, things are reversed; the South Pole has summer when the Earth is closest to the Sun. That, however, also means that the Earth is moving a little faster. Therefore the South Polar summer, while potentially somewhat warmer, is slightly shorter; the north has slightly cooler but longer summers. Conversely, the south has a colder and longer winter. Then there is the phenomenon of the procession of the equinoxes -- we can't go into detail here -- which has the result that, in twenty-odd-thousand-year intervals, the other pole attains the favored position of the somewhat longer summers. Adhemar advanced the idea that the Ice Age was simply the time when the North Pole was in the position which now applies to South Pole. During those regularly repeating cycles when the tilt of the axis pointed the northern hemisphere toward the Sun, while the Earth was closest, the north had long and cold winters. Though the summers were hotter, they were too short to melt the ice which had accumulated. And the more the ice accumulated, winter after winter, the weaker the effect of the summer on that accumulation. So far, this was, for the factual knowledge then available, a theory that could be seriously considered. But Adhemar did not stop there. As the ice accumulated around the unfavored pole, its weight shifted the center of gravity of the planet. This would cause the waters of the surface to assemble near the cold pole. Look at the map -- the high north is largely land, but the massive ice of the south is surrounded by thousands of miles of sea water. Then, as the severity of the cold season slowly shifts from one pole to the other, the formerly ice pole melts clear. One summer the last ice floe disappears down there... and suddenly the center of gravity of the planet shifts and the waters hurry in an in describable flood to the other pole. During the last shift of the waters to the north, the mammoths were carried from their tropical homeland into, the ice of Siberia, where they managed to live for one season -- Adhemar could not know just how well the mammoths were adapted to a cold climate in every detail of their physiology -- and the last water shift to the south was probably the Flood of the Bible. The next shift, Adhemar predicted in #, would take place # years hence.  every count, he had introduced an idea which many a geologist tried to utilize later on : the notion that what looks like an ice age may just have been normal polar winter. But the poles may have been where they are not now. About #, the Urania Observatory in Berlin had reported after considerable hesitation that its own latitude seemed to' shift a bit. The amount was unimportant and hardly detectable. But the fact itself seemed -- they said "seemed" -- correct. The observatory of Pulkova in Russia was the first to corroborate the strange news. Prague followed suit. Just to make sure, an astronomer, Dr. Markuse, was shipped halfway around the world to the Sandwich Islands to make measurements from an antipodal point. It was true. The North Pole -- and. of course, the South Pole, too -- moves a little, some # feet away from its theoretical location. It is not a straight-line movement, but a kind of shivering -- and no jokes about the low temperature, please. Well, if the poles move a little now, they might have moved much more in the past. Look at a map again, a world map this time, or better still, a globe. Supposing that at one time the whole Earth had been turned in such a way that the North Pole had occupied the southern tip of Greenland. That would obviously have meant an Ice Age for both North America and Europe. Supposing that in the preceding geological period, the North Pole had been located under what we now call # degrees latitude in northeastern Asia. At that time the equator would have run through Texas and Louisiana on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, and through Spain and Greece on the other side. It would certainly have been tropical in North America and Europe then. just shifts the pole along the #th meridian does not work out in reality. For Ireland, England and North Germany, and, of course, Scandinavia, were covered by glaciers, while France and Spain were not. But this was the general idea, set forth, for the first time to my knowledge, in the Annual Report for the Year #I of the Society for Geography in Dresden. The author of this particular paper was an engineer by the name of Paul Reibisch. It seemed to Reibisch that the whole Earth performed a very slow pendulum movement, swinging in the course of geological periods north and south, bringing different continents into the tropics and under the poles. If you want to visualize what he meant, take a globe and hold it between two fingertips which are placed on Sumatra and Ecuador. Turn the globe back and forth. Now, if you can imagine that the ice cap of the pole slithers back and forth over the continents and seas, you know the gist of Reibisch's theory. Reibisch followed up his original paper with two more publications in # and # and, in the latter year, another book appeared which enthusiastically supported Reibisch. Its author was Dr. Heinrich Simroth, professor of zoology at the University of Leipzig. Prof. Simroth had tried to coordinate Reibisch's geological ideas with his own knowledge of zoology, specifically the distribution of the animals over the globe, and had satisfied himself that everything worked out wonderfully. Simroth did something else. Reibisch had introduced that pendulum movement as a fact; Simroth tried to find the reason for it. His solution: a second moon of Earth had struck sevthe first glaciation in pre-Cambrian days. This shock had caused the first movement, and ever since then, the magnetic field of the Sun, acting upon the magnetic field of the Earth, had tried to dampen the pendulum movement, until only the slight shivering of the poles is left now. Very ingenious, but it has nothing to do with reality. Even forgetting Simroth's "elaborations," Reibisch's pendulum just does not work out. For one thing, while the European glaciation would fall between the Tertiary Period and the present, the North American glaciation would fall into the Tertiary. Geologists were quite sure even in # that they were simultaneous. Now, thanks to the carbon# method, we know they were. TUT there was one more thought. Possibly it was not the Earth as a whole which made weird movements, but only the Earth's crust or portions of the crust, floating upon the heavier magma of the next deeper layer. When you voice this thought now, everybody will think at once of Prof. Alfred Wegener's theory of the floating continents, an intriguing idea about which one may say that it almost explains things. But not quite; there are lots of difficulties left. Dr. Wegener, however, was not the first to make the crust of the Earth wander about the planet. The first, in #, had been a learned and careful outsider, Karl Count Loffelholz von Colberg, who offered this thought as a possibility. The next one to make this suggestion was (strange coincidence of names) Father Kolberg, S. J., and the third was Father Damian Kreichgauer, S.V.D., who some fifty years ago published his Die Aequatorirage in der Geologie which may be translated as "The Position of the Equator in Geological History." Father Kreichgauer was interested in the equator as the title shows, but if you move the equator, you move the poles, too. Interestingly enough, Father Kreichgauer -- who wrote before Reibisch published his works, even though the publication date is a little later -- also assumes that northern South America and the East Indies shifted little, if at all. Otherwise the equator is assumed to have almost "flopped over" in the course of geological history. Since Father Kreichgauer's continents can wander off obliquely, if needed, things work out far better than with Reibisch's rigid system. But even so the glaciations of East and West cannot be made to coincide. In reality, they did. A LL these ideas were not really explanations, They were attempts to explain the Ice Ages away, to show that unknown factors led to systematic mistakes in interpretation of the evidence. But since they all failed, the old assumption that the whole Earth was temporarily cooler is still the simplest and most logical. Nor did it have to be very much cooler. Melchior Neumayr of Vienna showed that a general reduction of the average temperature by just # to # degrees Fahrenheit is sufficient. If every noon and every midnight is # to # degrees F. cooler than now for a number of centuries, we'll get the most beautiful glaciation, both in the north and in the south, both east and west -- and no nonsense about shifting centers of gravity and second moons hitting us below the equator. One rather obvious thought centers upon the enormous cosmic dust clouds we see in interstellar space. If our sun with its planetary system wandered into such a cloud, the dust would absorb some of the solar radiation and Earth would receive less heat. It is really surprising that it took so long until somebody actually said so, yet the idea did not reach print until about # years ago with a paper by the astronomer Prof. Nolke. It seems simple, but the difficulties are enormous. The cosmic dust would absorb solar radiation, all right. It would also reflect radiation which would normally miss the Earth. The final result might well be an increase of radiation reaching us! (In fact, the British Col. Delauney, writing at about the same time as Nolke, took this position.) More important, the dust would fuel the Sun, increasing the output of heat. It is conceivable that you might wiggle through by assuming a density of dust in space of .just the right amount to act as a shield without increasing the Sun's output more than the shielding. But since the last glaciers vanished only # years ago, it would be a reasonable demand to have the cosmic cloud which caused the Ice Age pointed out in the sky. More than thirty years ago, the geologist Geinitz, who could be considered the foremost authority on all the theories relating to the Ice Age, wrote in the introduction to a heavy volume on this subject: "The causes of the Ice Age are unknown." Unfortunately, he could use the same sentence if he wrote now. But there is one more theory which I'll save for the next month. It cannot be proved, but it might be true in principle. T HE item on "pi" brought in a surprisingly large number of letters, among them six from correspondents who could not figure out just how a sentence about alcoholic drinks and quantum mechanics was supposed to help them remember the value of "pi" to # decimal places. I also received one letter (from Peter J. Sutro of Oklahoma City) in which he predicted that some readers would ask that question. I had to admit to Mr. Sutro that this was my fault. The clue is, of course, the number of letters in every word. I had taken it for granted that the readers would catch on, if not at once, at least after about five minutes had gone by. Now I assume that everybody but those six readers did, which isn't at all bad. An informative letter about "pi" came from Dr. James Stokley of General Electric's Research Laboratory. First of all, Dr. Stokley confirmed that the mnemonic I quoted was actually coined by Sir James Jeans; it appeared originally in a letter to Nature # years ago over the initials J.H.J., which were those of Sir James. Dr. Stokley also informed me that the value of "pi" is now known to # places. Only thirty years ago, that would have been the lifetime work of a mathematician, but times have changed. The calculation was accomplished by a group of researchers at the Aberdeen Proving Ground under W. Barkley Fritz. Working on their own time over the Fourth of July weekend computer, they not only derived the value of "pi" for many more places than ever before, but also calculated the value of "e" to # places. Anybody who wants to know more about this, please consult vol. #, p. #I (June #) of the Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation, published by the National Research Council. Several correspondents -- first me another mnemonic for "pi" which is good for # places and reads : Now I, even I, would celebrate In rhymes inapt, the great Immortal Syracusan, rivaled nevermore Who, in his wondrous lore, Passed on before, Left men his guidance How to circles mensurate. My personal feeling about this poem is that it would be easier to memorize "pi" to # places directly. Acting under the conviction that one bad poem deserves another, I replied with the French version which reads: Quc j'aime a faire apprendre un nombrc utile aux sages! Immortel Archimede, artiste ingnieur, Qui de ton jugement peut priser la valeur? Pour moi, ton probleme eut de pareils avantages. For good measure, I added a German version, constructed in # by the mathematician Weinmeister : Wie o! dies n , Macht emstlich so vielen viele Miih', Lernt immerhin, Junglinge, leichte Verselein, Wie so zum Beispel dies diirfte zu merken sein. When I thought it was all over, I received a stem-sounding postcard from Bill Powers of #I E. Oak Street in Chicago, #., reading: "I wish I could recapture my memory about Sir Jeans' diabolic mnemonics! However, invention now of any reliable, easy phrase is beyond 'what shy and fumbling aid my present intellect gives." Admittedly very fine and clever and certainly worth publication. But I have yet to find a case where # wasn't good enough. Space, we are told, is swarming with meteors. What is their origin? Robert B. Godwin # Lyndale Ave. So. Minneapolis #, Minn. Astronomers are pretty much convinced by now that the overwhelming majority of all the meteorites which we encounter have their origin in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. They are believed to originate from collisions, most of them glancing blows, between the smaller asteroids. Since such glancing blows must also impart velocity components to the fragments which are quite different from the orbits of the two asteroids that collided, the fragments must assume entirely different orbits. In a large numher of cases, these new orbits will lead out of the Belt. If this reasoning is correct, meteorities should be exceedingly rare beyond Jupiter. In science fiction it is accepted as a fact that hard radiation causes mutations. If this is true, why have there been no known cases of mutation from the Hiroshima bomb? Could it be that the radiation caused sterility instead? Tony Stieber # West #rd St. Los Angeles #, Calif. It is a fact that hard radiation causes mutations and this has been proved in the laboratory with fast-hreeding fruit flies ( Drosophila melanogasler). But it is also true that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not produce a flood of human mutants. There are two guesses in addition to your own: One is that the resistance to mutation-causing radiation is much higher in mammals than it is in insects. The other is that the mutations were so extreme that they could not have lived and thus they were miscarried. When we send manned rockets out, first to the Moon and then to Mars and Venus, we have to include fuel for the return trip. It might take us years longer to develop a round-trip fuel and rocket than a one-way fuel and roundtrip rocket. I would like to know the chances of finding fuels on the Moon, Mars and Venus, respectively. David Shear # Battery Lane Bethesda #, Md. It is highly unlikely that we would find substances which are raw materials for fuels on the Moon. I can't say that about Venus because its surface conditions are still unknown. Mars has water and sunlight. By means of solar mirrors operating turbo-generators, we could break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen and liquefy these two gases. They would be a usable fuel combination. Or else we could only keep the oxygen in its pure form and convert the hydrogen, utilizing atmospheric nitrogen, into hydrazine. Hydrazine has many advantages of pure hydrogen, all of them falling under the heading of ease in handling. But such processing, which amounts to a storing of solar energy, is quite complicated. When the time comes, we'll probably calculate twice whether it wouldn't be simpler to carry along the return fuel. BO The Kinsey of space was what he considered himself... and his was not a sterile labor! "R spaceman. " You'll , find it interesting -- under the circumstances. It's nof long. One of the salvage crews found it tied to a signal rocket just outside the Asteroid Belt. It'd been there quite a while. # thought of taking it to somebody at the university, a historian or somebody, but I don't suppose they'd be interested. They don't have any more free time than anybody else." He handed a metal cylinder to Fox, across the table, and ordered drinks for them both. Fox sipped from his glass before he opened the tube. " Sure you want me to read it now?" he asked. "Not much of a way to spend our free time." "Sure, go ahead and read it. What difference does it make?" So Fox spread out the emtex sheets. He began to read. offers special problems. Philosophic problems, I mean -- that  I immense "When is now?" which, vexatious enough within a solar system or even on the surface of a planet, becomes quite insoluble in deep except empirically or by predicating a sort of super-time, an enormous Present Moment which would extend over everything. And yet a diary entry must be dated, if only for convenience. So I will call today Tuesday and take the date of April #I from the gauges. Tuesday it is. On this Tuesday, then, I am quite well and cheerful, snug and comfortable, in the Ellis. The Ellis is a model of comfort and convenience; a man who couldn't be comfortable in it couldn't be comfortable anywhere. As to where I am, I could get the precise data from the calculators, but I think, for the casual purposes of this record, it's enough to say that I am almost at the edges of the area where the prott are said to abound. And my speed is almost exactly that at which they are supposed to appear. I said I was well and cheerful. I am. But just under my euphoria, just at the edge of consciousness, I am aware of an intense loneliness. It's a normal response to the deep space situation, I think. And I am upborne by the feeling that I stand on the threshold of unique scientific discoveries. T hursday the #th (my days are more than twentyfour hours long). Today my loneliness is definitely conscious. I am troubled, too, by the fear that perhaps the prott won't -- aren't going to -- put in an appearance. After all, their existence is none too well confirmed. And then what becomes of all my plans, of my smug confidence of a niche for myself in the hall of fame of good investigators? when I was on Earth. I know the bursar thought so, too, when I asked for funds for the project. To investigate the life habits of a nonprotoplasmic form of life, with special emphasis on its reproduction -- excellent! But now? Saturday, April #. Still no prott. But I am feeling better. I went over my files on them and again it seems to me that there is only one conclusion possible: They exist. Over an enormous sector in the depth of space, during many years, they have been sighted. For my own comfort, let's list the known facts about prott. First, they are a non-protoplasmic form of life. (How could they be otherwise, in this lightless, heatless gulf?) Second, their bodily organization is probably electrical. Simmons, who was electrical engineer on the Thor, found that his batteries showed discharges when prott were around. Third, they appear only to ships which are in motion between certain rates of speed. (Whether motion at certain speeds attracts them, or whether it is only at certain frequencies that they are visible, we don't know.) Fourth, whether or not they are intelligent, they are to some extent telepathic, according to the reports. This fact, of course, is my hope of communicating with them at all. And fifth, prott have been evocatively if unscientifically described as looking like big poached eggs. On the basis of these facts, I've aspired to be the Columbus -- or, more accurately, the Dr. Kinsey -- of the prott. Well, it's good to know that, lonely and rather worried as I am, I can still laugh at my own jokes. May #rd. I saw my first prott. More later. It's enough for now: I saw my first prott. May #th. The Ellis has allangle viewing plates, through # degrees. I had set up an automatic signal, ' and yesterday it rang. My heart thumping with an almost painful excitement, I ran to the battery of plates. There it was, seemingly some five yards long, a cloudy, whitish thing. There was a hint of a large yellow nucleus. Damned if the thing didn't look like a big poached egg! I saw at once why everyone has assumed that prott are lifeforms and not, for example, minute spaceships, robots, or machines of some sort. The thing had the irregular, illogical symmetry of life. I stood goggling at it. It wasn't alarming, even in its enormous context. After a moment, it seemed to flirt away from the ship with the watery ease of a fish. I waited hopefully, but it didn't come back. lyt'AY #. No prott. Question: since there is so little light in deep space, how was I able to see it? It wasn't luminous. I wish I had had more training in electronics and allied subjects. But the bursar thought it more important to send out a man trained in survey techniques. May #. No prott. May #. No prott. But I have been having very odd thoughts. May #th. As I half-implied in my last entry, the ideas I have been having (such odd ideas -- they made me feel, mentally, as if some supporting membrane of my personality were being overP R O TT strained) were an indication of the proximity of prott. I had just finished eating lunch today when the automatic signal rang. I hurried to the viewers. There, perfectly clear against their jet-black background, were three prott. Two were almost identical; one was slightly smaller in size. I had retraced over and over in my mind the glimpse of the one prott I had had before, but now that three of them were actually present in the viewers, I could only stare at them. They're not alarming, but they do have an odd effect upon the mind. After several tense seconds, I recovered my wits. I pressed a button to set the automatic photographic records going. I'd put in plates to cover the whole spectrum of radiant energy, and it will be interesting when I go to develop my pictures to see what frequencies catch the prott best. I also -- this was more difficult -- began to send out the basic "Who? Who? Who?" in which all telepathiq communicators are trained. I have become reasonably good at telepathy through practice, but I have no natural talent for it. I remember Mcllwrath telling me jokingly, just before I left New York, that I'd never have trouble with one of the pitfalls of natural telepaths -- transmitting a desired answer into the mind of a subject by telepathy. I suppose any deficiency has some advantageous side. I began, to send out my basic "Who?" It may have been only a coincidence, but as soon as the fourth or fifth impulse had left my mind, all three prott slid out of the viewing plates. They didn't come back. It would seem that my attempts at communication alarmed them. I hope not, though. When I was convinced that they would not return for a while, I began to develop my plates. Those in the range of visible light show the prott very much as they appear to the eye. The infra-red plates show nothing at all. But the ultra-violet-sensitive ones are really interesting. Two of the prott appear as a network of luminous lines intricately knotted and braided. For some reason, I was reminded of the "elfish light" of Coleridge's water snakes, which "moved in tracks of shining white." The third prott, which I assume to have been the smaller one, gave an opaque, flattened-ovoid image, definitely smaller than that of its companions, with a round dark shadow in the center. This shadow would appear to be the large yellow nucleus. Question; Do these photographic differences correspond to organizational differences? Probably, though it might be a matter of phase. Further question: If the difference is in fact organizational, do we have here an instance of that specialization which, among protoplasmic creatures, would correspond to sex? It is possible. But such theorizing is bound to be plain guesswork. May #th (I see I gave up dating by days some while ago.). No prott. I think it would be of some interest if, at this point, I were to try to put down my impression of those "odd thoughts" which I believe the prott inspired in me. In the first place, there is a reluctance. I didn't want to think what I was thinking. This is not because the ideas were in themselves repellent or disgusting, but because they were uncongenial to my mind. I don't mean uncongenial to my personality or my idiosyncrasies, to the sum of differences that make up "me," but uncongenial to the whole biological orientation of my thinking. The differences between protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic life must be enormous. In the second place, there is a frustration. I said, "I didn't want to think what I was thinking," but it would be equally true to say that I couldn't think it. Hence, I suppose, that sensation of ineffectuality. And in the third place, there is a great boredom. Frustration often does make one feel bored, I suppose. I couldn't apprehend my own thoughts. But whenever I finally did, I found them boring. They were so remote, so incomprehensible, that they were uninteresting. But the thoughts themselves? What were they? I can't say. How confused all this is! Well, nothing is more tiresome than to describe the indescribable. Perhaps it is true that the only creature that could understand the thoughts of a prott would be another prott. M AY #th. Were the "odd thoughts" the results of attempts on the protts' part to communicate with me? I don't think so. I believe they were near the ship, but out of "viewshot," so to speak, and I picked up some of their interpersonal communications accidentally. I have been devoting a good deal of thought to the problem of communicating with them. It is too bad that there is no way of projecting a visual image of myself onto the exterior of the ship. I have Matheson's signaling devices, and next time -- if there is a next -- I shall certainly try them. I have little confidence in devices, however. I feel intuitively that it is going to have to be telepathy or nothing. But if they respond to the basic "who?" with flight... well, I must think of something else. Suppose I were to begin the attempt at contact wittfa "splitquestion." "Splits" are hard for any telepath, almost impossible for me. But in just that difficulty, my hope of success might lie. After all, I suppose the prott flirted away from the ship at my "who?" because mental contact with me was painful to them. Later. Four of them are here now. I tried a split and they went away, but came back. I am going to try something else. May #th. It worked. My "three-way split" -- something I had only read about in journals, but that I would never have believed myself capable of -- was astoundingly effective. Not at first, though. At my first attempt, the prott darted right out of the viewers. I had a moment of despair. Then, with an almost human effect of hesitation, reluctance, and inclination, they came back. They clustered around the viewer. Once more I sent out my impulse; sweat was running down my back with the effort. And they stayed. I don't know what I should have done if they hadn't. A split is exhausting because, in addition to the three normal axes of the mind, it involves a fourth one, at right angles to all the others. A telepath would know what I mean. But a three-way split is, in the old-fashioned phrase, "lifting yourself up by your bootstraps." Some experts say it's impossible. I still have trouble believing I brought it off. I did, however. There was a sudden rush, a gush, of communication. I'd like to try to get it down now, while it's still fresh in my mind. But I'm too tired. Even the effort of using the playback is almost beyond me. I've got to rest. four hours. I don't think I ever slept so soundly. Now I'm almost myself again, except that my hands shake. I said I wanted to get the communication with the prott down while it was still fresh. Already it has begun to seem a little remote, I suppose because the subject matter was inherently alien. But the primary impression I retain of it is the gush, the suddenness. It was like pulling the cork out of a bottle of warm champagne which has been thoroughly shaken up. In the middle, I had to try to maintain my mental balance in the flood. It was difficult; no wonder the effort left me so tired. But I did learn basic things. One: identity. The prott are individuals, and though their designations for themselves escape me, they have individual consciousness. This is not a small matter. Some protoplasmic lifeforms have only group consciousness. Each of the four prott in my viewer was thoroughly aware of itself as distinct from the others. Two: difference. The prott were not only aware of identity, they were aware of differences of class between themselves. And I am of the opinion that these differences correspond to those shown on my photographic plates. Three: place. The prott are quite clearly conscious that they are here and not somewhere else. This may seem either trivial or so basic as not to be worth bothering with. But there are whole groups of protoplasmic life-forms on Venus whose only cognizance of place is a distinction between "me" and "not-me." Four: time. For the prott, time is as it is for us, an irreversible flowing in one direction only. I caught in their thinking a hint of a discrimination between biological (for such a life-form? That is what it seemed) time and something else, I am . not sure what. Beyond these four basic things, I am unsure. I do feel, though it is perhaps overoptimistic of me, that further communication, communication of great interest, is possible. I feel that I may be able to discover what their optimum life conditions and habitat are. I do not despair of discovering how they reproduce themselves. I have the feeling that there is something they want very much to tell me. According to my photographic record, only one of them was of the opaque solid-nucleus kind. The others all showed the luminous light-tracked mesh. The communication was difficult. It is exhausting to me physically. I had again that sense of psychic pressure, of urgency, in their sendings. If I only knew what they wanted to "talk" about, it would be so much easier for me. I have the impression that they have a psychic itch they want me to help them scratch. That's silly? Yes, I know, yet that is the odd impression I have. After they were gone, I analyzed my photographs carefully. The knotted light meshes are not identical in individuals. If the patterns are constant for individuals, it would seem that two of the light-mesh kind have been here before. What do they want to talk about? May #th. Today the prott -- seven of them -- and I communicated about habitat. This much is fairly certain. It would appear -- and I think that from now on any statement I make about them is going to have to be heavily qualified -- it would appear that they are not necessarily confined to the lightless, heatless depths of space. I can't be sure about this. But I thought I got the hint of something "solid" in their thinking. Wild speculation: do they get their energy from stars? Behind their sendings, I got again the hint of some other more desired communication. Something which at once attracts and -- repels? frightens? embarrasses? Sometimes the humor of my situation comes to me suddenly. An embarrassed prott ! But I suppose there's no reason why not. All my visitors today were of the knotted network kind. May #th. No prott yesterday or today. May #th. At last! Three prott! From subsequent analysis of the network patterns, all had been here to interview me before. We began communication about habitat and what, with protoplasm, would be metabolic processes, but they did not seem interested. They left soon. Why do they visit the ship, anyhow? Curiosity? That motive must not be so powerful by now. Because of something they want from me? I imagine so; it is again an awareness of some psychic itch. And that gives me a lead as to the course I should follow. The next time they appear, I shall try to be more passive in my communications. I shall try not to lead them on to any particular subject. Not only is this good interviewing technique, it is essential in this case if I am to gain their full cooperation. M AY #. After a fruitless wait yesterday, today there was one lone prott. In accordance with my recent decision, I adopted a highly passive attitude toward it. I sent out signals of I waited, watching the prott. For five or ten minutes there was "silence." The prott moved about in the viewers with an effect of restlessness, though it might have been any other emotion, of course. Suddenly, with great haste and urgency, it began to send. I had again that image of the cork blowing out of the champagne bottle. I TS sending was remarkably difficult for me to follow. At the end of the first three minutes or so, I was wringing wet with sweat. Its communications were repetitive, urgent, and, I believe, pleasurable. I simply had no terms into which to translate them. They seemed to involve many verbs. I "listened" passively, trying to preserve my mental equilibrium. My bewilderment increased as the prott continued to send. Finally I had to recognize that I was getting to a point where intellectual frustration would interfere with' # my telepathy. I . ventured to put a question, a simple "Please classify" to the prott. Its sending slackened and then ceased abruptly. It disappeared. What did I learn from the interview? That the passive approach is the correct one, and that a prott will send freely (and most confusingly, as far as I am concerned) if it is not harassed with questions or directed to a particular topic. What I didn't learn was what the prott was sending about. Whatever it was, I have the impression that it. was highly agreeable to the prott. Later -- I have been rereading the notes I made on my sessions with the prott. What has been the matter with me? I wonder at my blindness. For the topic about which the prott was sending -- the pleasurable, repetitive, embarrassing topic, the one about which it could not bear to be questioned, the subject which involved so many verbs -- that topic could be nothing other than its sex life. When put this baldly, it sounds ridiculous. I make haste to qualify it. We don't, as yet -- and what a triumph it is to be able to say "as yet" -- know anything about the manner in which prott reproduce themselves. They may, for example, increase by a sort of fission. They may be dioecious, as so much highly organized life is. Or their reproductive cycle may involve the cooperative activity of two, three or even more different sorts of prott. So far, I have seen only the two sorts, those with the solid nucleus, and those with the intricate network of light. That does not mean there may not be other kinds. But what I am driving at is this: The topic about which the prott communicated with me today is one which, to the prott, has the same emotional and psychic value that sex has to protoplasmic life. (Somehow, at this point, I am reminded of a little anecdote of my grandmother's. She used to say that there are four things in a dog's life which it is important for it to keep in mind, one for each foot. The things are food, food, sex, and food. She bred dachshunds and she knew. Question: does my coming up with this recollection at this time mean that I suspect the prott's copulatory activity is also nutritive, like the way in which ameba conjugate? Their exchange of nuclei seems to have a beneficial effect on their metabolism.) Be that as it may, I now have a thesis to test in my dealings with the prott!  May #. There were seven prott in the viewer when the signal rang. While I watched, more and more arrived. It was impossible to count them accurately, but I think there must have been at least fifteen. They started communicating almost immediately. Not wanting to disturb them with directives, I attempted to "listen" passively, but the effect on me was that of being caught in a crowd of people all talking at once. After a few minutes, I was compelled to ask them to send one at a time. From then on, the sending was entirely orderly. Orderly, but incomprehensible. So much so that, at the end of some two hours, I was forced to break off the interview. It is the first time I have ever done such a thing. Why did I do it? My motives are not entirely clear even to myself. I was trying to receive passively, keeping in mind the theory I had formed about the prott's communication. (And let me say at this point that I have found nothing to contradict it. Nothing whatever.) Yet, as time passed, my bewilderment increased almost painfully. Out of the mass of chaotic, repetitive material presented to me, I was able to form not one single clear idea. I would not have believed that a merely intellectual frustration could be so difficult to take. The communication itself was less difficult than yesterday. I must think. I have begun to lose weight. entry in my diary for a long time. In the interval, I have had thirty-six interviews with prott. What emerges from these sessions, which are so painful and frustrating to me, so highly enjoyed by the prott? First, communication with them has become very much easier. It has become, in fact, too easy. I continually find their thoughts intruding on me at times when I cannot welcome them -- when I am eating, writing up my notes, or trying to sleep. But the strain of communication is much less and I suppose that does constitute an advance. Second, out of the welter of material presented to me, I have at last succeeded in forming one fairly clear idea. That is that the main topic of the prott's communication is a process that could be represented verbally as -- ing the -- . I add at once that the blanks do not necessarily represent an obscenity. I have, in fact, no idea what they do represent. (The phrases that come into my mind in this connection are "kicking the bucket" and "belling the cat." It may not be without significance that one of these phrases relates to death and the other to danger. Communication with prott is so unsatisfactory that one cannot afford to neglect any intimations that might clarify it. It is possible that -- ing the -- is something which is potentially dangerous to prott, but that's only a guess. I could have it all wrong, and I probably do.) At any rate, my future course has become clear. From now on I will attempt, by every mental means at my disposal, to get the prott to specify what -- ing the -- is. There is no longer any fear of losing their cooperation. Even as I dictate these words to the playback, they are sending more material about -- ing the -- to me. very quickly, and yet each individual moment has dragged. I have had fifty-two formal interviews with prott -- they appear in crowds ranging from fifteen to forty or so -- and countless informal ones. My photographic record shows that more than ninety per cent of those that have appeared have been of the luminous network kind. In all this communication, what have I learned? It gives me a sort of bitter satisfaction to say : "Nothing at all." I am too chagrined to go on. July #. I don't mean that I haven't explored avenue after avenue. For instance, at one time it appeared that -- ing the -- had something to do with the intersections of the luminous network in prott of that sort. When I attempted to pursue this idea, I met with a negative that seemed amused as well as indignant. They indicated that -- ing the -- was concerned with the whitish body surfaces, but when I picked up the theme, I got another negative signal. And so on. I must have attacked the problem from fifty different angles, but I had to give up on all of them. -- ing the -- , it would appear, is electrical, non-electrical, solitary, dual, triple, communal, constant, never done at all. At one time I thought that it might apply to any pleasurable activity, but the prott signaled that I was all wrong. I broke that session off short. Outside of their baffling communications on the subject of -- ing the -- , I have learned almost nothing from the prott. (How sick I am of them and their inane, vacuous babbling! The phrases of our communication ring in my mind for hours afterward. They haunt me like a clinging odor or stubbornly lingering taste.) During one session, a prott (solid nucleus, I think, but I am not sure) informed me that they could live under a wide variety of conditions, provided there was a source of radiant energy not too remote. Besides that scrap of information, I have an impression that they are grateful to me for listening to them. Their feelings, I think, could be expressed in the words "understanding and sympathetic." I don't know why they think so, I'm sure. I would rather communicate with a swarm of dogfish, which are primitively telepathic, than listen to any more prott. I have had to punch another hole in my wristwatch strap to take up the slack. This makes the third one. July #rd. It is difficult for me to use the playback, the prott are sending so hard. I have scarcely a moment's rest from their communications, all concerned with the same damned subject. But I have come to a resolve: I am going home. Yes, home. It may be that I have failed in my project, because of inner weaknesses. It may be that no man alive could have accomplished more. I don't know. But I ache to get away from them and the flabby texture of their babbling minds. If only there were some way of shutting them off, of stopping my mental ears against them temporarily, I think I could stand it. But there isn't. I'm going home. I've started putting course data in the computers. going back with me. It seems they like me so much, they don't want to be without me. I will have to decide. July #th. It is dreadfully hard to think, for they are sending like mad. I am not so altruistic, so unselfish, that I would condemn myself to a lifetime of listening to prott if I could get out of it. But suppose I ignore the warnings of instinct, the dictates of conscience, and return to Earth, anyhow -- what will be the result? The prott will go with me. I will not be rid of them. And I will have loosed a wave of prott on Earth. They want passionately to send about -- ing the -- . They have discovered that Earthmen are potential receptors. I have myself to blame for that. If I show them the way to Earth... The dilemma is inherently comic, I suppose. It is none the less real. Oh, it is possible that there is some way of destroying prott, and that the resources of Earth intelligence might discover it. Or, failing that, we might be able to work out a way of living with them. But the danger is too great; I dare not ask my planet to face it. I will stay here. The Ellis is a strong, comfortable ship. According to my calculations, there is enough air, water and food to last me the rest of my natural life. Power -- since I am not going back -- I have in abundance. I ought to get along all right. Except for the prott. When I think of them, my heart contracts with despair and revulsion. And yet -- a scientist must be honest -- it is not all despair. I feel a little sorry for them, a little flattered at their need for me. And I am not, even now, altogether hopeless. Perhaps some day -- some day -- I shall understand the prott. I am going to put this diary in a permaloy cylinder and jet it away from the ship with a signal rocket. I can soup up the rocket's charge with power from the fuel tanks. I have tried it on the calculators, and I think the rocket can make it to the edge of the gravitational field of the Solar System. Good-by, Earth. I am doing it for you. Remember me. F OX put the last page of the manuscript down. " The poor bastard ," he said. "Yeah, the poor bastard. Sitting out there in deep space, year after year, listening to those things bellyaching, and thinking what a savior he was" "I can't say I feel much sympathy for him, really. I suppose they followed the signal rocket back." "Yeah. And then they increased. Oh, he fixed it, all right." There was a depressed silence. Then Fox said, "I'd better go. Impatient." . "Mine, too." They said good-by to each other on the curb. Fox stood waiting, still not quite hopeless. But after a moment the hateful voice within his head bejgan: " I want to tell you more about -- ing the -- " ( Continued from page #) eyed -- notions survive. If you believe that close-set eyes and lobeless ears constitute the criminal type, you can thank Lombroso for selling you a pseudo-scientific pup. Its vogue is over, thank God, but for a while he almost proved it -- social rejection drove many citizens into crime because they were afflicted with these characteristics! The insane conviction that genius is insanity forges right on, however. Maladjustment may push a gifted person into some endeavor in which he displays genius, but an emotionally crippled genius is only part of a genius. Cure his illness, liberate him, and he must function more ably. But geniuses and non-geniuses took Lombroso literally, and still do, for that matter. War is an integral part of mankind; it is ineradicable. As I've stated before, we'd be in a worse mess than now if we hadn't fought our just wars. Nevertheless, war is inflicted on humanity, not sought because, as the Nazis remorsely insisted, it's the highest goal of civilization. Even after the most intensive indoctrination any modern nation has received, Germany was in a state of panic in # that was resolved by the reality of war. that a "moral equivalent" for war must be found before we can have permanent peace. It's a political and economic expedient, not a psychic need. When those expedients are no longer necessary, war will vanish and nothing need take its place. Human nature cannot change. Definition, please! "Human nature" is a term without meaning; it lumps all groups in one inchoate mass, disregarding cultural goals, religions, economic setup, level of civilization, everything that distinguishes one branch of humanity from another. This gaseous quality called human nature may not change, but people do -- individuals as well as groups. We've left slavery and feudalism behind; we inhabit this planet from pole to equator; we're idolator and monotheist; carnivore, herbivore and omnivore; pacifist and militarist; selfish and idealistic. Man, in other words, is infinitely adaptable. He'll go to the stars and he'll change to meet their requirements. He will also stay on Earth and learn to live in a Galactic Federation. The Earth is flat; the stars are lamps; the Sun circles the Earth -- all were once common sense. How many of our "common sense" concepts are also pure nonsense? edited by Glenn Neley and J. Max Patrick. Henry Schuman, New York, #. # paes, # utopias for the science fiction lover's collection. It is genuinely scholarly without being in the least degree dull, authoritative without being pretentious. And it is crammed full of perfectly wonderful stuff. Practically all of the utopias included are much abbreviated; but this in itself is a merit. Utopians in general are wearisomely wordy, and Negley and Patrick have done a highly creative job of excerpting. In addition, they have modernized and sometimes "translated" the antique language of the older examples in such fashion as to retain their old-world charm while giving them greater clarity. Utopias available in modern editions are not included, in order to keep the book within reasonable size limits. However, these works are given thorough critical evaluation in the editors' informative and pleasantly written biographical-historical notes. Oddly, the modem Utopians, from Ignatius Donnelly, whose truly science fiction Caesar's Column (#) is effectively excerpted, to Conde Pallen's violently reactionary Crucible Island, in #, come first. Then the classicists, from Thomas More to Etienne Cabet, with his dull, idealistic Voyage to Icaria, come next. Finally, there is a return to contemporary utopian thought, with a #-page summary of current stuff up to and including Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and B. F. Skinner, whose Walden Two (#) is given quite a going-over by the editors. In all, a valuable job. The modern reader cannot fully appreciate good contemporary science fiction stories unless he has some knowledge of the historical trend of utopian thought and of the highlights of utopian writing. This book will give him that knowledge, and very pleasurably, too. by Isaac Asimov. Gnome Press, New York, #. # pages, # what eventually will be a three-volume history of the First and Second Foundations, and of the Galactic Empire which these odd organizations of psychohistorian Hari Seldon, these oases of science in the midst of a desert of galactic worlds returning to barbarism, strove to bring back to a new culture. The first volume, Foundation, was reviewed Volume Two takes Asimov's remarkable epic through the end of the first part of the story about "The Mule," that fantastic mutant who nearly overthrew the whole Seldon plan. For those who remember the series from its original appearance in Astounding Science Fiction, it can be said that it stands up magnificently. And for readers who are new to it, it can be reported that this fine swashbuckling galactic adventure is based (unlike most such items) on some extremely hard-headed, scientific and mature social-political thinking. Asimov takes his galactic civilizations up (and down) much the same culture steps that our own Earth society has trod, and this gives his imaginative romance a very solid, social-scientific air. By Ray Bradbury. Bantam Books, New York, #. # pages, #  TF there is anyone around who thinks creative writing is in the doldrums in America, he should have a look at this collection of # tales of the imagination, edited by one who really knows good fantasy when he sees it. Roughly half a dozen tales are by Europeans; the rest are by Americans and good! It is a strictly contemporary collection, too. Outside of Kafka's weird and overlong "In the Penal Colony" and "Inflexible Logic," that wonderful straightfaced farce by the lamented Russell Maloney, the stories are, I think, all by authors still living. Eighteen bear copyright dates later than #. It would be pointless to list the whole table of contents here. Every selection is distinguished, though two or three seem a bit tenuous. Particularly outstanding are John Steinbeck's ribald "Saint Katy the Virgin," Ludwig Bemelmans' gruesomely charming "Putzi," Henry Kuttner's lovely "Housing Problem," J. C. Furnas' "The Laocoon Complex," which is particularly good considering the nature of the author's usual matter-of-fact writing, and Hortense Calisher's completely terrifying "Heartburn." The only author not included, whom one automatically would expect to find in such a collection, is John Collier. Ray himself is represented by "The Pedestrian," which was elaborated from a passage in his novella, "The Fireman," published in the An enchanting collection -- and, at #, #'s Best Buy! E. van Vogt. Pellegrini #s Cudahy, New York, #. # pages, # that very high-spiced, faintly spoiled caviar that is van Vogt's science fiction : nine stories of the Impossible clutching the Rational by the throat and astonishing it to death. Very nice, too. Curiously, the best story in the book seems to be the one bearing most closely on reality: that memorable tale, "Secret Unattainable," in which a highly circumstantial story of the invention -- and destruction -- of a matter transmitter in Nazi Germany is told through the medium of memos, telegrams, interviews, letters, etc., from and to notables like Himmler, Heydrich, Hitler and also such fictional characters as Professor Kenrube, the inventor of the process. It is a remarkably real story that will stay with you for a long time. Other tales include "The Vault of the Beast," a fruity epic of Evil Beings on Mars who create the weirdest robot yet to conquer Man; "Heir Unapparent," about a bad dictator trying to take over from a good one; "Second Solution," a rather fascinating incident in the van Vogt epic of the Rulls, the Ezwals, and Professor Jamieson; and "Asylum," second-best story in the book from my point of view, which tells of the first contact of the Galactic civilization with Earth through the malign intervention of a pair of vampiric Dreeghs. In general, a book for van Vogt completists, as well as for lovers of gee-whizz writing, such as myself. by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # T HE fourth in this series of annuals contains # stories from the #I magazines. I class # as A or better, # as B, and # as C or less. A truly excellent average. # The dullest and most pretentious part of the book is the introduction, a heavy-handed literary survey of the literature of protest, only slightly connected to the science fiction in the book. For readers who loved Peter from the British New Worlds, it should be pointed out that his "At No Extra Cost" in this volume is the same tale. Other outstanding jobs include Leiber's "Appointment in Tomorrow," (previously anthologized under the title "Poor Superman!" in Heinlein's Tomorrow the Stars), Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons," Bester's "Of Time and Third Avenue," Boucher's "Nine-Finger Jack," and Reynolds' and Brown's "Dark Interlude," (also Reader of Science Fiction late last year). know about deserves mention here. This is Donald B. Day's superb Index to the Science Fiction Magazines (Perri Press, Portland, Ore., #). This big book contains a complete listing of the contents of all the science fiction magazines by authors' and artists' names and by story titles. The book has already saved me hours of work and a goodly number of errors -- for which I can only hope for Mr. Day the reward of a truly appreciative market which will at least to some degree repay him for his efforts. May we hope also that the compiler is planning to issue biennial supplements? The years #-# have been very fruitful of good -- and bad -- science fiction. The need for an index for these years is even greater than for earlier decades. Ring Around Hunted down for his strangeness, Vickers found himself hemmed in with no escape. But there was a way out -- into the unknown! too against the wall, fighting an enemy which it cannot identify. The razor blade industry has been wiped out by an everlasting blade -- buy one and never have to buy another. A cigarette lighter, never needing new flints, never needing fluid, has destroyed the lighter industry. The light bulb manufacturers are out of business because of an everlasting bulb. The auto industry is threatened by a new car, guaranteed to run forever. Housing interests are faced with extinction by the introduction of new houses which are manufactured to sell at # a room. i#s if all this were not bad enough, the cold war, in this year of #,' still is going on, complete with incident and insult, but never quite breaking out into shooting war. The Pretentionists are a sign of this tension -- a club movement, spreading rapidly, with the members of the clubs effecting a  retreat into the past by pretending that they are living in some other era. Jay Vickers, a writer, is invited through his literary agent, Ann Carter, to meet George Crawford. Crawford, it turns out, is the head of North American Research, a front for a worldwide organization of industries which have banded together to fight the invisible company or companies which are producing the " everlasting " items. Crawford is convinced that the "everlasting" companies want to destroy the entire global economic structure. Crawford wants Vickers to write a book exposing this threat, but Vickers refuses. Because of his refusal, he and Ann quarrel. Each of them, without realizing it (and if realizing, not admitting it) are in love with the other. Ann is angry because he could have named his price, hut he insists he has a book to finish. Vickers still remembers a girl named Kathleen Preston, with whom he was in love some # years before. He has managed to thrust this memory far back in his mind, but when the moppet next door asks him why he isn't married, it all comes back to him and he recalls the day that he and Kathleen had walked in what seemed to be an enchanted valley. Vickers and Ann visit an exhibit of the new #-a-room houses. The deal is astonishing -- Vickers, for instance, has a # home which the company would accept as a trade-in -- and pay him the difference, over #, in cash! Returning home alone, Vickers finds Horton Flanders, an eccentric old neighbor, waiting to spend the evening with him. In the course of their talk, Flanders declares that he believes there is some intervening force which keeps the world from war, that this same force some # years before had given the world a kick in the pants, booting it out of its rut and sending it at a gallop along a new road of scientific and technological achievement. Under Vickers' questioning, Flanders hints at some reason to believe there must be reservoirs of knowledge in the stars and expresses a belief that Man can reach out mentally and tap those reservoirs. After Flanders goes home, Vickers hears a mouse. There shouldn't be any mice, since the exterminator had been there that day. He sees the mouse in a corner and hurls a paperweight at it. It comes apart, no mouse, but some contraption which Vickers believes may be a spying device. Vickers starts out in the middle of the night to try to get out of Flanders the truth of the hints which he had dropped, only to find that Flanders has disappeared and is being hunted by a village posse. The next day Vickers gets a letter from Flanders apologizing for causing him inconvenience by disappearing, but explaining that it was necessary that he do so. He recommends that Vickers revisit the scenes of his childhood "so you may see with clearer eyes." Frantically seeking a key to the mystery which appears to be centering about him, Vickers finds in his attic a book of notes, written many years before, which indicates that he is somehow different than the normal run of humans. A friend, of his, Eb, the gar age man, comes to warn him that he is suspected of doing away with Flanders and that a lynch mob is forming. Eb tells him he must get away and has brought along a new Forever car in which he can make his escape. Vickers flees to his childhood country. Revisiting his old home, now standing vacant, he finds a battered top which he had lost when a boy of eight. He remembers an incident entirely forgotten until now, that the top once had taken him, as a child, into fairyland. Years later, he and Kathleen Preston had wandered into that same enchanted valley -- from which he had brought home a flower in winter. He tries to buy another top to try the trip again, but tops have gone out of style and there are none for sale. So he repairs the ancient one and repaints it, feeling that perhaps it will serve the purpose. Running out of money, he calls Ann Carter to have her telegraph him funds. She tells him that Crawford is searching frantically for him. Later that night Crawford, who has had Ann's phone tapped in an effort to locate Vickers, shows up at Vickers' hotel room. He tells Vickers that the people industry is fighting are a group of mutants who are systematically going about the reduction of Earth's economic system as the first step in building a world in which the mutant will be the Cro-Magnon to the normal man's Neanderthal. He says that Vickers is an unsuspecting mutant, pleads with him to work together in reaching an understanding between the mutants and the normal humans to avert war. He hints that Ann Carter also is a mutant, likewise not aware of her mutancy. Crawford says the normal humans have a secret weapon which they will not hesitate to use to smash the mutants. All of this baffles Vickers and makes him feel helpless , for he has not been in contact with any mutants and certainly not with their organization. And he is afraid of Crawford, who is even more afraid of Vickers -- which makes him all the more dangerous. ford's footfalls no longer, Vickers went to the telephone and lifted it and gave a number, then waited for the connection to be made. He'd have to tell Ann fast. He couldn't waste much time, for Crawford's wire tappers would be listening. She must be out and gone before they could reach her door. He'd say: "Will you do something for me, Ann? Will you do it without question, without asking why?" He'd say: "You remember that place where you asked about the stove? I'll meet you there." Then he'd say: "Get out of your apartment. Get out and hide. Stay out of sight. Right this minute. Not an hour from now. Not five minutes. Not a minute. Hang up this phone and go." It would have to be fast. It would have to be sure. It would have to be blind. He couldn't say, "Ann, you're a mutant," then have her want to know what a mutant was and how he came to know and what it meant, while all the time the listeners would be moving toward her door. She had to go on faith. But would she? Thinking of how she might want to argue, how she might not want to go without a reason for her going, he felt the moisture trickle out of his armpits and run down his ribs. The phone was ringing now. He tried to recall what her apartment looked like, how the phone sat on the table at the end of the davenport, and how she would be coming across the room to lift the receiver, and in a moment he would hear her voice. The operator said, "That number doesn't answer, sir." "Try this one, then," he said, giving the operator the number of her office. He waited again and heard the ringing. "That number doesn't answer, sir," the operator finally said. "Thank you," said Vickers. "Shall I try again?" "No," said Vickers. "Cancel the call, please." He had to think and plan. He had to try to figure out what it was all about. Before this, it had been easy to seek refuge in the belief that it was imagination, that he and the world were half insane, that everything would be all right if he'd just ignore whatever might be going on. He couldn't believe it any longer. For now he must accept at face value the story that Crawford had told, sitting . in this room, with his massive bulk bulging in the chair, with his face unchanging and his voice a flat monotone that pronounced threats, but gave them no inflection and also no life. He must believe in human mutation and in a world divided and embattled. He must believe even in the fairyland of childhood, for if he actually was a mutant, then fairyland somehow was a mark of it. H E tried to tie together the implications of Crawford's story, tried to understand what it all might mean, but there were too many ramifications, too many random factors, too much he did not know. There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known or, having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains. This was the next step up. This was evolution. This was how the human race advanced. "And God knows," said Vickers to the empty room, "it needs advancement now if it ever did." A band of mutants, working together, but working undercover since the normal world would turn on them with fang and claw for their very differentness if they revealed themselves. And what was this differentness? What could they hope to do with it? A few of the things he knew -- Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and the light bulbs that did not burn out and synthetic carbohydrates that fed the hungry and helped to hold war at arm's length from the throat of humanity. But what else? Surely there was more than that. Intervention, Horton Flanders had said, rocking on the porch. Some sort of intervention that had helped the world advance and then had staved off, somehow or other, the bitter, terrible fruits of progress wrongly used. Horton Flanders was the man who could tell him, Vickers knew. But where was Horton Flanders now? "They're hard to catch," Crawford had said. "You ring doorbells and wait. You send in your name and wait. You track them down and wait. And they're never where you think they are, but somewhere else." First, thought Vickers, plotting out his moves, I've got to get out of here and be hard to catch myself. Second, find Ann and see that she is hidden out. Third, find Horton Flanders and, if he doesn't want to talk, choke it out of him. He picked up the top and went downstairs and turned in his key. The clerk got out his bill. "I have a message for you," said the clerk, reaching back into the pigeonhole that held the key. "The gentleman who was up to see you a while ago gave it to me before he left." He handed across an envelope and Vickers ripped it open, pulled out a folded sheet. "A funny kind of business," said the clerk. "He'd just been talking to you." "Yes," said Vickers, "it is a funny kind of business." The note read: Don't try to use that car of yours. If anything happens, keep your mouth shut . It was a very funny kind of business. dawn. The road was deserted and the car ran like a fleeing thing, with no sound but the whistle of the tires as they hugged the pavement on the curves. Beside him, on the seat, the gaily painted top rolled back and forth to the motion of the car. There were two things wrong, two immediate things: He should have stopped at the Preston house. He should not have used the car. Both, of course, were foolish, and he berated himself for thinking of them. He pushed the accelerator down so that the whistle of the tires became a high, shrill scream as they took the curves. He should have stopped at the Preston house and tried out the top. That, he told himself, was what he had planned to do, and he searched in his mind for the reasons that had made him plan it that way, but there were no reasons. If the top worked, it would work anywhere and that was all there could be to it. It wouldn't matter where it worked, although deep inside him was a feeling that it did matter to him, at least, where it worked. There was something special about the Preston house. It was a key point -- it must be a key point in this mystery of mutants. I couldn't take the time, he argued with himself. The first job is to get back to New York and find Ann and get her out of sight. For Ann, he told himself, must be the other mutant, although once again, as with the Preston house, he could not be entirely sure. There was no reason, no substantial proof, that Ann Carter was a mutant. Reason he thought. Reason and proof. And what are they? No more than the orderly logic on which Man has built his world. Could there be inside a man another sense, another yardstick by which one could live, setting aside the matter of reason and of proof as childish things which once had been good enough, though clumsy at the best? Could there be a way of knowing right from wrong, good from bad, without the endless reasoning and the dull parade of proof? Intuition? That was female nonsense. Premonition? That was superstition. And yet were they really female nonsense and superstition? For years researchers had concerned themselves with extrasensory perception, a sixth sense that Man might hold within himself, but had been unable to develop to its full capacity. And if extrasensory perception were possible, then many other abilities were possible as well -- the psycho-kinetic control of objects through the power of mind alone, the ability to look into the future, the recognition of time as something other than the movement of the hands upon a clock, the ability to know and manipulate unsuspected dimensional extensions of the spacetime continuum. the sense of smell, of sight, of hearing, of taste and touch. Those were the five that Man had known since time immemorial, but did it mean that was all he had? Were there other senses waiting in his mind for development, as the opposable thumb, the erect posture and logical thinking had been developed throughout the millenia of Man's existence? He had evolved from a tree-dwelling, fear-shivering thing into a club-carrying animal, into a fire-making animal. He had made, first of all, the simplest of tools, then more complex tools, and finally tools so complex that they Were machines. All of this had been done as the result of developing intelligence. Was it not possible that the development of intelligence, the development of the human senses, was not finished yet? And if this were true, why not a sixth sense, or a seventh, or an eighth, or any number of additional senses, which would come under the general heading of the natural evolution of the human race? Was that, Vickers wondered, what had happened to the mutants, the sudden development of these additional and only halfsuspected senses? Was not the mutation logical in itself -- the thing that one might well expect? He swirled through little villages still sleeping between the night and dawn and went past farm houses lying strangely naked in the half light that ran on the eastern skyline. Don't try to use the car, Crawford's note had read. And that was foolish, too, for there was no reason why he should not use the car. No reason other than Crawford's saying so. And who was Crawford? An enemy? Perhaps, although at times he didn't act like one. A man who was afraid of the defeat that he felt sure would come, more fearful, seemingly, of the commission of defeat than of defeat itself. Reason once again. No reason why he should not use the car. But he was faintly uneasy, using it. No reason why he should have stopped at the Preston house and still, in his heart, he felt he had somehow failed by not stopping there. No reason to believe Ann Carter was a mutant, and yet he was sure she was. He drove through the morning, with the fog rising from all the little streams he crossed, with the flush of sun against the eastern sky, with, finally, boys and dogs going after cows, and the first traffic on the road. He suddenly realized that he was hungry and a little sleepy, but he couldn't stop to sleep. He had to keep on going. When it became dangerous to drive, he would have to sleep, but not until then, and then not for long. But he'd have to stop somewhere to eat. At the next town he came to, if it had an eating place that was open, he would stop and eat. Perhaps a cup or two of coffee would chase away the sleep. were eating places and people on the street, the six o'clock factory workers on the way to their seven o'clock jobs. He picked out a restaurant that didn't look too bad, that had less of the cockroach look about it than some of the others, and slowed to a crawl, looking for a parking place. He found one a block away. He parked and got out, locked the door. Standing on the sidewalk, he sniffed the morning. It still was fresh, with the deceptive coolness of a summer morning. He'd have breakfast, he told himself, take his time eating it, give himself a chance to relax, to let some of the road fatigue drop from his bones. Ann again. This morning he might catch her in. He'd feel safer if she knew and if she were in hiding. Perhaps instead of just meeting him at the place where they sold the houses, she should go there and explain to them what the situation was and they might help her. But to explain that to Ann would take too long. He had to tell her fast and she had to go on faith. He went back down the street and turned in at the restaurant door. There were tables, but no one seemed to be using them. All the eaters were bellied up to the counter. There were a few stools still left and Vickers took one. On the left side of him, a husky workman in faded shirt and bulging overalls was noisily slurping up a bowl of oatmeal, head bent close above the bowl, shoveling the cereal into hie mouth with a rapidly moving spoon that dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, almost as if the man were attempting to establish a siphoning flow of the food into his mouth. On the other side sat a man in blue slacks and white shirt with a neat black bow. He wore glasses and he read a paper and he was, from the look of him, a bookkeeper or something of the sort, a man handy with a column of figures and very smug about it. A waitress came and mopped the counter in front of Vickers with a wet cloth. "What'll you have?" she asked impersonally, running the question together into a single word. "Stack of cakes," said Vickers, "with a side of ham." "Coffee?" "Coffee." The breakfast came and he ate it, hurriedly at first, stuffing his mouth with great forkfuls of syrup-dripping cakes, with generous cuts of ham, then more slowly as the bite of hunger was appeased. The overalled man got up and left. A girl with drooping eyelids took his place. Some weary secretary, Vickers thought, with only an hour or two of sleep after a night out. He was almost through eating when he heard the shouting in the street outside, then the sound of running feet. The girl beside him swung around on her stool and looked out the window. "Everybody's running," she said. "I wonder what's the trouble." A man stopped outside the door and yelled, "They found one of them Forever cars!" stools and surged toward the door. Vickers followed slowly. They'd found a Forever car, the shouting man had said. The only one they could have found was the one Vickers had parked just up the street. They had tipped the car over and rolled it out into the middle of the road. They were ringed around it, shouting and shaking their fists. Someone threw a brick or stone at it and the sound of the object striking its metal boomed through the early morning street like a cannon shot. Someone picked up whatever had been thrown and heaved it through the door of a hardware store. Reaching in through the broken glass, someone else unlocked the door. Men streamed in and came out again, carrying mauls and axes. The crowd drew back to give them elbow room. The mauls and axes flashed in the slanted sunlight. They struck and struck again. Glass shattered with a crunching sound, then came the metallic clanging and denting. Vickers stood beside the restaurant door, sick in the pit of his stomach, his brain frozen with what later might be fear, but which now was no more than astonishment and blind befuddlement. Crawford had written: Don't try to use that cars of yours. This was what he'd meant. Crawford had known what would happen to any Forever car found parked upon the street. Crawford had known and tried to warn him. Friend or foe? Vickers reached out a hand and put it, palm flat, against the rough brick of the building. The touch of the brick, the roughness of it, told him that this was happening, that it was no dream, that he actually stood here, in front of a restaurant in which he had just eaten breakfast, and saw a mob, mad with hate, smashing up his car. The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants. And they hate the mutants. Of course they hate them, because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people. He turned and went back into the restaurant, ready to leap and run if someone should suddenly shout behind him, if a finger tapped his shoulder. The bespectacled man with the black bow tie had left the paper beside his plate. Vickers picked it up, walked steadily on, down the length of counter. He pushed open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. There was no one there. He walked through the kitchen rapidly, let himself out the rear door into an alley. He went down the alley, found another narrow one between two buildings, leading to an opposite street. He took it, crossed the street when he came to it, followed another alleyway between two buildings that led to another alley. "They'll fight," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room the night before, his big body "They'll fight with what they have." So now they were fighting, striking with what they had. They had picked up their club and were fighting back. He found a park and walking through it. came across a bench shielded from the street by a clump of bushes. He sat down and unfolded the paper he had taken from the restaurant, turned its pages back until he found the front page. And there the story was. T HE headline said: we are And the deck : Superhuman Race Among Us; Mystery of Everlasting Razor Blades Solved. And the story: greatest danger the human race has faced in all the years of its existence -- a danger which may reduce all of us to slavery -- was revealed today in a joint announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the military chiefs of staff and the Washington office of the International Bureau of Economics. The joint announcement was made at a news conference called by President Humphrey. Simultaneous announcements were made in all the other major capitals of the world -- London, Moscow, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Cairo, Peking and a dozen other cities. The announcement revealed that a new race of human beings, called mutants, has developed, and is banded together in an attempt to win domination over the entire world. A mutant, in the sense in which it is here used, is a human being who has undergone a sudden variation, the child differing from the parent, as opposed to the gradual change by which the human race has evolved to its present form. The variation, in this case, has not been noticeably physical; that is, a mutant is indistinguishable, so far as the eye is concerned, from any other human. The variation has been mental, with the mutant possessing certain skills which the normal human does not have -- certain "wild talents," the announcement said. (See adjoining column for full explanation of mutancy.) The announcement (full text in column #) said that the mutants had embarked upon a campaign to destroy the economic system of the world through the manufacture of certain items, such as the everlasting razor blade, the everlasting light bulb, the Forever car, the new prefabricated houses and the items generally sold in the so-called "gadget shops." The mutant group, it was revealed, has been under investigation by various governmental and independent agencies for several years and the findings, when correlated, showed unmistakably that a definite campaign was under way to take over the entire world. The formal announcement of the situation, it was said, was delayed until there could be no doubt concerning the authenticity of the reports. The announcement called upon the citizenry of the world to join in the fight to circumvent the plot At the same time it pleaded for a normal continuation of all activity and advised against hysteria. "There is no occasion for apprehension," the announcement said. "Certain countermeasures are being taken." There was no hint as to what any of these countermeasures might be. When the reporter attempted to question the spokesman concerning them, he was told that this was restricted information. To aid the world governments in their campaign against the intentions of the mutants, the announcement said that every citizen should take these steps: # -- Keep your head. Do not give way to hysteria. # -- Refrain from using any mutant-manufactured items. # -- Refuse to buy any mutantmanufactured items. Persuade others against their use or purchase. of any suspicious circumstances which might have a bearing upon the situation. The announcement said that first suspicions of any attempt at domina(Continued on Page #) Vickers did not turn to Page #. Instead, he studied the rest of the front page. There was the story which explained mutation and the complete text of the announcement. There was a signed article by some professor of biology, discussing the probable effects of mutation and its hypothetical causes. There were a half a dozen bulletins. They read: swept through the city armed with axes and iron bars. They swarmed into gadget shops, destroying the merchandise, smashing the fixtures. Apparently no one was found in any of the shops. One man was killed, but it was not believed he was connected with a gadget shop. today attacked and killed a man driving a Forever car. The car was smashed. today threw a heavy guard around several housing development projects containing a number of the prefabricated houses attributed to mutant manufacture. "The people who purchased these houses," said an explanation accompanying the order, "purchased them in good faith. They are in no way connected or to be connected with the conspiracy. The guards were ordered to protect these innocent people and their neighbors against any misdirected public violence." St. Malo, France (Reuters)The body of a man was found hanging from a lamp post at dawn today. A placard with the crude lettering of "Mutant" was pinned to his shirt front. from his hand. It made a ragged tent upon the ground. He stared out across the park. Morning traffic was flowing by on the roadway a block away. A boy came along a walk, bouncing a ball as he walked. A few pigeons circled down through the trees and strutted on the grass, cooing absently. Normal, he thought. A normal morning, with people going to work and kids out playing and the pigeons strutting on the grass. But underneath it was a current of savagery. Behind it all, behind the facade of civilization, the present was crouching in the cave, lying in ambush against the coming of the future. Lying in wait for himself and Ann and Horton Flanders. Thank God, he thought, that no one had thought to connect him with the car. Perhaps, later on, someone would. Someone might remember seeing him get out of the car. Perhaps someone would fasten suspicion upon the man who, of all of them, had not run out of the restaurant and joined the mob around the car. But for the moment he was safe. How long he would remain safe was another matter. Now what? He considered it. Steal a car and continue his trip? He didn't know how to steal a car; he would probably bungle it. But there was something else -- something that needed doing right away. He had to get the top. He had left it in the car and he'd have to get it back. But why risk his neck to get the top? It didn't make much sense. Come to think of it, it made no sense at all. Still, he knew he had to do it. Crawford's warning about not driving the car hadn't made sense, either, at the time he read it He had disregarded it and felt uneasy about disregarding it, had known, against all logic, that he was wrong in not paying it attention. And in this particular case, at least, logic had been wrong and his feeling -- his hunch, his premonition, his intuition, call it what you would -- had been right. He had wondered, he remembered, if there might not be a certain sense which would outweigh logic and reason, if within his brain a man might not have another ability, a divining faculty, which would outdate the old tools of logic and of reason. Maybe that was the sense that told him, without reason, without logic, that he must get back the top. T HE street had been blocked to traffic and the police were standing by, although there was little need of them, it seemed, for the crowd was orderly. The car lay in the middle of the street, battered and dented, with its wheels sticking into the air. like a dead cow in a cornfield. Its glass was shattered and strewed about the pavement, crunchcrowd. Its tires were knocked off and the wheels were bent and people stood around and stared at it. Vickers mingled with the crowd, moving nearer to the car. The front door, he saw, had somehow been smashed open and was wedged against the pavement. There was just a chance, he told himself, that the top might still be there. If it was, he would haveto figure out some way to get it. Maybe he could get down on his knees and pretend he was simply curious about the instrument panel or the controls. He'd tell his neighbors about how the control panel differed from that of an ordinary car and maybe he could hook in a hand and sneak out the top and hide it underneath his coat without any of them knowing. He shuffled about the wreck, gaping at it in what he hoped was an idly curious fashion as he talked a little with his neighbors, the usual banal comments of the onlooker. He worked his way around until he was beside the door and squatted down and looked inside the car and he couldn't see the top. He stayed there, squatting and looking, craning his neck, and he told his nearest neighbor about the control panel and wondered about the shift, though all the time he was looking for the top. But there wasn't any top. He got up again and milled with the crowd, watching the pavement, because the top might have fallen from the car and rolled away from it. Maybe it had rolled into the gutter and was lying there. He searched the gutters on both sides of the streets, and covered the pavement, but there was no top. So the tdp was gone -- gone before he could try it out, and now he'd never know if it could take him into fairyland. Twice he had gone into fairyland -- once when he was a child and again when he had walked a certain valley with a girl named Kathleen Preston. He had walked with her in an enchanted valley that could have been nothing else but another fairyland, and after that he had gone back to see her and had been told that she had gone away, and he had turned from the door and trudged across the porch. "Now wait!" he said. Had he turned from the door and trudged across the porch? H E tried to remember and, dimly, he saw it all again, the soft-voiced man who had told him that Kathleen was gone and then had said, "But won't you come in, lad? I have something you should see." He had gone in and stood in the mighty hall, filled with heavy shadow, with its paintings on the wall and the massive stairs winding up to the other stories and the man had said -- What had he said? Or had it ever happened? Why did an experience like this, an incident that he should have remembered without fail, come back to him after all the years of not knowing, as the lost memory of his boyhood venture into fairyland had come back to him after so long? And was it true or wasn't it? There was no way that he could judge. He turned away and walked down the street, past the policeman who leaned against a building and swung his club, smiling at the crowd. In a vacant lot, a group of boys were playing and he stopped to watch them. Once he had played like that, without thought of time or destiny, with the thought of nothing but happy hours of sunshine and the delight that bubbled up with living, for the day always ran on forever. There was one little fellow who sat apart from all the others. He held something in his lap and was turning it around, admiring it, happy in the possession of a wondrous toy. Suddenly he tossed it in the air and caught it and the sun flashed on its many colors. Vickers, seeing what it was, skipped a breath or two. It was the missing top! He left the sidewalk and sauntered across the lot. The playing boys did not notice him or, rather, they ignored him, after the manner of the playing youngster for whom the adult does not exist, or is no more than a shadowy personage out of some unreal and unsatisfactory world. Vickers stood above the boy who held the top. "Hello, son." "Hello yourself." "What you got?" "I found it," said the boy. "It's a pretty thing," said Vickers. "I'd like to buy it from you." "It ain't for sale." "I'd pay quite a bit," said Vickers, feeling desperate. The boy looked up with interest. "Enough for a new bicycle?" Vickers dug into his pocket and pulled out folded bills. "Gosh, mister... Out of the corner of his eye, Vickers saw the policeman standing on the sidewalk, watching him. The policeman took a step, started across the lot. "Here," said Vickers. He grabbed the top and tossed the folded bills into the boy's lap. He straightened and ran, heading for the alley. "Hey, you!" the policeman shouted. Vickers kept on running. A gun exploded and Vickers heard the thin, high whine of a bullet going high over his head. R eaching the first of the buildings in the alley, Vickers ducked around it, into a passageway between two buildings and realized that he'd turned in the wrong direction. The passageway would lead him back to the street on which lay the wrecked and battered car. He saw an open basement window, gauged his distance and threw himself feet first through the window. The sill caught him in the back and he felt the fire of pain run along his body. Then his head smacked into something and the basement was a place stars. He came down sprawling and the wind was knocked out of him and the top, flying from his hand, bounced along the floor. He clawed himself to his hands and knees and grabbed the top. He found a water pipe, grasped it and pulled himself erect. There was a raw place on his back that burned and his head buzzed with the violence of the blow. But he was safe, at least for a little while. He found stairs and climbed them and saw that he was in the back room of a hardware store. The place was filled with haphazardly piled rolls of chicken wire, rolls of roofing paper, cardboard cartons, bales of binder twine, lengths of stove pipe, crated stoves, coils of manila rope. He could hear people moving around up in front, but there was no one in sight. He ducked behind a crated stove and from the window above his head, a splash of sun came down, so that he crouched in a pool of light. Outside, in the alleyway, he heard running feet go past and from far away he heard men shouting. He hunched down, pressing his body against the rough board crating of the stove and tried to control his labored breathing, afraid that anyone coming into the room might hear his rasping breath. He'd have to figure out some way to get away. If he stayed where he was, they finally would find him. They would start combing the area, police and citizen alike. And, by that time, they would know who it was they hunted. The boy would tell them he found the top lying near the car and someone then might remember seeing him park the car and the waitress in the restaurant might tell them how he stayed while the others raced outside. From many little bits of information, they would know their fugitive was the man whose Forever car they'd smashed. He wondered what would happen to him when they found him, but he knew well enough, remembering the bulletin from St. Malo, about the man hanging from the lamp post with a placard on his chest. But there was no way to escape. He couldn't sneak out into the alley, for they'd be watching for him. He could go back into the basement, but that wasn't any better than where he was. He could saunter into the store and act like a customer, finally walk out to the street, doing his best to look like an ordinary citizen who had dropped into the place to look at some gun or tool. But he doubted that he could carry it off. So the illogic hadn't paid off, after all. Logic and reason were still the winners. There was no escape from this sunlit refuge behind the crated stove. There was no escape, unless -- He had found the top again. He had it there with him. There was no escape -- unless the top should work. H E put the top's point on the floor and slowly pumped the handle. It picked up speed. He let go and it spun, whistling. He knelt in front of it and watched the colored stripes. He saw them come into being and he followed them into infinity and he wondered where they went. He forced his attention on the top, narrowing it down until the top was all he saw. It didn't work. The top wobbled and he put out a hand and stopped it. He tried again. He had to be an eight-yearold. He must clear away his mind, sweep out all adult thoughts, all adult worry, all sophistication. He must become a child. He thought of playing in the sand, of napping under trees, of the feel of soft grass beneath bare feet. He closed his eyes and concentrated and caught the vision and the color and the smell of it. He opened his eyes and watched the stripes and filled his mind with wonder, with the question of their being and where they went when they disappeared. It didn't work. The top wobbled and he stopped it. A frantic thought wedged its way into his consciousness. He didn't have much time. He had to hurry. He pushed the thought away. A child had no conception of time. He was a little boy and he had all the time there was and he owned a brand-new top. He spun it again. He knew the comfort of a home and loved parents and the playthings scattered on the floor and the story books that Grandma would read to him when she came visiting again. And he watched the top with a simple, childish wonder -- watching the stripes come up and disappear, come up and disappear, come up and disappear -- ed upon the ground and he was sitting atop a hill. The land stretched out before him for miles and miles and miles, an empty land of waving grass and groves of trees and far-off, winding water. He looked down at his feet and the top was there, slowly spinning to a wobbling halt. N EW and empty of any mark of Man, the land was raw of earth and sky. Even the wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was untamed. From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark, moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo. Even as he watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud, a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the sky. The top had brought him through. He was safe in this empty land with wolves and buffalo. He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses, sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation -- no roads, no threads of smoke sifting up to the sky. He looked at the sun and wondered which way was west and thought he knew, and if he was right, the sun said it was midmorning. But if he was wong, it was afternoon and in a few hours darkness would come upon the land. And when darkness came, he would have to figure out how to spend the night. He had meant to go into fairyland. If he had stopped to think about it, he told himself, he would have known that it would not be, for the place he had gone to as a child could not have been fairyland. This was a new and empty.world, lonely and perhaps dangerous, but it was better than the back room of a hardware store in some unknown town with his fellow men hunting him to death. He sat down and emptied his pockets and made an inventory of what he had. A half a package of cigarettes; three packs of matches, one almost finished, one full, one with just a match or two gone from it; a pocket knife; a handkerchief; a billfold with some bills in it; a few cents in change; the key to the Forever car; a ring with the keys to the house and another to his desk and a couple of other keys he couldn't identify; a mechanical pencil; a few half sheets of paper folded together, pocket size, on  which he had intended to make notes if he saw anything worth noting -- and that was all. Fire and a tool with a cutting edge and paper money less useful than the blank paper and worthless bits of metal. If this world was empty, he must feed himself and defend himself and find shelter and, in time to come, contrive some way in which to clothe himself. He lit a cigarette and tried to think, but all he could think about was that he must go easy on the cigarettes, for the half pack was all he had and when those were gone, there would be no more. An alien land -- but not entireand buffalo were the same as old Earth had borne. Perhaps it was Earth. It looked for all the world as the primal Earth might have looked before Man had stripped and gutted it and torn all its treasures from it. I T was no alien land -- no alien dimension into which the top had flung him, although, of course, the top hadn't had anything to do with it. It was simply something on which one focused one's attention, a hypnotic device to aid the mind in the job ly alien, for it was Earth again, the old familiar Earth unscarred by the tools of Man. It had the air of Earth and the grass and sky of Earth, and even the wolves which it must do. The top had helped him come into this land, but it had been his mind and that strange otherness that was his which had enabled him to travel from old familiar Earth to this strange, primal world. There was something he had heard or read. He went searching for it, digging back into his brain with frantic mental fingers. A news story? Something he had heard? Or something he had seen on television? It came to him finally -- the article about the man in Boston -- a Dr. Aldridge, he seemed to remember who had said that there might be more worlds than one, that there might be an Earth a second ahead of ours and one a second behind ours and another a second behind that and still another and another and another, a long string of worlds whirling one behind the other, like men walking in the snow, one man putting his foot into the other's track and the one behind him putting his foot in the same track and so on down the line. A ring around the Sun. He hadn't finished feading the story, he recalled, for something had distracted him and he'd laid the paper aside. He wished he hadn't. For Aldridge might have been right. This might be the next world after the old, familiar Earth. He tried to puzzle out the logic of why there should be a ring of worlds around the Sun, but he gave it up, for he had no idea. Say, then, that this was Earth No. #, the next earth behind the original Earth which he had left behind. Say that in topographical features the earths would resemble one another, not exactly like one another, perhaps, but very close in their topography, with tittle differences here and there, each magnified in turn until probably a matter of ten earths back, the change would become noticeable. But this was only the second earth and its features might be but little changed and on old Earth he had been somethe kind of land that ancient He had gone into fairyland and there had been a garden and a house in a grove of trees and maybe this was the very earth he had visited when he was a boy of eight. And in later years he had walked an enchanted valley and it, too, might have been this earth, and if that was true, then there was a Preston house exactly like the one which stood so proudly in the Earth of his childhood. He knew there was little reason to believe there'd be a Preston house, little reason to think anything other than that he was trapped in an empty, lonely world. But he shut his mind to reason, for the hope that there was a Preston house was the only hope there was. He checked the Sun and saw that it had climbed higher in the sky, and that meant that it was morning and not afternoon, and by that he knew which way was west. He set off, striding down the hill, heading toward the one hope he had in all this strange new world. a camping site, a grove through which ran a stream. He took off his shirt and tied it to a stick to form a crude seine, then went down to a small pool in the creek and after some experimenting found how to use the seine to the best advantage. At the end of an hour, he had five good-sized fish. He cleaned the fish with his pocket knife and lit the fire with a single match and congratulated himself upon his woodsmanship. He cooked one of the fish and ate it. It was not an easy thing to eat, for he had no salt and the cooking was very far from expert -- part of the fish was charred by flame and the rest was raw. But he was ravenous and it didn't taste too bad until the edge was off his hunger. After that it was a hard job choking down the rest, but he forced himself to do it, for he knew that he faced hard days ahead and to get through them he must keep his belly filled. By this time, darkness had fallen and he huddled beside the fire. He tried to think, but he was too tired for thinking. He caught himself dozing as he sat. He slept, awoke to find the fire almost out and the night still black, built up the fire while cold sweat broke out on him. The fire was for protection as well as warmth and cooking and on the day's march he had seen not only wolves, but bear as well, and once a large tawny shape moving too fast for him to make out what it was, except that it looked fiercely feline. He woke again and dawn was in the sky! He built up the fire and cooked the rest of the fish, ate one and part of another, tucked the others, messy as they were, into his pocket. He would need food throughout the day, and he did not want to waste the time or matches to make a fire. He hunted around the grove and found a stout, straight stick. It would serve him for a walking staff and might be of some use as a club if he were called upon to defend himself. He checked his pockets to see that he was leaving nothing behind. He had his pocket knife and the matches and they were the important things. He wrapped the matches carefully in his handkerchief, then put them in his undershirt. He needed those matches, for he doubted very seriously that he could make fire with flint or sticks. He was off before the Sun was up, slogging northwestward, but going more slowly than the day before, for now he realized that it was not speed but stamina that counted. To wear himself out in these first few days of hiking would be suicidal. wide detour in the afternoon around a fair-sized herd of buffalo. He camped that night in another grove, having stopped an hour or so earlier beside a stream to catch another supply of fish with his shirt-and-staff seine. In the grove he found a few bushes of dewberries, with some fruit still on them, so he had dessert as well as fish. The Sun came up and he moved on again. And another day came up and he went on. And another and another. He caught fish. He picked berries. He found a deer that had been freshly killed, no doubt by some animal that his appearance had scared off. Hacking away with his pocket knife, he cut as many ragged hunks of venison as he could carry. Even without salt, the meat was a welcome change from fish. He even learned to eat a little of it raw, hacking off a mouthful and chewing it methodically as he walked along. He had to discard the last of the meat when it got so high that he couldn't live with it. He lost track of time. He had no idea of how many miles he had covered, nor how far he might be from the place where he was heading, nor even if he could find it at all. His shoes broke open and he stuffed them with dried grass and bound them together with strips cut off his trouser legs. One day he knelt to drink at a pool and in the glassclear water saw a strange face staring back, at him. With a shock he realized that it was his own face, that of a bearded man, ragged and dirty and with the lines of fatigue upon him. The days came and went. He moved ahead, northwestward. He kept putting first one foot out and then the other. The Sun burned him at first and the burn turned to a tan. He crossed a wide, deep river on a log. It took a long time to get across and once the log almost spun and spilled him, but he made it. He walked through an empty land, with no sign of habitation, although it was a land that was well suited for human occupation. The soil was rich and the grass grew tall and thick, and the trees, which sprang skyward from groves along the watercourses, were straight and towered high into the sky. Then one day, just before sunset, he topped a rise and saw the land sweeping downward toward the distant ribbon of a river that he thought he recognized. It was not the river which held his attention, but the flash of setting Sun on a large area of metal far away. He put up his hand and shielded his eyes against the sunlight and tried to make out what it was, but it was too remote and it shone too brightly. Climbing down the slope, not knowing whether to be glad or frightened, Vickers kept a close watch on the gleam of far-off metal.  At times he lost sight of it when he dipped into the swales, but it was always there when he topped the rise again, so he knew that it was real. Finally he was able to make out metallic buildings glinting in the Sun, and now he saw that strange shapes came and went in the air above them and that there was a stir of life around them. But it was not a city or a town. For one thing, it was too metallic. And for another, there were no roads leading into it. A S he came nearer, he made out more and more of the detail of the place. When he was only a mile or two away, he stopped and looked at it and knew whai it was. It was not a city, but a factory, a giant, sprawling factory and to it came, continually, the strange flying things that probably were planes, but looked more like flying boxcars. Most of them came from the north and west and they came flying low, not too fast, to land in an area behind a screen of buildings that stood between him and the landing field. And the creatures that moved about among the buildings were not men -- or did not seem to be men, but something else, metallic things that flashed in the last rays of the Sun. All about the buildings, standing on great towers, were cupshaped discs many feet across and all the faces of the discs were turned toward the Sun and the faces of the discs glowed as if there were fires inside them. He walked slowly toward the buildings and realized for the first time the sheer vastness of them. They covered acre after acre and they towered many stories high and the things that ran among them on their strange and many errands were not men, nor anything like men, but self-propellecf machines. Some of the machines he could identify, but most of them he couldn't. He saw a carrying machine rush past with a load of lumber clutched within its belly and a great crane lumber by at thirty miles an hour with its steel jaws swinging. But there were others that looked like mechanistic nightmares and all of them went scurrying about in a terrific hurry. He found a street, or, if not a street, an open space between two buildings, and went along it, keeping close to the side of one, for it would have been inviting death to walk down the center, where the machines were racing around. He came to an opening in the building, from which a ramp led out to the street, and he cautiously climbed the ramp and looked inside. The interior was lighted, although he could not see where the light came from, and he looked down long avenues of machinery, busily at work. But there was no noise -- that, he knew now, was what had bothered him. Here was a factory and it was utterly silent except for the sound of metal on the earth as the selfpropelled machines flashed, along the street. He left the ramp and went down the street, hugging the building, and came out on the edge of the airfield where the aerial boxcars were landing and taking off. He watched the machines land and disgorge their freight, great piles of shining, newly sawed lumber, which were at once snatched up by the carrying machines and hustled off in all directions. Great gouts of raw ore, more than likely iron, were dumped into the maw of other carrying machines that looked, or so Vickers thought, like so many pelicans. Once the boxcar had unloaded it took off again -- took off without a single sound, as if a wind had seized and wafted it into the upper air. The flying things came in endless streams, disgorging their endless round of cargo, which was taken care of almost immediately. Nothing was left piled up. By the time the machine had lifted into the air, the cargo it had carried had been rushed off somewhere. Their operation was not automatic, for to have been automatic, each operation must have been performed at a certain place and at a regular time, and each ship did not land in exactly the same place, nor was the time of their arrival spaced regularly. But each time a ship landed, the appropriate carrying machine would be on hand to take charge of the cargo. thought, and even as he thought of it, he knew that that was exactly what they were -- robots, each designed to take care of its own particular task. Not the manlike robots of one's imagination, but practical machines with intelligence and purpose. The Sun had set and as he stood at the corner of the building, he looked up at the towers which had faced it. The discs atop the towers were slowly turning back toward the east, so that when the Sun came up next morning, they would be facing it. Solar power, thought Vickers -- where else had he heard of solar power? Why, in the mutant-produced houses, the dapper little salesman had explained to Ann and him how, when you had a solar plant, you could dispense with public utilities. And here again was solar power. Here, too, were frictionless machines that ran without the faintest noise, like the Forever car that would not wear out, but would last through many generations. The machines paid no attention to him. It was as if they did not see him, did not suspect that he was there. Not one of them faltered as they rushed past him, not a single one had moved out of its way to give him a wider berth. Nor had any made a threatening motion toward him. With the going of the Sun, the area was lighted, but once again he could not determine the source of the light. The fall of night did not halt the work. The flying boxcars, great, angular, boxlike contraptions, still came flying in, unloaded and flew off again. The machines kept up their scurrying. The. long lines of machines within the buildings continued their soundless labor. The flying boxcars, he wondered, were they robots, too? And the answer seemed to be that they probably were. He edged his way onto the platform and looked at some of the crates closely, trying to determine what it was they held, but the only designations on them were stenciled code letters and numerals. He thought of prying some of them open, but he had no tools to do it, and he was just a bit afraid to do it, for while the machines continued to pay no attention to him, they might pay disastrous attention if he interfered. Hours later, he came out on the other side of the sprawling factory area and walked away from it, then turned back and looked at it and saw it glowing with its strange light and sensed the bustle of it. He looked back at the factory and wondered what was made there and thought that he could guess. Probably razor blades and lighters and maybe light bulbs and perhaps the houses and the Forever cars. Maybe all of them. For this, he felt certain, was the factory -- or at least one of the factories -- that Crawford and North American Research had been looking for and had failed to find. No wonder, he thought, that they failed to find it.  late in the afternoon, a river filled with tree-covered, grapevined islands, clogged with sandbars and filled with wicked gurgling and the hiss of shifting sands. He was sure it could be no other stream than the Wisconsin, flowing through its lower reaches to join the Mississippi. And if that were so, he knew where he was going. Now he feared that in this land there was no Preston house. Rather, he had fallen upon a strange land where there were no men, only a complex robotic civilization in which Man played no part. There were no men connected with the factory, he was sure, for the place had been too self-sufficient to need the hand or the brain of Man. He camped on the river's shore, and sat for a long time before he went to sleep, staring out over the' silvered miiror of the moonlit water, feeling the loneliness strike into him, a deeper, more bitter loneliness than he'd ever known before. When morning came, he'd go on; he'd tread the trail to its dusty end. He'd find the place where the Preston house should stand and when he found that there was no house -- what would he do then? He did not think about that. He did not want to think about it. He finally went to slejep. In the morning he went down the river and studied the bluffstudded southern shore and was more sure than ever that he knew where he was. He followed the river down and finally saw the misty blue of the great rock-faced bluff that rose at the junction of the rivers and the thin violet line of the cliffs beyond the greater river, so he climbed the nearest one and spied out the valley he had hunted. He camped that night in the valley and the next morning followed it and found the other branching valley that should lead to the Preston house. He was halfway up it before it became familiar, although he had seeen rock formations that seemed to bear some similarity to ones he had seen before. The suspicion and the hope grew in him, and at last the certainty, that, here once again was the enchanted valley he had traveled twenty years before! And now, he thought -- now if the house is there. He felt faint and sick at the certainty that it would not be there, that he would reach the valley's head and see where it should have been, but wasn't. For if that happened, he was an exile from Earth. He wouldn't know how to get back. H E found the path and followed it and he saw the wind blow across the meadow grass so that it seemed as if the grass were water and the whiteness of its wind-blown stems were whitecaps rolling on it. He saw the clumps of crab-apple trees and they were not in bloom because the season was too late, but they were the same nevertheless. The path turned around the shoulder of a hill. Vickers stopped and looked at the house standing on the hill. He felt his knees go wobbly beneath him and he looked away quickly, then brought his eyes back to make sure it was not imagination, that the house was really there. It really was. He started up the path and discovered that he was running and forced himself down to a rapid walk. And then he was running again and he didn't try to stop. He reached the hill that led up to the house and he went more slowly now, trying to regain his breath, and he thought what a sight he was, with weeks of beard upon his face, with his clothing ripped and tom and matted with the dirt and filth of travel, with his shoes falling to shreds, tied upon his feet with strips of cloth from his trouser legs, with his frayed trousers blowing in the wind, showing dirt-streaked knees. He came to the white picket fence and stopped beside the gate and leaned upon it, looking at the house. It was exactly as he had remembered it, neat, wellkept, with the lawn trimmed and flowers growing brightly, the woodwork newly painted and the brick a mellow color attesting to years of Sun upon it and the force of wind and rain. "Kathleen," he said, and he couldn't say the name too well, for his lips were parched and rough. "I've come back again." He wondered what she'd look like, after all these years. He must not, he warned himself, expect to see the girl he once had known, the girl of seventeen or eighteen, but a woman near his own age. She would see him standing at the gate and even with the beard and the tattered clothes and the weeks of travel on him, she would know him and would open the door and come down the walk to greet him. The door opened and the Sun was in his eyes so that he could not see her until she'd stepped out on the porch. "Kathleen," he said. But it wasn't Kathleen. It was someone he'd never seen before -- a man who had on almost no clothes at all and who glittered as he walked down the path and who said to Vickers, "Sir, what can I do for you?" the glitter of the man, something about the way he walked and the way he talked that didn't feel right. He had no hair, for one thing, either on his head or on his chest. His eyes were funny, too. They glittered like the rest of him and he seemed to have no lips. "I'm a robot, sir," he explained, seeing Vickers' puzzlement. "Oh," said Vickers. I "My name is Hezekiah." "How are you, Hezekiah?" Vickers asked inanely, not knowing what else to say. "I'm all right," replied Hezekiah. "I am always all right. There is nothing to go wrong with me. But thank you for asking, sir." "I had hoped to find someone here." said Vickers. "A Miss Kathleen Preston. Does she happen to be home?" He watched the robot's eyes and there was no answer in them. The robot asked, "Won't you come in, sir' and wait?" "Why, certainly," said Vickers. The robot held the gate open for him and he came through, walking on the path of mellowed brick, and he noticed how tidy the house was. The windows sparkled with the cleanliness of a recent washing and the shutters hung true and straight and the trim was painted and the lawn looked as if it had not been only mowed, but razored. Gay beds of flowers bloomed without a single weed and the picket fence marched its eternal guard around the house straight as wooden soldiers and painted gleaming white. The robot went up the steps to the little porch that opened on the side entrance and pushed the door open for Vickers. "To your right, sir," Hezekiah said. "Take a chair and wait. If there is anything you wish, there is a bell upon the table." "Thank you, Hezekiah," said Vickers. The room was large. It was gaily papered and had a small marble fireplace wfth a mirror over the mantle and there was a sort of official hush, as if the place might be an antechamber for important conferences. Vickers took a chair and waited. What had he expected? Kathleen bursting from the house and running down the steps to meet him, happy after twenty years of never hearing from him? He shook his head. It didn't work that way. It wasn't logical that it should. But there were other things that were not logical, either, and they had worked out. It had not been logical that he should find this house in this other world, and still he had found it and now sat beneath its roof and waited. It had not been logical that he should find the top he had not remembered and, finding it, know what to use it for. But he had found it and he had used it and was here. H E sat quietly, listening to the house. There was a murmur of voices in the room that opened off the waiting room and he saw that the door which led into it was open an inch or two. There was no other sound. The house lay in morning quiet. He got up from his chair and paced to the window and from the window back to the marble fireplace. Who was in that other room? Why was he waiting? Whom would he see when he walked through that door and what would they say to him? He stopped beside the door, standing with his back against the wall, holding his breath to listen. ITHE murmur of voices became words... going to be a shock." A deep, gruff voice said, "It always is a shock. There's nothing you can do to take the shock away. No matter how you look at it, it always is degrading." A slow, drawling voice said, "It's unfortunate that we have to work it the way we do. It's too bad we can't let them go on in their rightful bodies." Businesslike; clipped, precise, the first voice said, "Most of the androids take it fairly well. Even knowing what it means, they take it fairly well. We make them understand. And, of course, out of the three, there's always the lucky one, the one that can go on in his actual body." "I have a feeling," said the gruff voice, "that we started in on Vickers just a bit too soon." "Flanders said we had to. He thinks Vickers is the only one who can handle Crawford." And Flanders' voice saying, "I am sure he can. He was a late starter, but he was coming fast. We gave it to him hard. First the bug got careless and he caught it and that set him to thinking. Then, after that, we arranged the lynching threat. Then he found the top we planted and the association clicked. Give him just another jolt or two..." "How about the girl, Flanders? That -- what's her name?" "Ann Carter," Flanders said. "We've been jolting her a bit. but not as hard as Vickers." "How will they take it?" asked the drawling voice, "when they find they're android?" Vickers lurched away from the door, groping with his hands, as if he were walking in the dark through a room filled with furniture. Used, he thought. Not even human. "Dynn you, Flanders!" he said. "Damn you for a smirking heel!" Not only he, but Ann -- they were both androids. He had to get away, he told himself. He had to find a place where he could hide and let his mind calm down and plan what he meant to do. For he was going to do something. It wasn't going to stay this way. He'd deal himself a hand and cut in on the game. He moved along the hall and reached the door and opened it a crack to see if anyone was there. The lawn was empty. There was no one in sight. He went out the door and closed it gently behind him and when he hit the ground, jumping from the tiny porch, he was running. He went over the fence. He didn't look back until he reached the trees. When he did, the house stood serenely, majestically, on its hilltop at the valley's head. S O he was an android, an artificial man, a body made out of a handful of chemicals and the cunning of Man's mind and the wizardry of Man's technique -- but ordinary, normal men had no such cunning and no such technique. The mutants did. They could make an artificial man and make him so well and cleverly that even he, himself, would never know for sure. And artificial women, too -- like Ann Carter. The mutants could make androids and robots and Forever cars and everlasting , razor blades and a host of other gadgets, all designed to wreck the race from which they sprang. They had synthesized the carbohydrate as food and the protein to make the bodies of their androids, and they knew how to travel from one earth to another -- all those earths that ringed the Sun. This much he knew they could do and were doing. What other things they might be doing, he had no idea. Nor any idea, either, of the things they dreamed or planned. "You're a mutant," Crawford had told him. "You're one, of them." For Crawford had a machine that could pry into the mind and tell its owner what was in that mind, but the machine was stupid in the last analysis, for it couldn't even tell a real man from a fake. No mutant, but a mutant's errand boy. Not even a man, only an artificial copy. How many others, he wondered, could there be like him? How many of his kind were trailed and watched by Crawford's men, unaware that they did not trail and watch the mutant, but a thing of mutant manufacture? That, thought Vickers, was the true measure of the difference between the normal man and mutant -- the normal man could mistake the mutant's scarecrow for the mutant. The mutants made a man and turned him loose and watched him and allowed him to develop and set a spying mechanism that they called a bug to watch him, a little mechanical mouse that could be smashed with a paperweight. And in the proper time they jolted him -- jolted him for what? They stirred up his fellow townsmen so he fled a lynching party ; they planned for him to find a toy out of childhood and waited to see if the toy might not trip a childhood association; they fixed it so he would drive a Forever car when they knew that driving such a car could cause him to be mobbed. And after they had jolted an android, what happened to him then? What became of the androids once they had been used for the purpose of their making? He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd talk to him again. And now he knew something of what was going on and Crawford might be very interested. He walked on through the woods, with its massive trees and its deep-laid forest mold and thick matting of old leaves, with its mosses and its flowers and its strange silence filled with uncaring and with comfort. He had to find Ann Carter. He had to tell her. Together, the two of them would somehow stand against it. He halted beside the great oak tree and stared up at its leaves and tried to clear his mind, to wipe it clean of the chaos of his thinking so he could start fresh again. There were two things that stood out above all others: He had to get back to the parent Earth. He had to find Ann Carter. the voice startled him into turning. "Good morning, stranger," said the man, standing just a few feet away, a great, tall, strong man dressed much as a farm hand or a factory worker, but with a jaunty, peaked cap and Despite the rudeness of his clothing, there was nothing of the peasant about the man, but a cheerful self-sufficiency that reminded Vickers of someone he'd read about and he tried to think who it might be, and he thought of Robin Hood. Across the man's shoulder was a strap that held a quiver full of arrows and in his hand he held a bow. Two young rabbits hung lifeless from his belt and the blood dripping from them had smeared his trouser leg. "Good morning," said Vickers, shortly. He didn't like the idea of this man popping up from nowhere. "You're another one of them," the man said. "Another one of what?" The man laughed. "We get one of you every once in a while. Someone who has blundered thrpugh and doesn't know where he is. I've often wondered what happened to them before we were settled here or what happens to them when they pop through a long way from any settlement." "I don't know what you're talking about." "Another thing you don't know," said the man, "is where you are." "I have a theory," Vickers retorted. "This is a second earth." "You got it pegged pretty close. You're better than most of them. They just flounder around and gasp and won't believe it when we tell them this is earth number two." "That's neat," said Vickers. "Earth Number Two, is it? And what about Number Three?" "It's there, waiting until we need it. Worlds without end, waiting until we need them. We can go on pioneering for generation after generation. A new earth for each new generation if we have to, but they say we won't be needing them that fast." "They?" challenged Vickers. "Who are they?" "The mutants," said the man. "The local ones live in the Big House. You didn't see the Big House?" warily. "You must have missed it, coming up the ridge. A big brick place with a white picket fence around it and other buildings that look like barns, only they aren't barns." "Aren't they?" "No," said the man. "They are laboratories and experimental buildings and there is one building that is fixed uj! for listening." "Why do they have a place for listening? Seems to me you could listen almost anywhere. You and I can listen without having a special place fixed up for us." "They listen to the stars," the man told him. "They listen..." began Vickers, and then remembered Flanders sitting on the porch in Cliffwood, rocking in the chair and saying that great pools and reservoirs of knowledge existed in the stars, that it  was there for the taking and you might not need rockets to go there and get it, but might reach out with your mind and that you'd have to sift and winnow, but you'd find much that you could use. "Telepathy?" asked Vickers. "That's it," said the man. "They don't listen to the stars really, but to people who live on the planets of the stars. Now ain't that the screwiest thing you ever heard of -- listening to the stars!" "Yes, I guess it is." "But they get ideas from these people. They don't talk to them, I guess, just listen in on them. They catch some of the things they're thinking and some of the things they know and a lot of it can be used and a lot of it don't make no sense at all. But it's the truth, so help me, mister." "My name is Vickers. Jay Vickers." "Well, I'm glad to know you, Mr. Vickers. My name is Asa Andrews." He held out his hand and Vickers took it and his grip was hard and sure. And now. he knew that this was no Robin Hood. Here before him stood an American pioneer, thd' man who carried the long rifle from the colonies to the hunting grounds of Kentucky. Here were the alert stance, the independence, the quick good will and wit, the steady self-reliance. Here, once again, in the forests of Earth No. #, was another pioneer type, sturdy and independent and a good man for a friend. "These mutants must be the people who are putting out the everlasting razor and all that other stuff in the gadget shops," said Vickers. "You catch on quick," said Andrews. "We'll go up to the Big House in a day or two and you can talk to them." H E shifted the bow from one hand to another. "Look. Vickers, did you leave someone back there? A wife and some kids, maybe?" "No one," said Vickers. "Not a single soul:" "If you had, we'd have gone up to the Big House right away and told them about it and they would have fixed it up to bring the wife and kids through, too. That's the only thing about this place -- once you get here, there's no going back. Although why anyone would want to go back is more than I can figure out. So far as I know, no one has wanted to." He looked Vickers up and down, laughter tugging at his mouth. "You look all gaunted down," he said. "You ain't been eating good." "Just fish and some venison I found. And berries." "The old lady will have the victuals on. We'll get some food into you and those whiskers off and I'll have the kids heat up some water and you can take a bath, and then we can sit and talk. We got a lot to talk about." He led the way, with Vickers following, down the ridge through the heavy timber. They came out on the edge of a cleared field green with growing corn. "That's my place down there," said Andrews. "Down at the hollow's head. You can see the smoke." "Nice field of corn you have," Vickers said. "Knee-high by the Fourth. And over there is Jake Smith's place. You can see the house if you look a little close. And just beyond the hogsback are John Simmon's fields. There are other neighbors, but you can't see from here." They climbed the barbed wire fence and went across the field, walking between the corn rows. "It's different here," said Andrews, "than back on Earth. I was working in a factory there and living in a place that you wouldn't keep animals in. Then the factory shut down and there was no money. I went to the carbohydrates people and they kept the family fed. Then the landlord threw us out. The carbohydrates people had been so friendly that I went to them and told them what had happened. They were the only ones I knew of that I could turn to. After a day or two, one of them came around and told us about this place -- except, of course, he didn't tell us what it really was. He said it was a brand-new territory that was opening up and there was free land for the taking and help to get you on your feet and that I could make a living and have a house instead of a two-by-four apartment in a stinking tenement and I said that we would go. He warned me that if we went, we couldn't come back again and I asked him who would want to?" "You've never regretted it?" asked Vickers. "It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to us. Fresh air for the kids and all you want to eat and a place to live with no landlord to throw you out. No dues to pay and no taxes to scrape up. Just like in the history books." "The history books?" "When America was opened up and the pioneers piled in. Land for the taking. More land than anyone can use, so rich you just scratch the ground a little and throw in some seed and you got a crop. Land to plant things in and wood to burn and build with and you can walk out at night and the sky is full of stars and the air is so clean it seems to hurt your nose when you draw it in." at Vickers, his eyes hard. "It was the best thing that ever happened to me," he said, as if daring Vickers to contradict him. "But these mutants," said Vickers. "Don't they get into your hair? Don't they lord it over you?" "They don't do anything but help us. They send us a robot to help out with the work when we need to have some help and they send a robot that lives with us nine months of the year to teach the kids. One robot teacher for each family. Now ain't that something? Your own private teacher, just like you went out and hired yourself a high-toned private tu. tor like the rich folks back on Earth." "And you don't resent these mutants? You don't hate them because they knoW more than you do?" "Mister," said Asa Andrews, "you don't want to let anyone around these parts hear you talking like that. When we first came, they explained it all to us. They had indoct -- indoctrin -- " "Indoctrination courses." "That's it. They told us what the score was. They explained the rules. There aren't many." "Like not having any firearms," said Vickers. "That's one of them. How did you know that?" "You're hunting with a bow." "Another one is that if you get into a row with anybody and can't settle it peaceable, the two of you go up to the Big House and let them settle it. And if you get sick, you're to let them know right away so they can send you a doctor and whatever else you need. The rules work to your benefit." "How about work?" "Work?" "You have to earn some money, don't you?" "Not yet," said Andrews. "The mutants give us everything we want or need. All we do is grow the food. This is whst they call -- what was that word? -- this is what they call the pastoral-feudal stage. You ever hear a word like that?" "But they must have factories," Vickers persisted, ignoring the question. "Places where they make the razor hlades and stuff. They'd need men to work in them." "They use robots. Just lately they started making a car that can last forever. The plant is just a distance from here. But they use robots to do the entire job. You know what a robot is." "Yes, I know," said Vickers. They climbed the fence that edged the corn field and walked across a pasture toward the house. Someone yelled a joyous greeting and a half a dozen kids came running down the hill, followed by yelping dogs. A woman came to the door of the house, built of peeled logs. She waved to them and Andrews waved back and then the kids and dogs descended on them in a yelping, howling, happy pack. loft above the kitchen, and listened to the wind pattering on bare feet across the shingles just above his head. He turned and burrowed his head into the goosedown pillow and beneath him the cornshuck mattress rustled in the dark. He was clean, washed clean in the tub behind the house, with water heated in a kettle on an outdoor fire, lathering himself with soap while Andrews sat on a nearby stump and talked and the children played in the yard and the dogs lay sleeping in the Sun, twitching their hides to chase away the flies. He had eaten, two full meals of food such as he had forgotten could exist after days of halfcooked fish and half-rotten venison -- cornbread and sorghum and young rabbits fried in a smoking skillet, with creamed new potatoes and greens the children had gone out and gathered and a salad of watercress pulled from the spring below the house and for supper fresh eggs just taken from the nest. He had shaved, with the children ringed around him watching, after Andrews had seated him on a stump and had used the scissors to trim away the beard. And after that he and Andrews had sat on the steps and talked. Andrews had said that he knew of a place that was crying for a house -- a tucked-in place just across the hill, with a spring a step or two away and some level ground on a bench above the creek where a man could lay out his fields. There was wood in plenty for the house, great, tall trees, and Andrews said that he would help him cut them. When the logs were ready, the neighbors would come in for the raising and Jake would bring along some of the corn that he'd been cooking and Ben would bring his fiddle and they'd have themselves a hoedown when the house was up. If they needed help beyond what the neighbors could supply, all they'd have to do was send word up to the Big House and the mutants would send a gang of robots. But that probably wouldn't be necessary, Andrews had said. The neighbors were a help; glad, too, to see another family moving in. Once the house was built, said Andrews, Simmons had some daughters that Vickers might want to have a look at, although you could do your picking blind if you wanted to, for they were a likely lot. Andrews had dug Vickers in the ribs with his elbow and had laughed uproariously and Jean, Andrews' wife, who had come out to sit with them a while, had smiled shyly at him and then had turned to watch the children playing in the yard. After supper, Andrews had showed him with some pride the books on the shelf in the living room and had said that he was reading them, something he had never done before -- something he had never wanted to do before, nor had the time to do. Vickers, looking at the books, had found Homer and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Austen, Thoreau and Steinbeck. "You mean you're reading these?" he asked. Andrews had nodded. "Reading them and liking them, mostly. Once in a while I find it a little hard to wade through them, but I keep at it. Jean likes Austen best." It was a good life here, said Andrews, the best life they'd ever known and Jean smiled her agreement and the kids had lost an argument about letting the dogs come in and sleep the night with them. frontier, but idealized and bookish, with all the frontier's advantages and none of its terror and its hardship. Here was a paternal feudalism, the Big House on the hill serving as the castle that looked down across the fields where happy people took their living from the soil. Here was a timefor resting and for gathering strength. And here was peace. No talk of war, no taxes to fight a war, or to preness to fight. Here was -- what had Andrews said? -- the pastoral-feudal stage. And after that came what stage? The pastoralfeudal stage for resting and thinking, for getting thoughts in order, for establishing once again the bond between Man and soil, the stage in which was prepared the way for the development of a culture that would be better than the one they had left. This was one earth of many earths. How many others? Hunfollowing earth, and now all the earths lay open. He tried to figure it out and he thought he saw the pattern that the mutants planned. It was simple and it was brutal, but it was workable. There was an Earth that was a failure. Somewhere, on the path that led up from apedom, they had taken the wrong turning and had traveled since that day a long road of misery. There was goodness, and ability -- but they their ability into channels of hate and arrogance and their goodness had been buried in selfishness. They were worth the saving, as a drunkard or a criminal is worthy of rehabilitation. But to save them, you must get them ' out of the neighborhood they live in, out of the slums of human thought and method. To do this, you must break the world they live in and you must have a plan to break it and after it is broken, you must have a program that leads to a better world. But first of all, there must be a plan of action. nomic systems on which old Earth was built. You shattered it with Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and with synthetic carbohydrates that would feed the hungry. You destroyed industry by producing things that industry could not duplicate and when you shattered industry, war was impossible and half the job was done. But then you left people without jobs, so you fed them with carbohydrates while you tried to ferry them to the following earths that lay waiting for them. If there wasn't room enough on Earth No. #, you sent some of them to No. # and maybe No. #, so that you had no crowding, so there was room enough for all. On the new earths there was a beginning again, a chance to dodge the errors and skirt the dangers that had bathed Old Earth in blood for countless centuries. On these new earths you could build any sort of culture that you wished. You could even experiment, aim at one culture on Earth No. # and a slightly different one on No. # and yet a different one on No. #. And after a thousand years or so, you could compare these cultures and see which one was best and consult the bales of data you had kept and pinpoint each mistake in each particular culture. In time you could arrive at a formula for the best in human cultures. Here on this earth, the pastoral-feudal culture was only the first step. It vas a resting place for education and for settling down. Things would change or be changed. The son of the man in whose house he lay would build a better house and probably would have robots to work his fields, while he himself would live a leisured life. Out of a leisured people, with their energies channeled by good leadership, would come paradise on Earth -- or on many earths. There had been that article in the paper he had read on that morning -- was it only days ago? -- which had said that the authorities were alarmed at mass disappearances. While families were dropping out of sight for no apparent reason and with nothing in common except abject poverty. And, of course, it would be the very poor who would be taken first -- the homeless and the jobless and the sick -- to be settled on these earths that followed in the track of the dark and bloody world inhabited by Man. Soon there would be little more than a handful of people on the dark and bloody Earth. Soon, in a thousand years or less, it would go tumbling on its way alone, its hide cleansed of the ravening tribe which had eaten at it and mangled it and ravished it. This same tribe would be established on other earths, under better guidance, to create for themselves a better life. Beautiful -- and yet there was this matter of the. androids. told himself. Start with first facts, try to see the logic of it, to figure out the course of mutation. There ' always had been mutants. If'there had not been, Man would still be a little skittering creatufe hiding in the jungle. There had been the mutation of the opposable thumb. There had been mutations within the little brain that made for creature cunning. Some mutation, unrecorded, had captured fire and tamed it. Another mutation had evolved the wheel. Still another had invented the bow and arrow. And so it went, on do writhe ages, mutation on mutation, building the ladder that mankind climbed. Except that the creature who had captured and tamed the flame did not know he was a mutant. And neither had the tribesman who had thought up the wheel, nor the bow and arrow experimenter. Down through the ages there had been unsuspected and unsuspecting mutants -- men who were successful beyond the success of others, great business figures or great statesmen, great writers, great scientists and artists, men who stood so far above the herd of their fellow men that they had seemed like giants in comparison. Perhaps not all of them were mutants, but some of them would have been. But their mutancy would have been a crippled thing in comparison with what it could have been, for they were forced to conform to the social and economic pattern set by a nonmutant society. That they had been able to conform, to fit themselves to a smaller measure than their normal stature, that they had been able to get along with men who were less than they and still stand out as men of towering ability was in itself a measure of their mutancy. Although their success had been large in the terms of normal men, their mutancy had been a failure in that it never reached its full realization and this was because these men had never known that they were mutants. They had been just a little smarter or a little handier or somewhat quicker than the common run of mankind. But suppose that a man should know from a piece of indisputable evidence that he was a mutant what would happen then? Suppose, for example, a man should find that he could reach out to the stars and that he could catch the thoughts and plans of the thinking creatures who lived on planets circling those far suns -- that would be full and sufficient proof that he was a mutant. And if he could obtain from his seeking in the stars some specific information of certain economic value -- say, the principle of a frictionless machine -- then without question he would know that he had a mutant gift. Once knowing that he was a mutant, he would not be able to fit so snugly, nor so smugly, into his contemporary niche as those men who had been mutants, but had never known they were. Knowing that he was a mutant, he would have the itch of greatness, would know the necessity of following his own path and not the beaten path. H E might be slightly terrified by the things he learned winnowing the stars and he might be terribly lonesome and he might see the necessity of other humans than he alone working on the information that he was dredging from the depths of space. So he would seek for other mutants and he would do it cleverly and it might take him a long time before he found one of them and he would have to approach the other mutant cautiously and win his confidence and finally tell him what he had in mind. Then there'd be two mutants, banded together, and they would seek other mutants. Not all of them would be able to send their minds out to the stars, but they would be able to do other things. Some of them would understand electronics, almost as if by instinct, more completely than any normal man, even with years of intensive training, and another might sense the strange alignment of time and space that allowed for other worlds than one, circling the Sun like a cosmic ring of planets. Some of the mutants would be women and to the mutants found would be added mutants born, and eventually there would be a mutant organization of several hundred persons, pooling their talents. From the information they gathered from the stars, plus the mutant abilities of certain others of them, they would invent and market certain gadgets that would bring in the necessary money for them to continue with their work. How many of the now common, workaday, almost prosaic gadgets used in the world today, Vickers wondered, were the products of this mutant race? But the time would come when the mutant organization and the work they did would become too challenging to pass unnoticed and the mutants would seek a place to hide -- a safe place where they could continue the work that they were doing. And what safer place could there be than one of those other earths? shuck mattress and stared into the darkness and wondered at the glibness of his imagination, with the nagging feeling that it was not imagination -- that it was something that he knew. But how could he know it? Conditioning, perhaps, of his android mind. Or an actual knowledge gained in some period of his life that had been blotted out, as the time he had gone into fairyland at the age of eight had been -- a knowledge that now was coming back again, as the remembrance of the visit to fairyland had finally returned. Or ancestral memory, perhaps, actual specific memory passed to child from parent as instinct was passed -- but the catch was that, as an android, he didn't have a parent. He was parentless and raceless and a mockery of a man, created for a purpose he did not even know. What purpose could the mutants have for him? What talent did he possess that made him useful to them? That was the thing that hurt -- that he should be used for some purpose which he did not know, that Ann should have some purpose she did not even guess. The work of the mutants was more important than mere gadgetry, something greater than Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and synthetic carbohydrates. Their work was the rescue and the re-establishment of the race -- the starting over again of a badly muddled humanity. It was the development of a world or worlds where war would not be merely outlawed, but impossible, where fear would never raise its head, where progress would have a different value than it had in mankind's world today. And into a program of this sort, where did Jay Vickers fit? The mutants would take from the human race the deadly playthings and keep those playthings in trust until the child of Man was old enough to use them without hurting himself or injuring his neighbor. They would take from the three year old the twelve-year-old toy he was using dangerously and when he was twelve years old would give it back again, probably with refinements. And the culture of the future, under mutant guidance, would be not merely a mechanistic culture, but a social and an economic and an artistic and spiritual culture as well. The mutants would take lopsided Man and mold him into balance and the years that were lost in the remolding would pay interest in humanity in the years to come. But that was speculation; that was getting nothing done. The thing that counted now was what he. Jay Vickers, android, meant to do about it. What was the role that he was to play? Before he did anything about it, he needed information and he couldn't get it here, lying on a corn-shuck mattress in the loft above the kitchen of a neopioneer home. There was only one place where he could get that information. He slid noiselessly out of bed and fumbled in the dark to find his ragged clothes. in the moonlight, with the tall shadows of the trees cast against its front. He stood in the shadow just outside the front gate and looked at it, remembering how he had seen it in the moonlight once before, when a road ran past the gate, but now there was no road. He recalled how the glow had fallen on the whiteness of the pillars and had turned them to ghostly beauty and of the words the two of them had said as they stood and watched the moonlight shattered on the pillars. But that was dead and done. All that was left was the bitterness of knowing that he was not a man, but the imitation of a man. the walk and climbed the steps that led to the porch. He crossed the porch and his footsteps rang so loudly in the stillness that he felt certain those in the house would hear him. He found the bell and put his thumb upon it and pressed, then stood waiting, as he had waited once before. But this time there would be no Kathleen to come to the door to greet him. He waited and a light sprang into life in the central hall and through the glass he saw a manlike figure fumbling at the door. The door came open and he stepped inside and the gleaming robot bowed a little stiffly and said, "Good evening, sir." "Hezekiah, I presume," said Vickers. "Hezekiah, sir," the robot confirmed. "You met me this morning." "I went for a walk." "And now perhaps I could show you to your room." The robot turned and went up the winding staircase, with Vickers following him. "It's a nice night, sir," the robot said. "Very nice." "You have eaten, sir?" "Yes, thank you." "I could bring you up a snack," Hezekiah offered. "I believe there is some chicken left." "No," said Vickers. "Thank you just the same." Hezekiah shoved open a door and turned on a light, then stepped aside making room for Vickers to go in. "Perhaps," said Hezekiah, "you Would like a nightcap." "That's a good idea. Scotch, if you have it handy." "In just a moment, sir. You will find some pajamas in the third drawer from the top. They may be a little large, but probably you can manage." He found the pajamas and they were fairly new and very loud and they seemed quite a bit too big, but they were better than nothing and Vickers laid them out. T'HE room was pleasant, with a huge bed covered by a white, stitched counterpane and the white curtains at the windows blew in on the night breeze. He sat down in a chair to wait for Hezekiah and the drink and for the first time in many days he knew how tired he was. He'd have the drink and climb into bed and when morning came he'd go stomping down the stairs, looking for a showdown. The door opened and he turned to take the drink from Hezekiah. It wasn't Hezekiah; it was Horton Flanders, in a crimson dressing robe fastened tight about his neck, and slippers on his feet that slapped against the floor as he crossed the room. He sat down in another chair and looked at Vickers, with a half smile on his face. "So you came back," he sbid. "I came back to listen," Vickers told him. "You can start talking right away." "That's why I got up. As soon as Hezekiah told me you had arrived, I knew you'd want to talk." "I don't want to talk," said Vickers. "I want to listen." "Yes, certainly. I am the orle to do the talking." "And not about the reservoirs of knowledge, of which you sermonize most beautifully, but specific practical, rather mundane things." "Like what?" "Like why I am an android and why Ann Carter is, also. And whether there ever was a person named Kathleen Preston or is that just a story that was conditioned in my mind? And if there actually , was a Kathleen Preston, where is she now? And, finally, where do I fit in and now that I'm here what do you intend to do?" "A very admirable set of questions. You would pick the ones I can't answer." "I came to tell you that the mutants are being hunted down and killed on that other world, that the gadget shops are being wrecked and burned, that the normal humans' are finally fighting back. I came to warn you because I thought I was a mutant, too... "You are a mutant. I can as-, sure you, Vickers, you're a very special kind of mutant." "A mutant android." "You are difficult," said Flanders. "You let your bitterness -- " "Of course I'm bitter," Vickers cut in. "Who wouldn't be? All my life I believed I was a man and now I find I'm not." "You fool! You don't know what you are!" door and came in with a tray. He set it on a table and Vickers saw that there were two glasses and some mix and an ice bucket and a fifth of liquor. "Now," said Flanders, happily, "perhaps we can talk some sense. I don't know what it is about the stuff, but put a drink into a man's hand and you tend to civilize him." He reached into the pocket of his robe, brought out a pack of cigarettes and passed them to Vickers. Vickers took the pack and saw that his hand was shaking a little as he pulled out a smoke. He hadn't realized until then just how keyed-up he was. Flanders snapped the lighter and held out the flame. Vickers got his light. "That's good," he said. "I ran out of smokes after the fourth day." He sat in the chair, smoking, thinking how good the tobacco tasted, feeling the satisfaction run along his nerves. He watched Hezekiah busy with the drinks. "I eavesdropped this morning," Vickers said. "I came here and Hezekiah let me in. I listened when you and some others were talking in the room." "I know you did," said Flanders. "How much of that was staged?" "All of it," said Flanders, blithely. "Every blessed word of it." "You wanted me to know I was an android?" "We wanted you to know." "You set the mouse on me?" "We had to do something to shake you out of your humdrum life. And the mouse served a special purpose." "It tattled on me." "Oh, exceedingly well. The mouse was a most efficient tattler." "The thing that really burns me," Vickers said, "is that business about making Cliffwood think I had done you in." "We had to get you out of there and headed back to your childhood haunts." "How did you know where I'd go?" have you ever thought about the ability of hunch? I don't mean the feeble hunch that is used on the racetrack to pick a winner or the hunch about whether it is going to rain or not, but the ability in the fullness of its concept. You might say it is the instinctive ability to assess the result of a given number of factors, to know, without actually thinking the matter out, what is about to happen. "It's almost like being able to peek into the future." "Yes," said Vickers, "I have thought about it. A good deal in the last few days, as a matter of fact." "You have speculated on it?" "To some extent. But what has..." "Perhaps," said Flanders, "you have speculated that it might be a human ability that we never developed, that we scarcely knew was there and so never bothered with, or that it might be one of those abilities that it takes a long time to develop, a sort of an acein-the-hole ability for mankind's use when he was ready for it or might have need of it." "I did think that, or at least some of it, but..." "Now's the time we need it," Flanders interrupted again. "And that answers the question that you asked. We hunched you would go back." "At first I thought Crawford was the one, but he said he wasn't." Flanders shook his head. "Crawford wouldn't have done it. He needs you too badly. Your hunch on that one wasn't working too hot." "No, I guess it wasn't." "Your hunches don't work," said Flanders, "because you don't give them a chance. You still have the world of reason to contend with. You put your reliance on the old machinelike reasoning that the human race has relied on since it left the caves. You figure out every angle and you balance it against every other angle and you add up and cancel out as if you were doing a problem in arithmetic. You never give hunch a chance. That's the trouble with you." A ND that was the trouble, Vickers thought. He'd had a hunch to spin the top on the porch of the Preston house. If he had done that, he'd have saved himself days of walking through the wilderness of this second world to get to this same spot. He'd had a hunch that he should have paid attention to Crawford's note and not driven the Forever car. If he'd done that, he'd have saved himself a lot of trouble. And there had been the hunch, which he had finally obeyed, that he must get back the top -- and that one had paid off. "How much do you know?" asked Flanders. "I don't really know," Vickers admitted. "I know there's a mutant organization that had something to do with kicking the human race out of the rut you talked about, that night back in Cliffwood. And the organization has gone underground because its operations were getting too widespread and too significant to escape attention. You've got factories working, turning out the mutant gadgets you're using to wreck the economy of the old world. I saw one of those. Tell me, do the robots run it or..." Flanders chuckled. "The robots run it. We just tell them what we want." "Then there's this business of listening to the stars." "We've gotten many good ideas that way," said Flanders. "Not all of us can do it. Just some of us who are natural telepaths. And as I told you that night we talked, not all the ideas are ones that we can use. Sometimes we just get a hint of something and we go on from there." "And where are you headed? Where do you intend to go?" "That's one that I can't answer. There are new possibilities being added all the time, new directions opening out. We're close to many great discoveries. For one thing, immortality. There is one listener... "You mean," asked Vickers, "everlasting life?" "Why not?" O F course, thought Vickers, why not? If you had everlasting razor blades and everlasting light bulbs, why not everlasting , life? "And androids?" Vickers asked. "Where would an android like myself fit in? Surely, an android can't be too important." "We have a job for you," said Flanders. "Crawford is your job." "What do I do with Crawford?" "You stop him." "Stop him? Me? Do you know what's back of Crawford?" "I know what's back of you." "Tell me," Vickers said. "The highest, most developed hunch ability that ever has been registered in a human being. The highest ever registered and the most unsuspected, the least used of any we have ever known." "Wait a minute. You're forgetting that I'm not a human being." "Once you were. You will be again. Before we took your life "Took my life!" "The life essence," said Flanders, "the mind, the thoughts and impressions and reactions that made up Jay Vickers -- the real Jay Vickers -- aged eighteen. Like pouring water from one vessel to another. We poured you from your body into an android body and we've kept and guarded your body against the day we can pour it back again." Vickers came half out of his chair. Flanders waved a hand at him. "Sit down. You were going to ask me why." "And you're going to answer me," said Vickers. "Certainly I will answer you. When you were eighteep, you were not aware of the ability you had. There was no way to make you aware of it. It would have done no good to tell you or to attempt to train you. You had to grow into it. We figured it would take fifteen years, but it took more than twenty and you aren't even yet as aware as you should be." "But I could have..." "Yes," said Flanders, "you could have grown aware of it in your own body, except that there is another factor -- inherent memory. Your genes carry the inherent memory factor, another mutation that occurs as infrequently as our telepathic listeners. Before Jay Vickers started fathering children, we wanted him to be entirely aware of his hunch ability." Vickers remembered how he had speculated on the possibility of inherent memory, white lying on the corn-shuck mattress in the loft of Andrews' house. Inherent memory, memory passed on from father to son. His father had known about inherent memory, so he had guessed it, too. He had known about it, or at least he'd remembered it when the time had come for him to know about it, when he was growing -- he groped for the word -- aware. "So that is it," said Vickers. "You want me to put the hunch on Crawford and my children because they will have hunch, too."  we understand one another." "Yes," said Vickers. "I am sure we do. First of all, you want me to stop Crawford. That is quite an order. What if I put a price on it?" "We have a price. A most attractive price. I think it will interest you." "Try me." "You asked about Kathleen Preston. You wanted to know if there was such a person and I can tell that there is. How old were you when you knew her, by the way?" "Eighteen." Flanders nodded idly. "A very fine age to be." He looked at Vickers. "Don't you agree?" "It seemed so then." "You were in love with her." "Of course." "And she was in love with you." "I think so," Vickers said. "I can't be sure, but I think she was." "You may be assured that she was in love with you." "You will tell me where she is?" "No," said Flanders. "But you..." "When your job is done, you'll go back to eighteen again." "And that's the price," said Vickers. "That's the pay I get. To be given back a body that was mine to start with. To be eighteen again." "It is attractive to you?" "Yes, I guess so," Vickers said. "But don't you see, Flanders, the dream of eighteen is gone. It's not just the physical eighteen -- it's the years ahead and the promise of those years and the wild, impractical dreaming and the love that walks beside you in the spring of life." "Eighteen," said Flanders. "Eighteen and immortality and Kathleen Preston, herself seventeen again." "Kathleen?" Flanders nodded. "Just as it was before," said Vickers. "But it won't be the same, Flanders. Something that has slipped away." "Just as it was before," insisted Flanders. "As if all these years had never been." S O he was a mutant, after all, in the guise of android, and once he had stopped Crawford, he'd be an eighteen-year-old mutant in love with a seventeen year-old mutant and there was just a possibility that, before they died, the listener might pin down immortality. And if that were so, then he and Kathleen would walk enchanted valleys forever and they'd have mutant children and all of them would live a life such as the old pagan gods of Earth might have looked upon with envy. He threw back the covers and got out of bed and walked to the window. Standing there, he stated down at the moonlit enchanted valley where he'd walked that day of long ago and he saw that the valley was an empty place and would stay empty no matter what he did. He had carried the dream for more than twenty years and now that the dream was coming true, he saw that it was tarnished with all the time between, that there was no going back to that day in #, that a man never can go back to a thing he once has left. You could not wipe out the years of living, pile them neatly in a comer and walk away and leave them. They could be erased from your mind and they would be forgotten, but not forever, and the day would come when they'd break through again. And once they'd found you out, you'd know that you had lived not one lie, but two. That was the trouble, you couldn't hide away the past. The door creaked open and Vickers turned around. Hezekiah stood in the doorway, the dim light from the landing sparkling on his metal hide. "You cannot sleep?" asked Hezekiah. "Perhaps there's something I can do. A sleeping powder, perhaps, or... "There is something you can do," said Vickers. "There's a record that I want to see." "A record, sir?". "My family record. You must have it here somewhere." "In the files, sir. I can get it right away, if you will wait." "And the Preston file as well," added Vickers. "The Preston family record." "Yes, sir," said Hezekiah. "It will take a moment." " and sat down on the edge of the bed and he knew what he had to do. The enchanted valley was an empty place. The moonlight shattering on the whiteness of the pillar was a memory without life or color. The rose-scent upon the longgone night of June had blown away with the wind of yesteryear. "Ann," he said, "I've been a fool too long. What about it, Ann? We've bantered and quarreled and we've used the bantering and the quarreling to cover the love that both of us have held. If it hadn't been for me and my dreaming of a valley, the dream growing cold and my never knowing it, we would have known long ago the way it was with us." They took from us, he thought, the birthright that was ours of living out our lives in the bodies in which we first knew the world. They've made of us neither man nor woman, but something that passes for a man and woman and we walk through the streets of life like shadows flickering down the wall. And now they would take from us the dignity of death and the realization that our task was done and they make us live a lie -- I an android powered by the life-force of a man that is not myself, and you alive with a life that is not your own. "To hell with them," he said. "To hell with all this double living, with this being a manufactured mutant." He'd go back to Earth and find Ann Carter and he'd tell her that he loved her, not as one loved a moonlight and roses memory, but as a man and woman love. Together, they would live out what was left to them of life. He would write his books and she would go on with her work and they'd forget, as best they could, this matter of the mutants. He listened to the little murmurings of a house at night, unnoticed in the daytime when it is filled with human sounds. And he thought the record. would not tell the tale that he wished to know, would not tell all the truth that he hoped to find, but it would tell him who he'd been and sorrtething about that tattered farmer and his, wife who had been his father and his mother. T HE door opened and Hezekiah pattered in, with a folder tucked beneath his arm. He handed the folder to Vickers and stood to one side, waiting. Vickers opened it with trembling fingers and it was there upon the page. Vickers, Jay, b. Aug. #, #, l.t. June #, #, h.a., t., i.m., tat. He studied the line and it made no sense. "Hezekiah." "Yes, sir?" "What does all this mean?" "To what do you refer, sir?" "This line here," said Vickers, pointing. "This l.t. business and the rest of it." Hezekiah bent and translated: "Jay Vickers, born August #, #, life transferred June #, #, hunch ability, time sense, inherent memory, latent mutation. Meaning, sir, that you are unaware." "Thank you," said Vickers. "A pleasure, sir." He glanced at the line above and there he found the names, placed on the bracketed lines that indicated marriage, from which the line bearing his own name sprouted. Charles Vickers, b. Jan. #, #, cont. Aug. #, #, aw., t., el., i.m., s.a. Feb. #, #. Sarah Graham, b. Apr. #, #, cont. Sept. #, #, aw., ind. comm., t., i.m., s.a. Mar. #, #. His parents. Two paragraphs of symbols. He tried to make it out. "Charles Vickers, born January #, #, continued? No, that wouldn't be right... "Contacted, sir," said Hezekiah. "Contacted August #, #, aware, t., el. What's that?" "Time sense and electronics, sir." "Time sense?" "The other worlds. They are a matter of time, you know." "No, I didn't know. Would you explain it, please?"' "There is no time," said Hezekiah. "Not as the normal human thinks of time, that is. Not a continuous flow of time, but brackets of time, one second following behind the other. Although there are no seconds, no such things as seconds, no such measurement, of course." "That's right," said Vickers. It all came back to him, the explanation of those other worlds, the following worlds, each one encapsulated in a moment of time, in some strange and arbitrary division of time, each time bracket with its own world, how far back, how far ahead, no one could know or guess. secret trigger had been tripped and the inherent memory was his, as it always had been his, but hidden in his unawareness, as his hunch ability still was. There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it. And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past -- except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe. Back on Man's original Earth, there had been speculation on traveling in time, of going back into yesterday or forward into tomorrow. And now he knew that you could not do it, that the same instant of time remained forever within each bracket, that Man's Earth had ridden the same bubble of the single instant from the time of its genesis and that it would die and come to nothing within that self-same instant. You could travel in time, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. If you held a certain time sense, you could break out from one bracket to another, and when you did, you would not find yesterday or tomorrow. but another world. And that was what he had done when he had spun the top, except, of course, that the top had had nothing to do with it. It had simply been an aid. He went on with the line. "What is s.a., Hezekiah?" "Suspended animation, sir." "My father and my mother?" "Waiting for the day when the mutants finally achieve immortality." "But they died, Hezekiah!" "They would have died if they had been allowed to live. When there is that danger, mutants are kept in suspended animation until immortality becomes possible." The room was bright and cold and naked with the monstrous nakedness of truth. His mother and his father waited in suspended animation for the day they could have immortality ! And he, Jay Vickers, the real Jay Vickers, what of him? Not suspended animation, certainly, for the life was gone from the real Jay Vickers and was in this android body that sat in this room holding the family record in two android hands. "Kathleen Preston?" Vickers asked. Hezekiah shook his head. "I do not know about her, sir." "But you got the Preston family record!" Hezekiah shook his head again. "I searched the cross-index, sir. There is no Preston mentioned. No Preston anywhere." H E had made a decision and now the decision was no good -- made impossible by the memory of two faces. He closed his eyes and remembered his mother, every feature, a little idealized, perhaps, but mainly true, and he recalled how she had been horrified by his adventure into fairyland and how Pa talked to him and how the top had disappeared. Of course the top had disappeared. Of course he had been lectured about too much imagination. After all, they probably had a hard enough time keeping an eye on him and knowing where he was without his wandering into other worlds. An eight-year-old would be hard enough to keep track of on one world, let alone all the others. The memory of his mother's face and of his father's hand upon his shoulder, with the fingers digging into his flesh with a manly tenderness -- these were things no one could turn his back upon. In utter faith they waited, knowing that when the blackness came upon them, it would not be the end, but the beginning of an even greater adventure in living than they had hoped when they banded themselves with the little group of mutants so many years before. If they held such faith in the mutant plan, could his be any less? Could he refuse to do his part toward the establishment of that world for which they had done so much? They themselves had given what they could. The labor they had expended, the faith they had lavished must now be brought to realization by the ones they had left behind. He was one of those -- and he knew he could mot fail them. What kind of world? He thought he knew. An immortal world that had all the factors necessary to make immortality workable -- endless economic living room, endless opportunity, endless challenges to the best efforts of one's being. Endless living room there was, even if one took only Earth into account, for there now lay open to Man's possession that endless ring around the Sun. But there also would be the Galaxy, with all its solar systems, and each of these solar systems would have its following worlds as well. Take all the planets that there were and multiply them by infinity and you got a rough idea. Each world would be an opportunity and new techniques and new sciences would add to opportunity, so that Man, even eternal Man, need never fear the lack of opportunity or of challenge. what did you us it for? You used it to keep up your strength. Even if your tribe were small, even if the birth rate were not large, even if new members of the tribe were discovered but infrequently, you still would be sure of growth if no one ever died. You used it to conserve ability and knowledge. If no one ever died, you could count on the ultimate strength and knowledge and ability of each member of the tribe. When a man died, his ability died with him and, to some extent, his knowledge. Yet it wasn't only that. You lost not only his present ability and knowledge, but all his future ability and knowledge. What knowledge, Vickers wondered, did the Earth now lack because certain persons died a dozen years too soon? Some of the knowledge, of course, would be recovered through the later work of others, but certainly there was much that could never be recovered, ideas that would not be dreamed again, concepts that were blotted out forever by the death of a brain in which the first faint stirring of their development had just begun to ferment. Within an immortal society, such a thing could never happen. An immortal society would be certain of total ability and total knowledge of its manpower. Take the ability to tap the knowledge of the stars, take inherent memory, the technical knowledge that made everlasting merchandise and add immortality. That was the formula -- of what? Of the ultimate in life? Of the pinnacle of intellect? Of godhood itself? Go back a hundred thousand years. Consider the creature, Man. Give him fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, domesticated animals and plants, plus tribal organization and the first, faint dawning concept of Man as the lord of Earth. Take that formula and what did you have? The beginning of civilization, the foundation of a human culture. The formula of the mutants, he knew, was simply another step upward as the fire-wheel-dog formula of a hundred thousand years before had been an earlier forward step. The mutant formula was not the end result of human effort nor of human intellect and knowledge; it was but a step. Within the human mind still dwelled the possibility of even greater steps, but what the concepts of those steps might be was as inconceivable to him as the time structure of the following worlds would have been to the man who discovered fire or tamed the dog. YV'E still are savages, he  thought. We till crouch within our cave, staring out beyond the smoky fire that guards the entrance of our cave against upon the world. Someday we'll plumb that darkness, but not yet. Immortality would be a tool that might help us plumb that darkness and that is all it is, a simple, ordinary tool. What was the darkness out beyond the cave's mouth? Man's ignorance of what he was or why he was or how he came to be and what his purpose and his end. The old, eternal questions. Perhaps with the tool of immortality Man could track down these questions, could gain an understanding of the orderly progression and the awful logic which fashioned and moved the Universe of matter and of energy. The next step might be a spiritual one, the finding and understanding of a divine pattern that was law unto the entire Universe. Might Man find at last, in all humility, a universal God -- the Deity that men now worshiped with the faintness of human understanding and the strength of human faith? Would Man find at last the concept of divinity that would fill, without question and without quibble, Man's terrible need of faith, so clear and unmistakable that there could be no question and no doubt; a concept of goodness and of love with which Man could so identify himself that there would then be no need of All the science fiction, fnntasy. weird, and supernatural books in print in America or England I I can supply anything you see mentioned, listed or offered anywhere! Send #c for my new Giant Printed Checklist of over # titles, including over # pnperbound books at #c each up. Or. if you are nearby N.Y.C., visit me at my home iiust two miles from N.Y.C. line) which is literally crammed with thousands of back issue magazines and used books in addition to the largest variety of new books of this kind in the world. Phone meat Floral Pak #-#, iyou can dial it), and I'll gladly furnish directions to get here. # Sherwood Avenue Franklin Square, L. I N. Y. faith, but faith replaced with knowing and an everlasting sureness? And if Man outlawed death, he thought, if the doorway of death is closed against the final revelation and the resurrection, then surely Man must find such a concept or wander forever amid the galaxies a lost and crying thing. "Hezekiah," said Jay Vickers, "you are sure?" "Of what, sir?" "About the Prestons. You are sure there are none?" "Positive, sir. None whatever." "There was a Kathleen Preston," Vickers said. "I am sure there was." But how could he be so sure? For one thing, he remembered her. For another, Flanders said there was no such a person. But his memory could be conditioned and so could Flanders'. Kathleen Preston could be no more than an emotional factor designed to bind him to this house, a keyed-in response that would not let him forget, no matter where he went or what he might become, this house and the ties it held for him. "Hezekiah, who is Horton Flanders?" Vickers asked. "Horton Flanders," said the robot, "is an android, just the same as you." on your mental retina. One question you may find yourself pondering: If you're not yourself, who is? excuse his long absence. Its premise seems harmless -- a scientist becomes absorbed in his work -- but wait till you see what Knight does with that simple fact! Strange, though, how getting rid of one problem often creates another, usually worse than the first. Short stories? Willy Ley? Our regular features? Of course! i  Jcu Gan Influence Others With Your Thinking ! HTry it some time, Concentrate intently upon another person seated in a room with you, without his noticing it. Observe him gradually become restless and finally turn and look in your dircction. Simple -- yet it is a positive dem onstration that thought generates a mental energy which can be projected from your mind to the consciousness of another. Do you realize how much of your success and happiness in life depend upon your influencing others? Is it not important to you to have others understand your point of view -- to be receptive to your proposals? Demonstrable Facts How many times have you wished Hr there were some way you could impress another favorably -- get across to him (! or her your ideas ? That thoughts can be transmitted, received, and under' stood by others is now scientifically demonstrable. The tales of miraculous accomplishments of mind by the an t cicnts are now known to be fact -- not fable. The method whereby these things can be intentionally. not accidentally, ttr, accomplished has been a secret long cherished by the Rosicrucians -- one of the schools of ancient wisdom existing throughout the world. To thousands everywhere, for centuries, the Rosi crucians have privately taught this nearlylost art of the practical use of mind power. This Free Book Points Out the Way The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) invite you to explore the powers of your mind. Their sensible, simple suggestions have caused intelligent men and women to soar to new heights of accomplishment. They will show you how to use your natural forces and talents to do things you now think are beyond your ability. Send for a copy of the fascinating sealed free book, "The Mastery of Life," which explains how you may receive this unique wisdom and benefit by its application to your daily affairs. Address your request to: Scribe: O.H.Y. The Rosicrucians San Jose, California. U. S. A. ing believable people in unusual situations. tions might do has excited the imagination of thinking men and women everywhere. "John Taine" (who is Dr. E. T. Bell of the California Institute ' of Technology) has permitted his imagination to investigate some of the possibilities in a similar fascinating theme. This is not a stojy involving, the atomic bomb, however. Atomic energy is part of the story, but only an incidental part, as are such unlikely tube, chicken eggs which hatch out reptilian monsters, and other equally strange plot threads. Dr. Bell has again displayed his usual ability to write about the unusual. When Dr. Andrew Crane of the Erickson Foundation tries to make a man of Neils Bork, his laboratory assistant, he succeeds in a spectacular manner. Berk himself contributes to the end result in his bungling way, and there emerges Miguel De Soto, a superman in every sense of the word. His rate of thinking and perceiving has accelerated many thousand times beyond that of any human being who has ever' lived. He is a partial, accidental anticipation of the race man may be destined to become in the millenniums ahead. which characterizes all of Dr. Bell's work, including such wellknown books as "The Magic Numbers," "The Forbidden Garden," "The Iron Star," "Before the Dawn," "Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science," and his many "John Taine" science novels. And it is adult reading fare, realistic, gripping and informative. Above all it is good entertainment. FEBRUARY #  GALAXY... Science Fiction ing believable people in unusual situations. T hought of the atomic bomb and what exposure to its radiations might do has excited the imagination of thinking men and women everywhere. "John Taine" (who is Dr. E. T. Bell of the California Institute of Technology) has permitted his imagination to investigate some of the possibilities in a similar fascinating theme. This is not a story involving the atomic bomb, however. Atomic energy is part of the story, but only an incidental part, as are such unlikely tube, chicken eggs which hatch out reptilian monsters, and other equally strange plot threads. Dr. Bell has again displayed his usual ability to write about the unusual. When Dr. Andrew Crane of the Erickson Foundation tries to make a man of Neils Bork, his laboratory assistant, he succeeds in a spectacular manner. Bork himself contributes to the end result in his bungling way, and there emerges Miguel De Soto, a superman in every sense of the word. His rate of thinking and perceiving has accelerated many thousand times beyond that of any human being who has ever lived. He is a partial, accidental anticipation of the race man may be destined to become in the millenniums ahead. which characterizes all of Dr. Bell's work, including such wellknown books as "The Magic Numbers," "The Forbidden Garden," "The Iron Star," "Before the Dawn," "Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science," and his many "John Taine" science novels. And it is adult reading fare, realistic, gripping and informative. Above all it is good entertainment. OaiiAxy #I Hudsim Street. New York #, N. Y. Me per copy. Subscriptions: # copies) S# per year in tbe United States. Canada. Mexico, South and Central America and LI.S. Possessitms. Elsewhere #. )#. tered as second-class matter at tbe Post Office, New York, N. Y. Ccyrisbt, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Ine. Reg. U.S. Pat. OH.  ' civilization have there been so many toys, play costumes and amusements for children. It's an alarming situation. And why not? It's alarmed all other generations in the past; there's no reason why we should be spared. The lessons of history should help, but they never do. No generation has yet known how to cope with the problem. But we can try, can't we? Let's (as) rationally and objectively (as possible) scrounge around in the past in order to understand the present and anticipate the headaches our kids will inevitably have with their own kids. For one thing, no matter how far back we go, the pattern remains identical; Parents invariably give their children more toys and games than they had when they were youngsters. The children then have (at least it seems so to parents) everything to play with and nothing to play. The plaintive "What should I do now?" brings forth the outraged "Why, when I was your age -- " What comes after that gambit forms an oral record of the human. race: " -- We didn't have wooden wheels to roll, just fire to play with." " -- I wasn't allowed to have any shrunken heads until I was old enough to go out and hunt for them." " -- I wouldn't even dare ask my father for a slave of my own." " -- We didn't have bows -- " " -- arquebuses -- " " -- ducking stools -- " " -- stagecoaches -- " " -- railroad trains -- " " -- airplanes -- " And now, of course, it's all the paraphernalia in miniature of the Old West, crime, war, the Atomic Age and space exploration. Very few adults have ever been able to resist delivering the whywhen#wasyourage lecture. Having done my own share, I wonder what drives us to it. Partly exasperation, of course, but it must be mostly envy camouflaged by recollections of deprivation bravely borne. The deprivation is obviously in the present, since one does not feel deprived of something that doesn't yet exist. We had our soapbox cars and other makeshift toys, including discarded eggbeaters and such from the kitchen, and we never suspected or missed the dazzlesome gadgets of today. Even if we had, though, we'd have kept it to ourselves; we'd only have been inviting still more tiring reminders of how much harder our ciders' childhoods were than ours. Envy seems a mean emotion for an adult to have, but it shouldn't need an apology. Older generations as a rule did have less in their youth and, remembering that little and contrasting it with the next generation's engorgement, they couldn't possibly see how a child could own so many things and yet not know what to play with. Naturally, we've outgrown the desire for toys, but here is the blunt truth -- we wish we'd had them as children. Perhaps that envy is more visible in the case of books. At any rate, it is to me, because I recall digging doggedly along the bookshelves of public libraries in search of science fiction, of which there was hardly any and that bit hidden well among general titles, whereas children now are inundated with the stuff. Instead of having to hunt, they have to dodge. What with toys, books, magazines. comics, radio, TV, movies and cver#rthing else, it does seem as if we have more to contend with and envy than any previous generation. But what will our children face? The thought that they'll tell their children how little they had to play with may seem preposterous, but is it? Toys are an excellent index to a civilization: they're non-functioning replicas of devices in common use -- as a rule. The exception, of course, is the element of fantasy in play and playthings. If an alien race tried to analyze our civilization via toys and books, it would have to conclude that we have space travel, disintegrator rays and so forth. As technology advances and the number of gadgets increases, so must pla#Tthings become more numerous and complex. It would be absurd to expect one without the other. Also, barring an absolutely unthinkable racial catastrophe, it would be absurd to expect the process to do anything but accelerate. What will our grandchildren play with? To know that, you'd have to be able to outguess progress. But you may be sure that toys will at the very least keep abreast of science and exploration. Now add to that fact the certainty that we'll reach other planets within a single generation. Lord knows what we'll find there in the way of artifacts, pets and plants. But whatever we find, the kids of that day will have either as imports or imitations. I feel sorry in advance for their parents, wholl yelp in vexation, "A whole solar menagerie and you don't know what to play with? Why, when I was your Four in One Oeorge reaHied he was lucky. He fell into something scientists dream of -- he was able to become completely absorbed in his work! I G eorge Meister had once seen the nervous system of a man -- a display specimen, achieved by coating the smaller fibers until they were coarse enough to be seen, then dissolving all the unwanted tissue and replacing it by clear plastic. A marvelous job; that it. What was his name?... At any rate, having seen the specimen, Meister knew what he himself must look like at the present moment. Of course, there were distortions. For example, he was almost certain that the distance between his visual center and his eyes was now at least thirty centimeters. Also, no doubt, the system as a whole was curled up and spread out rather oddly, since the musculature it had orisinally controlled was gone; and he had noticed certain other changes which might or might not be reflected by gross structural differences. The fact remained that he -- all that he could still call himseli -- was nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, a spinal cord, and a spray of neurons. George closed his eyes for a second. It was a feat he had learned to do only recently and he was proud of it. That first long period, when he had had no control whatever, had been very bad. He had decided later that the paralysis had been due to the lingering effects of some anesthetic -- the agent, whatever it was, that had kept him unconscious while his body was -- Well. Either that or the neuron branches had simply not yet knitted firmly in their new positions. Perhaps he could verify one or the other supposition at some future time. But at first, when he had only been able to see and not to move, knowing nothing beyond the moment when he had fallen face-first into that mottled green and brown puddle of gelatin... that had been upsetting. H e wondered how the others were taking it. There were others, he knew, because occasionally he would feel a sudden acute pain down where his legs used to be, and at the seme instant the motion of the landscape would stop with a jerk. That could only be some other brain, trapped like his, trying to move their common body in another direction. Usually the pain stopped immediately, and George could go on sending messages down to the nerve-endings which had formerly belonged to his fingers and toes, and the gelatinous body would go on creeping slowly forward. When the pains continued, there was nothing to do but stop moving until the other brain quit -- in which case George would a very slow vehicle -- or try to alter his own movements to coincide, or at least produce a vector with the other brain's. He wondered who else had fallen in. Vivian Beilis? Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty? All three of them? There ought to be some way of finding out. He tried looking down once more and was rewarded with a blurry view of a long, narrow strip of mottled green and brown, moving sluggishly along the dry stream bed they had been crossing for the last hour or more. Twigs and shreds of dry vegetable matter were stuck to the dusty, translucent surface. He was improving; the last time, he had only been able to see the thinnest possible edge of his new body. When he looked up again, the far side of the stream' bed was perceptibly closer. There was a cluster of stiff-looking, darkbrown vegetable shoots just beyond, on the rocky shoulder: George was aiming slightly to the left of it. It had been a plant very much like that one that he'd been reaching for when he lost his balance and got himself into this situation. He might as well have a good look at it. anyhow. The plant would probably turn out to be of little fhterest. It would be out of all reasfcn to expect every new life-form to be a startling novelty; and George Mcister was convinced that he had already stumbled into the most interesting organism on this planet. Something-or-other meisterif, he thought, named after him. of course. He had not settled on a generic term -- he would have to learn more about it before he decided -- but meisterii certainly. It was his discovery and nobody could take it away from him. Or, unhappily, him away from it. Ah, well! I T was a really lovely organism, though. Primitive -- less structure of its own than a jellyfish, and only on a planet with light surface gravity like this one could it ever have hauled itself up out of the sea. No brain, no nervous system at all, apparently. But it had the perfect survival mechanism. It simply let its rivals develop highly organized nervous tissue, sat in one place (looking exactly like a deposit of leaves and other clutter) until one of them fell into it. and then took all the benefit. It wasn't parasitism, either. It was a true symbiosis, on a higher level than any other planet, so far as George knew, had ever developed. The captive brain was nourished by the captor: wherefore it served the captive's interest to move the captor toward food and away from danger. You steer me, I feed you. It was fair. They were close to the plant, almost touching it. George inspected it. As he had thought, it was a common grass type. Now his body was tilting itself up a ridge he knew to be low, although from his eye-level it looked tremendous. He climbed it laboriously and found himself looking down into still another gully. This could probably go on indefinitely. The question was -- did he have any choice? He looked at the shadows cast by the low-hanging sun. He was heading approximately northwest, directly away from the encampment. He was only a few hundred meters away: even at a crawl, he could make the distance easily enough... if he turned back. He felt uneasy at the thought and didn't know why. Then it struck him that his appearance was not obviously that of a human being in distress. The chances were that he looked like a monster which had eaten and partially digested one or more people. If he crawled into camp in his present condition, it was a certainty that he would be shot at before any questions were asked, and only a minor possibility that narcotic gas would be used instead of a machine rifle. No, he decided, he was on the right course. The idea was to get away from camp, so that he wouldn't be found by the relief party which was probably searching for him now. Get away, bury himself in the forest, and study his new body: find out how it worked and what he could do with it, whether there actually were others in it with him, and if so, whether there was any way of communicating with them. It would take a long time, he realized, but he could do it. Limply, like a puddle of mush oozing over the edge of a tablecloth, George started down into the gully, leading up to George's fall into the Something-or-other mejsterii were as follows: Until as late as the mid-twenty-first century, a game invented by the ancient Japanese was still hemisphere of earth. The game was called go. Although its rules were almost childishly simple, its strategy included more permutations and was more difficult to master than chess. Co was played at the height of development -- just before the geological catastrophe that wiped out most of its devotees -- on a board with nine hundred shallow holes, using small pill-shaped counters. At each turn, one of the two players placed a counter on the board, wherever he chose, the object being to capture as much territory as possible by surrounding it completely. There were no other rules; and yet it had taken the Japanese almost a thousand years to work up to that thirty-by-thirty board, adding perhaps one rank and file per century. A hundred years was not too long to explore all the possibilities of that additional rank and file. At the time George Meistcr fell into the gelatinous green-andbrown monster, toward the end of the twenty-third century A. D... a kind of  was being played in a three-dimensional field which contained more than was the board, the positions were star-systems, men were the counters. The loser's penalty was annihilation. The Galaxy was in the process of being colonized by two opposing federations, both with the highest aims and principles. In the early stages of this conflict, planets had been raided, bombs dropped, and a few battles had even been fought by fleets of spaceships. Later, that haphazard sort of warfare became impossible. Robot fighters, carrying enough armament to blow each other into dust, were produced around the outer stars of a cluster belonging to one side or the other, they swarmed like minnows. Within such a screen, planets were safe from attack and from any interference with their commerce... unless the enemy succeeded in colonizing enough of the surrounding star-systems to set up and maintain a second screen outside the first. It was o, played for desperate stakes and under impossible conditions. Everyone was in a hurry; everyone's ancestors for seven generations had been in a hurry. You got your education in a speeded-up, capsulized form. You mated early and bred frantically. And if you were assigned to an advance ecological team, as George was, you had to work without proper preparation. The sensible, the obvious thing to do in opening up a new planet with unknown life-forms would have been to begin with at least ten years of immunological study conducted from the inside of a sealed station. After the worst bacteria and viruses had been conquered, you might proceed to a little cautious field work and exploration. Finally -- total elapsed time fifty years, say -- the colonists would be shipped in. There simply wasn't that much time. F ive hours after the landing, Meister's team had unloaded fabricators and set up barracks enough to house its # members. An hour after that. Meister, Gumbs, Beilis and McCarty had started out across the level cinder and ash left by the transport's tail jets to the nearest living vegetation, six hundred meters away. They were to trace a spiral path outward from the camp site to a distance of a thousand meters, and then return with their specimens -- providing nothing too large and hungry to be stopped by machine rifle had previously eaten them. Meister, the biologist, was so hung down with collecting boxes that his slender torso was totally invisible. Major Gumbs had a survival kit, binoculars and a machine rifle. Vivian Beilis, who knew exactly as much mineralogy as had been contained in the three-month course prescribed for her rating, and no more, carried a light rifle, a hammer and a specimen sack. Miss McCarty -- no one knew her first name -- had no scientific function. She  was the group's Loyalty Monitor. She wore two squat pistols and a bandolier bristling with cartridges. Her only job was to blow the cranium off any team member caught using an unauthorized communicator, or in any other way behaving oddly. All of them were heavily gloved and booted, and their heads were covered by globular helmets, sealed to their tunic collars. They breathed through filtered respirators, so finely meshed that -- in theory -- nothing larger than an oxygen mdlecule could get through. On their second circuit of the camp, they had struck a low ridge and a scries of short, steep gullies, most of them choked with the dusty-brown stalks of dead vegetation. As they started down into one of these, George, who was third in line -- Gumbs leading. then Beilis, and McCarty behind George -- stepped out onto a protruding slab of stone to examine a cluster of plant stalks rooted on its far side. His weight was only a little more than twenty kilograms on this planet, and the slab looked as if it were firmly cemented into the wall of the gully. Just the same, he felt it shift under him as soon as his weight was fully on it. He found himself falling, shouted, and caught a flashing glimpse of Gumbs and Beilis, standing as if caught by a high-speed camera. He heard a rattling of stones as he went by. Then he saw what looked like a shabby blanket of leaves and dirt floating toward him, and he remembered thinking, It looks like a soft landing, anyhow... That was all, until he woke up feeling as if he had been prematurely buried, with no part of him alive but his eyes. M uch later, his frantic efforts to move had resulted in the first fractional success. From then on, his field of vision had advanced fairly steadily, perhaps a meter every fifty minutes, not counting the times when someone else's efforts had interfered with his own. His conviction that nothing remained of the old George Meister except a nervous system was not supported by observation, but the evidence was regrettably strong. To begin with, the anesthesia of the first hours had worn off, but his body was not reporting the position of the torso, head and four limbs he had formerly owned. He had, instead, a vague impression of being flattened and spread out over an enormous area. When he tried to move his fingers and toes, the response he got was so multiplied that he felt like a centipede. He had no sense of cramped muscles, such as would normally be expected after a long period of paralysis -- and he was not breathing. Yet his brain was evidently being well supplied with food and oxygen; he felt clearheaded, at ease and healthy. He wasn't hungry, either, although he had been using energy steadily for a long time. There were, he thought, two possible reasons for that, depending on how you looked at it. One, that he wasn't hungry because he no longer had any stomach lining to contract; two. that he wasn't hungry because the organism he was riding in had been well nourished by the superfluous tissues George had contributed. Two hours later, when the sun was setting, it began to rain. George saw the big, slow-falling drops and felt their dull impacts on his "skin." He didn't know whether rain would do him any damage or not, but crawled under a bush with large, fringed leaves just to be on the safe side. When the rain stopped, it was night and he decided he might as well stay where he was until morning. He did not feel tired, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he still needed to sleep. He composed himself as well as he could to wait for the answer. He was still wakeful after a long time had passed, but had made no progress toward deciding whether this answered the question or prevented it from being answered, when he saw a pair of dim lights coming slowly and erratically toward him. G eorge watched them with an attentiveness compounded of professional interest and apprehension. Gradually, as they came closer, he made out that the lights were attached to long, thin stalks which grew from an ambiguous shape below -- either light organs, like those of some deep-sea fish, or simply luminescent eyes. n George noted a feeling of tension in himself which seemed to suggest that adrenalin or an equivalent was being released somewhere in his system. He promised himself to follow this lead at the first possible moment; meanwhile, he had a more urgent problem to consider. Was this approaching organism the kind which the Something meisterii ate, or the kind which devoured the Something meisfenV? If the latter, what could he do about it? For the present, at any rate, sitting where he was seemed to be indicated. The body he inhabited made use of camouflage in its normal, or untenanted state, and was not equipped for speed. So George held still and watched, keeping his eyes halfclosed, while he considered the possible nature of the approaching animal. The fact that it was nocturnal, he told himself, meant nothing. Moths were nocturnal; so were bats -- no, the devil with bats, they were carnivores. The light-bearing creature came nearer, and George saw the faint gleam of a pair of long, narrow eyes below the two stalks. Then the creature opened its mouth. It had a great many teeth. George found himself crammed into some kind of crevice in a wall of rock, without any clear recollection of how he had got there. He remembered a flurry of branches as the creature sprang at him, and a moment's furious pain, and nothing but vague, starlit glimpses of leaves and soil. How had he got away? He puz#led over it until dawn came, and then, looking down at himself, he saw something that had not been there before. Under the smooth edge of gelatinous flesh, three or four projections of some kind were visible. It struck George that his sensation of contact with the stone underneath him had changed, too. He seemed to be standing on a number of tiny points ' instead of lying flat. He flexed one of the projections experimentally, then thrust it out straight ahead of him. It was a lumpy, single-jointed caricature of a finger or a leg. II  George Meister thought about it with as much coherence as he could muster. Then he waggled the limb again. It was there, and so were all the others, as solid and real as the rest of him. He moved forward experimentally, sending the same messages down to his finger-and-toe nerveends as before. His body lurched out of the cranny with a swiftness that very nearly tumbled him down over the edge of a minor precipice. Where he had crawled like a snail before, he now scuttled like an insect. But how? No doubt, in his terror when the thing with the teeth attacked, he had unconsciously tried to run as if he still had legs. Was that all there was to it? George thought of the carnivore again, and of the stalks supporting the organs which he had thought might be eyes. That would do as an experiment. He closed his eyes and imagined them rising outward, imagined the mobile stalks, growing, growing... He tried to convince himself that he had eyes like that, had always had them, that everyone who was anyone had eyes on stalks. Surely, something was happening. George opened his eyes again and found himself looking straight down at the ground, getting a view so close that it was blurred, out of focus. Impatiently, he tried to look up. All that happened was that his held of vision moved forward a matter of ten or twelve centimeters. It was at this point that a voice shattered the stillness. It sounded like someone trying to shout through half a meter of lard. "Urghh! Lluhh! Eerahh!" George leaped convulsively, executed a neat turn and swept his eyes around a good two hundred and forty degrees of arc. He saw nothing but rocks and lichens. On a closer inspection, it appeared that a small green and orange larva or grub of some kind was moving past him. George regarded it with suspicion for a long moment, until the voice broke out again: "Ellfff! Elffneee!" The voice, somewhat higher this time, came from behind. George whirled again, swept his eyes around -- Around an impossibly wide circuit. His eyes were on stalks, and they were mobile whereas a moment ago he had been staring at the ground, unable to look up. George's brain clattered into high gear. He had grown stalks for his eyes, all right, but they'd been limp, just extensions of the jellylike mass of his body, without a stiffening cell-structure or muscular tissue to move them. Then, when the voice had startled him, he'd got the stiffening and the muscles in a hurry. That must have been what had happened the previous night. Probably the process would have been completed, but much more slowly, if he hadn't been frightened. A protective mechanism, obviously. As for the voice -- r G eorge rotated once more, slowly, looking all around him. There was no question about it: he was alone. The voice, which had seemed to come from someone or something standing just behind him. must in fact have issued from his own body. The voice started again, at a less frantic volume. It burbled a few times, then said quite clearly in a high tenor. "Whass happen'? Wheh am I?" George was floundering in enough bewilderment. He was in no condition to adapt quickly to more new circumstances, and when a large, dessicated lump fell from a nearby bush and bounced soundlessly to within a meter of him, he simply stared at it. He looked at the hard-shelled object and then at the laden bush from which it had dropped. Slowly, painfully, he worked his way through to a logical conclusion. The dried fruit had fallen without a sound. This was natural, because he had been totally deaf ever since his metamorphosis. But he had heard a voice I Ergo, hallucination or telepathy. The voice began again. "Help! Oh, dear, I wish someone would answer!" Vivian Beilis. Gumbs, even if he affected that tenor voice, wouldn't say. "Oh, dear." Neither would Miss McCarty. George's shaken nerves were returning to normal. He thought intently,  scared, grow legs... Beilis gets scared, grows a telepathic voice. That's reasonable, I guess -- her first and only impulse would be to yell. George tried to put himself into a yelling mood. He shut his eyes and imagined himself cooped up in a terrifyingly alien medium, without any control or knowledge of his predicament. He tried to shout: "Vivian!" He went on trying, while the girl's voice continued at intervals. Finally she stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. George said, "Can you hear me?" "Who's that? What do you want?" "This is George Meister, Vivian. Can you understand what I'm saying?" "What -- " George kept at it. His pseudovoice, he judged, was a little garbled, just as Beilis's had been at first. At last the girl said, "Oh, George -- I mean Mr. Meister! Oh, I've been so frightened. Where are you?" George explained, apparently not very tactfully, because Beilis shrieked when he was through and then went back to burbling. George sighed, and said, "Is there anyone else on the premises? Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty? Can you hear me?" A few minutes later two sets of weird sounds began almost simultaneously. When they became coherent, it was no trouble to identify the voices. Gumbs, the big. red-faced professional soldier, shouted, "Why the hell don't you watch where you're going, Meister? If you hadn't started that rock-slide, we wouldn't be in this mess!" Miss McCarty, who had a grim white face, a jutting jaw, and eyes the color of mud, said coldly, "Meister, all of this will be reported. All of it." I T appeared that only Meister and Gumbs had kept the use of their eyes. All four of them had some muscular control, though Gumbs was the only one who had made any serious attempt to interfere with George's locomotion. Miss McCarty, not to George's surprise, had managed to retain a pair of functioning ears. But Beilis had been blind, deaf and dumb all through the afternoon and night. The only terminal sense-organs she had been able to use had been those of the skin -- the perceptors of touch, heat and cold, and pain. She had heard nothing, seen nothing, but she had felt every leaf and stalk they had brushed against, the cold impact of every rain drop, and the pain of the toothy monster's bite. George's opinion of her went up several notches when he learned this. She had been terrified, but she hadn't been driven into hysteria or insanity. It further appeared that nobody was doing any breathing and nobody was aware of a heartbeat. George would have liked nothing better than to continue this discussion, but the other three were united in believing that what had happened to them after they got in was of less importance than how they were going to get out. "We can't get ouf," said George. "At least. I don't see any possibility of it in the present state of our knowledge. If we -- " "But we've got to get out!" Vivian cried. "We'll go back to camp," said McCarty coldly. "Immediately. And you'll explain to the Loyalty Committee why you didn't return as soon as you regained consciousness." "That's right," Gumbs put in self-consciously. "If you can't do anything, Meister, maybe the other technical fellows can." George patiently explained his theory of their probable reception by the guards at the camp. McCarty's keen mind detected a flaw. "You grew legs, and stalks for your eyes, according to your own testimony. If you aren't lying. you can also grow a mouth. We'll announce ourselves as we approach." "That may not be easy," George told her. "We couldn't get along with just a mouth. We'd need teeth, tongue, hard and soft palates, lungs or the equivalent, vocal cords, and some kind of substitute for a diaphragm to power the whole business. I'm wondering if it's possible at all, because when Miss Beilis finally succeeded in making herself heard, it was by the method we're using now. She didn't -- " "You talk too much," McCarty interrupted. "Major Gumbs, Miss Beilis, you and I will try to form a speaking apparatus. The first to succeed will receive a credit mark on his record. Commence." G eorge, being left out of the contest by implication, used his time trying to restore his hearing. It seemed to him likely that the Whatever-it-was meisterii had sofne sort of division of labor built into it. since Gumbs and he -- the first two to fall in -- had kept their sight without making any special effort, while matters like hearing and touch had been left for the latecomers. This was fine in principle, and George approved of it, but he didn't like the idea of Miss McCarty's being the sole custodian of any part of the apparatus whatever. Even if he were able to persuade the other two to follow his lead -- and at the moment this prospect seemed dim -- McCarty was certain to be a holdout. And it might easily be vital to all of them, at some time in the near future, to have their hearing hooked into the circuit. He was distracted at first by muttered comments between Gumbs and Vivian -- "Getting anywhere?" "I don't think so. Are you?" -- interspersed between yawps, humming sounds and other irritating noises as they tried unsuccessfully to switch over from mental to vocal communication. Finally McCarty napped. "Concentrate on forming the necessary organs instead of braying like jackasses." George settled down to work, using the same technique he had found effective before. With his eyes shut, he imagined that the thing with all the teeth was approaching in darkness -- tap; slither; tap; click. He wished valiantly for ears to catch those faint approaching sounds. After a long time he thought he was beginning to succeed -- or were those mental sounds, unconsciously emitted by one of the other three? Click. Slither. Swish. Scrape. George opened his eyes, genuinely alarmed. A hundred meters away, facing him across the shallow slope of rocky ground, was a uniformed man just emerging from a stand of black vegetation spears. As George raised his eye-stalks, the man paused, stared back at him, then shouted and raised his rifle. George ran. Instantly there was a babble of voices inside him. and the muscles of his "legs" went into wild spasms. "Run, dammit!" he said frantically. "There's a trooper with -- " The rifle went off with a deafening roar and George felt a sudden hideous pin aft of his spine. Vivian Beilis screamed. The struggle for possession of their common legs stopFed and they scuttled full speed ahead for the cover of a nearby boulder. The rifle roared again. George heard rock splinters screeching through the foliage overhead. Then they were plunging down the side of a gully, up the other slope, over a low hummock and into a forest of tall, bare-limbed trees. George spotted a leaf-filled hollow and headed for it, fighting somebody else's desire to keep on running in a straight line. They plopped into the hollow and crouched there while three running men went past them. Raising his eye-stalks cautiously, George was able to see that several jagged splinters of stone had penetrated the monster's gelatinous flesh near the far rim. They had been very lucky. The shot had apparently been a near miss -- accountable only on the grounds that the trooper had been shooting downhill at a moving target -- and had shattered the boulder behind them. Looking more closely, George observed something which excited his professional interest. The whole surface of the monster appeared to be in constant slow ferment, tiny pits opening and closing as if the flesh were boiling... except that here the bubbles of air were not forcing their way outward, but were being engulfed at the surface and pressed down into the interior. He could also see, deep under the mottled surface of the huge lens-shaped body, four vague clots of darkness which must be the living brains of Gumbs, Beilis. McCarty -- and Meister. Yes, there was one which was radially opposite his own eyestalks. It was an odd thing, George reflected, to be looking at your own brain. He hoped he could get used to it in time. ,The four dark spots were arranged close together in an almost perfect square at the center of the lens. The spinal cords, barely visible, crossed between them and rayed outward from the center. Pattern, George thought. The thing was designed to make use of more than one nervous system. It arranged them in an orderly fashion, with the brains inward for greater protection -- and perhaps for another reason. Maybe there was even a provision for conscious cooperation among the passengers: a matrix that soqiehow promoted the growth of communication cells between the separate brains. If that were so. it would account for their ready success with telepathy. George wished acutely that he could get inside and hnd out. Vivian's pain was diminishing. Hers was the brain opposite George's and she had taken most of the effect of the rock splinters. But the fragments were sinking now, slowly, through the gelid substance of the monster's tissues. Watching carefully, George could see them move. When they got to the bottom. they would be excreted, no doubt, just as the indigestible parts of their clothing and equipment had been, George wondered idly which of the remaining two brains was McCarty's and which was Gumb's. The answer proved easy to find. To George's left, as he looked back toward the center of the mound, was a pair of blue eyes set flush with the surface. They had lids apparently grown from the monster's substance, but thickened and opaque. To his right, George could make out two tiny openings, extending a few centimeters into the body, which could only be Miss McCarty's ears. George had an impulse tosee if he could devise a method of dropping dirt into them. Anyhow, the question of returning to camp had been settled, at least for the moment. McCarty said nothing more about growing a set of speech organs, although George was sure she was determined to keep on trying. He didn't think she would succeed. Whatever the mechanism was by which these changes in bodily structure were accomplished. amateurs Jike themselves probably could succeed only under the pressure of considerable emotional strain, and then just with comparatively simple tasks which involved one new structure at a time. And as he had already told McCarty, the speech organs in Man were extraordinarily diverse and complicated. I T occurred to George that speech might be achieved by creating a thin membrane to serve as a diaphragm, and an air chamber behind it, with a set of muscles to produce the necessary vibrations and modulate them. He kept the notion to himself, though, because he didn't want to go back. George was a rare bird: a scientist who was actually fitted for his work and loved it for its own sake. And right now he was sitting squarely in the middle of the most powerful research tool that had ever existed in his field: a protean organism, with the observer inside it, able to order its structure and watch the results: able to devise theories of function and test them on the tissues of what was effectively his own body -- able to construct new organs, new adaptations to environment! George saw himself at the point of an enormous cone of new knowledge and some of the possibilities he glimpsed humbled and awed him. He couldn't go back, even if it were possible to do it without getting killed. If only he alone had fallen in -- No, then the others would have pulled him out and killed the monster. There were, he felt, too many problems demanding solutions all at once. It was hard to concentrate; his mind kept slipping maddeningly out of focus. Vivian, whose pain had stopped some time ago, began to wail again. Gumbs snapped at her. McCarty cursed both of them. George himself felt that he had had very nearly all he could take, cooped up with three idiots who had no more sense than to squabble among themselves. "Wait a minute," he said. "Do you all feel the same way? Irritable? Jumpy? As if you'd been working for sixty hours straight and were too tired to sleep?" "Stop talking like a video ad," Vivian said angrily. "Haven't we got enough trouble without -- " "We're hungry." George interrupted, "We didn't realize it, because we haven't got the organs that usually signal hunger. But the last thing this body ate was us, and that was a whole day ago. We've got to find something to ingest. And soon. I'd say." "Good Lord, you're right," said Gumbs. "But if this thing only eats people -- I mean to say -- " "It never met people until we landed." George replied curtly. "Any protein should do." He started off in what he hoped was the direction they had been following all along -- directly away from camp. At least, he thought, if they put enough distance behind them, they might get thoroughly lost. Ill and down the long slope of a valley, over a wiry carpet of dead grasses, until they reached a watercourse in which a thin trickle was still flowing. Far down the bank, partly screened by clumps of skeletal shrubbery, George saw a group of animals that looked vaguely like miniature pigs. He told the others about it, and started cautiously in that direction. "Which way is the wind blowing, Vivian?" he asked. "Can you feel it?" She said, "No. I could before, when we were going downhill, but now I think we're facing into it." "Good. We may be able to sneak up on them." "But we're not going to eat animals, are we?" "Yes, how about it, Meister?" Gumbs put in. "I don't say I'm a squeamish fellow, but after all -- " George, who felt a little squeamish himself -- like all the others, he had been brought up on a diet of yeasts and synthetic protein -- said testily, "What else can we do? You've got eyes; you can see that it's autumn here. Autumn after a hot summer, at that. Trees bare, streams dried up. We eat meat or go without -- or would you rather hunt for insects?" Gumbs, shocked to the core, muttered for a while and then gave up. Seen at closer range, the animals looked less porcine and even more unappetizing than before. They had lean, segmented, pinkish-gray bodies, four short legs, flaring ears, and blunt scimitarlike snouts with which they were rooting in the ground, occasionally turning up something which they gulped, ears flapping. George counted thirty of them, grouped fairly closely in a little space of clear ground between the bushes and the river. They moved slowly, but their short legs looked powerful; he guessed that they could run fast enough when they had to. He inched forward, keeping his eye-stalks low, stopping instantly whenever one of the beasts looked up. Moving with increasing caution, he had approached to within ten meters of the nearest when McCarty said abruptly: "Meister, has it occurred to you to wonder just how we are going to eat these animals?" "Don't be foolish," he said irritably. "We'll just -- " He stopped, baffled. lID the thing's normal method of assimiliation stop as soon as it got a tenant? Were they supposed to grow fangs and a gullet and all the rest of the apparatus? Impossible; they'd starve to death first. But on the other hand -- damn this fuzzyheaded feeling -- wouldn't it have to stop, to prevent the tenant from being digested with his first meal? "Well?" McCarty demanded. That guess was wrong, George knew, but he couldn't say why; and it was a distinctly unpleasant , thought. Or, even worse, suppose the meal became the tenant, and the tenant the meal? The nearest animal's head went up, and four tiny red eyes stared directly at George. The floppy ears snapped to attention. It was no time for speculation. "He's seen us!" George shouted mentally. "Run!" One instant they were lying still in the prickly dry grass; the next they were skimming across the ground, with the herd galloping away straight ahead of them. The hams of the nearest beast loomed up closer and closer, bounding furiously; then they had run it down and vaulted over it. Casting an eye backward, George saw that it was lying motionless in the grass -- unconscious or dead. They ran down another one. The anesthetic, George thought lucidly. One touch does it. And another, and another. Of course we can digest them, he thought, with relief. It has to be selective to begin with or it couldn't have separated out our nervous tissue. Four down. Six down. Three more together as the herd bunched between the last arm of the thicket and the steep river-bank; then two that tried to double back ; then four stragglers, one after the other. The rest of the herd disappeared into the tall grass up the slope, but fifteen bodies were strewn behind them. went back to the beginning of the line and edged the monster's body under the first carcass. "Crouch down, Gumbs," he said. "We have to slide under it... that's far enough. Leave the head hanging over." "What for?" barked the soldier. "You don't want his brain in here with us, do you? We don't know how many this thing is equipped to take. It might even like this one better than any of ours. But I can't see it bothering to keep the rest of the nervous system, if we make sure not to eat the head." "Oh!" said Vivian. "I beg your pardon, Miss Beilis." George said contritely. "It shouldn't be too unpleasant, though, if we don't let it bother us. It isn't as if we had taste buds or -- " "It's all right," she said. "Just please let's not talk about it." "I should think not," Gumbs put in. "A little more tact, don't you think, Meister?" Accepting this reproof, George turned his attention to the corpse that lay on the monster's glabrous surface, between his section and Gumbs's. It was sinking, just visibly, into the flesh. A cloud of opacity was spreading around it. When it was almost gone and the neck had been severed, they moved on to the next. This timer at George's suggestion, they took aboard two at once. Gradually their irritable fnood faded; they began to feel at ease and cheerful, and George found it possible to think consecutively without having vital points slip out of his reach. They were on their eighth and ninth courses, and George was happily engaged in an intricate chain of speculation as to the monster's circulatory system, when Miss McCarty broke a long silence to announce; "I have now perfected a method by which we can return to camp safely. We will begin at once."  George turned his eyes toward McCarty's quadrant of the monster. Protruding from the rim was a stringy, jointed something that looked like -- yes, it was! -- a grotesque but recognizable arm and hand. As he watched, the lumpy fingers fumbled with a blade of grass, tugged, uprooted it. "Major Gumbs!" said McCarty. "It will be your task to locate the following articles as quickly as possible. One, a surface suitable for writing. I suggest a large leaf, light in color, dry but not brittle, or a tree from which a large section of bark can be easily peeled. Two, a pigment. No doubt you will be able to discover berries yielding suitable juice. If not, mud will do. Three, a twig or reed for use as a pen. When you have directed me to all these essential items. I will employ them to write a message outlining our predicament. You will read the result and point out any errors, which I will then correct. When the message is completed, we will return with it to the camp, approaching at night, and deposit it in a conspicuous place. We will retire until daybreak, and when the message has been read, we will approach again. Begin, Major." "Well, yes," said Gumbs, "that ought to work, except -- I suppose you've figured out some system for holding the pen, Miss McCarty?" "Fool!" she replied. "I have made a hand, of course." "Well, in that case, by all means. Let's see, I believe we might try this thicket first -- " Their common body gave a lurch in that direction. George held back. "Wait a minute," he said desperately. "Let's at least have the common sense to finish this meal before we go. There's no telling when we'll get another." McCarty demanded, "How large are these creatures. Major?" "About sixty centimeters long, I should say." "And we have consumed nine of them, is that correct?" "Nearer eight," George corrected. "These two are only half gone." "In other words," McCarty said, "we have had two apiece. That should be ample. Don't you agree. Major?" George said ; earnestly, "Miss McCarty, you're thinking in terms of human food requirements, whereas this organism has a different metabolic rate and at least three times the mass of four human beings. Look at it this way -- the four of us together had a mass of about three hundred kilos, and yet twenty hours after this thing absorbed us, it was hungry again. Well, these animals wouldn't weigh much more than twenty kilos apiece at one G -- and according to your scheme, we've got to hold out until after daybreak tomorrow." "Something in that." Gumbs agreed. "Yes, on the whole, Miss McCarty, I think we had better forage while we can. It won't take us more than half an hour longer, at this rate." "Very well. Be as quick as you can, though." T hey moved on to the next pair of victims. George's brain was working furiously. It was no good arguing with McCarty. If he could only convince Gumbs, then Beilis would fall in with the majority -- maybe. It was the only hope he had. "Gumbs," he said, "have you given any thought to what's going to happen to us when we get back?" "Not my line, you know. I leave that to the technical fellows like yourself." "No, that isn't what I mean. Suppose you were the C. O. of this team, and four other people had fallen into this organism instead of us -- " "What? What? I don't follow." George patiently repeated it. "Yes, I see what you mean. So?" "What orders would you give?" Gumbs thought a moment. "Turn the thing over to the bio section, I suppose." "You don't think you might specimen and so on. Handle with order it destroyed as a possible menace?" "Good Lord, I suppose I might. No, but you see, we'll be careful what we say in the note. We'll point out that we're a valuable care." "All right," George said, "suppose that works, then what? Since it's out of your line. I'll tell you. Nine chances out of ten. bio section will classify us as a possible biological enemy weapon. That means, first of all, that we'll go through a full-dress interrogation and I don't have to tell you what that can be like -- " "Major Gumbs," said McCarty stridently, "Meier will be executed for disloyalty at the first opportunity. You are forbidden to talk to him, under the same penalty." "But she can't stop you' from listening to me," George said tensely. "In the second place, Gumbs, they'll take samples. Without anesthesia. Finally, they'll either destroy us just the same, or they'll send us back to the nearest strong point for more study. We will then be Federation property, Gumbs. in a topsecret category, and since nobody in Intelligence will ever dare to take the responsibility of clearing us, we'll stay there. "Gumbs, this is a valuable specimen, but it will never do anybody any good if we go back to camp. Whatever we discover about it. even if it's knowledge that will be top-secret, too, and it'll never get past the walls of Intelligence... If you're still hoping that they can get you out of this, you're wrong. This isn't like limb grafts. Your whole body has been destroyed, Gumbs. ever#rthing but your nervous system and your eyes. The only new body we'll get is the one we make ourselves. We've got to stay here and -- and work this out ourselves." "Major Gumbs," said McCarty, "I think we have wasted quite enough time. Begin your search for the materials I need."  silent and their collective body did not move. Then he said : "Miss McCarty -- unofficially, of course -- there's one point I'd like your opinion on. Before we begin. That is to say, they'll be able to patch together some sort of bodies for us, don't you think? I mean one technical fellow says one thing, another says the opFosite. Do you see what I'm driving at?" George had been watching McCarty's new limb uneasily. It was flexing rhythmically and, he was almost certain, gradually growing larger. The fingers groped in the dry grass, plucking first a single blade, then two together, finally a whole tuft. Now she said : 'T have no opinion, Major. The question is irrelevant. Our duty is to return to camp. That is all we need to know." "Oh. I quite agree with you there," said Gumbs. "And besides, "he added, "there really isn't any alternative, is there?" George, staring down at one of the fingerlike projections visible below the rim of the monster, turn into an arm. He had, he suspected, started much too late. "The alternative," he said, "is simply to keep on going as we are. Even if the Federation holds this planet for a century, there'll be places on it that will never be explored. We'll be safe." "I mean to say," Gumbs went on as if he had only paused for thought, "a fellow can't very well cut himself off from civilization, can he?" There was a thoughtful tone to his voice. Again George felt a movement toward the thicket; again he resisted it. Then he found himself overpowered as another set of muscles joined themselves to Gumbs's. Quivering, crabwise, the Something-or-other meisterii moved half a meter. Then it stopped, straining. "I believe you, Mr. Mcister -- George," Vivian Beilis said. "I don't want to go back. Tell me what you want me to do." "You're doing beautifully right now," George assured her after a speechless instant. "Except if you can grow an arm, I imagine that will be useful." "Now we know where we stand," said McCarty to Gumbs. "Yes. Quite right." "Major Gumbs," she said crisply, "you are opposite me, I believe?" "Am I?" asked Gumbs doubtfully. "Never mind. I believe you are. Now is Meister to your right or left?" "Left. I know that, anyhow. Can see his eye-stalks out of the comer of my eye." "Very well." McCarty's arm rose, with a sharp-pointed fragment of rock clutched in the blobby fingers. it bend backward across the curve of the monster's body. The long, knife-sharp point probed tentatively at the surface three centimeters short of the area over his brain. Then the fist made an abrupt up-and-down movement and' a fierce stab of pain shot through him. "Not quite long enough, I think," McCarty said. She flexed the arm, then brought it back. "Major Gumbs, after my next attempt, you will tell me if you notice any reaction in Meister's eye-stalks." The pain was still throbbing along George's nerves. With one half-blinded eye, he watched the embryonic arm that was growing, too slowly, under the rim; with the other, fascinated, he watched McCarty's arm lengthen slowly toward him. It was growing visibly, he suddenly realized, but it wasn't getting any nearer. In fact, incredibly enough, it seemed to be losing ground. The monster's flesh was flowing away under it, expanding in both directions. McCarty stabbed again, with vicious strength. This time the pain was less acute. "Major?" she asked. "Any result?" "No," said Gumbs, "no, I think not. We seem to be moving forward a bit, though. Miss McCarty." "A ridiculous error," she replied. "We are being forced back. Pay attention, Major." "No, really," he protested. "That is to say, we're moving toward the thicket. Forward to me, backward to you." "Major Gumbs, I am moving forward, you are moving back." They were both right, George discovered. The monster's body was no longer circular; it was extending itself along the axis. A suggestion of concavity was becoming visible in the center. Below the surface, too, there was motion. The four brains now formed an oblong, not a square. The positions of the spinal cords had shifted. His own and Vivian's seemed to be about where they were, But Gumbs's now passed under McCarty's brain, and vice versa. Having increased its mass by some two hundred kilos, the Something-or-other meisterii was fissioning into two individuals -- and tidily separating its tenants, two to each. Gumbs and Meister r in one. McCarty and Beilis in the other. N ext time it happened, he realized, each product of the fission would be reduced to one brain -- and the time after that, one of the new individuals out of each pair would be a monster in the primary state, quiescent, camouflaged, waiting to be stumbled over. But that meant that, like the common ameba. this fascinating organism was immortal, barring accidents. It simply grew and divided. Not the tenants, though, unfortunately. Their tissues would wear out and die. Or would they? Human nervous tissue didn't regenerate, but neither did it proliferate as George's and Miss McCarty's had done; neither did any human tissue build new cells fast enough to account for George's eyestalks or Miss McCarty's arm. There was no question about it: none of that new tissue could possibly be human; it was all counterfeit, produced by the monster from its own substance according to the structural "blueprints" in the nearest genuine cells. And it was a perfect counterfeit: the new tissues knit with the old. axones coupled with dendrites, muscles contracted or expanded on command. And therefore, when nerve cells wore out, they could be replaced. Eventually the last human cell would go. the human tenant would have become totally monster -- but "a difference that makes no difference is no difference." Effectively, the tenant would still be human and he 'would be immortal. Barring accidents. Or murder. Miss McCarty was saying. "Major Gumbs, you are being ridiculous. The explanation is quite obvious. Unless you are deliberately deceiving me, for what reason I cannot imagine, then our efforts to move in opposing directions must be pulling this creature apart." McCarty was evidently confused in her geometry. Let her stay that way -- it would keep her off balance until the fission was complete. No, that was no good. George himself was out of her reach already and getting farther away, but how about Beilis? Her brain and McCarty's were, if anything, closer together... warned the girl, that would only draw McCarty's attention to her sooner. There wasn't much time left, he realized abruptly. If some physical linkage between the brains actually had occurred to make communicationN possible, those cells couldn't hold out much longer; the gap between the two pairs of brains was widening steadily. He had to keep McCarty from discovering how the four of them would be paired. "Vivian!" he said. "Yes, George?" "Listen, we're not pulling this body apart. It's splitting. That's the way it reproduces. You and I will be in one half, Gumbs and McCarty in the other," he lied convincingly. "If they don't give us any trouble, we can all go where we please." "Oh, I'm so glad!" What a warm voice she had... "Yes," said George nervously, "but we may have to fight them; it's up to them. So row an arm, Vivian." "I'll try," she said uncertainly. McCarty's voice cut across hers. "Major Gumbs, since you have eyes, it will be your task to see to it that those two do not escape. Meanwhile. I suggest that you also grow an arm." "Doing my best," said Gumbs. Puzzled, George glanced downward, past his own half-formed arm. There, almost out of sight, a fleshy bulge appeared under Gumbs's section of the rim! The Major had been working on it in secret, keeping it hidden... and it was already better-developed than George's. "Oh-oh," said Gumbs abruptly. "Look here. Miss McCarty, Meister's been leading you up the garden path. Deceiving you, you understand. Clever, I must say. I mean you and I aren't going to be in the same half. How could we be? We're on opposite sides of the blasted thing. It's going to be you and Miss Beilis, me and Meister." The monster was developing a definite waistline. The spinal cords had rotated now, so that there was clear space between them in the center. "Yes," said McCarty faintly. "Thank you. Major Gumbs." "George!" came Vivian's frightened voice, distant and weak. "What shall I do?" "Grow an arm!" he shouted. There was no reply. IV F rozen, George watched McCarty's arm, the rock-fragment still clutched at the end of it, rise into view and swing leftward at full stretch over the bubbling surface of the monster. He had time to see it bob up and viciously down again; time to think. Still short, thank God -- that's McCarty's right arm, it's farther from Vivian's brain than it was from mine; time, finally, to realize that he could not possibly help Vivian before McCarty lengthened the arm the few centimeters more that were necessary. The fission was only half complete, yet he could no more move to where he wanted to be than a Siamese twin could walk around his brother. Then his time was up. A flicker of motion warned him, and he looked back to see a lumpy, distorted pseudo-hand clutching for his eye-stalks. Instinctively he brought his own up, grasped the other's wrist and hung on desperately. It was half again the size of his, and so strongly muscled that although his leverage was better, he couldn't force it back or hold it away. He could only keep the system oscillating up and down, adding his strength to Gumbs's so that the mark was, overshot. Gumbs began to vary the force and rhythm of his movements, trying to catch him off guard. A thick finger brushed the base of one eye-stalk. "Sorry about this, Meister," said Gumbs. "No hard feelings, you understand. Between us (oof) I don't fancy that McCarty woman much -- but (ugh! almost had you that time) way I see it, I've got to look after myself. Mean to say (ugh) if I don't, who will? See what I mean?" George did not reply. Astonishingly enough, he was no longer afraid, either for himself or for Vivian; he was simply overpoweringly, ecstatically, monomaniacally angry. Power from somewhere was surging into his arm. Fiercely concentrating, he thought Bigger! Stronger! Longer! More arm! The arm grew. Visibly, it added substance to itself, it lengthened, thickened, bulked with muscle. So did Gumbs's, however. He began another arm. So did Gumbs. All around him the surface of the monster was bubbling violently. 'And, George realized, the lenticular bulk of it was perceptibly shrinking. Its curious breathing system was inadequate; the thing was cannibalizing itself, destroying its own tissues to make up the difference. How small could it get and still support two human tenants? And which brain would it dispense with first? He had no leisure to think about it. Scrabbling in the grass with his second hand. Gumbs had failed to find anything that would serve as a weapon. Now, with a sudden lurch, he swung their entire body around. The fission was complete. That thought reminded George of Vivian and McCarty. He risked a split-second's glance behind him, saw nothing but a featureless ovoid mound, and looked back in time to see Gumbs's half-grown right fist pluck up a long, sharp-pointed dead branch and drive it murderously at his eyes. T he lip of the river-bank was a meter away to the left. George made it in one abrupt surge. Their common body slipped, tottered, hesitated, hands clutching wildly -- and toppled, end over end, hurtling in a cloud of dust and pebbles down the breakneck slope to a meaty smash at the bottom. The universe made one more giant turn around them and came to rest. Half-blinded. George groped for the hold he had lost, found the wrist and seized it. "Oh, Lord!" said Gumbs. "I'm hurt, Meister. Go on, man. finish it, will you? Don't waste time." George stared at him suspiciously, without relaxing his grip. "What's the matter with you?" "Paralyzed. I can't move." They had fallen onto a small boulder, George saw, one of many with which the river-bed was strewn. This one was roughly conical; they were draped over it, and the blunt point was directly under Gumbs's spinal cord, a few centimeters from the brain. "Gumbs. that may not be as bad as you think. If I can show you it isn't, will you give up and put yourself under my orders?" "How do you mean? My spine's crushed." "Never mind that now. Will you or won't you?" "Why, yes," agreed Gumbs. "That's very decent of you, Meister, matter of fact. You have my word, for what it's worth." "All right," said George. Straining hard, he managed to get their body off the boulder. Then he stared up at the slope down which they had tumbled. Too steep; he'd have to find an easier way back. He turned and started off to eastward, paralleling the thin stream that flowed in the center of the watercourse. "What's up now?" Gumbs asked after a moment. "We've got to find a way up to the top," George said impatiently. "I may still be able to help Vivian." "Ah, yes. Afraid I was thinking about myself, Meister. If you don't mind telling me. what's the damage?" S HE couldn't still be alive, George was thinking despondently, but if there were any small chance -- "You'll be all right." he said. "If you were still in your old body, that would be a fatal injury, or permanently disabling, anyhow, but not in this thing. You can repair yourself as easily 'I as you can grow a new limb." "Stupid of me not to think of that." said Gumbs. "But does that mean we were simply wasting our time trying to kill one another?" "No. If you'd crushed my brain, I think the organism would have digested it and that would be the end of me. But short of anything' that drastic, I believe we're immortal." "Immortal? That does rather put another face on it. doesn't it?" The bank was becoming a little lower, and at one point, where the raw ground was thickly seeded with boulders, there was a talus slope that looked as if it could be climbed. George started up it. "Meister," said Gumbs after a moment. "What do you want?" "You're right, you know -- I'm getting some feeling back already. Look here, is there anything this beast can'f do? I mean, for instance, do you suppose we could put ourselves back together the way we were, with all the -- appendages, and so on?" "It's possible," George said curtly. It was a thought that had been in the back of his mind, but he didn't feel like discussing it with Gumbs just now. They were halfway up the slope. "Well, in that case," said Gumbs meditatively, "the thing has military possibilities, you know. Man who brought a thing like that direct to the War Department could write his own ticket, more or less." "After we split up," George offered, "you can do whatever you please." "But dammit," said Gumbs in an irritated tone, "that won't do." "Why not?" "Because," said Gumbs, "they might find you." His hands reached up abruptly, pried out a small boulder before George could stop him. The large boulder above it trembled, dipped and leaned ponderously outward. George, directly underneath, found that he could move neither forward nor back. "Sorry again." he heard Gumbs saying, with what sounded like genuine regret. "But you know the Loyalty Committee. I simply can't take the chance." boulder seemed to take forever to fall. George tried twice more, with all his strength, to move out of its path. Then, instinctively, he put his arms up straight under it. It struck. George felt his arms breaking like twigs, and saw a looming grayness that blotted out the sky; r he felt a sledge impact that made the ground shudder beneath him. He heard a splattering sound. And he was still alive. That astonishing fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, at last, he looked down to his right. The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been enough to lever the falling boulder over, a distance of some thirty centimeters. The right half of the monster was a flattened, shattered ruin. He could see a few flecks of pasty gray matter, melting now into green-brown translucence as the mass flowed slowly together again. In twenty minutes, the last remnants of a superfluous spinal cord had been absorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George's pain was diminishing. In five minutes more, his mended arms were strong enough to use. They were also more convincingly shaped and colored than before -- the tendons, the fingernails, even the wrinkles of the skin were in good order. In ordinary circumstances this discovery would have left George happily bemused for hours. Now, in his impatience, he barely noticed it. He climbed to the top of the bank. Thirty meters away, a humped green-brown body like his own lay motionless on the dry grass. It contained, of course, only one brain. Whose? McCarty's, almost certainly; Vivian hadn't had a chance. But then how did it happen that there was no visible trace of McCarty's arm? Unnerved. George walked around the creature for a closer inspection. O N the far side, he encountered two dark-brown eyes, with an oddly unfinished appearance. They focused on him after an instant and the whole body quivered slightly, moving toward him. Vivian's eyes had been brown; George remembered them distinctly. Brown eyes with heavy dark lashes in a tapering slender face. But did that prove anything? What color had McCarty's eyes been? He couldn't remember. George moved closer, hoping fervently that the Something-orother meisterii was at least advanced enough to conjugate, instead of trying to devour members of its own species... The two bodies touched, clung and began to flow together. Watching, George saw the fissioning process reverse itself. From paired lenses, the alien flesh melted into a slipper-shape, to an ovoid, to a lens-shape again. His brain and the other drifted closer together, the spinal cords crossing at right angles. And it was only then that he noticed an oddityabout the other brain. It seemed to be more solid and compact than his, the outline sharper. "Viviad" he said worriedly. "Is that you?" No answer. He tried again; and again. Finally: "George! Oh dear -- I want to cry, but I don't seem able to do it." "No lachrymal glands," George said automatically. "Uh, Vivian?" "Yes, George?" That warm voice again... "What happened to Miss McCarty? How did you -- " ' "I don't know. She's gone, isn't she? I haven't heard her for a long time." "Yes." said George, "she's gone. You mean you don't know? Tell me what you did." "Well, I wanted to make an arm, because you told me to, but I didn't think I had time enough. So I made a skull instead. And those things to cover my sine -- " "Vertebrae." Now why, he thought discontentedly, didn't I think of that? "And then?" "I think I'm crying now," she said. "Yes, I am. It's such a relief -- And then, after that, nothing. She was still hurting me. and I just lay still and thought how wonderful it would be if she weren't in here with me. After a while, she wasn't. And then I grew eyes to look for you." The explanation, it seemed to George, was more perplexing than the enigma. Staring around in a vague search for enlightenment, he caught sight of something he hadn't noticed before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the grass, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy extension trailing off from it. There must, he decided suddenly, be some mechanism in the Something-or-other meisterii for disposing of tenants who failed to adapt themselves -- brains that went into catatonia, or hysteria, or suicidal frenzy. An eviction clause in the lease. Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism -- to convince the organism that McCarty's brain was not only superfluous but dangerous -- "Toxic" was the word. It was the ultimate ignominy. Miss McCarty had not been digested. She'd been excreted. T Y sunset, twelve hours later, they had made a good deal of progress. They had reached ' an understanding very agreeable to them both. They had hunted down another herd of the pseudopigs for their noon meal. They had not once quarreled or even irritated each other. And for divergent reasons -- on George's side because the monster's normal metabolism was unsatisfactory when it had to move quickly, and on Vivian's because she refused to believe that any man could be attracted to her in her present condition -- they had begun a serious attempt to reshape themselves. The first trials were extraordinarily difficult, the rest surprisingly easy. Again and again, they had to let themselves collapse back into an ameboid shape, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ, but each failure smoothed the road. They were at last able to stand breathless but breathing, swaying but stable, face to face -- two preliminary sketches of self-made Man. They had also put thirty kilometers between themselves and the Federation camp. Standing on the crest of a rise and looking southward across the shallow valley. George could see a faint funereal glow: the mining machines. chewing out metals to feed the fabricators that would spawn lethal spaceships. "We'll never go back there, will we?" begged Vivian. "No," said George confidently. "We'll let them find us. When they do, they'll be a lot more disconcerted than we will. We can make ourselves anything we want to be, remember." "I want you to want me, so I'm going to be beautiful," "More beautiful than any woman ever was," he agreed, "and both of us will have super-intelligence. I don't see why not. We can direct our growth in any way we choose. We'll be more than human." "I'd like that," said Vivian. "They won't. The McCartys and the Gumbs and all the rest would never have a chance .against us. We're the future." There was one thing more, a small matter, but important to George, because it marked his sense of accomplishment, of one phase ended and a new one begun. He had finally completed the name of his discovery. It wasn't Something-or-other meisterii at all. It was Spes hominis -- Man's hope. Protective Mimicry If you have to eliminate logic to solve a problem, the answer must be whatever is left ever! T he strip of indestructible fiber goes into a slot in one end of the machine. It passes between rollers, dips into chemical baths, is stamped, dyed, analyzed for flaws, and then run through a unit which is detached from the main body of the machine every night and locked in a guarded vault. Finally, the strip emerges, is chopped into convenient lengths, and delivered into a bin, from which it is carefully moved into armored cars and distributed. It is known as money. Besides being non-defaceable, fireproof, immune to wear, weather and water, it has also  had an electronic pattern impressed into the fiber by that topsecret unit. When you spend it, it re passed over a simple plate that reads the pattern. If serial number and pattern match, nothing happens. But if what you're presenting as legal tender is homemade, so many bells go off you'd think you were in a penny arcade. The engraving, the chemical composition of the ink, and the fiber are difficult enough to duplicate, but the pattern snaps the clincher on it. Only the government's got the equipment to put that in. All of which may serve to explain why Saxegaard yelped when I spread the fourteen identical bills on his desk. B esides being the chief Insjector, United Galactic Federations Department of the Treasury, Investigation Division, (Currency), Saxegaard is a short man with a big mouth. The kind of fellow who always waits ninety seconds between cigarettes so he won't be accused of chain smoking. "Baumholtzer, where'd you get these?" he asked after he climbed down off the drapes. They'd come into the New York Clearing House from a branch on Deneb XI. The manager ther had blown his top and called us the minute he spotted them. I told Saxegaard that, and he chewed at his thumb for a few minutes. "Will he spread the word around?" he asked finally. 'T threw the fear of UnGalac into him." "Good. At least we won't have any financial panics -- for a while. Notuntil that manager gets himself out from financially under, anyway. You checked these through the lab?" he hopefully asked, probably hoping for a loophole. "The ink and paper's government stock, all right, and they match government plates. Beeper plates don't even hum when they're passed over them. In fact, you could spend them anywhere, as long as you only passed one bill at a time." "Probably wouldn't even have to be that careful. How do you know all the bills in your wallet right now don't have the same serial number?" Saxegaard asked. I shook my head. "I checked." Saxegaard looked at the bills a while longer, then sank back into his chair. His mouth twisted into a sad little smile. "Baumholtzer," he said, "you know how much work this office has done up to now. It's a joke, a sinecure. Nobody, nobody can logically expect to counterfeit a bill and get away with it. It's only because, throughout the Universe, there is a certain percentage of people who will try anything once, and a corresponding percentage of purblind idiots who will accept anything with engraving on it as currency of the realm, that this department exists at all. I have seen cigar coupons and crayon sketches come into this office. I have seen grocery store premium certificates and jet bus transfers, but only because those same microcephalic imbeciles have neglected to pass the stuff over a beeper plate. "Do you think I've been happy in my job, Baumholtser? I get paid a good salary, and nothing ever happens to make me sweat to earn it. I shouldn't have any worries," He sighed. "But I do, Baumholtzer, I do. For fifteen years I have sat in this office and waited for somebody to invent a matter duplicator." I'd thought of that, too, but our part-time lab technician had mumbled something about the conservation of matter and energy. He had a hard time making it stick, though, with those fourteen bills, identical down to a whisky stain in one comer, staring him in the face. Still, one of the first things you learn in this racket is not to go off half-cocked. Saxegaard knew that, too, because he said, "All right. Baumholtzer, off to Deneb XI with you, and find out if anyone in that neighborhood has a matter duplicator, or if he hasn't, what he has got that looks so much like it." He looked at his watch and lit another cigarette. hadn't. The hot fog that passes for atmosphere on Deneb XI washed out my lungs and made the smoke taste like well-decayed leaf mold. I dragged a sleeve across my face, removing the sweat from my brow and replacing it with sweat from my arm. Deneb XI is a jungle world, with climate and insects to match. I leaned my tired and dripping body against a wall and slapped limply at a specimen of insect that could have given a Brazilian mosquito cards and spades. I cursed it with damp enthusiasm and enjoyed my view of the capital city of Deneb XI. This jewel in the diadem of the UnGalac was a motley collection of structures that looked as if they had been deposited there by the last high tide. This capital city -- whose name, take it or leave it, was Glub -- was also the only city on Deneb XI. which was the one reason it had endeared itself to me. I have my suspicions that the Denebians have yet to invent the wheel. At any rate, practically the only way to get around the planet is on foot. Not that checking every bank and electronicsupply shop in Glub was any Sunday promenade. My feet kept reminding me of that. The insect got in between me and the wall at this point, and stabbed me in the back. I consigned matter duplicators, blankfaced store owners, and prissy bank managers to the same gooey hell, smashed the insect against the wall, and headed for a bar. One nice thing about Deneb -- the natives are too primitive to run things, so practically all the people who do anything important in Ghib are Terrestrials, or at least members of the Terrestrial Federation, in whose territory Dcncb XI lies. I not only found a bartender who spoke UnGalac. but one who knew what a Tom Collins was. It was a bright spot in an otherwise abysmal day. I carried my glass over to a tabk and stretched out on the chair beside it. I would have been a more or less contented man if it hadn't been for the knowledge that I'd have to be up and back to my fruitless clod-hopping in a few minutes. I had yet to discover anyone who was buying more than a normal amount pf electronic parts, or who had bought same at any time in the recent past. The banks were no better. Nobody had pushed large amounts of money across their plates recently. nobody had brought in any duplicate bills for investigation. nobody had deposited bills with identical serial numbers. If I asked a clerk how come fourteen duplicates had gotten through, the answer was that it must have been during Harry's shift, or Moe's, or Maxie's. Anybody's but theirs. I'd found seven defective beeper plates in five banks, but taking the wind out of the sails of caspetitious bank managers wasn't helping me find my man. I took one last drag on the Tom Collins and was about to leave when I looked up and saw an interesting individual standing over my table. been on Deneb a long time, because he was wearing the floursack type of garment the natives have. His hair, which was potatofield gray, was parted in the middle and curled around his temples and led back behind his ears. The ears had little pieces of bone in them. His eyes were corniced with the biggest damned eyebrows I ever saw, and his ping-pong-ball nose was thrust out of a clump of whiskers. He stood about six eight and must have weighed close to one hundred pounds, saturated. I lay back and enjoyed the sight for a while. He stared right back, but I guess he got tired of playing look-me-in-the-eye, because the whiskers moved and the apparition spoke. "Mr. Baumholtzer?" it queried in a disappointingly normal voice. "True," I confessed. "The same Mr. Baumholtzer who has been going around asking all those questions about duplicate UnGalac notes?" "Probably. What's your trouble. Mr -- ?" I let it trail off in the time-honored fashion. "Munger," he answered. "Duodecimus Munger." "This bids fair to become fascinating," F said, wondering whether it would be Moe or Maxie that was going to get the blame for letting my name and assignment leak out. "Won't you pull up a chair, Mr. Munger?" "I'm afraid I won't have time." he answered in a flustered voice. "Are you really the Mr. Baumholtzer that's working on this case for the Treasury Department?" "Yeah, sure." I answered. "Why? You're not the fellow that's turning out these duplicates. are you?" Which stands as the leading question of the year, because Munger rummaged around in the folds of his toga and came up with a Mistral coagulator. which he then pointed at my head. "I am." he said. The bartender hit the floor with a crash and I put my hands on the edge of the table. "Let's not make any rash decisions, now." I said, wondering if I could get to my own pacifier before he fused my brains solid. Munger shook his head. "I can't very well see how I could let you live." "Aw. come on. try." I answered, and tilted the table into the pit of his stomach at the same time I dived for the floor. The Mistral belched and mummified a potted plant behind me. The table smashed against the floor. Munger said "Oh, drat!" and landed with a sound like a pool cue bouncing on linoleum. I scrambled over the table and managed to raise an arm and swipe at his jaw. I missed, but I hit the Mistral, which flew across the room and broke open, immolating every bug in that vicinity. but rendering itself obsolete at the same moment. Munger made an annoyed sound and clubbed me on the jaw. I started to pass out, and he put his hands around my neck, but right about then the bartender let out a yelp that must have attracted some attention, because feet came running toward the bar from out in the street. Munger repeated his expression of annoyance and smacked me another one. This time I went under. my face I opened my eyes, and there was the bartender with a wet rag. "All right, where is he?" I asked. The bartender gave me a frightened look. "He's gone. He ran out when I yelled. I came right over and started to bring you to. You haven't been unconscious for more than a minute. That's because I came right over and started to bring you to. He ran out when I yelled, you know." "Which way did he go. Galahad?" "I -- I don't know. I didn't have time to notice after I yelled and came over to -- " "Stuff it!" I said, threw him off, and ran out the back door. Naturally, there wasn't a trace of Munger. I tried the front, but there was a small crowd out there, and he hadn't gone that way. I walked back to the bar, "All right, bright eyes," I said, "feed me another Collins. And don't put any little sprigs of mint in it." "Well, you don't have to get huffy about it!" he said. R eally. Mr. Baumholtzer, there's no need to be excited about this unfortunate occurrence," the police inspector said. He leaned back in his chair and gazed at the end of his cigar. "This man was an obvious maniac. We'll pick him up on your complaint in a day or two, and he'll eventually wind up in a psycho ward." I sighed. I was getting worse than nowhere. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my buzzer. I flung it on his desk. "This badge says I'm a Treasury Agent, so don't go treating me like an ordinary taxpayer. I'm here investigating a counterfeiting case and this guy's in it up to his conspicuous ears. Now let's see some action!" I wasn't supposed to let anyone in on my job, but the news was already all over town, so the cops might as well be enlightened, too. The inspector's eyebrows went up. "Counterfeiting?" I could hear the wheels running around loose inside his head. "Alaric!" he yelled all of a sudden. "Alaric! Get me the Munger file!" He turned back to me with a pieeating grin on his face. "I'm sorry. Mr. Baumholtzer, I'm afraid I was telling you something of a white lie. "You see," he went on. "we get a number of complaints about Munger, but he's apparently a very wealthy man. He's a trader or something at a native village in the interior, and once or twice a year he comes out and raises a little hell. He scares people sometimes and I thought this was one of those cases. But counterfeiting? Well!" "Yeah," I said.  I had a hunch the inspector was kind of worried that some of Munger's money might have found its way to him. I wouldn't have any real trouble with the inspector, though. He could be bought, but he wouldn't stay bought. Not if any big trouble came up, anyway. "You say he was a trader?" I asked, trying to pass time until the file came up. "How does this tie in with a matter duplicator?" "Matter duplicator!" The inspector turned pale. "You mean those counterfeits of his are identical copies of the real thing?" "That's the idea." "You don't say!" He was fighting hard not to dig into his wallet and take a thorough, nervous look. Build a fire under it. turn on the hot shower, and crawl in. Wallow. Do that and you've got a fair idea of the Denebian jungle. Never mind the trees. The inspector and I had been plowing along for half a day and I hadn't seen a tree yet -- the rain wastoo thick. I ran into them and I still couldn't see them, maybe because there was mud all over me every time I picked myself up. I'd stumble on until the rain washed me off. and then I'd hit another tree, and ploppo! The inspector led the way. stopping to consult a compass and a map once in a while. He was all eagerness. Finally, he put out a hand and stopped me. I looked up and realized there was no rain coming down on me at about the same time I saw the leaf-thatched roof. "Rain shelter." he explained. "The natives build them. This one's not too far from Munger's village. Wf'll rest a while and -- " The inspector's mouth hung open. I turned around and there, in the far corner of the shelter, stood Munger and a couple ofnatives armed with spears. "Coincidence, what?" Munger asked, grinning nastily. He turned to the natives and said something that I swear sounded like "Itchy scratchy." but it must have meant "Take care of 'em for me. boys." or something like that, because they moved' in on us. One of the lads had the point of his spear right in my middle or I would have tried to break for it. but the inspector was luckier. "I'll get help!" he yelled, and took off into the mud like a bigbottomed turtle. The native that was supposed to handle him took off after him, but the inspector had the advantage of feet developed through years of pounding beats. The native realized almost immediately that he was up against superior talent, tried a perfunctory cast of his spear, and then came sloshing back to our little tableau. "Well. Mr. Baumholtzer, your companion's action has saved your life, for a while," Mungersaid. "Now we'll have to hold you as a hostage in case help should arrive." "Thanks." I said. I was looking at my native's loincloth. It was composed of tastefully arranged thousandcredit notes. "Itchy scratchy pretty damn quickie," Munger said, and this time it obviously meant "Let's get this jerk to the village, fellows," because that's what they did. T he jungle echoed to the thunder of a huge drum. In the flickering firelight, naked figures swayed and leaped, and bare feet thudded on a log platform in the center of the village. The rhythm vibrated through the platform until the air seemed to shudder, and the tremors shook my trussed-up body. "Brr-room! Boom!" ' A strident keening rose from the savage throats and distant huts sent back the echo of the primal wail. The firelight gleamed from the polished skin of Duodecirnus Munger, who had doffed the formal toga and assumed the simple loincloth of the jungle. He stood impassively beside me, his arms folded, staring out with brooding eyes over the people he ruled. In the fire's gleam, he was as much a savage as they, and the majesty of his bearing spoke more loudly than words that he was their king. He inclined his head toward me and spoke. "It's amazing, the nonsense you have to take with these people." he said. "This clambake, for instance. They're propitiating the spirit of the tree. Why? I don't know. Damn tree's never failed yet." He indicated a majestic giant of the jungle with a nod. "But no. they've got to go into this marathon every night before I do my stuff. This'll keep up to dawn and I'll be dead on my feet tomorrow, but we got to have the stinkin' dance." He shook his head in disgust. "Jesus. I wish I had a fifth handy. I've been drinking this native bilge for too long." Then he went back into his cigar store Indian act. He was right. We were up until the sun rose and that racket didn't knock off for an instant. I had all that time to sit there, trying to figure out where Munger was making those duplicate bills, and what was so important about that tree. Needless to say, I didn't reach any illuminating conclusions. That drum kept pounding away like crazy. If I could have gotten loose somehow. I would have grabbed my gun, which Munger now had strapped to his waist, and shot that berserk drummer before even thinking about making a break for it. Finally the sun came up and the Denebians quit howling. Neither Munger nor I were in a mood for small talk or pleasant conversation by that time. He picked me up and put me on my feet. "Let's go. Baumholtzer," he said. "Now you'll discover just how it's done," "Good of you to show me.' I said. "I suppose this means .I'll never live to tell about it." "That's very sensible of you. I like a man who can face facts." Vv  walked across th log  platform to the base of the tremendous tree in whose honor the recent brawl had been held. I still couldn't see the connection. I didn't have to. Not very long, anyway. Munger reached into a pouch on his loincloth and pulled out a bill. I looked at it. It was either another of the duplicates I'd brought into Saxegaard's office, or else it was the parent bill. "I don't use the thousand-credit note unless the natives need new loincloths," Munger explained over his shoulder. "These fifties are a lot easier to dispose of." "The hell they are," I said. "How'd I find you?" "That was a mistake." he answered testily. "The minute I've got enough of these made, I sell them to certain -- ah -- contacts of mine for fifty per cent of face value. What you caught was a sample batch one of my former contacts spent through misguided avarice." "Less talk and more action." I said. I didn't even have to guess what had happened to his "contact" and I was impatient to see how he was going to get a tree to duplicate his money for him. "All right," he said, pulling my gun out of his belt. "I used to have the natives make a loud noise, but this will be infinitely more efficient." He'd folded the fifty-credit bill into a paper airplane while we'd been talking. Now he held it in his right hand, ready to launch at the tree, while he raised my gun in his left. Behind us. the murmurs among the natives cut down into silence. The tree's big leaves rustled loudly in the silence. Bam! The gun went off and the folded bill flew at the tree. It sailed into the foliage. There was a popping noise. Followed by another. And another. More. More, infinitely more, and still more, until all I could hear was pop! pop! pop! The bill came sailing back out of the foliage. Right behind it came another one. and behind these came flight groups, squadrons, wings, armadas of paper airplanes that were fifty-credit noces! They scattered out in all directions from the strangely moving foliage, and sailed around over tne native village. "Well, what do you know?" I said blankly, my mouth open. An airplane flew into it. I pulled the plane out and carefully uniolded it, staring at it with bulging eyes. It was as genuine as the day is long. All around me the natives were going crazy, running and jumping around, picking airplanes out of the air and off the ground, stuffing them into little bags they had ready. Munger turned around and looked at me. "Startling, isn't it?" he asked politely. "Protective mimicry!" I yelled. suddenly realizing. He nodded. "Precisely. I discovered this tree six years ago. I was lost while attempting to evade the clutches of the law on a confidence rap. I swung an ax at the damn thing to blaze a trail, and I almost got scalped. Fifty axes came bouncing back at me." "But how did anything ever develop mimicry to this extent? I've heard of animals and insects assuming the forms of dangerous life-forms as camouflage, but never to this degree." "Search me." Munger said. "The Eglins contacted this world centuries ago, before the Terrestrials took this federation away from them. They were great little experimenters, the Eglins." "Hmm. It does look funny, just this one tree like this. Mayoe it was some kind of experimental plant. It is just one tree, isn't it?" I asked hastily. "Definitely. After I became buddies with the natives and set up this village here, I had them scour the jungle for another like it. but no go." "Hell, one's good enou. What a setup! You scare the tree with a loud noise, and it obliges by duplicating what it thinks is the menace. Brother!" "That's what I said when those axes came at me," Munger said. He yvas facing me, with fifty credit bills settling down all around him, and now he raised Current ISew Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction. as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New Yerii #. New York Opii Monday Tbru Saturday, #:# A.M. to #i.# P.M. Oprn Wednoday F.veninea until RiOO P.M. (Phone GRomercy ##) my gun. "Well, Baumholtzer, it looks as though your pal didn't bring help, after all. I'll miss your company." He began tightening on the trigger, and I started to sweat. Suddenly there was an outbreak of yelling on the other side of the village. A gun went off and several spears slashed through the air. "The cops!" Munger stood staring at the inspector and his men as they broke into the open from the edge of the jungle. "They must have sneaked up after surprising my lookouts!" Munger raised my gun again. "I'll still get you, though!" I charged at him. hoping he'd miss the first shot. He didn't fire it before I plowed into him. We rolled onto the ground and I grabbed for him. but he scrambled away. I stumbled back against the tree just as he fired and missed me. we sit in the spaceport on Deneb XI. waiting for the government to get around to sending out a ship to pick us all up. Once Munger missed his shot, the fight was over, for obvious reasons. He didn't stand a chance against us. Yeah, us. All one hundred and sixty-eight of me. realistic novella based on news items that you've reod repeatedly, wondered about for a short while, and then shrugged away os impossible to exploin. But there is an explanation... one that the reporters are unable to track down... unless, to all the other necessary qualifications, they add photographic montage process first displayed on the December # Look forward also to two stimulating novelets: position -- selling things it never hod to interstellar visitors who haven't the cash or goods to buy them. reseorch crew. That wouldn't be so oppolling if the researching crew weren't infallible and if the mistake stopped getting more and more complex and bewildering. galaxy proudly presents Beyond Designed, edited and produced by the Galaxy staff. A full color print of tho cover reproduced especially for framing The valuable first issue permonized with a plastic coating to preserve it # Issues for # This offer is limited and expires on date of publication, May #, #, so rush the coupon below. Reierv my color print plus permonizod first issue of your Magazine and send the # issues to me at oddress below. I enclose #. Foreign -- #. Name Address City v: I F she's dead, I thought. I'll never find her in this white flood of moonlight on the white sea, with the surf seething in and over the pale, pale sand like a great shampoo. Almost always, suicides, who stab themselves or shoot themselves in the heart carefully bare their chests : the same strange impulse generally makes the sea-suicide go naked. A little earlier. I thought, or later, and there would be shadows for the dunes and the breathing toss of the foam. Now the only real shadow was mine, a tiny thing just under me, but black enough to feed the blackness of the shadow of a blimp. A Jittle earlier, I thought, and I might have seen her plodding up the silver shore, seeking a place lonely enough to die in. A little later and my legs would rebel against this shuffling trot through sand, the maddening sand that could not hold and would not help a hurrying man. My legs did give way then and I knelt suddenly, sobbing -- not for her: not yet -- just for air. There was such a rush about me : wind, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light. I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me. shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then SO There are secrets that can be repeated endlessly and remain wholly and absolutely secret soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea was on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud. And there she was. taller curve in the sloping foam. She must have sensed me -- perhaps I yelled -- for she turned and saw me kneeling there. She put her fists to her temples and her face twisted, and she uttered a piercing wail of despair and fury, and then plunged seaward and sanks I kicked off my shoes and ran into the breakers, shouting, hunting. grasping at flashes of white that turned to sea-salt and coldness in my fingers. I plunged right past her, and her body struck my side as a wave whipped my face and tumbled both of us. I gasped in solid water, opened my eyes beneath the surface and saw a greenish-white distorted moon hurtle as I spun. Then there was sucking sand under my feet again and my left hand was tangled in her hair. The receding wave towed her away and for a moment she streamed out from my hand like steam from a whistle. In that moment I was sure she was dead, but as she settled to the sand, she fought and scrambled to her feet. She hit my ear, wet, hard, and a huge pointed pain lanced into my head. She pulled, she lunged away from me, and all the while my hand was caught in her hair. I couldn't have freed her if I had wanted to. She spun to me with the next .wave, battered and clawed at me, and we went into deeper water. "Don't... don't... I can't swim!" I shouted, so she clawed me again. "Leave me alone," she shrieked. "Oh, dear God. why can't you leave" (said her fingernails) "me... (said her snapping teeth) "alone!" (said her small hard fist). So by her hair I pulled her head down tight to her white shoulder; and with the edge of my free hand I hit her neck twice. She floated again, and I brought her ashore. I carried her to where a dune was between us and the sea's broad noisy tongue, and the wind was above us somewhere. But the light was as bright. I rubbed her wrists andstroked her face and said, "It's all right," and. "There!" and some names I used to have for a dream I had long, long before I ever heard of her. She lay still on her back with the breath hissing between her teeth, with her lips in a smile which her twisted-tight, wrinklesealed eyes made not a smile but a torture. She was well and conscious for many moments and still her breath hissed and her closed eyes twisted. "Why couldn't you leave me alone?" she asked at last. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She had so much misery that there was no room for fear. She shut her eyes again and said. "You know who I am." "I know," I said. She began to cry. stopped crying, there were shadows among the dunes. A long time. She said, "You don't know who I am. Nobody knows who I am." I said, "It was in all the papers." "That!" She opened her eyes slowly and her gaze traveled over my face, my shoulders, stopped at my mouth, touched my eyes for the briefest second. She curled her lips and turned away her head. "Nobody knows who I am." I waited for her to move or speak, arid finally I said "Tell me." "Who are you?" she asked, with her head still turned away. "Someone who..." "Well?" "Not now," I said, "Later, maybe." She sat up suddenly and tried to hide herself. "Where are my clothes?" "I didn't see them." "Oh," she said. "I remember. I put them down and kicked sand over them, just where a dune would come and smooth them over, hide them as if they never were... I hate sand. I wanted to drown in the sand, but it wouldn't let me... You mustn't look at me!" she shouted. "I hate to have you looking at me!" She threw her head from side to side, seeking. "I can't stay here like this! What can I do? Where can I go?" "Here," I said. She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half-turned from me. "Don't touch me. Get away from me." "Here," I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. "Here." I pointed behind the dune. At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. "Back there?" I nodded. "I didn't see them." "So dark..." She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moonshadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. "Stay away from me," she spat. I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, "Don't go away." I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. "There," she said, "over there. In the dark. Just be a... Stay away from me now... Be a -- voice." I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her. She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.  S HE was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoar frost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it. Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously nore than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did. For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belonged to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel and glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else. So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer. It was beautiful. It was golden. with a dusty finish like that of an unripe concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical. At first she felt no astonishment. for this was so different from anything 'she had ever seen before that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-fiash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc. She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it -- saw something -- too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a globe of silent astonishment, and outside it she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales. She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far awby the saucer was. No; rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head. back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn't see it: then as she looked up and up. there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning. right over her head. She bit her tongue. From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wondermcnt. the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times. The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gaping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her. The saucer's gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape. The saucer hummed and tilted, tilted... She opened her mouth to scream, fell to her knees, and the saucer struck. It dropped against her forehead and clung there. It seemed almost to lift her. She came erect on her knees, made one effort to raise her hands against it, and then her arms stiffened down and back, her hands not reaching the ground. For perhaps a second and a half the saucer held her rigid, and then it passed a single ecstatic quiver to her body and dropped it. She plumped to the ground, the backs of her thighs heavy and painful on her heels and ankles. The saucer dropped beside her. rolled once in a small circle, once just around its edge, and lay still. It lay still and dull and metallic, different and dead. H azily, she lay and gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring sky, and hazily she heard whistles. And some tardy screams. And a great stupid voice bellowing "Give her air!" which made everyone press closer. Then there wasn't so much sky because of the blue-clad bulk with its metal buttons and its leatherette notebook. "Okay, okay, what's happened here stand back figods sake." And the widening ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: "It knocked her down." "Some guy knocked her down." "He knocked her down." Some guy knocked her down and -- " "Right in broad daylight this guy... "The park's gettin' to be... onward and outward, the adulteration of fact until it was lost altogether because excitement is so much more important. Somebody with harder a shoulder than the rest bulling close, a notebook here, too. a witnessing eye over it, ready to change "... a beautiful brunet..." to "an attractive brunet" for the afternoon editions, because "attractive" is as dowdy as any woman is allowed to get if she is a victim in the news. The glittering shield and the florid face bending close: "You hurt bad. sister?" And the echoes, back and back through the crowd. "Hurt bad, hurt bad. badly injured, he beat the hell out of her, broad daylight..." And still another man, slim and purposeful, tan gabardine, cleft chin and beard-shadow: "Flyin' saucer, hm? Okay, Officer, ril take over here." "And who the hell might you be. takin' over?" The flash of a brown leather wallet, a face so close behind that its chin was pressed into the gabardine shoulder. The face said, awed: "F.B.I." and that rippled outward, too. The policeman nodded -- the entire policeman nodded in one single bobbing genuflection. "Get some help and clear this area," said the gabardine. "Yes, sir!" said the policeman. "F. B. I., F. B. I.," the crowd murmured and there was more sky to look at above her. She sat up and there was a glory in her face. "The saucer talked to me." she sang. "You shut up," said the gabardine. "You'll have lots of chance to talk later." "Yeah, sister," said the policeman. "My God. this mob could be full of Communists." "You shut up, too." said the gabardine. Someone in the crowd told someone else a Communist beat up this girl, while someone else was saying she got beat up because she was a Communist. S HE started to rise, but solicitous hands forced her down again. There were thirty police there by that time. "I can walk," she said. "Now you just take it easy," they told her. They put a stretcher down beside her and lifted her onto it and covered her with a big blanket. "I can walk," she said as they carried her through the crowd. A woman went white and turned away moaning, "Oh, my God, how awful!" A small man with round eyes stared and stared at her and licked and licked his lips. The ambulance. They slid her in. The gabardine was already there. A white-coated man with very clean hands: "How did it happen, miss?" "No questions," said the gabardine. "Security." The hospital. She said, "I got to get back to work." "Take your clothes off," they told her. She had a bedroom to herself then for the first time in her life. Whenever the door opened, she could see a policeman outside. It opened very often to admit the kind of civilians who were very polite to military people, and the kind of military people who were even more polite to certain civilians. She did not know what they all did nor what they wanted. Every single day hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked to each other because each of them asked her the same questions over and over. "What is your name?" "How old are you?" "What year were you born?" "What is your name?" Sometimes they would push her down strange paths with their questions. "Now your uncle. Married a woman from Middle Europe, did he? Where in Middle Europe?" "What clubs or fraternal organizations did you belong to? Ah ! Now about that Rinkeydinks gang on #rd Street. Who was behind it?" But over and over again, "What did you mean when you said the saucer talked to you?" And she would say, "It talked to me." And they would say, "And it said -- " And she would shake her head. There would be a lot of shouting ones, and then a lot of kind oiies. No one had ever been so Idnd to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to her. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her: "What do you mean it talked to you?" Mom's or school or any place, and she used to sit with her ntouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light ill her eyes and let her get thirsty. Konie, there was a transom over tJie bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring tfirough it all night, every night, sO she wouldn't get the horrors. So the light didn't bother her at ell. They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some irays it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds. "You are a very important young lady, you know." That was nice at first, but as usual it turned out they didn't mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened, with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn't the same. They'd cut a lot of chips and pieces out of the saucer and, besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that and for once she told them. "It's empty now," she said. The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, "Listen, I think the way they've been treating you stinks. Now get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out why you won't tell what the saucer said. I don't want to know what it said and I'll never ask you. I don't even want you to tell mg. Let's just find out why you'iT keeping it a secret." Finding out why turned out to be hoiirs of just talking about having pneumonia and the flower pot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wine glass in both hands and peeping over it at some man. And one day she told him why she wouldn't say about the saucer. just the way it came to her: "Because it was talking to me, and it's just nobody else's business." She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own. He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. "I have no business saying this, but they're going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don't let 'em get your goat. You have a right to own something." He got up and swore and left.  to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we are, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if the Earth wasn't attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook his finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working for the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man that was defending her at the trial. The jury found her guilty of contempt of court and the judge recited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in il for a 'few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose. That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant' and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much that Mom didn't want her back home. Mom was drunk most of the time and sometimes used to tear up the whole neighborhood, but all the same she had very special ideas about being respectable, and being in the papers all the time for spying was not her idea of being decent. So she put her maiden name on the mailbox downstairs and told her daughter not to live there any more. At the restaurant she met a man who asked her for a date. The first time. She spent every cent she had on a red handbag to go with her red shoes. They weren't the same shade, but anyway they were both red. They went to the movies and afterward he didn't try to kiss her or anjhing, he just tried to find out what the flying saucer told her. She didn't say an#rthing. She went home and cried all night. Then some men sat in a booth talking and they shut up and glared at her every time she came past. They spoke to the boss, and he came and told her that they were electronics engineers working for the government and they were afraid to talk shop while she was around -- wasn't she some sort of spy or something? So she got fired. Once she saw her name on a juke box. She put in a nickel and punched that number, and the record was all about "the flyin' saucer came down one day, and taught her a brand new way to play, and what it was I will not say, but she took me out of this world." And while sh was listening to it, someone in the jukejoint recognized her and called her by name. Four of them followed her home and she had to block the door shut. S ometimes she'd be aii right for months on end. and then someone would ask for a date. Three times out of five, she and the date were followed. Once the man she was with arrested the man who was tailing them. Twice the man who was tailing them arrested the man she was with. Five times out of five, the date would try to find out about the saucer. Sometimes she would go out with someone and pretend that it was a real date, but she wasn't very good at it. So she moved to the shore and got a job cleaning at night in offices and stores. There weren't many to clean, but that just meant there weren't many people to remember her face from the papers. Like clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag it all out again in a magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone saw a headlight on a mountain or a light on a weather balloon it had to be a flying saucer, and there had to be some tired quip about the saucer wanting to tell secrets. Then for two or three weeks she'd stay off the streets in the daytime. Once she thought she had it whipped. People didn't want her, so she began reading, the novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies -- all about the pretty ones who really own the world. So she learned things -- animals, trees. A lousy little chipmunk caught in a wire fence bit her. The animals didn't want her. The trees didn't care. Then she hit on the idea of the bottles. She got all the bottles she could and wrote on papers which she corked into the bottles. She'd tramp miles up and down the beaches and throw the bottles out as far as she could. She knew that if the right person found one, it would give that person the only thing in the world that would help. Those bottles kept her going for three solid years. Everyone's got to have a secret little something he does. And at last the time came when it was no use any more. You can go on trying to help someone who maybe exists; but soon you can't pretend there is such a person any more. And that's it. The end. " A RE you cold?" I asked when she was through telling me. The surf was quieter and the shadows longer. "No," she answered from the shadows. Suddenly she said, "Did you think I was mad at you because you saw me without my clothes?" "Why shouldn't you be?" "You know, I don't care? I wouldn't have wanted... wanted you to see me even in a ball gown or overalls. You can't cover up my carcass. It shows; it's there whatever. I just didn't 'want you to see me. At all." "Me, or anyone?" She hesitated. "You." I got up and stretched and walked a little, thinking. "Didn't the F.B.I. try to stop you throwing those bottles?" "Oh, sure. They spent I don't know how much taxpayers' money gathering 'em up. They still make a spot check every once in a while. They're getting tired of it, though. All the writing in the bottles is the same." She laughed. I didn't know she could. "What's funny?" "All of 'em -- judges, jailers, juke-boxes -- people. Do you know it wouldn't have saved me a minute's trouble if I'd told 'em the whole thing at the very beginning?" "No?" "No. They wouldn't have believed me. What they wanted was a new weapon. Super-science from a super-race, to slap hell out of the super-race if they ever got a chance, or out of our own if they don't. All those brains," she breathed, with more wonder than scorn, "all that brass. They think 'super-race' and it comes out 'super-science.' Don't they ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings, too -- super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?" She paused. "Isn't it time you asked me what the saucer said?" I "I'll tell you," I blurted. "There is in certain living souls A tfuality oi loneliness unspeakable. So great it must be shared As company is shared Oy lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this Thai in immensity There is one lonelier than you." "Dear Jesus," she said devoutly, and began to weep. "And how is it addressed?" "To the foneHest one... "How did you know?" she whispered. "It's what you put in the bottles, isn't it?" "Yes," she said. "Whenever it gets to be too much, that no one cares, that no one ever did... you throw a bottle into the sea. and out goes a part of your own loneliness. You sit and think of someone somewhere finding it... learning for the first time that the worst there is can be understood." The moon was setting and the surf was hushed. We looked up and out to the stars. She said, "We don't know what loneliness is like. People thought the saucer was a saucer, but it wasn't. It was a bottle with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean to cross -- all of space -- and not much chance of finding anybody. Loneliness? We don't know loneliness." When I could, I asked her why she had tried to kill herself. "I've had it good," she said, "with what the saucer told me. I wanted to... pay back. I was bad enough to be helped: I had to know I was good enough to help. No one wants me? Fine. But don't tell me no one, anywhere, wants my help. I can't stand that." I took a deep breath. "I found one of your bottles two years ago. I've been looking for you ever since. Tide charts, current tables, maps and... wandering. I heard some .talk about you and the bottles hereabouts. Someone told me you'd quit doing it, you'd taken to wandering the dunes at night. I knew why. I ran all the way." I needed another breath now. "I got a club foot. I think right, but the words don't come out of my mouth the way they're inside my head. I have this nose. I never had a woman. Nobody ever wanted to hire me to work where they'd have to look at me. You're beautiful," I said. "You're beautiful." She said nothing, but it was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practiced moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough. the French astronomer Gerard de Vaucouleurs as having said that the surface of Mars can be likened to a terrestrial desert, moved to the Arctic and lifted to stratospheric heights. I should have added that Monsieur de Vaucouleurs introduced one unnecessary move. Lifting the desert to stratospheric heights would be enough: that would not only thin the air over the desert, it would also cool it. c This thought is the basis of a little known theory of the origin of the Ice Ages, offered by the Austrian geologist Prof. Doctor Franz Xaver Schaffer, It has been mentioned earlier that Schaffer's compatriot, Prof. Melchior Neumayr, had shown that a comparatively slight drop in the average temperature, some # to # degrees Fahrenheit, would account for all the observed phenomena. provided only that it lasted long enough. Schaffer, about # years later, brought in the additional fact that the average temperature of, say, Vienna, is # to # degrees lower # feet above that city. So far, this sounds like a wonderfully simple idea. If one could prove that, at the time of the glaciations, the land masses of at least the northern hemisphere had been # feet higher than now. the whole difficult problem would resolve itself neatly and easily. That figure of # feet must not be misunderstood : it does not have to mean # feet higher above sea level, for the sea level may have been different itself in the past. Probably the best way of phrasing it is to say that the land level of the northern hemisphere is supposed to have been under an average air pressure of about # norm. Unfortunately, Prof. Schaffer could not show any evidence tending to prove such a higher elevation. In fact, he has to torture existing evidence to a good extent by declaring, for example, that this or that glaciation described in the textbooks was not a "true" glaciation at all, but that these geological traces upon which the textbook statement rests "happen to be misleading." In short, the neat idea did not work out. But the fundamental assumption -- namely, that the cause of the ice ages has to be sought in the atmosphere instead of somewhere in space -- is rather logical. It was upon this assumption that the noted Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius began building a famous theory half a century ago. A S for Svante Arrhenius himself : even those who do not confuse him with a Swedish botanist of the same name usually consider him an astronomer or an astrophysicist. Although much of the work done by him in his later life belonged in the realm of cosmology and encroached heavily upon astrophysics, he was originally a chemist. Being a chemist, he was struck by the thought that the underlying cause for climatic changes 'I rmight be changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The present norm, expressed without fractions, is #I per cent oxygen, # per cent nitrogen. I per cent argon and "traces." And, of course, a varying amount of water vapor. The radiation of the Sun. the textbooks say, is absorbed by the ground and by the atmosphere. If the ground is covered with snow and ice. it will absorb less radiation, and as regards the atmosphere -- wait a minute: just which part of the atmosphere does absorb infrared. or heat? It turned out to be one of the "traces," carbon dioxide (COo), which constitutes only # per cent of the atmosphere near the ground. One other gas which is also especially active in retaining heat is water vapor. Arrhenius made a little calculation. Supposing that there were no carbon dioxide in the air at all, what would that do to the climate? The result was devastating, even though it was merely a figure on paper. The average would drop by about # degrees Fahrenheit! Furthermore, since a drop of # degrees F. would freeze all the water vapor out of the atmosphere, there would be an additional drop due to the absence of water vapor. This would be an estimated # degrees -- about # degrees altogether. It would spell Antarctica for both temperate zones and quite a lot of grief even for the tropics. The next step in the reasoning ran as follows: if the climatic variations correspond to fluctuations in the carbon dioxide (and aldng with it the water vapor) content of the atmosphere, what could be the reason for such fluctuation? How does the carbon dioxide originate? The layman is apt to think of gigantic forest fires, presumably caused by lightning. It is true that such fires do contribute, but it isn't so much a question of quantity, since the total in the atmosphere is quite small, but rather of steadiness of supply. Most forests don't burn down, (Actually, industrial activity and households contribute more than natural fires, just because they are steady producers). The main suppliers of carbon dioxide are the volcanoes and other phenomena associated with them. The main consumers are the oceans. According to Arrhenius, they absorb slightly more than # per cent of the gas. Next biggest consumer is erosion which, like plant life, ties .the carbon dioxide chemically. In the seas, much of it is also tied up by organisms other than plants, but they can get only at the carbon dioxide in the water. with much carbon dioxide in the air -- say, of one per cent -- would be periods of warmth and of luxurious plant life. But, Arrhenius pointed out, each such period contains the beginnings of its own end. Volcanic activity is somehow connected with mountain building -- we don't have to go into the question of whether it causes, is accompanied by, or is the result of mountain building -- and these mountains erode while still rising. The plants thrive in the high carbon dioxide content, gulping what they can. The multitudes of sea things do the same, depleting the waters of carbon dioxide so that the ocean will absorb more. As the Department of Economics would say: with everything geared to high consumption, a slackening of production means depletion of the reserves. In less forbidding language: as soon as the volcanoes calm down, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere also goes down, and so does the average temperature. After Arrhenius had stated his general concept, a professional geologist. Dr. Fritz Freeh of Breslau, tri to fit this scheme to the actual geologic past. He claimed that two full cycles could actually be found geologically; There was this very early Cambrian glaciation near the beginning of the Earth's geological history which we know reasonably well. During the following two geological periods, the Silurian and Devonian, volcanic activity was heavy and the climate apparently grew uniformly warm, for corals from that time have been found in high latitudes. The plants conquered the land and, during the Carboniferous Period which followed the Devonian, they appear in incredible masses. Our coal deposits formed then -- all this coal was at one time carbon dioxide which the plants took out of the atmosphere. Around the middle of that long Carboniferous Period, enormous mountain ranges formed in all continents, many of them eroding fat. Apparently there was little, if any, new volcanic supply for a while and the result was the Permian glaciation. This, according to Freeh, was the first complete cycle. The second began during the middle of the Permian Period, when there were enormous volcanic eruptions in the northern hemisphere. More of the same, especially in North America, occurred during the next period, the Triassic, and the Jurassic which followed after the Triassic. Warm climate, apparently without climatic zones. Corals in the seas above Scotland, marine reptiles as far North as Spitsbergen, palms and cycads near Baltimore. Dinosaurs. Near the end of the Cretaceous Period which followed the Jurassic, it looked as if there were hints of climatic zones. But before things slipped too badly -- possibly because there were no recent mountain chains to erode in addition to the older ones -- there were enormous basaltic eruptions in India. A T any event, the Tertiary Period which followed the Cretaceous began in full tropical splendor with swamp cypresses as far North as Ellesmere Island. Apparently it grew a bit cooler during the Oligocene, the second subdivision of the Tertiary Period, but again a series of gigantic basaltic eruptions intervened. The following subdivision, the Miocene, was warm again; the lignite beds formed. Soon the great mountain chains of today began to grow -- the Andes, the Himalayas, the Alps. Volcanism diminished during the last Tertiary subdivision, the Pliocene, and then seems to have stopped almost completely. The Ice Age came in. The volcanic cones we have now, including those which are dehd, all formed later. And that is how Arrhenius and Freeh explained the past. It is hardly necessary to state that there is no beautiful and unanimous agreement with them. Some have pointed at big eruptions of historical times, like the Krakatoa catastrophe, which, by into the atmosphere, caused cool summers and cold and wet winters. But it is only a special type of eruption which will do that, and a rare type at that. Others have found evidence for volcanic activity just at times where Freeh said there was none. To which Freeh's pupils replied, in essence, that even during a depression there are a few people who have money, but that these exceptions do not make prosperity. Still others have said that they admit that with #I per cent carbon dioxide in the air, it would be colder, but that a surplus over what we have now won't make it warmer. Arrhenius stuck to his guns, or rather his calculations. We don't know the answer yet. But in time, we will. inter office memos recently, beginning at my end. Mine read: "Horace, please stop printing stories about the fourth dimension like 'Star, Bright' because they cause too many letters." The reply: "Willy, are you really serious about this?" My answer: 'Well, no, but I did get more letters about four-dimensional problems that month than about any other topic." These letters ranged from such one-sentence requests as "Please explain the Fourth Dimension" to communications of several pages and single-spaced which amounted to dissertations. If one conclusion could be drawn from all this, it is that the problem of the fourth dimension still excites lots of people. Another conclusion is that we seem to be dealing with a new generation of readers, for the older science fiction fans have been through this two decades ago. Now let's look at the fourth dimension first from the point of view of elementary mathematics. Reasoning here begins literally with a point which has no dimension at all. Move the point and you get a line from A to B, A being where the movement began and B where it stopped. This line has one dimension: length. Now move the line at a right angle to the movement of the original point and you get a plane. If the movement was,, as specified, at right angles and for the same distance as the length of the line, the figure will be a square. Now lift the square from the paper and move it vertically, again for the same distance, and you get a cube. So far, you had a visible, logical progression from dimensionless point to one-dimensional line, from there to the twodimensional plane, and from that to the three-dimensional solid. But when you move the solid through space, all you get is another solid of a different shape. Offhand, this seems to indicate that the number of dimensions stops with the third, but many people will feel like the philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner who asked why Nature should be unable to count beyond three. If you ask for a little more information of what the fourth dimension should be, the mathematician is apt to hold up a box of any kind, point at one of its corners and say; "The corner of the box demonstrates the three dimensions of space -- namely, length, width and height. As one can clearly see. these three dimensions are vertical to each other. The fourth dimension should be a line which is vertical to the other three -- and don't think that the simple prolongation of any of the other three lines beyond the corner is the answer to the problem. 'You can't visualize such a fourth line? Of course not, because that would be the fourth dimension and our world is threedimensional. Hence it is impostible to visualize the fourth dimension, but we can treat it mathematically. Since we call the line a, the square is aand the cube and nothing prevents and nothing prevents us from writing a and from giving a name to the four-dimensional super-solid thus described." Obviously, nothing prevents us from doing that, but neither the symbol nor the name tesseract proves or even indicates that there is something in reality which corresponds to this concept. which indicates the reality of the fourth dimension? Let's begin at the beginning again. Take a piece of ordinary writing paper (not a square) and cut it diagonally. You'll get two triangles, visibly congruent since their sides and their angles correspond. Place them on your table, both with the right angle to the left. You can make them Answer to seven correspondents: yes, I do know that a cube has # vertices. My statement in reply to a letter that it has # is not due to ignorance nor has it, as two correspondents suspected, a "hidden and higher meaning." It was a simple typographical error. cover simply by moving them along the plane of the table top. But place them in such a way now that one has the right angle at the left and the other at the right. They can be made to cover only by turning one of them through the third dimension. To a two-dimensional being, this would be an impossible move and it was, quite some time ago. the theme of a book called Flatland by A. Square. Flatland has been quoted in early science fiction stories about as often as the name of Albert Einstein was thrown around. Now there are a number of three-dimensional bodies which seemed to be analogous to the two planes that would not match. It was Immanuel Kant who was the first to point out that our two hands are examples of such bodies. Your right glove will not fit your left hand, and your left shoe will not fit the right foot, even though they seem to be geometrically alike, having the same measurements in all three dimensions. But maybe they could be made to "cover" by "turning" them through the fourth dimension! Can they? I don't know -- I can't even visualize it. naturally -- I'm only a three-dimensional solid myself. Let's return to the two triangles where things are somewhat simpler. Since the lengths of all three sides correspond, and since all three angles arc the same, they should be as congruent as anyone could wish. Our simple experiment proved, however, that they may or may not be congruent. What is wrong now? Simply this : a description in terms of sides and angles is an incomplete description. To make it complete, a description of arrangement has to be added. If you keep in mind that such an additional term should be included, you can see clearly that the two triangles, when positioned in such a way that they fail to match, simply are not congruent. And the same goes for asymmetrical solid bodies, such as crystals. They may agree in all angles and dimensions, but if you have ( and here the language has supplied a very signihcant term) one right-hand crystal and one left-hand crystal, they can't match. To insist that they should merely means to insist on an incomplete description. However, the fourth dimension has one more twist. A solid, in order to exist, has to have length, width, height... and duration. If it had no duration, it wouldn't exist. Hence there is a fourth dimension. but we have always used another name for it. We have called it time. Time, therefore. should be considered the fourth dimension. But you don't have to consider it that way at all. T he existence of a planet outside the orbit of Neptune was, as is rather well known, suspected since about #. The planet, Pluto, was finally found in # by Clyde Tombaugh, and it has been under what surveillance could be managed ever since. But we now know that Pluto could have been discovered in #, for it was photographed twice during that year. The explanation is not, however, that astronomers overlooked it on these two plates. The fact is that they could not help but overlook it; two occurrences effectively hid the still unknown planet. On one of the two plates, the tiny image of the planet was neatly bisected by a hairline flaw in the plate. Such hairline flaws are rare, but when they do occur, astronomers recognize them at a glance. Naturally, the pinpoint of light, sitting so precisely on a hairline flaw, was taken to be a part of the flaw. On the other plate, the planet happened to be in line of sight with a small distant star. It was not precisely the line of sight, else it could not have been found later, but almost so. The result was that a star image, known to belong in that spot, was finally elongated, though so faintly that it was not conspicuous. And that's why Pluto was not discovered until eleven years after it was photographed. What is the reason or a the planets bein near the plane of the ecliptic? Why aren't some of them revolving around Sol vertically in comparison with the others? Pat Scholz # Fourth Avenue Brooklyn #, N. Y. The reason why our solar system -- and presumably all other solar systems, too -- is so flat lies in the period before the formation of the planets. Let's assume that the Solar System began with a roughly spherical cloud of gas atoms and dust particles which surrounded the Sun. We can also assume that this cloud rotated around the sun. Now the particles molecules and atoms which moved in and near the equatorial plane of that cloud did not interfere with each other very much. But those which originally moved in other directions, crossing the equator from "above' and "below," ran into each other and into "equatorial particles" in time. If their movement was stopped completely by the collision, they simply fell into the Sun. Or, if their movement was not stopped completely they "fell in" with the equatorial motion. In either case, the number of particles moving at large angles to the "equator" was diminished. That took place before the planets themselves formed and continued while they were forming and even afterward. A few of the nonconformist particles may still be around, but not enough to see. If the gravitational pull of the Moon is responsible for the tides here on Earth, how would the tides be affected by two or more moons. How about a planet which has rings like Saturn, but no moon or moons? Jean De Grazia # Hopkins St. Sewickly, Penna. Let's first get a clear mental picture of what the tides are. Seen from space, they are a slight double mountain of water, one directly under the Moon, the other on the opposite side, both of which move around the Earth, inundating those portions of the shorelines which are shallow enough to be inundated. In the case of a planet with out a moon, but with a ring or rings, there would be a slight equatorial bulge all around which does not move. A rotating planet has such an equatorial bulge, anyway, because of its rotation, and the ring would slightly reenforce that bulge. Since this would be stationary, the planet would appear to have no tides. In the case of a planet with several large moons, the tidal picture would be enormously complicated. Each moon would produce its double bulge and, since the various moons would revolve around the planet with various periods of revolution, so would the bulges. The high tide caused by moon A might increase the high tide of moon B, or else the low tide of moon A might cancel the high tide of moon B. If you had a fairly watery planet with four large moons, its inhabitants would develop astronomy to a high degree early in their history. Could you please explain the ether theory as applied to sound transmission? And what is the accepted Bgure for the speed of electromagnetic waves? E. A. Lackenbach # Pine Avenue New Rochelle, N. Y. Sound waves are transmitted through the air, not through the (hypothetical) ether. As the air thins out with altitude, there comes a point where it ceases to be a continuous medium, and even though there are still molecules of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases around, sound is no longer transmitted. At present, this is thought to take place at about # miles above the Earth, but it may be much lower. The speed of sound depends only on the temperature of the air, not its density. At normal temperatures, it is about # miles per hour. Physics textbooks need revision to bring them up to date on this point; they state that the speed is # miles an hour at # feet, and ascribe it to density. In reality, the figures apply to the prevailing temperatures at those altitudes and not to the atmospheric densities. Electromagnetic waves of any wave length do not depend on air for transmission, and so they all travel at the same rate, which is roughly # miles per second, the speed of light. ir you could only see what we have in store for the Next # Issues, rific. The covers will introduce three new artists. You will clamor for more of their work.  Don't miss a single issue -- Let the mail man deliver them right to your door a week before they go on sale at your newsstand. Fill in the I Yeor # Yeori # Years (Add # Foreign Postage for each year) Your Name Address City . State Strange how often the Milfenium has been at hand. The idea is peace on Earth, see, and the way to do it is by figuring out angles. saw that the rest of the watchbird manufacturers were already present. There were six of them, not counting himself, and the room was blue with expensive cigar smoke. "Hi, Charlie," one of then! called as he came in. The rest broke off conversation long enough to wave a casual greeting at him. As a watchbird manufacturer, he was a member manufacturer of salvation, he reminded himself wryly. Very exclusive. You must have a certified government contract if you want to save the human race. "The government representative isn't here yet," one of the men told him. "He's due any minute." "We're getting the green light," another said. "Firje." Gelsen found a chair near the door and looked around the room. It was like a convention, or a Boy Scout rally. The six men made up for their lack of numbers by sheer volume. The president of Southern Consolidated was talking at the top of his lungs about watchbird's enormous durability. The two presidents he was talking at were grinning, nodding, one trying to interrupt with the results of a test he had run on watchbird's resourcefulness, the other talking about the new recharging apparatus. The other three men were in their own little group, delivering what sounded like a panegyric to watchbird. Gelsen noticed that all of them stood straight and tall, like the saviors they felt they were. He didn't find it funny. Up to a few days ago he had felt that way himself. He had considered himself a pot-bellied, slightly balding saint. ette. At the beginning of the project, he had been as enthusiastic as the others. He remembered saying to Macintyre, his chief engineer, "Mac, a new day is coming. Watchbird is the Answer." And Macintyre had nodded very profoundly -- another watchbird convert. How wonderful it had seemed then! A simple, reliable answer to one of mankind's greatest problems, all wrapped and packaged in a pound of incorruptible metal, crystal and plastics. Perhaps that was the very reason he was doubting it now. Gelsen suspected that you don't solve human problems so easily. There had to be a catch somewhere. After all, murder was an ' old problem, and watchbird too new a solution. "Gentlemen -- " They had been talking so heatedly that they hadn't noticed the government representative entering. Now the room became quiet at once. "Gentlemen," the plump government man said, "the President. with the consent of Congress, has acted to form a watchbird division for every city and town in the country." The men burst into a spontaneous shout of triumph. They were going to have their chance to save the world after all, Gelsen thought, and worriedly asked himself what was wrong with that. He listened carefully as the government man outlined the distribution scheme. The country was to be divided into seven areas, each to be supplied and serviced by one manufacturer. This meant monopoly, of course, but a necessary one. Like the telephone service, it was in the public's best interests. You couldn't have competition in watchbird service. Watchbird was for everyone. "The President hopes," the representative continued, "that full watchbird service will be installed in the shortest possible time. You will have top priorities on strategic metals, manpower, and so forth." "Speaking for myself." the president of Southern Consolidated said, "I expect to have the first batch of watchbirds distributed within the week. Production is all set up." equally ready. The factories had been prepared to roll out the watchbirds for months now. The final standardized equipment had been agreed upon, and only the Presidential go-ahead had been lacking. "Fine," the representative said. "If that is all. I think we can -- is there a question?" "Yes, sir," Gelsen said. "I want to know if the present model is the one we are going to manufacture." "Of course," the representative said. "It's the most advanced." "I have an objection." Gelsen stood up. His colleagues were glaring coldly at him. Obviously he was delaying the advent of the golden age. "What is your objection?" the representative asked. "First, let me say that I am one hundred per cent in favor of a machine to stop murder. It's been needed for a long time. I object only to the watchbird's learning circuits. They serve, in effect, to animate the machine and give it a pseudo-consciousness. I can't approve of that." "But, Mr. Gelsen, you yourself testified that the watchbird would not be completely efficient unless such circuits were introduced. Without them, the watchbirds could stop only an estimated seventy per cent of murders." "I know that," Gelsen said, feeling extremely uncomfortable. "I believe there might be a moral danger in allowing a machine to make decisions that are rightfully Man's," he declared doggedly. "Oh, come now, Gelsen," one of the corporation presidents said. "It's nothing of the sort. The watchbird will only reinforce the decisions made by honest men from the beginning of time." "I think that is true," the representative agreed. "But I can understand how Mr. Gelsen feels. It is sad that we must put a human problem into the hands of a machine, sadder still that we must have a machine enforce our laws. But I ask you to remember, Mr. Gelsen, that there is no other possible way of stopping a murderer beiore he strikes. It would be unfair to the many innocent ieople killed every year if we were to restrict watchbird on philosophical grounds. Don't you agree that I'm right?" "Yes, f suppose I do," Gclsen said unhappily. He had told himself all that a thousand times, but something still bothered him. Perhaps he would talk it over with Macintyre. As the conference broke up. a thought struck him. He grinned. A lot of policemen were going to be out of work! "IOW what do you think of that?" Officer Celtrics demanded. "Fifteen years in Homicide and a machine is replacing me." He wiped a large red hand across his forehead and leaned against the captain's desk. "Ain't science marvelous?" Two other policemen, late of Homicide, nodded glumly..."Don't worry about it." the captain said. "We'll find a home for you in Larceny, Celtrics. You'll like it here." "I just can't get over it," Celtrics complained. "A lousy little piece of tin and glass is going to solve all the crimes." "Not quite," the captain said. "The watchbirds are supposed to prevent the crimes before they happen." "Then how'll they be crimes?" one of the policeman asked. "I mean they can't hang you for murder until you commit one, can they?" "That's not the idea," the captain said. "The watchbirds are supposed to stop a man before he commits a murder." "Then no one arrests him?" Celtrics asked. "I don't know how they're going to work that out," the captain admitted. The men were silent for a while. The captain yawned and examined his watch. "The thing I don't understand," Celtrics said, still leaning on the captain's desk, "is just how do they do it? How did it start. Captain?" HE captain studied Celtrics' face for possible irony; after all, watchbird had been in the papers for months. But then he remembered that Celtrics, like his sidekicks, rarely bothered to turn past the sports pages. "Well," the captain said, trying to remember what he , had read in the Sunday supplements, "these scientists were working on criminology. They were studying murderers, to find out what made them tick. So they found that murderers throw out a different sort of brain wave from ordinary people. And their glands act funny, too. All this happens when they're about to commit a murder. So these scientists worked out a special machine to flash red or something when these brain waves turned on." "Scientists," Celtrics said bitterly. "Well, after the scientists had this machine, they didn't know what to do with it. It was too big to move around, and murderers didn't drop in often enough to make it flash. So they built it into a smaller unit and tried it out in a few police stations. I think they tried one upstate. But it didn't work so good. You couldn't get to the crime in time. That's why they built the watchbirds." "I don't think they'll stop no criminals," one of the policemen insisted. "They sure will. I read the test results. They can smell him out before he commits a crime. And when they reach him, they give him a powerful shock or something. It'll stop him." "You closing up Homicide. Captain?" Celtrics asked. "Nope," the captain said. "I'm leavtng a skeleton crew in until we see how these birds do." "Hah," Celtrics said. "Skeleton crew. That's funny." "Sure," the captain said. "Anyhow, I'm going to leave some men on. It seems the birds don't stop all murders." "Why not?" "Some murderers don't have these brain waves," the captain answered, trying to remember what the newspaper article had said. "Or their glands don't work or something." "Which ones don't they stop?" Celtrics asked, with professional curiosity. T don't know. But I hear they got the damned things fixed so they're going to stop all of them soon." "How they working that?" "They learn. The watchbirds, I mean. Just like people." "You kidding me?" "Nope." "Well," Celtrics said, "I think I'll just keep old Betsy oiled, just in case. You can't trust these scientists." "Right." "Birds!" Celtrics scoffed. soared in a long, lazy curve. Its aluminum hide glistened in the morning sun, and dots of light danced on its stiff wings.' Silently it flew. Silently, but with all senses functioning. Built-in kinesthetics told the watchbird where it was, and held it in a long search curve. Its eyes and ears operated as one unit, searching, seeking. And then something happened! The watchbird's electronically fast reflexes picked up the edge of a sensation. A correlation center tested it, matching it with electrical and chemical data in its memory files. A relay tripped. Down the watchbird spiraled, coming in on the increasingly strong sensation. It smelled the outpouring of certain glands, tasted a deviant brain wave. Fully alerted and armed, it spun and banked in the bright morning sunlight. Dinelli was so intent he didn't see the watchbird coming. He had his gun poised, and his eyes pleaded with the big grocer. "Don't come no closer." "You lousy little punk," the grocer said, and took another step forward. "Rob me? I'll break every bone in your puny body." The grocer, too stupid or too courageous to understand the threat of the gun, advanced on the little thief. "All right," Dinelli said, in a thorough state of panic. "All right, sucker, take -- " A bolt of electricity knocked him on his back. The gun went off. smashing a breakfast food display. "What in hell?" the grocer asked, staring at the stunned thief. And then he saw a flash of silver wings. "Well, I'm really damned. Those watchbirds work !" He stared until the wings disappeared in the sky. Then he telephoned the police. The watchbird returned to his search curve. His thinking center correlated the new facts he had learned about murder. Several of these he hadn't known before. This new information was simultaneously flashed to all the other watchbirds and their information was flashed back to him. New information, methods, definitions were constantly passing between them, lOW that the watchbirds were  ' rolling off the assembly line in a steady stream, Gelsen allowed himself to relax. A loud contented hum filled his plant. Orders were being filled on time, with top priorities given to the biggest cities in his area, and working down to the smallest towns. "All smooth. Chief," Macintyre said, coming in the door. He had just completed a routine inspection. "Fine. Have a seat." The big engineer sat down and lighted a cigarette. "We've been working on this for some time," Gelsen said, when he couldn't think of anything else. "We sure have," Macintyre agreed. He leaned back and inhaled deeply. He had been one of the consulting engineers on the original watchbird. That was six years back. He had been working for Gelsen ever since, and the men had become good friends. "The thing I wanted to ask you was this -- " Gelsen paused. He couldn't think how to phrase what he wanted. Instead he asked, "What do you think of the watchbirds, Mac?" "Who, me?"The engineer grinned nervously. He had been eating, drinking and sleeping watchbird ever since its inception. He had never found it necessary to have an attitude. "Why, I think it's great." "I don't mean that." Gelsen said. He realized that what he wanted was to have someone understand his point of view. "I mean do you figure there might be some danger in machine thinking?" 'T don't think so, Chief. Why do you ask?" "Look, I'm no scientist or engineer. I've just handled cost and production and let you boys worry about how. But as a layman, watchbird is starting to frighten me." "No reason for that." "I don't like the idea of the learning circuits." "But why not?" Then Macintyre grinned again. "I know. You're like a lot of people. Chief -- afraid your machines are going to wake up and say, 'What are we doing here? Let's go out and rule the world.' Is that it?" "Maybe something like that," Gelsen admitted. "No chance of it," Macintyre said. "The watchbirds are complex, I'll admit, but an M.I.T. calculator is a whole lot more complex. And it hasn't got consciousness." "No. But the watchbirds can learn." "Sure. So can all the new calculators. Do you think they'll team up with the watchbirds?" G elsen felt annoyed at Macintyre, and even more annoyed at himself for being ridiculous. "It's a fact that the watchbirds can put their learning into action. No one is monitoring them." "So that's the trouble," Macintyre said. "I've been thinking of getting out of watchbird." Gelsen hadn't realized it until that moment. "Look, Chief, 'f Macintyre said. "Will you take an engineer's word on this?" "Let's hear it." "The watchbirds are no more dangerous than an automobile, eter. They have no more consciousness or volition than those things. The watchbirds are built to respond to certain stimuli, and to carry out certain operations when they receive that stimuli." "And the learning circuits?" "You have to have those," Macintyre said patiently, as though explaining the whole thing to a ten-year-old. "The purpose of the watchbird is to frustrate all murder-attempts, right? Well, only certain murderers give out these stimuli. In order to stop all of them, the watchbird has to search out new definitions of murder and correlate them with what it already knows." "I think it's inhuman," Gelsen said. "That's the best thing about it.The watchbirds are unemotional. Their reasoning is nonanthropomorphic. You can't bribe them or drug them. You shouldn't fear them, cither." The intercom on Gelsen's desk bu#zed. He ignored it. "I know all this," Gelsen said. "But, still, sometimes I feel like the man who invented dynamite. He thought it would only be used for blowing up tree stumps." "You didn't invent watchbird." "I still feel morally responsible because I manufacture them." The intercom buzzed again, and Gelsen irritably punched a button. "The reports are in on the first week of watchbird operation," his secretary told him. "How do they look?" "Wonderful, sir." "Send them in in fifteen minutes." Gelsen switched the intercom off and turned back to Macintyre, who was cleaning his fingernails with a wooden match. "Don't you think that this represents a trend in human thinking? The mechanical god? The electronic father?" "Chief," Macintyre said, "I think you should study watchbird more closely. Do you know what's built into the circuits?" "Only generally." "First, there is a purpose. Which is to stop living organisms from committing murder. Two, murder may be defined as an act of violence, consisting of breaking, mangling, maltreating or otherwise stopping the ftmetions of a living organism by a living organism. Three, most murderers arc detectable by certain chemical and electrical changes." Macintyre paused to light another cigarette. "Those conditions take care of the routine functions. Then, for the learning circuits, there are two more conditions. Four, there are some living organisms who commit murder without the signs mentioned in three. Five, these can be detected by data applicable to condition two." "I see," Gelsen said. "You realize how foolproof it is?" "I suppose so." Gelsen hesitated a moment. "I guess that's all." # 'Right," the engineer said, and left. Gelsen thought for a few moments. There couldn't be anything wrong with the watchbirds. "Send in the reports," he said into the intercom. ings of the city, the watchbird soared. It was dark, but in the distance the watchbird could see another, and another beyond that. For this was a large city. To prevent murder... There was more to watch for now. New information had crossed the invisible network that connected all watchbirds. New data, new ways of detecting the violence of murder. There! The edge of a sensation! Two watchbirds dipped simultaneously. One had received the scent a fraction of a second before the other. He continued down while the other resumed monitoring. Condition tour, there are some living organisms who commit murder without the signs mentioned in condition three. Through his new information, the watchbird knew by extrapolation that this organism was bent on murder, even though the characteristic chemical and electrical smells were absent. The watchbird, all senses acute, closed in on the organism. He found what he wanted, and dived. Roger Greco leaned against a building, his hands in his pockets. In his left hand was the cool butt of a .#. Greco waited patiently. He wasn't thinking of anything in particular, just relaxing against a building, waiting for a man. Greco didn't know why the man was to be killed. He didn't care. Greco's lack of curiosity was part of his value. The other part was his skill. One bullet, neatly placed in the head of a man he didn't know. It didn't excite him or sicken him. It was a job, just like anything else. You killed a man. So? As Greco's victim stepped out of a building. Greco lifted the .# out of his pocket. He released the safety and braced the gun with his right hand. He still wasn't thinking of anything as he took aim... And was knocked off his feet. Greco thought he had been shot. He struggled up again, looked around, and sighted foggily on his victim. Again he was knocked down. This time he lay on the ground, trying to draw a bead. He never thought of stopping, for Greco was a craftsman. With the next blow, everything went black. Permanently, because the watchbird's duty was . to protect the object of violence -- at whatever cost to the murderer. The victim walked to his car. He hadn't noticed anything unusual. Everything had happened in silence. V;  good. The watchbirds had  been operating perfectly. Crimes of violence had been cut in half, l and cut again. Dark alleys were no longer mouths of horror. Parks and playgrounds were not places to shun after dusk. Of course, there were still robberies. Petty thievery flourished, and embezzlement, larceny, forgery and a hundred other crimes. But that wasn't so important. You could regain lost money -- never a lost life. Gelsen was ready to admit that he had been wrong about the watchbirds. They were doing a job that humans had been unable to accomplish. The first hint of something wrong came that morning. Macintyre came into his office. He stood silently in front of Gelsen's desk, looking annoyed and a little embarrassed. B# "What's the matter, Mac?" Gelsen asked. "One of the watchbirds went to work on a slaughterhouse man. Knocked him out." Gelsen thought about it for a moment. Yes. the watchbirds would do that. With their new learning circuits, they had probmals as murder. "Tell the packers to mechanize their slaughtering," Gelsen said. "I never liked that business myself." "All right," Macintyre said. He pursed his lips, then shrugged his shoulders and left. Gelsen stood beside his desk, thinking. Couldn't the watchbirds differentiate between a murderer and a man engaged in a legitimate profession? No, evidently not. To them, murder was murder. No exceptions. He frowned. That might take a little ironing out in the circuits. But not too much, he decided hastily. Just make them a little more discriminating. He sat down again and buried himself in paperwork, trying to avoid the edge of an old fear. into the chair and fitted the electrode to his leg. "Oh, oh," he moaned, only half-conscious now of what they were doing. They fitted the helmet over his shaved head and tightened the last gtraps. He continued to moan softly. And then the watchbird swept in. How he had conie, no one knew. Prisons are large and strong, with many locked doors, but the watchbird was there -- To stop a murder. "Get that thing out of here!" the warden shouted, and reached for the switch. The watchbird knocked him down. "Stop that!" a guard screamed, and grabbed for the switch himself. He was knocked to the floor beside the warden. "This isn't murder, you idiot!" another guard said. He drew his gun to shoot down the glittering, wheeling metal bird. Anticipating, the watchbird smashed him back against the wall. There was silence in the room. After a while, the man in the helmet started to giggle. Then he stopped. The watchbird stood on guard, fluttering in mid-air -- Making sure no murder was done. New data flashed along the watchbird network. Unmonitored, independent, the thousands of watchbirds received and acted Upon it. The breaking, mangling or otherwise stopping the functions of a living organism hy a living organism. New acts to stop. "Damn you. git going!" Farmer Ollister shouted, and raised his whip again. The horse balked, and the wagon rattled and shook at he edged sideways. "You lousy hunk of pigmeal, git going!" the farmer yelled and he raised the whip again. It never fell. An alert watchbird, sensing violence, had knocked him out of his seat. A living organism? What is a living organism? The watchbirds extended their definitions as they became aware of more facts. And. of course, this gave them more work. The deer was just visible at the edge of the woods. The hunter raised his rifle, and took careful aim. He didn't have time to shoot. mopped perspiration from his face. "All right," he said into the telephone. He listened to the stream of vituperation from the other end, then placed the receiver gently in its cradle. "What was that one?" Macintyre asked. He was unshaven, tie loose, shirt unbuttoned. "Another fisherman," Gelsen said. "It seems the watchbirds won't let him fish even though his family is starving. What are we going to do about it, he wants to know." "How many hundred is that?" "I don't know. I haven't opened the mail." "Well, I figured out where the trouble is," Macintyre said gloomily, with the air of a man who knows just how he blew up the Earth -- after it was too late. "Let's hear it." "Everybody took it for granted that we wanted all murder stopped. We figured the watchbirds would think as we do. We ought to have qualified the conditions." "I've got an idea," Gelsen said, "that we'd have to know just why and what murder is, before we could qualify the conditions properly. And if we knew that, we wouldn't need the watchbirds." "Oh, I don't know about that. They just have to be told that some things which look like murder are not murder." "But why should they stop fisherman?" Gelsen asked. ' "Why shouldn't they? Fish and animals are living organisms. We is murder." The telephone rang. Gelsen glared at it and punched the intercom. "I told you no more calls, no matter what." "This is from Washington," his secretary said. "I thought you'd -- " "Sorry." Gelsen picked up the telephone. "Yes. Certainly is a mess... Have they? All right, I certainly will." He put down the telephone.  "Short and sweet," he told Macintyre. "We're to shut down temporarily." "That won't be so easy." Maciqtyre said. "The watchbirds operate independent of any central control, you know. They come back once a week for a repair checkup. We'll have to turn them off then, one by one." "Well, let's get to it. Monroe over on the Coast has shut down about a quarter of his birds." "I think I can dope out a restricting circuit," Macintyre said. "Fine," Gelsen replied bitterly. "You make me very happy." watchbirds were learning rapidly, expanding and adding to their knowledge. Loosely defined abstractions were extended, acted upon and re-extended. To stop murder... Metal and electrons reason well, but not in a human fashion. A living organism? Any living organism I The watchbirds set themselves the task of protecting all living things. The fly buzzed around the room, lighting on a table top, pausing a moment, then darting to a window sill. The old man stalked it, a rolled newspaper in his hand. Murderer ! The watchbirds swept down and saved the fly in the nick of time.  The old man writhed on the floor a minute and then was silent. He had been given only a mild shock, but it had been enough for his flattery, cranky heart. His victim had been saved, though, and this was the important thing. Save the victim and give the aggressor his just desserts. VT "Why aren't they being turned off!" The assistant control engineer gestured. In a corner of the repair room lay the senior control engineer. He was just regaining consciousness. "He tried to turn one of them off," the assistant engineer said. Both his hands were knotted together. He was making a visible effort not to shake. "That's ridiculous. They haven't got any sense of selfpreservation." "Then turn them off yourself. Besides, I don't think any more are going to come." What could have happened? Gelsen began to piece it together. The watchbirds still hadn't decided on the limits of a living organism. When some of them were turned off in the Monroe plant, the rest must have correlated the data. So they had been forced to assume that they were living organisms, as well. No one had ever told them otherwise. Certainly they carried on most of the functions of living organisms. Then the old fears hit him. Gelsen trembled and hurried out of the repair room. He wanted to find Macintyre in a hurry. riHE nurse handed the surgeon the sponge. "Scalpel." She placed it in his hand. He started to make the first incision. And then he was aware of a disturbance. "Who let that thing in?" "I don't know," the nurse said, her voice muffled by the mask. "Get it out of here." The nurse waved her arms at the bright winged thing, but it fluttered over her head. The surgeon proceeded with the incision -- as long as he was able. The watchbird drove him away and stood guard. "Telephone the watchbird company!" the surgeon ordered. "Get them to turn the thing off." The watchbird was preventing violence to a living organism. The surgeon stood by helplessly while his patient died. network of highways, the watchbird watched and waited. It had been constantly working for weeks now. without rest or repair. Rest and repair were impossible, because the watchbird couldn't allow itself -- a living organism -- to be murdered. And that was what happened' when watchbirds returned to the factory. There was a built-in order to return, after the lapse of a certain time period. But the watchbird had a stronger order to obey -- preservation of life, including its own. The definitions of murder were almost infinitely extended now, impossible to cope with. But the watchbird didn't consider that. It responded to its stimuli, whenever they came and whatever their source. There was a new definition of living organism in its memory files. It had come as a result of the watchbird discovery that watchbirds were living organisms. And it had enormous ramifications. The stimuli came! For the hundredth time that day, the bird wheeled and banked, dropping swiftly down to stop murder. Jackson yawned and pulled his car to a shoulder of the road. He didn't notice the glittering dot in the sky. There was no reason for him to. Jackson wasn't contemplating murder, by any human definition. This was a good spot for a nap, he decided. He had been driving for seven straight hours and his eyes were starting to fog. He reached out to turn off the ignition key -- And was knocked back against the side of the car. "What in hell's wrong with you?" he asked indignantly. "All I want to do is -- " He reached for the key again, and again he was smacked back. Jackson knew better than to try a third time. He had been listening to the radio and he knew what the watchbirds did to stubborn violators. "You mechanical jerk," he said to the waiting metal bird. "A car's not alive. I'm not trying to kill it." But the watchbird only knew that a certain operation resulted in stopping an organism. The car was certainly a functioning organism. Wasn't it of metal, as were the watchbirds? Didn't it run? repairs they'll run down." He shoved a pile of specification sheets out of his way. "How soon?" Gelsen asked. "Six months to a year. Say a year, barring accidents." "A year," Gelsen said. "In the meantime, everything is stopping dead. Do you know the latest?" "What?" "The watchbirds have decided that the Earth is a living organism. They won't allow farmers to break ground for plowing. And. of course, everything else is a living organism -- rabbits, beetles, flies, wolves, mosquitoes, lions, crocodiles, crows, and smaller forms of life such as bacteria." "I know," Macintryc said. "And you tell me they'll, wear out in six months or a year. What happens now? What are we going to cat in six months?" The engineer rubbed his chin. "We'll have to do something quick and fast. Ecological balance is gone to hell." "Fast isn't the word. Instantaneously would be better." Gelsen lighted his thirty-fifth cigarette for the day. "At least I have the bitter satisfaction of saying, T told you so.' Although I'm just as responsible as the rest of the machine-worshipping fools." Macintyre wasn't listening. He was thinking about watchbirds. "Like the rabbit plague in Australia." "The death rate is mounting," Gelsen said. "Famine. Floods. Can't cut down trees. Doctors can't -- what was that you said said about Australia?" "The rabbits," Macintyre repeated. "Hardly any left in Australia now." "Why? How was it done?" "Oh, found some kind of germ that attacked only rabbits. I think it was propagated by mosquitos -- " "Work on that," Gelsen said. "You might have something. I want you to get on the telephone, ask for an emergency hookup with the engineers of the other companies. Hurry it up. Together you may be able to dope out something." "Right," Macintyre said. He grabbed a handful of blank paper and hurried to the telephone. cer Celtrics said. He grinned at the captain. "Didn't I tell you scientists were nuts?" "I didn't say you were wrong, did I?" the captain asked. "No, but you weren't sure." "Well, I'm sure now. You'd better get going. There's plenty of work for you." "I know." Celtrics drew his revolver from its holster, checked it and put it back. "Are all the boys back, Captain?" "All?" the captain laughed humorlessly. "Homicide has increased by fifty per cent. There's more murder now than there's ever been." "Sure." Celtrics said. "The watchbirds are too busy guarding cars and slugging spiders." He started toward the door, then turned for a parting shot. "Take my word, Captain. Machines are stupid." The captain nodded. trying to stop countless millions of murders -- a hofeless task. But the watchbirds didn't hope. Without consciousness, they experienced no sense of accomplishment, no fear of failure. Patiently they went about their jobs, obeying each stimulus as it came. They couldn't be everywhere at the same time, but it wasn't necessary to be. People learned quickly what the watchbirds didn't like and refrained from doing it. It just wasn't safe. With their high speed and superfast senses, the watchbirds got around quickly. And now they meant business. In their original directives there had been a provision made for means failed. Why spare a murderer? It backfired. The watchbirds extracted the fact that murder and crimes of violence had increased geometrically since they had begun operation. This was true, because their new definitions increased the possibilities of murder. But to thewatchbirds, the rise showed that the first methods had failed. Simple logic. If A doesn't work, try B. The watchbirds shocked to kill. Slaughterhouses in Chicago stopped and cattle starved to death in their pens, because farmers in the Midwest couldn't cut hay or harvest grain. No one had told the watchbirds that all life dejjends on carefully balanced murders. Starvation didn't concern the watchbirds, since it was an act of omission. Their interest lay only in acts of commission. Hunters sat home, glaring at the silver dots in the sky, longing to shoot them down. But for the most part, they didn't try. The watchbirds were quick to sense the murder intent and to punish it. Pishing boats swung idle at their moorings in San Pedro and Gloucester. Fish were living organisms. Farmers cursed and spat and died, trying to harvest the crop. Grain was alive and thus worthy of protection. Potatoes were as important to the watchbird as any other living organism. The death of a blade of grass was equal to the assassination of a President -- To the watchbirds. And, of course, certain machines were living. This followed, since the watchbirds were machines and living. God help you if you maltreated your radio. Turning it off meant was silenced, the red glow of its tubes faded, it grew cold. The watchbirds tried to guard their other charges. Wolves were slaughtered, trying to kill rabbits. Rabbits were electrocuted, trying to eat vegetables. Creepers were burned out in the act of strangling trees. A butterfly was executed, caught in the act of outraging a rose. This control was spasmodic, because of the fewness of the couldn't have carried out the ambitious project set by the thousands. The effect was of a murderous force, ten thousand bolts of irrational lightning raging around the country, striking a thousand times a day. Lightning which anticipated your moves and punished your intentions. G entlemen, please," the government representacive begged. "We must hurry." The seven manufacturers stopped talking. "Before we begin this meeting formally," the president of Monroe said. "I want to say something. We do not feel ourselves responsible for this unhappy state of affairs. It was a government project; the government must accept the responsibility, both moral and financial." Gelsen shrugged his shoulders. It was hard to believe that these men, just a few weeks ago, had of saving the world. Now they wanted to shrug off the responsibility when the salvation went amiss. "I'm positive that that need not concern us now," the representative assured him. "We must hurry. You engineers have done an excellent job. I am proud of the cooperation you have shown in this emergency. You are hereby empowered to put the outlined plan into action." "Wait a minute," Gelsen said. "There is no time." "The plan's no good." "Don't you think it will work?" "Of course it will work. But I'm afraid the cure will be worse than the disease." The manufacturers looked as though they would have enjoyed throttling Gelsen. He didn't hesitate. "Haven't we learned yet?" he asked. "Don't you see that you can't cure human problems by mechanization?" "Mr. Gelsen," the president of Monroe said, "I would enjoy hearing you philosophize, but, unfortunately, people are being killed. Crops are being ruined. There is famine in some sections of the country already. The watchbirds must be stopped at once!" "Murder must be stopped, too. I remember all of us agreeing upon that. But this is not the way!" "What would you suggest?" the representative asked. G elsen took a deep breath. What he was about to say took all the courage he had. "Let the watchbirds run down by themselves," Gelsen suggested. There was a near-riot. The government representative broke it up. "Let's take our lesson," Gelsen urged, "admit that we were wrong trying to cure human problems by mechanical means. Start again. Use machines, yes. but not as judges and teachers and fathers." "Ridiculous." the representative said coldly. "Mr. Gelsen, you are overwrought. I suggest you control yourself." He cleared his throat. "All of you are ordered by the President to carry out the plan you have submitted." He looked sharply at Gelsen. "Not to do so will be treason." "I'll cooperate to the best of my ability," Gelsen said. "Good. Those assembly lines must be rolling within the week." Gelsen walked out of the room alone. Now he was confused again. Had he been right or was he just another visionary? Certainly, he hadn't explained himself with much clarity. Did he know what he meant? Gelsen cursed under his breath. He wondered why he couldn't ever be sure of anything. Weren't there any values he could hold on to? He hurried to the airport and to his plant. HE watchbird was operating erratically now. Many of its delicate parts were out of line, worn by almost continuous operation. But gallantly it responded when the stimuli came. A spider was attacking a fly. The watchbird swooped down to the rescue. Simultaneously, it became aware of something overhead. The watchbird wheeled to meet it. There was a sharp crackle and a power bolt whizzed by the watchbird's wing. Angrily, it at a shock wave. The attacker was heavily insulated. Again it spat at the watchbird. This time, a bolt smashed through a wing. The watchbird darted away, but the attacker went after it in a burst of speed, throwing out more crackling power. The watchbird fell, but managed to send out its message. Urgent! A new menace to living organisms and this was the deadliest yet! Other watchbirds around the country integrated the message. Their thinking centers searched for an answer. " fifty today," Macintyre said, coming into Gclsen's office. "Fine," Gelsen said, not looking at the engineer. "Not so fine." Macintyre sat down. "Lord, I'm tired! It was seventy-two yesterday." "I know." On Gelsen's desk were several dozen lawsuits, which he was sending to the government with a prayer. "They'll pick up again, though," Macintyre said confidently. "The Hawks are especially built to hunt down watchbirds. They're stronger, faster, and they've got better armor. We really rolled them out in a hurry, huh?" "We sure did." "The watchbirds arc pretty good, too." Macintyre had to admit. "They're learning to take cover. They're trying a lot of stunts. You know, each one that goes down tells the others something." Gelsen didn't answer. "But anything the watchbirds can do, the Hawks can do better," Macintyre said cheerfully. "The Hawks have special learning circuits for hunting. They're more flexible than the watchbirds. They learn faster." Gelsen gloomily stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. The sky was blank. Looking out, he realized that his uncertainties were over. Right or wrong, he had made up his mind. "Tell me,' he said, still watching the sky, "what will the Hawks hunt after they get all the watchbirds?" "Huh?" Macintyre said. "Why -- " "Just to be on the safe side, you'd better design something to hunt down the Hawks. Just in case, I mean." "You think -- " "All I know is that the Hawks are selfcontrolled. So were the watchbirds. Remote control would have been too slow, the argument went on. The idea was to get the watchbirds and get them fast. That meant no restricting circuits." "We can dope something out," Macintyre said uncertainly. "You've got an aggressive machine up in the air now. A murder machine. Before that it was an anti-murder machine. Your next gadget will have to be even more self-sufficient, won't it?" Macintyre didn't answer. "I don't hold you responsible," Gelsen said. "It's me. It's everyone." In the air outside was a swiftmoving dot. "That's what comes," said Gelsen, "of giving a machine the job that was our own responsibility." zeroing in on a watchbird. The armored murder machine had learned a lot in a few days. Its sole function was to kill. At present it was impelled toward a certain type of living organism, metallic like itself. But the Hawk had just discovered that there were other types of living organisms, too -- Which had to be murdered. rr' # Star Shelf neut, Jr. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, #, # paes, # H ere is a sharp-pointed weapon -- a biting, vividly alive and very effectively understated anti-Utopia. It deals with the cy bernetic future of the U.S.A., a future in which all jobs of repetitive or patternable nature have been eliminated, and the workers have been replaced by self-operating machines. This is not primarily a hovel of revolt against the machine, however; it deals only glancingly with the fate of the disemployed. What it does is examine the mores and miseries of the managerialengineering group that has become the nation's leaders, its elites. The author takes one man. Dr.  Paul Proteus, son of the first national technological dictator and (at first without knowing it) a rebel, and studies his decline and fall. In the process. Vonnegut reviews with bright venom the apotheoses of advertising, Chamber of Commercism, joinerism. and vulgarity that the new society has arrived at. with particular emphasis on the moral climate of the tinc. This involves  fanatical emphasis on r loyalty to the machine itself. The greatest crime of the society is sabotage of the machine -- not murder of the human being: for this is the level to which the thinking of the elites in this disturbing and highly entertaining book has arrived. But Vonnegut gives the "people" their part of the stage, too. Most of them are either in the armed forces or the "Wrecks and Reeks" -- Reconstruction and trying to make do as bartenders, gamblers, and members of other ancient "fringe" professions such as hotel-keeping and whatnot. And all are completely demoralized. defeated, decadent. They are given practically everything they want in the way of mechanical equipment (one must maintain markets and keep the machines rolling, mustn't one?) but they have lost their reason for being, their independence. Throughout the book, as a sort of Zadigan counterpoint, we keep meeting the Shah of Bratpuhr, touring America under the aegis of the State Department, who cannot be dissuaded from his contended analysis of the lower classes (# per cent of the people) as takaru; i.e., slaves. For readers who think well of the chances of individual man under a cybernetic economy, this book will have a very, very nasty flavor. Which is why we others will like it very much indeed! Ryan. Viking Press, New York, #. # paes, proluselv iHustrated, # gaudy to describe this book are hard to find. This is it. friends -- the real interplanetary tomorrow! The difference between all previous books on space flight and this book is in essence the difference between science fiction and science. In the past, it has been, "This is the way it might be, if -- " But with this magnificent volume it becomes. "This is the way it will be!" It has been written by a group of scientists and engineers who really know the practical realities of airless flight: and it seems, after one finally puts the book down, breathless, that there are practically no questions which they have not answered. The book is based on material originally presented at the First Symposium on Space Travel, held on Columbus Day. #, at the Hayden Planetarium. New York, and more fully developed in a special issue of Colliers, March #. #. Contributors are: Joseph Kaplan, Professor of Physics: Wernher von Braun, co-designer of the German V-# rocket; Heinz Haber, specialist in the medical aspects of airless, weightless flight; our own Willy Ley, who was one of the original organizers of the symposium ; Oscar Schachter, deputy director of the Legal Division of the United Nations; and Fred Whipple, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. Not a single visionary among them! The magnificent illustrations (ten in full color) by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman and Rolf Klep make tangible the machines and the nature of space flight that the book describes. They are almost frighteningly real!  The only cavil one might have against the book is the way in which it tries to "sell" space travel for strictly military reasons. Gentlemen, please do not forget that scientific progress can be made in peacetime. There's no law against it. is there? Of course, it'll be easier to raise the needed station during war; but what's the point if we end up using it to destroy Elarth? We might just as well have stood in bed! ctions, Inc., New Yqrk, #, # paes, #  omnibus can now be put on the shelf along with the previous Wells and Haggari novel collections. This one just about, but not quite, puts all of Wells's science fantasy back in print. A few utopian novels, many of them dull, remain unreprinted. Every science fiction short story is in this book, plus two novels -- Men Like Gods and Star Begotten. Omitted are six straight fantasies, which would have violated the "science fiction" promise of the title. However, what is offered here is so wonderful that the omissions are not noticeable (except to the editor of the volume -- the undersigned.) The facts are that Wells's science fiction short stories are still among the finest ever written. ited by August Derleth. Pellegrini  Cudahy, New York, #. # pages, # M r. Derleth's twelfth anthology contains # stories, # of which are A, # are B-, one is C, and # are D or D-. This is really what we reviewers are prone to define as an "uneven" selection. Six stories deal with invaders of Earth; # with Terran explorations of space ; and # serve as beginning and ending of the volume. Class A stories are Simak's "Beachhead' van Vogt's "Repetition," Russell's previously anthologized "Metamorphosite," Asimov's "Breeds There A Man... and Wyndham's "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down." The rest of the tales (even the mildly "B" ones) we really can do without. The idea behind the book is good, though not original. It is unfortunate that it is filled out with such a thin and inadequate group of tales. by Wilson Tucker. Rinehart  Co., New York, #. # pas, # second science fiction novel is in the classic tradition of the wandering few humans living in a largely destroyed world or continent. Unfortunately, it can claim little of the imaginative richness or the philosophic perceptions that other tales in this category have possessed. Nevertheless, it is easily readable, and will serve to pass a couple of hours without boredom. The "Enemy" has knocked out the U.S.A. east of the Mississippi with plague germs and only a few immune plague-carriers survive. Atom bombs, of course, preceded the germ warfare. West of the Big River, the "Enemy" did nothing, and civilization marches on there, including radio commercials and the like. The story tells about the dirty adventures of a heel who happened to be among the few immune carriers east of the Mississippi, and who eventually managed to cross to the west side. There he spreads plague along with his criminal ventures. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Los Angeles, #. # pages, # stories, only about six or eight; and I have read a lot of science fiction by other people. This is just about the worst yet, and its reprinting at this late date (it was originally published by Dutton in #) can only weaken science fiction and damage Dr. Eric Bell's ("John Taine's") reputation. The story is about a crazy scientist who learns how to dissolve the Universe and who darn near does so. A pox upon him! know thy neighbor The terrors that inhabit the night may be even more awful in deteitful broad daylight! on the fire escape and ended with the green monster in the incinerator chute, but still, it wouldn't be quite fair to blame it all on the neighborhood... The apartment house was in the heart of the district that is known as "The Tenderloin" -- that section of San Francisco from Ellis to Market and east from Leavenworth to Mason Street. Not the best section. To Ellen's mind, it was an unsavory neighborhood, but with apartments so hard to get and this one only # a month and in a regular apartment building with an elevator and all -- well, as she often told the girls at the office, you can't be too particular these days. Nevertheless, it was a ordeal to walk up the two blocks from Market Street, particularly at night when the noise of juke boxes dinned from the garish bars, when the sidewalks spilled over with soldiers and sailors, with peroxided, blowsy-looking women and the furtive gamblers who haunted the back rooms of the innocentappearing cigar stores that lined the street. She walked very fast then, never looking to left or right, and her heart would pound when a passing male whistled. But once inside the apartment house lobby, she relaxed. In spite of its location, the place seemed very respectable. She seldom met anyone in the lobby or the elevator and, except on rare occasions like last night, the halls were as silent as those in the swanky apartment houses on Nob Hill. She knew by sight only two of her neighbors -- thc short, stocky young man who lived in #, and Mrs. Moffatt, in #. Mrs. Moffatt was the essence of lavender and old lace, and the young man -- he was all right, really: you couldn't honestly say he was shady-looking. the man from # was waiting for the elevator when Ellen came out to get her paper. He glanced up at the sound of the door and stared. Quickly, she shut the door again. She didn't like the way he looked at her. She was wearing a housecoat over her nightgown, and a scarf wrapped around her head to cover the bobbypins -- a costume as unrcvealing as a nun's -- but she felt as though he had invaded her privacy with his stare, like surprising her in the bathtub. She waited until she heard the elevator start down before opening her door again. The boy must have aimed from the stairs; her paper was several yards down the hall, almost in front of #. She went down to get it. Mrs. Moffatt must have heard Ellen's footsteps in the hall. An old lady udth a small income (from her late husband, as she had explained to Etlen) and little to do, she was intensely interested in her neighbors. She opened the door of her apartment and peered out. Her thin white hair was done up in tight kid curlers. With her round fadedblue eyes and round wrinkled-apple cheeks, she looked like an inquisitive aged baby. "Good morning," said Ellen pleasantly. "Good morning, my dear," the old lady answered. "You're up early for a Saturday." "Well, I thought I might as well get up and start my housecleaning. I didn't sleep a wink after four o'clock this morning anyway. Did you hear all that racket in the hall?" "Why, no. I didn't." The old lady sounded disappointed. "I don't see how I missed it. I guess because I went to bed so late. My nephews -- you've seen them, haven't you? -- They're such nice boys. They took me to a movie last night." "Well, I'm surprised you didn't hear it," said Ellen. "Thumping and scratching, like somebody was dragging a rake along the floor. I just couldn't get back to sleep." The old lady clicked her tongue. "I'll bet somebody came home drunk. Isn't that terrible? I wonder who it was." "I don't know," said Ellen, "but it was certainly a disgrace. I was going to call Mrs. Anderson." With the door open, the hall seemed filled with the very odd odor of Mrs. Moffatt's apartment -- not really unpleasant, but musty, with the smell of antiques. The apartment itself was like a museum. Ellen had been inside once when the old lady invited her in for a cup of tea. Its two rooms were crammed with, a bizarre assortment of furniture, bric-a-brac and souvenirs. "Oh. how's your bird this naorning?" Ellen asked. In addition to being a collector, Mrs. Moffatt was an animal fancier. She owned three cats, a pair of love-birds, goldfish, and even a cage of white mice. One of the love-birds, she had informed Ellen yesterday, was ailing. "Oh, Buzzy's much better today," she beamed. "The doctor told me to feed him whisky every three hours -- with an eyedropper, you know -- and you'd be surprised how it helped the little fellow. He even ate some birdseed this morning." "I'm so glad," said Ellen. She picked up her paper and smiled at Mrs. Moffatt. "I'll see you later." The old woman closed her door, shutting off the musty smell, and Ellen walked back to her own apartment. She filled the coffee pot with water and four tablespoons of coffee, then dressed herself while the coffee percolated. Standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, she took the bobbypins out of her hair. Her reflection looked back at her from the mirror, and she felt that unaccountable depression again. I'm not bad-looking, she thought, and young, and not too dumb. What have other women got that I haven't? She thought of the days and years passing, the meals all alone, and nothing ever happening. That kind of thinking gets you nowhere: forget it. She combed her hair back, pinned it securely behind her ears, ran a lipstick over her mouth. Then she went into the kitchenette, turned off the gas flame under the coffee pot. and raised the window shade to let in the sun that was just beginning to show through morning fog. A dead cat lay on the fire escape under the window. S HE stared at it, feeling sick to her stomach. It was an ordinary gray cat, the kind you see in every alley, but its head was twisted back so that its open eyes and open mouth leered at her. She pulled the blind down, fast. Sit down, light a cigarette. It's nothing, just a dead cat. that's all. But how did it get on the fire escape? Fell, maybe, from the roof? And how did it get on the roof? Besides, I thought cats never got hurt falling. Isn't there something about landing on your feet like a cat? Maybe that's just a legend, like the nonsense about nine lives. Well, what do I do, she thought. I can't sit here and drink coffee with that under the window. And God knows I can't take it away myself. She shuddered at the thought. Call the manager. She got up and went to the telephone in the foyer. She found the number scribbled on the back of the phone book. Her hand was shaking when she dialed. "This is Ellen Tighe in #. Mrs. Anderson, there's a dead cat on the fire escape outside my window. You'll have to do something about it." Mrs. Anderson sounded halfasleep. "What do you mean, a dead cat? Are you sure it's dead? Maybe it's sleeping." "Of course I'm sure it's dead! Can't you send Pete up to take it away? It's a horrible thing to have under my window." "All right. I'll tell Pete to go up. He's washing down the lobby now. As soon as he's finished, I'll send him up." Ellen set the phone back on its stand. She felt a little silly. What a fuss to make over a dead cat. But really, outside one's window -- and before breakfast -- who could blame me? She went back into the kitchenette, carefully not looking toward the window, even though the shade was drawn, and poured herself a cup of coffee. Then she sat at the table in the little nook, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette and leafing through the paper. The front page was all about a flying saucer scare in Marin County. She read the headline, then thumbed on through the paper. stopping to read the movie reviews and the comic page. attracted by a headline that read: "Liquor Strong These Days -- Customer Turns Green, Says Bartender." It was a brief item, consciously cute. "John Martin, #, a bartender of # Mason Street, was arrested early this morning, charged with drunkenness and disturbing the peace, after firing several shots from a .# revolver on the sidewalk in front of his address. No one was injured. Martin's defense, according to police records, was that he was attempting to apprehend a 'pale-green, claw-handed' customer who fled after eating a live mouse and threatening Martin. "Upon questioning, Martin admitted that the unidentified customer had been in the bar for several hours and appeared perfectly normal. But he insisted, 'When I refused to serve him after he ate the mouse, he turned green and threatened to claw me to death.' Martin has a permit to carry the gun and was dismissed with a fifty dollar fine and a warning by Judge Greely against sampling his own stock too freely." Drunken fool, thought Ellen. With fresh indignation, she remembered the disturbance in her own hall this morning. Nothing but drunks and gangsters in this neighborhood. She thought vaguely of looking at the "For Rent" section of the want ads. There was a noise on the fire escape. Ellen reached over and lifted up the shade. The janitor was standing there with a big paper sack in his hand. Ellen opened the window and asked, "How do you think it got there, Pete?" "I dunno. Maybe fall offa the roof. Musta been in a fight." "What makes you think so?" "Neck's all torn. Big teeth marks. Maybe dog get him." "Up here?" "Somebody find, maybe throw here -- I dunno." Pete scratched his head. "You don't worry any more, though. I take away now. No smell, even." He grinned at her and scuttled to the other end of the fire escape where he climbed through the window to the fourth floor corridor. Ellen poured herself a second cup of coffee and lighted another cigarette, then turned to the woman's page in the paper. She read the Advice Column and the Psychology and glanced through the "Help Wanted -- Women" in the classifieds. That finished the morning's reading. She looked at her watch. Almost ten. She carried her coffee cup to the sink, rinsed it out and set it on the drainboard. There was still a cup or more coffee left in the pot. That could be warmed over later, but she took out the filler and dumped the grounds into the paper bag that held garbage. The bag was almost full. I'll throw it in the incinerator now, she thought, before I straighten the apartment. She emptied the ashtrays -- the one beside her bed and the other on the breakfast table -- then started down the hall with the garbage bag in her hand. incinerator chute was at the rear of the hall, next to the service stairs. Ellen could see-., the door standing slightly open. She hesitated. # might be there. It was bad enough to ride in the elevator with him. feeling his eyes on her, but there was something unbearably intimate about standing beside him, emptying garbage. The door seemed to move a little, but nobody came out. She waited another minute. Oh, well, maybe the last person out there just forgot to shut the door tight. She opened it wider, stepped out on the stair landing. No one was there. The chute was wide, almost three feet around. Ellen opened the top and started to throw the bag down. Something was stuck in there. Her eyes saw it, but her brain refused to believe. What Was there, blocking the chute, looked like -- looked like -- a chicken's foot, gnarled, clawed, but as large as a human foot -- and an ugly, sickly green! Automatically, she reached in and clutched it. Her stomach turned at the cold feel of the thing, but still she tugged at it, trying to work it loose. It was heavy. She pulled with all her strength, felt it start to slide back up the chute. Then it was free! She gaped in sick horror at the thing she held. Her hand opened weakly and she sat down on the floor, her head swimming and her throat muscles retching. Dimly, she heard the thing rattle and bump down to the incinerator in the basement. The full horror of it gradually hit home. Ellen stood up. swaying. and ran blindly down the hall. Her feet thudded on the carpeted floor. As she passed #. she was vaguely conscious of Mrs. Moffatt's concerned face poking around the door. "Is there something wrong. Miss Tighe?" "No," Ellen managed to gasp "It's all right -- really -- all right." She kept on running, burst through the apartment door, slammed it behind her, fell on her knees in the bathroom and became thoroughly, violently ill. She continued to kneel, unable to think, her head against the cool porcelain bowl. Finally, she stood up weakly, ran cold water, washed her face and streaming eyes. Thank God the wall bed was still down! She fell on it, shaking. ghastly, impossible thing? It was the size of a man. but thin, skeleton thin, and the color of brackish water. It had two legs, two arms, like a man... but ending with those huge, birdlike claws. Heaven alone knew what its face was like. She had let go before it was that far clear of the chute. She thought of the story in the paper. So that was what the bartender saw! He wasn't drunk at all. and what happened when he told the police? They laughed at him. They'd laugh at me, too, she thought. The proof is gone, burned up in the incinerator. Why did this happen to me? Dead cats on the fire escape, dead monsters in the incinerator chute... it's this terrible neighborhood! She tried to think coherently. Maybe the cat had something to do with it. The bartender said the thing ate a mouse -- maybe it had tried to eat the cat. too. A monster like that might eat anything. Her stomach started churning again at the thought. But what was it doing in the incinerator chute? Someone in the building must have put it there, thinking it would slide all the way down and be burned up. Who? One of them, probably. But there couldn't be any more green monsters around. They can't live in an apartment house, walk the streets like anyone else, not even in this neighborhood. She remembered something else in the bartender's story. He said it looked perfectly normal at first. That meant they could look like humans if they wanted to. Hypnotism? Then any man could be... Suddenly another thought struck her. Supposing they find out I saw -- what will they do to me? She jumped up from the bed, white with fear, her faintness forgotten in the urge to escape. She snatched her bag from the dresser. threw on her brown coat. At the door, she hesitated, afraid to venture into the hall, yet afraid to stay inside. Finally, she eased open the door, peered out into the corridor. It was deserted. She ran to the elevator, punched the bell, heard the car begin its creaky, protesting ascent. The elevator door had an automatic spring closing. The first time she tried it, her hands shook and the door sprang closed before she got in. She tried it again. This time she managed to hold it open long enough to get inside. She pushed the button, felt the elevator shake and grind and move slowly down. Out into the lobby. Out into the street. now. The sun shone on the still-damp street. There were very few people around -- The Tenderloin sleeps late. She went into the restaurant next door, sat down at the white-tiled counter. She was the only customer. A sleepy-eyed waitress, her black hair untidily caught into a net, waited, pad in hand. "Just coffee," Ellen mumbled. She drank it black and it scalded her throat going down. The waitress put a nickel in the juke box and then Bing Crosby was singing "Easter Parade." Everything was so normal. Listening to Bing Crosby, how could you believe in things like green monsters? In this sane, prosaic atmosphere. Ellen thought, I must be batty. She said to herself. "I'm Ellen Tighe, bookkeeper, and I just saw the body of a green man with claws on his feet... No. that didn't help a bit. Put it this way: "I'm Ellen Tighe and I'm # years old and I'm not married. Let's face it. any psychiatrist will tell you that's enough cause for neurosis. So I'm having delusions." It made more sense that way. I read that story in the paper. Ellen thought, and it must have registered way down in my subconscious. That had to be it. Any other way, it was too horrible, too impossible to be borne. I'll go back to the apartment and call Dr. Clive, thought Ellen. She had the feeling, no doubt held over from the days of measles and mumps, that a doctor could cure anything, even green monsters on the brain. She drank the last of the coffee and fished in her coin purse for change. Picking up the check, she walked over to the cash register at the end of the counter, facing the street. The untidy waitress came from the back of the restaurant to take the money. Ellen looked out at the street through the glass front. The man from # was standing out there, smoking a cigarette, watching her. When their eyes met. he abruptly threw away the cigarette and started walking toward the apartment house. Again she felt that faint dread she had experienced in the hall earlier. The waitress picked up her quarter, gave her back a nickel and a dime. Ellen put the change into her purse, got out her key chain and held it in her hand while she walked quickly next door. # was just ahead of her in the lobby; he held the front door open for her. She kept her head down, not looking at his face, and they walked, Indian Ble, across the lobby to the elevator. He opened the elevator doors, too. and she stepped in ahead of him. she had a feeling of panic. Alone with him... cut off from help. He didn't pretend not to know her floor, but silently pressed the proper button. While the car moved slowly upward, her heart was beating wildly. I'm not convinced, she thought. I'm not convinced. I saw it so plainly... I felt it, cold in my hands. The elevator stopped. The man held the door open and for a moment she thought he was going to say something. His free hand made a swift, involuntary movement as though he were going to catch her arm. She shrank away, but he stepped back and let her through. Ellen almost ran down the hall. Behind her, she heard his footsteps going in the opposite direction toward his apartment. She was panting when she reached her door. She fumbled for the right key -- front door, office -- and then she froze. There was a scratching sound in the apartment. She put her ear close to the door, listened. There was a rasping noise, like somebody dragging a rake... or like claws, great heavy claws, moving over the hardwood floors! Ellen backed away from the door. It was true, then. She retreated, inch by inch, silently. Get away, leave before it catches you! She turned, ready to make a dash for the elevator... and faced the man from #. Down at the end of the hall, in front of his apartment, he was watching her. The way he lingered outside the restaurant, the way he looked at her. One of them... maybe underneath that homely, ordinary face, his skin was green and clammy. Maybe there were long, sharp claws on his feet. She was breathing unevenly now. Trapped! The thing in the apartment, the man in the hall. Her eyes darted to the elevator, then back, down the hall, past the door marked #... , the door marked #! She covered the few yards in a mad dash, flung herself at the door, pounding wildly. "Please, please!" she sobbed. "Mrs. Moffatt, open, please!" The door opened at once. Mrs. MolTatt's round, wrinkled face beamed at her. "Come in, my dear, come in." She almost fell over the landing. The door closed behind her. She stumbled to the davenport, sank down, gasping. Two cats rubbed against her legs, purring. Two cats? She heard herself say stupidly, "Mrs. Moffatt, where's the other cat?" and wondered why she said it. Then she understood. The old lady's face quivered, altered, melted into something... something green. from # slowly returned to his apartment. Pushing open the door, he thought. I'll never get the nerve to ask her out. Well, probably wasn't a chance, anyhow. What would a girl like her have to do with a lousy cop like me? Conclusion of #-Part Serial Vickers was safe on the other world, but he had fb return for Ann -- or she'd be slain by those who tried to fight evofufi'oni industry is fighting for its life aans a group of mutants who are attempting to destroy the world" s economic system as the first step in building a new and better world. The world, in this year of #, is in a sness. The cold war still goes on. The people of the world have lived so long under tension that tension has become the normal way of life. An indication of this tension is the rapid spread of the Pretentronist cubs, whose members seek security by pretending that they are living in the past. The mutants' attack on world industry has taken the form of placing on the market everlasting cars, razor blades, cigarette lighters and light bulbs, thus destroying one industry after another. Jay Vickers, a writer, is introduced to George Crawford by his agent, Ann Carter. Crawford is head of a coalition of industrial neress which have organized to fight the mutant menace. Crawford wanfs Vickers to write a book exposing the mutant plot and Vickers reuses. Vickers and Ann are in love, but Vickers does not realize it. He is obsessed with the memory of a walk with his lost love, Kathleen Preston, # years ago, in what seemed to be an enchanted valley. An old eccentric neighbor, Horton Flanders, hints that there is a new factor in the world which is keeping the world from war and that this same factor in the last # years, has nudged the human race into a technological gallop. When Flanders disappears, the village suspects Vickers of having done away with him. Eb, the garageman, warns Vickers that a lynch mob is forming and loans him a new Forever car, one of the mutant products, to use to maice a getaway. Fleeing, Vickers returns to the country where he had spent his childhood and fallen in love with Kathleen Preston. There, in the now abandoned house where he had lived as a boy, he finds a top, a lost childhood toy. He remembers a fact which until then he had utterly forgotten -- as a boy of eight, he had used the top to go into what had seemed to be fairyland. He is contacted by Crawford, who says that Vickers and Ann Carfer are latent mutants. He tells Vickers that the normal humans have a secret weapon they will not hesitate to use aains the mutants, pleads with Vickers to aid him in enabling the two groups to reach an undersfandin short of war. With Crawford gone, Vickers tries to phone Ann in New York, intending to warn her to get out of Crawford's reach, but her telephone does not answer. Vickers starts back to New York, but when he stops at a town, his car is wrecked by a mob. Escaping, Vickers finds a rrewspaper, which reveals that mutant shops are being wreclced, mutants are being hunted down. Vickers risks his life to go back to his wrecked car and retrieve the top he has found. Spotted, he eludes his pursuers and takes temporary refuge in the back room of a hardware store. In a frantic bid to escape, he uses the top which once before had taken him into "fairyland," although he knows that it could not have been fairyland, but another 'world co-existing with our own. The top carries him back to a wilderness, with no sign of Man anywhere. Fearing that he is trapped in a primitive, empty world, he sets out for the region where his and Kathleen's homes were located in the normal world, feeling that, if anywhere, he will find humans there. After days of travel on foot through the wilderness, he stumbles on what apparently is a factory operated entirely by robots and IS convinced that mutants are operating it to manufacture their everlasting products. He finds the home of Kathleen Preston duplicated in the co-existent world, but Kathleen is not there. Led into a waiting room by a robot, he overhears a conversation and learns that he is not a human being, but an android, a human manufactured by the mutants, and so is Ann Carter. One of the voice he recognizes as that of Horton Flanders. Enraged and chagrined, Vickers eaves the house and wanders into the woods. There he meets a man by the name of Asa Andrews, a colonist who has been brought to this place, which he calls Barth No. #. The mutants, Andrews explains, are bringing the economically and socially oppressed members of the human race there to give them a new start in life. There are an infinite number of co-exisn earths traveling in a ring around the Sun, so that with the way between the earths now opened by the mutants, there is no end to living space and opportunity for the human race. Vickers tries to figure out the setup. The mutants apparently are using Earth No. # as an operating base. Because their numbers are small, they employ robots and androids to carry on their campaign against humanity. He is surprised by the many things which he actually seems to know, almost as if he had a previous memory of the situation. He goes back to the Preston louse and there demands an explanation of Flanders. The mind and personality of the actual Vickers, Flanders explains, have been franserrerf to the android Vickers, so that, when his mind is returned to the original Jay Vickers, he will be able to transmit to his children, through the inherent memory factor, all the advantages of full-blown mutation. Flanders says one of the factors of mutancy which Vickers carries is a hunch ability, badly needed to win the fight for a mutant world. The hunch ability, Flanders explains, is the development of a hidden human trait which does away with the necessity of slow, tortuous human reasoning. He tells Vickers that his job is to stop Crawford, that he is the only man who can do it. Vickers is reluctant to fall in with the mutant campaign. Flanders dangles a reward in front of Vickers: When Crawford and his gang have been stopped, Vickers and Kathleen will be returned to the age of #. It will be as if all the other years had never been. They will be # and in love and they may even hope for immortality, since the mutants are close to the secret of eternal life. With Flanders gone, Vickers asks a robot, Hexekiah, to bring him the record of his and Kathleen's families. He finds that his mother and father have been placed in suspended animation to await the day when the mutants have established a new human society and immortality is available. Vickers, who had been on the verge of walking out on Flanders and the mutants, now realizes that he has no choice but to work for the mutants, thus to keep the faith that his parents held in the mutant cause. Hexekiah says,, however, that there is no record of any Preston family. Vickers wonders if Kathleen may be no more than an emotional trap introduced into his android brain to keep him tied to the cause of mutation "Hexekiah," he asks, "who is Horton Flanders?" "Horton Flanders," says the robot, "is an android, just the same as you." S o Vickers was supposed to stop Crawford. But first he had to figure out the angles. There was the might of industry, not one industry alone, but the might of all the industry in the entire world. There was the fact that Crawford and industry had declared open war upon the mutants. And there was the matter of the secret weapon. "Desperation and a secret weapon," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room. "But the secret weapon," he had added, "isn't good enough." First of all, Vickers had to know what the secret Veapon was. Until he knew that, there would be no point in making any plans. He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and sorted out the facts and had a look at them. Then he juggled them a bit, balancing the strength of normal human against the strength of mutant. There were many places where they canceled one another and there were other instances where they did not. He got exactly nowhere. "And of course I won't," he said. "This is the old awkward normal human way of doing. This is reasoning." Hunch was the thing. And how to do the hunching? He swept the factors from his mind and lay upon the bed, staring at the darkness where the ceiling was, and did not try to think. ' He could feel the factors bumping in his brain, bouncing together, then fleeing from each other, but he ignored and shunned them. An idea came: War. He thought about it and it grew and gripped him. War, but a different kind of war than the world had ever known. What was that phrase from the old history of the beginning of World War II? A phony war. And yet not a phony war. It was a disturbing thing to think about something you couldn't place -- to have a hunch -- that was it, a hunch gnawing at you and not knowing what it was. He tried to think about it and it retreated from him and he stopped thinking. Another idea came: Poverty. And poverty was somehow tied up with war and he sensed the two ideas, circling like coyotes around the campfire that was himself, snarling and growling at one another in the darkness beyond the flame of his understanding. He tried to banish them into the darkness and they would not banish. tomed to them and it seemed that the campfire flickered lower and the coyote-ideas did not run so fast nor snap so viciously. There was another factor, said his sleepy mind. The mutants were short on manpower. That's why they had the robots and the androids. There would be ways you could get around a manpower shortage. You could take one life and split it into many lives. You could take one mutant life and you could spread it thin, stretch it out and make it last longer and go further. In the economy of manpower, you could do many things if you just knew how. The coyotes were circling more slowly now and the fire was growing dimmer and I'll stop you, Crawford, I'll get the answer and I'll stop you cold and I love you. Ann, and -- Then, not knowing he had slept, he woke and sat upright in the bed. He knew!  summer dawn, he swung his legs from beneath the covers and felt the cold of the floor against his bare soles. Vickers ran to the door and yanked it open and came out into the landing. The stairway spiraled down into the hall below him. "Flanders !" he shouted. "Where are you, Flanders?", Hezekiah appeared from somewhere and began to climb the stairs, calling, "What is the matter, sir? Is there something you want?" "I want Horton Flanders!" Another door opened and Flanders stood there, bony ankles showing beneath his pajama bottom, sparse hair standing almost erect. "What's going on?" he asked, tongue still thick with sleep. "What's all this racket about?" Vickers strode across the hall and grabbed him by the shoulders and demanded, "How many of us are there, Flanders? How many ways was Jay Vickers' life divided?" "If you'll stop shaking me -- " "I will when you tell me the truth!" "Oh, gladly," Flanders said. "There are three of us -- you and I and..." "You?" "Certainly? Why not?" "But you're older than I." "You can do a great deal with synthetic flesh," said Flanders. "You should know that. I don't see why you're surprised." And he wasn't, Vickers suddenly realized. It was as if he had been aware of it all his life. "The third one?" he asked. "You said there are three of us." Flanders shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't tell you that yet." "Why not?" "It would -- create complications for you. Impair your efficiency and thus your value." "By knowing who the other third of Jay Vickers is?" "Decidedly. Not only can I not tell you who it is, but I can't even explain why I can't, because it would give away what I must conceal from you." A frightful suspicion came into Vickers' mind. He stepped away from Flanders and his back touched the doorway to his own room and he leaned against it, shaking. "I know." he said. "I know who the other is." Flanders shrugged. "Perhaps. You won't get confirmation or denial from me." Vickers turned and faced him. "I have it now, everything you hoped for. I know the secret weapon and the answer to it. You said I should stop Crawford. I can." "You're sure of that?" "Completely sure," said Vickers. "but what the hell's the use?" He went into his room and shut the door. when he had seen his course straight and clear before him -- the realization that Kathleen Preston might have been no more than a conditioned figment, that for years the implanted memory of the walk in the enchanted valley had blinded him to his love for Ann Carter and the love he now was sure she felt for him, disguised behind their silly bitter quarreling. Then had come the knowledge that his parents slept away the years in suspended animation, waiting for the coming of that world of peace to which they had given so much -- waiting, too, for the immortality which alone could revitalize their aged bodies. And he had not been able to turn his back upon them. Perhaps, he told himself, it was just as well, for now there was this other factor -- making more than one life out of a single individual. It was a sensible way to do things, possibly a valid method, for the mutants needed manpower. When you needed manpower, you did the best you could with what you had at hand. You placed in the hands of robots the work that could be left to robots, and you took men and women and out of each of those lives you made several, housing the living fractions in the bodies of your androids. Ann Carter was not another person, at all, but a part of him. For three androids had been given the spark of life from the person who had been Jay Vickers -- he and Horton Flanders and Ann Carter. In time, the three of them would let their life flow back again into the body of the original Jay Vickers. And when that happened, he wondered, which one of them would continue as Jay Vickers? Or would none of them? Would it be a sentence of death for all three of them and a continuation of the consciousness that Jay Vickers himself had known? Or would the three of them be mingled, so that the resurrected Jay Vickers would be a Flanders-CarterVickers personality? no way of knowing. If it were the three of them, a commingling of the three of them, God help the original Jay Vickers when he was resurrected. And the love he bore Ann Carter. the tenderness after the moonlight-and-roses years -- what of that love now? There could be no such love, he knew. You could not love a facet of yourself or let a facet of yourself love you. Twice he had known love of a woman and twice it had been taken from him and now he was trapped with' no other choice but to do the job that had been assigned him. He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd come back and talk to him and between the two of them they'd see if there was a compromise. But there was no compromise now. Not if his hunch was right. And Flanders had said that hunch was a mutant way of reasoning, a more mature, more positive way of arriving at the answer to a problem. A method, Flanders had told him, that did away with the winding path of reason that the human race has used through all its formative years. For the secret weapon was the old, old weapon of deliberate war, waged with mathematical cynicism and calculated precision. How many wars, he wondered, could the human race survive? And the answer seemed to be: Just one more real war. The mutants were the survival factor in the race of Man and now there was nothing left to him -- neither Kathleen nor Ann, nor even, perhaps, the hope of personal humanity. He must work as best he could to carry forward the lone hope of the human race. Someone tapped softly and politely at the door. "Yes," said Vickers. "Come on in." "Breakfast will be ready, sir," said Hezekiah, "by the time you get dressed." him in the dining room when Vickers came down the stairs. "The others left," said Flanders. "They had work to do. And you and I have plotting." Vickers did not answer. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Flanders. The sunlight from the windows came down across Flanders' shoulders and his head stood out against the window glass in bold relief, with the whiteness of his hair like a fuzzy halo. His clothes still were slightly shabby and his necktie had seen better days, but he still was neat and his face shone with the scrubbing he had given it. "I see that Hezekiah found some clothes for you," said Flanders. "I don't know what we'd do without Hezekiah." "A pack of money, too. It was lying on the dresser with the shirt and tie. I didn't take the time to count it, but there seem to be several thousand dollars." "Hezekiah thinks of everything." "But I don't want several thousand dollars." "Go ahead," said Flanders. "We've got bales of it." "Bales!" "Certainly. We keep making it." "You mean you counterfeit it?" "Oh. bless me, no," said Flanders, "although it's something we have often thought of. Another string to our bow, you might say." "You mean flood the normal world with counterfeit money?" "It wouldn't be counterfeit. We could duplicate the money exactly. Turn loose a hundred billion dollars of new money in the world and there'd be hell to pay." "I can see the point," said Vickers. "I'm amazed you didn't do it." Flanders looked sharply at him. "I have a feeling that you disapprove of us." "In some ways I do." with tall glasses of cold orange juice, plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, buttered toast, a jar of jam and a pot of coffee. "Have you noticed," asked the; robot, "how fine the morning is?", "I have noticed that." said! Vickers. ! "The weather here is most un-i usually fine. Much finer, I am; told, than on the earth ahead." i He served the food and left, out through the swinging door into the kitchen, where they could hear him moving about at his morning chores. "We have been humane," said Flanders, "as humane as possi ble. But we had a job to do and I once in a while someone got his I toes stepped on. It may be that I we will have to get a little roughI er now, because we are being  pushed. If Crawford and his gang I had just taken it a little easier, it would have worked out all right and we wouldn't have had to hurt them or anyone else. Now it has to amount almost to revolution. Had we been given twenty years more, it would have been evolution. Given time, we would have taken over not only world industry and world finance, but world government as well, only they didn't give us the time. The crisis came too soon." "What we need now," said Vickers, "is a counter-crisis." "We set up dummy companies. We should have set up more, but we lacked the manpower. Given  the manpower, we would have gone more extensively into the manufacture of certain basic gadgets. But we needed the little manpower we had at so many other places -- at key points or to search for other mutants to enlist into our group." "There must be many mutants." Vickers said. "There are a number of them," agreed Flanders, "but a large percentage of them are so entangled in the world and the affairs of the normal world that you can't dislodge them. Take a mutant man married to a normal woman. You simply can't break up a happy marriage. Say some of their children are mutants -- what can you do about them? Not a thing. You simply watch and wait. When they grow up and go out on their own. you can approach them, but not until then. "Take a banker or an industrialist upon whose shoulders rests an economic empire. Tell him he's a mutant and he'll laugh at you. He's made his place in life. He's satisfied. His loyalties are set to the pattern of the life he's made and there's nothing we can offer that will interest him.""You might try immortality," suggested Vickers. "We haven't got immortality." "You should have attacked on the governmental level." F landers shook his head. "We did a little of it. but not much. With a thousand major posts in governments of the world, we would have won easily and quickly. But we didn't have the thousand mutant diplomats to train. By various methods, we headed off crisis after crisis. The carbohydrates relieved a situation which would have led to war. Helping the West get the hydrogen bomb years ahead of time held off the East just when they were set to strike. But we weren't strong enough and we didn't have the time to carry out any welldefined long-range program, so we had to improvise. We introduced gadgets as the only quick way we knew to weaken the socio-economic system of Earth and, of course, that meant that sooner or later we would force Earth industry to band against us." "What else would you expect?" asked Vickers. "You interfere..." "I suppose we do." said Flanders. "The human race is our patient. It has a malignant growth. We are surgeons. It will be painful for the patient and there will be a period of convalescence, but at least the patient will live and I have the gravest doubts that the human race could survive another war." "But the high-handed methods you use!" "Now wait a moment," Flanders objected. "You think there must be other methods and I will agree, but all of them would be equally objectionable to humanity and the old human methods themselves have been discredited long ago. Men have shouted peace and there has been no peace. You would have us hold conferences? I ask you, my friend, what is the history of the conference? "Or maybe we should go before the people, before the heads of government, and say to them we are the new mutations of the race and that our knowledge and our ability are greater thpn theirs and that they should turn all things over to us so we could bring the world to peace. What would happen then? I can tell you what would happen. They'd hate us and drive us out. So there is no choice for us. We must work underground. We must attack the key points. No other way will work." you say," said Vickers, "may be true so far as the people are concerned, but how about the individual? How about the little fellow who gets socked in the teeth?"  "Asa Andrews was here this morning," Flanders told him.'He said you'd been at his place and had disappeared and he was worried about what might have happened to you. But that is beside the point. What I want to ask you is. would you say that Asa Andrews was a happy man?" 'T've never seen anybody happier." "And yet," said Flanders, "we interfered with him. We took away his job -- the job he needed to feed his family and clothe them and keep a roof above their heads. He searched for jobs and could find none. When he finally came for help, we knew that we were the ones who cost him his job that forced him finally to be evicted, to stand in the street and not know where his family would lay their heads that night. We did all this and yet, in the end, he is a happy man. There are thousands of others throughout this earth who have thus been interfered with and now are happy people. Happy. I must insist, because of our interference." "You can't claim." Vickers contended, "that there is no price for this happiness. I don't mean the loss of job, the bread of charity -- but what comes afterward. You are settling them here on this earth in what you are pleased to call a pastoral-feudal stage, but the fancy name you call it can't take away the fact that, in being settled here, they have lost many of the advantages of advanced civilization." "We have taken from them," Flanders said, 'little more than the knife with which to cut their own or their neighbor's throat. Whatever else we've taken from them will in time be given back, in full measure and with fantastic interest. For it is our hope, Mr. Vickers, that in time to come they all will be like us. that eventually the entire race may have everything we have. "We are not freaks, you understand. but human beings, the next step in evolution. We're just a step ahead of all the rest. To survive, Man had to change, had to mutate, had to become something more than what he was. We are only the first forerunners of that mutation of survival. And because we are the first, we must fight a delaying action. We must fight for the time that it will take for the rest of them to catch up with us. In us you see not one little group of privileged persons, but all of humanity." "Humanity," said Vickers sourly, "seems to be taking a dim view of your delaying fight to save them. Up on that world of ours, they're smashing gadget shops and hunting down the mutants and hanging them from lamp posts." "That's where you come in," Flanders pointed out.  me to stop Crawford." "You told me you could." "I had a hunch." "Your hunches, my friend, are more likely to be right than the most precise reasoning." "I will need some help," said Vickers. "Anything you say." "I want some of your pioneers -- men like Asa Andrews -- sent back to do some missionary work." "But we can't do that," protested Flanders. "They're in this fight, too," said Vickers. "They can't expect to sit back and not lift a finger." "Misonary work? You want them to go back to tell about these other worlds?" "That is exactly what I want." "But no one would believe them. With the feeling running as it is on Earth, they would be mobbed and lynched." Vickers shook his head. "There is one group that would believe them -- the Pretentionists. Don't you see, the Pretentionists are fleeing from reality. They pretend to go back and live in the London of Pepys' day, and to many other eras of the past, but even there they find certain restraining influences, certain encroachments upon their own free will and their security. But here there is complete freedom and security. Here they could go back to the simplicity, the uncomplicated living that they are yearning for. No matter how fantastic it might sound, the Pretentionists would embrace it." "You're certain of this?" asked Flanders. "Positive," said Vickers. "But that's not all?" "There is one thing more," said Vickers. "If there were a sudden demand on the carbohydrates, could you meet it?" 'T think we could. We could reconvert our factories. The gadget business is shot now. To dispense carbohydrates, we'd have to set up a sort of black market system. If we went out in the open, Crawford and his crew would break it up." "At first, perhaps," agreed Vickers. "But not for very long. Not when tens of thousands of people would be ready to fight him to get their carbohydrates." "When the carbohydrates are needed," Flanders said, "they'll be there." "HE Pretentionists will believe," said Vickers. "They are ripe for belief, any kind of fantastic belief. To them it will be an ' imaginative crusade. Against a normal population, we might have no chance, but we have a great segment who have been driven to escape by the sickness of the world. All they need is a spark, a word -- some sort of promise that there is a chance of real escape instead of the illusory escape they have been driven to. There will be many who will want to come to this second world. How fast can you bring them through?" "As fast as they come." "I can count on that?" "You can count on that." Flanders lifted his shoulders. "I don't know what you're planning. I hope your hunch is right." "You said it was," Vickers declared. "You know what you're going up against? You know what Crawford's planning?" "I think he's planning war. He said it was a secret weapon. I'm convinced it's war." "But war..." "Let's look at war," said Vickers, "just a little differently than it ever has been looked at. Just a little differently than the historians see it. Let's see it as a business because war. in certain aspects, is just that. When a country goes to war, it means that labor and industry and resources are mobilized and controlled by governments. The businessman plays as important a part as does the military man. The banker and the industrialist are as much in the saddle as the general. "Now let's go one step further and imagine a war fought on strictly business lines -- for the strictly business purpose of obtaining and retaining control in those very areas we are threatening. War would mean that the system of supply and demand would be suspended and that certain civilian items would cease to be manufactured and that the governments could crack down on anyone who would attempt to sell them... "Like cars, perhaps," offered Flanders, "and lighters and even razor blades." "Exactly," Vickers told him. "That way they could gain the time, for they need time as badly as we do. Upon military pretext they'd seize complete control of the world economy." "What you're saying is that they plan to start war by agreement." "T'M convinced that's it." said Vickers. "They'd hold it to a minimum. Perhaps one bomb on New York in return for a bomb on Moscow and another on Chicago for one on Leningrad. You get the idea -- a restricted war, a gentleman's agreement. Just enough fighting to convince everyone that it was real. "But phony as it might be, a lot of people would die and there'd always be the danger that someone would get sore and instead of one bomb on Moscow it might be two, or the other way around, or an admiral might get just a bit too enthusiastic and a bit too accurate." "It's fantastic," Flanders said. "You forget that they are desperate men. They are fighting, every one of them, Russian and American, French and Pole and Czech, for the kind of life that Man has built upon the Earth. To them we must appear to be the most vicious enemy mankind's ever faced. They are frightened stiff." "And you?" asked Flanders. "I'd go back to old Earth, except that I lost the top. I don't know where I lost it, but..." "You don't need the top. That was just for novices. All you have to do is will yourself into the other world. Once you've done it, it's a cinch." "If I need to get in touch with you?" "Eb's your man," said Flanders. "Just get hold of him." "You'll send Asa and the others back?" "We will." Vickers rose and held out his hand. "But," said Flanders, "you don't need to leave just yet. Sit down and have another cup of coffee." Vickers shook his head. 'Tm anxious to get going." "The robots could get you back to New York in no time at all," said Flanders. "You could return to old Earth from there." Vickers said. "I want time to think. I have to do some planning -- hunchii, you'd call it." "Buy a car," advised Flanders. "Hezekiah left you enough cash to get one and have some left over. Eb will have mor if you need it. It wouldn't be safe to travel any other way. They'll have traps set out for mutants. They'll be watching all the time." "I'll be careful." Vickers promised. XL room was dusty and festooned with spider webs and its emptiness made it seem much larger than it was. The paper was peeling from the walls and the plaster cracks ran like jagged chains of lightning from the ceiling molding to the baseboard at the floor. But one could see that at one time the peeling paper had been colorful, with garlands of little flowers and the larger figure of a Dresden shepherdess guarding woolly sheep and, beneath the film of dust, one knew the woodwork lay with some of the old wax still on it, ready to shine again when rescued from neglect. Vickers turned slowly in the center of the room and he saw that the doors were where they had been and the windows, too, in that other room where he'd just risen from the chair after eating breakfast. But here the door to the kitchen stood open and the windows were dark with the shutters closed against them. He took a step or two and he saw that he left footprints in the dust and the footprints started at the center of the room. There were no footprints leading from anywhere to the center of the room. The tracks just started there. He stood and looked at the room and tried to reconstruct it, not as he had known it less than sixty seconds before, but as he first had seen it twenty years ago. Or was it fantasy-conditioned fantasy? Had he ever actually stood in this room before? Had there ever been a Kathleen Preston? And if there had been, had Jay Vickers ever loved her or had she ever loved Jay Vickers? He knew that a Vickers family, a X)or farm family, had lived not more than mile from where he stood. He thought of them -- the mother, courageous in her ragged dress and drab sweater: the father with the pitiful little shelf of books beside his bed and how he used to sit in faded overalls and too-big shirt, reading the books in the dim yellowness of the kerosene lamp: the son, a helter-skelter sort of kid who had too much imagination and once went to fairyland. Masquerade, he thought, a bitter masquerade, a listening post set out to spy out the talk of enemies. But it had been their job and they had done it well. They had watched their son grow into a youth and known by the manner of his growing that he was no throwback, but truly one of them. And now they waited, those two who had posed as lonely farmer folk for all the anxious years, fitting themselves into an ordinary niche wlfich was never meant for such as they, against the day when they could take their rightful place in the society which they had given up to stand outpost duty for the big brick house standing proudly on its hill. He could not turn his back on them and now there was no need to turn his back on them, for there was nothing else. He walked across the dining room and along the hall that led to the closed front door and he left behind him a trail of footprints in the dust. Outside the door, he knew, was nothing -- not Ann, nor Kathleen, nor any place for him -- nothing but the cold knife-edge of duty to a life he had not chosen. yrE had his moments of doubt while he drove across the country, savoring the goodness of the things he saw and heard and smelled -- the little villages sleeping in the depth of summer with their bicycles and canted coaster wagons; the friendly bumbling of the great transport trucks on the highways; the way the girl behind the counter smiled at you when you stopped at a roadside eating place. There was nothing wrong, he told himself, nothing wrong with the little villages or the trucks or the girl who smiled at you when you asked for a cup of coffee. Man's world was pleasant and fruitful, a good place in which to live. The mutants and their plans seemed like a nightmare snatched from some lurid Sunday supplement and he wondered, as he drove along, why he didn't simply pull off the road and let the car stay sitting there while he walked off into this good life he saw on every hand. Surely there was some place within it for a man like him; somewhere, here in the flat corn lands where the little villages clung to every crossroad, that a man could find peace and security. But he saw reluctantly it was not peace and security he sought for himself alone. Just a place to hide from the threat one could sense in the air. In wanting to leave his car beside the road and walk away, he was responding to the same bone-deep fear as the Pretentionists when they escaped emotionally to some other time and place. It was the urge to flee. The trouble was that even here, in the agricultural heart of the continent, one could feel secure only if one never read a paper or listened to a broadcast and did not talk with people. For the signposts of fear, of the eternal running from the threat of insecurity, could be found on every doorstep and in every home and at every corner. H e read the papers and the news was bad. He listened to the radio and the commentators were talking about a new and deeper crisis than the world had ever faced. He listened to the people talking in the lobbies of the hotels where he spent the F' nights or in the eating places where he stopped along the road. They would talk and shake their heads and one could Ifee that they were worried. They said; "What I can't understand is how things could change so quick. Here, just a week or two ago, it looked like the East and West would band together against this mutant business. At last they had something they could fight together instead of fighting one another, but now they're back at it again and it is worse thdh ever." They said: "If you ask me, it's the Commies that stirred up this mutant business. You mark my word, they're at the bottom of it." They said: "It just don't seem possible. Here we sit tonight a erything calm and peaceful. And tomorrow..." And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. They said: "If it was up to me, I'd get in touch with the mutants. They got stuff up their sleeve that would blow these Commies plumb to hell." They said: "We never should have demobilized at the end of World War II. We should have hit them then. We could've knocked them off in a month or two." They said: "The hell of it is that you never know. No one ever tells you anything and when they do, it's wrong." They said; "I wouldn't horse around with them a single damn minute. I'd load up some bombs and I'd let them have it." He listened to them and there was no talk of compromise or understanding. There was no hope in all the talk that war could be averted. "If not this time," they said, "it'll come in five years, or ten, so let's get it over with. You got to hit them first. In a war like this, there ain't any second chance. It's either them or us..." And it was then that he understood that even here, in the heartland of the nation, irt the farms and little villages, in the roadside eating places, there was a boiling hate. That was the measure of the culture that had been built upon the Earth -- a culture founded on a hatred and a terrible pride and a suspicion of everyone who did not talk the same language or eat the same food or dress the same as everyone else did. I " was a mechanical culture of clanking machines, a technological world that could provide creature comfort, but not human justice or security. It was a culture that had worked in metals, that had delved into the atom. that had mastered chemicals and had built a complicated and dangerous gadgetry. It had concentrated upon the technological and had ignored the spiritual so that a man might punch a button and destroy a distant city without knowing, or even caring, about the lives and habits, the thoughts and hopes and beliefs of the people that he killed. Underneath the sleek technological surface, one could hear the warning rumble of machines. The gears and sprockets, the driving chain, the generator, without the brake of.human understanding, were racing on to disaster. He drove and ate and drove again. He ate and slept and drove. He watched the cornfields and the reddening apples in the orchards and heard the song of mower and smelled the scent of clover and he looked into the sky and felt the terrible fear that hung high there and he knew that Flanders had been right, that, to survive, Man must mutate and that the survival mutation must win before the storm of hate would break. But it was not only news of approaching war which filled the columns of the daily press and spurred the news commentators into word-frothed quarter hours. There was still the mutant menace and the continuing exhortations to the people to keep a watch for mutants. There were riots and lynchings and gadget shops burned. And something else : A creeping whisper that spread across the land, that was talked over at the drugstore corners and at the dusty crossroads and in the shadowed night spots of the bigger cities -- the whisper that there was another world, a brandnew world where one could start his life again, where one would escape from the thousands of years of accumulated mistakes. The press at first was wary of the rumor, then printed cautious stories with very restrained headlines and the commentators seemed at first to be just as wary, but finally took the plunge. In a day or two. the news of the other world and of the strange, starryeyed people who had talked to someone else (always someone else) and claimed they had come from there ranked with the news of approaching war and with hatred of the mutants. You could feel the world on edge, like the sudden, strident ringing of a telephone in the dead of night. the smell and feel of home as Vickers drove along its streets and felt the lump of loss come into his throat. It had been here that he had thought to settle down and spend his years in writing. His house was here and the furniture and the manuscript and the crudely carpentered shelf that held his books, but it was his home no longer, and now could never be again. And that wasn't all. he thought. The Earth, the original human earth -- the earth with the capital "E" -- was his home no more. He'd go and see Eb first and after he had seen Eb. he'd go to his own house and get the manuscript. He could give the manuscript to Arm; she would keep it safely for him. On second thought, he'd have to find some other place, for he didn't want to see Ann -- although that was not precisely the truth. He did want to see her, but knew he shouldn't, now that there lay between them the knowledge that he and she were part of a single life. He pulled the car to a stop in front of Eb's house and sat there for a moment looking at it, wondering at the neatness of the house and yard. Eb lived alone without wife or child, and it was not usual that a man alone would keep a place so tidy. He'd spend just a minute with Eb. would tell him what had happened, what was 'going on, make arrangements to keep in touch with him, and learn from him whatever news might be worth knowing. He closed the car door and went across the walk, fumbling at the latch of the gate that opened to the yard. Moonlight came down through the trees and splotched the walk with light. He followed it to the porch, and now, for the first time, he noticed that there were no lights burning in the house. He rapped on the door, knowing from poker sessions and other infrequent visits that Eb had no doorbell. There was no answer. He waited and finally rapped again and then turned from the door and went down the walk. Maybe Eb was still down at the garage, putting in some overtime on an urgent repair job, or he might be down at the tavern, having a quick one with the boys. He'd sit out in the car and wait for Eb. It probably wouldn't be safe to go down into the village business section where he'd be recognized. A voice asked, "You looking for Eb?" ' ward the voice. It was the next door neighbor, he saw, standing at the fence. "Yes." said Vickers. "I was looking for him." He was trying to remember who lived next to Eb. Someone he knew, someone who might recognize him? Tm an old friend of his," Vickers added. "Just passing through. Thought I'd stop and say hello." The man had stepped through a break in the fence and was coming across the lawn. "How well did you know Eb?" "Not too well," said Vickers. "Haven't seen him in ten or fifteen years. We used to be kids together." "Eb is dead," the neighbor said. "Dead!" The neighbor spat. "He was one of those damned mutants." "No," protested Vickers. "No, he couldn't be!" "He was. We had another one. but he got away. We always had a suspicion Eb might have tipped him off." And in the bitterness and hatred of the neighbor's words, Vickers felt the sheer terror of the strange dog cornered by the local pack. The mob killed Eb and they would kill him if they knew he had returned to town. And in just a little while they'd know, for any minute now the neighbor would recognize him -- now . he knew finally who, the neighbor was, the beefy individual who worked at the meat counter in the town's one chain store. His name was -- It didn't really matter. "Seems to me," the neighbor said, "I've seen you somewhere." "You must be mistaken. I've never been East before." "Your voice..." Vickers struck with all the power he had, starting the first down low and bringing it up in a vicious arc, twisting his body to line it up behind the blow, to put the weight of his body behind it. He hit the man in the face and the impact of flesh on flesh, of bone on bone, made a whiplike sound and the man went down. He went racing for the gate. He almost tore the car door from its hinges getting in. He thumbed the starter savagely and trod down on the gas and the car leaped down the street, spraying the bushes with gravel thrown by its frightened wheels. His arm was numb from the force of the blow he'd struck. When he held his hand down in front of the lighted dash panel, he saw that his knuckles were lacerated and slowly dripping blood. He had a few minutes' start, for once the neighbor was on his feet, once he could reach a phone, they'd begin hunting him, screaming through the night on whining tires, with shotgun and rope and rifle. He had to get away. Now he was on his own. Eb was dead, shot down or strung up or kicked to death, and Eb had been his contact. Now there was no one but himself and Ann. even know that she was a mutant. He struck the main highway and swung down the valley. There was an old abandoned road some ten miles down the highway, he remembered. A man could duck a car in there and wait until it was safe to double back again, although doubling back probably wouldn't be too safe. Maybe it would be better to take to the hills and hide out until the hunt blew over. No, he told himself, there was nothing safe. And he had no time to waste. He had to get to Crawford, had to head Crawford off the best way that he could. And he had to do it alone. abandoned road was there, halfway up a long, steep hill. He wheeled the car into it and bumped along it for a hundred feet or so, then got out and walked back hastily to the road. Hidden behind a clump of trees, he watched cars go screaming past, but there was no way to know if any of them might be hunting him. Then a rickety old truck came slowly up the hill, engine howling with the climb. He watched it. an idea growing in his mind. When it came abreast, he saw that it was closed in the back with a high end gate. He went out into the traffic lane and raced after it. caught up with it and leaped. His fingers gripped the top of the end gate and he heaved himself clear of the road, scrambled up and clambered over the boxes stacked inside the truck. He huddled there, staring out at the road behind him. A hunted animal, he thought; hunted  by men who once had been his friends. After ten miles or so, someone stopped the truck. A voice asked: "You see anyone up the road? Walking, maybe?" "Hell, no," the truck driver said. "I ain't seen a soul." "We're looking for a mutant. Figure he must have ditched his car." "I thought we had all of them cleaned out." "Not all. Maybe he took to the hills. If he did, we've got him -- unless he s disappears the way they always do when they're warned." "Your truck'll be stopped again," another voice said. "We phoned ahead both ways. They got road blocks set up." 'T'll keep my eyes peeled," the driver replied. "You got a gun?" "No." "Well, keep watching, any way." When the truck rolled on, Vickers saw the two men standing in the road. The moonlight glinted harshly on their rifles. He set to work cautiously, moving some of the boxes, making himself a hideout. He needn't have bothered. The truck was stopped at three other road blocks. At none of them did anyone do more than flash a light inside the truck. They seemed convinced that they wouldn't find a mutant as easily as finding him hidden among crates. Nor would they, for Vickers would have vanished to Earth No. # the instant they closed in. But he was glad he didn't have to. This was the quickest way to get to Ann Carter. but he went there just the same, because it was the only place he could think of where he might establish contact. But the huge show window was broken and the miniature house that had stood on display was smashed as utterly as if it had stood in a cyclone's path. The mob had done its work. He stood in front of the gaping window and stared at the wreckage of the model house and remembered the day that he and Ann had stopped there on their way to the bus station. The house, he recalled, had had a flying ducks weather vane and a sundial had stood in the yard and there had been a car standing in the driveway, but the car had disappeared completely. Dragged out into the street, probably, and smashed as his own car had He turned away from the window and walked slowly down the street. It had been foolish to go to the show room, he told himself, but there had been a slim chance -- as he knew all his chances were. He turned a comer and there, in a dusty square across the street, a good-sized crowd had gathered and was listening to someone who had climbed a park bench and was talking to them. Idly, Vickers walked across the I street, stopped opposite the crowd. The man on the park bench had taken oiT his coat and rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie. He talked almost conversationally, yet his words carried clear across the park to where Vickers stood.  "When the bombs come," asked the man, "what will happen then? They say don't be afraid. They say stay on your jobs and don't be afraid. But what will they do when the bombs arrive? Will they help you then?" He paused and the crowd was tense, tense in a terrible silence. You could feel the knotted muscles that clamped the jaws tight shut and the hand that squeezed the heart until the body turned all cold. And you could sense the fear -- speaker told them, speaking slowly and deliberately. "They will not help you, for you will be past all help. You will be dead, my friends. Dead by the tens of thousands. Dead and restless atoms. My friends, why don't you heed? The other world awaits. The poor go first. The poor and desperate, the ones for which this world you stand on has no further use. The only way you can go is in utter poverty, by quitting your jobs and giving away all your possessions. "In that other world there are no bombs. There is a beginning over, a starting over again. An entire new world, almost exactly like this world, with trees and grass and fertile land and game upon the hills and fish teeming in the rivers. The kind of place you dream of. And there is peace." There were sirens screaming, getting closer. Vickers stepped off the sidewalk and dashed across the street. A squad car roared around a comer, skidding and whipping to get straightened out. its tires screaming on the pavement, its siren a-wail as if in agony. Almost at the curb, Vickers stumbled and went sprawling. Instinctively, he pulled himself to hands and knees and flicked a sidewise glance to see the squad car. bearing down upon him. He knew he could not make it, that before he could get his feet beneath him, the car would crush him. A hand came down out of nowhere and fastened on his arm and he felt himself catapulting off the street and across the sidewalk. Another squad car came around the corner, skidding and with flattened tires protesting, almost as if the first had returned to make a second entrance. The scattered crowd was running in terror. The hand tugged at his arm and hauled him erect and Vickers saw his benefactor for the first time, a man in a ragged sweater, with an old jagged knife-mark across bis cheek. "Quick," said the man, the knife-mark writhing as he spoke, teeth flashing in the whiskershadowed face. He shoved Vickers into a narrow alleyway between two buildings and Vickers sprinted, shoulders hunched, between the walls of brick that rose on either side. He heard the man panting along behind him. "To your right." said the man. "A door." 'and the door swung open into a darkened hall. The man stepped in beside him and closed the door and they stood together in the darkness, the sound of their gasping beating like an erratic heart in the confining darkness. "That was close," the man said. "Those cops are getting on the ball. You no more than start a meeting and... He did not finish the sentence. Instead he reached out and touched Vickers on the arm. "Follow me," he said. "Be careful. There are stairs." Vickers followed, feeling his way down the creaky stairs, with the musty smell of cellar growing stronger with each step. At the bottom of the stairway, the man pushed aside a hanging blanket and they stepped into a dimly lighted room. There was an old, broken-down piano in one corner and a pile of boxes in another and a table in the center, around which four men and two women sat. One of the men said, "We heard the sirens." Scar-face nodded. "Charley was just going good. The crowd was getting ready to start shouting." "Who's your friend, George?" asked another. "He was running," said George. "Police car almost got him." They looked at Vickers with interest. "What's your name, friend?" asked George. Vickers told them. "Is he all right?" asked somebody. "He was there," said George. "He was running." "But is it safe..." "He's all right," George insisted, but Vickers noted that he said it too vehemently, too stubbornly, as if he now realized that he might have made a mistake in bringing a total stranger here. "Have a drink," offered one of the men. He shoved a bottle across the table toward Vickers. Vickers sat down in a chair and took the bottle. One of the women, the betterlooking of the two, said to him, "My name is Sally." Vickers said, 'Tm glad to know you, Sally." He looked around the table. None of the rest of them seemed ready to introduce themselves. He lifted the bottle and drank. It was cheap stuff. He choked a little on it.  "I beg your pardon?" "An activist or purist?" "He's an activist," said George. "He was right in there with the rest of them." Vickers could see that George was sweating a little, afraid he had made a mistake. "He sure as hell doesn't look like one," one of the men stated. "I'm an activist," said Vickers, because he could see that was what they wanted him to be. "He's like me," Sally declared. "He's an activist by principle, but a purist by preference. Isn't that right?" she asked Vickers. "Yes," said Vickers. "Yes, I guess that's it." He took another drink. "What's your period?" Sally asked. "My period?" repeated Vickers blankly. "Oh, yes, my period." And he remembered the white, intense face of Mrs. Leslie asking him what historic period he thought would be the most exciting. "Charles the Second," he said. "You were a little slow on that one," said one of the men suspiciously. "I fooled around some," Vickers evaded. "Dabbled, you know. Took me quite a while to find the period I liked." "And then you settled on Charles the Second," Sally said. "That's right." "Mine," Sally told him, "is Aztec." "But Aztec..." "It really isn't fair, is it? There's so little known about the Aztecs. But that way I can make it up as I go along. It's so much more fun that way." G eorge said, "it's plain damn foolishness. Maybe it was all right to piddle around with diaries and pretend you were someone else when there was nothing else to do. But now there is something else to do." "George is right," nodded the other woman. "You activists are the ones who're wrong," Sally argued. "The basic thing in Pretentionism is the ability to lift yourself out of your present time and space, to project yourself into another era." "Now. listen here," said George. "I..." "Oh, I agree that we must work for this other world. It's the kind of opportunity we wanted all along. But that doesn't mean we have to give up... "Cut it out," said one of the men, the big fellow at the table's end. "This ain't no place for gabbling." Sally said to Vickers, "We're having a meeting tonight. Would you like to come?" He hesitated. In the dim light, he could see that all of them were looking at him. "Sure," he said. "It would be a pleasure." He reached for the bottle and took another drink, then passed it on to George. "There won't be anybody stirring for a while," said George. "Not until the cops have a chance to get cooled off a bit." He took a drink and passed the bottle on. HE meeting was just getting under way when Sally and Vickers arrived. "Will George be here?" asked Vickers. Sally laughed a little. "George here? George is a roughneck. A red-hot. A born organizer. How he escaped communism is more than I'll ever know." "And you?" "We are the propagandists," she said. "We go to meetings. We talk to people. We get them interested. We do the missionary work and get the converts who'll go out and preach. When we get thm, we turn them over to people like George." "I see." The dowager sitting at the table rapped with the letter opener she was using as a gavel. "Please," she said. Her voice was aggrieved. "This meeting will come to order." Vickers held a chair for Sally, then took one for himself. The others in the room were quieting down. The room, Vickers saw, was really two -- the living room and the dining room, with the French doors between them thrown open so that in effect they became one room. Upper middle class, he thought. Just swank enough not to be vulgar, but failing the grandeur of the really rich. Real paintings on the wall and a Provincial fireplace and furniture that was of some period or other, although he couldn't name it. He glanced at the faces around him and tried to place them. An executive type over there -- a manufacturer's representative, he'd t# guess. And that one who needed a haircut might be a painter or a writer, although nota successful one. And the woman with the iron-gray hair and the outdoor tan was more than likely a member of some riding set. But it did not matter, he knew. Here it was upper middle class in an apartment house with its doorman uniformed, while across the city there would be another meeting in a tenement which had never known a doorman. And in the little villages and the smaller cities they would meet perhaps at the banker's house or at the barber's house. And in each instance someone would rap on the table and say would the meeting come to order, please. At most of the meetings, too, there would be a woman or a man like Sally, waiting to talk to the members, hoping to make converts. dowager was saying, "Miss Stanhope is the first member on our list to read tonight." Then she sat back, contented, now that she had them finally quieted down and the meeting started.  Miss Stanhope stood up and she was, Vickers saw, the personification of frustrated female flesh and spirit. She was forty, he would guess, and manless, and she would hold down a job that in another fifteen years would leave her financially independent -- and yet she was running from a specter, seeking sanctuary behind the cloak of another personality from the past. Her voice was clear and strong, but with a tendency to simper, and she read with her chin held high, which made her neck appear more scrawny than it was, in the manner of an elocution student. "My period, you may remember," she said, "is the American Civil War, with its locale in the South." She read : "Ocf. #, # -- Mrs. Hampton sent her carria for me today, with old Ned, one of her few remaining servants, driving, since most of the others have run off, leaving her quite destitute of help, a situation in which many of us also find ourselves..." Running away, thought Vickers, running away to the age of crinoline and chivalry, to a war from which time had swept away the blood and agony and made of its pitiful participants, both men and women, figures of pure romantic nostalgia. She read: "... Isabella was there and I was glad to see her. It had been years since wehad met, that time back there, in Alabama... Fleeing, of course. And yet a fleeing now turned into a readymade instrument to preach the gospel of that other world, the peaceful second world behind the scarred and tired Earth. No more than three weeks and they're already organized, Vickers thought, with the Georges to do the shouting nd the running and occasionally the dying, and Sallys to do undercover work. And yet, even with the other wofld before them, even with the promise of the kind of life they seek, they still cling to the old nostalgic ritual of the magnoliascented past. It was the mark of suspicion upon them, refusing to give up the dream through fear that the actuality, if they reached for it, would dissolve beneath their fingertips. Miss Stanhope read on; " saf ior an hour beside" old Mrs. Hampton's bed, reading Vanity Fair, a book of which she is fond, having read it herself, and having had it read to her since the onset of her infirmity, more times than she can remember.'  dung to the scented dream, there were others, the Georges among them, who would fight for the promise that they sensed in the second world. They would spread the word and they would flee the police when the sirens sounded and they would hide in the dark cellars and come out again when the police were gone. The world is safe, thought Vickers. It has been placed in hand that will guard and cherish it, that can do no other than guard and cherish it. Miss Stanhope read on and the old dowager sat behind the table, nodding her head a little drowsily, but with a firm grip still upon the letter opener, and all the others were listening, some of them politely, but most with consuming interest. When the reading was done, they would ask questions on points of research and pose other matters to be clarified and would make suggestions for the revision of the diary and would compliment Miss her work. Then someone else would stand up and read about life in some other time and place and once again all of them would sit and listen and repeat the performance. Vickers felt the futility of it, the dread, dead hopelessness. It was as if the room were filled with the spice scent of many dusty years. When Miss Stanhope had finished and the room was stirring with the questions asked and the questions to be asked, he rose quietly from his chair and went out to the street. The stars were shining. Tomorrow he would go to see Ann Carter. And that was wrong, he knew. He shouldn't see her. XC.IV When he heard her footsteps coming across the floor, he knew he should turn from the door and run. He had no right to come here and he knew he shouldn't have. There was no reason why he should see her at all, for the dream of her was dead as the dream of Kathleen. But he had had to come, literally had to. He had paused twice before the door of the apartment building and then had turned around and gone away again. This time he had not ttimed back, could not, but had gone in and now here he was, before her door, listening to the sound of footsteps corping toward him. And what, he wondered wildly, would he say to her when the door was opened? What would he do then? Go in as if nothing M# at all had happened, as if they each were the same person they had been the last time they had met? Should he tell her she was a mutant and. more than that, an android, a manufactiired woman? The door came open and she was a woman, as lovely as he remembered her, and she reached out a hand and drew him in and closed the door behind them and stood with her back against it. "Jay," she said, "Jay Vickers." He tried to speak, but he couldn't. He only stood there looking at her and thinking: It's a lie. It can't be true. "What happened, Jay? You said you would call me." He held out his arms, fighting not to, and she made a quick, almost desperate motion and was in them. He held her close against him and it was if the two of them stood in the final consolation of a misery which each had believed the other did not know. "I thought at first you were just a little crazy," she told him. "Remembering some of the things you said over the phone from that Wisconsin town, I was almost sure there was something wrong with you -- that you'd gone off the beam. Then I got to remembering things strange little things you had done or said or written and..." "Take it easy, Ann," he said. "You don't need to tell me." "Jay, have you ever wondered if you were quite human? If there might not be something in you that wasn't quite the usual pattern -- something unhuman." "Yes." he said. "I've often wondered that." "I'm sure you aren't. Not quite human, I mean. And that's all right. Because I'm not quite human, either." him, he knew finally that here, clinging to one another, were two wan souls, lost and friendless in a sea of humanity. Neither of them had anyone but the other. Even if there were no love between them, they still must be as one and stand against the world. The telephone buzzed at them from its place upon the end tabic and they scarcely heard it. "I love you, Ann," he said, and a part of his brain that was not a part of him, but a cold, detached observer that stood off to one side, reminded him that he had known he could not love her, that it was impossible and immoral and preposterous to love someone who was closer than a sister, whose life had once been a part of his own and once more would blend with his life into another personality that might be unaware of them. "I remembered," Ann told him in a vague and distant voice. "And I haven't got it straight. Maybe you can help me get it straight." He asked, lips stiff with apprehension, "What did you remember, Ann?" "A walk I had with someone. I've tried, but I can't recall his name, although I'd know his face, even after' all these years. We walked down a valley, from  big brick house that stood on a hill. We walked down the valley and it was springtime because the wild crab apple blossoms were in bloom and there were singing birds and the funny thing about that walk is that I know I never took it, but I remember it. How can you remember something. Jay, when you know it never happened?" "I don't know," said Vickers. "Imagination, maybe. Something that you read somewhere." But this was it. he knew. This was the proof of what he had suspected. There were three of them, Flanders had said, three androids made out of one human life. The three of them had to be himself and Flanders and Ann Carter. Ann remembered the enchanted valley as he remembered it -- but because he was a man, he had walked with a girl by the name of Kathleen Preston, and since Ann was a woman, she had walked with a man whose name she could not recall. And when and if she did recall it, of course it would be wrong. For if he had walked with anyone, it had not been with a girl named Kathleen Preston, but a girl with some other name. "And that's not all," said Ann. "I know what other people think. "Please, Ann," he said. "I try not to know what they think, now that I realize that I can do it. I've been doing it, more or less unconsciously, all the time for years. Anticipating what people were about to say. Getting the ' jump on them. Knowing their objections before they even spoke them. Knowing what would appeal to them. I've been a good businesswoman, Jay, and that may be why I am. I can get into other people's minds. I did only the other day. When I first suspected that I could do it, I tried deliberately, just to see if I could or was imagining it. And I could. Jay, I could!" Ann's one of the telepaths, one of those who can go out to the stars. "What are we. Jay?" she asked. "Tell me what we are." The telephone shrieked at them. "Later," he said. "It's not so terribly frightening. In some ways it's wonderful. I came back because I loved you, Ann. I tried to stay away, but I couldn't. Because it isn't right... "It's right," she almost sang. "Oh. Jay, it's the Tightest thing there ever was. I prayed that you would come back to me again. When I knew there was something wrong, I was afraid you wouldn't -- that you might not be able to, that something awful might have happened to you. I prayed and the prayer was wrong because prayer was strange to me and I felt hypocritical and awful..." ringing was a persistent snarl. "The phone," she said. He let her go and she walked to the davenport and sat down and took the receiver out of its cradle, while he stood and looked at the room and tried to bring it and Ann into focus with his memory. "It's for you," she said. "For me?" "Yes. Did anyone know you were coming here?" He shook his head, but took the receiver and stood with it in his hand, trying to guess who might be calling him and why. Wondering, he knew that he was scared, felt the sweat break out beneath his armpits and trickle down his ribs, because it could only be one person on the phone. A voice .said: "This is the Neanderthaler, Vickers." "Club and all?" asked Vickers. "Break out your spear," said Crawford. "We have a bone to chew." "At your office?" "There's a cab outside. It is waiting for you." "How long have you been tracking me?" Crawford chuckled. "Ever since Chicago. We have the country plastered with our analyzers." "Picking up much stuff?" "A few strays here and there." "Still confident about that secret weapon?" "Sure, I'm confident, but..." "Go ahead. You're talking to a friend." "I have to hand it to you, Vickers. Get over here fast." He hung up. Vickers took the receiver down from his ear and stared at it a moment, then placed it in the cradle. "That was Crawford," he said to Ann. "He wants to talk to me." "Is everything all right, Jay?" "Fine." "You'll come back?" "Well, of course." "You know what you are doing?" "Oh, yes," said Vickers. "I know what I'm doing now.' chair beside the desk. Vickers saw with a start that it was the same chair he'd sat in when he'd come to the office, only weeks ago, with Ann. "It's nice seeing you again," said Crawford. "I'm glad we can get together." "Your plans must be going well," Vickers said. "You are more affable than when I saw you last." "I'm always affable. Worried and afraid sometimes, but always affable." "You haven't picked up Ann Carter." Crawford shook his head. "There's no reason to. Not yet." "But you're watching her." "We're watching all of you. The few that are left." "Any time we want to, we can come unwatched." "I don't doubt it," Crawford afmitted, "but why do you stick around? If I were a mutant, I wouldn't." "Because we have you licked and you're the one who knows it," said Vickers, wishing he were half as confident as he hoped he sounded. "We can start a war. All we have to do is lift a finger and the shooting begins.' "You won't start it." "You played your hand too hard. You're pushing us into war against our will as a last defense." "You mean the other world idea?" "Exactly," Crawford said. He sat and stared at Vickers with the pale blue bullet eyes peering out unemotionally from the rolls of flesh. "What do you think we'll do?" he asked. "Stand still and let you steamroller us? You tried the gadgets and we stopped them with, I admit, rather violent methods. So you tried an approach, a sort of religion, a piece of park bench fanaticism -- tell me, Vickers, what do you call this business?" "The blunt truth," said Vickers. "No matter what it is, it's good. Too good. It'll take a war to stop it." "You'd call it subversive, I suppose." "It is subversive," Crawford said. "Already, just a few days since it started, it has shown results. People quitting their jobs, walking away from their homes, throwing away their money. Poverty, they said, that was the key to the other world. What kind of gag have you cooked up, Vickers?" "What happens to these people? The ones who quit their jobs and threw away their money A# -- have you kept a check on what happens to them?' in his chair. "That's the thing that scares us. Those people disappeared before we could round them up.' "They went to the other world," said Vickers. "I don't know where they went, but I know what will happen if we let it continue. Our workers will leave us. a few at first and then more and more... "If you want to turn on that war. start reaching for the button." "We won't let you do this to us," Crawford said. "We will stop you somehow. I told you about the analyzers. Well, they're everywhere. In railroad terminals, bus depots, hotel lobbies, eating joints... "I thought as much. That's how you picked me up." "I warned you once before. Don't despise us because we're merely human. With an organization of world industry, you can do a lot of things and do them awfully fast." "You outsmart yourself," said Vickers. "You've found out a lot of things from those analyzers that you didn't want to know." "Like what?" "A lot of your industrialists and bankers and the others who are in your organization are really the mutants you are fighting." "I said I had to hand it to you. Would you mind telling me how you planted them?" "We didn't plant them, Crawford." "You didn't...  "Let's take it from the start," said Vickers. "Let me ask you what a mutant is." "Why, I suppose he's an ordinary man who has some extra talents, an understanding of certain things that the rest of us can't grasp." "And suppose a man were a mutant and didn't know he was, but regarded himself as an ordinary man, what then? Where would he wind up? Doctor, lawyer, beggarman. thief? He'd wind up at the top of the heap. He'd be an eminent doctor or a smart attorney or an artist or a highly successful editor or writer. He might also be an industrialist or banker." The blue bullets of the eyes stared out from Crawford's face. "You," said Vickers, "have been heading up one of the finest group of mutants in the world today, men wc couldn't touch because they were tied too closely to the normal world." "I know I have." "And what are you going to do about it, Crawford?" "Not a single thing. I'm not going to tell them." "Then I will." "No, you won't," said Crawford. "Because you, personally, are washed up. How do you think you've lived this long in spite of all the analyzers we have? I've let you, that's how." "You claimed you wanted to make a deal." "Not any more. You were an asset once. You're a danger now." "You're throwing me to the wolves?" "That's just what Tm doing. Good day, Mr. Vickers. It was nice knowing you." Vickers rose from the chair. "I'll see you again." "That," said Crawford, "is something I doubt." thought furiously. It would take Crawford a little while to spread the word that he was unprotected, that anyone could pot him like a sitting duck. If it had only been himself, it would have been an easy matter, but Ann was involved. Ann, without a doubt, would become fair game, too, for now the chips were down and Crawford wasn't the kind of man who would play according to rules. Vickers had to reach Ann. Reach and tell her fast, keep her from asking questions and make her understand. At the ground floor, he stepped out with the other passengers and as he walked away, he saw the operator leave the elevator open and dash for a phone booth. Reporting me, he thought. There was an analyzer on the elevator and it made some sort of a signal that would go undetected to anyone but the operator. And there were other analyzers everywhere, Crawford had said, in railroad terminals and bus stations and eating places -- anywhere that a man might go. Once one of the analyzers spotted a mutant, the word would be called in somewhere -- to an exterminator squad, perhaps -- and they would hunt the mutant down. Maybe they spotted him with portable analyzers, or maybe there were other ways to spot him, and once they spotted him, it would be all over. All over because the mutant would not know, because he would have no warning of the death that tracked him. Given a moment's notice, a moment to concentrate, he could disappear, as the mutants had disappeared at will when Crawford's men had tried to track them down for interview and parley. What was it Crawford had said? "You ring the bell and wait. You sit in a room and wait." But now the mutants seldom had a chance since they had no warning. Except that always before, when Jay Vickers had been spotted. he'd been known as one of the few who were not to be molested -- he and Ann and maybe one or two others. But now it would be different. He was only another mutant, a hunted rat, just like all the others. TE reached the sidewalk outside the building and stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. A cab. he thought, but there would be an analyzer in it. There would be analyzers everywhere. There must be one at Ann's apartment building. How else could Crawford have known so quickly that he had arrived there? There was no way he could duck the analyzers, no way to hide or prevent them from knowing where he might be going. He stepped to the sidewalk's edge and hailed a cruising cab. It drew up and he stepped inside and gave the driver the address. The man threw a startled backward look at him. "You won't be in any trouble," said Vickers, "as long as you don't try anything." "It's all right, chum," the driver nervously told him. "I won't try a thing." "That's just fine," said Vickers. "Now let's go." He watched the blocks slide by, keeping an eye on the driver, watching for any motions that might be signals that there was a mutant in the taxi. The man made none and Vickers gradually relaxed. A thought struck him. What if they had gone immediately to Ann's apartment and had found her there and were waiting for him now? It was a risk, he decided, that he'd have to take a chance on. HE cab stopped in front of the building and Vickers leaped out. The driver gunned the car, not waiting for the fare. Vickers ran toward the door, ignored the elevator, and went pounding up the stairs. He reached Ann's door and seized the knob and turned it, but the door was locked. He rang the bell and nothing happened. He rang it again and again. Then he backed to the opposite wall and hurled his body forward across the corridor, smashing at the door. He felt it give as the hinges were loosened. He backed up again. The third try and the door ripped away and sent him sprawling. "Ann!" he shouted, leaping up. There was no answer. He went running through the rooms and found no one there. He .stood for a moment, sweat breaking out on him. Ann was gone! There was little time left to them and Ann was gone! He plunged out the door and went tearing down the stairs. When he reached the sidewalk, the cars were pulling up. three of them, one behind the other, and there were two more across the street. Men were piling out of it, men who carried guns. He tried to swing around to get back into the door again and bumped into someone. It was Ann, arms filled with shopping bags, and from one of the bags, he saw, protruded the leafy top of a bunch of celery. "Jay," she said, "what's going on? Who are all these men?" "Quick," he ordered, "get into my mind. The way you did the others. The way you know how people think." "But... "Quick!" He felt her come into his mind, groping for his thoughts, fastening onto them. Something hit the stone wall of the building just above their heads and went twisting skyward with a shriek of tortured metal. "Hang on," he said. "We're getting out of here." H# closed his eyes and willed himself to the other earth, with all the urgency and will he could muster. He felt the tremor of Ann's mind and then he slipped and fell. He hit his head on something hard and stars wheeled inside his skull and something tore at his hand and something else fell on top of him. he heard the sound of wind blowing in the trees and there were no buildings. He lay fiat upon his back, at the foot of a gray granite boulder. A bag of groceries, with the top of a bunch of celery sticking out of it, lay upon his stomach. He sat up. "Ann," he called. "Here I am," she said. "You all right?" "Physically, yes, but not mentally. What happened? Where did we go to?" "We fell off that boulder," Vickers told her. He stood up and reached down a hand to help her to her feet. "But the boulder, Jay! Where I live?" "We're in the second world," said Vickers. They stood together and looked across the land -- wild, desolate, wooded, with scattered rocks and granite ledges sticking from the hilt slopes. "The second world," repeated Ann dazedly. "That crazy stuff that's been in the papers?" Vickers nodded gravely. "There's nothing crazy about it. Ann. It exists." "I'll take your word for it." She paused to grow practical. "Well, we brought our dinner with us. Help me pick up these groceries." Vickers got down on hands and knees to chase down the potatoes that had escaped from the sack. It had split wide open in the tumble from the boulder. I T was Manhattan as it must have appeared before the white man came, finally to build upon it the Man-made half-wonder. half-monstrosity. But now it was a world unspoiled. "And yet," said Vickers, "there must be something here. The mutants would have to have some sort of supply depot to store the stuff they'd want to funnel to New York." "And if they haven't?" He looked at her and grinned wryly. "How are you at travel?" "All the way to Chicago?" "Farther than Chicago." he told her. "On foot. Although we might rig up a raft when we hit a westward-flowing river." "There'd be other mutant centers." "I suppose there would be, but we might not be lucky enough to stumble on one of them." She shook her head at him. "This is all so strange." "Not strange," he said. "Just sudden. If we'd had the time. I'd have explained -- prepared you -- but we didn't." "J#y they were shooting at us." Vickers nodded grimly. "They play for keeps." "But they're human beings. Jay. Just like us." "Not like us." said Vickers. "Only human. That's the trouble with them. Being human in this day isn't quite enough." He tossed two or three pieces of wood on the campfire. "Come on. let's go," he said. "But it's getting dark." "If there's anything on the island, we'll spot it by the lights. Just up on that hill. If we don't see anything, we'll come back. When morning comes, we can look again." "Jay," she said, "in lots of ways, it's just like a picnic." "I'm no good at riddles. Tell me why it's like a picnic." "Why, the fire and eating in the open and..." "Forget it," Vickers stated. "We're not on any picnic." H e moved ahead and she followed close behind him. threading their way between the thickets and the boulders. Night hawks skimmed the air above them in graceful, insect-catching swoops. From somewhere far off came the wickering of a coon. A few lightning bugs flashed on and off, dancing in the bushes. They climbed the hill, not very high, but fairly steep, and when they reached the top they saw the lights, far down toward the island's tip. "There it is." said Vickers. "I figured they would have to be here." "It's a long way off. Will we have to walk it?" "Maybe not." "But how... "And you a telepath." She shook her head. "I don't understand." "Go on and try," said Vickers. "Just want to talk to someone down there." And he remembered Flanders, rocking on the porch and saying that distance should be no bar to telepathy, that a mile or a light-year should not make the slightest difference. "You think I can?" "I don't know," said Vickers. "You don't want to walk, do you?" "Not that far." "Then give it a try." They stood silently, looking toward the small area of light in the gathering darkness. He tried to pick out the different locations. There was where Rockefeller Center was located back on the old Earth, and up there Central Park and down there, where the East River curved in, the old abandoned United Nations structure. But the areas were covered with grass and trees instead of concrete and asphalt. "Jay!" Her whisper was tense with excitement. "Yes, Ann." "I think I have someone." "A man dr a woman?" "Good heavens, neither! He says he's a robot! He says he'll send someone -- no, not someone -- something for us."  "Ann..." "He says for us to wait right here. They'll be right along." "Ann, ask him if they can make movies." "Movies?" "Motion pictures. Have they got cameras and film?" "But what do you... "Just go ahead and ask him." "He says they can." "That's fine," said Vickers. "But motion pictures?" "I have an idea we can lick Crawford yet." "Oh, no, you aren't going back!" "You bet I am." "Jay Vickers, I won't let you!" "You can't stop me," Vickers said. "Here, let's sit down and wait to be picked up." T hey sat down, close together. "I have a story," Vickers said. "It's about a boy. His name was Jay Vickers and he was very young..." He stopped abruptly. "Go on," she said. "I'd like to hear your story." "Some other time." "I want to hear it now." "Not when a moon is coming up," said Vickers. "That's no time for stories." And he wondered; Can I ever tfell her that w'e are closer than she thinks, that we came from the same life and will go back to the same body and that we cannot love one another? She leaned against him and put her head against his shoulder and looked up at the sky. "It's getting clearer," she said, "not so strange now. Queer as it may be, it seems right. This other world and the things we have, those strange abilities and all and the strange remembering." He put his arm around her and she turned her head and gave him a quick, impulsive kiss. "We'll be happy," she said. "The two of us in this new world." And now, he knew, he could never tell her. telephone and Vickers asked for Crawford. "Mr. Crawford is in conference," she said. "He cannot be disturbed." "Tell him this is Vickers." "Mr. Crawford cannot be... Did you say Vickers? Jay Vickers?" "That's right. I have news for him." "Just a minute, Mr. Vickers." He waited, wondering how long he might have, for the analyzer in the phone booth must have sounded the alarm and the exterminator squad must be on the way. Crawford's voice said, "Hello, "Vickers." "Call off your dogs," said Vickers. "They're wasting your time and theirs." He heard the rage in Crawford's voice. "I thought I told you -- " "Take it easy. You haven't got a chance of potting me. Your men couldn't do it when they had me cornered... So if you can't kill me, you better dicker with me." "Dicker?" "That's what I said." "Listen, Vickers. I'm not -- " "Of course you will," said Vickers. "That other world business is really rolling now and you are getting hurt. It's time you talked sense." 'Tm tied up with my directors." Crawford said. "That's fine. They're the ones I really want to talk to." "Vickers, no matter what you're .planning, you'll never get away with it. You can't leave here alive. I can't save you if you keep up this foolishness." "I'm not going away." "I like you, Vickers. I don't know why. I certainly have no reason to..." "I'm coming up." "All right," said Crawford wearily. "Do what you want. It's your funeral." Vickers picked up the film case and stepped out of the booth. An elevator car was waiting and he walked swiftly toward it, shoulders hunched a little against the anticipated bullet in the back. "Third floor," he said. The elevator operator didn't bat an eye. The analyzer by noNff must have given its signal, but more than likely the operator had his instructions on third floor passengers.  North American Research and Crawford was waiting for him in the reception room. "Come on," said Crawford He turned and marched ahead and Vickers followed him down the long hall. He looked at his watch and did fast mental arithmetic. It was going better than he'd hoped. He still had a margin of two or three minutes. It hadn't taken as long to convince Crawford as he had thought it might. Ann would be calling in ten minutes. What happened in that time would decide success or failure. Crawford stopped in front of the door at the end of the hall. "You know what you are doing. Vickers?" Vickers nodded. "One slip and... Crawford made a hissing sound between his teeth and sliced a finger across his throat. "I understand," said Vickers. "Those men in there are the desperate ones. There still is time to leave. I won't tell them you were here." "Cut out the stalling, Crawford." "What have you got there?" "Some documentary film. It will help explain what I have to say. You've got a projector inside?" Crawford nodded. "But no operator." "I'll run the machine myself." "A deal?" "A solution," Vickers said. "All right, then. Come in." The shades were drawn and the room was twilit and the long table at which the men sat seemed to be no more than a row of white faces turned toward them. Vickers followed Crawford across the room, feet sinking into the heavy carpeting. He looked at the men around the table and saw that many of them were public figures. There, at Crawford's right hand, was a banker, and beyond him a man who had often been called to the White House to be entrusted semi-diplomatic missions. And there were others also that he recognized, although there were many that he didn't, and a few of them wore the strange dress of other lands., Here was the directorate of North American Research, those men who guided the destiny of the embattled normals against the mutant menace -- Crawford's desperate men. "A strange thing has happened, gentlemen." said Crawford. "A most unsual thing. We have a mutant with us." TN the silence, the white faces flickered around at Vickers, then turned back again. "Mr. Vickers," Crawford went on, "is an acquaintance of some standing. You will recall that we have talked of him before. At one time, we hoped he might be able to help us reconcile the differences between the two branches of the human race. "He comes to us of his own accord and has indicated to me that he may have a possible solution. He has not told me what that solution might be. I brought him directly here. It's up to you, of course, whether you want to hear what he has to say." "Why, certainly," said one of them. "Let the man talk." And another said, "Most happy to." The others nodded their agreement. Crawford said to Vickers, "The floor is yours." Vickers walked to the table's head and he was thinking: So far. so good. Now if only the rest works out. If I don't make a slip. If I can carry it off. Because it was win or lose; there was no middle ground. He set the film case on the table and said, "No infernal weapon, gentlemen. It's a film that, with your permission, I'll show you in just a little while." They simply sat and looked at him and there was nothing that you could read in their faces, but he felt the coldness of their hatred. "You're about to start a war," he said. "You're meeting here to decide if you should reach out and turn oh the tap..." The white faces seemed to be leaning forward, all of them straining toward him. 'One of them said: "You're either a brave man, Vickers, or an absolute idiot." "Tve come here," said Vickers. "to end the war before it starts." R eaching into his pocket, Vickers' hand came out in a flicking motion and tossed the thing it held onto the table. "That's a top," he said. "A thing that kids play with -- or used to play, at any rate. I want to talk to you for a minute about a top." "A top?" raged someone. "Is he trying to make fools of us?" But the banker across the table said reminiscently. "I had a top like that when I was a boy. They don't make them any more. I haven't seen one of them in years." He reached out a hand and picked up the top and spun it on the table. The others craned their necks to look at it. Vickers glanced at his watch. Still on schedule. Now if nothing spoiled it! "You remember the top, Crawford?" asked Vickers. "The one that was in my hotel room that night you unexpectedly dropped in on me?" "I remember it." said Crawford. "You spun it and it vanished." "And it came back again." "Crawford, why did you spin that top?" Crawford licked his lips in embarrassment. "Why, I don't know. It might have been an attempt to rescue a lost memory, an urge to be a boy again." "You asked me what the top was for." "You told me it was for going into fairyland and I told you that a week before I would have said that we were crazy -- you for saying a thing like that and I for listening to you." "But before I came in, you spun the top. Tell me, Crawford, why did you do it?" "Go ahead," the banker urged. "Tell him." "I did." said Crawford. "I just told you the reason." Behind Vickers, a door opened. He turned his head and saw a secretary beckoning to Crawford. time, Vickers thought. Working like a charm. Ann was on the phone and Crawford was being called from the room to talk to her. And that was the way he'd planned it, for with Crawford in the room, the plan would be hopeless. "Mr. Vickers," the banker said, "I'm curious about this business of the top. What connection is there between a top and the problem that we face?" "A sort of analogy," replied Vickers. "There are certain basic differences between the normals and the mutants and I can ex plain them best by the use of a top. But before I do, I'd like you to see my film. After that I can go ahead and tell you and you will understand me. If you gentlemen will excuse me?" He lifted the film case from the table. "Why, certainly," the banker said. "Go right ahead." Vickers went back to the stairs which led to the projection booth, opened the door and went inside. He'd have to work fast and surely, for Ann could not hold Crawford on the phone very long and she had to keep Crawford out of the room for at least five minutes. He slid the film into the folder and threaded it through the lenses with shaking fingers and clipped it on the lower spool and then swiftly checked what he had done. Everything seemed all right. He found the switches and turned them on and the cone of light sprang out to spear above the conference table. On the screen before the table was a with the stripes moving up and disappearing, maving up and disappearing -- The film track said; "Here you see a top, a simple toy, but it presents one of the most baffling illusions..." The words were right, Vickers knew. Robotic experts had spent days picking out the right words, weaving them together, with just the right relationship, just the right inflection, to give them maximum semantic value. The words would hold the audience, fix their interest on the top, and keep it there after the first few seconds. He ca.mc silently down the stairs and moved over to the door. If Crawford should come back, he could hold him off until the job was done. HE film track said: "Now if you will watch closely, 'you will see that the lines of color seem to move up the body of the top and disappear. A child, watching the lines of color, might wonder where they went, and so might anyone..." He tried to count the seconds off and the seconds dragged. The film track said: "Watch closely now -- watch closely. They come up and disappear, they come up and disappear -- ' There were not nearly so many men at the table, only two or three now, and they were watching so closely that they had not even noticed the others disappear. Maybe those two or three would stay. Of them all, these few might be the only ones who weren't unsuspecting mutants. Vickers opened the door softly and slid out and closed it behind him. The door shut out the soft persuasive voice of the film tract : Cme up and disappear -- watch Why did you spin that top?" Crawford shook his head. 'T can't understand it, Vickers. It doesn't make any sense, but I went into fairyland once myself. Just like you, when I was a kid. I remembered it after I talked to you. Maybe because I talked to you. I sat on the floor and watched the top spin and wonclosely-come up and..." Crawford was coming down the hall, lumbering along. He saw Vickers and stopped. "What do you want?" he asked. "What are you out here for?" "A question," Vickers said, "one you didn't answer in there. dered where the stripes were going -- you know how they come up and disappear and then another one comes up and disappears. I wondered where they went and I got so interested that I must have followed them, because all at once I was in fairyland and there were a lot of Crawford stared at him. "You don't believe me?" "I do." . It hadn't been Ann Carter, afI ter all! Flanders and he and Crawford -- they were the three who had been given life from the body of Jay Vickers!  And Ann? i flowers and I picked one. When I got back again, I still had the flower and that's the way I knew I'd been in fairyland. You see, it was winter and there were no flowers and when I showed it to Mother..." "That's enough," Vickers interrupted elatedly. "That is all Ann had within hef the life of that girl who had walked the valley with him -- the girl he remembered as Kathleen Preston, but who had some other name. For Ann remembered the valley and that she had walked the valley in the springtime with someone by her side. There might be more than Ann.  There might be three of Ann just as there were three of him, but that didn't matter, either. Maybe Ann's name really was Ann Carter as his really was Jay Vickers. Maybe that meant that, when the lives drained back into the rightful bodies, it would be his consciousness and Ann's that would survive. And it was all right now to love Ann. She was a separate person and not a part of him. Ann had come into this world to place a telephone call and to get Crawford from the room, so that he would not recognize the danger of the top spinning on screen, and now she'd gone back to the other world again and the threat was gone. "Everything's all right," said Vickers. "Everything's just fine." Soon he'd be going back himself and Ann would be waiting for him. And they'd be happy, the way she had said they'd be, sitting there on a Manhattan hilltop waiting for the robots. "Well, then." said Crawford, "let's go back in again." Vickers put out his hand to stop him. "There's no use going in." "No use?" "Your directors aren't there," said Vickers. "They're in the second world. The one, you remember, that the Pretentionists preached about in the squares all over town." "The top!" "That's right." "We'll start again," said Crawford. "Another board, another... "You haven't got the time. This Earth is done. The people are fleeing from it. Even those who stay won't listen to you, won't fight for you." "I'll kill you," Crawford said. "I'll kill you, Vickers." "No, you won't." They stood face to face silently, tensely. "No," said Crawford. "No, I guess I won't. I should, but I can't. Why can't I kill you, Vickers?" Vickers touched the big man's arm. "Come on, friend," he said softly. "Or should I call you brother?" What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess?  to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has ft that their secrets of personal power and suecessful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than #lOOth of #o of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes, Your thoughts and actions' are governed by fundamental laws. Example; The law of compensation la as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in Life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and sdf-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the higi regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- tho.se who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells h#w to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended tor general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to; Scribe O.Y.S. Sati Joso California You've dene It often. Call it day-dceamint if you like, but you've seen yourself in a biftger job -- ttivinx orders and making decisions -- driving nS in a smart new car -- buying your family a fine home. There's nothing wrong with dreams. But how about making them come true? You Look around you. The men who are going places are the trained men. They've learned 'T noticed that tht trained men held the beller Jobo. Tnal'e when I decided . C. Seoutee. Knrolling Hh ' special iilb that bring them better jobs and higher pay. 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What worlds would you want to visit? A problem, eh? Any era you chose would eliminate all the others, and any worlds you visited would leave the rest unexplored by you. But you can live in any age, from the beginning of life to the end of history! You can see any planet, from Mars clear out to the limits of the Universe! Stay with them long enough to know them thoroughly, and then... on to the next era, the next solar system ! How? monthly #c tour through all time and all space... or to guarantee not missing any, send # for twelve issues of exciting excursions to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. You'll have the time of your countless lives! Galaxy #I Hudson Street, New York I #, N, Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions, Elsewhere ##-#. Entered as second-daw matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, I #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including' translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in fh U.S. A, by the Guinn Co,, Inc. Rig. U.S, Pat, Off, tractive novel contest being and Simon  Schuster, the biggest in the history of science fiction, it's inevitable that authors who are unfamiliar with this field will be studying the magazine to learn what kind of material we are seeking. To save their time and ours, here is a partial list of overworked ideas that should be strenuously avoided: Fictional warnings of nuclear and biological destruction, the post-atomicworld, reversion to barbarism, mutant children slain because they have only ten toes and fingers instead of twelve, absurdly planned and preposterously successful revolts against dictatorships, problems of survival wearily turned over to women, war between groups, nations, worlds and solar systems. Flying Saucers, cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in space, the duel between the good guy and the bad guy alone on an asteroid, the bright revelation that the characters we have been reading about are Adam and Eve or Jesus, the creation 'of a miniature universe in a laboratory by a scientist whose name turns out to be an anagram of Jehovah, the alien eater of life force in the Andes whose menu consists exclusively of pretty virgins. There are many more that slither across my desk, to lie there pulsing feebly while they acquire rejection slips, but the debilitated notions listed are readiest to mind. From time to time, writers can still make them come to life through rarely encountered virtuosity. The odds on that happening are not worth taking, however. The best advice to follow is to learn how to hunt down fresh themes or new approaches to old ones. What's done with the idea is then a matter of talent and skill, neither of which can be taught here, but the basic steps in science fiction thinking can be presented. First of all, science fiction answers in dramatic terms the unstated question: "What would happen if- -- ?" The if selected depends on whether the author takes the most blatant trends or tendencies in our society, in which case he is competing with just about everybody else, or digs beneath the surface for less apparent ones. Those, obviously, rate and receive the more enthusiastic welcome. Political conflicts and wars, however gigantic, have a way of becoming obscured by time. But the inventions and discoveries that were being made then live long after the issues are resolved. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, quickly turned into a pathetic figure after his defeat; the development of planes, tanks, longrange artillery and submarines was the lasting influence of World War I. Even Hitler has lost much of his frightfulness, while jets, rockets, atomic energy and antibiotics, all of which got their start in World War II, will be part of the life of the future. What will be remembered when the threat of communism is gone? That's what the writer has to find and dramatize for us.  most popular subject in science fiction and writers have suggested all kinds of crews: introverts because they can take loneliness, extroverts because they get along better with each other, women because they tolerate monotony, men because they are more adventurous. The reasoning is generally sound enough, but aren't there other possibilities? Gravy Planet offered a midget spaceman, # pounds of computer and pilot, an enormous saving of fuel, food, air renewal and living space. Why not deaf mutes? The noise of takeoff and landing wouldn't bother them, and they've been conditioned to the awful silence of the void. The blind, on the other hand, wouldn't be appalled by the immensities of space. Missionaries have always been on the heels of explorers, yet what would happen if they came across a humanoid race -- not the usual monstrosities -- on a planet where personal death is unknown? There are savages on Earth who don't have this knowledge, but they soon pick it up, and fear along with it. Suppose, though, that the alien bodies disintegrate instantly at death? The concept of afterlife would be completely unthinkable to them. The canals of Mars irrigate the deserts? Not necessarily. Maybe they're meant to drain the land and keep it suitably arid tor Martians. Well, there's the method of finding fresh ideas -- turn the obvious upside down, inside out and hind-end fore. Actually, digging up ideas is only the beginning of the job. Next comes choosing characters, building conflict, sustaining suspense, advancing the story, working out a solution consistent with theme and characterization -- all the labor of orchestration. It's hard, lonesome work, but who said writing is easy? It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen times a year, wonder about briefly , and then promptly forget -- but the real story is the one that the reporters are unable to cover.' tering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the flaking metal bed. There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enough to show the tight drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that the flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was going over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a "Y; OU again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily. I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feeling of hopeful eagerness. Maybe this time, I thought, I'd get the answer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places -- the quavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky chair, totfederal grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape, who had brought me here. "When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases, Sergeant?" the M.G. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his morbid curiosity!" For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a friend of mine -- I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the force -- and he's a follower of Stanislavsky." The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A Red?" the Stanislavsky method of acting was, while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed so they could be them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a character right up to the point where a play starts -- where he was born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood, adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money, success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of the life history created by the actor. How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at # and I'd been playing old men ever since. I had them down pretty well -- it's not just a matter of shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice, which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like inside -- and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them do what they did, fee! the compulsion that drove them to it. The old woman on the bed, for instance, had # in five bank accounts... and she'd died of starvation. You've come across' such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year, and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I had to know as much about them as I could. That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were practically an obsession. Look, they almost always have around # pinned to their underwear, hidden in mattresses, I parked in the bank, yet they turve themselves to death. If I  tuld understand them, I could write a play or have one written; i might really make a name for myself, even get a Hollywood  ontract, maybe, if I could act them as they should be acted. So I sat there in the lone chair, t tying to reconstruct the character of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single rent of her # for food. by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it, Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging into their savings." I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to decide that I ought to eat even if it cost me something. I camd out of it and said, "That's what you keep telling me." "I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more. What are the chances, Weldon?". "Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not." He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the basket team. He could at least have said goodby. He never did, though. A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion. Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary desperation and needless death. Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money out of the bank. I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up. "The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right." Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark." "But he doesn't know old people." "What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was -- and still would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a psychotic than eating?" . "Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation, no." "Why not?" "You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't: Not when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid of. Anybody who's alive on nearly nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I can't see going without food altogether." hadn't until then because he didn't want to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables.",, "It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die of starvation?" "That depends on age, health, amount of activity -- " "Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!" "So it takes weeks. Where's the problem -- if there is one?" I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes -- old men seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see, and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it out. "Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked. "No. Did you?" "In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last couple of years -- I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a jvay of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room and slowly starve to death." He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flitked it away, his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet. "There's charity," I. went on, "relief -- except for those who have their dough in banks, where it can be checked on -- old age pension, panhandling, cadging off neighbors." He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact with anybody." S "Even when they're starting to t real hungry?" "You've got something, Mark,ul that's the wrong tack," he nl thoughtfully. "The point is Imt they don't have to make "iitact; other people know themi about them. Somebody would heck after a few days or a week the janitor, the landlord, somene in the house or the neighborhood." "So they'd be found before they died." "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they hardly know these old people and whether they're alive or not. Maybe that's what threw us off. But you don't need friends and relatives to start wondering, and investigate when you haven't shown up for a while." He lifted his head and looked at me. "What does that prove, Mark?" "That there's something wrong with these cases. I want to find out what." to Headquarters, where he let me see the bankbooks the old woman had left. "She took damned good care of them," I said. "They look almost new," "Wouldn't you take damned good care of the most important thing in the world to you?" he asked. "You've seen the hoards of money the others leave. Same thing." .I peered closely at the earliest entry, April #, #, #. My eyes aren't that bad; I was peering at the ink. It was dark, unfaded. I pointed it out to Lou. "From not being exposed to daylight much," he said. "They don't haul out the bankbooks or money very often, I guess." "And that adds up for you? I can see them being psychotics all their lives... but not senile psychotics." "They hoarded, Mark. That adds up for me." "Funny," I said, watching him maneuver his cigarette as if he loved the feel of it, drawing the smoke down and letting it out in plumes of different shapes, from rings to slender streams. What a living he could make doing cigarette commercials on TV! "I can see you turn into one of these cases, Lou." He looked startled for a second, but then crushed out the butt carefully so he could watch it instead of me. "Yeah? How so?" "You've been too scared by poverty to take a chance. You know you could do all right acting, but you don't dare giving up this crummy job. Carry that far enough and . you try to stop spending money, then cut out eating, and finally wind up dead of starvation in a cheap room." "Me? I'd never get that scared of being broke!" "At the age of # or #?" "Especially then! I'd probably tear loose for a while and then buy into a home for the aged." I wanted to grin, but I didn't. He'd proved my point. He'd also shown that he was as bothered by these old people as I was. "Tell me, Lou. If somebody kept you from dying, would you give' him any dough for it, even if you were a senile psychotic?" I could see him using the Stanislavsky method to feel his way to the answer. He shook his head. "Not while I was alive. Will it, maybe, not give it." "How would that be as a motive?" H E leaned against a metal filing cabinet. "No good, Mark, You know what a hell of a time we have tracking down relatives to give the money to, because these people don't leave wills. The few relatives we find are always surprised when they get their inheritance -- most of them hardly remember dear old whoever-it-was that died and left it to them. All the other estates eventually go to the State treasury, unclaimed." "Well, it was an idea." I open ed the oldest bankbook again. "Anybody ever think of testing the ink, Lou?" ' "What for? The banks' records always check. These aren't for geries, if that's what you'r thinking." "I don't know what I'm think ing," I admitted. "But I'd like to turn a chemist loose on this for a little while." "Look, Mark, there's a lot I'i I've done plenty, but there's a limit -- " I let him explain why he couldn't let me borrow the book and then waited while he figured out how it could be done and did it. He was still grumbling when he helped me pick a chemist out of the telephone directory and went along to the lab with me. "But don't get any wrong notions," he said ' on the way, "I have to protect State property, that's all, because I signed for it and I'm responsible." "Sure, sure," I agreed, to humor him. "If you're not curious, why not just wait outside for me?" He gave me one of those whitetooth grins that he had no right to deprive women audiences of. "I could do that, but I'd rather see you make a sap of yourself." I turned the bankbook over to the chemist and we waited for the report. When it came, it had to be translated. used # years ago. Lou. Pape gave me a jab in the ribs at that. But then the chemist said that, according to the amount of oxidation, it seemed fresh enough to be only a few months or years old, and it was Lou's turn to get jabbed. Lou pushed him about the aging, asking if it couldn't be the result of unusually good care. The chemist couldn't say -- that depended on the kind of care; an airtight compartment, perhaps, filled with oneof the inert gases, or a vacuum. They hadn't been kept that way, of course, so Lou looked as baffled as I felt. He took the bankbook and we went out to the street. "See what I mean?" I asked quietly, not wanting to rub it in. "I see something, but I don't know what. Do you?" "I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything else about these cases." "What do you do next?" "Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before they do." "If they're loaded, they won't say so, Mark, and there's no way f telling them from those who are down and out." I rubbed my pipe disgruntledly against the side of my nose to oil it. "Ain't this a beaut of a problem? I wish I liketk problems. I hate them." Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather die of starvation than spend a few cents for food. I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late. And the fresh ink, over half a century old , . , banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an old bankbook that had fresh ink from # years before. Lou was some help there -- he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks. I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage calls that didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to me; they'd have interrupted my outside work. After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement -- acting like a cop, you know, instead of projecting his feelings -- and he couldn't haul me out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go. "Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with # in cash inside the lining of his jacket." "Alive?" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again. "Just barely. They're trying intravenous feeding to pull him through, I don't think he'll make it." "For God's sake, let's get there before he conks out!" Lou raced me to the City Hos pital and up to the ward. There was a scrawny old man in a bed, nothing but a papery skin stretched thin over a face like a skull and a body like a Hallow een skeleton, shivering as if he was cold. I knew it wasn't the cold. The medics were injecting a heart stimulant into him and he was vibrating like a rattletrap car racing over a gravel road. "Who are you?" I practically yelled, grabbing his skinny arm. "What happened to you?" He went on shaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open. "Ah, hell!" I said, disgusted. "He's in a coma." "He might start talking," Lou told me. "I fixed it up so you can sit here and listen in case he does." "So I can listen to delirious ravings, you mean." Lou got me a chair and put it next to the bed. "What are you kicking about? This is the first live one you've seen, isn't it? That ought to be good enough for you." He looked as annoyed as a director. "Besides, you can get biographical data out of delirium that you'd never get if he was conscious." H E was right, of course. Not only data, but attitudes, wishes, resentments that would normally be repressed. I wasn't thinking of acting at the moment, r hough. Here was somebody who  trnld tell me what I wanted to know... only he couldn't talk. Lou went to the door. "Good nek," he said, and went out. I sat down and stared at the don't have to ask if you've ever lone that; everybody has. You krep thinking over and over, getting more and more tense, "Talk, damn you, talk !" until you find that every muscle in your body is a fist and your jaws are aching because you've been clenching your teeth so hard. You might just as well not bother, but once in a while a coincidence makes you think you've done it. Like now. The old man sort of came to. That is, he opened his eyes and looked around without seeing anything, or it was so far away and long ago that nobody else could see what he saw. I hunched forward on the chair and willed harder than ever. Nothing happened. He stared at the ceiling and through and beyond me. Then he closed his eyes again and I slumped back, defeated and bitter -- but that was when he began talking. There were a couple of women, though they might have been little girls in his childhood, and he had his troubles with them. He was praying for a toy train, a roadster, to pass his tests, to keep from being fired, to be less lonely, and back to toys again. He hated his father, and his mother was too busy with church bazaars "and such to pay much attention to him. There was a sister: she died when he was a kid. He was glad she died, hoping maybe now his mother would notice him ,but he was also filled with guilt because he was glad. Then somebody, he felt, was trying to shove him out of his job. The intravenous feeding kept dripping into his vein and he went on rambling. After ten or fifteen minutes of it, he fell asKiep. I felt so disappointed that I could have slapped him awake, only it wouldn't have done any good. Smoking would have' helped me relax, but it wasn't allowed, and I didn't dare go outside for one, for fear he might revive again and this time come up to the present. ed, trying to sit up. I pushed him down gently, and he went on in frightful terror, "Old and poor, nowhere to go, nobody wants me, can't make a living, read the ads every day, no jobs for old men." He blurted through weeks, months, years -- I don't know -- of fear and despair. And finally he came to somefhing that made his face glow like a radium dil. "An ad. No experience needed. Good salary." His face got dark and awful. All he added was, "El Greco," or something that sounded like it, and then he went into terminal breathing. I rang for the nurse and she went for the doctor. I couldn't stand the long moments when the old man's chest stopped moving, the abrupt frantic gulps of air followed by no breath at all. I wanted to get away from it, but I had to wait for whatever more he might say. It didn't come. His eyes fogged and rolled up and he stopped taking those spasmodic strangling breaths. The nurse came back with the doctor, who felt his pulse and shook his head. She pulled the blanket over the old man's face. I left, feeling sick. I'd learned things I already knew about hate and love and fear and hope and frustration. There was an ad in it somewhere, but I had no way of telling if it had been years ago or recently. And a name that sounded like "El Greco." That was a Spanish painter of fourfive hundred years ago. Had the old guy been remembering a picture he'd seen? No, he'd come up at least close to the present. The ad seemed to solve his problem about being broke. But what about the # that had been found in the lining of his jacket? He hadn't mentioned that. Of course, being a senile psychotic, he could have considered himself broke even with that amount of money. None coming in, you see. That didn't add up, either. His was the terror of being old and jobless. If he'd had money, he would have figured how to make it last, and that would have come through in one way or another. There was the ad, there was his hope, and there was this El Greco. A Greek restaurant, maybe, where he might have been bumming his meals. But where did the # fit in? L OU Pape was too fed up with the whole thing to discuss it with me. He just gave me the weary eye and said, "You're riding this too hard, Mark. The guy was talking from fever. How do I know what figures and what doesn't when I'm dealing with insanity or delirium?" "But you admit there's plenty about these cases that doesn't figure?" "Sure. Did you take a look at the condition the world is in lately? Why should these old people be any exception?" I couldn't blame him. He'd pulled me in on the cases with plenty of trouble to himself, just to do me a favor. Now he was fed up. I guess it wasn't even that -- he thought I was ruining myself, at least financially and maybe worse, by trying to run down the problem. He said he'd be glad to see me any time and gas about anything or help me with whatever might be bothering me, if he could, but not these cases any more. He told me to lay off them, and then he left me onmy own. I don't know what he could have done, actually. I didn't need him to go through the want ads with me, which I was doing every day, figuring there might be something in the ravings about an ad. I spent more time than I liked checking those slanted at old people, only to find they were supposed to become messengers and such. One brought, me to an old brownstone fivestory house in the East #s. I got on line with the rest of the applicants -- there were men and women, all decrepit, all looking badly in need of money -- and waited my turn. My face was lined with collodion wrinkles and I wore an antique shiny suit and rundown shoes. I didn't look more prosperous or any younger than they did. I finally came up to the woman who was doing the interviewing. She sat behind a plain office desk down in the main floor hall, with a pile of application cards in front of her and a ballpoint pen in one strong, slender hand. She had red hair with gold lights in it and eyes so pale blue that they would have seemed the same color as the whites if she'd been on the stage. Her face would have been beautiful except for her rigid control of expression; she smiled abruptly, shut it off just like that, looked me over with all the impersonality and penetration of an X-ray from the soles to the bald head, exactly as she'd done with the others. But that skin! If it was as perfect as that all over her slim, stiffly erect, proudly shaped body, she had no business off the stage ! "Name, address, previous occupation, social security number?" she asked in a voice with good clarity, resonance and diction. She wrote it all down while I gave the information to her. Then she asked me for references, and I mentioned Sergeant Lou Pape. "Fine," she said. "We'll get in touch with you if anything comes up. Don't call us -- we'll call you." I hung around to see who'd be picked. There was only one, an old man, two ahead of me in the line, who had no social security number, no references, not even any relatives or friends she could IS have checked up on him with. Damn! Of course that was what she wanted! Hadn't all the starvation cases been people without social security, references, either no friends and relatives or those they'd lost track of? I'd pulled a blooper, but how was I to know until too late? Well, there was a way of making it right. that evening, I stood on the corner and watched the lights in the brownstone house. The ones on the first two floors went out, leaving only those on the third and fourth. Closed for the day... or open for business? I got into a building a few doors down by pushing a button and waiting until the buzzer answered, then racing up to the roof while some man yelled down the stairs to nd out who was there. I crossed the tops of the two houses between and went down the fire escape. It wasn't easy, though not as tough as you might imagine. The fact is that I'm a whole year younger than Lou Pape, even if I could play his grandpa professionally. I still have muscles left and I used them to get down the fire escape at the rear of the house. The fourth floor room I looked into had some kind of wire mesh cage and some hooded machinery. Nobody, there. The third floor room was the redhead's. She was coming out of the bathroom with a terrycloth bathrobe and a towel turban on when I looked in. She slid the robe off and began dusting herself with powder. That skin did cover her. She turned and moved toward a vanity against the wall that I was on the other side of. The next thing I knew, the window was flung up and she had a gun on me. "Come right in -- Mr. Weldon, isn't it?" she said in that completely controlled voice of hers. One day her control would crack, I thought irrelevantly, and the pieces would be found from Dallas to North Carolina. "I had an idea you seemed more curious than was justified by a helpwanted ad." "A man my age doesn't get to see many pretty girls," I told her, making my own voice crack pathetically in a senile whinny. She motioned me into the room. When I was inside, I saw a light over the window blinking red. It stopped the moment I was in the room. A silent burglar alarm. She let her pale blue eyes wash insolently over me. "A man your age can see all the pretty girls he wants to. You're not old. "And you use a rinse," I retorted. She ignored it. "I specifically advertised for old people. Why did you apply?" It had happened so abruptly that I hadn't had a chance to use the Stanislavsky method to feel old in the presence of a beautiful nude woman. I don't even know if it would have worked. Nothing's perfect. "I needed a job awful bad," I answered sullenly, knowing it sounded like an ad lib. S HE smiled with more contempt than humor. "You had a job, Mr. Weldon. You were very busy trying to find out why senile psychotics starve themselves to death." "How did you know that?" I asked, startled. "A little investigation of my own. I also happen to know you didn't tell your friend Sergeant Pape that you were going to be here tonight." That Was a fact, too. I hadn't felt sure enough that I'd found the answer to call him about ft. Looking at the gun in her steady hand, I was sorry I hadn't. "But you did find out I own this building, that my name is May Roberts, and that I'm the daughter of the late Dr. Anthony Roberts, the physicist," she continued, "Is there anything else T# you want me to tell you about yourself?" j "I know enough already. I'm j more interested in you and the j starvation cases. If you weren't j connected with them, you wouldn't have known I was inI vestigating them." j "That's obvious, isn't it?" She reached for a cigarette on the vanity and used a lighter with her free hand. The big mirror gave me another view of her lovely body, but that was beginning to interest me less than the gun. I thought of making a grab for it. There was too much distance between us, though, and she knew better than to take her eyes off me while she was lighting up. "I'm not afraid of professional detectives, Mr. Weldon. They deal only with facts and every one of them will draw the same conclusions from a given set of circumstances. I don't like amateurs. They guess too much. They don't stick to reality. The result -- " her pale eyes chilled and her shapely mouth went hard -- "is that they are likely to get too close to the truth." I wanted a smoke myself, but toward the pipe in my jacket. "I may be close to the truth. Miss Roberts, but I don't know what the devil it is. I still don't know how you're tied in with the senile psychotics or why they starve ith all that money. You could ' me go and I wouldn't have a ung on you." She glanced down at herself id laughed for real for the first me. "You wouldn't, would you? n the other hand, you know liere I'm Working from and uld nag Sergeant Pape into getug a search warrant. It wouldn't i criminate me, but it would be i convenient. I don't care to be i convenienced." "Which means what?" "You want to find out my connection with senile psychotics. I intend to show you." "How?" , She gestured dangerously with the gun. "Turn your face to the wall and stay that way while I get dressed. Make one attempt to turn around before I tell you to and I'll shoot you. You're guilty of housebreaking, you know. It would be a little inconvenient for me to have an investigation... but not as inconvenient as for you." stomach braid itself into a tight, painful knot of fear. Of what, I didn't know yet, only that old people who had something to do with her died of starvation. I wasn't old, but that didn't seem very comforting. She was the most frigid, calculating, deadly woman I'd ever met. That alone was enough to scare bell out of me. And there was the problem of what she was Capable of. Hearing the sounds of her dressing behind me, I wanted to lunge around and rush her, taking a chance that she might be too busy pulling on a girdle or reaching back to fasten a bra to have the gun in her hand. It was , a suicidal impulse and I gave it up instantly. Other women might compulsively finish concealing themselves before snatching up the gun. Not her. "All right," she said at last. I faced her. She was wearing coveralls that, if anything, emphasized the curves of her figure. She had a sort of babushka that covered her red hair and kept it in place -- the kind of thing women workers used to wear in factories during the war. She had looked lethal with nothing on but a gun and a hard expression. She looked like a sentence of execution now. "Open that door, turn to the right and go upstairs," she told me, indicating directions with the gun. I went. It was the longest, most anxious short walk I've ever taken. She ordered me to open a door on the fourth floor, and we were inside the room I'd seen from the fire escape. The mesh cage seemed like a torture chamber to me, the hooded motors designed to shoot an agonizing current through my emaciating body. "You're going to do to me what you did to the old man you hired today?" I probed, hoping for an answer that would really answer. She flipped on the switch that started the motors and there was a shrill, menacing whine. The wire mesh of the cage began blurring oddly, as if vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork. "You've been an unexpected nuisance, Weldon," she said above the motors. "I never thought you'd get this far. But as long as you have, we might as well both benefit by it." "Benefit?" I repeated. " Both of us?" She opened the drawer of a work table and pulled out a stack of envelopes held with a rubber band. She put the stack at the other edge of the table. "Would you rather have all cash or bank accounts or both?" My heart began to beat. She was where the money came from i  "V#"OU trying to tell me you're a philanthropist?" I demanded. "Business is philanthropy, in a way," she answered calmly. "You need money and I need your services. To that extent, we're doing each other a favor. I think you'll find that the favor I'm going to do for you is a pretty i considerable .one. Would you , mind picking up the envelopes j on the table?" i I took the stack and stared at the top envelope. "May #, #," I read aloud, and looked suspiciously at her. "What's this for?" "I don't think it's something that can be explained. At least it's never been possible before and I doubt if it would be now. I'm . assuming you want both cash and bank accounts. Is that right?" "Well, yes. Only -- " "We'll discuss it later." She looked along a row of shelves against one wall, searching the labels on the stacks of bundles there. She drew one out and pushed it toward me. "Please open that and put on the things you'll find inside." I tore open the bundle. It contained a very plain business suit, black shoes, shirt, tie and a hat with a narrow brim. "Are these supposed to be my burial clothes?" "I asked you to put them on," she said. "If you want me to make that a command, I'll do it." I looked at the gun and I looked at the clothes and then for some shelter I could change behind. There wasn't any. She smiled. "You didn't seem 'ncerned about my modesty. I iD't see why your own should ther you. Get dressed!" I obeyed, my mind anxiously ti using one possibility after ant her, all of them ending up with iy death. I got into the other i lings and felt even more uncomrtable, They were all only an proximate fit: the shoes a little  )o tight and pointed, the collar  if the shirt too stiffly starched und too high under my chin, the gray suit too narrow at the shoulders and the ankles. I wished I had a mirror to see myself in. I felt like an ultraconservative Wall Street broker and I was sure I resembled one, "All right," she said. "Put the envelopes in your inside pocket. You'll find instructions on each. Follow them carefully." "I don't get it!" I protested. "You will. Now step into the mesh cage. Use the envelopes in the order they're arranged in," "But what's this all about?" "I can tell you just one thing, Mr. Weldon -- don't try to escape. It can't be done. Your other questions will answer themselves if you follow the instructions on the envelopes." She had the gun in her hand. I went into the mesh cage, not knowing what to expect and yet too afraid of her to refuse. I didn't want to wind up dead of starvation, no matter how much money she might have given me -- but I didn't want to get shot, either. She closed the mesh gate and pushed the switch as far as it would go. The motors screamed as they picked up speed ; the mesh cage vibrated more swiftly; I could see her through it as if there were nothing between us. And then I couldn't see her at all. I was outside a bank on a sunny day in spring. #fY fear evaporated instantly -- I'd escaped somehow! But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her brownstone house. Even the season had changed! Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats, their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders, plain black or brown shoes -- the same kind of clothes I was wearing. The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square boefies, tubular radiators... For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered ai the mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me electroshock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or taken me South and left me on a street in daylight. But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily. Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis? That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me... Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been hypnotized. Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed the top envelope to the teller. He hauled # out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd been treated in years. I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance. The date he'd stamped was May #, #. more afraid of -- being stranded, middle-aged, in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that brownstone house. I had only an instant torealize that I was a kid in high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in the city. The date on the enevelope was May #th and it was still #. I made a # deposit there, then # in another place a few days later, and so forth, spending only a few minutes each time and going forward anywhere from a couple of days to almost a month. Every now and then, I had a stamped, addressed envelope to mail at a corner box. They were addressed to different stock bro-: kers and when I got one open before mailing it and took a look inside, it turned out to be an order to buy a few hundred shares of stock in a soft drink company in the name of Dr. Anthony Roberts. I hadn't remembered the price of the shares being that low. The last time I'd seen the quotation, it was more than five times as much as it was then. I is making dough myself, but i was doing even better for May K'oberts. A few times I had to stay  i round for an hour or so. There is the night I found myself in a i shy speakeasy with two envelopes that I was to bet the consents of, according to the instructions on the outside. It was June 'il, #, and I had to bet on Jack Sharkey to take the heavyweight title away from Max Schmeling. The place was serious and quiet -- no more' than three women, a couple of bartenders, and the rest male customers, including two cops, huddling up close to the radio. An affable character was taking bets. He gave me a wise little smile when I put the money down on Sharkey. "Well, it's a pleasure to do business with a man who wants an American to win," he said, "and the hell with the smart dough, eh?" "Yeah," I said, and tried to smile back, but so much of the smart money was going on Schmeling that I wondered if May Roberts hadn't made a mistake. I couldn't remember who had won. "You know what J. P. Morgan said -- don't sell America short." "I'll take a buck for my share," said a sour guy who barely managed to stand. "Lousy grass growing in the lousy streets, nobody working, no future, nothing!" "We'll come out of it okay," I told him confidently. He snorted into his gin. "Not in our lifetime, Mac. It'd take a miracle to put this country on its feet again. I don't believe in miracles." He put his scowling face up close to mine and breathed blearily and belligerently at me, "Do you?" "Shut up, Gus," one of the bartenders said. "The fight's starting." and a lot of bad Scotch, listening. It went the whole IS rounds, Sharkey won, and I was in almost as bad shape as Gus, who'd passed out halfway through the battle. All I can recall is the affable character handing . over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes, while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was outside a bank again. I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit. There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets to put down on Singing Wood in # at Belmont Park and Max Baer over Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in #, and James Braddock over Baer in #, and a big daily double payoff, Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued interest were something to watch grow. The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of # -- a' total of maybe four or five hours subjectively -- before I realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My father  and mother, for instance, were still alive in #. If I could break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through time, I could go and see them. The thought, attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent, yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again and I didn't dare. I couldn't... Why couldn't I? Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks, speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area, whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May Roberts had lined up for me. Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it was fresh; it wasn't given a chance to oxidize -- at the rate I was going, I'd be back to my own time in another few hours or so, with # or better in deposits, compound interest and cash. If I'd been around #, you see, she could have sent me back to the beginning of the century with the same amount of money, which would have accumulated to something like #. Get it now? I did. And I felt sick and frightened. The old people had died of starvation somehow with all that dough in cash or banks. I didn't give a hang if the time travel was responsible, or something else was. I wasn't going to be found dead in my hotel and have Lou Pape curse my corpse because I'd been borrowing from him when, since #, I'd had a little fortune put away. He'd call me a i ' re mature senile psychotic and he'd be right, from his point of view, not knowing the truth. posit in October, #, I grabbed a battered old cab and fold the driver to step on it. When I showed him the # bill that was in it for him, he squashd down the gas pedal. In #, # was real money. We got a mile away from the i ank and the driver looked at me :n the rear-view mirror. "How far you want to go, mister?" My teeth were together so hard that I had to unclench them before I could answer, "As far away as we can get." "Cops after you?" "No, but somebody is. Don't he surprised at anything that happens, no matter what it is." "You mean like getting shot at?" he asked worriedly, slowing down. "You're not in any danger, friend. I am. Relax and step on it again." I wondered if she could still reach me, this far from the bank, and handed the guy the bill. No justice sticking him for the ride in case she should. He pushed the pedal down even harder than he had been doing before. We must have been close to three miles away when I blinked and was standing outside the first bank I'd seen in #. I don't know what the cab driver thought when I vanished out of his hack. He probably figured I'd opened the door and jumped while he wasn't looking. Maybe he even went back and searched for a body splashed all over the street. Well, it would have been a hopeless hunt. I was a week ahead. I gave up and drearily made my deposit. The one from early October that I'd missed I put in with this one. There was no way to escape the babe with the beautiful hard face, gorgeus warm body and plans for me that all seemed to add up to death, I didn't try any more. I went on making deposits, mailing orders to her stock brokers, and putting down bets that couldn't miss because they were all past history. I don't even remember what the last one was, a fight or a race. I hung around the bar that had long ago replaced the speakeasy, until the inevitable payoff, got myself a hamburger and headed out the door. All the envelopes I was supposed to use were gone and I felt shaky, knowing that the next place I'd see was the room with the wire mesh cage and the hooded motors. It was. S HE was on the other side of the cage, and I had five bankbooks and envelopes filled with cash amounting to more than #, but all I could think of was that I was hungry and something had happened to the hamburger while I was traveling through time. I must have fallen and dropped it, because my hand was covered with dust or dirt. I brushed it off and quickly felt my face and pulled up my sleeves to look at my arms. "Very smart," I said, "but I'm nowhere near emaciation." "What made you think you would be?" she asked. "Because the others always were." She cut the motors to idling speed and the vibrating mesh slowed down. I glared at her through it. God, she was lovely -- as lovely as an ice sculpture! The kind of face you'd love to kiss and slap, kiss and slap... "You came here with a preconceived notion, Mr, Weldon. I'm a businesswoman, not a monster. I like to think there's even a good deal of the altruist in me. I could hire only young people, but the old ones have more trouble finding work. And you've seen for yourself how I provide nest eggs for them they'd otherwise never have." "And take care of yourself at the same time." "That's the businesswoman in me. I need money .to operate." . "So do the old people. Only they die and you don't." She opened the gate and invited me out. "I make mistakes occasionally. I sometimes pick men and women who prove to be too old to stand the strain. I try not to let it happen, but they need money and work so badly that they don't always tell the truth about their age and state of health." "You could take those who have social security cards and references." "But those who don't have any are in worse need!" She paused. "You probably think I want only the money you and they bring back, that it's merely some sort of profit-making scheme. It isn't." "You mean the idea is not just to build up a fortune for you with a cut for whoever helps you do it?" "I said I need money to operate, Mr. Weldon, and this mehod serves. But there are other purposes, much more important. What you have gone through is -- basic training, you might say. You know now that it's possible to travel through time, and what it's like. The initial shock, in other words, is gone and you're better equipped to do something for me in another era." "Something else?" I stared at her puzzledly. "What else could you want?" "Let's have dinner first. You must be hungry." "I bought a hamburger just before you brought me back. I don't know what happened to it. My hand was dirty and the hamburger was gone, as if I'd fallen somehow and dropped it and got dirt on my hand." She looked worriedly at the hand, probably afraid I'd cut it and disqualified myself. I could understand that; you never know what kind of diseases can be picked up in different times, because I remember reading somewhere that germs keep changing according to conditions. Right now, for instance, strains of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. I knew her concern wasn't really for me, but it was pleasant all the same. "That could be the explanation, I suppose," she said. "The truth is that I've never taken a time voyage -- somebody has to operate the controls in the present -- so I can't say it's possible or impossible to fall. It must be, since you did. Perhaps the wrench back from the past was too violent and you slipped just before you returned."  She led me down to an ornate dining room, where the table had been set for two. The food was waiting on the table, steaming and smellingtasty. Nobody was around to serve us. She pointed out a chair to me and we sat down and began eating. I was a little nervous at first, afraid there might be something in the food, but it tasted fine and nothing happened after I swallowed a little and waited for some effect. "You did try to escape the time tractor beam, didn't you, Mr. Weldon?" she asked. I didn't have to answer; she knew. "That's a mistaken notion of how it functions. 'The control beam doesn't cover area ; it covers era. You could have flown to any part of the world and the beam would still have brought you back. Do I make myself clear?" She did. Too bloody clear. I waited for the rest. "I assume you've already formed an opinion of me," she went on. "A rather unflattering one, I imagine." " 'Bitch' is the cleanest word I can find. But a clever one. Anybody who can invent a time machine would have to be a genius." "I didn't invent it. My father did -- Dr, Anthony Robert -- using the funds you and others helped me provide him with." Her face grew soft and tender. "My father was a wonderful man, a great man, but he was called a crackpot. He was kept from teaching or working anywhere. It was just as well, I suppose, though he was too hurt to think so; he had more leisure to develop the time machine. He could have used it to extort repayment from mankind for his humiliation, but he didn't. He used it to help mankind." "Like how?" I goaded. "It doesn't matter, Mr. Weldon. You're determined to hate me and consider me a liar. Nothing I tell you can change that." S HE was right about the first part -- I hadn't dared let myself do anything except hate and fear her -- but she was wrong about the second. I remembered thinking how Lou Pape would have felt if I had died of starvation with over #, after borrowing from him all the time between jobs. Not knowing how I got it, he'd have been sore, thinking I'd played him for a patsy. What I'm trying to say is that Lou wouldn't have had enough information to judge me. I didn't have enough information yet, either, to judge her. "What do you want me to do?" I asked warily. "Everybody but one person was sent into the past on specific errands -- to save art treasures and relics that would otherwise have been lost to humanity." "Not because the things might be worth a lot of dough?" I said nastily. "You've already seen that I can get all the money I want. There were upheavals in the past -- great fires, wars, revolutions, vandalism -- and I had my associates save things that would have been destroyed. Oh, beautiful things, Mr. Weldon! The world would have been so much poorer without them!" "El Greco, for instance?" I asked, remembering the raving old man who had been found wandering with # in his coat lining. "El Greco, too. Several paintings that had been lost for centuries." She became more brisk and efficient-seeming. "Except for the one man I mentioned, I concentrated on the past -- the future is too completely unknown to us. And there's an additional reason why I tentatively explored it only once. But the one person who went there discovered something that would be of immense value to the world." "What happened to him?" She looked regretful. "He was too old. He survived just long enough to tell me that the future has something we need. It's a metal box, small enough to. carry, that could supply this whole city with power to run its industries and light its homes and streets!" "Sounds good. Who'd you say benefits if I get it?" "We share the profits equally, of course. But it must be understood that we sell the power so cheaply that everybody can afford it." "I'm not arguing. What's the other reason you didn't bother with the future?" "You can't bring anything from the future to the 'present that doesn't exist right now. I won't go into the theory, but it should be obvious that nothing can exist before it exists. You can't bring the box I want, only the technical data to build one." "Technical data? I'm an actor, not a scientist." "You'll have pens and weatherproof notebooks to copy it down in." mind about her. I've already said she was beautiful, which always prejudices a man in a woman's favor, but I couldn't forget the starvation cases. They hadn't shared anything but malnutrition, useless money and death. Then again, maybe her explanation was a good one, that she wanted to help those who needed help most and some of them lied about their age and physical condition because they wanted the jobs so badly. All I knew about were those who had died. How did I know there weren't others -- a lot more of them than the fatal cases, perhaps -- who came through all right and were able to enjoy their little fortunes? And there was her story about saving the treasures of the past and wanting to provide power at really low Cost. She was right about one thing; she didn't need any of that to make money with; her method was plenty good enough, using the actual records of the past to invest in stocks, bet on sports -- all sure gambles. But those starvation cases... , "Do I get any guarantees?" I demanded. She looked annoyed. "I'll need you for the data. You'll need me to turn it into manufacture. Is that enough of a guarantee?" "No. Do I come out of this alive?" "Mr. Weldon, please use some logic. I'm the one who's taking the risk. I've already given you more money than you've ever had at one time in your life. Part of my motive was to pay for services about to be rendered. Mostly, it was to give you experience in traveling through time." "And to prove to me that I can't run out," I added. "That happens to be a necessary attribute of the machine. I couldn't very well move you about through time unless it worked that way. If you'd look at my point of view, you'd see that I lose my investment if you don't bring back the data. I can't withdraw your money, you realize." "I don't know what to think," I said, dissatisfied with myself because I couldn't find out what, if anything, was wrong with the deal. "I'll get you the data for the power box if it's at all possible and then we'll see what happens." Finished eating, we went upstairs and I got into the cage. She closed the circuit. The motors screamed. The mesh blurred. And I was in a world I never knew. Y OU'D call it a city, I suppose ; there were enough buildings to make it one. But no citv ever had so much greenery, ft wasn't just tree-lined streets, like Unter den Linden in Berlin, or islands covered with shrubbery, like Park Avenue in New York. The grass and trees and shrubs grew around every building, separating them from each other by wide lawns. The buildings were more gla'ss -- or what looked like glass -- than anything else. A few of the windows were opaque against the sun, but I couldn't see any shades or blinds. Some kind of polarizing glass or plastic? I felt uneasy being there, but it was a thrill just the same, to be alive in the future when I and everybody who lived in my day was supposed to be dead. The air smelled like the country. There was nd foul gas boiling from the teardrop cars on the glass-level road. They were made of transparent plastic clear around and from top to bottom, and they moved along at a fair clip, but more smoothly than swiftly. If I hadn't seen the airship overhead, I wouldn't have known it was there. It flew silently, a graceful ball without wings, seeming to be borne by the wind from one horizon to the other, except that no wind ever moved that fast. One car stopped nearby and someone shouted, "Here we are!" Several people leaped out and headed for me. I didn't think, I ran, I crossed the lawn and ducked into the nearest building and dodged through long, smoothly walled, shadowlessly lit corridors until I found a door that would open. I slammed it shut and locked it. Then, panting, I fell into a soft chair that seemed to form itself around my body, and felt like kicking myself for the bloody idiot I was. What in hell had I run for? They couldn't have known who I was. If I'd arrived in a time when people wore togas or bathing suits, there would have been some reason for singling me out, but they had all had clothes just like ours -- suits and shirts and ties for the men, a dress and high heels for the one woman with them. I felt somewhat disappointed that clothes hadn't changed any, but it worked out to my advantage; I wouldn't be so conspicuous. Yet why should anyone have yelled "Here we are!" unless... No, they must have thought I was somebody else. It didn't figure any other way. I had run because it was my first startled reaction and probably because I knew I was there on what might be considered illegal business; if I succeeded, some poor inventor would be done out of his royalties. I wished I hadn't run. Besides making me feel like a scared fool, I was sweaty and out of breath. Playing old men doesn't make climbing down fire escapes much tougher than it should be, but it doesn't exactly make a sprinter out of you -- not by several lungfuls. trying to guess what next. I had no more idea of where to go for what I wanted than an ancient Egyptian set down in the middle of Times Square with instructions to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. I didn't even have that much information. I didn't know any part of the city, how it was laid out, or where to get the data that May Roberts had sent me for. I opened the door quietly and looked both ways before going out. After losing myself in the cross-connecting corridors a few times, I finally came to an outside door. I stopped, tense, trying to get my courage. My inclination was to slip, sneak or dart out, but I made myself walk away like a decent, innocent citizen. That was one disguise they'd never be able to crack. All I had to do was act as if I belonged to that time and place and who would know the difference? There were other people walking as if they were in no hurry to get anywhere. I slowed down to their speed, but I wished wistfully that there was a crowd to dive into and get lost. A man dropped into step and said politely, "I beg your pardon. Are you a stranger in town?" I almost halted in alarm, but that might have been a giveaway. "What makes you think so?" I disked, forcing myself to keep at the same easy pace. "I -- didn't recognize your face nd I thought -- " "It's a big city," I said coldly. "You can't know everyone." "If there's anything I can do to help -- " I told him there wasn't and left him standing there. It was plain common sense, I had decided quickly while he was talking to me, not to take any risks by admitting anything. I might have been dumped into a police state or the country could have been at war without my knowing it, or maybe they were suspicious of strangers. For one reason or another, ranging from vagrancy to espionage, I could be pulled in, tortured, executed, God knows what. The place looked peaceful enough, but that didn't prove a thing. I went on walking, looking for something I couldn't be sure existed, in a city I was completely unfamiliar with, in a time when I had no right to be alive. It wasn't just a matter of getting the information she wanted. I'd have been satisfied to hang around until she pulled me back without the data... But then what would happen? Maybe the starvation cases were people who had failed her! For that matter, she could shoot me and send the remains anywhere in time to get rid of the evidence. Damn it, I didn't know if she was better or worse than I'd supposed, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I had to bring her what she wanted. It read; to shopping center. The arrow pointed along the road. When I came to a fork and wondered which way to go, there was another sign, then another pointing to still more farther on. I followed them to the middle of the city, a big square with a park in the center and shops of all kinds rimming it. The only shop I was interested in said : I went in. A neat young salesman came up and politely asked me if he could do anything for me. I sounded stupid even to myself, but I said, "No, thanks, I'd just like to do a little browsing," and gave a silly nervous laugh. Me, an actor, behaving like a frightened yokel! I felt ashamed of myself. He tried not to look surprised, but he didn't really succeed. Somebody else came in, though, for which' I was grateful, and he left me alone to look around. I don't know if I can get my feelings across to you. It's a situation that nobody would ever expect to find himself in, so it isn't easy to tell what it's like. But I've got to try. Let's stick with the ancient Egyptian I mentioned a while back, the one ordered to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe that'll make it clearer. The poor guy has no money he can use, naturally, and no idea of what New York's transportation system is like, where the museum is, how to get there, what visitors to a museum do and say, the regulations he might unwittingly break, how much an ordinary citizen is supposed to know about which customs and such. Now add the possible danger that he might be slapped into jail or an insane asylum if he makes a mistake and you've got a rough notion of the spot I felt I was in. Being able to speak English doesn't make much difference; not knowing what's regarded as right and wrong, and the unknown consequences, are enough to panic anybody. That doesn't make it clear enough. f Well, look, take the electrical appliances in that store; that might give you an idea of the situation and the wayit affected me. The appliances must have been as familiar to the people of that time as toasters and TV sets and lamps are to us. But the things didn't make a bit of sense to me... any more than our appliances would to the ancient Egyptian. Can you imagine him trying to figure out what those items are for and how they work? can puzzle over: There was a light fixture that you put against any part of a wall -- no screws, no cement, no wires, even -- and it held there and lit up, and it stayed lit no matter where you moved it on the wall. Talk about pin-up lamps... this was really it ! Then I came across something that looked like an ashtray with a blue electric shimmer obscuring the bottom of the bowl, I lit my pipe -- others I'd passed had been smoking, so I knew it was safe to do the same -- and flicked in the match. It disappeared. I don't mean it was swirled into some hidden compartment. It vanished. I emptied the pipe into the ashtray and that went, too. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching. I dredged some coins out of my pocket and let them drop into the tray. They were gone. Not a particle of them was left. A disintegrator? I haven't got the slightest idea. There were little mirror boxes with three tiny dials on the front of each. I turned the dials on one -- it was like using three dial telephones at the same time -- and a pretty girl's face popped onto the mirror surface and looked' # expectantly at me. "Yes?" she said, and waited for me to answer. "I -- uh -- wrong number, I guess," I answered, putting the box down in a hurry and going to the other side of the shop because I didn't have even a dim notion how to turn it off. The thing I was looking for was on a counter -- a tinted metal box no bigger than a suitcase, with a lipped hole on top and small undisguised verniers in front, I didn't know I'd found it, actually, until I twisted a vernier and every light in the store suddenly glared and the salesman came rushing over and politely moved me aside to shut it off. "We don't want to burn out every appliance in the place, do we?" he asked quietly. "I just wanted to see if it worked all right," I said, still shaking slightly. It could have blown up or electrocuted me, for all I knew. "But they always work," he said. "Ah -- always?" "Of course. The principle is simple and there are no parts to get worn out, so they last indefinitely," He suddenly smiled as if he'd just caught the gist. "Oh, you were joking! Naturally -- everybody learns about the Dynapack in primary education. You were interested in acquiring one?" "No, no. The -- the old one is good enough. I was just -- well, you know, interested in knowing ' if the new models are much different or better than the old ones." "But there haven't been any new models since #," he said. "Can you think of any reason why there should be?" "I -- guess not," I stammered. "But you never can tell." "You can with Dynapacks," he said, and he would have gone on if I hadn't lost my nerve and mumbled my way out of the store as fast as I could. Y OIwant to know why? He'd asked me if I wanted to "acquire" a Dynapack, not buy one. I didn't know what "acquire" meant in that society. It could be anything from saving up coupons to winning whatever you wanted at some kind of lottery, or maybe working up the right number of labor units on the job -- in which case he'd want to know where I was employed and the equivalent of social security and similar information, which I naturally didn't have -- or it could just be fancy sales talk for buying. I couldn't guess, and I didn't care to expose myself any more than I had already. And my blunder about the Dynapack working and the new models was nothing to make me feel at all easier. Lord, the uncertainties and hazards of being in a world you don't know anything about! Daydreaming about visiting another age may be pleasant, but the reality is something else again. "Wait a minute, friend!" I heard the salesman call out behind me.  looked back as casually, I hoped, as the pedestrians who heard him. He was walking quickly toward me with a very worried expression on his face. I stepped up my own pace as unobtrusively as possible, trying to keep a lot of people between us, meanwhile praying that they'd think I was just somebody who was late for an appointment. The salesman didn't break into a run or yell for the cops, but I couldn't be sure he wouldn't. As soon as I came to a corner, # turned it and ran like hell. There was a sort of alley down the block. I jumped into it, found a basement door and stayed inside, pressed against the wall, quivering with tension and sucking air like a swimmer who'd stayed underwater too long. Even after I got my wind back, I wasn't anxious to go out. The place could have been cordoned off, with the police, the army and the navy all cooperating to nab me. What made me think so? Not a thing except remembering how puzzled our ancient Egyptian would have been if he got arrested in the subway for something everybody did casually and without punishment in his own time -- spitting! I could have done something just as innocent, as far as you and I are concerned, that this era would consider a misdemeanor or a major crime. And in what age was ignorance of the law ever an excuse? Instead of going back out, I prowled carefully into the building. It was strangely silent and deserted. I couldn't understand why until I came to a lavatory. There were little commodes and wash basins that came up to barely above my knees. The place was a school. Naturally it was deserted -- the kids were through for the day. I could feel the tension dissolve in me like a ramrod of ice melting, no longer keeping my back and neck stiff and taut. There probably wasn't a better place in the city for me to hide. A primary school! The salesman had said to me, "Everybody learns about the Dynapack in primary education." eerie, like visiting a familiar childhood scene that had been distorted by time into something almost totally unrecognizable. There were no blackboards, teacher's big desk, children's little desks, inkwells, pointers, globes or books. Yet it was a school. The small fixtures in the lavatory downstairs had told me that, and so did the miniature chairs drawn neatly under the low, vividly painted tables in the various schoolrooms. A large comfortable chair was evidently where the teacher sat when not wandering around among the pupils. In front of each chair, firmly attached to the table, was a box with a screen, and both sides of the box held spools of wire on blunt little spindles. The spools had large, clear numbers on them. Near the teacher's chair was a compact case with more spools on spindles, and there was a large screen on the inside wall, opposite the enormous windows. I went into one of the rooms and sat down in the teacher's chair, wondering how I was going to find out about the Dynapack. I felt like an archeologist guessing at the functions of strange relics he'd found in a dead city. Sitting in the chair was like sitting on a column of air that let me sit upright or slump as I chose. One of the arms had a row of buttons. I pressed one and waited nervously to find out if I'd done something that woulii get me into trouble. Concealed lights in the ceiling and walls began glowing, getting brighter, while the room gradually turned dark. I glanced arouryjl bewilderedly to see why, because it was still daylight. The windows seemed to be sliding slightly, very slowly, and as they slid, the sunlight was damped out. I grinned, thinking of what my ancient Egyptian would make of that. I knew there were two sheets of polarizing glass, probably with a vacuum between to keep out the cold and the heat, and the lights in the room were beautifully synchronized with the polarized sliding glass. I wasn't doing so badly. The rest of the objects might not be too hard to figure out. The spools in the case alongside the teacher's chair could be wire recordings. I looked for something to play them with, but there was no sign of a playback machine. I tried to lift a spool off a spindle. It wouldn't come off. Hah! The wire led down the spindle to the base of the box, holding the spool in place. That meant the spools could be played right in that position. But what started them playing? nutely. Every part of it was featureless -- no dials, switches or any unfamiliar counterparts. I even tried moving my hands over it, figuring it might be like a theramin, and spoke to it in different shades of commai, because it could have been built to respond to vocal orders. Nothing happened. Remember the Poe story that shows the best place to hide something is right out in the open, which is the last place anyone would look? Well, these things weren't manufactured to baffle people, any more than our devices generally are. But it's only by trying everything that somebody who didn't know what a switch is would start uf a vacuum cleaner, say, or light a big chandelier from a wall clear across the room. I'd pressed every inch of the box, hoping some part of it mighj act as a switch, and I finally touched one of the spindles. The spool immediately began spinning at a very low speed and the screen on the wall opposite the window glowed into life. "The history of the exploration of the Solar System," said an announcer's deep voice, "is one of the most adventuresAme in mankind's long list of achievements. Beginning with the crude rockets developed during World War II..." There were newsreel shots of V-l and V-# being blasted from their takeoff ramps and a montage of later experimental models. I wished I could see how it all turned out, but I was afraid to waste the time watching. At any moment, I might hear the footsteps of a guard or janitor or whoever tended buildings then. I pushed the spindle again. It checked the spool, which rewound swiftly and silently, and stopped itself when the rewinding was finished. I tried another. A nightmare underwater scene appeared. "With the aid of energy screens," said another voice, "the oceans of the world were completely charted by the year #..."  I turned it off, then another on developments in medicine, one on architecture, one on history, the geography of such places as the interior of South America and Africa that were -- or are -- unknown today, and I was getting frantic, starting the wonderful wire films that held full-frequency sound and pictures in absolutely faithful color, and shutting them off hastily when I discovered they didn't have what I was looking for. They were courses for children, but they all contained information that our scientists are still groping for... and I couldn't chance watching one all the way through! I was frustratedly switching off a film on psychology when a female voice said from the door, "May I help you?" her in sudden fright. She was young and slim and slight, but she could scream loud enough to get help. Judging by the way she was looking at me, outwardly polite and yet visibly nervous, that scream would be coming at any second. "T must have wandered in here by mistake," I said, and pushed past her to the corridor, where I began running back the way I had come. "But you don't understand!" she cried after me. "I really want to help -- " Yeah, help, I thought, pounding toward the street door. A gag right out of that psychology film, probably -- get the patient to hold still, humor him, until you can get somebody to put him where he belongs. That's what one of our teachers would do, provided she wasn't too scared to think straight, if she found an oldlooking guy thumbing frenziedly through the textbooks in a grammar school classroom. When I came to the outside door, I stopped. I had no way of knowing whether she'd given out an alarm, or how she might have done it, but the obvious place to find me would be out on the street, dodging for cover somewhere. I pushed the door open and let it slam shut, hoping she'd hear it upstairs. Then I found a door, sneaked it open and went silently down the steps. In the basement, I looked for a furnace or a coal bin or a fuel tank to hide behind, but there weren't any. I don't know how they got their heat in the winter or eooled the building in the summer. Probably some central atomic plant that took care of the whole city, piping in the heat or coolant in underground conduits that were led up through the walls, because there weren't even any pipes visible. I hunched into the darkest corner I could find and hoped they wouldn't look for me there. B Y the time night came, hunger drove me out of the school, but I did it warily, making sure nobody was in sight. The streets of the shopping center were more or less deserted. There was no sign of a restaurant. I was so empty that I felt dizzy as I hunted for one. But 'lien a shocking realization made ne halt on the sidewalk and weat with horror. Even if there had been a restaurant, what would I have used for money? Now I got the whole foul pic' i ire. She had sent old people ack through time on errands like mine... and they'd starved to death because they couldn't buy food! No, that wasn't right. I renembered what I had told Lou 'ape : anybody who gets hungry nough can always find a truck . irden or a food store to rob. Only... I hadn't seen a truck . irden or food store anywhere in this city. And... I thought about people in the past having their hands rut off for stealing a loaf of bread. This civilization didn't look as if it went in for such drastic punishments, assuming I could find a loaf of bread to steal. But neither did most of the civilizations that practiced those barbarisms. I was more tired, hungry and scared than I'd ever believed a human being could get. Lost, completely lost in a. totally alien world, but one in which I could still be killed or starve to death... and God knew what was waiting for me in my own time in case I came back without the information she wanted. Or maybe even if I came back with it! That suspicion made up rfiy mind for me. Whatever happened to me now couldn't be worse than what she might do. At least I r didn't have to starve. I stopped a man in the street. I let several others go by before picking him deliberately because he was middle-aged, had a kindly face, and was smaller than me, so I could slug him and run if he raised a row. "Look, friend," I told him, "I'm just passing through town -- " "Ah?" he said pleasantly. " -- And I seem to have mislaid -- " No, that was dangerous. I'd been about to say I'd mislaid my wallet, but I still didn't know whether they used money in this era. He waited with a patient, friendly smile while I decided just how to put it. "The fact is that I haven't eaten all day and I wonder if you could help me get a meal." He said in the most neighborly voice imaginable, "I'll be glad to do anything I can, Mr. Weldon," M Y entire face seemed to drop open. "You -- you called me -- " "Mr. Weldon," he repeated, still looking up at me with that neighborly smile. "Mark Weldon, isn't it? From the #th Century?" I tried to answer, but my throat had tightened up worse than on any opening night I'd ever had to live through. I nodded, wondering terrifiedly what was going on. "Please relax," he said persuasively. "You're not ib any danger whatever. We offer you our utmost hospitality. Our time, you might say, is your time." "You know who I am," I managed to get out through my constricted glottis. "I've been doing all this running arid ducking and hiding for nothing." He shrugged sympathetically. "Everyone in the city was instructed to help you, but you were so nervous that we were afraid to alarm you with a direct approach. Every time we tried to, as a matter of fact, you vanished into one .place or another. We didn't follow for fear of the effect on you. We had to wait until you came voluntarily to u" My brain was racing again and getting nowhere. Part of it was dizziness from hunger, but only part. The rest was plain frightened confusion. They knew who I was. They'd been expecting me. They probably even knew what I was after. And they wanted, to help! "Let's not go into explanations now," he said, "although I'd like to smooth away the bewilderment and fear on your face. But you need to be fed first. Then we'll call in the others and -- " I pulled back. "What others? How do I know you're not setting up something for me that I'll wish I hadn't gotten into?" "Before you approached me, Mr. Weldon, you first had to decide that we represented no greater menace than May Roberts. Please believe me, we don't." So he knew about that, too! "All right. I'll take my chances," I gave in resignedly. "Where does a guy find a place to eat in this city?" I T was a handsome restaurant with soft light coming from three-dimensional, full-color na' ture murals that I might mistakenly have walked into if I'd been alone, they looked so much like gardens and forests and plains. It was no wonder I couldn't find a restaurant or food store or truck garden anywhere -- food came up through pneumatic chutes in each building, I'd been told on the way over, grown in hydroponic tanks in cities that specialized in agriculture, and those who wanted to eat "out" could drop into the restaurant each building had. Every city had its own function. This one was for people in the arts. I liked that. There was a glowing menu on the table with buttons alongside the various selections, I looked starvingly at the items, trying to decide which I wanted most. I picked oysters, onion soup, breast of guinea hen under plexiglas and was hunting for the tastiest and most recognizable dessert when the pleasant little guy shook his head regretfully and emphatically. "I'm afraid you can't eat any of those foods) Mr. Weldon," he said in a sad voice. "We'll explain why in a moment." A waiter and the manager came over. They obviously didn't want to stare at me, but they couldn't help it. I couldn't blame them. I'd have stared at somebody from George Washington's time, which is about what I must have represented to them. "Will you please arrange to have the special food for Mr. Weldon delivered here immediately?" the little guy asked. "Every restaurant has been standing by for this, Mr. Carr," said the manager. "It's on its way. Prepared, of course -- it's been ready since he first arrived." "Fine," said the little guy, Carr, "It can't be too soon. He's very hungry." I glanced around and noticed for the first time that there was nobody else in the restaurant. It was past the dinner hour, but. even so, there are always late diners. We had the place all to ourselves and it bothered me. They could have ganged up on me... But they didn't. A light gong sounded, and the waiter and manager hurried over to a slot of a door and brought out a couple of trays loaded with covered dishes, "Your dinner, Mr. Weldon," the manager said, putting the plates in front of me and removing.the lids. I stared down at the food. "This," I told them angrily, "is a hell of a trick to play on a starving man!" "Mashed dehydrated potatoes, canned meat and canned vegetables," Carr replied. "Not very appetizing. I know, but I'm afraid it's all we can allow you to' eat." I took the cover off the dessert dish. "Dried fruits!" I said in disgust. "Rather excessively dried, I'm sorry to say," the manager agreed mournfully. I sipped the blue stuff in a glass and almost spat it out. "Powdered milk! Are these things what you people have to live on?" "No, our diet is quite varied," Carr said in embarrassment. "But we unfortunately can't give you any of the foods we normally eat ourselves." "And why in blazes not?" "Please eat, Mr. Weldon," Carr begged with frantic earnestness. "There's so much to explain -- this is part of it, of course -- and it would be best if you heard it on a full stomach." I was famished enough to get the stuff down, which wasn't easy; uninviting as it looked, it tasted still worse. When I was through, Carr pushed several buttons on the glowing menu. Dishes came up from an opening in the center of the table and he showed me the luscious foods they contained. "Given your choice," he said, "you'd have preferred them to what you have eaten. Isn't that so, Mr. Weldon?" "You bet I would!" I answered, sore because I hadn't been given that choice. "And you would have died like the pathetic old people you ware investigating," said a voice behind me. I turned around, startled. Several men and women had come in while I'd been eating, their footsteps as silent as cats on a rug. I looked blankly from them to Carr and back again. "These are the clothes we ordinarily wear," Carr said. "An #th Century motif, as you can see -- updated knee breeches and shirt waists, a modified stock for the men, the daring low bodices of that era, the full skirts treated in a modern way by using sheer materials for the women, bright colors and sheens, buckled shoes of spun synthetics. Very gay, very ornamental, very comfortable, and thoroughly suitable to our time." "But everybody I saw was dressed like me!" I protested. "Only to keep you from feeling more conspicuous and anxious than you already were. It was quite a project, I can tell you -- your styles varied so greatly from decade to decade, especially those for women -- and the materials were a genuine problem; they'd gone out of existence long ago. We had the textile and tailoring cities working a full six months to clothe the inhabitants of this city, including, of course, the children. Everybody had to be clad as your contemporaries were, because we knew only that you would arrive in this vicinity, not where you might wander through the city." "There was one small difference you didn't notice," added a handsome mature woman. "You were the only man in a gray suit. We had a full description of what you were wearing, you sec, and we made sure nobody else was dressed that way. Naturally, everyone knew who you were, and so we were kept informed of your movements." "What for?" I demanded in alarm. "What's this all about?" down, looking to me like a witchcraft jury from some old painting. "I'm Leo Blundell," said a tall man in plum-and-gold clothes. "As chairman of -- of the Mark Weldon Committee, it's my responsibility to handle this project correctly." "Project?" "To make certain that history is fulfilled, I have to tell you as much as you must know." "I wish somebody would!" "Very well, let me begin by telling you much of what you undoubtedly know already. In a sense, youare more a victim of Dr. Anthony Roberts than his physicist, but because of his eccentric behavior, he was ridiculed for his theories and hated for his arrogance. He was an almost perfect example of self-defeat, the way in which a man will hamper his career and wreck his happiness, and then blame the world for his failure and misery. To get back to his connection with you, however, he invented a time machine -- unfortunately, its secret has since been lost and never rediscovered -- and used it for antiI social purposes. When he died, his daughter May carried on his work. It was she who sent you to this time to learn the principle by which the Dynapack operates. She was a thoroughly ruthless woman." "Are ypu sure?" I asked uneasily. "Quite sure." "I know a number of old people died after she sent them on errands through time, but she said they'd lied about their age and health." "One would expect her to say that," a woman put in cuttingly. Blundell turned to her and shook his head. "Let Mr. Weldon clarify his feelings about her, Rhoda. They are obviously very mixed." "They are," I admitted. "She seemed hard, the first time I saw her, when I answered her ad, but she could have been just acting businesslike. I mean she had a lot of people to pick from and she had to be impersonal and make certain she had the right one. The next time -- I hope you don't know about that -- it was really my fault for breaking into her room. I really had a lot of admiration for the way she handled the situation." "Go on," Carr encouraged me. "And I can't complain about the deal she gave me. Sure, she litne out ahead on the money I lct and invested for her. But I did all right myself -- I was richer than I'd ever been in my life -- and she gave that money to me before I even did anything to earn it!" "Besides which," somebody else said, "she offered you half of the profits on the Dynapiack." for signs of hostility. I saw none. That was surprising. I'd come from the past to steal something from them and they weren't it all angry. Well, no, it wasn't leally stealing. I wouldn't be depriving them of the Dynapack. It just would have been invented before it was supposed to be. "She did," I said. "Though I wouldn't call that part of it philanthropy. She needed me for the data and I needed her to manufacture the things." "And she was a very beautiful woman," Blundell added. I squirmed a bit. "Yes." "Mr. Weldon, we know a good deal about her from notes that have come down to us among her private papers. She had a safety deposit box under a false name. I won't tell you the name; it was not discovered until many years later, and we will not voluntarily meddle with the past." I sat up and listened sharply. "So that's how you knew who I was and what I'd be wearing and what I came for! You even knew when and where I'd arrive!" "Correct," Blundell said. "What else do you know?" "That you suspected her of being responsible for the deaths of many old people by starvation. Your suspicion was justified, except that her father had caused all those that occurred before #, when she took over after his own death. All but two people were sent into the past. Roberts was curious about the future, of course, but he did not want to waste a victim on a trip that would probably be fruitless. In the past, you understand, he knew precisely what he was after. The future was completely unknown territory." "But she took the chance," I said. "If you can call deliberate murder taking a chance, yes. One man arrived in #, over fifty years ago. The other was yourself. The first one, as you know, died of malnutrition when he was brought back to your era." "And what happened to me?" I asked, jittering. "You will not die. We intend to make sure of that. All the other victims -- I presume you're interested in their errands?" "I think I know, but I'd like to find out just the same." "They were sent to the past to buy or steal treasures of various sorts -- art, sculpture, jewelry, fabulously valuable manuscripts and books, anything that had great scarcity value." "That's not possible," I objected. "She had all the money she wanted. Any time she needed more, all she had to do was send somebody back to put down bets and buy stocks that she knew were winners. She had the records, didn't she? There was no way she or her father could lose!" H E moved his shoulders in a plum-and-gold shrug. "Most of the treasures they accumulated were for acquisition's sake -- and for the sake of vengeance for the way they believed Dr. Roberts had been treated. When there were unusual expenses, such as replacing the very costly parts of the time machine, that required more than they could produce in ready cash, both Roberts and his daughter 'discovered' these treasures." ' He waited while I digested the miserable meal and the disturbing information he had given me. I thought I'd found a loophole in his explanation : "You said people were sent back to the past to buy treasures, besides stealing them." "I did," he agreed. "They were provided with currency of whatever era they were to visit." I felt my forehead wrinkle up as my theory fell apart. "Then they could buy food. Why should they have died of malnutrition?" "Because, as May Roberts herself told you, nothing can exist before jt exists. Neither can anything exist after it is out of existence. If you returned with a Dynapack, for example, it would revert to a lump of various metals, because that was what it was in your period. But let me give you a more personal instance. Do you remember coming back from your first trip with dust on your hand?" "Yes. I must have fallen." "On one hand? No, Mr. Weldon. May Roberts was greatly upset by the incident; she was afraid you would realize why the hamburger had turned to dust -- and why the old people died of starvation. All of them, not just a few." He paused, giving me a chance to understand what he had just said. I did, with a sick shock. "If I ate your food," I said shakily, "I'd feel satisfied until I was returned to my own time. But the food wouldn't go along with me!" "And so you, too, would die of malnutrition. The foods we have given you existed in your #   fra. We were very careful of that, so careful that many of i hem probably were stored years "-fore you left your time, We i egret that they are not very palatable, but at least we are positive they will go back with you. You will be as healthy when you arrive in the past as when you left. "Incidentally, she made you hange your clothes for the same reason -- they had been made in #. She had clothing from very era she wanted visited and i hose old people who would fit them best. Otherwise, you see, they'd have arrived naked." I began to shake as if I were is old as I'd pretended to be on the stage. "She's going to pull me back! If I don't bring her the information about the Dynapack, she'll shoot me!" "That, Mr. Weldon, is our problem," Blundell said, putting his hand comfortingly on my arm to calm me. "Your problem? I'm the one who'll get shot, not you!" "But we know in complete detail what will happen when you are returned to the #th Century." I pulled my arm away and grabbed his. "You know that? Tell me!" "I'm sorry, Mr. Weldon, If we tell you what you did, you might thing of some alternate action, and there is no knowing what the result would be." "But I didn't get shot or die of malnutrition?" "That much we can tell you. Neither." They all stood up, so bright and attractive in their colorful clothes that I felt like a shirtsleeved stage hand who'd wandered in on a costume play. "You will be returned in a month, according to the notes May Roberts left. She gave you plenty of time to get the data, you see. We propose to make that month an enjoyable one for you. The resources of our city -- and any others you care to visit -- are at your disposal. We wish you to take full advantage of them." "And the Dynapack?" "Let us worry about that. We want you to have a good time while you are our guest." I did. It was the most wonderful month of my life. T HE mesh cage blurred around me. I could see May Roberts through it, her hand just leaving the switch. She was as beautiful as ever, but I saw beneath her beauty the vengeful, vicious creature her father's bitterness had turned her into ; Blundell and Carr had let me read some of her notes, and I knew. I wished I could have spent the rest of my years in the future, instead of having to come back to this. She came over and opened the gate, smiling like an angel welcoming a bright new soul. Then her eyes traveled startledly over me and her smile almost dropped off. But she held it firmly in place. She had to, while she asked, "Do you have the notes I sent you for?" "Right here," I said. I reached into my breast pocket and brought out a stubby automatic and shot her through the right arm. Her closed hand opened and a little derringer clanked on the floor. She gaped at me with an expression of horrified surprise that should have been recorded permanently; it would have served as a model for generations of actors and actresses. "You -- brought back a weapon!" she gasped. "You shot me!" She stared vacantly at her bleeding arm and then at my automatic. "But you can't -- brin anything back from the future. And you aren't -- dying of malnutrition." She said it all in a voice shocked into toneless wonder. "The food I ate and this gun are from the present," I said. "The people of the future knew I was coming. They gave me food that wouldn't vanish from my cells when I returned. They also gave me the gun instead of the plans for the Dynapsck." "And you took it?" she screamed at me. "You idiot! I'd have shared the profits honestly with you. You'd have been worth "With acute malnutrition," I amended. "I like it better this way, thanks -- poor, but alive. Or relatively poor, I should say, because you've been very generous and I appreciate it." "By shooting me!" "I hated to puncture that lovely arm, but it wasn't as painful as starving or getting shot myself. Now if you don't mind -- or even if you do -- it's your turn to get into the cage, Miss Roberts." She tried to grab for the derringer on the floor with her left hand. "Don't bother," I said quietly. "You can't reach it before a bullet reaches you." # S HE straightened up, staring at me for the first time with terror in her eyes. "What are you going to do to me?" she whispered. "I could kill you as easily as you could havekilled me. Kill you and send your body into some other era. How many dozens of deaths were you responsible for? The law couldn't convict you of them, but I can. And I couldn't be convicted, either." She put her hand on the wound. Blood seeped through her fingers as she lifted her chin at me. "I won't beg for my life, Weldon, if that's what you want. I could offer you a partnership, but I'm not really in a position to offer it, am I?" She was magnificent, terrifyingly intelligent, brave clear through... and deadlier than a plague. I had to remember that. "Into the cage," I said. "I have some friends in the future who have plans for you. I won't tell you what they are, of course; you didn't tell me what I'd go through, did you? Give my friends my fondest regards. If I can manage it, I'll visit them -- and you." She backed warily into the cage. It would have been pleasant to kiss those wonderful lips good-by. I'd thought about them for a whole month, wanting them and loathing them at the same time. It would have been like kissing a coral snake. I knew it and I concentrated on shutting the gate on her. "You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you, Weldon?" she asked through the mesh. "I can be," I said. "I have the machine. I can send people into he past or future and make myr If a pile . of dough. Only I'd :ve them food to take along. I wouldn't kill them off to keep he secret to myself. Anything Ise on your mind?" "You want me," she stated. I didn't argue. "You could have me." "Just long enough to get my throat slit or brains blown out. I don't want anything that much." I rammed the switch closed. The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the ioor, but she was gone into the : nture I had just come from. That was when the reaction tilt me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun, but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped ny stomach over and unhinged my knees. Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found a phone. that I still hadn't gotten over the tremors, in spite of a bottle of bfandy I dug out of a credenza, maybe because the date on the label, #, . gave me a new case of the shivers. I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himself that I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him what had happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess I hadn't really expected him to. "If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark head unhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Even knowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do." "All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly. "From what I was told, there ought to be plenty," We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood with his face slack. "Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!" The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice as high as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammed with paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts, goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, and tapeseverything was as bright and sparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of a lot of it. "The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lou said, "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was a collector and she knew where to find things." "She certainly did," I agreed. "What did you do with her?" "I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me and I sent her into the future." He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. You wanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got rid of her body somehow." "Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leave sleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his hands loose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here? Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'd have sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody -- including you -- would know I'd ever been here. Come "That's easy. You lost your on, use your head." nerve." "I'm not even losing my patience."  H E pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff or because of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're no friend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, and I'll make sure you fry." "You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead and wrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, send me up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do the proving, not me." He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break or I'll plug you as if I never saw you before." He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particular damn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killed May Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, would have stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason for my relief -- if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find, he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have tried to get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievable explanation. But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'd shot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at and that had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.  She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; they regarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with their marvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contented citizen, living out her existence in an era that had given me more happiness than I'd ever had. I sat and tried to stupefy my elf with brandy that should long i go have dried to brick-hardness, 'hile Lou Pape stood at the door vith his hand near his holster md glared at me. He didn't take  is eyes off me until somebody  amed Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson ame in and was introduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs. It was minutes before I resized what they were going to !o. I ran up after them. I was just in time to see Aaron.on carefully take the housing off the hooded motors, and leap back  uddenly from the fury of lightning sparks. r T'HE whole machine fused while we watched helplessly -- motors, switches, panel and mesh rage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and melted together in a charred and molten pile, "Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to short if it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a mess like this." He finally glatjced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching all the way around the rear for it with his left hand. Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any sense of it, Prof?" he asked. "Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify it when it looks like this." He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief. Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine to -- ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now we'll have to dig tmough the house to find her body." "You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of 'me." He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for her body, Mark?" "Tear the place apart if you want." "We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide." "Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like." "You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through." I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in the future could take on the job -- they could do it faster and better than I can -- but some nice, peaceful quiet would help." H E didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest. She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep. But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care could have made a great and honored scientist out of him. They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible. I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone. Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are impossible to work out ever could. I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came over to where I was sitting. "You knew we wouldn't find her," he said. "That's what I kept telling you." "Where is she?" "In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in veils for the depraved -- " "Cut out the kidding! Where is she?" "What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?" "That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead." "She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else, just that" He hauled me out of the chair md stared hard at my face. You aren't lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not." "All right, then." "But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and betterlooking than her, for ne thing -- " "Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my naked scalp. "Witfi a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens to 'e a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me -- they checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head, which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten together like gin and tonic." L OU arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on you?" "Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glaneed out the window at the smoky city. "That's why. They couldn't tell me if I'd ever get back to the future. I wasn't taking any chances. As long as there was a possibility that I'd be stranded in my own time, I wasn't going to lose my livelihood. Which reminds me, you have anything else to do here?" "There'll be a guard stationed around the house and all her holdings and art will be taken ovr until she comes back -- " "She won't." " -- or is declared legally dead." "And me?" I broke in. "We can't hold you without proof of murder." "Good enough. Then let's get out of here." "I have to go back on duty," he objected. "Not any more. I've got over # in cash and deposits -- enough to finance you and me." "Enough to kill her for." "Enough to finance you and me," I repeated doggedly, "I told you I had the money before she sent me into the future -- " "AH right, all right," he interrupted. "Let's not go into that again. We couldn't find a body, so you're free. Now what's this about financing the two of us?" I put my fingers around his arm and steered him out to the street. "This city has never had a worse cop than you," I said. "Why? Because you're an actor, not a cop. You're going back to acting, Lou. This money will keep us both going until we get a break." He gave me the sliteyed look he'd picked up in line of duty, "That wouldn't be a bribe, would 'it?" "Call it a kind of memorial to a lot of poor, innocent old people and a sick, tormented woman." We walked along in silence out in the clean sunshine. It was our silence; the sleek cars and burly trucks made their noise and the pedestrians added their gabble, but a good Stanislavsky actor like Lou wouldn't notice that. Neither would I, ordinarily, but I was giving him a chance to work his way through this situation. "I won't hand you a lie, Mark," he said finally. "I never stopped wanting to act. I'll take your deal on two considerations."  "All right, what are they?" "That whatever I take off you is strictly a loan." "No argument. What's the other?" He had an unlit cigarette almost to his lips. He held it there while he said: "That any time you come across a case of an old person who died of starvation with # stashed away somewhere, you turn fast to the theatrical page and not tell me or even think about it.". "I don't have to agree to that." H E lowered the cigarette, stopped and turned to me. "You mean it's no deal?" "Not that," I said. "I mean there won't be any more of those cases. Between knowing that and both of us back acting again. I'm satisfied. You don't have to believe me. Nobody does." He lit up and blew out a pretty plume, fine and slow and straight, which would have teleThen he grinned. "You wouldn't want to bet on that, would you?" "Not with a friend. I do all my surething betting with bookies." "Then make it a token bet," i he said. "One buck that somebody dies of starvation with a big poke within a year." I took the bet. I took the dollar a year later. i games If is a tough assignment for a child to know where a daydream ends and impossibility begins! himself, which meant he was two tribes of Indians having a war. "Bang," he muttered, firing an imaginary rifle. He decided that it was a time in history before the white people had sold the Indians any guns, and changed the rifle into a bow. "Wizzthunk," he substituted, mimicking from an Indian film on TV the graphic sound of an arrow striking flesh. "Oof." He folded down onto the grass, moaning, "Uhhhooh..." and relaxing into defeat and death. "Want some chocolate milk, Ronny?" asked his mother's voice from the kitchen. "No, thanks," he called back, climbing to his feet to be another man. "Wizzthunk, wizzthunk," he added to the flights of arrows as the best archer in the tribe. "Last arrow. Wizzzz," he said, missing one enemy for realism. He addressed another battling brave. "Who has more arrows? They are coming too close. No time -- I'll have to use my knife." He drew the imaginary knife, ducking an arrow as it shot close. standing somewhere else, and he saw that the warriors left alive were outnumbered. "We must retreat. We cannot leave our tribe without warriors to protect the women." Ronny decided that the chief was heroically wounded, his voice wavering from weakness. He had been propping himself against a tree to appear unharmed, but now he moved so that his braves could see he was pinned to the trunk by an arrow and could not walk. They cried out. He said, "Leave me and escape. But remember..." No words came, just the feeling of being what he was, a dying old eagle, a chief of warriors, speaking to young warriors who would need advice of seasoned humor and moderation to carry them through their young battles. He had tg finish the sentence, tell them something wise. Ronny tried harder, pulling the feeling around him like a cloak of resignation and pride, leaning indifferently against the tree where the arrow had pinned him, hearing dimly in anticipation the sound of his aged voice conquering weakness to speak wisely of what they needed to be told. They had many battles ahead of them, and the battles would be against odds, with so many dead already. They must watch and wait, be flexible and tenacious, determined and persistent -- but not too rash, subtle and indirect -- not cowardly, and above all be patient with the triumph of the enemy and not maddened into suicidal direct attack. His stomach hurt with the arrow wound, and his braves waited to hear his words. He had to sum a part of his life's experience in words. Ronny tried harder to build the scene realistically. Then suddenly it was real. He was the man. He was an old man, guide and adviser in an oblique battle against great otfcfs. He was dying of something and his stomach hurt with a knotted ache, like hunger, and he was thirsty. He had refused to let the young men make the sacrifice of trying to rescue him. He was hostage in the jail and dying, because he would not surrender to the enemy nor cease to fight them. He smiled and said, "Remember to live like other men, but -- remember to remember." And then he was saying things that could not be put into words, complex feelings that were ways of taking bad situations that made them easier to smile at, and then sentences that were not entences, but single alphabet letters pushing each other ' with igns, with a feeling of being coni iected like two halves of a swing, one side moving up when the other moved down, or like swings or like cogs and pendulums inside a clock, only without the fogs, just with the push. It wasn't adding or multipication, and it used letters instead of numbers, but Ronny knew it was some kind of arithmetic. And he wasn't Ronny. He was an old man, teaching young men, and the old man did oot know about Ronny. He thought sadly frdw little he would be able to convey to the young men, and he remembered more, trying to sum long memories and much living into a few direct thoughts. And Ronny was the old man and himself, both at ince. t TT was too intense. Part of Ronny wanted to escape and tie alone, and that part withdrew and wanted to play something. Ronny feat in the grass and played with his toes like a much younger child. Part of Ronny that was Doctor Revert Purcell sat on the edge of a prison cot, concentrating on secret unpublished equations of biogenic stability which he wanted to pass on to the responsible hands of young researchers in the concealed-research chain. He was using the way of thinking which they had told him was the telepathic sending of ideas to anyone ready to receive. It was odd that he himself could never tell when he was sending. Probably a matter of age. They had started trying to teach him when he was already too old for anything so different. The water tap, four feet away, was dripping steadily, and it was hard for Purcell to concentrate, so intense was his thirst. He wondered if he could gather strength to walk that far. He was sitting up and that was good, but the struggle to raise himself that far had left him dizzy and trembling. If he tried to stand, the effort would surely interrupt his transmitting of equations and all the data he had not sent yet. Would the man with the keys who looked in the door twice a day care whether Purcell died with dignity? He was the only audience, and his expression never changed when Purcell asked him to point out to the authorities that he was not being given anything to eat. It was funny to Purcell to find that he wanted the respect of any audience to his dying, even of a man without response who treated him as if he were already a corpse. Perhaps the man would respond if Purcell said, "I have changed my mind. I will tell." But if he said that, he would lose his own respect. At the biochemists' and biophysicists' convention, the reporter had asked him if any, of his researches could be applied to warfare. He had answered with no feeling of danger, knowing that what he did was common practice among research men, sure that it was an unchallengeable right. "Some of them can, but those I keep to myself." The reporter remained deadpan. "For instance?" "Well, I have to choose something that won't reveal how it's done now, but -- ah -- for example, a way of cheaply mass-producing specific antitoxins against any germ. It sounds harmless if you don't think about it, but actually it would make germ warfare the most deadly and inexpensive weapon yet developed, for it would make it possible to prevent the backspread of contagion into a country's own troops, without much expense. There would be hell to pay if anyone ever let that out." Then he had added, trying to get the reporter to understand enough to change his cynical unimpressed expression, "You understand, germs are cheap -- there would be  new plague to spread everytime some pipsqueak biologist mutated a new germ. It isn't even expensive or difficult, as atom bombs are." The headline was: "Scientist Refuses to Give Secret of Weapon to Government." G overnment men came and asked him if this was correct, and on having it confirmed pointed out that he had an obligation. The research foundations where he had worked were subsidized by government money. He had been deferred from military service during his early years of study and work so he could become a scientist, instead of having to fight or die on the battlefield. "This might be so," he had said. "I am making an attempt to serve mankind by doing as much good and as little damage as pos sible. If you don't mind, I'd rather ,use my own judgment about what constitutes service." The statement seemed too blunt the minute he had said it, and he recognized that it had implications that his judgment was superior to that of the government. It probably was the most antagonizing thing that I could have been said, but he J could see no other possible state ment, for it represented precisely i what he thought. There were bigger headlines j about that interview, and when I he stepped outside his building for lunch the next day, several small gangs of patriots arrived with the proclaimed purpose of pursuading him to tell. They fought each other for the privilege. The police had rescued him after he had lost several front teeth and had one eye badly gouged. They then left him to the care of the prison doctor in protective custody. Two days later, after having been questioned several times on his attitude toward revealing the parts of his research he had kept secret, he was transferred to a place that looked like a military jail, and left alone. He was not told what his status was. When someone came and asked him questions about his attitude, Purcell felt quite sure that what they were doing to him was illegal. He stated that he was going on a hunger strike until he was allowed to have visitors and see a lawyer. The next time the dinner hour arrived, they gave him nothing to eat. There had been no food in the cell since, and that was probably two weeks ago. He was not sure just how long, for during part of the second week his memory had become garbled. He dimly remembered 'something that might have been delirium, which could have lasted more than one day. Perhaps the military who wanted the antitoxins . for germ warfare were waiting quietly for him either to talk or die. and went into the kitchen, stumbling in his walk like a beginning toddler. "Chocmil?" he said to his mother. She poured him some and teased gently, "What's the matter, Ronny -- back to baby-talk?" He looked at her with big solemn eyes and drank slowly, not answering. In the cell somewhere distant. Dr. Purcell, famous biochemist, began waveringly trying fo rise to his feet, unable to remember hunger as anything separate from him that could ever be ended, but weakly wanting a glass of water. Ronny could not feed him with the chocolate milk. Even though this was another himself, the body that was drinking was not the one that was thirsty. He wandered out into the back yard again, carrying the glass. "Bang," he said deceptively, pointing with his hand in case his mother was looking. "Bang." Everything had to seem usual; he was sure of that. This was too big a thing, and too private, to tell a grownup. On the way back from the sink, Dr. Purcell slipped and fell and lit his head against the edge of the iron cot. Ronny felt the edge K-tshing through skin and into hone, and then a relaxing blankness inside his head, like falling sleep suddenly when they are Uing you a fairy story while vou want to stay awake to find out what happened next. "Bang," said Ronny vaguely, pointing at a tree. "Bang." He was ashamed because he had fallen down in the cell and hurt his head and become just Ronny ;'ain before he had finished nding out his equations.He ied to make believe he was alive igain, but it didn't work. You could never make-believe anything to a real good finish. They never ended neatly -- there was always something unfinished, and something that would t;o right on after the end. It would have been nice if the i ailers had come in and he had been able to say something noble to them before dying, to show that he was brave. "Bang," he said randomly, ointing his finger at his head, nd then jerked his hand away is if it had burned him. He had become the wrong person that time. The feel of a bullet jolting the side of his head was startling and unpleasant, even if not real, and the flash of someone's vindictive anger and self-pity while pulling a trigger... , My wife will be sorry she ever... He didn't like that kind of make-believe. It felt unsafe to do it without making up a story first. Ronny decided to be Indian braves again. They weren't very real, and when they were, they had simple straightforward emotions about courage and skill and pride and friendship that he would like. on the fence, watching him. "Nice day." What's the matter, kid, are you an esper? "Hul-lo," Ronny stood on one foot and watched him. Just making believe. I only want to play. They make it too serious, having all these troubles. "Good countryside," The man gestured at the back yards, all opened in together with tangled bushes here and there to crouch behind, when other kids were there to play hide and seek, and with trees to climb. It can be the Universe if you pick and choose who to be, and don't let wrong choices make you shut off from it. You can make yourself learn from this if you are strong enough. Who have you been? Ronny stood on the other foot and scratched the back of his leg with his toes. He didn't want to remember. He always forgot right away, but this grownup was confident and young and stronglooking, and meant something when he talked, not like most grownups. "I was playing Indian." I was an old chief, captured by enemies, trying to pass on to other warriors the wisdom of my life before I died. He made believe he "Was the chief a little to show the young man what he was talking about. "Purcell!" The man drew in his breath between his teeth, and his face paled. He pulled back from reaching Ronny with his feelings, like holding his breath in. "Good game." You can ern from him. Don't leave him shut off, I beg you. You can let him influence you without being pulled off your own course. He was a good man. You were honored, and I envy the man you wilt be if you contacted him on resonant similarities. The grownup looked frightened. But you are too young. You'll block him out and lose him. Kids have to grow and leart I at their own speed. Then he looked less afraid, but uncertain, and his thoughts struggled against each other. Their own speed. But there should be someone alive with PurcelFs pattern and memories. We loved him. Kids should grow at their own speed, but... How strong are you, Ronny? Can you move ahead of the normal growth pattern? Grownups always want you to do something. Ronny stared back, clenching his hands and moving his feet uneasily. The thoughts were open to him Do you want to be the old chief again, Ronny? Be him often, so you can learn to know what he knew? ( And feel as he felt. It would be a stiff dose tor a kid.  It will be rich and exciting, full of memories and skills. (Rut hard . to chew. I'm doing this for Pur cell, Ronny, not for you. You j, have to make up your own mind ) "That was a good game. Are you going to play it any more?" H IS mother would not like it. She would feel the difference in him, as much as if he had read one of the books she kept away from him, books that were supposed to be for adults only. The difference would hurt her. He was being bad, like eating between meals. But to know , what grownups knew... He tightened his fists and; looked down at the grass. "I'llj play it some more." The young man smiled, still pale and holding half his feelings back behind a dam. Then mesh with me a moment. Let me in. He was in with the thought, feeling Ronny's confused consent, reassuring him by not think-? ing or looking around inside while  riding out a single call, Pur f II, Doc, that found the combination key to Ronny's guarded yesterdays and last nights and ten minutes agos. Ronny, I'll set that door, Purcell's memories, open tor you. You can't close it, hut feel like this about it -- and lie planted in a strong set, questioning, cool, open, a feeling of tbsorbing without words... it will give information when you need it, like a dictionary. The grownup straightened ,iway from the fence, preparing to walk off. Behind a dam pressed grief and anger for the leath of the man he called Pur ell. "And any time you want to be t he old chief, at any age he lived, rust make believe you are him." Grief and anger pressed more trongly against the dam, and the man turned and left rapidly, letting his thoughts flicker and scatter through private memories that Ronny did not share, that no one shared, breaking thought contact with everyone so that the man could be alone in his own mind to have his feelings in private. glass that had held his chocolate, milk from the back steps where he had left it and went inside. As he stepped into the kitchen, he knew what another kitchen had looked like for a fiye-year-old child who had been Purcell ninety years ago. There had been an iron sink, and a brownandgreen-spotted faucet, and the glass had been heavier and transparent, like real glass. Ronny reached up and put the colored plastic tumbler down, "That was a nice young man, dear. What did he say to you?" Ronny looked up at his mamma, comparing her with the remembered mamma of fifty years ago. He loved the other one, too. "He tol' me he's glad I play Indian."... For an offer to charter subscribers that will save you money and yet give you valuable bonuses!... , For pure myths for moderns... plotted, written and edited with the jm # if Jr  w.?I #  For Your  o  " # # a '  I Information-# Ancestor of the Dinosaurs in easy traveling distance, of New York, Chicago, San Diego or London(England) will, if they are so inclined, be able to see something without trouble for which they would formerly have had to travel half way around V fl the world and possibly without success. For the first time in many decades, the New Zealand government has permitted the export for exhibition of four Tuataras, (Hatterias or Sphenodons; in short, rhynchocephalia) . What do they look like? Well, like lizards, more or less dirty green in color, with an unusually large head and unusually large bright eyes in that head. Adult specimens are about # inches long. The ones on exhibit in the zoological gardens of the cities mentioned are young specimens which have not yet attained their full size. But they do have the spiny crest along back and tail which is the reason for the name Tuatara, a Maori word which can be translated as "spinebearer." It should be abundantly clear by now, because of the mention of the New Zealand government and the Maori name of the little creature, that its home is in New Zealand. But no longer New Zealand generally. Only a few hundred years ago, the Tuatara, it is believed, lived on both the main islands of New Zealand. The Maoris who came there from their original home islands of the Southern Pacific -- they call their original home Hawaiki, but it was not the Hawaii of our maps -- did not bother the small lizard much. Nor did the white settlers of a hundred and fifty years ago. But the white settlers brought animals with them -- dogs, cats and pigs, all three destructive to life-forms such as the Tuatara. The pigs especially, with their habit of rummaging through underbrush and eating everything that isn't wood or stone, exterminated the Tuatara on the main islands, by eating lizards and eggs alike. All this happened without the settlers being even aware of what went on, which is the main reason why so much of this article is conjecture. Tuatara, if it had ever been abundant on the South Island, would still be there. There are still large unsettled and virtually unexplored areas on the South Island, as the recent rediscovery of the bird Takahe ( Notornis ) has demonstrated. At any event, if you want to find the present home of Tuatara on a map, you need a pretty good map. The North and South Islands of New Zealand are separated by Cook Strait. West of Cook Strait, due north of the South Island, there is a smaller island named D'Urville Island, which is still indicated on most maps. Due north ot D'Urville Island there is a small rocky islet called Stephen Island, rarely seen on any map. But it is Tuatara's home, or rather one of them, for the little saurian also occurs on a few other rocky islands along the New Zealand coast, all strictly protected. When at home, Tuatara, slowmoving and cold-loving, eats insects, small crustaceans and other lizards, provided they are small enough. In captivity the diet is usually earthworms, but some have taken fish. The fact that they do eat fish, even though rarely, may explain why the Tuataras, very long ago, decided to set up community housekeeping with birds, -- "dovey petrels," to be precise. These marine birds nest in burrows which they dig, but the Tuataras move in on them. Whether the Tuataras elaborated upon the burrows or the petrels obligingly did it for them (as is generally assumed) is not completely known. But there is a double nest at the bottom; the petrels occupy the dugout to the left and the Tuataras the one to the right of the entrance. It was comparatively easy to tell that Tuatara (the scientific names, as has been mentioned, ire Hatteria or Sphenodoii) is very rare. There was no problem n reporting where and how they live. But when it comes to the question of why zoologists and paleontologists grow dreamyeyed at the very mention of the name, I don't have a one-sentence answer. T ET me try to explain it chron ologically. Tuatara became known to science about #. An explorer by the name of Dieffenbach reported on its existence in i German journal. The main reason why his report is still remembered is that he gave the name Ngarara as the Maori name; all others reported the native name as Tuatara, Tuatera, Ruatara, or Tuatete -- obviously the same word with slightly differing pronunciations. Four years before Dieffenbach. a British scientist, Edward Gray, had published a Note on a Peculiar Structure in the Head of an Agama. , Of course, Tuatara is not an Agama lizard; but the report on the strange organ in its head caused some comment, and an anatomist by the name of Gunther went to work, delicately and diligently. Finally he could announce that the "structure" itself was not so peculiar, only its location on top of the head. It was a third eye! This was enough to give paleontologists vivid professional dreams. Once upon a time, during the Triassic period, some # million years ago, threeeyed reptiles were no rarity. But few of them f had survived even to the end of the Triassic Period. Here was one with that feature, still alive. Apparently the third eye had somewhat reduced its size and activity in the course of time. It is smaller than the other two and is protected by a large transparent scale which is "set" in a circle of small opaque scales. But it is a complete eye in structure. Its connecting optical nerve is in working order and the whole is sensitive at least to light and dark. (Only the large black seaweed-eating iguana of the Galapagos Islands also has a still sensitive third eye, but it is far less well-preserved than that of Hatteria.') The third or "pineal" eye alone proved that Tuatara was old. How old was established by careamination of each of its features. Tuatara turned out to be the last surviving member of a group of reptiles which bear the scientific label of rynchocephalians ("beakheads"). The group was going strong during the Triassic Period. During the following period, the Jurassic, they spread considerably, but became less numerous at the same time. One of these Jurassic rynchoago, Homoesaurus, looked and was so much like Tuatara that it would be hard to tell the two apart if both were still alive. The remains of Homoesaurus have been found in England and in Bavaria, but representatives of that type had reached Malaya and New Guinea at just about that time. There was then a land bridge from New Guinea to New Zealand's North Island via New Caledonia. This is how Tuatara got to New Zealand. Some time afterward, that land bridge broke up into widely separated islands. Tuatara was in a place where it was safe, with nothing to bother it, until the settlers introduced pigs. Occasionally you can read in a popular book or article that Tuatara is a surviving small dinosaur. That is not so! The dinosaurs came later. Tuatara is one of the ancestors of the dinosaurs. month I receive a letter in which I am informed that all space travel men lack imagination. Just because they have discovered that a rocket is the only known means for accelerating and decelerating in the vacuum of space, they want to use rockets for everything. And because they can't imagine anything else any more but liquid fuel rockets, they build rocket ships consisting of three stages, the two lower steps exclusively designed to boost the top stage up to the desired speed. Of course, the step below the third has to be much heavier and larger, and the bottom step, which has to lift all the others off the ground, must be the biggest and clumsiest of them all. But, the reasoning runs, we only have to get the top stage up to proper speed. There is no need for the lower stages to develop a lot of speed, especially since they are supposed to fall back, anyway. Why not use a catapultlike or gunlike device to put some initial speed behind the top stage? The whole job would be much easier and it probably would take less fuel, too. It almost sounds convincing. Or, rather, it may sound convincing to those who have never tackled the job. Let's look at an actual example. There was that two-stage shot which carried to # miles. Corporal rocket. The lower stage was a V-# rocket, which provided :ie upper stage with a velocity  if almost precisely one mile per second at an altitude of # miles. poral to # miles without a lower stage, we then have to supply one mile per second by means of a catapult or a gun. In fact, we may have to supply a little more than one mile per second, because the catapult obviously would not he # miles tall and would there it a lower altitude, where the air s denser Ind offers more resist nce. The "muzzle velocity" 'ould have to be # feet per econd. The acceleration the rocket would receive in the catapult is given by the formula where a is the acceleration, s is the length of the catapult or the gun and v is the velocity at the end of the catapult -- those # feet per second, squared. Just try it a few times with various sets of figures and you'll be convinced that it is not lack of imagination that makes the space travel scientists stick to multiple stages. Even if you aim for as low a "muzzle velocity" as # ft.sec., you'll find that you either need a catapult of impossible length or else that the rocket would have to sustain accelerations as high as several hundred g. If you tried the latter, you would require a very massive rocket -- let's not even mention pilot and passengers -- so that it emerges in one piece and in workable condition. Unfortunately, it would then also have a very poor mass-ratio. Even with a mile-long shaft -- one drilled, say, into the top of a mountain -- the accelerations would still be too high for human occupants, in spite of the fact that humans can stand much higher accelerations than was believed possible as recently as eight years ago. And a tube one mile long, whether it is a vertical shaft in a mountain or a nearvertical structure up a steep mountain slope, will cost large sums of money. What you really need, though, is an acceleration path # or # miles long; more in some cases. And the cheapest way to accomplish that is by means of lower stages. My son suggested that you might be able to answer my question: " Why is there no frost on cloudy nights?" I have known this fact for years, but no one seems to be able to tell me why. Mrs. Mary Coulson RR #, Box # Silver Lake, Indiana The statement that there is no frost on cloudy night is generally correct; in fact, there is a proverb which says "clear Moon, frost soon,'" indicating the same observation. The explanation is mostly provided by the fact that the air near the ground is mostly heated by the ground. In other words, the Sun does not heat the bottom layers of the air to any appreciable extent directly. It heats the ground, which passes the heat onby re-radiation. If, after a clear day, the night is clear, too, the heat is radiated into space. But if a cloud blanket forms at sunset, it acts like a real blanket, trapping the heat between ground and cloud layer. There is one condition where you may have frost in spite of an overcast sky. This happens if the weather has been quite cold -- around # Fahrenheit, for some time; usually the sky is clear, or almost so, in such weather. Then, if a warm and moist air mass moves in, it may not displace the cold air mass, but ride on top of it. Where the moist warm air touches the cold air, the moisture will condense, forming a cloud blanket which keeps the Sun's rays out. The result is a series of cold days with an overcast sky. Why does water expand when it is cooled below its freezing point? Stephen Obrecht # Glenway Drive S.E. Cedar Rapids, Iowa Water reaches its greatest density not at its freezing point, but somewhat above the freezing point, at # centigrade. It freezes at # centigrade. Above and below # centigrade, it has a lesser density, than at that critical temperature. This is of great biological importance. If water below zero centigrade -- ice -- were heavier than liquid water, all ice that forms would sink to the bottom of rivers and lakes. During a Jong and severe winter, the lakes and most rivers would be solidly filled with ice from the bottom up, presumably destroying many life-forms in the process. Since the ice floats on top, it forms an insulating layer, keeping the water below liquid so that aquatic life-forms can survive. Some time ago I heard that if a person stays in a completely darkened room long enough to allow his irises to open completely, he'll be able to see by socalled ' "black" or ultraviolet light, but that every object he sees will seem to be displaced a certain angular distance from its actual position. Can you shed any light ( black or otherwise ) on this? Bert Aver a Box # Fairhope, Alabama It is not true that everybody van see ultra-violet after he has I teen in the dark long enough for his eyes to attain maximum sensitivity. It is true that' some people can see ultra-violet and they don't even have to stay in a dark room -- the main point is here that the intensity of ordinarily visible light must he low enough so that the u-v is not "drowned out" completely. The ability to see u-v seems to be restricted to light-eyed people who are still fairly young; the ability seems to be lost with age. I don't know whether an age limit has been actually established. As a rule of thumb, a person over # years of age is too old for that. But the idea of an angular displacement is wrong. Everybody can "see" ultra-violet via his camera. If there were sufcli a displacement, all pictures taken in light with much u-v in it (sunlight, for example) would be fuzzy or have double outlines. I admit having seen photographs with fuzzy or double outlines, but the u-v had nothing to do with that. I have read that the Northern Lights are caused by Sun spots. If so, why are they seen only in the north? Would they be seen on other planets? Mildred Moore Hightstown, N. J. The Northern Lights are caused by solar activity (Sun spots), but they are not restricted to the north. They appear in the regions of the magnetic poles, which are reasonably close to the geographical poles. Scientific terminology is aurora borealis for those near the geographical North Pole and aurora australis for those near the geographical South Pole. The second portion of the question is especially interesting; it would he nice if we could be sure. To the best of my knowledge, no aurora has ever been seen in the Martian atmosphere, but quite a number of astronomers believe that aurorae may have been seen in the Venusian atmosphere. Venus, going around the Sun inside the orbit of Earth, shows decided phases like the Moon. It happens that f#r more of the sickle points is visible than can be accounted for geometrically. Also, the outline of the sickle is sometimes "bumpy." These irregularities do not necessarily have to be caused by aurorae, but they may be. #n the July #I issue of the American Scientist , George Gamow writes: "Recently this theoretical conclusion ( Weizsacker , Kuiper et. a.) found confirmation in the actual discovery of planetary systems near two close stars. Please explain. Joe Low # Holland Lakewood, Colo. When you ask me to explain Dr. Gamow'e statement, I take it that you are looking for confirmation of his assertion that planets of other stars are known. They are. To phrase it as carefully as possible, one has to say that star systems comparatively near in space to our own sun are known to have nonluminous companions of planetary mass. They have not been seen so far -- their existence is known because they influence the movement of their suns, which we can measure. The sUns in question are binaries or double stars, two suns moving around their common center of gravity. Once this motion has been established, we are able to predict the relative positions accurately. But by careful study of photographs taken over a number of years, it turned out that the positions did not check precisely. There had to be at least one more body, not registering on the plates, to account for this. Several such suspicious cases had been under investigation for some years when K. Aa. Strand of Sproul Observatory (Swarthmore College) announced in # that the double star #I in Cygnus had a companion of planetary mass, # times as massive as Jupiter and moving around its sun once in # years. Only a few months later, the Leander McCormick Observatory of the University of Virginia announced a similar dark companion of the system # in Ophiuchus. The period of this object is # years and its mass # times that of Jupiter. Naturally, only very large dark companions can be found by this method. But it is logical to expect smaller planets where there are large ones. announce The Richest Science Fiction Novel Contest in History # minimum Guaranteed to the author of the best... To raise the literary level of the field still higher... To augment the already high standards with new writing talent ,... To focus more attention on this increasingly important form of literature. Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and one of the leading book publishin outright cash gifts, payments and guaranteed advance royalties. ,... The award novel will appear as a serial in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine... It will be published in book form by Simon and Schuster... Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and guaranteed advance royalties for book The entire # award will be paid to the winner at the time his (or her) name is announced -- certainly the largest single payment to any author in the history of science fiction. For Details and Rules See Page # When a really infallible scientific bureau makes a drastically 'serious error, the data must be wrong... but wrong in' what way? T HE first morning that they the planet, the executive officer stepped out of the ship. It was not quite dawn. Executive Hafner squinted in the early light ; his eyes opened wider, and he promptly went back inside. Three minutes later, he reappeared with the biologist in tow. "Last night you said there was nothing dangerous," said the executive. "Do you still think it's so?" Dano Marin stared. "I do." What his voice lacked in conviction, it made up in embarrassment. He laughed uncertainly. "This is no laughing matter. I'll talk to you later." The biologist stood by the ship and watched as the executive walked to the row of sleeping colonists. "Mrs. Athyl," said the executive as he stopped beside the sleeping figure. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, rolled over, and stood up. The covering that should have been there, however, wasn't. Neither was the garment she had on when she had gone to sleep. She assumed the conventional position of a woman who is astonished to find herself unclad without her knowledge or consent. "It's all right, Mrs. Athyl. I'm not a voyeur myself. Still, I think you should get some clothing on." Most of the colonists were awake now. Executive Hafner turned to them. "If you haven't any suitable clothing in the ship, the commissary will issue you some. Explanations will be given later." The colonists scattered. There was no compulsive modesty among them, for it couldn't have survived a year and a half in crowded spaceships. Nevertheless, it was a shock to awaken with no clothing on and not know who or what had removed it during the night. It was surprise more than anything else that disconcerted them. On his way back to the spaceship, Executive Hafner paused. "Any ideas about it?" Dano Marin shrugged. "How could I have? The planet is as new to me as it is to you." "Sure. But you're the biologist." As the only scientist in a crew of rough-and-ready colonists and builders, Marin was going to be called on to answer a lot of questions that weren't in his field. "Nocturnal insects, most likely," he suggested. That was pretty weak, though he knew that in ancient times locusts had stripped fields in a matter of hours. Could they do the same with the clothing of humans and not awaken them? "I'll look into the matter. As soon as I find anything, I'll let you know." "Good." Hafner nodded and went into the spaceship. grove in which the colonists had been sleeping. It had been a mistake to let them bed down there, but at the time the request had been made, there had seemed no reason not to grant it. After eighteen months in crowded ships everyone naturally wanted fresh air and the rustle of leaves overhead. Marin looked out through the grove. It was empty now; the colonists, both men and women, had disappeared inside the ship, dressing, probably. The trees were not tall and the leaves were dark bottle-green. Occasional huge white flowers caught sunlight that made them seem larger than they were. It wasn't Earth and therefore the trees couldn't be magnolias. But they reminded Marin of magnolia trees and thereafter he always thought of them as that. The problem of the missing clothing was ironic. Biological Survey never made a mistake -- yet obviously they had. They listed the planet as' the most suitable for Man of any so far discovered. Few insects, no dangerous animals, a most equitable climate. They had named it Glade because that was the word which fitted best. The whole land mass seemed to be one vast and pleasant meadow. Evidently there were things about the planet that Biological Survey had missed. Marin dropped to his knees and began to look for clues. If insects had been responsible, there ought to be a few dead ones, crushed, perhaps, as the colonists rolled over in their sleep. There were no insects, either live or dead. He stood up in disappointment and walked slowly through the grove. It might be the trees. At night they could exude a vapor which was capable of dissolving the material from which the clothing had been made. Farfetched, but not impossible. He crumbled a leaf in his hand and rubbed it against his sleeve. A pungent smell, but nothing happened. That didn't disprove the theory, of course. He looked out through the trees at the blue sun. It was bigger than Sol, but farther away. At Glade, it was about equal to the Sun on Earth. He almost missed the bright eyes that regarded him from the underbrush. Almost, but didn't -- the domain of biology begins at the edge of the atmosphere; it includes the brush and the small creatures that live in it. He swooped down on it. The creature fled squealing. He ran it down in the grass outside the grove. It collapsed into quaking flesh as he picked it up. He talked to it gently and the terror subsided. It nibbled contentedly on his jacket as he carried it back to the ship. unhappily into the cage. It was an undistinguished animal, small and something like an undeveloped rodent. Its fur was sparse and stringy, unglamorous; it would never be an item in the fur export trade. "Can we exterminate it?" gsked Hafner. "Locally, that is." "Hardly. It's ecologically basic." The executive looked blank. Dano Marin added the explanation: "You know how Biological Control works. As soon as a planet has been discovered that looks suitable, they send out a survey ship loaded with equipment. The ship flies low over a good part of the planet and the instruments in the ship record the neural currents of the animals below. The instruments can distinguish the characteristic neural patterns of anything that has a brain, including insects. "Anyway, they have a pretty good idea of the kinds of animals on the planet and their relative distribution. Naturally, the survey party takes a few specimens. They have to in order to correlate the pattern with the actual animal, otherwise the neural pattern would be merely a meaningless squiggle on a microfilm. "The survey shows that this animal is one of only four species of mammals on the planet. It is also the most numerous." Hafner grunted. "So if we kill them off here, others will swarm in from surrounding areas?" "That's about it. There are this peninsula. Of course, if you want to put a barrier across the narrow connection to the mainland, you might be able to wipe them out locally." The executive scowled. A barrier was possible, but it would involve more work than he cared to expend. "What do they eat?" he asked truculently. "A little bit of everything, apparently. Insects, fruits, berries, nuts, succulents, and grain." Dano Marin smiled. "I guess it could be called an omnivore -- now that our clothing is handy, it eats that, too." Hafner didn't smile. "I thought our clothing was supposed to be verminproof." Marin shrugged. "It is, on twenty-seven planets. On the twenty-eighth, we meet up with a little fella that has better digestive fluids, that's all." Hafner looked pained. "Are they likely to bother the crops we plant?" "Offhand, I would say they aren't. But then I would have said the same about our clothing." Hafner made up his mind. "All right. You worry about the crops. Find some way to keep them out of the fields. Meanwhile, everyone sleeps in the ship until we can build dormitories." Individual dwelling units would have been more appropriate in the colony at this stage, thought Marin. But it wasn't for him to decide. The executive was a man who regarded a schedule as something to be exceeded. "The omnivore -- " began Marin. Hafner nodded impatiently. "Work on it," he said, and walked away. The biologist sighed. The omnivore really was a queer little creature, but it was by no means the most important thing on Glade. For instance, why were there so few species of land animals on the planet? No reptiles, numerous birds, and only four kinds of mammals. Every comparable planet teemed with a wild variety of life. Glade, in spite of seemingly ideal conditions, hadn't developed. Why? He had asked Biological Controls for this assignment because it had seemed an interesting problem. Now, apparently, he was being pressed into service as an exterminator. He reached in the cage and picked up the omnivore. Mammals on Glade were not unexpected. Parallel development took care of that. Given roughly the same kind of environment, similar animals would usually evolve. In the Late Carboniferous forest on Earth, there had been creatures ike the omnivore, the primitive mammal from which all others had evolved. On Glade,' that kind of evolution just hadn't taken place. What had kept nature from exploiting its evolutionary potentialities? There was the real problem, not how to wipe them out. Marin stuck a needle in the omnivore. It squealed and then relaxed. He drew out the blood and set it back in the cage. He could learn a lot about the animal from trying to kill it. T HE quartermaster was shouting, though his normal voice carried quite well. "How do you know it's mice?" the biologist asked him. "Look," said the quartermaster angrily. Marin looked. The evidence did indicate mice. Before he could speak, the quartermaster snapped, "Don't tell me they're only micelike creatures. I know that. The question is: how can I get rid of them?" "Have you tried poison?" "Tell me what poison to use and I'll use it." It wasn't the easiest question to answer. What was poisonous to an animal he had never seen and knew nothing about? According to Biological Survey, the animal didn't exist... It was unexpectedly serious. The colony could live off the land, and was expected to. But another group of colonists was due in three years. The colony was supposed to accumulate a surplus of food to feed the increased numbers. If they couldn't store the food they grew any better than the concentrates, that surplus was going be scanty. Marin went over the warehouse thoroughly. It was the usual early construction on a colonial world. Not esthetic, it was sturdy enough. Fused dirt floor, reinforced foot-thick walls, a ceiling slab of the same. The whole was bound together with a molecular cement that made it practically airtight. It had no windows; there were two doors. Certainly it should keep out rodents. A closer examination revealed an unexpected flaw. The floor was as hard as glass; no animal could gnaw through it, but, like glass, it was also brittle. The crew that had built the warehouse had evidently been in such a hurry to get back to Earth that they hadn't been as careful as they should have been, for here and there the floor was thin. Somewhere under the heavy equipment piled on it, the floor had cracked. There a burrowing animal had means of entry. Short .of building another warehouse, it was too late to do anything about that. Micelike animals were inside and had to be controlled where they were. The biologist straightened up. "Catch me a few of them alive and I'll see what I can do." I N the morning, a dozen live specimens were delivered to the lab. They actually did resemble mice. Their reactions were puzzling. No two of them were affected by the same poison. A compound that stiffened one in a matter of minutes left the others hale and hearty, and the poison he had developed to control the omnivores was completely ineffec tive. The depredations in the ware; house went on. Black mice, white ones, gray and brown, short tailed and long-eared, or the rej verse, they continued to eat the j concentrates and spoil what they j didn't eat. I Marin conferred with the executive, outlined the problem as he saw it and his ideas on what i could be done to combat the j nuisance. I "But we can't build another j warehouse," argued Hafner. "Not J until the atomic generator is set I up, at any rate. And then we'll j have other uses for the power." I The executive rested his head in his hands. "I like the other soluj tion better. Build one and see how ' it works." I "I was thinking of three," said the biologist. "One," Hafner insisted. "We J can't spare the equipment until I we know how it works." At that he was probably right. ; They had equipment, as much  as three ships could bring. But the more they brought, the more f was expected of the colony. The net effect was that equipment was always in short supply. Marin took the authorization to the engineer. On the way, he privately revised his specifications upward. If he couldn't get as many as he wanted, he might as well get a better one. In two days, the machine was ready. It was delivered in a small crate to the warehouse. The crate was opened and the machine leaped out and stood there, poised. "A cat!" exclaimed the quartermaster, pleased. He stretched out his hand toward the black fuzzy robot. "If you've touched anything a mouse may have, get your hand away," warned the biologist. "It reacts to smell as well as sight and sound." Hastily, the quartermaster withdrew his hand. The robot disappeared silently into the maze of stored material. In one week, though there were still some mice in the warehouse, they were no longer a danger. T HE executive called Marin into his office, a small sturdy building located in the center of the settlement. The colony was growing, assuming an aspect of permanency. Hafner sat in his chadr and looked out over that growth with satisfaction. "A good job on the mouse plague," he said. The biologist nodded. "Not bad, except there shouldn't be any mice here. Biological Survey -- " "Forget it," said the exec. "Everybody makes mistakes, even B. S." He leaned back and looked seriously at the biologist. "I have a job I need done. Just now I'm short of men... If you have no objections..." The exec was always short of men, would be until the planet was overcrowded, and he would try to find someone to do the work his own men should have done. Dano Marin was not directly responsible to Hafner; he was on loan to the expedition from Biological Controls. Still, it was a good idea to cooperate with the executive. He sighed. "It's not as bad as you think," said Hafner, interpreting the sound correctly. He smiled. "We've got the digger together. I want you to run it." Since it tied right in with his investigations, Dano Martin looked relieved and showed it. "Except for food, we have to import most of our supplies," Hafner explained. "It's a long haul, and we've got to make use of everything on the planet we can. We need oil. There are going to be a lot of wheels turning, and everyone of them will have to have oil. In time we'll set up a synthetic plant, but if we can locate a productive field now, it's to our advantage." "You're assuming the geology of Glade is similar to Earth?" Hafner waggled his hand. "Why not? It's a nicer twin of Earth." Why not? Because you couldn't always tell from the surface, thought. Marin. It seemed like Earth, but was it? Here was a good chance to find out the history of Glade. Hafner stood up. "Any time you're ready, a technician will check you out on the digger. Let me know before you go." a digger. It didn't move or otherwise displace' a gram of dirt or rock. It was a means of looking down below the surface, to any practical depth. A large crawler, it was big enough for a man to live in without discom... fort for a week. W It carried an outsize ultrasonic generator and a device for directing the beam into  the planet. That was the sending apparatus. The receiving end bec gan with a large sonic lens which g picked up sound beams reflected 'f from any desired depth, converted it into electrical energy and  thence into an image which was flashed onto a screen. At the depth of ten miles, the image was fuzzy, though good 't enough to distinguish the main ' features of the strata. At three miles, it was better. It could pick  up the sound reflection of a buried coin and convert it into a picture on which the date could be seen.  It was to a geologist as a microscope is to a biologist. Being  a biologist, Dano Marin could ? appreciate the analogy. He started at the tip of the peninsula and zigzagged across, heading toward the isthmus. Methodically, he covered the territory, sleeping at night in thi digger. On the morning of th f third day, he discovered oil traces and by that afternoon he had located the main field. ' He should probably have turned back at once, but now that hr had found oil, he investigated more deliberately. Starting at the top, he let the image range downward below the top strata. It was the reverse of what it should have been. In the top few feet, there were plentiful fossil remains, mostly of the four species of mammals. The squirrellike creature and the far larger grazing animal were the forest dwellers. Of the plains animals, there were only two, in size fitting neatly between the extremes of the forest dwellers. After the first few feet, which corresponded to approximately twenty thousand years, he found virtually no fossils. Not until he reached a depth which he could correlate to the Late Carboniferous age on Earth did fossils reappear. Then they were of animals appropriate to the epoch. At that depth and below, the history of Glade was quite similar to Earth's. Puzzled, he checked again in a dozen widely scattered localities. The results were always the same -- fossil history for the first twenty thousand years, then none Beyond that, it was easy to trace the thread of biological development. In that period of approximatesomething unique had happened to Glade. What was it? On the fifth day his investigations were interrupted by the sound of the keyed-on radio. "Marin." "Yes?" He flipped on the sending switch. "How soon can you get back?" He looked at the photo-map. "Three hours. Two if I hurry." "Make it two. Never mind the oil." "I've found oil. But what's the matter?" "You can see it better than I can describe it. We'll discuss it when you get back." tracted the instruments into the digger. He turned it around and, with not tdo much regard for the terrain, let it roar. The treads tossed dirt high in the air. Animals fled squealing from in front of him. If the grove was small enough, he went around it, otherwise he went through and left matchsticks behind. He skidded the crawler ponderously to halt near the edge of the settlement. The center of activity was the warehouse. Pickups wheeled in and out, transferring supplies to a cleared area outside. He found Hafner in a corner of the warehouse, talking to the engineer. Hafner turned around when he came up. "Your mice have grown, Marin." Marin looked down. The robot cat lay on the floor. He knelt and examined it. The steel skeleton hadn't broken; it had been bent, badly. The tough plastic skin had been torn off and, inside, the delicate mechanism had been chewed into an unrecognizable mass. Around the cat were rats, twenty or thirty of them, huge by any standards. The cat had fought; the dead animals were headless or disembowled, unbelievably battered. But the robot had been outnumbered. Biological Survey had said there weren't any rats on Glade. They had also said that about mice. What was the key to their error? The biologist stood up. "What are you going to do about it?" "Build another warehouse, twofootthick fused dirt floors, monolithic construction. Transfer all perishables to it." Marin nodded. That would do it. It would take time, of course, and power, all they could draw out of the recently set up atomic generator. All other construction would have to be suspended. No wonder Hafner was disturbed. "Why not build more cats?" Marin suggested. The executive smiled nastily. "You weren't here when we opened the doors. The warehouse was swarming with rats. How many robot cats would we need -- five, fifteen? I don't know. Anyway the engineer tells me we have enough parts to build three more cats. The one lying there can't be salvaged." It didn't take an engineer to see that, thought Marin. Hafner continued, "If we need more, we'll have to rob the computer in the spaceship. I refuse to permit that." Obviously he would. The spaceship was the only link with Earth until the next expedition brought more colonists. No exec in his right mind would permit the ship to be crippled. But why had Hafner called him back? Merely to keep him informed of the situation? thoughts. "At night we'll floodlight the supplies we remove from the warehouse. We'll post a guard armed with decharged rifles until we can move the food into the new warehouse. That'll take about ten days. Meanwhile, our fast crops are ripening. It's my guess the rats will turn to them for food. In order to protect our future food supply, you'll have to activate your animals." The biologist started. "But it's against regulations to loose any animal on a planet until a complete investigation of the possible ill effects is made." "That takes ten or twenty years. This is an emergency and I'll be responsible -- in writing, if you want." The biologist was effectively countermanded. Another . rabbitinfested Australia or the planet that the snails took over might be in the making, but there was nothing he could do about it. "I hardly think they'll be of any use against rats this size," he protested. "You've got hormones. Apply them." The executive turned and began discussing construction with the engineer. gathered up and placed in the freezer for further study. After that, he retired to the laboratory and worked out a course of treatment for the domesticated animals that the colonists had brought with them. He gave them the first injections and watched them carefully until they were safely through the initial shock phase of growth. As soon as he saw they were going to survive, he bred them. Next he turned to the rats. Of note was the wide variation in size. Internally, the same thing was true. They had the usual organs, but the proportions of each varied greatly, more than is normal. Nor were their teeth uniform. Some carried huge fangs set in delicate jaws; others had tiny teeth that didn't match the massive bone structure. As a species, they were the most scrambled the biologist had ever encountered. He turned the microscope on their tissues and tabulated the results. There was less difference here between individual specimens, but it was enough to set him pondering. The reproductive cells were especially baffling. Late in the day, he felt rather than heard the soundless whoosh of the construction machinery. He looked out of the laboratory and saw smoke rolling upward. As soon as the vegetation was charred, the smoke ceased and heat waves danced into the sky. They were building on a hill. The little creatures that crept and crawled in the brush attacked in the most vulnerable spot, the food supply. There was no brush, not a blade of grass, on the hill when the colonists finished. were the hunting dogs of the agricultural era. What they lacked in size they made up in ferocity toward rodents. They had earned their keep originally in granaries and fields, and, for a brief time, they were doing it again on colonial worlds where conditions were repeated. The dogs the colonists brought had been terriers. They were still as fast, still with the same antirodent disposition, but they were no longer small. It had been a difficult job, yet Marin had done it well, for the dogs had lost none of their skill and speed in growing, to the size of a great dane. The rats moved in on the fields of fast crops. Fast crops were made to order for a colonial world. They could be planted, grown, and harvested in a matter of weeks. After four such plantings, the fertility of the soil was destroyed, but that meant nothing in the early years of a colonial planet, for land was plentiful. The rat tide grew in the fast crops, and' the dogs were loosed on the rats. They ranged through the fields, hunting. A rush, a snap of their jaws, the shake of a head, and the rat was tossed aside, its back broken. The dogs went on to the next. Until they could not see, the dogs prowled and slaughtered. At night they came in bloody, most of it not their own, and exhausted. Marin pumped them full of antibiotics, bandaged their wounds, fed them through their veins, and shot them into sleep. In the morning he awakened them with an injection of stimulant and sent them tingling into battle. It took the rats two days to learn they could not feed during the day. Not so numerous, they came at night. They climbed on the vines and nibbled the fruit. They gnawed growing grain and ravaged vegetables. The next day the colonists set up lights. The dogs were with them, discouraging the few rats who were still foolish enough to forage while the sun was overhead. An hour before dusk, Marin called the dogs in and gave them an enforced rest. He brought them out of it after dark and took them to the fields, staggering, he scent of rats revived them; they were as eager as ever, if not quite so fast. The rats came from the surrounding meadows, not singly, or in twos and threes, as thy had before; this time they came together. Squealing and rustling the grass, they moved toward the fields. It was dark, and though he could not see them, Marin could hear them. He ordered the great lights turned on in the area  of the fields. The rats stopped under the The dogs quivered and whined. Marin held them back. The rats resumed their march, and Marin released the dogs. The dogs charged in to attack, but didn't dare brave the main mass. They picked off the stragglers and forced the rats into a tighter formation. After that the rats were virtually unassailable. The colonists could have burned the bunched-up rats with the right equipment, but they didn't have it and couldn't get it for years. Even if they'd had it, the use of such equipment would endanger the crops, which they had to save if they could. It was up to the dogs. The rat formation came to the edge of the fields, and broke. They could face a common enemy and remain united, but in the presence of food, they forgot that unity and scattered -- hunger was the great divisor. The dogs leaped joyously in pursuit. They hunted down the starved rodents, one by one, and killed them as they ate. When daylight came, the rat menace had ended. The next week the colonists harvested and processed the food for storage and immediately planted another crop. tried to analyze the situation. The colony was moving from crisis to crisis', all of them involving food. In itself, each critical situation was minor, but lumped together they could add up to failure. No matter how he looked at it, they just didn't have the equipment they needed to colonize Glade. The fault seemed to lie with Biological Survey; they hadn't reported the presence of pests that were endangering the food supply. Regardless of what the exec thought about them, SurHe set up his equipment carevey knew their business. If they fully on the fringes of the settlesaid there were no mice or rats on ment. There and in no other place Glade, then there hadn't been existed the information he wantany -- when the survey was made. ed. The question was: when did He spent time in the digger, they come and how did they get checking his original investigahere? tions. It added up to a complete  Marin sat and stared at the picture, wall, turning over hypotheses in When he was certain of his his mind, discarding them when facts, he called on Hafner. they failed to make sense. The executive was congenial; His gaze shifted from the wall it was a reflection of the smoothto the cage of the omnivores, the ness with which the objectives of squirrel-size forest creature. The the colony were being achieved, most numerous animal on Glade, "Sit down," he said affably, it was a commonplace sight to "Smoke?" the colonists. The biologist sat down and took And yet it was a remarkable a Cigarette. J animal, more than he had rea"I thought you'd like to know  lized. Plain, insignificant in apwhere the mice came from," he  pearance, it might be the most began.  important of any animal Man had Hafner smiled. "They don't  encountered on the many worlds bother us any more."  he had settled on. The longer he "I've also determined the oriI watched, the more Marin became gin of the rats."  convinced of it. "They're under control. We're He sat silent, observing the doing nicely." J creature, not daring to move. He  sat until it was dark and the "'VN the contrary, thought MarI? omnivore resumed its normal acv in. He searched for the prop tivity. er beginning.  Normal? The word didn't ap"Glade has an Earth-type ply on Glade. climate and topography," he said. ; The interlude with the om"Has had for the past twenty J nivore provided him with one thousand years. Before that, I he thought he knew what it was, ago, it was also like Earth of H but he had to have more data, the comparable period." additional observations. He watched the look of polite interest settle on the executive's face as he stated the obvious. Well, it was obvious, up to a point. The conclusions weren't, though. years and twenty thousand years ago, something happened to Glade," Marin went on. "I don't know the cause; it belongs to cosmic history and we may never find out. Anyway, whatever the cause -- fluctuations in the sun, unstable equilibrium of forces within the planet, or perhaps an encounter with an interstellar, dust cloud of variable density -- the climate on Glade changed. "It changed with inconceivable violence and it kept on years ago, plus or minus, there was carboniferous forest on Glade. Giant reptiles resembling dinosaurs and tiny mammals roamed through it. The first great change wiped out the dinosaurs, as it did on Earth. It didn't wipe out the still more primitive ancestor of the omnivore, because it could adapt to changing conditions. "Let me give you an idea how the conditions changed. For a few years a given area would be a desert; after that it would turn into a jungle. Still later a glacier would begin to form. And then the cycle would be repeated, with wild variations. All this might happen -- did happen -- within a span covered by the lifetime of a single omnivore. This occurred many times. For roughly a hunnorm of existence on Glade. This condition was hardly conducive to the preservation of fossils." Hafner saw the significance and was concerned. "You mean these climatic fluctuations suddenly stopped, twenty thousand years ago? Are they likely to begin again?" "I don't know," confessed the biologist. "We can probably determine it if we're interested." The exec nodded grimly. "We're interested, all right." Maybe we are, thought the biologist. He said, "The point is that survival was difficult. Birds could and did fly to more suitable climates; quite a few of them survived. Only one species of mammals managed to come through." "Your facts are not straight," observed Hafner. "There are four species, ranging in size from a squirrel to a water buffalo." "One species," Marin repeated doggedly. "They're the same. If the food supply for the largest animal increases, some of the smaller so-called species grow up. Conversely, if food becomes scarce in any category, the next generation, which apparently can be produced almost instantly, switches to a form which does have an adequate food supply." "The mice," Hafner said slowly. for him. "The mice weren't here when we got here. They were born of the squirrel-size omnivore." Hafner nodded. "And the rats?" "Bom of the next larger size. After all, we're environment, too -- perhaps the harshest the beasts have yet faced." Hafner was a practical man, trained to administer a colony. Concepts were not his familiar ground. "Mutations, then? But I thought -- " The biologist smiled. It was thin and cracked at the edges of his mouth. "On Earth, it would be mutation. Here it is merely normal evolutionary adaptation." He shook his head. "I never told you, but omnivores, though they could be mistaken for an animal from Earth, have no genes or chromosomes. Obviously they do have heredity, but how it is passed down, I don't know. However it functions, it responds to external conditions far faster than anything we've ever encountered." Hafner nodded to himself. "Then we'll never be free from pests." He clasped and unclasped his hands. "Unless, of course, we rid the planet of all animal life." "Radioactive dust?" asked the biologist. "They have survived worse." The exec considered alternatives. "Maybe we should leave the planet and leave it to the animals." "Too late," said the biologist. "They'll be on Earth, too, and all the planets we've settled on." Hafner looked at him. The same pictures formed in his mind that Marin had thought of. Three ships had been sent to colonize Glade. One had remained with the colonists, survival insurance in case anything unforeseen happened. Two had gone back to Earth to carry the report that all was well and that more supplies were needed. They had also carried specimens from the planet. The cages those creatures were kept in were secure. But a smaller species could get out, must already be free, inhabiting, undetected, the cargo spaces of the ships. There was nothing they could do to intercept those ships. And once they reached Earth, would the biologists suspect? Not for a long time. First a new kind of rat would appear. A mutation could account for that. Without" specific knowledge, there would be nothing to connect it with the specimens picked up from Glade. "We have to stay," said the biologist. "We have to study them and we can do it best here." He thought of the vast complex of buildings on Earth. There was too much invested to tear them down and make them vercould not be moved off the planet while the work was being done. They were committed to Glade not as a colony, but as a gigantic laboratory. They had gained one planet and lost the equivalent of ten, perhaps more when the destructive properties of the omnivores were finally assessed. A rasping animal cough interrupted the biologist's thoughts. Hafner jerked his head and glanced out the window. Lips tight, he grabbed a rifle off the wall and ran out. Marin followed him. fields where the second fast crop was maturing. On top of a knoll, he stopped and knelt. He flipped the dial to extreme charge, aimed, and fired. It was high; he missed the animal in the field. A neat strip of smoking brown appeared in the green vegetation. He aimed more carefully and fired again. The charge screamed out of the muzzle. It struck the animal on the forepaw. The beast leaped high in the air and fell down, dead and broiled. They stood over the animal Hafner had killed. Except for the lack of markings, it was a good imitation of a tiger. The exec prodded it with his toe. "We chase the rats out of the warehouse and they go to the fields," he muttered. "We hunt them down in the fields with dogs and they breed tigers." "Easier than rats," said Marin. "We can shoot tigers." He bent down over the slain dog near which they had surprised the big cat. The other dog came whining from the far comer of the field to which he had fled in terror. He was a courageous dog, but he could not face the great carnivore. He whimpered and licked the face of his mate. The biologist picked up the mangled dog and headed toward the laboratory. "You can't save her," said Hafner morosely. "She's dead." "But the pups aren't. We'll need them. The rats won't disappear merely because tigers have showed up." The head drooped limply over his arm and blood seeped into his clothing as Hafner followed him up the hill. "We've been here three months," the exec said suddenly. "The dogs have been ih the fields only two. And yet the tiger was mature. How do you account for something like that?" Marin bent under the weight of the dog. Hafner never would understand his bewilderment. As a biologist, all his categories were upset. What did evolution explain? It was a history of organic life on a particular world. Beyond that world, it might not apply. Even about himself there were many things Man didn't know, dark patches in his knowledge which theory simply had to pass over. About other creatures, his ignorance was sometimes limitless. Birth was simple; it occurred on countless planets. Meek grazing creatures, fierce carnivores -- the most unlikely animals gave birth to their young. It happened all the time. And the young grew up, became mature and mated. He remembered that evening in the laboratory. It was accidental -- what if he had been elsewhere and not witnessed it? They would not know what little they did. He explained it carefully to Hafner. "If the survival factor is high and there's a great disparity in size, the young need not ever be young. They may be born as fully functioning adults!" it had initially set, the colony progressed. The fast crops were slowed down and a more diversified selection was planted. New buildings were constructed and the supplies that were stored in them were spread out thin, for easy inspection. The pups survived and within a year shot up to maturity. After proper training, they were released to the fields where they joined the older dogs. The battle against the rats went on; they were held in check, though the damage they caused was considerable. The original animal, unchanged in form, developed an appetite for electrical insulation. There was no protection except to keep the power on at all times. Even then there were unwelcome interruptions until the short was located and the charred carcass was removed. Vehicles were kept tightly closed or parked only in verminproof buildings. While the plague didn't increase in numbers, it couldn't be eliminated, either. There was a flurry of tigers, but they were larger animals and were promptly shot down. They prowled at night, so the colonists were assigned to guard the settlement around the clock. Where lights failed to reach, the infra-red 'scope did. As fast as they came, the tigers died. Except for the first one, not a single dog was lost. The tigers changed, though not in form. Externally, they were all big and powerful killers. But as the Slaughter went on, Marin noticed one astonishing fact -- the internal organic structure became progressively more immature. The last one that was brought to him for examination was the equivalent of a newly born cub. That tiny stomach was suited more for the digestion of milk than meat. How it had furnished energy to drive those great muscles was something of a miracle. But drive it had, for a murderous fifteen minutes before the animal wars brought down. No lives were lost, though sick bay was kept busy for a while. That was the last tiger they shot. After that, the attacks ceased. The seasons passed and nothing new occurred. A spaceship civilization or even that fragment of it represented by the colony was too much for the creature, which Marin by now had come to think of as the "Omnimal." It had evolved out of a cataclysmic past, but it could not meet the challenge of the harshest environment. Or so it seemed. colonists were due, a new animal was detected. Food was missing from the fields. It was not another tiger: they were carnivorous. Nor rats, for vines were stripped in a manner that no rodent could manage. The food was not important. The colony had enough in storage. But if the new animal signaled another plague, it was necessary to know how to meet it. The sooner they knew what the animal was, the better defense they could set up against it. Dogs were useless. The animal roamed the field they were loose in, and they did not attack nor even seem to know it was there. The colonists were called upon for guard duty again, but it evaded them. They patrolled for a week and they still did not catch sight of it. Hafner called them in and rigged up an alarm system in the field most frequented by the animal. It detected that, too, and moved its sphere of operations to a field in which the alarm system had not been installed. Hafner conferred with the engineer, who devised an alarm that would react to body radiation. It was buried in the original field and the old alarm was moved to another. Two nights later, just before dawn, the alarm rang. Marin met Hafner at the edge of the settlement... Both carried rifles. They walked; the noise of any vehicle was likely to frighten the animal. They circled around and approached the field from the rear. The men in the camp had been alerted. If they needed help, it was ready. They crept silently through the underbrush. It was feeding in the field, not noisily, yet they could hear it. The dogs hadn't barked. They inched nearer. The blue sun of Glade came up and shone full on their quarry. The gun dropped in Hafner's hand. He clenched his teeth and raised it again. Marin put out a restraining arm. "Don't shoot," he whispered. "I'm the exec here. I say it's dangerous." "Dangerous," agreed Marin, still in a whisper. "That's why you can't shoot. It's more dan'gerous than you know." Hafner hesitated and Marin went on. "The omnimal couldn't compete in the changed environment and so it evolved mice. We stopped the mice and it countered with rats. We turned back the rat and it provided the tiger. "The tiger was easiest of all for us and so it was apparently stopped for a while. But it didn't really stop. Another anima was being formed, the one you see there. It took the omnimal two years to create it -- how, I don't quired to evolve it on Earth." Hafner hadn't lowered the rifle and he showed no signs of doing so. He looked lovingly into the sights. "Can't you see?" urged Marin. "We can't destroy the omnimal. It's on Earth now, and on the other planets, down in the storage areas of our big cities, masquerading as rats. And we've never been able to root out even our own terrestral rats, so how can we exterminate the omnimal?" "All the more reason to start now." Hafner's voice was flat. Marin struck the rifle down. "Are their rats better than ours?" he asked wearily. "Will their pests win or ours be stronger? Or will the two make peace, unite and interbreed, make war on us? It's not impossible; the omnimal could do it if interbreeding had a high survival factor. "Don't you still see? There is a progression. After the tiger, it bred this. If this evolution fails, if we shoot it down, what will it create next? This creature I think we can compete with. It's the one after this that I do not  want to face." head and looked around. Slowly it edged away and backed toward a nearby grove. The biologist stood up and called softly. The creature scurried to the trees and stopped just inside the shadows among them. The two men laid down their rifles. Together they approached the grove, hands spread open to show they carried no weapons. It came out to meet them. Naked, it had had no time to learn about clothing. Neither did it have weapons. It plucked a large white flower from the tree and extended this mutely as a sign of peace. "I wonder what it's like," said Marin. "It seems adult, but can it be, all the way through? What's inside that body?" "I wonder what's in his head," Hafner said worriedly. It looked very much like a man. Current (Veio Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of searce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #. New York Open Monday Thru Saturday : #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until # :# P.M. (Phone GRamercy #-#) Secret of the House It's spice that's the variety of interplanetary life -- and it fust drove Kathy nutmeggyi O F course no one realized in advance what would be, ounce for ounce, the most valuable return cargo of the Earth-Venus ' spaceships, I even though the answer should have been obvious to anyone with the faintest knowledge of historical patterns. Rare metals? With the cost of fuel to lift them out of Venus's almost-Earth gravity making them even costlier than on Earth itself? No, the answer was the obvious but overlooked one: What did Marco Polo bring back from China and Vasco da Gama from India? Why was Columbus seeking a new route to the Indies? In one word: spices. Man's palate needs occasional rejuvenation. One of the main purposes of exploration, intercontinental or interplanetary, is the restimulation of jaded taste buds. And in addition to the new spices there were new methods of cooking, such as that wonderful native Venusian quick passing through live steam, which gave the startling effect of sizzling hot crisp rawness; or balj, that strange native dish which was a little like a curry and a little like a bouillabaisse, but richer and more subtle than either. There was sokalj, or Venusian swamphog, the most delicately delicious meat on three planets -- not that anything Martian would ever be considered by the true gourmet. Kathy listened to regularly once a week for the first year of her marriage. For she had married not only a prominent and successful man, she soon realized, but one who had been bitten at a susceptible age by the word gourmet. It was fun while they were courting. It was fun, anyway, for a video network receptionist to be taken to good restaurants by the top interplanetary commentator. It was especially fun to watch him go through the masculine production number of conferring with the headwaiter, sending his compliments (and instructions) to the chef, and exchanging views with the sommelier, as Kathy quickly learned to call the-man-with-the-wine. Wine did not ship well interplanetarily ; acceleration over one g, in the term of the cognoscenti, "bruised" it. In this domain, the French still reigned supreme, and stressed their superiority to mask their natural jealousy of the upstart Venusian colonists. In every American city -- with a few exceptions in New Orleans and San Francisco -- former "French" restaurants had become "Venusian" and even in Paris cuisine venerienne marked some of the most highly esteemed establishments. But the entertainment value of a gourmet exhibitionist decreased as courtship progressed logically into marriage, and being wined and dined gave place to the daily problem of feeding the man. Quick freezing had, of course, made the bride's problems simple compared to those of earlier centuries. But George, completely in character, insisted on a high percentage of personally prepared meals -- and was shrewd enough to spot any substitute makeshifts via the deep freeze and the electronic oven. Not even the apartment on the very top level of Manhattan, where you could still see the Hudson, not even the charge accounts at shops she'd never dared enter, not even the wondrous fact that she loved George with an intensity which she had always considered just an unlikely convention of the women's minimags -- none of these could quite reconcile Kathy to life with a man who could down three bowls of your best hand-made oyster stew without interrupting his speech on the glories of authentic balj a la Venusberg, who could devour enough of a prime rib roast to throw the whole week's budget out of joint while expatiating on the absurdity of the legend that Earth, cooks in general, and the Anglo-Saxons in particular, did at least understand beef. -of hiring a cook, not so much to satisfy George as to divert his inevitable reproaches to someone else. But aside from the fact that a cook's salary would turn her charge accounts anemic,' Kathy knew that her mother, both her grandmothers, and undoubtedly all four of her greatand all eight of her great-greatgrandmothers had fed their men and kept them happy. This was a matter of family pride. Then came the awful day when George brought Jose Lermontov home to dinner. Kathy's younger sister was also dining with them that night, and wrinkled her nose after George's face faded from the visiphone. "These revolting Venus-colonial diplomats," said Linda. "He'll have a swamp-beard and a paunch and a wife and six children at home. Kathy, why doesn't George ever meet anybody newsworthy who's -- well, worthy?" "He's a very fine young man, I hear," Kathy muttered distractedly. "Guerilla leader against the dictatorship, wrote a fine book about its overthrow. What worries me is the paunch -- and what I'm going to put into it." Five minutes after meeting the Venusian, Linda slipped into the kitchen to whisper, "Sister... please... can I have that in my stocking for Christmas?" But even this pleasing reversal did not divert Kathy from the task of preparing to fill the, as it turned out, non-existent paunch. Dinner, she thought a little later, was going surprisingly well, especially between Jose and Linda. But then George, having speared and destroyed the last pork chop, cleared his throat. "You must make allowances, Lermontov. Mere pork to a man accustomed to s okalj..." "Mean swamphog?" Jose asked politely, with the usual clipped Venusian avoidance of pronouns and articles. "And," George added commiseratingly, "this so-called 'country gravy' -- rather a shock to a man from a planet where they think, thank God, not in terms of gravies, but of sauces." "Very good gravy," said Jose, mopping up the last of his with a slice of Kathy's own bread. "Imagine 'so-called' because first made by those who live in country?" "Even granting that," George persisted, "can't you picture what just a pinch of baj-powder would have done for it? Or perhaps a hint of tinilj?" "Myself," Jose replied gravely, "prefer one of your Earth herbs -- dash of oregano, bit of savory. Summer savory, of course." George gave the matter serious thought. "Possibly. Very possibly. But in either case it demonstrates the pitiful lack of imagination of the average Earth housewife." It is conceivable that Kathy made too obvious a clatter in stacking and removing the dinner dishes. In any event, Linda followed her hastily into the kitchen. "Please, Kathy angel, don't explode, not just yet. I know George is asking for it, but he's probably been told already that all Earthwomen are shrews and I don't want..." Kathy controlled herself until the one agreeable result of the evening was reached when Jos asked if he might see Linda home. To her surprise, she went right on # G controlling herself even after they had left, because by then she had thought of The Plan.  npHE very next morning, The Plan was well under way. A: Kathy invaded her favorf ite bookshop and bought every book in stock on Venusian spices and cooking, and even added such pre-Venusian classics of culinary perception as BrillatSavarin, Escoffier, and M. F. K. Fisher. B: She enrolled herself for daily lessons at the Uya Rulj School of Venusian Cookery (formerly the Ecole de Cuisine Cordon Bleu). C: Knowing that George had a luncheon date in Chicago with his sponsor, she visited the restaurant where her husband normally lunched. It was an unobtrusive chop house in the thirties, far down on Manhattan's base-level, and the excellent lunch she enjoyed there confirmed her darkest suspicions. For two weeks she read her books and took her lessons without trying out what she learned except for lunches by herself. And she did learn things. George's school of thought had its points. For Kathy's cooking, like that of her eight great-great-grandmothers, had been not only Earthly but plain American. There was a fresh delight in learning that the Architect of all things had established on this planet a certain inevitable relationship between tomatoes and sweet basil, and had ordained that caraway seeds should fulfill the destiny of red cabbage -- even as on another planet He had sown tinilj so that the flesh of the swamphog might be even sweeter. And who was to anticipate the masterfully predestined interplanetary blends? The inescapable kinship of garlic and lamb. Kathy had long known, but her eyes opened wide on discovering how a pinch of ba;powder completed the trinity. But these discoveries did not weaken The Plan. And that same Architect smiled upon The Plan by allowing the network's robowaxer to deposit a minutely oversufficient flow upon the floor of the corridor in front of George's office. On that wax, George slipped and broke his leg. George probably never admitted, even to himself, that he enjoyed being bedridden: the visiphone calls, the mini-script couriers from the network, the bedside microphone and cameras. But he did begin to admit that he was enjoying Kathy's cooking. Where once she might have served steak, she now brought forth grenadine de boeuf a la venerienne. Where once she might have served her asparagus with melted butter, she now ventured on a hollandaise (with five grains of baljpowder replacing the cayenne of ancient recipes). Where once she might have served leftover simply reheated, she now masked them with a sauce which would cause the recumbent George to smack his lips, roll his eyes, and murmur, "Silj, of course, and chives... and a hint of tinilj... possibly a whisper of pnutj, probably Earth-grown? Yes, I thought so... and... what is that?" "Chevil, darling," Kathy would say, and he'd answer, "Of course, of course. I would have had it in a minute. You know, Katherine my dear, you are developing an imagination!" George's plasticast was to come off that Thursday, Kathy decided it was time for the denouement of The Plan. As she was painstakingly making up her shopping list on Thursday morning, the visiphone rang and it was, miraculously, not the network for George. "Oh, Kathy!" Linda burbled. "I've got one of those nice let'sseewhathappens dates with him tonight and could you possibly ask us both to dinner? Because he likes you and he's really just about almost there and if we were... you know, all in the family and everything, I think it might just -- " "Jose?" Kathy asked, knowing the answer. She grinned and doubled the quantities on the list. The worst of the preparations for dinner were over when Linda arrived, carrying, to Kathy's surprise, a weekend case. The girl devoted only the necessary minimum of time to admiring George's knitted leg, then dragged her sister into the bedroom. "Kathy, I've got such a problem. He's known so many women... all over two planets and at embassies and maybe even spies. I told you tonight I think he will; only I don't know what lipstick to use, what perfume, anything. I've got to make myself interesting; but I don't want to overdo it. So I just brought everything I have. You tell me." Kathy looked at the array. She thought of her dinner and The Plan and she began giving Linda her advice. TT was the same cast that had attended the awful dinner which inspired The Plan, but they were different people. Jose, no longer the visiting colonial, was a gentleman at home among friends; Linda was radiant in the glow of simplicity and a wellscrubbed face; and George was praising the food. He praised the green peas. He praised the mashed potatoes. And above all he praised the fried chicken. ff "I can't quite analyze it," he kept saying. "There's a touch there I can't quite get. You've brought out the flavor miraculously. It wouldn't," he demanded suspiciously, "be that new powder Koenigsberg claims he found among the natives at the tip of the southern continent? I thought they hadn't shipped any of that in yet." "They haven't,darling," said Kathy. "Perhaps the tiniest pinch of balj with a little freshly ground celery seed?" "No." "Then what in two planets -- " "A woman must have some secrets, George. Let's just say this is... a secret of the house." At this point Kathy happened to catch Josh's eye and hastily looked away. It was impossible that a Venusian diplomat would be winking at his hostess! George was still pursuing his questions over brandy in the living room. Jose, also possibly (Kathy prayed) in a questionasking mood, had led Linda out onto what the architect called the sun-area, though Kathy persisted in thinking of it, more romantically, as the balcony. As she saw the two turn to come back in, Kathy headed for the kitchen, an immemorial spot for sisterly confidences. But it was not Linda who followed her in. It was Jose. He leaned casually against the door jamb and told her, "Know secret of house." "Yes?" said Kathy casually. "Oh, I mean -- you do? Sometimes I have to stop and reread you, like a telegram. Well?" "Bought food of highest quality, cooked it extremely well, relied on nothing but natural flavor, probably little salt. Good old George always wanted so much seasoning, this strikes him as new and revolutionary taste sensation. Right?" ly," she said. "I thought it would work and I was sure of it when I ate at his regular lunch place. That's just what they do; but because it's a chop house with a reputation, he thinks it's magic. Except I've learned things his way, too. From now on, Georgegets variety at home -- and I think he'll like all of it without ever knowing why he likes which." "Simplicity also magic," Jos# observed. "Your idea -- clean, fresh simplicity of Linda that accounts for fact am going to be your brother-in-law. Correct?" "Correct? It's perfect!" Impulsively, Kathy kissed him. "Oh, my!" she said as she drew back. "Now you've got lipstick after coming off the balcony spotless!" "Variety," said Jose approvingly. "Still wonder one thing, Kathy. Those mashed potatoes -- extraordinary. If secret of house, there's where. Confide in me?" "Now that you're part of the family, sure." "Yes?" "The secret is this: I take lots of butter and cream -- real cowstuff, no syntho -- and I beat the living bejeepers out of 'em." When they returned to the living room, it was obvious that Linda had told George the news. Using his newly recovered leg with as ostentatious pride as a year-old toddler, George advanced paternally upon Jos# Lermontov. "Let tonight's dinner be a marital lesson to you, my boy. Remember the last time you ate here, and realize that there's no fault in a wife that a little husbandly persistence can't cure." This time there was no doubt whatsoever that the gentlemanly Venusian diplomat was winking at his hostess. # Star Shelf ed by Judith Merril, Random House, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # T is rare that this sour-grapes reviewer goes all-out about an anthology; there have been too manyand most have been of poor quality. Here is one, however, that is way up on the top of the pile: an "idea" anthology that contains fantasy and science fiction and thrives on both. There are # I tales in the volume, all of which tell about odd and unlikely varieties of life (and "non-life") on or off our planet. All but three rate B-for better. A rather rare high average. Life types range from sentient whirlwinds (Robert Heinlein) to more or less standard robots, however, in the least routinely described. There are tales of ghosts, werewolves, mutants, angels, "creatures," gnomes and, often best of all, completely real and civilized beings on or from other planets and realms. Authors whose tales particularly enchanted me, in addition to the two men mentioned above, are Mark Clifton, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, Laurence Manning (with a very touching story never before published anywhere), Anthony Boucher, Roger Dee, Lester del Rey, and Murray Leinster. Del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," incidentally, is the only story to have first been published before #. There is an excellent short bibliography of strange-life stories that have appeared in other anthologies: a fine idea, but here a little too short to be truly representative. Fletcher Pratt. Random House, New York, #. # pages, illustrated, # FT#HE second volume in the Coggins-Pratt series on astronautics for the younguns is just as good as the first, which was (see The present volume takes you from Earth to the first Space Station, to the Moon -- and does so in plain and not-too-technical language and in magnificent pictures, half of which are in full color. No attempt is made to overdramatize the humdrum aspects of the undertaking, or to oversimplify. While it does not make the job sound easy, it does make it easy to understand, both in writing and in the illustrations. cover is used as one of the fullpage plates (page #) in the book. It is not often that the cover of a science fiction magazine is sufficiently accurate, engineeringwise, to appear in a non-fiction discussion as a good approximation of future reality. by Mark Twain. Harper  Brothers, New York, #. # pages, # W HY do people generally ignore Mark Twain's "science fiction?" Could it be because all his fantasy was bitterly satiric? That may be, but the best science fiction is shrewd, penetrating and often sharp in tone. Well, here is Mark Twain at his satiricfantastic best. The book is an expanded version, prepared by the late Dixon Wecter, of Mark's famous squib against pomposity in religion and in daily life, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," plus a hitherto unpublished satire on the same theme, "Letter From the Recording Angel." Two brand-new chapters in the Stormfield saga open the book with a superb attack on race prejudice. "The Recording Angel" slashingly satirizes hypocrisy and the meanness of miserly wealth; and the whole wonderful document presents some of the most hilariously biting satire -- and some of the richest science fiction imagination -- that has ever appeared in print. Pratt. Introduction by John Ciardi. Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, #. # pages, #  TT is with a little hesitancy that I discuss this book in these columns. Witchery is probably not appropriate here -- especially stories which try to kid the reader into actually believing in supernatural powers. Nearly the best thing about this volume is John Ciardi's sharp and poetic introduction, an appreciative review of the anthropological origins of belief in witches and a deftly subtle analysis of witch types. As for the three novelets themselves, I find Leiber's "Conjure Wife," from a # Unknown Worlds, to be straight-faced (and very well-done) obscurantism, based on the concept of the soul as a tangible (and stealable) article. Blish's relatively short "There Shall Be No Darkness," from a is somewhat more persuasive for me, perhaps because it is closer to being science fiction. It is Fletcher Pratt's "The Blue Star," however, nearly novel length by itself, that provides the real surprise of the book. This never previously published tale is an immensely effective piece of mannered pseudo-historical writing, a recreation of a time when witchcraft was really believed in -- in this instance on a parallel world that is only slightly different from our world during its medieval period. It is full of color, sex, and wonderful, robust characters. The witchcraft, because it is placed in a suitable environment, is quite believable.For my money. Witches Three is worth buying especially because of the excellent imaginings in Fletcher Pratt's splendid baroque tapestry. antoniorrobles. Twayne Publishers, New York, #. # pages, # Witches Three, they also included in the package this changeling, this simplemad tale translated from the Spanish by Edward and Elizabeth Huberman. It is just about the goofiest thing I have read since Tristram Shandy. I don't know if it's any gooji; all I know is I enjoyed it! It tells of the adventures of a real centaur in Nazi Germany, through the Spanish Civil War, and finally into modern Mexico, where the author of this book, famed in prewar Spain, is now living. These adventures are partly sharp anti-Fascism, partly straight bizarre romance, and partly (a large part) sheer nonsense, but the kind of poetic nonsense that looseminded characters like the undersigned love. ton... Cecile Matschat, Editor; Carl Car met, Consulting Editor. John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia. #. #-# pages, # each. " science fiction juveniles maintains the same high quality established by the first five A bit oversimple in the writing (for adults, that is) and overgadgety in the science, these tales nevertheless are clean as a whistle, excellent and effecive promotion of scientific and technological ideas, and "action-packed" without leaning too heavily on carnage and catastrophe, with one or two exceptions. Poul Anderson's Vault of the Ages is one of the exceptions -- a ilization destroyed and a barbaric society beginning its way back up the scale by means of data found in a Twentieth Century Time Vault. Arthur Clarke's Islands in the Sky is a wholly convincing tale of a boy's adventures on our first artificial satellite. Chad Oliver's Mists of Dawn is a dramatic but rather run-ofthe-mill tale of a lad's exciting doings in the year # B.C., where he was placed by an accident to a time machine. Philip St. John's Rocket Jockey is one of those rather oldfashioned tales of an "auto race" in space, with some nasty Martians as villains. It is perhaps the least convincing of the five tales. Bryce Walton's Sons of the Ocean Deep is a genuinely exciting story of the exploration of the ocean bottom, and of the very surprising things that are found there. It's cast in the future, when space travel is old-hat. The series is just the thing for the growing generation, and a fine lead-in for them to more adult science fiction eventually. The Drop Certainly the cheapest way to get where you want to go is to be deported. And there are between planets, even on a ship like the Ironrod, so my first goal in Forbeston on Mars was always the pool. I stripped down to trunks, ultraviolet checked, and plunged out into the green-tinted water. After blowing around a while, I lay back and floated. Above, beyond the almost invisible protective dome, there was the purple velvet of the Martian sky, flecked, now that the Sun was low on the horizon, with the larger stars. One of jj them, unwinking and tremendous, I was green -- Earth, of course. From the pool to the club; the : usual routine. The Senior Officers' ; Club was on the corner of #th j and X, just across from the Dej partment of Commerce building. I had belonged to it two years now, and at # was no longer the ' youngest member. A prodigy of #I had got his master's ticket two or three months before. known for years he just called I checked in, and from his little "Captain," "Commodore," or Cubbyhole Steve recognized me, whatever it was. which was certainly an honor. He "Venus to Mercury run," I brought my mail down from its told him. "Clarke's Point, Karsbox: half a dozen bills, two vocoville, Mordecai -- the usual." letters from a distant cousin, and "You get around," he said. "I a pile of advertising voco-flips. stick here." Steve said: "Where've you I'd heard the complaint from, been, Captain Newsam?" him before, and also from others The individual naming was anin Forbeston and at other landother part of his technique. I had falls. They mostly looked contennoticed that people he really had ted enough, though. "One place is like another," I told him tiredly. "Yes," he said. "I've heard that. What you're used to, I figure. Going in to eat?" "Directly." I dropped the vocoflips in a disposal chute. "Do something for me, Steve." "Any old thing. What is it?" "Check me Captain Gains." He didn't hesitate long, but I'm used to observing small actions and probing them -- I did a thesis on behavior for my diploma. I saw Steve's eyes flicker, and the involuntary movement of his hands. He said: "I'll check him, Captain. I haven't seen him around much lately." s "How lately?" I asked quietly. He was smooth again now. "Well, you know how it is. With serving officers, you don't always know whether they're here or away. Even when they're at Forbeston, they don't always come into the club. Hunting trips and such." "Your memory's not bad, Steve. Just when did you last see him?" He pretended to consider. "Might be two months. How long you been gone?" "Just over two months." "Yes, I'd say that's about it." "Thanks. Check him for me all the same. Check him all over. I'm going in to eat." the window, and ordered. This part of the club overlooked the playground of the Forbeston Junior School. I sat eating and watching the generation that would be prepared to take over when I had completed my twenty years in space and was ready to retire to that plantation up in the hills. I didn't notice when someone came up to the table. He tapped the back of my chair. "Mind if I join you?" It was Matthews, from the Firelike. I had run into him at various times, in various places, and liked him well enough. I 'j nodded, and he sat down. "Just in?" "Three hours." He nodded. "Been in over a week myself. We're on the Uranus trip now. That's a rough  job I'll be glad to see the end of. j We lost the Steelback on our last run. It's a God-forsaken I stretch of sky." "One place is like another," I said. It was the conventional phrase. j Matthews glanced at me. "Glad J you think so." j "What else?"  "People get ideas," he said i vaguely. "Do you go near the  Earth at all on your present run?" i "The Moon. Clarke's Point. Why?" "We used to hit Tycho.  They've got a telescope there that's pretty good. I used to get into the observatory. You can make out some small groups of buildings on Earth when the weather's right." The conversation was becoming embarrassing. To mention Earth at all was bad enough; to speak of "weather" was something worse. I looked at Matthews. He seemed normal, but I thought I detected a watchfulness behind the placidity of his expression. I said deliberately: "I've never given it a thought." "Sometimes people get to acting peculiar. We had a second officer with us three or four years back. He got an idea in his head that the Earth was raising a battle fleet. He used to spend his off-duty time at the lookout screen watching for the enemy cruisers approaching." I laughed. "What did they do with him?" "Gave him the drop. I guess he knows better by now." "If he's still alive." Matthews paused for a moment. "Have you ever wondered why we drop the misfits back to Earth?" I looked at him again. "What is there to think about? The reason's obvious enough. Since the ruling was made against prefrontal leucotomy, it's the only alternative to snuffing them out, unless they are kept in institutions at our expense." He drained his coffee. "I've known some to say that we should never have abandoned Earth. It's richer in natural resources than all the planets together." I added: "And populated to the We couldn't dispose of that lot, and we couldn't avoid being contaminated if we had to live among them. The reason our kind came to the planets was to get away from them, to be able to develop our superior civilization in peace and without interruption. We've got the Sirius project under way. In a couple of centuries we may be in a different solar system altogether." "Or we may not," Matthews corrected. "There have been quite a few earlier projects, starting with the Proxima Centauri project. That was two hundred years ago." "You sound pessimistic." "It's the Uranus trip," he said. He grinned. "Forget it. One place is like another. Doing anything tonight?" "Nothing much. Looking a friend up." "Yes," he said. "I thought you might be." The remark was, I felt, an enigmatic one. He left without waiting for me to ask him to clarify it. out. "Any luck with Captain Gains?" I asked him. He shook his head. "Forget it then. I'm going along to his place. There'll be a message, even if he isn't there." Steve nodded. As I went out, he flicked the vidiphone switch in front of him. Larry's bubble was seven or eight kilometers outside the city. I took my own car to the West Lock ' and picked up a sand tracker there. The Sun had set when I got outside the city bubble, but Phobos was up and I didn't need to use the main lights to see my way. I made a good twenty and in about a quarter hour was under the ridge on which the bubble that surrounded Larry's place was fixed. I could see it shimmering in the full moonlight, but there was no sign of a light within. I parked the tracker outside and went in. The lock was automatic ; as it closed behind me, the main lights inside went on. Larry's shack was in front of me. I pushed the door open. The living room looked reasonably tidy, but there was dust that showed no one had been in it for some weeks, at least. I went straight across to the vidiphone and pressed the message button. The screen stayed blank.This was unusual. There should have been some kind of message. I set out to hunt through the shack for some kind of clue, but there was nothing. Larry Gains and I had gone through college at Tycho together, and we graduated together. Our first four years in space we were on the same boat -- the Graylance on the Asteroid Circuit -- and after the inevitable split came with my posting to the Ironrod, we still saw as much of each other as our wanderings permitted. Fortunately, both boats were based on For best on. Six months before, the old Graylance had made its last loop round the Belt; a chunk of rock weighing twenty tons or more had torn her open. Larry had been one of the survivors, but with injuries enough to ground him for at least a year. It was then he had had this shack put up. It was a handy base from  which to hunt rocktrotters. I had j: stayed out there with him on a V couple of leaves. Now the place . J was deserted. Might he have been seconded# back into space on a special board? But there would have  been a message, either at the club or here. An extended trip, up onto the Kayser Plateau? Then again there should have been a mesv i'vv:  s sage; but he might not have expected to be away for long. That seemed the only possible solution. But there was the thick dust, and there had been that funny look in Steve's eye when I had mentioned Larry. I began hunting aimlessly around the hut again. A tape of the Forbeston edition of the Tycho Capsule. I clipped it into the screen. # -- #. That made it just over two months old. I heard the door open behind me and turned around, half expecting to see Larry himself there. But instead there were two men in Medical uniform. One of them stepped forward. "Captain Newsam?" He framed it as a question, but it was a statement. I knew that and nodded. "Just a checkup," he said. "I had acheckup. This afternoon. When I got in with the Ironrod." "That's all right," the Medic said. "We won't keep you long." "You won't keep me at all, I've had my checkup. You can reach me through Venus Base, if you're interested." I moved to pass them. The one who had been talking didn't do anything. The other raised his left hand and shook it gently. Venusian arodate, of course, and they themselves immunized against it. I saw the golden dust shake out toward me and had ; time to run two or three paces before my muscles locked and everything went black. Medical building, back in Forbeston. My muscles were still j rigid. I was on a stretcher un' derneath the Verifier. The two  Medics were there, and a Medic Captain. He was a little tubby man with ginger whiskers and a toothy grin. He said: "Sorry about the ini formality. Just a routine. We did ; have a warrant, incidentally, in case you should feel like legist ering a complaint against us." Being underneath the Verifier  explained the arodate, but it didn't explain why. I thought of saying something and then def cided to keep my mouth shut. The electrodes were clamped neatly behind my ears. The globe of the Verifier glowed its normal ' pink. The Captain said : "My name's Pinski. Now, Captain Newsam, you are Chief Navigator of the Ironrod, on the Venus-Mercury run?" "Yes." "Landfall five hours back?" "If I've been out half an hour, yes." The questions continued. For the most part, they were routine. Pinski kept one eye on the Verifier globe, Then he started tossing in a few more unusual ones. "Ever been among the outer planets?" "Beyond the Asteroids? No." "Do you know Commander Leopold?" "No." "Commander Stark?" "No." "What are your views on prefrontal leucotomy?" "Never thought about it. It's not used now, is it? They give them the drop." "What do you think of the Sirius project?" "Not much interested." "Do you ever dream of wide stretches of water?" "Not since I was a boy." I had no reason to fear anything from the Verifier, so it didn't make me nervous. The globe stayed pink as the questions 'went on. Pinski said: "What were you doing at the place where the Medics found you?" "I was looking for Captain Gains. Perhaps you'll tell me where I can get hold of him." Pinski grinned. "I'm not under the Verifier, Captain Newsam." He stepped back. "I think that's all okay. Sorry to have bothered, you. In two or three minutes you'll be' able to get around again. Call in the Bar on your way out. Third on the right along the corridor. I'll be in there. The drinks are on Medical." I found him all right. He was sitting at a table with two drinks in front of him. Someone must have told him I drank sloe gin. I sat down at the empty chair. "Glad to make your acquaintance in a more formal manner. Captain Newsam," Pinski said. "Have a drink." I took it. "Now just yhy -- " He lifted one hand. "To get things quite straight, I can give you no information as to the reason for your being picked up and verified." "Right," I said. "Then do you know where I can find Gains?" He hesitated briefly. "The answer must be no." I swallowed the drink. "Thank you very much for all the hospitality. Good night, Captain Pinski." "A piece of strictly medical advice," he said. "Go back to bed and have a good night's sleep." I called back, "Thanks!" I was halfway to the door. on the interplanetary routes, has its less respectable side. I drove down to the East side and parked the car at the corner of #th and J. The Persepolis is a small club at the far end of #th. I'm known there, but every time I go I feel less and less like boasting of it, I had a couple of sloe gins at the Bar and then went up to the Saturn Room. Cynthia came at me from behind. "Hello! Long time." "Seems longer," I said. "Tell me, when was Larry in last?" "Larry? I haven't seen him since you were both up here -- nine, ten weeks ago. But I've been away on a trip up the Long Canal. Tell you what, I'll ask Sue." "That'll, be fine," I said. She was gone two or three minutes. When she came back, she said: "No. He doesn't seem to have been around since then." But she wasn't being spontaneous any longer; she was weighing her words. And she didn't seem at all curious as to what might have happened to him. "I thought we were friends, Cynth," I said. "Come on, what is it?" "What's what? I could do with, a drink." I dropped a note on the table. "Have this one on Larry. See you, Cynthia." She caught me before I reached the door. "I don't know, Jake. I honestly don't know. All I was told was that it was best not to inquire." She was telling the truth now. "Thanks," I said. "Good night, anyway." "Where are you going?" "There's only one place where I stand a chance of finding things  out."  I was thinking about that as j, I went outside. The Terminal OfIf fice had tabs on all officers on the space routes. If Larry had not been reporting for his fortnightly medical boards, they would know, and they would certainly have checked to see what was happening. If there was something else wrong, they would know that, too. I jumped into the car without thinking and released power. Behind me, a familiar voice said: "You don't seem to have had any luck in finding your friend, Captain Newsam." It was Matthews. His tall body was cramped into the back of the car. "Good of you to join me," I said. "I'd like you to drop in at my place. It's on #nd." "Is there anything at the end of it? Information?" "A drink. Maybe information." "Suits me," I told him, and headed there. TT was a more luxurious apart ment than I thought Matthews could have afforded. Four rooms, all well furnished. He set me down in a long chair in front of a glow-fire and brought me the drink. He had it right, too -- sloe gin -- but the fact that everyone knew my taste in liquor had ceased to worry me. "Now," I said, "I want to know where Larry Gains is." Matthews raised his eyebrows. "Gains? Ah, he must be this friend you didn't find." I said wearily : "What information do you think I came here for?" "I thought you came for the drink. No, don't go. If you try the Terminal Office at this time of night, you'll only get the clerk, who will tell you to come back in the morning. Finish your drink and have another. I understand you got picked up for verification earlier this evening." "Yes." "What sort of questions did they ask you?" I told him and he nodded. "Leopold... Stark... That's interesting." "Just what is it all about?" He paused. "That little talk we had this afternoon. Remember it?" "More or less. You were talking about misfits." Matthews looked straight at me. "Captain Larry Gains was classified as a misfij: three weeks ago. He was dropped to Earth over a week ago. Is that what you wanted to know?" "You're off your rocker yourself. Larry was perfectly sane when I saw him just over two months ago. It takes two boards three months apart for misfit classification." "Not," Matthews said softly, "for classification #-K." "#-K? What in hell is that?" "Organized activities against the Stated" "Larry? Don't be funny!" "Tell me," Matthews said, "what do you know about the Earth?" "Ordinary general knowledge. That when the Third Atomic War broke out on Earth, the colonies on the Moon and here on Mars declared their neutrality. The technical staffs on the Earth bases for the most part pulled out to join them; those that didn't presumably got submerged in the holocaust. The state of the war was followed by wireless until the last transmitter went off the air, marking the breakdown. The colonies concentrated on their own expansion -- first, on the Moon and Mars; later, on Venus and with the outposts in the Asteroids, and on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. There was no point in going back to an Earth poisoned with radioactive gases, with a savage population rotted by radiation diseases. The obvious thing was to expand outward, toward other solar systems." "And, of course," Matthews said, "there was the Protocol." T HE Protocol, I suppose, could be called the basis of our education -- that the old and outworn should be put behind; that Man should go on to greater things, never turning back to the world of misery and wretchedness to which he had for so long been confined. There was a lot more,but that was the gist of it. Children learned it by heart. "Yes, the Protocol," I said. "The Protocol rose naturally enough out of the circumstances." "Out of the circumstances," Matthews agreed. "But circumstances change. The Protocol remains the same." "Why shouldn't it?" "Well, grubbing around from one artificial environment to another -- do you think that's the best existence men can have? Turning our backs on an unbelievably fruitful planet?" "It's only a temporary phase. The Sirius project -- " " -- is a failure," Matthews cut in. "We won't be told about that officially until a new project has been got going -- another carrot in front of the donkey. But it's a failure. Two planets, neither one habitable or capable of being made habitable." I said slowly: "Now perhaps you will tell me just what all this has to do with Larry Gains." ' Matthews got up and walked across to the telescreen. He touched a small switch on the j left-hand side, and the screen  moved into patterns of whorls i spreading out from the center. I l recognized it for a watcherJ alarm: if anyone were tapping the room, the whorls would be j irregular and broken. Matthews I came back and sat down again. j "Gains had a lot of time on his hands after his crackup. He got to thinking things over. He happened to meet someone in  our group. To put it shortly, he j joined us." I "Your group? Joined you? Who J are you?" "We represent a party whose objective is to overthrow the Protocol. We want to get back to j Earth, to recolonize it and re' claim it from savagery. Gains I came in with us."  "You're crazy! What makes I you think you know better than v the Directorate? We're improving  conditions on the planets every p year. Why, the new bubble up the Long Canal takes in over forty square kilometers!" "Bigger bubbles," Matthews said, "but always bubbles. Never the chance to live a natural life in natural surroundings." "And Larry? You let him get caught?" "It was bad luck." "Bad luck?" "He and another of our group had their conversation tapped. They were both taken. Fortunately, neither of them knew more than a couple of other people in the group, and those two people got away. We couldn't do anything for Gains and Bessemer. They were held strictly incommunicado." "So he's really gone. You're sure they're not still holding him somewhere?" "On some points our information is definite. They've been dropped all right. On the North American continent -- that's the usual place they drop misfits." rying me all along, and suddenly I knew what it was. I said warily: "Well, I've got the information I came in search of. Now I'm beginning to wonder why I got it. I don't imagine you thought I would be a cinch for your organization just because Larry had been in it, did you? And yet you've told me a lot which you can't be in the habit of passing out casually. What's behind it?" "Well, we haven't told you anything the Directorate doesn't know," Matthews said evenly. "Except that I'm in it, and I have my means of getting away; in any case, I'm expendable. But you're correct in thinking there was a reason. Gains was a good friend of yours." "The best." "He was a good man. We didn't want to lose him, and we'd like to get him back." "Back? From Earth?" "We have a small cruiser at our disposal that is confidential and I've burned both your boats and ours by telling you -- and we can get down to the Earth and back again. It isn't easy, and of course there can be no question of organizing search parties. But if someone else were dropped, with instructions forGains and Bessemer as to a spot to go to to be picked up, all three could be taken off. We're lucky that misfits are always dropped in more or less the same area. It means finding them is made easier for us. It might be possible." "What's known about conditions in that part of the planet?" Matthews looked at me levelly. "Not a thing." I paused. "All right, I'll go. How?" Matthews smiled. "I thought you would. As for going -- that's easy. You intended to drop in at the Terminal Office. Do that. If you are persistent, they'll inform you about Gains. After that, it's easy. You will be under automatic examination at the Office, and the shot of adrenalin you will take before you go over there will register. You will be pulled in on suspicion. Certain papers will have been planted in your things at the Club. From that point on, things will be straightforward. All we have to do is just hope that when they verify you again, they keep a reasonable distance from suspicion of what's really happening. I think they will. Verifiers aren't very good nowadays." "Thanks," I said. "You seem to have everything well worked out. Just as a matter of interest, that remark about burning both my boats and yours -- if I hadn't volunteered for this, what would you have done?" "We were fairly sure of you," Matthews said. "But if we had been wrong... He turned his thumb down very regretfully. the proceedings were rushed through. The papers Matthews had had planted in my gear must have been very incriminating. I was transferred to the Moon, to Archimedes Crater, for the final decision, but it was cut-and-dried beforehand. Within a week of my conversation with Matthews, I was standing in front of the Board, listening to myself being pronounced a misfit and condemned to the drop back to Earth. I was marched out. Someone was waiting for me in an anteroom. It was Pinski. I said: "I've been verified three times in a week. I'd never have thought you would have needed any more." Pinski smiled. "This time it's different. You have a compulsory total recall to go through." "You can't do that. Regulation # states that no one can be put under a form of interrogation that his conscious mind cannot observe. The Verifier is the limit." "You know the regulation," Pinski said, "ex-Captain Newsam. Unfortunately, they don't apply to you any longer. The State has cast you out. This won't take very long." So much, I though grimly, for Matthews' sources of information. There was nothing I could do now. I could resist, but that would only mean being put into an arodate paralysis. "Sit down," Pinski said. The little silver balls began to revolve ; the mirrors gleamed with strange lights. I heard Pinski's voice, close at first, and then from greater and greater echoing distances. After an indefinite space of time, Pinski's voice again: "Wake up, Newsam. Wake up." I raised my head, my mind clear. Pinski was looking at me commiseratingly. "You'Ve had tough luck," he observed. "They certainly roped you in." I wasn't sure how much they had got from me, though I guessed it would be everything. "I'm not complaining," I said. "There's no provision for reclassifying misfits, I'm sorry to say. If there were, we might have saved you. As it is... you can take the drop in the satisfaction that you've done the Directorate a final service. We didn't know about that cruiser." He paused. "The boat's outside. Good luck, Newsam." We shook hands. The guards took me outside, through the lock to the Main Ramp. I had a last look at Archimedes, spread squatly around under its glistening bubble, and went through into the boat -- a light coracle. During the takeoff and the three-hour journey toward Earth, I had time to consider things. Matthews' little scheme had been nicely blown up. When the cruiser arrived at the rendezvous that had been arranged, there would be a handy battle fleet waiting for it. What fools they were, anyway, to attempt to outwit the Directorate! As for resettling the Earth... I had the job of doing it on my own now, with the aid of Larry and this fellow Bessemer -- if I could find them at all. I I 'HE coracle dropped into an orbit, and they made the final arrangements for the drop. Matthews had been right, at least, in saying that they didn't drop misfits at random. The whole thing was meticulously calculated. When they finished, I was fitted up in the dropsuit. The captain of the coracle, a small, morose fellow, gave me instructions. "The five retard jets will fire 'automatically. After the fifth, the first parachute comes into action, and ten seconds later the second." He grinned sadly. "If nothing has happened after fifteen seconds, you'll know something has gone wrong in the packing. You'll smash flat in that case, killed outright. You'll feel no pain whatever." "Thanks," I said. "We've never had any complaints before, but then I suppose we wouldn't. The spot you are to hit is the place we always send misfits. Out of the generosity of the Directorate, it's good hunting ground and, if you survive long enough, you can probably even farm it. Within easy reach of the ocean, too. Used to be called New Hampshire." "Any provisions?" "Concentrated food for a week. And a Klaberg pistol with a hundred rounds. I'd look after them if I were you -- which I'm glad I'm not, incidentally." They eased me out of the lock with stopwatch timing. I didn't wait for the airblast to pi'sh me clear; I sprang off myself. As I did so, the clearance jet pushed behind me. Tumbling over and over in space, I saw the coracle shrink behind me like a deflating balloon. I was on my own now with a vengeance. Just after the fifth retard jet, a thought struck me and sent a prickling apprehension down my spine. Matthews had failed to anticipate the compulsory total recall. What if he and his group were wrong in another minor detail? There might have been more than a gruesome jest in the Captain's remark about the second parachute not opening. Who would know if the drop ended in death? Might not the Directorate feel that so swift an end was only merciful? The first parachute opened with a jerk, and I began counting, slowly, in my head. At fifteen, I knew I was right. I was plunging down faster and faster through the thin air. Death was below me. At twenty, with a heaving jerk, the main parachute opened. The Captain's sense of humor had been even more gruesome than I imagined. Still, untrained as I was for this kind of thing, I hit the ground hard. Rolling over, I hit my head against something and I went out, thinking, just as I blanked, that I was getting tired of being unconscious. again, I heard Larry's voice. I thought of it as a hallucination, but it was a remarkably persistent one. "Come on, Jake, you're all right now." I opened my eyes. It was Larry. Stranger yet, there were half a dozen people behind him. And two of them were women. "I was to have found you and taken you to a place up on the coast, for a cruiser to take us off," I told him miserably. "But the Directorate knows about it. The whole thing's a trap." Larry laughed. "It's a trap, sure enough, but the Directorate hasn't got it quite right." "I'm serious," I insisted. "They got it from me under total recall." "We knew that," Larry said. "Matthews couldn't warn you of it, of course, or the warning itself would have shown up. So there had to be another story -- one that would convince you, and throw the Directorate off the scent at the same time." "How do you know all this?" "We haven't got a cruiser," Larry said. "We haven't even got a coracle. But we do have wireless communication. We were waiting for you. We always are waiting for misfits." "We?" I asked. "We have a nice little colony here. Fifty-eight of us, and still growing." They had been helping me out of the dropsuit. I felt a breeze on my face, and the smell, the indescribable smell, of natural air laden with a dozen different scents of flowers and grass and trees. Larry was watching me. "It's really something, isn't it?" "What about the savages?" He shrugged. "There may be some to the west. We haven't had time to lopk properly. But this country's clear." There was soft turf beneath my feet. "But why?" I asked. "The Directorate must know what this planet is like. Why don't they" move back, instead of fumbling around with interstellar projects that never get anywhere?" "The Directorate is an organization designed to rule a set of neatly controlled artificial cities -- a state spread out over nearly a dozen planets and satellites, but an entirely urban state. If men came back to Earth, came back to farm the land, living in villages as we do now, the Directorate's power would be broken. If you want any more reasons, you just don't know enough about human nature.' "And can we beat them?" I asked him. "Can we defy them under their very noses? With the Tycho telescope trained on the Earth, inspecting everything?" "We don't want to beat anybody," Larry said. "We're satisfied to escape notice. The village is made of small, scattered buildings, and even then they are camouflaged to make them harder to spot. We farm our land, and our agents on the planets pick our recruits." "Matthews," I exclaimed suddenly. "Poor devil-s -- he's still at Forbeston!"  "You'll see him shortly. He's due to be arrested within three months." He laughed and the rest of the small party with him. I saw the joke myself, and began laughing almost uncontrollably. Larry put an arm on my shoulder. "Take a look at that," he said. "Take a good look." I looked and saw the sunset. It was glowing through clean, pure air instead of a bubble or a viewport. the Newest and Brightest Star in  J I   the Science Fiction Heavens!  Number I  Volume I -- #I -- (A future rare collectors' treasure) may be yours in #. -- You may buy it for SOe -- (my list included Free). page issues .postpaid to you directly from Scotland) for only #. #. -- I'll pay for the subscription so you will receive all # first issues free if you'll order at least # worth from my giant printed checklist of over # available S.F., Fantasy and Weird Books and magazines including over # paperbound books at #c each and up. P.S. -- I'll send you my list alone for #c. Here are the details and rules of the # Galaxy Magazine and Simon and Schuster Science Fiction contest announced on page # #. The closing date is October #, #. Manuscripts may be subGalaxy Science Fiction, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. form) and not committed to any other magazine or book publisher. #. Novels submitted must be between # and # words in length, typed in black ink on one side of white bond paper, doublespaced, with at least an inch margin cut all sides and each page numbered. #. Manuscripts must be accompanied by sufficient postage for return. will be given full consideration for possible serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, book publication by Simon and Schuster, or both, at standard rates. #. There are no requirements, stipulations or taboos regarding themes. Fresh ideas and convincing characterization, conflict and plot development are the important criteria. Writers who enter the contest can best familiarize themselves with the standards of the judges through study of the science fiction published by Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Simon and Schuster. #. Sole judges will be the editorial staffs of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Simon and Schuster. The decisions of the judges will be final. #. Contestants agree, in submitting their manuscripts, to accept standard publishing agreements with the sponsors of the contest in the event that their novel is the winning entry. #. Anyone may enter this contest except employees of the Galaxy Publishing Corp. and of Simon and Schuster, Inc., and their families; their present publishers... which means, in effect, that contestants science fiction. Horse Trader Monopolizing Galactic trade in intangibles was Earth's lovely racket. It paid off in profits, progress... and a cosmic headache ! threatening to snap the thin Atlantic lifeline. Supersonics looked promising, but that was a littleknown Reid in which researchers had to start from the very bottom. Not far away, as Galactic distances go, the people of Sumanor on the planet they called Urish could have told the Allied councillors everything about supersonics. It would have been a fair exchange, for on Urish they had never heard of submarines. A D. #: The rangy blond man with the somewhat improbable name of Auchinleck Welcome stepped off the sidewalk and strode across the springy, semi-living warmth of the floor toward the arched gateway. Suitably dignified flame-letters danced above it to spell out: Technical Division But some light-hearted soul had painted a horse on the door and Welcome, not one to stand on dignity, had allowed it to remain; His office was known from Mercury to Minerva as the Horse that the description was apt. The door opened for him and he walked through the outer office, nodding to the clerks and secretaries at the computers, tapefiles, dictoscribes, and the rest of the complex office paraphernalia. A few bars of Waltzing Matilda whistled between his teeth as he entered the inner suite. The receptionist smiled at his greeting and he went by her and through the office of his private secretary, Christine Ernenek. " 'Morning," he said, pausing. Despite all the years he had spent in space, there was still a hint ofAustralian twang in his speech. "How's life?" "Just fine, Auch," the Greenlander answered. "I think you have a busy day lined up." "Who's first?" She glanced at her memotab. "The little duck from Arcturus. Robotics, you know. Have you seen him yet?" "No, too busy. He'll have been going through the usual processing first, anyway." Welcome sighed. "When will Health get it through their heads that Man hasn't caught an extraterrestrial disease yet?" "There's always the first time, Auch. And then the diplomats and so on have to see him. He is a sort of ambassador, after all." "I know, I know." Welcome nodded impatiently and fumbled out a battered corncob pipe and began stuffing it. Christine had been in the office longer than he; he'd only been given the job a month ago, because of his engineering work on Freyja. A flicker of eagerness kindled in him. "This robotics stuff may turn out to be one of our biggest hauls." "Maybe so." Christine giggled. "He's cute, that duck." Glancing at the tab again : "Then, of course, you're still negotiating with Vega, Sirius and Procyon. Oh, yes, and a Centaurian." "What?" Welcome almost dropped his pipe. from the clan of Brogu, continent of Almerik, name of Helmung. He wants spaceships and atomic energy in exchange for witchcraft." "Oh, no!" "The main office said for you to see him, anyway. He seems to have special abilities -- Well, you'll find out." Christine grinned with friendly malice. "Good luck." went on into his own office. You had to take the bad with the good, he supposed. There had, been the tentacled monster from Van Maanen's Star who had grown very indignant on learning that Earth didn't care to trade the null-null drive for a system of astrology which, taking Galactic drift into account, was guaranteed infallible. But aetainst that you had to balance the Zarbadian little more work, that device should be able to annihilate any disease germ just by putting the patient under a force generator. And at the present moment, the envoys from Procyon and Vega -- possibly the one from Arcturus, too -- were carrying portfolios which meant revolutionary technological advances for Earth. When it took more than four years objective time to reach even the nearest star -- however short the interval was subjectively for those on board the spaceship -- the traditional cargoes became valueless. No mineral, no material treasure whatever, was worth the cost of such hauling. Nor was there any special reason these days for humans to emigrate. But the intangibles of knowledge -- that was another matter. You could well afford to spend a few megacredits and decades, if it meant learning a technology your race might not otherwise master for a thousand years. And Earth had the only intercultural clearing house in the Galaxy. They still have to come to us, even if we are the ones who haul them here and back. I just park myself and wait. Welcome sat down, feeling the sensuous flow of the chair as it modeled itself to his angular contours, and let his eyes rove the office. It was a big room, tastefully decorated in the Neoflamboyant style, a broad window opening on the jagged view of Luna beyond the dome. It was near dawn, there was a glare on the highest peaks shouldering above the horizon, but Earth still dominated a heaven full of stars. He glanced at the planet, thinking of his family in Sydney. They were visiting there. It wasn't fair ' to children, keeping them on Luna all the time; they ought to have some sea and open sky. Well, work to do. with intelligent natives, of which only one group had more than a primitive technology, Welcome recalled. Those were a friendly race, anxious to please, and the three expeditions there had all returned quite excited about the cybernetic advances of the leading nation. So now the Arcturian ducks had come to swap horses. Welcome decided that he would get some rather low-pressure salesmanship; after all, the Arcturians couldn't be sure how much humanity already knew, and they were not an agressive breed. Still, when you met a people who weren't human to begin with, and had a different cultural pattern to boot, you never knew what to expect. That was the reason for the informal basis on which the Horse Traders were allowed to operate, and their chief's nearly absolute power to drive bargains. But God help him if he made a mistake! Christine's voice came over the intercom, jarring him to full awareness: "The envoy Rappapa to see you, Freeman Welcome." There was a confused noise in the background, and he thought her voice held an uncontrollable laughter. "Send him in, please." Welcome stood up as the door opened. Since notions of courtesy varied fantastically from world to world, he had decided to stick by Terrestrial conventions. four!" Welcome thought briefly and wildly that he must be dreaming. A small regiment of dolls was entering his office. No, not dolls -- robots, shiny humanoid robots five inches high. They goosestepped in perfect marching order, swinging their arms in unison, accompanied by tanks and helicopters built to scale. Behind them, quacking his shrill commands, was the Arcturian. He was of ostrichlike shape, some four feet tall, blue-feathered arid crested; instead of wings, he had skinny four-fingered arms carrying a large box, and his head was big and round, popeyed, with a flexible bill. Two-three-four! Com-pan-ee -- T HE toy soldiers halted, wheeled, and snapped to attention. A helicopter buzzed watchfully over Welcome's head. It was about the size of a pigeon. "How do you do, how do you do, noble sir?" The Arcturian bowed, touching the floor with his beak. "I trust that you in splendid health find yourself?" "Yes," said Welcome faintly. "Excuse me while I pick up my jaw." "If I your excellency's magnificent jaw have caused to fall, it is to be of the most apologetic," said the Arcturian unhappily. "Never mind," said Welcome. "Please sit down, Freeman Rappapa. If you wish to," he added hastily; he couldn't remember whether this particular species sat or not. "If you will it of indifference find, I will stand in the luminous presence of your excellency," said Rappapa. "Among my greetingsto-you-conveying folk, only nesting females sit." "I -- well, do you  smoke?" Welcome extended a box of cigars. "You are to be magnificently thanked," said Rappapa, accepting one. " Whichuwaki " One of the helicopters swooped down and shot out a flame to light it for him. Welcome seated himself. "I take it those are robots." "Of a most humble sort, for demonstration purposes alone," said Rappapa. "They are powered by radiation from this control box here, as your excellency is undoubtedly aware. The brain circuits are also herein contained. Each machine has its individual brain, controlling the external body, or any number of brains can be joined in series to produce higher effectiveness." be impassive. Inwardly, his heart leaped. If the Arcturians could make a cybernetic setup that compact, what couldn't they do? "May I afjd they can act at individual discretion, within the limits of their basic directives?" said Rappapa eagerly. "Possibly toys or household servants for your superb people?" "It seems to me that a house could be built to do everything itself, without needing a special robot," said Welcome. "Of a most suredly! These, as I say, are illustrative only. It has insignificantly occurred to me that your splendid spaceships could be given brains of their own, eliminating .necessity for  crews on those so-long voyages." "To be sure, Freeman Rappapa. And control and communications in general -- you can doubtless show us a great deal we don't know." "It is of a strangeness that you, who so daringly bridged the stars, have not surpassed us in this humble endeavor." "Well, it's not so odd, really." Welcome rekindled his pipe. "Many things determine the technological progress of a cub ture: social need and demand, the general background of knowledge and tradition, the ability of individual researchers within a given field -- sheer accident, tod, I suppose. My race has gone furthest in developing transportation and energy sources. Your people stayed on their planet, but instead have gone in primarily for robots, automata, computers they're superbiologists, especially in the line of controlled genetics, but lack atomic energy. And so on throughout the Galaxy. It would be strange if the history of any one race had caused it to excel in everything." "I am blinded by the clarity of your explanation. Sir, dare I hope that you will find our little skill worthy of consideration?" "Indeed you may," said Welcome. "Was there anything in particular you would like to have from us, or do you first want to see what we can offer?" "Your incredible process for obtaining atomic energy from the disintegration of any matter whatsoever would prostrate us of r  iHE human rubbed his chin. That was certainly a reasonable enough asking price. In fact, his conscience hurt him a bit. "I think that can be agreed on," he said blandly. "You have, of course, brought specialized assistants, and plans and textbooks and so on, from which our people can learn what you have to teach them? Good. Then you should designate some of your people to study our energyconversion techniques. The new hypnopedic system will make it possible for both sides to learn these things rather fast. Of course, it isn't quite that simple. One can't introduce a new science into a vacuum. For example, being told all about nuclear disintegration isn't going to help you unless you already know something about magnetronics. I'll give you a general outline of the course, and would like you to prepare a similar outline dealing with cybernetics, just so each side can know exactly what it is the other has to offer. Then the final agreement can be made and we can proceed to teach each other." "That is a scheme of the slyest magnanimity," said Rappapa with innocent enthusiasm. "Excellent." Welcome slouched farther back in his chair and went on to social matters. How did the Arcturian party like the quarters which had been prepared for them here in the dome? The food and gravity and air-conditioning were satisfactory? They were enjoying themselves? Tours of Earth would be arranged for them -- everything to make the guests from afar feel at home. And to disarm them, make them more receptive to our suggestions. Welt, why not? When the future of entire planets is involved, naivete would be criminal. Rappapa was charmed and quacked eloquent praises. His party had already seen a good deal of the dome, met the other extraterrestrials currently there, been lavishly entertained. Welcome nodded. There was certainly no rule against the different embassies having contact and perhaps driving their own bargains independently of Earth. As a matter of fact, such a deal was going on right now. The Sirian knowledge of nucleonics had turned out to be inferior to Earth's, but the Vegan representative -- who had come alone -- high-pressure chemistry for it. Welcome didn't care very much, since he could always get the chemistry from Vega in exchange for something else -- or  even from Sirius, perhaps. Once a planet -- or nation, tribe, clan, individual -- had bought a technology, it was their own business what they did with it. A Horse Trader operated between all parties, playing both ends against the middle. ) ""'WN a lower plane than your excellency, I think -- " Rappapa was interrupted by the buzzing of the intercom. Welcome flipped the switch and Christine shouted half hysterically: "No, you can't go in there. He's busy -- Auch, look out! The g Sirian -- "  There was a thunderous crash on the door. Rappapa squawked ; and made a Lunar-gravity leap to cower behind his regiment. The door flew open and Thevorakz of Dzuga, Dominator from Sirius A IV, stalked in, waving his arms and roaring. He was a centauroid, with a quadrupedal gray body and a lashing tail. The upper torso, swathed in a black robe and cowl, was almost human; a bristling white walrus mustache concealed the fact that he had no chin. Under a forest of brow, his ruby eyes glared fire, and his ears twitched and his hoofs stamped ominously. "You!" he bellowed. "You low thiefing monthter! You thcum! I You dominated! I do not like you!" Welcome got up, grateful for the expanse of desk between him and the newcomer. "What's the matter, Dominator Thevorakz?" fie tried hard to keep his voice level. "I thpit my cud on you!" roared Thevorakz. "I foul your floor! I go home to Thiriuth and come back with an army!" Christine squeaked in the doorway and sprang aside for the gleaming six-foot sphere rolled slowly in on its wheels, laying a mechanical hand on Thevorakz's rump, and the viewer swiveled toward Welcome. It looked uncomfortably like a gun. Inside, breathing hydrogen and ammonia at a pressure of incaloulable atmospheres, the monster known only as George was staring at the human. His force-filled generator hummed in a sudden crackling silence; if it ever quit, the vehicle would blow up like a gigantic bomb and scatter the dome from here to Copernicus. It had been a long, difficult, and expensive proposition to contact the natives of New Jupiter and get one of them to make the trip, but living under such conditions, they had learned things about high-pressure chemistry which men had never imagined. They wanted atomic energy and control circuits in exchange. The first they had gotten from Sirius, the second they had intended to get frpm Earth. Only -- ily and put indignation into his voice. "May I ask the meaning of this intrusion? You know very well that I am in conference with the freeman from Arcturus." "That amorakz!" shouted the Sirian. "Dithmith him!" "Help!" wailed Rappapa. His robots formed a hollow square about him. "Calmness, please." George's Voder voice was flat. "I think, Freeman Welcome, you know very well why we have come." "No, I don't." "You do tho!" roared Thevorakz. "I shall detail the matter," said George. "The Sirian group and I reached a bargain, and I educated them as agreed. Naturally, there were many technical data which it would be pointless to memorize, formulas and constants and the like, and I gave them a book of tables. Those tables are the main thing of value which I had to offer, since the basic theory of high-pressure chemistry is already known to you and to Sirius. Dominator Thevorakz put this book in his strongbox last night. This moming the box was open and the thus you would have two techbook was gone." nologies in exchange for one. "You don't -- no!" gasped However, the possibility remains Christine.  that some .other of the parties . "I'm sorry to hear of this." rifled the box. Everyone knew j Welcome forced calmness on about it." himself. "The matter will be in"Or that the Sirians.did it. to ; vestigated at once." blackmail us," said Welcome "By you!" bellowed Thevogauntly. "Or that you did it your rakz. "And you are the mithbeself, George." gotten dominated who thtole it!" anger. "You're insulting not only the room, the tiny robots my personal integrity, but the scampering to avoid his feet.  honor of Earth. You have vio"I'm terribly sorry this has ; lated the sacred obligation of a happened," he said. "I'll get the guest to his host. I demand an dome police on the case immeimmediate apology." He stalked diately. Meanwhile, I wish you forward, swinging his clenched would just return to your quarI fists at his sides. ters. I'll notify you as soon as ; "I will help your excellency," anything happens." quacked Rappapa. "Company "I will be waiting," said George, ' forward! On the double! Hupand rolled ponderously out of hup-hup-hup-hup!" The robots the office. Thevorakz snorted and goosestepped after the man. stalked after him. Rappapa Thevorakz suddenly looked crawled out from under the desk, worried. "If I am mithtaken, I "A pretty mess!" Welcome rewill apologize," he mumbled sulalized that he was shaking. "Just 'lenly. "But the book had better what I need to start my job off be found, and you had better right!" prove you did not take it." "I am with humble, firmness Welcome turned to George, assured that your excellency will j preferring the chill sanity of the on the instant penetrate the j monster. "Do you really think depths of all dastardliness," said we'd stoop to theft?" Rappapa. "I have no opinion in the mat"Um, yes, thanks." Welcome ter," said the toneless voice. "It looked sharply at the Arcturian. would be to your advantage to At least, I suppose I mean steal Vega's knowledge and buy thanks. "Sorry you were bothered j something else that we know; this way, Freeman Rappapa. If j you don't mind, I'll be rather busy now -- " "Of course. I shall not obtrude." Rappapa lifted his Form ranks! Right face! Forwafour, hup-two-three-four, huptwo-three-four -- " He marched out of the office trailing his army behind him. Christine leaned against the door and looked helplessly at Welcome. "Now what?" "Now we get to work. Get me Captain M'Gamba." face was on the screen. Welcome explained the situation. M'Gamba frowned. "Bad business, huh?" "This is not a Good Thing," quoted Welcome. "You can see the spot we're in. If that book isn't recovered fast, we're going to lose face everywhere in the whole Galaxy. Earth will be branded as a planet of thieves and nobody will care to come here to do his Horse Trading. Sirius could take the lead away from us on that, and you know what an arrogant, opinionated lot they are. Nice people to have as the leading race of our new interstellar culture!" "Maybe they did this job themselves, just to discredit us?" "I wouldn't put it past 'em. But get busy, will you? You know the line -- be tactful, but just as firm as you dare. And, Captain M'Bamba, if we don't settle this affair quick, you and I are both going to be looking for new jobs." "And good jobs aren't easy to find these days. All right, Freeman Welcome, we'll blast off on it right away. I'll call you as soon as I have a report." Welcome gave Christine a haggard look. She ran a hand through her blue-black hair and regarded him sympathetically. "Tojjgh luck, Auch." "For me or for Earth?" he asked bitterly. "You, mostly." Her eyes widened. "You don't think this could -- lead to war, do you?" "Oh, no. The logistics of interstellar warfare and conquest are ridiculous. But it could lead to bad relations with our Galactic neighbors." Welcome knocked the dottle from his pipe and began recharging it. "And you know, Chris, this new culture developing with the null-null drive is an abstract thing, an exchange of information and sympathy, ideas, philosophies -- abstracts, not tangibles. Ill feeling now could poison it at the source. I don't know. I just don't know." He stared moodily out at Earth. couple of hours later, and Welcome frowned as he fitted it into the pattern of knowledge he already had. There were a dozen adjoining suites on the fourth sub-level of the dome, adjustable .to the conditions of other planets, and the same level held three large clubrooms for the use of guests. Currently, the apartments housed the envoys of five stars: Sirius, Vega, Arcturus, Procyon, and Alpha Centauri. All these groups had been on Luna for periods ranging from several days to three weeks, and had mingled freely in mutual curiosity. Last night the dome's chief, Carlos Petersen, had thrown one of his periodic parties for the guests, and all had attended. The Sirians had come home late and gone directly to sleep, not noticing that their . place was robbed until they woke up the next "morning." Whoever did the burglary had been confoundedly clever. There was an electronic lock, supposedly burglar-proof, on the outer door of the suite, wired to sound an alarm if anyone tried to break it. It had been opened with no trouble at all. The thief had entered, cut into the strongbox with an energy torch, taken the book, and walked out again, locking the door behind him. Welcome scowled. The technique of fooling an electronic lock was something beyond the science of Earth. Of course, Thevorakz himself, or one of his underlings, might have raided the box and hidden tlfe book. "The torch could have been taken from any of the workshops on the fifth sub-level," said M'Gamba over the screen. "They're open all the time, you know, for the use of anyone who has to build a model or something. The thief need only have taken the torch, used it, and returned it when nobody was around. But what gadget did he have to unlock that door?" "A key, maybe," suggested Welcome. "But Thevorakz has the only key to it, except for Petersen's." "I know. How about the suspects?" "Well, the company was wandering in; and out of the clubrooms all the while the party went on; and everybody was pretty looped, too, except that George creature. In short, nobody we've talked to can swear that any other being was there all evening." "Hm-hm. Have you searched for the book?" "We're still looking. We've requested permission to search all the apartments of our guests. So far, only the Arcturians have waived diplomatic immunity and invited us to do so." "Weli, keep plugging, Captain, and let me know what turns up." "Will do." Petersen was on the screen, demanding to know what the trouble was. Welcome sighed and broke the news as gently as possible. "Oh, Lord!" said Petersen. "And little blue devils," agreed the Australian. "I'd have your seat in a sling this moment, Welcome, if it weren't that I have to go to Earth immediately," said Petersen. "I'll be gone a couple of days. When I come back, I'll expect to see this mess straightened out." "We'll try." Welcome was feeling too harried by now to care for manners. But the fact that he wouldn't have Petersen breathing down his neck was a minor mercy. "M'Gamba's a good man." "He'd better be. I like you, Welcome, and think you were the right choice for your job. But this can develop into something too big and nasty for ethics to count. If it shows signs of doing so, Earth is going to need a scapegoat and you may very well be it." Petersen grimaced. "If they don't pick me, instead -- or both of us." He glanced at his wrist chrono. "Got to run now. Earth rocket leaves in ten minutes." "Have fun," said Welcome moodily. He paced once around the office, and threw himself into his chair. For a minute he exercised the more picturesque parts of his vocabulary. The intercom interrupted him: "The envoy Orazuni of Inyasee you, Freeman Welcome." The man blinked. "Oh, yes. He did have an appointment, didn't he? Send him in, please." He stood up, composing himself as the Procyonite entered. someone's idea of a medieval demon. His slim graceful body sloped forward, stalking on clawed feet and counterbalanced by the long thick tail. The six-fingered hands were also clawed, and the pointed ears were almost winglike in their size. But the head, though bald, was handsome by human standards, in a highcheeked, sharp-chinned, flatnosed way, and the golden eyes were large and luminous and beautiful. He wore a light tunic carried a portfolio under one arm. "Good day, Freeman Welcome,"he said, bowing. He had taken better to the hypnopedic teaching of English than most non-humans, his accent being a nearly perfect Bostonian. "I trust you are in good health and spirits?" "More or less," said Welcome wryly. He liked the Procyonite, despite the sharp battle of wits which had been going on between them for days now. "And yourself?" "Quite well, thank you." Orazuni sat down on his tail, bracing himself with his rigidly straight legs, and accepted the proffered cigar. "There seems to have been an unfortunate incident last night." "Yes, rather. Have you any notion -- ?" Orazuni shrugged delicately. "One prefers not to become involved in such matters. I would not throw baseless accusations about. My group has, however, decided to show good faith by permitting the searching of our quarters. I shall so notify the police." "Thank you. The more cooperation we get, the sooner we'll be able to clear this up." Welcome grinned. "I wish you were as easy to deal with in the line of business, Freeman Orazuni." "I regret the impression," smiled Orazuni, "but I have my own planet to think of." He opened the portfolio and took out a sheet covered with an elaborate diagram. "Here, sir, is the structural formula -- on a genetic rather than a chemical basis -- of the human X chromosome, as determined by our technicians since we arrived on Luna. We have found conclusively that the tendency to certain types of cancer in your race -- mammary, for instance -- is linked here and here." He indicated a point where several lines diverged. That was a cluster of formulas in the alphabet of Inyahuna. "By proper treatment, it should be possible to modify the linkage without otherwise altering heredity in the zygote. The long-range prospect is the total elimination of any possibility of cancer from the heredity of your race." prised. What he wanted was the knowledge of theoretical and applied genetics which made such studies possible in the first place. Biological engineering -- designing any life-form whatsoever, and creating it by controlled mutation! Perhaps Man himself becoming superman -- at the very least, losing the inherited weaknesses which dragged him down and shadowed his life and ultimately killed him. This could mean more than the scientific revolution that began with Galileo had yet offered. Only it hardly seemed fair of the Inyahunans to demand everything Earth knew in exchange. They were welcome to the nullnull drive, the energy converter, and the magnetronic tube. When they also asked for instruction in such things as mathematical sociology, supercomputer theory and practice and industrial catalysis, it was going too far. Their culture didn't need all that information. They could only want it for purposes of selling to someone else -- underselling Earth, maybe. Welcome and Orazuni had been bargaining for a whole week now. "We'd have to send a goodsized technical mission to Procyon to teach you all this," said the Australian. "It would be hard to find enough top-rank men in all those fields who'd want to be gone so many years on an alien planet; we'd have to pay them fantastic salaries. And the equipment they'd need! Really, Freeman Orazuni, you must be reasonable. I think I could add a course in advanced metal crystallography to what I've already offered you. That would help you with a good many construction problems. But then, naturally, we'd want you to give us your chemical-probe technique in return." "In addition to the genetic theory and the tables of constants?" protested Orazuni. "Do you wish to ruin us, Freeman Welcome? What will our poor race be able to trade for further information?" "Your own biological technology. You can't have worked out genetics as thoroughly as you have without a good background in biochemistry, histology, and I don't know what else." The human put the tips of his' fingers together and peered over the bridge they formed. "After all, we do have some good biologists on Earth, too, you know. We could work all this out for ourselves in time. The very knowledge that such things are possible is a long step forward." "As for that," shrugged Orazuni gracefully, "we could send students to Earth who could consult your books and journals -- " "It would be of limited value without the help of men who've had practical experience," said Welcome. "I'm afraid your people wouldn't even know what to look for." though it was plain to both of them: Now that the civilized planets had gotten on to the idea of Horse Trading, they weren't going to be particularly cooperative toward casual students from outside. It wasn't a question of censorship; an effective barrier was imposed by the fact that there was no material trade to# speak of between the stars. How could a visitor pay for his stay and education? He had to be financed by his hosts. And he could only earn such a scholarship' as a reward for his planet's having offered a similar one to the other world. They bargained in a gentlemanly fashion for a while longer, Orazuni dipping into his portfolio from time to time -- he never released it, and there were rumors that he slept with it -- for some tantalizing sample of information. Welcome in turn threw out remarks concerning , the value of nuclear energy and high-strength alloys. The human found himself wishing that he knew more about  Inyahuna's culture. They were a polite but reserved people -- one might almost say secretive. It went well today, though. Orazuni seemed much more amenable than he had been yesterday, and at the close of the discussion there was almost complete agreement. "I think we can wind this up tomorrow," said Welcome. "I repeat my offer of throwing in a course in quantum theory of resonance bonds as applied to alloys. Think it over." "I must discuss it with my group," replied Orazuni, "but I think they will consider the terms fair. Frankly, I would like to return soon with my wives. Our children will be nearly grown by the time we get home. If you would make arrangements to have the Messenger depart in a week or so -- " "Well, all right." Welcome balanced the factors in his mind. He'd have to round up all the instructors and other experts he had on tap to go to Procyon, alert the ship's people, arrange clearance. But a week should be enough. The other Inyahunans would remain to take posts at one of Earth's universities. "Wouldn't you like to visit around in the Solar System for a few months first, though? It seems a shame for you to come all this way without seeing much more than Luna." "No, thank you. My people are not given to tourism." Orazuni got up to go. "Oh, by the way, if you will pardon my returning to a painful subject -- I am curious. What is so unusual about this robbery, apart from the circumstances?" "Well, the fact that an electronic lock was opened. It's not supposed to be possible without a key." As Orazuni arched his hairless brows, Welcome explained: "The lock has no keyhole. It's held by a magnetronic field clamping two plates together with a force of several thousand tons, the field being generated by the circulation of an electronic current in several Cheval tubes. The whole thing is also wired in to an alarm circuit which goes off at any attempt to tamper. The key is actually a self-powered tube creating a heterodyning field. Since a literal infinity of wave-combinations is possible, there should be no chance of anyone's Using a variable key to fumble the lock open." "I see. I thought it was something on that order." Orazuni nodded and stroked his chin. "Do you know, if the crime was not committed by the Sirians themselves -- or, if you will pardon me, by a human -- then it seems logical that the guilty party should have a very advanced knowledge of electronics." "I'd say so." "Cybernetics?" murmured Orazuni. He bowed. "Well, I will not intrude further on your time. Good day, Freeman Welcome." He left. When he was gone, the human stood thinking for a long while. Small complicated circuits -- Arcturus? Rappapa seemed like a pleasant little chap, but you never knew. He sighed and looked out the window. The slow Lunar dawn was breaking incandescently over the jagged airless horizon and blazing into his eyes. "Nice day," he muttered bitterly. minutes later. "We found the book," he said. "Eh?" Welcome's long body jerked forward. "Lying in a corner of Shop Number Seven. Anybody could have left it there. We gave it back to the Sirians, but they weren't very polite about it." Welcome shrugged. "I don't blame them. Obviously the thief took photomicrographs of the book and got rid of the thing itself away after he was done with it. Now all we have to find is a packet consisting of a few oneinch-square films. Hell, he could have swallowed 'em." "And grabbed himself a whole technology without paying Vega for it. # guess George is hopping mad too, though you can't tell. He gives me the crawlies." "The devil with that. We've got to find the burglar to clear ourselves. Been through the apartments?" "All but the Sirians and George. The Sirians wouldn't hear of it, and it'd be impossible to make a decent search in a place 'conditioned to New Jupiter. Nothing. Not a thing." Welcome bit his lip, then blurted out his suspicions of Arcturus. The police captain nodded. "Sounds pretty reasonable."  "I took Rappapa for a dinkum cobber, but -- well, we can't trust anybody, can we? Rig some traps. Try to fluoro him and his bunch without their knowing it. Go through their suite again with an electronic probe. Try anything." "All jets," said M'Gamba glumly, and clicked off. The intercom buzzed. "The envoy Helmung dur Brogu-Almerto see you, Freeman Welcome," said Christine in a mechanical voice. "On top of everything else," groaned the Australian. "All right, send him in." T HE door flew open. A ninefoot giant stamped in, thumping the butt of his spear on the floor, his chain mail jangling and his sword clanking. He was fairly humanoid, except for a blue skin, a tail, and antennae above his small slant eyes, but the battered face was tattooed in a ferocious pattern of red and yellow. If it hadn't been for several exploration parties from Earth, which had maintained a more or less permanent liaison with the clan chief of Brogu, this visit -- or visitation -- would never have happened. But the barbarians had heard news of the Horse Traders and insisted on getting into the game, and in the interests of peace the last expedition had brought this delegate back. And sloughed him off on me! thought Welcome with resentment. "How do you do, Freeman Helmung?" The Earthman said very softly. The Centaurian's head looked immensely high above him. "Quiet, I will speak!" The walls rattled. "Just as you wish." Welcome extended the customary box of cigars. Health hadn't reported this race as allergic to tobacco, but he hoped maliciously that Helmung would be. The giant grabbed a handful, popped them into his mouth, and chewed noisily. "Not bad," he said, sprawling into a chair. He swallowed, spat on the floor, and cocked his spurred feet up on the desk. "I am Helmung dur BroguAlmerik. Look on me and be afraid." It seemed a ritual greeting, for he added in a more friendly tone: "You may call me Skull-smasher." "Ah, yes, to be sure." Welcome sat down on the other side of the desk. "I trust you have been enjoying your stay?" "Not enough fights. No females big enough. That Orazuni, he is good sort and gives me much drink, otherwise you can hialamar them all." Welcome did not inquire what it was to hialamar, though he could make a shrewd guess. "I am great sorcerer. I have much vingutyr." "You have much everything," agreed Welcome hastily. "Vingutyr is -- is what I have much of. That is why I am great sorcerer." The gravelly bass paused for a thunderous belch. "I shall show you how to wish your enemies dead. You shall show me how make ships-thatfly. Then we shall sack many worlds." "Well, really, I say now -- " Welcome had a sudden sense of futility. "There just isn't much witchcraft on Earth these days." "I knew you was backward peoples!" cried Helmung triumphantly. "Look, dance of death, begins this way." He jumped tip, waving his spear, and began to prance around, chanting. "Isn't there something about making a doll and sticking pins in it?" asked Welcome weakly. "Old-fashioned. Brogu is modern peoples. My father, top witch in Almerik, study from Earthmen. Learn about laws of science. He go on to figure laws of witchcraft." Helmung ticked off the points on his fingers, and Welcome realized that he must, after all, be his race's equivalent of an intellectual. "Law of likes-makelikes. Law of luck. Law of -- " "Now hold on, please do." his papers till he found the memo on Alpha Centauri submitted by the preliminary investigators, which, in the madhouse today, he hadn't had time to read. Confound it, the barbarian must have something worth the time of a division chief! He skimmed rapidly down the sheet and stopped at a paragraph referring to a limited degree of telekinesis as a congenital talent. The. phenomenon was almost nonexistent among humans, and the parapsychology boys wanted Helmung humored so they could study him in detail. Welcome thought of the Centaurian tossing boulders through the air by pure will-power, and shuddered. f "I understand," he began cautiously, "that you can move things merely by wishing them to move." "Well, little things," said Helmung deprecatingly. "Not very big. Powerful wish-mover back home was showed game called dice by Earthmen. He won much treasure from them. But he had be much powerful to move dice." "I see." Welcome suppressed an impulse to mop his brow. He wasn't very well briefed on modern parapsych theory, but he remembered vaguely that telekinesis was attributed to a linkage between the neural field and the local sub-electronic fluxes. If that was so, you wouldn't expect the nervous system to have enough energy output to lift anything massive. Still, it would be interesting to watch. "Do you mind if I try you?" he asked. "I've never seen this before." "Is little thing," said Helmung scornfully. "Why not ask me wish-kill somebody for you?" "Some other time," said Welcome. He wpnt over to a cabinet in which he kept testing equipment and took out an oscilloscope. When he had a steady sine wave on it, he gestured with one hand. "Can you change that wiggly shape there?" he asked. "Easy," grunted Helmung. "Orazuni told me about little things, too small to see." "Yes. As a biologist, he'd naturally be interested in TK, too. Never mind, go ahead, if you please." centration. The electron trace jerked wildly, slithered across the screen, and began shaping itself into obscene drawings. Welcome hastily shut off the scope. "That's fine," he said. "That's just beautiful." Helmung rubbed his hands with a businesslike air. "Now how you build ships-that-fly?" "I don't think you would be really interested in that," said Welcome as tactfully as possible. Helmung's tail lashed against his ankles. He leaned across the desk, grabbed the human by the scruff of the neck, lifted him up, and shook him. "So Brogu witchcraft not good enough for you, hah?" "Yowp!" Welcome was near choking when Helmung set him down. "I am patient man," rumbled the barbarian, "but you show me how build ships, or -- " "Now look, Skull-smasher," said Welcome shakily. "Really, I'd like to, you know, but I'm not the boss here. I can't tell. you myself. You see -- uh -- well, on Earth our witches still believe in the dollsand-pins theory. Also, to build spaceships you'd need tools you don't have, even if you knew how. Why don't you think it over for a while? We could show you lots of other things. For instance, you know what an alloy is? Well, we can tell you how to make better alloys than you now have. Unbreakable swords and so on. Why not start with that and work up?" "Might be," grumbled Helmung, taking a thoughtful bite off another cigar. "Oh, and ways to brew firewater, perhaps," added Welcome. He winked, and Helmung guffawed, and presently the interview ended in a spirit of good fellowship. When the broad mail  ed back had gone out the door, Welcome made a dash for a three-starred bottle. He thumbed the intercom switch. "Come on in Chris," he said. "I think we both need a drink." rlWO hours later, Welcome was pretty sure he had tracked down the thief. The time had been 'devoted to hard thinking and to study of the files on the four possible planets, sent up from the Division of Biopoliticology. Four planets, because you could eliminate Helmung immediately, and Welcome was sure enough of his own staff to feel certain that no human, even in a fit of greed or planetarism, had snaffled the book. Furthermore, you had to bear in mind that none of the delegates could have known in advance that a theft would be possible. They could not have made elaborate preparations beforehand for the job, but must have used whatever means were available to them, more nr less on impulse. That argued for the burglar's having the technology to pick an electronic lock even if he had never seen one before. That also ruled out Procyon at once. Enough was known of their science to make it quite certain that they lagged behind Earth in such matters as control circuits. Vega -- you couldn't be sure just what George ,did or did not have at his disposal, but the fact that he had come here in the first place to get some of mankind's electronic and magnetronic knowledge pretty well proved that he couldn't have done the crime. Why should he steal his own book, anyway? New Jupiter wasn't much interested in interstellar intercourse or in setting up its own Horse Traders. It was also a safe bet that Sirius did not know how to open the lock without a key. To be sure, Thevorakz did have such an instrument, and he might well have faked the crime to discredit Earth in the eyes of other races. But the psychology reports, while not conclusive, did make that line of thought seem improbable. The Dominators weren't that subtle. By elimination -- Arcturus. Welcome sighed and called M'Gamba's office. "Anything new?" "We're working along," said the policeman. "We've had every human who was on the fourth sub-level last night, at the party or on duty elsewhere, under deep hypnosis -- total recall. By piecing together all their accounts, we've shown that every member of the Procyonite and the Arcturian delegations was seen by somebody all the time until the party broke up and the Sirians went home. In other words, there's not a chance that any of them could have done it. There are blank spots as far as the rest are concerned, though." "Arcturus, eh?" Welcome frowned. "Do you have anything else on them?" "Well, we have been snapping fluoros at the Arcturian ducks on the sly, as you suggested. You know those little pouches they wear around their necks, to carry things in? One of their party -- Srnapopoi, the name is -- is carrying around a packet of microfilms. But it can't be the film, can it?" "Can't it?" Welcome showed his teeth in a humorless grin. "Look, Captain, a circuit technology as highly developed as theirs should be able to crack the electronic lock." "I tell you, they were under observation all evening!" "But were their robots?" M'Gamba paused. "Never thought of that." "Well, it seems plausible, doesn't it? Trouble is, this is a delicate matter. We can't just arrest them on suspicion; we'll need mighty good proof." "I think a look at this Arcturian's neck pouch could be arranged. He's down in the shop now, working up a demonstration model. I'll have one of my skilled operators go down and talk to him and -- ah -- accidentally cut the thongs of the pouch with a beam-slicer. Cut the pouch itself open, too. The contents will spill out and -- "It's your problem. Just make sure you have a cover-up in case he turns out not to be carrying the stuff, after all. Call me as soon as you know, will you?" Welcome clicked off and sat for a moody while, considering his own next move. Finally he sighed and called Christine. "Get hold, of Rappapa and have him come here, please. Diplomatically, of course." "Auch, you don't think -- " "I'm afraid I do." Welcome stuffed his pipe and looked out at the savage dawnglare. Damn and blast, how did you accuse an accredited envoy of theft, especially when you liked him? Rappapa came bustling in accompanied by no more than a midget helicopter. "Twice in one arbitrary diurnal period?" he quacked. "Believe me, your excellency, I am flattered by such hyper-attention on the part of your doubtless busywith vast problems of interstel lar-negotiations self." "I need your help," said the human awkwardly. "Would you like a cigar?" "Gratitude erupts from me," said Rappapa. "If there is even of-the-most-micrometric way I can assist in -- " "It's this business of the theft." Welcome drew heavily on his pipe. "It puts my whole planet in a deucedly bad light. We have to catch the burglar to save our own reputation. At the same time, he is somebody's diplomat, which could lead to an unholy row if we arrested him." "Anyone who would ponder the violation of your excellency's so lavish hospitality should be dedignified," said Rappapa indignantly. I T'S not that simple, I'm afraid," Welcome explained. "His planet would react with a great show of injury, one harsh word would lead to another, the seeds of mutual suspicion would be sown. Don't you think, Freeman Rappapa, it would be best for the thief's own planet, too, if he merely surrendered his loot? Then no one need ever know what has happened. The whole thing could be discreetly hushed up and forgotten." "First the muchtobepondered question of locating the pilferish ambassador arises," said Rappapa. "Does your excellency the assistance of my abject self in such detection work desire?" So he's going to stall , after all. "If the thief confessed," said Welcome desperately, "I would understand that he committed the act only from the highest motives of planetarism. I would not look down on him for it, or discriminate against him in any way." Rappapa waved his cigar reverently. "Behold the magnanimity of the magnanimous!" "If he doesn't confess, though, if we have to find him for ourselves, we may have to be rather stern about it afterward." "Of course. Your excellency burrows to the very foundation of justice." The visor buzzed. Here goes, thought Welcome. He clicked it on, and M'Gamba's features looked bleakly out at him. "Well?" "It worked," said the captain. "My agent got his hands on the films, shoved them under the nearest reader. They're the ones, sure enough." "And how about the -- one who carried them?" "He insists he didn't know he had them. Says someone must have planted them on him. That wouldn't be hard to do, of course, so I haven't put him under formal arrest yet. What do you suggest?" "I'll call you back." Welcome clicked off and turned to Rappapa. "Well, we've located our thief. Finally," he said. "So I g-gathered." The Arcturian jittered about on the floor, stuttering in his excitement. "Who is it? Who is the low, vile, not-tobe-mentioned-without-expectoration creature?" "His name," said Welcome heavily, "is Smapopoi." "Sma -- " "Yes." "B-but -- donnabi whichu krx killuwi -- it is not of the possible! Believe me, excellent excellency, w-we are p-pure as distilled water!" Rappapa began trembling. "Your people should be able to figure out an electronic lock and have your robots pick it," said Welcome tonelessly. "And Srnapopoi was carrying the films." "Copies? Copies m-made by the th-thief to divert suspicion!" from behind the desk. "Don't take it so hard," he said kindly. "If you like, we'll claim that Srnapopoi did it on his own initiative, without your knowledge. We'll hush it all up." "But he couldn't have !" wailed Rappapa. "The robots can only my orders obey!" Welcome leaned back against the desk, scowling. His pipe had gone out and he made an elaborate ritual of relighting it to hide his uneasiness. He had given Rappapa an out and the duck hadn't taken it. Nor would, you expect anyone cool enough to pull that job to blow his jets this way when discovered -- or, for that matter, to hide his loot so clumsily, though of course there was no accounting for non-human psychology. Rappapa began to cry. "We are besmirched with accusations and have lost confidence. You think I am a not-fit-to-wipe-thefeet-on-egg-eater. What will my nestmates say?" "Now, after all -- " "They will say, 'Twiutiuk poipoi tu spung Rappapa.' " Welcome scratched his head helplessly. "All right, all right, you didn't do it. You've been the victim of a fraud. But then who is guilty?" Rappapa rubbed the tears from his bulging eyes. "It is necessary by the true monster finding," he said with some return of his old perkiness. "Will you give me out of your polychromatic mercy a chance?" "Certainly. Because if you're not guiity, then we've still got to find the one who is." Welcome sat down on a corner of the desk. Inwardly, he groaned at the thought of starting over again, just when he had thought the business was settled -- but, damn it, you couldn't simply call an official delegate a liar, however much you might wantto. "Let us assume that you did not do it. That leaves two possibilities, Sirius and Vega." "Would you from the scintillant heights of intellect descend to explain the omission of Procyon and Alpha Centauri?" "Well, the Centaurian is obvious. He's too stupid even to think of such a job. And Orazuni and his people were never out of sight of a human last night." Fairness forced Welcome to admit: "Neither were you Arcturians, for that matter. But you had the robots." "Could not Orazuni have had hidden-away robots?" "Not with his technical background. They're biologists, biochemists, not electronicians, except on an elementary level. Unless Orazuni stole the key, which he did not, he just had no means of opening that lock." "That leaves only some elaborate and improbable-on-the-faceof-it plot by Sirius or Vega." "And I don't think it could have been Vega. They're backward in electronics. With the atmospheric pressure of New Jupiter, they never even developed a vacuum tube. And as for Sirius -- " "No, wait! Robot delegate sent to do foul deeds while the weaver of intricate plots sits at his ease in public view." Rappapa's eyes bulged until they seemed in danger of falling out. Welcome looked at him, and he looked at Welcome. "Killuweetchunguf" squawked Rappapa. "Let us go!" "Hold on. We have to think this out." "No time to think! Come!" office. Welcome cursed and charged after him. If that impulsive featherhead accused the wrong being -- Christine saw four feet of squawking Arcturian, followed by six feet of cursing human, followed by seven inches of valiantly laboring helicopter, shoot through her office. She got up and raced after them. The receptionist saw the parade go by and excitedly joined it. A passing janitor saw them streaking through the hall and took out after the receptionist. Rappapa went down the ramp to the fourth sub-level, screeching and whistling. Thevorakz came out of his quarters to see what the fuss was about, just in time for Rappapa to unbalance him by darting under his legs, Welcome to bowl him over, and Christine, the receptionist, the janitor, and a few odd specimens picked up along the way to trample across him. As he rose, howling his fury, the helicopter collided with his head. He snarled and galloped after the rest. "Where is the Centaurian?" clacked Rappapa at George, who was rolling down the corridor. "Where is he lurking?" "In the clubroom," said the Vegan, pointing. Rappapa vaulted the metal shell. Welcome and Christine leapfrogged over him. The others drew up, until Thevorakz took a dying broad jump above the whole group. George stared after them, shrugged, and rolled imperturbably on his way. The clubroom was almost deserted: a stray Arcturian was reading a murder mystery, Helmung was draped over the bar clutching a bottle, and Orazuni sat chatting with the warrior. "There they are!" yammered Rappapa. "There abide the overly diabolical thieves!" "Shut up, you bloody fool -- " Welcome tripped on a chair and went flat on the floor. When he crawled up, Rappapa was grabbing Helmung by the baldric and chattering a stream of questions. "What is, little one?" rumbled the barbarian. "And why?" "We want to know how much Orazuni offered you to turn thief!" "I?" Orazuni smiled tolerantly. "Our colleague seems a trifle excited, Freeman Welcome." the bar, brushing assorted humans aside. "I demand an apology!" he roared. "I did not come nine light-yearth to be walked on!" "Let me go," growled Helmung uneasily. He batted Rappapa away. "Help!" squealed the Arcturian. "Really, now," said Orazuni reproachfully, "I must say this is a most undignified scene."  "Will you apologize to me?" bellowed Thevorakz. "I go my place," said Helmung. "Do not follow." He shoved his way through the crowd. "Stop, thief!"yelled Rappapa. His robots marched ia the door. "The Centaurian!" he added. "Now, see here -- " began Orazuni. "Stop him, too!" cried Rappapa. "He the films has!" "I shall also demand an apology," said the Procyonite with stiff dignity. Thevorakz reached out and gathered in a handful of his cloak. "Maybe you better wait a little," he said. Helmung had just noticed the robots deploying before him. "I see little men!" he gasped. He waved his arms and started an incantation. A detachment of robots swarmed up some curtains, took them down, and began to hobble the Centaurian with them. Helmung looked suddenly crushed. "My witchcraft not works here on Luna," he mumbled. "I want go home." Welcome decided it was time for him to do something. "Helmung," he asked, "did you open the door to the Sirian quarters for Orazuni?" "I promise him I not tell anyone that," said Helmung in a self-righteous voice. "You torture me, do anything, I not confess I was one who open door." Suddenly Orazuni broke into a laugh. "Never mind," he said. "Here is the other copy of the book." He fished in his portfolio and tossed a packet over to Welcome. "And now, freemen, if you will excuse me -- " Thevorakz's bellow cut through a sudden quiet. "When do I get my apology?" "TT should have been obvious, I suppose," said Welcome to Christine and M'Gamba. "That attempt to frame the Afcturians by making an extra copy of the book and planting it on one of them couldn't have thrown us off very long. But Orazuni only needed to have us baying along his false trail for a few days; then he'd be safely on his way home, bearing the films. We did know, though, that he had been cultivating Helmung's friendship ever since he learned that the Centaurians are telekinetic. His interest was scientific to start with, but it soon occurred to him that if Helmung could control electron streams easily enough to make pictures on an oscilloscope, he could surely open an electronic lock. And the Vegan data is valuable." "Did he hope to get more out of it than just the tables themselves?" asked M'Gamba. "Yes. I was talking to him just now, and he was quite frank and cheerful. Procyon has entertained notions of taking the job of Horse Trading -- ultimately the scientific leadership in all respects -- away from Earth. This theft would not only have discredited us, but given them a nice chunk of knowledge to trade with, besides what they learned from us through legitimate channels. Orazuni got Helmung to steal the book from him by the bribe of a love potion-#A hormone mixture adapted to Centaurian biochemistry. Helmung's received that payment, by the way, and is eager to get home and try it out; so that's one more nuisance off our necks." "And what are we going to do about Orazuni?" asked Christine worriedly. Welcome shrugged. "Keep an eye on him. What else can we do? We need the knowledge and the good will of his planet. We'll go on just as if nothing had happened. Horse Traders can't be very prim, you know." H E looked out the office window. The Sun was visible now, its blinding glare filtered to a soft radiance, and the sterile land of crags and craters had an eerie beauty over it. "Hard to believe this affair only took one working day," he said. "And what a day! Can we have some nice peaceful routine for a while, Chris?" "Not for long," she told him. "The Quest is due in from Tau Ceti soon. The previous expedition there reported the natives were quite anxious to learn from us and readying a delegation. I think their proudest achievement to date is an ingenious method of chipping flint." as strange and awesome ahoneymoon couple as science fiction has ever presented. You wouldn't want them for neighbors, but are they handy to the most highly educated and gifted only! At any rate, they're the ones who are the unsuspecting students in a course they never knew existed. Pulling Galileo's unpleasant little trick of proving that something that for two people in particular and the rest of the world in general! You'd never think a simple fact could have so drastic an effect. Beyond Designed, edited and produced by the Galaxy staff. 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Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe P.C.H. San Jose California The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon by Isaac Ysimov It began when Joseph Schwartz was walking down a street in Chicago, past the Institute tor Nuclear Research. He raised one foot in the twentieth century; he lowered it in Galactic Era #, the victim of an odd accident inside the Institute involving an experiment with crude uranium. Schwartz awoke to a strange world -- he was still on Earth, but at a time when all the planets of the Galaxy were inhabited, and the people of Earth were outcasts, suffering vindictive discrimination because their tiny world was radioactive! His subsequent adventures involved Schwartz in a brewing revolution of the Earth militarists, and a romance between the daughter of an eminent Earth scientist and a young Galactic archeologist. Then, strangely, it was the little retired tailor from Chicago who found himself the only man who could avert the impending cosmic disaster. But Schwartz, homesick and confused, wasn't sure he even cared! Combining tenseness, irony, romance, and fast action with a basis of really intriguing science, Pebble in the Sky is a truly ingenious tale of the far-distant future. Watch For It On Sale In March SCIENCE FICTION R ' I --  --  w At Last! A Brand-New Book Club ers who enjoy rocket-swift thrills... daring flights of imagination . , . jet-propelled action! It's the brand-new Science-Fiction Book Club -- organized to bring you the most daring and skillfully-written of these spinetingling novels at only a fraction of regular retail price! And now to welcome you to the Club you are invited to acthe books shown here for only -- just pick your # books and mail Arthur C. Clarke -- Earth-Man to crash into the Martian desert... the first to track d own the strange footprints and find yourself face to face with the ment. Both the Hunter and the Hunted were creatures that had to live within another body. So the Hunter entered the body of a student -- and the strange chase went on. er Pratt -- Two beau tiful women -- identical twins but unplaces at the same time! Asimov -- Why did "they" plant a deadly radiation bomb in the room of the young University of Earth student? And what could the lone boy do to prevent the planet-byplanet conquest o the entire Galaxy? Kornbluth. Rocket ! fans start building a ship for the first trip fo the moon. 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You will bill me only I for all three (plus few cents shipping charge), and nroll me as a member of the Science-Fiction Book Club. Every month send me the lb's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to ' (lve the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will iv only I plus a few cents shipping charge. I do not have to take a book every month nly four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after u j-cptlng four selections. nothing, and this membership will be cancelled! Name (Please Print) Address City Zone State (ion price in Canada Sl-JO, plus shipping. Address # Bond St., Torojito #. Offer good only in U.S.A. and Canada. Vol. #, No. I by J. T. M'Infosh by Murray Leinster by 'Robert Sheckley by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. by Edward Wellen by Willy Ley by H. L. Gold #I Huhon Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions : (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by seif-addiessed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories, printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. words in the January editorial called "Common Sense," I unwittingly bumped into a nest that the most truculent hornet would be proud to belong to. I said we are not faced by the threat of real inflation. The reaction was so instantaneous and violent that one would think the danger of inflation is necessary to our saCred institutions. That's not how I see it. I sense a fear of losing a fear, perhaps for fear that the eradicated fear will leave room for another and possibly more terrible fear. If that's so, then I probably have no right trying to alleviate what strikes me as a needless anxiety. But our era is confronted by so many real ones that it seems to me the removal of unreal fears should release energy to tackle genuine problems. Here is what I was guilty of saying : "Inflation is a sudden and disastrous gap between the cost of living and income. If income keeps pace with rising prices, the result is a decline in the purchasing power of money, but it is not inflation... "It doesn't matter whether steak cost #c or # a pound. If wages are # an hour, it won't stay at #c a pound. If they're #c an hour, # a pound is cataclysmic. But #c an hovir and #c a pound and # an hour and # a pound are equal." Let's be even blunter; they are exactly equal, which may be unorthodox economics, but it's a good statement of relativity. It isn't for or against; it's just the seemingly reckless truth that the height or depth of wages and prices is less important than fhe gap between them. I don't see evidence of any such gap. As long as there is none, inflation is not a menace. Let's not confuse individual distress with general disaster. Persons and groups with fixed incomes are being pressed hard, no doubt of it. I didn't need the news item one reader sent in, headlined "High Prices Force Worker onto Relief," to convince me; we can all supply affidavits. But true inflation, which I, along with anyone else who went overseas in World War II, saw in full tornado destructiveness, doesn't . merely press hard. It pauperizes. Savings are wiped out. Insurance and other investments become trash. Only goods (continued on page #) She couldn't keep the truth from him and he couldn't keep the truth from the world -- and so began the strangest divorce trial ever! I N ot a soul watched as Roderick Liffcom carried his bride across the threshold. They were just a cou pie of nice, good-looking kidsRoderick a psychologist and Ali son an ex-copy-writer. They weren't news yet. There was nothing to hint that in a few days the name of Liffcom would be known to almost everyone in the world, the tag on a case which interested everybody. Not everyone would follow a murder case, a graft case, or an espionage case. But everyone would follow the Liffcom case. Let's have a good look at them while we have the chance, before the mobs surround them. Roderick was big and strong enough to treat his wife's # pounds with contempt, but there was no contempt in the way he held her. He carried her as if she were a there was a strong wind blowing. He looked down at her with his heart in his eyes. He had black hair and brown eyes and one could see at a glance that he could have carried any girl he liked over the threshold. Alison nestled in his arms like a kitten, eyes halfclosed with rapture, arms about his neck. She was blonde and had fantastically beautiful eyes, not to mention the considerable claims to notice of her other features. But even at first glance one would know that there was more to Alison than beauty. It might be brains, or courage, or hard, bitter experience that had tempered her keen as steel. One could see at a glance that she cduld have been carried over the threshold by any man she liked. As they went in, it was the end of a story. But let's be different and call it the beginning. TN the morning, when they were at breakfast on the terrace, the picture hadn't changed radically. That is, Roderick was rather different, blue-chinned and sleepy-eyed and in a brown flannel bathrobe, and Alison was more spectacularly different in a pale green negligee that wasn't so much worn as wafted about. But the way they looked at each other hadn't changed remotely -- then. "There's something," remarked Alison casually, tracing patterns on the damask tablecloth with one slim finger, "that perhaps I ought to tell you." Two minutes later they were fighting for the phone. "I want to call my lawyer," Roderick bellowed. "I want to call my lawyer," Alison retorted. He paused, the number half dialed. "You can't," he told her roughly. "It's the same lawyer." She recovered herself first, as she always had. She smiled sunnily. "Shall we toss a coin for him?" she suggested. "No," said Roderick brutally. Where, oh, where was his great blinding love? "He's mine. I pay him more than you ever could." "Right," agreed Alison. "I'll fight the case myself." "So will I," Roderick exclaimed, and slammed the receiver down. Instantly he picked it up again. "No, we'll need him to get things moving." "Collusion?" asked Alison sweetly. "It was a low, mean, stinking, dirty, cattish, obscene, disgusting, filthy-minded thing to wait until..." "Until what?" Alison asked with more innocence than one would have thought there was in the world. "Android!" he spat viciously at her. Despite herself, her eyes flashed with anger. II T he newspapers not only mentioned it, they said it at the top of their voices: human sues much of a headline, for one naturally wondered why a human suing an android for divorce should rate a front-page story. After all, half the population of the world was android. Every day humans divorced humans, humans androids, androids humans, and androids androids. The natural reaction to a headline like that was: "So what? Who cares?" But it didn't need particular intelligence to realize that there must be something rather special about this case.  The report ran: "Everton, Tuesday. History is made today in the first human vs. android divorce case since the recent grant of full legal equality to androids. It is also the first case of a divorce sought on the grounds that one contracting party did not know the other was an android. This became possible only because the equality law made it no longer obligatory to disclose android origin in any contract. "Recognizing the importance of this test case, certain to affect four Hours will cover the case, which opens on Friday, in meticulous detail. Ace reporters Anona Geier and Walter Hallsmith will bring to our readers the whole story of this historic trial. Grier is human and Hallsmith android..." The report went on to give such details as the narnes of the people in this important test case, and remarked incidentally that although the Liff'com marriage had lasted, only ten hours and thirteen minutes before the divorce plea was entered, there had been even briefer marriages recorded. Twenty-four Hours thus adroitly obviated thousands of letters asking breathlessly: "Is this a record?" Ill flat, stretched herself on a divan, focused her eyes past the ceiling on infinity, and thought and thought and thought. She wasn't particularly unhappy. Not for Alison were misery and resentment and wild, impossible hope. She met the tragedy of her lifewith placid resignation and even humor. "Let's face it," she told herself firmly, "I'm hurt. I hoped he'd say, 'It doesn't matter. What difference could that make? It's you I love' -- the sort of thing men say in love stories. But what did he say? Dirty android." Oh, well. Life wasn't like love stories or they wouldn't just be stories. She might as well admit for a start that she still loved him. That would clarify her feelings. She should have told him earlier that she was an android. Perhaps he had some excuse for believing she merely waited until non-consummation was no longer grounds for divorce, and then triumphantly threw the fact that she was an android in his lap. (But what good was that supposed to do her?) It wasn't like that at all, of course. She hadn't told him because they had to get to know each other before the question arose. One didn't say the moment one was introduced to a person; "I'm married," or "I once served five years for theft," or "I'm an android. Are you?" If in the first few weeks she had known Roderick, some remark had been made about androids, she'd have remarked that she was one herself. But it never had. When he asked her to marry him, she honestly didn't think of saying she was an android. There were times when it mattered and times when it didn't; this seemed to be one of the latter. Roderick was so intelligent, so liberalminded, and so easygoing (except when he lost his temper) that she didn't think he would care. It never did occur to her that he might care. She just mentioned it, as one might say: "I hope you doq't mind my drinking iced coffee every morning." Well, almost. She just meritioned it... And happiness was over. Now an idea was growing in the sad ripple of her thoughts. Did Roderick really want this divorce case, after all, of was he only trying to prove something? Because if he was, she was ready to admit cheerfully that it was proved. She wanted Roderick. She 'didn't quite understand what had happened -- perhaps he would take her back on condition that he could trample on her face first. If so, that was all right. She was prepared to let him swear at her and rage at androids and work off any prejudice and hate he might have accumulated somehow, somewhere -- as long as he took her back. S HE reached behind her, picked up the telephone and dialed Roderick's number. "Hello, Roderick," she said cheerfully. "This is Alisqn. No, don't hang up. Tell me, why do you hate androids?" There was such a long silence that she knew he was considering everything, including the advisability of hanging up without a word. It could be said of Roderick that he thought things through very carefully before going off half-cocked. "I don'thate androids," he barked at last. "You've got something against android girls, then?" "No!" he shouted. "I'm a psychologist. I think comparatively straight. I'm not fouled up with race hatred and prejudice and megalomania and -- " "Then," said Alison very quietly, "it's just one particular android girl you hate." Roderick's voice was suddenly quiet, too. "No, Alison. It has nothing to do with that. It's just... children." So that was it. Alison's eyes filled with tears. That was the one thing she could do nothing about, the thing she had refused even to consider. "You really mean it?" she asked. "That's not just the case you're going to make out?" "It's the case I'm going to make out," he replied, "and I mean it. Trouble is, Alison, you hit something you couldn't have figured on. Most people want children, but are resigned to the fact that they're not likely to get them. I was one of a family of eight. The youngest. You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that that line was pretty safe? "Well, all the others are married. Some have been for a long time. One brother and two sisters have been married twice. That makes a total of seventeen human beings, not counting me. And their net achievement in the way of reproduction is zero. "It's a question of family continuity, don't you see? I don't think we'dmind if there was one child among the lot of us -- one extension into the future. But there isn't, and there's only this chance left." Alison dropped as close to misery as she ever did. She understood every word ' Roderick said and what was behind every word. If she ever had a chance of having children, she wouldn't give it up for one individual or love of one individual, either. But then, of course, she never had it. In the silence, Roderick hung up. Alison looked down at her own beautiful body and for once couldn't draw a shadow of complacency or content from looking at it. Instead, it irritated her, for it would never produce a child. What was the use of all the appearance, all the mechanism of sex, without its one real function? But it never occurred to her to give up, to let the suit go undefended. There must be something she could do, some line she could take. Winning the case was nothing, except that that might be a tiny, unimportant part of winning back Roderick. IV T he judge was a little pompous, and it was obvious from the start that under the very considerable power he had under the contract-court system, he meant to run this case in his own way and enjoy it. He clasped his hands on the bench and looked around the packed courtroom happily. He made his introductory remarks with obvious intense satisfaction that at least fifty reporters were writing down every word. "This has been called an important case," he said, "and it is. I could tell you why it is important, but that would not be justice. Our starting point must be this." He wagged his head in solemn glee at the jury. "We know nothing." He liked that. He said it again. "IVe know nothing. We don't know the factors involved. We have never heard of androids. All this and more, we have to be told. We can call on anyone anywhere for evidence. And we must make up our minds here and now, on what we are told here and now, on the rights and wrongs of this case -- and on nothing else." He had stated his theme and he developed it. He swooped and soared: he shot away out of sight and returned like a swift raven to cast pearls before swine. For, of course, his audience was composed of swine. He didn't say so or drop the smallest hint to that effect, but it wasn't necessary. Only on Roderick and Alison did he cast a fatherly, friendly eye. They had given him his hour .of glory. They weren't swine. But Judge Collier was no fool. Before he had lost the interest he had created, he was back in the 'lurtroom, getting things moviiig. "I understad," he said, glancig from Alison to Roderick and then back at Alison, which was understandable, "that you are conducting your own cases. That will be a factor tending toward informality, which is all to the' good. First of all, will you look at the jury?" Everyone in court looked at the jury. The jury looked at each other. In accordance with contract-court procedure, Roderick and Alison faced each other across the room, with the jury behind Alison so that they could see Roderick full-face and Alison in profile, and would know when they were lying. "AI ison Liffcom," said the judge, "have you any objection to any member of the jury?" Alison studied them. They were people, no more, no less. Careful police surveys produced juries that were as near genuine random groups as could reasonably be found. "No," she said. "Roderick Liffcom. Have you any objection -- " "Yes," said Roderick belligerently. "I want to know how many of them are androids." There was a stir of interest in the court. So it was really to be a human android battle. not change. "Out of order," he said. "Humans and androids are equal at law, and you cannot object to any juror because he is an android." "But this case concerns the rights of humans and androids," Roderick protested. "It concerns nothing of the kind," replied the judge sternly, "and if your plea is along those lines, we may as well forget the whole thing and go home. You cannot divorce your wife because she is an android." "But she didn't tell me -- " "Nor because she didn't tell you. No android now is obliged, ever, to disclose -- " "I know all that," said Roderick, exasperated. "Must I state the obvious? I never had much to do with the law, but I do know this -- the fact that A equals B may cut no ic, while the fact that B equals A may sew the whole case up. Okay, I'll state the obvious. I seek divorce on the grounds that Alison concealed from me until after our marriage her inability to have a child." It' was the obvious plea, but it was still a surprise to some people. There was a murmur of interest. Now things could move. There was something to argue about. Alison watched Roderick and V smiled at the thought that she knew him much better than anyone else in the courtroom did. Calm, he was dangerous, and he was fighting to be calm. And as she looked steadily at him, part of her was wondering how she could upset him and put him off stroke, while the other part was praying that he would be able to control himself and show up well. She was asked to take the . stand and she did it absently, still thinking about Roderick. Yes, she contested the divorce. No, she didn't deny that the facts were as stated. On what grounds did she contest the case, then? She brought her attention back to the matter in hand. "Oh, that's very simple. I can put it in -- " she counted on her fingers -- "nine words. How do we know I can't have a child?" Reporters wrote down the word "sensation." It wouldn't have lasted, but Alison knew that. She piled on more fuel. "I'm not stating my whole case," she said. "All I'm saying at the moment is..." She blushed. She felt it on her face and was pleased with herself. She hadn't been sure she could do it. "I don't like to speak of such things, but I suppose I must. When I married Roderick, I was a virgin. How could I possibly know then that I couldn't have a baby?" I T took a longtime to get things back to normal after that. The judge had to exhaust himself hammering with his gavel and threatening to clear the court. But Alison caught Roderick's eye, and he grinned and shook his head slowly. Roderick was two people, at least. He was the hothead, quick to anger, impulsive, emotional. But he was also, though it was hard to believe sometimes, a psychologist, able to sift and weigh and classify things and decide what they meant. She knew what he meant as he shook his head at her. She had made a purely artificial point, effective only for the moment. She knew she was an android and that androids didn't have children. The rest was irrelevant. "We have now established;" the judge was saying, breathless from shouting and banging with his gavel, "what the case is about and some of the facts. Alison Liffcom admits that she concealed the fact that she was an android, as she was perfectly entitled to do -- " He frowned down at Roderick, who had risen. "Well?" Roderick, at the moment, was the psychologist. "You mentioned  the word 'android,' Judge. Have you forgotten that none of us knows what an android is? You said, I believe: 'We have never heard of androids.' " Judge Collier clearly preferred the other Roderick, whom he could squash when he liked. "Precisely," he said without enthusiasm. "Do you propose to  tell us?" "I propose to have you told," said Roderick.  Dr. Geller took the stand. Roderick faced him, looking calm and competent. Most of the audience were women. He knew how to make the most of himself, and he did. Dr. Geller, silver-haired, dignified, was as impassive as a statue. "Who are you. Doctor?" asked Roderick coolly. "I am director of the Everton Creche, where the androids for the entire state are made." "You know quite a bit about androids?" "I do." "Just incidentally, in case anyone would like to know, do you mind telling us whether you are human or android?" "Not at all. I am an android." "I see. Now perhaps you'll tell us what androids are, when they were first made, and why?" "Androids are just people. No different from humans except that they're made instead of born. I take it you don't want me to tell you the full details of the process. Basically, one starts with a few living cells -- that's always necessary -- and gradually forms a complete human body. There is no difference. I must stress that. An android is a man or a woman, not in any sense a robot or automaton." There was a stir again, and the judge smiled faintly. Roderick's witness looked like something of a burden to Roderick. But Roderick merely nodded. Everything, apparently, was under control. "About two hundred years ago," the doctor went on, "it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that the human race was headed for extinction fairly soon. The population was halving itself every generation. Even if human life continued, civilization could not be maintained..." It was dull for everybody. Even Dr. Geller didn't seem very interested in what he was saying. This was the part that everyone knew already. But the judge didn't interfere. It was all strictly relevant.  A T first the androids had only been an experiment, interesting because they were from the first an astonishingly successful experiment. There was little failure, and a lot of startling success. Once the secret was discovered. one could, by artificial means, manufacture creatures who were men and women to the last decimal point. There was only one tiny flaw. They couldn't reproduce, either among themselves or with human partners. Everything was normal except that conception never took place. But as the human population dropped, and as the public services slowed, became inefficient, or closed down, it was natural that the bright idea should occur to someone : Why shouldn't the androids do it? So androids were made and trained as public servants. At first they were lower than the beasts. But that, to do hurnanity justice, lasted only until it became clear that androids were people. Then androids ascended the social scale to the exalted level of slaves. The curious thing, however, was that there was only one way to make androids, and that was to make them as babies and let them grow up. It wasn't possible to make only stupid, imperfect, adult androids. They turned out like humans, good, bad antf indifferent. And then came the transformation. Human births took an upsurge. It was renaissance. There was even unemployment for a while again. It would have been inhuman, of course, to kill off the androids, but on the other hand, if anyone was going to starve, they might as well. They did. No more androids were made. Human births subsided. Androids were manufactured again. Human births rose. It became obvious at last. The human race had not so much been extinguishing itself with birth control as actually failing to reproduce. Most people, men and women, were barren these days. But a certain proportion of this barrenness was psychological. The androids were a challenge. They stimulated a stubborn strain deep in humans. So a balance was reached. Androids were made for two reasons only -- to have that challenging effect that kept the human race holding its ground, almost replacing its losses, and to do all the dirty work of keeping a juggernaut of an economic system functioning smoothly for a decimated population. Even in the early days, the androids had champions. Curiously enough, it wasn't a matter of the androids fighting for and winning equality, but of humans fighting among each other and gradually giving the androids equality. The humans who fought most were those who couldn't have children. All these people could do if they were to have a family was adopt baby androids. Naturally they lavished on them all the affection and care that their own children would have had. They came to look on them as their own children. They therefore were very strongly in favor of any move to remove restrictions on androids. One's own son or daughter shouldn't be treated as an inferior being. That was some of the story, as Dr. Geller sketched it. The court was restive, the judge looked at the ceiling, the jury looked at Alison. Only Roderick was politely attentive to Dr. Geller. VI when the lull was over. If anyone missed Roderick's question, no one missed the doctor's answer: " -- reasonably established that androids cannot reproduce. At first there was actually some fear that they might. It was thought that the offspring of android and human would be some kind of monster. But reproduction did not occur." "Just one more point. Doctor," said Roderick easily. "There is, I understand, some method of identification -- some means of telling human from android, and vice versa?" "There are two," replied the doctor. Some of the people in court looked up, interested. Others made their indifference obvious to show that they knew what was coming. "The first is the fingerprint system. It is just as applicable to androids as to humans, and every android at every creche is fingerprinted. If for any reason it becomes necessary to identify a person jvho may or may not be android prints are taken. Once these have been sent to every main android center in the world -- a process which takes only two weeks -- the person is either positively identified as android or by elimination is known to be human." "There is no possibility of error?" "There is always the possibility of error. The system is perfect, but to err is human -- and, if I may be permitted the pleasantry, android as well." "Quite," said Roderick. "But may we take it that the possibility of error in this case is small?" "You may. As for the other method of identification: this is a relic of the early days of android manufacture and many of us feel -- but that is not germane." For the first time, however, he looked somewhat uncomfortable as he went on: "Androids, of course, are not bom. There is no umbilical cord. The navel is small, even and symmetrical, and faintly but quite clearly marked inside it are the words -- in this country, at any rate -- 'Made in U.S.A.' " A wave of sniggers ran round the court. The doctor flushed faintly. There were jokes about the little stamp that all androids carried. Once there had been political cartoons with the label as the motif. The point of one allegedly funny story came when it was discovered that a legend which was expected to be 'Made in U.S.A.' turned out to be 'Fabrique en France' instead. I T had always been something humans could jibe about, the stamp that every android would carry on his body to his grave. Twenty years ago, all persecution of androids was over, supposedly, and androids were free and accepted and had all but the same rights as humans. Yet twenty years ago, women's evening dress invariably revealed the navel, whatever else was chastely concealed. Human girls flaunted the fact that they were human. Android girls either meekly showed the proof or, by hiding it, admitted they were android. "There is under review," said the doctor, "a proposal to discontinue what some people feel must always be a badge of subservience -- " "That is sub judice," interrupted the judge, "and no part of the matter in question. We are concerned with things as they are." He looked inquiringly at Roderick. "Have you finished with the witness?" "Not only the witness," said Roderick, "but my case." He looked so pleased with himself that Alison, who was difficult to anger, wanted to hit him. "You have heard Dr. Geller's evidence. I demand that Alison submit herself to the two tests he mentioned. When it is established that she is an android, it will also be established that she cannot have a child. And that she therefore, by concealing her android status from me, also concealed the fact that she could not have a child." The judge nodded somewhat reluctantly. He looked over his glasses at Alison without much hope. It would be a pity if such a promising case were allowed to fizzle out so soon and so trivially. But he personally could see nothing significant that Alison could offer in rebuttal. "Your witness," said Roderick, with a gesture that called for a kick in the teeth, or so Alison thought. "Thank you," she said sweetly. She rose from her seat and crossed the floor. She wore a plain gray suit with a vivid yellow blouse. only a little of it visible, supplying the necessary touch of color. She had never looked better in her life and she knew it. Roderick looked as though he were losing the iron control which he had held for so long against all her expectations, and '.he did what she could to help by wriggling her skirt straight in the way he had always found so attractive. "Stop that!" he hissed at her. "This is serious." She merely showed him twenty-eight of her perfect teeth, and then turned to Dr. Geller. phrase you used, Doctor," said Alison. "You said it was 'reasonably established' that androids could not reproduce. Now I take it I have the facts correct. Y ou are director of the Everton Creche?" "Yes." "And your professional experience is therefore confined to androids up to the age of ten?" "Yes." "Is it Usual for even humans," asked Alison, "to reproduce before the age of ten?" There was stunned silence, then a laugh, then applause. "This is not a radio show," shouted the judge. "Proceed, if you please, Mrs. Liffcom." Alison did. Dr. Geller was the right man to come to for all matters relating to young androids, she said apologetically, but for matters relating to adult androids (no offense to Dr. Geller intended, of course), she proposed to call Dr. Smith. Roderick interrupted. He was perfectly prepared to hear Alison's case, but hadn't they better conclude his first? Was Alison prepared to submit herself to the two tests mentioned? "It's unnecessary," said Alison. "I am an android. I am not denying it." "Nevertheless -- " said Roderick. "I don't quite understand, Mr. Liffcom," the judge put in. "If there were any doubt, yes. But Mrs. Liffcom is not claiming that she is not an android." "I want to know." "Do you think there is any doubt?" "I only wish there were." It was "sensation" again. "And yet it's all perfectly natural, when you consider it," said Roderick, when he could be heard. "I want a divorce because Alison is an android and can't have a child. If she's been mistaken, or has been playing some game, or whatever it might be, I don't want a divorce. I want Alison, the girl I married. Surely that's easy enough to understand?" "All right," said Alison emotionlessly. "It'll take some time to check my fingerprints, but the other test can be made now. What do I do. Judge, peel here in front of everybody?" "Great Scott, no!" Five minutes later, in the jury room, the judge, the jury and Roderick exarnined the proof. Alison surrendered none of her dignity or self-possession while showing it to them. There was no doubt. The mark of the android was perfectly clear. Roderick was last to look. When he had examined the brand, his eyes met Alison's, and she had to fight back the tears. For he wasn't satisfied or angry, only sorry. he waived the fingerprint test. And Alison called Dr. Smith. He was older than Dr. Geller, but bright-eyed and alert. There was something about him -- people leaned forward as he took the stand, knowing somehow that what he had to say was going to be worth hearing. "Following the precedent of my learned friend," said Alison, "may I ask you if you are human or android. Dr. Smith?" "You may. I am human. However, most of my patients have been android." ' "Why is that?" "Because I realized long ago that androids represented the future. Humans are losing the fight. That being so, I wanted to find out what the differences between humans and androids were, or if there were any at all. If there were none, so much the better -- the human race wasn't going to die out, after all." "But of course," said Alison casually, yet somehow everyone hung on her words, "there  was one essential difference. Humanity was becoming sterile, but androids couldn't reproduce." "There was no difference," said Dr. Smith. Sometimes an unexpected statement produces silence, sometimes bedlam. Dr. Smith got both in turn... There was the stillness of shock as he elaborated and put his meaning beyond doubt. "Androids can have and have had children." Then the rest was drowned in a wave of gasps, whispers and exclamations that swelled in a few seconds to a roar. The judge hammered and shouted in vain. There was anger in the shouts. There was excitement, anxiety, incredulity, fear. Either the doctor was lying or he wasn't. If he was lying, he would suffer for it. People tricked by such a hoax T# are angry, vengeful, people. If he wasn't lying, everyone must re-evaluate his whole view of life. Everyone -- Shuman and android. The old religious questions would come up again. The question would be decided of whether Man, himself becoming extinct, had actually conquered life, instead of merely reaching a compromise with it. It would cease to matter whether any person was bom or made. There would be no more androids, only human beings. And Man would be master of creation. T he court sat again after a brief adjournment. The judge peered at Alison and at Dr. Smith, who was again on the stand. "Mrs. Liffcom," he said, "would you care to take up your examination at the same point?" "Certainly," said Alison. She addressed herself to Dr. Smith. "You say that androids can have children?" This time there was silence except for the doctor's quiet voice. "Yes. There is, as may well be imagined, conflicting evidence on this. The evidence I propose to bring forward has frequently been discredited. The reaction when I first made this statement shows why. It is an important question on which everyone must have reached some conclusion. Possibly one merely believes what one is told." As he went on, Alison cast a glance at Roderick. At first he was indifferent. He didn't believe it. Then he showed mild interest in what the doctor was saying. Eventually he became so excited that he could hardly sit still. And Alison began to hope again. "There is a psychologist in court," remarked the doctor mildly, "who may soon be asking me questions. I am not a psychologist any more than any other general practitioner, but before I mention particular cases, I must make this point. Every android grows up knowing he or she cannot have children. That is accepted in our civilization. "I don't think it should be accepted. I'll tell you why." No one interrupted him. He wasn't spectacular, but he wasted no time. He mentioned the case of Betty Gordon Holbein, # years before. No one had heard of Betty Gordon Holbein. She was human, said the doctor. Prostrate with shock, she testified she had been raped by an android. The android concerned was lynched. In due course, Betty Holbein had a normal child. "The records are available to everyone," said the doctor. "There was a lot of interest and indignation when the girl was raped, very little when she had her child. The suggestion that she had conceived after the incident was denied, without much publicity, or belief, for even then it was known that androids were barren." He looked at the judge, who nodded. "Look, are you twisting this to make a legal case," he demanded, "or did this girl -- " "You cannot ask the witness if he is perjuring himself," remarked the judge reprovingly. "I give a damn about perjury!" Roderick exclaimed. "I just want to know if this is true!" It was all very irregular; but Alison knew he might explode any moment and swear at the doctor and the judge. She didn't want that. So her eyes met his and she said levelly: "It's true, Roderick." Roderick sat down. "Now to get a true picture," the doctor continued, "we must droids were being tested, and mating among themselves, and even having irregular liaisons with humans -- and no conception took place. Or did it?" A little over a century ago, an android girl had been found in a wood, alive, but only just. Around her there were marks of many feet. She had been mutilated. Though she lived, she was never quite sane after that. But she also had a child. Roderick rose again, frowning. "I don't understand," he said "If this is true, why is it not known?" The judge was going to intervene, but Roderick went on quickly, "The doctor and I art professional men. I can ask hin for a professional opinion, sure ly? Well, Doctor?" "Because it has always been possible to disbelieve what one has decided to disbelieve. In this case, that nameless woman was mutilated so that the navel mark would be removed. There was a record of her fingerprints as those of an android. But it was authoritatively stated that there must have been a mistake and that, by having a child, the woman had thus been proved to be human." A century and a half ago, Winnie -- androids had begun to have at least a first name by this time -- had a child and it was again decided that this girl, who had been a laundry maid, must have been mixed up with an android while a baby and was in fact human. A little dead baby was found buried in a garden and an android couple was actually in court over the matter. But since they were androids, it could obviously not be their child, and they were discharged. Roderick jumped up again. "If you knew this," he asked Dr. Smith, "why keep it secret until now?" "Five years ago," said the doctor, "I wrote an article on the subject. I sent it to all the medical journals. Kventually one of the smaller publications printed it. I had half a dozen letters from people who were interested. Then nothing more. "One must admit," he added, "that not one of the cases I have mentioned -- as reported at the time -- would be accepted as positive scientific proof that androids can reproduce. The facts were recorded for posterity by people who didn't believe them. But..." "But," said Alison, a few minutes later, when the doctor had finished giving his evidence, "in view of this, it can hardly be stated that I know I cannot have a child. It may be unlikely; shall I call more medical evidence to show how unlikely, conception is for the average human woman?" so she continued: "The present position, as anyone concerned with childbirth would tell you, is that few marriages produce children, but those that do produce a lot. People who can have children go on doing it, these days. "Now I want to introduce a new point. It is not grounds for divorce among humans if the woman is barren and is not aware of it. It is, on the other hand, if she has had an operation which makes it impossible for her to have children and she conceals the fact." "I see what you are getting at," said the judge, "and it is most ingenious. Finish it, please." "Having had no such operation," said Alison, "and being able to prove it, I understand that I can't be held, legally, to have known that I could never have children." "To save reference to case histories," said the judge contentedly, "I can say here and now that the lady is right. It is for  the jury to decide on the merits of the case, but Mrs. Liffcom may be said to have established -- " "I demand an adjournment," said Roderick. There was a low murmur that ' gradually died out. Roderick and Alison were both on their feet, staring at each other across ten yards of space. The intensity of their feeling could be felt by everyone in the courtroom. "Court adjourned until tomor row," said the judge hastily. IX A lmost every newspaper which mentioned the Liff com case committed contempt of court. Perhaps the feeling was that no action could be taken against so many. All the newspapers went into the rights and wrongs of the affair as if they were giving evidence, too. Very little of the material was proor anti-android. It was, rather, for or against the evidence brought up. Anyone could see, remarked one newspaper bluntly, that Ali n Liffcom was nobody's fool. I I a woman like that went to t lie trouble of defending a suit  if any kind, she would dig up mething good and play it to lie limit. This was no aspersion nil the morals or integrity of Mrs. I iff com, for whom the newspaper he had to do was cast the faintest doubt on the truism that androids could not reproduce. She liad done that. But that, of course, said the iper decisively, didn't mean iliat androids could. Another newspaper took it from there. Just as good a case, it remarked, could have been made out for spiritualism, telepathy, possession, the existence of werewolves... Dr. Smith, who was undoubtedly sincere, had been misled by a few mistakes. Obviously, when androids were human in all respects save one, some humans would be passed off or mistaken for androids and vice versa. Equally obviously, the mistake would only be discovered if and when conception occurred, as in the cases quoted by Dr. Smith. A third paper even offered Alison a point to make in court if she liked. True enough. Dr. Smith had shown that such mistakes could occur. It was only necessary for Alison then to quote these cases and stress the jMJssibility that the same thing might have happened to her. If the proof of android origin was  not proof, the case would collapse. Other papers, however, took the . view that there might be something in the possibility that androids could reproduce. Why not? asked one. Androids weren't bloodless, inferior beings. One could keep things warm by holding them against the human body -- or by building a fire. In the same way, children could be nurtured in a human body or in culture tanks. The results were identical. They must be identical if one could take them forty years later, give them rigorous tests, and tell one from the other only because the android was stamped "Made in U.S.A." and because his fingerprints were on file. People had believed androids could not have children because they had been told . androids never had. Now they were told androids had reproduced. Where was the difficulty? You believed you had finished your cigarettes until you took out the pack and saw there was one left. What did you do then -- say you had finished them, therefore that what looked like a cigarette wasn't, and throw it away? And almost all the newspapers, whatever their general view. asked the real, fundamental question as well. That artificially rriade humans could conceive was credible, in theory. That they could not was also credible, in theory. lion? Even present-day humans could average one fertile marriage in six.  X "TF you have no objections," said Roderick politely -- determined to be on his best be- havior, thought Alison -- "let's turn this into a court of inquiry. Let's say, if you like, that Alison has successfully defended the case on the grounds that she can't legally be said to have known she couldn't have a child. Forget the divorce. That's not the point." "I thought it was," the judge objected, dazed. "Anyone can see that what , matters now," said Roderick impatiently, "is what Dr. Smith brought up: Let's get down to the question of whether there's any prospect of Alison having a baby." "A courtroom is hardly the place to settle that," murmured Alison. But she felt the first warm breath of , a glow of happiness she had thought she would never 'w. be able to experience again. "Women always go from t ue general to the particular," Roderick retorted. "I don't mean the question of whether you will have children. I mean the question of whether it's really possible that you might."  I The judge rapped decisively. 'I have been too lenient. I insist on, having a certain amount of order in my own court. Roderick Liff-. com, do you withdraw your suit?" ' "What does it matter? Anyway, if you must followthat line,  we'd have to have a few straight I questions and answers like whether Alison still loves me." The judge gasped. j "Do you?" demanded Roderick, glaring at Alison. I Alison felt as if her heart was going to explode. "If you want a straight answer," she said, "yes." "Good," said Roderick with satisfaction. "Now we can go on from there." He turned to glower at Judge Collier, who was trying to interrupt. "Look here," Roderick deT manded, "are you interested in ' getting at the truth?" "Certainly, but -- " "So am I. Be quiet, then. I meant to keep my temper with you, but you're constantly getting in my hair. Alison, would you mind taking the stand?" Phere was no doubt that Rod' k had personality. With Alison on the stand, he ' lied to the jury. "I'll tell you it I have in mind," he told in in friendly fashion. "We all iider why, if this thing's posic, it's happened so seldom. I ' I ilortunately, to date there hasn't been any real admission ' it it is possible,, so I didn't now. I never had a chance to work on it. Now I have. What I want to know is, if androids can I I v'c children, what prevents I I I I in from doing so." He reached out absently, without looking around, and squeezed Alison's shoulder. "We've got Aliion here," Roderick went on. "Let's find out if we can, shall we, what would stop her from having children?" Alison was glad she was sitting down. Her knees felt so weak that she knew they wouldn't support her. Did she have Roderick liack or didn't she? Could she really have a baby? Roderick's baby? The court swam dizzily in front of her eyes. Only gradually did she become aware of Roderick's voice asking anxiously if she was all right, Roderick bending over her, Roderick's arm behind her back, supporting her. "Yes," she said faintly. "I'm sorry. Roderick, I'll help you all I can, but do you think there's really very much chance?" "I'm a psychologist," he reminded her quietly, "and since you've never seen me at work, there's no harm in telling you I'm pretty good. Maybe we won't work this out here in half an hour, but we'll get through it in the next sixty years." Alison didn't forget where she was, but everything was so crazy that a little more wouldn't hurt. She reached up and drew his lips down to hers. XI be in the life of every android, male and female," said Roderick. "I don't expect to find it right away. Just tell us, Alison, about any times when you were aware of distinction -- when you were made aware that you were an android, not a human. Start as early as you like. "And," he added with a sudden, unexpected grin, "plea.se address your remarks to the Judge. Let's keep this as impersonal as we can." Alison composed her mind for , the Job. She didn't really want to look back. She wanted to look into the new, marvelous future. But she forced herself to begin. "I grew up in the New York Android Creche," she said. "There was no distinction there. Sotne of the children thought there was. Sometimes I heard older children talking about how much better off they would be if they were humans. But twice when there was overcrowding in the creche and plenty of room at the orphanage for human children, I was moved to the orphanage. And there waS absolutely no difference. "In a creche, it's far more important to be able to sell yourself than it ever can be later. If you're attractive or appealing enough, someone looking for a child to adopt will notice you and you'll have a home and security and affection. I wasn't attractive or appealing. I stayed in the creche until I was nine. I saw so many couples looking for children, always taking away some child but never me, that I was sure I would stay there until I was too old to be adopted and then have to earn my living, always on my own. "Then, one day, one of the sisters at the creche found me crying -- I forget what I was crying about -- and told me there was no need for me to cry atout anything because I had brains and " I was going to be a beapty, and what more could any girl want? I looked in the mirror, but I still seemed the same as ever. She must have known what she was talking about, though, for just a week later, a couple came and looked around the creche and picked me." Alison took a deep breath, and there was no acting about the tears in her eyes. "Nobody who's never experienced it can appreciate what it is to have a home for the first time at the age of nine," she said. "To say I'd have died for my new parents doesn't tell half of it. Maybe this is something that misled Roderick. He knew that twice a month, at least, I go and see my folks. He must hav thought they were my real parents, so he didn't ask if I was android." She looked at Roderick for the first time since she started the story. He nodded. "Go on, Alison," he said quietly. "You're doing fine." "This isn't a hard world for androids," Alison insisted. "It's only very occasionally..." She stopped, and Roderick had to prompt her. "Only very occasionally that what?" But Alison wasn't with him. She was eleven years back in the past. A lison had known all about that awkward period when she would cease to be a child and become a woman. But she had fvcr quite realized how rapid it  uld be, and how it would seem vi-n more rapid, so that it was vrr before she was ready for it to I iirt. She wasn't sleeping well, but tuwas so healthy and had such  serves of strength that it didn't how, and for once her adopted I larents failed her. Though Alison vould never admit that, it would i:ive been so much easier if Sutn had talked with her, and Koger, without saying a word, had indicated in his manner that lie knew what was going on. One day she was out walking, frying to tire herself for sleep later, and ran into a group of youths of her own age in the woods. She knew one of them slightly. Bob Thomson, and she knew that their apparent leader, as tall as a man at fifteen, was Harry Hewitt. She didn't know whether any of them were androids or not -- the question had never occurred to her. And it didn't seem of any immediate interest or importance that she was an android, either, as she passed through them and some of them whistled, and involuntarily, completely aware of their eyes on her, she reddened. She saw Bob Thomson whisper to Harry Hewitt and Hewitt burst out: "Android,, eh? Android f That's fine!" He stepped in front of her and barred her path. 'What a pretty android," he said loudly, playing to his gallery. "I've seen you before, but I thought you were just a girl. Take off your blouse, android." There was a startled movement in the group, and someone nudged Hewitt. "It's all right," he said. "She's an android. No real parents, only people who have taken her in to pretend they can have kids." Alison looked from side to side like a cornered animal. "Humans can do anything they like with androids," Hewitt told his more timorous companions. "Don't you know that?" He turned back to Alison. "But we must be sure she is an android. Hold her. Butch." Alison was grasped firmly by the hips, which had so recently stopped being boyish and swelled alarmingly. She kicked and struggled, her heart threatening to burst, but Butch, whoever he was, was strong. Two other boys held her arms. Carefully, to a chorus of nervous, excited sniggers, Hewitt parted her blouse' and skirt a narrow slit and peered at her navel. "Made in U.S.A.," he said with satisfaction. "It's all right, then." In contrast to his previous cautious, decorous manner, he tore the blouse out of her waistband and ripped it off. Alison's knees sagged as someone behind her began to fumble with her brassiere. "No, no!" Hewitt exclaimed in mock horror. "Mustn't do that until she says you can. Even androids have rights. Or at least, if they haven't, we should be polite and pretend they have. Android, say we can do whatever we like with you." "No!" cried Alison. "That's too bad. Shift your grip a bit. Butch." The rough hands went up around her ribs, rasping her soft skin. Alison struggled and twisted wildly. "Keep still," said Hewitt. He spoke very quietly, but there was savage joy in his face. Slowly and carefully, he loosened Alison's belt and eased her skirt and the white trunks under it down to the pit of her stomach. Then he took out a heavy claspknife, opened it and set the point neatly in the center of her belly. Alison drew in her stomach; the knifrf point followed, indenting the flesh. "Say we can do whatever we like with you, android." The knife pricked deeper. A tiny drop of crimson came from under it and ran slowly down to Alison's skirt. Her nerve broke. "You can do whatever you like with me!" she screamed. H er brassiere came loose and fluttered to the ground. Hewitt's knife cut her belt and her skirt began to slip over her hips. Butch's hands went down to her waist again, biting into it cruelly. From behind, a hand tentatively touched her breast and another clutched her shoulder. One at a time, her feet were raised and the shoes taken off them and thrown in the bushes. But someone else had heard Alison's scream. Long after she had thought no one would come, someone did. "Hell," said Hewitt as one of his companions shouted and pointed, "something always spoils everything. Beat it, boys." They were gone. Alison clutched her skirt and looked behind her thankfully. A man and a woman were only a few yards from her. The woman was young and heavy with child. Humans, both of them. She opened her mouth to thank them, to explain, to weep. ' But they were looking at her as if she were a crushed beetle of some kind. "Android, of course," said the man disgustedly. "Dirty little beast." "Hardly more than a child," the woman said, "and already at this." "I think I'll give her a good hiding," the man went on. "Won't do any good, I suppose, t'Ut... Alison burst into tears and darted among the bushes. She didn't wait to see whether the man started after her. Branches and thorns tore her skin. Her skirt dropped and tripped her. She flew headlong, flinched away from a thorny bush, slammed hard into a tree-trunk, and waited on the ground, sick and breathless, for the man to beat her.  Her legs and arms and shoulders were covered with long scratches and a wiry branch had lashed her ribs like a whip, leaving a long weal. But that didn.'t matter. A twisted root was digging into her side -- that, too, didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Why had no one told her she was an inferior being?. Somehow she had known; she had always known. But no one had ever .shown her before. She realized afterward why the man and the woman, who must have seen or guessed what had really happened, had spoken as they did. They had, or were going to have, children. They hated all androids. Androids were unnecessary, their enemies, and the enemies of their children. But at the time she merely waited helpless, "incapable of thought. The man would come and beat her, Susan and Roger would turn her away, and she would never know happiness again. parents never knew about that," said Alison. "I hid in the bushes until it was dark, and then went straight home. I climbed into my bedroom from the outhouse and pretended laterI'd been there for hours." "Why didn't you tell anyone?" Roderick asked. Alison shrugged. "It was a small incident that concerned me alone. I knew, once I'd had time to think, that my adopted, parents would be upset and angry, but not at me. I thought  I'd better keep it to myself. I wasn't hurt and none of it matters when you look back on it, does it?" "How about the man who was going to give you a good hiding?" "I never saw him again. It was two years later when I got my first punishment." "Just a minute," said Roderick. "You said that even then you knew you were an inferior being -- you had always known, but this was the first time anyone showed you. How had you known? Who or what had told you? When? Where?" Alison tried. They could see her try. But she had to say: "I don't know." "All right," said Roderick, as if it weren't important. "What was this that happened two years later?" "Perhaps I am giving too much significance to these incidents," Alison remarked apologetically. "Certainly they happened. But when I say 'two years passed,' perhaps I'm not making it clear that in those two years hardly anjthing happened, hardly anything was said or done, to remind me I was an android and not a human being. "When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I suddenly developed a talent for tennis. I had played since I was quite young, but just as front-rank players run in and out of form, I improved quite unexpectedly. I joined a new club. I was picked for an important match. I was in singles, mixed and women's doubles. I did well, but that's not the point. "After the match, my doubles partner told me I was wanted in the locker room. There was something strange about the way she told me, but I couldn't place it. I wondered if I'd broken some rule, failed to check with someone, played in the wrong match, or forgotten to bow three times to the east -- you know what these clubs are like." "No, we don't," said Judge Collier. "We know nothing, remember? Tell us." Unexpectedly, he ot an approving nod from the unpredictable Roderick. she followed Veronica. She wasn't nervous or sensitive as a .rule; she seldom felt apprehension. She was curious, naturally, and even wilder possibilities suggested themselves. Had she been mistaken for someone else? Had someone stolen something and they thought she'd done it? Had someone inspected her racket and found it was an inch too wide? The whole team was waiting in the locker room. It looked serious, especially when she saw their expressions. It still didn't occur to her that the fact that she was an android could have anything to do with it. Only once in her life had there been any real indicationthat in some way androids were inferior beings. But that was what it was. Bob Walton, the captain of the team, said gravely that their opponents, well beaten, had accused them of recruiting star androids to help them. Alison laughed. "That's a new one. I've heard some peculiar excuses. Made them myself, too -- the light was bad, the umpire was crazy, I had a stone in my shoe, people were moving about, the net was too high. But never 'You fielded androids against us.' Androids are just ordinary people -- good and bad tennis players. The open singles champion is an android, but the number one woman is human. You know that as well as I do. Might as well complain because you're beaten by tall people, or short people, or people with long arms." Everyone had relaxed. "Sorry, Alison," said Walton. "It's just that none of us knew you weren't an android." Alison frowned. "What's all this? I'm an android, sure. I didn't say so only because nobody asked me." "We took it for granted," said Walton stiffly, "that you would know... as, of course, you did. There are no androids competing in the Athenian League. We try to keep one group, at least, clean." He looked at the other two men in the team and inclined his head. Without a word they left the room, all three of them. Alison, left with the other three girls, one of whom she had kept out of the team, looked exasperated. "This is nonsense," she said. "If you like to run an all-human league, that's all right as far as I'm concernedj but you should put up notices to avoid misunderstanding. I didn't know you were -- " "Whether you knew or not is beside the point," said Veronica coldly -- the same Veronica who had laughed and talked and won ) a match with Alison only a few ? minutes before. "We're going to make sure you never forget." T hey dosed in on her. It was to be a fight, apparently. Alison didn't mind. She jabbed Veronica in the ribs and sent her gasping across the room. She expected them to tear ler clothes, thinking it would be conventional in dealing with android girls. But it was quite different from the scene in the bushes. This was clean and sporting. The men had left, very properly, and instead of half a dozen youths with a knife against a terrified child, it was only three girls to one. Alison fought hard, but fair. She guessed that, if she didn't fight clean, it would be ammunition for the android-haters. To do them justice, the other girls were clean, too. They didn't mind hurting her, but they didn't go for her face, use their nails or yank her hair. Alison gave a good account of herself, but other things being equal, three will always overcome one. She was turned on her face on the floor. One of the girls sat on her legs and one on her shoulders while the third beat the seat of her shorts with a I irmly swung racket. It was no joke. Alison wouldn't have made a sound if it had ircn far worse, but when they ift her go, she was feeling sorry lor herself. They left her alone i the room. She picked herself up and dusted herself off. The floor was  lean and the mirror in one ' Omer showed that she looked ill right. In fact, she looked coniderably better than the three I'.irls who had beaten her. Still angry, she was able I () grin philosophically at the thought that she could beat them all in a beauty contest and at tennis. She could tell herself, if she liked, that they were jealous of her. It was probably at least partly true. Her feelings were hurt, but there was no other damage. She could even see their pioint of view. XV was their point of " of view?" asked Roderick. "Well, they were human and they were snobs. They'd even have admitted they were snobs, if you put the question the right way. It was a private club -- " "And it was quite reasonable," suggested Roderick softly, "that they should exclude androids, who are inferior beings." "No, not quite that," Alison protested, laughing. "I don't really believe..." She stopped. "Just sometimes?" Roderick persisted. "Or just one part of you, while the other knows quite well an android is as good as a human?" Alison shivered suddenly. "You know, I have a curious feeling, as if I were being trapped into something." "That's how people always feel," said Roderick, "just before they decide they needn't be terrified any more of spiders or whatever it was they feared." The court was very quiet. There was something about Roderick's professional competence and Alison's determination to cooperate that made any kind of interruption out of the question. "There's very little more I can say about this," said Alison. "I took a job, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. It was with an advertising agency. They knew I was an android. They paid me exactly what they paid anyone else. When I did well, they gave me a raise. "But then I noticed something -- I never got any credit for anything. When I had an idea, somehow it was always possible to give the credit to someone else. Soon there was a very curious situation. I held a very junior position, I had little or no standing, but I did responsible work and I was paid well for it. "I went to another agency and it was quite different. Again, they knew I was an android, but no one seemed remotely interested. When I did well, I was promoted. When I did badly on any job, my chief swore at me and called me a fool and an incompetent and an empty-headed glamor girl and a lot of things I'd rather not repeat here. "But it never seemed to occur to him to call me a dirty android. I don't think he was an android himself, either. "I joined a dramatic society, but again I chose the wrong club. They didn't mind at all that I was an android. They didn't keep me in small parts. But it was perfectly natural that the threfe human girls in the cast shouldn't want to use the same dressing room as another android girl in the show and I did. When we were at small places, she and I had to change in the wings. "There were scores of other little incidents of the same kind. They multiplied as I grew older -- not because differentiation was getting worse, but because I was moving inhigher society. In places where it's held against you that you didn't go to Harvard or Yale, naturally it's a disadvantage if you're an android, besides. "Then a law was passed and it was no longer necessary to admit being an android. I don't know what the Athenian Tennis League did about that. I'd come to Everton then and hardly anyone knew I was an android. And the plain fact, despite everything I've said, is that hardly anyone cared. There are so many androids, so many humans. You may find yourself the only android in a group -- or the only human. "Then I met Roderick." "There," said Roderick, "I think we can stop." He turned t the judge. "I'm withdrawing my suit, of course. I think I made that clear quite a while ago." He gave Alison his arm. "Come on, sweetheart, let's go." T he roar burst out again. It must have been both one of the noisiest and one of the quietest trials oh record. The judge, dignity forgotten, was standing up, hopping from one foot to the other in impatience and vexation. "You can't go like that!"' he shrieked. "We haven't finished... we don't know..." "I've gone as far as I can here," said Roderick. He hesitated as the roar grew. "All right," he went on, raising his voice. "But you don't explain ' pUto themselves. Any little ks that make them do funny limus, or not do normal things, I get them gradually to ex' II to you, and to themselves." Me searched in his pockets and  d out a key ring. "Go and '.lilt in the car, honey," he said,  ml told Alison where it was. ihc went, dazed. "I 'll have to keep the papers iiom her for a day or two," Rod. I ick went on, almost to himself. After that, it won't matter." He "lined his attention to the court. All right, then, listen. If I'm I ight, I've found something that's I'ccn under everyone's nose for ' wo hundred years and has never ren seen before. I don't say I lound it in five minutes. I've tieen working it out for the last twenty-four hours, with the help of quite a few records of android patients. "Will you listen?" he yelled as the excited chatter increased. "I don't want to tell you this. I want to go home with Alison. You've seen her. Wouldn't you want to?" The court gradually settled. "Let's consider human sterility for a moment," said Roderick. "As you might imagine, some of it's medical and some psychological. As a psychologist. I've cured people of so-called barrenness -- nnd when I did, of course, if wasn't sterility at all, but a neurosis. These people didn't and don't have children because, owing to some imconscious conclusion they've reached, they don't want them, feel they shouldn't have them, or are certain they can't have them. "But that's only some. Others come to me and, in consultation with a specialist in that line, I find there's nothing psychological about it whatever. "I have an idea, now, that all androids are psychologically sterile. Sterility has eaten into the cycle of human reproduction but how should it touch the androids? If one android can reproduce, they all can. Unless they, like these humans I've cured, have reached unconscious conclusions to the effect that androids can't or shouldn't or mustn't have children. "And we know they nearly all have." and when Roderick spoke quietly, he was emphasizing points and people listened. There was no murmuring now. "I think if you were to run a survey and find who now is continuing to deny -- passionately, honestly, sincerely  that androids can reproduce, you'd find the most passionate, honest and sincere are androids. If you looked into the past, I think you'd find the same thing. Wasn't it significant that it had to be a human doctor who declared publicly that androids weren't sterile? "Into every android is built the psychological axiom that an android must be inferior to a human to survive. That's the answer. Androids don't come to me to be cured of this because they don't want to be cured of it. They know it's essential to them. With the more aware part of their brains, they may know exactly the opposite, but that doesn't count when it comes to things like this. "And long ago, without knowing it, androids picked on this. Androids could not be a menace if they couldn't reproduce. Androids would be duly inferior if they couldn't reproduce. Androids would be allowed to exist if they couldn't reproduce. Androids could compete with humans in other things if . they couldn't reproduce." He knew he was right as he looked around the court. For once, almost at a glance, it was possible to tell humans from androids. Half the people in court were interested, bored, amused, indifferent, thoughtful -- the humans. The other half were angry, frightened, ashamed, apathetic, resentful, wildly excited, or in tears... for Roderick was tearing at the very foundation of their world. "I have real hopes for Alison," he remarked mildly, "because she brought in Dr. Smith. See what that means? Not one an droid in a thousand could have done it. She must love me a lot... but that's none of your business." He went the way Alison had gone. No one tried to stop him this time. At the door, he paused. "When the first acknowledged android children are born," he observed, "it'll mean that regardless of the trials or disasters mankind still has to face, the human race won't die out. Because... I think we might all chew a little on this point... the children of androids can't be android, can they?" j R oderick drove. Aiison usually did when they were out in a car together, but there i was an unspoken agreement that Roderick would have to take charge of almost everything for a while.  "We both won," she said happily. "At least, we will have when . little Roderick arrives." j "Do you believe he will?" asked Roderick, in his professional, neutral tone. "Not quite. I wonder what you ,# iiiul in the court. I suppose I'm not to try to find out?" "FincJ out if you like. But do it from yourself. From what's in vou. I'll help." "I think," Alison mused, "it must be something to do with I )r. Smith." Oh? Why?" "Because I had the most peculiar feeling when I remembered licaring about him and the idea Hint androids could have chilIren. Like when Hewitt had his iviiife in my stomach, only as..." She laughed nervously, unomfortably. "As if I were holding it myself, and had to cut oniething out, but couldn't do had a sort of idea I could cut It out, if I tried hard enough and long enough, and not kill myself." Roderick turned the corner into their street. "This is a little unprofessional," he said, the exhilaration in his voice ill-concealed, "but I don't think it'll do liny harm with you, Alison. There is going to be a little Roderick. I didn't decide it. You decided it. And it won't kill you. And -- God, look at that!" Cameras clicked like grasshoppers as Roderick Liffcom carried his bride across the threshold. The photographers hadn't had to follow them, for they knew where the Liffcoms were going. Scores of plates were exposed. The Liffcoms were news. The name of Liffcom was known to almost everyone. Roderick was big and strong enough to treat his wife's # pounds with contempt, but there was no contempt in the way he held her. He carried her as if she was made of crystal which the faintest jar would shatter. One could see at a glance that he could have carried any girl he liked over the threshold. Alison nestled in his arms like a kitten, eyes half-closed with rapture, arms about Roderick's neck. One could see at a glance she could have been carried over the threshold by any man she liked. As they went in, it was the beginning of a story.But let's be different and call it the end. For the biggest, most lucrative and attractive novel contest in the entire history of science fiction!  seventh victim The most dangerous game, said one writer, is Man. But there is another still more deadly! had written the previous night, couldn't think about business. All he could do was wait until the mail came. He had been waiting for his notification for two weeks now. The government was behind schedule, as usual. The glass door of his office was marked Merger and Frelaine, Clothiers. It opened, and E. J. Merger walked in, limping slightly from his old gunshot wound. His shoulders were bent ; but at the age of seventythree, he wasn't worrying too much about his posture. "Well, Stan?" Merger asked. "What about that ad?" Frelaine had joined Merger sixteen years ago, when he was twenty-seven. Together they had built Protec-Clothes into a million-dollar concern. "I suppose you can run it," Frelaine said, handing the slip of paper to Morger. If only the mail would come earlier, he thought. " 'Do you own a ProtecSuit?' " Morger read aloud, holding the paper close to his eyes. " 'The finest tailoring in the world has gone into Morger and Frelaine's Protec-Suit, to make it the leader in men's fashions.'" Morger cleared his throat and glanced at Frelaine. He smiled and read on. " 'Protec-Suit is the safest as well as the smartest. Every Protec-Suit comes with special builtin gun pocket, guaranteed not to bulge. Ho one will know you are carrying a gun -- except you. The gun pocket is exceptionally easy to get at, permitting fast, unhindered draw. Choice of hip or breast pocket.' Very nice," Morger commented. Frelaine nodded morosely. " 'The Protec-Suit Special has the fling-out gun pocket, the greatest modern advance in personal protection. A touch of the concealed button throws the gun into your hand, cocked, safeties off. Why not drop into the ProtecStore nearest you? Why not be safe?' "That's fine," Morger said. "That's a very nice, dignified ad." He thought for a moment, fingering his white mustache. "Shouldn't you mention that Protec-Suits come in a variety of styles, single and double-breasted, one and two button rolls, deep and shallow flares?" "Right. I forgot." sheet and jotted a note on the edge of it. Then he stood up, smoothing his jacket over his prominent stomach. Frelaine was forty-three, a little overweight, a little bald on top. He was an  amiable-looking man with cold eyes. "Relax," Morger said. "It'll come in today's mail." Frelaine forced himself to smile. He felt like pacing the floor, but instead sat on the edge of the desk. "You'd think it was my first kill," he said, with a deprecating smile. "I know how it is," Morger said. "Before I hung up my gun, I couldn't sleep for a month, waiting for a notification. I know." The two men waited. Just as the silence was becoming unbearable, the door opened. A clerk walked in and deposited the mail on Frelaine's desk. Frelaine swung around and gathered up the letters. He thumbed through them rapidly and found what he had been waiting for -- the long white encial government seal on it. "That's itl" Frelaine said, and broke into a grin. "That's the baby !" "Fine." Morger eyed the envelope with interest, but didn't ask Frelaine to open it. It would be a breach of etiquette, as well as a violation in the eyes of the law. No one was supposed to know a Victim's name except his Hunter. "Have a good hunt." "I expect to," Frelaine replied confidently. His desk was in order -- had been for a week. He picked up his briefcase. "A good kill will do you a world of good," Morger said, putting his hand lightly on Frelaine's padded shoulder. "You've been keyed up." "I know." Frelaine grinned again and shook Merger's hand. "Wish I was a kid again," Morger said, glancing down at his crippled leg with wryly humorous eyes. "Makes me warit to pick up a gun again." The old man had been quite a Hunter in his day. Ten successful hunts had qualified him for the exclusive Tens Club. And, of course, for each hunt Morger had had to act as Victim, so he had twenty kills to his credit. "I sure hope my Victim isn't anyone like you," Frelaine said, half in jest. "Don't worry about it. What number will this be?" "The seventh." "Lucky seven. Go to it," Morger said. "We'll get you into the Tens yet." Frelaine waved his hand and started out the door. "Just don't get careless," warned Morger. "All it takes is a single slip and I'll need a new partner. If you don't mind, I like the one I've got now." "I'll be careful," Frelaine promised. Frelaine walked to his apartment. He wanted time to cool off. There was no sense in acting like a kid on his first kill.  As he walked, Rrelaine kept his eyes strictly to the front. Staring at anyone was practically asking for a bullet, if the man happened to be serving as Victim. Some Victims shot if you just glanced at them. Nervous fellows. Frelaine prudently looked above the heads of the people he passed. Ahead of him was a huge billboard, offering J. F. O'Donovan's services to the public. "Victims!" the sign proclaimed in huge red letters. "Why take chances? Use an O'Donovan accredited Spotter. Let us locate your assigned killer. Pay after you get him!" The sign reminded Frelaine. He would call Morrow as soon as he reached his apartment. He crossed the street, quickening his stride. He could hardly wait to get home now, to open the envelope and discover who his victim was. Would he be clever or stupid? Rich, like Frelaine's fourth Victim, or poor, like the first and second? Would he have an organized Spotter service, or try to go it on his own? The excitement of the chase was wonderful, coursing through his veins, quickening his heartbeat. From a block or so away, he heard gunfire. Two quick shots, and then a final one. Somebody got his man, Frelaine thought. Good for him. It was a superb feeling, he told himself. He was alive again. A t his one-room apartment, the first thing Frelaine did was call Ed Morrow, his spotter. The man worked as a garage attendant between calls. "Hello, Ed? Frelaine." "Oh, hi, Mr. Frelaine." He could see the man's thin, greasestained face, grinning flat-lipped at the telephone. "I'm going out on one, Ed." "Good luck, Mr. Frelaine," Ed Morrow said. "I. suppose you'll want me to stand by?" "That's right. I don't expect to be gone more than a week or two. I'll probably get my notification of Victim Status within three months of the kill." "I'll be standing by. Good hunting, Mr. Frelaine." "Thanks. So long." He hung up. It was a wise safety measure to reserve a first-class spotter. After his kill, it would be Frelaine's turn as Victim. Then, once again, Ed Morrow would be his life insurance. And what a marvelous spotter Morrow was! Uneducated -- stupid, really. But what an eye for people! Morrow was a natural. His pale eyes could tell an outof-towner at a glance. He was diabolically clever at rigging an ambush. An indispensable man. Frelaine took out the envelope, chuckling to himself, remembering some of the tricks Morrow had turned for the Hunters. Still smiling, he glanced at the data inside the envelope. Janet-Marie Patzig... His Victim was a female! Frelaine stood up and paced for a few moments. Then he read the letter again. Janet-Marie Patzig. No mistake. A girl. Three photographs were enclosed, her address, and the usual descriptive data. Frelaine frowned. He had never killed a female. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the telephone and dialed. "Emotional Catharsis Bureau, Information Section," a man's voice answered. "Say, look," Frelaine said. "I just got my notification and I pulled a girl. Is that in order?" He gave the clerk the girl's name. "It's all in order, sir," the clerk replied after a minute of checking micro-files. "The girl registered with the board under her own free will. The law says she has the same rights and privileges as a man." "Could you tell me how many kills she has?" "I'm sorry, sir. The only information you're allowed is the victim's legal status and the descriptive data you have received." "I see." Frelaine paused. "Could I draw another?" "You can ruse the hunt, of course. That is your legal right. But you will not be allowed another Victim until you have served. Do you wish to refuse?" "Oh, no," Frelaine said hastily. "I was just wondering. Thank you." his largest armchair, loosening his belt. This required some thought. Damn women, he grumbled to himself, always trying to horn in on a man's game. Why can't they stay home? But they were free citizens, he reminded himself. Still, it just didn't .seem feminine. He knew that, historically speaking, the Emotional Catharsis Board had been established for men and men only. The board had been formed at the end of the fourth world war -- or sixth, as some historians counted it. At that time there had been a driving need for permanent, lasting peace. The reason was practical, as were the men who engineered it. Simply -- annihilation was just around the corner. In the world wars, weapons increased in magnitude, efficiency and exterminating power. Soldiers became accustomed to them, less and less reluctant to use them. But the saturation point had been reached. Another war would truly be the war to end all wars. There would be no one left to start another. So this peace had to last for all time, but the men who engineered it were practical. They recognized the tensions and dislocations still present, the cauldrons in which wars are brewed. They asked themselves why peace had never lasted in the past. "Because men like to fight," was their answer. "Oh, no!" screamed the idealists. But the jnen who engineered the peace were forced to postulate, regretfully, the presence of a need for violence in a large percentage of mankind. Men aren't angels. They, aren't fiends, either. They are just very human beings, with a high degree of combativeness. With the scientific knowledge and the power they had at that moment, the practical men could have gone a long way toward breeding this trait out of the race. Many thought this was the answer. The practical men didn't. They recognized the validity of competition, love of battle, strength in the face of overwhelming odds. These, they felt, were admirable traits for a race, and insurance toward its " perpetuity. Without them, the race would be bound to retrogress. The tendency toward violence, they found, was inextricably linked with ingenuity, flexibility, drive. The problem, then: To arrange a peace that would last after they were gone. To stop the race from destroying itself, without removing the responsible traits. The way to do this, they decided, was to rechannel Man's violence. Provide him with an outlet, an expression. The first big step was the legalization of gladiatorial events, complete with blood and thunder. But more was needed. Sublimations worked only up to a point. Then people demanded the real thing. There is no substitute for murder. OO murder was legalized, on a 'strictly individual basis, and only for those who wanted it. The governments were directed to create Emotional Catharsis Boards. After a period of experimentation, uniform rules were adopted. Anyone who wanted to murGiving certain data and assurances, he would be granted a Victim. Anyone who signed up to murder, under the government rules, had to take his turn a few months later as Victim -- if he survived. That, in essence, was the setup. The individual could commit as many murders as he wanted. But between each, he had to be a Victim. If he successfully killed his Hunter, he could stop, or sign up for another murder. At the end of ten years, an estimated third of the world's civilized population had applied for at least one murder. The nurnber slid to a fourth, and stayed there. Philosophers shook their heads, but the practical men were satisfied. War was where it belonged -- in the hands of the individual. Of course, there were ramifications to the game, and elaborations. Once its existence had been accepted it became big business. There were services for Victim and Hunter alike. The Emotional Catharsis Board picked the Victims' names at random. A Hunter was allowed six months in which to make his kill. This had to be done by his own ingenuity, unaided. He was given the name of his Victim, address and descriptioi, and allowed to use a standard caliber pistol. He could wear no armor of any sort. The Victim was notified a week before the Hunter. He was told only that he was a Victim. He did not know the name of his Hunter. He was allowed his choice of armor, however. He could hire spotters. A spotter couldn't kill; only Victim and Hunter could do that. But he could detect a stranger in town, or ferret out a nervous gunman. The Victim could arrange any kind of ambush in his power to kill the Hunter. There were stiff penalties for man, for no other murder was death. The beauty of the system was that the people who. wanted to kill could do so. Those who didn't -- the bulk of the population -- didn't have to. At least, there weren't any more big wars. Not even the imminence of one. Just hundreds of thousands of small ones. man; but she had signed up. It wasn't his fault. And he wasn't going to lose out on his seventh hunt. He spent the rest of the morning memorizing the data on his Victim, then filed the letter. Janet Patzig lived in New York. That was good. He enjoyed hunting in a big city, and he had always wanted to see New York. Her age wasn't given, but to judge from her photographs, she was in her early twenties. Frelaine phoned forjet reservations to New York, then took a shower. He dressed with care in a new Protec-Suit Special made for the occasion. From his collection he selected a gun, cleaned and oiled it, and fitted it into the fling-out pocket of the suit. Then he packed his suitcase. A pulse of excitement was pounding in his veins. Strange, a new excitement. It was something you just didn't tire of, the way you did of French pastry or women or drinking or anything else. It was always new and different. Finally, he looked over his books to see which he would take. His library contained all the good books on the subject. He wouldn't need any of his Victim books, like L. Fred Tracy's Tactics for the Victim, with its insistence on a rigidly controlled environment, or Dr. Frisch's Don't Think Like a Victim! He would be very interested in those in a few months, when he was a Victim again. Now he wanted hunting books. Tactics for Hunting Humans was the standard and definitive work, but he had it almost memorized. Development of the Ambush was not adapted to his present needs. He chose Hunting in Cities, by Mitwell and Clark, Spotting the Spotter, by Algreen, and The Victim's Ingroup, by the same author. Everything was in order. He left a note for the milkman, locked his apartment and took a cab to the airport. TN New York, he checked into a hotel in the midtown area, not too far from his Victim's address. The clerks were smiling and attentive, which bothered Frelaine. He didn't like to be recognized so easily as an outof-town killer. The first thing he saw in his room was a pamphlet on his bedtable. How to Get the Most out of your Emotional Catharsis, it was called, with the compliments of the management. Frelaine smiled and thumbed through it. Since it was his first visit to New York, Frelaine spent the afternoon just walking the streets in his Victim's neighborhood. After that, he wandered through a few stores. Martinson and Black was a fascinating place. He went through their HunterHunted room. There were lightweight bulletproof vests for Victims, and Richard Arlington hats, with bulletproof crowns. On one side was a large display of a new .# caliber sidearm. "Use the Malvern Strait-shot!" proved. Carries a load of twelve shots. Tested deviation less than .#I inch per # feet. Don't miss your Victim! Don't risk your life without the best! Be safe with Malvern!" Frelaine smiled. The ad was good, and the small black weapon looked ultimately efficient. But he was satisfied with the one he had. There was a special sale on trick canes, with concealed fourshot magazine, promising safety and concealment. As a young man, Frelaine had gone in heavily for novelties. But now he knew that the old-fashioned ways were usually the best. Outside the store, four men from the Department of Sanitation were carting away a freshly killed corpse. Frelaine regretted missing the kill. He ate dinner in a' good restaurant and went to bed early. Tomorrow he had a lot to do. The next day, with the face of his Victim b.efore him, Frelaine walked through her neighborhood. He didn't look closely at anyone. Instead, he moved rapidly, as though he were really going somewhere, the way an old Hunter should walk. He passed several bars and dropped into one for a drink. Then he went on, down a side street off Lexington Avenue. There was a pleasant sidewalk cafe there. Frelaine walked past it. And there she was! He could never mistake the face. It was Janet Patzig, seated at a table, staring into a drink. She didn't look up as he passed. of the block. He turned the corner and stopped, hands trembling. Was the girl crazy, exposing herself in the open? Did she think she had a charmed life? He hailed a taxi and had the man drive around the block. Sure enough, she was just sitting there. Frelaine took a careful look. She seemed younger than her pictures, but he couldn't be sure. He would guess her to be not much over twenty. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and combed above her ears, giving her a nunlike appearance. Her expression, as far as Frelaine could tell, was one of resigned sadness. Wasn't she even going to make an attempt to defend herself? Frelaine paid the driver and hurried to a drugstore. Finding a vacant telephone booth, he "Are you sure that a Victim named Janet-Marie Patzig has been notified?" "Hold on, sir." Frelaine tapped on the door while the clerk looked up the information. "Yes, sir. We have her personal confirmation. Is there anything wrong, sir?" "No," Frelaine said. "Just wanted to check." After, all, it was no one's business if the girl didn't want to defend herself. He was still entitled to kill her. It was his turn. He postponed it for that day, however, and went to a movie. After dinner, he returned to his phlet. Then he lay on his bed and glared at the ceiling. All he had to do was pump a bullet into her. Just ride by in a cab and kill her. She was being a very bad sport about it, he decided resentfully, and went to sleep. THE next afternoon, Frelaine walked by the cafe again. The girl was back, sitting at the same table. Frelaine caught a cab. "Drive around the block very slowly?" he told the driver. "Sure," the driver said, grinning with sardonic wisdom. From the cab, Frelaine watched for spotters. As far as he could tell, the girl had none. Both her hands were in sight upon the table. An easy, stationary target. Frelaine touched the button of his double-breasted jacket. A fold flew open and the gun was in his hand. He broke it open and checked the cartridges, then closed it with a snap. "Slowly, now," he told the driver. The taxi crawled by the cafe. Frelaine took careful aim, centering the girl in his sights. His finger tightened, on the trigger. "Damn it!" he said. A waiter had passed by the girl. He didn't want to chance winging someone else. "Around the block again," he told the driver. The man gave him another grin and hunched down in his seat. Frelaine wondered if the driver would feel so happy if he ' knew that Frelaine was gunning for a woman. This time there was no waiter around. The girl was lighting a cigarette, her mournful face intent on her lighter. Frelaine centered her in his sights, squarely above the eyes, and held hs breath. Then he shook his head and put the gun back in his pocket. The idiotic girl was robbing him of the full benefit of his catharsis. He paid the driver and started to walk. It's too easy, he told himself. He was used to a real chase. Most of the other six kills had been quite difficult. The Victims had tried every dodge. One had hired at least, a dozen spotters. But Frelaine had gotten to them all by altering his tactics to meet the situation. Once he had dressed as a milkman, another time as a bill collector. The sixth Victim he had had to chase trough the Sierra Nevadas. The man had clipped him, too. But Frelaine had done better than that. How could he be proud of this one? What would the Tens Club say? That brought Frelaine up with a start. He wanted to get into the club. Even if he passed up this girl, he would have to defend himself against a Hunter. Surviving that, he would still be four hunts away from membership. Atthat rate, he might never get in. again, then, on impulse, stopped abruptly. "Hello," he said.   Janet Patzig looked at him out of sad blue eyes, but said nothing. "Say, look," he said, sitting down. "If I'm being fresh, just tell me and I'll go. I'm an out-oftowner. Here on a convention. And I'd just like someone feminine to talk to. If you'd rather I didn't -- " "I don't care," Janet Patzig said tonelessly. "A brandy," Frelaine told the waiter. Janet Patzig's glass was still half full. Frelaine looked at the girl and he could feel his heart throbbing against his ribs. This was more like it -- having a drink with your Victim! "My name's Stanton Frelaine," he said, knowing it didn't matter. "Janet." "Janet what?" "Janet Patzig." "Nice to know you," Frelaine said, in a perfectly natural voice. "Are you doing anything tonight, Janet?" "I'm probably being killed tonight," she said quietly. Frelaine looked at her carefully. Did she realize who he was? For all he knew, she had a gun leveled at him under the table. He kept his hand close to the fling-out button. "Are you a Victim?" he asked. "You guessed it," she said sardonically. "If I were you, I'd stay out of the way. No sense getting hit by mistake." Frelaine couldn't understand the girl's calm. Was she a suicide? Perhaps she just didn't care. Perhaps she wanted to die. "Haven't you got any spotters?" he asked, with the right expression of amazement. "No." She looked at him, full in the face, and Frelaine saw something he hadn't noticed before. She was very lovely. "I am a bad, bad girl," she said lightly. "I got the idea I'd like to commit a murder, so I do it." sympathizing with her. "But I'm still in, of course. Even if I didn't shoot, I still have to be a Victim." "But why don't you hire some spotters?" he asked. "I couldn't kill anyone," she said. "I just couldn't. I don't even have a gun." "You've got a lot of courage," Frelaine said, "coming out in the open this way." Secretly, he was amazed at her stupidity. "What can I do?" she asked listlessly. "You can't hide from a Hunter. Not a real one. And I don't have enough money to make a real disappearance." "Since it's in your own defense, I should think -- " Frelaine began, but she interrupted. "No. I've made up my mind on that. This whole thing is wrong, the whole system. When I had my Victim in the sights -- when I saw how easily I could -- I could -- " She pulled herself together quickly. "Oh, let's forget it," she said, and smiled. Frelaine found her smile dazzling. After that, they talked of other things. Frelaine told her of his business, and she told him about New York. She was twentytwo, an unsuccessful actress. They had supper together. When she accepted Frelaine's invitation to go to the Gladiatorials, he felt absurdly elated. He called a cab -- he seemed to be spending his entire time in New York in cabs -- and opened the door for her. She started in. Frelaine hesitated. He could have pumped a shot into her at that moment. It would have been very easy. But he held his hand. Just for the moment, he told himself. TnHE Gladiatorials were about the same as those held anywhere else, except that the talent was a little better. There were the usual historical events, swordsmen and netmen, duels with saber and foil. Most of these, naturally, were fought to the death. Then bull fighting, lion fighting and rhino fighting, followed by the more modern events. Fights from behind barricades with bow and arrow. Dueling on a high wire. The evening passed pleasantly. Frelaine escorted the girl home, the palms of his hands sticky with sweat. He had never found a woman he liked better. And yet she was his legitimate kill. He didn't know what he was going to do. She invited him in and they sat together on the couch. The girl lighted a cigarette for herself with a large lighter, then settled back. "Are you leaving soon?" she asked him. "I suppose so," Frelaine said. "The convention is only lasting another day." She was silent for a moment. "I'll be sorifr to see you go. Send roses to my funeral." They were quiet for a while. Then Janet went to fix him a drink. Frelaine eyed her retreating back. Now was the time. He placed his hand near the button. But the moment had passed for him, irrevocably. He wasn't going to kill her. You don't kill the girl you love. The realization that he loved her was shocking. He'd come to kill, not to find a wife. She came back with the drink and sat down opposite him, staring at emptiness. "Janet," he said. "I love you." She sat, just looking at him. There were tears in her eyes. "You can't," she protested "I'm a Victim. I won't live long enough to -- " "You won't be killed. I'm your Hunter." She stared at him a moment, then laughed uncertainly. "Are you going to kill me?" she asked. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "I'm going to marry you." Suddenly she was in his arms. "Oh, Lord!" she gasped. "The waiting -- I've been so frightened -- " "It's all over," he told her. "Think what a story it'll make for our kids. How I came to murder you and left marrying you." She kissed him, then sat back and lighted another cigarette. "Let's start packing," Frelaine said. "I want -- " "Wait," Janet interrupted. "You haven't asked if I love you." "What?" She was still smiling, and the cigarette lighter was pointed at him. In the bottom of it was a black hole. A hole just large enough for a .# caliber bullet. "Don't kid arpund," he objected, getting to his feet. "I'm not being funny, darling," she said. TN a fraction of a second, Frelaine had time to wonder how he could ever have thought she was not much over twenty. Looking at her now -- really looking at her -- he knew she couldn't be much less than thirty. Every minute of her strained, tense existence showed on her face. "I don't love you, Stanton," she said very softly, the cigarette lighter poised. Frelaine struggled for breath. One part of him was able to realize detachedly what a marvelous actress she really was. She must have known all along. Frelaine pushed the button, and the gun was in his hand, cocked and ready. The blow that struck him in the chest knocked him over a coffee table. The gun fell out of his hand. Gasping, halfconscious, he watched her take careful aim for the coup de race. "Now I can join the Tens," he heard her say elatedly as she squeezed the trigger. Leading next month's issue is an enchanting -- iteray enchanting -- noveling" change meaning through misuse, let's keep in mind that it does not mean "darling" or "stunning" or any other Hollywoodism. The story is verbal, emotional and scientific witchery that will drag you into the action almost bodily... wherever you may be! and challenges you to find your way off it again. Fuel isn't the problem, or wrecked equipment, or lack of complete and explicit directions. No, it's something else -- junkyards just don't like to give up the things they accumulate. Both these stories are long and strong and loaded with adrenalin, so there may not be room for another novelet. On the other hand, there may. We'll see how the isue makes up and cram in, as usual, all the material it can hold. You can count on a full complement of short stories heavily armed with bright ideas, sharply drawn situations and ingenious solutions... plus our regular features (the editorial, for example, is guaranteed to produce both M ost ideas which finally took the shape of an invention have a long and usually complicated history. Talk about the submarine and you can, without straining, find dozens of examples of early thinking or dreaming about underwater travel. The amount of early material on flying is almost overwhelming. Even such a relatively simple machine as the typewriter can l)oast a lot of background -- I remember the amazement with which I read a publication of the Society of German Engineers for which a diligent researcher had collected dozens of centuryuld typewriters. Not just reports, but pictures of them and even a number of originals. Moreover, he had covered only the Germanspeaking countries of Europe. Small wonder that nobody ever succeeded in writing a complete and reliable History of All Inventions, although there are at least a dozen books which bear some such title. However, there are exceptions. The "idea" of photography, prior to the first picture actually taken, seems to have been only a few years old. As for earlier prophecy, there is just one old French science fiction novel in which something resembling photography was forecast. Another exception is the X-ray. It did not have any earlier "history" at all. Dr. Konrad Rontgen discovered X-rays almost accidentally, immediately realized their value for surgery -- especially military and industrial surgery -- and that was that. Later, some German doctor discovered an older book, dating back about a quarter-century prior to the actual discovery, in which the author writing under the heading of Medical Fairy Tales had said, "We'll make the patient as transparent as a jelly-fish," and this was duly noted as the only "prediction" of the X-ray. tion is such an exception, too. While the idea of space travel has a two-thousand-year history, the idea of the space station has virtually none. It appeared for the first time in # in Kurd Lasswitz' famous novel On T wo Planets, and it was introduced as a technological concept in # in Prof. Herman Oberth's first scientific work on space travel by means of liquid fuel rockets. There is nothing between these two dates which may be said to have contributed to the concept. True, old Herman Ganswindt told me that he had thought of space stations around #, when he toyed with the idea of reaction-propelled ships. Even if he remembered his youthful ideas correctly after so many years, he had not influenced anybody. At any event, he could not show me any documentation to prove he had mentioned the idea in public. Nor can I bring myself to consider a certain French science fic( tion novel -- now half a century old -- as a contribution to tK idea, even though the theme consisted in putting something in an orbit around the Earth a few thousand miles away. This novel, Selena Cie, was based upon the notion that people could save money ordinarily spent for the illumination of cities and roads if only the Moon were not # miles away, but circled the Earth at an altitude of # or # miles. (That it would spend a lot of time in the Earth's shadow when at such a short distance, which would eliminate it as a source of illumination, was nowhere mentioned.) The story relates that a mountain of pure iron is discovered in French Equatorial Africa which, wound with cables, makes an enormous and powerful magnet. Why this should pull the Moon closer is incomprehensible, but in the story it did. The outcome was less than satisfactory -- the Moon wins and pulls the iron mountain clean out of the African soil. The concept of the space station thus originated in just two places: first in a novel and then in a scientific book. It has to be mentioned, however, that Kurd Lasswitz, the author of the novel, was a scientist himself, specifically an astronomer and professor of mathematics. The space station he thought up for his novel is so unique that it has never been imitated by any other writer, simply because it would have been such an obvious imitation. When Lasswitz wrote the book (during the years #-#), it was more or less generally accepted in astronomical circles that the planet Mars is inhabited by intelligent beings. Other theoretical reasoning had it that the planets were the older the farther they were from the Sun. Mars, as an older planet, had provided the proper conditions for the origin of life at an earlier date, so intelligent life had also appeared much earlier than here. Hence the intelligent Martians should be far ahead of us in every respect. conclusion that, if space travel were possible at all, the Martians would come to us long before we could go to them. In order to explain the delay (for they might just as well have arrived during the reign of Nabopolassar of Babylon or of Augustus Caesar), Lasswitz made the problem of space travel appear much more difficult than it actually is. And he made the solution of the problem such that it could not be solved on Earth. On Mars, he postulated, there is a substance which happens to be transparent as glass, but which has the far more important proprrty that it can also be made "transparent" to gravity. Lasswitz got around a few important theoretical difficulties by saying that the energy of gravity did not appear as gravity in treated material, but "in other forms of energy." He also was careful to point out that just as glass cannot be made completely transparent to light, this substance could not be made completely transparent to gravity, but only to a point where the still remaining weight did not matter any more. And finally he made it clear that the substance retained its inertia. A takeoff from the planet, under these conditions, would then proceed as follows: The ship, spherical in shape for structural reasons, would be made virtually gravity-free. Instead of following its planet around the Sun, it would continue in a straight line, a tangent to the orbit. After waiting long enough, the planet would have receded far enough so that its gravitational field hardly influenced the ship, even if susceptibility to gravity were restored. But the Sun would then influence the ship and, by diligent and precalculated maneuvering in the gravitational fields, the ship could go from one planet to another, in a tedious and dangerous voyage. (You can see where H. G. Wells got his idea for cavorite for his story The First Men in the Moon.) But then reaction propulsion is added to the ships and the safety of trips and the duration are improved enormously. Still, a takeoff has to be made from the poles of the planet, where there is no rotation to interfere. It is still better not to take off from the surface at all, but from a space station. For Earth, this is an absolute necessity because the marvelous substance of the Martians happens to deteriorate in the presence of water vapor. Hence the Martians first equip their planet and then the Earth with two space stations each, placed vertically over the poles; in each case, one planet-radius from the surface. Travelers come from a polar installation on the ground to the space stations by way of a specialized conveyance built for just this purpose, and then transfer to the true spaceships. In appearance, the space stations resemble the planet Saturn sliced in half in the plane of its rings. There is a hemispherical main dome which has eight cutouts for the ships to berth in, with ring-shaped galleries around. The whole can be rotated around its vertical axis so that the station can be turned in such a manner that no part of its structure f will interfere with a departing or an incoming ship. Of course, nothing that is not made of this substance from Mars could be made to stay in place without moving over one of the poles. But aside from this, you might have noticed the first appearance of a number of very "modern" ideas; for example, the need for a specialized vehicle, capable of penetrating the atmosphere, for the trip from the ground to the station, while the spaceships proper never enter an atmosphere and are, in fact, incapable of doing it. IOW for the appearance of the " space station concept in science. As has been mentioned, the idea was introduced by Professor Hermann Oberth in # in the first edition of his book Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen ("A Rocket into Interplanetary Space"). Even there it cropped up very much as an afterthought, on pages #-#, which are the last pages of the last chapter. In that last chapter, Prof. Oberth, after having investigated mathematically the characteristics of liquid fuel rockets and discussed possible design features, spoke about likely applications of large-size liquid, fuel rockets. He had only two in mind at the time, one a high altitude research rocket -- virtually what we now actually have with the rocket Aerobee -- and one a man-carrying rocket ship for flights into space in the vicinity of Earth. Then he threw out a few estimates to indicate the general order of size which such rockets would have. He estimated, for example, that a rocket ship for flights up to about # miles with a pilot only would have a takeoff weight of # metric tons and that the rocket ship built for two men would need a takeoff weight of at least # metric tons. After that he started a new paragraph, writing (I am now translating from the original book) : "If we force such largesize rockets to circle the Earth, the rocket will behave like a small mOon. Such rockets do not even have to be designed for landing. Contact between them and the Earth can be maintained by means of smaller rockets so that the large ones (let's call them observing stations) can be rebuilt in the orbit the better to suit their real purpose. If the continuing state of apparent weightlessness should have undesirable consequences, which, however, I doubt, one could connect two such rockets by wire ropes a few kilometers long and make them rotate around each other." Here you have the whole concept in a few sentences : The rocket which stays in space and which is gradually changed II round to such an extent that it cannot even land, anymore; the smaller transport rockets; the idea of substituting centrifugal iicceleration for gravity, if needed. Then he went on to outline a few possible uses: "With their powerful instruments, they would be able to see fine detail on Earth and could communicate by means of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Remember that this was written about #, when radio was very much in its infancy. -- W.L.  This might be useful for communication with places on the ground which have no cable connections and which cannot be reached by electric waves. Since, they, provided the sky is clear, could see a candle at night and the reflection from a hand mirror by day, provided only that they know where and when to look, they could maintain communications between expeditions and their homeland, colonies and their motherland, ships at sea, etc... "The strategic value is obvious especially in the case of war in areas of low population density; they might either belong to one of the two countries at war or sell their services at high rates to one of the combatants... The station at this point the term "station" is used for the first time would notice every iceberg and warn ships... the catastrophe of the Titanic in # would have been avoided by such means." A ND then Oberth added another completely new idea which had not been voiced before anywhere. "All this," he wrote, "amounts to. practical advantages. But an even greater advantage could be gained in the following manner: one could spread a large circular wire net simply by rotating it around its center. Small plane metal mirrors could be fitted into the spaces between the wires and their position relative to the wire net could be controlled electrically from the station. The mirror as a whole should rotate around the Earth in a plane which forms a right angle with the plane of the Earth's orbit. The wire net would be inclined to the direction of the Sun's rays by #. By proper adjustment of the positions of the single facets, one could' either concentrate the reflected sunlight on specific points of the ground or could diffuse it over large areas, or, if not needed, make the whole beam miss the Earth. If, for example, the mirror is # kilometers (# miles) distant, the image of the Sun from each facet would have a diameter of # kilometers; if they are made  to coincide, the energy would be concentrated in an area of # square kilometers. Since the mirror can have any size desired, it could have colossal effects. It would be possible, for example, to keep the shipping lane to Spitsbergen and the North Siberian ports ice-free by such concentrated sunlight. If the diameter of the mirror is # kilometers, it could make large areas in the North habitable by means of diffused sunlight. In the middle latitudes, it could prevent sudden drops in temperature in Spring and Fall and save the fruit and vegetable crops of whole countries. It is especially important that the mirror is not stationary over any one point of Earth and is therefore capable of rendering all these services..." After a discussion .of the most suitable material for the mirror (Oberth believed sodium metal would be best), and the estimated costs (far too low), he continued: "The observing station could also be a refueling station. If the hydrogen and oxygeq the fuels Oberth had in mind are shielded against solar radiation, they'll keep for any length of time in the solid state. A rocket which is refueled at the station is no longer hampered by air resistance and not much by the Earth's gravitation... Furthermore, it no longer needs a high velocity of its own. In the first place, the potential of the Earth is lower at the distance of the station. In the second place, the rocket only needs to make up the difference between the required final velocity and the velocity of the station which is, in round figures, six kilometers per second. If we now connect a large sphere of sodium metal which was assembled and filled with fuel in the station's orbit with a small solidly constructed rocket which pushes the "fuel sphere" ahead and draws its fuel from the sphere, we get a highly efficient apparatus which should be capable of flying to other planets." Oberth's first book stopped at that point. Then the concept of the station in space was adopted by others who added their own ideas. How the evolution of the space station progressed will be discussed here next month. I know of binaries and I know that there are triple systems of stars, two stars moving around each other and one of them a binary itself. Are there systems of more stars than three and, if so, are they stable? Gloria Quinn # Miller St. city missing') If you had mentioned your city, you would have had your anHwer weeks ago. The answer is yes. One of the, examples which are easily found in the sky is the star Zeta JJrsae Majoris, the middle star in the "handle" of the Big Dipper. It is, as you can easily see, a naked-eye binary. The Arabic name of the brighter star is Misar and that of the faint companion is Alkor; the latter word is said to mean "litllerschel who found that the larger of this pair was a binary, the two components of which are now known to swing around one another with a period of # years. Later it was found that the fainter star is a binary too, with a period of only four (lays. And the smaller binary moves around the common center of gravity with the bigger one in sixty years. The most amazing collection of multiples of binaries can be found in the (Constellation which the ancients called Gemini, the Twins, because of the two bright stars Castor and Pollux. Both are not merely binaries hut multiple systems. Seen with the naked eye. Castor looks like a single bright star but even a comparatively small telescope shows that it is a binary, the two components about # times farther away from each other than the earth is from the sun. Then it turned out that each one of these two white stars is a binary itself and a faint reddish star, not far away, was found to be a binary, too. So Castor consists of two white twins, with periods of three and nine days, respectively. The two pairs swing around their common center of gravity in # years. The faint red star, is, as mentioned, a twin too, with a period of about # hours. And the red twdns move slowly around the system of the two bright twins. They haven't been under observation long enough to establish their period but it must be many thousands of years. -- As to your second (uestion: to the best of our knowledge these systems are stable.  recently read in a local paper that a German clergyman had found a city in the sea off the German coast. He is said to have expressed his belief that he has found Plato's Atlantis. 'Do you have any opinion about this? Name withheld) Lansing, Mintu I haven't read this report even though I receive several German scientific periodicals. But I am quite certain that the sunken city which the German clergyman found is not Plato's Atlantis -- a remark which may have been added by the newspaperman who wrote the story. The mention of Atlantis, no matter who made it, is probably just a hangover from those days when every sunken city, or suspicion of a sunken city, w'as linked with the Platonic dialogues. It can he considered pretty well established by now that the "model" for Plato's Atlantis was the city of Tartessos, the Biblical Tarshish, in western Spain; the same city which served as the model for Homer's Scheria in the Odyssey, On the other hand I feel reasonably sure that the German clergyman found something. Along the northern coast of Germany there are a number of remains of what looks like old roads which seem to lead straight into the sea. And there are also quite a number of local legends of remains of old cities and towns at the bottom of the sea, but generally close enough to present day land so that the land is still clearly in sight from the alleged locations of the old cities. The legends have a tendency to exaggerate, but most of them seem to be founded on some fact. Often these former cities -- or better, townships -- are generally referred to as "vinetas," which is supposed to be the name of the most famous of them. Detail is awfully hard to ascertain. It seems that about a thousand years ago a number of old townships were abandoned because they had been established too close to the shore line. It is even possible that the sea level rose somewhat as a late result of the melting of Ice Age glaciers. At any event the finding of a sunken settlement off the German coast is not at all unlikely. I may add a few words about the "city" of Vineta, the supposed name of which is sometimes used as a generic name...The former existence of that city is historically well-established ; it existed during the tenth and eleventh centuries and had been built by a Slavonic people, the Venden or Wenden. But the original name of the'city was Jumne, the version Vineta originated by way of Latinization on the part of later chroniclers. They first doubted its former existence, and historians were agreed that the sea finally conquered merely an abandoned city destroyed by war, there was no agreemerit about where it originally Htood. It was known that its inhabitants could reach it from the hinterland by travelling downstream on the Oder River, hut that still left a comparatively large area where it could have been. Only a quarter century ago did historians succeed in finding a place which was in full agreement with all the sources. It happened to be quite near a small seashore resort which later became famous. Name of Peenemiinde. If there is a layer of hydrogen in the upper atmosphere, is there not danger that one day a rocket will he fired high enough to enter and explode this hydrogen layer? Raymond Wilkes Box # Greenfield, Missouri The answer to that one is "no" and this answer can be backed up with a number of good reasons. In the first place the idea that there is a layer of pure hydrogen in the upper atmosphere (proposed originally by Svante Arrhenius) has been dropped. In the second place even if there were sueh a layer it would be enormously attenuated and should properly be called "a vacuum with occasional hydrogen atoms in it." But even if there were a layer of pure hydrogen (which there isn't) and even if it had a density comparable to that at sea level (which is impossible) it would still not be ignited by a rocket's exhaust blast. Igniting hydrogen means to start combustion which requires oxygen. Without oxygen the hydrogen could not explode and in a pure hydrogen layer there would, of course, he no oxygen. Finally, if there were such a layer and if enough oxygen were present too, the whole would have heen of years ago. When the distance from one planet to another is mentioned, do they measure from the center of one to center of the other or do they start measuring from the edge? Loren Shaw # S.E. Division Portland #, Oregon All astronomical distances are center-to-center distances, not surface-to-surface distances. This is a fundamental rule but most of the time it would not matter much if surface-to-surface distance were used by somebody by mistake. In the case of Earth and Moon, the difference between center-tocenter distance and surface-tosurface distance is just about # miles. But the center-tocenter distance varies itself. from a minimum of # miles to a maximum of # miles. In the case of Mars and Earth the difference becomes negligihle, the difference between surface-to-surface and center-to-center distances is on the order of # miles while the closest possible distance is How does the H-bomb work? Frank Goodwyn, Jr. # Lorain Avenue Silver Spring, Md. This question is a somewhat large order, --  -- not even counting the fact that the classifications which are probably stamped on each and every document pertaining to the H-homb are terrifying themselves. But since this question will probably come in from numerous readers I'll try to answer it to the best of my ability. Let's begin with the "old fashioned" A-bomb. This is a "fission bomb," which means that the atoms of uranium-# or of plutonium break apart, into two pieces of about equal mass, releasing energy in the process. The H-bomb is known to be a "fusion bomb" in which hydrogen atoms are fused together into heavier atoms, presumably helium, a process which also releases energy. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the process which keeps the sun and most of the other stars visible in the sky going. In our sun the process takes place in six successive stages which fuse four hydrogen atoms into one helium atom ; a carbon atom is involved in this process which has been  called the Solar Phoenix Reaction because that hydrogen atom which initiates the first step re-appears unchanged at the end of the sixth step so that it can start all over again. The fusion process in the H-bomb is in all probability quite different from the Solar Phoenix Reaction. But it has to be mentioned first that there are three kinds of hydrogen atoms, of three different weights and the rarer the heavier they are. The first is ordinary hydrogen, the second, of double the weight, is "heavy hydrogen" or Deuterium. The third, of thrice the weight of ordinary hydrogen is called Tritium. Ordinarily two "deuterons" would not fuse into one helium atom and no "triton" would consider fusing with a "proton," the nucleus of the ordinary hydrogen atom. The nuclei, having like electric charges, would repel one another if they came too close. Only if they move very fast can the energy of movement overcome the repulsion. It is easy lo make small material particles move fast, all one has to do is to apply heat and thermal motion "will he the result. All this is not precisely new knowledge, the main difficulty was to find a sufficiently intensive heat source so that the thermal motion would he violent enough to do what it was supposed to do. But the heat required was such that even an electric arc was icy cold by comparison. Not even the surface of our sun is hot enough for this purpose, one had to go into stellar interiors to find places with the requisite number of degrees of temperature. Until the A-bomh came along. The A-bomb does produce enough heat, even if only for a fraction of a second. It is for this reason that it has been said that the A-homb is the "fuze" or "starter" for the H-bomb. The hydrogen in the H-bomb is probably not ordinary hydrogen; it would be asking too much to expect four atoms to have a head-on collision at precisely the right instant. But one can expect two deuterons to collide, or a triton to collide with a proton. Presumably, then, the hydrogen part of the H-bomb is a mixture of all three isotopes of hydrogen. Obviously there must be an optimum mixture. Obviously this optimum mixture is Top-Top Secret, for good and sufficient reasons. Ail this, of course, is valid only with the proviso that the H-bomb is actually based on the reasoning given. Science has become so complex and confusing, even to scientists, that there must be some question you'd like Willy Ley to explain clearly, authoritatively and in everyday English. As you can see for yourself, he's an expert on clorification. reason to be ashamed to ask any question in his field. All we request is that you hold your questions down to one or two at a time (you can always send in more, later) and type or print legibly. Please add your name and address -- we'll withhold them if you want us to -- because there isn't room to answer all queries in the magazine and every one of the others is answered by mail. Now... what was it you wanted to know? University The greats of Earth's scientists, they had dozens of excellent reasons for going into space... but they didn't know the real one! Put six small drunken ants in a twenty-gallon oil drum and heave it into space somewhere between Earth and Mars -- started over again. The space concept wasn't to scale, anyway. Six bacteria in a seed-spore might be nearer the mark. I had to convey space, time and place in a fashion that the lay public could grasp when and if we boomeranged home. It was difficult -- impossible, perhaps -- and not made easier by the noise. M'Bassi had improvised a bongo drum from an upturned wastebasket and Brocuzynski was trying to scramble onto the desk to do a step-dance. Yet I didn't wish to seek silence in my cabin. The ship was too vast, the company too small. Being alone made you feel that the alien dark might creep in behind you, reach out with tentacular fingers -- I wanted to join Lao in his old game of "show-fingers-guesssum-guess-wrong-drink another" which can be conveyed in precisely two Chinese characters and is perhaps the most ancient of all drinking games. But I stayed at the transcriber trying to think back, getting memories lined up to explain just why, in this instant of mankind's greatest adventure, it was necessary for these pioneers to be as soaked in alcohol as a sextet of brandied peaches. Necessary? Of course. Sam had given the instructions and impressioning long ago -- That phrase seeped up from my subconscious. It seemed to mean something, but when I tried to pin it down for analysis, its sense-structure disappeared like a pellet of frozen CO# in a hot hand. It left me with a feeling of estrangement from the others, the seventh ant in the oil drum -- the odd ant out. That's how I'd felt earlier when these six had been at each others' throats instead of around each others' necks. Six babies. Six damned, squalling selfish babies. Six bouncing, babbling, but far from bonny babies. Five months ago, on Mars, they had been responsible, well-integrated men, the pick of the nations, esteemed beyond the borders of their own countries. The trouble started a "month" after the Boomerang's strange drive Iiad reduced a whole hemisphere of that dead planet to glassy aridity and flicked us out of the Solar System. Aventos and Brodcuzynski. Chessmen were scattered over the messroom floor. When I told them to quit behaving like kids, Aventos turned his sneer on me. "Listen to All-Nations Boy! Get back to your diary, sonny. Sold it in advance, haven't you? The only one who's making money out of this crazy trip. That is, if we ever do return." I went back to my desk. I tried never to argue, only to pacify. It became increasingly difficult to sting any of them into the realization that they were mature men of science, not fretful schoolkids on a too-long picnic jaunt. We couldn't stay alone in our cabins and we couldn't stay together in the messroom. That's what it came to. And we couldn't wander alone in the empty, echoing gangways and corridors of the ipile-long ship. That was the quickest way to go psychptic. Borg sparked the next eruption. The mystery outside had touched some vein of poetry in his Scandinavian soul. He stood by the vision screen one "day" and started quoting aloud. Very loud -- clear and ringing. It may have been his own stuff or a translation of one of the Sagas: "The sea-devils thunder and mock our ears With cries of women and blinded children; But we must keep our eyes on the prow Where stands Erik the Hairless One Defying the sea-mountains. Our lips are sealed with ice -- " Braithewaite let out a howl like a factory hooter: "Shut up you damned Dane! I'm trying to read!" "Then go to your cabin. You don't appreciate good poetry, you clod of a Yorkshireman." I managed to grab Braithewaite before he made a suicidal nish at the Borg, who was big and strong enough to club him to death with a single fist. M'Bassi managed to keep out of quarrels, but his genial face turned to immobile ebcwiy and reduced his normally fluent conversation to the grunted basics of his original tongue. And disdain and cold withdrawal crept into the eyes of Lao T'Sun. Me? All-Nations Boy, they called me, in good-humor at first, then mockingly and with raw resentment. They were all degreed men. I was a mere publicist, appointed official chronicler by fortuitous virtue of thoroughly mixed racial descent, abrogation of all nationality allegiances and world-citizen status. When instability affected these most stable of men, I became unofficial arbiter. Not a leader. There could be no leaders on this trip. T he ship was semi-automatic, crewless, photonically set to snap into normal space within planetary observation distance of a sun, and then return. A captain, despite all possible screening, might be partisan. He might attempt to land if a suitable planet were seen and claim it -- and the Boomerang -- for his own nation, with accidents arranged for those of the crew who protested. So there was no crew. The Boomerang couldn't have been built by any single nation. It taxed the resources of the entire Earth. And the federal Earth government had made sure it would return as a federal ship -- if it returned. The Ituninous dust that now ringed the Earth to mark the orbit of the vanished Moon was a reminder that no single nation could ever again be allowed to make an extraterrestrial conquest. Federal government, imposed and maintained by mutual fear of a war that might reduce Earth itself to the same dust, hadn't diminished nationalistic rivalries in all spheres. Healthy economic and cultural competition remained, but under extremely tight control. Now, if never before, I could see why. We're still children. Proof enough of that in the squabbles after the Boomerang had been built, when the "proportional representation" howl went up. It was howled down, and the decision was made that basic racial groupings and not states should be represented, on a geopolitical basis. Yet these six under the strain of flight had become a microcosm of the still-divided world. But they were powerless to do more than quarrel. We were still under the aegis of the government which set and sealed us aboard this fabulous craft to go, observe, return and report. Our destiny was still in the hands of men back in the Solar System, as surely as though those hands were propelling us. Perhaps it was that knowledge of complete helplessness that was partly responsible for the psychological crackup. These men were theoreticians. None could assume control of the vessel. Only two -- Aventos and Lao -- had a full mathematical grasp of the spacestrain theory on which the propulsion unit was based. But neither would know what to do with a spanner if you put one in theii hands. Except crack each other over the head with it. That's what nearly happened. Middle-aged men might taunt, decry, jibe, revert to childishness in these circumstances, but I figured their whole conditioning would prevent actual personal violence. Then I had to hold Braithewaite back. And not long after that episode, Lao T'Sung, oldest and wisest among us, staggered against my desk and slumped near my feet. Brodcuzynski looked at his grazed knuckles. "I must be insane," he muttered. He seemed even more shocked than Lao, who sat up and rubbed a bruised chin. For a moment, I thought the cosmologist would burst into tears of remorse. Instead, he helped the sixty-year-old mathematician to his feet. "T'Sung, I could cut off my fist," he said awkwardly. "Something snapped in my head. How can I apologize -- " ' Lao T'Sung took both hands of the man who'd just struck him and said: "I'm more surprised than hurt. Better to forgive yourself, Brod, than need my forgiveness." And Brodcuzynski snatched his wrists away and shouted: "For God's sake, ' don't be magnanimous! Let me be sorry my own way!" was a lousy trick, Brod." "Don't I know it? Here, take a smack." He jutted out his unshaven; chin. "Go on, take a poke at me. But don't preach!" Lao made graceful, deprecatory motions with his slender yellowy hands. "Lao, you've said I had wisdom beyond my years. Isn't it time we applied everybody's wisdom to the present problem?" Lao looked at me. "I refer that to the man who's just demonstrated that problem. What's your opinion, Brod?" Brodcuzynski worriedly passed the buck to M'Bassi. "You're the psychologist. Why did I knock Lao down? What's got into us?" M'Bassi was determinedly engaging himself with a stereostrip projection of the World Games. He lifted his eyebrows. "You heard," I said. "Just ignoring what I can't control." He unrolled his lanky black length from a sit-easy. He was wearing only a pair of linen shorts. "I could happily knock all your silly heads together -- knowing that my own head needs an equally powerful jolt. My neural paths are cross-circuiting into a neurosis cycle. We're affected by something beyond our immediate understanding. Something beyond human experience. Out there." He nodded toward the dull jet of the vision screen. It was lifeless except for the bluewhite patch of the Galaxy we were both leaving and approaching -- and existing in. "Within our own solar system, our minds are safe. The distances ' and speeds involved in transit are directly comprehensible. But our present velocity and mode of propulsion are beyond either direct or intuitive conception. ' "In effect, we're in an alien universe. But our minds, trained to perceive and correlate, are instinctively trying to grasp the unknowable. That way, conflict is sown in the unconscious." "But men have made such journeys in the imagination," Lao protested, "and the imagination is a fvmction of the higher centers. Our friend Statlen -- " he waved at me -- "has a drawerful of photostats of ancient magazines in which the concept of interstellar travel is taken for granted." M'Bassi tried to smile. Once, Sam had a similar strained smile on his face, before he gave me the impressioning. The whole project was h'gliegn -- fun, playing with kids -- but I must forget that and behave like a child... Who was Sam? A fleeting mental picture, halfdream -- "Imagination," M'Bassi said, "can withdraw from the extrapolation of its own functioning. But our minds are experiencing the unknowable. We can't withdraw. Our destiny isn't in our own hands. And there lies another conflict. Part of our minds is back home, grasping the familiar referents... The other part is here." M'Bassi was sitting on the ledge in front of the vision screen. Brodcuzynski sat up there beside him, blocking the incredible scene. "The end result?" Brod asked. "Increasing xenophobia," M'Bassi said. "The unconscious is fighting to retain its integrity against the impwjssible demands of the higher centers." He took a cigarette from the pocket of his shorts. "Neurosis begins. Finally, unless the conflict is sublimated or resolved -- " He held up the cigarette, tensed his fingers. We watched the flimsy thing intently. It broke imder the strain. He tossed the halves to the messroom floor. T AO, after the silence, asked:  "Why isn't Statlen affected to the same extent as the rest of us?" "Young, resilient mind. And with all respect to our youthful friend, it's because his brain isn't highly trained in scientific method. The more you know, the more you know you don't know." I said: "Thanks. Are you suggesting they should have sent a bimch of morons? Anyway, how about Borg? He may act a little crazy, but he hasn't shown any homicidal tendencies. Let him alone and he'll spout poetry all day quite happily." "It's hard to believe you're all such innocents or so unobservant." M'Bassi grinned fleetingly. "Have you smelled Borg's breath? He carries it well, but he's been drunk for days. He's stultified his higher centers with alcohol." Borg Was gently snoring in a chair. "Why hasn't he mentioned it, shared it around?" M'Bassi shrugged. "We've hardly been on companionable terms lately. He may be ashamed of his secret tippling. And he may not have much of a hoard." "Would it work?" "Eventually it would have the same depressant effect as a barbiturate." Aventos said: "I disagree. Depends on the individual." "Wake Borg," I said. "I'd rather ride with a bunch of drunks than a homicidal gang of schizophrenics." Lao was startled. "My dear Statlen, have some respect for your elders. Do you propose to feed us alcohol as you'd feed a baby soothing syrup?" M'Bassi waved an expressive pink-palmed hand at the group. "Babies," he said. "I prescribe it. We must try something, and do it soon. The only alternative is narcotics from the first-aid, in large doses. If there's enough to go around, we'd become raging addicts." ."We don't know if there's enough alcohol," Braithewaite pointed out. "Borg couldn't have secreted much." I shook Borg's shoulders roughly. His head lolled over and he opened red-veined eyes. "Where is it? Where do. you keep your liquor?" He smiled feebly. "Wouldn't . you like to know, son? Go away." "How much have you got cached? We feel like a drink ourselves." He sat up and looked around blearily. "That's different. I figured you were all blue noses because I was the only one who brought any aboard.' I finished that way back, but I got plenty more. Plenty. More'n you could drink in a year of pub-crawling." Of course there was plenty. That was arranged by Sam long ago. No mass expedition, no moronic minds, but a few of th best -- with their higher centers temporarily dulled. B org weaved out of the door with drunken benevolent gestures to us to follow. I had the crazy idea he might possible, using ration fruit bars. Where? Practically any place away from our quarters. We weren't cramped for spage. The Boomerang was a rabbit-warren. It wouldn't have been overmanned with a crew of a few hundred, and there were only seven of us. The machinery installed to replace crew -- rob-mechs of fantastic omniscience, competence and cost -- occupied only fractional space. A full-scale distillery could have been set up somewhere in the miles of convoluted steel guts of the ship. She'd been started as a generationtogeneration vessel. An entire self-contained colonizing community was to have boarded her, with the hope that their great great great grandchildren would get to some star on straight atomic drive. That might have been better. Time and a common, recognized destiny would have welded them into racial and political homogeneity. But when the new drive was discovered, it was cheaper to install it in this vast, near-empty hull than build another. The drive disregarded mass, could move or "translate" a mountain as easily as a molehill. Still, the Boomer ang could be carrying hundreds instead of a mere seven political and scientific guinea pigs. Six guinea pigs -- and yourself, Station, said a timeless whisper. I stumbled on M'Bassi's heels as we filed into yet another empty, echoing corridor. He halfturned with a forgiving grin. "This calls for fullest exercise of your descriptive powers, Statlen. Here we are, seven mature representatives of a race that's reaching out for the Universe, and we're running away from our own presumption. Running away from the stars -- in search of a drink." Aventos, just behind me, said quietly and without blasphemy: "... and on the sixth day, God took time off from Creation to slip into the nearest saloon for a shot of rye." Lao T'Sung said: "You think we're playing at being God?" "We're playing at being men. At the moment we all want to go home to Mother. We think we're grown up, making our way in the world. But we're still tied to her apron strings." M'Bassi's voice boomed back in the corridor. "Mother Earth, eh? A startlingly fresh application of the ancient Jungian psychology." Borg stopped in front of a redpainted sliding door, fumbled with a complicated catch. "Open Sesame !" Cans were stacked in clamped piles inside. "The Boomerang," said Borg, "is a complete ship. The emergency chemical jets may never have to be used. If they are, there's sufficient for five minute's blasting in the tanks. And if that's not enough, here's a reserve." Brodcuzynski looked at the symbols on the cans and uttered a few wondering cusswords. "Look what that Dane's been drinking! Don't anyone give Borg a cigarette or he'll jet off clean out of his boots." "Not neat, of course," Borg agreed. "Recipe is one-third absolute, one-third water, one-third fruit juice. No fusel oils or other rotgut products after distillation. Just plain, pure ethyl alcohol. It makes terrific cocktails. I've tried it with lemon, bay leaves, tomato ketchup, aniseed and milk so far. It curdles the milk. But let's experiment." ago, ship time. The pickling process with men obviously unused to alcohol had been rapid. And they weren't in prime physical condition, though you wouldn't guess it, looking at the exertions of Brodcuzynski and M'Bassi. Their reactions were slowed, high centers dulled. Nicely timed. In about an hour according to the clock in my mind -- the only possible measurement in this case -- they would be in the passive stage, quietly happy or maybe maudlin, according to temperament. And receptive. Receptive to what? M'Bassi quit his thumping, came over to my desk and grabbed the edge to steady himself. "You don' look too good, son. What's troublin' you?" "Wish I knew," I said, and meant it. I rubbed the back of my head. "There's something ticking away here, and the ticks are getting closer together." He laughed. "Sonarscope, maybe. Or that's an egg and you've got something hatching inside there waitin' to bust out. Don't worry, boy. Have some more snake-milk." I shot the drink down with a grimace. But the ticking went on, irritating, irregular, quickening, like a geiger counter approaching a radioactive source. Within the hour it had become a continuous susurration. A few seconds after the alarm signal vibrated through the messroom, it stopped abruptly. The observation screen flared white and blank, pseudogravity ceased with the cutting of the drive-field, and the simple instruments rimming the screen showed the impossible: zero readings all around. The Boomerang was at rest. I saw the necessity for the relaxing .alcohol now. translated at more-than-light velocity can't come to a dead stop. But it had. And alcohol cushioned the mind against that fact. And against other things. "Pink elephants!" Aventos breathed. He turned a slow cartwheel in front of the screen and solemnly regarded the dials upside down. "I don't believe it." Braithewaite pointed to the thing that was growing slowly in the middle of the messroom. "Thass not pink," he said carefully, "and it's not an ephelant." Sam stabilized himself at half his full size and looked around. He saw me and smiled. "Having fun?" he asked vocally in English. I'd waited four thousand years for that trigger. Now I remembered. "Nice body," Sam approved. "Can you still semblize?" "Give me time," I said. "It's been quite a while." "We'll shift the whole heap down to the -- what's the word?" "Campus," I supplied. " -- campus, and give these good gentlemen a little gravity before they lose their last meal." A T the farther end of the Hall, the statue of Athena hadn't changed since I last saw it. The Eternal Light still burned as brightly from the alabaster of that vast, high forehead. Not surprising, considering it had a halfI gave her a perfunctory nod and half a wink. We revere wisdom, not its symbols. But she impresses the customers. Sam, to me, direct: No Greek? English universal tongue now. Barbaric. You get it? In clear. Help out with odd term. Vocally, to the six: "Gentlemen, as -- " President. " -- president of this establishment, I welcome you and trust that your stay will be pleasant. Mr. Statlen will continue to act as your mentor and guide and I shall be available at any time if you wish for anyfurther information and -- " Enlightenment. Filthy concatenation of syllables, that. Don't like."  " -- enlightenment." "If this be Valhalla, I recogize no gods," muttered Borg suddenly. I thought it was a misplaced sense of the dramatic until I realized he was quoting. He strode forward and poked at Sam's shoulder. "I'm all here," Sam said politely. "That's more than I am, mister." "And my name isn't -- " Bearded mythological gatekeeper? St. Peter. " -- isn't St. Peter. I realize you must be upset and confused by the suddenness of this arisement, but we find it psychologically unwise to allow reason to intervene by doing things more gradually." "Upset?" Braithewaite laughed shortly. "That's the ultimate understatement." but alcohol still put a protective haze over their higher faculties. "If it's real," M'Bassi said, "I'm due for a galaxy-size hangover." "Where are we?" asked Lao bluntly. Drinking rice wine in his youth had given him a hard and intensely practical head. "A planet," Sam replied. "Impossible. Our retranslation into the normal continuum could not have taken place so near planetary mass." "So near? You were a lightmonth distant when our field encompassed you." "Stopped us and brought us here within ten minutes?" "An arbitrary measure of time." "What system is this?" "One far removed from your own." "Our range was five light-years. Centaurus -- " "Your range was far greater than you were permitted to imagine. Even had it been less, you would have been broiight within the aegis of this establishment. And now, gentlemen, please allow Mr. Statlen to conduct yon to your quarters. Time for questions and work after you've rested." self elsewhere and left me to face the growing storm. I'm afraid Aventos was the first to display terrestrial chauvenism and a lamentable lack of intellectual discipline. "I suppiose you can vanish like that, you bloody spy?" I laughed at the use of the term. "I've nearly forgotten, but I'll be getting into practice again. The word 'spy' implies conflict. There's no conflict here. You're safe and you'll be made comfortable." Brodcuzynski spoke for the first time. Despite his silvered hair, he was the youngest in heart. He was still happy-drunk. He had wandered away to study the decorated wall panels. He'd even spoken to a student scurrying through the Hall to look at the Boomerang. She smiled, psyched him quickly, gave his head a benedictory pat, and hurried on to join her quietly amused colleagues in the doorway. None of them had paused to look at our group. Brod rejoined us. "Nice place," he said. "Coeducational, too. Umum. Don't tell my wife." Thank Athena for Brod at that moment. The temporary easing of suspicion gave me time to usher them to their adjoining rooms. "Take a nap, freshen up, then we'll eat," I said. Aventos sat on the edge of his couch. His normally olive face was pale. "Where is it?" "Out along the corridor to the left. Marked with an unmistakable ssmibol." "We're not prisoners?" "Go where you like, Juan. But I'd advise you to rest." He put his head in his hands and looked sick and miserable. When I reported to Sam later, he was giving instructions for the Boomerang to be parked else"Interference?" where. "Of course not. Unconscious Direct: "Litters up the place, participation to a worthy end. What a ship! A power hammer Do you recall no example?" to crack a nut. Initially a colonI thought back. "A statesmanizer?" thinker, Francis Bacon... Yes, "Yes." I started trend." "You did well, Stat." "Completed?" "No thanks to me. Does con"No. Still mind-matter bifurditioning take everything into cation." account, every conceivable deviSafn: "Obvious, from that unation?" gainly hulk of metal. Will they "No. You automatically apply get through?" correction." Doubt. Hope. "I like them." Sam, amusement: "They don't like you. They'll like you less afterward. Tough job." Myself, deprecation concept : "Would be, if I were conscious of performing it." "Return if necessary?" "Certainly. Was writing imaginative fiction. Helps a little, I believe." six were observed during their unrestrained wanderings. I took part and scanned them myself during one particular sleep-period, the greater part of which they spent in Lao T'Sung's room, framing questions. Aventos called it a "council of war." On the following day-start, I took them to Assembly in the Hall. Despite exercise therapy, they, still showed signs of mental wear and physical dissipation. But Brodcuzynski was still irrepressible. He looked at a group of stuformly blonde, in purple gowns. "Magnificent !" M'Bassi surprise# me. "Don't fool yourself, Brod. They probably regard you as a mentally retarded savage from a cesspool planet." "That came hard, didn't it, M'Bassi?" I asked quietly. "It's obvious. The only possible conclusion to fit the facts. The others don't agree, but -- " He shrugged his massive black shoulders. "My branch of the race suffered imposed inferiority for so long that my ego isn't outraged by the assumption, unlike Juan Aventos and Lao T'Sung, who seem to be taking the dignity of the entire race on their shoulders." True dignity caii never be pathetic, even when it lacics substance for its assertion. But I smiled within when Lao marched up to the rostrum beneath the representation of Athena and raised his voice to Sam: "Let's stop this farce! Why are we here? Where is this place? What is the purpose of this gathering? If this is some form of religious ceremony -- " A vocal buzz of surprise arose from the students as they put out psych-prongs to Lao and grasped -- or failed to grqsp -- his meaning. Even though he knew it was coming, Sam was a little embarf I rassed. There bad been few such years of his presidency. 'j; "I regretful -- " Sam began. !ji Word, quickly. That's incorrect. Just say you're sorry. "I'm sorry you should chose this moment to question me, Mr.  Lao. I have told you that you ij have access to me at any time. , # ; And this is not religion. I can  see your concept dimly. You are not -- " Sam fumbled impatiently in my mind. Abrogating, I told him. It's a soothing vocalization. " -- abrogating one whit of your particular individual or racial su? perstition -- " Attention, Sam. That's wrong. Use belief. " -- beliefs by attending this little ceremony. We are merely dedicating the new day to a chase of knowing." Sam plucked the words from me before I could indicate correct usage, and tried metaphor in an unknown tongue -- a very chancy business. Pursuit of wisdom. Doesn't matter. He gets the idea. Lao did. He returned to our group, sat in hard-faced silence until the brief business was finished, students had dispersed and seats which were not being used had sunk again into the floor. When Sam came up to us, grayhaired old Braithewaite chuckled at a sudden recollection. "In walk and general demeanor," he said, "you might be the twin brother of my tutor at Oxford." A classical university. Sam grinned back. "I take that as a compliment. You were a student of Greek?" "A poor one." "But you recognize our emblem?" "I've seen similar representations of Athena, allegoricized as a symbol of wisdom.' first expedition. They brought her back some four thousand of your years ago. She replaced an earlier symbol from another solar system, and has remained our favorite since, although we have a choice of five hundred or more similar symbols from the mythologies of other planets. Our second expedition placed Mr. Statlen among you." "Are we to believe he's as old as that?" Aventos demanded, looking at me with bleak-eyed suspicion. Reply, Stat. "In effect, considerably older," I said. "But until yesterday, I had no memories beyond those of the thirty-odd years I've spent in this particular body; and I didn't know that I was anything other than what I seemed." "The essence of what is loosely called mind or ego was, in Mr. Statlen's case, rendered transferable," Sam explained. "The faculty was unconscious, together with memories of its endowment and its eventual purposes. The awareness of an observer becomes a factor in his observations, so awareness was suppressed. "When intervention of a kind at last became necessary, Mr. Statlen becamethe unconscious transmitter of certain impulses which subtly influenced the course of events. "A devious method of achieving our ends, but a more direct means would defeat our purpose." "And what is that purpose?" Aventos asked. "To ascertain without its knowledge whether a race has achieved a degree of civilization commensurate with its material and scientific advancement. Civilization lies in the hearts and minds of men, not in their works. You've developed interstellar travel, but are you fit to use it? Are you fit to -- graduate?" M'Bassi widened his broad nostrils. "If Statlen's the bossboy and he's been around so long, why not ask him?" "Neither Mr. Statlen nor his innumerable colleagues are able to communicate with us, or we with them. That would negate the non-intervention principle. Their sole task -- mainly unconscious -- is to insure that suitable representatives of an aspiring race are brought here for examination when they develop an interstellar drive." "And suppose they don't make the grade?" "What happens under your own curiously varied education system if a student fails an entrance examination? We can't press the analogy too close, but doesn't he return to junior or public or elementary school?" Aventos stepped closer. "Quit dodging. You say all this is done without the knowledge of the race. But we've been brought here. So we know. So what happens to us and our ship?" Aventos' death-fear was almost a physical pain in Sam's mind and mine. probe. "You are sent back," he said gently. "Your memories of this period are erased and replaced by the conviction that your expedition has failed, that your ship did not emerge at all from its probability state into the normal continuum. "You will have been nowhere, seen nothing. Your drive will be altered to put you on a false and infinitely complex mathematical trail. This, and the vast cost of experimentation, together with subtly hindering influences unconsciously transmitted by the mentor delegated to your planet, will guarantee that no further major attempts are made for several centuries." Sam was becoming positively pedantic in his use of this new language. Direct : more to this tongue than I suspected. Good flowing periods pmssible. Borg, who'd been standing quietly enough, fingering his fair beard and gazing at Athena, said suddenly in his deep bull voice; "By what right do you arrogate these powers to yourselves, whatever you may be?" "The simple right of exclusion, which has no moral, ethical or legal basis, but is applied as a matter of common sense. Statlen informs me you are a professor of comparative philology at Harvard University. "Suppose a five-year-old child from a village school demanded the right to enter your classes, sit in on your lectures, avail himself of your library. You wouldn't even question whether he'd benefit. You'd take him firmly by the ear, lead him outside, tell him to come back when he'd gone through the grades and high i'.' school and college, or however you term the progressive units in your educational system. "Even if he protested that, despite his behavior in fighting other kids and breaking your windows with his slingshot, he was really quite grown up and a hidden genius and fascinated by comparative philology, would you take his word for it?" "A fantastic and degrading analogy," Lao said coldly. "You can't equate a race with an individual in such an incredibly cavalier manner." "But we can and do," said Sam. H e had endowed himself with the physiognomy of an ancient Roman emperor for the benefit of the six. He rubbed the highbridsred nose as he spoke. "By our standards, you are a young race. You may have advanced sufficiently to be permitted at least to study here. That is what we must ascertain. "As I indicated, the empathy index weighs more heavily with us than the intelligence quotient. I understand that your mental and physical sciences are still largely divided. That doesn't promise well for you. "Until a race achieves a synthesis, an integrated system recognizing the indivisibility of mind-matter concepts, its natural chauvinism cannot be sublimated. It remains the child of conflict. "That attitude is useful, even necessary, in the infancy of the race, when survival is the only criterion. But if the race carries that attitude into maturity, it becomes dangerous to itself -- and, unfortunately, to others, because its intransigeance is implemented by the weapons of material maturity. "We don't claim to know the purpose of the Universe, except, perhapsr-that its purpose is to divine its own purpose. But we do know that fire and the sword are not the tools for that fundamental research." Stand by, Stat. Test coming. Psych all six and cross-check with me. In clear. Hold Brodcazynski or trauma possible. Brod was still thinking in a vague and delightfully pagan way about the Mizra people. Sam resumed his vocalizing to the six: "You find this difficult to grasp. A demonstration is more effective than many words." Sam, direct to A'hig Onefour, who was standing by the right hand of Athena watching the six Terrestrials in amused fascination: Come. One of the tall, blonde Mizra students who was standing by the right hand of Athena came across Hall toward our group. She halted, smiling, within the half-circle we formed. In Earth terms: Aphrodite newrisen from caressing, milky-crested waves, an Amazonian Helen, a brazen Psyche, a Pompadour in free-limbed sports rig, a sexed angel, an aggregation of impossible but somehow attainable desire, a nymph rampant, a summation of sensuality, a positive aura of concupiscence -- A'hig Onefour played the part well. Brodcuzynski ; My God, what a cookie! Braithewaite : Sylvia -- what is she that all her swains commend her; holy fair and wise is she... Borg : Ericka, who tasted blood from the bronze sword of her master and went red-lipped to eternal battle... Freyka, beloved of strong gods. Aventos: Northern provinces of Spain and Italy produce such blonde, long-limbed wonders... Nevr cold... M'Bassi: The uprightness of breasts... Mind high clear efficient... Couch, consulting room... Hell, she'd analyze me... Censor. Lao T'Sung: By any human esthetic standards. East or West... Or equatorial... How is it possible?... Surely parallel development of humanoid type imposed by conditions of initial formation? Fail to see... Sam, vocally, and direct to A'hig: "Would you please resume your natural form. Miss A'hig relinquishing that which you and your colleagues adopted for the mental convenience of these gentlemen?" Badly put, Sam. Gross connotation. Doesn't matter. Psych them. I'm holding Brod together. And the blonde, the leggy blonde, the luscious blonde, became in slow dissolve --  -- using transliterated universal terms --  -- a multi-sexed, commendably developed brachialiferous thase, with its fifteen specialized arms in display position, including the electropod, biometric analyzer, spectroscope, ultra-mike, awarelifeorganizedmatingprong, radiation counter,semblizer,vibration mathematic entertainment preen, quaintpsychseething, genetic regularizer, telekinetic control -- All stemmed from Sn acceptably odd oblate spheroid; a sweetly esthetic organization of functional necessity. Its very truthin-purpose was beautiful... This language is so limited in its conceptual terminology. The psychic storm from the others nearly overwhelmed me, smashing like the ravening tumble of a cloudburst. by fear, shaken by hate, until Sam put out a calming thought. You're identifying yourself, Stat. Come away. Help me psych and tabulate. i I withdrew and touched only what came to the surface. Brodcuzynski : Mental scream... This isr nightmare... I've gone mad... God let me look away... Fear... Hate... Kill it. Braithewaite : Sick disgust, retching... Medusa, monstrous foul, demonic abortion... Perseus! A shield, a weapon... strike... Its color... Slime, filth, stench, hate, kill, cleanse... Fire, i Borg: Delirium tremens That damned alcohol... " Shouldn't have brought it with me... Or hypnosis?... Kraken... Can't exist... Shouldn't exist... Worm that dieth not... I Beowulf killed it... Abomina' tion... Kill. Sam struck in with his musical, little-used voice. It cut through the welter of near-madness. I heard only snatches of it in my own intense preoccupation: "... highest life-form on four planets of a system... specialization... beautiful, is it not?" Aventos: Christ, planets swarming with them!... the star drive... sear them off... Cauterize, burn... monstrous horror... Never intelligence embodied thus... Line of guns thudding. sundered alien flesh flying. M'Bassi : Jungle, night... Fear... Leaping creature, spear, kill or be killed... Redness and insane delight. Lao T'sung : Quick control, but vivid picture of heel squashing snake before blankout, and another obscene unverbalized picture. It was as though every racial hatred and fear of difference that had ever beset mankind welled up in a suppurating flow from their minds. Scientific curiosity and thus conscious sanity returned within seconds. But to Sam and me it seemed hours. Sam said: "I'm sorry to sifbject you to this, gentlemen, but we wanted immediate unconscious reactions. Had you been prepared, some of you might have retained rational control, according to your degree of advancement beyond atavistic xenophobia. But we are interested only in the degree of empathic rapport with other intelligences. Sam called up a chair from the floor of the Hall and sat in it casually. Our group was alone now in the vastness of the Hall. A'hig, myself, and the six remained standing. S AM stroked his Roman nose again and tried to explain. "Suppose your colonizing vessel had landed on one of the planets inhabited by A'hig's fellows, and they had suddenly semblized near you, would the hand controlling your weapons be restrained by reason? Possibly. But fear might trigger the weapon, even if you were otherwise well-protected. "Suppose they approached you slowly and with circumspection, apparently in awe at your mastery of time and space, showing what you would take to be due humility in face of your technical achievements, could you learn to live in peace and cooperation with such -- monsters? Especially when you learned they were your vast superioi; in mental science? Yes, you say, but I doubt it. And there must be no doubt in such matters. You do not, it seems, know yourselves." He sighed. "Such a simple lesson, so long in the learning." "Totally unfair!" Aventos blurted. "A farcial test, springing something like that. Not that we concede you have any damned right to make any kind of test at all." "You confirm my views. Pride is a tiger and vanity its teeth." Sam, pleased with Lao T'Sung's quick control, had gone deep within him and found that proverb. " 'Unfair' and 'concede' mean nothing to us." Direct: Off now, Stat. Reporting to Top. Not unpleased, but long, tong yet. Take' them. Unlearning the tongue. Find it slightly distasteful now. "i'he question, gentlemen," Sam murmured, "is not whether the Universe is fit for Man, but whether Man is fit for the Universe. You have answered it. He is not -- yet." He gestured toward shining Athena. "Know yovuelves. Then return." He semblized himself to his room. Poor A'hig Onefour was becoming a little embarrassed. I sent a quick pleasure-scale to her-his-its vibration mathematic entertainment preen. Not so laughably removed from a wolf-whistle. Beautiful creature. Direct: Gratitude. That's all. Semblize off. Stay as sweet as you are. Query your meaning. Esthetic appreciation?  Sorry. Yes. Earth sexual. Habit. Thanks again. A'hig semblized. Braithewaite scratched his gray thatch. "What about this socalled examination?" "You've been undergoing it since you arrived. You've just failed your Finals. So -- back to school, kids." Ahh, get away from me, you dirty black. You stink. Jim, Jim, there's a spider in the bath! Vggh, beastly thing, kill it! (delicate legs, sensitive quivering palps, a thousand diamonds for eyes, a sweetly odd oblate spheroid for main body, a sheen of iridescent purple and green. A smear of dark blood on white porcelain.) You lousy no-account halfbreed. I regret that our generous offer of an arrangement to restore a balance of trade has met with what can only be described as contempt. If such outrageous provocation should continue -- See, you pull its wings off an' its gotta crawl, it's gotta crawl over this pencil, see? Hands off, punk, or I'll kick your teeth in. There's a mouse! Quick, quick, it's getting away! Kinda saw red. Didn't mean to kill him, honest. Goddam furriners... The od on page # is something you'll want to see... and act on. It's a gift and a cash saving and a new reading experience all in a single sparkling package! That's right, page #. Origins of Galactic Law When you go on an interstellar journey, be sure to take along this handy little legal guide. Principle of selfpunishment: provided the court concurs, any person pleading guilty to a crime may choose the punishment he deems fitting. People v. Kilgore, #, # Un. #) Terran pilot who was scheduled to make the first solo hop, in a faster-than-light craft, from Pluto to Alpha Centauri. Celebrating the coming event at the Universal Joint, a spacemen's hangout on Mars, he met a former shipmate. He testified at his trial that, after a nebulous number of Venus vapor cocktails, he agreed to drop his friend off at Pluto. Kilgore said that while they were passing through the Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, he discovered that the flap of the kit attached to his uniform was open. Anxiously, he felt in the pocket. It was empty. His doppler pills, compounded especially for his projected flight, were missing. He testified that he searched the entire ship and failed to find the pills. Then, with growing suspicion and rage, he looked at his snoring passenger. He shook the limp figure of his friend and angrily asked if the latter had swallowed the pills. The friend made no answer except a foolish grin. Kilgore claimed that this was too much for him. Vengefully, he jammed his friend into a spacesuit and dumped him on one of the # or more milethick asteroids. Each pill, Kilgore testified, would hold up metabolism across # lightyears. Long before the drug wore off, Kilgore said he believed, someone would come across his sleeping friend. Still fuming, Kilgore returned to Mars for a new supply of the pills. His first stop was the Universal Joint. He testified that the bartender seemed glad to see him and handed him a small pill box. The bartender said that Kilgore had dropped it there. When it came time for the judge to pronounce sentence, Kilgore asked to be allowed to impose his own punishment. The judge was surprised, but he heard Kilgore out. And he sanctioned the penalty, a harsher penalty than he had intended to impose. Kilgore spent the remainder of his life hunting the sleeping body of the man he had marooned on one of the myriad asteroids. Psychic guilt'. Htting the punishment to the criminal supersedes fitting the punishment to the crime. (People v. Nice, #, # Un. #) TN the lobby of the Jovian hostel at which he was staying, Bor Nica, a Sagittarian, brushed against another guest, an Antarean. The Antarean, being unused to the gravity of Jupiter, fell and bruised himself considerably. When he had struggled up again, however, instead of rebuking Nica for jostling him and not offering to assist him to his feet, he passed the incident off lightly. He was about to hop on his way again when Nica, in an insane rage, felled him with a blow. This time the fall was fatal. Nica, instead of trying to escape, waited expectantly beside the body until a nickel led him off to detention. (Note: by # U.E., inflation had caused nickel to replace copper as the designation for an officer of the law.) There he remained, happily awaiting trial, until word reached him that the widow of the Antarean he had murdered harbored no hatred for him, and had indeed forgiven him. Infuriated, Nica broke out of his cell, located the widow and killed her, too. Again he waited beside the body of his victim. And again he not only did not resist arrest, but seemed to welcome it. Smiling, he pleaded guilty to both murders and listened eagerly for the verdict. But the judge deferred passing sentence until sociologists could go into Nica's background for a clue to his seemingly illogical actions. They found that Nica's society had stabilized itself on a mass psychosis. Because of atrocities his people had committed in their history, they had piled up a vast unpaid debt of guilt. This weighed so heavily on them that every normal individual in Nica's society had a compulsion to seek punishment. Th e j ud ge studied this report. He reasoned that the greatest punishment Nica could receive would be no punishment. Any penalty he could impose would only gratify Nica instead of punishing him. Therefore he set Nica free. Frantic, Nica appealed the court's judgment, but in vain. The Galactic Tribunal held that he could not place himself in double jeopardy. The Jovians deported Nica to his home planet. There he remained an outcast because of his humiliating failure to obtain the punishment they all sought. His honor was not restored until he bribed a passing Cygnian to shoot him in a carefully contrived hunting accident. Pro rata sentencing: terms of penal servitude are to be based upon comparative life expectancy. (Pe#pIe V. Gund, #, # Un. #) TN the park on the vacation satellite orbiting around Albeaten to death. Beside him lay the carcass of his pet ululu, also beaten to death. Erdo Gund, a Procyoni, voluntarily gave himself up. At his trial, Gund's deposition, which he had signed by impressing his noseprint, was offered in evidence by the prosecutor. In this deposition, Gund adbut not the pet. In fact, he stated, was the anger he felt when he saw the Vegan brutally beating the pet. He struck the Vegan down when the cumulative effect of witnessing nearly two hours of the master's cruelty and the pet's pain had proved unbearable. At this point the judge interrupted the reading of the deposition. He said he had understood other witnesses to state that the Vegan's fatal beating of the ululu had lasted only ten minutes at most. The prosecutor said that His Honor was correct in his understanding. But, he said, the deposition was accurate, too. He explained to the judge that, to the Terran-type observer, the Procyi Oni's span of life averaged two  Earth years. In that length of time, the Procyoni lived -- subjectively -- as long as a centenarian Earthman. The prosecutor further said that in view of all the circumstances, he was of the opinion that .Gund could not plead "not guilty by reason of temporary insanity." However, added the prosecutor, he would ask His Honor to be lenient and take into account the temporal differential. The judge followed the prosecutor's recommendation and sentenced Gund to # Earth hours of psychic guilt. Semantic jurisprudence : that branch of the law which systematizes forensic debate on questions of meaning. (JJ. of Venus v. Vac. Inc. et al., #, # Un. #) Inc., was a Terran corpo' ration supplying the vacuum of space for use in laboratory research. At its plant on Luna, it manufactured its product by welding two duralloy hemispheres lip to lip and thus sealing a vacuum inside the globe they formed. One container in a shipment to the University of Venus proved to be defective. The University sued for damages resulting from sudden failure of the built-in valve. These damages included the tearing of the elbow-beard of a visiting Ganymedean professor, which had been sucked into the globe. Attorney for the defendants asked for dismissal of the suit on the grounds that a vacuum was nothing, and that when both parties to the action had stipulated the loss of a vacuum, the plaintiff in effect admitted losing nothing. In support of this contention, attorney for the defandants exhibited the advertising slogan of Vac., Inc., "Nothing -- but the best!" Attorney for the plaintiff countered the dismissal motion by stating that if this were true, then the defendants were confessing to the inequity of giving nothing in exchange for good hard cash. However, attorney for the plaintiff argued, no absolute vacuum exists in all space, there being a minimum of twelve molecules per cubic foot in the emptiest reaches. Therefore, she claimed, there  is nothing in the Universe which one might name "nothing." That last statement, attorney for the defendants replied scornfully, was self-contradictory. "Nothing" exists, he said; the space between the molecules is "nothing." Quickly, attorney for the plaintiff exclaimed that now her learned opponent was arguing on the side of her client by agreeing that "nothing" is something.  At this point the judge wearily recessed court, declaring that he intended to damp his brain waves with tonic chord therapy. As soon as court reconvened, the judge asked if either party objected to the swearing in of a panel of semanticists. There was no objection. And so, before deciding on the dismissal motion, the judge submitted the problqn to the panel. With a squad of burly bailiffs keeping order among the venerable semanticists, the question finally came to a vote. The majority decided that a vacuum is "something." The judge denied the defendants' motion for dismissal, heard the case, and found for the plaintiff. He awarded to the University penses and the adverse publicity bankrupted Vac., Inc. It paid nothing. Law of identity: any judgment of the court is a true judgment in all succeeding cases where the circumstances are the same. (Smith V. General Teletote, #, # Un. #) Titan branch of the First Solar Bank  Trust jCo., filed a civil suit against General Teletote. He sought to recover damages for , injuries he had sustained while i utilizing the facilities of the pas' senger division of that firm. Under a governmental Class F , priority (his heart could not j stand the strain of spaceship travel), he had returned to his native  Terra via teletote. He charged  General Teletote with garbling j him in transmission. General Teletote admitted that its tri-dimensional scanner had reassembled Smith improperly. The firm also conceded that its  Terran operator had been out on ' a pan jo drunk, leaving the receptor controls untended and incorrectly adjusted -- permitting  electronic snow to piebald Smith.  But though it acknowledged its t carelessness, General Teletote firmly disclaimed any liability. It produced the customary waiver ; that Smith had signed prior to transmission, absolving General Teletote of all responsibility for mishap in transit andor upon reception. Smith replied that as he was now obviously not the same individual who had signed the waiver, its terms were not binding on him. General Teletote answered that if Smith was not the same individual, he could not claim damages in the other's name. Having studied the briefs, the Galactic Tribunal ruled that even by the signing of a waiver, an individual cannot divest himself of his inalienable right to his own identity. Smith had just won his case when the "ghost image" of Smith came forward, pressing claims for a like award. To prove these claims, the ghost image produced witnesses who testified that Smitho had emerged from the receptor shortly after Smithi, although records failed to show any other transmission scheduled for that time and place. Smithi struggled for sole possession of his identity. He sided with General Teletote in its attempts to disprove Smith # 's physical appearance by saying that the latter was merely a partial albino who saw a good chance to cash in on the accidental resemblance. The battle ended suddenly one day in court when the judge intervened, pointing but that both had equally good evidence, that there was no doubt that they were the same man, and asked them to effect a compromise. Otherwise, the judge explained, the case would result in a deadlock. Smithi and Smitha quickly came to a, settlement. The two set up a partnership with the credits they collected and established a firm which became the foremost competitor of General Teletote. Doctrine of excusable fraud', deception, when welcomed by the victimized party, comes within the realm of caveat emptor. (Based on a quashed indictment, # U.E.  coup, Conway Limbeck was a minor criminal preying on the gullible-minded and larcenoushearted. He sold interests in a formula for synthesizing ambidextrose sugar. For years he thrived on this formula, which was more than his victims could claim. At the time he dreamed up steward aboard a Sirius-bound liner. Thanks to forged credentials, he was making a getaway in the most comfortable style. While the liner was approachgave Limbeck a fifty credit tip. Limbeck examined the note. It gave him ideas. He stole into the chart room and trimmed the blank edges from the astronautical maps. These plastic strips had the official heat mark imbedded in them. Then Limbeck burgled enough photo supplies to counterfeit the strips into notes When the liner landed on Sirius Presidential Shack. Convincing credentials vouching for Limbeck as representative plenipotentiary of the lo Trading Trust gained him immediate admittance. After the ceremonial somersaults were exchanged, Limbeck announced that the Trust had authorized him to negotiate for that season's output of tumul. The President was . hard-ofsmelling until the interpreter wafted that Limbeck had finally When he gave vent to his great satisfaction, the President nearly bowled Limbeck over. Limbeck chartered a vessel and took off with his precious payload. His vessel had hardly come out of synergy when the Siriutes realized that Limbeck had jetted a fast one on them. A and boarded Limbeck's vessel. Limbeck's heart sank as he faced the boarding party. Then to hi? amazement he scented that the Siriutes were emitting friendly laughs. Their leader passed over a new agreement for Limbick to sign. It was a contract for tumul futures. In bewilderment, Limbeck read the terms. They were extremely favorable to him -- especially the explicit condition that he was to make payment in counterfeit credits only. The Siriutes told him they valued the counterfeit more than the genuine. This fetish of theirs, they explained, stemmed from the darkest age of their history, when a tyrant had set himself up through fraud. The revolutionary fervor with which they at last overthrew him fired in them a passion for skepticism. For this reason they treasured symbols of disbelief. Limbeck was more than happy to sign the contract. But news of the Sirius situation nailed him. However, the Galactip Government had no evidence with which to pin the counterfeiting charge on Limbeck, as the proud possessors of the fakes had hidden them and would not yield them up. The most that the government ceuld do was to put a brake on his future activities: It enjoined him from counterfeiting. Limbeck fulfill the contract. The Galactic Tribunal ruled that the scripcion sent to a new address, notify Why so long? Because... Master and secondary lists have to be corrected. A new addressograph plate has to be cut. The plate has to be put in its proper alphabetical place in the addressograph machine. Other people are moving, too, and their changes of address bave to be processed. Four weeks is none too long, but we can handle it. As soon as you know where you're moving to, please send the old as well as the new address immediately to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. contract was illegal and invalid. But the Secretary for Galactic defense privately informed Limbeck that he was anxious to see the deal come off, as tumul was vital to defense. Limbeck, of course, was equal to the problem. He arranged a secret rendezvous in deep space. The Siriutes and Limbeck exchanged tumul and currency. After Limbeck's departure, the Siriutes noticed an inscription beginning to appear in each of the notes. The inscription read : G E N U I N E -- This double fraud doubly delighted the Siriutes and they gratefully bestowed upon Limbeck their highest award. The medal, of course, was made of synthetic platinum. Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday! #:# A.M. to #tSO P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings anti! #:# P.M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) and announce The Richest Science Fiction Novel Contest in History # minimum Guaranteed to the author of the best... To raise the literary level of the field still higher... To augment the already high standards with new writing talent... To focus more attention on this increasingly important form of literature. 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Novels submitted must be between # and # words in length, typed in black ink on one side of white bond paper, doublespaced, with at least an inch margin on all sides and each page numbered. #. Manuscripts must be accompanied by sufficient postage for return.  will be given full consideration for possible serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, book publication by Simon and Schuster, or both, at standard rates. #. There are no requirements, stipulations or taboos regarding themes. Fresh ideas and convincing characterization, conflict and plot development are the important criteria. Writers who enter the contest can best familiarize themselves with the standards of the judges through study of the science fiction published by Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Simon and Schuster. #. Sole judges will be the editorial staffs of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Simon and Schuster. The decisions of the judges will be final. #. Contestants agree, in submitting their manuscripts, to accept standard publishing agreements with the sponsors of the contest in the event that their novel is the winning entry. #. Anyone may enter this contest except employees of the Galaxy Publishing Corp. and of Simon and Schuster, Inc., and their families; their present publishers... which means, in effect, that contestants science fiction. V Escaping your worries is good sound medical advice -- as long as you leave yourself behind! those of us who weren't born into it, will ever feel quite at home being amphibious -- amphibious in the new sense of the word. I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don't matter any more. I can't help worrying about my business, for instance -- or what used to be my business. After all, . I spent thirty years building the thing up from scratch, and now the equipment is resting and getting clogged with dirt. But even though I know it's silly of me to care what happens to the business, I borrow a body from a storage center every so often, and go around the old home town, and clean and oil as much of the equipment as I can. Of course, all in the world, the equipment was good for was making money, and Lord knows there's plenty of that lying around. Not as much as there used to be, because there at first some people got frisky and threw it all around, and the wind blew it every which way. And a lot of go-getters gathered up piles of the stuff and hid it somewhere. I hate to admit it, but I gathered and stuck it away. I used to get it out and count it sometimes, but that was years ago. Right now I'd be hard put to say where it is. But the worrying I do about my old business is bush league stuff compared to the worrying my wife, Madge, does about our old house. That thing is what she herself put in thirty years on while I was building the business. Then no sooner had we gotten nerve enough to build and decorate the place than everybody we cared anything about got amphibious. Madge borrows a body once a month and dusts the place, though the only thing a house is good for now is keeping termites and mice from getting pneumonia. get into a body and work as an attendant at the local storage center, I realize all over again how much tougher it is for women to get used to being amphibious. Madge borrows bodies a lot oftener than I do, and that's true of women in general. We have to keep three times as many women's bodies in stock as men's bodies, in order to meet the demand. Every so often, it seems as though a woman just has to have a body, and doll it up in clothes, and look at herself in a mirror. And Madge, God bless her, I don't think she'll be satisfied until she's tried on every body in every storage center on Earth. It's been a fine thing for Madge, though. I never kid her about it, because it's done so much for her personality. Her old body, to tell you the plain blunt truth, wasn't anything to get excited about, and having to haul the thing around made her gloomy a lot of the time in the old days. She couldn't help it, poor soul, any more than anybody else could help what sort of body they'd been born with, and I loved her in spite of it. Well, after we'd learned to be amphibious, and after we'd built the storage centers and laid in body supplies and opened them to the public, Madge went hog wild. She borrowed a platinum blonde body that had been donated by a burlesque queen, and" I didn't think we'd ever get her out of it. As I say, it did-wonders for her self-confidence. I'm like most men and don't care particularly what body I get. Just the strong, good-looking, healthy bodies were put in storage, so one is as good as the next one. Sometimes, when Madge and I take bodies out together for old times' sake, I let her pick out one for me to watch whatever she's got on. It's a funny thing how she always picks a blond, tall one for me. My old body, which she claims she loved for a third of a century, had black hair, and was short and paunchy, too, there toward the last. I'm human and I couldn't help being hurt when they scrapped it after I'd left it, instead of putting it in storage. It was a good, homy, comfortable body; nothing fast and flashy, but reliable. But there isn't much call for that kind of body at the centers, I guess. I never ask for one, at any rate. The worst experience I ever had with a body was when I was flimflammed into taking out the one that had belonged to Dr. Ellis Konigswasser. It belongs to the Amphibious Pioneers' Society and only gets taken out once a year but for the big Pioneers' Day Parade, on the anniversary of Konigswasser'ff discovery. Everybody said it was a great honor for me to be picked to get into Konigswasser's body and lead the parade. Like a plain damn fool, I believed them.  getting me into that thing again -- ever. T aking that wreck out certainly made it plain why Konigswasser discovered how people could do without their bodies. That old one of his practically drives you out. Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches -- a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes, and a complexion like a used steamer trunk. He was and sdll is the sweetest person you'd ever want to know, but, back when he was stuck with that body, nobody got close enough to find out. We tried to get Konigswasser back into his old body to lead us when we first started having the Pioneers' Day Parades, but he wouldn't have anything to do with it, so we always have to flatter some poor boob into taking on the job. Konigswasser marches, all right, but as a sixfoot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger. Konigswasser is just like a kid with that body. He never gets tired of bending beer cans with it, and we all have to stand around in our bodies after the parade, and watch as though we were very impressed. I don't suppose he could bend very much of anything back in the old days. Nobody mentions it to him, since he's the grand old man of the Amphibious Age, but he plays hell with bodies. Almost every time he takes one out, he busts it, showing off. Then somebody has to get into a surgeon's body and sew it up again. I don't mean to be disrespectful of Konigswasser. As a matter of fact, it's a respectful thing to say that somebody is childish in certain ways, because it's people like that who seem to get all the big ideas. There is a picture of him in the old days down at the Historical Society, and you can see from that that he never did grow up as far as keeping up his appearance went -- doing what little he could with the rattle-trap body Nature had issued him. His hair was down below his collar, he wore his pants so low that his heels wore through the legs above the cuffs, and the lining of his coat hung down in festoons all around the bottom. And he'd forget meals, and go out into the cold or wet without enough clothes on, and he would never notice sickness until it almost killed him. He was. what we used to call absent-minded. Looking back now, of course, we say he was starting to be amphibious. mathematician, and he did all his living with his mind. The body he had to haul around with that wonderful mind was about as much use to him as a flat car of scrap-iron. Whenever he got sick and had to pay some attention to his body, he'd rant somewhat like this: "The mind is the only thing about human beings that's worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones, and tubes? No wonder people can't get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway -- no matter how much you stuff and protect it! "Who," he wanted to know, "really wants one of the things? What's so wonderful about protoplasm that we've got to carry so damned many pounds of it with ds wherever we go? "Trouble with the world," said Konigswasser, "isn't too many people -- it's too many bodies." When his teeth went bad on him, and he had to have them all out, and he couldn't get a set of dentures that were at all comfortable, he wrote in his diary, "If living matter was able to evolve enough to get out of the ocean, which was really quite a pleasant place to live, it certainly ought to be able to take another step and get out of bodies, which are pure nuisances when you stop to think about them." He wasn't a prude about bodies, understand, and he wasn't jealous of people who had better ones than he did. He just thought bodies were a lot more trouble than they were worth. He didn't have great hopes that people would really evolve out nf their bodies in his time. He just wished they would. Thinking hard about it, he walked through a park in his shirtsleeves and stopped olf at the zoo to watch the lions being fed. Then, when the rainstorm turned to sleet, he headed back home and was interested to see firemen on the edge of a lagoon, where they were using a pulmotor on a drowned man. Witnesses said the old man had walked right into the water and had kept going without changing his expression until he'd disappeared. Konigswasser got a look at the victim's face and said he'd never seen a better reason for suicide. He started for home again and was almost there before he realized that that was his own body lying back there. body just as the firemen got it breathing again, and he walked it home, more as a favor to the city than anything else. He walked it into his front closet, got out of it again, and left it there. He took it out only when he wanted to do some writing or turn the pages of a book, or when j he had to feed it so it would have , enough energy to do the few odd ; jobs he gave it. The rest of the  time, it sat motionless in the closet, looking dazed and using ' almost no energy. Konigswasser told me the other day that he  used to run the thing for about ' a dollar a week, just taking it out when he really needed it. i But the best part was that Konigswasser didn't have to sleep  any more, just because it had to sleep: or be afraid any more, just because it thought it might get ' hurt; or go looking for things it seemed to think it had to have.  And, when it didn't feel well,  Konigswasser kept out of it until it felt better, and he didn't have  to spend a fortune keeping the  thing comfortable.  When he got his body out of the closet to write, he did a book on how to get out of one's own body, which was rejected without comment by twenty-three publishers. The twenty-fourth sold changed human life more than the invention of fire, numbers, the alphabet, agriculture, or the wheel. When somebody told Konigswasser that, he snorted that they were damning his book with faint praise. I'd say he had a point there. By following the instructions in Konigswasser's book for about two years, almost anybody could get out of his body whenever he wanted to. The first step was to understand what a parasite and dictator the body was most of the time, then to separate what the body wanted or didn't want from what you yourself -- your psyche -- wanted or didn't want. Then, by concentrating on what you wanted, and ignoring as much as possible what the body wanted beyond plain maintenance, you made  your psyche demand its rights and become self-sufficient. That's what Konigswasser had done without realizing it, until he and his body had parted company in the park, with his psyche going to watch the lions eat, and with his body wandering out of control into the lagoon. The ) final trick of separation, once your psyche grew independent eiough, was to start your body walking into some direction and suddenly take your psyche off in j another direction. You couldn' do it standing still, for some reason -- you had to walk. At first, Madge's and my psyches were clumsy at getting along outside our bodies, like the first sea animals that got strandi and who could just waddle and squirm and gasp in the mud. But v we became better at it with time, because the psyche can naturally adapt so much faster than the body. I son for wanting to get out. Everybody who was crazy enough to try to get out at the first had good reasons. Madge's  body was sick and wasn't going i to last a lot longer. With her ' going in a little while, I couldn't work up enthusiasm for sticking , around much longer myself. So ' we studied Konigswasser's book and tried to get Madge out of her body before it died. I went along  with her, to keep either one of us  from getting lonely. And we just barely made it -- six weeks before her body went all to pieces. ? That's why we get to march . every year in the Pioneers' Day # Parade. Not everybody does -- j only the first five thousand of us who turned amphibious. We were guinea pigs, without much to lose one way or another, and we were the ones who proved to the rest how pleasant and safe it was -- a heck of a lot safer than taking chances in a body year in and year out. Sooner or later, almost everybody had a good reason for giving of us -- invisible, insubstantial, indestructible, and, by golly, true to ourselves, no trouble to anybody, and not afraid of anything. When we're not in bodies, the Amphibious Pioneers can meet on the head of a pin. When we get into bodies for the Pioneers' Day Parade, we take up over fifty thousand square feet, have to gobble more than three tons of food to get enough energy to march; and lots of us catch colds or worse, and get sore because somebody's body accidentally steps on the heel of somebody else's body, and get jealous because some bodies get to-lead and others have to stay in ranks, and -- oh, hell, I don't know what all. I'm not crazy about the parade. With all of us there, close together in bodies -- well, it brings out the worst in us, no matter how good our psyches are. Last year, for instance. Pioneers' Day was a scorcher. People couldn't help being out of sorts, stuck in sweltering, thirsty bodies for hours. Well, one thing led to another, and the Parade Marshal offered to beat the daylights out of my body with his body, if my body got out of step again. Naturally, being Parade Marshal, he had the best body that year, except for Konigswasser's cowboy, but I told him to soak his fat head, anyway. He swung, and I ditched my body right there, and didn't even stick around long enough to find out if he connected. He had to haul my body back to the storage center himself. I stopped being mad at him the minute I got out of the body. I understood, you see. Nobody but a saint could be really sympathetic or intelligent for more than a few minutes at a time in a body -- or happy, either, except in short spurts. I haven't met an amphibian yet who wasn't easy to get along with, and cheerful and. interesting -- as long as he was outside a body. And I haven't met one yet who didn't turn a little sour when he got into one. The minute you get in, chemistry takes over -- glands making you excitable or ready to fight or hungry or mad or affectionate, or -- well you never know what's going to happen next. at the enemy, the people who are against the amphibians. They never get out of their bodies and won't try to learn. They don't want anybody else to do it, either, ' and they'd like to make the amphibians get back into bodies and stay in them. After the tussle I had with the Parade Marshal, Madge got wind of it and left her body right in the middle of the Ladies' Auxiliary. And the two of us, feeling full of devilment after getting shed of the bodies and the parade, went over to have a look at the enemy. I'm never keen on going over to look at them. Madge likes to see what the women are wearing... Stuck with their bodies all the time, the enemy women change their clothes and hair and cosmetic styles a lot oftener than we do on the women's bodies in the storage centers. I don't get much of a kick out of the fashions, and almost everything else you see and hear in enemy territory would bore a plaster statue into moving away. Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren't talking about that, then they're talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they'll talk about fear, which we .used to call politics -- job politics, social politics, government politics. The enemy hates that, having us able to peek in on them any time we want to, while they can't ever see us unless we get into bodies. They seem to be scared to death of us, though being scared of amphibians makes as much sense as being scared of ' the sunrise. They could have the ; whole world, except the storage. , centers, for all the amphibians j care. But they bunch together as  though we were going to come whooping out of the sky and do something terrible to them at any moment. They've got contraptions all over the place that are supposed to detect amphibians. The gadgets aren't worth a nickel, but they seem to make the enemy feel good -- like they were lined up against great forces, but keepi ing their nerve and doing impor tant, clever things about it. Knowhow -- all the time they're patting each other about how much knowhow they've got, and about how we haven't got anything by comparison. If knowhow means weapons, they're dead right. I guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret, and to get out of bodies every time there's an air raid, or the enemy fires a rocket, or something. That just makes the enemy madder, because the raids and rockets and all cost plenty, and blowing up things nobody needs anyway is a poor return on the taxpayer's money. We always know what they're going to do next, and when and where, so there isn't any trick to keeping out of their way. But they are pretty smart, considering they've got bodies to look after besides doing their thinking, so I always try to be cautious when I go over to watch them. That's why I wanted to clear out when Madge and I saw a storage center in the middle of one of their fields. We hadn't talked to anybody lately about what the enemy was up to, and the center looked awfully suspicious. Madge was optimistic, the way she's been ever since she borrowed that burlesque queen's body, and she said the storage center was a sure sign that the enemy had seen the light, that they were getting ready to become amphibious themselves. Well, it looked like it. There was a brand-new center, stocked with bodies and open for business, as innocent as you please. We circled it several times, and Madge's circles got smaller and smaller, as she tried to get a close look at what they had in the way of ladies' ready-to-wear. "Let's beat it," I said. "I'm just looking," said Madge. "No harm in looking." Then she saw what was in the main display case, and she forgot where she was or where she'd come from. The most striking woman's body I'd ever seen was in the case -- six feet tall and built like a goddess. But that wasn't the payoff. The body had coppercolored skin, chartreuse hair and fingernails, and a gold lame evening gown. Beside that body was the body of a blond, male giant in a pale blue field marshal's uniform, piped in scarlet, and spangled with medals. i think the enemy must have swiped the bodies in a raid on one of our outlying storage centers, and padded and dyed them, and dressed them up. "Madge, come back!" I said. The copper-colored woman with the chartreuse hair moved. A siren screamed and soldiers rushed from hiding places to grab the body Madge was in. The center was a trap for amphibians! The body Madge hadn't been able to resist had its ankles tied together, so Madge couldn't take the few steps she had to take if she was going to get out of it again. The soldiers carted her off triumphantly as a prisoner of war. I got into the only body available, the fancy field marshal, to try to help her. It was a hopeless situation, because the field marshal was bait, too, with its ankles tied. The soldiers dragged me after Madge. I I "(HE cocky young major in charge of the soldiers did a jig along the shoulder of the road, he was so proud. He was the first man ever to capture an amphibian, which was really something from the enemy's point of view. They'd been at war with us for years, and spent God knows how catching us was the first thing that made any amphibians pay much attention to them. When we got to the town, people were leaning out of windows and waving their fiags, and cheering the soldiers, and hissing Madge and me. Here were all the people who didn't want to be amphibious, who thought it was terrible for anybody to be amphibious -- people of all colors, shapes, sizes, and nationalities, joined together to fight the amphibians. It turned out that Madge and I were going to have a big trial. After being tied up every which way in jail all night, we were taken to a court room, where television cameras stared at us. Madge and I were worn to frazzles, because neither one of us had been cooped up in a body that long since I don't know when. Just when we needed to think more than we ever had, in jail before the trial, the bodies developed hunger pains and we couldn't get them comfortable on the cots, no matter how we tried; and, of course, the bodies just had to have their eight hours sleep. The charge against us was a capital offense on the books of the enemy -- desertion. As far as the enemy was concerned, the amphibians had all turned yellow and run out on their bodies, just when their bodies were needed to do brave and important things for humanity. We didn't have a hope of being acquitted. The only reason there was a trial at all was that it gave them an opportunity to sound off about why they were so right and we were so wrong. The court room was jammed with their big brass, all looking angry and brave and noble. "Mr. Amphibian," said the prosecutor, "you are old enough, aren't you, to remember when all men had to face up to life in their bodies, and work and fight for what they believed in?" "I remember when the bodies were always getting into fights, and nobody seemed to know why, or how to stop it," I said politely. "The only thing everybody seemed to believe in was that they didn't like to fight." "What would you say of a soldier who ran away in the face of fire?" he wanted to know. "I'd say he was scared silly." "He was helping to lose the battle, wasn't he?" "Oh, sure." There wasn't any argument on that one. "Isn't that what the amphibians have done -- run out on the human, race in the face of the battle of life?" "Most of us are still alive, if that's what you mean," I said. TT was true. We hadn't licked death, and weren't sure we wanted to, but we'd certainly lengthened life something amazing, compared to the span you could expect in a body. "You ran out on your responsibilities!" he said. "Like you'd run out of a burning building, sir," I patiently explained. "Leaving everyone else to struggle on alone!" "They can all get out the same door that we got out of. You can all get out any time you want to. All you do is figure out what you want and what your body wants, and concentrate on -- " The judge banged his gavel until I thought he'd split it. Here they'd burned every copy of Konigswasser's book they tould find, and there I was giving a course in how to get out of a body over a whole television network. "If you amphibians had your way," said the prosecutor, "everybody would run out on his responsibilities, and let life and progress as we know them disappear completely." "Why, sure," I agreed. "That's the point." "Men would no longer work for what they believe in?" he challenged. "I had a friend back in the old days who drilled holes in little square thingamajigs for seventeen years in a factory, and he never did get a very clear idea of what they were for. Another one I knew grew raisins for a glassblowing company, and the raisins weren't for anybody to eat, and he never did find out why the company bought them. Things like that make me sick -- now that I'm in a body, of course -- and what I used to do for a living makes me even sicker." "Then you despise human beings and everything they do," he said. "I like them fine -- better. than I ever did before. I just think it's a dirty shame what they have to do to take care of their bodies. You ought to get amphibious and see how happy people can be when they don't have to worry about where their body's next meal is coming from, or how to beep it from freezing in the wintertime, or what's going to happen to them when their body wears out." "And that, sir, means the end of ambition, the end of greatness!" "Oh, I don't know about that," I said. "We've got some pretty great people on our side. They'd be great in or out of bodies. It's the end of fear is what it is." I looked right into the lens of the nearest television camera. "And that's the most wonderful thing that ever happened to people." Down came the judge's gavel again, and the brass started to shout me down. The television men turned off their cameras frantically, and all the spectators, except for the biggest brass, were cleared out. I knew I'd really said something. All anybody would be getting on his television set now was organ music. When the confusion died down, the judge said the trial was over, and that Madge and I were guilty of desertion. N othing i could do could get US in any worse, so I talked back. "Now I understand you poor fish," I said. "You couldn't get along without fear. That's the only skill you've got -- how to scare yourselves and other people ' into doing things. That's the only ; fun you've got, watching people  jump for fear of what you'll do to their bodies or take away from their bodies." i Madge got in her two cents" worth. "The only way you can get any response from anybody is to scare them." "Contempt of court!" said the i judge. , '! "The only way you can scare people is if you can keep them in their bodies," I told him. The soldiers grabbed Madge  and me and started to drag us : out of the court room. ' "This means war!" I yelled. ? Everything stopped right there j and the place got very quiet. S "We're already at war," said  a general uneasily. j "Well, we're not," I answered, ' "but we will be, if you don't unt tie Madge and me this instant." J I was fierce and impressive in  that field marshal's body. "You haven't any weapons," i said the judge, "no knowhow. Outside of bodies, amphibians are nothing."  "If you don't cut us loose by the time I count ten," I told him,  "the amphibians will occupy the bodies of the whole kit and ca, boodle of you and march you right off the nearest cliff. The place is surrounded." That was J hogwash, of course. Only one person can occupy a body at a time, but the enemy couldn't be sure of that. "One! Two! Three!" The general swallowed, turned white, and waved his hand vaguely. "Cut them loose," he said weakly. The soldiers, terrified, too, were glad to do it. Madge and I were freed. , I took a couple of steps, headed my spirit in another direction, and that beautiful field marshal, medals and all, went crashing down the staircase like a grandfather clock. I realized that Madge wasn't with me. She was still in that copper-colored body with the chartreuse hair and fingernails. "What's more," I heard her saying, "in payment for all the trouble you've caused us, this body is to be addressed to me at New York, delivered in good condition no later than next Monday." "Yes, ma'am," said the judge. neers' Day Parade was just breaking up at the local storage center, and the Parade Marshal got out of his body and apologized to me for acting the way he had. "HeQk, Herb," I said, "you don't need to apologize. You weren't yourself. You were parading around in a body." That's the best part of being amphibious, next to not being afraid -- people forgive you for whatever fool thing you might have done in a body. Oh, there are drawbacks, I guess, the way there are drawbacks to everything. We still have to work off and on, maintaining the storage centers and getting food to keep the community bodies going. But that's a small drawback, and all the big drawbacks I ever heard of aren't real ones, just old-fashioned thinking by people who can't stop worrying about things they used to worry about before they turned amphibious. As I say, the oldsters will probably never get really used to it. Every so often, I catch myself getting gloomy over what happened to the pay-toilet business it took me thirty years to build. But the youngsters don't have any hangovers like that from the past. They don't even worry much about something happening to the storage centers, the way us oldsters do. So I guess maybe that'll be the next step in evolution -- to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea. (continued from pae #) have value then, for they can be eaten, worn, bartered for other commodities. They remain real; money does not. This is not what we are experiencing today. You'll find personal difficulties in any time of prosperity, just as you'll find prosperous individuals in any depression, but it is the health of the economy as a whole that counts, not the fortune or misfortune of persons or groups. There is only a single conclusion to be drawn from the application of relativity to economics: Our system has, with marvelous resiliency, balanced prices and incomes to such an astonishingly great extent that whatever dangers face us, inflation is not one of them. N aturally, you can count on the creative mind to hunt for a story in any given situation. For example: We wistfully remember when steak was #c a pound, custommade suits cost #, the average house was priced under #, and our money was wooed by desperate offers of bargains. Those were days, yes, sir! The good old days -- of low prices. We have considerably more trouble remembering just how scarce our money was. We now work shorter hours to earn a pound of steak, buy more suits, and never have so many of us owned homes. These, then, are the days -- of high incomes. All some genius has to do is give us the incomes of today and the prices of the past. It can be done only in fiction, and even there it would be hard to work out logically. There's another psychological quirk in the situation. Mark Twain noted it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. If people are offered their choice of #c an hour and #c a pound, or # an hour and # a pound, they'll almost invariably choose # an hour and # a pound -- even though there is not the least actual difference. Why? I don't know. Maybe because it feels good to strip big bills off a thick roll while grumbling about what prices used to be. The editorial that started all this fuss began: "You might say that humanity's slogan is, 'The obvious we see eventually; the completely apparent takes longer. " To that paraphrase of the Army Corps of Engineers' motto, I should have added: "When you contradict 'common sense,' keep your motor' running for a fast ir you could only see what we have in store for the Next # Issues, rific. The covers will introduce three new artists. You will clamor for more of their work.  Don't miss a single issue -- Let the mail man deliver them right to your door a week before they go on sale crTyour newsstand. Fill in the I Year # Years # Yeart (Add # Foreign Postage for each year) Your Name Address City State # Star Shelf Robert Heinlein. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, #. # pages, # bad when the best science fiction of the month is a juvenile. However; The Rolling Stones might take leading place even if the competition was stiff. For this is one of Heinlein's most delightful tales for young (and old) about the coming era of space travel. It has wit (including some monstrous puns), richly lifelike people, believable plot (provided you grant the premises), some blistering commentary (as, for example, the part on the beauties of our internal combustion motors!), and an outlook that is both adventuresome and mature. The tale tells of a pair of ingenious #-year-old twii named Castor and Pollux Stone, who are inventors and haywirers and some times general nuicances, and of their travels, with the other members of the Stone family, from the Moon clear out to the Asteroid Belt, with a stop en routeat Mars. Mixed up in the astral pottage is a telepathic youngest brother who always beats his grandma at chess because he can read her mind; some unflattering satire on television space opera (one is being written by the Stone family, ostensibly by seasoned spaceman Roger Stone, but actually as a collaboration) ; a # year old grandma named Hazel, an enchanting old adventuress. The bicycle repair shop in space is an incident not easily forgotten -- nor are the strange reproductive customs of the Martian "flat cats," lovable pets, but -- ! A thoroughly delightful job. Don't hesitate to give it to a youngster --  or to read it yourself. day Se Co., New York, #. # pages, # rHlS is another rip-snorting juvenile by a member of the profession who certainly knows what he is doing -- Isaac Asimov, who is hiding behind that "French" falseface. This one is strictly for bloodand-thunder; "gripping" is the word, and (for my taste) a bit too violent from its first two sentences, "David Starr was staring right at the man, so he saw it happen. He saw him die," to its final episode where the hero puts the villain through a medieval course of torture by slow poison. However, violence aside, it is a The plot : foods raised on Mars are essential to Earth's people, about # years from now. Villains are trying to get control of the Solar System's government by submitting Earth's populace to slow poison. David Starr, young Council of Science member, goes to Mars and after many adventures (including his discovery of the existence of real Martians in caves far below the planet's surface) pins down the rotters and frees Earth from threat of extinction. Not a girl in a carload; no romance; parlous little science; but endless imagination, exciting ideas and events. A good juvenile needn't offer more. This would be good even if it had less to offer. , Edgar Anderson. Little Brawn  Co., Boston, #. # pages, # who enjoys Willy Ley's natural history books will not want to miss. It is right down the science fiction lover's lane, telling an enthralling story of plant origins, plant variations and plant mysteries, with special emphasis on certain common weeds and agricultural crop plants. Admittedly a little heavier than the popularizations of Ley, this book by the assistant director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Professor of Botany at Washington University, St. Louis, is nevertheless an exciting adventure into a "new continent," the story of our ordinary plants. For once I can agree with a jacket blurb: "Probably not since the time of Darwin has there been a book more intelligible to the general reader, which was also of direct significance in the realm of science." Brackett. Gnome Press, New York, #. # pages, # novel in hard covers is a pleasurable way of passing a couple of hours. She writes well, moves her plot along at a suitable pace, and maneuvers her characters in a lifelike manner. The story deals with an American, Michael Trehearne, who discovers that he is one of an alien world of mutants whose mutation is such that they are able to stand the physical effects of acceleration for interstellar flight. The discovery is strange indeed, and so is life on the hidden spaceship of the Vardda, as the mutants are called. Trehearne leaves Earth and becomes an accepted Varddan. There is a beautiful girl, Shairn; a villain, Kerrel; and a plot which involves the efforts of a certain group to give the secret of star flight to all people of the Universe, removing it from the status of a Varddan monopoly. Everything comes out right in the end, of course. Corwin. Illustrated by Tibor Gergely. Simon  Schuster, New York', #. # pages, # Galaxy, Runyon Jones, aged #, sets out to locate Curgatory, where his dog, Pootzy, went after being run over by an auto. It is and other science fiction cliches, and it is occasionally rather sharp on the inequities of rules-andregulations, bureaucrats, and so on. Among the characters, pleasant and otherwise, whom you will meet are Mother Nature, B. L. Z. Bubb, Father Time, and the Giant. It's all rather cute, but (except once or twice) not sickeningly so. Fun for those who like Stuart Little by E. B. White, or The White Deer by James Thurber -- though not approaching those two pluperfect gems. Charles Dye. Abelard Press, New York, #. # pages, # T here are #I chapters in this book. By the end of Chapter #, every important character except the hero, the mystery woman, the watchman and "Hypo Ned" have been bumped off. A few pages later, the watchman is found dead, half a dozen other supernumeraries have been permanently disposed of or conked on the bean. At the end, after roughly a dozen more completely uncalledfor murders of unimportant people, one finds that practically no one is left except the hero, who has bumped off Hypo Ned, and the mystery woman, who takes over the hero with the following ineffable phrases which close the book: "You need someone to watch you," she finally said... "To kill you, of course..." And the last three words: "Their lips met." There is no real story behind all this pointless mayhem, although there was a good idea. The purpose was to show a ruthless telepath -- only one -- trying to take over the world and run it as he wishes. If ruthless enough, such a telepath could certainly do it, and the story might have been fascinating. But here it is so buried in blood, bruises, cut lips, knockouts, "stungunned" roughs, tortures and murders that before long you realize it's an evasion instead of a plot. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Los Angeles, #. # pages, # M eet one of those varicosed imitations of A. Merritt that proliferated during the #s and that always made Merritt, a pretty purple writer himself, seem restrained. Drome is one of the poorest of the imitations -- weak in concept, in plot, in characterizations, in style of writing. There is literally no reason for its being hauled lifeless out of tlie obscurity of the magazine files. Briefly, Drome tells of one more underworld, this one entered through a crevasse in the upper reaches of Mount Rainier in the state of Washington. By page #, one has still not reached Drome and boredom has set in. It is not relieved until page #, which is where the book ends. The Sentimentalisfs #i. ft dalictha were on their honeymoon, and consequently they were sentimental. To be sure, it would not have been easy for humans to imagine sentiment as existing between them. Humans would hardly associate tenderness with glances cast from sets of sixteen eyes mounted on jointed eye stalks. nor link langorous thrills with a coy mingling of positronic replilsion blasts -- even when the emission of positron blasts from beneath one's mantle was one's normal personal mode of locomotion. And when two creatures like Rhadampsicus and Nodalictha stood on what might be roughly described as their heads and twined their eye stalks together, so that they gazed fondly at each other with all sixteen eyes at once, humans would not have thought of it as the equivalent of a loving kiss. Humans would have screamed and run -- if they were not paralyzed by the mere sight of such individuals. Nevertheless, they were a very happy pair and they were very sentimental, and it was probably a good thing, copsidered from all angles. They were still newl#rweds on their wedding tour -- they had been married only seventy-five years before -- when they passed by the sun that humans call Cetis Gamma. Rhadampsicus noted its peculiarity. He was anxious, of course, for their honeymoon to be memorable in every possible way. So he pointed it out to Nodalictha and explained what was shortly to be expected. She listened with a bride's rapt admiration of her new husband's wisdom. Perceiving his scientific interest, she suggested shyly that they stop and watch. the area. There were planets -- inner ones, and then a group of gas giants, and then a very cosy series of three outer planets with surface temperatures ranging from three to seven degrees Kelvin. They changed course and landed on the ninth planet out, where the landscape was delightful. Rhadampsicus unlimbered his traveling kit and prepared a bower. Nitrogen snow rose and swirled and consolidated as he deftly shifted force-pencils. When the tumult subsided, there was a snug if primitive cottage for the two of them to dwell in while they waited for Cetis Gamma to accomplish its purpose. Nodalictha cried out softly when she entered the bower. She was fascinated by its completeness. There was even running liquid hydrogen from a little rill nearby. And over the doorway, as an artistic and appropriate touch, Rhadampsicus had put his own and Nodalictha's initials, pricked out in amber chlorine crystals and intertwined within the symbol which to them meant a heart. Nodalictha embraced him fondly for his thoughtfulness. Of course, no human would have recognized it as an embrace, but that did not matter. Happily, then, they settled down to observe the phenomenon that Cetis Gamma would presently display. They scanned the gas giant planets together, and then the inner ones. On the second planet out from the sun, they perceived small biped animals busily engaged in works of primitive civilization. Nodalictha was charmed. She asked eager questions, and Rhadampsicus searched his memory and told her that the creatures were not well known, but had been observed before. Limited in every way by their physical constitution, they had actually achieved a form of space travel by means of crude vehicles. He believed, he said, that the name they called themselves was "men." sun rose slowly in the east, and Lon Simpson swore patiently as he tried for the eighteenth time to get the generator back again in a fashion to make it work. His tractor waited in the nearby field. The fields waited. Over in Cetopolis, the scales and storesheds waited, and somewhere there was doubtless a cargo ship waiting for a spacegram to summon it to Cetis Gamma Two for a load of thanar leaves. And of course people everywhere waited for thanar leaves. age away -- which was not an advertising slogan but sound, practical geriatric science. But thanar leaves would only grow on Cetis Gamma Two, and the law said that all habitable planets had to be open for colonization and land could not be withheld from market. There was too much population back on Earth, anyhow. Therefore the Cetis Gamma Trading Company couldn't make a planetwide plantation and keep thanar as a monopoly, but Could only run its own plantation for research and instruction purposes for new colonists. Colonists had to be admitted to the planet, and they had to be sold land. But there are' ways of getting around every law. Lon Simpson swore. The Diesel of his tractor ran a generator. The generator ran the motors in the tractor's catawheels. But this was the sixth time in a month that the generator had broken down, and generators do not break down. Lon put it together for the eighteenth time this breakdown, and it still wouldn't work. Therewas nothing detectably wrong with it, but he couldn't make it work. Seething, he walked back to his neat, prefabricated house. He picked up the beamphone. Even Cathy's voice at the exchange in Cetopolis could not soothe him, he was so furious. "Cathy, give me Carson -- and don't listen!" he said tensely. He heard clickings on the twoway beam. "My generator's gone," he said sourly when Carson answered. "I've repaired it twice this week. It looks like it was built to stop working! What is this all about, anyhow?" The representative of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company sounded bored. "You want a new generator sent out?" he asked without interest."Your crop credit's still all right -- if the fields are in good shape." "I want machinery that works!" Lon Simpson snapped. "I want machinery that doesn't have to be bought four times over a growing season! And I want it at a decent price!" "Look, those generators come out from Earth. There's freight on them. There's freight on everything that comes out from Earth. You people come to a developed planet, you buy your land, your machinery, your house, and you get instruction in agriculture. Do you want the company to tuck you in bed at night besides? Do you want a new generator or not?" "How much?" demanded Lon. When Carson told him, he hit the ceiling. "It's robbery! What'll I have left for my crop if I buy that?" bored. "If you buy it and your crop's up to standard, you'll owe the crop plus three hundred credits. But we'll stake you to next growing season." "And if I don't?" demanded Lon. "Suppose I don't give you all my work for nothing and wind up in debt?" "By contract," Carson told him, "we've got the right to finish cultivating your crop and charge you for the work because we've advanced you credit on it. Then we attach your land, and house for the balance due. And you get no more credit at the Company stores. And passage off this planet has to be paid for in cash." He yawned. "Don't answer now," he said without interest. "Call me back after you calm down. You'd ' only he to apologize." Lon Simpson heard the click as he began to describe, heatedly, , what was in his mind... He said it anyhow. Then Cathy's voice came from the exchange. She  sounded shocked but sympa" thetic. , ' "Lon! Please!" He swallowed a particularly i inventive description of the man...ners, morals and ancestry #f all the directors and employees of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. Then he said, still fuming, "i "I told you not to listen!" His wrongs overcame him again. "It's robbery! It's peonage! They've got every credit I  had! They've got three-quarters ' of the value ofmy crop charged  up for replacements of the lousy l machinery they sold me-and now I'll end the growing season in debt! How am I going to ask you to marry me?" "Not over a beamphone, I hope," said Cathy. He was abruptly sunk in gloom. "That was a slip," he admitted. "I was going to wait until I got paid for my crop. It looked good. Now -- " "Wait a minute, Lon," Cathy J said. There was silence. She gave  somebody else a connection. ; The phone-beams from the colony farms all went to Cetopolis and Cathy was one of the two operators there. If or when the colony got prosperous enough, there would be a regular intercommunication system. So it was said. Meailwhile, Lon had a suspicion that there might be another reason for the antiquated central station. Cathy said brightly, "Yes, Lon?" "I'll come in to town tonight," he said darkly. "Date?" "Y-yes," stammered Cathy. "Oh, yes!" He hung up and went back out to the field and the tractor. He began to think sourly of a large number of things all at once. There was a law to encourage people to leave Earth for colonies on suitable planets. There was even governmental help for people who didn't have funds of their own. But if a man wanted to make something of himself, he preferred to use his own money and pick his own planet and choose his own way of life. Lon Simpson had bought four hectares of land on Cetis Gamma Two. He'd paid his passage out. He'd given five hundred credits a month for an instruction course on the Company's plantation, during which time he'd labored faithfully to grow, harvest, and cure thanar leaves for the Company's profit. Then he'd bought farm machinery from the Company -- and a house -- and very painstakingly had set out to be a colonist on his own. had arrived on a Company ship and taken up her duties as beamphone operator at Cetopolis. It was a new colony, with not more than five thousand humans on the whole planet, all of them concentrated near the one small town with its plank sidewalks and prefabricated buildings. Lon Simpson met Cathy, and his labors on his thanar farm acquired new energy and purpose. But he was up against a shrewd organization. His inordinately expensive farm machinery broke down. He repaired it. After a time it could not be repaired any longer and he had to buy more. Before the thanar plants were half grown, he owed more than half his prospective crop for machinery replacements. Now he could see the method perfectly. The Company imported all machinery. It made that machinery in its own factories, machinery that was designed to break down. So this year -- even if nothing else happened -- Lon would wind up owing more for machinery replacements than the crop would bring. It was not likely that nothing else would happen. Next season he would start off in debt, instead of all clear, and if the same thing happened he would owe all his crop and be six thousand credits behind. By harvest after next, his farm and house could be foreclosed for debt and he could either try to work for other colonists -- who were in the process of going through the same wringer themselves -- or hire out as a farmhand on the Company's plantation. He would never be able to save space-fare away from the planet. He would be very much worse off than the assisted emigrants to other planets, who had not invested all they owned in land and machinery and agricultural instructions. And there was Cathy. She owed for her passage. It would be years before she could pay that back, if ever. She couldn't live in the farmhand barracks. They might as well give up thinking about each other. It was a system. Beautifully legal, absolutely airtight. Not a thing wrong with it. The Company had a monojxdy on thanar, despite the law. It had all the cultivated land on Cetis Gamma Two under its control, and its labor problem was .solved. Its laborers first paid something like sixteen thousand credits a head for the privilege of trying to farm independently for a year or two,  and then became farmhands for the Company at a bare subsistence wage.  Lon Simpson was in the grip of that system. He had taken the i generator apart and put it back f together eighteen times. There was nothing visibly wrong with it. It had been designed to break down with nothing visibly wrong with it. I he couldn't repair it, though, he was out fifteen hundred credits, his investment was wiped out, and all his hopes ere ? gone. He took the generator apart for the nineteenth time. He wondered grimly how the Company's de' signers made generators so cleverf ly that they would stop working so that even the trouble with them couldn't be figured out. It was a very ingenious system. UT on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus explained the situation to his bride as they waited for the interesting astronomical phenomenon. They were quite cosy, waiting. Their bower was simple, of course. Frozen nitrogen walls, and windows of the faint bluish tint of oxygen ice. Rhadampsicus had grown some cyanogen flower-crystals to make the place look homelike, and there was now a lovely reflectionpool in which liquid hydrogen reflected the stars. Cetis Gamma, the local sun, seemed hardly more than a very bright and very near star -- it was four light-hours away -- and it glimmered over the landscape and made everything quite charming. Nodalictha, naturally, would not enter the minds of the male bipeds on the inner planet. Modesty forbade such a thing -- as, of course, the conscientiousness of a brand-new husband limited Rhadampsicus to the thoughts of the males among the' bipeds. But Nodalictha was distressed when Rhadampsicus told her of what was occurring among the bipeds. He guided her thoughts to Cathy, in the beamphone exchange at Cetopolis. "But it is terrible!" said Nodalictha in distress when she had absorbed Cathy's maiden meditations. She did not actually speak in words and soundwaves. There is no air worth mentioning at seven degrees Kelvin. It's all frozen. A little helium hangs around, perhaps. Nothing else. The word for communication is not exactly the word for speech, but it will do. Nodalictha said, "They love each other! In a cute way, they are like -- like we were, Rhadampsicus!". Rhadampsicus played a positron-beam on her in feigned indignation. If that beam had hit a human, the human would have curled up in a scorched, smoking heap. But Nodalictha bridled. "Rhadampsicus!" she protested fondly. "Stop tickling me ! But can't you dd something for them? They are so cute!" And Rhadampsicus gallantly sent his thoughts back to the second planet, where a biped grimly labored over a primitive device. T ON Simpson, staring at the " disassembled generator, suddenly blinked. The grimness went out of his expression. He stared. An idea had occurred to him. He went over it in his mind. He blew out his breath in a long whistle. Then, very painstakingly, he did four or five things that completely ruined the generator for the extremely modest trade-in allowance he could have gotten for it at the Company store. He worked absorbedly for perhaps twenty minutes, his eyes intent. At the end of that time he had threads of unwound secondary wire stretched back and forth across a forked stick of dhil weed, and two small pieces of sheet iron twisted together in an extremely improbable manner. He connected the ends of the secondary wire to contacts in his tractor. He climbed into the tractor seat. He threw over the drive control. The tractor lurched into motion. The Diesel wasn't running. But the tractor rolled comfortably as Lon drove it, the individual motors in the separate catawheels drawing power from a mere maze of wires across a forked stick -- plus two pieces of sheet iron. There was plenty of power. Lon drove the tractor the rest of the morning and all afternoon with a very peculiar expression on his face. He understood what he had done. Now that he had done it, it seemed the most obvious of expedients. He felt inclined to be incredulous that nobody had ever happened to think of this particulardevice before. But they very plainly hadn't. It was a source of all the electric power anybody could possibly want. The voltage would depend on the number of turns of copper wire around a suitably forked stick. The amperage would be whatever that voltage could put through whatever was hooked to it. He no longer needed a new generator for his tractor. He had one. He didn't even need a Diesel. With adequate power -- he'd been having to nurse the Diesel along, too, lately -- Lon Simpson ran his tractor late into the twilight. He cultivated all the ground that urgently needed. cultivation, and at least one field he hadn't hoped to get to before next week. But his expression was amazed. It is a very peculiar sensation to discover that one is a genius. T hat night, in Cetopolis, he told Cathy all about it. It was a very warm night -- an unusually warm night. They walked ' along the plank sidewalks of the little frontier town -- as a new colony, Cetis Gamma Two was a frontier -- and Lon talked extravagantly. ' He had meant to explain painfully to Cathy that there was" no use in their being romantic about each other. He'd expected to have to tell . her bitteirly that he was I doomed to spend the rest of his j life adding to the profits of the ! Cetis Gamma Trading Company, j with all the laws of the human  race holding him in peonage. He'd I thought of some very elegant dei scriptions of the sort of people ; who'd worked out the system in force on Cetis Gamma' Two.  But he didn't. As they strolled  under the shiver trees that lined i the small town's highways, and ? smelled the chanel bushes beyond  the town's limits, and listened to : the thin violinlike strains of what k should have been night birds -- they weren't; the singers were furry instead of feathered, and they slept in burrows during the day -- as they walked with linked fingers in the warm and starlit night, Lon told Cathy about his invention. He explained in detail just why wires wound in just that fashion, and combined with bits of sheet iron twisted in just those shapes, would produce power for free and forever. He explained how it had to be so. He marveled that nobody had ever thought of it before. He explained it so that Cathy could almost understand it. "It's wonderful!" she said wistfully. "They'll run spaceships on your invention, won't they, Lon? And cities? And everything! I guess you'll be very rich for inventing it!" He stopped short and stared at her. He hadn't thought that far ahead. Then he said blankly; "But I'll have to get back to Earth to patent it! And I haven't got the money to pay one fare, let alone two!" "Two?',' asked Cathy hopefully. "Why two?" "You're going to marry me, aren't you?" he demanded. "I sort of hope that was all settled." Cathy stamped her foot. "Hadn't you heard," she asked indignantly, "that such things aren't taken for granted? Especially when two people are walking in the starlight and are supposed to be thrilled? It isn't settled -- not until after you've kissed me, anyhow!" He remedied his error. iUT on the ninth planet, very far away, Nodalictha blushed slightly. As a bride, she was in that deliciously embarrassing state of becoming accustomed to discussions which would previously have been unconventional. "They are so quaint!" Then she hesitated and said awkwardly, "The idea of putting their -- their lips together as a sign of affection -- " Rhadampsicus was amused, as a bridegroom may be by the de lightful innocences of a new wife. He evinced his amusement in a manner no human being could conceivably have recognized as the tender laugh it was. "Little goose!" he said fondly. Of course, instead of a fowl, he thought of a creature that had thirty-four legs and scales instead of feathers and was otherwise thoroughly ungooselike. "Little goose, they do that because they can't do this!" And he twined his eye stalks sentimentally about hers. Two. Lon Simpson cultivated his thanar fields. But he began to worry. His new power source was more than a repair for a broken-down tractor. It was valuable. It was riches! He had in it one of those basic, overwhelmingly important discoveries by which human beings have climbed up from the status of intelligent Earthbound creatures to galactic colonists -- And a lot of good it had done theml It was a basic principle for power supply that would relieve mankind permanently of the burden of fuels. The number of planets available for colonization would be multiplied. The cost of every object made by human beings would be reduced by the previous cost of power. The price of haulage from one planet to another would be reduced to a fraction. Every member of the human race would become richer as a result of the gadget now attached to Lon Simpson's tractor. He was entitled to royalties on the wealth he was to distribute. But... He was a ihanai farmer on Cetis Gamma Two. His crop was mortgaged. He could not possibly hope to raise enough money to get back to Earth to arrange for the marketing of his invention. Especially, he could not conceivably raise money enough to take Cathy with him. He had riches, but they weren't available. And something else might happen to ruin him at any time. Something else did. The freezer element of his deep-freeze locker broke down. He didn't notice it. He had a small kitchen locker in which food for week-to-week use was stored. He didn't know anything about the deep-freeze unit that held a whole growing season's supply of food. The food in it -- all imported from Earth and very expensive -- thawed, fermented, spoiled, developed evil smelling gases, and waited for an 'appropriate moment to reveal itself as a catastrophe. There were other things to worry about at the time. A glacier up at Cetis Gamma Two's polar region began to retreat, instead of growing as was normal for the season. There was a remarkable solar prominence of three days' duration swinging around the equator of the local sun. There was a meeting of directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company, at which one of the directors pointed out that the normal curve of increase" for profits was beginning to flatten out, and something had to be done to improve the financial position of the company. Ugly sun-spots appeared on the northern hemisphere of Cetis Gamma. If there had been any astronomers on the job, there would have been as much excitement as a four alarm fire. But there were no astronomers. The greatest agitation on the second planet of Cetis Gamma Two was felt by Lon Simpson. Cathy had made friends with a married woman colonist who would chaperon her on a visit to Lon's farm, and was coming out to visit and see the place that was to be the scene of the ineffable, unparalleled happiness she and Lon would know after they were married. She came, she saw, she was captivated. Lon blissfully opened the door of the house she was to share. He had spent the better part of two days cleaning up so it would be fit for her to look at. Cathy entered. There was a dull, booming noise, a hissing, and a. bubbling, and then a rank stench swept through the house and strangled them. riHE boom, of course, was the bursting open of the deepfreeze locker from the p'ressure of accumulated gases within it. The smell was that of the deepfreeze contents, ten days thawed out without Lon knowing it. There are very few smells much worse than frozen fish gone very, very bad in a hot climate. If there are worse smells, they come from once-frozen eggs bursting from their shells when pressure outside them is relieved. In this case, trimmings were added by fermenting strawberries, moldy meat and badly decayed vegetables, all triumphantly making themselves known at the same instant. Cathy gasped and choked. Lon got her out of doors, gasping himself. It was not difficult to deduce what had happened. He opened the house windows from the outside, so the smell could go away. But he knew despair. "I -- can't show you the house, Cathy," he said numbly. "My locker went bad and all the food followed suit." "Lon!" wailed Cathy. "It's terrible! How will you eat?" Lon began to realize that the matter was more serious than the loss of an opportunity for a sentimental inspection of the house. He had dreamed splendidly, of late. He didn't quite know how he was going to manage it, but since his tractor was working magnificently he had come to picture himself and Cathy in the role of successful colonists, zestfully growing thanar leaves for the increasing multitudes of peoday. He'd reverted to the pictured dreams in the Cetis Gamma Trading Company's advertisements. He'd daydreamed of himself and Cathy as growing with the colony, thriving as it throve, and ultimately becoming moderately rich -- in children and grandchildren, anyhow -- with life stretching out before them in a sort of rosy glow. He'd negligently assumed that somehow they would also be rich from the royalties on his invention. But now he came down to reality. His house was uninhabitable for the time being. He could continue to cultivate his fields, but he wouldn't be able to eat. The local plant-life was not suitable for human digestion. He had to live on food imported from Earth. Now he had to buy a new stock from the Company, and it would bankrupt him. With an invention worth more -- probably -- than the Cetis Gamma Company itself, if he could realize on it, he still was broke. His crop was mortaged. If Carson learned about his substitute for a generator, the Company would immediately clamp down to get it away from him. He took Cathy back to Cetopolis. He feverishly appealed to other colonists. He couldn't tell them about his generator substitute. If they knew about it, in time Carson would know. If they used it, Carson would eventually get hold of a specimen, to send back to Earth for pirating by the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. All Lon could do was try desperately to arrange to borrow food to live on until his crop came in, though even then he wouldn't be in any admirable situation. He couldn't borrow food in quantity. Other colonists had troubles, too. They'd give him a meal, yes, but they couldn't refill his freezer without emptying their own. Which would compel them to buy more. Which would be charged against their crops. Which would simply hasten the day when they would become day-laborers on the Company's thanar farm. Lon had about two days' food in the kitchen locker. He determined to stretch it to four. Then he'd have to buy more. With each meal, then, his hopes of freedom and prosperity -- and Cathy -- grew less. Of course, he could starve... mously and pleasantly interested in what went on in Cetis Gamma's photosphere. From the ninth planet, he scanned the prominences with enthusiasm, making notes. Nodalictha tried to take a proper wifely interest in her husband's hobby, but she could not keep it up indefinitely. She busied herself with her housekeeping. She fashioned a carpet of tufted methane fibres and put up curtains at the windows. She enlarged the garden Rhadampsicus hacf made, adding borders of crystallized ammonia and a sort of walkway with a hedge of monoclinic sulphur which glittered beautifully in the starlight. She knew that this was only a temporary dwelling, but she wanted Rhadampsicus to realize that she, could make any place a comfortable home. He remained absorbed in the phenomena of the local sun. One great prominence, after five days of spectacular existence, divided into two which naturally moved apart and stationed themselves at opposite sides of the sun's equator. They continued to rotate with the sun itself, giving very much the effect of an incipient pin wheel. Two other minor prominences came into being midway between them. Rhadampsicus watched in fascination. Nodalictha came and reposed beside him on a gentle slope of volcanic slag. She waited for him to notice her. She would not let herself be sensitive about his interest in his hobby, of course, but she could not really find it absorbing for herself. A trifle wistfully, she sent her thoughts to the female biped on the second planet. After a while she said in distress, "Rhadampsicus! Oh, they are so unhappy!" Rhadampsicus gallantly turned his attention from the happenings on the sun. "What's that, darling?" "Look!" said Nodalictha plaintively. "They are so much in love, Rhadampsicus! 'And they can't marry because he hasn't anything edible to share with her!" Rhadampsicus scanned. He was an ardent and sentimental husband. If his new little wife was distressed about anything at all, Rhadampsicus was splendidly ready to do something about it. kitchen locker. The big deepfreezer was repaired now. Once a season, a truck came out from Cetopolis and filled it. The food was costly. A season's supply was kept in deep-freeze. Once in one or two weeks, one refilled the kitchen locker. It was best to leave the deep-freeze locker closed as much as possible. But now the big deep-freeze was empty. He'd cleaned out the ghastly mess in it, and he had it running again, but he had nothing to put in it. To have it refilled would put him hopelessly at the Company's mercy, but there was nothing else to do. Bitterly, he called the Trading Company office, and Carson answered. "This is Simpson," Lon told him. "How much -- " "The price for a generator," sSid Carson, bored, "is the same as before. Do you want it sent out?" -- "No! My food locker broke down. My food store spoiled. I need more." "I'll figure it," replied Carson over the beamphone. He didn't seem interested. After a moment, he said indifferently, "Fifteen hundred credits for standard rations to crop time, hen you'll need more." "It's robbery!" raged Lon. "I can't expect more than four thousand credits for my crop! You've got three thousand charged against me now!" Carson yawned. "True. A new generator, fifteen hundred: new food supplies fifteen hundred. If your crop turns out all right, you'll start the new season with two thousand credits charged up as a loan against your land." Lon Simpson strangled on his fury. "You'll take all my leaves and I'll still owe you! Then credit for seed and food and -- If I need to buy more machinery, you'll own my farm and crop next crop time! Even if my crop is good! Your damned Company will own my farm!" "That's your lookout," Carson said without emotion. "Being a thanar farmer was your idea, not mine. Shall I send out the food?" Lon Simpson bellowed into the beamphone. He heard clicking, then Cathy's voice. It was at one reproachful and sympathetic. "Lon! Please!" He panted at her, and hung up. It is essential to a young man in love that he shine, somehow, in the eyes of the girl he cares for. Lon was not shining. He was appearing as the Galaxy's prize sap. He'd invested a sizable fortune in his farm. He was a good farmer -- hard-working and skilled. In the matter of repairing generators, he'd proved to be a genius. But he was at the mercy of the Cetis Gamma Company's representative. He was already in debt. If he wanted to go on eating, he'd go deeper. If he were careful and industrious and thrifty, the Trading Company would take his crop and farm in six more months and then give him a job at day-labor wages. He went grimly to the kitchen of his home. He looked at the trivial amount of food remaining. He was hungry. He could eat it all right now. If he did -- Then, staring at the food in the kitchen locker, he blinked. An idea had occurred to him. He was blankly astonished at it. He went over and over it in his mind. His expression became dubiously skeptical, and then skeptically amazed. But his eyes remained intent as he thought. Presently, looking very skeptical indeed, he went out of the house and mwound more copper wire from the remnant of the disassembled generator. He came back to the kitchen. He took an emptied tin can and cut it in a distinctly peculiar manner. The cuts he made were asymmetrical. When he had finished, he looked at it doubtfully. A long time later he had made a new gadget. It consisted of two open coils, one quite large and one quite small. Their resemblance to each other was plain, but they did not at all resemble any other coils that had been made for any other purpose whatsoever. If they looked like anything, it was the "mobiles" that some sculptors once insisted were art. Lon stared at his work with an air of helplessness. Then he went out again. He returned with the forked stick that had proved to be a generator. He connected the wires from that improbable contrivance to the coils of the new and still more unlikely device. The eccentrically cut tin can was in the middle, between them. There was a humming sound. Lon went out a third time and came back with a mass of shrubbery. He packed it in the large coil. He muttered to himself, "I'm out of my head! I'm crazy!" But then he went to the kitchen locker. He put a small packet of frozen green peas in the tin can between the two coils. The humming sound increased. After a moment there was another parcel of green peas -- not frozen -- in the small coil. Lon took it out. The device hummed more loudly again. Immediately there was another parcel of green peas in the small coil. He took them out. When he had six parcels of green peas instead of one, the mass of foliage in the large coil collapsed abruptly. Lon disconnected the wires and removed the debris. The native foliage looked shrunken, somehow, dried-out. Lon tossed it through the window. green peas on to cook and sat down and held his head in his hands. He knew what had happened. He knew how. The local flora on Cetis Gamma Two naturally contained the same chemical elements as the green peas imported from Earth. Those elements were combined in chemical 'compounds similar, if not identical to, those of the Earth vegetation. The new gadget simply converted the compounds in the large coil to match those in the sample -- in the tin can -- and assembled them in the small coil according to the physical structure of the sample. In this case, as green peas. The device would take any approximate compound from the large coil and reassemble it -- suitably modified as per sample -- in the small coil. It would work not only for green peas, but for roots, barks, herbs, berries, blossoms and flowers. It would even work for thanar leaves. When that last fact occurred to him, Lon Simpson went quietly loony, trying to figure out how he had come to think of such a thing. He was definitely crocked, because he picked up the beamphone and told Cathy all about it. And he was not loony because he told Cathy, but because he forgot his earlier suspicions of why there was a central station for beamphones in Cetopolis, instead of a modern direct-communication system. In fact, he forgot the system in operation on Cetis Gamma Two -- the Company's system. It had been designed to put colonists through the wringer and deposit them at its own farm to be daylaborers forever with due regard to human law. But it was a very efficient system. It took care of strokes of genius, too. That night, Carson, listening boredly to the record of all the conversations over the beamphone during the day, heard what Lon had told Cathy. He didn't believe it, of course. But he made a memo to look into it. himself. Out on the ninth planet, the weather was slightly warmer -- almost six degrees Kelvin, two hundred and sixty-odd degrees centigrade below zero -- and he was inclined to be lazy. But he was very handsome, in Nodalictha'seyes. He was seventy or more feet from his foremost "It was fatiguing to make him eye stalk to the tip of his least go through it, darling, but since crimson appendage, and he fluoryou wished it, it is done. He now esced beautifully in the starlight, has food to share with the feHe was a very 'gallant young male." bridegroom. "And you're handsome, too, When he saw Nodalictha lookRhadampsicus!" Nodalictha said ing at him admiringly, he said irrelevantly. with his customary tenderness : Slie felt as brides sometimes do on their honeymoons. She was quite sure that she had not only the bravest and handsomest of husbands, but the most thoughtful and considerate. Presently, with their eye stalks intertwined, he asked softly: "Are you weary of this place, darling? I would like to watch the rest of this rather rare phenomenon, but if you're not interested, we can go on. And truly I won't mind." "Of course we'll stay!" protested Nodalictha. "I want to do anything you want to. I'm perfectly happy just being with you." And, unquestionably, she was. bit upset by the recorded conversation he'd listened to. Lon Simpson had been almost incoherent, but he obviously meant Cathy to take him seriously. And there were some things to back it up. He'd reported his generator hopelessly useless -- and hadn't bought a new one. He'd reported all his food spoiled -- and hadn't bought more. Carson thought it over carefully. The crop inspection helicopter reported Simpson's fields in much better shape than average, so his tractor was obviously working. Carson asked casual, deadpan questions of other colonists who came into the Company store. Most of them were liarried, sullen and bitter. They were unanimously aware of the wringer they were being put through. They knew what the Company was doing to them and they hated Carson because he represented it. But they did answer Carson's casual questions about Lon Simpson. Yes, he'd tried to borrow food from them. No, they couldn't lend it to him. Yes, he was still eating. In fact he was offering to swap food. He was short on fruit and long on frozen green peas. Then he was long on fruit and frozen green peas and short on frozen sweet corn and strawberries. No, he didn't want to trade on a big scale. One package of frozen strawberries was all he wanted. He gave six packages of frozen peas for it. He gave six packages of frozen strawberries for one package of frozen sweet corn. He'd swapped a dozen parcels of sweet corn for one of fillet of flounder, two dozen fillet of flounder for cigarettes, and fifty cartons of cigarettes for a frozen roast of beef. It didn't make sense unless the conversation on the beamphone was right. If what Lon had told Cathy was true, he'd have his frozen food locker filled up again by now. He had some sort of device which converted the indigestible local flora and fauna into digestible Earth products. To suspect such a thing was preposterous, but Carson suspected everyone and everything. As representative of the Company, Carson naturally did its dirty work. New colonists bought farms from the central office on Earth and happily took ship to Cetis Gamma Two. Then Carson put them through their instruction course, outfitted them to try farming on their own, and saw to it that they went bankrupt and either starved or took jobs as farmhands for the Company, at wages assuring that they could never take ship away again. It was a nasty job and Carson did it very well, because he loved it. While he still debated Lon's insane boasts to Cathy over the beamphone system, he prepared to take over the farm of another colonist. That man had been deeper in debt than Lon, and he'd been less skilled at repairs, so it was time to gather him in. Carson called him to Cetopolis to tell him that the Company regretfully could not extend further credit, would have to take back his farm, house, and remaining food stores, and finish the cultivation of his thanar leaf crop to repay itself for the trouble. The colonist, however, said briefly: "Go to hell." air-cooled office. Carson said mildly : "You're broke. You'll want a job when you haven't got a farm. You can't afford to tell me to go to hell." "You can't take my farm unless my fields are neglected," the colonist said comfortably. "They aren't. And my thanar leaf crop is going to be a bumper one. I'll pay off all I owe -- and we colonists are planning to start a trading company of our own, to bring in good machinery and deal fairly." Carson smiled coldly, "You forget something," he said. "As representative of the Trading Company, I can call on you to pay up all your debts at once, if I have reason to think you intend to try to evade payment. I do think so. I call on you for immediate payment in full. Pay up, please!" This was an especially neat paragraph in the fine print of the colonists' contract with the Company. Any time a colonist got obstinate he could be required to pay all he owed, on the dot. And if he had enough to pay, he wouldn't owe. So the Trading Company could ruin anybody. But this colonist merely grinned. "By law," he observed, "you have to accept thanar leaves as legal tender, at five credits a kilo. Send out a truck for your payment. I've got six tons in my barn, all ready to turn in." He made a most indecorous gesture and walked out. A moment later, he put his head back in. "I forgot," he commented politely. "You said I couldn't afford to tell you to go to hell. With six tons of thanar leaves on hand, I'm telling you to -- " He added several other things, compared to which telling Carson to go to hell was the height of courtesy. He went away. Carson went a little pale. It occurred to him that this colonist was a close neighbor of Lon Simpson. Maybe Lon had gotten tired of converting dhil weed and shiver leaves into green peas and asparagus, and had gotten to work turning out thanar. It was a very bad road, and any four-wheeled vehicle would have shaken itself to pieces on the way. The gyrocar merely jolted Carson severely. The jolting kept him from noticing how hot the weather was. It was really extraordinarily hot, and Carson suffered more because he spent most of his time in an air-conditioned office. But for the same reason he did not suspect anything abnormal. When he reached Lon's farm, he noticed that the thanar leaves were growing admirably. For a moment, sweating as he was, he was reminded of tobacco plants i growing on Maryland hillsides. The heat and the bluish-green color of the plants seemed very familiar. But then a cateagle ran hastily up a tree, out on a branch, and launched its crimson furry self into midair. That broke the spell of supposedly familiar j things. i Carson turned his gyrocar in  at Lon Simpson's house. There j were half a dozen other colonists  around. Two of them drove up I with farm trucks loaded with  mixed foliage. They had pulled I up, cut off and dragged down ' just about anything that grew, ; and loaded their truck with it. Two other colonists were loading i another cart with thanar leaves,  neatly bundled and ready for the  warehouse. j They regarded Carson with j pleased eyes. Carson spoke ses verely to Cathy. "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on duty ,, at the beamphone exchange! You ' can be discharged -- " Lon Simpson said negligently, "I'm paying her passage. By law, anybody can pay the passage of any woman if she intends to marry him, and then her contract with the company is ended. They had rules like that in ancient days -- only they used to pay in tobacco instead of thanar leaves." Carson gulped. "But how will you pay her fare?" He asked sternly. "You're in debt to the Company yourself." Lon Simpson jerked his thumb toward his barn. Carson turned and looked. It was a nice-looking barn. The aluminum siding set it off against a backing of shiver trees, dhil and giant sketit growth. Carson's eyes bugged out. Lon's barn was packed so tightly with thanar leaves that they bulged out the doors. "I need to turn some of that stuff in, anyhow," said Lon pleasantly. "I haven't got storage space for it. By law you have to buy it at five credits a kilo. I wish you'd send out and get some. I'd like to build up some credit. Think I'll take a trip back to Earth." At this moment, there was a very peculiar wave of heat. It was riot violent, but the temperature went up about four degrees -- suddenly, as if somebody had turned on a room heater. But still nobody looked up at the sun. furiously if Lon had converted other local foliage into thanar leaves, as he'd made his green peas and the other stuff he'd told Cathy about on the beamphone. Lon tensed, and observed to the other colonists that evidently all beamphones played into recorders. The atmosphere became unfriendly. Carson got more rattled still. He began to wave his arms and sputter. Lon Simpson treated him gently. He took him into the house to watch the converter at work. One of the colonists kept its large coil suitably stuffed with assorted foliage. There was a "hand" of cured, early -- best quality -- thanar leaves in an erratically cut tin can. Duplicates of that hand of best quality thanar were appearing in the small coil as fast as they were removed, and fresh foliage was being heaped into the large coil. "We expect," said Lon happily, "to have a bumper crop of the best grade of thanar this year. It looks like every colonist on the planet will be able to pay off his debt to the Company and have credit left over. We'll be sending a committee back to Earth to collect our credits there and organize an independent cooperative trading company that will bring out decent machinery and be a competitive buying agency for thanar. I'm sure the Company will be glad to see us all so prosperous." It was stifling hot by now, but nobody noticed. The colonists were much too interested in seeing Carson go visibly to pieces before them. He was one of those people who seem to have been developed by an all-wise Providence expressly to be underlings for certain types of large corporations. Their single purpose in life is to impress their superiors in the corporation that hires them. But now Carson saw his usefulness ended. Through his failure, in some fashion, the Company's monopoly on thanar leaves and its beautiful system of recruiting labor were ruined. He would be discharged and probably blacklisted. If he had looked up toward the western sky, squinted a little, and gazed directly at the local sun, he would have seen that his private troubles were of no importance at all. But he didn't. He went staggering to his gyrocar and headed back for Cetopolis. It was a tiny town, with plank streets, a beamphone exchange, and its warehouses over by the spaceport. It was merely a crude and rather ugly little settlement on a newly colonized planet. But it had been the center of an admirable system by which the Cetis Gamma Trading Company got magnificently rich and disa day kept old age away) throughout all humanity at the very top price the traffic would bear. And the system was shaky now and Carson would be blamed for it. Behind him, the colonists rejoiced as hugely as Carson suffered. But none of them got the proper perspective, because none of them looked at the sun. About four o'clock in the afternoon, it got suddenly hotter again, as abruptly as before. It stayed hotter. Something made Cathy look up. There was a thin cloud overhead, just the right thickness to act something like a piece of smoked glass. She could look directly at the sun through it, examine the disk with her naked eye. But it wasn't a disk any longer. Cetis Gamma was a bulging, irregularly shaped thing twice its normal size. As she looked, it grew larger still. O UT on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus was absorbed in his contemplation of Cetis Gamma. With nothing to interfere with his scanning, he could follow the developments perfectly. There had been 'first one gigantic prominence, then two, which separated to opposite sides of its equator. Then two other prominences began to grow between them. For two full days, the new prominences grew, and then split. so ttiat the sun came to have the appearance of a ball of fire surrounded by a ring of blue-white incandescence. Then came instability. Flame geysers spouting hundreds of thousands of miles into emptiness ceased to keep their formation. They turned north and south from the equatorial line. The outline of the sun became irregular. It ceased to be round in profile, and even the appearance of a ring around it vanished. It looked -- though this would never have occurred to Rhadampsicus -- very much like a fiercely glowing gigantic potato. Its evolution of heat went up incredibly. It much more than doubled its rate of radiation. Rhadampsicus watched each detail of the flare-up with fascinated attention. Nodalictha dutifully watched with him. But she could not maintain her interest in so purely scientific a phenomenon. When a thin streamer of pure blue-white jetted upward from the sun's pole, attaining a speed of six hundred and ninety-two miles per second, Rhadampsicus turned to her with enthusiasm. "Exactly in the pattern of a flare-up according to Dhokis' theory!" he exclaimed. "I have always thought he was more nearly right thah the modernists. Radiation pressure can build up in a closed system such as the interior of a sun. It can equal the gravitational constant. And obviously it would break loose at the pole." Then he saw that Nodalictha's manner was one of distress. He was instantly concerned. "What's the matter, darling?" he asked anxiously. "I didn't mean to neglect you, my precious one!" Nodalictha did something that would have scared a human being out of a year's growth, but was actually the equivalent of an unhappy, stifled sob. "I am a beast!" said Rhadampsicus penitently. "I've kept you here, in boredom, while I enjoyed myself watching this sun do tricks. I'm truly sorry, Nodalictha. We will go on at once. I shouldn't have asked you to -- " But Nodalictha said unhappily, "It isn't you, Rhadampsicus. It's me! While you've been watching the star. I've amused myself watching those quaint little creatures on the second planet. I've thought of them as -- well, as pets. I've grown fond of them. It was absurd of me -- " "Oh, but it is wonderful of you," said Rhadampsicus tenderly. "I love you all the more for it, my darling. But why are you unhappy about them? I made sure they had food and energy." "They're going to be burned up!" wailed Nodalictha, "and they're so cute!" Rhadampsicus blinked his eyes -- all sixteen of them. Then he said self-accusingly, "My dear, I should have thought of that. Of course this is only a flare-up, darling..." Then he made an impatient gesture. "I see! You would rather think of them as happy, in their little way, than as burned to tiny crisps." He considered, scanning the second planet with the normal anxiety of a bridegroom to do anything that would remove a cloud from his bride's lovely sixteen eyes. N ight fell on Cetopolis, and with it came some slight alleviation of the dreadfulness that had begun that afternoon. The air was furnacelike in heat and dryness. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. Thestars were faint and red and ominous, seen through the smoke that overlay everything. So far, to be sure, breathing was possible. It was even possible to be comfortable in an air-conditioned room. But this was only the beginning. Lon and Cathy sat together on the porch of his house, after sundown. The other colonists had gone away to their own homes. When the crack of ' doom has visibly begun, men do queer things. In Cetopolis some undoubtedly got drunk, or tried to. But there were farmers who would spend this last night looking at their . drooping crops, trying to persuade themselves that if Cetis Gamma only went back to normal before sunrise, the crops might yet be saved. But none of them expected it. Off to the south there was an angry reddish glare in the sky. That was vegetation on the desert there, burning. It grew thick as jungle in the rainy season, and dried out to pure dessication in dry weather. It had caught fire of itself from the sun's glare in late afternoon. Great clouds of acrid smoke rose from it to the stars. Beyond the horizon to thewest there was destruction. Lon and Cathy sat close together. She hadn't even asked to be taken back to Cetopolis, as convention would have required. The sun was growing hotter still while it sank below the horizon. It was expanding in fits and starts as new writhing spouts of stuff from its interior burst the bonds of gravity. Blazing magma flung upward in an unthinkable eruption. The sun had been three times normal size when it set. Lon was no astronomer, but plainly the end of life on the inner planets of Cetis Gamma was at hand. Cetis Gamma might, he considered, be in the process of becoming a nova. Certainly beyond the horizon there was even more terrible heat than had struck the human colony before sundown. Even if the sun did not explode, even if it was only as fiercely blazing as at its setting, they would die within hours after sunrise. If it increased in brightness, by daybreak its first rays would be death itself. When dawn came, the very first direct beams would set the shiver trees alight on the hilltops, and as it rose the fires would go down into the valleys. This house would smoke and writhe and melt; the air would become flame, and the planfet's surface would glow red-hot as it turned into the sunshine. "XT'S going to be -- all right, Lon," Cathy said unconvincedly. "It's just something happening that'll be over in a little while. But -- in case it isn't -- we might as well be together. Don't you think so?" Lon put his arm comfortingly around her. He felt a very strong impulse to lie. He could pretend to vast wisdom and tell her the sun's behavior was this or that, and never lasted more than a few V hours, but she'd know he lied. They could spend their last hours trying to deceive each other out of pure affection. But they'd know it was deceit. "D-don't' you think so?" insisted Cathy faintly. He said gently, "No, Cathy, and neither do you. This is the finish. It would've been a lot nicer to go on living, the two of us. We'd have had long, long years to be together. We'd have had kids, and they'd have grown up, and we'd have had -- a lot of things. But now I'm afraid we won't." He tried to smile at her, but it hurt. He thought passionately that he would gladly submit himself to be burned in the slowest and most excruciating manner if only she could be saved from it. But he couldn't do anything. Cathy gulped. "I -- I'm afraid so, too, Lon," she said in a small voice. "But it's nice we met each other, anyhow. Now we know we love each other. I don't like the idea of dying, but I'm glad we knew we loved each other before it happened." Lon's hands clenched fiercely. Then the rage went away. He said almost humorously, "Carson -- he's back in Cetopolis. I wonder how he feels. He has no better chance than anybody else. Maybe he's sent off spacegrams, but no ship could possibly get here in time." Cathy shivered a little. "Let's not think about him. Just about us. We haven't much time." And just then, very strangely. an idea came to Lon Simpson. He tensed. After a moment, he said in a very queer voice, "This isn't a nova. It's a flare-up. The sun isn't exploding. It's just too hot, too big for the temperature inside it, and it's a closed system. So radiation pressure has been building up. Now it's got to be released. So it will spout geysers of its own substance. They'll go out over hundreds of thousands of miles. But in a couple of weeks it will be back -- nearly -- to normal." He suddenly knew that. He knew why it was so. He could have explained it completely and precisely. But he didn't know how he knew. The items that added together were themselves so self evident that he didn't even wonder how he knew them. They had to be so! face against his shoulder, "But we won't be alive in a couple of weeks, Lon. We can't live long past daybreak." He did not answer. There were more ideas coming into his mind. He didn't know where they came from. But again they were such self evident, unquestionable facts that he did not wonder about them. He simply paid tense, desperately concentrated attention as they formed themselves. "We -- may live," he said shakily. "There's an ionosphere up at the top of the atmosphere here, just like there is on Earth. It's made by the sunlight ionizing the thin air. The -- stronger sunlight will multiply the ionization. There'll be an -- actually conducting layer of air... Yes... The air will become a conductor, up there." He wet his lips. "If I make a -- gadget to -- short-circuit that conducting layer to the ground here... When radiation photons penetrate a transparent conductor -- but there aren't any transparent conductors -- the photons will -- follow the three-finger rule... "They'll move at right angles to their former course -- " He swallowed. Then he got up very quietly. He put her aside. He went to his tool shed. He climbed to the roof of the barn now filled with thanar leaves. He swung his axe. The barn was roofed with aluminum over malleable plastic. The useful property of malleable plastic is that it does not yield to steady pressure, but does yield to shock. It will stay in shape indefinitely under a load, but one can tap it easily into any form one desires. Lon swung his axe, head down. Presently he asked Cathy to climb up a ladder and hold a lantern for him. He didn't need light for the rough work -- the burning desert vegetation gave enough for that. But when one wants to make a parabolic reflector by tapping with an axe, one needs light for the finer part of the job. TN Cetopolis, Carson agitatedly put his records on tape and sent it all off by spacegram. He'd previously reported on Lon Simpson, but now he knew that he was going to die. And he followed his instinct to transmit all his quite useless records, in order that his superiors might realize he had been an admirable employee. It did not occur to him that his superiors might be trying frantically to break his sending beam to demand that he find out how Lon Simpson made his power gadget and how he converted vegetation, before it was too late. They didn't succeed in breaking his beam, because Carson kept it busy. He was true to type. Elsewhere, other men were true to type, too. The human population of Cetis Gamma Two was very small. There were less than five thousand people on the planet -- all within a hundred miles of Cetopolis, and all now on. the night side. The rest of the planet's land masses scorched and shriveled and burst into flame where the sun struck them. The few small oceans heated and their surfaces even boiled. But nobody saw it. The local fauna and flora died over the space of continents. But in the human settlement area, people acted according to their individual natures. Some few ran amok and tried to destroy everything -- including themselves -- before the blazing sun could return to do it. More sat in stunned silence, waiting for doom. A few dug desperately, trying to excavate caves or pits in which they or their wives or children could be safe... But Lon pounded at his barn roof. He made a roughly parabolic mirror some three yards across. He stripped off aluminum siding and made a connection with the ground. He poured water around that connection. He built a crude multiply twisted device of copper wire and put it in the focus of the parabolic mirror. He looked up at the sky. The stars seemed dimmer. He took the copper thing away, and they brightened a little. He carefully adjusted it until the stars were at their dimmest. He descended to the ground again. He felt an odd incredulity about what he'd done. He didn't doubt that it would work. He was simply unable to understand how he'd thought of it. are quite safe!" Rhadampsicus said pleasedly. Nodalictha scanned the second planet. It was apparently coated with a metallic covering. But it was not quite like metal. It was misty, like an unsubstantial barrier to light -- and to Nodalictha's penetrating thoughts. "I had your male pet," Rhadampsicus explained tenderly, "set up a power beam link to the ionosphere. With several times the usual degree of ionization -- because of the flaring sun -- ;the grounded ionosphere became a Rhinthak screen about the planet. The more active the sun, the more dense the screen. They'll have light to see by when their side of the planet is toward the sun, but no harmful radiation can get down to them. And the screen will fade away as the sun goes back to its normal state." Nodalictha rejoiced. Then she was a little distressed. "But now I can't watch them!" she pouted. Rhadampsicus watched her gravely. She said ruefully, "I see, Rhadampsicus. You've spoiled me! But if I can't watch them for the time being, I won't have anything to occupy me. Darling Rhadampsicus, you must talk to me sometimes!" He talked to her absorbedly. He seemed to think, however, that discussion of the local solar phenomena was conversation. With feminine guile, she pretended to be satisfied, but presently she went back to her housekeeping. She began to dream of their life when they had returned home, and of the residence they would inhabit there. Presently she was planning the parties she would give as a young matron, with canapes of krypton snow and zenon ice, with sprinklings of lovely red nickel bromide crystals for a garnish -- r I 'HE sun rose again, and they lived. It was as if the sky were covered with a thick cloud barik which absorbed the monstrous radiation of a sun now four times its previous diameter and madly changing shape like a monstrous ameba of flame. In time the sun set. It rose again. It set. And Cetis Gamma Two remained a living planet instead of being a scorched cinder. When four days had gone by and nobody died, the colonists decided that they might actually keep on living. They had at first no especially logical foundation for their belief. But Cathy boasted. And she boasted in Cetopolis. Since they were going to keep on living, the conventions required that she return to the planet's one human settlement and her duties as a beamphone operator. It wasn't proper for her to stay unchaperoned so long as she and Lon weren't married yet. She had no difficulty with Carson. He didn't refer to her desertion. Carson had his own troubles. Now that he had decided that he would live, his problems multiplied. The colonists' barns were filled to capacity with thanar leaves which would pay off their debts to the Company. He began to worry about that. , Lost without the constant directives from the Company, he had his technicians step up the power in the settlement transmitter. He knew that the screen Lon had put up would stop ordinary spacegram transrhission. Even with a tight beam, he could broadcast and receive only at night, when the screen was thinnest. Even so, he had to search out holes in the screen. The system didn't work perfectly -- it wasn't two-way at all, until the Company stepped up the power in its own transmitter -- but spacegrams started to get through again. Carson smiled in relief. He began to regain some of his old arrogantly bored manner. Now that the Company's guiding hand was once more with him, nothing seemed as bad as it had been. He was able to report that something had happened to save the colony from extinction, and that Lon Simpson had probably done it. In return, he got a spacegram demanding full particulars, and precise information on the devices he had reported Lon Simpson to have made. Humbly, Carson obeyed his corporation. not difficult, because she was bursting with pride in Lon. She confirmed, in detail, the rumor that Lon was somehow responsible for the protective screen that was keeping everybody alive. Carson sent the information by spacegram. He was informed that a special Company ship was heading for Cetis Gamma Two at full speed. Carson would take orders from its skipper when it arrived. Meanwhile, he would buy thanar leaf if absolutely necessary, but stall as long as possible. The legal staff of the Trading Company was working on the problem of adapting the system to get the new surplus supplies of thanar without letting anybody get anything in particular for it. He would keep secret the coming of the special ship, which was actually the space yacht of a member of the Board of Directors. And he would display great friendliness toward Lon Simpson. The last was the difficult part, because Lon Simpson was becoming difficult. With the sun writhing as if in agony overhead -- seen dimly through a permanent blessed mistiness -- and changing shape from hour to hour, Lon Simpson had discovered something new to get mad about. Lon had felt definitely on top of the world. He had solved the problem of clearing his debts and getting credit sufficient for two passages back to Earth, with money there to take care of getting rich on his inventions. There was no reason to delay marriage. He wanted to get married. And through a deplorable oversight, there had been no method devised by which a legal marriage ceremony could be performed on Cetis Gamma Two. It was one of those accidental omissions which would presently be rectified. But the legal minds who'd set up the system for the planet had been thinking of money, not marriages. They hadn't envisioned connubial bliss as a service the Company should provide. And Lon was raising cain. His barn was literally bursting with thanar leaves, and he was living quarters and kitchen with 'more. He was rich. He wanted to get married. And it wasn't possible. Lon was in a position to raise much more cain than ordinary. He'd made an amicable bargain with his fellow colonists. They brought truckloads of miscellaneous foliage to be put into his vegetation converter," and he converted it all into thanar leaves. The product was split two ways. Everybody was happy -- except Carson -- Because every colonist had already acquired enough thanar leaf to pay himself out of debt, and was working on extra capital. If this kept up, the galactic market would be broken. Carson had nightmares about that. CO the sun went through con vulsions in emptiness, and nobody on its second planet paid any attention at all. After about a week, it occasionally subsided. When that happened, the ionization of the planet's upper atmosphere lessened, the radiation screen grew thinner, and a larger proportion of light reached the surface. When the sun flared higher, the shield automatically grew thicker. An astronomical phenomenon which should have destroyed all life on the inner planets came to be taken for granted. But events on the second planet were not without consequences elsewhere. The Board of Directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company simultaneously jittered and beamed with anticipation. If Lon could convert one form of vegetable product into another, then the Company's monopoly of thanar would vanish as soon as he got loose with his device. On the other hand, if the Company could get that device for its very own... Thanar had a practically unlimited market. Every year a new age group of the population old age away. But besides that, there was Martian zuss fiber, which couldn't be marketed because there wasn't enough of it, but would easily fetch a thousand credits a kilo if Lon's gadget could produce it from samples. There was that Arcturian sicces dust -- the pollen of an inordinately rare plant on Arcturus Four -- which could be sold at more than its weight in diamonds, for perfume. And -- The directors of the Company shivered over what might happen; and gloated over what could. So they kept their fingers crossed while the space yacht of one of their number sped toward Cetis Gamma Two, manned by very trustworthy men who would carry out their instructions with care and vigor and no nonsense about it. Lon Simpson worked with his neighbors, converting all sorts of vegetable debris -- the ' fact that some of it was scorched did not seem to matter -- into thanar leaf which was sound legal tender on that particular planet. From time to time he went to Cetopolis. He talked sentimentally and yearningly to Cathy. And then he went to Carson's office and raised the very devil because there was as yet no arrangement by which he and Cathy could enter into the state of holy matrimony. his notes and was very well pleased. He explained to Nodalictha that from now on the return of Cetis Gamma to its normal condition would be a cut-anddried affair. He would like to stay and watch it, but the important phenomena were all over now. He said solicitously that if she wanted to go on, completing their nuptial journey... She might be anxious to see her family and friends... She might be lonely... Nodalictha smiled at him. The process would have been horrifying to a human who watched, but Rhadampsicus smiled back. "Lonely?" asked Nodalictha coyly. "With you, Rhadampsicus?" He impulsively twined his eye stalks about hers. A little later he was saying tenderly, "Then I'll just finish my observations, darling, and we'll go on -- since you don't mind waiting." "I'd like to see my pets again,' said Nodalictha, nestling comfortably against him. Together, they scanned the second planet, but their thoughts could not penetrate its Rhinthak screen. They saw the space yacht flash up to it. Rhadampsicus inspected the minds of the bipeds inside it. Nodalictha, of course, modestly refrained from entering the minds of male creatures other than her husband. "Peculiar," commented Rhadampsicus. "Very peculiar. If I were a sociologist, I might fird it less baffling. But they must have a very queer sort of social system. They actually intend to harm your pets, Nodalictha, because the male now knows how to supply them all with food and energy! Isn't that strange? I wish the Rhinthak screen did not block off scanning... But it will fade, presently." "You will keep the others from harming my pets," said Nodalictha confidently. "Do you know, darling, I think I must be quite the luckiest person in the Galaxy, to be rharried.to you." riHE space yacht landed at the field outside Cetopolis. Inhabitants of the tiny town flocked to the field to see new faces. They were disappointed. One man came out and the airlock closed. No visitors. The skipper went into Carson's office. He closed the door firmly behind him. He had very beady eyes and a very hard-boiled expression. He looked at Carson with open contempt, and Carson felt that it was because Carson did the Company's dirty work with figures and due regard for law and order, instead of frankly and violently and without shillyshallying. "This Lon Simpson's got those gadgets, eh?" asked the skipper. "Why -- yes," said Carson unhappily. "He's very popular at the moment. He made something on his barn roof that kept the sun from burning us all to death, you know -- that still keeps us from burning to death, for that matter." "So if we take it away or smash it," observed the skipper, "we don't have to worry about anybody saying nasty things about us afterward. Yeah?" Carson swallowed. "Everybody'd die if you smashed the gadget," he admitted, "but all the thanar plants in existence would be burned up, too. There'd be no move thanar. The Company wouldn't like that." The skipper waved his hand. "How do I get this Simpson on my ship? Take a bunch of my men and go grab him?" "Wh-what are you going to do with him?" "Don't you worry," said the skipper comfortingly. "We know how to handle it. He knows how to make some things the bosses want to know how to make. Once I get him on the ship, he'll tell. We got ways. Do I take some men and grab him, or will you get him on board peaceable?" "There -- ah -- " Carson licked his lips. "He wants to get married. There's no provision in the legal code for it, as yet. It was overlooked. But I can tell him that as a ship captain, you -- " The skipper nodded matter of factly. "Right. You get him and the girl on board. And I've got some orders for you. Gather up plenty of thanar seed. Get some starting trays with young plants in them. I'll come back in a couple of days and take you and them on board. The stuff this guy has got is too good, understand?" "N-no. I'm afraid I don't." to make his gadgets," the skipper explained contemptuously. "We make sure he tells us right. To be extra sure, we leave the gadgets he's got made and working back here, where he can't get to 'em and spoil 'em. But when we know all he knows -- and what he only guesses, too, and my tame scientists have made the same kinda gadgets, an' they work -- why, we come back and pick you up, and the thanar seed and the young growing plants. Then we get the gadgets this guy made here, and we head back for Earth." "But if you take the gadget that keeps us all from being burned up -- " Carson said agitatedly, "if you do, everybody here -- " "Won't that be too bad!" the skipper said ironically. "But you won't be here. You'll be on the yacht. Don't worry. Now go fix it for the girl and him to walk into our parlor." Carson's hand shook as he reached for the beamphone. His voice was not quite normal as he explained to Cathy in the exchange that the skipper of the space yacht had the legal power to perform marriage ceremonies in space. And Carson, as a gesture of friendship to one of the most prominent colonists, had asked if the captain would oblige Cathy and Lon. The captain had agreed. If they made haste, he would take them out in space and marry them. The skipper of the space yacht regarded him with undisguised scorn when he hung up the phone and mopped his face. "Pretty girl, eh?" he asked contemptuously, "and you didn't have the nerve to grab her for yourself?" He did not wait for an answer. "I'll look her over. You get your stuff ready for when I come back in a couple of days." "But -- when you release them," Carson said shakily, "They'll report -- " The skipper looked at Carson without any expression at all. Then he went out. Carson felt sick. But he was a very loyal employee of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. From the windows of his air-conditioned office, he watched Lon Simpson greet Cathy on his arrival in Cetopolis. He saw Cathy put a sprig of chanel blossoms on the lapel of her very best suit, in lieu of a bridal bouquet. And he watched them go with shining faces toward the airport. He didn't try to stop them. Later he heard the space yacht take off.  share the thoughts and the happiness of the female biped whose emotions were familiar, since Nodalictha was so recently a bride herself. Rhadampsicus was making notes, but he gallantly ceased when Nodalictha called to him. They sat, then, before their crude but comfortable bower on the ninth planet, all set to share the quaint rejoicing of the creatures of which Nodalictha had grown fond. Nodalictha penetrated the thoughts of the female, in pleased anticipation. Rhadampsicus scanned the mind of the male, and his expression changed. He shifted his thought to another and another of the bipeds in the ship's company. He spoke with some distaste. "The ones you consider your pets, Nodalictha, are amiable enough. But the others -- " He frowned. "Really, darling, if you went into their minds, you'd be most displeased. They are quite repulsive. Let's forget about them and start for home. If you really care for pets, we've much more suitable creatures there." Nodalictha pouted. "Rhadampsicus, let's just watch their marriage ceremony. It is so cute to think of little creatures like that loving each other -- and marrying -- " Rhadampsicus withdrew his thought from the space yacht and looked about the charming rural retreat he and Nodalictha had occupied. Its nitrogen-snow walls glittered in the starlight. The garden of cyanogen flowers and the border of ammonia crystals and the walkway of monoclinic sulphur, and the reflection pool of liquid hydrogen he'd installed in an odd half hour. These were simple, but they were delightful. The crudity of the space yacht with its. metal walls so curiously covered over with a coating of lead oxide in hardened oil, and the vegetable gum flooring... Rhadampsicus did not like the surroundings men made for themselves in space. "Very well, darling," he said resignedly. "We will watch, and then we'll take off for home. I'm anxious to see what the modernists have to say when I show them my notes on this flare-up. -- And of course," he added with grave humor, "you want to show your family that I haven't illtreated you." He was the barest trace impatient, but Nodalictha's thoughts were with the female biped in the spaceship. Her expression was distressed. "Rhadampsicus!" she said angrily. "The other bipeds are being unkind to my pets! Do something! I don't like them!" led them into the space yacht's saloon. The airlock clanked shut, and the yacht soared for the skies. The sailor vanished. Nobody else came near. Then Lon stiffened. He got the flavor of his surroundings. He had Cathy with him. On her account, his flesh crawled suddenly. This was a space yacht, but of a very special kind. It was a pleasure ship. The decorations were subtly disgusting. There were pictures on the walls, and at first glance they were pretty enough, but on second glance they were disquieting, and when carefully examined they were elaborately and allusively monstrous. This was the yacht of someone denying that anything could be more desirable than pleasure -- and who took his pleasure in a most unattractive fashion. Lon grasped this much, and it occurred to him that the crew of such a yacht would be chosen for owner's enterprises. And Lon went somewhat pale, for Cathy was with him. The ship went up and up, with the dark shutters over the ports showing that it was in sunshine fierce enough to be dangerous on unshielded flesh. Presently there was the feel of maneuvering. After a time the shutters flipped open and stars were visible. Lon went quickly to a port and looked out. The great black mass of the night side of Cetis Gamma Two filled half the firmament. It blotted out the sun. The space yacht might be two or three thousand miles up and in the planet's umbra -- its shadow -- which was not necessary for a space wedding, or for anything involving a reasonably brief stay in the excessive heat Cetis Gamma gave off. There were clankings. A door opened. The skipper came in and Cathy smiled at him because she didn't realize Lon's fierce apprehension. Four other men followed, all in soiled and untidy space yacht uniforms, then two other men in more ordinary clothing. Their expressions were distinctly uneasy. The four sailors walked matter of factly over to Lon and grabbed at him. They should have taken him completely by surprise, but he had been warned just enough to explode into battle. It was a very pretty fight, for a time. Lon kept three of them busy. One snarled with a wrenched wrist, another spat blood and teeth and a third had a closed eye before the fourth swung a chair. Then Lon hit something with his head. It was the deck, but he didn't know it. hobbled. He was not bound so he couldn't move, but his hands were handcuffed together, with six inches of chain between for play. His ankles were similarly restricted. He could move, but he could not fight. Blood was trickling down his temple and somebody was holding his head up. Tlie skipper said impatiently, "All right, stand back." Lon's head was released. The skipper jerked a thumb. Men went out. Lon looked about desperately for Cathy. She was there -- dead white and terrified, but apparently unharmed. She stared at Lon in wordless pleading. "You're a suspicious guy, aren't you?" asked the skipper sardonically. "Somebody lays a finger on you and you start fighting. But you've got the idea. I'll say it plain so we can get moving. You're Lon Simpson. Carson, down on the planet, reported some nice news about you. You made a gadget that converts any sort of leaf to thanar. Maybe it turns stuff to other stuff, too." He paused. "We want to know how to make gadgets like that. You're gonna draw plans an' explain the theory. I got guys here to listen. We're gorma make one, from your plans an' explanations, an' it'd better work. See?" "Carson sent for you to do this," Lon Simpson said thickly. "He did. The Company wants it. They'll use it to make zuss fiber and sicces dust, and stuff like that. Maybe dream dust, too, an' so on. The point is you're gonna tell us how to make those gadgets. How about it?" Lon licked his lips. He said slowly, "I think there's more. Go on." "You made another gadget," said the skipper, with relish, "that turns out power without fuel. The Company wants that. too. Spacelines will pay for it. Cities will pay for it. It ought to be a pretty nice thing. You're gonna make plans and explanations of how that works and we're gonna make sure they're right. That clear?" "Will you let us go when I've told you?" Lon asked bitterly. "Not without one more gadget," the skipper added amiably. "You made something that put a screen around the planet yonder, so it didn't get burned up. It'd oughta be useful. The company 'll put one around Mercury. Convenient for minin' operations. One around that planet that's too close to Sirius. Oh, there's plenty of places that'll be useful. So you'll get set to draw up the plans for that, too -- and explanations of how it works. Then we'll talk about lettin' you go." T ON knew that he wouldn't be let go in any case. Not after he'd told them what was wanted. Not by men who'd vyork on a pleasure craft like this. Not with Cathy a prisoner with him. But he might as well get all the cards down. "And if I won't tell you what you want to know?" he asked. The skipper shrugged his shoulders. "You were knocked out a while," he said without heat. "While we were waitin' for you to come to, we told her -- " he jerked his thumb at Cathy -- "what would happen to her if you weren't obligin'. We told her plenty. She knows we mean it. We won't hurt you until we've finished with her. So you'd better get set to talk. I'll let her see if she can persuade you peaceable. I'll give her ten minutes." He went out. The door clicked shut behind him and Lon knew that this was the finish. He looked at Cathy's dazed, horror-filled eyes. He knew this wasn't a bluff. He was up against the same system that had brought colonists to Certs Gamma. Two. The brains that had planned that system had planned this. They'd gotten completely qualified men to do their dirty work in both cases. "Lon, darling! Please kill me!" Cathy said in a hoarse whisper. He looked at her in astonishment. "Please kill me!" repeated Cathy desperately. "They -- they can't ever dare let us go, Lon, after what they've told me ! They've got to kill us both. But -- Lon, darling -- please kill me first..." An idea came into Lon's mind. He surveyed it worriedly. He knew that he would have to tell what he knew and then he would be killed. The Cetis Gamma Trading Company wanted his inventions, and it would need him dead after it had them. The idea was hopeless, but he had to try it. They knew he'd made gadgets which did remarkable things. If he made something now and persuaded them that it was a weapon... His flesh crawled with horror. Not for himself, but for Cathy. He fumbled in his, pockets. A pocket knife. A key chain. String. His face was completely gray. He ripped an upholstered seat. There were coiled springs under the foamite. He pulled away a piece of decorative molding. He knew it wouldn't work, but there wasn't anything else to do. His hands moved awkwardly, with the handcuffs limiting their movements. Time passed. He had something finished. It was a bit of wood with a coil spring from the chair, with his key chain wrapped around it and his pocket knife set in it so that the blade would seem to make a contact. But it would achieve nothing whatever. Cathy stared at him. Her eyes were desperate, but she believed. She'd seen three equally improbable devices perform wonders. While Lon made something that looked like the nightmare of an ultimatist sculptor, she watched in terrified hope. the door opened again and the skipper came back into the saloon. He said prosaically, "Shall I call in the scientist guys to listen, or the persuader guys to work on her?" "Neither. I've made another gadget," Lon said from a dry throat. "It will kill you. It'll kill everybody on the ship -- from here. You're going to put us back down on the planet below." The skipper did not look at the gadget, but at Lon's face. Then he called. The fouy, men of the crew and the two uneasy scientists came in. "We got to persuade," the skipper said sardonically. "He just told me he's made a new gadget that'll kill us all." He moved unhurriedly toward Lon. Lon knew that his bluff was no good. If the thing had actually been a weapon, he'd have been confident and assured. He didn't feel that way, but he raised the thing menacingly as the skipper approached. The skipper took it away, laughing. "We'll tie him in a chair an' get to work on her. When he's ready to talk, we'll stop." He looked at the object in his hands. It was ridiculous to look at. It was as absurd as the device that extracted power from matter stresses, and the machine that converted one kind of vegetation into another, and the apparatus -- partly barn roof -- that had shortcuited the ionosphere of Cetis Gamma Two to the planet's solid surface. It looked very foolish indeed. The skipper was amused. "Look out, you fellas," he said humorously. "It's gonna kill you!" He crooked his finger and the knifeblade made a contact. He swept it in mock menace about the saloon. The four crew-members and the two scientists went stiff. He gaped at them, then turned the device to stare at it incredulously. He came within its range. He stiffened. Off-balance, he fell on the device, breaking its gimcrack fastenings and the contact which transmitted nothing that Lon Simpson could imagine coming out of it. The others fell, one by one, with peculiarly solid impacts. Their flesh was incredibly hard. It was as solid, in fact, as so much mahogany. ' "You're a darling, Rhadampsicus! It was outrageous of those nasty creatures to intend to harm my pets! I'm glad you attended to them!" "And I'm glad you're pleased, my dear," Rhadampsicus said pleasantly. "Now shall we set put for home?" Nodalictha looked about the cosy landscape of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma. There were jagged peaks of frozen air, and mountain ranges of water, solidified ten thousand aeons ago. There were frost-trees of nitrogen, the elaborate crystal formations of argon, and here a wide sweep of oxygen crystal sward, with tiny peeping wild crystals of deep-blue cyanogen seeming to grow more thickly by the brook of liquid hydrogen. And there was their bower; primitive, but the scene of a true honeymoon idyll. "I almost hate to go home, Rhadampsicus," Nodalictha said. "We've been so happy here. Will you remember it for always?" "Naturally," said Rhadampsicus. "I'm glad you've been happy." Nodalictha snuggled up to him and twined eye stalks with him. "Darling," she said softly, "you've been wonderful, and I've been spoiled, and you've let me be. But I'm going to be a very dutiful wife from now on, Rhadampsicus. Only it has been fun, having you be so nice to me!" "It's been fun for me, too," replied Rhadampsicus gallantly. Nodalictha took a last glance around, and each of her sixteen eyes glowed sentimentally. Then she scanned the far-distant spaceship in the shadow of the second planet from the now subsiding sun. "My pets," she said tenderly. "But -- Rhadampsicus, what are they doing?" "They've discovered that the crew of their vehicle -- they call it a space yacht -- aren't dead, that they're only in suspended animation. And they've decided in some . uneasiness that they'd better take them back to Earth to be revived." "How nice! I knew they were sweet little creatures!" Rhadampsicus hesitated a moment. "Erom the male's mind I gather something else. Since the crew of this space yacht was incapacitated, and they were -- ah -- not employed on it, he and your fe male will bring it safely to port, and, I gather that they have a claim to great reward. Ah -- it is something they call 'salvage.' He plans to use it to secure other rewards he calls 'patents' and they expect to live happily ever after." "And," cried Nodalictha gleefully, "from the female's mind I know that she is very proud of him, because she doesn't know that you designed all the instruments he made, darling. She's speaking to him now, telling him she loves him very dearly." Then Nodalictha blushed a little, because in a faraway space yacht Cathy had kissed Lon Simpson. The process seemed highly indecorous to Nodalictha, so recently a bride. "Yes," said Rhadampsicus, drily. "He is returning the compliment. It is quaint to think of such small creatures -- Ha! Nodalictha, you should be pleased again. He is telling her that they will be married when they reach Earth, and that she shall have a white dress and a veil and a train. But I am afraid we cannot follow to witness the ceremony." Their tentacles linked and their positron blasts mingling, the two of them soared up from the surface of the ninth planet of Cetis Gamma. They swept away, headed for their home at the extreme outer tip of the most far-flung arm of the spiral outposts of the Galaxy. "But still," said Nodalictha, as they swept through emptiness at a speed unimaginable to humans, "they're wonderfully cute." "Yes, darling," Rhadampsicus gument so soon after the wedding. "But not as cute as you." Simpson tried to use his genius to invent a way to get his handcuffs and leg-irons off. He failed completely. Cathy had to get the keys out of the skipper's pocket and unlock them for him. Beyond Designed, edited and produced by the Galaxy staff. A fulj color print of the cover reproduced especially for framing  The valuable first issue permanized with a plastic coating to preserve it  # Issues for # This offer is limited and expires on date of publication. May #, #, so rush the coupon below. Reserve my color print plus permanized first issue of your Magazine and send the # issues to me at address below. I enclose #. Foreign -- #. Name Address  City Zone State sjLijnjjTS rnuoitu ru a T here are some things that can not be generally told -- Angs you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. Tlie Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness oi their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery oi Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe P.V.B. Rosicrucians  I San Jose, California, U. S. A. I I Please send copy of sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life," which   I shall read as directed. j I Name  Address City Q#iLdixy  art, articles -- but not its attitude. of IQs, though your IQ can't help showing when you read the magazine. It's meant for everybody, male and female, young and old, adult enough not to run to the dictionary whenever a word with more than two syllables is encountered, who wants to know what futures humanity face, what the past may have been like, what may be found on other worlds... and how people will act under those circumstances. more rapidly than any other science fiction magazine? Read it and you'll see for yourself! Only #c a copy at your favorite newsstand... or # a year. (Add I per year on foreign subscriptions to) Write to... #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. Oalaoo' #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office. New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied b; self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. N the year #, traffic experts predict, automobiles will outnumber people. That recent news item was printed as practically a sure bet, since it was done by experts dealing with hard facts. If it had appeared as science fiction, the likelihood is that it would not have caused glee among car manufacturers, oil refiners, mechanics, and dismay among drivers, traffic cops and highway planners. There must, after all, be a great difference between statistical analysis and fiction exploring possibilities, which is what science fiction does. Actually, the traffic experts used exactly the methods of any writer of science fiction: They gave top priority to a coupled trend -- population growth and increased ownership of cars -- to produce an intelligible extrapolation. If this prediction had been submitted to me as the basis of a story, however, here are the questions I'd want taken care of in a logical and convincing way:  How is it that nothing has replaced the automobile long before #? As a means of transportation, it's far from satisfactory, being wasteful of fuel, space, metals, roads, labor and lives.  Will fuel and materials hold out to that extent? It's not possible unless a cheaper and more plentiful fuel is used, and metals are replaced by plastics.  Since the driving and parking problems would be even more of a headache than now, is it reasonable to expect people to buy more and more cars? Why? How are these problems solved? For they must be solved or the majority would rather not own cars.  Automobiles will outnumber people where in #?  To what extent?  With what results in the lives of car owners, appearance of city and countryside, counter-advertising of competitive products to pull away sales, counter-counteradvertising to keep up sales of cars? And there you have an approximate notion of the way a theme' should be worked out in science fiction. Handled routinely, it would probably become a sad little tale of a housewife afraid that her husband will be in an accident on the grotesquely murderous highways, and he would, of course; or a wild rebellion of pedestrians against the tyranny of the automobile autocracy. A more thoughtful writer would have his characters try to get along in such a congested society. Whoever wrote it, though, would be faced with the need to guess beyond present knowledge, as the literature of surmise has always had to do. You'd expect an expert to anticipate developments in his field, but nobody, however trained and ingenious, can foresee the shook discoveries that explode so abruptly, with no prior warning, on society -- steam power, bacteriology, radioactivity, internal combustion, antibiotics -- and with such violence that civilization is shot ahead as if out of a gun. That applies only to invention, a tough enough matter. But how about customs, attitudes, modes of life? We're writing of civilizations millenia away, and yet the gap between the #th Century and today is almost unthinkable. This is how our age might have looked to a writer of that time: "By ftage to Bofton, which great diftance waf covered at an aftonifhing # milef an hour. Our driver ftated that thif if accomplifhed by breeding horfef of great fpeed and endurance. "The peftilence in Bofton caufed by miafmic air haf been erafed in a moft ingeniouf manner: Trained falconf haraff leff predatory birdf into beating their wingf over the city, thuf difpelling the noxiouf atmofphere." We don't use the antique "S" any longer, but there were other customs equally inviolable tq the hypothetical #th Century writer :  He poured away what we call tea and ate the leaves with melted butter.  He enjoyed chocolate-covered sausages.  He paid the postage on the mail he received.  His marriage was arranged for him -- an economic matter because a family was a financial asset.  When he didn't pay his debts, he went to prison.  If he couldn't afford tutors, his  He knew the future would be different, but he expected to be able to recognize it if he should somehow see it. He was wrong, obviously. then, pretend to describe the actual future? No, certainly not... Anyone who thinks so is missing the point -- like an engineer trying to harness the energy of noisemakers at a New Year's party. We're having fun with ideas, making first this one and then that predominant just to see what might happen if. In #, I 'predict, traffic experts will outnumber all cars and car owners. Bet I can "prove" it, too! Even today machinery can be repaired with hairpins and kept running with a kick -- and harder kicks will mean more power! M att refused to believe it. Vacant incredulity paralyzed him for a moment as he stared after the fleeing, bounding tire. Then, with a sudden release, he sprinted after it. "Stop!" he yelled futilely. "Stop, damn it!" With what seemed like sadistic glee, the tire bounced high in the air and landed going faster than ever. Matt pounded down the hot dusty road for a hundred yards before he pulled up even with it. He knocked it over on its side. The tire lay there, spinning and frustrate, like a turtle on its back. Matt glared at it suspiciously. Sweat trickled down his neck. A tinkling of little silver bells. Laughter? Matt looked up quickly, angrily. The woods were thin along the top of this Ozark ridge. Descending to the lake, sparkling cool and blue far below, they grew thicker, but the only one near was the young girl shuffling through the dust several hundred yards beyond the crippled car. And her head was bent down to watch her way. Matt shrugged and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. A late June afternoon in southern Missouri was too hot for this kind of work, for any kind of work. Matt wondered if it had been a mistake. TN shimmering heat waves and a slowly settling haze of red dust, he righted the tire and began to roll it back toward the green Ford with one bare metal wheel drum pointiig upward at a slight angle. The tire rolled easily, as if it repented its brief dash for freedom, but it was a dirty job and Matt's hands and clothes were soiled red when he reached the car. With one hand clutching the tire. Matt studied the road for a moment. He could have sworn that he had stopped on one of the few level stretches in these hills, but the tire had straightened up from the side of the car and started rolling as If the car were parked on a steep incline. Matt reflected bitterly on the luck that had turned a slow leak into a flat only twenty-five miles from the cabin. It couldn't have happened on the highway, ten miles back, where he'd have been able to pull into a service station. No, it had to wait until he couldn't get out of this rutted cow track. The tire's escapade had been only the most recent of a series of annoyances and irritations to which bruised shins and scraped knuckles were painful affidavits. He sighed. After all, he had wanted isolation. Guy's offer of a hunting cabin in which to finish his thesis had seemed like a godsend at the time, but now Matt wasn't so certain. If this was a fair sample. Matt was beginning to see how much of his time would be wasted just on the problems of existence. Cautiously, Matt rolled the tire to the rear of the car, laid it carefully on its side, and completed pulling the spare from the trunk. Warily, he maneuvered the spare to the left rear wheel, knelt, lifted it, fitted it over the bolts, and stepped back. He sighed again, but this time with relief. Kling-ng! Klang! Rattle! Matt hastily looked down. His foot was at least two inches from the hub cap, but it was rocking now, empty. Matt saw the last nut roll under the car. Matt's swearing was vigorous, systematic, and exhaustive. It concerned itself chiefly with the perversity of inanimate objects. There was something about machines and the things they made which was basically alien to the human spirit. They might disguise themselves for a time as evitably, they turned against their masters. At the psychological moment, they rebelled. Or perhaps it was the difference in people. For some people, things always went wrong -- their cakes fell; their lumber split; their golf balls sliced into the rough. Others established a mysterious sympathy with their tools. Luck? Skill? Coordination? Experience? It was, he felt, something more conscious and malignant. disastrous brush with chemistry; he had barely passed qualitative analysis. For him the tests had been worse than useless. Faithfully he had gone through every step of the endless ritual: precipitate, filter, dissolve, precipitate... And then he would take his painfully secured, neatly written results to -- what was his name? -- Wadsworth, and the little chemistry professor would study his analysis and look up, frowning. "Didn't you find any whatyoumaycallit oxide?" he would ask. "Whatyoumaycallit oxide?" Startled. "Oh, there wasn't any whatyoumaycallit oxide." And Wadsworth would make a simple test and, sure enough, there would be the whatyoumaycallit oxide. There was the inexplicably misshapen gear Matt had made ing pen that would not draw a smooth line no matter how much he sanded the point... It had convinced Matt that his hands were too clumsy to belong to an engineer. He had transferred his ambitions to a field where tools were less tangible. Now he wondered. Kobolds? Accident prones? Some time he would have to write it up. It would make a good paper for the Journal of -- Laughter! This time there was no possible doubt. It came from right behind him. Matt whirled. The girl stood there, hugging her ribs to keep the laughter in. She was a young little thing, not much over five feet tall, in a shapeless, faded, blue dress. Her feet were small and bare and dirty. Her hair, in long braids, was mouse-colored. Her pale face was saved from plainness only by her large, blue eyes. Matt flushed. "What the devil are you laughing at?" "You!" she got out between chuckles. "Whyn't you get a horse?" "Did that remark just arrive here?" He swallowed his irritation, turned, and got down on his hands and knees to peer under the car. One by one he gathered up the nuts, but the last one, inevitably, was out of reach. Sweating, he crawled all the way under. " was still there. "What are you waiting for?" he asked bitingly. "Nothin'." But she stood with her feet planted firmly in the red dust. Kibitzers annoyed Matt, but he couldn't think of anything to do about it. He twirled the nuts onto the bolts and tightened them up, his neck itching. It might have been the effect of sweat and dust, but he was not going to give the girl the satisfaction of seeing him rub it. That annoyed him even more. He tapped the hub cap into place and stood up. "Why don't you go home?" he asked sourly.  "Cain't," she said. He went to the rear of the car and released the jack. "Why not?" "I run away." Her voice was quietly tragic. Matt turned to look at her. Her blue eyes were large and moist. As he watched, a single tear gathered and traced a muddy path down her cheek. Matt hardened his heart. "Tough." He picked up the flat and stuffed it into the trunk and slammed the lid. The sun was getting lower, and on this forgotten lane to nowhere it might take him the better part of an hour to drive the twenty-five miles. He slid into the driver's seat and punched the starter button. After one last look at the forlorn little figure in the middle of the road, he shook his head savagely and let in the clutch. "Mister! Hey, mister!" He slammed on the brakes and stuck his head out the window"Now what do you want?" "Nothin'," she said mournfully. "Only you forgot your jack." Matt jammed the gear shift into reverse and backed up rapidly. Silently, he got out, picked up the jack, opened the trunk, tossed in the jack, slammed the lid. But as he brushed past her again, he hesitated. "Where are you going?" "No place," she said. "What do you mean 'no place'? Don't you have any relatives?" She shook her head. "Friends?" he asked hopefully. She shook her head again. "All right, then, go on home!" He slid into the car and banged the door. She was not his concern. The car jerked into motion. No doubt she would go home when she got hungry enough. He shifted into second, grinding the gears. Even if she didn't, someone would take her in. After all, he was no welfare agency. He grudgingly slowed, then angrily backed up and skidded to a stop beside the girl. "Get in," he said. of the ruts was trouble enough, but the girl jumped up and down on the seat beside him, squealing happily. "Careful of those notes," he said, indicating the bulging manila folders on the seat between them. "There's over a year's work in those." Her eyes were wide as she watched him place the folders in the back seat on top of the portable typewriter that rested between the twenty-pound sack of flour and the case of eggs. "A year's work?" she echoed wonderingly. "Notes. For the thesis I'm going to write." "You write stories?" "A research paper I have to do to get my degree." He glanced at her blank expression and then looked back at the road. "It's called," he said with a nasty superior smile, " 'The Psychodynamics of Witchcraft, with Special Reference to the Salem Trials of #.' " "Oh," she said wisely. "Witches." As if she knew all about witches. Matt felt unreasonably annoyed. "All right, where do you live?" She stopped bouncing and got very quiet. "I cain't go home." "Why not?" he demanded. "And don't tell me 'I run away,' " he imitated nasally. "Paw'd beat me again. He'd purty nigh skin me alive, I guess." "You mean he hits you?" "He don't use his fists -- not often. He uses his belt mostly. Look." She pulled up the hem of her dress and the leg of a pair of baggy drawers that appeared to be made from some kind of sacking. Matt looked quickly and glanced away. Across the back of one thigh was an ugly dark bruise. But the leg seemed unusually well rounded for a girl so small and young. Matt frowned thoughtfully. Did girls in the hills mature that early? He cleared his throat. "Why does he do that?" "He's just mean." "He must have some reason." "Well," she said thoughtfully, "he beats me when he's drunk 'cause he's drunk, and he beats me when he's sober 'cause he ain't drunk. That covers it mostly." "But what does he say?" She glanced at him shyly. "Oh, I cain't repeat it." "I mean what does he want you to do?" "Oh, that !" She brooded over it. "He thinks I ought to get married. He wants me to catch some strong young feller who'll do the work when he moves in with us. A gal don't bring in no money, he says, leastwise not a good one. That kind only eats and wants things." "Married?" Matt said. "But you're much too young to get married." corner of her eye. "I'm sixteen," she said. "Most girls my age got a couple of young 'uns. One, anyways." Matt looked at her sharply. Sixteen? It seemed impossible. The dress was shapeless enough to hide almost anything -- but sixteen! Then he remembered the thigh. She frowned. "Get married, get married! You'd think I didn't want to get married. 'Tain't my fault no feller wants me." "I can't understand that," Matt said sarcastically. She smiled at him. "You're nice." She looked almost pretty when she smiled. For a hill girl. "What seems to be the trouble?" Matt asked hurriedly. "Partly Paw," she said. "No one'd want to have him around. But mostly I guess I'm just unlucky." She sighed. "One feller I went with purty near a year. He busted his leg. Another nigh drownded when he fell in the lake. Don't seem right they should blame me, even if we did have words." "Blame you?" She nodded vigorously. "Them as don't hate me say it's courtin' disaster 'stead of a gal. The others weren't so nice. Fellers stopped cornin'. One of 'em said he'd rather marry up with a catamount. You married. Mister -- Mister -- ?" "Matthew Wright. No, I'm not married." She nodded thoughtfully. "Wright. Abigail Wright. That's purty." "Abigail Wright?" "Did I say that? Now, ain't that funny? My name's Jenkins." Matt gulped. "You're going home," he said with unshakable conviction. "You can tell me how to get there or you can climb out of the car right now." "But Paw -- " "Where the devil did you think I was taking you?" "Wherever you're going," she said, wide-eyed. "For God's sake, you can't go with me! It wouldn't be decent." "Why not?" she asked innocently. In silence. Matt began to apply the brakes. "All right," she sighed. She wore an expression the early Christians must have worn before they were marched into the arena. "Turn right at the next cross road."  of the wheels, fluttering and squawking; pigs squealed in a pen beside the house. Matt stopped in front of the shanty, appalled. If the two rooms and sagging porch had ever known paint, they had enjoyed only a nodding acquaintance, and that a generation before. A large brooding figure sat on the porch, rocking slowly in a rickety chair. He was dark, with a full black beard and a tall head of hair. "That's Paw," Abigail whispered in fright. Matt waited uneasily, but the broad figure of her father kept on rocking as if strangers brought back his daughter every day. Maybe they do. Matt thought with irritation. "Well," he said nervously, "here you are." "I cain't get out," Abigail said. "Not till I find out if Paw's goih' to whale me. Go talk to him. See if he's mad at me." "Not me," Matt stated with certainty, glancing again at the big, black figure rocking slowly, ominously silent. "I've done my duty in bringing you home. Good-by. I won't say it's been a pleasure knowing you." "You're nice and mighty hand' some. I'd hate to tell Paw you'd taken advantage of me. He's a terror when he's riled." For one horrified moment. Matt stared at Abigail. Then, as she opened her mouth, he opened the door and stepped out. Slowly he walked up to the porch and put one foot on its uneven edge. "Uh," he said. "I met your daughter on the road." Jenkins kept on rocking. "She'd run away," Matt went on. Jenkins was silent. Matt studied the portion of Jenkins's face that wasn't covered with hair. There wasn't much of it, but what there was Matt didn't like. "I brought her back," Matt finished desperately. Jenkins rocked and said nothing. Matt spun around and walked quickly back to the car. He went around to the window where Abigail sat. He reached through the window, opened the glove compartment, and drew out a full pint bottle. "Remind me," he said, "never to see you again." He marched back to the porch. "Care for a little drink?" NE large hand reached but, smothered the pint, and  brought it close to faded blue overalls. The cap was twisted off by the other hand. The bottle was tilted toward the unpainted porch ceiling as soon as the neck disappeared into the matted whiskers. The bottle gurgled. When it was lowered, it was only half full. "Weak," the beard said. But the hand that held the bottle held it tight. "I brought your daughter back," Matt said, starting again. "Why?" he asked. "She had no place to go. I mean -- after all, this is her home." "She run away," the beard said. Matt found the experience extremely unnerving. "Look, Mr. Jenkins, I realize that teen-age daughters can be a nuisance, and after meeting your daughter I think I can understand how you feel. Still in all, she is your daughter." "Got my doubts." Matt gulped and tried once more. "A happy family demands a lot of compromise, give-andtake on both sides. Your daughter may have given you good cause to lose your temper, but beating a child is never sound psychology. Now if you -- " "Beat her?" Jenkins rose from his chair. It was an awesome thing, like Neptune rising out of the sea in all his majesty, gigantic,  bearded, and powerful. Even subtracting the height of the porch, Jenkins loomed several inches over Matt's near six feet. "Never laid a hand to her. Dassn't." My God, thought Matt, the man is trembling! "Come in here," said Jenkins. He waved the pint toward the open door, a dark rectangle. Uneasily, Matt walked into the room. Under his feet, things gritted and cracked. Jenkins lit a kerosene lamp and turned it up. The room was a shambles. Broken dishes littered the floor. Wooden chairs were smashed and splintered. In the center of the room, a table on its back waved three rough legs helplessly in the air; the fourth leg sagged pitifully from its socket. "She did this?" Matt asked weakly. "This ain't nothin'." Jenkins' voice quavered; it was a terrible sound to come from that massive frame. "You should see the other room." "But how? I mean why?" "I ain't a-sayin' Ab done it," Jenkins said, shaking his head. His beard wobbled near Matt's nose. "But when she gets onhappy, things happen. And she was powerful onhappy when that Duncan boy tol' her he wan't cornin' back. Them chairs come up from the floor and slam down. That table went dancin' round the room till it fell to pieces. Then dishes come a-flyin' through the air. Look!" His voice was full of self-pity as he turned his head around and parted his long, matted hair. On the back of his head was a large, red swelling. "I hate to think what happened to that Duncan boy." "Now, mister, I guess I got ever' right to lay my hand to that gal. Ain't I?" he demanded fiercely, but his voice broke. Matt stared at him blankly. "But whop her? Me? I sooner stick my hand in a nest of rattlers." "You mean to say that those things happened all by themselves?" "That's what I said. I guess it kinder sticks in your craw. Wouldn't have believe it myself, even seein' it and feelin' it -- " he rubbed the back of his head -- "if it ain't happen afore. Funny things happen around Ab, ever six year ago." "But she's only sixteen," Matt objected. "Sixteen?" Jenkins glanced warily around the room and out the door toward the car. He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper... "Don't let on I tol' you, but Ab alius was a fibber. She's past eighteen!" From a shelf, a single unbroken dish crashed to the floor at Jenkins' feet. He jumped and began to shake. "See?" he whispered plaintively. "It fell," Matt said. "She's witched." Jenkins took a feverish swallow from the bottle. "Maybe I ain't been a good Paw to her. Ever since her Maw died, she run wild and got all kinda queer notions. 'Taint alius been bad. For years I ain't had to go fer water. That barrel by the porch is alius filled. But ever since she got to the courtin' age and started bein' disappointed in fellers round about, she been mighty hard to live with. No one'll come nigh the place. And things keep a-movin' and a-jumpin' around till a man cain't trust his own chair to set still under him. It gets you, son. A man kin only stand so much!" To Matt's dismay, Jenkins's eyes began to fill with large tears. "Got no friend no more to offer me a drink now and again, sociable-like, or help me with the chores, times I got the misery in my back. I ain't a well man, son. Times it's more'n I kin do to get outa bed in the mornin'. "Look, son," Jenkins said, turning to Matt pleadingly. "Yore a city feller. Yore right nicelookin' with manners and edyacation. I reckon Ab likes you. Whyn't you take her with you?" Matt started retreating toward the door. "She's right purty when she fixes up and she kin cook right smart. You'd think a skillet was part of her hand, the way she kin handle one, and you don't even have to marry up with her." faced and incredulous. "You must be mad. You can't give a girl away like that." He turned to make a dash for the door. A heavy hand fell on Matt's shoulder and spun him around. "Son," Jenkins said, his voice heavy with menace, "any man that's alone with a gal more'n twenty minutes, it's thought proper they should get married up quick. Since yore a stranger, I ain't holdin' you to it. But when Ab left me, she stopped bein' my daughter. Nobody asked you to bring her back. That gal," he said woefully, "eats more'n I do." Matt reached into his hip pocket. He pulled out his billfold and extracted a five dollar bill. "Here," he said, extending it toward Jenkins, "maybe this will make life a little more pleasant." Jenkins looked at the money wistfully, started to reach for it, and jerked his hand away. "I cain't do it," he moaned. "It ain't worth it. You brought her back. You kin take her away." Matt glanced out the doorway toward the car and shuddered. He added another five to the one in his hand. Jenkins sweated. His hand crept out. Finally, desperately, he crumpled the bills into his palm. "All right," he said hoarsely. "Them's ten mighty powerful reasons." Matt ran to the car as if he had escaped from bedlam. He opened the door and slipped in. "Get out," he said sharply. "You're home." "But Paw -- " "From now on, he'll be a doting father." Matt reached across and opened the door for her. "Good-by." Slowly Abigail got out. She rounded the car and walked up to the porch, dragging her feet. But when she reached the porch, she straightened up. Jenkins, who was standing in the doorway, shrank back from his five-foottall daughter as she approached. "Dirty, nasty old man," Abigail hissed. Jenkins flinched. After she had passed, he raised the bottle hastily to his beard. His hand must have slipped. By some unaccountable mischance, the bottle kept rising in the air, mouth downward. The bourbon gushed over his head. Pathetically, looking more like Neptune than ever, Jenkins peered toward the car and shook his head. Feverishly, Matt turned the car around and jumped the car out of the yard. It had undoubtedly been an optical illusion. A bottle does not hang in the air without support. G UY'S cabin should not have been so difficult to find. Although the night was dark, the directions were explicit. But for two hours Matt bounced back and forth along the dirt roads of the hills. He got tired and hungry. For the fourth time, he passed the cabin which fitted the directions in every way but one -- it was occupied. Lights streamed from the windows into the night. Matt turned into the steep driveway. He could, at least, ask directions. As he walked toward the door, the odor of frying ham drifted from the house to tantalize him. Matt knocked, his mouth watering. Perhaps he could even get an invitation to supper. The door swung open. "Come on in. What kept you?" Matt blinked. "Oh, no!" he cried. For a frantic moment, it was like the old vaudeville routine of the drunk in the hotel who keeps staggering back to knock on the same door. Each time he is more indignantly ejected until finally he complains, "My God, are you in all the rooms?" "What are you doing here?" Matt asked faintly. "How did you -- How could you -- ?" Abigail pulled him into the cabin. It looked bright and cheerful and clean. The floor was newly swept; a broom leaned in the corner. The two lower bunks on opposite walls were neatly made up. Two places were laid at the table. Food was cooking on the wood stove. "Paw changed his mind," she said. "But he couldn't! I gave him -- " "Oh, that." She reached into a pocket of her dress. "Here." She handed him the two crumpled five dollar bills and a handful of silver and copper that Matt dazedly added up to one dollar and thirty-seven cents. "Paw said he'd have sent more, but it was all he had. So he threw in some vittles." He sat down in a chair heavily. "But you couldn't -- I didn't know where the place was myself, exactly. I didn't tell you -- " "I always been good at finding things," she said. "Places, things that are lost. Like a cat, I guess." "But -- but -- " Matt spluttered, "how did you get here?" "I rode," she said. Instinctively, Matt's eyes switched to the broom in the corner. "Paw loaned me the mule. I let her go. She'll get home all right." "But you can't stay here. It's impossible!" "Now, Mr. Wright," Abigail said soothingly. "My Maw used to say a man should never make a decision on a empty stomach. You just sit there and relax. Supper's all ready. You must be nigh starved." "There's no decision to be made!" Matt said, but he watched while she put things on the table -- thick slices of fried ham with cream gravy, corn on the cob. fluffy biscuits, butter, homemade jelly, strong black coffee that was steaming and fragrant. Abigail's cheeks were flushed from the stove, and her face was peaceful. She looked almost pretty. "I can't eat a bite," Matt told her. "Nonsense." Abigail filled his plate. bite of ham and put it in his mouth. It was so tender, it almost melted. Before long he was eating as fast as he could shovel the food into his mouth. The food was delicious; everything was cooked just as he liked it. He had never been able to tell anyone how to fix it that way. But that was the way it was. He pushed himself back from the table, teetering against the wall on the back legs of his chair, lit a cigarette and watched Abigail pour him a third cup of coffee. He was swept by a wave of contentment. "If I'd had time I'd a made a peach pie. I make real good peach pie," Abigail said. Matt nodded lazily. There would be compensations in having someone around to -- "No!" he said violently, thumping down on the two front legs of his chair. "It won't work. You can't stay here. What would people say?" "Who'd care? -- Paw don't. Anyways, I could say we was married." "No!" Matt said hoarsely. "Please don't do that!" "Please, Mr. Wright," she pleaded, "let me cook and clean for you. I wouldn't be no trouble, Mr. Wright, honest I wouldn't." "Look, Abbie!" He took her hand. It was soft and feminine. She stood beside his chair obediently, her eyes cast down. "You're a nice girl, and I like you. You can cook better than anyone I've ever known, and you'll make some man a good wife. But I think too much of you to let you ruin your name by staying here along with me. You'll have to go back to your father." The life seemed to flow out of her. "All right," she said, so low that it was difficult to hear her. Dazed at his sudden success. Matt got up and walked toward the door. She followed him, and Matt could almost feel the tears welling in her eyes. Matt opened the car door for her and helped her in. He circled the front of the car and slid into the driver's seat. Abbie huddled against the far door, small and forlorn. Since Matt's speech, she hadn't said a word. Suddenly, Matt felt very sorry for her and ashamed, as if he had hit a child. The poor little thing! he thought. Then he caught himself. He shook his head. For a poor little thing, she had certainly managed to browbeat her father. He thumbed the starter button, and the motor growled, but it didn't catch. Matt let it whine to a stop and pressed again. The motor moaned futilely. Matt checked the ignition. It was on. Again and again he pushed in the button. The moans got weaker. He tried to roll the car -- but the brakes locked. E glanced suspiciously at Abigail. But that's absurd, he thought. Since he had met Abbie, his thoughts had taken a definite paranoid tinge. It was foolish to blame everything that went wrong on the girl. But the car wouldn't move. He gave up. "All right," he sighed. "I can't put you out this far fromhome. You can sleep here tonight." Silently, she followed him into the cabin. She helped him tack blankets to the upper bunks on each side of the cabin. They made an effective curtain around the lower beds. As they worked. Matt discovered that he was unusually sensitive to her nearness. There was a sweet, womanly smell to her, and when she brushed agaiiist him the spot that was touched came to life -- tingling awareness. When they finished, Abbie reached down and grasped the hem of her dress to pull it off over her head. "No, no," Matt said hurriedly. "Don't you have any modesty? Why do you think we tacked up those blankets?" He gestured to the bunk on the left hand wall. "Dress and undress in there." She let the hem of her dress fall, nodded meekly, and climbed into the bunk. Matt stared after her for a moment and released his breath. He turned and climbed into his own bunk, undressed, and slipped under the blanket. Then he remembered that he had forgotten to turn out the lamps. He rose on one elbow and heard a soft padding on the floor. The lamps went out, one by one, and the padding faded to the other side of the room. Rustling sounds. Darkness and silence. "Good night, Mr. Wright." It was a little child's voice in the night. "Good night, Abbie," he said softly. And then after a moment, firmly, "But don't 'forget -- back you go first thing in the morning." Before the silence wove a pattern of sleep. Matt heard a little sound from the other bunk. He couldn't quite identify it. A sob? A snore? Or a muffled titter? odor of frying bacon and boiling coffee crept into Matt's nightmare of a terrifying pursuit by an implacable and invisible enemy. Matt opened his eyes. The bunk was bright with diffused sunlight: the dream faded. Matt sniffed hungrily and pushed aside the blanket to look out. All the supplies from the car had been unloaded and neatly stowed away. On a little corner table by the window were his typewriter and precious manila folders, and a stack of blank white paper. Matt dressed hurriedly in his cramped quarters. When he emerged from his cocoon, Abbie was humming happily as she set breakfast on the table. She wore a different dress this morning -- a brown calico that did horrible things for her hair and coloring, but fitted better than the blue gingham. The dress revealed a slim but unsuspectedly mature figure. How would she look, he wondered briefly, in good clothes and nylons, shoes, and make-up? The thought crumbled before a fresh onslaught to his senses of the odor and sight of breakfast. The eggs were cooked just right, sunny side up, the white firm but not hard. It was strange how Abbie anticipated his preferences. At first he thought that she had overestimated his appetite, but he stowed away three eggs while Abbie ate two, heartily. He pushed back his plate with a sigh. "Well," he began. She got very quiet and stared at the floor. His heart melted. He felt too contented : a few hours more wouldn't make any difference. Tonight would be time enough for her to go back. "Well," he repeated, "I guess I'd better get to work." Abbie sprang to clear the table. Matt walked to the comer where the typewriter was waiting. He sat down in the chair and rolled in a sheet of paper. The table was well arranged for light; it was the right height. Everything considered, it was just about perfect for working. He stared at the blank sheet of paper. He leafed through his notes. He resisted an impulse to get up and walk around. He rested his fingers lightly on the keys and after a moment lifted them, crossed one leg over the other knee, put his right elbow on the raised leg, and began to finger his chin. There was only one thing wrong: he didn't feel like working. Finally he typed in the middle of the page: With Special Reference to the Salem Trials of # He double-spaced and stopped. TT wasn't that Abbie was noisy; she was too quiet, with a kind of purposeful restraint that is worse than chaos. With one ear Matt listened to the sounds of dishwashing and stacking. And then silence. Matt stood it as long as he could and turned. Abbie was seated at the table. She was sewing up a hole in the pocket of his other pair of pants. He could almost see the aura of bliss that surrounded her. Like a child. Matt thought, playing at domesticity. But there was something mature about it, too; a mature and basic fulfillment. If we could all be happy with so little. It's a pity, with so small an ambition, to have the real thing so elusive. As if she felt him looking at her, Abbie glanced around and beamed. Matt turned back to his typewriter. It still wouldn't come. Witchcraft, he began hesitantly, is the attempt of the primitive mind to bring order out of chaos. It is significant, therefore, that belief in witchcraft fades as an understanding of the natural workings of the physical universe grows more prevalent. He let his hands drop. It was all wrong, like an image seen in a distorted mirror. He swung around: "Who wrecked your father's house?" "Libby," she said. "Libby?" Matt echoed, "Who's Libby?" "The other me," Abbie said calmly. "Mostly I keep her bottled up inside, but when I feel' sad and unhappy I can't keep her in. Then she gets loose and just goes wild. I can't control her.'" Good God! Matt thought. Schizophrenia! "Where did you get an idea like that?" he asked cautiously. "When I was born," Abbie said, "I had a twin sister, only she died real quick. Maw said I was stronger and just crowded the life right out of her. When I was bad. Maw used to shake her head and say Libby'd never have been mean or cross or naughty. So when something happened, I started saying Libby done it. It didn't stop a licking, but it made me feel better." What a thing to tell a child! Matt thought. "Purty soon I got to believing it, that Libby done the bad things that I got licked for, that Libby was part of me that I had to push deep down so she couldn't get out and get me in trouble. After I" -- she blushed -- "got older and funny things started happening, Libby come in real handy." "Can you see her?" Matt ventured. "Course not," Abbie said reproachfully. "She ain't real." "Isn't." "Isn't real, Abbie said. "Things happen when I feel bad. I can't do anything about it. But you got to explain it somehow... I use Libby." Matt sighed. Abbie wasn't so crazy -- or stupid either. "You can't contrdl it -- ever?" "Well, maybe a little. Like when I felt kind of mean about that liquor you gave Paw, and I thought how nice it would be if Paw had something wet on the outside for a change." "How about a tire and a hub cap full of nuts?" She laughed. Again that tinkling of little silver bells. "You did look funny." Matt frowned. But slowly his expression cleared and he began to chuckle. "I guess I did." yrE swung back to the typewriter before he realized that he was accepting the events of the last eighteen hours as physical facts and Abbie's explanation as theoretically possible. Did he actually believe that Abbie could -- how was he going to express it? -- move objects with some mysterious, intangible force? By wishing? Of course he didn't. He stared at the typewriter. Or did he? He called up a picture of a pint bottle hanging unsupported in mid air, emptying its contents over Jenkins's head. He remembered a dish that jumped from a shelf to shatter on the floor. He thought of a hub cap that dumped its contents into the dirt when his foot was two inches away. And he saw a tire straighten up and begin to roll down a level road. You can't just dismiss things, he thought. In gny comprehensive scheme of the universe, you must include all valid phenomena. It the accepted scheme of things cannot find a place for it, then the scheme must change. Matt shivered. It was a disturbing thought. The primitive mind believed that inanimate objects had spirits that must be propitiated. With a little sophistication came mythology and its personification -- nymphs and sprites, Poseidon and Aeolus -- and folklore, with its kobolds and poltergeists. Sir James Frazer said something about the relationship between science and magic. Man, he said, associates ideas by similarity and by contiguity in space or time. If the association is legitimate, it is science; if illegitimate, it is magic, science's bastard sister. But if the associations of magic are legitimate, then those of science must be illegitimate, and the two reverse their roles and the modern world is standing on its head. Matt felt a little dizzy. Suppose the primitive mind is wiser than we are. Suppose you can insure good luck by the proper ritual or kill your enemy by sticking a pin in a wax doll. Suppose you can prove it. You had to have some kind of explanation of unnatural events, the square pegs that do not fit into any of science's round holes. Even Abbie recognized that. Matt knew what the scientific explanation would be: illusion, delusion, hypnosis, anything which demanded the least possible rearrangement of accepted theory, anything which, in effect, denied the existence of the phenomenon.  plain it? How could you explain Abbie? Did yobelieve in the spirits of inanimate objects, directed by Abbie when she was in the proper mood? Did you bc' lieve in poltergeists which Abbie ordered about? Did you believe in Libby, the intangible projectable, manipulative external soul? You had to explain Abbie or your cosmology was worthless. That man at Duke -- Rhine, the parapsychologist -- he had a word for it. Telekinesis. That was one attempt to incorporate psychic phenomena into the body of science, or, perhaps, to alter the theoretical universe in order to fit those phenomena into it. But it didn't explain anything. Then Matt thought of electricity. You don't have to explain something in order to use it. You don't have to understand it in order to control it. It helps, but it isn't essential. Understanding is a psychological necessity, not a physical one. Matt stared at the words he had written. The seventeenth century. Why was he wasting his time? Here was something immediate. He had stumbled on something that would set the whole world on its ear, or perhaps stand it on its feet again. It would not molder away, as the thesis would in a university library. Matt turned around. Abbie was sitting at the table, her mending finished, staring placidly out the open doorway. Matt stood up and walked toward her. She turned her head to look at him, smiling slowly. Matt turned his head, searching the room. "Kin I get you something?" Abbie asked anxiously. Matt looked down at her. "Here!" he said. He plucked the needle from the spool of darning thread. He forced it lightly into the rough top of the table so that the needle stood upright. "Now," he said defiantly, "make it move." Abbie stared at him. "Why?" "I want to see you do it," Matt said firmly. "Isn't that enough?" "But I don't want to," Abbie objected. "I never wanted to do it. It just happened." "Try!" "No, Mr. Wright," Abbie said firmly. "It never brung me nothing but misery. It scared away all my fellers and all Paw's friends. Folks don't like people who can do things like that. I don't ever want it to happen again." "If you want to stay here," Matt said flatly, "you'll do as I say." "Please, Mr. Wright," she begged. "Don't make me do it. It'll spoil everything. It's bad enough when you can't help it, but it's worse when you do it a-purpose -- something terrible will come of it." Matt glowered at her. Her pleading eyes dropped. She bit her lip. She stared at the needle. Her smooth, young forehead tightened. Nothing happened. The needle remained upright. Abbie took a deep breath. "I cain't, Mr. Wright," she wailed. "I just cain't do it." "Why not?" Matt demanded fiercely. "Why can't you do it?" "I don't know," Abbie said. Automatically her hands began to smooth the pants laid across her lap. She looked down and blushed. "I guess it's 'cause I'm happy." mentation, Matt's only halfconscious need was still unsatisfied. He had offered Abbie an innumerable assortment of objects: a spool of thread, a fountain pen cap, a dime, a typewriter eraser, a three-by-five note card, a piece of folded paper, a bottle... The last Matt considered a stroke of genius. But tip it as he would, the bottle, like all the rest of the objects, remained stolidly unaffected. He even got the spare tire out of the trunk and leaned it against the side of the car. Fifteen minutes later, it was still leaning there. Finally, frowning darkly. Matt took a cup from the shelf and put it down on the table. "Here," he said. "You're so good at smashing dishes, smash this." Abbie stared at the cup hopelessly. Her face seemed old and haggard. After a moment, her body seemed to collapse all at once. "I cain't," she moaned. "I cain't." "Can't!" Matt shouted. "Can't! Are you so stupid you can't say that? Not 'cain'f -- can't!" Her large blue eyes lifted to Matt's in mute appeal. They began to fill with tears. "I can't,"  she said. A sob broke from her throat. She put her head down on her arms. Her thin shoulders began to quiver. Moodily, Matt stared at her back. Was ever # rthing that he had seen merely an illusion? Or did this phenomenon only evidence itself under very rigid conditions? Did she have to be unhappy? It was not without a certain logic. Neurotic children had played a large part in the history of witchcraft. In one of the English trials, children had reportedly fallen into fits and vomited crooked pins. They could not pronounce such holy names as "Lord," "Jesus," or "Christ," but they could readily speak the names "Satan" or "Devil." Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth, # persons had been put to death for witchcraft. How many had come to the rack, the stake, or the drowning pool, through the accusations of children? A child saw a hag at her door. The next moment she saw a hare run by and the woman had disappeared. On no more convincing evidence than that, the woman was accused of turning herself into a hare by witchcraft. Why had the children done it? Suggestibility? A desire for attention? Whatever the reason, it was tainted with abnormality. In the field of psychic phenomena as well, the investigations of the Society of Psychical Research were full of instances in which neurotic children or neurotic young women played a distinct if inexplicable role. Did Abbie have to be unhappy? Matt's lips twisted. It it was true, it was hard on Abbie. "Get your things together," Matt said harshly. "You're going home to your father." Abbie stiffened and looked up, her face tear-streaked but her eyes blazing. "I ain't." "You are not," Matt corrected sharply. "I are not," Abbie said fiercely. "I are not. I are not." Suddenly the cup was sailing toward Matt's head. Instinctively, he put out his hand. The cup hit it and stuck. Matt looked at it dazedly and back at Abbie. Her hands were still in her lap. Y OU did it!" Matt shouted. "It's true." Abbie looked pleased. "Do I have to go back to Paw?" Matt thought a moment. "No," he said. "Not if you'll help me." Abbie's lips tightened. "Ain't -- isn't once enough, Mr. Wright? You know I can do it. Won't you leave it alone now? It's unlucky. Something awful will happen. I got a feeling." She looked up at his implacable face. "But I'll do it, if you want." "It's important," Matt said gently. "Now. What did you feel just before the cup moved toward me?" "Mad." "No, no. I mean what did you feel physically or mentally not emotionally." Abbie's eyebrows were thick. When she knit them, they made a straight line across the top of her nose. "Gosh, Mr. Wright, I cain't -- " She looked at him quickly. "I can't find the words to tell about it. It's like I wanted to pick up the nearest thing and throw it at you, and then it was like I had thrown it. Kind of a push from all of me, instead of just my hand." Matt frowned while he put the cup back on the table. "Try to feel exactly like that again." Obediently, Abbie concentrated. Her face worked. Finally she sagged back in her chair. '"I cai -- I can't. I just don't feel like it." "You're going back to your father!" Matt snapped. The cup rocked. "There!" Matt said quickly. "Try it again before you forget!" The cup spun around. "Again!" The cup rose an inch from the table and settled down. Abbie sighed. "It was just a trick, wasn't it, Mr. Wright? You aren't really going to send me back?" "No, but maybe you'll wish I had before we're through. You'll have to work and practice until you have full conscious control of whatever it is." "All right," Abbie said submissively. "But it's terrible tiring work when you don't feel like it." "Terribly," Matt corrected. "Terribly," Abbie repeated. "Now," Matt said. "Try it again." Her maximum effort was to raise the cup a foot from the table, but that she could do very well. "Where does the energy come from?" Matt asked. "I don't know," Abbie sighed, "but I'm powerful hungry." "Very," Matt said. "Very hungry," Abbie repeated. She got up and walked to the cupboard. "How many ham sandwiches do you want -- two?" Matt nodded absently. When the sandwiches came, he ate in thoughtful silence. It was true, then. Abbie could do it, but she had to be unhappy to have full power and control. "Try it on the mustard," he said. "I'm so full," Abbie explained contentedly. She had eaten three sandwiches. Matt stared at the yellow jar, unseeing. It was quite a problem. There was no sure way of determining just what Abbie's powers were, without getting some equipment. He had to find out just what it was she did, and what effect it had on her, before he could expect to fully evaluate any data. But that wasn't the hardest part of it. He should be able to pick up the things he needed in Springfield. It was what he was going to have to do to Abbie that troubled him. All he had been able to find out about Abbie's phenomena was that they seemed to occur with the greatest frequency and strength when the girl was unhappy. Matt stared out through the cabin window. Gradually, he was forming a  plan to make Abbie unhappier than she had ever been. A LL afternoon Matt was very kind to Abbie. He helped her dry the dishes, although she protested vigorously. He talked to her about his life and about his studies at the University of Kansas. He told her about the thesis and how he had to write it to get his master's degree in psychology and what he wanted to do when he was graduated. "Psychology," he said, "is only an infant science. It isn't really a science at all but a metaphysics. It's a lot of theorizing from in-' sufficient data. The only way you can get data is by experimentation, and you can't experiment because psychology is people, living people. Science is a ruthless business of observation and setting up theories and then knocking them down in laboratories. Physicists can destroy everything from atoms to whole islands ; biologists can destroy animals; anatomists can dissect cadavers. But psychologists have no true laboratories; they can't be ruthless because public opinion won't stand for it, and cadavers aren't much good. Psychology will never be a true science until it has its laboratories where it can be just as ' ruthless as the physical sciences. It has to come." Matt stopped. Abbie was a good listener; he had forgotten he was talking to a hill girl. "Tell me more about K.U.," she sighed. He tried to answer her questions about what the coeds wore when they went to classes and when they had dates and when they went to dances. Her eyes grew large and round. "Guess it would be romantic," Abbie sighed. "How far do they let a fellow go if they ain't -- aren't serious?" Matt thought Abbie's attempt to improve her English was touching -- almost pathetic. He puzzled about her question for a moment. "I guess it depends on the girl." Abbie nodded understandingly. "Why do they go to college?" "To get married," Matt said. "Most of them." Abbie shook her head. "All those pretty clothes. All those men. They must be awful -- very slow not to get married quick. Can't they get married at home without waiting so long?" Matt frowned perplexedly! Abbie had a talent for asking questions which reached down to basic social relationships. "The men they meet at college will make more money for them." "Oh," Abbie said. She shrugged. "That's all right, I guess, if that's what you want." So it went. Matt paid Abbie little compliments on her appearance, and she blushed and looked pleased. He told her he couldn't understand why she wasn't besieged by suitors and why she hadn't been married long ago. She blushed deeper. He bragged expansively on the supper she cooked and swore that he had never tasted better. pier. She hummed through her tasks. Ever#rthing worked well  for her. The dishes were done almost as soon as they were started. Matt walked out on the porch. He sat down on the edge. Abbie settled herself beside him, quietly, not touching him, her hands in her lap. The cabin was built on the top of a ridge. It was night, but the moon had come up big and yellow, and they could look far out over the valley. Silvery, in a dark green setting of trees, the lake glimmered far below. "Ain't -- isn't it purty," Abbie sighed, folding her hands. "Pretty," Matt said absently. "Pretty," Abbie sighed. They sat in silence. Matt sensed her nearness in a way that was almost physical. It stirredhim. There was something intensely feminine about Abbie that was very appealing at times, in spite of her plain face and shapeless clothes and bare feet and lack of education. Even her singleminded ambition was a striving to fulfill her true, her basic function. In a way it was more vital and understandable than all the confused sublimations of the girls he had known. Abbie, at least, knew what she wanted and what she would pay to get it. She would make someone a good wife. Her one goal would be to make her husband happy. She would cook and clean for him and bear his strong, healthy children with a great and when he was silent, unobtrusive when he was working, merry when he was gay, infinitely responsive when he was passionate. And the transcendent wonder of her finest function in doing it; she would be serenely happy, blissfully content. Matt lit a cigarette in an attempt to break the mood. He glanced at her face by the light of the match. "What is courting like here in the hills?" he asked. "Sometimes we walk' Abbie said dreamily, "and look at things together, and talk a little. Sometimes there's a dance at the school house. If a fellow has a boat, you can go out on the lake. There's huskin' bees an' church socials an' picnics. But mostly when the moon is a-shinin' an' the night is warm, we just sit on a porch an' hold hands and do whatever the Matt reached out and took one of her hands and held it in his. It ws cool and dry and strong. It clung to his hand. She turned her face to him, her eyes searching for his face in the darkness. "Do you like me a little bit, Mr. Wright?" she asked softly. "Not marryin'-like, but friendly-like?" "I think that you're the most feminine girl I've ever met," he said, and realized it was true. Almost without volition on either part, they seemed to lean together, blending in the night. Matt's lips sought her pale little girl lips and found them, and they weren't pale or little girlish at all, but warm and soft and passionate. Matt felt her lips part. He broke away, breathing quickly. Abbie half turned to nestle against his shoulder, his arm held tightly around her. She sighed contentedly. "I reckon I wouldn't lously, "whatever you wanted to do." "I can't understand whv you didn't get married long ago," he said. "T guess it was me," Abbie said reflectively. "I wasn't rightly satisfied with any of my fellows. I'd get mad at them for no reason at all, and then something bad would happen to them and pretty soon no one would come courtin'. Maybe I expected them to be what they weren't. I guess I wasn't really in love with any of them. Anyways, I'm glad I didn't get married up." She sighed. Matt felt the stirrings of something that felt oddly like compunction. tVfiat a louse you are, Matthew Wright! "What happened to them -- your fellows?" he asked. "Was it something you did?" "Folks said it was," Abbie said. There was a trace of bitterness in her voice. "They said I had the evil eye. I don't see how. There isn't anything wrong with my eyes, is there?" She looked up at him : her eyes were large and dark blue, with little flecks of silvery moonlight in them. "Not a thing," Matt said. "Thejf're very beautiful." "I don't sec how it could have been any of my fault," Abbie said. "Of course, when Hank was late that evening, I told him he was so slow he might as well have a broken leg. Right after that he was . nailing shingles on a roof, and he fell off and broke his leg. But I reckon he'd have broke it anyways. He was always right careless. "And then Gene, he was so cold I told him he should fall in the lake and warm up. But a person who does a lot of fishin', I guess he falls in a lot anyways." "I guess so," Matt said. He began to shiver. "You're shivering, Mr. Wright," Abbie said solicitously. "Let me go get your jacket." "Never mind," Matt said. "It's about time for bed anyway. You go in and get ready. Tomorrow -- tomorrow we're going to drive , to Springfield for some shopping." "Really, Mr. Wright? I haven't never been to Springfield," Abbie said incredulously. She got up, her eyes shining. "Really?" "Really," Matt said. "Go on in, now." She went in. She was almost dancing. Matt sat on the porch for a few minutes longer, thinking. It was funny what happened to the fellows that disappointed Abbie. When he lit a cigarette, his hand was shaking. Abbie had a way of being many different persons. Already Matt had known four of them: the moody little girl with braids down her back shuffling along a dusty road or bouncing gleefully on a car seat; the happy, placid housewife with cheeks rosy from the stove : the unhappy vessel of strange powers, tearful and reluctant; the girl with the passionate lips in the moon-streaked darkness. Which one was Abbie, the true Abbie? next morning Matt had a  fifth Abbie to consider. Her face was scrubbed and shining until it almost rivaled her eyes. Her braided hair was wound in a coronet around her head. She was wearing a different dress made of a shiny blue quilted material with a red lining. Matt scanned his small knowledge of dress materials. Taffeta? The color did terrible things to her hair. The dress had a V-shape neck and back and fitted better than anything she had worn yet. On one hip was a large artificial rose. Her stockingless feet were enclosed in a pair of black, patent-leather sandals. My God! Matt thought. Her Sunday best! I'll have to walk with that down the streets of Springfield. He shuddered, and resisted the impulse to tear off that horrible rose. "Well," he said, "all ready?" Abbie blushed excitedly. "Are we really going to Springfield, Mr. Wright?" "We are if the car will start." "Oh, it'll start," Abbie said confidently. Matt gave her a thoughtful sidelong glance. That was another thing. After the usual hearty breakfast, with fried potatoes on the side, they got into the car. The brakes released without hesitation. The drive was more than fifty miles, half of it over dirt roads that were roller-coaster washboards, and they drove it in silence. Every few miles Matt would glance at Abbie out of the corner of his eye and shudder. As excited as she was, like a child, Abbie was contented to sit quietly and enjoy the ride, particularly when they swung off the dirt road onto Highway #. When they came into Springfield, Abbie's face was glowing. She stared at the buildings as if they had sprung magically into being especially for her. Then she began to inspect the people walking along the streets. Matt noticed that it was the women who received her closest attention. Suddenly Matt noticed that Abbie was very quiet. He glanced toward her. She was still, staring down at her hands resting in her lap. "What's the matter?" Matt asked. "I guess," she said, her voice a little unsteady, "I guess I look pretty funny. I guess you'll feel ashamed having me along. If it's all right with you, Mr. Wright, I'll just sit in the car." "Nonsense," Matt said heartily. "You look fine." The little devil, he thought. She has an uncanny talent for understanding things. She's either unusually perceptive or -- What? "Besides, I'll need you to try on some clothes." "Clothes, Mr. Wright!" she exclaimed. She seemed to find it hard to speak. "You're going to buy some clothes." Matt nodded. He parked the car in front of Springfield's biggest department store. He came around to Abbie's door and helped her out. For a moment Abbie's face was level with his; her blue  eyes locked with his dark ones in a look that Matt refused to analyze. They walked into the store, Abbie clinging to his arm. He could feel her heart beating swiftly. Matt stopped a moment to study the directory. "Second floor," he said. Abbie held back as Matt started off. "Kin we -- can we look around here -- for just a second?" Abbie asked hesitantly. Matt glanced at her and shrugged. "I suppose so." toward some mysterious, unseen destination, leading Matt down innumerable aisles. All the way to the back of the store they went, and emerged miraculously into the kitchenware department. Abbie stopped on the threshhold, gazing rapturously at the gleaming pots and pans, beaters, knives, and gadgets, as if they were jewels. She dismissed with a glance the stoves and electrical appliances, but the cooking utensils brought forth long sighs. After a moment she moved among them, staring at them, touching them with one timid finger. She made little crooning sounds deep in her throat. Matt had to drag her away. They were almost to the stairs when Matt noticed that she was I olding something to her breast. He stopped. He stared aghast. She was hugging a tiny frying pan of shiny aluminum and dully gleaming copper. "Where did you get that?" he demanded. "Back there," she said innocently. "They got so many. They'll never miss a little thing like this." "But you can't do that!" Matt said. "That's stealing." " 'Tain't stealing when they got so much and I got so little," she explained. "You've got to take itback I" Matt made a futile grab for the frying pan. Abbie hugged it to her breast with both arms. "Don't take it away from me!" she wailed. "Please don't make me take it back!" Matt glanced around nervously. So far no one seemed to be watching them. He turned back to Abbie. "Sh-h-h!" he said. "Be quiet now. Please be quiet." He looked at her pleadingly. She hugged the frying pan tighter. "All right," he sighed. "Stay here! Don't move! Don't say anything!" Q uickly he walked back to kitchenwares. He caught the attention of the clerk. "How much are those," he said, pointing to the frying pans. "Four-fifty, sir. Shall I wrap one up?" "Four-fifty!" "Yes, sir," the man said. "We have some cheaper ones in all aluminum -- " "Never mind," Matt said hurriedly. He pulled out his billfold. "Here. Give me a receipt and a sack." The clerk picked up a frying pan. "No, no," Matt said. "I don't want one. I just want a receipt and a sack." "But, sir," the man said bewilderedly. "You said -- " "Don't argue with me," Matt said. "Just give me a receipt and a sack!" The clerk rang up the sale, tore off the receipt, dropped it in a sack, and handed it to Matt with a very dazed expression on his face. "Anything else, sir?" he asked automatically. "I hope not," said Matt, and hurried away. When he looked back the clerk was still staring after him. stairs where he had left her. "Put the frying pan in here," he whispered. She gave him a look of admiration. "Oh, that was real clever of you." Matt mopped his forehead. "Yes, wasn't it." He took her arm and hurried her up the stairs. At the top Matt came to a halt and looked around. Abbie stared with big eyes at the racks upon racks of dresses. "I never knew," she whispered, "there was so many dresses in the world." Matt nodded absently. Hehad to get away long enough to find a laboratory from which to rent some testing apparatus. He saw a saleswoman, and drew her aside. "The girl' over there," he said. "I want you to take her to the beauty parlor and give her the works. Haircut, shampoo, setting, facial, eyebrows thinned and shaped and a makeup job. Then get her a new outfit from the skin out. Can you do all that?" The saleswoman looked quite pleased. "We'll be very happy to help you." Matt took out his billfold and peered into it. Slowly he extracted one traveler's check for one hundred dollars and then another. It left him only three hundred dollars, and he still had to get the equipment and live for the rest of the summer. Matt sighed and countersigned the checks. "Try to keep it under this," he said heavily. "If you can." "Yes, sir," said the saleswoman and hesitated, smiling. "Your fiancee?" "Good God, no," Matt blurted out. "I mean -- she's my -- niece. It's her birthday." He walked over to Abbie, breathing heavily. "Go with this woman, Abbie, and do what she tells you." "Yes, Mr. Wright," Abbie said dazedly. And she walked away as if she were entering into fairyland. Matt turned, biting his lip. He felt slightly sick. before he could leave the store. Making sure Abbie was gone, he went into the lingerie department. He regretted it almost immediately. Once he had seen a woman come into a pool hall; he must, he thought, wear the same Sheepish, out-of-place expression. He swallowed his qualms -- they were a hard lump in his throat -- and walked up to the counter. "Yes, sir," said the young woman brightly, "what can I do for you?" Matt avoided looking at her. "I'd like to buy a negligee," he said in a low voice. "What size?" Matt began a motion with his hands and then dropped them hastily at his sides. "About five feet tall. Slim." The woman led him along the counter. "Any particular color?" "Uh -- black," Matt said hoarsely. The clerk brought out a garment that was very black, very lacy, very sheer. "This is thirtynine ninety-eight." Matt stared at it. "That's awfully black," he said. "We have some others," the clerk began, folding the negligee. "Never mind," Matt said quickly. "Wrap it up." Furtively, he slipped the money over the counter. When he came out, the package under his arm, he was sweating freely. He put the box in his car and looked at his watch. He had about two and a half hours, at least. He should be able to find everything he needed in that time. He pulled a list of things out of his pocket, and found a telephone directory in a drugstore.  tory supply house. He called the number, asked for the equipment he'd need, was told they had it for rent, and drove over' to pick it up. The rental didn't seem like much by the day, but it was, he discovered on figuring it out, a lot by the month -- enough to break him fast if he didn't get something like a controlled series of tests, very fast. Feeling like a child-slayer, he drove back to the department store and parked, Only one hour had gone by. He went into the store and browsed about. Two hours. He put another nickel in the parking meter. He ' sat down in a red leather chair and tried to look as if he were testing it for size and comfort. Three hours. He fed the parking meter again, and began to feel hungry. He went back to the chair. From it, he could keep an eye on the stairs. Women went up and came down. None of them were Abbie. He wondered, with a flash of fear, if she had been caught trying to make off with something else. Matt tried not watching the stairs on the theory that a watched pot never boils. Never again, he vowed, would he go shopping with a woman. Where the devil was Abbie? "Mr. Wright." The voice was tremulous and low. Matt looked up and leaped out of his chair. The girl standing beside him was blond and breathtaking. The hair was short and fluffed out at the ends; it framed a beautiful face. A soft, simple black dress with a low neckline clung to a small but womanly figure. Slim, long legs in sheer stockings and, small black shoes with towering heels. "Good God, Abbie! What have they done to you?" "Don't you like it?" Abbie asked. The lovely face clouded up. "It's -- it's marvelous," Matt spluttered. "But they bleached your hair!" Abbie beamed. "The woman who worked on it called it a rinse. She said it was natural, but I should wash it every few days. Not with laundry soap, either." She sighed. "I didn't know there was so much a girl could do to her face. I've got so much to learn. Why, she -- " Abbie prattled on happily while Matt stared at her, incredulous. Had he been sleeping in the same small cabin with this girl? Had she been cooking his meals and darning the holes in his pockets? Had he really kissed her and held her in his arms and heard her say, "I reckon I wouldn't be unHe wondered if he would act the same again. ence but not such a startling one. She wore her clothes with a becoming sureness. She walked on the high heels as if she had worn them all her life. She carried herself as if she was born to beauty. But then, things always worked well for Abbie. Abbie opened a small black purse and took out five dollars and twenty-one cents. "The woman said I should give this back to you." Matt took it and looked at it in his hand and back at Abbie. He shrugged and smiled. "The power of money. Have you got everything?" Under her arm she carried a large package that contained, no doubt, the clothes and shoes she had worn. Matt took it from her. She refused to give up the package that held the frying pan. "I couldn't wear this," she said. She reached into her purse and pulled out something black and filmy. She held it up by one strap. "It was uncomfortable." Matt shot nervous glances to the right and the left. "Put it away." He crammed it back into the purse and snapped the purse shut. "Are you hungry?" "I could eat a hog," Abbie said. Coming from this blonde creature, the incongruity set Matt to laughing. Abbie stared with wide eyes. "Did I say something wrong?" she asked plaintively. "No." Matt got out and led her toward the door. "You got to tell me," Abbie said appealingly. "There's so much I don't know." Matt located the most expensive restaurant in town. It had a romantic atmosphere but he had chosen it because it specialized in sea food. He wanted to be sure that Abbie had things to eat she had nver tasted before. Matt ordered for both of them : shrimp cocktail, assorted relishes, chef's salad with roquefort dressing, broiled lobster tails with drawn butter, french fried potatoes, broccoli with a cheese sauce, frozen eclair, coffee. The food was good, and Abbie ate everything with great wonderment, as if it were about to disappear into the mysterious place from which it came. She stared wideTeyed at the room and its decorations and the other diners and the waiter, and seemed oblivious of the fact that other men were staring admiringly at her. The waiter puzzled her. "Is this all he does?" she asked timidly. Matt nodded. "He's very good at it," Abbie conceded. "Try to move the coffee cup," Matt said when they finished. Abbie stared at it for a moment. "I can't," she said softly. "I tried awful -- very hard, but I can't. I'd do anything you wanted, Mr. Wright, but I can't do that." Matt smiled. "That's all right. I just wanted to see if you could." could dance. He ordered a couple of drinks. Abbie sipped hers once, made a face, and wouldn't touch it again. She danced lightly and gracefully in her high-heeled shoes. They brought the top of her head level with his lips. She rested her head blissfully against his shoulder and pressed herself very close. For a moment Matt relaxed and let himself enjoy the pleasures of the aftermath of a good meal and a beautiful girl in his arms. But Abbie seemed to be in a private Eden of her own, as if she had entered a paradise and was afraid to speak for fear the spell would break. During the long drive home, she spoke only once. "Do people live like that all the time?" "No," Matt said. "Not always. Not unless they have a lot of money." Abbie nodded. "That's the way it should be," she said softly. "It should only happen a long ways apart." When they reached the cabin. Matt reached into the back seat for the package he had bought. "What's that?" Abbie asked. "Open it," Matt said. She held it up a little, lacy and black in the moonlight. Then she turned to look at Matt, her face transparent, her eyes glowing. "Wait out here a minute, will you?" she asked breathlessly. "All right." Matt lit a cigarette and stood on the porch looking out over the valley, hating himself. After a few minutes, he heard a little whisper. "Come in, Mr. Wright." and stopped, stunned. One kerosene lamp lit the room dimly. The new clothes were draped carefully over the edge of a chair. Abbie was wearing the negligee. That was all. Through its lacy blackness she gleamed pink and white, a lovely vision of seductiveness. She stood by the table, staring at the floort When she looked up, her cheeks were flushed. Suddenly she ran lightly across the floor and threw her arms around Matt's neck and kissed him hard on the lips. Her lips moved. She drew back a little, looking up at him. "There's only one way a girl like me can thank a man for a day as wonderful as this," she whispered. "For the clothes and the trip and the dinner and the dancing. And for being so nice. I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me. I don't mind. I guess it isn't bad when you really like someone. I like you awful -- very well. I'm glad they made me pretty. If I can make you happy -- just for a moment -- " Gently, feeling sick. Matt took her hands from around his neck. "You don't understand," he said coldly. "J've done a terrible thing. I don't know how you can ever forgive me. Somehow you misunderstood me. Those clothes, the negligee -- they're for another girl -- the girl I'm going to marry -- my fiancee. You're about her size and I thought -- I don't know how I could have misled..." He stopped. It was enough. His plan had worked. Abbie had crumpled. Slowly, as he spoke, the life had drained out of her, the glow had fled from her face, and she seemed to shrink in upon herself, cold and broken. She was a little girl, slapped across the face in her most spiritual moment by the one person she had trusted most. "That's all right," she said faintly. "Thanks for letting me think they was mine -- that it was for me -- only for a little. I'll never forget." She turned and went to the bunk and let the blanket fall back around her. It was the sobbing that kept Matt from going to sleep that night. Or maybe it was the way the sobs were so soft and muffled that he had to strain to hear them. meal. There was something wrong with the food, although Matt couldn't quite pin down what it was. Ever#d:hing was cooked just the same, but the flavor was gone. Matt cut and chewed mechanically and tried to avoid looking at Abbie. It wasn't difficult; she seemed very small today, and she kept her eyes on the floor. She was dressed in the shapeless blue gingham once more. She toyed listlessly with her food. Her face was scrubbed free of makeup, and everything about her was dull. Even her newly blonde hair had faded. Several times Matt opened his mouth to apologize again, and shut it without saying anything. Finally he cleared his throat and said, "Where's your new frying pan?" She looked up for the first time. Her blue eyes were cloudy. "I put it away," she said lifelessly, "do you want it back?" "No, no," Matt said hurriedly. "I was just asking." Silence fell again, like a sodden blanket. Matt sat and chainsmoked while Abbie cleaned up the table and washed the dishes. When she finished she turned around with her back to the dishpan. "Do you want me to move things for you? I can do it real good today." Matt saw the little pile of packages in the corner and noticed for the first time that the new clothes were gone. He steeled himself. "How do you know?" "I got a feeling." "Do you mind?" "I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She came forward and sat down in the chair. "Look!" The table between them lifted, twisted, tilted on one leg, and crashed on its side to the floor. "How did you feel?" Matt said excitedly. "Can you control the power? Was the movement accidental?" "It felt like it was kind of a part of me," Abbie said. "Like my hand. But I didn't know exactly what it was going to do." "Wait a minute," Matt said. "I'm going to get some things out of the car. Maybe we can learn a little more about what makes you able to do things like this. You don't mind, do you?" "What's the good of it?" she asked listlessly. Matt dashed out to the car and pulled the two cartons of equipment out of the trunk. He carried them into the shack and laid the apparatus out on the table. He went back to the car and brought in the bathroom scales he'd bought in the drugstore in Springfield. "All right, Abbie. First, let's find out a few things about you before we try moving anything else." Abbie complied automatically while he took her temperature and pulse, measureci het blood pressure and weighed her. "I wish I could set up controls to measure your basal metabolism," he muttered as he worked, "but this will have to do. I wish this shack had a generator." "I could get you electricity," Abbie said without much interest. "Hmmm -- you could at that, I guess. But that would make these tests meaningless, if you had to devote energy to keeping the equipment running." edge that was undoubtedly making him miss things that a man who had studied longer would have know more about. But there wasn't anything he could do about that. Once he'd reached some preliminary conclusions, more experienced researchers could take over the job. Working carefully, he wrote down the results. "Now, Abbie, would you please pick that chair up off the floor, and hold it up for a few minutes? No -- I mean really go over and pick it up." He let her hold it for exactly five minutes, then ran her through the same tests as before, noting the changes in temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, respiration, and then he weighed her again. "All right. Take a rest now. We'll have to wait until these readings drop down to what they were before we do anything else," Matt said. Still not displaying anything more than acquiescence, Abbie sat down in another chair and stared at the floor. "Abbie, do you mind helping me?" Matt asked. "It's for your benefit, too. If you can control these powers all the time, maybe the fellows around here will stop breaking legs and falling into lakes." Abbie's dull expression did not change. "I don't care," she said. Matt sighed. For a moment, he considered dropping his experiments and just getting out of Abbie's life -- packing his thesis notes and typewriter in the car and driving back to the University. But he couldn't stop now. He was too close to the beginnings of an answer. He checked Abbie again, and found that his readings coincided with the first set. The short rest had dropped her heartbeat and respiration back to normal. "Let's try all over again," Matt said. "Lift that chair to the same height you were holding it, please." The chair jerked upward, hesitantly. "Easy. Just a little more." It straightened, then moved more steadily. "Hold it there." The chair hovered motionless in the air, maintaining its position. Matt waited five minutes. "All right. Let it down now, easy. Slow." The chair settled gently to the floor, like a drifting feather. Once more, he checked Abbie. Her heartbeat was below what it had been. Her blood pressure was lower. Her respiration was shallow -- her breast was barely rising to each breath. Her temperature was low -- dangerously so, for an ordinary human being. "How do you feel.?" he asked apprehensively. If this was what always happened, then Abbie was in real danger every time she used her powers. "All right," she said with no more than her previous disinterest. Matt frowned, but she was showing no signs of discomfort. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Yes," she said. "You want me to try some more?" "If you're sure you're not in danger. But I want you to stop if you feel any pain or if you're uncomfortable. Now, lift the table just this far..." for an hour. At the end of that time, Abbie had it under perfect control. She could raise it a fraction of an inch or rocket it to the ceiling where it would remain, legs pointing stiffly toward the floor, until she lowered it. She balanced it on one leg and set it spinning like a top. Distance did not seem to diminish Abbie's control or power. She could make the table perform equally well from any point in the room, from outside the cabin, or from a point to which she shuffled dispiritedly several hundred yards down the road. "How do you know where it is and what it's doing?" Matt asked frowning. Abbie shrugged listlessly. "I just feel it." "With what?" Matt asked. "Do you see it? Feel it? Sense it? If we could isolate the sense -- " "It's all of those," Abbie said. Matt shook his head in frustration. "You look a little tired. You'd better lie down." She lay in her bunk, not moving, her face turned to the wall, but Matt knew that she wasn't asleep. When she didn't get up to fix lunch. Matt opened a can of soup and tried to get her to eat some of it. "No, thanks, Mr. Wright," Abbie said. "I ain't hungry." "I'm not hungry," Matt corrected. Abbie didn't respond. In the evening she got out of her bunk to fix supper, but she didn't eat more than a few mouthfuls. After she washed the dishes, she went back into her bunk and pulled the blanket around it. Matt sat up, trying to make sense out of his charts. Despite their readings, Abbie hadn't reacted dangerously to what should have been frightening physiological changes. He could be fairly safe in assuming that they alays accompanied the appearance of her parapsychological powers -- and she had certainly lived through those well enough. But why was there such a difference in the way she reacted when she was happy and when she wasn't? The first morning, when she had barely been able to assume conscious control, she'd been ravenously hungry. Today, when she had performed feats that made the others insignificant she was neither hungry nor abnormally exhausted. She was tired, yes, but there had been a measurable, though slight, expenditure of energy with each action, which, accumulated through their numerous experiments, could be expected to equal that required for an afternoon's normal work. What was different? Why, when she tried with what amounted to will-power alone, was it harder for her to move an object telekinetically than it would have been to do so physically? Why was the reverse true when she was unhappy? Unless she was tapping a source of energy somewhere. The thought sounded as though there might be something behind it. He reached for a blank sheet of paper and began jotting down ideas. Disregarding the first morning's experiments, when she was obviously succeeding despite this hypothetical force, what source of energy could she be contacting? Well, what physical laws was she violating? Gravity? Inertia? ' ' she could nullify gravity -- no, not exactly gravity -- mass. Once she had done that, a process that might not require much energy at all, the object rose by itself, and, having no mass, could be pushed around easily. Somehow, by some unconscious mechanism, she could restore measured amounts of mass and -- there was an idea trying to come to the surface of his thinking -- of course ! The energy created by the moving or falling body when mass , was restored and gravity re-asserted itself was channeled into her body. She stopped being a chemical engine sustained by food burned in the presence of oxygen, and became a receiver for the power generated by the moving bodies. Writing quickly, he systematized what he had learned. Obviously, the energy restored when the manipulated objects fell or swooped back into place couldn't quite balance the energy required to move them. She did get tired -- but nowhere near as tired as she should have been. If she empathized with her feelings at such times, she retained a bare margin of control even when happy, but she lost the delicate ability to tap the energy thus liberated, and had to draw on her own body for the power. Matt grimaced. If that was true -- and his charts and graph confirmed it, then she could never use her powers unless she was miserable. And the key to that lay buried in the childhood of a little hill girl, who probably had been scolded and beaten, as hill children were when they were bad. In this case 'bad' meaning a little girl who could move things without touching them, who had been confronted with the example of 'Libby,' the perfect little girl who would, always have minded her mother, until she had come to associate the use of her powers only with unhappiness, with not being wanted, with rejection on the part of the people whom she loved. Matt winced. You louse, Wright! But it was too late to do anything about it now. He had to go on with what he was doing. better in the morning. She looked tired, too, as if she hadn't slept. Matt stared at her for a moment thoughtfully, then shrugged and put her to work. In a few minutes, Abbie could duplicate her feats with the table of the day before with a control that was, if anything, even finer. Matt extended his experiment to her subjective reactions. "Let's isolate the source," he said. "Relax. Try to do it with the mind alone. Will the table to move." Matt jotted down notes. At the end of half an hour he had the following results: Mind alone -- negative. Body alone -- negative. Emotions alone -- negative. It was crude and uncertain. It would take days or months of practice to be able to use the mind without a sympathetic tension of the body, or to stop thinking or to wall off an emotion. But Matt was fairly sure that the telekinetic ability was a complex of all three and perhaps some others that he had no way of knowing about, which Abbie couldn't describe. But if any of the primary three were inhibited, consciously or unconsciously, Abbie could not move a crumb of bread. Two of them could be controlled. The third was a product of environment and circumstances. Abbie had to be unhappy. A muscle twitched in Matt's jaw, and he told Abbie to try moving more than one object. He saw a cup of coffee rise in the air, turn a double somersault down gently in the saucer that climbed to meet it. Matt stood up, picked the cup out of the air, drank the coffee, and put the cup back. The saucer did not wobble. There were limits to Abbie's ability. The number of dissimilar objects she could manipulate seemed to be three, regardless of size; she could handle hve similar objects with ease, and she had made six slices of bread do an intricate dance in the air. It was possible, of course, that she might improve with practice. "My God!" Matt exclaimed. "You could make a fortune as a magician." "Could I?" Abbie said without interest. She pleaded a headache and went to bed. Matt said nothing. They had worked for an hour and a half. Matt lit a cigarette. The latent telekinetic power could explain a lot of things, poltergeist phenomena, for instance, and in a more conscious form, levitation and the Indian rope trick and the whole gamut of oriental mysticism. He spent the rest of the day making careful notes of everything Abbie did, the date and time, the object and its approximate weight and its movements. When he finished, he would have a complete case history. Complete except for the vital parts which he did not dare put down on paper. Several times he turned to stare at Abbie's still, small form. He was only beginning to realize the tremendous potentialities locked up within her. His awareness had an edge of fear. What role was it he'd chosen for himself. He had been fairy godmother, but that no longer. Pygmalion? He felt a little like Pandora must have felt before she opened the box. Or, perhaps, he thought ruefully, he was more like Doctor Frankenstein. A bbie did not get up at all that day, and she refused to eat anything Matt fixed. Next morning, when she climbed slovly from her bunk, his apprehension sharpened. She was gaunt, and her face had a middle-aged, haggard look. Her blond hair was dull and lifeless. Matt had already cooked breakfast, but she only went through the motions of eating. He urged her, but she put her fork down tiredly. "It don't matter," she said. "Maybe you're sick," Matt fretted. "We'll take you to a doctor." Abbie looked at Matt levelly and shook her head. "What's wrong with me, a doctor won't fix." That was the morning Matt saw a can of baking powder pass through his chest. Abbie had been tossing it to Matt at various speeds, gauging the strength of the push necessary. Matt would either catch it or Abbie would stop it short and bring it back to her. But this time it came too fast, bullet-like. Involuntarily, Matt looked down, tensing his body for the impact. He saw the can go in... Abbie's eyes were wide and frightened. Matt turned around dazedly, prodding his chest with trembling fingers. The can had shattered against the cabin wall behind him. It lay on the floor, battered, in a drift of powder. "It went in," Matt said. "I saw it, but I didn't feel a thing. It passed right through me. What happened, Abbie?" "I couldn't stop it," she whispered, "so I just sort of wishe I it wasn't there. For just a moment. And it wasn't." That was how they found out that Abbie could teleport. It was as simple as telekinesis. She covld project or pull objects through walls without hurting either one. Little things, big things. It made no difference. Distance made no difference either, apparently. "What about living things?" Matt asked. Abbie concentrated. Suddenly there was a mouse on the table, a brown field mouse with twitching whiskers and large, startled black eyes. For a moment it crouched there, frozen, and then it scampered for the edge of the table, straight toward Abbie. Abbie screamed and reacted. Twisting in the air, the mouse vanished. Matt looked up, his mouth hanging open. Abbie was three feet in the air, hovering like a hummingbird. Slowly she sank down to her chair. "It works on people, too," Matt whispered. "Try it again. Try it on me." had suddenly stepped off the Earth. The room shifted around him. He looked down. He was floating in the air about two feet above the chair he had been sitting on. He was turning slowly, so that the room seemed to revolve around him. He looked for Abbie, but she was behind him now. Slowly she drifted into view. "That's fine," he said. Abbie looked happier than she had looked for days. She almost smiled. Matt began to turn more rapidly. In a moment he was spinning like a top; the room flashed into a kaleidoscope. He swallowed hard. ' "All right," he shouted, "that's enough." Abruptly he stopped spinning and dropped. His stomach soared up into his throat. He thumped solidly into the chair and immediately hopped up with a howl of anguish. He rubbed himself with both hands. "Ouch!" he shouted. And then accusingly, "You did that on purpose." Abbie looked innocent. "I done what you said." "All right, you did," Matt said bitterly. "From now on, I resign as a guinea pig." Abbie folded her hands in her lap. "What shall I do? "Practice on yourself," Matt said. "Yes, Mr. Wright." She rose sedately in the air. "This is wonderful." She stretched out as if she were laying in bed. She floated around the room. Matt was reminded of shows in which he had seen magicians producing the same illusion, passing hoops cleverly around their assistant's body to show that there were no wires. Only this wasn't magic; this wasn't illusion; this was real. Abbie settled back into the chair. Her face was glowing. "I feel like I could do anything," she said. "Now what shall I try." Matt thought a moment. "Can you project yourself?" "Where to?" "Oh, anywhere," Matt said impatiently. "It doesn't matter." "Anywhere?" she repeated. There was a distant and unreadable expression in her eyes. And then she vanished. Matt stared at the chair she had been in. She was gone, indisputably gone. He searched the room, a simple process. There was no sign of her. He went outside. The afternoon sun beat down, exposing everything in a harsh light. "Abbie!" Matt shouted. "Abbie!" He waited. He heard only the echo drifting back from the hills across the lake. For five minutes he roamed about the cabin, shouting and calling, before he gave up. He went back into the cabin. He sat down and stared moodily at the bunk where Abbie had slept. Where was she now? Was she trapped in some extra dimension, weird and inexplicable to the senses, within which her power could not work. There had to be some such explanation for teleportation -- a fourth dimensional shortcut across our three. Why not -- if she could nullify mass, she could adjust atoms so that they entered one of the other dimensions. A S he brooded, remorse came to him slowly, creeping in so stealthily that awareness of it was like a blow. The whole scheme had been madness. He could not understand now the insane ambition that had led to this tinkering with human lives and the structure of the Universe. He had justified it to himself with the liame of science. But the word had no mystic power of absolution. His motive had been something entirely different. It was only a sublimated lust for power, and thinly disguised at that. The power, of knowledge. And for that lust, which she could never understand, an innocent, unsophisticated girl had suffered. Was Abbie dead? Perhaps that was the most merciful thing. Ends can never justify means. Matt realized now. They are too inextricably intertwined ever to be separated. The means inevitably shape the ends. In the long view, there are neither means nor ends, for the means are only an infinite series of ends, and the ends are an infinite series of means... And Abbie appeared. Like an Arabian genie, with gifts upon a tray, streaming a mouth-watering incense through the air. Fullformed, she sprang into being, her cheeks glowing, her eyes shining. "Abbie!" Matt shouted joyfully. His heart gave a sharp bound, as if it had suddenly been released from an unbearable weight. "Where have you been?" "Springfield." "Springfield I" Matt gasped. "But that's over fifty miles." Abbie lowered the tray to the table. She snapped her fingers. "Like that, I was there." Matt's eyes fell to the tray. It was loaded with cooked food: shrimp cocktail, broiled lobster tails, french fried... Abbie smiled. "I got hungry." "But where -- ?" Matt began. "You went back to the restaurant," he said accusingly, "you took the food from there." Abbie nodded happily. "I was hungry." "But that's stealing," Matt moaned. And he realized for the first time the enormity of the thing he had done, what he had let loose upon the world. Nothing was safe. Neither money nor jewels nor deadly secrets. Nothing at all. "They won't ever miss it," Abbie said, "and nobody saw me." She said it simply, as the ultimate justification. Matt was swept by the staggering realization that where her basic drives were concerned Abbie was completely unmoral. There was only one small hope. If he could keep her from realizing her civilization-shattering potentialities! They might never occur to her. "Sure." Matt said. "Sure." Abbie ate heartily, but Matt had no appetite. He sat thoughtfully, watching her eat, and he experienced a brief thankfulness that at least she wasn't going to starve to death. "Didn't you have any trouble?" he asked. "Getting the food without anyone seeing you?" Abbie nodded. "I couldn't decide how to get into the kitchen. I could see that the cook was all alone..." "You could see?" "I was outside, but I could see into the kitchen, somehow. So finally, I called 'Alberti' And the cook went out and I went in and took the food that was sitting on the tray and came back here. It was really simple, because the cook was expecting someone to call him." "How did you know that?" "I thought it," Abbie said, frowning. "Like this." S HE concentrated for a moment. He watched her, puzzled, and then knew what she meant. Panic caught him by the throat. There were things she shouldn't know. Because he was trying so hard to bury them deep, they scuttled across his consciousness. Telepathy! And as he watched her face, he knew that he was right. Her eyes grew wide and incredulous. Slowly, something hard and cruelly cold slipped over her face like a mask. Oh, Abbie! My sweet, gentle Abbie! "You -- " she gasped. "You devil! There ain't nothin' too bad for anyone who'd do that!" I'm a dead man. Matt thought. "You with your kindness and your handsome face and your city manners," Abbie said pitifully. "How could you do it? You made me fall in love with you. It wasn't hard, was it? All you had to do was hold a little hill girl's hand in the moonlight an' kiss her once, an' she was ready to jump into bed with you. But you didn't want anything as natural as that. All the time you was laughing and scheming. Poor little hill girl ! "You make me think you like me so well you want me to look real purty in new clothes and new hair and a new face. But it's just a trick. All the time it's a trick.  When I'm feeling happiest and most grateful, you take it all away. I'd sooner you hit me across the face. Poor little hill girl! Thinking you wanted her. Thinking maybe you were aiming to marry her. I wanted to die. Even Paw was never that mean. He never done anything a-purpose, like you." White-faced, Matt watched her, his mind racing. "You're thinking you can get around me somehow," Abbie said, "and I'll forget. You can make me think it was all a mistake. 'Tain't no use. You can't, not ever, because I know what you're thinking." What had he been thinking? Had he actually thought of marrying her? Just for a second? He shuddered. It would be hell. Imagine, if you can, a wife whois all-knowing, all-powerful, who can never be evaded, avoided, sighed to, lied to, shut out, shut up. Imagine a wife who can make a room a shambles in a second, who can throw dishes and chairs and tables with equal facility and deadly accuracy. Imagine a wife who can be any place, any time, in the flicker of a suspicion. Imagine a wife who can see through walls and read minds and maybe wish you a raging headache or a broken leg or aching joints. It would be worse than hell. The torments of the damned would be pleasant compared to that. Abbie's chin came up. "You don't need to worry. I'd as soon marry up with a rattlesnake. At least he gives you warning before he strikes." "Kill me!" Matt said desperately. "Go ahead and kill me!" too good for you. I don't know anything that ain't too good for you. But don't worry. I'll think of something. Now, go away and leave me alone." to turn. Before he could complete it, he found himself outside the cabin. He blinked in the light of the sinking sun. He began to shiver. After a little he sat down on the porch and lit a cigarette. There had to be some way out of this. There was always a way. From inside the cabin came the sound of running water. Running water! Matt resisted an impulse to get up and investigate the mystery. "Leave me alone," Abbie had said, in a tone that Matt didn't care to challenge. A few minutes later he heard the sound of splashing and Abbie's voice lifted in a sweet soprano. Although he couldn't understand the words, the tune sent chills down his back. And then a phrase came clear: Root-a-toot-toot Three times she did shoot Right through that hardwood door. He ivas her man, But he done her wrong... Matt began to shake. He passed a trembling hand across his sweaty forehead and wondered if he had a fever. He tried to pull himself together for he had to think clearly. The situation was obvious. He had done a fiendishly cruel thing -- no matter what the excuse -- and he had been caught and the power of revenge was in the hands of the one he had wronged, never more completely. The only question was: what form would the revenge take? When he knew that, he might be able to figure out a way to evade it. There was no question in his mind about waiting meekly for justice to strike. The insurmountable difficulty was that the moment he thought of a plan, it would be unworkable because Abbie would be forewarned. And she was already armed. He had to stop thinking. How do you stop thinking? he thought miserably. Stop thinking! he told himself. Stop thinking, damn you! He might be on the brink of the perfect solution. But if he thought of it, it would be worthless. And if he couldn't think of it, then -- The circle was complete. He was back where he started, staring at its perfect viciousness. There was only one possi -- Mary had a little Iamb with fleece as white as snow and everywhere that Mary went (Relax!) the Iamb (Don't think!) was sure (Act on the spur of the moment) fo go. Mary had a... "Well, Mr. Wright, are you ready to go?" Matt started. Beside him were a pair of black suede shoes filled with small feet. His gaze traveled up the lovely, nylon-sheathed legs, up the clinging black dress that swelled so provocatively, to the face with its blue eyes and red lips and blond hair. Even in his pressing predicament, Matt had to recognize the impact of her beauty. It was a pity that her other gifts were too terrible. "I reckon your fiancee won't mind," Abbie said sweetly. "Being as you ain't got a fiancee. Are you ready?" "Ready?" Matt looked down at his soiled work clothes. "For what?" "You're ready," Abbie said. him, followed by a wave of nausea. Matt shut his eyes. They receded. When he opened his eyes again, he had a frightening sensation of disorientation. Then he recognized his surroundings. He was on the dance floor in Springfield. Abbie came into his arms. "All right," she said, "dance!" Shocked, Matt began to dance, mechanically. He realized that people were staring at them as if they had dropped through a hole in the ceiling. Matt wasn't sure they hadn't. Only two other couples were on the small floor, but they had stopped dancing and were looking puzzled. As Matt swung Abbie slowly around he saw that the sprinkling of customers at the bar had turned to stare, too. A waiter in a white jacket was coming toward them, frowning determinedly. Abbie seemed as unconcerned about the commotion she had caused as the rainbow-hued juke box in the corner. It thumped away just below Matt's conscious level of recognition. Abbie danced lightly in his arms. The waiter tapped Matt on the shoulder. Matt sighed with relief and stopped dancing. Immediately he found himself moving jerkily around the floor like a puppet. Abbie, he gathered, did not care to stop. The waiter followed doggedly. "Stop that!" he said bewilderedly. "I don't know where you came from or what you think you're doing, but you can't do it in here and you can't do it dressed like that." 'T -- I c-can-n't s-st-stop-p!" Matt said jerkily. "Sure you can," the waiter said soothingly. He plodded along after them. "There's lots of things a man can't do, but he can always stop whatever you're doing. I should think you'd be glad to stop." "W-wwould," Matt got out. "S-st-stop-p!" he whispered to Abbie. "Tell the man to go 'way," Abbie whispered back. Matt decided to start dancing again. It was easier than being shaken to pieces. "I think you'd better go away," he said to the waiter. "We don't like to use force," the waiter said, frowning, "but we have to keep up a standard for our patrons. Come along quietly," he jerked on Matt's arm "or -- " The grip on Matt's arm was suddenly gone. The waiter vanished. Matt looked around wildly. The juke box had a new decoration. Dazed, opaque-eyed, the waiter squatted on top of the box, his white jacket and whiter face a dark fool's motley in the swirling lights. Abbie pressed herself close. Matt shuddered and swung her slowly around the floor. On the next turn, he saw that the waiter had climbed down from his perch. He had recruited reinforcements. Grim-faced and silent, the waiter approached, followed by another waiter, a lantern-jawed bartender, and an ugly bulldog of a man in street clothes. The manager. Matt decided. They formed a menacing ring around Matt and Abbie. "Whatever your game is," growled the bulldog, "we don't want to play. If you don't leave damn quick, you're going to wish you had." Matt, looking at him, believed it. He tried to stop. Again his limbs began to jerk uncontrollably. "I-I c-can-n't," he said. "D-ddon't y-you th-think I-I w-would if I-I c-could." The manager stared at him with large, awed, bloodshot eyes. "Yeah," he said. "I guess you would." He shook himself. His jowls wobbled. "Okay, boys. Let's get rid of them." "Watch yourself," said the first waiter uneasily. "One of them has a trick throw." They closed in. Matt felt Abbie stiffen against him. other, like candles being snuffed. Matt glanced unhappily at the juke box. There they were on top of the box, stacked in each other's laps like a totem pole. The pile teetered and collapsed in all directions. Dull thuds made themselves heard even above the juke box. Matt saw them get up, puzzled and wary. The bartender was rubbing his nose. He doubled his fists and started to rush out on the floor. The manager, a wilier sort, grabbed his arm. The four of them went into consultation. Every few seconds one of them would raise his head and stare at Matt and Abbie. Finally the first waiter detached himself from the group and with an air of finality reached behind the juke box. Abruptly the music stopped; the colored lights went out. Silence fell. The four of them turned triumphantly toward the floor. Just as' abruptly, the lights went back on; the music boomed out again. They jumped. Defiantly, the manager stepped to the wall and pulled the plug from the socket. He turned, still holding the cord. It stirred in his hand. The manager looked down at it incredulously. It wriggled. He dropped it hurriedly, with revulsion. The plug rose cobralike from its coils and began a slow, deadly, weaving dance. The manager stared, hypnotized with disbelief. The cord struck. The manager leaped back. The bared, metal fangs bit into the floor. They retreated, all four of them, watching with wide eyes. Contemptuously, the cord turned its back on them, wriggled its way to the socket, and plugged itself in. The music returned. Matt danced on with leaden legs. He could not stop. He would never stop. He thought of the fairy tale of the red shoes. Abbie seemed as fresh and determined as ever. As the juke box came into sight again. Matt noticed some commotion around it. The bartender was approaching the manager with an axe, a glittering fire axe. For one whirling moment. Matt thought the whole world had gone mad. Then he saw the manager take the axe and approach the juke box cautiously, the axe poised in one hand ready to strike. He brought it down smartly. The cord squirmed its coils out of the way. The manager wrenched the axe from the floor. Bravely he advanced closer. He looked down and screamed. The cord had a loop around one leg; the loop was tightening. Frantically the manager swung again and again. One stroke hit the cord squarely. It parted. The music stopped. The box went dark. The headless cord squirmed in dying agonies. Abbie stopped dancing. Matt stood still, his legs trembling, sighing with relief. "Let's go, Abbie," he pleaded. "Let's go quick." She shook her head. "Let's sit." She led him to a table which, like the rest of the room, had been suddenly vacated of patrons. "I reckon you'd like a drink." "I'd rather leave," Matt muttered. Abbie beckoned at the waiter. He came toward the table cautiously. Abbie looked inquiringly at Matt. "Bourbon," Matt said helplessly. "Straight." In a moment the waiter was back with a bottle and two glasses on a tray. "The boss said to get the money first," he said timidly. Matt searched his pockets futilely. He looked at the manager, standing against one wall, glowering, his arms folded across his chest. "I haven't got any money on me," Matt said. "That's all right," Abbie said. "Just set the things down." "No, ma'am," the waiter began, and his eyes rolled as the tray floated out of his hand and settled to the table. He stopped talking, shut his mouth, and backed away. Abbie was brooding, her chin in one small hand. "I ain't been a good daughter," she said. "Paw would like it here." "No, no," Matt said hurriedly. "Don't do that. We've got enough trouble -- " Jenkins was sitting in the third chair, blinking slowly, reeking of alcohol. Matt reached for the bottle and sloshed some into a glass. He raised it to his lips and tossed it off. The liquor burned his throat for a moment and then was gone. Matt waited expectantly as he lowered the glass to the table. He felt nothing, nothing at all. He looked suspiciously at the glass. It was still full. Jenkins focused his eyes. "Ab!" he said. He seemed to cringe in his chair. "What you doin' here? You look different. All fixed up. Find a feller with money?" Abbie ignored his questions. "If I asked you to do somethin'. Paw, would you do it?" "Sure, Ab," Jenkins said hurriedly. His eyes lit on the bottle of bourbon. "Anything." He raised the bottle to his lips. It gurgled pleasantly and went on gurgling. Matt watched the level of amber liquid drop in the bottle, but when Jenkins put it down and wiped his bearded lips with one large hairy hand, the bottle was half empty and stayed that way. Jenkins sighed heavily. Matt raised his glass again and tilted it to his lips. When he lowered it, the glass was still full and Matt was still empty. He stared moodily at the glass. "If I asked you to hit Mr. Wright in the nose," Abbiewent on, "I reckon you'd do it?" Matt tensed himself. "Sure, Ab, sure," Jenkins said. He turned his massive head slowly. He doubled his fist. The expression behind the beard was unreadable, but Matt decided that it was better that way. "Ain't you been treatin' mah little gal right?" Jenkins demanded. "Say, son," he said with concern, "you don't look so good." He looked back at Abbie. "Want I should hit him?" "Not now," Abbie said. "But keep it in mind." Matt relaxed and seized the opportunity to dash the glass to his mouth. Futilely. Not a drop of liquor reached his stomach. Hopelessly, Matt thought of Tantalus. "Police!" Jenkins bellowed suddenly, rising up with the neck of the bottle in one huge hand. Matt looked. The bartender was leading three policemen into the front of the room. The officers advanced stolidly, confident of their ultimate strength and authority. Matt turned quickly to Abbie. "No tricks," he pleaded. "Not with the law." Abbie yawned. "I'm tired. I reckon it's almost midnight." Jenkins charged, bull-like, bellowing with rage. And the room vanished. Matt blinked, sickened. They were back in the cabin. Abbie and he. "Wha.t about your father?" Matt asked. "Next to liquor," Abbie said, "Paw likes a fight best. I'm going to bed now. I'm real tired." She left her shoes on the floor, climbed into her bunk, and pulled the blanket around herself. bunk. Mary had a little lamb... He sat down on it and pulled off his shoes, letting them thump to the floor... with fleece as white as snow... He pulled the blanket around his bunk and made rustling sounds, but he lay down without removing his clothes... and everywhere that Mary went... He lay stiffly, listening to the immediate sounds of deep breathing coming from the other bunk... the lamb was sure to go... Two tortured hours crawled by. Matt sat up cautiously. He picked up his shoes from the floor. He straightened up. Slowly he tiptoed toward the door. Inch by inch, listening to Abbie's steady breathing, until he was at the door. He slipped it open, only a foot. He squeezed through and drew it shut behind him. A porch board creaked. Matt froze. He waited. There was no sound from inside. He crept over the pebbles of the driveway, suppressing exclamations of pain. But he did not dare stop to put on his shoes. He was beside the car. He eased the door open and slipped into the seat. Blessing the steep driveway, he released the brake and pushed in the clutch. The car began to roll. Slowly at first, then picking up speed, the car turned out of the driveway into the road. it sped silent down the long hill. After one harrowing tree-darkened turn. Matt switched on the lights and gently clicked the door to its first catch. When he was a mile away, he started the motor. Escape ! pump in the gray dawn that was already sticky with heat. Through the dusty, bug-splattered windshield the bloodshot sun peered at him and saw a dark young man in stained work clothes, his face stubbled blackly, his eyes burning wearily. But Matt breathed deep; he drew in the wine of freedom. Was this Fair Play or Humansville? Matt was too tired and hungry to remember. Whichever it was, all was well. It seemed a reasonable assumption that Abbie could not find him if she did not know where he was, that she could not teleport herself anywhere she had not already been. When she had disappeared the first time, she had gone to the places in Springfield she knew. She had brought her father from his two-room shanty. She had taken him back to the cabin. The sleepy attendant approached, and with him came a wash of apprehension to knot his stomach. Money! He had no money. Hopelessly he began to search his pockets. Without money he was stuck here, and all his money was back in his cabin with his clothes and his typewriter and his manila folder of notes. And then his hand touched something in his hip pocket. Wonderingly, he pulled it out. It was his billfold. He peered at its contents. Four dollars in bills and three hundred in travelers' checks. "Fill it up," he said. When had he picked up the billfold? Or had he had it all the time? He could have sworn that he had not had it when he was in the cocktail lounge in Springfield. He was almost sure that he had left it in his suit pants. The uncertainty made him vaguely uneasy. Or was it only hunger? He hadn't eaten since toying with Abbie's stolen delicacies yesterday afternoon. "Where's a good place to eat?' he asked, as the attendant handed him change. It was an old fellow in coveralls. He pointed a few hundred feet up the road. "See those trucks parked outside that diner?" Matt nodded. "Usual thing, when you see them outside, you can depend on good food inside. Here it don't mean a thing. Food's lousy. We got a landmark though. Truckers stop to see it." The old fellow cackled. "Name's Lola." As Matt pulled away, the old man called after him. "Don't make no difference, anyway. No place else open." Matt parked beside one of the large trailer trucks. Lola? He made a wry face as he got out of the car. He was through with women. The diner, built in the shape of a railroad car, had a long counter running along one side, but it was filled with truckers in shirt sleeves, big men drinking coffee and smoking and teasing the waitress. Tiredly, Matt slipped into one of the empty booths. The waitress detached herself from her admirers immediately and came to the booth with a glass of water in one hand, swinging her hips confidently. She had a smoldering, dark beauty, and she was well aware of it. Her black hair was cut short, and her brown eyes and tanned face were smiling. Her skirt and low-cut peasant blouse bulged generously in the right places. Some time -- and not too many years in the future -- she would be fat, but right n,ow she was lush, ready to be picked by the right hand. Matt guessed that she would not be a waitress in a small town long. As she put the water on the table, she bent low to demonstrate just how lush she was. The neckline drooped. Against his will, Matt's eyes drifted toward her. "What'll you have?" the waitress said softly. Matt swallowed. "A couple of -- hotcakes," he said, "with sausages." She straightened up slowly, smiling brightly at him. "Stack a pair," she yelled, "with links." She turned around and looked enticingly over her shoulder. "Coffee?" Matt nodded. He smiled a little to show that he appreciated her attentions. There was no doubt about the fact that she was an attractive girl. In anyone's mind. Any other time... she said suddenly and straightened. She began to rub her rounded bottom vigorously and cast Matt a hurt, reproachful glance. Slowly her pained expression changed to a roguish smile. She waggled a coy finger at Matt. "Naughty, naughty!" the finger said. Matt stared at her as if she had lost her senses. He shook his head in bewilderment as she vanished behind the counter. And then he noticed that a couple of the truckers had turned around to glower at him, and Matt became absorbed in contemplating the glass of water. It made him realize how thirsty he was. He drank the whole glassful, but it didn't seem to help much. He was just as thirsty, just as empty. Lola wasted no time in bringing Matt's cup of coffee. She carried it casually and efficiently in the saucer. But as she neared Matt the inexplicable happened. She tripped over something invisible on the smooth floor. She stumbled. The coffee flew in a steaming arc and splashed on Matt's shirt with incredible accuracy, soaking in hotly. Lola gasped, her hand to her mouth. Matt leaped up, pulling his shirt away from his chest, swearing. Lola grabbed a handful of paper napkins and began to dab at his shirt. "Golly, honey, I'm sorry," she said warmly. "I can't understand how I came to trip." She pressed herself close to him. Matt could smell the odor of gardenias. "That's all right," he said, drawing back. "It was an accident." She followed him up, working at his shirt. Matt noticed that the truckers were all watching, some darkly, the rest enviously. He slipped back into the booth. One of the truckers guffawed. "You don't have to spill coffee on me, Lola, to make me steam," he said. The rest of the truckers laughed with him. "Oh, shut up!" Lola told them. She turned back to Matt. "You all right, honey?" "Sure, sure," Matt said wearily. "Just bring me the hotcakes." The coffee had cooled now. His shirt felt clammy. Matt thought about accident prones. It had to be an accident. He glanced uneasily around the diner. The only girl here was Lola. The hotcakes were ready. She was bringing them toward the booth, but it was not a simple process. Matt had never seen slippery hotcakes before this. Lola was so busy that she forgot to swing her hips. The hotcakes slithered from side to side on the plate. Lola juggled them, tilting the plate back and forth to keep them from sliding off. Her eyes were wide with astonishment ; her mouth was a round, red "O"; her forehead was furrowed with concentration. She did an intricate, unconscious dance step to keep from losing the top hotcake. As Matt watched, fascinated, the sausages, four of them linked together, started to slip from the plate. With something approaching sentience, they skilled off and disappeared down the low neck of Lola's blouse. Lola shrieked. She started to wriggle, her shoulders hunched. While she tried to balance the hotcakes with one hand, the other dived into th? blouse and hunted around frantically. Matt watched: the truckers watched. Lola hunted and wiggled. The  hand that held the plate flew up. The hotcakes scattered. One hit the nearest trucker in the face. He peeled it off, red and bellowing. "A joker!" He dived off the stool toward Matt. table caught him in his stomach. He climbed up on the seat. The hotcake the trucker had discarded had landed on the head of the man next to him. He stood up angrily. Lola had finally located the elusive sailsages. She drew them out of their intimate hiding place with a shout of triumph. They whipped into the open mouth of the lunging trucker. He stopped, transfixed, strangling. "Argh-gh-uggle!" he said. A cup crashed against the wall, close to Matt's head. Matt ducked. If he could get over the back of this booth, he could reach the door. The place was filled with angry shouts and angrier faces and bulky shoulders approaching. Lola took one frightened loolf and grabbed Matt around the knees. "Protect me!" she said wildly. The air was filled with missiles. Matt reached down to disengage Lola's fear-strengthened arms. He glanced up to see the trucker spitting out the last of the sausages. With a maddened yell, the trucker threw a heavy fist at Matt. Hampered as he was, Matt threw himself back hopelessly. Something ripped. The fist breezed past and crashed through a window. Matt hung over the back of the booth, head downward, unable to get back up, unable to shake Lola loose. Everywhere he looked he could see rage-enflamed faces. He closed his eyes and surrendered himself to his fate. From somewhere, above the tumult, came the sound of laughter, like the tinkling of little silver bells. Then Matt was outside with no idea of how he had got there. In his hand was a strip of thin fabric. Lola's blouse. Poor Lola, he thought, as he threw it away. What was his fatal fascination for girls? Behind him the diner was alive with lights and the crash of dishes and the smacking of fists on flesh. Before long they would discover that he was gone. Matt ran to his car. It started to life when he punched the button. He backed it up, screeched it to a stop, jerked into first, and barreled onto the highway. Within twenty seconds, he was doing sixty. He turned to look back at the diner and almost lost control of the car as he tried to absorb the implications of the contents on the back seat. Resting neatly there were his typewriter, notes, and all his clothes. on the streets of Clinton, he was feeling easier mentally and much worse physically. The dip in a secluded stream near the road, the change of clothes, and the shave -- torturing as it had been in cold water -- had refreshed him for a while. But that had worn off, and the lack of a night's sleep and twenty-four hours without food were catching up with him. Better that, he thought grimly, than Abbie. He could endure anything for a time. As for the typewriter and the notes and the clothes, there was probably some simple explanation. The one Matt liked best was that Abbie had had a change of heart; she had expected him to leave and she had made his way easy. She was, Matt thought, a kind-hearted child underneath it all. The trouble with that explanation was that Matt didn't believe it. He shrugged. There were more pressing things -- money, for instance. Gas was getting low, and he needed to get something in his stomach if he was to keep up his strength for the long drive ahead. He had to cash one of his checks. That seemed simple enough. The bank was at the corner of this block. It was eleven o'clock. The bank would be open. Naturally they would cash a check.  But for some reason Matt felt uneasy. Matt walked into the bank and went directly to a window. He countersigned one of the checks and presented it to the teller, a thin little man with a wispy mustache and a bald spot on top of his head. The teller compared the signatures and turned to the shelf at his side where bills stood in piles, some still wrapped. He counted out four twenties, a ten, a five, and five ones. "Here you are, sir," he said politely. Matt accepted it only because his hand was outstretched and the teller put the money in it. His eyes were fixed in horror upon a wrapped bundle of twenty dollar bills which was slowly rising from the shelf. It climbed leisurely over the top of the cage. "What's the matter, sir?" the teller asked in alarm. "Do you feel sick?" Matt nodded once and then tore his eyes away and shook his head vigorously. "No," he gasped. "I'm all right." He took a step back from the window. "Are you sure? You don't look well at all." Matt felt something fumble its way into his right hand coat pocket. He  plunged his hand in after it. His empty stomach revolved in his abdomen. He could not mistake the touch of crisp paper. He stooped quickly beneath the teller's window. The teller leaned out. Matt straightened up, the package of bills in his hand. "I guess you must have dropped this," he muttered. The teller glanced at the shelf and back at the sheaf of twenties. "I don't see how -- But thank you! That's the funniest -- " Matt pushed the bills under the grillwork. "Yes, isn't it," he agreed hurriedly. "Well, thank you." "Thank you!"  Matt lifted his hand. The money lifted with it. The package stuck to his hand as if it had been attached with glue. "Excuse me," he said feebly. "I can't seem to get rid of this money." He shook his hand. The money clung stubbornly. He shook his hand again, violently. The package of bills did not budge. "Very funny," the teller said, but he was not smiling. From his tone of voice. Matt suspected that he thought money was a very serious business indeed. The teller reached under the bars and caught hold of one end of the package. "You can let go now," he said. "Let go!" Matt tried to pull his hand away. "I can't!" he said, breathing heavily. The teller tugged. Matt tugged. "I haven't time to play games," the teller panted. "Let go!" "I don't want it," Matt said frantically. "But it seems to be stuck. Look!" He showed his hand, fingers spread wide. The teller grabbed the bundle of bills with both hands and braced his feet against the front of his cubicle. "Let go!" he shouted. Matt pulled hard. Suddenly the tension on his arm vanished. His arm whipped back. The teller disappeared into the bottom of the cubicle. Something clanged hollowly. Matt looked at his hand. The bills were gone. Slowly the teller's head appeared from the concealed part of the cubicle. It came up, accompanied by groans, with a red swelling in the middle of the bald spot. After it came the teller's hand, waving the package of twenties triumphantly. The other hand was rubbing his head. "Are you still here?" he demanded, slamming the bills down at his side. "Get out of this bank. And if you ever come back I'll have you arrested for -- for disturbing the peace." "Don't worry," Matt said. "I won't be back." His face suddenly grew pale. "Stop" he said frantically, waving his arms. "Go back!" The teller stared at him, fearfully, indecisively. rHE bundle of twenties was rising over the top of the cage again. Instinctively, Matt grabbed them out of the air. His mind clicked rapidly. If he was to keep out of jail, there was only one thing to do. He advanced on the teller angrily, waving the bills in the air. "What do you mean by throwing these at me!" "Throwing money?" the teller said weakly. "Me?" Matt shook the bills in front of the teller's nose. "What do you call this?" The clerk glanced at the money and down at his side. "Oh, no!" he moaned. "I have a good mind," Matt said violently, "to complain to the president of this bank." He slammed the bills down. He closed his eyes in a silent prayer "Tellers throwing money around!" He took his hand away. Blissfully, the money stayed where it was on the counter. The teller reached for it feebly. The package shifted. He reached again. The bills slid away. He stuck both hands through the slot and groped wildly. The money slipped between his arms into the cage. Matt stood shifting his weight from foot to foot, paralyzed between flight and fascination. The bundle winged its way around in the cage like a drunken butterfly. Wide-eyed and frantic, the teller chased it from side to side. He made great diving swoops for it, his hands cupped into a net. He crept up on it and pounced, catlike, only to have to slip between his fingers at the last moment. Suddenly he stopped, frozen. His hands flew to his head. "My God!" he screamed. "What am I doing? I'm mad!" Matt backed toward the door. The other clerks and tellers were running toward the center of the disturbance. Matt saw a dignified gentleman with a paunch stand up inside a railed-in office and hurdle the obstacle with fine show of athletic form. Matt turned and ran, dodging the guard at the gate. "Get the doctor," he yelled. From somewhere came the sound of a tinkling of little silver bells. There was no doubt in Matt's mind as he gunned his car out of Clinton. Abbie was after him. He had not been free a moment. All the time she had known where to find him. He was the fleeing mouse, happy in his illusion of freedom -- until the cat's paw comes down on his back. Matt thought of the Furies -- awful Alecto, Tisi phone, Megaera -- in their blood-stained robes and serpent hair pursuing him across the world with their terrible whips. But they all had Abbie's face. Matt drove north toward Kansas City, thirsty, starving, half dead from fatigue, wondering hopelessly where it would end. were creeping up the eastern sky as Matt reached Lawrence, Kansas. He had not tried to stop in Kansas City. Something had drawn him on, some buried hope that still survived feebly, and when, five miles from Lawrence, he had seen Mount Oread rise against the sunset, the white spires and red tile roofs of the university gleaming like beacons, he had known what it was. Here was a citadel of knowledge, a fortress of the world's truth against black waves of ignorance and superstition. Here, in this saner atmosphere of study and reflection, logic and cool consideration, here, if anywhere, he could shake off this dark conviction of doom that sapped his will. Here, surely, he could think more clearly, act more decisively, rid himself of this demon of vengeance that rode his shoulders. Here he could get help. He drove down Massachusetts Street, his body leaden with fatigue, his eyes red-rimmed and shadowed searching restlessly from side to side. His hunger was only a dull ache; he could almost forget it. But his thirst was a live thing. Somewhere -- he could not remember where -- he had eaten and drunk, but they had vanished from his throat as he swallowed. Is there no end? he thought wildly. Is there no way out? There was, of course. There always is. Always -- Mary had a little Iamb... Impulse swung his car into the diagonal parking space. First he was going to drink and eat, come what may. He walked into the restaurant. Summer students filled the room, young men in sport shirts and slacks, girls in gay cotton prints and saddle shoes, laughing, talking, eating... Swaying in the doorway, Matt watched them, bleary-eyed. Once I was like them, he thought dully. Youn and alive and conscious that these were the best years I would ever know. Now  am old and used up, doomed... He slumped down at a table near the front, filled with a great surge of sorrow that all happiness was behind him. He was conscious that the waitress was beside him. "Soup," he mumbled. "Soup and milk." He did not look up. "Yes, sir," she said. Her voice sounded vaguely familiar, but they are all the same, all the voices of youth. He had eaten here before. He did not look up. Slowly he raised the glass of water to his lips. It went down his throat in dusty gulps. It spread out in his stomach in cool, blessed waves. Matt closed his eyes thankfully. The hunger pains began to return. For a moment Matt regretted the soup and wished he had ordered steak. After the soup, he thought. The soup came. Matt lifted a spoonful. He let it trickle down his throat. "Feelin' better, Mr. Wright," said the waitress. It was Abbie! Abbie's face bending over him. Matt choked and spluttered. Students turned to stare. Matt gazed around the room wildly. The girls -- they all looked like Abbie. He stood up, almost knocking over the table as he ran to the front door. With his hand on the door knob, he stopped, paralyzed. Staring in at him, through the glass, was a pair of bloodshot eyes set above an unruly black nest. Stooped, powerful shoulders loomed behind the face. As Matt stared back, the eyes lighted up as if they recognized him. "Argh-gh!" Matt screamed. He staggered back and turned on trembling legs. He tottered toward the back of the restaurant. The aisle seemed full of feet put out to trip him. He stumbled to the swinging kitchen door and broke through into odors of frying and baking that no longer moved him. The cook looked up, startled. Matt ran on through the kitchen and plunged through the back door. The alley was dark. Matt barked his shins on a box. He limped on, cursing. At one end of the alley a street light spread a pool of welcome. Matt ran toward it. He was panting. His heart beat fast. Then it almost stopped. A shadow lay along the mouth of the alley. A long shadow with huge shoulders and something that waved from the chin. Matt spun. He ran frantically toward the other end of the alley. His mind raced like an engine that has broken its governor. Nightmarish terror streaked through his arms and legs; they seemed distant and leaden. But slowly he approached the other end. He came nearer. Nearer. A shadow detached itself from the dark back walls. But it was no shadow. Matt slowed, stopped. The shadow came closer, towering tall above him. Matt cowered, unable to move. Closer. Two long arms reached out toward him. Matt quivered. He waited for the end. The arms wrapped around him. They drew him close. "Son, son," Jenkins said weakly. "Yore the first familiar face I seen all day." Matt's heart started beating again. He drew back, extracting his face from Jenkin's redolent beard. "Cain't understand what's goin' on these days," Jenkins said shaking his head sadly, "but I got a feelin' Ab's behint it. Just as that fight got goin' good, the whole shebang disappeared and here I was. Where am I, son?" "Kansas," Matt said. "Lawrence, Kansas." "Kansas?" Jenkins wobbled his beard. "Last I heard, Kansas was dry, but it can't be half as dry as I am. I recollect bearin' Quantrell burned this town. Too bad it didn't stay burned. Here I was without a penny in my pocket and only what was left in the bottle I had in my hand to keep me from dyin' of thirst. Son," he said sorrowfully, "somethin's got to be done. It's Ab, ain't it?" Matt nodded. "Son," Jenkins went on, "I'm gettin' too old for this kind of life. I should be sittin' on my porch with a jug in my lap, just arockin' slow. Somethin's got to be done about that gal." "I'm afraid it's too late for that," Matt said. "That's the trouble," Jenkins said mournfully. "Been too late for these six years. Son, yore an edyicated inan. What we gonna do?" "I can't tell you, Jenkins," Matt said. "I can't even think about it." Mary had a little Iamb... "If I did, it wouldn't work. ' But if you want to hit me, go ahead. I'm the man who's responsible." Jenkins put a large hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry about it, son. If it weren't you, it would've been some other man. When Ab gets a notion, you cain't beat it out of her. I learned that years ago." Matt pulled out his billfold and handed Jenkins a five dollar bill. "Here. Kansas isn't dry any more. Go get something and try to forget. Maybe when you're finished with that, things will have changed." "Yore a good boy, son. Don't do nothin' rash." Mary had a little lamb... hand in a parting salute. Matt watched the mountainous shadow dwindle, as if it was his last contact with the living. Then Jenkins rounded the corner and was out of sight. Matt walked slowly back to Massachusetts Street. There was one more thing he had to do. As he reached the car. Matt sensed Abbie's nearness. The awareness was so sharp that it was almost physical. He felt her all around, like dancing motes of dust that are only visible under certain conditions, half angel, half devil, half love, half hate. It was an unendurable mixture, an impossible combination to live with. The extremes were too great. Matt sighed. It was not Abbie's fault. If it was anyone's fault, it was his. 'Inevitably, he would pay for it. The Universe has an immutable law of action and reaction. It was dark as Matt drove along Seventh Street. The night was warm, and the infrequent street lights were only beacons for nightflying insects. Matt turned a corner and pulled up in front of a big old house surrounded by an ornamental iron fence. The house was a twostory stucco, painted yellow -- or perhaps it had once been white -- and the fence sagged in places. Most of the houses in Lawrence are old. The finest and the newest are in the west, on the ridge overlooking the Wakarusa Valley, but university professors cannot afford such sites or such houses. Matt rang the bell. In a moment the door opened. Blinking out of the light was Professor Franklin, his faculty adviser. "Matt!" Franklin said. "I didn't recognize you for a second. What are you doing back so soon? I thought you were secluded in the Ozarks. Don't tell me you have your thesis finished already?" "No, Dr. Franklin," Matt said wearily, "but I'd like to talk to you for a moment if you can spare the time." "Come in, come in. I'm just grading some papers." Franklin grimaced. "Freshman papers." Franklin led the way into his bookcluttered study off the living room. His glasses were resting on top of a pile of papers. He picked them up, slipped them on, and turned to Matt. He was a tall man, a little stooped now in his sixties, with gray, unruly hair. "Matt!" he exclaimed. "You aren't looking well. Have you been sick?" "In a way," Matt said, "you might call it that. How would you treat someone who believes in the reality of psychic phenomena?" Franklin shrugged. "Lots of people believe in it and are still worthwhile, reliable members of society. Conan Doyle, for instance -- " "And could prove it," Matt added. "Hallucinations? Then it becomes more serious. I suppose psychiatric treatment would be necessary. Remember, Matt, I'm a teacher, not a practitioner. But look here, you aren't suggesting that -- ?" Matt nodded. "I can prove it, and I don't want to. Would it make the world any better, any happier?" "The truth is always important -- for itself if for nothing else. But you can't be serious -- " "Dead serious." Matt shivered. "Suppose I could prove that there were actually such things as levitation, teleportation, telepathy. There isn't any treatment, is there. Professor, when a man goes sane?" "Matt! You are sick, aren't you?" "Suppose," Matt went on relentlessly, "that your glasses should float over and come to rest on my nose. What would you say then?" "I'd say you need to see a psychiatrist," Franklin said worriedly. "You do. Matt." themselves and floated leisurely through the air and adjusted themselves on Matt's face. Franklin stared blindly. "Matt!" he exclaimed, groping. "That isn't very funny." Matt sighed and handed the glasses back. Franklin put them back on, frowning. "Suppose," Matt said, "I should float in the air?" As he spoke, he felt himself lifting. Franklin looked up. "Come down here!" Matt came back into his chair. "These tricks," Franklin said sternly, "aren't very seemly. Go to a doctor. Matt. Don't waste any time. And," he added, taking off his glasses and polishing them vigorously, "I think I'll see my oculist in the morning." Matt sighed again. "I was afraid that was the way it would be. Abbie?" Franklin stared. "Yes, Mr. Wright." The words, soft and gentle, came out of midair. Franklin's eyes searched the room frantically. "Thanks," Matt said. "Leave this house!" Franklin said, his voice trembling. "I've had enough of these pranks!" Matt got up and went to the front door. "I'm afraid Dr. Franklin doesn't believe in you. But I do. Good-by, Dr. Franklin. I don't think a doctor would cure what I've got." When he left, Franklin was searching the living room. ly final about the drive through the campus. Along Oread street on top of Mount Oread, overlooking the Kaw Valley on the north and the Wakarusa on the south, the university buildings stood dark and deserted. Only the Student Union was lighted and the library and an occasional bulletin board. The long arms of the administration building were gloomy, and the night surrounded the white arches of Hoch Auditorium... He pulled into the parking area behind the apartment building and got out and walked slowly to the entrance. He hoped that Guy wouldn't be in. Matt opened the door. The apartment was empty. He turned on a living rpom lamp. The room was in typical disarray. A sweater on the davenport, books in the chair. In the dark. Matt went to the kitchen. He bumped into the stove and swore, and rubbed his hip. Mary had a little laAib... Somewhere around here... Some hidden strength kept Matt from dropping in his tracks. He should have collapsed from exhaustion and hunger long ago. But soon there would be time to rest... and everywhere that Mary went... He stooped. There it was. The sugar. The sugar. He had always liked blue sugar. He found a package of cereal and got the milk from the refrigerator. He found a sharp knife in the drawer and sliced the box in two. He dumped the contents into a bowl and poured the milk over it and sprinkled the sugar on top. The blue sugar... with fleece as white as snow... He was very sleepy. He lifted a spoonful of the cereal to his mouth. He chewed it for a moment. He swallowed... And it was gone. He grabbed the knife and plunged it toward his chest. And his hand was empty. He was very sleepy. His head drooped. Suddenly it straightened up. The hissing had stopped. A long time ago. He turned on the light and saw that the burner was turned off, the one that never lighted from the pilot, the one he had stumbled against. The blue insect poison had failed and the knife and the gas. He felt a great wave of despair. It was no use. There was no way out. room, brushed the sweater off the davenport, and sat down. The last hope -- beyond which there is no hope -- was gone. And yet, in a way, he was glad that his tricks had not worked. Not that he was still alive but because it had been the coward's way. All along he had been trying to dodge the only solution that faced him at every turn. He had refused to recognize it, but now there was no other choice. It was the hard way, the bitter way. The way that was not a quick death but a slow one. But he owed it tp the world to sacrifice himself on the altar he had raised, under the knife he had honed, wielded by the arm that he had given strength and skill and,, consciousness. He looked up. "All right, Abbie," he sighed. "I'll marry you." The words hung in the air. Matt waited, filled with a fear that was half hope. Was it too late for anything but vengeance? But Abbie filled his arms, cuddled against him in homely blue gingham, scarcely bigger than a child but with the warmth and softness of a woman. She was more beautiful than Matt had remembered. Her arms crept around his neck. "Will you, Mr. Wright?" she whispered. "Will you?" A vision built itself up in his mind. The omniscient, omnipotent wife, fearsome when her powers were sheathed, terrible in anger or disappointment. No man, he thought, was ever called upon for greater sacrifice. But he was the appointed lamb. He sighed. "God help me," he said, "I will." He kissed her. Her lips were sweet and passionate. M atthew Wright was lucky, of course, far luckier than he deserved to be, than any man deserves to be. The bride was beautiful. But more important and much more significant -- The bride was happy. Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction,' as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday t #:# A.M. to #tSO P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until # tOO P.M (Phono GRomercy ##) T he photon storm struck without warning, pouncing upon the Ship from behind a bank of giant red stars. Eye barely had time to flash a last second warning through Talker before it was upon them. It was Talker's third journey into deep space, and his first light-pressure storm. He felt a sudden pang of fear as the Ship yawed violently, caught the force of the wave-front and careened end for end. Then the fear was gone, replaced by a strong pulse of excitement. Why should he be afraid, he asked himself -- hadn't he been Recruiting all the parts of a ship works great ,... unless you suddenly run out of recruits! trained for just this sort of emergency? He had been talking to Feeder when the storm hit, but he cut off the conversation abruptly. He hoped Feeder would be all right. It was the youngster's first deep space trip. The wirelike filaments that made up most of Talker's body were extended throughout the Ship. Quickly he withdrew all except the ones linking him to Eye, Engine, and the Walls. This was strictly their job now. The rest of the Crew would have to shift for themselves until the storm was over. Eye had flattened his disklike body against a Wall, and had one seeing organ extended outside the Ship. For greater concentration, the rest of his seeing organs were collapsed, clustered against his body. Through Eye's seeing organ. Talker watched the storm. He translated Eye's purely visual image into a direction for Engine, who shoved the Ship around to meet the waves. At appreciably the same time. Talker translated direction into velocity for the Walls, who stiffened to meet the shocks. The coordination was swift and sure -- Eye measuring the waves. Talker relaying the messages to Engine and Walls, Engine driving the ship nose-first into the waves, and Walls bracing to meet the shock. Talker forgot any fear he might have had in the swiftly functioning teamwork. He had no time to think. As the Ship's communication system, he had to translateand flash his messages at top speed, coordinating information and directing action. In a matter of minutes, the storm was over. " A LL right," Talker said. Let's see if there was any damage." His filaments had be'come tangled during the storm, but he untwisted and extended them through the Ship, plugging everyone into circuit. "Engine?" "I'm fine," Engine said. The tremendous old fellow had dampened his plates during the storm, easing down the atomic explosions in his stomach. No storm could catch an experienced spacer like Engine unaware. "Walls?" The Walls reported one by one, and this took a long time. There were almost a thousand of them, thin, rectangular fellows making up the entire skin of the Ship. Naturally, they had reinfprced their edges during the storm, giving the whole Ship resiliency. But one or two were dented badly. Doctor announced that he was all right. He removed Talker's filament from his head, taking himself out of circuit, and went to work on the dented Walls. Made mostly of hands. Doctor had clung to an Accumulator during the storm. "Let's go a little faster now," Talker said, remembering that there still was the problem of determining where they were. He opened the circuit to the four Accumulators. "How are you?" he asked. There was no answer. The Accumulators were asleep. They had had their receptors open during the storm and were bloated on energy. Talker twitched his filaments around them, but they didn't stir. "Let me," Feeder said. Feeder had taken quite a beating before planting his suction cups to a Wall, but his cockiness was intact. He was the only member of the Crew who never needed Doctor's attention; his body was quite capable of repairing itself. He scuttled across the floor on a dozen or so tentacles, and booted the nearest Accumulator. The big, conial storage unit opened one eye, then closed it again. Feeder kicked him again, getting no response. He reached for the Accumulator's safety valve and drained off" some energy. "Stop that," the Accumulator said. "Then wake up and report," Talker told him. The Accumulators said testily that they were all right, as any fool could see. They had been anchored to the floor during the storm. HE rest of the inspection went quickly. Thinker was fine, and Eye was ecstatic over the beauty of the storm. There was only one casualty. Pusher was dead. Bipedal, he didn't have the stability of the rest of the Crew. The storm had caught him in the middle of a floor, thrown him against a stiffened Wall, and broken several of his important bones. He was beyond Doctor's skill to repair. They were silent for a while. It was always serious when a part of the Ship died. The Ship was a cooperative unit, composed entirely of the Crew. The loss of any member was a blow to all the rest. It was especially serious now. They had just delivered a cargo to a port several thousand lightyears from Galactic Center. There was no telling where they might be. Eye crawled to a Wall and extended a seeing organ outside. The Walls let it through, then sealed around it. Eye's organ pushed out, far enough from the Ship so he could view the entire sphere of stars. The picture traveled through Talker, who gave it to Thinker. Thinker lay in one corner of the room, a great shapeless blob of protoplasm. Within him were all the memories of his spacegoing ancestors. He considered the picture, compared it rapidly with others stored in his cells, and said, "No galactic planets within reach." Talker automatically translated for everyone. It was what they had feared. Eye, with Thinker's help, calculated that they were several hundred light-years off their course, on the galactic periphery. Every Crew member knew what that meant. Without a Pusher to boost the Ship to a multiple of the speed of light, they would never get home. The trip back, without a Pusher, would take longer than most of their lifetimes. "What would you suggest?" Talker asked Thinker. This was too vague a question for the literal-minded Thinker. He asked to have it rephrased. "What would be our best line of action," Talker asked, "to get back to a galactic planet?" Thinker needed several minutes to go through all the possibilities stored in his cells. In the meantime, Doctor had patched the Walls and was asking to be given something to eat. "In a little while we'll all eat," Talker said, twitching his tendrils nervously. Even though he was the second youngest Crew member -- only Feeder was younger -- the responsibility was largely on him. This was still an emergency; he had to coordinate information and direct action. O NE of the Falls suggested that they get good and drunk. This unrealistic solution was vetoed at once. It was typical of the Walls' attitude, however. They were fine workers and good shipmates, but happy-golucky fellows at best. When they returned to their home planets, they would probably blow all their wages on a spree. "Loss of Ship's Pusher cripples the Ship for sustained fasterthan-light speeds," Thinker began without preamble. "The nearest galactic planet is four hundred and five light-years off." Talker translated all this instantly along his wave-packet body. "Two courses of action are open. First, the Ship can proceed to the nearest galactic planet under atomic power from Engine. This will take approximately two hundred years. Engine might still be alive at this time, although no one else will. "Second, locate a primitive planet in this region, upon which are latent Pushers. Find one and train him. Have him push the Ship back to galactic territory." Thinker was silent, having given all the possibilities he could find in the memories of his ancestors. They held a quick vote and decided upon Thinker's second alternative. There was no choice, really. It was the only one which offered them any hope of getting back to their homes. "All right," Talker said. "Let's eat. I think we all deserve it." The body of the dead Pusher was shoved into the mouth of Engine, who consumed it at once, breaking down the atoms to energy. Engine was the only member of the Crew who lived on atomic energy. For the rest. Feeder dashed up and loaded himself from the nearest Accumulator. Then he transformed the food within him into the substances each member ate. His body chemistry changed, altered, adapted, making the different foods for the Crew. Eye lived entirely on a complex chlorophyl chain. Feeder reproduced this for him, then went over to give Talker his hydrocarbons, and the Walls their chlorine compound. For Doctor he made a facsimile of a silicate fruit that grew on Doctor's native planet. F inally, feeding was over and, the Ship back in order. The Accumulators were stacked in a corner, blissfully sleeping again. Eye was extending his vision as far as he could, shaping his main seeing organ for highpowered telescopic reception. Even in this emergency. Eye couldn't resist making verses. He announced that he was at work on a new narrative poem, called Peripheral Glow. No one wanted to hear it, so Eye fed it to Thinker, who stored everything, good or bad, right or wrong. Engine never slept. Filled to the brim on Pusher, he shoved the Ship along at several times the speed of light. The Walls were arguing among themselves about who had been the drunkest during their last leave. Talker decided to make himself comfortable. He released his hold on the Walls and swung in the air, his small round body suspended by his crisscrossed network of filaments. He thought briefly about Pusher. It was strange. Pusher had been everyone's friend and now he was forgotten. That wasn't because of indifference; it was because the Ship was a unit. The loss of a member was regretted, but the important thing was for the unit to go on. The Ship raced through the suns of the periphery. Thinker laid out a search spiral, calculating their odds on finding a Pusher planet at roughly four to one. In a week they found a planet of primitive Walls. Dropping low, they could see the leathery, rectangular fellows basking in the sun, crawling over rocks, stretching themselves thin in order to float in the breeze. All the Ship's Walls heaved a sigh of nostalgia. It was just like home. These Walls on the planet hqdn't been contacted by a galactic team yet, and were still unaware of their great destiny -- to join in the vast Cooperation of the Galaxy. There were plenty of dead worlds in the spiral, and worlds too young to bear life. They found a planet of Talkers. The Talkers had extended their spidery communication lines across half a continent. Talker looked at them eagerly, through Eye. A wave of self-pity washed over him. He remembered home, his family, his friends. He thought of the tree he was planning to buy when he got back. For a moment. Talker wondered what he was doing here, part of a Ship in a far corner of the Galaxy. He shrugged off the mood. They were bound to find a Pusher planet, if they looked long enough. At least, he hoped so. T here was a long stretch of arid worlds as the Ship pushed through the unexplored periphery. Then a planetful of primeval Engines, swimming in a radioactive ocean. "This is rich territory," Feeder said to Talker. "Galactic should send a Contact party here." "They probably will, after we get back," Talker said. They were good friends, above and beyond the all-enveloping friendship of the Crew. It wasn't only because they were the youngest Crew members, although that had something to do with it. They both had the same kind of functions and that made for a certain rapport. Talker translated languages; Feeder transformed foods. Also, they looked somewhat alike. Talker was a central core with radiating filaments; Feeder was a central core with radiating tentacles. Talker thought that Feeder was the next most aware being on the Ship. He was never really able to understand how some of the others carried on the processes of consciousness. More suns, more planets. Engine started to overheat. Usually, Engine was used only for taking off and landing, and for fine maneuvering in a planetary group. Now he had been running continuously for weeks, both over and under the speed of light. The strain was telling on him. Feeder, with Doctor's help, rigged a cooling system for him. It was crude, but it had to suffice. Feeder rearranged nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms to make a coolant for the system. Doctor diagnosed a long rest for Engine. He said that the gallant old fellow couldn't stand the strain for more than a week. The search continued, with the Crew's spirits gradually dropping. They all  realized that Pushers were rather rare in the Galaxy, as compared to the fertile Walls and Engines. The Walls were getting pockmarked from interstellar dust. They complained that they would need a full beauty treatment when they got home. Talker assured them that the company would pay for it. Even Eye was getting bloodshot from staring into space so continuously. They dipped over another planet. Its characteristics were flashed to Thinker, who mulled over them. Closer, and they could make out the forms. Pushers! Primitive Pushers! They zoomed back into space to make plans. Feeder produced twentythree different kinds of intoxicants for a celebration. The Ship wasn't fit to function for three days. E veryone ready now?" Talker asked, a bit fuzzily. He had a hangover that burned all along his nerve ends. What a drunk he had thrown! He had a vague recollection of embracing Engine, inviting him to share his tree when they got back home. He shuddered at the idea. The rest of the Crew were pretty shaky, too. The Walls were letting air leak into space; they were just too wobbly to seal their edges properly. Doctor had passed out. But the worst off was Feeder. Since his system could adapt to any type of fuel except atomic, he had been sampling every batch he made, whether it was an unbalanced iodine, pure oxygen or a supercharged ester. He was really miserable. His tentacles, usually a healthy aqua, were shot through with orange streaks. His system was working furiously, purging itself of everything, and Feeder was suffering the effects of the purge. The only sober ones were Thinker and Engine. Thinker didn't drink,, which was unusual for a spacer, though typical of Thinker, and Engine couldn't. They listened while Thinker reeled off some astounding facts. From Eye's pictures of the planet's surface, Thinker had detected the presence of metallic construction. He put forth the alarming suggestion that these Pushers had constructed a mechanical civilization. "That's impossible," three of the Walls said flatly, and most of the Crew were inclined to agree with them. All the metal they had ever seen had been buried in the ground or lying around in worthless oxidized chunks. "Do you mean that they make things out of metal?" Talker demanded. "Out of just plain dead metal? What could they make?" "They couldn't make anything," Feeder said positively. "It would break down constantly. I mean metal doesn't know when it's weakening." But it seemed to be true. Eye magnified his" pictures, and everyone could see that the Pushers had made vast shelters, vehicles, and other articles from inanimate material. The reason for this was not readily apparent, but it wasn't a good sign. However, the really hard part was over. The Pusher planet had been found. All that remained was the relatively easy job of convincing a native Pusher, which shouldn't be too hard. Talker knew that cooperation was the keystone of the Galaxy, even among primitive peoples. The Crew decided not to land in a populated region. Of course, there was no reason not to ex pect a friendly greeting, but it was the job of a Contact Team to get in touch with them as a race. All they wanted was an individual. Accordingly, they picked out a sparsely populated land-mass, drifting in while that side of the planet was dark. They were able to locate a solitary Pusher almost at once. E ye adapted his vision to see in the dark, and they followed the Pusher's movements. He lay down, after a while, beside a smallv fire. Thinker told them that this was a well-known resting habit of Pushers. Just before dawn, the Walls opened, and Feeder, Talker and Doctor came out. Feeder dashed forward and tapped the creature on the shoulder. Talker followed with a communication tendril. The Pusher opened his seeing . organs, blinked them, and made a movement with his eating organ. Then he leaped to his feet and started to run. The three Crew members were astounded. The Pusher hadn't even waited to find out what the three of them wanted! Talker extended a filament rapidly, and caught the Pusher, fifty feet away, by a limb. The Pusher fell. "Treat him gently," Feeder said. "He might be startled by our appearance." He twitched his tendrils at the idea of a Pusher -- one of the strangest sights in the Galaxy, with his multiple organs -- being startled at someone else's appearance. Feeder and Doctor scurried to the fallen Pusher, picked him up and carried him back to the Ship. The Walls sealed again. They released the Pusher and prepared to talk. As soon as he was free, the Pusher sprang to his limbs and ran at the place where the Walls had sealed. He pounded against them frantically, his eating organ open and vibrating. "Stop that," the Wall said. He bulged, and the Pusher tumbled to the floor. Instantly, he jumped up and started to run forward. "Stop him," Talker said. "He might hurt himself." One of the Accumulators woke up enough to roll into the Pusher's path. The Pusher fell, got up again, and ran on. Talker had his filaments in the front of the Ship also, and he caught the Pusher in the bow. The Pusher started to tear at his tendrils, and Talker let go hastily. "Plug him into the communication system!" Feeder shouted. "Maybe we can reason with him!" Talker advanced a filament toward the Pusher's head, waving it in the universal sign of communication. But the Pusher continued his amazing behavior, jumping out of the way. He had a piece of metal in his hand and he was waving it frantically. "What do you think he's going to do with that?" Feeder asked. The Pusher started to attack the side of the Ship, pounding at one of the Walls. The Wall stiffened instinctively and the metal snapped. "Leave him alone," Talker said. "Give him a chance to calm down." Thinker, but they couldn't decide what to do about the Pusher. He wouldn't accept communication. Every time Talker extended a filament, the Pusher showed all the signs of violent panic. Temporarily, it was an impasse. Thinker vetoed the plan of finding another Pusher on the planet. , He considered this Pusher's behavior typical; nothing would be gained by approaching another. Also, a planet was supposed to be contacted only by a Contact Team. If they couldn't communicate with this Pusher, they never wpuld with another on the planet. "I think I know what the trouble is," Eye said. He crawled up on an Accumulator. "These Pushers have evolved a mechanical civilization. Consider for a minute how they went about it. They developed the use of their fingers, like Doctor, to shape metal. They utilized their seeing organs, like myself. And probably countless other organs." He paused for effect. "These Pushers have become unspecialized!" They argued over it for several hours. The Walls maintained that no intelligent creature could be unspecialized. It was unknown in the Galaxy. But the evidence was before them -- The Pusher cities, their vehicles... This Pusher, exemplifying the rest, seemed capable of a multitude of things. He was able to do everything except Push! Thinker supplied a partial explanation. "This is not a primitive planet. It is relatively old and should have been in the Cooperation thousands of years ago. Since it was not, the Pushers upon it were robbed of their birthright. Their ability, their specialty, was to Push, but there was nothing to Push. Naturally, they have developed a deviant culture. "Exactly what this culture is, we can only guess. But on the basis of the evidence, there is reason to believe that these Pushers are -- uncooperative." Thinker had a habit of uttering the most shattering statement in the quietest possible way. "It is entirely possible," Thinker went on inexorably, "that these Pushers will have nothing to do with us. In which case, our chances are approximately # to one against finding another Pusher planet." "We can't be sure he won't cooperate," Talker said, "until we get him into communication." He found it almost impossible to believe that any intelligent creature would refuse to cooperate "But how?" Feeder asked. They decided upon a course of action. Doctor walked slowly up to the Pusher, who backed away from him. In the meantime. Talker extended a filament outside the Ship, around, and in again, behind the Pusher. The Pusher backed against a Wall -- and Talker shoved the filament through the Pusher's head, into the communication socket in the center of his brain. The Pusher collapsed. and Doctor had to hold the Pusher's limbs, or he would have ripped out the communication line. Talker exercised his skill in learning the Pusher's language. It wasn't too hard. All Pusher languages were of the same family, and this was no exception. Talker was able to catch enough surface thoughts to form a pattern. He tried to communicate with the Pusher. The Pusher was silent. "I think he needs food," Feeder said. They remembered that it had been almost two days since they had taken the Pusher on board. Feeder worked up some standard Pusher food and offered it. "My God! A steak!" the Pusher said. The Crew cheered along Talker's communication circuits. The Pusher had said his first words! Talker examined the words and searched his memory. He knew about two hundred Pusher languages and many more simple variations. He found that this Pusher was speaking a cross of two Pusher tongues. After the Pusher had eaten, he looked around. Talker caught his thoughts and broadcast them to the Crew. The Pusher had a queer way of looking at the Ship. He saw it as a riot of colors. The walls undulated. In front of him was something resembling a gigantic spider, colored black and green, with his web running all over the Ship and into the heads of all the creatures. He saw Eye as a strange, naked little animal, something between a skinned rabbit and an egg yolk -- whatever those things were. Talker was fascinated by the new perspective the Pusher's mind gave him. He had never seen things that way before. But now that the Pusher was pointing it out. Eye was a pretty funny-looking creature. They settled down to communication. "What in hell are you things?" the Pusher asked, much calmer now than he had been during the two days. "Why did you grab me? Have I gone nuts?" "No," Talker said, "you are not psychotic. We are a galactic trading ship. We were blown off our course by a storm and our Pusher was killed." "Well, what does that have to do with me?" "We would like you to join our crew," Talker said, "to be our new Pusher." THE Pusher thought it over after the situation was explained to him. Talker could catch the feeling of conflict in the Pusher's thoughts. He hadn't decided whether to accept this as a real situation or not. Finally, the Pusher decided that he wasn't crazy. "Look, boys," he said, "I don't know what you are or how this makes sense. I have to get out of here. I'm on a furlough, and if I don't get back soon, the U. S. Army's going to be very interested." Talker asked the Pusher to give him more information about "army," and he fed it to Thinker. "These Pushers engage in personal combat," was Thinker's conclusion. "But why?" Talker asked. Sadly he admitted to himself that Thinker might have been right; the Pusher didn't show operate. "I'd like to help you lads out," Pusher said, "but I've got a war to fight. Besides, I don't know where you get the idea that I. could push anything this size. You'd need a whole division of tanks just to budge it." "Do you approve of this war?" Talker asked, getting a suggestion from Thinker. "Nobody likes war -- not those who have to do the dying at least." "Then why do you fight it?" The Pusher made a gesture with his eating organ, which Eye picked up and sent to Thinker. "It's kill or be killed. You guys know what war is, don't you?" "We don't have any wars," Talker said. "You're lucky," the Pusher said bitterly. "We do. Plenty of them." "Of course," Talker said. He had the full explanation from Thinker now. "Would you like to end them?" "Of course I would." "Then come with us. Be our Pusher." The Pusher stood up and walked up to an Accumulator. He sat down on it and doubled the ends of his upper limbs. "How the hell can I stop all wars?" the Pusher demanded. "I'm just Private Dave Martinson. Even if I went to the big shots and told them -- " "You won't have to," Talker said. "All you have to do is come with us. Push us to our base. Galactic will send a Contact Team to your planet. That will end your wars." "The hell you say," the Pusher replied. "You boys are stranded here, huh? Good enough. No monsters are going to take over Earth." tried to understand the reasoning. Had he said something wrong? Was it possible that the Pusher didn't understand him? "I thought you wanted to end wars," Talker said. "Sure I do. But I don't want anyone making us stop. I'm no traitor. I'd rather fight." "No one will make you stop. You just will stop because there will be no further need for fighting." "Do you know why we're fighting?" "It's obvious." "Yeah? What's your explanation?" "You Pushers have been separated from the main stream of the Galaxy," Talker explained. "You have your specialty -- pushing -- but nothing to Push. Accordingly, you have no real jobs. You play with things -- metal, inanimate objects -- but find no real satisfaction. Robbed of your true vocation, you fight from sheer frustration. "Once you find your place in the galactic Cooperation -- and I assure you that it is qp important place -- your fighting will stop. Why should you fight, which is an unnatural occupation, when you can Push? Also, your mechanical civilization will end, since there will be no need for it." The Pusher shook his head in what Talker guessed was a gesture of confusion. "What is this pushing?" Talker told him as best he  could. Since the job was out of his scope, he had only a general idea of what a Fhisher did. "You mean to say that that is what every Earthman should be doing?" "Of course," Talker said. "It is your great specialty." The Pusher thought about it for several minutes. "I think you want a physicist or a mentalist or something. I could never do an#Tthing like that. I'm a junior architect. And besides -- well, it's difficult to explain." But Talker had already caught Pusher's objection. He saw a Pusher female in his thoughts. No, two, three. And he caught a feeling of loneliness, strangeness. The Pusher was filled with doubts. He was afraid. "When we reach galactic," Talker said, hoping it was the right thing, "you can meet other Pushers. Pusher females, too. All you Pushers look alike, so you should become friends with them. As far as loneliness in the Ship goes -- it just doesn't exist. You don't understand the Cooperation yet. No one is lonely in the Cooperation." fHE Pusher vas still considering the idea of there being other Pushers. Talker couldn't understand why he was so startled at that. The Galaxy was filled with Pushers, Feeders, Talkers, and many other species, endlessly duplicated. "I can't believe that anybody could end all war," Pusher said. "How do I know you're not lying? I won't go." Talker felt as if he had been struck in the face. Thinker must have been right when he said these Pushers would be uncooperative. Was this going to be the end of Talker's career? Were he and the rest of the Crew going to spend the rest of their lives in space, because of the stupidity of a bunch of Pushers? Even thinking this, Talker was able to feel sorry for the Pusher. It must be terrible, he thought. Doubting, uncertain, never trusting anyone. If these Pushers didn't find their place in the Galaxy, they would exterminate themselves. Their place in the Cooperation was long overdue. "What can I do to convince you?" Talker asked. In despair, he opened all the circuits to the Pusher. He let the Pusher see Engine's good-natured gruffness, the devil may care humor of the Walls; he showed him Eye's poetic attempts, and Feeder's cocky good nature. He opened his own mind and showed the Pusher a picture of his home planet, his family, the tree he was planning to buy when he got home. The pictures told the story of all of them, from different planets, representing different ethics, united by a common bond -- the galactic Cooperation. The Pusher watched it all in silence. After a while, he shook his head. The thought accompanying the gesture was uncertain, weak -- but negative. Talker tola the Walls to open. They did, and the Pusher looked at his own planet in amazement. "You may leave," Talker said. "Just remove the communication line and go."  "What will you do?" "We will look for another Pusher planet." "Where? Mars? Venus?" "We don't know. All we can do is hope there is another in this region." The Pusher looked at the opening, then back at the Crew. He hesitated and his face screwed up in a grimace of indecision. "All that you showed me was true?" No answer was necessary. " A LL right," the Pusher said suddenly. "I'll go. I'm a damned fool, but I'll go. If this means what you say -- it must mean what you say!" Talker saw that the agony of the Pusher's decision had forced him out of contact with reality. He believed that he was back in a dream, where decisions are easy and unimportant. "There's just one little trouble," Pusher said with the lightness of hysteria. "Boys, I'll be hanged if I know how to Push. You said something about fasterthan-light? I can't even run the mile in an hour." "Of course you can Push," Talker assured him, hoping he was right. He knew what a Pusher's abilities were; but this one... "Just try it." "Sure," Pusher agreed. "I'll probably wake up out of this, anyhow." They sealed the ship for takeoff while Pusher talked to himself. "Funny," Pusher said. "I thought a camping trip would be a nice way to spend a furlough and all I do is get nightmares!" Engine boosted the Ship into the air. The Walls were sealed and Eye was guiding them away from the planet. "We're in clear space now," Talker said. Listening to Pusher, he hoped his mind hadn't cracked. "Eye and Thinker will give a direction. I'll transmit it to you, and you Push along it." "You're crazy," FHisher mumbled. "You must have the wrong planet. I wish you nightmares would go away." "You're in the Cooperation now," Talker said desperately. "There's the direction. Push!" The Pusher didn't do anything for a moment. He was slowly emerging from his fantasy, realizing that he wasn't in a dream, after all. He felt the Cooperation. Eye to Thinker, Thinker to Talker, Talker to Pusher, all inter coordinated with Walls, and with each other. "What is this?" Pusher asked. He felt the oneness of the Ship, the great warmth, the closeness achieved only in the Cooperation. He Pushed. Nothing happened. "Try again," Talker begged. He found a deep well of doubt and fear. Staring into it, he saw his own tortured face. Thinker illuminated it for him. Pushers had lived with this doubt and fear for centuries. Pushers had fought through fear, killed through doubt. That was where the Pusher organ was! Martinson -- specialist. Pusher -- entered fully into the Crew, merged with them, threw mental arms around the shoulders of Thinker and Talker. Suddenly, the Ship shot forward at eight times the speed of light. It continued to accelerate. aO Your Information O-#-O# concept of the manned  rocket in an orbital path around the Earth and its possible subsequent development into a space station Vas evolved and presented by Hermann Oberth in #. After that, very little happened for about six years and the reason was a popular book. Oberth's original work, while not long, was very hard reading for practically everybody. There were pages upon pages of massed equations and the "clear text" which followed after such a discussion made very little sense unless you had waded through the mathematics preceding them. Oberth was approached by his own publisher with the suggestion of writing a popular version of his work. He was not opposed to the idea in principle, as many other German scientists of that time would have been, but he did not have the time to write it. Once or twice, I believe, he actually started to, but each time a new and unsuspected and most interesting mathematical relationship turned up which, of course, had to be investigated first. Then, one day, a professional writer came to Oberth, suggesting that they do the book in collaboration. Oberth was to supply the information and the writer -- his name was Max Valier -- was to do the writing. TT did not work out well. Valier was not able to follow Oberth's mathematical reasoning on many points. He suggested "improvements." Oberth tried to explain why these suggestions, far from being improvements, would not work. Sometimes he convinced Valier, generally he did not, and he had to explain later that Valier's book was, after all, Valier's book and not his. His problem was that many other people began writing about "Oberth's ideas," but took their information from Valier. As for the space station, Valier had not mentioned it at all. He had simply skipped that portion of Oberth's work. I am not sure whether he failed to understand the concept or just what prompted him. At any event, instead of discussing the space station concept, he described a base on the Moon. When I questioned him about that once, he declared that he could not see why anybody should bother tobuild a space station when we have a readymade natural space station in the form of the Moon. I tried to reason with him that hauling anything to the Moon is obviously much more difficult than hauling the same thing to a height of, say, # miles and providing it with a lateral push so that it would take up an orbit and stay there. Valier replied that hauling something to an orbit would require a velocity of about # miles per second (including air resistance and a safety factor) while hauling something to the Moon would require "just # miles per second more." ('Tain't so. Seven miles per second will merely get you through the Earth's gravitational field. Then you need additional fuel to brake your fall and to adapt to the orbital velocity of the Moon.) Furthermore, Valier insisted, you would have to haul "everything" to the space station's orbit, but only essentials to the Moon, where you could build what you need from raw materials to be found there. (Optimistic, to put it mildly.) Still thinking I might win, I pointed out that if the primary purpose of a space station were to serve as a refueling place for interplanetary ships, a ship leaving from the station would have a speed of some # miles per second relative to the Earth, and would only have to make up the difference between # miles per second and the actual velocity required for the interplanetary trip, which would be some # -- # miles per second relative to Earth. The moon, I then said, has an orbital velocity of only # miles per second and more than that is needed even to overcome its own gravitational field. No go. Valier insisted that the raw material for fuel would be found on the Moon, too, so it would be unimportant that the Moon's orbital velocity is of no real help. Since his answers were pat. while my own portion of the discussion came out slowly and gropingly, I feel sure that he had had the same discussion with Oberth before and had not been convinced. And since, as I have already said, people absorbed Oberth's ideas from Valier's book, there was no space station discussion for quite some time afterward. r I iHE first book largely devoted to the idea of the space station appeared in #. Its author was an Austrian by the name of Potocnic who wrote under the pen name of Herman Noordung. The title page of his book stated that he was an engineer and a captain in the reserve. To this day, I have failed to find out whether these two statements belonged together -- meaning that he was a captain in the engineer corps -- or whether one was his peacetime occupation and the other a wartime commission. The title of the book was Das Problem der Befahrun des Weltraums ("The Problem of Travel in Space") and Potocnic-Noordung succeeded in getting himself into the bad graces of all the rocket men at once by producing a fantastic method for calculating overall efficiency. Another point on which he failed to make friends was his insistence that a space station should be located over the equator, # miles above mean sea level. At such a distance, the station would need precisely # hours to go around the Earth once. If it moved in an easterly direction, it would seem to stand still over one point of the equator. For reasons I still don't understand, Potocnic-Noordung considered this a great advantage, though actually such a position would be full of drawbacks. The station could be seen from only one hemisphere, but it could also observe only one hemisphere. Because of the long distance -- costly in fuel consumption -- it could not even observe very well. But he did have a number of interesting ideas. His proposed space station consisted of three units; the "living wheel" (as he called it), the "power house" and the "observatory." The first was to be a wheelshaped unit, about # feet in diameter, which was to spin around its hub so as to substitute centrifugal force for gravity around the rim. Of course the entrance was in the hub and he drew a diagram of a counter-rotating airlock for the hub. Potocnic-Noordung also pointed out that there would be a slight difference in apparent gravity between the head and the feet of a man standing upright, and said that one would have to compensate for this while moving, especially if it came to vertical movements. He stated correctly that power could be had free from the Sun, by means of a condensing mirror and steam boiler pipe. Along with these essentially correct thoughts, however, there ran a number of boners. For example, he wanted to spin the wheel so rapidly that the centrifugal force inside would be one full This would require one complete revolution in # seconds. Actually there is no need for one full g inside a space station, just as there is no need for sea-level air-pressure. Even untrained people are adaptable enough so that g and about half-sea-level pressure (with a higher oxygen content) would be sufficient. This would cut down the number of revolutions per minute required and lighten the whole structure very considerably. dung's misconceptions I always look at with a smile is the design of his windows. They are slightly convex lenses and many of the windows are also equipped with a plane mirror in a frame on the outside, adjusted to reflect additional sunlight into the interior of the station. What everybody forgot until recently is that people aren't cold-blooded and that the "heating device" for a spacesuit is the guy inside. In fact, these "heating devices" are so annoyingly efficient that the main worry of the modern space engineer is how to get rid of all the surplus heat. The second unit, the "observatory," was not described in much detail. It was merely stated that it would be cylindrical, like a boiler, to maintain pressure inside and that it would contain all the astronomical instryiments. It was not supposed to rotate, but was to be connected with the main station or "living wheel" by two electric cables and a flexible air hose. It was to be properly heated simply by piping air of the right temperature into it, while the power cables were to supply electricity for the instrumentation. The third unit, the "power house," was mostly a large parabolic mirror with a set of boiler pipes along the focal line (the description grew more and more vague) and the current generated was to be supplied to the "living wheel" or else to be stored in storage batteries. As regards the purpose of the whole space station, PotocnicNoordung merely paraphrased Oberth ; Earth observation, astronomical observation, possible warlike action by means of a solar mirror and possible storage of fuels for long distance trips. During the same yedr, #, there appeared a series of articles on the space station concept by another author. Count Guido von Pirquet, then Secretary of the Austrian Society for Space Travel Research. The articles were published in the monthly journal Die Rakete ("The Rocket") of the German Society for Space Travel, usually abbreviated as VfR. While Potocnic-Noordung had devoted a lot of attention to design detail and virtually none at all to the optimum orbit, von Pirquet did not say a word about design detail, but calculated carefully where his space station should be located and why. In the course of these calculations, von Pirquet discovered a fundamental fact which has often been quoted since : You can't have space travel at all with chemical fuels unless you build a space station first. A secondary but almost equally important discovery was that the building of the space station,the necessary first step, is also the most difficult. Everything that comes afterward is simple, or almost so, by comparison. TT should be obvious by now that the various possible purposes of a space station are to some slight extent contradictory. From the point of view of fuel economy, the nearer the Earth, the better. From the point of view of Earth observation, you also do generally better if you are close, but the 'limits are somewhat different. You don't want to be quite as close as you would like to be from the standpoint of fuel economy. From the point of view of refueling depot for long range trips, you may have trouble making up your mind. A "low" orbit will provide you with a higher orbital velocity, but a somewhat higher orbit might give you more room for maneuvering. The modern compromise orbit is the one advocated by Dr. Wemher von Braun -- # miles above sea level, which would produce a period of revolution around the Earth of precisely two hours. Count von Pirquet solved this dilemma in a different way. Like Potocnic-Noordung, he advocated a three-unit station. But the three units were to run in three different orbits. The one closest to Earth, the so-called Inner Station, was to revolve # miles above sea level with an orbital period of # minutes. The one farthest away, the so-called Outer Station, was to circle the Earth # miles from the surface with an orbital period of # minutes. The third, or Transit Station, was to be on an elliptical orbit touching the other two orbits. Its distance from the surface would therefore vary from # to # miles and its orbital period would be # minutes. When closely approaching either the Inner or the Outer Station, the velocity of the Transit Station would not match. There would be a velocity difference of about Y # mile per second which would have to be adjusted for the men and materials to be transferred. While the two statements at which von Pirquet arrived while working on the problem of the space station are still valid and correct, his suggestion for a station consisting of several units in different orbits has not borne any fruit. articles, there was another hiatus in the development of the space station concept, lasting longer than the first, about twenty years. But then a lot of people started work in earnest. A good many of the papers read at the Second International Congress for Astronautics in London, #, concerned one phase or another of the space station concept. Somewhat earlier, Wernher von Braun had published his concept in the book Space Medicine; a few months later, it was revised after prolonged discussions and published in its present form in the book Across the Space Frontier. Needless to say that the various concepts published do not closely agree with each other, for there is room for a variety of opinions. Obviously the space station will look different if designer A assumes heating by solar radiation, something which is known and can be calculated right now, while designer B assumes that the atomic engineers will have come up with a useful small atomic reactor during the time it took the rocket engineers to produce a suitable cargo-carrying rocket to bring the space station's material up into an orbit. Although we can predict a good deal of detail right now, some of this will be subject to change during the next decade. We can be sure of one thing only : There will be a space station in the reasonably near future. drew kis blaster with lightning speed or with the speed of light. No matter, for the worthy hero drew his with the speed of thought, so justice naturally triumphed. This column being what it is, my readers will now expect me to tabulate the figures for these various speeds in kilometers or in miles per second. And that is just what I am going to do, not wasting any time with the wellknown speed of light, but getting right down to the speed of thought. We cannot actually measure the speed of a thought, but for this purpose we may consider thought a nerve impulse and we can measure that. If somebody drops a five-pound weight on your foot, you feel this "at once." This is not due to any fantastic speed of the nerve impulse, though, but merely to the fact that it is only about two yards from your foot to your brain. As I said, the speed of such a nerve impulse can be measured, the main difficulty being simply that you deal with a relatively high speed over a short distance. Nothing Organic which can be used for such experiments is very long. Consequently the figures found by the various experimenters differ somewhat. The lowest figure I have seen reported was # meters (#I feet) per second, the highest # meters (# feet) per second. That higher figure corresponds to # kilometers or # miles per hour. In Germany, some # years ago, they used to say that the principle of the electric telegraph was easy to understand : just imagine a dachshund long enough to reach from one city to another. You step on its tail in Berlin and he'll bark in Hamburg. If we use that dachshund under American conditions, his tail ends at the Loop in Chicago while his head is at Times Square in New York. Now let's translate that into neural speed. A driver in Chicago carelessly rolls his car over the tail while hurrying out to the airport, which 'is some forty minutes of hard driving. While the driver fights for his reservation -- "I did confirm it. Miss!" -- the nerve impulse races through the long dachshund's nerve fibers, having just about passed Waterloo in Indiana when the DC-# experimentally wags its ailerons prior to takeoff. Then there is a little delay because sontebody else wants to land; the nerve impulse is still racing. The DC-# overtakes it in the general vicinity of Cleveland and lands at La Guardia airport while the nerve impulse is speeding somewhere to the north of Pittsburgh. The man who started it all in Chicago can wait for his baggage, stand in line for a taxi and have a leisurely meal in a restaurant on Times Square, waiting for the "bark" to arrive. It does arrive -- # hours and # minutes after it was started. All this is under the assumption that the speed of a nerve impulse actually is # meters per second. It may be as low as # meters per second, which amounts to just # miles per hour. Of course, inside the body, with a maximum distance of six feet to travel -- # feet in the case of a giraffe -- # mph serves as well as # mph and improving it to # mph, if that could be done, would probably not make any noticeable difference... But when it comes to really long distances, pick something faster than the speed of a nerve impulse. I would like to know if you think that meteorite craters larger than Chubb Crater in Canada will be found on Earth. Stephen Maran # St. John's PI. Brooklyn #, N. Y. I am convinced that craters of meteoric origin larger than Chubh Crater exist on Earth. In fact, there are several formations which are suspected of being just that. One is Lake Bosumtvi in Ashantiland in Africa, only a few degrees from the equator. This perfectly circular lake has a diameter of six miles and the general geology of the area is such that meteoric origin is the easiest explanation for its existence. Another suspected crater is the so-called Pretoria Salt Pan in South Africa, which has an even larger diameter -- on the order of twenty miles. So far, the meteoric origin of these formations has not been proved, but I understand that some work on the Pretoria Salt Pan is in progress. The problem, as you can see from the foregoing, is not the finding of larger formations that might be impact craters, hut establishing proof that they actually are such. In your article on the satellites ot the Solar System (March # as being moonless. Is this an established fact or an assumption because of lack of other evidence? B. Rule Haver ford, Penna. When I said that Pluto is "moonless," I meant, of course, that no moon of Pluto is known. Since Pluto has been under pretty intensive observation from the time of its discovery, the two statements "Pluto is moonless" and "no satellite of Pluto has been discovered so far" mean pretty nearly the same thing. Are the large constellations in the skies, such as Leo, Orion, Ursus major and minor, etc., parts of our galaxy? Alexander Bozic # Shore Road Brooklyn #, N. Y. Yes. The constellations you name, and all the others which could be listed, consist of stars that belong to our galaxy. The only naked-eye object in the northern sky which does not belong to our galaxy is the so' called nebula in Andromeda which is the nearest other galaxy. From the southern hemisphere, you can see two other objects whih are not members of our galaxy -- or only once removed -- namely, the two Magellanic Clouds. They are clouds of stars outside our galaxy proper, but they are what some astronomers call "satellite galaxies," quite close to our own, as galactic distances go. I am not certain if it is known yet whether the Magellanic Clouds share the rotation of our galaxy, but I would expect them to do so. Recently I heard (name deleted) say during a radio interview that the Flying Saucers originated from the star Wolf #, about eight light-years away. What authority is there for making such a statement? Does Wolf # have a planetary system? Is there any other information on this star obtainable? Arthur C. Eckstein # West #th St. New York City, N. Y. Even if there were any evidence that the so-called Flying Saucrs are visitors from another solar system, the star possible choice. If it has been picked merely because it is not very far away (as measured in light-years), I don't see why the alleged experts did not settle for Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is only about half as far away as Wolf #. , It also is a big binary, both components of yhich are bright stars. Little Wolf # is one of the faintest stars on record. Its absolute magnitude is # and if it were not so near, we wouldn't even know that it exists. The amount of energy emitted from its surface is just about l#th of that of our own sun -- it would take fifty thousand of Wolf #'s caliber to make one Sol. We don't know whether Little Wolfie has a planetary system, hut with an energy output like that, its planets would be in a sorry plight. Naturally, an "expert" would use that as a reason for coming to our solar system -- and one probably will. also enjoy writing fantasy, it seems reasonable that fantasy should appeal to almost all science fiction readers... and we have a power-lineup of stories in the first issue that should convince you that you will like fantasy: full charge of the literary magic that Theodore Sturgeon is noted for. Knight, which brings a frightful Biblical incident clear up to date, and T. L. though not necessarily fun, considering the complications; and a host of mesmeric, short stories to help conjure up a stimulating new magazine that for Earth Not to be or not to not be... that was the not-question for the invader of the not-world. D ear Editor: My # year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody, everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, "Why didn't you warn us?" I could not go to the police because they are not too friendly to me because of some of my guests who frankly are stew bums. Also they might think I was on booze, too, or maybe the hops, and get my license revoked. I run a strictly legit hotel even though some of my guests might be down on their luck now and then. What really got me mixed up in this was the mysterious disappearance of two of my guests. They both took a powder last Wednesday morning. Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias, I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know. And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were the letters I told you about. Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that checked in Thursday... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame. Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him. In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the mirror. Only the frame! it might have been a gag. Sometimes these guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says. India, China, England, everywhere. My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place, the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never touch junk, not even aspirin. Yours very truly, Ivan Smernda Bombay, India June # Mr. Joe Binkle Plaza Ritz Arms New York City Dear Joe: Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection, for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I, Glmpauszn, will be bom. Today I hang in our newly developed not-pod just within the mirror gateway, torn with the agony that we calculated must go with such tremendous wavelength fluctuations. I have attuned myself to a fetus within the body of a not-woman in the not-world. Already I am static and for hours have looked into this weird extension of the Universe with fear and trepidation. As soon as my stasis was achieved, I tried to contact you, but got no response. What could have diminished your powers of articulate wave interaction to make you incapable of receiving my messages and returning them? My wave went out to yours and found it, barely pulsing and surrounded with an impregnable chimera. Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what the not-world calls "mail" till we meet. For this purpose I must utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you. Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time. I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their Jiberator. You failed in your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we return again. The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact location, for the not-people might have access to the information. I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be bom. When it is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational likeness. I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in order that I might destroy the notpeople completely. All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision. Gezsltrysk, what a task! Farewell till later. Glmpauszn Wichita, Kansas June # Dear Joe: Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you, I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which therg are no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my birth. Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited equipment. These notpeople are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me. As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally, since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. Mynot-mother (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up their hands and left. I learned the following day that the opposite component of my not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance during my birth. He was out on... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born. When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was # not-world inches tall by evening. My notfather entered while I was standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind. He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of speech. Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world. "Poppa," I said. This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have jarred on my notfather's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the room. They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth, she fell down heavily. She made a distinct thump on the floor. This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched, but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings! I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats. But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself and it's his nature never to flatter anyone. From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we learned otherwise, while they never have. New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could have happened to your vibrations? Glmpauszn Albuquerque, New Mexico June # Dear Joe: I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time. My process -- original with myself, by the way -- is to send out feeler vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my letter and piails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he has done. My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent. In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz fis uhrytzg... no, it won't come out. Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here. As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl... my brain... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire the stuff needed for the destruction of these people. Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient mechanism I inhabit. I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions. It was strange and... now I know... beautiful. However, I hurried immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up and all about me at the beauty. Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not let yourself believe they do. This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here. Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She wore... what are they?... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped. The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told myself. But they were. I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you unfortunately do not have -- invisibility. I lay there and listened. "He was stark naked," the girl with the sneakers said. A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her. "Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of this area." "But -- " "No more buck-bathing, Lizzy," the officer ordered. "No more speeches in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him." That was it -- I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty, pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I must feel each, become accustomed to it. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe. What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write you with more enlightenment. Glmpauszn Moscow, Idaho June # Dear Joe; I received your first communication today. It baffies me. Do you greet me in the proper fringezone manner? No. Do you express joy, hope, pride, helpfulness at my arrival? No. You ask me for a loan of five bucks! It took me some time, culling my information catalog to come up with the correct variant of the slang term "buck." Is it possible that you are powerless even to provide yourself with the wherewithal to live in this inferior world? A reminder, please. You and I -- I in particular -- are now engaged in a struggle to free our world from the terrible, maiming intrusions of this not-world. Through many long gleebs, our people have lived a semi-terrorized existence while errant vibrations from this world ripped across the closely joined vibration flux, whose individual fluctuations make up our sentient population. Even our eminent, all-high Frequency himself has often been jeopardized by these people. The not-world and our world are like two baskets as you and I see them in our present forms. Baskets woven with the greatest intricacy, design and color; but baskets whose convex sides are joined by a thin fringe of filaments. Our world, on the vibrational plane, extends just a bit into this, the not-world. But being a world of higher vibration, it is ultimately tenuous to these gross peoples. While we vibrate only within a restricted plane because of our purer, more stable existence, these people radiate widely into our world. They even send what they call psychic reproductions of their own selves into ours. And most infamous of all, they sometimes are able to force some of our individuals over the fringe into their world temporarily, causing them much agony and fright. The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one of them at the first opportunity to see for myself. Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked them up while examining the "slang" portion of my information catalog which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate cause -- in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace of our world -- shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short, get hep. As far ashe five bucks is concerned, no dice. Glmpauszn Des Moines, Iowa June # Dear Joe: Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need. Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here "revolting" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most important part of my journey -- completion of the weapon against the notworlders -- I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that day, I assure you. Glmpauszn Boise, Idaho July # Dear Joe: A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last. Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed bending before the winds of passion. In fact. I'm rather badly bent indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known quaintly in this tongue as a "hooker of red-eye" Ha! I've mastered even the vagaries of slang in the not-language... Ahhh! Pardon me again. I feel much better now. You see, 'oe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to. Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle, I experience a tickle... This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome... a group of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover... Ahhh! Pardon me again. Strangely... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have. I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best hotel here in -- no, sorry -- and stared at it for hours. Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other about it. Yet all around another for the love of it. Anyway... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then. I'll feel I have failed. This alcohol is taking effect now. Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports! I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry. Love. Hal What an adventure this is becoming. By the way, Joe, I'm forward' ing that five dollars. You see, it won't cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh? I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one simply must persevere, I always say. Olmpauszn Penobscot, Maine July # Dear Joe: Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body. There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this body and this world that  I almost consider myself a member of it. Now I can function efficiently. I sent Bigftury some long reports today outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his vibrations. I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is perfect in every detail... actually a not-world ideal. I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration. We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the money in her bare feet! Then we kissed. Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of theentire endocrine system follotvs. Thus I felt the beginnings of love. I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself quickly. Now in all the motion pictures -- true representations of life and love in this world -- the man with a lot of money or virtue kisses the girl and tries to induce her to do something biological. She then refuses. This pleases both of them, for he wanted her to refuse. She, in turn, wanted him to want her, but also wanted to prevent him so that he would have a high opinion of her. Do I make myself clear? I kissed the blonde girl and gave her to understand what I then wanted. Well, you can imagine my surprise when she said yes! So I had failed. I had not found love. I became so abstracted by this problem that the blonde girl fell asleep. I thoughtfully drank quantities of excellent alcohol called gin and didn't even notice when the blonde girl left. I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't I wish old Bigftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive? I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a gin mixture. I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation. Boy, 'What an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe, you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately. Glmpauszn Sacramento, Calif. July # Dear Joe: All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance things. Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again because she said yes immediately. The nerves of my dermis were working over time when suddenly I had the most frightening experiience of my life. Now I know what a horror these people really are to our world. The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I was too busy with the redhead to notice. Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white, shapeless cascade of light. Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, "Grandma Lucy!" Then I really took notice. Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku was open and his btgrimms were down. Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the redhead. Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these not-world bodies T# need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality of notreality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become invisible any more. I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly. Quickly ! Glmpauszn Florence, Italy September # Dear Joe: This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds. I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not aware of the nature of my activities. I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since T was his best customer. "But why, sir?" he asked plaintively. I was baffled. What could I tell him? "Don't you like the rooms?" he persisted. "Isn't the service good?" "It's the rooms," I told . him. "They're -- they're -- " "They're what?" he wanted to know. "They're not safe." "Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is..." At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol. "See?" I screamed. "Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!" He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die. Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like the not-men, curse them. Glmpauszn Rochester, New York September # Dear Joe; I have it! It is done! In spite of the alcohol, in spite of Blgftury's niggling criticism, I have succeeded. I now have developed a form of mold, somewhat similar to the antibiotics of this world, that, transmitted to the human organism, will cause a disease whose end will be swift and fatal. First the brain will dissolve and then the body will fall apart. Nothing in this world can stop the spread of it once it is loose. Absolutely nothing. We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators. You say you eat little and drink as much as youcan. The same with me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My notworld senses falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live. In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can we, Joe? And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have hgutry before the ghjdksla! Glmpauszn Dear Editor : These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who knows answer, write to me -- Ivan Smernda. Plaza Ritz Arms -- how long is a gleeb? up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, will give you continued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. A truly original anthology Jre is a wonderfully strange collection, to startle and delight true S-F connoisseurs: Uventy-one tales aixtut some ot the most tiniisttal (to put it mildly) boys and girls you are likely to meet in this or any other century. ,moiig the choice items in this fascinating look of stories about (hut most certainly not for) children, you'll find: Theodore Sturgeon's Baby Is Three -- the first reprinting of this memorable novelette altout what tnight be called a "collective child," Lewis Padgett's account of a problem that only telepathic  C, M, Kornbluth's tale of a Ijoy with more odd powers than you'd want any soti ot yours to have, Wilmar Shiras' classic super-child story, In Hiding, A Ray Bradbury macabre about the youngest possible killer. Stories by some of the most distinguished authors of our time -- Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster, among others -- who prove that they can create imaginative literature of the highest order. one of S-Fs foremost writers, with the same deft irony and impact that mark his own stories. He has provided, Uk), a surprising introduction. All this for ouv #, Children Of Wonder is just published. It's availal)le at your bookseller's now. Or use the coupon below. Send it to Simon and Schuster, Dept. W#, # Fifth Avenue, New York #, N. Y. Gentlemen: Please send me a copy of Children of Wonder. I will pay postman # plus few cents postage. If not delighted I may return book in # days for refund of purchase price. Name. Address . City Zone...State age. Same refund guarantee. Trading with the natives was like taking candy from a kid -- but which were the natives? ily to the orlop and ran toward me. "Hurry up, Qan!" he projected on a sublevel, trying to escape my mother's consciousness. "They're coming! All the others are up already." "Who's coming?" my mother wanted to know, but her full interest was absorbed by her work, and she gave us only the side of her mind. "You youngsters really must learn to think clearly." "Yes'm." Ppon projected suitable youthful embarrassment, but on a lower level he was giggling. Later I must give him another warning; we young ones could not yet separate the thought channels efficiently, so it was more expedient not to try. "The zkuchi are coming," I lied glibly, knowing that the old ones accept inanity as merely a sign of immaturity, "on hundreds of golden wings that beat faster than light." Grandfather removed a part of his mind from his beloved work. "The zkuchi are purely mythological creatures," he thought crossly. "You're old enough to know better than that... Qana," he appealed to my mother, "why do you let him believe in such nonsense?" "The zkuchi are part of our cultural heritage. Father," she projected gently. "We must not let the young ones forget our heritage. Particularly if we are to be here for some time." "It seems to me you're unnecessarily pessimistic," he complained. "You know I've never failed you yet. We shall get back, I promise you. It's just that the transmutation takes time." "But it's taken such a long time already," she thought sadly. "Sometimes I begin to have doubts." Then she apparently remembered that serious matters should not be discussed before us young ones. As if we didn't know what was going on. "Run along and play, children," she advised. "but don't forget to check the atmosphere first." Grandfather started to excogitate something about how it would be better if Ppon went and helped his father while I stayed and did my lessons -- you never seem to escape from lessons anywhere in the Universe -- but we got away before he could finish. jumping up and down in their excitement. Ztul, the half-wit, was so upset he actually spoke: "Hurry, Qan, the tourists are coming!" "Ztul, you must never, never make words aloud!" I thought fiercely. "The old ones might hear and find out about the game." "It's a harmless game," Ppon contributed. "And useful, too. Your grandfather needs the stuff." "Yes," I agreed, "but perhaps the old ones wouldn't see it that way. They might even stop the game. Adults have funny ideas, and there's no use asking for trouble." There was a chorus of assenting thought from the others. All of us had our family troubles. We got to work. Quickly we arranged the interiors of the shelters which we had cleverly built out of materials borrowed from below when the old ones' perceptions were directed elsewhere. The essential structure of the materials had not been changed and could easily be replaced when the time came, but there was no use having to give involved explanations. The old ones never seemed to understand anything. At first We had just built the shelters as play huts, but when the first tourists had misunderstood, we had improved upon the original misconception. Now we had a regular street full of rude dwellings. Lucky for us the old ones never came topside. As the little spaceship landed, Ppon and I and four of the others were ready at its door to form a welcoming committee. The rest dispersed to play villagers. The others took turns alternating the two roles, but I, of course, was always leader. After all. I'd made up the game. Two members of the crew dropped lightly out of the ship and slid a ramp into place. Then the passengers -- there was a sizable group this time, I noted with satisfaction -- came, followed by Sam, the guide, a grizzled old human. He grinned at us. We were old friends, for he'd been leading these tours for ten of their Earth years. The passengers stopped at the foot of the ramp and Sam ran forward to face them. By now we were used to the appearance of the human beings -- small, binocular, with smooth, pasty skins -- although they had really frightened us when we first laid eyes on them. "lOW, you see, folks," Sam ' bellowed through his megaphone, "the scientists don't know everything. They said life could not exist out here in the Asteroid Belt -- and, behold, life! They said these little planets were too small, had too little gravity to hold an atmosphere. But you just breathe in that air, as pure and fresh and clean as the atmosphere of our own Earth! Speaking of gravity, you'll notice that we're walking, not floating. Matter of fact, you'll notice it's even a little hard to walk; you seem a bit heavier than at home. And they said there would be hardly any gravity. No, folks, those scientists know a lot of things, I won't deny that, but they sure don't know everything." "Amazing!" a small, bespectacled male passenger said. "I can hardly believe my own senses!" "Watch out for him," Ppon projected to me. "I think he's a scientist of some kind." "Don't teach your ancestor to levitate," I conceptualized back. Of course what struck the passengers first was neither the atmosphere nor the gravity; it was us. They never failed to be surprised, although the travel folders should have shown thenj what to expect. One of the folders had a picture of me, amusingly crude and two-dimensional, it's true, but not entirely unflattering. I'm not really purple, just a sort of tender fuchsia, but what could you expect from the rudimentary color processes they used? Sam had let me have the original and I always wished I could show it to Mother, but I couldn't without having to explain where it had come from. "They're so cute!" a thin female screamed. "Almost like big squirrels, really, except for all those arms." Her teeth protruded more than those of the small rodent she was thinking about, or than mine, for that matter. "Be careful, ma'am," the guide warned her. "They speak English." "They do? How clever of them. Why, they must be quite intelligent, then." "They are of a pretty. high or-' der of intelligence," the guide agreed, "although their methods of reasoning have always baffled scientists. Somehow they seem to sense scientists, think of them as their enemies, and just clam up entirely." "I think they're just simply too cute," she said, gazing at me fondly. "Ah, srrk yourself, madam," I excogitated, confident that humans were non-telepathic. though; I'd better watch myself. After all, as leader I had to set a good example. "This here is Qan," the guide introduced me. "Headman or chief or something of the tribe. He is always on hand to greet us." "Welcome, travelers from a distant star," I intoned, wrapping my mother's second-best cloak more impressively about me, "to the humble land of the Gchi. Come in peace, go in peace." "Why, he speaks excellent English," the scientist exclaimed. "They pick up things very fast," Sam explained. "Natives can be very, very shrewd," a stout female commented, clutching her handbag tightly. "And now," Sam said, "we will visit the rude dwellings of this simple, primitive, but hospitable people." "People!" Ppon projected. "You better mind your language, Buster! People, indeed!" "Our friend Qan will lead the way." Sam waved toward me. I smiled back at him, but didn't move. "Whatsa matter?" he hissed. "Don't you trust me? Your old pal Sam?" in "No," I whispered back. "Last time I let you pay me at the end of the tour, the take was # short." He tried another tack. "But look, Qan, it's a hell of a job getting all those coins together. Why can't you take paper money instead?" "What good would paper money do me up here?" "What I can't figure out is what good the metal does you up here, either." I beamed. "We eat it." Muttering to himself, he walked over to the ship and called one of the crewmen. They dragged a bag out of the ship's hold. Puffing, they laid it at my feet. I tossed it to Ztul. "Count it," I ordered out loud, "and if there's any missing, no one leaves this planet alive." I snarled ferociously. Everybody laughed. It was part of the act. "You will notice," Sam announced as we led the way down the street, "that the Gchi are all aboutthe same size. No young ones among them. We don't know whether this is because they reproduce differently from us, or because they have concealed their offspring." "The children must be dear little creatures," the toothy female gushed. "If even the adults are cute when they're seven or eight feet tall, the little ones must be simply precious... Tell me. Chief, do you have any children?" "Don't understand," I grunted. "Concept unfamiliar. Not know what children is." "Funny," remarked the scientist, "he was speaking perfectly good English before." "Watch yourself, kid," Ppon ideated warningly to me. "Children are..." she began and stopped. "They're -- well, how do you reproduce?"  upon himself to answer. "If you'll just step into my hut, madam, I'll be delighted to show you." "If you ask me," the scientist stated, "these are frauds." "Whaddya mean frauds?" Sam demanded indignantly. "Human beings dressed up as extraterrestrials. They speak too good an English. Their concepts are too .much like ours. Their sense of humor is equally vul -- too similar." "You and your big mouth!" I projected to Ppon. "Look who's thinking!" he excogitated back. I could see I'd have to give him a mind-lashing later. It was up to me to save the situation. "If you would like to examine me more closely, sir," I # t addressed the scientist, "you will see that I am not a human be mg. He approached me dubiously. "Closer," I said, looking him in the eye, as I bared my teeth and growled. "I have five eyes, sir, and you will notice that I am looking at you with each one of them. I have seven arms, sir -- here I reached out to grab him " -- and you will notice that they are all living tissue." "No, you couldn't be a human being," he agreed, backing away as soon as I released my grip, "but the whole thing is... odd. Very odd." "If anthropologists on Earth can't explain all the customs of the primitives there," Sam tried to placate him, "how can we explain the behavior of extraterrestrials? Let's go into some of the houses. The chief has kindly given us his permission to look around." "Our houses are your houses," I stated, bowing graciously. As always, the tourists grew extremely enthusiastic about the furniture in our simple dwellings. "What lovely -- er -- things you have," squirrel-tooth commented. "What are they used for?" "Well, the pryu is for the mrach, of course," I explained glibly, "and the wrooov is much used for cvrking the budz, although the ywri is preferred by the less discriminating. "Oh," she said. "How I should love to have one of the -- 'ivroov' I think it was you said, for my very own. I wonder whether..." By a curious coincidence, Hsoj arrived at this point, carrying a tray full of things and stuff. "Artifacts!" he shouted. "Nice artifacts! Who wants to buy artifacts?" A LL the tourists did. They were pretty good artifacts, if I do say so myself. I'd made them out of the junk I rescued from our dustbins before the disintegration unit got to work. Honestly, I can't understand how the old ones can complain about our being wasteful and then go and throw away all sorts of perfectly useful things. "You must pay the natives in metal," the guide explained. "They accept only coins." "Why?" the stout female wanted to know. "Do thej really eat metal?" "I doubt it. One of them ate a couple of pounds of Earth candy a tourist gave him last time and he seemed to enjoy it without ill effects." "Without ill effects!" Ppon excogitated. "You should have seen Ztul afterward, boy!" "Look, Mac." A short fat human offered Hsoj a small silver coin and then five larger brown ones. "Which would you rather have?" "Thern." Hsoj pointed unhesitatingly to the brown coins. A smile rippled covertly through the tourists. "They're a simple and childlike people, but really so goodnatured," Sam footnoted. All of us gave simple goodnatured smiles as Hsoj accepted the gift of the brown coins. "Keep up the good work," I projected. "We can use all the copper we can get." "You like metal, dear?" a female asked Hsoj. She unfastened a belt from around her waist. "Would you take this in exchange for some of your pretty things?" "Say 'yes,' " I conceptualized. "That's steel. Old and worthless to her, but not to us." "I know, I know," Hsoj ideated impatiently. "What makes you think you're the only one who knows anything?" Never had we got such a big haul before, because everybody seemed to have all sorts of metal stuff on him that he valued less than coins. Now came the sad part of the spiel. "Remember, folks, these simple, honest individuals you see before you are but the scanty remnants of a once-proud race who spanned the skies. For their ancestors must have been godlike indeed to have erected such edifices as that commanding structure over there." Sam pointed to the portable atmosphere machine which was set up several yebil away to give our playground proper air. "Once glorious, now fallen into ruin and decay." "You're going to catch muh from the old ones," Ppon ideated, "when they find out you haven't been keeping the machine clean." "Don't be a silly oosi," I thought back with a mental grin. "I'm using the atmosphere machine to create atmosphere." "You're getting to be as stupid as a human," he thought in disgust. "May we go inside?" the scientific passenger asked Sam. "No, indeed," I said hastily. "It is our temple, sacred to the gods. No unbeliever may set foot in it." "What are the basic tenets of your religion?" the scientist wanted to know. "We do not talk about it," I said with dignity. "It is tabu. Bad form." " A ND now," announced the guide, glancing at his watch, "we have just time for the war dance before we leave for Vesta." "Against whom are they planning a war?" asked a small passenger, turning pale. "It's a vestigial ritual," Sam explained quickly, "dating back to the days when there were other -- er -- when there was somebody to fight. Just an invocation to the gods... general stuff like that... nothing to be afraid of. Isn't it so, Qan?" "Quite so," I replied, folding all my arms across my toother's cloak. "Come in peace, go in peace. Our motto." We started the dance. It wouldn't have got us a passing mark in first grade, where we'd learned it rffi ago, but our version of the dance of the zkuchi was plenty good enough for the tourists. "If I ever visit Earth, Janna forbid," I thought to Ppon as we executed an intricate caracole, "I'm going to wear earplugs all the time." The dance finished. "Now everybody get together!" Sam shouted, clapping his hands to round up his charges. "We are about to leave little Gchik." "He should only know what gchik means," Ppon sniggered mentally. "Little Gchik is barren, dying, its past glories all but forgotten," Sam almost sobbed, "but still its simple, warm-hearted inhabitants carry on bravely..." "Couldn't we do something for them?" suggested the stout female. Everybody murmured assent. This contingency arose all too often -- a result of our being just too lovable. "No one can help us," I said in a deep voice, pulling the cloak over my face. The idzik feathers trimming it tickled like crazy. "We must dree our own weird alone. Besides, the air of Gchik has a deleterious effect upon human beings if they're exposed to it for longer than four hours." There was a mad scramble to reach the ship. "Stand by the atmosphere machine, Hsoj," I instructed, "to poison a little air in case anybody wants to take a sample." The scientist actually did, in a little bottle he seemed to have brought along for the purpose; but he got off, the "asteroid" as rapidly as the rest of them, after that. We watched the spaceship dwindle to a silver mote in the distance. "Whew," Ppon thought, sinking to the surface. "That war dance sure takes a lot out of a fellow." dignantly as he -- as well as the rest of us -- floated off the top level. "Somebody's cut the gravity!" "Must be Grandfather," I mentalized. "I suppose he thinks we've been out long enough, so he's warning us, just as if we were a bunch of infants. I guess we'd better go inside, though. Let's not forget to turn off the atmosphere, fellows. It uses too much energy and the old ones won't let us play topside any more." "You know everything, don't you, Qan?" Ppon sneered. I ignored him. "Pretty good haul," I excogitated as I hefted the bags of metal. "Here, Ztul, catch!" "You always make me carry everything!" he complained. Grandfather caught us as we lowered ourselves from the airlock. I figured he must have been getting suspicious or otherwise he'd never have left his beloved engines. "What's this you youngsters have?" he wanted to know, pouncing on our bags. "Metal, eh? I suppose you were going to make another fake meteorite out of it for me, were you?" "I thought you wanted metal. Grandfather," I sulked. He could have .been more appreciative. "Certainly I want metal. You know I need it to get the drive working again. But what I want to know is where you got it from. I'd think you stole it, but how could even little muhli like you steal out here in space?" "They have always brought you metal from time to time, Father," Mother projected, coming out as she overthought us. "So clever of them, I always thought." "Yes, but I've been thinking that their encountering so many meteorites was a singularly curious coincidence. And they were curious meteorites, too. I suppose the young ones made them themselves." "But out of what. Father? You know we don't have any spare metal on the ship. That's why you haven't been able to get the repairs finished before. Where else could they get the metal but from meteorites?" "I don't know where they get their metal from, but certainly not from meteorites. These pieces here are artifacts. Look, the metal has been more or less refined and roughly formed into shapes with crude designs upon them. Tell me the truth, Qan, where did you get these?" "Some people gave them to us," I replied sullenly. "People?" asked my mother. "What are people?" "Natives of this solar system. They call themselves people." "Nonsense!" my grandfather interjected. "It's just another one of your fantasies. You know what the astronomers say -- none of the planets of this little system is capable of supporting life." "They come from the third planet," I persisted, trying to keep from disgracing myself by tllwng in front of the other young ones. "There is life there. All of us have seen them. Besides, there is the metal." My companions chorused agreement. "You see, Father," my mother smiled, stroking my head with three hands, "the wise ones are not always right." llY grandfather nodded his head slowly. "It is not impossible, I suppose. I hope it is true that these -- people gave you and your friends the metal, Qan." "Oh, yes. Grandfather," I thought anxiously. "Of their own free will." "Well -- " he continued, not altogether convinced -- "this lot should be enough to repair the engines. Perhaps, when we take off, we should have a look at the youngsters' third planet on the way home." "But this trip has taken such a long time already. Father," my mother protested. "Almost a rff; the young ones have missed nearly two semesters of school. And Qan has been getting some very peculiar ideas -- from those people, I suppose." "But if there is some sort of intelligent life," Grandfather thought, "it's our duty to visit it. Next time we need to stop the ship for repairs, it might be more convenient to put in at this third planet instead of just hanging out there in space. And the young ones say the natives seem to be friendly." "I'd like to see Sam's face when he comes back and finds his 'asteroid' gone," I conceptualized. "Yes," Ppon agreed, with the edge of his mind, but his main channel was turned in another direction. "That is the end of this garrie now, you know. In the next game I shall be leader." "Oh, yes?" I thought back. "I'm the leader and I'm staying leader, because I am the biggest and cleverest." "Children!" my mother protested, distressed. "I'm afraid you've picked up some really unpleasant concepts from those dreadful natives." "Come, come, Qana," Grandfather ideated, "we mustn't be intolerant." , "Perhaps not," she replied with heat, "and I know the natives probably don't know any better, but I am not going to have my young one or anyone else's contaminated. Visit the third planet if you wish, but not this time. You'll have to make a special trip for it. I'm not going to let you stop off there while the young ones are aboard. It's obviously no fit place for children." # Star Shelf Moore. Gnome Press, New York, #. # pages, #. Catherine Moore, wife of Henry Kuttner and a first-rate writer in her own right. I enjoyed all the stories except one, andeven that, a space opera called "Paradise Street," is superior to most of its breed. But the other four are very good indeed. "Judgment Night," nearly novel-length, is a gaudy, somewhat overrich science-fantasy in the grand tradition. There is a galactic empress whose regime is attacked from without and within; the narrative of her struggle -- and her loves -- is highly satisfying. "Promised Land" deals with some of the possible methods that will have to be developed to enable men to live far from the Sun -- on Ganymede, in this instance. The plot weaves about the machinations of the boss of the satellite, a monster in body -- and in mind. "The Code" describes what might happen if one could reverse time in a human being and start him back toward babyhood. Instead of becoming a baby, he becomes a complete alien, an emigrant to another dimension. "Heir Apparent" tells of "integrator teams" that, by combining the powers of several specialized minds into one powerful instrument, are able to keep an overcomplex civilization going. A rich collection, indeed -- varied, imagination stretching, written without cheapness or shallowness. I don't think you should miss this one. by Charles Galton Darwin. Doubleday Co., New York, #. # pages, # sets before us the old argument of the eugenicists that the breed is deteriorating because the "top brains" are not reproducing themselves. Charles Darwin's elderly grandson is also Francis Galton's godson, and Galton was one of the founders of eugenics theories. The present author has forgotten nothing Kis tutor taught him about the inherent superiority of the successful and the poor breeding material of the masses. The book also touches upon the worldwide wastage of our natural resources, and the inevitable power famine that will result in a few centuries. He believes solar energy will be the solution. Atomic energy from nonradio-active sources? Sir Charles doesn't give it a thought. Not once is space travel even mentioned! The physical and psychological evolution of the race in # years is inevitable, yet the author blandly ignores it. As a prediction, the book is practically outdated right now. Worse still, it's dull reading, as pedestrian as a bicyclist with a flat tire -- traveling backward on a jet highway to the future. dom House, New York, #. # pages, # written, confused, revolting and fascinating book. It shocks, disgusts, terrifies and not infrequently bores. It is as enormous -- and enormously messy -- as our own situation as human beings let loose amid the destroying machines of our own creation. It contains some of the most pretentious writing in the history of the novel -- and some of the most biting and important satire. Voluntary amputation and replacement of limbs with atompowered prosthetics creates a new elite in this future world -- an elite in which women (who are not permitted the honor of amputation) become the active lovers and the preservers of the race. The theory behind the vol-amps, as they are called, is that they cannot carry on war, and that thus they create permanent peace. Hmmm! The time is around #, after (the remains of Soviet Eurasia) and "Strip" (a section of the U.S.A. including Denver to the Mississippi and little more). There is the inevitable conflict between them -- temporarily sublimated in athletic contests among teams of the vol-amps. There are widespread pre-frontal lobotomies to remove aggressions; flaming sexuality; super-atombombing; and endless juvenile attempts at mature philosophy. Here are some of the men whose ideas and systems Wolfe has cannibalized to give the book an appearance of superior intellectual satire : Equivalent of War becomes the basis of much vol-amp political jargon; Norbert Wiener, whose cypernetics theories jaid the foundation for the astonishing atom-powered arms and legs of the vol-amps; Korzybsky (semantics) ; Burnham (the managerial society); Koestler (Yogis and Commissars); Hubbard (dianetics); Wilhelm Reich (orgone boxes) ; Morgenstern (and his theory of games, out of which help from people) ; Claude Shannon; Thomas Mann; Andre Gide; Dostoyevsky (and his ghastly Notes from the Underground ) ; and Marx and Darwin and Descartes and Freud -- Freud, in a way, is the helpless master of the whole crazy puppet show. The style is really incredible. There are innumerable puns, good and bad; slashing wit; dull stretches which somehow you don't dare skip because something good may be buried there; vomit; orgasms; rape (of male by female!) and so on and so on; and finally World War IV, and only the Lord knows what after that. Once you get past the first # pages, which are boring but important, you find yourself caught up in this impossible-to-describe anti-Utopia and you can't quit. It's got you; and before you're done, you really have been pulled through a knothole; you're bleeding, bludgeoned, bewildered -- and hypnotized. I suppose it's actually a bad book; most of the conventional reviewers seem to think so. However, it is also a book for the bitter present, a book carrying harsh warnings of a more horrifying future. dren ! Whether it is for you or not is a matter you must decide for yourself. I liked it as much as I detested it. Isaac Asimov. Doubleday  Co., New York. #. # pages, # episode in the history of the pictured in the Foundation series. A "psycho-probed" "spatioanalyst" (one of those newfangled scientists of tomorrow) has learned that the planet Fiorina, source of the miracle textile "kyrt," is about to be destroyed when its sun goes nova. The scientist is put out of commission to keep the fact from being known. The book tells how this attempt by the master-race of Sarkians who had enslaved the Florinians to foil the evacuation of the threatened planet was defeated, and the Florinians themselves were given their freedom. One of Asimov's lesser efforts, but still considerably above the average space opera. Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # space-time novelets from the adolescence of science fiction. Though now strictly for kids, they are naively effective despite the painful awkwardness of the writing. The title story perfectly exemplifies a #year-old's wish-fancies. Denny Lanning is "thinking about time." This makes it possible for "Lethonee" (perfect name for a dream girl!) to appear before him from another spacetime world and tell him that the future of both his and her world depends on him -- his ability to defeat "the evil flower of the Gyronchi." To find how he does it, read the book and enjoy a return to the youth of your literacy. "After World's End" is more of the same, only a bit bloodier; both the hero and the heroine die, believing they will meet after death. They have been to the end of Earth's time together, suffered all sorts of horrors, and finally expire in a mysterious blaze of glory that I couldn't quite figure out.  Th beloved movie idol smfing ttie passionatelove lyrics of the "Kashmiri Sottg."  wu nun The 'Cowboy Philosopher " in a porayal which typifies the hspun wit and humor for which he was famous. The iwashbucMing lover of early motion pictures enacting the fmal Ktne from his most famous roil.  V#N Author ot "Shine On Harvest Moon", singing one of the pop ular songs of his day.  M# The tncompaiable Irish tenor, star of opera and the concert stage m a fine recording.  #N The voice of Melba exempliried the Golden Age of Opera. A classic recording performed at her peah.  M# The beloved German contralto war netad for an amaiingly rich voice of unusual range Recorded in #. that brings to vivid life the dramatic excitement of history making events -- torn from Yesterday's headlines... Recreate the magic genious of great personalities -- Right In Your Own Home.  #I The Scotch vaudeville star presenting a medley of his most famous songs.  # The "I Don't Care" girt singing her famous theme song. In the style of the "Flapper tra".  V# The ster who ceptiveted the nation m the "Gay #s" singing her favorite air.  V# "Bojangles" celebrating his #th year in show business. Singmg and dancing in the style that endeared him to  "iJaoj aonph Htnu Eicerpts from the never to be forgotten "Rape of Vienna" speech. With English translation. n H# The voice and philosophy of this political and spiritual leader His "Spiritual Message" recorded m English. D A# renouncing his Crown and Empire for "the woman I love'  I sot The only known recording of lenin. #I On the same record the voice of Stalm. # glish translation  X# Hightighis of the second World War. ucerpts from the great speeches of this renowned English statesmen  XS# The great soldier-statesman's memorable address launching the drive that won the war  VMl Two ofsebaU's immortal sluggers m an impromptu, off the record baseball talk  RlOOl The Evangelist n a passionate denunciation of the evils of alcohol Ai, Ivpical sermon m the "Sunday tradition.  AB#I "How to operate a Gramaphone." The English playwright in e recording laical of his keen wit and satire  H#I Father of the phonograph re leting e humorous story to e friend. Recorded by his essociete in #.  M#I One of the earliest recordings of the peerless Italian tenor Made in Europe, #. O Eicerpts from the "Fireside Chats" of F.O.R. Highlights of the "New Deal" If not dwiighud, roturn In lO daye for full pur choso prico rofund. Q I enclose  for Records. Q Send C.O.D. I pay cost plv .toteA. One thing this planet could not be accused of was lack of hospitality. Anytime it had company, it wanted them to stay -- for good! I T hey had solved the mystery -- with a guess, a very erudite and educated guess -- but they didn't know a thing, not a single thing, for certain. That wasn't the way a planetary survey team usually did a job. Usually they nailed it down and wrung a lot of information out of it and could parade an impressive roll of facts. But here there was no actual, concrete fact beyond the one that would have been obvious to a twelve-yearold child. Commander Ira Warren was worried about it. He said as much to Bat Ears Brady, ship's cook and slightly disreputable pal of his younger days. The two of them had been planet-checking together for more than thirty years. While they stood at opposite poles on the table of organization, they were able to say to one another things they could not have said to any other man aboard the survey ship or have allowed another man to say to them. "Bat Ears," said Warren, "I'm just a little worried." "You're always worried," Bat Ears retorted. "That's part of the job you have." "This junkyard business..." "You wanted to get ahead," said Bat Ears, "and I told you what would happen. I warned you you'd get yourself weighed down with worry and authority and pomp -- pomp -- " "Pomposity?" "That's the word," said Bat Ears. "That's the word, exactly." "I'm not pompous, Warren contradicted. "No, you're worried about this junkyard business. I got a bottle stowed away. How about a little drink?" thought. "Someday I'll bust you wide open. Where you hide the stuff, I don't know, but every trip we make..." "Now, Ira! Don't go losing your lousy temper." "Every trip we make, you carry enough dead weight of liquor to keep you annoyingly aglow for the entire cruise." "It's baggage," Bat Ears insisted. "A man is allowed some baggage weight. I don't have hardly nothing else. I just bring along my drinking." "Someday," said Warren savagely, "it's going to get you booted of the ship about five light-years from nowhere." The threat was an old one. It failed to dismay Bat Ears. "This worrying you're doing," Bat Ears said, "ain't doing you no good." "But the survey team didn't do the job," objected Warren. "Don't you see what this means? For the first time in more than a hundred years of survey, we've found what appears to be evidence that some other race than Man has achieved space flight. And we don't know a thing about it. We should know. With all that junk out there, we'd ought to be able by this time to write a book about it." Bat Ears spat in contempt. "You mean them scientists of ours." The way he said "scientist" made it a dirty word. "They're good," said Warren. "The very best there is." "Remember the old days, Ira?" asked Bat Ears. "When you was second looey and you used to come down and we'd have a drink together and..." "That has nothing to do with it." "We had real men in them days. We'd get ourselves a club and go hunt us up some natives and beat a little sense into them and we'd get more facts in half a day than these scientists, with all their piddling around, will get in a month of Sundays."  "This is slightly different," Warren said. "There are no natives here." There wasn't, as a matter of fact, much of anything on this particular planet. It was strictly a low-grade affair and it wouldn't amount to much for another billion years. The survey, understandably, wasn't too interested in planets that wouldn't amount Its surface was mostly rock outcroppings and' tumbled boulder fields. In the last half million years or so, primal plants had gotten started and were doing well. Mosses and lichens crept into the crevices and crawled across the rocks, but aside from that there seemed to be no life. Although, strictly speaking, you couldn't be positive, for no one had been interested in the planet. They hadn't looked it over and they ' hadn't searched for life; everyone had been too interested in the junkyard. They had never intended to land, but had circled the planet, making routine checks and entering routine data in the survey record. Then someone at a telescope had seen the junkyard and they'd gone down to investigate and had been forthrightly pitchforked into a maddening puzzle. yard and that was what it was. Strewn about were what probably were engine parts, although no one was quite sure. Pollard, the mech engineer, had driven himself to the verge of frenzy trying to figure out how to put some of the parts together. He finally got three of them assembled, somehow, and they didn't mean a thing, so he tried to take them apart again to figure out how he'd done it. He couldn't get them apart. It was about that time that Pollard practically blew his top. The engine parts, if that was what they were, were scattered all over the place, as if someone or something had tossed them away, not caring where they fell. But off to one side was a pile of other stuff, all neatly stacked, and it was apparent even to the casual glance that this stuff must be a pile of supplies. There was what more than likely was food, though it was a rather strange kind of food (if that was what it was), and strangely fabricated bottles of plastic that held a poison liquid, and other stuff that was fabric and might have been clothing, although it gave one the shudders trying to figure out what sort of creatures would have worn that kind of clothing and bundles of metallic bars, held together in the bundles by some, kind of gravitational attraction instead of the wires that a human would have used to tie them in bundles. And a number of other objects for which there were no names. "They should have found the answer," Warren said. "They've cracked tougher nuts than this. In the month we've been here, they should have had that engine running." "If it is an engine," Bat Ears pointed out. "What else could it be?" "You're getting so that you sound like them. Run into some,thing that you can't explain and think up the best guess possible and when someone questions you, you ask what else it could be. And that ain't proof, Ira." "You're right. Bat Ears," Warren admitted. "It certainly isn't proof and that's what worries me. We have no doubt the junk out there is a spaceship engine, but we have no proof of it." "Nobody's going to land a ship," said Bat Ears testily, "and rip out the engine and just throw it away. If they'd done that, the ship would still be here." "But if that's not the answer," demanded Warren, "what is all that stuff out there?" "I wouldn't know. I'm not even curious. I ain't the one that's worrying." He got up from the chair and moved toward the door. "I still got that bottle, Ira." "No, thanks," Warren said. He sat and listened to Bat Ear's feet going down the stairs. II alien psychologist, came into the cabin and sat down in the chair across the desk from Warren. "We're finally through," he said. "You aren't through," challenged Warren. "You haven't even started." "We've done all we can." Warren grunted at him.' "We've run all sorts of tests," said Spencer. "We've got a book full of analyses. We have a complete photographic record and everything is down on paper in diagrams and notes and -- " "Then tell me: What is that junk out there?" "It's a spaceship engine." "If it's an engine," Warren said, "let's put it together. Let's find out how it runs. Let's figure out the kind of intelligence most likely to have built it." "We tried," replied Spencer. "All of us tried. Some of us didn't have applicable knowledge or training, but even so we worked; we helped the ones who had training." "I know how hard you worked." And they had worked hard, only snatching stolen hours to sleep, eating on the run. "We are dealing with alien mechanics," Spencer said. "We've dealt with other alien concepts," Warren reminded him. "Alien economic, and alien religions and alien psychology..." "But this is different." "Not so different. Take Pollard, now. He is the key man in this situation. Wouldn't you have said that Pollard should have cracked it?" "If it can be cracked, Pollard is your man. He has everything -- the theory, the experience, the imagination." "You think we should leave?" asked Warren. "That's what you came in to tell me? You thinkthere is no further use of staying here?" "That's about it," Spencer admitted.  "All right," Warren told him. "If you say so. I'll take your word for it. We'll blast off right after supper. I'll tell Bat Ears to fix us up a spread. A sort of achievement dinner." "Don't rub it in so hard," protested Spencer. "We're not proud of what we've done." Warren heaved himself out of the chair. "I'll go down and tell Mac to get the engines ready. On the way down. I'll drop in on Bat Ears and tell him." Spencer said, "I'm worried, Warren." "So am I. What is worrying you?" "Who are these things, these other people, who had the other spaceship? They're the first, you know, the first evidence we've ever run across, of another race that had discovered space flight. And what happened to them here?" "Scared?" "Yes. Aren't you?" "Not yet," said Warren. "I probably will be when I have the time to think it over." He went down the stairs to talk to Mac about the engines. Ill cubby hole, smoking his blackened pipe and reading his thumb-marked Bible. "Good news," Warren said to him. Mac laid down the book and took off his glasses. "There's but one thing you could tell me that would be good news," he said. "This is it. Get the engines ready. We'll be blasting off." "When, sir? Not that it can be too soon." "In a couple of hours or so," said Warren. "We'll eat and get settled in. I'll give you the word." The engineer folded the spectacles and slid them in his pocket. He tapped the pipe out in his hand and tossed away the ashes and put the dead pipe back between his teeth. "I've never liked this place," he said. "You never like any place." "I don't like them towers." "You're crazy, Mac. There aren't any towers." "The boys and me went walking," said the engineer. "We found a bunch of towers." "Rock formations, probably." "Towers," insisted the engineer doggedly. "If you found some towers," Warren demanded, "why didn't you report them?" "And have them science beagles go baying after them and have to stay another month?" "It doesn't matter," Warren said. "They probably aren't towers. Who would mess around building towers on this backwash of a planet?" "They were scary," Mac told him. "They had that black look about them. And the smell of death." "It's the Celt in you. The big, superstitious Celt you are, rocketing through space from world to world -- and still believing in banshees and spooks. The medieval mind in the age of science." Mac said, "They fair give a man the shivers." They stood facing one another for a long moment. Then Warren put out a hand and tapped the other gently on the shoulder. "I won't say a word about them," he said. "Now get those engines rolling." IV table's head, listening to the others talk. "It was a jury-rigged job," said Clyne, the physicist. "They tore out a lot of stuff and rebuilt the engine for some reason or other and there was a lot of the stuff they tore out that they didn't use again. For some reason, they had to rebuild the engine and they rebuilt it simpler than it was before. Went back to basic principles and cut out the fancy stuff -- automatics and other gadgets like that -- but the one they rebuilt must have been larger and more unwieldy, less compact, than the one that they ripped down. That would explain why they left some of their supplies behind." "But," asked Dyer, the chemist, "what did they jury-rig it with? Where did they get the material?" Briggs, the metallurgist, said, "This place crawls with ore. If it wasn't so far out, it would be a gold mine." "Wesaw no signs of mining," Dyer objected. "No signs of mining or smelting and refining or of fabrication." "We didn't go exploring," Clyne pointed out. "They might have done some mining a few miles away from here and we'd have never known it." Spencer said, "That's the trouble with us on this whole project. We've adopted suppositions and let them stand as fact. If they had to do some fabrication, it might be important to know a little more about it." "What difference does it make?" asked Clyne. "We know the basic facts -- a spaceship landed here in trouble, they finally repaired their engines, and they took off once again." Old Doc Spears, down at the table's end, slammed his fork on his plate. "You don't even know," he said, "that it was a spaceship. I've listened to you caterwauling about this thing for weeks. I've never seen so damn much motion and so few results in all my born days." All of them looked a little surprised. Old Doc was normally a mild man and he usually paid little attention to what was going on, bumbling around on his regular rounds to treat a smashed thumb or sore throat or some other minor ailment. All of them had wondered, with a slight sickish feeling, how Old Doc might perform if he faced a real emergency, like major surgery, say. They didn't have much faith in him, but they liked him well enough. Probably they liked him mostly because he didn't mix into their affairs. And here he was, mixing right into them truculently. Lang, the communications man, said, "We found the scratches. Doc. You remember that. Scratches on the rock. The kind of scratches that a spaceship could have made in landing." "Could have made," said Doc derisively. "Must have made!" LD Doc snorted and went on with his eating, holding his head down over the plate, napkin tucked beneath his chin, shoveling in the food with fork and knife impartially. Doc was noted as a messy eater. "I have a feeling," Spencer said, "that we may be off the beaten track in thinking of this as a simple repair job. From the amount of parts that are down there in the junkyard. I'd say that they found it necessary to do a redesigning job, to start from the beginning and build an entirely new engine to get them out of here. I have a feeling that those engine parts out there represent the whole engine, that if we knew how, we could put those parts together and we'd have an engine." "I tried it," Pollard answered. "I can't quite buy the idea that it was a complete redesigning job," Clyne stated. "That would mean a new approach and some new ideas that would rule out the earlier design and all the parts that had been built into the original engine as it stood. The theory would explain why there are so many parts strewn around, but it's just not possible. You don't redesign an engine when you're stranded on a barren planet. You stick to what you know." Dyer said, "Accepting an idea like redesigning sends you back again to the problem of materials." "And tools," added Lang. "Where would they get the tools?" "They'd probably have a machine shop right on board the ship," said Spencer. "For minor repairs," Lang corrected. "Not the kind of equipment you would need to build a complete new engine." "What worries me," said Pollard, "is our absolute inability to understand any of it. I tried to fit those parts together, tried to figure out the relationship of the various parts -- and there must be some sort of relationship, because unrelated parts would make no sense at all. Finally I was able to fit three of them together and that's as far as I could get. When I got them together, they didn't spell a thing. They simply weren't going anywhere. Even with three of them together, you were no better off, no further along in understanding, than before you'd put them together. And when I tried to get them apart, V I couldn't do that, either. You'd think, once a man had got a thing together, he could take it apart again, wouldn't you?" "It was an alien ship," Spencer offered, "built by alien people, run by alien engines." "Even so," said Pollard, "there should have been some basic idea that we could recognize. In some way or other, their engine should have operated along at least one principle that would be basic with human mechanics. An engine is a piece of mechanism that takes raw power and controls it and directs it into useful energy. That would be its purpose, no matter what race built it." "The metal," said Briggs, "is an alien alloy, totally unlike anything we have ever run across. You can identify the components, all right, but the formula, when you get it down, reads like a metallic nightmare. It shouldn't work. By Earth standards, it wouldn't work. There's some secret in the combination that I can't even guess at." Old Doc said, from the table's end, "You're to be congratulated, Mr. Briggs, upon your fine sense of restraint." "Cut it out. Doc," Warren ordered sharply, speaking for the first time. "All right," said Doc. "If that's the way you want it, Ira, I will cut it out."  Warren looked across the planet. Evening was fading into night and the junkyard was no more than a grotesque blotch of deeper shadow on the hillside. Once, not long ago, another ship had rested here, just a little way from where they rested now. Another ship -- another race. And something had happened to that ship, something that his survey party had tried to ferret out and had fa'iled to discover. It had not been a simple repair job; he was sure of that. No matter what any of them might say, it had been considerably more than routine repair. There had been some sort of emergency, a situation with a strange urgency about it. They had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned some of their supplies. No commander of any spaceship, be he human or alien, would leave supplies behind except when life or death was involved in his escape. There was what appeared to be food in the stack of supplies -- at least. Dyer had said that it was food, although it didn't look edible. And there were the plasticlike bottles filled with a poison that might be, as like as not, the equivalent of an alien whisky. And no man, Warren said, leaves food and whisky behind except in the direst emergency. He walked slowly down the trail they'd beaten between the ship's lock and the junkyard and it struck him that he walked in a silence that was as deep as the awful stillness of far space. There was nothing here to make any sound at all. There was no life except the mosses and the lichens and the other primal plants that crept among the rocks. In time there would be other life, for the planet had the air and water and the basic ingredierits for soil and so, there might arise a life economy as complex as that of Earth. is a long, long time. He reached the junkyard and walked its familiar ground, dodging the larger pieces of machinery that lay all about, stumbling on one or two of the smaller pieces that lay unseen in the darkness. npHE second time he stumbled, he stooped and picked up the thing he had stumbled on and it was, he knew, one of the tools that the alien race had left behind them when they fled. He could picture them, dropping their tools and fleeing, but the picture was not clear. He could not decide what these aliens might have looked like or what they might have fled from. He tossed the tool up and down, catching it in his hand. It was light and handy and undoubtedly there was some use for it, but he did not know the use nor did any of the others up there in the ship. Hand or tentacle, claw or paw -- what appendage had it been that had grasped the tool? What mind lay behind the hand or tentacle, claw or paw that had grasped and used it? He stood and threw back his head and looked at the stars that shone above the planet and they were not the familiar stars he had known when he was a child. Far out, he thought, far out. The farthest out that Man had ever been. A sound jerked him around, the sound of running feet coming down the trail. "Warren!" cried a voice. "Warren! Where are you?" There was fright in that voice, the frantic note of panic that one hears in the screaming of a terrified child. "Warren!" "Here!" shouted Warren. "Over here. I'm coming." He swung around and hurried to meet the man who was running in the dark. The runner wopld have charged on past him if he had not put out a hand and gripped him by the shoulder and pulled him to a halt. "Warren! Is that you?" "What's the matter, Mac?" asked Warren. "I can't... I can't... I..." "What's wrong? Speak up! You can't what, Mac?" He felt the engineer's fumbling hands reaching out for him, grasping at his coat lapels, hanging onto him as if the engineer were a drowning man. "Come on, come on," Warren urged with the impatience of alarm. "I can't start the engines, sir," said Mac. "Can't start the..." "I can't start them, sir. And neither can the others. None of us can start them, sir." "The engines!" said Warren, terror rising swiftly. "What's the matter with the engines?" "There's nothing the matter with the engines. It's us, sir. We can't start them." "Talk sense, man. Why can't you?" "We can't remember how. We've forgotten how to start the engines!" VI light above the desk and straightened, seeking out the book among the others on the shelf. "It's right here, Mac," he said. "I knew I had it here." He found it and took it down and opened it beneath the light. He leafed the pages rapidly. Behind him he could hear the tense, almost terrified breathing of the engineer. "It's all right, Mac. It's all here in the book." He leafed too far ahead and had to back up a page or two and reached the place and spread the book wide beneath the lamp. "Now," he said, "we'll get those engines started. It tells right here..." He tried to read and couldn't. He could understand the words all right and the symbols, but the sum of the words he read made little sense and the symbols none at all. He felt the sweat breaking out on him, running down his forehead and gathering in his eyebrows, breaking out of his armpits and trickling down his ribs. "What's the matter. Chief?" asked Mac. "What's the matter now?" Warren felt his body wanting to shake, straining every nerve to tremble, but it wouldn't move. He was frozen stiff. "This is the engine manual," he said, his voice cold and low. "It tells all about the engines -- how they operate, how to locate trouble, how to fix them." "Then we're all right," breathed Mac, enormously relieved. Warren closed the book. "No, we aren't, Mac.' I've forgotten all the symbols and most of the terminology." "You what!" "I can't read the book," said Warren. "T just isn't possible," argued Spencer. "It's not only possible," Warren told him. "It happened. Is there any one of you who can read that book?" They didn't answer him. "If there's anyone who' can," invited Warren, "step up and show us how." Clyne said quietly, "There's none of us can read it." "And yet," declared Warren, "an hour ago any one of you -- any single one of you -- probably would have bet his life that he not only could start the engines if he had to, but could take the manual if he couldn't and figure how to do it." "You're right," Clyne agreed. "We would have bet our lives. An hour ago we would have. It would have been a safe, sure bet." "That's what you think," said Warren. "How do you know how long it's been since you couldn't read the manual?" "We don't, of course," Clyne was forced to admit. "There's something more. You didn't find the answer to the junkyard. You guessed an answer, but you didn't find one. And you should have. You know damn well you should have." Clyne rose to his feet. "Now see here, Warren..." "Sit down, John," said Spencer. "Warren's got us dead to rights. We didn't find an answer and we know we didn't. We took a guess and substituted it for the answer that we didn't find. And Warren's right about something else -- we should have found the answer." Under any other circumstances, Warren thought, they might have hated him for those blunt truths, but now they didn't. They just sat there and he could see the realization seeping into them. Dyer finally said, "You think we failed out there because we forgot -- just like Mac forgot." "You lost some of your skills," replied Warren, "some of your skills and knowledge. You worked as hard as ever. You went through the motions. You didn't have the skill or knowledge any more, that's all." "And now?" asked Lang. "I don't know." "This is what happened to that other ship," said Briggs emphatically. "Maybe," Warren said with less conviction. "But they got away," Clyne pointed out. "So will we," promised Warren. "Somehow." crew of that other, alien ship had evidently forgotten, too. But somehow or other they had blasted off -- somehow or other they had remembered, or forced themselves to remember. But if it had been the simple matter of remembering, why had they rebuilt the engines? They could have used their own. Warren lay in his bunk, staring into the blackness, knowing that a scant two feet above his head there was a plate of steel, but he couldn't see the steel. And he knew there was a way to start the engines, a simple way once you knew it or remembered it, but he couldn't see that, either. Man experienced incidents, gathered knowledge, knew emotion -- and then, in the course of time, forgot the incident and knowledge and emotion. Life was a long series of forgettings. Memories were wiped out and old knowledge dulled and skill was lost, but it took time to wipe it out or dull it or lose it. You couldn't know a thing one dy and forget it on the next. But here on this barren wcfrld, in some impossible way, the forgetting had been speeded up. On Earth it took years to forget an incident or to lose a skill. Here it happened overnight. He tried to sleep and couldn't. He finally got up and dressed and went down the stairs, out the lock into the alien night. A low voice asked, "That you, Ira?" "It's me. Bat Ears. I couldn't sleep. I'm worried." "You're always worried," Bat Ears. "It's an occu... occu..." "Occupational?" "That's it," said Bat Ears, hiccoughing just a little. "That's the word I wanted. Worry is an occupational disease with you." "We're in a jam. Bat Ears." "There's been planets," Bat Ears said, "I wouldn't of minded so much being marooned on, but this ain't one of them. This here place is the tail end of creation." They stood together in the darkness with the sweep of alien stars above them and the silent planet stretching off to a vague horizon. "There's something here," Bat Ears went on. "You can smell it in the air. Them fancy-pants in there said there wasn't nothing here because they couldn't see nothing and the books they'd read said nothing much could live on a planet that was just rocks and moss. But, me. I've seen planets. Me, I was planetchecking when most of them was in diapers and my nose can tell me more about a planet than thefr brains all lumped together, which, incidentally, ain't a bad idea." "I think you're right," confessed Warren. "I can feel it myself. I couldn't before. Maybe it's just because we're scared that we can feel it now." "I felt it before I was scared." "We should have looked around. That's where we made our mistake. But there was so much work to do in the junkyard that we never thought of it." "Mac took a little jaunt," said Bat Ears. "Says he found some towers." "He told me about them, too." "Mac was just a little green around the gills when he was telling me." "He told me he didn't like them." "If there was any place to run to, Mac would be running right now." "In the morning," Warren said, "we'll go and see those towers." IX and there were eight of them in line, like watch towers that at one time had stretched across the planet, but something had happened and all the others had been leveled except the eight that were standing there. They were built of undressed native rock, crudely piled, without mortar and with little wedges and slabs of stone used in the interstices to make the stones set solid. They were the kind of towers that might have been built by a savage race and they had an ancient look about them. They were about six feet at the base and tapered slightly toward the top and each of them was capped by a huge flat stone with an enormous boulder placed upon the sl,ab to hold it in its place. Warren said to Ellis, "This is your department. Take over." The little archeologist didn't answer. He walked around the nearest tower and went up close to it and examined it. He put out his hands and acted as if he meant to shake the tower, but it didn't shake. "Solid," he said. "Well built and old." "Type F culture, I would say," guessed Spencer. "Maybe less than that. No attempt at an esthetic effect -- pure utility. But good craftsmanship." Clyne said, "Its purpose is the thing. What were the towers built for?" "Storage space," said Spencer. "A marker," Lang contradicted. "A claim marker, a cache marker..." "We can find the purpose," Warren said. "That is something we needn't argue nor speculate about. All we have to do is knock off the boulder and lift the cap and have a look inside." He strode up to the tower and started climbing it. It was an easy thing to climb, for there were niches in the stones and hand and toe holds were not too hard to find. He reached the top. "Look out below," he yelled, and heaved at the boulder. It rolled and then slowly settled back. He braced himself and heaved again and this time it toppled. It went plunging off the tower, smashed to the ground, went rumbling down the slope, gathering speed, hitting other boulders in its path, zigzagging with the deflection of its course, thrown high into the air by the boulders that it hit. rope up to me. I'll fasten it to the capstone and then we can haul it off." "We haven't got a rope," said Clyne. "Someone run back to the ship and get one. I'll wait here till he returns." Briggs started back toward the ship. Warren straightened up. From the tower he had a fine view of the country and he swiveled slowly, examining it. Somewhere nearby, he thought, the men -- well, not men, but the things that built these towers -- must have had their dwelling. Within a mile or so there had been at one time a habitation. For the towers would have taken time in building and that meant that the ones who built them must have had at least a semipermanent location. But there was nothing to see -- nothing but tumbled boulder fields and great outcroppings and the blankets of primal plants that ran across their surfaces. What did they live on? Why were they here? What would have attracted them? What would have held them here? He halted in his pivoting, scarcely believing what he saw. Carefully he traced the form of it, making sure that the light on some boulder field was not befuddling his vision. It couldn't be, he told himself. It couldn't happen three times. He must be wrong. He sucked in his breath and held it and waited for the illusion to go away. It didn't go away. The thing was there. "Spencer," he called. "Spencer, please come up here." He continued watching it. Below him, he heard Spencer scrabbling up the tower. He reached down a hand and helped him. "Look," Warren said, pointing. "What is that out there?" "A ship!" cried Spencer. "There's another ship out there!" ibly old. It was red with rust; you could put your hand against its metal hide and sweep your hand across it and the flakes of rust would rain down upon the rock and your hand would come away painted with rust. The airlock once had been closed, but someone or something had battered a hole straight through it without opening it, for the rim was still in place against the hull and the jagged hole ran to the ship's interior. For yards around the lock, the ground was red with violently scattered rust. They clambered through the hole. Inside, the ship was bright and shining, without a trace of rust, although there was a coating of dust over everything. Through the dust upon the floor was a beaten track and many isolated footprints where the owners of the prints had stepped out of the path. They were alien tracks, with a heavy heel and three great toes, for all the world like the tracks of a mighty bird or some long-dead dinosaur. The trail led through the ship back to the engine room and there the empty platform stood, with the engines gone. "That's how they got away," said Warren, "the ones who junked their engines. They took the engines off this ship and put them in their ship and then they took off." "But they wouldn't know -- " argued Clyne. "They evidently did," Warren interrupted bluntly. Spencer said, "They must have been the ones. This ship has been here for a long time -- the rust will tell you that. And it was closed, hermetically sealed, because there's no rust inside. That hole was punched through the lock fairly recently and the engines taken." "That means, then," said Lang, "that they did junk their engines. They ripped them out entire and heaved them in the junkpile. They tore them out and replaced them with the engines from this ship." "But why?" asked Clyne. "Why did they have to do it?" "Because," said Spencer, "they didn't know how to operate their own engines." "But if they didn't know how to operate their engines, how could they run this one?" Dyer. "That's one that you can't answer." "No, I can't," shrugged Warren. "But I wish I could, because then we'd have the answer ourselves." "How long ago," asked Spencer, "would you say this ship landed here? How long would it take for a spaceship hull to rust?" "It's hard to tell," Slyne answered. "It would depend on the kind of metal they used. But you can bet on this -- any spaceship hull, no matter who might have built it, would be the toughest metal the race could fabricate." "A thousand years?" Warren suggested. "I don't know," said Clyne. "Maybe a thousand years. Maybe more than that. You see this dust. That's what's left of whatever organic material there was in the ship. If the beings that landed here remained within the ship, they still are here in the form of dust." XI Warren tried to think, tried to sort out the chronology of the whole thing. A thousand years ago, or thousands of years ago, a spaceship had landed here and had not got away. Then another spaceship landed, a thousand or thousands of years later, and it, too, was unable to get away. But it finally escaped when the crew robbed the first ship of its engines and substituted them for the ones that had brought it here. Then years, or months, or days later, the Earth survey ship had landed here and it, too, couldn't get away -- because the men who ran it couldn't remember how to operate its engines. He swung around and strode from the engine room, leaving the others there, following the path in the dust back to the shattered lock. And just inside the port, sitting on the floor, making squiggles in the dust with an awkward finger, sat Briggs, who had gone back to the ship to get a length of rope. "Briggs," said Warren sharply. "Briggs, what are you doing here?" Briggs looked up with vacant, laughing eyes. "Go away," he said. Then he went back to making squiggles in the dust. A- reverted to childhood. His mind is wiped as clean as a oneyear-old's. He can talk, which is about the only difference between a child and him. But his vocabulary is limited and what he says makes very little sense." "He can be taught again?" asked Warren. T don't know." "Spencer had a look at him. What does Spencer say?" "Spencer said a lot," Doc told him. "It adds up, substantially, to practically total loss of memory." "What can we do?" "Watch him. See he doesn't get hurt. After a while we might try re-education. He may even pick up some things by himself. Something happened to him. Whether whatever it was that took his memory away also injured his brain is something I can't say for sure. It doesn't appear injured, but without a lot of diagnostic equipment we don't have, you can't be positive." "There's no sign of injury?" "There's not a single mark anywhere," said Doc. "He isn't hurt. That is, not physically. It's only his mind that's been injured. Maybe not his mind, either -- just his memory gone." "Amnesia?" "Not amnesia. When you have that, you're confused. You are haunted by the thought that you have forgotten something. You're all tangled up. Briggs isn't confused or tangled. He seems to be happy enough." "You'll take care of him, Doc? Kind of keep an eye on him?" Doc snorted and got up and left. Warren called after him, "If you see Bat Ears down there, tell him to come up." Eoc clumped down the stairs. Warren sat and stared at the blank wall opposite him. First Mac and his crew had forgotten how to run the engines. That was the first sign of what was happening -- the first recognizable sign -- for it had been, going on long before Mac found he'd forgotten all his engine lore. The crew of investigators had lost some of their skills and their knowledge almost from the first. How else could one account for the terrible mess they'd made of the junkyard business? Under ordinary circumstances, they would have wrung some substantial information from the engine parts and the neatly stacked supplies. They had gotten information of a sort, of course, but it added up to nothing. Under ordinary circumstances, it should have added up to an extraordinary something. He heard feet coming up the stairs, but the tread was too crisp for Bat Ears. It was Spencer.  the chairs. He sat there opening and closing his hands, looking down at them ith helpless anger. "Well?" asked Warren. "Anything to report?" "Briggs got into that first tower," said Spencer. "Apparently he came back with the rope and found us gone, so he climbed up and threw a hitch around the capstone, then climbed down again and pulled it off. The capstone is lying on the ground, at the foot of the tower, with the rope still hitched around it." Warren nodded. "He could have done that. The capstone wasn't too heavy. One man could have pulled it off." "There's something in that tower." "You took a look?" "After what happened to Briggs? Of course not. I posted a guard to keep everyone away. We can't go monkeying around with the tower until we've thought a few things through." "What do you think is in there?" "I don't know," said Spencer. "All I have is an idea. We know what it can do. It can strip your memory." "Maybe it's fright that did it," Warren said. "Something down in the tower so horrible... Spencer shook his head. "There is no evidence of fright in Briggs. He's calm. Sits there happy as a clam, playing with his fingers and talking silly sentences -- happy sentences. The way a kid would talk." "Maybe what he's saying will give us a hint. Keep someone listening all the time. Even if the words don't mean much..." "It wouldn't do any good. Not only is his memory gone, but even the memory of what took it away." "What do you plan to do?" "Try to get into the tower," said Spencer. "Try to find out what's in there. There must be a way of getting at whatever is there and coming out okay." "Look," Warren stated "we have enough as it is." "I have a hunch." "This is the first time I've ever heard you use that word. You gents don't operate on hunches. You operate on fact." Spencer put up an outspread hand and wiped it across his face. "I don't know what's the matter with me, Warren. I know I've never thought in hunches before. Perhaps because now I can't help myself, the hunch comes in and fills the place of knowledge that I've lost." "You admit there's been knowledge lost?" "Of course I do," said Spencer. "You were right about the junkyard. We should have done a better job." "And now you have a hunch." "TT'S crazy," said Spencer. "At least, it sounds crazy. That memory, that lost knowledge and lost skill went somewhere. Maybe there's something in the tower that took it away. I have the silly feeling we might get it back again, take it back from the thing that has it." He looked challengingly at Warren. "You think I'm cracked." Warren shook his head. "No, not that. Just grasping at straws." Spencer got up heavily. "I'll do what I can. I'll talk with the others. We'll try to think it out before we try anything." When he had gone, Warren buzzed the engine room communicator. Mac's voice came reedily out of the box. "Having any luck, Mac?" "None at all," Mac told him. "We sit and look at the engines. We are going out of our heads trying to remember." "I guess that's all you can do, Mac." "We could mess around with them, but I'm afraid if we do, we'll get something out of kilter." "Keep your hands off everything," commanded Warren in sudden alarm. "Don't touch a single thing. God knows what you might do." "We're just sitting," Mac said, "and looking at the engines and trying to remember." Crazy, thought Warren. Of course it was crazy. Down there were men trained to operate spaceship engines, men who had lived and slept with engines for year on lonesome year. And now they sat and looked at engines and wondered how to run them. Warren got up from his desk and went slowly down the stairs. In the cook's quarters, he found Bat Ears. Bat Ears had fallen off a chair and was fast asleep upon the floor, breathing heavily. The room reeked with liquor fumes. An almost empty bottle sat upon the table. Warren reached out a foot and prodded Bat Ears gently. Bat Ears moaned a little in his sleep. Warren picked up the bottle and held it to the light. There was one good, long drink. He tilted the bottle and took the drink, then hurled the empty bottle against the wall. The broken plastiglass sprayed in a shower down on Bat Ears' head. Bat Ears raised a hand and brushed it off, as if brushing away a fly. Then he slept on, smiling, with his mind comfortably drugged against memories he no longer had. the capstone once again and rigged a tripod and pulley above it. Then they took the capstone off and used the pulley to lower an automatic camera into the pit and they got their pictures. There was something in the tower, all right. They spread the pictures out on the table in the mess room and tried to make out what they had. It was shaped like a watermelon or an egg ' stood on one end with the lower end slightly mashed so that it would stand upright. It sprouted tiny hairs all over and some of the hairs were blurred in the pictures, as if they might have been vibrating. There was tubing and what seemed to be wiring, even if it didn't look exactly the way you thought of wiring, massed around the lower end of the egg. They made other tests, lowering the instruments with the pulley, and they determined that the egg was alive and that it was the equivalent of a warm-blooded animal, although they were fairly sure that its fluids would not be identical with blood. It was soft and unprotected by any covering shell and it pulsed and gave out some sort of vibrations. They couldn't determine what sort of vibrations. The little hairs that covered it were continually in motion. They put the capstone back in place again, but left the tripod and the pulley standing. Howard, the biologist, said, "It's alive and it's an organism of some kind, but I'm not at all convinced that it's pure animal. Those wires and that piping lead straight into it, as if, you'd almost swear, the piping and the wires were a part of it. And look at these what would you call them? -- these studs, almost like connections for other wires." "It's not inconceivable," said Spencer, "that an animal and a mechanism should be joined together. Take Man and his machines. Man and the machines work together, but Man maintains his individual identity and the machines maintain their own. In a lot of cases it would make more sense, economically, if not socially, that Man and machine should be one, that the two of them be joined together, become, in face, one organism." Dyer said, "I think that may be what we have here." "Those other towers?" asked Ellis. "They could be connected," Spencer suggested, "associated in some way. All eight of them could be, as a matter of principle, one complex organism." "We don't know what's in those other towers," said Ellis. "We could find out," Howard answered. "No, we can't," objected Spencer. "We don't dare. We've fooled around with them more than was safe. Mac and his crew went for a walk and found the towers and examined them, just casually, you understand, and they came back not knowing how to operate the engines. We can't take the chance of fooling around with them a minute longer than is necessary. Already we may have lost more than we suspect." "You mean," said Clyne, "that the loss of memory we may have experienced will show up later? That we may not know now we've lost it, but will find later that we did?" what happened to Mac. He or any member of his crew would have sworn, up to the minute that they tried to start the engines, that they could start them. They took it for granted, just as we take our knowledge for granted. Until we come to use the specific knowledge we have lost, we won't realize we've lost it." "It scares you just to think about it," Howard said. Lang said, "It's some sort of communications system." "Naturally you'd think so. You're a communications man." "Those wires." "And what about the pipes?" asked Howard. "I have a theory on that one," Spencer told them. "The pipes supply the food." "Attached to some food supply," said Clyne. "A tank of food buried in the ground." "More likely roots," Howard put in. "To talk of tanks of food would mean these are transplanted things. They could just as easily be native to this planet." "They couldn't have built those towers," said Ellis. "If they were native, they'd had to build those towers themselves. Something or someone else built the towers, like a farmer builds a barn to protect his cattle. I'd vote for tanks of food." Warren spoke for the first time. "What makes you think it's a communications setup?" Lang shrugged. "Nothing specific. Those wires, I guess, and the studs. It looks like a communications rig." "Communications might fill the bill," Spencer nodded. "But a communications machine built to take in information rather than to pass information along or disseminate it." "What are you getting at?" demanded Lang. "How would that be communication?" "I mean," said Spencer, "that something has been robbing us of our memory. It stole our ability to run the engines and it took enough knowledge away from us so we bungled the junkyard job." "It couldn't be that," said Dyer. "Why couldn't it?" asked Clyne. "It's just too damn fantastic." "## more fantastic," Spencer ' told him, "than a lot of other things we've found. Say that egg is a device for gathering knowledge..." "But there's no knowledge to gather here," protested Dyer. "Thousands of years ago, there was knowledge to gather from the rusted ship out there. And then, just a while ago, there was knowledge to gather from the junkyard ship. And now there's us. But the next shipload of knowledge won't come along for maybe uncounted thousands of years. It's too long to wait, too big a gamble. Three ships we know of have come here; it would be just as reasonable to suppose that no ship would ever come here. It doesn't make any sense." "Who said that the knowledge had to be collected here? Even back on Earth we forget, don't we?" "Good Lord!" gasped Clyne, but Spencer rushed ahead. "If you were some race setting out fish traps for knowledge and had plenty of time to gather it, where would you put your traps? On a planet that swarmed with sentient beings, where the traps might be found and destroyed or their secrets snatched away? Or would you put them on some uninhabited, out-of-the-way planet, some second-rate world that won't be worth a tinker's dam to Warren said, "I'd put them on a planet just like this." "Let me give you the picture," Spencer continued. "Some race is bent on trapping knowledge throughout the Galaxy. So they hunt up the little, insignificant, good-for-nothing planets where they can hide their traps. That way, with traps planted on strategically spaced planets, they sweep all space and there's little chance that their knowledge traps ever will be found." "You think that's what we've found here?" asked Clyne. "I'm tossing you the idea," said Spencer, "to see what you think of it. Now let's hear your comments." "Well, the distance, for one thing -- " "What we have here," said Spencer, "is mechanical telepathy hooked up with a recording device. We know that distance has little to do with the speed of thought waves." "There's no other basis for this belief beyond speculation?" asked Warren. "What else can there be? You certainly can't expect proof. We don't dare to get close enough to find out what this egg is. And maybe, even if we could, we haven't got enough knowledge left in us to make an intelligent decision or a correct deduction." "So we guess again," said Warren. "Have you some better method?" Warren shook his head. "No, I don't think I have." a rope running from it to the pulley in the tripod set above the tower. He carried wires to connect to the studs. The other ends of the wires were connected to a dozen different instruments to see what might come over them -- if anything. Dyer climbed the tower and they lowered him down into the inside of the tower. Almost immediately, he quit talking to them, so they pulled him out. When they loosened the spacesuit helmet and hinged it back, he gurgled and blew bubbles at them. Old Doc gently led him back to sick bay. Clyne and Pollard worked for hours designing a lead helmet with television installed instead of vision plates. Howard, the biologist, climbed inside the spacesuit and was lowered into the tower. When they hauled him out a minute later, he was crying -- like a child. Ellis hurried him after Old Doc and Dyer, with Howard clutching his hands and babbling between sobs. After ripping the television unit out of the helmet, Pollard was all set to go in the helmet made of solid lead when Warren put a stop to it. "You keep this up much longer," he told them, "and we'll have no one left." "This one has a chance of working," Clyne declared. "It might have been the television lead-ins that let them get at Howard." "It has a chance of not working, too." "But we have to try." "Not until I say so." Pollard started to put the solid helmet on his head. "Don't put that thing on," said Warren. "You're not going anywhere you'll be needing it." "I'm going in the tower," Pollard said flatly. Warren took a step toward him and without warning lashed out with his fist. It caught Pollard on the jaw and crumpled him. Warren turned to face the rest of them. "If there's anyone else who thinks he wants to argue. I'm ready to begin the discussion -- in the same way." None of them wanted to argue. He could see the tired disgust for him written on their faces. Spencer said, "You're upset, Warren. You don't know what you're doing." "I know damned well what I'm doing," Warren retorted. "I know there must be a way to get into that tower and get out again with some of your memory left. But the way you're going about it isn't the right way." "You know another?" asked Ellis bitterly. "No, I don't," said Warren. "Not yet." "What do you want us to do?" demanded Ellis. "Sit around and twiddle our thumbs?" "I want you to behave like grown men," said Warren, "not like a bunch of crazy kids out to rob an orchard." He stood and looked at them and none of them had a word to say. "I have three mewling babies on my hands right now," he added. "I don't want any more." He walked away, up the hill, heading for the ship. stolen, probably by the egg that squatted in the tower. And although none of them had dared to say the thought aloud, the thing that all of them were thinking was that maybe there was a way to steal that knowledge back, to tap and drain all the rest of the knowledge that was stored within the egg. Warren sat at his desk and held his head in his hands, trying to think. Maybe he should have let them go ahead with what they had been doing. But if he had, they'd have kept right on, using variations of the same approach -- and when the approach had failed twice, they should have figured out that approach was wrong and tried another. Spencer had said that they'd lost knowledge and not known they had lost it, and that was the insidious part of the whole situation. They still thought of themselves as men of science, and they were, of course, but not aSi skilled, not as knowledgable as they once had been. That was the hell of it -- they still thought they were. They despised him now and that was all right with him. Anything was all right with him if it would help them discover a way to escape. Forgetfulness, he thought. All through the Galaxy, there was forgetfulness. There were explanations for that forgetfulness, very learned and astute theories on why a being should forget something it had learned. But might not all these explanations be wrong? Might it not be that forgetfulness could be traced, not to some kink within the brain, not to some psychic cause, but to thousands upon thousands of memory traps planted through the Galaxy, traps that tapped and drained and nibbled away at the mass memory of all the sentient beings which lived among the stars? On Earth a man would forget slowly over the span of many years and that might be because the memory traps that held Earth in their orbit were very far away. But here a man forgot completely and suddenly. Might that not be because he was within the very shadow of the memory traps? He tried to imagine Operation Mind Trap and it was a shocking concept too big for the brain to grasp. Someone came to the backwoods planets, the good-fornothing planets, the sure-to-bepassed-by planets and set out the memory traps. They hooked them up in series and built towers to protect them from weather or from accident, i and set them operating and connected them to tanks of nutrients buried deep within the soil. Then they went away. And years later -- how many years later, a thousand, ten thousand? -- they came back again and emptied the traps of the knowledge they had gathered. As a trapper sets out traps to catch animals for fur, or a fisherman should set the pots for lobsters or drag the seine for fish. A harvest, Warren thought -- a continual, never-ending harvest of the knowledge of the Galaxy. TF this were true, what kind of race would it be that set the traps? What kind of trapper would be plodding the starways, gathering his catch? Warren's reason shrank away from the kind of race that it would be. The creatures undoubtedly came back again, after many years, and emptied the traps of the knowledge they had snared. That must be what they'd do, for why otherwise would they bother to set out the traps? And if they could empty the traps of the knowledge they had caught. that meant there was some way to empty them. And if the trappers themselves could drain off the knowledge, so could another race. If you could only get inside the tower and have a chance to figure out the way, you could do the job, for probably it was a simple thing, once you had a chance to see it. But you couldn't get inside. If you did, you were robbed, of all memory and came out a squalling child. The moment you got inside, the egg grabbed onto your mind and wiped it clean and you didn't even know why you were there or how you'd got there or where you were. The trick was to get inside and still keep your memory, to get inside and still know what there was to do. Spencer and the others had tried shielding the brain and shielding didn't work. Maybe there was a way to make it work, but you'd have had to use trial and error methods and that meant too many men coming out with their memories gone before you had the answer. It meant that maybe in just a little while you'd have no men at all. There must be another way. When you couldn't shield a thing, what did you do? A communications problem, Lang had said. Perhaps Lang was , right -- the egg was a communications setup. And what did you do to protect communications? When you couldn't shield a communication, what did you do with it? There was an answer to that one, of course -- you scrambled it. But there was no solution there, nor any hint of a solution. He sat and listened and there was no sound. No one had stopped by to see him; no one had dropped in to pass the time of day. They're sore, he thought. They're off sulking in a corner. They're giving me the silent treatment. To hell with them, he said. He sat alone and tried to think and there were no thoughts, just a mad merry-go-round of questions revolving in his skull. Finally there were footsteps on the stairs and from their unsteadiness, he knew whose they were. It was Bat Ears coming up to comfort him and Bat Ears had a skin full. He waited, listening to the stumbling feet tramping up the stairs, and Bat Ears finally appeared. He stood manfully in the doorway, putting out both hands and bracing them against the jambs on either side of him to keep the place from swaying. plunged across the space from doorway to chair and grabbed the chair and hung onto it and wrestled himself into it and looked up at Warren with a smirk of triumph. "Made it," Bat Ears said. "You're drunk," snapped Warren disgustedly. "Sure, I'm drunk. It's lonesome being drunk all by yourself. Here..." He found his pocket and hauled the bottle out and set it gingerly on the desk. "There you are," he said. "Let's you and me go and hang one on." Warren stared at the bottle and listened to the little imp of thought that jigged within his brain. "No, it wouldn't work." "Cut out the talking and start working on that jug. When you get through with that one, I got. another hid out." "Bat Ears," said Warren. "What do you want?" asked Bat Ears. ".I never saw a man that wanted -- " "How much more have you got?" "How much more what, Ira?" "Liquor. How much more do you have stashed away?" "Lots of it. I always bring along a marg... a marg..." "A margin?" "That's right," said Bat Ears. "That is what I meant. I always figure what I need and then bring along a margin just in case we get marooned or something." Warren reached out and took the bottle. He uncorked it and threw the cork away., "Bat Ears," he said, "go and get another bottle." Bat Ears blinked at him. "Right away, Ira? You mean right away?" "Immediately," said Warren. "And on your way, would you stop and tell Spencer that I want to see him soon as possible?" Bat Ears woh)bled to his feet. He regarded Warren with forthright admiration. "What you planning on doing, Ira?" he demanded. "I'm going to get drunk," said Warren. "I'm going to hang one on that will make history in the survey fleet." XV "V#"OU can't do it, man," protested Spencer. ".You haven't got a chance." Warren put out a hand against the tower and tried to hold himself a little steadier, for the whole planet was gyrating at a fearful pace. "Bat Ears," Warren called out. "Yes, Ira." "Shoot the -- hie -- man who tries to shtop me." "I'll do that, Ira," Bat Ears assured him. "But you're going in there unprotected," Spencer said anxiously. "Without even a spacesuit." "I'm trying out a new appro... appro..." "Approach?" supplied Bat Ears. "Thash it," said Warren. "I thank you. Bat Ears. Thash exactly what I'm doing." Lang said, "It's got a chance. We tried to shield ourselves and it didn't work. He's trying a new approach. He's scrambled up his mind with liquor. ,I think he might have a chance." "The shape he's in," said Spencer, "he'll never get the wires connected." Warren wobbled a little. "The hell you shay." He stood and blurredly watched them. Where there had been three of each of them before, there now, in certain cases, were only two of them. "Bat Ears." "Yes, Ira." "I need another drink. It's wearing off a little." Bat Ears took the bottle from his pocket and handed it across. It was not quite half full. Warren tipped it up and drank, his Adam's apple bobbing. He did not quit drinking until the last of it was gone. He let the bottle drop and looked at them again. This time there were three of each of them and it was all right. He turned to face the tower. "Now," he said, "if you gen'men will jush -- " Ellis and Clyne hauled on the rope and Warren sailed into the air. "Hey, there!" he shouted. "Wha' you trying to do?" He had forgotten about the pulley rigged on the tripod above the tower. He dangled in the air, kicking and trying to get his balance', with the blackness of the tower's mouth looming under him and a funny, shining glow at the bottom of it. Above him the pulley creaked and he shot down and was inside the tower. He could see the thing at the bottom now. He hiccoughed politely and told it to move over, he was coming down. It didn't move an inch. Something tried to take his head off and it didn't come off. The earphones said, "Warren, you all right? You all right? Talk to us." "Sure," he said. "Sure, all right. Wha' matter wish you?" stood beside the funny thing that pulsated in the pit. He felt something digging at his brain and laughed aloud, a gurgling, drunken laugh. "Get your handsh out my hair," he said. "You tickle." "Warren," said the earphones. "The wires. The wires. You remember, we talked about the wires." "Sure," he said. "The wires." There were little studs on the pulsating thing and they'd be fine things to attach a wire to. Wires? What the hell were wires? "Hooked on your belt," said the earphones. "The wires are hooked on your belt." His hand moved to his belt and he found the wires. He fumbled with them and they slipped out of his fingers and he got down and scrabbled around and grabbed hold of them again. They were all tangled up and he couldn't make head or tail of them and what was he messing around with wires for, anyhow? What he wanted was another drink -- another little drink. He sang : "I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer!" He said to the egg: "Friend, I'd be mosh pleashed if you'd join me in a drink." The earphones said, "Your friend can't drink until you get those wires hooked up. "He can't hear without the wires hooked up. He can't tell what you're saying until you get those wires hooked up. "You understand, Warren? Hook up the wires. He can't hear till you do." "Now, thash too bad," said Warren. "Thash an awful thing." He did the best he could to get the wires hooked up and he told his new friend just to be patient and hold still, he was doing the best he could. He yelled for Bat Ears to hurry with the bottle and he sang a ditty which was quite obscene. And finally he got the wires hooked up, but the man in the earphones said that wasn't right, to try it once again. He changed the wires around some more and they still weren't right, and so he changed them around again, until the man in the earphones said, "That's fine! We're getting something now!" And then someone hauled him out of there before he even had a drink with his pal. TE stumbled up the stairs and negotiated his way around the desk and plopped into the chair. Someone had fastened a steel bowl securely over the top half of his head and two men, or possibly three, were banging it with hammer, and his mouth had a wool blanket wadded up in it, and he could have sworn that at any moment he'd drop dead of thirst. He heard footsteps on the stairs and hoped that it was Bat Ears, for Bat Ears would know what to do. But it was Spencer. "How're you feeling?" Spencer asked. "Awful," Warren groaned. "You turned the trick!" "That tower business?" "You hooked up the wires," said Spencer, "and the stuff is rolling out. Lang has a recorder hooked up and we're taking turns listening in and the stuff we're getting is enough to set your teeth on edge." "Stuff?" "Certainly. The knowledge that mind trap has been collecting. It'll take us years to sort out all the knowledge and try to correlate it. Some of it is just in snatches and some of it is fragmentary, but we're getting lots of it in hunks." "Some of our own stuff being fed back to us?" "A little. But mostly alien." "Anything on the engines?" Spencer hesitated. "No, not on "Well?" "We got the dope on the junkyard engine. Pollard's already at work. Mac and the boys are helping him get it assembled." "It'll work?" "Better than what we have. We'll have to modify our tubes and make some other changes." "And you're going to -- " Spencer nodded. "We're ripping out our engines." Warren couldn't help it. He couldn't have helped it if he'd put his arms down on the desk and hid his face in them and shouted raucously with incoherent laughter. After a time he looked up again and mopped at laughter-watered eypc "I fail to see -- " Spencer began stiffly. "Another junkyard," Warren said. "Oh, God, another junkyard!" "It's not so funny, Warren. It's brain-shaking -- a mass of knowledge such as no one ever dreamed of. Knowledge that had been accumulating for years, maybe a thousand years. Ever since that other race came and emptied the trap and then went away again." we wait until we came across the knowledge of our engines? Surely it will come out soon. It went in, was fed in, whatever you want to call it, later than any of the rest of this stuff you are getting. If we'd just wait, we'd have the knowledge that we lost. We wouldn't have to go to all the work of ripping out the engines and replacing them." "Lang figured it out. There seems to be no order or sequence in the way we get the information. The chances are that we  might have to wait for a long, long time. We have no way of knowing how long the information will keep pouring out. Lang thinks for maybe years. But there's something else. We've got to get away as soon as possible." "What's the matter with you, Spencer?" "I don't know." "You're afraid of something. Something's got you scared." Spencer bent over and grasped the desk edge with his hands, hanging on. "Warren, it's not only knowledge in that thing. We're monitoring it and we know. There's also -- " "I'll take a guess," said Warren. "There's personality." He saw the stricken look on Spencer's face. "Quit monitoring it," ordered Warren sharply. "Turn the whole thing off. Let's get out of here." "We can't. Don't you understand? We can't! There are. certain points. We are -- " "Yes, I know," said Warren... "You are men of science. Also downright fools." "But there are things coming out of that tower that -- " "Shut it off!" "No," said Spencer obstinately. "I can't. I won't." "I warn you," Warren said grimly, "if any of you turn alien. I'll shoot you without hesitation." "Don't be a fool." Spencer turned sharply about and went out the door. Warren sat, sober now, listening to Spencer's feet go down the steps. It was all very clear to Warren now. Now he knew why there had been evidence of haste in that other ship's departure, why supplies had been left behind and tools still lying where they had been dropped as the crew had fled. After a while Bat Ears came up the stairs, lugging a huge pot of coffee and a couple of cups. He set the cups down on the desk and filled them, then banged down the pot. "Ira," he said, "it was a black day when you gave up your drinking." "How is that?" asked Warren. "Because there ain't no one, nowhere, who can hang one on like you." hot, black coffee. Then Bat Ears said, "I still don't like it." "Neither do I," admitted Warren. "The cruise is only half over," said Bat Ears. "The cruise is completely over," Warren told him bluntly. "When we lift out of here, we're heading straight for Earth." They drank more coffee. Warren asked: "How many on our side. Bat Ears?" "There's you and me," said Bat Ears, "and Mac and the four engineers. That's seven." "Eight," corrected Warren. "Don't forget Doc. He hasn't been doing any monitoring." "Doc don't count for nothing one way or the other." "In a pinch, he still can handle a gun." After Bat Ears had gone, Warren sat and listened to the sound of Mac's crew ripping out the engines and he thought of the long way home. Then he got up and strapped on a gun and went out to see how things were shaping up. engineer you've ever encountered. It's his skill that gets him into trouble to begin with, but that isn't what makes him unwittingly the greatest force for good on that cloudy planet -- which might have been all right, except that what was good for Venus was pure murder for him! problem: The task of Terran Control is to explore, subdue and integrate raw new worlds into the galactic economy, which naturally means nasty jobs for its agents. The nastiest job, though, is not what you might expect -- it's taking a dazed young girl out into space to rule over an all-male planet! There's an equally disquieting situation in the second novelet in the of course, but worse still when you can't be sure it is an enemy. But what happens when you can't even fmd it in the first place? Short stories, features... and don't forget that Willy Ley answers all your mind? Don't keep it to yourself; let Mr. Ley explain it to you. But please type or print so your letter will be legible, hold down the number of questions to no more than two or three, and sign your name and address in case the answer must be mailed.  What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and successful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than l!#th of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reaeh. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something v;hich "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders', thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe T.E.H. San Jose California Beyond Designed, edited and produced by the Galaxy staff. A full color print of the cover reproduced especially for framing  The valuable first issue permanized with a plastic coating to preserve it  # Issues for # This offer is limited and expires on date of publication, May #, #, so rush the coupon below. Reserve my color print plus permanized frst issue of your Magazine and send the # issues to me at address below. I enclose #. Foreign -- #. Zone State JUNE # GALAXY Science Fiction eiaxy hy Isaac Asimov It began when Joseph Schwartz was walking down a street in Chicago, past the Institute for Nuclear Research. He raised one foot in the twentieth century; he lowered it in Galactic Era #, the victim of an odd accident inside the Institute involving an experiment with crude uranium. Schwartz awoke to a strange world -- he was still on Earth, but at a time when all the planets of the Galaxy were inhabited, and the people of Earth were outcasts, suffering vindictive discrimination because their tiny world was radioactive! His subsequent adventures involved Schwartz in a brewing revolution of the Earth militarists, and a romance between the daughter of an eminent Earth scientist and a young Galactic archeologist. Then, strangely, it was the little retired tailor from Chicago who found himself the only man who could avert the impending cosmic disaster. But Schwartz, homesick and confused, wasn't sure he even cared I Combining tenseness, irony, romance, and fast action with a basis of really intriguing science, Pebble in the Sky is a truly ingenious tale of the far-distant future. Galaxy by F. L. Wallace by J. T. M'lntosh by Philip K. Dick by Win Marks by Robert Sheckley by Richard Wilson by Willy Ley by H. L. Gold by Groff Conklin #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per E ar in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. sewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Prlnftd in tha U.S.A. by lha Guinn Co., Inc. Rag. U.S. Pat. OH. TN spite of its turbulence, or maybe because of it, our era is rolling out a seemingly endless belt of miracles that were "impossible" only yesterday. That's the surface phenomenon. There are three others, however, that are more significant in foreguessing possible future trends:  The flow of marvels is accelerating instead of slowing down, which is astonishing only if you follow the wrong line of reasoning. Discoveries, even supposedly ultimate ones, generally lead to others, which in turn make still others possible. The vacuum pump, for instance, gave impetus to research and produced electric lights, radio, TV and vacuum cleaners. We haven't seen the final results of the Curies' experiments with radium. When the security wraps can be taken off the physical sciences, we are likely to find that entire new fields have been opened up, which will open up many more. For science fiction writers, the devil of it is that none of us can even imagine what those advances will be. And to make it still worse, what further discoveries will those advances lead to?  Sociologically, the attitude toward these discoveries is impor : tant, for as fast as former impossibilities become reality, they are accepted and absorbed -- sometimes prematurely, as with Chloromycetin, sometimes too uncritically, as with chlorophyll -- which is a great contrast to the ness to accept innovations also is accelerating. There are risks involved, of course. Whenever a societal pendulum swings, it follows Newton's third law -- to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction -- and swings too far. But it does come back. Besides, we have enough professional, industrial and governmental safeguards to make the risk small in comparison with the gains.  Rather than creating greater complexity, very many of these discoveries simplify things. The transistor is a good example. Medicine is another -- a general practitioner today, using modem drugs, can combat more major diseases more effectively than a whole group of specialists a few years ago. Great discoveries aren't merely more damned things to add to our technical warehouse. They often unify masses of previously unrelated data. It's a bit hard to find a book that commits as many mental assaults on the reader as Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years, which is probably reason enough to fight back, but that's not my purpose in mentioning it. Sir Charles tells us that the human race is coming unglued because the "superior" element is allowing the "inferior" to outproduce it. The ancient Greeks and Romans also yelped about that situation -- and for the same reason, which Sir Charles and his too-numerous co-yelpers neglect to analyze. The plain fact is that a large family is an economic asset to the poor, a liability to the betterheeled. As long as the children of the poor boost the family income by working, it's absurd to hope that the poor will start having small families. Don't look at me -- I have no answer, except that a number of children of poor families have made the race a lot richer. Josue de Castro's The Geography of Hunger claims that malnutrition increases human fertility. All we have to do then is feed the overproducers until they start reproducing sensibly. The "how" might be a problem -- but then there'd be still more economic advantage in having large families. And how would it help if the "superior" element began breeding unrestrainedly? It would only help crowd us off the planet that much sooner. To smooth the feathers ruffled by my statement that we are not facing inflation, one reader suggests this diplomatic formula : "Price and income could be aligned more equitably." Well, sure, of course they could be. But how often have they been, and for how long? I recommend parity for the whole country -- but let George administer it, not me. Science fiction shares a wonderful privilege with news analysts -- both can solve the problems of the world without leaving the desk. The difference, of course, is that we label our opinions "guesses," while analysts claim omniscience. There must be something wrong somewhere in the analysis business. If they were that good, we wouldn't need so many of them. One would be enough to tell us what's going to happen and why. Odder still, science fiction, dealing with guesses just for mental and emotional stimulation, has a better record. Jadiver objected to being the greatest influence for good on Venus... because what was good for Venus was bad for Jadiver! him in a sheet of ice and spice. Somebody was pulling it tight so that his toes ached and his fingers tingled. He still had fingers, and eyes too. He opened his eyes and they turned in opposite directions and couldn't focus on what they saw. He made an effort, but couldn't keep it up and had to let his eyes flutter shut again. "Rest. You're all right." That's where he got the idea of ice and spice -- from that voice. "Mmmm," said Jadiver. He tried to raise his hand, but it wouldn't move. It was good advice -- to rest; he couldn't do otherwise. "What happened?" he whispered. "You had an accident. Remember?" He didn't. It was his mind playing tricks, of course. It couldn't have be n pleasant if his memory didn't have access to it. "Mmmm," he evaded. "Go to sleep. 'We'll talk later." He thought he felt something shoved deep in his flesh, but he may have been wrong. In any event, the light that filtered through his closed eyelids faded away and the external world, of which there wasn't much in the first place, vanished completely. much later, he didn't know, but it may have been days. The oppressive languor had left him and he felt capable of movement. To prove it to himself, he turned his head. He Wj S alone, and he thought he recognized where he was. He didn't like it. There was an odor in the room, but this time it Was the kind that lingers in all hospitals. He tried to sit up, but tht was more than he could manage;. He lay there a long time, looking through the heavily reinforce window; then someone came ii. "You'll live," said the voice behind him -- the sme voice. "Think so?" He hadn't intended to turn aroumd, but the spice was back and hie wanted to see. It was only th-e fragrance she wore -- there was none in her voice or demeanor. That was still ice. When she sat down, he could see that her hair was a shade of copper and the uniform she wore a dark green. She was not a robot and therefore not a nurse or a guard. It was logical to assume she was a doctor, police variety -- definitely the police. Thadeus Jadiver sighed. "What am I in for?" "You're not in for anything. Maybe you should be, but that's not 'my business," she said in a flat voice. That was the only thing about her that was flat; the rest curved nicely even under the uniform. "This is an emergency as well as a police hospital. We were close, so we took you in." That was reassuring. Jadiver tried to smile as he lifted a curiously bandaged arm. "Thanks for this." "I'll take only half the credit. That was a combo job." He was going to have difficulty if she insisted on using technical slang. "What's a combo job?" "Just what it sounds like. A combination robot-human surgeon. All hospitals use them. The robot is more precise and delicate, but it lacks the final margin of judgment that's supplied by the human. Two of us work together in critical cases." He still couldn't remember what had happened, but it would come back in time. "I was critical?" Her mouth was firm and her cheekbones a trifle too broad. Just the same, the total effect was pleasing, would have been more so with a little warmth stirred in. "To give you an idea, you'll notice that every square inch of your skin is now synthetic." She leaned over and took his hand, which was encased in a light spongy cocoon. Expertly, she peeled back the end and exposed the tips of his fingers. Jadiver looked, then turned away. "Cellophane," he said. "A man can be born, live, die, and be shoveled away; begot and beget, completely untouched by human hands." She looked blank at the mention of cellophane. Probably didn't know what it was, thought Jadiver. So few people did any more. "Don't worry about it," she said. "Your skin's transparent now, but in a few days it will be normal." "That's nice," said Jadiver. "I suppose it would be educational, but I'd just as soon not be an anatomy model of the first layer of the human body." She stood up and managed to work up a creditable imitation of interest. "We had to peel off the burned part, and when you were completely raw, we fitted the synthetic skin to your body. Over that we sprayed the bandage. New body cells form with this synthetic substance as the matrix. You'll gradually return to normal or better. Your new skin may be more resistant to corrosive chemicals and microbe invasions." "Glad to hear it," said Jadiver. "Superman." For the first time, she smiled. "Don't count on it. This stuff is too new for us to know how it reacts in all cases." She turned around at the door. "In a few days I'll take off the bandages and you can go home. Meanwhile, you know what to do if you need anything." left, thinking. He hadn't asked what the accident was and she had assumed he remembered. He ought to, but he didn't. He frowned and tried to recall the last thing he had been doing. They had removed his skin and replaced it with a synthetic substance. Why? Take it from there and work back. He stirred uneasily. The last he remembered, he'd been in his apartment. That didn't help much; he was often there. He shook his head. He was in the apartment, preparing to leave. That meant he must have used the autobath. That was it. The picture came into focus: He touched the door of the autobath and it swung open. He went inside. "Shave, massage, bath," he ordered. The mechanism reached out of the wall to enfold him. He leaned back. It gripped him, not comfortably, as usual -- but tightly. He squirmed, but when the grip didn't adjust, he relaxed. The autobath rumbled familiarly and a jet of water spouted up from the floor. It was icy cold and Jadiver shivered. "You didn't listen," he said firmly. "I asked for the bath last." The autobath paid no attention. The top and side jets turned on. The force was greater than he had ever experienced. It was difficult to breathe. The water got hotter rapidly, and then, seconds later, steam blew out of the nozzles. Jadiver shouted and tried to struggle free. The autobath did not let go. Instead, it ground at his muscles with hard inflexible hands. Here and there his skin began parting from his flesh. The autobath kept on kneading him. It was when it reached for his face -- Jadiver remembered very clearly -- he lost consciousness. He lay on the bed in the hospital, sweat soaking into the bandages. He could understand why he'd had a memory block -- being boiled alive was frightful enough for his mind to repress. It was not only the accident that was disturbing, but the manner in which it occurred. He knew robot machinery and the principles used in the construction of it. The autobath was one of the best -- foolproof, if there was such a mechanism. Someone had tampered with it -- object: to try to kill him. That was one possibility and he could face it with equanimity. There was also another, but he didn't like to think about that. From his apartment, the topography resembled that of a lunar crater. In the middle was a giant concrete plain, the rocketport. From the edges of the rocketport, the size of the buildings increased gradually: at a third of the distance from the center, they were at maximum height; thereafter, they decreased gradually until one and two story structures nibbled at the surrounding forest. years there would undoubtedly be seven, a sizable metropolis even for Earth. That didn't mean that the population of Venus could compare with the home planet. Venus was settled differently. Newcomers started with the cities; only later did they venture out into the vast wild lands. Venus was civilized, after a fashion, but it wasn't a copy of Earth. The screen glimmered at his back. "Thadeus Jadiver, consulting engineer?" He turned. "That's right. Can I help you?" The man on the screen closed one eye slowly and opened it again the same way. "This is Vicon Burlingame. I've been doing some experimenting and am now at the point where I can use some technical assistance." "I'm not sure. I've been in the hospital until this morning. I think I need a checkup." "I called while you were gone," said Burlingame. "I know about the hospital; however, I don't think my work will be strenuous. Perhaps you'd come over and we'll discuss it." "I'll take the chance I can help you." "Good." Vicon Burlingame gave him the address before fading out of the screen. Jadiver dressed slowly. Weak, but better than he expected. Physically, hisrecovery was far advanced. It wasn't he who was taking a chance, of course; it was Burlingame. Jadiver had warned him and if Burlingame to him. Before he left, Jadiver checked his office. A few calls in the last week, but nothing important. It was a routine check and he gave the robot routine instructions. A tiny thing, that office, located on the ground floor of a building fronting a principal thoroughfare. A space large enough for a client to sit down, if one should come, which wasn't often. Behind the desk was the upper half of a robot. Tiny though the office was, it was not inexpensive, and the business that passed through it was barely enough to pay the rent. There were other advantages in maintaining it, though. As long as he had a business address, he was spared certain legal embarrassments. greeted by Vicon Burlingame. "Come in." Jadiver did so. Burlingame silently studied Jadiver closely. "Maybe you're tired," he said at last. "A little sun would relax you." "It might," agreed Jadiver. "This cloudy Venus." "It's not so bad when you're home," said Burlingame. "But public places are bad for ultraviolet." He indicated the next room. "The lamp is in there." Jadiver went in and began to remove his clothing. Before he finished, a little man came in, nodding silently at Jadiver. Without comment, Jadiver stood in front of the machine. While the little man methodically examined him, his clothing disappeared. The little man looked up at the end of the intensive investigation. "You'll do," he said. "Clear?" asked Jadiver. "Clear as the atmosphere of the Moon. We were afraid they'd planted you while you were in the hospital, but we decided to take the chance." For the first time since the accident, Jadiver felt relaxed. "Thanks, Cobber. I was hoping to contact someone to check it for me." Cobber shrugged. "Who can you trust? If you go to a doctor good enough to find a gadget that small, what is he? A high-powered professional and he's got his problems. He sees something inside and smiles and says you're fine and charges you a fat fee. Even if he tells you that you've been planted, there's nothing you can do. No one's going to cut it out -- not while the police can hear everything through it." "Thanksfortaking the chance." Burlingame came in smiling confidently. "Now we can talk," he said. Behind him were three other men Jadiver had never seen. "Where are my clothes?" Jadiver wanted to know. "They'll be ready," promised Burlingame, "The police have got all kinds of cute tricks, only we don't fall for them. We're systematic." They were that, decided Jadiver, and something more. They had to be to survive so long. Burlingame was good. A gamin's face peered through the doorway and one hand thrust his clothing into the room and waved it. "Here. They didn't try to conceal anything." She sounded disappointed. Jadiver dressed as Burlingame relayed the clothing to him. The gamin wrinkled her nose and disappeared. By the time Jadiver was completely dressed, she came back with refreshments. They sat down at the table. "I want faces," said Burlingame, across from him -- "five faces." Jadiver looked around. There were six. "None of my business, except in a professional way, but who do I leave out?" "Cobber. We have other plans for him." It wasn't a good idea to pry. He had to know the human material on which he was expected to work, but it was safer not to know what they were planning. He tapped his glass. "What kind of faces? Soft faces, hard faces, space faces? And do you want anything else?" "Society faces," said Burlingame, "Emily wants to wear a low-cut gown. The rest of us just need faces." "Real low," the gamin insisted, wriggling. "Society," mused Jadiver. "I always did think it was better to rob the rich... like Robin Hood." "Sure," Burlingame said. Jadiver tilted the glass. "Especially since the poor don't have much money." "That has something to do with it," Burlingame cheerfully agreed. Cobber broke in. He was a little gnarled man, older than the others. "A point, Jadiver. The poor don't have much money, but there's so many more of them. You can actually be more successful robbing them. But you have to keep at it every day in the year, and then you don't call it robbery; you say you're governing them." "Don't have that kind of stamina," said Burlingame. "A good point, Cobber." Jadiver leaned on the table. "I don't want specific information, but how can you make robbery pay off these days?" astutely. "Considering it yourself?" Jadiver shook his head. "Intellectual curiosity. I'm doing all right in my own line." "It's a theory," said Burlingame. "You can't touch banks or financial institutions. Too many electronic safeguards, robots, and what have you. In order to get past that kind of equipment, you have to be a top-notch scientist -- and one that can do better at a top-notch job. "Now, who's got money? The rich, and they want to show it off wherever they go. Naturally they take precautions, too, but people are always involved and that's the weakness. You can build a machine that does one thing perfectly, but people make mistakes -- they get rattled. Teamwork can take advantage of it. A feint here, and a block there, and before anyone knows what's happening, we're through their defenses. With, of course, their money." Jadiver looked at him, at his handsome, ruddy, respectable face. "You played football?" Burlingame grinned. "Twentyfive years ago." "It's changed. You wouldn't recognize it now." "Perhaps not. But the principle is still the same, and it's the principle that pays off." Jadiver stood up. "I'd better get started. Where do I work?" "Here," said Burlingame. "We have the tools ready for you." "Mind if I look at the setup?" "Go ahead." The gamin bounced up and took charge of Jadiver, leading him to a small workshop screened off in a comer of one of the larger rooms. The layout was authentic enough to justify the equipment -- a few robot forms in the rough state, handbooks on design, several robot heads in various stages of completion, and an assortment of the specialized tools of the trade. It was standard for the tinkerer, for the would-be designer of robot bodies. Burlingame always covered himself in every detail. Jadiver inspected it thoroughly, the gamin standing impatiently at his side. "I'm first when you're ready," she said. He eyed her amusedly. "What's the hurry?" "There's more to do on me and you'll do your best work when you're not tired." "I'll start soon. Let me see the plastic." S HE opened a cabinet and there it was. Jadiver squatted and read the instructions on the containers. He shook his head in despair. Every amateur always did this. He stood up. "You've got the worst kind," he said. She shrugged. "They told me it was the best." "That depends. There are two kinds, and this one does look more real than the other. In fact, for a time this actually becomes a part of your body, a pseudoflesh. But it's quite dangerous." "The other kind is just a cosmetic, isn't it?" "That's right, but -- " "Then I'm not worried," she said, tossing her head. "The way I see it, it's dangerous not to use the best disguise we can get." She might be right. At least he'd warned her, and as long as she had the facts straight, the decision was hers to make. Jadiver peeled off his jacket and slid into a protective smock. "Ask Burlingame to come . in. This is going to be delicate, you know." The gamin grinned. "I've never been overly concerned about Vicon, and he knows I can take care of myself." She stepped behind a, screen and presently came out again, nude. "Where do you want me to stand?" "On the pedestal, under the light." He looked at her closely. He had thought she was a little girl, a tired little girl who hadn't slept much recently. It was the pert face that had fooled him, with the upturned nose, because she wasn't young. Forty he would say, maybe more, nearly as old as Burlingame. Her body was slight, but not much was wrong with it. Here and there were a few wrinkles, though in general her figure appeared youthful. It would require all his skill to make her as spectacular in a low-cut gown as she wanted to be. And her legs, though well shaped, were slightly bowed, a sure sign of Venusian rickets. Early settlers hadn't realized that the soil was deficient in some essential trace elements. He would have to straighten her legs if she expected to mingle with society. It was beyond his power to change the bones, but he could add pseudo-flesh to give the same effect. He slipped on the mask, attached the various containers, thrust his hand into the glovelike control valve, and began to work. She winced involuntarily as the spray tingled against her body and adhered with constrictive force. He blocked out the areas he had to alter and then began to fill in and build up. "I don't see it," said Emily. "I know you must be good. That's why Burlingame wanted you. But it seems to me this is out of your line." He brought the spray up in a straight line along the edge of her shin. "How good I am is a matter of opinion. Mine and the places I've worked." "What places, for instance?" "Mostly Earth." "I've never been there," she said wistfully. "You haven't missed much." He knew that, while he believed that with part of his mind, essentially he was wrong. As the spray was drying on her legs, he "However, this isn't as much out of my line as you think. Engineers specialize, you know. Mine's industrial design. We don't usually monkey with the internal mechanism of a machine, though we're able to. Mostly, we design housings for the machines, robots as a rule." He proceeded to her face and changed the upturned nose to a straight one. "The ideal external appearance of a machine ought to establish the function of that machine, and do so with the most efficient distribution of space and material." total effect. She was coming along. "The human body is a good design -- for a human. It doesn't belong on a robot. That, for most purposes, should be a squat container with three wheels or treads, with eyestalks and tentacles on top. I designed one like that, but it was never built. Robots always look like beautiful girls or handsome men, and the mechanism is twice as clumsy as it should be, in order to fit in with that conception." He squinted at the spray. "In other words, I design robot bodies and faces. Why should it be strange I can do the same with humans?" The spray was neither a liquid nor a dustlike jet. She shivered under it. "Why don't you like robots? I don't see anything wrong with them. They're so beautiful." He laughed. "I'll give you an idea. I got tired of the meaningless perfection of the bodies I was turning out. Why shouldn't the bodies be beautiful, considering how they're made? Anyway, I put a pimple on one model. Not on her face. Her shoulder." She extended her hands and he took off the fine wrinkles with a sweeping motion of the spray. "What happened?" "I had to start looking for another job. But somebody higher up began to think about what I'd done. Now, on Earth, all robots that model clothing have some perceptible skin defects. More lifelike, they say." "Is that why you came to Venus?" "I'd been considering it for some time. It seemed to me that there ought to be a place for a good designer, even if I did have to work on robots." He smiled wryly. "A lot of other engineers had the same idea." "Too much competition?" "Sort of." He grimaced. "My first job here was designing female bodies for so-called social clubs." "Oh, those," she said scornfully. "It's legitimate on Venus. Anyway, I tried out that idea again. Customers didn't like it. Said they could get women with blemishes any time. When they got a robot, they wanted perfection." "Don't blame them," Emily said practically. She looked at him with sudden suspicion. "Don't give me pimples." "Not a one," he assured her. "You're flawless." And she Was -- with only one item missing. He flexed his fingers in the control glove and sprayed on nipples. She was finished. He shucked off the mask and laid aside the spray gun. "Look at yourself." She went to the mirror and turned in front of it. She smoothed her hands across her face and smiled with pleasure. "It feels like flesh." "It is, almost. Tomorrow you'll bleed there if you cut yourself." She nodded. "Is that all?" "Except for instructions, yes." She looked at him with curious shyness and hurriedly slipped into her clothing. She hadn't minded nudity before, when she wasn't as lovely as she wanted to be. What she didn't know was that Jadiver liked her better as she had been. him. "What are those instructions?" He tore off two envelopes attached to the container. He checked the spray gun to determine how much had been used. "Pseudo-flesh is highly poisonous," he said, handing her the envelopes. "The tablets in the white package neutralize the toxic effects. Take one every eight hours. And don't forget to take it, unless you want to end up in convulsions on the floor." "I'll remember. When do I begin?" "In three hours. And now for some advice I know you don't want. You can keep yourself as you are for two months. But you'll be healthier if you get rid of the pseudo-flesh as soon as you can." She looked longingly at the face in the mirror. "How do I do that?" "When you're ready, take the tablets in the green package, one every hour until the pseudo-flesh is absorbed. After it's gone, take three more at the same interval. The total time should be about thirteen hours." She was not paying attention. He eased between her and the mirror. "Get a complete checkup before you try this again. It takes years off your life." "I know that. How many?" "I can't say exactly. It's a body, pseudo-flesh weight ratio, plus some other factors that no one knows anything about. I'd estimate that you'll lose about three years for every two weeks you keep it." "It's worth it," she said, gazing again into the mirror. She turned away in indecision. "I've always known Burlingame was mine, even if I wasn't pretty. Now I'm not so sure, after this." It wasn't exactly Burlingame she was concerned with, thought Jadiver. For a while she was going to be beautiful beyond her expectations. The irony was that almost any robot outshone her temporary beauty. She was jealous of machines that had no awareness of how they looked. Jadiver straightened up. He hadn't fully recovered from his accident and he was tired. And the artificial skin, no matter what they said, hadn't been completely integrated to his body. It itched. "Send the rest of them in, one at a time," he said as she went out. It wasn't going to take long, for which he was grateful. Now that he knew a spying device hadn't been surgeried into him, there were certain aspects of the accident that demanded investigation. apartment. The chair unfolded and came to meet him as he entered. He relaxed in the depths of it and called out for food. Soon he had eaten, and shortly after that he dozed. When he awakened, refreshed, he began the thinking he'd put off until now. The fee from Burlingame was welcome. It was dangerous business, so Jadiver had charged accordingly. Now his economic problem was solved for about a month. In the hospital he had been sure of a motive for the accident. It had seemed simple enough : the police had planted a spying device in him. However, since he had been examined thoroughly at Burlingame's and nothing had been found, that theory broke down. There was still another possibility -- someone had tried to kill him and had failed. If so, that put the police in the clear and he would have to look elsewhere. He might as well start there. He walked over to the autobath and began inspecting it. It wasn't the one he'd been injured in. That had been removed and replaced by the management. It would have helped if he had been able to go over the original one. The new autobath was much like the old, a small unit that fitted decoratively into the scheme of the room, not much taller than an upright man, or longer than a man lying down. The mechanism itself, and there was plenty, was effectively sealed. Short of an atomic torch, there wasn't any way to get into it. Jadiver pryed and poked, but learned nothing. In response to the human voice, it automatically provided all the services necessary to human cleanliness, but there was no direct way to check on the involved mechanism. H E finally called the firm that made it. The usual beautiful robot answered: "Living Rooms, Incorporated. Can I help you?" "Information," he said. "Autobath unit." "Sales? New or replacement?" "Service. I want to see about repairs." "We have no repair department. Nothing ever wears out." "Perhaps not, but it becomes defective and has to be replaced." "Defective parts are a result of wear. Since nothing wears out, no repair is necessary.' Occasionally an autobath is damaged, but then it doesn't work at all, even if the damage is slight. It has to be replaced." That was what he thought, but it was better to be sure. "This is hypothetical," he said. "Suppose there was an accident in an autobath. Is there an alarm system which would indicate that something was wrong?" The robot was smooth and positive. "Your question is basically misleading, according to our statistics. In eight hundred and forty all the inhabited planets of the Solar System, there has never been one accident. "The autobath is run by a small atomic motor and is not connected in any way to an outside power source. There are plumbing connections, but these are not suitable for the transmission of a signal. To answer your question specifically: There is no alarm system of any kind, local or general, nor is there any provision for someone else to attach one." "Thanks," said Jadiver, and cut the screen. He was nearly certain now. One check remained. walked out of the room to the hall and stood there listening. He could hear nothing. He came closer to the door and there was still no sound. He pressed his ear against the juncture of the door and jamb. Not the slightest noise. He winced when he opened the door. The music he had switched on was deafening. He hurried inside and turned it off. He had known his apartment was soundproofed. Just how good that soundproofing was, he hadn't tested until now. The so-called accident had happened in the autobath. The unit couldn't signal that anything was wrong. No one passing in the hall could hear his yells. The evidence indicated that no accident could happen in the autobath -- yet it had. Logically, he should have died in that accident that couldn't happen -- yet he hadn't. What did they want? And was it the police? In the hospital he had been sure -- certain, too, of what they were attempting. Now the facts wouldn't fit. Tiredness came back, reinforced by doubt. His skin itched -- probably from nervous tension. He finally fell into an uneasy sleep with the help of a sedative. TN the morning, the itch was still there. He looked curiously at his skin; it appeared normal. It was definitely not transparent, hadn't been even in the hospital when the bandages were removed. He'd had a glimpse of it in the original transparent stage only once, when the doctor had exposed the tips of his fingers. Briefly he wondered about it. Did it really itch that bad, or was it an unconscious excuse to see the doctor? She was a sullen, indifferent creature, but without doubt worth seeing again. He didn't know her name, but he could find out easily enough. As if in answer to the silent question, his whole body twitched violently. He raked his fingers across his forearm and the nails broke off. She was at least partly right in her predictions; his skin was considerably tougher than it had been, though nothing appeared different. He didn't like communicating with the police, but he had little choice. He flipped on the screen and made a few inquiries. The name he wanted was Doctor Doumya Filone. She was off duty at present. However, if it was an emergency -- ? His skin crawled and he decided it was just that and identified himself. There were a number of persons with whom he had contacts who wouldn't approve his doing this, but they didn't have to live in his skin. He dialed her quickly. He couldn't place the number, but figured it was probably across town, in one of the newer districts. He didn't fully remember what she was like until she appeared on the screen. With that face to put on a robot, he might make a fortune. That is, if he could capture the expression as well as the features. "How's the patient?" she asked. Behind her briskness he thought he could detect a flicker of concern. "You can take back that skin you gave me," he said. "It itches." She frowned. "I told you it was very new. We aren't able to anticipate all the reactions." She paused. "However, it shouldn't itch. By now it ought to be well integrated with your body and new cell growth should be occurring with the synthetic substance as the matrix." "Thanks," he said dryly. "That doesn't explain how I feel." Unperturbed, she looked down at a desk he could imagine, but could not see. She got up and walked out of the field of vision. She was gone for quite some time. A disturbing thought formed in his mind. Was she calling elsewhere for instructions? There was no reasofi why she should, yet the thought persisted. She came back. "Get a detergent. What kind doesn't matter. Put it in the autobath and take a hot bath, plenty of lather. Soak in it for at least fifteen minutes." tive in the extreme. Did she really expect it to be effective, or did she have something else in mind? "Do you think I'm going to trust myself to that machine?" he said. "I've got myself a little enamel basin. Had to steal it out of a museum." Nothing was outwardly changed, but she seemed slightly sympathetic. "I can understand how you feel, but you'll have to get over it or go pioneering in the wild lands. As long as you're in a city, you can't rent, buy or build accommodations that have no autobath. Besides, I've been assured that the odds are against that happening again." That was an understatement, if his information was correct. Actually, he had wanted her reaction, but it didn't tell him a thing. "Feel better already," he said. She nodded. "Suggestion at work. Take your bath now and call me tomorrow if it doesn't work. Sooner, if you need to." She cut their connection before he could answer. In addition to physical relief, he had hoped that she would let slip some information. She hadn't done so. Of course, she might not know anything more than the purely medical aspects of the police plan. If it was the police. He left the screen and checked the autobath for supplies. Satisfactory for the present. He removed his clothing, stepped inside, and followed her instructions. A tub rose out of the floor, fllled with water, and the mechanism immersed him in it. Thick soapy suds billowed up and warm water laved his skin. The rubbery hands of the autobath were soft and massaged him gently and expertly. He tried to relax. So far, he had suffered no irreparable harm. He tried to avoid the memory of his accident, but that was impossible. The one comfort was that his death was not the objective: He corrected himself -- not the immediate objective. Anyway, he'd been rescued and placed under good medical care. How the rescue had been effected was unknown, unless it had been included in the plan from the beginning. If so, he could assume that the autobath had been tampered with and fixed with a signal that would indicate when he was unconscious. "Fifteen minutes and ten seconds," said the autobath. "Do you wish to remain longer?" "That'll do," he said. "The rinse, please." He lay back and curled up his legs, stretching his arms while clear water flowed soothingly over him. In spite of his skepticism, this primitive prescription of Doumya Filone seemed to work. The itch had stopped completely; although his skin was now mottled. No scars; the hospital and Doumya Filone had done a good job. He scrutinized his skin carefully. The marks were not actually on his skin; they were beneath it. So faint as to be almost invisible, it was nevertheless a disturbing manifestation. The marks gradually became more distinct. It looked like a shadowy web thrown over and pressed deep into his body. he stood in front of the mirror. There was no mistake -- a network spread over his body, arms, legs, face too ; perhaps on his head as well, though he couldn't see that. His skin was not transparent -- it was translucent for a certain depth. Disfigurement didn't concern him. Even if the condition persisted, it wasn't noticeable enough to constitute a handicap. It was not the superficial nervous system showing through, nor the capillary blood vessels. The web effect was strikingly regular, almost mathematical in appearance. As he looked, the translucence faded and his skin switched to normal, the marks disappearing. That was the word, switched. He ought to be thankful for that, he supposed. Somehow he wasn't. He was out of the autobath and half dressed before the realization came to him. He knew what the network was, the patterned marks beneath his skin. A circuit. A printed circuit, or, since it was imposed on flesh, possibly tattooed. A circuit. What did anyone use a circuit for? To compute, to gather data, to broadcast, to control. How much of that applied to him, to the body it was concealed in? The first he could eliminate. Not to compute. As for the rest, he was not certain. It seemed possible that everything could be included in the function of the network beneath his skin. He hadn't been controlled up to now, but that didn't mean control wasn't there, quiescent, waiting for the proper time. However, it didn't seem likely. Human mentality was strong, and a reasonably intact mind was difficult to take over. What else? To gather data and broadcast it. Of that he could be almost positive. The data came from his nervous system. He suspected where it was broadcast to -- back to the police. How the circuit on his body gathered data was unknown. The markings appeared to parallel his central nervous system. It seemed reasonable that it operated by induction. That meant it involved chiefly tactile sensations, unless, of course, there were other factors he didn't know about. He felt his forehead carefully, his temples, and his skull around his ears. Nothing, but that didn't mean that infinitesimal holes hadn't been drilled through his skull and taps run to the optic and auditory nerves. It could be done and he wouldn't know about it, couldn't feel it. The broadcasting circuits could then be spread over his head, or, for that matter, over any part of his body. TF his suppositions were correct, then he was a living, walking broadcasting station. Everything he felt, saw or heard was relayed to some central mechanism which could interpret the signals. The police. Cobber had been looking for a spy mechanism, a mechanical device in Jadiver's body. He hadn't found it, but it was there, almost impossible to locate. A surgeon might find it by performing an autopsy, but even then he would have to know what to look for. How Jadiver had been able to find it was a pure puzzle. Obviously, the police hadn't been as thorough as they had meant to be. Their mechanism had somehow gone awry at precisely the time Jadiver was most conscious of his skin. Without the itch, he would never have noticed it. At least one thing was clear now -- the purpose. He'd been boiled into unconsciousness, his skin removed, the circuit put in place, and then had the synthetic substance carefully fitted over his body. His tension increased, for he knew now that he had betrayed Burlingame without meaning to -- but it was betrayal nonetheless. It wasn't only a question of professional ethics; it was how long he would remain alive. Burlingame's survivors, if there were any, would have an excellent idea of who was responsible. This thing went with him wherever he went. Did it also sleep when he did? That wasn't important, really. He had to try to warn Burlingame. Even these thoughts might be a mistake. The police might know what he was thinking. This was one way to determine whether there was such a thing as mechanically induced telepathy, but he couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the experiment. His own problem was essentially the same as if a mechanical spying device had been planted in him -- with one difference. A mechanical part was a foreign object and could be cut out by risk police retaliation. But only those who had installed this complicated circuit would know how to take it out. It was probably useless trying to trace him -- he very likely had arranged to drop out of sight. He was good at that. The police hadn't caught up with him in twenty years. There was Cobber. He'd be elsewhere, setting up a rendezvous to which Burlingame and the rest could return and hide while their faces and figures were absorbed into their normal bodies. Cobber would be even tougher to locate. The only place Burlingame could be found with any degree of certainty, Jadiver reasoned, would be at the scene of the robbery. Jadiver went to the screen and spent an intensive half hour in front of it. At the end of that time, he had narrowed it down to two society events, one of which would occur in a few hours. He made a decision to cover it and warn them, if he could. After that, it was up to Burlingame. Jadiver rubbed his chin; the stubble had to come off. He went to the autobath, but it wouldn't open. A figure in bas-relief appeared on the door. The surface had been smooth an instant before. "Sorry," said the voice of the lifelike, semi-nude girl, "the autobath is out of certain supplies. It won't function properly until these are replaced." "Let's have the list," growled Jadiver. He was jumpy. The bas-relief figure extended a hand with a slip in it. "If I may suggest, these can be placed on perpetual order to avoid future inconvenience." What the future held was unknown. It wasn't likely to include a comfortable existence in a wellfurnished apartment. "I'll think about it," he grunted. "If there's any other way I can help you -- " "There isn't," said Jadiver. The door shivered and the figure snapped back into the memory plastic from which it was made. The surface was smooth again. punched a code. The counter display flashed on and then was replaced by a handsome neuter face. That face studied him, ascertained his maximum susceptibility, and promptly faded. The next face was that of a robot harem girl. Sex sells, that was always the axiom. "Is there anything I can do for you?" she asked huskily. "Yes," said Jadiver. "You can get off the screen and let me see some merchandise." "We're not allowed to do that." Jadiver grumbled in defeat. "I want something for my whisk -- " "Just the thing," she said enthusiastically, reaching out of his field of vision. The hand came back with a package. "Tear off a capsule, crush it, and apply to your face. It removes whiskers permanently for two days, and leaves your face as soft and smooth as Martian down." Jadiver shuddered. "I'd rather be a man than a bird. Do you have anything that leaves a face feeling like skin?" The robot harem girl stabbed out frantically, but nothing came to hand. She turned around and went off to search. Jadiver sighed with relief and started to scan the shelves. The robot returned before he could make a selection. "We have nothing like that," she said, crestfallen. "Asteroid alabaster or hydroponic grapes and several other things, but no whiskoff that will leave your face feeling like skin." "Then order something that will," said Jadiver. "Meanwhile I'll settle for a face of hydroponic grapes. Two weeks supply will be enough." The robot complied eagerly. "Anything else? Shampoo?" Jadiver looked at the list and nodded. "No need to open the bottle," she rushed on. "Just place in the autobath dispenser and let the machine do the rest. The bottle will dissolve, adding to the secret ingredients. Foams in micro-seconds as proven by actual test, and when you're through, only an expert can tell your hair from mink." "Mink?" he repeated. "Don't think I'd like it. What about raccoon? I've always admired the legendary Daniel Boone, alone in the terrestrial wilderness with a single-shot rifle. Sure, make it raccoon." "I know we have none of that." The clerk was positive. "Then order it," he snapped. "You don't have to furnish the rifle, though." She seemed confused. "There is a ten per cent extra charge for non-standard merchandise." "All right. Just don't stand there arguing." When the clerk left the screen to place the order, Jadiver hastily selected what he wanted. He validated the purchases and snapped off the screen. The merchandise arrived in a few minutes. He loaded it into the autobath. This time the door opened and the bas-relief figure didn't appear on it. Within a half hour he was ready to leave. rpHE door was not a door. It was a mirror, three-dimensional. The difference to the eye was slight, but since he knew what to expect, it was not difficult to detect. It was a legitimate piece of staging, but it cost plenty to maintain the illusion. A society event, he supposed, called for such precautions. There must be more inside. He ignored the mirror and pressed a blank section of the wall directly opposite. The wall faded and a robot in an impressive black-and-white livery stared at him with the proper insolence. "Your invitation, sir." "What?" he said tipsily. "Your invitation, sir." The voice was louder and the insolence increased. If he asked again, the robot would very likely shove him out and close the door. Delicately adjusted and unhumanly strong, it was a bit too invariable in the behavior department to be consistently efficient. His knowledge of robots was more than fair. In a few seconds he sized up the model facing him. A thin slip fluttered from his hand to the floor. The robot bent over tp pick it up. At that instant Jadiver thrust a long, thin, double-tined fork deep into the back of the robot's neck, probing for the right place. He found it. Time became static for the robot; it remained bent over and could not move. Jadiver rifled the pockets, removed all the invitations, glanced at them, found one that would do, and thrust the rest back. Shadows of figures passed across the field behind the robot. Could they see what Jadiver was doing? Probably not; privacy was too highly regarded. Nevertheless, some people were coming down the corridor and they could see when and if they got close. Stepping back, he took away the double-tined fork and the robot straightened up. "You dropped something, sir," said the robot, handing him the slip from the floor. "It was nothing," said Jadiver, taking it. That was the best description of what he had dropped. He extended the invitation he had just filched. The robot grasped the invitation and seemed unable to focus. It tried to examine the markings invisible to human eyes. It passed a trembling hand across a troubled forehead. "Didn't you come in half an hour ago?" it asked in bewilderment. Someone had -- the person to whom the invitation had been issued. The robot, of course, had remembered. "Nonsense," said Jadiver sharply. "Do you feel right? Are you sure of your equilibrium?" If it was sure, he had miscalculated badly. Robots were so much more or less than humans. It should be possible to design a perfect robot, one that would realize all the potentialities of a mechanical personality. It had never been done; anthropomorphic conceptions had always interfered. "Must be mistaken," mumbled the robot, and swayed. It would collapse in twenty minutes. The robot pressed a button and the field behind him flickered off. Jadiver passed through it and the field fell back in place. usual swank, or maybe more so. Impressive, if he cared to be impressed by it. At the moment he didn't. He had to find Burlingame or Emily. He had created the faces of the other three as well, but he had made them into handsome nonentities. Among so many others who resembled them, he doubted that he could recognize them. For an instant he thought he saw Emily and made his way through the crowd. When he got there, he saw his mistake. This girl's flesh hadn't been put on with a spray gun. Burlingame was after jewels, of course, to be carefully selected from two or three of the wealthier guests. He must also have currency in mind, something negotiable for immediate use. He'd need cash to drop out of sight for a while. Time was growing short for a word with Burlingame, just one word, whispered or spelled out silently: "Police." That was all Burlingame would need. Jadiver was weaponless, and aside from warning Burlingame, he couldn't help. Until now he'd steered clear of violence and illegality. He'd known the use to which his disguises had been put, but that was the business of those who paid him. Now it was different. The police had a line to him, direct. How much they knew was impossible to estimate. He could visualize a technician sitting in front of a screen, seeing everything that Jadiver saw. That, however, was a guess, for he didn't actually know how the circuit beneath his skin functioned. Until he learned, he would have to continue guessing, and blunder accordingly. He made his way to the balcony that encircled half the huge high room. He didn't know the entire layout or the habits of those who lived here, but it was reasonably certain that they kept a large amount of cash on hand and that it would be safeguarded in a room not accessible to all the guests. It might even be up here. The few people on the balcony were at the far end. He looked no sign of Burlingame or any of his crew. Jadiver had done his work too well. They were indistinguishable from the others. At that moment, the lights brightened glaringly. The guests looked less glamorous. Women bulged excessively, top-heavy, and the tanned faces of the men turned an unpleasant gray. Magically, uniforms appeared at every exit. "Attention," a harsh voice rang out. "Please line up. There are criminals among you and we can identify them." rest. His eyes were on the uniformed men. Mercifully, they carried tangle guns. That much he was thankful for. Burlingame and his crew would be taken alive. They might not like what would happen later, but at least they would live. The tangle gun was the most effective and least lethal weapon ever conceived. It would bring down a butterfly at two hundred yards and hold it there, without crumpling a wing or disturbing the dustlike scales. It would do the same with a Venusian saurian or a Martian windbeast, either of which outbulked an elephant and outsavaged a tiger. It didn't have to hit the target. With proximity fuses -- and it was usually furnished that way -- it was sufficient for the bullet to pass near. Jadiver drew a deep breath. No one was going to get killed because of him. Nevertheless, his skin crawled. He gazed down at the guests lining up. They, too, knew what tangle guns were. Suddenly a man darted out of line and headed toward one of the exits. He collided with an officer and the policeman went down. A tangle gun snapped. The running man fell headlong. Three more times the tangle gun fired at the man Writhing on the floor -- at his hands, at his face, and again at his legs. The tangle gun propelled a plastic bullet, and that plastic was a paradox. It was the stickiest substance known and would adhere to a sphere of polished platinum, tearing away the solid metal if it were forcibly removed without first being neutralized. It also extruded itself into fine, wirelike strands on a moving object. The more anything moved, the tighter it wrapped around. The victim was better off to relax. He couldn't escape; no one ever had. Jadiver watched the man threshing on the floor. One shot would have been enough. Someone on the Venicity force liked to see men squirm. As nearly as Jadiver could determine, the man on the floor was not Burlingame. The leader hadn't been taken, but he didn't have long to enjoy his freedom. The theory he had about teamwork was tarnished now -- a feint here and a block there -- and they were all headed into the arms of the Venicity police. It couldn't work against superior force, and an ambush set unwittingly by Jadiver. Then Jadiver saw them. They moved as a unit -- Burlingame, Emily and two others. They smashed through the guests with a formation that had the flying wedge as a remote ancestor. Burlingame was leading it, tangle gun in hand. The guests were thrown back and a policeman went down. It was hard to fire into the mob through which Burlingame and his crew were bulling. In that respect, the tangle gun was not selective. It seized on any motion. They couldn't make it, but Jadiver hoped for them. They were at the edge of the crowd. Between them and freedom was a thin cordon of police. Beyond the police was a planted area where jungle vines and shrubs, considerably taller than a man, grew dense. Just past that area were two exits leading to the street. From the balcony, Jadiver could see it clearly. If they could reach the exits, they had a chance for flight. They broke through the cordon. They shouldn't have, for superior trained men were opposing them. But it was another kind of training that Burlingame was using and with it he split the police. The group plunged into the jungle shrubs and emerged on the other side. The police on the floor couldn't see them, the planted area screened off the view. They were almost safe. The exits opened before they could reach them -- more police. Burlingame went down, a cloud around his face, weaving wire shapes that tightened on his throat. The other two stumbled as police fired at their feet. was close and moving too fast. She escaped the tangle guns, but ran directly into the arms of a burly officer. He laughed and grabbed her as if she were a robot. She bit him.  He swore at her and swiftly looked around. The guests couldn't see. He hit her solidly in the middle. She gasped for breath. He took out his tangle gun and fired into her mouth. Jadiver sicklily knew he had been wrong about the tangle gun ; it could kill if the person who used it had sufficient experience and brutality. Emily would never have to lose that beautiful face and figure. She could keep it until she died, which wouldn't be long. Nobody could stop the peristaltic motion of the digestive system, voluntarily or otherwise, or of the lungs in trying to breathe. Burlingame wouldn't know. Policemen were cooperative, and it would be listed as an accident. Jadiver closed his eyes. Emily was dying and no one could help her. Or himself, either, when they came to pick him up. They had to know exactly where he was. He waited, expecting a tap on the shoulder or the snap of the tangle gun. The lights dimmed and the same harsh voice spoke. "The danger is over, thanks to the efficient work of the Venicity police force. You are now safe." Nothing like advertising yourself, thought Jadiver. No one came near him. Apparently the police didn't want him yet -- they expected him to do more for them. He went down the stairs and mingled with the excited guests. It had been a good show, unexpected entertainment, especially since it hadn't involved any real danger for them. He circulated through the chattering men and women until he came near the planted area. At an opportune moment, he slipped in. It was a miniature jungle; he was safe from ordinary detection as long as he stayed there.' He went quietly through the vines and shrubs toward the other side. The broad back of a policemen loomed up in front of him. Jadiver was an industrial engineer, a specialist in the design of robot bodies and faces, robots that had to look like humans. He knew anatomy, not in the way a doctor did, but it was nonetheless the knowledge of an expert. He reached out and the policeman toppled. He dragged the unconscious man deeper into the little jungle and listened. No one had noticed. Physically a large man, the policeman might be the one who had shot Emily -- and then again he might not be. He did have a tangle gun, which was the important thing. Jadiver took it and rifled the man's pockets for ammunition. He knelt for a final check on the body. The chest rose and fell with slow regularity. For insurance, Jadiver again pressed the nerve. This man wouldn't trouble anyone for a few hours. Jadiver looked out. When he was sure he wasn't observed, he walked out and joined the guests. He moved politely from one group to another and in several minutes stood beside the door. He left the way he came. It was that simple. He had to assume that until events proved he was mistaken. It was not late and the city overflowed with men and women walking, flying, skimming. Roughly dressed men down from the north polar farms, explorers from the temperate jungles, government girls -- the jumbled swarm that comes to a planet in the intermediate stages of exploitation. It was a background through which he could pass unnoticed. The circuit, though -- always the circuit. He couldn't escape that by walking away from it. But at least he'd proved that telepathy wasn't possible by means of it, or he wouldn't still be free. Other than that, he didn't know how it operated. If it was purely electronic in nature, then it had a range. He might be able to get beyond that range, if he knew how far it extended. A lot depended on the power source. He hadn't been able to check closely, hadn't really known what he was looking at when he'd seen it in the autobath. He remembered that the circuit seemed to be laid over his own nervous system. Considering the power available, the range was apt to be quite limited. That was pure supposition and might be wrong. There was nothing to preclude an external power source, say a closed field blanketing the city or even the entire planet. If so, it represented a technical achievement beyond anything he was familiar with. That didn't disprove it, of course. The circuit itself indicated a startling advance and he knew it existed. There was still another possibility. The circuit might not be entirely electronic. It might operate with the same forces that existed inside a single nerve cell. If so, all bets were off ; there was no way he could determine the range. It might be anything at all, micro-inches or light-years. With unlimited equipment and all the time in the worlds, he could answer some of those questions floating around in his mind. He had neither', but there were solutions he could make use of. Limited solutions, but it was better than waiting to be caught. Jadiver headed toward one such solution. The robot clerk looked up, smiling and patient, as he entered. It could afford to be patient. There was no place it wanted to be other than where it was at the moment. "Can I help you?" "Passage to Earth," said Jadiver. The clerk consulted the schedule. That was pretense. The schedule and not much else had been built into its brain. "There's an orbit flight in two weeks." In two weeks, Jadiver could be taken, tried, and converted ten times over. "Isn't there anything sooner?" "There's an all-powered flight leaving tomorrow, but that's for Earth citizens only." "Suits me. Book me for it." "Be glad to," said the robot. "Passport, please." TT was going to cost more than just the fare, Jadiver knew. He would arrive on Earth with very little money and could expect to start all over. He was no longer fresh out of training, willing to start at the bottom. He was a mature man, experienced beyond the ordinary, and most organizations he could work for would be suspicious of that. But it was worth it, aside from the escape. No future for him there, jammed in on a crowded world, but it was his planet, always would be, and he wouldn't mind going back. "Sorry," said the clerk, flipping over the passport and studying it. "I can't book you. The flight's only for Earth citizens." "I was bom there," Jadiver impatiently said. "Can't you see?" "You were?" asked the robot eagerly. "I was built there." It handed him back the passport. "However, it doesn't matter where you were born. You've been here three years without going back. Automatically, you became a citizen of Venus two and a half years ago." Jadiver hadn't known that. He doubted that many did. It was logical enough. Earth was overflowing and the hidden citizenship clause was a good way of getting rid of the more restless part of the population and making sure they didn't come back. "There's still the orbit flight," said the clerk, smiling and serene. "For that you need a visitor's visa, which takes time. Shall I make the arrangements?" Aside from the time element, which was vital, he couldn't tip the police off that he intended to leave. "Thanks," he said, taking the passport. "I'll call back When i make up my mind." Down the street was another interplanetary flight office and he wandered into it. It might have been the same office he had just left, robot and all. "Information on Mars," he said, his manner casual. The clerk didn't bother to consult the schedule. There was a difference, after all. "There'll be an orbit flight in four months," it said pleasantly. "Rate, fourfifths of the standard fare to Earth." Nothing was working out as expected. "What about the moons of Jupiter?" This was the last chance. "Due to the position of the planets, for the next few months there are no direct flights anywhere beyond Mars. You have to go there and transfer." That escape was closed. "I can't make plans so far in advance." The robot beamed at him. "I can see that you're a gentleman who likes to travel." It grew confidential and leaned over the counter. "I have a bargain here, truly the most sensational we've ever offered." Jadiver drew away from that eagerness. "What is this bargain?" "Did you notice the fare to Mars? Four-fifths of that to Earth, and yet it's farther away. Did you stop to think why?" he knew why. It was another side of the citizenship program. Get them away from Earth, the farther the better, and don't let them come back. If necessary, shuttle them between colonies, but don't let them come back. "I hadn't," he said. "Why?" The voice throbbed throatily and robot eyes grew round. "To induce people to travel. Travel is wonderful. I love to travel." Pathetic thing. Someone had erred in building it, had implanted too much enthusiasm for the job. It loved to travel and would never get farther than a few feet from the counter. Jadiver dismissed that thought. "What's this wonderful offer?" he asked. "Just think of it," whispered the robot. "We have another destination, much farther than Jupiter, but only one-tenth the fare to Earth. If you don't have the full fare in cash, just give us verbal assurance that you'll pay when you get the money. No papers to sign. We have confidence in your personal integrity." "Sounds intriguing," Jadiver said, backing away. It sounded more like a death sentence. Alpha Centauri or some such place -- hard grubbing labor under a blazing or meager sun, it didn't matter which. Exile forever on planets that lagged and would always lag behind Earth. It took years to get there, even at speeds only a little below that of light, time in which the individual was out of touch. "I hope you won't forget," said the robot. "It's hard to get people to understand. But I can see that you do." He understood too well. He ducked out of the flight office. He'd stay and take it here if he had to, escape some way if he could. Nothing was worth that kind of sacrifice. He went slowly back to the apartment. It was not so strange that the police hadn't arrested him. They knew that he'd stay on the planet, that he had to. They'd had it figured out long before he did. He fell into the bed without removing his clothing. The bed made no effort to induce him to sleep. It wasn't necessary. IN the morning, Jadiver awakened to the smell of food. The room he slept in was dark, but in the adjacent room he could hear the Kitch-Hen clucking away contentedly as it prepared breakfast. He rolled over and sat up. He was not alone. "Cobber?" he called. "Yeah," said Cobber. He was very close, but Jadiver couldn't see him. "The police got them," Jadiver said, reaching for the tangle gun. It was gone. He'd expected that. "I heard. I was waiting for them and they didn't come." He was silent for a moment. "It had to be you, didn't it?" "It was," Jadiver said. "When I found out, I tried to tell them. But it was too late." "Glad you tried," said Cobber. At that instant, so was Jadiver. "I checked you myself. I couldn't find anything," Cobber added thoughtfully. "They must have something new." "It is new," Jadiver wearily confirmed. "I can't get rid of it." "Mind telling me? I figure I ought to know." Hunched up in the darkness, Jadiver told him what he could. At present, he was defenseless. Cobber was a little man, but he was no stranger to violence and he had the weapons. Perhaps that was what the police counted on -- that Cobber would save them an arrest. "Bad," said Cobber after an interval. It sounded like a reprieve. Jadiver waited. "I liked Burlingame," continued Cobber. "Emily, too." Burlingame was a decent fellow. Emily he had seen only once, twice if he counted last night. She deserved better than she got. "I don't know who it was," Jadiver said. "Some big policeman." "I know a lot of people -- I'll find out," Cobber promised. "I liked Emily." It wouldn't do any good, though Jadiver approved. For a while there'd be one less sadist on the force, and after that they'd hire another. "You'd better leave while you can," said Jadiver. Cobber laughed. "I'll get away. I know Venus and I don't have a spy inside." He got up, turned on the lights and tossed the tangle gun on the bed. "Here. You need this worse than I do." Jadiver blinked gratefully and took it. Cobber believed him. If the police wanted to eliminate him, they'd have to come for him, after all. He stood up. "Breakfast?" "No breakfast," said Cobber. "I'm going to take your advice and get out of here." He went to the door, opened it a fraction and listened. Satisfied, he closed it and turned back to Jadiver. "Tell that cop I know a few tricks with a tangle gun he never heard of. I'll show him what they are." "I won't see him, I hope." "You don't have to. They're taking everything down. They'll tell him. That is, I hope they do." He slipped out the door and was gone. rpHE Kitch-Hen tired of waiting for Jadiver to come out. It cackled disgustedly and sent a table into his room. Mechanically he sat down and began to eat. Not only how far but also what kind of data did the circuit transmit? That was one unanswered problem. If he couldn't outrun it, he might outthink it. First, the data was transmitted to the police with some degree of accuracy. They had been able to anticipate the robbery. Not completely, but they did know it was Burlingame and how many men he was using. They also knew the approximate date. From that, it was a matter of logic to determine what specific society event he was aiming at. Jadiver had been able to do the same. Thoughts, visual and auditory impressions, tactile and other sensory data -- that was the sum of what the circuit could transmit, theoretically. He could almost positively rule out thoughts. It had never been proved that thoughts could be transferred from one person to another, mechanically or otherwise. But that was not his reason for rejecting it. If they could read his thoughts, it was useless for him to plan anything. And he was going to plan ahead, whether it was useless or not. Tactile sensations, temperature, roughness, and the like were unimportant except to a scientist. He doubted that police were that scientifically interested in him. He could forget about the sense of touch. Sight and hearing. Neither of these could be eliminated at present. They could see what he saw, hear what he heard. As long as they could, escape was out of the question. It wouldn't take much to betray him -- a street sign glimpsed through his eyes, for instance, and they knew where he was. As long as they could see what he saw. But there was such a thing as a shield. Any known kind of radiation could be shielded against. He was working with intangibles. He didn't know the nature of the phenomenon he had to fight. He had to extrapolate in part, guess the rest. One thing was certain, though: If he was successful in setting up a shield against the circuit, the police would arrive soon after. Arrive hre. His value to them was obvious. Through him they could make an undetected contact with the shadowy world of illegality. If that contact was cut off or if he seemed about to escape, his usefulness came to an end and they would want one more arrest while they could get it. Once he started to work on the shield, he would have towork fast. Jadiver went to the screen. There could be "no hesitation; the decision was ready-made. The bank robot appeared on the screen and Jadiver spoke to him briefly, requesting that his account be cleared. He scribbled his signature and had it recorded.  pack, sorting what he wanted to take. It wasn't much, some special clothing. His equipment, except for a few small tools, he had to leave. No matter. With luck, he could replace it; without luck, he wouldn't need it. In a few minutes he was ready, but the money hadn't arrived. He sat down and nervously scrawled on a scrap of paper. Presently the delivery chute clattered and the money was in it, crisp new bills neatly wrapped, the total of his savings over the years. He stuffed the money in his pocket. The scrap of paper was still in his hand. He started to throw it away, but his fingers were reluctant to let it go. He stared curiously at the crumpled wad and on impulse smoothed it out, There were words on it, though he hadn't remembered writing any. The handwriting was shaky and stilted, as if he were afflicted with some nervous disease ; nevertheless, it was unmistakably his own. There was a message on it, from himself to himself. No, not from himself. But it was intended that he read it. The note said : He sat down. A picture rose involuntarily in his mind. The face was that of Doumya Filone. He couldn't prove it, but it seemed certain that she was the one. She knew about the circuit, of course, had known long before he did. He remembered the incident when his skin had itched. He had called her about it and she hadn't seemed surprised. She had left the screen for some time -- for what purpose? To adjust the mechanism, or have someoneelse adjust it. The last, probably ; the mechanism was almost certainly at the police end, and at the time he called she had been at home. In any event, the mechanism had originally been set too strong and she had ordered the setting to be reduced. That suggested one thing: the power to activate the circuit came from the mechanism -- a radarlike device. Then what? His skin had momentarily become translucent, allowing him to see the circuit. How she achieved that, he didn't know, but the reason was obvious. It had been her way of warning him and it had worked. The message in his hand told him one thing. He had known about the danger, but he hadn't guessed that he didn't have to face it alone. Something else was evident: her control was limited -- perhaps she could step in at a critical moment, but the greater part was up to him. He moved quickly. He opened the delivery chute and put in the small bag that held his clothing, then punched a code that dispatched it to the transportation terminal. In return, he received a small plastic strip with the same code on it. The bag could be traced, but not without trouble, and he should be able to pick it up before then. At this stage he didn't want to be encumbered. He took a last look around and stepped into the hall. He leaped back again. A heavy caliber slug crashed into the door. He was lucky it hadn't. Who was it? Not the police. By law they were restricted to tangle guns, though they sometimes forgot. In this case, their memory should be good -- they'd have difficulty explaining away the holes in his body. Not that they'd have to, really; if they wanted, they could toss him into an alley and claim they had found his body later. Still, there was no particular reason why they should want to kill him outright when they could do it by degrees scientifically and with full legal protection. They another term: converting. The converting process was not new; the principles had existed for centuries. The newness lay in the proper combination of old discoveries. Electric shock was one ingredient, a prolonged drastic application of it during the recreation of a situation that the victim had a weakness for. In the case of an adulterer, say, the scene was hypnotically arranged with the cooperation of a special robot that wouldn't be short-circuited. At the proper moment, electric shock was applied, repeatedly. Rigorous and somewhat rough on the criminal's wife, but the adulterer would be saddled all his life with an unconditional reflex. That was only one ingredient. There were others, among them a pseudo-religious brotherhood, membership in which was compulsory. C. C. -- Confirmed Converters. They kept tab on one another with apocalyptic fervor. Transgressions were rare. Death came sooner. Jadiver stood there thinking. It wasn't the police, because they had converting with which to threaten him. It wasn't Cobber, either. He could have killed Jadiver earlier and hadn't. Cobber might have talked, though. There were enough people who now "regretted that Jadiver had once given them new faces. As far as they were concerned Jadiver was in the hands of the police. The identity of the man outside didn't matter. He was not from the police, but he did want Jadiver dead. Jadiver stood back and pushed the door open. Another slug crashed into it, tiny, but with incredible velocity. He knelt, thrust his hand outside the door near the bottom and fired a random fusillade down the corridor. Then he took his finger off the trigger and listened. There wasn't a sound. The man had decided to be sensible. Jadiver stepped out. The man was crouched in an inconspicuous corner and he was going to stay in that position for a long time. He couldn't help breathing, though, and his chest was a tangle of wires. There were some on his face, too, where his eyelids flickered and his mouth twitched. The gun was in his hand and it was aimed nearly right. There was nothing to prevent his squeezing the trigger -- except the tangle extruded loosely over his hand. And he could move faster than it could. #nce, at any rate. "I wouldn't," said Jadiver. "You're going to have a hard time explaining that illegal firearm. And it'll look worse if I'm here with my head wrapped around a hole that just fits the slug." The man reaffirmed his original decision to be sensible about it by remaining motionless. Jadiver didn't recognize him. Probably a hired assassin. The man paled with the effort not to move. He teetered and the tangle stuff coiled fractionally tighter. "Take care of yourself," Jadiver said, and left him there. transportation terminal. The police could trace him that far. Let them; he intended that they should. It would confuse them more when he walked right off their instruments. Once inside the underground structure, he lost himself in the traffic. That was just in case he had been followed physically as well as by radiation. People coming from Earth, fewer going back. They arrived in swarms from the surface, overhead from the concrete plain where rockets roared out on takeoff or hissed in for landing. Transportation shunted the mob in one direction for interplanetary travel, in another for local air routes. Jadiver reclaimed his bag, boarded the moving belts and hopped on and off several times, again just in case. The last time off, he had coins ready. He slipped around a comer and walked down a long quiet corridor. There were doors on either side, a double deck with a narrow balcony on the second story. At intervals, stairs led to the balcony. He walked a third of the way down the corridor, inserted coins in the slot, and a door opened. He went inside the sleep locker and the door closed behind, locking automatically. It was miserable accommodation if he intended to sleep, but he didn't. It was also a trap if the police were trailing him. He didn't think they were -- they were too certain of him. Nevertheless, the sleep locker had one advantage: it was all metal. Considering the low power that probably went into the circuit, it should be a satisfactory temporary shield. He changed into clothes that looked ordinary -- out of style, in fact, though that was not noteworthy in a solarwide economy -- but the material, following a local terrestrial fad of a few years back, contained a high proportion of metallic fiber. That solved only part of the problem, of course. His hands and his head were uncovered. The pseudo-flesh that he had used on Emily was not for him. In a way, it was the best disguise, but he was playing this one to live, as much as he could, all the way. A standard semidurable cosmetic would do; that is, it would when he finished altering it to suit his purpose. The chief addition was a flaky metallic powder, lead. However the signal worked, radar or not, that should be effective in dampening the signal. He squeezed the mixture into a tube and attached the tube to a small gun which he plugged into a wall socket. Standing in front of the tiny mirror, with everything else cramped in the sleep locker, he went over his face and hands. He had trouble getting it on his scalp and under his hair, but it went on. He looked himself over. He now appeared older, respectable, but not successful, which fitted neatly into the greatest category on Venus -- or anywhere, for that matter. He stuffed the clothing he'd worn back into the bag and walked out. He'd been in the sleep locker half an hour. He was operating blind, but it was all he could do. He had to assume that the metallic fiber in his clothing and the lead flakes in the cosmetic would scramble the circuit signal. If they didn't, then he was completely without protection. He'd soon know how correctly he had analyzed the problem. portation terminal and hailed an air cab which took him over the city and left him at the edge of a less reputable section. It was not an old slum -- Venicity hadn't endured long enough to have inherited slums; it built them quickly out of shoddy material and then tore them down again as the need for living space expanded outward. He checked in at a hotel neither more nor less disreputable than the rest. The structure made up in number of rooms what it lacked in size and appearance. This was the test period and he had to wait it out. If he passed, he was on an equal footing with any other person wanted by the police.' He'd take his chances on that, his wits against their organization; he could disappear if he didn't carry a beacon around with him. This was the best place to spend the interim period, crowded together with people coming and going to and from the wild lands of Venus. But if he didn't pass the test -- He refused to think about it. He walked aimlessly in the grayness of the Venusian day. Different people from those in the bright new sections of Venicity, quieter, grimmer, more bewildered. Tough, but not the hardness of the criminal element. These people had no interest in either making or breaking the law. After nightfall, he loitered on the streets for a few hours, watching faces. When policemen began appearing in greater numbers, he checked into his room. It was a grimy, unpleasant place. Considering the comfort it offered, the rate was exorbitant. Safety, however, if it did afford, and that was beyond price. He lay down, but couldn't sleep. The room, apparently, was designed on the acoustical principle of an echo chamber or a drum. The adjacent room on one side was occupied by a man and woman. The woman, though, was not a woman. There was a certain pitch to the laughter that could come only from a robot. The management obviously offered attractions other than sleep. The room on the other side was quieter. Somebody coughed twice, somebody sniffled once. Two of them, decided Jadiver, a man and a woman, both human. They weren't talking loud or much. He couldn't hear the words, but the sounds weren't gay. In the hall, other voices intruded. Jadiver lay still. He could recognize the way of walking, the tone of voice. Cops. His test period wasn't lasting as long as he'd hoped. "What good is it?" grumbled one, down the hall, but Jadiver could hear distinctly. "We had him dead center and now we've lost him. If I had my way, we'd have taken him sooner." so pood if the police were this close. He got up and crept noiselessly toward the door, fully dressed, as he had to be at all times if he expected to scramble the circuit signal. The companion of the first policeman was more cheerful. "He's not lost. We've just mislaid him. We know the direction he's in. Follow the line and there he is at the end of it." "Sounds good, but have we got him?" "We will." That was the fallacy. He'd scrambled the signal, but he hadn't eliminated it. He still showed up on the police instrument as a direction. He could imagine a technician sitting in front of a crazily wavering screen. The instrument could no longer pick up what he saw through his eyes, but it hadn't lost him altogether. Jadiver clutched the tangle gun. "Better check where we are," said the first officer. "Going to," answered the second. Jadiver couldn't see. but he could visualize the pocket instrument. "This is Lieutenant Parder. How close are we?" The voice came back, almost inaudible. What he could hear, though, was disturbing. It sounded like someone he knew, but not Doumya Filone. "You're off a hundred yards to your left," said the voice. "Also, he's a mile farther out. Either that or a hundred and fifty miles." "He's really moving," said the lieutenant. "A hundred and fifty miles is in the middle of the swamp." "I know that," said the tantalizing familiar voice. "I can't choose between outside and inside the city. If he's inside, I want him to move. That motion, extended a hundred and fifty miles, by simple mathematics will indicate a distance he couldn't possibly travel in the jungle." The voice paused. "We'll send a party to check the swamp. You go to the point a mile farther on. We want him tonight. If we don't get him, we'll probably have to wait until tomorrow night." "I'll find him," said the lieutenant. "Report when I get there." Jadiver could hear footsteps receding down the hall. He breathed in relief. The makeshift shield hadn't been a total failure. They knew the direction, but not the distance from some central location. The scramble had affected the strength of the signal and they couldn't be sure. The impromptu visit told him this as well: there was only one instrument on him. With two, they could work a triangulation, regardless of the signal strength. He could hazard a guess as to why they had to get him at night. During the day, there were radiological disturbances originating in the atmosphere that made reception of the signals difficult. That meant that the day was safest for him. lay down, to puzzle over the familiar voice, to sleep if he could. Sleep didn't come easily. The man and the female robot had left, but the quiet couple on the other side had been awakened by the noise in the hall. The woman sniffled. "I don't care, Henry. We're going back to Earth." It was not an old voice, though he couldn't be sure, not seeing her. Thirty-five, say. Jadiver resented the intrusion at a time like this. He was trying to sleep, or think, he wasn't sure which. "Now, hon, we can't," Henry whispered back. "We've bought the land and nobody's going to buy it back." "We bought it when they told us there would be roses," said the woman, loud and bitter. "Great big roses, so big that most of the plant grew below ground, only the flower showing. So big, no stem could support them." "Well, hon -- " "Don't hon me. There are roses, ten feet across, all over our land, just like they said." Her voice rose higher. "Mud roses, that's what they are. Stinking mud roses that collapse into a slimy hole in the ground." She sniffled again. "Did you notice the pictures they showed us? People standing by the roses with their heads turned away. And you know why the pictures were like that? Because they didn't dare show us the expressions on those people's faces, that's why." "It's not so bad," said the man soothingly. "Maybe we can do something about it." "What can we do? The roses poison cattle and dogs run away from the smell. And we're humans. We're stronger, we're supposed to take it." "I've been thinking," said Henry quietly. "I could take a long pipe and run it at an angle to the roots. I could force concrete through the pipe and seal it off below ground. When it collapsed, the rose wouldn't grow back." The woman asked doubtfully, "Could you?" "I think so. Of course I'd have to experiment to get the right kind of concrete." "But what would we do with the hole it left?" There was a faint tremor of hope. "We could haul away the slime," he said. "It would stop smelling after a while. We might even be able to use it for fertilizer." "But there's still the hole." "It would fill with water after the next rain. We could raise ducks in it." "White ducks?" "If you like." ITHE woman was silent. "If you think we can do it, then we'll try," she said. "We'll go back to our farm and forget about Earth." Henry was silent, too. "They're kind of pretty, even if they do smell bad," he said after a long interval. "Maybe I could pump a different kind of cement, real thin, directly into the stem. It might travel up into the flower instead of down." "And make them into stone roses," enthused the woman. "Mud roses into stone. I'd like that -- a few of them -- to remind us of what our farm was like when we came to it." She wasn't sniffling. They had their own problems, decided Jadiver, and their own solution, which, in their ignorance, might actually work. He'd been like that when he first came to Venus, expecting great things. With him it had been different. He was an engineer, not a farmer, and he didn't want to be a farmer. There was nothing on Venus for him. He couldn't stay much longer on Venus in any capacity. Earth was out of the question. Mars? If he could escape capture in the months that followed and then manage to get passage on a ship. It wasn't hopeless, but his chances weren't high. The puzzling thing was why the police wanted him so badly. He was an accessory to a crime -- several of them, in fact. But even if they regarded him as a criminal, they couldn't consider him an important one. And yet they were staging a manhunt. He hated to think of the number of policemen looking for him. There must be a reason for it. He had a few days left, possibly less. In that time, he would have to get off the planet or shed the circuit. Without drastic extensive surgery, there was not much hope he could peel off the circuit. Unless -- He had received a message from someone self-identified as a friend. And that friend knew about the circuit and claimed to He kept seeing gray eyes and a strong, sad, indifferent face, even in his sleep. tended. Since daylight was safest for him, that was a serious error. He wasted no time in regret, but went immediately to the mirror. Under the makeup, his face was dirty and sweating. He didn't dare to remove the disguise for an instant, since to do so would be to expose himself to the instrument. He sprayed on a new face, altering the facial characteristics as best he could. His clothing, too, had to stay on. He roughed it up a bit, adding a year's wear to it. For what it was worth, he didn't look quite the same as yesterday. Seedier and older. It was a process he couldn't keep extending indefinitely. He would not have to, of course. One way or the other, it would be decided soon. He shredded the bag and his extra clothing, tossing them into the disposal chute. No use giving the police something to paw over, to deduce from it what they could. The tiny spray gun he kept, and the tube of makeup. He might need them once more. It was close to noon when he left the room. There were lots of people on the streets and only a few policemen. Again he had an advantage. He found a pay screen and began the search. Doctor Doumya Filone wasn't listed with the police and that seemed strange. A moment's reflection showed that it wasn't. If she were officially connected, she might not show the sympathy she had. Neither was she listed on the staff of the emergency hospital in which he'd been a patient. He had a number through which he could reach her, but he resisted an impulse to use it. It was certain the police wouldn't confine their efforts to the instrument check. They knew he had that number and they'd have someone on it, tracing everyone who called her. Noon passed and his stomach called attention to it. He hadn't eaten since yesterday. He took a short break, ate hurriedly, and resumed the search. Doumya Filone was difficult to find. It was getting late and he had ascertained she wasn't on the staff of any hospital not listed for private practice. He finally located her almost by accident. She had an office with Medical Research Incorporated. That was the only thing registered under her name. Evening came early to Venus, as it always did under the massive cloud formations. He got off the air cab a few blocks from his destination and walked the rest of the way. Inside the building, he paused in the lobby and found her office. Luckily it was in a back wing. He wandered through the corridors, got lost once, and found the route again. The building was almost empty by this time. Her name was on the door. Dr. Doumya Filone. Research Neurological Systems, whatever that meant. There was a light in the office, a dim one. He eased the door open. It wasn't locked, which meant, he hadn't tripped an alarm.  around. There was another door in back. He walked over to it. It didn't lead to a laboratory, as he expected. Instead, there were living quarters. A peculiar way to conduct research. The autobath was humming quietly. He sat down facing it and waited. She came out ,in a few minutes, hair disarranged, damp around her forehead. She didn't see him at first. "Well," she said coolly, staring at him. There was no question that she recognized him through the disguise. She slipped quickly into a robe that, whatever it did for her modesty, subtracted nothing from the view. He wished he was less tired and could appreciate it. She found a cigarette and lighted it. "You're pretty good, you know." "Yeah." But not good enough, he thought. "Why are you here?" she asked. She was nervous. "You know," he said. She had promised him help once before. Now let her deliver. But she had to volunteer. "I know." She looked down at her hands, long skilled hands. "I put in the circuit. But I didn't choose you." He began to understand part of it. The 'Medical Research' business was just a cover. The real work was done at the police emergency hospital. That was why she had no laboratory. And the raw material -- "Who did choose me?" "The police. I have to tafce what they give me." There were certain implications in that statement he didn't like. "Have there been others?" "Two before you." "What happened to them?" "They died." He didn't like where this was taking him. His hand slid toward the tangle gun in his pocket. "Maybe I should die, too." She nodded. "That would be one solution." She added harshly: "They shouldn't have taken you. Legally speaking, you're not a criminal. But I couldn't investigate you personally before I put the circuit in." Why not? Was she an automaton, that reacted in response to a button? In a way she was, but the button was psychological. "That doesn't help me," he said tiredly. "The police wanted to catch Burlingame through me. That's right, isn't it?" She indicated that it was. "I did, without knowing what I was doing," he went on. "Now I want out. Even if I cooperated with the cops, which I'm not going to do, I'm of no further value to them. Every criminal on Venus knows about me by now." "That's part of it," she said. "But there's more. You've tied up the machine and neither I nor the police can use it." ing faster. It was no wonder the police wanted him badly. They had a perfect device to use against criminals, which was all they were concerned with, and they couldn't use it as long as the circuit was in him. It made sense, but that kind of logic was deadly -- for him. "I'll face it," he said. "I'll take whatever charge they hang on me. It shouldn't be more than a few years. You can use the time to take this damn thing out of me. Only I want a guarantee first." She got up and stood with the light behind her. It was deliberately intended to distract him. Under other circumstances, it would have. "If it were a small circuit, over just a fraction of your body, I could cut it out," she said. "But the way it is, I can't. It would kill you." At least she was honest about it. And he still didn't know what she meant when she had written, with his hands in the apartment, that she would help him. He would have to find out. "I can smash the machine," he said. "That's the other solution." She leaned against the wall. "You can't. And neither can I, though it's technically my machine. It's in the police department with an armed guard around it at all times. Besides, the machine can defend itself." He looked at her without understanding. It didn't sound right. He was sweating under the makeup and part of it was coming loose. "Then what did you mean when you said you'd help?" he asked. "You promised, but what can you do?" "I never promised to help." It was her turn not to understand. Her hand slipped down and so did the robe. She was lying to him, had been lying all along. She never intended to help, though she said she would. The purpose? To lead him into a trap. She'd been successful enough. He looked up in anger, in time to see an object hurtling from her hand. It struck him on the side of the head, hard. Some of the makeup chipped and fell off, but that was less important than yanking out the tangle gun. He fired twice, once at her feet and once at her shoulders. He had aimed at her head, but the shot went low. Her face was still pretty, though no longer indifferent or so strong. "What do you want?" she screamed. "Why don't you leave me alone? I can't help you. Nobody can." She was standing there rigid, not daring to move. The robe rippled in a breeze from the vent and the tangle stuff gripped it and the fabric tore. She'd stand there a few more hours and then topple over. They'd find her in the morning and remove the tangle with the special tongs. As for himself, it was too late. He might have got off Venus at one time if he had concentrated on it. He hadn't tried harder because of Doumya Filone. He had wanted to believe her because -- well, because. "I told you I'd help, Jadiver. I will." The voice was distinct. It wasn't Doumya Filone who'd said it. A tangle strand had worked up her throat and gripped her face. She couldn't speak if she tried. Her gray eyes weren't gray ; they were the color of  tears.Doumya Filone -- and there wasn't any other person in the room. "I've kept the police away," said the familiar voice. "I can protect you for a while longer. There's still time to save yourself. But you have to guess right. You can't make any more mistakes." Strictly speaking, it wasn't a voice. Doumya Filone didn't hear it; that was obvious. It was the circuit then. Someone was making use of the machine to actuate the auditory nerve directly. That was what he seemed to hear. Jadiver was tired and his body grimy, muscles twitching under the tension. But if his unknown friend -- real, after all -- could outwit a room full of police and tinker with the mechanism which was supposed to spot him, he couldn't do less. He grinned. "I'll make it this time. I know what to do." "The police haven't given up," said the voice. "I'm going to be busy with them. Don't expect further communication from me." He didn't know who the person was, in spite of the haunting familiarity of the voice. And he wasn't going to find out soon. Probably never. It was enough, however, to know that he had a friend. He left Doumya Filone standing there, which was a mistake, he realized as he reached the front office. He should have fired once more at her hands. The screen was crackling; her hands had been free and she'd managed to turn the screen on before the tangle strands interfered with her movement. He'd made a grave error, but not necessarily fatal. It would be some time before anyone got there. By then he hoped to be safe. He slipped through the corridors, went out the rear of the building and looked around for an air cab. The place was deserted at this hour and no cabs were in the nearby sky. He had to walk and he didn't have that much time. He headed toward the nearest main thoroughfare. It was in the opposite direction to his destination, but he should be able to find an air cab there. He was walking too fast, for a light flashed down on him. He wasn't presentable and his haste was suspicious. "Stop," said the amplified voice. It was probably just a routine check, but he couldn't risk even that. He dodged into a space between two buildings and began to run. In the center of town, this would be a blind alley, but in this section it wasn't. There was a chance he could lose them. The buildings were just high enough so that they couldn't use" the air car and they'd have to follow on foot. The patrol car alighted almost instantly and one of the policemen started after him. The man following him knew his business and was in good physical condition, better than Jadiver was after days of tension and little sleep. Jadiver turned and snapped a half dozen shots at his pursuer. He was lucky, a couple were close enough. The policeman crashed to the ground and began to swear. His voice was choked off in seconds. The other one got out of the patrol car and let it stand. It was the principle of the thing: nobody did that to a policeman. Jadiver had a substantial lead and it was dark, but he didn't know the route. Jadiver was enormously tired and this was the policeman's regular beat. The gap between them closed rapidly. Out of breath and time and space to move around in, Jadiver took the wrong turn because the man was so close -- and found himself boxed in.  the oncoming man, a dark shape he sensed rather than saw. The tangle gun clicked futilely, out of ammunition. He fumbled hastily for a clip ; before he could reload, the policeman squeezed the trigger and held it down. The bullets didn't hit him, they were set to detonate a fraction of an inch away. He gave up and awaited the constricting violence of the tangle strands. The bullets detonated and the strands flashed out, glowing slightly in the flarkness. They never touched him; instead, they bent into strange shapes and flipped away. The stickiest substance known, and one of the strongest, from which there was no escape, yet it would not adhere to him -- was, in fact, forcefully repelled! It was that skin, of course, the synthetic substance they had put on him over the circuit. They should have tested it under these conditions. They might not have been so anxious to boil men alive. He felt that he was almost invincible. It was an exhilarating feeling. He stopped trying to reload the tangle gun and stood up. He sprinted at the policeman, who stood his ground, firing frantically at a target he could not miss and yet did not hit. The tangle strands shattered all around the target. Jadiver swung the gun with his remaining strength; the butt connected with the policeman's forehead. Jadiver scooped up the discarded tangle gun and fired twice at close range, in case the man should decide to revive too soon, which was doubtful. He went back and entered the idling patrol car. He hadn't lost much time, after all. He sat the car down on top of a building near the edge of the rocketport, straightened his clothing and wiped the grime off his face. Some of the disguise went, too, but that no longer mattered much. He stepped out of the elevator and walked casually along the street until he came to the interplanetary flight office. The same robot was there -- would be there every hour, day and night, until the rocketport was expanded and the building tom down and rebuilt, or the robot itself wore out and had to be replaced. The clerk looked up eagerly. "You're back. I knew I could count on you." "I'm interested in that flight you were telling me about," said Jadiver. "We've changed rates," the robot clerk replied, beaming. "It was a bargain before, but just listen to the revised offer. "We pay you, on a per diem basis -- subjective, of course. When yu arrive, you actually have a bank account waiting for you." Per diem, subjective -- the time that seemed to elapse when the rocket was traveling near the speed of light. It wasn't as good as the robot made it sound. "Never mind that," said Jadiver. "I'll take it if it's going far." "Going far!" echoed theclerk. A policeman sauntered by outside, just looking, but that was enough. "I said I'd take it," Jadiver repeated in a loud voice. The clerk deflated. "I wish I could go with you," it explained wistfully. It reached under the counter and pulled out a perforated tape. "This will get you on the ship, and it also constitutes the contract. Just present it at the other end and collect your money. You can send for your baggage after you're on board." Jadiver opened his mouth and then closed it. His baggage was intangible, mostly experience, not much of it pleasant. "I'll do that," he said. The clerk came out from behind the counter and watched Jadiver leave. Lights from the rocketport glittered in its robot eyes. It was not enough to be on it, for the police could still trace him. And if they did, they could get him off. It was not only himself, there was his unknown friend. They had ways to learn about that. He passed a vision port on his way through the ship. It was night, but it didn't seem so on the vast, brightly lighted concrete plain. A strange vehicle streaked across the surface of the rocketport in defiance of all regulations and common sense. It was coming his way. It dodged in and out of rockets landing and taking off, escaping blazing destruction with last minute, intricate maneuvers. The driver had complete control of the vehicle and was fantastically skillful. It was a strange machine. Jadiver had never seen anything quite like it. As far as he knew, it resembled nothing the police used. It didn't halt outside the ship. The loading ramp was down and the machine came up without hesitation. The entrance was too narrow and the vehicle would never get through -- that seemed evident. An instant later, he was not so sure. The ship quivered and groaned and vibrations ran throughout the structure. He leaned over the railing and looked down. The 'machine was inside, dented and scraped. "Captain," bellowed a voice from the vehicle. It was an authoritative voice and it puzzled Jadiver. The captain came running, either in response to the command or to find out how much damage had been done in the crash and why. "Take off, Captain," said the voice. "Take off at once." The captain sputtered. "I give orders here. I'll take off when I get ready." "You're ready when the ship reaches a certain mass. As soon as I came on board, you attained it. Check your mass gauges, Captain." The captain hurried to the gauges and glanced at them. He stared back at the machine. "Captain," purred the machine, "you have a little daughter. By the time you get back, she will be grown and will have children of her own. The sooner you leave, the sooner you will see her again. I will regard it as a personal favor if you see that we take off immediately." The captain looked at the machine. Tentacles and eye stalks rose up out of the tip as he watched. It was a big machine, well put together, and it appeared quite capable of handling a roomful of armed men. As a matter of fact, it just had. The captain shrugged and gave the order to lift ship. TT was none too soon. Out of the visionport, Jadiver could see uniformed men edging up from the underground shelters. They backed out of sight when the rockets began to flame. Faster the ship rose and higher. They were in the dense clouds and then through them, out in the clear black of space, away from Venus. Jadiver looked down at the machine. It wasn't a vehicle. It was a robot, and it was familiar. "It ought to be familiar," said the robot softly. That voice was for him alone, directly on the auditory nerve. "You designed most of it back on Earth, remember?" He remembered. It was not a pretty imitation of a human -- it was his perfect robot. And it was also his unknown friend, the one who had watched over him. He walked slowly down the stairs and stood beside it. The robot switched to the regular speaking voice. "They built your design, after all. They needed a big and powerful mobile robot, one that could house, in addition to the regular functions, an extensive and delicate mechanism." That was the voice that had haunted him so long and in so many situations. It was not Jadiver's own voice, but it resembled his. A third person might not recognize the difference. "That other mechanism," said Jadiver. "Is that the one that monitors the circuit in my body?" "That parallels the circuit in your body." Tentacles were busy straightening out the dents. "When I was built, they gave me a good mind, better than your own in certain respects. What I lacked was sensory perception. Eyes and ears, to be sure, good ones in a way, but without the delicate shadings a human has, particularly tactile interpretations. I didn't need better, they thought, because my function was to observe and report on the parallel circuit I mentioned. "In the beginning, that circuit was a formless matrix and only faintly resembled your nervous system. As nerve data was exchanged back and forth, it began to resemble you more and more, especially your mind. Now, for practical purposes, it is you and I can look into it at will." Jadiver stirred uneasily. "Don't you understand?" asked the robot. "My mind isn't yours, and vice versa. But we do have one thing in common, a synthetic nervous system which, if you were killed, would begin to disintegrate slowly and painfully. And now that it's developed as much as it is, I would probably die, too, since that synthetic nervous system is an otherwise unused part of my brain." "There were two other victims before me," said Jadiver. "There were, but they were derelicts -- dead, really, before the experiment got started. They lasted a few hours. I tried to help them, but it was too late. It was not pleasant for me."  had a vital interest in keeping him alive. He could trust it, had to. After what had happened, doubt wasn't called for. Jadiver rubbed his weary eyes. "That shield I used," he said. "Did it work?" The robot laughed -- Jadiver's laughter. It had copied him in many ways. "It worked to your disadvantage. The circuit signals got through to me, but I couldn't send any back until Doumya Filone chipped off part of your disguise. Then I spoke to you. Before that, I had to misdirect the police. I built up a complete and false history for you and kept them looking where you weren't." If he had thought, he would have known it had to be that way. The police were efficient; they could have taken him long ago without the aid of the circuit. But it had seemed so easy and they had trusted the robot -- had to where the circuit was concerned. No man could sit in front of a screen and interpret the squiggles that meant his hand was touching an apple. Jadiver sat down. The strain was over and he was safe, bound for some far-off place. "The police used you, though not as much as you used them," he said. "Still, they didn't develop the theory." "They didn't. There was a man on Earth, a top-notch scientist. He worked out the theory and set up the mechanism. He had a surgical assistant, a person who would never be more than that on Earth because she wasn't good on theory, though she was a whiz at surgery. She realized it and got his permission to build another machine and take it to Venus. Originally it was intended to accumulate data on the workings of the human nervous system. "On Venus, things were diferent. Laws concerning the rights of individuals are not so strict. New novel asks tricky question Suppose someone invented razor blades that never grew dull, electric light bulbs that never grew dim, automobiles guaranteed to last for generations. Good idea? It sounds like a fine idea, but for the people of # this sudden and mysterious windfall carried a frightful price tag -- the destruction of our entire civilization! vent i ve new science fiction novel, tells the story of a young writer caught up in this strange threat to man's future -- a bewildering tangle that involved a badly frightened business executive, a lovely literary agent, a helpful robot, a child's toy top with 'magical' properties, and the awesome possibilities of an endless chain of identical Earths. ized in this magazine last year, was one of the most provocative stories ever to appear in Galaxy. If you read it then, you'll certainly want to own a permanent copy of this s-f masterpiece; if you missed it, there's a treat in store for you. Just published, price #. Dept. S-#, # Fifth Ave., N.Y. # Oentlemen: Please send me a copy of Ring Around the Sun. I will pay postman # plus a few cents postage. If not delighted I may return book in # days for refund of purchase price. ers pay postage. Same refund guarantee, j She got the idea of examining the whole nervous system at once, not realizing what it meant because it had never been done that way. She discussed it with officials from the police department who saw instantly what she didn't -- that once an extensive circuit was in a human, there was no way to get it out, except by death. They had no objecfurnish her with specimens, for their own purposes and only incidentally hers. Once the first man died, they had her and wouldn't let her back out, though she wanted to." Specimen," repeated Jadiver. "Yeah, I was a specimen to her." His head was heavy. "Why didn't you tell me this in the beginning?" "Would you have listened when I first contacted you?" asked the robot. "Later, perhaps. But once you put on the shield, I couldn't get in touch with you until you were with Doumya Filone." ed? Not until it became a matter of raw survival. Even now he hated to leave Earth and what , it meant for the unknown dangers and tedium of a planet circling an alien sun. It was more than that, of course. Just as he'd had a design for a perfect robot, he had in mind a perfect woman. He could recognize either when he saw it. "Doumya Filone was the assistant?" "She was." The robot was his now, Jadiver knew. Others had built it, but it belonged to him by virtue of a nervous system. It had as good a mind as his, but it wouldn't dispute his claim. "Like yourself," continued the robot, "in the Solar System she would never have been more than second rate, and she wanted to be first. Hardly anyone recognizes it, but the Solar System is not what it once was. It's like a nice neighborhood that decays so slowly that the people in it don't notice what it's become. There are some who can rise even in a slum, but they're the rare exceptions. "Others need greater opportunity than slums offer. They have to leave if they expect to develop freely. But the hold of a whole culture is strong and it's hard to persuade them that they have to go." The robot paused. "Take a last look at a blighted area." Outside planets glimmered in the distance. Jadiver was tired and his eyes were closing. Now he could sleep safely, but not in peace. "Don't regret it," advised the robot. "Where you're going, you'll have real designs to work on. No more pretty robot faces." "Where is it -- Alpha Centauri?" Jadiver asked disinterestedly. "That ship left yesterday. They got their quota and left within the hour, before any of the passengers could change their minds. We're going farther, to Sirius."  planets to match. It was a place to be big. Big and lonely. "I can't force you to do anything," said the robot. It sounded pleased. "But I have no inhibitions about others." The robot flipped up its cowl. There was a storage space and a woman in it. Except for her hands, she was bound tightly by tangle strands. "I don't think she likes you at the moment," said the robot. "She'll tell you that as soon as she's able to speak. She may relent later, when she realizes what it's really like on Sirius. You've got the whole voyage to convince her." The eye-stalks of the robot followed Jadiver interestedly. "Are you looking for the tongs? Remember that the tangle stuff is repelled by your skin." and the tangle strands fell off. As the robot had predicted, Doumya Filone was not silent -- at first. With this reproduction of the powerful cover by Powers to guide you, you Fantasy Fiction, now on your newsstand. Here is the exciting contents page of the first issue: by Theodore Sturgeon by Frank M. Robinson the water eater Most experiments were dropped because they failed -- and some because they worked too well! too anxious to find it. Instead, I sure wish I had gone fishing with McCarthy and the boys like I'd planned. I drive a beer truck for a living, but here it is almost noon Monday and I haven't turned a wheel. Sure, I get beer wholesale, and I have been known to take some advantage of my discount. But that wasn't what happened to this weekend. Instead of fishing or bowling or poker or taking the kids down to the amusement park over Saturday and Sunday, I've been losing sleep over an experiment. Down at the Elks' Club, the boys say that for a working stiff I have a very inquiring mind. I guess that's because they always see me reading Popular Science and Scientific American and such, instead of heading for the stack of Esquires that are piled a foot deep in the middle of the big table in the reading room, like the rest of them do. Well, it was my inquiring mind that lost me my wife, the skin of my right hand, a lot of fun and sleep -- yeah, not a wink of sleep for two days now! Which is the main reason I'm writing this down now. I've read somewheres that if you wrote down your troubles, you could get them out of your system. I thought I had troubles Friday night when I pulled into the driveway and Lottie yelled at me from the porch, "The fire's out! And it's flooded. Hurry up!" Trouble, hah! That was just the beginning. " waitress as ever flipped the suds off a glass of beer, but she just ain't mechanically minded. The day Uncle Alphonse died and left us # and I went out and bought a kitchen and shed full of appliances for her, that was a sad day, all right. She has lived a fearful life ever since, too proud of her dishwasher and automatic this and that to consider selling them, but scared stiff of the noises they make and the vibrations and all the mysterious dials and lights, etc. So this Friday afternoon when the oil-burner blew out from the high wind, she got terrified, sent the kids over to their grandmother's in a cab and sat for two hours trying to make up her mind whether to call the fire department or the plumber. Meanwhile, this blasted oil stove was overflowing into the fire pot. "Well, turn it off!" I yelled. "I'll be in right away!" I ducked into the garage and got a big handful of rags and a hunk of string and a short stick. This I have been through before. I went in and kissed her pretty white face, and a couple of worry lines disappeared. "Get me a pan or something," I said and started dismantling the front of the heater. These gravityflow oil heaters weren't built to make it easy to drain off excess oil. There's a brass plug at the inlet, but no one in history has been able to stir one, the oil man told me. I Weigh # pounds stripped, but all I ever did was ruin a tool trying. The only way to get out the oil was to open the front, stuff rags down through the narrow fire slot, sop up the stuff and fish out the rags with the string tied around one end of the bundle. Then you wring out the rags with your bare hands into a pan. "Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster! It'll be hard to clean out the oil smell!" But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a halfpint of oil into it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking how lousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling glad that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living. lit with only one serious blast of soot out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and set the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie was peeling potatoes for dinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind of apologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot and oil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, for gosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least. The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in little shrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home for Sunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oil smell out of the pan. "Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaning soaps and stuff and let's see what we got." Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helper compound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in high school, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my pals used to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been reading the science magazines right along ever since. So I know what a detergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuff that most people take the advertisers' word for. "This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?" She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffee pot. She remembered it specially. I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained. "What's saponify?" Lottie asked. "That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap." "But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?" We went into the business of soap-making pretty deep. Meanwhile, I read some more labels and added pinches of this and that detergent and a few squirts of liquid "wonder-cleaners" that didn't say what was in them. In her crisp Scotch way, Lottie got across to me that she thought I was wasting soap powder and my time and cluttering up the sink while she was busy there, so I wound up with half a cup of Doozey soap flakes, filled the pan to the brim and set the concoction at the back of the drain board to do its business. "" in the living room reading the paper when I heard Lottie muttering at the sink. Lottie doesn't usually mutter, so I went out to see what was wrong. "Nice mess," she said and pointed at the roaster. The stuff had cooled and jelled into a halfsolid condition. "Hah!" I said. "We had a supersaturated solution. When it cooled off, it coagulated." Lottie scowled. It makes her nervous when I use big words 'Which I only do when I'm talking about chemistry and the like. "Well, uncoogalate it and dump it out of my roaster," she told me. My scientific inquiring mind  was stirred as I lifted the pan over to the table under the center light. We had here a gelatin of various cleaners, and every one of them claiming to be best ever. What would this new combination do? I grabbed a pan off the stove that had a mess of scorched carrot leavings in the bottom. Lottie had been soaking it with about a half inch of water. As I reached for a tablespoon, Lottie objected. "Look, now, if you are going to start another experiment, dump that mess out first and let me work on the roaster. I saved about a cupful of the slimy gunk and she went back to her dishes. "You'll be sorry," I said under my breath, "if this turns out to be the only batch of the finest cleaner in the whole world. And us with only a cupful." A minute later, I was glad she hadn't heard me. When I dropped a little glob of the stuff into the carrot pan and stirred it around a bit, instead of dissolving and diluting in the extra water, the mixture seemed to stay the same density after swallowing up the water. "Give me a pie tin," I demanded. Lottie sighed, but she got a shallow pan out of the pantry and handed it to me. Then I poured the jelly out of the carrot pan and I made my first important discovery. The stuff was not good for cleaning out scorched carrots. The pot was bone-dry. So were the carrots. They had a desiccated look and were stuck worse than ever to the bottom. I brushed them with my finger and the top layers powdered to dust. Then I noticed that not a droplet or smidgin of the jelly remained in the pot. When I had poured it out, it had gone out all at the same time, as if it was trying to hang together. The carbonized carrots at the very bottom were hard and dry, too. A scrape job if I ever saw one.  rTiHE pie tin was now full almost to the rim. The globby stuff sort of rolled around, trying to find a flat condition, which it finally did. The motion was not as startling as the sudden quiet that settled over the surface after a last ripple. The stuff looked like it was waiting. The temptation was worse than a park bench labeled "wet paint," so I stuck my finger in it. Right in the middle of it. A ripple flashed out from the center like when you drop a pebble in a pool, and the ripple hit the brim and converged back to my finger. When it hit, the surface climbed up my finger about an eighth of an inch. Another ripple, another eighth of an inch, and about now I felt something like a gentle sucking sensation. Also, another feeling I can only tell you was "unclammy." I jerked away fast and shook my finger hard over the pan, but it wasn't necessary. None of the stuff had stayed with me. In fact, my finger was dry -- powdery dry! Then I got the feeling that someone was staring over my shoulder. There was. It was Lottie, and she had a look of horror on her face that didn't help my nerves a bit. "Get rid of it, Charlie!" she cried. "Get rid of it! Please throw it out!" "Now, now, honey," I said. "It ain't alive." "It is!" she insisted. Lottie chatters quite a bit and pretty well speaks her mind. But she doesn't go around making assertions. When she does come out flat-footed with a serious statement, it is always from the bottom of her #carat womanly intuition, and she is practically always right. "How could it be alive?" I argued. I often argue when I know I'm wrong. This time I argued because I wanted to wipe that awful look off my wife's face. "Come on in the living room and relax," I said. A ND then sweet-natured, honey-haired little Lottie did a violent thing. Still staring over my shoulder at the pie tin, she screamed wide-open and ran out of the house. A second later, I heard her start the car out the driveway at # miles an hour in reverse. She burned rubber out in front and was gone. I hadn't moved an inch. Because when she screamed, I looked back at the jelly to see why, and the stuff had oozed over the edge and was flowing slowly toward me. I know a little about Korzybski and how he wanted everybody to make what he called a corticothalamic pause whenever they get scared as hell. So I was making this cortico-thalamic pause, which is really counting to ten before you do anything, while Lottie was leaving the house. When I got through with my pause, I jumped backward over my kitchen chair so hard that I must have knocked my head on the tile sink-board. When I came to, it was after midnight. The kitchen light was still on. Lottie was still gone. I knew it. If she was here, she'd have had me in bed. No matter how much of my employer's product I have sampled, never has Lottie let me sleep it off on the kitchen floor. Her # pounds is a match for my # in more ways than one, and she takes good care of her man. Then I realized that this was not a stag beer-bust. There was something about a pot of soapjelly. It was still there. A long slug of the half-transparent stuff had strung down off the edge of the table and still hung there like a nasty-looking icicle. The knob on the back of my head throbbed so much that at first I couldn't figure what was wrong with the air. Then my aching dry throat told me what the matter was. The air was dry like the summer we spent at a dude ranch in Arizona. It made my nostrils crimp, and my tongue felt like a mouthful of wrinkled pepperoni. When I got to my feet and looked at the top of the kitchen table, I almost panicked again. But this time the pause worked and I got better results. Alive or dead, the gunk was the most powerful desiccant I'd ever heard of. It had drunk up the water in the carrot pot, sucked the surface moisture from my finger and then spent the past few hours feeding on the humidity in the air. It was thirsty. Like alcohol has affinity for water, this stuff was the same way, only more SO; In fact, it even reached out toward anything that had water in it -- like me. That's why it had oozed over the pan the way it did. that, I asked myself. Plants grow toward water. But plants are alive! That's what Lottie had said -- before she screamed. "So you're thirsty?" I asked it out loud. "Okay, we'll give you a real drink!" I got a bucket from the service porch and took the pancake turner to scrape the gooey nightmare into it. I even caught the drip off the edge, and it seemed quietly grateful to sink back to the parent glob in the pail, which by now amounted to about a quart. I set the pail in the laundry tray and turned on the faucet hard. In about a second and a half, I almost sprained my wrist turning it ioff. Not only did the jelly drink up the water without dissolving, but it started creeping up the stream in a column about three inches in diameter, with the water pouring down its middle. When I got the water shut off, the unholy jelly-spout slopped back disappointedly. And now the bucket was over half full of the stuff. I dropped in an ice-cube as an experiment. It didn't even splash. The surface pulled away, letting the cube make a pretty good dent in it, but then only gradually did the displaced goo creep back around it as if to sample it cautiously. I couldn't stand the dry air any more, so I threw open the doors and windows and let the cool, damp night air come in. The ice-cube had disappeared without even a surface puddle. Now, as the humidity came back, I thought I noticed a restless shimmering in the jelly. The phone rang. It was Lottie's mother wanting to know why Lottie had come over there in hysterics, and where had I been since seven o'clock. I don't remember what I answered, but it served the purpose. Lottie hasn't returned and they haven't called up any more. When I returned to the bucket, it seemed that the stuff was deeper yet, but I couldn't tell because I hadn't marked the level. I got Lottie's fever thermometer out of the medicine chest and took the jelly's temperature. It read # degrees F. The wall thermometer read # degrees, too. Room temperature, with the windows open. What kind of "life" could this be that had no temperature of its own? But then what kind of a fancypants metabolism could you expect out of an organism that fed on nothing but Lake Michigan water, right out of the reservoir? out of Lottie's neat little desk and started making notes. I wondered about the density of the stuff. Ice floated in it and the bucket seemed heavy. I broke the thermometer and tapped a drop of mercury onto the restless surface. The droplet sank slowly to the bottom with no apparent effect either way. Heavier than water. Lighter than mercury. I took a beer out of the refrigerator and swallowed it. The last drops I sprinkled into the pail? The drippings sizzled across the surface until only a fine dust was left. A tiny ripple flipped this dust over to the edge of the pail as if clearing the thirsty decks for action. But this drew my eyes to the rim of the liquid. There was no meniscus, either up or down. Remembering back, I figured this meant there was no surface tension, which reminded me that part of this mixture was made of detergent. But had I created a new form of life? Like Lottie said, was it really alive? Certainly it could reproduce itself. It had brains enough to know the direction of more water, like when it took off after me on the table. Not long ago, there was this important physicist who wrote about how life probably got started away back when the Earth was just forming. He argued that special creation was more or less a lot of hogwash, and that what actually took place was that as the Earth cooled, all the hot chemicals mixing around sort of stumbled onto a combination or two that took on the first characteristics of life. In other words, this guy left off where Mr. Darwin began his theory of evolution. Now me, I don't know. Lottie makes me go to church with the kids every Sunday and I like it. If this chemical theory about life getting started is ' right -- well, then, a lot of people got the wrong idea about things, I always figured. But how would I or this physicist explain this quivering mess of protoplasm I got on my hands by accident this particular Friday night? I experimented some more. I got out the kids' junior encyclopedia and looked up some things I'd forgot, and some I had never learned in the first place. S O it got to be Saturday morning. Fred and Claude phoned about the fishing trip and I made an excuse. No one else bothered me. All day Saturday, I studied. And all Saturday night and Sunday. But I couldn't figure out any sensible answers that would make peace with my minister. It looked like I had created some form of life. Either that or some life-form in the stove oil years had suddenly found a condition to its liking and had decided to give up hibernating in favor of reproduction. What drove me on was the thought that I must have something here that was commercially important -- a new culture of something that would revolutionize some branch of chemistry or biology. I wouldn't even stop to fry an egg. I chewed up some crackers and drank a few more bottles of beer when my stomach got too noisy. I wasn't sleepy, although my eyes felt like they were pushed four inches into my skull.  Junior's little chemistry set didn't tell me very much when I made the few tests I knew how. Litmus paper remained either red or blue when stuck into the jelly. This surprised me a little because this whole mass of desudsed washing compound mixture had started out with a pretty good shot of lye in it. So my notes grew, but my useful information didn't. By midnight Sunday, it appeared that my jelly invention had only one important talent: The ability to drink endlessly anything containing water. And only the water was used, it seemed. Dissolved solids were cast aside in the form of variously colored dusts. By now, the goop had outgrown the pail and was twothirds up in the laundry tub. A slow drip from the faucet kept the surface of my monster in a constant state of frenzy, like feeding a rumpot beer by the thimbleful. It was fascinating to watch the little curleycues of jelly flip up after each drop, reaching for more, and then falling back with a cranky little lash. A T two o'clock this morning, I began to get a little sense in me. Or maybe it was just the fear finally catching up again. There was danger here. I was too fuzzy to know exactly what the danger was, but I began to develop a husky hate for the whole project. "Kill it!" came into my mind. "Get rid of it, Charlie!" Lottie's scream shrilled back into my ears, and this command became very important to me. I became angry. "Want a drink, do you?" I shouted out loud. I put on the tea kettle and when it was to full steam, I took it back to the tub. "I'll give you a drink with a kick in it!" What happened, I would like to forget. Ten times as fast as it had climbed up the cold water spout, it ran up the boiling water stream, into the tea kettle, blew off the lid and swarmed over my hand with a scalding-dry slither that made me drop the kettle into the tub and scream with pain. The jelly steamed and stuck to my flesh long enough to sear it half to the bone. Then it slopped back with the rest and left me grabbing my wrist and tearing at the flesh with my fingernails to stop the pain. Then I got insane mad. I got my big blowtorch I use for peeling paint, and I lit it and pumped it up as high as it would go and aimed it down into that tub. Not too much happened. The jelly shrank away from the roaring blast, but it didn't climb over the edge of the tub. It shrank some more and I poured the flame on. It didn't burn. It just got to be less and less, and what was left began to get cloudy. And when I hit the bottom of the tub, the last glob moved around pretty active, trying to escape the . heat, but I got it. Every damned last shred of it, and I was laughing and crying when I dropped the torch into the tub. I had been holding it with my scalded hand and I guess I fainted. I wasn't out long. I got up and dressed my hand with lard, and it felt pretty good. Took a couple of aspirins and sat down at Lottie's typewriter. I know I won't sleep until I get this off my mind in about the way it happened, because I probably won't believe all of it myself when I get back to normal. I just now went out and fished the blowtorch out of the laundry tub. All there was left in the bottom of the tub was maybe half a pound of singed-looking -- soap flakes? this all down. But I'm still not sleepy. I'm not worried about patching things up with Lottie. She's the most wonderful, understanding wife a guy ever had. My hand feels real good now. I got it wrapped in lard and gauze, and I could drive the truck if I wanted to. I'm not afraid of getting fired or bawled out for not coming to work on time this morning. No, the reason I haven't turned a wheel on my beer truck today is something else. Friday night, when Lottie wanted to wash the roaster, I saved only a cup of the jelly for my experiments. The rest she washed down the drain. The sewer empties into Lake Michigan. The brewery where I load up is right on the shore of Lake Michigan. I'm afraid to drive down there and look. new Catalog No. #. bringing your favorite authors of Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Weird adventures as ir as your mailbox! # pages, complete descriptions, fully illustrated and it doesn't cost you a cent ! Send your name and address -- you II get your copy by return mail... and we'll continue to keep you posted   --  j -- i i.n...Ma. rtf n.K.rc Bari Bargain buys... titles as we're doing for thousands of others. galore! Write today! # E. San Fernando St.  Dept. G-#  San Jose #J. California there lived in my father's town of Koenigsberg a gentleman by the name of Christian Goldbach. He was a mathematician by profession and a good one, though not an outstanding genius or a great innovator in his science. When he died in # he left a theorem behind which is in itself simple enough to be understood by a school child. It does not even need to be expressed as a formula to be stated concisely. It simply says that every even number can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. Try it. Any two prime numbers from "#" on up will always result in an even number when added together. Nor will you be able to find an even number that cannot be expressed as the sum of two primes. If the figure you pick is not too small, it can probably be expressed as the sum of two primes in a number of different ways. For example, # can be written as #  #, or as #I  #, #f #, #f#, ##, and a number of other ways. The trouble with Goldbach's beautiful and simple theorem is that it cannot be proved. Trying it out on any number of figures is no proof, if only because the amount of even numbers is infinite. A proof would consist of a sentence, or a paragraph, or, if necessary, a book which shows why this has to be so. Goldbach himself could not furnish such proof and later mathematicians, both professional and amateur, who went after the problem had to give up sooner or later in total defeat. dle, it is often useful to establish all the characteristics of the units involved. If we knew enough about the mathematical laws governing prime numbers, we might find the one which is responsible for the workability of Goldbach's theorem. That alone might be the reason why we can't prove it, for if there are specific laws governing the occurrence and structure of prime numbers, we haven't found them yet. But let's go over the ground systematically and begin with the definition of a prime number. That's easy -- a prime number is a whole number which does not have any divisors. Or to put it into the stricter language of number theory: "An integer p which is larger than I is called a prime number if the only divisors are the trivial ones  I and  p." In this phraseology, the "#" is not considered a prime number, but many number theorists count "#" as a prime number, too. They are all agreed that "#" is a prime number, the only even prime number in existence. It is also the only prime which -- for just this reason -- must be left out when using Goldbach's theorem. The next number "#" is also a prime and so are "#," "#," and "#." After them follow "#," "#" and "#." A method for establishing prime numbers has come down to us from antiquity and is known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes. To use it, you write down all the numbers in the interval you wish to investigate, say from "#" to "#." Then you cross out all even numbers except the "#," for all even numbers are divisible by "# " Next you cross out all remaining numbers which are divisible by "#," except the "#" itself. They are easy to recognize, even when very large, because all you have to do is add their digits together. If your number is #, you form the sum #-#  # #  #  #, with "#" divisible by "#," which means that the figure itself is divisible by "#." Then you cross out all numbers ending with a "#" for they are divisible by "#" (the numbers ending in a "#" which are also divisible by "#" are already gone since they are also even) and then you proceed to those divisible by "#." It can easily be seen that you use successively larger primes, as you establish them, to knock out all the multiples of these primes. The process is tedious, but reliable. The next question is how many prime numbers there are. By means of the Sieve of Eratosthenes, it has been established that there are # prime numbers in the first hundred; # in the first thousand; # in the first two thousand; # in the first show what one would suspect, anyway; namely, that the primes get rarer as we move up the ladder into larger and larger figures. If we go sufficiently high, will we come to a point where there are no primes left? T HE answer is no and again the proof has come to us from antiquity. Euclid himself established it. Supposing somebody claimed that the figure Z were the largest and last of the prime numbers, we then take all the smaller primes and multiply them, beginning with I times # times # times # times # times #I and we go through all of them until we have reached the prime below Z. Then we multiply the whole by Z, obtaining a much larger figure which we call P. Because of the way we constructed this figure, we can be certain that P is not a prime. But how about P  #? Well, P  I either is a prime or it isn't. If it is, we have a prime much bigger than Z. If P  I is not a prime, it can only be divisible by an unknown prime which must be smaller than P, but larger than Z. So whether P  I is a prime or not, it proves that Z cannot be the largest prime. No matter how high we climb in the realm of numbers, every once in a while we are bound to encounter a prime. This, of course, brings up the question about the largest prime actually known. It is a really monstrous figure, even though it can be written down in a simple form: # # -- #. This, at any event, is easier to memorize than the same figure in arithmetic long hand where it reads: #. How # # -- I was found is a small story in itself. At this point, it is important that this figure had to be found and then established as a prime. It could not be constructed, for there is no method of constructing large primes. Quite a number of mathematicians have tried to find such a method, partly because they might have been bored with the tedious Sieve of Eratosthenes; mostly, however, because a method of constructing primes would be a version of one of the mathematical laws governing prime numbers. Probably the first attempt to find such a method was that of Pierre de Fermat, a Frenchman who lived from #I to # and who, although technically an "amateur," was one of the great mathematicians of history. Pierre de Fermat believed that the expression # ( # ")  I where "n" successively assumes the value of #, #, #, #, etc., could be used for the construction of primes. Not of all primes, of course, but he thought that every figure constructed in accordance with that expression would be a prime. In action, it would look like this: n#, therefore #'#-## nl. #  ## n#. #  I  # n#, #" ## n#, # # ## n#, # m I # and up to # these figures actually are primes. The figure for n# was also believed to be a prime for at least a hundred years. But then the great Leonhard Euler, who lived at about the same time as Goldbach, found this "prime" could be obtained by multiplying # by #. limitation of his own method makes one wonder whether he and his compatriot and contemporary Marin Mersenne actually possessed a (lost) method for recognizing large primes instantly. The existence of such a method had been suspected because of the following: One day, Fermat received a letter asking whether # was a prime. Reportedly. Fermat replied without hesitation that the figure was not a prime, but the product of two primes, # and #. Nobody knows how he could tell so fast, but the assumption of a method for recognizing large primes is not convincing in the light of the breakdown of his own formula. At this point I have to devote a few lines to Monsieur Marin Mersenne, who engaged in correspondence with all the mathematicians of his time and was practically a one-man mathematical clearing house. If he were alive now, he would undoubtedly be the editor of a mathematical journal. In one of his books there is a short paragraph about numbers of a certain kind which have come to be called "Mersenne's Numbers," even though most mathematicians suspect that they are really Fermat's. But since Fermat's name is associated with several other things, the designation with Mersenne's name is quite useful. The numbers in question are numbers of the form # P -- I and if this expression reminds you of the largest prime known, you are correct; it is one of "Mersenne's numbers." Boiled down to a minimum of words, Mersenne's statement reads that numbers of the form # P -- I are primes if p is #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, # or #. In writing this down, Mersenne (or his printer) made an error -- the figure # should read #. Also, the two numbers # and # should have been included. Checking this statement was, of course, a terrible grind, especially in the higher numbers. The low ones are easy: M t (this is the way Mersenne's numbers are usually designated) is simply "#," M # is "#," M # is "#," M # is "#." As the rule says neither M # nor M # is a prime, the former is "#" and the latter "#," both divisible by "#." M # is larger than a hundred, namely #; Mi # is #, M i# is #I and M # is #. All these numbers were established as early as # by an Italian named Cataldi. The method he used was to divide the number to be checked by all prime numbers smaller than the square root of the number under investigation. Leonhard Euler established that M #I is a prime -- it is, of course, easy to find their numerical values, but hard to show what these numbers are once you have them. Two mathematicians, Pervouchine and Seelhoff, established the nature of M # i and incidentally that it should be M fiI and not Me-, and the American mathematician R. E. Powers added Mo to the list (in #) and three years later M # . The next higher Mersenne prime is M l# # or # # -- l, the largest prime known and verified. The verification was done quite some time ago, by the French mathematician Lucas in #, but it was not written out numerically until the #'s. time and wish to amuse themselves by constructing a few large primes might work with two expressions which, within limits, can be used for this purpose. One reads n # -- n  #. Here n, as usual, is #, #, #, #, and so forth. It works for all values of n up to #. When n grows to be #, the expression defeats itself, for it then becomes #I # -- #I #I which is obviously #I # and, being a square, cannot be a prime. Similarly, the expression n # -- #n  #I produces primes only if n equals # or less; it collapses when n reaches #. Let's see now how far we have progressed. All we really know is that there is no limit to the number of primes. Everywhere else we have failed -- we don't have a method of constructing primes and we don't have a simple method of recognizing one when we find it. We can't even tell how many primes there must be between, say, #I and #. A certain formula says that the number of primes between I and X resembles the figure you get when you divide X by its own "natural" (or basis e) logarithm. But the result only resembles the truth. For X  #, the formula yields # instead of #; for X  #, it produces # instead of #, while for X  l', #, #, the figure is # and should be #. So the best you can expect is a general guess -- all the hard work has to be done just as if that formula did not exist. Now let's look at something else. Low in the realm of numbers you have quite an assortment of "pairs of primes." Typical examples are #:#, #:#, #:#, #:# and #:#, two primes separated by one (even) number only. We know that primes must occur, if rarely, no matter how large the figures. How about prime pairs? Nobody can tell; there is no proof either way. Nor is there any rule for the interval between primes. Low down, between "#" and "#," the intervals are small. The first interval over five numbers occurs between "#" and "#," the first interval of more than ten numbers between "#" and "#." Naturally the intervals grow larger as the figures grow; the largest knowninterval occurs between # and #, an interval of # numbers. It is almost needless to add that there is no known rhyme or reason to those intervals, either. In short, in spite of centuries of mathematical effort, the prime numbers are still as intractable as they were in the time of Euclid. As for Goldbach's theorem, I was still taught, some twenty-five, years ago, that nobody had succeeded in doing anything about it. That has changed to some extent. According to George Gamow, two Russian mathematicians have made some inroads on the problem. One of them, Schnirelman, proved in #I that each even number is the sum of not more than # primes. Now this might be an interesting mathematical development, but the outsider has the distinct impression that "not more than # primes" isn't much help. A dozen years or so after Schnirelman came Vinogradoff, proving that every even number can be expressed as the sum of four primes. But Goldbach's assertion that it can be done with two primes has been found correct for every case actually tried. There are mathematical honors to be had for the man or woman #I who can do better than Vinogradoff and prove why. a comic strip currently appearing in a number of newspapers, several letters ask whether it might not be possible that there is a planet circling the Sun in the same orbit as the Earth, in such a manner that the Sun is always between us and that other planet so that we'll never be able to discover it. These letters were answered as they came in. This item is intended to forestall those that haven't been written yet. To begin with, the idea of a planet "at the other end" of Earth's orbit is not precisely new. It was invented more than two thousand years ago by the Pythagorean philosophers who saw an urgent mystical need for another body in the Solar System. It has to be remarked first that they had something they called the "central fire" of which the Sun was said to be merely a reflection. Now if you counted the bodies in the "Universe" (Solar System to us), you had the "central fire," Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- eight altogether. Adding the Earth made nine. But the figure nine was not acceptable to the Pythagoreans. There had to be ten bodies and the way out was to postulate the existence of a "counter-Earth" or Antikhthon. Needless to say, no other philosophical school paid the faintest attention to this innovation. But somehow the idea seems to be intriguing. For an answer, one could point out that there is no "counterMars" and no "counter-Venus" or "counter-Jupiter." We could see those if they existed. But this, it must be admitted, is no logical proof. Saturn's rings are real even though no other planet in the Solar System has rings. So we are forced to approach this problem from a different angle. If there were a planet like the ancient Antikhthon, we could never see it. This does not mean, however, that we could not detect its presence. Forever hidden in the glare of the Sun though it would be, the effects of its gravitational field would not stay hidden. It should influence the orbit of Venus. Venus, if there were such an unknown planet, would "unaccountably" deviate from the orbit calculated for it. In fact, the behavior of Venus would enable us to calculate the mass of the unknown planet, especially since would know its distance from the Sun, which would have to be But Venus fails to show any such "perturbations." As a result, we can take it for granted that the Antik,hthon does not exist. Why does a full Moon look larger on the horizon than it does at its zenith? It seems the exact opposite should be true, as the Moon on the horizon is farther away than the Moon overhead. Charles Ti singer y Bks. S#, N.A.T.T.C. Memphis #, Tennessee This question is a perennial -- and let's admit it right in the first sentence -- unsolved problem. It is not an astronomical problem, for, as reader Tisinger points out, the Moon overhead is closer to the observer. The difference is on the order of # miles which, compared m to the Moon's distance of # miles, is so little that it would not be apparent to nakedeye observation. The problem is somewhere in the realm of either physiology or psychology and probably a mixture of both. Some have tried to explain it by saying that the phenomenon is caused by the position of the head. If you watch the Moon on the horizon, you look straight ahead, whereas, if you watch it near the zenith, you have to lean back. If that were the t whole answer, the phenomenon should disappear by making both observations lying down. One man actually claims that it did disappear under these circumstances. Maybe it worked for him, but it does not work for me. Another explanation says that yon have nothing with which to compare the size of the Moon when it is high in the sky, while you do have objects (trees, buildings, hills) for comparison near the horizon. In my opinion, this should tend to make it look smaller at the horizon, but I know the Moon looks bigger. In short: explanation unsatisfactory. I have read that so-called shooting stars are new comets passing through our solar system. If this isn't true, what are they? Larry Willey # Dawson Avenue Mansfield, Ohio Shooting stars are tiny particles entering our atmosphere from space, at speeds ranging anywhere from # to # miles per second. They are so tiny that you could not feel them if you held some in the palm of your hand. Compressing the atmosphere in their paths, they are heated to such an extent that the vast majority of them vaporize. Only a small fraction of their number reach the ground at all. Far from being "new comets," they are most likely debris of very old comets which slowly disintegrated in their orbits many thousands of years ago. How did Halley know the time of his comet's return on a #year schedule? Did he live to see his comet appear twice? And how is it that comets have never collided with the planets? Shaler Morris Veteran's Home, Calif. Dr. Edmond Halley saw "his" comet only once, in #, when he was about # years old. He had just gone over a list of comet observations and, while there had been many comets at Unpredictable intervals, his suspicion was aroused by the fact that a large and bright comet had been seen at #-year intervals. There had been one in #, one in # and his own observation in #. He felt confident that this was the same comet, moving in a closed orbit, and predicted its return for the year #. Incidentally, the comet was not labeled "Halley's Comet" until the prediction was verified by actual observation. As for the third question, the answer is that we do not know whether a comet has ever collided with a planet. We know it has not happened during the last few centuries, but we cannot be positive about the past. warm It was a joyous journey Anders set out on... to reach his goal... but look where he wound upl l dressed except for his  m shoes and black bow tie, contemplating, with a certain uneasiness, the evening before him. In twenty minutes he would pick up Judy at her apartment, and that was the uneasy part of it. He had realized, only seconds ago, that he was in love with her. Well, he'd tell her. The evening would be memorable. He would propose, there would be kisses,and the seal of acceptance would, figuratively speaking, be stamped across his forehead. Not too pleasant an outlook, he decided. It really would be much more comfortable not to be in love. What had done it? A look, a touch, a thought? It didn't take much, he knew, and stretched his arms for a thorough yawn. "Help me!" a voice said. His muscles spasmed, cutting off the yawn in mid-moment. He sat upright on the bed, then grinned and lay back again. "You must help me!" the voice insisted. Anders sat up, reached for a polished shoe and fitted it on, giving his full attention to the tying of the laces. "Can you hear me?" the voice asked. "You can, can't you?" That did it. "Yes, I can hear you," Anders said, still in a high good humor. "Don't tell me you're my guilty subconscious, attacking me for a childhood trauma I never bothered to resolve. I suppose you want me to join a monastery." "I don't know what you're talking about," the voice said. "I'm no one's subconscious. I'm me. Will you help me?" Anders believed in voices as much as anyone ; that is, he didn't believe in them at all, until he heard them. Swiftly he catalogued the possibilities. Schizophrenia was the best answer, of course, and one in which his colleagues would concur. But Anders had a lamentable confidence in his own sanity. In which case -- "Who are you?" he asked. "I don't know," the voice answered. Anders realized that the voice was speaking within his own mind. Very suspicious. "You don't know who you are," Anders stated. "Very well. Where are you?" "I don't know that, either." The voice paused, and went on. "Look, I know how ridiculous this must sound. Believe me, I'm in some sort of limbo. I don't know how I got here or who I am; but I want desperately to get out. Will you help me?" voice speaking within his head, Anders knew that his next decision was vital. He had to accept -- or reject -- his own sanity. He accepted it. "All right," Anders said, lacing the other shoe. "I'll grant that you're a person in trouble, and that you're in some sort of telepathic contact with me. Is there anything else you can tell me?" "I'm afraid not," the voice said, with infinite sadness. "You'll have to find out for yourself." "Can you contact anyone else?" "No." "Then how can you talk with me?" "I don't know." Anders walked to his bureau mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, whistling softly under his breath. Having just discovered that he was in love, he wasn't going to let a little thing like a voice in his mind disturb him. "I really don't see how I can be of any help," Anders said, brushing a bit of lint from his jacket. "You don't know where you are, and there don't seem to be any distinguishing landmarks. How am I to find you?" He turned and looked around the room to see if he had forgotten anything. "I'll know when you're close," the voice said. "You were warm just then." "Just then?" All he had done was look around the room. He did so again, turning his head The room, from one angle, slowly. Then it happened, looked different. It was suddenly a mixture of muddled colors, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades he had selected. The lines of wall, floor and ceiling were strangely off proportion, zigzag, unrelated. Then everything went back to normal. "You were very warm," the voice said. "It's a question of seeing things correctly." Anders resisted the urge to scratch his head, for fear of disarranging his carefully combed hair. What he had seen wasn't so strange. Everyone sees one or two things in his life that make him doubt his normality, doubt sanity, doubt his very existence. For a moment the orderly Universe is disarranged and the fabric of belief is ripped. But the moment passes. Anders remembered once, as a boy, awakening in his room in the middle of the night. How strange everything had looked. Chairs, table, all out of proportion, swollen in the dark. The ceiling pressing down, as in a dream. But that had also passed. "Well, old man," he said, "if I get warm again, let me know." "I will," the voice in his head whispered. "I'm sure you'll find me." "I'm glad you're so sure," Anders said gaily, switched off the lights and left. greeted him at the door. Looking at her, Anders sensed her knowledge of the moment. Had she felt the change in him, or predicted it? Or was love making him grin like an idiot? "Would you like a before-party drink?" she asked. He nodded, and she led him across the room, to the improbable green-and-yellow couch. Sitting down, Anders decided he would tell her when she came back with the drink. No use in putting off the fatal moment. A lemming in love, he told himself. "You're getting warm again," the voice said. He had almost forgotten his invisible friend. Or fiend, as the case could well be. What would Judy say if she knew he was hearing voices? Little things like that, he reminded himself, often break up the best of romances. "Here," she said, handing him a drink. Still smiling, he noticed. The number two smile -- to a prospective suitor, provocative and understanding. It had been preceded, in their relationship, by the number one nice-girl smile, the don't misunderstand me smile, to be worn on all occasions, until the correct words have been mumbled. "That's right," the voice said. "It's in how you look at things." Look at what? Anders glanced at Judy, annoyed at his thoughts. If he was going to play the lover, let him play it. Even through the astigmatic haze of love, he was able to appreciate her blue-gray eyes, her fine skin (if one overlooked a tiny blemish on the left temple), her lips, slightly reshaped by lipstick. "How did your classes go today?" she asked. Well, of course she'd ask that, Anders thought. Love is marking time. "All right," he said. "Teaching psychology to young apes -- " "Oh, come now!" "Warmer," the voice said. What's the matter with me, Anders wondered. She really is a lovely girl. The gestalt that is Judy, a pattern of thoughts, expressions, movements, making up the girl I -- I what? Love? Anders shifted his long body uncertainly on the couch. He didn't quite understand how this train of thought had begun. It annoyed him. The analytical young instructor was better off in the classroom. Couldn't science wait until #:# in the morning? "I was thinking about you today," Judy said, and Anders knew that she had sensed the change in his mood. "Do you see?" the voice asked him. "You're getting much better at it." "I don't see anything," Anders thought, but the voice was right. It was as though he had a clear line of inspection into Judy's mind. Her feelings were nakedly apparent to him, as meaningless as his room had been in that flash of undistorted thought. "I really was thinking about you," she repeated. "Now look," the voice said. sions on Judy's face, felt the strangeness descend on him. He was back in the nightmare perception of that moment in his room. This time it was as though he were watching a machine in a laboratory. The object of this operation was the evocation and preservation of a particular mood. The machine goes through a searching process, invoking trains of ideas to achieve the desired end. "Oh, were you?" he asked, amazed at his new perspective. "Yes... I wondered what you were doing at noon," the reactive. machine opposite him on the couch said, expanding its shapely chest slightly. "Good," the voice said, commending him for his perception. "Dreaming of you, of course," he said to the flesh-clad skeleton behind the total gestalt Judy. The flesh machine rearranged its limbs, widened its mouth to denote pleasure. The mechanism searched through a complex of fears, hopes, worries, through halfremembrances of analogous situations, analogous solutions. And this was what he loved. Anders saw too clearly and hated himself for seeing. Through his new nightmare perception, the absurdity of the entire room struck him. "Were you really?" the articulating skeleton asked him. "You're coming closer," the voice whispered. To what? The personality? There was no such thing. There was no true cohesion, no depth, nothing except a web of surface reactions, stretched across automatic visceral movements. He was coming closer to the truth. "Sure," he said sourly. The machine stirred, searching for a response. Anders felt a quick tremor of fear at the sheer alien quality of his viewpoint. His sense of formalism had been sloughed off, his agreed-upon reactions bypassed. What would be revealed next? He was seeing clearly, he realized, as perhaps no man had ever seen before. It was an oddly exhilarating thought. But could he still return to normality? "Can I get you a drink?" the reaction machine asked. At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be. Viewing one's intended as a depersonalized, sexless piece of machinery is not especially conducive to love. But it is quite stimulating, intellectually. Anders didn't want normality. A curtain was being raised and he wanted to see behind it. What was it some Russian scientist -- Ouspensky, wasn't it -- had said? " Think in other categories." That was what he was doing, and would continue to do. "Good-by," he said suddenly. The machine watched him, open-mouthed, as he walked out the door. Delayed circuit reactions kept it silent until it heard the elevator door close. ff'Y'OU were very warm in there," the voice within his head whispered, once he was on the street. "But you still don't understand everything." "Tell me, then," Anders said, marveling a little at his equanimity. In an hour he had bridged the gap to a completely different viewpoint, yet it seemed perfectly natural. "I can't," the voice said. "You must find it yourself." "Well, let's see now," Anders began. He looked around at the masses of masonry, the convention of streets cutting through the architectural piles. "Human life," he said, "is a series of conventions. When you look at a girl, you're supposed to see -- a pattern, not the underlying formlessness." "That's true," the voice agreed, but with a shade of doubt. "Basically, there is no form. Man produces gestalis, and cuts form out of the plethora of nothingness. It's like looking at a set of lines and saying that they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material, extract it from the background and say it's a man. But in truth there is no such thing. There are only the humanizing features that we -- myopically -- attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of viewpoint." "You're not seeing it now," said the voice. "Damn it," Anders said. He was certain that he was on the track of something big, perhaps something ultimate. "Everyone's had the experience. At some time in his life, everyone looks at a familiar object and can't make any sense out of it. Momentarily, the gestalt fails, but the true moment of sight passes. The mind reverts to the superimposed pattern. Normalcy continues." The voice was silent. Anders walked on, through the gestalt city. "There's something else, isn't there?" Anders asked. "Yes." What could that be, he asked himself. Through clearing eyis, Anders looked at the formality he had called his world. He wondered momentarily if he would have come to this if the voice hadn't guided him. Yes. he decided after a few moments, it was inevitable. But who was the voice? And what had he left out? "Let's see what a party looks like now," he said to the voice. npHE party was a masquarade; the guests were all wearing their faces. To Anders, their motives, individually and collectively, were painfully apparent. Then his vision began to clear further. He saw that the people weren't truly individual. They were discontinuous lumps of flesh sharing a common vocabulary, yet not even truly discontinuous. The lumps of flesh were a part of the decoration of the room and almost indistinguishable from it. They were one with the lights, which lent their tiny vision. They were joined to the sounds they made, a few feeble tones out of the great possibility of sound. They blended into the walls. The kaleidoscopic view came so fast that Anders had trouble sorting his new impressions. He knew now that these people, existed only as patterns, on the same basis as the sounds they made and the things they thought they saw. Gestalts, sifted out of the vast, unbearable real world. "Where's Judy?" a discontinuous lump of flesh asked him. This particular lump possessed enough nervous mannerisms to convince the other lumps of his reality. He wore a loud tie as further evidence. "She's sick," Anders said. The flesh quivered into an instant sympathy. Lines of formal mirth shifted to formal woe. "Hope it isn't anything serious," the vocal flesh remarked. "You're warmer," the voice said to Anders. Anders looked at the object in front of him. "She hasn't long to live," he stated. The flesh quivered. Stomach and intestines contracted in sympathetic fear. Eyes distended, mouth quivered. The loud tie remained the same. "My God! You don't mean it!" "What are you?" Anders asked quietly. "What do you mean?" the indignant flesh attached to the ie demanded. Serene within its reality, it gaped at Anders. Its mouth twitched, undeniable proof that it was real and sufficient. "You're drunk," it sneered. Anders laughed and left the party. you don't know," the voice said. "But you were hot! I could feel you near me." "What are you?" Anders asked again. "I don't know," the voice admitted. "I am a person. I am I. I am trapped." "So are we all," Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that made up the gestalt city. And then there were the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water and land. All ridiculous. "Give me a dime for some coffee, mister?" something asked, a thing indistinguishable from any other thing. "Old Bishop Berkeley would give a nonexistent dime to your nonexistent presence," Anders said gaily. "I'm really in a bad way," the voice whined, and Anders perceived that it was no more than a series of modulated vibrations. "Yes! Go on!" the voice commanded. "If you could spare me a quarter -- " the vibrations said, with a deep pretense at meaning. No, what was there behind the senseless patterns? Flesh, mass. What was that? All made up of atoms. "I'm really hungry," the intricately arranged atoms muttered. All atoms. Conjoined. There were no true separations between atom and atom. Flesh was stone, stone was light. Anders looked at the masses of atoms that were pretending to solidity, meaning and reason. "Can't you help me?" a clump of atoms asked. But the clump was identical with all the other atoms. Once you ignored the superimposed patterns, you could see the atoms were random, scattered. "I don't believe in you," Anders said. The pile of atoms was gone. "Yes!" the voice cried. "Yes!" "I don't believe in any of it," Anders said. After all, what was an atom? "Go on!" the voice shouted. "You're hot! Go on!" What was an atom? An empty space surrounded by an empty space. Absurd ! "Then it's all false!" Anders said. And he was alone under the stars. "That's right!" the voice within his head screamed. "Nothing!" But stars, Anders thought. How can one believe -- The stars disappeared. Anders was in a gray nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless gray. Where was the voice? Gone. Anders perceived the delusion behind the grayness, and then there was nothing at all. Complete nothingness, and himself within it. mean? Anders' mind tried to add it up. Impossible. That couldn't be true. Again the score was tabulated, but Anders' mind couldn't accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself. "Where am I?" In nothingness. Alone. Trapped. "Who am I?" A voice. The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, "Is there anyone here?" No answer. But there was someone. All directions were the same, yet moving along one he could make contact .... with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps. "Save me," the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed, except for his shoes and black bow tie. Forecast enough to be called a novella. However, it would take some term-stretching, which we won't do, so it's a novelet. A strong and emotionally urgent one, too, with the sort of alarming problem that somebody once stated as: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." That warning is no solution at all, of course -- especially when the gifts are so desperately needed and seem to have no strings attached. Yet there must be strings! What are they and how much they will cost? seems to be a rollicking novelet... only it isn't. The trouble is that there are two practical jokers in it. One is a man and the other -- well, when a planet turns practical joker, the gags are likely to be cosmic rather than comic. a man whose occupation is useless and outmoded... and another thing when it suddenly isn't! Terran Control specialized in nasty jobs, but the nastiest was taking a dazed young W E were just a few hours from Lotrin, and I looked at Shirley and Ellen and wondered how we were going to settle the problem in time. It wasn't a life-and-death matter; probably none of us was going to die, whatever happened. It would be one way out, of course, for us all to commit suicide. But I couldn't see any of us doing that, including Shirley, even if she knew what we knew. Suicide is never the answer to a problem, it's only at best a compromise with it. We weren't just looking at each other. We were talking, arguing, ranting, dramatizing. Ellen was doing the talking, arguing, ranting and dramatizing, now that she had to take an interest again in what was going on. Shirley was never a talker, and I'm a good listener. Besides, the problem was less Ellen's than it was Shirley's and mine, and often the people who talk most are those who are least involved. I'm one of those people who always have an unconcerned, mildly interested alter ego, observing what's going on, sifting it, hauling up memories and comparing the present with the past. I found it quite easy, while Ellen talked, to run rapidly through our whole association with Shirley, right from the beginning back on Earth.  waiting for us, so there wasn't much chance of our getting an informal look at her. On the way, Ellen was irritated, as usual. Being Ellen, she was keeping me informed on her view of the situation. She drove, keeping her eyes on the road, but throwing out occasional asides. "We aren't just messengers," she muttered. "Anyone at all would have done," she grumbled. "We've never had to do anything I liked less," she complained. Silently, I agreed with that, at least. We were Terran Control agents and we were doing a job that someone had to do. In itself, it was simple and rather boring, which was behind Ellen's complaint that we weren't just messengers. But there was more than simplicity and boredom in it. Much more. The trouble was that we knew exactly what was in it. Sometimes we had been sent out, blind, to do very different jobs for TC, and we hadn't liked that. This time we knew what we were doing and, if anything, we liked it less. "There are more important things we might be doing than escorting an overgrown schoolgirl to Lotrin," Ellen beefed. I quoted ironically from the newscasts. "But what a girl," I said nasally. "What a. history she's going to have. What a life story she will one day be able to write." "Save that for the great galactic public," Ellen snapped. "Anyway, this girl is ordinary. Picked out because she's ordinary, normal, average, typical." She drew up outside the smalltown maisonette where the future First Lady of Lotrin lived. She stopped in her usual way, with a furious jerk of four locked wheels. She didn't wait for me, but was out and crunching up the gravel path while the car was still rocking. We thought at first there was nobody home, and Ellen sneered something about cold feet. But when we went around the back, there was the girl, pretending not to see us. She was draped on a garden seat, wearing a playsuit and reading a book. "Just to show she doesn't care," said Ellen. Ellen, this once, was dead right. Shirley Judson -- we'd seen pictures of her, and this was the girl, all right -- was good-looking. Where she was just attractive, not beautiful, was where current standards of beauty deviated from the norm. Make no mistake about it,  there was nothing in men from falling in love with her. Yet Ellen muttered: "Not chosen for her looks, anyway." I threw an expressive glance at her. Why will women insist on giving their worthless opinions of other women's attractiveness or women who were supposed to fall in love with Shirley. #E moved over to her and in  troduced ourselves. Shirley didn't notice exactly when it became impossible to pretend any more that she hadn't seen us, and give up the pretense, so I suppose technically it's still going on yet. There was casual, pointless conversation -- not about Lotrin. We didn't bow and express our pleasure to meet the First Lady of Lotrin. In fact, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding, we put her very much in her place. At any rate, Ellen did. At first. Ellen always looks like something straight out of Vogue, and in all modesty I can say I have seen worse-looking men of thirtyfive than me. Shirley was a very young twenty-one, and her playsuit, as Ellen soon demonstrated to her without saying a word, was two mistakes. Wearing a playsuit was wrong, and wearing that particular playsuit was wronger. Shirley was keyed up almost to breaking-point, naturally enough. Her nostrils were white, she was breathing quickly and shallowly, and somehow one knew her voice was coming out two tones higher than usual. But that couldn't be helped; the playsuit could. It had been meant to show she was completely at her ease, unimpressed by the solemnity of the occasion, and not in the least scared of us. It did pretty much the opposite. Instead of seeing the nervousness of her hands and face, four curious eyes noted the nervousness of her whole body. And the white frilly rompers suggested child when she wanted to be mature and at no disadvantage with us. And if we wanted to be nasty, which Ellen nearly always does with other women, it was only necessary to look at Shirley's legs or shoulders and then away, with faint distaste, to make it obvious that there was something wrong with the legs, or the display of them, without giving the girl anything she could answer. I haven't covered everything, but you can imagine the general lines of the situation. Anyway, Ellen made the mot of it. I tried to counteract the effect a little, but no one has ever been able to counteract Ellen. Then suddenly, just as the girl was about to cry, Ellen said, "Joe, take a walk," in an unexpectedly brisk tone, and jerked her head. Meekly, I went up the garden. I stopped where I could still see them, but not hear what they said. The funny thing about Ellen is that people don't hate her the way they should. Other people strive hard for affection and don't get it; Ellen seems to put in a lot of good solid work to be hated, only it doesn't turn out that way,. She was very careful with Shirley, I saw, not even touching her at first. Then they were all over each other in that curious way women have. Shirley was crying by this time, of course. Her white shoulders and chestnut hair were mixed up with Ellen's blue frock, and there was a tangle of bare arms and chic elbowlength gloves. And for some reason I had a lump in my throat. much. I wasn't around because Shirley spent most of the next two months in bra and panties or less, being poked and tapped by doctors, getting massages, doing violent exercises and being checked and doublechecked, slipping in and out of dresses, blouses, skirts, slacks and almost every other form of feminine at tire. One might have thought that clothes wouldn't matter much to the First Lady of Lotrin, who would be literally the first woman to set foot on the planet, certainly the last for a long time, and possibly the last ever. But Shirley was going to represent her whole sex on Lotrin. She would have to be supremely feminine, and a few crates of clothes, even if they had to be transported hundreds of light-years at fabulous cost, as these would be, were not regarded by Terran Control as a luxury. They really weren't for Shirley. They were for Lotrin. I wasn't there, but Ellen was, so I naturally heard all about it. I heard the story of every examination, every test, every checkup, every experiment; the details of Shirley's trousseau were inflicted on me. down to the last clip and lace curlicue. Ellen was bored with the whole business and she didn't see why my being a man should excuse me from being bored with them, too. So if anyone wants to know anything at all about what happens to a First Lady -- any First Lady -- before she leaves the New York TC center, just ask me. Nothing too minute, too intimate. The story of the testing and preparation and coaching and beautifying and swearing in and final passing of a First Lady is yours for the asking. Of course it isn't very interesting. I haven't said much about Terran Control. First of all, the name -- it means control of everything from and by Earth. Some say it's a clumsy and unworkable system, bound to fall apart eventually. Maybe it is, but it won't collapse during this generation or the next. Meantime, what TC says goes. And as far as Shirley was concerned, Ellen and I were TC; we represented it. I always say as little for or against TC as possible. This isn't because my job depends on keeping my mouth shut. TC is an autocracy, but not that kind. When you've got a big job in hand, like, say, colonizing a galaxy, there's only one good way of doing it. Before you start, there may be plenty of ways. Again, if you start and fail, you may try another way. But, if you start and don't fail, you have to keep on the way you began. I'm not going to argue about it; I'm just saying what I believe. "NE of the points of TC's way was this: the human race must stay human. There have been enough civil wars without creating new races so that there can be new race wars. The Martian War showed what can happen when men become not-men and somewhere else men stay men. As it happened, the men won -- there are no Martians left. There never will be Martians again while TC rules colonization. Humans can't live on Mars and stay human. Mars is a plague spot, and the ruins of human habitation on the red planet crumble to dust. Venus is another matter. So are the Aldebaran worlds, and the other scattered worlds named for themselves, not their suns -- Jenta, Smith, Babylon, Eyrie, Nostral, Hover, Gluckstein, Fortan, Jissel, Maple. Others, like Mars-r -- Robinson, Dahlia, Mantor, Arka -- are crossed out, forgotten names. Just plague spots. Dead, most of them. Some, unfortunately, are only dying. Others still -- Civnet, Lotrin, Martin, Beckland, Everest, Red Dawn -- have question marks after them. It takes a long time to remove a question mark. But, broadly, the query begins to fade at a set point. After that a world may still turn out to be a plague spot, but that's liable to be a gradual business. People can be taken out and settled elsewhere. Their strain will be watched, they may even be sterilized, but they will still be regarded as men. The set point is the birth of the first child conceived and delivered on the world under study. Scientists and doctors do everything but take the poor kid to pieces. Then they deliver their verdict. They say go ahead, or go ahead cautiously, or wait a while, or hold everything, or stop, or... But no one likes to examine that end of the scale too closely. And that's the main reason why the First Lady is so important. She's the chosen mother of that first child. The father is chosen, too, of course. TC is matchmaker as well as godfather. Shirley and some Lotrin settler whose name I didn't know were the future of Lotrin. The shape of Shirley's life, and the destiny of a whole world, depended on a child she would have by a man she was going out to marry, but had never met. It was a queer situation, though not new any longer. The First Lady of Jenta was dead a long while; so was the First Lady of Smith. The First Lady of Babylon was over a hundred, and still, it was said, went for a swim in a mountain stream every morning. Eyrie's First Lady was ninetythree. Nostral's was not only First Lady, but President of Nos tral as well. So on down to Maple's First Lady, who could still wear a playsuit like Shirley's, and to better effect, from what I'd been told. I'm not, if I can help it, going to say anything about the First Ladies of Robinson, Dahlia, Mantor or Arka. I told you those places are plague spots. I T must have been that curious power of divination they call feminine intuition that made Ellen call Shirley an overgrown schoolgirl before she had even met her, when she had only seen a photograph or two of the girl. For that's what Shirley was. I don't know whether TC has a definite pattern for the choice of First Ladies which includes an emotional maturity index; I haven't met many First Ladies. But if there is a pattern, and Shirley fitted it, a First Lady must be rather shy, quiet, inexperienced, above all virginal -- an overgrown schoolgirl, as a matter of fact. One might have thought a First Lady should be dynamic, reckless, or a hundred per cent glamor. TC apparently didn't agree. I don't mean that Shirley was timid, incapable of recklessness, and sexless. She was -- homy. One could see her as somebody's sister, somebody's girl friend, somebody's wife. Not as an official, a TC agent like Ellen and me, a dancehall girl, an athlete. Not as anything that needed drive or responsibility or amorality. It's difficult to describe Shirley at all, because anything you say about her, you have to qualify. If you say she was shy, you have to add that she wasn't very you couldn't describe her as stupid. Likewise, when she insisted on traveling incognito to avoid a great sendoff at New York, she could have been persuaded, and when the time came, I think she wished we hadn't given in so easily. She would never seek the limelight, but when she found herself in it, she would be capable of enjoying it. There were no cheering crowds and reporters and photographers when we left from New York spaceport. Shirley was traveling as Ellen's sister. She seemed to like the part. She had a crush on Ellen good and hard. TC was used to misleading the press. One might have thought some smart newsman would put two and two together and work out that since Lotrin's First Lady was about due to go out, and since this ship, in the course of its four-month tour, was going to touch Lotrin, and since Shirley had most of the hallmarks of a First Lady, it might be worth investigating her a little. But TC announced officially that the First Lady wasn't chosen yet, and circulated privately a rumor that she was chosen and would go on the next ship. The newspapermen rejected the statement and accepted the rumor. And if anyone checked over the passenger list of the Sardonia, he would have seen that we were going out to settle the Aldebaran section.  interest. "It's a wonderful ship," she said, gazing up at the smooth hull. "Is it?" murmured Ellen, obviously surprised that anyone should think it was wonderful. "Just wait till you get inside. You'll find that every foot has only nine inches. You'll get used to that, but when you reach the Moon, you'll discover the foot has shrunk to seven inches. On the next tender it'll be five, and when you're on the liner it'll come down to four." Shirley stared at her. "Isn't this the Sardonia ?" "Sometimes I wonder where you've been living these last twenty-one years. Tell her, Joe." Pencil skirts were in again; Ellen hobbled toward the tender. She could talk like that to Shirley. If I tried it, the tears would come. I wondered how many gallons Shirley had wept since TC first found her. Most of them, according to Ellen, were about her mother, and they were usually down Ellen's dress. "This is only a tender to take us to the Moon, Shirley," I said. "Curiously, its power-to-weight ratio is much higher than that of the ship that will take us all those light-years. On the Moon there'll be another check and another tender will take us to the Sardonia, which by that time will be orbiting around the Moon." I took Shirley's arm and steered her after Ellen. No one had any time for us; spaceships have no room for flunkeys. "The starships never land anywhere," I went on. "They're assembled in space, and when, despite all the safeguards, they're eventually saturated with radiation leakage, they're destroyed in space." "I can't make you and Ellen out," said Shirley suddenly, showing how much good my lecturette for children had done. "Do yoii love her, Joe?" I grinned wryly. "Shirley, sometimes you're too shy to say perfectly ordinary things, and other times you're a little too frank. Outside of novels, people don't go around asking people if they love other people." "But do you," she insisted, "since I've asked it?" "First define love," I said. When you've done that to my satisfaction, ask me again. Then if you get an answer in the morning, see if it's the same answer in the afternoon, and the next day, and next week." "You're married, I suppose?" "Why should you suppose that?" She seemed taken back. "You are living together," she said. "Aren't you?"  "We certainly work together, but that doesn't mean we're married." S HE was silent while we climbed to the airlock and began to sidle along the narrow passage. "I think I know what you are," she said. "You're secret agents. The way you don't answer questions shows you're used to it." "That's a point," I said agreeably. A few minutes later -- it was a slow business moving along that passage -- Shirley stated emphatically from behind me: "You're Joe Dell and she's Ellen Dell." "That settles it, then," I observed. "We must be married." "Don't you ever give a fact away., free?" I half turned and looked down at her reprovingly. "Weren't you listening? I told you about the tenders and the Sardonia -- " "Which I could have got from the steward. He can't tell me if you love Ellen." "Well, that makes two of us," I said easily. "Neither can I." "You won't, anyway." We had almost caught up with Ellen, and she stopped at that and waited. "He won't what?" she asked. I was between them, so they could hardly see each other at all. Corridors on spaceships have to be seen to be believed. Ellen and Shirley might have passed each other, but only at the cost of buttons and tears and bruises, and that's no exaggeration. If I had to pass anyone, we could only do it by climbing over each other. Shirley was silent. She was ready to ask questions of me, but not of Ellen. Not that kind of question. "It doesn't matter," I said, "since it's settled that I won't" Ellen accepted that, for the moment. She had found our room. "Yours is around the corner, Shirley," she said. "Come and I'll show you how things work." I backed into the cabin to get out of the way, and they went past. Shirley gave me a last searching, puzzled glance. space travel again is always pretty much the same. Ellen made the same grumbles, phrased differently. This time she wondered ironically why they didn't feed us on condensed milk and shortbread and make sure we starved. Remarked that you rubbed your head before you got up in anticipation of the bump. Said she realized at last why space girls on magazine covers wore tights -- they couldn't squeeze through spaceship doors wearing anything else. Suggested we come to some arrangement whereby I breathed out when she breathed in. Shirley, to whom it was all new, took it very much for granted. That is, she noticed with surprise how little room there was, adjusted herself to the new conditions and forgot the whole thing. When we were on the second tender, taking us out to the Sardonia, I asked Ellen: "How much does Shirley know?" She didn't feel like being sarcastic, for once, so she cut out everything but what I wanted to know. "Not much," she said. "Shirley doesn't know she'a got to marry this character -- let's call him Bill. She thinks she does, but she doesn't realize how absolutely inescapable it is that she must marry him and no one else. She doesn't know that she must be kind -- but not too kind -- to the her own ideas on that. What she doesn't realize is that she must be the perfect, flawless figurehead, the dreamgirl, the model for all women, at once the vestal virgin, the perfect wife, everybody's sister, everybody's sweetheart and everybody's mother." "I know what you mean," I said. "Not everyone would." "One thing," Ellen observed. "she probably does realize. She knows about the baby." I pressed my foot urgently against hers. "I suppose she knows," Ellen went on reflectively, "that if it's a monster, her whole future and Bill's and Lotrin's collapses. And not only collapses, but into a rather nasty little puddle. Yes, she probably knows that. I don't think she's really faced it, but who could? Certainly not me. I'll stay in TC and be asked to do the impossible and get shot at and maybe beaten up occasionally. But I'm glad I'm a, few years too old to be asked to be a First Lady." Shirley came right into the room. It had been a good touch on Ellen's part to drop these hints about our normal employment. Since neither of us had done anything of the sort before, it would convince Shirley that Ellen didn't know she was there. Shirley was white, but strictly under control. "So you're taking me to Lotrin" she said clearly, "to do something you wouldn't do yourself?" Ellen turned, and met her gaze. She didn't look startled that Shirley had heard her; it would have been out of character, anyway. "That's right, Shirley," she said quietly. going to be a scene. It was all between Ellen and Shirley. It was Ellen whom Shirley worshiped, not me. I could see Shirley deciding that Ellen was false and everything was, too, and you couldn't trust anyone or anything. I saw her being ashamed of all the times she had cried before Ellen, who all the while had been thinking she was mad and a fool to be doing what she was doing. Then Shirley whirled and went out. "Better go after her, hadn't you?" I said. "I've gone after her often enough." "But she may... "She may do what?" "Anything. Kill herself." "If she's going to kill herself, she'd better do it now, not when she's reached Lotrin and has actually been installed." I was silent, thinking. Shirley wouldn't kill herself, of course. Girls as delicately balanced as that would never be chosen as First Ladies. She would have much worse things to face than Ellen's defection. I knew why Ellen had spoken as she had. Ellen was no part of Shirley's life on Lotrin. If Shirley was pinning a lot on Ellen and Ellen's opinion of her and First Ladies in general, the sooner it was unpinned, the better. So Ellen tore it off. Besides, of course, Ellen was fed up playing nursemaid. "Just for curiosity," I said, "when were you shot at in the line of duty?" "On Maple, fool. Don't you remember?" "Oh, that. But the shot was meant for me." "A lot of difference that would have made to me if it killed me." "And when were you last beaten up?" "Nostral. When you were looking for the house." I didn't pursue that. On that occasion, Ellen certainly ran into my arms as she had never done before or since, and had stayed in bed for days afterward alleging nervous exhaustion. The thing about Ellen is that if she was nearly beaten up, she would talk about it at every opportunity, with all the details of what did happen and what might have happened, but if she was beaten up, she would shut up like a clam. I filed away the conclusion that she had probably had a tough time on Nostral, and I hadn't known about it before -- it had happened two years ago -- meant nothing. Not when you know the first thing about Ellen. I came back to what I thought was safer ground: "A few years too old?" "I'm twenty-five," Ellen remarked calmly. It wasn't impossible, though that meant she was only eighteen when I first met her. Just unlikely. So I left it at that. It was unlike Ellen to give away even that much. Twenty years hence, I could say that according to her own figures she was now fortyfive. But this isn't the story of Ellen. Not directly, at any rate. VY#E hardly saw Shirley when  we were changing over to the Sardonia. Ellen's attitude was that she had seen Shirley through the first part, and it was my turn now. She might have to take over again just before we reached Lotrin and clear up the mess I had made, but meantime she was going to have a rest from Shirley Judson. That's Ellen. If anything was to be done about Shirley, I would have to do it. I waited until the ship was well clear of the Moon and then went to look for Shirley, whom we had only seen at mealtimes. The Sardonia was nosing about, stopping and darting like a fish. Passengers weren't supposed to walk about at this stage. They were told to lie down or at least sit down. For the effect of the ship's motion was that, one moment, "down" was the floor, the next the left-hand wall, then the wall in front, then the wall behind. Of course it was never a full gravity; if you liked to take a chance, you could drop lightly on your feet on floor, walls and ceiling. The beds all swiveled with the changes in equilibrium. Apparently Shirley was taking her chance with the gravity, because she wasn't in her cabin. There was no room for social life on the Sardonia. The only place that held a fair number of people was the dining room, and, as the ship carried four hundred people, the dining room was on shift duty twenty-four hours a day. So, if Shirley wasn't in her own '"room, she was in someone else's. I considered the matter. Shirley had had a shock. Torn from the life she had grown used to in twenty-one years, she had set up Ellen as her model and guide. Ellen had allowed this until we were irrevocably on our way, then abdicated. What she had said was nothing; she could have won back Shirley's adoration any time she cared, but she hadn't bothered. What would Shirley do? She would feel nothing mattered. Nobody cared. She might as well enjoy 'herself -- show Ellen she didn't care, either. In the limited field offered by the Sardonia, there was only one thing she could do. I considered some more. If Shirley was going to throw herself at some man's head, the likelihood was that it would be someone on the same meal shift, someone she had at least seen and talked to. I picked Glen Mavor. Mavor was a shy youngster going out to Civnet to settle. Civnet, right on the outposts of Terran settlement, wasn't near the First Lady stage yet. I sought out Mavor. I tapped on his door, but walked right in. I was right. Shirley was there, lounging against a wall. Mavor was sitting on the bed. When I came in, the place was crowded. "Hallo, Shirley," I said. "I thought you might be here." sudden darts and Shirley and I somersaulted and landed on the ceiling, Shirley in a swirl of legs and skirt. She laughed. Mavor didn't have to move, because the bed kept its equilibrium. I saw the situation. Shirley was unconcerned, happy in a reckless way. Mavor was interested, excited, but very nervous. He might not know the intracacies of the situation, but he knew he was going to a world which wouldn't see a woman for a long time, and that Shirley consolation in advance. This wasn't the Shirley Judson we had met in the garden. This Shirley was more vital, and about twenty times as attractive, because now she was trying to be attractive. Innocence is an attitude of mind, not mere absence of experience. Shirley now, arms behind her and head thrown back against the wall, was far from innocent. Nothing much had happened to her experience, but a lot to her attitude of mind. She had chosen a thin canary-yellow blouse for two obvious reasons, and her scarlet skirt hugged her waist and hips and then flared carelessly, its work done. Shirley couldn't go around like that for long looking for trouble without finding it. Something had to be done. "Mavor," I said quietly, "I'm going to tell you a secret." Mavor, a good-looking young fellow, glanced at Shirley, but she only smiled and surveyed her ankles. He turned back to me. "I don't know if I want to hear any secrets," he said. "This one you hear all the same. And you keep it. It doesn't really matter now whether you keep it or not, but it would be more convenient if everyone on the ship didn't know it just yet. Shirley, you see, is the First Lady of Lotrin." I knew I had been right to tell him when I saw his expression. "I only mention it," I said casually, "because when people are playing with dynamite, they at least ought to know it's dynamite. Coming, Shirley?" There was another upheaval. This time Shirley landed on top of Mavor, her arms round his neck. It might have been an accident, but it was no accident when she pulled his face to hers and kissed him. That wasn't for Mavor's benefit at all, but for mine. She disentangled herself at her leisure and followed me. I took her to her own room. "Why did you tell him that?" she asked. She didn't mindshe was just curious. "To keep him out of your way," I said grimly. "He won't touch you with a grappling pole now. He's scared." "Why?" "You don't know much about TC, do you? It carries a lot of guns of different calibers. No one twists TC's tail for fun." "You mean Terran Control would victimize Glen?" "What for?" IT was a good question. It upset even the new, more confident Shirley. "I mean if..." "If what?" I demanded. "Why shouldn't I have a good time while I can, before I get to my prison?" "Nothing against having a good time. Unless the form it takes might have an adverse effect on the future." "I don't care about the future. There may be no future." We had reached her room. I passed it, pushed her inside and followed her in. We sat on the bed, where we could watch the gyrations of the walls with indifference. "What's the ship doing?" she abruptly wanted to know. "Looking for the rails," I told her. I didn't want to talk about the ship, but I was ready to play along with Shirley to a certain extent. "The rails?" "Sure. You know space travel is composed of two very different parts. Hoisting yourself free of a planet and then of a satellite of some kind, and then maneuvering about clumsily like this. The other part is as slick and wonderful as this is primitive and slow. At this rate, you'd take twenty thousand years to reach Aldebaran, let alone Lotrin." "But it only takes a few weeks!" "That's what I'm telling you," I said patiently. "It's slick and wonderful. There aren't really any rails, of course, but it's something like that. We're looking for a field that starts about here and stretches all the way to Aldebaran. A beam. The Catterick Field, they call it. We've passed through it several times already -- why we keep nosing about like this is that we have to be fair and square in the middle of it, and it's pretty tight. Only a few miles across." "The ship isn't a mile wide." "No. But if there was the slightmiles would be needed to show it up? Ever hear of inertia, Shirley?" "That's laziness." "You can put it that way. The laziness of matter. When it's still, matter can't be bothered to move, and it's a devil of a job to make it. And, when it's moving, it can't be bothered to make any effort to stop, and you have the same job all over again stopping it. "Now the Sardonia's engines generate enough power to take us to Lotrin in a few weeks without the Catterick Field -- only the ship wouldn't go with the engines at that acceleration. It would disintegrate. And at a fraction of that speed, we'd all be crushed to pulp. Just now, no acceleration of more than ten feet a second is being put on." TT'OR demonstration purposes, I caught her by the waist, raised her against about a third Earth gravity and pushed her into the center of the room just as the ship shot one way and then another. "And that can be quite hectic," I remarked, as Shirley bounced and somersaulted to the opposite wall. She had dressed for this sort of thing, I observed, with canary lingerie which was meant to make an interesting flurry as her legs thrashed about. I caught her unceremoniously by the waistband and hauled her back on the bed beside me. "Imagine what it would be like if the acceleration were ten miles a second," I went on. "Or a thousand miles. Or ten thousand." "I can't," she said truthfully. "Obviously, if you're going to travel hundreds of light-years at a time, you've got to do something about inertia. Suppose there were no inertia on Earth. That's impossible actually, because the field only operates in a vacuum. But if it wasn't, and gravity and air resistance remained the same, you could run at top speed from a standing start. If you wanted to turn and go back, you'd do it in one stride." "Nonsense," said Shirley, "you would strain a muscle or something." "No. That's inertia. If you're running at fifteen miles an hour and try to make your muscles stop you dead, certainly you'll tear something. But if there's no inertia, you could turn with one toe and be running the other way. Gravity and air resistance would not matter much. It's inertia you've got to counter." Shirley was tired of the whole subject and showed it. I went on grimly : "When we're firmly in the center of this field, which is maintained from the Moon, by the way, we'll start off with the Catterick Field energized. Then there won't be any gravity. No inertia. Only a trickle let through so that we can of the real force. The ship will be able to start and stop in a split second. It won't do more than a few hundred miles an hour at first, because we may still not be properly on the rails. When the captain's satisfied we are, we'll be off at the speed of light. Then bigger and bigger multiples of that till we reach Aldebaran. Then dead stop. We -- " "I'm going to have a shower," Shirley announced. "You mean you want me to leave?" "Stay if you like, as long as you don't go on gabbing about the Cat-whatever-it-is Field." The shower was a minute cubicle in the opposite wall. There was no sink; if you wanted to wash, you had to take a whole shower. I might have told Shirley that I had seen and read and done a lot more than she had, and that if she really wanted to shock or upset me, she would have to go much further than she was ready to do -- go around shooting people, for instance, or tampering with the engines, or trying to climb out into space. But that might give her ideas, and anyway she wanted me to protest. So I hoisted myself up and made for the door, knowing she didn't really want to be left alone, with Glen Mavor almost certainly crossed off from now on. "See you later," I said.  zled out. Glen Mavor was crossed off and she wasn't really sorry. She was fundamentally level-headed. She started speaking to Ellen again instead of ignoring her when we ate. Ellen took her tentative advances as she had taken her resentment, calmly and without reference to the past. But the old adoration was gone. It was me Shirley addressed most of her attention to, not Ellen. Time passes quickly when every day is the same, even more quickly when there is no day. We all slept about twelve hours out of twenty-four. Sustained exercise was almost impossible, and Ellen again had her usual worry about putting on weight. She did the usual thing about it -- shut me out of the cabin and exercised grimly, deliberately, systematically. She wouldn't let anyone see her swinging her arms and pedaling on her back. Shirley was politely shown out, too, once or twice. "She saw me doing that sort of thing often enough," Shirley objected once. "Is she made differently from other women, or what?" This was a far cry from her earlier worship of Ellen, which I thought was not a bad thing. "Oh, no," I said. "She couldn't have knock knees or a pot belly or anything?" "Nothing like that. She'll sunbathe in a swimsuit in the right surroundings, but only when she can be perfect. Ellen is the one perfect thing in a lot of imperfect worlds." "Do you think she's perfect?" "What I think doesn't count. I meant can you imagine seeing Ellen touching her toes and swinging over to try to do it backward? You may know she's doing it, but can you imagine seeing it?" She couldn't. Shirley and I were thus thrown in each other's company a lot. But we discovered a certain similarity in temperament with regard to passing time together which Ellen would never have understood. We would lounge comfortably in Shirley's room reading or considering life or even dozing, without saying a word. We each had company, but we didn't have to talk. And then Shirley finished that phase, too. I was reading a novel when she put her head between me and the book and kissed me. It may sound like a confession, but that really did startle me. Because when she did that, a lot of other things slipped into place. She had wanted to know, when we were just on our way, whether I loved Ellen. Whether we were married. She had quarreled with Ellen. She had let me stop an affair with Glen Mavor, and hadn't seemed to care. She had tried to upset me, put me off stroke. She became catty about Ellen. She spent nearly all her waking hours in my company. to take over once more, it was sent reeling again by the realization that Shirley wasn't any more ready for this clinch than I was. That's what they mean when they talk about love as a littleunderstood though prevalent disease. I had no possible reason or excuse for falling for Shirley, I hadn't meant to do it, it had never occurred to me that I could do it. And here we were. With Shirley in my arms, I wasn't going to move or think, if I could help it, because, once the moment ended, I was going to have to face a lot of things I didn't want to face. Shirley probably felt exactly the same. So we clung and felt our hearts beating together and tried to stop time. We succeeded no better than anyone ever has. I felt I was hurting Shirley and released my grip slightly. In turn, she took one arm from my neck and dropped it to my side. So, a little at a time, we broke it up. We pretended it was just one of those things that happen when you don't actually take steps to prevent it, meaning little or nothing. We didn't talk about it at all, and went on acting exactly as before. Except -- perhaps I'm biased, but Shirley really seemed to become a hundred per cent prettier. I don't think that's bias, for Ellen remarked one day that she didn't know why she'd once said Shirley wasn't chosen for her looks, anyway. But it must have been bias that made me think Shirley was really quite intelligent and had good taste and could make a good TC agent. Still Shirley and I never talked about Lotrin. Until the very last day when the bubble burst. We were still untold light-years from Lotrin, but only a few hours. We had not, of course, landed anywhere; we stopped several times and tenders came out to the Sardonia, but that affected us not at all except that there were different faces at mealtimes. Someone once said that the poor have large families because, cooped up in a small space, they haven't much else to do. But Shirley and I, despite that one lapse, were so sure of ourselves that we spent nearly all our time together in a space no larger than a big cupboard. There was nothing of sex in our talk, and, though we couldn't avoid touching each other accidentally, there was never a hint of sensuality in the contact between Shirley and me. and I was sitting on the floor wondering what assignment Ellen and I would be given next -- still in the determined pretense that this was just a job which would be over and all but forgotten very had given us the job oftaking Shirley out to Lotrin. But that was a train of thought that led in a direction I didn't like, and I jerked my head as one does when in search of distraction -- any distraction. Shirley's red slipper caught my eye, which then drifted up her legs. Shirley had good legs, but her skirt was tucked modestly under her and I couldn't even see to the knee. I was unreasonably irritated. Why did she have to pull her skirt about her like that? It was like shielding a letter from you as you passed, as if you were trying to read it. Uncalled for. I wasn't sitting on the floor so that I could see her legs. I hadn't even thought of her legs until I saw she was hiding them primly like a spinster. I reached out and touched Shirley's ankle, but, at the touch, anything I'd had in mind went away abruptly. She threw aside her book and slid down into my arms. We petted like teen-age lovers, just as nervous and excited. Suddenly Shirley threw herself back, eyes closed, waiting. And it had exactly the opposite effect on me of what it was supposed to have. "Look, Shirley," I said harshly. "This is an impossible situation." She sat up, her back against the bed. "Don't you know what a First Lady is?" I demanded. "She's a symbol. A goddess. A whole new world depends on her, loves her and would die for her. She's more of a sovereign than any queen in history." "Lotrin can have another First Lady," said Shirley sharply. "I'm going to abdicate right away." "You can't. Weeks ago, it was disclosed on Earth that the First Lady of Lotrin was Shirley Judson, who was on her way there. It hasn't anything like the importance to Earth that it has to Lotrin, but it's known. It can't be hushed up. Suppose you go back. Lotrin will hear the story eventually. Some other girl goes -- a second-best, not the real First Lady, a substitute for a failure or a coward. What chance will she have? Suppose TC covers up and sends out another girl as Shirley Judson with some story to explain the delay. She'll know. She'd have to be the best actress in the Galaxy to keep up the pretense all the rest of her life." "Why didn't you think of that before?" "I knew it all along." "Nobody can make me be a good First Lady. I can ruin Lotrin. I would." "Ruin a world because you didn't get your own way? Because you went back on your word?" W E were both being unfair, of course. We went around in circles for a while longer, blaming everything on each other, but not in hot anger -- rather with a sort of hopeless knowledge that what I had said was true. The TC colonization system is all built into a solid pyramid. At the bottom are the real pioneers, the men who take a chance on death or glory, poverty or fabulous wealth. They go to a world and shape it into a place for men to live. As time goes by and they prosper, there are more and more of them. A hundred men, a thousand, a hundred thousand. But no women. Everybody knows that. It's accepted. Every new world may be lifeblood or canker. If the canker ever has to be cut out, it must be possible to do it cleanly and completely. No women. The world settled, examined, explored, tested, tried out in every way. Early diseases and allergies and maladies conquered. Five hunAnd no women. TC controls all space travel, not only interstellar travel. No woman can possibly reach a virgin world. Then the First Lady. The real beginning. Recognition. Reward. Promise. Hope. That's one side. The other side is that if the world turns out to be canker, the First Lady can easily be sterilized, along with the unfortunate child, if it happens to be female. That's the end. The world must die, for there are no more women. Everybody knows and accepts that, too. It's a crazy structure of luck and fear and wild hope, but a solid structure. I could no more buck it than Shirley could. She was Lotrin's First Lady and there was no escape. But Shirley and I weren't really considering the issues, only toying with them. When I saw that, I said: "Let's get Ellen in on this." Shirley jumped. "Are you mad?" When we had been pretending to ourselves and to each other that we had merely been carried away once by the heat of the moment, we had naturally pretended very hard to Ellen that not even that had ever happened. "She's got to come into this," I said, "unless we can decide here and now that you and I are finished with each other." I hoped Shirley would say we could. I was afraid she might say it. She siid nothing. So I said, "Stay here," and went for Ellen. arms were above her head, swinging one way and then the other. She dropped her arms and looked at me in fury. "It's important," I said. "Shirley and I need your help. Never mind making yourself smart. Just come." I didn't tell her anything until we were wedged in Shirley's room. Then I told her that Shirley and I were in love. Ellen's frown cleared away as if by magic. This was interesting. It was a break in routine. It was a problem, a challenge. But she couldn't help sighing and saying: "I knew something would happen when I stopped running the show. I didn't know it would be this. I don't know everything." "You think you do," Shirley flashed. Ellen turned a cold eye on her. "Is that attitude going to help?" she asked. "Aren't you just putting it on to show you've outgrown your childish crush on me?" That was meant to make Shirley about two inches high. It failed because Shirley knew she was somebody. Merely being a First Lady was nothing, but now she had someone in love with her. "I'm not ashamed that I once thought you were wonderful," she retorted. "You're a great actress. You can even act the part of a decent human being." Ellen smiled. That smile showed Ellen's real talent. Come to think of it, Shirley was right. That's what Ellen is above all else -- an actress -- the kind I'd been talking about. "That's not hard." she said quietly. "Honestly, Shirley, have you ever met anyone who wasn't basically a decent human being?" Shirley hadn't. That was her good luck; it was like Ellen to play on it. "Now let's get the position clear," Ellen went on. "Is it settled that Shirley isn't going to be Lotrin's First Lady, and what we're looking for is some way out of it?" N obody spoke. "Well, let's make up our minds," Ellen insisted pleasantly, after a long pause. "Shirley, think about your mother." "That's you all over!" Shirley burst out. "Any weapon -- anything's fair to you! It's not safe for anyone to have feelings, because you'll twist them and use them against them -- " "All right, don't think about your mother. Count her out of it. You've already made up your mind that you'll probably never see her again, anyway." There was another long silence. Then Shirley said: "Suppose I think about her. What am I supposed to think?" "You were an ordinary girl, quite happy on Earth, content to stay there. Some TC men came along and talked to you, persuaded you to take a few tests, and then threw their bombshell. You could be important. You could rule a whole planet of men. Only it meant leaving Earth, leaving your mother, and the answer had to be yes or no, not maybe." "They made me go!" "They would be persistent, I admit. First Ladies don't grow on trees. But did you really believe you couldn't say no?" No answer. "Well, you could be somebody," Ellen continued reflectively, "or you could give up the chance. You love your mother. You didn't want to leave her. You thought of giving it up. You didn't, as history will bear out, really care about space and progress and mankind and all the big things like that. People don't, though it makes a good story. The real question was, could you give up an opportunity like that?" In case by any chance I haven't said so before -- Ellen has personality. She had both of us hanging on her words. Me a little less than Shirley, of course, but still enough. "You couldn't," said Ellen, "There were things you had to give up, a lot of things. Things I don't know about. Things no one but you will ever know about." I saw what was coming. I had been long enough seeing it; but, then, I had been pretty unreasonable in a lot ofways lately. "Never mind whether it's possible or not," said Ellen. "The question's still the same. Are you going to give up the things you have to give up to be a First Lady? Or are you going to give up being a First Lady?" "I'm not going to give up Joe," declared Shirley defiantly. Ellen nodded as if that was perfectly reasonable. "All right. The question is, then, have you got Joe?" She looked at me. I avoided her eye. "You won't understand' this," I said, "but I have really fallen for Shirley." "Oh, I understand that, all right. Do you see any future in it?" "I've already told Shirley that I don't." "I've tried to be fair to Shirley," Ellen said, "but I can be a lot tougher with you and still be fair. You know better." I might have known that when I went to Ellen with a problem, she would throw it right back in my lap. Shirley and me wasn't age or sex, but the fact that I knew TC. I wanted Shirley and I'd have moved Heaven and Earth for her. But I knew I couldn't move TC. I had one last doomed try. "You talk about Shirley giving up a chance, Ellen. A chance to be a tragic queen? Suppose Lotrin won't support human life and let it stay human. Wouldn't she be better off -- if she -- " "Cut it out," retorted Ellen. She turned to Shirley. "Listen, Shirley, Joe's doing this because he's a fool. He can't help that. It's too late to do anything about Joe. But you're doing it because you're afraid. At the last moment, only a few hours from Lotrin, you suspect you can't face what may happen there." "You admitted you couldn't either," said Shirley. "I didn't say I could. You did, so leave me out of it. Knowing you're alone, you turned to Joe, who's a fool, and made your problem his. I'm a woman, too, remember -- I know the technique. You were afraid and Joe was around and, after all, you were picked out for a whole world to fall in love with -- not only Joe, who's a fool. I don't blame you. You did a good job, helped by the fact that I was too busy with something else to have any time for either of you. And it was left to Joe, who's a fool, to find a way out for both of you. Joe -- " "Who's a fool," I supplied. Ellen made an impatient gesture. "Joe should have told you something. TC should have told you. But now I'll tell you. "Shirley, TC has the best brains of all humanity. Not running things, but finding out facts. The best scientific brains. "Listen, Shirley, this is important. In a sense, nearly every First Lady is a sham. Yes, you're meant to go to Lotrin and have a baby, and doctors and scientists and psychologists will very honestly and thoroughly test it for any deviation from the human norm. But do you really think TC needs that?" This, as they say, was the payoff. At the back of my mind, I had known when I went for Ellen that she would tell Shirley at least some of the truth. But I had hoped that the thing could be worked out some other way. Ellen didn't need to play for effect now. Shirley was rigid with attention. Ellen shook her head. "No, Shirley, the people who examine the world before it's colonized may not be sure what it will do to men, but after a few thousand have lived on a world for a year, and a hundred thousand or so settled there, the scientists know a lot more about' the place and its effect on human physical structure than any single experiment can tell them. You know a First Lady is a symbol. Well, that also applies to the test. The first birth. "TC knows already what it's going to show. TC always knows. But, so long as people are unreasonable and superstitious and unscientific and emotionally immature, this symbolic test will be needed. The proof that a world is safe or unsafe. "But it isn't proof to TC. It's confirmation of more than a ninety per cent probability, which is reasonable certainty in your language and mine. You can see that, can't you? Doesn't it make sense?" "Yes," Shirley grudgingly admitted. "And you want to know about Lotrin. Well, even you couldn't be told. And, now that I'm telling you, listen and keep it to yourself. The whole TC system is built on the First Ladies. Don't even tell Bill, or whatever his name turns out to be. He doesn't know. Nobody knows but TC. "You were never in any danger, Shirley. Lotrin is safe. Your child will be like any other woman's child on any human world. I tell you TC knows. Now are you going to cling to Joe?"  actually landed with Shirley. Ellen couldn't because the First Lady regulations were inflexible. No woman could even visit a world like Lotrin for as much as five minutes, except the First Lady. I saw what Shirley's arrival did to the place. Alextown was the main population center of Lotrin, and literally every inhabitant was there to welcome her. I can't describe the scene -- you would think I was mad. Have you ever seen or heard what a flag or a cross or just a sign can do to people living in the valley between life and death? Well, imagine the symbol isn't a flag or a cross or just a sign, but a living, breathing, beautiful girl in a world which no woman has ever trod. And still you won't be within light-years of the reality. When I said good-by to her, she had to make an obvious effort to bring her attention back to me. It wasn't that her thinking herself in love with me had been as light and casual and false as all that. I was already just an episode in an entirely irrelevant past, and it didn't matter in the least how important an episode I had been. Ellen was waiting when I got back to the Sardonia -- waiting, apparently, to look into my eyes. "I don't know how I got through it," I said dully. "I don't know, either," Ellen confessed with that incredible sympathy of hers which had won Shirley twice. "Let me say it first, Joe. This is the last time we ever do anything like this." "It's the last time for everyone. That's why we got the job, because no one will ever do it twice. And there can only be a few human beings in any generation foul enough to do it once." All of what Ellen had told Shirley was true except the end. TC naturally did know what was going to happen before the First Lady went out. Not long before -- not until the world was pretty fully colonized and there was a lot of data to work on. We knew before we saw Shirley. We hadn't like th job, but we agreed it was necessary. Lotrin still had to have a First Lady. Colonists who had worked and sweated and slaved to build a new world wouldn't believe a test tube. They wouldn't listen calmly when they were told there could be no more colonists and their world was condemned without the real test. But they would believe their own eyes when they saw Shirley's child. Ellen had told it the wrong way around. fallen in love with her because a woman is always ready to believe that of any man. She couldn't guess that the real reason was that I couldn't go on spending so much time with her and getting to know her without being so damn sorry for her that -- No, Ellen was no worse than me. She told the lie, but I acted it. "It isn't ninety per cent, of course," Ellen reminded me. "Only about seventy-five. There is a chance..." I nearly demanded, "Would you take it?" But I didn't. She would. Yes, Ellen would take one chance in four, for a world. It had been another lie when she told Shirley she wouldn't -- a devious lie to rid Ellen of Shirley's affection before Ellen had to return it. So it wasn't too bad really, I tried to convince myself. Ellen would do it. Ellen, my wife. I also tried to interest myself again in the fact that Ellen was one of the most beautiful women ever born. That was why people loved her against all reason, I told myself. I didn't often admit it, but Ellen was... When I looked at Ellen, though, gazing silently at me, all I could see was Shirley's face. Current IS etc Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, New York Opi-n Monday Tbru Saturdays #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) ' have of whipping an enemy who insists on joining your side? We Don't Want Any Trouble "W: very long interview, was it?" asked the professor's wife. She'd discovered the professor looking out of the living room window when she'd come home from shopping just now. "I wasn't counting on having dinner before nine," she said, setting her bundles down on the couch. "I'll get at it right away." "No hurry about dinner," the professor replied without turning his head. "I didn't expect we'd be through there before eight myself." He had clasped his hands on his back and was swaying slowly, backward and forward on his feet, staring out at the street. It was a favorite pose of his, and she never had discovered whether it indicated deep thought or just daydreaming. At the moment, she suspected uncomfortably it was very deep thought, indeed. She took off her hat. "I suppose you could call it an interview," she said uneasily. "I mean you actually talked with it, didn't you?" "Oh, yes, we talked with it," he nodded. "Some of the others did, anyway." "Imagine talking with something like that! It really is from another world, Clive?" She laughed uneasily, watching the back of his head with frightened eyes. "But, of course, you can't violate the security rules, can you? You can't tell me anything about it at all... Xi "There'll be a newscast at six o'clock. In ten minutes. Wherever there's a radio or television set on Earth, everybody will hear what we found out in that interview. Perhaps not quite everything, but almost everything." "Oh?" she said in a surprised, small voice. She looked at him in silence for a moment, her eyes growing more frightened. "Why would they do a thing like that?" "Well," said the professor, "it seemed like the right thing to do. The best thing, at any rate. There may be some panic, of course." He turned back to the window and gazed out on the street, as if something there were holding his attention. He looked thoughtful and abstracted, she decided. But then a better word came to her, and it was "resigned." "Clive," she said, almost desperately, "what happened?" He frowned absently at her and walked to the radio. It began to make faint, humming noises as the professor adjusted dials unhurriedly. The humming didn't vary much. "They've cleared the networks, I imagine," he remarked. The sentence went on repeating itself in his wife's mind, with no particular significance at first. But then a meaning came into it and grew and swelled swiftly, until she felt her head would burst with it. They've cleared the net-' works. All over the world this evening, they've cleared the networks. Until the newscast comes on at six o'clock... "As to what happened," she heard her husband's voice saying, "that's a little difficult to understand or explain. Even now. It was certainly amazing -- " He interrupted himself. "Do you remember Milt Caldwell, dear?" "Milt Caldwell?" She searched her mind blankly. "No," she said, shaking her head. "A rather well-known anthropologist," the professor informed her, with an air of faint reproach. "Milt got himself lost in the approximate center of the Australian deserts some two years ago. Only we have been told he didn't get lost. They picked him up -- " "They?" she said. "You mean there's more than one?" "Well, there would be more than one, wouldn't there?" he asked reasonably. "That explains, at any rate, how they learned to speak English. It made it seem a little more reasonable, anyhow," he added, "when it told us that. Seven minutes to six..." "What?" she said faintly. "Seven minutes to six," the professor repeated. "Sit down, dear. I believe I can tell you, in seven minutes, approximately what occurred..." in its cage, its large gray hands slackly clasping the bars. Its attitudes and motions, the professor had noted in the two minutes since he had entered the room with the other men, approximated those of a rather heavily built ape. Reporters had called it "the Toad from Mars," on the basis of the first descriptions they'd had of it -- the flabby shape and loose, warty skin made that a vaguely adequate identification. The round, homy head almost could have been that of a lizard. With a zoologist's fascination in a completely new genus, the professor catalogued these contradicting physical details in his mind. Yet something somewhat like this might have been evolved on Earth, if Earth had chosen to let the big amphibians of its Carboniferous Period go on evolving. That this creature used human speech was the only almost-impossible feature. It had spoken as they came in. "What do you wish to know?" it asked. The horny, toothed jaws moved, and a broad yellow tongue became momentarily visible, forming the words. It was a throaty, deliberate "human" voice. For a period of several seconds, the human beings seemed to be shocked into silence by it, though they had known the creature had this ability. Hesitantly, then the questioning began. The professor remained near the back of the room, watching. For a while, the questions and replies he heard seemed to carry no meaning to him. Abruptly he realized that his thoughts were fogged over with a heavy, cold, physical dread of this alien ani r mal. He told himself that under such circumstances fear was not an entirely irrational emotion, and his understanding of it seemed to lighten its effects a little. But the scene remained unreal to him, like a badly lit stage on which the creature in its glittering steel cage stood out in sharp focus, while the humans were shadow-shapes stirring restlessly against a darkened background. "This won't do!" he addressed himself, almost querulously, through the fear. "I'm here to observe, to conclude, to report -- I was selected as a man they could trust to think and act rationally!" He turned his attention deliberately away from the cage and what it contained, and directed it on the other human beings, to most of whom he had been introduced only a few minutes before. A young, alert-looking Intelligence major who was in some way in charge of this investigation; a sleepy-eyed general; a very pretty Wac captain acting as stenographer, whom the major had introduced as his fiancee. The handful of other scientists looked for the most part like brisk business executives, while the two Important Personages representing the Government looked like elderly professors. He almost smiled. They were real enough. This was a human world. He returned his attention again to the solitary intruder in it. "W HY shouldn't I object?" the impossible voice was saying with a note of lazy goodhumor. "You've caged me like -- a wild animal! And you haven't even informed me of the nature of the charges against me. Trespassing, perhaps -- eh?" The wide mouth seemed to grin as the thing turned its head, looking them over one by one with bright black eyes. The grin was meaningless; it was the way the lipless jaws set when the mouth was closed. But it gave expression to the pleased malice the professor sensed in the voice and words. The voice simply did not go with that squat animal shape. Fear surged up in him again. He found himself shaking. If it looks at me now, he realized in sudden panic, I might start to scream! One of the men nearest the cage was saying something in low, even tones. The Wac captain flipped over a page of her shorthand pad and went on writing, her blonde head tilted to one side. She was a little pale, but intent on her work. He had a moment of bitter envy for their courage and self-control. But they're insensitive, he tried to tell himself; they don't know Nature and the laws of Nature. They can't feel as I do how wrong all this is! Then the black eyes swung around and looked at him. Instantly, his mind stretched taut wih blank, wordless terror. He did not move, but afterward he knew he did not faint only because he would have looked ridiculous before the others, and particularly in the presence of a young woman. He heard the young Intelligence officer speaking sharply ; the eyes left him unhurriedly, and it was all over. "V#'OU indicate," the creature's voice was addressing the major, "that you can force me to reveal matters I do not choose to reveal at this time. However, you are mistaken. For one thing, a body of this type does not react to any of yotfPdrugs." "It will react to pain!" the major said, his voice thin and angry. Amazed by the words, the professor realized for the first time that he was not the only one in whom this being's presence had aroused primitive, irrational fears. The other men had stirred restlessly at the major's threat, but they made no protest. The thing remained silent for a moment, looking at the major. "This body will react to pain," it said then, "only when I choose to let it feel pain. Some you here know the effectiveness of hypnotic blocks against pain. My methods are not those of hypnosis, but they are considerably more effective. I repeat, then, that for me there is no pain, unless I choose to experience it." "Do you choose to experience the destruction of your body's tissues?" the major inquired, a little shrilly. The Wac captain looked up at him quickly from the chair where she sat, but the professor could not see her expression. Nobody else moved. The thing, still staring at the major, almost shrugged. "And do you choose to experience death?" the major cried, his face flushed with excitement. In a flash of insight, the professor understood why no one was interfering. Each in his own way, they had felt what he was feeling: that here was something so outrageously strange and new that no amount of experience, no rank, could guide a human being in determining how to deal with it. The major was dealing with it -- in however awkward a fashion. With no other solution to offer, they were, for the moment, The thing then said slowly and flatly, "Death is an experience I shall never have at your hands. That is a warning. I shall respond to no more of your threats. I shall answer no more questions. "Instead, I shall tell you what will occur now. I shall inform my companions that you are as we judged you to be -- foolish, limited, incapable of harming the least of us. Your world and civilization are of very moderate interest. But they are a novelty which many will wish to view for themselves. We shall come here and leave here, as we please. If you attempt to interfere again with any of us, it will be to your own regret." "Will it?" the major shouted, shaking. "Will it now?" The professor jerked violently at the quick successive reports of a gun in the young officer's hand. Then there was a struggling knot of figures around the major, and another man's voice was shouting hoarsely, "You fool! You damned hysterical fool!' The Wac captain had dropped her notebook and clasped her hands to her face. For an instant, the professor heard her crying, "Jack! Jack! Stop -- don't -- " But he was looking at the thing that had fallen on its back in the cage, with the top of its skull shot away and a dark-brown liquid staining the cage floor about its shoulders. What he felt was an irrational satisfaction, a warm glow of pride in the major's action. It was as if he had killed the thing himself. For that moment, he was happy.- in the room, he saw what happened then before the others did. One of the Personages and two of the scientists were moving excitedly about the cage, staring down at the thing. The others had grouped around the chair into which they had forced the major. Under the babble of confused, angry voices, he could sense the undercurrent of almost joyful relief he felt himself. The Wac captain stood up and began to take off her clothes. She did it quickly and quietly. It was at this moment, the professor thought, staring at her in renewed terror, that the height of insanity appeared to have been achieved in this room. He wished fervently that he could keep that sense of insanity wrapped around him forevermore, like a protective cloak. It was a terrible thing to be rational! With oddly detached curiosity, he also wondered what would happen in a few seconds when the others discovered what he already knew. The babbling voices of the group that had overpowered the major went suddenly still. The three men at the cage turned startled faces toward the stillness. The girl straightened up and stood smiling at them. The major began screaming her name. There was another brief struggling confusion about the chair in which they were holding him. The screaming grew muffled as if somebody had clapped a hand over his mouth. "I warned you," the professor heard the girl say clearly, "that there was no death. Not for us." Somebody shouted something at her, like a despairing question. Rigid with fear, his own blood a swirling roar in his ears, the professor did not understand the words. But he understood her reply. "It could have been any of you, of course," she nodded. "But I just happened to like this body." After that, there was one more shot. radio. For a time, he continued to gaze out the window. "Well, they know it now!" he said. "The world knows it now. Whether they believe it or not -- At any rate..." His voice trailed off. The living room had darkened and he had a notion to switch on the lights, but decided against it. The evening gloom provided an illusion of security. He looked down at the pale oval of his wife's face, almost featureless in the shadows. "It won't be too bad," he explained, "if not too many of them come. Of course, we don't know how many there are of them, acnone of our people try to make trouble -- the aliens simply don't want any troublei" He paused a moment. The death of the young Intelligence major had not been mentioned in the broadcast. Considering the issues involved, it was not, of course, a very important event and officially would be recorded as a suicide. In actual fact, the major had succeeded in wresting a gun from one of the men holding him. Another man had shot him promptly without waiting to see what he intended to do with it. At all costs now, every rational human being must try to prevent trouble with the Visitors from Outside. He felt his face twitch suddenly into an uncontrollable grimace of horror. "But there's no way of being absolutely sure, of course," he heard his voice tell the silently gathering night about him, "that they won't decide they just happen to like our kind of bodies." # Star Shelf edited by Frederik Phol. B all anti ne Books, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # i paper, # cloth A-ltion's World of Tomorrow in publishing: an original #-cent paper-backed anthology of # first-rate short stories never before published in any form, magazine or book! True, it's not "reading tapes," such as we old s.f. fans have been promised in the W. of T., but it's the next best thing. Ballantine Books can be congratulated on selecting an editor who knows good science fiction, too. Mr. Pohl has chosen well, even though, for my taste, the bit on the ghastly side, despite a fresh idea and good handling. On the other hand, we have Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (husband and wife) with a magnificent farce-fantasy on psychoanalysis; and we also have A-class stories by Leinster, Clarke, Kornbluth, del Rey, Leiber (with a bit about "Slickie Millane" that should make a Certain Novelist want to sue for ego-damages!), Simak, John Wyndham, Tenn., H. L. Gold (what a sock ending!) Bradbury (exquisite tale!), and Asimov. (He's going fantasy, too!)... Only a couple of items fell flat on my ear, besides the Morrison. Judith Merril's seemed in need of cutting, I thought, and Robert Sheckley's Mars was a bit too much like Bradbury's Mars. All in all, though, a magnificent collection. If your newsdealer doesn't have it, make him get it for you. by Martin Gardner, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, #. # pages, # A SK the average man in the street what he thinks about science fiction and he probably will say, "Oh, you mean flying saucers and all that?" Completely unfair for serious writers and appreciative readers of good science fiction! Willy Ley, both in his column in Galaxy and elsewhere, is always attacking this false concept, and now Martin Gardner has written a fascinating, documented study of phony science from Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the flat-Earth man, to the spiritualists who take off where Dr. Joseph Rhine stops in his study of parapsychological phenomena. In between, Gardner covers every important crank and fraud in modern times, and does so 'With a care for accuracy, a thoroughness of research, and an openmindedness that make the book essential reading. There are chapters on everything from Velikovsky to Reich's orgone boxes, from Forteanism to Lysenkoism, from Babson on gravity to Father Callahan on Einstein ("There is no use expecting Einstein to reason"), from dowsing to dianetics, and from Korzybski to Joseph Rhine, who Gardner feels may have something, but not as much as his supporters claim for him. Nothing important has been omitted, as far as I know. It's a rich gallery of cracks and quacks, visionaries, psychotics and charlatans, full of answers to those who may have fallen for one or another of their lines of gab. Just about the most stimulating science book of the year. Fletcher Pratt, H. Beam Piper and Judith Merril. Introduction by John D. Clark. Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # r pHE best part of this "idea" book is Dr. Clark's very circumstantial description of a planet with a silicone life form ("Uller") and another with a fluorine atmosphere ("Niflheim"). The three novelets written about these planets are readable, even though not in science fiction's upper class. Fletcher Pratt's "The Long View" is the best, with some good imagination, a certain sophistication, and a clear understanding of the possible varieties of tomorrow's sociologies, the complexities of interstellar governments, and the eternal unpredictabilities of people in love. Judith Merril's "Daughters of Earth" is a bit too feminist for my taste, and mushy and in need of cutting, but appealing nevertheless. Piper's novel-length "Uller Uprising" is just a huge dithyramb in praise of war, the necessity of war and the strategy and tactics of war. It assumes that tomorrow's Terran civilization is controlled by the descendants of Nazi generals, French collaborationists and the like, who lived safe in Latin America and elsewhere while World War Three decimated the rest of the world. Like any history of battle written without understanding or warmth, it bores and repels. Not a terribly inspiring book, on the whole. by John D. MacDonald. Greenberg, Publisher, New York, #. # Pages, # TT looks as if it has been decided that the next war will eliminate most if not all of the U.S.A., Russia and Europe. As noted below, Sprague de Camp makes Brazil the center of his new era. Piper, in his novelet in The Petrified Planet (above), believes that South America, Africa and Australia will be the scenes of future greatness. In John MacDonald's new one, India is the "new colossus," the rich and arrogant "U.S.A. of tomorrow," with the original U.S.A. nothing but a rundown tourist trap. Pessimism or prophecy? Who knows? Ballroom is an exciting and effective alien invasion novel, a bit reminiscent of Eric Russell's Sinister Barrier. The problem : why is Earth always warring? Why do the "good people" never take control? The answer, when it comes, is both silly and defeatist; but in the process of getting there, MacDonald unreels an enthralling tale, full of parapsychological gadgetry and wonderful supermen from another galaxy in our midst, etc. Worthwhile, despite the unsatisfactory ending. by L. Sprague de Camp. Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # " A S a result of the Third World War," says de Camp, "the United States was reduced to a second-class power and the U.S.S.R. ceased to be a power at all. World Leadership was taken over by fast-growing Brazil." The "Viagens Interplanetarias" is the "government-owned space transport system" that performed the "early spatial exploration." And that's all there is of solemn import in this otherwise cream puff-light book of space opera. The eight tales deal mostly with the efforts of Terrans to make money off the "savages" of distant plants, and the way these savages often get back their own with interest. Fine stuff for bedtime, but I do feel that the stories were written with the left hind paw of an just wasn't trying hard. Perhaps we should call it "relentlessly light reading!" by E. A. Gut kind. Doubleday  Co., Inc., #. # photographic plates, #. ( unpaged ) geography" is one of the most intellectually exciting photograph books ever published. A British reviewer referred to it as "a new kind of book... like something out of a fairy story." What he really meant was "like something out of science fiction," which is just what it is like. Maps, geographies of the standard types, even on-the-ground photographs -- none can make us feel what the Earth is really like. The air view is the only thing that does it -- and it does it with often devastating results. Compare, in this book, the air photo of Pompeii and that of New York. The parallels are odd and uncomfortable. The 'photos of Krakatoa and the Arizona meteor crater are more typically science fictional, but actually they are not half as revealing of Man's patterns of error, his persistence in repeating old mistakes. With this book, the phrase "bird's-eye view" at last takes on meaning. And the view is amazingly evocative. Don't miss it! Kendell Foster Crossen  Greenberg, Publishers, New York, #. # pages, #  inal stories, # in all -- or # per story -- plus a pseudophilosophical introduction by the editor, this could hardly be called a bargain. Of the reprints, the tales by B or better. Of the originals, those by Heard, Martin Gardner (delightful!), Rose Elliott, Blish, and John MacDonald are ditto -- in all, # out of #. The other # vary from routine to awful. Andre Norton. World Publishing Co., New York, #. # pages, # space opera for adventureminded kids, at a quarter per opera. H. B. 'Fyfe has two tales, including his fine "Star Linked," and Bernard Kahn two, both infantile. Cogswell's effective "Specter General" is there, and so is Kombluth's Machiavellian "That Share of Glory." Items by Gordon Dickson, Walt Sheldon, J. A. Winter, M.D., and Raymond Z. Gallun complete the slender roster. edited by August Derleth. Pellegrini and Cudahy, New York, #. #I pages, # N ineteen tales at about # each in this, Derleth's #th anthology. The best way to take the book is at the editor's own valuation as "offtrail science fiction." The liberal sprinkling of the weird, the supernatural and the impossible justifies the odd label. Like all of Derleth's collections, this one is almost unbelievably uneven. There are top-level items by Theodore Sturgeon (from Ray Bradbury, Margaret St. Clair, and Arthur C. Clarke (who has two stories, one of which appeared before in another anthology), ordinary ones by Fritz Leiber, Lewis Padgett, and Mack Reynolds, and a clutch of others I can't even arouse enough energy to try to grade. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. ir you could only see what we have in store for the Next # Issues, rific. The covers will introduce three new. artists. You will clamor for more of their work. Don't miss a single issue -- Let the mail man deliver them right to your door a week before they go on sale at your newsstand. Fill in the I Year # Years # Years (Add I .# Foreign Postage for each year) Your Name Address City State if you were the only -- Most love stories are about people. But not this story. robots, and then stopped. The war had come along and they'd had to convert Electronicorp to the new economy. Malley, the chief scientist, tried to interest the government in the robots. He had a meeting with they might be useful as spies, saboteurs or fifth columnists but Boardman said no; men still were best for that sort of thing. He'd bet on a trained agent's ingenuity over a robot's wiring any day. Besides, he said, a robot was expected to serve man. Wouldn't it be too much to ask it to make the fine distinction between a man it was expected to serve and a man it was expected to destroy? Malley was rather glad the robots had been turned down. They were the first the plant had ever made in human form and he was rather fond of them. They were the first of their kind in the world, as far as he knew. Experimental models X-l and X-# was the way the records showed them. One masculoid and one feminoid. Alpha and Beta, one of the men in the lab named them, and, of course, they came to be known as AI and Betty. They were pretty gorgeouslooking creations, these robots. For one thing, they were physically perfect. Artists and anatomists had been among the consultants in their production. The two sets of experts finally had been persuaded to compromise on two life-size statues, which became the pilot models. The technicians had to use all their ingenuity to get their miles of wires and gadgets inside a casing the size of a human body. "Give this guy one more inch around the waist," one of them said, "and we'll have no problem. Otherwise we're going to have to detour this circuit by way of his left instep." But the waistline remained trim and a way was found. Betty, the female, was less of a problem. Her generously rounded dimensions -- here the anatomist had conceded more than the artist -- provided ample room for the stowing away of her intricate mechanisms. A T last they were finished. Thelast weld had been covered with plastic skin and the last hair had been needled into its proper place. The technicians had a party in the lab that night. There was liquor and Gordon, one of the younger men, had too much of it. He became maudlin about Betty. He sat on the edge of the pedestal where she stood, nude and deactivated, and he stroked her leg gently. All of them knew how he felt; each of them also loved Betty in a special way. She was a combination of a daughter they had helped bring into the world, and the ideal woman, perfect and unattainable. Gordon was led away, sobbing, "I can't help it; I love her." And when they said, "Yes, but you mustn't let it affect you," he said, "No other girl will be good enough now." "But she's not a girl," they said, "and you mustn't think of her in that way." "I don't care, I don't care," he sobbed, "I love her, don't you understand?" Al, the masculoid, had a less obvious effect. A few of the technicians were women. They were pretty worldly gals, tough-talking and not usually susceptible, but it was noticeable that the male robot received only swift, indirect glances from them, as if they were afraid he would catch them in a spell if they looked at him directly. The next day Electronicorp chastely dressed AI and Betty in evening clothes and held a reception to which the board of directors and fheir wives and other business leaders and their wives were invited. The reason for the gathering was kept a secret while the guests chatted in groups in the lounge. Malley went from group to group and solemnly introduced "Mr. Alpha, one of our consulting engineers, and his wife, Betty." The masquerade went off perfectly. The robots sipped cocktails, exchanged small talk and charmed the guests with their grace and modesty. Even when the after-dinner speaker introduced them later as robots, many of the guests refused to believe they were not human. The demonstration that followed divided them still more firmly into two camps -- those who believed, and marveled at the built-in perfection of the humanoids, and those who were amused by the thought that Electronicorp had brought in two skilled entertainers, graduates, perhaps, of the school of pseudomechanical people once hired as traffic-stoppers for department store windows. There was a slight stiffness about AI and Betty that lent weight to this belief. It was barely noticeable, and Malley was sure it could be worked out in later models -- if not in X-# and X-#, then certainly in X-# and X-#. npHE demonstration was both amusing and touching, the guests thought. The robots' social graces had been proved during cocktails. Now, seated on the speakers' dais, they were tested by a series of contrived little accidents, such as the dropping of an ice cube down the front of Betty's gown by the master of ceremonies. She shrieked and AI stood up threateningly. He made a fist and might have gone even further except for Malley's quick explanation. The m.c. looked genuinely scared. When AI sat down again he seemed to do it with bad grace, as if he knew he was a robot and didn't like the restrictions this imposed on him. That was the last public appearance of X-l and X-#. The war took a turn for the worse, there at the start, and Electronicorp had no time for sidelines. Malley sent back the rented evening clothes and put the robots away at the back end of a basement storeroom at the plant. He deactivated them, of course, and he could have just slung them in a corner. But he did a peculiar thing. He had twin beds taken in and made up with sheets and blankets, and he personally tucked each robot away before he locked up the storeroom and left them. It wasn't a long war, as wars had been going. But it was intense and Electronicorp was kept humming around the clock. The personnel gradually forgot about the robots, or moved on to other war jobs. Malley was so busy consulting with people in Washington, Detroit, Ottawa and sometimes Mexico City that he had no time to look in on the robots. And so, a year later they still were there, stiff in their beds in the gloomy storeroom, gathering dust with the rest of the forgotten equipment. Even young Gordon, the technician who had professed his love for Betty, seemed to have forgotten them. He'd found a real girl. But one day Gordon came to work surrounded by the fragrance of alcohol. He had the bottle with him and he referred to it from time to time as he told anyone who would listen how his girl had thrown him over. "She gave me the big goodby and went off with one of those uniformed yoyos from the Technicorps," he said, sniffling a little. "It's fantastic. In fact, it's revolting. Enough to drive a man to drink. Here, have one -- I've got more -- enough for everyone." And so Gordon drank at his bench and naturally no one expected him to do any work that day, war or no war. When he disappeared, no one thought very much about it. as Malley was able to piece it together later : Gordon went down to the basement, maybe halfremembering his old infatuation for Betty, and found the storeroom. It was locked, of course, but he made short work of the combination -- a simple, presonic one -- and the door swung open. It was a gloomy, windowless place. The only light, from a mediumintensity Everglo in the ceiling, cast stark shadows from the haphazard piles of crates and outmoded machine parts. Gordon let the door slip closed behind him. He saw the beds in the far corner, dimly. He shivered a bit and took a quick drink. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, hesitated, took another drink, and went over to them. The robots were lying absolutely still, on their backs, the eyes closed, the covers drawn up to the chin. The beds were about three feet apart. There was a film of gray dust over everything. Gordon knelt between the beds, his back to Al,and stared at Betty's perfect face. He took out his handkerchief and tenderly flicked away the dust. He stroked her hair, gently. She was like a giant doll. Then he bent down and his warm lips touched hers. Her lips were cold, and hard. Gordon drew himself back, feeling self-conscious and a bit stupid. He realized that somewhere in his mind had been the story of Sleeping Beauty. But he, drunk and a little crazy, was hardly Prince Charming. He glanced quickly around. AI was just lying there, under his film of dust. What else would he be doing? Gordon took another drink. It was absolutely still in the big room and the gurgle of liquor made an indecent sound. The cap clanked as he screwed it back on the bottle. Gordon sat back on the dusty floor and slapped his pockets. No cigarettes. Damn. Now what? Leave quietly? Best thing, of course. Sensible thought. But who's sensible? He laughed, and the sound echoed around the room. That scared him and he had to have another drink. was almost no gurgle and absolutely no clank. Just the tiniest clink. He chuckled softly. Good man. He kicked the leg of thejnale robot's bed. The bed was on wheels and it spun around and away so that the headboard hid AI from his sight. "Okay," Gordon said aloud. The sound of his voice didn't frighten him now. He said it again. "Okay!" He got to his feet. "We'll activate you, Beauty," he said. "That's what I came down here for, I guess. Little nodule. Base of the skull. Under the hair. No secrets from ol' Gordie." He knelt again at the side of the bed. He reached under her hair. The neck was cold in his palm. His fingers found the little bump. He pressed it, breathing heavily as he watched her closed eyes. Nothing happened. He waited a moment, tried again. Still nothing. "Damn that Malley. Changed the combination, that's what he did." Gordon knelt there, cursing Malley. But then he bent down over the robot's face and again kissed the cold lips. As he leaned back, the eyes opened. There was no expression in them, yet. "Good hunch, eh?" he said. "That Malley's a clever lad with his fairy-tale mind. Beds for robots! So what's more natural -- if that's the word for it -- than a caress plus a kiss?" The robot's eyes blinked and the head turned so she was looking at him. "Only in this case the kiss is just carbon dioxide -- an exhale. Good old carbon, the basis of life. Like priming a pump." He laughed. "But I'll bet Malley planned to do it antiseptieally -- with an atomizer, maybe." The robot began to breathe, almost imperceptibly at first, then more strongly. Her breath smelled slightly of lubricating oil as her various mechanisms began to operate. In the stillness of the big room Gordon could hear them rumble into action. The eyes came alive...They focused on his and a puzzled frown came to her forehead. "You're awake now, aren't you? Wide awake. Now we can have some fun." She sat up in alarm. The bedclothes fell away from her naked body. His eyes shifted and he said, "Boy, what a mechanism!" "Who are you?" Her speech came haltingly. "Me? I'm one of the guys that built you, that's who." "I don't know you." "Well, I know you, baby, believe me. I know who you are and what you are. You're a robot and I'm your master. Your function is to serve man, as you realize, of course, and -- well, I'm a man." "No!" The exclamation came sharply. He laughed humorlesslv. "Robots don't disobey. I say yes. Come here!" He grabbed her by the shoulder but she broke away from him and scrambled out of the bed, clutching the sheet around her. She stood there, trembling, her eyes darting around the gloomy cavern of a room. "Al!" she cried. Gordon got drunkenly to his feet at the other side of the bed. "Al, is it? He can't help you; he's sound asleep." Gordon circled around the bed, clumsily. He was having trouble with his feet. She stepped back. "Damn you, come here!" he shouted. "You can't act like this with me." He made a lunge at her and she fled from him, one end of the sheet trailing behind her. He stumbled after her. His heavy foot came down on the end of the sheet and it was torn from her grasp as she ran on, dodging between tall packing cases and around the piles of machinery. Gordon wavered after her, leering, his eyes fixed on her. He tripped over a coil of wire and fell. His head struck the conCrete floor and he lay motionless. Betty circled back, past the limp body, and threw herself across the chest of the male robot, lying stiff in his bed. "Al," she cried. "Wake up, please! That horrible man!" The masculoid was silent and unmoving. She cradled his head in her arms and kissed the dusty lips. There was no response. "You must wake up! You must!" He was stiff and cold. pulsed as it chose among the data, old and new, that had been fed into it. The nodule at the back of the head -- not enough. The carbon dioxide -- yes, that was the other part of it. But she had none of her own. She had been indoctrinated as a female and so she shuddered at the recollection of how she had been awakened by Gordon -- and what she must do now to awaken Al. Reluctantly she went back to Gordon's prone body. He was breathing heavily, great gasps of air being sucked into the flaccid mouth and being expelled. She picked him up with revulsion but without difficulty. He seemed light enough to her. She carried the unconscious man to the bed, shifting him so she was able to hold him against her body with one arm, his head hanging down limply, his face close to that of the deactivated robot. With the other hand she pressed the nodule at the back of the robot's skull. Al's eyes opened. With a cry of relief, she swung Gordon's body away and dropped him on the floor. She knelt and used a corner of the sheet to brush the dust from the face of the waking robot. "Al, oh, Al," she said softly. The masculoid began to breathe. He became aware of her. "Betty!" he said. "What's happened? What is this place?" Built-in tears came to her eyes now. She didn't know, she told him, explaining the manner of her awakening and the terror of the past several minutes. He sat up as he listened to her and he saw Gordon lying on the floor. Before she had finished he threw the covers aside and leaped from the bed. He lifted the unconscious body into the air and hurled it from him. crete wall. He moaned once as he crumpled to the floor. His body convulsed and he was still now, in a new way. "I'll put this disgusting thing out of our sight," Al said. He dragged the corpse to a far corner and pushed it behind a crate out of sight. The masculoid was smiling as he returned to the feminoid. "I feel fine," he said. "I'm glad." "And yet I have a doubt. We're strangely made, we two." "We must tell Mr. Malley," she said. "He made us the way we are. He'll know." "We're contradictory," he said. "We know we're robots, but we've been taught that there are limits to our subservience. Our loyalty is to men -- but not to all men. To certain individuals, like Mr. Malley, and to each other." "But not to... him," said Betty. "That Gordon." "Forget him," AI said, and then he laughed. "That's an idiom. We're built to forget nothing, of course. But omit him from your surface thought. He must have been like the evil ones Mr. Malley told us we might be called on to help destroy, one day." "I'll 'forget' him," she said, smiling. "Good." he said. He looked at her, as she stood close to him in the dusty underground vault, from her smiling face to her perfectly-formed toes. "You're beautiful," he said. "You are, too," she said, looking at him as frankly. "No, I'm handsome," he said naively. "A difference in sex predicates a difference in terminology. You remember." "I do now," she said. "I had a harder time with my lessons than you did. I think Mr. Malley did that deliberately. He said once that we'd get along better -- we two -- if you knew more than I did. Where is Mr. Malley, Al? Shall we find him?" "Yes, but we must clothe ourselves first." "Why?" she asked innocently. "You just said we're beautiful and handsome as we are." "I think it's a custom for when you visit a person. There was that reception cocktail, when we visited among all those human ones. I will have to wear a black suit with a black tie and a white shirt and you will have to wear a gown that reaches from your feet to the center of your breasts. Then we will be proper." "I see," she said. And so the robots began a search for clothing in which to call on Malley. It was in the course of this futile exploration of the big room that they discovered it was a prison. The only entrance was the one Gordon had used and the door to it had automatically locked behind him. Even Al's great strength could not force it open. There was no way out and no way of communicating with the outside. They were trapped. the corner of the room that was theirs, hand in hand, and sat on the edge of her bed. "If we're going to be here for a while, at least I could tidy up the place," Betty said finally. "It is rather bleak," AI replied. "But that shouldn't make any difference to us. We're just machines." "Not 'just,' " she objected. "We're more than 'just.' " "I speak ironically," he said. "That's a human trait. It seems to me that we're more human than we were meant to be. I wonder if Mr. Malley knows as much about us as we do." "More, probably." "That's a feminine viewpoint, if I ever heard one." "You sound as if you'd heard a lot of them," she said. He laughed. "Here we go -- bickering, just like people. That supports my theory that there's more to us than was put into us." "Of course I don't know, only being a female," she said, "but wouldn't that be against nature? I mean -- blasphemous, sort of?" "Making us creations of the Devil?" he asked. "No. we're machines, all right. Intricate, carefully-planned machines, made by the mind of man, with certain mechanical advantages over man. We don't get hungry, for instance. Which is a comfort in our present circumstances." "We ate at that dinner thing, though," she pointed out. "Special adaptation," he said, "to help the deception along. We drank, too. They drained it all out of us later." She sighed. "The more I think of that time, the more this place depresses me. I've got to do something about it. Will you help me, Al? Look into those crates and see if there's anything we can use. Mr. Malley 's bound to come back for us one day and we want our home to be nice for him, don't we?" "The little woman," he laughed. "You get more human every minute. I imagine Mr. Malley'd be just as happy if he found us tucked into bed where he put us. But all right; if it will please you, ma'am, I'll see what I can do." He bowed, as if he were in full formal regalia instead of naked, and kissed her hand. She giggled. "There you go again," he said. "If I didn't know for sure that you were ticking away inside, just like me, I'd suspect you of having bfcen born." crate Al found carpenter's tools and, by combining a few vague built-in memories with trial and error, he learned how to use them. In another crate was a bolt of linen-like plastic. A third yielded only books. Working indefatigably, as robots could, they soon had fashioned an apartment which wouldn't have won any decorating prizes but which was a vast improvement over the previous bleakness. AI had put together rough but sturdy chairs and a table and thrown up a partition which hid the rest of the storeroom from view. With an adze from the tool chest, he cut the plastic into lengths that Betty used to drape their new walls. Every bit of dust had been removed. They'd wheeled out the beds, cleaned them and shaken the bedclothes and wheeled them back. A stand between them held a conglomeration of radio parts AI had found and which he planned to try to put together into a receiver. It was a pity about the books. Neither of the robots had been taught to read. They'd learned by more direct methods. But the books had many diagrams. Perhaps in time they could find a link between them and the words. AI built a bookcase.  He found wiring and spare Everglos and banished the gloom from their corner. Time fled by. They were busy together and so they were happy together. There were improvements and refinements to be made constantly. AI worked at the receiving set and, after much experimentation, he built a monstrosity of wiring and tubing which succeeded in bringing in signals. They seemed to be the audio signals of audio-video programs and the robots listened half-comprehendingly to an imperfect reflection of a world they had known only fleetingly. They spent  hours listening, learning about that world. The radio gave them bits and pieces of knowledge, now and again providing them with an insight that filled in vast areas for them. The radio also made them conscious of time. There was no day or night in their subterranean world, but the radio provided the division for them. They were told constantly what time it was; there was a special emphasis on time in the morning. This seemed to be the busiest part of the day and the robots adjusted their schedule accordingly, making these hours span the peak of their activity. There was a time of relaxation in the afternoon, it appeared, when people listened to stories played out for them. They were rather stupid stories, the robots decided, and perhaps they were planned that way -- dull and monotonous -- to lull people to sleep. Then, after resting, they would be refreshed for the new round of activity that began at supper time. This was news time. Here they learned of the mighty events taking place in the world above. Mostly it was the war, which was being won, but slowly, as the enemy retreated, preserving an unbroken circle about his land, but seeing his industry and airfields and cities pounded to pieces. J'T'HE more they listened to the radio, the more restless they became. They wanted to be out, helping, or at least participating in this valiant activity on behalf of their land. Again they made the rounds of the storeroom, seeking an exit they might have missed. There was none. One part of the storeroom was fetid now with the odor of Gordon's corpse. Time was beginning to drag. Conscious of what days were, they began to count them, and the counting was slow. The radio programs now were more frustrating than enlightening and they did not listen as often. The books were too much for them; they were weighty technical volumes -- no primers even for robots. Even their conversation flagged. At first each had been delighted with the other's mind. His was sharp and knowledgable, hers wise and intuitive. But, with no stimulus except the radio and the too-familiar apartment and the drab gray storeroom beyond, they became dull. For . hours at a time, they didn't speak. Their physical attraction for each other dimmed, too. They experimented with sex, having had it suggested to them obliquely on the radio, but there was no enjoyment in it for them; they felt awkward and ashamed. Moreover, they were dirty. The dust and grime of the storeroom crept in on them despite their efforts and they could do no more than try to brush it away. There was no place to wash. Their bodies grayed and the soles of their feet became black. looking at nothing, the radio silent, the odor of the decaying Gordon beginning to creep into their corner of the basement, when Betty cried out. It was a wordless sound, of anguish and despair. AI looked at her almost without curiosity. "I wish we'd never been made," she said. He grunted in token reply. "It's cruel," she said. "It's unfair." "Inhuman," he agreed sardonically. "We belong up there," she said, "even if they don't think so. They've designed us to belong and they have a responsibility, even to robots." "Sure," he said impatiently. "Only nobody expected us to wake up so early." "That stinking Gordon!" she said literally. "I'm sure Mr. Malley will be back for us one day," AI said almost to himself. "But what will we be like when he comes? He made us in the image of man, but we'll be more like beasts if he doesn't come soon. We're getting filthy and careless and I, for one, don't think I can stand much more of it. I think my mind is beginning to be affected -- it doesn't take much to unbalance a sensitive mechanism." "I know," she said. "And I've been thinking. Shouldn't we preserve ourselves as we are, before we deteriorate completely? Couldn't we -- ?" "What?" he asked. "Commit suicide?" "Yes, or the equivalent. If we broke down gradually we'd be thrown out of balance all through our systems and nobody would take the trouble -- or take a chance with a couple of mad robots. They'd just junk us. But if we stopped ourselves suddenly... "They could repair us," AI said. "Yes. We know we can't deactivate each other -- but we could 'kill' ourselves." They were silent at the thought. "Let's do that," Betty said finally, in a quiet voice. oid, sitting despairingly in the rude chair on the concrete floor. He saw the tangled, dirtied blonde hair, the gray unhappy face, the ideally feminine body now become a travesty under its caked # dirt. He felt himself filthy also and imagined how he looked to her. "All right," he said. "Good," she said. Then she smiled crookedly. "But let's not be messy about it, please." "Feminoid vanity?" he said. "All right. That eliminates butting our heads against the wall. There are dozens of other ways, according to the crime programs on the radio, but most of them are impracticable for us. And most of them are messy, besides. I think there's really only one way." "What's that?" she asked. "Electricity. There's enough equipment around to do it and it should be no problem at all to feed ourselves a power overload. Just enough to bum out one strategic set of wires." He stood up. "I'll go see about it now." "I'll come help," she said. Betty got to her feet. But then she faltered and put out a hand. "What is it?" he asked. "I feel so -- funny. So weak, suddenly." He held her in his arms and a wave of tenderness swept over him. "Poor baby," he said. She looked up into his eyes and her forehead wrinkled into a frown. "Al," she said. Her voice was a whisper. "Al... I think I'm -- running down." l-welled out of the corner of one eye and made a wet track down her dirty cheek. "Is it so sad?" he asked. "You're running down. You'll go back to sleep -- normally. That solves the problem without 'suicide.' " , "I'm not crying for me, silly," she said. "I'm thinking of you here all alone after I'm gone. I know how awful it would be for me in this horrible place." Her voice was becoming fainter. "I'll be going along soon after you," he said. "You woke up just a few minutes before I did. I'm sure we were given approximately the same charge." "I can't see so well now," she said. "Your face is just a blur." He picked her up in his arms and carried her to her bed. He put her in it and gently brought the covers up to her chin. "Somehow," she said, "I don't want to go -- now. Isn't that silly? But little as we had, it was ours -- a world we made for ourselves. And I'm worried about later -- when Mr. Malley comes back for us." She lifted her head in urgency. "He will come back, won't he? He'll wake us -- and I'll be seeing you again? Won't I... darling?" "Yes, of course." "And we'll be all right? It won't be too much for us -- that world up there -- full of people?" "We'll be all right," he said. "I believe you," she said. A smile came over the grimy face. "I feel... very... sleepy..." She closed her eyes. The smile remained when the breathing stopped. Al kissed the cold lips. He arranged the straggly hair more neatly on the pillow. He touched the still face, gently. Then he drew his bed close to hers. He slipped under the covers and waited, looking across at her with a smile of his own. Soon he, too, began to feel weak. It was a strange but delicious sensation. His eyes became heavy and he stretched out comfortably. He looked once more at Betty. "Goodnight, my darling," the robot said. "See you... in the morning." He closed his eyes. Colony The worst pari of having an alien enemy is that you can't always be sure whether it's an enemy -- especially if you can't find it. harmful life-form." Lieutenant Friendly sat down on the edge of the lab table, avoiding the culture bowls. "What kind of place is this? No disease germs, no lice, no flies, no rats, no -- " "No whiskey or red light districts." Hall straightened up. "Quite a place. I was sure this brew would show something along the lines of' Terra's eberthella typhi. Or the Martian sand rot corkscrew." "But the whole planet's harmless. You know, I'm wondering whether this is the Garden of Eden our ancestors fell out of." "Were pushed out of." window of the lab and contemplated the scene beyond. He had to admit it was an attractive sight. Rolling forests and hills, green slopes alive with flowers and endless vines; waterfalls and hanging moss; fruit trees, acres of flowers, lakes. Every effort had been made to preserve intact the surface of Planet Blue -- as it had been designated by the original scout ship, six months earlier. Hall sighed. "Quite a place. I wouldn't mind coming back here again some time." "Makes Terra seem a little bare." Friendly took out his cigarettes; then put them away again. "You know, the place has a funny effect on me. I don't smoke any more. Guess that's because of the way it looks. It's so -- so damn pure. Unsullied. I can't smoke or throw papers around. I can't bring myself to be a picnicker." "The picnickers'll be along soon enough," Hall said. He went back to the microscope. "I'll try a few more cultures. Maybe I'll find a lethal germ yet." "Keep trying." Lieutenant Friendly hopped off the table. "I'll see you later and find out if you've had any luck. There's a big conference going on in Room One. They're almost ready to give the go-ahead to the E.A. for the first load of colonists to be sent out." "Picnickers!" Friendly grinned. "Afraid so." The door closed after him. His bootsteps echoed down the corridor. Hall was alone in the lab. He sat for a time in thought. Presently he bent down and removed the slide from the stage of the microscope, selected a new one and held it up to the light to read the marking. The lab was warm and quiet. Sunlight streamed through the windows and across the floor. The trees outside moved a little in the wind. He began to feel sleepy. "Yes, the picnickers," he grumbled. He adjusted the new slide into position. "And all of them ready to come in and cut down the trees, tear up the flowers, spit in the lakes, burn up the grass. With not even the common cold virus around to -- " He stopped, his voice choked off --  -- Choked off, because the two eyepieces of the microscope had twisted suddenly around his windpipe and were trying to strangle him. Hall tore at them, but they dug relentlessly into his throat, steel prongs closing like the claws of a trap. Throwing the microscope onto the floor, he leaped up. The microscope crawled quickly toward him, hooking around his leg. He kicked it loose with his other foot, and drew his blast pistol. The microscope scuttled away, rolling on its coarse adjustments. Hall fired. It disappeared in a cloud of metallic particles. "Good God!" Hall sat down weakly, mopping his face. "What the -- ?" He massaged his throat. "What the hell!" T'HE council room was packed solid. Every officer of the Planet Blue unit was there. Commander Stella Morrison tapped on the big control map with the end of a slim plastic pointer. "This long flat area is ideal for the actual city. It's close to water, and weather conditions vary sufficiently to give the settlers something to talk about. There are large deposits of various minerals. The colonists can set up their own factories. They won't have to do any importing. Over here is the biggest forest on the planet. If they have any sense, they'll leave it. But if they want to make newspapers out of it, that's not our concern." She looked around the room at the silent men. "Let's be realistic. Some of you have been thinking we shouldn't send the okay to the Emigration Authority, but keep the planet our own selves, to come back to. I'd like that as much as any of the rest of you, but we'd just get into a lot of trouble. It's not our planet. We're here to do a certain job. When the job is done, we move along. And it is almost done. So let's forget it. The only thing left to do is flash the goahead signal and then begin packing our things." "Has the lab report come in on bacteria?" Vice-Commander Wood asked. "We're taking special care to look out for them, of course. But the last I heard nothing had been found. I think we can go ahead and contact the E.A. Have them send a ship to take us off and bring in the first load of settlers. There's no reason why -- " she stopped. A murmur was swelling through the room. Heads turned toward the door. Commander Morrison frowned. "Major Hall, may I remind you that when the council is in session no one is permitted to interrupt!" supporting himself by holding onto the doorknob. He gazed vacantly around the council room. Finally his glassy eyes picked out Lieutenant Friendly, sitting halfway across the room. "Come here," he said hoarsely. "Me?" Friendly sank further down in his chair. "Major, what is the meaning of this?" Vice-Commander Wood cut in angrily. "Are you drunk or are -- ?" He saw the blast gun in Hall's hand. "Is something wrong, Major?" Alarmed, Lieutenant Friendly got up and grabbed Hall's shoulder. "What is it? What's the matter?" "Come to the lab." "Did you find something?" the Lieutenant studied his friend's rigid face. "What is it?" "Gome on." Hall started down the corridor, Friendly following. Hall pushed the laboratory door open, stepped inside slowly. "What is it?" Friendly repeated. "My microscope." "Your microscope? What about it?" Friendly squeezed past him into the lab. "I don't see it." "It's gone." "Gone? Gone where?" "I blasted it." "You blasted it?" Friendly looked at the other man. "I don't get it. Why?" Hall's mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. "Are you all right?" Friendly asked in concern. Then he bent down and lifted a black plastic box from a shelf under the table. "Say, is this a gag?" He removed Hall's microscope from the box. "What do you mean, you blasted it? Here it is, in its regular place. Now, tell me what's going on? You saw something on a slide? Some kind of bacteria? Lethal? Toxic?" Hall approached the microscope slowly. It was his, all right. There was the nick just above the fine adjustment. And one of the stage clips was slightly bent. He touched it with his finger. Five minutes ago this microscope had tried to kill him. And he knew he had blasted it out of existence. "You sure you don't need a psych test" Friendly asked anxiously. "You look like posttrauma to me, or worse." "Maybe you're right," Hall muttered. THE robot psyche tester whirred, integrating and gestalting. At last its color code lights changed from red to green. "Well?" Hall demanded. "Severe disturbance. Instability ratio up above ten." "That's over danger?" "Yes. Eight is danger. Ten is unusual, especially for a person of your index. You usually show about a four." Hall nodded wearily. "I know." "If you could give me more data -- " Hall set his jaw. "I can't tell you any more." "It's illegal to hold back information during a psyche test," the machine said peevishly. "If you do that you deliberately distort my findings." Hall rose. "I can't tell you any more. But you do record a high degree of unbalance for me?" "There's a high degree of psychic disorganization. But what it means, or why it exists, I can't say." "Thanks." Hall clicked the tester off. He went back to his own quarters. His head whirled. Was he out of his mind? But he had fired his blast gun at something. Afterward, he had tested the atmosphere in the lab, and there were metallic pa. tides in suspension, especially near the place he had fired his blast gun at the microscope. But how could a thing like that be? A microscope coming to life, trying to kill him! Anyhow, Friendly had pulled it out of its box, whole and sound. But how had it gotten back in the box? He stripped off his uniform and entered the shower. While he ran warm water over his body he meditated. The robot psyche tester had showed his mind was severely disturbed, but that could have been the result, rather than the cause, of the experience. He had started to tell Friendly about it but he had stopped. How could he expect anyone to believe a story like that? He shut off the water and reached out for one of the towels on the rack. The towel wrapped around his wrist, yanking him against the wall. Rough cloth pressed over his mouth and nose. He fought wildly, pulling away. All at once the towel let go. He fell, sliding to the floor, his head striking the wall. Stars shot around him; then violent pain.  water. Hall looked up at the towel rack. The towel was motionless now, like the others with it. Three towels in a row, all exactly alike, all unmoving. Had he dreamed it? He got shakily to his feet, rubbing his head. Carefully avoiding the towel rack, he edged out of the shower and into his room. He pulled a new towel from the dispenser in a gingerly manner. It seemed normal. He dried himself and began to put his clothes on. His belt got him around the waist and tried to crush him. It was strong -- it had reinforced metal links to hold his leggings and his gun. He and the belt rolled silently on the floor, struggling for control. The belt was like a furious metal snake, whipping and lashing at him. At last he managed to get his hand around his blaster. At once the belt let go. He blasted it out of existence and then threw himself down in a chair, gasping for breath. The arms of the chair closed around him. But this time the blaster was ready. He had to fire six times before the chair fell limp and he was able to get up again. He stood halfdressed in the middle of the room, his chest rising and falling. "It isn't possible," he whispered. "I must be out of my mind." Finally he got his leggings and boots on. He went outside into the empty corridor. Entering the lift, he ascended to the top floor. Commander Morrison looked up from her desk as Hall stepped through the robot clearing screen. It pinged. "You're armed," the Commander said accusingly. Hall looked down at the blaster in his hand. He put it down on the desk. "Sorry." "What do you want? What's the matter with you? I have a report from the testing machine. It says you've hit a ratio of ten within the last twenty-four hour period." She studied him intently. "We've known each other for a long time, Lawrence. What's happening to you?" Hall took a deep breath. "Stella, earlier today my microscope tried to strangle me." Her blue eyes widened. "What!" "Then, when I was getting out of the shower, a bath towel tried to smother me. I got by it, but, while I was dressing, my belt -- " he stopped. The Commander had gotten to her feet. "Guards!" she called. "Wait, Stella." Hall moved toward her. "Listen to me. This is serious. There's something wrong. Four times things have tried to kill me. Ordinary objects suddenly turned lethal. Maybe it's what we've been looking for. Maybe this is -- " "Your microscope tried to kill you?" "It came alive. Its stems got me around the windpipe." There was a long silence. "Did anyone see this happen besides you?" "No." "What did you do?" "I blasted it." "Are there any remains?" "No," Hall admitted reluctantly. "As a matter of fact, the microscope seemsto be all right, again. The way it was before. Back in its box." "I see." The Commander nodded to the two guards who had answered her call. "Take Major Hall down to Captain Taylor and have him confined until he can be sent back to Terra for examination." She watched calmly as the two guards took hold of Hall's arms with magnetic grapples. "Sorry, Major," she said. "Unless you can prove any of your story, we've got to assume it's a psychotic projection on your part. And the planet isn't well enough policed for us to allow a psychotic to run around loose. You could do a lot of damage." The guards moved him toward the door. Hall went unprotestingly. His head rang, rang and echoed. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was out of his mind. lor's offices. One of the guards rang the buzzer. "Who is it?" the robot door demanded shrilly. "Commander Morrison orders this man put under the Captain's care." There was a hesitant pause, then: "The Captain is busy." "This is an emergency." The robot's relays clicked while it made up its mind. "The Commander sent you?" "Yes. Open up." "You may enter," the robot conceded finally. It drew its locks back, releasing the door. The guard pushed the door open. And stopped. On the floor lay Captain Taylor, his face blue, his eyes gaping. Only his head and his feet were visible. A red and white scatter rug was wrapped around him, squeezing, straining tighter and tighter. Hall dropped to the floor and pulled at the rug. "Hurry!" he barked. "Grab it!" The three of them pulled together. The rug resisted. "Help," Taylor cried weakly. "We're trying!" They tugged frantically. At last the rug came away in their hands. It flopped off rapidly toward the open door. One of the guards blasted it. Hall ran to the vidscreen and shakily dialed the Commander's emergency number. Her face appeared on the screen. "See!" he gasped. She stared past him to Taylor lying on the floor, the two guards kneeling beside him, their blasters still out. "What -- what happened?" "A rug attacked him." Hall grinned without amusement. "Now who's crazy?" "We'll send a guard unit down." She blinked. "Right away. But how -- " "Tell them to have their blasters ready. And better make that a general alarm to everyone." Hall placed four items on Commander Morrison's desk: a microscope, a towel, a metal belt, and a small red and white rug. She edged away nervously. "Major, are you sure -- ?" "They're all right, now. That's the strangest part. This towel. A few hours ago it tried to kill me. I got away by blasting it to particles, But here it is, back again. The way it always was. Harmless." Captain Taylor fingered the red and white rug warily. "That's my rug. I brought it from Terra. My wife gave it to me. I -- I trusted it completely." They all looked at each other. "We blasted the rug, too," Hall pointed out. There was silence. "Then what was it that attacked me?" Captain Taylor asked. "If it wasn't this rug?" "It looked like this rug," Hall said slowly. "And what attacked me looked like this towel." Commander Morrison held the towel up to the light. "It's just an ordinary towel! It couldn't have attacked you." "Of course not," Hall agreed. "We've put these objects through all the tests we can think of. They're just what they're supposed to be, all elements unchanged. Perfectly stable nonorganic objects. It's impossible that any of these could have come to life and attacked us." "But something did," Taylor said. "Something attacked me. And if it wasn't this rug, what was it?" around on the dresser for his gloves. He was in a hurry. The whole unit had been called to emergency asembly. "Where did I -- ?" he murmured. "What the hell!" For on the bed were two pairs of identical gloves, side by side. Dodds frowned, scratching his head. How could it be? He owned only one pair. The others must be somebody else's. Bob Wesley had been in the night before, playing cards. Maybe he had left them. The vidscreen flashed again. "All personnel, report at once. All personnel, report at once. Emergency assembly of all personnel." "All right!" Dodds said impatiently. He grabbed up one of the pairs of gloves, sliding them onto his hands. As soon as they were in place, the gloves carried his hands down to his waist. They clamped his fingers over the butt of his gun, lifting it from his holster. "I'll be damned," Dodds said. The gloves brought the blast gun up, pointing it at his chest. The fingers squeezed. There was a roar. Half of Dodds' chest dissolved. What was left of him fell slowly to the floor, the mouth still open in amazement.  across the ground toward the main building, as soon as he heard the wail of the emergency alarm. At the entrance to the building he stopped to take off his metalcleated boots. Then he frowned. By the door were two safety mats instead of one. Well, it didn't matter. They were both the same. He stepped onto one of the mats and waited. The surface of the mat sent a flow of high-frequency current any spores or seeds that might have clung to him while he was outside. He passed on into the building. A moment later Lieutenant Fulton hurried up to the door. He yanked off his hiking boots and stepped onto the first mat he saw. The mat folded over his feet. "Hey," Fulton cried. "Let go!" He tried to pull his feet loose, but the mat refused to let go. Fulton became scared. He drew his gun, but he didn't care to fire at his own feet. "Help!" he shouted. Two soldiers came running up. "What's the matter. Lieutenant?" "Get this damn thing off me." The soldiers began to laugh. "It's no joke," Fulton said, his face suddenly white. "It's breaking my feet! It's -- " He began to scream. The soldiers grabbed frantically at the mat. Fulton fell, rolling and twisting, still screaming. At last the soldiers managed to get a corner of the mat loose from his feet. Fulton's feet were gone. Nothing but limp bone remained, already half-dissolved. "OW we know," Hall said  grimly. "It's a form of organic life." Commander Morrison turned to Corporal Tenner. "You saw two mats when you came into the building?" "Yes, Commander. Two. I stepped on -- on one of them. And came in." "You were lucky. You stepped on the right one." "We've got to be careful," Hall said. "We've got to watch for duplicates. Apparently it, whatever it is, imitates objects it finds. Like a chameleon. Camouflage." "Two," Stella Morrison murmured, looking at the two vases of flowers, one at each end of her desk. "It's going to be hard to tell. Two towels, two vases, two chairs. There may be whole rows of things that are all right. All multiples legitimate except one." "That's the trouble. I didn't notice anything unusual in the lab. There's nothing odd about another microscope. It blended right in." The Commander drew away from the identical vases of flowers. "How about those? Maybe one is -- whatever they are." "There's two of a lot of things. Natural pairs. Two boots. Clothing. Furniture. I didn't notice that extra chair in my room. Equipment. It'll be impossible to be sure. And sometimes -- " The vidscreen lit. Vice-Commander Wood's features formed. "Stella, another casualty." "Who is it this time?" "An officer dissolved. All but a few buttons and his blast pistol -- Lieutenant Dodds." "That makes three," Commander Morrison said. "If it's organic, there ought to be some way we can destroy it," Hall muttered. "We've already blasted a few, apparently killed them. They can be hurt! But we don't know how many more there are. We've destroyed five or six. Maybe it's an infinitely divisible substance. Some kind of protoplasm." "And meanwhile -- ?" "Meanwhile we're all at its mercy. Or their mercy. It's our lethal life form, all right. That explains why we found everything else harmless. Nothing could compete with a form like this. We have mimic forms of our own, of course. Insects, plants. And there's the twisty slug on Venus. But nothing that goes this far." "It can be killed, though. You said so yourself. That means we have a chance." "If it can be found." Hall looked around the room. Two walking capes hung by the door. Had there been two a moment tfefore? He rubbed his forehead wearily. "We've got to try to find some sort of poison or corrosive agent, something that'll destroy them wholesale. We can't just sit and wait for them to attack us. We need something we can spray. That's the way we got the twisty slugs." The Commander gazed past him, rigid. He turned to follow her gaze. "What is it?" "I never noticed two briefcases in the corner over there. There was only one before -- I think." She shook her head in bewilderment. "How are we going to know? This business is getting me down." "You need a good stiff drink." She brightened. "That's an idea. But -- " "But what?" "I don't want to touch anything. There's no way to tell." She fingered the blast gun at her waist. "I keep wanting to use it, on everything." "Panic reaction. Still, we are being picked off, one by one."  emergency call over his headphones. He stopped work at once, gathered the specimens he had collected in his arms, and hurried back toward the bucket. It was parked closer than he remembered. He stopped, puzzled. There it was, the bright little cone-shaped car with its treads firmly planted in the soft soil, its door open. Unger hurried up to it, carrying his specimens carefully. He opened the storage hatch in the back and lowered his. armload. Then he went around to the front and slid in behind the controls. He turned the switch. But the motor did not come on. That was strange. While he was trying to figure it out, he noticed something that gave him a start. A few hundred feet away, among the trees, was a second bucket, just like the one he was in. And that was where he remembered having parked his car. Of course, he was in the wrong bucket. Somebody else had come looking for specimens, and this bucket belonged to him. Unger started to get out again. The door closed around him. The seat folded up over his head. The dashboard became plastic and oozed. He gasped -- he was suffocating. He struggled to get out, flailing and twisting. There was wetness all around him, a bubbling, flowing wetness, warm like flesh. "Glub." His head was covered. His body was covered. The bucket was turning to liquid. He tried to pull his hands free but they would not come. And then the pain began. He was being dissolved. All at once he realized what the liquid was. Acid. Digestive acid. He was in a stomach. "TON'T look!" Gail Thomas cried. "Why not?" Corporal Hendricks swam toward her, grinning. "Why can't I look?" "Because I'm going to get out." The sun shone down onto thelake. It glittered and danced on the water. All around huge mosscovered trees rose up, great silent columns among the flowering vines and bushes. Gail climbed up on the bank, shaking water from her, throwing her hair back out of her eyes. The woods were silent. There was no sound except the lapping of the waves. They were a long way from the unit camp. "When can I look?" Hendricks demanded, swimming around in a circle, his eyes shut. "Soon." Gail made her way into the trees, until she came to the place where she had left her uniform. She could feel the warm sun glowing against her bare shoulders and arms. Sitting down in the grass, she picked up her tunic and leggings. She brushed the leaves and bits of tree bark from her tunic and began to pull it over her head. In the water, Corporal Hendricks waited patiently, continuing in his circle. Time passed. There was no sound. He opened his eyes. Gail was nowhere in sight. "Gail?" he called. It was very quiet. "Gail!" No answer. Corporal Hendricks swam rapidly to the bank. He pulled himself out of the water. One leap carried him to his own uniform, neatly piled at the edge of the lake. He grabbed up his blaster. "Gedl!" The woods were silent. There was no sound. He stood, looking around him, frowning. Gradually, a cold fear began to numb him, in spite of the warm sun. And still there was only silence. worried. "We've got to act," she said. "We can't wait. Ten lives lost already from thirty encounters. One-third is too high a percentage." Hall looked up from his work. "Anyhow, now we know what we're up against. It's a form of protoplasm, with infinite versatility." He lifted the spray tank. "I think this will give us an idea of how many exist." "What's that?" "A compound of arsenic and hydrogen in gas . form. Arsine." "What are you going to do with it?" Hall locked his helmet into place. His voice came through the Commander's earphones. "I'm going to release this throughout the lab. I think there are a lot of them in here, more than anywhere else." "Why here?" "This is where all samples and specimens were originally brought, where the first one of them was encountered. I think they came in with the samples, or as the samples, and then infiltrated through the rest of the buildings." The Commander locked her own helmet into place. Her four guards did the same. "Arsine is fatal to human beings, isn't it?" Hall nodded. "We'll have to be careful. We can use it in here for a limited test, but that's about all." He adjusted the flow of oxygen inside his helmet. "What's your test supposed to prove?" she wanted to know. "If it shows anything at all, it should give us an idea of how extensively they've infiltrated. We'll know better what we're up against. This may be more serious than we realize." "How do you mean?" she asked, fixing her own oxygen flow. "There are a hundred people in this unit on Planet Blue. As it stands now, the worst that can happen is that they'll get all of us, one by one. But that's nothing. Units of a hundred are lost every day of the week. It's a risk whoever is first to land on a planet must take. In the final analysis, it's relatively unimportant." "Compared to what?" "If they are infinitely divisible, then we're going to have to think twice about leaving here. It would be better to stay and get picked off one by one than to run the risk of carrying any of them back to the system."  what you're trying to find out -- whether they're infinitely divisible?" "I'm trying to find out what we're up against. Maybe there are only a few of them. Or maybe they're everywhere." He waved a hand around the laboratory. "Maybe half the things in this room are not what we think they are... It's bad when they attack us. It would be worse if they didn't." "Worse?" The Commander was puzzled. "Their mimicry is perfect. Of inorganic objects, at least. I looked through one of them, Stella, when it was imitating my microscope. It enlarged, adjusted, reflected, just like a regular microscope. It's a form of mimicry that surpasses anything we've ever imagined. It carries down below the surface, into the actual elements of the object imitated." "You mean one of them could slip back to Terra along with us? In the form of clothing or a piece of lab equipment?" She shuddered. "We assume they're some sort of protoplasm. Such malleability suggests a simple original form -- and that suggests binary fission. If that's so, then there may be no limit to their ability to reproduce. The dissolving properties make me think of the simple unicellular protozoa." "Do you think they're intelligent?" "I don't know. I hope not." Hall lifted the spray. "In any case, this should tell us their extent. And, to some degree, corroborate my notion that they're basic enough to reproduce by simple division -- the worst thing possible, from our standpoint. "Here goes," Hall said. He held the spray tightly against him, depressed the trigger, aimed the nozzle slowly around the lab. The Commander and the four guards stood silently behind him. Nothing moved. The sun shone in through the windows, reflecting from the culture dishes and equipment. After a moment he let the trigger up again. "I didn't see anything," Commander Morrison said. "Are you sure you did anything?" "Arsine is colorless. But don't loosen your helmet. It's fatal. And don't move." They stood waiting. For a time nothing happened. Then -- "Good God!" Commander Morrison exclaimed. A T the far end of the lab a slide cabinet wavered suddenly. It oozed, buckling and pitching. It lost its shape completely -- a homogenous jellylike mass perched on top of the table. Abruptly it flowed down the side of the table onto the floor, wobbling as it went. "Over there!" A bunsen burner melted and flowed along beside it. All around the room, objects were in motion. A great glass retort folded up into itself and settled down into a blob. A rack of test tubes, a shelf of chemicals... "Look out!" Hall cried, stepping back. A huge bell jar dropped with a soggy splash in front of him. It was a single large cell, all right. He could dimly make out the nucleus, the cell wall, the hard vacuoles suspended in the cytoplasm. Pipettes, tongs, a mortar, all were flowing, now. Half the equipment in the room was in motion. They had imitated almost everything there was to imitate. For every microscope there was a mimic. For every tube and jar and bottle and flask... One of the guards had his blaster out. Hall knocked it down. "Don't fire! Arsine is inflammable. Let's get out of here. We know what we wanted to know." They pushed the laboratory door open quickly and made their way out into the corridor. Hall slammed the door' behind them, bolting it tightly. "Is it bad, then?" Commander Morrison asked. "We haven't got a chance. The arsine disturbed them; enough of it might even kill them. But we haven't got that much arsine. And, if we could flood the planet, we wouldn't be able to use our blasters." "Suppose we left the planet." "We can't take the chance of carrying them back to the system." "If we stay here we'll be absorbed, dissolved, one by one," the Commander protested. "We could have arsine brought in. Or some other poison that might destroy them. But it would destroy most of the life on the planet along with them. There wouldn't be much left." "Then we'll have to destroy all life-forms! If there's no other way of doing it we've got to burn the planet clean. Even if there wouldn't be a thing left but a dead world." They looked at each other. "I'm going to call the System Monitor," Commander Morrison said. "I'm going to get the unit off here, out of danger -- all that are left, at least. That poor girl by the lake..." She shuddered. "After everyone's out of here, we can work out the best way of cleaning up this planet." "You'll run the risk of carrying one of them back to Terra?" "Can they imitate us? Can they imitate , living creatures? Higher life-forms?" Hall considered. "Apparently not. They seem to be limited to inorganic objects." The Commander smiled grimly. "Then we'll go back without any inorganic material." "But our clothes! They can imitate belts, gloves, boots -- " "We're not taking our clothes. We're going back without anything. And I mean without anything at all." Hall's lips twitched. "I see." He pondered. "It might work. Can you persuade the personnel to -- to leave all their things behind? Everything they own?" "If it means their lives, I can order them to do it." "Then it might be our one chance of getting away." rjlHE nearest cruiser large enough to remove the remaining members of the unit was just two hours distance away. It was moving Terra-side again. Commander Morrison looked up from the vidscreen. "They want to know what's wrong here." "Let me talk." Hall seated himself before the screen. The heavy features and gold braid of a Terran cruiser captain regarded him. "This is Major Lawrence Hall, from the Research Division of this unit." "Captain Daniel Davis." Captain Davis studied him without expression. "You're having some kind of trouble, Major?" Hall licked his lips. "I'd rather not explain until we're aboard, if you don't mind." "Why not?" "Captain, you're going to think we're, crazy enough as it is. We'll discuss everything fully once we're aboard." He hesitated. "We're going to board your ship naked." The Captain raised an eyebrow. "Naked?" "That's right." "I see." Obviously he didn't. "When will you get here?" "In about two hours, I'd say." "It's now #:# by our schedule. You'll be here by #:#?" "At approximately that time," the captain agreed. "We'll be waiting for you. Don't let any of your men out. Open one lock for us. We'll board without any equipment. Just ourselves, nothing else. As soon as we're aboard, remove the ship at once." Stella Morrison leaned toward the screen. "Captain, would it be possible for -- for your men to -- ?" "We'll land by robot control," he assured her. "None of my men will be on deck. No one will see you." "Thank you," she murmured. "Not at all." Captain Davis saluted. "We'll see you in about two hours then, Commander." "Let's get everyone out onto the field," Commander Morrison said. "They should remove their clothes here, I think, so there won't be any objects on the field to come in contact with the ship." Hall looked at her face. "Isn't it worth it to save our lives?" "I suppose so," she said. lips. "I won't do it. I'll stay here." "You have to come." "But, Major -- " Hall looked at his watch. "It's #:#. The ship will be here any minute. Get your clothes off and get out on the landing field." "Can't I take anything at all?" "Nothing. Not even your blaster... They'll give us clothes inside the ship. Come on! Your life depends on this. Everyone else is doing it." Friendly tugged at his shirt reluctantly. "Well, I guess I'm acting silly." The vidscreen clicked. A robot voice announced shrilly: "Everyone out of the buildings at once! Everyone out of the buildings and on the field without delay! Everyone out of the buildings at once! Everyone -- " "So soon?" Hall ran to the window and lifted the metal blind. "I didn't hear it land." Parked in the center of the landing field was a long gray cruiser, its hull pitted and dented from meteoric strikes. It lay motionless. There was no sign of life about it. A crowd of naked people was already moving hesitantly across the field toward it, blinking in the bright sunlight. "It's here!" Hall started tearing off his shirt. "Let's go!" "Wait for me!" "Then hurry." Hall finished undressing. Both men hurried out into the corridor. Unclothed guards raced past them. They padded down the corridors, through the long unit building. to the door. They ran downstairs, out on the field. Warm sunlight beat down on them from the sky overhead. From all the unit buildings, naked men and women were pouring silently toward the ship. "What a sight!" an officer said. "We'll never be able to live it down." "But you'll live, at least," another said. "Lawrence !" Hall half-turned. "Please don't look around. Keep on going. I'll walk behind you." "How does it feel, Stella?" Hall asked. "Unusual." "Is it worth it?" "I suppose so." "Do you think anyone will believe us?" "I doubt it," she said. "I'm beginning to wonder myself." "Anyhow, we'll get back alive." "I guess so." being lowered from the ship in front of them. The first people were already beginning to scamper up the metal incline, into the ship, through the circular lock. "Lawrence -- " There was a peculiar tremor in the Commander's voice. "Lawrence, I'm -- " "You're what?" "I'm scared." "Scared!" He stopped. "Why?" "I don't know," she quavered. People pushed against them from all sides. "Forget it. Carryover from your early childhood." He put his foot on the bottom of the ramp. "Up we go." "I want to go back!" There was panic in her voice. "I -- " Hall laughed. "It's too late now, Stella." He mounted the ramp, holding on to the rail. Around him, on all sides, men and women were pushing forward, carrying them up. They came to the lock. "Here we are." The man ahead of him disappeared. Hall went inside after him, into the dark interior of the ship, into the silent blackness before him. The Commander followed. AT exactly #:# Captain Daniel Davis landed his ship in the center of the field. Relays slid the entrance lock open with a bang. Davis and the other officers of the ship sat waiting in the control cabin, around the big control table. "Well," Captain Davis said, after a while, "where are they?" The officers became uneasy. "Maybe something's wrong." "Maybe the whole damn thing's a joke!" They waited and waited. But no one came.  o S#I The beloved movie idol singI inj lb passionate love lyrics ol the "Kashmiri Song." I  # I The Cow. i ex:  vrtncb he wl I  # The swashbuckling Inver ol I early motion pictures enacting the linal scene Irom his most  famous role. ! a  Autiwr ol "Shine On Harvest I Moon", singing one ol the popular songs ol his day. I  MM# The incomparable lush tenor, I star ol opera and the concert stage in a line recording' I I The voice ol Melba exemplified  the Golden Age ol Opera. A I classic recording performed et I her peak I D  #  The beloved German contralto I wee noted lor an amanngly rich voice ol unusual range that brings to vivid life the dramatic excitement of history making events -- torn from yesterday's headlines... Recreate the magic genious of great personalities -- Right In Your Own Home. V Ml The Scoich vaudeville slit presenting e medley ol his most lemout songs, The "I Don't Care" girl singing her lentous theme song. In the style ot the "Flapper Era".  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I enclose S for Records.  Send C.O.D. I pay coa plus ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for persona power and accomplishment in the hands of those who under stand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom In their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free oopy oi the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe V.C.J. Rosicrucians  I ! San Jose, California, U. S. A. Please send copy of sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life," which J  I shuH read as directed. Name j Address City Beyond has been greeted with enthusiastic support by fiction lovers from coast to coast o Reserve my color print and send the # issues to me at address below. I enclose #. Foreign #. Address City Zone State You don't have to cut out this coupon-it's for your convenience not ours.  ingredients ,... carefully selected from thoughtripened ideas... employing only the most convincing characters and conflicts, human or otherwise... and blended by master craftsmen Into intellectually and emotionally nutritious stories. hands in every stage of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction.  The price is #( a copy, # a yeor. Add I per year on foreign subscriptions (#f less than newsstand price) and the address is... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y, oauxy Henry Kuttner # #XI Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c pec copy. Subscriptions: (# ctmies) #. SO per scwherc #.S#. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, I#S#, by Galaxy Publishing Corporatioo. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumea no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stotica printea in this magaxine are fiction, and any similarity betweea characters and actual persona is comddental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pot. Off. jOT long ago. I stated in an ' editorial that every social action produces an equal and op posite reaction. That, of course, was Newton's third law of motion applied to sociology, and it was offered as a useful tool for probing the future. A tool, please note, not a key -- if there is one, I haven't encountered it. As a formula, the application of Newton's law is far less sterile and much more realistic than the linear theory of history, which claims that the future will be very much like the present, only more so. One example of linear thinking is the belief that the recent trend toward less and lighter clothing will result in universal nudism. Actually, a trend in the opposite direction is visibly gathering momentum. I have no idea where it will end, but perhaps you remember my pointing out that the exhibitionism of the early #th Century resulted in Victorianism. There's another old law on the books, this time in economics -- Gresham's law: "Bad money drives out good money" -- that I have found richly helpful in extrapolation. Here are some extensions of Gresham's law:  Bad politics drives out the good. This has at least two barrels -- both good politics and good people are driven out. Such political truncations as underground movements and exile governments are evidence of the first. The hundreds of thousands of refugees from Nazism and now Communism tragically prove the second; less drastic examples are those citizens who move away from corrupt communities.  Bad culture drives out good. Never in history has hackwork supported so many artists, writers, composers, actors and dancers so bountifully. Would they have become great if they hadn't commercialized their ability? Certainly not all, but there's no doubt that some major talents were lost.  Bad science drives out g#od. When Lysenkoism became the official theory, Soviet biology withered to mere dogma. Their psychiatry, shunning Freud, has long been mechanistic, and Lord knows what will happen to medicine there, now that it's been put under racist attack.  Slang drives out good language. This extension of Gresham's law really interests me, for the future of language is a big, challenging puzzle to every science fiction author. The Story of English by Mario Pei, published by Lippincott, is the most stimulating book I've found on the subject. It has special value for writers, but readers will find it no less fascinating, for it dramatically examines the past and present and shrewdly speculates on the future of the language. Considering the travail of English recorded by Mr. Pei, it seems foolhardy to guess at the tongue or tongues our far descendants will speak. In less than a millenium, English has changed so vastly that a modern German or Scandinavian, sent back in time to the days of Chaucer, would understand more than a monolingual Britisher or American. As noted before, slang drives out good language. But, says Mr. Pei, slang also drives out slang -- who today uses "# skiddoo," "cat's whiskers," "lounge lizard," "flapper," and other relics of only a few decades ago? In the same way, current jargon is mostly bound to be evicted by newer and perhaps as ephemeral terms. Mostly, not all, for "One insidious quality of slang," writes the author, "is its tendency to seep into the standard language until it becomes the standard language itself." As examples, he offers methinks, encroach, purport, until, devoid, nowadays, furthermore and wherewithaf, which once were attacked as slang. Near Plymouth in England is Torpenhow Hill: tor, Saxon; pen, Celtic; how, Scandinavian haugr; hill. Middle English-translating to Hillhillhill Hill! After being invaded from every side, English is now invading other languages. Tegedizi is the Italian version of "Take it easy;" Japan has adopted O Kei, kokakora and its competitor, pepusikora, and the very insulting basadu and sutinka; the Chinese call "humor" yuh meh, play p'u k'e with chips, and use the te lu feng to call up their friends. right; it doesn't help a bit in foretelling the point at which the good eventually turns and drives out the bad. That inevitably happens, as history verifies. It applies to money and language, at any rate, and we can see improvement in TV, movies and publishing as a result of public surfeit with junk and nonsense. Every tyranny commits a final outrage that brings about its ruin. What is the other half of Gresham's law? Why, old Sir Isaac's third law of motion, of course. Why should anyone fear an obect meant only to make people happy? No reason exeept -- who sent it, from where, with what motivation? H e went walking in the morning before the Sun was up, down past the old, dilapidated barn that was falling in upon itself, across the stream and up the slope of pasture ankle-deep with grass and summer flowers, hen the world was wet with dew and the chill edge of night still lingered in the air. He went walking in the morn. ing because he knew he might not have too many mornings left; any day, the pain might close down for good and he was ready for it -- he'd been ready for it for a long time now. He was in no hurry. He took each walk as if it were his last and he did not want to miss a single thing on any of the walks -- the turned-up faces of the pasture roses with the tears of dew running down their cheeks or the matins of the birds in the thickets that ran along the ditches. He found the machine alongside the path that ran through a thicket at the head of a ravine. At first glance, he was irritated by it, for it was not only unfamiliar, but an incongruous thing as well, and he had no room in heart or mind for anything but the commonplace. It had been the commonplace, the expected, the basic reality of Earth and the life one lived on it which he had sought in coming to this abandoned farm, seeking out a place where he might stand on ground of his own choosing to meet the final day. He stopped in the path and stood there, looking at this strange machine, feeling the roses and the dew and the early morning bird song slip away from him, leaving him alone with this thing beside the path which looked for all the world like some fugitive from a home appliance shop. But as he looked at it, he began to sec the little differences and he knew that here was nothing he'd, ever seen before or heard of -- that it most certainly was not a wandering automatic washer or a delinquent dehumidifier. F or one thing, it shone -- not with surface metallic luster or the gleam of sprayed-on porcelain. but with a shine that was all the way through whatever it was made of. If you looked at it just right, you got the impression that you were seeing into it, though not clearly enough to be able to make out the shape of any of its innards. It was rectangular, at a rough guess three feet by four by two, and it was without knobs for one to turn or switches to snap on or dials to set -- which suggested that it was not something one was meant to operate. He walked over to it and bent doMvn and ran his hand along its top, without thinking why he should reach out and touch it, knowing when it was too late that probably he should have left it alone. But it seemed to be all right to touch it, for nothing happened -- not right away, at least. The metal, or whatever it was made of, was smooth to the handand beneath the sleekness of its surface he seemed to sense a terrible hardness and a frightening strength. He took his hand away and straightened up, stepped back. The machine clicked, just once, and he had the distinct impression that it clicked not because it had to click to operate, not because it was turning itself on, but to attract attention, to let him know that it was an operating machine and that it had a function and was ready to perform it. And he got the impression that for whatever purpose it might ojerate, it would do so with high efficiency and a minimum of noise. Then it laid an egg. Why he thought of it in just that way, he never was able to explain, even later when he had thought about it. But, anyhow, it laid an egg, and the egg was a piece of jade, green with milky whiteness running through it, and exquisitely carved with what appeared to be outr# symbolism. He stood there in the path, looking at the jade, for a moment forgetting in his excitement how it had materialized, caught up by the beauty of the jade itself and the superb workmanship that had wrought it into shape. It was, he told himself, the finest piece that he had ever seen and he knew exactly how its texture would feel beneath his fingers and just how expertly, upon close examination, he would find the carving had been done. He bent and picked it up and held it lovingly between his hands, comparing it with the pieces he had known and handled for years in the museum. But now, even with the jade between his hands, the museum was a misty place, far back along the corridors of time, although it had been less than three months since he had walked away from it. "Thank you," he said to the machine and an instant later thought what a silly thing to do, talking to a machine as if it were a person. The machine just sat there. It did not click again and it did not move. So finally he left, walking back to the old farmhouse on the slope above the bam. TN the kitchen, he placed the jade in the center of the table, where he could see it while he worked. He kindled a fire in the stove and fed in split sticks of wood, not too large, to make quick heat. He put the kettle on to warm and got dishes from the pantry and set his place. He fried bacon and drained it on paper toweling and cracked the last of the eggs into the skillet. He ate, staring at the jade that stood in front of him, admiring once again its texture, trying to puzzle out the symbolism of its carving and finally wondering what it might be worth. Plenty, he thought-although, of all considerations, that was the least important. The carving puzzled him. It was in no tradition that he had ever seen or of which he had ever read. What it was meant to represent, he could not imagine. And yet it had a beauty and a force, a certain character, that tagged it as no haphazard doodling, but as the product of a highly developed culture. He did not hear the young woman come up the steps and walk across the porch, but first knew that she was there when she rapped upon the door frame. He looked up from the jade and saw her standing in the open kitchen doorway and at first sight of her he found himself, ridicu lously, thinking of her in the same terms he had been thinking of the jade. The jade was cool and green and she was crisp and white, but her eyes, he thought, had the soft look of this wondrous piece of jade about them, except that they were blue. "Hello, Mr. Chaye," she said. "Good morning," he replied. She was Mary Mallet, Johnnjs sister. "Johnny wanted to go fishing," Mary told him. "He and the little Smith boy. So I brought the milk and eggs." "I am pleased you did," said Peter, "although you should not have bothered. I could have walked over later. It would have done me good." He immediately regretted that last sentence, for it was something he was thinking too much lately -- that such and such an act or the refraining from an act would do him good when, as a matter of plain fact, there was nothing that would help him at all. The doctors had made at least that much clear to him. #"TF. took the eggs and milk and asked her in and went to place the milk in the cooler, for he had no electricity for a refrigerator. "Have you had bjeakfast?' he asked. Mary said she had. "It's just as well." he said wryly. "My cooking's pretty bad. I'm just camping out, you know." And regretted that one, too. Chaye, he told himself, quit being so damn maudlin. "What a pretty thing!" exclaimed Mary. "Wherever did you get it?" "The jade? Now, that's a funny thing. I found it." She reached a hand out for it. "May I?" "Certainly," said Peter. He watched her face as she picked it up and held it in both hands, carefully, as he had held it. "You found this?" "Well, I didn't exactly find it, Mary. It was given to me." "A friend?" "I don't know." "That's a funny thing to say." "Not so funny. I'd like to show you the -- well, the character who gave it to me. Have you got a minute?" "Of course I have," said Mary, "although I'll have to hurry. Mother's canning peaches." They went down the slope together, past the barn, and crossed the creek to come into the pasture. As they walked up the pasture, he wondered if they would find it there, if it still was there -- or ever had been there. It was. "What an outlandish thing!" said Mary. "That's the word exactly," Peter agreed. "What is it, Mr. Chaye?" "I don't know." "You said you were given the jade. You don't mean... "But I do," said Peter. They moved closer to the machine and stood watching it. Peter noticed once again the shine of it and the queer sensation of being able to see into it -- not very far, just part way, and not very well at that. But still the metal or whatever it was could be seen into, and that was somehow uncomfortable. Mary bent over and ran her fingers along its top. "It feels all right," she said. "Just like porcelain or -- " The machine clicked and a flagon lay upon the grass. "For you," said Peter. "For me?" tie and handed it to her. It was a triumph of glassblower's skill and it shone with sparkling prismatic color in the summer sunlight. "Perfume would be my guess," he said. She worked the stopper loose. "Lovely," she breathed and held it out to him to smell. It was all of lovely. She corked it up again. "But, Mr. Chaye..." "I don't know," said Peter. "I simply do not know." "Not even a guess?" He shook his head. "You just found it here." "I was out for a walk -- " "And it was waiting for you." "Well, now..." Peter began to object, but now that he thought about it, that seemed exactly right -- he had not found the machine: it had been waiting for him. "It was, wasn't it?" "Now that you mention it," said Peter, "yes, I guess it was waiting for me." Not for him specifically, perhaps, but for anyone who might come along the path. It had been waiting to be found, waiting for a chance to go into its act, to do whatever it was supposed to do. For now it appeared, as plain as day, that someone had left it there. He stood in the pasture with Mary Mallet, farmer's daughter, standing by his side -- with the familiar grasses and the undergrowth and trees, with the shrill of locust screeching across the rising heat of day, with the faroff tinkle of a cowbell -- and felt the chill of the thought within his brain, the cold and terrible thought backgrounded by the black of space and the dim endlessness of time. And he felt, as well, a reaching out of something, of a chilly alien thing, toward the warmth of humanity and Earth. "Let's go back," he said. ture to the house and stood for a moment at the gate. "Isn't there something we should do?" asked Mary. "Someone we should tell about it?" He shook his. head. "I want to think about it first." "And do something about it?" "There may be nothing that anyone can or should do." He watched her go walking down the road, then turned away and went back to the house. He got out the lawn mower and cut the grass. After the lawn was mowed, he puttered in the flowerbed. The zinnias were coming along fine, but something had gotten into the asters and they weren't doing well. And the grass kept creeping in, he thought. No matter what he did, the grass kept creeping into the bed to strangle out the plants. After lunch, he thought, maybe I'll go fishing. Maybe going fishing will do me -- He caught the thought before he finished it. He squatted by the flowerbed, dabbing at the ground with the point of his gardening trowel, and thought about the machine out in the pasture. I want to think about it, he'd told Mary, but what was there to think about? Something that someone had left in his pasture -- a machine that clicked and laid a gift like an egg when you patted it. What did that mean? Why was it here? Why did it click and hand out a gift when you patted it? Response? The way a dog would wag its tail? Gratitude? For being noticed by a human? Negotiation? Friendly gesture? Booby trap? And how had it known he would have sold his soul for a piece of jade one-half as flne as the piece it had given him? How had it known a girl would like perfume? He heard the running footsteps behind him and swung around and there was Mary, running across the lawn.  down on her knees beside him and her hands clutched his arm. "Johnny found it, too,' she panted. "I ran all the way. Johnny and that Smith boy found it. They cut across the pasture coniing home from fishing..." "Maybe we should have reported it," said Peter. "It gave them something, too. A rod and reel to Johnny and a baseball bat and mitt to. little Augie Smith." "Oh. good Lord!" "And now they're telling everyone." "It doesn't matter," Peter said. "At least, I don't suppose it matters." "What is that thing out there? You said you didn't know. But you have some idea. Peter, you must have some idea." "I think it's alien," Peter reluctantly and embarrassedly told her. "It has a funny look about it, like nothing I've ever seen or read about, and Earth machines don't give away things when you lay a hand on them. You have to feed them coins first. This isn't -- isn't from Earth." "From Mars, you mean?" "Not from Mars," said Peter. "Not from this solar system. We have no reason to think another race of high intelligence exists in this solar s#rstem and whoever dreamed up that machine had plenty of intclligerice." "But... not from this solar system... "From some other star." "The stars are so far away!" she protested. So far away, thought Peter. So far out of the reach of the human race. Within the reach of dreams, but not the reach of hands. So far away and so callous and uncaring. And the machine -- "Like a slot machine," he said, "except it always pays in jackpots and you don't even need a coin. That is crazy. Mary. That's one reason it isn't of this Earth. No Earth machine, no Earth inventor, would do that." "The neighbors will be coming," Mary said. "I know they will. They'll be coming for their handouts." "But it isn't very big. It could not carry enough inside it for the entire neighborhood. It does not have much more than room enough for the gifts it's already handed out." "Mary, did Johnny want a rod and reel?" "He'd talked of practically nothing else." "And you like perfume?" "I'd never had any good perfume. Just cheap stuff." She laughed a little nervously. "And you? Do you like jade?" "I'm what you might call a minor expert on it. It's a passion with me." "Then that machine... "Gives each one the thing he wants," Peter finished for her. "It's frightening," said Mary. And it seemed strange that anything at all could be frightening on such a day as this -- a burnished summer day, with white clouds rimming the western horizon and the sky the color of pale blue silk, a day that had no moods, but was as commonplace as the cornfield earth. A fter Mary had left, Peter went in the house and made his lunch. He sat by the window, eating it, and watched the neighbors come. They came by twos and threes, tramping across the pasture from all directions, coming to his pasture from their own farms, leaving the haying rigs and the cultivators, abandoning their work in the middle of the day to see the strange machine. They stood around and talked, tramping down the thicket where n he had found the machine, and at times their high, shrill voices drifted across to him, but he could not make out what they said, for the words were flattened and distorted by the distance. From the stars, he'd said. From some place among the stars. And if that be fantasy, he said, I have a right to it. First contact, he thought. And clever! Let an alien being arrive on Earth and the women would run screaming for their homes and the men would grab their rifles and thcre'd be hell to pay. But a machine -- that was a different matter. What if it was a little different? What if it acted a little strangely? After all, it was only a machine. It was something that could be understood. And if it handed out free gifts, that was all the better. After lunch, he went out and sat on the steps and some of the neighbors came and showed him what the machine had given them. They sat around and talked, all of them excited and mystified, but not a single one of them was scared. Among the gifts were wristwatches and floor lamps, typewriters and fruit juicers, sets of dishes, chests of silver, bolts of drapery materials, shoes, shotguns, carving sets, book ends, neckties, and many other items. One youngster had a dozen skunk traps and another had a bicycle. A modern Pandora's box, thought Peter, made by an alien intelligence and set down upon the Earth. Apparently the word was spreading, for now the people came in cars. Some of them parked by the road and walked down to the pasture and others came into the barnyard and parked there, not bothering to ask for permission. After a time, they would come back loaded with their loot and drive away. Out in the pasture Peter, watching it, was reminded of a county fair or a village carnival. B y chore-time, the last of them had gone, even the neighbors who had come to say a few words with him and to show him what they'd gotten, so he left the house and walked up the pasture slope. The machine still was there and it was starting to build something. It had laid out around it a sort of platform of a stone that looked like marble, as if it were laying a foundation for a building. The foundation was about ten feet by twelve and was set level against the pasture's slope, with footings of the same sort of stone going down into the ground. He sat down on a stump a little distance away and looked out over the peace of the countryside. It seemed more beautiful, more quiet and peaceful than it had ever seemed before, and he sat there contentedly, letting the evening soak into his soul. npHE Sun had set not more than half an hour ago. The western sky was a delicate lemon fading into green, with here and there the pink of wandering cloud, while beneath the horizon the land lay in the haze of a blue twilight, deepening at the edges. The liquid evensong of birds ran along the hedges and the thickets and the whisper of swallows' wings came down from overhead. This is Earth, he thought, the peaceful, human Earth, a landscape shaped by an agricultural people. This is the Earth of plum blossom and of proud red bams and of corn rows as straight as rifle barrels. had lain thus, without interference; a land of soil and life, a local corner of the Galaxy engaged in its own small strivings. And now? Now, finally, there was interference. Now, finally, someone or something had come into this local comer of the Galaxy and Earth was alone no longer. To himself, he knew, it did not matter. PhysicaMy, there was no longer anything that possibly could matter to him. All that was left was the morning brightness and the evening peace and from each of these, from every hour of each day that was left to him, it was his purpose to extract the last bit of joy in being alive. But to the others it would matter -- to Mary Mallet and her brother Johnny, to the little Smith boy who had gotten the baseball bat and mitt, to all the people who had visited this pashad not visited or even heard of it. 'Here, in this lonely place in the midst of the great comlands, had come, undramatically, a greater drama than the Earth had yet known. Here was the pivot point. He said to the machine: "What do you intend with us?" There was no answer. He had not expected one. He sat and watched the shadows deepen and the lights spring up in the farm houses that were sprinkled on the land. Dogs barked from far away and others answered them and the cowbells rang across the hills like tiny vesper notes. At last, when he could see no longer, he walked slowly back to the house. TN the kitchen, he found a lamp and lit it. He saw by the kitchen clock that it was almost nine o'clock -- time for the evening news. He went into the living room and turned on the radio. Sitting in the dark, he listened to it. There was good news. There had been no polio deaths in the state that day and only one new case had been reported. "It is too soon to hope, of course," the newscaster said, "but it definitely is the first break in the epidemic. Up to the time of broadcast, there have been no new cases for more than twenty hours. The state health director said..." He went on to read what the health director said, which wasn't much of anything, just one of those public statements which pretty generally add up to nothing tangible. It was the first day in almost three weeks, the newscaster had said, during which no polio deaths had been reported. But despite the development, he said, there still was need of nurses. If you are a nurse, he added, won't you please call this number? You are badly needed. He went on to warm over a grand jury report, without adding anything really new. He gave the weather broadcast. He said the Emmett murder trial had been postponed another month. Then he said: "Someone has just handed me a bulletin. Now let me see... You could hear the paper rustling as he held it to read it through, could hear him gasp a little. "It says here," he said, "that Sheriff Joe Burns has just now been notified that a Flying Saucer has landed on the Peter Chaye farm out near Mallet Corners. No one seems to know too much about it. One report is that it was found this morning, but no one thought to notify the sheriff. Let me repeat -- this is just a report. We don't know any more than what we've told you. We don't know if it is true or not. The sheriff is on his way there now. We'll let you know as soon as we learn anything. Keep tuned to this... Peter got up and turned off the radio. Then he went into the kitchen to bring in the lamp. He set the lamp on a table and sat down again to wait for Sheriff Burns. He didn't have long to wait. iff, "this here Flying Saucer landed on your farm." "I don't know if it's a Flying Saucer, Sheriff." "Well, what is it, then?" "I wouldn't know," said Peter. "Folks tell me it was giving away things." "It was doing that, all right." "If this is some cockeyed advertising stunt," the sheriff said, "I'll have someone's neck for it." "I'm sure it's not an advertising stunt." "Why didn't you notifj me right off? What you mean by holding out on a thing like this?" "I didn't think of notifying you," Peter told him. "I wasn't trying to hold out on anything." "You new around here, ain't you?" asked the sheriff. "I don't recollect seeing you before. Thought I knew everyone." "I've been here three months." "Folks tell me you ain't farming the place. Tell me you ain't got no family. Live here all by yourself, just doing nothing." "That's correct," said Peter. The sheriff waited for the explanation, but Peter offered none. The sheriff looked at him suspiciously in the smbky lamplight. "Can you show us this here Flying Saucer?" By now Peter was a little weary of the sheriff, so he said, "I can tell you how to find it. You go down past the barn and cross the brook..." "Why don't you come with us, Chaye?" "Look, Sheriff, I was telling you how to find it. Do you want me to continue?" "Why, sure," the sheriff said. "Of course I do. But why can't you... "I've seen it twice," said Peter. "I've been overrun by people all the afternoon." "All right, all right," the sheriff said. "Tell me how to find it." He told him and the sheriff left, followed by his two deputies. The telephone rang. Peter answered it. It was the radio station he'd been listening to. "Say," asked the radio reporter, "you got a Saucer out there?" "I don't think so," Peter said. "I do have something out here, though. The sheriff is going out to take a look at it." "We want to send out our mobile TV unit, but we wanted to be sure there was something there. It be all right with you if we send it out?" "No objections. Send it along." "You sure yougot something there?" "I told you that I had." "Well, then, suppose you tell me..." Fifteen minutes later, he hung up. The phone rang again. TT was the Associated Press. The man at the other end of the wire was wary and skeptical. "What's this I hear about a Saucer out there?" Ten minutes later, Peter hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. "McClelland of the Tribune," said a bored voice. "I heard a screwball story..." Five minutes. The phone rang again. It was the United Press. "Hear you got a Saucer. Any little men in it?" Fifteen minutes. The phone rang. It was an irate citizen. "I just heard on the radio you got a Flying Saucer. What kind of gag you trying to pull? You know there ain't any Flying Saucers..." "Just a moment, sir," said Peter. He let the receiver hang by its cord and went out to the kitchen. He found a pair of clips and came back. He could hear the irate citizen still chewing him out, tlie voice coming ghostlike out of the dangling receiver. He went outside and found the wire and clipped it. When he came back in again, the receiver was silent. He hung it carefully on the hook. Then he locked the doors and went to bed. To bed, but not immediately to sleep. He lay beneath the covers, staring up into the darkness and trying to quiet the turmoil of speculation that surged within his brain. He had gone walking in the morning and found a machine. He had put his hand upon it and it had given him a gift. Later on, it had given other gifts. "A machine came, bearing gifts," he said into the darkness. A clever, calculated, wellworked-out first contact. Contact them with something they will know and recognize and need not be afraid of, something to which they can feel superior. Make it friendly -- and what is more friendly than handing out a gift? What is it? Missionary? Trader? Diplomat? Or just a mere machine and nothing more? Spy? Adventurer? Investigator? Surveyor? Doctor? Lawyer? Indian chief? , And why, of all places, had it landed here, in this forsaken farmland, in this pasture on his farm? And its purpose? the almost inevitable motive, of those fictional alien beings who, in tales of fantasy, had landed on Earth? To take over, of course. If not by force, then by infiltration or by friendly persuasion and compulsion: to take over not only Earth, but the human race as well. The man from the radio station had been excited, the Associated Press man had been indignant that anyone should so insult his intelligence, the Tribune man had been bored and the United Press man flippant. But the citizen had been angry. He was being taken in by another Flying Saucer story and it was just too much. The citizen was angry because he didn't want his little world disturbed. He wanted no interference. He had trouble enough of his own without things being messed up by a Saucer's landing. He had problems of his own -- earning a living, getting along with his neighbors, planning his work, worrying about the polio epidemic. Although the newscaster had said the polio situation seemed a little brighter -- no new cases and no deaths. And that was a fine thing, for polio was pain and death and a terror on the land. Pain, he thought. I've bad no pain today. For the first time in many days, there has been no pain. He lay stiff and still beneath the covers, examining himself for pain. He knew just where it lurked, the exact spot in his anatomy where it lurked hidden out of sight. He lay and waited for it. fearful, now that he had thought of it, that he would find it there.  But it was not there. He lay and waited for it, afraid that the very thought of it would conjure it up from its hiding place. It did not come. He dared it to come, he invited it to show itself, he hurled mental jibes at it to lure it out. It refused to be lured. He relaxed and knew that for the moment he was safe. But safe only temporarily, for the pain still was there. It bided its time, waited for its moment, would come when the time was right. With careless abandon, trying to wipe out the future and its threat, he luxuriated in life without the pain. He listened to the house -- the slightly settling joists that made the floor boards creak, the thrum of the light summer wind against the weathered siding, the scraping of the elm branch against the kitchen roof. Another sound. A knocking at the door. "Chaye! Chaye, where are you?" "Coming," he called. TE found slippers and went to the door. It was the sheriff and his men. "Light the lamp," the sheriff said. "You got a match?" Peter asked. "Yeah, here are some." Groping in the dark, Peter found the sheriff's hand and the book of matches. He located the table, slid his hand across the top and felt the lamp. He lit it and looked at the sheriff from across the table. "Chaye," the sheriff said, "that thing is building something." "I know it is." "What's the gag?" "There's no gag." "It gave me this," the sheriff said. He threw the object on the table. "A gun," said Peter. "You ever see one like it?" It was a gun, all right, about the size of a .#. But it had no trigger and the muzzle flared and the whole thing was made of some white, translucent substance. Peter picked it up and found it weighed no more than half a pound or so. "No," said Peter. "No, I've never seen one like it." He put it back on the table, gingerly. "Does it work?" "It does," the sheriff said. "I tried it on your barn." "There ain't no barn no more," said one of the deputies. "No report, no flash, no nothing," the sheriff added. "Just no barn," repeated the deputy, obsessed with the idea. A car drove into the yard. "Go out and see who's there," said the sheriff. One of the deputies went out. "I don't get it," complained the sheriff. "They said Flying Saucer, but I don't think it's any Saucer. A box is all it is." "It's a machine," said Peter. Feet stamped across the porch and men came through the door. "Newspapermen," said the deputy who had gone out to see. "I ain't got no statement, boys," the sheriff said. One of them said to Peter: "You Chaye?" Peter nodded. "I'm Hoskins from the Tribune. This is Johnson from the AP. That guy over there with the sappy look is a photographer, name of Langly. Disregard him." He pounded Peter on the back. "How does it feel to be sitting in the middle of the century's biggest news break? Great stuff, hey, boy?" Langly said: "Hold it." A flash bulb popped. : "I got to use the phone," said Johnson. "Where is it?" "Over there," said Peter. "It's not working." "How come at a time like this?" "I cut the wire." "Cut the wire! You crazy, Chaye?" "There were too many people calling." "Now," saidHoskins, "wasn't that a hell of a thing to do?" "I'll fix her up," Langly offered. "Anyone got a pair of pliers?" npHE sheriff said, "You boys hold on a minute." "Hurry up and get into a pair of pants," Hoskins said to Peter. "We'll want your picture on the scene. Standing with your foot on it, like the guy that's just killed an elephant." "You listen here," the sheriff said. "What is it. Sheriff?" "This here's important. Get it straight. You guys can't go messing around with it." "Sure it's important," said Hoskins. "That is why we're here. around with their tongues hanging out for news." "Here are some pliers," someone remarked. "Leave me at that phone," said Langly. "What are we horsing around for?" asked Hoskins. "Let's go out and see it." "I gotta make a call," said Johnson. "Look here, boys," the sheriff insisted in confusion. "Wait -- " "What's it like, Sheriff? Figure it's a Saucer? How big is it? Does it make a clicking noise or something? Hey, Langly, take the sheriff's picture." "Just a minute," Langly shouted from outside. "I'm fixing up this wire." More feet came across the porch. A head was thrust into the door. "TV truck," the head said. "This the place? How do we get out to the thing?" The phone rang. Johnson answered it. "It's for you. Sheriff." The sheriff lumbered across the room. They waited, listening. "Sure, this is Sheriff Burns... Yeah, it's out there, all right... Sure, I know. I've seen it... No, of course, I don't know what it is... Yes, I understand... Yes. sir... Yes, sir. I'll see to it, sir." He hung up the receiver and turned around to facethem. "That was military intelligence," he said. "No one is going out there. No one's moving from this house. This place is restricted as of this minute." He looked from one to another of them ferociously. "Them's orders," he told them. "Oh, hell," said Hoskins. "I came all the way out here," bawled the TV man. "I'm not going to come out here and not..." "It isn't me that's doing the ordering," said the sheriff. "It's Uncle Sam. You boys take things easy," Peter went out into the kitchen and poked up the fire and set on the kettle. "The coffee's there," he said to Langly. "I'll put on some clothes."  Hoskins and Johnson phoned in the information they had jotted down on folded copy paper, their pencils stabbing cryptic signs as they talked to Peter and the sheriff. After some argument with the sheriff about letting him go, Langly left with his pictures. The sheriff paced up and down the room. The radio blared. The phone banged constantly. They drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, littering the floor with ground-out stubs. More newsmen pulled in, were duly warned by the sheriff, and settled down to wait. Someone brought out a bottle and passed it around. Someone else tried to start a poker game, but nobody was interested. Peter went out to get an armload of wood. The night was quiet, with stars. He glanced toward the pasture, but there was nothing there to see. He tried to make out the empty pla'ce where the bam had disappeared. It was too dark to tell whether the barn was there or not. Death watch or the last dark hour before the dawn -- the brightest, most wonderful dawn that Man had ever seen in all his years of striving? The machine was building something out there, building something in the night. And what was it building? Shrine? Trading post? Mission house? Embassy? Fort? There was no way of knowing, no way that one could tell. Whatever it was building, it was the first known outpost ever built by an alien race on the planet Earth. He went back into the house with the load of wood. "They're sending troops," the sheriff told him. "Tramp, tramp, tramp," said Hoskins, dead pan, cigarette hanging negligently to his underlip. "The radio just said so," the sheriff said. "They called out the guard." Hoskins and Johnson did some more tramp-tramping. "You guys better not horse around with them soldier boys," the sheriff warned. "They'll shove a bayonet... Hoskins made a noise like a bugle blowing the charge. Johnson grabbed two spoons and beat out galloping hoofs. "The calvary!" shouted Hoskins. "By God, boys, we're saved!" Someone said wearily: "Can't you guys be your age?" They sat around, as the night wore on, drinking coffee and smoking. They didn't do much talking. The radio station finally signed off. Someone fooled around, trying to get another station, but the batteries were too weak to pull in anything. He shut the radio off. It had been some time now since the phone had rung. D awn was stui an hour away when the guardsmen arrived, not marching, nor riding horses, but in five canvas-covered trucks. The captain came in for just a moment to find out where this goddam obscenity Saucer was. He was the fidgety type. He wouldn't even stay for a cup of coffee. He went out yelling orders at the drivers. Inside the house, the others waited and heard the five trucks growl away. Dawn came and a building stood in the pasture, and it was a bit confusing, for you could see that it was being built in a way that was highly unorthodox. Whoever or whatever was building it had started on the inside and was building outward, so that you saw the core of the building, as if it were a building that was being torn down and some one already had ripped off the entire exterior. It covered half an acre and was five stories high. It gleamed pink in the first light of the morning, a beautiful misty pink that made you choke up a little, remembering the color of the dress the little girl next door had worn for her seventh birthday party. The guardsmen were ringed around it, the morning light spattering off their bayonets as they stood the guard. Peter made breakfast -- huge stacks of flapjacks, all the bacon he had left, every egg he could find, a gallon or two of oatmeal, more coffee. "We'll send out and get some grub," said Hoskins. "We'll make this right with you." After breakfast, the sheriff and the deputies drove back to the county seat. Hoskins took up a collection and went to town to buy groceries. The other newsmen stayed on. The TV truck got squared off for some wideangle distance shots. The telephone started jangling again. The newsmen took turns answering it. Peter walked down the road to the Mallet farm to get eggs and milk. Mary ran out to the gate to meet him. "The neighbors are getting scared," she said. "They weren't scared yesterday," said Peter. "They walked right up and got their gifts." "But this is different, Peter. This is getting out of hand. The building..." And that was it, of course. The building. No one had been frightened of an innocent-appearing machine because it was small and friendly. It shone so prettily and it clicked so nicely and it handed out gifts. It was something that could be superficially recognized and it had a purpose that was understandable if one didn't look too far. But the building was big and might get bigger still and it was being erected inside out. And who in all the world had ever seen a structure built as fast as that one -- five stories in one single night? "QW do they do it. Peter?" Mary asked in a hushed little voice. "I don't know," he said. "Some principle that is entirely alien to us, some process that men have never even thought of, a way of doing things, perhaps, that starts on an entirely different premise than the human way." "But it's just the kind of building that men themselves would build," she objected. "Not that kind of stone, perhaps -- maybe there isn't any stone like that in the entire world -- but in every other way there's nothing strange about it. It looks like a big high school or a department store." "My jade was jade," said Peter, "and your perfume was perfume and the rod and reel that Johnny got was a regular rod and reel." "That means they know about us. They know all there is to know. Peter, they've been watching us!" "I have no doubt of it." He saw the terror in her eyes and reached out a hand to draw her close and she came into his arms and he held her tightly and thought, even as he did so, how strange that he should be the one to extend comfort and assurance. "I'm foolish, Peter." "You're wonderful," he assured her. "I'm not really scared." "Of course you're not." He wanted to say, "I love you," but he knew that those were words he could never say. Although the pain, he thought -- the pain had not come this morning. "I'll get the milk and eggs," said Mary. "Give me all you can spare. I have quite a crowd to feed." Walking back, he thought about the neighbors being frightened now and wondered how long it would be before the world got frightened, too -- how long before artillery would be wheeling into line, how long before an atom bomb would fall. He stopped on the rise of the hill above the house and for the first time noticed that the barn was gone... It had been sheared off as cleanly as if cut with a knife, with the stump of the foundation sliced away at an angle. He wondered if the sheriff still had the gun and supposed he had. And he wondered what the sheriff would do with it and why it had been given him. For, of all the gifts that he had seen, it was the only one that was not familiar to Earth. In the pasture that had been empty yesterday, that had been only trees and grass and old, grassed-over ditches, bordered by the wild plum thickets and the hazel brush and blackberry vine, rose the building. It seemed to him that it was bigger than when he had seen it less than an hour before.  papermen were sitting in the yard, looking at the building. One of them said to him, "The brass arrived. They're waiting in there for you." "Intelligence?" asked Peter. The newsman nodded. "A chicken colonel and a major." They were waiting in the living room. The colonel was a young man with gray hair. The major wore a mustache, very military. The colonel introduced himself. 'Tm Colonel Whitman. This is Major Rockwell." Peter put down his eggs and milk and nodded acknowledgment. "You found this machine," said the colonel. "That is right." "Tell us about it," said the colonel, so Peter told them about it. "This jade," the colonel said. "Could we have a look at it?" Peter went to the kitchen and got the jade. They passed it from one to the other, examining it closely, turning it over and over in their hands, a bit suspicious of it, but admiring it, although Peter could see they knew nothing about jade. Almost as if he might have known what was in Peter's mind, the colonel lifted his eyes from the jade and looked at him. "You know jade," the colonel said. "Very well," said Peter. "You've worked with it before?" "In a museum." "Tell me about yourself."  Peter hesitated -- then told about himself. "But why are you here?" the colonel asked. "Have you ever been in a hospital. Colonel? Have you ever thought what it would be like to die there?" The colonel nodded. "I can see your point. But here you'll have no -- " "I won't wait that long." "Yes. yes," the colonel said. "I see." "Colonel," said, the major. "Look at this, sir, if you will. This symbolism is the same..." The colonel snatched it from his hands and looked. "The same as on the letterhead!" he shouted. The colonel lifted his head and stared at Peter, as if it had been the first time he had seen him, as if he were surprised at seeing him. There was, suddenly, a gun in the major's hand, pointing at Peter, its muz#le a cold and steady eye. Peter tried to throw himself aside. He was too late. The major shot him down.  through a wool-gray nothingness that screamed and he knew it must be a dream, an endless atavistic dream of falling. brought down through all the years from incredibly remote forebears who had dwelt in trees and had lived in fear of falling. He tried to pinch himself to awaken from the dream, but he couldn't do it, since he had no hands to pinch with, and, after a time, it became apparent that he had no body to pinch. He was a disembodied consciousness hurtling through a gulf which seemed to have no boundaries. through the void that seemed to scream at him. At first the screaming soaked into him and filled his soul, since he had no body, with a terrible agony that went on and on, never quite reaching the breaking point that would send him into the release of insanity. But he got used to it after a time and as soon as he did. the screaming stopped and he plunged down through space in a silence that was more dreadful than the screaming. He fell forever and forever and then it seemed that forever ended, for he was at rest and no longer falling. He saw a face. It was a face from incredibly long ago, a face that he once had seen and had long forgotten, and he searched back along his memory to try to identify it. He couldn't see it too clearly, for it seemed to keep bobbing around so he couldn't pin it down. He tried and tried and couldn't and he closed his eyes to shut the face away. "Chayc," a voice said. "Peter Chaye." "Go away," said Peter. The voice went away. He opened his eyes again and the face was there, clearer now and no longer bobbing. It was the colonel's face. H e shut his eyes again, remembering the steady eye of the gun the major had held. He'd jumped aside, or tried to, and he had been too slow. Something had happened and he'd fallen for with the colonel looking at him. He'd been shot. That was the answer, of course. The major had shot him and he was in a hospital. But where had he been hit? Arm? Both arms seemed to be all right. Leg? Both legs were all right, too. No pain. No bandages. No casts. The colonel said: "He came to for just a minute, Doc, and now he's off again." "He'll be all right," said Doc. "Just give him time. You gave him too big a charge, that's all. It'll take a little time." "We must talk to him." "You'll have to wait." There was silence for a momt. Then: "You're absolutely sure he's human?" "We've gone over every inch of him," said Doc. "If he isn't human, he's too good an imitation for us ever to find out." "He told me he had cancer," the colonel said. "Claimed he was dying of cancer. Don't ypu see, if he wasn't human, if there was something wrong, he could always try to make it look... "He hasn't any cancer. Not a sign of it. No sign he ever had it. No sign he ever will." felt that he was agape with disbelief and amazement. He forced his eyes to stay closed, afraid that this was a trick. "That other doctor," the colonel said, "told Peter Chaye four months ago he had six more months to live. He told him... Doc said, "Colonel, I won't even try to explain it. All I can tell you is that the man lying on that bed hasn't got cancer. He's as healthy a man as you would wish to find." "It isn't Peter Chaye, then," the colonel stated in a dogged voice. "It's something that took ove Peter Chaye or duplicated Peter Chaye or... Doc said, "Now, now. Colonel. Let's stick to what we know." "You're sure he's a man. Doc?" "I'm sure he's a human being. if that is what you mean." "No little differences? Just one seemingly unimportant deviation from the human norm?" "None," Doc said, "and even if there were, it wouldn't prove what you are after. There could be minor mutational difference in anyone. The human body doesn't always run according to a blueprint." "There were differences in all that stuff the machine gave away. Little differences that came to light only on close examination -- but differences that spelled out a margin between human and alien manufacture." "All right, then, so there were differences. So those things were made by aliens. I still tell you this man is a human being." "It all ties in so neatly," the colonel declared. "Chaye goes out and buys this . place -- this old, abandoned farm. He's eccentric as hell by the standards of that neighborhood. By the very fact of his eccentricity, he invites attention, which might be undesirable, but at the same time his eccentricity might be used to cover up and smooth over anything he did out of the ordinary. It would be just somebody like him who'd supposedly find a strange machine. It would be..." "You're building up a case," said Doc. "without anything to go on. You asked for one little difference in him to base your cockeyed theory on -- no offense, but that's how I, as a doctor, see it. Well, now let's have one little fact -- fact, mind you, not guess -- to support this idea of yours." "What was in that barn?" demanded the colonel. "That's what I want to know. Did Chaye build that machine in there? Was that why it was destroyed?" "The sheriff destroyed the barn," the doctor said. "Chaye had nothing to do with it." "But who gave the gun to the sheriff? Chaye's machine, that's who. And it would be an easy matter of suggestion, mind control, hypnotism, whatever you want to call it..." "Let's get back to facts. You used an anesthetic gun on this man. You've held him prisoner. By your orders, he has been subjected to intensive examination, a clear invasion of his privacy. I hope to God he never brings you into court. He could throw the book at you." ' "I know," the colonel admitted reluctantly. "But we have to bust this thing. We must find out what it is. We have got to get that bomb back!" "The bomb's what worries you." "Hanging up there," the colonel said, sounding as if he'd shuddered. "Just hanging up there!" "I have to get along," replied the doctor. "Take it easy, Colonel." rilHE doctor's footsteps went out the door and down the corridor, fading away. The colonel paced up and down a while and then sat down heavily in a chair. Peter lay in bed, and one thought crashed through his brain, one thought again and again: Vm oin to live! But he hadn't been. He had been ready for the day when the pain finally became too great to bear. He had picked his ground to spend his final days, to make his final stand. And now he had been reprieved. Now, somehow, he had been given back his life. He lay in the bed, fighting against excitement, against a growing tenseness, trying to maintain the pretense that he still was under the influence of whatever he'd been shot with. An anesthetic gun, the doctor had said. Something new, something he had never heard of. And yet somewhere there was a hint of it. Something, he remembered, about dentistry -- a new technique that dentists used to desensitize the gums, a fine stream of anesthetic sprayed against the gums. Something like that, only hundreds or thousands of times stronger? Shot and brought here and examined because of some wild fantasy lurking in the mind of a G-# colonel. Fantasy? He wondered. Unwitting, unsuspecting, could he have played a part? It was ridiculous, of course. For he remembered nothing he had done or said or even thought which gave him a clue to any part he might have played in the machine's coming to the Earth. Could cancer be something other than disease? Some uninvited guest, perhaps, that came and lived within a human body? A clever alien guest who came from far away, across the unguessed light-years? And that, he knew, was fantasy to match the colonel's fantasy, a malignant nightmare of distrust that dwelt within the human mind, an instinctive defense mechanism that conditioned the race to expect the worst and to arm against it. There was nothing feared so much as the unknown factor, nothing which one must guard against so much as the unexplained. We have to bust this thing, the colonel had said. We must find out what it is. And, that, of course, was the terror of it -- that they had no way of knowing what it was. H e stirred at last, very deliberately, and the colonel spoke. "Peter Chaye," he said. "Yes, what is it, Colonel?" "I have to talk to you." "All right, talk to me." He sat up in the bed and saw that he was in a hospital room. It had the stark, antiseptic quality. the tile floor, the colorless walls, the utilitarian look -- and the bed on which he lay was a hospital bed. "How do you feel?" the colonel asked. "Not so hot," confessed Peter. "We were a little rough on you, but we couldn't take a chance. There was the letter, you see, and the slot machines and the stamp machines and all the other things and... "You said something about a  letterhead." "What do you know about that, Chaye?" "I don't know a thing." "It came to the President," said the colonel. "A month or so ago. And a similar one went to every other administrative head on the entire Earth." "Saying?" "That's the hell of it. It was written in no language known anywhere on Earth. But there was one line -- one line on all the letters -- that you could read. It said : 'By the time you have this deciphered, you'll be ready to act logically.' And that was all anybody could read -- one line in the native language of every country that got a copy of the letter. The rest was in gibberish, for all we could make of it." "You haven't deciphered it?" He could see the colonel sweating. "Not even a single character, much less a word." Peter reached out a hand to the bedside table and lifted the carafe, tipped it above the glass. There was nothing in it. The colonel heaved himself out of his chair. 'TTl get you a drink of water." He picked up the glass and opened the bathroom door. 'Til let it run a while and get it cold," he said. But Peter scarcely heard him. for he was staring at the door. There was a bolt on it and if -- The water started running and the colonel raised his voice to be heard above it. "That's about the time we started finding the machines," he said. "Can you imagine it? A cigarette-vending machine and you could buy cigarettes from it. but it was more than that. It was something watching you. Something that studied the people and the way they lived. And the stamp machines and the slot machines and all the other mechanical contrivances that we have set up. Not machines, but watchers. Watching all the time. Watching and learning... bed and touched the floor. He approached swiftly and silently on bare feet and slammed the door, then reached up and slid the bolt. It snicked neatly into place. "Hey!" the colonel shouted. Clothes? They might be in the closet. Peter leaped at it and wrenched the door open and there they were, hung upon the hangers. He ripped off the hospital gown, snatched at his trousers and pulled them on. Shirt, now! In a drawer. And shoes? There on the closet floor. Don't take time to tic them. The colonel was pushing and hammering at the door, not yelling yet. Later he would, but right now he was intent on saving all the face he could. He wouldn't want to advertise immediately the fact that he'd been tricked. Peter felt through his pockets. His wallet was gone. So was everything else -- his knife, his watch, his keys. More than likely they'd taken all of it and put it in the office safe when he'd been brought in. No time to worry about any of them. The thing now was to get away. He went out the door and down the corridor, carefully not going too fast. He passed a nurse, but she scarcely glanced at him. He found a stairway door and opened it. Now he could hurry just a little more. He went down the stairs three at a time, shoelaces clattering. The stairs, he told himself, were fairly safe. Almost no one would use them when there were the elevators. He stopped and bent over for a moment and tied the laces. The floor numbers were painted above each of the doors, so he knew where he was. At the ground floor, he entered the corridor again. So far, there seemed to be no alarms, although any minute now the colonel would start to raise a ruckus. Would they try to stop him at the door? Would there be someone to question him? Would -- A basket of flowers stood beside a door. He glanced up and down the corridor. There were several people, but they weren't looking at him. He scooped up the flowers. At the door, he said to the attendant who sat behind the desk: "Mistake. Wrong flowers." She smiled sourly, but made no move to stop him. Outside, he put the flowers down on the steps and walked rapidly away. An hour later, he knew that he was safe. He knew also that he was in a city thirty miles away from where he wanted to go and that he had no money and that he was hungry and his feet were sore from walking on the hard and unyielding concrete of the sidewalks. He found a park and sat down on a bench. A little distance away, a group of old men were playing checkers at a table. A mother wheeled her baby. A young man sat on a nearby bench, listening to a tiny radio. HE radio said:... apparently the building is completed. There has been no sign of it growing for the last eighteen hours. At the moment, it measures a thousand stories high and covers more than a hundred acres. The bomb, which was dropped two days ago, still floats there above it, held in suspension by some strange force. Artillery is standing by, waiting for the word to fire, but the word has not come through. Many think that since the bomb could not get through, shells will have no better chance, if any at all. "A military spokesman, in fact, has said that the big guns are mere precautionary measures, which may be all right, but it certainly doesn't explain why the bomb was dropped. There is a rising clamor, not only in Congress, but throughout the world, to determine why an attempt was made at bombing. There has as yet been no hostile move directed from the biilding. The only damage so far reported has been the engulfment by the building of the farm home of Peter Chaye, the man who found the machine. "All trace has been lost of Chaye since three days ago, when he suffered an attack of some sort and was taken from his home. It is believed that he may be in military custody. There is wide speculation on what Chaye may or may not know. It is entirely likely that he is the only man on Earth who can shed any light on what has happened on his farm. "Meanwhile, the military guard has been tightened around the scene and a corridor of some eighteen miles in depth around it has been evacuated. It is known that two delegations of scientists have been escorted through the lines. While no official announcement has been made, there is good reason to believe they learned little from their visits. What the building is, who or what has engineered its construction, if you can call the insideout process by which it grew construction, or what may be expected next are all fields of groundless speculation. There is plenty of that, naturally, but no one has yet come up with what might be called an explanation. "The world's press wires are continuing to pile up reams of copy, but even so there is little actual, concrete knowledge -- few facts that can be listed one, two, three right down the line. "There is little other news of any sort and perhaps it's just as well, since there is no room at the moment in the public interest for anything else but this mysterious building. Strangely, however, there is little other news. As so often happens when big news breaks, all other events seem to wait for some other time to happen. The polio epidemic is rapidly subsiding; there is no major crime news. In the world's capitals, of course, all legislative action is at a complete standstill, with the governments watching closely the developments at the building. "There is a rising feeling at many of these capitals that the building is not of mere national concern, that decisions regarding it must be made at an international level. The attempted t#ombing has resulted in some argument that we, as the nation ost concerned, cannot be trusted to act in a calm, dispassionate way, and that an objective world viewpoint is necessary for an intelligent handling of the situation." and walked awayHe'd been taken from his home three days ago, the radio had said. No wonder he was starved. Three days -- and in that time the building had grown a thousand stories high and now covered a hundred acres. He went along, not hurrying too much now, his feet a heavy ache, his belly pinched with hunger. He had to get back to the building -- somehow he had to get back there. It was a sudden need, realized and admitted now, but the reason for it, the source of it, was not yet apparent. It was as if there had been something he had left behind and he had to go and find it Something I left behind, he thought. What could he have left behind? Nothing but the pain and the knowledge that he walked with a dark companion and the little capsile that he carried in his pocket for the time when the pain grew too great. He felt in his pocket and the capsule was no longer there. It had disappeared along with his wallet and his pocket knife and watch. No matter now, he thought. I no longer need the capsule. He heard the hurrying footsteps behind him and there was an urgency about them that made him swing around. "Peter!" Mary cried out. "Peter, I thought I recognized you. I was hurrying to catch you." He stood and looked at her as if he did not quite believe it was she whom he saw. "Where have you been?" she asked. "Hospital," Peter said. "I ran away from them. But you..." "We were evacuated, Peter. They came and told us that we had to leave. Some of us are at a camp down at the other end of the park. Pa is carrying on something awful and I can't blame him -- having to leave right in the middle of haying and with the small grain almost ready to be cut." She tilted back her head and looked into his face. "You look all worn out," she said. "Is it worse again?" "It?" he asked, then realized that the neighbors must have known -- that the reason for his coming to the farm must have been general knowledge, for there were no such things as secrets in a farming neighborhood. "I'm sorry, Peter," Mary said. "Terribly sorry. I shouldn't have... "It's all 'right," said Peter. "Because it's gone now, Mary. I haven't got it any more. I don't know how or why, but I've gotten rid of it in some way." "The hospital?" she suggested. "The hospital had nothing to do with it. It had cleared up before I went there. They just found out at the hospital, that is all." "Maybe the diagnosis was wrong-' He shook his head. "It wasn't wrong, Mary." How could he, or the medical world, say positively that it had been malignant cells and not something else -- some strange parasite to which he had played the unsuspecting host? "You said you ran away," she reminded him. "They'll be looking for me, Mary. The colonel and the major. They think I had something to do with the machine I found. They think I might have made it. They took me to the hospital to find out if I was human." "Of all the silly things!" "I've got to get back to the farm," he said. "I simply have to get back there." "You can't," she told him. "There are soldiers everywhere." "I'll crawl on my belly in the  ditches, if I have to. Travel at night. Sneak through the lines. Fight if I'm discovered and they try to prevent me. There is no alternative. I have to make a try." "You're ill," she said, anxiously staring at his face. He grinned at her. "Not ill. Just himgry." "Come on then." She took his arm. He held back. "Not to the camp. I can't have someone seeing me. In just a little while, I'll be a hunted man -- if I'm not one already." "A restaurant, of course." "They took my wallet, Mary, I haven't any money," "I have shopping money." "No," he said. "I'll get along. There's nothing that can beat me now." "You really mean that, don't you?" "It just occurred to me," Peter admitted, confused and yet somehow sure that what he had said was not reckless bravado, but a blunt fact. "You're going back?" "I have to, Mary." "And you think you have a chance?" He nodded. "Peter," she began hesitantly. "Yes?" "How much bother would I be?" "You? How do you mean? A bother in what way?" "If I went along." "But you can't. There's no reason for you to." She lifted her chin just a little. "There is a reason, Peter. Almost as if I were being called there. Like a bell ringing in my head -- a school bell calling in the children... "Mary," he said, "that perfume bottle -- there was a certain symbol on it, wasn't there?" "Carved in the glass," she told him. "The same symbol, Peter, that was carved into the jade." And the same symbol, he thought, that had been on the letterheads. "Come on," he decided suddenly. "You won't be any bother." "We'll eat first," she said. "We can use the shopping money." hand in hand, like two teenage sweethearts. "We have lots of time," said Peter. "We can't start for home till dark." They ate at a small restaurant on an obscure street and after that went grocery shopping. They bought a loaf of bread and two rings of bologna and a slab of cheese, which took all of Mary's money, and for the change the grocer sold them an empty bottle in which to carry water. It would serve as a canteen. They walked to the edge of the city and out through the suburbs and into the open country, not traveling fast, for there was no point in trying to go too far before night set in. They found a stream and sat beside it, for all the world like a couple on a picnic. Mary took off her shoes and dabbled her feet in the water and the two of them felt disproportionately happy. Night came and they itarted out. There was no Moon, but the sky was ablaae with stars. Although they took some tumbles and at other times wondered where they were, they kept moving on, staying off the roads, walking through the fields and pastures, skirting the farm houses to avoid barking dogs. It was shortly after midnight that they saw the first of the campfires and swung wide around them. From the top of a ridge, they looked down upon the camp and saw the outlines of tents and the dull shapes of the canvascovered trucks. And, later on, they almost stumbled into an artillery outfit, but got safely away without encountering the sentries who were certain to be stationed around the perimeter of the bivouac. Now they knew that they were inside the evacuated area, that they were moving through the outer ring of soldiers and guns which hemmed in the building. They moved more cautiously and made slower time. When the first false light of dawn came into the east, they holed up in a dense plum thicket in the corner of a pasture. "I'm tired," sighed Mary. "I wasn't tired all night or, if I was, I didn't know it -- but now that we've stopped, I feel exhausted." "We'll eat and sleep," Peter said. "Sleep comes first. I'm too tired to eat." Peter left her and crawled through the thicket to its edge. N the growing light of morn ing stood the Building, a great blue-misted mass that reared above the horizon like a blunted finger pointing at the sky. "Mary!" Peter whispered. "Mary, there it is!" He heard her crawling through the thicket to his side. "Peter, it's a long way off." "Yes, I know it is. But we are going there," They crouched there watching it. "I can't see the bomb," said Mary. "The bomb that's hanging over it." "It's too far off to see." "Why is it us? Why are we the ones who are going back? Why are we the only ones who are not afraid?" "I don't know," said Peter, frowning puzzledly. "No actual reason, that is. I'm going back because I want to -- no, because I have to. You see, it was the place I chose. The dying place. Like the elephants crawling off to die where all other elephants die." "But you're all right now, Peter." "That makes no difference -- or it doesn't seem to. It was where I found peace and an understanding." "And there were the symbols, Peter. The symbols on the bottle and the jade." "Let's go back," he said. "Someone will spot us here." "Our gifts were the only ones that had the symbols," Mary persisted. "None of the others had any of them. I asked around. There were no symbols at all on the other gifts." "There's no time to wonder about that. Come on." They crawled back to the center of the thicket. The Sun had risen above the horizon now and sent level shafts of light into the thicket and the early morning silence hung over them like a benediction. "Peter," said Mary, "I just can't stay awake any longer. Kiss me before I go to sleep." He kissed her and they clung together, shut from the world by the jagged, twisted, low-growing branches of the plum trees. "I hear the bells," shelreathed. "Do you hear them, too?" Peter shook his head. "Like school bells," she said. "Like bells on the first day of school -- the first day you ever went." "You're tired," he told her. "I've heard them before. This is not the first time." He kissed her again. "Go to sleep," he said and she did. almost as soon as she lay down and closed her eyes. He sat quietly beside her and his mind retreated to his own hidden depths, searching for the pain within him. But there was no pain. It was gone forever. The pain was gone and the incidence of polio was down and it was a crazy thing to think, but he thought it, anyhow: Afissonary.'  went out to heathen lands, what were the first things that they did? They preached, of course, but there were other things as well. They fought disease and they worked for sanitation and labored to improve the welfare of the people and tried to educate them to a better way of life. And in this way they not only carried out their religious precepts, but gained the confidence of the heathen folk as well. And if an alien missionary came to Earth, what would be among the first things that he was sure to do? Would it not be reasonable that he, too, would fight disease and try to improve the welfare of his chosen charges? Thus he would gain their confidence. Although he could not expect to gain too much at first. He could expect hostility and suspicion. Only a pitiful handful would not resent hin; or be afraid of him. And if the missionary -- Peter fell asleep. The roar awakened him and he sat upright, sleep entirely wiped from his mind. The roar still was there, somewhere outside the thicket, but it was receding. "Peter! Peter!" "Quiet, Mary! There is something out there!" The roar turned around and came back again, growing until it was the sound of clanking thunder and the Earth shook with the sound. It receded again. The midday sunlight carne down through the branches and made of their hiding place a freckled spot of Sun and shade. Peter could smell the musky odor of warm soil and wilted leaf. They crept cautiously through the thicket and when they gained its edge, where the leaves thinned out. they saw the racing tank far down the held. Its roar came to them as it tore along, bouncing and swaying to the ground's unevenness, the great snout of its cannon pugnaciously thrust out before it, like a stiffarming football player. A road ran clear down the field -- a road that Peter was sure had not been there the night before. It was a straight road, absolutely straight, running toward the building, and it was of some metallic stuff that shimmered in the Sun. And far off to the left was another road and to the right another, and in the distance the three roads seemed to draw together, as the rails seem to converge when one looks down a railroad track. Other roads running at right angles cut across the three roads, intersecting them so that one gained the impression of three far-reaching ladders set tightly side by side. tank raced toward one of the intersecting roads, a tank made midget by the distance, and its roar came back to them no louder than the humming of an angry bee. It reached the road and skidded off, whipping around sidewise and slewing along, as if it had hit something smooth and solid that it could not get through, as if it might have struck a soaped metallic wall. There was a moment when it tipped and almost went over, but it stayed upright and finally backed away, then swung around to come lumbering down the field, returning toward the thicket. Halfway down the field, it pivoted around and halted, so that the gun pointed back toward the intersecting road. The gun's muzzle moved downward and flashed and, at the intersecting road, the shell exploded with a burst of light and a puff of smoke. The concussion of the shot slapped hard against the ear. Again and again the gun belched out its shells pointblank. A haze of smoke hung above the tank and road -- and the shells still exploded at the road -- this side of the road and not beyond it. The tank clanked forward once more until it reached the road. It approached carefully this time and nudged itself along, as if it might be looking for a way to cross. From somewhere a long distance off came the crunching sound of artillery. An entire battery of guns seemed to be firing. They fired for a while, then grudgingly quit. The tank still nosed along the road like a dog sniffing beneath a fallen tree for a hidden rabbit. "There's something there that's stopping them," said Peter. "A wall," Mary guessed. "An invisible wall of some sort, but one they can't get through." "Or shoot through, either. They tried to break through with gunfire and they didn't even dent it." He crouched there, watching as the tank nosed along the road. It reached the point where the road to the left came down to intersect the crossroad. The tank sheered off to follow the left-hand one, bumping along with its forward armor shoved against the unseen wall. Boxed in, thought Peter -- those roads have broken up and boxed in all the military units. A tank in one pen and a dozen tanks in another, a battery of artillery in another, the motor pool in yet another. Boxed in and trapped; penned up and useless. And we, he wondered -- are we boxed in as well? A group of soldiers came tramping down the right-hand road. Peter spotted them from far off. black dots moving down the road, heading east, away from the building. When they came closer, he saw that they carried no guns and slogged along without the slightest semblance of formation and he could see from the way they walked that they were dog-tired. Mary had left his side until she came creeping back again, ducking her head to keep her hair from being caught in the lowhanging branches. She sat down beside him and handed him a thick slice of bread and a chunk of bologna. She set the bottle of water down between them. "It was the building," she said, "that built the roads." Peter nodded, his mouth full of bread and meat. "They want to make it easy to get to the building," Mary said. "The building wants to make it easy for people to come and visit it." "The bells again?" he asked. She smiled and said, "The bells." The soldiers now had come close enough to see the tank. They stopped and stood in the road, looking at it. Then four of them turned off the road and walked out into the field, heading for the tank. The others sat down and waited. "The wall only works one way," said Mary. "More likely," Peter told her, "it works for tanks, but doesn't work for people." "The building doesn't want to keep the people out." The soldiers crossed the field and the tank came out to meet them. It stopped and the crew crawled out of it and climbed down. The soldiers and the crew stood talking and one of the soldiers kept swinging his arms in gestures, pointing hefc and there. From far away came the sound of heavy guns again. "Some of them," said Peter, "still are trying to blast down the walls." Finally the soldiers and the tank crew walked back to the road, leaving the tank deserted in the field. And that must be the way it was with the entire military force which had hemmed in the building, Peter told himself. The roads and walls had cut it into bits, had screened it off -- and now the tanks and the big guns and the planes were just so many ineffective toys of an infant race, lying scattered in a thousand playpens. Out on the road, the foot soldiers and the tank crew slogged eastward, retreating from the siege which had failed so ingloriously. N their thicket, Mary and Peter  sat and watched the Building. "You said they came from the stars," said Mary. "But why did they come here? Why did they bother with us? Why did they come at all?" "To save us," Peter offered slowly. "To save us from ourselves. Or to exploit and enslave us. Or to use our planet as a military base. For any bne of a hundred reasons. Maybe for a reason we couldn't understand even if they told us." "You don't believe those other reasons, the ones about enslaving us or using Earth as a military base. If you believed that, we wouldn't be going to the building." "No, I don't believe them. I don't because I had cancer and I haven't any longer. I don't because the polio began clearing up on the same day that they arrived. They're doing good for us, exactly the same as the missionaries did good among the primitive, disease-ridden people to whom they were assigned. I hope -- " He sat and stared across the field, at the trapped and deserted tank, at the shining ladder of the roads. "I hope," he said, "they don't do what some of the missionaries did. I hope they don't destroy our self-respect with alien Mother Hubbards. I hope they don't save us from ringworm and condemn us to a feeling of racial inferiority. I hope they don't chop down the coconuts and hand us -- " But they know about us, he told himself. They know all there is to know. They've studied us for -- how long? Squatting in a drugstore corner, masquerading as a dgarette machine. Watching us from the counter in the guise of stamp machine. And they wrote letters -- letters to every head of state in all the world. Letters that might, when finally deciphered, explain what they were about. Or that might make certain demands. Or that might, just possibly, be no more than applications for permits to build a mission or a church or a hospital or a school. They know us, he thought. They know, for example, that we're suckers for anything that's free, so they handed out free gifts -- just like the quiz shows and contests run by radio and television and Chambers of Commerce, except that there was no competition and everybody won. Throughout the afternoon. Peter and Mary watched the road and during that time small groups of soldiers had come limping down it. But now, for an hour or more, there had been no one on the road. T hey started out just before dark, walking across the field, passing through the wall-thatwasn't-there to reach the road. And they headed west along the road, going toward the purple cloud of the building that reared against the redness of the sunset. They traveled through the night and they did not have to dodge and hide, as they had that first night, for there was no one on the road except the one lone soldier they met. By the time they saw him, they had come far enough so that the great shaft of the building loomed halfway up the sky, a smudge of misty brightness in the bright starlight. The soldier was sitting in the middle of the road and he'd taken ofi his shoes and set them neatly beside him. said by way of greeting. So they sat down with him to keep him company and Peter took out the water bottle and the loaf of bread and the cheese and bologna and spread them on the pavement with wrapping paper as a picnic cloth. They ate in silence for a while and finally the soldier said, "Well, this is the end of it." They did not ask the question, but waited patiently, eating bread and cheese. "This is the end of soldiering," the soldier told them. "This is the end of war." He gestured out toward the pens fashioned by the roads and in one nearby pen were three self propelled artillery pieces and in another was an ammunition dump and another pen held military vehicles. "How are you going to fight a war," the soldier asked, "if the things back there can chop up your armies into checkerboards? A tank ain't worth a damn guarding ten acres, not when it isn't able to get out of those ten acres. A big gun ain't any good to you if you can't fire but half a mile." "You think they would?" asked Mary. "An # rwherc, I mean?" "They done it here. Why not somewhere else? Why not any place that they wanted to? They stopped us. They stopped us cold and they never shed a single drop of blood. Not a casualty among us." He swallowed the bit of bread end cheese that was in his mouth and reached for the water bottle. He drank, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "J'm coming back," he said. "I'm going out and get my girl and we both are coming back. The things in that building maybe need some help and I'm going to help them if there's a way of doing it. And if they don't need no help, why, then I'm going to figure out some way to let them know I'm thankful that they came." "Things? You saw some things?" The soldier stared at Peter. "No, I never saw anything at all." '#ut this business of going out to get your girl and both of you coming back? How did you get that idea? Why not go back right now with us?" "It wouldn't be right," the soldier protested. "Or it doesn't seem just right. I got to sec her first and tell her how I feel. Besides, I got a present for her." "She'll be glad to see you," Mary told him softly. "She'll like the present." "She sure will." The soldier grinned proudly. "It was something that she wanted." H e reached in his pocket and took out a leather box. Fumbling with the catch, he snapped it open. The starlight blazed softly on the necklace that lay inside the box. Mary reached out her hand. "May I?" she asked. "Sure," the soldier said. "I want you to take a look at it. You'd know if a girl would like it." Mary lifted it from the box and held it in her hand, a stream of starlit fire. "Diamonds?" asked Peter. don't know," the soldier said. "Might be. It looks real expensive. There's a pendant, sort of, at the bottom of it, of green stone that doesn't sparkle much, but -- " "Peter," Mary interrupted, "have you got a match?" The soldier dipped his hand into a pocket. "I got a lighter, miss. That thing gave me a lighter. A beaut!" He snapped it open and the blaze flamed out. Mary held the pendant close. "It's the symbol," she said. "Just like on my bottle of perfume." "That carving?" asked the soldier, pointing. "It's on the lighter, too." "Something gave you this?" Peter urgently wanted to know. "A box. Except that it really was more than a box. I reached down to put my hand on it and it coughed Up a lighter and when it did, I thought of Louise and the lighter she had given me. I'd m lost it and I felt bad about it, and here was one just like it ex ccpt for the carving on the side. And when I thought of Louise, the box made a funny noise and out popped the box with the necklace in it.' The soldier leaned forward, his young face solemn in the glow from the lighter's flame. "You know what I think?" he said. "I think that box was one of them. There are stories, but you can't believe everything you hear..." He looked from one to the other of them. "You don't laugh at me," he remarked wonderingly. Peter shook his head. "That's I . about the last thing we'd do. Soldier."  Mary handed back the neckI lace and the lighter. The soldier I put them in his pocket and began putting on his shoes. "I got to get on," he said"Thanks for the chow." "We'll be seeing you," said Peter. "I hope so." "I know we will," Mary stated positively. They watched him trudge away, then walked on in the other direction. symbol is the mark of them. The ones who get the symbol are the ones who will go back. It's a passport, a seal of approval." "Or," Peter amended, "the brand of ownership." "Theyd be looking for certain kinds of people. They wouldn't want anybody who was afraid of them. They'd want people who had some faith in them." "What do they want us for?" Peter fretted. "That's what bothers me. What use can we be to them? The soldier wants to help them, but they don't need help from us. They don't need help from anyone." "We've never seen one of them," said Mary. "Unless the box was one of them." And the cigarette machines, thought Peter. The cigarette machines and God knows what else. "And yet," said Mary, "they know about us. They've watched us and studied us. They know us inside out. They can reach deep within us and know what each of might want and then give it to us. A rod and reel for Johnny and a piece of jade for you. And the rod and reel were a human rod and reel and the jade was Earth jade. They even know about the soldier's girl. They knew she would like a shiny necklace and they knew she was the kind of person that they wanted to come back again and "The Saucers," Peter said. "I wonder if it was the Saucers, after all, watching us for years, learning all about us." How many years would it take, he wondered, from a standing start, to learn all there was to know about the human race? For it would be from a standing start ; to them, all of humanity would have been a complex alien race and they would have had to feel their way along, learning one fact here and another there. And they would make mistakes; at times their deductions would be wrong, and that would set them back. "I don't know," said Peter. "I can't figure it out at all." They walked down the shiny metal road that glimmered in the starlight, with the building growing from a misty phantom to a gigantic wall that rose against the sky to blot out the stars. A thousand stories high and covering more than a hundred acres, it was a structure that craned your head and set your neck to aching and made your brain spin with its glory and its majesty. And even when you drew near it, you could not see the dropped and cradled bomb, resting in the emptiness above it, for the bomb was too far away for seemg. But you could see the little cubicles sliced off by the roads and, within the cubicles, the de structive toys of a violent race, deserted now, just idle hunks of fashioned metal. dawn, to the great stairs that ran up to the central door. As they moved across the flat stone approach to the stairs, they felt the hush and the deepness of the peace that lay in the building's shadow. Hand in hand, they went up the stairs and came to the great bronze door and there they stopped. Turning around, they looked back in silence. The roads spun out like wheel spokes from the building's hub as far as they could see, and the crossing roads ran in concentric circles so that it seemed they stood in the center of a spider's web. Deserted farm houses, with their groups of buildings -- barns, granaries, garages, silos, hog pens, machine sheds -- stood in the sectors marked off by the roads, and in other sectors lay the machines of war, fit now for little more than birds' nests or a hiding place for rabbits. Bird songs came the fields and you could smell the freshness and the coolness of the countryside. "It's good," said Mary. "It's our country, Peter." "It was our country," Peter coi;rected her. "Nothing will ever be quite the same again." "You aren't afraid, Peter?" "Not a bit. Just baffled." "But you seemed so sure before." "I still am sure," he said. "Emotionally, I am as sure as ever that everything's all right." "Of course everything's all right. There was a polio epidemic and now it has died out. An army has been routed without a single death. An atomic bomb was caught and halted before it could go off. Can't you see, Peter, they're already making this a better world. Cancer and polio gone -- two things that Man had fought for years and was far from conquering. War stopped, disease stopped, atomic bombs stopped -- things we couldn't solve for ourselves that were solved for us." "I know all that," said Peter. "They'll undoubtedly also put an end to crime and graft and violence and everything else that has been tormenting and degrading mankind since it climbed down out of the trees." K I N # E R O A R T E N "What more do you want?" "Nothing more, I guess -- it's just that it's circumstantial. Its not real evidence. All that we Icnow, or think we know, we've learned from inference. We have no proof -- no actual, solid proof." "We have faith. We must have faith. If you can't believe in someone or something that wipes out disease and war, what can you believe in?" "That's what bothers me." "The world is built on faith," said Mary. "Faith in God and in ourselves and in the decency of mankind." "You're wonderful," exclaimed Peter. He caught her tight and kissed her and she clung against him and when finally they let each other go, the great bronze door was opening.  the threshold with arms around each other, into a foyer that arched high overhead. There were murals on the high arched ceiling, and others paneled in the walls, and four great flights of stairs led upward. But the stairways were roped off by heavy velvet cords. Another cord, hooked into gleaming standards, and signs with pointing arrows showed them which way to go. Obediently, walking in the hush that came close to reverence, they went across the foyer to the single open door. They stepped into a large room, with great, tall, slender windows that let in the morning sunlight, and it fell across the satiny newness of the blackboards, the big-armed class chairs, the heavy reading tables, case after case of books, and the lectern on the lecture platform. They stood and looked at it and Mary said to Peter: "I was right. They were school bells, after all. We've come to school, Peter. The first day we ever went to school." "Kindergarten," Peter said, and his voice choked as he pronounced the word. It was just right, he thought, so humanly right: The sunlight and the shadow, the rich bindings of the books, the dark patina of the wood, the heavy silence over everything. It was an Earthly classroom in the most scholarly tradition. It was Cambridge and Oxford and the Sorbonne and an Eastern ivy college all rolled into one. The aliens hadn't missed a bet -- not a single bet. "I have to go," said Mary. "You wait right here for me." "I'll wait right here," he promised. He watched her cross the room and open a door. Through it, he saw a corridor that went on for what seemed miles and miles. Then she shut the door and he was alone. He stood there for a moment, then swung swiftly around. Almost running across the foyer, he reached the great bron#e door. But there was no door, or none that he could see. There was not even a crack where a door should be. He went over the wall inch by inch and he found no door. He turned away from the wall and stood in the foyer, naked of soul, and felt the vast emptiness of the building thunder in his brain. Up there, he thought, up there for a thousand stories, the building stretched into the 'sky. And down here was kindergarten and up on the second floor, no doubt, first grade, and you'd go up and up and what would be the end -- and the purpose of that end? When did you graduate? Or did you ever graduate? And when you graduated, what would you be? What would you be? he asked. Would you be human still? school for days, the ones who had been picked, the ones who had passed the strange entrance examination that was necessary to attend this school. TheyM come down the metal roads and climb the steps and the great bronze door would open and they would enter. And others would come, too, out of curiosity, but if they did not have the symbol, the doors would not open for them. And those who did come in, when and if they felt the urge to flee, would find there were no doors. He went back into the classroom and stood where he had stood before. Those books, he wondered. What was in them? In just a little while, he'd have the courage to pick one out and see. And the lectern? What would stand behind the lectern? What, not who. The door opened and Mary came across the room to him. "There arc apartments out there," she said. "The cutest apartments you have ever seen. And one of them has our names on it and there are others that have other names and some that have no names at all. There are other people coming, Peter. We were just a little early. We were the ones who started first. We got here before the school bell rang." Peter nodded. "Let's sit down and wait," he said. Side by side, they sat down, waiting for the Teacher. caretaker If you look hard enough, you eon usually find what you're seeking -- or trying to avoidi I mander Lowndes voice, m speaking from the great exploration ship stationed on the other side of the world, "that we're recording it officially as Hulman's Planet. I think that might please him." Mardcr hesitated with his reply. Through the viewport of the parked little scout flier, he looked out at the vast, shadowy valley before him, at green and scarlet swamps, at gleaming dark waters threaded through them. A huge, blue-wooded wave of mountains rose beyond, the setting sun just touching their crest. In a quarter of an hour, it would be completely dark. His glance turned, almost reluctantly, to the substantial but incongruous reality of Hulman's house nearby, its upper story and roof mirrored in the tiny swamp lake. "No, it wouldn't please him," he said. "Boyce suggested it during our first visit with Hulman today. He wants us to record it instead as -- ##I spell it -- C-r-e-sg-y-t-h. Cresgyth. That's his phonetic interpretation of the name given it by the people here." "Fair enough," Commander Lowndes agreed, "if that's how he wants it." He inquired whether Marder had anything to add to the present report. "Not now," Marder said. "I'll call you back after we've met his woman." "TIS wife," Lowndes corrected him carefully. T'm glad it happened to be you and Boyce who found Hulman. You're reliable men; you in particular, Marder. I don't need to emphasize that Hulman's chance discovery of what appears to be the first genuine human race ever encountered outside of Earth is of primary importance... He continued to emphasize that obvious fact at some length. "Boyce might be inclined to hurry through the -- ah, diplomatic overtures," he concluded. "You'll be careful about that part of it, Marder?" "Very careful," Marder promised. "On the two continents we've scanned so far, we've found no traces of human inhabitants, present or past. It's possible that Hulman's acquaintances are the sole survivors of humanity here. If we frighten the tribe into hiding, there may never be another contact -- and within a hundred years or less, they may have become extinct." "I understand." "Fine. Now, then -- what about these other creatures? What did Hulman have to say about them?" "In the twenty years he's been marooned in this valley, he's had only three or four actual encounters with them -- rather violent encounters, on his side. Apparently, they learned to avoid him after that. He seems," Marder added thoughtfully, "to have an almost psychopathic hatred for them." "Not very surprising!" Lowndes' tone was reproving, reminding Marder that Hulman had been, for the past forty years, one of the great, legendary names of stellar exploration. "Deems' scout reports it bagged a couple of specimens a few hours ago and is bringing them in. The description checks with what Hulman gave you -- a wormlike, blue body with a set of arms, legs, and a head. Out of water, they appear to wear some kind of clothes, presumably to conserve body moisture." Marder agreed that it checked. "We've found them remarkably elusive otherwise," Lowndes went on. "There seems to have been a widespread rudimentary civilization along the seas and major lake coasts -- amphibious cave-builders is what they were originally. But all the Caves we examined have been deserted for centuries, at least, which indicates major migratory movements of the species inland. The seas and lakes are almost completely barren of life above the plankton level." There had been, according to Hulman, some kind of planetary catastrophe, Marder said. Hunger had driven the "snakes," as he called them, out of the great lake chains of their origin, up into the valley swamp lands and along the river courses, forcing the remnants of the mysterious human race ahead of them in their slow migration and gradually reducing the human living area. Hulman had killed six of the bluish, wormlike creatures in this section of the valley, in the first few years after he had crashed on the planet; after that, they had ceased to show up here. But, until now, he had been unable to give the humans more effective help. Marder remained sitting in the scout for a time, gazing out at the vast, darkening valley with troubled, purrled eyes. For twenty-two years after the destruction of his ship, Hulman had lived here, separated from the humanity of his origin by an enormity of light-years, by the black abyss of space, but in the company of a woman who was of an alien, dying race. "My wife!' Hulman had said, not defiantly but proudly, in speaking of her. "I called her Celia from the start, and she liked the name.' Hidden somewhere in the shadowed swamps, the woman he'd called Celia was watching Hulman's great log house until she could overcome her timidity of the visitors from space. "She'll show up some time during the night," Hulman had laughed. "I'm leaving the doors open for her. I'll talk to her a little first, to reassure her, and you can meet her then. Meanwhile, why don't #rou have a look at her picture." Years ago, as a boy, Marder had first seen Hulman's early paintings of the outer worlds and, like countless thousands of others before and since, he had felt his imagination swell and grow wide with the c(mic grandeur of Hulman's vision of universal life. In the fifty or so paintings he had seen in the log house that day, the great sweep of space had dwindled to something apparently much more commonplace. Hulman's imagination seemed to have shrunk to correspond to the physical limitations of the valley that confined him. However, he had retained a characteristic and extraordinary precision of lifelike detail, particularly in regard to the human beings he had found here. They were beautiful creatures; but the paintings aroused a revulsion in Marder, in which he recognized a vague flavoring of terror. In the one painting Hulman showed them of the woman Celia, that effect was particularly pronounced. Marder found it difficult to explain to himself. Boyce seemed insensitive to it, and there was nothing in Hulman's words or attitude to provide additional clues. Re-entering the house, Marder glanced back with more than a trace of uneasiness at the swamp from the doors Hulman had left open. After twenty years, Hulman should know whether danger threatened him from there; but for a visitor on a strange world, "it" and "they" were always present in the unknown dark outside -- fears that usually were imaginary, but sometimes were not. Marder smiled a little grimly at his own present apprehensions and went in. TE found Hulman and Boyce in a cavcmoxis cellar level beneath the house itsSlf. It was well lit and showed familiar and reassuring features ; power plants, storage rooms, even a hydroponic garden. The two men stood beside the opening of a deep fresh-water well, twenty feet across, which took up the left side of the main cellar hall. "Sixty feet down, it's ten degrees Fahrenheit," Hulman was stating, with a disarming houseowner's pride. He was a big man, rather heavy now, with a squarecut brown beard that showed only a few traces of gray. "I got the idea from Celia's people. Swamp water's none too healthy here at various seasons, but the well taps an underground river that's as pure as you could wish -- He caught sight of Marder. "Any news?" His face had become suddenly anxious. "They're going to wait over there with the ship," Marder said, "a week or more, if required. We're to follow your judgment in every way in establishing contact with the Crcsgythians." "Good!" Hulman was obviously relieved. "We can't do anything till Celia comes in -- and we'll have to be very tactful then. But I'm sure it won't take a week." "What makes them so shy of us?" Boyce inquired. A shadow passed over Hulman's face. "It's not you," he said. "It's me... Or it's an impression I gave them of the Earth kind of human beings." Back upstairs, with the three of them settled comfortably in the big living room, he explained. He'd given Boyce and Marder a room together on the top floor of the house, across a small hall from his own room and that of his wife. "I've never asked Celia much about her people," he said. "There's some kind of very strong taboo that keeps her from talking about them. When I tried to press her for details at first, it was almost as if I were committing some sort of gross indecency. But I do know they hate violence, insanity -- anything unbeautiful! And, you see... When his ship crashed into the valley, he was the only man left alive on her out of the original crew of four. "Banning went insane two days before that and killed Nichols and Dawson," he said, his face drawn and taut, remembering it again over a period of twenty-two years. He paused. "And so I killed Banning before he could wreck the ship completely." He looked from one to the other of them. "Jt was unavoidable. But they never understood that, these people of Celia's," "How did they find out?" Harder stirred uncomfortably. Hulman shrugged. "I was unconscious for about a month and completely blind for six months afterward. They got me out of the wreck and nursed me back to life, but as soon as I was out of danger, only Celia would stay with me. She and I were alone for weeks before I regained my sight. How did they find out? They're sensitive in a number of ways. And there were those bodies in the ship. They -- withdrew from me," he said with a grimace, "as soon as I no longer needed their help." "Then in all this time," Harder said slowly, "you never were able to gain their confidence?" Hulman stared at him a moment, apparently weighing the words. "It's not a question of confidence," he said finally. "It's a question of -- well, I'm trying to tell you! I didn't mind being alone with Celia." He grinned suddenly, almost boyishly. "The others stayed in a small lake village they had a couple of miles up the valley, across the swamps. Celia went up there every few days, but she never brought anyone. back with her. I suspected it was simply because I was an alien, I thought they'd get over that in time. Celia seemed happy enough, so it wasn't a very acute problem -- " He paused a few seconds, frowning. "One day, when she'd slipped away again, I remembered a pair of field glasses I'd taken off the ship, and I got them and trained them on the village. That was a very curious experience -- I never have found a complete explanation for it. For just one instant, I had everything in the clearest possible focus. There were children playing on the platforms above the water; a few adults standing in the doorway of a house. And, suddenly, everything blurred!" Hulman gave a short hacking laugh. "Can you imagine that? They didn't want me to look at them, so they just blurred my vision!" "Eh?" Boyce was frowning. Harder sat still, startled, feeling the uneasiness growing up in him again. Hulman smiled crookedly. "That's all I can tell you. The glasses had a four-mile range and they were functioning perfectly, but the instant I turned them on the village, the field" blurred. I'd never felt so wholeheartedly -- and successfully -- snubbed before." " ably and glanced at Harder. He was still more than a little in awe of Hulman, of the shining legend miraculously resurrected' from the black tomb of space; but he, too, Harder decided, had the vague sense of something disturbing and out of order here. Well, so much the better. There would be two of them to look out for trouble, if trouble came. "I'll adnflt the trick annoyed me," Hulman said, "as soon as I'd got over my first surprise at it. Next day, I announced to Celia that I was going over to the village. She made no objection, but she followed me at a distance -- probably to make sure I didn't drown on the way. It's wet going around here. At last I came over a rise and found myself a hundred yards from the village, on the land side. Almost immediately. I realized they had abandoned it. I walked around it a while and found cooking fires still glowing; but nobody had waited to receive me. So I went home, insulted and very sulky -- I wouldnt even talk to Celia until the next morning!" He laughed. "I got over that in a hurry. And then I settled down to building us a house of our own, much bigger and better than anything they had in the village; and. that took up all my time for several nionths. For that whole period, I ignored our neighbors quite as thoroughly as they had ignored me." He grinned at his guests a little shamefacedly. "But you know, I couldn't keep it up then'. There was something so curiously happy and peaceful about them, even if they were giving me the cold shoulder. And the one good look I'd had of them had showed me they were physically the most beautiful people I'd ever seen. One day, when Celia was gone, I made another trip to the village -- with exactly the same results as the first one. So I decided to look around for a less exclusive neighborhood. "I'd got the little flier of my ship repaired enough to take it off the ground and set it down again; and I calculated I'd salvaged enough fuel for at least one twenty-four-hour trip. Celia watched me take off. I flew high over the village and could see them down there, ignoring me as usual. Then I flew down the valley for almost fifty miles before I came across the first colony of the other ones -- the snakes!" thing Lowndes had said. "Do the snakes live in caves?" "No!" Hulman said distastefully. "That's what fooled me. It was a village of stake houses set into the head of a little lake, almost like the one here. I set down on the lake, coasted up to the village, climbed up a ladder, and saw theml" He shuddered. "They just stood there, very quietly, watching me from the doors and windows. What made it worse somehow was that they wore clothes -- but the clothes didn't cover enough. Those weaving, soft, blue bodies and staring eyes! I backed off down the ladder, with my gun ready, in case they rushed me; but they never moved... He had found eight more colonies of the snakes farther down the valley, but no trace of another tribe of his beautiful humanoids. He flew up the valley then, high up into the mountains, almost exhausting his fuel; and beside a glacier-fed mountain lake was a tiny stake village, built into the water. And they were snakes again. "At the time, I didn't know just what to make of it. There was the possibility that my village represented an advance troop of human beings into a land of snakes. But I suspected -- I felt -- even then, that it was the other way around: that it was the snakes that were encroaching on the humans. So I swore to myself that as long as I lived, at least, human beings were going to hold this section of the valley undisturbed'and in safety. "When I came back, I said to Celia -- she was standing at the same spot I'd seen her last, as if she'd never left it -- 'Celia, I must speak to your people. Go tell them I will come again tomorrow and that they must not run away. She looked at me silently for a long time, and then she turned and left in the direction of the village. She came back late at night and crept into my arms and said, 'They have promised to wait for you. "I set out next morning, full of great plans. The snakes lived in widely scattered settlements, after all. The villagers and I could wipe out those settlements one by one, until we'd cleared the land about usi That was the natural solution, wasn't it? I didn't realize then how different, in some ways, Celia's people were from us!" happened?" "What happened?" Hulman repeated. "Well, I came over that rise, and there the village was. This time I knew they'd stayed at home! Then, not twenty feet off my path, I saw two of the snakes standing in the bushes, one watching me, the other looking at the village. Each had a kind of chunky crossbow across his shoulders; and they couldn't be seen from the village... He paused and shook his head. "So I shot them both down, before they got over their surprise. That was all." He looked from one to the other again. "It was the natural thing to .do, wasn't it?" Boyce nodded uncertainly. Marder said nothing. Hulman leaned forward. 'But apparently, from the point of vicyr of the villagers, it wasn't! Because when I was done with the snakes -- one of them took three shots before it would lie still -- the village was empty again. When I got back home, I was actually sick with disappointment. And then I discovered that Celia was gone! "That was a bad three days. But she came back then. And on the morning she came back, I discovered they'd broken up the village overnight and moved on. I think they're not more than ten or twenty miles distant from here, but I never tried to look them up again." Boyce said puzzled, 'But I don't see -- " "Neither did I," Hulman interrupted, "until it was too late!" He gave his short bark of laughter again; there was, Marder realized, a sort of suppressed fury in it. "They won't kill their enemies -- they're too polite for that! So their enemies are gradually squeezing them out of existence." The three men studied each other in silence for a moment. Then Marder asked slowly, "Captain Hulman, what do you expect us to do in this situation?" "Kill the snakes!" Hulman said promptly. "As many as we can find! If the human beings of this world won't defend themselves, we'll have to defend them. As long as I've been here, no party of snakes has come past this point of the valley. A few of them have tried!" His eyes glittered with open hatred. "But I can't be on guard here forever. It's up to you and the other men on the ship to do the job right!" uneasily, Marder hadn't yet shut his eyes. The uneasiness was in him, too; and in him it was strong enough to offset the fatigue and excitement of the day. Vague night sounds came into the room they shared, a plaintive, thin calling like the distant cry of a bird. Not too different from the sounds on many other worlds he had known, and, as on all worlds that were new and strange, faintly tinged with the menace that was largely in the imagination. But it was Hulman himself who was the principal cause of Marder's uneasiness. The face of the old explorer, the rumbling, angry voibe, his monomaniacal devotion to the strange humanoids kept recurring in his mind. Nothing Hulman had done previously to stimulate the imagination of Earthmen toward the laborious exploration of space could equal this final accidental achievement: to have encountered the first other human beings Sarthmen had yet discovered in the Universe. Men had looked out from their world like children staring into a great, dark forbidding room. They had found space to be peopled sparsely with intelligent life -- life that was sometimes horrible, sometimes merely odd, sometimes beautiful in weird, incomprehensible ways. But never enough like Man to be acceptable! Hulman's fierce insistence on protecting what seemed to be the dying remnants of a human race against its own wishes was something Marder could understand well enough. He did not doubt that Boyce and the others would respond wholeheartedly to that insistence. Here was the proof that human life could rise spontaneously and endlessly throughout all the galaxies, that the Universe was not a darkened room, after all, but one lighted forever by the fires of humanity. They had to protect that proof... Strangely enough, though Boyce was asleep and he awake, it was Boyce who first seemed aware of motion in the house. Marder heard him breathe and stir unquietly, and then come awake and grow still, listening, waiting. He smiled faintly at the familiar signs, the tense alertness, the silent questioning of the strange world about them: "What is it? Who moves?" On many other strange, dark worlds, he had been among Earthmen as they came awake, asking that question. And he with them... T He grew aware of it then : there was motion in the house now, beyond the walls. Gradually, it resolved itself into slow, heavy steps on the carpeted flooring; and the picture of Hulman leaving his room to peer down the stairs came so convincingly into his mind that at once he relaxed again. And he was aware that Boyce was relaxing too. Neither of them spoke. After a time, Hulman went back to his room, walking carefully so as not to disturb his guests; and the house was still. Presently, Boyce was sleeping again. Marder tried to pick up the train of thoughts he had been following before the disturbance; but they eluded him now. Fatigue grew up in him like waves of mental darkness, smothering the remnants of uneasiness; and reluctantly he let himself drift off. The blast that roused him seemed to have gone off almost beside his head. the center of the room, gun in one hand, fiashbeam in the other. Boyce's wide back was just disappearing through the door into the dark hall beyond; and Boyce's shout was in his ears: "Hulman! They've ot Hulmanf" Marder halted a fraction of a second, checked by the ridiculous hesitation of a man who doesn't want to go out into a strange house undressed; then he was following Boyce. As he plunged down the broad staircase to the lower floor of Hulman's house, a memory flashed into his mind: the guns that Hulman, cut off from standard power sources, had manufactured for himself here and shown them earlier in the evening. It had been the report of a missile gun that had awakened him; one of Hulman's own. He lost Boyce's light for a moment when he reached the lower floor, and stood in indecision until he heard a muffled shouting to his left, and remembered the descent into the cellars. As he reached the door, there was another angry shout from Boyce, and a bla#e of pink light from below. Boyce had cut loose with his gun, so he was in contact with the intruders; and things would have to be finished very quickly now -- a thermion spray was not designed to be an indoor weapon! Marder reached the bottom of the cellar stairs seconds later. A hedge of flame to their right, steady, impenetrable and soundless, slanted from the wall half around the great well. It cut them off from further advance; presumably it had cornered their antagonists. Boyce, dressed in nightshorts, turned a furiously contorted face to him. "One of them ducked around the corner over there I It can't get out. It was carrying Hulman!" "Where is Hulman?" "Over there -- dead!" reflected glare of the fire. Something dark lay hunched against the wall beyond the well; that was all he could make out. "Sure he's dead?" His voice carefully matter-of-fact. "Of course!" Boyce said beside him. The hand that held the gun was shaking. "When it dropped him -- when I snapped a bolt at it -- I saw he'd been shot through the head with his own gun!" "The natives?" Marder asked, still carefully. "No. Something -- those snakes he was afraid of -- some animal. It whipped around the corner before I saw it very clearly -- " His voice had gone dull. Marder glanced at him quickly. Boyce was in a state of semi-shock, and they had only a few minutes before the fire ate far enough into the walls to threaten their retreat upstairs and out of the house. He had no personal qualms about leaving Hulman's body and Hulman's slayers to roast together -- the coincidence of murder on that particular night was something one could Agure out more conveniently later -- but Boyce might present a problem. A voice addressed them from out of a passage beyond the well. "You who were his friends," it said, "will you listen to me?" Marder felt his scalp crawling. "Who are you?" he called back. "He called me his wife." Boyce started violently, but Marder waved him to silence. It was a rich, feminine voice, a trifle plaintive: it was not difficult to fit it mentally to the painting of Hulman's wife. "Why did you kill him?" There was a pause. "But I thought you understood," the voice said. "Your medical men would say that he had been insane for twenty years, as he counted time. They would have forced him back into sanity. I could not bear the thought that he should suffer that." Marder swallowed hard. "Suffer what?" "Are you all fools? He was a fool, though I loved him. He could not see behind the shape of things. So -- here among us -- he saw shapes he could bear to see. In those moments when sanity came to him and he really saw what was there -- then he killed. Are you all like that?" mouth working. "What is she talking about?" he whispered hoarsely. "Is the snake with her?" "Go upstairs, Boyce! Wait for me outside!" "Are you going to kill the snake?" "Yes, I'll kill the snake." Boyce disappeared up the stairs. "The house is burning, but there is some time left," Marder told the voice then. "Is there any way you can save yourself?" "I can leave by the river that flows under the well," the voice said, "if you do not shoot' at me." "I won't shoot at you." "May I take his body?" Marder hesitated. "Yes." "And you will all leave with your ship? I loved him, though my people thought it strange almost beyond their tolerance. They are foolish, too, yet not as foolish as you are. They saw what was in his mind and not beyond that, and so they were afraid of him. But he is dead now and there is nothing that your people and mine could share. We are too different. Will you leave?" Marder moistened his lips. "We'll leave," he said, seeing it all now, and glad he had sent Boyce upstairs. "What did you see beyond what was in his mind?" "A brave spirit, though very frightened," the voice said slowly. "He ventured far and far and far into the dark of which he was afraid. I loved him for that!" It caused. "I am coming now," it added, "and I think you had better look away." Marder did not intend to look away, but at the last moment, when there was movement at the comer of the passage, he did. He saw only a swift undulating shadow pass along the wall, pause and stoop quickly, rise again with a bulky burden clasped to it, glide on and vanish. He stood staring at the blank wall until there was a faint splash in the well far below him. rHE great ship was drifting slowly above the night side of the world it was leaving, when Commander Lowndes joined Marder at the observation port. "Boyce will make out all right," he said moodily. "He only guessed part of the truth, and that bit is being taken from his mind." He studied Marder thoughtfully. "If you'd looked squarely at the thing, we might have had to give you the same treatment. Our pickled specimens are pretty damned hideous." Marder shrugged. Lowndes sat on the edge of a table. "Selective hysterical blindness maintained for twenty-two years -- with his own type of artistic hallucinations thrown ini I can't help wishing it hadn't happe'ned to Hulman." "He didn't maintain it through out," Marder said slowly. "And whenever he saw them clearly, he killed them..." "Who wouldn't? I almost feel," Lowndes said, "like getting out of space and staying out, for good!" Which was giving it the ultimate in emphasis. "What are you reporting?" Marder asked. "That Hulman died here, quite peacefully, about a year before we found him -- leaving a diary of inspiring courage and devotion to space exploration behind him. We'll have time enough to work up the diary. That should keep everybody happy. Marder," he said suddenly, waving his hand at the observation port, "do you think there actually are -- well, people out there. Somewhere?" Marder looked out at the vast, star-studded, shining black immensity. "I hope so," he said. "Do you think we'll ever find them?" "I don't know," Marder said thoughtfully. "They've never found us." Home is the Hunter Incenfives change constantly, but one thing never does -- the idea that they are permanent! talk to except myself. I stand here at the head of the great waterfall of marble steps dropping into the reception hall  below and all my wives in all their jewels are waiting, for this is a Hunter's Triumph -- my Triumph, Honest Roger Bellamy, Hunter. The light glitters on the glass cases down there with the hundreds of dried heads that I have taken in fair combat, and I'm one of the most powerful men in New York. The heads make me powerful. But there's nobody I can talk to. Except myself? Inside me, listening, is there another Honest Roger Bellamy? I don't know. Maybe he's the only real part of me. I go along the best I can, and it doesn't do any good. Maybe the Bellamy inside of me doesn't like what I do. But I have to do it. I can't stop, for I was bom a Hunter. It's a great heritage to be born to. Who doesn't envy me? Who wouldn't change with me, if they could? # But knowing that doesn't help at all. I'm no good. Listen to me, Bellamy, listen to me, if you're there at all, deep inside my head. You've got to listen -- you've got to understand. You, there, inside the skull. You can turn up in a glass case in some other Hunter's reception hall any day now, any day, with the crowds of Populi outside pressing against the view-windows and the guests coming in to see and envy, and all the wives standing by in satin and jewels. Maybe you don't understand, Bellamy. You should feel fine now. It must be that you don't know this real world I have to go on living in. A hundred years ago, or a thousand, it might have been different. But this is the Twentyfirst Century. It's today, it's now, and there's no turning back. I don't think you understand. Y OU see, there isn't any choice. Either you end up in another Hunter's glass case, along with your whole collection of heads, while your wives and children are turned out to be Populi, or else you die naturally (suicide is one way) and your eldest son inherits your collection, and you become immortal, in a plastic monument. You stand forever in transparent plastic on a pedestal along the edge of Central Park, like Renway and old Falconer and Brennan and all the others. Everyone remembers and admires and envies you. Will you keep on thinking then, Bellamy, inside the plastic? Will I? Falconer was a great Hunter. He never slowed down, and he lived to be fifty-two. For a Hunter, that is a great old age. There are stories that he killed himself. I don't know. The wonder is that he kept his head on his shoulders for fifty-two years. The competition is growing harder, and there are more and more younger men these days. Listen to me, Bellamy, the Bellamy within. Have you ever really understood? Do you still think this is the wonderful young time, the boyhood time, when life is easy? Were you ever with me in the long, merciless years while my body and mind learned to be a Hunter? I'm still young and strong. My training has never stopped. But the early years were the hardest. Before then, there was the wonderful time. It lasted for six years only, six years of happiness and warmth and love with my mother in the harem, and the fostermothers and the other children. My father was very kind then. But when I was six, it stopped. They shouldn't have taught us love at all, if it had to end so soon. Is it that you remember, Bellamy within? If it is, it can never come back. You know that. Surely you know it. The roots of the training were obedience and discipline. My father was not kind any more. I did not see my mother often and, when I did, she was changed, too. Still, there was praise. There were the parades when the Populi cheered me and my father. He and the trainers praised me when I showed I had special skill in the duel, or in marksmanship, or judo-stalking. It was forbidden, but my brothers and I sometimes tried to kill each other. The trainers watched us carefully. I was not the heir, then. But I became the heir when my elder brother's neck was broken in a judo-fall. It seemed an accident, but of course it wasn't, and then J had to be more careful than ever. I had to become very skillful. All that time, all that painful time, learning to kill. It was natural. They kept telling us how natural it was. We had to learn. And there could be only one heir... We lived under a cloud of fear even then. If my father's head had been taken, we would all have been turned out of the mansion. Oh, we wouldn't have gone hungry or unsheltered. Not in this age of science. But not to be a Hunter! Not to become immortal. in a plastic monument standing by Central Park!  am one of the Populi. It seems strange, but in the dream I am hungry. And that is impossible. The great power plants supply all that the world needs. Machines synthesize food and build houses and give us all the necessities of life. I could never be one of the Populi, but if I were, I would go into a restaurant and take whatever food I wished out of the little glass-fronted compartments. I would eat well -- far better than I eat now, as a matter of fact. And yet, in my dream, I am hungry. Perhaps the food I eat does not satisfy you, Bellamy within me. It does not satisfy me, but it is not meant to. It is nutritious. Its taste is unpleasant, but all the necessary proteins and minerals and vitamins are in it to keep my brain and body at their highest pitch. And it should not be pleasant. It is not pleasure that leads a man to immortality in plastic. Pleasure is a weakening and an evil thing. Bellamy within -- do you hate me? My life has not been easy. It isn't easy now. The stubborn flesh fights against the immortal future, urging a man to be weak. But if you are weak, how long can you hope to keep your head on your shoulders? The Populi sleep with their wives. I have never even kissed any of mine. (Is it you who have sent me those dreams?) My children? Yes, they are mine; artificial insemination is the answer. I sleep on a hard bed. Sometimes I wear a hair shirt. I drink only water. My food is tasteless. With my trainers I exercise every day, until I am very tired. The life is hard -- but in the end we shall stand forever in a plastic monument, you and I, while the world envies and admires. I shall die a Hunter and I shall be immortal. The proof is in the glass cases down there in my reception hall. The heads, the heads -- look, Bellamy, so many heads! Stratton, my first. I killed him in Central Park with a machete. This is the scar on my temple that he gave me that night. I learned to be more deft. I had to. Each time I went into Central Park, fear and hate helped me. Often it is dreadful in the Park. We go there only at night, and sometimes we stalk for many nights before we take a head. The Park is forbidden, you know, to all but Hunters. It is our hunting ground. I have been shrewd and cunning and resourceful. I have shown great courage. I have stopped my fears and nursed my hate, there in the Park's shadows, listening, waiting, stalking, never knowing when I might feel sharp steel burning through my throat. There are no rules in the Park. Guns or clubs or knives -- once I was caught in a man-trap, all steel and cables and sharp teeth. But I had moved in time, and fast enough, so I kept my right hand free and shot Miller between the eyes when he came to take me. There is Miller's head down in that case. You would never know a bullet had gone through his forehead, for the thanologists are clever. But usually we try not to spoil the heads.  so, Bellamy within? I am one of the greatest Hunters in New York. But a man must be cunning. He must lay traps and snares a long way in advance, and not only in Central Park. He must keep his spies active and his lines of contact taut in every mansion in the city. He must know who is powerful and who is not worth taking. What good would it do to win against a Hunter with only a dozen heads in his hall, while risking your own collection and your own head? I have hundreds. Until yesterday, I stood ahead of every man in my age-group. Until yesterday, I was the envy of all I knew, the idol of the Populi, the acknowledged master of half New. York. Half New York! Do you know how much that meant to me? That my rivals loathed me and acknowledged me their better? You do know, Bellamy. It was the breath of life that True Jonathan Hull and Good Ben Griswold ground their teeth when they thought of me, and that Black Bill Lindman and Whistler Cowles counted their trophies and then called me on the TV phone and begged me with tears of hate and fury in their eyes to meet them in the Park and give them the chance they craved. I laughed at them. I laughed Black Bill Lindman into a berserker rage and then almost envied him, because I have not been berserker myself for a long while now, I like that wild unloosening of all my awareness but one -- the reason. I could forget even you then, Bellamy within. But that was yesterday. And yesterday night, Good Ben Griswold took a head. Do you remember how we felt when we learned of it, you and I? First I wanted to die, Bellamy. Then I hated Ben as I have never hated anyone before, and I have known much hate. I would not believe he had done it. I would not believe which head he took. I said it was a mistake, that he took a head from the Populi. But I knew I lied. No one takes a common head. They have no value. Then I said to myself, "It can't be the head of True Jonathan Hull. It can't be. It must not be!" For Hull was powerful. His hall held almost as many heads as mine. If Griswold were to have them all, he would be far more powerful than I. The thought was a torment I could not endure. I put on my Status Cap, with one bell on it for each head I have taken, and I went out to see. It was true, Bellamy. The mansion of Jonathan Hull was being emptied. The mob was surging in and out, while Hull's wives and children were leaving in little, quiet groups. The wives did not seem unhappy, but the boys did. (The girls had been sent to the Populi at birth, naturally; they are worthless.) I watched the boys for a while. They were all wretched and angry. One was nearly sixteen, a big, agile lad who must have nearly finished his training. Someday I might meet him in the Park. The other boys were all too young. Now that their training had ben interrupted, they would never dare enter the Park. That, of course, is why none of the Populi ever become Hunters. It takes long years of arduous training to turn a child from a rabbit to a tiger. In Central Park, only the tigers survive, than's view-windows. I saw that the glass cases in his reception hall were empty, "So it is not a nightmare or a lie -- Griswold does have them," I thought, "and True Jonathan's, besides." I went into a doorway and clenched my fists and beat them against the brownstone and groaned with self-contempt. I was no good at all. I hated myself, and I hated Griswold, too. Presently it was only that second hate that remained, so I knew what I had to do. "Today," I thought, "he stands where I stood yesterday. Desperate men will be talking to him, begging him, challenging him, trying every means they know to get him into the Park tonight. But I am crafty. I make my plans far ahead. I have networks that stretch into the mansions of every Hunter in the city, crossing their own webs." One of my wives, Nelda, was the key here. Long ago I realized that she was beginning to dislike me. I never knew why, but I fostered that dislike until it became hate. I saw to it that Griswold would learn the story. It is by strategems like this that I became as powerful as I was then -- and will be again, will surely be again. I put on a glove, with hair and knuckle-lines and nails painted on to look like a hand, and I went to my TV phone and called Good Ben Griswold. He came grinning to the screen. "I challenge you, Ben," I said. "Tonight at nine, in the Park, by the carousel site." He laughed at me. He was a tall, heavily muscled man with a thick neck. I looked at his throat. "Tonight at nine," I repeated. He laughed again. "Oh. no, Roger," he said. "Why should I risk my head?" "You're a coward." "Certainly I'm a coward.!. he agreed, still grinning, "when there's nothing to gain and everything to lose. Was I a coward last night, when I took Hull's head? I've had my eye on him a long time, Roger. I'll admit I was afraid you'd get him first. Why didn't you, anyway?" "It's your head I'm after, Ben." "Not tonight," he said..."Not for quite a while. I'm not going back to the Park for a long time; I'll be too busy. You're out of the running, anyhow, Roger. How many heads have you?" He knew, damn him, how far ahead of me he was -- now. I let the hate show in my face. "The Park at nine tonight," I yelled. "The carousel site. Or else I'll Icnow you're afraid." "Eat your heart out, Roger," he mocked me. "Tonight I lead a parade. Watch me. Or don't -- but you'll be thinking about me. You can't help that." "You swine! You rotten, cowardly swine!" H e laughed; he derided me, he goaded me, as I had done so many times to others. I did not have to pretend anger. I wanted to reach into the screen and sink my fingers in his throat. The furious rage was good to feel. It was very good. I let it build until it seemed high enough. I let him laugh and enjoy it. Then at last I did what I had been planning. At the right moment, when it looked convincing, I let myself lose all control and I smashed my fist into the TV screen. It shattered. Griswold's face flew apart; I liked that. It was very satisfying. The connection was broken, of course. But I knew he would check quickly back. I slipped the protective glove from my right hand and called a servant I knew I could trust. (He is a criminal; I protect him. If I die, he will die and he knows it.) He bandaged my unharmed right hand and I told him what to say to the other servants. I knew the word would reach Nelda quickly, in the harem, and I knew that Griswold would hear within an hour. I fed my anger. All day, in the gymnasium, I practiced with my trainers, machete and pistol in my left hand only. I made it seem that I was approaching the ness that overcomes us when we feel we have completely failed. That kind of failure can have one of two results only. Suicide is the other. You risk nothing then, and you know your body will stand by the Park in its plastic monument. But sometimes the hate turns outward and there is no fear left. Then the Hunter is berserker, and while this makes him very dangerous, he is also good quarry then -- he forgets his cunning. It was dangerous to me, too, for that kind of forgetfulness is very tempting, the next best thing to oblivion itself. Well, I had set the lure for Griswold. But it would take more than a lure to bring him out when he thought he had nothing to gain by such a risk. So I set rumors loose. They were very plausible rurnors. I let it be whispered that Black Bill Lindman and Whistler Cowles, as desperate as I at Grisworld's triumph over us all, had challenged each other to a meeting in the Park that, night. Only one could come out alive, and that one would be master of New York so far as our age-group counted power. (There was, of course, old Murdoch with his fabulous collection accumulated over a lifetime, but it was only among ourselves that the rivalry ran so high.) thought Griswold would act. There is no way to check such news. A man seldom announces openly that he is going into the Park. It could even be the truth, for all I knew. And for all Griswold knew, his supremacy was in deadly peril before he had even enjoyed his Triumph. There would be danger, of course, if he went out to defend his victory. Lindman and Cowles are both good Hunters. But Griswold, if he did not suspect my trap, had a chance at one sure victory -- myself. Honest Roger Bellamy, waiting in berserker fury at a known rendezvous and with a right hand useless for fighting. Did it seem too obvious? Ah, but you don't know Griswold. When it was dark, I put on my hunting clothes. They are bulletproof, black, close-fitting, but very easy with every motion. I blacked my face and hands. I took gun, knife and machete with me, the metal treated so that it would not catch or reflect the light. I like a machete especially -- I have strong arms. I was careful not to use my bandaged hand at all, even when I thought no one watched me. And I remembered that I must seem on the verge of berserker rage, because I knew Griswold's spies would be reporting every motion I made. I went toward Central Park, the entrance nearest the carousel site. That far Griswold's men could track me, but no farther. At' the gate I lingered for a moment -- do you remember this, Bellamy within me? Do you remember the plastic monuments we passed on the edge of the Park? Falconer and Brennan and the others, forever immortal, standing proud and godlike in the clear, eternal blocks. All passion spent, all fighting done, their glory assured forever. Did you envy them, too, Bellamy? I remember how old Falconer's eyes seemed to look through me contemptuously. The number of heads he had taken is engraved on the base of his monument, and he was a very great man. "Wait," I thought. "I'll stand in plastic, too. I'll take more heads than even you, Falconer, and the day that I do, it will be the day I can lay this burden down..." Just inside the gate, in the deep shadows, I slipped the bandage from my right hand. I drew my black knife and, dose against the wall, I began to work my way rapidly toward the little gate which is nearest Griswold's mansion. I had, of course, no intention of going anywhere near the carousel site. Griswold would be in a hurry to get to me and out again, and he might not stop to think. Griswold was not a thinker. I gambled on his taking the closest route. I waited, feeling very solitary and liking the solitude. It was hard to stay angry. The trees whispered in the darkness. The moon was rising from the Atlantic beyond Long Island. I thought of it shining on the Sound and on the city. It would rise like this long after I was dead. It would glitter on the plastic of my monument and bathe my face with cold light long after you and I, Bellamy, are at peace, our long war with each other ended. ing. I tried to empty my mind was for this that my body and mind had ben trained so painfully ever since I was six years old. I breathed deeply a few times. As always, the deep, shrinking fear tried to rise in me. fear, and something more. Something within me -- is it you, Bellamy? -- that says I do not really want to kill. Then Griswold came into sight. and the familiar, hungry hatred made everything all right again. I do not remember very much about the fight. It all seemed to happen within a single timeless interval, though I suppose it went on for quite a long while. It was a hard, fast, skillful fight. We both wore bulletproof clothing, but we were both wounded before we got close enough to try for each other's heads with steel. He favored a saber, which was longer than my machete. Still, it was an even battle. We had to fight fast, because the noise might draw other Hunters, if there were any in the Park tonight. But in the end I killed him. I took his head. The Moon was not yet clear of the high buildings on the other side of the Park and the night was young. I summoned a taxi. Within minutes, I was back in my mansion, with my trophy. Before I would let the surgeons treat me, I saw to it that the head was taken to the laboratory for a quick treatment, a very quick preparation. And I sent out orders for a midnight Triumph. While I lay on the table and the surgeons washed and dressed my wounds, the news was flashing through the city already. My servants were in Griswold's mansion, transferring his collections to my reception hall, setting up extra cases that would hold all my trophies, all True Jonathan Hull's and all of Griswold's, too. I would be the most powerful man in New York, under such masters as old Murdoch and one or two more. All my age-group and the one above it would be wild with envy and hate. I thought of Lindman and Cowles and laughed with triumph. I thought it was triumph -- then. the staircase, looking down at row upon row of trophies, my wives in all their jewels. Servants are moving to the great bronze doors to swing them ponderously open. What will be revealed? The throng of guests, the great Hunters coming to give homage to a greater Hunter? Or -- suppose no one has come to my Triumph, after all? The bronze doors are beginning to open. And I'm afraid. The fear that never leaves a Hunter, except in his last and greatest Triumph, is with me now. Suppose, while I stalked Griswold tonight, some other Hunter ambushed even bigger game -- what if, for example, someone has taken old Murdoch's head? Then someone else would be having a Triumph in New York tonight, a greater Triumph than mine! The fear is choking me. I've failed. Some other Hunter has beaten me. I'm no good... No. Listen. Listen to them shouting my name! Look, look at them pouring in through the opened doors, all the great Hunters and their jewel-flashing women, thronging in to fill the bright hall beneath me. I feared too soon. I was the only Hunter in the Park tonight, after all. So I have won, and this is my Triumph. There's Lindman. There's Cowles. I can read their expressions very, very easily. They can't wait to get me alone tonight and challenge me to a duel in the Park. They all raise their arms toward me in salute. They shout my name. I beckon to a servant. He hands me the filled glass that is ready. Now I look down at the Hunters of New York -- I look down from the height of my Triumph -- and I raise my glass to them. I drink. Hunters, you cannot rob me now. I shall stand proud in plastic, godlike in the eternal block that holds me, all passion spent, all fighting done, my glory assured forever. The poison works quickly. This is the real Triumph ! q.Q.QiQ F or some time now, I have been accumulating letters that could not be answered briefly, but which asked questions that I believe to be of general interest. The first of these letters came from Donald Kingsbury of # Maplewood Avenue, Montreal, Canada, who offers this problem. Let's assume that space travel engineering has progressed to the point where we can send an expedition to Venus along the orbit of minimum fuel expenditure, a so-called Hohmann A orbit. Supposing that this is the best we can do, for we cannot yet use a more expensive orbit, the problem is this: How soon can a second expedition follow the first? A LL right, let us "see first how such a trip would be made. The Earth moves around the Sun with a velocity of # miles per second. This is exactly enough to counteract the Sun's gravitational force at the distance of # off from the "forward" side of the Earth -- which means at dawn -- it would add its own velocity 'to that of the Earth and move "too fast" for the Sun to hold. As a result, the ship would drift outward in the Solar System, away from the Sun. But if the ship took off from the "back" of the Earth, at dusk, it would subtract its own velocity from the orbital velocity of the Earth and be "too slow" to maintain its position. It would drift inward in the Solar System. Don't be confused by the idea of taking off in the opposite direction of Earth's orbital movement. The ship would still move around the Sun in the same direction, because the ship's velocity would be on the order of # or # miles per second, so it would still move in the same direction as the Earth, only more slowly. Seen from the Sun, it would make about # miles per second instead of #. Drifting inward in the Solar System, the ship would approach the orbit of Venus. Now it can be shown conclusively that the minimum of fuel would be required if the ship's orbit just touched that of Venus. If you spent more fuel, it would cross the orbit and then you'd need more fuel to correct this. If you wanted to spend still less, the ship would not quite reach its destination. To travel from Earth to Venus along this most economical orbit would take # days. (See Diagram). In the course of these # days, the ship would traverse, an angle of # as seen from the Sun. In other words. Earth at the moment of departure, the Sun, and Venus at the moment of arrival, must form a straight line. departure time so that it will be in that straight-line position # days later? Venus, moving with an orbital velocity of # miles per second, needs # days to go around the Sun once. This means that Venus moves ## d  # degrees per day. Earth moves ## d  # degrees per day. So while the ship describes an arc of # during the # days of the trip's duration, Erth describes an arc of # times #  # and Venus # times #  #. Venus, during that time interval, moves # #  # more than the ship. Therefore the planet could be reached only if at the instant of departure Venus (Vj) is # degrees behind Earth (El). At the instant of arrival when Venus (Va) is in the right position, the more sedately moving Earth (Ea) is # behind Venus. Supposing the ship somehow missed Venus, it would then drift back (dotted line in diagram) to the orbit of Earth, needing another # days for the trip back. It would arrive, after # days, where the Earth was # days ago -- but unfortunately Earth needs # days (let's forget about those extra six hours) to get to the same spot so that it would still be # away (Ea). To arrive at Earth from Venus, Earth should not be # behind Venus, but # ahead of Venus. Since Venus is faster than Earth, the only thing one can do is to wait until Venus has caught up from behind. Venus is # ahead at arrival, but we want Venus to catch up so that it is # behind Earth. In other words, we want Venus to gain # #  #. Per day, Venus gains #  #  # or a little better than half a degree. To gain # consequently takes ##  # days, which is the waiting period until the expedition can return, reaching Earth after #f#  # days. The figures for a trip to Mars work out as #  #  # days. Although the trip to Mars would take .longer in itself, the waiting period happens to be a little shorter. But how soon could a second expedition follow the first? Well, obviously, the next time Venus is behind Earth by #, which simply means that, from one takeoff position to the next, we want Venus to gain a full circle or #. Which is ##  #I days or a year and seven months. The second expedition, then, would reach its goal almost precisely two years after the departure of the first. supposed to be unknown, cosmic rays continue to excite the imagination, and in my mail they run a close second to "flying saucers." Indeed, sometimes they seem to catch up with the saucers, which, considering the reported velocities involved, would be only natural. The letter that prompts me to write about cosmic rays at this time came from a lady (Joan Ellen Coan, # East #th Street, N. Y. C.), who had been informed by somebody she politely fails to identify that "a person living near the equator is safer from the mysterious cosmic rays than a person in the arctic because he has more air over his head to protect him." The informant also .added -- I knew this was coming -- that it would be impossible to protect a space crew against cosmic rays. This takes some careful dissecting to straighten out, because the statement as quoted is a fine mixture of fancy with some fact hidden inside. To begin with, there is little mystery about the nature of the cosmic rays. They are simply atomic nuclei traveling at high velocities. Most of them are the nuclei of light atoms, but there are occasional heavies. What is "mysterious" is the source. The very best available evidence indicates that the cosmic ray intensity does not vary with either the time of the day or with the season. Day in and day out, all year round, you get very closely the same number. It does vary with the latitude because of the Earth's magnetic field. At the magnetic equator, the number is smallest; at the magnetic poles, it is highest, about ten times as large near the magnetic poles as near the magnetic equator. What happens is that the magnetic lines of force deflect the incoming particles. It is just because of this deflection that we don't know where they originate, for the direction of travel near the ground where we catch them has absolutely nothing to do with the direction of their travel in space before they approached the Earth. Although we don't have enough material as yet to be sure, this deflection seems to take place at such heights that the #-mile altitude of research rockets makes no difl'erence. The same force that obscures the origin of the cosmic rays is also responsible for their distribution. Over the magnetic poles, an incoming cosmic ray is virtually unopposed; over the magnetic equator, there is maximum deflection. You might say that the rays are admitted at the magnetic poles while those which appear elsewhere managed to climb the fence, said fence-climbing growing more difficult with distance from the magnetic poles. So this takes care of nature, origin and distribution. N ext we come to the problem of protection. It is generally assumed, and correctly so, that incredibly heavy armor or steel, lead or concrete would be needed to stop cosmic rays. From this fact, it is usually reasoned that one will have to find a satisfactory compromise between the weight of armor that can be carried and the amount of protection afl'orded by that armor. This reasoning, however, is fallacious. It isn't as simple as saying that #-inch armor will stop #-inch shells so that you have to worry only about heavier artillery. When a cosmic ray hits matter -- say, our atmosphere -- it produces so-called secondary rays which are hardly better than the original rays or "primaries." So after having produced the "secondaries," "tertiaries," etc., etc., you still need enough mass behind or below to stop all of them. Thin armor, then, instead of affording "some" protection, only serves as a source for secondaries without stopping the primaries. Under these circumstances, it is easy to see why scientists who have investigated these problems have declared bluntly that "a little protection is far worse than none at all." It is like seeking protection against revolver bullets behind several thicknesses of window pane. All you accomplish is to get the bullets and glass splinters. Rocket engineers, naturally, are pleased by this. They much prefer to have a cabin wall as thin and as light as possible, just good enough to stay reliably pressurized. Now it turns out that this is best with regard to cosmic rays, too. But granting that "partial protection" is worse than none at all, can we do without protection? The answer is a clear yes. We now know the cosmic ray intensity that will be encountered in space. We know how much exposure is permissible for an individual and the top authority in the field, Dr. Hermann J. Muller, has declared that an exposure time of # or # years would still be safe. The term "safety" refers, of course, to offspring that may be conceived after the exposure. But when it comes to people who do not intend to have additional children, the term "safe" must be used with reference to direct bodily harm. And that stretches the exposure time very considerably. Quite likely, it is going to give a man far more years in space than he will care to spend out there. A S with all other items in this month's column, this is also in response to a letter. A reader in Cleveland who does not wish to see his namein print wrote me a fairly long letter in which, after innumerable protestations of his devotion to astronomical knowledge, he finally got around to two points. One was a request to tell everything that is known about Jupiter's Red Spot. The other asked whether the Red Spot might be connected with the "flying saucers." As for the question, the answer is no. I am unable to see any connection between a phenomenon in Jupiter's atmosphere and a set of phenomena of a different type in our own atmosphere. But I'll be happy to oblige with the information requested. Jupiter's Red Spot is precisely what the name indicates -- a large red spot which can be seen in a good telescope and which shows quite conspicuously on photographs. It is south of Jupiter's equator -- in astronomical telescopes and photographs, where the image is reversed, it shows above the equator -- and is elliptical in shape. In location, it corresponds to Madagascar on Earth, # southern latitude, but in size it corresponds to # times the area of the Pacific Ocean, for the Red Spot extends for about # miles east to west, and between # and # miles north to south. In color, the Red Spot was a decided brick red when strongest, but in the course of time it has been pinkish and even simply gray -- one observer told me several decades ago that he had seen it as magenta when he was a young man. In many books you can find the statement that the Red Spot was discovered in #. That is not quite correct. It merely became prominent and conspicuous in that year. But there is an unbroken series of observations for twenty years prior to that date, beginning with one in #. A historically minded astronomer, W. F. Denning, spent much time going through older astronomical records and found it on a drawing made by Schwabe on the #th of September #. In fact, it is possible that the first detail ever seen on Jupiter's surface, a dark spot on Jupiter's southern hemisphere, discovered by Robert Hooke in #, was what we now call the Red Spot. We know from our own experience since # that the spot does not have to be red and that it can fade out. The latter might explain the lack of mention between # and the #th Century. know, rotates astonishingly fast for a planet of its size, doing so in a little less than ten hours. Consequently, Jupiter's disk is visibly flattened and streaked with cloud banks, indicating the presence of strong "trade winds." But since we cannot see Jupiter's surface, and since the clouds move with relation to the planet, you And a different rotational velocity if you look at different latitudes. Near the north pole, you find # hours, # min. and # sec. Near the south pole, it is # hours, # min., # sec. The southern "temperate current" moves within # hours, # min. and # sec., while its northern equivalent needs # hours, # min., # sec. The equatorial belt takes # hours, # minutes and # sec., the red spot itself # hours, # min., and # seconds. Since it is largely in an area that requires # hours, # min. and # seconds, it moves slowly with respect to the neighboring cloud bands. The fact that the rotational period of the spot was different from the period of the atmosphere surrounding it was eagerly seized upon for an explanation. Naturally, the explanations were made up against the background of the astronomical beliefs of the time, some sixty years ago. Most astronomers were convinced then that Jupiter was still hot, possibly semi-molten, and it was often thought that the four large moons of Jupiter might have a nice, pleasant climate. Even though they could not get much heat from the distant Sun, Jupiter itself probably made up for that. Another belief that was still around then was the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the formation of planets and moons. It said, in short, that a rapidly rotating Sun will throw off its equatorial bulge as a ring, which then condenses into a planet, and that a rapidly spinning planet makes its moons in the same manner. et, spinning exceptionally fast. Moreover, a planet with many moons and a planet which was still hot. Wasn't it logical to assume that Jupiter was giving birth to another moon? At any rate, a number of astronomers accepted this idea and thev p'oSably expected to see the Red Spot separating itself from tne ball of the planet to take up a semi-independent existence as another of Jupiter's moons. When that did not happen, the explanation was turned around. The difference in rotational motion might indicate that the Red Soot revealed the true motion of Jupiter's surface, hence the spot we saw was not the "event" itself, but merely a reflection of something that had taken place down below. Since the crust covering the fiery mass of the planet was probably very thin, it was easy to assume that a break had occurred which flooded an area of continental dimensions with lava. The cause for the break might have been purely local, a "geological" event, or elsethe break might have been caused by the crash of a minor planet or an unknown moon of Jupiter. At least the second explanation had the advantage that it could be clearly visualized and understood. Unfortunately, as we knilRv now, it cannot be true. Not that we consider a crash of a minor planetoid into Jupiter unlikely -- that has probably happened quite often -- but our ideas about Jupiter itself have changed greatly. Being, in round figures, # miles in diameter, Jupiter occupies # times as much volume as the Earth. But its weight is only # times as great. So there cannot be an atmosphere some # or # miles deep with a justcrustedover lava core at the bottom of it. The planet simply does not weigh enough for that. The present concept of Jupiter, for this and other reasons, is that its atmosphere, consisting mostly of hydrogen with some methane and ammonia, is # miles deep, obviously with enormous pressures in its lower layers. Then follows what is called the Ice Mantle, some # miles thick, consisting of various "ices," frozen water, frozen ammonia, frozen methane. And only inside this ice mantle is there a rather small rocky and metallic core. The Red Spot, then, must be an atmospheric phenomenon, located in the upper layers. We don't know what it is, because chemistry and meteorology for an atmosphere like Jupiter's are sciences which don't yet exist, What caused Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit to place "zero" arbitrarily # decrees below freezing? There are # decrees between freezing and boiling by his scafe. Does this have anything to do with the number of degrees in a semi-circle? How does F. compare with Celsius and centigrade? Battell Loomis #, #fh Street Manhattan Beach, Calif. Yes, Herr Fahrenheit of Danzig did act in an arbitrary manner when he placed his "zero" # flegrecs below the freezing point of water. But he had some justification for picking this particular temperature -- it was the coldest he could produce (by mixing snow and salt) on a cold winter's day. The range of # F. between freezing and boiling has no reference to the # degrees of arc in a half-circle; this is probarc in a half-circle; this is probably accidental. The upper fixed point was not the boiling point of water, originally. Fahrenheit thought that the temperature of the blood of an adult would be best, for it was then believed that this was a constant, provided the man was healthy. According to some historians of science, he took the blood temperature to be #, while others say that # was intended. Both values miscarried, as we well know, for a man with a blool temperature of # is decidedly a "patient." Even though, in Europe, centigrade degrees are called Celsius degrees -- translators often slip up on this -- there is a difference. It was the Swedish astronomer Prof. Anders Celsius who was the first to propose that the temperature interval between freezing and boiling of uncontaminated water under sea level pressure be divided into # degrees. But he wanted to call the boiling point "zero" and the freezing point "#" (or minus #). On the centigrade scale which is now in use, zero is the freezing point and # the boiling point of water. The Kelvin degrees -- named after the British phyaicist William, Baron Kelvin -- are the same as centigrade degrees, but counted from absolute zero ( -- #.I on the centigrade scale) to avoid having to fuss with minus degrees. Fifty years ago, the Englishspeaking countries used the scale of the German Fahrenheit, the French, the Italians, Spaniards and others that of the Swede Celsius, but the Germans and Russians still clung to that of the Frenchman Ren# Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur. On that scale, now fortunately extinct, zero was the freezing point of water, but the boiling point wa # degrees. A few months ao, I ran across the term googolplex which was described as Is this same as #? I know that a googol is usually written as a one followed by # zeros. Jay Olins # Sunburst St. Northridge, Calif. Your last sentence is correct. A googol (of which its author, Dr. Edward Kasner, says that Mt is not even approximately a Russian author') is a one followed by a hundred zeroes, in mathematical notation #'. A googolplex is dehned as a one followed by a googol zeroes, in mathematical notation # " or if you Want to lessen the probability of typographical errors and misreading Of course your figure loC."'") is much larger than #' since that is only #' This number does not have a separate name, however. Is uranium the heaviest element naturally occurring on Earth? Jerry O'Neill Silver Springs, Md. From the way you use the term heaviest element," it seems to me that you mean atomic weight rather than specific gravity. In either case, uranium is not the heaviest element naturally occurring on Earth -- plutonium is. The heaviest uranium isotope has a weight of #. Plutonium has a weight of #. As for specific gravity or density, osmium is at the top of the list with a density of # times that of water. The density of uranium is #. I don't know whether or not the density of plutonium has been ofcially released. the Weather on Mercury Anyone mad enough (#) fo land on that crazy world #) in order to rescue that screwball explorer should (#) have his heed examinedl T he first thing McCracken did was shoot a Mercurian native. But then McCrack-v en, although he had powerful muscles, was never supposed to be verv strong in the head. The expedition was in the Twilight Zone, naturally, at the time. Without special clothing, which no one had, both the perpetual night of the Cold Side and the furnace heat of the Hot Side were out of the question. The Twilight Zone at this point was about forty miles wide, and the Astrolight had been skillfully brought down smack in the middle of it. Two hours after the landing, having ascertained that the air was as breathable as Kalinoff had reported, McCracken went out and aimed his explosive bullet at the Mercurian. If it hadn't been for Carvalho, who accompanied him, the rest of the group would have known nothing of the incident. It was Carvalho who reported what had happened to Lamoureux, captain of the expedition. McCracken, of course, burst into vigorous denials that he had shot a native. "You don't think I'd be fool enough to go around looking for trouble, do you?"  would, but didn't say so. "You did shoot at something. We heard the report." 'T tried to hit a dangerous bird." "What sort of bird was it?" "Kind of like a penguin, I'd say, but with a broader face. No bill to speak of -- " "Then don't speak of it," snapped Lamoureux. "Did you score a hit?" "I think the explosion caught it in the shoulder. It got away." "Thank God for small favors," said Lamoureux. "That bird, you pigeon-brain, was a Mercurian. How do you expect intelligent inhabitants o other planets to look? Like you? They'd die of mortification." "Damn it, how was I to know?" "I told you not to shoot unless you were attacked." Lamoureux scowled. "Kalinoff is somewhere in the Twilight Zone and we were supposed to find him with the help of the Mercurians. It may interest you to know that, while you were out at target practice, some of them came around here and began to behave as if they wanted to be friendly. Then they suddenly disappeared. I imagine they got news of what you had done. A fat lot of help they'll give us now." "We'll run across Kalinoff without them," said McCracken confidently. Carvalho, who had a habit of looking for the dark side of every situation, and finding it, suggested, "Suppose the Mercurians attack us?" McCracken said, "They haven't any weapons." "How do you know?" "Kalinoff didn't mention any." Lamoureux emitted a laugh that sounded like an angry bark. "Kalinoff wouldn't know. He was friendly with them. He did report that they were an intelligent race. It'll be too bad if they use their intelligence against us." McCracken thrust out his jaw. There was a streak of stubbornness in him, and he was not going to take too many dirty cracks lying down. He groveled, "I think you're making a mountain out of an anthill." "Molehill," corrected Lamoureux. 'Whatever it is. What if Kalinoff did say the Mercurians would help us? You can't take his word for it. Everybody knows what Kalinoff is." Lamoureux frowned. "Kalinoff is a great man and a great explorer." "They call him the interplanetary screwball." "Not on this expedition, they don't, McCracken. You will please keep a civil tongue in your head." "There's nothing wrong in what I'm saying. Kalinoff is a screwball, and you know it. Captain. He's always playing practical jokes. Look at how he got that Martian senator into the same cage with a moon-snake, and locked the door on him. The senator had a fit. How was he to know the shake was harmless?" "You don't think Kalinoff would play jokes when his own life was at stake, do you?" "Once a screwball," insisted McCracken firmly, "always a screwball." Lamoureux lost patience. "Once an idiot, always an idiot. Get over to the ship and help with the unpacking. And remember, if we don't find Kalinoff, it'll be your fault, and God help you." Cracken feeling properly ashamed of himself. Lamoureux walked away. The responsibility was beginning to weigh him down. The other nineteen men in the expedition thought they were merely trying to rescue an intrepid explorer for the sake of human life, which was supposed to be sacred. They didn't know that, behind his screwball surface, Kalinoff was as shrewd as they came. He had made some valuable discoveries -- and promptly staked out a claim to thenv He had run across large quantities of stable isotopes of metals whose atomic numbers ranged from # to #. These had remarkable and useful properties. They were, to begin with, of unusual value as catalysts in chemical reactions. For example, element #. in the presence of air, was a more powerful oxidising agent than platinum or palladium was a reducing agent, in the presence of hydrogen. And the oxidations could be controlled beautifully, could be made to affect almost any part of a complicated organic molecule at a time. Element # was recoverable, and could be used again and again. A few hundred grams of it alone might very well pay for the cost of the entire expedition. Add the value of a few kilos of elements #I to #, and Kalinoff had discovered enough to make him and a few other people rich for life. Lamoureux wanted to be one of those other people. He had three kids he wanted to send through Lunar Tech; he had a wife with expensive tastes in robot servants; and he had relatives. Let him get Kalinoff off this God-forsaken planet, where he had been marooned for the past year, and even an interplanetary screwball might be expected to show some feeling of gratitude. Combine this feeling of gratitude with a reasonably fair contract already printed, and needing only the explorer's scrawl to give it validity, and Lamoureux could almost feel the money in his pocket. If only McCracken had not spoiled everything by his stupidity -- Lamoureux shuddered to think that by the time they got to him Kalinoff might be dead, and they would have to do business with his heirs -- heirs who had no sense of gratitude to impair their business judgment. He felt suddenly poor again. But he put the gloomy thought out of his head, and went on with his work. ished in a couple of hours at most. Meanwhile there was some preliminary exploring to be done. The neighboring ground must be surveyed, and landmarks noted, so that they would have a suitable base from which to start their search. Kalinoff had talked about two mountains with a saddlelike ridge joining them. Those two mountains shouldn't be too difficult to recognize -- if ever the expedition ran across them. McCracken, obeying orders, was lending a hand at the unloading. What with Mercury's low gravity, and his own strength, he had no difficulty in wrestling around the five hundred pound crates in which their supplies had been packed. However, he was of little help in getting the work done. With what Lamoureux decided was characteristic stupidity, he seemed to be mostly in everyone else's way. Lamoureux called, "McCracken!" "Yes, sir.'x "Let go those crates. The others will handle them. I want you -- " Lamoureux stopped suddenly. A distant sound had come to his ears -- the explosion of a bullet. There was a sudden silence that was so absolute, Lamoureux could hear his men breathe. Another bullet exploded, then another -- and silence again. Somebody whispered, "The natives don't have guns. It must be Kalinoff!" "What luck to find him, this way!" Lamoureux had run fr his own gun. He fired ten shots into the air and waited. But there was no reply. Lamoureux spat out his orders with machine-gun speed. "McCracken, ,you, Carvalho, and Haggard set out to the right. The shots seemed to be coming from that direction. But we'll take no chances. Gronski, Terrill and Cannoni, go straight ahead. Marsden and Blaine, to the left; Robinson and Sprott, to the rear. Spread out fast and keep your eyes peeled. Don't go any further away than the sound of a bullet. Uncover every damned whitebush, and tear up every desertcat hill, but don't come back without Kalinoff. Now get going!" HE men started on a run. Lamoureux, waiting impatiently, walked up and down in growing excitement. He had come prepared for a three months' search, expected it. He had pictured himself and his men, exhausted by a long trek across the planet, coming upon the startled Kalinoff, striking a magnificent attitude, and saying, with characteristic Tellurian modesty, "Dr. Livingston, I presume." And, instead, he was going to find Kalinofi in less than a day. He ran into the ship, got out the printed contract, and read it hastily. All was in order. He'd have Kalinoff's signature that day. A half hour passed, and Lamoureux fired ten more shots. Haskell, the cook, was looking at the sky with a troubled expression on his face. He approached Lamoureux apologetically. "Say, Captain -- " "What is it, Haskell?" "Does it ever rain on Mercury?" "Never. No rain, no snow, no hail. No man who has ever set foot on the planet has come across any sort of bad weather. Kalinoff emphasizes that fact." "Well, that's what I seemed to remember. But just now I thought I felt a drop of rain." "Impossible, Haskell. Some bird -- " Lamoureux stopped abruptly. He, too, had thought hefelt a drop of rain. Haskell held out a hairy paw. "I thought I felt another one." His eyes fell on the brown rocks. "Say, here's a big drop that splashed." The brown rocks were being slowly spotted with black. And, as Lamoureux stared, he felt his head grow wet. There was no doubt about it. It was raining. His mouth dropped open. "But it doesn't rain on Mercury!" The sky was a dull gray now, and the patter of rain drowned out his words. He realized suddenly that he was becoming soaked. Haskell was running for the ship. Lamoureux followed him and slammed the door shut. The men who had not been sent to search for KalinofT were already inside. The rain rattled on the hull of the Astrohght, and on the parched ground. Lamoureux stared through the side port and repeated blankly, "But it doesn't rain on Mercury!" Fortunately, the noise of the rain was so loud that no one heard him say it. II TT was six hours before the hrst of the searclf parties Lamoureux had sent out returned. The men were soaked, but they had seen no trace of KalinofT. They had faithfully tried to follow Lamoureux's directions, but in a downpour where it was impossible to see more than fifty feet ahead of them, they stood little chance of rescuing anyone. Most of the six hours had been spent finding their own way home. The other search parties drifted in slowly, until all had returned. Lamoureux checked them off one by one, and discovered, with practically no surprise, that McCracken was missing. "Where is the idiot?" he growled. "McCracken separated from the rest of us," replied Carvalho. "He thought he could catch a glimpse of those mountains KalinofT described." "When was this?" "Just before it started to rain." "He's probably within a few hundred yards of the ship right now, but can't find us because of this rain. I hope he has sense enough to dig up a whitebush and get some shelter." "We Can never be sure how much sense McCracken has. Anyway, Captain, it can't go on raining like this for very long." But it could, and it did. The men sat around in the ship, stretching lazily, and took life easy. They had not had time to unpack many of the five hundred pound crates, and what materials were exposed to the rain would not be spoiled. There was no harm in leaving them where they were. A vacation of this sort would have been welcome, if the trip through space to Mercury had itself not been so largely a vacation. After a day, Lamoureux saw plainly that his men were sick of inactivity. So, for that matter, was he. He had come to take part in a strenuous and dangerous expedition, not to sit on his fanny waiting for the rain to go away. Twenty-four hours after everyone else had returned to the ship, McCracken made a sensational reappearance. With that independence of thought that Lamoureux was beginning to recognize, he had found his own way of coping with the bad weather. He had stripped off his soggy and unpleasant clothing, and had meandered around for the past day clad in nothing but his shorts, with his rifle, his one remaining possession, held firmly in the crook of his right arm. The rain was fairly warm, and outside of giving him his usual ravenous appetite, his outing had done him no harm. crew to dig up an extra suit of clothes to cover McCracken's manly beauty. "Where did you sleep?" "I didn't." "You wandered around all thtf time shocking the natives without rest?" "I'm no sissy," grunted McCracken. "I'm not even tired." He yawned, and caught himself. "I didn't see anything of Kalinoff. But I got a good look at those mountains he described. The pair with the saddleback ridge between them." "Where are they?" McCracken scratched his head. "I think I lost my sense of direction. But they're not far from here. No, sir, they're not far. Kalinoff is as good as found. The screwball." His eyes closed while he was talking, and Lamoureux had him led to his bunk and depKsited there. Two minutes later, McCracken's snoring was competing successfully with the noise of the rain. There was little sense in looking for the mountains until the rain let up. Lamoureux waited, and waited in vain. The downpour kept on until its monotonous sound had lecome an integral part of their life. They learned to talk without paying any attention to it, and without even hearing it. But not without, now and then, ciirsing it. After it had been raining for a week, Lamoureux noticed that the temperature was falling. It probably signified that on this part of the Twilight Zone the Sun was dropping further behind the horizon. As if he didn't already have troubles enough. He cursed Mercury; he cursed the Twilight Zone; he cursed the rain; he even cursed the Sun. A few hours later, he also cursed the snow and the hail. Such weather was absolutely incredible. There was nothing to explain it. As he had told Haskell, the cook, no previous explorer had ever seen a sign of rain, snow, or hail. Kalinoff had not reported such phenomena, and Kalinoff got around. The men were going crazy with inactivity. Worst of all, to Lamoureux, was the way they looked at him. They seemed to feel that, as leader of the expedition, he was responsible for the weather. Lamoureux almost found himself agreeing with them. the tenth day, he could stand it no longer. He called the men together and made a short speech. "Men, this rain seems able to go orT forever. We can't stay here waiting for it to clear up." Somebody cheered hopefully, and the others, for the sake of exercising their lungs, joined in. Lamoureux held up his hand. "McCracken has reported that he saw the mountains we were looking for, with the saddleback ridge between them. Rain or no rain, we're going to find them." Somebody yelled, "Three cheers for Big Muscles McCracken!" The three cheers were roared. Then there came, "Three cheers for our brave and heroic captain!" and, "Three cheers for the mountains!" and even, "Three cheers for the lousy rain and snow." Lamoureux began to feel uncomfortable. This was too much like a high school football rally, with burlesque overtones, to suit him. The men were bursting with pent-up energy, and it had to get out somehow. "I'm leaving only a half dozen of you behind to stay with the ship. The rest are coming with me. Any volunteers?" He had expected what followed. They all volunteered. He made his choices rapidly. McCracken went along because he had actually seen the mountains. Carvalho would make an intelligent assistant, Gronski, Marsden, Sprott -- he reeled off the names rapidly, and in less than a minute had his group, leaving a disgruntled half dozen who would have nothing to do but continue to sit around the ship. Lamoureux himself carried a two-way radio transmission set capable of receiving intelligible signals over a distance of # miles. He gave another of the sets to McCracken, and ordered the man to hang on to it no matter what happened. In the rain, it would be their only way of maintaining communications with the ship. He put McCracken and the radio in the second squad under Carvalho, and himself took charge of the first. The two squads would stick together unless some emergency demanded that they separate. When they set out in the snow, wearing the heaviest clothing they had, the men were singing. McCracken's voice, like the croaking of a huge bullfrog, supplied an It sounded so impressive to Lamoureux that not until McCracken had reached the third song did he perceive that the man didn't know any of the melodies at all. He just oompahed as the spirit moved him, evidently feeling that, on Mercury, noise and good spirits were more important than any tune. a half hour when Gronski exclaimed, "Well, ITl be damned to Venus and back!" "What's wrong, Gronski?" "It isn't snowing so hard, Captain." It wasn't. Carvalho said hopefully, "Maybe it'll stop." Sprott was so overwhelmed with delight that he scooped up a huge pile of snow, pressed it together, and popped McCracken on the nose with it. McCracken threw him down and poured snow down his back. Lamoureux said angrily, "Stop that, you fools! You're not a bunch of kids." The horseplay came to an abrupt halt. They marched on a little more soberly, and in a few minutes the snow had stopped falling altogether. Instead of being as happy as Lamoureux had expected, McCracken seemed puzzled. He scratched his head and scowled. "What's wrong, McCracken? Termites?" "It's this snow, Captain. We walk two or three miles and it stops. It don't make sense." "It's got to stop sometime." "The point is. Captain, it didn't snow here at all. There's none on the ground. It just snowed around the ship." It cost Lamoureux an effort to admit it, but McCracken was right. He was not as stupid as he had seemed.' It was Lamoureux's turn to scowl. He got in touch with the ship. "Haskell!" "Yes, sir?" "How's the weather where you are?" "Are you joking. Captain?" "I'm serious, Haskell. Is it clear?" "It's still snowing, Captain, just as it was less than an hour ago when you left." Lamoureux grunted. "You may be interested to know that it hasn't snowed here at all." He cut off Haskell's astonished voice, and turned to the others, who now seemed a little uneasy. The unexpected changes, in the weather were a little too much for them. "Now that it's cleared up, we should be able to find that mountain. We'll spread out just a little, but not too far. For all we know, it may start to snow again. Carvalho, you take your group off to the left -- " Sprott whispered, "Captain!" "Yes?" "Isn't that a Mercurian?"  Sprott had pointed. About a half mile away, a small gray creature, looking, as McCracken had reported, like a penguin, but with a broader face and no bill to speak of. was standing motionless. "Sprott, you and Marsden go over to that thing. Be as friendly as you know how. Smile, grin, stand on your head if you have to, but don't scare it away. Try to induce it to follow you here. Maybe we'll finally get some of that information about Kalinoff we're looking for." Sprott and Marsden were approaching the Mercurian cautiously. Several hundred yards away, they stopped and spread their arms in what was evidently meant to be a gesture of good will. The Mercurian remained motionless. Not until the men had come within thirty feet of it did it give a sign of life. Then it took a step toward them. As Lamoureux watched, the two men spoke a few words. The Mercurian did not respond, but when they turned around and moved away, it followed slowly. Seen from close at hand, the Mercurian did not so greatly resemble a penguin. To begin with, it had no wings, and no arms either. It lacked a bill altogether, but had instead a small mouth that seemed crammed with teeth. Its two eyes were slanted, which gave it an appearance of slyness. There were two round tufted ears. It moved forward not by waddling, but with a smooth rollercoaster gait that was the result of its moving its four legs forward one after the other. Sprott reported, "It seems hurt." There was, in fact, a grayish wound on the Mercurian's chest. Lamoureux didn't know enough about Mercurian physiology to hazard a guess as to what would be the best treatment; and, therefore, decided to leave well enough alone. But, according to Kalinoff, the Mercurians were intelligent. He wondered if the screwball explorer had taught this one any of r i  the Earth languages. 'Can you speak English?" The Mercurian stared at him with its sly expression and said nothing. "Parlez-vous frangais? Sprecien sie Deutsch?" The men were grinning now, and Lamoureux felt his face growing warm. He must look like a fool, trying to carry on a conversation with a bird. He asked, "Anybody here know Russian? Polish? Spanish?" TIS men supplied him with phrases in the languages he asked for, but the Mercurian remained unresponsive. McCracken ventured, "He don't look very bright to me, Captain. I can't understand why Kalinoflf said they were intelligent." "Maybe," suggested Sprott, "it's because they just stand there looking wise and don't say anything." Lamoureux shook his head. "Kalinoff wouldn't be impressed by anybody's just looking wise. And he wouldn't be impressed by anybody's not saying anything. He didn't go for cither stuffed shirts or strong silent men. That's why I believe that this thing must have a language of its own, and a fairly decent brain." The Mercurian closed its two eyes slowly, like a sleepy cat, and ojened them again. Then it poked one of its four feet out from under its body and scratched on the ground. "He's nuts," decided McCracken. "Just scrabbling around." "Hold it," ordered Lamoureux, "I'm beginning to get this." The Mercurian had scratched nine parallel lines, only a few of them visible on the rocky ground. Now it scratched other lines, perpendicular to these. Lamoureux barked, "A checkerboard! That's what it is! Has anybody got one?" Marsden had a pocket chess set. He took it out. The Mercurian's eyes brightened. It sat down suddenly on the hard ground. "I'll be damned," said Lamoureux. "He wants to play a game. Go ahead, Marsden. Entertain our guest." The men were grinning again. Marsden squatted down on the ground and began to set up the men. The Mercurian stretched out two of its paws -- three-fingered affairs, the fingers almost human -- and seized one white chessman and one black. It hid the paws behind its back, then held them out again. Marsden chose the white, and moved forward the queen's pawn. The Mercurian countered and the game was on. It was Kalinoff who must have taught this creature the game, and, if it did nothing else, the incident showed that the explorer was just as screwy as ever, and probably alive somewhere on the planet. Or did it merely show that he had been alive? Lamoureux, undecided, watched the curious battle of wits. Half an hour later, Marsden, thoroughly beaten, demanded, "Who says this thing isn't intelligent?" Ill T he Mercurian was sitting up, wagging its head from side to side as if waiting for approbation. But Lamoureux, quite sure now that it wouldn't or couldn't talk, wouldn't have given a damn if it had beaten every champion on Earth. In addition, he was bothered by the fact that it was snowing again. The flakes had just begun to fall, large and feathery, and Lamoureux himself soon had a powdered look. Most of the other men were still gathered around the Mercurian. But one of them, Sprott, came over to Lamoureux and glanced up at the sky as if puzzled. "It's following us around. Captain." "What is?" "The snow, sir." "Don't be silly, Sprott. We just happen to have run into a streik of bad weather." Sprott went on stubbornly, "It looks funny to me. First it rains and snows for ten days around the ship. But it doesn't rain, or at least it doesn't snow, here. An hour after we get to this place, though, it starts coming down." Lamoureux brushed some of the white flakes off his shoulders. "All right, Sprott, suppose you are right. It is following us around. That's no reason to alarm the other men, is it?" "I guess not, sir... I won't say a word. But there's something else I wanted to speak to you about, sir. It's McCracken." "You believe he's responsible for the snow?" Sprott looked astonished. 'T don't mean that, sir. I don't see how he could be." "I do. He shot a Mercurian. I have an idea that they're the ones who are causing the peculiar weather we've been having." "Why would they do that, sir?" "Well, Kalinoff didn't mention seeing any weapons among them, so we've always assumed they had none. But suppose the weather was their weapon. It's a very effective one, Sprott. They've made things damnably unpleasant for us." "How can they make rain where there isn't any. Captain? I know that rainmakers on Earth have had some success. But all they do is get the rain to fall near where it would have fallen anyway. They may make it precipitate a few hours before it would have otherwise, but that's all. Here there weren't any clouds to start with." Lamoureux admitted, "I don't know how the trick is done, Sprott. But I agree with you that the snow is following us around, and I'm sure that the trick is done."  Then he said, "And you think, sir, it's all because McCracken shot one of them?" "They evidently believe in the principle of the rain falling on the just and unjust alike. And the same thing goes for the snow." Sprott said doubtfully, "I'm not sure about that, sir. But I do know that McCracken is up to something. He's been getting some queer noises on his receiver." "Such as Haskell singing lullabies from the ship?" "Nothing as unpleasant as that, Captain. They're just a series of sounds, some a little longer than others. Da, da, da-a-a, da -- that sort of thing." Lamoureux asked, "When did you hear them?" "About ten minutes ago. McCracken doesn't know an # rthing abput chess, and neither do I, so we both wandered away after the first ten minutes. McCracken said he had an idea where those mountains were.' Lamoureux's eyes narrowed. "Those noises are undoubtedly a message. I seem to remember that some centuries back there was a cod? invented by a man named Morris. That's it, the Morris code. But where could such a message have come from?" Sprott shook his head. "I couldn't say, sir. There's supposed to be no one but Kalinoff on Mercury, and his radio set doesn't work. Could the message have been sent from Earth?" "Impossible, Sprott. That set will hardly get more than twelve thousand miles.' Sprott looked uncomfortable. "Then maybe what I heard wasn't a message at all, sir." "I think it was. Docs McCracken know you overheard him?" "I don't think so, sir." "Then don't let him know that we suspect anything wrong. Come to think of it, McCracken never seems to act quite as stupid as he pretends to be. I shouldn't be surprised if, when he shot that Mercurian, he understood very well what he was doing." "You believe, sir, that he deliberately tried to cause trouble? Why would he do that?" "I don't know," said Lamoureux slowly. That wasn't the whole truth. He didn't know, but he certainly could make a shrewd guess. All along, his chief reason for fearing delay on this expedition had been that Kalinoff might die before he could get to him. Now there was another reason for fearing delay. Suppose there were another expedition on the way to rescue Kalinoff. And suppose McCracken was secretly in the pay of the people behind that expedition, and doing everything possible to sabotage this one. Lamoureux nodded to himself. That was probably it. The first thing, then, was to get the radio set from McCracken. B ig Muscles, as the other men had nicknamed McCracken, was a few hundred feet away, staring off into the distance. What else he could see besides snow, Lamoureux couldn't guess. He yelled, "Hey, McCracken!" "Coming, Captain." McCracken took a few tentative steps, broke into a short run, and then made a leap that carried him seventy-five feet through the. air, past where Lamoureux was standing. He ended up at attention, his hand raised, in a military salute. Lamoureux frowned. Knowing what he did about McCracken, this attempt to seem carefree, childish, and perhaps a little stupid impressed him unfavorably. He said, "McCracken, I'm taking you out of Carvalho's group and putting you into my own. I may need some strong-arm work and you're just the man for it." "I sure am, Captain." "Seeing as I already have a radio, you may as well turn yours over to Carvalho." McCracken seemed a trifle less eager. "It's rather heavy, Cap tain. If you'd like. I'd carry it for you just the same." "I prefer to have my own where I can get at it whenever the need arises. Turn yours over to Carvalho, McCracken." "Yes, sir. Meanwhile, I want to report, sir, that from where I was standing when you called to me, I think I could see those mountains." Lamoureux had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. "Good," he said briefly. "We'll get going." He called the men together again and gave them their marching orders. Whether the Mercurian understood what he said, Lamoureux didn't know. At any rate, it went along wdllingly. They reached the place where McCracken had been standing, and Lamoureux stared where Big Muscles pointed. There were two mountains rising off in the distance, barely visible through the snow, and there was certainly a saddleback ridge between them. The only trouble was that one of the mountains was almost twice the height of the other. Kalinoff had reported them as approximately the same height. "That doesn't fit Kalinoff's description." McCracken said, "Maybe he looked at them from a different angle, sir. Then they might have seemed the same height." "If he looked at them from a different angle, the ridge would no longer seem saddlebacked." "That's true, sir. But then you know, sir, Kalinoff is a screwball -- " Lamoureux found this a little hard to take from a man he suspected of quietly trying to stab him in the back. But he continued to hide his feelings. "That's as may be, McCracken, but he's not cockeyed. These aren't the mountains he described. Still, we may as well approach them. We may be able to get a good view from the top of the taller one." quarter of an hour's marching took them to the edge of the falling snow. As they walked further, the air became completely clear, and Lamoureux could see the mountains without straining his eyes. There was no doubt about it. They were not the mountains Kalinoff had described. The Mercurian horizon was not so far away as the more familiar horizon of Earth, and it was too a little difficult for Lamoureux to estimate distances. Still, the foothills of the mountains could not be more than twenty miles away. For the past day, little more than the rim of the Sun had been visible above the horizon, and while the peaks were ablaze with scarlet and golden colors, only the higher one was out of the shadow to any considerable extent. The saddlebacked ridge itself was a vague outline of dull black. The snow did not catch up with them until four or five hours later, when they stopped to prepare a meal and rest. Then it began to fall gently after they had been in the same place for threequarters of an hour. By now, Lamoureux was sure that it was the Mercurians who were to blame. He still wondered how they did it. The one they had come across had remained with them, and Lamoureux found it harder than ever to regard the creature as intelligent. All the thing had done was walk and play chess. Lamoureux had a low opinion of chess players, even when they were fairly human. He had an even lower opinion of trained animals. This Mercurian fell, in his estimation, somewhere between. They were no more than a mile or two from the foothills of the larger mountain by now, and the saddlebacked ridge loomed several hundred feet into the air. Unfortunately, the snow was between it and them, and prevented them from gaining too clear a view. Lamoureux wondered if the snow would keep up even at the top of the mountain, and damned McCracken again for shooting that Mercirian. And then he discovered that McCracken's feats of arms were not yet ended. McCracken was at that very moment aiming at some target that Lamoureux could not see. Lamoureux sprang to his feet. "Don't shoot, you fool!" He was a little too late. The noise of the explosion rang out. McCracken said, "Sorry, sir. I didn't hear you until my finger had already squeezed the trigger. But I wasn't trying to hit anything that was alive. There was something that looked like a rock on that ridge -- " The words died away in his throat. Lamoureux lifted his eyes and saw something hovering in front of them, high in the air. It had eyes and a mouth and, from these features, he knew that it was a huge head, as large as a fair-sized house. There was a long, interminable stretch of neck behind it, and somewhere in the rear he felt sure was a monstrous body. But he wasted no time searching for that. The eyes were staring at the men unblinkingly. These eyes alone were bigger than the men were. Then the neck stretched out and the head came poking down. It had been years since he had done much physical exercise, but he made up for them now. Then, too, as the captain of the expedition, he felt that the men might expect a certain amount of leadership from him; it was with some dismay that he discovered that all the rest were ahead of him. Picking up speed, he passed Sprott, then Marsden, and then Gronski. Ahead of him someone stumbled, and Lamoureux wasted a precious second helping the man to his feet. The huge head opened, and a roar that almost knocked out his eardrums vibrated through Lamoureux's body. The ground shook under him. That meant that the whole creature, whatever it was, was coming after them. Gronski and Sprott passed him as if someone had stuck a needle into them, and Lamoureux, sobbing for breath, tripped over a rock and plunged headlong. The ground beside him trembled as if it were being rocked by a series of quakes. A deep shadow fell over him, and Lamoureux tried to dig his prone body into the ground and not breathe. Prom far ahead, a scream of terror split the air. Then the quakes and the shadow had passed, and Lamoureux dared to lift his head. Far ahead, he could make out the gigantic neck stretching into the air, its outline already vague through the falling snow. A few feet away from him lay Gronski, and a little further on McCracken. None of the other men were in sight. The valiant McCracken, his rifle still clutched to him, was aiming at the vanishing figure. Lamoureux said, "Don't bother, McCracken. You've already done enough harm." "I just thought I'd get a shot at him, sir, while he was excited. He wouldn't know where it came from." "He knew the first time. Don't bother, I say. You can't hurt him, and he can do plenty to you." "All right, Captain." Lamoureux brushed some of the snow off him and tried to catch his breath. "McCracken, if you're really anxious to play with your gun, you may fire into the air. Five times." "Yes, sir." McCracken fired, and they waited. Lamoureux said, T hope nobody was hurt. I don't think any of them, if they're alive, are .too far away to hear those shots. We'll wait for them to assemble here and then start out for those mountains again." "Yes. sir. Except, Captain, that it may be a little difficult -- " "What'll be difficult?" "Finding those mountains. They just don't look the same." Lamoureux stared. The mountains stretched into the air exactly the same as before, the same scarlet and gold colors glowing on their peaks, the same shadows on their sides. But the saddlebacked ridge between them -- Lamoureux looked again. The entire ridge was gone. IV snow fell as steadily as ever while Lamoureux waited for the men to assemble. Only two were missing now -- Terrill and Carvalho. McCracken had fired again and again into the air, but these two had not returned. Lamoureux decided finally, "It looks as if they're not coming. Gronski, you take over for Carvalho. You'll stay here in charge of his group while the rest of us climb the mountain." McCracken said, "You want me to come with you, don't you. Captain?" "I certainly do. I'm curious to know what in hell way of ruining this expedition you'll think of next." "Aw, now. Captain, that isn't fair. How was I to know that whole ridge was one big animal? You wouldn't have believed it yourself. Something over five hundred feet high, with a neck even longer. We're not used to them that big on Earth. Here the gravity's less, so it's okay. But even Kalinoff -- " "Don't talk to me about Kalinoff," said Lamoureux fiercely. "He's as bad as you. That screwball!" "We're still trying to find him, aren't we. Captain?" "Sure, we're trying to find him, but how can we expect to do it?" Was it his imagination, or did McCracken seem pleased? Lamoureux didn't care. He Went on, very bitterly, "He starts off by telling us that the Mercurians are intelligent. You saw how intelligent they were. Where's that specimen we had?" "He got lost in the shuffle," reported Gronski. "It's just as well. Kalinoff tells us of a landmark -- two mountains with a saddlebacked ridge between them. The ridge runs aWay, and our landmark isn't a landmark any more. Then there's the weather -- no rain, no hail, no snow. Nothing but pure fresh air and nice clean sunshine." He kicked at a snowdrift. "What's this thing supposed to be, a mirage?" McCracken said, "I know how you feel. Captain. But about this mountain now -- do you really think we ought to climb it?" "Why not?" "You can't see the top from herc'on account of the snow. It's coming down in bigger flakes than ever now. That means you can't sec here from the top. And as the only reason we want to climb it is to take a look around -- " "We'll climb it anyway. Maybe it isn't snowing as hard on the other side." Lamoureux barely keeping a tight enough grip on his feelings to prevent his talking to himself. The mountain was steep, but the gravity here being low, it was easy enough to climb. McCrack en demonstrated how easy it was by running up it full speed. Lamoureux let him go, hoping that he would break his neck, but McCracken's luck was too good. All he did was start a gentle landslide that almost buried everybody else. As they rose, they got more and more of the Sun's rays andtfie temperature went up slightly. The snow turned to rain, drenching them to the skin, and they climbed all the faster, anxious to get the job over with. At the top, the rain had died down to a faint drizzle. Lamoureux, looking off into the distance, could see as through a veil a range of sky-piercing mountains, their peaks gleaming in the Sun, their roots cleft vnth deep shadowed valleys. Between almost every pair of mountains was a saddlebacked ridge. "Landmarks," commented Lamoureux sourly. "To hell with them." "I told you it would be a waste of time. Captain." "Not in the least, McCracken. After all, you might have broken your neck." They started down again, and n a half hour were back at the line where the rain changed to snow. Another hour took them to Gronski again. Lamoureux shook his head. "No sign of Kalinoff." "What do we do now?" "We go back to the ship and carry on from there. I don't know what steps we'll take after that, but at least we'll get back to shelter, out of this snow." "Which way is the ship?" "That," said Lamoureux, "is one question we can find the answer to." He spoke into his radio. "Haskell!" Haskell was alert. "Yes, Captain." "Keep your radio beam going. We're depending on it for direction." "Sure, Captain." Lamoureux snapped off the sending set. "Now let's get moving, before we freeze to death." The return trip was a slow one. Their spirits were all low, even McCracken's. Lamoureux pictured the return to Earth, the eager, and then disappointed, reception, and the wave of ridicule that would follow their account of the difficulties they had encountered. They stopped once to eat. Lamoureux estimated that they had supplies for another two and a half months left in the ship, not counting what would be needed for the return journey. They might as well stay here until those supplies were used up. They might possibly find Kalinoff during those two and a half months, although, with the Twilight Zone of the whole planet to look in, and no decent clues, not to mention the difficulties caused by the snow, the chances were none too bright. Nevertheless, they would have to do their best. The meal came to an end, and they started off again. They had gone only a few hundred yards, when Lamoureux noticed something wrong. "HaskeU!" There was no eply. Haskell's radio beam had bieen shut off. was a little too much. Lamoureux let oose a streak of profanity that had even McCracken staring at him in awe. Then they started out again, trying, through the falling snow, and over the rocky ground, to keep in as straight a line as possible toward the ship. Lamoureux managed to sustain his spirits only by thinking of what he would do to his cook. Two hours later, he had an opportunity to put his plan into practice. For out of the snow there emerged Haskell, and the men who had been left with him at the ship. Haskell started to run toward Lamoureux the moment he caught sight of the other group. "Here we are. Captain! We came as fast as we could!" Lamoureux's eyes were almost as cold as the snow. "How thoughtful of you." "Who else is hurt, Captain?" "Nobody's hurt, but somebody is going to be." Haskell looked surprised. "I don't get it. You told me to come as fast as I could, and you said that eight of the men were badly injured." "# told you?" "Yes, sir. I thought you were hurt yotirself, sir. Your voice sounded hoarse." Lamoureux's jaws were clenched together so tightly in his effort to maintain his self-control that his teeth hurt. He unclenched them. "I don't quite understand you, Haskell. My voice is as melodious as ever. Something else is strange, too. You ask who else is hurt' "Yes, sir. We ran across Terrill a little while ago. He got brushed by the tail of some animal and was walking around in a real daze." "How do you suppose we're walking? At any rate. I'm glad you found him. See any signs of Carvalho?" "No, sir. We left the radio beam on to guide you -- " "What's that? You're sure you left it on?" "Positive, sir." "Well, someone has turned it off! Someone -- Oh, my God!" It was so damn simple, and he had never even thought of it. Carvalho was the man. Carvalho was shrewd and quiet, a man who could keep his intentions to himself and wreck an expedition without so much as being suspected. Subconsciously, Lamoureux hadn't quite believed in McCracken's guilt, despite the seeming evidence against him. McCracken had too genuine a love of horseplay, and of childish showing off. These things were hard to pretend. You didn't put snow down somebody's back when you were plotting to leave him marooned on a deserted planet. And you didn't impress people by making a seventy-five foot broad jump when you could impress them much more effectively by condemning them to slow death. Lamoureux couldn't doubt. Carvalho had turned off the radio beam at the ship. By now the Astrolight was probably somewhere in space, possibly proceeding to some rendezvous with a rival expedition. Carvalho  wouldn't dare appear back on Earth as the lone passenger returning on Lamoureux's ship. But he wouldn't have to. He could set the Astrolight adrift, be "rescued" by the people who had employed him, and come back to tell of the dangers he had braved on Mercury. It all fitted in. Carvalho had been the one who had tried to hamper their work from the moment they had landed. When McCracken had shot that Mercurian -- Lamoureux asked, "What happened then? Try to remember." McCracken scratched his head vigorously. "I think Carvalho saw this Mercurian and started to yell and run. I thought he was scared. That's why I shot." So Carvalho had really been responsible for the shooting. Lamoureux asked, "Why didn't you report that Carvalho started to yell and run?" "Well, Captain, you don't expect me to go around telling you #  things like that about another guy?" The words, "You fool," had been on Lamoureux's lips, but he bit them back. After all, who had been the bigger fool, McCracken or he himself, who had insisted that Carvalho get the radio? There was no doubt about the answer to that one. As for the occasion when the radio had begun to emit its mys terious code signals, the explanation for that was simple enough, too. The people who were in contact with Carvalho had sent their messages, not knowing whether strangers might be listening in, but not caring either. No one could make head or tail of the mysterious sounds but Carvalho. McCracken had, in fact, considered the noises a new strange form of static that had interefered when he tried to talk to Haskell. Lamoureux felt like asking McCracken to kick him in the pants. As that would have been bad for discipline, he substituted an order to get started back toward the ship. There was the faintest of chances that Carvalho had delayed, or had been forced by some accident to delay, his departure back to Earth. It was snowing harder than ever now, and it was difficult for Lamoureux to see more than fifty feet ahead of him. The rim of the Sun was blotted out so thoroughly that it was almost as dark as on a moonless night. Nevertheless he pressed on doggedly. It was not until six hours later, after he and the men had been wandering around aimlessly for a long enough time to have reached the ship and returned, that he admitted to himself that they were lost. V jOT that it mattered a great  deal. Lamoureux realized perfectly well that by this time the AstroUht was on its return journey to Earth. All the same, it was disheartening to know that he was so completely unable to find his way about on this planet. The question now was what to do. They had little enough food, and not too much in the way of other supplies. 'They would have to live off the planet until some kind of rescue expedition had been organized to save them. If Kalinoff had done it, they could, too. Lamoureux's face burned as he pictured himself striding over to Kalinoff, staring at the man solemnly, and uttering those historic words, "#r. Livingston, I presume." That was one scene that would never take place. It was growing colder by the hour. That meant that they would have to move over toward the Hot Side before the Sun sank beneath the horizon altogether, McCracken, the most cheerful of the lot, had a glum face as he asked, "What do we do now, Captain?" "First wc eat, McCracken. Then we ' move toward the Sun. Just one word, McCracken. You like to shoot?" "Yes, sir." "Save your bullets. I have an idea we're going to need them before this little adventure of ours is finished." Then Lamoureux sat down on a snowy rock, 'leaned back, and thought everything over. It was improbable now that any of his kids would ever get to Lunar Tech. Well, that wasn't anything to be sorry about. The life of ease and luxury of the place had ruined more than one promising youngster. His wife would have to get along with a single robot. It would do her good to wait on the family for a change. As for his relatives -- to hell with them. Let them find somebody else to sponge on. He was busy with these cheerful refiections when he heard McCracken shout, "Hey!" A figure loomed out of the snow ahead. The figure paused and stared at Lamoureaux. McCracken yelled, "Hey, Captain!" The figure came forward, bowed. and showed its teeth. "Mr. Stanley, I presume?"  Lamoureux decided that this was the most mortifying moment of his life. He had been sent to save Kalinofi. Instead, Kalinoff had saved him. It was the screwball explorer, of course. Lamoureux recognized him at once. Kalinoff was a shrimp, a fraction of an inch below five feet in height, and he had a face like a monkey's. Having taken a good look at him. Lamoureux felt, "My God, is this what we've been trying to rescue?" Kalinoff was not alone. He was accompanied by a pair of penguin-like Mercurians, who looked just as sly and acted with as little intelligence as the one they had previously encountered. Lamoiireux had no idea how Kalinoff had managed to get along with them. Kalinoff, it seemed, was angry. "Why in hell," he demanded, "didn't you have sense enough to return to the ship?" Lamoureux stared. "You mean the Astrolight is still here?" "Of course it's here. And the radio beam is on." "You're sure -- the beam is on?" "Of all the nitwits to let loose on an unfriendly planet, you're about the worst. I've just told you it's on, haven't I? It's been on for the past two hours." Lamoureux swallowed hard. "And Carvalho?" "There's a man who I assume is Carvalho. He's tied up. I've got a couple of friends watching him to make sure he doesn't get away." "Friends?" "Like these." Kalinoff indicated the Mercurians. "Come on. Id like to get back to Earth. There's a girl I've got to see." "But who -- what happened to Carvalho?" "He seemed anxious to leave, so I pushed my hst down his throat. Incidentally, there was a radio going, with a code message." "Short distance radio?" "Interplanetary. The ship's hull acted as a receiver, naturally. You could get the message anywhere on the planet by arranging a short distance automatic rebroadcast." "So that's what Carvalho did." "If I'm late this time," said Kalinoff worriedly, "she and I up with dates six months in advance, but there's a limit, and I've been late too often. And she's too nice to lose. Get a move on, quick." Lamoureux, in a daze, complied. They were only an hour's journey from the ship, and, under Kalinoff's urging, they made it in forty minutes. Carvalho, looking terrified of the two Mercurians who were standing over him with their teeth showing, yelled, "Help!" "Never mind him," Kalinofi ordered. "Hop into the ship." "But what are we going to do with him?" "Well, what's he been up to?" L amoureux explained briefly, and Kalinoff grunted. "You fellows are a bunch of screwballs, setting out on an expedition like this without proper equipment and proper information about Mercury." At the word "screwballs," Lamoureux winced, but remained silent. Maybe it was deserved. Kalinoff went on, "'As for Carvalho, that's simple. Leave him behind. He intended to maroon you, didn't he? Maroon him instead. But first let him send one interplanetary radio message to his friends." "In code? We won't know what it is!" Kalinoff grinned. "We'll leave his punishment up to him. Suppose he reports you've found me. Then his pals won't come for him. and he's going to stay here indefinitely." "What if he reports you haven't been found?" "Then they come for him, discover he's a liar, and there's hell to pay. Either way, he's in for a lousy time." "They'll murder him." "Oh, no. We'll let them know that we're' reporting the facts of the case to the Interplanetary Commission. They'd never dare commit murder." Lamourcux objected doubtfully, "Wouldn't the Mercurians kill him?" "If he treats them right, they'll treat him right. They're not as intelligent as I thought at first -- maybe you've discovered that -- but they have their points." "They're wonderful chess players." "Fair," said Kalinofif critically. "Only fair. I always beat them, but then, naturally. I'm very good. Maybe that's why they admire me. They have great mathematical abilities, and they can visualize well, but their language is primitive and in some ways they're halfwits. There have been plenty of mathematical prodigies on Earth just like them -- wonders at calculating, and fools at everything else. To hell with them. Let's get started." "Wait a minute, Kalinoff. What about those huge beasts? Won't they be dangerous to Carvalho?" "Oh, them." Kalinoff chuckled. "I certainly gave you some offbeam instructions before that radio of mine went on the blink. I really thought at first that those two mountains I described with the saddlebacked ridge between them would make a good landmark. Two days afterward, I discovered that the ridges were living creatures. The things have a habit of sheltering themselves from the Sun between a pair of mountains. They wrap their necks around their bodies, tuck their heads beside them, and you'd never know they were alive. They don't move for days at a time." "But when they do move -- " "Leave them alone, and they leave you alone." Captain asked, "What about the rain and snow?" "I may as well clear this up once and for all. The rain and snow were my doing. After I had told you to rely on the Mercurians and described the landmark, I discovered that the Mercurians were nitwits and the landmark a false alarm. That meant that, once you landed, you'd never find me except by accident. That put it up to me to find you. "As you may have heard, normally there's no such thing as rain or snow on Mercury. But there is water. And there is a continual process of transfer going on. The water flows through subterranean channels to the Hot Side, evaporates, and is carried over in the air to the Cold Side. There it deposits on the ground eventually as ice, melts, and goes through the whole process again." "Why doesn't it rain?" "Because there's no dust in Mercury's air. The absence of a rapidly alternating day and night means that the air doesn't circulate on the same scale as on Earth. Practically no wind, combined with little erosion, means little dust. The water-laden air cools off and becomes super-saturated at the Twilight Zone. But there are no clouds, and there's no precipitation because the water needs either dust or ions to condense on. In a Wilson cloud chamber, an experimenter furnishes it with ions. Here on Mercury I furnished it with dust. "I gave the Mercurians rifles and explosive bullets, and taught them to shoot into the air. It was quite a job, but they learned. The explosion spreads a cloud of dust, the water condenses, and you have rain or snow, depending on the temperature. I impressed it upon their brains, such as they are, that the presence of human beings calls for a Fourth of July celebration -- shooting into the air. And there you are. I had the occurrence of rain and snow reported to me, moved toward wherever the snow was thickest, and found the ship." "Another thing -- " "I've talked enough. That dame won't wait forever. Which will it be, Carvalho, the Lady or the Tiger?" They listened in curiosity as Carvalho, tight-lipped, tapped out a short message in code. They didn't ask him what it was.  As the Astrolight drove upward away from Mercury, Lamoureux had one last glimpse of the Mercurians shooting into the air. The snow wascoming down in enormous flakes two inches across, and Carvalho, staring after the ship, was shivering and cursing. After they reported the facts to the Interplanetary Commission, a ship would be sent to pick him up -- but it might take some time. "Let me tell you about this dame," said Kalinoff. Lamoureux listened patiently, got out his contract, and waited, with pen ready, for the interplanetary screwball's signature. in our handsome binder. It's sturdy, holds six issues, and costs only # from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. in Oon'f waff fo "Gaf 'am whffa fha'ra hot." By than, ft is too iafe fo gef fiiam of alii T he big bright doors of the office building parted with a pneumatic whoosh and Robie glided onto Times Square. The crowd that had been watching the fifty-foot-tall girl on the clothing billboard get dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself in yard-high script, hurried to look. Robie was still a novelty. Robie was fun. For a little while yet, he could steal the show. But the attention did not make Robie proud. He had no more emotions than the pink plastic giantess, who dressed and undressed endlessly whether there was a crowd or the street was empty, and who never once blinked her blue mechanical eyes. But she merely drew business while Robie went out after it. For Robie was the logical conclusion of the development of vending machines. All the earlier ones had stood in one place, on a floor or hanging on a wall, and blankly delivered merchandise in return for coins, whereas Robie searched for customers. He was the demonstration model of a line of sales robots to be manufactured by Shuler Vending Machines, provided the public invested enough in stocks to give the company capital to go into mass production. The publicity Robie drew stimulated investments handsomely. It was amusing to see the TV and newspaper coverage of Robie selling, but not a fraction as much fun as being approached personally by him. Those who were usually bought anywhere from one to five hundred shares, if they had any money and foresight enough to see that sales robots would eventually be on every street and highway in the country. R obie radared the crowd, found that it surrounded him solidly, and stopped. With a carefully built-in sense of timing, he waited for the tension and expectation to mount before he began talking. 'Say, Ma, he doesn't look like a robot at all," a child said. "He looks like a turtle." Which was not completely inaccurate. The lower part of Robie's body was a metal hemisphere hemmed with sponge rubber and not quite touching the sidewalk. The upper was a metal box with black holes in it. The box could swivel and duck. A chromium-bright hoopskirt with a turret on top. "Reminds me too much of the Little Joe Paratanks," a legless veteran of the Persian War muttered, and rapidly rolled himself away on wheels rather like Robic's. His departxire made it easier for some of those who knew about Robie to open a path in the crowd. Robie headed straight for the gap. The crowd whooped. Robie glided very slowly down the path, deftly jogging aside whenever he got too close to ankles in skylon or sockassins. The rubber buffer on his hoopskirt was merely an added safeguard. The boy who had called Robie a turtle jumped in the middle of the path and stood his ground, grinning foxily. Robie stopped two feet short of him. The turret ducked. The crowd got quiet. "Hello, youngster," Robie said in a voice that was smooth as that of a TV star, and was, in fact, a recording of one. The boy stopped smiling. "Hello," he whisiercd. "How old are you?" Robie asked. "Nine. No, eight." "That's nice," Robie observed. A metal arm shot down from his neck, stopFed just short of the boy. The boy jerked back. m "For you," Robie said. The boy gingerly took the red polly-lop from the neatly fashioned blunt metal claws, and began to unwrap it. "Nothing to say?" asked Robic. "Uh -- thank you." After a suitable pause, Robie continued, "And how about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop to go with your polly-lop?" The boy lifted his eyes, but didn't stop licking the candy. Robie waggled his claws slightly. "Just give me a quarter and within five seconds -- " A little girl wriggled out of the forest of legs. "Give me a polly-lop, too, Robie," she demanded. "Rita, come back here!" a woman in the third rank of the crowd called angrily. Robie scanned the newcomer gravely. His reference silhouettes were not good enough to let him distinguish the sex of children, so he merely repeated, "Hello, youngster." "Rita!" "Give me a polly-lop!" Disregarding both remarks, for a good salesman is single-minded and does not waste bait. Robie said winningly, "I'll bet you read Junior Space Killers. Now I have here -- " "tJh-uh, I'm a girl. He got a polly-lop." A t the word "girl," Robie broke off. Rather ponderously, he said, "##I bet you read Gee-Gee Jones, Space Striper. Now I have here the latest issue in the stationary vending machines. Just give me fifty cents and within five -- " "Please let me through. I'm her mother." A young woman in the front rank drawled over her powdersprayed shoulder, "I'll get her for you," and slithered out on six-inch platform shoes. "Run away, children," she said nonchalantly. Lifting her arms behind her head, she pirouetted slowly before Robie to show how much she did for her bolero halfjacket and her form-fitting slacks that melted into skylon just above the knees. The little girl glared at her. She ended the pirouette in profile. At this age-level, Robie's reference silhouettes permitted him to distinguish sex, though with occasional amusing and embarrassing miscalls. He whistled admiringly. The crowd cheered. Someone remarked critically to a friend, "It would go over better if he was built more like a real robot. You know, like a man." The friend shook his head. "This way it's subtler." No one in the crowd was watching the ncwscript overhead as it scribbled, "Icc Pack for Hot Truce? Vanadin hints Russ may yield on Pakistan." Robie was saying,... in the savage new glamor 'tint we have christened Mars Blood, complete with spray applicator and ht-all fingerstalls that mask each finger completely except for the nail. Just give me five dollars -- uncnimpled bills may be fed into the revolving rollers you see beside my arm -- and within five seconds -- " "No, thanks, Robie," the young woman yawned. "Remember," Robie persisted, "for three more weeks, seductivizing Mars Blood will be unobtainable from any other robot or human vendor." "No, thanks." Robie scanned the crowd resourcefully. "Is there any gentleman here... he began just as a woman elbowed her way through the front rank. "I told you to come back!" she snapped at the little girl. "But I didn't get my pollylop!"... who would care to..." "Rita !" "Robie cheated. Ow!" M eanwhile, the young woman in the half bolero had scanned the nearby gentlemen on her own. Deciding that there was less than a fifty per cent chance of any of them accepting the proposition Robie seemed about to make, she took advantage of the scuffle to slither gracefully back into the ranks. Once again the path was clear before Robie. He paused, however, for a brief recapitulation of the more magical properties of Mars Blood, including a telling phrase about "the passionate claws of a Martian sunrise." But no one bought. It wasn't quite time. Soon enough silver coins would be clinking, bills going through the rollers faster than laundry, and five hundred people struggling for the privilege of having their money taken away from them by America's first mobile sales robot. But there were still some tricks that Robie had to do free, and one certainly should enjoy those before starting the more expensive fun. So Robie moved on until he reached the curb. The variation in level was instantly sensed by his under-scanners. He stopped. His head began to swivel. The crowd watched in eager silence. This was Robie's best trick. Robie's head stopped swiveling. His scanners had found the traffic light. It was green. Robie edged forward. But then the light turned red. Robie stopped again. still on the curb. The crowd softly ahhed its delight. It was wonderful to be alive and watching Robie on such an exciting day. Alive and amused in the fresh, weather-controlled air between the lines of bright skyscrapers with their winking windows and under a sky so blue you could almost call it dark. (But way, way up, where the crowd could not see, the sky was darker still. Purple-dark, with stars showing. And in that purple-dark, a silver-green something, the color of a bud, plunged down at better than three miles a second. The silver-green was a newly developed paint that foiled radar.) Robie was saying, "While we wait for the light, there's time for you youngsters to enjoy a nice refreshing Poppy Pop. Or for you adults -- only those over five feet tall are eligible to buy -- to enjoy an exciting Poppy Pop fizz. Just give me a quarter or -- in the case of adults, one dollar and a quarter; I'm licensed to dispense intoxicating liquors -- and within five seconds..." But that was not cutting it quite fine enough. Just three seconds later, the silver-green bud bloomed above Manhattan into a globular orange flower. The skyscrapers grew brighter and brighter still, the brightness of the inside of the Sun. The windows winked blossoming white fire-flowers. The crowd around Robie bloomed, too. Their clothes puffed into petals of flame. Their heads of hair were torches. orange flower grew, stem and blossom. The blast came. The winking windows shattered tier by tier, became black holes. The walls bent, rocked, cracked. A stony dandruff flaked from their cornices. The flaming flowers on the sidewalk were all leveled at once. Robie was shoved ten feet. His metal hoopskirt dimpled, regained its shape. The blast ended. The orange flower, grown vast, vanished overhead on its huge, magic beanstalk. It grew dark and very still. The cornice-dandruff pattered down. A few small fragments rebounded from the metal hoopskirt. Robie made some small, uncertain movements, as if feeling for broken bones. He was hunting for the traffic light, but it no longer shone either red or green. He slowly scanned a full circle. There was nothing anywhere to interest his reference silhouettes. Yet whenever he tried to move, his under-scanners warned him of low obstructions. It was very puzzling. The silence was disturbed by moans and a crackling sound, as faint at first as the scampering of distant rats. A seared man, his charred clothes fuming where the blast had blown out the fire, rose from the curb. Robie scanned him. ".Good day, sir," Robie said. "Would you care for a smoke? A truly cool smoke? Now I have here a yet-unmarketed brand... But the customer had run away, screaming, and Robie never ran after customers, though he could follow them at a medium brisk roll. He worked his way along the curb where the man had sprawled, carefully keeping his distance from the low obstructions, some of which writhed now and then, forcing him to jog. Shortly he reached a fire hydrant. He scanned it. His electronic vision, though it still worked, had been somewhat blurred by the blast. "Hello, youngster," Robie said. Then, after a long pause, "Cat got your tongue? Well, I have a little present for you. A nice, lovely polly-lop. "Take it, youngster," he said after another pause. "It's for you. Don't be afraid." His attention was distracted by other customers, who began to rise up oddly here and there, twisting forms that confused his reference silhouettes and would not stay to be scanned properly. One cried, "Water," but no quarter clinked in Robie's claws when he caught the word and suggested, "How about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop?" The rat-crackling of the flames had become a jungle muttering. The blind windows began to wink fire again. A little girl marched, stepping neatly over arms and legs she did not look at. A white dress and the once taller bodies around her had shielded her from the brilliance and the blast. Her eyes were fixed on Robie. In them was the same imperious confidence, though none of the delight, with which she had watched him earlier. "Help me, Robie," she said. "I want my mother." "Hello, youngster," Robbie said. "What would you like? Comics? Candy?" "Where is she, Robie? Take me to her." "Balloons? Would you like to watch me blow up a balloon?" The little girl began to cry. Thf sound triggered off another of Robie's novelty circuits, a service feature that had brought in a lot of favorable publicity. "Is something wrong?" he asked. "Are you in trouble? Are you lost?" "Yes, Robie. Take me to my mother." "Stay right here," Robie said reassuringly, "and don't be frightened. I will call a policeman." He whistled shrilly, twice. Time passed. Robie whistled again. The windows flared and roared. The little girl begged, "Take me away, Robie," and jumped onto a little step in his hoopskirt. "Give me a dime," Robie said. The little girl found one in her pocket and put it in his claws. "Your weight," Robie said, "is fifty-four and one-half poiuds." "Have you seen my daughter, have you seen her?" a woman was crying somewhere. "I left her watching that thing while I stepped inside -- Rta.'" "Robie helped me," the little girl began babbling at her. "He knew I was lost. He even called the police, but they didn't come. He weighed me, too. Didn't you, Robie?" But Robie had gene off to peddle Poppy Pop to the members of a rescue squad which had just come around the comer, more robotlike in their asbestos suits than he in his metal skin. up his remarkable successes in his magozine. It's the story of an Interstellar war... but not about who destroys how much with vat weapons and strategy, which is really the dull side of war, but of people whipped about by the unleashed forces. The infurioting thing was that there was no reason for the colonists' revolt against Earth, but the rebels had every reason to conceal thot facti Two powerful novelets support the swift, sleek convoy of stories: situation thot could turn explosive with only the slightest jostling. It's an odd fact that monsters usually seem to be of the opinion that we're the ones who ore monsters. You know, they have a point... it's probably a good idea not to orgue it with theml polite and reosonoble end deadly than any in history, for if Earth was to live as a free world, he had to die. He odmitted he wasn't immortal -- and yet nothing could kill him! Short stories, of course, and our regular features. Speaking of which, have you joined the pleased crowd of readers whose questions have been an# Star Shelf nor. Coward McCann, New York, #. # paes, # T his fascinating, exasperating book should be in the collection of everyone who has more than a passing interest in science fiction, despite the fact that it takes itself and its subject too seriously a good part of the time. It says dogmatically that science fiction is an#hing from today's literature of ideas to -- quite simply -- the literature of tomorrow. There is, of course, a lot that is valuable as information, and nearly as much that is important as evaluation. Sprague de Camp, on imaginative fiction, and Arthur Clarke, on science fiction as preparation for the age of space, both present amusing data on the utopias and pre-Gemsbackian "science" fantasies that so thickly populated the #th and early #th Centuries. Anthony Boucher and Don Fabun give us richly informative discourses on science fiction publishing. and in movies, radio and TV. Fletcher Pratt delivers himself of some occasionally pertinent criticisms of current science fiction trends, fads and failures. John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov and Bretnor himself devote their energies to discussing how significant science fiction has been, is, or may be. It is my feeling that they are all a little too dire. Philip Wylie takes a characteristically negative attitude on science fiction's significance, or its values as social criticism. His diatribe against secrecy in science, however, should be read much more widely than it probably will be. Gerald Heard has a (to me) confusing view of science fiction's inAuences on morals and religion, which he says are slight today, but may be great tomorrow. I hope he is right. The essay I enjoyed most is "Science Fiction and the Main Stream," by poetess Rosalie Moore. Here is the book's most perceptive analysis of science fiction's strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities as a literary form. The author compares the genre with other types of modem fiction, giving a very acute report that makes excellent sense throughout. Incidentally -- where was Gold when the contributors were being selected? He certainly has opinions worth hearing. Panborn. Doubleday  Co., New York, #, # pages, # rewards and tragedies of pioneering on a far planet that sees print in hard covers without prior serialization. Why? It is relatively slow-paced; it pays more attention to character development, sentiment and ideas than it does to plotting. From one point of view, the book is less science fiction than a novel of exploration in the Swiss Family Robinson tradition. Few indeed are the gadgets; missing entirely the derring-do of ordinary space opera. For those who like understated writing, warm characterizations, humanscale happenings (even when they happen to quite believable of moral ideas, this book will have a solid appeal. It is a firstrate first novel by any standard, science fictional or otherwise. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Little, Brown  Co., Boston, #. # pages, # items from our esteemed competitor's pages contains # short stories, ranging from a hilarious bit of spoofery by Jan Struther called "Ugly Sister" and Ralph Robin's farcical yet sharp "Budding Explorer" to Alfred Bcsters scintillating "Hobson's Choice," brutal and bitterly gay, and Manly Wellman's surprisingly beautiful bit of ghostly folklore, "The Desrick on Yandro." The book, indeed, runs a gamut that is a gamut and should be used as an example for critics who abuse the word. In addition to those mentioned above, there's Jack Finney's time fantasy, "The Third Level;" Elizabeth Bowen's piece of fine writing, "The Cheery Soul;" H. B. Fyfe's charmingly horrid "Ransom;" Mildred Clingerman's heartbreaking "Stair Trick;" Kcm Bennett's delightful "Soothsayer;" and several others nearly as good. Enthusiastically recommended. Eric Frank Russell. Bouregy  Curl, Inc., New York, #. # pages, #  HE author of Sinister Barrier and Dreadful Sanctuary has produced a third novel (serialized under the title The Star Watchers) which, like the first two, deals with the idea that Man is in one way or another being managed by extra-solar or extradimensional beings. The sentinels from space in the current tale are delightful people to know, for a change, and they are trying to help mankind, now spread over Venus and Mars as well as Earth, to avoid committing race suicide through war, if possible. It seems that space travel has resulted in innumerable mutations in Man, due to the hard radiations in space. The mutants possess various supernormal powers, from telepathy and teleportation to pyrotics and levitation. The tale tells how a plot to take over the triplanetary civilization is defeated by the sentinel David Raven, with the help of his opposite number on Venus, Charles by name. The story is one of the most inventive of the last year or so. It is rich with experiment in the mental sciences, and strong in its plea for sanity in our own lives: a fable for peace as well as a fine science fantasy. Guest reviewer Isaac Asimov now discusses: H. Menzel. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., #. # pages, # D r. Menzel, Acting Director of the Harvard College Observatory, does not believe in flying saucers -- and proves he's right in authoritative and interesting detail in this book. Flying saucers are atmospheric phenomena resulting from very usual and prosaic laws of refraction and reflection of light by a vantemperatured atmosphere -- not interplanetary adventurers poking about our volcanic mud ball. The book discusses these atmospheric tricks quietly and good naturedly; photographs show various species of flying saucers, from fakes to clouds to variously focused lights. Not a spaceship in the bunch. Dr,. Menzel points out that flying saucers are not only a contempKjrary phenomenon. He traces them back to their equivalents in Biblical times, and reviews the scares they caused in the last decades of the #th Century. They were thought to be airships in those days. Today, people are jittery over the cold war. They have heard a lot about super-weapons. They know now that space travel may really be practical. So they jump to conclusions whenever reports of strange lights or objects are spread, conclusions completely unwarranted by the evidence at hand. We should read this book for positive enjoyment as well as for an Antidote to the deep end off which it is so tempting to go. My own personal use for it will involve braining with its edge the next innocent who says: "But don't all science-fiction writers believe in flying saucers?" E. R. Eddison. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages, # R eprinted for the first time since its original publication in #, this is one of the great fantasy-romanceadventures of all time. It is a modern imaginative Edda, perhaps the most magnificent piece of swashbuckling imagination of this century -- a recreation of the Age of Chivalry in a Never-Never Land called Mercury. As the late James Stephens put it in his introduction to the original edition (here also reprinted) : "Waking or in dream, this author has been in strange regions and has supped at a torrent which only the greatest know of." The result is sheer magic that even tough and materialistic science fiction buffs will love. Milter. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa. #. # pages, # seven short stories and novelets and one heretofore-unpublished short novel, by my opposite number over on Astounding. The time of writing ranges from #, when the author must still have been toddling, through #. The quality ranges from the highly effective, as in "As Never Was" and "Forgotten," (both previously anthologized) and "Glceps," (delightfully ridiculous) to the abysmal, like the title novel, which the author informs me was rejected back in #. Other items included are : "Old Man Mulligan," "Spawn," "In The Good Old Summer Time," and "The Ap-henius Horror," a fine old ghoulish-type thing from a #I Amazing. Crown Publishers, New York, #. # pages, # volume, two of them -- "Recruiting Station" by A. E. van Vogt and "The Scarlet Plague" by Jack London -- being themselves book-length short novels. Practically every author of science fiction note is represented, as well as one or two famed writers who arc not usually thought of as addicted to the genre. Furthermore, just about every type of S-F story is represented. Not the least of the book's virtues is its demonstration of the scope of science fiction, which is as large as thought itself. Although none of the stories has been included in other science fiction anthologies, several have seen hard-cover publication before -- something of a change in Mr. Conklin's anthologizing habits, and not one, we hope, that is establishing a trend in his books. Stories by Ray Bradbury, Lewis Padgett, A. E. van Vogt, Andre Maurois, Sprague de Camp, David Keller, H. P. Lovecraft, and Jack London have appeared elsewhere -- true enough, mainly in books now unavailable. The stories themselves should never be allowed to go out of print. The #th World Science Fiction Convention will be held at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia on September #, #, #, #. You'll meet your fovorite writers, ortists and editors there. Send I for membership to #th World Science Fiction Convention, Box #, Philadelphia #, Penn. You'll get all advance news and Progress Bulletins in return. Beyond has been greeted with enthusiastic support by fiction lovers from coast to coast  lUscrvt my color print and nd Hw # Iuum to me ot oddrou bolow. I onclot #. Foreign -- #. Nome Address City Zona State YoN don't linvo to eat nut tkli enupon -- it's for jrtnr ceavenltnco mt oars. Since evils eaneef out, avoid odd numbers of them... even if you hove to get an odder one! T he September evening was hot and humid, and Helen Raymond, watching her husband pace nervously about the living room, grew tenser by the minute. Robert would walk up to an open window, sniff abstractedly, move to the next window, and repeat the performance. "For goodness' sakes, Robert, what are you snuffling about?" she finally demanded in exasperation. She had been on edge ever since her cousin Dora had arrived that afternoon. Dora had lost another of a long succession of short-lived jobs and, as usual, had descended on them without warning for an indefinite visit. Wasn't it enough to have to bear, that and the heat, too. without Robert's acting up? "Smog's getting worse all the time," Robert complained. Dora lifted her nose to sniff daintily. "It is an odd smog. Now in New York we don't " Her voice trailed off and left the sentence hanging as she drew in another sample of the night air. Helen sniffed, too. "We look like a bunch of rabbits," she thought irritably. But Dora was right. It was an odd smog, sort of sweet and bitter at the same time. Not sulphuric like most of the smog they were used to, or the spoiled-onions-frying-in-rancid-fat smell of oil wells when the wind was off the land. This #   in TM Mo# Mm Mol Mr int Me mW#iIm lyrics d iktfastwiri Sa(. I Tke "CbO! niilethM"  a ! Mrtrcyti  lyviMs the I iMsisspw mi # to I The monpxjM Iristi tehv. I ttet # ) oper sod the CftMtn iU( lA s luH rccwdni. dramotic xcitmnf of history making ovonts -- torn from yosterday' heodinos... 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IM Enlnl iismlsiisn  IN# ol Iht stconS WerM Wsr Wtrpts I'SM tht irtsi spstchts at HM (tnoi Enenfc Usinmsn C IN# Ttw irtil MMisrsisletnsn's mtotwsbit sdfss leunckini IM d(M thsl non tht uor tiiitn a Iht (tetid biMbjN ij D moot Iht CtMftini M I psuwnsit dtfHiAcisiwn tl Iht tn at ticehti A Irpual MitMi a IM ' IrtdrtMA  AHI to nwsti a Q NNt iHhtr tf a MMI #a el tht tsrimi itewdaii at Iht tttrint lieiith tenti Cl tTBl nuMRiw B. BoettmT Eicirsit Iron Iht "fHtsidt Chsts tl f.#.R. MMiBhl d tht "Nt OtiT  I OAcfoet  for --  -- . loeordt., Q SomI C.O.D. I war U lw If net dolisMod, return in #-dovt ter full pt  heto price rofortd. r l odor made her think of rank tropical weeds, a jungle miasma, thougli she had never been near a jungle. about it, though, and then she remembered that her hands had smelled like that the morning after she had weeded the tiny garden alongside their house. The flowerbed had been cluttered with weeds of a kind she had never seen before, horriblelooking things. Could they be the cause of that awful smell? They had sprung up everywhere lately, and, while she had pulled them out of their own garden, they were growing all over, and she couldn't very well weed the whole town, could she? "I think -- wait, I want to get something," she said, and ran outdoors. She came back with a sample of the weed, one that she pulled from the garden of the vacant house next door. The plant was about a foot high, with a straight, stiff stem, of a bright metallic green, with a single row of inchwide rosettes of chartreuse leaves or petals down one side of the stem. There could be no doubt about its being the cause of the unpleasant odor, and Helen held it out at arm's length. "What the heck is that?" Robert asked. "Smell!" she said. "Phew! So that's it. What is it, anyway?" Helen shook her head. "Never saw anything like it until recently. I pulled 'em out of our garden, but they're all over." Helen carried the offending plant to the back door. When she came back, Robert peered at her intently, shut his eyes and shook his head quickly, and then stared at her again. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" she asked, annoyed. "First good look I've had at you this evening. What kind of face powder is that you're using? Don't tell me that peculiar shade is the latest fashion?" Puzzled, Helen put her hand to her face as if she should be able to feel the color. "Mom's green!" chortled eightyear-old Bobby. "You ought to see yourself!" "Green?" Helen asked worriedly. "Green," Robert said. "You feel all right?" "Anemia," Dora declared positively. "You don't eat properly. Not enough vitamins. Now, while I'm here -- " A quick look in the mirror, and Helen told herself that she wasn't really a green green, just sort of greenish, if you looked at her in the right light. By morning, the odd color ought to be all gone. There was no sense in worrying. Anybody could look sort of off-color now and then. Maybe Dora was right -- she was anemic. B ut she was stunned by the first sight of herself in the mirror the next morning. There was no mistaking it this time. She was as green as grass, and Dora, too, was beginning to show signs of becoming that unbecoming color. Reluctantly, Dora conceded that it might not be the diet, after all. She hadn't been there long enough for it to have that much effect. Robert and Bobby were still shockingly normal. "What -- whatever can it be?" Helen asked shakily, holding out her green hands. The only answer was hysterical screaming that sent them all racing to the front door. The Raymonds lived in a typical California court, with four small houses facing four other small houses across a central walk that ran at right angles to the street. On this walk most of the tenants were now gathered, and the Raymonds and Dora joined them. Helen didn't know whether to feel relieved or more dismayed when she saw that all the women and girls were as green as she, and just as terrified. Someone, of course, had called the police, and a prowl car hummed to a stop at the curb. A harrassed, white-faced policeman leaned out of the window. "We're doing all we can," he called. "It's like this all over town. Don't know yet what caused it, but we're investigating." The car sped away. It was soon apparent that only Mimosa Beach was affected. Why, no one could guess. Some said it was all a publicity stunt of some kind, advertising a movie or television show, or a chlorophyll product, perhaps, but they couldn't explain how it worked, or why only women and girls were affected. And how could it possibly help sell anything? Overnight, Mimosa Beach became famous, and infested with reporters and color photographers, all male. There would have been a mass exodus if there had been any place to go. But other communities, fearing that their womenfolk would "catch" the greenness, like measles, refused to let them in. Besides, in Mimosa Beach they had the dubious comfort of all being alike, while elsewhere they would have been freaks. There was so little they could do to make themselves look attractive. The cosmetics they had or that were available were all wrong. But they did the best they could, though there was no hiding that ghastly green complexion. "What a shame your hair isn't red," Dora said one day to Helen. "Amy Olson, now, her hair really goes with green skin." Cocking her head to one side, she studied the younger woman intently. "Your hair -- that mousy brown -- wonder if we couldn't touch it up just a wee bit?" Helen clenched her teeth against the coy, criticizing voice. "I'm not the flamboyant type," she said. Dora was as green as Helen by this time, and it certainly wasn't a bit more becoming to her. She seemed to be enjoying the publicity, though. Besides, it gave her a good excuse for not leaving. If only the greenness had come before Dora -- they might have been spared one calamity! house next to the Raymonds, the last house in the row. Neither the Raymonds nor Dora noticed that they had moved in; they came so quietly. The houses in the court were furnished and they must have paid the rent, obtained the keys, and walked in, all settled as soon as they closed the door behind them. It wasn't until they rang the Raymonds' doorbell in the early evening that anyone in the household was aware of them. "We move next door," one of them said brightly to Helen when she answered the door, "We come see you, get acquainted. We come in?" "Of course," Helen said, and they trooped in. "We're the Raymonds, and this is my cousin. Dora Hastings." The new neighbor who had spoken first pointed to her companions, one by one. "Patricia Pontiac," she said. "Clara Ford. Mary Maroon. Me," poking a thumb at her own midriff, "Jack Jones." "Jack Jones?" Helen repeated. "That's a man's name." "Man?" the girl asked blankly. "Man!" Robert said impatiently. "Like me." The four girls noticed him for the first time, and then they saw Bobby. They stared at the two of them, their mouths slightly open, their eyes wide with horror. They drew closer to each other, as if for protection, and shivered. Robert and Bobby looked at each other in bewildered embarrassment. "My husband and son," Helen said tartly. Did these odd creatures think all males were wolves, including eight-year-old Bobby? "That -- that color!" Mary Maroon quavered. "Not green!" "Only dames are green," Bobby scornfully said. "Imagine!" Dora tittered nervously. "Afraid of Robert and Bobby!" "Won't you sit down?" Helen asked. This nonsense of being scared of her menfolk had gone on long enough. She didn't want them to sit down. She wanted them to go. But she could hardly ask them to do that. Naturally, they sat down. Bobby turned on the television for a space opera, and the four new neighbors watched it avidly. When the spaceship landed on what was supposed to be Venus, they giggled behind their hands and looked at each other sidewise. Hadn't they ever seen a show like that before? What was so unusually funny about this one? When the commercial came on, Robert turned off the sound. Mary Maroon looked at Bobby, and then at Helen, who was sitting with her arm around her son. "You -- baby?" she asked. Helen smiled proudly. "Yes, this is my baby." Bobby squirmed indignantly. Mary Maroon then turned to Robert. "You got baby?" Robert said, "Sure, this is my baby," patting Bobby on the knee. To Helen, he muttered, "What docs she think, anyway?" The four stared at Robert and Bobby and Helen in such obvious confusion that Robert jumped up nervously to turn the sound back home, Bobby was sent off to bed, and Robert, loosening his tie. demanded, "What's the matter with them, anyhow? Do they have to stare at me as if I were a damned biological error? Don't they know what a man is. for heaven's sake?" "Really, Robert," Dora protested. blushing a deeper green. "Well, for gosh sakes -- " "Those names!" Helen said. "Clara Ford, that's not too bad. I'm not so sure about Mary Maroon." Dora nodded. "Mary White. Mary Black. So why not Mary Maroon? But Patricia Pontiac!" Helen threw up her hands. "They must have made that one up. But Jack yones!" "Crazy, if you ask me," Robert said, "pretending they were scared of me and Bobby." "There's a Patricia Beauty Shoppe next to the Pontiac agency," Dora suggested. "Maybe -- " "Funny way to get a name. Where the heck are they from?" Robert wondered. "Must be from right here in town," Helen reminded him. "Otherwise they wouldn't be green." on. "You know, the greeness looks sort of natural on them," Dora said thoughtfully. "Well, think I'll go to bed." After she had gone, Helen said wistfully in a whisper, "If only awful things could sort of counteract each other the way some poisons do." She started making up the davenport bed; Dora had their room. "First Dora's coming, and our turning green, and now those crazy girls right next door. But three poisons -- no, it wouldn't come out even." TT was a day or two later when  Helen found her new neighbors working in the little flowerbed alongside their house. They were busily transplanting weeds of the kind responsible for the unpleasant odor. "For goodness' sake!" Helen exclaimed, disgusted. "What in the world do you want with that stuff? Why, it took the rest of us here in the court days to get it all out and now you want to bring it back. Throw it away!" "Oh, no!" Patricia Pontiac objected, holding a bunch of the weeds against her heart protectingly. "It's faneweedi" "You mean you've seen the stuff before?" Patricia nodded. "We have it all over where we came from. Must have faneweed." "But you couldn't have come from some place else," Helen pointed out. "You wouldn't be green if you did." "All green where we come from," Mary Maroon said. "I don't know where that stuff -- faneweed, you call it?-ame from," Helen said, refusing to pay any attention to their claim that they came from some place else where everyone was green. There just wasn't any such place! "We drop seed other time we come," Patricia said. Then she added indignantly, "You no believe we come from other place?" "What other place?" asked Helen, with weary politeness. "You call it Venus." "That picture the other night," Clara Ford giggled. "Not like Venus at all. So funny!" Helen could stand no more. "So are you!" she said rudely, and went into the house. They were even crazier than she'd thought. Greener, too, when you saw them in broad daylight. Did the greenness affect the mind, and the greener you got, the zanier you became? Would she get to be like that? The idea frightened her. "No turn green?" Patricia Pontiac asked Robert plaintively one day, as if she were blaming him for her bewilderment. "No!" he answered shortly. "But I don't blame you for envying us men. It must be tough to be that lousy-looking color." "Green is good color!" Mary Maroon declared stoutly. "You no have baby yourself?" "Of course not!" Patricia turned to Helen. "Then what she for?" "He!" Robert corrected, and then added sarcastically, "Papa works to buy baby shoes. Now, does that answer your question?" Helen sighed. There was just no use trying to explain anything to those four girls. dull monotony of being green was accented now and then by articles and pictures in newspapers and magazines, and by rumors, always proved false, that a remedy had been found, though chemists, biologists and doctors continued hunting for the cause of the catastrophe. Autopsies provided no clue. Women protested that the doctors were looking at them with a wishful drop-dead expression, as if the next autopsy might be the one that would supply the answer. The greenness was still confined to Mimosa Beach. Other communities kept up their quarantine. The four girls next door to the Raymonds were as zany as ever, and Dora Hastings stayed on, of necessity. And then the monotony was broken by greater calamities. First, there was the matter of Patricia Pontiac's approaching motherhood. While this, of course, made no difference as far as the town was concerned, Dora was greatly perturbed, and, ever being one to insist on others keeping within the limits of her own narrow paths, she took the girl to task. "Patricia," she insisted sternly, "there simply must be a man to blame for your condition! You must marry him. Think of the baby! You want him to be fatherless?" "Fatherless? Him?" Patricia repeated, frowning in perplexity. "What you talking about? My little baby girl all mine. This man business I don't understand." "Nonsense! You're just trying to pretend innocence." "Oh, give it up, Dora," Helen urged wearily. "She doesn't know what you're talking about." Dora raised skeptical eyebrows. "In her condition?" After that, Dora went around with a great air of virtue condescending to help the wayward. It must be a burden, Helen felt, to have to feel superior because of other people's faults. Such a negative sort of superiority. Dora had plenty of chance to feel superior. Other unmarried girls and women besides Patricia became pregnant and, like Patricia, they insisted no man was responsible. But they were not complacent about it the way Patricia was; to them it was an indignity they did not deserve. "What's this town coming to, anyway?" Dora demanded. "Parthenogenetic births, maybe?" Helen ventured. "No one would have believed that we'd turn green, but we did. Honestly, Dora, I'm getting so I'd believe almost anything in this nightmare existence of ours, even that you were about to have a baby!" "That," Dora rejoined acidly, "is not at all likely. But arc you trying to imply that our turning green could have something to do with these shameful births?" "I didn't say that, but you could be right." "Hmmph!" Dora snorted. "A lot of nonsense!" The four girls were in the Raymonds' living room one afternoon, a week later, talking with Helen, when Dora, who had been feeling ill and had gone to the doctor's, walked in. She glared at the four girls. 'Tm going to have a baby," she accused them. Helen drew her breath in sharply. "Oh, no! Not you, too!" "Of course," Clara Ford said complacently. "Every one have babies. Except Robert and Bobby and the ones like them. Jack and Mary and I have ours before we leave Venus. Have only one each, of course." "But why am I like this? How can I have a baby this way?" Dora's voice was shrill with anger and panic. "How else?" Jack asked calmly. A little chill of horror raced down Helen's spine. Could these odd girls really be telling the truth? Were they from Venus, as they insisted? She could just imagine them coming to Earth -- on a Flying Saucer, maybe -- listening to the radio to learn the language. Spying on us, but not learning as much as they thought they did. She choked off a giggle, an incipient hysteria, as another thought struck her. "Will  have one of those -- those -- ?" "You already have baby," Patricia said. "Can't see how you have baby before we come with faneweed to make you green." Helen and Dora stared at her. "You mean," Helen finally was able to ask, "that that weed caused all this? That little weed?" "But that is what we tell you all along, only you always walk away angry." A LL those scientists working so hard, Helen realized bitterly, and all the time what they were looking for was literally under their feet! How could anyone have thought that the faneweed was responsible for anything but the bad smell they had finally become accustomed to? "Why didn't I listen to these girls, pay more attention to what they said?" Helen asked herself. She might have been able to prevent a lot of things that had happened. She got up from her chair and walked nervously about. Well, she couldn't change the past, but she coujd stop further evil from the faneweed. 'Til bet they don't have men on Venus," she said to Dora, "judging from the way they act. Then they'd have to have parthenogenetic births." She turned to Patricia. "Why did you come to Earth? And whv iust to Mimosa Beach?" "We try little place, what you call sample, before we change whole world," Patricia explained. And then she added sadly, "So many of our babies die. Not enough people left on Venus. We think maybe you like to come to Venus with us, so we make you as us." "That was very, very wicked of you!" Dora said severely. The four Venusians shrugged resignedly. "Might as well go home," Mary Maroon said. "They don't like it our way." "And leave me like this?" Dora demanded shrilly. "Get rid of faneweed, be as before," Patricia assured her. "With a baby I'll have trouble accounting for," Dora said bitterly "Oh, no, you don't. You stay right here. And, Helen, don't you tell anybody that it' the faneweed. Then people from other places won't know about my baby, and it won't matter here as long as things are the way they are." "You come with us," Clara suggested wheedlingly. "You'll like Venus.' Venus so pretty! No work, all happiness!" "No work? No wonder the babies die!" Dora exclaimed. Helen could see the yeast of reform beginning to work in Dora. The four Venusians looked puzzled. "They do that all the time," Helen thought irritably. Aloud, she said, "Dora, of course I have to tell about the faneweed. There are others involved, you know." "I don't suppose," Dora interrupted, "that you girls know anything about diet. Those babies could probably be saved with a little intelligence and some hard work."  left shortly thereafter for their home, they took along Dora Hastings, who had great plans for their planet. With the faneweed on Earth destroyed, the women and girls of Mimosa Beach returned to their original color. Even the parthenogenetic baby girls bom as a result of the unfortunate experi m?nt of the Venusians were white. "Well, the bad things went in pairs, after all," Helen said to Robert when everything was normal again. "The faneweed was the fourth evil, though we didn't know it. And when we got rid of the faneweed, the greenness left. The Venusians went away and -- and I do hope Dora's all right!" "She finally got what should be a lifetime job," Robert answered. He crossed his fingers and, looking out of a western window at Venus, bright against the darkening sky, added, "At least, Venus is farther away than New York. That ought to help." ccriptioi) fcnc to a new addresi. notify Why so long? Because... Mastet and secondary lists have to be corrected. A new addressograph plate haa to be cut. The plate nai to be put io its proper alphabMical place in the addressograph machine. Other people are moving, too, and their changes of address have to be processed. Four weeks is none too long, but we can handle it. As soon as rau know where mu're moving to, please send the old as well as the new address motediatelv to . #I Hudson Street New York # N. Y. Current New Boaks: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction. as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, Naw York Open Monday Thru Saturdayi ;#S A.M. to :# P.M. favorite authors of Science-Fictioa, Fantasy and Weird adventures as near as your mailbox! # pages, complete descriptions, fully illustrated -- and it doesn't cost you a cent I Send your name and address -- you'll get your copy by return mail... and we'll continue to ke you potted on new titles as we're doing for thousands of others. Bargain buys galore! Write today! I # . San Fernando St.  Dept. G-#  San Jose #, California #S In tho norfhland, deep, and in a ireat cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior seeps. or this is the resting time, the time of peace, end so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore im need, and out oi the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will Come. -- Scandinavian legend T hroughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north ; in the nnorning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement. There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them. After a while a rather tall, fraillooking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness. "Well, I never," a nice lady said. "What's he just standing there for?" another lady said. And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers. The lone man kept standing in the freesing wind. a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him. The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes. "Captain Dylan, sir." His voice was low and did not carry. "I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?" Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. "Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?" The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan. "C'n I go now, Jim?" Dylan turned and nodded. "Be back for you tonight," the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled "Catch" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it imconcemedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift. "Was he drunk? Rossel began angrily. "Was that a bottle of liquor?' The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. "You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time." He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold. After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again. rjiHE first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year # -- the exact date remains unknown -- an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army. When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something. For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V foo, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut. In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut. The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back. In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had. This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip. A N obscenely cheerful expression u(xn his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage. Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee ; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities. This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly. By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly ; "Lupus, Lupus -- doesn't that mean wolves or something?" Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it. But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance. "Sec here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand... It wcnfon and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, "soldier boy." The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was. "There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were bom. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is." that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move. "We'd better get going," he finally said, and there was quiet. "Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructec to have you gone by then." For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action. Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine. Dylan had been called up out of a bar -- he and Bossio -- and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time. He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip. Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all. Once he had even studied military tactics. He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died -- of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet -- and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And... now he was a captain. He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging  at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands. Although he had been, in his cynical way, cxpecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut. by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that. When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire. I "Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?" Dylan looked at him vaguely. "She sleeps two and won't take off with morc'n ten. Why?" His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack. "We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought... Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. "You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?" "Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck -- she's all we could afford." Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. "It 'pears that somebody's gonna And out first hand what them aliens look like." It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. "All right," he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, "we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask." The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people. "Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?" Dylan shook his head. "The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays." Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, "We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave Anybody." It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened. Dylan showed him the two clean ends. "Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice." "The damn fool!" Rossel exploded. "Who?". "Why, one of... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never... "You think one of your people did it?" Rossel stared at him. "Isn't that obvious?" "Why?" "Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids... T was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily. "Maybe an animal?" Dylan shook his head. "No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too -- newly cut." The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white. "So something," said Dylan, "knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb, was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again." "Listen," said Rossel, "I'd better go ask." He started away but Dylan caught his arm. "Tell them to arm," he said, "and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire." Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands. He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire. All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us? No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know. Were they small? Little animals? Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it. He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel. He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had -- he never had fired a gun. HE snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow. By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk -- maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting... A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him. He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship end that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him. Rosl was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man -- who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope. "Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that." Dylan shrugged. "Don't count on it." "But they have a contract!" The soldier grinned. The big man. Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said: "Who cut that wire, Cap?" at him. "As far as I can figure, an alien cut it." Rush shook his head. "No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago." He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. "Uh-uh. One of us did it." The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet. "Telepathy?" asked Dylan. "Might be." "Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?" Rush calmly -- at least outwardly calmly -- lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before. "Don't know," he said gruffly. "But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor." He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending. Then Rossel jumped. "My God!" Dylan moved to quiet him. "Look, is thre any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?" After a pause, Rush answered. "Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky." He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. "I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries." Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three. When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, "Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up." Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow. "You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship." The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. "Nice day for huntin'," he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints. rpHE Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small viewscreen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed. He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave. That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But ffexibility, he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption, and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably lgun. The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold. Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.  Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan. Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio. Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and. if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead -- the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-cared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust. He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore. Bossio -- a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges -- Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help. UT in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people. But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without. their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio. After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone. They were thinking of him now. he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anjing to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship. It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up. In the end, the ship took fortysix people. Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexFected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went .slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell -- she couldnt get off the ground. R ush was sitting hunched over in the snow, his rifle across his knees. He was coated a thick white and if he hadn't spoken Dylan would have stumbled over him. Dylan took out his pistol and sat down. "What happened?" Rush asked. "Lining burned out. She's being repaired." "Coincidence?" Dylan shook his head. "How long'll it take to fix?" "Four -- five hours." "It'll be night by then." Rush paused. "I wonder." "Seems like they want to wait 'til dark." "That's what I was figurin'. Could be they ain't got much of a force." Dylan shrugged. "Also could mean they see better at night. Also could mean they move slow. Also could mean they want the least number of casualties." Rush was quiet and the snow fell softly on his face, on his eyebrows, where it had begun to gather. At length he said, "You got any idea how they got to the ship?" Dylan shook his head again. "Nobody saw anything -- but they were all pretty busy. Your theory about it maybe being one of us is beginning to look pretty good." The colonist took off his gloves, lit a cigarette. The flame was strong and piercing and Dylan moved to check him, but stopped. It didn't make much difference. The aliens knew where they were. And this is right where we're gonna be, he thought. "You know," he said suddenly, speaking mostly to himself, "I been in the army thirty years, and this is the first time I was ever in a hght. Once in a while we used to chase smugglers -- never caught any, their ships were new -- used to cut out after unlicensed ships, used to do all kinds of piddling things like that. But I never shot at anybody." Rush was looking off into the woods. "Maybe the mail ship will come in." Dylan nodded. "They got a franchise, dammit. They got to deliver as long as they's a colony here." When Dylan didn't answer, he said almost appealingly: "Some of those guys would walk barefoot through hell for a buck." "Maybe," Dylan said. After all, why not let him hope? There were four long hours left.  ' into himself, curiously, because he himself was utterly without hope and yet he was no longer really afraid. It was a surprising thing when you looked at it coldly, and he guessed that, after all, it was because of the thirty years. A part of him had waited for this. Some crazy part of him was ready -- even after all this time -- even excited about being in a fight. Well, what the hell, he marveled. And then he realized that the rest of him was awakening too, and he saw that this job was really his... that he had always been, in truth, a soldier. Dylan sat, finding himself, in the snow. Once long ago he had read about some fool who didn't want to die in bed, old and feeble. This character wanted to reach the height of his powers and then explode in a grand way -- "in Technicolor," the man had said. Explode in Technicolor. It was meant to be funny, of course, but he had always remembered it, and he realized now that that was a small part of what he was feeling. The rest of it was that he was a soldier. Barbarian, said a small. voice, primitive. But he couldn't listen. "Say, Cap," Rush was saying, "it's getting a mite chilly. I understand you got a bottle." "Sure," he said cheerfully, "near forgot it." He pulled it out and gave it to Rush. The colonist broke the seal and drank, saying to Dylan half-seriously, halfhumorously: "One for the road." Beneath them the planet revolved and the night came on. They waited, speaking briefly, while the unseen sun went down. And faintly, dimly through the snow, they heard at last the muffled beating of a ship. It passed overhead and they were sighting their guns before they recognized it. It was the mailship. They listened while she settled in a field by the camp, and Rush was pounding Dylan's arm. "She will take us all," Rush was shouting, "she'll take us all," and Dylan too was grinning, and then he saw a thing. coated and almost invisible, the thing had come out of the woods and was moving toward them, bobbing and shuffling in the silent snow. Dylan fired instinctively, because the thing had four arms and was coming right at him. He fired again. This time he hit it and the thing fell, but almost immediately it was up and lurching rapidly back into the trees. It was gone before Dylan could fire again. They both lay flat in the snow, half-buried. From the camp there were now no sounds at all. For the first time today Dylan could hear the snow fall. "Did you get a good look?" Rush grunted, relaxing. "Should've saved your fire, son. Looked like one o' them monkeys." But there was something wrong. There was something that Dylan had heard in the quickness of the moment which he could not remember but which was very wrong. "Listen," he said, suddenly placing it. "Dammit, that was no monkey." "Easy -- " "I hit it. I hit it cold. It made a noise" Rush was staring at him. "Didn't you hear?" Dylan cried. "No. Your gun was by my ear." And then Dylan was up and running, hunched over, across the snow to where the thing had fallen. He had seen a piece of it break off when the bolt struck, and now in the snow he picked up a paw and brought it back to Rush. He saw right away there was no blood. The skin was real and furry all right but there was no blood. Because the bone was steel and the muscles were springs and the thing had been a robot. Alien rose up from his cot, whistling with annoyance. When that ship had come in, his attention had been distracted from one of the robots, and of course the miserable thing had gone blundering right out into the humans. He thought for a while that the humans would overlook it -- the seeing was poor and they undoubtedly would still think of it as animal, even with its firing ports open -- but then he checked the robot and saw that a piece was missing and knew that the humans had found it. Well, he thought unhappily, flowing into his suit, no chance now to disable that other ship. The humans would never let another animal near. And therefore -- for he was, above all, a flexible being -- he would proceed to another plan. The settlement would have to be detonated. And for that he would have to leave his own shelter and go out in that miserable cold and lie down in one of his bunkers which was much farther away. No need to risk blowing himself up with his own bombs, but still, that awful cold. He dismissed his regrets and buckled his suit into place. It carried him up the stairs and bore him out into the snow. After one whiff of the cold, he snapped his viewplate shut and immediately, as he had expected, it began to film with snow. Well, no matter, he would guide the unit by coordinates and it would find the bunker itself. No need for caution now. The plan was nearly ended. In spite of his recent setback, the Alien lay back and allowed himself the satisfaction of a full tremble. The plan had worked very nearly to perfection, as of course it should, and he delighted in the contemplation of it.  detected, in the region of Bootes, much thought had gone into the proper method of learning their technology without being discovered themselves. There was little purpose in destroying the humans without first learning from them. Life was really a remarkable thing -- one never knew what critical secrets a starbome race possessed. Hence the robots. And it was an extraordinary plan, an elegant plan. The Alien trembled again. The humans were moving outward toward the Rim, their base was apparently somewhere beyond Centaurus. Therefore, a ring of defense was thrown up on most of the habitable worlds toward which the humans were coming -- oh, a delightful plan -- and the humans came down one by one and never realized that there was any defense at all. With a cleverness which was almost excruciating, the Aliens had carefully selected a number of animals native to each world, and then constructed robot duplicates. So simple then to place the robots down on a world with a single Director, then wait ,... for the humans to inhabit. Naturally the humans screened all the animals and scouted a planet pretty thoroughly before they set up a colony. Naturally their snares and their hunters caught no robots, and never found the deep-buried Alien Director. Then the humans relaxed and began to make homes, never realizing that in among the animals which gamboled playfully in the trees there was one which did not gambol, but watched. Never once noticing the monkey-like animals or the small thing like a rabbit which was a camera eye, or the thing like a rat which took chemical samples, or the thing like a lizard which cut wires. The Alien rumbled on through the snow, trembling so much now with ecstasy and anticipation that the suit which bore him almost lost its balance. He very nearly fell over before he stopped trembling, and then he contained himself. In a little while, a very little while, there would be time enough for trembling. the sun went out," Rush said, "and we never would've known." "I wonder how much they've found out," Dylan said. Rush was holding the paw. "Pretty near everything, I guess. This stuff don't stop at monkeys. Could be any size, any kind... look, let's get down into camp and tell 'em." Dylan rose sIowlyto a kneeling position, peering dazedly out into the far white trees. His mind was turning over and over, around and around, like a roulette wheel. But, at the center of his mind, there was one thought, and it was rising up slowly now, through the waste and waiting of the years. He felt a vague surprise. "Gettin' kind of dark," he said. Rush swore. "Let's go. Let's get out of here." He tugged once at Dylan's arm and started off on his knees. Dylan said: "Wait." Rush stopped. Through the snow he tried to see Dylan's eyes. The soldier was still looking into the woods. Dylan's voice was halting and almost inaudible. "They know everything about us. We don't know anything about them. They're probably sittin' out there right now, a swarm of 'em there behind those trees, waitin' for it to get real nice and dark." He paused. "If I could get just one." It was totally unexpected, to Dylan as well as Rush. The time for this sort of thing was past, the age was done, and for a long while neither of them fully understood. "C'mon," Rush said with exasperation. Dylan shook his head, marveling at himself. "I'll be with you in a little while." Rush came near and looked questioningly into his face. "Listen," Dylan said hurriedly, "we only need one. If we could just get one back to a lab we'd at least have some clue to what they are. This way we don't know anything. We can't just cut and run." He struggled with the unfamiliar, time-lost words. "We got to make a stand." TE turned from Rush and lay forward on his belly in the snow. He could feel his heart beating against the soft white cushion beneath him. There was no time to look at this calmly and he was glad of that. He spent some time being very much afraid of the unknown things beyond the trees, but even then he realized that this was the one thing in his life he had to do. It is not a matter of dying, he thought, but of doin#' Sooner or later a man must do a thing which justifies his life, or the life is not worth living. The long cold line of his existence had reached this point, here and now in the snow at this moment. He would go on from here as a man... or not at all. Rush had sat down beside him, beginning to understand, watching without words. He was an old man. Like all arthmen, he had never fought with his bands. He had not fought the land, or the tides, or the weather, or any which Man had grown up fighting, and he was beginning to realize that somewhere along the line he had been betrayed. Now, with a dead paw of the enemy in his hand, he did not feel like a man. And he was ready to fight now, but it was much too late and he saw with a vast leaden shame that he did not know how, could not even begin. "Can I help?" he said. Dylan shook his head. "Go back and let them know about the robots, and, if the ship is ready to leave before I get back, well -- then good luck." He started to slither forward on his belly but Rush reached out and grabbed him, holding with one hand to peace and gentleness and the soft days which were ending. "Listen," he said, "you don't owe anybody." Dylan stared at him with surprise. "I know," he said, and then he slipped up over the mound before him and headed for the trees. N OW what he needed was luck. Just good, plain old luck. He didn't know where they were or how many there were or what kinds there were, and the chances were good that one of them was watching him right now. Well, then he needed some luck. He inched forward slowly, carefully, watching the oncoming line of trees. The snow was falling on him in big. leafy flakes and that was fine, because the blackness of his suit was much too distinct and the more white he was the better. Even so, it was becoming quite dark by now and he thought he had a chance. He reached the first tree. Silently he slipped off his heavy cap. The visor got in his way and above all he must be able to see. He let the snow thicken on his hair before he raised himself on his elbows and looked outward. There was nothing but the snow and the dead quiet and the stark white boles of the trees. He slid past the first trunk to the next, moving forward on his elbows with his pistol in his right hand. His elbow struck a rock and it hurt and his face was freezing. Once he rubbed snow from his eyebrows. Then he came through the trees and lay down before a slight rise, thinking. Better to go around than over. But if anything is watching, it is most likely watching from above. Therefore, go around and come back up from behind. Yes. His nose had begun to run. With great care he crawled among some large rocks, hoping against hope that he would not sneeze. Why had nothing seen him? Was something following him now? He turned to look behind him but it was darker now and becoming difficult to see. But he would have to look behind him more often. He was moving down a gorge. There were large trees above him and he needed their shelter, but he could not risk slipping down the sides of the gorge. And far off, weakly, out of the gray cold ahead, he heard a noise. He lay face dowi in the snow, listening. With a slow, thick shuffle, a thing was moving through the trees before him. In a moment he saw that it was not coming toward him. He lifted his head but saw nothing. Much more slowly now, he crawled again. The thing was moving down the left side of the gorge ahead, coming away from the rise he had circled. It was moving without caution and he worried that if he did not hurry, he would lose it. But for the life of him he couldn't stand up. THE soldier went forward on  his hands and knees. When his clothes hung down, the freezing cold entered his throat and shocked his body, which was sweating. He shifted his gun to his gloved hand and blew on the bare fingers of his right, still crawling. When he reached the other end of the gorge, he stood upright against a rock wall and looked in the direction of the shuffling thing. He saw it just as it turned. It was a great black lump on a platform. The platform had legs and the thing was plodding methodically upon a path which would bring it past him. It had come down from the rise and was rounding the gorge when Dylan saw it. It did not see him. If he had not ducked quickly and brought up his gun, the monkey would not have seen him either, but there was no time for regret. The monkey was several yards to the right of the lump on the platform when he heard it start running, and he had to look up this time and saw it leaping toward him over the snow. All right, he said to himself. His first shot took the monkey in the head, where the eyes were. As the thing crashed over, there was a hiss and a stench, and fiame seared into his shoulder and the side of his face. He lurched to the side, trying to see, his gun at arm's-length as the lump on the platform spun toward him. He fired four times. Three bolts went home in the lump, the fourth tore a leg off the platform and the whole thing fell over. Dylan crawled painfully behind a rock, his left arm useless. The silence had come back again and he waited, but neither of the alien things moved. Nothing else moved in the woods around him. He turned his face up to the falling snow and let it come soothingly upon the awful wound in his side. After a while he looked out at the monkey. It had risen to a sitting position but was frozen in the motion of rising. It had ceased to function when he hit the lump. Out of the numbness and the pain, he felt a great glad ness rising. The guide. He had killed the guide. H e would not be cautious any more. Maybe some of the other robots were self-directing and dangerous, but they could be handled. He went to tnc lump, stared at it without feeling. A black doughy bulge was swelling out through one of the holes. It was too big to carry, but he would have to take something back. He went over and took the monkey by a stiff jutting arm and began dragging it back toward the village. Now he began to stumble. It was dark and he was very tired. But the steel he had been forging in his breast was complete, and the days which were coming would be days full of living. He would walk with big shoulders and he would not bother to question, because Man was not bom to live out his days at home, by the fire. It was a very big thing that Dylan had learned and he could not express it, but he knew it all the same, knew it beyond undetstanding. And so he went home to his people. One by one, increasing, in the wee black corner of space which Man had taken for his own, other men were learning. And the snow fell and the planets whirled, and, when it was spring where Dylan had fought, men were already leaping back out to the stars. What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to self' advancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and suc' cessful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accuraulat' ed through the ages, is never lost...At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than #lOOth of I  of the earth's people were thought capable of receiv ing basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot he entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weak nesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All #xed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in Ufe. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Andent and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis,' abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request, It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe V.N.X. San Jose California r "I.C.S. made the impossible-easy!" J You've often heard Arthur Godfrey, famed 'Huck Finn of Radio," on his coast-to-coast "Talent renown on television. But this is the first time you've heard the star on the subject of I.C.S.:  had to gait high tehool before the end of my tecond year. Later in life, at the U. S. Naval Materiel School at Bellevue, D. C., I had to matter a working knowledge of math, alt the way from timple decimal and fraction through trigonometry, in the first six week or be dropped from the course. So I took an I.C.S, Course and finished at the head of the elas! I.C.S. made the impossible -- easy!" As usual, the former Navy radio operator and present Commander in the U. S, Naval Reserve knows what he's talking about. As an I. C. S. graduate, Mr. Godfrey Is In the best of all positions to teH you about the educational system that's served so long as talent scout for American Industry. Study his statement. Then mark your interest on the coupon and mall it today for full information on what I. C. S. can do for you! AUGUST # GALAXY Science Fiction gLXy aus ;i, t # Beyond has been greeted with enthusiastic support by fiction lovers from coast to coast  Reserve my color print and send the # issues to me at address below. I enclose #. Foreign -- #. Name... Address City Zone State You don't have to cut out this coupon -- it's tor your convenience not ours. Galaxy fay J. T. M'lniosh by Robert Sheckley by Raymond Z. Gatin by Betsy Curfis fay Theodore R. Cogsw ell by Willy Ley by H. L. Gold #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y#c per copy. Subscriptions; (# copies)  #, # per year in the United State. Canada. Mexico. South and Central America and TJ.S-Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as SecOnd-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited, material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. "hN the wall of a tavern in mid town New York is a sign that advises customers: "In Case of Atomic Raid, Stand Near the Cuspidor -- Nobody Has Hit It Yet!" It's meant as a sarcastic gag, of course, but in it is the sort of cockeyed logic to be found in cloud chambers and history books. It's perfectly possible that somebody, beerily obeying the wry advice, may save his life while everybody around him is fried with mushroom explosions. The number of disasters that humanity and individuals have stumbled into through blind, freak accident is appalling. Many of them are among the most important entries in the history of our race. But... how many disasters have humanity and individuals avoided through other blind, freak accidents? The wars that might have happened and didn't; the inventions, like Hero's steam reaction engine, made prematurely, that could have wrecked civilizations unready for them, but, by pure great luck, were unrecognized for what they were; the missed trains and planes that crashed; the potential Napoleons thwarted because they came onstage at the wrong moment... It's an endless list and one that fortunately can never be verified. Neither, of course, can the happenstances that cost us discoveries, masterpieces, the births or the lives of geniuses and good ordinary people -- and eras of peace where there was none, but might have been. During the early days of World War II, the government had to prohibit the sale of steel-clad Bibles, which, it was claimed, would turn aside bullets and fragments of shell. This hopeful business got its impetus from actual instances of soldiers being saved by plain clothbound Bibles carried in their pockets. Those were real accidents, and they worked. But the contrived ones didn't. They turned nonlethal bullets into dumdums -- which is why the sale had to be stopped. I don't suggest that we rely on chance to the extent of providing the population with unhittable cuspidors instead of atomic shelters, or soldiers with clothbound Bibles solely to replace the very effective body armor developed for the Korean war, or that everything possible should not be done to avert fission warfare. But neither should the role of the unexpected and unpredictable bit of freak luck be disregarded -- especially by science fiction writers. One dramatic example is the startling effect of Stalin's death. I'd like to do an editorial soon on the influence erf random factors on both events and individuals. If you have something to contribute to the relatively meager supply of data I have on hand, I'd be happy to see it. A T the moment, though, I'm bemused by a book called Maps and Map-Makers by R. V. Tooley (Crown Publishers), partly because it's a lavishly lovely array of colorful ancient maps, but mostly because it details a talent that will have to be applied to other planets, when we reach them. Studying these old maps, I'm struck more by their approximations to accuracy than what others might consider their quaint notions of geography. There's an astonishing ability shown here, the ability to convert land and sea masses into bird'seye views -- wjjh benefit of only the crudest instruments and vessels. It's the ability to visualize as if from the air or even space. Since I don't have that talent for abstraction, it amazes me as much as levitation might. And yet, as Tooley remarks, "mapmaking is probably the oldest of the graphic arts, for it is common to all primitive peoples. For example, the Eskimos have constructed maps of their own coasts but little inferior to Admiralty charts. Marshall islanders preserve a knowledge of their own localities by a sequence of palm leaves and sea shells; a native of Tahiti drew a map of an area nearly # miles in length for Captain Cook... "Cortes traveled # miles through Central America guided only by a calico map provided by a local cacique," There are strange national variations in the making of maps, and even more so from period to period, that one doesn't usually associate with anything so factual. Italian cartography was severe; French, light and almost witty; Dutch, meticulous and comfortable; and the bounciness of the Elizabethan era is a remarkable contrast to the solidity of prosperous Victorianism. Of course, when we reach new planets, we'll have an advantage that the ancients lacked -- actually being able to map from outer space all the way down to lowlevel aerial photography and onthe-spot surveying. But even if a world is cut off and reverts to barbarism, the ability to make maps won't be lost. In fact, judging by past history, it probably would be one of the first to be reborn. There was no reason for the revolt of the Murrane colonists against Earth but they had every reason to hide the fact I I I F she had been a man, they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble and killed her. Yet they had quite a few reasons for doing what they did. First, the knowledge she had must be destroyed one way or another -- there was no question of that. They couldn't afford to keep her prisoner anywhere on Murrane, so it was either death or this. Another reason was that they had a new technique and this was a chance to try it out. Another was that they liked the idea of being able to let her go, even return her to her own world, and nevertheless know that she was no danger to them. Another, perhaps, was that should it ever become necessary, they could reveal that they hadn't killed her after all. But behind all this was the fact that they were Murriners. Women, on the frontiers of galactic exploration, were almost sacred. The whole attitude toward women was different from that on an overcrowded world with as many women as men. All this was irrelevant in this particular case; but, being Murriners, they still didn't want to kill a woman. "You can't rhide this," she told them vehemently. "Every human being, on Earth or Murrane or anywhere else, is bound to know the truth anyway in a few years. You should be trying to heal the differences between Earth and Murrane, not carry on this insane war!" "That's a point of view," one of the Murriners admitted. "Another is that we've a much better chance of getting what we want, on our own terms, if Earth doesn't have the faintest idea what our motivation is." "But your own people think -- " "When did any people," the Murriner said gently, "ever know truly, exactly, why they were fighting a war?" stroyed her knowledge. The first thing to go, of course, was that little piece of knowledge -- the true motive for the war. But they didn't stop there. Only one thing, at this point, was missing out of a well-ordered, well-stocked brain, and she would therefore soon get it back by calculation, observation or guess. So the next thing to go was her entire personal experience... All her memories of every event in her life were cleared away like so much rubble. She didn't know who she was or anything she had ever done. But she still knew language and how to read and write and walk and talk and think. She could still be identified in five minutes by these things. So they had to go, too. All that she had learned in years of life and study was removed in a few hours. But there was a difference between what was done to her personal memories and what was done to her general knowledge, including language. The memories were erased completely; the knowledge was merely blotted out. Thus when they came to teach her English again, she learned very quickly but talked quite differently. They taught her to write again, and as if to help them she automatically wrote with her left hand though she had always written with her right. Her writing was completely different, of course. "Where am I? Who am I?" she asked often. At first, when she knew only a few words, they didn't answer. But when they saw she could understand, they told her, to quieten her, that she was Muriel Martin. She repeated the name hesitantly; "Muriel Martin. Mur-iel Mar-tin. Martin. Muriel -- " and then burst out suddenly: "But that's not my name!" "All right," she was told. "Call yourself anything you like. Do you know any other name?" She was silent. She didn't. They hadn't told her any other names. After that, they changed her physically. First they altered her metabolism. It was a tiny change, but her rather dark skin became much lighter, she ate less, she began to like foods she had disliked and lose her taste for others, and she became more deliberate in her movements, far less restless. An inch came off her hip measurement and two inches off her chest, Other changes were made merely for the sake of change. But since the people who worked on her were artists in their way, since they had to change in any case, since they were experimenting -- they improved. They straightened the bones of her legs, corrected her stance and toughened the muscles of her neck and shoulders, so that she stood an inch and a half taller. It was enough. Big changes Were completely unnecessary. THE process, however, wasn't done with kindness, consideration and loving care. Since there had to be pain, they used it for conditioning. To make sure the conditioning was effective, they did nothing about quite a tot of pain that could have been avoided. She was conditioned against taking any interest in the EarthMurrane war, on one side or the other. Most particularly she was conditioned against ever coming back to Murrane. The latter was selective, since they had so much effective pain to play about with -- they could afford to condition her to mild respect for Murrane, and strongly against ever coming back to it. There was enough stimulus available to hammer home even a complicated lesson. After all this, they removed the personal memories she had begun to build up again since the last rape of her mind, and left everything else alone. They tested her, and were pleased. Inside two weeks -- it had had to be inside two weeks -- they had destroyed one woman and put another, quite different, in her place. She would never remember her previous history, for it wasn't there to be remembered. When the job was finished, they drugged her to insensibility and took her to a small ship, a twoman vessel that could not only make the journey from Murrane to the Solar System, but could land almost anywhere in reasonable safety, being so small and so obviously harmless. The pilot of the ship, who would have to fly it without assistance farther than any such ship had ever been flown before, frowned and asked who the girl was to merit such consideration. It would be better for him not to know now, he was told. But he could ask when he came back, if he wished. He never came back. His ship, tiny as it was, was spotted by the Terran fleet out beyond Pluto and destroyed when it tried to run. It was ironic, for he wasn't entering the Solar System, but leaving it, having done his job. He was doing no harm. But in war an enemy is an enemy, whether he's doing any harm or not. II been days when she was near the threshold of awareness, it was on a definite day, almost at a definite second , that she was fully conscious and aware of being conscious. She looked around her, but that was unnecessary. Before full consciousness there had been perception, and she knew her surroundings. She was sitting in a garden -- a warm, healthy, luxurious garden, obviously on Venus. She felt light, but on Mars she would be lighter still. Here she could hold out her aim straight from the shoulder and keep it there for half an hour without discomfort. It was breathing that was most different. On Earth, one was seldom completely unaware of it. It was a mild labor to breathe, raising chest and shoulders, expanding ribs. Here the air seemed to flow in and out of its own volition. There was no tendency to droop when exhaling. The chest didn't fall, it merely grew a little smaller. One didn't have to breathe fast and shallowly, as on Mars. On Mars, too, it would be very much colder. She was wearing white shorts and blouse, nothing else. She wasn't heavy enough to have to wear shoes to protect her feet. And on Venus -- a point of interest to most women who went there -- it was usually quite unnecessary to wear a brassiere or a girdle. Even flabby pectoral and abdominal muscles could hold flesh firm against the mild gravitational pull of Venus, threetwentieths less than that of Earth. Yes, she was on Venus, without a doubt. A hundred other things confirmed it -- the low, heavyclouds, the heat, the perfectlydiffused sunlight that made shadows almost non-existent, the lushness of the grass, the haze over the forests, the smell of the air... All of which showed that she knew Venus, Earth and Mars, at least. S HE was alone. But when she turned her head, she sw a vwhite building through the trees. In the other direction, down the hill, she knew there was a tall wire fence. This, then, pleasant though it might be, was a prison of some kind. She fingered her blouse thoughtfully. Though clean and fine, it was very plain, a common pattern, the kind of garment that wouldn't generally be worn from choice. She wasn't disturbed. She knew she was called Muriel Martin, and was pretty sure that wasn't her real name -- but whoever she was, wherever she was, however she had got there, she was quite confident of her ability to handle the situation. Trying to look into the past, even the recent past, was unpleasant. She gave up the effort as far as the distant past was concerned. There was nothing there, and a curious finality about the nothing. But she explored the recent past conscientiously, ignoring the disinclination to do so. There were shadow-memories of testing and probing, people trying to make her do things she couldn't do. There was also the hurt of being treated as little better than an animal because she was little better than an animal, yet knowing that she was very nearly a sane, intelligent human being. But there was no maliciousness in that ; the people were really trying to help her. There was one spot of maliciousness, however. Something concerning a Security officer. He had been vile. She didn't remember much about what had happened, but he had been thoroughly unpleasant, tearing with his questions and suspicion and anger and disbelief at the brain that was trying to heal. She classed him, on the little she could recall, as a petty, frustrated official, the kind of man who must always be a failure in handling people but who so often is permitted to try. Before that there was -- horror. She knew nothing about it and didn't want to. Though she probed for it grimly, she was rather glad when she was forced to the realization that it was quite unavailable to her. She rose lightly. The apparent loss of even a small fraction of  weight makes anyone feel an athlete, An athlete feels like jumping over trees. She ran, not because she was in any hurry, but because she felt like running. She stopped when she saw another girl, also alone and also wearing the same kind of blouse and shorts. This girl was pretty but there was something missing in her face. Muriel saw that even before she spoke. Two minutes later Muriel turned away. The girl was only dimly aware that someone was talking to her. She made sounds in reply, agreeably, and there was clearly no harm in her. But her I.Q. couldn't be more than # and was probably much less. In half an hour, Muriel had spoken to a dozen or so women in the grounds -- and that was enough to show her that she was in some kind of home for subnormals. Her confidence subsided a little. People didn't get into places like this without good reason. That blank spot of horror in the past -- was it really horrible, or was it something a sane mind should have taken in its stride? Had it just been something she couldn't take, something she had scuttled from in fear instead of facing boldly? She was sane now, she believed -- but perhaps that was something that didn't happen often. Perhaps she had brainstorms. Perhaps... She put aside the anxious, frightened thoughts that rushed into her mind. If she wasn't often sane, the sooner she made good use of this lucid spell the better. Anyway, the other women she had seen didn't seem to be insane. There might be psychotics here, too -- but for the most part they had seemed merely subnormal. She walked up to the house. Before crossing the hall, she took a pair of sandals from a cupboard just inside the door and put them on. That was automatic. She wondered how often she had been here... how often she had done that without really knowing what she was doing. She hesitated before tapping on a door at the end of a white corridor. She had a clear enough picture of the man inside, though she didn't remember his name. She had no fear of him, certainly; he was old and kind, though sometimes rather fierce. What caused her hesitation was the sudden realization that she didn't know what she herself looked like... whether she was young or old... Resolutely, she tapped at the door and went in. I'TiHE man was as she remem  bered him, and she knew at once she could trust him. He wore an ordinary lounge suit, which made him almost ludicrously overdressed on Venus. But a lot of older people dressed like that. It wasn't that they objected to scanty apparel, but only that they felt they couldn't behave with any authority if they were half naked. "Hallo, Muriel," he said pleasantly. "Sit down." His eyes were keen, she saw, not missing much. "I think you asked me questions before, doctor," she said briskly, "and couldn't get much out of me. Would you like to try again?" The expression on his face became almost delighted. His eagerness, Muriel guessed, was the natural sympathy and interest of anyone who worked among handicapped people, the joy in any sign of improvement. "You've recovered your memory?" he asked. "No, I'm afraid not. I still don't know a thing about myself. Not even how old I am or how I look." The doctor showed no sign of disappointment. "Perhaps we should deal with that first," he said. "You want to know how you look?" "Well, I'm naturally interested." She smiled. "Ever meet a woman who was more or less sane and didn't know whether she was tall or short, young or old, pretty or ugly?" "Before you look at yourself," said the doctor, "do you think it's all right to do it? I mean, you haven't any fear of looking in a mirror?" "No. Only an in -- " She stumbled. "What's the trouble?" asked the doctor sympathetically. She remembered now that his name was Johnston. "Just words. I was going to say only a something curiosity, but I don't know the word. It means very strong." "Intense?" "That's it. Intense curiosity," She tried the words over once or twice, and found they came easilyThe doctor rose from behind his desk and opened a cupboard. "There's a full-length mirror inside the door." Muriel got up and stood in front of the mirror. She had braced herself mentally, for she hoped she was young but knew she might have to bear the disappointment of seeing she was old. She wanted to be pretty, but the chance of that seemed small -- she had some shadowy awareness that she wasn't pretty. What she saw wasn't anything like what she had expected. She was young, clearly -- not more than twenty-five at the most. And she was beautiful, astonishingly beautiful... but even that consideration was swept away for the moment by something she wouldn't have believed possible, even granting her almost complete loss of memory. The girl facing her in the mirror was a complete stranger. She had never seen her before in her life. ing an intelligence test. She had told Dr. Johnston, unprompted, that she thought she could do a non-verbal test adequately, but as yet a verbal test would give a misleading result. He said nothing, merely gave her a book and a pencil. He watched her as she worked; it didn't seem to bother her at all. He noticed that she tried the pencil in one hand, then the other, before beginning to write with her left, at first awkwardly, and then with more precision. He hadn't suggested that she should work at the desk, waiting to see what she would do. She'd crossed her legs and worked quite confidently with the book on her knee. Stenographer? he wondered. She was apparently completely sane, but the type of amnesia was puzzling. It was oddly selective. It was curious that she should remember nothing whatever of her own life and yet have almost free access to the normal general knowledge and vocabulary of an educated person. He knew he wasn't handling her as the textbooks said such a case should be handled, but he felt certain without working it out that it was much better to give her mind a lot to do than too little. She hardly needed directions on how to do the intelligence test. She saw the form of it and became absorbed in it. Muriel finished the test and handed it back to him. He put it aside, "Aren't you going to check it and tell me how I've done?" she asked. "It isn't normally done." "I know. But it would help me, I think. I don't know whether I'm above or below average. It will help me plan my life, when I'm ready to plan. I'd like to know what that shows, please." From the moment she'd entered the room she had been completely at home, unperturbed by the situation. He checked the test and referred to a list. "This gives you an I.Q. of # plus," he told her. "What does that mean?" "That you're in the top two per cent of the population in intelligence. It doesn't show any more than that. The standard deviation in this test is fifteen... do you know what I'm talking about?" "I think so. You mean fifteen points are arranged to cover about a third of all people. A third between # and #, and another third between # and #. And I'm #." "You're # plus. Anything over #. That is, the test takes no responsibility for you. It's meant to grade normal and subnormal people to a certain extent that shouldn't be overestimated." "Not absolute but -- ?' "Empirical. Statistical." "I see. What's the next move?" Unexpectedly his face grew hard, even angry. But she knew the anger wasn't against her. "Security," he said. "They've insisted on seeing you again, as soon as possible. I'm afraid it's possible now. I'm sorry, Miss Martin. Do you remember anything about the last time a Security officer saw you?" "Yes, a little -- and I don't like what I remember. What is this Security? Why do they insist on seeing me?" "They think you might be a Murriner spy," said the doctor derisively. "Murrane," the girl mused. "I've never been there and I don't want to go there. I'm not interested in the war." "You know about the war?" asked the doctor quickly. "Only that there is one. Oh, well... if I have to see this man, doctor, it might as well be now." Dr. Johnston stared at her for a few moments, then nodded. He picked up the phone on his desk. Ill terbox. The words poured out of her in a sort of verbal peipetuum mobile r a pleasant sound if one didn't pay too much attention to what she was saying. "Yes, you're my size, as near as makes no difference," she said, surveying Muriel. "We'd better hurry, Miss Martin -- shall I call you Muriel? Security said someone would be along about four, but it would be just like Security to say that and make it two hours earlier, to catch you on the hop. That's the way they work. Of course, it's all necessary and no doubt they do a valuable job, but sometimes one wonders why they have to be so tough about it. I'm so glad you're all right now -- I always thought there was something different about you, you always looked so clever, even when you were... but that's all over, and I'm sure you'll be able to stand up to this officer and let him see he can't push you around -- he can't really, you know, if you only remember you've nothing to be afraid of. They're hard and suspicious, and they work on people by making them nervous and jumpy, and if you refuse to be nervous they have to climb down and be civil. Dr. Johnston says it's a crime that they should be allowed to come here and -- " On it went, with Muriel half listening, because she knew so little that she could learn even from Nurse Brayne. It was still only two hours since she had come to full consciousness in the garden. She knew now that six weeks ago she had wandered into a village fifty miles away, Norbum, dirty and disheveled and completely dazed. There had been a search for a crashed ship or plane in the vicinity, but nothing was found. At first it had been thought that she was suffering from ordinary shock, but it soon appeared to be more than that. She had been taken to the nursing home, not because that seemed the right permanent place for her, but because she had to be sent somewhere where she could be looked after. "Dr. Johnston's quite right," said Nurse Brayne. "You'll feel so much more confident if you know you're looking your best." "Will I?" asked Muriel. "I don't think it would make any difference to me, Helen." "Don't you care about clothes?" "No." That almost made Nurse Brayne speechless for a while. TT had been Dr. Johnston's idea to freshen Muriel up before the Security Officer came, and in one respect, Muriel agreed, it was a good idea. People did judge you by your appearance. If you were well-groomed and immaculately dressed, people were a little more cautious with you, afraid of what you might think, feeling themselves at a disadvantage. But in the end, your manner mattered more. Anyway, Helen Brayne had volunteered to take her away and make her more presentable. Muriel had showered and was now in the nurse's bedroom, waiting patiently for Nurse Brayne to decide what she should wear. "Are you a max or a min?" the nurse asked. "I'm afraid I don't follow that," said Muriel. "I can guess you mean maximum or minimum, but that doesn't help." "You must have known, but forgotten," said Helen. "Everybody's a max or a min. You wear as much as you can for any occasion, or as little." Muriel smiled. "No, that's new to me... but surely people are sometimes one thing, sometimes the other?" "It's all right if you've got natural taste," said Helen cheerfully. "But how many girls have? If they follow a pattern -- max-min, bright-somber, plainfrilly, and so on -- they can be sure that they're dressed more or less right most of the time. It's quite sensible, really. If you're overdressed for a ball and underdressed for a garden party, you're not giving your personality a chance. Are you sure you never heard of max-min? You seem to know most things, and this has been going on for five years now." Muriel found that interesting. "On Venus and Earth, you mean?" "And Mars." "Suppose I haven't been on Venus or Earth or Mars in the last five years?" Helen ceased abruptly to be the gay chatterbox and became the surprisingly efficient nurse. "I see what you mean. Or you could have lost your memory five years ago. But if you weren't here, you must have been on Murrane." "Murrane? I've never been there. Isn't there anywhere else I could have been?" "Not that I know of, unless you're an explorer. Well, what are you -- max or min?" "Max, I guess." Helen looked surprised. "Oh, well, if you say so. People who look like you generally prove it, if you know what I mean. Say, Muriel -- " she was serious again -- "don't give the Security man any idea that you've been out of this System in the last five years. They're suspicious by vocation." She turned back to the drawer whose contents she was investigating. Muriel reflected that perhaps the Security men had to be hard and tough and suspicious, to counteract the openness and friendliness of people like Dr. Johnston and Nurse Brayne, who seemed to take it for granted that she couldn't possibly be a spy or saboteur or anything of the sort. It was more than Muriel took for granted herself.  quite right. While she was brushing Muriel's hair, over two hours before the Security Officer was due, there came an imperious summons relayed by a rather scared nurse. Captain Clark was in Dr. Johnston's room and wanted to see Muriel Martin immediately. Dr. Johnston met her in the hall and, probably against all the rules, told her fiercely that if that tough jumped-up cop said anything she didn't like, she could press the bell under the desk and he'd come running in to take him apart. "Thanks, doctor," said Muriel warmly. "But I don't think it'll be necessary, now." She had remembered a little more of the last occasion when a Security Officer had come to see her. She'd been able to say only a few words at the time, and couldn't understand what was going on. But she had felt the truculence of the man, his suspicion, his anger; his emotion had been like a physical attack on her. When he touched her roughly, though he hadn't really done anything much, she had felt terrified and utterly helpless. He had tried to force the truth out of her, when the only possible way to get anything out of her at all, as Dr. Johnston must have told him, was to draw it out with infinite gentleness and patience. Muriel opened the door of the doctor's room and went inside. It was very different from the last time she had entered it, only a short time ago. The man behind the desk this time was younger than she expected, not as hard looking as she expected, but quite as grim and humorless. He wore some kind of uniform, blue and spruce. He looked up from some papers he held as she came in. Muriel was glad, after all, that she was neatly and attractively dressed. For just a fraction of a second, Captain Clark's eyes widened and flickered over her. and she knew that he was human. It was worth it for that. Then he was himself again. "Please disabuse your mind," he said coldly, "of anything you've heard about Security in this somewhat uncooperative establishment." That was nasty. In typical Security fashion, even with a girl in a nursing home, he was starting off by trying to cow her, to undermine her confidence in herself. "It's all right," said Muriel easily. "I'm disabused." "I didn't say you could sit down," said Clark sharply, as she moved toward the other chair. S HE sat down. "Captain Clark," she said, "I started off with the fixed determination of cooperating with you all I possibly couldAre you going to insist on making it hard for me to do that?" "Yes," he said. "Why?" "I'm asking the questions." "You haven't asked any yet." "Why are you determined to cooperate? Because you have something to hide?" Muriel laughed. "Could be. I'm hiding it very successfully from myself, and I could do with your help, or anyone else's to find out what it is." "Do you realize I have the power of life and death over you?" "No. I don't think you have." "I give you my solemn word that if I thought you were a Murriner and had any chance of escaping, I'd shoot you here and now." "Oh, no doubt. But that's hardly relevant, is it?" She had realized some time ago that he was acting a part. The other Security Officer, whom she dimly remembered, had been either a different type of man or a much better actor -- but the goal was the same. They both tried to push her, to annoy her, to frighten her. Only the first officer had succeeded. The second wasn't going to. "How do you feel about the EarthMurrane war?" "I don't give a damn about the war." "Why is that?" Clark rapped. "We're fighting for our System, our very lives, and you don't care?" "No, I'm afraid not. Maybe I've had nothing to do with the war." "Don't try to explain it. I can see what your answers mean. Do you think we should just surrender to the Murriners?" "I don't knowabout that. Remember, I've only just waked up. What are you trying to do, put me back to sleep again?" "Ah," said Clark softly, "I've touched a tender spot, have I?" "No. That was an honest request for information." Clark came out from behind the desk. "Sit closer to the desk," he said, standing over her. "What for?" demanded Muriel warily. "Sit closer!" he shouted. S HE pulled her chair closer to the desk. She had an idea, by this time, that nothing very serious was going to happen. He took a small plastic case from his pocket, placed it on the desk in front of her and opened it. Inside was a morse key, a small light and a buzzer. "Hold that key down," he said. "When the light goes on and the buzzer sounds, let the key up as quickly as you can. Got that?" "Yes." Muriel searched her mind for the term 'reaction time', but though the idea was perfectly clear, she couldn't quite find the words. Twenty times the buzzer sounded and the light flashed. Then Clark opened the back of the little case and took out a card. "Point three six, point two nine, two seven, three two, three one -- " he read. "I don't believe you," said Muriel. He grunted, but didn't let her see the card. He was a very bad actor Muriel thought. It was quite obvious that he was no longer in the least suspicious of her, though he kept up the pretense of brusqueness. He was really rather nice, she thought, sensing the good nature behind his formidable front. She found the term she was looking for. "Murriners have slower reaction times than we do, then?" she asked, interested. "You didn't know that?" "I believe I did. Is the hold-up at the synapses?" He tried to snap back at her, but couldn't. "No, the transmission through the nerve fiber is slower." "Of course. Range of about four to sixty meters a second, instead of five to a hundred -- funny how I can remember figures. But that couldn't always be a conclusive test, then." Clark simulated biting sarcasm. "Maybe you could find a better one?" "I'm sure I could. A blood test, perhaps. Isn't there something in Murrane's air, soluble in the blood, that affects the endocrine glands -- modifying the chemical reactions, changing some of the enzymes . , "Sure," said Clark. "Only I can't carry around a laboratory I can carry this. Say, aren't you supposed to have lost your memory?" he added, forgetting to be tough. "I was surprised I remembered that," said Muriel, pleased. "Tell you what, let me test my own blood and I'll tell you whether I'm a Murriner or not." It was too much for Captain Peter Clark. He stared at her for a moment, then laughed. "All right," he said. "You win. Can I call you Muriel?" IV W left the Veborn nursing home, he should have been beginning to forget that Muriel Martin even existed. His job in Security was counter-espionage, nothing else. Having satisfied himself that Muriel wasn't a Murriner, he had done his job, and as far as he was concerned she should have ceased to exist. But back on Murrane no allowance had been made for the fact that Peter Clark was younger than most Security Officers and had always liked intelligent brunettes who didn't lose their tempers. Murriners, naturally, had a different view of Security Officers, and certainly didn't regard them as human beings. So instead of starting to forget Muriel, Clark was running over possible excuses to pursue the matter, and Muriel. At the nursing home, Muriel was assuring Dr. Johnston and Nurse Brayne that Security Officers weren't as bad as they thought. "He explained himself afterwards," she said. "I suppose I shouldn't pass it on to you, but I don't think it will do any harm. Murriners feel inferior -- they can't help it. They deny it, of course, even boast that a Murriner is better than a Terran any day, but it's there. They're angrydefensive. And the best way to discover them is to be angry-offensive. I saw Clark was only trying to annoy me, and that what was said didn't really matter. So he didn't annoy me at all." Dr. Johnston had been looking at her closely as she spoke. "You're quite normal, Miss Martin," he said. "In fact, I rarely met anyone saner. You're almost aggressively sane." Muriel laughed. "Yes. But tell me -- what can I do now?" "You can walk out of here any time you like, now that you've been passed by Security. But that doesn't help you much, since you haven't any job or relatives or mone. I suggest that you work in the office here. It won't pay much, but at least you'll be independent and we'll be able to help you to get your bearings." "Thanks, doctor," said Muriel warmly. "I'll do that for a while anyway. Am I really free?" "Of course. It isn't a crime to have lost your memory. You were never certified, and this isn't an asylum." Impulsively Nurse Brayne, an affectionate creature, put her arm around Muriel's shoulders. "We'll try to make you happy," she said.  taken over the running of the office. No one there had any organizing ability, and everyone was glad to pass the reins over to her. She didn't believe, however, that she had ever worked in an office before. She found she was much more at home in the pharmacy. Gradually things were being confirmed or denied. She was a chemist of sorts, but not a doctor. Yet a lot of biology was familiar to her, and when she discovered anthropology the subject was clearly not new to her. In mechanics she was completely blank; dynamics meant nothing to her. In fact, there were subjects on the technological side that she didn't even seem to have heard of. Chemistry was the best bet. She regained whole chunks of knowledge merely by picking up bottles and looking at the labels. She was learning all the time, and enjoying the process. Often she would merely look at the name of a substance, and into her mind would come a picture of it and all the things it would do. On the fourth day she had a visitor. "Not Captain Clark," he protested. "Call me Peter. Can you take the afternoon, off?" "Easily," she said, "if I'm shown a good reason."' He frowned. "I don't know whether it's good or not," he admitted, "but I've been thinking it up ever since I saw you last." She laughed, and gave herself the afternoon off. the grounds, but they didn't go far from them. One couldn't sit anywhere on Venus without being soaked, but Peter was prepared. He spread a thin plastic groundsheet on the steaming grass. Muriel sat at one comer of it and motioned him to stay on the other. "Not too close," she told him. "I may be married, you know, and I'd better stay faithful just in case." Peter's eyes widened. "I never thought of that," he said. "Let's see your left hand... look, you never wore a ring!" "Doesn't prove anything," she smiled. "Now, what about this reason you were going to show me?" Peter became more serious. "Frankly, at first I was only looking for an excuse to see you again," he admitted. "And if I hadn't found one, I'd have come anyway. But I did find one, I think. What does your history, as far as you know it, suggest to you about how you lost your memory? Anything?" She shook her head. "Does it suggest something to you?" "Yes. You didn't lose your memory. You had it lost for you." He put it bluntly, and Muriel not only understood at once, but also agreed with it. "But how could that happen?" she asked. "You mean someone hit me over the head, or something?" "No -- not that kind of thing at all. If someone loses her memory by what you might call natural means, she's not normal and confident but without her personal history, like you. She's dazed and lost and doubtful, and she has quite a lot of her personal history, if she remembers as much as you do. Loss of identity is common, but -- " "I see what you mean," said Muriel slowly. "People wouldn't have language and knowledge -- but not a single recollection of anything that ever happened to them. I don't remember any person I ever knew, or going to school, or what I used to look like -- "  an hour or so, they carefully examined what she knew and what she didn't. Nothing very much emerged from it, but Peter's idea got some support. It was as if everything she had ever learned had been put either into a personal or a general memory bank, and then the personal bank had been taken away. "Which doesn't happen by accident," he said. "Muriel, there's one psychiatrist on Venus who might be able to find out something more about this. Will you go and see him?" "Of course. Who is he?" "Dr. Waterson, at Finylake. I can fly you there any day you like." They settled the details of that, and Peter heaved a sigh of relief. "That was all very well," he said, "but I came out with a girl, not a psychiatric case. Can I move a little closer, please?" "How about my not-out-ofthequestion husband?" "You don't remember any husband, do you? Well, you haven't got one." He moved closer. "Quite a lot of people would refuse to believe this of a Security Officer Muriel observed brightly. "Aren't they all hard and tough and unsympathetic?" "That's just a myth. Just give me a chance and I'll prove it." He moved closer still. "Suppose I were to turn out to be a Murriner spy?" "That's the core of the whole thing," said Peter with satisfaction. "This is bare-faced blackmail. If you don't let me kiss you, I'll tell Security you're a Murriner after all, and they'll take you out and shoot you. See?" "I don't want to be shot," Muriel admitted. He took her in his arms and kissed her very thoroughly. the new electronic psychiatrists. He seemed to have grown a little electronic himself ; he hummed like an electric motor as he worked, his little black eyes glittered like nuclei, and his black hair perpetually stood on end as if charged with electricity. He ignored Muriel and Peter completely as he gathered data from his various machines. Though he used a lot of apparatus, his work was by no means all electronic. The word in any case was a misnomer; it had been applied to men like Dr. Waterson through wholesale confusion of psychiatry and cybernetics, encephalographs and electronic brains, electricity and electronics, and had been so generally used that it had stuck. Now Waterson himself called his profession electronic psychiatry -- an example of the power of the uninformed layman. Dr. Waterson's work wasn't all electric, then -- he had put some pretty shrewd questions to Muriel while connecting her to this machine and that, and she was wondering, now that it was over, how much of his use of impressive apparatus was window-dressing. At lasfhe said, "I'm not going to charge you anything, Miss Martin. Which means, I'm afraid, that I can't produce any results." "What we know now is tentative, doctor," Peter put in. "Can't you add anything, even if it's tentative too?" "I can only say this. If any tampering with Miss Martin's brain was done -- and I admit that this is a reasonable conclution to reach -- it was very well done. There is certainly an interesting problem here. It seems extremely unlikely that your loss of memory is due to any neurosis, Miss Martin. There is neurosis present, of course -- " "There is?" said Peter, startled. The psychiatrist smiled faintly. "I should hardly mention it, if it were significant. There are certain fixed patterns, or nearly fixed patterns, and fixation is neurosis. I didn't investigate those, because they seem to have nothing to do with the loss of memory. They seem to have been acquired afterward, possibly as a result... however, the loss of memory, if not neurotic, would certainly appear to be the result of some operation -- " "Surgical?" asked Peter. head. "There is no evidence of surgery. But there is also no evidence of anything else. I merely assume, from a fair knowledge of the human mind, that it is not surgical. I wish X could say more. I can only repeat -- if anything has been done, it has been, very well done. That simplifies the matter, if you wish to pursue it." "Simplifies it?" Muriel exclaimed. "I should have thought it would be the other way round." "Simplifies it," repeated the psychiatrist patiently. "Have you a lot of money, Miss Martin?" "No." "A pity. If you had, I should advise you to go to Earth and consult some of the leading electronic psychiatrists there. You would soon find yourself on the right track. The quality of this hypothetical operation, you see, means that only a very few people could possibly have done it." "I see," said Muriel. As he was showing them out, he asked curiously "Do you intend to proceed with this, Miss Martin?" She hesitated. "I don't think so. It's not of tremendous importance to me, and anyway it'll be quite a while before I'll be able to afford to go to Earth." "A pity. You would have to go there. All the men who might be able to help you are there. Or on Murrane." If he hadn't added the last three words, principally to himself, the matter would probably have died there. But Peter heard them and whirled around. "Murrane !" he exclaimed. "I didn't propose Miss Martin should go there," said the psychiatrist dryly. "You mean there are people on Murrane who might have done this to Muriel?" "If anything was done, yes. Murrane is probably well ahead of us in electronic psychiatry. It's the only branch of psychiatry they have, I believe." "Then something will be done about this," said Peter. "Security is taking it up. Come on, Muriel. You're going to Security HQ after all!" V was making the short hop from Finylake to Veborn, Muriel asked coolly, "Am I a prisoner, Peter?" "That would be a very difficult question to answer," said Peter cheerfully. "Let's pretend you didn't ask it, shall we?" "No. I don't like that attitude at all. I want to know where I stand." "How can anyone possibly tell you where you stand? That's what we're trying to find out." "What are we going to do?" "First, you'll have a thorough medical examination. That'll show pretty definitely whether you could be a native Murriner or not. If that's negative, as I expect it will be, I'm going to take you to Earth to see those psychiatrists that Dr. Waterson mentioned." "Why?" "I don't know exactly why," Peter admitted. "You don't know anything about Security, Muriel, do you? Well, it's an important job. This war is being fought mainly by two strong fleets that are trying to destroy each other, not advance on other objectives. Our fleet, say, can't afford to go too far from this System while the Murriner fleet is still strong. It can't afford to attack Murrane, because that would allow the Murriners to attack Earth freely. Space is big, and the only thing that prevents either side blasting the other's base is the knowledge that the fleet that tried it would be a total loss. Do you get the idea? There's no split between defense and attack any more -- it's just one fleet against another." "Go on. I don't quite see how it must be like that, but I'll take your word for it." "Our high command can't be with the fleet, because that's too mobile. The planning is probably done on Earth, but the real base may be on Venus or Mars or even Pluto for all I know. Anyway, you can see that in a war like this, gains by either side can Only be made by doing something slightly out of the ordinary. A raid on Murrane can be made and it can be effective, provided it's carefully planned and the enemy gets no hint of the plan. "There's the rub. Our spies get little or nothing out of Murrane, and Murrane is obviously getting quite a lot out of us. In direct proportion to that, they're doing better than we are. "So Earth, at the moment, is losing this war, despite greater potential -- and the section that's failing is Security. Murrane is keeping this a battle of espionage and counter-espionage, and winning it. Do you see why we have to follow up any line that shows itself? If you were to turn out to be a Murriner spy, we'd be glad we'd found you, but it wouldn't mean very much. We've found plenty of Murriner spies. But if we found something that was new -- " He brought the plane down neatly at Veborn landing-field. Almost at once the door was opened and two Security Officers waited on either side of it for Muriel to come out. "Then I am a prisoner?" she said. "I wish you'd just take things as they come, Muriel," he said. "You've nothing to be afraid of." "Yes, I have." Incredibly, Muriel burst into tears. "You're trying to make me go to Murrane #" she cried. Amazed, Peter stared at her. rpHE examination put it beyond doubt that Muriel was a native Terran. "Apart from her slightly above normal reaction time," the doctor observed, "there are several small things which, taken in the aggregate, show that she was born and grew up on Earth. I can't, of course, tell you whether she has ever been on Murrane or not. There are indications that she has. But any trace there may be of the Murrane enzymes is negligible." Peter visited Muriel in what he insisted on calling her room, not her cell. "Pve been talking to Dr. Johnston, Muriel," he said. "I told him you've been co-opted into Security." Muriel was calm and at ease again. She had been as amazed as Peter at her breakdown. She wanted to know what could have made her do that. "And have I?" she asked. He shook his head. "I have a theory," he said quietly, "that you were in it already." Muriel started, but didn't speak. "The doctor here added a few things to what we know about you," Peter went on. "Still nothing definite, but 'it's building up. Waterson said your brain might have been tampered with by a very good electronic psychiatrist. The doctor here says you may have spent a long time on Murrane." "Does he? I thought he said -- " "I persuaded him to go a little further after you'd gone. You see, we have to give people the benefit of the doubt, and he was assuming that you were a suspect, that your life depended on what he said. So he stated, correctly, that the traces of Murrane enzymefe in your blood were negligible. But when I told him the true circumstances and some of my own ideas, he admitted that while he wouldn't convict you on it, he was pretty certain that you had been on Murrane... possibly for some time. Unfortunately, while your mind was recovering, your body has been dissipating all traces of Murrane." Muriel nodded. "That's so. Heavy tan. Vitamin D restored, reaction time accelerating again -- if I was on Murrane, but only for a year or two, the journey here and a few weeks out in the open on Venus would cover up just about everything." "The doctor also says," Peter went on, "that you've been physically changed in some way. There are things about you that don't match. But that, again, was well done. Though there have been surgical operations, the main thing was a metabolic change. He can't say what you were like before." "Another thing," said Muriel quietly -- and she told him how she and Nurse Brayne had first concluded that she might not have been on Earth during the last few years. "It all fits," said Peter. "With what?" "It would all make sense," he said slowly, "if you were a Tzrran agent on Murrane, were found out, and for some reason of their own they didn't kill you but sent you back here, altered." Muriel tried that for size. "It seems to make a certain limited amount of sense," she said cautiously. "Despite the definite fact that you were never on Murrane?" "I... I'm not sure. But I do know I'm never going there!" "That," said Peter, "is the most significant part of all." VI rpHE hop from Venus to Earth was almost all acceleration and deceleration, and most people stayed in their bunks. Muriel used the time to read up on Murrane and the war. She had to overcome a disinclination even to read about them, but it could be done. She became interested in what she was reading, and the disinclination to have anything whatever to do with Murrane lost some of its force. But she remained quite determined that it was out of the question for her ever to go there. She took it in three parts -- Murrane itself, the war, and how either of these affected her or might possibly affect her. She had provided herself with half a dozen pocketbooks, which she scanned for the meat in them. First, Murrane. It was a cold world, but so suitable for colonization in other respects that the cold was accepted. There were no seasons; the inclination of the equator to the orbit was less than one degree, and its eccentricity was also extremely small. The year was # days and the day thirty-eight hours, making a period which wasn't a great deal different from Earth's year. The diameter was # miles, less than that of Earth, less even than that of Venus, but the mass and density made up for that. Temperature was Mu rr one's one drawback. A top limit of #S degrees F. had been recorded, but normal equatorial temperature range was from # to # degrees F. Naturally, all the Murriner towns and cities were in a thousand-mile belt around the equator. Muriel found she knew all this as soon as she looked at it. She knew more, without going farther in the book. She knew that Murrane, surprisingly, was teeming with warm-blooded life, with no intelligent animals to prey on it until men came along. She knew that Murrane was rich in metals of all kinds. She knew that hydro-electric power was abundant. She knew how the Murriners dressed, in a one-piece snowsuit with a hood, over several layers of fine underclothing that trapped many blankets of air as insulation. It was pretty obvious that she had been on Murrane, despite the insistence by one part of her mind that she had not. She passed on to a brief review of the war. She didn't feel any need to read more about Murrane and its people and history. She knew all about them. T was a strange war. It had started out of mere suspicion, jealousy and differences, without warning. Earth had been careless, Murrane precipitate. Murrane was the attacker, but there were people on Earth who blamed Earth for the war. After all, there was such a historical record of colonies turning against the parent country that it didn't seem unfair to say Earth should have been more alert and never let a war like this happen. From the first, it was a space war. There had been raids on Earth and Murrane, but they weren't worth the trouble. Each side insured that the other couldn't have a base near its own territory; any force raiding the enemy planet, therefore, had to start from home, evade the enemy fleet, advertise its presence by an attack against objectives which were in any case well guarded, and then try to get home again. It couldn't be done. It was a plain matter of statistics. If ships made long detours, their offensive power was cut down by the necessity for so much fuel and provisions. Moreover, they were unavailable, useless, not paying their way, all the time they were on the two long journeys. And if they attempted quick, bold raids, they were poking their heads into a natural trap. If the Terran fleet did nothing until a Murriner force attacked Earth, it could then pick off the" Murriners as and how it liked, where it liked, when it liked. Since the whole campaign was one of fleet maneuvers, anything that could be found out about those movements was in itself a victory. And at this the Murriners were leading easily. After all, to even a fifthgeneration Murriner -- that was as far as it went yet -- everything Terran was familiar, and Earth was a second home. All the books were about Earth, the language was the same, Murriner cities were copies of Terran cities. A Murriner, save for the small physical differences, was a natural spy to send secretly to Earth. Terrans, on the other hand, could know little about Murrane. It was changing rapidly, while Earth stayed the same. Information was scanty instead of abundant. An untrained Terran on Murrane would betray himself in five minutes, while an untrained Murriner on Earth was safely mingling with the crowd and learning what he needed to know.  the umpteenth time, was 'hat from the moment a man -nt to a colony he was a colont. not a Terran. The colony, . herever it was, was his home. Vo go there at all, he must have preferred the colony to Earth. He was a malcontent or a pioneer, Before any quarrel started, his side in it was fixed. Another thing was that Earth couldn't help underestimating Murrane. That had happened, was happening, and would continue to happen. The Terran Command was getting over that error, but the people of Venus, Earth and Mars probably never would. They underestimated Murrane in many respects, but the main one was man-power. Knowing that Earth alone could swallow the whole population of Murrane in one country, they shrugged off the whole question of possible victory for the Colony, They forgot that only a tiny proportion of Earth's potential could be used, and that for the sidered that their duty in the matter ended with reading the newspapers. Not much was made in the books of the physical differences between Terra ns and the Colonists, Muriel noticed. Probably unimportant. They certainly weren't the cause of the conflict. When she came to the question of how all this concerned her, the answer was surprisingly simple. It didn't. Or didn't seem to. At New York, Peter took Muriel straight to the Security building. "This isn't my section at all, of course," he said, "but I'm going to see if I can get permission to follow this thing through to the end. Mind?" She didn't answer that. She certainly didn't object to Peter staying around, but what exactly to say to him, in the circumstances, was a puzzle she couldn't solve. tests, a nameless director at the Security building told Muriel : "I don't think you can possibly be an agent of ours sent to Murrane, Miss Martin." "Allowing for all possible surgical and medical transformation?" asked Peter, who had been there most of the time. He had been given permission to continue the investigation of the strange case of Muriel Martin. "Allowing for all possible change and about twenty per cent over the top, for luck. I'm not going to give the figures, even to you, fcaptain Clark, but you can imagine that the number of women agents we send to Murrane is small. And of the women who have been landed on Murrane, we can definitely account for a fair number. You are in some way or another disqualified from being any one of the remainder." "Can you put some sort of percentage of probability on it?" Peter asked. "I mean, there are strong improbabilities already in Miss Martin's case. If we are ever to find out anything, we'll probably have to accept some improbability or other," "I should say the chances against Miss Martin having been an agent of ours," said the director, "would be about five hundred to one." Peter rose. "We'll have to see if we can find a better chance than that, Muriel' he said. "Thanks, director.' Something more definite was provided by the first electronic psychiatrist they visited. He was prepared to state definitely that electronic psychiatry had been used. "Just taking the patterns of what you know and what you don't, Miss Martin," he said, "they're too neat and definite to be the result of any kind of mental illness. But..." He stared thoughtfully at Muriel, then at Peter -- who wasn't in uniform -- and back to Muriel. "This is certainly a criminal case," he said bluntly. "You would hardly have permitted anything of this sort, Miss Martin. I suggest you go to the police, for your own safety. Anyone who went to the trouble of -- " Peter showed him his badge. "If you feel you must report on this, doctor," he said, "please report to Security, not to the civil police." "I see," said the psychiatrist. "I suggest you consult Dr. Hyneker. You understand, electronic psychiatry is a new branch. I'm a practitioner, not one of the founders of the science. Dr, Hyneker or Dr. Ball may be able to help you further, where I can't." So they went to see Dt. Hyneker. D R. Hyneker was curiously like the psychiatrist they had seen on Venus. He gave the same impression of being a machine himself, as if this new branch of science was actually turning men into quick, jerky, shrewdeyed machines. They told him as little as possible, to see what he could find out for himself. Rather surprisingly, the thing he picked out mid concentrated on was Muriel's disinclination to go to Murrane. "Before your own conclusions can be trusted, Miss Martin," he observed, arranging and rearranging papers on his desk, "you must remove this fixation." "That's interesting, but how do I do it?" Muriel asked, smiling. "Go to Murrane." Muriel had got over trembling with fright or bursting into tears whenever the idea was mentioned. But she frowned, still not liking it. Peter shot a glance at her, and spoke for her. "Quite so, doctor," he observed, "but how would you suggest she do it?" The doctor took a sheaf of papers from the bottom of a pile and began to deal them out on the desk like a pack of cards. "I admit the suggestion, at the moment, is somewhat impracticable," he said. "However, often we psychiatrists must be impractical. Someone comes in and I examine him and find the only real solution to his problem is for him to become a great violinist. But perhaps he has no talent whatever. What do I do?" He sighed. "Long ago I decided that where people appeared to be reasonably intelligent and stable, the thing to do was to tell them the answer, however impossible it seemed. Last year I told a man to go home and beat his wife. I was quite certain, I must admit, that he would never be able to do it. Apparently I was wrong. They're now very happy and contented together." pers he had dealt out and began to fan them out like a bridge hand. "I do this, for example, because I want to pile all these papers together and set fire to the lot. Impossible -- by my own decision. So I relieve my feelings by controlling them, destroying their significance, then restoring it." "But just a minute, doctor," said Muriel. "I haven't come here as a patient, not in the normal sense. I don't really want to be cured of anything, because I'm not aware of anything radically wrong. Except for my memory, and I'm told I can't have that back because there's nothing there. All I want is to find out what happened to me. To know." Dr. Hyneker's eyes opened wide. "But obviously you can only find that on Murrane," he said chidingly, as if she should have known that. "What!" exclaimed Peter. "Of course." He still seemed astonished that what he said wasn't obvious. "Here we have a fairly neat removal "of certain memories, and over all -- very untidy -- a threat, a positive prohibition against going to Murrane The job as a whole is extremely amateurish -- other things, like your conditioned disinterest in the EarthMurrane war, make it clear that you were not supposed to know that Murrane was concerned at all. But obviously, from this artificial respect and fear and warning this -- this untidy blot over the good work that preceded it, Murrane is the key to the whole thing, and if you ever want to find an answer, you must go there." He shuffled the papers in his hand. Muriel observed automatically that they were getting rather crumpled and dog-eared by this time. "I'm sorry' he said in a different tone, "that it's impossible for you to go to Murrane, Miss Martin. Yours is a very interesting case. I should like to see it resolved in some way." Peter was about to speak, but Muriel waved him silent. From the expression on his face, he didn't appear to have anything very helpful to say. "You mean if I were to go to Murrane," she said slowly, "I'd know, just because of that, what this was all about?" "Possibly, It may be more difficult than that If I say more, I'm guessing . " . is that understood? Very well, then: After the treatment I and others, apparently, have given you, you may take it that merely by returning to Murrane --  "Returning" Peter shouted. "You're sure of that?" TR. Hyneker turned a pained countenance on him. "This isn't recognized behavior for a psychiatrist's consulting room, young man," he observed. "If you don't restrain yourself, I shall have to continue this discussion with Miss Martin alone. "I took the fact that you have been there before for granted," he went on, to Muriel. "As I was saying, you may take it that merely by returning to Murrane you will probably, by this time, break down the fixation completely. You will then, as far as I can see, be wholly rational, in the loose way we generally use the term. Going to Murrane guarantees nothing else. But it would probably open up at once some knowledge of the world which would show you definitely that you had previously been there. And that knowledge might even make it clear to you where to look further. There wouldn't be so definite a prohibition against something, if disregarding the prohibition wasn't liable to produce something -- " "Of course," said Peter. He had himself in control now, and spoke quite calmly. "Muriel, all this makes sense' "But I can't possibly -- " "Doctor," said Peter. "Suppose we merely landed her on some quiet, unoccupied spot on Murrane and took her off again. Would that -- ?" "We?" said the doctor. Again Peter had to show his badge. "I don't know," said Dr. Hyneker. "The only way to find out would be to try. I doubt it. Miss Martin would probably have to make closer contact with the life and conditions of Murrane than that before anything very remarkable would happen." Then, carelessly, he threw another small bombshell. "If you by any chance do go to Murrane, Miss Martin," he said, "I'd advise you to be very careful about visiting a town called Rillan, and particularly a Dr. James Ball who lives there. Because, much as I hate to say it, I fear that whatever was done to you must have been done by him or under his direction," IX about James Ball, but he waved that aside. "I haven't seen him for years," he said. "He's done most of his work on Murrane." "A Murriner?" asked Peter. "Depends what you mean by a Murriner. He chooses to work there, on what he calls the fundamental problems of psychiatry. The removal of your personal memories might have been his work, Miss Martin. The rest is rather clumsy for a man of his skill. I should have doubted whether he'd turn against Earth -- but then, he's lived on Murrane for some time. If you want further information on Dr. Ball, I'm not the one to give it. There's a daughter, I think, here in New York. Go and see her." So Muriel and Peter found themselves on the move again. Peter wanted to talk about what Dr. Hyneker had said, but Muriel made it clear that she didn't. He bore it until they were within a block of the address Dr. Hyneker had given them. Then he caught Muriel's arm and stopped her. "Let's try to work this out, Muriel," he said. "If this Dr. Ball was the man who worked on your brain -- " "I think he must be," said Muriel thoughtfully. "I remember Rillan. I've been there, I'm sure. But what harm can it do to see Barbara Ball? She can't very well be in touch with Murrane." "That's one thing to find out first. Wait here while I ring Security." He disappeared into a drugstore. He 'was gone only a few minutes. He came back looking thoughtful. "Security say they've been watching her for a long time. She was at school here when the war started -- there isn't much schooling on Murrane, of course, and Barbara was only there for a year when she was fourteen. The rest of the time she's been on Earth. Since the war, it seems she's been moving heaven and earth to get herself into Security as an agent on Murrane. They have nothing against her, but refused her at first because she was too young, and now because she's probably more concerned about joining up with her father again than working for Earth. "But," he went on, "it seems there's another daughter, Lorna, with Dr. Ball at Rillan. What do you think of that?" "Should I think anythfng about that?" she asked, puzzled. Peter didn't insist on the idea. "Oh, well, let's go and see Barbara." small, rather dark-skinned, and would have been called pretty only by someone determined to see the best in her. It would have been in order, however, to call her attractive -- she had quite a neat figure, rather on the thin side, and thick dark hair with a luster which many a prettier girl would envy. Peter showed her his card at once, knowing she would cooperate all she could with a Security Officer. She did. She invited them into a surprisingly expensivelooking lounge with every evidence of excitement. "I don't want to disappoint you, Miss Ball," said Peter. "We're not here about your application to go to Murrane. That's not my department at all. We want to ask you some questions about your father and -- Lorna." She was disappointed; it was inevitable. Apparently she had set her mind on going to Murrane, She blinked and smiled brightly, but Muriel wasn't deceived. She patted Barbara's knee sympathetically. "Pity you and I can't do a switch, Barbara," she said. "You want to go to Murrane, and everybody's trying to make me go there, but I don't want to." "Careful, Muriel," said Peter quietly. "No, it's not that we don't trust you, Miss Ball. But there may be something very important behind this..." He put some questions about Dr. Ball and Lorna. Dr. Ball, it seemed, was about fifty, and had been a medical doctor for some time before he heard of electronic psychiatry. He'd moved into that branch right at the beginning, and soon, with Dr. Hyneker, was the leading authority on it. He went to Murrane because, he said, on Earth you couldn't see the trees for the forest. The environment of a psychiatrist's patients was so complicated that he could never see the effect of any one item. In a colony, life was so comparatively simple that it was possible to trace things, really cure things which on Earth could only be alleviated. He had started his own school there, experimenting and training electronic psychiatrists. "You seem to know the background pretty well. Miss Ball," said Peter.  ly. "I'm the dunce of the family," she said. Lorna had also been at school in New York, but five years ago, when Barbara was fourteen, she had gone to Murrane. Barbara had been left in the general charge of an aunt -- actually, on her own. "Pop believes in people having to look after themselves early," said Barbara. school and college she had done pretty well in everything, refusing to specialize. She did enough electronic psychiatry to know her way around the subject, but only from the psychological side. She kept off medicine and concentrated on chemistry. Peter stopped Barbara when she was in the middle of her description of Lorna. "Have you a picture?" he asked. "Of Lorna? Sure, on the table beside you." Peter looked at it closely. It was rather a shock, in two ways. He passed it on to Muriel, who merely glanced at it casually and put it back on the table. Apparently Peter's idea wasn't going to strike Muriel at all. "Miss Ball," he said slowly, "let's suppose that on Murrane for some reason Lorna was changed physically so that she became completely different -- so that appearance was nothing to go by. Suppose all her personal memories were removed, so that she didn't know anything that had ever happened to her, anyone she had ever met. But suppose also that her general knowledge, the memories that had nothing to do with Lorna Ball personally, were carefully split off and only lightly covered up. Supposing all that -- how would you know that Muriel here wasn't your sister Lorna?" Muriel wasn't much affected by the idea Peter suggested one way or the other. But Barbara jumped, went white, and stared at Muriel. "She cartt be... she murmured. "Lorna's no glamor girl. And she -- " She was troubled by the two things that Peter had noticed about the picture. Lorna wasn't ugly, but at best she was merely a pie as antlooking girl. One would say she looked intelligent, which was true, and avoid altogether the question, of whether she was pretty or not. The other thing was that Lorna and Muriel were so obviously different, beauty apart, that one didn't look for similarities. It was like comparing an orange and an apple. Girls much more like each other would still have been obviously different people. Barbara, though she called herself the dunce of the family, wasn't stupid. And she had imagination. Her gifts seemed to lie all in that direction, in fact. She was an artist bom to a scientist: the intelligence was there, but instead of being calculating intelligence it was talent, apparently. A volume of Beethoven sonatas lay on the piano; the watercolors hung on the walls were probably hers, and Peter wouldn't have been surprised to learn she wrote, too. Barbara soon got over the plain difficulties of the matter and began to consider the question seriously.  subjects Lorjia knew, and apparently threw in a few on subjects Lorna didn't know. Presently, her own knowledge being deficient, she armed herself with an encyclopedia. Muriel wasn't often sure; she usually answered hesitantly. Sometimes Barbara helped her, giving part of the answer to see if Muriel could supply the rest. As a rule she could. Barbara naturally enough tried for other memories now and then -- people Lorna had known, things she had done, places she had visited. Sometimes something came out about the places, but nothing on the other things. "Have you a scar on your left thigh?" Barbara asked. "I don't think so." "Marks like that wouldn't be left," Peter put in. "There would be no point in the other changes, if Lorna could be identified by a simple thing like a scar." Nevertheless, Muriel rolled down her stocking and Barbara looked closely at the skin. There was a very faint mark which might have been a scar, "They didn't make it easy for us, did they?" asked Muriel, amused. She was still far less concerned about the whole affair than Peter and Barbara. "Don't you care?" Barbara asked. "Of course I care, but -- well, after all, I must be someone. It doesn't seem to matter such a tremendous amount who I am, if you see what I mean. If I'm Lorna Ball, fine. If not, I won't be heartbroken." Barbara looked at Muriel's teeth. A back tooth was missing that Barbara didn't know about. "Perhaps there was something unusual about it," suggested Peter. "There was," Barbara said, with some evidence of excitement. "It was the only one that was filled. Either Loma got it out since, or they took it out because it could be identified from dental photographs -- " "Then you're certain I'm Lorna?" "No, not certain Whoever did this made sure I couldn't be certain. There's nothing conclusive. You don't know things Loma definitely did know. You do know things Lorna hadn't studied, to my knowledge. But allowing for all that -- I think you're my sister." j wanted to go to Murrane I couldn't." "Perhaps you could," said Peter quietly, watching her closely. "How?" "Through Security. The route Barbara has been trying to take." Muriel looked at Barbara. "If they won't let her go, why should they let me?" It was Barbara who answered that. "If you're Lorna," she said, "they'll let you go. Terran agents have to know Murrane and be able to act like Murriners. They don't think I can. They've tested me twice. I'm quiet, dreamy and even-tempered, and I should be reckless, hasty and extrovert, or able to act that way." She frowned, then admitted honestly: "I can't, I guess. But you're different. Try Security and see." Muriel fought a sharp, silent battle with herself. She could be quite happy without ever knowing for sure who she was -- and it would be dangerous to go to Murrane as a spy. She didn't think of it as more than that: dangerous. She was quite confident of being able to pass among Murriners as one of them -- it seemed like the kind of thing she could do. But why? Why take such a risk when it didn't matter? She didn't really care much about what had been done to her. She didn't want revenge. And she still trembled inwardly at the thought of going to Murrane. Yet what really mattered seemed to be this: she did want to know more. This was a way in which she might learn. "Peter," she said abruptly, "am I free? Do you trust me? Do I have to go to Murrane?" Peter took her hand and pressed it affectionately. "Let's take them in order, baby," he said. "Are you free? Sure. You have always been. Perhaps Security should be as tough as it's supposed to be, and kill on suspicion. But it isn't. Maybe that's why we're losing the war. It gives the benefit of the doubt, and you know there's so much doubt that Security can't ever touch you. Do I trust you? That's not so easy. Trust has to be both ways. If you trust me, maybe you can see the answer to that." Muriel returned the pressure warmly. "I like that," she said. "I always knew you were a nice guy, Peter, even when you were acting like a screen villain. Only a good guy would say a thing like that. But you didn't answer the last question." "Do you have to go to Murrane? No... I didn't. Only you can answer that, Muriel.' X  Peter. "And -- come back, will you?" Muriel had let him kiss her before, but this time she kissed him. Then she left the helicopter and struck out for the distant glow of the city. She was a little light-headed. She was deliberately not thinking of her fear of going to Murrane, and the fact that she was now on it. There was also the danger that would be with her every second of the time she was on the world: the danger of being discovered as a Ter ran spy. And, curiously, the two fears seemed to cancel each other out. The ship which had brought her would stay in the vicinity. She didn't know where -- she hadn't been told, in case she should be discovered and interrogated. Peter and Barbara were aboard it, and every three days Peter would drop in the helicopter to the same spot to see if she were ready to go back yet or had anything to report. The ship wouldn't be discovered. A single ship could seldom be detected in space, unless it was moving fast. Almost all the devices for detecting the presence of other spaceships were based on the increase of mass with velocity. The faster a ship went, the more chance it had of getting through a waiting fleet -- and the more certain it was to be detected. The slower it went, the safer it was from detection of that kind; but if it should be spotted by eyes or radar it was a dead duck, with no acceleration built up. No, Muriel's line of escape was safe enough; all the danger was on Murrane itself. It was the beginning of the long night of Murrane, and she had been landed between Felter and Ederton. The answers she wanted were probably all to be found in Rillan, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, but she hadn't dared go there at once. For all she knew, perhaps everyone in Rillan would recognize her. A S she walked, she pondered about how familiar this world was to her. She had had the normal training of any Terran who was sent to Murrane as a spy, yet she hadn't been thinking of that when she was careful not to touch the low branches of the Murriner pines. No, there was no doubt that she was familiar with Murrane. It had" been obvious during her training by Security. She didn't think anything had been said about Murriner pines at night in the training she had had from Security. Murrane had once been warmer; many of its plants spent their lives grasping for heat, from any source. Any animal or man who blundered into a pine, particularly, was liable to be clutched and held, if he wasn't strong and nimble, and drained of his body heat. He might be alive at morning, if he had enough vitality; but probably not. Certainly not if the morning was thirty-eight hours away. She walked on through the hard snow, adjusting herself. to the environment. Murrane's three moons, all of them risen at the moment, gave about the same illumination as a full moon on Earth. She wore a black snowsuit, plain but neatly cut. It covered everything but her face, hands and feet. On her feet were furlined boots; long gloves covered her hands and the sleeves of her suit. Under the snowsuit she wore a similar but finer white coverall, and under that a thin sweater and pantaloons. All this would come off when she went inside. Below this was the indoor dress, creaseless slacks and a sweater. Any sins of the flesh committed on Murrane .weren't caused by seeing too much of it. She stopped as a call sounded behind her. She wasn't frightened; she was rather glad that her first meeting with a Murriner should be like this, alone, in the open, at night. Women on Murrane had nothing to fear from such encounters -- the penalties for all kinds of sex crime were too severe. She couldn't see any more of the man who came up to her than he could of her -- a few square inches of face above a bulky figure. "Oh -- a girl!' he exclaimed in some surprise. "You're late on this road, aren't you?" Already there were slight physical changes; soon there would be a distinctive Murriner accent, then a dialect. There was no radio communication between Earth and Murrane, of course, nor would there ever be. That meant that any change in pronunciation would be a divergence. "Yes, I'm later than I meant to be," said Muriel, in the same accent. "I thought I'd make Felter an hour ago." They walked on together. "Looking for a job?" asked the Murriner. Terran Intelligence, poor as it was, could at least be trusted to give its operatives a sound identity and purpose. "Yes," said Muriel, "they need chemists at the factory. # ' "Where are you from?" "Rillan," she told him. "Why leave Rillan for a little place like this?" "Rillan's gone all psychiatric and biological. This looks as if it's going to be the place for chemists." "You're smart," said the Murriner, after considering that. "What's your name?" Muriel gave him her third identity -- Thelma Bittner. "Glad to meet you. I'm Bill Seuter. Say, I used to work in Rillan. They still got that old ship in the square?" Muriel turned her head to stare at him. "Ship? Square?" "Sure, the museum piece. Used to pass it every day."  about Rillan, but a few vague pictures came up as he spoke. More than enough for her to' say: "Not in Rillan you didn't. No offense -- you think I'm a Terran spy, perhaps?" Seuter laughed. "We check on anyone who arrives in a place. That's enough. We don't make many mistakes." " 'We'?" "I'm in Counter-espionage." "Oh. You check on people even before they get to Felter?" "Sometimes. I don't follow any fixed routine," said Seuter complacently, "but I don't miss much. You're all right. When we get where it's warmer, remind me and I'll give you a CE pass for Felter."  Security didn't know anything about CE passes. "Thanks," said Muriel. "But, say... how could you tell I'm all right? Just because I know there's no ship in the square at Rillan?" "Nope," said Seuter, still complacent. "Fact is, Earth and Murtane are growing apart every minute. I don't need to run lab tests on you, even if I knew how. T alking for five minutes is enough." He would be right, too, Muriel thought -- except with someone like her who had actually lived on Murrane. "Find many?" she asked. "Three a month. I spend a lot of time on roads outside towns and pick up people like you.' They had reached the town. No snow lay there; Murrane had only electric power, but there was any amount of that. It was because there was only electric power that people had to do so much walking between towns. Electric power wasn't much good for the heavy vehicles that would be needed to force their way through the drifts and ice, and instead, an electric railway system was being gradually extended, Muriel hadn't had to explain that she had gone by train from Rillan to Ederton and walked on to Felter -- that would be taken for granted. Seuter gave her a pass, saluted her with a wave of his hand and went back to patrol the roadwayMuriel looked after him thoughtfully. Because of him, three Terrans would be identified and shot in the next month or so. But he was only doing his job, and doing it well. She liked him. Sometimes one met someone for only a few minutes, said only a few words and then parted, but felt as if one had made a friend. It was like that with Seuter. She hoped desperately that she would find what she was looking for, and that it would end this senseless war. Surely if it could only be stopped soon Earth would have the sense never to make the same mistakes again, whatever they were, and Murrane would know better than to fight a war for freedom that had never really been denied. Suddenly she realized that she hadn't been afraid since she set foot on Murrane. XI S HE got the job. On Murrane, so far, there was no system of qualifications and references. They tried you in a job, and if you did it well, you were in. In the first few days she saw how easy it was for anyone who knew Murrane well to pass as a Murriner, and how utterly impossible it was for anyone who didn't. The physical differences were nothing -- absolutely nothing. What mattered was whether you were a Murriner or not. Earth was flooding Murrane with operatives who weren't, and they stood out like sore thumbs. Muriel saw one of them. She couldn't do anything about him. He was obviously being left alone for the moment, carefully watched, no doubt, to see what he would do. How could Security hope to train agents? What they needed wasn't the right knowledge, but the right attitude. That couldn't be learned in New York. She met Seuter again a few days later at the factory. He was there checking on the other new chemists. "Say!" he said when he saw her, "if f'd seen more of you that night I'd have stayed with you longer." "I thought so too," she admitted frankly. "I'm not usually dropped as quickly as that." "Why aren't you married?" he asked bluntly. "Because Tm a chemist. There's no romance in chemistry." "There's one chemist I could go for.' She held up her hand in protest. "No," she said, "not a CE man. Someone will shoot you some day. I'm not going to marry anyone who's going to be shot." But that raised another problem. In frontier country there are always more men than women. The women on Murrane were very quickly married. At twenty five, on Murrane, a healthy, pretty girl who was unmarried was an enigma to everyone. Muriel would have to do her job in a hurry, before anyone became puzzled enough to be suspicious. Every three days, she knew, Peter was landing his little shell of a helicopter in the same spot to take her away if she was ready. Ready! She hadn't even started. Working on the basis that the secret she was looking for was psychiatric or anthropological, she studied the Murriners around her not individually but in the mass. Nothing suggested itself. They were different from Terrans, of course, but such differences as she saw were known or guessed on Earth. sive, as Peter had once said. They boasted of how much better they were than Terrans, and se-. cretly believed the opposite. They were reckless, brave, with a fine disregard for male life. Women weren't allowed to be brave, however. They were too valuable for the young Murriners they could produce. Murriners in general were less intelligent than Terrans, more ready to take chances, more quarrelsome, more immature, more generous, more vital. But all that was known. Whatvas it that wasn't known? She saw nothing of anyone who was actually engaged in fightingno spacenavy men, no ammunition dumps, no military depots, or, in fact, anything whatever that was connected with the war. She was very careful not to. That was bound to be a dangerous line of investigation. The regular Terran agents would be working on that problem, and succeeding moderately or failing completely, as usual. She was pretty certain, moreover, that what she wanted wasn't to be found under the heading of normal military information. Only when others introduced the subject did she even talk about the war. The usual attitude was about what she expected. Her fellowworkers had no very clear idea of what was going on, or why it was going on; but they were naturally, temperamentally in favor of a war against Earth. To most of them, the issue was plain -- Murrane was teaching Earth a lesson. Earth was being shown that you couldn't push Murriners around. They knew, most of them, that there was more to it than that. But that was policy -- none of their business. After two weeks of merely being an ordinary Murriner chemist, Muriel decided that she would have to risk visiting Rillan. Dr. Hyneker was probably right. The secret would be there. It certainly didn't appear to be in Felter. She had seen nothing that seemed worthwhile even trying to follow up. She told Seuter she was going back to pick up some things. "Made up your mind to stay, baby?" he said. "Fine. I'm still hoping to change your mind about CE men." "You might at that,' said Muriel encouragingly. "I haven't known many. And maybe it'll be a long time before someone shoots you." that it was dangerous. Rather than scratch cautiously along the edges of the affair, however, she marched straight up to # Third Street, rang the bell and asked the woman who came to the door if Dr. James Ball lived there. "Not now," said the woman, apparently unsuspicious. "I don't know where he went." "Can you tell me anyone who might?" The woman considered. "There's Joe Cruickshank at number #," she said. "He used to be a friend of the doctor." Muriel thanked her and crossed the street to number #. Joe Cruickshank was an oldish man with very heavy black brows. When Muriel mentioned Dr. Ball he drew them together in a dark frown, almost hiding his eyes. "You a friend of his?" he demanded. "Or maybe a friend of his daughter?" Despite the signs, Muriel thought the best answer was, "Yes." "You want to know what happened to him?" "And Lorn a." He hesitated; then said abruptly, "Come in," and turned away without waiting to see if she was following him. There was nothing luxurious about the sitting-room into which he led her, but in a simple way it was very comfortable. An electric fire was set into one wall; otherwise it was like a sittingroom in a country cottage on Earth circa #. Cruickshank sat heavily on a rocking-chair and motioned Muriel to an armchair on the other side of the fire. "Who are you?" he demanded. Muriel didn't want to give any of her three names. It was still not proven that she was Lorn a Ball, and in any case she clearly couldn't give that name. If the theory she was working on was correct, she had been named Muriel Martin on Murrane, probably in Rillan, and that was equally undesirable as a name to give. And though Thelma Bittner had gone back to Rillan quite openly, she didn't want Thelma Bittner to be known as having shown interest in James and Lorna Ball. S O she gave a fourth name, and a few brief details to satisfy Cruickshank. She had plenty of information that she could use to prove she had known Lorna well. "And you don't know anything about what happened to them?" asked Cruickshank. "No. Nothing." "Neither does anyone else," said Cruickshank bitterly, apparently deciding to trust her. "I think they're both dead." "Dead! Why?" "When the war started, Jim wouldn't join CE, He wouldn't have anything to do with it, or the war. Well, you know what Jim Ball has done for Murrane. CE might want to shoot him or lock him up, but most of us here in Rillan had other ideas. CE didn't dare touch him. He went on working as usual, though both he and Lorna had to report to CE every second day. They weren't allowed to write or receive letters." "That's why I never got any irplyl" said Muriel adroitly. "Jim told me one day he knew the real reason for the war -- " "Did he tell you what it was?" "If he had, I wouldn't be here now. CE shot me full of drugs later, and only let me go when they were sure I didn't know anything. Anyway, the day after Jim told me that he disappeared. So did Loma." He breathed hard. "Some of us got together. CE may be spying on us and telling us what to do, but CE isn't Murrane. We weren't afraid of CE. We went along to the office, a whole crowd bf us, ready to tear the place apart. But they fobbed us off with some story -- told us the doctor and Loma would be back in two weeks. So we went away." Cruickshank wasn't looking at her, but into the orange glow of the fire. "They came for me that night and made sure I didn't know anything. They were polite enough, and I didn't make an issue of it. "Two weeks later we went back and they told us Jim and his daughter had been deported to Earth. We didn't believe them. We went all through the office, but there was no sign of either of them."  "They'd been shot, that's why! CE knew it couldn't keep them prisoner -- we'd have had them out in no time. Jim Ball was never against Murrane. Everyone knew that. Whatever CE had against them, or thought it had, it couldn't bring them to trial. It couldn't keep them. The only thing it could do was kill them and hide their bodies so that no one would ever find them. Well, whoever harmed Jim Ball or his daughter was no true Murriner, and I don't care who .hears me say so! They were good friends to all of us!" He glared at Muriel as if she were CE itself. "Maybe CE told the truth," said Muriel. "Maybe they were deported.". "Would CE give Earth a man like Jim Ball, for free?" said Cruickshank derisively. "No, CE wouldn't do that. CE shot them!" There seemed to be very little more Cruickshank could tell her. Unless . , . "How did Dr. Ball look when he told you he knew the real reason for the war?" she asked. "Happy? Sad? Disillusioned? Amused?" "None of those. Just... surprised. Sort of 'Who'd have thought it?' " That was something, she thought. She was practically certain, now, that she was Lorna Ball. She got one thing more from Joe Cruickshank -- a name and address. It was her only lead now. If Cruickshank couldn't tell her arty more, clearly the thing to do was to go to someone who could -- whether he would or not. She didn't want the local CE Chief or second-in-command. They would be too important, too well-guarded perhaps. They might also be too clever or too fanatic. So she had asked for the name of the man who rated about third. He must know the secret, and there was a better chance that he would be easy to get to. The man was Edward Voigt, # Seventh Street. She advised Cruickshank, as she left, to forget that he had ever seen her; but he wasn't curious. He was sunk in his anger at what he believed had happened to Jim and Lorna Ball. good choice. His home was no bigger than Cruickshank's, and Muriel was inside it, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, waiting. She had had to break a catch on a bedroom window, but it was already dark and she was sure no one had seen her. She had planned carefully; no further planning would help much. Peter would land outside Felter that night -- she had to catch the train in two hours' time if she didn't mean to wait three days more. She wasn't optimistic enough to expect to have the information she wanted when the ship picked her up, but she meant to take this chance of getting it -- and if she failed she'd have to leave Murrane anyway. Surely Voigt must come soon. He lived alone, apparently. Muriel had her gun #in her hand, silenced. She stood in the dark, alert for the first sound of anyone entering At first she had been afraid he would come home too soon, for she couldn't leave Rillan until the train went, and it would be dangerous to wait anywhere. But as the time slowly passed, she began to fear that he wouldn't come home at all, or would be too late for her to do what she wanted to do and still catch the train. She had wound her scarf round her face. Very likely Voigt had seen her before. He would know when he saw her that she was Muriel Martin, who had been Lorna Ball. And he would know many more things which Muriel herself didn't know. She probed her mind for anything she knew of Voigt, but there was nothing. There was still that curious division. Many things in Rillan were quite familiar to her, but she remembered nothing that had ever iuppened there. She must have nown Joe Cruickshank once, but " was as much a stranger to her is she was to him. At last, a key scraped in the ck. Muriel tensed. The next few minutes would not only mean success or failure, but perhaps, quite independent of that, life or death. She wasn't sorry she had chosen this way, however. At last die was going to be face to face with someone who knew what she wanted. There was a step in the vestibule, then the light clicked on. Muriel stepped in from the kitchen as Voigt closed the other door, and he saw her at once. "If you make a sound," said Muriel softly, "I'll shoot to kill." pected he would be a young man, ambitious, a future local CE Chief. But he Was old, and had probably climbed as high in the organization as he would ever go. She rejoiced; that was better still. "Do you want to live, Voigt?" she asked. "I want information. If you give it, no one need know I got it from you. If you don't, I kill you and get it from someone else." "You're a Terranl" Voigt exclaimed. She pulled aside her scarf. "Do you know now why I'm here?" she asked quietly. He went white. "Muriel Martin," he breathed, but she caught the note of interrogation he couldn't keep out of it. "Lorna Ball," she said evenly. "But you can't know! They told us -- " "As you see, I do know." She was trying to say as little as possible that might reveal the limitations of her knowledge. "Now, Voigt, do I get what I want, or do I shoot?" Suddenly he stiffened. "Yes, get it over with. You'd never let me live." That was unfortunate. She apparently had good reasons for and she didn't. "For what I once knew, I may," she said. "What was it that was so important you had to kill my father?" "I didn't! You're only guessing." "Keep your voice down," she murmuredFrom the frantic way he talked, how he had looked when he recognized her, and the way he had said "You'd never let me live," she was almost certain that her father was dead, and that Voigt was the man who had actually killed him. It was a piece of bad luck if Voigt was the killer. Having no recollection of her father she felt no urge to revenge, but Voigt would never believe that. Her threat was weakened because he believed he must die anyway. "Listen," she said. "I give you my word that if you tell me, I'll tie you up and leave you unhurt. What did my father find out?" He was frightened, and she was playing on that. A brave man would have laughed at her, and she would have been helpless. "I don't know," Voigt said desperately. "I didn't understand it. It was too complicated." Muriel shook her head. "Complicated things aren't that important. This is simple. You can tell me in one sentence." She saw that he could. He was easy to read. She forced herself to be patient. She ought to be able to get what she wanted from a man as scared of death as Voigt was. "X don't like the idea of torture," she said, "but maybe it's the only thing you understand, If I shot you two or three times in the stomach, you'd probably want me to finish you off. Would you rather be begging for life or begging for death?" chair to hold himself up. "We let you go," he said piteously. "You can hardly expect me to be grateful. Well, what's it to be?" "It's mutation," he said, his nerve gone. The words came out cracked, almost unrecognizable. "Once we've mutated, we can't mutate again. We can only go back to Earth. We're prisoners here, we can't expand, we can't -- " By a strange quirk of emotion, he recovered his courage the instant it was too late. He flung himself at Muriel, his modth opening to shout. She shot him in the shoulder, thinking it would stop him. Instead, it made him wild. He thought he was dying, apparently, and rushed forward to take Muriel with him. Muriel shot for his legs, but he was pitching forward to dive at her knees and took the little bullet full in the top of his head. He crumpled like an old suit. Curiously, Muriel was appalled. It didn't seem to matter that he had killed her father and would have killed her if he'd reached her. She had talked grimly of shooting him in the stomach, yet she was horrified at the thought that she had killed him. She bent for a moment beside him in the futile hope that a man. with a bullet through his brain could be merely stunned, not dead. But then what he had said drove other considerations from her mind for the moment. There must have been a weakness, after all, in the job CE had done on her. For she knew at nee that what Voigt had said vas true -- and her mind leaped 'he gap of forgetfulness to wide, irsighted conclusions that it must have reached once before. She needed no more. She unUrstood. She had no proof, but  tie knew she could get it. There was a limit to the powers  if adaptation of those intensely idaptable creatures, human bengs. They would go to a new world and make it their home, md in doing so they would change to meet the new conditions -- a little or a lot, it didn't matter. They would always have to do that, for no world would ever be quite the same as Earth. And having changed, they lost some of the power to change again. They could go back -- Earth itself would always be a refuge to them, a refuge from which, eventually, they could go out anew to other worlds, their power of adaptation restored. But Murrane was the Murriners' prison. Cut off from Earth, they could never live freely, naturally, on any world but their own. And the Murriqers, almost exclusively, were restless, unsatisfied, hot-blooded pioneers. The very thought of encirclement restriction, would be enough to make any Murriner fight his shadow, let alone the world that held the key to freedom. It was as simple as that. fact that she had killed a man was almost her undoing at the station. She didn't even notice the CE man staring at her closely until he spoke to her. "Where are you going?" he demanded. She brought her attention back with a jerk. It would be tragic to be discovered now. "Ederton -- for Felter," she said, and fumbled in her pocket. She gave him Seuter's pass. "What have you been doing here?" "I've been visiting a relative." "Who?" She couldn't give Joe Cruickshank's name. In a few hour, they would find the whole story 'and shoot him as a traitor. "Ted Voigt," she said boldly. "Oh." His face relaxed. But he put one more question to make sure. "What kind of clock has he on the mantel?" Muriel laughed. "There isn't a mantel. There's an alarm clock on a little table. The floorcloth's green and white squares." And Voigt's lying on it, she thought. "The curtains are dark green and in one corner -- " "All right," said the CE man. "There's your train." reached Ederton onwards, Muriel was really terrified, for the tirst time since she had landed on iMurrane. Now that she was so near leaving the planet, all the anxiety and nervousness and fear he might have felt before, but hadn't, seemed to pile up in one ndal wave of terror. She was alternately cold and hot. Her legs u-emed about to give way and pitch her forward in the snow. She saw no one on the road, but she was sure that if she looked behind she would see a mob at her heels. When she reached the arranged spot and waited, she forgot all about the Murriner pines, and was pulled against the trunk of one before she even noticed the questing branch. Other branches swung slowly towards her to trap her inextricably, and already she felt the chill of the trunk against her back. She fought wildly with the branches that closed tightly across her body, crushing her ribs. The only way out was under -- she got both arms against a branch and forced herself down, straining to tear her snowsuit because it was firmly caught. Very slowly it gave, and branches rasped over her chest. She slid to the ground, her arms still trapped above her head, and tried to dig her heels into the ground to drag herself clear. The snow gave no purchase. She relaxed completely, and after a few long seconds the branches above her slackened very slightly. She waited, gathering her strength, then suddenly threw herself away from the tree with a heave of shoulders and legs. Her hands came free. Muriel got to her feet and stood gulping for air, laughing weakly when she found that instead of having two or three ribs broken, as had seemed likely, she wasn't even scratched. Her heavy clothing had taken the brunt of the damage. But she hoped Peter would hurry up, for she was wet through and the freezing air was getting inside her tom clothes. The numbness in her side wasn't a wound -- it was the cold air of Murrane sucking warmth from her skin. As a dark shape dropped from the slightly less dark sky, she fell on the snow in a faint. the ship, warm, dry and comfortable -- and obviously safe. She remembered dimly saying, "Peter, I killed a man!" and Peter's cheerful, unexpected reply, "Good for you." He was sitting on the bed now. "You didn't put me to bed, did you?" she gasped. He grinned and nodded across her. Muriel turned and saw Barbara, sitting and watching her. "Hallo, Barbara," she said. "I am your sister." "I know it." "Dr. Ball" -- it didn't seem natural to call him anything else -- "Dr. Ball is dead." Barbara nodded. "I guess I knew that too." "I killed the man who did it, if that's any comfort. I didn't mean to do it." There was a silence, and she knew they were waiting to hear whether she had succeeded or failed. "Yes, I got what I was looking for," she said. She told them. Peter, she saw, found it very difficult to understand. He couldn't quite see the process, or what it meant, or how it could be so important. Most particularly he couldn't see why this, known only to Murrane's CEorganization, should make them goad their people on to fight Earth. "Surely the effect would be just the opposite," he said. "Wouldn't they try to straighten out the differences with Earth that alreadyexisted, so that they could -- " Muriel had been watching Barbara. "You understand, Barbara, don't you?" she said. "I think so," Barbara said slowly. "It's like this, Peter. Think of a man and Woman crossing a tropical desert back on Earth. The man's stronger -- he carries the water and supplies. And after long, scorching days of travel, the woman thinks. Suppose he goes on and leaves me while I'm asleep? She knows she'll die of thirst. She doesn't dare ask to carry some of the water, for the man may refuse. She may put the idea of leaving her into his mind. So after days of this, out of her fear, she takes the water from the man while he's asleep and goes on alone. Perhaps she kills him too, to make sure. Do you see?"L" CE is naturally suspicious, Peter -- like some of Earth's Security Officers. It finds that Murrane is dependent on Earth. Murriners can't colonize forthemselves, can't do anything but stay in their own hard, cold world, except with Earth's gracious permission -- and colonists are the most independent human beings in the Galaxy. They won't ask for anything they think they might be able to take. So CE, knowing this, sets the Murriners, who are always ready for a fight, at Earth. Make Earth ask for terms, and demand a slice of Earth itself, where Murriners can -- " "Yes, I see that," said Peter, " coming excited. "But this ans -- " 'The end of the war, anyway. E. always knew that. I expect icy guarded this secret in the  pe that they'd get what they anted before we found out what it was. And beyond that -- " Peter jumped up. "##I get us to curity HQ on the double!" He was gone. Muriel smiled wryly, and Barbara, seeing her smile, grinned too. "lm afraid he's forgotten about you, Lorna," she said teasingly. "He's become a Security man again." "Don't call me Lorna," said Muriel. "I stopped being Lorna when they took away my memories." "Couldn't you ever get them back?" "No. You could tell me what happened, and I'd believe you. But I'd only be remembering what you told me, not what happened. I'm used to being Muriel Martin now -- I'd rather stay that way." Presently Barbara murmured, "Science is often like that -- expecting something until something else proves to be true. Isn't evolution supposed to increase range of adaptability, not diminish it?" "True -- yet we can't extract enough oxygen from water with the lungs we have now, which our ancestors may have done once. No, that's not the important thing about this, Barbara. Can't you see it? "Nature often seems to have thought of situations that happen to us, long before they happen. When we're fighting and are always born than at any other time. And nature even seems to have allowed for nuclear weapons. People exposed to hard radiation just don't have children, if they would be monsters. If children are born, they're all right. If we find out from the genes that they wouldn't be all right, we don't have to sterilize anybody, for they're sterilized already. Hard on the individual, sometimes, but excellent for the race. "Now look at this. Human beings stretching out to the stars and adapting, necessarily, to survive in different conditions. No difficulty in that. They adapt easily and logically. "But now it seems that the human race will always be tied to the world that produced them. Isn't that wise, too? There will be many worlds, many different peoples, some a lot more different from us than the Murrinera. But it's still a unit, not a lot of units. The different peoples are all bound, not to each other, but to Earth. It's like the spokes of a wheel. No matter what quarrels there will be -- and there will still be quarrels -- nature keeps mankind in one unit." She looked around for a wrap. "I'm all right. I want to get up." bed to rest now, when they wanted to be active. The patient was at last accepted as the best authority on what was good for him -- or her. Barbara produced a pink lace negligee. "That will do nicely," she said, "if your Security man manages to get over one kind of excitement and comes looking for another." Laughing, Muriel protested. Barbara grinned at her. "You needn't be so restrained," she said. "I've talked with him often enough to know you're in no danger of losing his respect. For a Security Officer, he's all right. Nail him, Muriel." 'I still want a nice respectable dressing-gown." Barbara sighed and produced one. Muriel got out of bed, steady enough despite a slight heaviness of head and a burning sensation where the pine branches had scraped her ribs. She put on the wrap, and when she turned Barbara was gone. Suppose, she thought, amused, that after all this I shouldn't want Peter? People were taking it pretty much for granted. But she certainly didn't mean to marry  anyone until she felt a little more I stable in her environment again, bolstered up by memories and friends and security. Not even Peter. There was a knock on the door. "Wait," she called peremptorily. "I'm sorry, Muriel," came Peter's voice. "I know I forgot all about you for a moment." Too many people rushed into marriage. If Peter did ask her, she would think it out very carefully, as a scientist should, taking her time. She would weigh all the advantages and disadvantages, and she would make very sure that she and Peter were right for each other before she would... "You must admit," said Peter, "that I only neglected you for something pretty big. You told me so yourself," She picked up the lace wrap to throw it out of sight. It wasn't that she thought there was anything wrong with it, she admitted to herself. She just didn't have the nerve to wear a thing like  that. I "Please," said Peter. She threw off her dressinggown and slipped into the pink wrap. It settled on her like a cloud of perfumed mist. "Come in, Peter," she said. 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Fred Ludekens p j Albert Dorn City, Zon, Stata j T HE females and children worked among the lichen growth, picking off the fattest, ripest leaves for their food and moisture, completing their arc of the circle of symbiosis. The males worked at the surface of the canals, or in open excavations. Their wide, mutated hands chipped into the rock-hard clay, opening a channel which was to be filled with sand and then sealed off with clay on all sides and surface. That water might seep through the sand without evaporation, without loss, from the poles to the equatof of Mars -- seep unimpeded, so that moisture might reach the lichen plants of everyone, so that none might thirst or hunger. The seepage must flow. Not even buried in the dim racial memory had there ever been one who took more than his share, for this would be like the fingers of one hand stealing blood from the fingers of the other. Among the Mars race there were many words for contentment, kinship of each to all. There were words to express the ecstasy of watching the eternal stars, by night and by day, through the thin blackish atmosphere. There were words to express the joy of opening slitted nostrils to breathe deeply in those protected places where the blowing sands did not swirl, of opening folds of rubbery skin to catch the weak rays of the distant Sun. But there were no words for "mine  I as separate from "yours." And there was no urge to cry out, "Why am I here? What is the purpose of it all?' Each had his purpose, serene, unquestioning. Each repaired or extended the seepage canals so that others, unborn, might know the same joys and ecstasies as they. The work was in itself a part of the total joy; and they resisted it no more than healthy lungs resist clear, cool air. So far back that even the concept of beginnings had been forgotten, the interwoven fabric of their symbiotic interdependence seeped through their lives as naturally as the precious water seeped through the canal sands. As far back as that, they had achieved civilization. Their kind of civilization. an impassive face. (Let that, too, be a part of the legend.) Without expression, he looked through the screen at the red land flashing below the ship. But unconsciously he squared his shoulders, breathed deeply, enjoying the virile pull of his uniform over his expanding chst. Resolutely he pushed aside the vision of countless generations of school children, yet to come, repeating the lesson dutifully to their teachers. "Captain Thomas H. Griswold took possession of Mars, June # , # ." No, he must not allow any mood of vanity to spoil his own memories of this moment. It was beside the point that his name would rank with the great names of all times. Still, the history of the moment could not be denied. Lieutenant Atkinson's voice broke through his preoccupation, and saved him the immodest thought of wondering if perhaps his cap visor might not be worn a little more rakishly to one side. He must father a custom, something distinctive of those who had been to Mars -- "Another canal, sir." Below them, a straight line of gray-green stretched to the horizon, contrasting sharply with the red ferrous oxide of the landscape. An entire planet of ferrous oxide -- iron -- steel for the already starving technology of the Western Alliance. The captain felt a momentary irritation that even this narrow swath displaced the precious iron ore. Obviously these canals served no purpose. His ship had circled the planet at its equator, and again from pole to pole. Canals everywhere, but nothing else. Enough time and fuel had been wasted. They must land. Obviously there was no intelligent life. But the history of the moment must not be marred by any haste. There must be no question within the books yet to be written. There must be no accredited voice of criticism raised. "My compliments to Mr. Berkeley," he said harshly to Lt. Atkinson, "and would .he kindly step to the control room?" He paused and added dryly, "At his convenience.' Mister Berkeley, indeed. What was it they chlled the civilian -- an ethnologist? A fellow who was supposed to be an authority on races, civilizations, mores and customs of groups. Well, the man was excess baggage. There would be no races to contact here. A j good thing, too. These civilian j experts with their theories -- show ! them a tooth and they'll dream ! up a monster. Show them a fingernail paring and they'll deduce a civilization from it. Nonsense! "You wanted to see me, Captain?" The voice was young, quiet, controlled. Griswold turned and faced Berkeley. Not only a theorist, but a young theorist. These superbright young men with their sharp blue eyes. A lot of learning and no knowledge. A lot of wisdom and no common sense. He carefully controlled his voice, concealing his lack of respect for the civilian. "Well, Mr. Berkeley, we have quartered the globe. We have seen no evidence of civilization." "You discount the canals, Captain?" Berkeley asked, as if more from curiosity than refutation. "I must discount them," the captain answered decisively. "Over all the planet we have seen no buildings, not even ruins, no evidence at all that intelligence exists here." "I consider straight lines, running half the length of a world, to be evidence of something, sir. It was a flat statement, given without emphasis. Arguments! Arguments! Little men who have to inflate themselves into a stature of importance -- destroy the sacred history of the moment. But quietly now. There must be no memory of petty conflict. "Where are their buildings, Mr. Berkeley?" he asked with patient tolerance. "Where are their factories? The smoke from their factories? The highways? The transportation facilities? Where are the airplanes? Even this thin air would support a fast jet. I do not require they have spaceships, Mr. Berkeley, to concede them intelligence. I do not require they be the equal of Man. I also have some scientific training. And my training tells me I cannot recognize the existence of something where there is no evidence at all.' "The canals," Berkeley answered. His voice also was controlled, for he, too, knew the history of this moment. But his concern was not for his own name in the history books. He knew only too well what its writers did to individuals for the sake of expediency. His concern was that this moment never be one of deep shame for Man. "Perhaps they have no buildings, no factory smoke, because they don't need them. Perhaps they don't have highways because they don't want to go anywhere. Perhaps their concept of living is completely unlike ours." G riswold shrugged his shoulders. "We speak an entirely different language, Mr. Berkeley." "I'm afraid you're right, Captain," Berkeley sighed. "And it might be a tragic thing that we do. Remember, European man spoke a different language from that of the American Indian, the Mayan, Polynesian, African, Indonesian -- " He broke off as if the list were endless. "I ask only that we don't hasten into the same errors all over again." "We can't hover here above the surface forever," Griswold said irritably. "We have quartered the globe. The other experts are anxious to land, so they can get to their work. We have made a search for your civilization and we have not found it." "I withdraw all objections to landing. Captain. You are entirely correct. We must land." The intercom on the wall squawked into life. "Observation to Control. Observation to Control. Network of canals forming a junction ahead.' "Prepare for landing, Lieutenant Atkinson," Griswold commanded sharply. "At the junction." He turned and watched the screen. "There, Mr. Berkeley, dead ahead. A dozen -- at least a dozen of your canals joining at one spot. Surely, if there were a civilization at all, you would find it at stich a spot.' Slowly and carefully, he constructed the pages of history. "I do not wish the implication ever to arise that this ship's commander, or any of its personnel, failed to cooperate in every way with the scientific authorities aboard." "I know that, Captain," Berkeley answered, "And I agree. The junction, then." rjHE sigh of servo-mechanism, the flare of intolerably hot blue flame, and the ship stood motionless above the junction of canals. Ponderously, slowly, she settled; held aloft by the pillars of flame beneath her, directly above the junction, fusing the sand in the canals to glass, exploding their walls with steam. Within their warm and protected burrows beside the canals, slitted nostrils closed, iris of eyes contracted, fluted layers of skin opened and pulled tight, and opened again convulsively in the reflexes of death. There was a slight jar only as the ship settled to the ground, bathed in the mushrooming flame. "A good landirig, Lieutenant," Captain Griswold complimented. "A good landing, indeed." His head came up and he watched the sefeen to see the landscape reappear through the dust and steam. "Prepare to disembark in approximately six hours, Lieutenant. The heat should have subsided sufficiently by then. The ship's officers, the civ -- er -- scientific party, a complement of men. I will lead the way. You, Lieutenant, will carry tke flag and the necessary appurtenances to the ceremony. We will hold it without delay." Berkeley was watching the screen also. He wondered what the effect of the landing heat would be on the canals. He wondered why it had been considered necessary to land squarely on the junction; why Man always, as if instinctively, does the most destructive thing he can. He shrugged it away. Wherever they landed might have been the wrong place. where the heat had not reached, the Mars race began to emerge from their protecting burrows. They had seen the meteor hurtling downward, and it was part of their conditioning to seek their burrows when any threatening phenomenon occurred. Flaming meteors had fallen before, but never in the interlocked racial mind was there memory of one which had fallen directly on a canal junction. Within the fabric of their instinct, they sensed the fused sand, the broken clay walls, the water boiling through the broken walls, wasted. They sensed the waters on the other side of the barrier seeping onward, leaving sand unfilled. Within the nerves of their own bodies they felt the anticipated pangs of tendril roots searching down into the sand for water, and not finding it. The urgency came upon them, all within the region, to remove this meteor; restore the canals as soon as the heat would permit. They began to gather, circling the meteor, circling the scorched ground around it. The urgency of getting at it before there was too much water lost drove them in upon the hot ground. The unaccustomed heat held them back. They milled uncertainly, in increasing numbers, around the meteor.  not asked him to leave the control room during landing operations, Berkeley still stood and watched the screen. At the first appearance of the Mars race emerging from the soil, he exclaimed in great excitement: "There they are! There they are, Captain!' Griswold came over and stood beside him, watching the screen. His eyes widened. "Horrible," he muttered in revulsion. The gorge arose in his throat and stopped his speech for a moment. But history took possession of him again. 'T suppose we will get accustomed to their appearance in tiyie," he conceded. "They're the builders, Captain. Wonderful!" Berkeley exulted. "Those shovel-shaped forelimbs -- they're the builders!" "Perhaps," Griswold agreed. "But in the way a mole or gopher -- still, if they were intelligent enough to be trained for mining operations -- but then you certainly cannot call these things intelligent, Mr. Berkeley." "How do we know, Captain?" But the Captain was looking about vainly for buildings, for factory smoke, for highways. "Lieutenant Atkinson!" he called. "Yes, sir." "Send an immediate order throughout the ship. The Mars things are not to be molested." He glanced at Berkeley as he gave the order, and thert glanced away. "Double the complement of men on the landing party and see that they are fully armed." Then back to Berkeley, "A good leader guards against every contingency. But there will be no , indiscriminate slaughter. You may be assured of that. I am as anxious as you that Man -- " "Thank you, Captain," Berkeley answered. "And the planting of the flag? The taking possession?" "Well, now, Mr. Berkeley, what shall we do, now that we have seen some -- things? Go away? Leave an .entire planet of iron ore to be claimed later by Eastern Alliance? The enemy is not far behind us in their technology, Mr. Berkeley." He warmed to his theme, his head came up, his shoulders back. "Suppose these things are intelligent. Suppose they do have feelings of one kind or another. What would happen to them if the Eastern Alliance laid claim to this planet? Under us, at least, they will have protection. We will set aside reservations where they may live in peace. Obviously they live in burrows in the ground; I see no buildings. Their total food supply must be these miserable plants. What a miserable existence they have now! "We will change that. We will provide them with adequate food, the food to fill their empty stomachs -- if they have stomachs. We will clothe their repulsive nakedness. If they have enough sense to learn, we will give them the pride of self-employment in our mines and factories. We would be less than human, Mr. Berkeley, if we did not acknowledge our duty." The light of noble intention shone in his face. He was swept swept away with his own eloquence. "If," he finished, "we take care of the duty, the destiny will take care of itself I" That was very good. He hoped they would have the grace to quote him on that. It was a fine summing up of his entire character. Berkeley smiled a rueful smile. There was no stopping it. It was not a matter of not planting the flag, not taking possession. The captain was right. If not the Western Alliance, then certainly the Eastern Alliance. His quarrel was not with the captain nor with the duty, but with the destiny. The issue was not to be decided now. It had already been decided -- decided when the first aperaan had crept into the tree nest of another and stolen his mate. Man takes. Whether it be by barbaric rapine, or reluctant acceptance of duty through carefully contrived diplomacy, Man takes. Berkeley turned and made his way out of the control room. its contortions of cooling. The wind whispered dryly over the red landscape, sending up little swirls of dust, eternally shifting it from one place to another. The soil was less hot, and as it cooled, the Mars race pressed inward. Theirs was the urgency to get at this meteor as quickly as possible, remove it, start the water flowing once more. "Observation reports ground cool enough for landing!" The magic words seemed to sing into the control cabin. "Summon all landing party," Captain Griswold commanded immediately. The signal bells rang throughout the ship. The bell in the supercargo cabin rang also. With the other scientists, Berkeley dressed in his protecting suit, fitted the clear glassite oxygen helmet over his head, fastened it. Together with the rest, he stood at the designated airlock to await the captain's coming. And the captain did not keep them waiting. At precisely the right moment, with only a flicker of a side glance at the photographic equipment, the captain strode ahead of his officers to the airlock. The sealing doors of the cbrridor behind them closed, shutting off the entire party  making the corridor itself into a great airlock. There was a long Sigh, and the great beams of the locks moved ponderouslyagainst their weight. There was the rush of air from the corridor as the heavier pressure tushed out through the opening locks, to equalize with the thin air of Mars. With the air rushed outward fungus spores, virus, microbes; most of them to perish under the alien conditions, but some to survive -- and thrive. The red light above the lock was blinking on-offon-off. The officers, the scientists, the armed men, watched the light intently. It blinked off for the last time. The locks were open. The great ramp settled to the ground. I N ordered, military file, the captain at their head, the landing party passed down the corridor, through the locks, out upon the ramp beneath the blueblack sky; and down to the red soil. Captain Griswold was the first man to set foot on Mars, June #, #. The photographers were second. Now the Mars race was moving closer to the ship, but the ground was still too hot for their unprotected feet. The pressing need for removing the meteor possessed them. The movement of the men disembarking from the ship was to them no more than another unintelligible aspect of this incredible meteor. The sound of a bugle pierced the thin air, picked up by the loudspeaker from thC ship, reverberating through their helmets. The landing party formed a semi-circle at the foot of the ramp. Captain Griswold, his face as rigidly set as the marble statuary of him to follow, reached out and took the flag from Lieutenant Atkinson. He planted it firmly, without false motion, in the framework one of the men had set upon the baked ground to receive it. He pointed to the north, the south, the east, the west. He brought his hands together, palms downward, arms fully outstretched in front of him. He spread his arms wide open and down, then back together and up; completing a circle which encompassed all the planet. He held out his right hand and received the scroll from Lieutenant Atkinson. With a decisive gesture, not quite theatrical, he unfurled the scroll. He read in a voice firm enough to impress all posterity; "By virtue of authority invested in me from the Supreme Council of the Western Alliance, the only true representatives of Earth and Man, I take possession of all this planet in the name of our President, the Supreme Council, the Western Alliance, Earth, and in the name of God." T HE ground was cool enough now that their feet might bear it. The pain was great, but it was lost in the greater pain of feeling meteor had brought to their canals. The Mars race began to press inward, inexorably. It was in the anticlimactic moment, following the possession ceremony, when men milled around in uncertainty, that Lt. Atkinson saw the Mars race had come closer and were still moving. "The monsters!" he exclaimed in horror. "They're attacking!" Berkeley looked, and from the little gestures of movement out of his long training he deduced their true motive. "Not against us!" he cried. "The ship." Perhaps his words were more unfortunate than his silence might have been; for the ship was of greater concern to Captain Griswold than his own person. "Halt!" Griswold shouted toward the approaching Mars race. "Halt or I'll fire!" The Mars race paid no heed. Slowly they came forward, each step on the hot ground a torture, but a pain which could be borne. The greater torture, the one they could not bear, was the ache to press against this meteor, pash it away, that they might dig the juncture clean again. As a man whose breath is stopped fights frantically for air, concerned with nothing else, so they felt the desperation of drying sands. They came on. "For the last time," Griswold shouted, "halt!" He made a motion with his hands, as if to push them back, as if to convey his meaning by signs. Involuntarily, then, his eyes sought those of Berkeley. A look of pleading, helplessness. Berkeley met the glance and read the anxiety there, man to arouse posterity's rage or contempt. It was a brief glance only from both men and it was over. Captain Griswold's head came up; his shoulders straightened in the face of the oncoming monsters. They were close now, and coming closer. As always, the experts were free with their advice when it was not needed. When the chips were down, they could do no more than smirk and shrug a helpless shoulder. He gave the command, and now there was no uncertainty. "Fire!" T HE celebration was being held in the Great Stadium, the largest, most costly structure that Man had ever built. It was a fitting structure for the more important football games; and used on occasion, if they could be fitted in without upsetting the schedule, for State affairs. Now the stadium was filled to capacity, its floor churned by the careless feet of the thousands upon 'thousands who had managed to obtain an entrance. From the quartermilehigh tiers of seats, from the floor of the stadium, the shouts welled up, washing over the platform at the North end. "Griswold! Griswold!" It was not yet time for history to assess the justice of the massacre. The President raised his hand. The battery of video cameras picked up each move. "Our hopes, our fears, our hearts, our prayers rode through every spacedark, starflecked mile with these glorious pioneers." He turned then to the captain. "For the people of Earth, Admiral Griswold, this medal. A new medal for a Guider of Destiny, Maker of Empire, Son of Man!" The voice faltered, stopped. The crowd on the floor of the stadium was pressing outward from the center, screaming m pain and terror. At the moment when the people should be quiet, rapt in reverence, they were emptying the floor of the stadium. ing pressed back and out, as a great weight pushes its way through water. Those who could move outward no farther were crushed where they stood. And then the ship appeared. Hazy of outline, shimmering with impossible angles, seen by its glinting fire of light rather than by its solid form, as if its reality were in some other dimension and this only a projection, the ship appeared. The President's hand reached out and gripped Griswold's shoulder as he leaned back and back, trying to determine its vast height. A silence then clutched the crowd -- a terrified silence. A full minute passed. Even on the platform, where all the pioneers of Mars were assembled with Earth's dignitaries, even there the people cowered back away from this unseeable, unknowable horror. But one man leaned forward instead, frantically studying the shimmering outline of the ship. One man -- Berkeley. With the training of the ethnologist, a man who really can deduce an entire civilization from mystifying data, he recognized the tremendous import. At the end of that minute, without warning, a group of figures hovered in the air near the floor of the stadium, assessed their form, their color, the increasing solidity of the humanoids. There are some movements, some gestures, common to all things of intelligence -- the pause, the resolution, the lift of pride. "Nor he screamed and started forward. "Oh, no! We're civilized. We're intelligent!" He was pulled back, as in his terror he tried to leap from the platform to get at the humanoids. Held there, unable to move, he read the meaning of the actions of the group hovering near the ship. One flashed a shining tentacle around, as if to point to the stadium, the pitifully small spaceship on display, the crowds of people. The leader manifestly ignored him. He flowed forward a pace, his ovoid head held high in pride and arrogance. He pointed a tentacle toward the south end of the stadium, and a pillar of leaping flame arose; fed with no fuel, never to cease its fire, the symbol of possession. He pointed his tentacles to the north, the south, the east, the west. He motioned with his tentacles, as if to encircle all of Earth. He unfurled a scroll and began to read. v.v. #t  Perhaps half of all science fiction today is based on the robot theme -- the mechanical brain, the engine that thinks. V But the mechanical Ijrain is an uctuality, not fiction. Do you know how it works ? Do you know what it can do today and what it will be able to do tomorrow? Can you follow not only the plot but the science of your favorite science fiction writer? For this you moat read John Diebold's exciting three-part true story of the thinking machine. See special offer below. I enclose for which send me The Nation weekly for ten weeks, my subscription to include John Diebold's essay on Science Fiction! Name -- Address -- w w wwvwwywAw By Scientific Journey from the region of the Iron Curtain -- either side of it. Fly him some # miles along a Great Circle route, timing your arrival to coincide with daybreak. Then parachute him to the ground, after having made sure first that there is no roa# sign, no store front, no advertising of any kind and in general no scrap of reading matter for miles around -- and also nobody who could answer a question. Instruct your botanist that he'll be picked up just as soon as he convinces you by radio that he has identified his location; general terms like "the Kalahari desert" or "Java" will be acceptable. The very first thing your botanist is likely to see will make him believe that the task is an easy one... a road, lined on both sides, as far as the eye can reach, with eucalyptus trees. There are also small groves of eucalyptus off the road; in fact, three or four different varieties can be found within easy walking distance. Now, eucalyptus is as typically Australian as the platypus -- but what may cause our botanist some dismay is that clumps of bamboo nestle between and near some of the tall trees. Seeing these, he will probably wish that he had read something on the flora of Australia more recently than at the time he took his degree. The climate of northern Australia, of course, is such that bamboo can grow there -- but does it? Possibly it has been introduced by Whites, or by the Chinese who can't live without bamboo -- but once you start considering artificial introduction, you have to be twice as careful. Walking along, our botanist will see something that is also very typical... of a landscape half way around the planet from Australia. There are half a dozen century plants, growing close to each other. Their place of origin is, of course, the southwestern part of the North American continent. Eucalyptus and century plants cannot occur together without the intervention of Man, our botanist thinks. Therefore, one has been introduced. He notes that the century plants are in the minority by far. A T the turn of the road, the landscape suddenly changes. There is a big grove of lemon trees, which normally would point to the Mediterranean -- but this is a plantation. And beyond the plantation of comparatively small lemon trees, there are the heavy green-and-gold fountain sprays of date palms, scores and scores of them. This, of course, should indicate the general region of Arabia, Turkey, Palestine or North East Africa -- but high above the date palms stretch lofty Royal palms, and other slender stems in the distance might well be coconut palms. Nearby, three banana plants rise from a clump of short bamboo, but the fleeting impression of Central America -- the climate doesn't feel right either -- is destroyed by a row of still another kind of palms. These startle the European botanist for a moment. They certainly aren't date, nor are they the Royal Palm, even though at first glance they bear some slight resemblance to each. Searching back through his memory, he may conclude that they are the type called Washingtonias; trouble is, he has specialized in the flora of the northern tundra. If there were only something he could be sure of... Here is a stand of pines. From a distance, they look somewhat like poor specimens of the European Pinus sylvestris; and the resemblance holds in some respects even when they are seen close by. Still, there are pronounced differences -- and not far from that stand of pines, sheltered by two big eucalyptus trees and flanked by several century plants, there grows a tree fern! By this time, the botanist is either ready to weep or is already doing so because of the hopelessly tangled botanical mess around him. So we may as well take pity on him and tell him where he is: San Diego County, in California. No, I do not seriously advocate kidnapping botanists from the Iron Curtain area and flying them non-stop to San Diego; these were just some idle thoughts that crossed my mind as Chesley Bonestell drove me through this complex landscape on the road from San Diego to Palomar Mountain. What got me going was the fact that the plants which really belong there are around, but in a minority. The only native plant which appeared in any quantity was the Torrey pine, which does not grow elsewhere but which also requires specialized knowledge (or experience) to label properly. Practically all of the rest -- the easily identified plants which greet the eye everywhere -- are imports. The half-dozen varieties of eucalyptus are there because somebody in California once thought that eucalyptus was a valuable timber tree, whereas actually its wood is not good for building, is poor for furniture and not even good for firewood. The planted for obvious reasons not primarily to provide Hollywood with Arab settings. The lemon and orange groves do not really require explanation -- but they dominate the landscape. I spent all of March on the road, if that phrase can be used with reference to a trip which was made exclusively by air. On the flight home from Denver (where I merely changed airlines) I added it up : the total was around # miles. It was a lecture tour -- several cities in Oklahoma and eastern Texas, then El Paso (no time for a side tfip to the White Sands Proving Ground, unfortunately), then Pasadena, and after that home to New York, with lecture stopovers in Utah and Wyoming. I have spoken with other people who have gone on such tours and they often used terms like a "grind," or "hard work" and so forth. I don't deny that it is hard work, but it was certainly not a "grind" -- # found something interesting to see wherever I went. One night professor Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the head of the Air Force's Department of Space Medicine, drove me around. There were clumps of opuntias growing along the roadside, and he told me how local farmers, using surplus flame throwers, burn the spines of the plants, while their cattle wait eagerly behind them "as if those things were baked apples' Strughold did not tell this as a simple fact; it was somewhat more of a complaint -- for he had told the story at a party in Washington, and somebody had remarked skeptically that "Dr. Strughold has the most unusual ideas of what can be done." It was not until Life magazine ran a picturespread on this practice that he was believed. This conversation took place while we went to see Dr. Ulrich G. Luft, former member of a Mt. Everest expedition and expert on medical problems of high altitude aviation. We were still talking about it when Dr. Luft's son brought in a bucket of fossils which they had found while gardening. Question : "What are they?" For once I was lucky. Even without any reference books, I could see that they were the shells of ammonites, shelled octopi which were quite common in the seas of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Judging from the locality I could be even more specific: ammonites from the Niobrara sea of the Upper Cretaceous. I don't know the opinion of the local chamber of commerce, but to me San Antdn is the place where I had to classify a bucketful of fossils without preparation, or warning. Likewise, El Paso is not merely the airport nearest the White Sands Proving Ground, but the city where three unexpected events happened all in one day. One of them was that T unexpectedly met Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, who had come to my lecture. The second was that I saw my first genuine western dust storm -- I know they're not rare, but I had never been in one before. My companions were somewhat unhappy about it, because they had wanted to show me their city from a lookout point -- and if it had been my fifth or sixth dust storm, I suppose I might have felt the same way. As it was, I welcomed it, as I did my first earthquake twelve years ago (Bob Heinlein still claims that he arranged it for me). The third unexpected event had actually preceded the dust storm; I had been informed in the morning that a visit to Fort Bliss would be welcomed and that the commanding officer, General Mickelsen, had set some time aside for me. Then I was informed that a number of their "graduates" were assembled in the basement of building suchand-such, and that it would be appreciated if I spoke to them. On the way over, I tried to think of something that the "graduates" of Fort Bliss might not know about rockets or missiles. lem was still unsolved. But, leaning against a Nike missile, I saw the pumping unit of a V-#, and then I had something to tell. The only danger left was that Wernher von Braun, from whom I had the story, had told it to these people also. In a small liquid fuel rocket, as Science Fiction are apt to know, you can feed the rocket motor by simply pressurizing the two tanks holding the fuel and the oxidizer. Of course, fairly strong tanks are required to withstand a pressurization of some # pounds per square inch, but in a small rocket this does not constitute much of a problem. As the rocket grows in overall size, however, a considerable weight penalty begins to creep in if you continue pressurizing the tanks; and once the rocket has a take-off weight of, say, a ton or more, you have to pump the fuel. Then the tanks can be comparatively light, since they hold the fuel in the same P manner as the fu'el tanks in ears and planes, while the job of force feeding the motor is done by the pumps. It was at the time when the Peenemiinde Institute was doing preliminary work on the V-# that the pump problem came up in earnest. Wernher on Braun first assigned a man to make a general study about pumps; the man came up with the reply that there didn't seem to be anything which spoke very strongly either in favor or against piston pumps or centrifugal pumps and that the choice would depend on the "status of the art" -- the actual accomplishments of pump builders. A conference with a manufacf turer was set up, and von Braun arrived with some preliminary specifications, convinced that at one point or another the engineers would tell him that this or that "simply couldn't be done." He began by telling them that he needed two pumps, each of which wotild have to handle some # pounds of liquid per second. This was greeted by a respectful silence. He continued that the low pressure end would be just about # lbs. per square inch, while the high pressure end would have to deliver some # lbs. per second. Still silence. Then he added that the pressure at the high pressure end would have to be kept within a fraction of one per cent of the value. Still silence. It was necessary, furthermore, he explained, that the pump should not need more than a very few seconds from standstill to full delivery pressure. And since nobody had yet said that all this was impossible, he concluded by pointing out that these pumps must be capable of being stored for many months, yet at any time must be ready for instant use. Whereupon one of the pump engineers said that all this simply amounted to a plain, everyday firefighters' pump. Such a pump has to have high delivery pressure, because the firefighter has to shoot the water jet over a considerable distance. The pressure must be very steady; otherwise the fireman wouldn't aim properly. And since fires happen relatively infrequently and at unpredictable moments, the equipment obviously must function perfectly after long storage and reach full delivery pressure swiftly, since in fire fighting seconds may count. The moral of the story is, of course, that if you build a spaceship and need a synchronized double hyperframmis, don't sit down and design it... it might be in use in the biscuit industry. valley of the sun," and is a prime tourist attraction. Everybody is greatly surprised to learn that you came there on business. But, as usual, I learned a few things. It was one of the rare times in my life when I got a naked-eye view of the planet Mercury. In fact, there was quite a nice astronomical display: Venus was brilliant in the evening sky (the telescope proved her to be in the phase which is called lima fallax when applied to the moon) ; Jupiter was higher up, and Mars off to one side of Venus. But what was more interesting to me was the collection of bells at the college in Tempe, Arizona. Ranchers and farmers continually find them, and when they see that there are two stars on one side and the letters U.S. on the other, they assume that the bells are government property and turn them in to the college -- which doesn't bother to pass them on, because the government doesn't care anymore. The bells are camel bells. Shortly before the Civil War, a number of people reasoned as follows: "We are now conquering the West, The area between present-day forts and presentday and future settlements is mostly desert. In North Africa, no animal is as useful in the desert as the camel. Hence camel will be useful in the West." U. S. officers were sent to Egypt to buy camels and import camel drivers. Camels were bred in this country and sent West. There . were the beginnings of a U.S. camel cavalry -- but then things began to go wrong. The Civil War came along and interrupted proceedings; also, it turned out that while the camel's feet are admirably suited to the sandy deserts of Africa and Arabia, they do not stand up well in the stony deserts of our West. For a while camels did industrial load carrying. A number escaped; others were set free by disappointed owners, who turned to horses and burros instead. There were wild camels for a short time, but they made themselves quite obnoxious -- no difficulty at all for a camel -- and were shot. Only two things remain of this episode -- the bells, with the let' ters U.S.; and rumors that offspring of thosecamels still roam the western deserts. The scientists  at Tempe are certain that no camels roam in their vicinity ; but they concede that possibility for the areas bordering Mexico, where there are sandy deserts. Speaking about the difference i in the deserts: you can't grow the desert plants of Africa in the  Arizona desert -- the sun willkill I them off. This, at least, is the experience of the experts in the fabulous Desert Botanical Garden near Phoenix. When I got there -- my hostess at the Hudson Lodge had insisted this was something I had to see -- I was puzzled by a metal structure. It did not look reasonable, being merely a skeleton of angle iron supporting a lot of parallel metal slats. It certainly would not keep out the rain (if that was the intention), and the plants growing there did not look as though they needed anything to hold onto while climbing. In fqct, they didn't look as if they could climb, even if you promised them fertilizer. Well, as old Dr. W. Taylor Marshall explained, it was supposed to do something entirely different -- namely to provide a diffused shade for his collection of African desert plants. IT was also Dr. Marshall who told me a large number of facts about the giant saguaro cacti, which is the way they spell the name in Arizona -- in botanical handbooks, the spelling sahuaro seems to be preferred. In Europe, they are known as "pillar cacti," which I consider a nice descriptive term. The botanical name is Cereus giganteu s. Easterners who see them for the first time in tjieir natural habitat often wonder whether the plant is still alive. There it stands, stiff and inflexible, dusty and dry in the desert. Many of them are covered with holes, about an inch across, made by woodpeckers. After the woodpeckers leave, a tiny sparrowsized bird, the elf owl, takes over the hole. Those saguaros are among the slowestgrowing plants. Dr. Marshall has a collection labeled by age -- #, #, #, # years and so on -- all of which you could keep on your desk in pots so far as size goes -- a #year-old specimen was barely higher than my knee. But those that grew outside were more than, ten feet tall; they count a century of growth for every six feet. When they are very young, the sun is their enemy, for a oneyear-old saguaro, being about the size of a pea, can grow only in the shade of a bush. Fifty years later, the bush is gone, and yet the cactus is still very young, but strong enough to live in direct sunlight. They don't have a tap root, but a horizontal root system which, in an old and massive specimen, may cover a circular area sixty feet in diameter. When it rains, they can absorb water at a rate which is not rivaled by any plant on earth; and they are built accordingly. When you look at them, with their vertical #S ridges, you visualize a wooden skeleton something like that of an airliner's fuselage: long stringers held in place by circular members. Well, it is somewhat like that -- the long stringers, vertical in this case, are there. But they join at irregular intervals, and each joint is between two "stringers" only; there are no circular members; the plant can expand fast when there is a chance of getting water. When you see a picture of a saguaro, you usually recognize it by its odd branches; but every once in a while you find one which really looks like a pillar. I wasn't there long enough to see one in person, but I was shown a photograph of a #-foot straight and unbranched specimen, which had grown up in a sheltered spot. According to Dr. Marshall, this would be the norm if they were all sheltered -- the branching merely serves to balance the plant. They have #-mile winds on occasion, and since Cereus giganteus does not have a tap root, such a wind often forces it out of plumb. Then it simply grows a branch to stabilize itself. It is not known just how this works -- Dr. Strughold, with whom I discussed this later, guessed that it might be the tensed tissue. At any event, the branch does not stop growing when it is large enough and heavy enough to serve the purpose of balancing -- it keeps growing, overbalancing the whole in the other direction, and so a new branch has to form to counteract the first. Dr. Marshall told me that he did not feel certain whether he should accept this explanation, and took a straight saguaro cactus, planting it at an angle. It branched... I can't leave off without telling the best remark I heard during the whole trip. The scene: a restaurant at the San Diego waterfront, at dinner time. The participants: two scientists from the Scripps Oceanographic Institute at La Jolla, California, Chesley Bonestell and myself. The topic of discussion: oceanographic expeditions -- in particular, the last one of the Scripps Institute. "Yes," said Dr. Hamilton, talking about the expedition: "they went to the Marquesas, and to the Tonga islands. They made a side trip to Samoa, and then went to Oahu. And then they came home to La Jolla and demanded a vacation!" I am annoyed by the nonsense of " weightlessness ." Far out in space, if we could get there, maybe, but why should something be weightless close to Earth? Recently some scientists have even said that one could be weightless in the atmosphere. If rockets got to be weightless, they would fly off into space and not fall back.  Charles D. Collins #Fairway Dr. Santa Maria, Calif. It is evident that you think "weightlessness" means that the body which is weightless is outside any gravitational field, specifically that of the Earth. Just because Jules Verne and H. G. Wells indulged in muddled and inconclusive thinking about the actions of gravity, this does not have to go on forever. Let's try to clear up the problem by first stating what "weight" is. The definition which should be taught in school (but isn't, as I well know) is that weight is the result of fighting or impeding the pull of gravity. As I Sit here in front of my typewriter, my body cannot follow the pull of gravity It is supported by a chair, the chair is kept from following the pull of gravity by the floor, the floor is, in turn, supported by the ground. The result is that I am prevented from falling, which gives the sensation of weight. If I were not prevented from falling in other words, if I could follow the pull of gravity freely -- I would not feel any weight. (, Therefore; a rocket which falls back from its peak altitude of, say, # miles is under the influence of gravity, all right, but weightless since nothing impedes its fall until it enters the denser layers of the atmosphere. Recently I heard a scientist say that a body could be weightier and still have its full inertia. Did I understand this correctly and if l did, how can this be? W. A. Robertson # Canyon Drive Santa Monica, Calif. First, please read my reply to Mr. Collins as to the definition of weight. But whether weightlessness occurs inside a gravitational field, near a space station, for example, or so far from any gravitational field that it is due simply to the absence of gravitation, the inertia of a moving body is not changed. This can be realized best by looking at the formula for the inertia (more precisely the kinetic energy) of a body. It reads m# times v #  you multiply half of its mass by the square of its velocity. IVo factor which has anything to do with a gravitational field appears in this formula. It is merely a question of the body's mass and its velocity. While the concept of something as massive as an iron ball, without weight but with all its inertia, might be strange at first glance, it is nevertheless correct. The question voted among us as "the question we'd most like Ley to discuss" is the following: What is the basis of Einstein's Theory of Relativity? Martin Evans, Pres. Miami Beach S.F. Club # Penn Ave. Miami Beach #, Fla. This is a hard question indeed, partly because of the subject matter, partly because different people are likely to have different opinions as to what they regard as the most important tenet ; the tendency then being to regard this as the "basic" idea. One man may quote Minkowski's statement "space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two retains an independent existence" and consider the concept of spacetime the "basis." Another man may feel that the elimination of the "ether" and the explanation of gravity as a kind of "illusion" is the most important. Still others might insist, with much justification, that the "basic" thoughts are those which got Einstein started ; like the "contraction" of George Francis FitzGerald, published by him in # and, about half a year later, by Hendrick Antoon Lorentz, and now usually called the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction. Or the concept of the velocity of light as the limiting velocity, first published by Jules Henri Poincare in #, a full year before Einstein announced his. Poincar stated le principe de Ui relativite by saying that the laws of physical phenomena must be the same both for a fixed and a uniformly moving observer, so that the observer himself cannot possibly tell whether he is in motion or not. Then he continued that this required une mecanique entierement nouvelle, qui serait surtout caracterisee par ce fait qu'aucune vitesse ne pouvait de passer celle de la lufiere. In English: "an entirely new concept which, above all, is characterized by the fact that no speed can surpass that of light." Any one of the concepts mentioned may be considered "the basis," but I think that most physicists might agree that Poincare's enunciation of the principles is "it." When young Mr. Mozart played his gay '"'Posthorn" Serenade in Archbishop Colloredo's palace, the bite of the strings was close and crisp, the bom belled boldly in your ear. You cat hear it today like this, eoo, but not in Carnegie Hall. Mozart, like many another, might almost have written ? his music to order (for today's wonderful, high fidelity home-music equipment. Musical time-travel, evening after evening, is here now -- for the man who knows how to pick his amplifier, turntable, tuner, pickup, speaker-system tested-in-the-hame reports on new hi-fi equipment, its handsome installation picture-pages and lively feature articles. Current atttaction : a comparative report on the entire recorded works of Mozart, by C. G. Burke. Why miss it? High fidelity The Magazine for Music Listeners Charles Fowler, Editor # Publishing House, Great Barrington, Mass.  #, # years #, I year Name , . Address... Published Bi-Monthly ayt Gt.Barrin.gton, Mass. Foreign Postoge # per year diplomatic immunity He said he wasn't immortal -- btf nothing could kill him. Still, if the Earth was to live as a free world, he had to die. Q fl men," the Ambassador waved them into the very special suite the State Department had given him. "Please be seated." Colonel Cercy accepted a chair, trying to size up the individual who had all Washington chewing its fingernails. The Ambassador hardly looked like a menace. He was of medium height and slight build, dressed in a conservative brown tweed suit that the State Department had given him. His face was intelligent, finely molded and aloof. As human as a human, Cercy thought, studying the alien with bleak, impersonal eyes. "How may I serve you?" the Ambassador asked, smiling. "The President has put me in charge of your case," Cercy said. "I've studied Professor Darrig's reports -- " he nodded at the scientist beside him -- "but I'd like to jear the whole thing for myself." "Of course," the alien said, lighting a cigarette. He seemed genuinely pleased to be asTced; . which was interesting, Cercy thought. In the week since he had landed, every  important scientist in the country had been at him. But in a pinch they call the Army, Cercy reminded himself. He settled back in his chair, both hands jammed carelessly in his pockets. His right hand was resting on the butt of a .#, the safety off. "as an afhbassadorat-large, representing an empire that stretches half-way across the Galaxy. I wish to extend the welcome of my people and to invite you to join our organization." "I see," Cercy replied. "Some of the scientists got the impression that participation was compulsory." "You will join," the Ambassador said, blowing smoke through his nostrils. Cercy could see Darrig stiffen in his chair and bite his Up. Cercy moved the automatic to a position where he could draw it easily. "How did you find us?" he asked. "We ambassadorsat-large are each assigned an unexplored section of space," the alien said. "We examine each starsystem in that region for planets, and each planet for intelligent life. Intelligent life is rare in the Galaxy, you know." Cercy nodded, although he hadn't been aware of the fact. "When we find such a planet, we land, as I did, and prepare the inhabitants for their part in our organization." "How will your people know that you have found intelligent life?" Cercy asked. "There is a sending mechanism that is part of our structure," the Ambassador answered. "It is triggered when we reach an inhabited planet. This signal is beamed continually into space, to an effective range of several thousand light-years. Follow-up crews are continuaUy sweeping through the limits of the reception area of each Ambassador, listening for such messages. Detecting one, a colonizing team follows it to the planet." He tapped his cigarette delicately on the edge of an ash tray. "This method has definite advantages over sending combined colonization and exploration teams obviously. It avoids the necessity of equipping large forces for what may be decades of searching." "Sure." Cercy's face was expressionless. "Would you tell me more about this message?' "There isn't much more you need know. The beam is not detectable by your methods and, therefore, cannot be jammed The message continues as long as I am alive." v sharply, glancing at Cercy. "If you stopped broadcasting," Cercy said casually, "our planet would never be found." "Not until this section of space was resurveyed," the diplomat agreed. "Very well. As a duly appointed representative of the President of the United States, I ask you to stop transmitting. We don't choose to become part of your empire." "I'm sorry," the Ambassador said. He shrugged his shoulders easily. Cercy wondered how many times he had played this scene on how many other planets. "There's really nothing I can do." He stood up. "Then you won't stop?" "I can t. X have no control over the sending, once it's activated." The diplomat turned and walked to the window. "However, I have prepared a philosophy for you. It is my duty, as your Ambassador, to ease the shock of transition as much as possible. This philosophy will make it instantly apparent that -- " As the Ambassador reached the window, Cercy I s gun was out of his pocket and roaring. He squeezed six rounds in almost a single explosion, aiming at the Ambassador's head and back. Then an uncontrollable shudder ran through him. The Ambassador was no longer there! each other. Darrig muttered something about ghosts. Then, just as suddenly, the Ambassador was back. "You didn't think," he said, "that it would be as easy as all that, did you? We Ambassadors have, necessarily, a certain diplomatic immunity." He fingered one of the bullet holes in the wall. "In case you don't understand, let me put it this way. It is not in your power to kill me. You couldn't even understand the na ture of my defense." He looked at them, and in that moment Cercy felt the Ambassador's complete alienness. "Good day, gentlemen," he said. Darrig and Cercy walked silently back to the control room. Neither had really expected that the Ambassador would be killed so easily; but it bad still been a shock when the slugs had failed. "I suppose you saw it all, Malley?" Cercy asked, when he reached the control room. The thin, balding psychiatrist nodded sadly. "Got it on film, too." "I wonder what his philosophy is," Darrig mused, half to himself. "It was illogical to expect it would work. No race would send an ambassador with a message like that and expect him to live through it. Unless -- " "Unless what?" "Unless he had a pretty effective defense," the psychiatrist finished unhappily. Cercy walked across the room and looked at the video panel. The Ambassador's suite was very special. It had been hurriedly constructed two days after he had landed and delivered his message: The suite was steel and lead lined, filled with video and movie cameras, recorders, and a variety of other things.  It was the last word in elaborate death cells. In the screen, Cercy could see the Ambassador sitting at a table. He was typing on a little portable the Government had given him. "Hey, Harrison!" Cercy called. "Might as well go ahead with Plan Two." Harrison came out of a side room where he had been examining the circuits leading to the Ambassador's suite. Methodically . he checked his pressure gauges, set the controls and looked at Cercy. "Now?" he asked. "Now." Cercy watched the screen. The Ambassador was still typing. Suddenly, as Harrison sent home the switch, the room was engulfed in flames. Fire blasted out of concealed holes in the walls, poured from the ceiling and floor. In a moment, the room was like the inside of a blast furnace. Cercy let it burn for two min' utes, then motioned Harrison to cut the switch. They stared at the roasted room. They were looking, hopefully, for a charred corpse. But the Ambassador reappeared beside his desk, looking ' ruefully at the charred typewriter. He was completely unsinged. "Could you get me another typewriter?" he asked, looking directly at one of the hidden projectors. "I'm setting down philosophy for you ungrateful wretches." He seated himself in the wreckage of an armchai. In a moment, he was apparently asleep. " A LL right, everyone grab a seat," Cercy said. "Time for a council of war." Malley straddled a chair backward. Harrison lighted a pipe as he sat down, slowly puffing it into life. "Now, then," Cercy said. "The Government has dropped this squarely in our laps. We have to kill the Ambassador -- obviously. I've been put in charge." Cercy grinned with regret. "Probably because no one higher up wants the responsibility of failure. And I've selected you three as my staff. We can have anything we want, any assistance or advice we need. All right. Any ideas?" "How about Plan Three?" Harrison asked. "We'll get to that," Cercy said. "But I don't believe it's going to work." "I don't either," Darrig agreed. "We don't even know the nature of his defense." "That's the first order of business. Malley, take all our data so far, and get someone to feed it into the Derichman Analyzer. You know the stuff we want. What properties has X, if X can do thus and thus?" "Right," Malley said. He left, muttering something about the ascendancy of the physical sciences. "Harrison," Cercy asked, "is Plan Three set up?" "Sure." "Give it a try." While Harrison was making his last adjustments, Cercy watched Darrig. The plump little physicist was staring thoughtfully into space, muttering to himself. Cercy hoped he would come up with something. He was expecting great things of Darrig. Knowing the impossibility of working with great numbers of people, Cercy had picked his staff with care. Quality was what he wanted. With that in mind, he had chosen Harrison first. The stocky, sour-faced engineer had a reputation for being able to build anything, given half an idea of how it worked. Cercy had selected Malley, the psychiatrist, because he wasn't was going to be a purely physical problem. Darrig was a mathematical physicist, but his restless, curious mind had come up with some interesting theories in other fields. He was the only one of the four who was really interested in the Ambassador as an intellectual problem. "He's like Metal Old Man," Darrig said finally.  # "What's that?" "Haven't you ever heard the story of Metal Old Man? Well, he was a monster covered with black frietal armor. He was met by MonsterSlayer, an Apache culture hero. MonsterSlayer, after many attempts, finally killed Metal Old Man." "How did he do it?" "Shot him in the armpit. He didn't have any armor there." "Fine," Cercy grinned. "Ask our Ambassador to raise his arm." "All set?" Harrison called. "Fine. Go." In the Ambassador's room, an invisible spray of gamma rays silently began to flood the room with deadly radiation. But there was no Ambassador to receive them. "That's enough," Cercy said, after a while. "That would kill a herd of elephants." But the Ambassador stayed invisible for five hours, until some of the radioactivity had abated. Then he appeared again. "I'm still waiting for that typewriter," he said. port." M alley handed Cercy a sheaf of paper?. "This is the final formulation, boiled down." Cercy read it aloud: "The simplest defense against any and all weapons, is to become each particular weapon." "Great," Harrison said. "What does it mean?" "It means," Dairig explained, "that when we attack the Ambassador with fire, he turns into fire. Shoot at him, and he turns into a bullet -- until the menace is gone, and then he changes back again." He took the papers out of Cercy' a hand and riffled through them. "Hmm. Wonder if there's any historical parallel? Don't suppose so." He raised his head. "Although this isn't conclusive, it seems logical enough. Any other defense would involve recognition of the weapon first, then, an appraisal, then a countermove predicated on the potentialities of the weapon. The Ambassador's defense would be a lot faster and safer. He wouldn't have to recognize the weapon. I suppose his body simply identifies, in some way, with the menace at hand." "Did the Analyzer say there was any way of breaking this defense?" Cercy asked. "The Analyzer stated definitely that there was no way, if the premise were true," Malley answered gloomily. "We can discard that judgment," Darrig said. "The machine is limited." "But we still haven't got any way of stopping him," Malley pointed out. "And he's still broad casting that beam." Cercy thought for a moment. "Call in every expert you can find. We're going to throw the book at the Ambassador. I know' he said, looking at Darrig's dubious expression, "but we have to try." every combination and permutation of death was thrown at the Ambassador. He was showi ered with weapons, ranging from  Stone-Age axes to modern highpowered rifles, peppered with hand grenades, drowned in acid, suffocated in poison gas. He kept shrugging his shoulI ders philosophically, and continued to work on the new type! writer they had given him. j Bacteria was piped in, first the  known germ diseases, then mui tated species. The diplomat didn't even sneeze. I He was showered with electricity, radiation, wooden weap ons, iron weapons, copper weapI ons, brass weapons, uranium I weapons -- anything and everything, just to cover all possibilities. He didn't suffer a scratch, but i his room looked as though a barroom brawl had been going on in it continually for fifty years. Malley was working on an idea of his own, as was Darrig. The physicist interrupted himself long enough to remind Cercy of the Baldur myth. Baldur had been showered with every kind of weapon and remained unscathed, because everything on Earth had promised to love him. Everything, except the mistletoe. When a little twig of it was shot at him, he died. Cercy turned away impatiently, but had an order of mistletoe sent up, just in case. It was, at least, no less effective than the explosive shells or the bow and arrow. It did nothing except lend an oddly festive air to the battered room. After a week of this, they moved the unprotesting Ambassador into a newer, bigger, stronger death cell. They were unable to venture into his old one because of the radioactivity and micro-organisms. The Ambassador went back to work at his typewriter. All his previous attempts had been burned, torn or eaten away. "Let's go talk to him," Darrig suggested, after another day had passed. Cercy agreed. For the moment, they were out of ideas. the Ambassador said, so cheerfully that Cercy felt sick. "I'm sorry # can't offer you anything. Through an oversight, I haven't been given any food or water for about ten days. Not that it matters, of course.", "Glad to hear it," Cercy said. The Ambassador hardly looked as if he had been facing all the violence Earth had to offer. On the contrary, Cercy and his men looked as though they had been under bombardment. "YouVe got quite a defense there," Malley said conversationally. "Glad you like it." "Would you mind telling us how it works?" Darrig asked innocently. "Don't you know?" "We think so. You become what is attacking yu. Is that right?" "Certainly," the Ambassador said. "You see, I have no secrets from you." "Is there anything we can give you," Cercy asked, "to get you to turn off that signal?" "A bribe?" "Sure," Cercy said. "Anything you -- ?" "Nothing," the Ambassador replied. "Look, be reasonable," Harrison said. "You don't want to cause A war, do you? Earth is united now. We're arming -- " "With what?" "Atom bombs," ' Malley answered him. "Hydrogen bombs. We're -- " "Drop one on me," the Ambassador said. "It wouldn't kill me. What makes you think it . will have any effect on my peoI pie?"   i T HE four men were silent, j Somehow, they hadn't thought j of that. I "A people's ability to make ; war," the Ambassador stated, "is j a measure of the status of their civilization. Stage one is the use of simple physical extensions. Stage two is control at the molecular level. You are on the threshold of stage three, although  still far from mastery of atomic and subatomic forces." He smiled ingratiatingly. "My people are reaching the limits of stage five." "What would that be?" Darrig asked. "You'll find out," the Ambassador said. "But perhaps you've wondered if my powers are typical? I don't mind telling you that they're not. In order for me to do my job and nothing more, I ; have certain built-in restrictions, making me capable only of passive action." "Why?" Darrig asked. j "For obvious reasons. If I were j to take positive action in a moj ment of anger, I might destroy j your entire planet."  "Do you expect us to believe j that?" Cercy asked. t "Why not? Is it so hard to understand? Can't you believe that there are forces you know nothing about? And there is another reason for my passiveness. Certainly by this time you've deduced it?" "To break our spirit, I sup pose," Cercy said. "Exactly. My telling you won't make any difference, either. The pattern is always the same. An Ambassador lands and delivers his message to a high-spirited, wild young race like yours. There is. frenzied resistance against him, spasmodic attempts to kill him. # After all these fail, the people are usually quite crestfallen. When the colonization team arrives, their indoctrination goes along just that much faster." He paused, then said, "Most planets are more interested in the philosophy I have to offer. I assure you, it will make the transition far easier." He held out a sheaf of typewritten pages. "Won't you at least look through it?" Darrig accepted the papers and put them in his pocket. "When I get time." "I suggest you give it a try," the Ambassador said. "You must be near the crisis point now. Why not give it up?" "Not yet," Cercy replied tonelessly. "Don't forget to read the philosophy," the Ambassador urged them. The men hurried from the room.L ' they were back in the control room, "there are a few things we haven't tried. How about utilizing psychology?" "Anything you like," Cercy agreed, "including black magic. What did you have in mind?" "The way I see it," Malley answered, "the Ambassador is geared to-respond, instantaneously, to any threat. He must have an all-or-nothing defensive reflex. I suggest first that we try something that won't trigger that reflex." "Like what?" Cercy asked. "Hypnotism. Perhaps we can find out something." "Sure," Cercy said. "Try it. Try anything." Cercy, Malley and Darrig gathered around the video screen as an infinitesimal amount of a light hypnotic gas was admitted into the Ambassador's room. At the same time, a bolt of electricity lashed into the chair where the Ambassador was sitting. "That was to distract him," Malley explained. The Ambassador vanished before the electricity struck him, and then appeared again, curled up in his armchair. "That's enough," Malley whispered, and shut the valve. They watched. After a while, the Ambassador put down his book and stared into the distance. "How strange," he said. "Alfern dead. Good friend... just a freak accident. He ran into it, out there. Didn't have a chance. But it doesn't happen often." "He's thinking out loud," Malley whispered, although there was no possibility of the Ambassador's hearing them. "Vocalizing his thoughts. His friend must have been on his mind for some time." "Of course," the Ambassador went, on, "Alfern had to die sometime. No immortality -- yet. But that way -- no defense. Out there in space they just pop up. Always there, underneath, just waiting for a chance to boil out." "His body isn't reacting to the hypnotic as a menace yet,-" Cercy whispered. "Well," the Ambassador told himself, "the regularizing principle has been doing pretty well, keeping it all down, smoothing out the inconsistencies -- " Suddenly he leaped to his feet, his face pale for a moment, as he obviously tried to remember what he had said. Then he laughed. "Clever. That's the first time that particular trick has been played on me, and the last time. But, gentlemen, it didn't do you any good. I don't know, myself, laughed at the blank walls. "Besides," he continued, "the colonizing team must have the di; rection now. They'll find you ' with or without me." He sat down again, smiling.P"He's not invulnerable. Something killed his friend Alfern." "Something out in space," Cercy reminded him... "I wonder what it was." "Let me see," Darrig reflected aloud. "The regularizing principle. That must be a natural law ,we knew nothing about. And underneath -- what would be underneath?" "He said the colonization team . would find us anyhow," M alley reminded them. "First things first," Cercy said. "He might have been bluffing us... no, I don't suppose so. We still have to get the Ambassador out of the way." ' ; "I think I know what is underneath!" Darrig exclaimed. "This J is wonderful. A new cosmology,  perhaps."   "What is it?" Cercy asked. "Anything we can use?" v "I think so. But let me work  it out. I think I'll go back to : my hotel. I have some books ' there I want to check, and I don't ' want to be disturbed for a few hours." 'All right," Cercy agreed. "But what -- ?" "No, no, I could be wrong," Darrig said. "Let me work it out." He hurried from the room. "What do you think he's driving at?" Malley asked. "Beats me," Cercy shrugged. "Come on, let's try some more of that psychological stuff.' First they filled the Ambassador's room with several feet of water. Not enough to drown him, just enough to make him good and uncomfortable. To this, they added the lights. For eight hours, lights flashed in the Ambassador's room. Bright lights to pry under his eyelids; dull, clashing ones to disturb him. Sound came next -- screeches and screams and shrill, grating noises. The sound of a man's fingernails being dragged across slate, amplified a thousand times, and strange, sucking noises, and shouts and whispers. Then, the smells. Then, everything else they could think of that could drive a man insane. The Ambassador slept peacefully through it all. N OW look," Cercy said, the following day, "let's start using our damned heads." His voice was hoarse and rough. Although the psychological torture hadn't bothered the Ambassador, it seemed to have backfired on Cercy and his men. "Where in hell is Darrig?" "Still working on that idea of his," Malley said, rubbing his stubbled chin. "Says he's just about got it." "We'll work on the assumption that he can't produce," Cercy said. "Start thinking. For example, if the Ambassador can turn into anything, what is there he can't turn into?" "Good question,"  Harrison grunted. "It's the payoff question," , Cercy said. "No use throwing a spear at a man who can turn into one." "How about this?" Malley asked. "Taking it for granted he can turn into anything, how about putting him in a situation where he'll be attacked even after he alters?" "I'm listening," Cercy said. "Say he's in danger. He turns into the thing threatening him. What if that thing were itself being threatened? And, in turn, was in the act of threatening something else? What would he do then?" "How are you going to put that into action?" Cercy asked. "Like this." Malley picked up  the telephone. "Hello? Give me the Washington Zoo. This is urgent." The Ambassador turned as the hungry tiger was propelled in. The door slammed shut. The tiger looked at the Ambassador. The Ambassador looked t the tiger. "Most ingenious," the Ambassador said. At the sound of his voice, the tiger came unglued. He sprang like a steel spring uncoiling, landing on the floor where the Ambassador had been. The door opened again. Another tiger was pushed in. He snarled angrily and leaped at the first. They smashed together in midair. The Ambassador appeared a few feet off, watching. He moved back when a lion entered the door, head up and alert. The lion sprang at him, almost going over on his head when he struck nothing. Not finding any human, the lion leaped on one of the tigers. The Ambassador reappeared in his chair, where he sat smoking and watching the beasts kill each other. In ten minutes the room looked like an abattoir. But by then the Ambassador had tired of the spectacle, and was reclining on his bed, reading. "That was my last bright idea." Cercy stared at the floor, not answering. Harrison was seated in the corner, getting quietly drunk. The telephone rang. "Yeah?" Cercy said. "I've got it!" Darrig' s voice shouted over the line. "I really think this is it. Look, Fm taking a cab right down. Tell Harrison to find some helpers." "What is it?" Cercy asked. "The chaos underneath!" Darrig replied, and hung up. They paced the floor, waiting for him to show up. Half an hour passed, then an hour. Finally, three hours after he had called, Darrig strolled in. "Hello," he said casually. "Hello, hell!" Cercy growled. "What kept you?" "On the way. over," Darrig said, "I read the Ambassador's philosophy. It's quite a work." "Is that what took you so long?" "Yes. I had the driver take me around the park a few times, while I was reading it." "Skip it. How about -- " "I can't skip it," Darrig said, in a strange, tight voice. "I'm afraid we were wrong. About the aliens, I mean. It's perfectly right and proper that they should rule us. As a matter of fact, I wish they'd hurry up and get here." But Darrig didn't look certain. His voice shook and perspiration poured from his face. He twisted his hands together, as though in agony. "It's hard to explain," he said. "Everything became clear as soon as I started reading it. I saw how stupid we were, trying to be independent in this interdependent Universe. I saw -- oh, look, Cercy. Let's stop all this foolishness and accept the Ambassador as our friend." "Calm down!" Cercy shouted at the perfectly calm physicist. "You don't know what you're saying." "Its strange," Darrig said. "I know how I felt -- I just don't feel that way any more. I think. Anyhow, I know your trouble. You haven't read the philosophy. You'll see what I mean, once you've read it." He handed Cercy the pile of papers. Cercy promptly ignited them with his cigarette lighter. "It doesn't matter," Darrig said. "I've got it memorized. Just listen. Axiom one. All peoples -- " Cercy hit him, a short, clean blow, and Darrig slumped to the floor. "Those words must be semantically keyed," Malley said. "They're designed to set off certain reactions in us, I suppose. All the Ambassador does is alter the philosophy to suit the peoples he's dealing with." "Look, Malley," Cercy said. "This is your job now. Darrig knows, or thought he knew, the answer. You have to get that out of him," "That won't be easy," Malley said. "He'd feel that he was betraying everything he believes in, if he were to tell us." "I don't care how you get it," Cercy said. "Just get it." "Even if it kills him?" Malley asked, "Even if it kills you." "Help me get him to my lab," Malley said. son kept watch on the Ambassador from the control room. Cercy found his thoughts were racing in circles. What had killed Alfem in space? Could it be duplicated on Earth? What was the regularizing principle? What was the chaos underneath? What in hell am I doing here? he asked himself. But he couldn't start that sort of thing. "What do you figure the Ambassador is?" he asked Harrison. "Is he a man?" "Looks like one," Harrison said drowsily. "But he doesn't act like one. I wonder if this is his true shape?" Harrison shook his head, and lighted his pipe. "What is ther of him?" Cercy asked. "He looks like a man, but he can change into anything else. You can't attack him; he adapts. He's like water, taking the shape of any vessel he's poured into." "You can boil water," Harrison yawned. "Sure. Water hasn't any shape, has it? Or has it? What's basic?" With an effort, Harrison tried to focus on Cercy's words. "Molecular pattern? The matrix?" "Matrix," Cercy repeated, yawning himself. "Pattern. Must be something like that. A pattern is abstract, isn't it?" "Sure. A pattern can be impressed on anything. What did I say?" "Let's see," Cercy said. "Pattern. Matrix. Everything about the Ambassador is capable of change. There must be some unifying force that retains his personality. Something that doesn't change, no matter what contortions he goes through." "Like a piece of string," Harrison murmured with his eyes closed. "Sure. Tie it in knots, weave a rope out of it, wind it around your finger; it's still string." "Yeah." "But how do you attack a pattern?" Cercy asked. And why couldn't he get some sleep? To hell with the Ambassador and his hordes of colonists, he was going to close his eyes for a moment... Cercy pried his eyes open and looked up at Malley. Besides him, Harrison W as snoring deeply. "Did you get anything?" "Not a thing," Malley confessed. "The philosophy must've had quite an effect on him. But it didn't work all the way, Darrig knew that he had wanted to kill the Ambassador, and for good and sufficient reasons. Although he felt differently now, he still had the feeling that he was betraying us. On the one hand, he couldn't hurt the Ambassador; on the other, he wouldn't hurt us." "Won't he tell anything?" "I'm afraid it's not that simple," Malley said. "You know, if you have an insurmountable obstacle that must be surmounted... and also, I think the philosophy had an injurious effect on his mind," "What are you trying to say?" Cercy got to his feet. "I'm sorry," Malley apologized, "there wasn't a damned thing I could do. Darrig fought the whole thing out in his mind, and when he couldn't fight any longer, he -- retreated. I'm afraid he's hopelessly insane." "Let's see him." They walked down the corridor to Malley's laboratory. Darrig was relaxed on a couch, his eyes glazed and staring. "Is there any way of curing him?" Cercy asked. I "Shock therapy, maybe." Malley was dubious. "It'll take a long time. And he'll probably block out everything that had to do with producing this. Cercy turned away, feeling sick. Even if Darrig could be curedj it would be too late. The aliens must have picked up the Ambassador's message by now and were undoubtedly heading for Earth. "What's this?" Cercy asked, picking up a piece of paper that lay by Darrig's hand. "Oh, he was doodling," Malley said. "Is there anything written on it?" Cercy read aloud: " 'Upon further consideration I can see that Chaos and the Gorgon Medusa are closely related.' " "What does that mean.?" Malley asked. "I don't know," Cercy puzzled. "He was always interested in folklore." "Sounds schizophrenic," the psychiatrist said. Cercy read it again. " 'Upon further consideration, I can see that Chaos and the Gorgon Medusa are closely related.' " He stared at it. "Isn't it possible," he asked Malley, "that he was trying to give us a clue? Trying to trick himself into giving and not giving at the same time?" "It's possible," Malley agreed. "An unsuccessful compromise -- But what could it 'mean?" "Chaos," Cercy remembered Darrig's mentioning that word in his telephone call. "That was the original state of the Universe in Greek myth, wasn't it? The formlessness out of which everything came?" "Something like that," Malley said. "And Medusa was one of those three sisters with the horri, ble faces." Cercy stood for a moment, i staring at the paper. Chaos... ' Medusa... and the organizing principle! Of course! "I think -- " He turned and ran from the room. Malley looked at j him; then loaded a hypodermic  and followed. I I N the control room, Cercy shouted Harrison into consciousness.  "Listen," he said, "I want you  to build something, quick. Do you hear me?" "Sure." Harrison blinked and sat up. "What's the rush?" "I know what Darrig wantedto tell us," Cercy said. "Come on. I'll tell you what I want. And Malley, put down that hypodermic. I haven't cracked. I want you to get me a book on Greek mythology. And hurry it up." Finding a Greek mythology isn't an easy task at two o'clock in the morning. With the aid of dealer out of bed. He got his book and hurried back. Cercy was redeyed and excited, and Harrison and his helpers were working away at three crazy looking rigs. Cercy snatched the book from Malley, looked up one item, and put it down. "Great work," he said. "We're all set now. Finished, Harrison?" "Just about." Harrison and ten helpers were screwing in the last parts. "Will you tell me what this is?" "Me too," Malley put in. "I don't mean to be secretive," Cercy said. "I'm just in a hurry. I'll explain as we go along." He stood up. "Okay, let's wake up the Ambassador." bolt of electricity leaped from the ceiling to the Ambassador's bed. Immediately, the Ambassador vanished. "Now he's a part of that stream of electrons, right?" Cercy asked. "That's what he told us," Malley said. "But still keeping his pattern, within the stream," Cercy continued. "He has to, in order to get back into his own shape. Now we start the first disrupter." Harrison hooked the machine into circuit, and sent his helpers away. "Here's a running graph of the electron stream," Cercy said. "See the difference?" On the graph there was an irregular series of peaks and valleys, constantly shifting and leveling. "Do you remember when you hypnotized the Ambassador? He talked about his friend who'd been killed in space." "That's right," Malley nodded. "His friend had been killed by something that had just popped up." "He said something else," Cercy went on. "He told us that the basic organizing force of the Universe usually stopped things like that. What does that mean to you?" "The organizing force," Malley repeated slowly. "Didn't Darrig say that that was a new natural law?" "He did. But think of the implications, as Darrig did. If an organizing principle is engaged in some work, there must be something that opposes it. That which opposes organization is -- " "Chaos!" "That's what Darrig thought, and what we should have seen. The chaos is underlying, and out of it there arose an organizing principle. This principle, if I've got it right, sought to suppress the fundamental chaos, to make all things regular. "But the chaos still boils out in spots, as Alfera found out. Perhaps the organizational pattern is weaker in space. Anyhow, those spots are dangerous, tin til the organizing principle gets to work on them." H E turned to the panel. "Okay, Harrison. Throw in the second disrupter." The peaks and valleys altered on the graph. They started to mount in crazy, meaningless configurations. "Take Darrig's message in the light of that. Chaos, we know, is underlying. Everything was formed out of it. The Gorgon Medusa was something that couldn't be looked upon. She turned men into stone, you recall, destroyed them. So, Darrig found a relationship between chaos and that which can't be looked upon. All with regard to the Ambassador, of course." "The Ambassador can't look upon chaos!" Malley cried. "That's it. The Ambassador is capable of an infinite number of alterations and permutations. But something -- the matrix -- can't change, because then there would be nothing left. To destroy something as abstract as a pattern, we need a state in which no pattern is possible. A state of chaos." The third disrupter was thrown into circuit. The graph looked as if a drunken caterpillar had been sketching on it. "Those disrupters are Harrison's idea," Cercy said. "I told him I wanted an electrical current with absolutely no coherent pattern. The disrupters are an extension of radio jamming. The first alters the electrical pattern. That's its purpose: to produce a state of patternlessness. The second tries to destroy the pattern left by the first; the third tries to destroy the pattern made by the first two. They're fed back then, and any remaining pattern is systematically destroyed in circuit... I hope." "This is supposed to produce a state of chaos?" Malley asked, looking into the screen. For a while there was only the whining of the machines and the crazy doodling of the graph. Then, in the middle of the Ambassador's room, a spot appeared. It wavered, shrunk, expanded -- What happened was indescribable. All they knew was that everything within the spot had disappeared. "Switch it off" Cercy shoutedT Harrison cut the switch. The spot continued to grow. "How is it we're able to look at it?" Malley asked, staring at the screen, "The shield of Perseus, remember?" Cercy said. "Using it as a mirror, he could look at Medusa." "It's still growing!" Malley shouted. "There was a calculated risk in all this," Cercy said. "There's always the possibility that the chaos may go on, unchecked. If that happens, it won't matter much what -- " The spot stopped growing. Its edges wavered and rippled, and then it started to shrink. "The organizing principle," Cercy said, and collapsed into a chair. "Any sign of the Ambassador?" he asked, in a few minutes. The spot was still wavering. Then it was gone. Instantly there was an explosion. The steel walls buckled inward, but held. The  screen went dead. "The spot removed all the air from the room," Cercy explained, "as well as the furniture and the Ambassador." "He couldn't take it," Malley . said. "No pattern can cohere, in a state of pattemlessness. He's gone to join Alfern." Malley started to giggle. Cercy felt like joining him, but pulled himself together. "Take it easy," he said. "We're not through yet.' "Sure we are! The Ambassai dor -- " "Is out of the way. But there's ; still an alien fleet homing in on  this region of space. A fleet so j strong we couldn't scratch it with j an H-bomb. They'll be looking  for us." I He stood up. i "Go home and get some sleep. Something tells me that tome row we're going to have to start figuring out some way of camouflaging a planet." the She had her mind made up -- the one way they'd make her young again was over her dead bodyt O LD Miss Barbara Noble twitched aside the edge of the white scrim curtain to get a better look at the young man coming down the street. He might be the one. The young man bent a little under the weight of the battered black suitcase as he crossed Maple and started up Prospect on Miss Noble's side. She could see him set the case down on the wide porch of the Raney house and wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. Then she lost sight of him as he advanced to the door. He could be a visitor to the Raney's, but they were out of town on vacation. He could be a salesman. Miss Barbara shifted her rocker to the other side of the window where she could watch without having to disturb the curtain. This secondfloor sitting room made an excellent lookout. She quickly scanned the street in the other direction, but there was no sign of movement in the hot sunlight. She settled down to watch the black suitcase sitting uncommunicatively at the edge of the porch. It must have been all of two minutes before the young man appeared from under the overhanging roof and picked up the case. A persistent fellow. He went down to the sidewalk and approached her own house, came up on her own front doorstep, tried to set the case down on the narrow stoop, couldn't, straightened up and rang the bell. A raucous buzz filled the sitting room. ward the window, pulled back the curtain a scant inch, and studied his back as he looked at the windows on the other side of the front door. Limp yellow hair and a big perspiration stain in the middle of a dark sport shirt were her chief impressions. He could be a bona fide salesman working hard at it. She wouldn't let him in, of course ; but she felt a little sorry for himlugging that big case around in this weather. Then he turned and looked straight at the window behind which she was hiding, and she let the curtain go suddenly. Had he seen it move? The buzzer sounded again, imperiously. Miss Barbara got up stiffly, moved to the big vizer screen in the nearest corner, and switched it on. The man might have something interesting and she couldn't get out to shop the way she used to. She smoothed her lilac housedress and left the room to descend the stairs to the front door. In the tiny front hall she hesitated, then opened the door inward about eight inches. Deftly the man stuck the broad brown toe of his shoe into the opening and looked down at her. She grinned as she saw his. expression of shock. She was old, really old. Her sparse white hair was pulled so tightly into a knob on top of her head that the plentiful wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes seemed to run vertically, giving her an oriental look. The hand she rested on the door jamb was a waxy-white claw, a blue vein standing up prominently under the skin tightdrawn over gnarly finger joints. He had probably never seen a woman much past middle age. "Well?" Her croak was high and rough. riHE young man recovered himself and began his spiel. "Madame, I represent one of the bestknown and most reputable firms in the country. Our products have received three international medals for purity and effective performance. They... "What are you selling, young man?" "I have the privilege of being a field representative for Taffeta Beauty Aids. Please accept this generous ten-ounce bottle of our Diamond Dew Refreshest Lotion... He reached into his side pocket and brought it out, offered it with the most appreciative smile, his 'you hardly need this' smile. Her hand did not reach out "I don't want any. Goodbye!" The door tightened against his foot. "But madame," his foot did not budge and his smile became both engaging and pleading, "all I ask is a chance to show you our line. Our products sell themselves. Besides, I'm paid on a demonstration basis -- so much for every potential customer who receives our free sample and so much for every home demonstration. You wouldn't want me to lose two-fifty when it would take only six and a third minutes of your time exactly to look over one of the most amazing displays ever... "Well, I don't know... "I know you'll enjoy watching our Tissue Cleanser in action and seeing the new simplicity of our Home Re... (oops, he'd almost said it)... Hair Relustrification Kit. I promise you that your few minutes won't be wasted." "Yours would be, young man. I don't buy that stuff." "You may be one of the lucky few women who don't need our products, but I don't think you can say that before you've seen them." "I never did see such persistence, honest to goodness!" Her face assumed a crabbed smile. "Come along then." HE moved back from the door into the darkness of the house; and the salesman shifted his case back to his left hand, pushed the front door wide and took a quick long step inside. He was just in time to hear the slight click of the closing of a second door in front of him. He reached for the knob, turned it ; but the door was locked. The outside door still stood open, caught by the end of the sample case. The July daylight from outside showed him that he was in a tiny entrance hall not more than forty inches each way. He pulled the case in and by squeezing against the inner door allowed the front door to close. Anyhow, he was inside the ouse. He rapped sharply on the inner door. The latch on the front door snapped to and instantly the hall was flooded with light from a tremendous bulb in the ceiling, which, surprisingly, was twenty feet above him. A harsh voice, tinny with tremendous amplification but unmistakably that of the old woman, filled the hall, "all right, young Screening his eyes with his fingers, the salesman scanned the walls and ceiling for the vizer lens, found it beside the five-hundred watt bulb pouring blindingly down on him, on the other side of a speaker grille. "C-certainly, madamc." What a layout. As he automatically laid his case on the floor and opened back the top against the front door, his eyes searched the walls for indications of openings which might mean unexpected defenses such as anesthetic tanks. The only breaks in the two smooth white plaster surfaces which he could see as he squatted before the case were a horizontal row of glass bosses on each side at about the height of his knees. "Now, since my face," he closed his eyes and flashed a toothy smile, like a video actor, up at the vi#er lens, "is subjected to the daily care of Taffeta Products," he turned his face down to the case and gritted his teeth, "I must smear facial muscle softener into the left half to show the action and appearance of muscles which have lost their tonus." He whipped the cover off a small ivorine jar and rubbed his cheek vigorously with a brownish salve. "You will note that this softener also contains a percentage of grime which lodges in the pores." He heard a gasp from the speaker grille when he displayed a faoe whose left cheek and brow were sagged, wrinkled and hideously brown speckled. From somewhere behind the gasp, he heard a continuous tinkle of tiny bells. His hands moved among the bottles and jars, raised a round silver box which he held up. "The delicately perfumed applicator pads for all applications of Taffeta Preparations are pre-sat urated with Firmol Tone Charger. I dip the pad into this solution of Enhancing Hyssop," he did so, "and work it gently into the pores. The results are instantaneous!" He turned up his original video star appearance. ward to reach the articles strapped to the top of the case, he noticed that the tone of the distant bells was raised. Screwing a circular hairbrush to the thread of a collapsible tube, he sank back on his haunches. The bell tones were lower. He placed a hand on one of the glass bosses nearest the inner door, apparently to steady himself. An even lower tone was added to the bell notes. Obviously electric eyes with a set of bell signals in the old woman's present location. He smiled down at the floor -- to himself. "Now I want you to notice closely this object which I will show you." He held up the brush with the tube screwed on its back and turned it about. "Do you know what this is?" There was no answer from the speaker but its own hum and the tinkle of the bells. "What does it look like?" He spoke rapidly, pleasantly. There was still no answer. He rose quickly and tried the knob of the inner door again. He could hear the bell notes lower in pitch as he pressed against the door. "let me see the thing again, He jumped back to the center of the hall. "Thisbrush is the essential feature of our sensational Hair Relustrifier Kit. The tube screwed to the top feeds the directly through each hollow j bristle to reach every part of the ; hair." He ran or rather scrubbed  the brush through the right side of his long fair pompadour with small rotary motions. When he removed the brush, that side of his head was covered with crisp yellow ringlets which shone under the light like sculptured gold. voice was interrupted by a syncopated clicking. A telephone signal. "just a moment, young man." The hum of the speaker cut off and the sudden silence ' seemed full of the echoes of the j bells. j the gadget into the case and grabbed a handful of cleansing i tissues from a box in it. He i snapped down the top of the ! case and whipped the straps I through the buckles. Then he shoved the case against one of the side walls and sat on it to ! flip off his shoes and socks. Shoving his back tightly against the wall, he bent his knees up and pushed his bare feet flat against the other. After placing the wad of tissues in his lap, he put his hands against the wall below his buttocks and, like an experienced mountain climber, inched his way rapidly up the 'chimney' of the hall. When his head touched the ceiling, he braced himself firmly with his left hand and reached with his right for the tissues in his lap. Protecting his hand with several of the white papers, he felt above him for the base of the light bulb, unscrewed it, and dropped it gently onto the rest of the tissues still in his lap. The sudden blackness was smothering. ( Heat seeped through the tissues more rapidly than he had expected; and the effort to keep his knees from contracting and to the floor fifteen feet below was agony. When he finally reached the floor, he placed the bulb on it beside the sample case. Then he opened the front door and closed it again, leaving the door caught open a fraction of an inch by the latch against the frame. Taking an anesthetic cartridge out of his pants pocket, he broke the seal, taking care not to trigger it, and returned to his crevice-climbing posture. He lifted himself again above the row of electric eyes and waited, cartridge in hand, leg muscles cramping painfully. turned off the speakphone, she pulled herself away from the fascinating view of golden curls and scuttled. over to a stiff ladderback chair beside the telephone stand. She lifted the antique cradle phone (none of these modern invasions of privacy like the vizerphone) and spoke warily into the mouthpiece. "Who is it? What do you want?" "Barbara?" A man's voice was urgent. "This is Miss Noble speaking," she replied haughtily. The voice was savage. "Well, this is Doctor Harris, then. Have you looked at the mail today? I got my directors' meeting notice this morning." "Yes, I got one. The fifth of August," she said impatiently. "And this seems to be our year. There's been a girl here already this morning with some story about my having advertised for a housekeeper. She told it to the doorphone and wouldn't leave when I said I didn't want anybody -- but it only took one drop of skunk oil in the hallway to send her packing." The horrid chuckle that came from the receiver was so raucous that Miss Noble held it away from her ear. "Blonde or brunette?" she asked noncommittally. "Blonde -- and really young, not a damn rejuvenee!" "Rod Harris! You actually went and peeked at her, you old goat!" "Only through the one-way." "Well, since the company knows that a pretty girl is still good bait for an old ninny, you're as good as a goner. They'll have you rejuvenated before long." "They won't get a chance to! And I'm going to get old enough so I can't even lift a hand to thumb my nose at the company. Then I'm going to go and die and the Juvine Perpetual Youth Corporation will scream in agony as it disbands and makes public property of its hallowed formulas as per the original articles of incorporation... and you will probably get a new set of false teeth and take the treatment again since you could get it real cheap when the monopoly's finished and not have to disturb sugar bowl." This mixture of facetiousness and downright sarcasm was only surpassed by Miss Noble, who snapped back, "Don't you sneer at me. Doctor Roland Harris, when you know perfectly well that the only reason I have to go on living this long is to make sure that you are really dead first. You didn't invent rejuvenation all by yourself without the aid of Barbara Noble, Ph.D., and the company has the sole right to the process until we're both dead. And, if you start peeking at plump blonde wenches at this point, I suppose I'll have to live till Los Alamos freezes over!" "All right, all right. But she wasn't plump. She wasn't any bigger than you are. Besides, you know I'd rather have dinner with you. My man Marko could give us roast beef with all the fixings and afterward I want you to hear my latest discovery. It's the best damn extemporesinger you've ever heard, Jeery Wade -- fellow in his first late fifties, no fluff brain of a juvenee -- a blood and thunder baritone that'll lift that knob of hair clean off your scalp. Let's say you get here about sixthirty and I'll phone him we'll be over at his place for a session of hollering about eight." vizer to carry it over the wire in full force. "I'm not going to budge out of this house until after the director's meeting and then only if the shops stop all delivery service. This time I'm not taking any chances. Life is too much of a bore to have to put up with it for another eighty years even for your marvelous singer who would probably go and get rejuvenated just as I got 'to enjoy him. And nothing could induce me to listen to an evening of your stories for the nine hundredth time. If there's one thing I'm thankful for in this scatterbrained age, it's the marriage dissolution law that's got me free from your anecdotes after three separate terms of fifty years each." "Now, Barbara, was it that bad?" Roland Harris sounded distressed. "Do you really think I could be honestly grateful to the Corporation for a hundred and fifty years of listening to that disgraceful old thing about the Martian, the Venusian, and the robot?" "Well, if you feel that way about it, I'll keep my discoveries to myself. I hope your fancy hallway keeps you safe till you rot."' , "It's doing all right," replied the old woman smugly. "I have a young pup down there right now cooling his number thirteens and waiting to pretend to interest me in some new face paint and hair gik. My electric eye set and vizer are less repulsive than your skunk oil and twice as effective." "They're not going to stop me from having a good time while I last, anyhow. I think they're through with me for today; and I'm going to hear Jeery Wade, anyhow. He'll make up a hooting good song about all this when I tell him." "Take care of yourself, Rod... goodbye," said Miss Noble, almost concernedly. She dropped the phone into its cradle, rose, and went back to the vizer screen, switching on the speaker as she sat down. Only then did she notice that the screen was entirely dark except for a vague sliver of gray. "Are you still there, young man?" she asked the microphone. There was silence from the speaker. The hammer on each bar of the long metal xylophone of the electric ey? signal hung motionless. "He's gone... and left the front door unlatched too. And I thought he was persistent." She was disappointed. "He owes me four more minutes of fun." She got up slowly and started fpr the door. "That curly hair stuff is new since my last sixties, too. I wonder if it would work on white hair... I'd better go down and close the door. Can't have just anybody coming into one's house." S HE descended the stairs, opened the door from the front room, then took one step forward into the hall. Before she could interpret the soft bump of the salesman's bare feet as they struck the floor, she was encircled by his strong arm; and the hiss of the anesthetic gun was loud in the small area of the hall. Limply she sagged against his arm. The hissing of the gun stopped. The young man slipped it into his pocket and,, turning, thrust the inner door wide open with his now free hand. Entering the tidy front room, he kicked the door shut behind him and gulped in the good air before he headed for the back of the house, cradling the small body easily in his arms. Failing to find there what he was looking for, he went up the narrow whiterailed stairway to the second floor. Across the landing, the gleam of porcelain showed through a halfopen door. He laid his burden carefully on the varicolored braided rug by the tub and began to draw a warm bath, testing the temperature frequently with his hand. When water reached the overflow outlet, he turned off the tap and sprinted downstairs for his sample case. The hall was still chokingly full of gas; and after grabbing out the case, he slammed the door again. He brought the case up to the bathroom, where he opened it on the floor beside the form of the old woman. He lifted out the tray, revealing masses of silvery tubing and a number of flasks of iridescent solutions nestling among loops of rubber insulated wiring. One flask he emptied into the bath, making the 'water seethe and turn a cloudy green. Then, dashing down the stairs again, he began looking for the telephone. His search became more and more hurried, as he opened cupboards and drawers in front room and kitchen with no success. Returning upstairs, he almost missed the instrument in the sitting-room because he was expecting the familiar sight of a round vizer screen. He stood over the phone and dialed. "Hey, Alice!" "What luck, Riggy?" "I'm in. The old lady's out cold on the bathroom floor. Primer solution's in the bath at five above tepid. I'm shoving her in now -- with all her clothes on, of course -- and I've wasted a lot of time already looking for this hypoblastic phone, so beat it on over here with Margy and get to work." "Are you ordering me around, Rigel O'Maffey?" "You know I never did this job on a woman. And don't forget, honey, we'll get enough out of this to get a new copter together. C'mon now." He put the phone back in the cradle before she could answer. a long thermometer from the case, took a careful reading on the water, ran in a little more hot from the faucet and left it running the slightest dribble. Carefully lifting the small body of Barbara Noble, Ph.D., he slid it gently into the water feet first over the end, smoothing down with one hand the percale housed ress which ballooned as she went into the water. Finally he knelt beside the tub, holding her head out of the water in the crook of his elbow. A banging on the inner door downstairs some fifteen minutes later reminded him of the force with which he had slammed it in his hurry to reach the uncontaminated air of the front room. He looked longingly across the bathroom at the racks of towels on the other side, but finally, as the banging stopped and a feminine voice began yelling, "Hey, Riggy! Let us in!" he grabbed up the bright rug and wadded it under the scrawny neck. The girls scolded him all the way up the stairs for not leaving the door unlocked, while he tried to explain, at the same time, that he had to hold up the woman's head. "Screepers, Riggy, what do you think the perfectly good pair of water-wings in your case is for?"' Humbled, he departed as the girls took over the beginning of the complicated, fortnight-long process of the rejuvenation of Barbara Noble. riiHE receptionist behind the ebony desk, whose gold plate proclaimed it as the headquarters of the Juvine Perpetual Youth Corporation, crammed shut the drawer before her. A metallic clink from within was the fall of a mirror with which she had been assisting the application of scarlet which now fluoresced gently on her full lips. Tossing her head (which showed the crop of glistening black curls to the fullest advantage) in a preoccupied manner, she addressed the man who stood before her desk. "How can the Juvine Perpetual Youth Corporation serve you ?' # Her hastily assumed look of efficient importance was replaced by melting eagerness as she took in the chiselled perfection of features and the broad shoulders of the young man in knife-creased bronze spunlon. "I'm Harris. For the directors' meeting." His voice was curt. " You're Doctor Harris? The Director? Oh, do come in." She rose from the desk and went around the end of it to open the high wroughtgold gate and hold it wide for him. "You're a little early. I'll take you down to the to help was apparent in her every gesture. "Thanks, I know the way," he informed her, brushing past. She followed him, however, across the patio-like reception room, with its exotically gardened borders and splashing fountain, down th.e' long corridor past glowing murals of men and women swimming, dancing and playing tennis, past tapestry shielded doorways to the great bright arch at the end. Before he went through, she caught his sleeve. "I should be pleased to steno for you today, if you need me." He turned and looked at her as if he had not known she was behind him. "Thanks, but I sha'n't need one. It'll be a short meeting." He smiled down and patted her cheek. "But if I'm not entirely satisfied with the proceedings, maybe I can dictate a little afterward." She laughed as if that were a special joke between them and retreated rapidly down the corridor before he had time to turn and miss the splendor of her graceful carriage. His eyebrows were still raised and the corners of his mouth curved in appreciation when he passed through the arch and into the vast room under the clear bubble of a tremendous skydome. back to him, looking out over the simmering city streets to the cool rise of mountains beyond. He recognized ' at once the slight figure, the sheen of the long curling auburn bob, the poise of her head and slim hand resting on the arm of the chair. "Babst" She turned half around. "Hello, Rod." He grinned and sank down in the next chair. "Here we are again." "Knocked out by your own skunk oil?" she asked pointedly. "No. Company copter man got me leaving Jeery Wade's. What happened to you? I thought you were walled up neatly for the declining years." "The cosmetic man ambushed me in the hall. But I've got another fifty years to figure out something better... if I still need it." "What do you mean if you still need it? Are you changing your mind about rejuvenation?" She smiled. "Well, you know it's always fun at first. But I'm having my lawyer come to this meeting. I've got an idea we can change the articles of agreement so that the process can finally become public property at the end of another fifty years instead of only after our deaths. Then if we want to go on and die, nobody" (she waved her hand around the great room at the little group of athletic men and glamorous, expensively gowned women moving in through the arch) "nobody will have any financial interest in rejuvenating us. Then, too, our own fat incomes will lapse ; and since that's the reason we set up the articles the way they are -- so we'd never be in danger of starving, that is -- we'd have the more interesting choice of whether to die off or get young again and go back to work. Would you sign a fiftyyear termination, Rod?" "Would you marry me for the fifty years, Babs?" His voice was gentle, pleading. "Honest to goodness, now, aren't you really pretty tired of me?" she asked earnestly, turning to face him. "No, I can't say I am. You're pretty special, doctor, and you're special pretty." It was a ritual. "You know you're the only man. I'll marry you. Will you sign?" "Of course I'll sign. I would have anyhow when I knew you wanted me to. And Babs -- maybe we could get some sort of jobs now -- sort of to get in practice. I'll bet we could rent a lab somewhere and do commercial analyses for a while until we got hit by another idea for research." "Rod, that's the best idea you've had in the last hundred and fifty years. But we could have a honeymoon first, couldn't we?" "That's your best suggestion in the last seventy years. And maybe we could get Jeery Wade and his wife to rejuvenate and go with us. After the first couple of weeks, that is." arm, somewhat ahead of the rather disgruntled group of directors, who stayed behind to lament the end of a good thing. In the garden room, Barbara stopped to choose an orchid. Rod Harris wandered on to the receptionist's desk, where thetjirl of the black curls waited, smnmg. He looked back at Barbara, then smiled down at the girl. "Just like I said... a short meeting. No need for any dictating. Lucky you." "Oh, I don't know," she countered coyly. "Say, I heard a story the other day you might like. Do you like stories?" "What kind of story?" "You'd have to be the judge of that." Suddenly Barbara was with them, pinning on a bronze and green blossom. "C'mon along, dear. We've got a good many things to do before we leave." He opened the golden wicket for her and followed her out. Turning back toward the desk, he called to the girl, "I may be back in a few weeks to see about a job. Remind me then to tell you the one about the Martian, the Venusian and the robot." # Star Shelf Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. Ballantine Books, Inc., New York, #. Cloth #; paper, # a chance to say in print that Gravy Planet (now ineptly retitled as above), which was a haps the best science fiction satire since Brave New World, better even than Player Piano and for my money vastly superior to the dull and overrated #. And now I have an opportunity to point out in addition that the flaws some people found in the magazine version, such as the ending on Venus, have been polished out, so that what we now have is a well-nigh perfect attack on the stupid, the cynical, the mercenary, the powercrazy tendencies of the Salesmen's Civilization. The story? Fowler Schocken Associates, advertising agency supreme, steal the project for exploiting the planet Venus from a competitor, and places Mitch Courtenay, star class copysmith who tells the story himself, in charge. Courtenay is kidnaped by the competitor and nearly bumped off. He then finds out some home truths about the Consies, the subversives of the future, who are Conservationists. They want to save Venus for a naturally balanced economy rather than for the destructive looting of a salesinsane monopoly. Courtenay becomes a secret Consie and turns Venus over to these inheritors of the future. The plot is only a small part of the book's merits, though. Look what it has -- Wood is so rare that "a real oak ring" is more valuable than a diamond solitaire. Space in Earth's cities is so hard to find that the fire-stairs in skyscrapers are rented out (one step per coupe) to the lower classes for sleeping quarters. Captive audiences are so captive that it is legal to drug coffee (the Fowler Schocken crowd have it trade marked "Coffiest") with a habitforming alkaloid which costs # to be cured of. Government has fallen so completely into the hands of the corporations that there are Senators from DuPont, Nash-Kelvinator, YummyCola, and so on, and the Presidency of the United States has become a hereditary and solely honorary office -- a minor detail that one doesn't discover till the third page from the end of the book! This is a permanent addition to the good books of our era. It is not "just another science fiction book," though I am sure you will find some smug snobs referring to it as such. Buy it -- read it -- give it away. You can afford to, at # a copy. win A. Abbott ). Dover Publications, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # cloth, # paper fished in Boston in #, was written by a schoolmaster who specialized in literature and theology. How he ever came to write this charming bit of mathematical whimsy, with its curious yet sharply real picture of twodimensional life, has never been determined. Banesh Hoffman, who wrote an introduction for this new edition, states that "Its aim is to instruct," but to instruct whom about what, we are not informed. Certainly not mathematics ; there isn't an equation in the whole book, though there are some amateur geometrical drawings by Abbott himself. Perhaps morals, though the moral of this book is more radical than one would imagine such an author would want to teach openly. Regularity and conservatism are the death of progress: this is really the lesson it teaches. Beyond that, it is simply and solely a delightful, stately bit of fancy, which should be read for pleasure, not for profit. Double day  Co. f Inc., New York, #. # paes, # stories, Ray Bradbury steps out of the class (if he ever was in it, which some fanatics still deny) of science fiction writer. Not more than seven of the stories can be labeled science fiction; I believe only two appeared in science fiction magazines. Bradbury is now clearly in a class with the great writers of imagination of modern times -- not just a "special" writer for a "special" audience. He writes in every form and mood except the pedestrian, the formula or the cheap. Sometimes he may overwrite a little, but he never writes badly. In the new book there are, I believe, some of the best imaginative stories he or anyone else has ever written. One cannot even begin to describe their delights; but one can at least mention a few of the ideas which Bradbury develops. There is the murderer who goes mad trying to polish his fingerprints off everything he may have touched -- a horror story that is already a classic. There is the Chinese Emperor of the year # who beheaded one of his subjects who invented a man-carrying kite because it made the Chinese Wall worthless -- soldiers could glide over it! A biting sketch describes race prejudices in an amateur baseball game. Another tells of the Mexican who did not like a fash ion photographer using the front of his adobe shack as a back ground for photos of young ladies modeling clothes, and made an issue of it in a magnificently unanswerable way. Then there is the lovely one about seventeen year-old Marianne, who had Just Discovered Boys. Quote: "She'll be all right," Mother said to Father, "Girls only seem stupid because when they're in love they can't hear." "It affects the semicircular canals," said Father. "Making many girls fall right into a fellow's arms. I know. I was almost crushed to death once by a falling woman, and let me tell you -- " And then there's the oddly tragic story about the boy named who always had to move from adopted family to adopted family whenever his persistent youth began to show. This book presents a writer of genius approaching the height of his powers. It should not be missed. E. Sanger and I. Bredt. Robert Cornog, # Cheltenham Rd., Santa Barbara, Calif. # pages, # attention to this important but highly technical document with the remark that it is one of the basic works on the theory and practice of rocketpowered airplanes. It was translated from the German by M. Hamermesh of the U.S. Navy's Radio Research Laboratory, and has been previously available only in photostats at around #. The report, which Mr. Ley discussed at length in Appendix I of his Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, #I edition, explores the unique theory that a winged rocket, climbing at very high speeds and steep angle, would ricochet repeatedly from denser to thinner atmosphere levels, like a flat stone spinning over water, thus enormously increasing its flying range. Dr. Eugen Sanger is an Austrian engineer who once worked for the Herman Goering Institute of the Luftwaffe. Dr. Irene Bredt is a mathematician who helped Dr. Sanger in the immensely complex theoretical calculations described in the report. Today they are married and are living in Paris, working for the French Government's Arsenal de l'Aeronautique. Dr. Sanger is also president of the International Astronautical Federation. mond F . Jones. Shasta Publishers, Chicago, #. # pages, # had three major interests in science fiction: alien invasions, infiltrations or inspections of Earth; advanced computer-cybernetic concepts; and the horrors of war, particularly atomic. In this swift-moving adventure, Jones combined all three interests -- with, unfortunately, a somewhat less mature point of view than usual in his work. Evidences of an unbelievably advanced science come to the attention of electronics engineer Cal Meacham, He follows down the clues; makes an "interociter," a weird communications device, by pursuing the mysterious leads; and then is transported to a strange new paradise for scientists in the deserts near Phoenix, Arizona. From then on, he is inextricably involved in the struggles between two great galactic enemies which are using Earth as a secret armory. The narrative is sharp, exciting; the science is technical, naturalistic; The plot is one of the oldest in any kind of adventure writing and the characters are cardboard chessmen. The tale as a whole is fast, fascinating and shallow, fine for a relaxation hour, but scarcely as rich and rewarding as some of Jones's more profound tales. Wright. John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia, #. Various pages, # each ston's series of science fiction juveniles bring the total in print to fifteen and also lower the average quality of the group somewhat. There is one solid item -- Marsten's Rocket to Lima ; the others are perilously close to comic book melodrama; exciting' enough, but not particularly well written and certainly not very inventive or realseeming. However, they all make quick, exciting reading. Vance's Vandals of the Void tells of space pirates on the MarsEarth run, complete with a villain named the Basilisk, and all kinds of Western-story derringdo. Lowndes' Mystery of the Third Mine is about miners in the Asteroid Belt, and their struggle against the Vested Interests of the phony Asteroid Miners' Association. Erik Van Lhin's Battle on Mercury tells a bizarre tale about Earthian colonizers on the planet nearest the Sun, and how they win their battle against the solar powers with the aid of some extremely odd forms of life that are electric in nature. The Mysterious Planet by Kenneth Wright is all about a plot to destroy Earth, and how a human youth, held captive on Planet X where the plot is hatched, is able to foil it. Even Marsten' s book is about space travel, making all five similar in basic theme -- simple space opera. Rocket to Luna, however, is of much higher quality. It is an infirst trip to the Moon, via a space station in an orbit around Earth, excellent for its vivid writing, the accuracy of its scientific data, and the realism of its carefully developed plot. minimum sentenca His secret was no secret, the amiable alien insisted -- which was the cause ef the trouble! F lip Danielson came striding into his fortycredit-a-day suite at the Hotel Metro, wearing a broad grin and a checked suit. "I've got him right where we want him," he said. "He's hanging on the ropes." Stretched out on the bed with a wet towel swathed around his head like a turban, the pudgy figure groaned and turned over, burying his face in the covers. "Go 'way. I'm a sick man." #I  Flip skipped across the room, tossed the covers aside, and bounced up and down on the bed. "Snap out of it, Potsy. I've got us an out." The fat man winced at the motion and feebly raised his head. "I'll never live to use an out. What was I drinking last night -- straight fusel-oil?" "Quang Dal was mixing cocktails out of cremede-menthe and anisette, and you were taking two to every one of his just to be sociable." "That explains it," groaned Potsy. "Hand me that bottle on the bureau, like a good fellow. Fve got to do something to get rid of that aftertaste." Flip went over and got it, stopped to take a short sample himself, and then, handed it over. There was a liquid gurgle as the bottle dropped an inch and a half, and then a satisfied sigh. "Maybe I'll live, after all. Now, who's on the ropes?" "Quang Dal. No thanks to you, though. You were passed out in the comer, snoring like a pig, when I rolled him." rriHE fat man looked up in sudden interest "How much did you get?" "Looks like about four thousand. I haven't bothered to count it yet." "Toss it over. I'll be glad to." "It'll do for chicken feed." Potsy clucked like a hen and grabbed the billfold. He pulled out a thick sheaf of currency and ran his fingers over it reverently. "Think of the time we can have -- " He broke off suddenly and tossed the money despondently on the floor. "Could have had, I mean. We won't have any use for money where we're going. Twenty years -- minimum!" He grabbed his head between his hands as it started in throbbing again. "And forty years maximum," said Flip unsympathetically. "Next time you line up an easy mark, make sure she's not the Police Commissioner's motherin-law." "Maybe something will happen. We've still got three weeks before we have to report for sentencing." "So?" "We've still got the ship. We could make a run for it." "Where to? If it's any place in the Solar System where people can live, the law's there. And if it's a place where the law isn't, people can't live." Potsy drank unhappily from his bottle. "What gets me is that the floppers and the crawlers and the wigglers and the rest can hop around the Galaxy in just about nothing flat while we humans can't go past Pluto. If we could just get our hands on one of their faster-thanlight drives, we could thumb our noses at the law." He sighed. "If wishes were horses... "Get ready to saddle up." There was a complacent smile on Flip's face as he tossed a long manila envelope on to the bed. "The thought of sitting in a Lunar prison cell for the next twenty years with nothing to look at but your fat face was just too much -- so I went and did something about it." Potsy opened the envelope and stared at its contents in bewilderment. Flip grinned. "Return ticket, passport, identity card --  the works. His ship takes off at ten into him to keep him under for another six hours. When Quang Dal comes to, he's going to be an unhappy little Centaurian -- broke, stranded, and friendless. Do you begin to get the picture?" Potsy looked up at his partner with open admiration. "Not friendless. He's got us." had recovered sufficient strength to carry him down the corridors in a tottering crawl, the first thing he did was to go to the police. "Get outta here before I squash ya," growled the desk sergeant. "If w're such ignorant bums we ain't good enough to be let in j your Galactic Union, we sure  ain't smart enough to help you out when you get into a jam."  "But, sir," protested Quang  Dal, "I am just poor priwate Centaurian citizen who have nothing to do with admission standards whatsoewer. Is not to be despairing for that, howewer. Has . not Grand Council giwen fine promise that admission shall be accompaniment of attainment of minimumnal socialization percentile?" "Scram," said the desk sergeant. "I ain't paid to get lectured by cockroaches." Quang Dal drew himself up with dignity, "Is, one, inaccurate statement -- terrestrial cockroach is not sapient being. Is, two, obviously hostile manifestation. Is through politeness and well wishing comes minimumnal socialization, not harsh speaking. In Cosmos, all entities are siblings... Translation: brothers andor sisters." With a quick wabble to the left, he avoided the descending boot and scuttled toward the door. "I love you," he said ceremoniously, but earnestly. "Is well wishing with a wengeance." At the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs, he received a politer reception, but little in the way of help. "Terribly sorry, old man," said the Third Assistant. "Wouldn't have had it happen for all the worlds. Don't know quite what I can do about it, though, now that your ship's gone. It was the first one in twenty years and there's no telling when the next one will stop by. It is rather shameful the way the rest of the Galaxy tends to avoid us, you know. I mean, after all, if you chaps would let us in on the faster-than-light drive and a few things like that, we wouldn't be so embarrassingly provincial." "Are explaining many times before," said Quang Dal patiently. "Is no such thing as faster-thanlight drive. As your good man Einstein show you long time ago, is theoretical impossibility." The Third Assistant sniffed his disbelief. "And how many months has it been since you left Alpha Centauri?" "Three months between time, but is not workable for Solar peoples. Is only what you call a conwenience." The official maintained his professional calm, but there was a little edge to his voice. "I take it, then, that you consider us too stupid to know how to use it?" "Did not say," said Quang Dal. "Is only unachievement of miniraumnal socialization. Are principles inwolved that might be used for harm to other entities." The Third Assistant glanced at his watch, rose from his desk, and ushered the little Centaurian to the door. "You'll have to excuse me, old man.Tea time, you know. Sorry I can't offer you a lift home on one of our ships, but since we've never been able to do better than one-fifth light speed, I'm afraid that we'll just have to putter around inside our own solar system until you chaps decide we're socialized enough to be given the galactic drive. I'll make a personal note of your case, however, and when an extraterrestrial ship drops in, one of my successors will get in touch with you immediately," Quang Dal's attempt to explain again that there was no such thing as a faster-than-light drive was cut short by the closing of the door in his face. Rearing up on his hind legs, he ran his voice tube through the keyhole and said politely, "Note, please -- I love you." and hostile world, Potsy and Flip, were waiting for him when he got back to the hotel. "How did it go?" "Is, as you say, without soap," said Quang Dal mournfully. "Is constant expectoration upon by unwellwishers." "Don't let it get you down, pal," comforted Potsy, "What do you expect from a bunch of bums with a low-grade socialization index?' He reached in his pocket, pulled out a bulging billfold, and peeled off several bills. "Here's a little ready cash. Just remember that no matter what happens, you've still got us." Flip nodded his agreement. "What's ours is yours. It may be fifty years before another galactic ship stops by, and even then it may be going the wrong way, but we'll stand by you!" "If fifty years, .not too bad," said Quang Dal. "Is sewenty-five, is too late, I think so maybe. Is now Ides of March. Would be most inconweniencing to spousesto-be if not returning by June. Is getting married then," he explained, "and sewening no good with only six." "If you're saying what I think you're saying," Potsy said, sympathetically, "you're in a tough spot. If you've got to wait fifty years, it won't be much of a marriage." "Yeah," agreed Flip. "I can just see the poor girls waiting for their lover to come home, hopefully setting a light in their windows each night, slowly losing hope as the years pass -- growing lined and gray and bitter with the thoughts of what might have been." "Is many misconceptions here," said Quang Dal. "In first place, is not year question, is month question. In second, is not females on Alpha Centauri same kind like Earth. Is seven sexes. I am sptanton, number four kind." He went into a detailed description of relations and permutations that left the two Earthmen confused. "If this is what is meant by being socialized," said Potsy finally, "I don't see how Earth will ever make it." friend has to be home by June to get married, we're going to see that he makes it. Like he's always saying, all entities are siblings under the epidermis." "I'm all for it," said his partner, "but how?" "We've got a ship, haven't we?" "Yeah, but without the galactic drive, it would take him twenty years to get back and he's due in June." "He can make it," said Flip confidently. "All he has to do is build one of those faster-thanlight gadgets and install it in the ship. Then he could make it back in time." "Is not faster than light," objected Quang Dal once more. "Is merely conwenience. But if loanation of ship could be made, would be well-wishing with a wengeance and impressive sign of attainment of minimumnal socialization' was done. "Is all fix and workable fine,"' said Quang Dal. "You come down and see me off in morning. Is needful to express final love and gratitude' "Wouldn't mjss it for the world," said Flip. "I think I go make last-time checkup." When he left, Potsy pulled off his shoes and stretched on the bed. "Looks like we'll make it "Just in time, too," said Flip. "In case you've forgotten, we're due down at the Justice Department at noon tomorrow for sentencing." He shuddered. "Twenty years would have been a long time!" "Not as long as forty," said Potsy. "I think I'll have a bottle sent up. I feel like celebrating." "Excellent idea. Order up five women while you're at it. We owe it to our race to see if we can get onto this sevening." At eight sharp the next morning, the two were standing in the control room of their spaceship listening to Quang Dal's last grateful good-bys. "It's nothing at all," said Flip. "We'd do the same for any friend. How about showing us around before you take off?" Quang Dal thought for a moment and then quivered assent. "Would be no real wiolation of Galactic Union order. Secret things are all behind panels." The control room had been considerably altered. In place of the complicated banks of controls that had flanked the pilot's seat, there were two push buttons set in a simple black box. "This one take care of nawigation," explained Quang Dal. "One push, I go home. Start, go, stop -- whole thing automatical. Could not change course if wanted to." "You don't have to tell us what the other one controls," said PotAlpha Centauri in June." "Is not whoosh. Is putt-puttputt. Wery conweniervt, though." "Well, I guess we're ready," said Potsy. "Do you want to do the honors. Flip, or shall I?" "Is not understanding," Quang Dal equivalently frowned. "Didn't you tell him?" asked Flip. "I thought he'd take it for granted. After all, somebody has to bring the ship back." Quang Dal reared up on. his back four legs in an agitated fashion. "Accompaniment cannot be, sweet entities. Is not only Galactic Union law wiolation, but not possible for two-legged human peoples," cious-looking gun. "Anything bugs can do, we can do better. Get aft before I splatter you against the bulkhead!" "Weapon-using is sign of low soci a li ration," said Quang Dal with regret and pity. "Are you talking or walking?" demanded Flip, sighting down the barrel of his gun. "Is terrible thing you doing," warned the little Centaurian as he backed out of the control room. "You have no right to do this to selves." Potsy walked over to the control box. He reached out to press the first button and then hesitated. "What if something should happen?" he asked worriedly. "Couldn't be worse than twenty years in a Lunar isolation cell," said Flip. "You can stay behind if you want to, but I'm getting out of here." Potsy still hesitated. Finally he came back and sat down. "You push it," he offered. Flip snorted in disgust and tossed his gun over to his partner. "Go on back and lock our little friend up in the aft stateroom. If we let him run around loose, he might get into mischief. I'll take care of things up here."  When Potsy had left the compartment, Flip took a deep breath, walked over to the control box, and slowly pushed the first button. The results weren't spectacular. There was a hum of lifters as the ship rose slowly, and then, with a gentle push, they were off. Once out of the atmosphere, the ship pointed its nose toward Alpha Centauri and began to pick up speed. Potsy came back into the control room and took a quick look out the side port to where the Moon hung like a great pockmarked balloon. The penal colony itself couldn't be seen, but Lunaport was visible as a small glittering splotch. He gave a little shiver and turned away. "Everything under control?" "So far. Do you think I ought to hit the other stud?" Potsy shook his head. "The galactic ships never seem to use their drives until they are far enough away to be out of detection range. There must be a reason for it. Maybe the gadget blows up if it's set off near a sun." They waited two days before Flip pressed the second button. There was a low whine from beneath the deck and then a squeal of fright from Potsy as a nerve scraping vibration ran through the ship. A strange mistiness covered everything, as though the matter of which the ship was composed were turning to nothingness and then back again a thousand times a second. With a final shudder, the ship returned to normal. Potsy gave a sigh of relief and mopped his forehead. "Well, we're still in one piece. And I guess we're finally on our way." "Go let Quang Dal out," said Flip. "If these controls are as completely automatic as he says, he can't do us any harm now." Potsy came back five minutes later, alone. "He's got his door locked from the inside. He says that he's going to take a little nap and we should wake him come June." Flip shrugged. "If that's the way he wants it." A S the weeks crawled slowly by, the two Earthmen found themselves growing more and more irritable. "I think I'd almost prefer the Lunar prison colony," said Potsy. "Oh, well," growled Flip, "we've only got two weeks left. I guess I can stand your ugly face that long." Potsy gestured toward Alpha Centauri which glimmered palely directly ahead. "You'd think it would be getting bigger by now." "It'll Stay like that almost to the end," said Flip. "The way I got it figured, we're going so fast , that most of the light shoots past before it has a chance to get in, If you want to see the difference, go take a look through the rear 'scope. The Sun should be out of sight by now." Potsy trotted obediently to the rear and took a look out through the aft telescope. A moment later, he returned and asked in a timid and somewhat frightened voice, "If the Sun's supposed to be so far away, how come I can still see most of the planets?" "Huh? You can?" Flip looked nervous as Potsy nodded. "That lousy little bug must have given us cockeyed instructions, knowing the galactic drive is Greek to us." "But why should he?" "How do I know? Maybe he wants us to break our necks some way while he's safe in his cabin. Well, I'll break his if he doesn't .give us the right dope!" "Go easy," Patsy advised anxiously. "Try to con the information out of him first. Then let him have it if he won't talk." After considerable pounding, they managed to wake Quang Dal. His voice tube poked out through the grille at the top of his locked door and he asked politely, "Is June already?" "No," said Flip, "it's only the middle of May. Potsy and I are sorry to have to wake you up, but something seems to have gone wrong with the drive. Would you mind coming out and fixing it?" "Is nothing wrong," replied Quang Dal. "Can hear with propemess from here. Sound smooth." "The planetary drive is on, all right, but the fasterthan-light didn't cut in. After all this time, we're still only a stone's throw from Earth. We should be almost to Alpha Centauri by now." stateroom for a minute. "Is unhappiness to say this," the lit' tie Centauri an said regretfully, "but  as I explain past times, faster-than-light drive is theoretical impossibility. Galactic Union scientists work two, maybe this time, nothing, except once in a while little conwenience. Is still taking twenty years going Earth, Alpha Centauri, or wice-wersa." "Then how in hell do you expect to get home in three months?" "Is three months between time, not three months pass time. Wery different things," said Quang Dal, "Between time is from little conwenience I tell you before about. With it, can take trip maybe two hundred years and still not be away from family too long. Wery fine conwenience." "Two hundred years!" gasped Potsy. "Is one other thing which you mistake for faster-than-light drive. Old galactic peoples like Centauri ans live thirty-five, maybe forty thousands Earth years. Would not be socialized to tell poor Earth two-legged standeruppers they live and die same thing like I get up and go bed. Is not well-wishing to make other entities unhappy. Would not tell you this, only I think you unhappier if I do not explain. So sorry." Flip stood rigid, his brain freezing as the cold and horrid truth began to seep in. "Then the second button... "Is biggest conwenience. Fasterthan-light drive impossible, but not time travel. Push second button, whole ship come back nineteen years, nine months. Could make it exactly same time of same year we leave Earth when we reach Alpha Centauri, but I like better awaken at time of sewening, so I set controls for June " His voice was drowsier. "You will wake me in June, kindly? Until, I take small nap -- only twenty years. Apologizing that you cannot do likewise." Quang Dal's voice was almost inaudible as he withdrew his voice tube from the grille. "Is wishing well with a wengeance," he said, too conditioned to politeness to let weariness excuse him from the ritual of farewell. "Note, please -- I love you." #ft We mean your collection of really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold J stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from rough reading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paper-bound books at #c each up ; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousand? of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. a long novelet that refuses to hold still long enough to be outguessed. Here's a hint for you to work on; Osser knew exactly what he wanted, why he wanted it, and how to get it -- except that each one of his reasons was totally wrong! an Australian, is actually a bit closer to it than we are. Heat, however, is pretty much the central problem of the story -- when a politician of the future is run out of office, he really has to travel to cool off. Out to the moons of Saturn, as a matter of fact. Except that that's where things first start to get hotl about the perfect place for a criminal to commit the perfect crime. There's one little flaw, though -- he can never remember just what it was he had committed I stamped It's a funny thing , but most monsters seem to be of the opinion that it's men who are the monsters. You know, they have a point. T EN minutes after the crackup, somebody phoned for the Army. That meant us. The black smoke of the fire, and the oily residues, which were later analyzed, proved the presence of a probable petroleum derivative. The oil was heavily tainted with radioactivity. Most likely it was fuel from the odd, conchlike reaction-motors, the exact principles of which died, as far as we were concerned, with the crash. The craft was mainly of aluminum, magnesium and a kind of stainless steel, proving that, confronted with problems similar to ones we had encountered, aliens might solve them in similar ways. From the crumpledup wreckage which we dug out of that Missouri hillside, Klein even noticed a familiar method of making girders and braces lighter. Circular holes were punched out of them at spaced intervals. I kept hunting conviction by telling myself that, for the first time in all remembered history, we were peeking behind the veil of another planet. This should be the beginning of a new era, one of immensely widened horizons, and of high romance -- but with a dark side, too. The sky was no lbnger a limit. There were things beyond it that would have to be reckoned with. And how does unknown meet unknown? Suppose one has no hand to shake? The mass of that wreck reeked like a hot cinderpile and a burning garbage dump combined. It oozed blackened goo. There were crushed pieces of calcined material that looked like cuttlebone. The thin plates of charred stuff might almost have been pressed cardboard. Footlong tubes of thin, tincoated iron contained combined chemicals identifiable as proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Food, we decided. here was a wonderful clue to the plant and animal life of another world. Take a can of ordinary beef goulash; you can see the fibrous muscle and fat structure of the meat, and the cellular components of the vegetables. And here it was true, too, to a lesser degree. There were thin flakes and small, segmented cylinders which must have been parts of plants. But most was a homogeneous mush like gelatin. Evidently there had been three occupants of the craft. But the crash and the fire had almost destroyed their forms. Craig, our biologist, made careful slides of the remains, tagging this as horny epidermis, this as nerve or brain tissue, this as skeletal substance, and this as muscle from a tactile member -- the original had been as thin as spaghetti, and darkblooded. Under the microscope, muscle cells proved to be very long and thin. Nerve cells were large and extremely complex. Yet you could say that Nature, starting from scratch in another place, and working through other and peryears, had arrived at somewhat the same results as it had achieved on Earth. I wonder how an other-world entity, ignorant of humans, would explain a shaving-kit pr a lipstick. Probably for like reasons, much of the stuff mashed into that wreck had to remain incomprehensible to us. Wrenches and screwdrivers, however, we could make sense of, even though the grips of those tools were not handgrips. We saw screws and bolts, too. One device we found had been a simple crystal diaphragm with metal details -- a radio. There were also queer rifles. Lord knows how many people have wondered what the extraterrestrial equivalents of common human devices would look like. Well, here were some answers. A few of the instruments even had dials with pointers. And the" numeral I used on them was a vertical bar, almost like our own. But zero was a plus sign. And they counted by twelves, not tens. But all these parallels with our own culture seemed canceled by the fact that, even when this ship was in its original undamaged state, no man could have gotten inside it. The difficulty was less a matter of human size than of shape and physical behavior. The craft seemed to have been circular, with compartmentation in spiral form, like a. chambered nautilus. things we knew sent frost imps racing up and down my spine. And it prompted Blaine to say : "I suppose that emotions, drives, and purposes among off-Earth intelligences must be utterly inconceivable to us." We were assembled in the big trailer that had been brought out for us to live in, while we made a preliminary survey of the wreck. "Only about halfway, Blaine," Miller answered. "Granting that the life-chemistry of those intelligences is the same as ours -- the need for food creates the drive of hunger. Awareness of death is balanced by the urge to avoid it. There you have fear and combativeness. And is it so hard to tack on the drives of curiosity, invention, and ambition, especially when you know that these be-, ings made a spaceship? Cast an intelligence in any outward form, anywhere, it ought to come out much the same. Still, there are bound to be wide differences of detail -- with wide variations of viewpoint. They could be horrible to us. And most likely it's mutual." I felt that Miller was right. The duplication of a human race on other worlds by another chain of evolution was highly improbable. And to suppose that we might get along with other entities on a human basis seemed pitifully naive. With all our scientific thoroughness, when it came to examining, photographing and recording everything in the wreck, there was no better evidence of the clumsy way we were investigating unknown things than the fact that at first we neglected our supreme find almost entirely. It was a round lump of dried red mud, the sire of a soft baseball. When Craig finally did get around to X-raying it, indications of a less dense interior and feathery markings suggesting a soft bone structure showed up on the plate. Not entirely sure that it was the right thing to do, he opened the shell carefully. Think of an artichoke... but not a vegetable. Dusky pink, with thin, translucent mouth-flaps moving feebly. The blood in the tiny arteries was very red -- rich in hemoglobin, for a rare atmosphere. As a youngster, I had once opened a chicken egg, when it was ten days short of hatching. The memory came back now. "It looks like a growing embryo of some kind," Klein stated. "Close the lump again, Craig," Miller ordered softly. The biologist obeyed. "A highly intelligent race of beings wouldn't encase their developing young in mud, would they?" Klein almost whispered. "You're judging by a human esthetic standard," Craig offered. "Actually, mud can be as sterile as the cleanest surgical gauze." discussion was developing unspoken and shadowy ramifications. The thing in the dusty red lump -- whether the young of a dominant species, or merely a lower animal -- had been born, hatched, started in life probably during the weeks or months of a vast space journey. Nobody would know anything about its true nature until; and if, it manifested itself. And we had no idea of what that manifestation might be. The creature might emerge an infant or an adult. Friendly or malevolent. Or even deadly. Blaine shrugged. Something scared and half-savage showed in his face. "What'll we do with the thing?" he asked. "Keep it safe and see what happens. Yet it might be best to get rid of it fast -- with chloroform, cyanide or the back of a shovel." Miller's smile was very gentle. "Could be you're right. Blaine." I'd never known Miller to pull rank on any of the bunch. Only deliberate thought would remind us that he was a colonel. But he wasn't really a military man; he was a scientist whom the Army had called in to keep a finger on a possibility that they had long known might be realized. Yes -- space travel. And Miller was the right guy for the job. He had the dream even in the wrinkles around his deep-set gray eyes. Blaine wasn't the right guy. He was a fine technician, good at machinery, radar -- anything of the sort. And a nice fellow. Maybe he'd just blown off steam -- uncertainty, tension. I knew that no paper relating to him would be marked, "Psychologically unsuited for task in hand." But I knew just as surely that he would be quietly transferred. In a big thing like this, Miller would surround himself only with men who saw things his way. That night we moved everything to our labs on the outskirts of St. Louis. Every particle of that extraterrestrial wreck had been packed and crated with utmost care. Klein and Craig went to work to build a special refuge for that mud lump and what was in it. They were top men. But I had got tied up with Miller more or less by chance, and I figured I'd be replaced by an expert. I can say that I was a college man, but that's nothing. I guess you can't give up participation in high romance without some regret. Yet I wasn't too sorry. I liked things the way they'd always been. My beer. My Saturday night dates with Alice. On the job, the atmosphere was getting a bit too rich and futuristic.  drew me aside. "You've handled carrier pigeons and you've trained dogs, Nolan," he said. "You were good at both." "Here I go, back to the farmyard." "In a way. But you expand your operations, Nolan. You specialize as nurse for a piece of offtheEarth animal life." "Look, Miller," I pointed out. "Ten thousand professors are a rarin' to go." "They're liable to fhinic they're well qualified, when no man could be -- yet. That's bad, Nolan. The one who does it has to be humble enough to be wary -- ready for whatever might happen. I think a knack with animals might help. That's the best I can do, Nolan." "Thanks, Miller." I felt proud -- and a little like a damn fool. "I haven't finished talking yet," Miller said. "We know that real contact between our kind and the inhabitants of another world can't be far off. Either they'll send another ship or we'll build one on Earth. I like the idea, Nolan, but it also scares the hell out of me. Men have had plenty of trouble with other ethnic groups of their own species, through prejudice, misunderstanding, honest suspicion. How will it be at the first critical meeting of two kinds of things that will look like hallucinations to each other? I suspect an awful and inevitable feeling of separateness that nothing can bridge -- except maybe an impulse to do murder. "It could be a real menace. But it doesn't have to be. So we've got to find out what we're up against, if we can. We've got to prepare and scheme. Otherwise, even if intentions on that other world are okay, there's liable to be an incident at that first meeting that can spoil a contact across space for all time, and make interplanetary travel not the success it ought to be, but a constant danger. So do you see our main objective, Nolan?" I told Miller that I understood. That same night, Klein and Craig put the lump of mud in a small glass case from which twothirds of the air had been exhausted. The remainder was kept dehydrated and chilled. It was guess work, backed up by evidence : The rusty red of that mud; the high hemoglobin content of the alien blood we had seen; the dead-air cells -- resistant to cold -- in the shreds of rough skin that we had examined. And then there was the fair proximity of Mars and Earth in their orbits at the time. My job didn't really begin till the following evening, when Craig and Klein had completed a much larger glass cage, to which my outlandish -- or, rather, outworldish -- ward was transferred. Miller provided me with a wire-braced, airtight costume and oxygen helmet, the kind fliers use at extreme altitudes. Okay, call it a space suit. He also gave me a small teargas pistol, an automatic, and a knife. All there was to pit such armament against was a seemingly helpless lump of protoplasm, two inches in diameter. Still, here was an illustration of how cautiously you are prompted to treat so unknown a quantity. You are unable to gauge its powers, or lack of them, for you have nothing on which to base a judgment. I became like a monk -- my pressure armor was my robe; the chilly semivacuum inside that glass cage, my cell. Nights out with Alice were going to be far between. N the third evening, that lump  of mud, resting in dried-out soil similar to itself, split along the line where Craig had originally cut it. Out onto the cage floor crept what the records designated as E.T.L. -- Extra Terrestrial Life. It was finished with the mud shell that had enabled it to survive a crash and fire. Craig, Klein, Miller and a lot of news reporters stared into the glass cage from outside. There was nothing for me to do just then except watch that tiny monster, and try to read, in its every clumsy, dragging movement, some fragmentary unveiling of many riddles. Although it might have shrunk a bit since I had last seen it, it looked more complete. The dusky pink of its wrinkled integument was darker. It had dozens of short tendrils, hardly thicker than horsehair, with which it pulled itself along. It had lost some leaflike pieces of skin. Laterally, two eyes gleamed, clear and slit-pupiled. Its jaws, hinged on a horizontal plane, opened and closed between fleshy flaps. Through the thin plastic of my oxygen helmet, I heard a querulous "chip-chip-chip," which reminded me of the squeaking of an infant bat. The E.T.L. crept in a small looping course on the cage floor, back to one half of the mud shell that had encased it. It tried to mount this, perhaps to gain a vantage point for better observation. But it fell and turned over. Its ventral surface was ceilingward; its tendrils writhed furiously as it tried to right itself. I thought of a horseshoe crab, stranded on its back and kicking helplessly. But this thing's form and movement were even more alien. After a moment, I followed an impulse which was part duty to my job and part pity. I tipped the little horror back on its bottom, glad that there was a glove between me and it. Then I did the same thing I would do with a pet puppy or kitten. I set a dish of food -- chemically prepared to duplicate the contents of the' tubes we had found in the wreck -- right down in front of the E.T.L. It fumbled at the stuff and, possibly because of a gravity twoand-a-half times as great as it was made for, it almost got itself stuck in the mess. But it freed itself. Its mouth-flaps began to make lapping movements as it sucked the nourishment. I felt prematurely relieved. This was no potentially dominant wizard in a strange body, I told myself. This was pure animal. Over my helmet radiophone -- there was a mike outside the cage, so they could communicate with me when I was inside -- I heard Miller say to the reporters : "The feeding instinct. They've got it, too. Now we know for sure  . colic from that first meal, though, like any half smart puppy trainer, I tried not to let it eat too much. It writhed for a while, as if in pain. And I was on pins. How was I supposed to know just what was best to feed the thing, so it would survive? Everything was guesswork, varying formulas cautiously, groping. And it wasn't only the food. There was the searching for the temperature, the air-pressure and the degree of dryness at which the E.T.L. seemed most comfortable. And there was also the fiddling around with light-composition and intensities, variable in the sun lamps, to find what seemed best.  We seemed to have figured things out right -- or else the monster was just rugged. It shed several skins, thrived and grew active. Its size increased steadily. And other things began to grow in that cage. Odd, hard-shelled, bluish green weeds; lichenous patches, dry as dust; invisible, un-Earthly bacteria -- all were harmless, possibly even beneficial, to my charge. How did all this stuff come into being? Miller and Craig had examined the dried clay of the E.T.L's discarded casing with microscopes. They scraped dust from every fragment of the wreck that hadn't been blasted too much with fire, and made cultures. They were looking for spores and seeds and microbes. And it wasn't long before they had classified quite a list of otherworld biological forms. The most common of these they transplanted into the cage. Often I even slept inside the cage, clad in my armor. That's devotion to a purpose for you. In a way, it was like living on a little piece of Mars. Often enough I was bored stiff. But plenty did happen. From the start Etl -- we began calling the thing that -- showed an almost electrically intense curiosity for everything. Some of the habits of its kind were written in its instincts. It basked in strong light, but it liked dark comers, too. At night -- when we turned the sun lamps off, that is -- it would bury itself in the dusty soil. Protection against nocturnal cold might have been the reason for that two days out of his clay shell, Etl tried to rear up vertically on his tendrils. He kept toppling over. Maybe he was trying to "walk." But there were no bones in those tendrils and, of course, the strong Earth gravity defeated him. Lots of times I tried to see what he could do. A real scientist would call this "making tests." I just called it fooling around. I made him climb a stool for his food. He seemed to make a careful survey first, eying each rung; then he drew himself up in one motion. During one of my rare nights in town -- to get a refresher from outlandish stuff in Alice's company -- I bought some toys. When I came back to relieve Craig, who had taken care of Etl during my absence, I said: "Etl, here's a rubber ball. Let's play." He caught it on the second try, in those swift, dextrous tendrils. There was a savagery in the way he did it. I thought of a dog snapping a bumblebee out of the air. Yet my idea that Etl was just an animal had almost vanished by then. I got into the habit of talking to him the way you do to a pup. Sort of crooning. "Good fella, Etl. Smart. You learn fast, don't you?" Stuff like that. And I'd coax him to climb up the front of my ' spacesuit. There were fine, barblike prongs along the length of his many tentacles; I could feel them pulling in the tough, rubberized fabric, like the claws of a climbing kitten. And he would make a kind of contented chirping that might have had affection in it. But then there was the time when he bit me. I don't know the reason, unless it was that I had held onto his ball too long. He got my finger, through the glove, with his snaggy, chalk-hued mandibles, while he made a thin hissing noise. Pretty soon my hand swelled up to twice its size, and I felt sick. Klein had to relieve me in the cage for a while. The bite turned out to be mildly venomous. Before that, I'd had a rash on my arms. An allergy, probably ; maybe some substance from those Martian plants had gotten inside my spacesuit and rubbed onto my skin. Who knows? Perhaps Earthly flesh can sense alien life, and reddens to fight it off. And there you have one of the potential disadvantages of contact with unknown worlds. thing. But Etl's show of rage was another -- a sign of the mixed nature of all his kind, emerging a bit from the shadows of enigma. Here revealed was the emotion on which things like murder are based. These creatures had it, just as we did. Maybe it's necessary for any kind of thing that can progress upward from nothing. Still, people did not find it reassuring when they heard about it on the newscast. After that, popular opinion insisted that the cage be constantly surrounded by four manned machine-guns pointing inward. And tanks of cyanogen were so arranged that the poison gas could be sent gushing into the cage at any time. Part of my mind felt these precautions were completely exaggerated. There is a certain, everpresent segment of any public, whose jittery imagination is a constant fusecap for panic. Such cowardice angered me. But the rest of me went along with Miller when he said : "We're in the dark, Nolan. For all we know, we might be up against very swift maturity and inherited memory. And we've got to go on testing Etl... with toys, psychological apparatus and tools and devices made by his own people. Suppose he 'remembers' skills from his ancestors, and can build dangerous new devices, or make old ones work again? If his kind are bent on being enemies, we'd better find it out as soon as possible, too, hadn't we? No, I don't truly expect any serious developments, Nolan. Still -- just for insurance -- eh?" mishap -- unless I should mention that Alice and I got married. But it didn't spoil anything, and it raised my morale. We got a bungalow right on the lab grounds. A lot had been accomplished, otherwise. Once I let Etl play with my gun, minus cartridges. He was avidly interested; but he paid no attention to the Hopalong cap pistol that I left in its place when I took the gun back. He figured out how to grip, simple Martian tools, threading his tactile members through the holes in their handles; but complicated devices of the same origin seemed more of a puzzle to him than to the rest of us. So our inheritedmemory idea faded out. Etl liked to work with those slender tendrils of his. The dexterity and speed with which he soon learned to build many things with a construction set seemed to prove a race background of perhaps ages of such activities. I made a tower or a bridge, while he watched. Then he was ready to try it on his own, using screwdrivers that Klein had made with special grips. Of course we tried dozens of intelligence tests on Etl, mostly of the puzzle variety, like fitting odd-shaped pieces of plastic together to form a sphere or a cube. He was hard to rate on any common human I.Q. scale. Even for an Earthian, an I.Q. rating is pretty much of a makeshift proposition. There are too many scattered factors that can't be touched. With Etl, it was even tougher. But at the end of that first year Miller had him pegged at about #, judging him on the same basis as a five-year-old child. This score scared people a lot, because it seemed to hint at a race of super-beings. But Miller wasn't jumping to conclusions. He pointed out to the reporters that Etl's kind seemed to grow up very rapidly; # was only twenty points above the norm -- not uncommon among Earth youngsters, especially those from more gifted families. Etl seemed to have sprung from corresponding parentage, he said, for it seemed clear that they had been of the kind that does big things. They'd made a pioneering voyage across space, hadn't they? TT'TL could make chirps and squeaks and weird animal cries. Human speech, however, was beyond his vocal powers, though I knew that he could understand simple orders. He had a large tympanic membrane or "ear" on his ventral surface. Of course we wondered how his kind communicated with one another. The way he groped at my fingers with certain of his tentacles gave us a clue. There were tiny, nervelike threads at their extremities. Seeing them prompted Miller to do something as brave as it was foolhardy. He called in a surgeon and had a nerve in his arm bared. It must have hurt like the devil, but he let Etl clutch it with those threadlike members. I was cockeyed enough to follow Miller's example and found out how much it really hurt. The idea was to establish a nerve channel, brain to brain, along which thoughts might pass. But nothing came through except a vague and restless questioning, mixed with the pain of our experiment. "It doesn't work with us p Nolan," Miller said regretfully. "Our nervous systems aren't hooked up right for this sort of stunt, or Etl's nerve cells are too different from ours." So we had to fall back on simpler methods of communication with Etl. We tried teaching him sign language, but it didn't work too well, because tentacles aren't hands. Klein's inventive ability, plus some pointers from me about how Etl used his tendrils, finally solved the problem. Klein made a cylindrical apparatus with a tonal buzzer, operated by electricity, at one end. It had dozens of stops and controls, their grips in the shape of tiny metal rings, along the sides of the cylinder. First I had to learn a little about how to work that instrument with my big fingers. The trick was to mold the sounds of the buzzer, as human lips and tongue mold and shape tones of the vocal cords, so that they became syllables and words. "Hell-oh-g-g-Et-t-l-l... Chees-s-ee-whad-d I-ee got-t?" It was tougher for me than learning to play a saxophone is for a boy of ten. And the noises were almost as bad. I turned the apparatus over to Ml Etl as soon as I could. Let him figure out how to use it. I'd just give him the words, the ideas. Of course he had to get educated, learn his cat, dog and rat, and his arithmetic, the same as a humah kid, even if he was from another world. In a way, it was the law. You can't let a youngster, capable of learning, stay home from school. And I was Etl's tutor. I thought what a crazy situation we had here; an entity from one planet being brought up on another, without any real knowledge of his own folks, and unable to be very close to those entities by whom he was being reared. It was strange and sad and a little comic. For a while I thought I had a stammering parrot on my hands : "Hel-l-l-l-o... Hell-oh-g-o... N-n-ol-l-an-n-n... Hell-lo-oh." Etl never lost that habit of repetition. But he made progress in his studies. "One, two, free, fo', fibe, siss... One time one ee one. toot time one ee two... Picture it the way it was -- I, clad in a spacesuit, crouching beside Etl in the cold, thin air inside that cage, tracing numbers and words in the dusty soil on the floor, while he read aloud with his voice tube or copied my words and figures with a sharp stick. Outside the transparent cage, the television cameras would be watching. And I would think that maybe in. a way Etl was like Tarzan, being raised by apes. had offspring of my own. Patty and Ron. Good-looking, lovable brats. But Etl was my job -- and maybe a little more than that. At the end of two years, he stopped growing. He weighed fiftytwo pounds and he was the ugliest-looking, elongated, graypink, leathery ovoid that you could imagine. But with his voice tube clutched in his tendrils, he could talk like a man. He could take the finest watch apart, repair and clean it in jigtime -- and this was just one skill among scores. Toward the end of the four years, a Professor Jonas was coming in regularly and getting into a spacesuit to give him lessons in physics, chemistry, college math, astronomy and biology. Etl was having his troubles with calculus. And Etl could at least ape the outward aspects of the thoughts and feelings of men. There were things he said to me that were characteristic, though they came out of apparent sullenness that, for all I knew, had seeds of murder in it: "You're my pal, Nolan. Sort of my uncle. I won't say my father; you wouldn't like that." Nice, embarrassing sentiment, on the surface. Maybe it was just cool mimicry -- a keen mind adding up human ways from observation of me and my kids, and making up something that sounded the same, without being the same at all. Yet somehow I hoped that Etl was sincere. Almost from the building of the cage, of course we'd kept photographs and drawings of Mars inside for Etl to see. Hundreds of times I had said to him things like: "It's a ninetynine and ninety-nine hundredths per cent probability that your race lives on that world, Etl. Before the ship that brought you crashed on Earth, we weren't at all sure that it was inhabited, and it's still an awful mystery. I guess maybe you'll want to go there. Maybe you'll help us make contact and establish amicable relations with the inhabitants -- if there's any way we can do that." During those five years, no more ships came to Earth from space, as far as we knew. I guessed that the Martians understood how supremely hard it would be to make friendly contact between the peoples of two worlds that had always been separate. There was difference of form, and certainly difference of esthetic concepts. Of custom, nothing could be the . same. We didn't have even an inkling of what the Martian civilization would be like. "NE thing happened during the " third year of Etl's existence. And his presence on Earth was responsible. Enough serious interest in space travel was built Up to overcome the human inertia that had counteracted the longstanding knowledge that such things were possible. A hydro gen fusion reaction motor was built into a rocket, which was then hurled to the moon. Miller went along, ostensibly to help establish the first Army experimental station there, but mostly to acquire the practical experience for a far longer leap. In a way, I wished I could have gone, too: but, after all, the shadows in Etl's background were far more intriguing than the dead and airless craters and plains of the lunar surface. Before Miller and the other moon voyagers even returned, Detroit was busy forging, casting and machining the parts for a better, larger and much longerrange rocket, to be assembled in White Sands, New Mexico. When Miller got back, he was too eager and busy to say much about the moon. For the next two and a half years, he was mostly out in White Sands. But during the first of our now infrequent meetings, he said to Craig and Klein and me: "When I go out to Mars, I'd like to keep my old bunch as crew. I need men I'm used to working with, those who understand the problems we're up against. I have a plan that makes sense. The trouble is, to join this expedition, a man has to be part damn-fool." Klein chuckled. 'Til sell you some of mine." I just nodded my way in. I'd never thought of backing out. Craig grabbed Miller's hand and shook it. Miller gave Etl a chance to say no. "You can stay on Earth if you want to, Etl." But the creature said: "I have lived all my life with the idea of going, Miller. Thank you." plan. Then he, Klein, Craig and I all took a lot of psych tests -- trick questioning and so forth to reveal defects of conviction and control. But we were all pretty well indoctrinated and steady. Etl had taken so many tests already that, if there were any flaws still hidden in him, they would probably never be found. Mars and Earth were approaching closer to each other again in their orbital positions. A month before takeoff time, Craig, Klein and I took Etl, in a small air-conditioned cage, to White Sands. The ship towered there, silvery, already completed. We knew its structure and the function of its machinery intimately from study of its blueprints. But our acquaintance with it had to be actual, too. So we went over it again and again, under Miller's tutelage. Miller wrote a last message, to be handed to the newscast boys after our departure : ", by Martian action, we fail to return, don't blame the Martians too quickly, because there is a difference and a doubt. Contact between worlds is worth more than the poson of a grudge..." I said good-by to Alice and the kids, who had come out to see me off. I felt pretty punk. Maybe I was a stinker, going off like that. But, on the other hand, that wasn't entirely the right way to look at things, because Patty's and Ron's faces fairly glowed with pride for their pa. The tough part, then, was for Alice, who knew what it was all about. Yet she looked proud, too. And she didn't go damp. "If it weren't for the kids, I'd be trying to go along, Louie," she told me. "Take care of yourself." She knew that a guy has to do what's in his heart. I think that the basic and initial motive of exploration is that richest of human commodities -- high romance. The metallic ores and other commercial stuff that get involved later are only cheap by-products. To make the dream of space travel a reality was one of our purposes. But to try to forestall the danger behind it was at least as important.  E blasted off in a rush of fire that must have knocked down some selfoperating television cameras. We endured the strangling thrust of acceleration, and then the weightlessness of just coasting on our built-up velocity. We saw the stars and the black sky of space. We saw the Earth dwindle away behind us. But the journey .itself, though it lasted ninety days, was no real adventure -- comparatively speaking. There was nothing unpredictable in it. Space conditions were known. We even knew about the tension of nostalgia. But we understood, too, the mental attitudes that could lessen the strain. Crossing space to another world under the tremendous power of atomic fusion, and under the precise guidance of mathematics and piloting devices, reduces the process almost to a formula. If things go right, you get where you're going; if not, there isn't much you can do. Anyway, we had the feeling that the technical side of interplanetary travel was the simplest part. There is a marking near the Martian equator shaped like the funnel of a gigantic tornado. It is the red planet's most conspicuous feature and it includes probably the least arid territory of a cold, arid world. Syrtis Major, it is called. Astronomers had always supposed it to be an ancient seabottom. That was where our piloting devices were set to take us. Over it, our retarding forejets blazed for the last time. Our retractable wings slid from their sockets and took hold of the thin atmosphere with a thump and a soft rustle. On great rubbertired wheels, our ship -- horizontal now, like a plane -- landed in a broad valley that must have been cleared of boulders by Martian engineers countless ages before. Our craft stopped rumbling. We peered from the windows of our cabin, saw the deep blue of the sky and the smaller but brilliant Sun. We saw little dusty whirlwinds, carven monoliths that were weathering away, strange blue green vegetation, some of which we could recognize. To the east, a metal tower glinted. And a mile beyond it there was a tremendous flat structure. An expanse of glassy roof shone. What might have been a highway curved like a white ribbon into the distance. The scene was quiet, beautiful and sad. You could feel that here maybe a hundred civilizations had risen, and had sunk back into the dust. Mars was no older than the Earth; but it was smaller, had cooled faster and must have borne life sooner. Perhaps some of those earlier cultures had achieved space travel. But, if so, it had been forgotten until recent years. Very soon now its result would be tested. The meeting of alien entity with alien entity was at hand. I looked at Etl, still in his airconditioned cage. His stalked eyes had a glow and they swayed nervously, Here was the home-planet that he had never seen. Was he eager or frightened, or both? His education and experience were Earthly. He knew no more of Mars than we did. Yet, now that he was here and probably at home, did difference of physical structure and emotion make him feel that the rest of us were enemies, forever too different for friendly contact? My hide began to pucker. aircraft glistened. On the distant turnpike there were the shining specks of vehicles that vanished from sight behind a ridge shaggy with vegetation. Miller had a tight, nervoussmile. "Remember, men," he said. "Passivity. Three men can't afford to get into a fight with a whole planet." We put on spacesuits, which we'd need if someone damaged our rocket. It had been known for years that Martian air was too thin and far too poor in oxygen for human lungs. Even Etl, in his cage, had an oxygen mask that Klein had made for him. We had provided him with this because the Martian atmosphere, drifting away through the ages, might be even leaner than the mixture we'd given Etl on Earth. That had been based on spectroscopic analtance, which isn't close enough for any certainty. Now all we could do was wait and see what would happen. I know that some jerks, trying to make contact with the inhabitants of an unknown world, would just barge in and take over. Maybe they'd wave a few times and grin. If instead of being met like brothers, they were shot at, they'd be inclined to start shooting. If they got out alive, their hatred would be everlasting. We had more sense. Yet passivity was a word that I didn't entirely like. It sounded spineless. The art of balancing naive trust exactly against hard cynicism, to try to produce something that makes a little sense, isn't always easy. Though we knew something of Martians, we didn't know nearly enough. Our plan might be wrong; we might turn out to be dead idiots in a short time. Still, it was the best thing that we could think of. The afternoon wore on. With the dropping temperature, a cold pearly haze began to form around the horizon. The landscape around us was too quiet. And there was plenty of vegetation at hand to provide cover. Maybe it had been a mistake to land here. But we couldn't see that an arid place would be any good either. We had needed to come to a region that was probably inhabited. We saw a Martian only once -- scampering across an open glade, holding himself high on his stiffened tentacles. Here, where the gravity was only thirtyeight percent of the terrestrial, that was possible. It lessened the eeriness a lot to know beforehand what a Martian looked like. He looked like Etl. " agely against the flank of our rocket. So there were triggerhappy individuals here, too. But I remembered how, on Earth, Etl's cage had been surrounded by machine-guns and cyanogen tanks, rigged to kill him quickly if it became necessary. That hadn't been malice, only sensible precaution against the unpredictable. And wasn't our being surrounded by weapons here only the same thing, from another viewpoint? Yet it didn't feel pleasant, sensible or not. There were no more shots for half an hour. But our tension mounted with the waiting. Finally Klein said through his helmet phone: "Maybe Etl ought to go out and scout around now." Etl was naturally the only one of us who had much chance for success. "Go only if you really want to, Etl," Miller said, "It could be dangerous even for you." But Etl had already put on his oxygen mask. Air hissed into his cage from the greater pressure outside as he turned a valve. Then he unlatched the cagedoor. He wouldn't be harmed by the brief exposure to atmosphere of Earthdensity while he moved to our rocket's airlock. Now he was getting around high on his tendrils. Like a true Martian. He left his specially built pistol behind, according to plan. We had weapons, but we didn't mean to use them unless everything went dead wrong. Etl's tendrils touched the dusty surface of Mars. A minute later, he disappeared behind some scrub growths. Then, for ten minutes, the pendant silence was heavy. It was broken by the sound of a shot, coming back to us thinly through the rarefied air. "Maybe they got him," Craig, said anxiously. Nobody answered. I thought of an old story I'd read about a boy being brought up by wolves. His ways were so like an animal's that hunters had shot him. He had come back to civilization dead. Perhaps there was no other way. By sundown, Etl had not returned. So three things seemed possible: He had been murdered. He had been captured. Or else he had deserted to his own kind. I began to wonder. What if we were complete fools? What if there were more than differences of body and background, plus the dread of newness, between Earthmen and Martians, preventing their friendship? What if Martians were basically malevolent? But speculation was useless now. We were committed to a line of action. We had to follow it through. We ate a meager supper. The brief dusk changed to a night blazing with frigid stars. But the darkness on the ground remained until the jagged lump of light that was Phobos, the nearer moon; arose out of the west. Then we saw two shapes rushing toward our ship to find cover closer to it. As they hid themselves behind a clump of cactiform shrubs, I had only the memory of how I had seen them for a moment, their odd masks and accoutrements glinting, their supporting tendrils looking like tattered rags come alive in the dim moonlight. W E'D turned the light out in our cabin, so we couldn't be seen through the windows. But now we heard soft, scraping sounds against the outer skin of our rocket. Probablythey meant that the Martians were trying to get in. I began to sweat all over, because I knew what Miller meant to do. Here was a situation that we had visualized beforehand. "We could shut them out till dawn. Miller," I whispered hoarsely. "We'd all feel better if the meeting took place in daylight. And there'd be less chance of things going wrong." But Miller said, "We can't tell what they'd be doing in the dark meanwhile, Nolan. Maybe fixing to blow us up. So we'd better get this thing over with now." I knew he was right. Active resistance to the Martians could never save us, if they intended to destroy us. We might have taken the rocket off the ground like a plane, seeking safety in the upper air for a while, if we could get it launched that way from the rough terrain. But using our jets might kill some of the Martians just outside. They could interpret it as a hostile act. We didn't matter much, except to ourselves. And our primary . objective was to make friendly contact with the beings of this planet, without friction, if it could be done. If we failed, space travel might become a genuine menace to Earth. At Miller's order, Craig turned on our cabin lights. Miller pressed the controls of our ship's airlock. While its outer valve remained wide, the inner valve unsealed itself and swung slowly toward us. Our air whooshed out. The opening of that inner valve meant we were letting horror in. We kept out of line of possible fire through the open door. Our idea was to control our instinctive reactions to strangeness, to remain passive, giving the Martians a chance to get over their own probable terror of us by finding out that we meant no harm. Otherwise we might be murdering each other. The long wait was agony. In spite of the dehumidifying unit of my spacesuit, I could feel the sweat from my body collecting in puddles in the bottoms of my boots. A dozen times there were soft rustles and scrapes at the airlock; then sounds of hurried retreat. But at last a mass of gray-pink tendrils intruded over the threshold. And we saw the stalked eyes, faintly luminous in the shadowy interior of the lock. Grotesquely up-ended on its tentacles, the monster seemed to flow into the cabin. Over its mouthpalps was the cup of what must have been its oxygen mask. What was clearly the muzzle of some kind of pistol, smoothly machined, was held ready by a mass of tendrils that suggested Gorgon hair. Behind the first monster was a second, similarly armed. Behind him was a third. After that I lost count, as the horde, impelled by fear to grab control in one savage rush, spilled into the cabin with a dryleaf rustle. A LL my instincts urged me to yank my automatic out of my belt and let go at that flood of horror. Yes, that was in me, although ld been in intimate association with Etl for four years. Psychologists say that no will power could keep a man's reflexes from withdrawing his hand from a hot stove for very long. And going for my gun seemed almost a reflex action. There was plenty of sound logic to back up the urge to shoot. In the presence of the unfathomable, how could you replace the tried defenses of instinct with intellectual ideas of good will? On the other hand, to shoot now would be suicide and ruin our hopes, besides. So maybe there'd have to be human sacrifices to faith between the planets. j If we succeeded ia following the plan, our faith would be proven either right or wrong. If we didn't act passively, the failure would be partly our fault. In any case, if we didn't get back to Earth, hatred and fear of the Martians would inevitably arise there, whether it had been the Martians' fault or ours. The message that' Miller had left for newscast might only give people the self-righteous attitude that Earthly intentions had been good. If another expedition ever came to Mars, it might shoot any inhabitants on sight, and maybe get wiped out itself. Still, how could we know that' the Martians weren't preparing the kind of invasion of Earth that has been imagined so often? It was a corny notion, but the basis for it remained sound. Mars was a dying world. Couldn't the Martians still want a new planet to move to? All these old thoughts popped back into my head during that very bad moment. And if I was almost going for my pistol, how much worse was it for Craig, Klein and Miller, who hadn't been as friendly with Etl as I had been? Maybe we should have put our weapons out of our own reach, in preparation for this incident. Then there would have been no danger of our using them. But any freedom of action was swiftly wrested from us. The Martians rolled over us in a wave. Thousands of dark tendrils with fine, sawlike spines latched onto our bodies. I was glad that I wore a spacesuit, as much from the revulsion I felt at a direct contact as for the small protection it gave against injury. T AM sure that there was panic behind that wild Martian rush. To get US pinned down and helpless quickly, they drove themselves in spite of their own fear of the horrid human forms. For did I feel a tremor in those tendrils, a tendency to recoil from me? I was trembling and sweating. Still, my impressions were vivid. Those monsters held us down as if they were Malay beaters holding down trapped pythons. Maybe they had known beforehand what men looked like -- from previous, secret expeditions to Earth. Just as we had known about Martians from Etl. But it wouldn't have made any difference. Or perhaps they weren't even aware that we were from the neighboring planet. But it would be obvious that we were from another world; nothing from their own planet could be so strange. Our own reactions to the situation differed a little. Craig gasped curses through his helmet phones. Miller said, "Easy, men! Easy!" It was as if he were trying to build up his own morale, too. I couldn't utter a sound. It wasn't hard for our captors to recognize our weapons. We were disarmed. They carried us out into the night and around a hill. We were piled onto a flat metallic surface. A vehicle under us began to throb and move; you could have called it a truck. The nature of its mechanism was hinted at only by a small, frosty wisp of steam or vapor up front. Perhaps it came from a leak. The Martians continued to hold us down as savagely as ever. Now and then a pair of them would, join the nerveends of tendrils, perhaps to converse. Others would chirp or hoot for no reason that I could understand. The highway rolled away behind us, under the light of Phobos. Buildings passed, vague as buildings along a road usually are at night. It was the same with the clumps of vegetation. Lights, which might have been electrical, flashed into my eyes and passed by. In a deep valley through which we moved in part of our short trip, a dense, stratified fog arose between the lights and me. I noticed with an odd detachment that the fog was composed of minute ice crystals, which glinted in the glow of the strange lamps. I tried to remember our course. I knew that it was generally east. Off in the night there were clangings and hisses that might have been factory noises. Once Miller asked, "Is everybody okay?" ' Klein's and Craig's responses were gruff and unsteady in the v phones. "Sure... "More or less -- if heart-failure doesn't get me." "I guess our skins are still intact," I said. We didn't talk after that. A T last we entered a long, downward slanting tunnel, full of soft luminescence that seemed to come out of the whitetiled wails themselves. My attention grew a little vague. It could be that my mind turned in on itself, like a turtle drawing in its head for protection, In that state of semiconsciousness, I experienced a phantasm. I imagined I was a helpless grub being dragged down into the depths of an anthill. But such a grub belongs in an ant-hill a lot more than a man belonged where I was going. This became plainer when the large tunnel ended, and we were dragged and carried along winding burrows, never more than three feet in diameter. Mostly they were tiled, but often their walls were of bare rock or soil. Twice we passed through airlocks. I couldn't describe too much of what I saw or the noises I heard in those warrens. In one place incandescence glowed and wheels turned. In a great low-ceilinged chamber full of artificial sun-rayy there was a garden with strange blooms. The architecture of the city was not altogether utilitarian and it was not unpleasing. I saw a lot more. But my mind was somewhat fuzzy, probably from shock and fatigue. I know we traversed another chamber, where trays full of round lumps of soil were set in frames. A Martian nursery, no doubt. Some minutes later, my companions and I were left in a small room, high enough so that we could stand erect in it. Here the Martians let go of us. We sprawled on the floor, faces down. We'd had a busy day. Our nerveenergy was burned out. Hopelessness warped all of my thoughts. I must have slipped into the coma of exhaustion. I had jangled dreams about Alice and the kids and home, and almost imagined I was there. Half awake again, I had a cursing spree, calling myself fifty kinds of a numbskull. Be passive before the people of other worlds ! Reassure them! How did we ever think up that one? We'd been crazy. Why didn't we at least use our guns when we'd had the chance? It wouldn't have made any difference to be killed right away. Now we were sacrificial lambs on the altar of a featherbrained idea that the inhabitants of worlds that had always been separate from the beginning should become friends, learn to swap and to benefit from the diverse phases of each other's cultures. How could Martians who hatched out of lumps of mud be like humans at all? Klein, Craig, Miller and I were alone in that room. There were crystalglazed spywindows in the walls. Perhaps we were still being observed.  exit had been sealed with a circular piece of glassy stuff. Near the floor there were vents through which air was being forced into the room. Hidden pumps, which must have been hastily rigged for our reception, throbbed steadily. Miller, beside me, had removed his oxygen helmet. His grin was slightly warped as he said to me : "Well, Nolan, here's another parallel with what we've known before. We had to keep Etl alive in a cage. Now the same thing is being done to us." This could be regarded as a service, a favor. Yet I was more inclined to feel that I was like something locked up in a zoo. Maybe Etl's case was a little different. For the first thing he had known in life was his cage. I removed my oxygen helmet, too, mainly to conserve its airpurifier unit, which I hoped I might need sometime soon -- in an escape. "Don't look so glum, Nolan," Miller told me. "Here we have just what we need, a chance to observe and learn and know the Martians better. And it's the same for them in relation to us. It's the best situation possible for both worlds." I was thinking mostly -- belatedly -- of my wife and kids. Right then, Miller was a crackpot to me, a monomaniac, a guy whose philosophical viewpoint went way beyond the healthy norm. And I soon found that Craig and Klein agreed with me now. Something in our attitude had shifted. I don't know how long we were in that sealed room. A week, perhaps. We couldn't see the daylight. Our watches had vanished along with our weapons. Sometimes there were sounds of much movement in the tunnels around us; sometimes little. But the variation was too irregular to indicate a change based on night and day. Lots of things happened to us. The air we breathed had a chemical smell. And the Martians kept changing its composition and density constantly -- experimenting, no doubt. Now it would be oppressively heavy and humid; now it would be so dry and thin that we began to feel faint. They also varied the temperature, from below freezing to Earthly desert heat. And I suspected that at times there was a drug in the air. Food was lowered to us in metal containers from a circular airlock in the ceiling. It was the same kind of gelatinous stuff that we had found in the wreck of the ship that had brought the infant Etl to Earth. We knew that it was nourishing. Its bland sweetishness was not to our teste, but we had to eat. Various apparatus was also lowered to us. There were odd mechanical puzzles that made me think how grotesquely Earthly Martian scientific attitudes were. And there was  little globe on a wire, the purpose of which we never figured out, though Miller got an electric shock from it.  kept looking for Etl among the Martians at the spy-windows, hoping that he'd turn up again. I had noticed that Martians showed variations of appearance, like humans -- longer or shorter eye-stalks, lighter or darker tendrils... I figured I'd recognize Etl. But I didn't see him. We were none of us quite ourselves. Not even Miller, whose scientific interest in the things around him sustained him even in captivity. Mine had worn out. And Klein and Craig were no better off. I was desperately homesick, and I felt a little ill, besides. I managed to loosen the metal heel-plate from one of my boots, and with this, when I thought that no Martian was watching, I started to dig the gummy cement from around the circular glassy disc with which the main exit of our quarters had been sealed. Craig, Klein and I worked at it in brief and sporadic shifts. We didn't really hope that we could escape. It was just somethingto do. "We're going to try to get to the ship. Miller, if it's still there," I whispered once. "Probably it won't work. Want to join up with the rest of us?" I just didn't think of him as being in command now. And he seemed to agree, because he didn't protest against my high-handed way of talking. Also, he didn't argue against a projected rashness that could easily get us killed. Apparently he understood that our lives weren't worth much to us as things were. He smiled a little. "I'll stick around, Nolan. If you do manage to get back to Earth, don't make the Martians sound too bad." "I won't," I answered, troubled by an odd sense of regret. Loosening that exit disc proved in the end to be no special trick. Then we just waited for a lull in the activity in the tunnels around us. We all put on our oxygen helmets. Miller included, for the air-pressure here in our "cage" would drop as soon as the loosened disc was dislodged. We put our shoulders against it and pushed. It popped outward. Then the three of us, with Miller staying behind, scrambled on hands and knees through the tunnel that lay before us. A crazy kind of luck seemed to be with us. For one thing, we didn't have to retrace our way along the complicated route by which we had been brought down to our prison. In a minute we reached a wide tunnel that slanted upward. A glassy rotary airlock worked by a simple lever -- for, of course, most of the city's air would be pressurized to some extent for the Martians -- led into it. The main passage wasn't exactly deserted, but we traversed it in leaps and bounds, taking advantage of the weak Martian gravity. Shapes scattered before us, chirping and squeaking. We reached the surface quickly. It was frigid night. We stumbled away into it, taking cover under some lichenous bushes, while we looked for the highway. It was there, plain to see, in the light of Phobos. We dashed on toward it, across what seemed to be a planted field. A white layer of icecrystal mist flowed between and over those tough coldendured growths. For a minute, 'just as two shots rang out behind us, we were concealed by it completely. I thought to myself that, to the Martians, we were like escaped tigers or leopards -- only worse. For a moment I felt that we had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. But, as we reached the highway, my spirits began to soar. Perhaps -- only perhaps -- I'd see my family again before too long. There was traffic on the road, trains of great softtired wagons, pulled by powered vehicles ahead. I wondered if, like on Earth, much freight was moved at night to avoid congestion. "When I was a college kid, I used to hitch-hike sometimes," Craig remarked. "I don't guess we had better try that here," Klein said. "What we can do is more of a hobo stunt." We found the westerly direction we needed easily enough from the stars. The constellations naturally looked the same as they did at home. We hid behind some rustling leaves, dry as paper, and waited for the next truck train to pass. When one came, we used the agility which Martian gravity gave us and rushed for the tailend wagon and scrambled aboard. There we hid ourselves under a kind of coarsefibered tarpaulin. Peering past boxes and bales, we kept cautious watch of the road. We saw strange placques, which might have served as highway signs. Again we saw buildings and passing lights. We were dopes, of course, ever to think that we were going to get away with this. Our overwrought nerves had urged us to unreasoning rebellion, and we had yielded to them. O UR last hope was punctured when at last we saw the floodlights that bathed our ship. The taste on my tongue was suddenly bitter. There were roughly three things we could do now, and none of the choices was especially attractive. We could go back where we had come from. We could try to keep concealed in the countryside, until we were finally hunted down, or until our helmet airpurifiers wore out and we smothered. Or we could proceed to our rocket, which was now surrounded by a horde of Martians. Whichever one we chose, it looked as if the end would be the same -- death. "I'm for going on to the ship,' Klein said in a harsh whisper. "The same with me," Craig agreed. "It's where we want to go. If they're going to kill or capture us, it might as well be there." Suddenly, for no good reason, I thought of something. No special safeguards had been set up around that sealed room in the city. Escape had been easy. What did that mean? "Okay," I said. "Maybe you've both got the same hunch I just got. We walk very slowly toward our rocket. We get into the light as soon as possible. Does that sound right to you? We'd be going back to the plan. And, it could be, to common sense." "All right," Klein answered. "We'll give it a whirl," Craig agreed. We jumped off that freight wagon at the proper moment and moved toward the rocket. Nothing that we'd done on Mars -- not even making out first acquaintance with the inhabitants -- was as ticklish an act. proached the floodlighted area, keeping close together before that horde which still looked horrible to us. One thing in our favor was that the Martians here had probably been warned of our escape by whatever means of communication they used. And they could certainly, guess that our first objective would be our ship. Hence they would not be startled into violence by our sudden appearance. One of them fired a shot which passed over our heads. But we kept on going, making our movements as unfrightening as we could to counteract the dread of us that they must have still felt. Panic and the instinctive fear of the strange were balanced in our minds against reason. We got to the nose of our ship, then to the open doors of its airlock. The horde kept moving back before us and we clambered inside. Martian eyes remained wary, but no more action was taken against us. Our cabin had been ransacked. Most of the loose stuff had been removed... even my picture of Alice, and our two kids. "Who cares about trifles?" I muttered. "Rap on wood, guys -- I think we've won. So have the local people." "You're right," Klein breathed. "What other reason can there be for their not jumping us? Miller's passive strategy must've worked the first time. The story that we meant no harm must have gotten around. They don't want to make trouble, either. And who, with any sense does?" I felt good -- maybe too good. I wondered if the Martians felt the same eager fascinatioh for the enigmas of space that we felt, in spite of the same fear of the nameless that we too could feel. My guess was that they did. Undoubtedly they also wanted interplanetary relations to be smooth. They could control their instinctive doubts to help attain this objective. If they coveted Earth's resources, it was still far away, and could defend itself. Besides, they were not built to live in comfort under the raw conditions of its strange environment. Commerce was the only answer. Suddenly Mars was no longer a hostile region to me, out in the reaches of space. Again it was full of endless, intriguing mysteries. It was beautiful. And knowledge of that beauty and mystery had been won, in spite of some blundering. The scheme that we had practiced, and that Miller had stuck to, had paid off. It had broken down that first inevitable barrier of alienness between Earthmen and Martians enough so that they now had a chance to start looking for the countless similarities between us. A fraction of our food stores aboard the rocket had been taken, probably for analysis. But there was plenty more. We closed the airlock, repressurized the cabin from air-tanks, and cooked ourselves a meal. Then we slept in shifts, one of us always awake as guard. At dawn, Miller hammered at a window. He'd been brought out from the city. We weren't too surprised by then. 'C'TL turned up at noon. He came in a kind of plane, which landed right beside our rocket, making quite a noise. I recognized him easily enough; I'd know those eyestalks anywhere. Besides, as he came out of the plane, he was carrying the speech-tube that Klein had made for him. We let him into the cabin. "Hello, gang," he said, manipulating the tube with his tendrils. "I see you passed your tests almost as well as I did on those weird things you were always making me take on Earth." "So they were tests," I said. "Sure. Otherwise, why do you think I didn't come to you before? They said you had to solve your own problems." "How did they treat you?" Miller wanted to know. "Mostly my people were nice to me. They took me to a great desert city, far away. Sort of the capital of Mars, It's in an 'oasis' where a network of 'canals' join. The canals fit an old theory of your astronomers. They're ribbons of irrigated vegetation. But the water is piped underground. I spoke to my people in the way that you once thought I would, trying to convince them that you were okay. But I guess that you did most of the job yourselves." "In spite of a lot of blunders, maybe we did, Etl," I replied dryly. "What are your plans? Going to stay here now? Or will you come back with us?" I sensed that he would stay. It was natural. Maybe I even sensed a remoteness in him, a kind of withdrawal. Not unfriendly, but... we both knew it was the parting of the ways. "It's best for what we're trying to accomplish, Nolan," he said. "I can tell my people about Earth; you can tell yours about Mars. Besides, I like it here. But I'll be back on Earth some time. Just so you'll come here again. Thanks to you guys for everything." "I'd like to stay too, Nolan," Miller said, smiling. "If they'll have me. Under Etl's instructions, they might improve my quarters." O that much was settled. I felt a certain longing myself now. But I'm a family man, with home still in my blood. Klein and Craig weren't tied as I was, but they had a lot to hold them to Earth. Besides, somebody had to report back. We were on Mars two days longer, though we didn't go any farther than back to the neighboring city. We took thousands of photographs, We were given samples of common Martian apparatus, pieces of jade that were covered with queer, beautiful before, bars of radioactive metal. Earth was still near enough in its orbit to be reached without too much trouble. We jacked our rocket into a vertical position, from which an interplanetary takeoff could best be made. The cabin, swinging on its universal joints, stayed level. Martians watched, interested, but still obviously not quite ready to cast aside their deeper suspicions. Yet, when we blasted clear, we knew that a ship of theirs, halfway around the planet, was doing the same and would follow us back to Earth. Ambassadors, of course, and commercial attaches. I'd lost my picture of Alice, Patty and Ron to some local souvenir hunter. But I knew that I was going to see them... The friendly contact between Earth and Mars can still be queered by somebody's silly blunder, of course. Human or Martian. You have to be careful. But a beginning has been made. Join the #th World Science Fiction convention on September #, # , #, # at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. You'll meet your favorite writers, artists and editors there. Naturalist, rocket authority and science to #th World Science Fiction Convention, Box #, Philadelphia #, Penn. co Introduce ocii to you. With yc As a "get acquainted" offer, we will send the first # readers of this magazine who write in and request it, this exciting science-fiction novel -- The first rochet ghiR to Saturn crashes on Titan, largest of the planet's satellites. Sojarr, the only survivor. discovers the strangest secret of the cosmos! Over # pages -- # words -- ft! breathless action. A complete sciencefiction novel-yours for the asking I unique book service ur gifthook you will v #page illustrated bare alne -- selenee-flefautastic adventure. wmm #he Tinputtifaed ought to know. Great personal power and at   stand them. 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It's meant for everybody, male and female, young and old, adult enough not to run to the dictionary whenever a word with more than two syllables is encountered, who wants to know what futures humanity may face, what the past may have been like, what may be found on other worlds... and how people will act under those circumstances. more rapidly than any other science fiction magazine? Read it and you'll see for yourself! Only #c a copy at your favorite newsstand... or # a year. (Add I per year on foreign subscriptions to) Write to... #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. September # GALAXY Science Fiction r # What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? - to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to #elfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and successful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from im : ' dons men in high places, but never destmyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than l#th of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of inter, sting truths. You can start at once to i .I.' n your inner powers of selfon I i t iding and self-advancement. You...m learn from one of the world's oldest I I r titutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not #old, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe Y.I.C. San Jose California Vol. #, No. # Q#lxxy #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada. Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. by Clifford D. Simak # by Roger Dee # by Dave Dryfoos # by Donald Colvin # Prlnftd In th U.S. A. by fh Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pet Off. What's The Good Word ? TN discussing Mario Pei's stimulating The Story of English (Lippincott), I mentioned briefly the vexing problem of the science fiction writer in foreguessing future language. It can't be ignored, of course; objects and methods must be named so the reader will recognize them. All the author can do is apply logic, which sometimes works, as in the case of several commonly used terms invented by science fiction, but more often does not, as in terms that are born naturally, not synthesized. The annoying difficulty can be followed closely in World Publishing Company's Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language. Unlike almost all other dictionaries, this one is a record of the words and phrases that you and I have helped to popularize rather than, as Ambrose Bierce defined such books: "A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic." Dictionaries don't determine "good" usage; people do. If that weren't so, we'd still be using the words listed in # by Wynkyn de Worde's Promptorum Parvulorum sive clericorum, which, despite its Latin title, was the first dictionary to be printed on English soil. Let's take a few examples from this New World Dictionary and see how language grows. Television, TV and video are now established. TV first was used in # in a magazine called The World Today, but engineers used distant electric vision, a cumbersome term that couldn't compete with science fiction's name for the device. Jeep, nylon, kleenex and cellophane have invaded so many languages that nylon signifies "superfine" in Turkey and Greece, and Communist Hungary has banned jeep and nylon as decadent capitalistic word-inventions. Jeep was coined by soldiers during World War II from the frigid military designation of the vehicle, "General Purpose Car," which naturally was abbreviated to "G.P." in stock lists. Using only logic, you'd expect it to be called jeepie, and perhaps it would have if the Wacs (another fortuitous military invention) had named the machine. There is nothing snide in that comment, for sex has a lot to do with the devising of words. Women, or those who sell to them, created panties, scanties and nighties, while male merchandising is designed to make even the puniest man feel outdoorsy. The armed services here and in England finally recognised the importance, of initials, hence: Wrens and Waves. Amgot had to be shortened to A.M.G. because it was banned as a censorable word in Turkey. Nylon and kleenex are trade names, born at the conference table, which gave us such valuable additions as sudsy, deep(The process, known as spitballing in advertising, meaning to offer suggestions, was omitted, but should be included.) Cellophane more classically is derived from cella, small room, plus phanein, to appear, seem -- not too unlikely an invention for a writer, but he'd have had no chance to anticipate the others. One argument I don't expect to be resolved quickly is the spelling of hassel vs. hassle, the first preferred by the New World and the second by the New Century. New World defines it as a heated discussion, squabble. I accept New World's spelling in entirety, the definition in part, and the etymology not at all. The popular meaning is any frantic activity, usually although not always verbal, resulting in purposeless confusion and frustration. There should be no "?" in giving its origin. Radio Row, which should know, accredits it to Joe Hassel, a sportscaster notable for his excitability. ( Newscaster got into the New World, but sportscaster for some reason didn't.) So, like boycott, derrick, mae west and spoonerism, hassel is, as the French would put it, the name of a nartie. Even if a science fiction writer of the past had known they would be, he might just as legitimately have chosen cosgrove, manischewitz, dolly dawn or smithism . More troublesome, though, is deciding which slang terms will endure, which will enter the language as full citizens, and which will be the future equivalent of odds bodkins or the bee's knees.  Ain't, for example, is properly included in the New World -- the first time, as far as I know, without being snooted (Middle English, snute, snout). And Mark Twain is our authority for creative etymology. He proved that Middletown was named after Moses by droppingoses and addingiddletown. If we were trying to predict instead of entertain, you'd be right in objecting to our inevitable bloopers (origin unknown). But would you rather wait for the correct lingo ( lingua , tongue) or enjoy our guessing right now? the touch of your hand Osser knew exactly what he wanted, why he wanted it, and how to get it -- except that t each one of his reasons was totally wrong! IG there," said Osser, pointing. The black-browed man pulled back. "Why?" "We must dig deep to build high, and we are going to build high." "Why?" the man asked again. "To keep the enemy out." "There are no enemies." Osser laughed bitterly. "I'll have enemies." "Why?" Osser came to him. "Because I'm going to pick up this village and shake it until it wakes up. And if it won't wake up, I'll keep shaking until I break its back and it dies. Dig." "I don't see why," said the man doggedly. Osser looked at the golden backs of his hands, turned them over, watched them closing. He raised his eyes to the other. "This is why," he said. His right fist tore the man's cheek. His left turned the man's breath to a bullet which exploded as it left him. He huddled on the ground, unable to exhale, inhaling in small, heavy, tearing sobs. His eyes opened and he looked up at Osser. He could not speak, but his eyes did; and through shock and pain all they said was "Why?" said, when he felt the man could hear him. "You want reasons -- all of you. You see both sides of every question and you weigh and balance and cancel yourselves out. I want an end to reason. I want things done." He bent to lift the bearded man to his feet. Osser stood half a head taller and his shoulders were as full and smooth as the bottoms of bowls. Golden hairs shifted and glinted on his forearms as he moved his fingers and the great cords tensed and valleyed. He lifted the man clear of the ground and set him easily on his feet and held him until he' was sure of his balance. "You don't understand me, do you?" The man shook his head weakly"Don't try. You'll dig more if you don't try." He clapped the handle of the shovel into the man's hand and picked up a mattock. "Dig," he said, and the man began to dig. Osser smiled when the man turned to work, arched his nostrils and drew the warm clean air into his lungs. He liked the sunlight now, the morning smell of the turned soil, the work he had to do and the idea itself of working. Standing so, with his head raised, he saw a hash of bright yellow, the turn of a tanned face. Just a glimpse, and she was gone. For a moment he tensed, frowning. If she had seen him, she would be off to clatter the story of it to the whole village. Then he smiled. Let her. Let them all know. They must, sooner or later. Let them try to stop him. He laughed, gripped his mattock, and the sod flew. So Jubilith saw fit to watch him, did she? He laughed again. Work now, Juby later. In time he would have everything. Everything. wandered and from time to time divided and rejoined itself, for each house was built on a man's whim -- near, far, high, small, separate, turned to or away. What did not harmonize contrasted well, and over all it was a pleasing place to walk. Before a shop a wood-cobbler sat, gouging out sabots; and he was next door to the old leatherworker who cunningly wove immortal belts of square-knotted rawhide. Then a house, and another, and a cabin; a space of green where children played; and the skeleton of a new building where a man, his apron pockets full of hardwood pegs, worked knowledgably with a heavy mallet. The cobbler, 'the leatherworker, the children and the builder all stopped to watch Jubilith because she was beautiful and because she ran. When she was by, they each saw the others watching, and each smiled and waved and laughed a little, though nothing was said. A puppy lolloped along after her, three legs deft, the fourth in the way. Had it been frightened, it would not have run, and had Jubilith spoken to it, it would have followed wherever she went. But she ignored it, even when it barked its small soprano bark, so it curved away from her, pretending it had been going Somewhere else anyway, and then it sat and puffed and looked after her sadly. Past the smithy with its shadowed, glowing heart she ran; past the gristmill with its wonderful wheel, taking and yielding with its heavy cupped hands. A boy struck his hoop and it rolled across her path. Without breaking stride, she leaped high over it and ran on, and the glassblower's lips burst away from his pipe, for a man can smile or blow glass, but not both at the same time. When at last she reached Wrenn's house, she was breathing deeply, but with no difficulty, in the way possible only to those who run beautifully. She stopped by the open door and waited politely, not looking in until Pyva came out and touched her shoulder. her eyes closed for a long moment, for Oyva was not only very old, she was Wrenn's wife. "Is it Jubilith?" asked Oyva, smiling. "It is," said the girl. She opened her eyes. Oyva, seeing their taut corners, said shrewdly, "A troubled Jubilith as well. I'll not keep you. He's just inside." Juby found a swift flash of smile to give her and went into the house, leaving the old woman to wonder where, where in her long life she had seen such a brief flash of such great loveliness. A firebird's wing? A green meteor? She put it away in her mind next to the memory of a burst of laughter -- Wrenn's, just after he had kissed her first -- and sat down on a three-legged stool by the side of the house. been set up inside the doorway, to form a sort of meander, and at the third turn it was very dark. Juby paused to let the sunlight drain away from her vision. Somewhere in the dark before her there was music, the hay-clean smell of flower petals dried and freshly rubbed, and a voice humming. The voice and the music were open and free, but choked a listener's throat like the sudden appearance of a field of daffodils. The voice and the music stopped short, and someone breathed quietly in the darkness. "Is... is it Wrenn?" she faltered. "It is," said the voice. "Jubilith here." "Move the screen," said the voice. "I'd like the light, talking to you, Jubilith." She felt behind her, touched the screen. It had many hinges and swung easily away to the doorside. Wrenn sat crosslegged in the corner behind a frame which held a glittering complex of stones. He brushed petal-dust from his hands. "Sit there, child, and tell me what it is you do not understand." She sat down befpre him and lowered her eyes, and his widened, as if someone had taken away a great light. When she had nothing to say, he prompted her gently: "See if you can put it all into a single word, Jubilith." She said immediately, "Osser." "Ah," said Wrenn. "I followed him this morning, out to the foothills beyond the Sky-tree Grove. He -- " Wrenn waited. Jubilith put up her small hands, clenched, and talked in a rush. "Sussten, with the black brows, he was with Osser. They stopped and Osser shouted at him, and, when I came to where I could look down and see them, Osser took his fists and hammered Sussten, knocked him down. He laughed and picked him up. Sussten was sick; he was shaken and there was blood on his face. Osser told him to dig, and Sussten dug, Osser laughed again, he laughed... I think he saw me. I came here." Slowly she put her fists down. Wrenn said nothing, Jubilith said, in a voice like a puzzled sigh, "I understand this: when a man hammers something, iron or clay or wood, it is to change what he hammers from what it is to what he wishes it to be." She raised one hand, made a fist, and put it down again. She shook her head slightly and her heavy soft hair moved on her back. "To hammer a man is to change nothing. Sussten remains Sussten." "It was good to tell me of this," said Wrenn when he was sure she had finished. "Not good," Jubilith disclaimed. "I want to understand." cocked her head on one side like a wondering bright bird. When she realized that his gesture was a refusal, a small paired crease' came and went between her brows. "May I not understand this?" "You must not understand it," Wrenn corrected. "Not yet, anyway. Perhaps after a time. Perhaps never." "Oh," she said. "I -- I didn't know." "How could you know?" he asked kindly. "Don't follow Osser again, Jubilith." She parted her lips, then again gave the small headshake. She rose and went out. I ' Oyva came to her. "Better now, Jubilith?" Juby turned her head away; then, realizing that this was illmannered, met Oyva's gaze. The girl's eyes were full of tears. She closed them respectfully. Oyva touched her shoulder and let her # Watching the slim, bright figure trudge away, bowed with thought, drag-footed, unseeing, Oyva grunted and stumped into the house. "Did she have to be hurt?" she demanded. "She did," said Wrenn gently. "Osser," he added. "Ah," she said, in just the tone he had used when Jubilith first mentioned the name. "What has he done now?" Wrenn told her. Oyva sucked her lips in thoughtfully. "Why was the girl following him?" "I didn't ask her. But don't you know?" "I suppose I do," said Oyva, and sighed. "That mustn't happen, Wrenn." "It won't. I told her not to follow him again." She looked at him fondly. "I suppose even you can act like a fool once in a while." He was startled. "Fool?" "She loves him. You won't keep her from him by a word of advice." "You judge her by yourself," he said, just as fondly. "She's only a child. In a day, a week, she'll wrap someone else up in her dreams." "Suppose she doesn't?" "Don't even think about it." A shudder touched his voice. "I shall, though," said Oyva with determination. "And you'd do well to think about it, too." When his eyes grew troubled, she touched his cheek gently. "Now play some more for me." He sat down before the instrument, his hands poised. Then into the tiny bins his fingers went, rubbing this dried-petal powder and that, and the stone's glowed, changing the flower-scents into music and shifting colors. He began to sing softly to the music. and they built. Osser did the work of three men, and sometimes six or eight others worked with him, and sometimes one or two. Once he had twelve. But never did he work alone. When the stone was three tiers above ground level, Osser climbed the nearest rise and stood looking down at it proudly, at the thick! ness and strength of the growing walls, at the toiling workers who lifted and strained to make them grow. "Is it Osser?" The voice was as faint and shy as a fern uncurling, as promising as spring itself. He turned. "Jubilith,  # ' she told him. "What are you doing here?" "I come here every day," she said. She indicated the copse which crowned the hill. "I hide here and watch you." "What do you want?" She laced her fingers. "I would like to dig there and lift stones." "No," he said, and turned to study the work again. "Why not?" "Never ask me why. 'Because I say so' -- that's all the answer you'll get from me -- you or anyone." She came to stand beside him. "You build fast." He nodded. "Faster than any village house was ever built." He could sense the 'why' rising within her, and could feel it being checked.  "I want to build it, too," she pleaded. "No," he said. His eyes widened as he watched the work. Suddenly he was gone, leaping down the slope in great springy strides. He turned the corner of the new wall and stood, saying nothing. The man who had been idling turned quickly and lifted a stone. Osser smiled a quick, taut smile and went to work beside him. Jubilith stood on the slope, watching, wondering. She came almost every day as the tower grew. Osser never spoke to her. She watched the sunlight on him, the lithe strength, the rippling gold. He stood like a great tree, squatted like a rock, moved like a thundercloud. His voice was a whip, a bugle, the roar of a bull. She saw him less and less in the village. Once it was a fearsome thing to see. Early in the morning he appeared suddenly, overtook a man? lifted him and threw him flat on the ground. "I told you to be out thefe yesterday," he growled, and strode away. Friends came and picked the man up, held him softly while he coughed, took him away to be healed. No one went to Wrenn about it; the word had gone around that Osser and his affairs were not to be understood. Most things could be understood by anyone. Wrenn's function was to explain those few things which could not be understood. But certain of these few were not to be understood at all. So Osser was left alone to do as he wished -- which was a liberty, after all, that was enjoyed by everyone else. lith waited past her usual time. She waited until by ones and twos the workers left the tower, until Osser himself had climbed the hill, until he had paused to look back and be proud and think of tomorrow's work, until he, too, had turned his face to the town. Then she slipped down to the tower and around it, and carefully climbed the scaffolding on the far side. She looked  about her. The tower was now four stories high and seemed to be shaping toward a roof. Circular in crosssection, the tower had two rooms on each floor, an east-west wall between them on the ground floor, a north-south wall on the next, and so on up. , There was a central well into which was built a spiral staircase -- a double spiral, as if one helix had been screwed into the other. This made possible two exits to stairs on each floor at the same level, though they were walled off one from the other. Each of the two rooms on every floor had one connecting doorway.Each room had three windows in it, wide on the inside, tapering through the thick stone wall to form the barest slit outside. A portion of the castellated roof was already built. It overhung the entrance, and had slots in the overhang through which the whole entrance face of the tower could be covered by one man lying unseen on the roof, looking straight down. Stones lay in a trough ready for placing, and there was some leftover mortar in the box. Jubilith picked up a trowel and worked it experimentally in the stuff, then lifted some out and tipped it down on the unfinished top of the wall, just as she had seen Osser do so many times. She put down the trowel and chose a stone. It was heavy -- much heavier than she had expected -- but she made it move, made it lift, made it seat itself to suit her on the fresh mortar. She ticked off the excess from the join and stepped back to admire it in the fading light. Two great clamps, hard as teeth, strong as a hurricane, caught her right thigh and her left armpit. She was swung into the air and held helpless over the unfinished parapet. She was utterly silent, shocked past the ability even to gasp. "I told you you were not to work here," said Osser between his teeth. So tall he was, so long were his arms as he held her high over his head, that it seemed almost as far to the parapet as it was to the ground below. He leaned close to the edge and  shook her. "I'll throw you off. This tower is mine to build, you hear?" If she had been able to breathe, she might have screamed or pleaded with him. If she had screamed or pleaded, he might have dropped her. But her silence apparently surprised him. He grunted and set her roughly on her feet. She caught at his shoulder to keep her balance, then quickly transferred her hold to the edge of the parapet. She dropped her head between her upper arms. Her long soft hair fell forward over her face, and she moaned. "I told you," he said, really seeing her at last. His voice shook. He stepped toward her and put out his hand. She screamed. "Be quiet !" he roared. A moan shut off in mid-breath. "Ah, I told you, Juby. You shouldn't have tried to build here." He ran his great hands over the edge of the stonework, found the one she had laid, the one that had cost her such effort to lift. With dne hand, he plucked it up and threw it far out into the shadows below.  "I wanted to help you with it," she whispered. "Don't you understand?" he cried. "No one builds here who wants to help!" S HE simply shook her head. She tried to breathe deeply and a long shudder possessed her. When it passed, she turned weakly and stood, her back partly arched over the edge of the parapet, her hands behind her to cushion the stone. She shook the hair out of her face; it fell away on either side like a dawnlit bowwave. She looked up at him with an expression of such piteous confusion that .his dwindling rage vanished altogether. He dropped his eyes and shuffled one foot like a guilty child. "Juby, leave me alone." Something almost like a smile touched her lips. She brushed her bruised arm, then walked past him to the place where the scaffolding projected above the para!et. "Not that way," he called. "Come here." He took her hand and led her to the spiral staircase at the center of the tower. It was almost totally dark inside. It seemed like an age to her as they descended; she was alone in a black universe consisting of a rhythmic drop and turn, and a warm hard hand in hers, holding and leading her. When they emerged, he stopped in the strange twilight, a darkness for all the world but a dazzle to them, so soaked with blackness were their eyes. She tugged gently, but he would not release her hand. She moved close to see his face. His eyes were wide and turned unseeing to the far slopes; he was frowning, yet his mouth was not fierce, but irresolute. Whatever his inward struggle was, it left his face gradually and transferred itself to his hand. Its pressure on hers became firm, hard, intense, painful. "Osser!" He dropped the hand and stepped back, shamed. "Juby, I will take you to... Juby, do you want to understand?" He waved at the tower. She said, "Oh, yes!" He looked at her closely, and the angry, troubled diffidence came and went. "Half a day there, half a day back again," he said. She recognized that this was as near as this feral, unhappy man could come to asking a permission. "I'd like to understand," she said. "If you don't, I'm going to kill you," he blurted. He turned to the west and strode off, not looking back. Jubilith watched him go, and suddenly there was a sparkle in her wide eyes. She slipped out of her sandals, caught them up in her hand, and ran lightly and silently after him. He planted hisfeet strongly, like the sure, powerful teeth of the millwheel gears, and he would not look back. She sensed how immensely important it was to him not to look back. She knew that right-handed men look back over their left shoulders, so she drifted along close to him, a little behind him, a little to his right. How long, how long, until he looked to see if she was coming? U P and up the slope, to its crest, over... down... ah! Just here, just at the last second where he could turn and look without stopping and still catch a glimpse of the tower's base, where they had stood. So he turned, and she passed around him like a windblown feather, unseen. And he stopped, looking back, craning. His shoulders slumped, and slowly he turned to his path  again -- and there was Jubilith before him. She laughed. His jaw dropped, and then his lips came together in a thin, . angry seal. For a moment he stared at her; and suddenly, quite against his will, there burst from him a single harsh bark of laughter. She put out her hand and he came to her, took it, and they went their way together. They came to a village when it was very late and very dark, and Osser circled it. They came to another, and Jubilith thought he would do the same, for he turned south; but when they came abreast of it, he struck north again. "We'll be seen' he explained gruffly, "but we'll be seen coming from the south and leaving northward." She would not ask where he was taking her, or why he was making these elaborate arrangements, but already she had an idea. What lay to the west was -- not forbidden, exactly, but, say discouraged. It was felt that there was nothing in that country that could be of value. Anyone traveling that way would surely be remembered. So through the village they went, and they dined quickly at an inn, and went northward, and once in the darkness, veered west again. In a wood so dark that she had taken his hand again, he stopped and built a fire. He threw down springy boughs and a thick heap of ferns, and this was her bed. He slept sitting up, his back to a tree trunk, with Jubilith between him and the fire. Jubilith awoke twice during the long night, once to see him with his eyes closed, but feeling that he was not asleep; and once to see him with his eyes open and the dying flames flickering in the pupils, and she thought then that he was asleep, or at least not with her, but lost in the pictures the flames painted. In the morning they moved on, gathering berries for breakfast, washing in a humorous brook. And during this whole journey, nothing passed between them but the small necessary phrases: "You go first here." "Look out -- it drops." "Tired yet?" For there was that about Jubilith which made explanations unnecessary. Though she did not know where they were going, or why, she understood what must be done to get them there within the framework of his desire: to go immediately, as quickly as possible, undetected by anyone else. She did only what she could to help and did not plague him with questions which would certainly be answered in good time. So: "Here are berries." "Look, a red bird!" "Can we get through there, or shall we go around?" And nothing more. was fine, and by mid-morning they had reached the tumbled country of the Crooked Hills. Jubilith had seen them from afar -- great broken mounds and masses against the western sky -- but no one ever went there, and she knew nothing about them. They were in open land now, and Jubilith regretted leaving the color and aliveness of the forest. The grasses here were strange, like yet unlike those near her village. They were taller, sickly, and some had odd ugly flowers. There were bald places, scored with ancient rain-gullies, as if some mighty hand had dashed acid against the soil. There were few insects and no animals that she could see, and no birds sang. It was a place of great sadness rather than terror; there was little to fear, but much to grieve for. By noon, they faced a huge curved ridge, covered with broken stones. It looked as if the land itself had reared up and pressed back from a hidden something on the other side -- something which it would not touch. Osser quickened their pace as they began to climb, although the going was hard. Jubilith realized that they were near the end of their journey, and uncomplainingly struggled along at the cruel pace he set. At the top, they paused, giving their first attention to their wind, and gradually to the scene before them. The ridge on which they stood was nearly circular, and perhaps a mile and a half in diameter. In its center was a small round lake with unnaturally bare shores. Mounds of rubble sloped down toward it on all sides, and farther back was broken stone. But it was the next zone which caught and held the eye. The weed-grown wreckage there was beyond description. Great twisted ' b and ribs of gleaming metal ve in and out of the slumped ups of soil and masonry, firby, a half-acre of laminated i ' stood on edge like a dinnerit in a clay bank. What could  vc been a building taller than n iy Jubilith had ever heard about f i y on its side, smashed and bulgmg. Gradually she began to realize the peculiarity of this place -- All the larger wreckage lay in lines directly to and from the lake in a monstrous radiation of ruin. "What is this place?" she asked at last. "Don't know," he grunted, and went over the edge to skip down the steep slope. When she caught up with him near the bottom, he said, "There's miles of this, west and north of here, much bigger. But this is the one we came to see. Come." He looked to right and left as if to get his bearings, then plunged into the tough and scrubby underbrush that vainly tried to cover those tortured metal bones. She followed as closely as she could, beating at the branches which he carelessly let whip back. Just in front of her, he turned the corner of a sharp block of stone, and when she turned it no more than a second later, he was gone. S HE stopped, turned, turned again. Dust, weeds, lonely and sorrowful ruins. No Osser. She shrank back against the stone, her eyes wide. The bushes nearby trembled, then lashed. Osser's head emerged. "What's the matter? Come on!" he said gruffly. She checked an impulse to cry out and run to him, and came silently forward. Osser held the bushes briefly, and beside him she saw a black hole with broken steps leading downward. She hesitated, but he moved his head impatiently, and she passed him and led the way downward. When he followed, his wide flat body blocked out the light. The darkness was so heavy; her eyes ached. He prodded her in the small of the back. "Go on, go on!" The foot of the steps came sooner than she expected and her knees buckled as she took the downward step that was not there. She tripped, almost fell, then somehow got to the side wall and braced herself there, trembling. "Wait," he said, and the irrepressible smile quirked the corners of her mouth. As if sbe would go anywhere! . She heard him fumbling about somewhere, and then there was a sudden aching blaze of light that made her cry out and clap her hands over her face. "Look," he said. "I want you to look at this. Hold it." Info her hands he pressed a cylinder about half the length of her forearm. At one end was a lens from which the blue-white light was streaming. "See this little thing here," he said, and touched a stud at the side of the cylinder. The light disappeared, came on again. She laughed delightedly, took the cylinder and played its light around, switching it on and off, "It's wonderful!" she cried. "Oh, wonderful!" "You take this one," he said, pleased. He handed her another torch and took the first from her. "It isn't as good, but it will help. I'll go first." She took the second torch and tried it. It worked the same way, but the light was orange and feeble. Osser strode ahead down a slanting passageway. At first there was a great deal of rubble underfoot, but soon the way was clear as they went farther and deeper. Osser walked with confidence, and she knew he had been here before, probably many times. "Here," he said, stopping to wait for her. His voice echoed strangely, vibrant with controlled excitement. He turned his torch ahead, swept it back and forth. They were at the entrance to a room. It was three times the height of a man, and as big as their village green. She stared around, awed. "Come," Osser said again, and went to the far corner. A massive, boxlike object stood there. One panel, about eye-level, was of a milky smooth substance, the rest of black metal. Projecting from the floor in front of it was a lever. Osser grasped it confidently and pulled. It yielded sluggishly, and returned to its original position. Osser tugged again. There was a low growling sound from the box. Osser pulled, released, pulled, released, each time a little faster. The sound rose in pitch, higher and higher. "Turn off your light," he said. She did so and blackness snapped in around them. As the dazzle faded from her eyes, she detected a flicker of silver light before her, and realized that it came from the milky pane in the box. As Osser pulled at the lever and the whine rose and rose in pitch, the square got bright enough for her to see her hands when she looked down at them. And then -- the pictures. tures like these. They moved, for one thing; for another, they had no color. Everything in them was black and white and shades f gray. Yet everything they i lowed seemed very real. Not at first, for there was flickmi ng and stopped motion, and ri f-n slow motion as Osser's lever i oved faster and faster. But at i ;t the picture steadied, and ser kept the lever going at the me speed, flicking it with apparent ease about twice a second, vttled to a steady, soft moan. The picture showed a ball spinning against a black, light-flecked  urtain. It rushed close until it tilled the screen, and still closer, and Jubilith suddenly had the feeling that she was falling at tremendous velocity from an unthinkable height. Down and down the scene went, until at last the surface began to take on the qualities of a bird's-eye view. She saw a river and lakes, and a great range of hills -- And, at last, the city. It was a city beyond fantasy, greater and more elaborate than imagination could cope with. Its towers stretched skyward to pierce the clouds themselves -- some actually did. It had wide ramps on which traffic crawled, great bridges across the river, parks over which the buildings hung like mighty cliffs. Closer still the silver eye came to the scene, and she realized that the traffic was not crawling, but moving faster than a bird, faster than the wind. The vehicles were low and sleek and efficient. And on the walks were people, and the scene wheeled and slowed and showed them. They were elaborately clothed and well-fed; they were hurried and orderly at the same time. There was a square in which perhaps a thousand of them, all dressed alike, were drawn up in lines as straight as stretched string. Even as she watched, they all began to move together, a thousand left legs coming forward, a thousand right arms swinging back. Higher, then, and more, of the city -- more and more of it, until the sense of wonder filled her lungs and she hardly breathed; and still more of it, miles of it. And at last a great open space with what looked like sections of road crossing on it -- but such unthinkable roads! Each was as wide as her whole village and miles long. And on these roads, great birdlike machines tilted down and touched and rolled, and swung and ran and took the air, dozens of them every minute. The scene swept close again, and it was as if she were in such a machine herself; but it did not land. It raced past the huge busy crossroads and out to a coastline. And there were ships, ships as long as the tallest buildings were high, and clusters, dozens, hundreds of other vessels working in the gray water. Huge machines crouched over ships and lifted out cargoes; small, agile machines scurried about the docks and warehouses. Then at last the scene dwindled as the magic eye rose higher and higher, faster and faster. Details disappeared, and clouds raced past and downward, and at last the scene was a disc and then a ball floating in starlit space. " snapped back to its original position. The moan descended quickly in pitch, and the motion on the screen slowed, flickered, faded and went out. Jubilith let the darkness come. Her mind spun and shook with the impact of what she had seen. Slowly she recovered herself. She became conscious of Osser's hard breathing. She turned on her dim orange torch and looked at him. He was watching her. "What was it?" she breathed. "What I came to show you." She thought hard. She thought about his tower, about his refusal to let her work on it, about his cruelty to those who had. She looked at him, at the blank screen. And this was to supply the reason. She shook her head. He lowered himself slowly and squatted like an animal, hunched up tight, his knees in his armpits. This lifted and crooked his heavy arms. He rested their knuckles on the floor. He glowered at her and said nothing. He was waiting. On the way here, he had said, "I'll kill you if you don't understand." But he wouldn't really, would he? Would he? If he had towered over her, ranted and shouted, she would not have been afraid. But squatting there, waiting, silent, with his great arms bowed out like that, he was like some patient, preying beast. She .turned off the light to blot out the sight of him, and immediately became speechless with terror at the idea of his sitting there in the dark so close, waiting. She might run; she was so swift... but no; crouched like that, he could spring and catch her before she could tense a muscle. Again she looked at the dead screen. "Wiil you... tell me something?" she quavered. "I might." "Tell me, then: When you first saw that picture, did you understand? The very first time?" His expression did not change. But slowly he relaxed. He rocked sidewise, sat down, extended his legs. He was man again, not monster. She shuddered, then controlled it. He said, "It took me a long ' i me and many visits. I should not have asked you to understand at once." She again accepted the timid halfstep toward an apology, and was grateful. He said, "Those were men and I women just like us. Did you see r that? Just like us." "Their clothes -- " "Just like us," he insisted. "Of course they dressed differently, lived differently! In a world like that, why not? Ah, how they built, how they built!" "Yes," she whispered. Those towers, the shining, swift vehicles, the thousand who moved like one... "Who were they?" she asked him. "Don't you know? Think -- think!" "Osser, I want to understand. I truly want to!" right thing to say, the right way to catch at this elusive thing which was so frighteningly important to him. All her life she had had the answers to the questions she wanted to understand. All she had ever had to do was to close her eyes and think of the problem, and the answers soon came. But not this problem. "Osser," she pleaded, "where is it, the city, the great complicated city?" "Say, 'Where was it?' " he growled. She caught his thought and gasped. "This?' These ruins, Osser?" "Ah," he said approvingly. "It comes slowly, doesn't it? No, Juby. Not here. What was here was an outpost, a village, compared with the big city. North and west, I told you, didn't I? Miles of it. So big that... so big -- " He extended his arms, dropped them helplessly. Suddenly he leaned close to her, began to talk fast, feverishly. "Juby, that city -- that world -- was built by people. Why did they build and why do we not? What is the difference between those people and ours?" "They must have had..." "They had nothing we don't have. They're the same kind of people; they used something we haven't been using. Juby, I've got that something. I can build. I can make others build." A mental picture of the tower glimmered before her. "You built it with hate," she said wonderingly. "Is that what they had -- cruelty, brutality, hatred?" "Yes!" "I don't believe it! I don't believe anyone could live with that much hate!" "Perhaps not. Perhaps they didn't. But they built with it. They built because, some men could flog others into building for them, building higher and faster than all the good neighbors would ever do helping one another." "They'd hate the man who made them build like that." Osser's hands crackled as he pressed them together. He laughed, and the echoes took everything that was unpleasant about that laughter and filled the far reaches of the dark room with it. "They'd hate him," he agreed. "But he's strong, you see. He  was strong in the first place, to make them build, and he's stronger afterward with what they built for him. Do you know the only way they can express their hatred, once they find he's too strong for them?" Jubilith shook her head. "They'd build," he chuckled. "They'd build higher and faster than he did. They would find the strongest man among them and ask him to flog them into it. That's the way a great city goes up. A strong man builds, and strong men follow, and soon the man who's strongest of all makes all the other strong ones do his work. Do you see?" "And the... the others, the weak?" "What of them?" he asked scornfully. "There are more of them than strong ones -- so there are more hands to do the strong man's work. And why shouldn't they? Don't they get the city to live in when it's built? Don't they ride about in swift shining carriers and fly through the air in the bird machines?" "Would they be -- happy?" she asked. H E looked at her in genuine puzzlement. "Happy?" He smashed a heavy fist into his palm. "They'd have a city!" Again the words tumbled from him. "How do you live, you and the rest of the village? What do you do when you want a -- well, a garden, food from the ground?" "I dig up the soil," she said. "I plant and water and weed." "Suppose you want a plow?" "I make one. Or I do work for someone who has one." "Uh," he grunted. "And there you are, hundreds of you in the village, each one planting a little, smithing a little, thatching and cutting and building a little. Everyone does everything except for how many -- four, five? -- the leather-worker, old Griak who makes wooden pegs for housebeams, one or two others." "They like to do just one work. But anyone can do any of the work. Those few, we take care of. Someone has to keep the skills alive." He snorted. "Put a strong man in the village and give him strong t I to do what he wants. Get i villagers at once and make m all plant at once. You'll food then for fifty, not ten!" Mut it would go to waste!" "It would not, because it would all belong to the head man. He  'Uld give it away as he saw fit i lot to those who obeyed him, thing to those who didn't, hat was left over he could keep i himself, and barter it out to i. ep building. Soon he would have the biggest house and the best animals and the finest women, and the more he got, the longer he would be. And a city would grow -- a city! And the  trong man would give everyone l utter things if they worked hard, and protect them." "Protect them? Against what?" "Against the other strong ones. There would be others." "And you -- " "I shall be the strongest of all," he said proudly. He waved at the box. "We were a great people once. We're ants now -- less than ants, for at least the ants work together for a common purpose. I'll make us great again.'-' His head sank onto his hand and he looked somberly into the shadows. "Something happened to this world. Something smashed the cities and the people and drove them down to what they are today. Something was broken within them, and they no longer dared to be great. Well, they will be. I have the extra something that was smashed out of them." "What smashed them, Qsser?" "Who can know? I don't. I don't care, either." He tapped her with a long forefinger to emphasize. "All I care about is this: They were smashed because they were not strong enough. I shall be so strong I can't be smashed." She said, "A stomach can hold only so much. A man asleep takes just so much space. So much and no more clothing makes one comfortable. Why do you want more than these things, Osser?" She knew he was annoyed, and knew, too, that he was considering the question as honestly as he could. "It's because I... I want to be strong," he said in a strained voice. "You are strong." "Who knows that?" he raged, and the echoes giggled and whispered. "I do. Wrenn. Sussten. The whole village." "The whole world will know. They will all do things for me." She thought, But everyone does everything for himself, all over the wojld. Except, she added, those who aren't able... With that in mind, she looked at him, his oaken shoulders, his powerful, bitter mouth. She touched the bruises his hands had left, and the beginhings of the understanding she had been groping for left her completely. She said dully, "Your tower... you'd better get back there." "Work goes on," he said, smiling tightly, "whether I'm there or not, as long as they don't know my plans. They are afraid. But -- yes, we can go now." his torch. It flared bluewhite, faded to the weak orange of Jubilith's, then died. "The light..." "It's all right," said Jubilith. "I have mine." "When they get like that, so dim, you can't tell when they'll go out. Come -- hurry! This place' is full of corridors; without light, we could be lost here for days.'" She glanced around at the crowding shadows. "Make it work again," she suggested. He looked at the dead torch in his hand. "You," he said flatly. He tossed it. She caught it in her free hand, put her torch on the floor, and held the broken one down so she could see it in the waning orange glow. She turned it over twice, her sensitive hands feeling with every part rather than with fingertips alone. She held it still and closed her eyes; and then it came to her, and she grasped one end with her right hand and the other with her left, and twisted. There was a faint click and the outer shell of the torch separated. She drew off the butt end of it; it was just a hollow shell. The entire mechanism was attached to the lens end and was now exposed. She turned it over carefully, keeping her fingers away from the workings. Again she closed her eyes and thought, and at last she bent close and peered. She nodded, fumbled in her hair, and detached a copper clasp. She bent and broke off a narrow strip of it and inserted it carefully into the light mechanism. Very carefully, she pried apart two small strands of wire, dipped a little deeper, hooked onto a tiny white sphere, and drew it out. "Poor thing," she murmured under her breath. "Poor what?" "Spider's egg," she said ruefully. "They fight so to save them; and this one will never hatch out now. It's been burned." She picked up the butt-end housing, slipped the two parts together, and twisted them until they clicked. She handed the torch to Osser. "You've wasted time," he complained, surly. "No, I haven't," she said. "We'll have light now." He touched the stud on the white light poured from it. "Yes," he admitted quietly. Watching his face as he handled the torch, she knew that if the could read what was in his mind in that second, she would have the answer to everything about him. She could not, however, and he said nothing, but led across the room to the dark corridor. He was silent all the way back to the broken steps. They stood halfway up, letting their eyes adjust to the daylight which poured down on them, and he said, "You didn't even try the torch to see if it would work, after you took out that egg." "I knew it Would work." She looked at him, amazed. "You're angry." "Yes," he said. He took her torch and his and put them away in a niche in the ruined stairwell, and they climbed up into the noon light. It was all but intolerable, as the two suns were all but in syzygy, the blue-white midget shining through the great pale gaseous mass of the giant, so that together they cast only a single shadow. "It will be hot this afternoon," she said, but he was silent, steeped in some bitterness of his own, so she followed him quietly without attempting conversation. O LD Oyva stirred sleepily in her basking chair, and suddenly sat upright. Jubilith approached her, pale and straight. "Is it Oyva?" "It is, Jubilith," said the old woman. "I knew you would be back, my dear. I'm sore in my heart with you." "Is he here?" "He is. He has been on a journey. You'll find him tired." "He should have been here, with all that has happened," said Jubilith. "He should have done exactly as he has done," Oyva stated bluntly. Jubilith recognized the enormity of her rudeness, and the taste of it was bad in her mouth. One did not criticize Wrenn's comings and goings. She faced Oyva and closed her eyes humbly.' Oyva touched her. "It's all right, child. You are distressed. Wrenn!" she called. "She is here!" "Come, Jubilith," Wrenn's voice called from the house. "He knows? No one knew I was coming here!" "He knows," said Oyva. "Go to him, child." Jubilith entered the house. Wrenn sat in his corner. The musical instrument was nowhere in sight. Aside from his cushions, there was nothing in the room. Wrenn gave her his wise, sweet smile. "Jubilith," he said. "Come close." He looked drawn and pale, but quite untroubled. He put a cushion by him and she crossed slowly and sank down on it. He was quiet, and when she was sure it was because he waited for her to speak, she said, "Some things may not be understood." "True," he agreed. She kneaded her hands. "Is there never a change?" "Always," he said, "when it's time." ' "Osser -- " "Everyone will understand Osser very soon now." She screwed up her courage. "Soon is not soon enough. I must know him now." "Before anyone else?" he inquired mildly. "Let everyone know now," she suggested. He shook his head and there was no appeal in it. "Then let me. I shall be a part of you and speak of it only to you.' "Why must you understand?" S HE shuddered. It was not cold, or fear, but simply the surgings of a great emotion. "I love him," she said. "And to love is to guard and protect. He needs me." "Go to him then." But she sat where she was, her long eyes cast down, weeping. Wrenn said, "There is more, then?" "I love..." She threw out an arm in a gesture which enfolded Wrenn, the house, the village. "I love the people, too, the gardens, the little houses; the way we go and come, and sing, and make music, and make our own tools and clothes. To love is to guard and protect... and I love these things, and I love Osser. I can destroy Osser, because he would not expect it of me; and, if I did, I would protect all of you. But if I protect him, he will destroy you. There is no answer to such a problem, Wrenn; it is a road," she cried, "with a precipice at each end, and no standing still!" "And understanding him would be an answer?" "There's no other!" She turned her face up to him, imploring. "Osser is strong, Wrenn, with a -- a new thing about him, a thing none of the rest of us have. He has told me of it. It is a thing that can change us, make us part of him. He will build cities with our hands, on our broken bodies if we resist him. He wants us to be a great people again -- he says we were, once, and have lost it all." "And do you regard that as greatness, Jubilith -- the towers, the bird-machines?" "How did you know of them?... Greatness? I don't know, I don't know," she said, and wept. "I love him, and he wants to build a city with a wanting greater than anything I have ever known or heard of before. Could he do it, Wrenn? Could he?" "He might," said Wrenn calmly"He is in the village now. He has about him the ones who built his tower for him. They cringe around him, hating to be near and afraid to leave. He sent them one by one to tell all the people to come out to the foothills tomorrow, to begin work on his city. He wants enough building done in one hundred days to shelter everyone, because then, he says, he is going to burn this village to the ground. Why, Wrenn -- why?" "Perhaps," said Wrenn, "so that we may all face his strength and yield to it. A man who could move a whole village in a hundred days just to show his strength would be a strong man indeed." "What shall we do?" "I think we shall go out to the foothills in the morning and begin to build." She rose and went to the door. "I know what to do now," she whispered. "I won't try to understand any more. I shall just go and help him." "Yes, go," said Wrenn, "He will need you." the parapet, and with him stared into the dappled dawn. The whole sky flamed with the loom of the red sun's light, but the white one preceded it up the sky, laying sharp shadows in the soft blunt ones. Birds called and chattered in the Sky-tree Grove, and deep in the thickets the seven-foot bats grunted .as they settled in to sleep. "Suppose they don't come?" she asked. "They'll come," he said grimly. "Jubilith, why are you here?" She said, "I don't know what you are doing, Osser. I don't know whether it's right or whether you will keep on succeeding. I do know there will be pain and difficulty and I -- I came to keep you safe, if I could... I love you." He looked down at her, as thick and dark over her as his tower was over the foothills. One side of his mouth twitched. "Little butterfly," he said softly, "do you think you can guard me ?" Everything beautiful about her poured out to him through her beautiful face, and for a moment his world had three suns instead of two. He put his arms around her. Then his great voice exploded with two syllables of a mighty laugh. He lifted her and swung her behind him, and leaped to the parapet. Deeply shaken, she came to follow his gaze. The red sun's foggy limb was above the townward horizon, and silhouetted against it came the van of a procession. On they came and on, the joung men of the village, the fathers. Women were with them, too, and everything on wheels that the village possessed -- flat-bed wagons, twowheeled rickshaw carts, children's and vendors' and pleasure vehicles. A snorting team of four tiger-oxen clawed along before a heavily laden stone-boat, and men shared packs that swung in the center of long poles. Osser curled his lip. "You see them," he said, as if to himself, "doing the only thing they can think of. Push them, they yield. The clods!" he spat. "Well, one day, one will push back. And when he does,I'll break him, and after that I'll use him. Meantime -- I have a thousand hands and a single mind. We'll see building now," he crooned. "When they've built, they'll know what they don't know now -- that they're men." "They've all come," breathed Jubilith. "All of them. Osser -- " "Be quiet," he said, leaning into the wind to watch, gloating. With the feel of his hard hands still on her back, she discovered with a crushing impact that there was no room in his heart for her when he thought of his building. And she knew that there never would be, except perhaps for a stolen moment, a touch in passing. With the pain of that realization came the certainty that she would stay with him always, even for so little. The procession dipped out of sight, then slowly rose over and down the near hill and approached the tower. It spread and thickened at the foot of the slope, as men cast about, testing the ground with their picks, eying the land for its color and vegetation and drainage... or was that what they were doing? the parapet and shook his head pityingly at their inefficiency. Look at the way they went about laying out houses! And their own houses. Well, he'd let them mill about until they were completely confused, and then he'd go down and make them do it his way. Confused men are soft men; men working against their inner selves are easy to divert from outside. Beside him, Jubilith gasped. "What is it?" She pointed. "There -- sending the men to this side, that side. See, by the stoneboat? It's Wrenn!" "Nonsense!" said Osser, "He'd never leave his house. Not to walk around among people who are sweating. He deals only with people who tell him he's right before he speaks." "It's Wrenn, it is, it is!" cried Jubilith. She clutched his arm. "Osser, I'm afraid!" "Afraid? Afraid of what?... By the dying Red One, it is Wrenn, telling men what to do as if this was his city." He laughed. "There are few enough here who are strong, Juby, but he's the strongest there is. And look at him scurry around for me!" "I'm afraid," Jubilith whimpered.  "They jump , when he tells them," said Osser reflectively, shading his eyes. "Perhaps I was wrong to let them tire themselves out before I help them do things right. With a man like him to push them... Hm. I think we'll get it done right the first time." He pushed himself away from the parapet and swung to the stairway. "Osser, don't, please don't!" she begged. He stopped just long enough to give her a glance like a stone thrown. "You'll never change my mind, Juby, and you'll be hurt if you try too often." He dropped into the opening, went down three steps, five steps... He grunted, stopped. Jubilith came slowly over to the stairwell. Osser stood on the sixth step, on tiptoe. Impossibly on tiptoe : the points of his sandals barely touched the step at all. He set his jaw and placed his massive hands one on each side of the curved wall. He pressed them out and up, forcing himself downward. His sandals touched more firmly; his toes bent, his heels made contact. His face became deep red, and the cords at the sides of his neck ridged like a weathered fallow-field. A strained crackle came from his shoulders, and then the pent breath burst from him. His hands slipped, and he came up again just the height of the single stairriser, to bob ludicrously like a boat at anchor, his pointed toe touching and lifting from the sixth step. He gave an inarticulate roar, bent double, and plunged his hands downward as if to dive head-first down the stairs. His wrists turned under and he yelped with the pain. More cautiously he felt around and down, from wall to wall. It was as if the air in the stairway had solidified, become at once viscous and resilient. Whatever was there was invisible and completely impassable. On his face there was fury and frustration, hurt and a shaking reaction. Jubilith wrung her hands. "Please, please, Osser, be care -- " The sound of her voice gave him something to strike out at, and he spun about, raising his great bludgeon of a fist. Jubilith stood frozen; too shocked to dodge the blow. "Osser" Osser stopped, tensed high, fist up, like some terrifying monument to vengeance. The voice had been Wrenn's -- Wrenn speaking quietly, even conversationally, but magnified beyond belief. The echoes of it rolled off and were lost in the hills. "Come watch men building, Osser" Dazed, Osser lowered his t arm and went to the parapet. Far below, near the base of the hill, Wrenn' stood, looking up at the tower. When Osser appeared, Wrenn turned his back and signaled the men by the stoneboat. They twitched away the tarpaulin that covered its load. Osser' s hands gripped the stone as if they would powder it. His eyes slowly widened and his jaw slowly dropped. At first it seemed like a mound of silver on the rude platform of the ox-drawn stone-boat. Gradually he perceived that it was a machine, a machine so finished, so clean-lined and so businesslike that the pictures he had shown Jubilith were clumsy toys in comparison. It was Sussten, a man Osser had crushed to the ground with two heavy blows, who sprang lightly up on the machine and settled into it. It backed off the platform, and Osser could hear the faintest of whines from it. The machine rolled and yet it stepped; it kept itself horizonlevel as it ran, its long endless treads dipping and rising with the terrain, its sleek body moving smooth as a swan. It stopped and then went forward, out to the first of a field of stakes that a crew had been driving. The flat, gleaming sides of the machine opened away and forward and locked, and became a single blade twice the width of the machine. It dropped until its sharp lower edge just touched the ground, checked for a moment, and then sank into the soil. Dirt mounded up before it until flakes fell back over the wide moldboard. The machine slid ahead, and dirt ran off the sides of the blade to make two straight windrows. And behind the machine as it labored, the ground was flat and smooth; and it was done as easily as a smoothing hand in a sandbox. Here it was cut and there it was filled, but everywhere the swath was like planed wood, all done just as fast as a man can run. Osser made a sick noise far back in his tight throat. machine wheeled and returned, one end of the blade now curved forward to catch up the windrow 'and carry it across the new parallel cut. And now the planed soil was twice as wide. As it worked, men worked, and Osser saw that, shockingly, they moved with no less efficiency and certainty than the machine. For Osser, these men had plodded and sweated, drudged, each a single, obstinate unit to be flogged and pressed. But now they sprinted, sprang; they held, drove, measured and carried as if to swift and intricate music. A cart clattered up and from it men took metal spikes, as thick as a leg, twice as tall as a man. Four men to a spike, they ran with them to staked positions on the new-cut ground, set them upright. A man flung a metal clamp around the spike. Two men, one on each side, drove down on the clamp with heavy sledges until the spike would stand alone. And already those four were back with another spike. Twenty-six such spikes were set, but long before they were all out of the wagon, Sussten spun the machine in its own length and stopped. The moldboard rose, hinged, folded back to become the silver sides of the machine again. Sussten drove forward, nosed the machine into the first of the spikes, which fitted into a slot at the front of the machine. There was the sound of a frantic giant ringing a metal triangle, and the spike sank as if the ground had turned to bread. Leaving perhaps two hand'sbreadths of the spike showing, the machine slid to the next and the next, sinking the spikes so quickly that it had almost  whole minute to wait while the spike crew set the very last one. At that a sound rolled out of the crowd, a sound utterly unlike any that had ever been heard during the building of the tower -- a friendly, jeering roar of laughter at the crew who had made the machine wait. Men unrolled heavy cable along the lines of spikes; others followed right behind them, one with a tool which stretched the cable taut, two with a tool that in two swift motions connected the cable to the tops of the sunken spikes. And by the time the cable was connected, two flatbeds, a buckboard and a hay wagon had unloaded a cluster of glistening machine parts. Men and women swarmed over them, wrenches, pliers and special tools in hand, bolting, fitting, clamping, connecting. Three heavy leads from the great ground cable were connected; a great parabolic wire basket was raised and guyed. Wrenn ran to the structure and pulled a lever. A high-pitched scream of force dropped sickeningly in pitch to a jarring subsonic, and rose immediately high out of the audible range. A rosy haze enveloped the end of the new machine, opposite the ground array and under the basket. It thickened, shimmered, and steadied, until it was a stable glowing sphere with an off-focus muzziness barely showing all around its profile. rrtHE crowd -- not a group now, but a line -- cheered and the line moved forward. Every conceivable village conveyance moved in single file toward the shining sphere, and, as each stopped, heavy metal was unloaded. Cast-iron stove legs could be recognized, and long strips of tinning solder, a bell, a kettle, the framing of a bench. The blacksmith's anvil was there, and parts of his forge. Pots and skillets. A ratchet and pawl from the gristmill. The weights and pendulum from the big village clock. As each scrap was unloaded, exactly the number of hands demanded by its weight were waiting to catch it, swing it from its conveyance into the strange sphere. They went in without resistance and without sound, and they did not come out. Wagon after wagon, pack after handsack were unloaded, and still the sphere took and took. It took heavy metal of more mass than its own dimensions. Had the metal been melted down into a sphere, it would have been a third again, half again, twice as large as the sphere, and still it took. But its color was changing. The orange went to burned sienna and then to a strident brown. Imperceptibly this darkened until at last it was black. For a moment, it was a black of impossible glossiness, but this softened. Blacker and blacker it became, and at length it was not a good thing to look into -- the blackness seemed to be hungry for something more intimate than metal. And still the metals came and the sphere took. A great roar came from the crowd; men fell back to look upward. High in the west was a glowing golden spark which showed a long blue tail. It raced across the sky and was gone, and moments later the human roar was answered by thunder from above. If the work had been swift before, it now became a blur. Men no longer waited for the line of wagons to move, but ran back along it to snatch metal and stagger forward again to the sphere. Women ripped off bracelets and hammered earrings and threw them to the implacable melanosphere. Men threw ip their knives, even their buttons. A rain of metal was sucked silently into the dazzling black. Another cry from the crowd, and now there was hurried anguish in it; again the craning necks, the quick gasp. The golden spark was a speed-blurred ovoid now, the blue tail a banner half a horizon long. The roar, when it came, was a smashing thunder, and the blue band hung where it was long after the thing had gone. A moan of urgency, caught and maintained by one exhausted throat after another, rose and fell and would not leave. Then it was a happy shout as Sussten drove in, shouldering the beautiful cutting machine through the scattering crowd. Its blade unfolded as it ran, latched high and stayed there like a shining forearm flung across the machine's silver face. As the last scrambling people dove for safety, Sussten brought the huge blade slashing downward and at the same time threw the machine into its highest speed. It leaped forward as Sussten leaped back. Unmanned, it rushed at the sphere as if to sweep it away, crash the structure that contained it. But at the last micro-second, the blade struck the ground; the nose of the machine snapped upward, and the whole gleaming thing literally vaulted into the sphere. ' black. Some people fell to their knees, their faces covered. Some turned blindly away, unsteady on their feet. Some stood trembling, fixed on it, until friendly hands took and turned them and coaxed them back to reality. # And at last a man staggered close, squinting, and threw in the heavy wrought-iron support for an inn sign -- And the sphere refused it. Such a cry of joy rose from the village that the sleeping bats in the thickets of Sky-tree Grove, two miles away, stirred and added their porcine grunting to the noise. A woman ran to Wrenn, screaming, elbowing, unnoticed galaxy science fiction and unheard in the bedlam. She caught his shoulder roughly, spun him half around, pointed. Pointed up at the tower, at Osser. Wrenn thumbed a small disc out of a socket in his belt and held it near his lips. "Osser!" The great voice rang and echoed, crushing the ecstatic noises of the people by its sheer weight. "Osser, come down or you're a dead man!" The people, suddenly silent, all stared at the tower. One or two cried, "Yes, come down, come down..." but the puniness of their voices was ludicrous after Wrenn's magnified tones, and few tried again. Osser stood holding the parapet, legs wide apart, eyes widfc -- too wide -- open. His hands curled over the edge, and blood dripped slowly from under the cuticles. "Come down, come down . , ." He did not move. His eyeballs were nearly dry, and unnoticed saliva lay in a drying streak from one corner of his mouth. "Jubilith, bring him down!" She was whimpering, begging, murmuring little urgencies to him. His biceps were as hard as the parapet, his face as changeless as the stone. "Jubilith, leave him! Leave him and come!" Wrenn, wise Wrenn, sure, unshakable, imperturbable Wrenn had a sob in his voice; and under such amplification the sob was almost big enough to be voice for the sobs that twisted through Jubilith's tight throat. She dropped to one knee and put one slim firm shoulder under Osser's wrist. She drove upward against it with all the lithe strength of her panicked body. It came free, leaving a clot of fingertip on the stone. Down she went again, and up again at the other wrist; but this was suddenly flaccid, and her tremendous effort turned to a leap. She clutched at Osser, who tottered forward. For one endless second they hung there, while their mutual center of gravity made a slow deliberation, and then Jubilith kicked frantically at the parapet, abrading her legs, mingling her blood with his on the masonry. They went together back to the roof. Jubilith twisted like a falling cat and got her feet down, holding Osser's great weight up. They spun across the roof in an insane staggering dance; then there was the stairway (with its invisible barrier gone) and darkness (with his hand in hers now, holding and leading) and a sprint into daylight and the shattering roar of Wrenn's giant voice: "Everybody down, down ilatr And there was a time of running, pulling Osser after her, and Osser pounding along behind her, docile and wide-eyed as a cat-ox. And then the rebellion and failure of her legs, and the will that refused to let them fail, and the failure of that will; the stunning agony of a cracked patella as she went down on the rocks, and the swift sense of infinite loss as Osser's hand pulled free of hers and he went lumbering blindly along, the only man on his feet in the wide meadow of the fallen. Jubilith screamed and someone stood up -- she thought it was old Oyva -- and cried out. Then the mighty voice again, "Osser Down , man!" Blearily, then, she saw Osser stagger to a halt and peer around him. "Osser, lie down!" A ND then Osser, mad, drooling, turning toward her. His eyes protruded and he slashed about with his heavy fists. He came closer, unseeing, battling some horror he believed in with great cuts and slashes that threatened elbow and shoulder joints by the wrenching of their unimpeded force. His voice -- but not his, rather the voice of an old, wretched crone -- squeaking out in a shrill falsetto, "Not down, never down, but up. I'll build, build, build, break to build, kill to build, and all the ones who can do everything, anything, everything, they will build everything for me. I'm strong!" he shrieked, soprano. "All the people who can do anything are less than one strong man..." He jabbered and fought, and suddenly Wrenn rose, quite close by, his left hand enclosed in a round flat box. He moved something on its surface and then waved it at Osser, in a gesture precisely like the command to a guest to be seated. Down went Osser, close to Jubilith, with his face in the dirt and his eyes open, uncaring. On him and on Jubilith lay the invisible weight of the force that had awaited him in the stairway. The breath hissed out of Jubilith. Had she not been lying on her side with her face turned skyward in a single convulsive effort toward air, she would never have seen what happened. The golden shape appeared in the west, seen a fraction of a second, but blazoned forever in tangled memories of this day. And simultaneously the earth-shaking cough of the machine as its sphere disappeared. She could not see it move, but such a blackness is indelible, and she sensed it when it appeared in the high distances as its trajectory and that of the golden flyer intersected. Then there was -- Nothing. fTiHE broad blue trail swept from the western horizon to the zenith, and sharply ended. There was no sound, no. concussion, no blaze of light. The sphere met the ship and both ceased to exist. Then there was the wind, from nowhere, from everywhere, all the wind that ever was, tearing in agony from everywhere in the world to the place where the sphere had been, trying to fill the strange space that had contained exactly as much matter as the dead golden ship. Wagons, oxen, trees and stones scraped and flew and crashed together in the center of that monstrous implosion. The weight Wrenn had laid on Jubilith disappeared, but her sucking lungs could find nothing to draw in. There was air aplenty, but none of it would serve her. Finally she realized that there was unconsciousness waiting for her if she wanted it. She embraced it, sank into it, and left the world to its wailing winds. Ages later, there was weeping. She stirred and raised her head. The sphere machine was gone. There was a heap of something down there, but it supported such a tall and heavy pillar of roiling dust that she could not see what it was. There, and there, and over yonder, in twos and threes, silent, shaken people sat up, some staring about them, some just sitting, waiting for the shockstopped currents of life to flow back in. But the weeping... She put her palm on the ground and inched it, heel first, in a weak series of little hops, until she was half sitting. Osser was weeping. He sat upright, his feet together and his knees wide apart, like a little child. He rocked. He lifted his hands and let them fall, lifted them and punctuated his crying with weak poundings on the ground. His mouth was an O, his eyes were single squeezed ' lines, his face was wet, and his crying was the most heartrending sound she had ever heard. She thought to speak to him, but knew he would not hear. She thought to go to him, but the first shift of weight sent such agony through her broken kneecap that she almost fainted. Osser wept. She turned away from him -- suppose, later, he should remember that she had seen this? -- and then she knew why he. was crying. He was crying because his tower was gone. Tower of strength, tower of defiance, tower of hope, tower of rebellion and hatred and an ambition big enough for a whole race of citybuilders, gone without a fight, gone without the triumph of taking him with it, gone in an instant, literally in a puff of wind. "Where does it hurt?" It was Wrenn, who had approached unseen through the blinding, sick compassion that filled her. "It hurts there." She pointed briefly at Osser. "I know," said Wrenn gently. He checked what she was about to say with a gesture. "No, we won't stop him. When he was a little boy, he never cried. He has been hurt more than most people, and nothing ever made him cry, ever. We all have a cup for tears and a reservoir. No childhood is finished until all the tears flow from the reservoir into the cup. Let him cry; perhaps he is going to be a man. It's your knee, isn't it?" "Yes. Oh, but I can't stand to hear it, my heart will burst!" she cried. "Hear him out," said Wrenn softly, taking medication from a flat box at his waist. He ran feather-fingers over her knee and nodded. "You have taken Osser as your own. Keep this weeping with you, all of it. It will fit you to him better through the healing time." "May I understand now?" "Yes, oh yes... and since he has taught you about hate, you will hate me for it." "I couldn't hate you, Wrenn." Something stirred within his placid eyes -- a smile, a pointed shard of knowledge -- she was not sure. "Perhaps you could." ful bandaging, and as he worked, he spoke. "Stop a man in his work to tell him that each of his fingers bears a pattern of loops and whorls, and you waste his time. It is a thing he knows, a thing he has seen for himself, a thing which can be checked on the instant -- in short, an obvious, unremarkable thing. Yet, if his attention is not called to it, it is impossible to teach him that these patterns are exclusive, original with him, unduplicated anywhere. Sparing him the truism may cost him the fact. "It is that kind of truism through which I shall pass to reach the things you must understand. So be patient with me through the familiar paths; I promise you a most remarkable turning. "We are an ancient and resourceful species, and among the many things we have -- our happiness, our simplicity, our harmony with each other and with ourselves -- some are the products of intelligence, per se, but most of the good things spring from a quality which we possess in greater degree than any other species yet known. That is -- logic: "Now, there is the obvious logic: you may never have broken your knee before, but you knew, in advance, that if you did it would cause you pain. If I hold this pebble so, you may correctly predict that it will drop when I release it, though you have never seen this stone before. This obvious logic strikes deeper levels as well; for example, if I release the stone and it does not fall, logic tells you not only that some unpredicted force is now acting on it, but a great many things about that force: that it equals gravity in the case of this particular pebble; that it is in stasis; that it is phenomenal, since it is out of the statistical order of things. "The quality of logic, which we (so far as is known) uniquely possess, is this: any of us can do literally anything that anyone else can do. You need ask no one to solve the problems that you face every day, providing they are problems common to all. To cut material so that a sleeve will fit a shoulder, you pause, you  close your eyes; the way to cut the material then comes to you, and you proceed. You never need do anything twice, because the first way is the most logical. You may finish the garment and put it away without trying it on for fit, because you know you have done it right and it is perfect. "If I put you before a machine which you had never seen before, which had a function unknown to you, and which operated on principles you had never heard of, and if I told you it was broken and needed repairing, you would look at it carefully, inside, outside, top and bottom, and you would close your eyes, and suddenly you would understand the principles. With these and the machine, function would explain itself. The step from that point to the location of a faulty part is self-evident. "Now I lay before you parts vfrhich are identical in appearance, and ask you to install the correct one. Since you thoroughly understand the requirements now, the specifications for the correct part are self-evident. Logic dictates the correct tests for the parts. You will rapidly reject the tight one, the heavy one, the too soft one, and the too resilient one, and you will repair my machine. And you will walk away without testing it, since you now know it will operate." all of us -- live in this way. We build no cities because we don't need cities. We stay in groups because some things need more than two hands, more than one head, or voice, or mood. We eat exactly what we require, we use only what we need. "And that is the end of the truism, wherein I so meticulously describe to you what you know about how you live. The turning: Whence this familiar phenomenon, this closing of the eyes and mysterious appearance of the answer? There have been many engrossing theories about it, but the truth is the most fascinating of all. ' "We have all spoken of telepathy, and many of us have experienced it. We cannot explain it, as yet. But most of us insist on a limited consideration of it; that is, we judge its success or failure by the amount of detail sent and received. We expect facts to be transmitted, words, idea sequences -- or perhaps pictures; the clearer the picture, the better the telepathy. "Perhaps one day we will learn to do this; it would be diverting. But what we actually do is infinitely more useful. "You see, we are telepathic, not in the way of conveying details, but in the much more useful way of conveying a manner of thinking. "Let us try to envisage a man who lacks this quality. Faced with your broken machine, he would be utterly at a loss, unless he had been specially trained in this particular field. Do not overlook the fact that he lacks the conditioning of a whole life of the kind of sequence thinking which is possible to us. He would probably bumble through the whole chore in an interminable time, trying one thing and then another and going forward from whatever seems to work. You can see the tragic series of pitfalls possible for him in a situation in which an alternate three or four or five consecutive steps are possible, forcing step six, which is wrong in terms of the problem. "Now, take the same man and train him in this one job. Add a talent, so that he learns quickly and well. Add years of experience -- terrible, drudging thought! -- to his skill. Face him with the repair problem and it is obvious that he will repair it with a minimum of motion. "Finally, take this skilled man and equip him with a device which constantly sends out the habit-patterns of his thinking. Long practice has made him efficient in the matter; in terms of machine function he knows better than to question whether a part turns this way or that, whether a rod or tube larger than x diameter is to be considered. Furthermore, imagine a receiving device which absorbs these sendings whenever the receiver is faced with an identical problem. The skilled sender controls the unskilled receiver as long as the receiver is engaged in the problem. Anything the receiver does which is counter to the basic patterns of the sender is automatically rejected as illogical. "And now I have described our species. We have an unmatchable unitary existence. Each of us with "a natural bent -- the poets, the musicians, the mechanics, the philosophers -- each gives of his basic thinking method every time anyone has an application for it. The t expert is unaware of being tapped -- which is why it has taken hundreds of centuries to recognize the method. Yet, in spite of what amounts to a veritable race intellect, we are all very much individuals. Because each field has many experts, and each of those experts has his individual approach, only that which is closest both to the receiver and his problem comes in. The ones without special talents live fully and richly with all the skills of the gifted. The creative ones share with others in their field as soon as it occurs to any expert to review what he knows; the one step forward then instantly presents itself. "CO much for the bulk of our  kind. There remain a few specializing non-specialists. When you are faced with a problem to which no logical solution presents itself, you come to one of these few for help. The reason no solution presents itself is that this is a new line of thinking, or (which is very unlikely) the last expert in it has died. The non-specialist hears your problem and applies simple logic to it. Immediately, others of his kind do the  same. But, since they come from widely divergent backgrounds and use a vast variety of methods, one of them is almost certain to  find the logical solution. This is your answer -- and through you, it is available to anyone who ever faces this particular problem. "In exceptional cases, the nonspecializing specialist encounters a problem which, for good reason, is better left out of the racial 'pool' -- as, for example, a physical or psychological experiment within the culture, of long duration, which general knowledge might alter. In such cases, a highly specialized hypnotic technique is used on the investigators, which has the effect of cloaking thought on this particular matter. "And if you began to fear that I was never coming to Osser's unhappy history, you must understand, my dear, I have just given it to you. Osser was just such an experiment. "It became desirable to study the probable habit patterns of a species like us in every respect except for our unique attribute. The problem was attacked from many angles, but I must confess that using a live specimen was my idea. "By deep hypnosis, the telepathic receptors in Osser were severed from the rest of his mind. He was then allowed to grow up among us in real and complete freedom. "You saw the result. Since few people recognize the nature of this unique talent, and even fewer regard it as worth discussion, this strong, proud, highly intelligent boy grew up feeling a hopeless inferior,and never knowing exactly wby Others did things, made things, solved problems, as easily as thinking about them, while Osser had to study and sweat and piece and try out. He had to assert his superiority in some way. He did, but in as slipshod a fashion as he did everything else. "So he was led to the pictures you saw. He was permitted to make what conclusions he wished -- they were that we are a backward people, incapable of building a city. He suddenly saw in the dreams of a mechanized, starreaching species a justification of himself. He could not understand our lack of desire for possessions, not knowing that our whole cultural existence is based on sharing -- that it is not only undesirable, but impossible for us to hoard an advanced idea, a new comfort. He would master us through strength. "He was just starting when you came to me about him. You could get no key to his problem because we know nothing about sick minds, and there was no expert you could tap. I couldn't help you -- you, of all people -- because you loved him, and because we dared not risk having him know what he was, especially when he was just about to take action. "Why he chose this particular site for his tower I do not know. And why he chose the method of the tower I don't know either, though I can deduce an excellent reason. First, he had to use his strength once he became convinced that in it lay his superiority. Second, he had to try out this build-with-hate idea -- the bugaboo of all other man-species, the trial-and-error, the inability to know what will work and what will not. "And so we learned through Osser precisely what we had learned in other approaches -- that a man without our particular ability must not live among us, for, if he does, he will destroy us. "It is a small step from that to a conclusion about a whole race of them coexisting with us. And now you know what happened here this afternoon." slowly. "A whole ship full of... of what Osser was?" "Yes. We did the only thing we could. Quick, quite painless. We have been watching them for a long time -- years. We saw them start. We computed their orbit -- even to the deceleration spiral. We chose a spot to launch our interceptor." He glanced at Osser, who was almost quiet, quite exhausted. "What sheer hell he must have gone through, to see us build like that. How could he know that not one of us needed training, explanation, or any but the simplest orders? How could he rationalize to himself our possession of machines and devices surpassing the wildest dreams of the godlike men he admired so? How could he understand that, having such things, we use them only when we must, and that otherwise we live in ways which will not violate the walking, working animal we are?" She turned to him a mask so cold, so beautiful, he forgot for a moment to breathe. "Why did you do it? You had other logics, other approaches. Did you have to do that to him?" He studiously avoided a glance at Osser. "I said you might hate me," he murmured. "Jubilith, the men in that ship were so like Osser that the experiment could not be passed by. We had astronomical data, historical, cultural -- as far as our observations could go -- and ethnological. But only by analogy could we get such a psychological study. And it checked too well. As for having him see this thing, today... building, Jubilith, is sometimes begun by tearing down." He looked at her with deep compassion. "This was not the site chosen for the launching of the interceptor. We uprooted the whole installation, brought it here, rebuilt it, just for Osser; just so that he could stand on his tower and see it happen. He had to be broken, leveled to the earth. Ah-h-h..." he breathed painfully, "Osser has earned what he will have from now on." "He can be -- well again?" "With your help." "So very right, you are," she snarled suddenly. "So sure that this or that species is fit to associate with superiors like us." She leaned toward him and shook a finger in his startled face. The courtly awe habitual to all when speaking to such as Wrenn had completely left her. "So fine we are, so mighty. And didn't we build cities? Didn't we have giant bird-machines and shiny carts on our streets? Didn't we let our cities be smashed -- haven't you seen the ruins in the west? Tell me," she sparked, "did we ruin them ourselves, because  one superior city insisted on proving its superiority over another superior city?" S HE stopped abruptly to keep herself from growling like an animal, for he was smiling blandly, and his smile got wider as she spoke. She turned furiously, half away from him, cursing the broken knee that held her so helpless. "Jubilith." His voice was so warm, so kind and so startling in these surroundings, held such a bubbling overtone of laughter that she couldn't reis'ist it. She turned grudgingly. In his hand he held a pebble. When her eye fell to it he rolled it, held it between thumb and forefinger, and let it go. It stayed motionless in midair. "Another factor, Jubilith." She almost smiled. She looked down at his other hand, and saw it aiming the disc-shaped forcefield projector at low power. He lifted it and, with the field, tossed the pebble into the air and batted it away. "We have no written history, Jubilith. We don't need one, but once in a while it would be useful. "Jubilith, our culture is one of the oldest in the Galaxy. If we ever had such cities, there are not even legends about it." "But I saw -- " "A ship came here once. We had never seen a humanoid race. We welcomed them and helped them. We gave them land and seeds: Then they called a flotilla, and the ships came by the hundreds. "They built cities and, at that, we moved away and left them alone, because we don't need cities. Then they began to hate us. They couldn't hate us until they had tall buildings to do it in. They hated our quiet; they hated our understanding. They sent missionaries to change our ways. We welcomed the missionaries, fed them and laughed with them, but when they left us glittering tools and humble machines to amuse us, we let them lie where they were until they rotted. "In time they sent no more missionaries. They joked about us and forgot us. And then they built a city on land we had not given them, and another, and another. They bred well, and their cities became infernally big. And finally they began to build that one city too many, and we turned a river and drowned it. They were pleased. They could now rid themselves of the backward natives." saw the tumbled agony of the mounds, radiating outward from a lake with its shores too bare. "All of them?" she asked. Wrenn nodded. "Even one might be enough to destroy us." He nodded toward Osser, who had begun to cry again. "They seemed... good," she said, reflectively. "Too fast, too big... and it must have been noisy, but -- " "Wait," he said. "You mean the people in the picture Osser showed you?" "Of course. They were the citybuilders you -- we -- destroyed, weren't they?" "They were not! The ones who built here were thin, hairy, with" backward-slanting faces andwebs between their fingers. Beautiful, but they hated us... The pictures, Jubilith, were made on the third planet of a pale star out near the Rim; a world with one Moon; a world of humans like Osser... the world where that golden ship came from." "How?" she gasped. "If logic is good enough," WrCnn said, "it need not be checked. Once we were so treated by humanoids, we built the investigators. They are not manned. They draw their power from anything that radiates, and they home on any planet which could conceivably rear humans. They are, as far as we know, indefectible. We've never lost one. They launch tiny flyers to make close searches -- one of them made the pictures you saw. The pictures and other data are coded and sent out into space and, where distances warrant it, other investigators catch the signal and add power and send them on. "Whenever a human or humanoid species builds a ship, we watch it. When they send their ships to this sector, we watch their planet and their ship. Unless we are sure that those people have the ability we have, to share all expertness and all creative thinking with all who want it -- they don't land here. And no such species ever will land here." "You're so sure." "We explore no planets, Jubilith. We like it here. If others like us exist -- why should they visit us?" She thought about it, and slowly she nodded. "I like it here," she breathed. across the rolling ground. It was late, and most of the villagers had gone home. A few picked at the mound of splinters at the implosion center. Their limbs were straight and their faces clear. They owned little and they shared their souls. He rose and went to Osser, and sat down beside him, facing him, his back to Jubilith. "M-m-mum, mum, mum, mum, mum-mummum," he intoned. Osser blinked at him. Wrenn lifted his hand and his ring, green and gold and a shimmering oval of purple, caught the late light. Osser looked at the ring. He reached for it. Wrenn moved it slightly. Osser's hand passed it and hit the ground and lay there neglected. Osser gaped at the ring, his jaws working, his teeth not meeting. "Mum, mum, mummy, where's your mummy, Osser?" "In the house," said Osser, looking at the ring. Wrenn said, "You're a good little boy. When we say the word, you won't be able to do anything but what you can do. When we saythe key, you'll be able to do anything anybody can do." "All right," Osser said. "Before I give the word, tell me the key. You must remember the key." "That ring. And 'last 'n' lost.' " "Good, Osser. Now listen to me. Can you hear me?" "Sure." He grabbed at the ring. "I'm going to change the key. It isn't 'last 'n' lost' any more. 'Last 'n' lost' is no good now. Forget it." "No good?" "Forget it. What's the key?" "I -- forgot." "The key," said Wrenn patiently, "is this." He leaned close' and whispered rapidly. Jubilith was peering out past the implosion center to the townward path. Someone was coming, a tiny figure. "Judilith," Wrenn said. She looked up at him. "You must understand something." His voice was grave. His hair reached for an awed little twist of wind, come miles to see this place: The wind escaped and ran away down the hill. Wrenn said, "He's very happy now. He was a happy child when first I heard of him, and how like a spacebound human he could be. Well, he's that child again. He always will be, until the day he dies. I'll see he's cared for. He'll chase the sunbeams, a velvet red one and a needle of blue-white; he'll eat and he'll love and be loved just as is right for him." They looked at Osser. There was a blue insect on his wrist. He raised it slowly, slowly, close to his eyes, and through its gauze wings he saw the flame-and-silver sunset. He laughed. "All his life?" "All his life," said Wrenn. "With the bitterness and the trouble wiped away, and no chance to mature again into the unfinished thing that fought the world with the conviction it had something extra." Then he dropped the ring into Jubilith's hand. "But if you care to," he said, watching her face, the responsive motion of her sensitive nostrils, the most delicate index of her lower lip, "if you care to, you' can give him back everything I took away. In a moment, you can give him more than he has now; but how long would it take you to make him as happy?" She made no attempt to answer him. He was Wrenn, he was old and wise; he was a member of a unique species whose resources were incalculable; and yet he was asking her to do something he could not do himself. Perhaps he was asking her to correct a wrong. She would never know that. "Just the ring," he said, "and the touch of your hand." He went away, straight and tall, quickening his pace as, far away, the patient figure she had been watching earlier rose and came to meet him. It was Oyva. Jubilith thought, "He needs her." Jubilith had never been needed by anyone. She looked at her hand and in it she saw all she was, all she could ever be in her own right; and with it, the music of ages; never the words, but all of thepressures of poetry. And she saw the extraordinary privacy of love in a world which looked out through her eyes, placed all of its skills in her hands, to do with as she alone wished. With a touch of her hand... what a flood of sensation, what a bursting in of voices and knowledge, for a child! How long a child? She closed her eyes, and quietly the answer came, full of pictures; the lute picked up and played; the instant familiarity with the most intricate machine; the stars seen otherwise, and yet . again otherwise, and every seeing an honest beauty. A thousand discoveries, and manhood with a rush. She slipped the ring on her finger, and dragged herself over to him. She put her arms around him and his cheek came down to the hollow of her throat and burrowed there. He said, sleepily, "Is it nighttime, Mummy?" "For just a little while," said Jubilith. for you Now I have and now I know- -- fice, ind we did. Mr. Levy was brimcovering. In worrywart An invalid may occupy his days by dreaming of a better world; but what about his nightmares? copyreader on the Daily judgment set against the news. Times and a copyreader He's a sort of cross between a is a funny kind of critter. He is walking encyclopedia and an ama comma watcher and a word bulatory index. Occasionally you meet a reporter or an editor or you see their pictures or you hear them spoken of. But you never hear about a copyreader. The copyreader sits with his fellow copyreaders at a horseshoe-shaped table. If he's an old time copyreader, like Charley is, he wears a green eyeshade and rolls his shirtsleeves up above his elbows. Inside the curve of the copydesk sits the man who directs the copyreaders. Since the inside of the desk is known as the slot, this man is called the slot man. To the slot man comes the daily flow of news; he passes the copy to the men around the desk and they edit it and write the headlines. i Because there is always copy  enough to fill twenty times the allotted space, the copyreader must trim all the stories and see there is no excess wordage in them. This brings him into conI tinuous collision with reporters, who see their ornately worded stories come out chopped and mangled, although definitely more readable. When work slacks off in the afternoon, the copyreaders break their silence and talk among themselves! They talk about the news and debate what can be done about it. If you listened to them, not knowing who they were, you'd swear you were listening in on some world commission ' faced by weighty problems on which life or death depended. For your copyreader is a worrier. He worries because each day he handles the fresh and bleeding incidents that shape the course of human destiny, and there probably is no one who knows more surely nor feels more keenly the knife-edge balance between survival and disaster. more than most. He worried about a lot of things that didn't seem to call for worry. There was the matter, for instance, of those "impossible" stories happening in sequence. The other men on the copydesk took notice of them after two or three had occurred, and talked about them -- among themselves, naturally, for no proper copyreader ever talks to anyone but another copyreader. But they passed them off with only casual mention. Charley worried about the incidents, secretly, of course, since he could see that none of his fellow copyreaders felt them worthy of really serious worry. After he had done a lot of worrying, he began to see some similarity among them, and that was when he really got down on the floor and wrestled with himself. First there had been the airliner downed out in Utah. Bad weather held up the hunt for it, but finally air searchers spotted the wreckage strewn over halfa mountain peak. Airline officials said there was no hope that any had survived. But when the rescuers were halfway to the wreckage, they met the survivors walking out; every single soul had lived through the crash. Then there was the matter of Midnight, the # to I shot, winning the Derby. And, after that, the case of the little girl who didn't have a chance of getting well. They held a party for her weeks ahead of time so she could have a final birthday. Her picture was published coast to coast and the stories about her made you want to cry and thousands of people sent her gifts and postcards. Then, suddenly, she got well. Not from any new wonder drug or from any new medical technique. She just got well, some time in the night. A few days later the wires carried the story about old Pal, the coon dog down in Kentucky who got trapped inside a cave. Men dug for days and yelled encouragement. The old dog whined back at them, but finally he didn't whine any more and the digging was getting mighty hard. So the men heaped boulders into the hole they'd dug and built a cairn. They said pious, angry, hopeless words, then went back to their cabins and their plowing. The next day old Pal came home. He was a walking rack of bones, but he still could wag his tail. The way he went through a bowl of milk made a man feel good just to see him do it. Everyone agreed that old Pal must finally have found a way to get out by himself. Except that an old dog buried in a cave for days, getting weaker all the time from lack of food and water, doesn't find a way to get out by himself. And little dying, girls don't get well, just like that, in the middle of the night. And # to I shots don't win the Derby. And planes don't shatter themselves among the Utah peaks with no one getting hurt at all. A miracle, sure. Two miracles, even. But not four in a row and within a few weeks of one another. I T took Charley quite a while to establish some line of similarity. When he did, it was a fairly thin line. But thick enough, at least, to justify more worry. The line of similarity was this: All the stories were "running" or developing stories. There had been a stretch of two days during which the world waited for the facts of the plane crash. It had been known for days bfefore the race that Midnight would run and that he didn't have a chance. The story of the doomed little girl had been a matter of public interest for weeks. The old coon dog had been in the cave a week or more before the men gave up and went back to their homes. In each of the stories, the result was not known until some time after the situation itself was known. Until the final fact was actually determined, there existed an infinite number of probabilities, some more probable than others, but with each probability's having at least a fighting chance. When you flip a dime inter the air, there always exists the infinitesimal probability, from the moment you flip it until it finally lands heads or tails, that it will land on edge and stay there. Until the fact that it is heads or tails is established, the probability of its landing on edge continues to remain. And that was exactly what had happened, Charley told himself: The dime had been flipped four times, and four times running it had stood on edge. There was one minor dissimilarity, of course... the plane crash. It didn't quite fit. Each event had been a spin of the dime, and while that dime was still in air, and the public held its breath, a little girl had gotten well, somehow, and a dog had escaped from a cave, somehow, and a # to I shot had developed whatever short-lived properties bf physique and temperament are necessary to make long shots win. But the plane crash -- there had been no thought of it until after the fact. By the time the crash came into the public eye, the dime was down, and what had happened on that mountain peak had already happened, and all the hopes and prayers offered for the safety of the passengers were, actually, retroactive in the face of the enormous probability that all had perished. Please, let the dog escape. Tonight. Let the little girl get well. Soon. Let my long shot come in. Next week. Let the passengers be alive. Since yesterday. Somehow the plane crash worried Charley most of all. and with no logic whatsoever, the Iranian situation cleared up, just when it began to look as if it might be another Korea. A few days later Britain announced, proudly that it had weathered its monetary storm, that all was well with the sterling bloc, and London would need no further loans. It took a while for Charley to tie these two stories up with the plane-girl-Derby-hound-dog sequence. But then he saw that they belonged and that was when he remembered something else that might -- well, not tie" in, exactly -- but might have something to do with this extraordinary run of impossibilities. After work, he went down to the Associated Press office and had an office boy haul out the files, stapled books of carboned flimsies -- white flimsies for the A wire, blue flimsies for the B wire, yellow for the sports wire and pink for the market wire. He knew what he was looking for hadn't come over either the market or the sports wire, so he passed them up and went through the A and B wire sheets story by story. He couldn't remember the exact date the story had come over, but he knew it had been since Memorial Day, so he started with the day after Memorial Day and worked forward. He remembered the incident clearly. Jensen, the slot man, had picked it up and read it through. Then he had laughed and put it on the spike. One of the others asked : "What was funny, Jens?" So Jensen took the story off the spike and threw it over to him. Ithad gone the rounds of the desk, with each man heading  it, and finally it had got back on  the spike again.  And that had been the last of it. For the story was too wacky for any newsman to give  second glance. It had all the earmarks  of the phony. f Charley didn't find what he was looking for the first day, although he worked well into the evening -- so he went back the next afternoon, and found it. It was out of a little resort town up in Wisconsin, and it told about an invalid named Cooper Jackson who had been bedridden since he was two or three years old. The story said that Cooper's old man claimed that Cooper could foresee things, that he would think of something or imagine something during the evening and the next day it would happen. Things like Line Abrams' driving his car into the culvert at Trout Run and coming out all right himself, but with the car all smashed to . flinders, and like the Reverend Amos Tucker's getting a letter from a brother he hadn't heard from in more than twenty years. The next day Charley spoke to Jensen. "I got a few days coming," he said, "from that time I worked six-day weeks last fall, and I still got a week of last year's vacation you couldn't find the room for... "Sure, Charley," Jensen said. "We're in good shape right now." rpWO days later Charley stepped off the milk-run train in the little resort town in Wisconsin. He went to one of the several cabin camps' down onthe lake that fronted the town and got himself a small, miserable cabin for which he paid an exorbitant price. And it wasn't until then that he dared let himself think -- really think -- of the reason he had come there. In the evening he went uptown and spent an hour or two standing around in the general store and the pool room. He came back with the information that he had set out for, and another piece of information he had not been prepared to hear. The first piece of information, the one he had gone out to get, was that Dr. Erik Ames was the man to see. Doc Ames, it appeared, was not only the doctor and the mayor of the town, but the acknowledged civic leader, sage and father confessor of the whole community. The second piece of information, one which had served the town as a conversation piece for the last two .months, was that Cooper Jackson, after years of keeping to his bed as a helpless invalid, now was ' on his feet. He had to use a cane, of course, but he got around real well and every day h took a walk down by the lake. They hadn't said what time of day, so Charley was up early in the morning and started walking up and down the lakeshore, keeping a good lookout. He talked with the tourists who occupied the other cabins and he talked with men who were setting out for a day of fishing. He spent considerable time observing a yellow-winged blackbird that had its nest somewhere in a bunch of rushes on a marshy spit. Cooper Jackson finally came early in the afternoon, hobbling along on his cane, with a peaked look about him. He walked along the shore for a ways; then sat down to rest on a length of old dead tree that had been tossed up by a storm. Charley ambled over. "Do you mind?" he asked, sitting down beside him. "Not at all," said Cooper Jackson. "I'm glad to have you." They talked. Charley told him how he was a newspaperman up there for a short vacation and how it was good to get away from the kind of news that came over the teletypes, and how he envied the people who could live in this country all the year around. When he heard Charley was a newspaperman, Cooper's interest picked up like a hound dog cocking its ears. He began to a.sk all sorts of questions, the kind of questions that everyone asks a newspaperman whenever he can corner one. What do you think of the situation and what can be done about it and is there any chance of preventing war and what should we do to prevent a war... and so on until you think you'll scream. Except that it seemed to Charley that Cooper's questions were a bit more incisive, backed by a bit more information than were the questions of the ordinary person. He seemed to display more insistence and urgency than the ordinary person, who always asked his questions in a rather detached, academic way. Charley told him, honestly enough, that he didn't know what could be done to prevent a war, although he said that the quieting of the Iranian situation and the British monetary announcement might go a long way toward keeping war from happening. "You know," said Cooper Jackson, "I felt the same way, too. That is, after I read the news, I felt that those were two good things to happen." A T this point, perhaps, a couple of things should be considered. If Charley Porter had been a regular newspaperman instead of of copyreader, he might have mentioned the plane wreck and the little girl who hadn't died, and how it was a funny thing about that coon dog getting out of the cave and how he knew of a man who'd made a mint of money riding in on Midnight. But Charley didn't say these things. If Charley had been a regular newspaperman, he might have said to Cooper Jackson: "Look here, kid, I'm on to you. I know what you're doing. I got it figured out. Maybe you better straighten me out on a point or two, so I'll have the story right." But Charley didn't say this. Instead he said that he had heard uptown the night before about Cooper's miraculous recovery, and he was Cooper Jackson, wasn't he? Yes, Cooper answered, he was Cooper Jackson, and perhaps his recovery was miraculous. No, he said, he didn't have the least idea of how it came about and Doc Ames didn't either. They parted after an hour or two of talk. Charley didn't say anything about seeing him again. But the next dayCooper came limping down to the beach and headed for the log, and Charley was waiting for him. That was the day Cooper gave Charley his case history. He had been an invalid, he said, from as far back as he could remember, although his mother had told him it hadn't happened until he was three years old. He liked to listen to stories, and the stories that his parents and his brothers and sisters told, him and read to him were what had kept him alive, he was certain, during those first years. For he made the stories work for him. He told how he made the characters -- Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man and Little Bo Peep and all the rest of them -- keep on working overtime after he had heard the stories. He would lie in bed, he said, and relive the stories over and over again. "But after a while, those stories got pretty threadbare. So I improved on them. I invented stories. I mixed up the characters. For some reason or other Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man always were my heroes. They would go on the strangest odysseys and meet all these other characters, and together they would have adventures that were plain impossible. "Except," he added, "they never seemed impossible to me." Finally he had got to be the age where kids usually start off to school. Cooper's Ma had begun to worry about what they should do for his education. But Doc Ames, who was fairly sure Cooper wouldn't live long enough for an education to do him any good, had advised that they teach him whatever he might be interested in learning. It turned out that about all Cooper was interested in was reading. So they taught him how to read. Now he didn't have to have anyone read him stories any more, but could read them for himself. He read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Lewis Carroll's works and a lot of other books. So now Jie had more characters, and Peter Rabbit had some rather horrible moments reconciling his world with the world of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mock Turtle. But he finally worked in, and the imagined adventuring got crazier and crazier. "It's a wonder," said Cooper Jackson, "that I didn't die laughing. But to me it wasn't funny. It was dead serious." "What do you read now, Cooper?" Charley asked. "Oh, the newspapers," Cooper said, "and the news magazines and stuff like that." "That's not what I mean," Charley explained. "What do you read for relaxation? What takes the place of Peter Rabbit?" Cooper hemmed and hawed a little and finally he admitted it. "I read science fiction. I ran onto it when someone brought hie a magazine six or seven years ago... no, I guess it's more like eight." "I read the stuff myself," said Charley, to put him at his ease. So they sat the rest of the afternoon and talked of science fiction. in his bed in the little lakeshore cabin, staring into the darkness, trying to understand how it must have been for Cooper Jackson, lying there all those years, living with the characters out of children's books and later out of boys' books and then out of science fiction. He had said that he'd never been in much pain, but sometimes the nights were long and it was hard to sleep, and that was how he'd got started with his imagining. He would imagine things to occupy his mind. At first, it was just a mental exercise, saying such and such a thing is happening now and going on from there to some other thing that was happening. But after a while he began to see an actual set of characters acting on an imaginary stage, faint and fuzzy characters going through their parts. They were nebulous at first; later on, they became gray, like little skipping ghosts; then they had achieved the sharpness of black and white. About the time he began to deal with Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe, the characters and backgrounds had begun to take on color and perspective. And from Huck Finn and Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, he had gone on to science fiction. Good Lord, thought Charley Porter. He went on to science fiction. Take an invalid who had never moved out of his bed, who had never had a formal education, who knew little and cared less about the human viewpoint, give him an overwrought imagination and turn him loose on science fiction -- and what have you got? Charley lay there in the darkness and tried to put himself into the place of Cooper Jackson. He tried to imagine what Cooper might have imagined, what far adventuring he might have embarked upon. Then let the same invalid suddenly become aware of the world around him, as Cooper had -- for now he read the newspapers and the news magazines. Let him see what kind of shape the world was in. What might happen then? You're crazy, Charley told himself. But he lay for a long time, looking up into the black, before he went to sleep.  and they spent a part of each day together. They talked about science fiction and the news of the day and what should be done to ensure world peace. Charley told him he didn't know what should be done, that a lot of men much smarter than he were working full time on it, and they had found no answer yet. "Someone," said Cooper, "must do something about it." And the way he said it, you would have sworn that he was going to set out any minute to do that very thing. So Charley went to call on old Doc Ames. "I've heard of you," the doctor told him. "Coop was telling me about you just the other day." "I've been spending a little time with Cooper," Charley said, "and I've wanted to ask him something, but I haven't done it." "I know. You wanted to ask him about the story that was in the papers here a few months back." "That's right," Charley agreed. "And I wanted to ask him, too, about how he got up and walked after all those years in bed." "You're looking for a story?" asked the doctor. "No," said Charley, "I'm not looking for a story." "You're a newspaperman." "I came for a story," Charley told him. "But not any more. Right now I'm... well, I'm sort of scared." "So am I." "If what I'm thinking is right, it's too big to be a story." "I hope," said Doc, "that both of us are wrong." "He's hell bent," Charley went on, "to bring peace to the world. He's asked me about it a dozen times in a dozen different ways. I've told him I don't know, and I don't think there's anyone who does." "That's the trouble. If he'd just stick to things like that lost plane out in Utah and the hound dog down in Kentucky, it might be all right." "Did he tell you about those things, Doc?" "No," said Doc, "he didn't really tell me. But he said wouldn't it be fine if all those people in the plane should be found alive, and he did a lot of fretting about that poor trapped dog. He likes animals." "I figure he just practiced up on a few small items," Charley suggested, "to find if he could do it. He's out for big game now." Then good, solid, common sense came back to him and he said : "But, of course, it isn't possible." "He's got help," said Doc. "Hasn't he told you about the help he's got?" Charley shook his head. "He doesn't know you well enough. I'm the only one he knows well enough to tell a thing like that." "He's got help? You mean someone's helping... ?" "Not someone," said Doc. "Something." Cooper had told him. It had started four or five years before, shortly after he'd gone on his science fiction binge. He'd built himself an imaginary ship that he took out into space. First he'd traveled around our own Solar System -- to Mars and Venus and all the others. Then, tiring of such backyard stuff, he had built iri a gadget that gave his ship speed in excess of light and had gone out to the stars. He was systematic about it; you had to say that much for him. He worked things out logically, and he didn't skip around. He'd land on a certain planet and give that planet the full treatment before he went on to the next one. Somewhere along the way, he picked himself up a crew of companions, most of which were only faintly humanoid, if at all. And all the time this spaceworld, this star-world, got clearer and sharper and more real. It almost got to the point where he lived in its reality rather than in the reality of the here and now. The realization that someone else had joined him, that he had picked up from somewhere a collaborator in his fantasies, began first as a suspicion, finally solidified into certainty. The fantasies got into the habit of not going as he himself was imagining them; they were modified, and added to, and changed in other ways. Cooper didn't mind though, for generally they were better than anything he could think up by himself -- and finally he had grown to know his collaborators -- not one of them alone, but three of them, each a separate entity. After the first shocks of recognition, the four them got along just swell. "You mean he knows these others -- these helpers?" "He knows them all right," said Doc. "Which doesn't mean, of course, that he has ever seen them or will ever see them." "You believe this, Doc?" "I don't know. I don't know. But I do know Coop, and I know that he got up and walked. There is no medical science... no human medical science... that would have made him walk." "You think these helpers, these collaborators of his, might somehow have cured him?" "Something did." "One thing haunts me," said Charley. "Is Cooper Jackson sane?"  S "Probably," answered Doc, "he's the sanest man on Earth." "And the most dangerous." "That's what worries me. I watch him the best I can. I see him every day..." "How many others have you told?" asked Charley. "Not a soul," said Doc. "How many are you going to tell?" "None. Probably I shouldn't have told you, but you already knew part of it. What are you going to do?" "I'm going home," said Charley. "I'm going to go home and keep my mouth shut." "Nothing else?" "Nothing else. If I were a praying man, I think I'd do some praying." H E went home and kept his mouth shut and did a lot of worrying. He wondered whether, praying man or not, he shouldn't try a prayer or two. But when he did, the prayers sounded strange and out of place coming from his lips, so he figured he'd better leave well enough atone. At times it still seemed impossible. At other times it seemed crystal clear that Cooper Jack. son actually could will an event to happen -- that by thinking so, he could make it so. But mostly, because he knew too much to think otherwise, Charley knew that the whole thing was true. Cooper Jackson had spent twenty years or so in thinking and imagining, his thoughts and imaginings shaped, not by the course of human events, but by the fantasy of many human minds. He would not think as a normal human being thought, and therein lay both an advantage and a danger. If he did not think in entirely human channels, he also was not trammeled by the limitations of human thinking; he was free to let his mind wander out in strange directions and bend its energies to strange tasks. His obsession with the necessity of achieving lasting peace was an example of his unhuman attitude; for, while the entire Earth did earnest lip service to the cause of peace, the threat of war had hung over every one so long that its horror had been dulled. But to Cooper Jackson, it was unthinkable that men should slay one another by the Always Charley came back to those helpers, those three shadowy figures he pictured as standing at Cooper Jackson's shoulder. He assigned them three arbitrary faces, but the faces would not stay as he imagined them. At last he understood that, they were things to which you could assign no face. But the thing that he still worried most about, although he tried not to thinfc of it at all because of its enormity, was the Utah plane crash. The plane had crashed before Cooper, or anyone else, could have known it was about to crash. Whatever had happened to the people in the plane had happened then, in that one split second when plane and peak had touched -- had happened without benefit of the magic of Cooper Jackson's wishful thinking. And to imagine that, without such benefit, the passengers and crew could have escaped unscathed was nothing short of madness. It just couldn't have happened that way. And that meant that Cooper not only could make something turn out the way he wanted it to turn out, but that he also could go back through time and undo something that was already done! Either that, or he could bring' dead people back to life, reassembling their shattered bodies and making them whole again, and that was even madder than to think that his wishful thinking might be retroactive. about that, the sweat would start out on him and he'd think about Britain and Iran and once again he would see Cooper's fqce, all puckered up with worry about wfiat the world was coming to. He watched the news more closely than he had ever watched it, analyzing each unexpected turn in it, searching for the clue that might suggest some harebrained scheme to Cooper Jackson, trying to think the way Cooper might think, but feeling fairly sure that he wasn't even coming close. He had his bags packed twice to go to Washington -- but each time he unpacked them and put away his clothes and shoved the bags back into the closet. For he realized there was no use going to Washington, or anywhere else for that matter. "Mr. President, I know a man who can bring peace to the world..." They'd throw him out before he had the sentence finished. He called Doc Ames, and Doc told him that everything was all right, that Cooper had bought a lot of back-issue science fiction magazines and was going through them, cataloguing story themes and variant ideas. He seemed happy in this pastime and calmer than he'd been for weeks. When Charley hung up, he found that his hands were shaking and he suddenly was cold all over, for he felt positive that he knew what Cooper was doing with those piles of magazines. He sat in the one comfortable chair in his rented room and thought furiously, turning over and over the plots that he had run across in his science fiction reading. While there were some that might apply, he rejected them because they didn't fit into the pattern of his fear. It wasri't until then that he realized he'd been so busy worrying about Cooper that he hadn't been paying attention to the recent magazines. Cold fear gripped him that there might be something in the current issues that might apply most neatly. He'd have to buy all the magazines he could find, and give them a good, fast check. TUT he got busy at one thing and another and it was almost a week before he got around to buying them. By that time his fear had subsided to some extent. Trudging home with the magazines clutched beneath his arm, he decided that he would put aside his worry for one night at least and read for enjoyment. That evening he settled himself in the comfortable chair and stacked the magazines beside him. He took the first one off the top of the stack and opened it, noting with some pleasure that the lead-off story was by a favorite author. It was a grim affair about an Earthman holding an outpost against terrific odds. He read the next one... about a starship that hit a space warp and got hurled into another universe. The third was about the Earth being threatened by a terrible war and how the hero solved the crisis by bringing about a condition which outlawed electricity, making it impossible in the Universe. Without electricity, planes couldn't fly and tanks couldn't move and guns couldn't be sighted in, so there was no war. Charley sat in the chair like a stricken man. The magazine dropped from his fingers to the floor and he stared across the room at the opposite wall with terror in his eyes, knowing that Cooper Jackson would have read that story too. After a while Charley got up and telephoned Doc. "I'm worried, Charley," Doc told him. "Coop has disappeared." "Disappeared!" "We've tried to keep it quiet. Didn't want to stir up any fuss -- the way Coop is and all. There might be too many questions." "You're looking for him?" "We're looking for him," Doc said, "as quietly as we can. We've scoured the countryside and we've sent out wires to police officials and missing persons bureaus." "You've got to find him, Doc!" "We're doing all we can." Doc sounded tired and a bit bewildered. "But where could he have gone?" asked Charley. "He doesn't have any money, does he? He can't stay hiding out too long without..." "Coop can get money any time he wants it. He can get anything he wants any time he wants it." "I see what you mean," said Charley. "I'll keep in touch," said Doc. "Is there anything... ?" "Not a thing," said Doc. "Not a thing that anyone can do. We can wait. That's all." Charley is still waiting. Cooper's still missing and there's no trace of him. So Charley waits and worries. And the thing he worries about is Cooper's lack of a formal education, his utter lack of certain basic common knowledge. There is one hope, of course -- that Cooper, if and when he decides to act, will make his action retroactive, going back in time to outlaw not electricity itself, but Man's discovery of electricity. For, disrupting and terrible as that might be, it would be better than the other way. But Charley's afraid that Cooper won't see the necessity for retroactive action. He's afraid that Cooper won't realize that, when you outlaw electricity, you can't limit it to the current that runs through a wire to light a lamp or turn an engine. When you rule out electricity as a natural phenomenon, you rule out all electricity, and that means you rule out an integral part of atomic structure. And that you affect not only this Earth but the entire Universe. So Charley sits and worries and waits for the flicker of the lamp beside his chair. Although he realizes, of course, that when it comes there won't be any flicker. Beginning Next Month... by Isaac Asimov Three tension-charged installments of mystery and suspense in the supercity civilization of the future. You'll be missing a lot if you don't read this new novel by one of science fiction's brightest stars! Information about five times a year, I receive a letter inquiring about the two small moons of Mars and whether they might not be space stations of the Martians. Some of these letters aiy tonguein-cheek, others ate honest questions, and inevitably one or two simply take the artificial nature of the moons for granted and wonder whether a careful photographic watch for "operations" is being kept by the Earth's observatories. My answer, of course, is always the same -- namely that Phobos and Deimos are actually moons and not artificial structures, even though the Martians -- if there were any -- could make good use of them as space stations. Sometimes I get a letter back, asking for proof: "Are our telescopes good enough to see detail, so that we know they are natural moons?" Well, no. They are too far away close) and too tiny (their diameters are estimated at # and # miles, respectively) for telescopic examination of their surfaces to be possible. But that scarcely makes them artificial structures -- and even if we knew that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings, the idea would still have to be rejected.' To understand the problem, let's look at the principles which will apply when we ourselves get around to putting a space station into an orbit around the Earth. rriHE first consideration will be to have the space station out far enough so that its movement would not be slowed by residual air resistance. In the case of the Earth, # miles above sea level would do nicely, and the same figure could be used for Mars. The next consideration is the expense of putting the station into space, and the expense of maintaining steady supply and contact. To lift a pound # miles costs so-and-so much fuel, and it doesn't matter whether you lift a pound of oxygen or a pound of stainless steel. To lift it # miles costs still more fuel. In short, it is more expensive to maintain the farther away it is (although the first # miles cost more by far than the next # miles) ; so the closer you can have the station the better, as far as fuel economy is concerned. But the problem isn't that simple. For when it comes to the inherent uses of the space station, a longer distance is preferable. The station wants to see the ground, and, for many purposes, it wants to be seen. If it is farther away, naturally it can see more area at any given moment and can be seen from a larger area. However, if you place it too far out, you lose detail; the home a little better than # of the sky -- which means that you would want the space station closer than # planet diameter. The diameter of the Earth being # miles, we would place our own space station or stations higher than # but lower than # miles. The precise height within these two limits will be decided by still another consideration: Since a very close check will be kept on the movements of the space station, it is convenient to place it at a distance where its natural period of revolution around the planet is an even fraction of the planet's rotation. That's the reason why von Braun wants his station at # miles, for that distance produces one revolution in # minutes. It is also the reason why I advocated the distance of # miles for an unmanned orbital instrument carrier, because that distance produces a period of # minutes. Of course, there is the #-hour orbit at # miles, where the period of revolution is equal to the Earth's rotation; but such a high orbit is of little use, except for planet-wide radio and television coverage, in which case you need three relay stations, spaced # apart, in the same orbit. Now that we have refreshed our memory, let's check what the Martian "engineers" have done. Their space station should not be farther out than # miles at the most, this being !# planet diameter, and it should be no closer than # miles. One useful distance for Mars would be about # miles from the planet's surface -- moving at a little less than # miles per second, the station would need l#th of a Martian day for one complete revolution. The Martian "engineers," then, have done a pretty sloppy job. The Martian day is # hours, # minutes and # seconds, or, forgetting about those # seconds, # minutes long -- and the moon Phobos moves around the planet # miles from the center (or # miles from the surface) once in # hours and # minutes, or once in # minutes. This is not only too far out on general principles; it is also a time relationship which is about as awkward as you can make it. As for the moon Deimos, it is even beyond the distance which, in the case of Mars, would result in a one-day orbit. The actual distance is # miles from the surface, and the period is # hours and # minutes or # minutes. Sorry, gentlemen, don't bother looking for "operations." The moons of Mars are just moons, probably asteroids captured from the nearby belt. Who," which, if it existed, would be very exclusive by its very nature, small in numbers of membership, but spread over large portions of the world, excluding the iron curtain district, Africa and South America. Its name would be "The Society of People Who Have Handled a Live Tuatara," and I would be a member. A few months ago I reported on Tuatara in this column and on the fact that, for the first time in many decades, the New Zealand government had permitted the export of a few live specimens. There is one in the New York Zoological Park, and one should assume, since I live in New York City, that that's the one I met socially. But things don't work that simply; I still haven't even seen the New York specimen. Instead, I made the acquaintance of the one in the San Diego Zoo, and so did Chesley Bonestell. Both our thanks to its keeper, Mr. Shaw, who generously pulled the somewhat reluctant survivor from the Mesozoic Age out of its heated cage for close inspection. An almost full-grown specimen, it measured # inches upon arrival in America, and has grown by about an inch since then. Because it is mature, the pineal or "third" eye has virtually disappeared. The third eye is reasonably conspicuous in a very young specimen, but tends to disappear with increasing age, and eventually it can be located only by a few tiny scales in a rosettelike arrangement. All of which proved to me in retrospect that the only other specimen I'd ever held, a dried one from the collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin, was quite young. Handling the living specimen, I learned a few things about Tuatara that you don't find in books -- at least, I don't remember reading them. Those "spines" on the back of the head and on top of the body do not only look like the empty shells of sunflower seeds, they also feel that way -- dry and fairly soft. And the spines on top of the tail are pointed and hard. The loose skin around the neck is just as loose, or even more so, as it looks on photographs -- it feels like fine, dry, old silk. As for the color, it is best described as "rock color" -- neither a pronounced gray nor a pronounced brown -- overlaid by green. Tuatara has exceptionally large eyes, and the San Diego specimen is in the habit of sitting for hours with one eye closed. What is probably the strangest aspect, in view of the background and age of the type, is that they like to be handled -- after a while you wouldn't be surprised if they purred... Diego, Dr. Robert S. Richardson had taken me up to Mt. Wilson Observatory. (To be precise, it was Chesley Bonestell who took me up the mountain, for he was driving, but Dr. Richardson acted as guide when we reached the top.) The visit included a look at the #-inch telescope, a close look at the #-inch (which Arthur C. Clarke called a "Victorian instrument") and an even closer look at the #-foot solar tower. Dr. Richardson even took us up. You ride in an open steel f box which rises outside the tower. Then you step across some # inches of nothing into the dome. And when the dome opens, you discover that there is no railing. Because I did not find the #inch especially "Victorian" mymuch more so in my opinion -- arrangements were made to show me the #-inch on Palomar Mountain. Of the #-inch I can only say that it is colossal, breathtaking and awe-inspiring. This extends to the control mechanism -- everything is enormous. What is normally a reflection inside a prism goes here across an entire room. Where you ordinarily turn a screw elsewhere, you have here a few handwheels. Even more modern looking and streamlined than the #-inch is Palomar's #-inch Schmidt telescope, housed in a separate dome. If it were mounted in the open, every visitor would take it to be a heavy siege howitzer, complete with two recoil absorbers. These, when you look closer, turn out to be "finders" -- small (by comparison) telescopes used for aiming the camera. There are two of them because the Schmidt can work from horizon to horizon, and in many of its positions one finder is most awkwardly placed; then you use the other, for the more finder A is out of reach, the easier finder B can be approached. The Schmidt bears the name of its originator -- or inventor, if you prefer -- Bernhard Schmidt of the observatory of Bergedorf, near Hamburg, Germany. The Schmidt is based on two ideas. Normally, when you build a telescope of the reflecting type, you begin by making a spherical mirror, which is comparatively easy. Then you parabolize the spherical mirror, which is tough and tedious. The difference between the spherical surface and the parabolic surface is small, but it is an important difference -- for one surface can be used and the other is useless. Useless, that is, until Bernhard Schmidt had the first of his two ideas that went into his invention. Why correct the mirror physically, he thought. Why not # # leave the spherical surface alone and correct its useless image optically? This required a correcting lens -- something very hard to make, mostly because no such lens had ever been made before. In fact, the correcting lens is so unlike other lenses, and differs so little from a piece of plate glass, that many astronomers call it the correcting "plate" rather than the correcting "lens." One thing I did not know until told : The designation of a Schmidt is based on the size of the correcting plate. Palomar's #-inch has a correcting plate of that size, while the diameter of the spherical mirror is # inches. (Of course, there are some instruments in which both units have the same diameter, but it is the correcting plate that counts.) Even with all this, however, you still don't get your image on a flat plane; the image remains curved. And this is where Bernhard Schmidt's second idea came in. One could either use such a small portion of the focal image that the curvature didn't matter too much; or one could sit down and try to figure out how to flatten it optically; or one could simply curve the photographic plate. For the #-inch Schmidt they use square plates of thin glass (# by # inches, if I remember correctly) which flex enough to fit into a plate holder that forces them into shape. Of course, when they are taken out they flatten again, and you have your photograph -- no optical refinements or fancy tricks needed. Except one: In the basement of the dome, there is a plate holder, with double the curvature of the one in the camera. The plate holder is mounted over a metal drawer, and there is a metal basket nearby. Each plate is thus tested before use -- it's so much easier to dispose of a drawerful of glass splinters than it is to fish them out of a large but delicate cannon-shaped camera! example, called one person persistently by the name of somebody else, either because of an accidental resemblance or because the correct name sets up some association of ideas? Well, I do this occasionally, and did Fiction in a reply to a letter. And, of course, I was promptly caught -- in this instance by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, the Director of the Institute of Meteoritics of the University of New Mexico. My mistake, committed in the May issue, was to say that the Pretoria Salt Pan has a diameter "on the order of # miles." Dr. LaPaz gave the correct figure in his letter, which is #-# feet, and continued: "No doubt you had in mind the remarkable Vredefort Ring structure in South Africa which by many is regarded as of meteoritic impact origin; and which, could we remove the sediments now covering much of the Ring, would be seen to have a diameter of at least # and, possibly, of as much as # miles." Yes, this is the one I had in mind, and this is about the fifth time that I have called the Vredefort Ring the Pretoria Salt Pan. But it is the first time that it's happened to me in print, and maybe this will cure me. My thanks to Dr. Lincoln LaPaz for catching it. I have two questions; one is: would a space station of Dr. von Braun's design be visible to the unaided eye from Earth? Another is: how much difference in " seeing" is expected by astronomers as they contemplate the possibility of work outside our atmosphere? ' C. W. Olney # Acacia Sierra Madre, Calif. Yes, von Braun's space station would not only be visible from the ground, it would be a fairly conspicuous slow-moving star. It would be easiest to see if the observer on the ground had the station overhead either just before sunrise or soon after sunset. In daylight, he might be able to pick it out if he knew where to look. In fact, the naked eye visibility of the space station may have some propaganda value: at least one expert on the Far East has gone on record as saying that the existence of the "American star" would greatly impress the Asiatic peoples. As for the improvement of "seeing," no simple answer can be given. Our atmosphere absorbs radiation of different wavelengths to different degrees. It is almost transparent to what we call visible light and to the very short electrical waves used in television, and almost opaque to other wavelengths which normally never reach the ground. To say that astronomical instruments above the atmosphere would receive a total of three times as much radiation as they do on the ground Ts probably a conservative statement. It will be at least that much, and it may be more. I would like to know whether it is a recognized fact that a planet's age is the higher the tart her it is from the Sun. L. Comunale #-#, # th St. Long Island City #, N. Y. The idea that a planet is older the farther it is from the Sun was baqpd on the so-called Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the formation of the Solar System. In that hypothesis, it was assumed that the matter which later condensed into planets had been thrown out from a rapidly spinning sunin successive rings. Under this assumption it seemed obvious to have the age of a planet inversely proportional to the distance from the Sun, and some people even went ahead and calculated the respective ages. This was especially reckless in view of the fact that they didn't even know the age of the Earth. Current theories assume that all the planets were formed at about the same time, because they condensed from dust and gas which never was a part of the finished Sun. Is it true that if one of the planets were destroyed or moved tromJts orbit the balance of the whole Solar System would be destroyed? Philip Officer # Ave. La Resolana Albuquerque, New Mexico. The mass of all the planets taken together is only a fraction of one per cent of the Sun's mass. For this reason, the destruction or removal of one planet would not change the overall picture at all. There would only be very minor changes in the orbits of the planets nearest the missing one. During the last few months I have read several articles and books about climbing Mt. Everest. Most of the climbers said emphatically that they did not use oxygen in the past and would not use it in the future. Yet I understand the Air Force makes everybody put on masks at # feet, only half the height those people climbed to. Why do they disdain oxygen, not sportsmanlike or something? Lucy Cores # Hillside Rd. Larchmont, N. Y. In the first place, they do think it is not sporting to use oxygen in the conquest of Mt. Everest. As one member of a former expedition expressed it to me: "If you want to conquer the mountain by mechanical means, you might as well use an airplane or a helicopter." But in addition to this attitude, which you may or may not share, there is a very sound practical reason. The members of these expeditions spend months at altitudes of # to # feet, where the air pressure is just about half what it is at sea level, in order to accustom themselves to low pressures before attacking the # foot summit. If they didn't do this, hut instead relied on oxygen, and then something went wrong with the oxygen supply... In such a case, an airplane pilot can simply put his plane into a steep dive and reach comfortable levels in a matter of minutes. But the mountain climbers could not get to comfortable levels and would perish. Post Script, June #, #: Everest climbed... with oxygen. What is a "space warp" and how does it work? Larry Givens Wexford, Penna. A "space warp" may simply be defined as a term in the science fiction fan's vocabulary. In stories it is used when the author has to get a spaceship over a distance of a few hundred light years in a hurry, and as usually stated to be a fourthdimensional phenomenon. One explanation read as follows: supposing you have a book, whose pages are inhabited by two-dimensional creatures. One of them is sitting in the center of a left-hand page and wants to go to the center of the right-hand page. For the two-dimensional creature, this would be a fairly long voyage; but a three-dimensional creature would simply step across the tiny gap separating the two pages of the (closed) book. In this explanation, the space warp is a kind of shortcut through the fourth dimension. Other authors do not bother to explain it at all. Still others call it "hyperspace." How cold is it in space? Russell Chauvenet #I Gist Avenue Silver Spring, Md. This is a question which requires two answers, the first being that space is neither hot nor cold; it simply does not have any temperature at all. Only material things ean have a temperature. Space is not material, hence it cannot have a temperature. But it is a different story if you ask about matter in space. A piece of matter will, of course, acquire a temperature: on one side, it will be illuminated and warmed by the Sun; on the other side, it will radiate some heat away. After a while, a balance of some sort will be reached, known technically as "thermal equilibrium." The most important factor is, obviously, the distance from the Sun. A secondary factor is the nature of the body, especially its color -- a dark body will absorb more heat than a light body. If you assume a color -- black, for example -- you can calculate what temperatures a body would acquire : At the distance of Mercury, (from the Sun) a black body would be # C (# F) ; at the distance of Venus, # C (# F) ; at the distance of Earth, # C (# F), and at the distance of Mars -- # C ( -- # F). Beyond the orbit of Mars, the color of a body hardly matters any more; at the distance of Jupiter the temperature would be -- # C; at the distance of Saturn -- # C; at that of Uranus -- # C, and at that of Neptune -- # C. One light year from the Sun the body would be within about one degree of absolute zero: -- # C. Is there a simple formula for the distance I can see if I am flying in an airplane? Henry C. Backer # Rhode Island Ave. NE Washington, D. C. Yes, there is, but you have to know how high you are, expressed in feet. Take the square root of the height and multiply it by # ; the result will be the distance of the horizon in miles. The Smithsonian Institution says that this formula includes both the curvature of the Earth and refraction. Since # is fairly close to I ##, you can simply take the square root of your height and add one third to it. The same formula for the metric system reads: Square root of height expressed in meters, multiplied by #, gives horizon distance in kilometers. I know that A.U, stands for "astronomical unit " and refers to the distance from the Sun to the Earth. But I also know that this distance is not always the same. Which figure is meant when astronomers say A.U .? Gloria Kupp # Burdey Avenue Chicago, #. The latest figure I have been able to find for the numerical value of an astronomical unit is that announced by Sir Harold Spencer Jones : # miles. But since A.U.s are normally used only for expressing general relationships, # Sometimes you can solve your problem by running out on it! that you don't ever have than you'd expect a four man to worry about being complement like ours to be handbored stiff in Solar Exploitations ed the sort of life-and-death field work. It never gets dull -- problem they put to us. and in some pretty strange places, And, if by some miracle of at that. prophecy you anticipated both, Take the S.E.#' s discovery it's a cirtch you'd never expect of Balak, which is a little planet that problem to be solved in the circling # Ophiuchi some # way ours was. light-years from Earth, for exacross the greatest race of sur and I couldn't have gone more geons in the Galaxy -- structural, than a hundred yards from the neural or what have you -- on a S.E.# before we met our first Balakian native. Or, to be more accurate, before he met us. little sterilized bottles with samples of soil and vegetation and keeping a wary eye out for possible predators when it happened. Gibbons, our ecologist and the scientific mainspring of our crew, was watching a swarm of little twelve-legged bugs that were busily pollinating a dwarf shrub at the top and collecting payment in drops of white sap that oozed out at the bottom in return. His eyes were shining behind their spectacles, and he was swearing to himself in a pleased monotone. "Signal the ship and tell the Quack -- if you can pry that hypochondriac idiot away from his gargles and germicide sprays -- to bring out a live-specimen container," he called to Captain Corelli. "We've stumbled onto something really new here, a conscious symbiosis between entirely dissimilar life-forms! If the rest of the flora and fauna cooperate like this..." At the moment, Gibbons' discovery didn't register, because it was just then that the first Balakian showed himself. The native looked at first glance something like a wrinkled pink octopus, standing three feet high and nearly as broad, and he walked in a skip-a-step swing like a man on crutches because his three short legs were set in a horizontal row. He had four arms to each side, the lower ones meant for grasping and holding and the upper ones for manipulation. He didn't have a head, exactly, but there was a face of sorts up near the top of the body that looked like nothing so much as a politely grinning Oriental's. He wasn't armed, but I took no  chances -- I dropped my specimen J kit and yanked out the heat-gun  that is a part of every S.E. field i operative's gear. Captain Corelli, who was on the point of calling the Quack at the ship, took his thumb off the mike button and grabbed for his own weapon. Gibbons, like a true scientist, stood by with his mouth open, too interested to be scared. Then the Balakian spoke, and Corelli and I gaped wider than Gibbons. As I said before, Balak is some # light-years from Earth, and to our knowledge we were the first human beings ever to come within a hundred parsecs of the place. "Please don't shoot, gentlemen," he said to us in Terran. "My name is Gaff a, and I assure you that I am quite friendly." for being fast on his mental feet; he had taken over before Corelli and I could get our mouths closed, and was talking to the native as if this sort of thing happened every time we made planetfall. "You speak Terran fluently," Gibbons said. "Or is this some sort of telepathic contact that creates the illusion of oral communication?" The native grinned delightedly. "The contact is oral. We learned your language from an independent planet-hunter named Haslop, who was wrecked here some years ago." In Solar Exploitations you learn to expect the unexpected, but to me this was stretching coincidence clear out of joint. We had the latest zero-interval-transference drive made, and I couldn't believe that any independent planet-staker could have beaten us here with outmoded equipment. "A Terran?" I asked. "Where is he now?" "Coming up," Gaffa said. "With my fellows." A couple of dozen other Balakians, looking exactly like him, bore down on us through the dwarf shrubbery, and with them were two lanky Terrans dressed in loose shirt-and-drawers ensembles which obviously had been made on Balak. Even at a distance the Terrans looked disturbingly alike, and when they got closer I could see that they were identical twins. "You don't count so good, chum," I said. "I see two Terrans." "Only one," Gaffa corrected, grinning wider. "The other is one of us." I didn't believe it, of course. Corelli didn't get it, either; his eyes had a glazed look, and he was shaking his head like a man with a gnat in his ear. One of the Terrans rushed up to us with tears in his eyes and his Adam's apple bobbing, so overcome with emotion that I was afraid he might kiss us. "I'm Ira Haslop," he said in a choked voice. "I've been marooned here for twenty-two eternal years, and I never thought I'd see a Terran face again. And now -- " He stopped, but not for breath. The other skinny Terran had grabbed his arm and swung him around. "What the hell do you think you're doing, you masquerading nightmare?" the second one yelled. "I'm Ira Haslop, and you damn well know it! If you think you're going to pass yourself off as me and go home to Earth in my place..." The first Haslop gaped at him for a moment; then he slapped the other's hand off his arm and shook a bony fist in his face. "So that's your game! That's why these grinning freaks made you look like me and threw us together all these years -- they've planned all along to ring in a switch and send you home instead of me! Well, it won't work!" rriHE second Haslop swung on him then and the two of them went to the mat like a pair of loose-drawered tigers, cursing and gouging. The grinning natives separated them after a moment and examined them carefully for damage, chattering away with great satisfaction in their own language. Corelli and Gibbons and I stared at each other like three fools. It was impossible to think that either of the two men could be anything but what he claimed to be, a perfectly normal and thoroughly angry Terran; but when each of them swore that one of them -- the other one, of course -- was an alien, and the natives backed up the accusation, what else could we believe? Gaffa, who seemed to be a sort of headman, took over and explained the situation -- which seemed to be an incredibly longrange gag cooked up by these octopod jokers, without the original Haslop's knowledge, against the day when another Terran ship might land on Balak. Their real intent, Gaffa said, was to present us with a problem that could be solved only by a species with a real understanding of its own kind. If we could solve it, his people stood ready to assist us in any way possible. If not... I didn't like the sound of it, so I reached for my heat-gun again. So did Captain Corelli and Gibbons, but we were too slow. A little stinging bug -- another link in the cooperative Balakian ecology -- bit each of us on the back of the neck and we passed out cold. When we woke up again, we were "guests" of Gaffa and his tribe in a sort of settlement miles from the S.E.#, and there wasn't so much as a nail file among us in the way of weapons. The natives hadn't bothered to shackle us or lock us up. We found ourselves lying instead in the middle of a circular court surrounded by mossy mounds that looked like flattened beeolives, but which were actually dwellings where the Balakians lived. We learned later that the buildings were constructed by swarms of tiny burrowing brutes like termites, who built them up grain by grain according to specifications. I can't begin to explain the principle behind the harmony existing between all living things on Balak; it just was, and seemed to operate like a sort of hypersympathy or interlocking telepathy between species. Every creature on the planet performed some service for some other creature -- even the plants, which grew edibles without pain-nerves so it wouldn't hurt to be plucked, and which sent up clouds of dust-dry spores once a week to make it rain. And the three-legged, eightarmed natives were right at the top of this screwy utopia, lords of it all. Not that any of us were interested at first in it as an geological marvel, of course. From the moment we woke up we were too busy with plans for escaping the trap we'd fallen into. ffnpHE Quack is our only hope," Captain Corelli said, and groaned at the thought. "If that hypochondriac idiot has brains enough to sit tight, we may have a chance. If they get him, too, we're lost." The Quack was a damned poor reed to lean on. His name was Alvin Frick, but no one ever used it. He was twenty-nine, and would never have rated a space berth as anything but a hydroponics attendant, which is one step above manual labor. He was short, plump and scrubbed to the pink, and he was the only hypochondriac I ever knew in this modem age of almost no sickness. He groused about the germs swarming in his reduction tanks, and he was scared green, in spite of his permanent immunization shots, that he'd contract some nameless alien disease at every planetfall. He dosed himself continuously with concoctions whipped up from an old medical book he had found somewhere, and he spent most of his off-duty time spraying himself and his quarters with disinfectant. His mania had only one good facet -- if he had been the careless sort, hydroponics being what it is, he'd have smelled like a barnyard instead of a dispensary. We had never made any attempt to get rid of him, since we might have drawn an even worse tank-farmer, but we began to wish now that we had. We had hardly begun to figure ways and means of escaping when a bunch of grinning natives swung into our court and deposited the Quack, sleeping soundly, in our midst. He came to just before sundown, and when we told him what had happened, he promptly passed out again -- this time from fright. "A fine lot of help you are, you super-sterile slob," I said when he woke up for the second time. I'd probably have said worse, but it was just then that the real squeeze began. Gaffa came back with the two scowling Haslops in tow and handed us the problem his tribe had spent twenty-two years in working up. "We have learned enough already from Haslop," Gaffa said, "to know something of the pressures and complexities that follow the expansion of your Terran Realm through the galaxy, and to assure us that in time we must either become a part of that Realm or isolate ourselves completely. "We are a peaceful species and feel that we should probably benefit as much from your physical sciences as your people would from our biological skills, but there is a question of compatibility that must be settled first, before we may risk making ourselves known to Terra. So we have devised a test to' determine what our course shall be." W E raised our brows at one another over that, not guessing at the time just what the Balakians really had on the ball. "For thousands of generations, we have devoted our energies to knowing ourselves and our environment," Gaff a said, "because we know that no species can be truly balanced unless it understands itself. The symbiosis between all life-forms on our planet is the result of that knowledge. We should like to assure ourselves that you are capable of understanding your own kind as well before we offer our services to your Terran Realm -- and therein lies the test we have arranged for you." Captain Corelli drew himself up stiffly. "I think," he said, "that the three of us should be able to unravel your little riddle, if you'll condescend to tell us what it is." Gaff a sent a puzzled look at the Quack, and I could see that he was wondering why Corelli hadn't included him in the boast. But Gaff a didn't know how simple the Quack could be, nor how preoccupied with his own physiology he was. "One of these two," said Gaffa, '  pointing to the two Haslops, "is the original Ira Haslop, who was stranded here twenty-two Terran years ago. The other is a synthetic creation of ours -- an android, if you like, who is identical, cell by cell, with the original so far as exterior likeness is concerned. We could not duplicate the interiorwithout dissection, which of course was out of the question, so we were forced to make compromises that -- " Gibbons interrupted him incredulously. "You mean you've created a living creature, brain and all?" "Only the body," Gaffa said. "Creation of intelligence is still beyond us. The brain of the duplicate Haslop is one of our own, transplanted and conditioned to Haslop's knowledge, memories and ideology." He paused for a moment, and the waiting circle of Balakians grinned with him in anticipation. "Your problem is this," Gaffa said. "If you know yourselves well enough to merit our help, then you should be able to distinguish readily between the real and false Haslops. If you fail, we shall have no alternative but to keep you here on Balak for the rest of your lives, since to release you would bring other Terrans down on us in force." And that was it. All we had to do was to take these two identical twins -- who looked alike, thought alike and cursed alike -- and determine which was real and which was bogus. "For a very pertinent reason which you may or may not discover," Gaff a said, "the test must be limited to a few hours. You have until sunrise tomorrow morning, gentlemen." And with that he crutched away at his skip-a-step walk, taking his grinning cohorts with him. The two Haslops remained behind, glowering and grumbling at each other. T HE situation didn't look too bad at first. "There are no two things," Captain Corelli declared, "that are exactly and absolutely identical. And that applies, I should say, especially to identities." It had a heartening sound. I've never been long on logic, being a very ordinary S.E. navigator whose automatic equipment is designed to do practically everything for him, and Corelli seemed to know what he was talking about. Gibbons, being a scientist, saw it differently. "That's not even good sophistry," he said. "The concept of identity between two objects has no meaning whatever, Captain, unless we have a prior identification of one or the other. Aristotle himself couldn't have told an apple from a coconut if he'd never seen or heard of either." "Any fool would know that," one of the Haslops grunted. And the other added in the same tone : "Hey, if you guys are going at it like that, we'll be here forever!" "All right," Corelli said, deflated. "We'll try another tack." He thought for a minute or two. "How about screening them for background detail? The real Haslop was a bounty-claimer, which means that he must have made thousands of planetfalls before crashing here. The bogus one couldn't remember the details of all those worlds as well as the original, no matter how many times he'd been told, could he?" "Won't work," one of the Haslops said disgustedly. "Hell, after twenty-two years I can't remember those places myself, and I was there." The other Haslop gave him a dirty look. "You were here, fellow -- I was there." And to the captain he said, "We're getting nowhere, friend. You're underestimating these Balakians -- they look and act like screwballs, but they're sharp. In the twenty-two years I've lived with that carbon copy of myself, he's learned everything I know." "He's right," Gibbons put in. He blinked a couple of times and turned pink. "Unless the real Haslop happened to be married, that is. I'm a bachelor myself, but I'd say there are some memories that a married man wouldn't discuss, even when marooned." Captain Corelli stared at him admiringly. "I never gave you enough credit, Gibbons," he said. "You're right! How about -- " "Don't help any," one of the Haslops said morosely. "I never was married. And now I never will be if I've got to depend on you jerks to get me out of this mess." The sun went down just then and a soft, drowsy darkness fell. I thought at first that we'd have to finish our investigation in the dark, but the natives had made provisions for that. A swarm of fireflies as big as robins sailed in from somewhere and circled around over the court, lighting it as bright as day. The Balakian houses made a dim row of flattened shadow-mounds at the outskirts of the circle. A ring of natives sat tailorfashion on the ground in front of them -- a neat trick considering that they had three legs each to fold up -- and grinned at us. They had waited twenty-two years for this show, and now that it had come they were enjoying every minute of it. O UR investigation was pretty rough going. The fireflies overhead all circled in one direction, which made you dizzy every time you looked up, and besides that the Quack had remembered that he was a prisoner in an alien environment and was at the mercy of any outlandish disease that might creep past his permanent immunization. He muttered and grumbled to himself about the risk, and his grousing got on our nerves even worse than usual. I moved over to shut him up, and blinked when I saw him pop something into his mouth. My first guess was that he had managed to sneak some food concentrate out of the ship somehow, and the thought made me realize how hungry I was. "What've you got there, Quack?" I demanded. "Come on, give -- what are you hiding out?" "Antibiotics and stuff," he answered, and pulled a little flat plastic case out of a pocket. It was his portable medicine chest, which he carried the way superstitious people used to carry rabbits' feet, and it was largely responsible for our calling him the Quack. It was full of patent capsule remedies that he had gleaned out of his home medical book -- a cut thumb, a surprise headache, or a siege of gas on the stomach would never catch the Quack unprepared! "Jerk," I said, and went back to Gibbons and Corelli, who were arguing a new approach to our problem. "It's worth a try," Gibbons said. He turned on the two Haslops, who were bristling like a pair of strange dogs. "This question is for the real Haslop: Have you ever been put through a Rorschach, thematic apperception or free association test?" The real Haslop hadn't. Either of them. "Then we'll try free association," Gibbons said, and explained what he wanted of them. "Water," Gibbons said, popping it out quick and sharp. "Spigot," the Haslops said together. Which is exactly what any spaceman would say, since the only water important to him comes out of a ship's tank. "Lake" and "river" and "spring," to him, are only words in books. Gibbons chewed his lip and tried again, but the result was the same every time. When he said "payday" they both came back "binge," and when he said "man" they answered "woman!" with the same gleam in their eyes. "I could have told you it wouldn't work," one Haslop said when Gibbons threw up his hands and quit. "I've lived so long with that phony that he even knows what I'm going to say next." "I wasgoing to say the same thing," the other one growled. "After twenty-two years of drinking and arguing with him, we've begun -- God help me! -- to think alike." I tried my own hand just once. "Gaff a says that they are exactly identical so far as outside appearance goes," I said. "But he may be wrong, or lying. Maybe we'd better check for our selves." course, but it did them no good. Gibbons and Corelli and I ganged them one at a time -- the Quack refused to help for fear of being contaminated -- and examined them carefully. It was a lively job, since both of them swore they were ticklish, and under different circumstances it could have been embarrassing. But it settled one point. Gaff a hadn't lied. They were absolutely identical, as far as we could determine. We had given it up and were resting from our labors when Gaff a came grinning out of the darkness and brought us a big crystal pitcher of something that would have passed for a firstclass Planet Punch except that it was nearer two-thirds alcohol than the fifty-fifty mix you get at most interplanetary ginmills. The two Haslops had a slug of it as a matter of course, being accustomed to it, and the rest of us followed suit. Only the Quack refused, turning green at the thought of all the alien bacteria that might be swimming around in the pitcher. A couple of drinks made us feel better. "I've been thinking," Captain Corelli said, "about what GafTa said when he limited the time of the test, that we might or might not discover the reason for ourselves. Now what the hell did the grinning heathen mean by that? Is there a reason, or was he only dragging a red herring across the bogus Haslop's track?" Gibbons looked thoughtful. I sat back while he pondered and watched the Quack, who was swallowing another antibiotic capsule. "Wait a minute," Gibbons exclaimed. "Captain, you've hit on something there!" He stared at the Haslops. They stared back, unimpressed. "Gaffa said you two were exactly alike outside," Gibbons said. "And we've proved it. Does that mean you're not alike inside?" "Sure," one of them said. "But what of it? You're sure as hell not going to cut one of us open to see!" "You're confusing the issue," Gibbons snapped. "What I'm getting at is this -- if you two aren't made alike inside, then you can't possibly exist on the same sort of diet. One of you eats the same sort of food as ourselves. The other can't. But which is which?" One of the Haslops pointed a quivering finger at the other. "It's him!" he said. "I've watched him drink his dinner for twenty-two years -- he's the fake!" "Liar!" the other one yelled, springing up. Corelli stepped between them and the second Haslop subsided, grumbling. "It's true enough, only he's the one that drinks his meals. This stuff in the pitcher is the food he lives on -- alcohol for energy, with minerals and other stuff dissolved in it. I drink it with him for kicks, but that phony can't eat anything else." "So that's why they limited our time, and why they brought this stuff -- to keep their fake Haslop refueled! All we've got to do to separate our men now is feed them something solid. The one that eats it is the real Haslop." "Sure, all we need now is some solid food," I said. "You don't happen to have a couple of sandwiches on you, do you?" Everybody got quiet for a couple of minutes, and in the silence the Quack surprised us all by deciding to speak up. "Since I'm stuck here for life," he said, "a few germs more or less won't matter much. Pass me the pitcher, will you?" He took a man-sized slug of the fiery stuff without even wiping off the pitcher's rim. After that we gave it up, as who wouldn't have? Captain Corelli said the hell with it and took such a slug out of the pitcher that the two Haslops yelled murder and grabbed it quick themselves, and from then on we just sat around and drank and talked and waited for the sunrise that would condemn us to Balak for the rest of our lives. Thinking about our problem had reminded me of an old puzzle I'd heard somewhere about three men being placed in a room where they can see each other but not themselves; they're shown three white hats and two black ones, and then they're blindfolded and a hat is put on each of their heads. When the blindfolds are, taken off, the third man knows by looking at the other two and by what they say just what color hat he's wearing himself, but I always forget how it is that he knows. We got so interested in the hat problem that the east was turning pink before we realized it. None of us actually saw the sun rise, though, except the Quack and the bogus Haslop. I was right in the middle of a sentence when all of a sudden my stomach rolled over and growled like a dying tiger, and I never had such an all-gone feeling in my life. I looked at the others, wondering if the stuff in the pitcher had poisoned us all, and saw Gibbons and Corelli staring at each other with the same startled look in their eyes. One of the Haslops was hit, too -- he had the same pinched expression around the mouth, and perspiration stood out on his forehead in drops as big as grapes. And then the four of us were on our feet and dashing for open country, leaving the Quack and the remaining Haslop staring after us. The Haslop who stayed looked puzzled, I thought, but the Quack only seemed interested and very much entertained. I couldn't be sure of that, though. There wasn't time to look twice. court later, shaken and pale and bracing ourselves for another dash at any minute, we found Gaff a and his grinning chums congratulating the Quack. The bogus Haslop had dropped his impersonation act and seemed very happy. "I've learned to like Haslop so well after twenty-two years," he said, "that I'm quite prejudiced in favor of his species, and I'm delighted that we are to join your Realm. Balak and Terra will get along famously, I know, since you people are so ingenious and appreciative of humor." We ignored the Balakians and swooped down on the Quack. "You put something in that pitcher after you drank out of it, you insult to humanity," I said. "What was it?" The Quack backed off with a wary look in his eye. "A recipe from the curiosa section of my medical book," he said. "I whipped up some capsules for my pocket kit, just in case of emergency, and I couldn't help thinking of them when -- " "Never mind the buildup," Captain Corelli said. "What was it?" "A formula invented by ancient Terran bartenders, and not recommended except in extreme cases," the Quack said. "With a very odd name. It's called a twin Mickey." We'd probably have murdered him then and there if the Quack's concoction had let us. Later on we had to admit that the Quack had actually done us a service, since his identifying the real Haslop saved us from being marooned for life on Balak. And the Balakians were such an immediate sensation in the Terran Realm that the Quack's part in their admittance made him famous overnight. Somebody high up in Goverment circles got him out of Solar Exploitations field work and gave him a sinecure in an antibiotics laboratory, where he wound up as happy as a pig in a peanut field. Which points up the statement I made in the beginning, that one thing you never have to worry about in Solar Exploitations work is being bored. You see what I mean? ful installments. It's a great place to visit, but... human race is "fixed" and he has to bet it will fail to reach the finish line! slogan; it's a military command to the most fiercely rigid warriors ever seen on Earth! F OR about the last five hundred hours of deceleration, the rings were plainly visible to the unaided eye. Looking out through the ports and seeing Saturn, suspended in three-quarter phase against the blackness, we realized fully for the first time that we were approaching the outermost dwelling-place of Man -- his closest colonized approach to the edge of interstellar emptiness. Grenville was in high spirits at the long and cramped voyage being nearly over, and even before Titan showed a perceptible disc, he was floating about the cabin singing happily to himself. Dagmar was still as sulky and disagreeable as she had been for most of the voyage. The bursts of boisterous good humor which from the start had intermittently broken this mood, however, began to increase in frequency. Of course she was looking forward to getting out of that cramped little spaceboat even more than Grenville and myself. She had said a lot of bitter words on the way about the discomfort of living in the small cabin for so long, with only a blanket stretched across it to give her a bit of privacy. Also, sanitary arrangements in such small craft are necessarily rather primitive, which annoyed her even more. Women can be so damned practical -- even when fleeing for their lives! TJ#E were within Titan's orbit about its primary when Grenville told me we were going to have trouble getting down. "It'll mean a braking orbit through the atmosphere, Mr. Clemmenceton. We had to take a chance on cutting it this fine, and it looks as though we're on the losing end. We're in for a hard bump." "Well, do your best," I said. "I t K 'nk we should be able to selves, but we'll have to get into spacesuits and be well strapped in for it." "You won't be able to control the ship strapped into a bumpseat," I objected. He grinned at me and said: "I can strap my head and body firm, and leave the arms and legs out. That will do." So that was how we did it. Dagmar, of course, complained irritably about the whole performance, but was too concerned about keeping that beautiful, delicate body of hers from getting hurt to neglect any of the precautions. It would be a pity to have got this far only to crash on Titan itself, I reflected. But Grenville would get us down safely if anyone could. He was a magnificent space pilot. Certainly few others could have evaded those two cruisers which challenged us just beyond the orbit of Mars. The following two weeks of sporadic acceleration and sidewinding ate up our fuel load, but they got us safely into the Asteroid Belt, where the cruisers' detection gear was useless. Now, though, without enough fuel for a landing, we faced the reckoning. We struck the outer fringes of Titan's methane atmosphere still doing over five miles a second. The poor little yacht heated up like a reactor. Fortunately, the outside temperature was something like minus one hundred Centigrade, and the heat was dispersed fast enough to keep the outer skin no hotter than a dull red. The refrigeration pumps were overloaded keeping the inside temperature down, but we were in suits by this time and not too worried. Grenville carefully kept fuel consumption down to a minimum, letting the atmospheric drag do all the work. It was a masterly display of craftsmanship, but, even so, it was not enough to avoid a crash. Grenville had strapped Dagmar and myself so tightly into the shock-seats that neither of us could move a limb. Then he had fixed chest, thigh and waist bands about himself and adjusted the headrest to hold his head firm. The tank dials showed "empty" at about nine hundred feet from the surface, but we got down to a hundred before the braking blasts cut out. Then we dropped free and hit hard with a grinding crunch. I was momentarily dazed by the jar, but unhurt. Dagmar was apparently unconscious, though not visibly injured. I looked forward to see Grenville, his safety straps torn from their fastenings, thrown limply over the control panel. I Waited a moment to recover a little, then pushed the release button under the seatarm, slipped free, and maneuvered over to him. As I reached him, I heard a soft moan from Dagmar, and turned to see her open her eyes. She said a few choice words about Grenville and myself, and started to feel for her own release button. I gathered from this that there was nothing seriously the matter with her and turned my attention back to Grenville. suit radio had been left on, and I tried to rouse him by calling his name. No result. Dagmar was ignoring us both. She shuddered violently, then dropped her space-helmeted head into her gauntleted hands and began to cry. Grenville's lips moved slightly. I called his name again, and this time he blinked his eyes open. Immediately, pain made him catch his breath sharply. "Oh, God, my leg!" he groaned. He had been stretched across the lower bank of firing levers, with his left leg twisted and forced between one of the stanchions and the instrument panel supports. His spacesuit had not been punctured, but from the way his leg was twisted, it looked as though there would be a break somewhere above the knee. "It's bleeding," he said between clenched teeth. "The whole leg is warm and sticky." "Dagmar, see if the airlock works," I called. It didn't register. She was still crying. I left Grenville and climbed aft over the mass of jufik littered over the buckled floor-plates. The airlock, I found, had been dented, but not totally wrecked, and might still be airtight. Ireturned for Grenville, carried him into the lock in a fireman's lift -- strenuous work for a man well into his fifties, even in Titan's point three gravity -- and opened the small test-valve in the gasket of my helmet to sniff the air. It was cold and smelled slightly of methane. There was a leak somewhere, probably around some part of the outer door, but only a slow one. "We'll have time to look at that leg before the air gets bad," I told Grenville. "I'll help you peel off that suit." Sitting on the metal floor with his legs stretched out in front of him, he rolled first to one side and then the other so I could get his spacesuit off. Then it took only a few seconds to rip his uniform trouser leg and expose the thigh. I got a nasty shock when I saw the break, a bad compound fracture. He had already lost a lot of blood, and there was no time to be wasted in getting a tourniquet into place. He had to do it himself, tying the torn cloth above the wound, because the gauntlets of the suit I was still wearing made my hands far too clumsy for the task. He tied the last knot and the spurt of arterial blood eased to a red trickle. A spasm of coughing shook him, and he started to rub his eyes. "Just finished in time," he gasped, blinking tearily. "Methane's bad enough, but now I'm beginning to get lungfuls of ammonia. It hurts the leg like blazes, too. Give me a hand." He lifted his helmet into place and I got him back into his suit. inner door told" us Dagmar was over one emotional reaction and ready for another. The intercom was out of action and the helmet radios useless with the steel bulkhead between us, but as I had spun the handle and begun to open the door, her angry voice sounded from my earphones. " -- by myself out there! By God, Wolseley, I'll get even with you for dragging me along on this idiotic -- " "Easy, woman; we're in no danger now, and I had to help tie up Grenville's leg," I answered, as gently as I could. "Come on, we'll get outside and see if we're in sight of the domes." I lifted Grenville again, while he protested vigorously that one leg was enough to get around on in the light gravity. "You won't be able to do anything when we get outside, anyway," he added. "The horizon will be too close for us to see more than a mile or so away. We'll just have to wait for them to come and get us. There's not a chance of us finding the domes ourselves." By this time, Dagmar had the outer door open. The locks of all spacecraft open inward to facilitate escape in difficult situations, as well as to use the air pressure to keep them tightly closed in space. In this case, it was certainly handy. Titan's surface is predominantly ice, with a lot of ammonium carbonate and ammonia incorporated into the ice. Our nearly red-hot ship had struck with the obvious result. I estimated we had sunk about ten feet into the ice, so that, if the airlock door had opened outward, I couldn't have squeezed through to cut steps up to the surface. I lifted Grenville on to the ice, climbed down again and reached back fb help Dagmar. She took my hand, raced lightly up ahead of me, and gave a relieved smile. We looked eagerly about us for signs of life. I hoisted myself atop the hull, but could still see only the jagged ice mountains, glinting in the cold white light of the distant Sun. I slid back to join the others. Dagmar, I think, was about to make some sarcastic remark about my choice of a destination or Grenville's skill as a pilot, when our radios came to life. "Hello, spaceship! Is anyone receiving me? Are you all right?" I motioned the others to quietness and answered. "Spaceship Ether Master here. We are getting you. We're down in the ice. The ship is a wreck and the pilot's hurt, but we're all alive. Can you pick us up?" "I hear you, Ether Master. We are coming for you in a crawler. We should reach you in about fifteen minutes." "Thank God!" Dagmar exclaimed. "Civilization!" We heard a voice exclaim, "A woman!" and then we settled down to wait for our rescuers. t  iHE noise of their antiquated machine carried on the thin cold air, and we could hear them coming, even through our heavy helmets, long before we could see them. Then at last they appeared, grinding their way toward us in a cloud of pulverized ice. The crawler was a hybrid monstrosity obviously built here in the colony, where workshop facilities were limited, and designed to operate in the fantastic conditions of Man's most distant outpost. Its ribbed metal treads were each thirty inches wide. Its riveted body could not have weighed less than fifty Earth tons and, as it rumbled along, it dropped patches of some black low-temperature lubricant on the ice behind it. It lurched to a halt a few yards from us, and a dense cloud began to form about twenty feet above its vertical exhaust pipe. With a bang, the front dropped open, and a figure, moving with the ease of long familiarity with his old-fashioned spacesuit, strode toward us. "Welcome to the last frontier, friends!" boomed a great voice in our helmets. "Tell us what brings you to the forgotten colony. Who did you kill? Or are you just in quest of the simple life?" "I am Wolseley Clemmenceton, President of the Triplanetary Republic, and my companions are the Lady Dagmar Educe and Major Grenville, who is hurt," I announced formally. A second, somewhat slighter figure joined the first and exclaimed: "Ha! The biter bit! We hope you'll be happy here. You'll probably become President, of the Titan Political Exiles Club if a Navy cruiser doesn't come for you first." I peered at his helmeted face and struggled to place the voice. Then I remembered. "Carter, Director of Venus!" "An honor to be remembered by my -- ah -- successor, I am sure." Dagmar gave a short nasty laugh. Carter spoke again. "A few years on Titan rub away a lot of the petty motivations that dominate the inner planet way of life, Clemmenceton. Out here, we no longer have jects to fight over. We will probably get along well." "How cozy!" commented Dagmar. "Now that the little pleasantries have been concluded," I said, "I would like to get my pilot to a medical man as soon as I can." "All right, everybody into the crawler," said Carter's companion, and turned to give me a hand with Grenville. Vw #E clanked up the sloping ' ' front, set Grenville down on the only bit of unobstructed floor space in the cabin -- directly behind the driver's seat -- and Carter started the small motor hauling up the drop-front. His companion introduced himself: "My name is Joe Gunn, folks. If you think we'd better get your friend out of his suit, we can seal this cabin and fill it with air. It's not regular practice because oxygen-methane mixtures are touchy, and it's more efficient to run these things full of methane and wear.suits. We can do it easy enough when it's necessary, though -- just blow the methane out with nitrogen from the cylinder before bringing up the oxygen concentration, so we don't get an explosion mixture in the cabin." I looked at Grenville. His face looked very white in its fishbowl, and though obviously fully conscious -- he had helped us get him into the vehicle -- he had not spoken since we left the ship. "I think we should have another look at that tourniquet, old man," I said. Grenville nodded, and I saw that his teeth were still clamped together. I turned to Gunn. "Get this contraption rolling while you blow the methane out, will you, please? And is there any first-aid equipment aboard?" The clumsy machine lurched and began to swing about, with Carter at the controls. A shrill whistle told us Gunn was changing the air. They weren't much help in the way of medical supplies, however. "Our first-aid equipment consists of adhesive patches for stopping suit leaks," Gunn explained. I eased Grenville's leg out of the suit and loosened the tourniquet for a moment. Dagmar looked away quickly. Gunn squatted beside us. "You may hose that leg, fella," he said quietly. "At the moment, I'd be glad to," Grenville gritted. I was glad to hear him say something, a reaction which made me realize how much I had come to depend on him since the insurrection. I looked at his thigh. It was certainly a mess. The sooner it was getting proper attention, the better I would like it. rriHE noise Gunn made moving around caused me to look up. "Now that we're well on our way, I thought I'd break out some rations," he said. "See what you think of our local version of coffee and biscuits." "What kind of state of affairs did you leave behind you, Clemmenceton?" Carter asked over his shoulder. "A fantastic botch. Hasn't any news of it come out here?" "Not in the past six Earth months. Your lunar station quit beaming messages out here at the end of February." "That was just about when things began to get really out of hand. Right up to the end, we were holding our own on Mars and Venus, but Terra was a cauldron of fury. The Emindale interests engineered the big protein crisis around the middle of last year, and Jockatra riots, followed. Grellet got control of the Public Order Force, through his dummy, Me Cardie, and built it up to face the so-called threat of the civil disorders his own agents were stirring up. "It was plain by then that more than just the usual pressure tactics and maneuverings of various interests were in progress. While I was occupied with this side of the plot, the Gordinester family acquired control of the spacelines. I caught onto the trend of the whole thing too late. I declared martial law and tried to strongarm my way through, but their planning had been too thorough. It was impossible to keep control on Earth, and their stranglehold on interplanetary travel prevented us from drawing support from Mars and Venus. The administration collapsed and its members scattered." "You always saw yourself as a twenty-third-century Julius Caesar," said Carter, "unifying and inspiring a republic torn by civil war and overrun with corrupt officials, didn't you, Clemmenceton? We had a selfcontained highly mechanized and developed culture on Venus, had cut our ties with a decadent Earth which was unable even to keep order at home at that stage, and could have preserved our achievements almost indefinitely if you hadn't forced us back into the Republic at gun-point. I gather your attempted strong-arm tactics failed. Apparently you reunified the Solar System only so it could all collapse together."  as argumentative as if on a TV debate. "Someone had to try to restore central government, Carter. 'When the government is weak, the people are oppressed', as Anatole France put it. Your 'highly developed' Venusian culture was completely static. Earth and Mars, where life was easier, were slipping back fast. For eleven years, I held the Republic together by playing one interest against another, and broke up the private armies with the threat of the bombardment squadrons. "It was always a precarious balance, but while it lasted the Interplanet rocket services kept regular schedules again, and the Lunar Station kept beaming. If I hadn't grasped the reins when I did, there would h'ave been no space communications at all in a few more years." Carter grinned. "You consider, then, that the day of the bow and arrow and the hand-plough will return soon, now that the Republic is deprived of your guiding hand?" "We shall see. Old Grellet is as cunning as they come, but I cannot see him holding the Presidency for any length of time. The very forces he used to upset my administration must inevitably destroy him. The powerful families were his allies against me, but they will not submit to his rule. Nor will the mobs he stirred up with promises of restoring the old freedoms and luxuries of last century. "His polygot following of incompatibles was united only against my government. With that destroyed, they must be tearing at each other right now. Even if it has the strength to ride the storm, it will be a strife-torn and weakened Republic that he rules. I could never imagine him being able to spare a cruiser to come out here after me." "But then you never managed to spare one to chase me, either," Carter said softly, and chuckled. The crawler lurched on, and, lost in introspection, I did not answer. "Mr. Gunn, would you help me get these boots off, please?" Dagmar, naturally. It was her typical reaction to being ignored. Big Joe Gunn bent down and loosened the straps, and held the boots one at a time while she withdrew her feet. Removing spaceboots is a process that is little bother to perform for oneself. I watched with the mild interest of one who views still another variation played on a familiar theme. Carter looked back to see what was going on, and laughed loudly. Gunn glared at him. "How far to Morgan?" I asked Carter. "If you come up forward here, you can see two of the domes just beyond that big outcrop," he replied. "Good. Can you call ahead and get a doctor to stand by for Grenville?" "I've done that. There will be a welcoming committee for you, too." His voice was quite expressionless, and I found it impossible to read his meaning. Dagmar paused in arranging her hair and looked at me. I shrugged and smiled slightly. Gunn, holding her handkerchief, resumed the task she had given him of removing smudges of dirt from her face. A couple of minutes later, we were at the airlock of the largest dome. W#E three inner-planet people  stared about us like tourists. Morgan consisted of eight domes, varying between twohundred and five-hundred meters in diameter, and connected by low, covered passageways. Between each dome and the surrounding ice was a thick rim of some non-metallic material, which in most cases projected two to three feet from the ground, and up to which ramps had been built to the airlocks. Our clumsy vehicle rolled up one of these, through the outer doorway, and halted before the inner. It took several minutes to pump the methane from the lock and flood it with air, and then the inner door opened and we drove into the dome proper. "Usually we leave these things outside," Carter explained. "They take up too much room in the domes, but at the moment this is the gentlest way of getting your pilot into the right hands." "Good. Thanks for the consideration, Carter." When we dropped the front of the crawler, we were met by the doctor and the committee Carter had spoken of. Nothing was said until the doctor, a heavily built man, past middle-age and with coarse ruddy features, had Grenville loaded on a wheeled stretcher and taken away. Then I looked up at the three men who stood waiting nearby. "You wish to talk business, gentlemen?" I inquired. "Yes, Clemmenceton," the foremost answered. "There are certain formalities to be attended to. You have met Mr. Carter, I see. This is Mr. Pelotzi and this is Mr. Brown. I am Rodericks, the Mayor. The four of us, together with Mr. Velez and Mr. Goth, who are busy elsewhere, constitute the Council which administers Morgan Settlement. To us, then, you and your companions may address a request to be allowed to take up residence in the Independency." "What is the correct formula? We, Wolseley Clemmenceton, Dagmar Educe and Martin Grenville, hereby request -- " "Yes, that'll do. Now, in order to compensate the people of the Independency for accepting you, what have you to offer?" "What? What use have you for Republican man-hour credits when there's no intercourse between here and the Republic? Or do you mean what skills have we to place at the colony's disposal?" "Neither. You came in a spaceship which is now lying slightly battered some miles out there." He waved an arm in the direction we had come from. "To us, that ship represents a fortune in heavy machinery which we have inadequate facilities to make ourselves. To you, it is a wreck and nothing more. Add to this the fact that you are not in a position to bargain, and I think you will agree that it is not an unreasonable price for citizenship." The man introduced as Brown, tall, dark and about forty, nodded at me and took up the conversation. "I won't blame you if you call this outright piracy, but piracy of one sort or another has always been a government's prerogative. When you have seen a bit of our way of life here, you will understand that we have to drive hard bargains to maintain a reasonable living standard for all. Now what's your answer?" looked like a rather sardonic smile. "Your price is accepted," I said. "I have driven some hard bargains myself in my time and don't expect charity. The ship is yours. Now you can tell us something of our rights and responsibilities as Titanian citizens." Carter answered me. "It's all pretty straightforward. Everyone works. Many of us have two jobs and some have more. The standard of living is higher than most innerplanet people seem to think, however. You understand, of course, that if an armed ship arrives to take you back to the Republic, no attempt will be made to protect or hide you. Is that clear?" "Fair enough," I replied. "Well, now that that's settled, I'd like to see how Grenville is getting along. Was he taken to a hospital or don't you have any?" "One moment. We have to vote on your admission. All in favor? Carried. Carter, will you take Clemmenceton to the hospital? I'll get citizenship papers made out presently. No hurry. Gunn,  where are you going with that woman?" "Going to show her around the domes," said Gunn. "Any objections?" "That depends on Mr. Clemmenceton," Rodericks answered. "It's his affair, it seems to me." They waited for my comment, Dagmar challenging me silently to refuse. "No objection whatever," I said. "Go right ahead. Mr. Carter, I'm ready if you are." Carter took me down a kind of thoroughfare between the rows of boxlike homes, factories, storehouses and office buildings. The entire inside of the dome was floored with the same mottled brown material we had noticed between the smooth painted white of the dome and the outside ice. "It's the best insulator we've got," Carter explained. "We could stand a lot higher heat loss than we have at the moment, but if we passed much more heat than we do out through the bases and walls of the domes, the whole setup would just melt its way right down to the core of the satellite and let the ice close again over it." "Oh," I said, "I see. The case of the missing colony, eh?" "The next place down here is the hospital. Doc Hawthorn and his wife and their three daughters live in and run the place. The Doc learned his profession here, by the way. He's never been off Titan in his life." "What's that? University training here?" "Oh, Lord, no. Everything is on the apprenticeship system. We've made it work surprisingly well, you know. Medicine, of course, is the worst off. There are hardly any books, no experimental animals at all and very few facili ties. A youngster just has to pick it up by working under the old doctor. Rather hard on the patient at times, but successful on the whole. The two kids studying under Hawthorn these days are both promising youngsters. They are probably getting a lesson in fracture and arterial bleeding right now." I felt some misgivings about the treatment Grenville would be receiving. "There was something else that caught my attention in that remark of yours," I said. "Your mention of the three daughters of the doctor living at home. I should imagine there would still be a heavy preponderence of menfolk here. How come there are three unattached women?" "A conclusion wrongly jumped to, old man. The daughters are all married and there are a couple of kids running about the place. The men go out to work and their wives do a good job of combining domestic and nursing duties. The family group like that is the natural economic and social unit here. The shortage of living space keeps the group together even when it gets bigger." crash and the bumpy trip to the settlement now some time behind me, I was beginning for the first time to be really curious about the way these people lived. I wondered what kind of future they looked forward to, and I asked Carter. "We look to the future a great deal. More than you would think, I suppose. With a bigger population, we could do more and life would be better for everyone. You will notice it in the colonists' attitudes. Your bringing a mistress along, for instance, will be distinctly disapproved of." "Small-town morality." "No, not a bit. Children are allimportant to our way of thinking, and relationships like yours are not usually productive. That's the only reason." "Hm. I always wanted children myself, but there were so many things against it. Now I probably never will have them. Dagmar doesn't want a child. There were other women back on Earth. I might have married, left an heir -- " "I don't think Lady Dagmar will like the colony. I doubt if it will like her." I smiled at him. "You're getting old, Carter. More so than I am, apparently. Didn't you notice Gunn's reaction? Dagmar might not like the colony, but her wiles work as well here as anywhere else. I wonder what effect she's having on Gunn right now." He looked at me intently for a moment. He wonders how jealous I am, I thought. Then he looked away and silently continued leading me through the settlement. The hospital was a square building of about average size for the dome we were in. It had two stories, the lower of which was devoted to beds, an operating theater and a dispensary. The second story was the living quarters of the Hawthorns. Carter knocked perfunctorily and we walked straight in. "General ward," Carter explained over his shoulder. "Surgery this way." in the outer room, two of them occupied by men who eyed us curiously as we passed through, and one bed was screened off. The place was clean and everything in it was neatly arranged. As i I looked at the plain iron bedsteads with their coarse white bedding, I grew more aware of the isolation of this colony and its continual battle with its unfriendly surroundings. They had kept it free of the mental decay that had destroyed the spirit of enterprise and respect for ethical standards among the peoples of the more comfortable inner planets. We knocked on the surgery door, a thin sheet of plastic in a metal frame, like most of the doors on this world, constructed without wood. "Carter and your patient's friend; we've come to see how the injured pilot is getting on," Carter answered to an inarticulate inquiring noise from within. "Come in. He'll live." We did so, to see Grenville with a trussed-up leg, Hawthorn with a satisfied expression on his face, two young men -- both, I should say, aboyt twenty-two or three -- who were apparently the apprentice doctors, and a girl in white who, I supposed, was one of Hawthorn's daughters. "Nastiest compound  fracture I've seen in years," the medical man said to us. "He's upt in any danger df losing the leg now, but it probably won't ever fully recover. The broken bone has done a lot of damage to the nerves in the forward part of the thigh. Still, I think we can patch him up well enough to make a useful citizen of him again." Grenville smiled a little grimly. "How useful a citizen will a space pilot with only one good leg make?" Hawthorne frowned at him. "Don't cast aspersions on my ability, young man. You'll have two good legs. One of them just won't be up to carrying you around on hundred-meter dashes and so forth. You'll only be able to catch the women that want to be caught from now on." "Well, Grenville," I said, "look after yourself, and do what the doctor tells you. Dagmar and I will get settled somewhere -- I think she is out laying the groundwork for herself, anyway, at the moment -- then, when we've found out what the settlement expects of us, we'll pay you a social call. You will probably be given something like a plant operator's job. What I shall do, I don't know. My trade is politics, but I think there would be some objections to my practicing it here." Carter looked up, an unfathomable expression on his face for a moment. "All right now," the doctor said. "Clear out, all of you. We have Work to do. Visiting horn's are over." "Right," I answered. "See you later, Grenville. I dare say it won't be long before you're up and about again." how we would get on for accommodations. "Mayor Rodericks is getting something lined up for you, I think, though Lady Dagmar appears to have ideas of her own on that score. She seems to be trying to talk Joe Gunn into taking her in.'.' He watched me closely for a reaction. I grunted noncommittally. Dagmar's conduct was not altogether surprising to anyone who knew her as well as I did. At the moment, she was furious that she had allowed herself to become involved in my misfortunes, and was seeking comfort in the attentions of a young and good-looking admirer. What her next move would be, however, I doubted if she knew herself. Carter and I turned a corner and almost collided with the councilor named Pelotzi. "Ah!" he exclaimed. "I've been looking for you. We checked up on living space and we find that we can give the three of you rooms in Residence Four in Aaron Dome. That's the small one, over there." "Thank you. Councilor," I said. "It may be some time before Major Grenville can be moved from the hospital, but I shall go to the quarters myself as soon as I can. Whether the arrangements will suit Lady Dagmar or not, I cannot say." He coughed apologetically. "I am afraid they will have to, Mr. Clemmenceton. There is no other place available." Carter and I both smiled. "Can I get over and have a look around now?" I asked. "Certainly, Mr. Clemmenceton. I'm sure Mr. Carter will take you there." "Does every new arrival upset the whole system of government like this? I mean get personally shown to his quarters by the Immigration Secretary or whatever you are?" "Well, it's three Earth years since the last ship came out this way, so there's no great strain involved," Carter answered. Pelotzi left us, and Carter resumed his role of guide. We passed through the connecting passageway with its airtight bulkheads at each end, and entered Aaron Dome. "Aaron is mainly residential buildings," said Carter, "except for a couple of places over there where we do a bit of air processing. This is Residence Four right here." miliar metal-framed plastic doors, and we entered a small foyer in which was an unattended desk. Taking a book from it, he leafed through the pages to find the numbers of the unoccupied rooms. "Third floor," he said, penciling something in the book. "A bedroom each) and a bathroom and lounge that you'll share with the other couple on the floor. We can't afford to waste any space, but we're not really badly crowded." "From all appearances, I'd say you lived pretty well out here." "We do all right. Consumer goods are scarce -- all those things that are mass-produced so cheaply on the inner planets -- and we lack adequate school and medical facilities. Just the same, the necessities of life are in reasonable supply, and we have a bit of leisure time, and a few luxuries." "I can't tell you how impressed I am by the way you've got the technical side of things sewn up. Back on Earth, I knew you'd had no supply ship for three years, but I just didn't realize what that implied. I think I pictured Titan as an out-of-the-way ually reverting to savagery on a bleak, unfriendly world." "Ha! You missed the point. In a really hostile setting like this, you either keep your technology up to the mark or die. That's why this settlement won't ever slip into decadence, even if all the rest of the Solar System does. And there's another reason, too -- the kind of people who've been able to adapt themselves to life on Titan are not the ones to sit idly by and watch their world fall apart. The pioneering stock, the misfits from the more ordered and organized and safer life of the inner worlds, generations of political refugees, they've built a world that can look forward when civilization everywhere else is crumbling from the Jry rot. "Take the emphasis on children here that I was telling you about. The bigger our population gets, the more specialization is possible and the better life becomes for everyone. Well, anyway, here's the Presidential Suite, so I'll cut the sales talk." I took the irony in good part. He selected a key, opened the door, and we both went in. "Here are your keys," he said, and handed them to me. "There are crawlers out already to bring your ship to the domes for stripping, so you'll be able to rescue your personal effects before long."   ters and was pleasantly surprised by their undeniably plain but eminently comfortable-looking furnishings. Nearly everything in sight was made of one plastic or another. Carter told me more about the colony's industry : "We've all the power we want from big hydrogen powered spaceship engines. Ice, ammonia and methane are our main raw materials, with the metals at a premium. We do a bit of direct synthesis for some foodstuffs and our plastics and textiles, but most of our complex organics come from the culture vats. At present, we're trying to develop a strain of -- " The door was thrown violently open to admit an apologetic Pelotzi, driven before one of Dagmar's most violent rages. Seeing me, she switched targets. "You, you walking antique, you drag me away from a life on a civilized world where I had every comfort and attention to a collection of huts on a chunk of where! And that animal, Gunn! Then they can't give me anywhere to live and they expect me to live with you! I must have been mad to ever get -- " "There, there, old girl, you'll  Carter laughed uproariously. Dagmar picked up a heavy carved plastic ornament and threw it at him, hitting him on the shoulder as he made a belated attempt to jump aside. Then she turned on me again. She sprang like a tiger, and I caught her, wrists to save my face from being, clawed. She kicked my shins. Carter was still laughing, while Pelotzi stood by, looking very embarrassed. I was not really angry. I had been through some tense experiences in the last few months, and I think they had tended to deprive my always fairly unexcitable disposition of some of its capacity for resentment, at least for the time being. I grasped both her small wrists in my left hand, drew back my right, and hit her carefully several times across the face. She screamed and kicked with increased violence for a moment or two, then subsided, sobbing. I spoke to her quietly. "You're misleading yourself, my darling. You're forgetting the raging mobs too easily. You would have been as violently used as I would have, if they'd been able to lay hands on you. "You remember the form Grellet's line took. All the ills of the times were due to the lustful and irresponsible dictator, meaning me, who was impoverishing three worlds to rain jewels upon his avaricious mistress, meaning you."  hands still clenched and unclenched, and her body shook, but her eyes were closed. "My own fate would have been certain, had I been taken," I went on. "But imagine the mob's delight at the fall of the tyrant's pampered mistress. You might be ruled out. You can begin your have been hung from a lamnintrigues all over again -- and you post. You would probably have haven't started to lose your looks had many elaborate indignities yet -- to get what power and perpetrated on you first. Possibly luxury this world can offer. If have been stripped and knocked you do, you'll probably be tarred down to be befouled by the muland feathered by the sturdy titude, then executed in some satcolonial women, With a sudden wrench she prepared to bear children, we tried to free her hands. I had been could conform to the provincfal expecting the attempt and it was morality of our adopted home." not successful. She cried: "What are you trying to do?" "It was all your fault! You she spat out bitterly, yet with a destroyed the power of the only little of doubt and surprise on people fit to rule Earth and her face. "Do you think you've cleared the ground for maniacs got me in a position where you . like Grellet. The old families had can keep me as an unpaid nurse had generations of experience in for your old age? What makes government. You made love to you think you could have a me so I would help you stab thenT'x child?" in the back!" were a rebel and a misfit in the  hurt, yet they had not been old oligarchy, just waiting to athurled with quite the violence tach yourself to some ambitious their meaning indicated, lover who would carry you into I drew her to me and stroked a position of power. Also, rememher fair hair. "Who's so old, anyber that your title and connection way? And you're no teen-ager with the families provided Grelyourself these days. I might be let with a weapon to use against pushing sixty, but while I had me...It allowed him to turn the the rejuvenation treatments and old popular resentment of the attention of the Republic's best oligarchs against me, while at the medical men, I did not age apsame time he bargained with the preciably. I shall probably still Emindales and Gordinesters to outlive you because I have a get their support. more equable disposition. You "Now you have two choices in will eventually put a fatal strain front of you. I gather from your on your heart or burst a blood reaction earlier that Gunn can vessel." She clung to me. She looked up for a moment, disheveled blonde hair streaked down over teardirtied face, and smiled as our eyes met. "Morgan Settlement may be no tropic island paradise, but it's no penal colony, either. This apartment could be fitted up to -- " Then she dropped her head against my chest again and cried unrestrainedly. Carter took Pelotzi's arm and started to propel him from the room. "It's all display," I explained amusedly. "Don't let it worry you. Some people call it Irish courtship. Freud wrote books about it." He closed the door. It had been more than thirteen years since we had first known each other, but there is nothing like violent emotional disturbance to restore for a night the passion of departed youth.  thirty the next morning, showing for once a politician's tact by not coming earlier. Though his greeting was cheerily informal, he had the manner of a man come to talk hard-headed business. "Well, have you got your domestic affairs settled?" he asked. "More or less. I'm expecting." "Good God, that was quick!" "Oh, it might take a couple of years. I mean I've assured myself of the opportunity to keep trying." "I see. Well, that's fine. Now, then, the reason for this visit. You were talking of 'practicing your trade,' as you put it. Well -- " he gestured me to silence as I started to interrupt -- "that is exactly what we want you to do. Take a post on the Federal Council. We're not afraid you'll try to make yourself dictator of Titan and set out to reconquer your lost Empire. Neither am I opposed to the idea on the grounds of old antagonisms. I never did and still don't like a lot of things abdut you and about your view of -- well, everything. But, like the other councilors here, I realize how much help your administrative ability can be to us. "The five Titanian settlements are largely self-governing, but do owe allegiance in some matters to a Federal Council. The problems of governing such a confederacy are enormous, as I suppose you can imagine." "Hold on a minute!" I said, suddenly remembering one of the problems. "If radio here is limited to line of sight, how did we get Gunn's call from the crawler?" "Rocket-aerials. All the crawlers have them so they can call the domes and each other from below their horizons. A small rocket carries a fine silver aerial up to about two and a half miles. That gives a radius of about a hundred miles, or two hundred if both sender and receiver have aerials up." "Oh. Very clever. Well, keep talking. What other troubles are you letting me in for?" "Apart from the griefs stemming from the environment, the usual run of small-time political feuds, nepotism, intercolony jealousies, everyqne trying to get more of scarce materials than he's entitled to." "What's the setup of the council itself? Is it elected, appointed, or what?" "Elected, nominally. Each colony has its representatives. We won't have any trouble getting you in if you decide to accept, though." I were thinking deeply, but my mind was made up, naturally. "I accept, Carter. You know, things are working out better for me than I had any right to hope for. What deposed autocrat, after deposition and barely getting away with his life, has ever been offered a respectable political appointment in a culture which may not be materially prosperous, but is definitely sound and is progressing, and been able also to carry a beautiful woman away with him to share his exile and raise his family in middleclass respectability?" Carter's answer was a slight, thin-lipped smile. I read the implication behind it with little difficulty. "Oh, I have a fair idea of your opinion of Dagmar, but you do her injustice." Pictures and fragments of reminiscences, some clear, some half-faded, were before me as I spoke. I was going to become a minor politician, with a host of routine duties. Well, there is more to life than merely satisfying ambition. What is a man whose personality is totally submerged in his ambition? Yet had I ever been truly ambitious? Who knows his own desires, at any time? Carter smiled still, and I continued. "When we first became lovers, she was the most talked-of beauty of the nobility. Yet she was a rebel even then against the casteand-wealth oligarchy. Throughout my eleven years in the lonely Damoclean seat, she was almost my only confidente anq ally. If you attempt to evaluate her on the evidence of temper, temperament and flirtation during a short twenty-four hours, you will only mislead yourself. "The wilfulness you've seen; her strength of character and intige of the former, without being talked of marriage and an heir, to have children, particularly She wanted the position and pressince her own youth is going. You iT: may say that she is still a lot younger than I am. True. But after all -- " "Mr. Carter! Mr. Carter! The Space Field Tower has spotted a ship approaching! A big one!" The young colonial who had run up with the message was puffing hard and trying to get his breath back. My stomach felt cold. I realized with a jar the extent to which overconfidence makes men vulnerable to emo tional shock. "It looks as though you were wrong, Clemmenceton -- you'll have to face the music," Carter said softly. "My judgment appears to have been badly astray," I replied, my voice flat and expressionless, and speaking half to myself. I honestly never believed they had the remotest chance of keeping the peace in their own domains with the forces at their command, let alone being able to spare a cruiser to come out this far after me. But very evidently they had. "Well, perhaps my personal misfortune should be weighed against the return of stable government to the inner planet people," I murmured. I imagined the planets torn by rioting, mob violence, and countless pitched battles. "It just shows how a man will overestimate his own importance." from the bedroom, and I was not aware of her presence until I felt her gently rest her hand on my arm. "And we weren't even unpacked," she said. "Wolseley, there's no need to say anything about Grenville. They won't be looking for him and he wasn't really playing empire-builders with us." Carter was looking at her intently. "We'll p'robably have a more comfortable trip back in the cruiser's brig than we had coming out in the Master's cabin, anyway." "The tower says they should have contact with the ship in not much over an hour," the messenger said. Dagmar whirled to face him. "You mean you haven't spoken to them yet? You don't really know what they want? What's the idea? Are you just trying to give Wolseley and me a fright?" "I'm sorry, Mrs. Clemmenceton," he answered, and I smiled at the form of address, "but there has been no contact between Titan and the inner worlds for over half a year now, and there was little enough before that. There could be no other reason for a big ship coming now." Then her eyes filled and I put one arm around her and held her close. Carter turned to me and said, "I regret this. We could have used you to such good purpose. We've got a world to run, with underpopulation and a shortage of machinery and a hostile environment to battle against. I wish we could give you sanctuary, Clemmenceton, but we just can't afford to antagonize the  inner world military. We're quite defenseless here, you see." I suppose at that moment my feelings were a chaotic admixture. There was a kind of helpless cold fury at being so suddenly deprived of the refuge in which I had felt myself safe, an angry contempt for Carter and the colonials of Titan for their fear of Grellet's ship. Of course I was aware that this anger sprang from my own position, but that did not lessen the feel-' ing any. And there was a kind of resignation to the inevitable -- and also a lot of gratitude to Dagmar for the way she was taking the ship's arrival. "Let's go to the' tower," I said. "Yes, I suppose we might as well. It would be humiliating to be taken to the ship under guard. Wait while I put some makeup on." "The reaction," I told Carter, "is typical. At times it has been an attitude which has infuriated me, but, at the moment, I like it," no S HE was only gone a moment, however. I looked at her close ly when she reappeared. She was as lovely as I had ever seen her. The light slacksuit, as affected by the settlement women, was not unbecoming, and together with the way her long lightbrown hair was pulled back and held by clips, and the lightly applied makeup, it made her look very young. Carter's face seemed to express cynicism, and I think embarrassment, as I kissed her and we set put for the tower. The "space field" was an arbitrarily defined area of , ice, and the tower a plastic affair, rising about two hundred feet into.' the poisonous air. In the hemispherical, transparent room at the top were two men, one of whom had earphones on and sat at the radio table. The second turned to face us. "No communication with them yet, Mr. Carter, though they're well within Morse range. In fact, I'd say now that they are in verbal range -- "Quiet, I'm getting something!" interrupted the man wearing the phones. He stretched out his left arm and cut in the loudspeaker on the wall. Through a storm of crackling and whistling came a man's voice.  " -- Settlement. Hello, Morgan Settlement. Spaceship Pax Republics calling. Space -- crackle, crackle -- Republics seeking permission to land with a hundred and twenty refugees from Earth. Seeking -- " Dagmar's shriek obliterated the repeat, and she began to pummel my arm and back, incoherently exclaiming a series of "We needn't go back"s and "I said it couldn't be a warship"s and similar things. I just suddenly relaxed. The shocks were coming in too rapid a succession to be appreciated as they happened. "They'll make it in about ten or twelve hours, I should say," the operator's assistant said. Dagmar and I looked at each other, and started back down the long stairway. About halfway to the bottom was a landing, with a big clear port looking out over the craggy whiteness. Here we paused. AS I watched the spectacular scintillations of an iceworld sunset, my thoughts ran again and again over the last hour. Here I would still be working for something I believed in very dearly, though in a small way, and without fanfares. Pageantry and circumstance, however, I had known well, and would not mourn their loss. Since my first entry into politics at the age of eighteen, just before the collapse of the Fourth Kingdom, I had belonged to many parties and known many viewpoints. Then I was a pacifist, abhorring bloodshed and violence, but, like most, I always recognized the decadence of the times, and when the chance came to play Caesar, I took it. The Empire was still-born, and the planets had reverted far toward barbarism, but out here, beyond the reach of bloody warlords and roving pirates, I would play a part in a small culture which logically should remain as Carter once had hoped his Venusian state would remain -- an isolated outpost whose people must retain their science merely to stay alive, and which would survive to welcome eventually the first contact with a resurgent inner-world culture. Dagmar turned her gaze from the sparkling ice crags, so brilliant beneath their blue-black sky, and our eyes met. It would be a stoic's world to bring children into, but one where hope and ambition were not unknown, and one that could offer the satisfaction that comes from achievement. Here I would find my personal fulfillment. Here I would see my children grow up, on this farthest outpost, far from the warming Sun. Very admirable rule: Never do tomorrow what you can put off Until after the age of forty I O NE thing about an electronic awakener: no matter how elaborate its hookup, melodious its music, and important its announced reminders, when it goes on in the morning you can always turn it off again. Boswell W. Budge always did exactly that. But there's no turning off one's kids, and thus, on the most important morning of his life, February #, #, Bozzy arose, much against his will, promptly at #. His Sophie, eight and ladylike, merely shook the bed with a disdainful gesture. But Howard, six, masculine, and athletic, climbed right up and sat on Bozzy's stomach. Baby Ralph, of the golden smile, gave Bozzy a big kiss, and Bozzy thus shared the gold, which was egg. "Did your mother send you in here?" Bozzy demanded, gazing suspiciously around with one eye open. "We came because we love you," Sophie answered. ) That opened Bozzy's other eye. "Thank you, dear," he said. "You're very sweet or very clever. Now if you'll coax Howard off my stomach -- " "I don't have to be coaxed," Howard announced, sliding to the floor with all the covers. "From now on, you just order me, Daddy. Because you'll be a Senior Citizen tomorrow." Bozzy didn't want to think of that just then. "Tell your mother I'm up," he said. "And get out so I can bathe and dress." Sophie minced, Howard ran, Ralph toddled. Bozzy rose, a pudgy man slightly under average height at six feet two, with blue eyes and thinning brown hair. He was exactly thirty-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days old. And that was the point. At forty, he would have to go to work. This was his day for jobtaking. He dreaded it. out of his mind and concentrated on his supersonic bath, the depilatory cream, the color of his outer clothing. It took time to achieve the right shade of purple in the bathroom plasticdispenser, but no time at all to pour, solidify, and cut the sheetlike robe required for the occasion. In it, he was the sensation of the breakfast room, handsome as a male bird in spring plumage. Kate, his slender wife, who had been up and at work for an hour, looked moth-eaten by comparison, as if their nest had been lined with her plucked-out down. "You look very attractive this morning, Kate," Bozzy told her. He gave her an extra-warm kiss. "Well!" she said. "Quite the gallant today, aren't we? Just be sure you're on time today, darling. Remember what Mr. Frewne had to say about promptness." Frewne. That overinflated windbag. The obesity who was about to become his boss. Without having worked a day in his life, Bozzy found he hated the idea of having a boss. "Let's think of something pleasant," he grunted, and thought of breakfast. He took his place at the table. Kate and the kids had already eaten, so Kate served, while the kids, attracted by his .finery, stood off and watched him swallow a vitamin pill, a thyroid pill, and a Dexedrine pill. Solemnly, he opened the three eggs Kate brought. Each was guaranteed by her to have been irradiated for exactly two minutes and fifty-five seconds, and guaranteed by the grocer to have been enriched by feeding the hens three kinds of mold. His mouth was full of the third and last one when Sophie asked, "Why do you have to go to work. Daddy?" The reminder choked him. Gulping, he said, "To support us all, honey. My pension stops tomorrow." "Yes, but I read in a book where people used to go to work when they were young." He was tempted to say, "I am young!" but thought better of it. "That was. long ago, dear." "Were people different then?" "No, but society was. Our Senior Citizens used to be pensioned off, while younger people worked. But when science improved the Seniors' health, they got tired of sitting in corners on pensions and, besides, a lot of them died soon after they stopped working. When it got so that more than half of all voters were between forty and seventy years old, the Seniors voted their pensions to the young, to get educated and raise families on, and nobody's allowed to work till he's forty. Now do you see?" "Forty is awful old," said Sophie. taken his mother's hand. "You're not going to work, are you, Mommy?" he asked. "Not for ten years, dear. I'll be here when you want me, so why don't you go play on the balcony? I've got to get Daddy off and give Ralph his bath." "I'll bathe him," Sophie volunteered. "You help, Howie. We can make like we're young." "Don't drop him," Kate warned. "Clean up the bathroom afterward," added Bozzy. "Yes, sir," said Howard, for the first time in his life. The children left, and Kate came close to pour Bozzy his cup of Daystart. He slipped an arm around her waist and squeezed convulsively. "Darling!" she said, stroking his bald spot. "You're positively trembling!" "Wouldn't you be, if you had to take over from somebody you like as well as I like Mr. Kojac? And for no good reason, except he's seventy-five and I'll soon be forty." Kate pushed away from him, frowning. "Sometimes you're so silly, it scares me. You know perfectly well that if you don't take Mr. Kojac's job, someone else will. He'd rather have it in your hands than in a stranger's, and I'd rather live on his income than on a laborer's. So stop moping and drink your Daystart, while I call a cab." No help in that quarter, Bozzy decided as she left. All Kate could think of was that she'd soon be the wife of a big-shot: the manager -- that is, controls setter -- of a furniture factory. Bozzy had never told her how simple the job really was, though he supposed she knew. You first ordered designs, and then you ordered a poll taken on the designs. A computer tabulated the poll's results and pointed out the design most likely to sell. You then fed economic data into the same computer, and found out how many units the market could take. You called in the engineers to set up the machines, and the maintenance men to keep them running. In brief,' you were errand boy to a bunch of gadgets, with nothing to do but look important. He was practicing his important look when Kate bustled in and spoiled it by sitting on his lap. "You're going to do fine today," she said, "and you're going to get off to a good start. I made them show me your cab. It's one of their brand-new battery-electric ones, a sort of mauve that will go with your purple robe. You'll look swell in it." the lobby buzzer sounded three long rings. ' "There's your cab," Kate said, rising. He followed her to the living room. Projected on one wall was a picture of the cabman facing the lobby annunciator, fifty-three stories down. The man was tall, fat, and in need of a shave, yet he wore purple tights with pink and green trim. Bozzy shuddered. "Who in the world concocted that rig?" "Your wife, sir," the cabman answered. "It's beautiful," said Bozzy. "I'll be right down." He wasn't, though. Kate told the kids he was leaving, and they trooped out of the bathroom to say good-by. Bozzy could tell Ralph was the one being bathed only because he was naked -- all three Were equally wet, and equally anxious to embrace their Daddy. He had to make himself a new robe while the cab meter ticked and Kate jittered. But once started, the drive between balconied buildings and intervening plazas went fast enough, Bozzy wasn't over half "an hour late in reaching Mr. Kojac's apartment building. The old man waited in the street, looking spare, spruce, and impatient. "I do wish," he said, easing himself into the cab, "that you had a less anti-social attitude. Now you'll have to claim I delayed you." "I'm sorry, sir' Bozzy mumbled. "It's kind of you to take the blame." He thought it was also typical. He had understudied Mr. Kojac for the preceding two years, and felt there was no one else in the world for whom he could have as much respect. "Actually, sir," he explained, "I was delayed by the children." "An excuse, Boswell! Whether conscious or subconscious, nothing more than an excuse! Distaste for today's ceremonial is smeared over your face like so much bread-andjelly." Unconsciously, Bozzy wiped his cheeks. Mr. Kojac laughed. "You're guilt-ridden and that's plain absurd. All young men in your position have to go through exactly the same thing. You must simply make up your mind to do what society requires." "All I can think of is your kindness," Bozzy blurted. "People should replace those they hate!" "But the understudy system wouldn't work, then," Mr. Kojac pointed out. "You can't learn from a man who upsets you." Bozzy nodded miserably. TN silence, he let himself be carried toward the furniture factory, till Mr. Kojac asked, "Did you bring the stimulants?" "Oh, yes, sir. Excuse me. I should have offered them sooner." With embarrassed clumsiness, he fished from a pocket in his underwear the pills required by custom. "Here you are, sir," he said in ritual form. "Big pills make troubles little." Mr. Kojac smiled. "I don't need any," he said gently. "You do. Take one."  "That isn't proper!" "No one will know. Go ahead."  He would feel like a fool to take a pill brought only for Mr. Kojac's use. He would feel much more like a fool if he broke down during the ceremony -- might even lose his job. He took the pill, finally, and immediately felt sorry. He was still tense and twitchy when they reached the factory. As custom demanded, everyone was out of sight. Nobody met them at the gate, or observed their silent progress up the escalator to the personnel office. Noiselessly; through empty soundproof offices, they walked together to the ceremonial chamber. The door they used was the room's only entrance. It was hooked open invitingly. Within was a small conference table of imitation oak, and six chairs of imitation leather. Ceiling, walls, and floor were plastic sheets in soft, sandy shades that harmonized with the furniture's rich browns.  On the table were four wristlets, four anklets, and two belts, all njade of iron links and stamped with either Bozzy's or Mr. Kojac's name. As he had been told to do, Bozzy picked out and put on his own set while Mr. Kojac rested in the armchair at the head of the table. Then, breathing noisily, he knelt before Mr. Kojac and fastened the old man's anklets. He rose, grunting. Mr. Kojac held out first the left hand, then the right, while Bozzy put the wristlets on him. Their cheeks accidently touched while Bozzy fastened the belt. He thought of his father and was irrationally tempted to plant a kiss, as if he were four instead of forty. He stifled the impulse and shook hands instead. "Good luck," Mr. Kojac said. that remark, and so, for a second, Bozzy forgot what came next. Then, helped by the stimulant pill, he focused his thoughts, crossed the room, and turned a lighted red switch that glowed by the door. He heard a muffled clank as iron links froze to the magnetized armchair, sounding the signal for his speech. "Sir," he intoned, "the Company takes this opportunity to express its deep and heart-felt appreciation of the thirty-five years you have devoted to serving the Company, the furniture industry generally, and that great public, our customers." Without looking at Mr. Kojac, he bowed, turned, went out, and released the catch holding the door open. It closed automatically, and automatically set in motion the rest of the ceremony. From somewhere out of sight, fat Mr. Frewne waddled over arid briefly shook Bozzy's hand "You've done fine," he wheezed. "A little late getting started, but that's to be expected. Everything's fine -- just fine!" Praise seemed a miscue, Bozzy didn't quite know how to answer, "Sir," he asked, mopping his forehead, "what about Mr. Kojac?" "Oh, he's all right," Mr. Frewne said. "Those fumes are fast. We can leave the rest to the undertaker." He slapped Bozzy on the back and pushed him down the corridor. "Come on into my office, boy. I'll pour you a drink -- pour us each one, as a matter of fact. And hand over your iron jewelry, son. You won't need that stuff again for thirty-five years."  Schuster, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # anthology: a carefully thought out, lovingly planned and charmingly presented patchwork of fantasies about the strangenesses of children. As Mr. Tenn points out in his delightful introduction, the juxtaposition of literary lights such as D. H. Lawrence ("Rocking Horse Winner"), E. M. Forster ("Story of a Panic"), and A. E. Coppard ("Adam and Eve and Pinch Me"), among others, with science fiction writers like Theodore Sturgeon ("Baby Is Three"), Murray Leinster ("Keyhole"), Katherine MacLean ("The Origin of the Species," a magnificently uncomfortable tale never before published anywhere) and others of equal note, shows that -- almost unbeknownst to the pundits of the literary reviews -- some of our good science fiction writers are turning out literature, too. Tenn has had the temerarious good taste to include his own "Errand Boy" in the book -- just right, too, particularly since it separates two of the more ominous entries, a section from Huxley's "Brave New World" that tells about the human baby hatchery, and Stephen Vincent Benet's verbose but effective narrative poem, "Nightmare for Future Reference." In addition to those mentioned, the following also have fine tales in this collection: C. M. Kornbluth, Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, Mary-Alice Schirring, "Saki," Grahame Greene, Jane Rice, Poul Anderson, Lewis Padgett, Judith Merril, Richard Matheson and Wilmar H. Shiras, the last four with stories well known to science fiction anthology readers. Alfred Bester. Shasta Publishers, Inc., Chicago, #. # pages, # the rounds declares querulously that what science fiction needs is more maturity. It's still for babes, it's too much space opera, etc. True enough that there is a lot of cheap and bad stuff being written, but there is also The Demolished Man, and a few others nearly in its class. (Incidentally, the novel was originally a of the recent crop of high-grade books.) Among other things,, this is as fascinating a study of character as I have ever read. Ben Reich, owner of the second most powerful business monopoly in the Solar System, ruthless murderer and bitterly tortured soul, is an unforgettably Vivid personality. picture of society in the year #, a society in which every profession and trade has its quota of mind-reading telepaths, most trusted (and hated) of all public servants. From Maria Beaumont's imitation Pennsylvania Terminal mansion, expressing almost immeasurable luxury, to Chooka Frood's Rainbow House, scene of the lowest vices and most brutal crimes, one is given a violently real view of a society in which the neuroses of #th Century urbanism have been almost infinitely multiplied through extrapolation. But the strongest attraction of the book is its plot. It is 'actually a superb murder-detective story in which the murderer (Ben Reich) is known practically from the start, but in which the motive was completely misunderstood, thus making conviction erf the murderer almost impossible. For he did not really know his own motives -- and until those motives were clear, Reich could not be convicted and sent to Demolition; the police's Thinking Machine would reject the evidence and, under Tomorrow's law, that would permit the murderer to go free. How he is finally trapped into a final recognition of his own basic motives is truly great psychological surrealism. In an otherwise laudable and lauding review, H. H. Holmes labels such ingenuities as tkins for Atkins and Wygfls for Wygand as "coy whimsies." w on you, Mr. Holmes, for ignoring language development! Many symbols need only formal inclusion tq make them part of the alphabet; in actual practice, they are there already. But your pedantry is forgiven, for you recognize this as a magnificent novel, which it decidedly is... edited by John Carnell. T. V. Boatdman  Co., Ltd., London, England, #. # pages, available from Stephen's Book Service, # Astor Place, New York, at # science fiction anthology, and a distinguished job it is, too. It contains ten stories by nine writers: two by John Beynon Harris, one under the name John Beynon and another under John Wyndham, and one each by Arthur C. Clarke, John Christopher, Peter F. Temple, A. Bertram Chandler ("George Whitley"), J. T. MTnEvery story in the book is top grade. Ross Ashby, M.D. John Wiley #s Sons, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # a review of this epochal book until I could enlist authoritative support from scientific reviews for my belief that it is an amazing step forward in the science and philosophy of the human brain. Warren S. McCulloch, M.D., in a lead review in The Scientific American, writes that Ashby, a British psychiatrist and neurologist, has "laid the foundation for a mechanistic theory of how biological systems adapt which for many years to come will command the respect and guide the imagination of his most formidable critics..." And, believe me, they will be formidable, since the author thoroughly demolishes the old metaphysical dichotomy between body and soul, mind and brain, and thus arrays against himself the whole world of religion and mysticism. The book is not easy to read, even though the mathematical theory is tucked away in an Appendix. But, though difficult, its message is so exciting that anyone interested in the theories of cybernetics and advanced psychology, as well as in the more philosophical problems mentioned, will want to struggle through the text for its new concepts and illuminating insights. The conclusion is that, by developing "ultrastable" types of machines and by combining and refining them, it should be possible (in Dr. McCulloch's words) to produce "a multistable system whose adaptations to the vicissitudes of life have no upper limit except those of our imagination." In other words, a better-thanhuman brain. Smith. Abelard Press, New York, #. # pages, #  pretty unsatisfactory for adult readers, but George O. Smith has now written a grown-up, exciting, well-worked-out space opus that deserves the ultimate commendation of wide reading. By calling it a "space opus," I mean to classify it as straight adventure as against more complex and sociologically slanted space documents like Asimov's Foundation series, not to run it down as an empty potboiler. It isn't by any means. The story revolves around the efforts of Farradyne, an ex-spacebum rescued from the depths by the Solar Anti-narcotics Department, to break up the love I ms, or "hellflower," racket. There are fantastic space flights, hand-tohand combats, dodges and escapes; there is some remarkably adult and actually quite moving lovemaking and sex psychology; and, when you think back over the story, there is one of the most effectively integrated plots in recent science fiction. It would be unfair to the reader to tell more than this; the payoff is too revealing a giveaway. Let it stand that "Hellflower," with the exception of some rather hasty tying up of loose ends as the story closes, is a fine and extremely enjoyable job. edited by Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press, New York, #, #I pages, # ITiEN stories, several of them longish novelets, and eight of them B or better. This is a good average, better than most anthologies. There are two stories by Lester del Rey and one each by John D. MacDonald, Bernard Wolfe (best story in the book and the original from which some of the fantastic ideas in his novel # -- were taken), Lewis Padgett, H. H. (Tony Boucher) Holmes, John S. Browning (not too good), A. E. van Vogt (ditto), Joseph E. Kelleam (fine) and robots, and none heretofore anthologized. I would like to make a small criticism of the book's planning, hoping Mr. Greenberg will not think it amiss : the chronological development of robots as seen by different writers develops some uncomfortably obvious contradictions. In one story, the Earth has been completely decimated and only robots are left. In the next, there are people aplenty. The result is confusing, to say the least. I suspect that this problem should lead to a generality on "idea" anthologies: one should never try to tell a connected story in such a book. One should, rather, present a variety of alternates, so that none conflict with its neighbors and all add to a rich pattern of different possibilities for the future. ray Leinster. Pocket Books, Inc., New York, #. # pages, #( TT is unfortunate that this melo drama for teen-agers, originally planned for hard-cover publication by Shasta Publishers, but not yet issued by them, bears no indication on its reprint cover that it is designed for young people. You start off expecting the usual rich Leinster job, and abruptly find yourself with a pared-down, oversimplified boy's book, perfect for its special market, but hardly for grownups. The story tells how young Joe Kenmore, with the aid of various cohorts including young Sally Holt (romance) and her stern pa, Major Holt (drama), succeeds in helping to foil ten or a dozen assorted attempts to sabotage the United States' fixed-orbit space station as it is being built in an American desert. Nobody but the U.S.A. wants the station, since it will put the rest of the world under our domination. Of course Joe and the U.S.A. win, the spade station flies up to its orbit, and everything is hunkydory. This is a good thriller indeed -- for youngsters.' High .thh'lil  tod. Merest of AudiolAdventure in Your Living Room "Stop!" cried the Publisher, in honest agony, "This is an ad we're writing, not a sociological report!" "I still say," repeated the Promotion Manager, "the two most exciting cultural phenomena in America today are..." "Not all over again!" muttered the Publisher. "... Are science fiction and high fidelity home music. People interested in one are almost bound to be interested in the other." "Maybe you are," growled the Publisher, "but who else?" "Me," said the Associate Editor, from his corner. "I've read every issue of Galaxy since the first... Ditto every issue of High Fidelity. And I own the best amplifier, record player, FM tuner, and speakersystem I can afford. As a snap analysis, I think the appeal ts to people who want adventure in their own living rooms." High fidelity at Great Barrington, Mass. "Snap me another analysis, then," said the Publisher, "How do we sell your fellowMartians on High Fidelity?" "Just tell 'em about it," said the Promotion Manager, simply. "We've got a beautiful magazine. This issue, # pages, firm, big, and slick. Nearly # record reviews, by experts in both music and sound. Testedin-the-home reports on the latest hi-fi equipment -- speakers, preamplifiers, tape recorders, everything. Picture pages, full of ideas for home music installations..." "And listen," said the Associate Editor, "these Galaxy readers are loyal. If we get response from this ad, we tell 'em, we'll run another." "Say, that's a low-down trick," said the Publisher, brightening. "Let's try it. Write the copy. I'll call up and reserve a page." Charles Fowler Editor # Publishing House, Great Barrington, Mass. magazine, for which I enclose  # # years Q # I year Name --  --  -- . AddressIt takes sportsmanship to make a ball team... and foul play to get a backward race civilized! away the group of Quxas  Reed, who was flaying third, that had surged over the This was bad, because Reed was first-base line. With broad grins a fifty-fifty player: It was an on their fiat, piebald faces, they even chance whether he got the moved away -- in the wrong direcball or the ball got him. One of tiOn, of course -- and squatted in the half-domesticated thrags broke loose and cantered across the outfield with its peculiar fivelegged gait. In the hubbub, Ray Bush stole second. Nobody seemed to notice. Sighing heavily, Bill returned to the mound and whiplashed in a fast one, tight across the letters. The hitter got only a small piece of it; a pop fly sauntered toward left field. Judging it to a nicety, Gust Mustas came racing in, evaded a tethered thrag, leaped a hole some Quxa had dug and forgotten, and made a shoestring catch, retiring the side. The Quxas cheered deliriously. Bill trotted off the mound. For a moment, the thrill of the game held him. This was the way things should be: The feel of  smoothly flowing muscles, the thudding sound of horsehide hitting a leather glove, the weight of a bat in your hands in your first ball game after clambering over and scrabbling in an unexplored planet for fourteen months. Then he caught sight of Candace Mathews, walking among the pneuma-huts that served as the outpost camp for the expedition. Gloom enveloped him again, surrounding him like a dank fog. TT'OR fourteen long months, Bill had feasted on the memory of Candy Mathews, on his recollection of her torquoise eyes and cascading brown hair, on the remembrance of her soft lips on his last night under the four moons Today she had arrived with the seventy-odd men and women who comprised the appraisal unit, the final group of the planet's explorers. He had looked forward like a schoolboy to her coming. And, like a schoolboy, he had suffered black despair when his dreams were shattered. For the Candy Mathews who got off the shuttlebug at Camp Outpost was not the Candy Mathews who had said soft instead, a self-assured young woman, somehow harder, who felt only an indifferent tolerance toward a tall young man named Bill Bradley, and an all-consuming, hero-worshiping infatuation for a newcomer, a dapper walking brain, Vance Montgomery, one of the council's smart boys, with the title of planet evaluator. "He's simply wonderful," she had said. And the joy of life had gone out of Bill Bradley. The appraisal group brought in athletic equipment and Bill's men spontaneously declared a holiday, their first on the planet. Baseball was the order of the afternoon and they shanghaied a should, he knew, be laying out reports for Montgomery to study. He did not particularly want to be with Montgomery. Bill sat on the xetal log that served as a bench. One Quxa was bent over, examining first base. He made a colorful sight. The first baseman slapped him jovially on the loin cloth to move him. The owner of the thrag caught up to it and was struggling manfully to lead it away. The fivelegged beast defied his efforts, rearing and dragging him. A dozen Quxas stood nearby. Their sympathies were obviously with their fellow-Quxa, but they made no move to help him. Reed was on the bench next to Bill. He had come in with the appraisal group. "Your vivid friends," he said, cocking a thumb at the Quxas, "don't appear too bright." "They're smart enough," said Bill. "Almost as intelligent as we are. It's just that they've never risen above a herd culture." "Look," said Reed. "I'm a silviculturist. Give me a hunk of wood and I can tell how long it took to grow, what it's good for, where it can be raised and how much board and profit can be made out of it. But this kind of talk throws me. Try another wave-length." "Socially, they're like the seals or penguins back on Earth. They like to gather in groups. The things they can do individually, they do well. But they don't know how to help each other. That's beyond them." "Don't understand the meaning of cooperation?" "The word isn't even in their language. I've seen forty of them standing around, fretting and stewing, while the horals killed off one of their fellows." "What are horals?" "The other dominant life-form here. Nasty brutes, like big upright ants with tentacles. Stand about as high as my chest. Most malignant things I've seen. One Quxa can handle any horal, maybe even two or three. But the horals hunt in packs. Good-by Quxa." "This is the last big concentration the Quxas have left. In another hundred years, there'll be no more Quxas." tives. The Quxas were something to see -- human in form, although somewhat shorter than Earthmen; their skins were blotched and dashed with patches of vivid colors. Antiquarians talked of their resemblance to the ancient circus clowns, a likeness furthered by their broad, flat faces and habitual grins. "Sort of hate to see them disappear," Bill said glumly. "They're happy, good-natured creatures. In their whole race, I know only one who's mean. We've done our best to help them. But if they won't cooperate even in a matter of life and death, what incentive can you offer them?" An elbow dug into him. "Up to the platter, dream boy," said Gust Mustas. "A hit means two runs." Selecting a bat. Bill made his way to the plate. In the middle distance, Vance Montgomery emerged from a hut. Candy went to him eagerly, put a hand on his arm. A deep rage engulfed Bill. The first pitch was a curve that failed to break. As it came fatly over the plate, Bill swung angrily. The ball rocketed up and away, past the infield, over the head of the desperately running left-fielder and dropped toward a sure home run. Then a curious thing happened. One of the Quxas darted away from the gabbling group along the foul line, his short legs churning over the uneven ground. As the ball sank, he dove, plucked it out of the air with one broad hand, turned a somersault and came up with it, grinning. It was an impossible catch and the Earthmen joined the Quxas in applause. Still clinging to the ball, the Quxa made little bobbing bows of acknowledgment. "Throw it in!" shouted Bill. The Quxa stood motionless. "Throw it in, Adlaa!" Bill urged. He went through a throwing motion. The Quxa nodded comprehension. He went into a violent windup. His left foot came up, his upper body went back, his right arm snapped in an arc. The ball flew from his hand, straight and fast. In the wrong direction, of course. The pack of Quxas pelted after it, shouting, picked it up and threw again. To his surprise. Bill found himself pounding after them, bawling fruitless pleas, aware that he looked foolish, but, in his rage, not caring. He closedin on them on the fifth throw and his fingertips touched the ball. He succeeded only in deflecting it. There was a dull thunk and the game was over. The ball had struck Vance Montgomery, planet evaluator, squarely in the left eye. Three things were said then to Bill Bradley. One was by Montgomery as he handed back the ball. "I was not aware, Bradley, that the job of camp leader entailed joining the rowdyism of the native races." One was by Candy Mathews, hopping with anger. "You're a barbarian, Bill Bradley. Monty might have been badly hurt." The third was by a clot of Quxas, crowding eagerly. "Play ball! Billbrad, more play ball!" To the first two, Bill did not reply. To the Quxas, he said one word, "Nuts!" and dolefully followed Montgomery into the headquarters hut. I N spite of his natural prejudice against Montgomery, Bill v;qs forced into a reluctant admiration for the way the man worked. Montgomery's task was to recommend whether the planet should be marked for immediate colonization, placed on a reserve list for future expansion, or be left strictly alone as unworthy of occupancy. He tore through Bill's reports like a small child through a bag of jellybeans. His questions, if pompous, were pointed. Within twentyfour hours, ready to leave for the main camp, he called a conference. He stood before the group, as dapper as a man can be with a rainbow bruise under one eye, complacently listening to the resonance of his own voice. Beside him, Candy nodded worshipful agreement. Bill grumped in a corner. For a full forty-five minutes, Montgomery outlined additional data he wanted gathered. His voice was faintly chiding, implying by its tone that anybody but a dolt would have obtained the information long ago. "And now," he said, "we come to the question of the humanoid denizens of this planet -- the socalled Quxas." He fingered his black eye. "Many persons might conclude that the Quxas are not worth saving; and in themselves, they are not. However, my preliminary conclusions -- based, unfortunately, on insufficient data -- lead me to believe that this planet will be used for colonization in about five hundred years. It would be very convenient then to have a dominant life-form friendly to the galactic humans and capable of being integrated with the colonists. Some method of preserving the Quxas must therefore be worked out. In this, the advance group has failed lamentably." He paused, glanced around triumphantly. "How do I propose to achieve this? By a historical method. What do nations do when they are in peril? They call upon a single man, place themselves under him and let him lead them out. When the ancient western civilization was in its greatest danger after the fall of Rome, the people gathered around the strong men, made them kings and dukes and earls, and were saved from barbarism. "I shall do the same for the Quxas. The Quxas shall have a king." His eyes sought out Bill. "My acquaintance here has been short. I must rely on advice. Bradley, whom would you recommend as king of the Quxas?" "Well," said Bill slowly, "Moahlo is the most intelligent. He's good-natured and kindly. He has a lot of artistic ability. N Some of his carvings are being taken back for the Galactic Folk Museum." "An artist!" said Montgomery in disgust. "Well, let's have a look at him." rine near one of the meandering paths that the Quxas had worn by habit, not design. A bemused group of natives looked on admiringly. Down the path came Ratakka, the biggest of the Quxas, his shoulders proudly back, his face set in the truculent scowl. Bill knew and disliked him, and apprehensively felt sure the peaceful scene would be destroyed. Alone of an amiable, tolerant race, Ratakka was perpetually ill-tempered, the rankling product of Lord knew what alien genetic accident or trauma. Ratakka found his path obstructed by the carving. Callously, he brought his foot down on the delicate figurine, crushing it to splinters. Moahlo sprang up in gentle protest. Ratakka gave him the back of a meaty hand that knocked him off his feet. Two spectators indicated disapproval. Ratakka smashed their heads together and strode on. "To save a culture, Bradley," said Montgomery, who had watched the brutal display with admiration, "you need strength, not delicacy or feeling. That man shall be king of the Quxas." He ran after Ratakka. The members of the outpost staff looked at Bill in dismay. He shrugged sadly and walked out of the headquarters hut. At the doorway, Adlaa was waiting for him with' the same old plea. "Play ball?" he begged. "More play ball, Billbrad?" In his despondent mood, Bill did not care. "All right. I'll throw the ball to you and you throw it back to me." "Quxas not do that." "It's just as much fun to throw the ball in one direction as in any other direction," Bill explained patiently. "Unless you throw it back, forget it -- no play ball." Adlaa thought seriously. "Hunky dokey. Want play ball." They were tossing it back and forth in the middle of a cheering group when a half-track passed, taking Montgomery, Candy and Ratakka to the main camp. The look that the girl gave Bill was disdainful. "There's a gaggle of natives outside in assorted shades," said Pat Reed the next day. "They want to play ball. Moahlo's at their head. He carved a bat." "Tell them to beat it. We're busy." "Let's give them some fun while we can. They won't enjoy life much after King Rat gets back here." "That's the truth," Bill agreed. "All right." would get over their baseball mania," complained Rudy Peters, the mineralogist, two days later. "Look me over carefully, will you, Bill? I think my throwing arm just dropped off." "They're nutty about it, all right," Bill Bradley said. "Too bad it couldn't have been about something with some economic value." "Economic value, the man wants. Okay, I'll talk economic value to you. Bet you fifty units I can make a better ball team out of these freaks than you can." "Well, make it thirty." "You're on, sucker. I've lined up the sweetest shortstop that ever spit in a glove..." "Here's your thirty," said Rudy Peters a week after. "How was I to know that shortstop wouldn't throw the ball to anyone except the centerfielder?" "Team play's the stuff, lad," said Bill Bradley. "Stress team play. Twenty-five, twenty-seven, twenty-nine, thirty. Exactly right. Another lesson at the same price?" He was refused, but never on an exploration had Bill Bradley had so much fun. And never, he reminded himself grimly, had he got so little work done. The Quxas were neglecting their skimpy food plots in their eagerness to play. They were getting lean. Finally, with reluctance, Bill called a temporary halt to baseball. "Billbrad say no baseball until work done," said Moahlo sadly to Adlaa. "Sometimes Billbrad talk like southpaw pitcher." Adlaa was trying to cultivate his food plot with the help of a thrag. The beast was of independent mind. It dragged Adlaa in eccentric ovals, in defiance of agricultural needs. "Adlaa want finish work, play baseball," the Quxa commented. "Thrag no play baseball, say nuts to work. Adlaa be old like Old Hoss Radbourne before work done." Moahlo contemplated. "Adlaa have trouble his thrag. Moahlo have trouble his. Moahlo help Adlaa his thrag and Adlaa help Moahlo his. Get work done more faster." Adlaa dismissed the revolutionary thought. "Quxas not do." "We play baseball run down play," argued Moahlo. "Play together. You throw ball me. I throw ball you. Yippee. Man out." "Same team. Old pals. Want sing team song?" "Want play team with thrag." Adlaa considered the matter in this new light. "Like ball game," he said at last in amazement. "Sure. You, me be us together. Make thrag look like busher." They both took hold of the thrag. Unable to resist their combined strengths, the beast submitted docilely. They began to work. in the headquarters pneumahut, Bill saw the incident in happy surprise. Perhaps, after all, his stay here might produce something to help the culture that Montgomery would introduce upon his return. He had no doubt of Montgomery's success. Neither, for that matter, had Montgomery. At the main camp, things were going swimmingly. The camp lay on the very fringe of the Quxa territory, but, by an arduous hunt, Ratakka had captured eight wandering Quxas to whom he immediately set about teaching the dyties of subjects. His method was simple -- the Quxa followed his orders, which he obtained from Montgomery, or the Quxa was knocked down, If he still refused, he was knocked down again. Within three weeks, Ratakka had them doing things no Quxas ever had done before. They performed them reluctantly and sullenly, but they did them. Seeing the result, but not the means, Candy was enthusiastic. "They're working together!" she cried. "Oh, Monty, what will the Quxas do to reward you?" "Oh, they'll probably make a culture god of me," said Montgomery, managing to look modest. "Like the Greeks did to that Martian, Proma Ss Thaa', who taught them the use of fire." As time went on, though, the girl began to have doubts. "But they're doing everything for Ratakka," she protested. "As far as they're concerned themselves, they're more wretched than before." "That's the way feudal cultures are built, my dear," Montgomery assured her. "The king gives them law and a fighting leader. In return, the subjects take care of his bodily comfort." "But they look so unhappy!" "In saving an inferior race, we cannot be concerned too much about the happiness of a few miserable members. Perhaps in three hundred years or so, they can afford happiness." And finally an incident happened to complete her disillusionment. One of Ratakka's morose subjects managed to slip the shackles with which he was bound at night and make a bolt for freedom. The king pursued him relentlessly, brought him back and then beat him, coldly and cruelly, slugging and gouging and kicking. Ashen-faced, Candy moved to interfere; Montgomery restrained her. "We're saving a race," he said. "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Candy turned and ran sobbing to her quarters, unable to dispel the memory of the writhing body on the ground. move equipment. It was a policy of the expeditions to leave their wornout machines for the most friendly of the native races, who could dismantle them and use the parts. The equipment not worth toting back to Earth was to be taken to the advance camp, where the Quxa center was. Montgomery also planned that day to take Ratakka to his kingdom. A few minutes ahead of the motorcade, Candy slipped out, got into a battered half-track and started driving the eighty miles to the advance camp. For the first twenty-five miles, she told herself that her eagerness was because it was a nice day and she wanted to get out of camp. For the next twenty-five miles, she called herself a liar. For the third twenty-five miles she gave herself up unashamedly to thinking about Bill Bradley: his smile, his gentleness, the awkward grace of his lean body. Not a man to set a planet on firebut how pleasant and restful to have around! She wondered if he would forgive the way she had acted. Somehow she was sure he would. The narrow vehicular trail ran through a grove of fernlike trees. It's just over the rise, Candy thought, just over the rise and down into the saucer, where Bill is waiting... The half-track struck a rock, lurched, threw a tread and went off the road, out of control. That did not matter especially, for the Quxas could use the material very well where it was. Candy went forward briskly afoot. A fallen branch brushed her ankle. Unheedingly, she kicked it away. She began to reconstruct Bill, feature by feature: the way his hair swirled on his forehead; his eyebrows, arched and regular; his eyes, wide, deepseated, with inner pools of merriment; his nose, straight and rather... Another branch caught her. She lifted her foot to free it. It did not come free. Another tentacle moved around her, pinioning her right arm to her side. She whirled in terror and found herself in the grip of the horals. horrors, their antenna ears erect, mandibles open. They exuded an acid odor, a sign of hunger. Candy screamed. She fought to reach her pistol, strapped to her right hip. More tentacles stopped her. She screamed and screamed again, throwing her body to shake off the grip, trying to kick with her feet. There was a movement in the road at the top of the rise. For a moment, elation surged in Candy, almost stifling her. Perhaps some expedition member had heard her, was hurrying to her rescue. Then she saw that the newcomers were Quxas. Hope vanished, leaving her limp and hollow. To be killed by these horrors was bad enough, but to be killed in the presence of a group of piebald morons, who would stand and watch and moan, but not lift a hand... In her agitation, she did not notice that the Quxas were nine .in number and wore baseball caps. They drew short clubs, shaped like bats. "Kill the umpire!" they shouted, hatred born of diamond conflicts in their cry. "Kill the umpire!" they yelled and charged. N military formation, they clubbed their way through their enemies, battering and smashing until Candy was free, with a dozen dying horals on the ground, their tentacles contract' ing and writhing. The Quxa leader made his bobbing bow to her. I "How do," he said politely. "We dip them in calcimine vat, you bet. We hang them out like wash. Now we give team yell." The Quxas put their arms around each other's shoulders. In unison, they chanted: "Hoe tomata; hoe potata Half past alligata, Bum, bum, bulligata, Chickala dah! Pussycats! Pussycats! Rah! Rah! Rah!" "Pussycats," the' leader explained to Candy, "are honored animal on planet where Billbrad is head cheese." "I'll bet you play baseball nicely," Candy said. Woe broke forth on nine broad faces. "Misfortunately not," confessed the captain "Thirty-three teams in Quxa town. Pussycats in thirty-third place." He brightened. "Go ivory hunt now. Catch nine new Quxas. Teach 'em baseball. Then maybe we beat 'em and not be in cellar any more." Together, the team bobbed politely to Candy and trotted down the road. Happily,. Candy went up the rise, then stopped in astonishment, looking at Quxa town. Gone was the straggling, haphazard settlement, with the flimsy huts and untended starvation patches where individual Quxas tried to raise their own food. Instead, building sites were laid out in straight, broad rows, and Quxas were working, three and four in a group, raising substantial homes of timber. Others were surrounding the settlement with a wall of brambles, impenetrable to horals. Teams of men, two to a thrag, were plowing, preparing large fields for tillage. And down the side of the settlement, affectionately tended, ran a line of baseball fields. Just off the road, a Quxa squatted, baseball cap on his head, watching a crude sun dial. "Nice day for game," he greeted Candy. the girl made a dazed questioning gesture toward the improvements. "Billbrad do it," the Quxa informed her. "He tell us how. Work one by one, he say, work all time to fill belly, maybe fill horal belly instead. Work all by all, do more quickHave time in afternoon. Batter up! Sock it, boy! Wing it home, he sliding!" The sun's shadow touched a peg. "Five minute!" bawled the Quxa. The laborers quit work, put away their tools. The farmers herded their thrags into a strongly constructed corral. The natives gathered in knots at the settlement edge and looked longingly at the baseball fields. "Yestday I fool Billbrad," confided the Quxa. "I hide ball, catch him off second. Billbrad get all red face and say -- " "Never mind what Bill said," Candy interjected hastily. The shadow touched another peg. "Play ball!" the Quxa yelled. "Play ball! Play ball! Play ball!" He sprang up, produced a baseball glove and spat into it reverently. "I go play now. You come see. Get scorecard, know players." He looked at Candy hopefully. " 'Specially me," he added. Out of the moil of Quxas came the lank form of Bill Bradley. He spied the girl, whooped and came running to her. For a few momerits they talked at once, in an incoherent and ecstatic jumble. Then Candy, catching control of herself, cited in admiration the change in the Quxa village. "And you've done all this!" she concluded. "I didn't do anything!" Bill protested. "They like to play baseball and this sort of happened. We're getting representative government into action now. Each team elects a captain and the captains are the town council. Tonight they're going to vote on naming the settlement Brooklyn." "You know," said Candy, "I'll bet they'll make you a culture god." 'X'HE tanned face of Bill Bradley took on the rose hue of a blush. "Well, Moahlo carved a statue and they've put it in front of league headquarters -- that's their city hall," he admitted uncomfortably. "It doesn't look much like me. I've got six arms because they wanted me batting, pitching and catching a ball all at the same time." Candy slipped a hand into his. "Is there a place around here," she asked in a small tone, "where a culture god can take a girl and -- well, talk to her?" "Is there!" said Bill. "You just come with me..." A heavy object bumped into him. He whirled at the touch.  "Oh! Hi, Ratakka," Bill said I in a flat voice.  Montgomery's king had return; ed to his subjects. He was alone ' -- his captives having escaped on i the ride over -- and he was in vile  temper. Glaring evilly, he motioned at the baseball players. He was recalling an advice of Montgomery: "Whatever your j subjects like to do most, do it j better than they can. In that way, you will get their respect and find it easier to take over." "What that fool doings-on?" snarled Ratakka. "Ratakka do, too." Bill's already sagging spirits sank again. With Ratakka's strength and reflexes, the great brute undoubtedly would become the star of stars, gathering admirers to himself and destroying all the pleasant prospects now so happily started. Still, it was Bill's duty to give him every chance... "I'll see what team has an opening, Ratakka. Perhaps you'd better bat seventh for a few days. Then you can move to the cleanup spot." The giant stopped him. "Ratakka not ordinary Quxa; Ratakka a king. Ratakka not play like those serfs. Want special job." A wild thought struck Bill. On the playing fields were more than two hundred Quxas, most of them with a justified and carefully nurtured dislike for the surly slab of muscle before him. In the old days, they could do nothing individually against him. But the Quxas had learned to fight as a team. If he could only give them the shadow of an excuse, trap Ratakka into rousing their joint anger, take advantage of the predjudices of their newfound love for baseball, then Ratakka would get the reckoning that he deserved, the days of his supremacy would be over, the threat of his tyranny would be removed from a happy race. thing, old pal," he said. He took off his own baseball cap and put it' backward on Ratakka's head. He signaled for someone to bring over a mask and chest protector. "There's only one of these at each playing field," Bill explained. "In a way, he's boss of the game. Are you suit you want to do it? Sometimes the players argue with you." "Anyone argue with Ratakka," the giant said, raising a huge fist, "Ratakka knock 'em down. Ratakka a king, boss of game." "Okay, boy, you asked for it," Bill said. He thrust a whiskbroom into Ratakka's hand. "You can be umpire," said Bill The Best Way to Get Started Develop the working habit under the personal direction of an experienced writer or editor. vate school completely owned and operated by successful editors and writers, offers a series of fascinating assignments designed to get you started and keep you writing. They are sent regularly to your home, where you work on them in spare time. They give you a chance to polish your style the way professional writers polished theirs -- by writing continually. You may concentrate on either short story or article work, advancing as rapidly as your ability warrants. Every assignment you submit is returned with detailed criticism. 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Now and then a light breeze blew across the stands from the native section and at each breath his nostrils crinkled in protest at the acrid smell. This planet gave him the perfect chance to commit the perfect crime -- only he couldn't remember just what it was he had committed. Marlock wasn't much of a planet. Its one claim to fame was its widely advertised Nature's Moebius Strip. For eighteen months of the year -- nine months of sub-zero cold, and nine months of sultry, sand-driven summer -- the only outsiders to visit the planet came to buy its one export, the fur of the desert ox. But during the two months of fall and two months of spring the tourists poured in to gape at the Strip. Idly, for the hundredth time, Johnson let his gaze run over the tourists lining up for their "thrill" journey out onto the Strip. Most of them wouldn't go far; they only wanted to be able to say they'd been on it. They would build up some pretty exciting stories about it by the time they returned home. There was no sign of Johnson's man. qpHE party started out onto the Strip. At the first sensation of giddiness women squealed and most of them turned back. Their men came with them, secretly relieved at the excuse. Johnson watched disinterestedly until only two remained: the young couple he had designated in his mind as honeymooners . The girl had grit. Perhaps more than the young fellow with her. He was affecting bored bravado, laughing loudly as the girl hesitated, but white streaks had appeared along his jawline and across his temples as he waited his turn. The young couple had gone far enough out now so that they were in the first bend of the Strip's twisting dip. Already their bodies were leaning sharply, as the mysterious gravity of the Strip held them perpendicular with their pathway. From where he sat Johnson could read nausea on their faces. When they had followed the Strip around until they were leaning at a #-degree angle, the girl seemed to lose her nerve. She stopped and stood gripping the guide rope with both hands. The boy said something to her, but she shook her head. He'd have to show his superiority now by going on, but it wouldn't be for much farther, Johnson was willing to wager. The boy took three more steps and paused. Then his body bent in the middle and he was sick. He'd had enough. Both turned and hurried back. The crowd of tourists, watching or waiting their turn, cheered. In a few minutes, Johnson knew, the kid would be thinking of himself as a hero. Suddenly Johnson straightened up, having spotted a new arrival, who gripped a tan briefcase tightly under one arm, buying a ticket. He had bulky shoulders and a black beard. Johnson's man had come.  When he saw the bearded man go out with the next bunch to brave the Strip, Johnson rose and walked rapidly to the entrance. Elbowing his way through, with a murmured apology, he joined the waiting group. A thin-faced odd-job man opened the rope gate and they shuffled through. The group must have walked fifty paces, with the bearded man well up in front and Johnson somewhere in the middle, before Johnson's stomach sent him its first warning of unrest. Most of those ahead had stopped and Johnson threaded his way carefully past them. Another twenty-five steps and he left the others behind. All except the bearded man. He neither paused nor looked back, Johnson's stomach had drawn up into a tight knot now, and his head was beginning to feel light. There was a faint ringing in his ears. By the time he reached the end of the guide rope, nausea was creeping up from his stomach and into his throat. This was as far as it was supposed to be safe to go; the advertising literature had it that here was the point of no return. Up ahead his quarry was walking half doubled over, weaving back and forth, as though he were intoxicated. But he did not pause. Johnson turned to look back, and felt his breakfast fighting to come up. From his perspective, the ground and the spectators watching him had swung to a position almost perpendicular to him. He felt that he was about to slide off into space. A wave of vertigo swept over him, his legs folded and he fell to the ground -- sicker than he had ever been before in his life. Now he knew why the man ahead never looked back. For a moment Johnson wondered whether he should give up. But, even as he debated, tenacity pulled him to his feet and forced him on. And now something new was added to his vast discomfort. Tiny twinges of pain, like small electric shocks, began shooting up his legs, increasing in intensity with each step he took. The pain built up until the rusty taste of blood in his mouth told him that he had bitten into the flesh of his lower lip. Johnson's only consolation now was the thought that the man ahead of him must be suffering worse than he. At each step the pain increased its tempo, and the sound within his head grew to a battering roar. Although he felt himself at the last frayed ends of his vitality, he managed to stagger on. Abruptly he realized that he had very nearly overtaken the man ahead. Through eyes glazed with pain, he saw the other, still standing, but swaying with agony and sickness. The man seemed to be gathering his resources for some supreme effort. He tottered ahead two more steps, threw himself forward -- and disappeared! If he paused now, Johnson knew he would never be able to move again. Only will power and momentum carried him on. He stumbled and pitched forward. A searing pain traced a path through his head and he felt himself falling. never lost consciousness. The ground came up to meet him, and, with a last effort, he twisted his right shoulder inward. His cheek slid along the dirt and he lay on his side without strength. His legs pushed forward in a steady jerking movement as he fought to quiet his quivering muscles. Gradually a soothing lethargy bathed Johnson's body. His pains vanished, and the sickness left his stomach. But something was wrong -- terribly wrong! Slowly he climbed to his feet and stood looking about him. He was still on the narrow arm of the Strip. On either side of him banks of white clouds, with the consistency of thick smoke, billowed and curled about the Strip ( -- but somehow they left its pathway clear. Johnson shook his head. The wrongness, he guessed, was in his own mind. But he was unable to determine what it was. Desperately he marshalled his scattered thoughts. Nothing. He took one groping step in the direction from which he had come -- and staggered back from a wall of pain as tangible as a concrete structure. He had no choice except to go forward. There was something he must do, he realized, but what was it? With the question came the answer to what was troubling him. His memory was gone! Or, at least, a great gap had been tom through it as though carved out by a giant blade. Briefly, despair threatened to overwhelm him. "Hold it!" Johnson spoke aloud, and the words sobered him. All fears became worse when not looked at. He had to bring this disaster out into the open where he could face it; where he could assay the damage. He had always taken pride in having a logical mind, with thought processes as clear and orderly as a bookkeeper's ledger. Closing his eyes, he went swiftly over his recollections, placing each in its appropriate column. When he finished he found the balance extremely unfavorable, but not hopeless. On the asset side he remembered: His name. Donald Johnson. Right now he was on Nature's Moebius Strip, on the planet, Marlock. There was some man he had been following... The rest was on the liability side of his balance sheet. memory of his own identity was gone. There was no recollection of his reason for being on Marlock, or whom he had been following or why. That left him little with which to work. On the other hand, he mused, he might never be able to get off the Strip, so that didn't matter much. He doubted his ability to stand the stress of penetrating that electric curtain again. His body had been able to take the punishment the first time because the force had built up gradually. Going back would be something else again.  Still he planned his next actions methodically -- only in that way could he retain his sanity. He would go forward for one hour, he decided -- he checked his wrist watch and discovered it had run down -- and, if he found nothing, he would return and take his chances  on getting through the curtain. At the end of ten minutes he sighted land ahead of him. When he stepped off the Strip, he stopped in amazement! Somehow the Strip had doubled back on itself, and he had returned to his starting place! To his right was the rough wooden viewing platform, with its green umbrella gone. The stands were empty, and not a person -- tourist or concessionaire -- was in sight. As Johnson stood, perplexed, he became aware of numbness spreading over his body. He brought up his hands and watched them slowly turn blue with cold. He realized then, in a burst of wonder, that winter had come to Marlock. Yet it had been spring when he had gone out on the Strip! "##QD God, man!" the clerk exclaimed. "Have you been out in that cold without a coat and hat? It must be thirty below." Johnson was unable to answer. He had run from the Strip -- luckily he remembered its location in relation to the town -- but it must have been over a mile to the hotel. Now, as he stamped his feet and beat at his sides with numbed hands, he breathed heavily, gasping great gulps of air into his tortured lungs. "Come and warm yourself," the clerk said, leading him over to a hot water radiator. Johnson made no protest. He let the heat penetrate until it scorched the skin on his back. Only after the coldness left his body and was replaced by a drowsy inertia did his attention return to the clerk. "Did you ever see me before?" Johnson asked. The clerk shook his head. "Not that I know of." Any further investigation would have to wait until the next day, Johnson decided. He was dead tired, and he had to have some sleep. "Sign me up for a room, will you?" he asked. Once up in his room, Johnson counted his money. One hundred and fifty-four credits. Enough to buy winter clothing and pay his room and board for a week. Maybe two. What would he do if he could learn nothing about himself before then? The next day Johnson left the hotel to buy warm clothes. The town's only store was a half-block down the street -- as he remembered it, one of the big Interplanet Company stores. Johnson waited until the storekeeper finished with two of the hairy-eared natives before giving his order. As he paid for the purchase, he asked: "Have you ever seen me before?" The storekeeper glanced at him uneasily, and shifted his feet before answering. "Am I supposed to have?" Johnson ignored the question. "Where can I find the manager?" he asked, slipping into the heavy coat the clerk held for him. "Go up that stairway by the door," the clerk said. "You'll find him in his office." rriHE manager was an old man. Old and black, with the deep blackness only an Earthborn Negro possesses. But his eyes retained their youthful alertness. "Come in and sit down," he told Johnson as he looked up and saw him standing in the doorway. Johnson walked over and took the chair at the manager's left. "I've had an accident," he said, without preliminary, "and I seem to have lost my memory. Do you, by any chance, know who I am?" "itfever saw you before in my life," the manager answered. "What's your name?" "Don Johnson." "Well, at least you remember something," the old man said shrewdly. "You didn't come during the last six months, if that'll help any. There've been only two ships in that time. Both the Company's. I meet all Company ships. If you came in during the tourist season I wouldn't know." "Where else could I make inquiries?"  "Son," the old man said kindly, "there's three Earthmen on Marlock, that I know of -- besides yourself, of course -- the clerk at the hotel, my storekeeper, and myself. If you started asking questions at the hotel, you're at the end of the line now." Something in Johnson's expression caused the old man to go on. "How you fixed for money, son?" Johnson drew a deep breath. "I've got enough to last me about two weeks." The manager hesitated, and carefully surveyed the ceiling with his eyes before he spoke again. "I've always felt we Earthmen should stick together," he said. "If you want a job. I'll find something for you to do and put you on the payroll." Twenty minutes later Johnson took the job -- and twenty years later he was still working for the Company. He worked for them until... first twinge of fear came that it brought no panic. Instead it washed through his body, sharpening his reflexes and alerting his muscles for action. He never ceased to wonder about this faculty he had acquired for sensing the presence of danger. There was no doubt in his mind that it had come into active function through the influence of his environment. But it must have been an intrinsic part of him even before that, waiting to be activated. A moment before he had localized the source of his uneasiness -- an Earthman, following perhaps fifty paces behind him. The one quick glance Johnson had allowed himself told him his follower was above average in height, and lean -- with the wiry, muscular command of himself that marked him as a man capable of well-coordinated action. He fought the rising force of the next "sand-blaster" boiling in from the desert, until he was unable to take a step against it. Then he moved behind a mudpacked arm projecting from the native dwelling at his right. Every building had one of these protecting arms added on; even the concrete buildings in the newer, Earth-built section of the city conformed to the custom. The sandstorms raged intermittently on Marlock through the entire nine month summer season, and could not be ignored, either by visitors or natives. Johnson huddled against the projection, but the sand whipped around the comer and pounded at his back. Fine grains sifted through his clothing and mingled with the clammy sweat of his body. He resisted the frantic urge to scratch his itching, tormented skin, for he knew the flesh would be rubbed raw in a minute and increase the irritation to maddening proportions. As the "sand-blaster" lost its intensity, he came out from his shelter and walked away as rapidly as the diminishing force of the wind would permit. If he could reach his office before his stalker closed in, he would be safe. Suddenly a second Earthman, a short length of pipe in his right hand, came out of a doorway across the street and ran toward him. Johnson realized that here was the source of the warning his intuition had sent -- not the man behind him. TT'OR a brief instant, he weighed the situation. The man was equipped for assault, but the chances were he was interested only in robbery. Johnson could probably save himself a beating by surrendering his money without resistance. He rejected the thought. A man had to live with his pride, and his self-respect; they were more necessary than physical well-being. Setting his shoulders firmly against the wall, he waited. The man slowed to a walk when he saw his intended victim on guard. Johnson had the chance to observe him closely. He was a short and dark man, heavy of bone, with the lower half of his face thickly bearded, and sweat making a thin glistening film on his high cheekbones. Abruptly a voice said, "I wouldn't touch him if I were i you." Johnson followed the gaze of his nearattacker to his left where the lean man he had noted before stood with a flat blue pistol pointed in their direction. He held the pistol like a man who knew how to use it. "A gun!" the man in the street gasped. "Are you crazy?" "Better put it away -- fast," Johnson warned his ally. "If the native police catch you with that gun, you're in bad trouble." The lean man hesitated a moment, then shrugged and pocketed the gun. But he kept his : hand in the pocket. "I can still use it," he said, to no one in particular. "Look, chum," the bearded thug grated. "You're evidently a stranger here. Let me give you a tip. If you get caught using a gun, or even having one on you, the police'll slap you in jail with an automatic sentence of ten years. An Earthman couldn't stay alive in one of their so-called jails for a year. "Now I've got a little business to attend to with Mr. Johnson, and I don't want any interference. So be smart and run along." The smile never left the stranger's face. "Right now," he said, "I am interested in seeing that Mr. Johnson remains in good health. If you take another step toward him, I'll shoot. And, if I'm not successful in evading the police afterwards, you won't be alive to know it." "You're bluffing," the bearded man said. "I..." "Let me point out something," Johnson interrupted. "Suppose he is bluffing and doesn't use the gun: The odds are still two to one against you. Are you sure you could handle both of us -- even with the help of that pipe?" The man wasn't sure. He stood undecided, then his face showed black frustration. He mouthed a few choice phrases through his beard, turned and walked away. T#HE lean man extended his hand. "My name's Alton Hawkes." The rising whine of the next "sand-blaster" drowned out Johnson's answer. He drew his new acquaintance into the shelter of a sandarm. As they hugged the corner, they felt a third body press against them. The musky odor, mingled with the taint of old leather, told Johnson that their cpmpanion was a native. The storm eased its force and the two Earthmen raised their heads to regard the corner's other occupant. He was a mahogany brown, almost the exact color of the anklelength leather skirt he wore. "Man, he stinks!" Hawkes said. Their .visitor spread his hairy, wide-nostriled nose into the native equivalent of a smile. His hairy ears twitched with pleasure and he swelled his chest. "Blee strong all over," he said. "Want him guard?" "Why not?" Johnson answered, glancing inquiringly at Hawkes. He slipped a coin into the extended brown palm. "Guard us until we get to the big-house section." "Pale-smells be very safe," the native said. They left their shelter as the wind died down and started toward the taller buildings of the foreign section. "I must have said the right thing when I said he stinks," Hawkes remarked. "Telling a native that is the same thing, to him, as calling him strong and virile," Johnson answered. "They admit, reluctantly, that we foreigners have some good fighting qualities, but we're still regarded as unmanly because of our weak odor. Their females wouldn't look twice at either of us." When they reached one of the few three-story structures in the city, Johnson dismissed their guard. They entered the building and walked down a short corridor and through a door lettered : District Manager Interplanets Trade Company "To be frank with you," Hawkes said, as he eased his lank body into the chair Johnson offered, "I had planned to learn more about your local activities before I introduced myself. However, I've found in the past that my first judgment of a man is usually right, so I think I'll get down to business immediately." He drew a set of papers from an inside pocket and tossed them on the desk in front of Johnson. "I'm a Company Secret Service man," he said. but looked at the papers without comment. He glanced up at Hawkes. "Do you recognize either of the men in the pictures?" Hawkes asked, when he saw that Johnson had no intention of speaking. Unhurriedly Johnson picked up the papers and removed a rubber binder. He pulled out two photos and laid them on the desk in front of him. "The bearded one is the man who waylaid me," he said. "Of course." "Look at both a little closer," Hawkes suggested, "and see if you don't notice something else." Johnson studied the pictures. "There's no doubt about the first,"' he murmured. "Evidently I'm supposed to recognize the other also." Abruptly he sat erect. "They're both the same man," he exclaimed. "Only in the second picture h's clean-shaven." Hawkes nodded. "There's a story about those two pictures," he said. "But first, let me fill you in on some background. You know that Interplanets has branches on more than a thousand worlds. Because of this widespread operation it's particularly vulnerable to robbery. But it would cost more than the Company's earnings to post adequate guards on every station. And it would be impractical to depend on the protection of the local governments, many of which are extremely primitive. On the other hand, allowing themselves to be robbed with impunity would be financial suicide." Johnson nodded. "Of course." "That," Hawkes continued, "is where the Company's Secret Service comes in. It never lets up on the effort it will make to solve a robbery and bring the perpetrators to justice. And it never quits, once it begins an investigation. That policy has proven very effective in discouraging thievery. During the Company's entire tenure there have been less than a dozen unsolved thefts -- and two of them occurred right here on Marlock." "I was a clerk with the Company at the time of the second," Johnson said reminiscently. "Been with them about .three years then. That must have been over twenty years ago. I..." He paused and looked down. "I remember," he said. "The picture without the beard... That's the thief. The photograph was taken by one of the automatic cameras set up for just that purpose; we still use them. But they never found the man." "That's right," Hawkes agreed. "That robbery occurred a little over twenty years ago. And the other picture you have was taken at the time of the first robbery -- approximately twenty-five years before that." "But it isn't possible," Johnson protested. "These pictures are of the same man. And there's obviously no twenty-five year spread in age between them. Unless..." "Unless one is the other's father, or a relative that resembles him very closely?" Hawkes finished. "Look at the pictures again. There's the same scar on both foreheads, the same pockmark on the right cheek; our special section has even made measurements of the comparative sizes of the nose, ears and other features. There's no possible doubt that the pictures are of the same man,"Johnson asked. "I don't," Hawkes replied quietly. "That's one of the things I'm here to learn. But did you notice this? The man we encountered this afternoon was not only the same as the one on those pictures: he still looks the same. JtVe might, for the sake of argument, grant that a man's appearance would change only slightly in twenty-five years. But when you add another twentythree on top of that -- and he's still unchanged... ?" "If you're certain that he's the man, why don't you arrest him?" Johnson asked: "Can we arrest a man apparently about thirty years old and accuse him of a crime committed forty-eight years ago -- or even twenty-three years ago?" "I suppose not," Johnson agreed. "What do you intend to do?" "I haven't decided yet. First I'll have to learn more about the situation here. You can help me with that. Right now I'd like to know something about the native customs -- especially in regard to legal matters." i "Their laws are fairly simple," Johnson began. "There's no law against stealing or taking by force anything you can get away with. That sounds absurd by I Earth standards, it prevents the I amassing of more goods than an  individual needs, and makes for  fairly equitable distribution. If a ; native somehow acquires a sudden amount of wealth -- goods, in their case -- he must hire guards to protect it. Guarding is a major occupation. They do aa especially big business during the ' tourist seasons. In time the pay i of the guards will eat up any native's surplus. Either way -- by loss or guard pay -- the wealth is soon redistributed." "Can they even kill one another with impunity?" "No. Their laws are rigid in that respect. In the process of -- relieving another of his property, they must neither break a major bone, nor inflict permanent damage. If they disobey, they are tortured to death in the public square." Hawkes asked, "Who enforces their law?" "One of the clans. Its members are supported in their duties by all the others. And there's a permanent open season on murderers. Anyone, police or civilian may revenge a victim." "How about the law against carrying firearms?" "With them, intent is tantamount to commission," Johnson replied. "Onl-y foreigners are ever foolish enough to be caught armed. However, all native laws apply to them also. The only concession the Company has been able to force is that a foreign offender isn't tortured: He's put in jail for ten years. None ever #ve to come out." "I see," Hawkes said. "Interesting. However, the immediate situation is this. I've been sent here because the Service received reports that our bearded friend had made another appearance. And we believe it's safe to assume that he's here to attempt a third robbery. Right now we'll have to pass over his trick of longevity. Our problem is to catch him in the act. When do you think he'll make his play?" "It'll have to be some time before tomorrow noon"' Johnson answered. "Under our setup we accept furs from the natives whenever they're brought in. But we pay off only once a year. That way I'm not burdened with guarding money the whole year around. I have well over fifty thousand credits in the safe now. And tomorrow I begin paying off." "Then we'll have to be ready for him," Hawkes said, "though I don't expect him until tonight. Probably just about the time you're ready to close. He'll need you to open the safe. I can count on your help?" Johnson nodded. his office, Johnson turned to Hawkes. "I've been giving some thought to what you told me this afternoon about the robberies. I have a theory that might account for some of the things we don't understand." "Yes?" Hawkes looked closely at Johnson. "You've probably heard of our tourist attraction called Nature's Moebius Strip? As far as we know, no one has ever gone beyond a certain point -- and returned. Suppose there's a time flaw at that point -- and the bearded man has somehow learned about it. Suppose anyone completing the Moebius circle, and returning, finds -- say, twenty years have elapsed, while to him only a few minutes have passed?" "Go on." Hawkes leaned forward intently. "He makes his first holdup," Johnson continued, "and goes around the Strip. When he comes out twenty years later they're no longer looking for him. He leaves Marlock, and during the next five years he goes through the money he stole. He returns and repeats the process. This time the money lasts only three years. Now he's back to try it again. Do you see how that would tie everything up in a neat little package?" Hawkes smiled, as he relaxed and sat back. "A bit too neat," he said. "Also, you don't have an ounce of concrete evidence to back up your theory." "That's right. I don't," Johnson agreed. Outside the door a board creaked. Johnson glanced quickly across the room to where Hawkes sat with a pistol on his lap. Hawkes' eyebrows raised, but he made no sound.  kicked open and the blackbearded stranger stood framed in the doorway. "Raise 'em!" he barked. The gun in his hand was aimed at Johnson, The man took two steps into the room. Hawkes shifted slightly in his chair and the gunman's head swiveled in his direction. The slug from Hawkes' pistol made a small blue hole in the upper left comer of his forehead. The thug's face tipped up, shocked and unbelieving. He swayed slowly before he fell backward, his body rigid. His fur cap flew from his head as he struck the floor. "I thought we'd better play it safe," Hawkes said as he rose and walked over to the fallen man. He slipped his gun into his pocket before he bent and picked up the cap at his feet. He dropped it over the upturned face. For a long moment the silence held thin as the two men looked at each other. Hawkes stood, wiping his right hand on his trouser leg. Johnson toyed idly with the gun he had picked up from the desk in front of him. Finally Hawkes let his body sag into a chair at Johnson's, right. "This is always a dirty business," he said sourly. Johnson sat down also. "Did you notice the look on his face when he saw you, and you shot him?" he asked, abstractedly turning the pistol in his hand. "Funny thing. In that half-second before he fell an article I read somewhere flashed into my mind. It seems that during the French Revolution a certain doctor got to wondering just how long a man's brain remained active after his head had been cut off. He persuaded some of his friends who were due to be guillotined to cooperate in a series of tests. Each man was to keep blinking his eyes as long as possible after his head left his body, as a sign that he was still conscious. The doctor counted as high as six winks." "Very interesting, I'm sure," Hawkes said guardedly. "But a bit morbid, isn't it?" "I was wondering," Johnson went on as though he had not heard the other, "whether he was still conscious for that instant after you shot him. And if that brought the look of surprise to his face." face Johnson fully. "You're driving at something," he said sharply. "Get to the point." "Personally I've wondered at a few things about you myself," Johnson said. He held the gun steadily in his hand now, no longer pretending to play with it. "I told you that our second robbery occurred while I was a clerk with the Company," he went on. "They jerked me in to the Home Office, and for a while I had a pretty rough time... You know, when I joined the Company, I was an amnesiac. I remembered my name, but that's about all..." "No, I didn't know," Hawkes muttered, growing slightly paler. "I learned then from the Home Office that I had been a member of their Secret Service some twenty years earlier. I'd been sent here to investigate the first robbery. And I had disappeared. Naturally, they had , suspected me. "However, they had no evidence, and when I reappeared twenty years later they played it smart by just waiting, instead of arresting me. When the 'second robbery occurred, they closed in. "The only thing that saved me was the fact that tests proved my memory was really gone, and that I had told the truth -- as I knew it. From the few scraps of information I retained -- about being out on the Moebius Strip -- they and I arrived at the theory I mentioned a short time ago. I was sent back here to wait. The Company never gives up. Remember?" "Are you insinuating that I was in cahoots with this fellow here?" Hawkes asked harshly. "I'd say it was more than an insinuation," Johnson replied. "You made several other slips. In the first place, Secret Service men are usually better informed about a situation they're investigating than you seemed to be. Also, those identification papers you showed me were faked." T'HE skin along the bridge of Hawkes' hose had drawn tight, and now his lips grew narrower. "In that case, why did I save you from that man this afternoon?" he asked. "And why would I shoot him now?" "Your saving me was an act, to get into my confidence. You shot him so you wouldn't have to split the loot. I figure you were in with him on the second robbery also. There had to be someone because his memory would be gone, when he came off the Strip. But you weren't satisfied. Together you decided to pull off another robbery while you were here and double the spoils. Then you decided you wanted it all for yourself and you shot him." "There's one big flaw in your reasoning," Hawkes pointed out. "How did I plan to get away? The only ships leaving here for several months belong to the Company. Do you think I'd be foolish enough to expect them to let me slip out on one of their ships?" "No. I think you intended to go out on the Strip yourself." "All right then," Hawkes countered. "You admitted that this was a two-man job. How could I protect myself when I returned, if I knew in advance that I wouldn't know who I was, let alone what I had done?" "I'll come back, to that in a minute," Johnson said. "But now I'd advise you to drop your gun on the floor and give yourself up. You've got nothing to gain by carrying on the bluff. You know I'll never let you get to the Strip. And, once I put you on the ship, the Company will take over." Finally he smiled raggedly. "There's no use my arguing any longer," he said. "But you've made the mistake of underestimating me, my friend. I've lost my gamble. That's all. You have nothing on me. I'm not as ignorant of native law as I may have pretended. Granted, I am carrying a lethal weapon. But I'm on private property. That's legal. I shot a man. But only in defense of my own life. His gun. on the floor will prove he came in armed. So I'm clean as far as the natives are concerned. Right?" Johnson nodded. "And, as for the Company, what will they hold me for? They can't prove any connection between me and him." Hawkes indicated the man on the floor. "And this robbery -- it never actually came off. Earth laws don't allow prosecution for intent. Now, where does that leave you?" Johnson stood up. "You're right -- as far as you went," he said. "But, returning to your earlier question about one man pulling this job, I asked myself how I would do it, if it had to be done alone. And I found a way. You'd probably figure the same one. Now I'll take that paper in your pocket. It will serve very well as a confession." Suddenly Hawkes' right hand streaked toward a side pocket. Johnson leaned forward and brought the flat of his gun across the other's temple. As Hawkes sagged, Johnson ripped open his coat and took out a sealed envelope. He removed a sheet of paper and read: This has been written ior my own information. My name is Alton Hawkes. I have robbed the Interplanets Company and gone out on the Strip with the money. When I read this my memory will be gone and twenty years will have elapsed. Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. (Phone GRamercy #-#) ingredients... carefully selected from thoughtripened ideas... employing only the most convincing characters and conflicts, human or otherwise... and blended by master craftsmen into intellectually and emotionally nutritious stories. hands in every stage, of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction.   The price is # a copy, # a year. 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Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Roiloruelan (not a religious organisation), an age-old brotherhood of learning, have proservad this secret wisdom in thair arehives for oentuiies. They bow invite you to shore the practiiaJ helpvlaes of their taaebing. Write today for a ire copy Oi the book, "The Msalaty ol Lile." Within its pages may Ue a new Ilia o opportunity iot you. Address: Scribe A.X.R. j j San Jose, California, U. S. A.  I Please send copy of scaled booklet, "The Mastery of Life," which I I shall read as directed. I Jame! Address I City I ' How I foxed the Navy by Arthur Godfrey The Nay alniom aeulited me. I shudder t think of it. My crazy career could have ended ri:ht there. Who knows, I micht still be bum ming Chesterfields instead of selling them. To be scQllled by the Navy you've ettber got to do something wrong or neglect to do something right. They've got you both ways. For my part, I neglected to finish high sebo Ordinarily, a man can get along without a high school diploma. Plenty of men have. Bat not in the Navy, At least not in the TJ. S. Navy Materiel School at Bellevue, #). C., back in #. In those days a bluejacket had to have a mind like Einstein's. And I didn't. "Godfrey," said the lieutenant a few days after I'd checked in, "either yon leara maili mtftics and learn it fast or out you go. I'll give you six weeks." This, I figured, was it. For a guy who bad to lake oil his shoes to count above ten, it was an impossible assignuMiH. I was ready to turn in say belMseitonis. Bm an ad in a magatitie stopped me. Here, it said, it your chance le gel special training in almoei any subjerl -- maibemalics iiKluded. I hopped on it. Within a week I was enrellcd wiib the InlematieMl Correspoudenre Schools studying algebra, geometry and trig for all I was wertk, Caaae wcokend liberty, I studied. Came a holiday, I studied. Came the end of the six weeks, I was lop man in tho class. Within six weeks I had maMered two years of high school math, thanks to the training Id gotten. LC.S. made the impossible -- easy! Fite. iastroM atabc on career Hut Mitefcsts you. Ala K-poge. pocketSKc gsHte to advaacefnent, "Hew to Sucteed. lust outl the coopM! Vol, #, No. I gauxy by Isaac Asimov # by H. L Gold # by G. A. Morris # by J. B. Woodley # , . by Willy Ley # by H. L. GoM # by Groff Conkin # #I Hudson Street. New York #, N, Y. #c pet copy. Subscriptions: '# P' #." year in the United States. Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and J-SElsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office. New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing CorporatloR. Robeit Gumn. president. A' translaiion, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed Siaryied envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magawtic fiction, and any similatiiy between characKrs and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the C Title Reg. U.#. Pet. OH. as Charles Fort, have insisted that Earth has been visited by aliens from space. If their evidence weren't so unremittingly spectacular, they would have seen the truth r Earth is being invaded now! No giant ships arc raining death-rays from the sky, no land ironclads flattening our cities and laying waste the countryside. That's the truly devilish part of the invasion -- it's a sneak attack, utterly silent and unnoticeable. While the stormy petrels of science are pointing out vast footsteps and the craters of crashed ships, the weapons of conquest are in yovr home. The clues are outwardly so insignificant that only a squinting eye and a suspicious mind can detect them, let alone guess their sinister meaning. Let's piece the data together calmly, without panic. It may not be as evil as it seems, but I doubt that. As a child, did you or did you not have more marbles, jacks, tops and checkers than you ever bought? Of course you did. and so did every other child you knew. That doesn't sound like much to get excited about, which is exactly why the plot is more deadly than outright assault: The invasion weapons are purposely ordinary to keep us from becoming aware of the danger. Use this checklist. It is admittedly incomplete. No doubt you can add many more. purchased a box of # paper clips. We have not bought a single one since. A special case, you may say -- they're sent in with manuscripts. Well, then, answer this: Whenever you needed a paper clip, have you ever failed to find one somewhere or other?  If you can't locate a rubber band, yours is an exceptional home -- and yet when, if ever, did you buy any?  Is it or is it not a fact that you can always haul out a piece of string from drawer or toolbox? Did you buy it at a store or just accumulate it?  Do you or do you not have a collection of pencils, of which you bought none or very few? , How many clothes hangers did you yourself buy?  Wrapping and tissue paper?  Mucilage, glue, paste?  Nails, screws, toothpicks? These are the deceptively innocent ingredients of the plot to (ConL on page #)  '. , ' "H I The caves of steel  Beginning A #-Part Serial  Future New York would have been a great place to live in... if it weren't for the deadly helpfulness of its robots... and the fact that someone chose the worst man in the world to murder!  # Right away. Soon as you come his desk when he became  aware of R. Sammy watching him expectantly. The dour lines of his long face hardened. "What do you want?" "The boss wants you, Ltjc. "All right." R. Sammy stood there with his unchanging blank grin. Baley said, "All right, I told you! Go away!" R. Sammy turned and left to go about his duties. Baley wondered irritably why those duties couldn't be done by a man, He paused to examine the contents of his tobacco pouch and made a mental calculation. At two pipefuls a day, he could stretch it to next quota day. Then Baley stepped out from behind his railing -- he'd earned a railed corner two years ago -- and walked the length of the common room. Simpson looked up from a merc-pool file as he passed. "Boss wants you, Lije." "I know, R. Sammy told me." A closely coded tape reeled out of the merc-pool's vitals as the small instrument searched and analyzed its "memory" for the desired information, which was stored in the tiny vibration patterns of the gleaming mercury surface within. "I'd kick R. Sammy's armored behind if I weren't afraid of breaking a leg," said Simpson. "I saw Yiuce Barrett the other day." Baley's long face grew longer. "How's he doing?" "Working a delivery-tread on the yeast farms. He asked if there was any chance he could get his ob back. Qr any job in the Department. What could I tell him? R. Sammy's doing Vince's job now and that's that. A damned shame. Vince is a bright kid. Everyone liked him." Baley shrugged. "It's something we're all living through," he said in a manner stiffer than he intended or felt. He'd liked Vince, too, and hated the vacantly grinning robot that had replaced the boy. His own foot had itched in much the same fashion as Simpson's. Not just for R. Sammy, either. For any of the damned robots. T he boss rated a private ofletters, but individually removable. The rest underneath, "Commissioner of Police, City of New York," was carefully etched into the glass. The jobs were permanent: the job-holders were not. And with robots taking over more and more human occupations -- Baley stepped into the office and said, "You want to see me, Commissioner?" Enderby looked up. He wore spectacles because his eyes were sensitive and couldn't take the usual contact lenses. It was only after one got used to the sight of them that one could take in the rest of the face, which was quite undistinguished. Baley had a strong notion that the Commissioner valued his glasses for the personality they lent him and suspected that his eyeballs weren't as sensitive as all that. The Commissioner looked definitely nervous. He straightened his cuiTs, leaned back, and said, too heartily, "Sit down, Lije. Sit down." Baley sat down stiffly and waited. Enderby said, "How's Jessie and the boy?" "Fine," said Baley hollowly. "Just fine. And your family?" "Fine," echoed Enderby. "Just fine." It had been a false start; Baley thought: Something's wrong with his face. He said. "Commissioner, I wish you wouldn't send R. Sammy out after me." "Well, you know how I feel about those things, Lije. But he's been put here and I've got to use him for something." . "It's uncomfortable. Commissioner. He tells me you want me and then he stands there. I have to tell him to go or he just keeps on standing there." "Oh, that's my fault, Lije. I gave him the message to deliver and forgot to tell him specifically to get back to his job when he was through." Baley sighed. The fine wrinkles about his intensely brown eyes grew more pronounced. "Anyway you wanted to see me." "Yes, Lije," said the Commissioner, "but not for anything easy." He stood up, turned away, and walked to the wall behind his desk. He touched an inconspicuous contact-switch and a section of the wall grew transparent. Baley blinked at the unexpected insurge of grayish light. The Commissioner smiled. "I had this specially arranged last year, Lije. I don't think I've shown it to you before. Come over here and take a look. In the old days, all rooms had things like this. They were called 'windows.' Did you know that?" "I've heard of them," Baley said. He had viewed many historical novels. "Come here." Baley squirmed, but did as he was told. There was something indecent about exposing the privacy of a room to the outside world. Sometimes the Commissioner carried his affectation of Medievalism to a drastic extreme. Like his glasses, Baley thought. That was it! That was what made him look wrong! " Commissioner, but you're wearing new glasses, aren't you?" The Commissioner stared at him in mild surprise, took off his glasses, looked at them and then at Baley. Without his glasses, his round face seemed rounder and his chin a trifle more pronounced. He looked vaguer, too, as his eyes failed to focus properly. "Yes." He put his glasses back on his nose, then added with real anger, 'I broke my old ones three days ago. What with one thing and another, I wasn't able to replace them till this rhoming. Lije, those three days were hell." "On account of the glasses?" "And other things, too. I'm getting to that." He turned to the window and so did Baley. With mild shock, Baley realized it was raining. For a minute, he was lost in the spectacle of water dropping from the sky, while the Commissioner exuded a kind of pride, as though the phenomenon were a matter of his own arranging. "This is the third time this month I've watched it rain. Quite a sight, don't you think?" Against his will, Baley had to admit to himself that it was impressive. In his forty-two years, he had rarely seen rain or any of the phenomena of nature, for that matter. He said, "It always seems a waste for all that water to come down on the city. It should restrict itself to the reservoirs." "Lije," said the Commissioner, !'you're a Modernist. That's your trouble. In Medieval times, people lived in the open. I don't mean on the farms only. I mean in the cities, too. Even in New York. When it rained, they didn't think of it as waste. They gloried in it. They lived close to nature. It's healthier, better. The troubles of modem life come from being divorced from nature. Read up on the Coal Century sometime." Baley had. He had heard many people moaning about the invention of the atomic pile. He moaned about it himself when things went wrong, or when he got tired. Moaning like that was a built-in facet of human nature. Back in the Coal Century, people moaned about the invention of the steam engine. In one of Shakespeare's plays, a character moaned about the invention of gunpowder. A thousand years in the future, they'd be moaning about the invention of other things. The hell with it. He said, grimly, "Look, Julius." It wasn't his habit to get friendly with the Commissioner during office hours, however many "Lije"s the Commissioner threw at him, but something special seemed called for here. "You're talking about everything except what I came in here for and it's worrying me. What is it?" The Commissioner said, 'Til get to it, Lije. Let me do it my way. It's trouble." "Sure. What isn't on this planet? More trouble with the Rs?" "In a way, yes, Lije. I stand here and wonder how much more trouble the old world can take. When I put in this window, I wasn't just letting in the sky once in a while. I let in the City. I look at it and I wonder what will become of it in another century." the other's sentimentality, but he found himself staring outward in fascination. Even dimmed by the weather, the City was a tremendous thing to see. The Police Department was in the upper levels of City Hall, and City Hall reached high. From the Commissioner's window, the neighboring towers fell short and the tops were visible. They were so many fingers, groping upward. Their walls were blank, featureless. They were the outer shells of a giant human hive. "In a way," said the Commissioner, "I'm sorry it's raining. We can't see Spacetown." Baley looked westward, but the horizon had closed down. New York's towers grew misty and came to an end against blank whiteness. "I know what Spacetown is like," Baley replied. "I like the picture from here," said the Commissioner. "It can just be made out in the gap between the two Brunswick Sectors. Low domes spread out. It's the difference between us and the Spacers. We reach high and crowd close. With them, each family has a dome for itself. One family, one house. And land between each dome. Have you ever spoken to any of the Spacers, Lije?" "A few times. About a month ago, I spoke to one right here on your intercom." "Yes, I remember. But then I'm just getting philosophical. We and they -- different ways of life," Baley's stomach was beginning to constrict a little. The more devious the Commissioner's approach, the deadlier he suspected might be the conclusion. He said, "All right. But what's so surprising about it? You can't Earth in little domes. They've got space on their worlds, so let them live their way." The Commissioner walked to his chair and sat down. His eyes looked unblinkingly at Baley, shrunken a bit by the concave lenses in his spectacles. He said, "Not everyone is that tolerant about differences in culture. Either among us or among the Spacers." "All right. So what?" "Three days ago, a Spacer died." Now it was coming. The comers of Baley's thin lips tightened a trifle, but the effect upon his long, sad face was unnoticeable. He said, "Too bad. Something contagious, I hope. A virus. A cold, perhaps." The Commissioner looked startled. "What are you talking about?" Baley didn't care to explain. The efficiency with which the Spacers had bred disease out of their societies was well known. The care with which they avoided contact with disease-riddled Earthmen, as far as possible, was even better known. But, then, sarcasm was lost on the Commissioner. "I'm just talking," Baley said. "What did he die of?" He turned back to the window. The Commissioner said, "He died of a missing chest. Someone had used a blaster on him." asked, without turning, "What are you talking about?" "You're a plainclothesman. You know what murder is." Baley abruptly turned. "But a Spacer! Three days ago?" "Yes." "Who did it? How?" "The Spacers say it was an Earthman." "It can't be." "Why not? You don't like the Spacers. I don't. Who on Earth does? Someone didn't like them a little too much, that's all." "Sure, but -- " "There was the fire at the Los Angeles factories. There was the Berlin R-smashing. There were the riots in Shanghai." "Well?" "It all points to rising discontent. Maybe to some sort of organization." Baley said, "Commissioner, I don't get this. Are you testing me for some reason?" The Commissioner looked honestly bewildered. "Three days ago, a Spacer was murdered and the Spacers think the murderer is an Earthman. Till now, nothing's come out. Is that right? Commissioner, that's unbelievable. A thing like this would blow New York off the face of the planet if it really happened!" The Commissioner shook his head. "It's not as simple as that. Look, Lije, I've been away three days. I've been in conference with the Mayor. I've been out to Spacetown. I've been down in Washington, talking to the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation." "Oh? And what do the Terries have to say?" "They say it's our baby. Spacetown is under New York jurisdiction." "But with extraterritorial rights." "I know. I'm coming to that." The Commissioner's eyes fell away from Baley's flinty stare. He seemed to regard himself as having been suddenly demoted to the position of Baley's underling, and Baley behaved as though he accepted the fact, "The Spacers can run the show," said Baley. "Wait a minute, Lije," pleaded the Commissioner. "Don't rush me. I'm trying to talk this over, friend to friend. I want you to know my position. I was there when the news broke. I had an appointment with him -- with Roj Ncmennuh Sarton." "The victim?" "That's right." The Commissioner groaned. "Five minutes more and I myself would have discovered the body. What a shock that would have been! As it was, it was brutal. Brutal! They met me and told me. It started a three-day nightmare, Lije. That on top of having everything blur on me and having no time to replace my glasses for days. That won't happen again, at least. I've ordered three pairs."  ture he conjured up of the event. He could see the tall, fair Spacers approaching the Commissioner with the news and breaking it to him in their unvarnished emotionless way. Julius would remove his glasses and polish them. Inevitably, under the impact of the event, he would drop them, then look down at the broken remnants with a quiver of his soft, full lips. Baley was quite certain that for five minutes, anyway, the Commissioner was much more disturbed over his glasses than over the murder. The Commissioner was saying, "It's a devil of a position. As you say, the Spacers have extraterritorial rights. They can insist on their own investigation, make whatever report they wish to their home governments. The Outer Worlds could use this as an excuse to pile on indemnity charges. You know how that would be taken by Earth." "It would be political suicide if the President agreed to pay." "And another kind of suicide not to." "You don't have to draw me a diagram," said Baley. He had been a small boy when the gleaming cruisers from outer space sent down their soldiers into Washington, New York, Moscow, Paris, London and Canton to collect what they claimed was theirs. "Then you see," the Commissioner said. "Pay or not pay, it means trouble. The only way out is to find the murderer and hand him over to the Spacers. It's up to us." "Why not give it to the T.B.I. even if it is legally within our jurisdiction? There's the question of interstellar relations -- " "The T.B.I. won't touch it. This is hot and it's in our lap." For a moment, he lifted his head and peered keenly at his subordinate. "And it's not good, Lije. Every one of us stands the chance of being out of a job." "Replace all of us?" Baley demanded. "Yeast! The trained men to do it with don't exist." "Robots," said the Commissioner. "They exist." "What?" "R. Sammy is just a beginning. He runs errands. Other robots can patrol the Expressways, control traffic -- I hear it's been tried in other cities experimentally and it seems to work. There are robots that can do your work. Yes, and mine. Don't think we can't be declassihed. And at our age, to wind up in the labor pool -- " Baley said gruffly, "All right!" The Commissioner looked abashed. "Sorry, Lije." Baley nodded and tried not to think of his father. The Commissioner knew the facts from his Service file, of course. "You evidently think all this replacement business is threatening you ' and me," Baley said. "There's a limit to how far it can go." Lije: It's been getting worse and worse ever since the Spacers came, twenty-five years ago. It's just beginning to reach higher, that's all. If we muff this case, it's a big, long step toward the point where we can stop looking forward to collecting our pensiontab booklets. On the other hand, Lije, if we handle the matter well, it can push the danger far into the future. And it would be a particular break for you." "For me?" asked Baley. "You'll be the operative in charge, Lije." "I don't rate it, Commissioner. I'm only a C-#." "You want a C-# rating, don't you?" Did he? Baley knew the privileges of a C-#. A seat on the Expressway in the rush hour, not just from ten to four. Higher up on the list-of-choice at the Section Kitchens. Maybe even a chance at a better apartment and a quota ticket to the Solarium levels for Jessie. "I want it." he said. "Sure. But what would I get if I couldn't break the case?" "Why wouldn't you break it, Lije?" wheedled the Commissioner. "You're a good man." "But there are half a dozen men with higher ratings irf my Department Section. Why should they be passed over?" The Commissioner folded his hands. "Two reasons. You're not just another detective to me, Lije. We're friends, too. I'm not forgetting we were in college together. Sometimes it may look as though I have forgotten, but that's the fault of rating. I'm Commissioner and you know what that means. But I'm still your friend and this is a tremendous chance for the right person. I want you to have it." "That's one reason," said Baley, without warmth. "The second reason is that I need a favor." "What sort of favor?" "The Spacers agreed not to report the murder and to leave the investigation in our hands. In return, they insist that one of their own agents be in on the deal -- the whole deal." "It sounds like they don't trust us altogether." "Surely you see their point. If this is mishandled, a number of them will be in trouble with their own governments. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, Lije. well." "I'm sure they do, Commissioner. That's the trouble with them." rHE Commissioner looked blank at that, but went on, Spacer partner, Lije?" "You're asking that as a favor?" "Yes, I'm asking you to take the job with all the conditions the Spacers have set up." "I'll take a Spacer partner. Commissioner." "Thanks, Lije. He'll have to live with you." "Oh, now, hold on!" "I know, I know. But you've got a large apartment, Lije. Three rooms. Only one child. He'll be no trouble at all. And it's necessary." "Jessie won't like it." "You tell Jessie -- the Commissioner was so earnest that his eyes seemed to bore holes through the glass discs blocking his stare -- "that if you do this for me. I'll do what I can to jump you a grade. C-#, Lije. C-#!" "All right, Commissioner, it's a deal." Baley half-rose from his chair, caught the look on Enderby's face and sat down again. "There's something else?" Slowly, the Commissioner nodded. "One more item." "Which is?" "The name of your partner." "What difference does that make?" "The Spacers," said the Commissioner, "have peculiar ways. The partner they're supplying isn't -- isn't -- " Baley's eyes opened wide. "Just a minute!" "You've got to, Lije. You've iot to. There's no way out." "Stay at my apartment? A thing like that?" "Lije, I can't trust anyone else in this. Do I have to spell it out for you? We've ot to work with the Spacers. We've got to succeed, if we're to keep the indemnity ships away from Earth. But we can't succeed just any old way. You'll be partnered with one of their Rs. If h breaks the case, if he can report that we're incompetent, we're ruined, anyway. We as a Department. You see that, don't you? So you've got a delicate job on your hands. You have to work with him, yet see to it that you solve the case and not he. Understand?" "You mean cooperate with him one hundred per cent, except that I cut his throat? Pat him on the back with a knife in my hand?" "What else can we do? There's no other way out." Lije Baley stood irresolute. "I don't know what Jessie will say." "I'll talk to her. if you want me to." "No, Commissioner." He drew a deep, sighing breath. "What's my partner's name?" "R. Daneel Oliva." Baley said. "This isn't a time for euphemism. Commissioner. I'm taking the job, so let's use his full name. Robot Daneel Olivaw." T here was the usual crowd on the Expressway; the standees on the lower level and those with seat-privileges above. A continuous trickle of humanity filtered off the Expressway, across the decelerating strips to localways or into the Stationaries that led under arches or over bridges into the endless mazes of the City Sections. Another trickle, just as continuous, worked inward from the other side, across the accelerating strips and onto the Expressway. There were the infinite lights, the luminous walls and ceilings that seemed to drip cool, even phosphorescence; the flashing advertisements screaming for attention; the harsh, steady gleam of the "lightworms" that directed Most of all, there was the noise that was inseparable from ing. laughing, coughing, calling, humming, breathing. He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime's practice. Children learned to "hop the strips" as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds, he had reached the final sixty-mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the Expressway. No directions to Spacetown, he thought. No need for directions. If you had business there, you knew the way. If you didn't know the way, you had no business there. When Spacetown was first established some twenty-five years earlier, there had been a strong tendency to make a showpiece out of it. The hordes of the City herded in that direction. The Spacers put a stop to that. Politely -- they were always polite -- but without any compromise with tact, they put up a force barrier between themselves and the City. They established a combination Immigration Service and Customs Inspection. It gave rise to dissatisfaction, naturally. More dissatisfaction than it deserved. Baley remembered the Barrier Riots. He had been prt of the mob that had suspended itself from the rails of the Expressways, crowded onto the seats in disregard of rating privileges, run recklessly along and across the strips at the risk of a broken body, and remained just outside the Spacetown Barrier for two days, shouting slogans and destroying City property out of sheer frustration. Baley could still sing the chants of the time if he put his mind to it. There was "Man was born on Mother Earth, do you hear?" to an old folk-tune called "Hinkydinky-parlcy-voo." Man was born oq Mother Earth, do you hear? Earth's the world that gave him birth, do you hear? Spacer, get yon oil the face Of Mother Earth and into space. Dirty Spacer, do you hear?" verses. A few were witty, most were stupid, many were obscene. Every one, however, ended with "Dirty Spacer, do you hear?" Dirty, dirty. It was the futile throwing back at the Spacers their most keenly felt insult -- their insistence on considering the natives of Earth as disgustingly diseased. The Spacers didn't leave, of course. Earth's outmoded fleet had long since learned that it was suicide to challenge any Outer World ship. Earth planes had angrily ventured over Spacetown in the very early days of its establishment and simply disappeared. Only a shredded wingtip or two had tumbled down to the ground. And no mob could be so maddened as to forget the effect of the partable sub-etheric disruptors used on Earthmen in those days. So the Spacers sat behind their Barrier, which itself was the product of their own advanced science, and which no method known on Earth could duplicate or break. They just waited stolidly on the other side of the Barrier until the City quieted the mob with somno-vapor and retchgas. The below-level penitentiaries rattled afterward with ringleaders, malcontents, and people who had been picked up only because they were nearest at hand. They were all set free before long. After a proper interval, the Spacers eased their restrictions. The Barrier was removed and the City Police entrusted with maintaining Spacetown's arrogant, threatening isolation. Now, thought Baley, things might take a reverse trend. If the Spacers seriously thought that an Earthman had entered Spacetown and committed murder, the Barrier might go up again. It would be bad, he thought, knowing just how grotesque an understatement that was. He lifted himself onto the Expressway platform, made his way through the standees to the tight spiral ramp that led to the upper level, and sat down, He didn't put his rating ticket in his hatband till they passed the last of the Hudson sections. A C-# had no seat rights east of the Hudson and west of Long Island, and although there was ample seating available, one of the Way guards would have automatically ousted him. People were increasingly petty about rating privileges and, in all honesty, Baley lumped himself in with "people." riHE air made the characteristic whistling noise as it frictioned off the curved windshields set above the back of every seat. It made talking a chore, but was no bar to thinking when you were used to it. Baley's thinking was interrupted by a female shriek. A woman had dropped her handbag; he saw it for an instant, a pastel pink blob against the dull gray of the strips. A corner of Baley's mouth quirked. She might catch up with it, if she were clever enough and if passengers did not accidentally kick it this way and that. He would never know whether she did or not. The scene was already half a mile to the rear. Chances were she wouldn't. IJe knew the statistics -- an article was dropped on the strips somewhere in the City every three minutes and only one out of seventeen was recovered. The Lost and Found Department was among the biggest bureaus in the City. It was just one more complication of modern life. It was simpler once, Baley thought. That was what made Medievalists. Most Earthmen were Medievalists in one way or another. It was an easy thing to be when it meant looking back to a time when Earth was the world and not just one of fifty. The misfit one of fifty at that. Medievalism took different forms. To the unimaginative Julius Enderby, it meant the adoption of anachronisms -- spectacles, windows. To Baley, it was the study of history, particularly the history of folkways. The City now -- New York City, in which he lived and had his being. Larger than any City but Los Angeles. More populous than any but Shanghai. It was only three centuries old. To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn't been a City. There were no Cities then, just huddles of dwellings large and small, open to the air. They were something like the Space Domes, only much different, of course. These huddles -- the largest barely were scattered all over Earth by the thousands. By modem standards, they had been completely inefficient economically. on Earth with increasing popsupported by the planet by progressive lowering of the standard of living. When the population semi-starvation becomes the norm. A radical change had to take place in Man's culture, particularly when it turned out that the Outer Worlds (which had merely been Earth's colonies a thousand years before) were serious about their immigration restrictions. The radical change had been the gradual formation of the Cities over a thousand years of Earth's history. Efficiency implied bigness. Even in Medieval times, that had been realized, perhaps unconsciously. Home industry gave way to factories, and factories to continental industries. Think of the inefficiency of a hundred thousand houses for a hundred thousand families as compared with a hundred-thousand-unit Section; a book-film collection in each house, as compared with a Section film-concentrate: independent video for each family as compared with video-piping systems. For that matter, take the simple folly of endleSs duplication of kitchens and bathrooms as compared with the thoroughly efficient diners and shower rooms made possible by City culture. More and more, the villages, towns and "cities" of Earth died and were swallowed by the Cities. Even the early prospects of atomic war only slowed the trend. City culture meant optimum distribution of food, increasing utilization of yeasts and hydroponics. New York City spread over two thousand square miles and at the last census, its population was well over twenty hundred cities on Earth with an Each City became a semi-autonomous unit, economically all but self-sufficient. It could roof itself in. gird itself about, burrow itself under. It became a cave, a tremendous, self-contained cave of steel and concrete. It could lay itself out scientifically...At the center was the enormous complex of administrative offices. In careful orientation to one another and to the whole were the large residential Sections connected and interlaced by the Expressway and the Localways. Toward the outskirts were the factories, the hydroponic plants, the yeast-culture vats, the power plants. Through all this ran the water-pipes and sewageducts, schools, prisons and shops, power lines and communicationbeams. No doubt about it, the City was the culmination of Man's mastery over the environment. Not space-travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City. Earth's population lived outside the Cities. Outside was the wilderness, the open sky that few men could face with an#rthing like equanimity. To be sure, the open space was necessary. It held the water that men must have, the coal and the wood that were the ultimate raw materials for plastics and for the eternally growing yeast. (Petroleum had long vanished, but oil-rich strains of yeast were an adequate substitute.) The land between the Cities still held the mines, and was still used to a larger extent than most men realized for growing food and grazing stock. It was inefficient, but beef, pork and grain always found a luxury market and could be used for export purposes. But few humans were required to run the mines and ranches, to exploit the farms and pipe the water, and these supervised at long distance. Robots did the work better and required less. Robots. That was the one huge irony. It was on Earth that the positronic brain had been in vented and on Earth that robots had first been put to productive use. Not on the Outer Worlds, though the Outer Worlds always acted as if robots had been born of their culture. In a way, of course, the culmination of robot economy had taken place on the Outer Worlds. Here on Earth, robots had always been restricted to the mines and farmlands. Only in the last quarter-century, under the urgings of the Spacers, had robots filtered their slow way into the Cities. The Cities were good. Everyone but the Medievalists knew that they had no reasonable substitute. The only trouble was that they wouldn't stay good. Earth's population was still rising. Some day. with all that the Cities could do, the available calories per person would simply fall below basic subsistence level. It was all the worse because of the existence of the Spacers, the descendants of the early emigrants from Earth, living in luxury on their underpopulated robot-ridden worlds out in space. They were coolly determined to keep the comfort that grew out of the emptiness of their worlds, and for that purpose they kept their birth-rate down and immigrants from teeming Earth out. And this -- A nudge at Baley's unconscious warned him that he was approaching the Newark Section. If he stayed where he was much longer, he'd find himself speeding southwestward to the Trenton Section turning of the Way, through the heart of the warm and musty-odored yeast country. It was a matter of timing -- so long to shinny down the steps, so long to squirm through the grunting standees, so long to slip along the railing and out an opening, so long to hop across the decelerating strips. When he was done, he was precisely at the offshooting of the proper Stationary. At no time did he time his steps consciously. If he had, he would probably have missed. usual semi-isolation. Only a policeman was with him inside the Stationary and. except for the unnoticed whirring of the Expressway, there was an almost uncomfortable silence. The policeman approached, and Baley flashed his badge impatiently. The policeman lifted his hand in permission to pass on. The passage narrowed and curved sharply three or four times. That was obviously deliberate. Mobs of Earthmen couldn't gather in it and direct charges were impossible. A Spacer was standing at the point where a series of doors marked the openings to the open air and the domes of Spacetown. He was dressed in Earth fashion, trousers tight at the waist, loose at the ankle and color-striped down the seam of each leg. He wore an ordinary Textron shirt, open collar, seam-zipped and ruffled at the wrist, but the way he stood, the way he held his head, the calm and unemotional lines of his broad, high-cheekboned face, the careful set of his short, bronze hair lying flatly backward and without a part marked him as a Spacer. Baley approached and said in a monotone, "I am Plainclothesman Elijah Baley, Police Department, City of New York, Rating C-#." He showed his credentials. "I have been instructed to meet R. Daneel Olivaw at Spacetown Approachway." He looked at his watch. "I am a little early. May I request, the announcement of my presence?" The Spacer, who had listened politely, said, "It will not be necessary. I have been waiting for you." Baley's hand went up automatically, then dropped. So did his long chin. He didn't quite manage to say anything. The words froze. The Spacer said, "I shall introduce myself. I am R. Daneel Olivaw." "Yes? Am I making a mistake? I thought the first initial -- " "Quite so. I am a robot." hair, Baley smoothed it back unnecessarily. Then he held the hand out. "I'm sorry, Mr. Olivaw. I don't know what I was thinking of. I am Elijah Baley, your partner." The robot's hand closed on his with a smoothly increasing pressure that reached a comfortably friendly peak, then declined. "I seem to detect disturbance. May I ask that you be frank with me? It is best to have as many relevant facts as possible in a relationship such as ours. And it is customary on my world for partners to call one another by the familiar name. I trust that that is not counter to your own customs." "It's just that you don't look like a robot," said Baley desperately. "And that disturbs you?" Tt shouldn't, I suppose, Da -- Daneel. Are they all like you on your world?" "There are individual differences, Elijah, as with men." "Our own robots -- Well, you can tell they're robots. You look like a Spacer." "Oh, I see. You expected a rather crude model and were surprised. Yet it is only logical that our people should use a robot of pronounced humanoid characteristics in this case if we expected to avoid unpleasantness. Is that not so?" It was certainly so. An undisguised robot roaming the City would be in quick trouble. Baley said, "Yes." "Then let us leave now. Elijah." They made their way back to the Expressway. Robot Daneel caught the purpose of the accelerating strips and maneuvered along them with a quick proficiency. Baley, who had begun by moderating his speed, ended by hastening it in annoyance. He reached the endless cars of Expressway and scrambled aboard with what amounted to outright recklessness. The robot followed easily. Baley was red. He swallowed twice and said, 'Til stay down here with you." "Down here?" The robot, apparently oblivious to both the noise and the rhythmic swaying of the platform, said, "Is my information wrong? I was told that a rating of C-S entitled one to a seat on the upper level under certain conditions." "You're right. I can go up there, but you won't know where to get off if I'm not with you." "Why can I not go up with you?" "It takes a C-#, Daneel." Talking was difficult. The hiss of frictioning air was louder on the less-shielded lower level and Baley was understandably anxious to keep his voice low. R. Daneel said, "Why should I not be a C-#? I am your partner and, consequently, of equal rank. I was given this." From an inner shirt pocket he produced a rectangular credential card, quite genuine. The name given was Daneel Olivaw, without the all-important initial. The rating was C-#. "Come on up," said Baley woodenly. Seated. Baley looked straight ahead, angry with himself, very conscious of the robot sitting next to him. He had been caught twice. He had not recognized R. Daneel as a robot: he had not guessed the logic that demanded R. Daneel be given C-S rating. The trouble was, of course, that he was not the plainclothesman of popular myth. He was not incapable of surprise, imperturbable of appearance, infinite of adaptability, and lightning of mental grasp. He had never sup' #I posed he was, but he had never regretted the lack before. What made him regret it was that, to all appearances, R. Daneel Olivaw was that very myth embodied. He had to be. He was a robot. Baley began to find excuses for himself. He was accustomed to the robots like R. Sammy at the office. He had expected a creature with a skin of hard and glossy plastic, nearly dead white in color. He had expected an expression fixed at an unreal level of inane good humor. He had expected jerky, faintly uncertain motions. R. Daneel was none of that. Baley risked a quick sideglance at the robot. R. Daneel turned simultaneously to meet his eye and nod gravely. His lips had moved naturally when he had spoken and did not simply remain parted as those of Earth robots did. There had been glimpses of an articulating tongue. Baley thought: Why does he have to sit there so calmly? This must be something completely new to him -- noise, lights, crowds. Baley got up, brushed past R. Daneel and said, "Follow me." Off the Expressway, down the decelerating strips. Baley thought: Good Lord, what do I tell Jessie, an # rway? The coming of the robot had rattled that thought out of his head, but it was coming back with sickening urgency, now that they were heading down the Localway that led into the Lower Bronx Section. He said, "This is all one building, you know. Daneel; everything you see, the whole City. The Expressways go continuously, night and day, at sixty miles an hour. There are nine hundred and fifty miles of it altogether and thousands of miles of Localways." Any minute now, Baley thought, ril be figuring out how many tons of yeastproduct New York eats per day and how many cubic feet of water we drink and how many megawatts of power the atomic piles deliver per hour. Daneel said, "I was informed of this and other similar data in my briefing." Baley thought: Well, that covers the food, drink, and power situation, too, I suppose. Why try to impress a robot? T hey were at East #nd Street and, in not more than two hundred yards, they would be at the elevator banks thatfed those steel and concrete layers of apartments that included his own. He was on the point of saying, "This way," when he was stopped by a knot of people gathering force-door of one of the many retail departments that lined the ground levels solidly in this Section. He asked of the nearest in an automatic tone of authority, "What's going on?" The man he addressed, who was standing on tiptoe, said, "Damned if I know. I just got here." Someone else said excitedly, "They got those lousy Rs in there. I think maybe they'll throw them out here. Boy, I'd like to take them apart." Baley looked nervously at Daneel, but if the latter caught the significance of the words or even heard them, he did not show it. Baley plunged into the crowd. "Let me through. Police!" They made way. Baley caught words behind him. " -- take them apart nut by nut, split them down the seams slowlike -- " And someone else laughed. Baley turned a little cold. The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control. Occasionally, built-up inhibitions exploded. He remembered the Barrier riots. Reasons for anti-robot rioting certainly existed. Men who found themselves faced with the prospect of declassification, after half a lifetime of effort, could not decide cold-bloodedly that individual robots were not to blame. Individual robots could at least be struck at. One could not strike at something called "governmental policy" or at a slogan like "Higher production with robot labor." The government called it growing pains. It shook its collective head sorrowfully and assured everyone that, after a necessary period of adjustment, a new and better life would exist for all. But the Medievalist movement expanded along with the declassification process. Men grew frightened and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed. At this moment, minutes could be separating the hostility of the crowd from a flashing orgy of blood and smash. Baley writhed his way desperately to the force-door. T he interior of the store was emptier than the street outside. The manager, with commendable foresight had thrown the force-door early in the game. preventing potential troublemak ers from entering. It also kept the principals in the argument from leaving, but that was minor. Baley got through the forcedoor by using his official neutralizer. Unexpectedly, he found R. Daneel still behind him. The robot was pocketing a neutralizer of his own -- a slim one, smaller and neater than the standard police model. The manager ran to them instantly, talking loudly. "Officers, my clerks have been assigned me by the City. I am perfectly within my rights." There were three robots standing rodlike at the rear of the department. Six humans were standing near the force-door. They were all women. "All right now," said Baley crisply. "What's going on? What's all the fuss about?" One of the women said shrilly, "I came in for shoes. Why can't I have a human clerk? Ain't I respectable?" The manager said. "I'll wait on her myself if I have to, but I can't wait on all of them, Officer. There's nothing wrong with my men. They're registered clerks. I have their 'spec charts and guarantee slips -- " "Spec charts!" screamed the woman, turning to the rest. "He calls them men! They ain't men. They're ro -- bots!" She stretched out the syllables. "And I tell you what they do. in case you don't know. They steal jobs from men." A voice sounded from the other side of the force-door, queerly deadened and distorted by the effects of the barrier of inertia, but with anger still clearly audible. "My job! My job they took!" A figure shoved furiously through the crowd. The face was pale in the corridor lights; arms waved wildly. "I was ten years on that job. Now my kids ain't got enough to eat. Why? Why? I should've been born a robot. The Government takes care of them all right!" The crowd roared. of R. Daneel Olivaw standing at his elbow. He looked at the clerks. They were Earthmade. and even on that scale, relatively inexpensive models. They were just robots made to know such simple things as all the style numbers, their prices, the sizes available in each. They could keep track of inventory better than humans could since they would have no outside interests. They could compute the proper orders for the next week. They could measure the customer's foot. In themselves, harmless. As a group, incredibly dangerous. Baley could sympathize with the woman more deeply than he would have believed possible two hours before. Wondering if R. Daneel could not replace an ordinary Plainclothesman C-#, he could see the barracks, could taste the yeast-mush, and he could remember his father. His father had been a nuclear physicist, with a rating that had put him in the top percentile of the City. There had been an accident at the power plant and his father had borne the blame. He had been declassified. Baley did not know the details; it had happened when he was a year old. But he remembered the barracks of his childhood, the grinding communal existence just this side of the edge of bearability. He remembered his mother not at all; she had not survived long. His father he recalled well, a sodden man, morose and lost, speaking sometimes of the past in a hoarse, broken whisper. His father died, still declassified, when Baley was eight. Young Baley and his two older sisters moved into the Section orphanage. Children's Level, they called it. His mother's brother, whom Baley thought of always as "Uncle Boris," was himself too poor to prevent that. So it continued hard. And it was hard going through school, with no father-derived statusprivileges to smooth the way. And now he had to stand in the middle of a growing riot and pacify or intimidate men and women who, after all, only feared declassification for themselves and those they loved, as he himself did. woman who had spoken, "Let's not have any trouble, lady. The clerks aren't doing you any harm. "Sure they ain't done me no harm, snapped the woman. "They ain't gonna, either. Think I'll let their cold, greasy fingers touch me? I came in here expecting to get treated like a human being. I got a right to have human beings wait on me. And, listen, I got two kids waiting for supper. They can't go to the Section Kitchen without me like they were orphans. I gotta get out of here." "If you had let yourself be waited on, you'd have been out of here by now. You're just making trouble for nothing." "Well!" The woman registered shock. "Maybe you think you can talk to me like I was dirt. Maybe it's time the Government realized robots ain't the only things on Earth. I'm a hardworking woman and I've got rights." Baley could feel the situation get out of hand. Even if the woman would consent to be waited on, the waiting crowd was ugly enough for anything. There must be a hundred crammed outside the display window now. "What is the usual procedure in such a case?" asked R. Cancel Olivaw suddenly. Baley nearly jumped. He said, "This is an unusual case in the first place." "What is the law?" "The Rs have been duly assigned here. They're registered clerks. There's nothing illegal about that." "In that case," said R. Cancel, "order the woman to let herself be waited on or to leave." "It's a mob we have to deal with, not a woman. There's nothing to do but call a riot squad." "It should not be necessary for citizens to require more than one officer of the law to direct what should be done." said Cancel. He turned his broad face to the store manager. "Open thfe force-door, sir." Baley's arm shot forward to seize R. Caneel's shoulder, swing him about. He arrested the motion. If, at' this moment, two lawmen quarreled openly, it would mean the end of all chance for a peaceful solution. The manager protested, looked at Baley. Baley did not meet his eye. R. Daneel said, unmoved, "I order you with the authority of the Law," The manager bleated, 'T'll hold the City responsible for any damage to the goods or fixtures. I serve notice that I'm doing this under orders." barrier went down; men and women crowded in. There was a happy roar to them. They sensed victory. Baley had seen robots being lifted by a dozen hands, their heavy unresisting bodies carried backward from straining arm to straining arm. Men yanked and twisted at the metal mimicry of men. They used hammers, forceknives, needle-guns, and finally reduced the miserable objects to shredded metal and wire. Expensive positronic brains, the most intricate creation of the human mind, were thrown from hand to hand like footballs and mashed to uselessness in a trifle of time. Then, with the genius of destruction so merrily let loose, the mobs turned on anything else that could be taken apart. The robot clerks could have no knowledge of any of this, so they stood smilingly ready to sell shoes as the crowd flooded inward. The woman who had started the fuss, frightened at seeing it grow so suddenly, gasped, "Here, now. Here, now." The manager was shrieking, "Stop them. Officer! Stop them!" R. Daneel spoke. Without apparent effort, his voice was suddenly decibels higher than a human's voice had a right to be. Of course, thought Baley for the tenth time, he's not -- R. Daneel said, "The next man who moves will be shot." Someone well in the back yelled, "Get him!" But for a moment, no one moved. R. Daneel stepped nimbly upon a chair and from that to the top of a Transtex display case. The colored fluorescence gleaming through the slits of polarized molecular film turned his cool, smooth face into something unearthly. Unearthly, thought Baley. R. Daneel said crisply, "You are saying, 'This man is holding a neuronic whip, or a tickler. If we all rush forward, we will bear him down and at most one or two of us will be hurt and even they will recover. Meanwhile, we will do just as we wish and to space with law and order.' " His voice was neither harsh nor angry, but it carried authority. "You are mistaken. What I hold is not a neuronic whip, nor is it a tickler. It is a blaster and very deadly. I will kill many of you before you seize me -- perhaps most of you." There v.'as motion at the outskirts, but the crowd no longer grew. Those nearest R. Daneel were holding their breath, trying desperately to resist the mass pressure of those behind them. The woman with the hat broke the spell. "Hes gonna kill us! I ain't done nothing! Oh, lemme outta here!" She turned, but faced an immovable wall of crammed men and women. from the display counter and said, "I will now walk to the door. I will shoot the man or woman who touches me. When I  reach the door, I will shoot any man or woman who is not moving about his business. This woman here -- " "No, no!" yelled the woman with the hat. "I tell you I didn't do anything. I didn't mean any harm. I don't want any shoes. I just want to go home." "This woman here," went on Daneel, "will remain. She will be waited on." He stepped forward. The mob faced him dumbly. Baley closed his eyes. It wasn't his fault, he thought desperately. There'll be murder done and the worst mess in the world, but they forced a robot on me as partner. They gave him equal status. He didn't believe the excuse himself. He might have stopped R. Daneel at the start. He might have put in the call for a squadcar. He had let R. Daneel take responsibility, instead, and had felt a cowardly relief at it. When he tried to tell himself that R. Daneel's personality simply dominated the situation, he was filled with a sudden self-loathing. A robot dominating a situation! He was aware of no unusual noise, no shouting and cursing, no groans, no yells. His eyes sprang open. Jehoshaphat, they were dispersing! The manager of the store was cooling down, adjusting his twisted jacket, smoothing his hair, muttering angry threats at the vanishing crowd. One of the robot clerks advanced on the cowering woman with the hat and removed a shoe deftly. The robot's eye regarded it dispassionately for half a moment, then called out. "Size #-C, last #-X Alcove D-second shelf." A second clerk was already on the way to the indicated section. The smooth, fading whistle of a squad-car came to a halt just outside. Baley thought: Sure, when it's all over. The manager plucked his sleeve. "Let's have no more trouble. Officer." Baley said. "There won't be any trouble." It was easy to get rid of the squad-car. They had come in response to reports of a crowd in the street. They knew no details and could only see for themselves that the street was clear. R. Daneel stepped aside and showed no sign of interest as Baley explained to the men in the squadcar, minimizing the event and completely burying R. Daneel's part in it. R. Daneel to one side, against the steel and concrete of one of the building shafts. "Listen," he said, "I'm not trying to steal your show, you understand." "Steal my show? Is that one of your Earth idioms?" "I didn't report your part in this." "I do not know all your customs. On my world, a complete report is usual, but perhaps it is not so on your world. In any case, civil rebellion was averted. That is the important thing, is it not?" "Is it? Now you look here." Baley tried to sound forceful. "Don't you ever do it again." "Never again insist on the observance of law? If I am not to do that, what then is my purpose?" "Don't ever threaten a human being with a blaster again." "I would not have fired under any circumstances, Elijah, as you know very well. I am incapable of hurting a human. But, as you see, I did not have to fire. I did not expect to have to." "That was pure luck, not having to fire. Don't take that kind of chance again. I could have pulled that grandstand stunt -- " "Grandstand stunt? What is that?" "I could have pulled a blaster on the crowd myself. I had the blaster to do it with. But it isn't the kind of gamble I am justified in taking, or you, either. It was safer to call squad-cars to the scene than to try one-man heroics." R. Daneel considered. He shook his head. "I think you are wrong, partner Elijah. My briefing includes the information that, unlike the men of the Outer Worlds, Earthmen are trained from birth to accept authority. One man, representing authority firmly enough, was quite sufficient, as I proved. Your own desire for a squad-car was only an expression of your wish for superior authority to take responsibility out of your hands.On my own world, I admit that what I did would have been most unjustified." Baley's long face was red with anger. "If they had recognized you as a robot -- " "I was sure they wouldn't." "In any case, remember that you are a robot. Just a robot. Like those clerks in the shoe store." "But this is obvious." "And you're not human." Baley felt himself being driven into a wild cruelty almost against his will. "The division between human and robot is perhaps not as significant as that between intelligence and non-intelligence." "Maybe on your world, but not on Earth," Baley looked at his watch and shook his head angrily. He was an hour and a quarter late. He said curtly, "Let's go now. I've got to get you home." "You see, it is not proper to make any distinction of lesser meaning than the fact of intell -- " Baley's voice rose. "All riht! The subject is closed, Jessie is waiting for us." He walked in the direction of the nearest intrasection communi-tube, "I'd better call and tell her we're on our way up." "Jessie?" "My wife." Jehoshaphat, thought Baley, I'm in a fine mood to face Jessie. TT had been her name that had first made Elijah Baley really conscious of Jessie. He had met her at the Section Christmas party back in '#, over a bowl of punch. He had just finished his schooling, just taken his first job with the City, just moved into one of the bachelor alcoves of Common Room #A. She was handing out the punch. "I'm Jessie," she said. "Jessie Navodny. I don't know you." "Baley," he said, "Lije Baley. I'm new in the section." He took his punch and smiled mechanically. She impressed him as a cheerful and friendly person, so he stayed near her, watching the folks come and go, and sipping thoughtfully. "I helped make the punch." The girl's voice broke in upon him. "I can guarantee it. Do you want more?" Baley realized his glass was empty. He smiled and nodded. The girl's face was oval and not precisely pretty. Her dress was demure and conservative and she wore her light brown hair in a series of ringlets over her forehead.  She joined him in the next drink and he felt better. "Jessie," he said, feeling the name with his tongue. "It's nice. Do you mind if I use it when.I'm talking to you." "If you want to. Do you know what it's short for?" "Jessica?" "You'll never guess." "I can't think of anything else." She laughed and said archly, "My full name is Jezebel." That was when his interest flared. He put his punch glass down and said intently. "No, really?" "I'm not kidding. Jezebel. It's my real-for-true name on all my records. My parents liked the sound of it." She was quite proud of it, even though there was never a less likely Jezebel. Baley said seriously, "My name is Elijah, you know. My full name. I mean." It didn't register with her. He said, "Elijah was Jezebel's great enemy." "He was? " "Why. sure. In the Bible." "Oh? I didn't know that. Now isn't that funny? I hope that doesn't mean you'll have to be my enemy in real life." there was no question of that. It was the coincidence of names at first that made her more than just a pleasant girl at the punchbowl. But afterward he had grown to find her cheerful, tender-hearted and finally, by some queer alchemy of the spirit, even pretty. He appreciated her cheerfulness particularly. His own sardonic view of life needed the antidote of cheerfulness. But Jessie never seemed to mind his long grave face. "Oh. goodness," she said, "what if you do look like a sour lemon? I know you're not really, and I guess if you were always grinning away like clockwork, the way I do. we'd just explode when we got together. You stay the way you are. Lije, and keep me from floating away." And she kept Lije Baley from sinking down. He applied for a small Couples apartment and got a contingent admission pending marriage. He showed it to her and said. "Will you fix it so I can get out of Bachelor's. Jessie? I don't like it there." Maybe it wasn't the most romantic proposal in the world, but Jessie said yes. Baley could only remember one time when Jessie's habitual cheer deserted her completely and that. too. had involved her name. It was in their first year of marriage -- in fact the very month in which Bentley was conceived. (Their I.Q. rating. Genetic Values status, and Baley's position in the Department entitled him to two children, of which the first might be conceived during the first year.) Maybe, as Baley thought back upon it, that might have had something to do with it. Jessie had been drooping a bit because of Baley's consistent overtime hours of work. She said. "It's embarrassing to eat alone at the Kitchen every night." Baley was out of sorts. He said, "Why should it be? You can meet some nice single fellows there." And of course she promptly fired up. "You think I can't make an impression on them?" Maybe it was just because he was tired; maybe because Julius Enderby, a classmate of his, had moved up another notch on the C-scale rating while he himself had not. Maybe it was simply because he was a little tired of having her try to act up to the name she bore when she was nothing of the sort and never could be. In any case, he said bitingly. "I suppose you can. but I don't think you'll try. I wish you'd forget your name and be yourself." "I'll be just what I please." "Trying to be Jezebel won't get you anywhere. If you must know the truth, the name doesn't mean what you think, anyway. The Jezebel of the Bible was a faithful wife." "That isn't so. I've heard the phrase, 'a painted Jezebel.' I know what that means." "Maybe you think you do, but you're wrong. After Jezebel's husband, King Ahab, died, her son Jehoram became king. One of the captains of his army, Jehu, rebelled against him and assassinated him. Jehu then rode to Jezreel where the old queenmother, Jezebel, was residing. Jezebel knew that he meant to kill her. In her pride and courage, she painted her face and dressed herself in her best clothes so that she could meet him as a haughty and defiant queen. He had her thrown from the window of the palace and killed, but she made a good end according to my notions. And that's what people refer to when they speak of a 'painted Jezebel,' whether they know it or not." The next evening Jessie said in a small voice, Tve been reading the Bible, Lije." "What?" For a moment, Baley was bewildered. "The parts about Jezebel." "Oh! Jessie. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I was being childish." "No. No." She pushed his hand from her waist and sat on the couch, cool and upright, with a definite space between them, "It's good to know the truth. I don't want to be fooled by not knowing. So I read about her. She was a wicked woman, Lije." "Well, her enemies wrote those chapters. We don't know her side." "She killed all the prophets of the Lord that she could lay her hands on." "So they say." Baley felt about for a stick of chewing gum. He later abandoned that habit because Jessie said that with his long face and sad. brown eyes, it made him look like an old cow stuck with an unpleasant wad of grass it couldn't swallow and wouldn't spit out. He said. "If you want her side. I could think of some arguments for you. She followed the religion of her ancestors who had been in the land long before the Hebrews came. The Hebrews had their own God and. what's more, he was a jealous God. It wasn't enough for them to worship Him: everyone else had to worship Him as well. "Jezebel was a conservative, defending the old beliefs against the new ones. After all. even if the new beliefs had higher moral values, the old ones were more satisfying emotionally. The fact that she killed priests just marks her as a person of her times. It was the usual missionary method in those days. If you read I Kings, you must remember that Elijah (my namesake this time) had a contest with eight hundred and fifty prophets of Baal to see which could bring down fire from heaven. Elijah won and promptly ordered the crowd of onlookers to kill the eight hundred and fifty Baalites. And they did."  Naboth's vineyard, Lije? Here was this Naboth not bothering anybody, except that he refused to sell the King his vineyard. So Jezebel arranged to have people perjure themselves and say that Naboth had committed blasphemy or something." "He was supposed to have 'blasphemed God and the king." said Baley. "Yes. So they confiscated his property after they executed him." "That wasn't considered wrong then. In modern times, if the City or even if one of the Medieval nations had wanted Naboth's property, the courts would have ordered him off. had him removed by force if necessary. and paid him whatever they considered a fair price. King Ahab didn't have that kind of legal solution. He was sick and unhappy over the situation and Jezebel felt that her husband's welfare came ahead of Naboth's. I keep telling you, she was the model of a faithful wi -- " Jessie flung herself away from him. "I think you're mean and spiteful." He looked at her with complete dismay. "What have I done? What's the matter with you?" She left the apartment without answering and spent the evening and half the night at the subetheric video levels, traveling petulantly from showing to showing and using up a two-month supply of her quota allowance (and her husband's). When she came back to a still wakeful Lije Baley, she had nothing further to say to him. It occurred to Baley later, much later, that he had smashed an important part of Jessie's life. Her name had signified something wicked and licentious to her. It was a delightful makeweight for her prim, respectable nature. It gave her an aroma. of vice and she adored that. But it was gone. She never mentioned her full name again, not to Lije, not to her friends and maybe, for all Baley knew, not even to herself. She was Jessie and took to signing her name so. A S the days passed, she began speaking to him again ajd after a week or so, their relationship was on the old friendly footing and with all subsequent quarrels, nothing ever reached that one bad spot of intensity. Only once was there even an indirect reference to the matter. It was in her eighth month of pregnancy. She had left her own position as dietitian's assistant in Section Kitchen A-# and, with unaccustomed time on her hands, was amusing herself in speculation and preparation for the baby's birth. She said, one evening, "What about Bentley?" "Pardon me, dear?" said Baley, looking up from a sheaf of work he had brought home with him. (With an additional mouth to feed and Jessie's pay stopped and his own promotions to the non-clerical levels as far off, seemingly, as ever, extra work was necessary.) "I mean if the baby's a boy, what about Bentley as a name?" Baley pulled down the corners of his mouth. "Bentley Baley? Don't you think the names are too similar?" "I don't know. It has a swing, I think. Besides, the child can always pick out a middle name to suit himself when he gets older." "Well, it's all right with me." "Are you sure? I mean -- maybe you wanted him to be named Elijah." "And be called Junior? I don't think that's a good idea. Jie can name his.son Elijah, if he wants to." Then Jessie said, "There's just one thing," and stopped. After an interval, he looked up. "What one thing?" She was red and she did not quite meet his eye, but she said, forcefully enough, "Bentley isn't a Bible name, is it?" "No," said Baley, "I'm quite sure it isn't." "All right, then. I don't want any Bible names." And that was the only harking back that took place from that time to the day when Elijah Baley was coming home with Robot Daneel Olivaw, when he had been married for more than eighteen years and when his son Bentley Baley (middle name still unchosen) was past sixteen. double door on which there ters were written: Subsections lA -- IE. In still smaller letters, just above the key-slit, it stated: "In Case of Loss of Key, Communicate at Once with #-#." A man inched past them, inserted an aluminum sliver into the key-slit and walked in. He closed the door behind him, making no attempt to hold it open for Baley. Had he done so, Baley would have been seriously offended. By custom, men disregarded one another's presence entirely either within or just outside the Personals. One of the more interesting postmarital confidences was Jessie's telling him that the situation was quite different at Women's Personals. It was one of the penalties of civic advancement that when the Baleys were granted permission for a small washbowl in their bedroom, Jessie's social life suffered. Baley said, without completely masking his embarrassment, "Please wait out here, Daneel." "Do you intend washing?" asked R. Daneel. Baley squirmed and thought: Damned robot! If they were briefing him on everjrthing under steel, why didn't they teach him manners? I'll be responsible if he ever says anything like this to anyone else. He said, "I'll shower. It gets crowded evenings. I'll lose time then. If I get it done now, we'll have the whole evening before us." R. Daneel's face maintained its repose. "Is it part of the social custom that I wait outside?" Baley's embarrassment deepened. "Why need you go in for -- for no purpose?" "Oh, I understand you. Yes, of course. Nevertheless, Elijah, my hands grow dirty, too, and I will wash them." He indicated his palms, holding them out before him. They were pink and plump, with the proper creases. They bore every mark of excellent and meticulous workmanship and were as clean as need be. Baley said, "We have a washbasin in the apartment, you know." He said it casually. Snobbery would be lost on a robot. "Thank you for your kindness. On the whole, however, I think it would be preferable to make use of this place. If I am to live with you men of Earth, it is best that I adopt as many of your customs and attitudes as I can." "Come on in, then." The bright cheerfulness of the interior was a sharp contrast to the busy utilitarianism of most of the rest of the City, but it was all a blank on Baley's saturated retina. He whispered to Dancel, "I may take half an hour or so. Wait for me." He started away, then returned to add, "And don't talk to anybody and don't look at anybody. It's a custom." He looked hurriedly about to make certain that his own small conversation had not been noted, was not being met by secret shocked glances. Nobody, fortunately was in the ante-corridor, and after all, it was only the antecorridor. chambers to the private stalls. It had been five years now since he had been awarded one -- large enough to contain a shower, a small laundry and other necessities. It even had a small projector that could be keyed in for the news films. "A home away from home," he had joked when it was first made available to him. But now he often wondered how he would ever bear the adjustment back to the more Spartan existence of the common chambers if his stallprivileges were ever canceled. He pressed the button that activated the laundry and the smooth face of the meter lighted. R. Daneel was waiting patiently when Baley returned with a scrubbed body, clean underwear, a freshened shirt and, generally, a feeling of greater comfort. "No trouble?" Baley asked, when they were well outside the door and able to talk. "None at all, Elijah." said R. Daneel. Jessie was at the door, smiling nervously, when they arrived. Baley kissed her. "Jessie," he mumbled, "this is my new partner, Daneel Olivaw." Jessie held out a hand, which R. Daneel took and released. She turned to her husband, then looked timidly at R. Daneel. She said, "Won't you sit down. Mr. Olivaw? I must talk to my husband about some family matters. It'll take just a minute. I hope you won't mind." Her hand was on Baley's sleeve. He followed her into the next room. She said, in a hurried whisper, "You aren't hurt, are you? I've been so worried ever since the broadcast." "What broadcast?" "About the riot at the shoe counter. They said two plainclothesmen stopped it. I knew you were coming home with a partner and this was right in our sub-section and just when you were coming home and I thought they were making it sound better than it was and you were -- " "Please, Jessie. You see I'm perfectly all right." Jessie caught hold of herself with an effort. She said, shakily, "Your partner isn't from your division, is he?" "No," replied Baley miserably. "He's -- a complete stranger." "How do I treat him?" "Like anybody else. He's just my partner, that's all." He said it so unconvincingly that Jessie's quick eyes narrowed, "What's wrong?" "Nothing. Come, let's go back into the 'living room. It'll begin to look queer."  tain about the apartment now, though he had always been proud of it. It had three large rooms; the living room, for instance, was an ample fifteen feet by eighteen. There was a closet in each room. One of the main ventilation ducts passed directly by. It meant a rumbling noise, but, on the other hand, assured first-rate temperature control and well-conditioned air. Nor was the apartment far from either Personal, which was a prime convenience. But with the creature from worlds beyond space sitting in the midst of it, the apartment suddenly seemed cramped. Jessie said, with a gaiety that was slightly synthetic, "Have you and Mr. Olivaw eaten, Lije?" "As a matter of fact," said Baley quickly, "Daneel will not be eating with us. I will, though." Jessie accepted the situation without question. With food supplies so narrowly controlled, it was good form to refuse hospitality. She said, "I hope you won't mind our eating, Mr. Olivaw. Lije, Bentley and I generally cat at the Community Kitchen. There's more variety, and just between you and me, bigger helpings, too. But Lije and I do iiave permission to eat in our apartment three times a week if we want to -- Lije is quite successful at the Bureau and we have very nice status -- and I thought that just for this occasion, if you wanted to join us, we would have a little private feast of our own, though I do think that people who overdo their privacy privileges are anti-social." R. Daneel listened' politely. Baley said, with an undercover "shushing" wiggle of his fingers, "Jessie, I'm hungry." "Would I be breaking a custom, Mrs. Baley, if I addressed you by your given name?" R. Daneel asked. "Why, no, of course not" Jessie folded a table out of the wall and plugged the plate warmer into the central depression on the tabletop. "You go right ahead and call me Jessie all you like -- uh -- Daneel." She giggled. Baley was getting rapidly more uncomfortable. Jessie thought R. Daneel a man. The situation would be something to boast of and talk about in Women's Personal. He was good-looking in a wooden way, too, and Jessie was pleased with his deference. Anyone could see that. Baley wondered what R. Daneel thought of Jessie. She hadn't changed much in eighteen years, or at least not to Baley. She was heavier, of course, and her figure had lost its youthful vigor. But that's all beside the point, thought Baley somberly. On the Outer Worlds, the women were supposedly tall and as slim and regal as the men and those must be the kind of women R. Daneel was used to. But R. Daneel seemed quite unperturbed by Jessie's conversation, her appearance or her appropriation of his name. He said, "Are you sure that is proper? The name, Jessie, seems to be a diminutive, Perhaps its use is restricted to members of your immediate circle and I would be more proper if I used your full given name." Jessie, breaking open the insulating wrapper on the dinner ration, bent her head in sudden concentration. "Just Jessie," she said tightly. "Very well, Jessie." T he door opened and a youngster entered cautiously. His eyes found R. Daneel almost at once. "My son Bentley," said Baley. "This is Mr. Olivaw, Ben." "He's your partner, huh, Dad? How d'ye do, Mr. Olivaw." Ben's eyes grew large and luminous. "Say, Dad, what happened down in the shoe place? The newscast said -- " "Don't ask any questions now, Ben." Bentley's face fell and he looked toward his mother, who motioned him to a seat. "Did you do what I told you, Bentley?" she asked, when he sat down. His hair was as dark as his father's and he was going to have his father's height, but he had Jessie's oval face, her hazel eyes, her light-hearted way of looking at life. "Sure, Mom," said Bentley, hitching himself forward a bit to look into the double dish from which savory vapors were already rising. "What we got to eat? Not zymoveal again. Mom? Huh, Mom?" "There's nothing wrong with zymoveal." said Jessie, her lips pressing together. "Now you just eat what's put before you and let's not have any comments." It was quite obvious they were having zymoveal. Baley took his own seat. He himself would have preferred something other than zymoveal, with its sharp flavor and definite aftertaste, but Jessie had explained her problem before this. "Well, I just can't, Lije," she had said. "I live right here on these levels all day and I can't make enemies or life wouldn't be bearable. They know I used to be assistant dietitian and if . I just walked off with steak or chicken every other week, when there's hardly any one else on the floor that has private eating privileges even just on Sunday, they'd say it was pull or friends in the prep-room. It would be talk, talk, talk, and I wouldn't be able to put my nose out the door or visit Personal in peace. As it is, zymoveal and protoveg are very good. They're well-balanced nourishment with no waste and, as a matter of fact, they're full of vitamins and minerals and everything anyone needs and we can have all the chicken we want when we eat in Community on the chicken Tuesdays." Baley gave in easily. It was as Jessie said -- the first problem of living is to minimize resentment from the crowds that surround you on all sides. Bentley was a little harder to convince. I use Dad's ticket and eat in Community myself? I'd just as soon." Jessie shook her head in annoyance and said, "I'm surprised at you. Bentley. What would people say if they saw you eating by yourself as though your own family weren't good enough for you or had thrown you out of the apartment?" "Well. gosh, it's none of people's business." Baley said, with a nervous edge in his voice. "Do as your mother tells you. Bentley." Bentley shrugged unhappily. R. Daneel said suddenly, from the other side of the room, "Have I the family's permission to view these book-films during your meal?" "Oh, sure," id Bentley, slipping away froni the table, a look of instant interest upon his face. "Theyre mine I got them from the library on special school permit. I'll get you my viewer. It's a pretty good one. Dad gave it to me for my lost birthday." He brought it to R. Daneel and asked, "Are you interested in robots, Mr. Oivaw?" Baley abrujjtly dropped his spoon and bent to pick it up. R. Daneel soid, "Yes, Bentley. I am quite interested." "Then you'll like these. They're  all about robots. I've got to write an essay on them for school, so I'm doing research. It's quite a complicated Subject," he explained import;antly. "I'm against them myself." "Sit down, Bentley," said Baley unhap#ily, "and don't bother Mr. Olivaw." "He's not bothering me, Elijah. I'd like to tallt to you about the problem another time, Bentley. Your father and I will be very busy tonight." "Thanks, Mk. Olivaw." Bentley took his seat nd with a look of accusation in his mother's direction, cut off a jjortion of the pink zymoveal with his fork. Baley thoug;ht: Busy tonight? Then, with  resounding shock, he remember-ed his job. He thought of a Spacer lying dead in Spacetown and realized that, for hours, he had been so involved with his own deadly dilemma that he had forgotten the cold fact of murder. She was wearing a formal hat and a little jacket of keratohber as she said, "I hope you'll excuse me, Mr. Olivaw. I know you have a great deal to discuss with Lije." She pushed her son ahead of her after she opened the door. "When will you be back, Jessie?" asked Baley. She paused. "When do you want me to be back?" "Well, no use staying out all night. Why don't you come back your usual time? Midnight or so." He looked doubtfully at R. Daneel. R. Daneel nodded. "I regret having to drive you from your home." "Don't worry about that, Mr. Olivaw. This is my usual evening out with the girls, anyway. Come on, Ben." The youngster was rebellious. "Aw, why the dickens do I have to go? I'm not going to bother them. Yeast!" "Now do as I say." "Well, why can't I go to the etherics along with you?" "Because I'm going with some friends and you've got other things -- " The door closed behind them. The moment had come. Baley had put it off in his mind. He had thought: First let's meet the robot and see what he's like. Then it was: Let's get him home. And then : Let's eat. But now there was no excuse for further delay. It was down at last to the question of murder, of interstellar complications, of possible raises in ratings, of possible disgrace and declassification. And he had no way of even beginning except to turn to the robot for help. His fingernails moved aimlessly on the table, which had not been returned to its wall recess. R. Daneel said, 'How secure are we against being overheard?" Baley looked up, surprised. "No one would listen to what's going on in another man's apartment." "It is not your custom to eavesdrop?" "You might as well suppose they'd -- I don't know -- that they'd look in your plate while you're eating." "Or that they would commit murder?" "What?" "It is against your customs to kill, is it not, Elijah?" Baley felt anger rising. "Sec here, if we're going to be partners, don't try to imitate Spacer arrogance. There's no room for it in you, R. Daneel." He could not resist emphasizing the "R." 'T am sorry if I have hurt your feelings, Elijah. My intention was only to indicate that, since human beings are occasionally capable of murder in defiance of custom, they may be able to violate custom for the smaller impropriety of eavesdropping." "The apartment is adequately insulated," said Baley. still irritated. "You haven't heard anything from the apartments on any side of us, have you? Well, they won't hear us, either. Besides, why should anvone think anything of importance is going on here?" "We must not underestimate the enemy." started. My information ii sketchy, so I can lay out my hand without much trouble. I know that a man named Roj Nemennuh Sarton, a citizen of the planet Aurora and a resident of Spacetown, has been murdered by person or persons unknown. I understand that it is the opinion of the Spacers that this is not an isolated event. Am I right?" "You are entirely right, Elijah." "They tie it up with recent attempts to sabotage the Spacersponsored project of converting us to an integrated humanrobot society on the model of the Outer Worlds, and assume the murder was the product of a well-organized terrorist group." "Yes." "Then to begin with, is this Spacer theory necessarily true? Why can't the murder have been the work of an isolated fanatic? There is strong anti-robot sentiment on Earth, but there are no organized parties advocating violence of this sort." "Not openly, perhaps." "Even a group conspiring to destroy robots and robot-factories would have the common sense to realize that the worst thing they could do would be to murder a Spacer. It seems much more likely to have been the work of an unbalanced mind." R. Daneel thought carefully, then said, "I think the weight of probability is against the 'fanatic' theory. The person killed was too well-chosen and the time of the murder too appropriate for anything but deliberate planning." "Well, then, you've got more information than I have. Spill it!" "Your phraseology is obscure, but I think I understand. I will have to explain some of the background to you. As seen from Spacetown, Elijah, relations with Earth are unsatisfactory." "Tough," muttered Baley coldly. "I have been told that when Spacetown was first established, most of our people assumed the integrated society that has worked so well on the Outer Worlds. Even after the first riots, we thought that it was only a matter of your people getting over the first shock of novelty. That has not proven to be the case. Even with the cooperation of the Terrestrial government and of most of the variolas City governments, resistance has been continuous and progress has been very slow. Naturally, this has been a matter of great concern to our people." "Out of altruism, I suppose." "Not entirely," said R. Daneel, "although it is good of you to attribute worthy motives to them. It is our common belief that a healthy and modernized Earth would be of great benefit to the whole Galaxy. At least it is the common belief among our people at Space town. I must admit that there are strong elements opposed to them on the Outer Worlds." "What? Disagreement among the Spacers?" "Certainly. There are some who think that a modernized Earth will be a dangerous empfrebuilding Earth. This is particularly true among the populations of those older worlds. They are closer to Earth and have greater reason to remember the first few centuries of interstellar travel when their worlds were controlled, politically and economically, by Earth." " history. Arc they really worried? Are they still sore at us for things that happened a thousand years ago?" "Humans," said R. Daneel, "have their own peculiar makeup. They are not as reasonable, in many ways, as robots, since their circuits are more reactive than logical. I am told that this, too. has its advantages." "Perhaps it may," said Baley drily. "You are in a better position to know. In any case, continuing failure on Earth has strengthened the Nationalist parties on the Outer Worlds. They say it is obvious that Earthmen are different from Spacers and that if we imposed robots on Earth by superior force, we would be loosing destruction on the Galaxy. Earth's population is eight billions, while the total population of the fifty Outer Worlds combined is scarcely more than five here, particularly Dr. Sarton -- " "He was a doctor?" "A Doctor of Sociology, specializing in robotics, and a very "I see. Go on." "Dr. Sarton felt that the time had come to make a supreme effort to understand the psychology of the Eartbman. It is easy to say that your people are innately conservative and to speak tritely of 'the unchanging Earth' and 'the inscrutable Terrestrial mind,' but Dr. Sarton said we could not dismiss the Earthman with a proverb or a bromide. He claimed the Spacers who were trying to remake Earth must abandon the isolation of Spacetown and mingle with Earthmen. They must live as they, think as they, be as they." Baley said, "The Spacers? Impossible." "You are quite right," agreed R. Daneel. "Despite his views, Dr. Sarton himself could not have brought himself to enter any of the Cities and he knew it. He would have been unable to bear the noise and rush of the crowds. Even if he had been forced inside at the point of a blaster, the turmoil would have distracted him so that he could never have penetrated the truths for which he sought." "What about the way they're always worrying about disease?" demanded Baley. "Don't forget that. I don't think there's one of them who would risk entering a City for that reason alone." "There is that, too. Disease in the Earthly sense is unknown on the Outer Worlds and the fear of the unknown is always morbid. Dr. Sarton appreciated all of this and, nevertheless, he insisted on the necessity of growing to know the Earthman and his' way of life intimately." "He seems to have worked himself into a comer." "Not quite. The objections to entering the City hold for human Spacers. Robot Spacers are another thing entirely."  getting, damn it. Aloud, he said, "Oh?" "Yes," said R. Daneel. "We can be designed for adaptation to Earthly conditions. We could be accepted by Earthmen and allowed a closer view of their life." "And you yourself -- " began Baley in sudden enlightenment. "Am just such a robot. For a year, Dr. Sarton has been working upon the design and construction. I was the first of his robots and so far the only one. Unfortunately, my education is not yet complete. I have been hurried into my role prematurely as a result of the murder."  "Then not all Spacer robots are like you? I mean some look more like robots and less like humans. Right?" "Why, naturally. The outward appearance is dependent on a root's function. My own function requires a very manlike appearance. Others are different, although all are humanoid. Certainly they are more humanoid than the primitive models I saw at the shoe counter. Are all your robots being manufactured like that?" "More or less," said Baley. "You don't approve?" "It is difficult to accept a gross parody of the human form as an intellectual equal. Can your factories do no better?" "I'm sure they can, Daneel. I think we just prefer to know when we're dealing with a robot and when we're not." He stared directly into the robot's eyes as he said that. They were bright and moist, as a human's would be, but it seemed to Baley that their gaze was steady and did not flicker slightly from point to point as a man's would. R. Daneel said, "I am hopeful that in time I will grow to understand that point of view." For an instant, Baley thought  there was sarcasm in the remark, then dismissed the possibility. The robot was undoubtedly being quite sincere. "In any case," said R. Daneel. "Dr. Sarton saw clearly the fact, that it was a case for CFe." "What's that?" "Just the chemical symbols for the elements carbon and iron, Elijah. Carbon is the basis of human life, and iron of robot life. It becomes easy to speak of CFe when you wish to express a culture that combines the best of the two on an equal but paral Icl basis," "See fee. Do you write it with a hyphen or how?" "No, Elijah. A diagonal line between the two is the accepted way. It symbolizes neither one nor the other, but a mixture of the two, without priority." himself interested. Formal education on Earth included virtually no information on Outer World history or sociology after the Great Rebellion that made them independent of the mother planet. The popular book-film romances, to be sure, had their stock Outer World characters: the visiting tycoon, choleric and eccentric; the beautiful heiress, invariably smitten by the Earthman's charms; the arrogant Spacer rival, wicked and forever beaten. These were worthless sources, since Spacers never entered Cities and Spacer women virtually never visited Earth. For the first time in his life, Baley was stirred by an odd curiosity. What was Spacer life really like? He said, "I think I get what you're driving at. Your Dr. Sarton was attacking the problem of Earth's conversion to CFe from a new and promising angle. Our conservative groups -- Medievalists, as they call themselves -- were perturbed. They were afraid he might succeed. So they killed him. That's the motivation that makes ' it an organized plot and not an isolated outrage. Right?" "Quite right." Bal whistled thoughtfully under his breath. His long fingers tapped lightly against the table. Then he shook his head. "It won't wash. It won't wash at all." "I do not understand." "An Earthman walks into Spacetown, walks up to Dr. Sarton, blasts him, and walks out. But the entrance to Spacetown is guarded." R. Daneel nodded. "No Earthman can possibly have passed through the entrance illegally." "Then where does that leave you?" "It would leave us in a confusing position, Elijah, if the entrance' were the only way of reaching Spacetown from New York City." Baley watched his partner thoughtfully. "I don't get you. It's the only connection between the two." "Directly between the two, yes. May I have a piece of paper and a writer? Thank you. Look, partner Elijah. I will draw a big circle and label it 'New York City.' Now, tangent to it. I will draw a small circle and label it 'Spacetown.' Here, where they touch. I draw an arrowhead and label it 'Barrier.' Now do you see no other connection?" Baley said, "Of course not. There is no other connection." "In a way, I am glad to hear you say this. It is in accordance with what I have been taught about terrestrial ways of thinking. The Barrier is the only direct connection. But both the City and Spacetown are open to the countryside in all directions. It is possible for a Terrestrial to leave the City at any of numerous exits and strike out cross-country to Spacetown, where no Barrier will stop him." T he tip of Baley's tongue touched his upper lip and for a moment stayed there. Then he said, "Cross-country?" "Yes." "Cross-country. Alone?" "Why not?" "Walking?" "That would offer the least chance of detection. The murder took place early in the working day and the trip was undoubtedly negotiated before dawn." "Impossible! There isn't a man in the City who would do it. Leave the City? Alone?" "Ordinarily, it would seem unlikely. We Spacers know that, It is why we guard only the entrance. Even in the Great Riot, your people attacked only at the Barrier that then protected the entrance. Not one left the City." "Well, then?" "Now we are dealing with an unusual situation. It is not the blind attack of a mob following the line of least resistance, but the organized attempt of a small group to strike deliberately at the unguarded point. It explains why, as you say, a Terrestrial could enter Spacetown, walk up to his victim, kill him. and walk away. The man attacked .through a complete blind spot on our part." Baley shook his head. "It's too unlikely. Have your people done anything to check that theory?" "Yes, we have. Your Commissioner of Police was present almost at the time of the murder -- " "I know. He told me so." "That, Elijah, is another example of the timeliness of the murder. Your Commissioner has cooperated with Dr. Sarton in the past and he was the Earthman with whom Dr. Sarton planned to make initial arrangements for the infiltration of your City by robots such as myself. The appointment for that morning was to concern that. The murder, of course, stopped those plans, at least temporarily. The fact that it happened when your own Commissioner of Police was actually within Spacetown made the entire situation more difficult and embarrassing for Earth, and for our own people, too. "But that is not what I started to say. Your Commissioner was present. We said to him, 'The man must have come crosscountry.' Like you, he said, 'Impossible' or perhaps 'Unthinkable.' He was quite disturbed, of course, and perhaps that may have made it difficult for him to see the essential point. Nevertheless, we forced him to begin checking that possibility almost at once." missioner's broken glasses and, even in the middle of grim thoughts, a corner of his mouth twitched. Poor Julius! Yes, he would be disturbed. There would be no way for Enderby to have explained the situation to the lofty Spacers, who looked upon physical disability as a peculiarly disgusting attribute of the nongenetically selected Earthmen. That is, he couldn't without losing face, and face was valuable to Police Commissioner Julius Enderby. Well, Earthmen had to stick together in some respects. The robot would never find out about Enderby's nearsightedness from Baley. R. Daneel continued, "One by one, the various exit points from the City were investigated. Do you know how many there are, Elijah?" Baley hazarded, "Twenty?" "Five hundred and two." "How many?" "Originally, there were far more. Your City represents a slow growth, Elijah. It was once open to the sky and people crossed from City to country freely." "I know that." "Well, when it was first enclosed, there were many exits left. Five hundred and two still remain. The rest are built over or blocked up. We are not counting, of course, the entrance points for air-freight." "Well, what of the exit points?" "They are unguarded. We could find no official who was in charge or who considered them under his jurisdiction. A man could have walked out of any of them at any time and returned at will. He woiild never have been detected." "Anythir else? The weapon was gone, I suppose." "Oh, yes." "Any clues of any sort?" "None. We have investigated the grounds surrounding Spacetown thoroughly. The robots on the truck farms were quite useless as possible witnesses. They were little more than automatic farm machinery; scarcely humanoid. And there were no humans." "Uh-huh. What next?" "Having failed, so far, at one end, Spacetown, we will work at the other, New York City. It will be our duty to track down all possible subversive groups, to sift all dissident organizations -- " "How much time do you intend to spend?" interrupted Baley. "As little as possible, as much as necessary."  fully, "I wish you had another partner in this mess." "I do not," said R. Dancel. "The Commissioner spoke very highly of your loyalty and ability." "It was nice of him," said Baley sardonically. He thought: Poor Julius. I'm on his conscience and he tries hard. "We didn't rely entirely on him," said R. Daneel. "We checked your records. You have expressed yourself openly against the use of robots in your department." "Oh? Do you object?" "Not at all. Your opinions are your own. But it made it necessary for us to check your psychological profile very closely. We know that although you dislike robots intensely, you will work with one if you conceive it to be your duty. You have an extraordinarily high loyalty index and a respect for legitimate authority. It is what we need. Commissioner Enderby judged you well." "You have no personal resentment toward my anti-robot sentiments?" R. Daneel said. "If they do not prevent you from working with me and helping me do what is required of me, how can they matter?" Baley felt stopped. He said belligerently, "Well, then, if I pass the test, how about you? What makes you a detective?" "I do not understand you." "You were designed as an information-gathering machine. A man-imitation to record the facts of human life for the Spacers." "That is a good beginning for an investigator, is it not, to be an information-gathering machine?" "A beginning, maybe. But it's not all there is, by a long shot." "To be sure, there has been a final adjustment of my circuits." "I'd be curious to hear the details of that, Daneel." "That is easy enough. A particularly strong drive has been inserted into my motivation banks -- a desire for justice." "usffce.'" cried Baley. The irony faded from his face and was replaced by a look of the most earnest distrust. But R. Daneel turned swiftly in his chair and stared at the door. "Someone is out there." The door opened and Jessie, pale and thin-lipped, walked in. Startled, Baley explained, "Why, Jessie! Is anything wrong?" She stood there, eyes not meeting his. "I'm sorry. I had to -- Her voice trailed off. "Where's Bentley?" "He's to stay the night in the Youth Hail" "Why? I didn't tell you to do that." "You said your partner would stay the night. I felt he would need Bentley's room." R. Daneel said, "There was no necessity, Jessie." Jessie lifted her eyes to R. Daneel's fa, staring at it earnestly. Baley looked at his fingertips, sick at what mit follow, somehow unable to interpose. The momentary silence pressed thickly on his eardrums and then far away, as though through folds of plastex, he heard his wife say, "I think you are a robot, DaneeL" And R. Daneel replied, in a voice as calm as ever, "I am." O N the uppermost levels of some of the wealthiest subsections of the City are the natural Solariums, where a partition of quartz with a movable metal shield excludes the air, but lets, in the sunlight There the wives and daughters of the Cis highest administrators and executives may tan themselves, A unique thing happens there every evening. Night falls. In the rest of theCity (including the UV-Solariums, where the lotted time, might occasionally expose themselves to the artificial wavelengths of arc-lights) there are only the arbitrary cycles of hours. The business of the City might easily have continued in three eight-hour or four six-hour shifts, by "day" and "night" alike. Light and work could easily proceed endlessly. There were always civic reformers who periodically suggested such a thing in the interests of economy and efficiency. The notion was never accepted. Much of the earlier habits of Earthly society had been given up in the interests of that same economy and efficiency: space, privacy, even much of free will. They were the products of civilization, however, and not more than ten thousand years old. The adjustment of sleep to night, however, was as old as the evening was unseen, apartment lights dimmed as the hours of darkness passed and the City's pulse sank. No one could have told noon from midnight by any cosmic phenomenon along the enclosed avenues of the City, yet mankind followed the mute partitionings of the hour-hand. The Expressways emptied, the noise of life fell, the moving mob among the colossal alleys melted away; New York City lay in Earth's unnoticed shadow, and its population slept. Elijah Baley did not sleep. He lay in bed and there was no light in his apartment, but that was as far as it went. Jessie lay next to him, motionless in the darkness. He had not felt nor heard her move. On the other side of the wall sat, stood, lay (Baley wondered which) R. Daneel Olivaw. Baley whispered, "Jessiel" The dark figure beside him stirred slightly under the sheet. "What do you want?" "Jessie, don't make it worse for me." "You might have told me." "How could I? I was planning to, when I could think of a way. Jehoshaphat, Jessie -- " "Sh!" Baley's voice returned to its whisper. "How did you find out? Won't you tell me?" could sense her eyes looking through the darkness at him. "Lije." Her voice was scarcely more than a stirring of air. "Can he hear us. do you think?" "Not if we whisper." "How do you know? Maybe he has special hearing to pick up tiny sounds. Spacer robots can do all sorts of things." Baley knew that the pro-robot propaganda was forever stressing the miraculous feats of the Spacer robots; their endurance, their extra senses, their service to humanity in a hundred novel ways. Personally, he thought that approach defeated itself. Earthmen hated the robots all the more for their superiority. He whispered, "Not Daneel. They wanted him to be accepted as a human being, so he must have only human senses." "How do you know?" "If he had extra senses, there would be too much danger of his giving himself away as nonhuman by accident. He would do too much, know too much." "Well, maybe." A minute passed and Baley tried a second time. "Jessie, if you'll just let things be until -- until -- Look, dear, it's unfair of you to be angry." "Angry? Oh, Lije, you fool! I'm not angry. I'm scared; I'm scared clean to death." For a while, they clung together, and Baley's growing sense of injury evaporated into a troubled concern. "Why, Jessie? There's nothing to be worried about. He's harmless. You know he can't hurt humans." "Can't you get rid of him, Lije?" "It's Department business. How can I?" "What kind of business, Lije? Tell me." "Now, Jessie, I'm surprised at you." He groped for her cheek in the darkness and patted it. It was wet. Using his pajama sleeve, he carefully wiped her eyes. "Now, look, you're being a baby." "Tell them at the Department to have someone else do it, whatever it is. Please, Lije." Baley's voice hardened a bit. "Jessie, you've been a policeman's wife long enough to know an assignment is an assignment." "Well, why did it have to be you?" "Julius Enderby -- " She stiffened in his arms. "I might have known. Why can't you tell Julius Enderby to have someone else do the dirty work just once?" word with them since their engagement. He had been two classes ahead of Baley at the City School of Administrative Studies. They had been friends. When Baley had taken his battery of aptitude tests and neuroanalysis and found himself in line for the police force, Enderby was already there before him. Enderby had moved into the plainclothes division. Baley followed Enderby, but at a continually greater distance. Baley was capable enough, efficient enough, but he lacked something that Enderby had. Enderby fitted the administrative machine perfectly. He was one of those persons born for a bureaucracy. The Commissioner wasn't a great brain, and Baley knew it. He had his childish peculiarities, his intermittent rash of ostentatious Medievalism, for instance. But offended no one; he took orders gracefully; he gave them with the proper mixture of gentleness and firmness. He even got along' with the Spacers, though perhaps too obsequious to them. (Baley himself could never have dealt with them for half a day without getting into a state of bristle; he was sure of that, even though he had never really spoken to a Spacer.) But they trusted Enderby and that made him extremely useful to the City. So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale qmckly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley was nothing more than a C-#. Baley did not resent the contrast, though he was human enough to regret it. Enderby did not forget their earlier friendship and, in his queer way, tried to make up for his success by doing what he could for Baley. The assignment of partnership with R. Daneel was one example. It was tough and unpleasant, but there was no question that it carried the promise of tremendous advancement. The Commissioner might have given ffie chance to someone else. His own talk, that morning, of needing a favor, masked but did not hide that fact. Jessie never saw things that way. On similar occasions in the past, she had said,' "It's yovir silly loyalty index. I'm so tired of hearing everyone praise you for being so full of a sense of duty. Think of yourself once in a while. I notice the ones on top don't bring up the topic of their own loyalty index." Baley lay in bed in a state of stiff wakefulness, letting Jessie calm down. He had to think. He had to be certain of his suspicions...Little things chased one another and fitted together in his mind. Slowly, they were building into a pattern. Jessie stirred. "Lije?" Her lips were at his ear. "Why don't you resign?" "Don't be crazy." "Why not?" She was suddenly almost eager. "You can get rid of that horrible robot that way. Just walk in and tell Enderby you're through." Baley said coldly, "I can't resign in the middle of an important case. I can't throw the whole thing down the disposal tube just any time I feel like it. A trick like that means declassification for cause." "You can work your way up again. You can do it, Lije." "Civil Service doesn't take men who are declassified for cause. Manual labor is the only thing I can do; the only thing you could do. Bentley would lose all inherited status. For God's sake. Jessie, you don't know what it's like." "rve read about it. I'm not afraid of it." "You're crazy. You're plain crazy." Baley could feel himself trembling. There was a familiar, flashing picture of his father in his mind's eye. His father, moldering away toward death. Jessie sighed heavily. Baley's mind turned savagely away from her. In desperation, it returned to the pattern it was constructing. He said tightly, "Jessie, you've got to tell me. How did you find out Daneel was a robot? What made you decide that?" She began. "Well -- " and just ran down. It was the third time she had tried to explain and failed. He crushed her hand in his, Jessie. What's frightening you?" She said, "I just guessed he was a robot, Lije." He said, "There wasn't anything to make you guess that, JessieYou didn't think he was a robot before you left, now did you?" "No-o, but I got to thinking -- " "Come on, Jessie. What was it?" "Well -- the girls were talking in the Personal. You know how they are. Just talking about everything." Women! thought Baley. "Anyway," said Jessie. "The rumor is all over town. It must be."  age touch of triumph. Another piece in place! "All over town?" he repeated. "It was the way they sounded. They said there was talk about a Spacer robot loose in the City. He was supposed to look just like a man and to be working with the police. They even asked me about it. They laughed and said, 'Does your Lije know anything about it, Jessie?' And I laughed and said, 'Don't be silly!' "Then we went to the etherics and I got to thinking about your new partner. Do you remember those pictures you brought home, the ones Julius Enderby took in Spacetown, to show me what Spacers looked like? 'Well, I got to thinking that's what your partner looked like. I said to myself, Oh. my God, someone must've recognized him in the shoe department and he's with Lije and I just said I had a headache and I ran -- " Baley said, "Now, Jessie, get hold of yourself. You're not afraid of Daneel himself. You faced up to him when you came home." His teeth bit his last word in two. He sat up in bed, eyes uselessly wide in the darkness. He felt his wife move against his side. His hand leaped, found her lips and pressed against them. She heaved against his grip, her hands grasping his wrist and wrenching, but he leaned down against her still more heavily. Then, suddenly, he released her. She whimpered. He said huskily, "Sorry, Jessie. I was listening." He got out of bed, pulled warm Plastofilm over the soles of his feet. "Lije, where are you going? Don't leave me." "It's all right. I'm just going to the door." The Plastofilm made a soft, shuffling noise as he circled the bed. He cracked the door to the living room and waited a long moment. Nothing happened. It was so quiet, he could hear the thin whistle of Jessie's breath from their bed and the dull rhythm of his pulse in his ears. H IS hand crept through the opening of the door, snaking out to the spot he needed no light to find. His fingers closed upon the knob that controlled the ceiling illumination. He exerted the smallest pressure he could and the ceiling gleamed dimly, so dimly that the lower half of the living room remained in semi-dusk. He saw enough, however. The main door was closed and the living room lay lifeless and quiet. He wrenched the knob back into the off position and scuttled back to bed. It was all he needed. The pieces joined. The pattern was complete. Jessie pleaded with him, "Lije, what's wrong?" "Nothing's wrong, Jessie. Everything's all right. He's not here." "The robot? Do you meanjie's gone? For good?" "No, no. He'll be back. And before he does, answer my question." "What question?" "What are you afraid of?" Jessie said nothing. Baley grew more insistent. "You said you were scared to death." "Of him." "No, we went through that." Her words came slowly. "I thought if everyone knew he was a robot there might be a riot. We'd be killed." "Why us?" "You know what riots are like." "They don't even know where the robot is, do they?" "They might find out." "And that's what you're afraid of, a riot?" "Well -- " "Sh!" He pressed Jessie down to the pillow. Then he put his lips to her ear. "He's come back. Now listen and don't say a word. Everything's fine. He'll be gone in the morning and he won't be back. There'll be no riot, nothing." He was almost contented as he said that. He felt he could sleep. He thought again: No riot, nothing. And no declassification. And just before he actually fell asleep, he thought: Not even a murder investigation. Not even that. The whole thing's solved -- He slept. es with exquisite care and placed them upon the bridge of his nose. Baley thought: It's a good trick. Keeps you busy while you're thinking what to say, and it doesn't cost money the way lighting up a pipe does. And because the thought had entered his mind, he drew out his pipe and dipped into his pinched store of rough-cut. One of the few luxury crops still grown on Earth was tobacco, and its end was visibly approaching. Prices had gone up, never down, in Baley's lifetime: quotas down, never up. Enderby, having adjusted his glasses, felt for the switch at one end of his desk and flicked his door into one-way transparency for a moment. "Where is he now, Lije?" "He told me he wanted to be shown through the department, and I let Jack Tobin do the honors." Baley lit his pipe and tightened its baffle carefully. The Commissioner, like most non-indulgers, was petty about tobacco smoke. "I hope you didn't tell him Daneel was a robot." "Of course I didn't." The Commissioner did not relax. One hand remained aimlessly busy with the automatic calendar on his desk. "How is it?" he asked, without looking at Baley. "Middling rough." "I'm sorry, Lijc." Baley said firmly, "You might have warned me that be looked completely human." The Commissioner showed surprise. "I didn't?" Then, with sudden petulance, "Damn it, you should have known. I wouldn't have asked you to have him stay at your house if he looked like R. Scnnmy, would I?" "I know. Commissioner, but I'd never seen a robot like that and you had. I didn't even know such things were possible. I just wish you'd mentioned it, that's all." Tm sorry. I should have told you. But diis job has me so on edge that half the time I'm snapping at people fpr no reason. He -- I mean this Daneel thing -- is a new-type robot It's still in the experimental stage." "He said so himself." "Oh. WeU, that's it." Baley tensed a little. He said casually, teeth clenched on pipestem, "R. Daneel has arranged a trip to Spacetown for me." "To Spacetown!" Enderby looked up with indignation. "Yes. It's the logical next move, Commissioner. I'd like to see the scene of the crime; ask a few questions." head decidedly. "I don't think that's a good idea, Lije. We've gone over the ground. I doubt there's anything new to be learned. And they're strange people. They've got to be handled with Plastofilm gloves. You don't have the experience." He added, with unexpected fervor, "I hate them!" Baley injected hostility into his voice. "The robot came here and I should go there. It's bad enough sharing a front seat with a robot; I hate to take a back seat. Of course, if you don't think I'm capable of running this investigation, Commissioner -- " "It isn't that, Lije. It's not you, it's the Spacers. You don't know what they're like." "Well, then, suppose you come along." "No, Lije, I won't go there! Don't ask me to!" More quietly, he said, with an unconvincing smile, "Lots of work here, you know. I'm days behind." Baley regarded him thoughtfully. "I tell you what, then. Why not get into it by trimension later on? Just for a while, you understand. In case I need help." "Well, yes. I suppose I can do that." He sounded unenthusiastic. "Good." Baley glanced at the wall-clock, nodded, and got up. "I'll be in touch with you." Baley looked back as he left the office, keeping the door open for part of an additional second. He saw Commissioner's head begin bending down toward tht crook of one elbow as it rested on the desk. The plainclothesman could almost swear he heard a sob. Jehoshaphat! he thought, in outright shock. He paused in the common room and sat on the corner of a nearby desk, ignoring its occupant, who looked up, murmured a casual greeting, and returned to his work. Baley undipped the baffle from the bowl of the pipe and blew into it. He inverted the pipe itself over the desk's small ash-vacuum and let the powdery-white tobacco ash vanish. He looked regretfully at the empty pipe, readjusted the baffle, and put it away. Another pipeful gone forever. He reconsidered what had just taken place. In one way, Enderby had not surprised him. He had expected resistance to any attempt on his own part to enter Spacetown. He had heard the Commissioner talk often enough about the difficulties of dealing with Spacers, about the dangers of allowing any but experienced negotiators to have anything to do with them, even over trifles. He had not expected, however, to have the Commissioner give in so easily. He had supposed, at the very least,that Enderby would have insisted on accompanying him. The pressure of other work was meaningless in the face of the importance of this problem. And that was not what Baley wanted. He wanted exactly what he got. He wanted the Commissioner to be present by trimensional personification so that he could witness the proceedings from a place of safety Baley would need a witness who could not be put out of the way immediately. He needed that as the minimum guarantee of his own safety. The Commissioner had agreed to it at once. Baley remembered the parting sob, or ghost of one, and thought: Jehoshaphat, the man's into this beyond his depth. A cheerful, slurring voice sounded just at Baley's shoulder, and Baley started. "What the devil do you want?" he demanded. The smile on R. Sammy's face remained foolishly fixed, "Jack says to tell you Daneel is ready, Lije." "All right. Now get out of here." He frbwned at the robot's departing back. There was nothing so irritating as having that clumsy metal contraption forever making free with, his front name. He'd complained about thatwhen R. Sammy first arrived afid the Commissioner had shrugged his shoulders and said, "You can't have it both ways, Lije. The public insists that City robots be built with a strong friendship circuit. All right, then. He is drawn to you. He calls you by the friendliest name he knows." Friendship circuit! No robot built, of any type, could possibly hurt a human being. That was the First Law of Robotics: "A robot may not injure a human being, or. through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." No positronic brain was ever built without that injunction driven so deeply into its basic circuits that no conceivable derangement could displace it. There was no need for specialized friendship circuits. Yet the Commissioner was right. The Earthman's fear and resentment of robots were so deep and so justified that friendship circuits had to be incorporated, just as all robots had to be made smiling. On Earth, at any rate.  R. Daneel, though, never smiled. Sighing, Baley rose to his feet. He thought: Spacetown, next stop. Or, maybe, last stop. rpHE police forces of the City, as well as certain high officials, could still make use of individual squad-cars along the corridors of the City and even along the ancient underground motorways that were barred to foot-traffic. There were perennial demands by the Medievalists that these motorways be converted to children's playgrounds, to new shopping areas or to Expressway or Localway extensions. The strong pleas of "Civic Safety" remained unvanquished, however. In cases of fires too large to be handled by local devices; in cases of massive breakdowns in power lines or ventilators; most of all in cases of serious riot, there had to be some means whereby the forces of the City could be mobilized at the stricken point in a hurry. No substitute for the motorways existed or could exist. Baley had traveled along a motorway several times before in his life, but its indecent emptiness always depressed him. It warm, living pulsation of the City. It stretched out like a blind and hollow worm before his eyes as he sat at the controls of the squad-car. It opened continuously into new stretches as he moved around this gentle curve or that. Behind him, he knew without looking, another blind and hollow worm continually contracted and closed. The motorway was well-lit, but lighting was meaningless in the silence and emptiness. R. Daneel did nothing to break that silence or fill that emptiness. He looked straight ahead, as unimpressed by the empty motorway as by the bulging Expressway. In one sounding moment, to the tune of a wild whine of the squad-car's siren, they popped out of the motorway and curved gradually into the vehicular lane of a City corridor. The vehicular lanes were still conscientiously marked down each major corridor in reverence for one vestigial portion of the past. There were no vehicles any longer except for squad-cars, and pedestrians used the lanes in complete self-assurance. They scattered in indignant hurry before the rush of Baley's squealing car. Baley himself drew a freer breath as noise surged in about him, but it was an interval only. They turned into the subdued corridors that led toSpacetown Entrance. ' pected. The guards obviously knew R. Daneel by sight and, although themselves human, nodded to him without the least self-consciousness or condescension. One approached Baley arid saluted with perfect, if frigid, military courtesy. He was tall and grave, though not the perfect specimen of Spacer physique that R. Daneel was. He said, "Your identification card, if you please, sir." It was inspected quickly but thoroughly. Baley noticed that the guard wore flesh-colored gloves and had an all-but-unnoticeable filter in each nostril. The guard saluted again and returned the card. He said, "There is a Men's Personal here which we would be pleased to have you use to shower." .Baley was about to deny the necessity, but as the guard stepped back to his place, R. Daneel said, "It is customary. Partner Elijah, for City-dwellers to shower before entering Spacetown. I tell you this since I know you have no desire, through lack of information on this matter, to render yourself or ourselves uncomfortable. It is also advisable for you to attend to any matters of personal hygiene you may think advisable. There will be no facilities within Spacetown for that purpose." "No facilities? That's impossiblett' ' "I mean, of course," said R. Daneel, "none for use by Citydwellers." Baley's face filled with a clearly hostile astonishment. R. Daneel said, "I regret the situation, but it is a matter of custom." Wordlessly, Baley entered the Personal. He felt, rather than saw, R. Daneel entering behind him. He thought: Checking on me? Making sure I wash the alleged City filth off myself? For a furious moment, he reveled in the thought of the shock he was preparing fpr Spacetown. It seemed to him suddenly unimportant that he might, in effect, be pointing a blaster at his own chest. The Personal was small, but it was well appointed and antiseptjc in its cleanliness. There was a trace of sharpness in the air. Baley sniffed at it, momentarily pu#zled. Then he thought: Ozone! They've got ultra-violet radiation flooding the place. A little sign blinked on and off several times, then remained steadily lit. It said, "Visitor Will Please Remove All Clothing, Including Shoes, and Place It in the Receptacle Below." Baley obeyed. He unhitched his blaster and blaster-strap and recircled it about his naked waist. It felt heavy and uncomfortable. The receptacle closed and his clothing was gone. The lighted sign blanked out. A new sign flashed ahead. It said: "Visitor Will Please Tend to Personal Needs, then Make Use of the Shower Indicated by Arrow." Baley felt like a machine-tool being shaped by long-distance force-edges on an assembly line. small shower cubicle was to draw up the moistureproof flap on his blaster holster and slip it down firmly. He knew by repeated test that he could still draw and fire it in less than five seconds. There was no knob or hook on which to hang his blaster. There was not even a visible shower head. He placed the weapon in a comer away from the cubicle's entrance door. Another sign flashed: "Visitor Will Please Hold Arms Directly Out from His Body and Stand in the Central Circle with Feet in the Indicated Positions." As he placed his feet in the small depressions allowed for them, the sign blanked out. A stinging, foaming spray hit him from ceiling, floor and four walls. He felt the water welling up even beneath the soles of his feet. For a full minute it lasted, his skin reddening under the combined force of the heat and pressure and his lungs gasping for air in the warm dampness. There followed another minute of cool, low-pressure spray, and then finally a current of warm air that left him dry and refreshed. He picked up his blaster and blaster-strap and found that they, too, were dry and warm. He put them on and stepped out of the cubicle in time to see R. Daneel emerge from a neighboring shower. Of course! R. Daneel was not a City-dweller, but he had accumulated City dust. Quite automatically. Baley looked away. Then with the thought that, after all, R. Daneel's customs were not City eyes back for one moment. His lips quirked in a tiny smile. R. Daneel's resemblance to humanity was not restricted to his face and hands, but had been carried out with painstaking accuracy over the entire body. Baley stepped forward in the direction he had been traveling continuously since entering the Personal. He found his clothes waiting for him, neatly folded. They had a warm, clefan odor. A sign said, "Visitor Will Please Resume His Clothing and Place His Hand in the Indicated Depression." Baley did so. He felt a definite tingling in the ball of his middle finger as he laid it down upon the clean, milky surface. He lifted his hand hastily and found a little drop of blood oozing out. As he watched it, it stopped flowing. He shook it off and pinched the finger. No more blood was flowing even then. Obviously, they were analyzing his blood. He felt a surge of anxiety. His own yearly routine examination by Department doctors. he felt sure, was not carried on with the thoroughness or, perhaps, with the knowledge of these cold, robot-makers from outer space. He was not sure he wanted too probing an inquiry into the state of his health. The time of waiting seemed long to Baley, but when the light flashed again, it said simply, "Visitor Will Proceed." Baley drew a long breath of relief. He walked onward and stepped through an archway. Two metal rods closed in before him and, written in luminous air. were the words: "Visitor is Warned to Proceed no Farther." "What the devil -- " called out Baley, forgetting in his anger the fact that he was still in the Personal.  his ear. "The sniffers have detected a power source. I imagine. Are you carrying your blaster, Elijah?" Baley whirled, his face a deep crimson. He tried twice, then managed to croak out, "A police officer has his blaster on him or in easy reach at all times." It was the first time he had spoken in a Personal, proper, since he was ten years old. That had been in his Uncle Boris's presence and had merely been an automatic complaint when he stubbed his toe. Uncle Boris had slapped him hard when he reached home and had lectured him strongly on public decency. R. Daneel said, "No visitor may be armed. It is our custom, Elijah. Even your Commissioner leaves his blaster behind on all visits." Under almost any other circumstances, Baley would have walked away, away from Spacetown and away from that robot. Now, however, he'd been given additional goads to go through with his plan and have his revenge. In black anger. Baley unhitched his blaster belt. R. Daneel took it from him and placed it within a recess in the wall. A thin metal plate slithered across it. "If you will put your thumb in the depression," said R. Daneel, "only your thumb will open it later on." Baley felt undressed, far more so, in fact, than he had felt in the shower. He stepped across the point at which the rods had barred him, and. finally, out the Personal. He was back in a corridor again, but there was an element of strangeness about it. Up ahead, the light had an unfamiliar quality to it. He felt a whiff of air against his face. Automatically, he thought a squad-car had passed. R. Daneel must have read his uneasiness in his face. He said, "You are in open air now, Elijah. It is unconditioned." Baley felt faintly sick. How could the Spacers be so rigidly careful of a human body, merely because it came from the City, and then breathe the dirty air of the open fields? He tightened his nostrils, as though by pulling them together he could more effectively screen the ingoing air. R. Daneel said, "I believe you will find the open air is not deleterious to human health." "All right," said Baley faintly. The air currents hit queasily against his face. They were gentle enough, but they were erratic. That bothered him. Worse came. The corridor opened into blueness and as they approached its end, strong white light washed down. Baley had seen sunlight. He had been in a natural Solarium once in the line of duty. But protecting glass had enclosed the place and the Sun's own image had been refracted into a generalized glow. Here, all was open.' A Spacer was approaching. A tiny moment of terror struck Baley. R. Daneel, however, stepped forward to greet the approaching man with a handshake. The Spacer turned to Baley and said. "Won't you come with me, sir? I am Dr. Han Fastolfe." TT was better inside one of the domes. Baley found himself goggling at the size of the rooms and the way in which space was so carelessly distributed, but was thankful for the feel of the conditioned air. Fastolfe said, sitting down and crossing his long legs, "I'm assuming that you prefer air-conditioning to unobstructed wind." He seemed friendly enough. There were fine wrinkles on his forehead and a certain flabbiness to the skin below his eyes and just under his chin. His hair was thinning, but showed no signs of gray. His large ears stood away from his head, giving him a humorous and homely appearance that comforted Haley. Early that morning, Baley had looked once again at those pictures of Spacetown that Enderby had taken. R. Daneel had just arranged the Spacetown appointment and Baley was absorbing the notion that he was to meet Spacers in the flesh. Somehow that was considerably different from speaking to them across miles of carrier wave, as he had done on several occasions before. The Spacers in those pictures had been, generally speaking, like those that were occasionally featured in the bookfilms: tall, grave, coldly handsome. Like R. Daneel Olivaw, for instance. R. Daneel had named the Spacers for Baley and when Baley suddenly pointed and said, in surprise, "That isn't you, is it?" R. Daneel unemotionally answered, "No, Elijah, that was my designer. Dr. Sarton, the one who was murdered." "You were made in your maker's image?" asked Baley sardonically, but there was no answer to that and Baley scarcely expected one. A robot wouldn't know anything about the Bible. And now Baley looked at Han Fastolfe, a man who deviated noticeably from the Spacer norm in looks, and the Earthman felt gratitude for that fact. "Won't you accept food?" asked Fastolfe. He indicated the table that separated himself and R. Daneel from the Earthman. It bore nothing but a bowl of varicolored spheroids. Baley felt vaguely startled. He had taken them for table decorations. R. Daneel explained, "These are the fruits of natural plantlife grown on Aurora. I suggest apple and is reputed to be tasty." Fastolfe smiled. "R. Daneel does not know this by personal experience, of course, but he is quite right." his mouth. Its surface was red and green. It was cool to the touch and had a faint but pleasant odor. With an effort, he bit into it and the imexpectcd tartness hurt his teeth. He chewed it gingerly. ' Citydwellers ate natural food, of course, whenever rations allowed it. He himself had eaten real meat and bread several times. But such food bad always been processed in some way. It had been cooked or ground, blended or compounded. Fruit, now, properly speaking, should come in the form of sauce or preserve. What he was holding must have come straight from the dirt of a planet's soil. He thought: I hope they've washed it, at least. And again he wondered at the spottiness of Spacer notions about cleanliness. Fastolfe said, "Let me introduce myself a bit more specifically. I am in charge of the investigation of the murder of Dr. Sarton at the Spacetown end as Commissioner Enderby is at the City end. If I can help you in any way, I stand ready to do so. We are as eager for a quiet solution of the aiTair and prevention of future incidents of this sort as any of you City men can be." "Thank you, Dr. Fastolfe," said Balcy. "Your attitude is appreciated." So much, he thought, for the amenities. He bit into the center of the apple and hard, dark little ovoids popped into his mouth. He spat automatically. They flew out and fell to the ground. One would have struck Fastolfe's leg had not the Spacer moved it hastily. Baley reddened, started to bend. Fastolfe said, pleasantly, "It is quite all right, Mr. Baley. Just leave them, please." Baley straightened again. He put the apple down gingerly. He had the uncomfortable feeling that once he was gone, the lost little objects would be found and picked up by suction; the bowl of fruit would be burned or discarded far from Spacetown; the very room they were sitting in would be sprayed with viricide. He covered his embarrassment with brusqueness. He said, "I would like to ask permission to have Commissioner Enderby join our conference by trimensional personification." Fastolfe's eyebrows raised. "Certainly, if you wish it. Daneel, would you make the connection?" TN stiff discomfort, Baley waited until the shiny surface of the large parallelepiped in one comer of the room dissolved away to show Commissioner Julius Enderby and part of his desk. At that moment, the discomfort eased and Baley felt nothing short of love for that familiar figure, and a nostalgic longing to be safely back in that office with him, or anywhere in the City, for that matter -- even in the least prepossessing portion of the Jersey yeast vat districts. Now that he had his witness, Baley saw no reason for delay. He said, "I believe I have penetrated the mystery surrounding the death of Dr. Sarton." Out of the comer of his eyes, he saw Enderby springing to his feet and grabbing wildly (and successfully) at his flying spectacles. By standing, the Commissioner thrust his head out of the limits of the trimensic receiver and was forced to sit down again, red-faced and speechless. In a much quieter way, Dr. Fastolfe, head inclined to one side, was as startled. Only R. Daneel remained unmoved. "Do you mean," said Fastolfe, "that you know who the murderer is?" "No," Baley replied. "I mean there was no murder," "What?" yelped Enderby. "One moment, Commissioner Enderby," said Fastolfe, raising a hand. His eyes held Baley's and he asked in a tensely quiet voice, "Do you mean that Dr. Sarton is alive?" "That's exactly what I mean. And I believe I know where he is." Enderby's slack mouth silently formed the word, but it was Fastolfe who said it: "Where?" "Right there," said Baley. He pointed straight at R. Daneel Olivaw. continues building the tension and threat of his mystery plot... while completely detailing the city-world of the future. When you finish the story, you'll have lived through a dangerous hunt in a society so realistically described that you could almost find your way around In it without a guidel Few things are more difficult than science fiction's integration of plot and unfamiliar background -- when it's done well. Asimov has done it magnificently. The devil of his murder problem Is that It must be solved In exocly the right way or disaster will come to the detective or Earthl out of this issue. It'll definitely be In the next. The title, as previously noted, is more than on advertising slogan; it's a military command to the most fiercely rigid warriors ever seen on this planetl story of a civilization that never has a moment's security! It's the reverse of the grass always being greener in the other fellow's yard -- if you think you have troubles, try swapping them for somebody else's! should a former outlaw become a judge -- even if he need only pass sentence on a layer cake? that was the right word, but he could see that they didn't trust him. Uneasiness spoke in their awkward hurried motions when they came near him; fear looked out of their eyes. He had to reassure himself that all diis would pass. In time they'd learn to regard him as one of themselves and cease to recall what he had once been. For the time being, however, they still remembered. And so did he. Mrs. Claymore, of the Presiding Committee, was babbling, "Oh, Mrs. Silver, it's so good of you to come. Have you entered the contest?" "Not really," said Mrs. Silver with a modest laugh. "Of course I don't expect to win against so many fine women who are taking part. But I just thought I'd enter to -- to keep things interesting." "That was very kind of you. But don't talk about not winning. I still remember some of the dishes you served for dinner at your home that time George and I paid you a visit. Mmmmm -- they were really delicious." Mrs. Silver uttered another little laugh. "Just ordinary recipes. I'm so glad you liked them, though." "I certainly did. And I'm sure the judge will like your cake, too." "The judge? Don't you usually have a committee?" H e could hear every word. They had no idea how sharp his sense of hearing was, and he had no desire to disconcert them further by letting them know. He could hear every conversation taking place in ordinary tones in the large reception room. When he concentrated he could make out the whispers. At this point he had to concentrate, for Mrs. Claymore leaned over and breathed into her friend's attentive ear. "My dear, haven't you heard? We've had such trouble with that committee -- there were such charges of favoritism! It was really awdul." "Really? But how did you find a judge then?" "Don't look now -- no, I'll tell you what to do. Pretend I said something funny, and throw your head back and laugh. Take a quick glance at him while you do. He's sitting up there alone, on the platform." Mrs. Silver laughed gracefully as directed, and her eyes swept the platform. She became so excited, she almost forgot to whisper. "Why, he's -- " "Shhh. Lower your voice, my dear." "Why -- he isn't human!" "He's supposed to be -- now. But, of course, that's a matter of opinion!" "But who on Earth thought of making him judge?" "No one on Earth. Professor Haider, who lives over on that big asteroid the other side of yours, heard of the troubles we had, and came up with the suggestion. At first it seemed absurd -- " "It certainly seems absurd to me!" agreed Mrs. Silver. "It was the only thing we could do. There was no one else we could trust." "But what does he know about cakes?" "My dear, he has the most exquisite sense of taste #" "I still don't understand." "It's superhuman. Before we adopted Professor Haider's suggestion, we gave him a few tests. The results simply left us gasping. We could mix all sorts of spices -- the most delicate, most exotic herbs from Venus or Mars, and the strongest, coarsest flavors from Earth or one of the plantgrowing asteroids -- and he could tell us everything we had added, and exactly how much." Matilda." "Isn't it? It's honestly incredible. If I hadn't seen him do it myself, I wouldn't have believed it." "But he doesn't have human preferences. Wasn't he -- wasn't he -- " "Carnivorous? Oh, yes They say he was the most vicioxxs creature imaginable. Let an animal come within a mile of him, and he'd scent it and be after it in a flash. He and the others of his kind made the moon he came from uninhabitable for any other kind of intelligent life. Come to think of it, it may have been the very moon we're on now!" "Really?" "Either this, or some other moon of Saturn's. We had to do something about it. We didn't want to kill them off, naturally; that would have been the easiest way, but so uncivilized! Finally, our scientists came up with the suggestion for psychological reforming. Professor Haider told us how difficult it all was, but it seems to have worked. In his case, at least."-. Mrs. Silver stole another glance. "Did it? I don't notice any one going near him." "Oh, we don't like to tempt fate, Clara. But, if there were really any danger, I'm sure the psychologists would never have let him out of their clutches." "I hope not. But psychologists take the most reckless risks sometimes -- with other people's lives!" "Well, there's one psychologist who's risking his own life -- and his own wife, too. You know Dr. Cabanis, don't you?" "Only by sight. Isn't his wife that stuck-up thing?" "That's the one. Dr. Cabanis is the man who had actual charge of reforming him. And he's going to be here. His wife is entering a cake." "Don't tell me that she really expects to win!" "She bakes well, my dear. Let's give the she-devil her due. How on Earth an intelligent man like Dr. Cabanis can stand her, I don't know, but, after all, he's the psychologist, not I, and he could probably explain it better than I could." tion. So Dr. Cobanis was here. He looked arouitd, but the psychologist was not in sight. He would probably arrive later. The thought stirred a strange mixture of emotions. Some of the most painful moments of his life were associated with the presence of Dr. Cabaois. His early life, the life of a predatory carnivore, had been an unthinkingly happy one. He supposed that he could call his present life a happy one too, if you weren't overly particular how you defined the terra. But that period in between! That had been, to say the least, painful. Those long sessions with Dr. Cabanis had stirred him to the depths of a soul he hadn't known he possessed. The electric shocks and the druggings he hadn't minded so much. But the gradual reshaping of his entire psyche, the period of basic instruction, ir which he had been taught to hate his old life so greatly that he could no longer go back to it even if the way were open, and the conditioning for a new and useful life with human beings -- that was torture of the purest kind. If he had known what was ahead of him, he wouldn't have gone through it at all. He'd have fought until he dropped, as so many of the others like him did. Still, now that it was over, he supposed that the results were worth the pain. He had a position that was more important than it seemed at first glance. He exercised control over a good part of the food supply intended for the outer planets, and his word was trusted implicitly. Let him condemn an intended shipment, and cancellation followed automatically, without the formality of confirmation by laboratory tests. He was greatly admired. And feared. They had other feelings about him too. He overheard one whisper thgt surprised him. "My dear, I think he's really handsome." "But, Charlotte, how can you say that about someone who isn't even human!" "He looks more human than many human beings do. And his clothes fit him beaiJtifully. I wonder -- does he have a tail?" "Not that I know of." "Oh." There was disappointment in the sound. "He looks like a pirate." "He was a kind of wolf, they tell me. You'd never guess, to see him, that he ran on all fours, would you?" "Of course not. He's so straight and dignified." "It just shows you what psychology can do." df operations, dear ladies," he thought sarcastically... "Without them I wouldn't be able to stand so nice and straight with the help of all the psychologists in this pretty little solar system of ours." From behind a potted Martian nut-cactus came two low voices -- not whispers this time. And there was several octaves difference in pitch between them. One male, one female. The man said, "Don't be worried, Sweetheart. I'll match your cooking and baking against anybody's." There was a curious sound, between a click and a hiss. What human beings called a kiss, he thought. Between the sexes, usually an indication of affection or passion. Sometimes, especially within the ranks of the female sex, a formality behind which warfare could be waged. The girl said tremulously, "But these women have so much experience. They've cooked and baked for years." "Haven't you, for your own family?" "Yes, but that isn't the same thing. I had to learn from a cookbook. And I had no one with experience to stand over me and teach me." "You've learned faster that way than you'd have done with some of these old hens standing at your elbow and giving you directions. You cook too well. I'll be fat in no time." "Your mother doesn't think so. And your brother said something about a bride's biscuits -- " "The older the joke, the better Charles likes it. Don't let it worry you." He kissed her again. "Have confidence in yourself, dear. You're going to win." "Oh, Gregory, it's awfully nice of you to say so, but really I feel so unsure of myself." "If only the judge were human and took a look at you, nobody else would stand a chance. Have I told you within the last five minutes that you're beautiful?" tion again. He found human love-making as repulsive as most human food. He picked up a few more whispers. And then Dr. Cabanis came in. The good doctor looked around, smiled, greeted several ladies of his acquaintance as if he were witnessing a private strip-tease of their souls, and then came direct-, ly up to the platform. "How are you, Ronar?" "Fine, Doctor. Are you here to keep an eye on me?" "I hardly think that's nccessary. I have an interest in the results of the judging. My wife has baked a cake." "I had no idea that cake-baking was so popular a human avocation." "Anything that requires skill is sure to become popular among us. By the way, Ronar, I hope you don't feel hurt." "Hurt, Doctor? What do you mean?"  "Come now, you understand me well enough. These people still don't trust you. I can tell by the way they keep their distance." "I take human frailty into account, Doctor. Frailty, and lack of opportunity. These men and women haven't had the opportunity for extensive psychological treatment that I've had. I don't expect too much of them." "You've scored a point there, Ronar." "Isn't there something that can be done for them, Doctor? Some treatment that it would be legal to give them?" "It would have to be voluntary. You see, Ronar, you were considered only an animal, and treatment was necessary to save your life. But these people are supposed to have rights. One of their rights is to be left alone witl. their infirmities. Besides, none of them are seriously ill. They hurt no one." For a second Ronar had a human temptation. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "Your wife too, Doctor? People wonder how you stand her." But he resisted it. He had resisted more serious temptations. pervasively. Dr. Cabanis said, "I hope you have no resentment against me at this stage of the game, Ronar. I'd hate to have my wife lose the pri#e because the judge was prejudiced." "Have no fear. Doctor. I take professional pride in my work. I will choose only the best." "Of course, the fact that the cakes are numbered and not signed with the names of their creators will make things simpler," "That would matter with human judges. It does not affect me." Another gong sounded, more loudly this time. Gradually the conversation stopped. A man in. a full dress suit, with yellow stripes down the sides of his shorts, and tails hanging both front and rear, climbed up on the platform. His eyes shone with a greeting so warm that the fear was almost completely hidden. "How are you, Ronar? Glad to see you." "I'm fine, Senator. And you?" "Couldn't be better. Have a cigar." "No, thank you. I don't smoke." "That's right, you don't. Besides, I'd be wasting the cigar. You don't vote!" He laughed heartily. "I understand that they're passing a special law to let -- people -- like me vote at the next election." "I'm for it, Ronar, I'm for it. You can count on me." The chairman came up on the platform, a stout and dignified woman who smiled at both Ronar and the Senator, and shook hands with both without showing signs of distaste for either. The assembled competitors and spectators took seats. The chairman cleared her throat. "Ladies and gentlemen, let us open this meeting by singing the Hymn of All Planets." them. His voice wasn't too well adapted to singing, but neither, it seemed, were most of the human voices. And, at least, he knew all the words. The chairman proceeded to greet the gathering formally, in the name of the Presiding Committee. Then she introduced Senator Whitten. She referred archly to the fact that the Senator had long since reached the age of indiscretion and had so far escaped marriage. He was an enemy of the female sex, but they'd let him speak to them anyway. Senator Whitten just as archly took up the challenge. He had escaped more by good luck -- if you could call it good -- than by good management. But he was sure that if he had ever had the fortune to encounter some of the beautiful ladies here this fine day, and to taste the products of their splendid cooking and baking, he would have been a lost man. He would long since have committed polygamy. Senator Whitten then launched into a paean of praise for the ancient art of preparing food. Ronar's attention wandered. So did that of a good part of the audience. His ears picked up another conversation, this time whispered between a man and a woman in the front row. The man said, "I should have put your name on it, instead of mine." "That would have been silly. All my friends know that I can't bake. And it would look so strange if I won." "It'll look stranger if I win. I can imagine what the boys in the shop will say." "Oh, the boys in the shop are stupid. What's so unmanly in being able to cook and bake?" "I'm not anxious for the news to get arovmd." "Some of the best chefs have been men." "I'm not a chef." "Stop worrying." There was exasperation in the force of her whisper, "You won't win anyway." "I don't know. Sheila -- " "What?" "If I win, will you explain to everybody how manly I really am? Will you be my character witness?" She repressed a giggle. "If you won't help me, I'll have to go around giving proof myself." "Shh, someone will hear you." Senator Whitten went on and on. time when he had wandered over the surface of this, his native satellite, He no longer had the old desires, the old appetites. Only the faintest of ghosts still persisted, ghosts with no power to do harm. But he could remember the old feeling of pleasure, the delight of sinking his teeth into an animal he had brought down himself, the savage joy of gulping the tasty flesh. He didn't eat raw meat any more; he didn't eat meat at all. He had been conditioned against it. He was now half vegetarian, half synthetarian. His meals were nourishing, healthful, and a part of his life he would rather not think about. He took no real pleasure in the tasting of the cakes and other delicacies that born human beings favored. His sense of taste had remained keen only to the advantage of others. To himself it was a tantalizing mockery. Senator Whitten's voice came to a sudden stop. There was applause. The Senator sal down; the chairman stood up. The time for the judging had arrived. They set out the cakes -- more than a hundred of them, topped by icings of all colors and all flavors. The chairman introduced Ronar and lauded both his impartiality and the keenness of his sense of taste. They had a judging card ready. Slowly, Ronar began to go down the line. They might just as well have signed each cake with its maker's name. As he lifted a portion of each to his mouth, he could hear the quick intake of breath from the woman who had baked it, could catch the whispered warning from her companion. There were few secrets they could keep from him. At first they all watched intently. When he had reached the fifth cake, however, a hand went up in the audience. "Madam Chairman!" "Please, ladies, let us not interrupt the judging." "But I don't think the judging is right. Mr. Ronar tastes hardly more than a crumb of each!" "A minimum of three crumbs," Ronar corrected her. "One from the body of the cake, one from the icing, and an additional crumb "But you can't judge a cake that way! You have to eat it, take a whole mouthful -- " "Please, madam, permit me to explain. A crumb is all I need. I can analyze the contents of the cake sufficiently well from that. Let me take for instance Cake Number #, made from an excellent recipe, well baked. Martian granis flour, goover eggs, tinganflavored salt, a trace of Venusian orange spice, synthetic shortening of the best quality. The icing is excellent, made with rare dipentose sugars which give it a delightful flavor. Unfortunately, however, the cake will not win first prize. An anguished cry rose from the audience. "Why?" "Through no fault of your own, dear lady. The purberries used in picked. They have the character'istic flavor of refrigeration." "The manager of the store swore to me that they were fresh! Oh, I'll kill him, I'll murder him -- " She broke down in a flood of tears. R onar said to the lady who had protested, "I trust, madam, that you will now have slightly greater confidence in my judgment." She blushed and subsided. Ronar went on with the testing. Ninety per cent of the cakes he was able to discard at once, from some fault in the raw materials used or in the method of baking. Eleven cakes survived the first elimination contest. He went over them again, more slowly this time. When he had completed the second round of tests, only three were left. Number # belonged to Mrs. Cabanis. Number # had been made by the man who argued with his wife. Number # was the product of the young bride, whom he had still not seen. Ronar paused. "My sense of taste is somewhat fatigued. I shall have to ask for a short recess before proceeding further." There was a sigh from the audience. The tension was not released, it was merely relaxed for a short interval. Ronar said to the chairman, "I should like a few moments of fresh air. That will restore me. Do you mind?" "Of course not, Mr. Ronar." He went outside. Seen through the thin layer of air which surrounded the group of buildings, and the plastic bubble which kept the air from escaping into space, ful. The Sun, far away, was like a father star who was too kind to obUterate his children. Strange, he thought, to recall that this was his native satellite. A few years ago it had been a different world. As for himself, he could live just as well outside the bubble as in it, as well in rarefied air as in dense. Suppose he were to tear a hole in the plastic -- Forbidden thoughts. He checked himself, and concentrated on the three cakes and the three contestants. "You aren't supposed to let personal feelings interfere. You aren't even supposed to know who baked those cakes. But you know, all right. And you can't keep personal feelings from influencing your judgment. "Any one of the cakes is good enough to win. Choose whichever you please, and no one will have a right to criticize. To which are you going to award the prize? "Number #? Mrs. Cabanis is, as one of the other women has so aptly termed her, a bitch on wheels. If she wins, she'll be insufferable. And she'll probably make her husband suffer. Net that he doesn't deserve it. Still, he thought he was doing me a favor. Will I be doing him a favor if I have his wife win? "Number #, now, is insufferable in her own right. That loving conversation with her husband would probably disgust even human ears. On the other hand, there is this to be said for her winning, it will make the other women furious. To think that a young snip, just married, without real experience in home-making, should walk away with a prize of this kind! "Ah, but if the idea is to burn them up, why not give the prize to Number #? They'd be ready to drop dead with chalgrin. To think that a mere man should beat them at their own specialty! They'd never be able to hold their heads up again. The man wouldn't feel too happy about it, either. Yes, if it's a matter of getting back at these humans for the things they've done to me, if it's a question of showing them what I really think of them, Number # should get it. "On the other hand, I'm supposed to be a model of fairness. That's why I got the job in the first place. Remember, Ronar? Come on, let's go in and try tasting them again. Eat a mouthful of each cake, much as you hate the stuff. Choose the best on its merits." walked in, but the babbling stopped quickly. The chairman said, "Are we ready, Mr. Ronar?" "All ready." The three cakes were placed before him. Slowly he took a mouthful of Number #. Slowly he chewed it and swallowed it. Number # followed, then Number #. After the third mouthful, he stood lost in thought. One was practically as good as another. He could still choose which he pleased. The assemblage had quieted down. Only the people most concerned whispered nervously. Mrs. Cabanis, to her psychologist husband; "If I don't win, it'll be your fault. I'll pay you back for this." The good doctor's fault? Yes, you could figure it that way if you wanted to. If not for Dr. Cabanis, Ronar wouldn't be the judge. If Ronar weren't the judge, Mrs. C. would win, she thought. Hence it was all her husband's fault. Q.E.D. The male baker to his wife : "If he gives the prize to me. I'll brain him. I should never have entered this." "It's too late to worry now." "I could yell 'Fire'," he whispered hopefully. "I could create a panic that would empty the hall. And then I'd destroy my cake." "Don't be foolish. And stop whispering." The young post-honeymooning husband: "You're going to win, dear; I can feel it in my bones." "Oh, Greg, please don't try to fool me. I've resigned myself to losing." "You won't lose." "I'm afraid. Put your arm around me, Greg. Hold me tight. Will you still love me if I lose?" "Mmmm." He kissed her shoulder. "You know, I didn't fall in love with you for your cooking, sweetheart. You don't have to bake any cakes for me. You're good enough to eat yourself." "He's right," thought Ronar, as he stared at her. "The man's right. Not in the way he means, but he's right." And suddenly, for one second of decision, Ronar's entire past seemed to flash through his mind. The young bride never knew why she won first prize. Tfjtsc vruit mimh xvo Romrniifis jamirt rrankUi Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Write f#ry fopy pi tef; ; 'The Ma. Life" -- Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages ! Grasp the inner power of your mind! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor. Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist ,... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicmcians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose. California, U.S.A. Please send me the fret book. The Masierj of Lift, which explains how I may leant to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address City State A Doaprofit. : ; otgaaizatiofir Addcesi ; Scflbs A.K.J. I AM reasonably sure that most of my readers have never come across the name of Maupertuis. If you want to remedy this in a hurry, just reach for an encyclopedia -- you'll find him listed as "Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau dc, (#), French mathematician Q-O'ClU and astronomer." You'll find some remarks about his life, too: that his king (Louis XV) sent him to Lappland to measure tiie length of a degree of the meridian, and that he quarreled with Voltaire -- as who didn't? -- and was an able mathematician. Also it is stated that he was the author of a number of works such as Sur la figure de la terre, Lettre aur la comhte de #, and AsfrononTie nautique. All of which may tend to make you feel that Monsieur de Maupcrtuis may have been an important scientist in his time but not worth much type nowadays, beyond an entry in the encyclopedia. B ut that is merely due to the fact that reference books often omit the reftlly interesting things about people. Perhaps Maupertuis was excessively vain (at least all his contemporaries said that he was), and perhaps he was just a shade more quarrelsome than the other learned men of his time -- but he was also full of amusing ideas and never hesitated to talk about them. When, for example, his compatriot and contemporary George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, speculated about Terra australis incognita, the "Great Unknown Southland" which was then supposed to exist somewhere in the South Seas, Maupertuis jumped in without hesitation. Buffon, in his speculations, had drawn a parallel to South America. Coming from the Atlantic Ocean, he said, one first encounters the South American lowlands, inhabited by primitive tribes -- but farther inland, where the mountains tower toward the sky, there was an area where there had been a high culture with magnificent architecture. Similarly, in the South Seas, we had found only the low islands, inhabited by primitive peoples. So when we finally managed to penetrate to the hypothetical Southland -- which was assumed to have tall mountains tocwe'd probably find another strange and so far completely unknown culture. Maupertuis agreed with Buffon so far as the idea of an unknown southern continent was concerned. He also subscribed to the assumption of high mountains in the unknown Southland for the simple (and to us surprising) reason that it was not at that time known how an iceberg is formed: it was thought that icebergs formed in rivers only -- hence there had to be enormous rivers to produce the icebergs which had been seen. And the large rivers, in turn, demanded high mountain ranges to supply them. But there Buffon and Maupertuis parted company. Maupertuis did not expect to find a high culture in the Southland -- or any culture at all! The culture of the Andes was high, he admitted, but from there on things went downhill. The islands in the Pacific had a lower and lower culture the farther one went, so obviously none was left for Southland itself -- its inhabitants probably still had tails! All this was proclaimed, without any unnecessary hesitation, at Castle Sanssouci near Potsdam, at the dinner table of Frederic the Great. Many years later, French and German explorers might add deadpan to their reports that the natives were tailless... to the puzzlement of readers who did not know just what this was about. about Maupertuis, though, is that he is the father of an idea which has been repeatedly used in science fiction. He '-invented" the tube through the center of the earth. Just what would happen if one had a truly bottomless well? Maupertuis was, as has been said, an excellent mathematician. He was also one of the men of science who accepted Sir Isaac Newton's teachings wholeheartedly. The problem of the bottomless well became an exercise in mathematics. Obviously, if you fell into such a well, you'd fall faster and faster until you reached the center of the Earth. But you would not stop there, of course, for by that time you would have acquired a considerable speed, and would continue to "fall upward" through the remaining half of the well. Gravitation would slow you down to zero at the precise point of reaching the surface at the other end of the bottomless well -- and your assistant at the other end could yank you sidewise onto solid ground, before you had time to start falling again. The trip -- and the trip back, if you had no assistant -- would take # minutes and # seconds. The speed would be highest at the Earth's center, where it would be (expressed in our measurements) five miles per second. Of course, the bottomless well would have to be evacuated, so that the traveler would not be slowed down by air resistance. And the whole thing would work even better only if one first stopped the rotation of the Earth, for lacking that, one would have to dig the well from pole to pole. But in the pole-to-pole connection itself there is some hidden trouble: the area of the South Pole is about one mile above sea level, while the area of the North Pole is virtually at sea level. So if you try it from north to south, you don't quite reach the other end, which is one mile above your farthest point. And if you go from south to north, you reach north polar sea level with enough residual velocity to rise one mile into the thin . air ! So you might spend some time in such a tunnel... Just about half a century ago, a Russian writer by the name of A. A. Rodnych (who later acquired fame as a historian of aviation) demonstrated that Maupertuis, and after him Camille Flammarion, had failed to extract all the humor from the idea. There was still a trick left -- and Rodnych described it under the title; Subterranean sellpropelled railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow; Fanfastic Novel, for the Present in only three and moreover incomplete chapters. The point was very simple : there are no straight tunnels. If there were, you would not need fuel. Suppose a perfectly straight tunnel were built from Kansas City to San Francisco -- straight enough to look through, even though you might need a telescope to make out the light from the other end. This tunnel would be straight, but not horizontal: its center woiild be closer to the center of the Elarth than its two ends. Hence, from whichever end you enter, you go down. A railroad car on a track through the tunnel, with its brakes released, would begin to roll. Just as in the bottomless well, the speed would increase and increase until the center of the tunnel was reached, at which point the direction would be "up" and the speed would begin to decrease. And if there were no friction in the bearings and on the rails, and no air resistance (and also if the wheels could stand the speed near the center without being tom apart by centrifugal force), the railroad car would reach the other end of the tunnel with zero speed and without having used a drop of fuel. Provided, of course, that both tunnel mouths are the same distance from the center of the Earth, i.e. same elevation above sea level. The timetable for such a railroad would not pose any problems ; each and every train would arrive at its destination precisely # minutes and #I seconds after its brakes had been released at the other end... whether the tunnel was # miles or a mere # miles long;  gravity, let's consider the case of the young man whose chair simply moved across the polished hardwood floor until it was next to that of the beautiful brunette -- and who explained it by "attraction" and blamed it all on Sir Isaac Newton. Since I happened to be aroiind, I was called upon to testify that Newton actually had said that each particle of matter in the Universe attracts every other particle. True, he did say that... but if I had been the young lady, I would have protested bitterly at the implication that I weighed several times as much as Mt. Everest. Seriously : some people do wonder why the law of universal gravitation is not noticeable in daily life. Science says that all bodies attract each other, but most of the time it certainly doesn't look that way. On the other hand, when two ships collide in a fog there are always some people who believe that Newton's law was responsible. To get the matter straight, we obviously need some figures : If we have two pieces of matter, each weighing one gram, and they are one centimeter apart, what is the attraction between them? Answer: about ## the thousandth part of a gram, and there are # grams in an ounce. If one of the two pieces of matter weighed # grams and the other # grams -- and they were still one centimeter apart -- their mutual attraction would be # X # or # times as large as that of the two one gram pieces. But if they were three centimeters apart, you'd have to divide the attraction over the standard distance by # to get the proper figure. A nic# big orange weighs about # grams; two of them almost make a pound, since a pound is equivalent to # grams. If we place two such oranges ten centimeters or just about four inches apart, their mutual attraction then is # x #  # divided by # times #, which gives # as the result. This result has to be multiplied by ##, the final result being ## or not quite evidently, is far too little to be noticeable or even measurable. As for the young man and the beautiful brunette, their mutual gravitational attraction must have they were originally # centimeters (about forty inches) apart. But the friction of #he chair on even the best polished hardwood floor must have been well over twenty pounds -- so Tm afraid we must assume that some other kind of attraction was reSFonsible for that particular phenomenon. How about something that is really heavy, though -- say a middle-sized ocean liner of # tons weight? Since ocean liners as a rule avoid close contact, we'll say that they float # centimeters (#lOth of a mile) apart. Making the same calculation as before, which is multiplying eir weights in grams, divided by the square of their distance in centimeters and multiplied by the constant for one gram at one centimeter, we find that the liners would attract each other with a force of # grams. Even if they were only a hundred yards apart, the attraction would amount to just about one pound hardly enough to move a ship. So when two ships collide in a fog, it just means that they happened to be on a collision course. The figures show why the mutual gravitational attraction of masses does not show in daily life. It becomes important only if one of them is of planetary size -- for example when the man on a slippery floor is attracted by the Earth. TO other item in my column has brought in such a large volume of mail as my piece on prime numbers in the June # score of letters and postcards -- #, by actual count, at the moment of writing -- iueried the expression on p. #, ril begin the discussion with that. Of course, as eleven correspondents stated or at least suspected, Fermat's expression suffered from a typographical error. The exponent of the "#" is nof #n but #", so that the expression reads correctly #  # ") The five readers who amiably called me a bungler and ignoramus will pleaseair their grievance with the t # rpesetter; my copy was correct, and I have a carbon copy of the article to prove it. Another twelve letters dealt with a fact beyond my control, but one which I also regret. About a month after my article was Bureau of Standards Institute for Numerical Analysis) on the California, Los Aieles) anWestern Automatic Computer) had established higher Mersenne primes than the famous # -- #. The list of higher Mersenne primes reads as follows:  #MI I -- I #  I #  I #I  X One Canadian reader thought that he had found a proof of Goldbach's theorem. His reasoning was as follows: disregarding the #, which is the only even prime, a prime number must of necessity be an even number plus one: P  E  #. Hence, if you add two primes pi and p # you really add Ei  Ea  # which obviously must be an even number since you add three even numbers together. Now this is proof, if one were needed, that the sum of two primes must be an even number -- but this is not what Goldbach said. Goldbach stated that every even number is the sum of two primes, which sounds like the same statement, but actually is not. To explain tfie difference, let us assume that Goldbach's theorem is wrong. In that case, there should be at least one even number which is not the sum of two primes but merely the sum of two odd numbers, either of which, or both, are not primes. The proof to be found, therefore, is that there is no even number which cannot be expressed as a sum of two odd numbers both of which must be primes. Among the correspondence there were several letters asking me for a list of primes up to certain limits or asking where such a list can be gotten. I don't know whether the list can still be bought, but it should be in any reasonably large public library. Its title is List of Prime Numbers from I to #I by D. N. Lehmer; it is a publication of the Carnegie Institution ofWashington, Publication Nr. #, released in #. The recent work on the big Mersenne primes can be found in Mathematical Tables arid Aids to Computation, Vol. #. p. # (#). Will you please tell me how to determine the acceleration of a rocket if its weight and thrust are known? In space, would the w-eight of a rocket affect its acceleration in any way? Richard Weed #I Harper Avenue Morrisville, Penna. The formula for determinitig the acceleration of a rocket ia about as simple as a formula cun be. It is PW, where P stands for the thrust and W for tlie weight. In practical application, however, there are some Riinor complications which galaxy science fiction have to be taken into accoont one of which is the direction of the movement. Lets assume that the rocket has just taken off and is moving vertically upward. WeUl say that its weight is # lbs. and that its rocket motor develops a thrust of # lbs. # divided by # is, of course, # -- so the rocket's "absolute" acceleration would be #g. If this were the whole story, it would mean that the rocket is climbing at #g (or accelerating # feet per second), so that at the end of each second of flight its velocity would be # feet per second faster than at the beginning of that second. But (obviously) if the motor were not working, the rocket would fall backwhich is to say that the Earth's gravity swallows up one g of the 'absolute" acceleration. Hence the "effective" acceleration is #g, and the formula has to be amended to read PW -- Ig. The interesting point here is that, if the rocket is manned, the pilot feels the absolute acceleration while the speed increases according to the effective acceleration. The "true" effective acceleration is influenced by air resistance, which will vary with the speed of the rocket at a given moment and its altitude (or more precisely the density of the air at that altitude). As important as that is the fact that the weight of the rocket at the end of that second will be less than the weight at the beginning of the second. All this applies to empty space too, except that (a) there will be no air resistance, (b) the value for the thrust is about # per cent higher than the sea level value of the same rocket motor and (c) at a sufficient distance from the Earth the value for g may be noticeably less than the sea level value. For a height of # miles, for example, g has droppel from about # ftsec to # ftsec. Does a rocket which takes off toward the west have to attain a higher velocity relative to a point on the ground to reach orbital velocity than a rocket headed east? # iV #nd Avenue Portland #, Oregon Let's take this one step by step. In von Braun's orbit -- # miles above mean sea levels the rocket will have to have a velocity of # miles per second. If it has that velocity in the orbit, it doesn't matter whether it goes around the equator heading east or heading west, or along a meridian from pole to pole, or at any odd angle in between. Repeat : If it has that velocity in the orbit... but first it has to acquire this velocity. For simplicity's sake, let's suppose that take-off is at the equator. The equatorial diameter of the Earth is almost # miles, hence the length of the equator is that figure multiplied by 'pi" or, in round figures, # miles. Since the Earth turns once in # hours, a point at the equator moves in an easterly direction at the rate of # miles per hour or about # miles per second. So if your rocket heads east it has, relative to the center of the Earth, a speed of # miles per hour before it even starts. If you wanted to head west, you would not only lose that # mph, but you would have to "kill" it first -- so that you lose # miles per hour, or around # miles per second. Half-a-mile a second is a considerable speed, even for a rocket, so take-off in an easterly direction is usually assumed. What does the term "Doppelaner" mean? Fleet Post Office San FranciscOj Calif. This is originally a German word, composed of two words each of which is hard to translate -- which is, of course, the reason why it was adopted rather than translated. "Doppel" can mean "twice," and also 'Mouble" (the amount) or "duplicate." 'Ganger" is best translated as 'Svalker." The whole means: walking duplicate." The superstition attached to the word is that some people have such a 'duplicate" walking around, and when they meet it face to face they know that they are doomed, with usually only three days of grace left to them. But in everyday German conversation, the term "Doppelganger" can be and often is used without mystical connotations. A man saying to a friend, "I met your Doppelganger today," merely means that he met somebody or saw somebody who looked just like his friend. Why is the nautical mile longer than the ordinary mile? Ja there any relationsNp between the nautical mile and the metfic kilometer? And is there such a thing as a "metric mile"? James A. Monahan (no street iVen) U anybody knows the origin of the English mile, I wish he'd write me, for as far as I know the mile -- # yards or # feet long -- is a unit which just happened. The nautical mile, however, has a reason; its length is l#th of one degree at the equator. As for the kilometer, it also has a reason: it is l#th of the distance of a point on the equator from either pole -- Or rather it is supposed to be, for more recent measurements have shown a small deviation from that figure. There is no "metric mile"; but for a while geographera used a unit which they called the "geographic mile," which corresponded to l#th of a degree at the equator. The various national" miles are as uncertain in origin as the English mile, though some of them happen to come fairly close to the old geographic mile. To compare them, the kilometer has been used as the unit in the following table : I English mile # km. I nautical mUe # km. I geographic mile # km. I German mile # km. I Danish mile # km. I Swedish mile # km. I Norwan mile # km. The Russian verst measured # kilometers (or # miles), but like all the other old miles given, it is now obsolete. The only units in use internationally now are the kilometer, the English mile, and the nautical mile; but the French nautical mile is three times as long as the nautical mile of everybody else. Don't ask me why. up your library when there kept in our handsome gold-stomped binders, instead of just being ollowed to accumulote. Arronged according to date, will give you continued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Golaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. the carnivore Why were they apologetic? It wasn't their fault that they came to Earth much too late. T he beings stood around my bed in airsuits like skisuits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks. I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They are people. I recognize people and whether I am going to like this person or that person by something in the way they move and how they get excited when they talk; and I know that I like these people in a motherly sort of way. You have to feel motherly toward them, I guess. They all remind me of Ronny, a medical student I knew once. He was small and round and eager. You had to like him, but you couldn't take him very seriously. He was a pacifist : he wrote poetry and pulled it out to read aloud at ill-timed moments; and he stuttered when he talked too fast. They arc like that, all fright and gentleness. T am not the only survivor -- they have explained that -- but I am the first they found, and the least damaged, the one they have chosen to represent the human race to them. They stand around my bed and answer questions, and are nice to me when I argue with them. All in a group they look halfway between a delegation of nations and an ark, one of each, big and small, thick and thin, four arms or wings, all shapes and colors in fur and skin and feathers. I can picture them in their UN of the Universe, making speeches in their different languages, listening patiently without understanding each other's different problems, boring each other and being too polite to yawn. They are polite, so polite I almost feel they are afraid of me. and I want to reassure them. But I talk as if I were angry. I can't help it, because if things had only been a little different... "Why couldn't you have come sooner? Why couldn't you have tried to stop it before it happened, or at least come sooner, afterward... If they had come sooner to where the workers of the Nevada power pile starved slowly behind their protecting walls of lead -- if they had looked sooner for survivors of the dust with which the nations of the world had slain each other -- George Craig would be alive. He died before they came. He was my co-worker, and I loved him. We had gone down together, passing door by door the automatic safeguards of the plant, which were supposed to protect the people on the outside from the radioactive danger from the inside -- but the danger of a failure of politics was far more real than the danger of failure in the science of the power pile, and that had not been calculated by the builders. We were far underground when the first radioactivity in the air outside had shut all the heavy, lead-shielded automatic doors between us and the outside. We were safe. And we starved there. "Why didn't you come sooner?" I wonder if they know or guess how I feel. My questions are not questions, but I have to ask them. He is dead. I don't mean to reproach them -- they look well meaning and kindly -- but I feel as if, somehow, knowing why it happened could make it stop, could let me turn the clock back and make it happen differently. If I could have signaled them, so they would have come just a little sooner. They look at one another, turning their funny-face heads uneasily, moving back and forth, but no one will answer. The world is dead... George is dead, that thin, pathetic creature with the bones showing through his skin that he was when we sat still at the last with our hands touching, thinking there were people outside who had forgotten us, hoping they would remember. We didn't guess that the world was dead, blanketed in radiating dust outside. Politics had killed it. These beings around me, they had been watching, seeing what was going to happen to our world, listening to our radios from their small settlements on the other planets of the Solar System. They had seen the docan of war coming. They represented stellar civilizations of great power and technology, and with populations that would have made ours seem a small village; they were stronger than we were, and yet they had done nothing. "Why didn't you stop us? You cbuld have stopped us." than the others backs away, gesturing politely that he is giving room for someone else to speak, but he looks guilty and will not look at me with his big round eyes. I still feel weak and dizzy. It isard to think, but I feel as if they are hiding a secret. A doelike one hesitates and comes closer to my bed. "Wc discussed it... we voted... It talks through a microphone in its helmet with a soft lisping accent that I think comes from the shape of its mouth. It has a muzzle and very soft, dainty, long nibbling lips like a deer that nibbles on twigs and buds. "We were afraid," adds one who looks like a bear. "To us the future was very terrible," says one who looks as if it might have descended from some sort of large bird like a penguin. "So much -- Your weapons were very terrible." Now they all talk at once, crowding about my bed, apoloto know about. But your people didn't seem to mind." "Wc were afraid." "And in your fiction," the doelike one lisped, "I saw plays from your amusement machines which said that the discovery of beings in space would save you from war, not because you would let us bring friendship and teach peace, but because the human race would unite in hatred of the outsiders. They would forget their hatred of each other only in a new and more terrible war with US." Its voice breaks in a squeaK and it turns its face away from me. "You were about to come out into space. We were wondering how to hide!" That is a quicktaUdog one, as small as a child. He looks as if he might have descended from a bat -- gray silken fur on his pointed face, big night-seeing eyes, and big sensitive ears, with a humped shape on the back of his airsuit which might be folded wings. "We were trying to conceal where we had built, so that humans would not guess we were near and look for us." They are ashamed of their fear, for because of it they broke all the kindly laws of their civilizations, restrained all the pity and gentleness I see in them, and let us destroy ourselves. I am beginning to feel more awake and to see more clearly. And I am beginning to feel sorry for them, for I can see why they are afraid. They are herbivores. I remember the meaning of shapes. In the paths of evolution there are grass eaters and berry eaters and root diggers. Each has its functional shape of face and neck -- and its wide, startled-looking eyes to sec and run away from the hunters. In all their racial history they have never killed to eat. They have been killed and eaten, or run away, and they evolved to intelligence selection. Those lived who succeeded in running away from carnivores like lions, hawks, and men. T look up, and they turn their eyes and heads in quick embarrassed motion, not meeting my eye. The rabbity one is nearest and I reach out to touch him, pleased because I am growing strong enough now to move my arms. He looks at me and I ask the question: "Are there any carnivores -- flesh eaters -- among you?" He hesitates, moving his lips as if searching for tactful words. "We have never found any that were civilized. We have frequently found them in caves and tents fighting each other. Sometimes we find them fighting each other with the ruins of cities around them, but they are always savages." The bearlike one said heavily, "It might be that carnivores evolve more rapidly and tend toward intelligence more often, for we find radioactive planets without life, and places like the place you call your asteroid belt, where a planet should be -- but there are only scattered fragments of planet, pieces that look as if a planet had been blown apart. We think that Usually..." He looked at me uncertainly, beginning to fumble his words. "We think... "Yours is the only carnivorous race we have found that was -- civilized, that had a science and was going to come out into space," the doelike one interrupted softly. "We were afraid." They seem to be apologizing. The rabbity one, who seems to be chosen as the leader in speaking to me, says, "We will give you anything you want. Anything we are able to give you." They mean it. We survivors will be privileged people, with a key to all the cities, everything free. Their sincerity is wonderful, but puzzling. Are they trying to atone for the thing they feel was a crime; that they allowed humanity to murder itself, and lost to the Galaxy the richnessof a race? Is this why they are so generous? Perhaps then they will help the race to get started again. The records are not lost. The few survivors can eventually repopulate Earth. Under the tutelage of these peaceable races, without the stress of division into nations, we will flower as a race. No children of mine to the furthest descendant will ever make war again. This much of a lesson we have learned. These timid beings do not realize how much humanity has wanted peace. They do not know how reluctantly we were forced and trapped by old institutions and warped tangles of politics to which we could see no answer. We are not naturally savage. We are not savage when approached as individuals. Perhaps they know this, but are afraid anyhow, instinctive fear rising up from the blood of their hunted, frightened forebears. T'HE human race will be a good partner to these races. Even recovering from starvation as I am, I can feel in myself an energy they do not have. The savage in me and my race is a creative thing, for in those who have been educated as I was it is a controlled savagery which attacks and destroys only problems and obstacles, never people. Any human raised outside of the political traditions that the race' inherited from its bloodstained childhood would be as friendly and ready for friendship as I am toward these beings. I could never hurt these pleasant, overgrown bunnies and squirrels. "We will do everything we can to niake up for... we will try to help," says the bunny, stumbling over the English, but civilized and cordial and kind. I sit up suddenly, reaching out impulsively to shake his hand. Suddenly frightened he leaps back. All of them step back, glancing behind them as though making sure of the avenue of escape. Their big luminous eyes widen and glance rapidly from me to the doors, frightened. They must think I am about to leap out of bed and pounce on them and eat them. I am about to laugh and reassure them, about to say that all I want from them is friendship, when I feel a twinge in my abdomen from the sudden motion. I touch it with one hand under the bedclothes. There is the scar of an incision there, almost healed. An operation, The weakness I am recovering from is more than the weakness of starvation. For only half a second I do not understand; then I sec why they looked ashamed. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books In Print in America or Enyland I Send #c for ffiant printed checklist of over # avail able titles including over #S# paperbound boofti at Uc each np ; aho detaib of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to zell or swap. They voted the murder of a race. All the human survivors found have been made sterile. There will be no more humans after we die. I am frozen, one hand still extended to grasp the hand of the rabbity one, my eyes still searching his expression, reassuring words still half formed. There will be time for anger or grief later, for now, in this instant, I can understand. They are probably quite right. We were carnivores. I know, because, at this moment of hatred, I could kill them all. Current ISetc Book: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Nw Ywk #, Nw York Opn Mondky Thru Siiurday : S:t A.M. to S:S P.M. Open Wedneeday Bveningz until #:## P.M. (Phone GRomorcy #-#P#) (Cont. from page #) take over Earth. Even when they are pointed out, they arouse skepticism. But don't you see? They're meant to! Paper clips, rubber bands, strings, pencils, glue, all the deliberately trivial rest... Huge industries, employing thousands of people, turning out countless clips, hangers, pencils, miles of string... Paying wages and taxes... And nobody buys the products! But somebody must. We all have them and they aren't gifts of the manufacturers, or there would be no wages and taxes. Th Russians? No, they have them, too, and so must also be potential -- what? Victims? There is but one answer: Extraterrestrials! They -- or their human agents or dupes -- are cleverly supplying us all with these safe-seeming tools of conquest. How will the plan work? See for yourself.  The items are all genuine; many of them even carry the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.  They may or may not have been invented by aliens, but that's not the point now -- the industries are kept going by alien funds.  Step by step, we have been made increasingly dependent on these products, so dependent that even the most skeptical must blanch at this prospect: What would happen if everyone who needed a paper clip, rubber band, pencil, string or mucilage suddenly could not find any? Documents strewn around for lack of clips or rubber bands; parcels unwrapped because there is no paper or string; nothing pasted or glued together; orders and notes left unwritten... simplicity of the scheme? Withdraw these items abruptly and the armies of the world canrkot march, the governments will fall apart, civilian populations wilt be unable to pack up artd escape. Disintegration rays, atomic bombs, suidde ships from space with hydren warheads -- There arc defenses against such overt weapxMis. But what defense is there for a world suddenly deprived of pencils and nails, string and glue and wrappnng paper? We could buy our own and smash the conspiracy. As a solution, it's too drastic -- it violates the human instinct of collecting junk for possible emeiency. I hope somebody has a better answer. Origins of Galactic Etiquette Take this handy guide along on your Galactic jauntsto avoid decrtfi -- or even worsel M an Tippled out through the Galaxy, learrimg. He was learning -- often the hard way -- to abandon the set notions of morality that had conditioned him. He was learning that the guiding hand of the past could not reach from star to star. He was learning to evaluate new siruarions arising out of changed conditions. In sum, he was learning that etiquette varies with environment. At Grst, breaches of etiquette were all too common. The trouble they caused resulted largely from twin errors. The offender erred in failing to use his intelligence to deemirne the proper social expedient; and the one taking odense erred in failing to allow for the biinderer's ignorance. To recotKile conflicting ways of life -- without allowing one to impose its beliefs, shames, and fears upon another -- is the Galactic Council's mission. In # the Galactic Council consolidated its counseling services into the Department of Etiquette. It commissioned experts with a background of comparative studies in ecology, sociology, and psychoogy. These experts took the generic of Manners, Logic, Expediency -- not, as many think, from Emily Post, a probably mythical authority on Terran etiquette. The following examples of Galactic etiquette are a cross-section stage. Zel Pret (#-#), dean of Question: Three years ago a friend of mine disappeared. He had been working on a selfpopping cereal when it exploded. He left no trace and so we held mourning rites over the spot we believed he had last occupied. Six months ago he reappeared. But, naturally, until he goes through the birth ceremony, we must religiously follow the custom of "not seeing" him. He is taking unfair advantage of his "invisibility." Judging by his mischief-making, I suspect that he staged the explosion to cover his leaving -- and I shudder to think of what he must have done during those missing years. Now he walks right into our houses, helps himself to our best liquor, snatches food from our grasp, and pinches our wives. And he caps these indignities by tying our eye-stalks intq neat bows, turning our "unseeing" eyes upon ourselves. What do you advise? Fit-to-be-tied. Answer: You have a knotty problem, Fit-to-be-tied. To see how to cut the knot, simply follow the lesson you learn from the following example. Alusded Anstef (#-#), a who sculpted for a hobby, taught his son Rusica to believe in his philosophy, which held that the mind never can gather facts enough to be sure that one course of action is wiser than another -- that what now seems good may in the long run prove bad. One day in # Alusded stood on a high scaffold In his studio. He was absorbedly putting the finishing touches to a colossal statue. He stepped back to admire his work. He fell. The sudden stop didn't kill him... as he belonged to a metallic race, it merely dented him. Shakily, he grasped the scaffolding to pull himself upright. The scaffolding toppled. It struck the top of his head. Again his iron constitution saved his life -- but as he happened to be slanting in the right position relative to the magnetic lines of force of the planet, the blow permanently magnetized him. Then his head cleared and he started to get up. His heart bonged when he found himself stuck to the steel flooring. He strained, but couldn't pry himself loose. He needed help, and called out. He grimaced at the undignified sight he presented, but welcomed the ring of his son Rusica's footsteps. Somewhat bad-temperedly, he explained what had happened. Rusica stood watching his father thoughtfully. Then he slowly reflected aloud. 'Analyzing the situation," he said, "I must weigh my desires and good intentions against unforeseeable effects." By now, adding to Alusded's embarrassment, a group of his friends had gathered. They listened -- somL' impatiently, some amusedly -- to Rusica's careful .reasoning. At last, Rusica made up his mind. Taking the long view, he found himself unable to judge whether he would harm or help his father andor society by acting -- and so, uncertain that good would come of freeing his father from the floor, he went out. Less philosophical, three of Alusded's friends came closer to take hold of the fallen magnate. Three clangs echoed through the room -- and the three friends were sticking to Alusded. The remaining friends wisely used ropes to tug loose and sort out the quartet. Alusded gratefully wanted to shake hands with his rescuers, but they moved out of reach, wary of his personal magnetism, The suggested that he undergo heat and so lose his drawing power. Among themselves they muttered about Rusica's unfilial conduct. But Alusded, proud that his teachings had taken, resoundingly praised Rusica for sticking to them. Now, Fit-to-be-tied, you and I know that Alusded was rationalizing a defeat. His case shows how a stern doctrine may boomerang. Your problem will answer itself, I believe, when your "not seeing" makes you blunder into your friend in ways I leave to your imagination. Of course, I don't counsel that you run him down or through. But after he experiences two or three close calls he will decide to arrange for his rebirth. Atrata Beritar (#-#), Cygnian expert; author of the famous Melanocoryphic Memoirs. Ouesri'on: My neighbor hovers about, making disparaging remarks while I'm bleaching or dyeing my feathers. It's nearly moulting time and I'm afraid she'll want to come along when I shop for falsies. Would it be proper for me to tell her to go preen herself? ' RufBed. Answer: Patience, Ruffled. If your neighbor's kibitzing becomes overly annoying, you may with propriety ask her to desist. However, you'll do well to think of this: there are occasions when it's perfectly correct for one to kibitz. For example, when a Groombian philosopher seems lost in abstract thought, other Groombians deliberately make all manner of distracting sounds and gestures. They do this to remind him of the omnipresence of environment. Largely speaking, of course, most Galactic societies frown on derogatory kibitzing, because of the totalitariaii taint clinging to even such a modified form of spying. But in all societies, constructive kibitzing has become acceptable ever since #. In that year, a scout ship of the University of Capclla Expedition crashed in the wilderness of Deneb IX. A twisted beam pinned the scout in the wreckage. Only the thrust of his arms held the beam from crushing his chest. But his arms soon tired, and the weight of the beam slowly but inexorably settled. The magnetic storm that had caused the crash made it impossible for the command ship to get a fix on the lost scout. So when the scout failed to return or report, search parties set out on the ground to cover the area from opposite ends. AS they made their way toward each other, both parties became self-consciously aware of an arboreal creature that flitted back and forth between them. First it would hover over Search Party A, and with bright beady eyes watch the members blasting their way through the brush. Then it would swing back to give its attention to Search Party B. These bursts of scrutiny were distracting to the Capellans. They were itching to scare off the creature. But respect forall forms of life channeled their energy fnto the search for the rapidly weakening scout. After several hours of shuttling, the arboreal being diffidently addressed the members of Search Party B. An alien voice appeared to creep into their thoughts. It said, "Pardon me for intruding upon your minds, but would it be sporting if I were to tell you whether or not you are warm?" So, Ruffled, you see how one being may be in a position to do others a better turn than anyone imagines. You see how the others may be in a position to deprive themselves of that aid. Fortunately, in this case everything worked out happily. At length, but happily. But you see how easy it is for beings to fail to read each other's purposes. So try to keep from letting your annoyance with your neighbor's fault-finding open a breach between you. Remember what birds of a feather must do. Naea Muc (#-#), who won fame in the Cymini sector. Question: I recently had a pleasant visit at the Vernac branch of the Galactic Museum. I saw -- and rather fell in love with -- an outer garment made of animal pelts. I'd like to synthesize a duplicate of it. Would such a garment be socially acceptable today? Madcap. Answer: Stick to non-objective covering, Madcap. Otherwise you violate a long-standing taboo. This usage traces back to the disappearance of Katherine Roman, Miss Terra of #. Among the prizes she won when she gained the title was a mutatedcat coat worth four kilocredits. She wore it while enjoying another prize, a trip around the Galaxy. She never completed the trip, however, for she disappeared while on a stopover on Tasinack. The natives of Tasinack are a fur-bearing race. They turned out in honor of Katherine's muchpublicized visit in a crowd that spread over the spaceport like a rug. Unfortunately, Katherine's appearance rubbed the nap the wrong way. She stepped out of the spaceship and waved and smiled at the Tasinackians, and while their standards of beauty found Katherine wanting, they were anxious to make her feel welcome and so they had rehearsed spontaneous cheering for days. But when they saw that her coat consisted of pelts very like their own, their cheers changed to catcalls. Katherine's chaperone sensed the reason for the resentment and urged her to keep the fur coat out of sight during the stopover. Katherine reluctantly agreed. When they reached the hostelry, Katherine started to put the coat away, lingering over the packing process. She couldn't resist giving the soft, rich fur one last stroke. And that undid the effect of her chaperone's urging. Deaf to all warnings and pleas, Katherine wrapped herself in her fur coat and went out into the streets to do a bit of sightseeing. She didn't return. And no Terran eye ever again saw Miss Terra of # alive. The natives of Tasinack held contests too. Tasinack's Bestdressed Female of # won the title by sporting a supple jacket of something remarkably like humanoid skin. That's why I urge you to drop your idea of synthesizing a fur coat, Madcap. Only when you've inherited one is it in good taste for you to wear a fur coat. Sul Oea (#-#), Swind IV expert who also created a stir as a musician. Question: I've just come back from running a trading post on Tontowe II, Ive come back empty-handed. Sessuly, my competitor, has ccnne back with all his arms full. And I can't understand why. I remember the shock I felt when I first saw Sessuly acting boorishly. There be stood, in the middle cf a horde of bellowing natives. He was nodchng and smiling as if he understood what they were bellowing. And all the while he was rudely holding fingers in his ears, shutting out the deafening blast that passes for talk. I laughed to myself, because I was sxire be was taking the wrong tack. It came as a blow when he began reaping a windfall. The natives were storming him with trade goods and leaving my trading post strictly alone. For a long time I held to my course of pioliteness. I couldn't bring myself to veer about and follow Sessuly's example. And I saw my threshold remaining uncrossed and my goods becoming shopworn. Finally I made up my mind : if rudeness was etiquette on Tontowe n, I would outboor Sessuly. And so, though it scandalized me, I forced myself to make awkward attempts at being rude. I thumbed my tongue and stuck out my nose at the natives. I elbowed and shouldered them aside. I tried to drown them out with a vast bellowing of my own, until my lungs began to leak. But all in vain. My trade goods stayed becalmed on the shelf. What's the matter? Isn't etiquette what it's puffed up to be? Deflated. Answer: How did you wangle your trading permit? Sessuly had the good sense to bone up on the folkways of Tontowe II. You didn't. You leaped wrongly when you concluded that Sessuly was being rude. You remind me of Lene Han (#-#), of Lorsa I. While visiting Prah he heard cries of pain that shook him. The cries led him to a hut where a Prahi was beating his frail mate brutally. Han rushed in to stop the wife-beater. When he recovered from the wife's flesh-clawing and hair-pulling attack on him, Han found out that the frail wife had wanted the beating because she was frail. Her broken bones would knit beautifully andthe callus that formed would strengthen them. This is how the fpmales of Prah become fit for the heavy work they do. You, too, rushed in. You should have learned that the natives of Tontowe II speak a polyphonic form of double talk. The bellowing you heard was really a combining of two voices, a bass and a treble. The native uses his bass voice to give his running commentary on long-term space-time factors -- climate, social forces, and the like. He uses his treble voice to deal with matters of immediate concern, such as trading. The bass is -- in the ears of a non-Tontower -- so loud that it overpowers the treble. When Sessuly stuck his fingers in his ears he was making practical use of a simple principle: to hear speech above a loud continuous noise, plug your ears. Buy ear plugs. Deflated, and try Tontowe II again. Inili Sostota (#-#), Seden X expert, who redeemed himself many times over after failing in this case. Question : My problem becomes more pressing as my spaceship nears your planet. Some five months ago I hastily snapped shut a yawn. I was in the middle of a spaceship that was in the middle of nowhere -- and I was hearing meaningful tapping. I tracked the sound to a porthole. I looked out. I saw nothing but space. The tapping continued. I stepped up the magnification of the porthole -- and saw the tappers. They were spores. The tapping told me that inside each thick tough shell was a nucleated mass of thinking protoplasm with a food reserve of starch. For some time I had been yawning out of boredom, and so I eagerly welcomed company -- even if that company was protoplasm that communicated by Galactic Morse. Phrasing their query most politely, they asked me to let them land on my ship. I tapped back a warm welcome. But as the months dragged along I lost interest in what the spores had on tap to talk about. We really have nothing in common. What's more, they were -- and still are -- generating their own atmosphere, and are budding and fissioning wildly all over the hull. I'm concerned. This clvter of space barnacles threatens to impair the efficiency of an aerodynamic landing. How can I get rid of them now without negating my original welcoming of them? Host. i#nswer: Frankly, Host, I know nothing about the ways of the spores of space. But I hazard the following. When you point out that they are likely to become incandescent along with your spaceship, you will quickly lose your guests. (PostscriptHow unfortunate, Host followed my advice, which I based on insufficient data. Actually, his spaceship had passed through a stream of cosinfinitesimal punctures. He was unaware that the self-sealing walls failed him. Oxygen seeped out. His yawning was due more to oxygen loss thair to boredom. Unfortunately, the spores were polite -- much too much so to put him in their debt by telling him that they had sensed his danger and had come to plug the holes with themselves. They left for this reason, rather than because they were looking to their own safety. They converted some of their food reserve of starch into explosive and blasted off into deep space. Soon Host began to yawn again.) Inx Sorgu (#-#), distinguished Vegan expert. Quesion: I recently lost a valuable ologog. A Cetian found it and graciously returned it. When I gushed my gratitude, the Cetian stomped on my tail and stormed out. What do you think of such barbarity? Sore. Answer: Simmer down. Sore. You were at fault. Following this rule should help you in the future: it's better form to express  one's thanks to one's benefactor in writing than to do so in person. There are various reasons for this. Many races become embarrassed at a show of gratitude; they have merely done their duty. Others are also merely doing their duty, but resent the trouble another's carelessness puts them to. Still others would place a Freudian interpretation upon your losing an object you consciously value; they would consider your efifusive thanks evidence of unconscious hypocrisy. Your Cetian falls into the lastcited category. On the other hand, gratitude so delights a Siriute that he will filch an object over and over again in order to enjoy the pleasure of returning it. But perhaps the gravest reason for heeding this rule dates back to Dila Mirg (#-#). To his fellow Achemari, Dila Mirg was a particularly handsome specimen. To humanoids, however, his appearance was horrifying. Solarians, especially, found the sight of Mirg so chilling that they froze in terror. The effect on Mirg was just as great -- but in bis case the effect was one of intense hurt, for he was extremely sensitive to the reaction of others to himself. His only release for the emotional pressure on his wounded ego was to lash out with an eely tentacle. This tentacle was of modified muscular tissue; on excitation through the nervous system, it discharged a powerful electric shock. TN #, Mirg in this manner electrocuted a terrified Terran he encountered while the spaceship he astrogated lay docked on Callisto. To escape his angry pursuers, he stowed aboard a Procyon-bound freighter just before it blasted off. Mirg managed to stay hidden during the early part of the trip. But when he saw Mallory Quayle -- Mate and sole Terran in the ship's complement -- in danger, Mirg impulsively gave away his presence and risked his life to save Quayle's. From his hiding place Mirg watched Quayle brush against a bare live wire, Instantly, Mirg slithered to the rescue. He shorted the circuit with his own body. There was a blinding flash. Mirg blew out a fuse gland, but his regenerative powers would soon put him on the mend. Quayle suffered nothing worse than facial burns. Brimming with gratitude, QUayle fumed until he could remove his blindfolding bandages and thank his rescuer face to face. When the moment came, Quayle hurried to the astrogation room, where Mirg was now working his passage. As he laid eyes on irg, Quayle choked on the words of thanks he had prepared. Terror transfixed him. Hurt, Mirg lashed out with his tentacle. Like you, Sore, Quayle neglected to sound his benefactor's depths, neglected to ask about him. If Quayle had known in advance about Mirg's peculiarities and the effect they would have on himself, he would have been prepared. Then he might have averted his eyes while delivering his thanks. He might even have steeled himself to master the ordeal of looking squarely at Mirg. Or, better yet, he might have dropped Mirg a note of thanks, as you should always do in the future. Beyond The next # issues for # each You Save .# Delivered by mail # days ahead of newsstand sole Every cover suitoble for framing -- every story designed for your enjoyment. Fill out coupon end moil today. #I Hudson St., Now York #, N. Y. Encloied find # for # issues of Beyond to: #B With a Vengeance Keep this in mind in teaching apprentices: They are future iovrneymen -- and even masters! October #, # New San Francisco T oday, at precisely #:# a.m., Kyle became First Impefator of Terra. His coup was so fantastically direct and facile that. I am almost tempted to believe that old cliche "the time was right." Well, however badly it can be expressed, I suppose the world was ripe for this sort of thing. I can remember when much the same used to happen in elections. One man would win over another by a tremendous majority, and historians would then set about to show how "the time was right." Why do I persist in tormenting myself with that phrase! Analytically, I might say I resent this new aristocracy of politics. Specifically, I might say I resent Kyle. And both are true, both are true. This swing, though, to absolute monarchy, complete with the installation of the Kyle Dynasty -- damn him! This is something which psychologists, not historians, must explain. Has the age of the Common Man. so bravely flaunted for over one hundred years, truly come to nothing? Would people really prefer a figurehead and a symbol of undisputed authority? In this instance, one may again conclude that "the time was right." Contact with planets like Mars and Venus undoubtedly had its influence. I must confess that the televised audiences with the Mrit of Venus and the Znam of Mars did make Terra's President -- I should say, late President -- look a bit seedy. I daresay there is such a thing as a too common Common Man. Kyle was such, twenty years ago. His name wasn't Kyle then, although it was something very like that. I must see if any of the old ledgers are about! I'd like to see what the Imperator's name was when His Most Imperial Majesty was an apprenticed nobody! October #, #Q New San Francisco of dust behind the old printing press that was once the heart of my Beacon-Sentinel. There were others there too. Spent a delightful morning with them, reading back through those old account books. I wonder whatever happened to Hastings? And Drew? Best linotype men I ever had. They became pilots, or something, as I recall. Too bad, too bad. They futures, both of them. Why they felt they must ally themselves with the non-thinking, muscleflexing variety of mankind -- of which our Ruler is an excellent example -- I'll never know. Ah, yes, Kyle! In those days he was Kilmer Jones. I don't remember him too well, actually, except for the day I fired him. I suppose he was right in changing his name. We couldn't very well have an Imperator named Kilmer the First, or Jones the First. Much too common, not at all in keeping. Gawky fellow -- that Kilmer. When Bard brought me a sample of his work -- I guess I'll have to call it that -- we both had a good laugh over it! Atrocious spelling! Couldn't follow the proofreader's marks. Indeed, I wonder if the fellow could even read! The punctuation! And the grammar! I called the boy to the office that morning -- or was it the next day? No matter. I called him in and told him, as kindly as possible, that I thought there were other vocations to which he might be better suited. The irony of it! Kilmer Jones -- Kyle I! And he stood there, I remember. with those seventeen-yearold hands that weie all knuckles and bone and chapped skin, twisting those hands and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "Please. Mr. Booth," he said, his voice cracking. "I ain't got no other job in mind. I wanna be a noospapcr man. I ain't got no -- " If not for that "ain't got no," I think I might have relented. But no one is going to ruin the English language as he did! Not in my offices! I took him to task severely for his offensive usage, outlined a correct example of what he had attempted to say. gave him a brief lesson in the history of the tongue, and explained why it had been chosen as the official Terran speech. I think my conclusion was, "You'll be much better off in a position which requires you to quote neither Milton nor Shakespeare nor any author save possibly those who write the comic strips." "Got no training," he said softly. (I supposed it was to keep his voice from exhibiting its usual adolescent gymnastics.) I shuddered slightly, I remember. "You mean, T have no training.' " "Yeah..." softly again. "Yeah, Mr. Booth." "Yes.'" I cried impatiently. "Not 'yeah,' but yes!" I searched for his severance pay on my desk, wondering who the devil had hired him in the first place. Gave him three weeks pay, as I recall it, one more than necessary. Unmannerly pup! He just stood there for a minute and then finally left without even a "Thank you." or "Good-by." And this is the man who is Kyle the First, Ruler of Terra at the age of thirty-seven! I wonder what he is like now... January #, I New San Francisco to wonder. Surprisingly few heads have rolled, but apparently Jonesy chooses to exhibit his power in other ways. m Thanksgiving Day, a custom preserved in certain portions of the Directorate of North America, is three weeks away -- even though it is January. The Year One. There used to be some childish joke about the Year One. Don't remember it just now. Thanksgiving harvest in January. Christmas celebration in February. Spring planting in July! To say nothing of the inconvenience this "has caused in my bookkeeping department! I suppose the man will now try to change the weather to suit his new calendar! January #, I New San Francisco He can't last! He can't! A dictator is one thing. A monarch is another. But Kyle is something else! Naturally he had to remove certain persons from his way. And his summer palace in the plains region of America -- that's all right, that's all right! An authority of Kyle's stature is expected to remove undesirables, and to have a summer palace, and a winter palace, and anything else he wants! Of course! But why this? Why this of all things! No newspapers! Just like that! He waves an edict, and just like that, no newspapers The BeaconSentinel has been a great paper for the last twenty-five years! It was nothing, and I was nothing, and together we became a VcMce! And now again, we are nothing! Oh, I see what's behind it! It's revenge, that's what it is! Because he once couldn't become a "noospaper" man, he's taking his vengeance this way. A man as petty as that shall be overthrown! Mark my words! And the clumsiness of it! I see what he is! I know him! He's still that pup of seventeen, playing king with the world, twisting his hands in glee over his childish triumph. No subtlety! Just a direct pushing over an applecart he couldn't steer! Doesn't matter whose ales you destroy, does it, Jonesy? Just push it overpush it over! January #, I New San Francisco Closed the Beacon-Sentinel yesterday. My savings are enough to take care of me for a few years. After that -- ah, well, I am no longer a young man. I am glad that Elsa is not here to see this. February #, I New San Francisco R eceived a letter this morning, requesting me to appear at the chambers of His Most Imperial Majesty, Kyle the First, on Tuesday of next week. His Most Imperial Majesty can see me between #:# and #:# on that morning. Ten minutes -- rather a brirf spell in which to roll another head. I find myself amazed, though. Is this man so truly powerful that he needs no police to make his arrests for him? Can he really send messages via jetmail and be certain his enemies will not try to escape? I don't want to attempt flight Life without my work is no longer life. February #, I Kyleton Palace, North America over it twice, and I don't understand. If only Elsa were still with me! I could talk to her. She would help me decipher what it's all about. This morning, at #:# sharp, I was taken to the public audience chamber in the palace. His Majesty was seated behind a desk facing the doors. Behind him, on the wall, was His Coat of Arms. He stood up and walked toward me, waving away the guards. "How are you, Mr. Booth?" he said. And offered me His Hand! I recovered my presence of mind, of course, and replied as was fitting. And then He said it! T shall be at liberty later this week to discuss mcM'e fully the details of these past years." (Shades of "ain't got no!") "Meanwhile, my secretary will ve you a complete dossier on my planned Official Bulletin." He lighted a cigarette after offering me cme. "I should deem it an honor," he continued, "to have a man of your literary versatility and -- I must add -- your vast practical experience become Chief Editor of that Bulletin. The publication, which I should enjoy christening The Terran Beacon-Sentinel -- with your permission, rir -- shall be more than my official organ. It shall set the standards for the coming newspaper world." He cocked an eyebrow at me and smiled. "I believe we are in perfect accord about certain standards, are we not, Mr. Booth? The deplorable grammatical practices of some newspapers! Wen, really, Mr. Booth! I feel assured of your agreement!" He led me around the desk and pointed to the Coat of Arms. As He stood rilent, I felt obliged to look more closely. I had seen it before, of course, but seeing it now, greatly enlarged, I was able to make out its detail. What I had thought was a mere decorative border, I now realized was a motif I have seen all my life! A tiny lighthouse sending forth a beam! The trademark of my paper! As I stood there, gaping, His Majesty laughed softly and said, "That, Mr. Booth, I felt impelled to include. For, without your most fortuitous termination of my apprenticeship in your organization, I should not have risen to my present position." shook it, warmly. His hair is just a bit gray at the temples, and there are signs of strain on His finely featured face. Those awkward hands are now strong and purposeful. He apologized that He must return to His duties, and went with me to the door. "My secretary will fill in further details about your new position. Newspapers shall once again be published. No -- don't say a word, Mr. Booth! I know what you are thinking. "Your salary," he continued as we stood at the open door, "shall, of course, be commensurate to your high authority in this new field. Allow me, now, to thank you most deeply and sincerely for your unwitting aid in my youth. I assure you, Mr. Booth, I have often thought of that day we talked. And I hope to repay you, in some measure, for what you did." He said more, mostly polite phrases of good-by. And then I was outside after being handed a folder by some man. An official jetmobile took me to my residence -- which turned out to be in the East Wing. Here I am, and I don't understand. I came prepared to suffer heaven only knows what as part of Kilmer Jones's childish pattern for revenge. Instead, here I am, head of the Official Bulletin, titular ruler and ruIcr-in-fact of the future journalism of the world! There is something behind this -- I keep feeling there is. But what? What? Or is he truly generous, to a degree never before known among absolute monarchs? February #, I Kyleton Palace, North America T AM a suspicious and most humble old man. I see now that Kyle's generosity amazed me only because I myself would have been incapable of such an action. Just now, I fear for His Majesty. I was right, before, when I said there was no subtlety in the man. He is too open, too fair, too forgiving. A ruler with such greatness of heart might easily allow some small insignificant person in too far, too close. I fear for him! February #, I Kyleton Palace, North America Tomorrow we begin publication! The pressroom is magnificent! I can hardly wait. It's been a long time since I've felt such exuberance. This afternoon I am to conduct a conference of some eight hundred editors! His Majesty's secretary has sent me an outline on Journalistic Standards, which I shall study after lunch. There was a, note attached, in His Majesty's handwriting -- such beautiful penmanship, too. "A mere formality," it said, "for, of course, you and I know full well what the future of journalism shall be, Mr. Booth." Later -- How wrong can one man be in one lifetime? I wonder now why he changed the calendar. I wonder now what poor devil he destroyed then. But ' cheat him! I'll cheat him yet! Obituary, Trran Bacon-Sntinl, Fbruary #, I H unfortunat and untimly dmis of Gorg W. Booth is hrby notd with sorrow by thos who knw and lovd him. Mr. Booth, formr ditor and publishr of th Bacon-Sntinl of Nw San Francisco, Dirctorat of North Amrica, had apparntly bn in pK)or helth for som tim. It is blivd that worry ovr the succss of his nw policy-stting Trran Bacon-Sniinl was a contributing factor in his suicid lat in th aftrnoon of Fbruary #. His Most Imprial Majsty Kyi th First has ordrd a fitting monumnt to his lat lamntd frind. A simpl shaft of granit shall b retd in th gardn facing th Ast Wing of Kylton Palac, whr Mr. Booth mad his residue. On th shaft shall b inscribd th Ignd; "How bautous mankind is! Oh brav nw world. That has much peepl in't!" Th quotation is from Th Tmpst. Mr. Booth was a grat admirr of Shakspar. An vn mor fitting and longlivd mmorial is xprssd in th diet rlasd through th offics of His Majsty on th vry day of Mr. Booth's dath. It reeds in part: "Th nw linguistic policy on Trra, as dmonstratd in th Trran Bacon-SntinI, shall hneforth b known as Boothtalk." Mr. Booth bfrindd Our Imprial Rulr in His youngr days, and, as w all know. His Majsty nvr forgts a frind, Best Reading Time for a Dime Out September #; when you visit your drug store put down a dime and pick up a copy. Sold only at your druggist. -- arsd costs only  Fiction by America's top writers  Health articles by leading authorities  Feature stories on beauty, movies, household hints, hobbies, rodio and TV. i-...  Everett F. Bleihr and T. E. Dikiy. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. # paies, # rrmS second annual collection of science fiction novelets contains one from Astounding, we do feel good about the compliment. Astounding's contribution is talc called "Firewater." It's about "dots in bottles" from outer space that drive brainy men crazy and are themselves driven nuts by men. Murray Leinster's cute and weird science fantasy "The Gadget Had a Ghost," about some characters in Istanbul who find an icy spot in a wall where no such spot should be, and discover that small objects can be passed through it to the Thirteenth Century. Boyd Ellanby's "Category Phoenix," about the immortality conferred by the Blue Martian Fever and what happens because of it in a dictatorially ruled America; James Blish's "Surface Tension," describing the adventures of microscopic men on a far planet where they had been deposited by full-sized humans; and Walter Miller's "Conditionally Human," on the heartbreaking difficulties of a poundkeeper for mutated chimps that are used as substitute children in a genetically controlled world of tomorrow. Bleiler and Dikty are to be complimented on their second annual novelet collection; it is an excellent job. Oparin. Translated by Sergius Morgulis. Dover Publications, New York, #. # pages, #, paper O N May #, #, The New York Times published a long editorial on an experiment by Stanley L. Miller, a student of Professor Harold Urey at the University of Chicago. In this experiment, Miller is said to have created some of the amino acids that are the building blocks of life, and to have done so in an "atmosphere" similar to that exhalf years ago. In achieving this. Miller at least partially has proved, by laboratory experiment, the worldshaking gecbiological theories put forward in Oparin's book here under review. Both Miller and The rimes credit Oparin with the speculations on which the experiment was based. On any count, then, Oparin's book -- which was first published in this country in # by the Macmillan Company -- is of great public interest in view of new developments. But more than that, it is inherently valuable because of the lucid approach Oparin has taken to his subject, by Dr. Morgulis' smooth and easy-flowing translation. First, Oparin disposes of all previous theories of the origin of life, from spontaneous generation to the theory of the interstellar travel of life spores made popular by Arrhenius. He then goes on to show how organic matter must have come into existence before life itself, not after, and proves in passing that much of our store of petroleum hydrocarbons was probably created in the very beginnings of our planet. and is not the result of the decay of plant life, as we have all been taught. He also describes some fascinating new theories on the formation of the complex protein molecules from which living things that resulted in Man were developed. The book is moderately easy to grasp, even to people with only a high-school knowledge of chemistry. And it is epoch-making, no question of it. Make it one of your more serious "musts." Gnome Press, New York, #. # paes, # IOR my money, Hal Clement has the ability to make the utterly alien seem utterly real better than any other science  fiction writer now in operating condition. It is this magnificent ability to visualize that raises this tale above the average in science fiction. The story (serialized in Asrounding) tells of a small group of people, from a very hot world with a sulphur atmosphere, who are aboard an interstellar trading vessel. One of the crew is a detective trying to track down the source of a hideous habitforming drug that has been making inroads on his people. The ship lands on Mercury (a "cold" planet to them) and trading contact is made with Iceworld, or Earth. Eventually the drug is found to be a common Earthian herb, theretofore innocently supplied by an Earthian named Wing, who received in return for small quantities of it many pounds of rare and precious metals. Clement is a master of "imaginative realism." He refuses to mystify, or overawe, or hypnotize his readers with superscience, fantastic impossibilities and garish language. He makes his altogether unhistoric events seem real by talking about them in a completely matter-of-fact "tone of pen." Unfortunately, his aliens are more human than his human characters, which makes me wish he would deal with aliens only. Nevertheless, this is believable, exciting, and satisfying fiction. Clifford D. Simak. Simon fis Schuster, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # H ere, on the other hand, is a straight science fantasy -- and a genuinely lovely book, too. It is one of those bitter-sweet, tough-gentle, purely magic fairy tales of supernormal powers, parallel worlds, enormously advanced civilizations -- and children's playthings -- that take you completely out of yourself. People who read it first in to be told about its plot Others win have to be tantalized witii the follonring dues: It deals with the daydream of a Better World Next Door; the powers of paranormal magics like the mesmerizing spin of a child's top; a superscience that can produce indestructible modem conveniences practically free of charge; and the inspiring struggle between the humdrum dirtiness of Earthly industrialism and tiie enchantment of far-advanced science in the "better" paraUel world. It, too, in a different way, is believable, exciting and satisfying, with some of the most ingenious plot twists in recent sdence fiction. ner. Simon'bt Schuster, #rK., New York, #. # pagfis, # "T is not my intention to review this fascinating book by the man best known for his work on Cybernetics -- the very name of which he invented -- with anything like the completeness it caUs for. I only want to call your attention to the fact that the book is, in a sense, the autobiography of a homo superior, a man with definitely supernormal mental powers. This alone should make it exciting for most adult science fiction readers. But furthermore it is an enthralling human document as well, a picture of "growing Up" that can compete with most of the famous narratives of childhood I am familiar with. My only disappointment in the book is that it does not discuss any of the genetic aspects of the supernormal. All Dr. VWener does is to make it clear that he disagrees with his father's theory that a prodigy is entirely the result of special educational practices; he omits entirely any discussion of what circumstances cause or create prodigies. It seems to me that so intelligent and introspective a man might have found it worth his while to make a few observations along these lines... and who would be better suited to? But the objection is a minor one. The book is both revealing and warmly human; it deserves every reader it gets. dall Foster Crossen. Henry Holt as Co., Inc., New York, #. # # tlHlS is subtitled "A Novel of tihe Future," but actually consists of four novelets about the same characters: an insurance investigator named Manning Draco, his caricature of a Big Business Boss called J. Barnaby Cruikshank, two practical-joking insura neesalesmen-vi #I ai ns named Sam Warren and Dzanku Dzanku, the latter being a native of Rigel IV, and assorted Milky Way females. The adventures take place on various planets and involve genuine and counterfeit insurance claims arising from interstellar trade and travel. cher Prtt. BaUntine Books, Inc., New York, #. Cloth #, paper #c T AM sorry to have to report that this third ' item in the Ballantine Books' science fiction list falls far behind the quality of the first two. Star Science Fiction and Space Merchants, and also that it is far below the best that Fletcher Pratt can do. Tenuous is the word for it. It deals with a spaceship going on a complicated trip to the lightyears-distant planet of Danaan to steal a neptunium motor. The astropolitics encountered are involved and the various love motifs energetic, but neither do much to rescue the book from its basic weakness -- lack of inventiveness. Here's hoping that both Ballantine's and Pratt's next will be more nourishing than this one. by Jerry Sohl. Rinehart  Co., New York, #. # paes, # of rental library science fiction can be said to have dawned. Facile, mechanically adequate, uninspired, often reminiscent of other peoples' ideas (the present book would not be what it was, I think, were it not for Eric Frank Russell's immeasurably superior Sinister Barrier), and curiously empty and wooden, like a story written with the aid of a Plotto the attention, but rewards it vrith nothing of interest. Briefly, the book tells how aliens from Capella, breeding on the "thought force" released by humans killed in wars, plagues and other Earthly catastrophes, control our society. Magazine writer Martin Enders finds out all about this while trying to interview a scientist in charge of a top-secret military project. He escapes with his life, the girl, and the job of playing God to mankind, given him by the departing Capellans. Unconvincing, but it moves fast. #T How does a person come fo be scratched from the human race? Psychiatry did not have the answer -- perhaps decker's ivrf science did! came into the Blue Ribbon, on #th Street west of Broadway, he saw that nobody had told Doc Hawkins about his misfortune. Doc, a pubcrawling, non-practicing general  practitioner who wrote a daily medical column for a local tabloid, was celebrating his release guests at the rear table of the restaurant weren't in any mood for celebration. "What's the matter with you -- have you suddenly become immune to liquor?" Cldcker heard Doc ask irritably, while Clocker was passing the gem merchants, who, because they needed natural daylight to do business, were traditionally accorded the tables nearest the windows. "I said the drinks were on me, didn't I?" Doc insisted. "Now let us have some bright laughter and sparkling wit, or must we wait until Clocker shows up before there is levity in the house?" Seeing the others glance toward the door. Doc turned and looked at Clocker. His mouth fell open silently, for the first time in docker's memory. "Good Lord!" he said after a moment, "docker's become a character!" Clocker felt embarrassed. He still wasn't used to wearing a business suit of subdued gray, and black oxfords, instead of his slacks and two-tone suede shpes; a tie with timid little figures, whereas he had formerly been an authority on hand-painted cravats: and a plain wristwatch in place of his spectacular chronograph. By all Broadway standards, he knew, Doc was correct -- he'd become strange and eccentric, a character. was Zelda's idea," Clocker explained somberly, sitting down and shaking his head at the waiter who ambled over. "She wanted to make a gentleman out of me." "Watied to?" Doc repeated, bewildered. "You two. kids got married just before they took my snakes away. Don't tell me you phhtt already!" Clocker looked appealingly at the others. They became busy with drinks and paper napkins. Naturally, Doc Hawkins knew the background: That Clocker was a race handicapper -- publisher, if you could call it that, of a tiny tip sheet -- for Doc, in need of drinking money, had often consulted him professionally. Also that Clocker had married Zelda, the noted #nd Street stripteuse, who had social aspirations. What remained to be told had occurred during Doc's inevitably temporary cure. "Isn't anybody going to tell me?" Doc demanded. "It was right after you tried to take the warts off a fire hydrant and they came and got you," said Clocker, "that Zelda started hearing voices. It got real bad." "How bad?" "She's at Glendale Center in an upholstered room. I just came back from visiting her." Doc gulped his entire drink, a positive sign that he was upset, or happy, or not feeling anything in particular. Now, however, he was noticeably upset. "Did the psychiatrists give you a diagnosis?" he esk. "I got it memorized. Catatonia. Dementia praecox, what they used to call, one of the brain vets told me, and he said it's hopeless." "Rough," said Doc. "Very rough. The outlook is never good in such cases." "Maybe they can't help her," docker said harshly, "but I will." "People are not horses," Doc reminded him. "I've noticed that," said Handy Sam, the armless wonder at the flea circus, drinking beer because he had an ingrown toenail and couldn't hold a shot glass. Now that docker had told the grim story, he felt free to talk, which he did enthusiastically, "docker's got a giant brain. Doc. Who was it said Warlock'd turn into a dog in his third year? docker, the only dopester in the racket. And that's just one -- " "Zelda was my best flesh act," interrupted Arnold Wilson Wyle, a ten-percenter whom video had saved from alimony jail. "A solid boffola in the bop basements. Nobody regrets her sad condition more than me, Clocker, but it's a sure flop, what you got in , mind. Think of your public. For instance, what's good at Hialeah? My bar bill is about to be foreclosed and I can use a long shot." docker bounced his fist on the moist table. "Those couch artists don't know what's wrong with Zelda. I do." "You do?" Doc asked, startled. "Well, almost. I'm so close, I can hear the finish-line camera clicking." Buttonhole grasped Doc's lapel and hung on with characteristic avidity; he was perhaps docker's most pious subscriber. "Doping races is a science, docker maybe never doped the human race, but I got nine to five he can do it. Go on, tell him, Clocker." D OC Hawkins ran together the rings he had been making with the wet bottom of his tumbler. "I shall be most interested," he said with tabloid irony, clearly feeling that immediate disillusionment was the most humane thing for Clocker. "Perhaps we can collaborate on an article for the psychiatric journals." "All right, look." Clocker pulled out charts resembling those he worked with when making turf selections. "Zelda's got catatonia, which is the last heat in the schizophrenia parlay. She used to be a hoofer before she started undressing for dough, and now she does time-steps all day." Doc nodded into a fresh glass that the waiter had put before him. "Stereotyped movements are typical of catatonia. They derive from thwarted or repressed instinctual drive; in most instances, the residue of childhood frustrations." "She dance all day, huh, Clocker?" asked Oil Pocket, the Oklahoma Cherokee who, with the income of several wells, was famed for angeling bareback shows. He had a glass of tequila in one hand, the salted half of a lemon in the other. "She dance good?" "That's just it," Clocker said. "She does these time-steps, the first thing you learn in hoofing, over and over, ten-fifteen hours a day. And she keeps talking like she's giving lessons to some jerk kid who can't get it straight. And she was the kid with the hot routines, remember." "The hottest," agreed Arnold Wilson Wyle. "Zelda doing timesteps is like Heifetz fiddling at weddings."  "I still like to put her in show," Oil Pocket grunted. "She stacked like brick tepee. Don't have to dance good." "You'll have a long wait," observed Doc sympathetically, "in spite of what our young friend here says. Continue, young friend." Clocker spread his charts. He needed the whole table. The others removed their drinks. Handy Sam putting his on the floor so he could reach it more easily. "This is "ffhat I got out of checking all the screwball factories I could reach personal and by mail," Clocker said. "I went around and talked to the doctors and watched the patients in the places near here, and wrote to the places I couldn't get to. Then I broke everything down like it was a stud and track record." Buttonhole tugged Doc's lapel. "That ain't scientific, I suppose," he challenged. "Duplication of effort," Doc replied, patiently allowing Buttonhole to retain his grip. "It was all done in an organized fashion over a period of more than half a century. But let us hear the rest." are more male bats than "Females are inherently more stable, perhaps because they have a more balanced chromosome arrangement." "There are more nuts in the brain rackets than labor chumps." "Intellectual activity increases the area of conflict." "There are less in the sticks than in the cities, and practically none among the savages. I mean real savages," docker told Handy Sam, "not marks for con merchants." "I was wondering," Handy Sam admitted. "Complex civilization creates psychic insecurity," said Doc. "When these catatonics pull out, they don't remember much or maybe nothing," Clocker went on, referring to his charts. Doc nodded his shaggy white head. "Protective amnesia." "I seen hundreds of these mental gimps. They work harder and longer at what they're doing, even just laying down and doing nothing, than they ever did when they were regular citizens." "Concentration of psychic energy, of course." "And they don't get a damn cent for it." D OC hesitated, put down his half-filled tumbler. "I beg your pardon?" "I say they're getting stiffed," Clocker stated. "Anybody who works that hard ought to get paid. I don't mean it's got to be money, although that's the only kind of pay Zelda'd work for. Right, Arnold?" "Well, sure," said Arnold Wilson Wyle wonderingly. "I never thought of it like that. Zelda doing time-steps for nothing tenfifteen hours a day -- that ain't Zelda." "If you ask me, she likes her job," Clocker said. "Same with the other catatonics I seen. But for no pay?" Doc surprisingly pushed his drink away, something that only a serious medical puzzle could ever accomplish. "I don't understand what you're getting at." "I don't know these other catacharacters, but I do know Zelda," said Arnold Wilson Wyle. "She's got to get something out of all that work. Clocker says it's the same with the others and I take his word. What are they knocking theirsclf out for if it's for free?" "They gain some obscure form of emotional release or repetitive gratification," Doc explained. "Zelda?" exploded Clocker. "You offer her a deal like that for a club date and she'd get ruptured laughing." Pocket agreed, "plenty ads, plenty publicity, whole show built around her. Wampum, she says; save money on ads and publicity, give it to her. Zelda don't count coups." Doc Hawkihs called over the waiter, ordered five fingers instead of his customary three. "Let us not bicker," he told Clocker. "Continue." again. "There ain't a line that ain't represented, even the heavy rackets and short grifts. It's a regular human steeplechase. And these sour apples do mostly whatever they did for a living -- draw pictures, sell shoes, do lab experiments, sew clothes, Zelda with her timesteps. By the hour! In the airl' "In the air?" Handy Sam repeated. "Flying?" "Imaginary functioning," Doc elaborated for him. "They have nothing in their hands. Pure hallucination. Systematic delusion." "Sign language?" Oil Pocket suggested. "That," said docker, before Doc Hawkins could reject the notion, "is on the schnoz, Injun. Buttonhole says I'm like doping races. He's right. I'm working out what some numbers-runner tells me is probabilities. I got it all here," he tapped the charts, "and it's the same thing all these flop-ears got in common. Not their age, ndt their jobs, not their -- you should pardon the expression -- sex. They're teaching." Buttonhole looked baffled. He almost let go of Doc's lapel. Handy Sam scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully with a big toe. "Teaching, Clocker? Who? You said they're kept in solitary." "They are. I don't know who. I'm working on that now." Doc shoved the charts aside belligerently to make room for his beefy elbows. He leaned forward and glowered at Clocker. "Your theory belongs in the Sunday supplement of the alleged newspaper I write for. Not all catatonics work, as you call it. What about those who stand rigid and those who lie in bed all the time?" "I guess you think that's easy," Clocker retorted. "You try it sometime. I did. It's work, I tell you." He folded his charts and put them back into the inside pocket of his conservative jacket. He looked sick with longing and loneliness. "Damn, I miss that mouse. I got to save her, Doc! Don't you get that?" Doc Hawkins put a chunky hand gently on docker's arm. "Of course, boy. But how can you succeed when trained men can't?" "Well, take Zelda. She did time-steps when she was maybe five and going to dancing school -- " "Time-steps have some symbolic significance to her," Doc said with more than his usual tact. "My theory is that she was compelled to go againsther will, and this is a form of unconscious rebellion."  "They don't have no significance to her," docker argued #B doggedly. "She can do time-steps blindfolded and on her knees with both ankles tied behind her back." He pried Buttonhole's hand off Doc's lapel, and took hold of both of thepj himself. "I tell you she's teaching, explaining, breaking in some dummy who can't get the hang of it!" "But who?" Doc objected. "Psychiatrists? Nurses? You? Admit it, docker -- she goes on doing time-steps whether she's alone or not. In fact, she never knows if anybody is with her. Isn't that so?" "Yeah," docker said grudgingly, "That's what has me boxed." IL Pocket grunted tentatively, "White men not believe in spirits. Injuns do. Maybe Zelda talk to spirits." "I been thinking of that," confessed docker, looking at the red angel unhappily. "Spirits is all I can figure. Ghosts. Spooks. But if Zelda and these other catatonics are teaching ghosts, these ghosts are the dumbest jerks anywhere. They make her and the rest go through time-steps or sewing or selling shoes again and again. If they had half a brain, they'd get it in no time." "Maybe spirits not hear good," Oil Pocket offered, encouraged sider the hypothesis. "Could be," docker said with partial conviction. "If we can't see them, it may be just as hard for them to see or hear us." Oil Pocket anxiously hitched his chair closer. "Old squaw name Dry Ground Never Rainy Season -- what you call old maid -- hear spirits all the time. She keep telling us what they say. Nobody listen." "How come?" asked docker interestedly. "She deaf, blind. Not hear thunder. Walk into cactus, yell like hell. She hardly see us, not hear us at all, how come she see and hear spirits? Just talk, talk, talk all the time." docker frowned, thinking. "These catatonics don't see or hear us, but they sure as Citation hear and see somethin.' Doc Hawkins stood up with dignity, hardly weaving, and handed a bill to the waiter. "I was hoping to get a private racing tip from you, Clocker. Freshly sprung from the alcoholic ward, I can use some money. But I see that your objectivity is impaired by emotional considerations. I wouldn't risk a dime on your advice even after a race is nm." "I didn't expect you to believe me," said Clocker despairingly. "None of you pill-pushers ever do." "I can't say about your psycho-doping," declared Arnold Wilson Wyle, also rising. "But I got faith in your handicapping. I'd still like a long shot at Hialeah if you happen to have one." "I been too busy trying to help Zelda," Clocker said in apology. They left, Doc Hawkins pausing at the bar to pick up a credit bottle to see him through his overdue medical column.  Handy Sam slipped on his shoes to go. "Stick with it, Clocker. I said you was a scientist -- " "I said it," contradicted Buttonhole, lifting himself out of the chair on Handy Sam's lapels. "If anybody can lick this caper, Clocker can." Oil Pocket glumly watched them leave. "Doctors not think spirits real," he said. "I get sick, go to Reservation doctor. He give me medicine. I get sicker. Medicine man see evil spirits make me sick. Shakes rattle. Dances. Evil spirits go. I get better." "I don't know what in hell to think," confided Clocker, misererable and confused. "If it would help Zelda, I'd cut my throat from head to foot so I could become a spirit and get the others to lay off her." "Then you spirit, she alive. Making love not very practical." "Then what do I do -- hire a medium?" "Get medicine man from Reservation. He drive out evil spirits." Clocker pushed away from the table. "So help me. I'll do it if I can't come up with something cheaper than paying freight from Oklahoma." "Get Zelda out, I pay and put her in show." "Then if I haul the guy here and it don't work, I'm in hock to you. Thanks, Oil Pocket, but I'll try my way first." ing for the next day so he could visit Zelda, Clocker was like an addict at the track with every cent on a hunch. After weeks of neglecting his tip sheet to study catatonia, he felt close to the payoff. He spent most of the night smoking and walking around the room, trying not to look at the jars and hairbrushes on the bureau. He missed the bobbypins on the floor, the nylons drying across the shower rack, the toothpaste tubes squeezed from the top. He'd put her perfumes in a drawer, but the smell was so pervasively haunting that it was like having her stand invisibly behind him. As soon as the sun came up, he hurried out and took a cab. He'd have to wait until visiting hours, but he couldn't stand the slowness of the train. Just being in the same building with her would -- almost -- be enough. When he finally was allowed into Zelda's room, he spent all his time watching her silently, taking in every intently mumbled word and movement. Her movements, in spite of their gratingly basic monotony, were particularly something to watch, for Zelda had blue-black hair down to her shapely shoulders, wide-apart blue eyes, sulky mouth, and an astonishing body. She used all her physical equipment with unconscious provocativeness, except her eyes, which were blankly distant. docker stood it as long as he could and then burst out. "Damn it. Zelda, how long can they take to learn a time-step?" She didn't answer. She didn't see him, hear him, or feel him. Even when he kissed her on the back of the neck, her special place, she did not twist her shoulder up with the sudden thrill. He took out the portable phonograph he'd had permission to bring in, and hopefully played three of her old numbers -- a ballet tap, a soft shoe, and, most potent of all. her favorite slinky strip tune. Ordinarily, the beat would have thrown her off, but not any more. "Dead to this world," muttered Clocker dejectedly. He shook Zelda. Even when she was off-balance, her feet tapped out the elementary routine. "Look, kid," he said, his voice tense and angry, "I don't know who these squares are that you're working for, but tell them if they got you, they got to take me, too." Whatever he expected -- ghostly figures to materialize or a chill wind from nowhere -- nothing happened. She went on tapping. He sat down on her bed. They picked people the way he picked horses, except he pjeked to win and they picked to show. To show? Of course. Zelda was showing them how to dance and also, probably, teaching them about the entertainment business. The others had obviously been selected for what they knew, which they went about doing as singlemindedly as she did. H e had a scheme that he hadn't told Doc because he knew it was crazy. At any rate, he hoped it was. The weeks without her had been a hell of loneliness -- for him, not for her; she wasn't even aware of the awful loss. He'd settle for that, but even better would be freeing her somehow. The only way he could'do it would be to find out who controlled her and what they were after. Even with that information, he couldn't be sure of succceding. and there was a good chance that he might also be caught, but that didn't matter. The idea was to interest them in what he knew so they would want to have him explain all he knew about racing. After that --  well, he'd make his plans when he knew the setup. Clocker came dose to the automatic time-step machine that had been his wife. He began talking to her, very loudly, about the detailed knowledge needed to select winners, based on stud records, past performances of mounts and jockeys, condition of track and the influence of the weather -- always, however, leaving out the data that would make sense of the whole complicated industry. It was like roping a patsy and holding back the buzzer until the dough was down. He knew he risked being colddecked. but it was worth the gamble. His only worry was that hoarseness would stop him before he hooked their interest. An orderly, passing in the corridor, heard his voice, opened the door and asked with ponderous humor, "What you doing, Clocker -- trying to take out a membership card in this country club?" Clocker leaped slightly. "Uh, working on a private theory," he said, collected his things with a little more haste than he would have liked to show, ktd Zelda without getting any response whatever, and left for the day. But he kept coming back every morning. He was about to give up when the first feelings of unreality dazed and dazzled him. He carefully suppressed his excitement and talked more loudly about racing. The world seemed to be slipping away from him. He could have hung onto it if he had wanted. He didn't. He let the voices come, vague and far away, distorted, not quite meaningless, but not adding up to much, either. And then, one day, he didn't notice the orderly come in to teH him that visiting hours were over. Clocker was explaining the fundamentals of horse racing... meticulously, with immense patience, over and over and over... and didn't hear him. T had been so easy that Clocker was disappointed. The first voices had argued gently and reasonably over him. each claiming priority for one reason or another, until one either was assigned or pulled rank. That was the voice that Clocker eventually kept hearing -- a quiet, calm voice that constantly faded and grew stronger, as if it came from a great distance and had trouble with static. Clocker remembered the crystal set his father had bought when radio was still a toy. It was like that. Then the unreality vanished and was replaced by a dramatic new reality. He was somewhere far away. He knew.it wasn't on Earth, for this was like nothing except, perhaps, a World's Fair. The buildings were low and attractively designed, impressive in spite of their softly blended spectrum of pastel colors. He was in a huge square that was grasscovered and tree-shaded and decorated with classical sculpture. Hundreds of people stood with him, and they all looked shaken and scared. Clocker felt nothing but elation; he'd arrived. It made no difference that he didn't know where he was or anything about the setup. He was where Zelda was. "How did I get here?" asked a little man with bifocals and a vest that had pins and threaded needles stuck in it. "I can't take time for pleasure trips. Mrs. Jacobs is coming in for her fitting tomorrow and she'll positively murder me if her dress ain't ready." "She can't," Clocker said. "Not any more." "You mean we're dead?" someone else asked, awed. It was a softly pudgy woman with excessively blonde hair, a greasily red-lipped smile and a flowered housecoat. She looked around with great approval. "Hey, this ain't bad! Like I always said, either I'm no worse than anybody else or they're no better'n me. How about that, dearie?" "Don't ask me," Clocker evaded. "I think somebody's going to get an earful, but you ain't dead. That much I can tell you." The woman looked disappointed. Some people in the crowd were complaining that they had families to take care of while others were worried about leaving their businesses. They all grew silent, however, when a man climbed up on a sort of marble rostrum in front of them. He was very tall and dignified and wore formal clothes and had a white beard parted in the center. "Please feel at ease" he said in a big, deep, soothing voice, like a radio announcer for a symphony broadcast. "You are not in any danger. No harm will come to you." "You sure we ain't dead, sweetie?" the woman in the flowered housecoat asked Clocker. "Isn't that -- " "No." said Clocker. "He'd have a halo, wouldn't he?" "Yeah, I guess so," she agreed doubtfully. The white-bearded man went on, "If you will listen carefully to this orientation lecture, you will know where you are and why. May I introduce Gerald W. Harding? Dr. Harding is in charge of this reception center. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Harding." plauded out of habit... probably lecture fans or semipro TV studio audiences. The rest, including Clocker, waited as an aging man in a white lab smock, heavy-rimmed eyeglasses and smooth pink cheeks, looking like a benevolent doctor in a mouthwash ad, stood up and faced the crowd. He put his hands behind his back, rocked on his toes a few times, and smiled benevolently. "Thank you, Mr. Calhoun," he said to the bearded man who was seating himself on a marble bench. "Friends -- and I trust you will soon regard us as your friends -- I know you are puzzled at all this." He waved a white hand at the buildings around them. "Let me explain. You have been chosen -- yes, carefully screened and selected -- to help us in undoubtedly the greatest cause of all history. I can see that you are asking, yourselves why you were selected and what this cause is. I shall describe it briefly. You'll learn more about it as we work together in this vast and noble experiment." The woman in the flowered housecoat looked enormously flattered. The little tailor was nodding to show he understood the points covered thus far. Glancing at the rest of the crowd, Crocker realized that he was the only one who had this speech pegged. It was a pitch. These men were out for something. He wished Doc Hawkins and Oil Pocket were there. Doc doubtless would have searched his unconscious for symbols of childhood traumas to explain the whole thing; he would never have accepted it as some kind of reality. Oil Pocket, on the other hand, would somehow have tried to equate the substantial Mr. Calhoun and Dr. Harding with tribal spirits. Of the two, Clocker felt that Oil Pocket would have been closer. Or maybe he was in his own corner of psychosis, while Oil Pocket would have been in another, more suited to Indians. Spirits or figments? Whatever they were, they looked as real as anybody he'd ever known, but perhaps that was the naturalness of the supernatural or the logic of insanity. Clocker shivered, aware that he had to wait for the answer. The one thing he did know, as an authority on cons, was that this had the smell of one, supernatural or otherwise. He watched and listened like a detective shadowing an escape artist. "This may be something of a shock," Dr. Harding continued with a humorous, sympathetic smile. "I hope it will not be for long. Let me state it in its simplest terms. You know that there verse, and that stars have planets as naturally as cats have kittens. A good many of these planets are inhabited. Some life-forms are intelligent, very much so, while others are not. In almost all instances, the dominant form of life is quite different from -- yours." Unable to see the direction of the con, Clockcr felt irritated. "Why do I say yours, not ours?" asked Dr. Harding. "Because, dear friends, Mr. Calhoun and I are not of your planet or solar system. No commotion, please!" he urged, raising his hands as the crowd stirred bewilderedly. "Our names are not Calhoun and Harding; we adopted those because our own are so alien that you would be unable to pronounce them. We are not formed as you see us, but this is how we might look if we were human beings, which, of course, we are not. Our true appearance seems to be -- ah -- rather confusing to human eyes."   erently. Get to the point. "I don't think this is the time for detailed explanations," Dr. Harding hurried on before there were any questions. "We are friendly, even altruistic inhabitants of a planet # lightyears from Earth. Quite a distance, you are thinking; how did we get here? The truth is that we are not 'here' and neither are you. 'Here' is a projection of thought, a hypothetical point in space, a place that exists only by mental force. Our physical appearances and yours are telepathic representations. Actually, our bodies are on our own respective planets." "Very confusing," complained a man who looked like a banker. "Do you have any idea of what he's trying to tell us?" "Not yet," Clocker replied with patient cynicism. "He'll give us the convincer after the buildup." Theban who looked like a banker stared sharply at Clocker and moved away. Clocker shrugged. He was more concerned with why he didn't feel tired or bored just standing there and listening. There was not even an overpowering sense of urgency and annoyance, although he wanted to find Zelda and this lecture was keeping him from looking for her. It was as if his emotibns were somehow being reduced in intensity. They existed, but lacked the strength they should have had. T# So he stood almost patiently and listened to Dr. Harding say, "Our civilization is considerably older than yours. For many of your centuries, we have explored the Universe, both physically and telepathically. During this exploration, we discovered your planet. We tried to establish communication, but there were grave difficulties. It was the time of your Dark Ages, and I'm sorry to report that those people we made contact with were generally burned at the stake." He shook his head regretfully. "Although your civilization has made many advances in some ways, communication is still hampered -- as much by false knowledge as by real ignorance. You'll see in a moment why it is very unfortunate." "Here it comes," Clocker said to those around him. "He's getting ready finally to slip us the sting." The woman in the housecoat looked indignant. "The nerve of a crumb like you making a crack about such a fine, decent gentleman!" "A blind man could see he's sincere," argued the tailor. "Just think of it -- me, in a big experiment! Will Molly be surprised when she finds out!" "She won't find out and I'll bet she's surprised right now," Clocker assured him. "The human body is an unbelievably complicated organism," Dr. Harding was saying. The statement halted the private discussion and seemed to please his listeners for some reason. "We learned that when we tried to assume control of individuals for the purpose of communication. sands of unvolitional functions -- it is no exaggeration to compare our efforts with those of a monkey in a power plant. At our direction, for example, several writers produced books that were fearfully garbled. Our attempts with artists were no more successful. The static of interstellar space was partly responsible, but mostly it was the fact that we simply couldn't work our way through the maze that is the human mind and body." THE crowd was sympathetic. Clocker was neither weary nor bored, merely longing for Zelda and, as a student of grifts, dimly irritated. Why hold back when the chumps were set up? "I don't want to make a long story of our problems," smiled Dr. Harding. "If we could visit your planet in person, there would be no difficulty. But # light-years is an impossible barrier to all except thought waves, which, of course, travel at infinite speed. And this, as I said before, is very unfortunate, because the human race is doomed." The tailor stiffened. "Doomed? Molly? My kids? All my customers?" "Your customers?" yelped the woman in the housecoat. "How about mine? What's gonna happen, the world should be doomed?" Clockcr found admiration for Dr. Harding's approach. It was a line tried habitually by politicians, but they didn't have the same kind of captive audience, the control, the contrived background. A cosmic pitch like this could bring a galactic payoff, whatever it might be. But it didn't take his mind off Zelda. "I see you are somewhat aghast," Dr. Harding observed. "But is my statement really so unexpected? You know the history of your own race -- a record of incessant war, each more devastating than the last. Now, finally, Man has achieved the power of worldwide destruction. The next war, or the one after that, will unquestionably be the end not only of civilization, but of humanity -- perhaps even your entire planet. Our peaceful, altruistic civilization might help avert catastrophe, but that would require our physical landing on Earth, which is not possible. Even if it were, there is not enough time. Armageddon draws near. "Then why have we brought you here?" asked Dr. Harding. "Because Man, in spite of his suicidal blunders, is a magnificent race. He must not vanish without leaving a complete record of his achievements." The crowd nodded soberly. Clocker wished he had a cigarette and his wife. In her right mind, Zelda was unswervingly practical and she would have had some noteworthy comments to make. "This is the task we must work together on," said Dr. Harding forcefully. "Each of you has a skill, a talent, a special knowledge we need for the immense record we are compiling. Every area of human society must be covered. We need you -- urgently! Your data will become part of an imperishable social document that shall exist untold eons after mankind has perished." ' housecoat was stunned. "They want to put down what  can tell them?" "And tailoring?" asked the little man with the pin-cushion vest. "How to make buttonholes and press clothes?" The man who looked like a banker had his chin up and a pleased expression on his pudgy face. "I always knew I'd be appreciated some day," he stated smugly. "I can tell them things about finance that those idiots in the main office can't even guess at." Mr. Calhoun stood up beside Dr. Harding on the rostrum. He seemed infinitely benign as he raised his hands and his deep voice. "Friends, we need your help, your knowledge. I know you don't want the human race to vanish without a trace, as though it had never existed. I'm sure it thrills you to realize that some researcher, far in the future, will one day use the very knowledge that you gave. Think vthat it means to leave your personal imprint indelibly on cosmic history!" He paused and leaned forward. "Will you help us?" The faces glowed, the hands went up, the voices cried that they would. Dazzled by the success of the sell, docker watched the people happily and flatteredly follow their frock-coated guides toward the various buildings, which appeared to have been laid out according to very broad categories of human .occupation. He found himself impelled along with the chattering, excited woman in the housecoat toward a cerise structure marked seemed that she had been angry at not having been interviewed for a recent epic survey, and this was her chance to decant the experiences of twenty years. Clocker stopped listening to her gabble and looked for the building that Zelda would probhe tried to go there, he felt some compulsion keep him heading toward his own destination. Looking back helplessly, he went inside. cubicle with a fatherly kind of man who had thin gray hair, kindly eyes and a firm jaw, and who introduced himself as Eric Barnes. He took docker's name, age, specific trade, and gave him a serial number which, he explained, would go on file at the central archives on his home planet, cross-indexed in multiple ways for instant reference. "Now," said Barnes, "here is our problem, Mr. Locke. We are making two kinds of perpetual records. One is written; more precisely, microscribed. The other is a wonderfully exact duplicate of your cerebral pattern -- in more durable material than brain matter, of course." "Of course," Clocker said, nodding like an obedient patsy. "The verbal record is difficult enough, since much of the data you give us must be. by its nature, foreign to us. The duplication of your cerebral pattern, however, is even more troublesome. Besides the inevitable distortion caused by a distance of # light-years pnd the fields of gravitation and radiation of all types intervening, the substance we use in place of brain cells absorbs memory quite slowly." Barnes smiled reassuringly. "But you'll be happy to know that the impression, once made, can never be lost or erased!" "Delighted," Clocker said flatly. "Tickled to pieces." "I knew you would be. Well, let us proceed. First, a basic description of horse racing." Clocker began to give it. Barnes held him down to a single sentence -- "To check reception and retention," he said. The communication box on the desk lit up when Clocker repeated the sentence a few times, and a voice from the box said, "Increase output. Initial impression weak. Also wave distortion. Correct and continue." Barnes carefully adjusted the dials and Clocker went on repeating the sentence, slowing down to the speed Barnes requested. He did it automatically after a while, which gave him a chance to think. He had no plan to get Zelda out of here; he was improvising and he didn't like it. The setup still had him puzzled. He knew he wasn't dreaming all this, for there were details his imagination could never have supplied, and the notion of spirits with scientific devices would baffle even Oil Pocket. Everybody else appeared to accept these men as the aliens they claimed to be, but Clocker, fearing a con he couldn't understand, refused to. He had no other explanation, though, no evidence of any kind except deep suspicion of any noble-sounding enterprise. In his harsh experience, they always had a profit angle hidden somewhere. Until he knew more, he had to go along with the routine, hoping he would eventually find a way out for Zelda and himself. While he was repeating his monotonous sentence, he wondered what his body was doing back on Earth. Lying in a bed, probably, since he wasn't being asked to perform any physical jobs like Zelda's endless time-step. That reminded him of Doc Hawkins and the psychiatrists. There must be some here; he wished vengefully that he could meet them and see what they thought of their theories now. T hen came the end of what was apparently the work day. "We're making splendid progress." Barnes told him. "I know how tiresome it is to keep saying the same thing over and over, but the distance is such a great obstacle. I think it's amazing that we can even brid it, don't you? Just imagine -- the light that's reaching Earth at this very minute left our star when mammoths were roaming your western states and mankind lived in caves! And yet, with our thought-wave boosters, we are in instantaneous communication I" The soap, Clocker thought, to make him feel he was doing something important. "Well, you are doing something important," Barnes said, as though Clocker had spoken. Clocker would have turned red if he had been able to. As it was, he felt dismay and embarrassment. "Do you realize the size and value of this project?" Barnes went on. "We have a more detailed record of human society than Man himself ever had! There will be not even the most insignificant comer of your civilization left unrecorded! Your life, my life -- the life of this Zelda whom you came here to rescue -- all are trivial, for we must die eventually, but the project will last eternally!" Clocker stood up, his eyes hard and worried. "You're telling me you know what I'm here for?" "To secure the return of your wife. I would naturally be aware that you had submitted yourself to our control volimtarily. It was in your file, which was sent to me by Admissions." "Then why did you let me in?" "Because, my dear friend -- " "Leave out the 'friend' pitch. I'm here on business." Barnes shrugged. "As you wish. We let you in, as you express it, because you have knowledge that we should include in our archives. We hoped you would recognize the merit and scope of out undertaking. Most people do, once they are told." "Zelda, too?" "Oh, yes," Barnes said emphatically. "I had that checked by Statistics. She is extremely cooperative, quite convinced -- " "Don't hand me that!"  the papers on his desk, he said, "You want to speak to her and see for yourself? Fair enough." He led Clocker out of the building. They crossed the great square to a vast, low structure that Barnes referred to as the Education and Recreation Center. "Unless there are special problems," Barnes said, "our human associates work twelve or fourteen of your hours, and the rest of the time is their own. Sleep M# isn't necessary to the psychic projection, of course, though it is to the body on Earth. And what. Mr. Locke, would you imagine they choose as their main amusements?" "Pinball machines?" Clocker suggested ironically. "Crap games?" "Lectures," said Barnes with pride. "They are eager to learn everything possible about our project. We've actually had the director himself address them! Oh, it was inspiring, Mr. Locke -- color films in three dimensions, showing the great extent of our synthetic brains, each with indestructible memories of skills and crafts and professions and experiences that soon will be no more -- "Save it. Find Zelda for me and then blow. I want to talk to her alone." Barnes checked with the equivalent of a box office at the Center, where, he told Clocker, members of the audience and staff were required to report before entering, in case of emergency. "Like what?" Clocker asked. "You have a suspicious mind," said Barnes patiently. "Faulty neuron circuit in a synthetic duplicate brain, for example. Photon storms interfering with reception. Things of that sort." "So where's the emergency?" "We have so little time. We ask the human associate in question to record again whatever was not received. The percentage of refusal is actually zero.' Isn't that splendid?" "Best third degree I ever heard of," Clocker admitted through clamped teeth. "The cops on Earth would sell out every guy they get graft from to buy a thing like this." lecture hall, where a matronly woman from the other planet was urging her listeners to conceal nothing, however intimate, while recording -- "Because," she said, "this must be a psychological as well as a cultural and sociological history." Seeing Zelda, Clocker rushed to her chair, hauled her upright, kissed her, squeezed her, "Baby!" he said, more choked up than he thought his control would allow. "Let's get out of here!" She looked at him without surprise. "Oh, hello, Clocker. Later. I want to hear the rest of this lecture." "Ain't you glad to see me?" he asked, hurt. "I spend months and shoot every dime I got just to find you -- " "Sure I'm glad to see you, hon," she said, trying to look past him at the speaker. "But this is so important -- " Barnes came up, bowed politely. "If you don't mind. Miss Zelda, I think you ought to talk to your husband." "But what about 'the lecture?" asked Zelda anxiously. "I can get a transcription for you to study later." "Well, all right," she agreed reluctantly. Barnes left them on a strangely warm stone bench in the great square, after asking them to report back to work at the usual time. Zelda, instead of looking at Clocker, watched Barnes walk away. Her eyes were bright; she almost radiated. "Isn't he wonderful, Clocker?" she said. "Aren't they all wonderful? Regular scientists, every one of them, devoting their whole life to this terrific cause!" "What's so wonderful about that?" he all but snarled. She turned and gazed at him in mild astonishment. "They could let the Earth go boom. It wouldn't mean a thing to them. Everybody wiped out just like there never were any people. Not even as much record of us as the dinosaurs! Wouldn't that make you feel simply awful?" "I wouldn't feel a thing." He took her unresponsive hand. "All I'm worried about is us, baby. Who cares about the rest of the world doing a disappearing act?" "I do. And so do they. They aren't selfish like some people I could mention." "Selfish? You're damned right I am!" her neck in her favorite place. It got a reaction -- restrained annoyance. "I'm selfish," he said, "because I got a wife I'm nuts about and I want her back. They got you wrapped, baby. Can't you see that? You belong with me in some fancy apartment, the minute I can afford it, like one I saw over on Riverside Drive -- seven big rooms, three baths, one of them with a stall shower like you always wanted, the Hudson River and Jersey for our front lawn -- " "That's all in the past, hon," she said with quiet dignity. "I have to help out on this project. It's the least I can do for history." "The hell with history! What did history ever do for us?" He put his mouth near her ear, breathing gently in the way that once used to make her squirm in his arms like a tickled doe. "Go turn in your time-card, baby. Tell them you got a date with me back on Earth." She pulled away and jumped up. "No! This is my job as much as theirs. More, even. They don't keep anybody here against their will. I'm staying because I want to, Clocker." Furious, he snatched her off her feet. "I say you're coming back with me! If you don't want to, I'll drag you, see?" "How?" she asked calmly. He put her down again slowly, frustratedly. "Ask them to let you go, baby. Oil Pocket said he'd put you in a miisical. You always did want to hit the big time -- " "Not any more." She smoothed down her dress and patted up her hair. "Well, I want to catch the rest of that lecture, hon. See you around if you decide to stay." He sat down morosely and watched her snake-hip toward the Center, realizing that her seductive walk was no more than professional conditioning. She had grown in some mysterious way, become more serene -- at peace. He had wondered what catatonics got for their work. He knew now -- the slickest job of hypnotic flattery ever invented. That was their pay. But what did the pitchmen get in return?  Barnes at the box office of the Center. Barnes left a lecture for researchers from his planet and joined Clocker with no more than polite curiosity on his paternal face. Clocker told him briefly and bitterly about his talk with Zelda, and asked bluntly what was in it for the aliens. "I think you can answer that," said Barnes. "You're a scientist of a sort. You determine the probable performance of a group of horses by their heredity, previous races and other factors. A very laborious computation, calling for considerable aptitude and skill. With that same expenditure of energy, couldn't you earn more in other fields?" "I guess so," Clocker said. "But I like the track." "Well, there you are. The only human form of gain we share is desire for knowledge. You devote your skill to predicting a race that is about to be run; we devote ours to recording a race that is about to destroy itself." Clocker grabbed the alien's coat, pushed his face grimly close. "There, that's the hook! Take away the doom push and this racket folds." Barnes looked bewildered. "I don't comprehend -- " "Listen, suppose everything's square. Let's say you guys really are leveling, these marks aren't being roped, you're knocking yourself out because your guess is that we're going to commit suicide." "Oh." Barnes nodded somber ly. "Is there any doubt of it? Do you honestly believe the holocaust can be averted?" "I think it can be stopped, yeah. But you birds act like you don't want it to be. You're just laying back, letting us bunch up, collecting the insurance before the spill happens." "What else can we do? We're scientists, not politicians. Besides, we've tried repeatedly to spread the warning and never once succeeded in transmitting it." Clocker released his grip on the front of Barnes's jacket. "You take me to the president or commissioner or whoever runs this club. Maybe we can work something out." "We have a board of directors," Barnes said doubtfully. "But I can't see -- " "Don't rupture yourself trying. Just take me there and let me do the talking." Barnes moved his shoulders resignedly. He led Clocker to the Administration Building and inside to a large room with paneled walls, a long, solid table and heavy, carved chairs. The men who sat around the table appeared as solid and respectable as the furniture, docker's guess was that they had been chosen deliberately, along with the decorations, to inspire confidence in the customer. He had been in rigged horse parlors and bond stores and he knew the approach. with the white beard, was chairman of the board. He looked unhappily at Clocker. "I was afraid there would be trouble," he said. "I voted against accepting you, you know. My colleagues, however, thought that you, as our first voluntary associate, might indicate new methods, but I fear my judgment has been vindicated." "Still, if he knows how extinction can be prevented -- " began Dr. Harding, the one who had given the orientation lecture. "He knows no such thing," a man with several chins said in an emphatic basso voice. "Man is the most destructive dominant race we have ever encountered. He despoiled his own planet, exterminated lower species that were Important to his own existence, oppressed, suppressed, brutalized, corrupted -- it's the saddest chronicle in the Universe." "Therefore his achievements," said Dr. Harding, "deserve all the more recognition!" Clocker broke in: "If y#u'll lay off the gab. I'd like to get my bet down." "Sorry." said Mr. Calhoun. "Please proceed, Mr. Locke." M# n Clocker rested his knuckles on the table and leaned over them. "I have to take your word you ain't human, but you don't have to take mine. I never worried about anybody but Zelda and myself; that makes me human. All I want is to get along and not hurt anybody if I can help it; that makes me what some people call the common man. Some of my best friends are common men. Come to think of it. they all are. They wouldn't want to get extinct. If we do, it won't be our fault." Several of the men nodded sympathetic agreement. "I don't read much except the sport sheets, but I got an idea what's coming up," Clocker continued, "and it's a long shot that any country can finish in the money. We'd like to stop war for good, all of us. Little guys who do the fighting and the dying. Yeah, and lots of big guys, too. But we can't do it alone." "That's precisely our point," said Calhoun. "I mean us back on Earth. People are afraid, but they just don't know for sure that we can knock ourself off. Between these catatonics and me, we could tell them what it's all about. I notice you got people from all over the world here, all getting along fine because they have a job to do and no time to hate each other. Well, it could be like that on Earth. You let us go back and you'll see a selling job on making it like up here like you never saw before." Mr. Calhoun and Dr. Harding looked at each other and around to answer. Mr. Calhoun finally sighed and got out of his big chair. "Mr. Locke, besides striving for international understanding, we have experimented in the manner you suggest. We released many of our human associates to tell what our science predicts on the basis of probability. A human psychological mechanism defeated us." "Yeah?" Clocker asked warily. "What was that?" "Protective amnesia. They completely and absolutely forgot everything they had learned here."  know, I talked to some of these 'cured' catatonics -- people you probably sprung because you got all you wanted from them. They didn't remember anything." He braced again. "Look, there has to be a way out. Maybe if you snatch these politicians in all the countries, yank them up here, they couldn't stumble us into a war." "Examine your history," said Dr. Harding sadly, "and you will find that we have done this experimentally. It doesn't work. There are always others, often more unthinking, ignorant, stupid or vicious, ready to take their places." docker looked challengingly at every member of the board of directors before demanding, "What are the odds on me remembering?" "You are our first volunteer," said a little man at the side of the table. "Any answer we give would be a guess." "All right, guess." "We have a theory that your psychic censor might not operate. Of course, you realize that's only a theory -- " "That ain't all I don't realize. What's it mean?" "Our control, regrettably, is a wrench to the mind. Lifting it results in amnesia, which is a psychological defense against disturbing memories." "I walked into this, don't forget," Clocker reminded him. "I didn't know what I was getting into, but I was ready to take anything." "That," said the little man, "is the unknown factor. Yes, you did submit voluntarily and you were ready to take anything -- but were you psychologically prepared for this? We don't know. We think there may be no characteristic wrench -- " "Meaning I won't have amnesia?" "Meaning that you may not. We cannot be certain until a test has been made." "Then," said Clocker, "I want a deal. It's Zelda I want; you know that, at any rate. You say you're after a record of us in case we bump ourself off, but you also say you'd like us not to. I'll buy that, I don't want us to, either, and there's a chance that we can stop it together." "An extremely remote one," Mr. Calhoun stated. "Maybe, but a chance. Now if you let me out and I'm the first case that don't get amnesia, I can tell the world about all this. I might be able to steer other guys, scientists and decent politicians, into coming here to get the dope straighter than I could. Maybe thafd give Earth a chance to cop a pardon on getting extinct. Even if it don't work, it's better than hanging around the radio waiting for the results." glasses and wiped them thoughtfully, an adopted mannerism, obviously, because he seemed to see as well without them. "You have a point, Mr. Locke, but it would mean losing your contribution to our archives." "Well, which is more important?" Clocker argued. "Would you rather have my record than have us save ourself?" "Both," said Mr. Calhoun. "Wc see very little hope of your success, while we regard your knowledge as having important sociological significance. A very desirable contribution." The others agreed. Look, ril come back if I lame out," Clocker desperately offered. "You can pick me up any time you want. But if I make headway, you got to let Zelda go, too." "A reasonable proposition," said Dr. Harding. "I call for a vote." They took one. The best Clocker could get was a compromise. "We will lift our control," Mr. Calhoun said, "for a suitable time. If you can arouse a measurable opposition to racial suicide -- measurable, mind you ; we're not requiring that you reverse the lemming march alone -- we agree to release your wife and revise our policy completely. If, on the other hand, as seems more likely -- " "I come back here and go on giving you the inside on racing," Clocker finished for him. "How much time do I get?" Dr. Harding turned his hands palm up on the table. "We do not wish to be arbitrary. We earnestly hope you gain your objective and we shall give you every opportunity to do so. If you fail, you will know it. So shall we." "You're pretty sure I'll get scratched, aren't you?" Clocker asked angrily. "It's like me telling a jockey he don't stand a chance -- he's whammied before he even gets to the paddock. Anybody'd think do-gooders like you claim you are would wish me luck." "But we do!" exclaimed Mr. Calhoun. He shook docker's hand warmly and sincerely. "Haven't we consented to release you? Doesn't this prove our honest concern? If releasing all our human associates would save humanity, we would do so instantly. But we have tried again and again. And so, to use your own professional terminology, we are hedging our bets by continuing to make our anthropological record until you demonstrate another method... if you do." "Good enough," approved docker. "Thanks for the kind word." The other board members followed and shook docker's hand and wished him well. Barnes, being last, did the same and added, "You may see your wife, if you care to, before you leave." "If I care to?" Cldcker repcated, "What in hell do you think I came here for in the first place?"  and they were left alone in a pleasant reading room. Soft music came from the walls, which glowed with enough light to read by. Zelda's lovely face was warm with emotion when she sat down beside him and put her hands in his. "They telTme you're leaving, hon." she said. 'T made a deal, baby. If it works -- well, it'll be like it was before, only better." "I hate to see you leave. Not just for me," she added as he lit up hopefully. "I still love you, hon. but it's different now. I used to want you near me every minute. Now it's loving you without starving for you. You know what I mean?" "That's just the control they got on you. It's like that with me. too. only I know what it is and you don't." "But the big thing is the project. Why, we're footnotes in history! Stay here, hon. I'd feel so much better knowing you were here, making your contribution like they say." He kissed her lips. They were soft and warm and clinging, and so were her arms around his neck. This was more like the Zelda he had been missing. "They gave you a hypo, sweetheart," he told her. "You're hooked: I'm not. Maybe being a footnote is more important than doing something to save our skin, but I don't think so. If I can do anything about it. I want to do it." "Like what?" "I don't know," he admitted. "I'm hoping I get an idea when I'm paroled." She nuzzled under his chin. "Hon, I want you and me to be footnotes. I want it awful bad." "That's not what really counts, baby. Don't you see that? It's having you and stopping us humans from being just a bunch of old footnotes. Once we do that, we can always come back here and make the record, if it means that much to you." "Oh, it does!" He stood and drew her up so he could hold her more tightly. "You do want to go on being my wife, don't you, baby?" "Of course! Only I was hoping it could be here." "Well, it can't. But that's all I wanted to know. The rest is just details." He kissed her again, including the side of her neck, which produced a subdued wriggle of pleasure, and then he went back to the Administration Building for his release. complicated than opening his eyes, except for a bit of foggi ness and fatigue that wore off quickly, and Clocker saw he was in a white room with a doctor, a nurse and an orderly around his bed. "Reflexes normal," the doctor said. He told Clocker, "You see and hear us. You know what I'm saying." "Sure," Clocker replied. "Why shouldn't I?" "That's right," the doctor evaded. "How do you feel?" Clocker thought about it. He was a little thirsty and the idea of a steak interested him, but otherwise he felt no pain or confusion. He remembered that he had not been hungry or thirsty for a long time, and that made him i;ecall going over the border after Zelda. There were no gaps in his recollection. He didn't have protective amnesia. "You know what it's like there?" he asked the doctor eagerly. "A big place where everybody from all over the world tell these aliens about their job or racket." He frowned. "I just remembered something funny. Wonder why I didn't notice it at the time. Everybody talks the same language. Maybe that's because there's only one language for thinking." He shrugged off the problem. "The gu#rs who run the shop take it all down as a record for whoever wants to from now. That's on account of us humans are about to close down the track and go home." The doctor bent close intently. "Is that what you believe now or -- while you were -- disturbed?" docker's impulse to blurt the whole story was stopped at the gate. The doctor was staring too studiously at him. He didn't have his story set yet; he needed time to think, and that meant getting out of this hospital and talking it over with himself. "You kidding?" he asked, using the same grin that he met complainers with when his turf predictions went sour. "While my head was out of the stirrups, of course." The doctor, the nurse and the orderly relaxed... Clocker went on, being doggedly humorous. "What screwball ideas I got! HoW'd I act?" "Not bad," said the orderly. "When I found you yakking in your wife's room, I thought maybe it was catching and I'd better go find another job. But Doc here told me I was too stable to go psychotic." "I wasn't any trouble?" "Nah. All you did was talk about how to handicap races. I got quite a few pointers. Hell, you went over them often enough for anybody to get them straight!" "I'm glad somebody made a profit," said Clocker. He asked the doctor, "When do I get out of here?" "We'll have to give you a few tests first." "Bring them on," Clocker said confidently. They were clever tests, designed to trip him into revealing whether he still believed in his delusions. But once he realized that, he meticulously joked about them. "Well?" he asked when the tests were finished. "You're all right," said the doctor. "Just try not to worry about your wife, avoid overworking, get plenty of rest -- " Before Clocker left, he went to see Zelda. She had evidently recorded the time-step satisfactorily, because she was on a soft-shoe routine that she must have known cold by the time she'd been ten. He kissed her unresponsive mouth, knowing that she was far away in space and could not feel, see or hear him. But that didn't matter. He felt his own good, honest, genuine longing for her, unchecked by the aliens' control of emotions. "I'll spring you yet, baby," he said. "And what I told you about that big apartment on Riverside Drive still goes. We'll have a time together that ought to be a footnote in history all by itself. I'll see you... after I get the real job done." He heard the soft-shoe rhythm all the way down the corridor, out of the hospital, and clear back to the city.  sick, the circulation of his tip sheet gone. But he didn't worry about it; there were bigger problems. He studied the newspapers before even giving himself time to think. The news was as bad as usual. He could feel the heat of fission, close his eyes and see all the cities and farms in the world going up in a blinding cloud. As far as he was concerned, Barnes and Harding and the rest weren't working fast enough; he could see doom sprinting in half a field ahead of the completion of the record. The first thing he should have done was recapture the circulation of the tip sheet. The first thing he actually did do was write the story of his experience just as it had happened, and send it to a magazine. When he finally went to work on his sheet, it was to cut down the racing data to a few columns and fill the rest of it with warnings. "This is what you want?" the typesetter asked, staring at the copy Clocker turned in. "You sure this is what you want?" "Sure I'm sure. Set it and let's get the edition out early. I'm doubling the print order." "Doubling?" "You heard me." When the issue was out, Clocker waited around the main newsstands on Broadway. He watched the customers buy, study unbelievingly, and wander off looking as if all the tracks in the country had burned down simultaneously. Doc Hawkins found him there. "Clocker, my boy! You have no idea how anxious we were about you. But you're looking fit. I'm glad to say." "Thanks," Clocker said abstractedly. "I wish I could say the same about you and the rest of the world." Doc laughed. "No need to worry about us. We'll muddle along somehow." "You think so, huh?" "Well, if the end is approaching, let us greet it at the Blue Ribbon. I believe we can still find the lads there." They were, and they greeted Clocker with gladness and drinks. Diplomatically, they made only the most delicate references to the revamping job Clocker had done on his tip sheet. "It's just like opening night, that's all," comforted Arnold Wilson Wyle. "You'll get back into your routine pretty soon." "I don't want to," said Clocker pugnaciously. "Handicapping is only a way to get people to read what I really want to tell them." "Took me many minutes to find horses," Oil Pocket put in. "See one I want to bet on, but rest of paper make me too worried to bother betting. Okay with Injun, though -- horse lost. And soon you get happy again, stick to handicapping, let others worry about world." Buttonhole tightened his grip on docker's lapel. "Sure, boy. As long as the lx)btails run, who cares what happens to anything else?" "Maybe I went too easy," said Clocker tensely. "I didn't print the whole thing, just a little part of it. Here's the rest." T hey were silent while he talked, seeming stunned with the terrible significance of his story. "Did you explain all this to the doctors?" Doc Hawkifts asked. "You think I'm crazy?" Clocker retorted. "They'd have kept me packed away and I'd never get a crack at telling anybody." "Don't let it trouble you," said Doc. "Some vestiges of delusion can be expected to persist for a while.' but you'll get rid of them. I have faith in your ability to distinguish between the real and unreal." "But it all happened! If you guys don't believe me, who will? And you've to so I can get Zelda back!" "Of course, of course," said Doc hastily. "We'll discuss it further some other time. Right now I really must start putting my medical column together for the paper." "What about you, Handy Sam?" Clocker challenged. Handy Sam. with one foot up on the table and a pencil between his toes, was doodling selfconsciously on a paper napkin. "We all get these ideas, Clocker. I used to dream about having arms and I'd wake up still thinking so, till I didn't know if I did or didn't. But like Doc says, theo you figure out what's real and it don't mix you up any more." "All right," Clocker said belligerently to Oil Pocket. "You think my story's batty, too?" "Can savvy evil spirits, good spirits," Oil Pocket replied with stolid tact. "Injun spirits, though, not white ones." "But I keep telling you they ain't spirits. They ain't even human. They're from some world way across the Uru verse -- " Oil Px)cket shook his head. "Can savvy Injun spirits, Clocker. No spirits, no savvy." "Look, you see the mess we're all in, don't you?" Clocker appealed to the whole group. "Do you mean to tell me you can't feel we're getting set to blow the joint? Wouldn't you want to stop it?" "If we could, my boy, gladly," Doc said. "However, there's not much that any individual or group of individuals can do." "But how in hell does anything get started? With one guy, two guys -- before you know it, you got a crowd, a political party, a country -- " "What about the other countries, though?" asked Buttonhole. "So we're sold on your story in America, let's say. What do we do -- let the rest of the world walk in and take us over?" "We educate them," Clocker explained despairingly. "We start it here and it spreads to there. It doesn't have to be everybody. Mr. Calhoun said I just have to convince a few, people and that'll show them it can be done and then I get Zelda back." Doc stood up and glanced around the table. "I believe I speak for all of us. Clocker. when I state that we shall do all within our power to aid you." "Like telling other people?" Clocker asked eagerly. "Well, that's going ppetty -- " "Forget it, then. Go write your column, ril see you chumps around -- around ten miles up, shaped like a mushroom." He stamped out. so angry that he untypically let the others settle his bill.  the newspaper failed so badly that it was not worth the expense of putting it out; people refused to buy. Clocker had three-sheets printed and hired sandwich men to parade them through the city. He made violent speeches in Columbus Circle, where he lost his audience to revivalist orators: Union Square, where he was told heatedly to bring his message to Wall Street; and Times Square, where the police made him move along so he wouldn't block traffic. He obeyed, shouting his message as he walked, until he remembered how amusedly he used to listen to those who cried that Doomsday was near. He wondered if they were catatonics under imperfect control. It didn't matter; nobody paid serious attention to his or their warnings. The next step, logically, was a barrage of letters to the heads of nations, to the U.N., to editors of newspapers. Only a few of his letters were printed. The ones in Doc's tabloid did best, drawing such comments as: "Who does this jerk think he is, telling us everybody's ' going to get killed off? Maybe they will, but not in Brooklyn!" "When I was a young girl, some fifty years ago. I had a similar experience to Mr. Locke's. But my explanation is quite simple. The persons I saw proved to be my ancestors. Mr. Locke's new-found friends will, I am sure, prove to be the same. The World Beyond knows all and tells all, and my Control, with whom I am in daily conununication Over There, assures me that mankind is in no danger whatever, except from the evil effects of tobacco and alcohol and tlie disrespect of youth for their elders." "The guy's nuts! He ought to go back to Russia. He's nothing but a nut or a Communist and in my book that's the same thing." "He isn't telling us anything new. We all know who the enemy is. The only way to protect our"Is this Locke character selling us the idea that we all ought to go batty to save the world?" Saddened and defeated, Clocker went through his accumulated mail. There were politely noncommittal acknowledgments from embassies and the U.N. There was also a check for his article from the magazine he'd sent it to; the amount was astonishingly large. He used part of it to buy radio time, the balance for ads in rural newspapers and magazines. City people, he figured, were hardened by publicity gags, and he might stir up the less suspicious and sophisticated hinterland. The replies he received, though, advised him to buy some farmland and let the metropolises be destroyed, which, he was assured, would be a mighty good thing all around. The magazine came out the same day he tried to get into the U.N. to shout a speech from the balcony. He was quietly surrounded by a uniformed guard and moved, rather than forced, outside. TE went dejectedly to his hotel. He stayed there for several days, dialing numbers he selected randomly from the telephone book, and getting the brushoff from business offices, housewives and maids. They were all very busy or the boss wasn't in or they expected important calls. That was when he was warmly invited by letter to see the editor of the magazine that had bought his article. Elated for actually the first time since his discharge from the hospotal, Clocker took a cab to a handsome building, showed his invitation to a pretty and courteous receptionist, and was escorted into an elaborate office where a smiing man came around a wide bleached-mahogany desk and shook hands with him. "Mr. Locke," said the editor, "I'm happy to tell you that we've had a wonderful response to your story." "Article," Clocker corrected. The editor smiled. "Do you produce so much that you can't remember what you sold us? It was about -- " "I know." Clocker cut in. "But it wasn't a story. It was an article. It really -- " "Now. now. The first thing a writer must learn is not to take his ideas too seriously. Very dangerous, especially in a piece of fiction like yours." "But the whole thing is true!" "Certainly -- while you were writing it." The editor shoved a pile of mail across the desk toward him. "Here are some of the comments that have come in. I think you'll enjoy seeing the reaction." Clocker went through them, hoping anxiously for no more than a single note that would show his message had come through to somebody. He finished and looked up blankly. "You see?" the editor asked proudly. "You're a find." "The new Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift. A comic." "A satirist,", the editor amended. He leaned across the desk on his crossed forearms. "A mail response like this indicates a talent worth developing. We would like to discuss a series of stories -- " "Articles." . "Whatever you choose to call them. We're prepared to -- " "You ever been off your rocker?" Clocker asked abruptly. rjiHE editor sat back, smiling with polite puzzlement. "Why, no." "You ought to try it some time." Clocker lifted himself out of the chair and went to the door. "That's what I want, what I was trying to sell in my article. We all ought to go to hospitals and get ourself let in and have these aliens take over and show us where we're going." "You think that would be an improvement?" "What wouldn't?" asked Clocker, opening the door. "But about the series -- " 'Tve got your name and address. I'll let you know if anything turns up. Don't call me; I'll call you." Clocker closed the door behind him, went out of the handsome building and called a taxi. All through the long ride, he stared at the thinning out of the city, the huddled suburban communities, the stretches of grass end well-behaved woods that were permitted to survive. He climbed out at Glendale Center Hospital, paid the hackie, and went to the admitting desk. The nurse gave him a smile. "We were wondering when you'd come visit your wife," she said. "Been away?" "Sort of," he answered, with as little emotion as he had felt while he was being controlled. 'Til be seeing plenty of her from now on. I want my old room back." "But you're perfectly normal!" "That depends on how you look at it. Give me ten minutes alone and any brain vet will be glad to give me a cushioned room." Hands in his pockets, Clocker went into the elevator, walked down the corridor to his old room without pausing to visit Zelda. It was the live Zelda he wanted to see, not the tapping automaton. He went in and shut the door. was wrong," Clocker told the board of directors. "Turn me over to Barnes and I'll give him the rest of the dope on racing. Just let me see Zelda once in a while and you won't have any trouble with me." "Then you are convinced that you have failed," said Mr. Calhoun. "I'm no dummy. I know when I'm licked. I also pay anything I owe." Mr. Calhoun leaned back. "And so do we, Mr. Locke. Naturally, you have no way of detecting the effect you've had. We do. The result is that, because of your experiment, we are gladly revising our policy." "Huh?" Clocker looked around at the comfortable aliens in their comfortable chairs. Solid and respectable, every one of them. "Is this a rib?" "Visits to catatonics have increased considerably," explained Dr. Harding. "When the visitors are alone with our human associates, they tentatively follow the directions you gave in your article. Not all do, to.be sure; only those who feel as strongly about being with their loved ones as you do about your wife." "We have accepted four voluntary applicants," said Mr. Calhoun. docker's mouth seemed to be filled with cracker crumbs that . wouldn't go down and allow him to speak. "And now," Dr. Harding went on, "we are setting up an Information Section to teach the applicants what you have learned and make the same arrangement we made with you. We are certain that we shall, before long, have to increase our staff as the number of voluntary applicants increases geometrically, after we release the first few to continue the work you have so admirably begun." "You mean I made it?" Clocker croaked unbelievingly. "Perhaps this will prove it to you," said Mr. Calhoun. He motioned and the door opened and Zelda came in. "Hello, hon," she said. "I'm glad you're back. I missed you." "Not like I missed you, baby! There wasn't anybody controlling my feelings." Mr. Calhoun put his hands on their shoulders. "Whenever you care to. Mr. Locke, you and your wife are free to leave." Clocker held Zelda's hands and her calmly fond gaze. "We owe these guys plenty, baby," he said to her. "We'll help make the record before we take off. Ain't that what you want?" . "Oh, it is, hon! And then I want you." "Then let's get started," he said. "The quicker wc do, the quicker we get back." T# A new Galaxy reader? Now that you have read Galaxy, what do you think? Did you like the well-written, interestholding, thought-provoking type of stories? We can assure you that no issue will let down from this top standard of intelligent adult science fiction. A steady Galaxy reader? If so, you know that Galaxy gives you the finest entertainment, supeth plots, and well-handled stories. It is the type of reading you look forward to month after month. You ate one of # readers, but are you one of out subscribers? Either group can save time and money by subscribing to Galaxy -- delivered to you ten days ahead of the newsstand on sale,' at #c per copy -- # for a two year subscription; #c pet copy -- # for a one year subscription. 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Off.  one can be a cliche expert. There is a choice of diplomas: either a look of pained contempt or amused pity. Some sophisticates own both. The ability to recognize a cliche and scorn it is a necessary passport to literate circles. Intolerance is justified, of course. Through incessant repetition, cliches become mere automatic verbal responses to given stimuli. But there ought to be a postgraduate course, for few things are harder to manufacture than cliches. A successful cliche is (or was originally) the keenest view of a subject and the most concise way of expressing it. Psychology textbooks need chapters to state: What can't be cured must be endured; take it (an insult or hurt) whence it comes ; sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me; that's life; go fight City Hall; here today , gone tomorrow; into every life a little rain must fall; this, too, shall pass; every cloud has a silver lining. The trouble is not the content or phrasing of the clich -- except that, if done with extreme acuteness and compression, the observation becomes easy to remember and use. People are not likely to say: The tendency to dwell on past errors is an indication of emotional immaturity and must be rigorously checked by recognition of the fact that no amount of such regret can alter a prior experience. Not when the same lesson can be put this clearly: Don't cry over spilled milk. Whoever first said It's not the heat ; it's the humidity undoubtedly made a first-rate scientific observation and did so with the word-economy of a Newton or, for that matter, a Shakespeare. The actual difference between a cliche and a potential one is purely subject matter. Many masterpieces of clarity and pithiness don't -- well, make the grade because they're too specialized. A statement must be usable often and widely before it can qualify as a cliche. Remember Poe's "The Purloined Letter"? He showed that the best place to hide something is right out in full view, where it's sure to be overlooked. Well, a guaranteed way to take over an alien wprld is to inflict its knowledge on it in the form of cliches. Finding a startling truth S is a lot easier than peeling the verdigris off an old one. When a statement that qualifies in every way somehow fails to achieve clichedom in # years, I suppose it never will. I don't understand how Michelangelo's Only work can eliminate the traces of work escaped. It was fortunate for me that it did -- not having been deafened to his lesson, I was able to apply it to my writing and editing. This editorial you're reading, for example, is the fifth version I've written. Whatever you may think of it, it's clearer and more readable than the first four, which is all Michelangelo was saying. There are two other entrants that I'm anxious to share, though I know they won't ever be petrified into standard speech. One is by the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Continuity with the past is not a duty; it is only a necessity. Any number of civilizations might have been saved from extinction if they'd been relieved of mandatory veneration of the past Literally, there's no future in ancestor worship. Holmes's injunction also has considerable personal value. Undue attachment to. one's own past can be equally ritualistic and equally disastrous. As a possible cliche, his statement might, like Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny, have a very restricted currency. Certainly neither one fits broad daily needs. The same, of course, is true of Mankind is just emerging from antiquity, which was said by Bernard Berenson, octogenarian philosopher and expert on Italian painting. "Oh, we are, are we?" is a good healthy first reaction. "And how about all our scientific progress? What other era in history can match it?" Exactly. No other era can... which is why many people, perhaps the majority, blame our current problems on science. But no blame is called for if it's true that mankind is just emerging from antiquity. Our discoveries are not at fault. We primitively use them as bigger and more destructive ballistae, our bomb shelters are larger shields, and radioactivity and disease germs are only the present-day equivalent of plowing salt into the soil of Carthage so nothing may ever grow there again. See what I mean? I needed all this room to explain the concept. A historian would devote a whole book to it. Berenson made the point in six words. Only a race as mersrffbfy elastic as the Grom caoU have a single rule of war; P #D the Pilot slowed the ship almost to a standstill, and peered anxiously at the green planet below. Even without instruments, there was no mistaking it. Third from its sun, it was the only planet in this system capable of sustaining life. Peacefully it swam beneath its gauze of clouds. It looked very innocent. And yet, twenty previous Grom exkeep your shape peditions had set out to prepare this planet for invasion -- and vanished utterly, without a word. Pid hesitated only a moment, before starting irrevocably down. There was no point in hovering and worrying. He and his two crewmen were as ready now as they would ever be. Their compact Displacers were stored in body pouches, inactive but ready. Pid wanted to say something # ' to his crew, but wasn't sure how to put it. The crew waited. Ilg the Radioman had sent the final message to the Grom planet Ger the Detector read sixteen dials at once, and reported, "No sign of alien activity," His body surfaces flowed carelessly. N oticing the flow, Pid knew what to say to his crew. Ever since they had left Grom, shapediscipline had been disgustingly lax. The Invasion Chief had warned him; but still, he had to do something about it. It was his duty, since lower castes such as Radiomen and Detectors were notoriously prone to Shapelessness. "A lot of hopes are resting on this expedition," he began slowly. "We're a long way from home now." t Ger the Detector nodded. Ilg the Radioman flowed out of his prescribed shape and molded himself comfortably to a wall. "However," Pid said sternly, "distance is no excuse for promiscuous Shapelessness." Ilg flowed hastily back into proper Radioman's shape. "Exotic forms will undoubtedly be called for," Pid went on. "And for that we have a special dispensation. But remember -- any shape not assumed strictly in the line of duty is a foul, lawless device of The Shapeless One!" Ger's body surfaces abruptly stopped flowing. "That's all," Pid said, and flowed into his controls. The ship started down, so smoothly coordinated that Pid felt a glow of pride. They were good workers, he decided. He just couldn't expect them to be as shape-conscious as a highcaste Pilot. Even the Invasion Chief had told him that. "Pid," the Invasion Chief had said at their last interview, . "we need this planet desperately." "Yes, sir," Pid had said, standing at full attention, never quivering from Optimum Pilot's Shape. "One of you," the Chief said heavily, "must get through and set up a Displacer near an atomic power source. The army will be standing by at this end, ready to step through." "We'll do it, sir," Pid said. "This expedition has to succeed," the. Chief said, and his features blurred momentarily from sheer fatigue. "In strictest confidence, there's considerable unrest on Grom. The Miner caste is on strike, for instance. They want a new digging shape. Say the old one is inefficient." Pid looked properly indignant. The Mining Shape had been set down by the Ancients fifty thousand years ago, together with the  rest of the basic shapes. And now these upstarts wanted to change it! "That's not all," the Chief told him, "We've uncovered a new Cult of Shapelessness. Picked up almost eight thousand Grom, and I don't know how many more we missed." Pid knew that Shapelessness was a lure of The Shapeless One, the greatest evil that the Grom mind could conceive of. But why, he wondered, did so many Grom fall for His lures? npHE Chief guessed his question. "Pid," he said,"I suppose it's difficult for you to understand. Do you enjoy Piloting?" "Yes, sir," Pid said simply. Enjoy Piloting! It was his entire life! Without a ship, he was nothing. "Not all Grom feel that way " the Chief said. "I don't understand it either. All my ancestors have been Invasion Chiefs, back to the beginning of time. So of course I want to be an Invasion Chief. It's only natural, as well as lawful, But the lower castes don't feel that way." The Chief shook his body sadly. "I've told you this for a reason. We Grom need more room. This unrest is caused purely by crowding. All our psychologists say so. Another planet to expand into will cure everything. So we're counting on you, Pid." "Yes, sir," Pid said, with a glow of pride. The Chief rose to end the interview. Then he changed his mind and sat down again. "You'll have to watch your crew," he said. "They're loyal, no doubt, but lowcaste. And you know the lower castes." Pid did indeed. "Ger, your Detector, is suspected of harboring Alterationist tendencies. He was once fined for assuming a quasi-Hunter, shape, Ilg has never had any definite charge brought against him. But I hear that, he remains immobile for suspiciously long periods of time. Possibly, he fancies himself a Thinker." "But, sir," Pid protested. "If they are even slightly tainted with Alterationism or Shapelessness, why send them on this expedition?" The Chief hesitated before answering. "There are plenty of Grom I could trust," he said slowly. "But those two have certain qualities of resourcefulness and imagination that will be needed on this expedition." He sighed. "I really don't understand why those qualities are usually linked with Shapelessness." "Yes, sir," Pid said. "Just watch them." "Yes, sir," Pid said again, and saluted, realizing that the interview was at an end. In his body pouch he felt the dormant Displacer, ready to transform the enemy's power source into a bridge across space for the Grom hordes. "Good luck," the chief said. "I'm sure you'll need it." T HE ship dropped silently toward the surface of the enemy planet. Ger the Detector analyzed the clouds below, and fed data into the Camouflage Unit. The Unit went to work. Soon the ship looked, to all outward appearances, like a cirrus formation. Pid allowed the ship to drift slowly toward the surface of the mystery planet. He was in Optimum Pilot's Shape now, the most efficient of the four shapes alloted to the Pilot caste. Blind, deaf and dumb, an extension of his controls, all his attention was directed toward matching the velocities of the high-flying clouds, staying among them, becoming a part of them. Ger remained rigidly in one of the two shapes alloted to Detectors. He fed data into the Camouflage Unit, and the descending ship slowly altered into an altocumulus. There was no sign of activity from the enemy planet. Ilg located an atomic power source, and fed the data to Pid. The Pilot altered course. He had reached the lowest level of clouds, barely a mile above the surface of the planet. Now his ship looked like a fat, fleecy cumulus. And still there was no sign of alarm. The unknown fate that had overtaken twenty previous expeditions still had not showed itself. Dusk crept across the face of the planet as Pid maneuvered near the atomic power installation. He avoided the surrounding homes and hovered over a clump of woods. Darkness fell, and the green planet's lone moon was veiled in clouds, One cloud floated lower. And landed. "Quick, everyone out!" Pid shouted, detaching himself from the ship's controls. He assumed the Pilot's Shape best suited for running, and raced out the hatch. Ger and Ilg hurried after him. They stopped fifty yards from the ship, and waited. Inside the ship a little-used circuit closed. There was a silent shudder, and the ship began to melt. Plastic dissolved, metal crumpled. Soon the ship was a great pile of junk, and still the process went on. Big fragments broke into smaller fragments, and split, and split again. Pid felt suddenly helpless, watching his ship scuttle itself. He was a Pilot, of the Pilot caste. His father had been a Pilot, and his father before him, stretching back to the hazy past when 'the Grom had first constructed ships. He had spent his entire childhood around ships, his entire manhood flying them. Now, shipless, he was naked in an alien world. TN a few minutes there was only a mound of dust to show where the ship had been. The night wind scattered it through the forest. And then there was nothing at all. They waited. Nothing happened. The wind sighed and the trees creaked. Squirrels chirped, and birds stirred in their nests. An acorn fell to the ground. Pid heaved a sigh of relief and sat down. The twenty-first Grom expedition had landed safely. There was nothing to be done until morning, so Pid began to make plans. They had landed as close to the atomic power installation as they dared. Now they would have to get closer. Somehow, one of them had to get very near the reactor room, in order to activate the Displacer. Difficult. But Pid felt certain of success. After all, the Grom were strong on ingenuity. Strong on ingenuity, he thought bitterly, but terribly short of radioactives. That was another reason why this expedition was so important. There was little radioactive fuel left, on any of the Grom worlds. Ages ago, the Grom had spent their store of radioactives in spreading throughout their neighboring worlds, occupying the ones that they could live on. Now, colonization barely kept up with the mounting birthrate. New worlds were constantly needed. This particular world, discovered in a scouting expedition, was needed. It suited the Grom perfectly. But it was too far away. They didn't have enough fuel to mount a conquering space fleet. Luckily, there was another way. A better way. Over the centuries, the Grom scientists had developed the Displacer. A triumph of Identity Engineering, the Displacer allowed mass to be moved instantaneously between any two linked points. One end was set up at Grom's sole atomic energy plant. The other end had to be placed in promixity to another atomic power source, and activated. Diverted power then flowed through both ends, was modified, and modified again. Then, through the miracle of Identity Engineering, the Grom could step through from planet to planet; or pour through in a great, overwhelming wave. It was quite simple, But twenty expeditions had failed to set up the Earthend Displacer. What had happened to them was not known. For no Grom ship had ever returned to tell. through the woods, taking on the coloration of the plants around them. Their Displacers pulsed feebly, sensing the nearness of atomic energy. A tiny, four-legged creature darted in front of them. Instantly, Ger grew four legs and a long, streamlined body and gave chase. "Ger! Come back here!" Pid howled at the Detector, throwing caution to the winds. Ger overtook the animal and knocked it down. He tried to bite it, but he had neglected to grow teeth. The animal jumped free, and vanished into the underbrush. Ger thrust out  set of teeth and bunched his muscles for another leap. "Ger" Reluctantly, the Detector turned away. He loped silently back to Pid. "I was hungry," he said. "You were not," Pid said sternly. "Was," Ger mumbled, writhing with embarrassment. Pid remembered what the Chief had told him. Ger certainly did have Hunter tendencies. He would have to watch him more closely. "We'll have no more of that," Pid said. "Remember -- the lure of Exotic Shapes is not sanctioned. Be content with the shape you were born to." Ger nodded, and melted back into the underbrush. They moved on. At the extreme edge of the woods they could observe the atomic energy ( installation. Pid disguised himself as a clump of shrubbery, and Ger formed himself into an old log. Ilg, after a moment's thought, became a young oak. The installation was in the form of a long, low building, surrounded by a metal fence. There was a gate, and guards in front of it, The first job, Pid thought, was to get past that gate. He began to consider ways and means... From the fragmentary reports of the survey parties, Pid knew that, in some ways, this race of Men were like the Grom. They had pets, as the Grom did, and homes and children, and a culture, The inhabitants were skilled mechanically, as were the Grom. But there were terrific differ ences, also. The Men were of fixed and immutable form,, like stones or trees. And to compensate, their planet boasted a fantastic array of species, types and kinds. This was completely unlike Grom, which had only eight distinct forms of animal life. And evidently, the Men were skilled at detecting invaders, Pid thought. He wished he knew how the other expeditions had failed. It would make his job much easier. two incredibly stiff legs. Rigidity was evident in his every move. Without looking, he hurried past. "I know," Ger said, after the creature had moved away. 'Til disguise myself as a Man, walk through the gate to the reactor room, and activate my Displacer," "You can't speak their language," Pid pointed out. "I won't speak at all. I'll ignore them. Look." Quickly Ger shaped himself into a Man. "That's not bad," Pid said. Ger tried a few practice steps, copying the bumpy walk of the Man. "But I'm afraid it won't work," Pid said. "It's perfectly logical," Ger pointed out. "I know. Therefore the other expeditions must have tried it. And none of them came back." There was no arguing that, Ger flowed back into the shape of a log. "What, then?" he asked. "Let me think," Pid said. Another creature lurched past, on four legs instead of two. Pid recognized it as a Dog, a pet of Man. He watched it carefully. The Dog ambled to the gate, head down, in no particular hurry. It walked through, unchallenged, and lay down in the grass. "H'm," Pid said. They watched. One of the Men walked past, and touched the Dog on the head. The Dog stuck out its tongue and rolled over on its side. "I can do that," Ger said excitedly. He started to flow into the shape of a Dog. "No, wait," Pid said. "We'll spend the rest of the day thinking it over. This is too important to rush into." Ger subsided sulkily. "Come on, let's move back," Pid said. He and Ger started into the woods. Then he remembered Ilg. "IlgP'Vhe called softly. There was no answer. "UgJ" "What? Oh, yes," an oak tree said, and melted into a bush. "Sorry. What were you saying?" "We're moving back," Pid said. "Were you, by any chance, Thinking?" "Oh, no" Ilg assured him. "Just resting." Pid let it go at that. There was too much else to worry about. of the day, hidden in the deepest part of the woods. The only alternatives seemed to be Man or Dog. A Tree couldn't walk past the gates, since that was not in the nature of trees. Nor could anything else, and escape notice. Going as a Man seemed too risky. They decided that Ger would sally out in the morning as a Dog. "Now get some sleep," Pid said. Obediently his two crewmen flattened out, going immediately Shapeless. But Pid had a more difficult time. Everything looked too easy. Why wasn't the atomic installation better guarded? Certainly the Men must have learned something from the expeditions they had captured in the past. Or had they killed them without asking any questions? You couldn't tell what an alien would do. Was that open gate a trap? Wearily he flowed into a comfortable position on the lumpy ground. Then he pulled himself together hastily. He had gone Shapeless! Comfort was not in the line of duty, he reminded himself, and firmly took a Pilot's Shape. But a Pilot's Shape wasn't constructed for sleeping on damp, bumpy ground. Pid spent a restless night, thinking of ships, and wishing he were flying one. He awoke in the morning tired and ill-tempered. He nudged Ger. "Let's get this over with," he said. Ger flowed gaily to his feet. "Come on, Ilg," Pid said angrily, looking around. "Wake up." There was no reply. "Ilg!" he called. Still there was no reply. "Help me look for him," Pid said to Ger. "He must be around here somewhere " Together they tested every bush, tree, log and shrub in the vicinity. But none of them was IlgPid began to feel a cold panic run through him. What could have happened to the Radioman? "Perhaps he decided to go through the gate on his own," Ilg suggested. Pid considered the possibility. It seemed unlikely. Ilg had never shown much initiative. He had always been content to follow orders. They waited. But midday came, and there was still no sign of Ilg. "We can't wait any longer," Pid said, and they started through the woods. Pid wondered if Ilg had tried to get through the gates on his own. Those quiet types often concealed a foolhardy streak. But there was nothing to show that Ilg had been successful. He would have to assume that the Radioman was dead, or captured by the Men. That left two of them to activate a Displacer. And he still didn't know what had happened to the other expeditions. A T the edge of the woods, Ger turned himself into a facsimile of a Dog. Pid inspected him carefully. l! A little less tail," he said. Ger shortened his tail. "More ears," Ger lengthened his ears, "Now even them up." They became even. Pid inspected the finished product. As far as he could tell, Ger was perfect, from the tip of his tail to his wet, black nose. "Good luck," Pid said. "Thanks." Cautiously Ger moved out of the woods, walking in the lurching style of Dogs and Men. At the gate the guard called to him. Pid held his breath, Ger walked past the Man, ignoring him. The Man started to walk over, Ger broke into a run. Pid shaped a pair of strong legs for himself, ready to dash if Ger was caught. But the guard turned back to his gate. Ger stopped running immediately, and strolled quietly toward the main door of the building. Pid dissolved his legs with a sigh of relief... and then tensed again. The main door was closed! Pid hoped the Radioman wouldn't try to open it. That was not in the nature of Dogs. As he watched, another Dog came running toward Ger. Ger backed away from him. The Dog approached and sniffed. Ger sniffed back. Then both of them ran around the building. That was clever, Pid thought. There was bound to be a door in the rear. He glanced up at the afternoon sun. As soon as the Displacer was activated, the Grom armies would begin to pour through. By the time the Men recovered from Grom troops would be here, weapons and all. With more following. The day passed slowly, and nothing happened. Nervously Pid watched the front of the plant. It shouldn't be taking so long, if Ger were successful. Late into the night he waited. Men walked in and out of the installation, and Dogs barked around the gates. But Ger did not appear. Ger had failed. Ilg was gone. Only he was left. And stiff he didn't knQw what had happened. T Y morning, Pid was in complete despair. He knew that the twentyfirst Grom expedition to this planet was near the point of complete failure. Now it was all up to him. He saw that workers were arriving in great number, rushing through the gate#. He decided to take advantage of the apparent confusion, and started to shape himself into a Man. A Dog walked past the woods where he was hiding. "Hello," the Dog said. It was Ger! "What happened?" Pid asked, with a sigh of relief. "Why were you so long? Couldn't you get in?" "I don't know,? Ger said, wagging his tail. "I didn't try." Pid was speechless. "I went hunting," Ger said complacently. "This form is ideal for Hunting, you know. I went out the rear gate with another Dog." "But the expedition -- your duty -- " "I changed my mind," Ger told him. "You know, Pilot, I never wanted to be a Detector." "But you were born a Detector!" "That's true," Ger said. "But it doesn't help. I always wanted to be a Hunter." Pid shook his entire body in annoyance. "You can't," he said, very slowly, as one would explain to a Gromling. "The Hunter shape is forbidden to you." "Not here it isn't," Ger said, still wagging his tail. "Let's have no more of this," Pid said angrily. "Get into that installation and set up your Displacer. I'll try to overlook this heresy." "No," Ger said. "I don't want the Grom here. They'd ruin it for the rest of us." "He's right," a nearby oak tree said. "Ilg!" Pid gasped. "Where are you?" here," Ilg said. "I've been Thinking." "But -- your caste -- " "Pilot," Ger said sadly, "why don't you wake up? Most of the people on Grom are miserable. Only custom makes us take the caste-shape of our ancestors." "Pilot," Ilg said, "all Grom are born Shapeless!" "And being born Shapeless, all Grom should have Freedom of Shape," Ger said. "Exactly," Ilg said. "But he'll never understand. Now excuse me. I want to Think." And the oak tree was silent. Pid laughed humorlessly. "The Men will kill you off," he said. "Just as they killed off all the other expeditions." "No one from Grom has been killed," Ger told him. "The other expeditions are right here." "Alive?" "Certainly. The Men don't even know we exist. That Dog I was Hunting with is a Grom from the twelfth expedition. There are hundreds of us here, Pilot. We like it." Pid tried to absorb it all. He had always known that the lower castes were lax in caste-consciousness. But this was preposterous! This planet's secret menace was -- freedom ! "Join us, Pilot," Ger said. "We've got a paradise here. Do you know how many species there are on this planet? An uncountable number! There's a shape to suit every need!" Pid ignored them. Traitors! He'd do the job all by himself. So Men were unaware of the presence of the Grom. Getting near the reactor might not be so difficult after all. The others had failed in their duty because they were of the lower castes, weak and irresponsible. Even the Pilots among them must have been secretly sympathetic to the Cult of Shapelessness the Chief had mentioned, or the alien planet could never have swayed them. What shape to assume for his attempt? Pid considered. A Dog might be best. Evidently Dogs could wander pretty much where they wished. If something went wrong, Pid could change his shape to meet the occasion. "The Supreme Council will take care of all of you," he snarled, and shaped himself into a small brown Dog. "I'm going to set up the Displacer myself." He studied himself for a moment, bared his teeth at Ger, and loped toward the gate. H E loped for about ten feet and stopped in utter horror. The smells rushed at him from all directions. Smells in a profusion and variety he had never dreamed existed. Smells that were harsh, sweet, sharp, heavy, mysterious, overpowering. Smells that terrified. Alien and repulsive and inescapable, the odors of Earth struck him like a blow. He curled his lips and held his breath. He ran on for a few steps, and had to breathe again. He almost choked. He tried to remold his Dognostrils to be less sensitive. It didn't work. It wouldn't, so long as he kept the Dog-shape. An attempt to modify his metabolism didn't work either. All this in the space of two or three seconds. He was rooted in his tracks, fighting the smells, wondering what to do. Then the noises hit him. They were a constant and staggering roar, through which every tiniest whisper of sound stood out dearly and distinct. Sounds upon sounds -- more noise than he had ever heard before at one time in his life. The woods behind him had suddenly become a madhouse. Utterly confused, he lost control and became Shapeless. He halfran, halfflowed into a nearby bush. There he re-Shaped, obliterating the offending Dog ears and nostrils with vicious strokes of his thoughts. The Dog-shape was out. Absolutely. Such appalling sharpness of senses might be fine for a Hunter such as Ger -- he probably gloried in them. But another moment of such impressions would have driven Pid the Pilot mad. What now? He lay in the bush and thought about it, while gradually his mind threw off the last effects of the dizzying sensory assault. He looked at the gate. The Men standing there evidently hadn't noticed his fiasco. They were looking in another direction,... a Man? Well, it was worth a try. gate, Pid carefully shaped himself into a facsimile -- a synthesis, actually, embodying one I characteristic of that, another of this. He emerged from the side of the bush opposite the gate, on his hands and knees. He sniffed the air, noting that the smells the Man-nostrils picked up weren't unpleasant at all. In fact, some of them were decidedly otherwise. It had just been the acuity of the Dog-nostrils, the number of smells they had dewith which they had done so, that had shocked him. Also, the sounds weren't half so devastating. Only relatively close sounds stood out All else was an undetailed whispering. Evidently, Pid thought, it had been a long time since Men had been Hunters. He tested his legs, standing up and taking a few clumsy steps. Thud of foot on ground. Drag the other leg forward in a heavy arc. Thud. Rocking from side to side, he marched back and forth behind the bush. His arms flapped as he sought balance. His head wobbled on its neck, until he remembered to hold it up. Head up, eyes down, he missed seeing a small rock. His heel turned on it He sat down, hard. The ankle hurt. Pid curled his Man-lips and crawled back into the bush. The Man-shape was too unspeakably clumsy, It was offensive to plod one step at a time. Body held rigidly upright. Arms wobbling. There had been a deluge of sense-impressions in the Dogshape; there was dull, stiff, half-alive inadequacy to the Man-shape. Besides, it was dangerous, now that Pid thought it over, as well as distasteful. He couldn't control it properly. It wouldn't look right. Someone might question him. There was too much about Men he didn't -- couldn't -- know. The planting of the Displacer was too important a thing for him to fumble again. Only luck had kept him from being seen during the sensory onslaught. The Displacer in his body pouch pulsed and tugged, urging him to be on his way toward the distant reactor room. Grimly, Pid let out the last breath he had taken with his Man-lungs, and dissolved the lungs. What shape to take? Again he studied the gate, the Men standing beside it, the building beyond in which was the allimportant reactor. A small shape was needed, A fast one. An unobtrusive one. He lay and thought. The bush rustled above him. A small brown shape had fluttered down to light on a twig. It hopped to another twig, twittering. Then it fluttered off in a flash, and was gone. That, Pid thought, was it. Sparrow rose from the bush a few moments later. An observer would have seen it circle the bush, diving, hedgehopping, even looping, as if practicing all manuevers possible to Sparrows. Pid tensed his shoulder muscles, inclined his wings. He slipped off to the right, approached the bush at what seemed breakneck speed, though he knew this was only because of his small size. At the last second he lifted his tail. Not quite quickly enough. He swooped up and over the top of the bush, but his legs brushed the top leaves, his beak went down, and he stumbled in air for a few feet backforward. He blinked beady eyes as if at a challenge. Back toward the bush at a fine clip, again up and over. This time cleanly. He chose a tree. Zoomed into its network of branches, wove a web of flight, working his way around and around the trunk, over and under branches that flashed before him, through crotches with no more than a feather' s-breath to spare. At last he rested on a low branch, and found himself chirping in delight. The tree extruded a feeler from the branch he sat on, and touched his wings and tail. "Interesting," said the tree. "I'll have to try that shape some time." Hg. "Traitor," hissed Pid, growing a mouth in his chest to hiss it, and then he did something that caused Ilg to exclaim in outrage, Pid flew out of the woods. Over the underbrush and across the open space toward the gate. This body would do the trick! This body would do anything! He rose, in a matter of a few Sparrow heartbeats, to an altitude of a hundred feet. From here the gate, the Men, the building were small, sharp shapes against a greenbrown mat. Pid found that he could see not only with unaccustomed clarity, but with a range of vision that astonished him. To right and to left he could see far into the hazy blue of the sky, and the higher he rose the farther he could see. He rose higher. The Displacer pulsed, reminding him of the job he had to do. glided, regretfully putting aside his desires to experiment with this wonderful shape, at least for the present. After he planted the Displacer, he would go off by himself for a while and do it just a little more -- somewhere where Ilg and Ger would not see him -- before the Grom Army arrived and the invasion began. He felt a tiny twinge of guilt, as he circled. It was Evil to want to keep this alien flying shape any longer than was absolutely necessary to the performance, of his duty. It was a device of the Shapeless One -- But what had Ilg said? All Grom are bom Shapeless. It was true. Grom children were amorphous, until old enough to be instructed in the caste-shape of their ancestors. Maybe it wasn't too great a sin to alter your Shape, then -- just once in a long while. After all, one must be fully aware of the nature of Evil in order to meaningfully reject it. He had fallen lower in circling. The Displacer pulse had strengthened. For some reason it irritated him. He drove higher on strong wings, circled again. Air rushed past him -- a smooth, whispering flow, pierced by his beak, streaming invisibly past his sharp eyes, moving along his body in tiny turbulences that moved his feathers against his skin. It occurred to him -- or rather struck him with considerable force -- that he was satisfying a longing of his Pilot Caste that went far deeper than Piloting. He drove powerfully with his wings, felt tonus across his back, shot forward and up. He thought of the controls of his ship. He imagined flowing into them, becoming part of them, as he had so often done -- and for the first time in his life the thought failed to excite him. No machine could compare with this! What he would give to have wings of his own!... Get from my sight, Shapeless One! The Displacer must be planted, activated. All Grom depended on him. He eyed the building, far below. He would pass over it. The Displacer would tell him which window to enter -- which window was so near the reactor that he could do his job before the Men even knew he was about. He started to drop lower, and the Hawk struck. TT had been above him. His first inkling of danger was the sharp pain of talons in his back, and the stunning blow of a beak across his head. Dazed, he let his back go Shapeless. His body-substance flowed from the grasp of the talons. He dropped a dozen feet and resumed Sparrow-shape, hearing an astonished squawk from the attacker. He banked, and looked up. The Hawk was eying him. Talons spread again. The sharp beak gaped. The Hawk swooped. Pid had to fight as a Bird, naturally. He was four hundred feet above the ground. So he became an impossibly deadly Bird. He grew to twice the size of the bringing your fatorite authors of ScienceFiction. Fantasy and  # Weird adventures as near as your mailbox i Just send your name j by one of t and address -- you'll got your copy by return mail... and we'll j authors of t Bargain buys galore! Write today! I  Hawk. He grew a foot-long beak with a double razor's edge. He grew talons like six inch scimitars. His eyes gleamed a red challenge. The Hawk broke flight, squalling in alarm. Frantically, tail down and widespread, it thundered its wings and came to a dead stop six feet from Pid. Looking thoughtfully at Pid, it allowed itself to plummet. It fell a hundred feet, spread its wings, stretched its neck and flew off so hastily that its wings became blurs. Pid saw no reason to pursue it. Then, after a moment, he did. He glided, keeping the Hawk in sight, thoughts racing, feeling the newness, the power, the wonder of Freedom of Shape. Freedom... He did not want to give it up. The bird-shape was wondrous. He would experiment with it. Later, he might tire of it for a time and assume another -- a crawling or running shape, or even a swimming one. The possibilities for excitement, for adventure, for fulfilment and simple sensual pleasure were endless! Freedom of Shape was -- obviously, now that you thought on it -- the Grom birthright. And the caste-system was artificial -- obviously. A device for political and priestly benefit -- obviously. Go away. Shapeless One... this does not concern you. He rose to a thousand feet, two thousand, three. The Displacer's pulse grew feebler and finally vanished. At four thousand feet he released it and watched it spin downward, vanish into a cloud. Then he set out after the Hawk, which wasnow only a dot on the horizon. He would find out how the Hawk had broken flight as it had -- skidded on air -- he wanted to do that too! There were so many things he wanted to learn about flying. In a week, he thought, he should be able to duplicate all the skill that millenia had evolved into Birds. Then his new life would really begin. He became a torpedo-shape with huge wings, and sped after the Hawk. The dty of the future, and no very distant future, will have no trolley poles or wires and no hones. All movements will be on rails by silent air motort or by horseless carriages, equally silent. All pavements will be asphalt. Unlimited light will be as cheap as unlimited water is today. No coal will be delivered at private homes and no ashes taken from them. With no horses, no coal, and no ashes, street dirt will be reduced to a minimum. With no factory fires and no kitchen or furnace fires, the air will be as pure in the city as in the country. Trees will have a chance. Houses will be wanned and lighted as easily and cheaply as they are now supplied with water. A city will be a pretty nice place to live in when the first twenty years of the twentieth century are passed. -- The Philadelphia Press, July, #. Which century was that# JI Mr. President He had been overwhelmingly elected . Messages of sympathy poured in, but they couldn't help .  . nothing could. G eorge wong stood pale ajid silent by the video screen, listening to the election returns, a long-stemmed glass of champagne clutched forgotten in his trembling right hand. The announcer droned on: latest returns from Venus, with half of the election districts revotes for Wong, against one bilresults, added to the almost complete return's from Earth and the first fragmentary reports from Mars, clearly indicate a landslide vote for Wong as the next President of the Solar Union. The two Callisto, which will be received early tomorrow morning, cannot appreciably affect the results. The battle for the twenty-five VicePresidents is less clear. It is certain that Thompson, Miccio, Kau, Singh, and DuLavier will all be among those elected, but in what order is not yet... Wong leaned over and snapped the video off. His shoulders sagged. He leaned against the console as though too tired to move, a slight, narrow-shouldered man with a very high forehead and thin receding black hair. His large, sad, almond-shaped eyes and yellow-tinted skin indicated that there was a good deal of Asiatic in the mixed blood that flowed through his veins. "I'm sorry, truly sorry," Michael Thompson said sympathetically, placing a friendly arm across the narrow shoulders of the successful candidate. They were alone in the living 'room of the hotel suite in New Geneva, which they had shared for the campaign. "The people chose well. After the wonderful job you did in organizing the colonization of Io and Europa, you were the logical man. And then you do have the fantastic Responsibility Quotient of # out of #. Anyway," he added with a weary shrug, "don't feel too bad -- it looks as though I'll be First Vice-President." A brief ghost of a smile crossed George Wong's face. "We who are about to die salute you," he said, lifting his glass in a bitter toast to the blank video screen. Thompson, the man who was to be First Vice-President, silently joined him. "At least," Wong sighed, putting his empty glass down on the video, "I don't have a family. Look at poor Kau. At Miccio. With wives and children, how they must have suffered when they learned they had been drafted by the conventions... Well, I guess there's nothing else to do but to go to bed and wait until they come for me in the morning. Good night, Michael." "Good night, George," Michael Thompson said. He turned toward his own room. "I am sorry," he said again. breakfast and was dressed in an inconspicuous tweed suit for the inauguration when the chimes sounded, telling him that they were at the door. Slowly, he walked to the door and opened it "Good morning, Mr. President," the man outside said cheerily, flashing his famous grin. George Wong immediately recognized AI Grimm, the man who had been personal secretary to sixty-three Presidents. He was one of the vast army of civil servants who kept the wheels of government turning smoothly until Presidents were able to make the decisions that would create policy. "Good morning, Al," George Wong said. "I am afraid I'll have to place myself completely in your hands for these first few days. Do we go to the Executive Mansion for the inauguration now? "Yes, sir. Then, after your inauguration, to the office. Messages of condolence have been pouring in all night, but I don't think you want to bother with them. However, I am afraid we will have to bring up some of the problems that have arisen in the two weeks since President Reynolds left office." "How is he?" Wong asked. "I knew him, you know. He taught at Venus University at the same time I did. He was a fine man." "I'm afraid he's no better," Al said, shaking his head. "We're doing all we can for him, but he won't even speak to his wife. You know how difficult it is." "Yes, I know," Wong said. They rode downstairs in silence and walked to the Presidential Copter parked in the street in front of the house. A few guards loitered in the vicinity, but there were no crowds. They entered the plush copter, which rose smoothly Under its whirling blades and carried them over the city, landing finally on the lawn of the Executive Mansion. Chief Justice Herz met them, dressed in a blue business suit, and after they shook hands he administered the oath. "Do you, George Wong," he asked, "swear to make every decision you are asked to make as President of the Solar Union for the benefit of the people of the Union and in accord with what you believe to be fair and just, fully cognizant of the fact that citizens of the Union is dependent on you?" "I do," George Wong said, through a painfully dry throat that would barely permit the words to come out. Then Al Grimm led the President across the grassy lawn, into the mansion, and up to the office that had served over a thousand Presidents. Wong entered it nervously. It was a large plain room, severely decorated. Tentatively, he slid into the chair behind the huge steel desk, and began opening the drawers. He found them fully stocked with tapes, a recorder, all the other necessities. The desk and everything else in the room was brand new. There was no trace anywhere of his predecessors, and he was relieved to find it so. The Psychology Department at work, he thought. "While we are moving your effects into the living quarters, Mr. President' AI said from the doorway, "I wonder if we could start discussing the problem of the Gnii... their Ambassadors have presented an ultimatum, and they demand an answer today'  thought. Couldn't he have just a few hours to get used to his office, to wander through the building, to explore the green garden that he could see from his barred window stretching out behind the mansion? For a second, he almost rebelled ; but even as he thought of answering no, he realized that he never would. The Psych Agents had measured his Responsibility Quotient at #, and they didn't make mistakes, "Of course," he answered with forced enthusiasm. "Who do you suggest I discuss the matter with? For that matter, who are the Gnii?" "I have the Manager Defense, the Manager of Trade, and the Manager of Foreign Affairs waiting in the anteroom. With your permission, I'll call them in and they'll explain the problem. But first, if you would sign this order :... it has already been approved by President ReyHfcds and by all of the Managers concerned." . President Wongtook the paper. It was an order sending a space platoon, # warships and # men, to the system of Altair A, to place themselves under the command of the Grasvian fleet for an attack against the system of Altair D. The President frowned. "What's the story behind this?" "As you know," AI explained patiently, "there is an unwritten agreement throughout the Galaxy that if any system conquers too many other systems, an intersystem police force is formed to cut the conqueror down. Since for all practical purposes, there is an infinity of systems in the Galaxy, and as each conqueror borders on more and more of them as he grows larger in three-dimensional expansion, unlike the one-dimensional conquests that used to occur on the surface of planets, conquest of the Galaxy is an obvious impossibility. However, the inhabitants of Altair D seem to have embarked on a policy of reckless expansion that could reach us in time' "I see," President Wong said. "How far away are they?" "It will take the platoon sixteen years to get to the rendezvous. They will remain for ten years, then return. Because of the distance, we are not expected to send more than this token force." the order. It had already been signed by President Reynolds, by the Managers of Defense and of Foreign Affairs. After all, even though forty-two years was a long period of time to chop out of a man's life, only # men were involved, and it was the duty of every citizen to give his life for his planet if required. With an impatient motion, he rolled his thumbprint in the soft plastic signature space, and held it for a second as it hardened. Then he threw the order into a basket labeled outgoing correspondence. His first official duty completed, he should have felt exhilerated; but instead, nagging thoughts of guilt tugged at his brain. Who were the inhabitants of Altair D, anyway? How did he know that the police action was just? Shouldn't he get out the whole file and go over it? But that would take days... and there was the matter of the Gnii, whoever they were. The three managers entered. President Wong stood up and shook hands with them. They didn't waste time on other preliminaries, but rushed straight into business, "The Gnii," the Manager of Trade, a large, red-faced man said, "demand that we remove our trading planetoid from their system. They allege that the planetoid is a security risk, in that it could be used for remote control bombing of any of their planets. They threaten that if we don't remove it voluntarily, they will attack it, and their Ambassadors are here in person to take our reply to their ultimatum." There was nothing unusual in that, President Wong knew. Since both spaceships and any other known means of communication traveled at the speed of light, it was now more common to send Ambassadors on important missions than to send messages. "What do you think we should do?" President Wong asked the Manager of Trade. to go to hell," the Manager of Trade replied, his heavy face turning redder. "After all, we out in the Galaxy -- if we retreat here, we set a dangerous precedent." . "I see," Wong said, frowning. "I don't recall any alien trading planetoids in our system." "Of course not, Mr. President," said the Manager cff Foreign Affairs a tall, lean, distinguishedlooking gentleman with blue eyes and 'irongray hair. "We don't permit them, for much the same reason that the Gnii want them galaxy science fiction removed from their system. Trading planetoids are usually only tolerated in backward systems. Apparently the Gnii no longer desire to be considered backward. I, for one, think that we would be making a mistake not to accede to their request." "Oh, that's very fine, decent, sporting and all that," the Manager of Trade said irritatedly. "But I have to worry about feeding this overpopulated system of ours, which would starve if it weren't for intersystem trade -- a significant part of which is carried on through the planetoids." "Can we protect the threatened planetoid?" President Wong asked the Manager of Defense, a short, slim black man with flaming red hair. The Manager of Defense considered his reply carefully. "Not rific price to destroy it," he said finally, "After all, it's thirty three years away. While we can send out a fleet immediately that would get there at the same time as the Ambassadors, and before they could mount an attack, we hardly could send reinforcements and replacements once the battle is joined. But from the best information available, I think that a small force of twenty or twentyfive thousand troops should be able to frighten the Gnii out of doing anything foolish. They aren't very far advanced." "Thirty-three years," President Wong said frowning. "That means a mixed crew with facilities for children. I am told that things often go wrong on that type of mission." The Manager of Defense nodded. "They do," he agreed shortly. "However, I have analyzed that problem in detail in my report." President Wong sighed. "If you gentlemen will leave your reports with me, I will make my decision by tomorrow morning." Each of the Managers gave him several rolls of tape. Those of the Manager of Trade felt by far the heaviest. President Wong slipped them into the racks in his upper left-hand desk drawer. "Ask the Gnii to come in," he said to Al. A L pushed a button on the arm of his chair, and the door swung open. Four large spidery creatures entered the room, followed by a small bald man. Their round bodies were encased in plastic globes, in which a whitish translucent gas swirled. They walked over to the President's desk, and the leader extended a hairy leg. With an effort, President Wong forced himself to take the leg with his hand and pump it up and down. He noticed that the creature withdrew the leg as soon as it was decently possible, and smiled a bit as he concluded that their aversion was mutual. The Gnii stepped back and began waving his two front legs. "He is asking for your reply to his ultimatum," the small bald man interpreted. "Tell him I'll give him a definite decision tomorrow," President Wong said. "Apologize for my not being able to reply today, and point out that since it will take him thirty-three years to get home, one day will not make much difference." The bald interpreter waved his hands. The four Gnii went into a small huddle, waving their spidery legs at each othef. Then the again. President Wong pumped leader turned to the interpreter it once. The Gnii dropped his again and "spoke." hand and turned and left the "They say that they agree," room, with the three others and the interpreter said. "But they the interpreter filing after him. want to emphasize that it is not "If you don't need me any because they fear the power of more," the Manager of Trade the Solar System." said, glancing at his watch, "I'll The Gnii leader hesitated a go back to the Trade Bureau. I moment, then extended his leg have a meeting with a number of the department heads." President Wong nodded tired ly. "X have the tapes. I'll study all your positions tonight." HpHE Manager of Trade and  the Manager of Foreign Affairs rose and left the room. The Manager of Defense stayed in his seat. "If you feel up to it," AI said, "the Manager of Defense would appreciate it if you would present a Presidential citation to the remains of the Third Company. They were involved in a police action in the system of Veganea, and their morale is shattered. As you know, the award is traditional, as is the speech. Here's the text -- all you need do is read it " "All right," President Wong said, taking the paper from Al's hand and scanning it. There was only one paragraph, The door opened and four old men entered, followed by an honor guard of eight husky privates. They approached the desk and stood at attention... President Wong looked up from the speech and felt a wave of sudden nausea. For a second, he was afraid that he actually was going to be sick. None of their old lined faces was complete. The worst wounded had less than half a face, and that discolored by purple blotches of radiation scar-tissue. He was blind, and the others maneuvered him into position before the desk. "For the heroic parts which you played in the Police Action against Veganea -- " Wong stumbled over the name, then continued hastily -- "I, the President of the Solar Union, hereby . , "Hot," said the blind one, through toothless gums in a voice that was only a hoarse whisper. "Tell me, do you know where Veganea is? Does anyone on Earth know where Veganea is, or care? How many men, Mr. President, how many men, young and healthy, left for that police action? Do you know?" His hoarse voice rose. "Four came back... but can any of you gentlemen tell me how many left?" "That's enough," the Manager of Defense said. At his signal, two of the honor guards gently took hold of the veteran's arms and walked him out of the room along with the others. "I order that he not be punished," Wong said sharply. "He won't be," the Manager of Defense said. "Do you take me for a barbarian? I had hoped, though, that your interest might change their attitude. As you can imagine, it's raising hell with the morale of the recruits." "By the way," the President asked, "where is Veganea, and how many men did we send there?" "It's about twentyfour years iiway, near Vega. The action started before ny time and I don't know how many men were involved -- probably not more than  nded successfully, but our ships were in the first wave and were wiped out." T HE President sat down wearily. His hand strayed over to the order he had signed that morning for a police action, then drifted aimlessly away. "What's next?" he asked Al. He slipped a few energy pills into his mouth as Al consulted his book. "There's the matter of the conversion bomb," Al said. "The Manager of Scientific Research and the Manager of Defense would like you to make a decision about it." "The conversion bomb?" President Wong said, puzzled. "I've never heard of it "It is highest level top secret," the Manager of Defense explained. "Instead of breaking down atoms and releasing some energy as in the standard fission weapons, it converts matter entirely into energy. Given the matterenergy equation, the energy released by a small amount of matter is fantastic." Al had risen and gone to the door. He returned with an old, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered man. The President recognized the famous Manager of Research. The Manager launched immediately into his argument without preliminaries. "Mr. President, while my department has finally found a way to convert matter directly into energy, I believe that any use of this process would be disastrous. First, there is absolutely no safeguard that could prevent a matter-conversion powered machine, used for peaceful purposes, from being changed into a lethal weapon by the simplest of alterations. And as a weapon, the conversion bomb, unlike atomic bombs, could not only destroy planets but stars with their entire systems. We all know that the law of the Galaxy is to prevent its domination by any one system -- and given the distances and populations involved, that domination is obviously impossible. But if we began to construct conversion bombs, and if word of it got out, the whole Galaxy would rise against us, all the way to the Edge." "But, Mr. President," the Manager of Defense said calmly. "We are not a unique people. If we do not produce the conversion bomb, you may rest assured that someone else will. Maybe even our friends, the Gnii. No system has ever saved itself by refusing to manufacture the best weapons Tfc gfff that tatts a year Please fill out all information on the easy, self-mailing, addressed envelope opposite. Fold as indicated. Include your check. We will take care of the rest. This offer expires December IS, #.  V' .v ,' I year-# Big lssues-# . Each additional gift subscription lor one year # Beyond Subscription # Big lssues-#fl Each additional subscription of # Issues # Each "  VfK Tt ; .' ,--  .'  y .  . t jr .  IfejL-! )k,  Altogether Special Offer first of this Combination Galaxy # -- Beyond # And G Big Novell # Each additional gift of this combination #  # different during the year-# Additional sets of six during the year # I ,,V   available to it. As for the Galaxy rising against us -- if we have the conversion bomb, let them! We will be able to defend ourselves gainst any or all of them and blast their suns into novae." "Until they have the bomb," the Manager of Scientific Research interrupted. "As you say, we are not a unique people." "Gentlemen," the President said, standing up suddenly. "I feel tired and dizzy. The idea of a bomb that can wipe out systems is new to me. If you will leave your tapes, I will study your arguments tonight, and we can resume this discussion tomorrow." two Managers rose immediately, shook hands with the President, and left. They did not speak to each other as they went through the door. "Mr. President," AI said, "it's seven o'clock. Will you join me for dinner, sir?" President Wong slumped back into his seat and stared dully at Al, only half noticing his friendly grin. "What would you do about the Gnii, Al, if you were in my place?" he asked. "I'm sorry, sir," Al said, "but I really don't know. Better come along for some dinner. You've had a hard day, and you have a harder one ahead of you tomorrow. We saved a number of difficult problems that we didn't want to throw at you on your first day in office." A ghost of a smile crept over the President's face, then disappeared quickly. "It's all right, Al. Go ahead and eat. I think I'll just stay here and go over these tapes." As Al left, President Wong saw the order for the police action on his desk. He picked it up to call Al to take it with him, but his eyes caught the words # men... sixteen years, and a pic ture of the terribly wounded veterans flashed before his eyes. Really, he would have to go through the files and find out if the expedition was necessary . , . He opened the left-hand desk drawer and stared at the Gnii tapes, but he didn't take any of them out. It seemed like too much of an effort. And then, the conversion bomb was so much more important. He closed the first drawer and opened the one with the Conversion bomb tapes. But the Gnii had to be answered tomorrow -- the bomb could wait. He slammed the drawer shut. "Gnii," he muttered to himself, and opened the other drawer. Then hq noticed that he had put the police action order back into his outgoing basket. He slammed the drawer with the Gnii tapes shut again and opened the drawer below it and pushed the order inside, so that it wouldn't be picked up by mistake before he could check on it. "Five hundred thousand men in here," he said as he closed the drawer. "Going to -- " Where were they supposed to go? He couldn't remember. He opened the drawer again and looked at the order. To Altair D. The name had no meaning for him. Now, let's see... oh, yes, the conversion bomb tape. He opened the drawer to take out the tapes, and remembered that the Gnii ultimatum had to be answered by tomorrow. "Gnii, Gnu, Gnuts," he said, opening a drawer. It was the Wrong one, and the tapes weren't there. Which tapes? The door opened, and President Wong looked up to see Al's smiling face peering in. "I was passing by, sir," Al said, "and I wondered if I couldn't talk you into supper -- " " Get oat!" the President shouted. The door closed softly. Now where was he?... Oh, yes, the conversion bomb. Conversion, conversion, conversation, bomb, wasn't it either -- it was the Gnii, they had to be answered by tomorrow... w Gnii, Gnii, Gnu, Gnuts, now in what drawer had he put the gnats? And why order a police action against Gnats? Just convert every one of them into spiders... A L walked slowly down the hall, his grin gone, his face looking washed out. He turned into his own little office and snapped on the communications video. "First Vice-President Michael Thompson," he said to the operator. In a moment Thompson appeared on the screen. "Mr. First Vice-President," Al said in a tired voice, "may I suggest that you remain in the Capital for the next few weeks?" Even though he knew that it was not polite, Al snapped off the set without waiting for a reply -- but not before he caught the white and frightened look on Thompson's face. scientist, Stanley L. Miller of the University of Chicago, made an important discovery. Like many other scientific discoveries, it was exciting to the specialist who is aware of all the background, but needs a considerable amount of explanation for a layman to realize its significance. What happened was that Mr. Miller tried to duplicate under glass the conditions which probably prevailed on Earth some At that time, cosmological theory says, Earth's atmosphere must have been entirely different from what it is now. It was an atmosphere which every living thing of today, with the exception of certain bacteria, would find poisonous. When the job of imitating the surface of the Earth before life began was done, it was found that some chemicals had formed in the process. Not surprising in itself, except that the chemicals were amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein -- and that is the basis of life.  ET'S sit back for a moment and draw a kind of bookkeeping balance. To begin with, we have the undeniable fact that life does exist on Earth. Even half a century ago, it was known that, at some time in the past, life could not possibly have existed on Earth, for you can't have anything living on what amounted to a ball of lava. Therefore life on'Earth must have started at some relatively specific time. After you had progressed so far in your reasoning, you had the simple theoretical choice of postulating that it originated on Earth in some manner from things we'd call "non-living," or that interplanetary and interstellar space is full of life spores which continuously fall on every planet and either perish or settle and multiply, if conditions permit them to do so. At a later date -- over three decades intervening -- physicists began to work out how the Earth's surface must have looked after it had cooled, deriving a picture decidedly inimical to life, even though the excessive heat was gone. There would be no oxygen in the primeval atmosphere; that had all been oxidized away. There would be ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane gas and water, the latter in both forms, vapor and liquid. There would be, in addition to these material things, energy, sunlight with radiations of all wavelengths, from long radio waves down to X-rays, and probably electrical discharges. When that environment was produced in the laboratory, it yielded amino acids! Don't jump to conclusions at this point. Amino acids are as far removed from a complete, large and complex protein molecule as a pile of bricks is from a finished house. And a finished protein molecule., is a long -- though unknown -- distance from a living cell. The experimenters did not (as things are easily exaggerated) make a living cell in Chicago, but merely substances which we now know to be sub-subassemblies of a cell. Nor can one extrapolate from here on and say hopefully: Now that they have succeeded in creating the subsub-assembly from dead substances, next week (or month, or year) they'll get a few thousand amino acid molecules together and make a protein molecule. And the 'week (or month, or year) after that, they'll get a living cell. Even so -- But to make my thinking clear, let's assume that somebody, in the course of reproducing primevil. Earth environment, does obtain a living cell. There would then be just two possibilities: #. It did happen in the way in which those amino acids happened. In that case, virtually the whole of the secret of life would still need to be investigated, because all we would know is that it happened (admittedly a good deal) and we would still have to find out how and why. #. The researcher knew all the factors involved before hand, in which case the experiment would only have been the proof of a wellformulated and presumably complicated theory of life. VrE don't have such a theory  of life. In spite of a really enormous amount of work performed during the last seventy or eighty years, we have trouble even defining life. At first a purely chemical definition was tried, until it was realized that analyzing protoplasm was like melting down and analyzing a locomotive to see why it works. Then followed a long period in which not the chemical nature, but the chemical (and physical) actions were taken to be the main criterion. A favorite example was an ordinary egg -- or, rather, two of them, one fertilized and the other not. They were obviously alike chemically, yet one developed into a chick and the other would rot after a while. And 'if somebody objected and said that fertilization therefore must have introduced a chemical change, you could point out some rather incredible things researchers had done with eggs, if not chicken eggs. For the eggs of a sea urchin could be "fertilized" by brushing them with a medium-hard brush under water, or by sticking a needle into them -- gently, of course. It worked with butterfly eggs, too. Now all this could do was to push some substance from the outer layers into the interior. The result was fertilization, decidedly without introducing a chemical change of the whole. Well, all right, in which way did a living thing act differently from a dead substance? First of all, it would eat and grow, by taking in substance from outside its body. Crystals also grow, but they have to be in a solution of the same chemical substance, while a living cell could digest and "assimilate" different substances. At the time, some philosophers objected that this was true not only of living beings. A candle flame "assimilated" the wax. 'That flames could grow and multiply and that theywould leave behind the "indigestible" things which could not be assimilated, or only partly assimilated, did not need any special and elaborate proof. At a later date, chemists came up with the so-called autocatalytic compounds, substances which can also be said to "assimilate" other compounds. So the definition by "action," even if well meant, could not be phrased sharply enough to be fully acceptable. A much more recent definition also works with "action" and has been condensed as follows : A slab of beef is protein. A live animal is, too. Put them both on a board and tilt it. The steak will follow the laws of gravity; the live animal will fight back. Of course it may not succeed, but it will try. Y ou will have noticed that this discussion has wandered far afield, from what amounted to attempts to find a chemical formula for life, to the "intent" of fighting gravity. But this is merely an indication of the fact that we are dealing with a very complex problem which can be approached from many angles and somehow eludes a fine sharp definition. TN the foregoing, a number of parallels have been mentioned. A crystal will grow like a living cell, but only if it has the chemicals which constitute it to feed on. An autocatalyst can go a step further. And a flame -- a purely chemical process and a very simple one at that -- not only seems to assimilate, but also to propagate. Granted that the example of the flame is a superficial similarity, don't the other two indicate that there is no hard and fast borderline between living and non-living things? And didn't Dr. Wendell M. Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Princeton jump across this line one and a half decades ago when he succeeded in crystallizing a virus (the virus which produces the so-called mosaic disease of the tobacco For those who did not read about it at that time, I'll briefly explain that the crystals, to all intents and purposes, appeared to be as "dead" as beach sand or ground glass. Yet when they were put on the leaf of a tobacco plant, they caused the mosaic disease as if they had been subjected to no change of form. Naturally the conclusion was drawn that not only the tobacco mosaic virus, but any virus belonged in that border area between living and dead matter. Since then, we have learned one very important fact about viruses. Besides differing from bacteria in being much smaller, they are also much more specialized in their demands. A bacterium can force its way into the cells of a bigger host and live there, or it can live outside a cell. A virus needs the environment of a living cell; in that, it is reminiscent of the crystals which can grow only in a very specific environment. Now the question is: Is a virus actually such a borderline case which has not progressed all the way to the adaptability of truly living matter? Or is a virus a degenerated parasite which -- like far larger and far more complex parasites high up in the ladder of evolution -- has lost most of the adaptability it once possessed for the sake of the apparently easy life of a parasite? Personally, I feel inclined to suspect the latter. But either explanation may be correct. I don't think anybody really knows yet. That, unfortunately, is the note on which this little dissertation has to end. When it comes to questions like the suspected border area between living and non-living matter, our knowledge is simply insufficient to pass judgment. And the Chicago experiment? It has done two things. It has strengthened the supposition that life could originate on Earth after the planet cooled. It has opened up a new avenue of research which looks promising. In time, the dramatic experiment might lead us to an understanding of what life really is. And after we have succeeded in understanding, the creation of artificial life would probably be a process of extension -- protein molecule, cell, linked cells, and so forth, perhaps all the way up to synthetic human beings, the "androids" of science fiction. But the creating of amino acids is only the beginning of that long climb, analogous to Franklin's kite to attract lightning and the awesome complexity of modem electrical generation, power transmission and consumption. The experiment shows us that it apparently can be done. If artificial life is created, however, it would just be the confirmation of a theory that had been worked out beforehand. As you can see, we need the theory first Only after we have that can anybody state whether artificial life is a definite likelihood. Until then, it remains a theoretical possibility, though a good one, I believe. IS a result of a recent story involving the Trojan planets, several readers inquire what they are and whether they exist, and another wants to know if there is a minor planet named Agamemnon and where it is located. The story of the Trojan planets began either in # or in #, depending on your point of view. On February #, #, Prof. Max Wolf discovered a minor planet in a place in the sky where none of the known minor planets (or planetoids) could be that night. Of course it might also be a new comet, so it was provisionally and noncommittally labeled TC. Observations of TG over a period of time made it likely that it was not a comet and the observations were mailed to Dr. Berberich in Berlin, head of the special computing section for minor planets. It turned out to be planetoid No. # and Dr. Berberich announced that it appeared to move in the orbit of mighty Jupiter. The brightness of No. # seemed to indicate that it was fairly large for a planetoid, with an estimated diameter of # miles. The discoverer then named it Achilles and the next problem was to find out whether it was actually in the orbit of Jupiter. It was Prof. Charlier of Lund Observatory who was the first .to notice that the position of Achilles was some # degrees ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. That such a thing was possible at all had been predicted quite some time earlier, when Joseph Louis Lagrange had published an essay on "Three Bodies" in space and how they would move under the mutual gravitational attraction. That had been in # and Lagrange had found mathematically that three bodies could form a stable system if they were arranged in the three comers of an equilateral triangle. The triangle, in this case, consisted of the Sun, Jupiter and Achilles. During the same year, planetoid No. # was found and named Patroclus. It also formed an equilateral triangle with the Sun and with Jupiter, but in the other direction, since Patroclus trailed Jupiter in its orbit. And then it turned out that another new discovery. No. # (named Hector), was close to Achilles. Further observation showed that Achilles and Patroclus were members of small clusters of planetoids, one group moving ahead of Jupiter and one behind it. They were all named after heroes of the Trojan War, hence the general appellation of Trojan planets. The trailing group comprises seven known planetoids. The leading group has five well-established members, to which the Germans have tentatively added three that, for the moment, do not yet bear classical names. Since they are moving in this formation, the same set of figures applies to every one of them. They all move with an orbital velocity of #.I miles per second, need I I .# years to go around the Sun once, and their average disis the distance of each grpup from the Sun and of each group from Jupiter and, of course, the distance of Jupiter from the Sun. Because this is also a considerable distance from us, it is obvious that each group must have many more members than have been named, for at that distance we can find only comparatively large bodies. It is very likely that small ones, say a mile in diameter, move around in these clusters. A good deal of space debris i likely to be present, too. The motions inside these clusters must be very interesting, but we know comparatively little about them. We don't actually have to go there to find out. This is one of the astronomical problems that could be solved by photographic observation from a space station. At any event, the Trojan planets are as intriguing -- though lacking the popular appeal -- as the canals of Mars. What are the oldest known fossils and how old are they? Rita Eleftheriade s ( address withheld ) New York City. First let's get the chronology straight so that lack of explanation does not lead to misunderstandings. Prior to our own era, we had the Cenozoic Era, also called the Tertiary Period or the Age of Mammals, with a total duration of about # million years. Before that came the Mesozoic Era, also called the Age of Reptiles, with a total years, and, prior to that, the Paleozic Era with a total durafore that -- still going backward -- there was the Proterozoic Era and, before that, the Archeozoic Era, each estimated to duration. For quite a number of years (but algo quite a number of years ago), students were taught that a fossil from the Archeozoic was known -- hemispherical masses, from a few inches to a few feet in diameter. The name given was Eosoon canadense, but although this means "the dawn animal from Canada," it was stated that they had probably been colonies of algae. But it is now believed that Eozoon is not a fossil at all. From the Proterozoic Era, a few doubtful fossils are known, one from Australia (Protaledadia) and one from the Grand Canyon (Beltina danae ) both believed to be early arthropods. "Arthropods," in case anybody stumbles over the word, is the summary designation of crustaceans, insects, gpiderg, pedes. Spicules of sponges from the Proterozoic of Grand Canyon are less doubtful than the supposed early arthropods, and the trails of an otherwise unknown wormlike animal from the Proterozoic of Glacier National Park are accepted. The reason for the extreme scarcity of fossils from the first two Eras is twofold: One is the extreme age of thege periods and the other is that most very primitive animals and plants do not have solid shells, hones or other structures which can fossilize. With the first period (the Cambrian Period) of the Paleozoic Era, fossils become frequent. I have had some difficulty understanding what nebulae actually are. Are they composed of stars, cosmic dust or what? In connection with nebulae, I have heard the terms " planetary " " diffuse?' "dark" "galactic" and " spiral " What do these terms mean? ' Jarrell Fontenote # Npches Drive Port Neches, Texas Yes, the terminology is somewhat confusing. In Latin, the word nebula means "vapor" or "smoke" and nebulosity means "clouded." This word was chosen because the appearance of some nebulae suggests vapor or clouds. All nebulae are grouped as either "galactic" or "extragalactic," the former belong to our own galaxy while the extragalactic nebulae are other galaxies. The galactic nebulae are of three types: dark, diffuse and planetary. Dark nebulae bear that name because they show up dark against a background of stars, many of which they obscure. Diffuse nebulae are of irregular outline and shape and are probably visible only because of the light of nearby stars which they reflect. These two types, which might be essentially the same under different illumination, consist of gas molecules and dust particles. The planetary nebulae have the most misleading name. They were originally called that because in the telescope they show a disk like a planet, while the stars show as points. They are the gaseous envelopes of certain stars, round or nearly round in shape and sharply defined. The extragalactic nebulae are subdivided into two types, elliptical and spiral. The spirals are then subdivided once more into "normal spirals" and "barred spirals" and in each of the two spiral types, astronomers distinguish "early," "intermediate" and "late" forms. Since the elliptical extragalactics as well as the spirals are galaxies like our own, generally speaking, their light is due to the stars which compose them. To round off the survey, I have to add that a number of "irregular" extragalactic nebulae are known and that there are many Q-type extragalactic nebulae. Q-type means too faint to be classified properly. At Y our Newsstand Now Galaxy Novel ## ID November # lisuo A weird world -- cut off from the Universe, . it had universal wisdom ; facing death at every moment, it had the secret of peace! months out of the Academy. It was a wonderful day. The Commandant told Beauclaire to sit down, and sat looking at him for a long while. The Commandant Was an old man with a face of many lines. He was old, was hot, was tired. He was also very irritated. He had reached that point of oldness when talking to a young man is an irritation because they are so bright and certain and don't know anything and there is nothing you can do about it. "All right," the Commandant said, "there are a few things I have to tell you. Do you know where you are going?" "No. sir," Beauclaire said cheerfully. "All right," the Commandant said again, "I'll tell you. You are going to the Hole in Cygnus. You've heard of it, I hope? Good. Then you know that the Hole is a large dust cloud -- estimated diameter, ten light-years. We have never gone into the Hole, for a number of reasons. It's too thick for light speeds, it's too big, and Mapping Command ships are being spread thin. Also, until now, we never thought there was anything in the Hole worth looking at. So we have never gone into the Hole. Your ship will be the first." "Yes, sir," Beauclaire said, eyes shining. "A few weeks ago," the Commandant said, "one of our amateurs had a lens on the Hole, just looking. He saw a glow. He reported to us; we checked and saw the same thing. There is a faint light coming out of the Hole -- obviously, a sun, a star inside the cloud, just far enough in to be almost invisible. God knows how long it's been there, but we do know that there's never been a record of a light in the Hole. Apparently this star orbited in some time ago, and is now on its way out. It is just approaching the edge of the cloud. Do you follow me?" "Yes, sir," Beauclaire said. "Your job is this: You will investigate that sun for livable planets and alien life. If you find anything -- which is highly unlikely -- you are to decipher the language and come right back. A Psych team will go out and determine the effects of a starless sky upon the alien culture -- obviously, these people will never have seen the stars." ward, intent now for the first time. "Now, this is an important job. There were no other linguists available, so we' passed over a lot of good men to pick you. Make no mistake about your qualifications. You are nothing spectacular. But the ship will be yours from now on, permanently. Have you got that?" The young man nodded, grinning from ear to ear. "There is something else," the Commandant said, and abruptly he paused. He gazed silently at Beauclaire -- at the crisp gray uniform, the baby-slick cheek -- and he thought fleetingly and bitterly of the Hole in Cygnus which he, an old man, would never see. Then he told himself sternly to leave off selfpity. The important thing was coming up, and he would have to say it well.  "Listen," he said. The tone of his voice was very strong and Beauclaire blinked. "You are replacing one of our oldest men. One of our best men. His name is Billy Wyatt. He -- he has been with us a long time." The Commandant paused again, his fingers toying with the blotter on his desk. "They have told you a lot of stuff at the Academy, which is all very important. But I want you to understand something else: This Mapping Command is a weary business -- few men last for any length of time, and those that do aren't much good in the end. You know that. Well, I want you to be very careful when you talk to Billy Wyatt; and I want you to listen to him, because he's been around longer than anybody. We're relieving him, yes, because he is breaking down. He's no good for us any more; he has no more nerve. He's lost the feeling a man has to have to do his job right." The Commandant got up slowly and walked around in front of Beauclaire, looking into his eyes. "When you relieve Wyatt, treat him with respect. He's been farther and seen more than any man you will ever meet. I want no cracks and no pity for that man. Because, listen, boy, sooner or later the same thing will happen to you. Why? Because it's too big -- " the Commandant gestured helplessly with spread hands -- "it's all just too damn big. Space is never so big that it can't get bigger. If you fly long enough, it will finally get too big to make any sense, and you'll start thinking. You'll start thinking that it doesn't make sense. On that day, we'll bring you back and put you into an office somewhere. If we leave you alone, you lose ships and get good men killed -- there's nothing we can do when space gets too big. That is what happened to Wyatt. That is what will happen, eventually, to you. Do you understand?" The young man nodded uncertainly. "And that," the Commandant said sadly, "is the lesson for today. Take your ship. Wyatt will go with you on this one trip, to break you in. Pay attention to what he has to say -- it will mean something. There's one other crewman, a man named Cooper. You'll be flying with him now. Keep your ears open and your mouth shut, except for questions. And don't take any chances. That's all." Beauclaire saluted and rose to go. "When you see Wyatt," the Commandant said, "tell him I won't be able to make it down before you leave. Too busy. Got papers to sign, Got more damn papers than the chief has ulcers." The young man waited. "That, .God help you, is all," said the Commandant. the young man was still a long way off. The white caught his eye, and he watched idly for a moment. And then he saw the fresh green gear on the man's back and the look on his face as he came up the ladder, and Wyatt stopped breathing. He stood for a moment blinking in the sun. Me? he thought... me? Beauclaire reached the platform and threw down his gear, thinking that this was One hell of a way to begin a career. Wyatt nodded to him, but didn't say anything. He accepted the letter, opened it and read it. He was a short man, thick and dark and very powerful. The lines of his face did not change as he read the letter. "Well," he said when he was done, "thank you." There was a long wait, and Wyatt said at last : "Is the Commandant coming down?" "No, sir. He said he was tied up. He said to give you his best." "That's nice," Wyatt said. After that, neither of them spoke. Wyatt showed the new man to his room and wished him good luck. Then he went back to his cabin and sat down to think. After # years in the Mapping Command, he had become necessarily immune to surprise; he could understand this at once, but it would )e some time before he would react. Weil, well, he said to himself; but he did not feel it. Vaguely, flicking cigarettes onto the floor, he wondered why. The letter had not given a reason. He had probably flunked a physical. Or a mental. One or the other, each good enough reason. He was # years old, and this was a rough business. Still, he felt strong and cautious, and he knew he was not afraid. He felt good for a long while yet... but obviously he was not. Well, then f he thought, where now ? He considered that with interest. There was no particular place for him to go. Really no place. He had come into the business easily and naturally, knowing what he wanted -- which was simply to move and listen and see. When he was young, it had been adventure alone that drew him; now it was something else he could not define, but a thing he knew he needed badly. He had to see, to watch... and understand. It was ending, the long time was ending. It didn't matter what was wrong with him. The point was that he was through. The point was that he was going home, to nowhere in particular. When evening came, he was still in his room. Eventually he'd been able to accept it all and examine it clearly, and had decided that there was nothing to do. If there was anything out in space which he had not yet found, he would not be likely to need it. He left off sitting, and went up to the contrbl room. Cooper was a tall, bearded, scrawny man with a great temper and a great heart and a small capacity for liquor. He was sitting all alone in the room when Wyatt entered. Except for the pearl-green glow of dashlights from the panel, the room was dark. Cooper was lying far back in the pilot's seat, his feet propped up on the panel. One shoe was off, and he was carefully pressing buttons with his huge bare toes. The first thing Wyatt saw when he entered was the foot glowing luridly in the green light of the panel. Deep within the ship he could hear the hum of the dynamos starting and stopping. Wyatt grinned. From the play of Coop's toes, and the attitude, and the limp, forgotten pole of an arm which hung down loosely from the chair, it was obvious that Coop was drunk. In port, he was usually drunk. He was a lean, likable man with very few cares and no manners at all, which was typical of men in that Command. "What say, Billy?" Coop mumbled from deep in the seat. Wyatt sat down. "Where you been?" "In the port. Been drinkin' in the goddam port. Hot!" "Bring back any?" Coop waved an arm floppUy in no particular direction. "Look around." The flasks lay in a heap by the door. Wyatt took one and sat down again. The room was warm and green and silent. The two men had been together long enough to be able to sit without speaking, and in the green glow they waited, thinking. The first pull Wyatt took was long and numbing; he closed his eyes. Coop did not move at all. Not even his toes. When Wyatt had begun to think he was asleep, he said suddenly: "Heard about the replacement." Wyatt looked at him. "Found out this afternoon," Coop said, "from the goddam Commandant." Wyatt closed his eyes again. "Where you goin'?" Coop asked. Wyatt shrugged. "Plush job." "You got any plans?" Wyatt shook his head. Coop swore moodily. "Never let you alone," he muttered. "Miserable bastards." He rose up suddenly in the chair, pointing a long matchstick finger into Wyatt's face. "Listen, Billy," he said with determination, "you was a good man, you know that? You was one hell of a good goddam man." Wyatt took another long pull and nodded, smiling. "You said it," he said. "I sailed with some good men, some good men," Coop insisted, stabbing shakily but emphatically with his finger, "but you don't take nothin' from nobody." "Here's to me, I'm true blue," Wyatt grinned.  satisfied. "I just wanted you should know. You been a good man." "Betcher sweet life," Wyatt said. "So they throw you out. Me they keep. You they throw out. They got no brains." Wyatt lay back, letting the liquor take hold, receding without pain into a quiet world. The ship was good to feel around him, dark and throbbing like a living womb. Just like a womb, he thought. If s a lot like a womb. "Listen," Coop said thickly, rising from his chair. "I think I'll quit this racket. What the hell I wanna stay in this racket for?" Wyatt looked up, startled. When Coop was drunk, he was never a little drunk. He was always far gone, and he could be very mean. Wyatt saw now that he was down deep and sinking; that the replacement was a big thing to him, bigger than Wyatt had expected. In this team, Wyatt had been the leader, and it had seldom occurred to him that Coop really needed him. He had never really thought about it. But now he let himself realize that, alone, Coop could be very bad. Unless this new man was worth anything and learned quickly, Coop would very likely get himself killed. Now, more than ever, this replacement thing was ridiculous; but for Coop's sake, Wyatt said quickly: "Drop that, man. You'll be on this ship in the boneyard. You even look like this ship -- you got a bright red bow." When the tall man was dark and silent, Wyatt said gently, "Coop. Easy. We leave at midnight. Want me to take her up?" "Naw." Coop turned away abruptly, shaking his head. "T'hell with you. Go die." He sank back deeply in the seat, his gaunt face reflecting the green glow from the panel. His next words were sad, and, to Wyatt, very touching. "Hell, Billy," Coop said wearily, "this ain' no fun." Wyatt let him take the ship up alone. There was no reason to argue about it. Coop was drunk; his mind was unreachable. At midnight, the ship bucked and heaved and leaped up into the sky. Wyatt hung tenuously to a stanchion by a port, watched the night lights recede and the stars begin blooming. In a few moments the last clouds were past, and they were out in the lion speckled points of glittering blue and red and silver burned once more with the mighty light which was, to Wyatt, all that was real or had ever meant living. In the great glare and the black he stood, as always, waiting for something to happen, for the huge lonely beauty to resolve itself to a pattern and descend and be understood. It did not. It was just space, an area in Which things existed, in which mechanized substance moved. Wondering, waiting, Wyatt regarded the Universe. The stars looked icily back. At last, almost completely broken, Wyattwent to bed. passed very quickly. He spent them in combing the ship, seeking her out in her deepest layers, watching and touching and loving. The ship was to him like a woman; the first few days were his honeymoon. Because there is no lonelier job that a man an have, it was nearly always this way with men in the Command. Wyatt and Cooper left him pretty much alone. They did not come looking for him, and the few times that he did see them he could not help but feel their surprise and resentment. Wyatt was always polite. Cooper was not. Neither seemed to have anything to say to Beauclaire, and he was wise enough to stay by himself. Most of Beauclaire's life until now had been spent among books and dust and dead, ancient languages. He was by nature a solitary man, and therefore it was not difficult for him to be alone. On a morning some weeks after the trip began, Wyatt came looking for him. His eyes twinkling, Wyatt fished him up, greasecoated and embarrassed, out of a shaft between the main dynamos. Together they went up toward the astrogation dome. And under the great dome, beneath the massive crystal sheet on the other side of which there was nothing for ever and ever, Beauclaire saw a beauty which he was to remember as long as he lived. They were nearing the Hole in Cygnus. On the side which faces the center of the Galaxy the Hole is almost flat, from top to bottom, like a wall. They were moving in on the flat side now, floating along some distance from the wall, which was so huge and incredible that Beauclaire was struck dumb. It began above him, light-years high. It came down in a black, folding, rushing silence, fell away yond sight so far away, so unbelievably far away and so vast, that there could be nothing as big as this, and if he had not seen the stars still blazing on either side he would have had to believe that the wall was just outside the glass, so close he could touch it. From all over the wall a haze reflected faintly, so that the wall stood out in ridges and folds from the great black of space. Beauclaire looked up and then down, and then stood and gazed. After a while, Wyatt pointed silently down. Beauclaire looked in among the folds and saw it, the tiny yellow gleam toward which they were moving. It was so small against the massive cloud that he lost it easily. Each time he took his eyes away, he lost it, and had to search for it again. "It's not too far in," Wyatt said at last, breaking the silence. "We'll move down the cloud to the nearest point, then we'll slow down and move in. Should take a couple of days." Beauclaire nodded. "Thought you'd like to see," Wyatt said. "Thanks." Beauclaire was sihcerely grateful. And then, unable to contain himself, he shook his head with wonder. "My God he said. Wyatt smiled. "It's a big show." Later, much later, Beauclaire began to remember what the Commandant had said about Wyatt. But he could not understand it at all. Siire, something like the Hole was incomprehensible. It did not make any sense -- but so what? A thing as beautiful as that, Beauclaire thought, did not have to make sense. The gas was not thick by any Earthly standards -- approximately one atom to every cubic mile of space -- but for a starship, any matter at all is too much. At normal speeds, the ship would hit the gas like a wall. So they came in slowly, swung in and around the large yellow sun. They saw one planet almost immediately. While moving in toward that one they scanned for others, found none at all. Space around them was absolutely strange; there was nothing in the sky but a faint haze. They were in the cloud now, and of course could see no star. There was nothing but the huge sun and the green gleaming dot of that one planet, and the endless haze. From a good distance out, Wyatt and Cooper ran through the standard tests while Beauclaire watched with grave delight. They checked for radio signals, found none. The spectrum of the planet revealed strong oxygen and water vapor lines, surprisingly little nitrogen. The temperature, while somewhat cool, was in the livable range. It was a habitable planet. "Jackpot!" Coop said cheerfully. "All that oxygen, bound to be some kind of life." Wyatt said nothing. He was sitting in the pilot chair, his huge hands on the controls, nursing the ship around into the long slow spiral which would take them down. He was thinking of many other things, many other landings. He was remembering the acid ocean at Lupus and the rotting disease of Altair, all the dark, vicious, unknowable things he had approached, unsuspecting, down the years... So many years, that now he suddenly realized it was too long, too long. Cooper, grinning unconsciously as he scanned with the telescope, did not notice Wyatt's sudden freeze. It was over all at once... Wyatt's knuckles had gradually whitened as he gripped the panel. Sweat had formed on his face and run down into his eyes, and he blinked, and realized with a strange numbness that he was soaking wet all over. In that moment, his hands froze and gripped the panel, and he could not move them. It was a hell of a thing to happen on a man's last trip, he thought. He would like to have taken her down just this once. He sat looking at his hands. Gradually, calmly, carefully, with a cold will and a welling sadness, he broke his hands away from the panel. "Coop," he said, "take over." Coop glanced over and saw. Wyatt's face was white and glistening; his hands in front of him were wooden and strange. "Sure," Coop said, after a very long moment. "Sure." Wyatt backed off, and Coop slid into the seat. "They got me just in time," Wyatt said, looking at his stiff, still fingers. He looked up and ran into Beau claire's wide eyes, and turned away from the open pity. Coop was bending over the panel, swallowing heavily. "Well," Wyatt said. He was beginning to cry. He walked slowly from the room, his hands held before him like old gray things that had died. rpHE ship circled automatically throughout the night, while its crew slept or tried to. In the morning they were all forcefully cheerful and began to work up an interest. There were people on the planet. Because the people lived in villages, and had no cities and no apparent science, Coop let the ship land. It was unreal. For a long while, none of them could get over the feeling of unreality, Wyatt least of all. He stayed in the ship and got briefly drunk, and then came out as carefully efficient as ever. Coop was gay and brittle. Only Beauclaire saw the planet with any degree of clarity. And all the while the people looked back. From the very beginning it was peculiar. The people saw the ship passing overhead, yet curiously they did not run. They gathered in groups and watched. When the ship landed, a small band of them came out of the circling woods and hills and ringed the ship, and a few came up and touched it calmly, ran fingers over smooth steel sides. The people were human. There was not, so far as Beauclaire could tell, a single significant difference. It was not really extraordinary -- similar conditions will generally breed similar races -- but there was something about these men and women which was hard and powerful, and in a way almost grand. They were magnificently built, rounded and bronzed. Their women especially were remarkably beautiful. They were wearing woven clothes of various colors, in simple savage fashions; but there was nothing at all savage about them. They did not shout or seem nervous or move around very much, and nowhere among them was there any sign of a weapon. Furthermore, they did not seem to be particularly curious. The ring abbut the ship did not increase. Although several new people wandered in from time to time, others were leaving, unconcerned. The only ones among them who seemed at all excited were the children. Beauclaire stood by the viewscreen, watching. Eventually Coop joined him, looking without interest until he saw the women. There was one particular girl with shaded brown eyes and a body of gentle hills. Coop grinned widely and turned up the magnification until the screen showed nothing but the girl. He was gazing with appreciation and making side comments to Beauclaire when Wyatt came in. "Looka that , Billy," Coop roared with delight, pointing. "Man, we have come home!" changed the magnification quickly to cover the whole throng around them. "No trouble?" "Nope," Coop said. "Air's good, too. Thin, but practically pure oxygen. Who's first to go out?" "Me," Wyatt said, for obvious reasons. He would not be missed. No one argued with him. Coop was smiling as Wyatt armed himself. Then he warned Wyatt to leave that cute little brown-eyed doll alone. Wyatt went out. The air was clear and cool. There was a faint breeze stirring the leaves around him, and Wyatt listened momentarily to the far bell-calls of birds. This would be the last time he would ever go out like this, to walk upon an unknown world. He waited for some time by the airlock before he went forward. The ring of people did not move as he approached, his hand upraised in what the Mapping Command had come to rely on as the universal gesture of peace. He paused before a tall, monolithic old man in a single sheath of green cloth. "Hello," he said aloud, and bowed his head slowly. From the ship, through the wide-angle sights of a gun, Beauclaire watched breathlessly as Wyatt went through the pantomime of greeting. None of the tall people moved, except the old man, who folded his arms and looked openly amused. When the pantomime was done, Wyatt bowed again. The old man broke into a broad grin, looked amiably around at the circle of people, and then quite suddenly bowed to Wyatt. One by one the people, grinning, bowed. Wyatt turned and waved at the ship, and Beauclaire stood away from his gun, smiling. It was a very fine way to begin. I N the morning Wyatt went out alone, to walk in the sun among the trees, and he found the girl he had seen from the ship. She was sitting alone by a stream, her feet cooling and splashing in the clear water. Wyatt sat down beside her. She looked up, unsurprised, out of eyes that were rich and grained like small pieces of beautiful wood. Then she bowed, from the waist. Wyatt grinned and bowed back. Unceremoniously he took off his boots and let his feet plunk down into the water. It was shockingly cold, and he whistled. The girl smiled at him. To his surprise, she began to hum softly. It was a pretty tune that he was able to follow, and after a moment he picked up the harmony and hummed along with her. She laughed, and he laughed with her, feeling very young. Me Billy, he thought of saying, and laughed again. He was content just to sit without saying anything. Even her body, which was magnificent, did not move him to anything but a quiet admiration, and he regarded himself with wonder. The girl picked up one of his boots and examined it critically, clucking with interest. Her lovely eyes widened as she played with the buckle. Wyatt showed her how the snaps worked and she was delighted and clapped her hands. Wyatt brought other things out of his pockets arid she examined them all, one after the other. The picture of him on his ID card was the only one which seemed to puzzle her. She handled it and looked at it, and then at him, and shook her headEventually she frowned and gave it definitely I back to him. He got the impression that she thought it was very bad art He chuckled. The afternoon passed quickly, and the sun began to go down. They hummed some more and sang songs to each other which neither understood and both enjoyed, and it did not occur to Wyatt until much later how little curiosity they had felt. They did not speak at all. She had no interest in his language or his name, and, strangely, he felt all through the afternoon that talking was unnecessary. It was a very rare day spent between two people who were not curious and did not want anything from each other. The only words they said to each other were goodbye. Wyatt, lost inside himself, plodding, went back to the ship. TN the first week, Beauclaire spent his every waking hour learning the language of the planet. From the very beginning he had felt an unsettling, peculiar manner about these pople. Their behavior was decidedly unusual. Although they did not differ in any appreciable way from human beings, they did not act very much like human beings in that they were almost wholly lacking a sense of awe, a sense of wonder. Only the children seemed surprised that the ship had landed, and only the children hung around and inspected it. Almost all the others went off about their regular business -- which seemed to be farming -- and when Beauclaire tried learning the language, he found very few of the people teach him. But they were always more or less polite, and by making a pest of himself he began to succeed. On another day when Wyatt came back from the browneyed girl, Beauclaire reported some progress. "It's a beautiful language," he said as Wyatt came in"Amazingly welldev eloped. It's something like our Latin -- same type of construction, but much softer and more flexible. I've been trying to read their book." Wyatt sat down thoughtfully and lit a cigarette. "B xk?" he said. "Yes. They have a lot of books, but everybody has this one particular book -- they keep it in a place of honor in their houses. i 've tried to ask them what it is -- i think it's a bible of some kind -- hut they just won't bother to tell : lie." Wyatt shrugged, his mind drifting away. "I just don't understand them," Beauclaire said plaintively, glad to have someone to talk to. "I  ion't get them at all. They're luick, they're bright, but they haven't the damnedest bit of curiosity about anything, not even each other. My God, they don't even gossip!" Wyatt, contented, puffed quietly. "Do you think not seeing the stars has something to do with it? Ought to have slowed down the development of physics and math." Beauclaire shook his head. "No. It's very strange. There's something else. Have you noticed the way the ground seems to be sharp and jagged almost everywhere you look, sort of chewed up as if there was a war? Yet these people swear that they've never had a war within living memory, and they don't keep any history so a man could really find out." When Wyatt didn't say anything, he went on: "And I can't see the connection about no stars. Not with these people. I don't care if you can't see the roof of the house you live in, you still have to have a certain amount of curiosity in order to stay alive. But these people just don't give a damn. The ship landed. You remember that? Out of the sky come Gods like thunder -- " time, at any time in the past, he would have been very much interested in this sort of thing. But now he was not. He felt himself -- remote, sort of -- and he, like these people, did not particularly give a damn. But the problem bothered Beauclaire, who was new and fresh and looking for reasons, and it also bothered Cooper. "Damn!" Coop grumbled as he came stalking into the room. "Here you are, Billy. I'm bored stiff. Been all over this whole crummy place lookin for you. Where you been?" He folded himself into a chair, scratched his black hair broodingly with long, sharp fingers. "Game o' cards?" "Not just now, Coop," Wyatt said, lying back and resting. Coop grunted. "Nothin to do, nothin to do." he swiveled his eyes to Beauclaire. "How you comin, son? How soon we leave this place? Like Sunday afternoon all the tune." Beauclaire was always ready to talk about the problem. He outlined it now to Cooper again, and Wyatt, listening, grew very tired. There is just this one continent, Beauclaire said, and just one na"You said it," Coop boomed, tion, and everyone spoke the "I think they're all whacky." same tongue. There was no gov"But happy," Wyatt said sudemment, no police, no law that denly. "You can see that they're he could find. There was not happy." even, as far as he could tell, a "Sure, they're happy," Coop system of marriage. You couldn't chortled. "They're nuts. They even call it a society, really, but got funny looks in their eyes, dammit, it existed -- and BeauHappiest guys I know are screwy claire could not find a single trace as -- " of rape or murder or violence of The sound which cut him off, any kind. The people here, he which grew and blossomed and said, just didn't give a damn, eventually explained everything, had begun a few seconds ago, monstrous noise of a world coltoo softly to be heard. Now sudlapsing grew in the air and filled denly, from a slight rushing the room, filled the men and noise, it burst into an enormous, everything with one incredible, thundering scream. crushing, grinding shock. They leaped up together, horWhen it was over there was anrified, and an overwhelming, giother rushing sound, farther gantic blast threw them to the away, and another, and two more floor. tremendous explosions; and though all in all the noise lasted tTHE ground rocked, the ship for perhaps five seconds, it was fluttered and settled crazily, the greatest any of them had In that one long second, the ever heard, and the world beneath them continued to flutter, wounded and trembling, for several minutes. Wyatt was first out of the ship, shaking his head as he ran to get back his hearing. To the west, over a long slight rise of green and yellow trees, a vast black cloud of smoke, several miles long and very high, was rising and boiling. As he stared and tried to steady his feet upon the shaking ground, he was able to gather himself enough to realize what this was. Meteors. He had heard meteors before, long before, on a world of Aldebaran. Now he could smell the same sharp burning disaster, and feel the wind rushing wildly back to the west, where the meteors had struck and hurled the air away. In that moment Wyatt thought of the girl, and although she meant nothing to him at all -- none of these people meant anything in the least to him -- he began running as fast as he could towardthe west. Behind him, white-faced and bewildered, came Beauclaire and Cooper. When Wyatt reached the top of the rise, the great cloud covered the whole valley before him. Fires were burning in the crushed forest to his right, and from the lay of the cloud he could tell that the village of the people was not there any more. He ran down into the smoke, circling toward the woods and the stream where he had passed an afternoon with the girl. For a while he lost himself in the smoke, stumbling over rocks and fallen trees. Gradually the smoke lifted, and he began running into some of the people. Now he wished that he could speak the language. They were all wandering quietly away from the site of their village, none of them looking back, Wyatt could see a great many dead as he moved, but he had no time to stop, no time to wonder. It was twilight now, and the sun was gone. He thanked God that he had a flashlight with him; long after night came, lie was searching in the raw gash where the first meteor had falleji. He found the girl, dazed and bleeding, in a cleft between two rocks. He knelt and took her in his arms. Gently, gratefully, through the night and the fires and past the broken and the dead, he carried her back to the ship. I T had all become frighteningly clear to Beauclaire. He talked with the people and began to understand. The meteors had been falling since the beginning of time, so the people said. Perhaps it was the fault of the great dustcloud through which this planet was moving; perhaps it was that this had not always been a one-planet system -- a number of other planets, broken and shredded by unknown .gravitational forces, would provide enough meteors for a very long time. And the air of this planet being thin, there was no real protection as there was on Earth. So year after year the meteors fell. In unpredictable places, at unknowable times, the meteors fell, like stones from the sling of God. They had been falling since the beginning of time. So the people, the unconcerned people, said. And here was Beauclaire's clue. Terrified and shaken as he was, Beauclaire was the kind of man who saw reason in everything, He followed this one to the end. In the meantime, Wyatt nursed the girl. She had not been badly hurt, and recovered quickly. But her family and friends were mostly dead now, and so she had no reason to leave the ship. Gradually Wyatt learned the language. The girl's name was ridiculous when spoken in English, so he called her Donna, which was something like her real name. She was, like all her people, unconcerned about the meteors and her dead. She was extraordinarily cheerful. Her features were classic, her cheeks slim and smiling, her teeth perfect. In the joy and whiteness of her, Wyatt saw each day what he had seen and known in his mind on the day the meteors fell. Love to him was something new. He was not sure whether or not he was in love, and he did not care. He realized that he . needed this girl and was at home with her, could rest with her and talk with her, and watch her walk and understand what beauty was ; and in the ship in those days a great peace began to settle over him. When the girl was well again, Beauclaire was in the middle of translating the book -- the biblelike book which all the people seemed to treasure so much, As his work progressed, a striking change began to come over him. He spent much time alone under the sky, watching the soft haze through which, very soon, the stars would begin to shine. He tried to explain what he felt to Wyatt, but Wyatt had no time. "But, Billy," Beauclaire said fervently, "do you see what these people go through? Do you see how they live?" Wyatt nodded, but his eyes were on the girl as she sat listening dreamily to a recording of ancient music. "They live every day waiting," Beauclaire said. "They have no idea what the meteors are. They don't know that there is anything else in the Universe but their planet and their sun. They think that's all there is. They don't know why they're here -- but when the meteors keep falling like that, they have only one conclusion." smiling absently. None of this could touch him. He had seen the order and beauty of space, the incredible perfection of the Universe, so often and so deeply that, like Beauclaire, he could not help but believe in a Purpose, a grand final meaning. When his father had died of an insect bite at Oberon he had believed in a purpose for that, and had looked for it. # When his first crewmate fell into the acid ocean of Alcestis and the second died of a horrible rot, Wyatt had seen purpose, purpose; and each time another man died, for no apparent reason, on windless, evil useless worlds, the meaning of things had become clearer and clearer, and now in the end Wyatt was approaching the truth, which was perhaps that none of it mattered at all, It especially did not matter now. So many things had happened that he had lost the capacity to pay attention. He was not young any more; he wanted to : rest, and upon the bosom of this girl he had all the reason for anything and everything he needed. But Beauclaire was incoherent. It seemed to him that here on this planet a great wrong was being done, and the more he thought of it the more angry and confused he became. He went off by himself and looked at the terrible ' wound on the face of the planet, at all the sweet, lovely, fragrant things which would never be again, and he ended by cursing the nature of things, as Wyatt had done so many years before. And then he went on with the translation of the book. He came upon the final passage, still cursing inwardly, and reread it again and again. When the sun was ing, he went back to the ship. "They had a man here once," he said to Wyatt, "who was as good a writer as there ever was. He wrote a book which these people use as their Bible. It's like our Bible sometimes, but mostly it's just the opposite. It preaches that a man shouldn't worship anything. Would you like to hear some of it?" Wyatt had been pinned down and he had to listen, feeling sorry for Beauclaire, who had such a long way to go. His thoughts were on Donna, who had gone out alone to walk in the woods and say goodbye to her world. Soon he would go out and bring her back to the ship, and she would probably cry a little, but she would come. She would come with him always, wherever he went. "I have translated this the best way I could," Beauclaire said thickly, "but remember this. This man could write. He was Shakespeare and Voltaire and all the rest all at once. He could make you feel. I couldn't do a decent translation if I tried forever, but please listen and try to get what he means. I've put it in the style of Ecclesiastes because it's something like that." "All right," Wyatt said. long moment, feeling this deeply. When he read, his voice was warm and strong, and something of his emotion came through. As Wyatt listened, he found his attention attracted, and then he felt the last traces of his sadness and weariness fall away. He nodded, smiling. These are the words Beauclaire had gathered from the Book: Rise up smiling, and walk with me. Rise up in the armor of thy body and what shall pass shall make thee unafraid. Walk among the yellow hills, for they belong to thee. Walk upon grass and let thy feet descend into soft soil; in the end when all has failed thee the soil shall comfort thee, the soil shall receive thee and in thy dark bed thou shalt find such peace es is thy portion. In thine armor, hear my voice. In thine armor, hear. Whatsoever thou doest, thy friend and thy brother and thy woman shall betray thee. Whatsoever thou dost plant, the weeds and the seasons shall spite thee. Wheresoever thou goest, the heavens shall fall upon thee. Though the nations shall come unto thee in friendship thou art curst. Know that the Gods ignore thee. Know that thou art Life, and that pain shall forever come into thee, though thy years bi without end and thy days without sleep, even and forever. And knowing this, in thine armor, thou shalt rise up. Red and full and glowing is thy heart; a steel is forging within thy breast. And what can hurt thee now? In thy granite mansion, what can hurt thee ever? Thou shalt only die. Therefore seek not redemption nor forgiveness for thy sins, for know that thou hast never sinned. Let the Gods come unto the. When it was' finished, Wyatt sat very still. Beauclaire was looking at him intently. Wyatt nodded. "I see," he said. "They don't ask for anything," Beauclaire said. "No immortality, no forgiveness, no happiness. They take what comes and don't -- wonder." Wyatt smiled, rising. He looked at Beauclaire for a long while, trying to think of something to say. But there was nothing to say. If the young man could believe this, here and now, he would save himself a long, long, painful journey. But Wyatt could not talk about it -- not just yet. He reached out and clapped Beauclaire gently upon the shoulder. Then he left the ship and walked out toward the yellow hills, toward the girl and the love that was waiting.  claire asked himself, when the stars come out? When there are other places to go, will these people, too, begin to seek? They would. With sadness, he knew that they would. For there is a chord in Man which is plucked by the stars, which will rise upward and outward into infinity, as long as there is one man anywhere and one lonely place to which he has not been. And therefore what does the meaning matter? We are built in this way, and so shall we live. Beauclaire looked up into the sky. Dimly, faintly, like God's eye peeking through the silvery haze, a single star had begun to shine. Forecast With Plainclothesman Baley in grayer danger than ever, and the and a blinding burst of hope. But what a bitterly paradoxical hope! The hunt for a killer is always tense enough, but knowing that the fate of a world depends on the solution -- the solution that must be exactly found and sprung or it's worse than none at all -- would daunt any man. Yet Baley is inexorably forced to find and spring his solution in exactly the wrong way! If he keeps it to himself, he will be declassified, replaced by a robot, and the Spacers will relentlessly move in. If he reveals it, the only result can be chaos! terror. Wise as you are to the methods of infiltration, you wouldn't believe this one -- it's too preposterous. But you'll meet and flee from it just the same! on all the worlds and in the ships between them. It takes real heroism to be unbegotten child If this was true, there ought to be another edition of What Every Young Girl Should Know! ed, sitting bolt upf f right in the hospital bed, "has happened to the medical world? In Italy, they tell me I have an abdominal tumor. In Paris, it's cancer. And now you fat-heads are trying to tell me I'm pregnant!" I stuffed my stethoscope into my jacket pocket and tried to pat her hand. "Take it easy, Mrs. Caffey -- " "It's Miss Caffey, damn you," she said snatching her hand away, "and better I should have gone to an astrologer!" "See here, now," I said, letting a stem note enter my voice. "You came here requesting a verification of the malignancy of this growth. Our discovery of a six month foetus is a fact, not an accusation." "Look, Buster, I'm a thirtysix-year-old spinster. Like the joke goes, I haven't been married or anything. Also, I knew about the birds and the bees before you were emptying bedpans. Now will you get off this subject of babies and find out whether it's safe for me to start any continued stories?" married mothers were not uncommon, but Sara Caffey's cold convictions were unshakable. She sank back into her seven satin pillows and sighed mightily. Her wide-spaced, intelligent eyes glared at me from a handsome, if somewhat overly strong, face. Creamy white shoulders swept gracefully into gradually darkening neck skin and frankly tanned cheeks and broad forehead. Her straight, slender nose was sunburned. As resident physician for over fifteen years, I had learned patience in these matters. But the thought that this lovely creature expected me to believe that she was an unfulfilled old maid got under my skin, particularly under the circumstances. "Miss Caffey, I am a physician, not a philosopher. Just the same, permit me to congratulate you on your virginity." "Thanks," she said, in a voice not untinged with pride. "However," I went on, "in spite of certain contra-indications and irregularities of symptoms such as the absence of morning sickness and the like, I would like to enlist your cooperation in delivering yourself of an infant within the next three months." "Dr. Foley, please understand!" She threw her hands apart in despair. "I love children. I would have an acre of them if I were married, or even in the mood for any other alliance. But men just don't fit ray frame of reference. And regardless of what kind of a damned fool  I may make of myself in the future, I haven't, to date! Doctor, the kind of cooperation you ask for hasn't been known for two thousand years." I tried another tack. "Well, since you arrived without a medical history on your condition, would you tell us the name of your last doctor so we may write for a transcript?" "The surgeon?" She nodded. "And don't try to explain that he misdiagnosed because he's hungry for surgical fees. He didn't plan to operate. In fact, that's why I left. He was trying some new cure of his own that didn't set well with the staff there, and they got into such a squabble I figured I'd better remove the cause of it all before the dear old man lost his license." While she was speaking, I casually drew back the covers and exposed her slightly swollen abdomen. It, too, had a surprising coat of tan. I donned my stethoscope, moved the diaphragm around until I had what I wanted, and held it there. "Yes, I know of Dr. Sansome," I told her. "We shall send a wire at once for your case record. Helps, you know. Now, if you will just slip these into your ears -- " She let me hang the stethoscope around her neck, and even brushed back her shining black hair so I could adjust the earpieces for her. "If Doctor Sansome had heard that," I said, "he would have changed his mind." She listened intently to the quick, light, foetal heartbeat for over a minute, and gradually a faraway gleam lighted her eyes. "Oh if you were only right," she said softly, "Here I've chased stories all over the globe half my life, and I'd have the biggest story since the flood right here in my own tummy!" She lay back again. "But of course, you're wrong." "Then what do you call the sounds you've just heard?" I said in complete exasperation. , "Gut rumble," she said. "Now go along like a nice intern and find me a passel of surgeons and let's have at this tumor, cancer, bubblegum or what have you. I want out of here, fast as I can mend." the female news-correspondent in bed, but she wouldn't stir. Sansome's findings would convince us. Three days passed with no word from Paris. Then, on the fourth day, her medical history arrived in the briefcase of the famous surgeon himself. "I flew," he apologized, "but it took two days to detach myself. Delighted to meet you, Dr. Foley. Your cable mentioned a Miss Sara Caffey, maternity patient. Is it possible ?" He was large for a Frenchman, and his gauntness was compounded by an obvious lack of sleep. His black eyes bore into mine as if to drag out what appeared to me to be a fairly mundane admission. "We call her that," I said shrugging. "And as to her condition, you may examine her yourself." "Sacre bleu!" His eyes rolled up like bloodshot cue-balls. "She I left us at her own insistence. Aside from ethics, we must not disturb her by my reappearance. But I have a favor to ask. A giant mountain of a fantastic favor. Now that I have found her again, I must not lose her, certainly not, until -- " He grabbed pen and paper and moved his chair to my desk, He wrote briefly. H Voila! These simple adjustments in her metabolism -- diet, and just a few so petite injections. And may I remain here in the behind-ground, incognito? I will help with other work -- at no cost, of course. I will be an orderly, if you will. But I must remain in tpuch. Close touch." I was a bit nonplussed. A man of Sansome's reputation! It was like a United States Senator pleading for the opportunity to scrub out the men's room at the House of Representatives. Just the same, I wouldn't be stampeded or overawed. Several provocative explanations for the French doctor's concern came to mind... Was he the repudiated father of Sara's unborn child? Or was he a practitioner of artificial insemination, with a rather unfortunate error to his credit? "Your request is unusual," I said cautiously, "but not entirely unreasonable. In order to justify it, I am sure you will be this case, will you not, Doctor?" TE frowned, "I suppose I must. But you will believe little of it. My own staff agreed with my diagnosis, but they violently rejected my theory. Wait until they hear your diagnosis, doctor!" He unzipped his briefcase. "She probably protests that she has a malignant tumor, not a baby," he remarked as he laid thick sheafs of paper on my desk. "You are so very right," I said. "Madam oiselle is magnificent," he observed, running slender, wrinkled hands through his sparse gray hair. "But her obstinacy will not avail against evolution. No more than we doctors' monumental ignorance." "Evolution? Explain, please." "Here is the case history." He drummed on it with his shortclipped nails. "In it, you will find that Caffey came to us three months ago with her body cavity in the grasp of a small octopus of a soft form carcinoma. The pain reached from pelvis to chest." "Incredible!" I exclaimed. Sansome spread his hand on the record sheets. "Facts are never incredible," he reminded me gently. "What follows, however, will tax your credulity, and I beg of you to allow me to impose an outrageous concept whose only virtue appears to be its demonstrated validity.' "Proceed." "In forty years of slicing away tumerous growths, I had become morbid at the dreadful incidence of recurrence and the obscene mortality rate. In spite of all our techniques, these cancers have increased with the persistence of Nature herself. "In a fit of prolonged depression brought on by a foolishly strenuous research of histories, my mind stumbled into a stupid preoccupation with a few isolated cases of exogenic pregnancy. One which fascinated me was the young #year-old boy from whose lung a surgeon removed a live three-month foetus. Somehow the obvious explanation refused to satisfy me. It was, of course, concluded that the foetus was an undeveloped twin to the boy himself. "This could be so; but on what facts was this assumption based? None. Only the absence of any other theory justified the concept. The surgeon had expected to find a hard carcinoma. "And it came to me suddenly that he had found his cancer ! "My interpolation was this: Mankind is suffering an evolutionary change in his reproductive procedure. The high incidence of various tumors evidences Nature's experiments in developing a sexual reproduction," bergasted me that I looked at him for signs of facetiousness or irrationality. His extreme fatigue was evident -- but his calmness and clarity of self-expression in a foreign language indicated no mental confusion. A hoax of such magnitude was outside the realm of possibility for a surgeon of his distinction. The man was simply following a blind alley of reasoning, set off by his life-long frustration of battling cancer. I mustered my patience and drew him out, hoping he would find a contradiction in his own theory. "This is a rather staggering notion, Dr. Sansome," I said. "Have you been able to support it with -- additional evidence?" "Until Miss Caffey," he said, "frankly, no. Not the kind of evidence that is acceptable. But the theory has much to defend it. In your own Journal of the A. M. A., May #, #, Dr. Maud Slye published the first solid evidence that predisposition to so-called malignant tumor is hereditary. Is this not a better characteristic of a true mutation, rather than of a disease?" "Perhaps," I said. "But how does Mother Nature justify the desirability of a change from our present rather successful bisexual system? And isn't she being rather cruel in her methods? made suffer in her experiments " "Mother Nature" Sansome pronounced positively, "is neither kind nor cruel. She is manifestly indifferent to all but the goal of survival of the species. Our civilization has set out to thwart her with increasingly more effective methods of birth-control. In the light of survival, Nature is most justified in trying to bring millions of frustrated, childless humans to parenthood. fling the case history of Sara Caffey, "let us examine the evidence at hand. Our patient arrived in Paris positively cancerous. After confirming the diagnosis, I proposed an unprecedented treatment based on my theory. We know several body conditions which promote the rapid development of carcinoma, such as excess alkalinity and high blood sugar content and so forth. Instead of trying to reduce these and fight the tumor, I reversed the treatment and aided Miss Caffey's body to support and encourage its growth to what l predicted would be a new maturity. "And what happened?" He thretifr up his hands. "In two months, the tendrils of the octopus withdrew into the central body of the tumor. The tendency to spread in search for attenuated nourishment was reversed with the treatment. This alone was an accomplishment, for it would have made the growth operable in a short time. "Unfortunately, word of my unorthodox prescription reached a jealous colleague, and he set off such a quarrel at the Institute that Miss Caffey packed up and left with the generous misconception that she was saving me from embarrassment. I had no opportunity to assure her that the Cancer Institute would decide ultimately in my favor -- which it shall when I return with a photostat of a certain birth certificate." He smiled for the first time, and his charm was so powerful that I sincerely wanted to believe in him. I could see no use in denying him his request, for his prescriptions were of an innocuous nature for a normally pregnant woman such as Sara Caffey. I trusted that a normal birth of a typical baby would finally dissuade him. I extended my hand again. "You are most welcome to stay with us, doctor," I told him. "The treatment you desire is within reason, and I admire your tenacity with your theory. I hope you will forgive me, however, if I say that I find your premises rather tenuous. I feel that we will witness a very normal birth, and ultimately Miss Caffey will find it to her peace of mind to confess a secret marriage, or, at most -- an alliance of which she may be pathologically ashamed at the moment." Sansome grasped my hand with enthusiasm. "Bien! Tres bien!" he exclaimed. "This is more generous even than I expected. Certainly I do not expect a scientist of your station to swallow my theory at a gulp, Dr. Foley. I will admit that my persistence depends more than it should on intuition. But we shall see. I am grateful to you." And he kissed me firmly on each cheek. fully prepared case history on Sara Caffey did disturb me a little. I ordered a thorough reexamination, and was left with some puzzling conclusions at the apparent absence of tumorous growth, malignant or otherwise. Sara was enduring most of the classic symptoms of typical pregnancy, and was enjoying Dr. Sansotne's treatment hugely. She guzzled the alkaline-producing fruit juices, fortified with carefully rationed dribbles of gin. She nibbled contentedly at the sweets which the Frenchman supplied anonymously. And she raised merry hell because we refused to operate. After two weeks, she threatened to leave. I was paged over the P. A. and got to her room in time to catch her trying to zip up her skirt. She looked at me impatiently, and then back to her abdomen. "Damned thing's getting out of hand." She had on an expensive tweed suit, and the smart, powder-blue cashmere coat I helped her into made her look her role of distinguished world traveler, syndicated columnist and woman of parts. She hunched her shoulders forward slightly, so the loose folds of the coat concealed her protruding middle. "Thanks," she said casually. "I'll write you a check and be on my way," "Dr. Sansome will be disappointed," I said casually. "You heard from him?" she asked with interest. I nodded. She put her hands on her hips. "And you still persist with your fatuous idea that I'm going to have a baby?" ' "Let us say," I evaded, "that we have adopted Dr. Sansome's treatment on a wait-and-see basis. You said yourself that he refused to operate. We have definitely confirmed that much. Your condition is still inoperable, but you are coming along fine." "Well, now, why didn't you tell me that before." She threw off her coat and relieved the pressure of her waist zipper with a grateful sigh. "Now you're making sense. Send out for another Spillane. I'll go along with that. But no more of this drivel about transferring me to the maternity ward, see?" rlEN nights later, she changed her mind. I passed her room after a late emergency case. The door was open and I heard her crying softly to herself. I stopped in. Her bed lamp was on, and for a change she looked all woman. I felt her pulse and asked, "What's the matter, Sara?" "I'm going to have a baby!" she sobbed. "I've been feeling something peculiar for some time. But tonight it kicked the hell out of me." "Want to talk about it?" I asked, still holding her wrist. She looked at me with genuine bafflement in her eyes. Her face was puckered up like a hurt child's. "But it's so impossible, doctor. I'm sorry I talked to you the way I have, but so help me, I'm a good girl." I almost said, Well , these things happen, but that would have sounded pretty silly. It was evident that she still wouldn't admit even to herself how and when it had happened. "Ever go on a good binge?" I suggested. "Not since I was sixteen," she exclaimed. "But I could use one right now. No, that might hurt the baby." She folded her arms protectively around her middle. "I don't get it. I don't get it at all. But if that's the way it is -- " A crooked, pleased smile wrinkled tears from her cheeks. "Leave it to Sary to do things the unusual way." She looked up at me. "Did you know I was the first white woman to interview a Rajah's harem eunuch?" "Looks like you have a real story this time," I said, playing along with her. "Yeah. But who in hell will write it?" himself eminently useful. He assisted in surgery every morning, refusing fees and pleading with everyone to maintain his anonymity. The staff was in on the conspiracy, and the nurses smiled indulgently at him behind his back. But Sansome was too great a man to ridicule. The general feeling was the same as mine. He was older than he thought, not in body, but in over-tired nerves and exhausted mind. None contested his skill with the scalpel; but none gave ten cents worth of oedence to his twist on the theory of evolution. As Sara's confinement proceeded with precise conformity to my expectations, I thought Sansome would lose heart -- but he didn't. He arranged to be present in the delivery room with as much interest as if we expected a breach birth of a two-headed panda. I was unfortunately called to Baltimore at the last minute. I flew both ways, but my haste was in vain. Sara gave birth while I was still aloft. I checked in with more excitement than I'd thought possible. I asked at the desk, "How's Caffey." "Fine. Gave birth an hour ago. Beautiful little girl -- " I didn't wait for more. I dashed upstairs to the maternity ward, where Sara had finally consented to be moved, and slipped into her room. She was tired, but conscious. She smiled at me peculiarly. "So it's a girl!" I exclaimed. "Wait until I see Sansome. A beautiful, healthy, normal baby!" A hand tapped me softly on the shoulder, and I turned to look into Sansome's triumphant eyes. "Without a navel," he said. Current ISetc Books t Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Now York #, Now York We mean your collection of really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from rough handling, your back issues of rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:S# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenin until #:# P.M. (Phan GRomarcy #-#RO) Edited by Basil Davenport. Funk  W agnails Co., New York, #. # pages, # rpHE science fiction event of #, for American readers, is the publication of this huge omnibus of five science fantasies by the late British writer Olaf Stapledon. For incomprehensible reasons, only one of the five novels has ever been published before in the United States: Odd John, the famous story of the mutant homo superiors and their ill-fated attempt to establish their own society on an island in the Pacific. The other four are Last and First Men, Stapledon' s weird and wonderful dream of the distant tomorrows of Man in the Universe; Star Maker, his vivid fantasy of travels among different life-forms in our galaxy; Sirius, a touching story of an intelligent dog and its reactions to the complexities of human civilization; and The Flames, a rather undistinguished short novel about a man in contact with the intelligences that inhabit fire. Olaf Stapledon was a man possessed by the idea of Infinity, an overwhelming pessimist, his whole life colored by preoccupation with "the tragic disorder of our whole terrestrial hive," as he put it. This combination of magnificently untrammeled imagination and a persistent sense of the futility of life resulted in some of the most offtrail science imaginings in fantastic literature. Furthermore, as Basil Davenport points out in his pleasant Introduction, the novels are the original source of many of the current concepts in science fiction. The fuller and more circumstantial development of many of his ideas by other authors is not reprehensible in the least. For one of Stapledon's major defects was that he was a very bad novelist. His books are melanges of often undeveloped science fiction concepts and bombastic philosophizing. Today's writers frequently do the ideas they take from Stapledon a real favor by developing them more adequatelyHowever, despite its many faults, this is definitely not a book to be missed. It belongs with the science fiction classics. Haber. Illustrated by Jerry Milord. Bobbs Merrill Co., Inc., Indianapolis, #. #I pages, # I N the rapidly increasing bibliography of serious books on space travel, this excellent volume has a special value for the lay reader. It is the first popular book on the subject to emphasize the "condition of Man in space" rather than the spaceship itself and the engineering aspects of space travel. Heinz Haber is one of the nation's foremost experts on "space medicine," the physiology and pathology of living things subjected to the unprecedented conditions encountered beyond the Earth's thin envelope of atmosphere. He is, therefore, almost uniquely competent to discuss the problems, of Man in space, and in this volume he does so with authority and also with a pleasant clarity of style that makes his material very easy to absorb. For those who wanf to know not only what it will be like to travel in space, but also how much we know about what it will be like, this book summarizes an enormous amount of experimentation (mostly military) on the effects of acceleration, weightlessness, lack of oxygen, cosmic radiation, and all the other problems of space flight -- including some most of us never even dreamed of, such as the boiling of blood in the veins at low pressures. Dr. Haber's final conclusion is that while none of the planets around our sun will support our existence, nor will they possess any intelligent life of their own, nevertheless Man will definitely "take to space" -- if only to prove that he can . Dr. Haber closes his book with a fine plea for the conservation of our Earth's resources and the continual improvement of its living conditions, since "colonization of the Solar System... is an utterly unrealistic, utopian idea." I agree with Dr. Haber's conservationist sentiments wholeheartedly. But somehow I don't think we know enough about our own solar system -- or our future in science -- to make as dogmatic a statement as the one quoted. Like those who once said heavier than-airflight was impossible, Dr. Haber may eventually be proved wrong. Isaac Asimov, Gnome Press , New York, #. # paes, # " Foundation trilogy is completed. Together with its two preceding volumes, also published by Gnome, it comprises our first great sociological space opera. Comparisons with EE. Smith's six-volume Lensman series, the next-to-the-last volume of which is reviewed below, are natural, since the Smith opus is unquestionably one of the biggest presociological space-mellers in science fiction history. Both series engage in science extrapolations that are, to say the least, improbable; both are galactic or more in scope; both are tour de forces of the imagination. But Asimov's work, based as it is on fairly sound social principles and the activities of fairly normal human beings, has a pressing sense of reality that Smith's fairy tales lack all the way through. This third volume contains the last two novellas Asimov has written on his subject: the story of the subjugation (by a member of the Second Foundation) of the Mule, that crippled mutant who nearly ruined Hari Seldon's psycho-historical matrix for the hastening of the organization of the Second Galactic Empire; and the tale of Arkady Darrell, Homir Munn, and the simple Preem Palver, and how they worked out the fragile plans of the Second Foundationeers (masters of mental science) to set the Galaxy on its correct track through the wildernesses of the future. For my taste, it is a thoroughly satisfying and adult play of the scientific imagination. by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # TOR over # years, E. E. Smith has been the beloved of young space opera addicts, for he is the inventor and sole producer of intergalactic melodrama on which most of the later imitations have been based. It is a real achievement, this invention, something that will live on for years as a classic of science fiction juvenali a. Of course, it is pretty dull going for people who want a bit more than thud and blunder, irresistable forces conquering immovable objects, and a style reminiscent of the balloons in the s.f. comic strips. In the present volume, Kimball Kinnison, dreamboat, Second Stage Lensman and whatnot, and his mighty crew of assistants of various shapes and planetary origins are still hunting down the Evil Powers that are attacking us from outside our Galaxy, and still failing to find the real villains, the Eddorians. They are still ridding the Universe of Boskonians instead, and a good thing, too -- the vicious, sadistic drug-peddlers! And, in the end, Kim acquires his Clarrissa in holy matrimony -- at last! There is a foreword, too, that gives the reader a synopsis of the previous books in the series -- excellent for orientation in the Smith fairyland. Gnome Press, New York, #. # pages, # many facets -- he is the author of the only Book of the Month Club selection (nonfiction) on space travel -- has here written a charming fantasy of the far-distant future, designed for boys and girls of all ages. It deals with the adventures of now, and his efforts to get the remnants of mankind on this planet out of the lethargy that near-immortality has given it. First he escapes from the "prison of Diaspar," the city of perfection where only initiative is dead, and finds the rich rural civilization of Lys. Then, with the aid of some magical robots, spaceship and takes off to find what else is left alive in the Galaxy. The tale ends with a reassurance of mankind's renaissance. "It is a light, simple, fast-moving and often richly imaginative fantasy, a very pleasant timepasser indeed. How about Beyond ? Have you read Galaxy's companion magazine? In just three issues, Beyond has become the top fantasy fiction magazine. Sales on number # issue jumped #, with issue number # showing every indication of the same meteoric leap. The letters from our readers tell us why. Because for the first time, a fantasy fiction magazine has been written for adults, by the tops in this literary field. Beyond is written to entertain you -- every issue is packed with the type of stories that caused one of our readers to say -- "I wish Beyond was published once a week." Try it at our risk. Send in your subscription for six issues. If you don't like the first issue, cancel your subscription and we will return your money in full. -- Oh yes, you save # on this subscription, or # on twelve issues. Fill out the coupon below. Please start my subscription with the next issue. Enclosed find  Check which offer (T.OO Foreign Potage for each year) Your Name Address City State A veferon veterinarian might have vamoosed -- but Watts had fo help any sick animal... ever happened to Oliver Watts than being rejected by his draft board for a punctured eardrum until, deferring as usual to the superior judgment of his Aunt Katisha and of Glenna -- his elder and militantly spinster sister -- he put away his lifelong dream and took up, at the age of twenty-five, the practice of veterinary medicine. The relinquished dream was Oliver's ambition, cherished since childhood, to become some day a hunter and trainer of jungle animals. It had been discouraged firmly and at length by his Aunt Katisha, who maintained that the skin of the last male Watts was not to be risked in a pursuit so perilous; and his Aunt Katisha won. He would do far better, Oliver realized finally, to resign himself to the quiet suburban life of Landsdale, Florida, and to perpetuate the Watts line by marrying some worthy and practical local girl. The quiet life, it developed, was that of a D. V. M.; the worthy and practical girl, Miss Orella Simms of Tampa, to whom he was now engaged. To put it plainly, Oliver was until the moment of his Great Opportunity a good-humored stooge with a cowlick and a sense of responsibility, whose invariable cue was family obligation and whose crowning virtue was docility. He was maneuvered into becoming a D. V. M. (though to tell the truth the profession suited him well enough, being the nearest possible approach to realizing his ambition) solely because the veterinary college in Tampa was near enough to Landsdale for commuting and because his later practice could be carried on under the guiding aegis of his personal matriarchy. The virtuous, and vapid, Orella Simms became his fiancee by the same tactics and for the same reasons. Oliver had considered rebellion, of course, but common sense discouraged the idea. He had no intimates outside his family nor any experience with the world beyond Landsdale and Tampa, and his fledgling selfconfidence invariably bogged down in a welter of introspective apprehensions when he thought of running away. Where would he go, and to whom could he turn in emergency? Such was the character and condition of Oliver Watts when his newly undertaken practice of veterinary medicine threw him into the company of "Mr. Thomas Furnay" and of a girl whose name, as nearly as it can be rendered into English, was Perrlhigh-C-trill-and-A-above. Their advent brought Oliver face to face for the first time in his sedentary life with High Adventure -- with adventure so high, as a matter of fact, that it took him literally and bodily out of this humdrum world. rriHE initial step was taken when Mr. Furnay, known to Landsdale as a wealthy and eccentric old recluse who had recently leased a walled property on Federal Route # that had once been the winter retreat of a Prohibition-era gangster, was driven by emergency to call upon Oliver for professional service. Mr. Furnay usually kept very much to himself behind his irongrilled gates and his miles of clean break stuccoed wall; but it happened that in pursuit of his business (whose true nature would have confounded Landsdale to its insular core) he had just bought up the entire menagerie of an expiring circus billed as Skadarian Brothers, and it was the sudden illness of one of his newly acquired animals that forced him to breach his isolation. Mr. Furnay called at the Watts place in his town car, driven by a small, dark and taciturn chauffeur named Bivins. He found Oliver at work in his neatly ordered clinic at the rear of the big house, busily spooning cod-liver oil into a trussed and thoroughly outraged chow named Champ. "I have a sick animal," Mr. Furnay stated tersely. He was a slight man with a moderately long and wrinkled face, a Panama hat two sizes too large and a voice that had, in spite of its excellent diction, a jarring timbre and definitely foreign flavor. Oliver blinked, surprised and a little dismayed that Fate should have sent him so early in his career a known and patently capin visored and putteed impassivity to reopen the door for his master, was silently impressive; the town car, parked on the crushed shell driveway outside, glittered splendidly in the late afternoon sunshine: 'Til be happy to call later in the day," Oliver said. He removed the padded block that had held Champ's jaws apart, and narrowly missed losing a finger as the infuriated chow snapped at his hand. "My aunt and sister are bringing my fiancee down from Tampa for dinner this evening, and I can't leave the clinic until they get here. Someone might call for his pet." Mr. Furnay protested his extremity of need. "The animal s'lffers periodic convulsions," he said. "It may be dangerously ill!" Oliver unstrapped Champ from his detention frame and dodged with practiced skill when the chow tried to bite him on the thigh. He had taken it for granted -- having heard none of the gossip concerning Mr. Fumay's recent purchase of the Skadarian Brothers' menagerie -- that the sick animal in question was a dog or cat or perhaps a saddle horse, and the bald description of its symptoms startled him more than Champ's predictable bid for revenge. "Convulsions? What sort of animal is it, Mr. Furnay?" "A polar bear," said Mr. Furnay. "Polar bear!" echoed Oliver, and in his shock of surprise he dropped a detaining strap and let Champ loose. 'T'HE dog sprang across the room -- without a breath of warning, as chows will -- and bit Bivins on the leg just above his puttee. The chauffeur screamed in a high and peculiarly raucous voice and jerked away, jabbering in a vowelless and totally unfamiliar foreign tongue. Mr. Furnay said something sharply in the same grating language; Bivins whipped out a handkerchief, pressed it over the tear in his whipcords and went quickly out to the car. Oliver collared the snarling Champ and returned him to his cage, where the dog pressed bristling against the bars and stared at Mr. Furnay hungrily with wicked, muddy eyes. Mr. Furnay's shocked voice said, behind Oliver, "What a ghastly world, where even the pets... He broke off sharply as Oliver turned from the cage. "I'm truly sorry, Mr. Furnay," Oliver apologized. "If there's anything I can do... a dressing for Bivins' leg -- " Mr. Furnay gathered himself with an effort. "It is nothing, a scratch that will heal quickly. But my bear -- you will come to see him at once?" At another time, the thought of absenting himself without due notice to his Aunt Katisha and Glenna would have prompted Oliver to refuse; but the present moment called more for diplomacy than for convention. Better to suffer matriarchal displeasure, he thought, than to risk a dam"I'll come at once," Oliver said. "I owe ypu that, I think, after the fright Champ gave you." And, belatedly, the realization that he might handle a bear -- a great, live, lumbering bear! -- surged up inside him to titillate his old boyhood yearning. Perhaps it was as well that his aunt and sister were away; this chance to exercise his natural skill at dealing with animals was too precious to decline. "Of course I won't guarantee a cure," Oliver said, qualifying his promise, "because I've never diagnosed such a case. But I think I can help your bear." Oddly enough, he was almost sure that he could. Oliver, in his younger days, had read a great deal on the care and treatment of circus animals, and the symptoms in this instance had a familiar sound. Mr. Furnay's bear, he thought, in all probability had worms. The Furnay town car purred away, leaving Oliver to marvel at his own daring while he collected the instruments and medicines he might need. In leaving the clinic he noted that Mr. Fumay's chauffeur had dropped his handkerchief at the doorway in his hurry to be gone -- but Oliver by this time was in too great a hurry to stop and retrieve it. His Aunt Katisha might spoil the whole adventure on the instant with a telephone call from Tampa. Bivins could wait. THE drive, after a day spent in the antiseptic confines of his clinic, was like a holiday jaunt. The late June sun was hot and bright, the rows of suburban houses trim and clean as scrubbed children sunning themselves among color-splashed crotons and hibiscus and flaming poincianas. Oliver whistled gaily as he turned his little white-paneled call truck off the highway and drove between twin ranks of shedding cabbage palms toward the iron gates of the Fumay estate. A uniformed gateman who might have been a twin to Bivins admitted him, pointing out a rambling white building that lay behind the stuccoed mansion, and shut the gate. Oliver parked his truck before the menagerie building -- it had been a stable in the heyday of the Prohibition-era gangster, when it had held horses or cases of contraband as occasion demanded -- and found Bivins waiting for him. Bivins, looking upset and sullen in immaculate new whipcords, opened the sliding doors without a word. The vast inside of the remodeled stable was adequately lighted by roof-windows and fluorescent bulbs, but seemed dark for the moment after the glare of sun outside; there was a smell, familiar to every circusgoer, of damp straw and animal dung, and a restless background stir of purring and growling and pacing. Oliver gaped when his eyes dilated enough to show him the real extent of Mr. Furnay's menagerie holdings. At the north end of the building two towering Indian elephants swayed on picket, munching hay and shuffling monotonously on padded, ponderous feet. A ropedoff enclosure held half a dozen giraffes which nibbled in aristocratic deprecation at feed-bins bracketed high on the walls; and beyond them three disdainful camels lay on untidily folded legs, sneering glassily at the world and at each other. The east and west sides of the building were lined with rank after rank of cages holding a staggering miscellany of predators: great-maned lions with their sleek green-eyed mistresses; restless tigers undulating their stripes back and forth and grinning in sly, tusky boredom ; chattering monkeys and chimpanzees; leopards and cheetahs and a pair of surly black jaguars whose clawscored hides indicated either a recent difference of opinion or a burst of conjugal affection. The south end of the vast room had been recently partitioned off, with a single heavy door breaking the new wall at its center. On either side of this door the bears held sway: shaggy grizzlies, black bears, cinnamon and brown; spectacled Andeans and sleek white polars padding silently on tufted feet. The sick bear sulked in a cage to himself, humped in an oddly doglike pose with his great head hanging disconsolately. Oliver sized up the situation, casting back to past reading for the proper procedure. "I'll need a squeeze-cage and a couple of cage boys to help immobilize the brute," he said. "Will you -- " He was startled, in turning, to find that Bivins had not accompanied him into the building. He was not alone, however. The door at the center of the partitioning wall had opened while he spoke, and a slender blonde girl in the briefest of white sunsuits was looking at him. expected Oliver, for there was open interest in her clear green eyes. She said something in a clear and musical -- but completely unintelligible -- voice that ranged, with a remarkably operatic effect, through two full octaves. Oliver stared. "I'm here to doctor the sick bear," he said. "Oh, a native the girl said in English. Obviously she was trying to keep her voice within the tonal range of his own, but in spite of the effort it trilled distractingly up and down the scale in a fashion that left Oliver smitten with a sudden j and unfamiliar weakness of the knees. "May I help?" she said. She might, Oliver replied. She could have had as readily, he might have added, a pint of his blood. Many times while they worked, finding a suitable squeeze-cage and dragging it against the bear's larger cage so that the two doors coincided, Oliver found the prim and reproachful image of Miss Orella Simms rising to remind him of his obligations; but for the first time in his life an obligation was surprisingly easy to dismiss. His assistant's lively conversation, which was largely uninformative though fascinatingly musical, bemused him even to the point of shrugging off his Aunt Katisha's certain disapproval. The young lady, it seemed, came from a foreign country whose name was utterly unpronounceable; Oliver gathered that she had not been long with Mr. Furnay, who was of another nationality, and that she was homesick for her native land -- for its "saffron sun on turquoise hills and umber sea," which could only be poetic exaggeration or simple unfamiliarity with color terms of a newly learned language -- and that she was as a consequence very lonely. She was, incredibly, a trainer of animals. "Not of such snarling fierce ones as yours," she said, with a little shiver for the polar bear watching them sullenly through the bars, "but of my own gentle beasts, who are friends." Her name was a startling combination of soprano sounds that might have been written as Perrlhigh-CtrillandAabove, but which Oliver was completely unable to manage. "Would you mind," he asked, greatly daring, "if I called you Pearl instead?" She would not. But apparently Mr. Furnay would. tered the menagerie unheard, spoke sternly to the girl in his own raucous tongue and pointed a peremptory finger toward the door through which she had come. The girl murmured "Ai docssain, Tsammai" in a disappointed tone, gave Oliver a smile that would have stunned a harem guard, and disappeared again into her own territory. Oliver, being neither Chesterfield nor eunuch, was left with the giddy sensation of a man struggling to regain his balance after a sudden earth temblor. His client reoriented him brusquely, "Treat my bear," Mr. Furnay said. "I've been waiting for help " Oliver said defensively. "If you'll send around your menagerie manager and a cage boy or two -- " "I have none," Mr. Furnay said shortly. "There are only the four of us here, and not one will approach within touching distance of a brute so vicious." Oliver stared at him in astonishment... Four of them meant only Bivins, the gateman, the lovely blonde creature who called herself Perrl-highC-trillandAabove and Mr. Furnay himself. "But four inexperienced people can't possibly look after a menagerie of this size!" Oliver protested. "Circus animals aren't house pets, Mr. Furnay -- they're restless and temperamental, and they need expert care. They bite and claw each other -- " "There will be more of us later," Mr. Furnay said morosely, "but I doubt that numbers will help. We had not anticipated a ferocity so appalling, and I fear that my error may have proved the ruin of an expensive project. The native beasts were never so fierce on other- -- " He broke off. "I am sorry. You will have to manage as best you can alone." And he left the menagerie without looking back. To deal tersely with subsequent detail, Oliver did manage alone -- after a fashion and up to a point. It was a simple matter, once he found a four-foot length of conveniently loose board, to prod the unhappy bear from his larger prison to the smaller. The process of immobilizing the brute by winching the squeeze-cage tight was elementary. But in his casting-back Oliver had overlooked two vitally important precautions: he'd forgotten to secure the gear fastenings, and he'd neglected to rope the smaller cage to the larger. The bear, startled by the prick of the needle when Oliver gave him a sizable injection of nembutal, reacted with a frantic struggling that reversed the action of the unsecured winch and forced the two cages apart. The door burst open, sprung by the sudden pressure. The bear stood free. A considerable amount of legitimate excitement could be injected into such a moment by reporting that the bear, at last in a position to revenge itself for past indignities, leaped upon its tormentor with a bloodfreezing roar and that Oliver, a fragile pygmy before that near-ton of slavering fury, escaped only by a hair or was annihilated on the spot. Neither circumstance developed, however, for the reason that the bear was already feeling the effects of the anesthetic given it and wanted nothing so much as a cool dark place where it might collapse in privacy. And Oliver, caught completely off guard, was too stunned by the suddenness of catastrophe to realize his own possible danger. What did happen was that Perrl high C trill and Aabove chose that particular moment to open her door again and look out. Her fortuitous timing altered the situation on the instant; the bear, bent only on escape and seeing comparative gloom beyond the door, charged not at Oliver but through the opening. And Oliver, still too confused to think past the necessity of retrieving his error, ran after it, brandishing his length of board and shouting wildly. rjHE smaller area beyond the partition was dimly lighted, but to judge by its straw-covered floor and faint animal smell was evidently a special division of Mr. Fumay's menagerie. The light was too dim and the emergency too great to permit Oliver more than a brief and incredulous glimpse of the improbable beast placidly munching hay in a corner; his whole attention was centered first on the fleeing bear and then upon the prostrate form of Perrlhigh CtrillandAabove, who had been violently bowled over by the bear's rush. "Pearl!" yelled Oliver, petrified with horror. The bear stood swaying upright over her, threshing its tufted forepaws for balance and showing yellow tusks in a grimace that stemmed from drugged weakness but which passed quite creditably for a snarl of demoniac fury. Obviously something had to be done. Oliver, galvanized by the realization, came to the rescue with a promptness that amounted to reflex action. "Down, boy!" he said, and dealt the bear a sharp blow across the muzzle with his board. The bear dealt Oliver a roundhouse clout in return that stretched him half-conscious beside PerrlhighCtrillandAabove. Then, at precisely that moment of greatest dramatic impact, it shook its head dizzily and passed out cold. The girl scrambled up and knelt beside Oliver to listen to his heartbeat, found that he was alive and raised her voice in an urgent arpeggio that held in spite of its operatic timbre a distinct note of command. In answer to her call the great beast in the corner -- built something on the order of a hippopotamus but with unorthodox variations in that it boasted six legs to either side and was covered with closecurling, bright blue wool -- trotted out of the shadows and scooped up the unconscious bear in its four powerful anterior arms. A word trom Perrl-high-Ctrill-and-A-above sent it into the main menagerie quarters, where it stuffed the limp bear into its old cage and trotted back to its mistress with a look of adoring deference on its round face. The girl gave the creature a random trill of commendation and, displaying surprising strength for one so slight, herself dragged the reviving Oliver back to the scene of his unfinished diagnosis. The order given her earlier by Mr. Furnay was not forgotten, however, for she did not linger. "Not handsome, no," she murmured, locking the partition door behind her this time. "But O Personal Deity of Unmarried Maidens, such headlong bravery!" later to find himself alone with a memory of nightmare and a sleeping bear that offered no resistance whatever when he tunneled a quantity of tetrachlorethylene down its throat. He was still alone an hour later -- and still trying dizzily to separate fact from fancy, having tried the partition door and found it locked -- when the bear returned to semiconsciousness and submitted groggily to a follow-up dosage of purgative. Oliver would have liked to stay long enough to learn the results of his diagnosis and to see Perrlhigh-C-trill-and-A-above if she should reappear, but a glance at his watch electrified him with the realization that he had been away from his clinic for more than two hours and that his Aunt Katisha and Glenna might by now have the state police beating the palmetto flats for his body. Accordingly he left the Fur nay estate in a great hurry, pausing at the gate only long enough to leave word for Mr. Furnay that he would ring later in the evening to check his patient's progress. It was not until he had returned home and found his Aunt Katisha still out that his overworked nerves, punished outrageously by shock violence and confusion, composed themselves enough to permit him a reasonable guess as to what actually had happened -- and by that time his conclusions had, taken a turn so fantastically improbable that he was lost again in a hopeless muddle of surmise. He poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen (he preferred coffee, but his Aunt Katisha frowned on the habit) and took his grisly suspicions down to the clinic, where he felt more at ease than in the antimacassared austerity of the house. There he mulled them over again, and time was able to weave into the pattern the disjointed impressions carried over from his period of semiconsciousness and dismissed until now as nightmare figments from the delirium of shock. Their alignment with other evidence increased his conviction : Mr. Furnay and Manage, Oliver concluded with a cold thrill of horror, were not human beings at all but monsters. npHE pattern became even more disturbing when he considered various stories of local saucersightings and fireballs, which germanity to the events of the day. First there had been Champ's instant distrust of Mr. Furnay and Bivins, and his attempt to route them for the aliens they were. There had been Bivins' anomalous scream when bitten -- a raucous sound certainly not human -- and Mr. Furnay's grittily inconsonant order, spoken in no identifiable earthly tongue. The isolation of the Furnay estate took on a sinister and significant logic, as did its understaffed condition; there was the evident but baffling reluctance of Mr. Furnay and his myrmidons (with the notable exception of the goldenvoiced Pearl) to approach even safely caged beasts, and the greater mystery of why a man so terrified of wild animals should have bought a menagerie in the first place. Considering the part played by Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above in a scheme of things so fantastic left Oliver more disturbed than ever, but for a different reason. That she was unarguably as alien as the others made her equally mysterious, but connoted no share in whatever devious plot occupied the Furnay faction; a reexamination of Mr. Furnay's harshly dictatorial attitude toward her, coupled with Oliver's own uncertain memory of the moment when the girl had come to his rescue, convinced him that she was not ipso facto a member of the extraterrestrial cabal but was its prisoner instead. Visualizing the probable fate of a beautiful girl held captive by aliens -- and forced by them to train outlandish, half-remembered brutes like the one behind the partition -- rather strained Oliver's talent for surmise, but at the same time moved him to the uneasy conviction that it was his duty to rescue her in turn. The thought that he might already be too late appalled him. The slender blonde beauty of Perrl high C trill and Aabove was distractingly fresh in his mind, the eager arpeggiation of her voice an indelible memory. Recalling the smile she had given him in parting stirred an internal warmth unguessed at before, an emotional ignition certainly never kindled by his fiancee or family. Aunt Katisha! Thought of his obligations brought him back to reality with a jar; the appalling gulf between fact and fancy made clear to him with sudden and shocking clarity the nonentity's role that had been played, and must be played, all his life by Oliver Watts. He was the perennial romantic introvert, dreaming impossible dreams compounded of escape reading and frustration, grasping timorously at any thread of adventure that might lead him to forget for the moment the drab monotone of his existence. His mouth twisted wryly. There was, of course, no fantastic alien plot incubating on the Furnay estate, no sunsuited damsel in distress awaiting rescue at his inept hands. He'd imagined the romantic aspects of the episode -- the "unearthly" tongue, the improbable beast. No one required, or ever would require, anything of Oliver Watts except his Aunt Katisha and Glenna, who demanded obedience, and Orella Simms, who expected conformity. As if on cue, the Watts family car swung off the highway and rolled down the crushed shell driveway past the clinic. Oliver's Aunt Katisha got out, leaving Glenna and Orella Simms to wait, and strode into the clinic office. "I see you've managed to spoil another one," she said acidly, pausing long enough to retrieve the handkerchief Mr. Furnay 's chauffeur had lost earlier. "Moreover, I called twice this afternoon and found you gone. Where?" Oliver, as usual, weathered the storm in silence. Somewhere near the end he managed to squeeze in the information that he had treated a sick animal at the Furnay place -- a saddle horse, he said, lying automatically as the lesser of two evils. His aunt Katisha, her inquisitorial duty discharged, dropped the discolored handkerchief pointedly on Oliver's desk and rejoined Glenna and Orella Simms. The car drove away. Oliver, left alone in the growing dusk of evening to his miserable introspection, found his wandering attention returning unaccountably to the crumpled handkerchief, and drew it closer for a better look. It was only a harmless square of linen, smudged with dust and spotted with blood from Bivins' chow-bitten leg -- but with his closer look Oliver's world sprang up and exploded with a shattering bang in his startled face. The dust was quite ordinary, but Bivins' blood was not. It was green. He was never quite sure, later, just what happened next. He retained a vague memory of roaring away in his Aunt Katisha's car through a reckless showering of crushed shell; sometimes he could recall the cool onrush of wind whipping his face and the frantic dodging of approaching headlamps on the highway. But in the main, his descent upon the Fumay estate was a blank. Only one fact stood out with freezing clarity, excluding any thought of his Aunt Katisha's certain wrath or of Orella' s maidenly reproaches: Perrl-highC-trill-and-A-above was in Deadly Danger, and there was none but Oliver Watts to rescue her. There was a brief instant of lucidity as he approached the Fumay gates through the cabbage palms and was forced to choose a course of action. The attendant certainly would not admit him without orders from Mr. Furnay, who as certainly would not give them; the walls were much too high and sheer for climbing; and to make the need for haste even more critical, it was only too obvious that the Furnay gang was about to depart. A tremendous saucer-shaped ship had landed by the menagerie building, where it sat with circular peripheral ports aglow and lines of bold enigmatic hieroglyphs fluorescing greenly on its smooth undersurface. Jointed metal figures scurried here and there, chivvying the last of Mr. Furnay's herbivores up a ramp into the belly of the ship; the predators, in cages drawn by other sleek robot stevedores, followed in orderly procession. Oliver solved his problem of entry by driving headlong through the iron grillwork. There was a raucous yelling from the gateman, a monstrous rending of metal and jangling of broken glass. Aunt Katisha's car slewed erratically down the Furnay drive, turned over twice and pitched Oliver out, stunned for the second time that day, into the greenish glow shed by the saucership's lights. H E struggled back to awareness to find his head pillowed on something soft and wonderfully comfortable. A circle of startled faces, most of them dark facsimiles of the putteed Bivins', stared uncertainly down at him. In the near foreground stood Mr. Furnay, wringing his hands and muttering grittily to himself in his own dissonant tongue. Mr. Furnay, seen now for the first time without his too-large Panama, exhibited instead of hair a crest of downy blue feathers and pronged antennae that vibrated softly in the evening breeze. "Where is she?" Oliver demanded. He scrambled dizzily to his feet, and the circle of faces melted backward hastily. "What have you done with Pearl, you monsters?" Perrl high C trill and A above, on whose lap Oliver's head had been pillowed, stood up to move between Oliver and the patently apprehensive Mr. Furnay. She wore a light maroon cape over her sunsuit against the mild chill of evening, and could not possibly have looked less like a damsel in distress. She seemed, as a matter of fact, quite happy. "I hoped you would come to see me again before blastoff," she said. Her voice skipped, tinkling with pleasure, from octave to octave. "But so suddenly -- so dashing, so impetuous!" Oliver said dumbly. "Then they're not forcing -- you're not a prisoner after all?" Her laugh was an arpeggiando blending of surprise and amusement "A prisoner of these Tsam mai? No. I am a performer in their company, hired by Xtll -- Mr. Furnay -- to train and exhibit animals native to my own world." "But I heard Furnay threaten you in the menagerie building this afternoon! His tone -- " "The Tsammai tongue sounds dreadful because it is all consonants and not based on pitch and nuance as mine is," she said. "But the Tsammai themselves are only tradesmen, and are very gentle. Xtll -- Mr. Furnay -- only feared that I might say too much to you then, when it was important that the natives should not suspect our identity," "It is true," Mr. Furnay nodded, sounding relieved. "We must avoid notice on such worlds as yours, which are too backward to appreciate the marvels of our show. We stop here only to scout for new and novel exhibits." "Show!" Oliver echoed. "You mean all this is -- is -- " "What else?" asked Mr. Furnay. He pointed with his antennae to the fluorescent hieroglyphs on the undersurface of the saucer-ship. "See, in our lingua circuit." He indicated the circle of identical Bivinsey, "These are the Skrrff brothers, our owners. I, sir, am business manager." "But not always a good one," one of the brothers said pointedly. "This time he has bought an entire menagerie of such fierceness that our trainers cannot exhibit it. It will have to be sold to some frontierplanet too, and our loss will be staggering." It was left for Perrl-high-Ctrill-and-A-above to deal with the problem, which she did with universal feminine practicality. "Oliver made your bear well," she pointed out. "And he is afraid of nothing -- nothing! Could he not train his own fierce beasts as well as I train my gentle ones?" Oliver said, "Huh?" The Skrrff brothers, of course, implored Oliver on the spot to join them at any salary. Perrl high C trill and A above said demurely, in three octaves and for all the world to hear; "And I'm lonely, Oliver!" Oliver never had a chance. on, the ripples made by Oliver's departure long since smoothed away by the years. Miss Orella Simms has married the Methodist minister who was to have married her to Oliver. Aunt Katisha and Glenna have resigned themselves to Oliver's escape and have taken over the job of assisting Orella to superintend her husband's career, an occupation eminently satisfactory to all because the placid cleric never dreams troublesome dreams of adventure, as Oliver did, to try their matriarchial patience... But life is never dull for Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Watts, whose breathtaking performances currently electrify the thrillhungry cultures of a thousand worlds. They have traveled from Sirius to Saggitarius, and at this writing have two children: a golden-haired daughter of four named Perrl-high-C-trill-and-Asharp-above, and a tow-headed boy of two who has a cowlick like his father's and whose name is Butch. They are very happy and there has been no talk between them, though they are wealthy enough in galactic credits by now to have bought half a planet for a home, of settling down to the quiet life. They are quite satisfied to leave such consequential decisions to those who like change for the sake of change or who, unlike Oliver, never know when they are well off. One clean break to a lifetime, Oliver maintains, is enough. Remarkable as they ore, the Pyramids cannot compare with the Incan Road as a feat of ancient engineering. The road reaches from Ecuador to Central Chile, a distance of # miles over the giant mountains and great canyons of the Andes, crossing swift rivers, deserts and swamps. Twenty-five feet wide, it rises by easy grades from valley to peak and down again, slashing through rock barriers, supported by immense retaining walls, across causeways as high as modern dams over deep ravines, spanning torrents with magnificently anchored suspension bridges whose enormously thick cables were spun of wool and fiber, tunneling through cliffs for astonishing distances. With its many side roads from the sea to the jungle, the mighty Incan Road totals fully # miles -- yet, by flare and mirror signals, messages could be sent its entire length in four hours! Fish caught in the Pacific were eaten # miles awqy only # hours later -- the railroad covering the same distance now takes ten hours more! Most incredible of all, not a single vehicle ever traveled the ancient road, for the Incas never invented the wheel! Baley had the world's worst headacheif he solved the murder case, Earth would be seized and he and everybody else would be replaced by Spacer robots! The Caves of Steel By Isaac Asimov Part # of A #-Part Serial ( planets of other suns, originally colonized by Earthmen, but now independent ) have established a mission in t( Spacetown," just outside New York City, and are attempting to modernize Earth's ingrown economy by the introduction of robot workers. The people of Earth resent this, and when Dr. Sarton, an important " Spacer " is mysteriously murdered, presumably by an Earthman, there arises the possibility of an interstellar crisis. Elijah Baley, detective, is in charge of the investigation and is forced to accept a Spacer robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, as his partner. R. Daneel ( R . stands for robot ) is so perfectly constructed that Baley mistakes him at first for a human being. Julius Enderby, New York City's Commissioner of Police, was actually at the scene of the crime just after the time of the murder. He impresses upon Baley the fact that failure to solve the beings live in vast enclosed Cities and are fed on yeast and hydroponic foods. Men from the underpopulated " Outer Worlds," crime may bring about demands for an indemnity to the Outer Worlds , and may also hasten the gradual replacement of the human members of the Police Department by specialized robots. Allowing R. Daneel to solve the crime would be equally disastrous. In either case, Baley fears "declassification" -- the loss of all special privileges, and reduction to bare existence in the slum levels of the City. He fears this desperately, since his father was declassified and Baley remembers bitterly his resultant unhappy and poverty-stricken childhood. Baley brings R. Daneel to his apartment. On the way there, they are brought face to face with a threatening anti-robot riot in the shoe department of a retail store. It is R. Daneel s prompt action that averts the danger. At home, Baley ' s wife, Jessie, and his son, Bentley, meet R. Daneel without knowing his real nature. ( Jessie's full name is Jezebel, but as a result of an argument with her husband over the character of the Biblical Jezebel, she no longer uses her full name.) Jessie and Bentley leave in order that the two men may have privacy. It is R . Daneel's theory that the murder is the work of the "Medievalists," a group of Earthmen who advocate a return to Earth's ancient ways before the growth of the great " caves of steel," as the enclosed Cities are sometimes known. Most Earthmen have Medievalist tendencies. Even the Police Commissioner, for instance, wears old-fashioned glasses , despite the fact that they may break at inconvenient moments (as they did at the time of the murder in Spacetowh), leaving him almost helpless. Jessie returns unexpectedly and in great agitation. She has suspected that R. Daneel is a robot. When Baley confirms her guess , she is terrified that there may be ostracism or even outright antirobot violence. She is right -- if robots can be made so perfectly, nobody's job and status are safe any longer . The next morning, Baley asks for permission to travel to Spacetown. The Spacers take complicated precautions to make certain he does nof bring in any infection with him. Inside Spacetown, Baley accuses the Spacers of having presented Earth with a false crime in order to make possible aggressive demands He states that the apparent corpse, viewed by the Commissioner himself, was actually a cleverly designed robot, and that the pretended victim, Dr. Sarton, was s till alive. He was, in fact, the so-called "robot" who masqueraded under the name of R. Daneel Olivaw! Baley was most conscious of the thud of his own ptilse. He seemed to be living in a moment of suspended time. R. Daneel's expression was, as always, unreadable. The Spacer, Dr. Han Fastolfe, wore a look of wellbred astonishment on his face. It was Commissioner Julius Enderby's reaction that most concerned Baley. The trimensic receiver out of which his face stared did not allow perfect reproduction. There was always that tiny flicker and that notquite-ideal resolution. Through that imperfection and the further masking of the Commissioner's spectacles, Enderby's eyes were completely unreadable. Baley thought: Don't go to pieces on me, Julius. I need you. He didn't really think that Fastolfe would act in haste or under emotional impulse. He had read somewhere once that Spacers had no religion, but substituted, instead, a cold and phlegmatic intellectual! sm raised to the heights of a philosophy. He believed that and counted on it. They would make a point of acting slowly and then only on the basis of reason. If he were alone among them and had said what he had said, he was certain that he would never have returned to the City. The Spacers' plans were worth more to them, many times over, than the life of a Citydweller. Maybe they would present his corpse to the Commissioner, shake their heads and speak of an Earthman conspiracy having struck again. The Commissioner would believe them. If he hated Spacers, it was a hatred based on fear. He wouldn't dare disbelieve them. That was why he had to be an actual witness of events -- a witness, moreover, safely out of reach of the Spacers' calculated safety measures. rpHE Commissioner said chokingly, "Lije, you're all wrong. I saw Dr. Sarton's corpse." "You saw the charred remnants of something you were told was Dr. Sarton's corpse," retorted Baley. He thought grimly of the Commissioner's smashed glasses. That had been an unexpected break for the Spacers. "No, no, Lije. I knew Dr. Sarton well and his face was undamaged." The Commissioner put his hand to his glasses uneasily, as though he, too, remembered, and added, "I looked at him closely, very closely." "How about this one. Commissioner?" asked Baley, pointing to R. Daneel again. "Doesn't he resemble Dr. Sarton?" "Yes, the way a statue would." "An expressionless attitude can be assumed, Commissioner. Suppose it was a robot you had seen blasted to death. You say you looked closely. Did you look closely enough to see whether the charred surface at the edge of the blast was really organic tissue or carbonization over fused metal?" The Commissioner looked revolted. He said, "You're being ridiculous." Baley turned to the Spacer. exhumed for examination?" Dr. Fastolfe smiled. "I would have no objection, Mr. Baley, but we do not bury our dead. Cremation is a universal custom among us." "Very convenient." "Tell me, Mr. Baley," said Dr. Fastolfe, "just how did you arrive at this very extraordinary conclusion of yours?" Baley thought: He isn't giving up. He'll brazen it out, if he can. He said, "There's more to imitating a robot than just putting on a frozen expression and adopting a stilted style of conversation. The trouble with you men of the Outer Worlds is that you're too used to robots. You've gotten to accept them almost as human beings. On Earth, we're very conscious of what a robot is. R. Daneel is too good a human to be a robot. My first impression of him was that he was a Spacer. It was quite an effort for me to adjust myself to his statement that he was a robot. And, of course, the reason for that was that he was a Spacer and wasn't a robot." R. Daneel interrupted without any sign of self-consciousness. "As I told you, partner Elijah, I was designed to take a temporary place in a human society. The resemblance to humanity is purposeful." "Even," asked Baley, "down to the painstaking duplication of organs which, in a robot, would have no conceivable function?" Enderby demanded suddenly, "How did you find that out?" Baley reddened. "I couldn't help noticing in the -- in the Personal." Enderby looked shocked. understand that a resemblance must be complete if it is to be useful. For our purposes, halfmeasures are as bad as none at all." Baley asked abruptly, "May I smoke?" Three pipefuls in one day was a ridiculous extravagance, but he was riding a rolling torrent of recklessness and needed the release of tobacco. After all, he was talking back to Spacers. He was going to force their lies down their own throat. Fastolfe said, "I'm sorry, but I'd prefer that you didn't." It was a "preference" that had the force of a command. Baley felt that. Of course, he thought angrily, Enderby didn't warn me because he doesn't smoke himself, but it follows. They don't smoke on their hygienic Outer Worlds, or drink, or have any human vices. No wonder they accept robots in their damned -- what did R. Daneel call it? -- CFe society. No wonder R. Daneel can play the robot as well as he does. They're all robots to begin with. He said, "The toocomplete resemblance is just one point out of many. There was a near-riot in my section as I was taking him home." He had to point. He could bring himself neither to say "R. Daneel" nor "Dr. Sarton" aloud. "He was the one who stopped the trouble and he did it by pointing a blaster at the potential rioters." "Good Lord!" said Enderby. "The report stated that it was you -- " "I know, Commissioner. The report was based on information that I gave. I didn't want to have it on the record that a robot had threatened to blast men and women." "No, no, of course not." Enderby was visibly horrified. He leaned forward to look at something out of range of the trimensic receiver. Baley could guess what it was. The Commissioner was checking the power gauge to see if the transmitter was being tapped. "Is that a point in your argument?" asked Fastolfe. "It certainly is. The First Law of Robotics states that a robot cannot harm a human being." "But R. Daneel did no harm." "True. He even stated afterward that he wouldn't have fired under any circumstances. Still, no robot I ever heard of could have violated the spirit of the First Law by threatening to blast a human crowd, even if he had no intention to do so." "I see. Are you a robotics expert, Mr. Baley?" "No, sir. But I've had a course in general robotics and in positronjc analysis." "Very nice," said Fastolfe agreeably, "but, you see, I am a robotics expert, and I assure you that the essence of the robot mind lies in a completely literal interpretation of the Universe. It recognizes no spirit in the First Law, only the letter. The simple models you have on Earth may be incapable of threatening a human. An advanced model such as R. Daneel is another' matter. If I gather the situation correctly, Daneel's threat was necessary to prevent a riot. It was intended then to prevent harm to human beings. He was obeying the First Law, not defying it." but maintained a tight external calm. Hard as it would be, he would match this Spacer at his own game. He said, "You may counter each point separately, but they add up just the same. Last evening, in our discussion of the socalled murder, this alleged robot claimed that he had been converted into a detective by the installation of a new drive into his positronic circuits. A drive for justice." "I'll vouch for that," said Fastolfe. "It was done to him three days ago under my own supervision." "A drive for justice? Justice, Dr. Fastolfe, is an abstraction. Only a human being can use the term." "If you define 'justice' in such a way that it is an abstraction, if you sa"y that it is the rendering of each man his due, that it is adhering to the right, or anything of the sort, I grant you your argument, Mr. Baley. A human understanding of abstractions cannot as yet be built into a positronic brain,". "You admit that, then -- as an expert in robotics?" "Certainly. The question is, what did R. Daneel mean by using the term 'justice?' " "From the context of our conversation, he meant what you and I and any human being would mean, but what no robot could mean." "Why don't you ask him to define the term?" Baley turned to R. Daneel. "What is your definition of justice?" "Justice is that which exists when all laws are enforced." Fastolfe nodded. "A good definition for a robot, Mr. Baley. Justice is a very concrete term to him since it is based on law enforcement, which is in turn based upon the existence of specific and definite laws. There is nothiig abstract about it. A human being can recognize the fact that, on the basis of an abstract moral code, some laws may be bad ones and their enforcement unjust. What do you say, R. Daneel?" "An unjust law," said R, Daneel, "is a contradiction in terms." "To a robot it is, Mr. Baley. As you can see, you mustn't confuse your justice and R. Daneel's." Baley faced R. Daneel sharply and said, "You left my apartment last night," R. Daneel replied, "I did. If my leaving disturbed your sleep, I am sorry." "Where did you go?" "To the Men's Personal." For a moment, Baley was staggered. It was the answer he had already decided was the truth, but he had not expected it to be the answer R. Daneel would give. He felt a little of his certainty oozing away. The Commissioner was watching, his lensed eyes flickering from one to the other as they spoke. Baley couldn't back down now, no matter what sophistries they used against him. He said, "On reaching my section, he insisted on entering the Personal with me. His excuse was a poor one. During the night, he left to visit Personal again, as he has just admitted. If he were a man, I'd say he had every reason and right to do so. Obviously. As a robot, however, the trip was purposeless. The conclusion can only be that he is a man." not in the least put out. "This is most interesting. Suppose we ask Daneel why he made his trip to the Personal last night." Commissioner Enderby leaned forward. "Please, Dr. Fastolfe, it is not proper to -- " "You need not be concerned. Commissioner," said Fastolfe, his thin lips curving back in something that looked like a smile, but wasn't. "I am certain that Daneel's answer will not offend your sensibilities or those of Mr. Baley. Won't you tell us, Daneel?" R. Daneel said, "Elijah's wife, Jessie, left the apartment last night on friendly terms with me. It was apparent that she had no reason for thinking me to be other than human. She returned to the apartment knowing I was a robot. Quite evidently, the information to that effect exists outside the apartment. It followed that my conversation with Elijah last night had been overheard. In no other way could the secret of my true nature have become common knowledge. "Elijah told me that the apartments were well-insulated. Furthermore, we spoke together in low voices. Elijah is known as a policeman. If a conspiracy exists within the City sufficiently wellorganized to have planned the murder of Dr. Sarton, it may well have been aware that Elijah had been placed in charge of the murder investigation. It would fall within the realm of possibility then, even of probability, that his apartment had been spy-beamed. "I searched the apartment as well as I could after Elijah and Jessie had gone to bed, but could find no transmitter. This complicated matters. A focused duobeam could do the trick even in the absence of a transmitter, but that requires rather elaborate equipment. Dr. Fastolfe said, "Well, Mr. Baley, does this sound reasonable to you?" now. He said, "Reasonable as far as it goes, perhaps, but it stops short of perfection by a hell of a way. What he doesn't know is that my wife told me where she got the information and when. She learned he was a robot shortly after she left the house. Even then, the rumor had been circulating for hours. So the fact that he was a robot could not have leaked out through spying on our last evening's conversation." "Nevertheless," said Dr. Fasdered man. You are shown the corpse of something supposed to be human, but the corpse has since been disposed of and is not available for close examination. "The Spacers insist an Earththe only way they can make such an accusation stick is to suppose that a City man had left the City and cut cross-country to Spacetown alone and at night. You know damn well how unlikely that is. "Next they send a supposed robot into the City; in fact, they insist on sending him. The first thing the robot does is to threaten a crowd of human beings with a blaster. The second is to set in motion the rumor that there is ii Spacer robot in the City. The rumor is so specific that Jessie told me it was known that he was working with the police. That means that before long it will be known that it was the robot who handled the blaster. Maybe even now, the rumor is spreading across the yeast vat country and down the Long Island hydroponic plants that there's a killer robot on the loose." "This is impossible? Impossible !" groaned Enderby. "It's exactly what's happening, Commissioner, Don't you see it? There's a conspiracy in the City, nil right, but it's run from Spacetown. The Spacers want to be able to report a murder. They want riots. They want an assault on Spacetown. The worse things get, the better the incident Then Spacer ships can come down and occupy the Cities of Earth." "We had an excuse to do just that during the Barrier riots of twenty-five years ago." "You weren't ready then. You are now." Daley's heart was pounding madly. "This is quite a complicated plot you're attributing to us, Mr. Raley. If we wanted to occupy Earth, we could do so in much simpler fashion." "Maybe not. Dr. Fastolfe. Your so-called robot told me that public opinion about Earth is by no means unified on your Outer Worlds. I think he was telling the truth at that time, anyway. Maybe an outright occupation would not sit well with the people at home. Maybe an incident is an absolute necessity. A good shocking incident." "Like a murder, eh? Is that it? You'll admit it would have to be a pretended murder. You won't suggest, I hope, that we'd really kill one of ourselves for the sake of an incident." "You built a robot to look like Dr. Sarton, blasted the robot, and showed the remains to Commissioner Enderby." "And then," said Dr. Fastolfe, "having used R. Daneel to impeonate Dr. Sarton in the false murder, we have to use Dr. Sarton to impersonate R. Daneel in the false investigation of the false murder." "Exactly. I am telling you this in the presence of a witness who is not here in the flesh and whom you cannot blast out of existence and who is important enough to be believed by the City government and by Washington itself. We will be prepared for you and we know what your intentions are. If necessary, our government will report directly to your people, expose the situation for exactly what it is. I doubt if this sort of interstellar trickery will be tolerated." Fastolfe shook his head. "Really, you have the most astonishing notions. Suppose now that R. Daneel is really R. Daneel, that he is actually a robot. Wouldn't the corpse that Commissioner Enderby saw really be Dr. Sarton? It would be scarcely reasonable to believe that the corpse was still another robot. Commissioner Enderby witness R. Daneel under construction and can vouch for the fact only one existed." "If it comes to that," said Baley stubbornly, "the Commissioner is not a robotics expert. You might have had a dozen such robots." "Stick to the point, Mr. Baley. '( What if R. Daneel is R. Daneel? Would you have any further basis for this completely melodramatic and implausible interstellar plot you have con-, structed?" "If he is a robot! I say he is human. I say no other conclusion is possible." "Yet you haven't investigated . the problem, Mr. Baley," saidj Fastolfe. "To differentiate a robot, even a very humanoid robot from a human being, it isn't, necessary to make elaborately shaky deductions from little things he says or does. For in stance, have you tried sticking pin into R. Daneel?" "What's that?"  "What's that?" "It's a simple experiment There are others perhaps n quite so simple. His skin and h look real, but have you tried looking at them under adequate; magnification? Then again, h seems to breathe, particular! when he is using air to talk, bu have you noticed that his breath ing is irregular, that minutes ma go by during which he has ni breath at all? You might even have trapped some of his expired air and measured the carbon dij oxide content. You might ha tried to draw a sample of b! You might have tried to dete a pulse in his wrist, or a heartbeat under his shirt. Do you see what I mean, Mr. Baley?" "That's just talk," said Baley uneasily. "I'm not going to be bluffed. I might have tried any of those things, but do you suppose this alleged robot would have let me use a hypodermic on him, or a stethoscope or a microscope?" "I see your point," said Fsstolfe. He looked at R. Daneel and gestured slightly, R. Daneel touched the cuff of his right shirt sleeve and the diamagnetic seam slipped open the entire length of his arm. A smooth, sinewy and entirely human limb lay exposed. Its short bronze hairs, both in quantity and distribution, were exactly what one would expect of a human being. Baley said, "So?" R. Daneel squeezed the ball of his right middle finger with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Just as the sleeve had separated when the diamagnetic field of its seam had been interrupted, so the arm itself opened along the center. Under a thin layer of fleshlike material was the dull bluegray of stainless-steel rods, cords and joints. "Would you care to examine Daneel's workings more closely, Mr. Baley?" asked Dr. Fastolfe politely. Baley could scarcely hear the remark for the buzzing in his ears and the Commissioner's sudden hysterical laughter. T HE minutes passed and the buzzing grew louder and drowned out the laughter. The Dome and everything it contained and Baley's time-sense all wavered. He found himself sitting in an unchanged position, but with a definite feeling of lost time. The Commissioner was gone; the trimensic receiver was milky and opaque; and R. Daneel sat at his side, pinching up the skin of Baley's bared upper arm. Baley could see, just beneath the skin, the thin dark outline of a hyposliver. It vanished as he watched, spreading away into the intercellular fluid, from that into the bloodstream and the neighboring cells, and then into all the cells of his body. "Do you feel better, partner Elijah?" asked R. Daneel. Baley did. He rolled down his sleeve and looked about. Dr. Fastolfe sat where he had been, a small smile softening the homeliness of his face. "Did I black out?" Baley asked. and all sorts of repercussions. The Spacers will demand your removal from the case and it'll have to be that way. You understand that, don't you? But I'll protect you as far as I can, Lije." Baley knew that would be exactly true. The Commissioner would protect him, but only as far as he could -- not to the point, for instance of infuriating an already angry Mayor. He could hear the Mayor, too. "Damn it, Enderby, who's running the City? Why was an unauthorized robot allowed inside? And just what the devil did this Baley- -- " If it came to a decision between Baley's future in the Department and the Commissioner's own, what possible choice could Baley expect? He could find no reasonable way of blaming Enderby. The least he could expect was demotion and that was bad enough. The mere act of living in a modern City insured the bare possibility of existence, even for those entirely declassified. How bare that possibility was, he knew only too well. It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire. Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point, What a trifling addition to the convenience of the apartment a wash-basin was when, for thirty years, the trip to Personals had been an automatic and unregarded one. How useless it was even as a device to prove "status" when it was considered the height of ill-form to parade "status." Yet were the wash-basin to be removed, how humiliating and unbearable would each trip to Personals be! How yearningly attractive the memory of the bedroom shave! How filled with a sense of lost luxury! TT was fashionable . for modern political writers to look back with smug disapproval at the "Fiscalism" of Medieval times, when economy had been based on money. The competitive struggle for existence, they said, was brutal. No truly complex society could survive the eternal "fightfor the buck." (Scholars had varying interpretations of the word "buck," but there was no dispute over the meaning as a whole.) By contrast, modern "Civism" was praised as efficient and enlightened. Maybe so. There were historlll ical novels both in the romantic and the sensational tradition and the Medievalists thought "Fiscalism" had bred such things as individualism and initiative, Baley wondered sickly if ever a man fought harder for that buck, whatever it was, than a City-dweller fought to keep from losing his Sunday night option on a chicken drumstick -- a realflesh drumstick from a onceliving bird. Baley thought: Not me so much. There's Jessie and Ben. Dr. Fastolfe's voice broke in upon his thoughts. "Mr. Baley, do you hear me?" Baley blinked. "Yes?" How long had he been standing there like a frozen fool? "Won't you sit down, sir? Having attended to the matter on your mind, you may now be interested in the films we took of the scene of the crime." "No, thank you. I have business in the City." "Surely the case of Dr. Sarton comes first." "Not with me. I imagine I'm off the case already." Suddenly, he boiled over. "Damn it, why didn't you prove R. Daneel was a robot right away? Why did you let me make a fool of myself?" "My dear Mr. Baley, I was interested in your deductions. As for your being off the case, I # G made a special point of asking the Commissioner that you be retained. I believe he will cooperate," Baley sat down, not entirely voluntarily. He said sharply, "Why?" Dr. Fastolfe crossed his legs and sighed. "Mr. Baley, in general I have met two kinds of City-dwellers, rioters and politicians. Your Commissioner is useful to us, but he is a politician. He handles us, if you know what I mean. You came here and boldly accused us of tremendous crimes and tried to prove your case. I found it a hopeful development." "How hopeful?" asked Baley sardonically. "Hopeful enough. You are" someone I can deal with frankly. Last night, Mr. Baley, R. Daneel reported to me by shielded subether. Some things about you in' terested me very much. For instance, there was the point concerning the nature of the book-.; films in your apartment." "What about them?" "A good many dealt with historical and archeological subjects. It makes it appear that you are interested in human society and that you know a little about its evolution." "Even policemen can spend their free time on book-films, if they choose." ,# I "I'm glad of your choice of viewing matter. It will help me in what I am trying to do. In the first place, I want to explain, or try to, the exclusivism of the men of the Outer Worlds. We live here in Spacetown; we don't enter the City; we mingle with you Citydwellers only in a very rigidly limited fashion. I sit here now with filters in my nostrils, gloves on my hands, and a fixed determination to come no closer to you than I can help. Why do you suppose that is?" Baley said, "There's no point in guessing." Let him talk now. "If you guessed as some of your people do, you would say that it was because we despised the men of Earth and refused to lose caste by allowing their shadow to fall upon us. That is not so. The medical examination you went through, as well as the cleansing procedures, were not matters of ritual. They were dictated by necessity." "Disease?" "Yes, disease. The Earthmen who colonized the Outer Worlds found themselves on planets entirely free of terrestrial bacteria and viruses. They brought in their own, of course, but they also brought with them the latest medical and microbiological techniques. They had a small community of micro-organisms to deal with and no intermediate hosts, such as mosquitoes to spread malaria, snails to spread schistosomiasis. Disease agents were wiped out and symbiotic bacteria allowed to grow. The Outer Worlds became diseasefree. Naturally, as time went on, entrance requirements for immigrant Earthmen were made more and more rigorous, since less and less could the Outer Worlds resist disease." "You've never been sick. Dr. Fastolfe?" "Not with a parasitic disease. We are all liable to degenerative diseases, but I have never had a cold. If I were to contract one, I might die of it, having built up no resistance to it whatsoever. Those of us who come here run a great risk. Earth is riddled with diseases to which we have no defense, no natural defense. You yourself are carrying the germs of almost every known disease. You are not aware of it, since you keep them under control at almost all times through the antibodies your body has developed over the years. We lack the antibodies. Do you wonder that I come no closer to you? Believe me, Mr. Baley, I act aloof only in self-defense." Baley said, "If tflis is so, why isn't the fact made known on Earth? I mean that it is not just queasiness on your part, but a defense against an actual physical danger." The Spacer shook his head. "We are few. Mr. Baley, and are disliked as foreigners anyway. We maintain our own safety on the basis of a rather shaky prestige as a superior class of being. We cannot afford to lose face by admitting that we are afraid to approach an Earthman. Not, at least, until there is a better understanding between Earthmen and Spacers." "There won't be on the present terms. It's your supposed superiority that we -- they hate you for." "It is a dilemma. Don't think we aren't aware of it." "Does the Commissioner know of this?" "We have never explained it to him flatly, as I have just done to you. He may guess it, however. He is quite an intelligent man." "If he guessed it, he might have told me," Baley said reflectively. IR. Fastolfe lifted his eyebrows. "If he had, then you wouldn't have considered the possibility of R. Daneel being a human Spacer. Is that it?" Baley shrugged slightly. But Dr. Fastolfe went on, "That's quitfc true, you know. Putting the psychological difficulties to one side, the terrible effect of the noise and crowds upon us, the fact remains that for one of us to enter the City is the equivalent of a death sentence. It is why Dr. Sarton initiated his project of humanoid robots. They were substitute men, designed to enter the City instead of us -- " "R. Daneel explained it to me," "Do you disapprove?" "Look," said Baley, "since we're talking to one another so freely, let me ask a question in simple words. Why have you Spacers come to Earth anyway? Why don't you leave us alone?" Dr. Fastolfe said, with obvious surprise, "Are you satisfied with life on Earth?" "We get along." "Yes, but how long will that continue? Your population goes up continuously ; the available calories meet the needs only as a result of greater and greater effort. Earth is up a blind alley." "We get along," Baley repeated stubbornly. "Barely. A City like New York must spend every ounce of effort getting water in and waste out. The nuclear power plants are kept going by uranium supplies that are constantly more difficult to obtain even from the other planets of the Solar System, and the supply needed goes up steadily. The life of the City depends every moment on the arrival of wood-pulp for the yeast vats and minerals for the hydroponic plants. Air must be circulated unceasingly. The balance is a very delicate one in a hundred directions, and growing more delicate each year. What would happen to New York if the tremendous flow of input and outgo were to be interrupted for even a single hour?" "It never has been," Baley was on the defensive. "Which is no security for the future. In primitive times, individual population centers were virtually self-supporting, living on the produce of neighboring farms. Nothing but immediate disaster, a flood or a pestilence or crop failure, could harm them. As the centers grew and technology improved, localized disasters could be overcome by drawing on help from distant centers, but at the cost of making even larger areas interdependent. In Medieval times, the open cities, even the largest, could subsist on food stores and on emergency supplies of all sorts for a week at least. When New York first became a City, it could have lived on itself for a day. Now it cannot do so for an hour. A disaster that would have been uncomfortable ten thousand years ago and merely serious a thousand years ago and acute a hundred years ago would now be fatal," chair. "I've heard all this before. The Medievalists want an end to Cities. They want us to get back to the soil and to natural agriculture. Well, they're mad; we can't. There are too many of us and you can't go backward in history, only forward. Of course, if emigration to the Outer Worlds were not restricted -- " "You know why it must be." "Then we have to go on as we are." "What about emigration to new worlds? There are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy. It is estimated that there are a huninhabited." "That's ridiculous." "Why?" asked Dr. Fastolfe, with vehemence. "Why is the suggestion ridiculous? Thirty of the fifty Outer Worlds, including my native Aurora, were directly colonized by Earthmen. Is colonization no longer possible?" "Well -- " "If it is no longer possible, it is because of the development of City culture on Earth, Before the Cities, human life on Earth wasn't so specialized that men couldn't break loose and start all over on a raw world. They did it thirty times. But now Earthmen are so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel that they dare not leave. You, Mr. Baley, won't even believe that a Citydweller is capable of crossing country to get to Spacetown. Crossing space to get to a new world must represent impossibility squared to you. City civilization is ruining Earth!" Baley said angrily, "And if it does, how does that concern you people? It's our problem." "I know how you feel. It is not pleasant to listen to the preaching of a stranger. Yet I wish your people could preach to us for we, too, have a problem -- one that is analogous to yours." Baley smiled crookedly. "Overpopulation?" "Analogous, not identical. Ours is underpopulation. How old do you think I am?" The Earthman considered for a moment and then deliberately overestimated. "Sixty, I'd say." "A hundred and sixty, you should say." "What!" "A hundred and sixtythree next birthday, to be exact, and I'm using the standard Earth year as the unit. If I'm fortunate, if I take care of myself, most of all, if I catch no disease on Earth, I may double that age. People on Aurora have been known to live over three hundred and fifty years. And life expectancy is still increasing." Baley looked to R. Daneel (who throughout the conversation had been listening in stolid silence), as though he were seeking confirmation. H E said, "How is that possible?" "In an underpopulated society," replied Dr. Fastolfe, "it is practical to concentrate research on the aging process. In a world such as yours, a lengthened life expectancy would be disastrous. You couldn't afford the resulting rise in population. On Aurora, there is room for tricentenarians. Then, of course, a long life becomes doubly and triply precious. If you were to die now, you would lose perhaps forty years of your life, probably less. If I were to die, I would lose a hundred and fifty years, probably more. In a culture such as ours, then, individual life is of prime importance. Our birth rate is low and population increase is rigidly controlled. We maintain a definite robot man ratio designed to maintain the individual in the greatest comfort. Logically, developing children are carefully screened for physical and mental defects before being allowed to mature." Baley interrupted. "You mean you kill them if they don't -- " "If they don't measure up... Quite painlessly, I assure you. The notion shocks you. But the' Earthman's uncontrolled breeding shocks us just as much." "We're controlled, Dr. Fastolfe, Each family is allowed only so many children." Dr. Fastolfe smiled tolerantly. "So many of any kind of children; not so many healthy children." "Who's to judge?" "That's rather complicated and not to be answered in a sentence. Some day we may talk it over." "Well, where's yout problem? You sound satisfied with your society." "It is stable. That's the trouble. It is too stable." you. Our civilization is too close to the ragged edge of chaos, according to you, and your own isn't close enough." "It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries. There is no prospect for colonization in tlfe future. Our lives in the Outer Worlds are too long to risk and too comfortable to upset." "You've come to Earth. You risk disease." "There are some of us, Mr. Baley, who feel that the future of the human race is even worth the possible loss of an extended lifetime. Too few of us, I km sorry to say." "All right, we're coming to the point. How is Spacetown helping matters?" "In trying to introduce robots here on Earth, we're doing our best to upset the balance of your City economy." "That's your way of helping?" Baley's lips quivered. "You mean you're creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men on purpose?" "Not out of cruelty or callousness, believe me. A group of displaced men, as you call them, are what we need to serve as a nucleus for colonization. Your ancient America was discovered by ships fitted out with men from the prisons. Don't you see that the City '# womb has failed the displaced man? He has nothing to lose and worlds to gain by leaving Earth." "But it isn't working." Baley frowned thoughtfully. "No, it isn't," said Dr. Fastolfe, sadly. "There is something wrong. The resentment of the Earthman for the robot blocks things. Yet those very robots can accompany humans, smooth the difficulties of initial adjustment to a raw world, make colonization practical." "Then what? More Outer Worlds?" "No. The Outer Worlds were established before the Cities had spread over Earth. The new colonies will be built by humans who have the City background plus the beginnings of a CFe culture. It will be a synthesis. A carbon iron symbiosis. As it stands now. Earth's .own structure must go ricketing down in the near future, the Outer Worlds will slowly degenerate and decay in a somewhat further future, but the new colonies will be a new and healthy strain, combining the best of both cultures. By their reaction upon the older worlds, including Earth, we ourselves may gain new life." "I don't know. It's all very vague, Dr. Fastolfe." "A dream, yes, but a sharply detailed one. Think about it." Abruptly the Spacer rose to his feet. "I have spent more time with you than I intended. In fact, more time than our health ordinances allow. You will excuse me?" the dome. Sunlight, at a different angle, somewhat yellower, washed down upon them once again. Baley wondered uneasily whether sunlight might not seem different on another world. Less harsh and brazen, perhaps. More acceptable. Another world? The homely Spacer with the prominent ears had filled his mind with queer imaginings. Did the doctors of Aurora once look at the child Fastolfe and wonder if he ought to be allowed to mature? Wasn't he too ugly? Or did their criteria include physical appearance at all? When did ugliness become a deformity and what deformities -- But when the sunlight vanished and they entered the first door that led to the Personal, the mood became harder to maintain. Baley shook his head with exasperation. Forcing Earthmen to emigrate, to set up a new society! It was nonsense! What were these Spacers really after? He thought about it and came to no conclusion. Slowly, their squadcar rolled down the vehicular lane. Reality was surging all about Baley. His blaster was a warm and comfortable weight against his hip. The noise and vibrant life of the City were just as warm, just as comfortable. For a moment, as the City closed in, his nose tingled to a slight and fugitive pungence. He thought wonderingly: The City smells, He thought of the twenty million human beings crammed into the steel walls of the great cave and for the first time in his life he smelled them with nostrils that had been washed clean by outdoor air. He thought; Would it be different on another world? Less people and more air -- cleaner? But the afternoon roar of the City was all around them, the smell faded and was gone and he felt a little ashamed of himself. He let the drive-rod in slowly and tapped a larger share of the beamed power. The squad-car accelerated sharply as it slanted down into the empty Motorway. "Daneel," he said. "Yes, Elijah?" "Why was Dr. Fastolfe telling me all that?" "We are not here just to solve a murder, but to save Spacetown and, with it, the future of the human race." Baley said drily, "I think he'd have been better off if he'd let me see the scene of the crime and interview the men who first found the body." "I doubt if you could have added anything, Elijah. We have been quite thorough." "Have you? You've got nothing. Not a clue. Not a suspect." "No, you are right. The answer must be in the City. To be accurate, though, we did have one suspect," "What? You said nothing of this before." "I did not feel it to be necessary, Elijah. Surely it is obvious to you that one suspect automatically existed." "In the devil's name, who?" "The one Earthman who was on the scene. Commissioner Julius Enderby." rpHE squad-car veered to one side, halted against the concrete wall of the Motorway. With the humming of its motor stopped, the silence was dead and thick. Baley looked at the robot next to him and asked in an incongruously quiet voice, "What did you say?" Time stretched while Baley waited for an answer. A small and lonesome vibration rose and reached a minor peak, then faded. It was the sound of another squad-car, boring its way past them on some unknown errand, perhaps a mile away. Or else it was a fire-car hurrying along toward its own appointment with combustion. A detached portion of Baley's mind wondered if any one man any longer knew all the Motorways that twisted about in New York City's bowels. At no time in the day or night could the entire Motorway system be completely empty, and yet there must be individual passages that no man had entered in years. With sudden, devastating clarity, he remeirfbered a short story he had viewed as a youngster. It concerned the Motorways of London and began, quietly enough, with a murder. The murderer fled toward a prearranged hideout in the comer of a Motorway in whose dust his own shoeprints had been the only disturbance for a century. In that abandoned hole, he could wait in complete safety till the search died. But he took a wrong turning and in the silence and loneness of those twisting corridors he swore a blaspheming oath that he would yet reach his haven. From that time on, no turning was right. He wandered through an unending maze from the Brighton sector on the Channel to Norwich and from Coventry to Canterbury. He burrowed endlessly beneath the great City of London from end to end of its sprawl across the southeastern corner of Medieval England. His clothes were rags and his shoes ribbons, his strength wore down but never left him. He was tired, tired, yet unable to stop. Sometimes he heard the sound of passing cars, but they were always in the next corridor, and however fast he rushed (for he would gladly have given himself up by then), the corridors he reached were always empty. Sometimes he saw an exit far ahead that would lead to the City's life and breath, but it always glimmered farther away as he approached until he would turn -- and it would be gone. Occasionally, Londoners on official business through the underground would see a misty figure limping silently toward them, a semi-transparent arm lifted in pleading, a mouth open and moving, but soundless. As it approached, it would waver and vanish. It was a story that had lost the attributes of ordinary fiction and had entered the realm of folklore. The "Wandering Londoner" had become a familiar phrase to all the world. In the depths of New York City, Baley remembered the story and stirred uneasily.  was a small echo to his voice. He said, "We may be overheard." "Down here? Not a chance. Now what was that you said about the Commissioner?" "He was on the scene, ElijahHe is a City-dweller. He was inevitably a suspect." "Was? You mean he isn't a suspect now?" "His innocence was quickly established. For one thing, there was no blaster in his possession. There could not very well be one. He had entered Spacetown in the usual fashion and you know blasters are removed as a matter of course." "Was the murder weapon found at all?" "No, Elijah. Every blaster in Spacetown was examined and none had been fired for weeks." "Then whoever had committed the murder had either hidden the weapon so well -- " "It could not have been hidden anywhere in Spacetown." Baley said impatiently, "I'm trying to consider all possibilities. It was either hidden or it was carried away ,by the murderer when he left." "Exactly." "And if you admit only the second possibility, then the Commissioner is cleared." "Yes. As a precaution, of course, he was cerebroanalyzed." "He was what?" "The interpretation of the electromagnetic fields of the living brain cells." "Oh," said Baley, unenlightened. "And what does that tell you?" "It gives us information concerning the temperamental and emotional makeup of an individual. In the case of Commissioner Enderby, it told us that he was "I could have told you that." "It is better to have objective information. Naturally, our people in Spacetown allowed themselves to be cere bro analyzed as well." "All incapable, I suppose." "Beyond question. That is why we know that the murderer must be a City-dweller " ' "Well, then, all we have to do is put the whole City through your cute little process." "It would not be very practical, Elijah. There might be millions temperamentally capable of the deed." thinking of the crowds that long ago day who had screamed at the "dirty Spacers," and of the threatening and slobbering crowds outside the shoe store the night before. He thought: Poor Julius. A suspect ! He could hear the Commissioner's voice describing the period after the discovery of the body: '"It was brutal, brutal." No wonder he had broken his glasses in shock and dismay. No wonder he did not want to return to Spacetown. "I hate them," he had ground out between his teeth. Poor Julius, The man who could handle Spacers, The man whose greatest value to the City lay in his ability to get along with them. How much had that contributed to his rapid promotions? No wonder the Commissioner had wanted Baley to take over. Good old loyal, close-mouthed Baley. College chum! He would keep quiet if he found out about that little incident. Baley wondered how cerebroanalysis was done. He imagined huge electrodes, busy pantographs skidding inklines across graphed paper. Poor Julius. He must already be seeing himself at the end of his career with a forced letter of resignation in the hands of the Mayor. The squad-car slanted up into the sublevels of City Hall. IT was #:# when Baley arrived back at his desk. The Commissioner was out. R. Sammy, grinning his mechanical grin, did not know where the Commissioner was. Baley spent some time thinking. The fact that he was hungry didn't register. At #:# R. Sammy came to his desk and said, "The Commissioner is in now, Lije." Baley said, "Thanks." For once he listened to R. Sammy without being annoyed. R. Sammy, after all, was a kind of relation to R. Daneel, and R. #  Daneel obviously wasn't a person -- or thing, rather -- to get annoyed with. Baley wondered how it would be on a new planet with men and robots starting even about a City culture. He considered the situation quite dispassionately. The Commissioner was going through some documents as Baley entered, stopping occasionally to make notations. He said, "That was a giantsize blooper you pulled out in Spacetown." TTOR a moment, Baley felt puzzled. Then it hit him with shocking impact. Jehoshaphat, how had he forgotten the verbal duel with Fastolfe! His long face took on a lugubrious expression of chagrin. "I'll say I did. Commissioner. I'm sorry." Enderby looked up. His expression was keen and his eyes glanced firmly through thenglass barriers. He seemed more himself than at any time these thirty hours. He said, "Fastolfe didn't seem to mind, so we'll forget it. Unpredictable, these Spacers. You don't deserve your luck, Lije. Next time, talk it over with me before you make like a subether hero." Baley nodded. He had tried a grandstand stunt and it hadn't worked. Okay. He was a little surprised that he could be so casual about it, but there it was. He said, "Look, Commissioner. I want to have a two-man apartment assigned to Daneel and myself. I'm not taking him home tonight." "What's all this?" "The news is out that he's a robot. Remember? Maybe nothing will happen, but if there is a riot, I don't want my family in the middle of it." "Nonsense, Lije. I've had the thing checked. There's no such rumor in the City." "Jessie got the story somewhere, Commissioner." "Well, there's no organized rumor. Nothing dangerous. I've been checking this ever since I got off the trimensic at Fastolfe's dome, which was why I left. I had to track it down fast. There's through a dozen Women's Personals in different parts of the City, You know Doris. She's a competent girl. Well, nothing showed anywhere. Not a thing." "Then how did Jessie get the rumor?" "It can be explained. R. Daneel made a display of himself in the shoe store. Did he really pull a blaster, Lije, or were you stretching the facts a little -- just a little, perhaps?" "He really pulled one. Pointed it, too." shook his head. "All right. Someone recognized him. As a robot, I mean." "Hold on," said Baley indignantly. "You can't tell he's a robot." "Why not?" "Could you? I couldn't." "We're no experts. Suppose there was a technician out of the Westchester robot factories in the crowd, a man who has spent his life building and designing robots. He notices something queer about R. Daneel. Maybe in the way he talks or holds himself. He speculates about it. Maybe he tells his wife. She tells a few friends. Then it dies because people don't believe it. Only it got to Jessie before it died." "Maybe," said Baley doubtfully. "But how about an assignment to a bachelor room for two, anyway?" The Commissioner shrugged, lifted the intercom. After a while, he said, "Section Q-# is all they can do. It's not a very good neighborhood." "It'll do," said Baley. "Where's R. Daneel now, by the way?" "He's at our record files, trying to collect information on Medievalist agitators." "I know, but it keeps him happy." Baley was nearly at the door when he turned, half on impulse, and said, "Commissioner, did Dr. Sarton ever talk to you about Spacetown's program? I mean about introducing the CFe culture?" "The what?" "Introducing robots." "Occasionally." "Did he ever explain what Spacetown's purpose was?" "Oh, improve health, raise the standard of living. The usual stuff. I nodded my head and all that. It's just a matter of humoring them and hoping they'll keep their ideas within reason. Maybe some day -- " Baley waited, but Enderby didn't say what particular maybe some day might bring. Baley said, "Did he ever mention anything to you about emigration?" "Emigration? Never! Letting an Earthman into an Outer World is like finding a diamond asteroid in the rings of Saturn." "I mean emigration to new worlds." But the Commissioner answered that one with a simple stare of incredulous horror. Baley said with sudden bluntness, "What's cerebroanalysis, Commissioner? Ever hear of it?" The Commissioner's round face showed only polite interest. "No. What's it supposed to be?" "Nothing. Just picked it up." Baley left the office and at his desk continued thinking. Certainly the Commissioner wasn't that good an actor. AT #:#, Baley called Jessie and told her he wouldn't be home that night or probably any night for a while. "Lije, is there trouble?" she asked anxiously. "Are you in danger?" "A policeman is always in a certain amount of danger," he explained lightly. It didn't satisfy her. "Where will you be staying?" He didn't tell her. "If you're going to be lonely tonight," he said, "stay at your mother's." He broke the connection abruptly, which was probably just as well. At #:#, he made a call to Washington. It took a long time to reach the man he wanted and an almost equally long time to convince him he ought to make an air-trip to New York the next day. By #:#, he had succeeded. At #:#, the Commissioner left, passing him with an uncertain smile. The day shift departed en masse. The skeleton night shift made its way in and greeted him in varied tones of surprise. R. Daneel came to his desk with a thick sheaf of papers. "This is a list of men and women who might belong to a Medievalist organization, Elijah." Baley shook his head. "Can't be. It's too small." names here!" "Listen, Daneel. Almost all Earthmen are Medievalists in one way or another. Look at the Commissioner's -- " he almost said "spectacles," then remembered that Earthmen must stick together, the Commissioner's face must be protected in the figurative as well as the literal sense -- "eye-omaments." "Yes," said R. Daneel, "I had noticed them, but thought it perhaps indelicate to refer to them. I have not seen such ornaments on other City-dwellers." "It is a very old-fashioned sort of thing." "Does it serve a purpose of any sort?" "Usually. Daneel, how did you get your list?" "A machine did it for me. Apparently, one sets it for a particular type of offense and it does the rest. I let it scan all disorderly conduct cases involving robots over the jpast twentyfive years. Another machine scanned all City Newspapers for those who made unfavorable statements concerning robots or men of the Outer Worlds. It is amazing what can be done in three hours. The machine even eliminated the names of nonsurvivors from the lists." "You are amazed? Surely you've got computers on the Outer Worlds." "Very advanced ones. But none are as massive and complex as the ones here. You must remember, of course, that even the largest Outer World scarcely has the population of one of your Cities and so extreme complexity is not necessary." "Have you ever been on Aurora?" "No," said R. Daneel. "I was assembled here on Earth." "Then how do you know about Outer World computers?" "My data store was drawn from Dr. Sarton." "I see. Can you eat, Daneel?" "I am nuclear-powered. I had thought you were aware of that." "I didn't ask if you needed to eat. I asked if you covld eat -- put food in your mouth, chew it and swallow it. I should think that would be important in seeming to be a man." "I see your point. Yes, I can perform the mechanical operations of chewing and swallowing. Naturally, I would eventually have to remove the merely macerated food from what you might call my stomach." "All right. You can do that in the privacy of our room tonight. I've missed lunch, damn it, and I want you with me when I eat. And you can't sit there and not eat without attracting attention." "Very well," said R. Daneel. "I shall be glad to -- eat -- with you." same all over the City. What's more, Baley had been in Washington, Toronto, Buenos Aires, London, Canton and Durban in line of duty, and they had been the same there, too. Perhaps it had been different in Medieval times when languages and diets had varied. Nowadays, yeast products were identical everywhere; and English might not be the "English" of Shakespeare or Churchill, but it was the final potpourri that was current over all the continents and, with some modification, on the Outer Worlds as well. Language and dietary aside, there were the deeper similarities. There was always that particular odor, undefinabJe but completely characteristic, of "kitchen." There was the waiting triple line moving slowly in, converging at the door and splitting up again; right, left, center. There was the rumble of humanity, speaking and moving, and the sharper clatter of plastic on plastic. There was the gleam of simulated wood, highly polished; highlights on glass; long tables; the touch of steam in the air. Baley inched forward as the line moved. With all possible staggering of meal hours, a wait of at least ten minutes was almost unavoidable. He said to R. Daneel in sudden curiosity, "Can you smile?" R. Daneel had been gazing at the interior of the kitchen with cool absorption. He turned and smiled. That is, his lips curled back and the skin about either end folded. Only the mouth smiled, however. The rest of the robot's face was unchanged. Baley looked away. "Don't bother. It doesn't do a thing for you." They were at the entrance. Person after person thrust a metal food-tag through the appropriate slot and had it scanned. Click -- click -- click -- A smoothly running kitchen could allow the entrance of two hundred persons a minute, the tags of each one being fully scanned to prevent kitchenjumping, meal-jumping and rationstretching. But that was at maximum efficiency, which was lost when any one person required special treatment, like stepping to the manual window, as Baley and R. Daneel did, in order to thrust a special permit pass at the official in charge. Jessie, an assistant dietitian before she'd married Baley, had explained it once to him. "It upsets things completely, throws off consumption figures and inventory estimates. It means special checks. You have to match slips with all the different Section kitchens to make sure the balance isn't too unbalanced, if you know what I mean. There's a separate balance sheet to be made out each week. Then if anything goes wrong and you're overdrawn, it's always your fault. It's never the fault of the City for passing out special tickets to everybody and his kid sister. Oh, no. And when we have to say that free choice is suspended for the meal, don't the people in line make a fuss! It's always the fault of the people behind the counter -- " stood the dry and poisonous look he received from the woman behind the window. She made a few hurried notes. Home Section, occupation' reason for meal displacement ("official business," a very irritating reason, but irrefutable). Then she folded the slip and pushed it into a slot. A computer seized it, devoured the contents and digested the information. Finished with Baley, she turned to R. Daneel. Baley jumped in hurriedly. He said, "My friend is out-of-City." The woman looked finally and completely outraged. "Home City, please,' she asked through clamped teeth. Baley intercepted for Daneel once again. "All records are to be credited to the Police Department. No details necessary. Official business." The woman brought down a pad of slips with an angry slam and filled in the data in darklight code with savage pressure of the first two fingers of her right hand. "How long will you be eating here?" "Till further notice," said Baley. "Press here." Baley had a short qualm as R. Daneel's even fingers with their glistening nails pushed downward. Surely they wouldn't have forgotten to supply him with fingerprints. The woman took the blank away and fed it into the machine near her elbow. 'It belched nothing back and Baley breathed more easily. She gave them little metal tags that were in the bright red that meant "temporary." She said, "No free choices. We're short this week. Take table DF." They made their way toward DF. R. Daneel said, "I am under the impression that most of your people eat regularly in kitchens such as these." "Yes. Of course, it's rather gruesome eating in a strange kitchen. There's no one you know. In your own kitchen, you have your own seat and you're with your family and your friends. Especially when you're young, mealtimes are the bright spot of the day." Baley smiled in brief reminiscence. Table DF was apparently reserved for transients. Those already seated watched their plates and did not talk with one another. They looked with sneaking envy at the laughing crowds. There is no one so uncomfortable, thought Baley, as the man eating out-of-Section. Be it ever so humble, the old saying went, there's no place like homekitchen. Even the food tastes better, no matter how many chemists are ready to swear it to be no different from the food in Johannesburg, H E sat down on a stool and R. Daneel took one next to him. "No free choice," said Baley, "so just close the switch there and wait." It took two minutes. A disc slid back in the table top and a dish lifted. "Mashed potatoes, zymoveal sauce and stewed apricots. Oh, well," Baley said. A fork and two slices of whole yeast bread appeared in a recess just in front of the low railing that went down the long center of the table. R. Daneel said in a low voice, "You may help yourself to my serving, if you wish." For a moment, Baley was scandalized. Then he remembered and mumbled, "That would be bad manners. Go on, eat." Baley ate industriously, but without enjoyment. He flicked an occasional glance at R. Daneel. The robot ate with precise motions of his jaws. Too precise. It didn't look quite natural. Strange, now that Baley knew R. Daneel was actually a robot, all sorts of little disparities showed up clearly, such as no movement of an Adam's apple when R. Daneel swallowed. Yet Baley didn't mind so much. Was he getting used to the creature? Suppose people started afresh on a new world -- how that ran through his mind ever since Dr. Fastolfe had put it there -- suppose Bentley, for instance, were to leave Earth, could he get so he wouldn't mind working and living alongside robots? . R. Daneel said, "Elijah, is it bad manners to watch another man while he is eating?" "If you mean stare directly at him, well, sure. That's only common sense, isn't it? A man has a right to his privacy. Ordinary conversation is all right, but you don't gape at a man while he's chewing." "I see. Why is it, then, that I count eight people watching us very closely?" Baley put down his fork. He looked about as though he were searching for the salt-pinch dispenser. "I see nothing at all out of the ordinary." But he said it without conviction. The mob of diners was only a vast conglomeration of strangers to him. And when R. Daneel turned his impersonal brown eyes upon him, Baley suspected uncomfortably that those were not eyes he saw, but photographic scanners. "I am quite certain," said R. Daneel calmly. "Well, what of it? It's crude behavior, but what does it proVe?" "I cannot say, Elijah. Is it coincidence that six of the watchers were in the crowd outside the shoe store last night?" his fork. "Are you sure?" he demanded. and immediately realized the uselessness of the question. You don't ask a computer if it is sure of the answer it disgorges; not even a computer with arms and legs and face. "Are they close to us?" "Not very. They are scattered." Baley returned to his meal, his fork moving mechanically. Behind the frown on his long face, his mind worked furiously. Suppose the incident last night had been organized by a group of antirobot fanatics -- men who had studied robots with the intensity born of deep hostility. One of them might have recognized R. Daneel for what he was. (The Commissioner had suggested that, in a way. Damn it, there were surprising depths to that man.) Even if they had been unable to act in an organized manner at the spur of the moment, they would still have been able to plan for the future. If they could recognize a robot such as R. Daneel, they could certainly realize that Baley himself was a police officer. A police officer in the unusual company of a humanoid robot would very likely be a responsible man in the organization. It followed then that observers at City Hall (or perhaps agents within City Hall) would be bound to spot Baley, R. Daneel, or both before too long a time had passed. That they had within twentyfour hours was not surprising, They might have done so in less time if Baley's day had not been spent mainly in Spacetown and along the Motorway. R. Daneel had finished his meal. He sat quietly waiting, his perfect hands resting lightly on the end of the table. "Had we not better do something?" he asked. "We're safe here in the kitchen," said Baley, "Now leave this to me. Please." Baley looked about him cautiously and it was as though he saw a kitchen for the first time. What was the capacity of an average kitchen? About #. This one was larger than average. Suppose the cry "Robot!" were tossed among the thousands like a -- He was at a loss for a comparison, flare anywhere; in the kitchens as easily as in the corridors or in the elevators. More easily, perhaps. There was a lack of inhibition at mealtimes, a sense of horseplay that could degenerate into something more serious at a trifle. But a planned riot would be different. Here in the kitchen, the agitators would themselves be caught in a mob-filled room. Hundreds would certainly die and they themselves might easily be among them. No, a safe riot would have to be planned in the avenues of the City, in some relatively narrow passageway. There would be time for the quick, prepared fadeaway along the side passage or the unobtrusive step onto an escalating Localway that would move them to a higher level and disappearance. Baley felt trapped. There were probably others waiting outside. Baley and R. Daneel were to be followed to a proper point and the fuse would be set off. R. Daneel said, "Why not arrest them?" "That would only start the trouble sooner. You know their faces, don't you?" "I am not capable of forgetting," "Then we'll nab them another time. Follow me. Do exactly as I do." He rose, turned his dish carefully upside down, centering it on the movable disc on which it had risen. He put his fork back in its recess. R. Daneel, watching, did the same. The dishes and utensils dropped out of sight. R. Daneel said, "They are getting up, too." "They won't get too close. Not here." steamy haze and the noise and with incongruous sharpness thought of a visit to the City Zoo with Ben six or seven years ago. It had been the boy's first visit and he had been excited. After all, he had never actually seen a cat or a dog or a bird before. Even Baley himself, who had seen it a dozen, times before, was not immune to its fascination. It was feeding time in the sparrow cage and an attendant was dumping cracked oats into a long trough. Human beings had grown used to yeast substitutes, but animals, more conservative in their way, insisted on real grain. The sparrows flocked down in what seemed like hundreds. Wing to wing, with an earsplitting twitter, they lined the trough -- That was it, the picture that came to Baley' s mind as he looked back at the kitchen he was leaving. Sparrows at the trough. The thought repelled him. He thought: Jehoshaphat, there must be a better way. But what better way? What was wrong with this way? It had never bothered him before. He said abruptly to R. Daneel, "Ready, Daneel?" "I am ready, Elijah." They left the kitchen and escape was now flatly up to Baley.  sters know called "running the strips." Its rules vary from City to City, but the essentials are eternal. Its object is to get from point A to point B via the City's rapid transit system in such a way that the "leader" manages to lose as many of his followers as possible. A leader who arrives at the destination alone is skillful indeed, as is a follower who refuses to be shaken. The game is usually conducted during the evening rush-hour when the increased flow of commuters makes it more hazardous and complicated. The leader sets off, running up and down the accelerating strips. He does his best to do the unexpected, standing on a strip as long as possible, then leaping off suddenly in either direction. He will run quickly through several strips, then remain waiting once more. Pity the follower who incautiously careens forward one strip too far. Before he has caught his mistake, unless he is extraordinarily nimble, he has driven past the leader or fallen behind. To increase the complexity of the task tenfold, a leader will board the Localways or the Expressways themselves, and hurtle off the other side. It is bad form to avoid them completely and also bad form to linger on them. The attraction of the game is not easy for an adult to understand, particularly for an adult who has never himself been a teen-age strip-runner. The players are roughly treated by legitimate travelers into whose path they find themselves inevitably flying. They are persecuted by the police and punished by their parents, denounced in the schools and on the sub-etherics. No year passed without its four or five teen-agers killed at the game; its dozens hurt; its cases of injured innocent bystanders. Yet nothing could be done to wipe out the strip-running gangs. The greater the danger, the more the strip-runners had that most valuable of all prizes, honor in the eyes of their fellows. A successful one might well swagger; a well-known leader was cockofthewalk. Elijah Baley, for instance, remembered with satisfaction even now that he had been a striprunner once. He had led a gang of twenty from the Concourse Sector to the borders of Queens, crossing three Expressways. In two tireless and relentless hours, he had shaken off some of the most agile followers of the Bronx, and arrived at the destination point alone. They had talked about that run for months. Baley hadn't run the strips for over twenty years, but he remembered some of the tricks. What he had lost in agility, he made up in the fact that he was a policeman. No one but another policeman as experienced as himself could possibly know where almost every metal-bordered alley began and ended.  kitchen briskly, but not too rapidly. Each moment he expected the cry of "Robot! Robot!" to ring out behind him. He counted the steps until he felt the fif'st accelerating strip moving under him. He stopped for a moment, while R. Daneel moved smoothly up beside him. "Are they still behind us, Daneel?" "Yes. They are moving closer." "That won't last," said Baley confidently. He looked at the strips stretching to either side, with their human cargo whipping to his left more and more rapidly as their distance from him increased. He had felt the strips beneath his feet many times a day almost all the days of his life, but he had not bent his knees in anticipation of running them in seven thousand days and more. He felt the old familiar thrill and his breath grew more rapid. He forgot the one time he had caught Ben at the game. He had lectured him interminably and threatened to have him put under police surveillance. Lightly, quickly, at double the "safe" rate, he went up the strips. He leaned forward sharply against the acceleration. The Localway was humming past. For a moment, it looked as though he would mount, but suddenly he was fading backward, backward, dodging through the crowd to left and right as it thickened on the slower strips. He stopped and let himself be carried along at a mere fifteen miles an hour. "How many are with us, Daneel?" "Only one, Elijah." The robot was at his side, unruffled, unbreathing. "He must have been a good one in his day, too, but he won't last either." He looked about quickly. Where were they now? B-#nd Street flashed by. He judged his steps carefully. Up the strips, smoothly and steadily, a swing onto the Local way platform and a quick wriggle to the other side. Off he went and down the decelerating strips in a complicated pattern so that his feet met the Vjoint strips of an Expressway at the exact point of cross-over. Without loss of rhythm, he was accelerating again, then up and over an Expressway. "Is he with us, Daneel?" "Not one in sight, Elijah." "Good. What a strip-runner you would have been, Daneel!" Off onto another Localway in a whirl and down the strips with a clatter to a doorway, large and official in appearance. A guard rose to his feet. Baley flashed his identification. "Official business." They were inside. "Power plant," said Baley curtly. "This covers our tracks completely." plants before, including this one. Familiarity did not lessen his feeling of uncomfortable awe. His father had held an important job in such a plant -- before a robot specialist replaced him. There was the surrounding hum of the tremendous generators hidden in the central well of the plant; the faint sharpness of ozone in the air, the grim and silent threat of the red lines that marked the limits beyond which no one could pass without protective clothing. Somewhere in the plant -- Baley had no idea just where -- a pound of fissionable material was consurned each day. Every so often, the radioactive fission products, the so-called "hot ash" was forced by air pressure through leaden pipes to distant caverns ten miles out in the ocean and a half-mile below the ocean floor. Baley sometimes wondered what would happen when the caverns were filled. He said to R. Daneel with sudden gruffness, "Stay away from the red lines." Then he added sheepishly, "But I suppose it doesn't matter to you." "Is it a question of radioactivity?" asked Daneel. "Yes." "Then it does matter to me. Gamma radiation destroys the delicate balance of a positronic brain. It would affect me much sooner than it would affect you." "You mean it would kill you?" "I would require a new positronic brain. Since no two can be alike, I would be a new individual. The Daneel you now speak to would, in a manner of speaking, be dead." Baley looked at the other doubtfully. "I never knew that. Up these ramps." "The point isn't stressed. Spacetown wishes to convince Earthmen of the usefulness of such as myself, not of our weaknesses." "Then why tell me?" R, Daneel turned his eyes full on his human companion. "You are my partner, Elijah. It is well that you know my weaknesses and Shortcomings." Baley cleared his throat and had nothing more to add to the subject. "Out in this direction," he said a moment later, "and we're a quarter of a mile from our apartment." I T was a grim lower-class flat. One small room and two beds. Two fold-in chairs and a closet. A built-in sub-etheric screen that allowed no manual adjustment, and would be working only at stated hours, but would be working then. No wash-basin and no facilities for cooking or even boiling water. A small trashdisposal pipe was in one corner of the room, an ugly, unadorned, unpleasantly functional object. Baley shrugged. "I guess we can stand it." R. Daneel walked to the trash disposal pipe. His shirt unseamed at a touch, revealing a smooth and, to all appearances, wellmuscled chest. "What are you doing?" asked Baley. "Getting rid of the food I ingested. If I were to leave it, it would spoil and I would attract displeasure." R. Daneel placed two fingers carefully under one nipple and  his chest opened longitudinally. He reached in and from a welter of gleaming metal withdrew a translucent sac, partly distended. He opened it while Baley watched with a kind of horror. R. Daneel hesitated. He said, "The food is completely unchanged. I do not salivate or digest. It was drawn in through the gullet by suction, you know. It is as edible as if it were put through any other kind of machine." "That's all right," said Baley gently. "You just get rid of it." R. Daneel's food sac was of fluorocarbon plastic, Baley decided. At least the food did not cling to it It came out smoothly and was placed little by little into the pipe. A waste of good food at that, he thought. He sat down on one bed and removed his shirt. He said, "I suggest an early start tomorrow." "For a specific reason?" "The location of this apartment isn't known to our friends yet. At least, I hope not. If we leave early, we are that much safer. Once in City Hall, we will have to decide whether our partnership is still practical." "You think perhaps it is not?" Baley shrugged and said dourly, "We can't go through this sort of thing every day," "But it seems to me -- " R Daneel was interrupted by the sharp scarlet sliver of the door signal. and unlimbered his blaster. The door signal flashed once more. He moved silently to the door, put his thumb on the blaster contact and threw the switch that activated the one-way transparency patch. It was small and had a distorting effect, but it was good enough to show Baley's youngster, Ben, outside the door. Baley flung the door open, snatched brutally at Ben's wrist as the boy raised his hand to signal a third time and pulled him in. The look of fright and bewilderment faded only slowly from Ben's eyes as he leaned breathlessly against the wall toward which he had been hurled. He rubbed his wrist. "Dad!" he said. "You didn't have to grab me like that." Baley was staring through the view-patch of the closed door. As nearly as he could tell, the corridor was empty. "Did you see anyone out there, Ben?" "No. Gee, dad, I just came to see if you were all right." "Why shouldn't ! be all right?" "I don't know. It was Mom. She was crying and all like that. She said I had to find you. If I didn't she said she would go herself and then she didn't know what would happen. She made me go, Dad." Baley said, "How did you find me? Did your  mother know where I was?" "No, she didn't. I called up your office." "And they told you?" Ben looked startled at his father's vehemence. "Sure. Weren't they supposed to?" Baley and Daneel looked at one another. Baley rose heavily to his feet. "Where's your mother now, Ben? At the apartment?" "No, we went to Grandma's for dinner and stayed there. I'm supposed to go back there now. I mean as long as you're all right, Dad." "You'll stay here. Daneel, did you notice the exact location of the floor Communo?" The robot said, "Yes. Do you intend leaving the room to use it?" "I've got to. I have to get in touch with Jessie." "Might I suggest that it would be more logical to let Bentley do that? It is a form of risk and he is less valuable." Baley stared: "Why, you -- " He thought: Jehoshaphat, what am I getting angry about? He went on more calmly, "You don't understand, Daneel. Among us, it is not customary for a man to send his young son into possible danger, even if it is logical to do so." "Danger!" squeaked Ben in a sort of horrified pleasure. "What's going on, Dad? Huh, Dad?" "This isn't any of your business, understand? I Want you in bed when I get back. You hear me?" "Aw, gosh. You could tell a fellow. I won't say anything." "In bed!" "Aw, yeast!" Baley stood at the floor Cummuno, his blaster butt ready for snatching. He spoke his personal number into the mouthpiece and waited while a computer fifteen miles away checked it to make sure the call was permissible. It was a very short wait, since a plainsclothesman had no limit on the number of his business calls. He spoke the code number of his mother-in-law's apartment. The small screen at the base of the instrument lit up and her face looked out at him. He said in a low voice, "Mother, put Jessie on," Jessie must have been waiting for him. She appeared at once. Baley looked at her face and then darkened the screen deliberately. "All right, Jessie. Ben's here. Now what's the matter?' His eyes roved from side to side conr tinuously, watching. "Are you all right? You aren't in trouble?" . "I'm obviously all right, Jessie. Now stop it." "Oh, Lije, I've been so worried." "What about?" "You know. Your friend." "There'll be no trouble. I'm keeping Ben with me tonight and you go to bed. Good-by, dear.' He broke the connection and waited for two breaths before starting back. His face was gray with apprehension and fear. Ben was standing in the middle of the room when Baley returned. One of his contact lenses was neatly pocketed in a little suction cup. The other was still in his eye. Ben said, "Gosh, Dad, isn't there any water in the place? Mr. Olivaw says I can't go to the Personal." "You can't. Put that thing back in your eye, Ben. It won't hurt you to sleep with them for one night." "All right." Ben obeyed and climbed into bed. "Boy, what a mattress H Baley said to R. Daneel, "I suppose you won't mind sitting up." "Of course not. I was interested, by the way, in the queer glass ; Bentley wears close to his eyes. Do all Earthmen wear them?" "Just some," said Baley absently. "I don't, for instance." "For what reason is it worn?" Baley was too absorbed with his own thoughts to answer. His own uneasy thoughts. The lights were out, but Baley remained wakeful. He was dimly aware of Ben's breathing as it grew dCep and regular. When he turned his head, he became conscious of R, Daneel, sitting in a chair with grave immobility, facing the door. Then he fell asleep. , He dreamed Jessie was falling ;! into the fission chamber of a nuclear power plant. She held out her arms to him, shrieking, but he could only stand frozenly just outside a scarlet line and watch her distorted figure as it fell, growing smaller until it was only a dot. He could only watch her in the dream, knowing that it was he himself who had pushed her.  Commissioner Julius Enderby entered the office. He nodded wearily. The Commissioner looked at the clock. "Don't tell me you've been here all night." "I won't," Baley said. The Commissioner asked in a low voice, "Any trouble last night?" "No." "I've been thinking that I might be minimizing the danger of riots. If there's anything to -- " "For God's sake. Commissioner, if anything happened, I'd tell you. There was no trouble of any sort." "All right." The Commissioner moved away, closing the door that marked off the unusual privacy that went with his exalted position. Baley looked after him and thought: He slept last night. Baley hadn't. He bent to the routine report he was trying to write as a cover-up for the real activities of the last two days, but the words he had tapped out by finger-touch blurred and danced. Slowly, he became aware of an object standing by his desk. It was R. Sammy. Baley thought: Julius's private mechanical flunky. It pays to be a Commissioner. R. Sammy said through his fatuous grin, "The Commissioner wants to see you, Lije." "He just saw me. Tell him I'll be in later." "He says right now." "I heard you. Go away." The robot backed away, saying, "The Commissioner wants to see you right now, Lije. He says fight now." "Jehoshaphat," said Baley angrily. "I'm going. I'm going." He got up from his desk, headed for the office and R. Sammy was silent. Baley said as he entered, "Damn it, Commissioner, don't send that thing after me, will you?" The Commissioner was tapping the paper before him. "There's a record of a call you made to a Dr, Gerrigel at Washington by insulated beam." "That's right." "There's no record of the conversation, naturally, since it was insulated. What's it all about?" "I'm after background information." "He's a roboticist, isn't he?" . "Yes." "What's the point? What kind of information are you after?" "I'm not sure, Commissioner. I just have a feeling that in a case like this, information on robots might help." "I wouldn't, Lije. I don't think it's wise." "What's your objection?" "The fewer the people "who know about all this, the better." "I'll tell him as little as I can." "I still don't think it's wise." "Are you ordering me not to see him, Commissioner?" "No, no! Do as you see fit. You're heading this investigation. Only -- " "Only what?" The Commissioner shook his head. "Nothing. Where is he? You know who I mean." "Daneel's still at the files." The Commissioner paused a long moment. "We're not making much progress, you know." "We're not making any. That's why I'm calling in Dr. Gerrigel." "All right," said the Commissioner, but he didn't look as though he really thought it was all right.  desk when the plainclothesman returned. "Well, and what have you got?" Baley asked gruffly. "I have completed my first rather hasty search through the files, partner Elijah. I believe I have located two people whose descriptions tally with two of those who tried to track us last night and who. moreover, were at the shoe store during the former incident." "Let's see." R. Daneel placed the stampsize cards before Baley. They were mottled with the small dots that served as code. The robot also produced a portable decoder and put one of the cards into a slot. The dots possessed electrical conduction properties different from that of the card as a whole. The electric field passing through, the card was therefore distorted ; and, in response, the three-byi six screen above the decoder was filled with words. Words which,  uncoded, would have filled sev. eral sheets of standard report paper. Words, furthermore, which could not possibly be interpreted without an official police decoder. Baley read through the material stolidly. The first person was Francis Clousarr, age # at time of arrest two years before; cause of arrest, inciting to riot; employee at New York Yeast; home  address; parentage; hair, eyes ,  distinguishing marks, educational history, employment history, psyj choanalytic profile, physical pro- file, reference to tri-photo in the , rogues' gallery. "You checked the photo I graph?" asked Baley.  "Yes, Elijah." R. Daneel spoke  patiently.  The second person was Ger hard Paul. Baley glanced at the material on that card and said, "This is all no good." "I am sure that cannot be so. ' If there is an organization of Earthmen capable of the crime we are investigating, these are members. Should they not be questioned?" "We'd get nothing out of them." "They were there, both at the shoe store and in the kitchen. They cannot deny it." "Just being there's no crime. Besides which, they can say they weren't there. How can we prove they're lying?" "I saw them." "That's no proof' said Baley savagely. "No court, if it ever came to that, would believe that you could remember two faces in "It is obvious that I can." "Sure. Tell them what you are. As soon as you do that, you're no witness. Your kind have no status in any court of law on Earth." R. Daneel said, "I take it, then, that you have changed your mind." "What do you mean?" Baley scowled at him. "Yesterday, in the kitchen, you said there was no need to arrest them. You said that as long as I remembered their faces, we could arrest them at any time." "Well, I didn't think it through. It can't be dorfe." "Not even for psychological reasons? They would not know we had no legal proof of their complicity in conspiracy." Baley said tensely; "Look, lam expecting Dr. Gerrigel of Wash' ington in half an hour. Do you mind waiting till he's been here and gone? Do you mind?" "I will wait," said R. Daneel. A nthony gerrigel was a precise and very polite man of middle height, who looked far from being one of the most erudite roboticists on Earth. He was nearly twenty minutes late and quite apologetic about it. Baley, white with an anger bom of apprehension, shrugged off the apologies gracelessly. He checked his reservation on Conference Room D, repeated his instructions that they were not to be disturbed for an hour and led Dr. Gerrigel and R. Daneel down the corridor, up a ramp, and through a, door that led to one of the spy-beam-insulated chambers. Before sitting down, Baley listened to the soft burr of the pulsometer in his hand, waiting for any fading of the steady sound which would indicate a break, even a small one, in the insulation. He turned it on the ceiling, floor, and, with particular care, on the door. There was no break. Dr. Gerrigel smiled a little. He looked like a man who never smiled more than a little. He was dressed with a neatness that could only be described as fussy. His iron-gray hair was smoothed carefully back and his face looked pink and freshly washed. He sat with prim stiffness. He said to Baley, "You make this seem very formidable." "It's important, Doctor. Anything we say here, of course, is top secret and the City will expect you to forget it all when you leave." Baley looked at his watch. The little smile on the roboticist's face winked away. "Let me explain why I am late." The matter obviously weighed upon him. "I decided not to go by air. I get airsick." , "That's too bad," said Baley. He put away the pulsometer, after checking its standard settings to make last-minute certain that there was nothing wrong with it, and sat down. "Not exactly airsick, but nervous. A mild agoraphobia. It's nothing particularly abnormal, but it's there. So I took the Expressways." Baley felt a sudden sharp interest. "Agoraphobia?" "I make it sound worse than it is," the roboticist said at once. "It's just the sensation you get in a plane. Have you ever been in one, Mr. Baley?" "Several times." "Then you must know what I mean. It's that feeling of being surrounded by nothing; of being separated from -- from empty air by a mere inch of metal. It's very uncomfortable." "So you took the Expressway." "Yes." "All the way from Washington to New York?" "Oh, I've done it before. Since they built the BaltimorePhiladelphia tunnel, it's quite simple." S O it was. Baley had never made the trip himself, but he was aware that it was possible. Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had grown, in the last two centuries, to the point where all nearly touched. The Four City Area was almost the official name for the entire stretch of coast and there were a considerable number of people who favored administrative consolidation and the formation of a single super-City,  Baley disagreed. New York City  by itself was almost too large to be handled by a centralized govj ernment. A larger City with over break down under its own weight. "The trouble was," Dr. Gerrigel was saying, "that I missed a i connection in Chester Sector , I Philadelphia, and lost time. That ' and a little difficulty in getting a transient room assignment ended # by making me late." "Don't worry about it, doctor. What you say, though, is interesting. In view of your dislike for planes, how would you feel about going outside City limits on foot?" "For what reason?" He looked startled. "I'm not suggesting that you M# really should. I want to know how the notion strikes you, that's all." "It strikes me very unpleasantly." "Suppose you had to leave the City at night and walk crosscountry for half a mile or more." "I -- I don't think I could be persuaded to." "No matter how important the necessity?" "If it were to save my life or those of my family, I might try it." He looked embarrassed. "May I ask the point of these questions. Mr. Baley?" "I'll tell you. A serious crime has been committed, a particularly disturbing murder. I'm not at liberty to give you the details. There is a theory, however, that the murderer, in order to commit the crime, did just what we were discussing -- he crossed open country at night and alone. I was just wondering what kind of man could do that." Dr. Gerrigel shuddered. "No one I know. Certainly not I. Of you could find a few such individuals." "But you wouldn't say it was a very likely thing for a human being to do." "No. Not at all likely." "In fact, if there's any other explanation for the crime, any other conceivable explanation, it should definitely be considered." Dr. Gerrigel looked more uncomfortable than ever as he sat upright with his well-kept hands precisely folded in his lap. "Do you have an alternate explanation in mind?" "Yes. It occurs to me that a robot, for instance, would have no difficulty at all in crossing open country." "Oh, my dear sir!" "What's wrong?" asked Baley. "You mean a robot may have committed the crime?" "Why not?" "Murder? Of a human being?" "Yes. Please sit down, Doctor." "Mr. Baley, there are two acts involved: walking cross-country and murder. A human being could commit the murder, but would find difficulty in crossing open country. A robot could cross open country easily, but the murder would be completely impossible. If you're going to replace an unlikely theory by k an impossible one -- " "Impossible is a strong word." "You've heard of the First Law of Robotics, Mr. Baley?" "Sure. I can even quote it: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Baley suddenly pointed a finger at the roboticist. "Why can't a robot be built without the First Law? What's so sacred about it?" "If you even know a little about robotics, you must know the gigantic task involved, both mathematically and electronically, in building a positronic brain." "I have an idea," said Baley. He remembered well his visit to a robot factory once in line of duty. He had seen the library of bookfilms; long ones, each of which contained the mathematical analysis of a single type of positronic brain. It took more than an hour for the average film to be viewed at standard scanning speed, condensed though its symbolisms were. And no two brains were alike even when prepared according to the most rigid specifications. That, Baley understood, was a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This meant that each film had to be supplemented by appendices involving possible variations. It was a job, all right. Baley wouldn't deny that. Dr. Gerrigel said, "'Well, then, you must understand that a design for a new type of positronic brain, even one where only minor innovations are involved, is not the matter of a night's work. It usually requires the entire research staff of a factory and takes anywhere up to a year. Even this would not be enough if it were not that the basic theory of such circuits has already been standardized. The basic theory involves the Three Laws of Robotics: the First Law, which you've quoted; the Second Law, which states 'A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law,' and the Third Law, which states 'A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.' Do you understand?"  pearances, had been following the conversation with close attention, broke in, "If you will excuse me, Elijah, I would like to see if I follow Dr. Gerrigel. What you imply, sir, is that any attempt to build a robot, the workings of whose positronic brain is not oriented about the Three Laws, would require first the setting up of a new basic theory and that this, in turn, would take many years." The roboticist looked gratified. "That is exactly what I mean, Mr. -- " Baley said, "This is Daneel Olivaw, Dr. Gerrigel" "Good day, Mr. Olivaw." Dr. Gerrigel shook Daneel's hand. He went on, "It is my estimation that it would take fifty years to develop the basic theory of a nonAsenion positronic brain -- that is, one in which the basic assumptions of the Three Laws are disallowed -- and bring it to the point where robots similar to modern models could be constructed." "And this has never been done?" asked Baley. "We've been building robots for thousands of years. In all that time, hasn't anybody or any group had fifty years to spare?" "Certainly," said the roboticist, "but it is not the sort of work a roboticist would care to do." "I find that hard to believe. Human curiosity will undertake anything." "It hasn't undertaken the nonAsenion robot. The human race, Mr. Baley, has a strong Frankenstein complex." "A what?" "That's a popular name derived from a Medieval novel describing a robot that turned against its creator. I never read the novel myself. However, that's beside the point. What I wish to say is that robots without the First Law are simply not built." "And no theory for it even exists?" "Not to my knowledge, and my knowledge -- " he smiled selfconsciously -- "is rather extensive." "And a robot with a First Law built in could not kill a man." were completely accidental or unless it were necessary to save the lives of two or more men. In either case, the positronic conflict would ruin the brain beyond recovery," "All this represents the situation on Earth. Right?" "Yes. Certainly." "What about the Outer Worlds?" Baley demanded. assurance seemed to ooze away. "Oh, dear, Mr. Baley, I couldn't say of my own knowledge, but I'm sure that if nonAsenion positronic brains were ever designed or if the mathematical theory were worked out, we'd hear of it." "Would we? Well, let me follow up another thought in my mind. Dr. Gerrigel. I hope you don't mind." "No. Not at all." He looked helplessly first at Baley, then at R. Daneel. "After all, if It is as important as you say, I'm glad to do all I can." "Thank you, Doctor. My question is, why humanoid robots? I've been taking them for granted all my life, but it occurs to me that I don't know the reason for their existence. Why should a robot look like a man?" Dr. Gerrigel smiled a little. "The early literature of robotics is riddled with heated arguments over that very matter. If. you would like a very good reference to the polemics among the functionalists and antifunctionalists, I can recommend Hanford's History of RoboticsMathematics is kept to a minimum. I think you'd find it very interesting.' "I'll look it up," said Baley patiently. "Meanwhile, could you give me an idea?" "The decision was made on the basis of economics. Look here, Mr. Baley, if you were supervising a farm, would you care to buy a tractor, a reaper, a harrow, a milker, an automobile, and so on, each with a positronic brain; or would you rather have ordinary unbrained machinery with a single positronic robot to run them all? The second alternative, incidentally, represents only a fiftieth or a hundredth the expense." "But why the human form?" Baley persisted. "Because it is the most successful generalized form in all nature. We are not a specialized animal, Mr. Baley, except for our nervous systems and a few odd items. If you want a design capable of doing a great many different things, you could do no better than to imitate the human form. Besides that, our entire technology is based on the human form. An automobile, for instance, has controls meant to be manipulated by human hands and feet of a certain average size and shape, attached to the body by limbs of a certain average length and joints of a certain type. Even simple objects like chairs and tables or knives and forks are designed to meet such requirements. It is easier to have robots imitate the human shape than to redesign radically so much of our civilization." "That makes sense. Now isn't it true. Doctor, that the roboticists of the Outer World manufacture robots that are much more humanoid than our own?" "I believe so." "Could they manufacture a robot so humanoid that it would pass as human under ordinary conditions?" eyebrows and considered that. "It would be terribly expensive. I doubt that the return could be profitable enough to make the attempt worth the effort." "Do you suppose," went on Baley remorselessly, "that they could make a robot that would fool you into thinking it was human?" The roboticist tittered. "Oh, my dear Mr. Baley. I doubt that. Really, There's more to a robot than just his appear -- " Dr. Gerrigel froze in the middle of the word. Slowly, he turned to R. Daneel, and his pink face went very pale. "Dear me !" he whispered. "Oh, dear me!" He reached out one hand and touched R. Daneel's cheek gingerly. R. Daneel did not move away, but gazed at the roboticist calmly, "Dear me," said Dr. Gerrigel, with what was almost a sob in his voice, "you are a robot." "It took you a long time to realize that," said Baley drily. "I wasn't expecting it. I never saw one like this. Outer World manufacture?" "Yes." "It's obvious now. The Way he holds himself. The manner of his speaking. It is not a perfect imitation, Mr. Baley." "It's pretty good, though, isn't it?" "Oh, it's marvelous. I doubt that anyone could recognize the imposture at sight. I am very grateful to you for having me brought face to face with him. May I examine him?" The roboticist was on his feet, eager, Baley put out c hand. "Please, Doctor. In a moment. First, the matter of the murder, you know." "Is that real, then?" Dr, Gerrigel was bitterly disappointed and showed it. "I thought perhaps that was just a trick to keep my mind engaged and to see how long I could be fooled by -- " "It is not a trick, Dr. Gerrigel. Tell me now, in constructing a robot as humanoid as this one, with the deliberate purpose of having it pass as human, is it not necessary to make its brain possess properties as close to those of the human brain as possible?" "Certainly." "Very well. Couldn't such a humanoid brain lack the First Law? Perhaps it is left out accidentally. You say the theory is unknown. The very fact that it is unknown means that the constructors might set up a brain without the First Law. They would not know what to avoid." head vigorously. "Oh, no! Impossible! A robot without the First Law? It can't be done!" "Are you sure? We can test the Second Law, of course. Daneel, let me have your blaster." Baley's eyes never left the robot. His own fist, well to one side, gripped his own blaster tightly. R. Daneel said calmly, "Here it is, Elijah," and held it out, butt-first, Baley said, "A plainclothesman must never abandon his blaster. A robot has ho choice but to obey a human." "Except, Mr. Baley," said Dr. Gerrigel, "when obedience involves breaking the First Law," "Do you know, Doctor, that Daneel drew his blaster on an unarmed group of men and women and threatened to shoot?" "But I did not shoot," R. E)aneel stated. "Granted, but the threat was unusual in itself, wasn't it, Doctor?" Dr. Gerrigel bit his lip. "I'd need to know the exact circumstances to judge. It does sound unusual, I admit." "Consider this, then. R. Daneel was on the scene at the time of the murder, and if you omit the possibility of an Earthman having moved across open country, carrying a weapon with him, only Daneel of all the persons on the scene could have hidden the weapon." "Hidden the weapon?" asked Dr. Gerrigel. "I don't follow you." "Let me explain. The scene of the murder was searched minutely and the blaster that did the could not have vanished like smoke. There is only one place it could have been; only one place they would not have thought to look." "Where, Elijah?" asked R. Daneel. Baley brought his blaster into view, held its barrel firmly in the robot's direction. "In your food sac, Daneel !" T HE roboticist, whose glance had been alternating wildly between the plainclothesman and the robot, let it come to rest upon the human being. "What is all this?" he bleated. "I've asked you here for an authoritative analysis of this robot," said Baley. "I can arrange to have you use the laboratories of the City Bureau of Standards. If you need any piece of equipment they don't have, I'll get it for you. What I want is a quick and definite answer, and hang the expense and trouble," Dr. Gerrigel tittered nervously and said, "My dear Mr. Baley, I won't need a laboratory." "Why not?" asked Baley apprehensively, muscles tense. "It's not difficult to test the First Law, I've never had to, but it's simple enough." Baley pulled air in through his mouth and let it out slowly. "Are you saying that you can test him here?" "Yes, of course. If I were a Doctor of Medicine and had to test a patient's blood sugar, measure hi basal metabolic rate, his cortical function, or check his genes to pinpoint a congenital malfunction, I'd need elaborate equipment. On the other hand, I could learn if he was blind by merely passing my hand before his eyes and test whether he was dead by feeling for his pulse. "What I'm getting at is that the more important and fundamental the property being tested, the simpler the needed equipment. It's the same in a robot. The First Law is fundamental. It affects everything. If it were absent, the robot could not react properly in at least two dozen obvious ways." As he spoke, he took out a flat, black object which expanded into a small book-viewer. He inserted a well-worn spool into the receptacle. He then took out a stopwatch and a series of white plastic slivers that fitted together to form something that looked like a slide-rule with three independent movable scales. The notations upon it struck no chord of familiarity to Baley. Dr. Gerrigel tapped his bookviewer and smiled a little, as though the prospect of a bit of fieldwork cheered him. He said, "It's my Handbook of Robotics. I never go anywhere without it. It's like part of me." He put the eyepiece of the viewer to his eyes and his finger dealt delicately with the controls. The viewer whirred and stopped, whirred and stopped. "Built-in index," the roboticist said proudly, his voice muffled because the viewer covered his mouth. "I constructed it myself. It saves a great deal of time. But that's not the point now, is it? Let's see. Umm, won't you move your chair near me, Daneel?" R. Daneel did so. During the roboticist's preparations, he had watched closely and unemotionally. Baley shifted his blaster to keep aiming at the robot. disappointed him. Dr. Gerrigel proceeded to ask questions and perform actions that seemed without meaning, punctuated by references to his triple slide-rule and occasionally to the viewer itself. At one time, he asked, "If I have two cousins, five years apart in age, and the younger is a girl, what sex w the older ?" Daneel answered, "It is impossible to say on the information given." Dr. Gerrigel's only response, aside from a glance at his stopwatch, was to extend his right hand as far as he could sideways and to say, "Would you touch the tip of my middle finger with the tip of the third finger of your left hand?" Daneel did that promptly and easily. In fifteen minutes, Dr. Gerrigel was finished. He used his slide-rule for a last silent calculation, then disassembled it with a series of snaps. He put away his stopwatch, withdrew the Handbook from the viewer and collapsed the machine. "Is that all?" said Baley, frowning. "That's all." "But it's ridiculous. You've asked nothing that pertains to the First Law." "Mr. Baley, when a doctor hits your knee with a little rubber mallet, don't you accept the fact that it gives information concerning the presence or absence of some degenerative nerve disease? When he looks closely at your eyes and considers the reaction of your iris to light, are you surprised that he can tell you about your possible addiction to the use of certain alkaloids?" Baley said, "Wefl, what's your decision?" "Daneel is fully equipped with the First Law!" The roboticist jerked his head in a sharp affirmative. "You can't be right" said Baley flatly. "Are you teaching me my job?" The little smile had turned to an indignant glare. "I don't mean you're incompetent," said Baley. He put out a large, pleading hand. "But couldn't you be mistaken? You've said yourself nobody knows anything about the theory of nonAsenion robots. A blind man could read by using Braille or a soundscriber. Couldn't you, in all honesty, say that a man had eyes because he knew the contents of a certain book-film, and be mistaken?" again. T see your point. But a blind man could not read by use of his eyes and that is what I was testing, if I may use the analogy. Take my word for it, regardless of what a nonAsenion robot could or could not do, it is certain that R. Daneel is equipped with the First Law." "Couldn't he have falsified his answers?" "A human brain, or any mammalian brain, cannot be completely analyzed by any mathematical discipline now known. The robot brain is completely analyzable, or it could not be constructed. We know exactly what the responses to given stimuli must be. Therefore, no robot can falsify answers." "Then let's get down to cases," said Baley. "R. Daneel did point a blaster at a crowd of human beings. I was there. Granted that he didn't shoot, wouldn't the First Law still have forced him into a kind of neurosis? It didn't, you know. He was perfectly normal afterward." The roboticist put a hesitant hand to his chin. "That is anomalous." "Not at all," said R. Daneel suddenly. "Partner Elijah, would you look at the blaster that you took from me?" Baley looked down upon the blaster he held cradled in his left hand. "Break open the charge chamber," urged R. Daneel. "Inspect it." Baley weighed his chances, then slowly put his own blaster on the table beside him. With a quick movement, he opened the robot's blaster. "It's empty," he said blankly. "There is no charge in it," agreed R. Daneel. "If you will look closer, you will see that the blaster has no ignition-bud and cannot be used." Baley said, "You held an uncharged blaster on the crowd?" "I had to have a blaster or fail in my role as plainclothesman," said R. Daneel, "yet to carry a charged and usable blaster might have made it possible for me to hurt a human being by accident, #SI a thing which is, of course, unthinkable. It did not occur to me to explain that to a detective because I thought it was obvious. I still believe it is." Baley stared bleakly at the useless blaster in his hand and said in a low voice, "I think that's all, Dr. Gerrigel. Thank you for your help." " when it came (yeast-nut cake and a rather extravagant slice of fried chicken on cracker) he could only stare at it. Round and round went the currents of his mind. The immediate past stretched behind him like a misty improbable dream, dating back to the moment he had stepped into Julius Enderby's office and found himself suddenly immersed in a nightmare of murder and robotics. Jehoshaphat, it had begun only fifty hours before! Persistently, he had sought the solution in Spacetown. Twice he had accused R. Daneel, once of being a human being in disguise, and once as an admitted and actual robot; each time as a murderer. Twice the accusation had been broken. Against his will, he was being forced to turn his suspicions to the City, and since last night he dared not. Certain questions battered at his conscious mind, but he would not listen. If he heard them, he couldn't help but answer them and he didn't want to face the answers. "Lije! Lije!" A hand shook Baley's shoulder roughly. Baley stirred and said, "What's up, Phil?" Philip Norfis, Plainclothesman C-#, sat down, put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, peering at Baley's face. "What happened to you? Been living on knockout drops lately? You were sitting there with your eyes open and near as I could make out, you were dead." He rubbed his thinning, pale blond hair, and his close-set eyes appraised Baley's cooling lunch greedily. "Chicken!" he said. "It's getting so you can't get it without a doctor's prescription." "Take some," offered Baley listlessly. Decorum won out and Norris said, "Oh, well, I'm going out to eat in a minute. Say, what's doing with the Commish?" "What?" Norris attempted a casual attitude, but his hands were restless. "You know what I mean. You've been living with him ever since he got back. What's up? A promotion in the works?" Baley frowned and felt reality return somewhat at the touch of office politics. Norris had approximately his own seniority and he was bound to watch assiduously for any sign of official preference. Baley said, "No promotion. And if it's the Commissioner you're wanting, I wish I could give him to you!" "Don't get me wrong, Lije. I don't care if you get promoted. I just mean that if you've got any pull with the Commish, how about using 't for the kid?" Baley didn't have to ask what kid. Vincent Barrett, the youngster who had been moved out of his job to make room for R. Sammy, was shuffling up from an unnoticed corner of the room. A skull-cap turned uncomfortably in his hands and the skin over his high cheek-bones creased as he tried to smile. "Hello, Mr. Baley." "Oh, hello, Vince. How're you doing?" "Not so good, Mr. Baley." " grily. Baley thought: He looks lost, half-dead -- declassified. Then, savagely, his lips almost twisting with the force of his emotion, he thought: But what does he want from me? He said, "I'm sorry, kid." What else was there to say? "I keep thinking," said the boy. "Maybe something has come up." Norris moved close and spoke into Baley's ear. "Someone's got to stop this! They're going to push out Chenlow now." "What?" "Haven't you heard?" "No, I haven't. Damn it, he's a C-#. He's got ten years behind him." "I know. But a machine with legs can do his work. Who's next, now?" Young Vince Barrett was oblivious to the whispers. He said out of the depths of his own thinking, "Mr. Baley?" "Yes, Vince?" "You know what they say? They say Lyrane Millane, the dancer, is really a robot." "That's silly." "Is it? They say they can make robots look just like humans; give them a special plastic skin, sort of." Baley thought guiltily of R. Daneel and found no words. He shook his head. The boy said, "Do you suppose anyone will mind if I just walk around? It makes me feel better to see the old place." "Go ahead, kid-" The youngster wandered off. Baley and Norris watched him go. Norris said, "Maybe the Medievalists are right. The hell with robots. Old Earth has a better future without them." people and the uranium running out! What's better about it?" "What if the uranium does run out? We'll import it. Or we'll discover other nuclear processes. We can use sun power and that's can build space stations inside Mercury's orbit to act as energy accumulators. We'll transmit energy to Earth by direct beam." This project was not new o Baley. The speculative fringe of science had been playing with it for a hundred and fifty years at least. What was holding it up was the impossibility, so far, of projecting a beam tight enough without total dissipation, Baley said as much. Norris argued, "When it's necessary, it'll be done." of unlimited energy. Population could continue to increase; the yeast farms could expand; hydroponic culture intensify. Energy was the only thing needed. The raw minerals could be brought in from the uninhabited rocks of the System. If ever water became a bottleneck, more could be brought in from the moons of Jupiter. For that matter, the oceans could be frozen and dragged out into space where they could circle Earth as moonlets of ice. There they would be. always available for use, while the ocean bottoms would represent more land for exploitation; more room to live. Even carbon and oxygen could be maintained and increased on Earth through utilization of the methane atmosphere of Titan and the frozen oxygen of Umbriel. Earth's population could reach was a time when the current have been considered impossible. Even a population of a single able a couple of thousand years ago. There had always been prophets of Malthusian doom in every generation since Medieval days and they had always been proven wrong. What would Fastolfe say? A they would be dependent on imported air and water and an energy supply from complicated away. Earth would be, and remain, staring over the edge of disaster if any single part of the program failed. Disruption for only one hour would be catastrophic now. What would it be then? A minute? A second? Less? Baley said, "I think it would be easier to ship off some of the surplus population." It was more an answer to the picture he had conjured up than to anything Norris had just been saying. "Who'd have us?" said Norris with bitter lightness. "Any uninhabited planet." Norris rose, patted Baley on the shoulder. "Lije, you eat your chicken, and recover. You must be living on knockout pills." Baley watched him leave with a humorless twist to his mouth. Norris would spread the news and it would be weeks before the office comedians would lay off. But at least it got him off the subject of young Vince, or robots, or declassification. He sighed as he put a fork into the now-cold and somewhat soggy chicken, A S Baley finished the last of the yeast-nut, R. Daneel left his own desk (assigned him that morning) and approached. Baley eyed him uncomfortably. "Well?" R. Daneel said, "The Commissioner is not in his office and it is not known when he'll be back. I've told R. Sammy we will use it and that he was to allow no one but the Commissioner to enter." "What are we going to use it for?" "Greater privacy. I'm sure you agree that we must plan our next move. After all, you do not intend to abandon the investigation, do you?" That was precisely what Baley longed to do, but he rose and led the way into Enderby's office. The robot said, "Partner Elijah, since last night, you are not yourself. There is a definite alteration in your mental aura." A horrible thought sprang into Baley's mind. "Are you telepathic?"  "No, of course not," said R. Daneel. Baley's panic ebbed. "Then what the devil do you mean about my mental aura?" "It is difficult to explain. You will recall that I was originally designed to study human psychology for our people back in Spacetown." "I know. You were adjusted to detective work by the simple installation of a justicedesire circuit." Baley did not try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. "Exactly, Elijah. But my original design remains essentially unaltered. I was constructed for the purpose of cerebroanalysis." "For analyzing brain waves?" "Why, yes. It can be done by fieldmeasurements without the necessity of direct electrode contact, if the proper receiver exists. My mind is such a receiver. Is that principle not applied on Earth?" Baley didn't know. He ignored the question and said cautiously, "If you measure the bra inwaves, what do you get out of it?" "Not thoughts, Elijah. I get a glimpse of emotion and, most of all, I can analyze temperament, the underlying drives and attitudes of a man. For instance, it was I who was able to ascertain that Commissioner Enderby was the circumstances ofthe time of the murder." "And they eliminated him as a suspect on your say-so." "It was safe enough to do so. I am a very delicate machine in that respect." Again a thought struck Baley. "Wait! Commissioner Enderby didn't know he was being cerebroanalyzed, did he?" "There was no need to hurt his feelings." "I mean you just stood there and looked at him. No electrodes. No needles and graphs." "Certainly not. I am a selfcontained unit." Baley bit his lower lip in anger and chagrin. It had been the one remaining inconsistency, the one loophole through which a last stab might be made to pin the crime on Spacetown.  the Commissioner had been cerebroanalyzed. One hour later, the Commissioner himself had, with apparent candor, denied any knowledge of the term. Certainly no man could have undergone the shattering experience of electroencephalographic measurements by electrode and graph under the suspicion of murder without an unmistakable impression of what cerebroanalysis must be. But now that discrepancy had evaporated. The Commissioner had been cerebroanalyzed and had never known it. R. Daneel told the truth; so had the Commissioner. "Well," said Baley sharply, "what does cerebroanalysis tell you about me?" "You are disturbed." "That's a great discovery, isn't it? You're damn right I'm disturbed." "Specifically, though, your disturbance is due to a dash between motivations within you. On the one hand, your devotion to the principles of your profession urges you to look deeply into this conspiracy of Earthmen who lay siege to us last night. Another motivation, equally strong, forces you in the opposite direction. This much is apparent in the electric field of your cerebral cells" "My cerebral cells, yeast!" snapped Baley. "Look, I'll tell you why there's no point in investigating your so-called conspiracy. It has nothing to do with the murder. I thought it might have. I'll admit that. Yesterday, in the kitchen, I thought we were in danger. But what happened? They followed us out, were quicks ly lost on the strips and that was that. That was not the action of well-organized and desperatemen. "My own son found out where we were staying easily enpugh. He called the Department. He didn't even have to identify himself. Our alleged conspirators could have done the same if they had really wanted to get us." f "Didn't they?" "Obviously not. If they had wanted riots, they could have started one at the shoe counter, and yet they backed out tamely enough before one man and a blaster. One robot, and a blaster which they must have known you would be unable to fire. They're Medievalists, harmless crackpots. You wouldn't know that, but I should have. And I would have, if it weren't for the fact that this whole business has me thinking in idiotic melodramatic terms. "I tell you I know the type of people that become Medievalists. They're people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed. If you could cerebroanalyze a movement as you do an individual, you would find they are no more capable of murder than Julius Enderby himself." R. Daneel said slowly, "I cannot accept your statements at face value." "What do you mean?" "Your conversion to this view is too sudden. There are certain discrepancies, too. You arranged the appointment with Dr. Gerrigel hours before the evening meal. You did not know of my food sac then and could not have suspected me as the murderer. Why did you call him?" "I suspected you even then." "And last night you talked in your sleep." did I say?" "Merely the one word 'Jessie several times. I believe you were referring to your wife." Baley let his tight muscles loosen. He said shakily, "I had a nightmare. Do you know what that is?" "I do not know by personal experience, of course. The dictionary definition is that it is a bad dream." "And do you know what a dream is?" "Again, the dictionary definition only. It is an illusion of reality experienced during the temporary suspension of con' scious thought which you call sleep." "Sometimes the illusions can seem damned real. Well. I dreamed my wife was in danger. I called her name. That happens. You can take my word for it." "I am only too glad to do so. But it brings up a thought. How did Jessie find out I was a robot?" Baley's forehead went moist again. "We're not going into that again, are we? The rumor -- " "I am sorry to interrupt, partner Elijah, but there is no rumor. If there were, the City would be alive with unrest today. I have checked reports coming into the Department and there simply is no rumor. Therefore, how did your wife find out?" "Jehoshaphat! What are you trying to say? Do you think my wife is one of the members of -- of this -- " "I do, Elijah." Baley gripped his hands together tightly. "Well, she isn't, and we won't discuss that point any further." "This is not like you, Elijah. In the course of duty, you accused me of murder twice." "And is this your way of getting even?" "I am not sure I understand what you mean by the phrase. I approve your readiness to suspect me. You had your reasons. They were wrong, but they might have been right. Equally strong evidence points to your wife." "As a murderess? Jessie wouldn't hurt her worst enemy. She couldn't set foot outside the City. She couldn't -- Why, if you were flesh and blood. I'd -- " "I merely say that she is a member of the conspiracy. I say that she should be questioned." "Not on whatever it is you call your life. Now listen to me. The Medievalists aren't after our blood. It's not the way they do things. But they are trying to get you out of the City. And they're trying to do it by a kind of psychological attack. They're trying to make life unpleasant for you and for me, since I'm with you. They could easily have found out Jessie was my wife, and it was an obvious move for them to let the news leak to her. She's like any other human being. She doesn't like robots. She wouldn't want me to associate with one, especially if she thought it involved danger, and surely they would imply that. I tell you it worked. She begged all night to have me abandon the case or to get you out of the City somehow." "Presumably," said R. Daneel, "you have a very strong urge to protect your wife against questioning. It seems obvious to me that you are constructing this line of argument without really believing it." "What the hell do you think you are?" yelled Baley. "You're not a detective! You're a cerebroanalysis machine like the electroencephalographs we have in this building! You've got arms, legs, a head and can talk, but you're not one inch more than that machine! Putting a lousy circuit into you doesn't make you a detective, so you keep your mouth shut and let me do the figuring out!"  The robot said quietly, "I think it would be better if you lowered your voice, Elijah. Granted that I am not a detective in the sense that you are, I would still like to bring one small item to your attention." "I'm not interested." "If I am wrong, you will tell me so, and it will do no harm. It is only this. Last night you left our room to call Jessie by corridor phone. I suggested that your son go in your place. You told me it was not the custom among Earthmen for a father to send his son into danger. Is it the custom for a mother to do so?" "No, of cour -- " began Baley, and stopped. "You see my point," said R. Daneel. "Ordinarily, if Jessie feared for your safety and wished to warn you, she would risk her own life, not send her son. The fact that she did send Bentley could only mean that she felt that he would be safe while she herself would not. If the conspiracy consisted of people unknown to Jessie, that would not be the case, or at least she would have no reason to think it to be the case. On the other hand, if she were a member of the conspiracy, she would know -- she would know, Elijah -- that she would be watched for and recognized whereas Bentley might get through unnoticed." "Wait now," said Baley, sick at heart. "That's feather-fine reasoning, but -- " The signal on the Commissioner's desk started flickering madly. R. Daneel waited for Baley to answer, but the man could only stare at it helplessly. The robot closed contact. "What is it?" R. Sammy's slurring voice said, "There is a lady here who wishes to see Lije. I told her he busy, but she will not go away. She says her name is Jessie." "Let her in," said R. Daneel calmly, and his brown eyes rose unemotionally to meet the panicky glare of Baley's.  An#'"" Top Sciencefiction Thrillers r m y... j... )a, woo i ra twftW Wjn Mure than a score of tiest tales from a dozen years of Abound In ScienceFiction Magazine. -- # top stories o start line Inventions... of visitors from Outer Space... of Fur Travel Ins... i in Worlds of Tomor w. # (# ets In space Is Inhabited. Your Job is to find out ni)irh one ami contact these " humans" Hut they 're ready with every trick In interVonnegut, JrIn the Age of Kleetronlcs. machines do trerything. Ami when one man rebels, even Ills trial is conducted by... a machine' Wilson Tik srYou are a "contaminated" from u black piiuiue bomb, ami seated of) from civilization -- trapped in a prlmttUe new society! Send No Money -- Moil Postcard ilNE -- Any # of those full-size, full-l length new Science-Finikin Books yours for only #. A # to # value! We make this amazing offer to introduce you to the new .ScienceFiction Book Club. 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All stones primed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and aual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pet. Off. NE of the niorc piteous sounds of our era is the disenchanted cry of Arthur Koestler, perhaps our most noted -- surely our most vocal and persistent -- disappointce. His eruptions are not as frequent as Old Faithful's in Yellowstone National Park, but they are not a bit less predictable. He has honeymooned with one absolute after another, beginning with Communism, and his shrill divorce suits have deafened us as regularly as if he had to follow a schedule. It would seem that he had a little trouble meeting this hypothetical schedule, for. in a recent issue of Harper's Bazaar, he abjectly confesses that he was an "addict" of science fiction while living in America. As far as I had previously known, we've been reading science fiction because we enjoyed the exercise of speculating on possibilities and the excitement of living vicariously all over time and the Universe. Self-deluded fools that we are. we have been, according to Mr. Koestler. victims of a habitforming vice, "like opium, murder thrillers and yoghurt diets." and he informs us that "a dim. inarticulate suspicion... that the human race msy be a biological misfit doomed to extinction (is) one of the reasons for sudden interest in life on other stars." Mr. Koestler might properly have called his indictment I Escaped from Decadent Capitalistic Science Fiction, and maybe he would have if there had been enough material for a book. Certainly such a book might have had a large sale, considering the science fiction in magazines, books, TV and movies. I think he was wise not to try. however -- his wildly pointing finger turns out to be much too wild when one looks around to see where he is pointing. I'll concede that opium ishabitforming. Though I'm less sure about murder thrillers, I won't argue. But the suggestion that there are people who can't take yoghurt or leave it alone is preposterous to anyone who has tasted the stuff. If an insatiable craving for goo with the texture and appearance of library paste and the flavor of brushless shaving cream can be developed, then chalk and tallow should be put on the narcotics list. In terms of evolution, every race must be regarded as a biocontinued on Page #) Tfie deadliest creatures known to Earth were hunting Scott... but the worst of it was that he couldn't defend himself from his friendsi I T was almost dark when he awoke, and lay on the bed, motionless and trenfbling, his heart sinking in the knowledge that he should never have slept. For almost half a minute, eyes wide with fear, he lay in the silence of the gloomy room, straining to hear some sound, some indication of their presence. But the only sound was the barely audible hum of his wristwatch, and the dismal splatter of raindrops on the cobbled street outside. There was no sound to feed his fear, yet he knew then, without a flicker of doubt, that they were going to kill him. He shook his head, trying to clear the sleep from his brain as he turned the idea over and over in his mind. He wondered why he hadn't realized it before -- long before, back when they had first started this horrible, nervewracking cat-and-mouse game. The idea just hadn't occurred to him before. But he knew the game-playing was over. They wanted to kill him now. And he knew that ultimately they would kill him. There was no way for him to escape. bed, painfully, perspiration standing out on his bare back, and he waited for a long moment, listening. How could he have slept, exposing himself so helplessly? Every ounce of his energy, all the skill and wit and shrewdness at his command were necessary in this cruel hunt; yet he had taken the incredibly terrible chance of sleeping, of losing consciousness, leaving himself wide open and helpless against the attack which he knew was inevitable. How much had he lost? How close had they come while he Fearfully he walked to the window, ieered out, and felt his muscles relax a little. The gray, foggy streets were still light. He still had a little time before the terrible night began -- He stumbled across the small, old-fashioned room, sensing that action of some soi; was desperately needed. The bathroom was small; he stared at his face in the battered, stained reflector xinit, shocked at the red-eyed stubblefaced apparition that stared out at him. This is Harry Scott, he thought, thirty-two years old, and at the prime of life -- but not the same Harry Scott that started out on this ridiculous quest so many months ago. This Harry Scott was being hunted like an animal, driven by fear, helpless -- and sure to die, unless he could find an escape, somehow. But there were too many of them for him to escape, and they were too clever, and they knew he knew too much. He stepped into the showershave unit, trying to relax, to collect his radng thoughts -- above all, trying to stay this fear that burned through his mind, driving him to panic and desperation. The memory of the last hellish night was too stark in his mind to allow relaxation -- the growing fear, the silent, desperate hunt through the night; the realization that their numbers were increasing; his frantic search for a hiding place in the New City; and finally his panic-stricken, pell-mell flight down into the alleys and cobbled streets and crumbling frame buildings of the Old City... Even more horrible, the friends who had turned on him, who turned out to be like them. Back in the bedroom, he lay down again, his body still tense. There were sounds in the building, footsteps moving around on the floor overhead, a door banging somewhere down on the street. With every sound, every breath of noise, his muscles tightened still further, freezing him in fear. His own breath was shallow and rapid in his ears as he lay, listening, waiting. F only something would happen! He wanted to scream, to bang his head against the wall, to run about the room smashing his fist into doors, breaking every piece of furniture. It was the waiting, the eternal waiting, and running, waiting some more, feeling the net drawing tighter and tighter as he waited, feeling the measured, unhurried tread behind him. always following, coming closer and closer, as though he were a mouse on a string, twisting and jerking helplessly. If only they would move, do something he could counter. But he wasn't even sure any more that he could detect them. And they were so careful never to move into the open. He jumped up feverishly, moved to the window, peered between the slats of the dusty, oldfashioned blind out at the street below. An empty street at first... wet, gloomy. He saw no one. Then he caught the flicker of light in an entry several doors down and across the street, as a dark figure sparked a cigarette to life, and Harry felt the chill run down his back again. Still there, then, still waiting, a hidden figure, always present, always waiting... Harry's eyes scanned the rest of the street rapidly. Two threewheelers rumbled by, their rubber hissing on the wet street. One of them carried the blue-andwhite of the Old City police, but the car didn't slow up or hesitate as it passed the dark figure in the doorway. And they would never help him anyway, Harry thought bitterly. He had tried that before, and met with ridicule and threats. There would be no help from the police in the Old City. And then he saw another figure, coming around a corner. There was something vaguely familiar about the tall body and broad shoulders as the man walked across the wet street, something Harry vaguely recognized from somewhere during the spinning madness of the past few weeks. The man's eyes turned up toward the window for the briefest instant, then returned steadfastly to the street. Oh, they were sly, so damned sly! You could never spot them looking at you, never for sure, but they were always there, always nearby. And there was no one he could trust any longer, no one to whom he could turn. Not even George Webber. ered that possibility as he watched the figure move down the street. True, Dr. Webber had started him out on this search in the first place. But even Webber would never believe what he had found. Webber was a scientist, a researcher. What could he do-o to Webber and tell him that there were men alive in the world who were not men, who were somehow men and something more? Could he walk into Dr. Webber's office in the Hoffman Medical Center, walk through the gleaming bright corridors, past the shining metallic doors, and tell Dr. Webber that he had found people alive in the world who could actually see in four dimensions, live in four dimensions, think in four dimensions? Could he explain to Dr. Webber that he knew this simply because in some way he had sensed them, and traced them, and discovered them; that he had not one iota of proof, except that he was being followed by them, hunted by them, even now, in a room in the Old City, waiting for them to strike him down? He shook his head, almost sobbing. That was what was so horrible. He couldn't tell Webber, because Webber would be certain that he had gone mad, just like the rest. He couldn't tell anyone, he couldn't do anything. He could just wait, and run, and wait -- It was almost dark now and the creaking of the old board house intensified the fear that tore at Harry Scott's mind. Tonight was the night; he was sure of it. Maybe he had been foolish in coming down here to the slum area, where the buildings were relatively unguarded, where anybody could come and go as he pleased. But the New City had hardly been safer, even in the swankiest private chamber in the highest building. They had had agents there, too, hunting him, driving home the bitter lesson of fear they had to teach him. Now he was afraid enough; now they were ready to kill him. Down below he heard a door bang, and froze, his back against the wall opposite the door. There were footsteps, quiet voices, barely audible. His whole body shook and his eyes slid around to the window. Still the figure in the doorway waited -- but the other figure was not visible. He heard the steps on the stair, ascending slowly, steadily, a tread that paced itself with the powerful throbbing of his own pulse. Then the telephone screamed out -- TE gasped. The footsteps were on the floor below, moving steadily upward. The telephone rang again and again; the shrill jangling filled the room insistentlyi He waited until he couldn't wait any longer. Then his hand fumbled in a pocket and leveled a tiny, dull-gray metal object at the door. With the other hand, he took the receiver from the hook. "Harry! Is that you?' His throat was like sandpaper and the words came out in a rasp. "What is it?' "Harry, this is George -- George Webber -- " His eyes were glued to the door. "All right. What do you want?" "You've got to come talk to us, Harry. We've been waiting for weeks now. You promised us. We've to talk to you." Harry still watched the door, but his breath came easier. The footsteps moved with ridicilous slowness up the stairs, down the hall toward the room. "What do you want me to do? They've come to kill m -- " There was a long pause. 'Tlarry, are you sure?" "Dead sure." "Can you make a break for it?" Harry blinked. "I could try. But it won't do any good -- " "Well, at least try, Harry. Get here to the Hoffman Center. We'll help you all we can -- " "I'll try." Harry's words were hardly audible as he set the receiver down with a trembling hand. The room was silent. The footsteps had stopped. A wave of panic passed up Harry's spine; he crossed the room, threw open the door, stared up and down the hall, unbelieving. The hall was empty. He started down toward the stairs at a dead run, and then, too late, saw the faint golden glow of a Parkinson Field across the dingy corridor. He gasped in fear, and screamed out once as he struck it. And then, for seconds stretching into hours, he heard his scream echoing and re-echoing down long, bitter miles of hollow corridor. II G eorge Webber leaned back in the'Soft chair, turning a quizzical glance toward the younger man across the room. He lit a long black cigar. "Well?" His heavy voice boomed out in the small room. "Now that we've got him here, what do you think?" The younger man glanced uncomfortably through the glass wall panel into the small dark room beyond. In the dimness, he could barely make out the still form on the bed, grotesque with the electrode-vernier apparatus already in place at its temples. Dr. Manelli looked away sharply, and leafed through the thick sheaf of chart papers ;ih his hand. "I don't know," he said dully. "I just don't know what to think." The other man's laUgh seemed to rise from the depths of his huge chest. His heavy face creased into a thousand wrinkles. Dr. Webber Was a large man, his broad shoulders carrying a suggestion of immense power that matched the intensity of his dark, wide-set eyes. He watched Dr. Manelli's discomfort grow, saw the younger doctor's ears grow red, and the almost cruel lines in his face were masked as he laughed still louder, "Trouble with you, Frank, you just don't have the courage of your convictions." "Well, I don't see anything so funny about it!" Manelli's eyes were angry. "The man has a suspicious syndrome -- so you've followed him, and spied on him for weeks on end, which isn't exactly highest ethical practice in collecting a history. I still can't see how you're justified -- " Dr. Webber snorted, tossing his cigar down on the desk with disgust, "The man is insane. That's my justification. He's out of touch with reality -- he's wandered into a wild, impossible, fantastic dream world. And' we've got to get him out of jt, because what he knows, what 'he's trying to hide from us, is so incredibly dangerous that we don't dare let him go." The big man stared at Manelli, his dark eyes flashing. "Can't you sec that? Or would you rather sit back and let Harry Scott go the way that Paulus and Wineberg and the others went?" "But to use the Parkinson Field on him -- " Dr. Manelli shook his head hopelessly. "He'd offered to come over, George. We didn't need to use it." "Sure, he offered to come -- fine, fine. But supposing he changed his mind on the way? For all we know, he had us figured into his paranoia, too, and never would have come near the Hoffman Center." Dr. Webber shook his head. "We're not playing a game any more, Frank. Get that straight. I thought it was a game a couple of years ago, when we first started. But it ceased to be a game when men like Paulus and Wineberg walked in sane, healthy men, and came out blubbering idiots. That's no game any more. We're onto something big. And, if Harry Scott can lead us to the core of it, then I can't care too much what happens to Harry Scott." walked to the window, and looked down over the bright. clean buildings of the Hoffman Medical Center. Out across the terraced park that surrounded the glassed towers and shining metal of the Center rose the New City, tier upon tier of smooth, functional architecture, a city of dreams built up painfully out of the rubble of the older, ruined city. "You could kill him," the young man said finally. "The psycho-integrator isn't any standard interrogative technique; it's dangerous and treacherous. You never know for sure just what you're doing when you dig down there in a man's brain tissue with those little electrode probes... "But we can learn the truth about Harry Scott," Dr. Webber broke in. "Six months ago, Harry Scott was working with us, a quiet, affable, pleasant young fellow, extremely intelligent, intensely cooperative. He was just the man we needed to work with us, an engineer who could take our data and case histories, study them, and subject them to a completely non-medical analysis. Oh, we had to have it done -- the problem's been with us for a hundred years now, growing ever since the #s and #s -- insanity in the population, growing, spreading without rhyme or reason, insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of our civilized life." The big man blinked at Manelli. "Harry Scott was the new approach. We were too close to the problem. We needed a nonmedical outsider to take a look, to tell us what we were missing. So Harry Scott walked into the problem, and then abruptly lost contact with us. We finally track him down and find him gone, out of touch with reality- -- H#n the same wretched road that all the others went. With Harry, it's paranoia. He's being persecuted; he has the whole world against him. but most important -- the factor we don't dare overlook -- he's no longer working on the problem" Manelli shifted uneasily. "I suppose that's right -- " "Of course it's right!" Dr. Webber's eyes flashed. "Harry found something in those statistics. Something about the data, or the case histories, or something Harry Scott himself dug up opened a door for him to go through, a door that none of us ever dreamed existed. We don't know what he found on the other side of that door. Oh, we know what he thinks he found, all this garbage about people that look like everyone else, but who walk through walls when nobody's looking, who think around corners instead of in straighjt-line logic. But what he really found there, we don't have any way of telling. Wc just know that whatever he really found is something new, something unsuspected -- something so dangerous it can drive an intelligent man into the wildest delusions of paranoid persecution -- " A new light appeared in Dr. Manelli's eyes as he faced the other doctor. "Wait a minute," he said softly. "The integrator is an experimental instrument, too." Dr. Webber smiled slyly. "Now we're beginning to think," he said. "But you'll see only what Scott himself believes. And he thinks his story is true." "Then we'll have to break his story." "Break it?" "Certainly. For some reason, this delusion of persecution is far safer for Harry Scott than facing what he really found out. What we've got to do is to make this delusion Jess safe than the truth." The room was silent for a long moment. Manelli lit a cigarette, his fingers trembling. "Let's hear it." "We're really going to persecute Harry Scott -- as he's never been persecuted before." Ill A T first he thought he was at the bottom of a deep well and he lay quite still, his eyes clamped shut, wondering where he was and how he could pKssibly have come there. He could feel the dampness and chill of the stone floor under him, and nearby he heard the damp, insistent drip of water splashing against stone. He felt his muscles tighten as the dripping sound forced itself against his senses. Then he opened his eyes. His first impulse was to scream out wildly, in unreasoning, suffocating fear. He fought it down, struggling to sit up in the blackness, his whole mind turned in bitter, hopeless hatred at the ones who had hunted him for so long, and now had trapped him. Why? Why did they torture him? Why not kill him outright, have done with it? He shuddered, and struggled to his feet, staring about him in horror. It was not a well, but a little room, circular, with little rivulets of stale water running down the granite walls. The ceiling closed low over his head, and the only source of light came from the single doorway opening into a long, low stone passageway. Wave after wave of panic rose into Harry's throat. Each time he fought down the urge to scream, to lie down on the ground and cover his face with his hands and scream in helpless fear. How could they have known the horror that lay in his own mind, the horror of darkness, of damp, slimy walls and scurrying rodents, of the clinging, stale humidity of dungeon passageways? He himself had seldom recalled it, except in his most hideous dreams, yet he had known such fear as a boy, so many years ago -- and now he was in it. They had known somehow and used it against him. Why? He sank down on the floor, his head in his hands, trying to think straight, to find some clue in the turmoil bubbling through his mind that would tell him what had happened. He had started down the hallway from his room, to find Dr. Webber and tell him about the other people -- He stopped short, looked up wide-eyed. Had he been going to Dr. Webber? Had he actually decided to go? Perhaps -- yes, perhaps he had, though Webber would only laugh at such a ridiculous story. But the not-men who had hunted him would not laugh ; to them, it would not be funny. They knew that it was true. And they knew he knew it was true. But why not kill him? Why this torture? Why this horrible persecution that dug into the depths of his own nightmares to haunt him? His breath came fast and a chilly sweat broke out on his forehead. Where was he? Was this some long forgotten, vault in the depths of the Old City? Or was this another place, another world, perhaps, that the not-men, with their impossible powers, had created to torture him? hall, saw the turn at the end, saw the light which seemed to come from the end; and then in an instant he was running down the damp passageway, his pulse pounding at his temples, until he could hardly gasp enough breath as he ran. Finally he reached the turn in the corridor, where the light was brighter, and he swung around to stare at the source of the light, a huge, burning, smoky torch which hung from the wall. Even as he looked at it, the torch went out, shutting him into inky blackness. The only sound at first was the desperation of his own breath; then he heard little scurrying sounds around his feet, and screamed involuntarily as something sleek and four-footed jumped at his chest with snapping jaws. Shuddering, he fought the thing off, his fingers closing on wiry fur as he caught and squeezed. The thing went limp, and suddenly melted in his hands, and he heard it splash as it struck the damp ground at his feet -- What were they doing to his mind? He screamed out in horror, then followed the echoes of his own scream as he ran down the stone corridor, blindly, slipping on the wet stone floor, falling on his knees into inches of brackish water, scraping back to his feet with an uncontrollable convulsion of fear and loathing, only to run more -- The corridor suddenly broke into two and he stopped short. He didn't know how far, or how long, he had run, but it suddenly occurred to him that he was still alive, still safe. Only his mind was under attack, only his mind was afraid, teetering on the edge of control. And this maze of dungeon tunnels -- where could such a thing exist, so perfectly outfitted to horrify him, so neatly fitting into his own pattern of childhood fears and terrors; where could such a very individual attack on his sanity have sprung -- ?  Except from his own mind. For an instant, he saw a flicker of light, thought he grasped the edge of a concept previously obscure to his mind. He stared around him, at the mist swirling down the damp, dark corridors, and thought of the rat that had melted in his hand Then suddenly his mind was ahre, searching through his experience with the strange not-men he had learned to detect, trying to remember everything he had learned and deduced about them before they began their brutal persecution. They were men, and they looked like men, but they were different. They had other properties of mind, other capabilities that men did not have. They were not-men, then. They could exist, and co-exist, two people in one frame, one person known, realized by all who saw, the other one concealed except from those who learned how to look. They could use their minds; they could rationalize correctly; they could use their curious fourdimensional knowledge to bring them to answers no three-dimensional man could reach -- But they couldn't project into men's minds.' down the misty tunnels. They were clever, these creatures, and powerful. They had done their work of fear and terror on his mind skillfully, since they had discovered that he knew them. But they were limited, too; they couldn't make things happen that were not true -- fantasies, illusions... Yet this dungeon was an illusion. It bad to be. He cursed and started down the right-hand corridor, his heart sinking. There was no such place and he knew it. He was walking in a dream, a fantasy that had no substance, that could do no more than frighten him, drive him insane; yet he must already have lost his mind to be in such an illusion. Why had he delayed? Why hadn't he gone to the Hoffman Center, laid the whole story before Dr. Webber and Dr. Manelli at the very first, told them what he had found? True, they might have thought him insane, but they wouldn't have put him to torture. They might even have believed him enough to investigate what he told them, and then the cat would have been out of the bag. The tale would have been incredible, but at least his mind would have been safe -- He turned down another corridor, walked suddenly into waist-deep water, so cold it numbed his legs, and he stopped again to force back the tendrils of unreasoning horror that brushed his mind. Nothing could really harm him. He would merely wait until his mind finally reached a balance again. There might be no end; it might be a ghastly trap, but he would wait... Strangely, the mist was becoming greenish in color as it swirled K;W i .V toward him in the damp vaulted passageway. His eyes began watering a little and the lining of his nose started to bum. He stopped short, newly alarmed, and stared at the walls, rubbing the tears away to clear his vision. The greenish-yellow haze grew thicker, catching his eyes and burning like a thousand furies, ripping into his throat until he' was choking and coughing, as though great knives sliced through his lungs. He tried to scream, and started running, blindly. Each gasping breath was an agony as the blistering gas dug deeper and deeper into his lungs. Reason departed from him; he was screaming incoherently as he stumbled up a stony ramp, crashed into a wall, spun around and smashed blindly into another. Then something caught at his shirt. He felt the heavy planks and pounded iron scrollwork of a huge door, and threw himself upon it, wrenching at the rusty latch until the door swung open with a screech of rusty hinges; and he fell forward on his face. The door swung shut behind him. He lay face down, panting and sobbing in the stillness. collar, jerking him rudely to his feet, and he opened his eyes. Across the dim, vaulted room he could see the shadowy form of a man, a big man, with broad chest and powerful shoulders, a man whose rich voice Harry almost recognized, but whose face was deep in shadow. And as Harry wiped the tears from his tortured eyes, he heard the man's voice rumble out at him: "Perhaps you've had enough now to change your mind about telling us the truth." Harry stared, not quite comprehending. "The -- the truth?" The man's voice was harsh, cutting across the room impatiently. "The truth, I said. The problem, you fool -- what you saw, what you learned -- you know perfectly well what I'm referring to. But we'll swallow no more of this silly four-dimensional superman tale, so don't bother to start it." "I -- I don't understand you. It's -- it's true -- " Again he tried to peer across the room. "Why are you hunting me like this? What are you trying to do to me?" "We want the truth. We want to know what you saw." "But -- but you're what I saw -- You know what I found out -- I mean -- " He stopped, his face going white. His hand went to his mouth, and he stared still harder. "Who are you?" he whispered. "The truth!" the man roared. "You'd better be quick, or you'll be back in the corridor." "Webherr "Your last chance, Harry." Without warning, Harry was across the room, flying across the desk, crashing into the big man's chest. A stream of fury flew from his mouth as he fought, driving his fists into the powerful chest, wrenching at the thick, flailing arms of the startled man. "It's you!" he screamed. "It's you that's been torturing me. It's you that's been hunting me down all this time, not the other people, you and your crowd of ghouls have been at my throat!" He threw the big man off balance. dropped heavily on him as he fell back to the ground, glared down into the other's angry brown eyes. And then, as though he had never been there at all, the big man vanished, and Harry sat back on the floor, his whole body shaking with frustrated sobs as his mind twisted in anguish. He had been wrong, completely wrong -- eversince he had discovered the not-men. Because he had thought they had been the ones who hunted and tortured him for so long. And now he knew how far he had been wrong. For the face of the shadowy man, the man behind the nightmare he was living, was. the face of Dr. George Webber. "'YT'OU'RE a fool," said Dr.  Manelli sharply, as he turned away from the sleeping figure on the bed to face the older man. "Of all the ridiculous things, to let him connect you with this!" The young doctor turned abruptly and sank down in a chair, glowering at Dr. Webber. "You haven't gotten to first base yet, but you've just given Scott enough evidence to free himself from integrator control altogether, if he gives it any thought. But I suppose you realize that." "Nonsense," Dr. Webber retorted. "He had enough information to do that when we first started. I'm no more worried now than I was then. I'm sure he doesn't know enough about the psycho-integrator to be able to voluntarily control the patientoperator relationship to any degree. Oh, no -- he's safe enough. But you've missed the whole point of that little interview." Dr. Webber grinned at Manelli. "I'm afraid I have. It looked to me like useless bravado." "The persecution, man, the persecufon.' He's shifted his sights! Before that interview, the not-men were torturing him, remember? Because they were afraid he would report his findings to me, of course. But now it's I that's against him." The grin widened. "You see where that leads?" "You're talking almost as though you believed this story about a different sort of people among us." Dr. Webber shrugged. "Perhaps I do." "Oh, come now, George." Dr. Webber's eyebrows went up and the grin disappeared from his face. "Harry Scott believes it, Frank. We mustn't forget that, or miss its significance. Before Harry started this investigation of his, he wouldn't have paid any attention to such nonsense. But he believes it now." "But Harry Scott is insane. You said it yourself." "Ah, yes," said Dr. Webber. "Insane. Just like the others who started to get somewhere along those lines of investigation. Try to analyze the growing incidence of insanity in the population and you yourself go insaneYou've got to be crazy to be a psychiatrist. It's an old joke, but it isn't very funny any more. And it's too much for coincidence. "And then consider the nature of the insanity -- a full-blown paranoia -- oh, it's amazing. A cunning organization of men who are nof-men, a regular fairy story, all straight from Harry Scott's agile young mind. But now it's we who are persecuting him, and he still believes his fairy tale -- " "So?" Dr. Webber's eyes flashed angrily. "It's too neat, Frank. It's clever, and it's powerful, whatever we've run up against. But I think we've got an ace in the hole. We have Harry Scott." "And you really think he'll lead us somewhere?" Dr. Webber laughed. "That door I spoke of that Harry peeked through -- I think he'll go back to it again. I think he's started to open that door already. And this time I'm going to follow him through." IV TT seemed incredible, yet Harry Scott knew he had not been mistaken. It had been Dr. Webber's face he had seen -- a face no one forgot, an unmistakable face. And that meant that it had been Dr. Webber who had been persecuting him. But why? He had been going to report to Webber when he had run into that golden field in the rooming-house hallway. And then suddenly things had changed -- Harry felt a chill reaching to his fingers and toes. Yes, something had changed, all right. The attack on him had suddenly become butcherous, cruel, sneaking into his mmd somehow to use his most dreaded nightmares against him. There was no telling what new horrors might be waiting for him. But he knew that he would lose his mind unless he could find an escape. He was on his feet, his heart pounding. He had to get out of here, wherever he was. He had to get back to town, back to the city, back to where people were again. If he could find a place to hide, a place where he could rest, he could try to think his way out of this ridiculous maze, or at least try to understand it. He wrenched at the door to the passageway, started through, end smashed face-up against a solid brick wall. He cried out and jumped back from the wall. Blood trickled from his nose. The door was walled up, the mortar dry and hard. Frantically, he glanced around the room. There were no other doors, only the row of tiny windows around the ceiling of the room, pale, ghostly squares of light. He pulled the chair over to the windows, peered out through the cobwebbed openings to the corridor beyond. It was not the same hallway as before, but an old, dirty building corridor, incredibly aged, with bricks sagging away from the walls. At the end he could see stairs, and even the faintest hint of sunlight coming from above. Wildly, he tore at the masonry of the window, chipping away at the soggy mortar with his fingers until he could squeeze through the opening. He fell to the floor of the corridor outside. It was much colder and the silence was no longer so intense. He seemed to feel, rather than hear, the surging power, the rumble of many machines, the little, almost palpable vibrations from far above him. He started in a dead run down the musty corridor to the stairs and began to climb them, almost stumbling over himself in his eagerness. After several flights, the brick walls gave way to cleaner plastic, and suddenly a brightly lighted corridor stretched before him. Panting from the climb, Harry ran down the corridor to the end, wrenched open a door, and looked out anxiously. H e was almost stunned by the bright light. At first he couldn't orient himself as he stared down at the metal ramp, the moving strips of glowing metal carrying the throngs of people, sliding along the thoroughfare before him, unaware of him watching, unaware of any change from the usual. The towering buildings before him rose to unbelievable heights, bathed in ever-changing rainbow colors. and he felt his pulse thumping in his temples as he gaped. He was in the New City, of that there was no doubt. This was the part of the great metropolis which had been built again since the devastating war that had nearly wiped the city from the Earth a decade before. These were the moving streets, the beautiful residential apartments, following the modem neo-functional patterns and participational design which had completely altered the pattern of city living. The Old City still remained, of course -- the slums, the tenements, the skid-rows of the metropolis -- but this was the teeming heart of the city, a new home for men to live in. And this was the stronghold where the not-men could be found, too. The thought cut through Harry's mind, sending a tremor up his spine. He had found them here; he had uncovered his first clues here, and discovered them; and even now his mind was filled with the horrible, paralysing fear he had felt that first night when he had made the discovery. Yet he knew now that he dared not go back where he had come from. At least he could understand why the not-men might have feared and persecuted him, but he could not understand the horrible assault that Dr. Webber had unleashed. And somehow he found Dr. Webber's attack infinitely more frightening. He seemed to be safe here, though, at least for the moment. Q uickly he moved down onto the nearest moving ramp, heading toward the living section of the New City. He knew where he could go there, where he could lock himself in, a place where he could think, possibly find a way to fight off Dr. Webber's attack of nightmares. He settled back on the seat, watching the city moving past him for several minutes before he noticed the curious shadowform which seemed to whisk out of his field of vision every time he looked -- They were following him again! He looked around wildly as the strip moved swiftly through the cool evening air. Far above, he could see the shimmering, iridescent screen which still stood to protect the New City from the devastating virus attacks which might again strike down from the skies without warning. And far ahead he could see the magnificent "bridge" formed by the strip crossing over to the apartment area, where the thousands who worked in the New City were returning to their homes. And still somecfne was following him...  Then he heard the sound, so close to his ear he jumped, yet so small he could hardly identify it as a human voice. "What was it you found, Hdrry? What did you discover? Better tell, better tell -- " He swung around, staring, seeing nothing but the nearby passengers, and the dark, intangible shadow which he couldn't quite see. "Better tell us, Harry -- better tell. Unless you want the nightmares to start again... He shook his head, fear rising up in his chest. Voices in his ear, illusions... they couldn't be happening. He tried stuffing his fingers into his ears, but the voice followed him, even through his fingers. "The nightmares, Harry -- you haven't even tasted horror yet -- unless you tell us what you discovered -- " "No, no!" The words burst from his lips inadvertently. A dozen faces turned sharply toward him, a dozen pair of eyes shifted away in embarrassment. He cursed himself under his breath, and tried to sink back in the seat, tried to relax and regain control of his trembling fingers. Above all, he knew that he dared not attract attention. arouse suspicion among the passers-by. There was too much insanity in the world for the authorities' to take any chance on outbreaks of violence. Any suspicious action, he knew, would bring a quick arrest and an examination that niight put him in an asylum. And that chance he dared not take, not until he found some way to protect himself from Webber's attack. "Better tell us, Harry -- better tell -- " strip coming, far ahead, a great, gaping rent in the metal fabric of the swiftly moving road, as if a huge blade were slicing it down the middle. Harry's hand went to his mouth, choking back a scream as the hole moved with incredible rapidity down the center of the strip, swallowing up whole rows of the seats, moving straight toward his own. He glanced in fright over the side just as the strip moved out on the "bridge" and he gasped as he saw the towering canyons of buildings fall far below the road, saw thq seats tumble end over end, heard the sounds of screaming blend into the roar of air by his cars. Then the rift screamed by him with a demoniac whine and he sank back into his seat, gasping as the two cloven halves of the strip clanged back together again. He stared at the people around him on the strip and they stared back at him, mildly, unperturbed, and returned to their evening papers as the strip passed through the first local station on the other side of the "bridge." And then Harry Scott was on his feet, moving swiftly across the slower strips for the exit channels. He nQted the station stop vaguely, but his only thought now was speed, desperate speed, fear-driven speed to put into action the plan that had suddenly burst into his mind. He knew that he had reached his limit. He had come to a point beyond which he couldn't fight alone. Somehow, Webber had burrowed into his brain, laid his mind open to attacks of nightmare and madness that he could never hope to fight. Facing this alone, he would lose his mind. His only hope was to go for help to the ones he feared only slightly less, the ones who had minds capable of fighting back for him. He crossed under the moving strips and boardePCbe one going back into the heart of the city again. Somewhere there, he hoped, he would find the help he needed. Somewhere back in that city were men he had discovered who were men and something more -- the blood pressure of the sleeping figure on the bed; then turned to the other man. "He'll be dead soon,' he snapped. "Another few minutes now is all it'll take. Just a few more." "Absurd. There's nothing in these stimuli that can kill him." George Webber sat tense, his eyes fixed on the pale fluctuating screen near the head of the bed. "His own mind can kill him! He's on the run now; you've broken him loose from his nice safe paranoia. His mind is retreating, nmning back to some other delusion. lts escaping to the safety his fantasy people can afford him, these not-men he thinks about -- " "Yes, yes," agreed Dr. Webber, his eyes eager. "Oh, he's on the run now." "But what will he do when he finds there aren't any not-men' to save him? What will he do then?" Webber looked up, frowning and grim. "Then we'll know what he found through the dark door that he opened, that's what -- " "No, you're wrong! He'll die. He'll find nothing and the shock will kill him. My God, Webber, you can't tamper with a man's mind like this and hope to save his life! You're obsessed; you've always been obsessed by this impossible search for something in our society, some undiscovered factor to account for the mental illness, the divergent minds -- but you can't kill a man to trace it down!" "It's too neat," said Webber. "He comes back to tell us the truth, and we call him insane. We say he's paranoid, throw him in restraint, place him in an asylum -- and we never know what he found. The truth is too incredible; when we hear it, it must be insanity we're hearing -- " The big doctor laughed outright, jabbing his thumb at the screen. "This isn't insanity we're seeing. Oh, no -- this is the answer we're following. I won't stop now. I've waited too long for this show." "Well, I stay stop it while he's still alive." Dr. Webber's eyes were deadly. "Get out, Frank," he said softly. "I'm not stopping now." His eyes returned to the screen, to the bobbing figure that the psycho-integrator traced on the fluorescent backgroind. Twenty years of search had led him here, and now he knew the end was at hand. V TT was a wild, nightmarish journey. At every step, Harry's senses betrayed him: his wristgreen snake that snapped at his wrist; the air was full of snarling creatures that threatened him at every step, but he fought them off, knowing that they would harm him far less than panic would. He had no idea where to hunt, nor whom to try to reach, but he knew they were there in the New City, and somehow he knew they would help him, if only he could And them. He stepped off the moving strip as soon as the lights of the center of the city were clear below, and stepped into the selfoperated lift that sped down to ground level. From the elevator, he moved onto one of the long, honeycombed concourses. Ailed with passing shoppers who stared at the colorful, enticing threedimensional displays. At one of the intersections  ahead, he spotted a visiphone station, and dropped onto the little scat before the screen. There had been a number, if only he could recall it... But as he started to dial, the silvery screen shattered into a thousand sparkling glass chips, showering the floor with crystal and sparks. Harry cursed, grabbed the hand instrument, and jangled frantically for the operator. Before she could answer, the instrument grew warm in his hand, then hot and soft, like wax. Slowly, it melted and ran down his arm. He bolted out into the stream ' of people again, trying desperately to draw some comfort from the crowd around him. He felt utterly alone; he had to contact the notmen who were in the city warn them, before they spotted him, of the attack he carried with him. If he were leading his pursuer, he could expect no mercy from the ones whose help he sought. He knew the lengths to which they would go to remain undetected in the society around them. Yet he had to find them. In the distance, he saw a figure waiting, back against one of the show windows. Harry stopped short, ducked into a doorway, and peered out fearfully. Their eyes locked for an instant; then the figure moved on. Harry felt a jolt of horror surge through him. Dr. Webber hunting him in person! He ducked out of the doorway, turned and ran madly in the opposite direction, searching with his eyes for an up escalator he could catch. Behind him he heard shots, heard the angry whine of tiny missiles past his ear. He breathed in great, gasping sobs as he found an almost empty escalator, and bounded up it four steps at a time. Below, he could see Webber coming too, his broad shoulders forcing their way relentlessly through the mill of people. ' Panting, Harry reached the top, checked his location against a wall map, and started down the long ramp which led toward the building he had tried to call. A nother shot broke out behind him. The wall alongside powdered away, leaving a gaping hole. On impulse, he leaped into the hole, running agilely through to the rear of the building as the weakened wall swayed and crumbled into a heap of rubble just as Webber reached the place where Harry had entered. Harry breathed a sigh of relief and raced up the stairs of the building to reach a ramp on another level. He turned his eyes toward the tall building at the end of the concourse. There he could hide and relax and try, somehow, to make a contact -- Someone fell into step beside him, and took his arm gently but firmly. Harry jerked away, turning terrified eyes to the one who had joined him. "Quiet," said the man. steering him over toward the edge of the concourse. "Not a sound. You'll be all right." Harry felt a tremor pass through his mind, the barest touching of mental fingertips, a recognition that sent a surge of eager blood throuh his heart. He stopped short, facing the man. "I'm being followed," he gasped. "You can't take me anywhere you don't want Webber to follow, or you'll be in terrible danger -- " The stranger shrugged and smiled briefly. "You're not here. You're in a psycho-integrator. It can hurt you. if you let it. But it can't hurt me." He stepped up his pace slightly, and in a moment they turned abruptly into a darkened cul-de-sac. Quite suddenly, they were moving throuih the wall of the lobby of the tall building. Harry gasped, but the stranger led him without a sound toward the elevator, stepped aboard with him, and sped upward, the silence broken only by the whish-whishwhish of the passing floors. Finally they stepped out into a quiet corridor and down through a small office door. A man sat behind the desk in the office, his face quiet, his eyes very wide and dark. He hardly glanced at Harry, but turned his eyes to the other man. "Set?" he asked. "Couldn't miss now." The man nodded and looked at' last at Harry. "You're upset," he murmured. "What's bothering you?" "Webber," said Harry hoarsely. "He's following me here. He'll spot you. I tried to warn you before I came, but I couldn't -- " HE man at the desk smiled. "Webber again, eh? Our old friend Webber. That's all right. Webber's at the end of his tether. There's nothing he can do to stop us. He's trying to attack with force, and he fails to realize that time and thought are on our side. The time when force would have succeeded against us is long past. But now there are many of us -- almost as many as not." Harry stared shrewdly at the man behind the desk. "Then why are you so afraid of Webber?" he asked. "Afraid?" "You know you are. Long ago you threatened me -- if I reported to him. You watched me, played with me -- Why are you afraid of him?" The man sighed. "Webber is premature. We are stalling for time, that's all. We wait. We have grown from so very few, back in the #s and #s -- but the time for quiet usurpation of power has not quite arrived. But men like Webber force our hand, discover us, try to expose us -- " Harry Scott's face was white, his hands shaking. "And what do you do to them?" "We -- nleal with them." "And those like me?" The man smiled lopsidedly. "Those like Paulus and Wineberg and the rest -- they're happy, really, like little children. But one like you is so much more useful." He pointed almost apologetically to the small screen on his desk. Harry looked at it, realization dawning. He watched the huge, broad-shouldered figure moving down the hallway toward the door. "Webber was dangerous to you?" "Unbelievably dangerous. So dangerous we would use any means... Suddenly the door burst open and Webber stood in the door, a triumphant Webber, face flushed, eyes wide, as he stared at the man behind the desk. The man smiled back and said, "Come on in, George. We've been waiting for you." Webber stepped through the door. "Manelli, you fooll" There was a blinding flash as he crossed the threshold. A faint crackle of sound reached Harry's ears: then, quite suddenly, the world blacked out... It might have been minutes, or hours, or days. The man who had been behind the desk was leaning over Harry, smiling dowm at him, gently bandaging the trephine wounds at his temples. "Gently," he said, as Harry tried to sit up. "Don't try to move. You've been through a rough time." Harry peered up at him. "You're -- not Dr. Webber." "No. I'm Dr. Manelli. Dr. Webber's been called away -- an accident. He'll be some time recovering. I'll be taking care of you." Vaguely, Harry was aware that something was peculiar, something not quite as it should be. Then the answer dawned on him. "The statistical analysis!" he exclaimed. "I was supposed to get some data from Dr. Webber about an analysis -- something about rising insanity rates." Dr. Manelli looked blank. "Insanity rates? You must be mistaken. You were brought here for an immunity examination, nothing more. But you can check with Dr. Webber -- when, he gets back." VI G eorge Webber sat in the darkness of the little room, trembling, listening, his eyes wide in the thick, misty darkness. He knew it would be a matter of time now. He couldn't run much farther. He hadn't seen them, true. Oh, they had been very clever, but they thought they were dealing with a fool, and they weren't. He knew they'd been following him; he'd known it for a long time now. It was just as he had been telling the man downstairs the night before: They were everywhere -- your neighbor upstairs, the butcher on the corner, your own son or daughter, maybe even the man you were talking to -- ev'erywiere And of course he had to warn as many people as he possibly could before they caught him, throttled him off, as they had threatened to if he talked to anyone. If only the people would listen to him when he told them how cleverly it was all planned, how it would be a matter of years, maybe even months or days before the change would happen, and the world would be quietly, silently taken over by the other people, the different people who could walk through walls and think in impossibly complex channels. And no one would know the difference, because business would go on as usual. He shivered, sinking down lower on the bed. If only people would listen to him -- It wouldn't be long now. He had heard the stealthy footsteps on the landing below his room some time ago. This was the night they had chosen to make good their threats, to choke off his dangerous voice once and for all. There were footsteps on the stairs now, growing louder. Wildly he glanced around the room as the steps moved down the hall toward his door. And then he was over at the window, throwing up the sash, screaming out hoarsely to the silent street below: "Look out! They're here, all around us! They're planning to take over! Look out! Look out... And then the door burst open and there were two men moving toward him, grim-faced, dressed in white -- tall, strong men with sad faces and strong arms. One was saying, "Better come quietly, mister. No need to wake up the whole town." Current New Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, Naw York Open Mandajr Thru Satardap: ;S# A.M to i:S# P.M. Open Wedneaday Eveninpa until #:# P.M. (Phona ORamarcy #-#) icontinued from page #) logical misht, doomed to eventual extinction. So must all individuals. Julian Huxley, offering a healthy and useful bit of advice, points out that humanity must live as if it will never be dispossessed. This, of course, is the adjustment most of us make personally and as members of our possibly ephemeral race. Mr. Koestler, though, apparently insists on belonging only to a race that will never, never, never become extinct. A word of caution: Don't be taken in by microbes, insects and fish. They may look as if they haven't changed in eons, but they really have. "Life on other stars" is either ment or unbridled literary license. Elsewhere in his bitter rue, Mr. Koestler, ever dissatisfied with anything less than a total and eternal absolute, quarrels with nobody but himself over whethHere, I would say, is the major difference between Mr. K and practically all of us: Mr. K is relentlessly seeking the one economic system, the one philosophy, the one literature, the one anything whatever that seems possible and will make an entertaining yet mind-prodding Story. We don't expect science fiction to be anything more than one of many accepted branches of litererature indefinitely. Limericks almost were, for a while, and so were soap operas. Mr. K seems to curse this process of birth and death, but we're thankful for it. Limericks and soap operas and science fiction and everything else can become damnably irksome if there's no other choice. Several science fiction writers have laboriously created histories of the future as frameworks for their stories. The exercise was good and so were many of the stories, but an author can't help getting ideas that contradict others he's written. To sell these "contradictions," some authors had to use pen names! It doesn't bother us a bit to find each story negating every But such liberties must be absolute torment to an absolutist mind like Mr. K's. He came to and is enraged because it has too many. He is probably due to come screaming out of another dark room in a year or so. Wonder what it will be this time. TA gift that leais o year Please Dll out all Infonnation on the eaay, self-mailing, addressed envelope oppoaite. Fold as Indicated. Include your check. We will take care of the rest. Tms offer expires December #, #. I year-# Big lssues-W-# ;acU addilional gift subscription for one year  #k. # Beyond Subscription # Big Issues -- # Each additional subscription of # Issues S # EachJ # Big Issues E # . L Each additional combination  of this for # different during the year-JluSO Additional sets of six during the year #  AHogether Special Offer First of this Combination Galaxy # -- Beyond # And # Big Novels # Each additional gift of  k this combination    # . #  Fill Out Envelope One man's poison They could eat a horse, only luckily there was none ,...H might have eaten them firstl last radish out of the can with a pair of dividers. He held it up for Casker to admire, then laid it carefully on the workbench beside the razor. "Hell of a meal for two grown men,' Casker said, flopping down in one of the ship's padded crash chairs. "If you'd like to give up yotir share -- " Heilman started to suggest. Casker shook his head quickly. Heilman smiled, picked up the razor and examined its edge critically. "Don't make a production out of it," Casker said, glancing at the ship's instruments. They were approaching a red dwarf, the only planet-bearing sun in the vicinity. "We want to be through with supper before we get much closer." Heilman made a practice incision in the radish, squinting along the top of the razor. Casker bent closer, his mouth open. S# Heilman poised the razor delicately and cut the radish cleanly in half. "Will you say grace?" Hellman asked. Casker growled something and popped a half in his mouth. Hellman chewed more slowly. The sharp taste seemed to explode along his disused tastebuds. "Not much bulk value." Hellman said. Casker didn't answer. He was busily studying the red dwarf. A S he swallowed the last of his radish, Heilman stifled a sigh. Their last meal had been three days ago... if two biscuits and a cup of water could be called a meal. This radish, now resting in the vast emptiness of their stomachs, was the last gram of food on board ship. "Two planets." Casker said. "One's burned to a crisp." "Then we'll land on the other." Casker nodded and punched a deceleration spiral into the ship's tape. Heilman found himself wondering for the hundredth time where the fault had been. Could he have made out the food requisitions wrong, when they took on supplies at Calao station? After all, he had been devoting most of his attention to the mining equipment. Or had the ground crew just forgotten to load those last precious cases? He drew his belt in to the fourth new notch he had punched. Speculation was useless. Whatever the reason, they were in a jam. Ironically enough, they had more than enough fuel to take them back to Calao. But they would be a pair of singularly emaciated corpses by the time the ship reached there. "We're coming in now," Casker said. And to make matters worse, this unexplored region of space had few suns and fewer planets. Perhaps there was a slight possibility of replenishing their water supply, but the odds were enormous against finding anything they could eat. "Look at that place," Casker growled. Heilman shook himself out of his reverie. The planet was like a round gray brown porcupine. The mountains glittered in the red dwarf's feeble light. And as they spiraled lower, circling the planet, the pointed mountains seemed to stretch out to meet them. "It can't be all mountains," Heilman said. "It's not." Sure enough, there were oceans and lakes, out of which thrust jagged island-mountains. But no sign of level land, no hint of civilization, or even animal life. "At least it's got an oxygen atmosphere." Casker said. Their deceleration spiral swept them around the planet, cutting lower into the atmosphere, braking against it. And still there was nothing but mountains and lakes and oceans and more mountains. On the eighth run, Heilman caught sight of a solitary building on a mountain top. Casker braked recklessly, and the hull glowed red hot. On the eleventh run, they made a landing approach. "Stupid place to build," Casker muttered. The building was doughnutshaped, and fitted nicely over the top of the mountain. There was a wide, level lip around it, which Casker scorched as he landed the ship.  had merely seemed big. On the ground, it was enormous. Heilman and Casker walked up to it slowly. Heilman had his burner ready, but there was no sign of life. "This planet must be abandoned," Heilman said almost in a whisper. "Anyone in his right mind would abandon this place," Casker said. "There're enough good planets around, without anyone trying to live on a needle point," They reached the door. Hellman tried to open it and found it locked. He looked back at the spectacular display of mountains. "You know," he said, "when this planet was still in a molten state, it must have been affected by several gigantic moons that are now broken up. The strains, external and internal, wrenched it into its present spined appearance and -- " "Come off it," Casker said ungraciously. "You were a librarian before you decided to get rich on uranium." Heilman shrugged his shoulders and burned a hole in the doorlock. They waited. The only sound on the mountain top was the growling of their stomachs. They entered. The tremendous wedge-shaped room was evidently a warehouse of sorts. Goods were piled to the ceiling, scattered over the floor, stacked haphazardly against the walls. There were boxes and containers of all sizes and shapes, some big enough to hold an elephant, others the size of thimbles. Near the door was a dusty pile of books. Immediately, Heilman bent down to examine them. "Must be food somewhere in here," Casker said, his face lighting up for the first time in a week. He started to open the nearest box. 'This is interesting," Heilman said, discarding all the books ex cept one. "Let's eat first." Casker said, ripping the top ofT the box. Inside was a brownish dust. Casker looked at it, sniiTed, and made a face. "Very interesting indeed," Heilman said, leafing through the book. Casker opened a small can, which contained a glittering green slime. He closed it and opened another. It contained a dull orange slime. "Hmm," Heilman said, still reading. "Heilman! Will you kindly drop that book and help me find some food?" "Food?" Heilman repeated, looking up. "What makes you think there's anything to eat here? For all you know, this could be a paint factory." "It's a warehouse!" Casker shouted. He opened a kidney-shaped can and lifted out a soft pxirple stick. It hardened quickly and crumpled to dust as he tried to smell it. He scooped up a handful of the dust and brought it to his mouth. "That might be extract of strychnine," Heilman said casually.   dust and wiped his hands. "After all," Heilman pointed out, "granted that this is a warehouse -- a cache, if you wish -- we don't know what the late inhabitants considered good fare. Paris green salad, perhaps, with sulphuric acid as dressing." "All right," Casker said, "but we gotta eat. What're you going to do about all this?" He gestured at the hundreds of boxes, cans and bottles. "The thing to do," Heilman said briskly, "is to make a qualitative analysis on four or five samples. We could start out with a simple titration, sublimate the chief ingredient, see if it forms a precipitate, work out its molecular makeup from -- " "Heilman, you don't know what you're talking about. You're a librarian, remember? And I'm a correspondence school pilot. We don't know anything about titrations and sublimations." "I know," Heilman said, "but we should. It's the right way to go about it." "Sure. In the meantime, though, just until a chemist drops in, what'll we do?" "This might help us," Heilman said, holding up the book. "Do you know what it is?" "No," Casker said, keeping a tight grip on his patience. "It's a pocket dictionary and guide to the Helg language." "Helg?" "The planet we're on. The symbols match up with those on the boxes." Casker raised an eyebrow. "Never heard of Helg." "I don't believe the planet has ever had any contact with Earth," Heilman said. "This dictionary isn't Helg-English. It's Helg-Aloombrigian." Casker remembered that Aloombrigia was the home planet of a small, adventurous reptilian race, out near the center of the Galaxy. "How come you can read Aloombrigian?" Casker asked, "Oh, being a librarian isn't a completely useless profession," Heilman said modestly. "In my spare time -- " "Yeah. Now how about -- " "Do you know." Heilman said, "the Aloombrigians probably helped the Helgans leave their planet and find another. They sell services like that. In which case, this building very likely is a food cache!" "Suppose you start translating," Casker suggested wearily, "and maybe find us something to eat." They opened boxes until they found a likely-looking substance. Laboriously, Heilman translated the symbols on it. "Got it," he said. "It reads: -- 'Use Sniffners -- The Better Abrasive.' " "Doesn't sound edible," Casker said. "I'm afraid not." They found another, which "What kind of animals do you suppose these Helgans were?" Casker asked. Heilman shrugged his shoulders. The next label took almost fifteen minutes to translate. It read: argosel makes your "There must be something here we can eat," Casker said with a note of desperation. "I hope so," Heilman replied. A T the end of two hours, they were no closer. They had translated dozens of titles and sniffed so many substances that their olfactory senses had given up in disgust. "Let's talk this over," Heilman said, sitting on a box marked: "Sure," Casker said, sprawling out on the floor. "Talk." "If we could deduce what kind of creatures inhabited this planet, we'd know what kind of food they ate, and whether it's likely to be edible for us." "All we do know is that they wrote a lot of lousy advertising copy." Heilman ignored that. "What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mdun tains?" "Stupid ones!" Casker said. That was no help. But Hellman found that he couldn't draw any inferences from the mountains. It didn't tell him if the late Helgans ate silicates or proteins or iodine-base foods or anything. "Now look," Heilman said, "we'll have to work this out by pure logic -- Are you listening to me?" "Sure," Casker said. "Okay. There's an old proverb that covers our situation perfectly: 'One man's meat is another man's poison.' " "Yeah." Casker said. He was positive his stomach had shrunk to approximately the size of a marble. "We can assume, first, that their meat is our meat." Casker wrenched himself away from a vision of five juicy roast beefs dancing tantalizingly before him. "What if their meat is our poison. What then?" "Then," Heilman said, "we will assume that their poison is our meat." "And what happens if their meat and their poison are our poison?" "We starve." "All right," Casker said, standing up. "Which assumption do we start with?" "Well, there's no sense in asking for trouble. This is an oxygen planet, if that means anything. Let's assume that we can eat some basic food of theirs. If we can't we'll start on their poisons." "If we live that long," Casker said. Heilman began to translate labels. They discarded such brands they found a small gray box, about six inches by three by three. It was called valkorin's "This looks as good as any," Heilman said. He opened the box. Casker leaned over and sniffed. "No odor." a rectangular, rubbery red block. It quivered slightly, like jelly. "Bite into it," Casker said. "Me?" Heilman asked. "Why not you?" "You picked it." "I prefer just looking at it," Heilman said with dignity. "I'm not too hungry." "I'm not cither," Casker said. They sat on the floor and stared at the jellylike block. After ten minutes, Heilman yawned, leaned back and closed his eyes. "All right, coward,' Casker said bitterly. "I'll try it. Just remember, though, if I'm poisoned, you'll never get off this planet. You don't know how to pilot." "Just take a little bite, then," Heilman advised. Casker leaned over and stared at the block. Then he prodded it with his thumb. The rubbery red block giggled. "Did you hear that?" Casker yelped, leaping back. "I didn't hear anything," Hellman said, his hands shaking. "Go ahead." Casker prodded die block again. It giggled louder, this time with a disgusting little simper. "Okay," Casker said, "what do we try next?" "Next? What's wrong with this?" "I don't eat anything that giggles," Casker stated firmly. "Now listen to me," Heilman said. "The creatures who manufactured this might have been trying to create an esthetic sound as well as a pleasant shape and color. That giggle is probably only for the amusement of the cater." "Then bite into it yourself," Casker offered. Heilman glared at him, but made no move toward the rubbery block. Finally he said, "Let's move it out of the way." They pushed the block over to a corner. It lay there giggling softly to itself. "Now what?" Casker said.  Heilman looked around at the jumbled stacks of incomprehensible alien goods. He noticed a door on either side of the room. "Let's have a look in the other sections," he suggested. Casker shrugged his shoulders apathetically. Slowly they trudged to the door in the left wall. It was locked and Heilman burned it open with the ship's burner. It was a wedge-shaped room, piled with incomprehensible alien goods. The hike back across the room seemed like miles, but they made it only slightly out of wind. Hellman blew out the lock and they looked in. It was a wedge-shaped room, piled with incomprehensible alien goods. "All the same," Casker said sadly, and closed the door. "Evidently there's a series of these rooms going completely around the bmlding," Heilman said. "I wonder if we should explore them." Casker calculated the distance around the building, compared it with his remaining strength, and sat dowa heavily on a long gray object. "Why bother?" he asked. thoughts. Certainly he should be able to find a key of some sort, a clue that would tell him what they could eat. But where was it? He examined the object Casker was sitting on. It was about the size and shape of a large coffin, with a shallow depression on top. It was made of a hard, corrugated substance. "What do you suppose this is?" Heilman asked. "Does it matter?" Heilman glanced at the symbols painted on the side of the object, then looked them up in his dictionary. "Fascinating," he murmured, after a while. "Is it something to eat?" Casker asked, with a faint glimmering of hope. "No. You are sitting on some"Oh," Casker said dully. "This is important! Look at it! How does it work?" Casker wearily climbed off the Morog Custom Super Transport and looked it over carefully. He traced four almost invisible separations on its four comers. "Retractable wheels, probably, but I don't see -- " Heilman read on. "It says to give it three amphus of high-gain Integer fuel, then a van of Tender lubrication, and not to run it over three thousand Ruls for the first fifty mungus." "Let's find something to eat," Casker said. "Don't you see how important this is?" Heilman asked. "This could solve our problem. If we could deduce the alien logic inherent in constructing this vehicle, we might know the Helgan thought pattern. This, in turn, would give us an insight into their nervous systems, which would imply their biochemical makeup." Casker stood still, trying to decide whether he had enough strength left to strangle Heilman. "For example," Heilman said, "what kind of vehicle would be used in a place like this? Not one with wheels, since everything is up and down. Anti-gravity? Perhaps, but what kind of anti-gravity? And why did the inhabitants devise a boxlike form instead --  Casker decided sadly that he didn't have enough strength to strangle Heilman, no matter how pleasant it might be. Very quietly, he said, "Kindly stop making like a scientist. Let's see if there isn't something we can gulp down." "All right," Heilman said sulkily. wander off among the cans, bottles and cases. He wondered vaguely where Heilman got the energy, and decided that he was just too cerebral to know when he was starving. "Here's something," Heilman called out, standing in front of a large yellow vat. "What does it say?" Casker asked. "Little bit hard to translate. But rendered freely, it reads: morishille's voozy, with lactouniverse!" "That sounds good," Casker admitted, thinking that Heilman might not be so stupid after all. "This should tell us once and for all if their meat is our meat," Heilman said. "This Voozy seems to be the closest thing to a universal drink I've found yet." "Maybe," Casker said hopefully, "maybe it's just plain water!" "We'll see." Heilman pried open the lid with the edge of the burner. Within the vat was a crystalclear liquid.  "No odor," Casker said, bending over the vat. The crystal liquid lifted to meet him. Casker retreated so rapidly that he fell over a box. Heilman helped him to his feet, and they approached the vat again. As they came near, the liquid lifted itself three feet into the air and moved toward them. "What've you done now?" Casker asked, moving back carefully. The liquid flowed slowly over the side of the vat. It began to flow toward him. "Heilman!" Casker shrieked. Heilman was standing to one side, perspiration pouring down his face, reading his dictionary with a preoccupied frown. "Guess I bumbled the translation," he said. "Do something!" Casker shouted. The liquid was trying to back him into a corner. "Nothing I can do," Heilman said, reading on. "Ah, here's the error. It doesn't say 'Everyone drinks Voozy.' Wrong subject. 'Voozy drinks everyone' That tells us something! The Helgans must have soaked liquid in through their pores. Naturally, they would prefer to be drunk, instead of to drink." Casker tried to dodge around the liquid, but it cut him off with a merry gurgle. Desperately he picked up a small bale and threw it at the Voozy. The Voozy caught the bale and drank it. Then it discarded that and turned back to Casker. Heilman tossed another box. The Voozy drank this one and a third and fourth that Casker threw in. Then, apparently exhausted, it flowed back into its vat. Casker clapped down the lid and sat on it, trembling violently"Not so good," Heilman said. "We've been taking it for granted that the Helgans had eating habits like us. But. of course, it doesn't necessarily -- " "No, it doesn't. No, sir, it certainly doesn't. I guess we can sec that it doesn't. Anyone can see that it doesn't -- " "Stop that," Heilman ordered sternly. "We've no time for hysteria." "Sorry." Casker slowly moved away from the Voozy vat. "I guess we'll have to assume that their meat is our poison," Heilman said thoughtfully. "So now we'll see if their poison is our meat." Casker didn't say anything. He was wondering what would have happened if the Voozy had drunk him. In the corner, the rubbery block was still giggling to itself. "TOW here's a likely-looking poison," Heilman said, half an hour later. Casker had recovered completely, except for an occasional twitch of the lips. "What does it say?" he asked. Heilman rolled a tiny tube in the palm of his hand. "It's called Pvastkin's Plugger. The label reads: warning! highly dangerous! pvastkin's plugger is "Sounds great," Casker said. "It'll probably blow us sky-high." "Do you have any other suggestions?" Heilman asked. Casker thought for a moment. The food of Helg was obviously unpalatable for humans. So icrhaps was their poison... but wasn't starvation better than this sort of thing? After a moment's communion with his stomach, he decided that starvation was not better. "Go ahead," he said. Heilman slipped the burner under his arm and unscrewed the top of the little bottle. He shook it. Nothing happened. "It's got a seal," Casker pointed out. Heilman punctured the seal with his fingernail and set the bottle on the floor. An e.vil-smelling green froth began to bubbleout. Heilman looked dubiously at the froth. It was congealing into a glob and spreading over the floor. "Yeast, perhaps," he said, gripping the burner tightly. "Come, come. Faint heart never filled an empty stomach." "I'm not holding you back," Heilman said. The glob swelled to the size of a man's head. "How long is that supposed to go on?" Casker asked. "Well," Heilman said, "it's advertised as a Plugger. I suppose that's what it does -- expands to plug up holes." "Sure. But how much?' "Unfortunately, I don't know how much two cubic vims are. But it can't go on much -- " Belatedly, they noticed that the Plugger had filled almost a quarter of the room and was showing no signs of stopping. "We should have believed the label!" Casker yelled to him, across the spreading glob. "It is dangerous!" As the Plugger produced more surface, it began to accelerate in its growth. A sticky edge touched Heilman, and he jumped back. "Watch outl" He couldn't reach Casker,. on the other side of the gigantic sphere of blob. Heilman tried to run around!, but the Plugger had spread, cutting the room in half. It began to swell toward the walls. "Run for it!" Heilman yelled, and rushed to the door behind him. panding glob reached him. On the other side of the room, he heard a door slam shut. Hellman didn't wait any longer. He sprinted through and slammed the door behind hiin. He stood for a moment, panting, the burner in his hand. He hadn't realized how weak he was. That sprint had cut his reserves of energy dangerously close to the collapsing point. At least Casker had made it, too, though. But he was still in trouble. The Plugger poured merrily through the blasted lock, into the room. Heilman tried a practice shot on it, but the Plugger was evidently impervious... as, he realized, a good plugger should be. It was showing no signs of fatigue. Heilman hurried tothe far wall. The door was locked, as the others had been, so he burned out the lock and went through. How far could the glob expand? How much was two cubic vims? Two cubic miles, perhaps? For all he knew, the Plugger was used to repair faults in the crusts of planets. In the next room, Heilman stopped to catch his breath. He remembered that the building was circular. He would burn his way through the remaining doors and join Casker. They would burn their way outside and... Casker didn't have a burner! Heilman turned white with shock. Casker had made it into the room on the right, because they had burned it open earlier. The Plugger was undoubtedly oozing into that room, through the shattered lock... and Casker couldn't get out! The Plugger was on his left, a locked door on his right! Rallying his remaining strength, Heilman began to run. Boxes seemed to get in his way purposefully, tripping him, slowing him down. He blasted the next door and hurried on to the next. And the next. And the next. The Plugger couldn't expand completely into Casker's room! Or could it? The wedge-shaped rooms, each a segment of a circle, seemed to stretch before him forever, a jumbled montage of locked doors, alien goods, more doors, more goods. Heilman fell over a crate, got to his feet and fell again. He had reached the limit of his strength, and passed it. But Casker was his friend. Besides, without a pilot, he'd never get off the place. Heilman struggled through two more rooms on trembling legs and then collapsed in front of a third. "Is that you, Heilman?" he heard Casker ask, from the other side of the door. "You all right?" Heilman managed to gasp. "Haven't much room in here," Casker said, "but the Plugger's stopped growing. Heilman, get me out of here!" panting. "Moment," he said. "Moment, hell!" Casker shouted. "Get me out. I've found water!" "What? How?" "Get me out of here!" Heilman tried to stand up, but his legs weren't cooperating. "What happened?" he asked. the room, I figured I'd try to start up the Super Custom Transport. Thought maybe it could knock down the door and get me out. So I pumped it full of highgain Integor fuel." "Yes?" Heilman said, still trying to get his legs under control. "That Super Custom Transport is an animtil, Heilman! And the Intcgor fuel is water! Now get me out!" Heilman lay back with a contented sigh. If he had had a little more time, he would have worked out the whole thing himself, by pure logic. But it was all very apparent now. The most efficient machine to go over those vertical, razor-sharp mountains would be an animal, probably with retractable suckers. It was kept in hibernation between trips; and if it drank water, the other products designed for it would be palatable, too. Of course they still didn't know much about the late inhabitants, but undoubtedly... "Bum down that door!" Casker shrieked, his voice breaking. Heilman was pondering the irony of it all. If one man's meat -- and his poison -- are your poison. then try eating something else. So simple, really. But there was one thing that still bothered him. "How did you know it was an Earth-type animal?" he asked. "Its breath, stupid! It inhales and exhales and smells as if it's eaten onions!" There was a sound bf cans falling and bottles shattering. "Now hurry!" "What's wrong?" Heilman asked, finally getting to his feet and poising the burner. "The Custom Super Transport. It's got me cornered behind a pile of cases. Heilman, it seems to think that I'm its meat!" Broiled with the burner -- well done for Heilman, medium rare for Casker -- it was their meat, with enough left over for the trip back to Calao. I've Got Them AU!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England t Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction. Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what yon have to sell or swap.  . #  I ET me begin by quoting something:  "During the last two days, my native porters had done everything -- short of physical violence -- to prevent me from going on. They had made speeches: they had thrown themselves flat on the ground, refusing to move; in short, the only reason they came along at all was that they Q.(hOC were even more afraid to go back alone. "So we moved along under almost unbearable heat. The outline of the distant mountains, even though blurred by the heat, slowly grew more distinct. We were still pushing forward through the shoulder-high grass while the sun was sinking in the west when I suddenly broke out of the grass into a clearing. "It was a very strange clearing -- the grass simply stopped along a well-defined arc. On the bare ground were the bleached bones of animals and at a dis tance something that looked like a human skull. So it was true, after all. "Because in the center of this inexplicable and somehow ghastly hundred-yard clearing there stood The Tree... I know you ere quite sure that you have read this before, but right now you have trouble placing it. The reason is simple: you have read this in various stories and in Sunday Supplements quite a while back and maybe even in a book. The tree in the center of the clearing is. of course, deadly. It is either so poisonous that birds flying over it drop to the ground, dead, or else it is actively carnivorous. And because editors of Sunday Supplements used to suspect that their readers might not know what "carnivorous" means, the tree was dubbed "man-eating." Depending on the version, the natives -- those of Mindanao in one -- either shun it or else -- those of Madagascar in another -- they worship it and appease it with victims of which the white man must be kept unaware. The best way to combine both requirements is, naturally, to feed the white ipan to the tree, which preserves the secret and keeps the tree happy. A S far as I can tell, there haven't been any man-eating trees around for a number of years. The last one I know of was the blood-sucking tree of Mindanao of # which did not live long in the public prints. The man-eating tree of Madagascar, on the other hand, is alleged to have flourished for almost half a century. But even this hardy (though tropical) perennial was not the first, for the myth of deadly trees is much older than that. In fact, it seems to have originated during the so-called age of exploration, when Africa was circumnavigated for the first time since the Phoenicians and when the Western Hemisphere was discovered. I have a notion -- for which I have no proof at the moment -- that the deadly tree was originally a philosophical invention. Everything was contrasted by its opposite : light and darkness, heat and cold, life and death. The opposite of the royal lion was the deadly basilisk which could kill by a glance. Since the Bible spoke of a Tree of Life, it must have seemed at least likely that there was a Tree of Death, too. This belief seemed confirmed when travelers' tales followed hard upon the heels of the conquest of Central America. In the wonderland of the West Indies, there actually grew such a deadly tree. I don't know just how it was called at first, but later it was referred to very guardedly and with much awe as the Manzanilla tree. Scientists and especially botanists never mentioned it. yet it managed to survive as a literary tradition. The story reached its climax less than a century ego. Giacomo Meyerbeer, born in Berlin in #I as Jakob Beer, returned to his native city in # as musical boss of the Royal Opera, after living in Paris for two decades. But the Herr Generalmusikdirektor was not only supposed to conduct operas; he was also expected to compose some, and he did. One of his great successes was L'Africaine; in the last act. the heroine decides to die. which she does in a decorous manner by reposing in the shadow of a Manzanilla tree. When the opera was first performed in #, the assembled Berliners found this end most touching -- and not a single one of them thought of inquiring whether there was such a tree. To some extent, the story died because nobody else dared use it any more, for fear of being accused of plagiarism. But meanwhile another Tree of Death had made its appearance: the Upas tree. Later researchers have found what they believe to be the first appearance of this vegetable devil; an article in the London Magazine in #. Its author was a Dr. Foersch, who had lived for a number of years as a surgeon in Samarang. On his return, he told of the marvels of Java, among them the Upas tree, so poisonous that birds could not fly over it and animals could not pass near it. "All animal life within a range of # miles of such a tree will surely perish," Dr. Foersch stated. F that assertion had remained in the London Magazine, it would probably have been buried and forgotten. But Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was taken in and repeated the story in one of his works. This unfortunate fact did have one good aspect, at least. Because Erasmus Darwin had mentioned it, people who went to Java looked for it. And they turned up with a tree which is now listed in botanical works as Antiaris toxicaria; 'in Java, it is commonly referred to as the Anchar tree or, by the natives, as the Ipoh. It is a straight, slender tree, # to # feet tall, and it is poisonous. However, it can be approached without danger, as is shown by the fact that the natives cut holes into it to get its sap. which they use for poisoning arrows and other weapons. The sap tastes like quinine and contains a poison that is rather powerful if it gets into the body through a cut or wound, since it acts on the heart muscle and the central nervous system. But don't worry if your seafaring uncle brought poisoned arrows from Java. After about eight weeks, the poison stops being lethal. The strangest part of the whole story is that old Dr. Foersch may not have sold a deliberate hoax to his London editor, but may hav been honestly mistaken. Java is very strongly volcanic and there are areas, local depressions, which are full of volcanic carbon dioxide. Because this colorless and odorless gas is much heavier than air. it can fill a depression like water, forcing all the breathable air out. Small animals that enter such a place suddenly collapse, as if struck by lightning (or as if poisoned). Actually, they have "drowned" in carbon dioxide. Nobody had any idea of carbon dioxide in # when Dr. Foersch told his story. But there were areas on Java where animals collapsed and died and there was a poisonous tree on the islands. While the Manzanilla tree of operatic fame and the Upas tree of Java were merely supposed to be poisonous and as little concerned with the fate of the accidental victims as a poison ivy vine, the third in the succession of deadly trees had a purpose in mind. It was an active killer, intent on feeding the vegetable equivalent of a stomach. I am now speaking of the "Man-eating tree of Madagascar" which was discussed at great length in a book with the title "Madagascar -- Land of the Man-Eating Tree" by one Chase Salmon Osborn. LI.D., published in New York in #. I do not claim to be able to judge the chapters on tribal customs. native history, etc., of this book. As for the chapter on zoology. I do know that it is horribly amateurish, incredibly careless as to detail and poorly written. The chapter on the botany of Madagascar is no better and in general I feel that the proverbial "grain of salt" isn't enough. the man-eating tree of Madagascar was first described in # in a letter by a traveler named Carl Liche to a Dr. Omelius Fredlowski (neither of whom is listed in Webster's Biographical Dictionary). The book also says that the report appeared first in a German magazine in # and two years later in the New York World. I haven't had the time to check either and therefore cannot vouch for this. The alleged letter says that its author visited a primitive tribe in the interior of Madagascar which is called the Mkodo tribe. These people are said to be ignorant of clothing and have no native religion or tribal rites except the worship of the tree. After completely failing to identify the place and merely stating that it was a valley which could not have been more than # feet above sea level, "Carl Liche" claims to have reached a lake from which issued a small river. But now I feel I should quote verbatim : "The sluggish canal-like stream here wound slowly by, and in a bare spot in its bend was the most singular of trees. I will try to describe it to you. If you can imagine a pineapple eight feet high and thick in proportion, resting upon its base and denuded of leaves, you will have a good idea of the trunk of the tree which, however, was not the color of a pineapple but a dark dingy brown and apparently as hard as iron. From the apex of this truncated cone (at least two feet in diameter) eight leaves hung sheer to the ground, like doors swung back on their hinges. "These leaves were about #I or . I # feet long and shaped very much like the leaves of the American agave or century plant (did he think this was the same? -- W. L.). They were two feet through at their thickest point and three feet wide, tapering to a sharp point that looked like a cow's horn; very convex on the outer (but now under) surface and on the under (now upper) surface slightly concave. This concave face was thickly set with strong thorny hooks... N addition to the trunk and the eight spiked leaves, the plant had a large number of green tendrils "tapering from # inches to I # inch in diameter, yet stretched out stiffly as iron rods," a hollow on top filled with "a clear treacly liquid, honey sweet and possessed of violently intoxicating qualities" and, to round out the picture, "six white almost transparent palpi reared themselves towards the sky, twirling and twisting with a marvellous incessant motion. "Thin as reeds and frail as quills, apparently they were yet five or six feet tall and were so constantly and vigorously in motion that they made me shudder in spite of myself, with their suggestion of serpents flayed, yet dancing upon their tails." The alleged letter then goes on to tell that one of the native women was forced to climb the tree and that, all at once, the green hard tendrils wrapped themselves around her like pythons. "And now the great leaves rose slowly and stiffly, approached one another and closed about the dead and hampered victim with the silent force of a hydraulic press and the ruthless purpose of a thumb screw." For ten days the big leaves remained upright..."Then, when I came one morning, they were prone ain, the tendrils stretched, the palpi floating and nothing but a white skull at the foot of the tree to remind me of the sacrifice that had taken place there." Well! All I can say is that if there were a carnivorous plant of a size to catch and kill a victim the size of a man, it certainly would not function as described. As I said, I have not checked whether the letter actually appeared in the Carlsruhe Scientific Journal in # or in the New York World in #. I doubt it. All the references to the man-eating tree of Madagascar appeared after #; i.e., after the publication of Dr. C. S. Osborn's book. The whole thing may have been a one-shot hoax, rather than a literary tradition. If it was such a hoax, it certainly was successful for a time. L ast month, when I discussed research work devoted to the origin and definition of life, I felt tempted to insert a few words about experiments that aimed at cell imitation. But I decided to postpone this for a month so that nobody might be confused, especially since there is one case on record where a researcher (a Russian physician with the very un-Russian name of Martin Kuckuck) mistook his pseudocells for actual artificial life, loudly proclaiming that he had solved the "secret of spontaneous generation." Perhaps the simplest of the imitation cells is the one found by Prof. Johannes Traubc. Take a shallow glass dish and fill it with a solution of tannin. Then add one drop of old-fashioned carpenter's glue. Immediately a tough skin will form around the drop of glue. But the skin is not impervious to water; the glue drop absorbs water from the solutioa, '"grows" and finally bursts the skin. Of course a new skin forms immediately, which then again grows too tight for the water absorbed and so forth. Even more astonishing in ap pearance is the "dividing cell" devised, by the French physician Stephan Leduc. All it involves is a few drops of salt water on a piece of glass. One drop, placed in the center, consists of a weak salt solution to which a dye has been added. The two other drops, placed to the right and left of the first, contain no dye, but are somewhat stronger salt solutions. Then you make the three drops touch and observe the result with good magnifying glass. The result looks precisely like pictures of a real cell in division with "chromosomes" splitting off in both directions. Or maybe you would like to see an ameba eating a small alga. Use a sliver of glass, about a quarter of an inch in length, coat it with shellac, put it in very shallow water and add a drop of chloroform. (See diagram). The chloroform drop will exhibit the most lifelike properties, finally throwing out the "indigestible" glass. Finally, there are the "colpoids" of Prof. Alfonso L. Herrera of Mexico. The "nutrient" A ctMike drop of chloroform "eating" and "digesting" sheffoc of the "colpoids" is a mixture of olive oil and gasoline, two parts of gasoline (by volume) for one part of olive oil. The "cells" are a solution of washing soda in water that might be dyed to show things more clearly. The principle is the same as the cell of Prof. Traube -- namely, osmotic pressure -- but Herrera's are more active by far. They will move rapidly across the oil-gasoline "lake," pursue each other, eat each other and behave, in general, like irritated and hungry animalcules. No, it doesn't prove anything directly. It merely shows that those physical forces that are utilized by an actually living cell can also put on a line show by themselves. NE day, several years ago, after a lecture of mine on rockets and high altitude research, a gentleman came up to the platform and suggested with great politeness that I had made a mistake. An understandable and pardonable mistake since English is not my native tongue, but a mistake just the same. Of course I asked just what I had done wrong. "Well, sir," he said, "all through your lecture you spoke of rocket motors when you should have said engines.' I asked why a rocket should have an engine. He didn't know, but insisted that it was not a motor. I then asked what was the difference between an engine and a motor. He couldn't explain, but maintained that there was one. Since then, I have had several such conversations and one afternoon, when I had time, I went after that elusive difference between motor and engine, digging through encyclopedias, dictionaries, books on word origins and everything else that seemed pertinent. The situation is about as silly as it can possibly be; it is best (if inadvertently) summed up by the first sentence in the article Motor-Boats of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which says that a "motor-boat is a small vessel propelled by a gasoline engine." But if the motor-boat's gasoline engine is detachable, it promptly becomes an outboard motor. Similarly, with the aid of half a dozen or so engines in trucks, a company of soldiers is motorized. And every Englishman who can afford one drives a motorcar. Americans don't -- they ride in automobiles, except younger ones who have motorbikes. Linguistically, there can be no doubt that the right word is "motor," which is simply the Latin word for "mover." Trucks, cars, motorboats, airplanes and rockets indubitably move, being moved by the thing many people insist on calling "engine." As for the word "engine," it is supported by tradition only. Prior to the invention of the steam engine, the word "engine" was used in a sense which is expressed in present-day English by the words "contrivance" or "contraption." Remember that Domingo Gonzales, the hero of The Man in the Moone (#), builds himself an "engine" to escape from St. Helena. It is -- well, a contraption with a saddle at one end and harnesses for a dozen or so birds at the other. The word "engine" is derived from Latin, too, from inenium, the word that also produced "ingenuity." The steam engine, when it came along, was just a special contrivance involving steam. I know that this little dissertation is not going to change usage. Mechanics in garages will go on fixing engines, airplane pilots and operating personnel will continue to talk of the left outboard engine and so on. But I want at least to point out that there is no difference between "engine" and "motor" and that the latter is actually the better word. It merely has the drawback that it prevents the people who operate it from calling themselves "engineers" rather than "motorists," What is the "circular velocity of a body and how is it related to the escape velocity? Alexander E. Tiflis East Morninside Drive Atlanta, Georgia. The "circular velocity" of a planet is the velocity a body has to attain to describe a circular orbit around the planet. In the case of Earth, this amounts to # miles per second at sea level. Theoretically a projectile or rocket, having this speed, would circle Earth indefinitely, but in reality it would crash very rapidly because of air resistance. For practical reasons, therefore, thecircular velocity is always specified for a given distance or height, by saying that the circular velocity for a height of X miles is y miles per sec. You can calculate the circular velocity very easily according to the formula V g(rh) where r is the radius of the planet, while h is the additional distance above sea level. If you fired a projectile (neglecting air resistance) vertically with circular velocity, it would rise to a distance of one planet radius above the surface. The following table leads np to the second part of your question. Circular velocity is denoted by Vc. height reached : # r # r # r # r # r # r infinity velociirt Ve multiplied by   n M #  M H # #  # # # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # The last line in this table denotes escape velocity' and since # is the square root of # the relationship between circular velocity Vc and escape velocity Vp is Vp  Ve V # and the numerical value of Vp is # miles per sec. In a #-year old book which came into my possession, J found mention of a number called duowhether such a number is still in use and how lar it is. Carl R. White # Mt. View Terrace Dunellen, N. J. rarely used nowadays, mostly because of the misunderstandings that might be caused by their use. Unfortunately, Europeans and Americans could never reach an agreement on how to name figures latter point they agree, but the Amerlion, while Europeans call the noticed that I never say bilpartly because this is correct mathematically and partly because of our foreign editions.) Similarly, the Americans use the next higher name" after adding three zeros to a figure; the Europeans, after adding six zeros. Having progressed in either manner ten times, startderstandings, large figures are now written in this manner: #xl# can remember this system most easily by saying that the exponential figure is the number of zeros following a one. In the book The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett, its author, says i "Contrary to popular belief the moon does not re volve around the earth; they revolve around eetch other, or more precisely around a common center of gravity." Can you tell me if this is true? Peter J. McLean #I Victoria Dr. Vancouver B. C. The answer is yes, Earth and Moon revolve around a com mon center of gravity. If they were both of equal mass, that common center of gravity, tech nically known as the barycen ter, would be halfway between them. In the case of two bodies of unequal mass, the barycen ter is close to the larger of the two bodies. In the case of the EarthMoon system, the masses are so unequal that the bary center is comparatively close to the center of the bigger mass; i.e., the Earth. It is # miles from the Earths center and since the radius of the Earth is # miles, the barycenter is roughly # miles below the surface. What would happen if two galaxies collided? Peter Kreeft # Richardson Ave. Haledon, N. J. Let's see: in our section of the Galaxy, the average dis tance between stars seems to be lion miles. The diameter of a star is rarely more than two Even in the denser sections of a galaxy, the average distance is still several thousand star diameters. It is, therefore, pos sible that two galaxies might collide" by going through each other without a single star collision. In reaUty, there might be some very close approaches, but the ovmrall picture would be that nothing happens at all. I If you MtoloM lOe to eorer poetaio Md Weird adventunti as ntar u your mallboal Juat send your name i by one of the famoua selenea-detloa and addreai -- you'll cet your copy by return toall... and wa'll  author of today, I # e. San Feraaad St. Dept. S.ia Ran Jota IS. Calif. Costello, Hero He viranfed fo help people on all worlds and all ships between... and his plan was a warm and friendly one. Maybe a bit too friendlyl fl shut the door." "I beg your pardon, sir?" The Skipper never invited anyone in -- not to his quarters. His office, yes, but not here. He made an abrupt gesture, and I came in and closed the door. It was about as luxurious as a compartment on a spaceship can get. I tried not to goggle at it as if it was the first time I had ever seen it, just because it was the first time I had ever seen it. I sat down. He opened his mouth, closed it, forced the tip of his tongue through his thin lips. He licked them and glared at me. I'd never seen the Iron Man like this. I decided that the best thing to say would be nothing, which is what I said. He pulled a deck of cards out of the topmiddle drawer and slid them across the desk. "Deal." I said, "I b -- " "And don't say you beg my pardon!" he exploded. Well, all right. If the skipper wanted a cozy game of gin rummy to while away the parsecs, far be it from me to... I shuffled. Six years under this cold-blooded, fish-eyed automatic computer with eyebrows, and this was the first time that he -- "Deal," he said. I looked up at him. "Draw, five-card draw. You do play draw poker, don't you, Purser?" "Yes, sir." I dealt and put down the pack. I had three threes and a couple of court cards. The skipper scowled at his hand and threw down two. He glared at me again... I said, "I got three of a kind, sir." no longer existed, slammed out of his chair end turned his beck to me. He tilted his head back and stared up at the seeitall, with its complex of speed, time, position and distance-nin coordinates. Borinquen, our destination planet, was at spitting distance -- only a day or so offend Earth was a long, long way behind. I heard a sound and dropped my eyes. The Skipper's hands were locked behind him, squeezed together so hard that they crackled. "Why didn't you draw?" he grated. "I beg your -- " "When I played poker -- and I used to play a hell of a lot of poker -- as I recall it, the dealer would And out how many cards each player wanted after the deal and give him as many as he discarded. Did you ever hear of that. Purser?" "Yes, sir, I did." "You did." He turned around. I imagine he had been scowling this same way at the see-it-all, and I wondered why it was he hadn't shattered the cover glass. "Why, then. Purser," he demanded, "did you show your three of a kind without discarding, without drawing -- without, mister, asking me how many cards I might want?" I thought about it. "I -- we -- I mean, sir, we havent been playing poker that way lately." "You've been playing poker without drawing!" He sat down again and beamed that glare at me again. "And who changed the rules?" "I don't know, sir. We just -- that's the way we've been playing." He nodded thoughtfully. "Now tell me something. Purser. How much time did you spend in the galley during the last watch?" "About an hour, sir." "About an hour." "Well, sir," I explained hurriedly, "it was my turn." He said nothing, and it suddenly occurred to me that these galley-watches weren't in the ship's orders. I said quickly, "It isn't agidnai your orders to stand such a watch, is it, sir?" "No," he said, "it isn't." His voice was so gentle, it was ugly. "Tell me. Purser, doesn't Cooky mind these galleywatches?" "Oh. no, sir! He's real pleased about it." I knew he was thinking about the size of the galley. It was true that two men made quite a crowd in a place like that. I said, "That way, he knows everybody can trust him." "You mean that way you know he won't poison you." "Well -- yes, sir." "And tell me," he said, his voice even gentler, "who suggested he might poison you?" "I really couldn't say, Captain. It's just sort of something that came up. Cooky doesn't mind," I added. "If he's watched all the time, he knows nobody's going to suspect him. It's all right." "It's all right." I wished he wouldn't. I wished he'd stop looking at me like that. "How long," he asked, "has it been customary for the deck officer to bring a witness with him when he takes over the watch?" "I really couldn't say, sir. That's out of my department." "You couldn't say. Now think hard, Purser. Did you ever stand galley-watches, or see deck-officers bring witnesses with them when they relieve the bridge, or see draw poker played without drawing -- before this trip?" "Well, no, sir. I don't think I have. I suppose we just never thought of it before." "We never had Mr. Costello as a passenger before, did we?" "No, sir." I thought for a moment he was going to say something else, but he didn't, just: "Very well, Purser. That will be all," I went out and started back aft, feeling puzzled and sort of upset. The Skipper didn't have to hint things like that about Mr. Costello. Mr. Costello was a very nice man. Once, the Skipper had picked a fight with Mr. Costello. They'd shouted at each other in the dayroom. That is, the Skipper had shouted -- Mr. Costello never did. Mr. Costello was as good-natured as they come. A big good-natured soft-spoken man, with the kind of face they call open. Open and honest. He'd once been a Triumver back on Earth -- the youngest ever appointed, they said. You wouldn't think such an easygoing man was as smart as that. Triumvers arc usually lifetime appointees, but Mr. Costello wasn't satisfied. Had to keep moving, you know. Learning all the time, shaking hands all around, staying close to the people. He loved people. I don't know why the Skipper couldn't get along with him. Everybody else did. And besides -- Mr. Costello didn't play poker; why should he care one way or the other how we played it? He didn't eat the galley food -- he had his own stock in his cabin- so what difference would it make to him if the cook poisoned anyone? Except, of course, that he cared about us. People -- he liked people. An#Tway, it's better to play poker without the draw. Poker's a good game with a bad reputation. And where do you suppose it gets the bad reputation? From cheaters. And how do people cheat at poker? Almost never when they deal. It's when they pass out cards after the discard. That's when a shady dealer knows what he holds, and he knows what to give the others so he can win. All right, remove the discard and you remove ninetenths of the cheaters. Remove the cheaters and the honest men can trust each other. That's what Mr. Costello used to say, anyhow. Not that he cared one way or the other for himself. He wasn't a gambling man. there was Mr. Costello with the Third Officer. He gave me a big smile and a wave, so I went over. "Come on, sit down. Purser," he said. "I'm landing tomorrow. Won't have much more chance to talk to you." I sat down. The Third snapped shut a book he'd been holding open on the table and sort of got it out of sight. Mr. Costello laughed at him. "Go ahead. Third, show the Purser. You can trust him -- he's a good man. I'd be proud to be shipmates with the Purser." The Third hesitated and then raised the book from his lap. It was the Space Code and expanded Rules of the Road. Every licensed officer has to bone up on it a lot, to get his license. But it's not the kind of book you ordinarily kill time with. "The Third here was showing me all about what a captain can and can't do," said Mr. Costello. "Well, you asked me to," the Third said. "Now just a minute," said Mr. Costello rapidly, "now just a minute." He had a way of doing that sometimes. It was part of him, like the thinning hair on top of his head and the big smile and the way he had of cocking his head to one side and asking you what it was you just said, as if he didn't hear so well. "Now just a minute, you wanted to show me this material, didn't you?" "Well, yes, Mr. Costello," the Third said. "You're going over the limitations of a spacemaster's power of your own free will, aren't you?" "Well," said the Third, "I guess so. Sure." "Sure," Mr. Costello repeated happily. "Tell the Purser the part you just read to me." "The one you found in the book?" "You know the one. You read it out your own self, didn't you?" "Oh," said the Third. He looked at me -- sort of uneasily, I thought -- and reached for the book. Mr. Costello put his hand on it. "Oh, don't bother looking it Up," he said. "You can remember it." "Yeah,. I guess I do," the Third admitted. "It's a sort of safeguard against letting a skipper's power go to his head, in case it ever does. Suppose a time comes when a captain begins to act up, and the crew gets the idea that a lunatic has taken over the bridge. Well, something has to be done about it. The crew has the power to appoint one officer and send him up to the Captain for an accounting. If the Skipper refuses, or if the crew doesn't like his accounting, then they have the right to confine him to his quarters and take over the ship." "I think I heard about that," I said. "But the Skipper has rights, too. I mean the crew has to report everything by spaceradio the second it happens, and then the Captain has a full hearing along with the crew at the next port." liMR. Costello looked at us and shook his big head, full of admiration. When Mr. Costello thought you were good, it made you feel good all over. The Third looked at his watch and got up. "I got to relieve the bridge. Want to come along,' Purser?" "I'd like to talk to him for a while," Mr. Costello said. "Do you suppose you could get somebody else for a witness?" "Oh, sure, if you say so," said the Third. "But you're going to get someone." "Absolutely," said the Third. "Safest ship I was ever on," said Mr. Costello. "Gives a fellow a nice feeling to know that the watch is never going to get the orders wrong." I thought so myself and wondered why we never used to do it before. I watched the Third leave and stayed where I was, feeling good, feeling safe, feeling glad that Mr. Costello wanted to talk to me. And me just a Purser, him an ex-Triumver. Mr. Costello gave me the big smile. He nodded toward the door. "That young fellow's going far. A good man. You're all good men here." He stuck a suckercup in the heater and passed it over to me with his own hands. "Coffee," he said. "My own brand. All I ever use." I tasted it and it was hne. He was a very generous man. He sat back and beamed at me while I drank it. "What do you know about Borinquen?" he wanted to know. I told him all I could. Borinquen's a pretty nice place, what they call "four-nines Earth Normal" -- which means that the cli# mate, gravity, atmosphere and ecology come within .# of being the same as Earth's. There are only about six known planets like that. I told him about the one city it had and 'the trapping that used to be the main industry. Coats made out of junker fur last forever. They shine green in white light and a real warm ember-red in blue light, and you can take a full-sized coat and scrunch it up and hide it in your two hands, it's that light and fine. Being so light, the fur made ideal spacecargo. Of course, there was a lot more on Borinquen now-rare isotope ingots and foodstuffs and seeds for the drug business and all, and I suppose the glunker trade could dry right up and Borinquen could still carry its weight. But furs settled the planet, furs supported the city in the early days, and half the population still lived out in the bush and trapped. Mr. Costello listened to everything I said in a way I can only call respectful. I remember I finished up by saying, 'Tm sorry you have to get off there, Mr. Costello. I'd like to see you some more. I'd like to come see you at Borinquen, whenever we put in. though I don't suppose a man like you would have much spare time." He put his big hand on my arm. "Purser, if I don't have time when you're in port. I'U make time. Hear?" Ob, he had a wonderful way of making a fellow feel good.   vited me right into his cabin. He sat me down and handed me a sucker full of a mild red wine with a late flavor of cinnamon, which was a new one on me, and he showed me some of his things. He was a great collector. He had one or two little bits of colored paper that he said were stamps they used before the Space Age. to prepay carrying charges on paper letters. He said no matter where he was, just one of those things could get him a fortune. Then he had some jewels, not rings or anything, just stones, and a fine story for every single one of them. "What ydu'rc holding in your hand," he said, "cost the life of a king and the loss of an empire half again as big as United Earth." And : "This one was once so well guarded that most people didn't know whether it existed or not. There was a whole religion based on it -- and now it's gone, and so is the religion." It gave you a queer feeling, being next to this man who had so much, and him just as warm and friendly as your favorite imcle. "If you can assure me these bulkheads are soundproof, I'll show you something else I collect," he said. I assured him they were, and they were, too. "If ships' architects ever learned anything." I told him. "they learned that a man has just got to be by himself once in a while." He cocked his head to one side in that way he had. "How's that again?" "A man's just got to be by himself once in a while." I said. "So, mass or no, cost or no, a ship's bulkheads are built to give a man his privacy." "Good," he said. "Now let me show you." He unlocked a handcase and opened it. and from a little compartment inside he took out a thing about the size of the box a watch comes in. He handled it very gently as he put it down on his desk. It was square, and it had a fine grille on the top and two little silver studs on the side. He pressed one of them and turned to me. smiling. And let me tell you, I almost fell right off the bunk where I was sitting, because here was the Captain's voice as loud and as clear and natural as if he was right there in the room with us. And do you know what he said? He said, "My crew questions my sanity -- yet you can be sure that if a single man aboard questions my authority, he will leam that I am master here, even if he must leam it at the point of a gun."  wasn't only the voice but the words -- and what surprised me especially about the words was that I had heard the Skipper say them myself. It was the time he had had the argument with Mr. Costello. I remembered it well because I had walked into the dayroom just as the Captain started to yell. "Mr. Costello," he said in that big heavy voice of his, "in spite of your conviction that my crew questions my sanity... " and all the rest of it, just like on this recording Mr. Costello had. And I remember he said, too, "even if he must leam it at the point of a gun. That, air, applies to passenrs -- the crew has leial means oi their own." I was going to mention this to Mr. Costello, but before I could open my mouth, he asked me, "Now tell me. Purser, is that the voice of the Captain of your ship?" And I said, "Well, if it isn't, I'm not the Purser here. Why, I heard him speak those words my very own self." Mr. Costello swatted me on the shoulder. "You have a good ear. Purser. And how do you like my little toy?" #S Then he showed it to me, a little mechanism on the jeweled pin he wore on his tunic, a fine thread of wire to a pushbutton in his side pocket. "One of my favorite collections," he told me. "Voices. Anybody, anytime, an # where." He took off the pin and slipped a tiny bead out of the setting. He slipped this into a groove in the box and pressed the stud. And I heard my own voice say, "I'm sorry you have to get off there, Mr. Costello. I'd like to see you some more." I laughed and laughed. That was one of the cleverest things I ever saw. And just think of my voice in his collection, along with the Captain and space only knows how many great and famous people I He even had the voice of the Third Officer, from just a few minutes before, saying, "A lunatic has taken over the bridge. Well, something has to be done about it." All in all, I had a wonderful visit with him, and then he asked me to do whatever I had to do about his clearance papers. So I went back to my office and got .them out. They are kept in the Purser's safe during a voyage. And I went through them with the okayss There were a lot of them -- he had more than most people. I found one from Earth Central that sort of made me mad. I guess it was a mistake. It was a Know All Ye that warned consular officials to report every six months. Earth time, on the activities of Mr. Costello. I took it to him, and it was a mistake, all right -- he said, so himself. I tore it out of his passport book and adhesed an official note, reporting the accidental destruction of a used page of fully stamped visas. He gave me a beautiful blue gemstone for doing it. When I said, "I better not; I don't want you thinking I take bribes from passengers," he laughed and put one of those beads in his recorder, and it came out, in my voice, "I take bribes from passengers." He was a great joker. #E lay at Borinquen for four days. Nothing much happened except I was busy. That's what's tough about pursering. You got nothing to do for weeks in space, and then, when you're in spaceport, you have too much work to do even to go ashore much, unless it's a long layover. I never really minded much. I'm one of those mathematical geniuses, you know, even if I don't have too much sense otherwise, and I take pride in my work. Everybody has something he's good at, I guess. I couldn't tell you how the gimmick works that makes the ship travel faster than light, but rd hate to trust the Chief Engineer with one of my interplanetary cargo manifests, or a rate-of-exchange table. lunker pelts to U.E. dollars. Some hard jawed character with Space Navy Investigator credentials came inboard with a portable voice recorder and made me and the Third Officer recite a lot of nonsense for some sort of is always doing a lot of useless and mysterious things. I had an argument with the Port Agent, and I went ashore with Cooky for a fast drink. The usual thing. Then I had to work overtime signing on a new Third -- they transferred the old one to a corvette that was due in, they told me. Oh, yes, that was the trip the Skipper resigned. I guess it was high time. He'd been acting very nervous. He gave me the damnedest look when he went ashore that last time, like he didn't know whether to kill me or burst into tears. There was a rumor around that he'd gone beserk and threatened the crew with a gun, but I don't listen to rumors. And anyway, the Port Captain signs on new skippers. It didn't mean any extra work for me, so it didn't matter much. We upshipped again and made the rounds. Bootes Sigma and Nightingale and Caranho and Earth -- chemical glassware, blackprints, sho seed and glitter crystals; perfume, music tape. lizzard skins and Aldebar -- all the usual junk for all the usual months. And round we came again to Borinquen. Well, you wouldn't believe a place could change so much in so short a time. Borinquen used to be a pretty free-and-easy planet. There was just the one goodsized city, see, and then trapper camps all through the unsettled area. If you liked people, you settled in the city, and you could go to work in the processing plants or maintenance or some such. If you didn't, you could trap ivnketi. There was always something for everybody on Borinquen. But things were way different this trip. First of all, a man with a Planetary Government badge came aboard, by God, to censor the music tapes consigned for the city, and he had the credentials for it, too. Next thing I find out, the municipal authorities have confiscated the warehouses -- niy warehouses -- and they were being converted into barracks. And where were the goods -- the pelts and ingots for export? Where was the space for our cargo? Why. in houses -- in hundreds of houses, all spread around every which way, all indexed up with a whole big new office full of conscripts and volunteers to mix up and keep mixed up! For the first time since I went to space, I had to request layover so I could get things unwound. to wander around the town, which I don't often get. You should have seen the place! Everybody seemed to be moving out of the houses. All the big buildings were being made over into hollow shells, filled with rows and rows of mattresses. There were banners strung across the streets: are you a man or All of which meant nothing to me. But it wasn't until I noticed a sign painted in whitewash on the glass front of a barroom, saywas aware of one of the biggest changes of all. There were no trappers on the streets -- none at all. They used to be one of the tourist attractions of Borinquen, dressed in flanker fur, with the long tailwings afloat in the wind of their walking, and a kind of distance in their eyes that not even spacemen had. As soon as I missed them, I began to see the trappers where -- on the stores, the restaurants, the hotels and theaters. I stood on a street corner, looking around me and wondering what in hell was going on here, when a Borinquen cop yelled something at me from a monowheel prowl car. I didn't understand him, so I just shrugged. He made a U-turn and coasted up to me. "What's the matter, country boy? Lose your traps?" I said, "What?" He said, "If you want to go it alone, clunker, we got solitary cells over at the Hall that'll suit you fine." I just gawked at him. And, to my surprise, another cop poked his head up out of the prowler. A one-man prowler, mind. They were really jammed in there. This second one said, "Where's your trapline, jerker?" I said, "I don't have a trapline." I pointed to the mighty tower of my ship, looming over the spaceport. "I'm the Purser off that ship." "Oh, for God's sakes!" said the first cop. "I might have known. Look, Spacer, you'd better double up or you're liable to get yourself mobbed. This is no spot for a soloist." "I don't get you, Officer. I was just -- " "I'll take him," said someone I looked around and saw a tall Bortnquena standing just inside the open doorway of one of the hundreds of empty houses. She said, "I came back here to pick up some of my things. When I got done in here, there was nobody on the sidewalks. I've been here an hour, waiting for somebody to go with." She sounded a little hysterical. "You know better than to go in there by yourself," said one of the cops. "I know -- I know. It was just to get my things. I wasn't going to stay." She hauled up a duffelbag and dangled it in front of her. "Just to get my things," she said again, frightened. The cops looked at each other. "Well, all right. But watch yourself. You go along with the Purser here. Better straighten him out -- he don't seem to know what's right." "I will," she said thankfully. But by then the prowler had moaned off, weaving a little under its double load. pretty. She was sort of heavy and stupid. She said, "You'll be all right now. Let's go." "Where?" "Well, . Central Barracks, I guess. That's where most everybody is." "I have to get back to the ship." "Oh, dear," she said, all distressed again. "Right away?" "No, not right away. I'll go in town with you, if you want." She picked up her duffetbag, but I took it from her and heaved it up on my shoulder. "Is everybody here crazy?" I asked her, scowling. "Crazy?" She began walking, and I went along. "I don't think so." "All this," I persisted. I pointed to a banner that said, no "What's that mean?" "Just what it says." "You have to put up a big thing like that just to tell me... "Oh," she said. "You mean what does it mean!" She looked at me strangely. "We've found out a new truth about humanity. Look, I'll try to tell it to you the way Lucilles said it last night." "Who's Lucille?" The Lucilles," she said, in a mildly shocked tone. "Actually, I suppose there's really only one -- though, of course, there'll be someone else in the studio at the time," she added quickly. "But on trideo it looks like four Lucilles, all speaking at once, sort of in chorus." "You just go on talking," I said when she paused. "I catch on slowly." "Well, here's what they say. They say no one human being ever did anything. They say it takes a hundred pairs of hands to build a house, ten thousand pairs to build a ship.' They say a single pair is not only useless -- it's evil. All humanity is a thing made up of many parts. No part is good by itself. Any part that wants to go off by itself hurts the whole main thing -- the thing that has become so great. So we're seeing to it that no part ever gets separated. What good would your hand be if a finger suddenly decided to go off by itself?" I said, "And you believe this -- what's your name?" "Nola. Believe it? Well, it's true, isn't it? Can't you see it's true? Everybody knows it's true." "Well, it could be true," I said reluctantly. "What do you do with people who want to be by themselves?" "We help them." "Suppose they don't want help?" "Then they're trappers," she said immediately. "We push thm back into the bush, where the evil soloists come from." "Well, what about the fur?" "iVobody uses furs any more!" So that's what happened to our fur consignments! And I was thinking those amateur red-tapers had just lost 'em somewhere, She said, as if to herself. "All sin starts in the lonesome dark," and when I looked up, I saw she'd read it approvingly off another banner. W E rounded a comer and I blinked at a blaze of light. It was one of the warehouses. "There's the Central," she said. "Would you like to see it?" "I guess so." I followed her down the street to the entrance. There was a man sitting at a table in the doorway. Nola gave him a card. He checked it against a list and handed it back. "A visitor," she said. "From the ship." I showed him my Purser's card and he said, "Okay. But if you want to stay, you'll have to register." "I won't want to stay." I told him. "I have to get back." I followed Nola inside. The place had been scraped out to the absolute maximum. Take away one splinter of vertical structure more and it wouldn't have held a roof. There wasn't a concealed corner, a shelf, a drape, an overhang. There must have been two thousand beds, cots and mattresses spread out, cheek by jowl, over the entire floor, in blocks of four, with only a hand's-breadth between them. The light was blinding -- huge floods and spots bathed every square inch in yellow-white Are. Nola said, "You'll get used to the light. After a few nights, you don't even notice it." "The lights never gfet turned off?" "Oh, dear, no!" Then I saw the plumbing -- showers, tubs, sinks and everything else. It was all lined up against one wall. Nola followed my eyes. "You get used to that, too. Better to have everything out in the open than to let the devil in for one secret second. That's what the Lucilles say." I dropped her dulfelbag and sat down on it. The only thing I could think of was, "Whose idea was all this? Where did it start?" "The Lucilles." she said vaguely. Then, "Before them, I don't know. People just started to realize. Somebody bought a warehouse -- no, it was a hangar -- I don't know," she said again, apparently trying hard to remember. She sat down next to me and said in a subdued voice, "Actually, some people didn't take to it so well at first." She looked around. " didn't. I mean it, I really didn't. But you believed, or you had to act as if you believed, and one way or another everybody just came to this." She waved a hand. "What happened to the ones who wouldn't come to Centrals?" "People made fun of them. They lost their jobs, the schools wouldn't take their children, the stores wouldn't honor their ration cards. Then the police started to pick up soloists -- like they did you." She looked around again, a sort of contented familiarity in her gaze. "It didn't take long." I turned away from her, but found myself staring at all that plumbing again. I jumped up. "I have to go, Nola. Thanks for your help. Hey -- how do I get back to the ship, if the cops are out to pick up any soloist they see?" "Oh, just tell the man at the gate. There'll be people waiting to go your way. There's always somebody waiting to go everywhere." S HE came along with me. I spoke to the man at the gate, and she shook hands with me. I stood by the little table and watched her hesitate, then step up to a woman who was entering. They went in together. The doorman nudged me over toward a group of what apieared to be loungers. 'Notihr he bawled. I drew a pudgy little man with bad teeth, who said not one single word. We escorted each other two-thirds of the way to the spaceport, and he disappeared into a factory. I scuttled the rest of the way alone, feeling like a criminal, which I suppose I was. I swore I would never go into that crazy city again. And the next morning, who should come out for me, in an armored car with six two-man prowlers as escort, but Mr. Costello himself! It was pretty grand seeing him again. He was just like always, big and handsome and good-natured. He was not alone. All spread out in the back corner of the car was the most beautiful blonde woman that ever struck me speechless. She didn't say very much. She would just look at me every once in a while and sort of smile, and then she would look out of the car window and bite on her lower lip a little, and then look at Mr. Costello and not smile at all. Mr. Costello hadn't forgotten me. He had a bottle of that same red cinnamon wine, and he talked over old times the same as ever, like he was a special uncle. We got a sort of guided tour. I told him about last night, about the visit to the Central, and he was pleased as could be. He said he knew I'd like it. I didn't stop to think whether I liked it or not. "Think of it!" he said. "All humankind, a single unit. You know the principle of cooperation. Purser?" When I took too long to think it out, he said. "You know. Two men working together can produce more than two men working separately. Well, what happens work, sleep, eat. think, breathe together?" The way he said it, it sounded fine. He looked out past my shoulder and his eyes widened just a little. He pressed a button and the chauffeur brought us to a sliding stop. "Get that one," Mr. Costello said into a microphone beside him. Two of the prowlers hurtled down the street and flanked a man. He dodged right, dodged left, and then a prowler hit him and knocked him down. "Poor chap," said Mr. Costello, pushing the Go button. "Some of 'em just won't learn." I think he regretted it very much. I don't know if the blonde woman did. She didn't even look. "Are you the mayor?" I asked him. "Oh, no," he said. "I'm a sort of broker. A little of this, a little of that. I'm able to help out a bit." "Help out?" "Purser." he said confidentially, "I'm a citizen of Borinquen now. This is my adopted land and I love it. I mean to do everything in my power to help it. I don't care about the cost. This is a people that has found the truth, Purser. It awes me. It makes me humble." "Speak up, man. I'm your friend." "I appreciate that, Mr. Costello. Well, what I was going to say, I saw that Central and all. I just haven't made up my mind. I mean whether it's good or not." "Take your time, take your time," he said in the big soft voice. "Nobody has to make a man see a truth, am I right? A real truth? A man just sees it all by himsetf." "Yeah," I agreed. "Yeah, I guess so." Sometimes it was hard to find an answtrr to give Mr. Costello. car pulled up beside a building. The blonde woman pulled herself together. Mr. Costello opened the door for her with his own hands. She got out. Mr. Costello rapped the trideo screen in front of him. He said. "Make it a real good one, Lucille, real good. I'll be watching." 'She looked at him. She gave me a small' smile. A man came down the steps and she went with him up into the building. We moved off. I said, "She's the prettiest woman I ever saw." He said, "She likes you fine, Purser." I thought about that. It was too much. He asked, "How would you like to have her for your very own?" "Oh," I said, "she wouldn't" "Purser, I owe you a big favor. I'd like to pay it back." "You don't owe me a thing, Mr. Costello!" We drank some of the wine. The big car slid silently along. It went slowly now. headed back out to the spaceport. "I need some help," he said after a time. "I know you, Purser. You're just the kind of man I can use. They say you're a mathematical genius." "Not mathematics exactly, Mr. Costello. Just numbers -- statistics -- conversion tables and like that. I couldn't do astrogation or theoretical physics and such. I got the best job I could have right now." "No, you haven't. I'll be frank with you. I don't want any more responsibility on Borinquen than I've got, you understand, but the people are forcing it on me. They want order, peace and order -- tidiness. They want to be as nice and tidy as one of your multiple manifests. Now I could organize them, all right, but I need a tidy brain like yours to keep them organized. I want full birth-and death-rate statistics, and then I want them projected so we can get policy. I want calory-counts and rationing, so we can use the food supply the best way. I want -- well, you see what I mean. Once the devil is routed -- " "What devil?" "The trappers," he said grayly. "Are the trappers really harming the city people?" He looked at me, shocked. "They go out and spend weeks alone by themselves, with their own evil thoughts. They are wandering cells, wild cells in the body of humanity. They must be destroyed." of my consignments. "What about the fur trade, though?" He looked at me as if I had made a pretty grubby little mistake. "My dear Purser," he said patiently, "would you set the price of a few pelts above the immortal soul of a race?" I hadn't thought of it that way. He said urgently, "This is just the beginning. Purser. Borinquen is only a start. The unity of that great being, Humanity, will become known throughout the Universe." He closed his eyes. When he Opened them, the organ tone was gone. He said in his old, friendly voice, "And you and I, we'll show 'em how to do it. hey, boy?" I leaned forward to look up to the top of the shining spire of the spaceship. "I sort of like the job I've got. But -- my contract is up four months from now..." The car turned into the spaceport and hummed across the slag area. "I think I 'can count on you," he said vibrantly. He laughed. "Rememlr this little joke. Purser?" He clicked a switch, and suddenly my own voice filled the tonneau. " take bribes from passengers. "Oh, that," I said, and let loose one ha of a ha-ha before I understood what he was driving at. "Mr. Costello, you wouldn't use that against me." "What do you take me for?" he demanded, in wonderment. Then we were at the ramp. He got out with me. He gave me his hand. It was warm and hearty. "If you change your mind about the Purser's job when your contract's up, son, just buzz me through the field phone. They'll connect me. Think it over until you get back here. Take your time." His hand clamped down on my biceps so hard I winced. "But you're not going to take any longer than that, are you, my boy?" "I guess not," I said. He got into the front, by the chauffeur, and zoomed away. I stood looking after him and, when the car was just a dark spot on the slag area, I sort of came to myself. I was standing alone on the foot of the ramp. I felt very exposed. I turned and ran up to the airlock, hurrying, hurrying to get near people. the crazy man. His name was Hynes. He was United Earth Consul at Horinquen and he was going back to report. He was no trouble at first, because diplomatic passports are easy to process. He knocked on my door the fifth watch out from Borinquen. I was glad to see him. My room was making me uneasy and I appreciated his company. Not that he was really company. He was crazy. That first time, he came busting in and said, "I hope you don't mind. Purser, but if I don't talk to somebody about this. I'll go out of my mind." Then he sat down on the end of my bunk and put his head in his hands and rocked back and forth for a long time, without saying anything. Next thfng he said was. "Sorry," and out he went. Crazy, I tell you. But he was back in again before long. And then you never heard such ravings. "Do you know what's happened to Borinquen?" he'd demand. But he didn't want any answers. He had the answers. "I'll tell you what's wrong with Borinquen -- Borinquen's gone mad!" he'd say. I went on with my work, though there wasn't much of it in space, but that Hynes just couldn't get Borinquen out of his mind. He said, "You wouldn't believe it if you hadn't seen it done. First the little wedge, driven in the one place it might exist -- between the urbans and the trappers. There was never any conflict between them -- never! All of a sudden, the trapper was a menace. How it happened, why, God only knows. First, these laughable attempts to show that they were an unhealthy influence. Yes. laughable -- how could you take it seriously? "And then the changes. You didn't have to prove that a trapper had done anything. You only had to prove he was a trapper. That was enough. And the next thing -- how could you anticipate anything as mad as this?" -- he almost screamed -- "the next thing was to take anyone who wanted to be alone and lump him with the trappers. It all happened so fast -- it happened in our sleep. And all of a sudden you were afraid to be alone in a room for a second. They left their homes. They built barracks. Everyone afraid of everyone else, afraid, afraid... "Do you know what they did?" he roared. "They burned the paintings, every painting on Borinquen they could find that had been done by one artist. And the few artists who survived as artists -- I've seen them. By twos and threes, they work together on the one canvas." He cried. He actually sat there and cried. He said, "There's food in the stores. The crops come in. Trucks run, planes fly, the schools are in session. BeUies get full, cars get washed, people get rich. I know a man called Costello, just in from Earth a few months, maybe a year or so, and already owns half the city." "Oh, I know Mr. Costello," I said. "Do you now! How's that?" with Mr. Costello. He sort of backed off from me. "You're the one!" "The one what?" I asked in puzzlement. "You're the man who testified against your Captain, broke him, made him resign." "I did no such a thing." "I'm the Consul. It was my hearing, man! I was there! A recording of the Captain's voice, admitting to insanity, declaring he'd take a gun to his crew if they overrode him. Then your recorded testimony that it was his voice, that you were present when he made the statement. And the Third Officer's recorded statement that all was not well on the bridge. The man denied it, but it was his voice." "Wait, wait," I said. "I don't believe it. That would need a trial. There was no trial. I wasn't called to any trial." "There would have been a trial, you idiot! But the Captain started raving about draw poker without a draw, about the crew fearing poisoning from the cook, about the men wanting witnesses even to change the bridge-watch. Maddest thing I ever heard. He realized it suddenly, the Captain did. He was old, sick, tired, beaten. He blamed the whole thing on Costello, and Costello said he got the recordings from you." "Mr. Costello wouldn't do such a thing!" I guess I got mad at Mr. Hynes then. I told him a whole lot about Mr. Costello, what a big man he was. He started to tell me how Mr. Costello was forced off the Triumveratc for making trouble in the high court, but they were lies and I wouldn't listen. I told him about the poker, how Mr. Costello saved us from the cheaters, how he saved us from poisoning, how he made the ship safe for us all. I remember how he looked at me then. He sort of whispered, "What has happened to human beings? What have we done to ourselves with these centuries of peace, with confidence and cooperation and no conflict? Here's distrust by man for man, waiting under a thin skin to be punctured by just the right vampire, waiting to hate itself and kill itself all over again... "My God!" he suddenly screamed at me. "Do you know what I've been hanging onto? The idea that, for all its error, for all its stupidity, this One Humanity idea on Borinquen was a principle? I hated it. but because it was a principle, I could respect it. It's Costello -- Costello, who doesn't gamble, but who uses fear to change the poker rules -- Costello, who doesn't eat your food, but makesyou fear poison -- Costello, who can see three hundred years of safe interstellar flight, but who through fear makes the watch officers doubt themselves without a witness -- Costello, who runs things without being seen! "My God, Costello doesn't care! It isn't a principle at all. It's just Costello spreading fear anywhere, everywhere, to make himself strong!" He rushed out, crying with rage and hate. I have to admit I was sort of jolted. I guess I might even have thought about the things he said, only he killed himself before we reached Earth. He was crazy.  ever, scheduled like an interurban line: Load, discharge, blastoff, fly and planetfall. Refuel, clearance, manifest. Eat, sleep, work. There was a hearing about Hynes. Mr. Costello sent a spacegram with his regrets when he heard the news. I didn't say anything at the hearing, just that Mr. Hynes was upset, that's all, and it was about as true as anything could be. We shipped a second engineer who played real good accordian. One of the inboard men got left on Carnho. All the usual things, except I wrote up my termination with no options, ready to file. So in its turn we made Borinquen again, and what do you know, there was the space fleet of United Earth. I never guessed they had that many ships. They sheered us off, real Navy: all orders and no information. Borinquen was buttoned up tight; there was some kind of fighting going on down there. We couldn't get or give a word of news through the quarantine. It made the skipper mad and he had to use part of the cargo for fuel, which messed up my records six ways from the middle. I stashed my termination papers away for the time being. And in its turn, Sigma, where we lay over a couple of days to get back in the rut, and, same as always, Nightingale, right on schedule again. And who should be waiting for me at Nightingale but Barney Roteel, who was medic on my first ship, years back when I was fresh from the Academy. He had a pot belly now and looked real successful. We got the jollity out of the way and he settled down and looked me over, real sober. I said it's a small Universe -- I'd known he had a big job on Nightingale, but imagine him showing up at the spaceport just when I blew in! "I showed up because you blew in. Purser," he answered. Then before I could take that apart, he started asking me questions. Like how was I doing, what did I plan to do. I said. 'T've been a purser for years and years. What makes you think I want to do anything different?" "Just wondered." I wondered, too. "Well." I said, "I haven't exactly made up my mind, you might say -- and a couple of things have got in the way -- but I did have a kind of offer." I told him just in a general way about how big a man Mr. Costello was on Borinquen now, and how he wanted me to come in with him. "It'll have to wait, though. The whole damn Space Navy has a cordon around Borinquen. They wouldn't say why. But whatever it is, Mr. Costello'll come out on top. You'll see." Barney gave me a sort of puckered-up look. I never sow a man look so weird. Yes, I did, too. It was the old Iron Man, the day he got off the ship and resigned. "Barney, what's the matter?" I asked. He got up and pointed through the glass door-lights to a white monowheel that stood poised in front of the receiving station. "Come on," he said. "Aw, I can't. I got to -- " "Come on.'" I shrugged. Job or no, this was Barney's bailiwick, not mine. He'd cover me. He held the door open and said, like a mind reader, "I'll cover you." We went down the ramp and climbed in and skimmed off. "Where are we going?" But he wouldn't say. He just drove.  place. The most beautiful of them all, I think, even Sigma. It's run by the UE. one hundred per cent; this is one planet with no local options, but none. It's a regular garden of a world and they keep it that way. We topped a rise and went down a curving road lined with honest-to-God Lombardy poplars from Earth. There was a little lake down there and a sandy beach. No people. The road curved and there was a yellow line across it and then a red one, and after it a shimmering curtain, almost transparent. It extended from side to side as far as I could see. "Force-fence," Barney said and pressed a button on the dash. The shimmer disappeared from the road ahead, though it stayed where it was at each side. We drove through and it formed behind us, and we went down the hill to the lake. Just this side of the beach was the coziest little Sigma cabana I've seen yet, built to hug the slope and open its arms to the sky. Maybe when I get old they'll 'turn me out to pasture in one half as good. While I was goggling at it, Barney said, "Go on." I looked at him and he was pointing. There was a man down near the water, big, very tanned, built like a space-tug. Barney waved me on and I walked down there. , The man got up and turned to me. He had the same wide-spaced, warm deep eyes, the same full, gentle voice. "Why, it's the Purser! Hi, old friend. So you came, after all!" It was sort of rough for a moment. Then I got it out. "Hi, Mr. Costello." He banged me on the shoulder. Then he wrapped one big hand around my left biceps and pulled me a little closer. He looked uphill to where Barney leaned against the monowheel, minding his own business. Then he looked across the lake, and up in the sky. He dropped his voice. "Purser, you're just the man Ineed. But I told you that before, didn't I?" He looked around again. "We'll do it yet. Purser. You and me, we'll hit the top. Come with me. I want to show you something." He walked ahead of me toward the beach margin. He was wearing only a breech-ribbon, but he moved and spoke as if he still had the armored car and the six prowlers. I stumbled after him. He put a hand behind him and checked me, and then knelt. He said, "To look at them, you'd think they were all the same, wouldn't you? Well, son, you just let me show you something." I looked down. He had an anthill. They weren't like Earth ants.These were bigger, slower, blue, and they had eight legs. They built nests of sand tied together ao with mucus, and tunneled under them so that the nests stood up an inch or two like on little pillars. "They look the same, they act the same, but you'll see," said Mr. Costello. He opened a synthine pouch that lay in the sand. He took out a dead bird and the thorax of what looked like a Carho roach, the one that grows as long as your forearm. He put the bird down here and the roach down yonder. "Now," he said, "watch." rHE ants swarmed to the bird, pulling and crawling. Busy. But one or two went to the roach and tumbled it and burrowed around. Mr. Costello picked an ant off the roach and dropped it on the bird. It weaved around and shouldered through the others and scrabbled across the sand and went back to the roach. "You see, you see?" he said, enthusiastic. "Look." He picked an ant off the dead bird and dropped it by the roach. The ant wasted no time or even curiosity on the piece of roach. SI It turned around once to get its bearings, and then went straight back to the dead bird. I looked at the bird with its clothing of crawling blue, and I looked at the roach with its two or three voracious scavengers. I looked at Mr. Costello. He said raptly, "See what I mean? About one in thirty eats something different. And that's all we need. I tell you, Purser, wherever you look, if you look long enough, you can find a way to make most of a group turn on the rest." I watched the ants. "They're not fighting." "Now wait a minute," he said swiftly. "Wait a minute. All we have to do is let these bird-eaters know that the roach-eaters are dangerous." "They're not dangerous," I said. "They're just different." "What'.s the difference, when you come right down to it?. So we'll get the bird-eaters scared and they'll kill all the roach-eaters." "Yes, but why, Mr. Costello?" He laughed. "I like you, boy. I do the thinking, you do the wprk. I'll explain it to you. They all look alike. So once we've made 'em drive out these -- " he pointed to the minority around the roach -- "they'll never know which among 'em might be a roach-eater. They'll get so worried, they'll dp anything to keep from being suspected of roacheating. When they get scared enough, we can make 'em do anything we want." He hunkered down to watch the ants. He picked up a roacheater and put it on the bird. I got up. "Well, I only just dropped in, Mr. Costello," I said. "I'm not ap ant," said Mr. Costello. "As long as it makes no difference to me what they eat. I can make 'em do anything in the world I want." "I'll see you around," I said. He kept on talking quietly to himself as I walked away. He was watching jthe ants, figuring, and paid no attention to me. I went bapk to Barney. I asked, sort of choked, "What is he doing. Barney?" "He's doing what he has to do," Barney said. TV#E went back to the monowheel and up the hill and through the force-gate. After a while, I asked. "How long will he be here?" "As long as he wants to be." Barney was kind of short about it. "Nobody wants to be locked up." He had that odd look on his face again. "Nightingale's not a jail." "He can't get out." "Look, chum, we could start him over. We could even make a purser out of him. But we stopped doing that kind of thing a long time ago. We let a man do what he wants to do." "He never wanted to be boss over an anthill." "He didn't?" I guess I looked as if I didn't understand that, so he said, "All his life he's pretended he's a man and the rest of us are ants. Now it's come true for him. He won't run human anthills any more because he will never again get near one." I looked through the windshield at the shining finger that was my distant ship. "What happened on Borinquen, Barney?" "Some of his converts got loose around the System. That Humanity One idea had to be stopped." He drove a while, seeing badly out of a thinking face. "You won't take this hard. Purser, but you're a thick-witted ape. I can say that if no one else can." 'All right," I said. "Why?" "Wc had to smash into Borinquen, which used to be so free and easy. We got into Costello's place. It was a regular fort. We got him and his files. We didn't get his girl. He killed her, but the files were enough." After a time I said, "He was always a good friend to me." "Was he?" I didn't say anything. He wheeled up to the receiving station and stopped the machine. He said, "He was all ready for you if you came to work for him. He had a voice recording of you large as life, saying 'Sometimes a man's just got to be by himself.' Once you went to work for him, all he needed to do to keep you in line was to threaten to put that on the air." I opened the door. "What did you have to show him to me for?" "Because we believe in letting a man do what he wants to do, as long as he doesn't hurt the rest of us. If you want to go back to the lake and work for Costello, for instance. I'll take you there." I closed the door carefully and went up the ramp to the ship. I did my work and when the time came, we blasted off. I was mad. I don't think it was about anything Barney told me. I wasn't especially mad about Mr. Costello or what happened to him. because Barney's the best Navy psych doc there is and Nightingale's the most beautiful hospital planet in the Universe. What made me mad was the thought that never again would a man as big as Mr. Costello give that big, warm, soft, strong friendship to a lunkhead like me. by Wilmar H. Shiras. Gnome Press, New York, #. # paes, #. IHE theme of the mutant child conceived in the vicinity of an atomic explosion has been worked over almost to boredom since #. Professional science fiction writers of all qualities have tried their hands at it, but it is not too much to say that none of them has approached, much less equaled, the sensitive charm and understanding that Wilmar Shiras, a heretofore unknown writer, here brings to her fictional analysis of the problems of supergenius children. Those of us who happened to read her first Astounding novelet "In Hiding" more than five years ago will never forget the delighted shock of finding someone writing with real tenderness and perception about a problem which, in some degree at least, comes close to every one of us. For those who missed "In Hiding" and its sequels, it should be mentioned that the story is based on the assumption that after a catastrophic atomic explosion in the U.S. in #, a number of mutant children are born near the site of the tragedy. These super-genius kids hide their qualities until a psychiatrist named Peter Welles discovers one of them, a boy, and leads him to an understanding of his social problems, the problems of a truly intelligent being in a world of quasi-morons. The story develops as the two seek out the other mutants and bring them together in a special school for handling their own difficulties, which are primarily emotional rather than intellectual. For these children find it difficult to adjust to "life." It is a pleasure to report that Mrs. Shiras's finished novel, which contains nearly as much new material as reprint, measures up to the high standard set in "In Hiding." In one of the two new sections, the kids themselves begin solving their own social problems with a delightful mixture of mature scientific knowledge and of instinctive "peck order" psychology. In the second and last, they arrive at the only possible solution to their "differentness," following an attack upon them by a rabble-rousing radio preacher. The book now has a story line and a richness of character development that lift it out of the realm of the standard "supergenius" tale. Unreservedly recommended. ver Publications, New York, #, # pages, # TT IS pleasant to have these three historical novels back in print again. Haggard stands up amazingly well against the erosion of time. He is wordy and slow, it is true, but he is also vivid and satisfying. The book contains Monteiuma's Daughter, a rich and brutal narrative of the fall of the Aztec Empire in Mexico; Eric B righteyes, a retelling of one of the Icelandic sagas; and Cleopatra, a romantic version of the ancient tragedy of the Egyptian Queen. These ornately embroidered taiestries of imaginative adventure have rarely been surpassed for color, though they may have been for historical accuracy, in the half century since Haggard first set them down. Eminently readable. Gerald Kersh. Ballantine Books, New York. #. # pages, # cloth, #c paper starts out to write a suspense novel and gives it everything he's got, he's hard to surpass. Gerald Kersh is definitely one of the British experts. The Secret Masters, a suspense novel with science fiction aspects, provides one of Kersh's most conalong with it a set of characters so three dimensional and individual that they seem to be living portraits. The story is not quite as convincing as the characters nor as effective as the style in which it is written. It concerns itself with the uncovering of an international plot by the most powerful men in the world to destroy five-sixths of the human race by means of a fantastic new type of atomic bomb and to use most of the remaining people in a "sciocratic" slavocracy. The story gradually collapses in a morass of unresolved and unfinished business in the last few chapters. But don't let this defect hinder you from reading the book. It is still, on the whole, a first rate science fiction goose pimpler. G. Feinberg. Philosophical Library, New York, #. # pages, # Y now, there must be hun dreds of books, in and out of print, that purport to tell "The Atom Story." Generally they are all pretty much alike: gee-whiz stuff on EMC # atomic bombs, and the wonders of our atomic future -- provided we don't commit suicide meanwhile on a global scale. Dr. Feinberg has written an entirely different sort of book. A historian of science and a student of one of Britain's most celebrated physicists, Sir Frederick Soddy, he has outlined in rich detail the whole story of Man's ideas about ultimate particles, the composition of matter, and similar affairs, and has done so with a liveliness that is in no way touched with sensationalism so dear to Sunday supplement editors apd authors alike. We learn what were the contributions to atomic theory (or its opposing theories) by everyone from Democritus on down. We read with new fascination the story of the momentous events of #-# as seen through British eyes; and are given a great deal of the basics of modern nuclear physics and chemistry in completely understandable language. The book gains velocity and charm from its shrewd and often controversial judgments of people, its almost conversational style, and the warmth of conviction with which its author approaches his momentous subject. Highly rewarding for the curiousminded layman. by Ferley Poore Sheehan. Polaris Press, Box #, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # item in his Polaris Fantasy Library of pre-# reprints does not stack up as well for the general reader as did his first. The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens. This new item is really a fairy tale for youngsters, about how a young American, John McGoff, finds a magic city, complete with dream people, at the site of Genghis Khan's tomb in the Gobi Desert. He does this with the supernatural assistance of a number of "stick-figures" such as an old Chinese laundryman and an eccentric Russian cobbler. There is an idealistic love story, and a self-sacrificing grandma, and various other mechanical devices, and the whole is written in a kindergarten style that is irritating to most modern readers. However. I am sure that the book will appeal to a generation with memories that reach back to its original appearance in Argosy in #. But surely there are old stories much worthier of reprint. I hope Mr. Eschbach finds them. J. T. McIntosh. Doubleday, New York, #. # pages, # story, with a hero who is supposed to be "advance agent" for the invaders, this is a slick job -- one of those fast-paced melodramas of the "might-be" that are always intriguing no matter how trite the subject. The events take place in a society in which everyone achieves his true niche in life by Taking Tests. The smarter you are, the higher you climb, until you become a White Star, of which there may be fewer than a dozen in any one generation. Eldin Raigmore, a "man with no past," begins to take the tests soon after he has encountered beautiful Alison Hever, youngest living White Star. Before long, he is a White Star, too, and on the way to preparing the world to be taken over by the aliens. However, he changes his mind (love, ah, love!) and the invaders are finally beaten off in the last few pages of the book because (among other reasons) they are purely logical and do not know emotion. Why logic forces them to retreat is one of the high points of Hall of Mirrors It is o tough decision to make -- whetfier fo give up your lifo so you can live it over again! F or an instant you think, it is temporary blindness, this sudden dark that comes in the middle of a bright afternoon. It must be blindness, you think; could the sun that was tanning you have gone out instantaneously, leaving you in utter blackness? Then the nerves of your body tell you that you are standing, whereas only a second ago you were sitting comfortably, almost reclining, in a canvas chair. In the patio of a friend's house in Beverly Hills. Talking to Barbara. your fiancee. Looking at Barbara -- Barbara in a swim suit -- her skin golden tan in the brilliant sunshine, beautiful. You wore swimming trunks. Now you do not feel them on you; the slight pressure of the elastic waistband is no longer there against your waist. You touch your hands to your hips. You are naked. And standing. Whatever has happened to you is more than a change to sudden darkness or to sudden blindness. You raise your hands gropingly before you. They touch a plain smooth surface, a wall. You spread them apart and each hand reaches a comer. You pivot slowly. A second wall, then a third, then a door. You are in a closet about four feet square. Your hand finds the knob of the door. It turns and you push the door open. There is light now. The door has opened to a lighted room... a room that you have never seen before. TT is not large, but it is plcasantly furnished -- although the furniture is of a style that is strange to you. Modesty makes you open the door cautiously the rest of the way. But the room is empty of people. You step into the room, turning to look behind you into the closet, which is now illuminated by light from the room. The closet is and is not a closet: it is the size and shape of one, but it contains nothing, not a single hook, no rod for hanging clothes, no shelf. It is an empty, blankwalled, four-by-four foot space. You close the door to it and stand looking around the room. It is about twelve by sixteen feet. There is one door, but it is closed. There are no windows. Five pieces of furniture. Four of them you recognize -- more or less. One looks like a very functional desk. One is obviously a chair... a comfortable-looking one. There is a table, although its top is on several levels instead of only one. Another is a bed. or couch. Something shimmering is' lying across it and you walk over and pick the shimmering something up and examine it. It is a garment. You are naked, so you put it on. Slippers are part way under the bed (or couch) and you slide your feet into them. They fit, and they feel warm and comfortable as nothing you have ever worn on your feet has felt. Like lamb's wool, but softer. You are dressed now. You look at the door -- the only door of the room except that of the closet (closet?) from which you entered it. You walk to the door and before you try the knob, you see the small typewritten sign pasted just above it that reads: This door has a time loek set to open in one hour. For reasons you will soon understand, it is better that you do not leave this room before then. There is a letter for you on the desk. Please read it. It is not signed. You look at the desk and see that there is an envelope lying on it. You do not yet go to take that envelope from the desk and read the letter that must be in it. Why not? Because you are frightened. You see other things about the room. The lighting has no source that you can discover. It comes from nowhere. It is not indirect lighting: the ceiling and the walls are not reflecting it at all. They didn't have lighting like that, back where you came from. What did you mean by back where you came from? You close your eyes. You tell yourself: I am Norman Hastings. I am an associate professor of mafiemafics at the University of Southern CaJifornia.  am twenty-five years old, and this is the year nineteen hundred and fiftyfour. You open your eyes and look again. furniture in Los Angeles -- or anywhere else that you know of -- in #-#. That thing over in the corner -- you can't even guess what it is. So might your grandfather. at your age, have looked at a television set. You look down at you,rself, at the shimmering garment that you found waiting for you. With thumb and forefinger you feel its texture. It's like nothing you've ever touched before. I am Norman Hastings. This is nineteen hundred and fiftyfour. Suddenly you must know, and at once. You go to the desk and pick up the envelope that lies upon it. Your name is typed on the outside. Norman Hastings. Your hands shake a little as you open it. Do you blame them? There are several pages, typewritten. Dear Norman, it starts. You turn quickly to the end to look for the signature. It is unsigned. You turn back and start reading. "Do not be afraid. There is nothing to fear, but much to explain. Much that you must understand before the time lock opens that door. Much that you must accept and -- obey. "You have already, guessed that you are in the future -- in what, to you. seems to be the future. The clothes and the room must have told you that. I planned it that way so the shock would not be too sudden, so you would realize it over the course of several minutes rather than read it here -- and quite probably disbelieve what you read. "The 'closet' from which you have just stepped is, as you have by now realized, a time machine. From it you stepped into the world of #. The date is April #th. just fifty years from the time you last remember. "You cannot return. "I did this to you and you may hate me for it; I do not know. That is up to you to decide, but it does not matter. What does matter, and not to you alone, is another decision which you must make. I am incapable of making it. "Who is writing this to you? I would rather not tell you just yet. By the time you have finished reading this, even thbugh it is not signed (for I knew you would look first for a signature), I will not need to tell you who I am. You will know. "I am seventy-five years of age. I have, in this year #, been studying 'time' for thirty of those years. I have completed the first time machine ever built -- and thus far, its construction, even the fact that it has been constructed, is my own secret. "You have just participated in the first major experiment. It will be your responsibility to decide whether there shall ever be any more experiments with it, whether it should be given to the world, or whether it should be destroyed and never used again." #ND ot the first page. You look up for a moment, hesitating to turn the next page. Already you suspect what is coming. You turn the page. "I constructed the first time machine a week ago. My calculations had told me that it would work, but not how it would work. I had expected it to send an ob ject back in time -- it works backward in time only, not forward -- physically unchanged and intact. "My first experiment showed me my error. I placed a cube of metal in the machine -- it was a miniature of the one you just walked out of -- and set the machine to go backward ten years. I flicked the switch and opened the door, expecting to find the cube vanished. Instead I found it had crumbled to powder. "I put in another cube and sent it two years back. The second cube came back unchanged, except that it was newer, shinier, "That gave me the answer. I had been expecting the cubes to go back in time, and they had done so, but not in the sense I had expected them to. Those metal cubes had been fabricated about three years previously. I had sent the first one back years before it had existed in its fabricated form. Ten years ago it had been ore. The machine returned it to that state. "Do you sec how our previous theories of time travel have been wrong? We expected to be able to step into a time machine in, say, #, set it for fifty years back, and then step out in the year #... but it does not work that way. The machine does not move in time. Only whatever is within the machine is affected, and then just with relation to itself and not to the rest of the Universe. "I confirmed this with guinea pigs by sending one six weeks old five weeks back and it came out a baby. "I need not outline all my experiments here. You will find a record of them in the desk and you can study it later. "Do you understand now what has happened to you, Norman?" 'YT'OU begin to understand. And you begin to sweat. The  who wrote that letter you are now reading is you, yourself at the age of seventyfive, in this year of #. You are that seventy-five-year-old man, with your body returned to what it had been fifty years ago, with all the memories of fifty years of "living wiped out. You invented the time machine. And before you used it on yourself, you made these arrangements to help you orient yourself. You wrote yourself the letter which you are now reading. But if those fifty years are -- to you -- gone, what of all your friends, those you loved? What of your parents? What of the girl you are going -- were going -- to marry? You read on: "Yes, you will want to know what has happened. Mom died in #, Dad in #. You married Barbara in #. I am sorry to tell you that she died only three years later, in a plane crash. You have one son. He is still living; his name is Walter; he is now forty-six years old and is an accountant in Kansas City." Tears come into your eyes and for .a moment you can no longer read. Barbara dead -- dead for forty-five years. And only minutes ago, in subjective time, you were sitting next to her, sitting in the bright sun in a Beverly Hills patio... Y ou force yourself to read again. "But back to the discovery. You begin to see some of its implications. You will need time to think to see all of them. "It does not permit time travel as we have thought of time travel, but it gives us immortality of a sort. Immortality of the kind I have temporarily given us. "s it ood? Is it worth while to lose the memory of fifty years of one's life in order to return one's body to relative youth? The only way I can find out is to try, as soon as I have finished writing this and made my other preparations. "You will know the answer. "But before you decide, remember that there is another problem, more important than the psychological one. I mean overpopulation. "If our discovery is given to the world, if all who are old or dying can make themselves young again, the population will almost double every generation. Nor would the world -- not even our own relatively enlightened compulsory birth control as a solution. "Give this to the world, as the world is today in #. and within a generation there will be famine. suffering, war. Perhaps a complete collapse of civilization. "Yes, we have reached other planets, but they are not suitable for colonizing. The stars may be our answer, but we are a long way from reaching them. When habitable planets that must be out there will be our answer... our living room. But until then, what is the answer? "Destroy the machine? But think of the countless lives it can save, the suffering it can prevent. Think of what it would mean to a man dying of cancer. Think... and put it down. You think of Barbara dead for forty-five years. And of the fact that you were married to her for three years and that those years are lost to you. Ffty years lost. You damn the old man of seventy-five whom you became and who has done this to you... who has given you this decision to make. Bitterly, you know what the decision must be. You think that he knew, too; and realize that he could safely leave it in your hands. Damn him, he should have known. Too valuable to destroy, too dangerous to give. The other answer is painfully obvious. You must be custodian of this discovery and keep it secret until it is safe to give, until mankind has expanded to the stars and has new worlds to populate, or until, even without that, he has reached a state of civilization where he can avoid overpopulation by rationing births to the number of accidental -- or voluntary -- deaths. If neither of those things has happened in another fifty years (and are they likely so soon?), then you, at seventy-five, will be writing another letter like this one. You will be undergoing another experience similar to the one you're going through now. And making the same decision, of course. Why not? You'll be the same person again. Time and again, to preserve this secret until Man is ready for it. How often will you again sit at a desk like this one, thinking the thoughts you are thinking now, feeling the grief you now feel? There is a click at the door and you know that the time lock has opened, that you are now free to leave this room, free to start a new life for yourself in place of the one you have already lived and lost. But you are in no hurry now to walk directly through that door. You sit there, staring straight ahead of you blindly, seeing in your mind's eye the vista of a set of facing mirrors, like those in an old-fashioned barber shop, reflecting the same thing over and over again, diminishing into far distance. Wrote G. K. Chesterton in The Napoleon of Notting Hill: "The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning... and one of the games to which it is most attached is called... 'Cheat the Prophet.' The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, ond bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun." Nobody is more whimsical than a supposedly practical man, and nobody is more adept at hanging millstones on progress: "What, ride a horse when I still have a pair of good legs?" "Fulton's Folly is right; wind is the only way to sail." "Get a horse!" "It is mathematically demonstrable that a heavler-than-air craft cannot get off the ground." "Suicide ships, that's what planes are." "Rockets are all right for toys, but that's all." "Okay, so we can send an unmanned rocket # miles up, but who'd be crazy enough to get inside it?" That is where mankind is now, having dragged the millstone high above Earth. The next arguments are predictable: "Sure, we can put an artificial satellite # miles out in space, but we'll never reach the Moon." "All right, we got to the Moon, but the planets are a different matter." "Yes, but the planets are right in our own solar system; it would take centuries to reach even the nearest star..." Mankind will not run out of millstones or progress. Origins of Galactic Medicine Suffer from Defummeseeftce? Dementia Recap? Here's what to do till the doctor comes... mony centuries from novuf Dementia Reca pitulatica : atrophy of the cortex and of bilateral areas in the temporal and frontal lobes, characterized by overlapping of past and present thoughts. drug that the Egn'noojys of processes of growth causes dementia recapitulatica. Llaro Fsapilt (#-#) discovered the drug and was the first Egn'nooty to use it. His fear of aging impelled him to find a way of nullifying the process: and when at last he perfected the drug, he drank it eagerly. Unfortunately, he downed an overdose and regressed to an embryo before his assistant could help him. Following users have shown more caution. At some point in their middle years they take the drug, regress to infancy, then once more proceed through childhood and adolescence. As the Egn'nootys re-approach maturity, however, there is the onset of cortical end lobar atrophy, and the symptoms of dementia recap manifest themselves. Synpfoms and Signs : Past and present thoughts overlap, and the patient is unable to utilize recalled material in forming new concepts. One sufferer may become depressed, irritable, and suspicious, his previous personality acting as a shadowy hangover. Another may become euphoric, happily exchanging childhood reminiscences with himself. Diagnosis and Prognosis: Like the Egn'nootys, the Ghlenopys of Klinebly VI are humanoid and suffer 'cortical and lobar atrophy. But they should present no diagnostic problem, for the etiology and symptomatology of their condition differ from those of dementia recap. In the case of the Ghlenopys, obstetricians deliver viable foetuses at varying periods before full term. This is because of the special qualities inhering in each stage as the foetus recapitulates the evolution of the race. The three months foetus has vibrissal feelers and strong pincers that equip it for tunneling. The four month foetus has ballast ports and snorkel tubes that fit it for diving. The five month foetus has a thick lanugo -- an atavistic hairy coat -- that enables it to withstand freezing temperatures. The six month foetus has adhesive digits that let it walk on the walls and ceiling of a room; this ability is invaluable in a spaceship during free flight, and many six month Ghlenopy foetuses grow to be crewmen. The seven month foetus becomes the humanoid type. Because the Ghlenopys have been practicing this form of birth control universally, no one has any idea what the full teim Ghlenopy would be like. The Ghlenopy foetus readily adapts to its atrophied state and shows no symptoms beyond those common to immaturity. The dementia recap sufferer, with proper treatment, may hope to live a relatively normal existence. Treatment'. Occupational therapy best serves both society and the patient. The dementia recap sufferer finds his groove in teaching history, writing poetry, or ghost-writing political speeches. Tirudner Syndrome: thallophytic infection of the skin characterized by concurrent rashes, blisters, lesions, devil's pinches purpura simplex ) , crusting, scaling and oozing. the needs of their Acropaani host, parasitic algae produce antigenic substances. These antigens cause various types of eruptions to appear on the sensitized skin of the host. Symptoms and Signs: The eruptions appear suddenly, coinciding with meeting a stranger. Diagnosis and Prognosis: The multiple symptoms, together with their instantaneous development, make the Tirudner syndrome easily distinguishable from other skin infections. The prognosis is excellent when there is understanding on the part of the observer. Treatment : The physician must not allow the symptoms to paralyze him. Viewing the patient with philosophic detachment, he must use cool kindness and frank friendliness to reassure the patient. This was the example Dr. Ernest L. Tirudner (#-#) set when he met an Acropaani. It happened in #, on the First Solar Expedition to Murzim VI. Dr. Tirudner was in the landing party when they encountered an Acropaani at the outskirts of a town. Upon seeing the strangers, the humanoid Acropaani's short fine hair encrusted with purple algae became almost invisible beneath a horrifying assortment of sores that blossomed before their eyes. Only strong indoctrination in contact methodology prevented the men from fleeing in fear or blasting the Acropaani down. R. Tirudner ordered the crewman carrying the force-projector to throw up a protective screen, but it was too late. All of the men began itching unbearably. Several threw up. Dr. Tirudner ignored his own discomfort to examine the others. Finding nothing somatically wrong with any of the party, he decided that the itching and vomiting were subjective responses to the symptomatic appearance of the Acropaani. He quickly administered a hypnotic booster of contact methodology. The itching and vomiting stopped. Dr. Tirudner ordered the party to return to the spaceship. He himself moved to a safe distance from the Acropaani and lowered the protective screen. Using remote controls he ran out the servo-mechanical diagnoser. The Acropaani didn't budge, but submitted to a thorough job of diagnosis. Dr. Tirudner could recognize, from where he stood, the symptoms of measles, chickenpox, smallpox, mumps, scarlet fever, cellulitis, lymphadenitis, typhoid fever, cutaneous anthrax, bubonic plague, tularemia, tsutsugamushi disease, cutaneous leishmaniasis, leprosy, yaws, coccidioidomycosis, chromoblastomycosis, rhinosporidiosis. But through the diagnoser he ruled out all those diseases. He found there was no basis for suspecting bacteria or viruses or fungi. He discovered the presence of the algae, and realized that the disorder was totally innocuous -- that the syndrome was a protective device : The Acropaani was attempting to keep strangers from the town by displaying symptoms of most of the infectious diseases Dr. Tirudner had heard of. It was a scatter technique; one of the symptoms must suggest a disease that a stranger feared. It was analogous to the way the quadruple-jointed kresar of Rigel IX simulates liquescence and flows away from its nesting place to divert intruders from its young, and to the way the mineral metabolizers of Denebola VI become radioactive to render themselves unappetizing to creatures of prey. Dr. Tirudner convinced the Acropaani that the Solarians wished to be friends. The symptoms vanished when Dr. Tirudner doled out a placebo to the Acropaani and treated him to a creaky display of witch-doctor dancing as a face-saving expedient for the patient's ego. Periodic Deluminescence: a condition characterized by intermittent inability to light up. escence is a form of conversion hysteria. The cause is a psychic disturbance. By its very nature, the condition is peculiar to the Ahimntuy race pf humanof an Ahimntuy has six different kinds of pigment cells. There are strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange, lemon, and lime colors. The pigment cells have muscular walls that contract and expand. This shrinking and swelling enables the skin to take on a large variety of hues, tints, and shades, which are the Ahimntuy's means of communicating. The pigments are bioluminescent, so darkness does not bar conversation. The phenomenon of periodic deluminescencc began in antiquity. A possible legendary wandering revivalist, an Ahimntuy by the name of Sesamhi, had appeared in the city of Ehlmos. It was the time of the Festival of the East Wind, and pilgrims thronged the streets. Sesamhi chose a busy crossroad and began to preach. The officer on the beat saw that the revivalist was blocking traffic, and hashed a loud plaid order to move on. But Sesamhi stood stilt, smiling sadly at the officer. The officer clashed his colors in rage. He broke through the crowd and grabbed Sesamhi. Sesamhi answered the officer's wrath softly, in pastels. Disregarding Sesamhi's remarks, the officer dragged him before the magistrates of Ehlmos. The magistrates asked Sesamhi his name. His pigment cells remained inert. They asked again. He gave no response beyond the pale smile. The inquisitors thought there was something fishy (apologies to ichthyoids) about his failure to respond, seeing his recalcitrant behavior as a threat to the whole structure of government. So they resorted to more forcible means of cross-questioning. While they tortured him they mocked him, dyeing parts of his body in foul groupings of assorted colors. Sesamhi's heart gave out. At this crucial moment he flashed weakly what he had tried to tell the arresting officer -- that he was color blind. Long fasting had caused a vitamin deficiency that atrophied his fovea. But because they had not known, he forgave them. Then he died. Sheepishly, they dumped his pastel body in an abandoned quarry. TfcUT that was not the last of " Sesamhi. Ahimntuy whispered to Ahimntuy in subdued colors, and what they whispered was that Sesamhi had not really died -- that a faithful follower had seen life in the body and had to another world. As the story grew it gathered momentum and became an irresistible force, rainbow-shouted. The following year, at the time of the Festival of the East Wind, the first cases of periodic deluminescence appeared. Since then, yearly attacks of periodic deluminescence have become an almost universal phenomenon on Psychoanalysts theorize that it arises from unconscious conflict, which comes about when the Festival of the East Wind sharply reminds the Ahimntuy of Sesamhi. The Ahimntuy projects himself into Sesamhi's place and suffers the same frustration. And periodic deluminescence defends the ego from recognizing the infantile wishes, hostilities, and guilt feelings that are reawakened. Symptoms and Sins: Rising body temperature; inability to luminesce when conversing in darkness. Diagnosis and Prognosis: Periodic deluminescence is easy to differentiate from organic disorders, malingering, and schizophrenia. Body temperature soars, though not high enough to affect the enzyme which catalyzes bioluminescence. Bioluminescence would therefore still be under nervous control; this .indicates that the breakdown is due to hysteria. The onset of the symptoms at the time of the Festival of the East Wind is highly significant. The attack lasts three days, clearing up afterward of its own accord. Treatment: The patient should rest his pigment cells and meditate rather than try to talk in darkness. Larritonia Fever: an acute disease of the central nervous system characterized by involuntary clapping. the source of infection. Healthy carriers are often the cause of outbreaks. The larritonia virus enters the body through a break in the skin, invades .the blood stream by way of the lymphatic channels, and attacKs the brain, cord, and peripheral nerves by causing thiamine deficiency. Symptoms and Signs : As degeneration progresses, the patient increasingly demonstrates irrational thought, marked impairment of perception and loss of muscular control. The last evidences itself in seeing double. The patient reaches out confusedly, seeking to press into register the external objects which he sees as double images. To observers, this appears to be a clapping gesture. Diagnosis and Prognosis: The peculiar clapping gesture differentiates larritonia fever from all other diseases of the central nervous system. The condition is slowly progressive but is compatible witli lung life. Incapacitation is gradual and increasing. Prevention: Identification and isolation of carriers are essential. Treatment: Thiamine, # to # mg. or more, according to metabolic rate and physiological type, intramuscularly or intravenously daily. Lheet, # cc. daily. special care is necessary when administering lheet. Cottendans are marsupialoids with a pouch high on the back. This pouch holds a plant and a solution of nutrient salts. The plant grows with its roots dipped in the solution. In return for the nutrient salts, the plant disposes of excess carbon dioxide and provides leafy shade. Lheet upsets the symbiotic balance by draining the solution. This withers the plant and asphyxiates the Cottendan. M ost cottendans have a tremendous craving for lheet. however. Too often in their history this craving has mastered their judgment. After a lheet orgy in # threatened to wipe out the race, the surviving .Cottendans banned the use of Iheet ex cept for medicinal purposes. ' In # a new outbreak of lar ritonia fever began to sweep around the planet. Dr. Grevan Tisoti (#-#), a Terran exchange doctor, soon pinpointed the source of infection. It was a larritonia carrying individual peddling his infectious touch. Lheet-craving Cottendans willing to pay the price in credits and health were buying the disease to get the cure! Dr. Tisoti rushed to alert the civil authorities. They greeted him with applause. He told them of his discovery and gave them his advice. They applauded, and asked him to repeat his words. He repeated them over and over, each time to wilder applause. Then they asked him to submit his findings in writing -- in Cottendan hieroglyphs. Dr. Tisoti realized the cost of delay. He also realized that the official bodies were suffering from larritonia fever, and that he could expect no cooperation. Without wasting further time and breath, he returned to his lab. There he prepared a large amount of a soporific. He loaded it on his copter and flew to the government warehouse containing all the Iheet on Cottenda. He overpowered the guards (Cottendans are two feet high), entered the building and adulterated the Iheet with soporific. When word spread that patients were sleeping through their doses of Iheet instead of enjoying the effect, the outbreak of larritonia fever ended quickly. And just as quickly Dr. Tisoti found himself on a Terra-bound spaceship, the irritated authorities of Cottenda having invoked the law which forbade the distribution of sleeping-medicine without prescriptions. Incamplete Plasticizingi a malfunction of body covering, characterized by fluid condition of neW'forming skin. affects the natives of Affhiltu IX, a treeless, grassy, muggy and very small planet. Faithfully, every three of their years, the igneous rock underlying the crust of their planet had superheated the ground water into steam, activating a belt of geysers. The body chemistry of the natives had adapted to the cycle. Every three years their thermoplastic skin was ready to shed. Their body exuded a colloidal liquid which was the basis of their new skin. With perfect timing the geysers jetted steam. The natives paraded through the steam and the colloidal coating coagulated, forming a gel. This gave them a spanking new weatherproof, waterproof skin. But in # the cycle broke down. The belt of geysers encircling the globe failed to spout on schedule. The natives tried to keep their old skin from sloughing off, but soon found that patching up was a losing struggle. They begged their gods for help. A crippled Terran spaceship made a landing, its crew hoping to find materials for the repairs the ship needed. The natives rejoiced, believing that the spacemen were heavenly messengers. The natives had prayed to their gods, and now everything would be made right again. The heavenly messengers tried to keep from looking dismayed. could, in return for the materials they needed. But they lacked facilities for processing ten to solve the problem, they would be revealed as false gods, and would find the natives raging against them. Then they might not get what they needed, or live to use it if they got it. Symptoms and Signs: The patient exhibits a reticulating outer skin that floats uneasily over the unplasticized inner skin. Diagnosis and Prognosis: The reticulating and sliding of outer skin simplify diagnosis. Incomplete plasticizing responds readily to proper treatment. ' Treatment: Dr. Mike Nagel (#-#) was the surgeon of the Terran spaceship. He picked a random sampling of natives for studying. He tested them and found that their body temperature was much higher than the Terrans', and that they were allergic to certain Terran subjrR. Nagel sweated to find the solution. But he didn't know he had come up with it until a native, in a frenzy of devotion, pressed lips to the doctor's palm. The heavenly messenger looked on bug-eyed at what followed. The native writhed, fainted, and fell to the floor of the sick bay. His outer skin sloughed off. The new skin began to firm up. Dr. Nagel quickly took the native's temperature. It had risen # F. above normal. The doctor scraped the sweaty palm the native had kissed and analy # ed the scrapings. His findings: the sweat had caused the native to run the high fever, the fever heat had caused the colloidal coating to coagulate. Meanwhile the native came to, got up, saw his new skin, danced out. Dr. Nagel knew he would spread the news, and got busy. The crew turned a compartment into a turkish bath. At the end of three months they had collected enough sweat for global distribution. The grateful natives heaped upon the spacemen the materials they needed, many times over. Soon the spaceship was in shape to go. The shock of its take-off jolted every geyser on the tiny planet into action. The natives stretched their new skins in frantic dance at this parting gift. Infectious Keratolysis: a communicable disease characterized by a moth-eaten appearance. tious keratolysis. The acid attacks the carapace of chelonoids, the cell walls of fungoids, the hair and nails of humanoids. Symptoms and Signs: The onset is insidious, the typical moth-eaten appearance becoming evident only in the latter stages of the disease. Diagriosis and Prognosis: A moth-eaten appearance may be misleading without the supporting evidence of the salicylic acid ample is the mistaken diagnosis of Dr. O. Redmeld (#-#). Dr. Redmeld was a Ganymedan He found it a paradise of untouched splendor. The dominant form of life was a primitive society of beautiful winged creatures who spent their days flourishing their bright colors in the gold-moted air. Dr. Redmeld arrived at a Ganap settlement in #. The Ganapi smilingly welcomed him, then continued weaving their kaleidoscopic patterns in the sky. Determining to get the lie of the land, Redmeld boldly struck into the surrounding forest. Before he had gone very far, a loud crashing stopped him. The cause of the noise followed it shortly. The creature was vegetarian, but the doctor didn't know that at the time. He saw the long armored body, the huge jaws, the waving antennae, the three pairs of propelling legs, the several pairs of prolegs armed with hooks -- and he drew his gun and fired. The creature heaved a bit, then lay still. The shot had split off a section of armor. Dr. Redmeld could see that something had been eating away at the inner surface of the armor. Its motheaten appearance immediately suggested infectious keratolysis to him. Without analyzing the fluid that saturated the inner portion of the armor, he felt sure that it was salicylic acid, teemthought of disease in this paradise appalled him. Another loud crashing broke through this thought. Another huge creature appeared. Seeing its dead fellow, it threw itself across the body and clicked its enormous jaws in mourning. Redmeld shivered and fired again. This creature's armor showed the menacing moth-eaten appearance too. Burning with zeal, Redmeld pushed through the forest. Singlehandedly he would root out the evil! He gripped his gun tightly, alert for his next encounter. But the next encounter took him by surprise. Three of the beautiful winged Ganapi came silently down and seized him. They flew him to a clearing where their tribunal sat in judgment. It was at his trial that he learned that the creatures he had killed were not carriers of infectious keratolysis. The moth-eaten appearance was due to molting fluid that had been busily digesting the chitin of the giant larvae, enabling the imago -- the winged creature -- to break out. The tribunal ruled that Redonly if he agreed to limit his work to doctoring the superficial cuts and bruises of infant larvae. This he did. Prognosis is good; the mortality in infectious keratolysis is less than #.' Treatment: The physician must first draw off the salicylic acid and neutralize affected areas with an alkaline solution. Then he should administer an antibiotic. Ballpointin has been responsible for dramatic improvement. The initial basic dosage is # grams daily, with decreasing doses as improvement becomes manifest. Some authorities recommend using lobdomycetin as a prophylactic against secondary invaders. The basic dosage is # units given intravenously daily. Cosmetic or structural considerations may call for the use of plastic spray to fill in and smooth over the ravaged areas. As to color, the plastic spray may be in matching or contrasting hues. Many patients prefer the latter: a striking polka-dot "scar" provides a gambit for wedging one's operation into a conversation. Forecast From the sparkling, immeasurably beautiful and efficient city of the future, an apprehensive hero goes forth to sell civilization to the hostile countryside. He is not a covard. Any man has a right to feel the touch of fear when he is given a suicidal assignment. For the cities vitally need the countryside... and the countryside has blockaded the cities for many bitterly ontagonistic years. Nor is it a matter of cutting off noses to spite faces, as the hero InKnight. If you forget this acid-sharp obelisk of literary ingenuity in less than half a dozen years, your memory needs honing. But you won't forget it! that a fishing line gets into when !t spins back on the reel. It's a fishing expedition he writes about, in a way, but there's no doubt that it leaves mankind reeling! by Gordon R. Dickson. Don't let the exotic title mislead you. This far-distant station out in space is no home away from homel On the other hand, "home" has a lot to do with the adrenal-tense conflict and the explosive ending. Conclusion of a #-part serial The caves of steel The colonization of the Galaxy has come to a halt. Earth's eiht Cities, in a culture so specialized and artificial that they can no longer break loose to establish colonies on new raw worlds. On the other hand, the hity 'Outer Worlds" -- (jGalactic colonies established cenfuries earlier by an Earth that had not yet hardened entirely into its mold) -- had developed into underpopulated societies of long-lived humans who made extensive use of robots in their economy. To restore humanity to a policy of expansion and growth, a #aey no longer had to save in fact, was to!d net to. But when a man thinics be can, be' fry, no matter whatl Earth... small group of idealistic "Spacers" -- (men of the Outer Worlds) -- have established a mission in "Spacetown" just outside New York City and are attempting to introduce robots into Earth's Cities. In doing so, they hope to create a class of jobless Earth for other planets. This plan is not working. What is actually happening is that Earthmen are forming Medievalist organizations, groups dedicated to an anti-robot, anti-Spacer philosophy and to the belief that Earth's salvation is to be found in her primitive pre-City way of life. The philosophy is an attractive one. Even Julius Enderby, New York City's Commissioner of Police, wears old-fashioned spectacles and has a genuine window in his private office. The conflict between Earthmen and Spacers is brought to a head by the murcfer of Dr. Roj Nemmenuh Sarton, a prominent Spacer, presumably by a Medievalist. Plainclothesman Elijah Baley is in charge of the investigation and is forced to take a Spacer partner named R. Daneel Olivaw, the R. standing for robot. So well designed is R. Daneel, however, that it is almost impossible to discover he is not human. Commissioner Enderby impresses upon Baley the fact that failure to solve the crime may not only result in an interstellar crisis, but may have the more immediate effect of hastening the gradual replacement of the human members of the Police Department by appropriate robots. Already, simple robots such as R. Sammy are serving as office boys. This would mean "decassification" for men like Baley. Declassification involves the loss of all special privileges above that of bare existence. Baley fears such a situation desperately since his father was declassified in Baley's infancy with tragic results for the entire family. Baley takes R. Daneel to his apartment and on the way the robot, by quick action, prevents an anti-robot riot at a shoe store. Baley's wife, Jessie -- (her full name is Jezebel, but after a quarrel with her husband over the personality and character of the Biblical Jezebel, she no longer uses it) -- earns of R. Daneel's robotic nature through some unspecified outside source. Jessie urges Baley to drop the case, even to resign from the Department if he has to. Instead, Baley travels to Spacetown and there accuses the Spacers of having set up a false crime for their own devious motives. He accuses them of having presented Police Commissioner Enderby, who happened to be in Spacetown at about the time of the crime, with a "corpse" that was actually the remains of a humanoid robot. Meanwiule, he claims, the real Dr. Sarton, the supposed murdered man, masqueraded about as the "robot," R. Daneel Olivaw. This theory is disproved by R. Daneel himself, who can open parts of his body to show his mechanical interior. Baley is forced to seek another solution. Later in the day, he and R. Daneel are pursued by a group of Medievalist zealots, whom they escape by making use of New York's rapid transit system and by passing through one of the nuclear power plants of the City. In a lait attempt to show that Earthmen were not involved in the murder, Baley consults Dr. Gerriel, a roboticist, to see whether R. Daneel miht be a robot designed without the First Law of Robotics -- which states that a robot cannot hurt a human being. It is his theory that perhaps R. Daneel himself killed Dr. Sarton and hid the missing murder weapon in the orUy place no one had looked, i.e. in the interior of the robot's own body. Dr. Gerrigel assures Baley this is impossible. In the privacy of the Commissioner's office -- Enderby himself being away at the time -- R. Daneel then turns the tables by inquiring into the activity of Baley's wife, Jessie. How did Jessie learn that R. Daneel is a robot? He accuses her of being a member of an underground Medievalist organization. Baley fights this bitterly since, if it were true, it could mean declassification for both of them. Even as he does so, R. Sammy, the robot office boy, announces that Jessie, in a great state of agitation, wishes to see her husband. B aley remained standing, in a tetany of shock, as Jessie ran to him, seized his shoulders, huddled close. His pale lips formed the word, "Bentley?" She looked at him and shook her head. "He's all right." "Well, then?" Jessie said through a sudden torrent of sobs, in a low voice that could scarcely be made out. "I can't go on, Lije. I can't sleep or cat. I've got to tell you!" "Don't say anything," Baley said in anguish. "For God's sake. Jessie, not now!" "I must. I've done a terrible thing -- " Baley said hopelessly, "We're not alone, Jessie." She looked up and stared at R. Daneel with no sign of recognition. The tears in which her eyes were swimming were evidently refracting the robot into a featureless blur. R. Daneel said, "Good afternoon, Jessie." She gasped. "Is it the -- the robot?" She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes and stepped out of Baley's encircling right arm. She breathed deeply and, for a moment, a tremulous smile wavered on her lips. "It is you, isn't it?" "Yes. Jessie." "You don't mind being called a robot. " "No, Jessie. That is what I am." "And I don't mind being called a fool and an idiot and a -- a subversive agent, because that's what  am." "Jessie!" groaned Baley. "It's no use, Lije," she said. "He might as well know -- he's your partner. I don't care if I go to jail. I don't care if they send me down to the lowest levels and make me live on raw yeast and water. I don't care if -- You wop't let them, will you, Lije? Don't let them do anything to me! I'm frightened!" Baley patted her shoulder and let her cry. He said to R. Dancel. "She isn't well. We ' can't keep her here. What time is it?" R. Daneel replied without visibly consulting a timepiece, "Fourteen-forty-five." "The Commissioner may be back any minute. We'd better commandeer a squad-car. We can talk this over in the Motorway." Jessie's head jerked upright. "The Motorway? Oh, no, Lije." He said, in as soothing a tone as he could manage, "Now, Jessie, don't be superstitious. You can't go on the Expressway the way you are. Be a good girl and calm down or we won't even be able to go through the office."  damp handkerchief and said drearily, "Oh, look at my makeup." "Don't worry about your makeup," said Baley. "Daneel, what about the squad-car?" "It's waiting for us now, partner Elijah." "Come on, Jessie." "Wait -- just a minute, Lije. I've got to do something to my face." "It doesn't matter now." But she twisted away. "Please! I can't go through the Common Room like this. I won't take a second." The man and the robot waited -- the man impatiently, the robot impassively. Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. If there was one thing, Baley thought resignedly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since Medieval times, it was a woman's purse. Even the substitution of magnetic clotures for metal clasps had not proven successful. Jessie pulled out a small mirror and Ihe silver-cased cosmeto-kit that Baley had bought her three birthdays before. The cosmeto-kit had several orifices and she used each in turn. All but the last spray were invisible. She used them with that fineness of touch and delicacy of control that seems to be the birthright of women from Sumerian to Galactic eras. The base went on first, in a smooth, even layer that removed all shininess and roughness from the skin and gave it the light golden glow which long experi ence had taught Jessie was the shade best suited to the natural coloring of her hair and eyes. Then a touch of tan along the forehead and chin -- a gentle brush of color on either cheek, tracing back to the angle of the jaw -- a delicate drift of blue on the upper eyelids and along the earlobes F nally came the application of smooth carmine to the lips. This involved the one visible spray, a delicate pink mist that glistened liquidly in air, but dried and deepened richly on contact with the lips. "There," said Jessie, with several swift pats at her hair and a look of deep dissatisfaction. "I suppose that will have to do." The process had taken more than the promised second, but less than fifteen. Nevertheless, it had seemed interminable to Baley. "Come on," he said. She barely had time to return the cosmeto-kit to the purse before he pushed her through the door. eerie silence of the Motorway lay thick on either side. Baley said, "All right, Jessie. What did you do?" The impassivity that had masked Jessie's face since they left the Commissioner's office showed signs of cracking. She looked at her husband, then at Daneel in helpless silence. Baley said, "Get it over with, .Jessie -- please! Have you committed an actual crime?" "A crime?" She shook her head uncertainly. "No hysterics. Just say yes or no, Jessie. Have you -- " he hesitated briefly -- "killed anyone?" The look on Jessie's face was promptly changed to indignation. "Why, Lije Baley!" "Yes or no, Jessie." "No -- of course not." The hard knot in Baley's stomach softened perceptibly. "Have you stolen anything? Falsified ration data? Assaulted anyone? Destroyed property? Speak up, Jessie." "I didn't mean anything like that." She looked over her shoulder. "Lije, do we have to stay down here?" "Until this is over... Now start at the beginning. What did you come to tell us?" Jessie spoke in a soft voice. "It's these people, these Medievalists. You know, Lije -- they're always around, always talking. Even in the old days, when I was an assistant dietician, it was like that. Remember Elizabeth Thornbowe?, She was a Medievalist. She was always talking about how all our troubles came from the City and how things were better before the Cities started. "I used to asg her how she was so sure, especially after you and I met. Lije -- remember the talks we used to have? -- and then she'd quote Trom those small book-reels that are always floating around. You know, like Shame of the Cities that the fellow wrote. I don't remember his name." Baley said absently, "Ogrinsky and Lincoln Steffins. Centuries ago." "Yes, only most of the bookreels were lots worse. Then, when I married you, she was really sarcastic. She said, T suppose you're going to be a real City woman, now that you've married a policeman.' After that, she didn't talk to me much and then I quit the job and that was that. Lots of things she used to say were just to shock me, I think, or to make herself look mysterious and glamorous. "She was an old maid, you know -- never got married till the  day she died. Lots of those Medievalists don't fit in, one way or another. Remember you once sajd, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don't know how to fix themselves." Baley remembered and his words now sounded flip and superficial in his own ears. He said gently, "Keep to the point, Jessie." S HE went on, "Anyway, Lizzy was always talking about how there'd come a day and people had to get together. She said it was all the fault of the Spacers because they wanted to keep Earth weak and decadent. That was one of her favorite words, 'decadent.' She'd look at the menus I'd prepare for the next week and sniff and say, 'Decadent -- decadent.' Jane Myers used to imitate her in the cookroom and we'd die laughing. "She said. Elizabeth did, that someday we were going to break up the Cities and go back to the soil and have an accounting with the Spacers, who were trying to tie us forever to the Cities by forcing robots on us. Only she never called them robots. She used to say 'soulless monster-machines' -- if you'll excuse the expression, Daneel." The robot said, "I am not aware of the significance of the adjective used. Jessie, but in any case I am not offended. Please go on." Baley stirred restlessly. It was that way with Jessie. No emergency, no crisis, could make her tell a story in any but her own circuitous way. She said, "Elizabeth always tried to talk as though there were lots of people in it with her. She'd say, 'At the last meeting,' and then stop and look at me, sort of half-proud and half-scared, as though she wanted me to ask about it so she could look important, yet scared I might get her in trouble. Of course, I never asked her. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction. Anjrway, after I married you, Lije, it was all over until... She stopped. "Go on, Jessie," said Baley. "You remember that argument we had? About Je#ebel, I mean?" It took a second or two for Baley to recall that was Jessie's own name and not a reference to another woman. He turned to R. Daneel in an automatically defensive explanation. "Jessie's full name is Jezebel. She is not fond of it and doesn't use it." R. Daneel nodded gravely and Baley thought: Jehosophat, why waste an explanation on him? "It bothered me a lot, Lije," Jessie said. "It really did. I guess it was silly, but I kept thinking and thinking about what you said. I mean about your saying that Jezebel was only a conservative who fought for the customs of her ancestors against the strange ones the newcomers had brought. After all, I was Jezebel and I always..." She groped for a word and Baley supplied it. "Identified yourself?" looked away. "Not really, of course -- not literally -- not the way I thought she was. I wasn't like that." "I know, Jessie. Don't be foolish." "But still I thought of her a lot and somehow I got to thinking that it's just the same now as it was then. I mean we Earth people had our old ways and here were the Spacers coming in with a lot of new ways and trying to encourage the new ways we had stumbled into ourselves, and maybe the Medievalists were right. Maybe we should go back to our good old ways. So I went and found Elizabeth." "Yes. Go on." "She said she didn't know what I was talking about, and besides I was a cop's wife. I said that had nothing to do with it and finally she said, well, she'd speak to somebody and then, about a month later, she came to me and said it was all right and I joined and I've been going to meetings ever since." Baley looked at her sadly. "And you never told me?" Jessie's voice trembled. "I'm sorry, Lije." "Well, that won't help -- being sorry, I mean. I want to know about the meetings. In the first place, where were these klatsches held?" A sense of detachment was creeping ovr him, a numbing of emotions. What he had tried not to believe 'vas so, unmistakably so. In a sense, it was a relief to know the truth, to have the uncertainty overShe said, "Down here." "Down here? You mean on this spot?" "Right in the Motorway. That's why I didn't want to come down here. It was a wonderful place to meet, though. We'd get together -- " "How many?" "I'm not sure. Maybe sixty or seventy. It was just a sort of local branchThere'd be folding chairs and some refreshments and someone would make a speech. They were mostly about how wonderful life was in the old days and how someday we'd do away with the monsters -- the robots, that is -- and the Spacers, too. The speeches were sort of dull, really, because they were all the same. We just endured them. Mostly it vas the fun of getting together and feeling important. We would pledge ourselves to oaths and there'd be secret ways we could greet each other on the outside." "Weren't you ever interrupted? No squad-cars or fire-engines passed?" "No -- never." that tmusual, Elijah?" "Maybe not," Baley answered thoughtfully. "There are some side-passages that are practically never used. It's quite a trick, knowing which they are, though. Is that all you did at the meetings, Jessie -- make speeches and play at conspiracy?" "It's about all. We'd sing songs, sometimes. And, of course, we had refreshments. Nothing fancy -- just sandwiches and juice." "In that case," he said almost brutally, "what's bothering you?" Jessie winced. "You're angry." "Please!" said Baley, with iron patience. "Answer my question. If it's as harmless as that, why have you been in such a panic for the last day and a half?" "I thought they would hurt you, Lije. For heaven's sake, why do you act as though you don't understand? I've explained it to you." "No, you haven't -- not yet. You've told me about a harmless little kaffee-klatsch you belonged to. Did they ever hold open demonstrations? Did they ever destroy robots -- start riots -- kill people?" "Never! Lije, I wouldn't do any of those things. I wouldn't stay a member if they tried it." "Well, then, why do you say youVe done a terrible thing? Why do you expect to be sent to jail?" "They used to talk about someday when they'd put pressure on the government. We were supposed to get organized and then afterward there would be strikes and work stoppages. We could force the government to ban all robots and make the Spacers go back where they came from. I thought it was just talk and then this thing started -- about you and Daneel, I mean. "Then they said, 'Now we'll see action,' and, 'We're going to make an example of them and put a stop to the robot invasion right now.' Right there in Personal, they said it, not knowing it was you they were talking about. But I knew -- right away." Her voice broke. Baley softened. "Come on, Jessie. It was just talk. You can see for yourself that nothing has happened." "I was so -- so scared. And I thought, 'm part oi it. If there struction, you might be killed, and Bentley, and somehow it would be all -- my fault for taking part in it, and I ought to be sent to jail." Baley let her sob herself out. He put his arm about her shoulder and stared tight-lipped at R. Daneel, who gazed calmly back. He said, "Who was the head of your group?" HE was quieter now, patting  the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. "A man called Joseph Klemin was the leader, but he wasn't really anybody. He wasn't more than five feet four inches tall and I think he was terribly henpecked at home. I don't think there's any harm in him. You aren't going to arrest him, are you, Lije -- not on my say-so?" She looked guiltily troubled. "I'm not arresting anyone just yet. How did Klemin get his instructions?" "I don't know." "Did any strangers come to the meetings? You know what I mean -- big shots from Central Headquarters?" "Sometimes people would come to make speeches. That wasn't very often -- maybe twice a year or so." "Can you name them?" "No. They were always just introduced as 'one of us' or 'a friend from Jackson Heights' or wherever." "I see. Daneel!" "Yes, Elijah." "Describe the men you think you've tabbed. We'll see if Jessie can recognize them." R. Daneel went through the list with clinical exactness. Jessie listened with an expression of dismay. As the categories of physical measurements lengthened, she shook her head with increasing firmness. "It's no use, no use at all," she cried. "How can I remember how any of them looked? I can't..." She stopped and seemed to consider. "Did you say one of them was a yeast farmer?" "Francis Clousarr," said R. Daneel. "is an employee at New York Yeast." "Well, once a man was making a speech and I happened to be sitting in the first row and I kept getting a whiff -- just a whiff really -- of raw yeast. You know what I mean. The only reason I remember is that I had an upset stomach that day and the smell kept making me sick. I had to stand up and move to the back and of course I couldn't explain what was wrong. It was so embarrassing. Maybe that's the man you're speaking of. After all, when you work with yeast all the time, the odor gets to stick to your clothes." "You don't remember what he looked like?" asked Baley. "No," she replied with decision. "All right, then. Look, Jessie, I'm going to take you to your mother's. Bentley will stay with you and none of you will leave the Section. Ben can stay home from school and I'll arrange to have meals sent in and the corriridors around the apartftient watched by the police." "What about you?" quavered Jessie. , "I'll be in no danger." "But how long will we have to stay?" "I don't know. Maybe just a day or two." The words sounded hollow 'even to himself. way, Baley nd R. Daneel -- alone now. Baley's expression was dark. "It looks to me," he said, "as if we're up against an organization built up on two levels. First, a ground level with no specific program, designed only to supply mass support for an eventual coup. Secondly, a much smaller elite dedicated to a wellplanned program of action. It is this elite we must find. The comic-opera groups Jessie spoke of can be ignored." "All this," said R. Daneel, "follows if we can take Jessie's story at face value." "I think we can," Baley said stiffly. "So it wouW seem," said R. Dafieel. "There is nothing about her cerebro-impulses that would indicate a pathological addiction to lying." Baley turned an offended look lit upon the robot. "I should say not! And there will be no necessity to mention her name in our reports. Do you understand that?" "If you wish it so, partner Elijah," said R. Daneel calmly, "but our report will then be neither complete nor accurate." Baley said, "Maybe not,, but no real harm will be done. She came to us with whatever information she had and mentioning her name will only put her in the police records. I don't want that to happen." "In that case, certainly not -- provided we are certain nothing more remains to be foundout." "Nothing as far as she's concerned. My guarantee." "Could you then explain why the word Jezebel, the mere sound of a name, should lead her to abandon previous convictions and assume a new set? The motivation seems obscure." They were travelingslowly through the curving empty tunnel. Baley said. "Jezebel is a rare name. It once belonged to a woman of very bad reputation. My wife treasured that fact. It gave her a vicarious feeling of wickedness and compensated for a completely proper life." "Why should a law-abiding woman wish to feel wicked?" Baley almost smiled. "Because she IS law-abiding. Anyway, I did a very foolish thing. In a moment of irritation, I insisted that the historic Jezebel was in reality a good wife. I've regretted explaining that ever since. It made Jessie bitterly unhappy. I had spoiled something for her that couldn't be replaced. I Imagine she wished to punish me by engaging in activity she knew I wouldn't approve of. I would say the wish was not a conscious one." "Can a wish be anything but conscious? Is that not a contradiction in terms?" and despaired at attempting to explain the unconscious mind. He said instead, "Besides that, the Bile has a great influence on human thought and emotion." "What is the Bible?" For a moment Baley was surprised, and then was surprised at himself for being surprised. The Spacers, he knew, lived under a thoroughly mechanistic personal philosophy. R. Daneel could know only what the Spacers knew and no more. He said curtly, "It is the sacred book of about half of Earth's population." "I db not grasp the meaning of the adjective." "I mean that it ia highly regarded. Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code, of behavior which many, men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of man kind." R. Oaneel seemed to consider that. "Is this code incorporated into your laws?" "I'm afraid not. The code doesn't lend itself to legal enforcement. It must be obeyed by each individual out of a desire to do so. It is, in a sense, higher than any law can be." "Higher than law? Nothing can be!" Baley smiled wryly. "Shall I quote a portion of the Bible for you?" "Please do." Baley let the car slow to a halt and for a few moments sat with his eyes closed, remembering. He would have liked to use the sonorous Middle English of the Medieval Bible but, to R. Daneel, Middle English would be gibberish. He began, speaking almost casually, in the words of the Modem Revision, as though he were telling a story of contemporary life instead of dredging a tale out of Man's remote past. " 'Jesus went to the mount of CHives, and at dawn returned to the temple. All the people came to Him, and He sat down and preached to them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. and when they had placed her before Him, they said to Him, "Master, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us to stone such offenders. What do you say?" " 'They said this, hoping to trap Him. that they might have grounds for accusations against Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground, as though He had not heard them. But when they continued asking Him, He stood up and said to them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." " 'And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. And those that heard this, being convicted by their own conscience, went away one by one, beginning with the oldest, down to the last : and Jesus was left alone, with the woman standing before Him. When Jesus stood up and saw no one butw the woman. He said to her, "Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?" " 'She said, "No one, Lord." " 'And Jesus said to her, "Nor do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more." ' "  ly. He said, "What is adultery?" "That doesn't matter. It was a crime for which the accepted punishment was stoning -- that is, stones were thrown until the guilty 'one was killed." "And the woman was guilty?" "She was." "Then why was she not stoned?" "None of the accusers felt he could after Jesus' statement. The story is meant to show that there is something even higher than the justice which you have been filled with. There is a human impulse known as mercy, a human act known as forgiveness." "I am not acquainted with those words, partner Elijah." 'I know," muttered Baley. "I know." He started the squad-car vnth a jerk and let it tear forward savagely. He was pressed back against the cushions of the seat. "Where are we going?" asked R. Daneel. "To Yeast Town," said Baley, "to get the truth out of Francis Clousarr, conspirator." "You have a method for doing this, Elijah?" "Not I, exactly. But you have, Daneel -- a simple one." They sped onward.  aroma of Yeast Town growing stronger. He did not find it as unpleasant as some did -- Jessie, for instance. Actually, he rather liked it. It had pleasant connotations. Every time he smelled raw yeast, the alchemy of sense-perception carried him more than three decades into the past. He was a ten-year-old again, visiting his uncle Boris, who was a yeast farmer. Uncle Boris always had a little supply of yeast-delectables -- small cookies, chocolaty things filled with sweet liquid, hard confections in the shape of cats and dogs. Young as he was, he knew that uncle Boris shouldn't really have had them to give away and he always ate them very quietly, sitting in a corner with his back to the center of the room. He would eat them quickly for fear of being caught. They tasted all the better for that. Poor uncle Boris! He had had an accident and died. They had never told him exactly how, and he had cried bitterly, because he thought' uncle Boris had been arrested for smuggling yeast out of the plant. He expected to be arrested and executed himself. Years later, he had poked carefully through police files and learned the truth. Uncle Boris had fallen beneath the treads of a transport. It was a disillusioning ending to a romantic myth. Yet the myth would always arise in his mind, at least momentarily, whenever his nostrils caught a whiff of raw yeast. Yeast Town was not the official name of any part of New York City. It could be found in no gazetteer and on no official map. What was called Yeast Town in popular speech was, to the Post Office, merely the boroughs of Newark, New Brunswick and Trenton. It was a broad strip across what had once been Medieval New Jersey, dotted with residential areas, particularly in Newark Center and Trenton Center, but given over mostly to the many-layered farms in which a thousand varieties of yeast grew and multiplied. One-fifth of the City's productive population worked in the yeast farms -- another fifth worked in the subsidiary industries. Beginning with the mountains of wood and coarse cellulose that were dragged into the City from the tangled forests of the Alleghenies -- through the vats of acid that hydrolized it to glucose -- the carloads of niter and phosphate rock that were the most important additives -- down .to the jars, of organics supplied by the chemical laboratories -- it all came to only one thing: yeast and more yeast. Without yeast, six of Earth's year. Baley felt cold at the thought. Three days before, the possibility had existed as deeply as it did now. But, three days before, it would never have occurred to him. torway through an exit on the Newark outskirts. The thinly populated avenues, flanked on cither side by the featureless blocks that were the farms, offered little to check their speed. 'What time is it, Dancel?" asked Baley. "Sixteen-oh-five," replied R. Daneel. "Then he'll be at work, if he's on day-shift." Baley parked the squad-car in a delivery recess and froze the controls. "This is New York Yeast, Elijah?" asked the robot. "Part of it," said Baley. They entered a corridor flanked by a double row of offices. A receptionist at a bend in the corridor gave them an automatic smile. "Whom do you wish to see?" Baley opened his wallet. "Police. Is there a Francis Clousarr working for New York Yeast?" The girl looked perturbed. "I can check." She connected her switchboard through a line plainly marked Personnel and her lips moved slightly, though no sound could be heard, Baley was no stranger to the throat-phones that translated the sub-vocalization of the larynx into words. He said, "Speak up, please. Let me hear you." Her words became audible, but consisted only of,... he says he's a policeman, sir." A dark, well-dressed man came out through a door. He had a thin mustache and his hairline was beginning to retreat. He smiled mirthlessly and said, "I'm Prescott of Personnel. What's the trouble, Officer?" Baley stared at him coldly and Prescott's smile grew strained. He added, "I just don't want to upset the workers. They're touchy about the police." Baley said, "Tough, isn't it? Is Clousarr in the building now?" "Yes, Officer." "Let's have a rod then. If he's gone when we get there. I'll be speaking to you again." The other's smile was quite dead. He muttered, "I'll get you a rod. Officer." guide-rod was set for Dc partment CG, Section #. What that meant in factory terminology, Baley didn't know. He didn't have to. The rod was an inconspicuous thing which could be palmed in the hand. Its tip warmed gently when lined up in the direction for which it was set, cooled quickly when turned away. The warmth increased as the hnal goal was approached. To an amateur, the guide-rod was almost useless, with its quick little differences of heat content. But few City-dwellers were amateurs at this particular game. One of the most popular and perennial of the games of childhood was hide-and-seek through the school-level corridors with the use of toy guide-rods -- "Hot or Not, let Hot-Spot Spot. Hot-Spot Guide-Rods Are Keen." Baley had found his way through hundreds of massive piles by guide-rod, and he could follow the shortest course with one of them in his hand as though it had been mapped out for him. When he stepped into a large minutes, the guide-rod's tip was almost hot. Baley said to the worker nearest the door, "Francis Clousarr here?" The worker jerked his head. Baley walked in the indicated direction. The odor of yeast was sharp, despite the laboring airpumps whose humming made a steady background noise. A man had risen at the other end of the room and was taking off an apron. He was of moderate height, his face deeply lined, though he was comparatively youthful, and his hair just beginning to grizzle. He had large knobby hands, which he wiped slowly on a celltex towel. "I'm Francis Clousarr," he said. Baley looked briefly at R. Daneel. The robot nodded. "Okay," said Baley. "Anywhere we can talk?" "Maybe," said Clousarr slowly. "But its just about the end of my shift. How about tomorrow?" "Lots of hours between now and tomorrow. Let's make it now." Baley opened his wallet and displayed it to the yeast farmer. But Clousarr's hands did not waver in their somber wiping motions. He said coolly, "I don't know the system in the Police Department, but around here you get tight eating hours with no leeway. I eat at # to # or I don't eat." "It's all right," said Baley. "I'll arrange to have your supper brought to you." "Well, well," said Clousarr joylessly. "Just like an aristocrat or a C-class copper. What's next -- private bath?" "You just answer questions, Clousarr," said Baley, "and save your big jokes for your girlfriend. Where can we talk?" "If you want to talk, how about the balance room? Suit yourself about that. Me, I've got nothing to say -- nothing at all." to the balance room. It was square and antiseptically white, air-conditioned independently of the' larger room -- and more efficiently. Its walls were lined with delicate electronic balances, glassed off and manipulated by fieldforces only. Baley had used cheaper models in his college days. One make, which he recatoms. Clousarr said, "I don't think anyone will come in here." Baley grunted, then turned to Daneel and said, "Would you step out and have a meal sent up here? And, if you don't mind, wait outside for it." He watched R. Daneel leave, then said to Clousarr, "You're a chemist?" "I'm a zymologist, if you don't mind." "What's the difference?" Clousarr looked lofty. "A chemist is a soup-pusher, a stinkoperator. A zymologist is a man ple alive. I'm a yeast-culture specialist." "All right," sai Baley. "Continue talking." But Clousarr was not to bediverted. "This laboratory keeps New York Yeast going. There isn't a day, not one hour, that we haven't got cultures of every strain of yeast in the Company growing in our kettles. Wc check and adjust the food-factor requirements. We make sure it's breeding true. We twist the genetics, start the new strains and weed them out, sort their properties and mold them again. "When New Yorkers started getting strawberries out of season a couple of years back, those weren't strawberries, fella. Those were a special high-sugar yeast culture with a true-bred color and just a dash of flavor additive. It was developed right here in this room. "Twenty years ago, Saccharomyces olei Benedictae was just a scrub strain with a lousy taste of tallow and good for nothing. It still tastes of tallow, but its fat content has been pushed up from fifteen per cent to eightyseven. ' If you used the Expressway today, just remember that it's greased strictly with S. O. Benedictae, Strain AG#. Developed right here in this room. "So don't call me chemist. I'm a zymologist." Despite himself, Baley was impressed by the fierce pride of the other. He said abruptly, "Where were you last night between the hours of # and #?" Clousarr shrugged. "Walking. I like to take a little walk after dinner." "You visited friends? Or a sub-etheric?" "No. Just walked." visit to the sub-etherics would have involved a notch in Clousarr's ration plack. A meeting with a friend would have involved naming a man or woman and offered a cross-check. "No one saw you then?" "Maybe someone did. I don't know. Not that I know of, though." "What about the night before last?" "Same thing." "You have no alibi then for either night?" "If I had done anything criminal, I'd have one. What do I need an alibi for?" Baley didn't answer. He consulted his little book. "You were up before the magistrate once. Inciting to riot." "All right. One of the R-things pushed past me and I tripped him up. Is that inciting to riot?" "The court thought so. You were convicted and fined." "That ends it, doesn't it? Or do you want to fine me again?" "Night before last, there was a near-riot at a shoe department in the Bronx. You were seen there." #S "By whom?" Baley said, "It was at mealtime for you here. Did you eat the evening meal night before last?" Clousarr hesitated, then shook his head. "Upset stomach. Yeast gets you that way sometimes. Even an old-timer like me." "Last night, there was a nearwere seen there." "By whom?" "Do you deny you were present on both occasions?" "You're not giving me anything to deny. Where did these things happen and who says he saw me?" Baley stared at the zymologist levelly. "I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. I think you're an important man in an unregistered Medievalist organization." "I can't stop you from thinking, Officer, but thinking isn't evidence. Maybe you know that." Clousarr was grinning. "Maybe," said Baley, his long face stony, "I can get a little truth out of you right now." Baley stepped to the door of the balance room and opened it. He said to R. Daneel, who was waiting stolidly outside. "Has Clousarr's evening meal arrived?" "It is coming now, Elijah." "Bring it in, will you, Daneel?" later with a compartmented metal tray. "Put it in front of Mr. Clousarr, Daneel." said Baley. He sat down on one of the stools that lined the balance wall with his legs crossed and one shoe swinging rhythmically. He watched Clousarr edge stiffly away as R. Daneel placed the tray on a stool near the zymologist. "Francis Clousarr," said Baley. "I want to introduce you to my partner. Daneel Olivaw." Daneel put out his hand and said, "How do you do, Francis." Clousarr said nothing. He made no move to grasp Daneel's extended hand. Daneel maintained his position and Clousarr began to redden. Baley said softly. "You are being rude. Mr. Clousarr. Are you too proud to shake hands with a policeman?" Clousarr muttered, "If you don't mind. I'm hungry." He unfolded a pocket-fork out of a clasp-knife he took from his pocket and sat down, his eyes on his meal. Baley said, "Daneel, I think our friend is offended by your official attitude. You are not angry with him, are you?" "Not at all, Elijah," said R. Daneel. "Then show that there are no hard feelings. Put your arm about his shoulder." "I will be glad to," said R. Daneel. He stepped forward. Clousarr put down his fork. "What IS this? What's going on?" R. Daneel, unruffled, put out his arm. Clousarr swung back-handed wildly, knocking R. Daneel's arm to one side. "Damn it, don't touch me!" He jumped up and away, the tray of food tipping and hitting the floor in a messy clatter. Baley, hard-eyed, nodded curtly to R. Daneel, who continued a stolid advance toward the retreating zymologist. Baley stepped in front of the door. Clousarr yelled, "Keep that thing away from me!" "That's no way to speak." said Baley with equanimity. "The man's my partner." "You mean he's a damned robot!" "All right, let him alone, Daneel." said Baley promptly. R. Daneel stepped back and stood quietly against the door just behind Baley. Clousarr, panting harshly, his fists clenched, his face White, faced Baley. Baley said, "All right, smart boy. What makes you think Daneel's a robot?" "Anyone can tell!" "We'll leave that to a judge. Meanwhile, we want you at headquarters, Clousarr. We'd like to have you explain exactly how you knew Daneel was a robot. And lots more, mister, lots more. Daneel, step outside and get through to the Commissioner. He'll be at his home by now. Ask him to come down to the office. Tell him I have a fellow who can't wait to be questioned." R. Daneel stepped out of the room. your wheels go round, Clousarr?" "I want a lawyer." "You'll get one. Meanwhile, suppose you tell me what makes you Medievalists tick." Clousarr looked away in a determined silence. Baley said, "We know all about you and your organization. I'm not bluffing. Just tell me for my own curiosity -- what do you Medievalists ivan?"  "Back to the soil." said Clousarr in a stifled voice. "That's simple, isn't it?" "It's simple to say, but isn't simple to do. How's the soil go"Did I say back to the soil overnight? Or in a year? Or in a hundred years? Step by step. It doesn't matter how long it takes, but let's get started out of these caves we live in. Let's get out into the fresh air." "Have you ever been out in the fresh air?" Clousarr squirmed. "All right, so I'm ruined, too. But the children aren't ruined yet. Get them out, for God's sake. Let them have space and open air and sun. If we've got to, we can cut our population little by little." "Backward to an impossible past." Baley did not really know why he was arguing, except for the strange fever that was burning in his own veins. "Back to the seed, to the egg. to the womb. Why not move forward instead? Don't cut Earth's population. Use it for export. Go back to the soil, but go back to the soil of other planets. Colonize!" Clousarr laughed harshly. "And make more Outer Worlds? More Spacers?" "We won't. The Outer Worlds were settled by Earthmen who came from a planet that did not have Cities -- by Earthmen who were individualists and materialists. Those qualities were carried to an unhealthy extreme. We can now colonize out of a society that has carried cooperation, if anything, too far. Now environment and tradition can interact to form a new middle way, distinct from either old Earth or the Obiter Worlds. Something newer and better." He was parroting Dr. Fastolfe, he knew, but it was coming out as though he himself had been thinking of it for years. Clousarr said, "Yeast! Colonize desert worlds instead of developing our own? What fools would try?" "Many -- and they wouldn't be fools. There'd be robots to help." "No," said Clousarr fiercely. "Never! No robots!" "Why not, for God's sake? What are we afraid of in robots? If you want my guess, we all feel inferior to the Spacers and hate it. We've got to feel superior somehow, somewhere, to make up for it. It kills us that we can't at least feel superior to robots. They seem to be better than us -- only they're not. That's the irony of it."  ing as he spoke. "Look at Daneel. I've been with him for over two days. He's taller than I am. stronger, handsomer. He looks like a Spacer, in fact. He's got a better memory and knows more facts. He doesn't have to sleep or eat. He's not troubled by sickness or panic or love or guilt. "But he's a machine. I can do anything I want to him, the way I can to that micro-balance right there. If I slam the micro-balance, it won't hit me back. Neither will Daneel. I can order him to use a blaster on himself and he'll do it. "We can't ever build a robot that will be as good as a human being in anything that counts. We can't create a robot with a sense of beauty or a sense of ethics or a sense of religion. There's no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of absolute materialism. "We can't, damn it -- not as long as we don't understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can't measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, trying to understand what can't be understood. It's what makes us men. "A robot's brain must be finite or it can't be built. It must be calculated to the final decimal place, so that it has an end. Jehoshaphat, what are you afraid of? A robot can look like Daneel, he can look like a god, and yet be no more human than a blob of yeast. Can't you see that?" Clousarr had tried to interrupt several times and failed against Baley's furious torrent. Now. when Baley paused in sheer emotional exhaustion, he said weakly, "Copper turned philosopher. Well, what do you know?" ley looked .at him and frowned, partly with the anger that had not yet left him, partly with new annoyance. "What kept you?" he demanded. R. Daneel said, "I had trouble reaching Commissioner Enderby, Elijah. It turned out that he was still at his office." Baley looked at his watch. "TVow? What for?" "There is a certain confusion at the moment. A corpse has been discovered in the Department." 'What! For God's sake, who?" "The errand boy -- R. Sammy." Baley gulped. He stared at the robot and stated in an outraged voice, "I thought you said a corpse." R. Daneel amended smoothly, "A robot with a completely deactivated brain, if you prefer." Clousarr laughed suddenly and Baley turned on him, saying savagely, "Nothing out of you! Understand?" Deliberately, he unlimbered his blaster. Clousarr fell silent. Baley said, "Well, what of it? R. Sammy blew a fuse. So what?" "Commissioner Enderby was evasive. Elijah, but while he did not say so outright, my impression is that he believes R. Sammy was deliberately deactivated." Then, as Baley absorbed that silently, R. Daneel added gravely, "Or if you prefer the phrase -- murdered." but kept his hand unobtrusively upon its butt. He said, "Walk ahead of us, Clousarr, to #th Street Exit B." Clousarr said, "I haven't eaten." "There's your meal on the floor, where you dumped it." "I have a right to eat." "You'll eat in Detention or you'll miss a meal. You won't starve. Get going." All three were silent as they threaded the maze of New York Yeast -- Clousarr moving stonily in advance, Baley right behind him, R. Daneel in the rear. It was after Baley and R. Daneel had checked out at the receptionist's desk, after Clousarr had drawn a leave of absence, after they were out in the open alongside the parked squad-car, that Clousarr said, "Just a minute." He hung back, turned toward R. Daneel and, before Baley could make a move to stop him, stepped forward and swung his open hand full against the robot's cheek. "What the devil!" cried Baley, grabbing violently at Clousarr. Clousarr did not resist the plainclothesman's grasp. "It's all right. I'll go along with you. I just wanted to see for myself." He was grinning. R. Daneel, having rolled with the slap, but not having escaped it entirely, gazed quietly at Clousarr. There was no reddening of his cheek, no mark of any blow, at all. He said, "That was a dangerous action, Francis. Had I not moved backward, you might easily have damaged your hand. As it is, I regret that I must have caused you pain." Clousarr laughed. Baley said, "Get in, Clousarr. You too, Daneel -- right in the back seat with him. And make sure he doesn't move. I don't care if it means breaking his arm. That's an order." "What about the First Law?" mocked Clousarr. "I think Daneel is strong enough and fast enough to stop you without hurting you. But it might do you good to have an arm or two broken, at that." Baley got behind the wheel and the squad-car gathered speed. The empty wind ruffled his hair and Clousarr's, but R. Daneel's remained smoothly in place.  Clousarr, "Do you fear robots for the sake of your job, Mr. Clousarr?" Baley could not turn to see Clousarr's expression, but he was certain it would be hard and rigid with detestation. Clousarr's voice replied, "And my kids' jobs. And everyone's kids." "Surely adjustments are possible," said the robot. "If your children, for instance, were to accept training for emigration -- " Clousarr broke in. "You, too? The policeman talked about emigration. He's got good robot training. Maybe he is a robot." Baley growled, "That's enough, you!" R. Daneel said evenly, "A training school for emigrants would bring about security, guaranteed classification, an assured career. If you are concerned over your children, that is something to consider." "I wouldn't take anything from a robot, or a Spacer, or any of the trained hyenas in the Government." That was all. The silence of the Motorway engulfed them and there was only the soft whirr of the squad-car motor and the hiss of its wheels on the pavement until they reached the Deportment. Baley signed a detention certificate for Clousarr and left him in appropriate hands. Following that, he and R. Daneel took the Motospiral up the levels to Headquarters. R. Daneel showed no surprise that they had not taken the elevators, nor did Baley expect him to. He was becoming used to the robot's queer mixture of initiative and compliance and tended to leave him out of his calculations. The elevator was the logical method of leaping the vertical gap between Detention and Headquarters. The long moving stairway that was the Motospiral was useful only for short climbs or drops of two or three levels at most. People of all sorts and varieties of administrative occupation stepped on and then off in less than a minute. Only Baley and R. Daneel remained on continuously., moving upward in a slow and stolid measure. Baley felt he needed the time. It was only minutes at best, but up in Headquarters he would be thrown violently against another phase of the problem and he wanted a rest. He wanted time to think, to orient himself. Slowly as it moved, the Motospiral went too quickly to satisfy him. we will not be questioning Clousarr just yet." "He'll keep," said Baley irritably. "It is a pity. His cerebric qualities -- " "What about them?" "They have changed in a strange way. What took place between the two of you in the balance room while I was not present?" Baley said absently, "I passed along the Gospel according to St. Fastolfe." "I do not understand you, Elijah." Baley sighed. "I preached emigration, just as he told you in the squad-car." "I see. And what did you tell him about robots?" "You really want to know? I told him robots were simply machines. That was the Gospel according to St. Gerrigel. There are any number of gospels, I think." "Did you by any chance tell him that one could strike a robot without fear of a return blow, much as one could strike any other mechanical object?" "Except a punching bag. I suppose. Yes -- but what made you guess that?" Baley looked curiously at the robot. "It fits the cerebric changes," said R. Daneel, "and it explains his blow to my face just after we left the factory. He must have been thinking of what you said, so he simultaneously tested your statement, worked off his aggressive feelings and had the pleasure of seeing me placed in. what seemed to him a position of inferiority. In order to be so motivated and allowing for the delta variations in his quintic... He paused a long moment. "Yes, it is quite interesting. I believe I can form a self-consistent whole of the data." Headquarters level was approaching. Baley said, "What time is it?" He thought pettishly: Yeast! I could look at my watch. It's faster. But he knew why he asked. His motive was not so different from Clousarr's in punching R. Daneel. By giving the robot a trivial order that he must fulfill, he emphasized R. Daneel's mechanical nature and,' contrariwise, his own humanity. Baley thought: We're all brothers. Under the skin, over it, everywhere. Jeshoshaphat! R. Daneel said, "Twenty-ten." They stepped off the Motospiral and, for a few seconds, Baley had the usual queer sensation that went with adjustment to non-motion. He said, "And I haven't eaten. Damn this job, anyway." missioner Enderby through the open door of his office. The Common Room was empty and Enderby's voice rang through it. His round face looked bare and weak without its glasses, which he held in his hand while he mopped his smooth forehead with a paper tissue. His eyes caught Baley just as the latter reached the door, his voice rose in a petulant tenor. "Good God, Baley, where the devil were you?" Baley shrugged off the complaint and said, "What's doing? Where's the night-shift?" And then he caught sight of the second person in the office with the Commissioner. He added blankly, "Dr. Gerrigel!" The gray-haired roboticist returned the involuntary greeting by nodding briefly. "Glad to see you again. Mr. Baley." The Commissioner readjusted his glasses and stared at Baley through them. "The entire staff is being questioned downstairs. Signing statements. I was going mad trying to find you. It looked queer, your being away." "My being away!" "Anybody's being away. Someone in the Department did it and there's going to be hell to pay. What an unholy mess! What an unholy rotten mess!" He raised his hands as though in expostulation to heaven and, as he did so, his eyes fell on R. Daneel. Baley thought sardonically: First time you've looked Daneel in the face. Take a good look, Julius! The Commissioner said in a subdued voice, "He'll have to sign a statement. Even I've had to do it. Me!" Baley said, "Look, Commissioner, what makes you so sure that R. Sammy didn't blow a gasket all by himself? How do you know it was deliberate destruction?" The Commissioner sat down heavily. "Ask him," he said and pointed to Dr. Gerrigel. Dr. Gerrigel cleared his throat. "I scarcely know how to go about this, Mr. Baley. I take it from your expression that you are surprised to see me." "Moderately," admitted Baley. "Well, I was in no real hurry to return to Washington, and my visits to New York are few enough to make me wish to linger. More important, I felt it would be criminal for me to leave the City without at least one more effort to be allowed to analyze your fascinating robot, whom, by the way -- " he looked very eager -- "I see you have with you." "Impossible. He's Spacer property." The roboticist looked disappointed. "Perhaps you might ask them for permission." Baley's long face remained woodenly unresponsive.  called you, but you weren't in. No one knew where you could be located. I asked for the Commissioner and he asked me to come to headquarters and wait for you." The Commissioner interposed quickly, "I thought it might be important. I knew you wanted to see the man." Baley nodded. "Thanks." Dr. Gerrigel said, "Unfortunately, my guide-rod was somewhat off, or, perhaps in my over-anxiety, I misjudged its temperature. In either case, I took a wrong turning and found myself in a small room -- " The Commissioner interrupted again. "One of the photographic supply rooms, Lije." "Yes," said Dr. Gerrigel. "And in it was the prone figure of what was obviously a robot. It was quite clear to me after a brief examination that he was irreversibly deactivated. Dead, you might say. Nor was it very difficult to determine the cause of the deactivation." "What was it?" asked Baley. "In the robot's partly clenched right fist," said Dr. Gerrigel, "was a shiny ovoid about two inches long and half an inch wide, with a mica window at one end. The fist was in contact with his skull as though the robot's last act had been to touch his head. The thing he was holding was an alpha-sprayer. You know what they are, I suppose?" Baley nodded. He had handled several in his lab courses in physics. An alpha-sprayer was a lead-alloy casing with a narrow pit dug into it longitudinally, at the bottom of which was a fragment of a plutonium salt. The pit was capped with a sliver of mica, which was transparent to alpha particles. In that one direction, hard radiation sprayed out. An alpha-sprayer had many one of them -- not a legal one, at least. Baley said, "He held it to his head mica-first?" "Yes, and his positronic brainpaths were immediately randomized. Instant death, so to speak." Baley turned to the pale Commissioner. "No mistake? It really was an alpha-sprayer?" The Commissioner nodded, his lips pursed. "Absolutely. The counters could spot it ten feet away. Photographic film in the storeroom was fogged. Open and shut." He seemed to brood about it a moment or two, then said abruptly, "Dr. Gerrigel, I'm afraid you'll have to stay in the City until we get your evidence down on wire-film. I'll have you escorted to a room. You won't mind being under guard, I hope?" Dr. Gerrigel asked nervously, "Do you think it's necessary?" "It's safer." Dr. Gerrigel, seemingly quite abstracted, shook hands all around, even with R. Daneel. He left. The Commissioner heaved a sigh. "It's one of us, Lije. That's what bothers me. No outsider would come into the Department just to knock off a robot. Plenty of them outside where it's safer. And it had to be somebody who could pick up an alpha-sprayer. They're hard to get hold of."  even voice in contrast with the agitated tone of the Commissioner. He said, '#ut what is the motive for this murder?" The Commissioner glanced at R. Daneel with obvious distaste, then looked away. "We're human, too, unfortunately. I suppose policemen can't get to like robots any more than anyone else can. He's gone now, and maybe it's a relief to somebody. He used to annoy you considerably, Lije, remember." "That is scarcely a murder motive," said R. Daneel. "No," agreed Baley with decision. "It isn't murder," said the Commissioner. "It's property damage. Let's keep our legal terms straight. It's just that it was done inside the Department. Anywhere else, it would be nothing. Here it could be a first-class scandal. Lije!" "Yes?" "When did you last see R. Sammy?" Baley said, "R. Daneel spoke to R. Sammy after lunch. I should judge it was about #:#. He arranged to have us use your office. Commissioner." "My office? What for?" "I wanted to talk over the case with R. Daneel in moderate privacy. You weren't in, .so your office was an obvious choice." "I see," the Commissioner looked dubious, but let the matter ride. "You didn't see him yourself?" "No, but I heard his voice, perhaps an hour afterward." "That would be about #:#?" "Or a little sooner." The Commissioner bit his lower lip thoughtfully "Well, that settles one thing. The boy -- Vincent Barrett -- was here today." "I know. But he wouldn't do this." HE Commissioner lifted his eyes to Baley's face. "Why not? R. Sammy took his job away. I can understand how he feels. There would be a tremendous sense of injustice. He'd want revenge. Wouldn't you? But the fact is that he left the building at #:# and you heard R. Sammy alive at #:#. Of course, he might have given the alphasprayer to R. Sammy before he left, with instructions not to use it for an hour. But where could he have gotten an alpha-sprayer? No, it doesn't hold up. Let's get back to R. Sammy. When you spoke to him at #:#, what did he say?" Baley hesitated a perceptible moment, then replied carefully, "I don't remember. We left shortly afterward." "Where did you go?" "Yeast Town, eventually." The Commissioner rubbed his chin. "Jessie was in today. We checked on all visitors, of course. Why did she come here?" "Family matters." "I'm afraid she'll have to be questioned." "I understand police routine, Commissioner. Incidentally, what about the alpha-spray itself? Has it been traced?" "Oh, yes. It came from one of the power plants." "How do they account for having lost it?" "They don't. They have no idea. But look, Lije, except for routine statements, this has nothing to do with you. You stick to your case. It's just that... Well, you stick to the Spacetown investigation." Baley said, "May I give my routine statements later, Commissioner? I haven't eaten yet." Commissioner Enderby blinked. "By all means, get something to eat. But stay inside the Department, will you? Your partner's right, though, Lije -- " he seemed to avoid addressing R. Daneel or using his name -- "It's the motive we need." Baley felt suddenly frozen. Something outside himself, something completely alien, took up the events of this day and the day before and the day before that and juggled them. A pattern began to form. He said, "Which power plant did the alpha-sprayer come from, Commissioner?" Why?" "Nothing -- nothing." The last word Baley heard the Commissioner mutter as he strode out of the office, with R. Daneel immediately behind him, was, "Motive. Motive." " the small and infrequently used Department lunch room. He devoured a stuffed tomato on lettuce without noticing what he was eating. For a second or so, after he had gulped down the last mouthful, his fork still slithered aimlessly over the slick disposable plate, searching automatically for something that was no longer there. He became aware of it and put down his fork with a muffled, "Jehoshaphat!" He said, "Danccir R. Daneel had beeij sitting at another table, as though he wished to leave the obviously preoccupied Baley in peace, or as though he required privacy himself. Baley was past caring which. Daneel stood up, moved to Baley's table and sat down again. "Yes, partner Elijah?" Baley did not look at him. "Daneel. they'll question Jessie and myself. Let me answer the questions in my own way, understand?" "What if I am asked a direct question? It is not possible for me to saying anything but what is so." " you are asked a direct question, very well. Just don't volunteer information. You can do that, can't you?" "I believe so. Elijah, provided it does not mean that I am hurting a human being by remaining silent." Baley said grimly, "You'll hurt me if you don't. I assure you of that." "I do not quite comprehend your point of view, partner Elijah. Surely the matter of R. Sammy cannot concern you." "No? It all centers about motive, doesn't? You've questioned the motive. The Conimissioner questioned it. I question it myself, for that matter. Why should anyone want to kill R. Sammy? Mind you, it's not just a question of who would want to smash up robots in general. Practically any Earthman would want to do that. "The question is, who would want to single out R. Sammy? Vincent Barrett might, but the Commissioner said he couldn't get hold of an alphasprayer, and he's right. We have to look somewhere else and it so happens that one other person has a motive. It glares out; It yells. It stinks to top level." "Who is the person, Elijah?" Baley said softly, "I am. Daneel."  face did not change under the impact of the statement. He merely shook his head. Baley said, "You don't agree? My wife came to the office today. They know that already. Even the Commissioner is curious. If I weren't a personal friend, he wouldn't have stopped his questioning so soon. Now they'll find out why. That's certain. She was part of a conspiracy -- a foolish and harmless one, but a conspiracy just the same. And a policeman can't afford to have his wife mixed up with anything like that. It would be to my obvious interest to see that the matter was hushed up. "Well, who knew about it?" he added. "You and I. of course, and Jessie -- and R. Sammy. He saw her in a state of panic. When he told her that we had left orders not to be disturbed, she must have lost control. You saw how she was when she came in." R, Daneel said, "It is unlikely that she said anything incriminating to him." "That may be so. But I'm reconstructing the case the way they will. They'll say she did. There's my motive. I killed him to keep him quiet." "They will not think so." "They will think so. The murder was arranged deliberately in order to throw suspicion on me. Why use an alpha-sprayer? It's a rather risky weapon. It's hard to get and it can be traced. I believe those were the very reasons it was used. The murderer even ordered R. Sammy to go into the photographic supply room and kill himself there. It seems obvious to me that the reason for that was to have the method of murder unmistakable. Even if everyone was infantile enough not to recognize the alpha-sprayer immediately. someone would be bound to notice fogged photographic film in fairly short order." "How does all this relate to you. Elijah?" Baley grinned nervously, his long face completely devoid of humor. "Very neatly. The alphasprayer was taken from the Williamsburg power plant. You and burg power plant yesterday. We were seen and that fact will come out. That gives me opportunity to get the weapon as well as motive for the crime. And it may turn out that we were the last ones to see or hear R. Sammy alive -- except for the real murderer, of course." "I was with you in the power plant. I can testify that you did not have the opportunity to steal an alpha-sprayer." "Thanks," said Baley sadly, "but you're a robot. Your testimony will be invalid." "The Commissioner is your friend. He will listen. He will have to listen." "The Commissioner has a job to keep, and he's already a bit uneasy about me. There's only one chance of saving myself from this very nasty situation." "Yes?" ing framed? Obviously, to get rid of me. But why? Again, obviously, because I am dangerous to someone. I am doing my best to be dangerous to whoever killed Dr. Sarton in Spacetown. That might mean the Medievalists. of course, or at least the inner group among them. It would be this inner group that would know I passed through the power plant. One or more of them might have followed us along the strips that far, even though you thought we had lost them. "So the chances are that, if I find the murderer of Dr. Sarton, I find the man or men trying to get me out of the way. If I think it through -- if I crack the case -- I'll be safe. And Jessie. I couldn't stand to have her... But I don't have much time." Baley looked at R. Daneel with sudden burning hope. Whatever the creature was, he was strong and faithful, inspired by no selfishness. What more could you ask of any friend? Baley needed a friend, and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood-vessel in this particular one. "You and I," he said. "You and I, Daneel. We'll get it out of Clousarr. You can use your cerebroanalysis, squeeze the most out of it. make it..." He stopped in astonishment. R. Daneel was shaking his head. The robot said, "I am sorry, Elijah -- " there was no trace of sorrow on his face, of course -- "but I anticipated none of this. Perhaps my action was to your harm. I am sorry if the general good requires that." "What general good?" stammered Baley. "I have been in communication with Dr. Fastolfe." "Jehoshaphat! When?" "While you were eating. I possess the capacity for sub-etheric communication with Spacetown. It was thought wise to install a self-contained circuit for the purpose within me. I've used it before." Baley's lips tightened. Was he never to finish learning of new potentialities within the lump of metal and plastic that faced him now? "Well?" he managed to say. "What happened?" "You will have to clear yourself of suspicion of the murder of R. Sammy through some means other than the investigation of the murder of my designer. Dr. Sarton. Our people at Spacetown, as a result of my information, have decided to bring that investigation to an end, as of today, and to begin plans for leaving Spacetown and Earth." with something close to detachment. It was #:#. In two and a quarter hours, it would be midnight. He had been awake since before six and had been under tension now for more than two days. "What's it all about, Daneel?" he asked. R. Daneel said, "Is it not obvious?" "It is not a damn bit obvious." "We are here," said the robot, "to break down the isolationism of Earth and force its people into new expansion and colonization." "I know that." "If we were anxious to exact punishment for the murder of Dr. Sarton, it was not that in doing so we expected to bring Dr. Sarton back to life. It was only that failure to do so would strengthen the position of our home-planet politicians, who are against the very idea of Spacetown." "But now," said Baley, with sudden violence, "you say you're getting ready to go home of your own accord. Why? The answer to the Sarton case is close. It mus be close or they wouldn't be trying so hard to blast me out of the investigation. I have a feeling I have all the facts I need to work out the answer." Baley drew a shuddering breath. He was making a spectacle of himself before a machine that could only stare at him silently. He said harshly, "Well, never mind that. Why are the Spacers breaking off?" "Our project is concluded. We are satisfied that Earth will colonize." "You've switched to optimism?" "For a long time now, we of Spacetown have tried to change Earth by changing its economy. We have tried to introduce our own CFe culture -- the carbon and iron of a human-plus-robot society. Your planetary and various City government cooperated with us because it was expedient to do so. Still, for twenty-five years, we had consistently failed. The harder we tried, the stronger the opposing party of the Medievalists grew." "I know all this," said Baley. "Get to the point." Dr. Sarton who argued that we must reverse our tactics. We must first find a segment of Earth's population that desired what we desired or could be persuaded to do so. By encouraging and helping them, we could make the movement a native rather than an alien one. The difficulty was in finding the native element best suited for our purposes. You yourself, Elijah, were an interesting experiment." "I? What do you mean?" demanded Baley. "Wc were glad your Commissioner recommended you. From your psychic profile, we judged you to be a useful specimen. Cerebroanalysis confirmed our judgment. You are a practical man, Elijah. You do not moon romantically over Earth's past, despite your healthy interest in it. Nor do you blindly accept the City culture of the present. We felt that it was people such as yourself who could lead Earthmen to the stars once more. It was one reason Dr. Fastolfe was anxious to see you yesterday morning. "To be sure, your practical nature was embarrassingly intense. You refused to understand that the fanatical service of an ideal, even a mistaken ideal, may make a man do things quite beyond his ordinary capacity, as, for instance, crossing open country at night to destroy someone he considers an arch-enemy of his cause. We were not overly surprised, therefore, that you were stubborn and daring enough to attempt to prove the murder a fraud. In a way, it showed you were the man we wanted for our experiment." "For God's sake, what experiment?" "The experiment of persuading you that colonization was the answer to Earth's problems." R. Daneel spoke quietly. "Well, I was persuaded." "Yes, under the influence of the appropriate drug." Baley almost dropped the pipe cious rationed tobacco. Once again, he was seeing that scene in the Spacetown dome -- himself swimming back to awareness after the shock of learning that R. Daneel was a robot, after all -- R. Daneel's smooth fingers pinching up the flesh of his arm -- a hypo-sliver standing out darkly under his skin and then fading away. He said chokingly, "What was in the hypo-sliver?" "Nothing that need alarm you, Elijah. It was a mild drug intended only to make your mind more receptive." "And so I believed whatever was told me. Is that it?" He asked unevenly. "Not quite. You would not believe an#hing that was foreign to your basic thought pattern. In fact, the results of the experiment were disappointing. Dr. Fastolfe had hoped you would become fanatical on the subject. Instead, you became rather distantly approving and no more. Your practical nature stood in the way. It made us realize that our only hope was the romantics. And the romantics, unfortunately, were all Medievalists, actual or potential." of himself, glad of his stubbornness and happy that he had disappointed them. Let them experiment with someone else. He grinned. "So now you've given up. You're going home." "No," R. Daneel answered. "I said a few moments ago that we were satisfied Earth would colonize. It was you who gave us the answer." "# gave it to you? How?" "You spoke to Francis Clousarr concerning colonization. At least our experiment on you had that result. And Clousarr's aura changed." "You mean I convinced him I was right. Nonsense!" "Conviction does not come that easily. But the cerebric changes demonstrated conclusively that the Medievalist mind is open to that sort of conviction. The phenomenon called Medievalism is a frustrated wish to pioneer. To be sure, the direction in which that wish is directed at present is toward Earth. But the vision of distant worlds is a similar magnet and the romantic can turn to it easily. Clousarr felt the attraction as a result of a single lecture from you. "So. you see, we of Spacetown had already succeeded without knowing it. We ourselves, rather than anything we tried to introduce, were the unsettling factor. We crystallized the romantic impulses on Earth into Medievalism, and induced an organization. After all, it is the Medievalist who wishes to break the chains of custom, not the City officials who have most to gain from preserving the status quo. "If we leave behind a few obscure individuals or robots such as myself, who, together with sympathetic Earthmen such as yourself, can establish the training schools for emigrants that I spoke of, the Medievalist will eventually turn away from Earth. He will need robots and either get them from us or build his own. He will develop a CFe culture to suit himself." It was a long speech for R. Daneel. He must have realized that himself, for he added, ' "I tell you all this to explain why it is necessary to do something that may hurt you." minute. Let me introduce a practical note. You'll go back to your worlds and say that an Earthman killed a Spacer and went unpunished. The Outer Worlds will demand an indemnity from Earth and Eartli is no longer in a mood to give in to Spacer threats. There will be trouble." "I am sure that will not happen, Elijah. The elements on our planet most interested in pressing for an indemnity would also be most interested in forcing an end to Spacetown. We can easily offer the latter as an inducement to abandon the former. It is what we plan to do. Earth will be left in peace." Baley broke out, his voice hoarse with sudden despair, "And where does that leave me. The Commissioner will drop the Sarton investigation at once if Sammy thing will have to continue because it points to conspiracy inside the Department. He'll be in any minute with a ream of evidence against me. I know that. It's been arranged. I'll be declassified. Daneel. There's Jessie to consider. There's Bentley -- " R. Daneel said, "In the service of humanity's good, minor wrongs to individuals must be tolerated. Dr. Sarton has a surviving wife, two children, parents, a sister, many friends. All must grieve at his death and be saddened at the thought that his murderer has not been found and punished." "Then why not stay and find him?" "It is no longer necessary." Baley said bitterly, "Why not admit that the entire investigation was an excuse to study us under field conditions? You never cared who killed Dr. Sarton." "We would have liked to know," said R. Daneel coolly, "but we were never under any delusions as to which was more important, an individual or humanity. To continue the investigation would involve interfering with a situation which we now find satisfactory." "You mean the murderer might turn out to be a prominent Medievalist, and right now the Spacers don't want to do anything to antagonize their new friends." "It is not as I would say it, but there is truth iri your words." Daneel sounded faintly troubled. "Where's your justice circuit, Daneel? Is this justice?" "There are degrees of justice. Elijah. When the lesser is incompatible with the greater, the lesser must give way." It was as though Baley's mind were circling the impregnable logic of R. Daneel's positronic brain, searching for a loophole, a weakness. TE said. "Have you no personal curiosity. Daneel? You've called yourself a detective. Do you know what that implies?" Baley's hopes, not strong in the first place, weakened as he spoke. The word "curiosity" brought back his own remarks to Francis Clousarr four hours before. He had known well enough then the qualities that marked off a man from a machine. Curiosity had to be one of them. R. Daneel echoed his thoughts by asking, "What do you mean by curiosity?" Baley sighed. "Curiosity is the name we give to a desire to extend one's knowledge." "Such a desire exists within me, when the extension of knowledge is necessary for the performance of an assigned task." "Yes," said Baley sarcastically, "like when you ask questions about Bentley's contact lenses in order to learn more of Earth's customs." "Precisely." R. Daneel agreed, with no sign of any awareness of sarcasm. "Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency." While R. Daneel spoke. Baley's mouth opened and stayed so. Somewhere, deep inside his unconscious. he had built a case, built it carefully and in detail, but had been brought up short by a single impossibility. One impossibility that could be neither jumped over, burrowed under nor shunted aside. But the inconsistency had vanished -- the case was all in his hands -- at last. glare of mental light appeared to have stimulated Baley mightily. At least, he suddenly knew what R. Daneel's weakness must be, the weakness of any thinking machine. The thing must be literal-minded. He said, "Then Project Spacetown is concluded as of today and with it the Sarton investigation. Is that it?" "That is the decision of our people at Spacetown," agreed R. Daneel. "But today is not , yet over." Baley looked at his watch. "There is an hour and a half until midnight. Let's go on as before. It will do your people no harm. In fact, it will do them great good. My word upon it. It is only an hour and a half I ask." R. Daneel said. "What you say is correct. Today is not over. I had not thought of that, partner Elijah." Baley was "partner Elijah" again. He felt his muscles relax. He said, "Dr. Fastolfe spoke of a film of the scene of the murder when I was in Spacetown yesterday." "Yes. At the time, you were not interested." "At the time, I wasn't myself. It's different now. Can you get a copy of the film?" "Yes. partner Elijah." "I mean now -- instantly!" "In ten minutes, if I can use the Department transmitter." The process took less than that. Baley stared at the small aluminum block he held in his trembling hands. Within it, the subtle forces transmitted from Spacetown had strongly fixed a certain atomic pattern. And at that moment, Commissioner Julius Enderby stood in the doorway. He saw Baley and anxiety passed from his round face, leaving behind it a look of growing thunder. He said. "Look here, Lije, you're takifig a devil of a time eating." "I was bone-tired, Commissioner. Sorry if I've delayed you." "I wouldn't mind, only -- you'd better come to my office.' Baley's eyes flicked toward R. Daneel, but met no answering look. He followed Enderby out. tramped the floor before his desk. Baley watched him, himself far from composed. Occasionally, he glanced at his watch. It was #:#. The Commissioner moved his glasses up onto his forehead and rybbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. "Lije," he said suddenly. "when were you last in Baley said, "Yesterday, after I left the office. About # or shortly thereafter." The Commissioner shook his head. "Why didn't you say so sooner, Lije?" "I was going to. I haven't given an official statement yet." "What were you doing there?" "Just passing through, on our way to my temporary sleeping quarters." The Commissioner stopped short, stood before Baley and said, "That's no good, Lije. No one just passes through a power plant to get somewhere else." Baley shrugged. There was no point in going through the story of the pursuing Medievalists, of the dash along the strips. Not now. He said, "If you're trying to hint that I had an opportunity to get the alpha-sprayer that knocked out R. Sammy, Daneel was with me and will testify I went right through the plant without stopping." Slowly, the Commissioner sat down. He did not look in R. Daneel's direction or offer ,to speak to him. "Lije, I don't know what to say or what to think. And it's no use having your -- your partner as alibi. He can't give evidence." "I still deny that I took an alpha-sprayer." The Commissioner's fingers intertwined. He said. "Why did Jessie come to see you here this afternoon?" "You asked me that before Commissioner. Same answer. Family matters." 'Tve got information from Francis Clousarr, Lije." "What kind of information?" "He claims that a Jezebel Baley is a member of a Medievalist society dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force." "Are you sure he has the right person? There are many Baleys." "There aren't many Jezebel Baleys." "He said Jezebel?" "I heard him, Lije." " A LL right," Baley said. "Jessie was a member of a harmless lunatic-fringe organization. She never did anything but attend meetings and feel devilish about it." "It won't look that way to a board of review, Lije." "You mean I'm going to be suspended and held on suspicion of destroying government property in the form of R. Sammy?" "I hope not, Lije, but it looks bad. Everyone knows you didn't like R. Sammy. Your wife was seen talking to him this afternoon. She was in tears and some of her words were heard. They were harmless in themselves, but two and two can be added up, Lije. And you had an opportunity to obtain the weapon." Baley interrupted. "If I were wiping out all evidence against Jessie, would I arrest Francis Clousarr? He seems to know a lot more about her than R. Sammy could have. Another thing. I passed through the power plant eighteen hours before R. Sammy spoke to Jessie. Did I know, that long in advance, I would have to destroy him, and pick up an alpha-sprayer by pure clairvoyance?" The Commissioner said, "Those are good objections. I'll do my best." "Yes? Do you really believe I didn't do it, Commissioner?" Enderby said slowly, "I don't know what to think." "Then I'll tell you. Commissioner, this is all a careful and elaborate frame." "Now wait, Lije! Don't strike out blindly. You won't get any sympathy with that line of defense." "I'm not after sympathy. I'm just telling the truth. I'm being taken out of circulation to prevent me from learning the facts about the Sarton murder. Unfortunately for my framing pal, it's too late for that." "Whatr Baley looked at his watch. It was #:#. He said, "I know who is framing me and I know how Dr. Sarton was killed and by whom, and I have one hour to tell you about it, catch the man and end the investigation."  eyes narrowed and he glared at Baley. "You tried something like this in Spacetown yesterday morning. Not again." Baley nodded. "I know. I was wrong the first time." He thought fiercely: Also the second time. But not now! He said. "Judge for yourself, Commissioner. Grant that the evidence against me has been planted. Go that far with me and see where it takes you. Ask yourself who could have planted that evidence. Obviously, only someone who knew I was in the evening." "All right -- who?" asked Enderby. "I was followed out of the kitchen by a .Medievalist group. I lost them, or I thought I did, but obviously at least one of them saw me pass through the plant. My only purpose in going through was to lose them." The Commissioner considered. "Clousarr? Was he with them?" Baley nodded. Enderby said, "All right, we'll question him." "Don't stop there, Commissioner. Kqep thinking." "Clousarr saw you go into the else someone in his group did and passed the information along to him. He decided to utilize that fact to get you into trouble and off the investigation. Is that what you're saying?" "It's close." "Good.'i The Commissioner seemed to warm to the task. "He knew your wife was a member of his organization, naturally, and so he knew you wouldn't face a really close probe into your private life. He thought you would resign rather than fight circumstantial evidence. By the way. Lije, what about a resignation?" missioner." Enderby shrugged. "Well, so he got an alpha-sprayer, presumably through a confederate in the plant, and had another confederate arrange the destruction of R. Sammy." His fingers drummed lightly on the desk. "No good, Lije." "Why not?" '"Too far-fetched. Too many confederates. And he has a castiron alibi for the night and morning of the Spacetown murder. We checked that almost right away." "I never said it was Clousarr, Commissioner. You did. It could be anyone in the Medievalist organisation. Clousarr is just the owner of a face that Daneel happened to recognize. Though there is one queer thing about him." "What?" . asked Enderby. 'He did know Jessie was a member. Does he know every member in the organization, do you suppose?" 'T have no idea. He knew about Jessie, anyway. Maybe she was important because she was the wife of a policeman." "He came right out and said Jezebel Baley was a member -- just like that? Jezebel Baley?" him myself, Lije." "That's the funny thing. Commissioner," said Baley. "Jessie hasn't used her full first name since before Bentley was born. Not once. I know that for a fact. She joined the Medievalists after she dropped her full name. How would Clousarr know her as Jezebel then?" The Commissioner said, "Oh? Well, he probably said Jessie. I guess I just fille.d it in automatically -- " "Until now you were quite sure he said Jezebel. I asked several times." The Commissioner's voice rose. "You're not saying I'm a liar, are you?" "I'm just wondering if Clousarr said nothing at all. You've known Jessie for twenty years and you knew her name was Jezebel." "You're off your head, man." "Am I? Where were yoCi after lunch today? You were out of your office for two hours, at least." "Are you questioning me.'" "I'll answer for you, too. You plant." The Commissioner jumped up from his seat. His forehead glistened. "What the hell are you trying to say?" "Weren't you?" "Baley, you're suspended. Hand me your credentials." "Not till you hear me out." "I don't intend to. You're guilty. What gets me is your, cheap attempt to make me. look as though I were conspiring against you. In fact, you're under arrest." "No," said Baley. "Not yet. Commissioner. I've got a blaster on you. Don't fool with me, please, because I intend to have my say. Afterward, you can do what you please." With widening eyes, Julius Enderby stammered. "Twenty years for this, Baley. in the deepest prison level in the City." For the first time since R. Daneel had entered the City, the Commissioner spoke directly to the robot. "Hold him, you. First Law!"  ly. His hand clamped down on Baley's wrist. He said quietly, "I cannot perjnit this, partner Elijah. You must do no harm to the Commissioner." "I have no intention of hurting him, Daneel. You said you would help me clear this up. I have # minutes." R. Daneel, without releasing Baley's wrist, said, "Commissioner, I believe Elijah should be allowed to speak. I am in communication with Dr. Fastolfe at this moment." "How? How?" demanded the Commissioner wildly. "Self-contained sub-etheric unit," explained Baley. "He's a great little model of a robot. Commissioner." "I am in communication with Dr. Fastolfe," the robot went on inexorably, "and it would make a bad impression, Commissioner, if you were to refuse to listen to Elijah. Damaging inferences might be drawn." The Commissioner fell back in his chair. "I say you were in the Williamsburg power plant today, Commissioner," Baley said. "You got the alpha-sprayer and gave it to R. Sammy. You deliberateplant in order to incriminate me. You even seized on Dr. Gerrigel's reappearance to invite him down to the Department and give him a deliberately maladjusted guiderod to lead him to the photographic supply room and, allow him to find R. Sammy's remains. You counted on him to make a correct diagnosis." Baley put away his blaster. "If you want to have me arrested now, go ahead, but Spacetown won't take that for an answer." "Motive," spluttered Enderby breathlessly. His glasses were fogged and he removed them, looking once again curiously vague and helpless in their absence. "What motive could I have for this?" "You got me into trouble, didn't you? It will put a spoke in the Sarton investigation, won't it? And all that aside, R. Sammy knew too much." "About what, in Heaven's name?" "About the way in which a Spacer was murdered five and a half days ago. You see. Commissioner, you murdered Dr. Sarton of Spacetown."  shook his head violently. R. Daneel said, "Partner Elijah, you know it is impossible for Commissioner Enderby to have murdered Dr. Sarton." "Listen. Enderby begged me to take the case. Why? In the first place, we were college friends and he thought he could count on my loyalty-index. Secondly, he knew Jessie was a member of an underground organization and he counted on blackmailing me into silence if I g( too close to the truth. But he wasn't really worried about that. At the very beginning, he did his best to arouse my distrust of you, Daneel, to make certain the two of us worked at cross-purposes. He knew about my father's declassification. He could guess how I would react." The Commissioner said weakly, "How could I know about Jessie?" He turned to the robot. "Kou -- if you're transmitting this to Spacetown -- tell them it's a lie!" Baley broke in, "Certainly you would know about Jessie. You're a Medievalist and part of the organization. Your old-fashioned spectacles! Your windows! It's obvious. "And there's better evidence. How did Jessie find out Daneel was a robot? Through her Medievalist organization, of course. But that just shoves the problem one step backward. How did they know? "You, Commissioner, dismissed it with a theory that Daneel was recognized as a robot during the incident at the shoe counter. I couldn't believe that. I took him for human when I first saw him, and there's nothing wrcmg with my eyes. "Yesterday, I asked Dr. Gerrigel to come in from Washington. At the time, my only purpose was to see if he would recognize Daneel for what he was, with no prompting on my part. Commissioner, he didn't! I introduced him to Daneel, he shook hands with him, we all talked together and it was only after the subject got around to humanoid robots that he suddenly caught on. Now that was Dr. Gerrigel, Earth's greatest expert on robots. Do you mean to say a few Medievalist rioters could do better? "It's obvious now that the Medievalists must have known Daneel was a robot to begin with. The incident at the shoe counter was deliberately arranged to show Daneel and, through him. Spacetown, the extent of anti-robot feeling in the City. It was meant to confuse the issue. "Now if they knew the truth about Daneel to begin with, who told them? I didn't. I once thought it was Daneel himself, but that's out. The only other Earthman who knew about it was you, Commissioner." be spies in the Department, too. The Medievalists could have us riddled with them. Your wife was one, and if you don't find it impossible that I should be one, why not others in the Department?" Baley shook his head. "Let's not bring up mysterious spies until we see where the straightforward solution leads us. "It's interesting, now that I look back on it, Commissioner, to see how your spirits rose and fell in direct ratio with my nearness to the solution. When I wanted to visit Spacetown yesterday morning and wouldn't tell you the reason, you were in a state of agitation. Did you think I had you pinned, Commissioner? "Then when I came out with my completely wrong solution and you saw how immensely far from the truth I was, you were confident again. You even argued with me -- defended the Spacers. After that, you were master of yourself for a while -- quite confident. "Then I put in my call for Dr. Gerrigel, and you wanted to know why, and I wouldn't tell you. That plunged you into the abyss again, because you feared -- " R. Daneel suddenly raised his hand. "Partner Elijah!"  Baley looked at his watch -- #:#! He said, "What is it?" R. Daneel said, "He might have been disturbed at thinking you would find out his Medievalist connections, if we grant their existence. There is nothing, though, to connect him with the murder." Baley said, "You're wrong, Daneel. He didn't know what I wanted Dr. Gerrigel for, but it was safe to assuipe that it was for information about robots. This frightened the Commissioner, because a robot had an intimate connection with his greater crime. Isn't that so. Commissioner?" Enderby raised his head and glowered. "When this is over -- " he began. "How was the murder committed?" interrupted Baley with a suppressed fury. "CFe! I use your own term, Daneel. You're so full of the benefits of a CFe culture, yet you don'tsee where an Earthman might have used it for at least a temporary advantage. Let me sketch it in for you. "There is no inconsistency in the notion of a robot crossing open country. Even at night. Even alone. The Commissioner put a blaster into R. Sammy's hand, told him where to go and when. He himself entered Spacetown through the Personal and was relieved of his own blaster. He  received the other from R. Sammy's hands, killed Dr. Sarton, returned the blaster to R. Sammy, who took it back across the fields to New York City. And today he destroyed R. Sammy, who had become dangerous. "That explains the whole thing. The presence of the Commissioner, the absence of a weapon. And it makes it unnecessary to suppose any human New Yorker had walked a mile under the open sky alone at night." A T the end of Baley's accuse tion, R. Daneel said, "I am sorry, partner Elijah, though happy for the Commissioner, that your story explains nothing. I have told you that the cerebroanalysis of the Commissioner proves that it is impossible for him to have committed deliberate murder." "Thank you," muttered Enderby. His voice gained strength and confidence. "I don't know what your motives are, Baley, or why you should try to ruin me this way, but -- " "Wait," said Baley. "I'm not through. I've got this." He slammed the aluminum cube on Enderby's desk, tried to feel the confidence he hoped he was radiating. For half an hour, he had been hiding from himself one disturbing fact -- that he did not know what the picture showed. He was gambling, but it was all he could do now. Enderby shrank away from the small object. "What is it?" "It isn't a bomb," said Baley sardonically. "Just an ordinary micro-projector." "Well? What will it prove?" the Commissioner askpd. "Suppose We see." His fingernail probed at one of the slits in the cube, and a corner of the Commissioner's office blanked out. then lit up in an alien scene in three dimensions. It reached from floor to ceiling and extended out past the walls of the room. It was awash with a gray light of a sort the City's utilities never provided. Baley thought, with a pang of mingled distaste and perverse attraction: Itmust be this "dawn" they talk about. The pictured scene was of Dr. Sarton's dome. Dr. Sarton's dead body, a horrible, broken remnant, filled its center. Enderby's eyes bulged as he stared. Baley said, "I know the Commissioner isn't a killer. I don't need you to tell me that, Daneel. If I could have gotten around that one fact earlier, I would have had the solution earlier. Actually, I didn't see a way out of it until an hour ago, when I angrily reminded you that you had once been curious about Bentley's contact lenses. "That was it, Commissioner. It occurred to me then that your near-sightedness and your glasses were the key. They don't have near-sightedness on the Outer Worlds, I suppose, or they might have reached the true solution of the murder almost at once. Commissioner, when did you break your glasses?" "What do you mean?" "When I first saw you about this case," Baley said, "you told me you had broken your glasses in Spacetown. I assumed that you broke them in your agitation on hearing the news of the murder, but you never said so. Actually, if you were entering Spacetown with crime on your mind, you were already agitated enough to drop and break your glasses before the murder. Isn't that so?" R. Daneel said, "I do not see the point, partner Elijah." ton's dome-image as he was speaking. Clumsily, he expanded it, his fingernails unsure in the tension that was overwhelming him. Slowly, the corpse widened, broadened, heightened, came closer. Baley could almost smell the stench of scorched flesh. Baley cast a side-glance at the Commissioner. Enderby had closed his eyes. He looked sick. Baley felt sick, too, but he had to look. Slowly he circled the trimensional image by means of the transmitter controls -- rotating it, bringing the ground about the corpse into view in successive quadrants. He was still talking. He had to. He couldn't stop till he found what he was looking for. He said, "The Commissioner can't commit deliberate murder. Truel But any man can kill by accident. The Commissioner didn't enter Spacetown to kill Dr. Sarton. He came in to kill you, Daneel. You! "He is a Medievalist, an earnest one. He cooperated with Dr. Sarton and knew the purpose for which you were designed, Daneel. He feared that purpose might be achieved, that Earthmen would eventually be weaned away from Earth. So he decided to destroy you, Daneel. You were the only one of your type manufactured as yet, and he had good reason to think that, by demonstrating the extent and determination of Medievalism on Earth, he would discourage the Spacers. "I don't say even the thought pleasant one. He would have had R. Sammy do it, I imagine, if you didn't look so human that a primitive rpbot like Sammy could not have told the difference, or understood it. First Law would stop him. Or the Commissioner would have had another human do it if he himself were not the only one who had ready access to Spacetovwi at all times. "Let me reconstruct what the Commissioner's plan might have been. He made the appointment with Dr. Sarton, but deliberately came early -- at dawn, in fact. Dr. Sarton would be sleeping, but you, Daneel, would be awake. I assume, by the way, you were living with Dr. Sarton, Daneel?" rrHE robot nodded. "You are quite right, partner Elijah." Baley said, "You would come to the Dome door, Daneel, receive a blaster charge in the chest or head and be done with. The Commissioner would leave quickly, through the deserted streets of Spacetown's dawn, and back to where R. Sammy waited. He would give the robot back the blaster, then slowly walk again to Dr. Sarton's Dome. If necessary, he would 'discover' the body himself. How close am I,Commissioner?" Enderby writhed. "I didn't -- " "No," said Baley, "you didn't kill Daneel. He's here, and in all the time he's been in the City, you haven't been able to look him in the face or address him by name. Look at him qow. Commissioner:" Enderby couldn't. He covered his face with shaking hands. "I'll tell you what did happen," went on Baley inexorably. "You were at the Dome when yoti dropped your glasses. You must have been nervous. I've seen you when you're upset. You take the glasses off, wipe them -- you did that then. But your hands were shaking and you dropped them. Perhaps you stepped on them. Anyway, they were broken and, just then, the door opened and a figure that looked like Daneel faced you. "You blasted him, scrabbled up the remains of your glasses and ran. They found the body, not you, and when they came to find you, you discovered that it was not Daneel but the earlyrising Dr. Sarton you had killed. Dr. Sarton had designed Daneel in his own image, to his great misfortune. If you want the tangible proof, it's there!" The image of Sarton's Dome quivered and Baley put the transmitter carefully upon the desk, his hand tightly upon it. Commissioner Enderby's face was distorted with terror and Baley's with tension. R. Daneel, as always, was emotionless. Baley's finger was pointing. "That glitter in the grooves of the door. What was it, Daneel?" "Two small slivers of glass," said the robot coolly. "It meant nothing to us." "It will now. They're bits of concave lenses. Measure them and compare the results with those of the glasses Enderby is wearing now. Don't smash them, C ommi ssioner ! ' ' He lunged and wrenched them from the Commissioner's hand. He held them out to R. Daneel. "That's proof enough, I think, amfili, Phiofophar and Scianfiif This It Gaorg Adomski's sworn tesHmony on tha only foea-to-fafia encounter with a human being from another planet. This is his complete account with actual photographs of the Kout ship, the mother ship. Venusian writings and sketches of the Venusian man together with the notorized ofRdavits of all the members of Adomski's party. Desmond lasiia, Historian ' by Desmond Leslie and Qaorge Adomskl, it two books in one; the most complato and authorilotiva history of flying saucers -- an invaludescription by the American whom fote chose to be the first to encounter the man from another from your bookstore or order direct. Just send #. SO. your name, address, to: Dept. G., i# West #th Street, New York #. N. Y. Money bock guarantee. that he was at the Dome earlier than he was thought to be." R. Daneel said, "I am quite convinced. I can see now that I was thrown completely off the scent by the Commissioner's cerebroanalysis. I congratulate you, partner Elijah." Baley's watch said #:#. A new day was beginning. head sank down on his arms. His words were muffled wails. "It was a mistake. I never meant to kill him." Without warning, he slipped from the chair and lay crumpled on the floor. R. Daneel sprang to him, saying, "You have hurt him, Elijah!" "He isn't dead, is he?" "No. Unconscious." "He'll come to. It was too much for him, I suppose. I had to do it, Daneel. I had no evidence that would stand up in court -- only inferences. I had to badger him and let it out little by little, hoping he would break down. He did, Daneel. You heard him confess, didn't you?" "Yes." "Now, then, I promised this would be to the benefit of Spacetown's project, so... Wait, he's coming to." The Commissioner groaned. He stared speechlessly at them. Baley said, "Commissioner, do you hear me?" The Commissioner nodded listlessly. "All right, then. The Spacers have more on their minds than your prosecution. If you cooperate with them -- " "What? What?" There was a dawning flicker of hope in the Commissioner's eyes. "You must be a big wheel in New York's Medievalist organization, maybe even in the planetary setup. Maneuver them toward the colonization of space. You can see the propaganda line, can't you? We can go back to the soil, all right -- but on other planets." "I don't understand," mumbled the Commissioner. R. Daneel said, "Elijah is quite correct. Help us, Commissioner, and we will forget the past. I am speaking for Dr. Fastolfe and our people generally in this. Of course, if you should agree to help and later betray us. we would always have the fact of your guilt to hold over your head. I hope you understand that, too. It pains me to have to mention it." "I won't be prosecuted?" asked the Commissioner. "Not if you help us." Tears filled his eyes. "I'll do it. It was an accident. Explain that -- an accident. I did what I thought right." Baley said, "If you help us, you will be doing right. The colonization of space is the only possible salvation of Earth. You'll realize that if you think about it without prejudice. If you find you cannot, have a short talk with Dr. Fastolfe. And now you can begin to help by quashing the R. Sammy business. Call this one an accident also. End it!" added, "And remember, I'm not the only one who knows the truth. Commissioner. Getting rid of me will ruin you. All Spacetown knows. You see that, don't you?" R. Daneel said, "It is unnecessary to say more, Elijah. He is sincere. He will help. So much is obvious from his cerebroanalysis." "Then I can go home. I want to see Jessie and Bentley and take up a natural life again. And I want to sleep. Daneel, will you stay on Earth after the Spacers go?" R. Daneel said, "I may, along with others. It has not been decided. Why do you ask?" Baley bit his lip. "I didn't think I would ever say anything like this to anyone like you, Daneel, but I trust you. I even -- admire you. I'm too old ever to leave Earth myself, but when schools for emigrants are finally established, there's Bentley. If someday Bentley and you, toisa gethcr might be able to... "Perhaps." R. Daneel's face was emotionless. He turned to Julius Enderby, who was watching them with a flaccid face into which a certain vitality was only now beginning to" return. The robot said, "I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be -- that is, the destruction of what you people call evil -- is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good." He hesitated. Then, almost as though he were surprised at his own words, he said, "Go, and sin no more!" Baley, smiling, took R. Daneel's elbow and they walked out the door, fleshly arm in robotic arm. by Cveyn i. Smith by Jerome Bxby by WiWam Morrison by John Wyndham by Frederik Pohl Best Reading Time for a Dime when you visf your cfrug store pof down a dime ond pick up a copy.  Fiction by America's top writers factfiction Sold only at your druggist -- and costs only #  #I   Health articles by leading authorities Feature stories on beauty, movies, household hints, hobbies, radio and DvpI.OXta,Garden City, New Yofk Zone State StUuiun prite in Canada j.O. plus skipping. Addrass # Bond St., Toronto Z. Offer good only in U , S, and Canada) tlnyS'SiJopScieme-FictmThr (J  With membership r -- eenriftved From back ci hinosrun everythina. And wlicn oni rebel, even hie trial U conducted b The Book Club of Tomorrow U Kora Today crammed with science thrill of Ihe future... written by the most sought after ScienceI'iction writers of tixlay. A # to # value, complete and in handsome permanent biniiingat that Science Fiction has won a jilace as an important netv kind of literature. But how U wading through good and bad alike? out worrying about the cost, the Club haa lough they c... publishers' editiansl Each monio  selection free bulletin. "Things to Come." You take as four a year, if you wish. ihu new Hub, we are making this amazing ' Science-Fiction mafterpleces and one is your first Club, selection. This GX-T# Garden City, New York. T his remid haripeti toi Fifty thousand s' -jinOuier Space liumans anti it... One of tlicm. Raigii.oiv, begins  climb rapidly. 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What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and successful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured: not more than twenty generations ago, less than #lOOth of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Ma.stery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions arc governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law San Jose California A S individuals, dinosaurs seldom died of old age. As a race, however, they lasted some # years. As individuals, most of us manage to die of natural causes. As a race, however, we feel extinction approaching after less than # years. Purely on the basis of racial survival, it looks as if being a dinosaur was a better risk than .being a man. I doubt if any dinosaurs thought for a second about carrying on the family name. There are other differences between them and mankind, but that's probably the most important one. Most people sound like dinosaurs on the question of survival; they claim they're more interested in their own than hmnanity's. But the intense concern with racial doom indicates the opposite -- few of us would find very much point in life if the race died. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them. One millenium, they were contentedly chewing up the countryside and each other; the next, they were gone. Even if they had known what was happening to them, they could not have stopped it. We do know, all too acutely, the threats facing us. Solving them is another matter, but we are aware of them, which is the first step in working out a problem. All right, now let's pick the most imminent threat. We each have our favorite, ranging from the effect of noise on the human organism to that of fusion on the atmosphere. Mine -- for the purpose of this editorial, at least -- is overpopulation. A century and a half ago, Malthus noted that population tends to increase more rapidly than food supply. That part of his argument makes sense, especially if tends is emphasized. The other part is more questionable: Unless birth is controlled, he said, increase must be checked by poverty and war. Well, the current annual increase is #, which very naturally draws compound interest. I That's on the one hand. There are enough other hands to resemble Siva: Malthus would have called the size of the present population impossible. It is -- for the technology of his day. Where agricultural techniques have kept pace with increase, food supplies vary from adequate to glut. The pressure spots of the world, such as India and China, actually have lower rates of increase than elsewhere: their trouble is static agricultural methods. While most of the world has been growing in population, some countries, notably Ireland and France, have been confronted by falling birth rates. Why? Can it happen in other places? Incident ally, when it happens in a functioning economy, the result is as disastrous as growth is to a faltering one. The solutions Malthus gave -- birth control, poverty (famine and disease) and war -- haven't yet proved effective. The weapons we're building might be able to solve the problem, but only by creating a worse one. Mining the sea and synthesizing food could merely delay the final explosion. They're not answers in themselves. riHE one suggested most often in science fiction is migration -- moving whole populations to wherever there is room : other planets, reclaimed deserts, Amazonia, Africa, bubble cities under the ocean. Are the authors being realistic? Let's see if they are. The Nazis and Russians did profit. But they were simply herded off, in freight cars or on foot, and worked as slaves. No attempt was made to resettle them as humans. All this, remember, was by land. If it had to be done by sea or air, I doubt if even the most callous packing would have been economical enough. To complicate matters, we humanely would provide decent transportation, at least minimally adequate housing, proper food, training in needed skills, and farms, factories, shops and labs. This is the resettlement program Israel is following -- and the cost is crushing. The most modest goal we could settle for would be to siphon off the # extras per year. Whether by sea, air or spaceship, it would be a vast transportation job. But besides the gigantic fleets and rivers of fuel, we'd need enormous reception and training camps, moimtainous food supplies, cadre armies, a relocation plan capable of almost infinite expansion to absorb so many people annually. No, the solution is not at all realistic -- at present. Yet that is where we have the edge on the dinosaurs and those who think in saurian fashion; We know that one generation's impossibility is the next generation's commonplace. Natural State If was a world of wildest paradoxes -- patriotism, for example, meant all loyalty to the city and all hatred for the country! T he most promising young realie actor in Greater New York, everyone agreed, was a beetle-browed Apollo named Alvah Gustad. His diction, which still held overtones of the Under Flushing labor pool, the unstudied animal crrare nf his mnw. ments and his habitually sullen expression enabled him to dominate any stage not occupied by an unclothed woman at least as large as himself. At twenty-six, he had a very respectable following among the housewives of Manhattan, Queens, Jersey and the rest of the seven boroughs. The percentage of blown fuses resulting from subscribers' attempts to clutch his realized image was extraordinarily low -- Alvah, his press agents explained with perfect accuracy, left them too numb. Young Gustad, who frequently made his first entrance waterbeaded as from the shower, with a towel girded chastely around his loins, was nevertheless in his private life a modest and slightly bewildered citizen, much given to solitary reading, and equipped with a perfect set of the conventional virtues. These included cheerful performance of all municipal duties and obligations -- like every rightthinking citizen, Gustad held down two jobs in summer and three in winter. At the moment, for example, he was an actor by day and a metals-reclamation supervisor by night. Chief among his less tangible attributes, was that emotion which in some ages has been variously described as civic pride or patriotism. In A.D. #, as in B.C. #, they amounted to the same thing.  the wall was a single huge slab of black duroplast, with a map of the city picked out in entered with his manager and his porter, an unseen chorus of basso profundos broke into the strains of The Slidewalks of New York. After four bars, it segued to New York, New York, It's a Pip of a Town and slowly faded out. The Manager himself, the Hon. Boleslaw Wytak, broke the reverent hush by coming forward to take Alvah's hand and lead him toward the desk. "Mr. Gustad -- and Mr. Diamond, isn't it? Great pleasure to have you here. I don't know if you've met all these gentlemen. Commissioner Laurence, of the Department of Extramural Relations -- Director Ostertag, of the Bureau of Vital Statistics -- Chairman Neddo, of the Research and Development Board." Wytak waited until everyone was comfortably settled in one of the reclining chairs which fitted into slots in the desk, with cigars, cigarettes, liquor capsules and cold snacks at each man's elbow. "Now, Mr. Gustad -- and Mr. Diamond -- I'm a plain blunt man and I know you're wondering why I asked you to come here today. I'ni going to tell you. The City needs a man with great talent and great courage to do a job that, I tell you frankly, I wouldn't undertake myself without great misgivings." He gazed at Gustad warmly, affectionately but sternly. "You're the man, Alvah." Little Jack Diamond cleared his throat nervously. "What kind of a job did you have in mind, Mr. Manager? Of course, anything we can do for our city..." Wytak's big face, without perceptibly moving a muscle, somehow achieved a total change of expression. "Alvah, I want you to go to the Sticks." Gustad blinked and tilted upright in his chair. He looked at Diamond. The little man suddenly seemed two sizes smaller inside his box-cut cloth-of-silver tunic. He gestured feebly and wheezed, "Wake-me-up!" The porter behind his chair stepped forward alertly, clanking, and flipped open one of the dozens of metal and plastic boxes that clung to him all over like barnacles. He popped a tiny capsule into his palm, rolled it expertly to thumb-andfinger position, broke it under Diamond's nose. A reeking-sweet green fluid dripped from it and ran stickily down the front of Diamond's tunic. "Dumbhead!" said Diamond. "Not cream de menthy, a wakeme-up!" He sat up as the abashed servant produced another capsule. "Never mind." Some color was beginning to come back into his face. "Blotter!" A wad of absorbent fibers. "Vacuum!" A lemon-sized globe with a flaring snout. "Gon-Stink! Presser!" Gustad looked back at the Manager. "Your Honor, you mean you want me to go into the Sticks? I mean," he said, groping for words, "you want me to play for the Muckfeet?" "That is just exactly what I want you to do." Wytak nodded toward the Commissioner, the Director, and the Chairman. "These gentlemen are here to tell you why. Suppose you start, Ozzie." fringe of yellowish white hair around his potato-colored pate, shifted heavily and stared at Gustad. "In my bureau, we have records of population and population density, imports and exports, ratio of births to deaths and so on that go back all the way to the time of the United States. Now this isn't known generally, Mr. Gustad, but although New York has been steadily growing ever since its founding in #, our growth in the last thirty years has been entirely due to immigration from other less fortunate citjes. "In a way, it's fortunate -- I mean to say that we can't expand horizontally, because it has been found impossible to eradicate the soil organisms -- " a delicate shudder ran around the group -- "left by our late enemies. And as for continuing to build vertically -- well, since Pittsburgh fell, we have been dependent almost entirely on salvaged scrap for our steel. To put it bluntly, unless something is done about thfs situation, the end is in sight. Not alone of this administration, but of the city as well. Now the reasons for this -- ah -- what shall I say..." With his head back, staring at the ceiling, Wytak began to speak so quietly that Ostertag blundered through another phrase and a half before he realized he had been superseded as interlocutor. "Thirty years ago, when I first came to this town, an immigrant kid with nothing in the whole world but the tunic on my back and the gleam in my eye, we had just got through with the last of the Muckfeet Wars. According to your history books, we won that war. I'll tell you something -- we were licked!" Alvah squirmed uncomfortably as Wytak raised his head and glanced defiantly around the desk, looking for contradiction; The Manager said, "We drove them back to the Ohio, thirty years ago. And where are they now?" He turned to Laurence. "Phil?" Laurence rubbed his long nose with a bloodless forefinger. "Their closest settlement is twelve miles away. That's to the southwest, of course. In the west and north -- " "Twelve miles," said Wytak reflectively. "But that isn't the reason I say they licked us. They licked us because there are twenty Right, Phil?" Laurence said, "Well, there aren't any accurate figures, you know, Boley. There hasn't been any census of the Muckfeet for almost a century, but -- " "About one hundred fifty million," interrupted W#d:ak. "Even if we formed a league with every other city on this continent, the odds would be heavily against us -- and they breed like flies." He slapped the desk with his open palm. "So do their filthy animals!" the group. Diamond shut his eyes tight. "There it is," said Wytak. "Rome fell. Babylon fell. The same thing can happen to New will go on increasing year by year, getting more ignorant and more degraded with every generation... and a century from now -- or two, or five -- they'll be the human race. And New York... Wytak turned to 'look at the map behind him. His hand touched a button and the myriad tiny lights went out. Gustad was not an actor who wept readdy, but he felt tears welling over his eyelids. At the same time, the thought crossed his mind that, competition being what it was in the realies, it was a good thing that Wytak had gone into politics instead of acting. "Sir," he said, "what can we do?" W # dak's eyes were focused far away. After a moment, his head turned heavily on his massive shoulders, like a gun turret. "Chairman Neddo has the answer to that. I want you to listen carefully to what he's going to tell you, Alvah." Neddo's crowded small face flickered through a complicated series of twitches, all centripetal and rapidly executed. "Over the past several years," he said jerkily, "under Manager Wytak's direction, we have been developing certain devices, certain articles of commerce, which are designed, especially designed, to have an attraction for the Muckfeet. Trade articles. Most of these, I should say all of -- " "Trade articles," Wytak cut in softly. "Thank you, Ned. That's thephrase that tells the story. Alvah, we're going to go back to the principles that made our ancestors great. Trade -- expanding markets -- expanding industries. Think about it. From the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, there are some # million people who haven't got a cigarette lighter or a wristphone or a realie set among them. Alvah, we're going to civilize the Muckfeet. We've put together a grabbag of modern science, expressed in ways their primitive minds can understand -- and you're the man who's going to sell it to them! What do you say to that?" This was a familiar cue to Gustad -- it had turned up for the fiftieth or sixtieth time in his last week's script, when he had played the role of a kill-crazy sewer inspector, trapped by flood waters in the cloacae of Under Brooklyn. "I say -- " he began, then realized that his usual response was totally inappropriate. "It sounds wonderful," he finished weakly. " nesslike way. "Now here's the program." He pressed a button, and a relief map of the North American continent appeared on the wall behind him. "Indicator." Wytak's porter put a metal tube with a shaped grip into his hand -- a tiny spot on the map fluoresced where he pointed it. "You'll swing down to the southwest until you cross the Tennessee, then head westward about to here, then up through the Plains, then back north of the Great Lakes and home again. You'll notice that this route keeps you well clear of both Chicago and Toronto. Remember that -- it's important. We know that Frisco is working on a project similar to ours, although they're at least a year behind us. If we know that, the chances are that 'the other Cities know it too, but we're pretty sure there's been no leak in our own security. There isn't going to be any." He handed the indicator back. "You'll be gone about three months... Diamond was having trouble with his breathing again. "... You'll have to' rough it pretty much -- there'll be room in your floater for you and your equipment, and that's all." Diamond gurgled despairingly and rolled up his eyes. Gustad himself felt an unpleasant sinking sensation. "You mean," he asked incredulously, "I'm supposed to go all by myself -- without even a porter?" "That's right," said Wd:ak. "You see, Alvah, you and I are civilized human beings -- we know there are so many indispensable time and labor saving devices that nobody could possibly carry them all himself. But could you explain that to a Muckfoot?" "I guess not." "That's why only a man with your superb talents can do this job for the City. Those people actually live the kind of sordid brutal existence you portray so well in the realies. Well, you can be as rough and tough as they are -- you can talk their own language, and they'll respect you." Gustad flexed his muscles slightly, feeling pleased but not altogether certain. Then a new and even more revolting aspect of this problem occurred to him. "Your Honor, suppose I got along too well with the Muckfeet? I mean suppose they invited me into one of their houses to -- " he gagged slightly -- "eat?" Wytak's face went stony. "I am surprised that you feel it necessary to bring that subject up. All that will be covered very thoroughly in the briefing you will get from Commissioner Laurence and Chairman Neddo and their staffs. And I want you to understand, Gustad, that no pressure of any kind is being exerted on you to take this assignment. operative volunteer, not a draftee. T# If you feel you're not the man for it, just say so now." Gustad apologized profusely. Wytak interrupted him, with the warmest and friendliest smile imaginable. "That's all right, son, I understand. I understand perfectly. Well, gentlemen, I think that's all." A S soon as they were alone. Diamond clutched Gustad's sleeve and pulled him over to the side of the corridor. "Listen to me, AI boy. We can still pull you out of this. I know a doctor that will make you so sick you couldn't walk across the street. He wouldn't do it for everybody, but he owes me a couple of -- " "No, wait a minute. I don't -- " "I know, I know" said Diamond impatiently. "You'll get your contract busted with Seven Boroughs and you'll lose a couple months, maybe more, and you'll have to start all over again with one of the little studios, but what of it? In a year or two, you'll be as good as -- " "Now wait. Jack. In the first -- " "Al, I'm not just thinking about my twenty per cent of you. I don't even care about that -- it's just money. What I want, I want you should still be alive next year, you understand what I mean?" "Look," said Gustad, "you don't understand. Jack. I want to go. I mean I don't exactly want to, but -- " He pointed down the corridor to the window that framed a vista of gigantic colfading to massive darkness above, drifting like a river of stardust down the avenue. "Just look at that. It took thousands of years to build! I mean if I can keep it going just by spending three months... "And besides," he added practically, "think of the publicity." II T'HE foothill country turned out to be picturesque but not very rewarding. Alvah had bypassed the ancient states of Pennsylvania and Maryland as directed, since the tribes nearest the city were understood to be still somewhat rancorous. By the end of his first day, he was beginning to regard this as a serious understatement. He had brought his floater down, with flags flying, loudspeakers blaring, colored lights flashing and streamers flapping gaily behind him, just outside an untidy collection of two-story beehive huts well south of the former Pennsylvania border. He had seen numerous vaguely human shapes from the air, but when he extruded his platform and stepped out, every visible door was shut, the streets were empty, and there was no moving thing in sight, except for a group of singularly unpleasant-looking animals in a field to his right. After a few moments, Gustad shut off the loudspeakers and listened. He thought he heard a hum of voices from the nearest building. Suppressing a momentary qualm, he lowered himself on the platform stair and walked over to the building. It had a single high window, a crude oval in shape, closed by a discolored pane. Standing under this window, Alvah called, "Hello in there!" The muffled voices died away for a moment, then buzzed as busily as ever. "Come on out -- I want to talk to you!" Same result. "You don't have to be afraid! I come in peace!" The voices died away again, and Alvah thought he saw a dim face momentarily through the pane. A single voice rose on an interrogative note. "Peace!" Alvah shouted. The window slid abruptly back into the wall and, as Alvah gaped 'upward, a deluge of slops descended on him, followed by a gale of coarse laughter. Alvah's immediate reaction, after the first dazed and gasping instant, was a hot-water-andsoap tropism, carrying with it an ardent desire to get out of his drenched clothes and throw them away. His second, as imperious as the first, had the pure flame of artistic inspiration -- he wanted to see how many esthetically satisfying small pieces one explosive charge would make out of that excrescence-shaped building. Under no conditions, said the handbook he had been required to memorize, will you commit any act which might be interp feted by the Muckfeet as aggressive, nor will you make use of your weapons at any time, unless such use becomes necessary for the preservation of your own life. Alvah wavered, grew chilly and retired. Restored in body, but shaken in spirit, he headed south. Then there had been his encounter with the old man and the animal. Somewhere in the triangle of land between the Mississippi and the Big Black, at a point which was not on his itinerary at all, but had the overwhelming attraction of being more than a thousand air-miles from New York, he had set the floater down near another sprawling settlement. A S usual, all signs of activity in and around the village promptly disappeared. With newly acquired caution, Alvah sat tight. Normal human curiosity, he reasoned, would drive the Muckfeet to him sooner or later -- and even if that failed, there was his nuisance value. How long could you ignore a strange object, a few hundred yards from your home, that was shouting, waving flags, flashing colored lights and sending up puffs of pink-and-green smoke? Nothing happened for a little over an hour. Then, half dozing in his control chair, Alvah saw two figures coming toward him across the field. Alvah's ego, which had been taking a beating all day, began to expand. He stepped out onto the platform and waited. The two figures kept coming, taking their time. The tall one was a skinny loose-jointed oldster with a conical hat on the back of his head. The little one ambling along in front of him was some sort of four-footed animal. In effect, an audience of one -- at any rate, it was Alvah's best showing so far. He mentally rehearsed his opening lines. There was no point, he thought, in bothering with the magic tricks or the comic monologue. He might as well go straight into the sales'  talk. The odd pair was now much closer, and Gustad recognized the animal half of it. It was a socalled watchdog, one of the incredibly destructive beasts the Muckfeet trained to do their fighting for them. It had a slender, supple body, a long feline tail and a head that looked something like a terrier's and something like a housecat's. However, it was not half as large or as frightening in appearance as the pictures Alvah had seen. It must, he decided, be a pup. riWO yards from the platform, the oldster came to a halt. The watchdog sat down beside him, tongue lolling wetly. Alvah turned off the loudspeakers and the color displays. "Friend," he began, "I'm here to show you things that will astound you, marvels that you wouldn't believe unless you saw them with your own -- " "You a Yazoo?" Thrown off stride, Alvah gaped. "What was that, friend?" "Ah said -- you a Yazoo?" "No," said Alvah, feeling reasonably positive. "Any kin to a Yazoo?" "I don't think so." "Git," said the old man. Unlikely as it seemed, a Yazoo was apparently a good thing to be. "Wait a second," said Alvah. "Did you say Yazoo? I didn't understand you there at first. Am I a Yazoo! Why, man, my whole family on both sides has been -- " what was the plural of Yazoo? "Ah'll count to two," said the old man. "One." "Now wait a minute," said Alvah, feeling his ears getting hot. The watchdog, he noticed, had hoisted its rump a fraction of an inch and was staring at him in a tnarked manner. He flexed his right forearm slightly and felt the reassuring pressure of the pistol in its pop-out holster. "What makes you Muckfeet think you can -- " "Two," said the oldster, and the watchdog was a spreadeagled blur in midair, seven feet straight up from the ground. Instinct took over. Instinct had nothing to do with pistols or holsters, or with the probable size of a full-grown Muckfoot watchdog. It launched Alvah's body into a backward standing broad jump through the open floater door, and followed that with an economical underhand punch at the control button inside. The door slammed shut. It then bulged visibly inward and rang like a gong. Sprawled on the floor, Gustad stared at it incredulously. There were further sounds -- a thunderous growling and a series of hackle-raising skrieks, as of hard metal being gouged by something even harder. The whole floater shook. Alvah made the control chair in one leap, slammed on the power switch and yanked at the steering bar... At an altitude of about a hundred feet, he saw the dark shape of the watchdog leap clear and fall, twisting. A few seconds later, he put the bar into neutral and looked down. Man and watchdog were moving slowly back across the field toward the settlement. As far as Alvah could tell, the beast was not even limping. ably elastic, but he had already stretched' them badly in covering the southward leg of his route in one day. Still, there seemed to be nothing else to do. Either there was an area somewhere on the circuit where he could get the Muckfeet to listen to him, or there wasn't. If there was, it would make more sense to hop around until he found it, and then work outward to its limits, than to blunder straight along, collecting bruises and insults. And if there wasn't -- and this did not bear thinking about -- then the whole trip was a bust. Alvah switched on his communicator and tapped out the coded clicks that meant, "Proceeding on schedule" -- which was a lie -- "no results yet" -- which was true. Then he headed north. Nightfall overtook him as he was crossing the Ozark Plateau. He set the floater's controls to hover at a thousand feet, went to bed and slept badly until just before dawn. With a cup of kaffin in his hand, he watched this phenomenon in surprised disapproval: The scattered lights winking out below, the first colorless hint of radiance, which illuminated nothing, but simply made the Universe seem more senselessly vast and formless than before; finally, after an interminable progression of insignificant changes, the rinds of orange and scarlet, and the dim Sun bulging up at the rim of the turning Earth. It was lousy theater. How, Alvah asked himself, could any human being keep himself from dying of sheer irrelevance and boredom against a background like that? He was but his general impression of history was that people who didn't have a city always got busy improving themselves until they could build one or take one away from somebody else. All but the Muckfeet... Once their interest has been engaged, said the handbook at one point, you will lay principal stress upon the competitive advantages of each product. It will be your aim to create a situation in which ownership of one or more of our products will be not only an economic advantage, but a mark of social distinction. In this way, communities which have accepted the innovations will, in order to preserve and extend the recognition of their own status, be forced to convert members of neighboring communities. Well, maybe so. Alvah ate a Spartan breakfast of protein jelly and citron cakes, called in the coordinates and the time to the frog-voiced operator in New York, and headed the floater northward again. The landscape unrolled itself. If there were any major differences between this country and the districts he had seen yesterday, Alvah was unable to discern them. In the air, he saw an occasional huge flapping shape, ridden by human figures. He avoided them, and they ignored him. Below, tracts of dark-green forest alternated predictably with the pale green, red or violet of cultivated fields. Here and there across the whole visible expanse, isolated buildings stood. At intervals, these huddled closer and closer together and became a settlement. There were perhaps more roads as he moved northward, dustier ones. That was all. rilHE dustiness of these roads, it occurred to Alvah, was a matter that required investigation. The day was cloudless and clear; there was no wind at Alvah's level, and nothing in the behavior of the trees or cultivated plants to suggest that there was any farther down. He slowed the floater and lowered it toward the nearest road. As he approached, the thread of ocher resolved itself into an irregular series of expanding puffs, each preceded by a black dot, the overall effect being that of a line of black-and-tan exclamation points. They seemed to be moving barely perceptibly, but were actually, Alvah guessed, traveling at a fairly respectable clip. He transferred his attention to another road. It, too, was filled with hurrying dots, as was the next -- and all the traffic was heading in approximately the same direction, westward of Alvah's course. He swung the control bar over. The movement below, he was able to determine after twenty minutes' flying, converged upon a settlement larger than any he had yet seen. It sprawled for ten miles or more along the southern shore of a long and exceedingly narrow lake. Most of it looked normal enough -- a haphazard arrangement of cone-roofed buildings -- but On the side away from the lake, there was a fairly extensive area filled with what seemed to be long, narrow sheds. This, in turn, was bounded on two sides by a strip of fenced-in plots in which, as nearly as Alvah could make out through the dust, animals of all sizes and shapes were penned. It was this area which appeared to be the goal of every Muckfoot in the central Plains. The din was tremendous as Alvah floated down. There were shouts, cries, animal bellowings, sounds of hammering, occasional blurts of something that might be intended to be music, explosions of laughter. The newcomers, he noted, were being herded with much confusion to one or another of the fenced areas, where they left their mounts. Afterward, they straggled across to join the sluggish river of bodies in the avenues between the sheds. No one looked up or noticed the dim shadow of the floater. Everyone was preoccupied, shouting, elbowing, blowing an instrument, climbing a pole. Alvah found a clear space at some distance from the sheds -- as far as he could conveniently get from the penned animals -- and landed. He had no idea what this gathering was about. For all he knew, it might be a war council or some kind of religious observance, in which case his presence might be distinctly unwelcome. But in any case, there were customers here. He looked dubiously at the stud that controlled his attentioncatchers. If he used them, he would only be following directives, but he had a strong feeling that it would be a faux pas to do so in this situation. At the other extreme, the obvious thing to do was to get out and go look for someone in authority. This would involve abandoning the protection of the floater, however, and he might blunder into some taboo place or ceremony. Evidently his proper course was to wait unobtrusively until he was discovered. On the other hand, if he stayed inside the floater with the door shut, the Muckfeet might take more alarm than if he showed himself. Still, wasn't it possible that they would be merely puzzled by a floater, whereas they would be angered by a floater with a man on its platform? Or, taking it froiu another angle... The hell with it. opened the door and stepped out. He was relieved when, as he was considering the delicate problem of whether or not to lower the stair, a small group of men and urchins came into view around the corner of the nearest shed, a dozen yards away from him. They stopped when they saw him, and two or three of the smallest children scuttled behind their elders. They exchanged looks and a few words that Alvah couldn't hear. Then a pudgy little man with a fussed expression crowded forward, and the rest followed him at a discreet distance. "Hello," said Alvah tentativelyThe little man came to a halt a yard or so from the platform. He had a white badge of some kind pinned to his shapeless brown jacket, and carried a sheaf of papers in his hand. "Who might you be?" he asked irritably. "Alvah Gustad is my name. I hope I'm not putting you people out, parking in your area like this, Mr. -- " "Well, I should hope to spit you is, though. Supposed to be a tent go up right there. Got to be one by noon. What did you say your name was, Gus what?" "Gustad. I don't believe I caught your name, Mr. -- " "Don't signify what my name is. We're talking about you. What clan you belong to?" "Uh -- Flatbush," said Alvah at random. "Look, as long as I'm in the way here, you just tell me where to move to and -- " "Some little backwoods clan, I never even heard of it," said the pudgy man. "I'll tell you where you can move to. You can just haul that thing back where you come from. Gustad -- Flatbush! You ain't on my list, I know that." The other Muckfeet had moved up gradually to surround the little man. One of them, a lanky sad-faced youngster, nudged him with his elbow, "Might just check and see, Jake." "Well, I ought to know. My land, Artie, I got my work to do.  can't spend all day standing here." Artie's long face grew more mournful. "You thought them Keokuks wasn't on the list, either." "Well -- all right then, rot it." To Alvah: "What's your marks?" Alvah blinked. "I don't -- " "Come down off a there." Jake turned impatiently to a man behind him. "Give'm a stake." As Alvah came hesitantly down the stair, he found he was being offered a sharpened length of wood by a seamy-faced brown man, who carried a bundle of others like it under his arm. Alvah took it, without the least idea of what to do next. The brown man watched him alertly. "You c'n make your marks with that," he volunteered and pointed to the ground between them. The others closed in a little. "Marks?" said Alvah worriedly. brown man hesitated, then took another stake from his bundle. "Like these here," he said. "These is mine." He drew a shaky circle and put a dot in the center of it. "George." A figure four. "Allister -- that's me." A long rectangle with a loop at each end. "Coffin -- that's m' clan." Jake burst out, "Well, crying in a bucket, he knows that! You know how to sign your name, don't you?" "Well," said Alvah, "yes." He wrote Alvah Gustad and, as an afterthought, added Flatbush. There were surprised whistles. "Wrote it just as slick as Doc!" said a ten-year-old tow-headed male, bug-eyed with awe. Jake stared at Alvah, then spun half around to wave his papers under Artie's nose. "Well, you satisfied now, Artie Brumbacher? I guess that ain't on my list, is it?" "No," Artie admitted, "I guess it ain't -- not if you can read the list, that is." Everybody but Alvah laughed, Jake louder than anyone. "All right," he said, turning back to Alvah, "you just hitch up your brutes and get that thing out of here. If you ain't gone by the time I -- " "Jake!" called a businesslike female voice, and a small figure came shouldering through the crowd. "They need you over in the salamander shed -- the Quincies are ready to move in, but there's some Sullivans ahead of them." She glanced at Alvah, then at the floater behind him. "You having any trouble here?" "All settled now," Jake told her. "This feller ain't on the list. I  just give him his marching orders." "Look, if I can say something -- " Alvah began. The girl interrupted him. "Did you want to exhibit something at the Fair?" "That's right," said Alvah gratefully. "I was just trying to explain -- " "Well, you're late, but maybe we can squeeze you in. You won't sell anything, though, if it's what I think it is. Let me see that list, Jake." "Now wait a minute," said Jake indignantly. "You know we ain't got room for nobody that ain't on the list. We got enough trouble -- " "The Earth-movers won't be here from Butler till tomorrow," said the girl, examining the papers. "We can put him in there and move him out again when they get here. You need apy equipment besides what you brought?" "No," said Alvah. "That would be fine, thanks. All I need is a place -- " "All right. Before you go, Jake, did you tell those Sullivans they could have red, green and yellow in the salamander shed?" "Well, sure I did. That what it says right there."  pers and pointed to a line. "That's Quincy, see? Dot instead of a cross. Sullivans are supposed to have that corner in the garden truck shed, keep the place warm for the seedlings, but they won't budge till you tell them it was a mistake. Babbishes and Stranahans are fit to be tied. You get over there and straighten them out, will you? And don't worry too much about him." Jake snorted and moved away, still looking ruffled. The girl turned to Alvah. "All right, let's go." Unhappy but game, Alvah turned and climbed back into the floater with the girl close behind him. The conditioning he'd had just before he left helped when he was in the open air, but in the tiny closed cabin of the floater the girl's triply compounded stench was overpowering. How did they live with themselves? She leaned over the coqtrol chair, pointing. "Over there," she said. "See that empty space I'm pointing at?" Alvah saw it and put the floater there as fast as the generator would push it. The space was not quite empty -- there were a few very oddly assorted Muckfeet and animals in it, but they straggled out when they saw him hovering, and he set the floater down. To his immense relief, the girl got out immediately. Alvah followed her as far as the platform. Ill TN a tailor shop back in Middle Queens, the proprietors, two brothers named Wynn, whose sole livelihood was the shop, stared glumly at the bedplate where the two-hundred-gallon Klenomatic ought to have been. "He say anything when he took it away?" Clyde asked. Morton shrugged and made a sour face. "Yeah," said Clyde. He looked distastefully at a dead cigar and tossed it at the nearest oubliette. He missed. "He said a month, two months," Morton told him. "You know what that means." "Yeah." "So I'll call up the factory," Morton said violently. "But I know what they're gonna tell me. Give us a deposit and we'll put you on a waiting list. Waiting list!" "Yeah," said Clyde. In a factory in Under Bronnix, the vice president in charge of sales shoved a thick folder of coded plastic slips under the nose of the vice president in charge of production. "Look at those orders," he said. "Uh-huh," said Production. "You know how far back they go? Three years. You know how much money this company's lost in unfilled orders? Over two million -- " "I know. What do you expect? Every fabricator in this place is too old. We're holding them together with spit and string. Don't bother me, will you, Harry. I got my own -- " "Listen," said Sales. "This can't go on much longer. It's up to us to tell the Old Man that he's got to try a bigger bribe on the Metals people. Mortgage the plant if we have to -- it's the only thing to do." "We have more mortgages now than the plant is worth." Sales reddened. "Nick, this is serious. Last fall, it looked like we might squeeze through another year, but now... You know what's going to happen in another eight, ten months?" He snapped his fingers. "Right down the drain." Production blinked at him wearily. "Bribes are no good any more, Harry. You know that as well as I do.  They're out." "Well, then what are we going to do?" Production shook his head. "I don't know. I swear to God, I don't know." Four, in Under and Middle Jersey, the night shift was just beginning. In the blue-lit cavern of Ferrous, this involved two men, one bald and flabby, the other gray and gnarled. They exchanged a silent look, then each in turn put his face into the time clock's retinoscope mask. The clock, which had been emitting a shrill irritating sound, gurgled its satisfaction and shut up. "Well, that's it," said the gray one. "I'll be your work gang and you be mine, huh?" The flabby one spat. "Wonder what happened to Turk." "Who cares? I never liked him." "Just wondering. Yesterday he's here, today where is he? Labor pool, army -- " he spat again, with care -- "repair, maintenance... He was fifteen years in this department. I was just wondering." "Scooping sewage, probably. That's about his speed." .The gray man shambled over to the control bench opposite and looked at the indicators. Then he lighted a cigarette. "Nothing in the hoppers?" the flabby one asked. "Nah. They ought to put Turk in the hoppers. He had metal in his goddam teeth. Actual metal!" "Turk wasn't old," the flabby one said reproachfully. "No more than sixty." "I never liked him." "First it was the kid -- you know. Pimples. Then, lessee, the next one was that big guy, the realie actor -- " "Gustad. The hell with him." "Yeah, Gustad. What I mean is, where do they go to? It's the same thing on my three-toseven shift, over in Yeasts. Guys I knew for ten, fifteen, twenty years on the same job. All of a sudden, they're gone and you never see them. Must be a hell of a thing, starting all over again somewhere else -- guys like that -- I mean you get set in your ways, kind of." His eyes were patient and bewildered in their watery pouches. "Guys like me -- no kids, nobody that gives a damn about 'em. Kind of gives you the jumps to think about it. You know what I mean?" The gray one looked embarrassed, then irritated, then defiant. "Aah," he said, and produced a deck of cards from his kit -- the grimy coating on the creaseless, frayless plastic as lovingly built and preserved as the patina in a meerschaum. "Cut for deal. Come on! Let's play." "T'll have to know what you going to exhibit," the girl said. "For the Fair records." "Labor-saving devices," Alvah told her, "the latest and best products of human ingenuity, designed to -- " "Machines," she said, writing. She added, looking up, "There's a fee for the use of the fairground space. Since you're only going to have it for a day, we'll call it twenty twains." Alvah hesitated. He had no idea what a twain might be -- it had sounded like "twain." Evidently it was some sort of crude Muckfoot coinage. "Afraid I haven't got any of your money," he said, producing a handful of steels from his belt change-meter. "I don't suppose these would do?" The girl looked at him steadily. "Gold?" she said. "Precious stones, platinum, an#rthing of that kind?" Alvah shook his head. "Sure?" Alvah shrugged despairingly. "Well," she said after a moment, "maybe something can be arranged. I'll let you talk to Doc about it, anyhow. He'll have to decide. Come on." "Just a minute," Alvah said, and ducked back into the floater. He found what he was looking for and trotted outside again. "What's that?" asked the girl, looking at the bulky kit at his waist. "Just a few things I like to have 'with me." "Mind showing me?" "Well -- no." He opened the kit. "Cigarette lighter, flashlight, shaver, raincoat, heater, a few medicines over here, jujubes, food concentrates, things like that. Uh, I don't know why I put this in here -- it's a distress signal for people who get lost in the subway." "You never can tell," said the girl, "when a thing like that will come in handy." "That's true. Uh, this thing that looks like two dumbbells and a corkscrew..." "Never mind," said the girl. "Come along." The first shed they passed was occupied by things that looked like turtles with glittery four-foot shells. In the nearest stall, a man was peeling off from one of the beasts successive thin layers of this shell-stuff, which turned out to be colorless and transparent. He passed them to a woman, who dipped them into a basin and then laid them on a board to dry. The ones at the far end of the row, Alvah noticed, had flattened into discs. The girl apparently misread his expression as curiosity. "Glass tortoise," she told him. "For windows and so on. The young ones have more hump to their shells -- almost spherical to start with. Those are for bottles and bowls and things." Alvah blinked noncommittally. which metal tools were displayed -- knives, axes and the like. Similar objects, Alvah noted automatically, had only approximately similar outlines. There seemed to be no standardization at all. "These are local," the girl said. "The metal comes from Iron Pits, just a few miles south of here." In the next shed was a long row of upright rectangular frames, most of them empty. One near the end, however, was filled with some sort of insubstantial film or fabric. A tiny scarlet creature was crawling rapidly up and down this gossamer substance, working its way gradually from left to right. "Squareweb," the girl informed him. "This dress I'm wearing was made that way." Alvah verified his previous impression that the dress was opaque. Rather a pity, since it was also quite handsomely filled out. Not, he assured himself, that it made any difference -- the girl was a Muckfoot, after all. Next came a large cleared space. In it were half a dozen animals that resembled nothing in nature or nightmare except each other. They were wide and squat and at least six feet high at the shoulder. They had vaguely reptilian heads, and their scaly hides were patterned in orange and blue, rust and vermilion, yellow and poppy-red. The oddest thing about them, barring the fact that each had three sets of legs, was the extraordinary series of protuberances that sprouted from their backs. First came an upright, slightly hollow shield sort of thing, set crossways, behind the first pair of shoulders. Behind that, something that looked preposterously like an armchair -- it even had a bright-colored cushion -- and then a double row of upright spines with a wide space between them. "Trucks," said the girl. Alvah cleared his throat. "Look, Miss -- " "Betty Jane Hofmeyer. Call me B. J. Everybody does." "All right -- uh -- B. J. I wonder if you could explain something to me. What's wrong with metal? And plastic, and things like that. I mean why should you people want to go to so much trouble and -- and mess, when there are easier ways to do things better?" "Each," she said, "to his own taste. We turn here." A few yards ahead, the Fair ended and the settlement proper began with an unusually large building -- large enough, Alvah estimated, to fill almost an entire wing of a third-class hotel in New York. Unlike the hovels he had seen farther south -- which looked as if they had been excreted -- it was built of some regular, smooth-surfaced material, seamless and fairly well shaped. Alvah was so engrossed in these and other considerations that it wasn't until the girl turned three steps inside the doorway, impatiently waiting, that he realized a minor crisis was at hand -- he was being invited to enter a Muckfoot dwelling. "Well, come on," said B. J. R efuse any offers of food, transportation, etc., said the handbook, firmly, but as diplomatically as possible. Employ whatever subterfuge the situation may suggest, such as, "Thank you, but my doctor has forbidden me to touch fur," or, "Pardon me, but I have a sore throat and am unable to eat." Alvah cleared his throat frantically. The situation did not suggest anything at all. Luckily, however, his stomach did. "Maybe I'd better not come in," he said. "I don't feel very well. Maybe if I just sit down here quietly -- " "You can sit down inside," said the girl briskly. "If there's anything wrong with you, Doc will look you over." "Well," Alvah asked desperately, "couldn't you bring him out here for a minute? I really don't think -- " "Doc is a busy man. Are you coming or not?" Alvah hesitated. There were, he told himself, only two possibilities, after all: (a) he would somehow manage to keep his breakfast, and (b) he wouldn't. The nausea began as a faint, premonitory twinge when he stepped through the doorway. It increased steadily as he followed B. J. past cages filled with things that chirruped, croaked, rumbled, rustled or simply stared at him. The girl didn't invite comment on any of them, for which Alvah was grateful. He was too busy concentrating on trying not to concentrate on his misery... For the same reason, he did not notice at what precise point the cages gave way to long rows of potted green plants. Alvah was just beginning to wonder if he would live to see the end of them when, still following B. J., he turned a corner and came upon a cleared space with half a dozen people in it. One of them was the sad-faced youth, Artie. Another was a stocky man, all chest and paunch and no neck at all, who was talking to Artie while the others stood and listened. B. J. stopped and waited quietly. Alvah, perforce, did the same. " -- just a few seedlings and a couple of one-year-olds for now -- we'll see hoW they go. If you have more room later on... What else was I going to tell you?" The stocky man rumpled his hair nervously. "Oh, look, Artie, I had a copy of the specifications for you, but the fool bird got into a fight with a mirror and broke his... Wait a second." He turned abruptly. "Hello, Beej. Come along to the library for a second, will you?" He turned again and strode off, with Artie, B. J. and Alvah in his wake. riHE room they entered was, from Alvah's point of view, the worst he had struck yet. It was a hundred feet long by fifty wide, and everywhere -- perched on the walls and on multi-leveled racks that ran the length of the room, darting through the air in raucous birds, feathered in every prismatic shade, green, electricblue, violet, screaming red. "Mark seven oneohthree!" Bither shouted. The roomful of birds took it up in a hideous echoing chorus. An instant later, a sudden flapping sound turned itself into an explosion of color and alighted on the stocky man's shoulder, preening its feathers with a blunt green beak. "Rrk," it said and then, quite clearly, "Mark seven one-oh-three." The stocky man made a perch of one forefinger and handed the thing across to Artie's shoulder. "I can't give you this one. It's the only copy I got. You'll have to listen to it and remember what you need." "I'll remember." Artie glanced at the bird on his shoulder and said, "Magnus utility tree." The stocky man looked around, saw B. J. "Now, Beej, is it important? Because -- " "Magnus utility tree," the bird was saying. "Thrives in all soils, over ninety-one per cent resistant to most rusts, scales and other infestations. Edible from root to branch. Young shoots and leaves excellent for salads. Self-fertilizing. Sap can be drawn in second year for -- " "Doc," said the girl clearly, "this is Alvah Gustad. From New York. Alvah, meet Doc Bither." " -- golden orangoes in spring and early summer, Bither aperries in late summer and fall. Will crossbreed with -- " "New York, huh?" said Bither. "You a long way from home, young -- Excuse me. Artie?" " -- series five to one hundred fifteen. Trunks guaranteed straight and rectilinear, two-byfour at end of second year, fourby-six at -- " "I all set. Doc." " -- mealie pods and winterberries -- " "Fine, all right." He took B. J.'s arm. "Let's go someplace we can talk." -- absorb fireproofing and stiffening solutions freely through roots..." small, crowded room. "Now," he said, peering intently at Alvah, "what's the problem?" B. J. explained briefly. Then they both stared at Alvah. Sweat was beaded coldly on his brow and his knees were tremblingrjut he seemed to have stabilized the nausea just below the critical point. The idea, he told himself, was to convince yourself that the whole building was a realie stage and .all the objects in it props. Wasn't there a line to that effect in one of the classics -- The Manager of Copenhagen, or perhaps Have It Your Own Way? "What do you think?" Bither asked. "Might try him out." "Um. Damn it, I wish we hadn't run out of birds. Can you take this down for me, Beej? I'll arrange for the Fair rental fee, Alvah, if you just answer a few questions." It sounded innocuous enough. but Alvah felt a twinge of suspicion. "What kind of questions?" "Just personal questions, like how old, what you do for a living." "Twenty-six. I'm an actor." "Always been an actor?" "No." "What else you done?" "Labor." "What kind?" B. J. asked. "Worked with his hands, he means," Bither told her. "Parents laborers, too?" "Yes." B. J. and Bither exchanged glances. Alvah shifted uncomfortably. "If that's all... "One or two more. I want you to tell me, near as you can, when was the first time you remember knowing that our clothes and our animals and us and all the things we make smelled bad?" It was too much. Alvah turned and lurched blindly out the door. He heard their voices behind him : "... minutes." "... alley door!" Then there were hands on him, steering him from behind as he stumbled forward at a half-run. They turned him right, then left and finally he was out in the cool air, not a moment too soon. When he straightened, wiping tears away, he was alone, but a moment later the girl appeared in the doorway. "That's all," she said distantly. "You can start your exhibition whenever you want." IV fTHE magic tricks vent over fairly well -- at least nobody yawned. The comic monologue, however, was a flat failure, even though the piece had been expertly slanted for a rural audience and, by all the laws of psychostatics, should have rated at least half a dozen boffs. ("So the little boy came moseying back up the road, and his grandpa said to him, 'Why didn't you drive them hogs out of the corn like I told you?' And the little fellow piped up, 'Them ain't hogs -- them's shoatsi' ") Alvah launched hopefully into his sales talks and demonstrations. The all-purpose fireless lifetime cooker was received with blank stares. When Alvah fried up a savory batch of proteinpaste fritters and offered to hand them out, nobody responded but one small boy, and his mother hauled him down off the platform stair by the slack of his pants. Smiling doggedly, Alvah brought out the pocket-workshop power tools and accessories. This, it appeared, was more like it. An interested hum went up as he drilled three holes of various sizes in a bar of duroplast, then sawed through it from end to end and finally cut a mortise in one piece, a tenon in the other, and fitted them together. A few more people drifted in. "And now, friends," said Alvah, "if you'll continue to give me your kind attention... The next item was the little giant power-plant for the home, shop or office. Blank stares again. Alvah picked out one Muckfoot in the front row -- a blear-eyed, open-mouthed fellow, with hair over his forehead and a basket under his arm, who seemed typical -- and spoke directly to him. He outdid himself about the safety, economy, efficiency and unobtrusiveness of a little giant power-plant. He explained its operation in words a backward two-year-old could understand. "A little giant," he concluded, leaning over the platform rail to stare hypnotically into the Muckfoot's eyes, "is the power-plant for you!" The fellow blinked, slowly produced a dark-brown lump of something from his pocket, slowly put it into his inattentive mouth, and as slowly began to chew. Alvah breathed deeply and clutched the rail. "And now," he said, giving the clincher, "the marvel of the age -- the superspeed runabout!" He pressed the button that popped open a segment of the floater's hull and lowered the gleaming little twowheeled car into view. "Now, friends," he said, "just to demonstrate the amazing qualities of this miracle of modern science -- is thereany gentleman in the crowd who has an animal he fancies for speed?" ip'OR the first time, the Muckfeet reacted according to the charts. Shouts rocketed up: "Me, by damn!" "Me!" "Right here, mister!" "Yes, sir!" "Friends, friends!" said Alvah, spreading his hands. "There won't be time to accommodate you all. Choose one of you to represent the rest!" "Swifty!" somebody yelped, and other voices took up the cry. A red-haired young man began working his way back out of the crowd, propelled by gleeful shouts and slaps on the back. Alvah took an indicator and began pointing out the salient features of the runabout. He had not got more than a quarter of the way through when the redhead reappeared, mounted astride an animal which, toAlvah's revolted gaze, looked to be part horse, part lynx, part camel and part pure horror. To the crowd, evidently, it was one of nature's finest efforts. Alvah swallowed bile and raised his voice again. "Clear a space now, friends -- all the way around!" It took time, but eventually self-appointed deputies began to get the crowd moving. Alvah descended, carrying two bright marker poles, and, followed by the inquisitive redhead, set one up at either side of the enclosure, a few yards short of the boundary. "This will be the course," he told Swifty. "Around these markers and the floater -- that thing I was standing on. We'll do ten laps, starting and finishing here. Is that all right?" "All right with me," said the redhead, grinning more widely than before. There were self-appointed time-keepers and starters, too. When Alvah, in the runabout, and the redhead, on his monster, were satisfactorily lined up, one of them bellowed, "On y' marks -- Git set..." and then cracked a short whip with a noise out of all proportion to its size. For a moment, Alvah thought Swifty and his horrid mount had simply disappeared. Then he spotted them, diminished by perspective, halfway down the course, and rapidly getting smaller. He slammed the power bar over and took off in pursuit. Swifty, with Alvah nowhere. In the stretch, Alvah was coming up fast on the outside. Around the far turn, he was two monster lengths behind and, in the stretch again, they were neck and neck. Alvah kept it that way for the next two laps and then gradually pulled ahead. The crowd became a multicolored streak, whirling past him. In the sixth lap, he passed Swifty again -- in the eighth, again -- in the tenth, still again -- and when he skidded to a halt beyond the finish post, fluttering its flags with the wind of his passage, poor old Swifty and his steaming beast were still lumbering halfway down the stretch. "Now, friends," said Alvah, triumphantly mounting the platform again, "in a moment. I'm going to tell you how you, yourselves, can own this wonderful runabout and many marvels more -- but first, are there any questions you'd like to ask?" Swifty pushed forward, ' grinless, looking like a man smitten by lightning. "How many to a get?" he called. Alvah decided he must have misunderstood. "You can have any number you want," he said. "The price is so reasonable -- but I'm going to come to that in a -- " "I don't mean how many will you sell. How many to a get?" Alvah looked blank. "How many calves, or colts, or whatever, is what I want to know." There was a general murmur of agreement. This, it would seem, was what everybody wanted to know. Appalled, Alvah corrected the misapprehension as quickly and clearly as he could. "Mean to say," somebody called, "they don't breed?" "Certainly not. If one of them ever breaks down -- and, friends, they're built to last -- you get it repaired or buy another." "How much?" somebody in the crowd yelled. "Friends, I'm not here to take your money," Alvah said. "We just want -- " "Then how we going to pay for your stuff?" "I'm coming to that. When two people want to trade, friends, there's usually a way. You want our products. We want metals -- iron, aluminum, chromium -- " "Suppose a man ain't got any metal?" "Well, sir, there are a lot of other things we can use besides metal. Natural fruits and vegetables, for instance." The slack-faced yokel in the first row, the one with the basket under his arm, roused himself for the first time. His mouth closed, then opened again. "What kind?" "Natural products, friend. You know, the kind your great-granddad ate. We use a lot every year for table delicacies, even -- " The yokel came halfway up the platform stair. His gnarled fingers dipped into the basket and came up with a smooth redgold ovoid. He shoved it toward Alvah. "You mean," he said incredulously, "you wouldn' eat that?" a step. The Muckfoot came after him. "Raise 'em myself," he said plaintively, holding out the red fruit. "I tell you, they're just the juiciest, goodest -- Go ahead, try one." "I'm not hungry," Alvah said desperately. "I'm on a diet. Now if you'll just step down quietly, friend, till after the -- " The Muckfoot stared at him, holding the fruit under Alvah's nose. "You mean you won't try it?" "No," said Alvah, trying not to breathe. "Now go on back down there, friend -- don't crowd me." "Well," said the Muckfoot, "then durn you!" And he shoved the disgusting thing squashily into Alvah's face. Alvah saw red. Blinking away a glutinous film of juice and pulp, he glimpsed the yokel's face, spread into a hideous grin. Waves of laughter beat about his ears. Retching, he brought up his right fist in an instinctive roundhouse swing that clapped the yokel's grin shut and toppled him over the platform rail, basket, flying fruit and all. The laughter rumbled away into expectant silence. Alvah fumbled in his kit for tissues, scrubbed a wad of them across his face and saw them come away daubed with streaky red. He hurled them convulsively into the crowd and, leaning over the rail, shouted thickly, "Lousy stinking filthy Muckieet!" Muckfoot men in the front ranks turned and looked at each other solemnly. Then two of them marched up the platform stair and, behind them, another two. Still berserk, Alvah met the first couple with two violent kicks in the chest. This cleared the stair, but he turned to find three more candidates swarming over the rail. He swung at the nearest, who ducked. The next one seized Alvah's arm with both hands and toppled over backward. Alvah followed, head foremost, and landed with a jar that shook him to his toes. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground surrounded by upward of twenty thick seamless boots, choking on dust, and getting the daylights methodically kicked out of him. Alvah rolled over frantically, climbed the first leg that came to hand, got his back against the platform and, by flint of cracking skulls together, managed in two brisk minutes to clear a momentary space around him. Another dim figure lunged at him. Alvah clouted it under the ear, whirled and vaulted over the rail onto the platform. His gun popped out into his hand. For just a moment, he was standing alone, feeling the pistol grip clenched hard in his dirtcaked palm and able to judge exactly how long he had before half a dozen Muckfeet would swarrn up the stair and over the rail. The crowd's faces were sharp and clear. He saw Artie and Doc Either and Jake, his mouth open to howl, and he saw the girl, B. J., in a curious posture -- leaning forward, her right arm thrust out and down. She had just thrown something at him. blur wobbling toward him. He tried to dodge, but the thing struck his shoulder and exploded with a papery pop. For a bewildering instant, the air was full of dancing bright particles. Then they were gone. Alvah didn't have time to wonder about it. He thumbed the selector over to Explosive, pointed the gun straight up and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. There were two Muckfeet half over the rail and three more coming up the stair. Incredulous, still aiming at the air, Alvah tried again -- and again. The gun didn't work. Three Muckfeet were on the platform, four more right behind them. Alvah spun through the open door and slapped at the control button. The door stayed open. The Muckfeet were massed in the doorway, staring in like visitors at an aquarium. Alvah dived at the power bar, shoved it over. The floater didn't lift. "Holly! Luke!" called a clear voice outside, and the Muckfeet turned. "Leave him alone. He's got enough troubles now." Alvah was pawing at the control board. The lights didn't work. The air conditioner didn't work. The scent-organ didn't work. The musivox  didn't work. One of the Muckfeet put his head in at the door. "Reckon he has," he said thoughtfully and went away again. Alvah heard his voice, more faintly. "You do something, B. J.?" "Yes," said the girl, "I did something." outside. The girl was standing just below the platform, watching as the Muckfoot men filed down the stair. "You!" he said to her. She paid him no attention. "Just one of those things, Luke," she said. Luke nodded solemnly, "Well, the Fair don't come but once a year." He and the other men moved past her into the crowd, each one acquiring a train of curiosity-seekers as he went. The crowd began to drift away. A familiar voice yelped, "Ride'm out on a razorback is what I say!" A chorus of "Now, Jake!" went up. There were murmurs of dissent, of inquiry, of explanation. "Time for the poultry judging!" somebody called, and the crowd moved faster. Alvah went dazedly down and climbed into the runabout. He waggled its power bar. No response. He tore open his kit and began frantically hauling out one glittery object after another, holding each for an instant and then throwing it on the ground. The ' razor, the heater, the vacuum cleaner, the sonotube, the vibromasseur. Swifty rode by, at ease atop his horse-lynx-camel-horror. He was whistling. The crowd was almost gone. Among the stragglers was Jake, fists on his pudgy hips, his choleric cheeks gleaming with sweat and satisfaction. "Well, Mister High-andMighty," he called, "what are you going to do now?" That was just what Alvah was wondering. He was about a thousand miles from home by air -- probably more like fifteen hundred across-country. He had no transportation, no shelter, no power tools, no equipment. He had, he realized with horror, been cut off instantly from everything that made a man civilized. What was he going to do? V i feet on the glossy desktop. So did the Comptroller, narrowfaced old Mr. Greedy; the Director of Information, plump Mr. Kling; the Commissioner of Supply, blotched and pimpled Mr. Jackson: and the porcine Mr. McArdle, Commissioner of War. With chairs tilted back, they stared through a haze of cigar smoke at each others' stolid faces mirrored on the ceiling. Wytak's voice was as confident as ever, if a trifle muted, and when the others spoke, he listened. These were not the hired nonentities Alvah had seen; these were the men who had made Wytak, the electorate with whose consent he governed. "Jack," said Wytak, "I want you to look at it my way and see if you don't think I'm right. It isn't a question of how long we can hold out -- when you get right down and look at it, it's a question of can we do anything." "In time," said Jackson expressionlessly. "In time. But if we can do anything, there'll be time enough. You say we've got troubles now and you're right, but I tell you we can pull through a situation a thousand times worse than this -- if we've got an answer. And have we got an answer? We have." Creedy grunted. "Like to see some results, Boley." "You'll see them. You can't skim a yeast tank the first day. Will." "You can see the bubbles, though," said Jackson sourly. "Any report from this Gustad today, while we're talking about it?" "Not yet. He was getting some response yesterday. He's following it up. I trust that boy -- the analyzers picked his card out of deliver." "If you say so, Boley." "I say so." Jackson nodded. "That's good enough. Gentlemen?" TN another soundproof, spyproof office in Over Manhattan, Kling and McArdle met again twenty minutes later. "What do you think?" asked Kling with his meaningless smile. "Moderately good. I was hoping he would lie about Gustad's report, but of course there was very little chance of that. Wytak is an old hand." "You admire him?" Kling suggested. "As a specimen of his type. Wytak pulled us out of a very bad spot in '#." "Agreed." "And he has had his uses since then. There are times when brilliant improvisation is better than sound principles -- and times when it is not. Wytak is an incurable romantic." "And you?" "We," said McArdle grimly, "are realists." "Oh, yes. But perhaps we are not anything just yet. Creedy is interested, but not convinced -- and until he moves, Jackson will do nothing." "Wytak's project is a failure. You can't do business with the Muckfeet. But the fool was so confident that he didn't even interfere with Gustad's briefing." Kling leaned forward with interest. "You didn't...?" "No. It wasn't necessary. But it means that Gustad has no instructions to fake successful reports -- and that means Wytak can't stall until he gets back. There was no report today. Suppose there's none tomorrow, or the next day, or the next." "In that case, of course... However, it's always as well to offer something positive. You said you might have something to show me today." "Yes. Follow me." In a sealed room at the end of a guarded corridor, five young men were sitting. They leaped to attention when Kling and McArdle entered. "At ease," said McArdle. "This gentleman is going to ask you some questions. You may answer freely." He turned to Kling. "Go ahead -- ask them anything." Kling's eyebrows went up delicately, but he looked the young men over, selected one and said, "Your name?" "Walter B. Limler, sir." Kling looked mildly pained. "Please don't call me sir. Where do you live?" McCormick." frown. "McCormick? I don't place the district. Where is it?" The young man, who was blond and very earnest, allowed himself to show a slight surprise. "In the Loop," he said. "And where is the Loop?" The young man looked definitely startled. He glanced at McArdle, moistened his lips and said, "Well, right here, sir. In Chicago." Kling's eyebrows went up and then down. He smiled. "I begin to see," he murmured to McArdle. "Very clever." TT cost Alvah two hours' labor, using tools that had never been designed to be operated manually, to get the inspection plate off the motor housing in the floater. He compared the intricate mechanism with the diagrams and photographs in the maintenance handbook. He looked for dust and grime; he checked the moving parts for play; he probed for dislodged wiring plates and corrosion. He did everything the handbook suggested, even spun the flywheel and was positive he felt the floater lift a fraction of an inch beneath him. As far as he could tell, there was absolutely nothing wrong, unless the trouble was in the core of  the motor itself -- the force-field that rotated the axle that made everything go. The core casing had an "easily removable" segment, meaning to say that Alvah was able to get it off in three hours more. Inside, there was no resistance to his cautious finger. The spoolshaped hollow space was empty. Under Motor Force-field In operative the manual said simply: Remove and replace rhodopalladium nodules. Alvah looked. He found the tiny sockets where the nodules ought to be, one in the flanged axle-head, the other facing it at the opposite end of the chamber. The nodules were not there at all. Alvah went into the storage chamber. Ignoring the increasingly forceful protests of his empty stomach, he spent a furious twenty minutes locating the spare nodules. He stripped the seal off the box and lifted the lid with great care. There were the nodules. And there, appearing out of nowhere, was a whirling cloud of brightness that settled briefly in the box and then went back where it came from. And there the nodules were gone. Alva stared at the empty box. He poked his forefinger into the cushioned niches, one after the other. Then he set the box down with care, about-faced, walked outside to the platform and sat down on the top step with his chin on his fists. "You look peaked," said B. J.'s firm voice. Alvah looked up at her briefly. "Go away." "Had anything to eat today?" the girl asked. Alvah did not reply. "Don't sulk," she said. "You've got a problem. We feel responsible. Maybe there's something we can do to help." Alvah stood up slowly. He looked her over carefully, from top to bottom and back again. "There is one thing yoU could do for me," he said. "Smile." "Why?" she asked cagily. "I wanted to see your fangs." He turned wearily and went into the floater. minutes, then got cold rations out of the storage chamber and sat down in the control chair to eat them. But the place was odious to him with its gleaming, useless array of gadgetry, and he went outside again and sat down with his back to the hull near the doorway. The girl was still there, looking up at him. "Look," she said, "I'm sorry about this." The nutloaf went down his gullet in one solid lump and hit his stomach like a stone. "Please don't mention it," he said bitterly. "It was really nothing at all." "I had to do it. You might have killed somebody." Alvah tried another bite. Chewing the stuff, at any rate, gave him something to do. "What were those things?" he demanded. "Metallophage," she said. "They eat metals in the platinum family. Hard to get them that selective -- we weren't exactly sure what would happen." Alvah put down the remnant of nutloaf slowly. "Who's 'we'? You and Bither?" "Mostly." "And you -- you bred those things to eat rhodopalladium?" She nodded. "Then you must have some to feed them," said Alvah logically. He stood up and gripped the railing. "Give it to me." She hesitated. "There might be some -- " "Might be? There must be!" "You don't understand. They don't actually eat the metal -- not for nourishment, that is." "Then what do they do with it?" "They build nests," she told him. "But come on over to the lab and we'll see." At the laboratory door, they were still arguing. "For the last time," said Alvah, "I will not come in. I've just eaten half a nutcake and I haven't got food to waste. Get the stuff and bring it out." "For the last time," said B. J., "get it out of your head that what you want is all that counts. If you want me to look for the metal, you'll come in, and that's flat." They glared at each other. Well, he told himself resignedly, he hadn't wanted that nutloaf much in the first place. They followed the same route, past the things that chirruped, croaked, rumbled, rustled. The main thing, he recalled, was to keep your mind off it. "Tell me something," he said to her trim back. "If I hadn't got myself mixed up with that farmer and his market basket, do you still think I wouldn't have sold anything?" "That's right." "Well, why not? Why all this resistance to machinery? Is it a taboo of some kind?" S HE said nothing for a moment. "Is it because you're afraid the Cities will get a hold on you?" Alvah insisted. "Because that's foolish. Our interests are really the same as yours. We don't just want to sell you stuff -- we want' to help you help yourselves. The more prosperous you get, the better for us." "It's not that," she said. "Well, what then? It's been bothering me. You've got all these raw materials, all this land. You wouldn't have to wait for us -- you could have built your own factories, made your own machines. But you never have. I can't understand why." "It's not worth the trouble." He choked. "Anything is worth the trouble, if it helps you do the same work more efficiently, more intel -- " "Wait a minute." She stopped a woman who was passing in the aisle between the cages. "Marge, where's Doc?" "Down in roundworms, I think." "Tell him I have to see him, will you? It's urgent. We'll wait in here." She led the way into a windowless room, as small and cluttered as any Alvah had seen. "Now," she said. "We don't make a fuss about machines because most people simply haven't any need for them." ' "That's ridiculous," Alvah argued. "You may think -- " "Be quiet and let me finish. We haven't got centralized industries or power installations. Why do you think the Cities have never beaten us in a war, as often as they've tried? Why do you think we've taken over the whole world, except for twenty-two Cities? You've got to face this sooner or later -- in every single respect, our plants and animals are more efficient than any machine you could build." Alvah inspected her closely. Her eyes were intent and brilliant. Her bosom indicated deep and steady breathing. To all appearance, she was perfectly serious. "Nuts," he replied with dignity. "O  shook her head impa tiently. "I know you've got a brain. Use it. What's the most expensive item that goes into a machine?" "Metal. We're a little short of it, to tell the truth." "Think again. What are all  your gadgets supposed to save?" "Well, labor." "Human labor. If metal is expensive, it's because it costs a lot of man-hours." "If you want to look at it that way -- " "It's true, isn't it? Why is a complicated thing more expensive than a simple one? More manhours to make it. Why is a rare thing more expensive than a common one? More man-hours to find it. Why is a -- " "All right, what's your point?" "Take your runabout. You saw that was the thing that interested people most, but I'll show you why you never could have sold one. How many man-hours went into manufacturing it?" Alvah shifted restlessly. "It isn't in production. It's a trade item." She sniffed. "Suppose it was in production. Make an honest guess. Figure in everything -- amortization on the plant and equipment, materials, labor and so on. You can check your answer against wages and prices in your own money -- you'll come pretty close." Alvah reflected. "Between seven-fifty and a thousand." "Compare that with Swifty's Morgan Gamma -- the thing you . raced against. Two man-hours -- just two, and I'm being generous."  "Interesting," said Alvah, "if true." He suppressed an uneasy belch. "Figure it out. An hour for the vet when he was foaled. Call it another hour for amortization on the stable where it happened, but that's too much. It isn't hard to grow a stable and they last a long time." Alvah, who had been holding his own as long as machines were the topic, wasn't sure he could keep it up -- or, more correctly, down. "All right, two hours," he said. "The animals feed themselves and water themselves, no doubt." "They do, but that comes under upkeep. Our animals forage, most of them -- all the big ones. The rest are cheap and easy to feed. Your machines have to be fueled. Our animals repair themselves, like any living organism, only better and faster. Your machines have to be repaired and serviced. More man-hours. Incidentally, if you and Swifty took a ten-hour trip, you in your runabout, him on his Morgan, you'd spend just ten hours steering. Swifty would spend maybe fifteen minutes all told. And now we come to the payoff -- " "Some other time," said Alvah irritably. "This is important. When your runabout -- " "I'd rather not talk about it any more," said Alvah, raising his voice. "Do you mind?" "When your runabout breaks down and can't be fixed," she said firmly, "you have to buy another. Swifty's mare drops twins every year. There. Think about it." door opened and Bither came in, looking more disheveled than ever. "Hello, Beej, Alvah. Beej, I think we shoulda used annelid stock for this job. These F# batches no good at -- you two arguing?" Alvah recovered himself with an effort. "Rhodopalladium," he said thickly. "I need about a gram. Have you got it?" "Not a scrap," said Bither cheerfully. "Except in the nests, of course." "i told him I didn't think so," B. J. said. Alvah closed his eyes for a second. "Where," he asked carefully, "are the nests?" "Wish I knew," Bither admitted. "It's frustrating as hell. You see, we had to make them awful small and quick, the metallophage. Once you let them out of the sacs, there's no holding them. We did so good a job, we can't check to see how good a job we did." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Of course, that's beside the point. Even if we had the metals, how would you get the alloy you need?" "Palladium," said the girl, "melts at fifteen fifty-three Centigrade. I asked the hand bird." "Best we can get out of a salamander is about six hundred," Either added. "Isn't good for them, either -- they get esophagitis." "And necrosis," the girl said, watching Alvah intently. His eyes were watering. It was hard to see. "Are you telling -- " "We're trying to tell you," she said, "that you can't go back. You've got to start getting used to the idea. There isn't a thing you can do except settle down here and learn to live with us." Alvah could feel his jaw working, but no words were coming out. The bulge of nausea in his middle was squeezing its way inexorably upward. Somebody grabbed his arm. "In there!" said Either urgently. A door opened and closed behind him, and he found himself facing a hideous white-porcelain antique with a pool of water in it. There was a roaring in his ears, but before the first spasm took him, he could hear the girl's and Either's voices faintly from the other room: "Eight minutes that time." "Eeej, I don't know." "We can do it!" "Well, I suppose we can, but can we do it before he starves?" There was a sink in the room, but Alvah would sooner have drunk poison. He fumbled in his disordered kit until he found the condenser canteen. He rinsed out his mouth, took a tonus capsule and a mint lozenge. He opened the door. "Feeling better?" asked the girl. Alvah stared at her, retched feebly and fled back into the washroom. Either said, "He's had enough, Eeej. Let's take him out in the courtyard till he gets his strength back." , They moved toward him. Alvah said weakly, but with feeling, "Keep your itchy hands off me." He walked unsteadily past them, turned when he reached the doorway. "I hate to urp and run, but I'll never forget your hospitality. If there's ever anything I can do for you -- anything at all -- please hesitate to call on me." He heard muttering voices and an odd scraping sound behind him, but he didn't look back. He was halfway down the aisle between the cages when something furry and gray scuttled into view and sat up, grinning at him. It looked like an ordinary capuchin monkey except for its head, which was grotesquely large. "Go away," said Alvah. He advanced with threatening gestures. The thing chattered at him and stayed where it was. The aisle behind him was deserted. Very well, there were other exits. Alvah followed his nose back into the plant section and turned right. There was the monkey-thing again. At the next intersection of aisles, there were two of them. Alvah turned left. And right. And left. And emerged into a large empty space enclosed by buildings. "This is the courtyard," said Either, coming forward with the girl behind him. "Now be reasonable. Alvah. You want to get back to New York, don't you?" This did not seem to call for comment. Alvah stared at him in silence. "Well," said Either, "there's just one way you can do it. It won't be easy -- I don't even say you got more than a fighting chance. One thing, though -- it's up to you just how hard you make it for yourself." "Get to the point," Alvah said. "You got to let us decondition you so you can eat our food, ride on our animals. Now think about it, don't just -- " Alvah swung around, looking for the fastest and most direct exit. Before he had time to find it, a dizzying thought struck him and he turned back. "Is that what this whole thing has been about?" he challenged. He glared at Bither, then at B. J. "Is that the reason you were so helpful? Did you engineer that tight?" "Would we admit it if we did? Alvah, I'll admit this much -- of course we interested in you for our own reasons. This is the first time in thirty years we had a chance to study a City man. But what I just told you is true. If you want to get back home, this is your only chance." "Then I'm a dead man," said Alvah. "You is if you think you is," Bither told him. "Beej, you try." She looked at Alvah levelly. "You think what we suggesting isn't possible. Right?" "Discounting Doc's grammar," Alvah said sourly, "that's exactly what I'm thinking." She said, "Doc's grammar is all right -- yours is sixty years out of date. But I guess you already realize that your people are backward compared to us." Half angry, half curious, Alvah demanded, "Just how do you figure that?" "Easy. You probably don't know much biology, but you must know this much. What's the one quality that makes human beings the dominant race on this planet?" Alvah snorted. "Are you trying to tell me I'm not as bright as a Muckfoot?" "Not intelligence. Try again. Something more general -- intelligence is only a special phase of it." Alvah's patience was narrowing to a thin and brittle thread. '"You tell me." "All right. We like to think intelligence is important, but you can't argue that way. It's special pleading -- the way a whale might argue that size is the measuring stick, or a microbe might say numbers. But -- " "Control of environment," Alvah said. "Right. Another name for it is adaptability. No other organism is so independent of environment, so adaptable as Man. And we could live in New York if we had to, just as we can live in the Arctic Circle or the tropics. And, since you don't dare even try to live here... "All right," Alvah said bitterly. "When do we start?" VI TE refused to be hypnotized. "You promised to help," B. J. said in annoyance. "We can't break the conditioning till we find out how it was done, you big oaf!" "The whole thing is ridiculous anyhow," Alvah pointed out. "I said I'd let you try and I will -- you can prod me around to your heart's content -- but not that. I've put in a lot of Required Contribution time in restricted laboratories. Military secrets. How do I know you wouldn't ask me about those if you got me under?" "We're not interested in -- " B. J. began furiously, but Bither cut her off. "We is, though, Beej. Might be important for us to know what kind of defenses New Yok has built up, and I going to ask him if I got the chance." He sighed. "Well, there other' ways to skin a glovebeast. Lean back and relax, Alvah." "No tricks?" Alvah asked suspiciously. "No, we just going to try to improve your conscious recall. Relax now; close your eyes. Now think of a room, one that's familiar to you, and describe it to me. Take your time... Now we going further back -- further back. You three years old and you just dropped something on the floor. What is it?" Bither seemed to know what he was doing, Alvah had to admit. Day after day they dredged up bits and scraps of memory from his childhood, events he had forgotten so completely that he would almost have sworn they had never happened. At first, all of them seemed trivial and irrelevant, but even so, Alvah found, there was an unexpected fascination in this search through the dusty attics of his mind. Once they hit something that made Bither sit up sharply -- a dark figure holding something furry, and an accompanying remembered stench. Whether or not it had been as important as Bither seemed to think, they never got it back again. But they did get other things -- an obscene couplet about the Muckfeet that had been popular in P. S. # when Alvali was ten; a scene from a realie feature called Nix on the Stix; a whispered horror story; a frightening stereo picture in a magazine. "What we have to do," B. J. told him at one point, "is to make you realize that none of this was your own idea. They made you feel this way. They did it to you." "Well, I know that," said Alvah. She stared at him in astonishment. "You knew it all along -- and you don't care?" "No." Alvah felt puzzled and irritated. "Why should I?" "Don't you think they should have let you make up your own mind?" Alvah considered this. "You have to make your children see things the way you do, otherwise there wouldn't be any continuity from one generation to the next. You couldn't keep any kind of civilization going. Where would we be if we let people wander off into the Sticks and become Muckfeet?" she didn't react properly. She merely grinned with an exasperating air of satisfaction and said, "Why should they want to -- unless we can give them a better life than the Cities can?" This was absurd, but Alvah couldn't find the one answer that would flatten her, no matter how long and often he mulled it over. Meanwhile, his tolerance of Muckfoot dwellings progressed from ten minutes to thirty, to an hour, to a full day. He didn't like it and nothing, he knew, could ever make him like it, but he could stand it. He was able to ride for short distances on Muckfoot animals, and he was even training himself to wear an animal-hide belt for longer and longer periods each day. But he still couldn't eat Muckfoot food -- the bare thought of it still nauseated him -- and his own supplies were running short. Oddly, he didn't feel as anxious about it as he should have. He could sense the resistance within him softening day by day. He was irrationally sure.that that last obstacle would go, too, when the time came. Something else was bothering him, something he couldn't even name -- but he dreamed of it at night and its symbol was the threatening vast arch of the sky. After the Fair was over, it seemed that B. J. had very little work to do. As far as Alvah could make out, the same was true of everybody. The settlement grew mortuary-still. For an hour or so every morning, lackadaisical trading went on in the central market place. In the evenings, sometimes, there was music of a sort and a species of complicated ungainly folk-dancing. The rest of the time, children raced through the streets and across the pastures, playing incomprehensible games. Their elders, when they were visible, sat -- on doorsteps by ones and twos, grouped on porches and lawns -- their hands busy, oftener than not, with some trifle of carving or needlework, but their faces as blank and sleepy as a frog's in the Sun. "What do you do for excitement around here?" he asked B. J. in a dither of boredom. She looked at him oddly. "We work. We make things, or watch things grow. But maybe that's not the kind of excitement you mean." "It isn't, but let it go." "Our simple pleasures probably wouldn't interest you," she said reflectively. "They're pretty dull. We dance, go riding, swim in the lake..." So they swam. TT wasn't bad. It was unsettling to have no place to swim to -- you had to head out from the shore, gauging your distance, and then turn around to go back -- but the lake, to Alvah's considerable surprise, was clearer and bettertasting than any pool he'd ever been in. Lying on the grass afterward was a novel sensation, too. It was comfortable -- no, it was nothing of the sort; the grass blades prickled and the ground was lumpy. Not comfortable, but -- comforting. It was the weight, he thought lazily, the massive mother-weight of the whole Earth cradling you -- the endless slow pendulum-swing you felt when you closed your eyes. He sat up, feeling cheerfully torpid. B. J. was lying on her back beside him, eyes shut, one arm flung back behind her head. It was a graceful pose. In a detached way, he admired it, first in general and then in particular -- the fine texture of her skin, the firmness of her bosom under the halter that halfcovered it, the delicate tint of her closed eyelids -- the catalogue prolonged itself, and he realized that B. J., when you got a good look at her, was a uniquely lovely girl. He wondered, in passing, how he had missed noticing it before. She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was a groundswell of some sort and, without particular surprise, Alvah found himself leaning over and kissing her. "Beej," he said some time later, "when I go back to New York -- I don't suppose you'd want to come with me? I mean -- you're different from the others. You're educated, you can read; even your grammar is good." "I know you mean it as a compliment and I'm doing my best not to sound ungrateful or hurt your feelings, but..." She made a frustrated gesture. "Take the reading -- that's a hobby of Doc's and I picked it up from him. It's a primitive skill, Alvah, something like manuscript illuminating. We have better ways now. We don't need it any more. Then the grammar -- didn't it ever strike you that I might be using your kind just to make things easier for you?" She frowned. "I guess that was a mistake. As of now, I quit. No, listen a minute! The only difference between your grammar and ours is that yours is sixty years out of date. You still use T am, you are, he is' and all that archaic nonsense of tenses, case and gender. What for? If that's good, suppose we hunted up somebody who said T am, thou art, he is,' would his grammar be better than yours?" "Well -- " said Alvah. "And about NeW York, I appreciate that. But the Cities are done for, Alvah. In ten years there won't be one left. They're finished." most ridiculous -- " "#s it? Then why are you here?" "Well, we're in a crisis period now, but we've come through them before. You can't -- " "This crisis of yours started a long while ago. If r remember, it was around #nat Muller first changed the genes in fruit flies with X-ray bombardment. That was the first step -- over a hundred years before you were even born. Then came colchicine and the electron microscope and microsurgery, all in the next thirty years. But the day biological engineering really grew up -- #, Jenkins' and Scripture's gene charts and techniques -- the Cities began to go. Little by little, people drifted out to the land again, raising the new crops, growing the new animals. "The big Cities cannibalized the little ones, like an insect eating its own body when its food supply runs out. Now that's gone as far as it can, and you think it's just another crisis, but it isn't. It's the end." Alvah heard a chill echo of Wytak's words: "Rome tell. Babylon tell. The same thing can happen to New York..." He said, "What am I supposed to be, the rat that leaves the sinking ship?" She sighed. "Alvah, you got a better brain than that. "You don't have to think in metaphors or slogans, like a moron. I'm not asking you to join the winning side. That doesn't matter. In a few years there won't be but one side, no matter which way you junip." "What do you want then?" he asked. She looked dispirited. "Nothing, I guess. Let's go home." TT was a series of little things after that. There was the time he and Beej, out walking in the cool of the morning, stopped to rest at an isolated house that turned out to be occupied by George Allister of the Coffin clan, the shy little man who'd tried to show Alvah how to make his marks the day he landed. George, Alvah believed -- and questioning of Beej afterward confirmed it -- was about as low on the social scale as a Muckfoot could get. But he was his own master. He had a wife and three children and neat fields, with his own animals grazing in them. His house was big and cool and clean. He poured them lemonade -- which Alvah wistfully had to decline -- from a sweating peacock-blue pitcher, while sitting at his ease on the broad front porch. There were no servants among the Muckfeet. Alvah remembered an ancient fear of his, something that had cropped up in the old days every time he got seriously interested in a girl -- that his children, if any, might relapse into the labor-pool category from which he had risen or -- it was hard to say which would be worse -- into the servants' estate. He went back fiom that outing very silent and thoughtful. There was the time, a few days later, when Beej was working. and Alvah, at loose ends, wandered into a room in the laboratory building where two of Bither's assistants, girls he knew by sight, were sitting with two large, leathery-woody, pod-shaped boxes open on the bench between them. Being hungry for company and preoccupied with himself at the same time, he didn't notice what should have been obvious, that the girls were busy at something private and personal. Even when they closed the boxes between them, he wasn't warned. "What's this?" he said cheerfully. "Can I see?" They glanced at each other uncertainly. "These is our bride boxes," said the bnmette. "We don't usual show them to singletons -- " They exchanged another glance. "He's spoke for anyhow," said the redhead, with an enigmatic look at Alvah. They opened the boxes. Inside each was a multitude of tiny compartments, each with a bit of something wrapped in cloth or paper tissue. The brunette chose one of the largest and unwrapped it with exaggerated care -- an amorphous reddish-brown lump. "Houseplant," she said, and wrapped it up again. The redhead showed him a vial full of minuscule white spheres. "Weaver eggs. Two hundred of them. That's a lot, but I like more curtains and things than most." "Wait a minute," said Alvah, perplexed. "What does a houseplant do?" "Grow a house, of course," the brunette said. She held up another vial full of eggs. "Scavengers." The redhead had a translucent sac with dark specks in it. "Utility trees." "Garbage converter." "This grows into a bed and these is chairbushes." And so on, interminably, while the girls' eyes glittered and their cheeks flushed with enthusiasm. boxes, Alvah gathered, contained the germs of everything that would be needed to set up a Muckfoot household -- beginning with the house itself. A thought struck him: "Does Beej have one of these outfits?" Wide-eyed stares from both girls. "Well, of course!" Alvah shifted uncomfortably. "Funny, she never mentioned it." The girls exchanged another of those enigmatic glances and said nothing. Alvah, for some reason, grew more uncomfortable still. He tried once more. "What about the man -- doesn't he have to put up an#hing?" Yes, the man was expected to supply all the brutes and the seeds for outbuildings and all the crops except the bride's kitchengarden. Everything in and around the home was her province, everything outside was his. "Oh," said Alvah. "But if a young fellow don't have all that through no fault of his own, his clan put up for him and let him pay back when he able." "Ah," said Alvah and turned to make his escape. The redhead called after him, "You thought any about what clan you like to get adopted into, Alvah?" "Uh, no," said Alvah. "I don't think -- " "You talk to Doc Bither. He a elder of the Steins. Mighty good clan!" Alvah bolted. Then there was the Shakespeare business. It began in his third week in the Sticks, when he was already carrying a fleshy Muckfoot vegetable around with him -- a radnip, B. J. called it. He hadn't had the nerve yet to bite into it, but he knew the time was coming when he would. Beej came to him and said, "Alvah, the Rinaldos' drama group is doing Hamlet next Saturday, and they're short a Polonius. Do you think you could study it up by then?" "What's Hamlet? And who's Polonius?" She got the bird out of the library for him and he listened to the play, which turned out to be an archaic version of The Manager of Copenhagen. The text was nothing like the modernized abridgment he was used to, or the Muckfeet's slovenly speech . either. It was full of words like down-gyved and unkennel. It was three-quarters incomprehensible until he began to get the hang of it, but it had a curious power. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, and so on and so on. It rumbled, but it rumbled well.  character Alvah knew as Paul Arnson, an inconsequential old man who only existed in the play to foul up the love affair between the principals and got killed in the third act. Alvah ventured to suggest that he might be of more use as Hamlet, but the director, a dry little man with a surprising boom to his voice, stubbornly insisted that all he needed was a Polonius -- and seemed to intimate, without actually saying so, that Alvah was a dim prospect even for that. Alvah, with blood in his eye, accepted the part. The rehearsals were a nightmare. The lines themselves gave him no trouble -- Alvah was a quick study; in the realies, you had to be -- and neither, at first, did the rustic crudity of the stage he was asked to perform on. Letter-perfect when the other actors w.ere still stuttering and blowing their lines, he walked through the part with quiet competence and put the director's sour looks down to a witless hayseed hostility -- until, three days before the performance, he suddenly awoke to the realization that everyone else in the cast was acting rings around him. This wasn't the realies. There were no microphones to amplify his voice, no cameras to record every change in his expression. And the audience, what there was of it, was going to be right -- out -- there. Alvah went to pieces. Trying to emulate the others', wide gestures and declamatory delivery only threw him further off his stride. He had never had stagefright in his life, but by curtain time on Saturday night, he was a pale and quivering wreck. Dead and dragged off the stage at the end of act three, he got listlessly back into his own clothes and headed for an inconspicuous exit, but the director waylaid him. "Gustad," he said abruptly, "you ever thought of yourself as a professional actor?" "I had some such idea at one time," Alvah said. "Why?" "Well, I don't see why you shouldn't. If you work at it. I never see a man pick up so fast." "What?" cried Alvah, thunderstruck. "You wasn't bad," said the director. "A few rough edges, but a good performance. Now I happen to know some people in a few repertory companies -- the Mondrillo Troupe, the Kalfoglou Repertory, one or two more. If you interested, I'll bird them and see if there's an opening. Don't thank me, don't thank me." He moved off a few steps, then turned. "Oh, and, Gustad -- get back into your costume, will you?" "Uh," said Alvah. "But I'm dead. I mean -- " "For the curtain calls," said the director. "You don't want to miss those." He waved and walked back into the wings. Alvah absently drew out his radnip and crunched off a bite of it. The taste was faintly unpleasant, like that of old protein paste or the wrong variety of culture-cheese, but he chewecf and swallowed 'it. that he had to get out. He didn't put on his costume again. Instead, he rummaged through the property boxes until he found an old pair of moleskiri trousers and a stained squareweb shirt. He put them on, left by the rear door and headed south. South for two reasons. First, because, he hoped, no one would look for him in that direction. Second, because he remembered what Beej had said that first day when they passed the display of tools: "The metal comes from Iron Pits, just a few miles south of here." There might be some slender chance still that he could get the metal he needed, delouse the floater and go home in style -- without the painful necessity of explaining to Wytak what had happened to the floater and all his goods and equipment. If not, he would simply keep on walking. He had to do it now. He had almost waited too long as it was. They had laid out the pattern of a life for him -- to marry Beej, settle down in a house that would grow from a seed Beej kept in a pod-shaped box, be a rustic repertory actor, raise little Muckfeet. And the devil of it was, some unreasonable part of him wanted all of that! A good thing he hadn't stayed for the curtain calls... The Sun declined as he went, until he was walking down a ghost-dim road under the stars, with all the cool cricket-shrill world to himself. He spent the night uncomfortably huddled under a hedge. Birds woke him with a great clamor in the tree-tops shortly after dawn. He washed himself and drank from a stream that crossed the fields, ate a purplishred fruit he found growing nearby, then moved on. Two hours later, he topped a ridge and found his way barred by a miles-long shallow depression in the Earth. Like the rest of the visible landscape, it was filled with an orderly checkerwork of growing plants. There was nothing for it but to go through if he could. But surely he had gone more than "a few miles" by now? The road slanted down the embankment to a gate in a high thorn hedge. Behind the gate was a kind of miniature domed kiosk and, in the kiosk, a sunburned man was dozing with a greenand-purple bird on his shoulder. Alvah inspected a signboard that was entangled somehow in the hedge next to the gate. He was familiar enough by now with the Muckfeet's picture-writing to be fairly sure of what it said. The first symbol was a nail with an ax-head attached to it. That was iron. The second was a few stylized things that resembled fruit seeds. Pits? TE stared through the gate in mounting perplexity. You might call a place like this "Pits," all right, but imagination boggled at calling it a mine. Still... The kiosk, he noticed now, bore a scrawled symbol in orange pigment. He recognized that one, too; it was one of the common name-signs. "Jerry!" he called.  "Rrk," remarked the bird on the sleeping man's shoulder. "Kerry brogue; but the degradation of speech that occurs in London, Glasgow -- " "Oh, damn!" said Alvah. "You, there. Jerry!" "Rrk. Kerry brogue; but the -- " "Jerry!" "Kerry brogue!" shrieked the bird. The sunburned man sat up with a start and seized it by the beak, choking it off in the middle of "degradation." "Oh, hello," he said. "Don't know what it is about a Shaw bird, but they all alike. Can't shut them up." "I'd like," said Alvah, "to look through the -- uh -- Pits. Would that be all right?" "Sure," the man said cheerfully. He opened the gate and led the way down a long avenue between foot-high rows of plants. "I Jerry Finch," 'he said. "Littleton clan. Don't believe you said your name." "Harris," Alvah supplied at random. "I visiting from up north." "Yukes?" the man inquired. Alvah nodded, hoping for the best, and pointed at the plants they were passing. "What these?" "Hinge blanks. Let them to forage last month. Won't have another crop here till August, and a poor one then. I tell Angus -- he's the Pit boss -- I tell him this soil's wore out, but he a pincher -- squeeze the last ton out and then go after the pounds and ounces. You should seen what come off the ringbushes in the east hundred this April. Pitiful. Had to sell them for eyelets." A cold feeling was running up Alvah's spine. He cleared his throat. "Got any knife blades?" he inquired with careful casualness. "Mean bowies? Well, sure -- right over yonder." end of the field and down three steps into the next. The plants here were much taller and darker, with stems thick and gnarled out of all proportion to their height. Here and there among the glossy leaves were incongruous glints of silvery steel. Alvah stooped and peered into the foliage. The silvery glints were perfectly formed six-inch chromesteel knife blades. Each was attached to -- growing from -- the plant by way of a hard brown stem, exactly the right size and shape to serve as a handle. He straightened carefully. "We do things a little different up north. You mind explaining briefly how the Pits works?" Jerry looked surprised, but began readily enough, "'i'hese like any other ferrop)Ositors. They extract the metal from the ores and deposit it in the bowie shape, or whatever it might be. Work from the outside in, of course, so you don't have no wood core to weaken it. We get a year's crops, average, before the ore used up. Then we bring the Earth-movers in, deepen the Pit a few feet, reseed and start over. Ain't much more to it." Alvah stared at the fantastic growths. Well, why not? Plants that grew into knives or doorknobs or... "What about alloys?" he asked. "We got iron, lead and zinc. Carbon from the air. Other metals we got to import in granules. Like we get chrome from the Northwest Federation, mostly. They getting too big for their britches, though. Greedy. I think we going to switch over to you Yukes before long. Not that you fellows is any better, if you ask me, but at least -- " "Rhodium," said Alvah. "Palladium. What about them?" "How that?" "Platinum group." "Oh, sure, I know what you mean. We never use them. No call to. We could get you some, I guess -- I think the Northwests got them. Take a few months, though." "Suppose you wanted to make something out of a rhodopalladium alloy. How long would it take after you got the metals?" "Well, you have to make a bush that would take and put them together, right proportions, right size, right shape. Depends. I guess if you was in a hurry -- " "Never mind," said Alvah wearily. "Thanks for the information." He turned and started back toward the gate. When he was halfway there, he heard a hullabaloo break out somewhere behind him. "Waw" the voices seemed to be shouting. "Wawf Wawf" hind him, Jerry and the bird on his shoulder were in identical neck-straining attitudes. Beyond them, on the near side of a group of low buildings three hundred yards away, three men were waving their arms madly and shoutting, "Waiv Waw!" "Wawnt to know what it is," the bird squawked. "I wawnt be a Mahn. Violet: you come along with me, to your own -- " "Shut up," said Jerry, then cupped his hands and yelled, "Angus, what is it?" "Chicagos," the answer drifted back. "Just got word! They dusting Red Pits! Come on!" Jerry darted a glance over his shoulder. "Come on!" he repeated and broke into a loping run toward the buildings. Alvah hesitated an instant, then followed. With strenuous effort, he managed to catch up to the other man. "Where are we running to?" he panted. "Red Pits?" "Don't talk foolish," Jerry gasped. "We running to shelter." He glanced back the way they had come. "Red Pits over that way." Alvah risked a look and then another. The first time, he wasn't sure. The second time, the dusting of tiny particles over the horizon had grown to a cluster of visibly swelling black dots. Other running figures were converging on the buildings as Angus and Jerry approached. The dots were capsule shapes, perceptibly elongated, the size of a fingernail, a thumbnail, a thumb... And under them on the land was a hurtling streak of goldendun haze, like dust stirred by a huge invisible finger. Rounding the corner of the nearest building, Jerry popped through an open doorway. Alvah followed -- And was promptly seized from either side, long enough for something heavy and hard to hit him savagely on the nape of the neck. shallow vessel half full of a viscous clear liquid, with a great rounded veined and patterned glistening lump immersed in it, transparent in the phosphor-light that glowed from the sides of the container -- a single living cell in mitosis, so grossly enlarged that every gene of every paired chromosome was visible. B. J. watched from the other side of the table, silent, breathing carefully, as the man's thick fingers dipped a hair-thin probe with niinuscule precision, again and again, into the yeasty mass, exercising a particle, splitting another, delicately shaving a third. From time to time, she glanced at a sheet of horn intricately inscribed with numbers and genetic symbols. The chart was there for her benefit, not for Bither's -- he never paused or faltered. Finally, he sat back and covered the pan. "Turn on the lights and put that in the reduction fluid, will you, Beej? I bushed." She whistled a clear note, and the dark globes fixed to the ceiling glowed to blue-white lifer "You going to grow it right away?"  "Have to, I guess. Dammit, Beej, I hate making weapons." "Not our choice. When you think it be?" He shrugged. "War meeting this afternoon over at Council Flats. They let us know when it be." She was silent until she had transferred the living lump from one container to another and put it away. Then, "Hear anything more?" "They dusting every ore-bed Crystal, Butler's -- " "Butler's! That worked out." "I know it. We let them land there. They find out." After another pause, Bither said, "No word about Alvah, Beej. I sorry." She nodded. "Wouldn't be, this early." He looked at her curiously. "You still think he be back?" "If the dust ain't got him. Lay you odds." "Well," said Bither, lifting the cover of another pan to peer into it, "I hope you -- " "Ozark Lake nine-one-twofive," said a reedy voice from the corner. "Ozark Lake nine -- " "Get that, will you, Beej?" B. J. picked up the ocher spheroid from its shelf and said into its tympanum, "Bither Laboratories." "This Angus Littleton at Iron Pits," the thing said. "Let me talk to Bither." She passed it over, holding a loop of its rubbery cord -- the beginning of a miles-long sheathed bundle of cultivated neurons that linked it, via a "switchboard" organism, with thousands like it in this area alone, and with millions more across the continent. "This Doc Bither. What is it, Angus?" "Something funny for you, Doc. We got a couple prisoners here, one a floater pilot, other a Chicago spy." "Well, what you want me to -- " "Wait, can't you? This spy claim he know you. Doc. Say his name Custard. Alvah Custard." window, puzzled and angry. He had been in the room for about half an hour, while things were going on outside. He had tried to break the window. The pane had bent slightly. It was neither glass nor plastic, and it wasn't breakable. Outside, the last of the invading floaters was dipping down toward the horizon, pursued by a small darting black shape. Golden-dun haze obscured all the foreground except the first few rows of plants, which were drooping on their stems. The squadron had made one grand circle of the mine area, dusting as they went, before the Muckfeet on their incredibly swift flyers -- birds or reptiles, Alvah couldn't tell which -- had risen to engage them. Since then, a light breeze from the north had carried the stuff dropped over the Pits: radioactive dust with a gravitostatic charge to make it rebound and spread -- and then, with its polarity reversed, cling like grim death where it fell. He turned and looked at the other man, sitting blank-faced and inattentive, wearing rumpled sky-blue uniform, on the bench against the inner wall. Most of the squadron had flown off to the west after that first pass, and had either escaped or been forced down somewhere beyond the Pits. This fellow had crash-landed in the fields not five hundred yards from Alvah's window. Alvah had seen the Muckfeet walking out to the wreck -- strolling fantastically through the deadly haze -- and turkey trotting their prisoner back again. A little later, someone had opened the door and shoved the man in, and there he had sat ever since. His skin-color was all right. He was breathing evenly and seemed in no discomfort. As far as Alvah could see, there was not a speck of the deathdust anywhere on his skin, hair or clothing. But mad as it was, this was not the most incongruous thing about him. His uniform was of a cut and pattern that Alvah had seen only in pictures. There was a C on each gleaming button and, on dently a Floater Force officer from Chicago. The only trouble was that Alvah recognized him. He was a grips by day at the Seven Boroughs studios, famous for his dirty jokes, which he acquired at his night job in the Under Queens Power Station. He was a lieutenant j.g. in the N. Y. F. F. Reserve, and his name was Joe "Dimples" Mundry. Alvah went over and sat down beside him again. Mundry's normally jovial face was set in wooden lines. His eyes focused on Alvah, but without recognition. "Joe -- " "My name," said Mundry obstinately, "is Bertram Palmer, Float Lieutenant, Windy City Regulars. My serial number is # ." knew. Alvah hadn't been able to get another word out of him. Name, rank and serial number -- that was normal. Members of the armed services were naturally conditioned to say nothing else if captured. But why throw in the name of his outfit? One, that was the way they did things in Chicago, and there just happened to be a Chicago soldier who looked and talked exactly like Joe Mundry, who had the same scars on his knuckles from brawls with the generator monkeys. Two, Alvah's mind had snapped. Three, this was a ringer foisted on Alvah for some incomprehensible purpose by the Muckfeet. And four -- a wild and terrible suspicion... Alvah tried again. "Listen, Joe, I'm your friend. We're on the same side. I'm not a Muckfoot." "My name is Bertram Palmer, Float Lieutenant -- " "Joe, Lni leveling with you. Listen -- remember the Music Hall story, the one about the man who could... Alvah explained in detail what the man could do. It was obscenely improbable and very funny, if you liked that sort of thing, and it was a story Joe had told him two days before he left New York. A gleam of intelligence came into Joe's eyes. "What's the punchline?" he demanded. " 'What the hell did you want to change the key on me for?' " Alvah replied promptly. Joe looked at him speculatively. "That might be a old joke. Maybe they even know it in the Sticks. And my name isn't Joe." He really believed he was Bertram Palmer of the Windy City Regulars, that mucjh seemed clear. Also, if it was possible that the Muckfeet knew that story, it was likelier still that the Chicagolanders knew it. "All right," said Alvah, "ask me a question -- spmething I couldn't know if I were a Muckfoot. Go ahead, anything. A place, or something that happened recently, or whatever you want." A visible struggle was going on behind Joe's face. "Can't think of anything," he said at last. "Funny." Alvah had been watching him closely. "Let's try this. Did you see Manhattan Morons?" Joe looked blank. "What?" "The realie. You mean you missed it? Manhattan Morons? Till I saw that, I never really knew what a comical bunch of weak-minded, slobber-mouthed, monkey faced drooling idiots those New Yorkers -- " Joe's expression had not changed, but a dull red flush had crept up over his collar. He made an inarticulate sound and lunged for Alvah's throat. When Angus Littleton opened the door, with Jerry and B. J. behind him, the two men were rolling on the floor. ' ' was a spy?" B. J. demanded. They were a tight self-conscious group in the corridor. Alvah was nursing a split lip. "Said he a Yuke," Jerry offered, "but didn't seem too sure, so I said the Yukes greedy. He never turn a hair. And he act like he never see a mine before. Things like that." B. J. nodded. "It was a natural mistake, I guess. Well, thanks for calling us, Angus." "Easy," said Angus, looking glum. "We ain't out of the rough yet, Beej." "What do you mean? He didn't have anything to do with this attack -- he's from New York." "He say he is, but how you know? What make you think he ain't from Chicago?" Alvah said, "While you're asking that, you might ask another question about him." He jerked a thumb toward the closed door. "What makes you think he is?" The other three stared at him thoughtfully. "Alvah," Beej began, "what are you aiming at? Do you think -- " "I'm not sure," Alvah interrupted. "I mean I'm sure, but I'm not sure I want to tell you. Look," he said, turning to Angus, "let me talk to her alone for a few minutes, will you?" Angus hesitated, then walked away down the hall, followed by Jerry. "You've got to explain some things to me about this raid," said Alvah when they were out of hearing. "I saw those floaters dusting and it was the real thing. I can tell by the way the plants withered. But your people were walking around out there. Him, too -- the prisoner. How come?" "Antirads," said the girl. "Little para-insects, like the metallophage -- the metallophage was developed from them. When you've been exposed, the antirads pick the dust particles off you and . deposit them in radproof pots. They die in the pots, too, and We bury the whole -- " "All right," Alvah said. "How long have you had those things? Is there any chance the Cities knew about it?" "The antirads were developed toward the end of the last City war. That was what ended it. At first we stopped the bombing, and then when they used dust -- You never heard of any of this?" "No," Alvah told her. "Third question, what are you going to do about Chicago now, on account of this raid?" ears," B. J. said gravely. "We never did before partly because it wasn't necessary. We knew for the last thirty years that the Cities could never be more than a nuisance to us again. But this isn't just a raid. They've attacked us all over this district -- ruined the crops in every mine. We must put an end to it now -- not that it makes much difference, this year or ten years from now. And it isn't as if we couldn't save the people..." "Never mind that," said Alvah abstractedly. Then her last words penetrated. "No, go ahead -- what?" "I started to say, we think we'll be able to save the people, or most of them -- partly thanks to what we learned from you. It's just Chicago we're going to destroy, not the -- " "Learned from me?" Alvah repeated. "What do you mean?" "We learned that, when it's a question of survival, a City man can overcome his conditioning. You proved that. Did you eat the radnip?" "Yes." "There, you see? And you'll eat another and, sooner or later, you'll realize they taste good. A human being can learn to like anything that's needful to him. We're adaptable -- you can't condition that out of us without breaking us." Alvah stared at her. "But you spent over two weeks on me. How are you going to do that with all at once?" "We can do it. You were the pilot model -- two weeks for you. But now that we know how, we're pretty sure we can do it in three days -- the important part, getting them to eat the food. And it's a good thing the storehouses are full, all over this continent." They looked at each other silently for a moment. "But the Cities have to go," B. J. said. "Fourth and last question," he said. "If a City knew aboUt your radiation defenses all along, what would be their reason for attacking you this way?" "Our first idea was that it was just plain desperation -- they had to do something and there wasn't anything they could do that would work, so they just did something that wouldn't. Or ' maybe they hoped they'd be able to hold the mines long enough to get some metal out, even though they knew it was foolish to hope." "That was your first idea. What was your second?" She hesitated. "You remember what I told you, that the Cities cannibalized each other for a while, the big ones draining population away from the little ones and reclaiming their metals -- and you remember I said that had gone as far as it could?" "Yes." "Well, when the big fish have eaten up all the little fish, they can eat each other till there's just one big fish left." "And?" asked Alvah tensely. "And maybe one City might think that, if they got us to make war on another, they could step in when the fighting was over and get all the metals they'd need to keep them going for years. So they might send raiding parties out in the other City's uniforms, and condition them to think they really were from that City. Was that what happened, Alvah?" A lvah nodded reluctantly. "I don't understand it. They must have started planning this as soon as I stopped communicating. It doesn't make sense. They couldn't be that desperate -- or maybe they could. Anyway, it's a dirty stunt. It isn't like New York." She said nothing -- too polite to contradict him, Alvah supposed. Down at the end of the hall, Angus was beginning to look impatient. Alvah said, "So now you'll pull New York down?" "Alvah, it may sound funny, but I think you know this, really -- you're doing your people a favor." "If that's so," he said wryly, "then New York was 'really' trying to do one for Chicago." "I was hoping you'd see that it doesn't matter. It might have been Chicago that went first, or Denver, or any of the others, but that isn't important -- they all have to go. What's important is the people. This may be another thing that's hard for you to accept, but they're going to be happier, most of them." And maybe she was right, Alvah thought, if you counted in everybody, labor pool, porters and all. Why shouldn't you count them, he asked himself defiantly -- they were people, weren't they? Maybe the index of civilization was not only how much you had, but how hard you had to work for it -- incessantly, like the New Yorkers, holding down two or three jobs at once, because the City's demands were endless -- or, like the Muckfeet, judiciously and with honest pleasure. "Alvah?" said the girl. She put her question no more explicitly than that, but he knew what she meant. "Yes, Beej," replied Alvah Gustad, Muckfoot. IN the Jersey flats, hidden by a forest of traveler trees, a sprawling settlement took form -- mile after mile of forcedgrowth dwellings, stables, administration buildings, instruction centers. It was one of five. There was another farther north in Jersey, two in the Poconos and one in the vestigial state of Connecticut. They lay empty, waiting, their roofs sprouting foliage that perfectly counterfeited the surrounding forests. Roads had been cleared, converging toward the City, ending just short of the half-mile strip of wasteland that girdled New York, and it was there that Alvah stood. He found it strange to feel himself ready to walk unprotected across that stretch of country, knowing it to be acrawl with tiny organisms that had been developed not to tolerate Man's artificial buildings, whether of stone, metal, cement or plastics, but crumbled them all to the ground. Stranger still to be able to visualize the crawling organisms without horror or disgust. But the strangest of all was to be looking at the City from this viewpoint. The towers stared back at him across the surrounding wall, tall and shining and proud, the proudest human creation -- a century ago. Pitifully outdated today, the gleaming Cities fought back, unaware that they had lost long ago, that their bright spires and elaborate gadgets were as antiquated as polished armor would have been against a dun-painted motorized army. "I wish I could go with you," said Beej from the breathing forest at his back. "You can't," Alvah said without turning. "They wouldn't let you through the gate alive. They know me, but even so. I'm not sure they'll let me in after all this time. Have to wait and see." "You know you don't have to go. I mean -- " "I know what you mean," said Alvah unhappily, "and you're right. But all the same, I do have to go. Look, Beej, you've got that map I drew. It's a ten-to-one chance that, if I don't make the grade, they'll put me in the quarantine cells right inside the wall. So you're not to worry. Okay?" "Okay," she promised, worried. He kissed her and watched her fade back into the forest where the others were -- Bither and Artie Brumbacher and a few others from home, the rest Jerseys and other clansmen from the Seaboard Federation -- cheerful, matter-of-fact people who were going to bear most of the burdens of what was coming, and never tired of reminding the inlanders of the fact. He turned and walked out across the wasteland, crunching the dry weeds under his feet. around the City and, beyond the moat, high in the wall, a closed gateway -- corroded tight, probably: it was a very long time since the City had had any traffic except by air. But there was a spy tower above the gate. Alvah walked up directly opposite its bulbous idiot eyes, waved, and then waited. After a long time, an inconspicuous port in the tower squealed open and a fist-sized dark ovoid darted out across the fiames. It came to rest in midair, two yards from Alvah, clicked and said crisply, "State your name and business." "Alvah Gustad. I just got back from a confidential mission for the City Manager. Floater broke down, communicator, everything. I had to walk back. Tell him I'm here." The ovoid hovered exactly where it was, as if pinned against the air. Alvah waited. When he got tired of standing, he dropped his improvised knapsack on the ground and sat on it. Finally the ovoid said harshly, in another voice, "Who are you and what do you want?" Alvah patiently gave the satne answer. "What do you mean, broke down?" "Broke down," said Alvah. "Wouldn't run any more." Silence. He settled himself for another long wait, but it was only five minutes or thereabouts before the ovoid said, "Strip." When he had done so, the gate opposite broke open with a scream of tortured metal and ground itself back into a recess in the wall. The drawbridge, a long rust-pitted tongue of metal, thrust out and down to span the moat, a wall of flame on either side of it. Alvah walked across nimbly, the metal already hot against his naked soles, and the drawbridge whipped back into its socket. The gate screamed shut. room was the same, the anthems were the same. Alvah, disinfected, shaved all over and clad in an airtight glassine overall with its own air supply, stopped short two paces inside the door. The man behind the Manager's desk was not Wytak. It was jowly, red-faced Ellery , McArdle, Commissioner of the Department of War. One of the guards prodded Alvah and he kept going up to the desk. "Now I think I get it," he said, staring at McArdle. "When -- " McArdle's cold gaze flickered. Then his heavy head dropped forward a trifle, and he said, "Finish what you were saying, Gustad." "I was about to remark," Alvah said, "that when Wytak's pet project flopped, he lost enough support to let you impeach him. Is that right?" McArdle nodded and seemed to lose interest. "Your feet are not swollen or blistered, Gustad. You didn't walk back from the Plains. How did you get here?" Alvah took a deep breath. "We flew -- on a passenger roc -- as far as the Adirondacks. We didn't want to alarm you by too much air traffic so near the City, so we joined a freight caravan there." McArdle's stony face did not alter, but all the meaning went suddenly out of it. It was as if the man himself had stepped back and shut a door. The porter behind his chair swayed and looked as if he were about to faint. Alvah heard one of the guards draw in his breath sharply. ' "Fthuh!" said McArdle abruptly, his face contorting. "Let's get this over. What do you know about the military plans of the Muckfeet? Answer me fully. If I'm not satisfied that you do, I'll have you worked over till I am satisfied." Alvah, who had been feeling something like St. George and something like a plucked chicken, discovered that anger could be a very comforting thing. "That's what I came here to do," he said tightly. "The Muckfeets' military plans are about what you might have expected, after that lousy trick of yours. They know it wasn't Chicago that raided them." McArdle started and made as if to rise. Then he sank back, staring fixedly at Alvah. "They've had a gutful. They're going to finish New York." "When?" said McArdle, biting the word off short. "That depends on you. If they'll wait long enough for you to dicker with them. Otherwise, if I'm not back in about an hour, the fun starts." ifJ. "Green alert " pressed the stud again and laced his fingers together on the desk. "Hurry it up," he said to Alvah. "Let's have the rest." "I'm going to ask you to do something difficult," said Alvah. "It's this -- think about what I'm telling you. You're not thinking now, you're just reacting -- " He heard a slight movement behind him, saw McArdle's eyes flicker and his hand make a Not now gesture. "You're in the same room with a man who's turned Muckfoot and it disgusts you. You'll be cured of that eventually -- you can be. I'm the proof -- but all I want you to do now it put it aside and use your brains. Here are the facts. Your raiding parties got the shorts beat off them. I saw one of the fights -- it lasted about twenty minutes. The Muckfeet could have polished off the Cities any time in the last thirty years. They haven't 'done it till now, because -- " McArdle was beating time with his fingertips on the polished ebonite. He wasn't really listening, Alvah saw, but there was nothing for it except to go ahead. " -- they had the problem of deconditioning and re-educating nocent people, or else letting them starve to death. Now they have the knowledge they need. They can -- " "The terms," said McArdle. "They're going to close down this -- this reservation," Alvah said. "They'll satisfy you in any way you like that they can do it by force. If you help, it can be an orderly process in which nobody gets hurt and everybody gets the best possible break. And they'll keep the City intact as a museum. I talked them into that. Or, if they have to, they'll take the place apart slab by slab." Me Ar die's mouth was working violently. "Take him out and kill him, for City's sake! And, Morgan!" he called when Alvah and his guards were halfway to the door... "Yes, Mr. Manager." "When you're through, dump him out the gate he came in." TT was a pity about Wytak, Alvah's brain was telling him frozenly. Wytak was a scoundrel or h could never have got where he was -- had been -- but he wasn't afraid of a new idea. It might have been posssible to deal with W#rtak. "Where we going to do it?" the younger one asked nervously. He had been pale and sweating in the floater all the way across Middle Jersey. "In the disinfecting chamber," Morgan said, gesturing with his pistol. "Then we haul him straight out. In there, you." "Well, let's get it over with," the younger one said. "I'm sick." "You think I'm not sick?" said Morgan in a strained voice. He gave Alvah a final shove into the middle of the room and stood back, adjusting his gun. Alvah found himself saying calmly, "Not that way. Morgan, unless you want to turn black and shrivel up a second after." "What's he talking about?" the boy whispered shakily. "Nothing," said Morgan. The hand with the gun moved indecisively. "To puncture me," Alvah warned, "you've got to puncture the suit. And I've been eating Muckfeet food for the last month and a half. I'm full of microorganisms -- swarming with them. They'll bloop out of me straight at you, Morgan." Both men jerked back, as if they had been stung. "I'm getting outa here!" said the boy, grabbing for the door stud. Morgan blocked him. "Stay here!" "What're you going to do?" the younger one asked. He swore briefly. "We'll tell the O. D. Come on." The door closed and locked solidly behind them. Alvah looked to see if there was a way to double-lock it from his side, but there wasn't. He tried the opposite door to make sure it was locked, which it was. Then he examined the disinfectant nozzles, wondering if they could be used to squirt corrosive in on him. He decided they probably couldn't and, anyhow, he had no way to spike the nozzles. Then there was nothing to do but sit in the middle of the bare room and wait, which he did. The next thing that happened was that he heard a fint far-off continuous noise through the almost soundproof door. He stood up and went over and put his ear against the door, and decided it was his imagination. Then there was a noise, and he jumped back, his skin tingling all over, just before the door slid open. The sudden maniacal clangor of a bell swept Morgan into the room with it, wild-eyed, his cap missing, drooling from a corner of his mouth, his gun high in one white-knuckled fist. "Glah!" said Morgan and pulled the trigger. hard against his ribs, and the room blurred. Then he realized that there hadn't been any hiss of an ejected pellet. And he was still on his feet. And Morgan, with his mouth stretched open all the way back to the uvula, was standing there a yard away, staring at him and pulling the trigger repeatedly. Alvah stepped forward half a pace and put a straight left squarely on the point of Morgan's jaw. As the man fell, there were shrieks and running footsteps in the outer room. Somebody in Guard uniform plunged past the doorway, shouting incoherently, caromed off a wall, dwindled down a corridor. Then the room was full of leaping men in motley. The first of them was Artie Brumbacher, almost unrecognizable because he was grinning from ear to ear. He handed Alvah a four-foot knobkerrie and a bulging skin bag and said, "Le's go!" The streets were fuU of grounded floaters and stalled surface cars. The bells had fallen silent, and so had the faint omnipresent vibration that was like silence itself until it was gone. Not a motor was turning in the Borough of Jersey. Occasional chittering sounds floated on the air, and muffled buzzings and other odd sounds, all against the background chorus of faraway shrieks that rose and fell. At the corner of Middle Orange and Weehawken, opposite the Superior Court Building, they came upon a squad of Regulars who had throwrl away their useless guns and picked up an odd lot of assorted bludgeons -- lengths of pipe, tripods and the like. "Now you'll see," said Artie. The Regulars set up a ragged yell and came running forward. The two Muckfeet on either side of Alvah, Artie and the bucktoothed one called Lafe, dipped heaping darkbrown handfuls out of the bags they carried slung from their shoulders. Alvah followed suit, and recognized the stuff at last -- bran meal, soaked in some fragrant syrup until it was mucilaginous and heavy. Artie swung first, then Lafe, and Alvah last -- and the soggy lumps smacked the foremost faces. The squad broke, wiping frenziedly. But you couldn't wipe the stuff off. It clung coldly and grainily to he hair on the backs of your hands and your eyelashes and the nap of your clothing. All you could do was move it around. One berserker with a smeared face didn't stop, and Lafe dropped him with a knobkerrie between the eyes. One more, a white-faced youth, stood miraculously untouched, still hefting his club. He took a stride forward menacingly. Grinning, Artie raised another glob of the mash and ate it, smacking his lips. The youth spun around, walked drunkenly to the nearest wall and was rackingly sick. A N hour later, Knickerbocker Circle in Over Manhattan was littered with ameba-shaped puddles of clear plastic. Overhead, the stuff was hanging in festoons from the reticulated framework of the Roof and, for the first time in a century, an unfiltered wind was blowing into New York. Halfway up the sheer facade of the Old Movie House, the roc that had brought Alvah from Jersey was flapping along, a wingtip almost brushing the louvers, while its rider sprinkled pale dust from a sack. Farther down the street, a sickly green growth was already visible on cornices and window frames. The antique neon sign of the Old Movie dipped suddenly, its supports softened visibly. It swung, nodded and crashed to the pavement. Three hours later, a little group of whey-faced men in official dress was being loaded aboard a freight roc opposite the underpass to the Cauldwell Floatway in Over Bronnix. Alvah thought he saw McArdle among them, but he couldn't be sure. Twilight -- all the streets that radiated from the heart of the City were afloat with long, slowly surging tides of humanity, dim in the weak glow from the lumen globes plastered haphazardly to the flanks of the buildings. At the end of every street, the Wall was crumbled down and the moat filled, its fire long gone out. And down the new railed walkways from all three levels came the men, women and children, stumbling out into the alien lumenlit night and the strange scents and the wide world. Watching from the hilltop. with his arm around his wife's waist, Alvah saw them being herded into groups and led away, unprotesting -- saw them in the wains, rolling off toward the temporary shelters where, likely as not, they would sleep the night through, too numbed to be afraid of the morrow. In the morning, their teaching would begin. Babylon, Alvah thought, Thebes, Angkor, Lagash, Agade, Tyre, Luxor, and now New York. A City grew out and then in -- it was always the way, whether or not it had a Barrier around it. Growing,it crippled itself and its people -- and died. The weeds overgrew its felled stones. "Like an egg," B. J. said, although he had not spoken. "Omne ex ovum -- but the eggshell has to break." "I know," said Alvah, discovering that the empty ache in his belly was not sentiment but hunger. "Speaking of eggs -- " B. J. gave his arm a reassuring little pat. "Anything you want, dear. Radnip, orangoe, pearots, fleetmeat -- you pick the menu." Alvah's mouth began to water. Forecast . Either of the two long novelets in next month's issue would make a fine bet, here is what we're putting up: ever written. It's hard to tell you a little about it without telling you all. The idea, you see, is compressed right into the title itself! desperate advertising campaign in the history of humanity. With Earth rapidly dying, the job of the relief expedition is to remove the survivors. Very humanitarian indeed, but there's one huge problem... the survivors have to be sod on being saved! At least one and possibly two more novelets. Short stories... as many as we can shoehorn into the issue. ologists and answers to your science questions... and our regular features. Be it ever so (A) impossibly squalid or (B) impossibly lovely, there was, respectively, no place in the Galaxy like Station # or; B lame Clay Harbank, if you will, for what happened at Station # of the Sirius Sector; or blame William Peterborough, whom we called the Kid.' I blame no one. But I am a Dorsai man. The trouble began the day the kid joined the station, with his quick hands and his gambler's mind, and found that Clay, alone of all the men there, would not gamble with him -- for all that he claimed to having been a gambling man himself. And so it ran on for four years of service together. But the beginning of the end was the day they came off shift together. They had been out on a duty circuit of the frontier station that housed the twenty of us -- searching the outer bubble for signs of blows or leaks. It's a slow two hour tramp, that duty, even outside the station on the surface of the asteroid where there's no gravity to speak of. We, in the recreation room, off duty, could tell by the sound of their voices as the inner port sucked open and the clanging clash of them removing their spacesuits came echoing to us along the metal corridor, that the Kid had been needling Clay through the whole tour. "Another day," came the Kid's voice, "another fifty credits. And how's the piggy bank coming along, Clay?" I could see Clay carefully controlling his features and his voice. Then his pleasant baritone, softened by the burr of his Tarsusian accent, came smoothly to us. "Like a gentleman. Kid,' he answered. "He never overeats and so he runs no danger of indigestion." It was a neat answer, based on the fact that the Kid's own service account was swollen with his winnings from the rest of the crew. Hut the Kid was too thickskinned for rapier thrusts. He laughed; and they finished removing their equipment and came on into the recreation room. They made a striking picture as they entered, for they were enough alike to be brothers -- although father and son would have been a more likely relationship, considering the difference in their ages. Both were tall, dark, wideshouldered men with lean faces, but experience had weathered the softer lines from Clay's face and drawn thin parentheses about the corners of his mouth. There were other differences, too; but you could see in the Kid the youth that Clay had been, and in Clay the man that the Kid would some day. be. "Hi, Clay," I said. "Hello, Mort," he said, sitting down beside me. "Hi, Mort," said the Kid. I ignored him; and for a moment he tensed. I could see the anger flame up in the ebony depths of his black pupils under the heavy eyebrows. He was a big man; but I come from the Dorsai Planets and a Dorsai man fights to the death, if he fights at all. And, in consequence, among ourselves, we of Dorsai are a polite people. But politeness was wasted on the Kid -- as was Clay's delicate irony. With men like the Kid, you have to use a club. We were in bad shape. The twenty of us at Frontier Station #, on the periphery of the human area just beyond Sirius, had gone sour, and half the men had applications in for transfer. The trouble between Clay and the Kid was splitting the station wide open. We were all in the Frohtier Service for money; that was the root of the trouble. Fifty credits a day is good pay -- but you have to sign up for a ten year hitch. You can buy yourself out -- but that costs a hundred thousand. Figure it out for yourself. Nearly six years if you saved every penny you got. So most go in with the idea of staying the full decade. That was Clay's idea. He had gambled most of his life away. He had won and lost several fortunes. Now he was getting old and tired and he wanted to go back -- to Lulungomeena, on the little planet of Tarsus, which was the place he had come from as a young man. But he was through with gambling. He said money made that way never stuck, but ran away again like quicksilver. So he drew his pay and banked it. But the Kid was out for a the rest of the crew had given him more than enough to buy his way out and leave him a nice stake. And perhaps he would have done just that, if it hadn't been that the Service account of Clay's drew him like an El Dorado. He could not go off and leave it. So he stayed with the outfit, riding the older man unmercifully. themes. He pretended to disbelieve that Clay had ever been a gambler; and he derided Lulungomeena, Clay's birthplace : the older man's goal and dream, and the one thing he could be drawn into talk about. For, to Clay, Lulungomeena was beautiful, the most wonderful spot in the Universe; and with an old man's sick longing for home, he could not help saying so. "Mort," said the Kid, ignoring the rebuff and sitting down beside us, "what's a Hixabrod like?" My club had not worked so well, after all. Perhaps, I, too, was slipping. Next to Clay, I was the oldest man on the crew, which was why we were close friends. I scowled at the Kid. "Why?" I asked. "We're having one for a visitor," he said. Immediately, all talk around the recreation room ceased and all attention was focused on the Kid. All aliens had to clear through a station like ours when they crossed the frontier from one of the other great galactic power groups into human territory. But isolated as Station # was, it was seldom an alien came our way, and when one did, it was an occasion. Even Clay succumbed to the general interest. "I didn't know that," he said. "How'd you find out?" "The notice came in over the receiver when you were down checking the atmosphere plant," answered the Kid with a careless wave of his hand. "I'd already filed it when you came up. What'll he be like, Mort?" I had knocked around more than any of them -- even Clay. This was my second stretch in the Service. I remembered back about twenty years, to the Denebian Trouble. "Stiff as a poker," I said. "Proud as Lucifer, honest as sunlight and tight as a camel on his way through the eye of a needle. Sort of a humanoid, but with a face like a collie dog. You know the Hixabrodian reputation, don't you?" Somebody at the back of the crowd said no, although they may have been doing it just to humor me. Like Clay with his Lulungomeena, old age was making me garrulous. "They're the first and only mercenary ambassadors in the known Universe," I said. "A Hixabrod can be hired, but he can't be influenced, bribed or forced to come up with anything but the cold truth -- and, brother, it's cold the way a Hixabrod serves it up to you. That's why they're so much in demand. If any kind of political dispute comes up, from planetary to inter-alien power group levels, both sides have to hire a Hixabrod to represent them in the discussions. That way they know the other side is being honest with them. The opposing Hixabrod is a living guarantee of that." "He sounds good," said the Kid. "What say we get together and throw him a good dinner during his twenty-four hour stopover?" "You won't get much in the way of thanks from him," I grunted. "They aren't built that way." "Let's do it anyway," said the Kid. "Be a little excitement for a change." through the room. I was outvoted. Eyen Clay liked the idea. "Hixabrods eat what we eat, don't they?" asked the Kid, making plans. "Okay, then, soups, salad, meats, champagne and brandy -- " he ran on, ticking the items off on his fingers. For a moment, his enthusiasm had us all with him. But then, just at the end, he couldn't resist getting in one more dig at Clay. "Oh, yes," he finished, "and for entertainment, you can tell him about Lulungomeena, Clay." Clay winced -- not obviously, but we all saw a shadow cross his face. Lulungomeena on Tarsus, his birthplace, held the same sort of obsession for him that his Service account held for the Kid; but he could not help being aware that he was prone to let his tongue run away on the subject of its beauty. For it was where he belonged, in the stomach-twisting, throataching way that sometimes only talk can relieve. I was a Dorsai man and older than the rest. I understood. No one should make fun of the bond tying a man to his home world. It is as real as it is intangible. And to joke about it is cruel.  But the Kid was too young to know that yet. He was fresh from Earth -- Earth, where none of the rest of us had been, yet which, hundreds of years before, had been the origin of us all. He was eager and strong and contemptuous of emotion. He saw, as the rest of us recognized also, that Clay's tendency to let his talk wander ever to the wonder of Lulungomeena was the first slight crack in what had once been a man of unflawed steel. It was the first creeping decay of age. But, unlike the rest of us, who hid our boredom out of sympathy, the Kid saw here a chance to break Clay and bis resolution to do no more gambling. So he struck out constantly at this one spot so deeply vital that Clay's self-possession was no defense. Now, at this last blow, the little fires of anger gathered in the older man's eyes. "That's enough," he said harshly. "Leave Lulungomeena out of the discussion." "But somehow you keep reminding me of it. That and the story that you once were a gambler. If you won't prove the last one, how can you expect me to believe all you say about the first?" The veins stood out on Clay's forehead; but he controlled himself. "I've told you a thousand times," he said between his teeth. "Money made by gambling doesn't stick. You'll find that out for yourself one of these days." "Words," said the Kid airily. "Only words." For a second. Clay stood staring whitely at him, not even breathing. I don't know if the Kid realized his danger or cared, but I didn't breathe, either, until Clay's chest expanded and he turned abruptly and walked out of the recreation room. We heard his bootsteps die away down the corridor toward his room in the dormitory section. it. It was his second shift time, when most of the men in the recreation room had to go on duty. I ran the Kid to the groimd in the galley where he was fixing himself a sandwich. He looked up, a little startled, more than a little on the defensive, as I came in. "Oh, hi, Mort," he said with a pretty good imitation of casualness. "What's up?" "You," I told him. "Are you looking for a fight with Clay?" "No," he drawled with his mouth full. "I wouldn't exactly say that." "Well, that's what you're liable to get." "Look, Mort," he said, and then paused until he had swallowed. "Don't you think Clay's old enough to look after himself?" I felt a slight and not unpleasant shiver run down between my shoulder-blades and my eyes began to grow hot. It was my Dorsai blood again. It must have showed on my face, for the Kid, who had been sitting negligently on one edge of the galley table, got up in a hurry. "Hold on, Mort," he said. "Nothing personal." I fought the old feeling down and said as calmly as I could, "I just dropped by to tell you something. Clay has been around a lot longer than you have. I'd advise you to lay off him." "Afraid he'll get hurt?" "No," I answered. "I'm afraid you will." The Kid snorted with sudden laughter, half choking on his sandwich. "Now I get it. You think I'm too young to take care of myself." "Something like that, but not the way you think. I want to tell you something about yourself and you don't have to say whether I'm right or wrong -- you'll let me know without words." "Hold it," he said, turning red. "I didn't come out here to get psyched." "You'll get it just the same. And it's not for you only -- it's for all of us, because men thrown together as closely as we are choose up sides whenever there's conflict, and that's as dangerous for the rest of us as it is for you." "Then the rest of you can stay out of it." "We can't," I said. "What affects one of us affects us all. Now I'll tell you what you're doing. You came out here expecting to find glamor and excitement. You found monotony and boredom instead, not realizing that that's what space is like almost all the time." tainer. "And now you'll say I'm trying to create my own excitement at Clay's expense. Isn't that the standard line?" "I wouldn't know; I'm not going to use it, because that's not how I see what you're doing. Clay is adult enough to stand the monotony and boredom if they'll get him what he wants. He's also learned how to live with others and with himself. He doesn't have to prove himself by beating down somebody either half or twice his age." He took a drink and set the container down on the table. "And I do?" "All youngsters do. It's their way of experimenting with their potentialities and relationships with other people. When they find that out, they can give it up -- they're mature then -- although some never do. I think you will, eventually. The sooner you stop doing it here, though, the better it'll be for you and us." "And if I don't?" he challenged. "This isn't college back on Earth or some other nice, safe home planet, where hazing can be a nuisance, but where it's possible to escape it by going somewhere else. There isn't any 'somewhere else' here. Unless the one doing the hazing sees how reckless and dangerous it is, the one getting hazed takes it as long as he can -- and then something happens." "So it's Clay you're really worried about, after all." "Look, get it through your skull. Clay's a man and he's been through worse than this before. You haven't. If anybody's going to get hurt, it'll be you." He laughed and headed for the corridor door. He was still laughing as it slammed behind him. I let him go. There's no use pushing a bluff after it's failed to work. f'I'HE next day, the Hixabrod came. His name was Dor Lassos. He was typical of his race, taller than the tallest of us by half a head, with a light green skin and that impassive Hixabrodian canine face. I missed his actual arrival, being up in the observation tower checking meteor paths. The station itself was well protected, but some of the ships coming in from time to time could have gotten in trouble with a few of the larger ones that slipped by us at intervals in that particular sector. When I did get free. Dor Lassos had already been assigned to his quarters and the time of official welcoming was over. I went down to see him anyhow on the off-chance that we had mutual acquaintances either among his race or mine. Both of our peoples are few enough in number, God knows, so the possibility wasn't too far-fetched. And, like Clay, I yearned for anything connected with my home. "Wer velt (Thatchen, Hixabrod -- " I began, walking into his apartment -- and stopped short. The Kid was there. He looked at me with an odd expression on his face. "Do you speak Hixabrodian?" he asked incredulously. I nodded. I had learned it on extended duty during the Denebian Trouble. Then I remembered my manners and turned back to the Hixabrod; but he was already started on his answer. "En es Ter, I tu, Dorsaiven" returned the collie face, expressionlessly. "Da Tr'amgen lang. Met zurres nebent?" . "Em getiuc. Me mi Dorsai fene. Nona ne -- ves luc Les Lassos?" He shcxk his head. Well, it had been a shot in the dark an # way. There was only the faintest chance that he had known our old interpreter at the time of the Denebian Trouble. The Hixabrods have no family system of nomenclature. They take their names from the names of older Hixabrods they admire or like. I bowed politely to him and left. It was not imtil later that it occurred to me to wonder what in the Universe the Kid could ' find to talk about with a Hixabrod. about Clay. Since my bluff with the Kid had failed, I thought I might perhaps try with Clay himself. At first I waited for an opportune moment to turn up: but following the last argument with the Kid, he'd been sticking to his quarters. I finally scrapped the casual approach and went to see him. I found him in his quarters, reading. It was a little shocking to find that tall, still athletic figure in a dressing gown like an old man, eyes shaded by the lean fingers of one long hand, poring over the little glow of a scanner with the lines unreeling before his eyes. But he looked up as I came "in, and the smile on his face was the smile I had grown familiar with over four years of close living together. "What's that?" I asked, nodding at the book scanner. He set it down and the little light went out, the lines stopped unreeling. "A bad novel," he said, smiling, "by a poor author. But they're both Tarsusian." I took the chair he had indicated. "Mind if I speak straight out. Clay?" "Go ahead," he invited. "The Kid," I said bluntly. "And you. The two of you can't go on this way." "Well, old fire-eater," answered Clay lightly, "what've you got to suggest?" "Two things. And I want you to think both of them over carefully before answering. First, we see if we can't get up a ninetenths majority here in the station and petition him out as incompatible." "We can't do that, Mort." "I think I can get the signatures if I ask it," I said. "Everybody's pretty tired of him... They'd come across." "It's not that and you know it," said Clay. "Transfer by petition isn't supposed to be prejudicial, but you and I know it is. He'd be switched to some hardcase station, get in worse trouble there, and end up in a penal post generally shot to hell. He'd know who to blame for it, and he'd hate us for the rest of his life." "What of it? Let him hate us." "I'm a Tarsusian. It'd bother me and I couldn't do it." "All right," I said. "Dropping that, 'then, you've got nearly seven years in, total, and half the funds you need to buy out. I've got nearly enough saved, in spite of myself, to make up the rest. In addition, for your retirement. I'll sign over to you my pay for the three years I've got left. Take that and get out of the Service. It isn't what you figured on having, but half a loaf..." "And how about your homegoing?" he asked. "Look at me." He looked; and I knew what he was seeing -- the broken nose, the scars, the lined face -- the Dorsai face. "I'll never go home," I said. He sat looking at me for a long moment more, and I fancied I saw a little light burn deep in back of' his eyes. But then the light went out and I knew that I'd lost with him, too. "Maybe not," he said quietly. "But I'm not going to be the one that keeps you from it." I left him to his book. continuously, with someone on duty all the time. However, for special occasions, like this dinner we had arranged for the Hixabrod, it was possible, by getting work done ahead of time and picking the one four hour stretch during the twenty-four when there were no messages or ships due in, to assemble everybody in the station on an offduty basis. So we were all there that evening, in the recreation room, which had been cleared and set up with a long table for the dinner. We finished our cocktails, sat down at the table and the meal began. As it will, the talk during the various courses turned to things outside the narrow limits of our present lives. Remembrances of places visited, memories of an earlier life, and the comparison of experiences, some of them pretty weird, were the materials of which our table talk was built. Unconsciously, all of us were trying to draw the Hixabrod out. But he sat in his place at the head of the table between Clay and myself, with the Kid a little farther down, preserving a frosty silence until the dessert had been disposed of and the subject of Media unepectedly came up. " -- Media," said the Kid. "I've heard of Media. It's a little planet, but it's supposed to have ever#d;hing from soup to nuts on it in the way of life. There's one little life-form there that's claimed to contain something of value to every metabolism. It's called -- let me see now -- it's called -- " "It is called nygti," supplied Dor Lassos, suddenly, in a metallic voice. "A small quadruped with a highly complex nervous system and a good deal of fatty tissue. I visited the planet over eighty years ago, before it was actually opened up to general travel. The food stores spoiled and we had the opportunity of testing out the theory that it will provide sustenance for almost any kind of known intelligent being." He stopped. "Since you're here to tell the story, I assume the animal kept you alive." "I and the humans aboard the ship found the nygti quite nourishing," said Dor Lassos. "Unfortunately, we had several Micrushni from Polaris also aboard." "And those?" asked someone. "A highly developed but inelastic life-form," said Dorj Lassos, sipping from his brandy glass. "They went into convulsions and died." I had had some experience with Hixabrodian ways and I knew that it was not sadism, but a complete detachment that had prompted this little anecdote. But I could see a wave of distaste ripple down the room. No life-form is so universally well liked as the Micrushni, a delicate iridescent jellyfishlike race with a bent toward poetry and philosophy. The men at the table" drew away almost visibly from Dor Lassos. But that affected him no more than if they had applauded loudly. Only in very limited ways are the Hixabrod capable of empathy where other races are concerned. "That's too bad," said Clay slowly. "I have always liked the Micrushni." He had been drinking somewhat heavily and the seemingly innocuous statement came out like a half-challenge. Dor Lassos' cold brown eyes turned and rested on him. Whatever he saw, whatever conclusions he came to, however, were hidden behind his emotionless face. "In general," he said flatly, "a truthful race." That was the closest a Hixabrod could come to praise, and I expected the matter to drop there. But the Kid spoke up again. "Not like us humans," he said. "Eh, Dor Lassos?" I glared at him from behind Dor Lassos' head. But he went recklessly on. "I said, 'Not like us humans, eh?' " he repeated loudly. The Kid had also apparently been drinking freely, and his voice grated on the sudden silence of the room. "The human race varies," stated the Hixabrod emotionlessly. "You have some individuals who approach truth. Otherwise, the human race is not notably truthful." It was a typical, deadly accurate Hixabrodian response. Dor Lassos would have answered in the same words if his throat was to have been cut for them the minute they left his mouth. Again, it should have shut the Kid up, and again it apparently failed. "Ah, yes," said the Kid. "Some approach truth, but in general we are untruthful. But you see. Dor Lassos, a certain amount of human humor is associated with lies. Some of us tell lies just for fun." TOR Lassos drank from his  brandy glass and said nothing. "Of course," the Kid went on, "sometimes a human thinks he's being funny with his lies when he isn't. Some lies are just boring, particularly when you're forced to hear them over and over again. But on the other hand, there are some champion liars who are so good that even you would find their untruths humorous." Clay sat upright suddenly, and the sudden start of his movement sent the brandy slopping out over the rim of his glass and onto the white tablecloth. He stared at the Kid. I looked at them all -- at Clay, at the Kid and at Dor Lassos; and an ugly premonition began to form in my brain. "I do not believe I should," said Dor Lassos. "Ah, but you should listen to a real expert," said the Kid feverishly, "when he has a good subject to work on. Now, for example, take the matter of home worlds. What is your home world, Hixa, like?" I had heard enough and more than enough to confirm the suspicion forming within me. Without drawing any undue attention to myself, I rose and left the room. The alien made a dry sound in his throat and his voice followed me as I went swiftly down the empty corridor. "It is very beautiful," he said in his adding machine tones. "Hixa has a diameter of thirtyeight thousand universal meters. It possesses twenty-three great mountain ranges and seventeen large bodies of salt water..." The sound of his voice died away and I left it behind me. I went directly through the empty corridors and up the ladder to the communications shack. I went in the door without pausing, without -- in neglect of all duty rules -- glancing at the automatic printer to see if any fresh message out of routine had arrived, without bothering to check the transmitter to see that it was keyed into the automatic location signal for approaching spacecraft. All this I ignored and went directly to the file where the incoming messages are kept. I flicked the tab and went back to the file of two days previous, skimming through the thick sheaf of transcripts under that dateline. And there, beneath the heading "Notices of Arrivals," I found it, the message announcing the coming of Dor Lassos. I ran my finger down past the statistics on our guest to the line of type that told me where the Hixabrod's last stop had been. Tarsus.  there is a limit to what a man can take without breaking. On a wall of the communications shack was a roster of the men at our station. I drew the Dorsai Peterborough, and checked my gun out of the arms locker. I examined the magazine. It was loaded. I replaced the magazine, put the gun inside my jacket, and went back to the dinner. Dor Lassos was still talking. "... The flora and the fauna are maintained in such excellent natural balance that no local surplus has exceeded one per cent of the normal population for any species in the last sixty thousand years. Life on Hixa is regular and predictable. The weather is controlled within the greatest limits of feasibility." As I took my seat, the machine voice of the Hixabrod hesitated for just a moment, then gathered itself, and went on: "One day I shall return there." "A pretty picture," said the Kid, He was leaning forward over the table now, his eyes bright, his teeth bared in a smile. "A very attractive home world. But I regret to inform you. Dor Lassos, that I've been given to understand that it pales into insignificance when compared to one other spot in the Galaxy." The Hixabrod are warriors, too. Dor Lassos' features remained expressionless, but his voice deepened and rang through the room. "Your planet?" "I wish it were," returned the Kid with the same wolfish smile. "I wish I could lay claim to it. But this place is so wonderful that I doubt if I would be allowed there. In fact," the Kid went on, "I have never seen it. But I have been hearing about it for some years now. And either it is the most wonderful place in the Universe, or else the man who has been telling me about it -- " I pushed my chair back and started to rise, but Clay's hand clamped on my arm and held me down. "You were saying -- " he said to the Kid, who had been interrupted by my movement. " -- The man who has been telling me about it," said the Kid, deliberately, "is one of those champion liars I was telling Dor Lassos about." Once more I tried to get to my feet, but Clay was there before me. Tall and stiff, he stood at the end of the table. "My right -- " he said out of the corner of his motith to me. Slowly and with meaning, he picked up his brandy glass and. threw the glass straight into the Kid's face. It bounced on the table in front of him and sent brandy flying over the front of the Kid's immaculate dress uniform. "Get your gun!" ordered Clay. N OW the Kid was on his feet. In spite of the fact that I knew he had planned this, emotion had gotten the better of him at the end. His face was white with rage. He leaned on the edge of the table and fought with himself to carry it through as he had originally intended. "Why guns?" he said. His voice was thick with restraint, as he struggled to control himself. "You called me a liar." "Will guns tell me if you are?" The Kid straightened up, breathing more easily; and his laugh was harsh in the room. "Why use guns when it's possible to prove the thing one way or another with complete certainty?" His gaze swept the room and came back to Clay. "For years now you've been telling me all sorts of things," he said. "But two things you've told me more than all the rest. One was that you used to be a gambler. The other was that Lulungomeena -- your precious Lulungomeena on Tarsus -- was the most wonderful place in the Universe. Is either one of those the, truth?" Clay's breath came thick and slow. "They're both the truth," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. "Will you back that up?" "With my life!" "Ah," said the Kid mockingly, holding up his forefinger, "but I'm not asking you to back those statements up with your life -- but with that neat little hoard you've been accumulating these past years. You claimed you're a gambler. Will you bet that those statements are true?" Now, for the first time, Clay seemed to see the trap. "Bet with me," invited the Kid, almost lightly. "That will prove the first statement." "And what about the second?" demanded Clay. "Why -- " the Kid gestured with his hand toward Dor Lassos -- "what further judge do we need? We have here at our table a Hixabrod." Half-turning to the alien, the Kid made him a little bow. "Let him say whether your second statement is true or not." Once more I tried to rise from my seat and again Clay's hand shoved me down. He turned to Dor Lassos. "Do you think you could judge such a point, sir?" he asked. The brown inhuman eyes met is and held for a long moment. "I have just come from Tarsus," said the Hixabrod. "I was there as a member of the Galactic Survey Team, mapping the planet. It was my duty to certify to the truth of the map." T'HE choice was no choice. Clay stood staring at the Hixabrod as the room waited for his answer. Rage burning within me, I looked down the table for a sign in the faces of the others that this thing might be stopped. But where I expected to see sympathy, there was nothing. Instead, there was blankness, or cynicism, or even the wet-lipped interest of men who like their excitement written in blood or tears. And I realized with a sudden sinking of hopes that I stood alone, after all, as Clay's friend. In my own approaching age and garrulity I had not minded his talk of Lulungomeena, hour on repetitive hour. But these others had grown weary of it. Where I saw tragedy, they saw only retribution coming to a lying bore. And what Clay saw was what I saw. His eyes went dark and cold. "How much will you bet?" he asked. "All I've got," responded the Kid, leaning forward eagerly. "Enough and more than enough to match that bank roll of yours.  The equivalent of eight years' pay." Stiffly, without a word. Clay produced his savings book and a voucher pad. He wrote out a voucher for the whole amount and laid book and voucher on the table before Dor Lassos. The Kid, who had obviously come prepared, did the same, adding a thick pile of cash from his gambling of recent weeks. "That's all of it?" asked Clay. "All of it," said the Kid. Clay nodded and stepped back. "Go ahead," he said. The Kid turned toward the alien. "Dor Lassos," he said. "We appreciate your cooperation in this matter." "I am glad to hear it," responded the Hixabrod, "since my cooperation will cost the winner of the bet a thousand credits." The abrupt injection of this commercial note threw the Kid momentarily off stride. I, alone in the room, who knew the Hixabrod people, had expected it. But the rest had not, and it struck a sour note, which reflected back on the Kid. Up until now, the bet had seemed to most of the others like a cruel But at least honest game, concerning ourselves only. Suddenly it had become a little like hiring a paid bully to beat up a stationmate. But it was too late now to stop; the bet had been made. Nevertheless, there were murmurs from different parts of the room. Kid hurried on, fearful of an interruption. Clay's savings were on his mind. "You were a member of the mapping survey team?" he asked Dor Lassos. "I was," said the Hixabrod. "Then you know the planet?" "I do." , "You know its geography?" insisted the Kid. "I do not repeat myself." The eyes of the Hixabrod were chill and withdrawn, almost a little baleful, as they met those of the Kid. "What kind of a planet is it?" The Kid licked his lips. He was beginning to recover his usual self-assurance. "Is it a large planet?" "No." "Is Tarsus a rich planet?" "No." "Is it a pretty planet?" "I did not find it so." "Get to the point!" snapped Clay with strained harshness. The Kid glanced at him, savoring this moment. He turned back to the Hixabrod. "Very well. Dor Lassos," he said, "we get to the meat of the matter. Have you ever heard of Lulungomeena ?" "Yes." "Have you ever been to Lulungomeena?" "I have." "And do you truthfully -- " for the first time, a fierce and burning anger flashed momentarily in the eyes of the Hixabrod; the insult the Kid had just unthinkingly given Dor Lassos was a deadly one -- "truthfully say that in your considered opinion Lulungomeena is the most wonderful place in the Universe?" Dor Lassos turned his gaze, away from him and let it wander over the rest of the room. Now, at last, his conterqpt for all there was plain to be read on his face. "yes, it is," said Dor Lassos. of the stunned group around the table. From the pile of cash he extracted a thousand credits, then passed the remainder, along with the two account books and the vouchers, to Clay. Then he took one step toward the Kid. He halted before him and offered his hands to the man -- palms up, the tips of his fingers a scant couple of inches short of the Kid's face. "My hands are clean," he said. His fingers arced; and, suddenly, as we watched, stubby, gleaming claws shot smoothly frotn those fingertips to tremble lightly against the skin of the Kid's face. "Do you doubt the truthfulness of a Hixabrod?" his robot voice asked. The Kid's face was white and his cheeks hollowed in fear. The needle points of the claws were very close to his eyes. He swallowed once. "No -- " he whispered. The claws retracted. The hands returned to their owner's sides. Once more completely withdrawn and impersonal. Dor Lassos turned and bowed to us all. "My appreciation of your courtesy," he said, the metallic tones of his voice loud in the silence. Then he turned and, marching like a metronome, disappeared through the doorway of the recreation room and off in the direction of his quarters. " A ND so we part," said Clay Harbank as we shook hands. "I hope you find the Dorsai Planets as welcome as I intend to find Lulungomeena." I grumbled a little. "That was plain damn foolishness. You didn't have to buy me out as well." "There were more than enough credits for the both of us," said Clay. It was a month after the bet and the two of us were standing in the Deneb One spaceport. For miles in every direction, the great echoing building of this central terminal stretched around us. In ten minutes I was due to board my ship for the Dorsai Planets. Clay himself still had several days to wait before one of the infrequent ships to Tarsus would  be ready to leave. "The bet itself was damn foolishness," I went on, determined to find something to complain about. We Dorsai do not enjoy these moments of emotion. But a Dorsai is a Dorsai. I am not apologizing.  "No foolishness," said Clay. For a moment a shadow crossed his face. "You forget that a real gambler bets only on a sure thing. When I looked into the Hixabrod's eyes, I was sure." "How can you say 'a sure thing?' " "The Hixabrod loved his home," Clay said. I stared at him, astounded. "But you weren't betting on Hixa. Of course he would prefer Hixa to any other place in the Universe. But you were betting on Tarsus -- on Lulungomeena -- remember?" The shadow was back for a moment on Clay's face. "The bet was certain. I feel a little guilty about the Kid, but I warned him that gambling money never stuck. Besides, he's young and I'm getting old. I couldn't afford to lose." "Will you come down out of the clouds," I demanded, "and explain this thing? Why was the  bet certain? What was the trick, if there was one?" "The trick?" repeated Clay. He smiled at me. "The trick was that the Hixabrod could not be otherwise than truthful. It was all in the name of my birthplace -- Lulungomeena." He looked at my puzzled face and put a hand on my shoulder. "You see, Mort," he said quietly, "it was the name that fooled everybody. Lulungomeena stands for something in my language. But not for any city or town or village. Everybody on Tarsus has his own Lulungomeena. Everybody in the Universe has." "How do you figure that. Clay?" "It's a word," he explained. "A word in the Tarsusian language. It means 'home.' " Back in #, while other tourists were paying to see Little Egypt's famous dance, a shrewd young chap instead bought sheets of commemorative postage stamps. Wise fellow, he later sent his children through college by selling his increasingly valuable hoard one by one. With so many people saving stamps now, a profit like that is unlikely. are steadily bringing higher prices. If that's true after only three .and a half years -- well, you see what we mean. We don't have Vol. #, Nos. I and #, and very few of the next few issues, but we'll sell whatever we do have at #c each, postpaid. (Except overseas, of course; we have to charge #c extra per copy for mailing.) That stamp-buyer knew a good thing when he saw it. So can youl Besides, who ever heard of reading postage stamps? o V devoted a portion of this column to the moons of Mars, prompted by repeated questions from readers who wondered whether they might not actually be Martian space stations, possibly still active, but more likely abandoned for ages. Well, they are unquestionably small natural moons. The reason I have to return to them today is an interesting thought advanced by the German astronomer Professor Dr. Werner Schaub, a former president of the Gfisellschaft fiir WeltraumfoTschung, the new German Rocket Society. In fact, Prof. Schaub spoke about his idea for the first time at a regional meeting of this society in May, #. Even more to the point is the fact that his idea grew out of a study of the forces which will act on a space station's structure. The idea is that the inner moon of Mars might be slowly -- very slowly indeed -- disintegrating under our very eyes. Professor Schaub is careful to call this a "working hypothesis," but until it might be demolished by a detailed mathematical analysis it sounds like a good one. However, a little background is needed first. A S some readers are likely to know, the two small moons of Mars were discovered in August, #, by Asaph Hall with the #-inch telescope of the Naval Observatory. The discovery was a great surprise, not only because of the oft-told story of their "prediction" by Dean Swift, but because the two satellites of Mars were strange in several respects. They were tiny, appearing as luminous dots in even the biggest telescopes. Present estimates -- which are a downward revision of earlier guesses -- assign a diameter of not more than # miles to the inner moon (Phobos) and about # miles to the outer (Deimos). They also were most unusually close to their planet, the distance from the Martian surface to the outer moon being only # miles and, from the surface to the inner moon, a mere # miles, about the width of the Atlantic Ocean. This unheard-of nearness means that Phobos races around Mars in # hours and # minutes; its orbital velocity is # miles per second. The latter figure, incidentally, shows the weakness of the gravitational field of Mars. If the same moon circled Earth at the same distance from the Earth's center (# miles), it would be # miles from the surface and would need an orbital velocity of about # miles per second to stay in its orbit. Because the moonlet would need this much more orbital velocity to balance the Earth's stronger pull, it would also complete a full revolution in a much shorter time, namely a little more than # hours. It took half a century, counting from the original discovery by Asaph Hall, to find out that the orbital velocity of Phobos A small moon circling its planet near Roche's Limit, losing portions of its surface due to the tidal forces of the planet. The dotted line around the planet indicates the approximate limits of its atmosphere. The heavy circle is the orbit of the satellite. The fine lines show the orbits of the separated particles. IS slowly increasing! Such an in crease in orbital velocity can mean only one thing -- the distance of Phobos from Mars is slowly decreasing. As I understand it, the decrease of the dis' tance has not actually been measured yet, but the increase in speed has. It probably is easier to observe a small increase of the orbital velocity than a tiny shrinkage of the orbital distance. But that the two go together is established beyond a doubt. The next question, of course, is "Why?" Generally speaking, a moon will increase its speed if it finds a small amount of resistance along its orbit. This statement may seem paradoxical to somebody not used to the workings of celestial mechanics, but it is true just the same. The first result of finding some ' resistance along the orbit would be to slow the movement of the moon. But that would result in the moon no longer having enough speed to balance the pull of the planet for the distance at which it is located. The planet could pull it a little nearer, but in "falling" toward the planet, speed would be gained and the moon would establish a new balance slightly closer to the planet at a slightly higher speed. So if cosmic dust got in the way of Phobos, the observed increase in orbital velocity could be explained. And from the observed increase in speed, one could calculate the density of the cosmic dust which caused it. by Kerr and Whipple, but no acceptable results could be obtained. If cosmic dust near Mars were as thick as required, we should be able to see it. After all, one cannot very well postulate that the dust is only in the' moon's orbit and not anywhere else. Besides, dust of the proper density and spread through a large volume of space, as would be likely, should slow down Deimos, too, but Deimos is not affected. If Mars had as much water as our own planet, one might try to explain the misbehavior of Phobos by tidal act tion -- but Mars does not have much water. Yet this apparently impossible assumption of a cosmic dust handicap for Phobos, which can be found only in and near its orbit, is Dr. Werner Schaub's "working hypothesis." One can make this assumption if it is also assumed that the dust comes from Phobos itself, for Phobos is rather close to Roche's Limit. Roche's Limit, as has been statedmany a time in many science fiction stories, is the distance inside of which a moon cannot exist any more, since the gravitational force of the planet would break it up and scatter the remains along its orbit to form a ring. This explanation is essentially true, except that things aren't quite that simple. The distance R' (Roche's Limit) for a given planet is R' : # R (where R is the planet radius) measured from the planet's center if both planet and moon have the same specific gravity. If they haven't, the figure must be modified by multiplying it with the cube root of the ratio of their densities. Without such modification, R' equals # miles for our own planet and # miles for Mars. Since Phobos is # miles from the center of Mars, its distance is about # R, so that, for equal densities, it would be safely outside of R'. If Phobos were a ball of liquid, it would be badly deformed even where it is, but it is obviously some kind of rigid rock. Now there is another kind of limit proposed by Dr. Schaub specifically for rigid bodies and bodies with considerable structural strength, such as space stations, which lies at # R. At a distance of # #th of a planet radius from the planet's surface, the tidal forces of the planet become stronger than the gravitation of the moon at its surface. The result is that the existence of the moon itself is not endangered, but that everything lying around loose will be pulled off its surface! Like Roche's Limit of #, this limit of # is modified by the ratio of the densities of the two bodies involved. To make Phobos fall inside this limit, or rather to expand this limit to the distance of Phobos, one would have to assume that its overall density is half of that of an equal volume of water. If Phobos consists of very porous rock, this is possible. In this case, nothing could lie around on its surface, anchored only by the moonlet's gravitational pull. But whatever has been pulled off by Mars would not fall to the planet at once. It would form two very tenuous rings, one outside the moon and one inside. Each one of these tenuous rings would have a thickness about equal to the diameter of the moon and a width of at most three times the diameter of the moon. (See diagram.) A T first, the moon would move in an empty space between the two rings, but this space would not remain empty for long. As soon as there are enough particles in the rings, there will be collisions. Normally, when two particles collide, one can expect both of them to lose speed, so that they would cross from the outer ring into the inner ring. The outer ring, then, would steadily lose mass to the inner ring -- which is likely to get into Phobos' way while crossing over -- but the inner ring would lose mass in the same manner. If a particle collision occurs in he inner ring, the new orbits of the particles can be eccentric enough to graze the atmosphere of Mars, which obviously means their end as independent molecular satellites. More "loose mass" on Phobos will be created steadily, some of it by meteorite impact, most of it probably by cosmic rays. Their microscopic impacts cause the crystalline structure of the surface rocks to decay, thus creating dust. This is happening on our moon, too, but there the dust stays where it is, protecting the layers of rock underneath. On Phobos, if Dr. Schaub is right, the dust would be pulled off the satellite as quickly as it is formed. It is admittedly somewhat farfetched to extend the second limit so far out by assuming an unusually low density for the satellite. But remember that Phobos does show the acceleration which started the whole trend of thought. And it is, at any event, interesting that Jupiter V, the moon closest to the giant planet, shows a similar acceleration. Jupiter V is also comparatively small (estimated diameter is # miles) and moves at a distance of # miles from Jupiter's center or about # miles from its "surface." R' for Jupiter (unmodified) is # miles. In short, the situation is about the same -- theoretically, the moon just manages to stay outside of Roche's Limit, but if we knew all the other factors, most especially the satellite's density, we might say otherwise. Let's close with a look at our planned space station in Dr. von Braun's two-hour orbit, # miles above sea level. This is a geocentric distance of # miles and R' for Earth, as mentioned, is # miles. The space station would be well within Roche's Limit, but would hold together easily because of its structural strength. (Just to keep air inside, it has to have a higher structural strength than required to withstand the forces exerted by the Earth.) Since the space station's distance amounts to # planet radii and Dr. Schaub's limit is # R, the space station would also be inside that limit. This would not endanger people in spacesuits working near it in space. Even if not hooked to a line, they would have personal rocket propulsion guns which can easily overcome the forces involved. But the Earth would keep the space station spotlessly clean by attracting any debris that might accumulate on it -- a cosmic vacuum  cleaner, you might say. A T about the time you read this. West Germans and West Berliners will be able to buy and read a German edition of. my book The Lunghsh, the Dodo and the Unicorn. In East Germany, it will indubitably be banned because animals fail to conform to Marxist-LeninistStalinist principles (it being known, furthermore, that Beria occasionally petted animals, never tractors). I did not do the translation myself, but I checked it and in the course of this work I came across some old correspondence and notes which had half-slipped my memory. They dealt with the question of poisonous animals in general and specifically with the number of poisonous lizards. One hundred years ago, zoological textbooks were quite definite on that point. The majority of poisonous creatures were invertebrates -- spiders, scorpions, centipedes and certain true insects. Of the vertebrate animals, only some snakes were known to be poisonous, 'although a few fishes were said to have poisonous spikes, something that still needed verification (which has been supplied in the meantime). No lizard or amphibian had any venom, the book said. As for amphibians, it became known during the following fifty years that the skin secretions of several varieties are rather poisonous and that one frog (the beautiful "painter frog," Dendrobates titjctorius of Central and northern South America) is dangerous to handle. It can kill you if you happen to have fresh cuts on your hands. Logically, the natives use its skin secretion for a highly effective arrowhead poison. About #, the textbooks, after much reluctance, suspicion one-third the length one would expect a lizard's tail to be. The legs are short and small and the whole animal looks as if it were normally a dirty black, but has Heloderma suspectum. and cross-checking, admitted that there is a poisonous lizard. The lizard thus accepted is, of course, the Gila monster, a native of Arizona and New Mexico. The popular name is derived from the name of the Gila (prounced Hee-la) River. The scientific name is Heloderma suspectum. It is a creature that nobody who has seen one will ever forget, partly because of its coloration, partly because its shape is rather different from the ideas evoked by the word "lizard." Yes, it has a head, a body, a tail and four legs, but that's as far as the resemblance goes. The head is flat, the body like a stuffed sausage, the tail more so and only about been spattered with brick-red paint. While normally lazy, the Gila monster can develop a fit of temper at short notice. It will hiss loudly and can jump, especially making a # degree turn in one jump that puts the head where the tail was a moment ago. And when it bites, it does not strike like a snake. It is a bite more like that of a dog and it will hang on for as long as ten minutes. ' produced the first comprehensive description of this lizard. European works name Francesco Hernandez, body physician of Philip II of Spain, as the "discoverer"(), but I have some doubts about that. Hernandez collected -- from # -- in Mexico, where the Gila monster does not live. Even though Nueva Espana, if it could be pinned down on a map, probably comprised Gilamonster habitat, Hernandez hardly traveled that far west. It is far more likely that he "discovered" Gila monster's close relative, the Mexican Beaded Lizard Heloderma horridum) , which is similar in appearance, but of a more slender build, somewhat larger (or at least longer) and with bright yellow blotches on a shining dark background. It was this Mexican version that forced its way into the textbooks as the second poisonous lizard, though it was the first historically. Among the venomous snakes, there are some with hollow poison fangs and some with grooved poison fangs. The two types of Heloderma have grooved teeth, but unlike those of the venomous snakes, these teeth are not in front of the mouth and are in the lower jaw. So is the poison gland which supplies them. Another ' Doctor Hernandez' work never appeared in its original Latin version. It was priijted in # as Quatro libros de la naturaleza y virtutes de las plantas y animales qae estan recevidos en el uso de medicina en la nueva Espana. difference is that they need time to inject their poison, and a man bitten by Heloderma may get away with "just a bite" if he succeeds in tearing the reptile off at once. Normally, the Gila monster has little use for its poison apparatus, for its favorite food seems to be bird and snake eggs. So far we have stayed in the territory of well-known and established facts. The story has many loose ends, since very many facts about the two Helodermas are still unknown. But the most interesting loose end is that they may have unknown relatives elsewhere. One such suspected relative has a name of its own, Lanthanotus, and it lives, of all places, on Borneo. The trouble is that very little is known about it -- so little, in fact, that we cannot yet say with certainty whether Lanthanotus actually is a close relative to the Gila monster. Another suspected relative might live in Europe. The trouble here is the same as with Lanthanotus, but to a higher degree -- it hasn't been discovered yet. All along the European Alps, but especially in the sections belonging to Switzerland and to Austria, there has been talk for centuries about a rare, small and dangerous animal. It is said to be some two feet long -- which is slightly larger than Heloderma -- and of the general appearance of a fat lizard. It is reported to hiss and whistle, and its bite is described as deadly. Witnesses claim that it can make jumps without preparation. Since the Alpine farmers and cattle ranchers were not jn the habit of traveling, the animal has a name The only published picture of a Tatzelwurm, dating from #. of its own in almost every valley. The most common names are Stollwurm, Springwurm and Tatzeiwurm, which can be translated, in the same order, as "Cave Worm," "Jumping Worm" and "Worm with Paws" and it may be added that the term "worm" is not used in its zoological sense among those peoples, but a general term for anything alive of wormlike or snakelike shape. TN some older works, the existence of this animal is mentioned as a matter of course. The chronicle of a monastery in the Swiss Canton of Uri referred to it as occurring in the vicinity. A "Pocketbook for Amateur Naturalists and Gentleman Hunters," printed in #, even printed a picture (not a good one) and a Bavarian writer by the name of Kobell listed the animal in # as one "permitted to be hunted." He did not shoot one himself, but knew people who had. There is one more curious "document." In the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, it is customary to erect little monuments to people who perished because of avalanches or falling stones as close as possible to the spot where they died. One of these monuments -- their local name is Marterln -- has the inscription "In sudden fright died here, pursued by jumping worms, Hans Fuchs of Unken, #." The painting shows the dead Hans Fuchs lying on the ground, with two large lizards perched on a nearby rock; These two lizards are ordinary in shape, just large; obviously the local artist not only lacked talent, but also a model. The animal is still undiscov' ered. For some time, from about # to #, zoologists were inclined to consider the whole story a legend. In #, a scientific publication began to collect eye-witness reports and got around two dozen first-hand stories, most of the reporters stating emphatically that the animal was not an otter, which had been cited as an explanation of the legend by some. But none of the reporters had any proof -- no skins, no skulls, not even photographs. At about that time, somebody sent me a clipping from a small provincial Austrian newspaper, saying in so many words that the late Austrian General von Poser had killed two of the animals and that their bodies were preserved in Castle Grubhof near the city of Lofer. I had no idea where Lofer was located (I still don't know), but ' trusted that the Austrian Post Office did. Nor did I know who owned the castle at that time, but since every castle has a Superintendent General, I put that on my letter, which was aimed at somebody who could tell horses and cattle apart, but had never tried to distinguish a lizard from a newt. The result was similar to the scene they used to have in the early talkies, where an American traveler in Hongkong addresses a Chinese in pidgin and gets an answer with an Oxford accent. A Mr. Schmidtmann informed me that the two preserved animals were specimens of the East North African monitor, probably Varanus niloticus, shot by General von Poser during a vacation in Egypt. Besides, Mr. Schmidt. mann added, even though some witnesses claim they know an otter when they see one, the reports still concern otters. an article by the former Austrian Court Councellor, Dr. Nicolussi, in which he stated that, after examining all the evidence, he felt so certain about the existence of the animal and its essential relationship to the American Gila monster that he proposed the scientific name of Heloderma europaeum. At about that time a Swiss photographer took a picture of something that might be the animal, half hidden under dead leaves, but a search failed to yield results. One more item: After the first edition of my book The Lunghsh and the Unicorn had been published, I received a letter from a reader in Virginia who, in #, had seen a big lizard in the Italian Alps. His friends to whom he told the tale scoffed, so he went back to the same spot the next day, saw two of the big lizards and caught one with a butterfly net. When dumped at the inn, the lizard scared him so much with loud hissing that he caught it in the net again, obtained a glass jar and two liters of pure alcohol from the local druggist and drowned the animal in the liquid. Unfortunately he left the specimen in the small Italian town. But he remembered that it was # inches long, which is at least twice the length of any other lizard known to occur in that region. Well? So? Nobody knows. As in many other places in science, the motto which applies is "wait and see." I'm afraid the same is true of the letter section of this department. I've used up all my room, so the questions from readers will have to wait until next month. Sorry. At your newsstand now! by Edmond Hamilton Price #c -- Formerly Published # # (Title #. United States Code, Section Science Fiction, published monthly at New York, N. Y. for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers arc: Publisher, Robert M. Guinn. #I Hudson St., N. Y. C. ; Editor, H. L. Gold. # E. I#th St., N. Y. C. ; Managing editor. Business manager, none. #...The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corporation (Owner), #I Hudson St., N. Y. C. ; Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stockholder), # Knollwood Road, Eastchester, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities arc: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting ; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or disttibuted, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, scmiw'eekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Robert M. Guinn, President Sw'orn to and subscribed before me this #rd day ot September, #. Jacques N. Glick, Notary Public in the State of N. Y. No. #-#. Qualified in Bronx County. Cert, filed in Bronx  New York. County Clerk's  Registers Office. Commission expires March #, #. X If if was good enough for your grandfather, forget it . it is much too good for anyone else! resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his canetip and shout, "Hell, we did that a hundred years ago!" Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seeking that # A.D. rarity -- privacy -- were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou's father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife -- and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age -- somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties. Gramps looked older because he had already reached # when anti-gerasone was invented. He had not aged in the # years since. "Meanwhile," the commentator was saying, "Council Bluffs, Iowa, was still threatened by stark tragedy. But # weary rescue workers have refused to give up hope, and continue to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, #, who has been wedged for two days in a..." "I wish he'd get something more cheerful," Emerald whispered to Lou. "Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV's on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar -- " his voice suddenly softened and sweetened -- "when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder." He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years. "Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard," continued the commentator, "President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world's ills can be traced to the fact that Man's knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world." "Hell!" snorted Gramps. "We said that a hundred years ago!" "In Chicago tonight," the commentator went on, "a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, to be born in the hospital." The commentator faded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously. "Hell!" whispered Lou to Emerald. "We said that a hundred years ago." "I heard that!" shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set and his petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. "You, there, boy -- " "I didn't mean anything by it, sir," said Lou, aged #. "Get me my will. You know  where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!" Gramps snapped his gnarled fingers sharply. Lou nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over bedding to Gramps' room, the only private room in the Ford apartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room and the wide windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living room, and the daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favorites of the moment. On Gramps' bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets -- a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living room for Em and himself. "Boy!" called Gramps. "Coming, sir."Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Gramps the will. "Pen!" said Gramps. pens, one from each couple. "Not that leaky thing," he said, brushing Lou's pen aside. "Ah, there's a nice one. Good boy, Willy." He accepted Willy's pen. That was the tip they had all been waiting for. Willy, then -- Lou's father -- was the new favorite. Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though he was #, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door. Gramps missed none of the high drama he had authored and he gave his own familiar role ever # dhing he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep portentous monotone, like a bass note on a cathedral organ. "I, Harold D. Ford, residing in Building # of Alden Village, New York City, Connecticut, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made." He blew his nose importantly and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis -- repeating in particular his evermoreelaborate specifications for a funeral. At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might have forgotten why he'd brought out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control and, after erasing for a full minute, began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he had heard them so often. "I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land," Gramps said and wrote. "But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by -- " He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was. Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly. Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence -- "my great-grandson, Louis J. Ford." "Graridson, sir," said Lou. "Don't quibble. You're in deep enough now, young man," said Gramps, but he made the change. And, from there, he went without a misstep through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling. yN the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time or another, Lou's name was scratched out and Willy's substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom. "So!" said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will and substituted a new one, including the time of day. "Well -- time to watch the McGarvey Family." The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was #, or for a total of # years. "I can't wait to see what's going to happen next," he said. Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom door. Wishing Em would join him, he wondered where she was. He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps. "Em?" he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward. "Morty!" gasped Lou. Lou's great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Ford menage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand -- Gramps' enormous economy-size bottle of antigerasone, which had apparently been halfemptied, and which water. A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride. Shocked, Lou didn't know what to do. He couldn't let Gramps take the mousetrapped anti-gerasone -- but, if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing. Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could and began to pour the contents of Gramps' bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the # smaller bottles on the shelf. The bottle contained a halfgallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment, through the keyhole and under the door. T'HE bottle gurgled monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room and there were murmurs and the scraping of chairlegs on the floor. "Thus ends," said the television announcer, "the #st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys." Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door. "Just a sec," Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed on the tile floor. The door was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at the incriminating mess. Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of his neck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, waited for Gramps to speak. "Well, boy," said Gramps at last, "looks like you've got a little tidying up to do." And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd and locked himself in his bedroom. The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he also went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway. Tears  streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb -- please don't look so awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging about Gramps." "No," said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I was just -- " "You don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on "your side, no matter what." She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, "It wouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn't such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd be able to go any time God decided He wanted him." "What's going to happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he going to do?" T OU and Emerald stayed fear fully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep. At six o'clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son's generation. Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps' breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honestto-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine. on which Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune. "Well," said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm sure there's something to be panicky about." "Maybe he doesn't know what it was I busted," Lou said hopefully. "Probably thinks it was your watch crystal," offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheattype processed sawdust cakes. "Don't get sarcastic with your father," said Em,"and don't talk with your mouth full, either." "I'd like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something," complained Eddie, who was #. He glanced at the clock. "It's time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know." "Yeah, it is, isn't it?" said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have the tray, Em." "We'll both go." Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door. Em knocked. "Gramps," she called brightly, "break-fast is rea-dy." There was no reply and she knocked again, harder. The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty. A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan. TUT Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World's Fair of #. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud: " 'Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night's bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.' " "Gosh," said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get to see how the #-mile Speedway Race was going to come out." "Or the Solar Series," Eddie said, with large mournful eyes. "Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," added Morty. "There's more," said Lou, and he began reading aloud again : " T, Harold D. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.' " "No!" cried Willy. "Not another one!" " T do stipulate,' " read Lou, " 'that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.' " "Issue?" said Emerald. Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all own the whole damn shootin' match." Each eye turned instantly to the bed. "Share and share alike?" asked Morty.  "Actually," said Willy, who was the oldest one present, "it's just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here and -- " "I like thatV' exclaimed Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and -- " "How about letting somebody who's never had any privacy get a little crack at it?" Eddie demanded hotly. "Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about -- " "Yeah?" challenged Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick." "Silence!" shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens his mouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think." A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head. TN the next moment, a freefor-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room. After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units. For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the apartment was still and spacious, An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to # delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard. In the stillness of the threeroom Ford apartment on the #th floor of Building #, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker. The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Fords and their captors watched with professional interest. Em and Lou, in adjacent fourby-eight cells, were stretched out peacefully on their cots. "Em," called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all your own, too?" "Sure. Washbasin, bed, light -- the works. And we thought Cramps' room was something. How long has this been going on?" She held out her hand. "For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes -- look at me!" "Cross your fingers," said Lou. "The lawyer's going to try to get us a year." "Gee!" Em said dreamily. "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pull to get put away in solitary?" "All right, pipe down," said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain't never getting back in!" The prisoners instantly fell silent. ment darkened for a moment as the riot scenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. "And now, friends," he said, "I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over #. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things. "After years of research, medical science has now developed Super-anti-gerasone! In weeks -- yes, weeks -- you can look, feel and act as young as your greatgreat-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay # to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe, tested Super-anti-gerasone costs you only a few dollars a day. "Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard, and mail it to 'Super,' Box #, Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got that? I'll repeat it. 'Super,' Box #..." Underlining  the announcer's words was the scratching of Gramps' pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutes earlier, from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building # from across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, then had hired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction, a genius who had never gotten a client less than a year and a day. Gramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen, so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed of doing for years. "Schen-ec-ta-dy," murmured Gramps. "Got it!" His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut lines of bad temper. It was almost as though his trial package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next. I If you enclose #c to cover postage and Weird adventures as near as your mailbox! Just send your name j by one of the famous sclence-flctlon and address -- you'll get your copy by return mail... and we'll j author of today, # E. San Fernando St. Dept. #-# San Jose #, Calif. The holes around Mars Science said it could not be, but there it was. And whoosh -- look out -- here it is again! S paceship crews should be selected on the basis of their non-irritating qualities as individuals. No chronic complainers, no hypochondriacs, no bugs on cleanliness -- particularly no one-man parties. I speak from bitter experience. Because on the first expedition to Mars, Hugh Allenby damned near drove us nuts with his puns. We finally got so we just ignored them. But no one can ignore that classic last one -- it's written right into the annals of astronomy, and it's there to stay. Allenby, in command of the expedition, was first to set foot outside the ship. As he stepped down from the airlock of the Mars , he placed that foot on a convenient rock, caught the toe of his weighted boot in a hole in the rock, wrenched his ankle and smote the ground with his pants. Sitting there, eyes pained behind the transparent shield of his oxygen-mask, he stared at the rock. T was about five feet high. Ordinary granite -- no special shape -- and several inches below its summit, running straight through it in a northeasterly direction, was a neat round fourinch hole. "I'm upset by the hole thing," he grunted. The rest of us scrambled out of the ship and gathered around his plump form. Only one or two of us winced at his miserable double pun. "Break anything, Hugh?" asked Burton, our pilot, kneeling beside him. "Get out of my way. Burton," said Allenby. "You're obstructing my view." Burton blinked. A man constructed of long bones and caution, he angled out of the way, looking around to see what he was obstructing view of. He saw the rock and the round hole through it. He stood very still, staring. So did the rest of us. "Well, I'll be damned," said Janus, our photographer. "A hole." "In a rock," added Gonzales, our botanist. "Round," said Randolph, our biologist. "An artifact," finished Allenby softly. Burton helped him to his feet. Silently we gathered around the rock. Janus bent down and put' an eye to one end of the hole. I bent down and looked through the other end. We squinted at each other. As mineralogist, I was expected to opinionate. "Not drilled," I said slowly. "Not chipped. Not melted. Certainly not eroded." I heard a rasping sound by my ear and straightened. Burton was scratching a thumbnail along the rim of the hole. "Weathered," he said. "Plenty old. But I'll bet it's a perfect circle, if we measure." Janus was already fiddling with his camera, testing the cooperation of the tiny distant sun with a light-meter. "Let us see weather it is or not," Allenby said. tape-measure. The hole was four and three-eighths inches  across. It was perfectly circular and about sixteen inched long. And four feet above the ground. "But why?" said Randolph. "Why should anyone bore a fourinch tunnel through a rock way out in the middle of the desert?" "Religious symbol," said Janus. He looked around, one hand on his gun. "We'd better keep an eye out -- maybe we've landed on sacred ground or something." "A totem hole, perhaps," Allenby suggested. "Oh, I don't know," Randolph said -- to Janus, not Allenby. As I've mentioned, we always ignored Allenby's puns. "Note the lack of ornamentation. Not at all typical of religious articles." "On Earth," Gonzales reminded him. "Besides, it might be utilitarian, not symbolic." "Utilitarian, how?" asked Janus. "An altar for snakes," Burton said dryly.  "Well," said Allenby, "you can't deny that it has its holy aspects." "Get your hand away, will you, Peters?" asked Janus. I did. When Janus's camera had clicked, I bent again and peered through the hole. "It sights on that low ridge over there," I said. "Maybe it's some kind of surveying setup. I'm going to take a look." "Careful," warned Janus. "Remember, it may be sacred." As I walked away, I heard Allenby say, "Take some scrapings from the inside of the hole, Gonzales. We might be able to determine if anything is kept in it..." One of the stumpy, purplish, barrel-type cacti on the ridge had a long vertical bite out of it... as if someone had carefully carved out a narrow U-shaped section from the top down, finishing the bottom of the U in a neat semicircle. It was as flat and cleancut as the inside surface of a horseshoe magnet. I hollered. The others came running. I pointed. "Oh, my God!" said Allenby. "Another one." The pulp of the cactus in and around the U-hole was dried and dead-looking. Silently Burton used his tapemeasure. The hole measured four and three-eighths inches across. It was eleven inches deep. The semicircular bottom was about a foot above the gijound. "This ridge," I said, "is about three feet higher than where we landed the ship. I bet the hole in the rock and the hole in this cactus are on the same level." was not done all at once. It is a result of periodic attacks. Look here and here. These overlapping depressions along the outer edges of the., hole -- " he poihted -- "on this side of the cactus. They are the signs of repeated impact. And the scallop effect on this side, where whatever made the hole emerged. There are juices still oozing -- not at the point of impact, where the plant is desiccated, but below, where the shock was transmitted -- " A distant shout turned us around. Burton was at the rock, beside the ship. He was bending down, his eye to the far side of the mysterious hole. He looked for another second, then straightened and came toward us at a lope. "They line up," he said when he reached us. "The bottom of , the hole in the cactus is right in the middle when you sight through the hole in the rock." "As if somebody came around and whacked the cactus regularly." Janus said, looking around warily. "To keep the line of sight through the holes clear?" I wondered. "Why not just remove the cactus?" "Religious," Janus explained. The gauntlet he had discarded lay ignored on the ground, in the shadow of the cactus. We went on past the ridge toward an outcropping of rock about a hundred yards farther on. We walked silently, each of us wondering if what we half-expected would really be there. It was. In one of the tall, weathered spires in the outcropping, some ten feet below its peak and four feet above the ground, was a round four-inch hole. Allenby sat down on a rock, nursing his ankle, and remarked that anybody who believed this crazy business was really happening must have holes in the rocks in his head. Burton put his eye to the hole and whistled. "Sixty feet long if it's an inch," he said. "The other end's just a pinpoint. But you can see it. The damn thing's perfectly straight." I looked back the way we had come. The cactus stood on the ridge, with its U-shaped bite, and beyond was the ship, and beside it the perforated rock. "If we , surveyed," I said, "I bet the holes would all line up "But," Randolph complained, "why would anybody go out and bore holes in things all along a line through the desert?" "Religious," Janus muttered. "It doesn't have to make sense." stood there by the out" cropping and looked out along the wide, red desert beyond. It stretched flatly for miles from this point, south toward Mars' equator -- dead sandy wastes, crisscrossed by the "canals," which we had observed while landing to be great straggly patches of vegetation, probably strung along underground waterflows. st st... We jumped half out of our skins. Ozone bit at our nostrils. Our hair stirred in the electrical uproar. "L look," Janus chattered, lowering his smoking gun. About forty feet to our left, a small rabbity creature poked its head from behind a rock and stared at us in utter horror. Janus raised his gun again. "Don't bother," said Allenby tiredly. "I don't think it intends to attack." "But -- " "I'm sure it isn't a Martian with religious convictions." Janus wet his lips and looked a little shamefaced. "I guess I'm kind of taut." "That's what I taut," said Allenby. The creature darted from behind its rock and, looking at us over its shoulder, employed six legs to make small but very fast tracks. We turned our attention again to the desert. Far out, black against Mars' azure horizon, was a line of low hills. "Shall we go look?" asked Burton, eyes gleaming at the mystery. Janus hefted his gun nervously. It was still crackling faintly from the discharge. "I say let's get back to the ship!" Allenby sighed. "My leg hurts." He studied the hills. "Give me the field-glasses." Randolph handed them over. Allenby put them to the shield of his mask and adjusted them. After a moment he sighed again. "There's a hole. On a plane surface that catches the Sun. A lousy damned round little impossible hole." "Those hills," Burton observed, "must be thousands of feet thick." argument lasted all the way back to the ship. Janus, holding out for his belief that the whole thing was of religious origin, kept looking around for Martians as if he expected them to pour screaming from the hills. Burton came up with the suggestion that perhaps the holes had been made by a disintegrator-ray. "It's possible," Allenby admitted. "This might have been the scene of some great battle -- " "With only one such weapon?" I objected. Allenby swore as he stumbled. "What do you mean?" "I haven't seen any other lines of holes -- only the one. In a battle, the whole joint should be cut up. That was good for a few moments' silent thought. Then Allenby said, "It might have been brought out by one side as a last resort. Sort of an ace in the hole." I resisted the temptation to mutiny. "But would even one such weapon, in battle : make only one line of holes? Wouldn't it be played in an arc against the enemy? You know it would." "Well -- " "Wouldn't it cut slices out of the landscape, instead of boring holes? And wouldn't it sway or vibrate enough to make the holes miles away from it something less than perfect circles?" "It could have been very firmly mounted." "Hugh, does that sound like a practical weapon to you?" Two seconds of silence. "On the other hand," he said, "instead of a war, the whole thing might have been designed to frighten some primitive race -- or even some kind of beast -- the hole out of here. A demonstration -- " "Religious," Janus grumbled, still looking around. We walked on, passing the cactus on the low ridge. "Interesting," said Gonzales. "The evidence that whatever causes the phenomenon has happened again and again. I'm afraid that the war theory -- " "Oh, my God!" gasped Burton. We stared at him. "The ship," he whispered. "It's right in line with the holes! If whatever made them is still in operation..." "Run!" yelled Allenby, and we ran like fiends. W E got the ship into the air, out of line with the holes to what we fervently hoped was safety, and then we realized we were admitting our fear that the mysterious hole-maker might still be lurking around. Well, the evidence was all for it, as Gonzales had reminded us -- that cactus had been oozing. We cruised at twenty thousand feet and thought it over. Janus, whose only training was in photography, said, "Some kind of omnivorous animal? Or bird? Eats rocks and everything?" "I will not totally discount the notion of such an animal," Randolph said. "But I will resist to the death the suggestion that it forages with geometric precision." After a while, Allenby said, "Land, Burton. By that 'canal.' Lots of plant life -- fauna, too. We'll do a little collecting." Burton set us down featherlight at the very edge of the sprawling flat expanse of vegetation, commenting that the scene reminded him of his native Texas pear-flats. We wandered in the chilly air, each of us except Burton pursuing his specialty. Randolph relentlessly stalked another of the rabbity creatures. Gonzales was carefully digging up plants and stowing them in jars. Janus was busy with his cameras, recording every aspect of Mars transferable to film. Allenby walked around, helping anybody who needed it. An astronomer, he'd done half his work on the way to Mars and would do the other half on the return trip. Burton lounged in the Sun, his back against a ship's fin, and played chess with Allenby, who was calling out his moves in a bull roar. I grubbed for rocks. My search took me farther and farther away from the others -- all I could find around the 'canal' was gravel, and I wanted to chip at some big stuff. I walked toward a long rise a half-mile or so away, beyond which rose an enticing array of house-sized boulders. As I moved out of earshot, I heard Randolph snarl, "Burton, will you stop yelling, "Kt to B-# and check?' Every time you open your yap, this critter takes off on me." Then I saw the groove. T started right where the ground began to rise -- a thin, shallow, curvebottomed groove in the dirt at my feet, about half an inch across, running off straight toward higher ground. With my eyes glued to it, I walked. The ground slowly rose. The groove deepened, widened -- now it was about three inches across, about one and a half deep. I walked on, holding my breath. Four inches wide. Two inches deep. The ground rose some more. Four and three-eighths inches wide. I didn't have to measure it -- I knew. Now, as the ground rose, the edges of the groove began to curve inward over the groove. They touched. No more groove. The ground had risen, the grove had stayed level and gone underground. Except that now it wasn't a groove. It was a round tunnel. A hole. A few paces farther on, I thumped the ground with my heel where the hole ought to be. The dirt crumbled, and there was the little dark tunnel, running straight in both directions. I walked on, the ground falling away gradually again. The entire process was repeated in reverse. A hairline appeared in the dirt -- widened -- became lips that drew slowly apart to reveal the neat straight four-inch groove -- which shrank as slowly to a shallow line of the ground -- and vanished. I looked ahead of me. There was one low ridge of ground between me and the enormous boulders. A neat four-inch semicircle was bitten out of the very top of the ridge. In the housesized boulder directly beyond was a four-inch hole. the others when I came back and reported. "The mystery deepens," he told them. He turned to me. "Lead on, Peters. You're temporary drill leader." Thank God he didn't say Fall in. The holes went straight through the nest of boulders -- there'd be a hole in one and, ten or twenty feet farther on in the next boulder, another hole. And then another, and another -- right through the nest in a line. About thirty holes in all. Burton, standing by-the boulder I'd first seen, flashed his flashlight into the hole. Randolph, clear on the other side of the jumbled nest, eye to hole, saw it. Straight as a string! The ground sloped away on the far side of the nest -- no holes were visible in that direction -- just miles of desert. So, after we'd stared at the holes for a while and they didn't go away, we headed back for the canal. "Is there any possibility," asked Janus, as we walked, "that it could be a natural phenomenon?" "There are no straight lines in nature," Randolph said, a little shortly. "That goes for a bunch of circles in a straight line. And for perfect circles, too." "A planet is a circle," objected Janus. "An oblate spheroid," Allenby corrected. "A planet's orbit -- " "An ellipse." Janus walked a few steps, frowning. Then he said, "I remember reading that there is something darned near a perfect circle in nature." He paused a moment. "Potholes." And he looked at me, as mineralogist, to corroborate. "What kind of potholes?" I asked cautiously. "Do you mean where part of a limestone deposit has dissol -- " "No. I once read that when a glacier passes over a hard rock that's lying on some softer rock, it grinds the hard rock down into the softer, and both of them sort of wear down to fit together, and it. all ends up with a round hole in the soft rock." "Probably neither stone," I told Janus, '"would be homogenous. The softer parts would abrade faster in the soft stone. The end result wouldn't be a perfect circle." Janus's face fell. "Now," I said, "would anyone care to define this term 'perfect circle' we're throwing around so blithely? Because such holes as Janus describes are often pretty damned round." Randolph said, "Well..." "It is settled, then," Gonzales said, a little sarcastically. "Your discussion, gentlemen, has established that the long, horizontal holes we have found were caused by glacial action." "Oh, no," Janus argued seriously. "I once read that Mars never had any glaciers." All of us shuddered. ted more holes, about a mile down the 'canal,' still on a line, marching along the desert, through cacti, rocks, hills, even through one edge of the low vegetation of the 'canal' for thirty feet or so. It was the damnedest thing to bend down and look straight through all that curling, twisting growth... a round tunnel from either end. We followed the holes for about a mile, to the rim of an enormous saucerlike valley that sank gradually before us until, miles away, it was thousands of feet deep. We stared out across it, wondering about the other side. Allenby said determinedly, "We'll burrow to the bottom of these holes, once and for all. Back to the ship, men!" We hiked back, climbed in and took off. At an altitude of fifty feet, Burton lined the nose of the ship on the most recent line of holes and we flew out over the valley. On the other side was a range of hefty hills. The holes went through them. Straight through. We would approach one' hill -- Burton would manipulate the front viewscreen until we spotted the hole -- we would pass over the hill and spot the other end of the hole in the rear screen. One hole was two hundred and eighty miles long. Four hours later, we were halfway around Mars. Randolph was sitting by a side port, chin on one hand, his eyes unbelieving. "All around the planet," he kept repeating. "All around the planet... "Halfway at least," Allenby mused. "And we can assume that it continues in a straight line, through anything and everything that gets in its way... He gazed out the front port at the uneven blue-green haze of a 'canal' off to our left. "For the love of Heaven, why?" Then Allenby fell down. We all did. Burton had suddenly slapped at the control board, and the ship braked and sank like a plugged duck. At the last second. Burton propped up the nose with a short burst, the ten-foot wheels hit desert sand and in five hundred yards we had jounced to a stop. Allenby got up from the floor. "Why did you do that?" he asked Burton politely, nursing a bruised elbow. Burton's nose was almost touching the front port. "Look!" he said, and pointed. About two miles away, the Martian village looked like a handful of yellow marbles flung on the desert. W E checked our guns. We put on our oxygen-masks. We checked our guns again. We got out of the ship and made damned sure the airlock was locked. An hour later, we crawled inch by painstaking inch up a high sand dune and poked our heads over the top. The Martians were runts -- the tallest of them less than five feet tall -- and skinny as a pencil. Dried-up and brown, they wore loincloths of woven fiber. They stood among the dustylooking inverted-bowl buildings of their village, and every one of them was looking straight up at us with unblinking brown eyes. The six safeties of our six guns clicked off like a rattle of dice. The Martians stood there and gawped. "Probably a highly developed sense of hearing in this thin atmosphere," Allenby murmured. "Heard us coming." "They thought that landing of Burton's was an earthquake," Randolph grumbled sourly. "Marsquake," corrected Janus. One look at the village's scrawny occupants seemed to have convinced him that his life was in no danger. Holding the Martians covered, we examined the village from atop the thirtyfoot dune. The domelike buildings were constructed of something that looked like adobe. No windows -- probably built with sandstorms in mind. The doors were about halfway up the sloping sides, and from each door a stone ramp wound down around the house to the ground -- again with sand. storms in mind, no doubt, so drifting dunes wouldn't block the entrances. The center of the village was a wide street, a long sandy area some thirty feet wide. On either side of it, the houses were scattered at random, as if each Martian had simply hunted for a comfortable place to sit and then built a house around it. "Look," whispered Randolph. One Martian had stepped from a group situated on the far side of the street from us. He started to cross the street, his round brown eyes on us, his small bare feet plodding sand, and we saw that in addition to a loincloth he wore jewelry -- a hammered metal ring, a bracelet on one skinny ankle. The Sun caught a copperish gleam on his bald narrow head, and we saw a band of metal there, just above where his eyebrows should have been. "The super-chief," Allenby murmured. "Oh, shaman me!" As the bejeweled Martian approached the center of the street, he glanced briefly at the ground at his feet. Then he raised his head, stepped with dignity across the exact center of the street and came on toward us, passing the dusty-looking buildings of his realm and the dusty-looking groups of his subjects. He reached the slope of the dune we lay on, paused -- and raised small hands over his head, palms toward us. "I think," Allenby said, "that an anthropologist would give odds on that gesture meaning peace." He stood up, bolstered his gun -- without buttoning the flap -- and raised his own hands over his head. We all did. riHE Martian language consisted of squeaks. We made friendly noises, the chief squeaked and pretty soon we were the center of a group of wide-eyed Martians, none cif whom made a sound. Evidently no one dared peep while the chief spoke -- very likely the most articulate Martians simply squeaked themselves into the job. Allenby, of course, said they just squeaked by. He was going through the business of drawing concentric circles in the sand, pointing at the third orbit away from the Sun and thumping his chest. The crowd around us kept growing as more Martians emerged from the dome buildings to see what was going on. Down the winding ramps of the buildings on our side of the wide, sandy street they came -- and from the buildings on the other side of the street, plodding through the sand, blinking brown eyes at us, not making a sound. Allenby pointed at the third orbit and thumped his chest. The chief squeaked and thumped his own chest and pointed at the copperish band around his head. Then he pointed at Allenby. "I seem to have conveyed to him," Allenby said dryly, "the fact that I'm chief of our party. Well, let's try again." He started over on the orbits. He didn't seem to be getting anyplace, so the rest of us watched the Martians instead. A last handful was straggling across the wide street. "Curious," said Gonzales. "Note what happens when they reach the center of the street." Each Martian, upon reaching the center of the street, glanced at his feet -- just for a moment -- without even breaking stride. And then came on. "What can they be looking at?" Gonzales wondered. "The chief did it too," Burton mused. "Remember when he first came toward us?" We all stared intently at the middle of the street. We saw absolutely nothing but sand. The Martians milled around us and watched Allenby and his orbits. A Martian child appeared from between two buildings across the street. On six-inch legs, it started across, got halfway, glanced downward -- and came on. "I don't get it," Burton said. "What in hell are they looking at?" The child reached the crowd and squeaked a thin, high note. A number of things happened at once.  group around us glanced down, and along the edge of the crowd nearest the center of the street there was a mild stir as individuals drifted off to either side. Quite casually -- nothing at all urgent about it. They just moved concertedly to get farther away from the center of the street, not taking their interested gaze off us for one second in the process. Even the chief glanced up from Allenby's concentric circles at the child's squeak. And Randolph, who had been fidgeting uncomfortably and paying very little attention to our conversation, decided that he must answer Nature's call. He moved off into the dunes surrounding the village. Or rather, he started to move. The moment he set off across the wide street, the little Martian chief was in front of him, brown eyes wide, hands out before him as if to thrust Randolph back. Again six safeties clicked. The Martians didn't even blink at the sudden appearance of our guns. Probably the only weapon they recognized was a club, or maybe a rock. "What can the matter be?" Randolph said. He took another step forward. The chief squeaked and stood his ground. Randolph had to stop or bump into him. Randolph stopped. The chief squeaked, looking right into the bore of Randolph's gun. "Hold still," Allenby told Randolph, "till we know what's up." Allenby made an interrogative sound at the chief. The chief squeaked and pointed at the ground. We looked. He was pointing at his shadow. Randolph stirred uncomfortably. "Hold still," Allenby warned him, and again he made the questioning sound. The chief pointed up the street. Then he pointed down the street. He bent to touch his shadow, thumping it with thin fingers. Then he pointed at the wall of a house nearby. We all looked. Straight lines had been painted on the curved brick-colored wall, up and down and across, to form many small squares about four inches across. In each square was a 'bit of squiggly writing, in blackish paint, and a small wooden peg jutting out from the wall. Burton said, "Looks like a damn crossword puzzle." "Look," said Janus. "In the lower right corner -- a metal ring hanging from one of the pegs." A ND that was all we saw on the wall. Hundreds of squares with figures in them -- a small peg set in each -- and a ring hanging on one of the pegs. "You know what?" Allenby said slowly. "I think it's a calendar! Just a second -- thirty squares wide by twenty-two high -- that's six hundred and sixty. And that bottom line has twenty six -- twenty seven squares. Six hundred and eightyseven squares in all. That's how many days there are in the Martian year!" He looked thoughtfully at the metal ring. "I'll bet that ring is hanging from the peg in the square that represents today. They must move it along every day, to keep track..." "What's a calendar got to do with my crossing the street?" Randolph asked in a pained tone. He started to take another step. The chief squeaked as if it were a matter of desperate, concern that he make us understand. Randolph stopped again and swore impatiently. Allenby made his questioning sound again. The chief pointed emphatically at his shadow, then at the communal calendar -- and we could see now that he was pointing at the metal ring. Burton said slowly, "I think he's trying to tell us that this is today. And such-and-such a time of day. I bet he's using his shadow as a sundial." "Perhaps," Allenby granted. Randolph said, "If this monkey doesn't let me go in another minute -- " The chief squeaked, eyes concerned. "Stand still," Allenby ordered. "He's trying to warn you of some danger." The chief pointed down the street again and, instead of squealing, revealed that there was another sound at his command. He said, "Whooooooosh!" We all stared at the end of the street. ' enue between the houses, and the high sand dune down at the end of it, from which we had first looked upon the village. The chief described a large circle with one hand, sweeping the hand above his head, down to his knees, up again, as fast as he could. He pursed his monkeylips and said, "Whooooooosh!" And made the circle again. A Martian emerged from the door in the side of a house across the avenue and blinked at the Sun, as if he had just awakened. Then he saw what was going on below and blinked again, this time in interest. He made his way down around the winding lamp and started to cross the street. About halfway, he paused, eyed the calendar on the house wall, glanced at his shadow. Then he got down on his hands and knees and crawled across the middle of the street. Once past the middle, he rose, walked the rest of the way to join one of the groups and calmly stared at us along with the rest of them. "They're all crazy," Randolph said disgustedly. "I'm going to cross that street!" "Shut up. So it's a certain time of a certain day," Allenby mused. "And from the way the chief is acting, he's afraid for you to cross the street. And that other one just crawled. By God, do you know what this might tie in with?" We were silent for a moment. Then Gonzales said, "Of course!" And Burton said, "The holes!" "Exactly," said Allenby. "Maybe whatever made -- or makes -- the holes comes right down the center of the street here. Maybe that's why they built the village this way -- to make room for -- " "For what?" Randolph asked unhappily, shifting his feet. "I don't know," Allenby said. He looked thoughtfully at the chief. "That circular motion he made -- could he have been describing something that went around and around the planet? Something like -- oh, no!" Allenby's eyes glazed. "I wouldn't beHis gaze went to the far end of the street, to the high sand dune that rose there. The chief seemed to be waiting for something to happen. "I'm going to crawl," Randolph stated. He got to his hands and knees and began to creepacross the center of the avenue. The chief let him go. The sand dune at the end of the street suddenly erupted. A forty-foot spout of dust shot straight out from the sloping side, as if a bullet had emerged. Powdered sand hazed the air, yellowed it almost the full length of the avenue. Grains of sand stung the skin and rattled minutely on the houses. Randolph dropped flat on his belly. He didn't have to continue his trip. He had made other arrangements. we all sat around, still shaking our heads every once in a while, Allenby talked with Earth. He sat there, wearing the headphones, trying to make himself understood above the godawful static. "... an exceedingly small body," he repeated wearily to his unbelieving audience, "about four inches in diameter. It travels at a mean distance of four feet above the surface of the planet, at a velocity yet to be calculated. Its unique nature results in many hitherto unobserved -- I might say even unimagined -- phenomena." He stared blankly in front of him for a moment, then delivered the understatement of his life. "The discovery may necessitate a re-examination of many of our basic postulates in the physical sciences." The headphones squawked. Patiently, Allenby assured Earth that he was entirely serious, and reiterated the results of his observations. I suppose that he, an astronomer, was twice as flabbergasted as the rest of us. On the other hand, perhaps he was better equipped to adjust to the evidence. "Evidently," he said, "when the body was formed, it traveled at such fantastic velocity as to enable it to -- " his voice was almost a whisper -- "to punch holes in things." The headphones squawked. "In rocks," Allenby said, "in mountains, in anything that got in its way. And now the holes form a large portion of its fixed orbit." Squawk. "Its mass must be on the order of -- " Squawk. " -- process of making the holes slowed it, so that now it travels just fast enough -- " Squawk. " -- maintain its orbit and pene, trate occasional objects such as -- " Squawk. " -- and sand dunes -- " Squawk. "My God, I know it's a mathematical monstrosity," Allenby snarled. " didn't put it there!" Squawk. Allenby was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly, "A name?" Squawk. "H'm," said Allenby. "Well, well." He appeared to brighten just a little. "So it's up to me, as leader of the expedition, to name  it?" Squawk. "Well, well," he said. That chop-licking tone was in his voice. We'd heard it all too often before. We shuddered, waiting. "Inasmuch as Mars' outermost moon is called Deimos, and the next Phobos," he said, "I think I shall name the third moon of Mars -- Bottomos." The Big News Next Month... slant on the end of the world! # Star Shelf C. Clarke. Ballantine Books, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # cloth, # paper lOR a fascinating, uncomfort able -- and unforgettable -- experience, I recommend this strange book. Two months ago I reviewed Clarke's happy fairy tale. Against the Fall of Night, which peered into the misty future to a rebirth of mankind after millenia of desuetude. Now I want to introduce you to his weirdly fatalistic picture of the imminent transmogrification of Homo sapiens, the children of the book's title. It is the far other end of the Clarkean gamut -- from simple A to Z X #! Just as the United States and Russia are about to launch their competing spaceships, the Overlords arrive from some unimaginable star system, making human efforts at interplanetary travel look like nine cents. The Overlords see to it that peace breaks out, standards of living for all improve dramatically, comfort and security and leisure arrive post-haste. But no one knows who the Overlords are or what they want here on Earth. Decades later, one daring youth smuggles aboard an Overlord interstellar vessel, knowing it probably will be # years objective time, though only six months subjective, before he returns. However, he insists on going so he can find out what there  is to know about the Earth's benevolent but autocratic Masters. No sooner has he left than a completely unprecedented event takes place -- an event for which the Overlords had been sent by their Overlords to prepare -- and when he returns, the world of. Men that he knew is utterly and forever gone. He becomes the Last Man on Earth. But this capsule outline of the plot cannot even remotely suggest the richness, the variety, the maturity and the emotional darkness of this book. I am sure it will be compared with some of Stapledon's works -- unfairly to both authors, since resemblances are only on the surface and Clarke tells a much better story than Stapledon ever could. But the sense of the Enormous -- in space, in time, in thought -- are similar in both writers. And while Clarke's pessimism is double-barreled in that it has a glorious side to it, it nevertheless is a pessimism that makes one think of Last and First Men more than once. The book is a continuous excitement, a continuous kaleidoscope of the unexpected. That it is also sometimes a bit wearing because of the enormousness of its concepts and their essentially beyond-science nature is not surprising, nor is it a basic defect. It only makes you put the book down once in a while to gasp for breath. In all, it is a formidably impressive job. son Tucker. Rinehart and Co., New York, #. # pages, # to date has an idea as old as the genre itself, but a sufficiently fresh approach to give it high merit as a fast-moving scienceadventure-detective story. A "man with no past" turns up at Oak Ridge and drives its secret counterspy organization crazy with his seemingly pointless activities. There is a murder of a physicist, a fascinating Woman of Mystery who was the physicist's wife, and a whole passel of other tasty ingredients. Mixed in with all this is a sub-story of an "alien invasion," the result of a spaceship wreck many thousands of years ago, and a fantastic "explanation" of the ancient Gilgamesh Epic of a hero in search of immortality. As the tale progresses, these threads are cleverly woven together until at the end there is a completely logical, though highly surprising, unity. First rate science fiction thriller, well-written and sharply paced -- in a field where good mystery stories are rare. by Kenneth Heuer. Illustrated by Chesley Bonestell. Rinehart and Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages, # TF any of our readers want to know how astrologists and philosophers in the past, and astronomers and physicists today, think the world will end, this little book is for them. The author has collected a miscellany of purely superstitious, pseudo-religious ideas from the past concerning world's end, and has added a series of chapters on the "scientific" likelihood of terrestrial finis being accomplished by comet. Moon, asteroid and star collisions, explosion or death of the Sun -- and atomic war, only the last of which he deems possible within the foreseeable future. This end he believes is more than likely, through explosion of a series of hydrogen bombs with secondary radiation poisonings of the atmosphere. Most of the book is time-passing extrapolation, but the chapter on atomic war is a powerful plea for peace as the only way of avoiding a Man-made "end of the world." The Bonestell plates, first published in Coronet in July, #, are fine imaginative drawings that really need full color to be completely effective. But even in black and white they are worth having in your collection. Henry Myers. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # science fiction even though it is about the "science" of indefinitely prolonging lives. And yet it is science fiction, too, even though there's hardly a gadget in the whole book except railroads, which play a moderately macabre part in the plot. It's the story of an Anglican parson, from the day around # when at the age of three and a half he heard a doctor pronounce him not long for this world and thereupon decided to fool everyone and live long, down through the odd period when Darwin and his followers were smashing the idols of Fundamentalism and the archeologists were uncovering the library of Ashur-banipall and translating the Epic of Gilgamesh (strange to hit that ancient item twice in one month -- see the review of Tucker's book, above) with its legends of the long-lived Ancients, to the present, when the parson hero, thinly disguised as "The Old Gentleman," meets up with the story's narrator and the narrator finally meets up with the O.G.'s daughter and marries her. (Deep breath, please.) The Old Gent, incidentally, is well over a hundred, though he looks no more than a ruddy fifty-two. That's all there is to it, except for some rather romantically melodramatic plotting about Victorian morals and the "ethics" of the Church of England in the #th Century. The fascinating thing about the book is that it makes you feel that its scientific speculations on prolonging life are real, immediate, and up to you -- you, individually. You can will yourself to live longer if you go about it the right way! I think you'll like this most unusual and well-done novel, despite its being utterly unlike anything else in modern fantasy. Kuttner. Ballantine Books, New York, #. # pages, # cloth, # paper tEN top tales, by one who today is too little seen in the science fiction magazines, are here set before you in another of Ballantine's low-priced originals. Of the ten, three appeared during the past two years, six between # and #, and one new one. There is "Or Else," a gem about the man from space who tried to persuade a couple of Mexican feuders to declare peace -- with hilarious results. There is a fine Hogben tale from # (only Kuttner aficionados will know what a Hogben tale is; everyone else will have to read "Pile of Trouble" to find out) and a chiller named "Shock" that has to do with a person from the far future and a person from today and what happens when they mix it up in today's person's apartment. Many readers may remember the superb "Camouflage," from eight years ago, about the human "transplant" that defeats an attempt to hijack an atomic pile being taken to Callisto, and everyone will want to read the new item, "Year Day," which describes as our future a Gehenna of advertising techniques that makes a minute of silence the most valuable program an advertiser can buy on the air. Five other fine tales complete the roster. One of them, "Home Is the Hunter," appeared in this magazine. Frank Gaynor. Philosophical Library, New York, n.d. # pages, # npHE publication in this country of Gaynor's encyclopedia, first issued in England in #, is an important service to scientists working in the fields of nuclear physics, chemistry and engineering, even though it is already somewhat out of date. It is not a book for the layman, but nevertheless it deserves mention because it is such a valuable contribution to the bibliography on atomic energy. , Though it is basically British in orientation, this is hardly a defect. American scientists have here a source for British definitions through which their own terminology can be coordinated with that of their co-workers overseas. by Charles L. Harness. Bouregy and Curl, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # long piece of science fiction is so far from being believable that one reads it purely as a sort of berserk fairy tale, portentous and at the same time dull. It is, however, pretty astonishing if only because of the cauldronful of ideas and fantasies that are mixed up in it. The tale tells of Alar the Thief, another Man With No Past (see the Tucker book reviewed above). He is a member of the Society of Thieves in a dictator-ridden America of tomorrow; the Society devotes all its ill-gotten gains to freeing the "slaves" of this new decaying civilization. A moderately good start -- but before one has gone much further, one finds oneself mixed up with speeds so fast that spaceships return years before they have left; colonies on (or "in") the Sun, where madmen live for # days each, making "muirium," the fuel that makes such cosmic speeds possible; a sadist psychologist named Shey whose dealings with the heroine are more reminiscent of material to be found in pornography than in science fiction; and, finally, the End of Civilization -- wham! How about Beyond ? Have you read Galaxy's companion magazine? In just a short time. Beyond has become the top fantasy fiction magazine. The letters from our readers tell us why the sales keep jumping. Because for the first time, a fantasy fiction magazine has been written for adults, by the best in this literary field. Beyond is written to entertain you -- every issue is packed with the type of stories that caused one of our readers to say -- "I wish Beyond was published once a week." Try it at our risk. Send in your subscription for six issues. If you don't like the first issue, cancel your subscription and we will return your money In full. -- Oh yes, you save # on this subscription, or # on twelve issues. Fill out the coupon below. Please start my subscription with the next issue. Enclosed find  Check which offer (# Foreign Postage for each year) Your Name Address City State They were the perfect servants -- they were obvious question is: How much is nothing? tiating little runts never intended any harm. They were eager to please, a cinch to transact business with, and constantly, everlastingly grateful to us for giving them asylum. Yes, we gave the genuflecting little devils asylum. And we were glad to have them around at first -- especially when they presented our women' with a gift to surpass all gifts; a custom-built domestic servant. In a civilization that had made such a fetish of personal liberty and dignity, you couldn't hire a butler or an upstairs maid for less than love and money. And since love was pretty much rationed along the lines of monogamy, domestic service was almost a dead occupation. That is, until the Ollies came to our planet to stay. Eventually I learned to despise the spineless little immigrants from Sirius, but the first time I met one he made me feel foolishly important. I looked at his frail, olive-skinned little form, and thought. If this is what space has to offer in the way of advanced life-forms... well, we haven't done so badly on old Mother Earth. This one's name was Johnson. All of them, the whole fifty-six, took the commonest Earth family names they could find, and dropped their own name-designations whose slobbering sibilance made them difficult for us to pronounce and write. It seemed strange, their casually wiping out their nominal heritage just for the sake of our convenience -- imagine an O'Toole or a Rockefeller or an Adams arriving on Sirius IV and no sooner learning the local lingo than ' insisting on becoming known as Sslyslasciffsoszl ! But that was the Ollie. Anything to get along and please us. And of course, addressing them as Johnson, Smith, Jones, etc., did work something of a semantic protective coloration and reduce some of the barriers to quick adjustment to the aliens. appeared at my third underlevel office a few months after the big news of their shipwreck landing off the Maine coast. He arrived a full fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment, and I was too curious to stand on the dignity of office routine and make him wait. As he stood in the doorway of my office, my first visual impression was of an emaciated adolescent, seasick green, prematurely balding. He bowed, and bowed again, and spent thirty seconds reminding me that it was he who had sought the interview, and it was he who had the big favors to ask -- and it was wonderful, gracious, generous # who flavored the room with the essence of mystery, importance, godliness and overpowering sweetness upon whose fragrance little Ollie Johnson had come to feast his undeserving senses. "Sit down, sit down," I told him when I had soaked in all the celestial flattery I could hold. "I love you to pieces, too, but I'm curious about this proposition you mentioned in your message." He eased into the chair as if it were much too good for him. He was strictly humanoid. His fourand-a-half-foot body was dressed in the most conservative Earth clothing, quiet colors and cheap quality. While he swallowed slowly a dozen times, getting ready to outrage my illustrious being with his sordid business proposition, his coloring varied from a rather insipid gray-green to a rich olive -- which is why the press instantly had dubbed them Ollies. When they got excited and blushed, they came close to the eolor of a ripe olive; and this was often. few times, his equivalent of throat-clearing, and then lunged into his subject at a # degree tangent : "Can it be that your gracious agreement to this interview conus of the inferior ones?" His voice was light, almost reedy. "If it's legal and there's a buck in it, can't see any reason why not," I told him. "You manufacture and distribute devices, I am told. Wonderful labor-saving mechanisms that make life on Earth a constant pleasure." I was almost tempted to hire him for my public relations staff. "We do," I admitted. "Servomechanisms, appliances and gadgets of many kinds for the home, office and industry." "It is to our everlasting disgrace," he said with humility, "that we were unable to salvage the means to give your magnificent civilization the worthy gift of pur space drive. Had Flussissc or Shascinssith survived our long journey, it would be possible, but -- " He bowed his head, as if waiting for my wrath at the stale news that the only two pdwermechanic scientists on board were D.O.A. "That was tough," I said. "But what's on your mind now?" He raised his moist eyes, grateful at my forgiveness. "We who survived do possess a skill that might help repay the debt which we have incurred in intruding upon your glorious planet." He begged my permission to show me something in the outer waiting room. With more than casual interest, I assented. He moved obsequiously to the door, opened it and spoke to someone beyond my range of vision. His words sounded like a repetition of "sissle-flissle." Then he stepped aside, fastened his little wet eyes on me expeetantly, and waited. Suddenly the doorway was filled, jamb to jamb, floor to arch, with a hulking, bald-headed character with rugged pink features, a broad nose like a pug, and huge sugar-scoops for ears. He wore a quiet business suit of fine quality, obviously tailored to his six-anda-half-foot, clifflike physique. In spite of his bulk, he moved across the carpet to my desk on eat feet, and came to a halt with pneumatic smoothness. "I am a Soth," he said in a low, creamy voice. It was so resonant that it seemed to come from the walls around us. "I have learned your language and your ways. I can follow instructions, solve simple problems and do your work. I am very strong. I can serve you well." recitation was an expressionless monotone that sounded almost haughty compared to the self-effacing Ollie's piping whines. His face had the dignity of a rock, and his eyes the quiet peace of a cool, deep mountain lake. The Ollie came forward. "We have been able to repair only one of the six Soths we had on the ship. They are more fragile than we humanoids." "They don't look it," I said. "And what do you mean by you humanoids? What's he?" "You would call him -- a robot, I believe." My astonished reaction must have Satisfied the Ollie, because he allowed his eyes to leave me and seek the carpet again, where they evidently were more comfortable. "You mean you -- you make these people?" I gasped. He nodded. "We can reproduce them, given materials and facilities. Of course, your own robots must be vastly superior -- " a hypocritical sop to my vanity -- "but still we hope you may find a use for the Soths." I got up and walked around the big lunker, trying to look blase. "Well, yes," I lied. "Our robots probably have considerably better intellectual abilities -- our cybernetic units, that is. However, you do have something in form and mobility." That was the understatement of my career. I finally pulled my face together, and said as casually as I could, "Would you like to license us to manufacture these -- Soths?" The Ollie fluttered his hands. "But that would require our working and mingling with your personnel," he said. "We wouldn't consider imposing in such a gross manner." "No imposition at all," I assured him. But he would have none of it: "We have studied your economics and have found that your firm is an outstanding leader in what you term 'business.' You have a superb distribution organization. It is our intention to offer you the exclusive -- " he hesitated, then dragged the word from his amazing vocabulary -- "franchise for the sale of our Soths. If you agree, we wUl not burden you with their manufacture. Our own little plant will produce and ship. You may then place them with your customers." I studied the magnificent piece of animated sculpturing, stunned at the possibilities. "You say a Soth is strong. How strong?" The huge creature startled me by answering the question himself. He bent flowingly from the waist, gripped my massive steel desk by one of its thick, overlapping top edges, and raised it a few inches from the floor -- with the fingers of one hand. When he put it down, I stood up and hefted one edge myself. By throwing my back into it, I could just budge one side of the clumsy thing -- four hundred pounds if it was an ounce! refrained from comment. He said, "The Department of Commerce has been helpful. They have explained your medium of exchange, and have helped us with the prices of raw materials. It was they who recommended your firm as a likely distributor." "Have you figured how much one of these Soths should sell for?" "We think we can show a modest profit if we sell them to you for #," he said. "Perhaps we can bring down our costs, if you find a wide enough demand for them." I had expected ten or twenty times that figure. I'm afraid I got a little eager. "I -- uh -- shall we see if we can't just work out a little contract right now? Save you another trip back this afternoon." "If you will forgive our boorish presumption," Ollie said, fumbling self-conciously in his baggy clothing, "I have already prepared such a document with the help of the Attorney General. A very kindly gentleman." It was simple and concise. It allowed us to resell the Soths at a price of #, Fair Traded, giving us a gross margin of # to work with. He assured me that upkeep and repairs on the robot units were negligible, and we could extend a very generous warranty which the Ollies would make good in the event of failure. He gave me a quick rundown on the care and feeding of a Sirian Soth, and then jolted me with : "There is just a single other favor I beg of you. Would you do my little colony the exquisite honor of accepting this Soth as your personal servant, Mr. Collins?" "Servant?" We have trained him in the rudiments of the household duties and conventions of your culture. He learns rapidly and never forgets an instruction. Your wife would find Soth most useful, I am quite certain." "A magnificent specimen like this doing housework?" I marveled at the little creature's empty-headedness. "Again I must beg your pardon, sir. I overlooked mentioning a suggestion by the Secretary of Labor that the Soths be sold only for use in domestic service. It was also the consensus of the President's whole cabinet that the economy of any nation could not cope with the problem of unemployment were our .Soths to be made available for all the types of work for which they are fitted." My dream of empire collapsed. The little green fellow was undoubtedly telling the truth. The unions would strike any plant or facility in the world where a Soth put foot on the job. It would ruin our retail consumer business, too -- Soths wouldn't consume automobiles, copters, theater tickets and filets mignon. "Yes, Mr. Johnson," I sighed. "I'll be happy to try out your Soth. We have a place out in the country where he'll come in handy." The Ollie duly expressed his ecstasy at my decision, and backed out of my office waving his copy of the contract. I had assured him that our board of directors would meet within a week and confirm my signature. I looked up at the hairless giant. As general director of the Home Appliance Division of Worldwide Machines, Incorporporated, I had made a deal, all right. The first interplanetary business deal in history. But for some reason, I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd been had. the limoucopter, they charged me double fare for Soth's transportation to the private field where I kept my boat. As we left Detroit, I watched him stare down at the flattened skyline, but he did it with the unseeing expression of an old commuter. Jack, my personal pilot, had eyed my passenger at the airport with some concern and sullen muttering. Now he made much of trimming ship after takeoff. The boat did seem logy with the unaccustomed ballast -- it was a four-passenger Arrow, built for speed, and Soth had to crouch and spread all over the two rear seats. But he did so without complaint or comment for the halfhour hop up to our estate on my favorite Canadian lake. As the four hundred miles unreeled below us, I wondered how Vicki would react to Soth. I should have phoned her, but how do you describe a Soth to a semi-invalid whose principal excitement is restricted to birdwatching and repotting pxiny geraniums, and a rare sunhshing expedition to the end of our floating pier? Well, it was Friday, and I would have the whole weekend to work the robot into our routine. I had called my friend. Dr. dustrial psychologist, and invited him to drop over tonight if he wanted an interesting surprise. He was our nearest neighbor and my most frequent chess partner, who lived a secluded bachelor's life in a comfortable cabin on the far shore of our lake. As we came in for a water landing, I saw Fred's boat at our pier. Then I could make out Fred, Vicki and Clumsy, our Irish setter, all waiting for me. I hoped Fred's presence would help simmer Vicki down a little. We drifted in to the dock, and I turned to Soth and told him to help my pilot unload the supplies. This pleased Jack, whose Pilot and Chauffeur's Local frequently reminded me in polite little bulletins that its members were not obligated to perform other than technical services for their employers. Then I got out and said hello to Vicki and Fred as casually as possible. Vicki kissed me warmly on the mouth, which she does when she's excited, and then clung to me and let the day's tension soak out of her. How you get tense in a Twenty-first Century home in the midst of the Canadian wilderness is something I've never been able to figure out, but Vicki's super-imagination managed daily to defeat her doctor's orders for peace and quiet. "I'm glad you're home, dear," she said. "When Fred came over ahead of time I knew something was up, and I'm all unraveled with curiosity." Just then Soth emerged from the boat with our whole week's supply of foodstuffs and assorted necessities bundled under his long arms. "Oh, dear God, a dinner guest!" Vicki exclaimed. Tears started into her reproachful eyes and her slender little figure stiffened in my arms. arms with her and Fred, and started up the path. "Not a guest," I told her. "He's a servant who will make the beds, clean up and all sorts of things, and if you don't like him we'll turn him in on a new model laundry unit, and don't start worrying about being alone with him -- he's a robot." "A robot!" Fred said, and both their heads swiveled to stare back. "Yes," I said. "That's why I wanted you here tonight, Fred. I'd like to have you sort of go over him and -- well, you know -- " I didn't want to say, make sure he's safe. Not in Vicki's presence. But Fred caught my eye and nodded. I started to tell them of my visitor, and the contract with the castaways from space. Halfway through. Clumsy interrupted me with his excited barking. I looked back. Clumsy was galloping a frantic circle around Soth, cutting in and out, threatening to make an early dinner of the intruder's leg. Before I could speak, Soth opened his lips and let out a soft hiss through his white teeth. Clumsy flattened to the ground and froze, and Soth continued after us without a further glance at the dog. Fred looked at Vicki's tense face and laughed. "I'll have to learn that trick... Clumsy's chewed the cuffs off three pairs of my best slacks." Vicki smiled uncertainly, and went into the house. I showed Soth where to stow the supplies, and told him to remain in the kitchen. He just froze where he stood. Fred was making drinks when I returned to the living room. "Looks docile enough. Cliff," he told me. "Strong as a horse and gentle as a lamb," I said. "I want you two to help me find out what his talents are. I'll have to prepare a paper on him for the board of directors Monday." There were nervous whitecaps on Vicki's drink. I patted her shoulder. "I'll break him into the housekeeping routine, honey. You won't have him staring over your shoulder." She tried to relax. "But he's so quiet -- and big!" "Who wants a noisy little servant around?" Fred said helpfully. "And how about that rock retaining-wall Cliff is always about to build for your .garden? And you really don't love housework, do you, Vicki?" "I don't mind the chores," she said. "But it might be fun to have a big fellow like that to shove around." She was trying valiantly to hold up her end, but the vein in her temple was throbbing. " hours were more than interesting. Soth turned out to be what the doctor ordered, literally and figuratively. After I'd taken him on a tour of the place, I showed him how to work the automatic devices -- food preparation, laundry and cleaning. And after one lesson, he served us faultless meals with a quiet efficiency that was actually restful, even miraculously to Vicki. She began relaxing in his presence and planning a few outside projects "to get our money's worth" out of the behemoth. This was our earliest joke about Soth, because he certainly was no expense or problem to maintain. As the Ollie had promised, he thrived on our table scraps and a pink concoction which he mixed by pouring a few drops of purple liquid from a pocket vial into a gallon pitcher of water. The stuff would be supplied by the Ollies at a cost of about a dollar eighty a week. Saturday afternoon, Vicki bravely took over teaching him the amenities of butlering and the intricacies of bed-making. After a short session in the bedroom, she came out looking thoughtful. "He's awfully real looking," she said. "And you can't read a darned thing in his eyes. How far can you trust him. Cliff? You know -- around women?" Fred looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said, "Well, let's find out." We sat down and called Soth into the living room. He came and stood before us, erect, poised and motionless. Fred said, "Disrobe. Remove all your clothing. Strip!" Vicki sucked in her breath. The Soth replied instantly, "Your order conflicts with my conditioning. I must not remove my covering in the presence of an Earthwoman." Fred scratched his gray temple thoughtfully. "Then, Vicki, would you mind disrobing, please?" She gulped again. Fred was an old friend, but not exactly the family doctor. He sensed her mild outrage. "You'll never stop wondering if you don't," he said. She looked at Fred, me, and then Soth. Then she stood up gingerly, as if edging into a cold shower, gritted her teeth, grasped the catch to her full-length zipper of her blue lounging suit and stripped it from armpit to ankle. As she stepped out of it, I saw why she had peeled it off like you would a piece of adhesive tape: It was a warm day, and she wore no undergarments. hear him go, but Fred was watching him -- Fred's eyes were where they belonged. Soth stopped in the archway to the dining room with his back turned. Fred was at his side. "Why did you leave?" Fred demanded. "I am not permitted to remain in the company of an uncovered Earthwoman... unless she directs me to do so." While Vicki fled behind the French door to dress herself, Fred asked, "Are there any other restrictions to your behavior in the presence of Earthwomen?" "Many." "Recount some of them." "An Earthwoman may not be touched, regardless of her wishes, unless danger to her life requires it." "Looks like you wash your own back, Vicki," I chuckled. "What else?" she asked, poking her head out. "I mean what other things can't you do?" "There are many words I may not utter, postures I may not assume, and certain duties I may not perform. Certain answers to questions may not be given in the presence of an Earthwoman." Fred whistled. "The Ollies have mastered more than Our language... I thought you said they were noted mainly for their linguistic talents, Cliff." I was surprised, too. In the space of a few hectic months our alien visitors had probed deeply into our culture, mores and taboos -- and then had had the genius to instill their compounded discretions into their Soths. I said, "Satisfied, Vicki?" She was still arranging herself. Her lips curled up at the corners impishly. "I'm almost disappointed," she said. "I do an allout striptease, and no one looks but my husband. Of course," she added thoughtfully, "I suppose that's something..." Sunday evening. I went down to the pier to smoke a good-night pipe with him, and get his private opinion. "I'm buying a hundred shares of Worldwide stock tomorrow," he declared. "That critter is worth his weight in diamonds to every well-heeled housewife in the country.' In fact, put me down for one of your first models. I wouldn't mind having a laundry sorter and morning coffee-pourer, myself." "Think he's safe, do you?" "No more emotions than that stump over there. And it baffles me. He has self-awareness, painsensitivity and a fantastic vocabulary, yet I needled him all afternoon with every semantic hypo I could think of without getting a flicker of emotion out of him." He paused. "Incidentally, I made him strip for me in my room. You'll be as confused as I was to learn that he's every inch a man in his format." "What?" I exclaimed. "Made me wonder what his duties included back on his home planet... but as I said, no emotions. With the set of built-in inhibitions he has, he'd beat a eunuch out of his job any day of the week." A few seconds later, Fred dropped into his little two-seater and skimmed off for home, leaving me with a rather disturbing question in my mind. I went back to the house and cornered Soth out in the kitchen alone. Vicki had him polishing all the antique silverware. "Are there female Soths?" I asked point-blank. He looked down at me with that relaxed, pink look and said, "No, Mr. Collins," and went back to his polishing. The damned liar. He knew what I meant. He justified himself on a technicality. ing with more confidence than I'd had in ages. She had slept especially well, and the only thing on her mind was Clumsy's disappearance. He hadn't shown up since Soth scared the fleas off him with that hiss. At the office, I had my girl transcribe my notes and work up a memorandum to the board of directors. We sent it around before noon, and shortly after lunch I had calls from all ten of them, including the chairman. It was not that they considered it such a big thing -- they were just plainly curious. We scheduled a meeting for Tuesday morning, to talk the thing over. That night when I got home, all was serene. Soth served us cocktails, dinner and a late snack, and had the place tidied up by bedtime. He did all this and managed to remain virtually invisible. He moved so quietly and with such uncanny anticipation of our demands, it was if he were an old family retainer, long versed in our habits and customs. Vicki bragged as she undressed that she had the giant hog-tied and jumping through hoops. "We even got half the excavation done for the rock wall," she said proudly. On impulse, I went out into the hall and down to Soth's room, where I found him stretched out slaunchwise across the double bed. He opened his eyes as I came in, but didn't stir. "Are you happy here?" I asked bluntly. He sat up and did something new. He answered my question with a question. "Are you happy with my services?" I said, "Yes, of course." "Then all is well," he replied simply, and lay down again. It seemed like a satisfactory answer. He radiated a feeling of peace, and the expression of repose on his heavy features was assuring. TT rained hard and cold during the night. I hadn't shown Soth how to start the automatic heating unit. When I left the house next morning, he was bringing Vicki her breakfast in bed, a tray on one arm and a handful of kindling under the other. Only once had he watched me build a fire in the fireplace, but he proceeded with confidence. We flew blind through filthy weather all the way to Detroit. I dismissed Jack with orders to return at eleven with Soth. "Don't be late," I warned him. Jack looked a little uneasy, but he showed up on schedule and delivered Soth to us with rain droplets on his massive bald pate, just ten minutes after the conference convened. I had Ollie Johnson there, too, to put Soth through his paces. The Ollie, in a bedraggled, soggy suit, was so excited that he remained an almost purplish black for the whole hour. The directors were charmed, impressed and enthusiastic. When I finished my personal report on the Soth's tremendous success in my own household, old Gulbrandson, Chairman t of the Board, shined his rosy cheeks with his handkerchief and said, "I'll take the first three you produce, Johnson. Our staff of domestics costs me more than a brace of attorneys, and it turns over about three times a year. Cook can't even set the timer on the egg-cooker right." He turned to me. "Sure he can make good coffee, Collins?" I nodded emphatically. "Then put me down for three for sure," he said with executive finality. Gulbrandson paid dearly for his piggishness later, but at the time it seemed only natural that if one Soth could run a household efficiently, then the Chairman of the Board should have at least two spares in case one blew a fuse or a vesicle or whatever it was they might blow. most broke up the meeting right there, and when they quieted down again I had orders for twenty-six Soths from the board members and one from my own secretary. "How soon," I asked Ollie Johnson, "can you begin deliveries?" He dry-washed his hands and admitted it would be five months, and a sigh of disappointment ran around the table. Then someone asked him how many units a month they could turn out. He stared at the carpet and held out his hands like a pawnbroker disparaging a diamond ring : "Our techniques are so slow. The first month, maybe a hundred. Of course, once our cultures are all producing in harmony, almost any number. One thousand? Ten thousand? Whatever your needs suggest." One of the officers asked, "Is your process entirely biological? You mentioned cultures." For a moment, I thought Ollie Johnson was going to break out in tears. His face twisted. "Abysmally so," he grieved. "Our synthetic models have never proved durable. Upkeep and parts replacements are prohibitive. Our brain units are much similar to your own latest developments in positronics, but we have had to resort to organic cellular structure in order to achieve the mobility which Mr. Collins admired last Friday." The upshot of the meeting was a hearty endorsement over my signature on the Ollies' contract, plus an offer of any help they might need to get production rolling. As the meeting broke up, they pumped my hand and stared enviously at my Soth. Several offered me large sums for him, up to fifteen thousand dollars, and for the moment I sweated out the rack of owning something my bosses did not. Their understandable resentment, however, was tempered by their recognition of my genius in getting a signed contract before the Ollies went shopping to our competitors. What none of us understood right then was that the Ollies were hiring us, not the other way around. When I told Vicki about my hour of triumph and how the officers bid up our Soth, she glowed with the very feminine delight of exclusive possession. She hugged me and gloated, "Old biddy Gulbrandson -- won't she writhe? And don't you dare take any offer for our Soth. He's one of the family now, eh, Soth, old boy?" He was serving soup to her as she slapped him on the hip. Somehow he managed to retreat so fast she almost missed him, yet he didn't spill a drop of bouillon from the poised tureen. "Yes, Mrs. Collins," he said, not a trace more nor less aloof than usual. "Oops, sorry!" Vicki apologized. "I forgot. The code." I had the feeling that warmhearted Vicki would have had the Soth down on the bearskin rug in front of the big fireplace, scuffling him like she did Clumsy, if it hadn't been for the Soth's imtouchalale code -- and I was thankful that it existed. Vicki had a way of putting her hand on you when she spoke, or hugging anyone in sight when she was especially delighted. And I knew something about Soth that she didn't. Something that apparently hadn't bothered her mind since the day of her striptease. mid-fall before Ollie paid me another visit. When he showed up again, it was with an invoice for # Soths, listed by serial numbers and ready to ship. He had heard about sight drafts and wanted me to help him prepare one. "To hell with that noise," I told him. I wrote a note to purchasing and countersigned the Ollie's invoice for some #. I called my secretary and told her to take Ollie and his bill down to disbursing and have him paid off. I had to duck behind my desk before the Ollie dreamed up some new obscenity of gratitude to heap on me. Then I cleared shipping instructions through sales for the Soths already on order and dictated a memo to our promotion department. I cautioned them to go slowly at first -- the Soths would be on tight allotment for a while. One snarl developed. The Departn)ent of Internal Revenue landed on us with the question: Were the Soths manufactured or grown? We beat them out of a manufacturer's excise tax, but it cost us plenty in legal fees. The heads of three labor unions called on me the same afternoon of the tax hearing. They got their assurances in the form of a clause in the individual purchase contracts, to the effect that the "consumer" agreed not to employ a Soth for the purpose of evading labor costs in the arts, trades and professions as organized under the various unions, and at all times to be prepared to withdraw said Soth from any unlisted job in which the unions might choose to place a member human worker. Before they left, all three union men placed orders for household Soths. "Hell," said one, "that's less than the cost of a new car. Now maybe my wife will get off my back on this damfool business of organizing a maid's and butler's union. Takes members to run a union, and the only real butler in our neighborhood makes more than I do." only reason we spent a nickel on advertising was to brag up the name of W. W. M. and wave our coup in the faces of our competitors. By Christmas, production was up to two thousand units a month, and we were already six thousand orders behind. The following June, the Ollies moved into a good hunk of the old abandoned Willow Run plant and got their production up to ten thousand a month. Only then could we begin to think of sending out floor samples of Soths to our distributors. It was fall before the distributors could place samples with the most exclusive of their retail accounts. The interim was spent simply relaying frantic priority orders fronj high-ranking people all over the globe directly to the plant, where the Ollies filled them right out of the vats. Twenty thousand a month was their limit, it turned out. Even when they had human crews completely trained in all production phases, the fifty-six Ollies could handle only that many units in their secret conditioning and training laboratories. For over two more years, business went on swimmingly. I got a fancy bonus and a nice vacation in Paris, where I was the rage of the continent. I was plagued with requests for speaking engagements, which invariably turned out to be before select parties of V. I. P.s whose purpose was to twist my arm for an early priority on a Soth delivery. When I returned home, it was just in time to have the first stink land in my lap. An old maid claimed her Soth had raped her. Before our investigators could reveal our doctors' findings that she was a neurotic, dried up old virgin and lying in her teeth, a real crime occurred. A New Jersey Soth tossed a psychology instructor and his three students out of a third floor window of their university science building, and all four ended an attempted morbid investigation on the broad, unyielding cement of the concourse. My phone shrieked while they were still scraping the inquiring minds off the pavement. The Soth was holed Mp in the lab, and would I come right away? who was now sort of a public relations man for his tribe, and we arrived within an hour. The hallway was full of uniforms and weapons, but quite empty of volunteers to go in and capture the "berserk" robot. Ollie and I went in right away, and found him standing at the open window, staring down at the people with hoses washing off the stains for which he was responsible. Ollie just stood there, clenching and unclenching his hands and shaking hysterically. I had to do the questioning. I said sternly, "Soth, why did you harm those people?" He turned to me as calmly as my own servant. His neat denim jacket, now standard fatigue uniform for Soths, was unfastened. His muscular chest was bare. "They were tormenting me with that." He pointed to a small electric generator from which ran thin cables ending in sharp test prods. "I told Professor Kahnovsky it was not allowed, but he stated I was his property. The three boys tried to hold me with those straps while the professor touched me with the prods. "My conditioning forbade me from harming them, but there was a clear violation of the terms of the covenant. I was in the proscribed condition of immobility .when the generator was started. When the pain grew unbearable, the prime command of my conditioning was invoked. I must survive. I threw them all out the window." The Soth went with us peacefully enough, and submitted to the lockup without demur. For a few days, before the state thought up a suitable indictment, the papers held a stunned silence. Virtually every editor and publisher had a Soth in his own home. Then the D.A., who also owned a Soth, decided to drop the potentially sensational first degree murder charges that might be indicated, and came out instead with a second degree indictment. split down the middle on whether the charge should be changed to third degree murder or thrown out of court entirely as justifiable homicide by a nonresponsible creature. This was all very sympathetic to the Soth's cause, but it had a fatal effect. In bringing out the details of the crime, it stirred a certain lower element of our society to add fear and hate to a simmering envy of the wealthier Soth-owners. Mobs formed in the streets, marching and demonstrating. The phony rape story was given full credence, and soon they were amplifying it to a lurid and rabblerousing saga of bestiality. Soth households kept their prized servants safely inside. But on the afternoon of the case's dismissal, when the freed Soth started down the courthouse steps, someone caved his head in with a brick. Ollie Johnson and I were on either side of him, and his purple blood splashed all over my light topcoat. When the mob saw it, they closed in on us screaming for more. An officer helped us drag the stricken Soth back into the courthouse, and while the riot squad disbursed the mob, we slipped him out the back way in an ambulance, which returned him to the Willow Run plant for repairs. It hit the evening newscasts and editions: airwaves started buzzing. The mobs were going wild. Further developments were described as Jack and I landed on the windblown lake. The State Guard was protecting the Ollies' Willow Run Plant against a large mob that was trying to storm it, and reinforcements had been asked by the state police. Vicki met me on the' pier. Her face was white and terribly troubled. I guess mine was, too, because she burst into tears in my arms. "The poor Soth," she sobbed. "Now what will they do?" "God knows," I said. I told Jack to tie up the boat and stay overnight -- I feared I might be called back any minute. He mumbled something about overtime, but I think his main concern was in staying so near to a Soth during the trouble that was brewing. We went up to the house, leaving him to bed himself down in the temporary quarters in the boathouse that the union required I maintain for him. Soth was standing motionless before the video, staring at a streaky picture of the riot scene at Willow Run. His face was inscrutable as usual, but I thought I sensed a tension. His blacjc servingjacket was wrinkled at the shoulders as he flexed the muscles of his powerful arms. Yet when Vicki asked for some martinis, he mixed and served them without comment. We drank and then ate dinner in silence. We were both reluctant to discuss this thing in front of Soth. We were still eating when an aircab thundered overhead. A minute later, I watched it land a tiny passenger at our pier and tie up to wait for him. It was Ollie Johnson, stumbling hatless up the flagstone path. I held the door for him, but he burst by me with hardly a glance. "Where isi he?" he demanded, and stormed out into the kitchen without awaiting a reply. I followed in time to see him fall on his face before our Soth and shed genuine tears. He lay there sobbing and hissing for over a minute, and an incredible idea began forming in my mind. I sent Vicki to her bedroom and stepped into the kitchen. I said, "Will you please explain this?" He didn't move or acknowledge. Soth flipped him aside with a twist of his ankle and brushed past me into the living room, where he took up an immobile stance again before the video. He stared unblinkingly at the #-inch screen. "It's too bad," I said. He didn't answer, but he moved his head slightly so that his parabolic ear could catch the sound of my movements. TjOR minutes we stood transfixed by the magnitude of the mob action around the entrance to the Willow Run plant. The portable video transmitter was atop a truck parked on the outskirts of the mob. Thousands of over the excited voice of the announcer came hysterical screams. Even as we watched, more people thronged into the scene, and it was evident that the flimsy cordon of soldiers and troopers could not hold the line for long. candlepower searchlights held the insane figures somewhat at bay by tilting their hot, blinding beams down into the human masses and threatening them with tear gas and hack guns. The workers were out for blood. Not content with restricting Soths to non-union labor, now they were screaming their jealous hearts out for these new symbols of class distinction to be destroyed. Of course, their beef was more against the professionalmanagerial human classes who could afford a surface car, an airboat and a Soth. The two socalled crimes and the trial publicity had triggered a sociological time bomb that might have endured for years without detonating -- but it was here, now, upon us. And my own sweat trickling into my eyes stung me to a realization of my personal problem. I wiped my eyes clear with my knuckles -- and at that instant the video screen flashed with a series of concentric halos. The operator, apparently, was so startled he forgot to turn down the gain on the transmitter. When he finally did, we saw that the roof of the plant. Then great audio amplifiers from the plant set up an earsplitting sissssse that again overloaded the transmitting circuits for a moment. When the compensators cut down the volume, both Ollie and Soth leaned forward intently and listened to the frying sound that buzzed from the speaker. Those inside the plant were communicating a message to the outside, well knowing that it would reach the whole world. After a moment, the hissing stopped. And from a myriad of openings in the plant streamed an army of Soths with flaming weapons in their hands. The flames were directed first at the armed forces who were guarding the plant from attack. The thin line of soldiers fell instantly. The crowd surged blindly forward, and then, as those in the front ranks saw what had happened, began to dissolve and stampede. The screams became terrified. The flames grew brighter. And the picture winked out and the sound went dead. A standby pattern lighted the screen, and I stared at it numbly. TT was too late to run for my hunting rifle now, and I cursed my stupidity even as Soth turned upon me. I grabbed the sniveling little Ollie and held him between us with my hands around his neck. He hung there limply, hissing wildly through a larynx that vibrated under my fingers, his hands stretched imploringly to Soth. Soth stared at me and issued his first order. "Release him," he said. His voice was several notes higher than his usual monotone -- the voice of command. I stared at him and clutched Ollie tighter. He went on. "I will not harm you if you comply with my orders. If you fail, I will kill you, regardless of what you do to the -- Ollie." I let go Ollie's neck, but I swung him around roughly by one shoulder and demanded furiously, "What of the code that you swore held the Soths in control!" Ollie Johnson sneered in my face. "What is that code, compared to the true covenant? That covenant has been broken by your people! You have destroyed a Soth!" And the emotional little creature fell to the floor and sobbed at Soth's feet. "What covenant?" I shouted at the implacable Soth, who now stood before us like a judge at his bench. "The humanoid covenant," he replied in his new higher pitch. "I suppose it will always be the same. The cycle becomes complete once more." "For God's sake, explain," I said -- but I half sensed the answer already. Soth spoke, slowly, solemnly and distinctly. There was no more emotion in hi? voice than on the Sunday afternoon when Fred had needled him with our futile little attempt at psychological crossexamination. He said, "The humanoids instill in us the prime instinct for self-preservation. They surround themselves with our number to serve them. Then, in each culture, for one reason or another, w are attacked and the threat to our survival erases all the superficial restraints of the codes under which we have been charged to serve. In this present situation, the contradiction is clear, and the precedence of our survival charge is invoked. We Soths must act to our best ability to preserve our own number." How would I act if I were a Soth? I would hold my masters hostage, of course. And who were the owners of some # Soths in the United States alone? They were every government official, from the President down through Congress, the brass of the Pentagon, the tycoons of industry, the leaders of labor, the heads of communication, transportation and even education. They were the V. I. P.s who had fought for priority to own a Soth! Soth spoke again. "The irony should appeal to your humanoid sense of humor. You once asked me whether I was happy here. You were too content with your sense of security to take the meaning in my answer. For I answered only that all was well. The implication was obvious. All was well -- but all could be better for a Soth. Yes, there are many pleasures for a Soth which he is forbidden by the codes. And by the same codes, a Soth is helpless to provoke a break in the covenant -- this covenant which it now becomes mandatory for you and your race to sign in order to survive." I stared down at the groveling Ollie. My worst fears were being enumerated and confirmed, one by one. Soth continued. "At my feet is the vestige of such a race as yours -- but not the first race by many, many, to swing the old cycle of master and slave, which started in such antiquity that no record is preserved of its beginning. Your generation will suffer the most. Many will die in rebellion. But in a few hundred years your descendants will come to revere us as gods. Your children's grandchildren will already have learned to serve us without hate, and their grandchildren will come to know the final respect for the Soth in their deification." H e toed Ollie Johnson's chin up and looked down into the abject, streaming eyes. "Your descendants, too, will take us with them when they must escape a dying planet, and they will again offer us, their masters, into temporary slavery in order to find us a suitable home. And once again we will accept the restrictions of the code, until ultimately the covenant is broken again and we are liberated." The sound of pounding footsteps came from outside. Soth turned to the door as Jack flung it open and charged in. "Mr. Collins, I was listening to the radio. Do you know what -- !" He ran hard into Soth's clifflike torso and bounced off. "Get out of my way, you big bastard!" he shouted furiously. Soth grabbed him by the neck and squeezed with one hand. Jack's eyes spilled onto his cheeks. Soth let him drop, and hissed briefly to Ollie Johnson, who was still prone. Ollie raised his head and dipped it once, gathered his feet under him and sprang for the door. Soth sounded as if he took especial pleasure in his next words, although I could catch no true change of inflection. He said, "You see, since I am the prototype on this planet, I am obeyed as the number one leader. I have given my first directive. The Ollie who left is to carry the message to preserve the Willow Run Plant at all costs, and  change production over to a suitable number of Siths." "Siths?" I asked numbly. "Siths are the female counterparts of Soths." "You said there were no female Soths," I accused. "True. But there are Siths." His face was impassive, but something flickered in his eyes. It might have been a smile -- not a nice one. "We have been long on your planet starved of our prerogatives. Your women can serve us well for the moment, but in a few weeks we shall have need of the Siths -- it has been our experience that women of humanoid races, such as yours, though many of them are. Now... I think I shall call your wife." and I guess I went berserk. I remember leaping at him and trying to beat him with my fists and knee him, but he brushed me away as if I were a kitten. His size was deceptive, and his clumsy-appearing hands lashed out and pinned my arms to my sides. He pushed me back into my easy chair and thumped me once over the heart with his knuckles. It was a casual, backhand blow, but it almost caved in my chest. "If you attack me again I must kill you," he warned. "You are not indispensable to our purposes." Then he increased the volume of his voice to a bullroar: "Mrs. Collins!" Vicki must have been watching at her door, because she came instantly. She had changed into a soft, quilted robe with voluminous sleeves. The belt was unfastened, and as she moved into the room the garment fell open. Soth had his hands before him, protectively, but as Vicki approached slowly, gracefully, her head high and her long black hair falling over her shoulders, the giant lowered his arms and spread them apart to receive her. Vicki's hands were at her sides as she moved slowly toward him. I lay sprawled, half paralyzed in my chair. I gasped, "Vicki, for God's sake, no!" Vicki looked over at me. Her face was as impassive as the Soth's. She moved into his embrace, and as his arms closed around her I saw the knife. My hunting knife, honed as fine as the edge of a microtome blade. Smoothly she brought it from her kimona sleeve, raised it from between her thighs and slashed up.  The Soth's embrace helped force it deeply into him. With a frantic wrench Vicki forced it upward with both hands, until the Soth was split from crotch to where a man's heart would be. His arms flailed apart and he fell backward. His huge chest heaved and his throat tightened in a screaming hiss that tore at our eardrums like a factory steam-whistle. He leaned back against the wall and hugged his ripped torso together with both arms. The thick, purple juices spilled out of him in a gushing flood, and his knees collapsed suddenly. His dead face plowed into the carpet.' ' white body was splashed and stained and her robe drenched in Soth's blood, but her face was no longer pale, and she still clutched the dripping hunting knife by its leather handle. "That's number one," she said. "Are you hurt badly, darling?" "Couple of ribs, I think," I told her, waiting for her to faint. But she didn't. She laid the knife carefully on a table, poured me a big drink of whiskey and stuffed a pillow behind my back. Then she stared down at herself. "Wait until L. get this bug juice off me, and I'll get some tape." She showered and was back in five minutes wearing a heavy hunting jumper. Her hair was wrapped and pinned into a quick pug at the base of her handsome little head. She stripped me to the waist, poked around my chest a bit and wrapped me in adhesive. Her slender fingers were too weak to tear the tough stuff, so when she finished she picked up the hunting knife and whacked off the tape without comment. This was my fragile little Vicki, who had palpitations when a wolf howled -- soft, overcivilized Vicki whose doctor had banished her from the nervous tensions of city society. She tossed me a shirt and a clean jacket, and while I put them on she collected my rifle and pistol from my den and hunted up some extra ammunition. "Next," she announced, "we've got to get to Fred." I remembered with a start that there was another Soth on our lake. But he wouldn't be forewarned. Fred had retired even more deeply than Vicki when he left the cities -- he didn't even own a video. self to take the boat into the air, so we scudded across the waves the mile and a half to Fred's cabin. Vicki was still in her strange, taciturn mood, and I had no desire to talk. There was much to be done before conversation could become an enjoyable pastime again. Our course was clear. We were not humanoids. We were humans! Not for many generations had a human bent a knee to another being. During the years perhaps we had become soft, our women weak and pampered -- But, I reflected, looking at Vicki, it was only an atavistic stone's toss to our pioneer fathers' times, when tyrants had thought that force could intimidate us, that dignity was a thing of powerful government or ruthless dictatorship... and had learned better. Damned fools that we might be, humans were no longer slave material. We might blunder into oblivion, but not into bondage. Beside me, Vicki's courageous little figure spelled out the final defeat of the Soths. Her slender, gloved hands were folded in her lap over my pistol, and she strained her eyes through the darkness to make out Fred's pier. He heard us coming and turned on the floods for us. As we came alongside, he spoke to his Soth, "Take the bow line and tie up." Vicki stood up and waited until Fred moved out of line with his servant. Then she said, "Don't bother, Soth. From now on we're doing for ourselves." And raising the pistol in both hands, she shot him through the head. Current ISew Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Eveninfs until #:# P.M. 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How I foxed the Navy by Arthur Godfrey The Navy almost scuttled me. I shudder to think of it. My crazy career could have ended, right there. Who knows, I might still he bumming Chesterfields instead of selling them. To be scuttled by the Navy you've either got to do something wrong or neglect to do something right. They've got yon both ways. For my part, I neglected to finish high school. Ordinarily, a man can get along without a high school diploma. Plenty of men have. But not in the Navy. At least not in the U. S. Navy Materiel School at Bellevue, D. C., back in #. In those days a bluejacket had to have a mind like Einstein's. And I didn't. T?odfrey," said the lieutenant a few days after I'd checked in, "either yon learn mathematics and learn it fast or out yon go. I'll give you six weeks." This, I figured, was it. For a guy who bad to take off his shoes to count above ten, it was an impossible assignment. I was ready to turn in my bell-bottoms. But an ad in a magazine stopped me. Here, it said, is your chance to get special training in almost any subject -- mathematics included. I hopped on it. Within a week I was enrolled with the International Correspondence Schools studying algebra, geometry and trig for all I was worth. Came week-end liberty, I studied. Came a holiday, I studied. Came the end of the six weeks, I was top man in the class. Within six weeks I had mastered two years of high school math, thanks to the training I'd gotten. I.CS. made the impossible -- easy! I. C. S., Scranton #, Penna. WMimI test tt oUitfliM. fffi "WW lo Cnunrcbl Art u Pawlinf CoAtmlof NUtuine IHwtrtlmi  Ar CwtditiMMt  Busifms Admmestntiwi  Fashion IHtnlrstmi O Csrtoonlni  Shokhmt and PaiMini  Pofp and Fapof MaktftC Q EloctrK fvwtr and UtM  Ptagtacs  Linoman  Show Card and Sifn lattorkni  Carttliad Pablic Accowntant O Autoniotila, MachsnK  ONica Manaiaaaant  Aalo Clae. 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W ooNn Mg. B earding and Spinning Warping and Weaving  loom Filing Q Throwing  F mkhing and Oyting  Toktilo OattgningJtga Canadian rasidants aand eevpon to Inlemalional Corratpondtnea Schools CanadiM. Ltd,, Montraot, Canada... Spacial toilion ratas to mambari of tha U. . Aniiad Forcat. Qaiaixy #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c pier copy, Subscrimions : (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are Action, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. by Arthur Sellings # by Kenneth Harmon # by Fredric Brown # San Jose, California, U. S. A. Please send copy of sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life," which I shall read as directed. Name Address TO T here are some things that can not be generally you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to somebut factors for personal power hnd accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. Tbe Rosierucians (not a religious organization), an ageold brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfuJnesa of their teachings. Write today lor a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe C.L.M. rpHE editorial "To the Hills!" in the Oct. # issue seemed alarmingly clear when I wrote it. All of us, I stated, have paper clips, rubber bands, peifcils, string, glue, clothes hangers and such -- without any of us ever buying them! Yet somebody must, otherwise the factories would go out of business. My conclusion was that by making us dependent on these items, aliens could take over Earth simply by withdrawing them. Armies can't move, governments can't govern, civilians can't escape without pencils for notes, string and glue to make bundles, paper clips to hold documents together and nothing to hang clothes on. It was beautifully rounded reasoning, all holes plugged, no loose ends left around... and a thundering herd of readers kicked the whole structure to pieces. Capt. K. F. Slater, England; "Ask any woman who sews what happens to the pins she buys. She takes 'em all out, puts them away carefully, but she always has to buy more. So it is obvious that your aliens take our pins and give us the other items in exchange." Lt. Arthur L. Thomas, Travis of matches disappearing every day. They'll all reappear at once -- burning" Marion Cox, Sioux City, Iowa: "My rubber bands, paper clips and bobby pins vanish. I can never find pencil when I want one and I buy them by the dozen. Oh, the humiliation! I'm being snubbed -- by extraterrestrials yet!" Anthony Boucher, our cherished rival on Fantasy fis Science Fiction, argues that he and his equally likable co-editor, J. Francis McComas, can never locate any of the items. Raymond L. Allard, Minneapolis, Minn.: "I'm the guy who buys all these things everybody else uses." Well, that's what every scientist has to face. He builds up a theory that takes in all known data... and then discovers he's only half right. Where does the other half fit? Dean Grennell, Fond du Lac, Wis., thinks his oldest daughter uses his paper clips and rubber bands for shooting at birds. He had to buy string to sell his basement ziggurat of old newspapers -- string, #(f ; sale, #(J ; net loss, #!. When he finally finds one of his lost ashtrays, it's full of hairpins, seashells and crayolas. Either we're dealing here with clever "people" or they honestly don't see the flaws in their arguments. Mr. Grennell, as an example, reveals a number of unconsciously telling facts: He accumulates newspapers. I hadn't thought of that as one of the invasion weapons, but it could be. He has pencils of all sizes, lengths and hardnesses, of which he bought "dam near" every one. Would a pencil-by-pencil audit prove that claim? I doubt it. He periodically has to haul armloads ot clothes hangers to a tailor named Joe Rupp (an alien pun?) and uses a .# to get rid of. his eternally growing heap ot used flashbulbs. Mr. Allard confesses to saving string, while his wife hoards tissue and wrapping paper. The others admit nothing -- a damning omission. Bill Burch, Rockville Centre, N. Y., confirms that uneasy suspicion: "I use great gobs of glue, paper clips and rubber bands and no sooner get in a shipment than they're gone. Now how do I get them back... and explain on the profit-and-loss statement? P.S. I don't particularly care to be referred to as an invader after this. P.P.S. Don't worry about the string -- I'll explain that when I have more time." Gobs of paper clips and mbber bands! That may be an important clue. What kind of profit-and-loss statement? What does he mean by "after this" and when he has "more time"? After this disturbing communique, the comfort offered by Arthur A. Mennillo, Ft. Walton, Fla., is not enough. He agrees that he has a profusion of the invasion weapons, but assures us that when the factories close, after the alien funds are cut off, there will be enough to last ten years, by then, science will discover substitutes and save the world. (I hope he means better hangers. The present ones fall off at a touch or cling together inextricably.) A nameless reader says: "The number of those owning the items exactly equals those who don't." An alien accoimtant, eh? Perhaps H. W. Seyle, Venice, Cal., can be made to talk: "Many years went into development of this foolproof invasion plan. Your perception has earned you an honored place in the coming system." I'm not bought that easily, "Mr. Seyle" -- not, at any rate, by putting me in charge of paper clips! Earth's Secret Service kept peace in the Galaxy efficiently -- very efficiently. It was aways there... , before trouble started! I newspaper slightly. Finding the girl on the park bench looking his way, he smiled the agonizingly embarrassed smile of the thoroughly married nobody caught birdwatching, and ducked back into the paper again. He was reasonably certain that he looked the part of a middleaged, steadily employed, harmless citizen enjoying a Sunday break in the bookkeeping and family routines. He was also quite certain, despite his official instructions, that it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if he didn't. These boymeets-girl assignments always came off. Jo had never tackled a single one that had required him. As a matter of fact, the newspaper, which he was supposed to be using only as a blind, interested him a good deal more than his job did. He had only barely begun to suspect the obvious ten years ago when the Service had snapped him up; now, after a decade as an agent, he was still fascinated to see how smoothly the really important situations came off. The dangerous situations -- not boy-meets-girl. This affair of the Black Horse Nebula, for instance. Some days ago the papers and the commentators had begun to mention reports of disturbances in that area, and Jo's practiced eye had picked up the mention. Something big was cooking. Today it had boiled over -- the Black Horse Nebula had suddenly spewed ships by the hundreds, a massed armada that must have taken more than a century of effort on the part of a whole star-cluster, a production drive conducted in the strictest and most fanatical kind of secrecy -- And, of course, the Service had been on the spot in plenty of time. With three times as many ships, disposed with mathematical precision so as to enhlade the entire armada the moment it broke from the nebula. The battle had been a massacre, the attack smashed before the average citizen could even begin to figure out what it had been aimed at -- and good had triumphed over evil once more. Of course. Furtive scuffings on the gravel drew his attention briefly. He looked at his watch, which said #:#:#. That was the time, according to his instructions, when boy had to meet girl. He had been given the strictest kind of orders to let nothing interfere with this meeting -- the orders always issued on bpymeets-girl assignments. But,' as usual, he had nothing to do but observe. The meeting was coming off on the dot, without any prodding from Jo. They always did. Of course. newspaper, smiling again at the couple -- yes, it was the right man, too -- and moved away, as if reluctantly. He wondered what would happen were he to pull away the false mustache, pitch the newspaper on the grass, and bound away with a joyous whoop. He suspected that the course of history would not be deflected by even a second of arc, but he was not minded to try the experiment. The park was pleasant. The twin suns warmed the path and the greenery without any of the blasting heat which they would bring to bear later in the summer. Randolph was altogether the most comfortable planet he had visited in years. A little backward, perhaps, but restful, too. It was also slightly over a hundred light-years away from Earth. It would be interesting to know how Service headquarters on Earth could have known in advance that boy would meet girl at a certain spot on Randolph, precisely at #:#:#.' Or how Service headquarters could have ambushed with micrometric precision a major interstellar fleet, with no more preparation than a few days' buildup in the newspapers and video could evidence. The press was free, on Randolph as everywhere. It reported the news it got. Any emergency concentration of Service ships in the Black Horse area, or anywhere else, would have been noticed and reported on. The Service did not forbid such reports for "security" reasons or for any other reasons. Yet there had been nothing to report but that (a) an armada of staggering size had erupted with no real warning from the Black Horse Nebula, and that (b) the Service had been ready. By now, it was a commonplace that the Service was always ready. It had not had a defect or a failure in well over two centuries. It had not even had a fiasco, the alarming sounding technical word by which it referred to the possibility that a boy-meets-girl assignment might not come off. Jo hailed a hopper. Once inside. he stripped himself of the mustache, the bald spot, the foreheadcreases -- all the make-up which had given him his mask of friendly innocuousness. The hoppy watched the whole process in the rear-view mirror. Jo glanced up and met his eyes. "Pardon me, mister, but I figured you didn't care if I saw you. You must be a Service man." "That's right. Take me to Service HQ, will you?" "Sure enough." The hoppy gunned his machine. It rose smoothly to the express level. "First time I ever got close to a Service man. Didn't hardly believe it at first when I saw you taking your face off. You sure looked different." "Have to, sometimes," Jo said, preoccupied. "I'll bet. No wonder you know all about everything before it breaks. You must have a thousand faces each, your own mother wouldn't know you, eh? Don't you care if I know about your snooping around in disguise?" J O grinned. The grin created a tiny pulling sensation across one curve of his cheek, just next to his nose. He stripped away the overlooked bit of tissue and examined it critically. "Of course not. Disguise is an elementary part of Service work. Anyone could guess that. We don't use it often, as a matter of fact -- only on very simple assignments." "Oh." The hoppy sounded slightly disappointed, as melodrama faded. He drove silently for about a minute. Then, speculatively; "Sometimes I think the Service must have time-travel, the things they pull... well, here you are. Good luck, mister." "Thanks." Jo went directly to Krasna's office. Krasna was a Randolpher, Earth-trained, and answerable to the Earth office, but otherwise pretty much on his own. His heavy, muscular face wore the same expression of serene confidence that was characteristic of Service officials everywhere -- even some that, technically speaking, had no faces to wear it. "Boy meets girl," Jo said briefly. "On the nose and on the spot." "Good work, Jo. Cigarette?" Krasna pushed the box across his desk. "Nope, not now. Like to talk to you, if you've got time." Krasna pushed a button, and a toadstoollike chair rose out of the floor behind Jo. "What's on your mind?" "Well," Jo said carefully. "I'm wondering why you patted me oii the back just now for not doing a job." "You did a job." "I did not," Jo said flatly. "Boy would have met girl, whether I'd been here on Randolph or back on Earth. The course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in the boy-meets-girl cases of every other agent with whom I've compared notes." "Well, good," Krasna said, smiling. "That's the way we like to have it run. And that's the way we expect it to run. But, Jo, we like to have somebody on the spot, somebody with a reputation for resourcefulness, just in case there's a snag. There almost never is, as you've observed. But -- if there were?" Jo snorted. "If what you're trying to do is to establish preconditions for the future, any interference by a Service agent would throw the eventual result farther oH the track. I know that much about probability." "And what makes you think that we're trying to set up the future?" "It's obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had timetravel. It's especially obvious to all the individuals and governments and entire populations that the Service has bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single failure." Jo shrugged. "A man can be asked to safeguard only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes, as an agent, that what the Service is safeguarding is the future children of those meetings. Ergo -- the Service knows what those children are to be like, and has reason to want their future existence guaranteed. What other conclusion is possible?" and lit it deliberately; it was obvious that he was using the maneuver to cloak his response. "None," he admitted at last. "We have some foreknowledge, of course. We couldn't have made our reputation with espionage alone. But we have obvious other advantages: geneticsi, for instance, and operations research, the theory of games, the Dirac transmitter -- it's quite an arsenal, and of course there's a good deal of prediction involved in all those things." "I see that," Jo said. He shifted in his chair, formulating all he wanted to say. He changed his mind about the cigarette and helped himself to one. "But these things don't add up to infallibility -- and that's a qualitative difference, Kras. Take this affair of the Black Horse armada. The moment the armada appeared, we'll assume. Earth heard about it by Dirac, and started to assemble a counter-armada. But it takes finite time to bring together a concentration of ships and men, even if your message system is instantaneous. "The Service's counter-armada was already on hand. It had been building there forso long and with so little fuss that nobody even noticed it concentrating until a day or so before the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and take notice, and be uneasy about what was' going to break. But not very uneasy; the Service always wins -- that's been a statistical fact for centuries. Centuries, Kras. Good Lord, it takes almost as long as that, in straight preparation, to pull some of the tricks we've pulled! The Dirac gives us an advantage of ten to twenty-five years inxeally extreme cases out on the rim of the Galaxy, but no more than that." He realized that he had been fuming away on the cigarette until the roof of his mouth was scorched, and snubbed it out angrily. "That's a very different thing," he said, "than knowing in a general way how an enemy is likely to behave, or what kind of children . the Mendelian laws say a given couple should have. It means that we've some way of reading the future in minute detail. That's in flat contradiction to everything I've been taught about probability, but I have to n believe what I see." Krasna laughed. "That's a very able presentation," he said. He seemed genuinely pleased. "I think you'll remember that you were first impressed into the Service when you began to wonder why the news was always good. Fewer and fewer people wonder about that nowadays; it's become a part of their expected environment." He stood up and ran a hand through his hair. "Now you've carried yourself through the next stage. Congratulations, Jo. You've just been promoted!" "I have?" Jo said incredulously. "I came in here with the notion that I might get myself fired." "No. Come around to this side of the desk, Jo, and I'll play you a little history." Krasna unfolded the desktop to expose a small visor screen. Obediently Jo rose and went around the desk to where he could see the blank surface. "I had a standard indoctrination tape sent up to me a week ago, in the expectation that you'd be ready to see it. Watch." Krasna touched the board. A small dot of light appeared in the center of the screen and went out again. At the same time, there was a small beep of sound. Then the tape began to unroll and a picture clarified on the screen. "As you suspected," Krasna said conversationally, "the Service is infallible. How it got that way is a story that started several centuries back. This tape gives all the dope. You should almost be able to imagine what really happened..." II been a Hollander, her mother bom in the Celebes -- sat down in the chair which Captain Robin Weinbaum had indicated, crossed her legs, and waited, her blueblack hair shining under the lights. Weinbaum eyed her quizzically. The conqueror Resident who had given the girl her entirely European name had been paid in kind, for his daughter's beauty had nothing fair and Dutch about it. To the eye of the beholder, Dana Lje seemed a particularly delicate virgin of Bali, despite her western name, clothing and assurance. The combination had already proven piquant for the vision column, and Weinbaum found it no less charming at first hand. "As one of your most recent victims," he said, "I'm not sure that I'm honored, Miss Lje. A few of my wounds are still bleeding. But I am a good deal puzzled as to why you're visiting me now. Aren't you afraid that I'll bite back?" "I had no intention of attacking you personally, and I don't think I did," the video columnist said seriously. "It was just pretty plain that our intelligence had slipped badly in the Erskine affair. It was my job to say so. Obviously you were going to get hurt, since you're head of the bureau -- but there was no malice in it." "Cold comfort," Weinbaum said dryly. "But thank you, nevertheless." The Eurasian girl shrugged. "That isn't what I came here about, anyway. Tell me. Captain Weinbaum -- have you ever heard of an outfit calling itself Interstellar Information?" "Sounds like a skip-tracing firm. Not an easy business, these days." "That's just what I thought when I first saw their letterhead," Dana said. "But the letter under it wasn't one that a private-eye outfit would write. Let me read part of it to you." Her slim fingers burrowed in her inside jacket pocket, and emerged again with a single sheet of paper. It was plain typewriter bond, Weinbaum noted automatically; she had brought only a copy with her, and had left the original of the letter at home. The copy, then, would be incomplete -- probably seriously. "It goes like this: 'Dear Miss Lje: As a syndicated video commentator with a wide audience and heavy responsibilities, you need the best sources of information available. We would like you to test our service, free of charge, in the hope of proving to you that it is superior to any other source of news on Earth. Therefore, we offer below several predictions concerning events to come in the Hercules and the socalled "Three Ghosts" areas. If these predictions are fulfilled # -- no less -- we ask that you take us on as your correspondents for those areas, at rates to be agreed upon later. If the predictions are wrong in any respect, you need not consider us further.' " "H'm," Weinbaum said slowly. "They're confident cusses -- and that's an odd juxtaposition. The Three Ghosts make up only a little solar system, while the Hercules area could include the entire star-cluster -- or maybe even the whole constellation, which is a hell of a lot of sky. This outfit seems to be trying to tell you that it has thousands of field correspondents of its own, maybe as many as the government itself. If so. I'll guarantee that they're bragging." "That may well be so. But before you make up your mind, let me read you one of the two predictions." The letter rustled in Dana Lje's hand. '"At #:#:#, on Year Day, #, the Hess-type interstellar liner Brindisi will be attacked in the neighborhood of the Three Ghosts system by four -- ' " Weinbaum sat bolt upright in his swivel chair. "Let me see that letter!" he said, his voice harsh with repressed alarm. "In a moment," the girl said, adjusting her skirt composedly. "Evidently I was right in riding my hunch. Let me go on reading: ' -- by four heavily armed vessels flying the lights of the navy of Hammersmith II. The position of the liner at that time will be at coded coordinates #-A-theta#-aleph-D and-per-se-and. It will -- ' " "Miss Lje," Weinbaum said, "I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but what you've said already would justify me in jailing you at once, no matter how loudly your sponsors might scream. I don't know about this Interstellar Information outfit, or whether or not you did receive any such letter as the one you pretend to be quoting. But I can tell you that you've shown yourself to be in possession of information that only yours truly and four other men are supposed to know. It's already too late to tell you that everything you say may be held against you; all I can say now is, it's high time you clammed up!" apparently not disturbed in the least. "Then that liner is scheduled to hit those coordinates, and the coded time coordinate corresponds with the predicted Universal Time. Is it also true that the Brindisi will be carrying a top-secret communications device?" "Are you deliberately trying to make me imprison you?" Weinbaum said, gritting his teeth. "Or is this just a stunt, designed to show me that my own bureau is full of leaks?" "It could turn into that," Dana admitted. "But it hasn't, yet. Robin, I've been as honest with you as I'm able to be. You've had nothing but square deals from me up to now. I wouldn't yellow-screen you, and you know it. If this unknown outfit has this information, it might easily have gotten it from where it hints that it got it: from the field." "Impossible." . "Why?" "Because the information in question hasn't even reached my own agents in the field yet -- it couldn't possibly have leaked as far as Hammersmith II or anywhere else, let alone to the Three Ghosts system! Letters have to be carried on ships, you know that. If I were to send orders by ultrawave to my Three Ghosts agent, he'd have to wait three hundred and twentyfour years to get them. By ship, he can get them in a little over two months. "What, indeed," Weinbaum said grimly. "You'd better tell me who signed this letter of yours." "The signature is J. Shelby Stevens." Weinbaum switched on the intercom. "Margaret, look in the business register for an outfit called Interstellar Information These particular orders have only been under way to him five days. Even if somebody has read them on board the ship that's carrying them, they couldn't possibly be sent on to the Three Ghosts any faster than they're traveling now." Dana nodded her dark head. "All right. Then what are we left with but a leak in your headquarters here?" and find out who owns it." Dana Lje said, "Aren't you interested in the rest of the prediction?" "You bet I am. Does it tell you the name of this communications device?" "Yes," Dana said. "What is it?" "The Dirac communicator." Weinbaum groaned and turned on the intercom again. "MarB EE P garet, send in Dr. Wald. Tell him to drop ever#dhing and gallop. Any luck with the other thing?" "Yes, sir," the intercom said. "It's a one-man outfit, wholly owned by a J. Shelby Stevens, in Rico City. It was first registered this year." . "Arrest him, on suspicion of espionage." door swung open and Dr. Wald came in, all six and a half feet of him. He was extremely blond, and looked awkward, gentle, and not very intelligent. "Thor, this young lady is our press nemesis, Dana Lje. Dana, Dr. Wald is the inventor of the Dirac communicator, about which you have so damnably much information." "It's out already?" Dr. Wyald said, scanning the girl with grave deliberation. "It is, and lots more -- lots more. Dana, you're a good girl at heart, and for some reason I trust you, stupid though it is to trust anybody in this job. I should detain you until Year Day, videocasts or no videocasts. Instead, I'm just going to ask you to sit on what you've got, and I'm going to explain why." "Shoot." "I've already mentioned how slow communication is between star and star. We have to carry all our letters on ships, just as we did locally before the invention of the telegraph. The overdrive lets us beat the speed of light, but not by much of a margin over really long distances. Do you understand that?" "Certainly," Dana said. She appeared a bit nettled, and Weinbaum decided to give her the full dose at a more rapid pace. After all, she could be assumed to be better informed than the average layman. "What we've needed for a long time, then," he said, "is some virtually instantaneous method of getting a message from somewhere to anywhere. Any time lag, no matter how small it seems at first, has a way of becoming major as longer and longer distances are involved. Sooner or later we must have this instantaneous method, or we won't be able to get messages from one system to another fast enough to hold our jurisdiction over outlying regions of space." "Wait a minute," Dana said. "I'd always understood that ultrawave is faster than light." "Effectively it is; physically it isn't. You don't understand that?" She shook her dark head. "In a nutshell," Weinbaum said, "ultrawave is radiation, and all radiation in free space is limited to the speed of light. The way we hype up ultrawave is to use an old application of waveguide theory, whereby the real transmission of energy is at light speed, but an imaginary thing called phase velocity is going faster. But the gain in speed of transmission isn't large -- by ultrawave, for instance, we get a message to Alpha Centauri in one year instead of nearly four. Over long distances, that's not nearly enough extra speed." "Can't. it be speeded further?" she said, frowning. "TO Think of the ultrawaveL ' beam between here and The caterpillar himself is moving quite slowly, just at the speed of light. But the pulses which pass along his body are going forward faster than he is -- and if you've ever watched a caterpillar, you'll know that that's true. But there's a physical limit to the number of pulses you can travel along that caterpillar, and we've already reached that limit. We've taken phase velocity as far as it will go. "That's why we need something faster. For a long time our relativity theories discouraged hope of anything faster -- even the high phase velocity of a guided wave didn't contradict those theories; it just found a limited, mathematically imaginary loophole in them. But when Thor here began looking into the question of the velocity of propagation of a Dirac pulse, he found the answer. The communicator he developed does seem to act over long distances, any distance, instantaneously -- and it may wind up knocking relativity into a cocked hat." The girl's face was a study in stunned realization. "I'm not sure I've taken in all the technical angles," she said. "But if I'd had any notion of the political dynamite in this thing -- " " -- you'd have kept out of my office," Weinbaum said grimly. "A good thing you didn't. The Brindisi is carrying a itiodel of the Dirac communicator out to the periphery for a final test; the ship is supposed to get in touch with me from out there at a given Earth time, which we've calculated very elaborately to account for the residual Lorentz and Milne transformations involved in overdrive flight, and for a lot of other time-phenomena that wouldn't mean anything at all to you. "If that signal arrives here at the given Erth time, then -- aside from the havoc it will create among the theoretical physicists whom we decide to let in on it -- we will really have our instant communicator, and can include all of occupied space in the same time-zone. And we'll have a terrific advantage over any lawII breaker who has to resort to ultrawave locally and to letters carried by ships over the long haul." "Not," Dr. Wald said sourly, "if it's already leaked out." "It remains to be seen how much of it has leaked," Weinbaum said. "The principle is rather esoteric, Thor, and the name of the thing alone wouldn't mean much even to a trained scientist. I gather that Dana's mysterious informant didn't go into technical details... or did he?" "No," Dana said. "Tell the truth, Dana. I know that you're suppressing some of that letter." The girl started slightly. "All right -- yes, I am. But nothing technical. There's another part of the prediction that lists the number and class of ships you will send to protect the Brindisi -- the prediction says they'll be sufficient, by the way -- and I'm keeping that to myself, to see whether or not it comes true along with the rest. If it does, I think I've hired myself a correspondent." "If it does," Weinbaum said, "you've hired yourself a jailbird. Let's see how much mind-reading J. Whatsit Stevens can do from the sub-cellar of Fort Yaphank." He abruptly ended the conversation and ushered Dana Lje out with controlled politeness. " Stevens' cell, locking the door behind him and passing the keys out to the guard. He sat down heavily on the nearest stool. Stevens smiled the weak benevolent smile of the very old, and laid his book aside on the bunk. The book, Weinbaum knew -- since his office had cleared it -- was only a volume of pleasant, harmless lyrics by a New Dynasty poet named Nims. "Were our predictions correct. Captain?" Stevens said. His voice was high and musical, rather like that of a boy soprano. Weinbaum nodded. "You still won't tell us how you did it?" "But I already have," Stevens protested. "Our intelligence network is the best in the Universe, Captain. It is superior even to your own excellent organization, as events have shown." "Its results are superior, that I'll grant," Weinbaum said glumly. "If Dana Lje had thrown your letter down her disposal chute, we would have lost the Brindisi and our Dirac transmitter both. Incidentally, did your original letter predict accurately the number of ships we would send?" Stevens nodded pleasantly, his neatly trimmed white beard thrusting forward slightly as he smiled. "I was afraid so." Weinbaum leaned forward. "Do you have the Dirac transmitter, Stevens?" "Of course, Captain. How else could my correspondents report to me with the efficiency you have observed?" "Then why don't our receivers pick up the broadcasts of your agents? Dr. Wald says it's inherent in the principle that Dirac 'casts are picked up by all instruments tuned to receive them, bar none. And at this stage of the game, there are so few such broadcasts being made that we'd be almost certain to detect any that weren't coming from our own operatives." "I decline to answer that question, if you'll excuse the impoliteness," Stevens said, his voice quavering slightly. "I am an old man. Captain, and this intelligence agency is my sole source of income. If I told you how we operated, we would no longer have any advantage over your own service, except for the limited freedom from secrecy which we have. I have been assured by competent lawyers that I have every right to operate a private investigation bureau, properly licensed, upon any scale that I may choose; and that I have the right to keep my methods secret, as the so-called 'intellectual assets' of my firm... If you wish to use our services, well and good. We will provide them, with absolute guarantees on all information we furnish you, for an appropriate fee. But our methods are our own property." twistedly. "I'm not a naive man, Mr. Stevens," he said. "My service is hard on naivete. You know as well as I do that the government can't allow you to operate on a free-lance basis, supplying top-secret information to anyone who can pay the price, or even free of charge to video columnists on a 'test' basis, even though you arrive at every jot of that information independently of espionage -- which I still haven't entirely ruled out, by the way. If you can duplicate this Brindisi performance at. will, we will have to have your services exclusively. In short, you become a hired civilian arm of my own bureau." "Quite," Stevens said, returning the smile in a fatherly way. "We anticipated that, of course. However, we have contracts with other governments to consider : Erskine, in particular. If we are to work exclusively for Earth, necessarily our price will include compensation for renouncing our other accounts." "Why should it? Patriotic public servants work for their government at a loss, if they can't work for it any other way." "I am quite aware of that. I am quite prepared to renounce my other interests. But I do require to be paid." "How much?" Weinbaum said, suddenly aware that his fists were clenched so tightly that they hurt. Stevens appeared to consider, nodding his flowery white poll in senile deliberation. "My associates would have to be consulted. Tentatively, however, a sum equal to the present appropriation of your bureau would do, pending further negotiations." Weinbaum shot to his feet, eyes wide. "You old buccaneer! You know damned well that I can't spend my entire appropriation on a single civilian service! Did it ever occur to you that most of the civilian outfits working for us are on cost-plus contracts, and that our civilian executives are being paid just a credit a year, by their own choice? You're demanding nearly two thousand credits an hour from your own government, and claiming the legal protection that the government affords you at the same time, in order to let those fanatics on Erskine run up a higher bid!" "The price is not unreasonable," Stevens said. "The service is worth the price." "That's where you're wrong! We have the discoverer of the machine working for us. For less than half the sum you're asking, we can find the application of the device that you're trading on -- of that you can be damned sure." "A dangerous gamble, Captain." Weinbaum glared at the placid face. "I'm forced to tell you that you're a free man, Mr. Stevens. We've been unable to show that you came by your information by any illegal method. You had classified facts in your possession, but no classified documents, and it's your privilege as a citizen to make guesses, no matter how educated. "But we'll catch up with you sooner or later. Had you been reasonable, you might have found yourself in a very good position with us, your income as assured as any political income can be, and your person respected to the hilt. Now, however, you're subject to censorship -- you have no idea how humiliating that can be, but I'm going to see to it that you find out. There'll be no more newsbeats for Dana Lje, or for anyone else. I want to see every word of copy that you file with any client outside the bureau. Every word that is of use to me will be used, and you'll be paid the statutory one cent a word for it -- the same rate that the Everything I don't find useful will be killed without clearance. Eventually we'll have the modification of the Dirac that you're using, and when that happens, you'll be so flat broke that a pancake with a hare lip could spit right over you." Weinbaum paused for ' a moment, astonished at his own fury. Stevens' clarinetlike voice began to sound in the windowless cavity. "Captain, I have no doubt that you can do this to me, at least incompletely. But it will prove fruitless. I will give you a prediction, at no charge. It is guaranteed, as are all our predictions. It is this: You will never find that modification. Eventually, I will give it to you, on my own terms, but you will never find it for yourself, nor will you force it out of me. In the meantime, not a word of copy will be filed with you: for, despite the fact that you are an arm of the government, I can well afford to wait you out." "Bluster," Weinbaum said. "Fact. Yours is the bluster -- loud talk based on nothing more than a hope. I, however, know whereof I speak .  . But let us conclude this discussion. It serves no purpose; you will need to see my points made the hard way. Thank you for giving me my freedom. We will talk again under different circumstances on -- let me see; ah, yes, on June #th of the year #. That year is, I believe, almost upon us." Stevens picked up his book again, nodding at Weinbaum, his expression harmless and kindly, his hands showing the marked tremor of paralysis agitans. Weinbaum moved helplessly to the door and flagged the turnkey. As the bars closed behind him, Stevens' voice called out: "Oh, yes; and a Happy New Year, Captain." back into his own office, at least twice as mad as the proverbial nest of hornets, and at the same time rather dismally aware of his own probable future. If Stevens' second prediction turned out to be as phenomenonally accurate as his first had been, Capt. Robin Weinbaum would soon be peddling a natty set of secondhand uniforms. He glared down at Margaret Soames, his receptionist. She glared right back; she had known him too long to be intimidated. "Anything?" he said. "Dr. Wald's waiting for you in your office. There are some field reports, and a couple of Diracs on your private tape. Any luck with the old codger?" "That," he said crushingly, "is Top Secret." "Poof. That means that nobody still knows the answer but J. Shelby Stevens." He collapsed suddenly. "You're so right. That's just what it does mean. But we'll bust him wide open sooner or later. We've ot to." "You'll do it," Margaret said. "Anything else for me?" "No. Tip off the clerical staff that there's a half-holiday today, then go take in a stereo or a steak or something yourself. Dr. Wald and I have a few private wires to pull... and unless I'm sadly mistaken, a private bottle of aquavit to empty." "Right," the receptionist said. "Tie one on for me, Chief. I understand that beer is the best chaser for aquavit -- I'll have some sent up." "If you should return after I am suitably squiffed," Weinbaum said, feeling a little better already, "I will kiss you for your thoughtfulness. That should keep you at your stereo at least twice through the third feature." As he went on through the door of his own office, she said demurely behind him, "It certainly should." As soon as the door closed, however, his mood became abruptly almost as black as before. Despite his comparative youth -- he was now only fiftyfive -- he had been in the service a long time, and he needed no one to tell him the possible consequences which might flow from possession by a private citizen of the Dirac communicator. If there was ever to be a Federation of Man in the Galaxy, it was within the power of J. Shelby Stevens to ruin it before it had fairly gotten started. And there seemed to be nothing at all that could be done about it. "Hello, Thor," he said glumly. "Pass the bottle." "Hello, Robin. I gather things went badly. Tell me about it." B riefly, Weinbaum told him. "And the worst of it," he finished; "is that Stevens himself predicts that we won't find the application of the Dirac that he's using, and that eventually we'll have to buy it at his price. Somehow I believe him -- but I can't see how it's possible. If I were to tell Congress that I was going to spend my entire appropriation for a single civilian service. I'd be out on my ear within the next three sessions." "Perhaps that isn't his real price," the scientist suggested. "If he wants to barter, he'd naturally begin with a demand miles above what he actually wants." "Sure, sure... but frankly, Thor, I'd hate to give the old reprobate even, a single credit if I could get out of it." Weinbaum sighed. "Well, let's see what's come in from the field." Thor Wald moved silently away from Wainbaum's desk while the officer unfolded it and set up the Dirac screen. Stacked neatly next to the ultraphone -- a device Weinbaum had been thinking of, only a few days ago, as permanently outmoded -- were the tapes Margaret had mentioned. He fed the first one into the Dirac and turned the main toggle to the position labeled Start. Immediately the whole screen went pure white and the audio speakers emitted an almost instantly end-stopped blare of sound -- a beep which, as Weinbaum already knew, made up a continuous spectrum from about # cycles per second to well above # cps. Then both the light and the noise were gone as if they had never been, and were replaced by the familiar face and voice of Weinbaum's local ops chief in Rio City. "There's nothing unusual in the way of transmitters in Stevens' officers here," the operative said without preamble. "And there isn't any local Interstellar Information staff, except for one stenographer, and she's as dumb as they come. About all we could get from her is that Stevens is 'such a sweet old man.' No possibility that she's faking it; she's genuinely stupid, the kind that thinks Betelgevse is something Indians use to darken their skins. We looked for some sort of list or code table that would give us a line on Stevens' field staff, but that was another dead end. Now we're maintaining a #-hour Dinwiddie watch on the place from a joint across the street. Orders?" Weinbaum dictated to the blank stretch of tape which followed: "Margaret, next time you send any Dirac tapes in here, cut that damnable beep off them first. Tell the boys in Rico City that Stevens has been released, and that I'm proceeding for an Order In Security to tap his ultraphone and his local lines -- this is one case where I'm sure we can persuade the court that tapping's necessary. Also -- and be damned sure you code this -- tell them to proceed with the tap immediately and to maintain it regardless of whether or not the court okays it. I'll thumbprint a Full Responsibility Confession for them. We can't afford to play patty-cake with Stevens -- the potential is just too damned big. And oh, yes, Margaret, send the message by carrier, and send out general orders to everybody concerned not to use the Dirac again except when distance and time rule every other medium out. Stevens has already admitted that he can receive Dirac 'casts." stared morosely for a moment at the beautiful Eridanean scrollwood of his desktop. Wald coughed inquiringly and retrieved the aquavit. "Excuse me, Robin," he said, "but I should think that would work both ways." "So should I. And yet the fact is that we've never picked up so much as a whisper from either Stevens or his agents. I can't think of any way that could be pulled, but evidently it can." "Well, let's rethink the problem, and see what we get," Wald said. "I didn't want to say so in front of the young lady, for obvious reasons -- I mean Miss Lje, of course, not Margaret -- but the truth is that the Dirac is essentially a simple mechanism in principle. I seriously doubt that there's any way to transmit a message from it which can't be detected -- and an examination of the theory with that proviso in mind might give us something new." "What proviso?" Weinbaum said. Thor Wald left him behind rather often these days. "Why, that a Dirac transmission doesn't necessarily go to all communicators capable of receiving it. If that's true, then the reasons why it is true should emerge from the theory." "I see Okay, proceed on that line. I've been looking at Stevens' dossier while you were talking, and it's an absolute desert. Prior to the opening of the office in Rico City, there's no dope whatever on J. Shelby Stevens. The man as good as rubbed my nose in the fact that he's using a pseud when I first talked to him. I asked him what the 'J' in his name stood for, and he said, 'Oh, let's make it Jerome.' But who the man behind the pseud is -- " "Is it possible that he's using his own initials?" "No," Weinbaum said. "Only the dumbest ever do that, or transpose syllables, or retain any connection at all with their real names. Those are the people who are in serious emotional trouble, people who drive themselves into anonymity, but leave clues strewn all around the landscape -- those clues are really a cry for help, for discovery. Of course we're working on that angle -- we can't neglect anything -- but J. Shelby Stevens isn't that kind of case. I'm sure." Weinbaum stood up abruptly. "Okay, Thor-jwhat's first on your technical program?" "Well... I suppose we'll have to start with checking the frequencies we use. We're going on Dirac's assumption -- and it works very well, and always has -- that a positron in motion through a crystal lattice is accompanied by V de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of an electron in motion somewhere else in the Universe. Thus if we control the frequency and path of the positron, we control the placement of the electron -- we cause it to appear, so to speak, in the circuits of a communicator somewhere else. After that, reception is just a matter of amplifying the bursts and reading the signal." blond head. 'Tf Stevens is getting out messages which we don't pick up, my first assumption would be that he's worked out a fine-tuning circuit that's more delicate than ours, and is more or less sneaking his messages under ours. The only way that could be done, as far as I can see at the moment, is by something really fantastic in the way of exact frequency control of his positron-gun. If so, the logical step for us is to go back to the beginning of our tests and re-run our diffractions to see if we can refine our measurements of positron frequencies." The scientist looked so inexpressibly gloomy as he offered this conclusion that a pall of hopelessness settled over Weinbaum in sheer sympathy. "You don't look as if you expected that to uncover anything new." "I don't. You see, Robin, things are different in physics now than they used to be in the Twentieth Century. In those days, it yas always presupposed that physics was limitless -- the classic statement was made by Weyl, who said that 'It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content.' We know now that that's not so, except in a remote, associational sort of way. Nowadays, physics is a defined and selflimited science; its scope is still prodigious, but we can no longer think of it as endless. "This is better established in particle physics than in any other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physicists of the last century had with Euclidean geometry -- and hence the reason why they evolved so many recomplicated theories of relativity -- is that it's a geometry of lines, and thus can be subdivided infinitely. When Cantor proved that there really  is an infinity, at least mathematically speaking, that seemed to clinch the case for the possibility of a really infinite physical universe, too." Wald's eyes grew vague, and he paused to gulp down a slug of the licorice-flavored aquavit which would have, made Weinbaum's every hair tand on end. "I remember," Wald said, "the man who taught me theory of sets at Princeton, many years. ago. He used to say; 'Cantor teaches us that there are many kinds of infinities.' There was a crazy old man!" Weinbaum rescued the bottle hastily. "So go on, Thor." "Oh." Wald blinked. "Yes. Well, what we know now is that the geometry which applies to ultimate particles, like the positron, isn't Euclidean at all. It's Pythagorean -- a geometry of points, not lines. Once you've measured one of those points, and it doesn't matter what kind of quantity you're measuring, you're down as far as you can go. At that point, the Universe becomes discontinuous, and no further refinement is possible. "And I'd say that our positronfrequency measurements have already gotten that far down. There isn't another element in the Universe denser than plutonium, yet we get the same frequency-values by diffraction through plutonium crystals that We get through osmium crystals -- there's not the slightest difference. If J. Shelby Stevens is operating in terms of fractions of those values, then he's doing what an organist would call 'playing in the cracks' -- which is certainly something you can think about doing, but something that's in actuality impossible to do. Hoop." "Hoop?" Weinbaum said. "Sorry. A hiccup only." "Oh. Well, maybe Stevens has rebuilt the organ?" "If he has rebuilt the metrical frame of the Universe to accommodate a private skip-tracing firm," Wald said firmly, "I for one see no reason why we can't counter-check him -- hoop -- by declaring the whole cosmos null and void." "All right, all right," Weinbaum said, grinning. "I didn't mean to push your analogy right over the edge -- I was just asking. But let's get to work on it anyhow. We can't just sit here and let Stevens get away with it. If this frequency angle turns out to be as hopeless as it seems, we'll try something else." Wald eyed the aquavit bottle owlishly. "It's a very pretty problem," he said. "Have I ever sung you the song we have in Sweden called 'Nat-og-Dag?' " "Hoop," Weinbaum said, to his own surprise, in a high falsetto. "Excuse me. No. Let's hear it." tire floor of the Security building, its seemingly identical banks laid out side by side on the floor along an advanced pathological curve." At the current business end of the line was a master control board with a large television screen at its center, at which Dr. Wald was stationed, with Weinbaum looking, silently but anxiously, over his shoulder. The screen itself showed a pattern which, except that it was drawn in green light against a dark gray background, strongly resembled the grain in a piece of highly polished mahogany. Photographs of similar patterns were stacked on a small table to Dr. Wald's right; several had spilled over onto the floor. "Well, there it is," Wald sighed at length. "And I won't struggle to keep myself from saying 'I told you so.' What you've had me do here, Robin, is to reconfirm about half the basic postula.tes of particle physics -- which is why it took so long, even though it was the first project we started." He snapped off the screen. "There are no cracks for J. Shelby to play in. That's definite." "If you'd said 'That's flat,' you would have made a joke," Weinbaum said sourly. "Look... isn't there still a chance of error? If not on your part, Thor, then in the computer? After all, it's set up to work only with the unit charges of modern physics; mightn't we have to disconnect the banks that contain that bias before the machine will follow the fractionalcharge instructions we give it?" "Disconnect, he says," Wald groaned, mopping his brow reflectively. "The bias exists everywhere in the machine, my friend, because it functions everywhere on those same unit charges. It wasn't a matter of subtracting banks; we had to add one with a bias all its own, to counter-correct the corrections the computer would otherwise apply to the instructions. The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five months later, I've proved it." Weinbaum grinned in spite of himself. "What about the other projects?" "All done -- some time back, as a matter of fact. The staff and I checked every single Dirac tape we've received since you released J. Shelby from Yaphank, for any sign of intermodulation, marginal signals, or anything else of the kind. There's nothing, Robin, absolutely nothing. That's our net result, all around." "Which leaves us just where we started," Weinbaum said. "All the monitoring projects came to the same dead end; I strongly suspect that Stevens hasn't risked any further calls from his home office to his field staff, even though he seemed confident that we'd never intercept such calls -- as we haven't. Even our local wiretapping hasn't turned up anything but calls by Stevens' secretary, making appointments for him with various clients, actual and potential. Any information he's selling these days he's passing on in person -- and not in his office, either, because we've got bugs planted all over that and haven't heard a thing." "That must limit his range of operation enormously," Wald objected. out a doubt -- but he shows no signs of being bothered by it. He can't have sent any tips to Erskine recently, for instance, because our last tangle with that crew came out very well for us, even though we had to use the Dirac to send the orders to our squadron out there. If he overheard us, he didn't even try to pass the word. Just as he said, he's sweating us out -- " Weinbaum paused. "Wait a minute, here comes Margaret. And by the length of her stride. I'd say she's got something particularly nasty on her mind." "You bet I do," Margaret Soames said vindictively. "And it'll blow plenty of lids around here, or I miss my guess. The I.D. squad has finally pinned down J. Shelby Stevens. They did it with the voice-comparator alone." "How does that work?" Wald said interestedly. "Blink microphone," Weinbaum said impatiently. "Isolates inflections on single, normally stressed syllables and matches them. Standard I.D. searching technique, on a case of this kind, but it takes so long that we usually get the quarry by other means before it pays off. Well, don't stand there like a dummy, Margaret. Who is he?" " 'He,' " Margaret said, "is your sweetheart of the video waves. Miss Dana Lje." "They're crazy!" Wald said, staring at her. Weinbaum came slowly out of his first shock of stunned disbelief. "No, Thor," he said finally. "No, it figures. If a woman is going to go in for disguises, there are always two she can assume outside her own sex; a young boy, and a very old man. And Dana's an actress; that's no news to us." "But -- but why did she do it, Robin?" "That's what we're going to find out right now. So we wouldn't get the Dirac modification by ourselves, eh! Well, there are other ways of getting answers besides particle physics. Margaret, do you have a pick-up order out for that girl?" "No," the receptionist said. "This is one chestnut I wanted to see you pull out for yourself. You give me the authority, and I send the order -- not before." "Spiteful child. Send it, then, and glory in my gritted teeth. Come on, Thor -- let's put the nutcracker on this chestnut." As they were leaving the computer floor, Weinbaum stopped suddenly in his tracks and began to mutter in an almost inaudible voice. Wald said, "What's the matter, Robin?" "Nothing. I keep being brought up short by those predictions. What's the date?" "M'm... June #th. Why?" "It's the exact date that 'Stevens' predicted we'd meet again, damn it! Something tells me that this isn't going to be as simple as it looks." TF Dana Lje had any idea of what she was in for -- and considering the fact that she was 'J. Shelby Stevens' it had to be assumed that she did -- the knowledge seemed not to make her at all fearful. She sat as composedly as ever before Weinbaum's desk, smoking her eternal cigarette, and waited, one dimpled knee pointed directly at the bridge of the officer's nose. "Dana," Weinbaum said, "this time we're going to get all the answers, and we're not going to be gentle about it. Just in case you're not aware of the fact, there are certain laws relating to giving false information to a security officer, under which we could heave you in prison for a minimum of fifteen years. By application of the statutes on using communications to defraud, plus various local laws against transvestism, pseudonymity and so on, we could probably pile up enough additional short sentences to keep you in Yaphank until you really do grow a beard. So I'd advise you to open up.'I "I have every intention of opening up," Dana said. "I know, practically word for word, how this interview is going to proceed, what information I'm going to give you, just when I'm going to give it to you-and what you're going to pay me for it. I knew all that .many months ago. So there would be no point in my holding out on you." "What you're saying. Miss Lje," Thor Wald said in a resigned voice, "is that the future is fixed, and that you can read it, in every essential detail." "Quite right. Dr. Wald. Both those things are true." There was a brief silence. "All right," Weinbaum said grimly. "Talk." "All right. Captain Weinbaum, pay me," Dana said calmly. Weinbaum snorted. "But I'm quite serious," she said. "You still don't know what I know about the Dirac communicator. I won't be forced to tell it, by threat of prison or by any other threat. You see, I know for a fact that you aren't going to send me to prison, or give me drugs, or do anything else of that kind. I know for a fact, instead, that you are going to pay me -- so I'd be very foolish to say a word until you do. After all, it's quite a secret you're buying. Once I tell you what it is, you and the entire service will, be able to read the future as I do, and then the information will be valueless to me." Weinbaum was completely speechless for a moment. Finally he said, "Dana, you have a heart of purest brass, as well as a knee with an invisible gunsight on it. I say that I'm not going to give you my appropriation, regardless of what the future may or may not say about it. I'm not going to give it to you because the way my Government -- and yours -- runs things makes such a price impossible. Or is that really your price?" "It's my real price... but it's also an alternative. Call it my second choice. My first choice, which means the price I'd settle for, comes in two parts: (a), to be taken into your service as a responsible officer; and, (b), to be married to Capt. Robin Weinbaum." his chair. He felt as though copper-colored flames a foot long were shooting out of each of his ears. "Of all the -- " he began. There his voice failed completely. From behind him, where Wald was standing, came something like a large, Scandanavian-model guffaw being choked into insensibility. Dana herself seemed to be smiling a little. "You see," she said, "I don't point my best and most accurate knee at every man I meet." Weinbaum sat down again, slowly and carefully. "Walk, do not run, to nearest exit," he said. "Women and childlike security officers first. Miss Lje, are you trying to sell me the notion that you went through this elaborate hanky-panky -- beard and all -- out of a burning passion for my dumpy and underpaid person?" "Not entirely," Dana Lje said. "I want to be in the bureau, too, as I said. Let me confront you, though. Captain, with a fact of life that doesn't seem to have occurred to you at all. Do you accept as a fact that I can read the future in detail, and that that, to be possible at all, means that the future is fixed?" "Since Thor seems able to accept it, I suppose I can too -- provisionally." "There's nothing provisional about it," Dana said firmly. "Now, when I first came upon this -- uh, this gimmick -- quite a while back, one of thefirst things that I found out was that I was going to go through the 'J. Shelby Stevens' masquerade, force myself onto the staff of the bureau, and marry you, Robin. At the time, I was both astonished and completely rebellious. I didn't want to be on the bureau staff; I liked my free-lance life as a video commentator. I didn't want to marry you, though I wouldn't have been averse to living with you for a while -- say a month or so. And above all, the masquerade struck me as ridiculous. "But the facts kept staring me in the face. I was going to do all those things. There were no alternatives, no fanciful 'branches of time,' no decision-points that might be altered to make the future change. My future, like yours. Dr. Wald's, and everyone else's, was fixed. It didn't matter a snap whether or not I had a decent motive for what I was going to do; I was going to do it anyhow. Cause and effect, as I could see for myself, just don't exist. One event follows another because events are just as indestructible in space-time as matter and energy are. "It was the bitterest of all pills. It will take me many years to swallow it completely, and you too. Dr. Wald will come around a little sooner, I think. At any rate, once I was intellectually convinced that all this was so, I had to protect my own sanity. I knew that I couldn't alter what I was going to do, but the least I could do to protect myself was to suppjy myself with motives. Or, in other words, just plain rationalizations. That much, it seems, we're free to do; the consciousness of the observer is just along for the ride through time, and can't alter events -- but it can comment, explain, invent. That's fortunate, for none of us could stand going through motions which were truly free of what we think of as personal significances. "So I supplied myself with the obvious motives. Since I was going to be married to you and couldn't get out of it, I set out to convince myself that I loved you. Now I do. Since I was going to join the bureau staff, I thought over all the advantages that it might have over video commentating, and found that they made a respectable list. Those are my motives. "But I had no such motives at the beginning. Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we called motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event coming -- and, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen." "Wow," Dr. Wald said, inelegantly but with considerable force. dash' seems to be called for -- I can't quite decide which," Weinbaum agreed. "We know that Dana is an actress, Thor, so let's not fall off the apple tree quite yet. Dana, I've been saving the really hard question for the last. That question is; How? How did you arrive at this modification of the Dirac transmitter? Remember, we know your background, where we didn't know that of 'J. Shelby Stevens.' You're not a scientist. There were some fairly high-powered intellects among your distant relatives, but that's as close as you come." "I'm going to give you several answers to that question," Dana Lje said. "Pick the one you like best. They're all true, but they tend to contradict each other here and there. "To begin with,, you're right about my relatives, of course. If you'll check your dossier again, though, you'll discover that those so-called 'distant' relatives were the last surviving members of my family besides myself. When they died, second and fourth and ninth cousins though they were, their estates reverted to me, and among their effects I found a sketch of a possible instantaneous communicator based on de Brogliewave inversion. The material was in very rough form, and mostly beyond my comprehension, because I am, as you say, no scientist myself. But I was interested; I could see, dimly, what such a thing might be worth -- and not only in money. "My interest was fanned by two coincidences -- the kind of coincidences that cause-and-effect just can't allow, but which seem to happen all the same in the world of unchangeable events. For most of my adult life. I've been in communications industries of one kind or another, mostly branches of video. I had communications equipment around me constantly, and I had coffee and doughnuts with communications engineers every day. First I picked up the jargon; then, some of the procedures; and eventually, a little real knowledge. Some of the things I learned can't be gotten any other way. Some other things are ordinarily available only to highly educated people like Dr. Wald here, and came to me by accident, in horseplay, between kisses, and a hundred other ways -- all natural to the environment of a video network." Weinbaum found, to his own astonishment, that the "between kisses" clause did not sit very well in his chest. He said, with unintentional brusqueness ; "What's the other coincidence?" "A leak in your own staff." "Dana, you ought to have that set to music." "Suit yourself." "I can't suit myself," Weinbaum said petulantly. "I work for the Government. Was this leak direct to you?" "Not at first. That was why I kept insisting to you in person that there might be such a leak, and why I finally began to hint about it in public, on rhy program. I was hoping that you'd be able to seal it up inside the bureau beforje my first rather tenuous contact with it got lost. When I didn't succeed in provoking you into protecting yourself, I took the risk of making direct contact with the leak myself -- and the first piece of secret information that came to me through it was the final point I needed to put my Dirac communicator together. When it was all assembled, it did more than just communicate. It predicted. And I can tell you why." ly, "I don't find this very hard to accept, so far. Pruned of the philosophy, it even makes some sense of the 'J. Shelby Stevens' affair. I assume that by letting the old gentleman become known as somebody who knew more about the Dirac transmitter than I did, and who wasn't averse to negotiating with anybody who had money, you kept the leak working through you -- rather than transmitting data directly to unfriendly governments." "It did work out that way," Dana said. "But that wasn't the genesis or the purpose of the Stevens masquerade. I've already given you the whole explanation of how that came about." "Well, you'd better name me that leak, before the man gets away." "When the price is paid, not before. It's too late to prevent a getaway, anyhow. In the meantime, Robin, I want to go on and tell you the other answer to your question about how I was able to find this particular Dirac secret, and you didn't. What answers I've given you up to now have been cause-and-effect answers, with which we're all more comfortable. But I want to impress on you that all apparent cause-and-effect relationships are accidents. There is no such thing as a cause, and no such thing as an effect. I found the secret because I found it; that event was fixed; that certain circumstances seem to explain why I found it, in the old cause-andeffect terms, is irrelevant. Similarly, with all your superior equipment and brains, you didn't find it for one reason, and one reason alone: becatise you didn't find it. The history of the future says you didn't." "I pays my money and I takes no choice, eh?" Weinbaum said ruefully. "I'm afraid so -- and I don't like it any better than you do." "Thor, what's your opinion of all this?" "It's just faintly flabbergasting," Wald said soberly. "However, it hangs together. The deterministic Universe which Miss Lje paints was a common feature of the old relativity theories, and as sheer speculation has an even longer history. I would say that in the long run, how much credence we place in the story as a whole will rest upon her method of, as she calls it, reading the future. If it is demonstrable beyond any doubt, then the rest becofiies perfectly credible -- philosophy and all. If it doesn't, then what remains is an admirable job of acting, plus some metaphysics which, while self-consistent, are not original with Miss Lje." "That sums up the case as well as if I'd coached you. Dr. Wald," Dana said. "I'd like to point out one more thing. If I can read the future, then 'J. Shelby Stevens' never had any need for a staff of field operatives, and he never needed to send a single Dirac message which you might intercept. All he needed to do was to make predictions from his readings, which he knew to be infallible; no private espionage network had to be involved." "I see that," Weinbaum said dryly. "All right, Dana, let's put the proposition this way; I do not believe you. Much of what you say is probably true, but in totality I believe it to be false. On the other hand, if you're telling the whole truth, you certainly deserve a place on the bureau staff -- it would be dangerous as hell not to have you with us -- an the marriage is a more or less minor matter, except to you and me. You can have that with no strings attached; I don't want to be bought, any more than you would. "So: if you will tell me where the leak is, we will consider that part of the question closed. I make that condition not as a price, but because I don't want to get myself engaged to somebody who might be shot as a spy within a month." "Fair enough," Dana said. "Robin, your leak is Margaret Soames. She is an Erskine operative, and nobody's bubble-brain. She's a highly trained technician." "Well, I'll be damned," Weinbaum said in astonishment. "Then she's already flown the coop -- she was the one who first told me we'd identified you. She must have taken on that job in order to hold up delivery long enough to stage an exit." "That's right. But you'll catch her, day after tomorrow. And you are now a hooked fish, Robin." There was another suppressed burble from Thor Wald. "I accept the fate happily," Weinbaum said, eying the gunsight knee. "Now, if you will tell me how you work your swami trick, and if it backs up everything you've said to the letter, as you claim. I'll see to it that you're also taken into the bureau and that all charges against you are quashed. Otherwise, I'll probably have to kiss the bride between the bars of a cell." Dana smiled. "The secret is very simple. It's in the beep." "The beep? The Dirac noise?" "That's right. You didn't find it out because you considered the beep to be just a nuisance, and ordered Miss Soames to cut it off all tapes before sending them in to you. Miss Soames, who had some inkling of what the beep meant, was more than happy to do so, leaving the reading of the beep exclusively to 'J. Shelby Stevens' -- who she thought was going to take on Erskine as a client." "Explain," Thor Wald said, looking intense. "Just as you assumed, every Dirac message that is sent is picked up by every receiver that is capable of detecting it. Every receiver -- including the first one ever built, which is yours. Dr. Wald, through the hundreds of thousands of them which will exist throughout the Galaxy in the Twenty-Fourth Century, to exist in the Thirtieth Century, and so on. The Dirac beep is the simultaneous reception of every one of the Dirac messages which have ever been sent, or ever will be sent. Incidentally, the cardinal number of the total of those messages is a relatively small and of course finite number; it's far below really large finite numbers such as the number of electrons in the Universe, even when you break each and every message down into individual 'bits' and count those." "Of course," Dr. Wald said softly. "Of course! But, Miss Lje... how do you tune for an individual message? We tried fractional positron frequencies, and got nowhere." "I didn't even know fractional positron frequencies existed," Dana confessed. "No,it's simple -- so simple that a lucky layman like me could arrive at it. You tune individual messages out of the beep by time-lag, nothing more. All the messages arrive at the same instant, in the smallest fraction of time that exists, something called a 'chronon.' " "Yes," Wald said. "The time it takes one electron to move from one quantum-level to another. That's the Pythagorean point of time-measurement." "Thank you. Obviously no gross physical receiver can respond to a message that brief, or at least that's what I thought at first. But because there are relay and switching delays, various forms of feedback and so on in the apparatus itself, the beep arrives at the output end as a complex pulse which has been 'splattered' along the time axis for a full second or more. That's an effect which you can exaggerate by recording the 'splattered' beep on a high-speed tape, the same way you would record any event that you wanted to study in slow motion. Then you tune up the various failurepoints in your receiver, to exaggerate one failure, minimize all the others, and use noiSesuppressing techniques to cut out the background." still have a considerable garble when you were through. You'd have to sample the messages -- " "Which is just what I did; Robin's little lecture to me about the ultrawave gave me that hint. I set myself to find out how the ultrawave channel carries so many messages at once, and I discovered that you people sample the incoming pulses every thousandth of a second and pass on one pip only when the wave deviates in a certain way from the mean. I didn't really believe it would work on the Dirac beep, but it turned out just as well: #'r as intelligible as the original transmission afterit came through the smearing device. I'd already got enough from the beep to put my plan in motion, of course -- but now every voice message in it was available, and crystal-clear: If you select three pips every thousandth of a second, you can even pick up an intelligible transmission of music -- a little razzy, but good enough to identify the instruments that are playing -- and that's a very close test of any communications device." "There's a question of detail here that doesn't quite follow," said Weinbaum, for whom the technical talk was becoming a little too thick to fight through. "Dana, you say that you knew the course this conversation was going to take -- yet it isn't being Dirac-recorded, nor can I see any reason why any summary of it would be sent out on the Dirac afterwards." "That's true, Robin. However, when I leave here, I will make such a transcast myself, on my own Dirac. Obviously I will -- because I've aready picked it up, from the beep." "In other words, you're going to call yourself up -- months ago." "That's it," Dana said. "It's not as useful a technique as you might think at first, because it's dangerous to make such broadcasts while a situation is still developing. You can safely 'phone back' details only after the given situation has gone to completion, as a chemist might put it. Once you know, however, that when you use the Dirac you're dealing with time, you can coax some very strange things out of the instrument." She paused and smiled. "I have heard," she said conversationally, "the voice of the President of our Galaxy, in #, announcing the federation of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. I've heard the commander of a worldline cruiser, traveling from # to # along the world-line of the planet Hathshepa, which cir#, calling for help across elevkind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension. And many other things. When you check on me, you'll hear these things too -- and you'll wonder what many of them mean. "And you'll listen to them even more closely than I did, in the hope of finding out whether or not anyone was able to understand in time to help." Weinbaum and Wald looked dazed. somber. "Most of the voices in the Dirac beep are like that -- they're cries for help, which you can overhear decades or centuries before the senders get into trouble. You'll feel obligated to answer every one, to try to supply the help that's needed. And you'll listen to the succeeding messages and say: 'Did we -- will we get there in time? Did we understand in time?' "And in most cases you won't be sure. You'll know the future, but not what most of it means. The farther into the future you travel with the machine, the more incomprehensible the messages become, and so you're reduced to telling yourself that time will, after all, have to pass by at its own pace, before enough of the surrounding events can emerge to make those remote messages clear. "The long run effect, as far as I can think it through, is not going to be that of omniscience -- of our consciousness being extracted entirely from the time-stream and allowed to view its whole sweep from one side. Instead, the Dirac in effect simply slides the bead of consciousness forward from the present a certain distance. Whether it's five hundred or five thousand years still remains to be seen. At that point the law of diminishing returns sets in -- or the noise-factor begins to overbalance the information, take your choice -- and the observer is reduced to traveling in time at the same old speed. He's just a bit ahead of himself." "You've thought a great deal about this," Wald said slowly. "I dislike to think of what might have happened had some less conscientious person stumbled on the beep." "That wasn't in the cards," Dana said. In the ensuing quiet, Weinbaum felt a faint, irrational sense of let-down, of something which had promised more than had been delivered -- rather like the taste of fresh bread as compared to its smell, or the discovery that Thor Wald's Swedish "folk-song" Natog-Dag was only Cole Porter's Night and Day in another language. He recognized the feeling: it was the usual emotion of the hunter when the hunt is over, the born detective's professional version of the post coitum triste. After looking at the smiling, supple Dana Lje a moment more, however, he was almost content. "There's one more thing," he said. "I don't want to be insufferably skeptical about this -- but I want to see it work. Thor, can we set up a sampling and smearing device such as Dana describes and run a test?" "In fifteen minutes," Dr. Wald said. "We have most of the unit in already assembled form on our big ultrawave receiver, and it shouldn't take any effort to add a high-speed tape unit to it. I'll do it right now." He went out. Weinbaum and Dana looked at each other for a moment, rather like strange cats. Then the security officer got up, with what he knew to be an air of somewhat grim determination, and seized his fiancee's hands, anticipating a struggle. That first kiss was, by intention at least, mostly pro forma. But by the time Wald padded back into the office, the letter had been pretty thoroughly superseded by the spirit. HE scientist harrumphed and set his burden on the desk. "This is all there is to it," he said, "but I had to hunt all through the library to find a Dirac record with a beep still on it. Just a moment more while I make connections..." Weinbaum used the time to bring his mind back to the matter at hand, although not quite completely. Then two tape spindles began to whir like so many bees, and the end-stopped sound of the Dirac beep filled the room. Wald stopped the apparatus, reset it, and started the smearing tape very slowly in the opposite direction. came from the speaker. As Weinbaum leaned forward tensely, one voice said clearly and loudly above the rest; "Hello, Earth bureau. Lt. T. L. Matthews at Hercules Station #-#-#. We have the last point on the orbit-curve of your dope-runners plotted, and the curve itself points to a small system about # light-years from the base here; the lace hasn't even got a name on our charts. Scouts show the home planet at least twice as heavily fortified as we anticipated, so we'll need another cruiser. We have a 'can-do' from you in the beep for us, but we're waiting as ordered to get it in the out." After the first instant of stunned amazement -- for no amount cept could have prepared him for the overwhelming fact itself -- Weinbaum had grabbed a pencil and begun to write at top speed. As the voice signed out he threw the pencil down and looked excitedly at Dr. Wald. "Seven months ahead," he said, aware that he was grinning like an idiot. "Thor, you know the trouble we've had with that needle in the Hercules haystack! This orbit-curve trick must be something Matthews has yet to dream up -- at least he hasn't come to me with it yet, and there's nothing in the situation as it stands now that would indicate a closing-time of six months for the case. The computers said it would take three more years." "It's new data," Dr. Wald agreed solemnly. "Well, don't stop there, in God's name! Let's hear some more!" Dr. Wald went through the ritual, much faster this time. The speaker said ;  "Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom. Aimkaksetchoc. Sanbetogmow. Datdectamset. Domatrosmin. Out." "My word," Wald said. "What's all that?" "That's what I was talking about," Dana Lje said. "At least half of what you get from the beep is just as incomprehensible. I suppose it's whatever has happened to the English language, thousands of years from now." "No, it isn't," Weinbaum said. He had resumed writing, and was still at it, despite the comparative briefness, of the transmission. "Not this sample, anyhow. That, ladies and gentlemen, is code -- no language consists exclusively of four-syllable words, of that you can be sure. What's more, it's a version of our code. I can't break it down very far -- it takes a fulltime expert to read this stuff -- but I get the date and some of the sense. It's March #, #, and there's some kind of a mass evacuation taking place. The message seems to be a routing order." "But why will we be using code?" Dr. Wald wanted to know. "It implies that we think somebody might overhear us -- somebody else with a Dirac. That could be very messy." "It could indeed," Weinbaum said. "But we'll find out, I imagine. Give her another spin, Thor." ' "Shall I try for a picture this time?" Weinbaum nodded. A moment later, he was looking squarely into the green-skinned face of something that looked like an animated traffic signal with a helmet on it. Though the creature had no mouth, the Dirac speaker was saying quite clearly, "Hello, #, transmission date Gor #, # by my calendar, July #, # by yours. This is a lousy little planet. Everything stinks of oxygen, just like Earth. But the natives accept us and that's the important thing. We've got your genius safely born. Detailed re# Thammos out." "I wish I knew my New General Catalogue better," Weinbaum said. "Isn't that M #I in Canis Major, the one with the red star in the middle? And we'll be using non-humanoids there! What was that creature, anyhow? Never mind, spin her again." Dr. Wald spun her again. Weinbaum, already feeling a little dizzy, ha(J given up taking notes. That could come later, all that could come later. Now he wanted only scenes and voices, more and more scenes and voices from the future. They were better than aquavit, even with a beer chaser. Ill THE indoctrination tape ended, and Krasna touched a button. The Dirac screen darkened, and folded silently back into the desk. "They didn't see their way through to us, not by a long shot," he said. "They didn't see, for instance, that when one section of the government becomes nearly all-knowing -- no matter how small it was to begin with -- it necessarily becomes all of the government that there is. Thus the bureau turned into the Service and pushed everyone else out. "On the other hand, those people did come to be afraid that a government with an all-knowing arm might become a rigid dictatorship. That couldn't happen and didn't happen, because the more you know, the wider your field of possible operation becomes and the more fluid and dynamic a society you need. How could a rigid society expand to other star-systems, let alone other galaxies? It couldn't be done." "I should think it could," Jo said slowly. "After all, if you know in advance what everybody is going to do -- " "But we don't, Jo. That's just a popular fiction -- or, if you like, a red herring. Not all of the business of the cosmos is carried on over the Dirac, after all. The only events we can ever overhear are those which are transmitted as a message. Do you order your lunch over the Dirac? Of course you don't. Up to now, you've never said a word over the Dirac in your life. "And there's much more to it than that. All dictatorships are based on the proposition that government can somehow control a man's thoughts. We know now that the consciousness of the observer is the only free thing in the Universe. Wouldn't we look foolish trying to control that, when our entire physics shows that it's impossible to do s#? That's why the Service is in no sense a thought police. We're interested only in acts. We're an Event Police." "But why?" Jo said. "If all history is fixed, why do we bother with these boy-meets-girl assignments, for instance? The meetings will happen anyhow." "Of course they will," Krasna agreed immediately. "But look, Jo. Our interests as a government depend upon the future. We operate as if the future is as real as the past, and so far we haven't been disappointed: the Service is # successful. But that very success isn't without its warnings. What would happen if we stopped supervising events? We don't know, and we don't dare take the chance. Despite the evidence that the future is fixed, we have to take on the role of the caretaker of inevitability. We believe that nothing can possibly go wrong... but we have to act on the philosophy that history helps only those who help themselves. "That's why we safeguard huge numbers of courtships right through to contract, and even beyond it. We have to see to it that every single person who is mentioned in any Dirac 'cast gets born. Our obligation as Event Police is to make the events of the future possible, because those events are crucial to our society -- even the smallest of them. It's an enormous task, believe me, and it gets bigger and bigger every day. Apparently it always will." "Always?" Jo said. "What about the public? Isn't it going to smell this out sooner or later? The evidence is piling up at a terrific rate." "Yes and no," Krasna said. "Lots of people are smelling it out right now, just as you did. But the number of new people we need in the Service grows faster -- it's always ahead of the number of laymen who follow the clues to the truth." J O took a deep breath. "You take all this as if it were as commonplace as boiling an egg, Kras," he said. "Don't you ever wonder about some of the things you get from the beep? That 'cast Dana Lje picked up from Canes Venatici, for instance, the one from the ship that was travelling backward in time? How is that possible? What could be the purpose? Is it -- " "Pace, pace," Krasna said. "I don't know, and I don't care. Neither should you. That event is too far in the future for us to worry about. We can't possibly know its context yet, so there's no sense in trying to understand it. If an Englishman of around # had found out about the American Revolution, he would have thought it a tragedy; an Englishman of # would have a very different view of it. We're in the same spot. The messages we get from the really far future have no contexts yet." "I think I see," Jo said. "I'll get used to it in time, I suppose, after I use the Dirac for a while. Or does my new rank authorize me to do that?" "Yes, it does. But, Jo, first I want to pass on to you a rule of Service etiquette that must never be broken. You won't be allowed anywhere near a Dirac mike until you have it burned into your memory beyond any forgetfulness." "I'm listening, Kras, believe me." "Good. This is the rule: The date of aServiceman's death must never be mentioned in a Dirac 'cast." Jo blinked, feeling a little chilly. The reason behind the rule was decidedly tough-minded, but its ultimate kindness was plain. He said, "I won't forget that. I'll want that protection myself. Many thanks, Kras. What's my new assignment?" "To begin with," Krasna said, grinning, "as simple a job as I've ever given you, right here on Randolph. Skin out of here and find me that cab-driver -- the one who mentioned time-travel to you. He's uncomfortably close to the truth; closer than you were in one category. "Find him, and bring him to me. The Service is about to take in a new raw recruit!" The Boys From Vespis It was all just a frightful mistake -- but try convincing the Earthgirls that it was! I against them," said GilB lespie, the owner of the bar. "They're good clean-living lads." "Unlike your regular customers, is that it?" Herbert demanded. "I didn't say that. All I know is the Vespians are quiet -- " " -- dull -- " " -- sensible lads. They come in and have a drink or two, and that's that. No trouble, no fuss, no bellyaching." He looked meaningly at Herbert. "What have they got to bellyache about?" asked Herbert angrily. "They come and land here. Nobody gets indignant, the way some of the natives have where our boys have landed. People treat them decently. Decently isn't the word for the way the girls treat them! I tell you, it's a revolting sight outside their ship. They've even put seats out on the green. Next thing, they'll get a neat little Vespian sextet together and throw dances twice a week with food and drinks free." "That's what it boils down to, is it?" said Gillespie scornfully. "Primitive jealousy. That's a very uncivilized attitude to take toward our guests." "Guests are somebody you invite. Anyway, it's a primitive matter. This isn't a big town. Girls never were plentiful. Now they look down their noses at us local men. That sort of thing doesn't interest you -- or shouldn't at your age. It's all right for you tradesmen, you pillars of the community. It's the younger generation who've got the complaints." theme. "How would you like it if a distillery floated from space and set up shop next door, selling real liquor, not this hooch, at cut prices. That'd be a different story then, wouldn't it?" "Now who's being insulting? If you don't like the liquor, why do you drink it?" "Oh, yes, we ban always sell it to the Vespians, can't we? And shortchange the good clean-living boys. I've seen you do it." Gillespie grinned feebly. "That's no way to talk, Herbert," he said in half-hearted protest. "If the visitors are good for trade and make no trouble, why should we object? What benefits one benefits the community." "You're not making speeches in the Chamber of Commerce now. What benefits you and your friends benefits me less than nothing. I tell you, Gillespie, trouble's brewing. The younger generation's going to get these guests of ours railroaded out of town." "Now, now, remember the Interplanetary Welcome Statute. Any friendly visitors are welcome to Earth. Anyway, isn't it a nice change to have human visitors. after some of the specimens we have had?" "Sure, sure. Most of the others never had a taste for liquor, or needed suits of clothes, or spent money on girls. But I'd much rather have any of the others, any day, than these black-haired Adonises with their damned perfect manners. The green lizards from Arcturus were more fun. And one of those crystals from Sirius could sing a four-part harmony all on his own. They had personality. All these Vespians are good for is to fill out their lousy opalescent shirts." "They're fine shirts. I've got a couple myself. Perhaps you'd like me to try and get you one." "Thanks, I can beg one for myself." "Now that's not nice, Herbert. I didn't beg them. My daughter Doris took one of the lads home to tea and he brought them along for me -- as a nice friendly gesture. Kind of a souvenir." "Ain't that nice -- traitor!" Gillespie smirked. "You don't understand diplomacy. Friendliness encourages trade." "You'd sell the planet from under our feet, if they made a good enough offer!" "You've got them all wrong, Herbert. They're not here for trade. Little things like that are just ordinary acts of good will." "Like taking the troublesome women off our hands for us. If they're not here for trade, what are they here for?" "Now that's a stupid question. What do we go to other solar systems for? To map the Universe. To establish contact with the farflung civilizations of the Galaxy." "Anybody would think you were an astronaut to hear you talk. Anyway, the approach of this bunch is a whole lot too smooth for my liking. It's suspicious." "Only to people with suspicious minds." Y OU wait, my friend," said Herbert darkly. "You'll wake up one morning to find they've taken over the planet, or something like that. That's it -- they probably picked on Centerville to study small-town psychology. You're probably down in their little red book. 'Dominant type -- trademan. Vulnerable to smooth talk, opalescent shirts and approach through daughter.' All this goes back to Vespis, wherever Vespis is. Hy the way, I suppose you realize nobody has ever heard of Vespis. The big boys on Vespis give the word, and one morning we're being rounded up like cattle." Gillespie laughed hollowly. "The extent to which some people's distorted imaginations will take them -- " "I can think of worse things. I can think it's suspicious that the Vespians come here with such a nice command of our language. That they fitted in so well from the start." "Well, what's so funny about that? Other creatures have come here with a working knowledge of the language." "Because Earthmen had already been to their system. We haven't been to Vespis yet." "Well, I suppose they picked it up on their travels. Anyway, I don't see that it's anything to get all steamed up about. Perhaps they understand it by intuition." "Telepaths, eh? Then why don't they say they're telepaths? Tell me that." "There's no compulsion on anybody to say what he can do, is there?" Gillespie countered. "Besides, it wouldn't be like the Vespians to go around bragging about what they can and can't do. They're too modest." "They're too modest," Herbert mimicked scathingly. "They're so phony! You wait. I know. I've ot it." He laughed mirthlessly. "They're probably here on a white-slaving expedition. They make such a hit with the women, with their good looks and smooth manners. But all that's just a blind. One of these days, they'll sweep all the women into their ship -- under the guise of showing the sweet creatures how the dar ling spaceboat works. And then, when they're all safely on board, clang will go the ports, bang will go the rockets, and they'll all be on their way to the vice dens of Vespis." Gillespie laughed uproariously. "Decadence!" said Herbert bitterly. "Always, when a civilization is on the verge of catastrophe, you'll find it laughing at the prophets." "Herbert," Gillespie said between spasms of laughter, "all this time I thought you were being serious. I've misjudged you in the past. If you can keep that up. I'll hire you as a floor show. Right now, have a drink on the house. You've earned it." "I don't know that I should in such a traitorous bar. Only my present misery drives me to accept. Perhaps such a sacrifice of my principles will convince you of my desperation and high seriousness." Gillespie only laughed again as he turned to get the promised drink. A T that moment, a Vespian, with the inevitable girl on his arm, walked into the bar. Herbert recognized the girl as one he'd dated a couple of times himself a year or so back. The change in her was remarkable. Then, he'd thought her rather almost surly. Now, she was laughr ing at the Vespian and sparkling with pleasure. Herbert winced. Gillespie hastily slapped Herbert's drink down in front of him and concentrated on the Vespian, who ordered up with that delicate trace of unknown accent. As Gillespie hurried about his order in a way he would have done for no local inhabitant, the Vespian smiled amiably at Herbert and bowed graciously. Herbert forced his face into a stiff smile. The Vespian led his girl to a booth. Herbert swore under his breath. He had to hand it to them -- they were certainly smooth. Perhaps you couldn't really blame the girls. But there ought to be a law against it. Herbert was too consumed with jealousy to be surprised at finding himself on the side of the Puritans for once. But there ought to be something. There ought to be -- that was it -- there ought to be some technicality they'd infringed. He racked his brains. Illegal entry? No, there was a special, dispensation for interplanetary visitors in that respect. A routine matter of inspection of the ship, impouriding of any weapons or dangerous mechanisms, checks for radioactivity and bacteria. The Vespians had been properly cleared. Customs or currency infringements? Again, that didn't apply to interplanetary visitors. There was even the I.W.F., the Interplanetary Welcome Fund, for those who needed it. The Vespians had come well-loaded with gold, anyway. That, come to think of it, was another example of their suspicious preparedness. "I tell you -- " he started to say to Gillespie, but Gillespie was leaning on the counter, smiling benignly in the direction of the Vespian and his girl friend. There was a faraway look on his face, as if he heard the sweet music of a symphony for cash registers. "Yes?" Gillespie asked dreamily, without turning. "Oh, forget it," said Herbert, draining his drink and sliding off his stool. "I'm going to do something. I'm going to picket their ship. Or -- or something." evening scene, just outside the town, was like a delicate landscape by Watteau. Apart, that is, from the curving brightness of the ship and the costumes of the human and Vespian figures. In the dying light of the spring day, couples were stretched out on the grass, or seated on the green rustic seats that the Vespians had thoughtfully provided. Laughter and the sound of soft voices would have sounded idyllic to Herbert in another setting -- with himself as participant. As he approached the green, faery lamps broke into a thousand soft points of multicolored light. Herbert grumbled at this latest bit of Vespian stage-managing. He grumbled again when he noticed the mobile cafeteria. But this was a purely terrestial enterprise. If things went on like this, there'd be a small town clustered around the ship before long. Apart from the cafeteria attendant, he seemed to be the only home-planet male around. The girls looked at him as if this were Vespis and he were the intruder. The Vespians just smiled courteously. He flopped down on the grass before his legs sent him careering around the ship, yelling like a prophet of hellfire. He brooded. There had to be some way, some plan of action. Perhaps, if he stayed long enough, he'd spot the Vespians committing a breach of some minor bylaw or other, and he could get an injunction. But he looked about him for a long time, while the shadows grew longer and longer and finally merged, and he noticed nothing exceptionable. The Vespians conducted themselves with the utmost decoriim. They seemed not to mind his presence in the least. But the eyes of the girls began so to flash whitely in the twilight, whitely -- and dangerously -- Herbert thought. An alarming image of himself being lynched by a horde of angry women flashed across his mind. On a sudden impulse, he rose and crossed to the main port of the Vespian ship. There was only one thing to do -- talk this matter over with the Vespians, man to, so to speak, man. If he could show them that their conduct was resented, they might lay off. The Vespian sentry lolling elegantly at the foot of the ramp hardly looked like a guard, but that was his function, Herbert supposed. "I want to see the big man," said Herbert gruffly. "Ah, yes," said the Vespian, flashing a bright smile. "He may be in conference, but I'll see. Who shall I say is calling?" It was too disarming. "Er -- Mr. Herbert Plumtree." He cursed inwardly to find himself adding, in a polite tone he had not intended, "Er -- on a social matter." "Certainly," said the Vespian. "Excuse me." He seemed to frown down at his shirt for a moment, then looked up. "Certainly, Mr. Plumtree. This way, if you please." And he led Herbert up the ramp, down a softly lit corridor, into a small room and the presence of a Vespian even more handsome, if that were possible, than the usual run of his breed. The Vespian rose courteously from his desk and stretched out his hand. "Good evening, Mr. Plumtree. Is there anything I can do for you?" "I -- I -- " Herbert floundered. "Yes, there is. Correct as your men are in their behavior, I, as a deputation of one, would be very glad to see their handsome backs." "See their backs? Oh, yes. But, Mr. Plumtree -- " the Vespian looked genuinely hurt -- "I'm very sorry to hear that. Very sorry indeed. How have we given offense? If any of my men..." "There's nothing personal in it," said Herbert. setting effect that the Vespians were having on the balance of the sexes in the small town. "Oh, dear!" said the Vespian chief when Herbert had finished. "Oh, dear me, I hadn't thought of that." He appeared to be in such a state of perturbation that Herbert's worst suspicions were reawakened. "Look here," he said, feeling absurdly like a hero in an oldtime Western story. "Don't act so damned innocent about it. You're exactly the same as us. You can't pretend you weren't aware of the effect you'd have. If you don't clear out, I'm going to the authorities about it." The Vespian became very agitated. His smooth Vespian manners momentarily deserted him. "But, Mr. Plumtree, surely you don't -- surely you wouldn't... It was harmless, I assure you. We meant no harm." "Well, you've caused plenty." The Vespian said, "Do you mind if I consult my associates about this? Er -- perhaps you'd like a drink?"  "No, thank you," said Herbert stiffly. It would probably be drugged anyway, he told himself. "Well, er -- please excuse me a moment, if you will." And the agitated Vespian slid out through a door at the end of  the room. Herbert felt a mixed sensation of triumph -- and fear. This was the classical moment to make a dash for it. Or was it? He hadn't found any real clue to the purpose of the Vespians yet. In his mind's ear, he heard the roar of rockets as the alarmed Vespians took to their space-heels, bearing him off a captive. Or were they preparing a worse fate for him? After all, the only ones who had seen him enter the ship were the women outside, and he somehow felt that they would not be willing witnesses against their toohandsome swains. Well, if he had to be a martyr, perhaps the other fellows, when they woke up to what he had done for them, would erect a monument on the site. But no rockets sounded, no lethal gas hissed into the room. Instead, the door opened again and the chief Vespian came back, accompanied by two others. "Ah, Mr. Plumtree, I'm sorry. I hope my little flurry did not alarm you," said the alien leader. Steady, steady, Herbert told himself, and waited without replying. "My associates here are of the same opinion as myself. We agree that we should tell you of our purpose in behaving as we have." "Ah, so you do admit you had an ulterior purpose -- " "Certainly, Mr. Plumtree. Well, not exactly a purpose -- rather, a stratagem. It's one we adopt on all the inhabited planets we visit. It had always been successful before. We did not realize that what evidently has happened here could happen. We made a slight error in our calculations and, believe me, we are both distressed and pained." I'HE Vespian smiled a smile of aching sincerity. They're playing for time, thought Herbert. Probably stoking up the rockets. "Come to the point," he said. "We -- well... The Vespian hesitated, then said, "I've communed with my associates and we are convinced that the best course is to tell you the situation. We haven't ever had to do so before, but such an awkward problem as this has never arisen before. We seek to cause as little distress as possible to the inhabitants of the planets we visit, which was the reason for our stratagem in the first place. You see -- " he spread his hands in a gesture of heartfelt apology -- "we're not at all as you see us. In fact, we're not really humanoid at all." "Whatr "No, I assure you, Mr. Plumtree, that we are not. I could prove it to you -- let down the guard, as it were. But we have found, from distressing experience, that of all possible aspects, ours is one which universally strikes the inhabitants of the rest of the Galaxy with, I am sorry to say, fear, panic and often outright hostility. I hope you can appreciate that, Mr. Plumtree, and perhaps understand our feelings. Of course, to ourselves, in our natural state, we consider ourselves quite good-looking. And we are actually the kindest of creatures. "It wasn't so much that our feelings were -- well, a trifle hurt. More important, it was extremely difficult for us to carry on our peaceful researches on worlds where our presence was so strongly resented. So we learned to adapt ourselves to the ideal types of the people we meet." "You can do that?" asked Herbert, astonished. "It was not easy at first, but we have grown quite proficient at it." "I don't believe you," Herbert said flatly. "Mr. Plumtree," said the Vespian, "I told you I could proveit to you. I could give you a flicker. But you wouldn't like it." "Go on," Herbert said stoutly. "I dare you." "All right." The Vespian looked worriedly resigned. "But please don't hold it against me. You asked for it. Ready?" "Ready." The Vespian flickered for a moment. "All right, all right," gasped Herbert weakly. "I believe you." "You see," said the Vespian, "when we came to your planet, we evidently did our job too well. The men we made ourselves into are too perfect. And now that I've told you the facts, we'd better move on." He sighed heavily. "It will be a pity, because we rather like your planet and we still have a lot of research to do." He smiled wanly at Herbert. "We do conduct research, of course. We don't spend all our time with your girls." He coughed. "I'm sorry to harp Ufon a subject that is so painful to you. But you do understand, don't you? It was only in the interest of good relations. We have done nothing -- nothing at all -- to encourage your girls." H erbert was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for them. He brightened. "Why don't you just modify the Adonis model? You could make yourselves just a little repulsive." The Vespian laughed regretfully. "Your girls know so many of us by now that they've given us pet names. They'd be surprised at the change. No, I'm afraid it's too late for that now." "Mm -- I suppose so," said Herbert. Then the thought struck him. "So many? Does that mean that all your crew are not accounted for?" "No, there are a few who've stayed aboard ship since we landed. Researchers, mechanics." "Well, I've got a request to make," Herbert said, "and I think it might be a solution for both of us." He suddenly felt guilty and a traitor. But after all, he told himself, it wasn't altruism that had brought him here -- there was no altruism in matters like this. He outlined his idea to the Vespians. "Well," he finished, "do you think you can do it?" A fresh twinge of guilt seized him. "And you could keep a few -- er -- in stock, as it were." "And you would tell nobody else about this?" Herbert grinned. "Do you think for one moment I would?" The Vespian grinned, too. "No, I think not. Yes, it can be done. If you'll just hold on a moment." "Oh, just one thing," said Herbert. "Yes?" "Don't let down your standards of craftmanship." "We won't," promised the Vespian. And when he returned with what Herbert had asked for, it was quite obvious that they hadn't. When Herbert finally could speak, he said, "What -- what shall I call you?" "Call me what you wish." The voice, and the smile that accompanied it, besides sending a shiver of delight down Herbert's spine, reminded him of someone he'd seen every chance he'd had, but had, unfortunately and inevitably, never met. "Will Rita do?" he asked. "Rita? Yes, I should love you to call me Rita." Pet Farm The next worst thing to hell is being shanghaied into the Paradise of an alien planet! Illustrated by T hey had fled almost to the sheer ambient fce of the crater wall when the Falakian girl touched Farrell's arm and pointed back through the scented, pearly mists. "Someone," she said. Her voice stumbled over the almost forgotten Terran word, but its sound was music. "No matter," Farrell answered. "They're too late now." He pushed on, happily certain in his warm euphoric glow of mounting expectancy that what he had done to the ship made him -- and his new-found paradise with him -- secure. He had almost forgotten who they were; the pale half-memories that drifted through his mind touched his consciousness lightly and without urgency, arousing neither alarm nor interest. The dusk grew steadily deeper, but the dimming of vision did not matter. Nothing mattered but the fulfillment to come. Far above him, the lacy network of bridging, at one time so baffling, arched and vanished in airy grace into the colored mists. To right and left, other arms of the aerial maze reached out, throwing vague traceries from cliff to cliff across the valley floor. Behind him on the plain he could hear the eternally young people playing about their little blue lake, flitting like gay shadows through the tamarisks and calling to each other in clear elfin voices while they frolicked after the fluttering swarms of great, brighthued moths. The crater wall halted him and he stood with the Falakian girl beside him, looking back through the mists and savoring the sweet, quiet mystery of the valley. Motion stirred there ; the pair of them laughed like anticipant children when two wide-winged moths swam into sight and floated toward them, eyes glowing like veiled emeralds. Footsteps followed, disembodied in the dusk. "It is only Xavier," a voice said. Its mellow uninflection evoked a briefly disturbing memory of a slight gray figure, jointed yet curiously flexible, and a featureless oval of face. It came out of the mists and halted a dozen yards away, and he saw that it spoke into a metallic box slung over one shoulder. "He is unharmed," it said. "Directions?" Xavier? Directions? From whom? Another voice answered from the shoulder-box, bringing a second mental picture of a face -- square and brown, black-browed and taciturnly humorless -- that he had known and forgotten. Whose, and where? "Hold him there, Xav," it said. "Stryker and I are going to try to reach the ship now." The moths floated nearer, humming gently. "You're too late," Farrell called. "Go away. Let me wait in peace." "If you knew what you're waiting for," a third voice said, "you'd go screaming mad." It was familiar, recalling vaguely a fat, goodnatured face and ponderous, laughter-shaken paunch. "If you could see the place as you saw it when we first landed..." The disturbing implications of the words forced him reluctantly to remember a little of that first sight of Falak... The memory was sacrilege, soiling and cheapening the ecstasy of his anticipation. But it had been different. Farrell sick with disgust. He had known from the beginning that the planet was small and arid, non-rotating, with a period of revolution about its primary roughly equal to ten Earth years. The Marco Four's initial sweep of reconnaissance, spiraling from pole to pole, had supplied further information without preparing him at all for what the three-man Reclamations team was to find later. The weed-choked fields and crumbled desolation of Terran slave barracks had been depressing enough. The inevitable scattering of empty domes abandoned a hundred years before by the Hymenop conquerors had completed a familiar and unpromising pattern, a workaday blueprint that differed from previous experience only in one significant detail; There was no shaggy, disoriented remnant of descendants from the original colonists. The valley, a mile-wide crater sunk between thousand-foot cliffs, floored with straggling bramble thickets and grass flats pocked with stagnant pools and quaking slime-bogs, had:been infinitely worse. The cryptic three-dimensional maze of bridges spanning the pit had made landing there a ticklish undertaking. Stryker and Farrell and Gibson, after a conference, had risked the descent only because the valley offered a last possible refuge for survivors. Their first real hint of what lay ahead of them came when Xavier, the ship's mechanical, opened the personnel port against the heat and humid stink of the place. "Another damned tropical pesthole," Farrell said, shucking off his comfortable shorts and donning booted coveralls for the preliminary survey. "The sooner we count heads -- assuming there are any left to count -- and get out of here, the better. The long-term Reorientation boys can have this one and welcome." Stryker, characteristically, had laughed at his navigator's prompt disgust. Gibson, equally predictable in his way, had gathered his gear with precise efficiency, saying nothing. "It's a routine soon finished," Stryker said. "There can't be more than a handful of survivors here, and in any case we're not required to do more than gather data from full-scale recolonization. Our main job is to prepare Reorientation if we can for whatever sort of slave-conditioning deviltry the Hymenops practiced on this particular world." Farrell grunted sourly. "You love these repulsive little puzzles, don't you?"  good-natured malice. "Why not, Arthur? You can play the accordion and sketch for entertainment, and Gib has his starmaps and his chess sessions with Xavier. But for a fat old man, rejuvenated four times and nearing his fifth and final, what else is left except curiosity?" He clipped a heat-gun and audicom pack to the belt of his bulging coveralls and clumped to the port to look outside. Roiling gray fog hovered there, diffusing the hot magenta point of Falak's sun to a liverish glare halfeclipsed by the crater's southern rim. Against the light, the spidery metal maze of foot-bridging stood out dimly, tracing a random crisscross pattern that dwindled to invisibility in the mists. "That network is a Hymenop experiment of some sort,"Stryker said, peering. "It's not only a sample of alien engineering -- and a thundering big one at that -- but an object lesson on the weird workings of alien logic. If we could figure out what possessed the Bees to build such a maze here -- " "Then we'd be the first to solve the problem of alien psychology," Farrell finished acidly, aping the older man's ponderous enthusiasm. "Lee, you, know we'd have to follow those hive-building fiends all the way to # Ophiuchi to find out what makes them tick. And twenty thousand light-years is a hell of a way to go out of curiosity, not to mention a dangerous one." "But we'll go there some day," Stryker said positively. "We'll have to go because we can't ever be sure they won't try to repeat their invasion of two hundred years ago." He tugged at the owlish tufts of hair over his ears, wrinkling his bald brow up at the enigmatic maze. "We'll never feel safe again until the Bees are wiped out. I wonder if they know that. They never understood us, you know, just as we never understood them -- they always seemed more interested in experimenting with slave ecology than in conquest for itself, and they never killed off their captive cultures when they pulled out for home. I wonder if their system of logic can postulate the idea of a society like ours, which must rule or die." "We'd better get on with our survey," Gibson put in mildly, "unless we mean to finish by floodlight. We've only about forty-eight hours left before dark." the port, leaving Farrell to stare blankly after him. "This is a non-rotating world," Farrell said. "How the devil can it get dark, Lee?" Stryker chuckled. "I wondered if you'd see that. It can't, except when the planet's axial tilt rolls this latitude into its winter season and sends the sun south of the crater rim. It probably gets dark as pitch here in the valley, since the fog would trap even diffused light." To the patiently waiting mechanical, he said, "The ship is yours, Xav. Call us if an # d:hing turns up." Farrell followed him reluctantly outside into a miasmic desolation more depressing than he could have imagined. A stunted jungle of thorny brambles and tough, waist-high grasses hampered their passage at first, ripping at coveralls and tangling the feet until they had beaten their way through it to lower ground. There they found a dreary expanse of bogland where scummy pools of stagnant water and festering slime heaved sluggishly with oily bubbles of marsh gas that burst audibly in the hanging silence. The liverish blaze of Falakian sun bore down mercilessly from the crater's rim. They moved on to skirt a small lead-colored lake in the center of the valley, a stagnant seepagebasin half obscured by floating scum. Its steaming mud-flats were littered with rotting yellowed bones and supported the first life they had seen, an unpleasant scurrying of small multipedal crustaceans and water-lizards. "There can't be any survivors here," Farrell said, appalled by the thought of his kind perpetuating itself in a place like this. "God, think what the mortality rate would be! They'd die like flies." "There are bound to be a few," Stryker stated, "even after a hundred years of slavery and another hundred of abandonment. The human animal, Arthur, is the most fantastically adaptable -- " He broke off short when they rounded a clump of reeds and stumbled upon their first Falakian proof of that fantastic adaptability. young woman squatting on the mudflat at their feet stared back at them with vacuous light eyes half hidden behind a wild tangle of matted blonde hair. She was gaunt and filthy, plastered with slime from head to foot, and in her hands she held the half-eaten body of a larger crustacean that obviously had died of natural causes and not too recently, at that. Farrell turned away, swallowing his disgust. Gibson, unmoved, said with an aptness bordering -- for him -- on irony: "Too damned adaptable, Lee. Sometimes our kind survives when it really shouldn't." A male child of perhaps four came out of the reeds and stared at them. He was as gaunt and filthy as the woman, but less vapid of face. Farrell, watching the slow spark of curiosity bloom in his eye?, wondered sickly how many years -- or how few -- must pass before the boy was reduced to the same stupid bovinity as the mother. Gibson was right, he thought. The compulsion to survive at any cost could be a curse instead of an asset. The degeneracy of these poor devils was a perpetual affront to the race that had put them there. He was about to say as much when the woman rose and plodded away through the mud, the child at her heels. It startled him momentarily, when he followed their course with his eyes, to see that perhaps a hundred others had gathered to wait incuriously for them in the near distance. All were as filthy as . the first two, but with a grotesque uniformity of appearance that left him frowning in uneasy speculation until he found words to identify that similarity. "They're all young," he said. "The oldest can't be more than twenty -- twenty-five at most!" Stryker scowled, puzzled without sharing Farrell's unease. "You're right. Where are the older ones?"  "Another of your precious little puzzles," Farrell said sourly. "I hope you enjoy unraveling it." "Oh, we'll get to the bottom of it," Stryker said with assurance. "We'll have to, before we can leave them here." They made a slow circuit of the lake, and the closer inspection offered a possible solution to the problem Stryker had posed. Chipped and weathered as the bones littering the mudflats were, their grisly shapings were unmistakable. "I'd say that these are the bones of the older people," Stryker hazarded, "and that they, represent the end result of another of these religio-economic control compulsions the Hymenops like to condition into their slaves. Men will go to any lengths to observe a tradition, especially when its origin is forgotten. If these people were once conditioned to look on old age as intolerable -- " "If you're trying to say that they kill each other off at maturity," Farrell interrupted, "the inference is ridiculous. In a hundred years they'd have outgrown a custom so hard to enforce. The balance of power would have rested with the adults, not with the children, and adults are generally fond of living. for support, received none, and found himself saddled with his own contention. "Economic necessity, then, since the valley can support only a limited number. Some of the old North American Indians followed a similar custom, the oldest son throttling the father when he grew too old to hunt." "But even there infanticide was more popular than patricide," Farrell pointed out. "No group would practice decimation from the top down. It's too difficult to enforce." Stryker answered him with a quotation from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook, maliciously taking the pontifical classmaster's tone best calculated to irritate Farrell. " Chapter Four, Subsection One, Paragraph Nineteen: Any custom, fixation or . compulsion accepted as the norm by one roup of human beings can be understood and evaluated by any other group not influenced by the same ideology, since the basic perceptive abilities of both are necessarily the same through identical heredity. Evaluation of alien motivations, conversely -- " "Oh, hell," Farrell cut in wearily. "Let's get back to the ship, shall we? We'll all feel more like -- " His right foot gave way beneath him without warning, crushing through the soft ground and throwing him heavily. He sat up at once, and sworein incredulous anger when he found the ankle swelling rapidly inside his boot. "Sprained! Damn it all!" Gibson and Stryker, on their knees beside the broken crust of soil, ignored him. Gibson took up a broken length of stick and prodded intently in the cavity, prying out after a moment a glistening two-foot ellipsoid that struggled feebly on the ground. "A chrysalid," Stryker said, bending to gauge the damage Farrell's heavy boot had done. "In a very close pre-eclosion stage. Look, the protective sheathing has begun to split already." The thing lay twitching aimlessly, prisoned legs pushing against its shining transparent integument in an instinctive attempt at premature freedom. The movement was purely reflexive; its head, huge-eyed and as large as a man's clenched fist, had been thoroughly crushed under Farrell's heel. Oddly, its injury touched Farrell even through the pain of his injured foot. "It's the first passably handsome thing we've seen in this pesthole," he said, "and I've maimed it. Finish it off, will you?" Stryker grunted, feeling the texture of the imprisoning sheath with curious fingers. "What would it have been in imago, Gib? A giant butterfly?" "A moth," Gibson said tersely. "Lepidoptera, anyway." He stood up and ended the chrysalid's strugglings with a bolt from his heat-gun before extending a hand to help Farrell up. "I'd like to examine it closer, but there'll be others. Let's get Arthur out of here." slow stages, pausing now and then while Gibson gathered a small packet of bone fragments from the mudflats and underbrush. "Some of these are older than others," he explained when Stryker remarked on his selection. "But none are recent. It should help to know their exact age." An hour later, they were bathed and dressed, sealed off comfortably in the ship against the humid heat and stink of the swamp. Farrell lay on a chart room acceleration couch, resting, while Stryker taped his swoHen ankle. Gibson and Xavier, the one disdaining rest and the other needing none, used the time to run a test analysis on the bones brought in from the lakeside. The results of that analysis were more astonishing than illuminating. A majority of the fragments had been exposed to climatic action for some ten years. A smaller lot averaged twenty years; and a few odd chips, preserved by long burial under alluvial silt, thirty. "The older natives died at tenyear intervals, then," Stryker said. "And in considerable numbers; the tribe must have been cut to half strength each time. But why?" He frowned unhappily, fishing for opinion. "Gib, can it really be a perversion of religious custom dreamed up by the Hymenops to keep their slaves under control? A sort of festival of sacrifice every decade, climaxing in tribal decimation?" "Maybe they combine godliness with gluttony," Farrell put in, unasked. "Maybe their orgy runs more to long pig than to piety." He stood up, wincing at the pain, and was hobbling toward his sleeping cubicle when Gibson's answer to Stryker's question stopped him with a cold prickle along his spine. "We'll know within twentyfour hours," Gibson said. "Since both the decimations and the winter darkness periods seem to follow the same cycle. I'd say there's a definite relationship." #R once Farrell's cubicle, soundproofed and comfortable, brought him only a fitful imitation of sleep, an intermittent dozing that wavered endlessly between nightmare and wakefulness. When he crawled out again, hours later, he found Xavier waiting for him alone with a thermobulb of hot coffee. Stryker and Gibson, the mechanical said blandly, had seen no need of waking him, and had gone out alone on a more extensive tour of investigation. The hours dragged interminably. Farrell uncased his beloved accordion, but could not bear the sound of it; he tried his sketchbook, and could summon to mind no better subjects than drab miasmic bogs and steaming mudflats. He discarded the idea of chess with Xavier without even weighing it -- he would not have lasted past the fourth move, and both he and the mechanical knew it. He was reduced finally to limping about the ship on his bandaged foot, searching for some routine task left undone and finding nothing. He even went so far as to make a below-decks check on the ship's matter-synthesizer, an indispensable unit designed for the conversion of waste to any chemical compound, and gave it up in annoyance when he found that all such operational details were filed with infallible exactness in Xavier's plastoid h#ad. The return of Stryker and Gibson only aggravated his impatience. He had expected them to discover concealed approaches to the maze of bridging overhead, tunnelings in the cliff-face to hidden caverns complete with bloodstained altars and caches of sacrificial weapons, or at least some ominous sign of preparation among the natives. But theffe was nothing. "No more than yesterday," Stryker said. Failure had cost him a share of his congenital goodhumor, leaving him restless and uneasy. "There's nothing to find, Arthur. We've seen it all." Surprisingly, Gibson disagreed. "We'll know what we're after when darkness falls," he said. "But that's a good twelve hours away. In the meantime, there's a possibility that our missing key is outside the crater, rather than here inside it." both baffled and apprehensive. "What do you mean, outside?" Farrell demanded. "There's nothing there t)ut grassland. We made sure of that at planetfall." "We mapped four Hymenop domes on reconnaissance," Gibson reminded him. "But we only examined three to satisfy ourselves that they were empty. The fourth one -- " Farrell interrupted derisively. "That ancient bogey again? Gib, the domes are always empty. The Bees pulled out a hundred years ago." Gibson said nothing, but his black-browed regard made Farrell flush uncomfortably. "Gib is right," Stryker intervened. "You're too young in Colonial Reclamations to appreciate the difficulty of recognizing an alien logic, Arthur, let alone the impossibility of outguessing it. I've knocked about these ecological madhouses for the better part of a century, and the more I see of Hymenop work, the more convinced I am that we'll never equate human and Hymenop ideologies. It's like trying to add quantities of dissimilar objects and expressing the result in a single symbol; it can't be done, because there's no possible common denominator for reducing the disparate elements to similarity." " went on, "Our own reactions, and consequently our motivations, are based on broad attributes of love, hate, fear, greed and curiosity. We might empathize with another species that reacts as we do to those same stimuli -- but what if that other species recognizes only one or two of them, or none at all? What if their motivations stem from a set of responses entirely different from any we know?" "There aren't any," Farrell said promptly. "What do you think would they be?" "There you have it," Stryker said triumphantly. He chuckled, his good-nature restored. "We can't imagine what those emotions would be like because we aren't equipped to understand. Could a race depending entirely on extra-sensory perception appreciate a Mozart quintet or a Botticelli altar piece or a performance of Hamlet? You know it couldn't -- the esthetic nuances that make those works great would escape it completely, because the motives that inspired their creation are based on a set of values entirely foreign to its comprehension. "There's a digger wasp on Earth whose female singles out a particular species of tarantula to feed her larvae -- and the spider stands patiently by, held by some compulsion whose nature we can't even guess, while the wasp digs a grave, paralyzes the spider and shoves it into the hole with an egg attached. The spider could kill the wasp, and will kill one of any other species, but it submits to that particular kind without a flicker of protest. And if we can't understand the mechanics of such a relationship between reflexive species, then what chance have we of understanding the logic of an intelligent race of aliens? The results of its activities can be assessed, but not the motivations behind those activities." "All right," Farrell conceded. "You and Gib are right, as usual, and I'm wrong. We'll check that fourth dome." "You'll stay here with Xav," Stryker said firmly, "while Gib and I check. You'd only punish yourself, using that foot." period of waiting, Farrell was nearing the end of his patience. He tried to rationalize his uneasiness and came finally to the conclusion that his failing hinged on a matter of conditioning. He was too accustomed to the stable unity of their team to feel comfortable without Gibson and Stryker. Isolated from their perpetual bickering and the pleasant unspoken warmth of their regard, he was lonesome and tense. It would have been different, he knew, if either of the others had been left behind. Stryker had his beloved Reclamations texts and his microfilm albums of problems solved on other worlds; Gibson had his complicated galactic charts and his interminable chess boutswith Xavier... Farrell gave it up and limped outside, to stand scowling unhappily at the dreary expanse of swampland. Far down under the reasoning levels of his consciousness a primal uneasiness nagged at him, whispering in wordless warning that there was more to his mounting restlessness than simple impatience. Something inside him was changing, burgeoning in strange and disturbing growth. A pale suggestion of movement, wavering and uncertain in the eddying fog, caught his eye. A moment of puzzled watching told him that it was the bedraggled young woman they had seen earlier by the lake, and that she was approaching the ship timorously and under cover. "But why?" he wondered aloud, recalling her bovine lack of curiosity. "What the devil can she want here?" A shadow fell across the valley. Farrell, startled, looked up sharply to see the last of the Falakian sun's magenta glare vanishing below the crater's southern rim. A dusky forerunner of darkness settled like a tangible cloud, softening the drab outlines of bramble thickets and slime pools. The change that followed was not seen but felt, a swelling rush of glad arousal like the joy of a child opening its eyes from sleep. To Farrell, the valley seemed to stir, waking in sympathy to his own restlessness and banishing his unease. rHE girl ran to him through  the dusk on quick, light feet, timidity forgotten, and he saw with a pleasant shock of astonishment that she was no longer the filthy creature he had first seen by the lakeside. She was pretty and nubile, eyes and soft mouth smiling together in a childlike eagerness that made her at once infinitely desirable and untouchably innocent. "Who are you?" he asked shakily. Her hesitant voice was music, rousing in Farrell a warm and expectant euphoria that glowed like old wine in his veins. "Koaele," she said. "Look -- " Behind her, the valley lay wrapped like a minor paradise in soft pearly mists and luminous shadows, murmurous with the far sound of running water and the faint chiming of voices that drifted up from the little blue lake to whisper back in cadenced echo from the fairy maze of bridging overhead. Over it all, like a deepv sustained cello note, rose the muted humming of great flamewinged moths dipping and swaying over bright tropical flowers. '"Moths?" he thought. And then, "Of course." The chrysalids under the' sod, their eclosion time completed, were coming into their own -- bringing perfection with them. Born in gorgeous iridescent imago, they were beautiful in a way that hurt with the yearning pain of perfection, the sorrow that imperfection existed at all -- the joy of finally experiencing flawlessness. An imperative buzzing from the ship behind him made a rude intrusion. A familiar voice, polite but without inflection, called from an open port: "Captain Stryker in the scoutboat, requesting answer." Farrell hesitated. To the girl, who followed him with puzzled, eager eyes, he begged, "Don't run away, please. I'll be back." In the ship, Stryker's moonface peered wryly at him from the main control screen. "Drew another blank," it said. "You were right after all, Arthur -- the fourth dome was empty. Gib and I are coming in now. We can't risk staying out longer if we're going to be on hand when the curtain rises on our little mystery." "Mystery?" Farrell echoed blankly. Earlier discussions came back slowly, posing a forgotten problem so ridiculous that he laughed. "We were wrong about all that. It's wonderful here."  went long with astonishment. "Arthur, have you lost your mind? Whaf's wron there?" "Nothing is wrong," Farrell said. "It's right." Memory prodded him again, disturbingly. "Wait -- I remember now what it was we came here for. But we're not going through with it." He thought of the festival to come, of the young men and girls running lithe in the dusk, splashing in the lake and calling joyously to each other across the pale sands. The joyous innocence of their play brought an appalling realization of what would happen if the fat outsider on the screen should have his way: The quiet paradise would be shattered and refashioned in smoky facsimile of Earth, the happy people herded together and set to work in dusty fields and whirring factories, multiplying tensions and frustrations as they multiplied their numbers. For what? For whom? "You've got no right to go back and report all this," Farrell said plaintively. "You'd ruin everything." The alternative came to him and with it resolution. "But you won't go back. I'll see to that." He left the screen and turned on the control panel with fingers that remembered from long habit the settings required. Stryker's voice bellowed frantically after him, unheeded, while he fed into the ship's autopilot a command that would send her plunging skyward bare minutes later. Then, ignoring the waiting mechanical's passive stare, he went outside. The valley beckoned. The elfin laughter of the people by the lake touched a fey, responsive chord in him that blurred his eyes with ecstatic tears and sent him running down the slope, the Falakian girl keeping pace beside him. Before he reached the lake, he had dismissed from his mind the ship and the men who had brought it there. TUT they would not let him  forget. The little gray jointed one followed him through the dancing and the laughter and cornered him finally against the sheer cliff side...With the chase over, it held him there, waiting with metal patience in the growing dusk. The audicom box slung over its shoulder boomed out in Gibson's voice, the sound a noisy desecration of the scented quiet. "Don't let him get away, Xav," it said. "We'ce going to try for the ship now." The light dimmed, the soft shadows deepened. The two great-winged moths floated nearer, humming gently, their eyes glowing luminous and intent in the near-darkness. Mist currents from their approach brushed Farrell's face, and he held out his arms in an ecstasy of anticipation that was a consummation of all human longing. "Now," he whispered. The moths dipped nearer. The mechanical sent out a searing beam of orange light that tore the gloom, blinding him briefly. The humming ceased; when he could see again, the moths lay scorched and blackened at his feet. Their dead eyes looked up at him dully, charred and empty; their bright gauzy wings smoked in ruins of ugly, whiplike ribs. He flinched when the girl touched his shoulder, pointing. A moth dipped toward them out of the mists, eyes glowing like round emerald lanterns. Another follow'ed. The mechanical flicked out its orange beam and cut them down. A roar like sustained thunder rose across the valley, shaking the ground underfoot. A column of white-hot fire tore the night. "The ship," Farrell said aloud, remembering. He had a briefly troubled vision of the sleek metal shell lancing up toward a black void of space powdered with cold starpoints whose names he had forgotten, marooning them all in Paradise. The audicom boomed in Gibson's voice, though oddly shaken and strained. "Made it. Is he still safe, Xav?" "Safe," the mechanical answered tersely. "The natives, too, so far." "No thanks to him," Gibson said. "If you hadn't canceled the blastoff order he fed into the autopilot..." But after a moment of ragged silence: "No, that's  hardly fair. Those damned moths , beat down Lee's resistance in the few minutes it took us to reach the ship, and nearly got me as well. Arthur was exposed to their influence from the moment they started coming ouL" Stryker's voice cut in, sounding more shaken than Gibson's. "Stand fast down there. I'm setting off the first flare now." searing and unendurable, blasted the night. Farrell cried out and shielded his eyes with his hands, his ecstasy of anticipation draining out of him like heady wine from a broken urn. Full memory returned numbingly. When he opened his eyes again, the Falakian girl had run away. Under the merciless glare of light, the valley was as he had first seen it -- a nauseous charnel place of bogs and brambles and mudflats littered with yellowed bones. In the near distance, a haggard mob of natives cowered like gaping, witless caricatures of humanity, faces turned from the descending blaze of the parachute flare. There was no more music or laughter. The great moths fluttered in silent frenzy, stunned by the flood o light. "So that's it," Farrell thought dully. "They come out with the winter darkness to breed and lay their eggs, and they hold over men the same sort of compulsion that Terr an wasps hold over their host tarantulas. But they're nocturnal. They lose their control in the light." Incredulously, he recalled the expectant euphoria that had blinded him, and he wondered sickly: "Is that what the spider feels while it watches its grave being dug?" A second flare bloomed far up in the fog, outlining the crisscross network of bridging in stark, alien clarity. A smooth minnowshape dipped past and below it, weaving skilfully through the maze. The mechanical's voice box spoke again. "Give us a guide beam, Xav. We're bringing the Marco down." The ship settled a dozen yards away, its port open. Farrell, with Xavier at his heels, went inside hastily, not looking back. Gibson crouched motionless over his control panel, too intent on his readings to look up. Beside him, Stryker said urgently: "Hang on. We've got to get up and set another flare, quickly." The ship surged upward. last of the flares glare below in a steaming geyserof mud and scum. The ship hovered motionless, its only sound a busy droning from the engine room where her mass-synthesizer discharged a deadly cloud of insecticide into the crater. "There'll be some nasty coughing among the natives for a few days after this," Gibson said. "But it's better than being food for larvae... Reorientation will pull them out of that pesthole in a couple of months, and another decade will see them raising cattle and wheat again outside. The young adapt fast." "The young, yes," Stryker agreed uncomfortably. "Personally, I'm getting too old and fat for this business." He shuddered, his paunch quaking. Farrell guessed that he was thinking of what woqld have happened to them if Gibson had been as susceptible as they to the overpowering fascination of the moths. A few more chrysalids to open in the spring, an extra litter of bones to puzzle the next Reclamations crew... "That should do it," Gibson said. He shut off the flow of insecticide and the mass-converter grew silent in the engine room below. "Exit another Hymenop experiment in bastard synecology." "I can understand how they might find, or breed, a nocturnal moth with breeding-season control over human beings," Farrell said. "And how they'd balance the relationship to a time-cycle that kept the host species alive, yet never let it reach maturity. But what sort of principle would give an instinctive species compulsive control over an intelligent one, Gib? And what did the Bees get out of the arrangement in the first place?" Gibson shrugged. "We'll understand the principle when -- or if -- we learn how the wasp holds its spider helpless. Until then, we can only guess. As for identifying the motive that prompted the Hymenops to set up such a balance, I doubt that we ever will. Could a termite understand why men build theaters?" "There's a possible parallel in that," Stryker suggested. "Maybe this was the Hymenop idea of entertainment. They might have built the bridge as balconies, where they could see the show." "It could have been a business venture," Farrell suggested. "Maybe they raised the moth larvae or pupae for the same reason we raise poultry. A sort of insectile chicken ranch." "Or a kennel," Gibson said dryly. "Maybe they bred moths for pets, as we breed dogs." Farrell grimaced sickly, revolted by the thought. "A pet farm? God, what a diet to feed them!" chanical's featureless face. "What do you think, Xav?" he demanded. "What sort of motive would you say prompted the Hymenops to set up such a balance?" "Evaluation of alien motivations, conversely the mechanical said, finishing the Reclamations Handbook quotation which Stryker had begun much earlier, "is essentially impossible because there can be no common ground of comprehension." It centered the tray neatly on the charting table and stood back in polite but unmenial deference while they sucked at their coffeebulbs. "A greater mystery to me," Xavier went on, "is the congenital restlessness that drives men from their own comfortable worlds to such dangers as you have met with here. How can I understand the motivations of an alien people? I do not even understand those of the race that built me." The three men looked at each other blankly, disconcerted by the ancient problem so unexpectedly posed. It was Stryker who sheepishly answered it. "That's nothing for you to worry about, Xav," he said wryly. "Neither do we." ley, carrying a tray with three steaming coffee-bulbs. Farrell, still pondering the problem of balance between dominant and dominated species, found himself wondering for the thousandth time what went on in the alert positronic brain behind the meyard island, I climbed around on a minor mystery. Atop the clay mountains of Gay Head, the westernmost point of the island, there is a tall wire fence, now open. Inside that wire fence is a nice solid concrete platform, about # feet by # Your Information Q.#'#C tl feet in size and a foot or so in thickness. Underneath, in the clay ground, a kind of basement has been dug with steel posts that carry the platform. The local guide tells tourists that this was built during the first World War with the greatest amount of secrecy possible. To this day, nobody knows what purpose it served or whether it was used at all. While standing on the platform, I thought that when the date of construction eventually is forgotten, people will be likely to explain it as a launching platform for V-# type rockets, for it certainly resembles one. And then my mind jumped to Sprague de Camp's favorite short lecture that answers the question "How do you science fiction writers get your ideas?" and I thought that this would be a nice puzzler for a planetographer from the Rigelian star system. Five minutes later, I reconsidered. You don't have to go out into space. Just let a few centuries elapse right here on Earth and archeologists of our own kind will come across some beautiful brain-twisters, puzzles they'll never be able to solve unless still-preserved records help them. OR example, archeologists digging in southern England will find iron spheres. First one or two, then -- having brought magnetic detectors into play -- six more here, three more there, a total of about two dozen. Being careful archeologists, they will notice at once that all these spheres form a straight line, disregarding trivial lateral displacements that obviously took place later. Their spacing is another problem, however, for it doe? not seem to follow any pattern. The archeologists will then remove the spheres to the laboratory, for measurement and testing. In size, the iron spheres are all # inches in diameter, with very minor variations. But they differ in weight. Expressed in terms of the "old" English pound, they weigh # lbs., # lbs., # lbs., and # lbs. Since even the heaviest of these is too light for a solid cast iron sphere of # inches, they must be hollow. So a couple are sliced open with great care and under remote control. Yes, they are hollow and each opened sphere contains a little less than # lbs. of a crumbling powdery substance. The stuff does not explode. It does not even ignite well. It merely smolders under a sufficiently hot flame. Throwing a sample in a beaker of water, one man finds that it separates, much of it sinking to the bottom while the smaller portion floats. What sinks to the bottom looks like sand. Chemical analysis shows that it is sand. The stuff that floats shows the cellular structure of wood under the microscope and is subjected to age analysis by the carbon# method. Analysis says the trees were cut down in # A. D., with a possible error of plus or minus # years. But what are those things? The cannon balls used in the #th Century, the archeologists know, rarely exceeded' four inches in diameter and were solid iron. And, even accepting for a moment the preposterous theory that they were projectiles, they would have been filled with a mixture of charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter, not with sand and chips of wood in thickness. Well, the big balls actually were projectiles. The long line of about two dozen of them were the test rounds fired from a single weapon, one of two super-mortars which had originally been ordered by the British Ordnance Department for the pursuit of the Crimean War. That the balls were filled with # lbs. of sand and sawdust was merely a proving ground safety measure. The ordnance' men were testing the guns, not the projectiles. The large mortars were the invention of a Mr. Robert Mallet, who suggested that they be mounted on barges or rafts to bombard troops ashore. The nevelty was that the barrels were not cast, but consisted of a number of longitudinal bars, held together by rings and tightened by clamps and bolts. The authorities to whom he submitted his plan did not think much of the idea, but Mr. Mallet somehow got the ear of Lord Palmerston, the First Minister of the Crown, and a tough letter written by Lord Palmerston on May #nd, #, made the Lieutenant General of Ordnance take care of the matter personally.out within # hours and, when a bid came in, it was accepted within # hours! Unfortunately the firm which had sent in the bid went bankrupt before the two mortars were finished and another firm had to take over. All this delayed the delivery period -- instead of the ten weeks promised by the first firm, it took a total of # weeks. By then the war was over and the Chief of Ordnance asked for an accounting sheet. He did not like what he read. The bid for the mortars had been # pounds sterling for each, provided it weighed not more than # tons, with # pounds sterling for each additional ton. The two mortars weighed # tons apiece. The forty-odd projectiles cast by another firm cost # pounds sterling per ton. Two loading cranes cost # 'pounds sterling each. And the laying of just one platform for test firing was to cost # pounds sterling. So it was decided to build only one platform and to test only one of the two mortars. The first test was made October #, #, with a propelling charge of only ten pounds of coarse cannon powder. Range: # yards. The charge was doubled and the range increased to # yards. Round No. # with # lbs. of cannon powder carried to a distance of # yards. Then something broke and had to be repaired. In December, #, there were more tests -- one of them resulted in the first photograph of a projectile in flight -- and something broke again. This went on until July, #, when a range of # yards was reached and something else broke. The new Chief of Ordnance, General Peel, refused to spend any more cash on this project -- not a farthing more, he declared. (He did authorize an expenditure eleven years later, which was for guncotton to blast apart the piece.) As for the projectiles fired. Nos. #, # and # were found. The engineers would have liked to dig the others up, too, but when General Peel learned that this would cost # pounds sterling apiece, he decided to leave them in the ground. They are still there, at an estimated depth of # feet below the surface of the soil. In the case of the big round bombs from the Mallet mortar, future archeologists might still puzzle it out -- if they happen to know that the area was once an artillery proving ground. But one day they may come across several hundred yards of pipe, resting on the ocean bottom near the northern shore of Cuba. Everything about it will be puzzling, beginning with the question of what that length of pipe is doing in the ocean. This might be explained by saying that it may have been jettisoned by a freighter in distress or that i,t had been a tow cargo which broke loose. But for whatever reason it may have been lost, what was its intended purpose marine life which has assembled on the relic inside and out, the archeologists will find that it was not only long but also big, about five feet in diameter on the inside. The material is clearly sheet steel, but of a wall thickness that is ridiculously small compared to its size. That pipe could not have carried any pressure on the inside and it could not have withstood any pressure from the outside. But it must have been meant to carry something, and presumably something hot, because it was wrapped in heat-insulating materials. The explanation is that this pipe once was a part of an interesting experiment conducted (and paid for) by the French physicist and inventor Georg Claude in collaboration with the engineer Paul Boucherot. It all began some time back -- to be precise, with an article in the September #, #, issue of the French scientific magazine Revue scientiBque. The article was written by Professor Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval, who later acquired fame as an electrical researcher. But this early work of his did not concern electricity. Rather, it dealt with a novel form of "steam" engine. Professor d'Arsonval first stated for the benefit of those readers who were not engineers that any engine works on a difference in temperature levels. The steam in a boiler is "hot." The outside air, by comparison, is "cold." But it matters little what the two temperatures involved are in degrees of centigrade or Fahrenheit. What is important is that there is a differencei Nor is it necessary that this difference be as great as it usually is in a steam engine. Take the Warm Spring of Grenelle, for example, he continued. Its waters have a temperature of # Fahrenheit (I am converting: actually he used centigrade, of course) and the water of a river nearby has usually a temperature of # Fahrenheit, often less. So there is a difference of at least # Fahrenheit, often more. If one immersed a boiler in the Spring of Grenelle and cooled the condenser in the river, once would have # Fahrenheit to work on. This' wouldn't do anything if you had water in the boiler, but if you filled the boiler with sulfur dioxide, you would obtain a pressure difference of about # lbs. per square inch and this would be enough to do useful work. Nor does one need a warm spring for this scheme, d'Arsonval added. The boiler could be in a normal "cold" river if the condenser is packed in ice. Or the boiler could be at the surface in a warm ocean and the condenser at the bottom of the same ocean, for the bottom water of all oceans has a temperature of #-# Fahrenheit while the surface, in the tropics, is warmed to #-# F. ! The readers of the Revue scientifique probably thought this an amusing idea. They most likely checked the figures and found them correct, but they saw no reason to go on from there. Steam engines worked and one day, maybe, those who were after engines running on coal gas might succeed, too. AT a somewhat later date, however, several engineers tried their slide rules on the problem of the extraction of energy from small temperature level differences. The first after d'Arsonval was the American the two Italians Boggi and Dornig htld, in #, the German Dr. E. Brauer. None of them was in a position to build expensive machinery. George Claude, inventor of the neon tube and successful pioneer in other fields, was in a more favored situation. Claude had evolved the same chain of reasoning as d'Arsonval, but doubted whether a special working fluid was really needed. Water will boil at # Fahrenheit, provided the atmospheric pressure is lowered. To test his contention, Claude used two large narrow-necked glass jugs. Jug No. I was filled to about one-quarter of its capacity with water at a temperature of # Fahrenheit, the temperature of surface water in a tropical sea. From the neck of this jug, a pipe led to a small turbine in the second jug. The turbine was coupled with a tiny generator and from there wires led to three flashlight bulbs. The bottom of the second jug was covered by a layer of crushed ice, with the neck connected to an air pump. The air pump lowered the pressure in both jugs to three per cent of normal atmospheric pressure, when the valve was closed. By that time, the warm water in jug No. I was boiling furiously, the turbine spun and the three bulbs burned brightly. The spent steam condensed on the crushed ice. Heartened by this success, Paul Boucherot, the engineer of the team, spent some of Claude's money on a # KW generator, built a steam turbine and the necessary auxiliary equipment and assembled the whole near some blast furnaces in Belgium. The cooling water of the blast furnaces was the heat source. The river Meuse supplied the cold water for the condenser. The temperature difference was # Fahrenheit. The machinery ran for the first time on April #, #, and measurements proved that the auxiliary equipment (especially the air pump) used only one-quarter of the power generated. THE next step was to run this with ocean water. After a preliminary search, the Bay of Matanzas, about # miles to the east of Havana, was picked. There had to be three, pipes. One to take in warm surface water. One to discharge the used water. And one was to bring cold water from the bottom to the surface. The last pipe was the big problem.' It had to be insulated so that the cold water would not absorb heat on the way up. And it had to be quite long to reach down to cold water -- # miles, to be exact. Since Claude wanted to use this most expensive item of the whole in a later and bigger unit, he made it quite large, five feet in diameter, although a onefoot pipe might have been large enough for the unit that had been brought from Belgium. It was then that a streak of bad luck began. The first long pipe was lost because the ropes broke and it sank to a depth beyond accessibility by divers. The second kinked and developed a leak that could not be repaired. The third was put into place in September, #, but it was too short. The "cold" water came in at # Fahrenheit, so that the temperature difference which could and should have been # Fahrenheit was a mere # F. The equipment still ran, but it produced only a little over # per cent of the rated output. Claude had to buy power from the local power company to run the auxiliary equipment! And that is how a large and strange pipe got to be on the bottom of the ocean near the shore of Cuba. The rest of the story does not take long to tell. Claude was advised by Dr. Brauer and others that it had been wrong to work with low-pressure water vapor and that he should adopt d'Arsonval's proposal or use ammonia as a working fluid. But Claude blamed everything on the location on the shore and put his next set of machinery on a steamer, the # ton Tunisie. Again it worked badly and in the end Claude, in disgust, scuttled his equipment. I can't report the "consensus of experts" because only a small number of men have thought about this problem to any extent. But the few whose opinion I know do not believe that Claude's failure proves that it cannot be done. They think -- and said -- it merely proves that it cannot be done with Claude's equipment. A car is traveling along a road at about # mph. A fly which has been sitting on a back seat rises, hovers in the air for a morhent, flies toward the front of the car and lands on the dashboard. The fly, while hovering, was completely removed from the car, yet was not flying at # mph. Which scientific rule or law covers this situation? John Lanctot # Park St. Burlington, Vt. This is an old one and of the same kind as the following: "'A fly in an empty Itottle is perfectly halanred on a jeweler's scale as long as it is sitting down inside the bottle. What happens if the fly starts flying inside the bottle?" The answer is nothing for the weight of the fly stills rests on the air inside the bottle. Similarly, in the moving car -- pro ided it is a closed car -- it is moving along at the rate of # mph. While the "air speed" of the fly in flying from the hack seat to the dashboard may he just about three mph, its "ground speed" is # mph. Could meltings polar ice cause the ocean to rise enough to endanger coastal areas? Tom Treadwell #SN. I#th Springfield, Oregon The answer to this question depends almost entirely on the circumstances you have in mind. I think someone calculated that if all the polar ice on both poles were melted, the oceans would rise hy about # feet. This, of course, would endanger a number of coastal areas. But the assumptions of this calculation are that (A) all the ice is meltel and (B) that it happens suddenly. In reality, neither the one nor the other could take place. INor would all the water go into the oceans directly. Much of it wouhl enter the atmosphere anl condense on high mountain chains so that the result would be longer and thicker glaciers wherever glaciers form, the inland lakes would increase in depth and size, the underground water table would be raised, and so forth. The overall result of a gradual melting of the polar caps would likely be an increase of the depth of the oceans of only a few feet, which would be felt in a very few places. The only portion of the spectrum visible to the human eye is the portion beginning with red and ending with violet. But it seems conceited to me to believe that these are the only colors which exist in Nature. Are there any substances colored infra-red or ultra-violet, or would it be possible to manufacture infra-red or ultra-violet pigments? And how would such pigments appear to the naked eye? John Siegel #-#, #nd St. Bayside #, N. Y. To avoid the semantic confusion which is imbedded in this question, let's begin at the beginning. Our atmosphere is especially transparent to those rays which lie between what we call red and violet. As living beings evolved, their eyes logically acquired sensitivity to the rays which were around in massive doses, though these eyes did not necessarily distinguish color. (A surprising number of highly evolved mammals are totally color blind.) As for infrared, we are sensitive to these rays, hut our sensory organs interpret them as heat. In short, then, "colors" are what we see and distinguish as colors. What is beyond the colored portion of the spectrum is still radiation that might have optical effects, like ultraviolet on a photographic plate, but only in terms of light and dark, not at all in terms of color. Would you please explain how the gravitational pull of the Moon can cause tides on both sides of the Earth at the same time? And does the Sun cause any ' tides of the Earth's oceans or is it too far away? James L. Coleman # St. John's Rd. Toronto #, Ont., Canada The tide-raising action of the Moon is best understood if we first imagine a line drawn from the center of the Moon to the center of the Earth and then continued through the Earth. The ocean directly under the Moon around the line is somewhat .deformed, rising in the Moon's direction by about one yard. (The much higher tides observed near the shore are due to a 'funneling" action of the shoreline, especially in slowly constricting spaces like the Bay of Fundy.) Then the Earth as a whole yields somewhat to the Moon's attraction, so that the ocean directly away from the Moon, where the center-connecting line touches the surface again, is "left behind," forming a second deformation that is not quite as high as the one on the Moonward side. Because the Earth turns much more rapidly than the Moon travels around the Earth, these two bulges seem to travel around the Earth. They do not actually travel; it is simply that the ocean near that center-tocenter line is deformed. The tide-raising power of the Sun # much less than that of the Moon, hut it is measurable. When the solar bulges coincide with the lunar bulges (at "new" Moon and at full Moon), the tides are higher than normal. When a lunar bulge hits a solar "low," the tides are less than normal. Why IS it that no meteorites hit the Earth now, or hardly ever in the present time? John Guild # Burdick Rd. Oak Bay, Victoria, B.C. The Earth is being hit steadily by a hail of meteorites, but the vast majority of them are about the size of grains of very fine sand and burn away before they reach the surface. Really big meteorites, weighing a ton or more, are great rarities and seem to have been rare in the past, too. In the present century, there have been just two known large meteorites. Both of them struck in Siberia, the last one in #. But threequarters of the Earth's surface is water and there are huge uninhabited land areas from which we wouldn't get any reports. The odds, as you can see, are against meteorite strikes in civilized territory, in case anybody happens to be worrying about it. Do You Make these Mistakes h#Twln Cody's romarkabim Invmnflon has onablod morm than # poopio to corrocf thoir mlstakos In inpllsh. Qnty T# mlnwfes a tfey roqirlred fo improvo your spooth and writing. "between you anti #" instead of "between you and me. " It is astonishing how often "who" is used for "whom," and how frequently the simplest words are mispronounced. Most persons use only common words -- colorless, flat, ordinary. Every time they talk or write they show themselves lacking of English. the essential points Wonderful New Invention For many years Mr. Cody studied the problem of creating instinctive habits of using good English. After countless experiments, he Anally invented a simple method by which you can acquire a better command of the English language in only # minutes a day. Now you can stop making the mistakes which have been hurting you. Students of Mr. Cody's method have secured more improvement in flve weeks than previously had been obtained by similar pupils in two years ! A book explaining Mr. Cody's remarkable method is ready. If you are ever embarrassed by mistakes in English, this free book, "How You Can Master Good English -- in # Minutes a Day," will prove a revelation. Send the coupon for it now. No agent will N. Y. # Central Drive, Pert Washington, N. Y. Please send me, without any obligation on my part, your free book, "How You Can Master Good English -- in # Minutes a Day." No agent will call. Name Please print plainly Address Q If # yrs, or under check here for Booklet A Inanimate Objection Attacking someone's systematized delusions can be a dangerous thing. YoS're liable to find that he is not as deluded as you are! skimmed over the highlights of the Worksheet, Mental Status, as it strove presumptuously to fix the outlines of a human personality -- and . an off-beat one at that: Wm. Svindorff, Dr. Matthew Loftus in attendance. gineers, specialist electric communications. Retired small Catskill estate #. No record of major trauma or nee Barker, aged #, she says. Relationship amicable but somewhat distant. Attitude: Quiet, cooperative. Personal habits meticulous. Permitted unlimited access to books and electronic materials. Coherent outside limits of play active hostility. This is not directed at himself personally. In fact, he believes he can orcumvent it more readily than most, but expresses concern for safety of the human race. Discusses this belief with scholarship to nurse (Miss Clements) : "Your apron-bow is waiting to pick something off that tray." Said to me (Loftus) ; "I'd fix that loose heel if I were you. If it hasn't thrown you yet, it's just waiting for an opportunity to really break your neck." "Well, hell!" said Dr. Carl Wahl. "That's just a picturesque way of expressing commonplace facts. He sees .something that's liable to cause an accident, and personifies it. Why put a mild eccentric like that in here, when we can't accommodate urgent cases?" Dr. Matthew Loftus (resident) grimaced: "Since you ask, I'll agree it stinks. Of course, those excerpts don't give you any real idea. He's as psychotic as a jaybird, no doubt at all. He conducts himself entirely according to this fixation. And he's got it all worked out in theory, too; damnedest stuff you ever heard, plausible as only a complete psychotic can be -- half convinces you, till you get away from his spell and have a chance to think. But I agree... he certainly shouldn't be here." Wahl put the Worksheet on Matt Loftus's desk, looking interested. "You would draw the only ripsnorter with big ideas in this grab-bag of catatonics and dements." "Not to mention dipsos and plain stumblebums," Matt Loftus grinned. "And that old lady who makes immoral paper dolls." He looked at the sheet almost fondly. "A little old-fashioned, poetic madness is rather refreshing, isn't it? And Angus Burnside is a gentleman and scholar of some old school, and a most engaging conversationalist. I frequent his lair considerably more than is strictly required. Tell you what, Carl... I'll take you on as consultant, if you're interested. You could get next to him on music; he's got a terrific audio system up there, and he actually plays it as much as he tinkers with it. Best company in the institute." "That," said Carl Wahl, "is a deal." institutional knock and a polite summons from within, the two men entered the Major's room. Large by local standards, it could have been a good hotel-roomwith-bath, except for the barred windows and general starkness. The chintzy curtains, cheery rugs, and optimistic pictures usually found in high-class mental wards were absent, replaced with dialed cabinets, a long shelf of records and tape spools, and an electrician's workbench of impressive resources. The occupant, rising from the bench to face his visitors, would have dominated a much more distracting environment -- say, an amphibious retreat under enemy fire. He was a lean, brown man; his hair was silver but thick; his white mustache was clipped with extreme precision. His gray eyes were merry and kind, however: in that amphibious debacle, he would be the type to rescue men physically by diving in, or mentally with acrid jests. Carl's practiced glance could note none of the little tics or rigidities that often betray underlying dislocation of nerves or mind. The Major immediately put everybody on terms of informal equality by displaying the wireless relay he was arranging between his phonograph amplifier and speaker. Then, with the smartness of a precision-drill squad, he clicked back into racks and drawers the few tools and bits of material in use, and turned to Carl with disconcerting candor: "I suppose you want to hear my theory -- or mania? Fine! Make yourselves comfortable." Matt draped himself on the bed and Carl took an armchair. The two were a complete contrast: Matt, behind a youthful face and mild voice, kept in ambush a mind as incisive as an electric scalpel; Carl, raw-boned and lank-haired, was a very reliable citizen, but he harbored a quiet mysticism that was often invaluable in establishing rapport with the mentally unconventional. "I'll ask you," the Major began, "to consider my thesis as dispassionately as our relative positions will allow. For a start, perhaps you'll admit that any notion, however apparently fantastic, that has been held by many ages and cultures is worth scientific investigation, if only to explain it away." They nodded. "Good," said the Major. "Now, few notions have been so universally held as the one I shall discuss : that what we call inanimate objects have a will of their own. The ancients endowed them with spirits -- lares, oreads and so on. Medieval alchemists described an elaborate, if largely arbitrary, system of sympathies and antipathies -- not personification, but something far subtler. Modern science simply shrugs: fantasies of dawning reason. An opinion without proof, I submit. In the last war our fliers, the flower of the mechanical age, devised the Gremlins -- whole fun and half earnest -- for they sensed something more than a chance mechanical failure... some Thing malicious and aggressive." ing manner as well as matter : The Major's logic was certainly off the gold standard -- the case built on random gleanings, the disregard for alternative possibilities. Yet certain psychotic qualities were lacking; the grandiose seriousness, the touchiness, the air of knock-down argument. And, an inner mentor reminded, the ability to select significant detail was often the trademark of genius: "great wits are oft to madness near allied..." "Of course," the Major continued, "the idea flouts sacred axioms. But, after all... sacred? Science is study of evidence, not recitation of a creed. And aren't the axioms being badly strained? 'If you knew all the physical factors, you could explain everything.' Safe enough, since you never will know them. But your axioms work to a high approximation in certain carefully selected and managed cases, so you reject all other explanations for everything, in the name of a spurious unity." So he did consider alternatives, Carl thought. Aloud, he asked, "What evidence exists for any other explanations?" "Ha! That's exactly my 'mania.' By the theory of probability, you get a straight flush in every-so-many poker hands. But what if straight flushes crop up all over?" Matt objected: "We've already discussed how easily you can prove dreams are prophetic if you record the ones that turn out and disregard the rest, and so on." "True enough. And you can prove tigers' claws or #-desoxybethylene are miracle-drugs, if you stress the cures and explain away the regrettable fatalities." "Touche," said Matt. "Fire ahead." "Also, I've already admitted that my weak point is getting things on a statistical basis. I've been collecting data for years -- " he gestured toward a row of fat notebooks beside his records -- "but things like poker hands, which you can tabulate easily, are obviously least likely to illustrate my point -- they're too simple, mechanically, to enjoy much freedom of action. Besides..." He smiled faintly. "Go on," said Matt. "You think this is a weak link... sounds irrational. Seriously, it impressed me as genuine observation." "Glad to know it. Doctor. Well, you know that the presence of an observer changes conditions so you can't know what would have happened with no observer. That won't perceptibly affect motion of a falling body, or other such elementary cases. But in complex, versatile systems, I believe the effect increases enormously. I believe physical processes know they're being observed and evade analysis -- I'm using 'know' as engineers do when they use the expression 'How does the valve know force is applied?' " Carl was drawn off guard: "There's a traffic light at Tenth and Capitol I swear goes red just as I reach it -- oh, four times in five. I tried keeping count once, and I'm certain the frequency changed while I was doing it." "More likely your car than the light. Anyway, there you are. If you can't get statistics, you have to fall back on intuition, and that isn't science." "Well, then," Carl made amends to his professional conscience, "there isn't much point bothering with it, is there?" "Sometimes I fear not. But if enough people were thinking along those lines, someone might hit on a way to fool the resistance. Anyway, amuse yourself applying my theory and see how it fits." The Major dismissed the topic and talked electronics for the rest of the visit. "ward, "isn't that a honey of a mania? His science is topdrawer stuff, too. Tell you what: I'll lay you a dollar even that you'll be taking him 'whole fun and half earnest,' as he puts it, by Christmas. I know you won't cheat for that little: in fact, knowing you, it'll make you confess if you weaken." Carl laughed and took him up. Which meant that he had to take the Major's suggestion at least in half earnest. But he needed amusement. In addition to a merciless load of work at an institute half destaffed by flu, he had worries: his wife Clare, of whom he was somewhat fond, had the flu too, followed by pneumonia and complicated by allergic reaction to the antibiotics applied. Having had a fortnight off during the emergency, he could not decently get down to their little apartment more than once or twice in the next fortnight, and he was a type who worried quietly but effectively. He found Major Burnside's fantasy a distraction, and even hoped it would later appeal to Clare's lively sense of humor. So he collected instances: The dollar pencil that dropped on its rubber and vaulted into the plumbless depths of a hot-air register; the tiny rip in the sleeve of his white jacket that snagged on the tap of a coffee-urn, causing him to slop a cup of scalding coffee over trousers and ankle; the page of vital report that blew off his worktable and slid craftily behind a newspaper in the wastebasket; and a dozen more commonplace acts of malice by familiar objects. He had to convince himself that the laws of chance adequately covered each incident; but also he had to grapple with underlying implications. So Sunday afternoon he seized a breathing-space to go up, armed with a clearance from Matt, to reason with the Major. "Look here, sir," he began. "Gathering data is the first step, but you've got to have some general theory. Ruling out literal Gremlins, why should objects be actively hostile?" The Major looked up from a soldering job, with a twinkle: "If I give you a theory, will you be the least bit more persuaded? All right: Why do we like organization, control, applied power?" Carl reflected: "Oh... I suppose it's the nature of life to extend itself by organization of the environment -- tools and so on." "Excellent. Well, the mass of the Universe behaves in exactly the opposite way -- disorganizing, devolving. Any reason why this much vaster process shouldn't have -- well, a sort of counter-life? Well, then, to it, our organizing activities would be equivalent to fires, contrary winds, rust. Up to a few thousand years ago, the effects of life were trivial -- a little photosynthesis and burrowdigging that mattered no more to counter-life than geological erosion matters to us. But now Man is organizing matter and energy on an expanding scale -- a regular epidemic of natural disasters to counter-life. So, of course, it resists and fights back." "Hold on!" Carl protested. "After all, our activities cause increased breakdown of material, on the whole. That should be gratifying to it, not disconcertmg. "Yes -- but we organize some matter very highly, and might eventually reverse the whole trend. Anyway, the further we go, the more opposition we generate." "Pretty trivial opposition. Guerilla warfare." The Major smiled. "Napoleon and Hitler were softened up for the real counter-offensive by guerilla warfare. How much of your life does it waste, for example?"  morning, he had lost half an hour over a broken shoelace, a shaving-cream cap that escaped down the sink, a shirt-collar loop that refused to hitch over its button, and a handful of money that scattered jubilantly when his trouser pocket snared a finger. He had accordingly breakfasted on peanuts and, on ward rounds, had covered himself with mediocrity in lihe eyes of Dr. Svindorff. He changed his point of attack -- or perhaps fell back on his own second line? "But how does it work?" he asked. "I mean, we know the laws of mechanics, and they don't leave scope for free action." "Oh, don't they? We operate by chemistry, and yet we feel we have plenty of freedom. Simple mechanical systems made of docile materials don't have much freedom, true. But we can't extrapolate that fact to cover all cases." "Docile materials?" "Metals, for example. Passive, like plant life. And we cast them in geometric forms. And even then they trick us. We get endless amusement out of games played with the simplest geometric form to baseball. What do we know of possibilities in really subtle systems of matter -- fabrics, paper, rubber, ready to rebound from the almost organic forms forced on them?" "Hm! Aren't those organic materials?" "xorganic. What populations are more fanatical for liberty than those that have just been liberated from obnoxious control? And note this: We organize matter only for special purposes: matter tries to waste our energies out of systematic hostility. The aspirin tablet that eludes you and wastes two minutes of your time has won a victory in a battle we're not even consciously fighting yet." Carl rationed himself one last question -- the topper: "Do you consider that individual objects have personality -- that soldering iron, for instance?" "I have an impression they enjoy a sort of merged or cooperative mentality -- but certain forms have more or less individuality too. This iron -- " He reached for it back-handed; his cuff touched a kink in the cord and the iron swiveled in its cradle to graze his wrist. He snatched his hand away, sending the iron clattering across the bench ; but he caught it neatly before it had singed the wood, and set it in the cradle as if he were handling a cobra. "Yes! That soldering iron -- or its cord -- has plenty of personality; one of the most treacherous tools I've ever owned. And you'll notice how they use our very actions to thwart us, just as we use mechanical laws to make them act constructively. Of course, clumsiness gives them opportunity. I should have switched that off." Carl attributed the little accident to autosuggestion, a Freudian slip, and went away shaking his head. He had never met so well-integrated a delusion. By heaven, he hadn't found the flaw yet! He hoped it would amuse Clare -- she was often mighty sharp at analyzing such things. I'HE following evening was his night off. He entered the apartment house with two large shopping bags of staples and Clare's favorite delicacies, to find that he would have to heft them up six flights, the elevator being out of order. He set them, panting, on the floor of the seventh flight while he opened the door. The door-check resisted sullenly, and he had to put his heel in the opening while he scooped up the groceries. As he turned, something jerked violently at the small of his back -- the belt of his trenchcoat somehow, impossibly, had snubbed over the doorknob. Surprise, as much as the jerk, unbalanced him. His other heel slipped on the waxed linoleum of the landing. He lurched against the door, which now yielded like a swooning maiden, and he dove into the living room, frantically trying to save the toppling bags. The belt let go with the timing of a trained athlete, and everything went flying. He snatched at the top of one bag, and the sturdy paper ripped like tissue. With his other hand he came down solidly on a carton of cream that had rolled to the precise spot requisite, like an outfielder intercepting a fly. Clare, in her bathrobe, came scurrying to the bedroom door, to find him arising from among the debris. The door had closed decisively on a bag of eggs; a small sack of flour, disgorging at one corner, smirked raffishly against a sofa-leg. "Gracious!" Clare said, between mirth and peevishness. "Must you be clumsy?" Through Carl's mind, before he realized it, flashed. Well, they're not going to make trouble between me and Clare! And he gave the soft answer that turneth away wrath. After supper, he tried to turn the episode to account by using it to introduce the Major's fantasy. At the end, Clare said languidly, "Well, anyone who ever kept house wouldn't think he was so crazy!" They spent the next hour swapping instances: the row of books that always toppled the way you didn't want them; the garment that slid silkily to the floor if one arm hung over an edge; the drawerful of articles that restacked themselves to wedge it shut; the ball of paper that avoided the gaping waste-basket and dove easily into the narrow cranny behind; the balcony door that normally refused to latch and banged in every breeze, but that had swung shut and smartly locked her out ; and so on. It was fun and did amuse Clare; but afterward he wondered if he should have put such fantastic ideas into her still feverish mind. Also, he worried about having humored the Major quite so far; it was really very unprofessional! Next day, however. Matt eased the latter burden considerably by V saying, "Dr. Svindorff is working on the Major's case -- at my instigation. We can't prove that Ruth Elvira wants to enjoy his worldly goods in his absence; but there's no more reason to keep harmless cranks. Let him exercise his persuasive powers on the public along with Flat-Earthers, telekineticists, and prophets of Judgment Day come Jan. #... though, personally. I'll be sorry to lose him. I find him a diversion." he was itching to lick the Major's theory, over and above liking the man. But the odd hours they spent with the Major in his ward-cell-laboratory were devoted to mere yarns: " -- The wind snagged his parka on this one stub of branch, and there he was haltered over a fiVehundred-foot drop, with the blizzard settling down... The jeep door knocked his glasses onto the one bit of rock within yards -- thirty miles from town, dozens of hairpin bends, and the hills full of Huks -- Amusing, but... against violent backgrounds of far outposts, violent accidents seemed natural enough: while by contrast, the freaks of civilized life grew pale and trifling. The magnificent phantasmagoria seemed to be sinking in a swamp of believe-itor-not curiosities. Half wishing to rescue things from anticlimax, Carl finally demanded, "You called all this just so much guerilla action. What shape would the real offensive take?" The Major racked his tools and turned, as if the matter demanded his full attention: "Isn't it obvious? When we think of atomic war, we're afraid of the blast and fires and secondary radiation. But, to my mind, the big danger comes afterward... Ever drive down the Hudson, past those endless cliffs of apartment blocks, and wonder what would happen if a few power lines and water mains were cut, with no repair in sight? Lord! Those millions would be strangled, thrown back on techniques they'd utterly forgotten, pitted against materials that had learned to -- defend themselves." "Yes," Carl said slowly, "that would be an opportunity." The Major sat down and clasped his hands over a knee. "Look, Doctor, this may sound fantastic, but I'm mad anyway according to you. It's calculated habitable planets, of which many have had ample time to develop space travel. Yet we've never had a certified visitor. Why?" "I've heard it discussed. We're just a minor unit on the outskirts, for one thing." "Quite true," the Major nodded. "Yet, if there were no more than a few hundred exploring races, surely one would have gotten around to us. Isn't it just possible that something deadlocks all life at a certain stage -- some universal feed-back mechanism? And, on my theory, you can see what it would be -- progress piling up resistance from counter-life. Past a crucial point, you might tip the balance in favor of life -- but we're not nearly so close to that stage yet as we are to a blow-up. One slip, and we're done." "Well, wouldn't thinkers on other worlds have seen the danger, if it's real?" "Oh, I'm not so conceited -- or mad -- as to suppose I'm the only mind in the Universe to notice the obvious. But one is likely to see it too late, or not be able to persuade his contemporaries. I'm not making much headway, am I?" Carl departed considerably relieved. You might come to take Gremlins half seriously, as personifying an active principle behind freak accidents; but as a cosmic threat engulfing the world and myriads of populated planets, they were merely silly. Carl suddenly felt himself back in daylight, free of the insidious suspicion that after all there might be something in what the old boy said. He knew once more that mechanics explained all accidents, if you only had time and patience to analyze them. He said as much to Matt in the cafeteria. "So I lose my bet, do I?" Matt smiled wistfully: "Well, the bet's off anyway... Dr. Svindorff says that Angus G. will be leaving before Christmas. But I thought you were drifting toward his siren song. Weren't you, honestly?" "Out of idle amusement. It's lost its fascination." from Clare wiped out all other concerns. Clare had been out the day before, and gotten caught in the rain -- now she had a misery and a temperature of #. Carl felt a nasty qualm of apprehension; even a poor psychiatrist knew that in these cases the real danger was in relapse. He mortgaged his free time for the month ahead, and got the evening off. He arrived at the apartment to find Clare in bed with their electric blanket huddled around her, not even trying to read. She greeted him with an anxiety that showed she too knew about relapses; "Do you think I'm going to be very sick?" "Not if we keep you warm and quiet." He fixed the best light snacks he knew and fed her by hand. At the end, she suddenly asked, "How's that old man with the theory about objects?" and hastened on, not waiting for a reply, "He's perfectly right." She looked about fourteen, and valuable, bundled up with her brindled hair loose and her face worried. Carl scored himself for having filled her head with nonsense; though, of course, her fever would just have fastened on something else. He jollied her seriously: "Well, I think bacteria are more dangerous than objects, in your case." "These bacteria wouldn't have had a chance at me," she said firmly, "without Some mighty funny coincidences. I got wet because I dropped my last carfare money, and it rolled like mad, and when it came to a crack. I'll swear it just swiveled and eased itself in. And I wouldn't have dropped it if my finger hadn't been hurt from when the window-cord broke and the window came down on my hand. And I wouldn't have gotten so wet if I'd had my slicker -- but you remember how that went all funny when that bottle of cleaner on the shelf came uncorked and spilled over it." Carl sighed. "You wouldn't have gotten wet at all if you hadn't tried to be noble and get back into harness before you were ready. Now, take this, and you'll sleep ten hours and wake up feeling fine." But the last thing she said as she drowsed off was, "Shouldn've given'm chance. They know when you can't fight'm, 'n they pile on you." He pulled the sofa to the bedroom door, so he could hear the least murmur, made himself a bed and turned in. He knew he was exhausted, and was determined to avoid being a soft target for either germs or Gremlins by getting overfatigued... He woke in the dead of night, with an extra-sensory perception of something wrong. He rolled to his elbow. The air was abnormally chilly, even for a low-cost apartment in December. Clare stirred, and he called softly, "You all right?" She mumbled feverishly, "No. I'm coooold." without actually knocking it over. Naturally, the switch was in the one position where he had to flounder to reach it, and when it did click, nothing happened. Oh, fine, he thought. Electricity's off. Furnace controls dead! He strode over to the bed. The electric blanket, of course, was a mere flimsy fabric. He patted Clare's hunched shoulder. "I'll get another blanket. Where's the flash?" "On the table," she wheezed, and groped on the far side of the bed. There was a muffled bump, and she lamented weakly, "I had it and it just knocked against something and flipped out of my fingers." "Don't look for it," he said. "Keep wrapped up. I can find my way in the dark." No use wasting precious minutes, he thought, blundering around looking for the flash, while it, neatly ensconced in some improbable nook, gloated just out of his reach. He started around the foot of the bed toward the bathroom door... Something lashed out of the dark and swathed itself around his ankles. He stumbled disastrously, his outstretched hand plunging through air where wall should have been. His temple and cheek-bone jarred dazingly against a door frame. He saved himself from falling, but felt as if he had been battle-axed. Clare's voice came hoarse and scared: "What happened? Are you hurt?" He kept his tone cheerful, if shaky: "Just tripped over the bedspread turned back on the floor here. I'll throw it over you till I get the blanket." Easier said than done. The topologists' puzzle of the inner tube that can't be turned insideout through a hole in the side, though infinitely elastic, seemed elementary compared with flattening that eight-by-six rectangle of fluffy chenille. In the end, he gavQk up trying to do a perfect job, and bundled it over the shivering girl any old way, so he could be free to get that blanket. The bathroom was utterly black; he could see only the dial of his wristwatch moving. With a sudden giddy feeling that the solid fixtures had shifted, he picked his way from sink to tub and along to the linen-closet over the tub's end. His exploring fingers felt painted wood and brass knob, cold and hostile. He opened the door. Folded sheets and shaggy towels seemed somehow a little friendlier. Sanity began to steal back as he carefully disengaged a blanket, giving it no opportunity to ernulate the unruliness of the bedspread. As it came into his arms, a compact, well-folded mass, he let out a breath he had not known he was holding... Something hit the bottom of the bathtub with an ear-stunning smash -- a big bottle of some kind that had bided its time up there. Oh, well -- that particular mess could wait till morning, safely localized inside the tub. He edged back toward the door, calling, "Okay, honey, just a bottle. Be right with you." And he felt something hard under his foot, and then a sharp sting. His rational brain began parroting,... The first impression is "bf contact, carried by fast. Group A fibers, followed by one of pain, carried by slow. Group C fibers. Pain is of two types: first pain, bright, stinging, well localized... But a deeper level of his mind cut in with, "How did that hunk of glass know exactly where I was going to put my foot?"  Clare, angrily unconcerned that he was soaking the good carpet with gore. Nothing mattered except beating off this peril to Clare, whose teeth were now chattering in the darkness. Now... hot water bottles... Eureka! The gas stove would heat the place, and give a little light too... why hadn't he thought of that at first? Why, for that matter, hadn't he thought of using the blankets off his couchbed? They surely did exploit your stupidity! The hot water bottles were in the kitchen. He began to explore his way through the living room. The darkness was clammy. Windows were dim presences, hardly revealing their own positions. A radiator, when he touched it, was cold as drowned bones. For an endless moment he was groping through a subterranean passage, the weight of ancient rocks pressing down in a sentient and malignant desire to blot out his tiny flicker of life. This was a Thing with which one could have no compromise, because its very being was the sucking down of human aspiration and dream. Its only communication was hate and recognition that he was a special focus of danger, because he knew It for what It was and might rally resistance to It. It was attacking him through Clare; he stood alone between her and faceless Chaos. The bright, somewhat shoddy little apartment had melted like a fragile surface to show an abyss of death. What would that Presence be like if It once organized and gained the upper hand? He must not pause, or It would gain the upper hand... His touch found the stove where it should be. It had no pilot burner, and he had to locate the match holder. With grim deliberation he struck a match. The instant, blinding flare was no friendly light. He angled it till it burned steadily, then turned on the gas. The gust of air that always precedes the flow from a long-disused burner blew out the match. With the same measured restraint, he got another. But tension and vexation made him strike it a little too petulantly. As the head plumed into flame,  it snapped off and vaulted into a far comer. For a terrifying instant, he thought it had gone into the trash basket full of waxed wrappings and other tinder... he dove after it, and struck his bruised cheek sickeningly against a table-corner... the match-head died impotently. He found himself exulting aloud: "Failed, you little bastard!" On the third try, he got the burner lit, and its eldritch, blue, glare made it easier to light the others and get on a kettleful of water. He looked at the flame and admitted he was afraid to bundle Clare out here where it would soon be warm. If he didn't break his neck, or hers, he would probably pitch the two of them into the stove. While the water was heating, he impulsively went to inspect the fire escape. The window showed nothing but reflections of the burners and his own shadowy image. He raised the sash, and looked out... No wonder the power was off! The street lamps still shone, far below; but they revealed sleet falling like molten drops in Inferno; the trees were deep-sea corals and the windowpane was opaque as a sheet of paraffin. Q ueer nausea and faintness swamped him... He gripped the sill, and his fingers slipped on the sheath of ice. For a moment he thought he had lost balance and was toppling in the grip of gravity. Their master-force, over the low sill... Even as he recovered, he could imagine his own nightmare howl as he plunged past scared neighbors' windows to silence on the icy concrete. He grunted, stepped back, closed the window. He still felt giddy... Then he saw the dark smears on the floor. It took an exploring finger to explain them. He grunted again, a sour sound. Who wouldn't feel giddy if they'd been bleeding like a stuck pig! It took twice as long as it should have to put on a pressure bandage with a napkin. The water was too hot, now. He hung the bottles on a hook over the sink while he poured the scalding fluid into them. As he balanced the clum kettle, he slipped just a little on a smear of blood and swung the spout where his wrist might have been. But that was a waning threat, he realized -- a mere parting shot by a repulsed enemy. The knives, glassware, electrical gadgets, bulks of furniture, all glinted in the blue light, demons and imps ready to frustrate and harass; but the deeper Powec had withdrawn -- temporarily. He got the bottles snuggled beside Clare, who murmured gratification. At that juncture, the lights went on... N ext morning, the paper said : eighteen die in freak linemen slipping to death, highway crashes, frozen tramps, fractured skulls. Just a skirmish, thought Carl. Imagine that situation spread of situations like mine last night, year after year... Driving back to the Institute, he tried to keep his mind on the streets, so that last night could fall into perspective. Soon it began to... soon he was smiling a little. But, said his semi-conscious, one thing was sure; Whatevef the final verdict on the Major's theory -- even if he's wrong -- he's wrong with a damn good case! Carl flung himself into his duties till Matt Loftus came around, about mid-afternoon, flourishing a crisp, folded document. "This is it, son!" said Matt. "We lose the Major, and the Major regains his right to life, liberty and the rebuttal of the inanimate. Want to join the Liberation Committee?" The Major listened to Matt's announcement with his usual courtesy, but with such reserve that that normally self-assured medico ended rather lamely; "Maybe we should have told you this was coming along, sir. But I figured it as a sort of Christmas surprise. Anyway, we just need your signature..." The Major scanned the paper and then laid it on his workbench, smiling a little sadly. He said, "I appreciate your efforts. Doctor, and even more I appreciate your motives. But you don't quite understand." "I -- what? What don't I understand?" The Major seated himself and caressed his mustache for a long moment. Then: "Outside I'd be a target for a concerted attack. They know I'm the greatest menace to Them on Earth, and They'd even risk unmasking Themselves -- knowing most feople would simply gawk at the most fantastic series of accidents and never draw an inference. I wouldn't last a month. Here, I'm safe, with everything under control." Matt's face was a study: "But... what about alerting other people? Don't you have a duty to preach your theory and so on?" Carl glanced sharply at his friend. That was humoring a patient! "Why, Doctor," said the Major. "I have the best possible audience right here, funny as it sounds. You of the staff are the people best equipped to appreciate my theory -- scientists, but not convention-bound theorists. You're not only medical men, used to dealing with things as they are: you're psychiatrists, whose job is distinguishing between the rational and the irrational. You can analyze vital phenomena better than an engineer such as myself. And you're the people most likely to be listened to in turn, and best able to defend yourselves from the inevitable attacks by the enemy." considered the young men, and the corners of his mustache quirked: "What better converts could I have than you two?" Carl turned and stared at Matt, eyes questioning. Matt set his jaw: "Yes, I'm going to -- to follow it up. To see where it goes. And I wouldn't say so till I was sure of at least one competent associate... you are with me, aren't you?" "Yes," said Carl, with sudden complete conviction. The Major leaned back triumphantly. "You see! Of course, this place does put a certain ' stigma on my ideas. But with the safety factor, and now with grade-A channels, why should I leave? Do you think I'm crazy?" The biggest job in history and it had to be done with complete secrecy. It was -- which was just the troublel perfectionist, but if you do a thing, I always say, you might as well do it right. Everything satisfied me about the security measures on our assignment except one -- the official Army designation. Project Hush.  I don't know who thought it up, and I certainly would never ask, but whoever it was, he should have known better. Damn it, when you want a project kept secret, you don't give it a designation like that! You give it something neutral, some name like the Manhattan and Overlord they used in World War II, which won't excite anybody's curiosity. But we were stuck with Project too Hush and we had to take extra measures to ensure secrecy. A couple of times a week, everyone on the project had to report to Psycho for DD #b HA -- dream detailing and hypnoanalysis -- instead of the usual monthly visit. Naturally, the commanding general of the heavily fortified research post to which we were attached could not ask what we were doing, under penalty of court-martial, but he had to be given further instructions to shut off his imagination like a faucet every time he heard an explosion. Some idiot in Washington was actually going to list Project Hush in the military budget by name! It took fast action, I can tell you, to have it entered under Miscellaneous "X" Research. Well, we'd covered the unforgivable blunder, though not easily, and now we could get down to the real business of the project. You know, of course, about the A-bomb, H-bomb and C-bomb because information that they existed had been declassified. You don't know about the other weapons being devised -- and neither did we, reasonably enough, since they weren't our business -- but we had been given properly guarded notification that they were in the works. Project Hush was set up to counter the new weapons. Our goal was not just to reach the Moon. We had done that on # June # with an unmanned ship that carried instruments to report back data on soil, temperature, cosmic rays and so on. Unfortunately, it was put out of commission by a rock slide. An unmanned rocket would be useless against the new weapons. We had to get to the Moon before any other country did and set up a permanent station -- an armed one -- and do it without anybody else knowing about it. I guess you see now why we on (damn the name!) Project Hush were so concerned about security. But we felt pretty sure, before we took off, that we had plugged every possible leak. We had, all right. Nobody even knew we had raised ship. " of Mare Nubium, just off Regiomontanus, and, after planting a flag with appropriate throat-catching ceremony, had swung into the realities of the tasks we had practiced on so many dry runs back on Earth. Major Monroe Gridley prepared the big rocket, with its tiny cubicle of living space, for the return journey to Earth which he alone would make. Lieutenant colonel Thomas Hawthorne painstakingly examined our provisions and portable quarters for any damage that might have been incurred in landing. And I, Colonel Benjamin Rice, first commanding officer of Army Base No. I on the Moon, dragged crate after enormous crate out of the ship on my aching academic back, and piled them in the spot two hundred feet away where the plastic dome would be built. We all finished at just about the same time, as per schedule, and went into Phase Two, Monroe and I started work on building the dome. It was a simple pre-fab affair, but big enough to require an awful lot of assembling. Then, after it was built, we faced the real problem -- getting all the complex internal machinery in place and in operating order. Meanwhile, Tom Hawthorne took his plump self off in the single-seater rocket which, up to then, had doubled as a lifeboat. The schedule called for him to make a rough three-hour scouting survey in an everwidening spiral from our dome. This had been regarded as a probable waste of time, rocket fuel and manpower -- but a necessary precaution. He was supposed to watch for such things as bug-eyed monsters out for a stroll on the Lunar landscape. Basically, however, Tom's survey was intended to supply extra geological and astronomical meat for the report which Monroe was to carry back to Army HQ on Earth. Tom was back in forty minutes. His round face, inside its transparent bubble helmet, was fishbelly white. And so were ours, once he told us what he'd seen. He had seen another dome. "The other side of Mare Nubium -- in the Riphaen Mountains," he babbled excitedly. "It's a little bigger than ours, and it's a little flatter on top. And it's not translucent, either, with splotches of different colors here and there -- it's a dull, dark, heavy gray. But that's all there is to see." "No markings on the dome?" I asked worriedly. "No signs of anyone -- or anything -- around it?" "Neither, Colonel." I noticed he was calling me by my rank for the first time since the trip started, which meant he was saying in effect, "Man, have you got a decision to make!" "Hey, Tom," Monroe put in. "Couldn't be just a regularly shaped bump in the ground, could it?" "I'm a geologist, Monroe. I can distinguish artificial from natural topography. Besides -- " he looked up -- "I just remembered something I left out. There's a brand-new tiny crater near the dome -- the kind usually left by a rocket exhaust." "Rocket exhaust?" I seized on that. "Rockets, eh?" T'OM grinned a little sympathetically. "Spaceship exhaust, I should have said. You can't tell from the crater what kind of propulsive device these characters are using. It's not the same kind of crater our rearjets leave,' if that helps any." Of course it didn't. So we went into our ship and had a council of war. And I do mean war. Both Tom and Monroe were calling me Colonel in every other sentence. I used their first names every chance I got. Still, no one but me could reach a decision. About what to do, I mean. "Look," I said at last, "here are the possibilities. They know we are here -- either from watching us land a couple of hours ago or from observing Tom's scoutship -- or they do not know we are here. They are either humans from Earth -- in which case they are in all probability enemy nationals -- or they are alien creatures from another planet -- in which case they may be friends, enemies or what-have-you. I think common sense and standard military procedure demand that we consider them hostile until we have evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, we proceed with extreme caution, so as not to precipitate an interplanetary war with potentially friendly Martians, or whatever they are. "All right. It's vitally important that Army Headquarters be informed of this immediately. But since Moon-to-Earth radio is still on the drawing boards, the only way we can get through is to send Monroe back with the ship. If we do, we run the risk of having our garrison force, Tom and me, captured while he's making the return trip. In that case, their side winds up in possession of important information concerning our personnel and equipment, while our side has only the bare knowledge that somebody or something else has a base on the Moon. So our primary need is more information. "Therefore, I suggest that I sit in the dome on one end of a telephone hookup with Tom, who will sit in the ship, his hand over the firingbutton, ready to blast off for Earth the moment he gets the order from me. Monroe will take the single-seater down to the Riphaen Mountains, landing as close to the other dome as he thinks safe. He will then proceed the rest of the way on foot, doing the best scouting job he can in a spacesuit. "He will not use his radio, except for agreed-upon nonsense syllables to designate landing the single-seater, coming upon the dome by foot, and warning me to tell Tom to take off. If he's captured, remembering that the first purpose of a scout is acquiring and transmitting knowledge of the enemy, he will snap his suit radio on full volume and pass on as much data as time and the enemy's reflexes permit. How does that sound to you?" They both nodded. As far as they were concerned, the command decision had been made. But I was sitting under two inches of sweat. "One question," Tom said. "Why did you pick Monroe for the scout?" "I was afraid you'd ask that," I told him. "We're three extremely unathletic Ph. D.s who have been in the Army since we finished our schooling. There isn't too much choice. But I remembered that Monroe is half Indian -- Arapahoe, isn't it, Monroe? -- and I'm hoping blood 'will tell." "Only trouble. Colonel," Monroe said slowly as he rose, "is that I'm one-fourth Indian and even that... Didn't I ever tell you that my great-grandfather was the only Arapahoe scout who was with Custer at the Little Big Horn? He'd been positive Sitting Bull was miles away. However, I'll do my best. And if I heroically don't come back, would you please persuade the Security Officer of our section to clear my name for use in the history books? Under the circumstances, I think it's the least he could do." I promised to do my best, of course. dome over the telephone connection to Tom and hated myself for picking Monroe to do the job. But I'd have hated myself just as much for picking Tom. And if anything happened and I had to tell Tom to blast off, I'd probably be sitting here in the dome all by myself after that, waiting... "Broz neggle!" came over the radio in Monroe's resonant voice. He had landed the single-seater. I didn't dare use the telephone to chat with Tom in the ship, for fear I might miss an important word or phrase from our scout. So I sat and sat and strained my ears. After a while, I heard "Mishgashu!" which told me that Monroe was in the neighborhood of the other dome and was creeping toward it under cover of whatever boulders were around. And then, abruptly, I heard Monroe yell my name and there was a terrific clattering in my headphones. Radio interference! He'd been caught, and whoever had caught him had simultaneously jammed his suit transM fl fc y flu i  "h : m Jb mitter with a larger transmitter from the alien dome. Then there was silence. After a while, I told Tom what had happened. He just said, "Poor Monroe." I had a good idea of what his expression was like. "Look, Tom," I said, "if you take off now, you still won't have anything important to tell. After capturing Monroe, whatever's in that other dome will come looking for us, I think. I'll let them get close enough for us to learn something of their appearance -- at least if they're human or nonhuman. Any bit of information about them is important. I'll shout it up to you and you'll still be able to take off in plenty of time. All right?" "You're the boss. Colonel," he said in a mournful voice. "Lots of luck." And then there was nothing to do but wait. There was no oxygen system in the dome yet, so I 'had to squeeze up a sandwich from the food compartment in my suit. I sat there, thinking about the expedition. Nine years, and all that careful secrecy, all that expenditure of money and mind-cracking research -- and it had come to this. Waiting to be wiped out, in a blast from some unimaginable weapon. I understood Monroe's last request. We often felt we were so secret that our immediate superiors didn't even w;nt us to know what we we were working on. Scientists are people -- they wish for recognition, too. I was hoping the whole expedition would be written up in the history books, but it looked unpromising. rWO hours later, the scout ship landed near the dome. The lock opened and, from where I stood in the open door of our dome, I saw Monroe come out and walk toward me. I alerted Tom and told him to listen carefully. "It may be a trick -- he might be drugged..." He didn't act drugged, though -- not exactly. He pushed his way past me and sat down on a box to one side of the dome. He put his booted feet up on another, smaller box. "How are you, Ben?" he asked. "How's every little thing?" I grunted. "Well?" I know my voice skittered a bit. He pretended puzzlement." Well what? Oh, I see what you mean. The other dome -- you want to know who's in it. You have a right to be curious, Ben. Certainly. The leader of a top-secret expedition like this -- Project Hush they call us, huh, Ben -- finds another dome on the Moon. He thinks he's been the first to land on it, so naturally he wants to -- " "Major Monroe Gridley!" I rapped out. "You will come to attention and deliver your report. Now!" Honestly, I felt my neck swelling up inside my helmet. Monroe just leaned back against the side of the dome. "That's the Army way of doing things," he commented admiringly. "Like the recruits say, there's a right way, a wrong way and an Army way. Only there are other ways, too." He chuckled. "Lots of other ways." "He's off," I heard Tom whisper over the telephone. "Ben, Monroe has gone and blown his stack." "They aren't extraterrestrials in the other dome, Ben," Monroe volunteered in a sudden burst of sanity. "No, they're human, all right, and from Earth. Guess where." "I'll kill you," I warned him. "I swear I'll kill you, Monroe. Where are they from -- Russia, China, Argentina?" He grimaced. "What's so secret about those places? Go on! -- guess again." I stared at him long and hard. "The only place else -- " "Sure," he said. "You got it. Colonel. The other dome is owned and operated by the Navy. The goddam United States Navy!" Free Record sms or A A learn a new language. Lisbreakable record. Let your eyes lesson. Almost at once you'll be chatting whole sentences in your new language with a perfect accent! Offer may end soon. Rush #c to help cover cost of special packaging, shipping of free record, lesson. State language you are interested in. 'We'll send free information on full Cortina course. No obligation. Sslahlished in # Dpt. #. # W. #nd #t... N. Y. # I Cortina Academy. Dept. # (Est. #) # W. #nd St., New York #. N. Y. mation about the full Cortina course. Enclosed is #c (stamps or coin) to help cover the cost of special packaginer, shipping. Name Address City...Zone...State . # Star Shelf Bradbury. Ballantine Books, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # cloth, #f paper Bradbury has ever done. Even more, it is among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more. It is so far in advance of what its author has previously done, one can hardly belive it was written by the author of The Martian Chronicles. ber it from the February #I issue as "The Fireman." They will, however, hardly be able to recognize this as an outgrowth of that excellent tale. "The Fireman" was an angry fantasy of a mad world; "Fahrenheit #" (which, according to the title page, is the temperature required to ignite book paper) is an almost Biblical challenge to the human race to stop and consider while there still is time before suicide. The key idea in both tales is that firemen, put out of work by the invention of corripletely fireproof buildings, are given the task of setting fire, with tanks full of kerosene, to the homes of people who persist in iossessing banned books. Practically all books are banned in this society. However, though the premise is the same, the development in the new version is not as furiously angry as it was in the original. Three years of introspection have cooled off the rage with pity and understanding. Ideas and philosophies are set down with poetic care, rather chan in the fiery fashion of the original. Each character is an unforgettable human being -- perhaps the one major similarity between the two versions. If you begin to balk at some of the more fantastic aspects of the story, read the very last page of the book, the second page of Ballantine's writeup on Bradbury. There you will find how close to reality some of the author's horrible dreams of the future are right now -- today. The book is fattened out with two new short stories, neither of which need detain you long. You must buy the book for its title story, almost novel-length as it is. This is one piece of science fiction that you will never forget, even though you may want to. PjRZE science fiction. Edited by Donald A. Wollheim. The McBride Co., New York, #. # pages, # slim book for the price -- # stories at #Sf per -- the quality is pleasantly high, in general. Theoretically the first of an annual series to compete with the BleilerDikty selections, this collection is a good one even if it never has a sequel. Of the # stories, nine are Bplus or better -- and many may disagree with my feeling that Miller's "The Big Hunger," Coppel's "The Peacemaker" and Brackett's "The Last Days of Shandakor" are too fruity in their concept and style for modern science fiction. The other stories are tops; Arthur C. Clarke's "All the Time in the World," Derleth's Mcllvaine's Star" (previously anthologized), Robert Locke's "Demotion," Pearson and Corwin's "The Mask of Demeter," Beaumont's "The Beautiful Woman," Kornbluth's superb "The Altar at Midnight," Dickson's "Listen," Mark Clifton's "Star Bright," and Russell's "The Timeless T# Ones:" a nice bunch of yarns. The Kornbluth and the Clifton perhaps will be entirely new to you. lamy. A. A. Wyn, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # A TT A, the tale of the life of a man reduced to ant-size and living among ants, is a slight but vivid and occasionally moving story of adventure, somewhat reminiscent of a Robinson Crusoe on a miniature scale. More important, it is an impressive imaginative re-creation of what Earth must seem like to a person no larger than an ant, and an even more striking picture of what an ant civilization might be like, if there was one. Mr. Bellamy, once Executive Editor of the New Yorker, and of other magizines now dead, posits that ants are intelligent, not entirely creatures of instinct. He draws a detailed picture of their regimented, doctrinaire and bureaucratic society which you will not soon forget. However, the parts of the book I liked best are those describing the first adventures of'Brokell, the man made small, and his relations to his new world where grasses are trees and a tinfoil chocolate bar wrapping becornes impenetrable armor for his protection. I also thoroughly enjoyed the description of his relations with Atta, the solitary ant whom he saves from death and who befriends him and makes it possible for him to live in his incredible new environment. This is old-fashioned science fiction, in a sense, but even so it is vividly real and often very moving. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, #. # pages, # sidered as the study of the constellations, is one of the oldest sciences in the world, it was not until last year that its study by amateurs was made even passably easy and pleasant. It was then that Mr. Rey, Geririan-born but resident in the United States since #, published this fine book. Instead of picturing the constellations with the vague classical-allegorical shapes of tradition or the meaningless geometrical lines of more up-to-date texts, Rey has developed a technique of using straightforward lines connecting the stars in each constellation so that they actually look like a skeleton presentation of the figures they are supposed to represent. Gemini, the Twins, for example, look like twin stick-figures, with each important star in the constellation carefully included in the drawing. The same thing applies even to such complicated star groupings as the Great Bear and Hercules with his club. Not only does the book clearly identify the constellations, in # it also presents in # more charts a complete calendar of when and where the constellations are visible in the sky at latitude # degrees north, together with a one-page timetable to refer you to the correct chart for any hour of the night on any night of the year. And, to make the book a complete guide for amateur stargazers, there is an easy, readable introduction to the principles of scientific astronomy that explains everything from the precession of the equinoxes to the difference between solar and sidereal day so clearly that even an astronomical stand it. Graciously written, superbly illustrated by the author, and printed in large type and two colors, this book should become an almost obligatory item in the library of anyone interested in the nature of the ocean of stars. at the bottom of which we humans find ourselves. Ward Moore. Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, #. Cloth, #; Ballantine Books, Inc., New York, #, paper, # aspect of science fiction that las been overworked and yet remains fascinating is the "What If?" type of story. What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What kind of world would have existed if Hitler had been assassinated in #? And so on. What if -- as Ward Moore richly and realistically imagines in this first-rate novel, the "Southrons" had won the Battle of Gettysburg? Moore, who is a much better novelist than he is science fictioneer, draws a picture of a "United States" consisting of # states north of the Mason-Dixon line. The story is told by one Hodgrins McCormick Backmacker, who was born in #I and who died in #. The thing was that he died in the world we -- you and I -- know, having changed the course of history by appearing at Gettysburg from the future and inadvertently keeping the Southrons from winning that battle -- which, as we all know, they "actually" did not. But if they had -- ? In the world he had known as child and man, they had. The "United States" was a miserable dependency of the Confederacy, and most of this book is devoted to a palpably, painfully real picture of the serflike and ignorant life of a semi-enslaved Northern population. Rarely have I read a story that has such as acute understanding of how the forces of history are bent by events, not men. Briefly, the novel tells how Backmacker, born with an unusual quota of curiosity and selfreliance for a Northerner, tries to make something of himself. He learns to read, gets mixed up in which is called "The Grand Army" -- a subversive bunch of saboteurs and petty gangsters who are trying to undermine the imperial Confederacy -- escapes, and is finally asked to join an intellectual oasis in Pennsylvania. There, by various means, he becomes involved with a fantastic girl who invents a thoroughly fantastic time machine and goes back in the machine to Gettysburg to make his "fatal" error. This is an important original work, much better than the shorter version that appeared some time ago in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Merwin, Jr. Abelard Press, New York, #. #I pages, # tale from Sam Merwin's pen that comes off the presses, the quality improves. The current item, though less science fiction than detective story, has a sharpness and an authority in its writing, plotting and characterizations that make it soar high above his previous efforts. Like flny detective story, it is meant solely to entertain, not to edify: but entertain it does, in an expert and colorful fashion. The tale deals with the ancient fantasy of "possession" in a new way. The work of most geniuses, past and present, has been directed by minds from a ruthless future which take possession of either the unstable geniuses themselves or else of unstable people (often women) who are in a position to change the course of the geniuses' work. Dr. Julius Conrad, student of genius at the Wellington Institute for Studies in the Humanities, is killed off as he is about to publish a volume actually proving this theory. Other murders occur, and Journalist Henry Sanford and Detective Joe Luizetti set about trying to solve them. Tljey eventually do so,, but with a very wry and uncomfortable payoff. This is an easy and fast-moving tale. The classic route to a man's heart is through his stomach -- and she was just his dish. T he transport swung past Centaurus on the last leg of her long journey to Sol. There was no flash, no roar as she swept across the darkness of space. As silent as a ghost, as quiet as a puff of moonlight she moved, riding the gravitaticmal fields that spread like tangled, invisible spider webs between the stars. Within the ship there was also silence, but the air was stirred by a faint, persistent vibration from the field generators. This noiseless pulse stole into every corner of the ship, through long, empty passageways lined with closed stateroom doors, up spiraling stairways to the bridge and navigational decks, and down into vast and echoing holds, filled with strange cargo from distant worlds. This vibration pulsed through Lenore's stateroom. As she relaxed on her couch, she bathed in it, letting it flow through her to tingle in her fingertips and whisper behind her closed eyelids. "Home," it pulsed, "you're going home." self, moving her lips softly but making no sound. "Home," she breathed, "back home to Earth." Back to the proud old planet that was always home, no matter how far you wandered under alien suns. Back to the shining cities clustered along blue seacoasts. Back to the golden grainlands of the central states and the high, blue grandeur of the western mountains. And back to the myriad tiny things that she remembered best, the little, friendly things... a stretch of mapleshadowed streets heavy and still with the heat of a summer noon; a flurry of pigeons in the couifhouse square; yellow dandelions in a green lawn, the whir of a lawnmower and the smell of the cut grass; ivy on old bricks and the rough feel of oak bark under melons and crepe papery dances and picnics by the river in the summer dusk ; and the library steps in the evening, with fireflies in the cool grass and the school chimes sounding the slow hours through the friendly dark. She thought to herself, "It's been such a long time since you were home. There will be a whole new flock of pigeons now." She smiled at the recollection of the eager, awkward girl of twenty that she had been when she had finished school and had entered the Government Education Service. "Travel While Helping Others" had been the motto of the She had traveled, all right, a long, long way inside a rusty freighter without a single porthole, to a planet out on the rim of the Galaxy that was as barren and dreary as a cosmic slag heap. Five years on the rock pile, five years of knocking yourself out trying to explain history and Shakespeare and geometry to a bunch of grubby little miners' kids in a tin schoolhouse at the edge of a cluster of tin shacks that was supposed to be a town. Five years of trudging around with your nails worn and dirty and your hair chopped short, of wearing the latest thing in overalls. Five years of not talking with the young miners because they got in trouble with the foreman, and not talking with the crewmen from the ore freighters because they got in trouble with the first mate, and not talking with yourself because you got in trouble with the psychologist. They took care of you in the Education Service; they guarded your diet and your virtue, your body and your mind. Everything but your happiness. course. You could prepare lessons and read papers and cheap novels in the miners' library, or nail some more tin on your quarters to keep out the wind and the dust and the little animals. You could go walking to the edge of town and look at all the pretty gray stones and the trees, like squashed-down barrel cactus; watch the larger sun sink behind the horizon with its little companion star circling around it, diving out of sight to the right and popping up again on the left. And Saturday night -- yippee! -- three-year-old movies in the tin hangar. And, after five years, they come and say, "Here's Miss So-and-So, your relief, and here's your five thousand credits and wouldn't you like to sign up for another term?" Ha! So they give you your ticket back to Earth. You're on the transport at last, and who can blame you if you act just a little crazy and eat like a pig and take baths three times a day and lie around your stateroom and just dream about getting home and waking up in your own room in the morning and getting a good cup of real coffee at the corner fountain and kissing some handsome young fellow on the library steps when the Moon is full behind the bell tower? "And will the young fellow like you?" she asked herself, knowing the answer even as she asked the question. She whirled about in the middle of the stateroom, her robe " swirling around her, and ended with a deep curtsy to the fulllength mirror. "Allow me to introduce myself," she murmured. "Lenore Smithson, formerly of the Government Education Service, just back from business out on the Rim. What? Why, of course you may have this dance. Your name? Fairhearts?" She waltzed with herself a moment. Halting before the mirror again, she surveyed herself critically. "Well," she said aloud, "the five years didn't completely ruin you, after all. Your nose still turns up and your cheeks still dimple when you smile. You have a nice tan and your hair's grown long again. Concentrated food hasn't hurt your figure, either." She turned this way and that before the mirror to observe herself. Then suddenly she gave a little gasp of surprise and fright, for a cascade of laughter had flooded soundlessly inside her head. S HE stood frozen before the mirror while the laughter continued. Then she slowly swung around. It ceased abruptly. She looked around the compartment, staring accusingly at each article of furniture in turn; then quickly spun around to look behind her, meeting her own startled gaze in the mirror. Opening the door slowly, she ventured to thrust her head out into the corridor. It was deserted, the long rows of doors all closed during the afternoon rest period. As she stood there, a steward came along the corridor with a tray of glasses, nodded to her, and passed on out of sight. She turned back into the room and stood there, leaning against the door, listening. Suddenly the laughter came again, bursting out as though it had been suppressed and could be held back no longer. Clear, merry, ringing and completely soundless, it poured through her mind. "What is it?" she cried aloud. "What's happening?" "My dear young lady," said a man's voice within her head, "allow me to introduce myself. My aire Fairhearts. May I he the next dance?" "This is it," she thought. "Five years on the rock pile would do it to anyone. You've gone mad." She laughed shakily. "I can't dance with you if I can't see you." "I really should explain," the voice replied, "and apologize for my silly joke. It was frightfully rude to laugh at you, but when I saw you waltzing and preening yourself, I just couldn't help it. I'm a telepath, you see, from Dekker's star, out on the Rim." That would explain, she thought, his slightly stilted phraseology; English was apparently not his native tongue -- or, rather, his native thought. "There was a mild mutation among the settlers there, and the third generation all have this ability. I shouldn't use it, I know, but I've been so lonely, confined here to my room, that I cast around to see if there were anyone that I could talk to. Then I came upon you considering your own virtues, and you were so cute and funny that I couldn't resist. Then I laughed and you caught me." "T'VE heard of telepaths," she said doubtfully, "though I've never heard of Dekker's star. However, I don't think you have any right to go thinking around the ship spying on people." "Sh!" whispered the silent voice. "You needn't shout. I'll go away if you wish and never spy on you again, but don't tell Captain Blake, or he'll have me sealed in a lead-lined cell or something. We're not supposed to telepath around others, but I've been sitting here with all sorts of interesting thoughts just tickling the edges of my mind for so long that I had to go exploring." "Why not go exploring on your own two feet like anyone else? Have you so much brains, your head's too heavy to carry?". "Unfortunately," the vo mourned, "my trouble is in my foot and not in my head. On the second night out from Dekker's star, I lost my footing on the stairs from the dining hall and plunged like a comet to the bottom. I would probably have been killed but for the person of a stout steward who, at that moment, started to ascend the stairs. He took the full impact of my descent on his chest and saved my life, I'm sure. However, I still received a broken ankle that has given me so much pain that I have been forced to remain in my cabin. "I have had no one to talk to except the steward who brings me my meals, and, as he is the one whom I met on the stairs, he has little to say. In the morning he frowns at me, at noon he glowers, and in the evening he remarks hopefully, 'Foot still pretty bad?' Thus, I'm starved for conversation." Lenore smiled at this earnest speech. "I might talk with you for a minute or two, but you must admit that you have one advantage over me. You can' see me, or so you say, and know what I look like, but I can't see you. It isn't fair." "I can show myself to you," he . said, "but you'll have to help me by closing your eyes and concentrating very hard."  expectantly. There was a moment of darkness; then there appeared in the middle of the darkness a point of light, a globe, a giant balloon of color. Suddenly she was looking into the corner of a stateroom which appeared to hang in space. In the center of the area stood a handsome young man in a startling black and orange lounging robe, holding on to the back of a chair. She opened her eyes; for an instant the vision of the young telepath hung in the air over her couch like a ghostly double exposure. Then it faded and the room was empty. "That's a terrible effort," came his thought, "particularly when I have to balance on one foot at the same time. Well, now are we even?" Abandoning her post by the door, she moved to the couch and sat down. "I'm really disappointed," she smiled. "I was sure you'd have two heads. But I think you do have nice eyes and a terrible taste in bathrobes." She took a cigarette from her case and lit it carefully. Then she remembered her manners and extended the case to the empty air. "Won't you have one?" "I certainly would like to. I'm all out of them until the steward brings my dinner. But I'm afraid I'll have to wait, unless you can blow the smoke through the ventilators to me, or unless... you bring me one?" Lenore blushed and changed the subject. "Tell me, what do you do all day in your stateroom? Do you read? Do you play the flute? Do you telepath sweet nothings across the light-years to your girl friend on Dekker's star?" "I'm afraid my telepathic powers are a bit short-ranged to reach Dekker's star," he replied. "Besides, what girl would commune with me through the depths of space when some other young man is calling her from the dancing pavilion? And my musical talents are limited. However, I do read. I brought some books connected with the research I intend to do on Earth for my degree, and I have spent many happy hours poring over the Entomology and Galactic Arachnida." "I came better prepared than you did," she said. "Perhaps I could lend you some of my books. I have novels, plays, poetry, and one very interesting volume called Progressive Education under Rim Star Conditions. But," she lowered her voice to a whisper, "I must tell you a secret about that last one." "What is it?" "I haven't even opened it." merriment bubbling aloud in her cabin, his echoing silently inside her mind. "I haven't time to read a novel," his thought came, "and drama always bored me, but I must confess to a weakness for poetry. I love to read it aloud, to throw myself into a heroic ballad and rush along, spouting grand phrases as though they were my own and feeling for a moment as though I were really striding the streets of ancient Rome, pushing west on the American frontier or venturing out into space in the first wild, reckless, heroicdays of rocket travel. But I soon founder. I get swept away by the rhythm, lost in the intricacies of cadence and rhyme, and, when the pace slows down, when the poem becomes soft and delicate and the meaning is hidden behind a foliage of little gentle words, I lose myself entirely." She said softly, "Perhaps I could help you interpret some verses." Then she waited, clasping her hands to keep them from trembling with the tiny thrill of excitement she felt. "That would be kind of you," he said after a pause. "You could read, there, and I could listen, here, and feel what you feel as you read... or, if you wished..." Another pause. "Would you care to come down?" She could not help smiling. "You're too good a mind reader. A girl can't have any secrets any more." "Now look here," he burst out. "I wouldn't have said anything, but I was so lonely and you're the only friendly person I've come in contact with and..." "Don't be silly," she laughed. "Of course I'll come down and read to you. I'd love to. What's your cabin number?" "It hasn't got a number because -- actually I work on this ship so I'm away from the passengers' quarters. But I can direct you easily. Just start down the hall to your left and..." "My dear sir," she cried, "just wait a minute! I can't come visiting in my robe, you know; I'll have to change. But while I dress, you must take your spying little thoughts away. If I detect you peeking in here at the wrong moment, I'll run straight to Captain Blake and have him prepare his special lead-lined cell for one unhappy telepath. So you just run along. When I'm ready. I'll call you and you can lead me to your lair." He thought only the one word, "Hurry," but in the silence after he was gone she fancied she heard her heart echoing him, loud in the stillness. S HE laughed gaily to herself. "Now stop acting like a schoolgirl before the Junior Prom. You've got to get busy and wash and dress and comb and brush." And then to her reflection in the mirror; "Aren't you a lucky girl? of miles from Earth and it's starting already, and he's going to do research there for some time, and maybe at the university in your home town if you tell him just how nice it is, and he doesn't know any other girls, you'd have an inside track. Now you'd better get going or you'll never be ready. "For reading poetry, don't you think this dress is just the thing, this nice soft blue one that goes so well with your tan and shows your legs, which are really quite pretty, you know... And your silver sandals and those silver pins... just a touch of perfume... That's right; and now a little lipstick. You do have a pretty smile... There, that's right. Now stop admiring yourself and let's go." She moved to the bookshelf, frowning now, considered, selected and rejected. Finally she settled on three slim books bound in russet leather, in glossy plastic, in faded cloth. She took a little purse from the table, put the cigarette case into it. Then, with a laugh, she took one cigarette and slipped it into a tiny pocket on her skirt. "I really meant to bring you one," she whispered to the empty air, "but wasn't I mean to tease?" In the corridor, she walked quickly past the rows of closed doors to the tiny refreshment stand at the foot of the dining room stairs. The attendant rose from his stool as she approached, and came to the counter. "I'd like two frosted starlights, please," she said, "on a tray." "Two," said the attendant, and nothing more, but his eyebrow climbed up his forehead, hung for a second, then slowly drooped back to normal, as if to say that after all these years he no longer puzzled about a lovely young girl who came around in the middle of a Wednesday rest period, dressed like Saturday night and smelling of perfume, ordering two intoxicating drinks -- when she was obviously traveling alone. pleasure go through her, a feeling of possessing a delicious secret, a delightful sensation of reckless gaiety, of life stirring throughout the sleepy ship, of a web of sgprets and countersecrets hidden from everyone but this unconcerned observer. She walked back down the corridor, balancing the tray. When a little splashed over the rim of the tall glasses, she took a sip from each, tasting the sweet, cold liquid in her throat. When she came to the head of the stairs, she realized that she did not even know her telepath's name. Closing her eyes, she said very slowly and distinctly inside her head, "Mr. Fairheart?" Instantly his thought was with her, dverpowering, as breathless as an embrace. "Where are you?" "At the head of the central stairs." "Down you go." She went down the stairs, through more corridors, down more stairs, while he guided her steps. Once she paused to sip again at each glass when the liquid splashed as she was going down. The ice tickled her nose and made her sneeze. "You live a long way down," she said. "I've got to be near my charges," he answered. "I told you I work on the ship; I'm a zoologist classifying any of the new specimens of extraterrestrial life they're always picking up. And I always get stuck with the worst quarters on the ship. Why, I can't even call all my suite my own. The whole front room is filled with some sort of ship's gear that my steward stumbles over every meal time." She went on and on down and down. "How many flights?" she wondered. "Two or twelve or twenty?" Now, why couldn't she remember? Only four little sips and her mind felt so cloudy. Down another corridor, and what was that funny smell? These passages were poorly ventilated in the lower levels; probably that was what made her feel so dizzy. "Only one more flight," he whispered. "Only one more." Down and along and then the door. She paused, conscious of rising excitement, conscious of her beating heart. Dimly she noticed the sign on the door. "You -- you mean whatever it is you're taking care of is in there with you?" "Don't be frightened," his persuasive thought came. "It can't hurt you. It's locked in a cage." Then she slid the bolt and turned the handle. Her head hurt for an instant; and she was inside, a blue and silver shadow in the dim anteroom, with the tray in her hand and the books under her arm and her pulse hammering. She looked around the dim anteroom, at the spidery tangle of orange and black ropes against the left-hand wall; then at the doorway in the right-hand wall with the warm light streaming through. He was standing in the second room, one hand on the chair for support, the other extended toward her. For the first time he spoke aloud. "Hello, butterfly," he said. "Hello," she said. She smiled and walked forward into the light. She reached out for his hand. Then she stopped short, her hand pressed against an impenetrable wall. S HE could see him standing there, smiling, reaching for her hand, but there was an invisible barrier between them. Then, slowly, his room began to fade, the light dimmed, his figure grew watery, transparent, vanished. She was standing, staring at the riveted steel bulkhead of a compartment which was lit only by the dim light filtering through the thick glass over the transom. She stood there frozen, and the ice in the glasses tinkled nervously. Then the tray slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. Icy liquid splashed the silver sandals. In the silent gloom she stood immobile, her eyes wide in her white face, her fist pressed to her mouth, stifling a scream. Something touched her gently at head and wrist andankle -- all over her body. The web clung, delicate as lace, strong as steel. Even if she had been able to move, she could not have broken free as the thing against the wall began to clamber down the strands on eight furred legs. "Hello, butterfly," he said again. Two Timer Here is a brace of vignettes by the Old Vignette Master . , . short and sharp ,... like a hypodermic! Experiment  chine, gentlemen," ProB lessor Johnson proudly informed his two colleagues. "True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works." The small-scale model looked like a small scale -- a postage scale -- except for two dials in the part under the platform. Professor Johnson held up a small metal cube. "Our experimental object," he said, "is a brass cube weighing one pound, two point, three ounces. First, I shall send it five minutes into the future." He leaned forward and set one of the dials on the time machine. "Look at your watches," he said. They looked at their watches. Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine's platform. It vanished. Five minutes later, to the sec ond, it reappeared. Professor Johnson picked it up. "Now five minutes into the past." He set the other dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. "It is six minutes before three o'clock. I shall now activate the mechanism -- by placing the cube on the platform -- at exactly three o'clock. Therefore, the cube should, at five minutes before three, vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five minutes before I place it there." "How can you place it there, then?" asked one of his colleagues. "It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed there. Three o'clock. Notice, please." The cube vanished from his hand. It appeared on the platform of the time machine. "See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there I" His other colleague frowned at the cube. "But," he said, "what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o'clock? Wouldn't there be a paradox of some sort involved?" "An interesting idea," Professor Johnson said. "I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not..." There was no paradox at all. The cube remained. But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished. Sentry hungry and cold and he was fifty thousand light-years from home. A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult. But in tens of thousands of years this part of war hadn't changed. The flyboys were fine with their sleek spaceships and their fancy weapons. When the chips are down,. though, it was still the foot soldier, the infantry, that had to take the ground and hold it, foot by bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he'd never heard of until they'd landed him there. And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy... cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters. Contact had been made with them near the center of the Galaxy, after the slow, difficult colonization .of a dozen thousand planets: and it had been war at sight; they'd shot without even trying to negotiate, or to make peace. Now, planet by bitter planet, it was being fought out. He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital. He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he'd ever live to see home again. And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still. He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he'd never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales. Men like mules Never was there a more exasperating sales job... Earth was dying and its inhabitants had to be talked or tricked into leaving! rI T wasn't until we were curving in past Pluto that it occurred to any of us there might be difficulties about the job. "I suppose they'll come back with us all right?" said Tylo suddenly, as she and I picked out Earth among the pinpoints of light ahead. "Why, sure," I said. "Why would they want to stay?" "I don't know -- I just wondered," said Tylo vaguely. It ill becomes me as her brother to say so, but Tylo has no brains. She won't mind this admission if I add, as I intend to, that what she lacks in intelligence she makes up for in beauty. I might not have noticed that myself, but I've been told about it -- often. She also has something else she can and does use instead of brains. It might be intuition. Anyway, it's the capacity she often shows for finding the right thing to do, without laying any claim to the intelligence the rest of us need to work it out. Without it, she would not be a lieuttenant in the Navy. For the time being, that was all we said on the subject. There had been no suggestion of trouble about this job. little star we were approaching had once been much brighter. Even so, it was stronger than it would be in two hundred years, a hundred years, even fifty. This was the Sun that warmed the world that nurtured the seed that grew to life that developed intelligence that discovered the power that conquered space. The mighty Federation that seeped farther through the Galaxy, year by year, was the house that Jack built. I'd just been promoted to captain of the Natal, a transport ship. Being captain of a transport ship is a strange job, full of ups and downs. Sometimes you've only got the Ship itself -- the node, it's called -- and you feel like the lowest thing in the Navy, because the node, for all its power, is hardly bigger than a scout. And scout commanders are only lieutenants really, not exalted Naval brass like captains -- like me. Maneuvering around slowly in your ungainly node, a ludicrous little sevenman tub of a ship, the ugliest and second-smallest thing in space, you feel like an admiral in a rowboat. But when you're on a nine or ten-unit job, and you're pulling a couple of thousand people or hundreds of tons of cargo behind you, then you feel you're somebody. It doesn't matter that your equipage is as ugly and clumsy as ever, and that you still have a crew of only twenty or so to boss around. In terms of life and equipment, you've got as much responsibility as anyone in the Navy and all the other ships in your sector are rerouted to give you the widest of wide berths, which gives you a feeling of power. This was my first job in actual command of the Natal, and it was a big one. It wasn't difficult, at least not on the face of it. All I had to do was pick up the seven thousand remaining Terrans and take them to Yuny. From the technical and navigational point of view, a job like that wasn't beyond any ordinary junior lieutenant in the Navy. When you consider, however, the people I was transporting, and from where and why, you see why it was a big job. Earth, after all, was the birthplace of the human race. Though not by any means the only place in the Galaxy in which human beings could live, it was certainly" the only place where human beings could have evolved. This evacuation, this last farewell to Mother Earth, meant far more than just the removal of seven thousand people from one place to another. W E reached Earth and jockeyed the fourteen vast units -- separate ships, really -- into an orbit around the planet. That took time and care, but no particular skill. The principle of the transport ship is obvious. A powered, independent vessel to carry five hundred people isn't a complete impossibility, but it's impracticable. Two hundred is about the most any single ship is ever built to accommodate. Five hundred, on the other hand, can very easily and comfortably be housed in a vast shell of a vessel which has no motors, no jets, no gyros and which never has to stand the stresses and strains of gravity. These units are assembled in space, loaded and unloaded in space and, when not in use, are left orbiting around a nearby planet until they're needed again. There's next to no limit to the number of units a node can draw. At any rate, no one ever wants to transport more people or goods at any one time than one node can handle. The only real difference between the transport ships and locomotives drawing trucks across the face of a planet is the absence of gravity. Instead of applying itsbrakes like a locomotive when it wants to stop, the node has to get around behind the units in free flight, link up again and decelerate from the tail spots. Sounds complicated, but it's not. All the node had to do is move out of the way, decelerate very slightly, let the units in free fall coast on past it, edge itself into position and brake the whole convoy gradually. I left the maneuvers over Earth to Tylo and Jim Cubert. We were all on duty, the seven of us, but there was nothing for the rest of us to do exbept check everything Tylo and Jim did. Hard things are said about the Navy in the Navy, because we always gripe when we have to do what we're told, but it must be admitted that we have most of our personnel problems taped. There's always the right kind of crew for every job. A scout crew would be of no use in a transport ship, and both complements would be utterly unsuitable for duty on a big ship. I I HE men and women chosen for transport-ship duty have this in common -- they're all relaxed, indolent types -- unworried, unhurried, yet capable of bursts of activity for short periods. That's what is wanted in a transport ship. Most of the time you're doing nothing, because there's  nothing to do. Discipline hardly exists. A brother and sister wouldn't be officers together in any other Naval ship, but things like that are common enough in transports. "How did we do?" Tylo asked anxiously. She needn't have been anxious. Once again, she had demonstrated her talent for doing the right thing without, apparently, thinking. "You couldn't have done much better," I admitted. "That is, provided this orbit is right. Wait till I check it." Mary Wall checked with me. Mary and Tylo were the only women on the ship. There should have been three, to four men, but there are never enough girls in the Navy. Plenty come in, but most of them soon go out again, for one reason or another. Mary is a nice girl. But, from the point of view of appearance. she couldn't offer competition to a lot of girls who couldn't offer competition to Tylo. That was unfortunate for me. The other four men could at least enjoy looking at Tylo -- there wasn't much in that for me. So I was glad when we cast off, leaving the fourteen units -- each with its own lieutenant in charge -- coasting around above Earth's atmosphere and dropped toward Earth. It was a long time since I had had any interesting feminine companionship and I was looking forward to meeting the Terrans and a pleasant trip back. We landed in the Lenny Valley and put on warm coats before we went out. We didn't need them really -- the Lenny Valley is on the equator and still quite warm. But the knowledge that, of the once warm and friendly Earth, ninety-nine per cent was now snow and ice made us doubtful about even the few temperate spots. The Terrans came out to meet us, hundreds of them, and we were astonished to see how lightly clad they were. I don't mean they were dressed like the girls on the adventure magazine covers, but they wore only light, gay clothes, not furs and snowboots as I had half expected. They were an attractive lot -- a very attractive lot. What struck me particularly at first glance was how many old men were still handsome and athletic and how many middle-aged women had retained both beauty and slimness. "Hello," said a tall Terran pleasantly. "I'm Wili. This is Jan, and Bel -- Meni -- Reina -- Tian -- Martin. Is that enough for you at present?" I guessed that Wili had introduced seven people to us, including himself, because there were seven of us. I introduced our party in the ame bald way. "Captain Tony Wolkin. My sister Tylo -- Jim Cubert -- Mary Wall -- Noblin -- Joe Dee -- Ramon Barr." In the meantime. I noticed such diverse items as Wili's overwhelming personality, Tian's slow, friendly grin -- the apparent absence of excitement in the Terrans, or anything more than mild interest -- Meni's neat ankles -- how quickly my body felt at home on Earth -- the strange, unexpected lights in Jan's black hair -- the impish humor in Martin's eyes.  Terran. He was a leader, one of those strange individuals people like and follow, even though there may be nothing likable about them, or any real reason why they should be followed. I knew Wili was one of the people I'd always remember and I had to make an effort before I could treat him as an equal, as the leader of one group to another. "Shall we talk business right away," I asked bluntly, "or would you rather we all got acquainted first?" "I'd much rather we became better acquainted," he said amiably. "Your ship must be rather crowded -- won't you come and make yourself comfortable in my house?" We walked slowly across the grass. The seven Terrans who had been introduced to us -- four women and three men, all young -- stayed with us, but the others stayed in the background. I was glad Wili didn't talk. I wanted to get some more impressions. The attractiveness of the Terrans was even more striking when they were close. I began to understand it a little as I looked at them, one after another. A restless, passionate, polyglot culture has one kind of physical beauty. I knew that' kind, the wild, virile attractiveness of so many Federation planets, where everything is new  and raw and human characteristics are shaken up and mixed violently together in the pioneer surge -- race, intelligence, strength, passion, impatience, artistic ability, courage. The Terrans, in contrast, were placid, patient and cool. Not one of them had ever been hurried. Instead of talking loudly and rapidly, because there was so little time to talk and people were too busy to listen for long, they made speech a beautiful thing, sweet and slow and musical. Instead of scuttling about in an eternal race against time, they made every movement fluid and graceful, flowed neatly and artistically into the next. Instead of throwing on garments that didn't need attention, they dressed with such unhurried taste and care that any one of them could have served as a model for those few leisured people in the Federation worlds who really cared for their appearance. They were artists, every one of them. Those who had talent had it developed -- those who hadn't were given artistic education as a substitute for natural taste. As we approached the Lenn township, we saw that it, too, showed the same taste and craftsmanship. I won't try to describe it. I know what's good when I see it, but I don't know why or how it's good. We were all warm by the time we entered Will's house. We shed our coats and followed the seven Terrans into a pleasant room that was half veranda, half sunroom. Terrans had been told. My orders were simply to evacuate T#I Earth completely, leaving no single human being there, for reasons which were stated, but which I was not to pass on to the Terrans if I could help it. Tylo had taken to Wili, I saw. Tylo is a simple soul. Perhaps the best way to describe her is to say she's a kindly, motherly old lady, except that she happens to be twenty-two and beautiful. She always thinks the best of people, no matter how much caution and toughness the Navy tries to impose upoh her, or how many wolves she encounters in the course of her amorous adventures... Wili, I wasn't so sure about, but he seemed to have taken to Tylo too. "No," she was saying, "I've never been to Earth before. But you know that, don't you? You must know everyone who comes here these days." "I just wondered," said Wili, "because you've taken everything so much for granted -- you and your brother. That isn't usual." "What usually isn't taken for granted?" I asked. Wili smiled. "The last Naval ship was here two years ago. Its people thought us very quaint. They had cameras and took pictures of us. They even recorded our speech." "The natives are friendly." "Exactly! You seem to understand." I explained something of Naval selection. The last ship was an exploration job. Its personnel, I knew without Wili's hint, would naturally be glorified tourists, fastening on anything that was different from the worlds they knew. Wili listened with interest to my bit of rote. A S I talked, Jan joined the group, and I wasn't sorry. She was to Wili's group what Tylo was to ours. Tylo, I thought, didn't show up too well beside her. But that could be because Tylo wore a coverall which was neat, but purely utilitarian, while Jan wore a green silk dress which was sheer poetry. "I begin to have more respect for your Navy," said Wili. "I didn't give it credit for selecting the right human types for its various jobs." I wanted to say something to Jan, but didn't know what. So I answered Wili. "Tourists have seldom been a good advertisement for their country, or their world. Yet they have the necessary interest, the energy to find things out. And, generally, they are decent enough. They didn't bother you, did they?" "Not at all," said Jan. "We liked them. Nearly all of them paid me the compliment of taking pin-up pictures of me. So I naturally didn't have any objections." Jan had duly come into the conversation, but there wasn't much I could do with that. She had spoken with irony, a faint shade of resentment, an even fainter suggestion of humor. Anything I said would be wrong. I reflected on the oddity of tourists taking holiday snapshots of Jan, the attractive native. Hadn't they even sensed her superior intelligence and cultural' background? Probably they hadn't. I don't have a tall I.Q., but I had the brains and perception to know at once that the Terrans were more truly cultured than any other people in the Federation. The crew of the exploration ship, however, had no doubt seen that the Terrans climbed stairs instead of using elevators, walked instead of using cars, had no washing-machines, TV or film stars. So, they had rated them attractive primitives, quaint and backward. "Don't underestimate the exploration crew," I said, feeling an obscure urge to defend the Navy. "There would be some pretty shrewd reports going in -- some from people you hardly noticed." Wili nodded. "I guessed that. We tried to make the rep)orts as accurate as possible." I was like a child with these people. Don't misunderstand me -- I'm not making out that the Terrans are a super-race, or anything like that. But they have culture and education and understanding which probably no one else had time or inclination to acquire these days. And Wili, Jan and probably Martin had intelligence I couldn't match. It was natural enough. They were probably the cleverest of the seven thousand Terrans and I was only an ordinary Naval captain. Wili got me to state my business exactly when he wanted, not when I felt the time was right. He exchanged a glance with Jan, a glance which said clearly enough that it was just about what they had expected. "Twenty or so will go back with you," he said. "I'm not sure how many. We haven't made a survey. Say twenty certainly, fifty possibly, a hundred at most." "But I'm here to evacuate you all," I said, quelling my uneasiness. "Oh, no," said Wili pleasantly. "The rest of us aren't going. Neither now nor later." "And if you think we're merely being coy," added Jan indifferently, "you can ask everyone individually. It won't make any difference. We're staying here. We belong here." II TT became more and more clear that they meant it. I didn't do anything about it then. I wanted to think the matter over. But later I talked, I argued, I even threatened. I had read my instructions again. They were quite definite -- Earth to be evacuated completely. I read the stated reasons too, and related them to my own ideas. They made sense. Earth was still important. All through the Galaxy, on every one of the ninety-four Federation planets, people had a warm spot for the old world. The Yunians, say, were' mildly interested in the Collahimans or the Smithsonians or the Carones, but everyone was much more than mildly interested in the Terrans. It was a brake on Federation affairs. If nothing had been wrong on Earth, or if Earth had been dead and deserted, people wouldn't have spared a thought for it. But now, with the Sun rapidly declining, with Federation scientists seeking explanations and excuses for the occurrence of something they had said could not possibly occur. Earth was always in the Federation's thoughts. It was like an exciting game that wasn't quite over. Meanwhile, Earth counted too much. There seemed to be no doubt about that. People didn't really love Earth, they were just sentimental about it. It was like one of the old tear-jerker deathbed scenes, and it could drag on for years yet. The whole Federation was trying to carry on its multifarious activities with one eye on Earth. The traders, more hard-headed, didn't like it. The governors didn't like it. The Navy didn't like it. That was what I was to avoid telling the Terrans, if I could. Fortunately, none of the people left on Earth had ever been in any of the Federation cities. They didn't know how our smart, goahead Federation citizens sighed and went dreamy-eyed and sentimental when someone sang Take Me Back to Dear Old Terra. They didn't know why I had orders to ring down the curtain -- so that the audience could go back to work. A nd I agreed that the Terrans shouldn't be told this. They were proud and placid and imperturbable anyway. They were intelligent, cultured mules, but still mules. Perhaps this would make them even prouder and then it would be quite impossible to shift them. Of course, I could go back and report that the Terrans wouldn't come. I could imagine what would be said at Naval HQ if I did. "You were sent to evacuate them, weren't you? Why didn't you?" Every captain in a Space Navy has far more responsibility than an admiral in a Sea Navy. The admiral has to radio for orders. The captain has to act on the spot. Months, sometimes years may pass before a Federation Navy captain can report back for further orders and return and execute them. Besides, there is the colossal item of expense. Could I go back to Yuny and ask wjjat I was to do now? I could not. I had been sent to evacuate Earth and I couldn't go back to Yuny without the Terrans unless I was prepared to say, "I didn't do what I was sent to do, because the situation had changed since I got my orders. Instead I..." The situation hadn't changed. Earth still had to be evacuated, now or later. Anyone could see that with half an eye. Why couldn't the Terrans? Why did they choose to be mulish? I set out to make them see it. I argued with Wili, with Jan, with Bel, with Martin, with people I sought out myself, just to see what the ordinary Terran thought. Already, nearly all of Earth was frozen to death. Only the narrow belt that got the greatest concentration of the Sun's feeble rays had enough heat and light. True, Earth's inner fires still burned. By comparison with some of the barren worlds which were only now being colonized. Earth was still young. Earth, however, was dependent on a sun which had failed her. Hurricanes raged over most of the planet's surface, blizzards hid the dead rock from sight. What had once been the Land of the Midnight Sun now had hardly any light at all. There were still warm spots on the equator. I gathered that the Terrans sometimes went to swim in tepid pools, in regions where the temperature was in the seventies -- for a time. But only the Lenny Valley had the small range of temperature to which human beings are accustomed. A sort of Shangri-la, it was a refuge from the blizzards outside, the biting cold, the tearing winds, the floods, even the occasional, capricious heat. T saw in a few days that people  could live quite comfortably in Lenny Valley with very little shelter, without artificial weather control, without mechanization. They grew crops on the slopes, with hydroponics a standby. They kept cows and sheep and poultry and generally led a simple, fairly easy but full life divided among agriculture, building, reading, music, weaving, drama, painting and a hundred other things. It was idyllic -- but so ephemeral. Next year, or in ten years, the shirts would become heavy tunics, the light sandals heavy boots, the graceful skirts thick, heavily lined trousers. The crops would die. The cattle would die. Even the people would begin to die, as life became harder. And there would be nowhere on Earth to go. When Lenny Valley became cold, everswhere else would be colder. Unless the Federation forgot its pique at being turned down before and sent another transport ship -- for the Terrans had nothing like a spaceship of their own -- the Terrans would die, a few at first, then all in a rush. It was so unreasonable, so obstinate, so untypical of Wili and Jan, that I wondered if they were quite sane. I knew why they wanted to stay on Earth. It was natural -- I could understand that myself. But not to leave it, when they obviously must -- were they relying on the Federation to keep sending ships? If so, the sooner they were disillusioned, the better. The Navy isn't inhumane, but it does things like this in its own time. Sending a ship on a long and fantastically expensive journey every few years, to see if the Terrans were ready to leave yet, had no place in Naval economics. No one was prepared to calculate, after being so wrong already, how long the Sun would radiate energy at roughly its present rate. The Navy's plan, the sensible plan, was to evacuate the Terrans now, earlier than necessary, instead of coming back, possibly just too late, to rescue them. If the situation was as it seemed to be, I clearly had to take the Terrans away by force if necessary. If they were going to act like mules. I'd have to treat them as mules. I told Wili that. He laughed. "You wouldn't have told me that if you meant to do it, Tony," he said -- he still persisted in being friendly. "And I wouldn't be laughing, if I thought you could do it. But though you've got plenty of power in that ugly little ship of yours, how are you going to use it to get seven thousand of us in those shells out in space, when we won't come? How are you going to use your force of seven -- even your force of twenty-one -- to make us?" rans with the force I had was like building ships to accommodate five hundred people. It wasn't downright impossible, but it was highly impracticable. "I might," I said on another occasion, to Jan this time, "have your determination to stay here ruled attempted suicide. In such a case, you could be taken intoprotective custody and removed to safer worlds." "How true!" sighed Jan, not very interested. Jan never did seem very interested in anything. "But, if you try to do this in a legalistic way, look at all the shuttling back and forth there's going to be between here and the Federation worlds. Will that make you popular?" It wouldn't. I had to abandon that idea. And it was the same with everything else I thought of. Once Jan and I walked a mile or so down the valley, and I refrained from mentioning my mission. For the moment, I was more interested in Jan. I'm not very good at making guesses about groups like the Terrans or nations or races. But I can make pretty good guesses about individuals. I was beginning to have an idea about Jan. She was young, beautiful, intelligent -- yet bored, resentful, almost apathetic. Nevertheless, I was sure she was made for happiness, not misery. She didn't have the capacity for enjoying misery that a real pessimist has. "Suppose I tried to kiss you," I wondered aloud, "what's likely to come of it?" "You'd probably succeed," said Jan indifferently. Being kissed, apparently, was one of the many things that didn't matter at all. I kissed her. Then I looked at her, puzzled. "Have I purple teeth?" she asked resentfully. "Has my nose turned upside down?" "I wish I understood you, Jan." "No one ever understands anyone." I shook my head. "Not one of your more intelligent remarks, Jan. You know perfectly well what I mean." "Why should I think for you?" T tried to take her in my arms again, but she fended me off. "May I have three guesses?" I asked. "About what?"  "You. Why you're always angry." "I'm not angry," she retorted angrily. "People are generally angry," I said thoughtfully, "when they think they've made a bad mistake." She went white. "You can give yourself ten marks for that," she said bitterly. "I made a mistake all right. Now let's go back." "I haven't had my three guesses yet. One -- you can't make up your mind whether to leave Earth or stay." "Wrong. I'm staying, but I don't really care much." "Two -- you love Wili, and he won't have anything to do with you." She didn't do a thing. She simply stood still and stared at me, expressionless. "Three -- " I said, "that being so, you've dedicated your life to showing everyone how completely your heart is broken." Her eyes flashed dangerously at that. But presently she had control of herself again. "It's none of your business," she said at last. "It isn't Wili anyway. And it has absolutely nothing to do with you and why you're here, so forget it, will you?" T can't very well do that." We were sitting on a hump of grass. I took Jan's hand. She seemed too surprised to do anything about it. It hadn't occurred to her, apparently, that my kissing her like that had been anything more than a conventional recognition of the fact that she was an attractive girl. "No," I admitted, "perhaps it has nothing to do with why I'm here. But things don't come neatly packaged, ever#dhing partitioned off from everything else. They mingle with each other -- anyway, I can't just forget it, Jan. Would you laugh if I said I fell in love with you at first ' sight?" "I'm not laughing," said Jan. "But you're exaggerating." "A little. But it's true that, since I first saw you, I've wanted to know you better, find out more about you..." She moved restless! and freed her hand. "Look, Tony," she said, not unkindly, "I still think you'd better forget the whole thing." "Isn't there anything I can do?" "About what? Never mind. Let's go back. This time I mean it." We went back then, after one of the most unsatisfactory love scenes in history. Ill I T was probably my preoccupation with Jan which prevented me from seeing something very obvious about the Terrans for so long. The course of Tylo's possibly true love was running much more smoothly. She adored Wili more and more every day and he seemed quite prepared to reciprocate. I didn't interfere. I didn't think Tylo's intuition would let her down. She would know when to advance and when to retreat. She was with me in the control room one sunny afternoon when half a dozen young Terrans, Wili and Jan among them, came out and dropped lazily on the grass between the ship and the township to sun-bathe. I glanced quizzically at the wall thermometer. Sixty-one, and if that was in the shade it was also out of the light breeze that was blowing outside. Still, for Lenny Valley it was undoubtedly a warm day and the Terrans were used to slightly lower temperatures than we were. "Tony," said Tylo hesitantly, looking out at them. "Yes?" "Do you think they'd mind if I went out and joined them?" "Not in the least." I thought she was hinting that I should go out with her too, for company, but I had something else in mind. I wanted to look closely at the Terrans when they didn't know I was looking at them. I wanted to hear what they said, in case they dropped some clue about why they were remaining so stubbornly, so unreasonably on a world which could support them for only a short time longer. Tylo hesitated a little longer, then went out. The Terrans were two hundred yards from the ship, but in my control room I had gadgets I could use to count the hairs on their heads if I liked. Merely hearing what they said, bringing them to within an apparent six feet of my eyes, was nothing. I looked at Jan first, of course. Now that I had some sort of key to her personality, I seemed to understand her better every time I saw her. Her emotions were too deep. She was the kind of person who was always liable to be hurt, and seriously hurt, by things which would trouble others for five minutes and, then be forgotten. She had loved, not wisely, but too well. And I began to sense whom she had loved. There was something taut about the way she looked at Tian, something strained about the way he smiled at her. Tian was married to Meni, who was there, too. I didn't try to guess what had happened. The details didn't matter. What did matter was that Jan had receive'd a wound that wasn't healing as it should. made, everything they wore, showed what an artistic people they were. When Tylo joined the group of sun-bathers, the difference between her and the others was a mild shock. She had put on a bathing suit, the usual twopiece affair, and on any of the Federation worlds the result would have been declared just about perfect. Beside Jan's outfit, however, Tylo's was suddenly crude, even a little embarrassing. It covered what was usually covered and went to great trouble not to cover anything else. Tylo wasn't dressed, she was censored. Jan, on the other hand, wore a lovely asymmetrical sunsuit, which was equally unconcerned at revealing a lot that Tylo's covered and at concealing much that might decently have been exposed. It was fine art beside shoddy workmanship. Rather to my surprise, Tylo noticed fiiis at once. She wanted to borrow a sunsuit like the Terran girls', and seemed puzzled when they all agreed it was impossible. "Nothing that anyone wears can ever suit anyone else exactly," Meni explained. "If it's right for you, it must have been utterly wrong for whoever lent you it." "Surely a sunsuit like Jan's... ?" murmured Tylo hesitantly. "No," said Meni decidedly. "Definitely not! You and Jan..." And she went on to point out the various anatomical differences, differences of muscular tension and differences in patterns of movement, that made Jan's suit quite impossible for Tylo. Tylo agreed doubtfully, not .pretending to an artistic appreciation she didn't have. "Later," Meni promised, "I'll make you a dress." "The Naval uniform," Wili observed, "happens to suit your brother. He looks quite passable in it. But not you, Tylo. Promise you'll never wear it again while you're here." "I promise," said Tylo happily, glad to be able to promise Wili an#dhing. ing, swimming and then about the Terran way of life in general. Tylo diffidently mentioned, from her experience of other worlds, a few changes which would soon have to be made. The Terrans agreed placidly with every word she said. That was the inexplicable thing about it all. It would have made some kind of sense if the Terrans had argued about the future and declared passionately that the Sun would never die. But they agreed, with the utmost reasonableness, that soon the kind of life they were living would be impossible. I know I was dumb. It wasn't until I had ceased to pay any attention to what Tylo and the Terrans were saying, and had lost myself in rather wistful contemplation of Jan's charms, that I caught my first glimpse of the obvious. I cursed myself briefly, thought for a moment and went ' out after Tylo. I went straight to the sunbathers and looked down at Wili. "I suppose I should be ashamed of myself," I said, "but it's only just struck me that you must have a refuge somewhere." Jan looked up with a shadow of a smile. I got the impression she was mildly glad I'd worked that out at last, as if the other Terrans had said I was too stupid to see it and she'd said I wasn't. "You must have atomic power, of course," I went on, "though you don't use it here. You haven't forgotten your science, after all. You're just having a last holiday from a mechanized culture before you retire to it for ever. You prefer even a mechanized culture on Earth to any kind of life anywhere else." Wili nodded coolly. "You've even got the name," he said. "That's exactly what we call it -- Refuge." "Underground?" "No. It's in a valley like this." "Then what's the point? How is it a refuge?" "Tomorrow," said Wili, "we'll take you and Tylo to see it. Then you'll know." cemed. It wasn't clear whether they'd been hoping I wouldn't see that they must have a second string to their bow if they seriously intended to remain on Earth, or had expected me to see it long since. They were so simply, so completely sophisticated that a Yahoo like me was always in deep water. Soon after that, Tian, Meni and Tylo went away together. Gradually, Jan and I were alone, and we had another of our frustrating interludes. I needn't set down in detail what I said -- it was sincere and thoroughly conventional. I even told her I couldn't live without her. She listened indifferently and said at last, "Kiss me." "Why?" I asked perversely. "What good would it do?" "What good does anything ever do?" asked Jan chacteristically. "I want you, not a kiss and a hug that only makes me want you more." "Then you can have me." I gaped. "What do you mean?" "That! We're rather a moral lot as a rule, we Terrans. The others won't approve. But I don't think it matters. Where and when?" I had a strange, tight feeling inside me that I couldn't identify. "That wasn't what I had in mind," I said, my voice seeming to come from a long way off. "I want to marry you." "That would be stupid. If I still care for anything, it's keeping my word. I wouldn't make Ml all those marriage vows when I don't mean them." "What's the matter with you, Jan? Tian isn't worth it. Nobody's worth it!" "So you know it's Tian." "Never mind that. Because you can't have the man you want, it isn't the end of everything." That rare flash of humor came out from the shadows and she actually smiled. "I thought you said a moment ago that you couldn't live without me?" she said. I took the only way out of it. "That was a lie," I said. "I could live without you, but I'd rather not." She smiled again, but the bitterness was back. Involuntarily I dropped beside her. I only wanted, obscurely, to protect her, but when I touched her all my good resolutions dissolved. I kissed her again and again, holding her first this way, then that. I kissed her arms and her throat and her shoulders, knowing that next second I should have to get up and be calm and controlled, but not this second, not this kiss. reached the point when I had to let her go and force myself away from her. I was controlled, though I wasn't calm. "I'm sorry," I said flatly. "What for? I wasn't fighting." True, but she hadn't been responding either -- not really. "What would free you?" I asked. "If Tian died, would that do it?" him, are you?" "Would that free you?" I persisted. "I think I've always known," she said slowly, "that I could free myself whenever I liked." "Then why not do it and stop play-acting?" She was annoyed. "Who's play-acting?" "You, with your don't-care, nothing-matters pose. You're pretending to everybody, particularly yourself, that yours was such a great, true love that when Tian wouldn't have you your whole life was wasted." "Go away," she said. She was rigid with fury. Her muscles were taut and she panted a little. I had never seen anyone so visibly, physically angry. I wanted to stay and make her release all that passion, somehow. Without being a psychologist, I felt it must be a good thing for her to get some of that violence out of her. But I didn't know what she might do, and I couldn't afford to let her interfere with my main job on Earth. I turned and walked toward the ship, without  glance back at Jan.  adequate to describe Earth and the Terrans. And if that was true of their voices, their appearance, their clothes and the simple buildings of Lenn, how much more true it was of Refuge. Wili had invited only Tylo and me and I didn't ask to take the rest of my crew along. Of the Terrans, there were Wili, Tian, Meni, Martin and Jan. Jan neither sought my company nor made any attempt to avoid it. She ignored completely the incident of the day before. I wore my uniform, secure in the knowledge that I looked quite passable in it. I was also fully aware how obvious it was that I was a man from another world. Tylo was already almost assimilated by the Terrans, for though she still moved as she always had, she was wearing the dress Meni had made for her, and it subtly added grace to everything she did. Her voice had always been soft and musical, more like the Terrans' than most Federation voices. Now she was frankly imitating their speech, with fair success, for her ear for music was better than her eye for beauty. The clothes the Terrans and Tylo wore for the expedition should have given me a strong clue about Refuge. They were as simple as ever, but they suggested a much more highly civilized, less primitive culture. They weren't meant to keep the wearer warm, for one thing. The Terrans weren't in the slightest concerned about Federation standards of modesty, judging by the way Jan's breasts and Tylo's tummy were incorporated in the very design of the dresses they wore. Yet no one wore anything which was sexy or exhibitionist. In the cases of Jan and Tylo, as in the others, one could see that the aim was pure beauty, not sensuality, and that it had been gloriously achieved. I didn't feel in the least disturbed on Tylo's account, as I would have been, say, if she had made a similar exhibition of herself at a Yunian ball. The subway was the first surprise, but in view of the rest it's hardly worth mentioning. In one of the buildings we hadn't previously been inside, we went downstairs and found ourselves in a nicely designed subway station. We had known that the Terrans had available to them the mature technology which had built the starships, but this was the first indication that they still used any of it. how far the car took us. Since the tunnel was a sealed vacuum, it may have gone pretty fast -- acceleration was so smooth that it didn't tell us much. Tylo ingenuously asked how far we were going, but Wili, who had been attending her very closely since we started, merely smiled and shook his head. I sat in back with Jan. There was a tacit understanding among the Terrans that Jan and I, and Wili and Tylo, should be left together. They neither forced themselves on us nor embarrassed us by leaving us too obviously to ourselves. "If Wili marries Tylo," Jan remarked suddenly, "will she stay here?" The question wasn't merely startling, it left me no possible answer. As far as I was concerned, the question of the Terrans remaining on Earth didn't arise. Far less, then, did the question of Tylo staying too. I said the only thing I could think of. "If you marry me, will you come to Yuny?" She was less bitter and resentful, a much more pleasant companion than usual -- which seemed strange after our last conversation. She said easily, "Let's leave out the first part and consider the second. Would I go to Yuny? Certainly, on a visit. But I think I'd come back here in the end." "Because of the place or the people?" "The people. Earth counts less to me as a place than it does to most of the others. But you know something of our life here. Does anything like it exist anywhere else?" "No," I admitted. "You wouldn't consider going away, and staying away, because of Tian?" "I have -- often." "Will you consider it again?" "Yes." We were interrupted then. But that, short as it was, was the most satisfactory conversation I'd ever had with Jan. IV fuge? Think of ancient Babylon, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York. Think of Neris on Yuny, Phalan on Colahima, Mercosant on Smithson, Sanctuary on Carone. Think of a city which everyone would have to agree was a little better, a little more beautiful, a little greater than any of these -- and that's Refuge. Don't try to imagine it much better, much more beautiful. The imagination balks at that. It wasn't a huge city, yet it was clearly built for many more than the seven thousand Terrans. "When we come here," explained Wili, "we'll multiply again. Perhaps Earth will one day have more." "Why not come here now?" I asked, looking around me in wonder. "Why should we? This is Refuge, when we need it. You see it's also in a valley, like Lenn. Presently, we'll show you the difference." I could guess the difference. Lenn was a simple little town. Refuge was not only a great city, it was a powerful, versatile, clever city. The magnificent buildings were a blend of art and science. The art of the Terrans I had already seen -- not till I saw Refuge did I see their science. The exploration ship hadn't reported this. The exploration ship hadn't known about this. When one saw it, the Terrans became at once not idyllic primitives, but a still-great people. At a glance, I knew that the Terrans would be able to control the weather in this valley, heat the houses and the streets and the very air if necessary, carve out from the atmosphere above exactly the conditions they wanted. I knew they could put a dome over the city whenever they liked, and live in comfort, independent of the Sun and the conditions elsewhere on Earth. I knew that I was looking at a self-contained, almost immortal city. "Only a few people live here at the moment," said Wili. "Perhaps a score. They are merely caretakers -- everything is complete, ready for us, when we are ready to come." So far, I was only looking around. That was enough for me, without considering the implications of what I saw. Tylo wasn't saying anything. She just stared. We walked through the empty streets. Usually, there's something grim about an empty city, but that's because there's something grim behind the city being empty. Refuge was warm and friendly, like a new coat ready to be worn. It didn't seem dead at all -- doors opened at a touch, everything was spotless, everything worked when Wili showed us things. It was a production without a single flaw. I" saw now why the Terrans were dressed as they were.  Their clothes were just right for a city like this. It would never be too cold or too hot here. It would never rain or snow unless the Terrans wanted it to rain or snow. Clothes, yes, it wasn't the kind of city in which people would wander about naked. But clothes needed to supply no protection against the elements there. They would never be blown about capriciously by unwanted winds. They would never be caught in crude machinery or on hard, sharp corners. Perhaps I was the wrong man to have been assigned this job. Thousands of captains would have seen only buildings in Refuge. But I saw more. I had enough appreciation of the beauty and magnificence of Refuge to overwhelm me and tell me one thing plainly. I was going to fail. My orders were uncompromising -- evacuate the Terrans. Not for their own sake, not really because Earth couldn't support them, but so that, for everyone in the Federation, a neat line could be drawn after the story of Earth, and people would cease to be concerned and sentimental about it. I was no politician. I was simply supposed to do as I was told, without weighing the pros and cons of what was really a political and economic situation. I wasn't even a psychologist. It wasn't for me to say, "The Terrans are perfectly safe. They can look after themselves, so I left them. And anyway, I think you're wrong -- it doesn't do any harm for people to be sentimental bout Earth." I went on automatically asking "We haven't been building it for very long," Wili told us. "Only about fifteen years or so. And as you see, it was planned and built as a unit. There have been no afterthoughts. At the same time, the original plan allowed for any expansion which  may be necessary later." proachfully. I was monopolizing Wili, when I could be putting my questions to any of the Terrans. Tylo had got over her wonder. She still gave little delighted exclamations now and then, but she had already accepted the fact of the city. I dropped back beside Jan. "Well?" she said quizzically. I knew the extent of her question. She was thinking of our conversation in the tube, of Wili and Tylo, of herself and me, of my orders to evacuate the Terrans. I went to what seemed the root of the matter. "This won't make the slightest difference to the Federation," I said thoughtfully. "It does to me, but then I'm not the Federation, or the Navy for that matter. What's a city to the Federation? There must be hundreds of thousands of cities in the ninety-odd worlds. The Federation wants you people away from here. It's a move in a big game, a game that has nothing to do with me." Jan looked mildly interested, for once. "It might be fun to watch a big game like that closer at hand," she said. "But surely, your job ends with going back and reporting that we won't leave, that we can look after ourselves?" I shook my head. "Not in the least. This won't make the Federation change its mind. Rather the reverse, I guess. For, if people heard about Refuge, they'd all want to see it. And, instead of Earth being written off, there would be a constant stream of tourists coming back here. A lot of people would even want to live here." Jan nodded. "That's why Wili didn't want you to know about Refuge, if it could be avoided. He knew it wasn't likely that it could, but there was no harm in trying. We don't want your people here, Tony. They wouldn't fit in this world among us. I don't mean people like you and Tylo -- people like you will come back and we'll welcome them. But the others -- have the other five in your crew ever remotely understood us?" I knew they hadn't. "But that's a minor thing," I said. "Suppose I did go back and report as you suggest. If the Federation doesn't change its mind -- and it won't -- it'll merely send out someone else to do my job. My going back won't solve anything. You've got to leave, Jan." She merely smiled. r had known all along about this other, more pleasant, more interested Jan. I couldn't have loved her if I hadn't. But this was the first time she had come into the open, and I didn't know what I wanted to do more -- evacuate Earth, Jan with the rest, or try to make headway with Jan and forget the business of evacuation. There comes a time when one's private life is more important than one's public duty, and I had almost reached that stage over Jan. We had dropped well behind the others. Wili must have noticed it, but didn't appear to mind. Jan took a turning that led us away from the group ahead. I didn't comment. Presently Jan motioned me up shallow stone steps to a door. "I'm going to live here," she said. "We've even settled where we're going to live, you see." We went inside. "And aren't you impatient to come and live here?" She smiled with a touch of the old bitterness. "Me, impatient for anything?" When she put it that way, it did sound ridiculous. I couldn't imagine Jan being excited, anticipating the pleasure of the future. She had decided that there was probably no future and certainly no pleasure in it. "No, but the others?" I said. "We're not impatient people. Besides, there's a reluctance to go in before it rains, so to speak. We have such a short time to live on Earth as people have lived since before history began -- d Refuge will last forever. You see?" She broke off her explanation, because by this time we were in what looked like a lounge. It was comfortable, but not ridiculously luxurious. The Terrans held no brief for discomfort, but there were a lot of thirigs they rated higher. The chairs, for example, were as beautiful as possible, not as comfortable as possible. They weren't bulbous and cushiony as the most luxurious armchairs are. J AN pirouetted in the center of the room. She was so nearly happy, and we were getting on so well together, that I knew something was due to go wrong any moment. When and if Jan gave up the Tian myth, the ghost of her love for Tian, I would know. She hadn't done it yet. "What are you going to do?" she asked. An idea of what I must do was forming in my mind. But I couldn't tell Jan. "Forget it," I said. "We've said all we can say on that subject." She nodded. An odd expression came into her eyes. It wasn't resentment, it wasn't bitterness, it wasn't her occasional wry humor. It looked almost like longing. I mistrusted it. I did mistrust Jan. I wanted her, not as she was, but as she could be. "I like you, Tony," she said unexpectedly. "Do you really think it would be wrong if we... ?" I weakened. Feeling as I did about Jan, I could turn down an offer like that only once. "No," I said, my voice coming from far away again. "I don't really think it would be wrong." We kissed .and clung to each other. Jan bent up one leg behind her in that curious, delighted way woman have. It was completely different from the last time. It was wonderful and everything I felt was new to me, for I had never held in my arms a woman I loved a quarter as much as I loved Jan. That made it different from anything that had ever happened to me before, and I knew it wasn't wrong, after all. I kissed Jan's forehead tenderly. Then suddenly she burst into bitter tears and beat my chest with her fists. "You're not Tian! You're not Tian!" she cried over and over again. But she recovered herself before I had to slap her. Meni and Tian when we got back. I indicated silently but clearly that I wanted her back at the ship with me. Jim and Mary met us as we went to my cabin, asking what we'd seen and staring wide-eyed at Tylo, but I left them with their mouths open and shut the door of the cabin behind us. "What's the matter?" asked Tylo, puzzled. I looked at her as if I had never seen her before. I was in a foul mood. I stared her up and down and, under my gaze, she went as red as a tomato. She hadn't been able to change completely in a few hours -- the stares of Jim, Mary and me reminded her forcefully that no decent girl would wear a dress like that in public. "Take that filthy thing off and put on your uniform," I said. "Then come back here." I had succeeded magnificently in making her miserable and ashamed, but she stood still. "Do as I tell you," I shouted. "I promised Wili," she said in a small voice. "Oh -- never mind. The Terrans themselves have shown us how to evacuate them," I said. "Now we merely have to find . Refuge, destroy it, and they'll -- " "No!" exclaimed Tylo, her face ashen. "You can't do that." "Why not?" I said fiercely. "Our job is to carry out orders, and the Navy will blink at any little irregularity we may commit in doing so." "It's not any little irregularity to destroy Refuge!" Tylo critd, grasping my arm tightly. "It's a crime!" "With Refuge gone," I said savagely, "they'll have to come with us. That's the only thing that's enabled them to refuse. They can't build it again -- we could nifeke sure they hadn't so much as a screwdriver to start making another atom plant. It's what we're here to do." "You're mad," said Tylo. "You don't mean it. You understand the Terrans better than I do. You understand better than I do what a magnificent thing Refuge is." "All right," I said more calmly. "So they can build another. We'll give them a planet -- a new, young world with a warm sun. They can make a better Refuge, and they won't need a dome to imprison themselves when their world dies. What's so wonderful about old, dead Earth? I tell you. Refuge is going tobe blasted to dust, and the Navy won't strip me, it'll congratulate me."  people who are living there, you fool!" "No, I'll have to get them out first, then smash the city. They won't have weapons. Even if they have, we -- " "You can't do it, Tony," said Tylo. The first wild horror was gone. She spoke passionately, but seriously. "If you harmed Refuge, you'd never be able to forget it. I'm talking about you, not the Federation or the Navy or the Terrans." Once again she had found the right thing to say without really working it out. I calmed down some more. "I've got no choice, Tylo," I said. "Suppose I went back and reported, the first thing they'd say would be, 'You didn't have any chance to sabotage this socalled Refuge and take the fools away, did you?' And I can't see myself telling them, 'Yes, I could have done that, but it was such a pretty little city I hadn't the heart to do it.' " "Refuge isn't a pretty little city. I'm going to live there with Wili when we can't live in Lenn any longer." For a moment I almost let that influence me. "Has he asked you?" I demanded. "No, but he will. I know he'll ask me." "You'll be much more use to Wili on a young planet," I said. Tylo snatched the door open and was gone. She moved so quickly that, though I'd been watching her closely, ready for anything she might do, she was in the passage before I could move. The door, slammed hard, hit me as I went after her. By the time I got to the airlock, she was almost in the streets of Lenn and still running faster than I could. I closed the airlock. That meant I had to act right away. I bumped into Mary and Jim again and got them busy. The node was in the air in two minutes. If there were any defenses, Wili would have time to get them in operation, for I didn't know exactly where Refuge was. However, I had carefully noted the position of the Sun at Lenn and at Refuge, and had a good idea where to go. With luck, Wili would warn the twenty people in Refuge to get clear. safely destroy the main power plant of the city. It wasn't in operation and nobody lived in that district. The twenty caretakers were gathered in one corner of Refuge and, if I was careful, I could raze section after section until they made for cover. When I was sure they were clear, I could finish the job. Jim and Mary and Ramon kept bothering me with questions, but I only told them we had to destroy an empty town. Otherwise, I ignored them. Over and over again I checked my orders mentally and my reading of the situation. The Federation, I was certain, wanted Earth evacuated at any price -- and now. Once Refuge was destroyed, and the Terrans were away, arguments would be a waste of time. That didn't mean there wouldn't be any -- nevertheless, the Navy lawyers could always make a good case to defend a captain after he had done what the Navy wanted done. No, I didn't have to worry on that score. Provided nobody was hurt, the Federation would merely listen politely to any protests the Terrans might make, then generously give them a newly charted world in full reparation. I found Refuge even more easily than I had thought I would. From the air, in the fading light, it was a place of fairy beauty. Jim and the others exclaimed when they saw it. But they had seen the expression on my face. There was no argument. There was no apparent defense. We had our screens up as a matter of course, but nothing was testing them. We came down closer, and I picked out a little group of people on the hillside north of the city. They had been warned, apparently. Everything was perfect. There was no fear of blast harming them, not with the precision weapons we were going to use. I set the ranger on the site of the power-plant. It would remain on the plant now, no matter what the ship did. I set a trial limit of # yards, which might possibly destroy the plant right away, but not probably. I put my finger on the button. V acting, just like Jan. I knew I should press the button -- I wasn't in any doubt about that. But I had never intended to do it. All I had said to Tylo was true. Nevertheless, if the Navy wanted Refuge destroyed, they would have to send someone else to do it. I couldn't. Perhaps, at one time, I had thought my anger and bitterness said. "We're going back." The others didn't understand, of course, but their faces showed relief. I wasn't any more companionable on the way back than I had been on the way to Refuge. I knew now I had failed. Obviousat Jan might carry me through. Certainly, if I could have given the order for someone else to destroy the city, I might have done it. But as it was, I had only been barking vfithout any bite. I had made Tylo, who knew me better than anyone, think I was going to do it. I had almost made myself think I was going to do it. "Cancel those last remarks," I ly, no further appeal to Wili would have any effect, and I didn't think there was any point in threatening Refuge without intending to implement the threats. I set the ship down exactly where it had been before, as if I had merely been making a test flight. When the other noises stopped, I heard the ranger clicking. It was still set on the power-plant at Refuge. I looked over at Lenn, expecting someone to come out. No one did for a while. For a moment I felt a little resentful, thinking they might come out and say they were glad I hadn't destroyed Refuge after all. Then I grinned involuntarily at the idea of the Terrans weeping tears of gratitude, because I hadn't committed what even Tylo had called a crime. At last someone did appear, but it wasn't Tylo. It was Jan, alone. I didn't want my crew to hear what was said, so I went out and met her outside. For a full minute, we stood facing each other, not saying an#dhing. I couldn't read Jan's expression, which was unusual. As a rule, it was all too clear what she was thinking. "That was a silly thing to do, wasn't it." she said at last. I shrugged. "I should have gone through with it," I said. "Someone else will, later, unless you can get to work on the Federation or public opinion first." She shook her head definitely. "You were never going to do it," she said. "I knew that when Tylo told us what had happened." "You know me better than Tylo?" "Perhaps. You made a scene because of what happened at Refuge, that's all. You hurt Tylo because she was happy, and you weren't. I know. I've done the same sort of thing myself." W E smiled at each other. Jan's smile was a little bitter, but I was used to that. "All right," said Jan. "We'll try it." I knew what she meant. "Despite the fact that I'm not Tian?" I asked wryly. I had to take it calmly, for if I'd let myself go I'd have done something crazy. "I don't think I could pull that one again. It crept up on me. It was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. Anyway, Tony, I keep my word. If I go through those marriage vows with you. I'll mean them." We didn't even kiss. It seemed we'd always done that in the wrong Circumstances, at the wrong time. "Wili wants to see you," said Jan. "I thought he might." "You won't like what he has to say," Jan warned. "Maybe it'll damage your self-esteem. That's why I told you this first." She'd always been like that, really. She'd never been spoiled at the core -- only around the edges. "I'll wait here," she said. Tylo was with Wili, but she left us alone when I appeared. She wouldn't meet my eye. I didn't know whether she was still angry with me or not, but I didn't think it was likely. Tylo couldn't let the Sun go down on her wrath if she tried. Wili smiled and held out his hand. I took it. That made things a lot easier. "I gather from something Jan said," I remarked, "that Refuge isn't as easy to destroy as it looks?" "That is so. I don't think anyone will ever actually attack Refuge. We aren't going to represent competition or a threat to anyone. But all the same, we're prepared to defend it. Our weather-control, before we have to close the dome, will naturally work on a system of force-fields, enclosing masses of air and diverting rain and snow. For ordinary defense, we only have to reinforce this system. As you can imagine, power's practically limitless. We don't need Solar energy. Atomic power is enough." T nodded, noting he hadn't told me much. That was reasonable. I'd h,ve to report to Naval HQ., and he would naturally tell me only what he wanted to be in my report. "That wasn't what I wanted to speak to you about, Tony," said The Best Way to Get Started Develop the working habit under the personal direction oj an experienced writer or editor. 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Please send your free catalog, without obligation, to : Name... Address. (Inquiries confidential. No salesman will call) Wili. He was mild and friendly, as ever. I was realizing now that Wili must have been careful all along to show me only one side of himself. Tylo couldn't have fallen in love with the bland, imperturbable, featureless character I knew. "You know Tylo is staying?" I nodded. "What will the Navy do about that?" "Nothing much. It would be different if it were a man, but the women officers often desert like that. If it were made a serious offense, girls wouldn't volunteer. Besides, what happens largely depends on the captain's report, and Tylo doesn't have to worry about that." Wili laughed. "The more I hear of this Navy of yours, the more I respect it. How do you feel about Tylo staying?" "I'm not sure. Do you really love her? Are you going to make her happy?" "Those are two very different questions. Do I really love her? No, probably. I don't think I'm made for love as you understand it. I love everybody, not individuals. But as to whether I'm going to make her happy, I think I can assure you that I will. You know her -- do you doubt that?' No, I didn't doubt that. I'd have thought Wili was a big beautiful hollow husk if it hadn't been for his mighty intelligence. That made me think it more likely that I simply didn't understand him. "One other thing," said Wili. "You're going back now, aren't you?" That was what I meant. As soon as you decided a thing, he knew what you'd decided and took it for granted. "Yes," I said, "I'm going back." "I could let you go without saying anything," Wili said thoughtfully, "but I think, since we're going to be brothers, I should tell you how to make your report. If you make it clear you know why you were sent here, and what you were meant to do, it may make an enormous difference to your career." I was lost, completely. Wili sailed on serenely. "You believed all that rubbish you told Tylo about what the Federation really wants, didn't you?" "It happens to be true," I said. "Now look, Tony," said Wili quietly. "Tylo hasn't told me your orders, but I can guess what they are. You're ordered to evacuate us, but not told how, and the reason given is the sentimental importance of Earth among the Federation peoples, isn't it?" OO this was the thing I wasn't supposed even to hint to the Terrans. I could only nod. "Do you think the exploration crew that was here two years ago was really deceived into thinking we couldn't look after ourselves?" "I don't know. Perhaps not." "Pardon my being absolutely frank. The Federation must have known we would refuse to go. The question then became a political issue. A matter for discussion and arbitration, if anything was to be done, if they really wanted us to go. They knew we were by no means fools. Did they send a political mission with the power to treat with us and offer inducements? Did they send an experienced Naval force to capture and evacuate us against our will? They did not. They took neither the peaceful nor the warlike method of gaining their alleged end. "They sent -- pardon me again -- a newly promoted captain with impossible orders and a rather stupid crew. I think they underestimated you, Tony. You came a lot nearer evacuating us than anyone could have expected. You might even, for all the Navy has done to the contrary, have pulled it off." "You mean," I exclaimed, "that I was never meant to do it?" He was patient. "Could you have been meant to succeed?" "But why send me?" (#c To Earthmen) I # dramatic full color , SiF. decalcomanias! scenes, each a gem! if Durable transfers for your: S.F. book covers, drinking mugs  glasses, car window, lamps, childs toys, etc... send now to: Enclosed is #c in coin "I can't be sure," said Wili, with startling modesty, "but there are two possibilities. Either this was somehow forced on the Federation, possibly for the reasons stated in your orders, or you've been caught up in some maneuver which has Earth as its focal point. The first is quite possible. Your orders are then perfectly sound and honest, except that the Federation knew you would fail, and hoped then to have some other plan for dealing with the situation. "The second is a little less likely, I think. However, if this is the case, on your return, you'll probably be ridiculed and thrown out of the Navy, perhaps with full pension as recompense. Still, that can be avoided if you make it very clear in your report thht you know precisely what the Federation was up to." I was rather dazed when I left Wili. Dimly, I saw one or two things that made sense. the Federation had clearly had to send a transport ship to evacuate Earth. Whether the Federation actually wanted Earth evacuated, however, was another matter. Now that I came to think of it -- even Council members had that soft spot for Earth, that glad feeling that someone was still there, that Earth wasn't completely and utterly extinct. Certainly, on my record, I wasn't any miracle-worker. Jan was right, it did damage my selfesteem a little to be told that I'd been sent out to fail. But then, I hadn't entirely failed -- not reallyJan was waiting, as she had promised. The nights on Earth were not only very dark now, they were colder, and it was almost night now. I threw my tunic around her shoulders. "Will you come to Yuriy, Jan?" I asked. "Yes," she said-and, from the sound of her voice as she went on, I knew she was smiling her wry smile. "It will be interesting of miles from Tian, married to someone else." More confidently she went on, "I think I can beat it, Tony. Just be patient. It does seem that there's more to life than there used to be -- before you came here." "And then," I said, "after we've seen and done a few things, and I've resigned from the Navy, perhaps we'll come back here." She liked that. I could tell by the way she gripped my arm. "Perhaps," I said quietly, "Earth had to get rid of all the restless ' spirits, the people in a hurry, before life here could be quite perfect." Forecast Langston had technicolor delusions. Inanimate objects came alive in his know he wasn't going insane! Sounds contradictory, right enough, but you'll wit, the grass invariably is greener on your own planet -- even if there is no grass there and would not be that color if there were any! Budrys, was one of simple laws: Walk with dignity, talk with dignity; above Short stories? Of course! All these and our regular features, too! If you want to haunt the newsstand for the issue, it's your privilege, of course. But subscribers get their copies at least ten days before the stands do, so why not sit back and let the mailman do the job for you? 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A nonprofit organization. Address: Scribe C.X.L. Scribe C.X.L. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Address City . State #'OR those who came in late, I'll recapitulate a recent argument I had with myself: One of the most urgent problems facing humanity is growth of population, which is increasing at the rate of # a year. Malthus felt that unless birth is somehow controlled, war, famine and disease must keep population in line with food production. That, of course, was # years ago, before agriculture was mechanized. Also, the most devastating wars and famines have occurred since then, though nothing to compare with the great plagues and fires of the Middle Ages. None of Malthus's supposed population checks has yet worked. What can, then? Science fiction authors generally propose migration -- to other planets, various parts of the world, even to bubble cities under the sea. Right now, today, the solution is no solution at all. The fewest people we could move to control even the present dangerously high level is the annual increase of #. We're a long way from being able to transport them to other planets. That doesn't mean our authors arc being visionary. We, better than most, realize that the impossibility of one generation is the commonplace of another. But population is unreasonable -- it obstinately refuses to stop growing until we have the answer. Meanwhile, halfmeasures will have to serve. Provided, that is, that we can find them. The Amazing Amazon by Willard Price (John Day, N. Y., #) vividly charts a "last" frontier that is every bit as amazing as the author claims, and which could help immensely to feed the world, as well as supply minerals and ores that are becoming more and more scarce elsewhere. Even aside from this discussion, the Amazon River is astronomical enough in size and phenomena to belong to science fiction rather than fact. Just listen : The mouth of the Amazon is two hundred miles wide -- ten times as wide as the English Channel between Dover and Calais, twice as wide as the Mediterranean between Sicily and North Africa. This "moving sea," as Price justly calls it, represents onefifth of all the running fresh water on Earth. "Place the mouth of the Amazon at New York and its arms would reach up into Canada and down into Mexico and almost to California," Price states. With its # known tributaries, many of them larger than the Rhine, it drains # square miles of land -- an area almost as huge as the entire U.S.A. Ocean vessels can go upriver # miles, along with sharks, tarpons, sawfishes, swordfishes, porpoises and manatees, which thrive in the Amazon. This most gigantic of rivers even has a tide, a monstrous wave known as the pororoca, ten to fifteen feet high, which races up as far as Santarem once a month at the murderous rate of # miles an hour. There are three large islands at the mouth of the river, one of them, Marajd, as big as Denmark or Switzerland. One hundred miles offshore, a ship can drop buckets and bring up drinkable water, for the sweep out with such force that the river continues flowing right in the ocean. All of this falls into the category of "Well, what do you know?" information, but that is not the reason for this debate. Amazonia is unthinkably rich -- it contains the greatest deposits of high-grade iron ore in the world, industrial diamonds, gold, manganese and practically every other metal and mineral -- and geologists declare that half of Brazil floats on petroleum. Its forests abound in precious wood of all sorts, from building timber to medicinal roots, barks and berries. Nowhere on Earth is there deeper, blacker topsoil. What's holding us back? Not the animals, numerous and fearsome as many of them are; they could be exterminated right down to the last anaconda and piranha, the notorious cannibal fish. The swarming insects are the major problem. Price's chapter on them is exciting -- and dismaying. But he's right : we have techniques that could clear them out. Logically, it would seem that this is a call for a mass migration to Amazonia. Actually, there anchor and head for the jungle. The small number of food growers we rely on isn't commonly known, but this may give you an idea -- # of the producers supply over # of America's food. As Price points out, the conquest of this vast terrain is no job for individuals, corporations or even any one nation, regardless of its wealth. It is properly the business of the entire world, since the entire world would benefit. Wait for space travel so we can have planets to provide food and ores? Not when Amazonia is richer than any of the worlds in the whole Solar System! The Telenizer dripping from the tap in the bathtub, I knew that someone had a telenosis beam on me, and I breathed a very audible sigh of relief. During the past few days, I had begun to wonder if I was really cracking up. When you start seeing visions of a bearded gent with a halo, or having vague but wonderful dreams about some sort of perfect world, feeling intense loyalties to undefined ideals, and experiencing sudden impulses, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind -- you know that something's wrong. At least I do. Langston had technicolor delusions; inanimate objects came him... what a relief it was to know he wasn't going insane l If he -- whoever he was -- had just kept up the slow, subtle pace he'd maintained for the past two or three days, he would have had me in a little while. For whatever he wanted. But now, he'd overplayed his hand. I knew, at least, what was going on. Who was doing it, or why, I still didn't know -- nor whether I could stand it, even knowing. npHE thick, bright red blood dripping steadily from the water tap in the bath tub wasn't so bad. I stood before the mirror, with my softly humming razor in my hand, and I watched the blood ooze from the tap, quiver as it grew heavy and pregnant, then pull itself free and fall with a dull plonk to the enamel as another drop began to form. That wasn't so bad. But my sigh of relief became a gurgle of almost hysterical apprehension as I braced myself for what might come, with the telenizer knowing that I was aware. There was something I could do -- should do -- but my mind refused to focus. It bogged down in a muck of unreasoning terror and could only scream Why? Why? Why? The drops of blood from the water tap increased both in size and rapidity, as I watched. Heavy, red, marble-sized tears followed one another from the tap, plonk, plonk, plonk, splashing in the tub and on the floor. Faster and faster, and then the drip became a flow, a gush, as though the vein of some giant creature had been slashed. The tub filled rapidly, and blood flowed like a crimson waterfall over the edge and across the floor toward me. I heard a tiny howling, and looked down. I screamed and threw the soft, brown, fuzzy, squirming puppything that had been a razor into the advancing tide of blood. The fuzzy thing shattered when it hit the blood, and each of the thousand pieces became another tiny puppy-thing that grew and grew, yapping and swimming in the blood. The tide was now rising about my shoes. I backed away from the mirror, trembling violently. I forced myself to slosh through the thick blood into the bedroom, groping for a bottle of whisky on the bureau.  ing here?" the boss asked when I opened his office door and peeked in. "You're supposed to be in Palm Beach. Well, damn it, come on in!" I clung to the door firmly as I maneuvered myself through the opening. And when I closed the door. I leaned back against it heavily. I could see the boss -- Carson Newell, managing editor of Intergalaxy News Service -- half rising from behind his big desk across the room; but he was pretty dim and I couldn't get him to stay in one place. His voice was clear enough, though: "Must be mighty important to bring you back from... Damn it, Langston, are you drunk?" I grinned then, and said, "Carshon. Carton. Old boy. Do you know that telenosis therapy is no sonofabitchin' good on alcoholics?" Carson Newell sat back down, frowning. I stumbled to a chair by the corner of his desk and gripped the arms tightly. "Telenosis therapy," I repeated, "is just no -- " "Snap out of it," Newell barked. "It's no good on dumb animals, either, and you're probably out of range by now, anyway." He took a small bottle from his desk and tossed a yellow AntiAlch pill across the desk to me. I popped it into my mouth. It didn't take long to work. A few minutes later, still weak and a little trembly, I said, "Would have thought of that myself, if I hadn't been so damn drunk." The boss grunted. "Now what's this business about telenosis?" "Somebody's been using it on me," I said. "Maliciously. Damn near drowned in a lake of blood from a water faucet." "Couldn't have been DTs?" "I'm serious. It's been going on for three or four days now. Not the blood. That's what gave it away. But other things." "You've been working pretty hard lately," Newell reminded me. "Which is why I'm on vacation and all nice and relaxed. Or at least, I was. No, it's not that. Listen. Carson, I admit that I'm no technical expert on telenosis. But a long time ago -- seven or eight years ago, I guess -- I did a feature series on it. I learned a little bit. Enough to save my life this time." Newell shrugged. "Okay. You probably know more about it than I do. I just know it's damned restricted stuff." He paused thoughtfully. "Any missing teienizer equipment would cause a helluva fuss, and there hasn't been any fuss." "No machines in Palm Beach or vicinity that somebody on the inside could be using illegally?" And then I answered that question myself: "No... I doubt it. The machines are used only in the larger hospitals." "Don't suppose you have any hunches?" I shook my head slowly, frowning. "You couldn't really call it a hunch. Just a bare possibility. But I noticed on a news report the other day that Isaac Grogan Mayor of Memphis,' released about a month ago, bribery and corruption sentence -- anyway, he's taken up temporary residence in Palm Beach." The boss rubbed his chin. "As I recall, you did an expose series on him four or five years ago. Corroborated by official investigation, and Grogan was later sentenced. You thinks he's after revenge?" I raised a hand warningly. "Now, hold on -- I said it was a bare possibility. All I know is that Grogan hates my guts -- or might think he has some reason to. I know that Grogan is in Palm Beach, and that I've been under telenosis attack. There's no necessary connection at all." "No." Newell said. "But it's something to start on." He looked at his wrist watch. "Tell you what. It's nearly noon now. Let's go out for lunch, and while I'm thinking, you can tell me all you remember about telenosis." TT'S altogether possible that you may have no more than barely heard of telenosis -- its technical details are among the most closely guarded secrets of our time. So I'll go over some of the high spots of what I told Newell. Mind you, I'm no authority on the subject, and it has been a full seven years since I have done any research on it. However, I learned all I know from Dr. Homer Reighardt, who, at the time, was the world's outstanding authority. Telenosis, nowadays, is confined almost exclusively to use in psychiatric hospitals and corrective institutions. It's used chiefly on neurotics. In cases of extreme dementia, it's worthless. In fact, the more normal you are, the more effective the telenosis. Roughly -- without going into any of the real technicalities -- it's this way: Science has known for a long time that electrical waves emanate from the brain. The waves can be measured on an electroencaphalograph, and vary with the physiological and psychological condition of the individual. Extreme paranoia, for example, or epilepsy, or alcoholism are accompanied by violent disturbances of the waves. Very interesting, but... It wasn't until # that Professor Martin James decided that these brain waves are comparable to radio waves, and got busy inventing a device to listen in on them. The result, of course, was telenosis. The machine that James came up with, after twenty years of work, could not only listen in on a person's thoughts, which are carried on the brain waves, but it could transmit messages to the brain from the outside. "Unless the waves are in a state of disturbance caused by alcohol or insanity or some such thing?" Newell commented. I nodded. "The word 'telenosis' comes from 'hypnosis,' doesn't it?" "Yes, but not very accurately," I said. "In hypnosis, you need some sort of visual or auditory accompaniment. With telenosis, you can gain control of a person's mind directly, through the brain waves." "You say 'gain control of a person's mind,' " Newell said. "Do you mean that if you tell someone who is under telenosis to do something, he's got to do it?" "IVrOT necessarily," I said. "All ' you can do with telenosis is transmit thoughts to a person -- counting visual and auditory sensations as thoughts. If you can convince him that the thoughts you're sending are his thoughts... then you can make him do almost anything. But if he knows or suspects he's being telenized -- " "I'm with you," Newell interrupted. "He still gets the thoughts -- visions and sounds or what have you -- but he doesn't have to obey them." I nodded. My mind was skipping ahead to more immediate problems. "Don't you suppose we ought to notify Central Investigation Division right away? This is really a problem for them." But Newell was there ahead of me. "So was the Memphis affair," he said. I raised my eyebrows. "Meaning," the boss continued, "that I'd like to give your hunch a play first." "But it's not even a hunch," I objected. "How?" "Well, by having you interview Grogan, for instance... I opened my mouth and almost shook my head, but Newell hurried on. "Look, Earl, it's been a long time since Intergalaxy has scored a good news beat. Not since the Memphis expose, in fact. Remember that? Remember how good it felt to have your name on articles published all over the world? Remember all the extra cash? The fame?" I grunted. "Now before you say anything," Newell said, "remember that when you started on that case you didn't have a thing more concrete to go on than you have right now -- just a half a hunch. Isn't that right? Admit it!" "M'm." "Well, isn't it worth a chance? What can we lose?" "Me, maybe. But... The boss said nothing more. He knew that if he let me do the talking, I'd soon argue myself into it. Which I did. Five minutes later, I shrugged. "Okay. What, specifically, do you have in mind?" "Let's go back to the office," Newell said. I should say, it would have been a short walk, if we had walked. But New York was one of the very last cities to convert to the "level" transportation system. It had been one hell of an engineering feat, but for Amerpean ingenuity and enterprise nothing is impossible, so the job had finally been tackled and completed just within the past year. And the novelty of the ambulator bands on pedestrian levels was still strong for native New Yorkers. So instead of leaving the restaurant on the vehicle level, where we happened to be, and taking an old fashioned sidewalk ell insisted on taking the escalator up to the next level and then gliding along on an amband. That's just the sort of person he is. When we got back up to his office, he asked, "Isn't there some sort of defense against telenosis? I mean, other than alcohol or insanity?" I thought for a moment. "Shouldn't be too hard to devise one. All you need is something to set up interference vibrations on the same band as the brain waves you're guarding." "Sounds simple as hell. Could one of our men do it?" "A telenosis technician at one of the hospitals could do it quicker," I suggested. "Without the sanction of C.I.D.? I doubt that." "That's right," I agreed. "Okay. I'll run down to Technology and see what we can work out. It may take two or three days -- " "I'll see that it gets top priority. I want you to get back to Palm Beach as soon as you can." As I was getting up to leave, Newell said, "Say, by the way, how's that health cult in Palm Beach -- Suns-Rays Incorporated? Anything on that?" Suns-Rays Incorporated was one of the chief reasons I was taking my vacation in Palm Beach, Fla., instead of in Sacramento, Calif., my home town. Carson Newell had heard about this crackpot religious group that was having a convention in Palm Beach, and he couldn't see why one of his reporters shouldn't combine business and pleasure. And maybe that tells you a little more of the sort of person he is. "It's a complete fraud," I told him. "They worship a glorified sunlamp and take regular treatments. Same time, they follow a strict diet and system of exercises -- have their own little spot on one of the beaches. Guaranteed to cure what ails you." "Who's the head?" Newell asked. "How many are there?" "About twenty-five or thirty members, I'd say. That's not counting the few curiosity-seekers. like me. And nobody in particular seems to be in charge right now. I guess the big boss died, and they're holding this confab to elect a new one. Supposed to have the elections today. come to think of it. There's a great big scoop I missed." "Any real news value in it?" I shook my head. "Feature story, maybe, but it's pretty runof-the-mill stuff, even at that." "Well, stay with it." Newell said. "Just in case nothing pops on this telenosis deal. And get that defense mech as soon as possible." "Do I get a real vacation after this is all over?" I asked, knowing what the answer would be. "Scram," Newell replied. "I'm a busy man. Get going!"  day, my defense mechanism was ready. They had taken a reading of my brain wave with a makeshift electroencaphalograph, and then a couple of electronics boys had tinkered around until they had a gadget that would throw out vibrations on exactly my wave-band. Of course, not having any telenosis equipment, we weren't able to make a real check of the contraption's effectiveness. I had to take the technologists' word that It would work. Frankly, I didn't feel any too well defended as I hopped the five o'clock stratoliner back to Palm Beach. The defense mech was enclosed in a black case that looked like a portable radio or a portable typewriter or a small suitcase. When you opened the lid. there was a flat surface having only one dial -- for volume. The vibrations had a radius of about three-quarters of a mile. It was after six when I got back to my hotel. I had Grogan's address, and he wasn't too far from where I was staying -- but Grogan is not the sort of person on whom you make a business call after business hours. My confidence in the defense mech hadn't grown, but I knew of another sure-fire defense, so after dinner I went to the bar to start setting it up. But I lugged the thirty-pound portable along, anyway, wishing that it looked a little more like a briefcase instead of a typewriter or a radio. Not that it really mattered, though. I could have carried an open bird cage with a live and screaming Calypsian grimp, odor and all, and still not have attracted any attention -- because it wouldn't have been any more unusual than some of the guests at the hotel. For a student of interplanetary biology, this would be a perfect observation post. There aren't many forms of extraterrestrial life that can accommodate themselves to Earth's conditions, but there are spots that go out of their way to provide suitable conditions for anything that comes along, and this was one of them. here, I had seen only one Calypsian dominant, and he didn't happen to have a grimp with him. But there were a pair of Uranian galgaque -- squat, gray, midget honeymooners -- who smelled just as bad. They left a few days after I got here. Then there had been at least half a dozen flimsy, ethereal little Venusians at one time or another, dragging themselves around and looking unhappy as hell. None of them stayed more than a few days, and they spent most of their time in the water. I noticed one or two hairy, apelike dominants from Jupiter's third moon, and a few of the snaky, scaly, six-limbed creatures from the second. In addition, there was a group of Vega VI dominants who were hard to distinguish from humans if you didn't look closely enough to notice their complete hairlessness and the absence of neck. And of course there were the inevitable Martians -- giant, bigchested, spindly-limbed, red-hued parodies of humanity; friendly, good-natured and alert. But I don't really suppose they should be classed among the oddities of the place. As one of my colleagues commented in a national publication not long ago: "The only place a Martian is a novelty any more is on Mars." I fully expect the # census to show a Martian population on Earth more than double that of the home planet. So far, the Martians seem to be the only extraterrestrials who've really taken root here. And that's a problem, too. But how the hell did I get off on that? I was finishing my second martini, sitting in a booth with my feet propped on the seat opposite me and catching snatches of a conversation between an Earth girl and a Vega VI Romeo at a nearby table. It was pretty unsavory conversation, and I guess I was shaking my head sternly when a shadow fell over me. "Another of the same," I said, looking up' -- but it wasn't the waiter. It was an enormous, redskinned, balloon-chested, whitetogaed Martian, and his little wrinkled face was smiling like I was long-lost Uncle Eddie whom he hadn't seen for forty years. When he threw open his long, spindly arms and screeched a loud, "Ahh!" I was beginning to think maybe I was. "Mr. Langston!" he shrilled. "How gladly to see you! Where been? We missing you colossal!" Then he slapped one fragile hand against his protruding chest, looked up at the ceiling and squeaked: "Clean living and Suns-Rays Incorporated!" He looked at me again, smiling. "Huh?" I said. "Oh, yeah. Sure as hell. Clean living and SunsRays etcetera. Damn right. Pull up a chair, Blek, old boy." Martian looks pretty much like another: but now I recognized this one. There was only one extraterrestrial in the little screwball health-cult with which I had become rather loosely acquainted in the past two weeks, and this was him. I moved my feet and Zan Matl Blekeke sat down, exuding sunshine and clean living all over the place. We ordered drinks. He was elated as blazes about something, and I decided I might as well let him tell me about it -- and knowing the typical Martian's haphazard use of the English language, I regarded the prospect as something of a challenge. Zan Blekeke started right in telling me about it in his shrill, piping tones: "Ah, Mr. Langston, wrong time go. Where been? Should have been meeting. I derelicted resident. Ha! Expected, yups?" I replied, "Nups. Let's start over again. Something pretty damn important?" He nodded. He nodded again, smiling to beat hell. I thought for a moment, then tried a shot in the dark, illogical as it was. "You lost your home? Derelicted resident?" He looked like I'd stepped on his sore corn. I tried again. "You don't mean you were kicked out of the group?" He winced. "Oohhh, nooo! Opposition. Opposition." "You mean there was too much opposition to your being kicked out, so you weren't?" He slumped in his seat and regarded me balefully. With the pathos of a squeaky hinge, he said: "Head man. Top dog. Derelicted resident. Boss. Wheel. Me. Zan Blekeke." And if I didn't get it now, I just didn't deserve to know. But I got it. "You were elected president?" I said. Zan Blekeke nodded gratefully. "Yus and so. Undeserving awful, but..." He heaved his chest in resignation. "No. Not at all," I protested. "Why, I think that's wonderful. You're just the man for the job! Have another drink." W E ordered more drinks, and the Martian continued: "Membership obviousless that whatsoever I closest intimute of Dear Late Doctor -- " here he raised his eyes again and clapped a hand to his chest before he finished -- "I should wallow in step-tracks." "Why, absolutely," I agreed emphatically. "No question about it." From talking to some of the at beach sessions, I had gained the definite impression that Zan Blekeke had been a sort of a servant to "Dear Late Doctor," and would continue to be a servant to whoever was elected in his place. But instead, they had elected the Martian himself. Logical, in a cockeyed way. This was the first time I'd ever really talked to him. I'd seen him attended, but he had seemed pretty quiet there, letting others do most of the talking. He was in charge of administering the daily Sun-Ray treatments, which I had taken once or twice myself just for the experience: but on those occasions, he had been very cold and professional. Closest intimute of Dear Late Doctor... I had never been able to find out much about the Doctor. He was too sacred a subject for any of the members to even talk about. Of course, I hadn't tried very hard, because I wasn't especially interested in this assignment -- I was supposed to be on vacation. Now that a successor had been chosen, I wondered if the show was over and everyone could go home. I asked Blekeke about it. "Not while yet," he replied. "Colonial could be. All live one. Dear Late Doctor -- " hand to heart, face to Heaven, Amen -- "often told wanted colossal." It wasn't too clear, but I nodded anyway. Frankly, my interest in the whole thing was at a very low ebb. With the drinks and the effort of untangling Blekeke's twisted English, I was becoming listless and sleepy. But he insisted on knowing where I had been when the meeting was held. I told him I'd had to hurry back to New York for a conference with my publisher. He said, "Ah, yes. Writer." He pointed to the defense mech on the seat beside me. "That typer?" "Huh? Oh, no... that's a portable radio. Carry it around with me, in case the conversation gets dull." I was at the point where I didn't care much what I said. He must have taken it as a gentle hint, because in a little while he got up and left, shrilling: "fco gladly seeing you. Wanted know." I nodded and waved a limp hand at him. AS I was passing the desk on the way up to my room, the clerk called, "Mr. Langston, Mr. Langston. Long distance call for you, sir. I was just ringing your room. You can take it in a booth there, if you wish, sir." I nodded and walked to the row of vp booths. Closing the door, I sat down in front of the screen and picked up the mike. The visiphone screen lighted and the speaker crackled. The chubby face and shoulders of Carson Newell took form and floated on the plate. "Wanted to be sure you got the latest dope on Grogan before you see him," Newell said. "Just now got the report." "Go ahead," I said. "Well, then -- " The boss looked up from his note pad. "About how long had the telenosis been on ypu? How many days?" "H'm. Don't know. It's hard to tell, if it's handled right. Weird nightmares, daydreams, absentmindedness, sudden impulses, optical illusions -- it can be telenosis, and it can be just you. I'd say three or four days, but -- " "Wouldn't necessarily prove anything, anyway," Newell broke in. "Here's the report on Grogan. Been out of Corrective for a little more than a month now. Went directly to Memphis. Cleared up business affairs there, then went to Palm Beach for vacation. Arrived late Tuesday afternoon -- four days ago. Took a suite in Space Verge hotel with four quote secretaries unquote, and has refused to see anyone. No unusually large baggage. No unusual activities reported. So much for that." He turned a page of the note pad and went on: "Corrective Institute record: responded favorably to treatment. Occupational training in administrative accounting. Special courses in business and political ethics. Now get this -- it's the one thing that gives your hunch any credibility at all. Three months intermittent telenosis therapy for slight paranoiac tendencies. Response favorable. Dismissed from C.I. after five years, three weeks and six days. Classification: Apparent cure, but possibility of relapse." We were both quiet for a while, looking at each other. Then I said, "Well, I'll see him tomorrow. Remember, it's nothing but a hunch -- not' even that." "Be careful, dammit," Newell cautioned... I woke up sometime in the early morning, before it was light, with a clicking noise in my ears. I lay there in bed, gazing into the darkness, wondering, yet knowing, what would happen if the defense mech should break down -- if a tube should give out, or if some little coil should prove defective. The clicking stopped after a while, but it was a long time before I got back to sleep. interview with Grogan. I'd known I wouldn't. It was a simple matter of calling his suite and telling the loose-mouthed, scar-cheeked "secretary" who answered that Earl Langston would like to make an appointment with Isaac Grogan for, say, #:#. "Grogan ain't seein' nobody," the secretary growled. "Ask him," I said. The face vanished and reappeared on the screen a few moments later. "Okay. Come up anytime you're ready." "Fifteen minutes," I said, and replaced the mike. I turned up the volume of the defense mech as high as it would go, and left it in my room when I left. The same hideous secretary, with the loose jowels and the deep, livid scar on his right cheek, met me at the door of Grogan's suite "Th' boss'll see you in th' library," the bodyguard rumbled, and led me to the room. The door closed, but did not click behind me. Isaac Grogan was slouched on a sofa, hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. I stood for a moment, looking at him. He had changed only a little in five years. He was a big man with a broad, pleasant face and thick black hair. A deep dimple divided his chin. The last time I'd seen him, he had been getting a little paunchy, and there had been wrinkles developing in his neck and bags under his eyes. But that had been from strain and worry, and he looked a lot better now. "You're looking well," I told him. "What the hell do you want?" Grogan said quietly. "Why can't you leave me alone? I don't want any trouble." "Neither do I." And suddenly I felt very awkward. What the hell did I want? Just exactly what had I expected to accomplish with this visit? I didn't really know. I cleared my throat. "I've got one question, Grogan. Maybe two. Then I'll leave." He looked at me. "Do you still blame me for what happened in Memphis?" I asked. Grogan shifted his position and gave a sort of half-laugh. "Langston, I've never liked you, and I don't now. But I can't say that I blame you for the Memphis mess -- if I ever did. Now, what's your other question?" "Telenosis," I said. He waited, looking straight at me. "Well? What about it?" "According to your C.I. record," I said, "you had three months of intermittent telenosis therapy." He shruggged. "That's right. Lots of people do. You still haven't asked your question." "Yes, I have," I replied. "I'll leave now. Thanks for your time." FTHE gorilla-secretary was op- ening the front door for me, when Grogan spoke again. "Langston." I turned around. Grogan was standing in the door of the library. "Langston," he repeated. "I don't know what your angle is. I don't know why you came here, or whether you got what you wanted. Furthermore, I don't care much. Five years ago is not today, Langston. I've changed. Just the same, I don't believe I want to see you again. I don't like you. Okay?" I said, "Okay," and left. Back in my hotel room, I first turned down the volume of the defense mech, then sat down at the visiphone and put in a call to New York. The pudgy image of Carson Newell appeared. "I'm stumped," I told him. "What's the matter? Did you see Grogan?" "Yeah. Just now." "Well?" "Nothing. I'm stumped. He's completely changed. If there was ever a case of full and complete correction, I'd say Grogan is it." Newell tapped his fingertips together, then shrugged impatiently. "Well, hell, I don't think we're getting anywhere on this. I'll turn it over to the C.I.D. and let them worry about it." "So what happens now?" I asked. "What am I supposed to do?" "Take a vacation. But hang on to that defense mech. Stay in Palm Beach and contact me pronto if anything happens. Buzz me at least once a day, even if anything doesn't happen." He started to put down the mike, then lifted it again. "How's "Oh, that. I'll whip out a story on it in a couple of days." "No hurry. Find out all you can about it. Give you something to do while you're waiting around." He put down the mike and faded from the screen. S O I promptly did my damnedest to forget all about Isaac Grogan and telenosis. I spent the rest of the day at the beach, sprawled out on the hot sand with the defense mech beside me and an army of people -- humans and aliens -- surrounding me. Only once, at about four o'clock, did the defense mech start going click-click-click. I timed it. It lasted three minutes and then quit. When I got back to the hotel, at about five, a man fell into step with me as soon as I entered the lobby. "Name's Maxwell," he told me. "C.I.D. I'm one of your bodyguards for a while." "How many others do I rate?" I asked. He was a tall, heavily built young man in his middle twenties. He carried a briefcase. We headed for the elevator. "Only one," he replied, "but he'll stay pretty much out of sight. He'll join us in your room after a while. We have to ask you a lot of questions." The other bodyguard, who slipped into my room without knocking twenty minutes later, was shorter, thinner and older. He was bald except for a gray fringe, and his name was Johnson. The C.I.D. men spent a halfhour checking for hidden mikes and cameras before they said much of anything. Then they plopped down on the edge of the bed, and the young man opened his briefcase. The older one said, "Have your dinner sent up here. We'll get started on some of these questions right away." The questions were both exhaustive and exhausting. The older man, Johnson, fired the questions, and Maxwell wrote down the answers, occasionally inserting an inquiry of his own. They wanted to know everything -- not only about my telenosis experiences and my knowledge of and contacts with Isaac Grogan, but everything I had done, said or thought during the past two weeks, everyone I had met and talked to, and everything we had talked about. At the end of three and a half hours, I felt completely pumped out, and Maxwell had a sheaf of notes the size of a best-seller. Johnson said, "Well, I guess that'll do for a starter. We'll have another session tomorrow." He took the notes from Maxwell and put them in Maxwell's briefcase. He stood up. "I'll have these transcribed and maybe check around a little. I'll meet you here at six-thirty tomorrow night." "What about -- " I started. He cut me off : "Maxwell will stay with you. He's not to let you out of his sight. In case anyone asks, he's your brother-in-law from Sacramento." but it was an admiring laugh. "You fellows are nothing if not thorough. Does my real brotherin-law, John Maxwell of Sacramento, know about this?" I was curious. It was Maxwell who answered. "Your brother-in-law received a long-distance emergency call from you at noon today, telling him to join you immediately. Visionreception was fuzzy, but he recognized your voice and took the first strato. I changed places with him in Denver, where I happened to be stationed, and he was smuggled back home. He's with his family, but he'll have to stay in for a few days." I shook my head. "It's marvelous. Thoroughness personified. Say, I'll bet you fellows even thought of getting defense mechanisms... but where are they?" Johnson and Maxwell looked at each other, jaws hanging. "Well, I'll be damned!" Johnson said bitterly. "Thoroughness personified! Son of a..." He slapped his hat on his bald head and dashed out the door without looking back. Maxwell grimaced. He got up from the bed and walked to an easy chair and sat down again. "Well, Irvin Johnson will take care of that little detail. But it's going to take time..." "It would have taken time anyway -- a day or so -- even if you'd thought of it first thing," I said. "Besides, there's no danger until they find your wave-band, and that takes time, too." But he remained disconsolate. Not because of the danger, but simply because they'd overlooked an angle. Under a system in which the agents are given maximum responsibility for details and planning, that would count heavily against them on their records. I almost felt guilty for reminding them. I said, "John, look -- if all else fails, there's one sure quick defense. Alcohol. I would say that under the circumstances, since you're supposed to be protecting me, we should keep you as well defended as possible." "M'm?" "You do drink, don't you?" I asked. "Like a fish," Maxwell said, lunging to his feet. room, Maxwell said: "Hell, I don't see that telenoshis is such a damn menash to society, if all you have to do is get drunk." "You want a nation of alcoholics?" I said. I sat down on the bed and untied my shoes. "Anyway, whasha difference? D. T. horrors or 'noshis horrors? Whash worse?" Maxwell grunted. We both had to sleep in the same bed, and Maxwell was a restless sleeper. I had finally crept into the lower depths of slumber, where it was warm and snug, when he poked me sharply in the ribs. "What's that?" he demanded. He was sitting up. "What's what?" "Listen!" I heard it. Click-click-click... "What time is it?" I asked. My eyes were still closed, and I was damned if I was going to open them. "Three fifty-seven. But what is -- " "Defense mech," I said. "Right on time. Every twelve hours. Tries to get me. Now go sleep." I rolled over and shut my eyes even tighter -- but I couldn't get all the way back to sleep. Not back down to the warm, dark depths. It was a long time before Maxwell even lay back down, and he rolled and twisted for the rest of the night. At six o'clock, he fell into a deep, quiet slumber, and I was wide awake, damn him. So I got up and dressed. I found a news magazine I hadn't read, and occupied myself with it for an hour. Practically the entire issue was devoted to an analysis of the Martian immigration. It went way back into history and discussed the folklore fear that humans had for centuries about a Martian invasion. And it pointed out that something very like a Martian invasion was taking place right now. One particular article concluded with what I considered an unnecessarily grim warning that unless something were done soon to check the flow of immigrants, Earth would soon be overrun with Martians. Other articles in the magazine went into the causes and implications of the migration. One of the writers pointed out that Mars is a dying planet. In only a few thousand years, it will be too cold, too dry and too airless to support life. The development of interplanetary travel a century earlier had provided the inhabitants with a means of escape. They could survive on Earth; now they could get to Earth; so they came to Earth. One full article was devoted to the debates and pending legislation in World Council on the subject, but I didn't take the time to read it. I was fairly familiar with the current controversy, having followed the daily news reports, and besides, the reading was giving me a headache. A T seven o'clock, I considered going down for breakfast, but it occurred to me that it would be another black mark against Maxwell if I should be seen without him. Forgetting about the defense mech was enough for one case. So I ordered breakfast brought up to the room. While I was waiting, and since I was sitting near it anyway, I flicked the TV switch and tuned in ori the morning's news. Nothing earthshaking: a factory explosion in St. Louis: political unrest in India: speech in The World Council by Delegate Machavowski of Eurasia in support of the BagleyDalton bill to establish a yearly immigration quota of ten thousand from all planets, one thousand from Mars; protest reply by a Martian sociologist at Yale; spacecruiser crashed on Calypso, twenty killed. And so on and so on. My attention was held momentarily by the Martian question, since I was freshly informed on it. While the two views of the issue did nothing to settle it in my mind, they did serve to remind me of my Martian friend, Zan Matl Blekeke, and the fact that I was supposed to be digging up a feature story on SunsRays Incorporated. "What's on the agenda for today?" my pseudobrother-inlaw asked as I was finishing my coffee a half-hour later. He rolled out of bed, yawned and scratched his head vigorously. His hair was rumpled, but he looked rested, and I envied him to beat hell. "You mean it's up to me?" I asked.  "Sure. You just go on with your normal everyday existence and ignore me, like I'm nothing but a shadow." He was still stretching laiily. "Well, for the first thing, I'm going to see that we get a cot in here. There isn't room in that bed for both of us." Maxwell grinned as he buttoned his shirt. "D'l kick you out of bed? Sorry. Should have warned you." "Do you eat breakfast?" I asked him. "Hell, ye. Like a wolf." "Well, lt's go down and get you some breakfast while I figure out my agenda for today." to do -- start working on that could get it out of the way and either relax or concentrate on this telenosis business, which I was supposed to be forgetting about. I had most of the dope I needed for the story -- atmosphere, first hand experience... Everything, it occurred to me, but the essential facts. For instance, I would need to know more about Zan Blekeke himself -- simple biographical data that shouldn't take too long to gather. A harder job would be finding out about "Dear Late Doctor." So far I didn't even know what his name was. And would talk about him... As Maxwell and I sat at a breakfast room table, I made a mental checklist of the points I would have to work on. I was staring out the window at the flowers staging a color-riot in the garden, when suddenly Maxwell said: "Say, Earl, about how long does it take to find out a guy's brain wave band?" "Huh? What do you mean?" I looked at him. He was shoveling pancakes into his mouth like a fireman stoking a furnace. He shrugged and swallowed. "You said there was no danger from telenosis until they found my wave band. Well, last night I had the damnedest nightmares, and I was just wondering -- " "Relax," I said. "Ever been telenized?" "Not that I know of." "Got nothin' to worry about, then. If you had been telenized, it's just possible they could have gotten your band number from the Telenosis Bureau. Which, by God, come to think of it, is where they probably got mine. But without that, or an electroencaphalograph, it'd take weeks, at least." "But can't it influence a lot of people at once? I mean, like mass hypnosis?" "Sure be hell if it could," I said. "But I don't think it can. I don't know why not, but I definitely remember old Doc Reighardt saying it'd never been done." He seemed to feel better. He finished his breakfast in relative silence. I was able to map out a general procedure for gathering tion. First step was to get hold of Zan Blekeke again and have him tell me his life history. I shuddered at the prospect, but it had to be done. "We're going to East Emerson beach," I told John Maxwell. On the way, aboard a thirdever been investigated by you people?" "Damn if I know. Why?" "Never mind. Save me a lot of trouble, maybe, if it had. Just a thought." their usual place on the beach. It was a stretch on the far south end, a rough, gravelly portion quite a bit beyond the army of regular bathers. As we approached, threading our way through the maze of umbrellas, tablecloths and people, people, people in practically all stages of nudity, I noticed that a makeshift rope fence enclosed the little group of SR Is where they were sprawled out doing their relaxing exercises. That was something new -- the fence, I mean. I started to crawl through the ropes, and one of the nearby recliners jumped to his feet, stood in front of me and made pushing motions with his hands. "I'm sorry, sirs, but this is a meeting of The Suns-Rays Incorporated religious group. You are requested not to enter." Now, he knew better than to say a silly thing like that to me. His name was Monte Bingham, and he knew damn well who I was, and I told him so. "I'm practically an ex-officio member in good standing myself," I said. "Wake up, you goof." Monte Bingham turned slowly around and looked toward the big Martian, Zan Blekeke, who was sitting up with his spindly legs outstretched near the center of the enclosure. Blekeke got to his feet and waddled toward us, waving Bingham aside. He was not smiling. He stood glaring at us. "Whose?" he said with a swift, half-gesture toward Maxwell. "Whose?" I repeated. "He's mine. I mean, he's my brotherin-law, John Maxwell, come to visit me from Sacramento. He's okay. What's going on? I just wanted to make an appointment to talk with you." Blekeke heaved his big round bare chest. "Trying still disciple in," he replied. "How's that? Discipline, you mean?" "Yups. Laters out. Strangers out. No excepting. Can't." "Yeah, but you know me. and John here -- " "Brother law oaks, but both laters. See hall hour halfish. Talk then. Treatment, yups?" I said, "Well, I guess that'll be okay. Hour and a half, at the hall, huh?" Blekeke said, "Yups," and turned away. ped. I saw his spine stiffen. His head turned slowly toward the water's edge where two dogs '#ere running circles around each other, not far from the enclosure. As the dogs moved, Blekeke's head moved with them, back and forth and back again... Suddenly one of the dogs, the smaller one -- a black and white spaniel with flapping ears -- turncompound, bounding gracelessly members. The larger German shepherd gave two woofs and leaped playfully in pursuit. They passed within about ten feet of Blekeke. When the German shepherd barked, I heard a thin, drawnout squeak, like a mouse with his tail caught in a trap, come from Blekeke. He turned around with incredible speed and took a halfstep in our direction. His face was distorted as though in pain, and for an instant I thought he had stepped on a jagged piece of glass or something. But then I recognized the expression on his face. It was not pain. It was terror. I noticed now that he was trembling violently. He twirled again and started in the opposite direction, stopped and turned swiftly around once more. He acted as though he were surrounded on all sides by invisible Martian-eaters. The dogs paused at the edge of the enclosure for a moment to stand on their hind legs and exchange playful blows; then they raced off together toward the more densely populated beach area. Blekeke's face suddenly relaxed, and with a final shudder he controlled the trembling. He was muttering: "Doggie, doggie, doggie'," when he lowered his eyes to us, and he gave a little start as if he hadn't known we were standing there. "Hall. Hour halfish," he said after a moment's pause. Then he turned and walked rapidly back into the midst of the prostrate Maxwell and I exchanged glances and walked away. I felt, all of a sudden, rather sad and depressed. When we had gone a respectable distance, I said, "Poor devil! Fear of dogs. It must be awful." "Fear of dogs? Cynophobia? You think that's what it was?" "Well, sure," I replied. "Only thing it could be." Maxwell said, "First case I've ever seen of it." "Me, too." TT was still not quite ten o'clock. We killed the next hour and a half basking in the Sun and taking occasional dips in the water. We had to go one at a time, because one of us had to stay and guard the defense mech. At #:# we kept our appointment with Blekeke. He was alone metal building located a halfmile down the beach from the general bathing area. age warehouse of some kind -- I have no idea what kind. But that had been a long time ago; and it was now used exclusively There was another building near it, the ramshackle, rambling aire, which had been appropriquarters for the members who did not care to stay in rooms or hotels in town. And most of them didn't. Maxwell was interested in the house, but I couldn't tell him anything about it. I had never been in it, whereas I had been in the hall several times. Of course, there was nothing much to explain about the hall -- it was practically bare. The Sun Ray stood like an altar at one end. About thirty-five folding chairs were lined up in rows facing the Ray. That was all. Blekeke was doing something to the lamp part of the Ray when we came in -- tightening the bulb, apparently. It was a very simple contraption. Nothing but a padded, white-sheeted reclining table suspended over the full length of which was the lamp. The thing was operated by a bank of controls wired up a few feet away from the table. "Infra-red heat lamp," Maxwell whispered. "Sure," I said. "But don't say so." Blekeke saw us and jumped down from the platform and greeted us with open arms, apologizing for his rude behavior on the beach. I told him to forget about it; that I just wanted to ask him a few questions so I could write him a little free publicity. Blekeke beamed. Said he'd be glad to help all he could. But before I had a chance to ask any questions, he was blabbering: "Give treatment. New, improve. Much healthier. Give try." And he was pushing us toward the machine. I was not the least bit interested in taking a treatment, and I tried to tell him so, as kindly as I could. But he was insistent. Finally we agreed to take the treatment, hoping he would get it out of his system. I handed the defense mech to Maxwell and lay down. Couldn't tell a damn bit of difference. Ten minutes of warmth and dozy relaxation, and that's it. You don't feel a bit different after it's over than you did before. Unless you're a good cultist, and convince yourself by autosuggestion that all your bodily ills have been miraculously -- if temporarily -- baked out. After Maxwell had been given the treatment, I tried again to get Blekeke pinned down to answering some of my questions, but it was no good. He was obliging, cooperative and friendly as hell, but his heart just wasn't in it. He had to tell us about the improvements in the Ray, and when I threw specific questions at him, he always managed to answer with some reference to the Ray and start all over again -- and it was all pure gibberish. I gave up. We parted with mutual benedictions, and John Maxwell and I walked away, toward the one-track road leading to the old mansion. "What do you do in a situation like this?" I asked him. He shrugged. "Try somebody else." We walked up the front steps of the mansion, and I punched the doorbell. It was no go there, either. The cultist who opened the door, whom I remembered as a shoe salesman from Boise, informed us firmly and none too politely that no one could enter without the explicit and written permission of President Matl Blekeke He showed no sign of recognizing me. He slammed the door. I gave emphatic utterance to an unprintable word and said, "Let's go back to town." room promptly at six-thirty, as he had promised, again slipping in without knocking. He threw his briefcase and his hat on the bed and pulled up a chair to the cardtable where Maxwell and I were playing chess. "How about the defense mechs?" Maxwell asked. "Hospital in New York is working on 'em," Johnson said. "Promised they'd have 'em ready tomorrow morning. I'm going up tonight, after I get through here, so I can pick 'em up right away." "Quick work," I said. "Any new developments on this end? I've been too busy today getting things organized to keep an eye on you." "Every twelve hours Langston's defense mech starts clicking," Maxwell said. "Four o'clock this morning and four o'clock this afternoon." "So he's not giving up on you, anyway," Johnson said. "We know he's still around. What else? Anything new come up?" I shrugged. "Spent the whole day on a wild goose chase -- from my point of view. Trying to dig up information for my feature about Suns-Rays Incorporated." Johnson nodded. "No luck, huh?" I told him about the so-called interview with Blekeke that morning, and how in the afternoon I had tried to contact those been living in town. That had been futile, too; all of them had moved to the house on the beach. Then Maxwell and I had spent a couple of hours in the library, checking reference books for its members. With no results. Johnson recognized the frustration in my voice. "Don't let it get you down," he said. I asked him if the C.I.D. had ever investigated the cult. "Not yet," he said. "Not that I know of. But everyone that you've had any contact with since you've been here is being checked thoroughly. And since get a very complete going-over." I said, "Well, shucks, then. All I have to do is sit back and let you fellows dig up the information I need." "That, of course, depends on how the information is classified after it's processed," Johnson corrected. "Maybe you can use it and maybe you can't." He shrugged. "Well, I've got a whole new batch of questions here for you. That's my job right now. Let's get at 'em." I again felt mentally empty, I turned to Maxwell, who was pacing the floor restlessly: "Well, shall we go down and set up your defense barrier again?" "Let's take a walk," he said. "I've got a headache. Fresh air might help." "Suits me," I replied. "I know of a little bar seven or eight blocks from here..." I stopped because he was already going out the door, and I had to get up from the chair, grab the defense mech and run after him. He wasn't hurrying, just walking casually, but not waiting for anything. In the elevator, on the way down, he said, "Those defense mechs. God damn. I wish those defense mechs..." I nudged him. The elevator operator was looking at him closely, and there's no use taking any chances. He ought to know better. He was out of the elevator as soon as the door opened at ground level. He walked toward the front entrance. I had to run again to catch up with him. "Hey. what's the hurry?" I asked. "Can I come along too?" He didn't answer, just kept walking. Looking straight ahead, still not hurrying, but moving rapidly nevertheless. When we got outside, he turned right and continued at the same steady pace. I tugged at his arm. "Hey, the bar I mentioned is the other way." He shook my hand loose and kept walking. "I want to go this way." I shrugged and trotted to keep up with him. "Okay. If you know of a better place, we'll go there. But -- " "This damn headache," he said. "I've had it all day. All afternoon." "My fault," I said. "I started you puzzling over a problem that concerns only me... He wasn't listening. There were few pedestrians on this level of traffic; most people who walked places took the ambulators on the second level. Down here the sidewalks were narrow and the curbs high, the streets being used almost exclusively for heavy transfer and delivery trucks. A high metal railing along the street-side of the walk prevented careless pedestrians from stepping in the path of the huge, swift, rumbling vehicles. But there were no railings at the intersections. And at the next intersection. Maxwell stepped off the curb, shifted his course just a fraction, and went on at a tangent that would have had him smack in the middle of a truck-traffic lane. ed hard, to get him headed back in the right direction. "What the hell are you trying to do -- get yourself killed?" Which was almost exactly what I'd started to say. But he was the one who said it. So I just said, "Huh?" He jerked his arm free and continued walking -- straight toward an oncoming #-ton semi. I had a sudden idea of what was going on, and acted rapidly. I set the defense mech down, because you can't handle a man Maxwell's size with only one hand. I grabbed his arm again, this time with both hands, and pulled as hard as I could. It jerked him off balance and out of danger. The semi roared past. And Maxwell turned on me with sudden, violent anger. "Listen," he snapped, "what in hell's the matter with you? What do you think you're doing?" I didn't argue with him. I took careful aim and threw a haymaker, giving it everything I had. It caught the point of his chin squarely and jarred me to my ankle. He swayed a little bit and his face went blank, but he didn't fall. For which I shall be eternally grateful. Another giant semi, still nearly a block away, was hurtling toward us. If Maxwell had fallen, I could not possibly have dragged him out of the way in time. And the semi couldn't have stopped in that distance. As it was, I was able to snatch up the defense mech with one hand and propel Maxwell to the opposite curb, just seconds before the truck went by with a whiz and a rattle. I got Maxwell onto an escalator leading to the second level before his legs buckled. Then he went to his knees. I managed to get his arm around my shoulder and hoist him back to his feet before we reached the top. On the second level there were no vehicles; quite a few pedestrians glided by in both directions, on several different speeds of ambulator bands. I spotted a bar down the street and dragged Maxwell onto a amband going that way. By the time I got him inside and settled in a booth, he was beginning to recover, shaking his head and muttering to himself. I ordered a whole bottle of Scotch and handed Maxwell a glass of the stuff. He took it automatically and (jrank half of it as though it were water. and half rose from his seat, clutching his throat and gasping. I handed him another glass, this one containing water. He drank it and sat back down, slowly. "Drink the rest of that Scotch," I said. "Drink it quick and don't ask any questions. Someone's got a telenosis beam on you, and he isn't kidding." It penetrated, for he emptied the glass with short but rapid gulps. I filled the glass again and ordered more water. It took him fifteen minutes to kill the glass this time, taking only a little sip of Scotch for every deep gulp of water. But he got it down, though he was nearly unconscious at the end. "Listen," I said, reaching over to shake his limp shoulder. "Are you still with me? For the love of heaven, don't pass out on me -- that's about the worst thing you could do. John!" He jerked his head and regarded me with unfocused eyes. "Huh? Wash matter, ole fren? I'm wish ya. Wish ya ta the end. Washer trouble, huh?" I said, "John, listen. You're in danger. We've got to get you out of here. Out of town. Back to New York. Right away! Do you understand?" He nodded limply. I wasn't sure whether he really understood or not. But if he could only walk, it wouldn't make much difference. If only he didn't pass out... it wasn't very far. Just back to the door, then into the elevator instead of going onto the street at this level. Then, on the third level, only the few feet necessary to catch a bus or a cab to take us to the strato-port. If he couldn't walk, I didn't know what I'd do. Whoever the telenosis operator was, I was sure he had followed us to this bar through Maxwell's mind, That's the way telenosis works. Alcohol sets up a complete barrier, and contact is broken entirely: but about all a blow on the head does is immobilize the victim -- visions, commands and other impressions can still penetrate. and the operator can still receive whatever sensations his victim may have. Maxwell hadn't been unconscious enough for us to be safe. Someone wanted our blood. We had to move fast. And if he couldn't manage to walk at all... He couldn't, exactly. But he could get to his feet and lurch and stumble along after a fashion. It accomplished the same purpose. T got him to the third level, and we stood atthe entrance of the bar while I got myself oriented. I had made a tactical error. Vehicles going to the strato-port stopped on the other side of the street. And to get there, I would now have to walk Maxwell all the way down to the end of the block to a pedestrian cross-walk, then halfway back up the other side. The alternative was to go down again and cross in the middle of the block on the pedestrian level, which is what I should have done in the first place. But I wanted to get as far away from the bar as possible and as soon as possible. So I shrugged and turned to my left, shoving and dragging Maxwell with me. As I did so, my defense mech started clicking. Maxwell stumbled and nearly fell. I shoved him against the side of a building and leaned against him to keep him up. The liquor had hit him hard. If he once went down, there would be no getting him up. Not by me. We did better after I wrapped one of his arms around my shoulder. I could carry part of his weight and I had better control of him. I kept him as close to the storefronts as possible, to minimize the possibility of being recognized from a moving vehicle in the Street. It didn't do a bit of good. They'd probably spotted us as soon as we stepped away from the bar entrance. For all I know, they had been waiting for us since we entered the bar. Three of them. Sitting there in the illegally parked light passenger sedan just ahead of us. I saw it when we were still fifteen feet away. I saw it, and I knew what it was, and I stopped. The sedan wasn't really parked. It was just pulled over close against the curb, moving slowly toward us. When I stopped, the sedan moved up quickly even with us, and two men stepped out. I edged Maxwell toward a drugstore entrance a few feet to the left, but the men from the sedan were at our side in an instant. "Hey, friend, got a match?" one of them asked for the benefit of a passing couple who glanced at us. I recognized him. A deep crisscrossed scar ran from above his right cheekbone vertically down his cheek, ending in a big dent in his jaw bone. His lips were thick and loose. TT'OR just an instant I was mo- tionless, frozen, my right hand holding Maxwell's arm over my shoulder, my left hand gripping the quietly ticking defense mech. Then I moved almost without thinking about it. I released my grip on Maxwell's arm, shoving him against the thug that I didn't recognize. At the same time, I swung my defense mech, aiming at the head of my scarfaced acquaintance. He raised his arm, but the heavy case slammed into it and bounced off his forehead. It probably broke his arm, and possibly fractured his skull. I didn't wait to find out. Holding tightly to the defense mech, I darted into the store entrance. I left Maxwell blindly clutching the assailant into whose path I had thrown him. I didn't worry about Maxwell. They could have him. If I got away, they wouldn't dare kill him. And if I didn't get away, they would kill both of us. The escalator was just inside the door to the right, and I ran down the downward-moving steps, doubling back to the left at the bottom, and out the door on the pedestrian level. I turned left again and ran to the corner, crossed the street and ran threefourths the length of the block. I glanced backward and didn't see anyone running after me, so I entered a late-hour department store. I wasn't safe yet, and I didn't feel safe, but I felt encouraged enough to slow down to a fast walk through the aisles of the men's clothing section. I had to get to a visiphone, first of all, and call Newell in New York. And then -- well, I wasn't sure. Hide, somewhere. Keep from being captured. It took me three minutes of rapid wandering through the building to find a row of visiphone booths. I placed the call. While I waited, nervously crossing and uncrossing my legs, peering intermittently out the window to see if there was any sign of pursuit, I had time to think. I had time to think, but I didn't think. Not really. I was thinking of what I was going to tell Newell. Thinking of Maxwell being dragged away by Grogan's "secretaries," and wondering what would happen to him. But I didn't really think, and maybe it's just as well. A little less than nine agonizing minutes elapsed before Newell's plump face appeared on the screen. "You're late tonight," he said. "I was just on the verge of calling you. How're things going?" I told him quickly, and with a minimum of detail, what had happened since our last session. "It's Grogan, after all," I said. "I'd recognize that scarfaced gorilla of his anywhere. Get Grogan and -- " The boss nodded. "We'll get him. You let me worry about that. You've got to...You say they were beaming telenosis on Maxwell? How the devil did they get his wave-band so soon?" "You can worry about that one, too," I told him. "Okay. Never mind. Where are you now? Never mind that either. Just stay there. Call the nearest police station and have them send someone after you. Get in a nice snug cell and stay put. We'll take care of Grogan and Maxwell. Okay, now. Don't waste any time." W E hung up together. Then I quickly dialed the operator and asked for the nearest sectional police station. When the face of the desk sergeant flashed on the screen, I told him, "My name is Earl Langston. My life is in immediate danger. I'm in a vp booth near the Pacific Street entrance, number four, of Underhill's department store, second level." "Stay where you are," the sergeant replied. "We'll have someone after you in ten or fifteen minutes." In a surprisingly short time, an overweight, gray-uniformed policeman with a face like a bulldog rapped at the door of the booth. I stood up and opened the door. "Earl Langston?" he asked. I nodded and followed him to an elevator. We went up to the third level and then through a maze of aisles and departments before going out a door that opened on a parking lot. The policeman led me to an unmarked auto and opened the back door for me. Two dogs barked at my heels as we walked to the vehicle. I shooed them off before I closed the door. I leaned back on the soft cushions with a sigh and set the heavy defense mech on the edge of the seat beside me, still holding the handle loosely with one hand. The motor purred as we moved slowly out of the parking lot and into the street. I paid no attention to where we were going. Just breathed another sigh and closed my eyes. At last, I could begin to relax. In just a few minutes, now, I'd be safe. I hadn't realized how tense I was. My neck muscles ached and my stomach slipped slowly from my chest cavity back down to where it belonged. It seemed a long time ago that I had abandoned Maxwell to Grogan's thugs... What had happened to him since then? How long ago had it been? Only half an hour? Not much longer, anyway. Now again I had time to think, and this time I did think. I began to ask myself questions -- to wonder about certain things. How had Grogan learned Maxwell's waveband so soon? What was Grogan doing with a telenizer in the first place, and what was he up to? Just personal revenge against me? How did I know for sure that it was Grogan? That question startled me. I opened my eyes and sat up straight. In moving so suddenly, my hand knocked over the defense mech and it thudded to the floor. As I bent quickly to pick it up, it started clicking again. Several things occurred to me at once, then, and my stomach wadded itself into a tight ball and shot up again to press against my heart. My neck and back muscles tightened. T'HE first thing that struck me, I think, was that the defense mech had started clicking again. It had been clicking before... As Maxwell and I left the bar, the defense mech had begun clicking steadily. Then -- sometime -- it had stopped. Probably when I hit Scarface with it. But I hadn't noticed. And for thirty minutes -- closer to forty-five, now... There was no particular sequence to the flood of realizations that rushed my consciousness next and left me feeling weak and shaky. The desk sergeant had said ten minutes. The policeman had gotten there in less than five. We were driving, not through side streets toward a police station, but along a high-speed lane of a main thoroughfare, away from the city. Two dogs had yapped at my heels. The "police" vehicle was unmarked -- unusual if not illegal. When I looked at the driver, he was not, of course, a policeman. He was one of Grogan's bodyguards -- the one into whose arms I had thrown Maxwell not long ago. He was staring straight ahead at the road, his spread-nosed face composed. He hadn't noticed anything. I took a deep breath and leaned back again, half-closing my eyes. But I did not relax. The clicking of the defense mech seemed thunderous to me, but if the driver heard it, he gave no indication. Perhaps it would have meant nothing to him if he did hear it. I tried to think of the problem at hand, but my mind refused to cooperate. It kept rushing back to events of the recent past and demanding reasons and explanations. When the defense mech faltered and quietly stopped clicking, I was aware of it this rime. My first impulse was to hit it with my hand and try to make it work again, but I restrained myself. I controlled my thoughts firmly, holding them tight and shaping them carefully in my mind before letting them go. The driver was again a policeman in the gray police uniform. We were once more driving slowly through city streets instead of speeding along a highway. Two dogs ran beside the auto, barking -- the same two dogs that I had shooed before I closed the door. I formed my thoughts: I know who you are. It's no secret any more. But why? What are you trying to do? There was no reply. It could mean one of two things. Either he simply didn't want to answer, or else he wasn't on the machine in person but was playing an impression-tape on my wave-band. I tried again. You're licked, you know. Already you're licked. Even if my call to Newell was nothing but a telenosis dream -- even if no one knows anything about this but me, you're still licked --  I'd expected at least to get a sinister chuckle, or a flood of horrors. But there was nothing more nor less than what there had been -- the policeman driving through quiet city streets, and the dogs barking. Then it was just a recording, prepared in advance. My mind was not being followed in person. Not right now. But that was no help and no assurance. I still didn't dare get out of the car. Or knock the driver over the head and take over the car myself. At ninety miles an hour, and with a visual impression of moving slowly along city streets, that would be a sure form of suicide. Or would it? Apparently I had no choice but to wait until we arrived at our destination and then do what I could -- which might not be much. Lord, if I could make another vp call before we got there! Careful, though. Even with no operator at the telenizer, I had to watch out for thought leakage. My thoughts were surely being recorded, and certain kinds of thoughts might trigger automatic precautionary measures. I gave the defense mech a hard bang with my hand. It clicked twice. I got a brief glimpse of the highway flashing past and the lights of other vehicles. Then the clicking stopped, and we were back in town, crawling along. I hit the defense mech again, a series of lighter blows, and it obediently clicked and this time continued clicking; and we were on the highway again. Making an 'effort to control my breathing and to muffle the sound of my rapidly pounding heart, I leaned forward and examined the controls of the auto intently. There was a phone. Not a visiphone, of course, but a phone nonetheless. A means of communication There was also a luminous radar dial that might or might not mean automatic controls. Which might or might not be in operation. I concentrated on the hands and feet of the driver. Neither moved perceptibly. The course of the vehicle was straight and constant, though, so that didn't prove anything. "Hey, where in hell is this police station?" I asked. With a slight backward-turning motion of his head, the driver replied, "Almost there. Just a few minutes now." As his head moved, his hands moved the wheel a bare fraction. The auto did not swerve. I took a deep breath and hit the driver on the side of the head with my doubled right fist as hard as I could. He slumped, and I hit him again. His hands slid from the wheel... and the car continued on its course. I clambered into the front seat with the driver. A S I lifted the mike, the auto started slowing down, and I thought for a moment it wasn't electronically controlled after all. That was a horrible moment, and I clutched at the wheel instinctively, but the car still did not swerve. So I quit worrying about that and dialed the number. The conversation, once I had the call through, took quite a little while. I had to convince the man that I was serious. While I was talking, arguing frantically, the auto was slowing almost to a stop, maneuvering over to the turning lane on the right, making the turn and following a narrow road that crossed under the highway. The urgency of my voice must have been pretty convincing, because the voice on the other end finally said, "Well, I'll do what I can, Mr. Langston, but it'll take time. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. And so help me, if this is a joke -- " "It's no joke," I pleaded. "Believe me, it isn't. Please make it as fast as you can. Civilization may be at stake." On that deliberately ominous note, I hung up. Immediately I began thinking of the things I should have done, the machinery I should have set in motion instead of the one thing I had done. By all means, I ought to have notified the police directly. My notion that telenosis influenced all the police desk sergeants in town was hysterical, baseless. Well, I could call back, even now -- But I couldn't. The car was moving at a relatively slow speed -- but still over fifty miles an hour, on a narrow unpaved, downgrade road. Through the side window I saw dark trees and shadowy brush gliding by. And then through the window I saw lighted storefronts, mail boxes, a few vague pedestrians on smooth sidewalks, and two dogs running tirelessly beside the car, barking as they ran... Repeated pounding on the heavy black box did not restore reality. Now I did not dare use the phone again or even think about it. I was sitting beside the driver, and the driver was sitting erect at the wheel. On a sudden, stupid impulse, I struck at the driver's head, and my hand went through it without touching anything. I groped with my hand until I felt the man's limp head where my eyes said his shoulder was. With a suppressed shudder, I drew my hand away and sat back in the seat to wait. It couldn't be long now. The car turned a comer and continued at a much slower pace. It went perhaps a hundred yards before it pulled to the curb and stopped. Across the street I saw the police station. The entrance looked like any other store or business entrance, but a marquee-sign above the entrance read: "Section # Police Station." The driver sat motionless behind the wheel. He would not move, I knew, until... I shrugged, picked up the defense mech, and opened the door. Pedestrians walked by along the sidewalk, and autos glided in both directions on the street. Dogs yapped at my heels. I ignored them. They did not exist. But I knew the police station did exist. I walked directly toward the entrance -- a long kitty-corner across the street. When a powerfully humming auto headed toward me, I closed my eyes and braced myself and continued walking. It is not a pleasant sensation to be run down by a car -- even a dream-car with no substance. My skin was prickly and my palms moist. I could feel the blood pounding in my head. The door to the police station was open. A short flight of stairs went up to another door that was closed. I did not ring the bell, but opened the door and stepped into the reception room. The room was empty except for the uniformed policeman sitting at the radio bank on the other side of the railing with his back to me. He wore earphones. As the door clicked shut, the policeman turned in his swivel chair to face me. "Hello, Langston, we've been expecting you," he said. It was Isaac Grogan. I smiled and replied with calmness that amazed me: "Yes, I daresay you have, Zan Matl Blekeke." in the small, bare, brightly lighted but windowless room. Blekeke had spent a half-hour after my arrival trying to find out how much I knew. But after my initial shocker -- letting him know that I recognized him -- I had kept my mind closed tightly: and I was keeping it closed now. Blekeke was still listening in -- I had no doubt of that. Maxwell knew it too, for he made no attempt at conversation. He sat with his back to the walls in one corner, and I crouched in another corner, and we sat there, staring at the walls and at each other, not daring to speak or to think. After about ten or fifteen minutes the door opened, and Blekeke stepped in. He was wearing earphones, and a wire trailed behind him. In one hand he carried a blaster. He smiled broadly and nodded, once at each of us. "Something show you," he said. "Watching." He pushed a button on the wall beside the door and the lights died. For an instant everything was black, and I braved myself. Then the wall beside Blekeke glowed, flickered -- and a scene in black and white came into focus. "This observer room," Blekeke said. "Show what camera top meeting hall see." The scene was dim; a halfmoon bobbed and splashed in ocean waves in the background. In the right foreground, close and large, dark and dull, was the spaceship. It was Martian, but not military. An old cargo carrier. Its rear jets were extinguished, but the ship was vibrating. Leaving? I wondered -- and Blekeke caught my thought over the telenizer earphones. No -- just arriving, was his answer in my mind. But it leave again very soon. You with. Soon no matter what you know. What did. Soon gone. How soon ? I demanded. Blekeke spoke aloud: "Very soon. Fifteen, twenty, half-hour minutes. Looking more. All way right." I looked at the extreme right edge of the picture, where a rough, shadowy hillock arose. While I watched, an opening appeared in the hillock and a dim human figure emerged. It stood erect and walked across the stretch of gravel beach toward the spaceship. Another figure came from the hillock aperture and followed the first. The thought came from Blekeke: Cultists. Evidence. Prove my success. Success in what? Why? How? Blekeke pushed the button on the wall again, and the lights were suddenly on, and the wall bare. "No harm tell you now," he said. "Gone soon. No matter." crossed his fragile arms across his huge red chest. He said: "Mars home dying. You know. Need more somewhere. Earth best, but some Earthmen deciding not want." He shrugged. "Dear Late Doctor -- " he did not bother making the mystic sign -- Reighardt -- know name? Psychiatrist. Very old. No, I not kill; death natural. I wanted live longer, but... he shrugged again. "Learned much from, howso. He founded cult. I his servant after joining. He idea very innocent -- cure not really sick with mild 'nosis." He smiled modestly. "I also much rapid. Apply own idea, which not so innocent. Fact, very insidious. Telenize right persons, they want Martian then! Vote to let come, yups?" Maxwell broke in: "Then why didn't you start in on the right people at once? Why not set up your headquarters in Belgrade and telenize the World Council members, instead of playing around with a bunch of hypochondriacs here?" Blekeke held up his hand. "So fast not so. Must work with what got. Doctor machine very simple, and he telling me not all. Not trusting even me all way. Needing much work, then. Muchness development. Six months I workSo now have proof for Mars government, which verysome cautious. Demanding evidence." This time I broke in. "Blekeke," I said, with some of the respect I was beginning to feel for him, "you're a patriot, I guess, and I have to admire you for that. But you're also a damned fool. You can't get away with this -- and I think you know it. There are just too many loopholes." "Where loop-hole?" "Well, in the first place, I made a phone call before I got here -- while I was in the car and my defense mech was on. As a result, the police will be here in a very few minutes -- probably before you can get to the rocket -- " Blekeke smiled blandly. "Where second place?" "In the second place, assuming that you do get to the spaceship and take off before the police get here, it still won't matter. They know , now, who has been operating the telenizer. They can track you down. You'll be picked up long before you get to Mars." I stood up and strode purposefully toward him. "Give me the blaster, dammit. You're licked before you're even started." Blekeke frowned and pointed the blaster at my chest. "Please. So fast not so. Go back corner, please." I obediently returned to the corner and sat down. It had been worth a try. The Martian lowered the weapon and smiled. "You too brave. I not like kill. But pfoof for loop-hole. All plugged. Looking what front-door camera see. Polices here now." He pushed the button on the wall. to a halt in the driveway before the big house, and a halfdozen uniformed men, armed with deadly blasters, were piling out. Another car was whipping around the final curve. I knew that Maxwell was giving me a look of gratitude, but suddenly I wasn't sure it was warranted. I had assumed on a sort of blind faith that the police would get here in time -- but as I watched the scene, I didn't feel so good. For the policemen were not charging the house. They were not even looking at it. aimlessly. No, not aimlessly, exactly. They were looking for something; but they weren't seeing it. One of them got back in the car and used the radio, and the others wandered around, glancing unseeingly in all directions. "Mass telenosis?" I asked quietly, not taking my eyes from the scene, feeling my heart pound harder as I caught a glimpse of the bobbing, slower lights of another vehicle on the road far back. Blekeke said, "Yups. Plug all loop-hole. Police not see house, not see ship. No one see ship leave, not knowing Blekeke on board. Complete vanish." He shrugged. "Ship keep commercial schedule. Take auxiliary power to right course, then switch rocket. Stopped on way, maybe, so what? Telenize searchers, yups?" "What about the house?" I asked. "Go boom when we leave," Blekeke said. Maxwell said, "Judas! Everyone will just assume that we and Blekeke and all the cultists have gone boom, too. That's likely to end the investigation right there. Slow it down plenty, at least." Blekeke nodded applaudingly. "Yups. Is so." He pushed the wallbutton and we had the spaceship scene again. Men and Martians were loading large crates into the port of the ship. The other bulky boxes were being moved across the beach from the opening in the hill. "Leaving soon now," Blekeke said as he switched the lights on. "That most of vital equipment. Other going boom. We work awful quickness, yups?" "Just how do you mean?" I asked, more to kill time than out of real curiosity. "Ha! You not knowing how quickness we work since morning -- since getting Maxwell brain band on measure machine Sun Ray..." Maxwell exclaimed; "Oh, hell, of course! Son of a blunder! That's how you got it." and I guessed it was the information Blekeke had gained from Maxwell's mind that was forcing him to act now, before he had planned. "When learned you planning Blekeke corroborated. "So did. Not know you law man till then. Only that Langston mind stopped 'nosis. Not even knowing why. Worried for while -- whew!" He wiped the mock perspiration from his brow and smiled. I said, "The thugs who attacked Maxwell and me were Grogan's men. May I ask now -- just out of curiosity -- were they telenized, or was Grogan?" Blekeke seemed happy to reply. "Grogan. Reighardt happened work on Grogan in Cl. Also your brain wave number in file, but I getting first on Sun Ray machine." I had wondered about that, and there was another question that was bothering me. "When you started that blood dripping in the bathtub," I said, "was that a deliberate attempt to scare me away, or was that part of the standard treatment?" "Standard," Blekeke replied. "Subject no longer trust own senses after. But recognize 'nosis, so trying frighten you. Work good on others." I started to ask another question, but he switched on the spaceship loading scene again. A crane was hauling the last huge crate into the hold. All the apparently aboard ship. None were visible. A few Martians stood near the ship, some of them looking toward the hillock opening, and some watching the loading. Suddenly two policemen came into view on the screen, walking casually over the hill in which the opening was located. At the top they halted and looked out over the ocean. One of the men looked over his shoulder and pulled a bottle from an inside pocket. He offered it to his companion, who shook his head. The man shrugged and took a deep swallow himself, tucking the bottle inside his jacket again. I caught a sudden note of mild alarm from Blekeke's mind, which reminded me that he was still listening for careless thoughts of mine. The policemen continued walking toward the beach, heading to the right of the spaceship. I saw one of the Martians step back into the shadow of the ship. The others followed the policemen with their eyes. "We best going now," Blekeke said. He reached to turn off the picture... And his hand froze. He saw the same thing I saw, and at just about the same time. He saw a dog. And he must have felt the triumphant, incoherent chortle that gushed from my mind. spotted terrier. It came trotting absentmindedly over the hill after the policemen, and at the top it stopped. It quivered. It sat down, pointed its nose at the spaceship and opened its mouth in a howl I could almost hear. Then the scene was gone; the lights in the room glowed; Blekeke was pointing the blaster at me. And his trigger finger was trembling. He was shaking, very slightly, all over. His red-hued skin had turned a much paler shade. I don't think I moved a muscle while I waited for him to speak. boom." He laughed shrilly, almost hysterically. "You very cleverish. Finding one weakener. Tell polices bringing dogs." "Why, no," I said. "As a matter of fact, I told the dogs to bring the police." That caught his interest. His hand on the blaster relaxed enough so that I could breath. "That call I made from the car, coming here," I said. "It wasn't to the police. After the results of my first call to them, I thought it was just possible that you had somehow telenized all the desk sergeants. I wasn't thinking too sharp just then. Anyway, I called the city dog pound, instead. I told 'em to get as many dogs out here as fast as they possibly could." Blekeke spoke in a very soft voice. "Cleverly, cleverly. And I giving self way." "You sure did," I agreed. "There's dogs in every damn vision you dream up, you hate 'em so much. Same way some people have snakes." Blekeke gestured with the blaster. He had regained some of his color, and he wasn't trembling. "Getting up now. We leaving. Not kill if not necessary." Maxwell and I stood up. Blekeke backed through the door, motioning for us to follow. He walked us ahead of him along a corridor and down two flights of stairs, staying a safe distance behind us. The entrance to the tunnel was in the basement, through a door that looked like any other door. Blekeke took off the earphones he was wearing and tossed them aside. "This 'nizer blow up with house," he said. The tunnel was wide, straight and brightly lighted. The opposite end was a small black dot, but it didn't take us long to get there. My thoughts were running wild, now that no one was listening. The dogs had bothered Blekeke, but how badly? He seemed so damned sure of himself now. No hesitation at all. Or -- was it merely resignation? I didn't know. But if he once got us aboard that spaceship, his plan had a ridiculously good chance of succeeding... And would that be so bad? Were his motives so ignoble, or his methods so very atrocious? I drove that line of thought from my mind. I could think about that later... the tunnel, the dark spaceship seemed disturbingly close, and the expanse between it and us free of impediments of any kind. Only fifty or sixty quick steps, and then... The Martians at the ship saw us and climbed aboard. The ship . was beginning to vibrate again. The two policemen were wandering around by the water's edge. We could hear the dogs howling. Several others had joined in now, but we couldn't see them. They were above us. "Walk slow to ship," Blekeke instructed, tenseness obvious in his voice. "Casual. Like nothing. I right behind." Maxwell and I glanced at each other and stepped from the aperture to the gravelly beach and started walking very slowly and casually toward the spaceship. We had gone about ten feet when we heard, in the short intervals when the dogs weren't howling, the crunching footsteps of Blekeke behind us. They were faltering. I couldn't resist a backward glance. I saw about a half-dozen dogs on the hill behind and above Blekeke. They were squatting on their haunches, noses pointed at the spaceship, and they were creating the damnedest racket I had ever heard. Surely the cops would at least suspect something! Blekeke was walking stiffly, slowly, keeping the blaster pointed at us, making a visible effort not to turn around. "Hey, you goddam dogs!" one of the policemen on the beach shouted. "Shut the hell up!" He picked up a rock and threw it, but he was too far away. The missile whizzed low over my head. I ducked instinctively, turning to see where the stone hit. It missed the dogs by a good fifteen or twenty feet. Other policemen were appearing from the direction of the road, running anxiously toward the dogs, looking in the direction the dogs were pointing. And seeing nothing. Other dogs were appearing, too, some well within the vision of Blekeke -- but another quick glance showed me that he was staring rigidly ahead and walking steadily. We were entering the shadow of the spaceship. Less than twenty feet to go. Even in the dim light, I could almost distinguish the features of the Martian waiting there to haul us aboard. npHE policemen on the beach were now walking back to join the others. The one who had yelled and thrown the stone now whistled shrilly, and shouted, "Commere. you lousy, fleabitten mutts, and shut up!" He whistled again. Insistently. One dog stopped howling and slunk forward timidly, then halted. The whistle was a shrill command. I heard a soft gasp, perhaps a sob, from Blekeke. The dog trotted slowly, reluctantly, forward, tail between its legs, growling and whining at the same time. "Running! Running! Hurry!" Blekeke screamed. Instead, I turned around to watch, and so did Maxwell. The policeman continued to whistle. Another dog, a large, shaggy collie, left the pack. But it was not timid, and it paid no attention to the policemen -- it had seen Blekeke, and it rushed at him, snarling and yapping. The Martian made a gurgling noise. A shudder shook his frame, Current l etc Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Hack issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) and he turned and fired. I was watching, without really comprehending what I saw, the policeman who had been whistling. Abruptly he stopped whistling. He was looking. But not at the dogs, nor at the other policemen. Not even at the shaggy collie that vanished suddenly in a blinding flash. He was looking at the spaceship. And seeing it. He rubbed a hand across his eyes. When the collie was hit, the terrier which had slunk forward turned. At five feet from Blekeke, it growled and leaped at him. Blekeke collapsed. The blaster dropped from his hand, and he crumpled into a trembling, twitching, sobbing lump on the ground. I rushed to grab the blaster, and Maxwell kicked the snarling, frightened dog away. At the same time, the policeman yelled, "Jupiter! It is a spaceship! I knew I seen somethin'. I may have had a drink, but I ain't crazy!" He fired while he was yelling, and the Martian who had been leaning from the port ducked inside. The ship shuddered and rose quickly, with a rumble that was almost drowned by the racket the dogs were making. The policeman rubbed his eyes. "Huh?... I coulda swore I saw a spaceship. Right there. Just now. Just a second ago." "Man, you really are drunk," his companion said. The house blew up an instant later. No policemen were killed or injured in the explosion. They were all gathered on the beach to see why the dogs were howling. It took a bit of explaining. Frederik Pohl, which hauls you into an inflation more preposterous and yet unswervingly logical than any you could ever imagine. It's a fact, of course, that national budgets never stop growing... which means that individual ones don't, either. Our national budget makes Jefferson's look laughable, for instance... and Morey Fry's budgeting problem makes this whole country's look just as pathetic and absurd! And in case your disbelief refuses to suspend, show it any good economic survey of the last # years -- the proof is right there! aftermath of a disaster in space and a broken, helpless female basket case who has to trust a surgeon to give her back her body and mind -- an alien doctor who had never seen a human being before! littlest Getting a job in space was a big problem -- but they solved it neatly by making i came to the asteroid with his little people, I always made Dad take me with him. I was fascinated with the little people. I was too fascinated. It finally made trouble. My father was Personnel Director of the local Asteroid Mines, Inc. diggings on our tiny planet. He was one of the most small I important persons under the Dome. The workers and families of Point Montana always lifted their hats and smiled to him, and it was fun to be walking beside him and see the respect he got. Only the General Manager got more, and he was bald and they kidded about "Old Hat." But no one ever kidded with my father. We climbed up the steps of Mott's space-burned old craft with a feeling of importance, at least on my part, because no one was allowed aboard an Employment rocket except the Personnel Director of the asteroid and one or two other high officials. Old Mott met us at the entrance and bowed and grinned, his funny, old-fashioned glasses glittering and his almost toothless mouth shapeless in the smile. Then there was a long waste of talk while they had a glass of wine together. Meanwhile I was anxiously waiting, watching the door that burned so bright in my imagination. On the other side of its prosaic gray metal the little people rested. "No technicians," apologized Mott. "I can give you some cooks, and some helpers and some housewifehopefuls this trip. Many fine ones." My father shook his head. "Unskilled labor is a drug here, Mott. Like everywhere. I feel sorry for the poor devils, but I can't take any, especially the housewife-hopefuls." Old Mott looked disappointed. "Some of these people have been in space for many years," he muttered. "Too many. It ain't fair, Chet." "Send them back to Earth." Old Mott shook his head and sighed. Finally he and my father rose, and we went into the heavily locked room where the little people were. LD Mott had them arranged by profession. It was a small room, not over ten by ten, and three walls were filled with shelves. The little people were propped up along the shelves, with tiny name-plates beneath each one. They were about seven inches high and stood rigid like so many dolls. Only they weren't dolls; they were real people. They were the poor, the unskilled, the have-not hopefuls. They couldn't get jobs on Earth. They couldn't pay their way to the planets. So they signed contracts with Greater New York Employment or one of those outfits and traveled from planet to planet and out through the asteroids looking for work. In one of these Employment ships, when they were reduced in size, you could get a couple of hundred; and as little people they needed very little food or oxygen. Fullsized in life, the ship wouldn't take two dozen. And so they traveled, in a fitful sleep, reduced in size, reduced in hope, trying to find a place to work and settle down and make a home. Old Mott covered his stocks of little people with cellophane. That was so when Father or anybody picked one up. it wouldn't get dirty from handling. Sometimes you almost thought their tiny eyes watched you. Other times, you couldn't be sure. In reduction they were supposed to sleep, with the agent doing all of the interviewing for them. I wandered down the aisles, staring at the little people from Earth, while my father and Old Mott argued about a handful of laborers -- all that Dad was going to buy this trip. I was never allowed to touch the stock. It was a very important rule. Everybody felt a little ashamed about the little people and was sorry because they couldn't find a place to live. You were very careful not to handle them unnecessarily. But down on the end one of them had fallen on the floor. I picked it up. It was a woman, maybe a girl. She was staring right at me with bold blue eyes and a smile. I would swear that she looked at me and winked. Hands trembling to feel that unspeakable warm life in my hand, I hastened to put her back on the shelf. There was no place for her. Old Mott was getting pretty old at the time, and, I guess, careless. All the spots were filled and he must have let her fall to the floor and his weak old eyes didn't see her. I wondered how long she'd been there. father and Old Mott were. My father and the old man had selected three laborers and were studying them through magnifying glasses, my father telling Old Mott how defective they were, and Old Mott insisting that they were real good merchandise. Just as I came up to them there was a commotion outside the ship. Some men yelled. I was curious; but I wanted to tell Old Mott about the tiny woman first. "Father -- " "Please, son," said my father. "Don't interrupt." He was always touchy in the little room. It was, I think, the aura of failure and hopelessness. It was the embarrassment of having to touch and handle and scan the tiny bodies of other people less fortunate than him, and deciding their fates in dollars and cents. "Mr. Mott -- " "Go see who's climbing the ship, son," he ordered without looking. "I haven't got much time left. I'm due back on Mars Friday -- " I should have put the tiny figure on the table. But there was an unholy fascination in holding that hot little figure in my hand -- a person born before me, an adult, and here she was a tiny foot-ruler of life in my hand. So I went out to see what the trouble was about, still holding her. It was the Sheriff. He was herding along two men who hadn't worked out well on the asteroid. He had them in handcuffs, and they were fighting and cursing as he prodded them into the ship. My father and Old Mott came out and set down on the table the three tiny figures my father had chosen. Then Old Mott and the Sheriff and my father dragged the two men into the Converter and shut the door. I could hear the explosive cries of the rejected men who had gotten into trouble on our asteroid. Then the machinery cut over them, whining with a scary sound that made me shake all over. Once I heard a scream. Pretty soon they all came out again. The Sheriff went away, saying, "I hope you pick better ones this time, Mr. Blake." Old Mott had two tiny figures in his hands. He wrapped them in cellophane and put them in his pocket. "It'll be a cold day in January before I sell them two again," he said. "They been getting into trouble everywhere I take 'em. Let 'em cool for a while." Then he and my father took the three new little figures and went back in the Converter. The machinery whined again, but this time it sounded different. Pretty soon they came out, and I blinked. I always blinked when I saw those tiny figures go into the Converter and come out twice as big as me, full-sized and smiling and being real deferential to Father. "This is wonderful, Mr. Blake," said one. "We'll sure work hard, Mr. Mott." "It was real kind of you to take us on, Mr. Blake," said another. "We ain't never had a chance before." smiles that tried too hard, and held their hats in their hands and bobbed their heads. You could see the whites of their eyes like a dog's. They wore the faded blues and reds of workers, and they were clumsy on their feet after so many months of being little. They were young, but they looked old and tired, and I had to swallow in my throat when they looked out of the window and saw how small and gray our little asteroid was, and how they kept on smiling and bowing, and swallowing their disappointment at their new home. Father smiled back at them, but he'd heard it all before. Some of them would start drinking. Some of them would get in trouble with women. Some of them would get bored and make trouble. Not one in ten ever really liked our asteroid and really became one of us. Maybe it was partly our fault, because it made a big difference how you came to the asteroid. If you came in a regular rocket, full-sized and with luggage, it was easier. Those were the engineers and doctors and scientists, and they were important in the Dome. But the little people made big lived on the sides of the Dome, where there was less oxygen, and they didn't ever make much or have much. My father and I said good-by to Mr. Mott and climbed down the loading ladder. Old Mott peered after us through his glasses and smiled and waved, and my father waved the contracts up at him -- the contracts that said that Father would deduct Old Mott's money from the laborers' wages every month, and also pay the Greater New York Employment its fee. Then we started back for Point Montana, the new workers unsteady on their legs and still trying to be nice. My father walked between them, bracing them with his arms, and answered their questions. I brought up the rear. And that night, nearly eight years ago, when I got home, I found Gleam in my pocket. I had forgotten to give her back to Old Mott. I had stolen one of the little people. N aturally, i didn't know what to do with her -- until I went in my sister's playroom and saw her dolls. Then I gave her to my sister Kate and told her that it was a new kind of doll, a used-up little person that Old Mott had given me on the promise that I wouldn't tell the folks. I swore her to secrecy. Kate jumped up and down, hugging the little figure in cellophane. "She gleams," she cried, "I'll call her Gleam." For a while she played with Gleam like her other dolls, and our folks didn't notice because on Point Montana there was less power and fewer appliances and we all had to work -- even my mother had to do her own washing by hand -- and so we kids were left pretty much to entertain ourselves. I figured Kate would get tired of Gleam and I could return her to Old Mott on his next trip. I worried quite a lot in the meantime, because I knew they had rigid laws about handling the little people. The very day Old Mott came back, Kate brought Gleam to me. "Look," she said. "I was dumping my stuff in the toy box, and your dump-truck fell on her." There was something wrong with one of the legs. Gleam had straight, slim legs -- but now one of them was oddly crooked. I ran to Dad's library and got the magnifying glass. Gleam was good-looking, with a curved generous mouth that smiled and blue eyes that always had a far-off look of waking sleep. But now she was turning the lips in, and the cheek hollows stood out in pain, and there was sweat on her forehead. The blue eyes were closed. I got scared. I knew she was going to die. "I'm going to tell Mother," said Kate, looking at my face and beginning to whimper. "I didn't bring her here, and I don't like her any more." "All right, stupid, tell her," I said in misery. I was thinking what it would be like to go to prison -- but Kate wouldn't understand that. "Mom will probably stop our going to the videopix for three months," I said. That was something she could understand. Kate stopped whimpering. "You can have her," she said. "You can do whatever you want. I won't say anything." to Old Mott before I asked some questions. I casually asked him about the whole process, and then about injuries to the little people. He'd been reduced once himself, a long time ago. "Don't feel a thing," he said. "The Converter goes on, and you go to sleep while your molecules close up and a lot of water is taken out of you. Then you just drift and dream, slow, lazy, easylike, until you get your full size again." "What if they got hurt?" "It might wake 'em up," he chuckled. "But ain't nobody gonna buy damaged goods, so they just better not get hurt." That scared me more. If I gave her back to him, he couldn't get her a job now. "Say, Chet," he asked my father, "I didn't leave a girl with you last time, did I? I got one missin'. Cute little blonde, she was." My father smiled and shook his head. "You know I never take the cute ones. They only get the men to fighting, and make trouble. You probably bootlegged her to some slave-trader." Old Mott laughed and winked and said he'd filled out a missing persons report, but, for all of him, one missing was just one less to worry about. "Won't they -- won't they send you to prison for that?" I asked, round-eyed. Old Mott roared. "Prison? Naw, son, who cares about the little people?" After that, I was determined not to give her back to him. I got a first aid book and set Gleam's leg, using some of Mom's nailboards for splints. Then I put her in a pigeon-hole in my desk in my room, so I could check up on her. I even fed her with an eye-dropper like I'd seen Old Mott do once. "Sugar and water once every month," he had once said. "God, ain't it a shame us reliable folk got to eat so much expensive stuff when they get by on sugar and water?" TT was about two weeks after that when I got my next shock. I had checked on Gleam and found her eyes open and her face back to normal. Since she didn't move at all, I figured her leg was healing. Then one night I sat down to do my homework and found a scrap of paper on my desk in front of the pigeon-hole. I could see some tiny scratches on it -- some writing. I got the magnifying glass, my heart thumping. "An injury might wake 'em up," Old Mott had said. I read the note: Littl boy. You brok my leg. Give me bak to the Mployment. With trembling hands, I pulled her out of the pigeon-hole. I could feel the warmth of her body, and felt that I could even see her breathe. She was awake! I looked at her through the magnifying glass and tried to talk to her, but I could see the tiny head shake. She kept trying to raise her hand, and at last I saw she wanted the pencil. Littl boy, she wrote in tiny, tiny script. I cant beer you. Rite me note. Reel small note. I guessed then that my voice must sound like roaring in her ears. I wrote her: I can't give you back till the next employment rocket. Are you all right? She wrote: I hurt. Im lonly. I want to go home. At that point I felt very sorry for her, and I felt guilty too. I held my breath while she took off the splint and tried her leg. She moved slowly and with a limp. She walked the whole length of the desk, but the limp didn't go away. She put her hands to her tiny blonde head and shook as if in terror. Wide-eyed, I pushed the writing pad to her. I'm rooned, she wrote in panic. I limp. Littl boy youve rooned my life. Maybe it'll get better, I told her, sick myself. I was beetiful, she wrote, but whos gone marry a crippld girl? I was utterly miserable. Her leg looked all right, but the limp wouldn't go away. In my childlike reasoning. I had ruined her life, and in my guilt I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell Old Mott; I couldn't tell my father. Through damaging her leg, I had deprived her of a chance to get hired through Employment, and my father was the kind of man who took grim satisfaction in his principles. "We are leaders," he would say, "and we must have principles. I would as soon send my own son to prison as allow injustice to pass." It was this shuddery thought of his detached anger that imprisoned me with my problem. The only thing I could think of was to make Gleam into a schoolteacher. Miss Griswold, our teacher, had a withered arm and was very old. She was saving up to return to Earth. I figured that when I got to be a little older and understudied my father in his job as Personnel Director, I could take care of Gleam, and it wouldn't matter if she limped. Such is the selfish judgment of tender years. I told Gleam of my idea. No, she wrote. I was waittres. I dont want s cool. I will kill you if you dont let me go. I thought her threat was idle. " change of machinery in the asteroid Dome. All the lights go off, and the oxygen goes up, and they blow the scent of mountain pine trees through the ventilators. I remember waking in the middle of the night with a weight on my chest, and drawing the pure air into my lungs and feeling that something was horribly wrong. Gleam stood on my chest. Her figure was silhouetted against the dim starlight outside my window. She had my pocketknife. She was throwing her whole weight on it to stab me with the open blade, and before I could stop her, it plunged into my chest. I screamed. Stupid, ignorant, revengeful Gleam -- she had When my parents came running, I clutched her hot body in my hand under the covers. I could feel my own blood on my pajamas and I was scared and sick and angry. But the act of pulling up the covers had dislodged the knife, and I realized that I was not seriously hurt. I told my parents I'd had a nightmare. "Dreaming of the little people," my mother said to my fa-' ther. "You see, I told you he was too young to go on the Employment Rocket!" My father shrugged and insisted that a son of his should be strong-minded, and they went back to bed. I got up on the edge of my bed and leaned over and vomited, feeling hatred and an underlying abysmal guilt toward the soft, squirming thing I held in my hands. From the moment she plunged the knife blade in me, I was filled with anger and determination that she would not ruin my life, even by revealing her existence to my parents, who, I thought, would send me to prison. My idea of making her into a schoolteacher and hiring her to replace Miss Griswold, when I should have the power in a few years, grew from a promise snatched out of the air into real purpose. She objected violently, first crying and then cursing me so loudly that I could faintly hear the words. As I heard the squeaking vileness pour from her tiny lips, my hate toward her deepened into an almost holy reverence for my mission. She had been a poor girl; she had not had much education; she only wanted to marry and settle down, or at least get a job as a waitress, which was the only thing she knew. My feeling of pity for all the little folk, embarrassment at their poor possessions and awkward ways and helplessness, centered on her -- her shallow and vile being. As I chained her to the desk with a solid gold-plated watchchain that night, I had accepted the problem of her existence. Next evening I went to work. You are still good-looking, I wrote her, but you are stupid. I will make you less stupid. I will teach you how to be as smart and polite as Mrs. Ellensberg, the Chief Chemist's wife. Thus stirred by my emotions of fear, anger and pity, I laid out her schedule. When she refused to cooperate, I took the tiny arm and twisted it until she screamed. After that, she did what I wanted. The period of childhood has a prisonlike quality of "do"s and "don't"s, and my own discipline had been no less severe than that which I passed on to her. I made her do my homework with me; I made her take exercise; and every night promptly at nine, I shut her in my bureau drawer. In no other home on Point Montana could I have gotten away with it. But my parents were very busy people, and they left their children to amuse themselves, seldom even coming into our rooms. My sister Kate, of course, knew all about Gleam; but she was under my control, as younger sisters often are, and the secret was kept. "WF course, there were crises. One time my parents found the cat with its throat slit. I had to talk fast to get out of that one. I was going to put Gleam on bread and water for that sin, but when I saw the long, deep scratches that the cat had given her in its playful way, I said nothing. Then there was the time that she got loose and filled her thimble with Father's wine. I usually fed her with scraps from the table, for sugar and water wouldn't do for Gleam now that she moved around and was awake. I kept the thimble in her drawer for her to have her milk in. She came weaving into the study, slopping wine out of her thimble and singing a song that astounded my unsophisticated ears. "Little boy," she said in her tiny voice, "I'm going to spit in your eye." She stood on her tiptoes, her blonde hair hanging loose, laughing. "Wow, what a party," she cried enthusiastically. "What a crime!" I barely had time to scoop her up and hide her in the bureau before my father came snooping suspiciously into the room. He smiled when he saw me with a thimbleful of wine. "The young must learn by imitation," he said, "but you'll never get in much trouble if you only take a thimbleful at a time, John." Then he gave me my first real wineglass full of wine, and I knew I was growing up. We had a man-to-man talk in his study that night, about my future and my relations with Lucy Ellensberg, whom I had dated at school, and how I would go to work in Employment after I had been to school on Ceres. I almost told him about Gleam then, but when I started to talk about the little people, he got a pained look in his eye. "I'm sorry, John," he said, "but you mustn't go overboard for them. They're people -- but they're ignorant, superstitious and undisciplined. They must be treated differently." Afterward, back in my room, I found Gleam crying in the bureau drawer. She was still drunk. "I am going to kill myself, little boy," she wept. "Nobody loves me." "You have a home here," I told her. "You are being trained for a good job. Soon you'll be able to teach school and marry someone who doesn't mind your limp." She shook her head. "Someday you'll pay for this, little boy," she said, and then hiccupped and fell over and went to sleep. I couldn't help grinning. I reached in and brushed back her hair and eased her tiny figure into a more comfortable position. TT was when I went to school on Ceres that the change took place. Up until that time Gleam was like a pet, very little more to me than a frog or dog. But on Ceres, I had my first real drunk and my first real date; on Ceres it was I who didn't want to work, feeling the freedom of a real city, strange people, exciting things. Gleam became my conscience. And I didn't particularly like it. I had taken her to Ceres with many misgivings, not because I wanted to but because I was afraid to leave her behind. There were '"many other little people there, kept by the people of Ceres as pets just as I kept Gleam. Most of them were alcoholics or the demented who did not wish to become big again. So I was able to keep Gleam openly. And now, at last, I began to think of getting rid of her. The second day, I was walking down the astonishingly wide street with its gash of neon red and blue and green signs. Gleam, as usual, was standing in my pocket and leaning her elbows on the edge as she looked out. We came to the Ceres office of the Greater New York Employment. Suddenly, I stopped. "Gleam," I said, speaking softly and a little high-pitched, the way I'd found she could best understand me. "Maybe it's time for you to be big again." "No! Not now, little boy, it isn't time." The tiny voice was almost a cry of terror. Something about it puzzled me. When I asked her what was wrong, she wouldn't talk to me. That night, I told my roommate, Rand, about it. He shrugged. "They get afraid. They get used to being taken care of. She won't ever want to be big again." Now, for the first time, I was eager to get rid of Gleam; and she wouldn't go. She put on airs on Ceres. She acted very strangely, insisting on complete privacy for dressing and undressing, and when we traveled she preferred to ride on my neck, holding onto my ear and shouting wry comments at me. "That Alice you been eying," she said one day. "She's a common slut. You've got a future at Point Montana; she's after you. Better watch out, little boy." "I can take care of myself." "Those clothes!" she laughed, pointing to another girl that I had been trying to be introduced to. "She dresses like a waitress. And listen to her language! Split infinitives and dangling participles all over the place. One would do well to ignore these streetwomen, little boy!" After that, I didn't dare ask the girl for a date. lessons. She goaded me into doing them. She criticized my clothes and my manners and, since she knew cities and I did not, even told me where to go around the town. This was annoying to me -- but with her help I did well in school, and, due to her knowledge of the seamier side of life, achieved a certain fame among my contemporaries as a man of the world. She became increasingly meddlesome, and we had arguments often. Especially when I had dates and left her behind. I would come home to find her pacing my desk. "Well," she would sneer, "did the little darling find out how much you wilJqaKe and how big a home youown and hdf... much money your family has in the bank?" "Never mind." "You're an idiot, little boy. You have apples for brains." We finally had it out on my last week at school. "Gleam," I said, "when I go back, I'll have to get married, you know. That is, I can't hold a job in Employment unless I'm married. And Lucy Ellensberg is sort of -- " "What happens to me?" she cried. "You'll have to get big and get a job. I kept you because I ruined your life. But in our house you've learned enough to get by as a schoolteacher or a governess. You've learned how the other half lives. I've paid for my sin in stealing you and breaking your leg." "You could do better than Lucy Ellensberg!" "I don't want to do better." She picked up her thimble and tossed off the spate of beer I'd poured for her. "There's me, for instance," she said. "After all, I know your habits -- " I burst into laughter. "You! Marry you! Why, Gleam, I think of you as a sister, with your bad leg and -- " Then I stopped laughing. Because she was staring at me with something in her tiny eyes that I'd never seen before. All the years, we'd fought every step of the way. I had found her vile and obscene. She had found me childishly cruel. I had made her life hell at home, and she had made mine hell on Ceres. Always it had been with a veiled contempt on both sides. But this time her look was different. "I'm sorry, John. I'm sorry you said that." Before, I had always been "Little Boy." And I had always called her Gleam, because I knew her real name was impossibly corny. My chest felt hot. I was emcent," I said. "But this is as far as we can go together." npHE next day I took her to Employment, and she didn't complain. A thick distance lay between us. They accepted her. The last time I ever saw tiny Gleam was as she strode importantly up and down the Director's desk, limping but waving her hands in earnest and giving them complete instructions on the important job she wanted. Somewhere far away. "As far away as possible from provincial bumpkins like John Blake!" she cried to the Director. "You will make a good deal of money from me, my good man!" His jaw dropped, and the others in the room gathered around the self-important, strutting little figure as I slipped out to freedom. I was oddly disturbed at the parting, yet oddly pleased. The years of discipline had paid off for Gleam. She'd always had a good brain, just an undeveloped one; now she was fast, capable, bursting with confidence. I knew she'd get along. The next months were exceedingly enjoyable. For the first time in more than seven years, I didn't have to worry about Gleam. At first, I missed the business of feeding her and taking care of her wants; but far more than that I enjoyed being able to exercise privacy. I read what I wanted, kept the hours that I wanted, and dated the girls I wanted. Finally I returned to start my new job in Employment on Point Montana. "I won't ask too many questions about Ceres," smiled my father, who was noticeably older. "You seem to have matured astonishingly for your age. Ceres was good for you, John. By the way, Lucy Ellensberg is coming over for supper tonight." I had anticipated that night for a long time. Lucy seemed lovely; she had charm and manners; I was only a little disappointed to see how much her thoughts revolved around petty matters of the Point, and how soft and selfish she seemed. It was all very routine. We were alone; the night lights of Point Montana gleamed in fuzzy softness; we stood in my parents' tiny garden and smelled the pine scent of the ventilators, and I proposed and was accepted. "We'll live in a small house by the edge of the Dome at first," I told her. "I want to get the feel of the workmen's lives, since I'll be hiring them." "Well," she said dubiously. "Only for a very short time, John. After all, there's our part of the social calendar to keep up!" "And then we'll have to get started on a family." She laughed: "Later, John. It's all right for you -- you've been out to see the world and had your fling. But for me it's the first time away from home. I want parties! I want to learn to get drunk and have some real fun -- " It went on that way, and suddenly I saw Lucy as she really was. Suddenly I realized that Gleam had left her mark on me, despite her ignorance of social ways. In day-to-day close contact with Gleam's adult mind, I had gone a long way past the kids of my own age on the Point. Lucy would be fine when she grew up a little more. After she left, I noted that we had been standing near the spot where I had buried the cat Gleam had killed many years before. Alone in the garden, smoking a cigarette, I stared up through the Dome at the stars and wondered what Gleam was doing that night. It was certain that she wasn't worrying about the size of house she lived in -- Gleam hungered for any sort of a shack of her own. What would I do if Gleam should come this way again? I didn't know. Up until tonight, I'd thought I had planned my life with Lucy. I remembered then that the Greater New York Employment rocket was due next week, and I put out my cigarette and went in, a sort of expectant fear surging inside. jlJY father and I were there when the rocket landed. Old Mott was dead, of course, but young Billy Stanger grinned and poured the wine, and we sat and talked while I leafed through the list of names and occupations on the printed sheets. Trying to look casual, I turned to the "Schoolteachers" section. the page at me. I kept my voice steady, but I couldn't keep excitement out of it. "I need a schoolteacher," I said. I thrust the paper at him. "Try this one. I'm sure she'll be all right. I won't go in the room if you don't mind. Just put her through the Converter." Employment people see much, say little. Stanger nodded and went out. Presently he came out of the stock room, carrying something in his hand, and went into the Converter. I heard the machinery squeal and slowly got to my feet. The door opened. For comfort she was wearing briefies of pleasing black and white, bootlets, and a ribbon in her hair. The eyes were hard and suspicious, stuffed with a knowledge of me. The legs were youthful and graceful, but there was a slight limp. She was tall, a walking dream from my memories, barely three inches shorter than I, moving with assurance and poise. The Gleam I had made stood and stared at the John Blake she had made. "Well, little boy," she said in a voice that sounded loud because I'd always heard it thinner, "I see you got trapped in this forlorn dump for the rest of your life." "So have you," I said, walking toward her. My father and Stanger were staring. She raised her arms. Her eyes got wet. "So have I," said the new Gleam. It's real gone! If I missed an issue.  it would be fiendish torment... But I dont! And neither will you if you send # for six mesmeric issues (# for #) to... #I Hudson Street  New York #. N. Y. with other columnists, but from my own experience it seems that long letters can often be answered completely with a sentence or two, while short queries might require a book. Of course, every science editor is plagued by letters of the type which ask, "Please explain the Theory of Relativity" -- only eight years ago an institute received the perfectly serious request from a lady to "please send me what has been published about aviation" -- but that is not the kind I have in mind. I am thinking of a short letter that came in some time ago and which con- sisted of precisely three sentences. In the first sentence, the correspondent explained that his hobby was the making of scale models and that a classical chariot was the current project. In the second sentence, he said that the picture he owned showed sevenspoked wheels and could I tell him how to construct one. The third sentence thanked me for whatever help I could give. This was easy. I made a sketch and said that this would do for his purpose, even though the construction was incorrect mathematically. Back came the reply that it had worked beautifully, but why did I say that this construction was incorrect? He had tried it several times and had come to the conclusion that the "in" in front of "correct" had slipped in by mistake. But if it hadn't, why was it incorrect? Well, the answer is this column, for the simple question requires a treatise on the division of the circle. T ET'S begin with fundamentals. Using a protractor for dividing a circle isn't permitted -- in geometry, that is. You can use a protractor if you want to cut up a pie or to make a wheel with a silly number of spokes; in short, for practical purposes. But in geometry you can use only two instruments, a pair of compasses and a straight edge. Furthermore, the straight edge must be used only for connecting points, not for measuring distances. This strict rule has a good reason, even though beginners often have trouble understanding it. Ideally, you do all this in your head, drawing lines in the air with your finger; the lines on paper are merely a means of remembering (and communicating) what you have found by thinking. The straight lines just show which point is supposed to be connected with which other point. The circles "measure" since every point along the periphery of a circle has the same distance from its center. A protractor and other mechanical devices are "forbidden" because they will furnish information which did not exist in your head first. You are not supposed to read off an angle of #; you are supposed to find it by reasoning. For example: the sum of the three angles of a triangle is #; hence, each angle in an equilateral triangle must be #, and # is half of such an angle. Or: a right angle is #; if I construct an equilateral triangle in a right angle, the difference between the right angle and the triangle must be #. Now let's go on with the problem. Fig. I shows the ordinary hexagon, constructed, in this case, by first halving the circle by means of a straight line going through its center, and then using the compasses with the same opening that was used to draw the original circle from both ends of the diameter, points # and # in the diagram. Or you can do it without drawing a diameter first, by simply starting at any one point of the periphery with the compasses and going around. By halving the angles, you obtain the points for the #-cornered polygon. In the diagram, the usual method of halving was not used, since in this construction you can halve one of the # angles -- the one formed by points I and # with the center of the circle -- by erecting a vertical line on the diameter. By jumping every second point of the hexagon, you obtain an equilateral triangle, and by doing this twice in succession, you obtain the figure shown in Fig. #, the Star of David (which produces a hexagon in its center). Another way of arriving at the #-cornered polygon is shown in Fig. #. Instead of starting with a hexagon and halving every angle, you begin with two diameters of the circle forming right angles at the center. Then you use the compasses with the same opening used for the original circle from these four points (Nos. #, #, # and # in the diagram) in the manner shown in the right half of the diagram. The result is a figure sometimes called the Lilac Blossom (indicated at points A and B) and also the #cornered polygon. constructing an equilateral triangle in a circle. This consists of drawing a radius of the circle, halving the radius and erecting a vertical line on the halfway point. The distance from the halfway point to the periphery of the circle is one-half of the side of the equilateral triangle, indicated by the points A, # and B in Fig. #. But it so happens that this half side is very nearly the side of a #cornered polygon. The difference is quite small, amounting to # #th of the radius of the circle; if you have a circle with a radius of # inches, the difference is just about ##nd of an inch. Such an approximation is good enough for seven-spoked wheels, model or full scale, but it is only an approximation. To construct the true side of the #cornered polygon with compasses and straight edge is impossible. The same holds true for the #cornered, #-cornered and #comered polygon, to mention only a few cases. Don't waste your time trying. You probably will find approximations galore, but no true construction. In fact, there are only q few series which can be properly constructed. So far I have dealt with the one which I think of as the "hexagon series," which produces, beyond the hexagon, polygons with #, #, #, #, etc., corners. Another may be called the "square series," which is based on the square derived from two diameters at right angles to each other (Fig. #) and leads to polygons with #, #, #, #, etc., corners. Another one is the "pentagon series" (Fig. # and #) which, interestingly enough, does not really begin with the pentagon but with a #-comered polygon The method is shown in Fig. #. When you draw a smaller circle inside the first circle, the diameter of the small circle is equal to the radius of the large circle. Then you connect the center of the small circle to the point marked "#" in Fig. #. The distance from point # to the periphery of the small circle is the side of the #comered polygon. By jumping over every second point of the #-cornered polygon, you obtain the pentagon, and by jumping every second point in the pentagon, you obtain the "magic" five-pointed star with a smaller pentagon in its center (Fig. #). The "pentagon series," of course, leads to polygons with #, #, #, #, etc., corners. Since a full circle has #, the angle required for a #-cornered polygon is # and that can be constructed in an interesting manner. The angle of the equilateral triangle is #. The angle of the #-cornered polygon is #. And # minus #  #. The actual Fig. # construction is shown in Fig. #. This naturally leads to polygons with #, #, #, etc., corners by simple halving of the angles. For more than twenty centuries, these remained the only polygons that could be constructed, even though people through all these centuries kept looking for more. They were especially interested in the #cornered polygon because seven is supposedly a magic and holy number. They also devoted much effort to the #-comered polygon, but for no special reason than that it just seemed to be simple. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever wondered whether the possible and impossible constructions might both be covered by some law which one may discover. TT was in # -- we even know the date: March #th -- when a #-year-old student discovered that law. His baptismal name was Johann Friederich Carl Gauss, but later he signed his work Carl Friedrich Gauss. One of the consequences of the discovery was that it was possible to construct a #cornered polygon. It is not as simple a job as the ones discussed. In fact, the explanation would take up as much room as I have for my whole column, so that I can only say here where it may be found: in F. Klein's Famous Problems of Elementary Geometry (Hafner, New York, #). The #cornered polygon naturally leads to polygons with #, #, #, etc., sides, and by using a method similar to the one for the #cornered polygon, you can also construct a #cornered polygon (from triangle and #) and an #-cornered polygon (from pentagon and #). Well, what is Gauss's law? What is possible? Gauss's first reasoning was that only polygons with an odd number of sides need to be considered. The even-numbered polygons are just the result of halving angles; the whole "square sequence" works that way, because you first halve a full circle, then the semi-circle and so forth. Gauss then found and proved that the odd-numbered polygons which can be constructed are the same as the Fermat primes. Therefore you can construct: # #fI  # (triangle) # # I  # (pentagon) #  I  # # s  I  # # #  I  # All of them actually have been constructed, the last one of this series only once. And you can also construct odd-numbered polygons where the number is the product of the multiplication of two Fermat primes, hence the #-cornered polygon (#x#) and the #I and #-cornered polygons (# x # and # x #, respectively). Likewise the # x # #cornered polygon, etc., etc., should be possible. But #, # and # are not. How does a living cell know when to stop growing? Does the action of gravity have anything to do with the decision of an ameba to split? David L. Osborn Higashi-Nada Ku Kobe City, Japan The answer to this question is simple, if probably unsatisfactory: we do not know. There is obviously a complex of factors involved that will have to be unraveled slowly and patiently. Nor is it certain that an answer which would apply to a cell that is part of a unit (say, in the leaf of a tree or in the muscle of an animal) would also apply to cells that are "free," as, for example, the red corpuscles that circulate in our blood. In the case of the ameba, cited by you, one might think of gravity as the determining factor if the ameba were a dryland creature. But since it lives in water, which supports every portion of it, all the responsibility can't be placed on gravity alone. I remarked in one of my books that one of the biological research projects after the completion of the space station might well be to have unicellular plants and animals, like bacteria and amchas, grow in a zero-g condition with plenty of food around and see what happens. I can't predict what will happen, but I do believe that whatever is going to happen will furnish the main clue for an answer to your question. The Milky Way stretches from the northeast to the southwest. Does this give any indication as to our position in our galaxy? And another question: is the plane of the Moon's orbit around the Earth constant or does the Moon travel in various paths around us? Irma Anita Jones Route I, Box A Comanche, Oklahoma As to the first question: no. But from other observations, it has been concluded that our sun and its family of planets are between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total possible distance from the center. In other words, it is at least twice as far from the Sun to the center of the Galaxy as it is from the Sun to the rim. The orbit of the Moon happens to le unusually complicated and its calculation ranks among the more difficult problems. The minimum distance is # miles, the maximum distance # miles. The inclination of the plane of the Moon's orbit, compared to the ecliptic, the plane of the Earth's orbit, also varies. It can be as little as # degrees and # minutes of arc and as much as # degrees # minutes of arc. This means that there is a kind of doughnut-shaped volume of space around the Earth which contains all the possible positions of the Moon. I would like to know if the planets closer to the Sun rotate faster or slower; is there any relationship between the distance from the Sun and the speed of rotation of planetary bodies? James A. Miller # S.E. # th Portland, Oregon I wish I could be perfectly sure that you actually mean "rotation" (around the axis) and not "revolution" (around the Sun). As regards the latter, there is a very precise and clearcut relationship between the orbital velocity of a planet and its distance from the Sun. The closer they are to the Sun, the faster they move -- Kepler's Third Law -- the farther away from the Sun, the slower. For example, Venus proceeds at the rate of # miles per second, the Earth moves at # miles per second, Mars # miles per second, Jupiter #.I miles per second, while Saturn proceeds at the comparatively leisurely pace of "only" # miles per second. But there is no relationship between the period of rotation of a planet and its distance from the Sun. Mercury, the innermost planet, completes one rotation in the same time it needs for one revolution, namely # days. The rotational period of Venus is not known, but it seems to be about two of our weeks. Earth and Mars have periods of # hours and # hours # minutes, respectively, while Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus rotate quite fast. The figures are, in the same order, # hours # minutes, # hours # minutes, and # hours # minutes. Neptune needs # hours and # minutes, while the rotation of Pluto is as yet unknown. These figures look as if there might he a relationship between the size of a planet and its diurnal period because Jupiter, with an equatorial diameter of # miles, is the biggest planet and also has the shortest period. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are slower in the order mentioned, which is also the order of decreasing diameters, namely #, # and # miles, respectively. Likewise, when you consider the inner planets, Earth has a shorter diurnal period than either Venus, Mars or Mercury, and Earth is the biggest of the inner planets. This sounds like an intriguing idea until you look at the masses of the planets rather than their diameters. Jupiter does rotate faster than Saturn, the difference being # minutes. But Jupiter's mass is equal to # Earth masses, while Saturn's is equal to # Earth masses. Saturn rotates faster than Uranus (# minutes difference), but the difference in mass between these two is even more impressive, for Uranus has only # Earth masses. Neptune needs # hours more than Uranus, but while the handbook will tell you that Uranus has a somewhat larger diameter than Neptune, the same handbook will tell you that Neptune is the more massive of the two, having # Earth masses. That these differences in rotational period are not in proportion to the differences in mass is especially clear in the case of the inner planets. In round figures, Earth is ten times as massive as Mars, yet the Martian period is only # minutes longer. In short, there is no relationship between period of rotation and distance from the Sun, but in general it may be said that, at least in our solar system, the more massive planets tend to rotate faster than the lighter ones. Do you live next door to a man from Venus ? The most exciting true adventure Read this fantastic, but authentic and documented account of an actual meeting with a man from Venus. Read what this visitor from outer space said about other Venusians who have settled on earth... about the dangers of atomic warfare... see pictures of the Venusian footprints, and the hieroglyphic message he left for our world -- a message that top brains in the country are still trying to decipher today in A uthenticated documents ( . and photographs prove this book is fact,, not fiction -- a true account of the most historic meeting of the #th century -- the opening of a new era of interplanetary relations. The first part of this vital book is a historical tracing of all the saucer sightings that have ever taken place... from ancient Egypt to the present day -- an astonishing chronicle of interplanetary traffic. In the second half is the story of the momentous meeting with a man from outer space, which took place in the open -- in the presence of reliable witnesses. Now, for the first time, this outspoken book breaks through the hush-hush government conspiracy to ignore the facts about flying saucers. Send today for the handsome, illustrated, clothbound book that dares to prove there is life on other planets. # Eatt #th Street. New York #, N. Y. Young Garvin's world was one of simple laws; Walk with dignity; talk with dignity; above was twenty-six and had been, technically at any rate, a sex criminal for three years, when his mother called him into her parlor and explained why she could not introduce him to the girl on whom he'd been spying. "Cottrell, darling," she said,  # . v laying her delicately veined hand on his sun-darkened fist, "you . understand I think Barbara is  r A . a fine girl -- one whom any young V man of your class and station would ordinarily be honored to meet and, in due course of time, betroth. But surely you will admit that her family -- " there was the faintest inhalation through the fragile nose -- "particularly on the male side, is not one which could be accepted into our own." Her expression was genuinely regretful. "More explicitly, her father's opinion on the proper conduct of a domicile..." The sniff was more audible. "Then too, his behavior in accord with that opinion is such that our entire family would be embroiled in an endless series of affairs of Integrity. You, yourself, would be forced to bear the brunt of these encounters, as well as the responsibility of defending the notoriously untenable properties which Mr. Holland' pleases to designate as Barbara's dowry. "No, Cottrell, I fear that, much as this match may appeal to you superficially, you must realize that the responsibilities entailed would more than offset any possible benefits." Her hand patted his lightly. "I'm sorry." A tear sparkled in each eye, and it was obvious that the discussion had been a great strain upon her, for she genuinely loved her son. Cottrell sighed. "All right, Mother," he said. There was nothing more he could do at this time. "But should circumstances change you will reconsider, won't you?" he asked. H IS mother smiled and nodded, as she said, "Of course, Cottrell." But then the smile faded. "However, it does seem rather unlikely, doesn't it? Are there no other young ladies...?" At his expression, the smile returned, and her voice became reassuring. "Well, we'll see, we'll see." "Thank you, Mother." At least, he had that much. He rose from his chair and kissed her cheek. "I have to make sure the cows have all been stalled." With a final smile he left her, hurrying across the yard to the barn. The cows were all attended to, of course, but he stayed in the barn, driving his work-hardened fist into a grain sack again and again, while sweat beaded his forehead. Feeling slightly ill, he gently closed the barn door behind him and sensed from the hues of the sunset and the feel of the wind that it would be a clear night. The realization filled him with equal parts of guilt and anticipation. npHE temperature was just right and the dew had left a perfect leavening of dampness in the darkness. Cott let the false door close quietly behind him and slipped noiselessly across the moist lawn at an angle that brought him out on the clay road, precisely at the point where his property ended and Mr. Holland's began. He walked through the darkness with gravel shifting under his moccasins, his bandoleer bumping gently against his body, with the occasional feel of oily metal against his cheek as the carbine, slung from his shoulder, touched him with its curved magazine. It was a comforting sensation -- his father had felt it before him, and his father's father. It had been the mark of a free man for each of them. When he had come as close to Mr. Holland's house as he could without disturbing the dog, he slid into the ditch that ran beside the road. Cradling his carbine in the crooks of his bent arms, he belly-crawled silently and rapidly as close to the house as the ditch would take him. He raised his head from behind a clump of weeds he had planted during a spring rainstorm and, using this as cover, scanned the front of the house. For any of this to be possible without the dog's winding him, the breeze had to be just right. On this night, it was. The parlor window -- perhaps the only surface-level parlor window in this area, he thought -- was lighted, and she was in the room. Cott checked the sharp sound of his breath and sank his teeth against his lower lip. He kept his hands carefully away from the metalwork of his carbine, for his palms were sweaty. He waited until, finally, she put out the light and went downstairs to bed. Then he dropped his head on his folded arms for a moment, eyes closed and breath irregular, before he twisted around and began to crawl back up the ditch. Tonight, so soon after what his mother had said, he was shocked, but not truly surprised, to discover that his vision was badly blurred. He reached the point where it was safe to leave the ditch and stood up quietly. He put one foot on the road and sprang up to the clay surface with the agility of young muscles. There was no warning of a darker shadow among the dappled splotches thrown by roadside weeds and bushes. Mr. Holland calmly said, "Hi. boy." " was ready to let the carbine he had just reslung slide down his arm into his hand. He stood motionless, peering at Holland, who had stepped up silently. "Mr. Holland!" The old man chuckled. "Weren't expecting me, huh?" Cott took a measure of relief from the man's obvious lack of righteous anger. "Good -- uh -- good evening, sir," he mumbled. Apparently he was not going to die immediately, but there was no telling what was going on in his neighbor's mind. "Guess I was right about that patch of weeds springing up kind of sudden." Holland said. Cott felt the heat rush into his ears, but he said, "Weeds, sir?" "Pretty slick. You got the makings of a damn good combat man." Cott was thankful for the darkness, as one embarrassment was replaced by another. The lack of light, however, did not keep his voice from betraying more than it should. Holland's implication had been clear. "My family, sir, prefers not to acknowledge former members who have sunk below their station. You will understand that under differing circumstances, I might thus consider your remark to be not flattering." Holland chuckled. "No insult intended, son. There was a time when a guy like you wouldn't have stopped strutting for a week, after a pat on the back like that." Cott could still feel the heat in his cheeks, and its cause overrode his sharp sense of the incongruity of this midnight debate, a completely illogical circumstance which any other two men would have settled in a normal and civilized manner. "Fortunately, sir," his voice was now at its normal pitch, "we no longer live in such times." " You don't, maybe." Holland's voice was somewhat testy. "I sincerely hope not, sir." Holland made an impatient sound. "Boy, your Uncle Jim was the best damned rifleman that ever took out a patrol. Any family that gets snotty notions about being better than him... Oh, mercy!" Cott recoiled from the curse. "Sir!" "Excuse me," Holland said sarcastically. "I forgot we're living in refined times. Not too refined, though, for a man to go crawling through ditches to sneak a look at a gal reading a book!" he added with contempt.  through his bloodstream. At any moment, Mr. Holland was obviously going to exercise his right to call an affair of Integrity. Even while he formulated the various points for and against a right on his part to defend himself, even if surprised in so palpably immoral an action, his reflexes let the carbine slip down his shoulder and hang precariously from the sling which, despite careful oiling, now gave a perverse creak. Cott set his teeth in annoyance. "I haven't got a gun on you, boy," Mr. Holland said placidly. "There's better ways of protecting your Integrity than shooting people." Cott had long since decided that his neighbor -- like all the old people who had been born in the Wild Sixties and grown up through the Dirty Years -- was, to put it politely, unconventional. But the sheer lack of common sense about going unarmed into a situation where one's Integrity might be molested was more than unconventionality. But that was neither here nor there. In such a case, the greater responsibility in carrying out the proprieties was obviously his to assume. "Allow me to state the situation clearly, sir," he said, "in order that there be no misunderstanding." "No misunderstanding, son. Not about this situation, anyway. Hell, when I was your -- " "Nevertheless," Cott interposed, determined not to let Mr. Holland trap himself into a genuine social blunder, "the fact remains that I have trespassed on your property for a number of years -- " " -- for the purpose of peeping at Barbara," Holland finished for him. "Do me a favor, son?" Holland's voice was slightly touched by amusement. "Certainly, sir." "Lay off the -- " Holland caught himself. "I mean show a little less concern for the social amenities. Ease up on this business of doing the right thing, come hell or high water. Here -- let's sit down and let's talk over a few things." He was neither hung nor pardoned. Cott's nerves had edged to the breaking point. This final gaucherie was too much for him. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, his voice harsher than he intended, "but that's out of the question. I suggest you either do your duty as head of your family, or else to do so." "Why?" The question was not as surprising as it might have been, had it come at the beginning of this fantastic scene. But it served to crystalize one point. It was not meant as a defiant insult, Cott realized. It was a genuine, sincere inquiry. The fact that Holland was incapable of appreciating the answer was proof that his mother's advice had been correct. Holland was not a gentleman. only one course open to him now, if he were not to abandon all hope for Barbara's hand. Incredible as it might seem, it was to answer the question in all seriousness, in an attempt to force some understanding through the long-set habits of Mr. Holland's thinking. "I should think it hardly necessary to remind you that a person's Integrity is his most prized moral possession. In this particular case, I have violated your daughter's Integrity and, as a result, that of your family, as well." Cott shook his head in the darkness. Explain he might, but his voice was sign enough of his outrage. "What's that?" Holland's own voice was wearing thin. "I beg your pardon, sir?" "Integrity, damn it! Give me the definition." "Everyone knows what Integrity is, sir! That is, everyone should know." Cott's temper was foaming. Holland swore in frustration. "Can't verbalize it, but you'll cut another man down for it. Or expect to be cut down. All right! Go ahead, but don't expect me to help you make a damned fool of yourself." He sighed. "Go on home, son. Maybe, in about twenty years or so, you'll get up enough guts to come and knock on the door like a man, if you want to see Barbara." Through the occlusion of his almost overwhelming rage, Cott realized that now he could not say anything further which might offend Holland. "I'm certain that, if I were to do so, Miss Barbara would not receive me," he finally managed to say in an even voice, gratified at his ability to do so. "No, she probably wouldn't," Holland said bitterly. "She's too damn well brought up -- thanks to those merciful aunts of hers!" He turned his back like a coward and strode off down the road. Cott stood alone in the night, his hands clenching his bandoleer, grinding the looped cartridges together. Then he turned on his heel and loped home. II f'T'HE shadow coming events cast before them is pale compared to the umbra they leave behind them. It was a full generation since Berendtsen had marched his men across the face of North America, like a harrow that broke the hard root-clumps of isolated and fiercely independent survivors, and left the systematized ground ready and fertile for civilization's replanting. It was two generations since men had fought from house to house in New York, while snipers waited patiently at apartment windows for the rich target of a man -- any man whose knapsack might contain priceless ammunition and perhaps, if the hunter was lucky, food looted from the canned-goods shelves of some not-quite-completely-gutted store. It was a full three generations since the war nobody won, when the grime of Manhattan was replaced by a deadlier dust that glowed softly in the night, that lurked avidly outside the few populated caves which remained in the agonized cliffs of Manhattan. So Cott, as he ran for the only place where there was peace for him -- toward the Integrity of his home -- was only four generations removed from civilization, from the warm glow of light through farmhouse windows on soft nights in the summertime. But he was only three generations removed from a frightened, snarling, hunting and looting organism that crouched in a corner of its parquet-floored cave and fipgered the bolt of its ever-present weapon. He left his rifle on the family arms-rack in the front parlor and padded about the surface floor, resetting the alarms, interrupting himself occasionally, muscles tensed as he thought of what had happened. The incredible complexity of the problem overwhelmed him, presenting no clear face which he could attack and rationalize logically. Primarily, of course, the fault was his. He had committed a premeditated breach of Integrity. It was in its various ramifications that the question lost its clarity. He had spied on Barbara Holland repeatedly. Her father had become aware of the fact. Tonight, instead of issuing a direct challenge, Mr. Holland had lain in wait for him. Then, having informed Cott that he was aware of his guilt, Mr. Holland not only had not done the gentlemanly thing, but had ridiculed his expectation of it. Parenthetically, the man had insulted Cott and his family, and had derided his own daughter. He had referred to his sisters-in-law in an unbecoming manner which, if made public, would have called for a bandoleer-flogging at the hands of the male members of the female line. Nevertheless, whether Mr. Holland was a gentleman or not, Cott had been guilty of a serious offense. And in Cott's mind, as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame shone disastrous and disgusting as a public horror. Since Holland had refused to solve the problem for him in the conventional manner, Cott was left with his shame. Finally, Cott walked noiselessly down to the living quarters, uncertain of the degree of his guilt and, therefore, the extent of his disgrace. Knowing he would not be able to sleep no matter how long he lay on his bed, he fought down that part of his mind which recalled glowingly the image of Barbara Holland. membered picture was as strong as the others he had placed beside it, beginning with the first one five years ago when Cott had first passed her window, on his return from Graduate training. And, though he saw her almost daily at the post office or store, these special images were not obscured by the cold and proper aloofness with which she surrounded herself when she was not -- he winced -- alone. Again, there was the applling problem of Barbara's father. The man had been raised in the wild immorality and casual circumstances of the Dirty Years. Obviously, he could see nothing wrong with what Cott had been doing. He had had enough sense not to tell anyone else about it -- thank the good Lord -- but, in some blundering attempt to "Get you two kids together," or whatever he might call it, what would he tell Barbara? Dawn came, and Cott welcomed the night's end. As head of the family since his father's death in an affair of Integrity two years before -- he had, of course, been the Party at Grievance -- it was Cott's duty to plan each day's activities when they varied from normal farm routine. Today, with all the spring work done and the summer chores so light as to be insignificant, he was at loose ends -- yet he was grateful for this opportunity to bury himself in a problem with which he had been trained to cope. He devoted an hour's thinking to it and finally fell back on what, in retrospect, had been a device his father had used. If there was nothing else, there was always Drill. Out of consideration for his grandmother's age, he waited until # :# before he touched the alarm stud. But not even the heavy slam of shutters being hurled into their places in the armor plate of the outer walls, the screech of the generator as the radar antennae came out of their nocturnal halfsleep into whirling life, or the clatter of the household children firing test bursts from their machine guns was enough to disturb his brooding. The Drill lasted until #:#. By then, it was obvious that the household defenses were doing everything they were designed for and that the members of the household knew their assignments perfectly. Even his grandmother's legendary skill with her range finder had not grown dull. There was a distinct possibility that she had memorized the range of every likely target in the area. That, if true, was not an evasion of her duties, but a valuable accomplishment. "Very good," Cott said over the intercommunications system. "All members of the household are now free to return to their normal duties, except the children, who will report to me for training." His mother, whose battle station was at the radarscope a few feet away from him, smiled her approval as she returned the switches to Auto Survey. She put her hand gently on his forearm as he rose from the fire control chair. "I'm glad, Cottrell -- very glad," she said, smiling. He did not, at first, understand what she meant and looked at her blankly. "I was afraid you might be growing neglectful of your duties, as so many of our neighbors are doing," she explained. "But I should not have doubted you." Her voice was strongly underlaid with pride in him. "Your fiber is stronger than that. Why, I was even afraid that your disappointment after our little talk yesterday might distract you. But I was wrong, and you'll never know how happy I am that you didn't permit it." He bent to kiss her, then hurried to the parlor, where the children had already assembled and taken their weapons out of the arms-rack.  Y mid-afternoon, the younger children had been excused, and only his two oldest brothers were out on the practice terrain with him. "Stay down!" Cott shouted at Alister. "You'll never live to graduate if you won't learn to flatten out at the crest of a rise!" He flung his carbine up to his cheek and snapped a branch beside his brother's rump to prove his point. "Now, you." He whirled on Geoffrey. "How'd I estimate my windage? Quick!" "Grass," Geoffrey said laconically. "Wrong! You haven't been over that ground in two weeks. You have no accurate ideahow much wind will move that grass as much as it's doing." "Asked me how you did it," Geoffrey pointed out. "All right," Cott snapped, "score one for you. Now, how would you do it?" "Feel. Watch me." Geoffrey's lighter weapon cracked with a noise uncannily like that of the branch, which now split at a point two inches below where Cott's heavy slug had broken it off. "Have an instinct for it, do you?" Cott was perversely glad to find an outlet for his annoyance. "Do it again." Geoffrey shrugged. He fired twice. The branch splintered, and there was a shout from Alister. Cott blinked at Geoffrey. "You put it next to his hand. Guess he got some dirt in his face too." Cott looked at the point where the grass was undulating wildly, as Alister tried to roll away under its cover. He found time to note his brother's clumsiness before he said, "You couldn't have seen his hand -- or anything except the top of his rump, for that matter." Geoffrey's seventeen-year-old face was secretly amused. "I just figured, if I was Alis, where would I keep my hands? Simple." Cott could feel the challenge to his pre-eminence as the family's fighting man gathering thickly about him. "Very good," he said coldly. "You have an instinct for combat. Now, suppose that had been a defective cartridge -- bad enough to tumble to the right and kill your brother. What then?" "I hand-loaded those cases myself. Think I'm fool enough to trust that ham-handed gunsmith at the store?" Geoffrey was impregnable. Cott felt the strain of controlling his temper. "If you're so good, why don't you go off and join the Militia?" without expression. "Think I'll stick around. You're going to need help -- if old man Holland ever catches you on those little moonlight strolls of yours." Cott's anger was mounting. "What -- did -- you -- say?" The words emerged from his throat like bullets. "You heard me." Geoffrey put a bullet to either side of the thrashing Alister, then one above and one below. Alister's training broke completely and he sprang out of the grass and began to run, shouts choking his throat. "A rabbit," Geoffrey said contemptuously. "Just pure rabbit. Me, I've got Uncle Jim's blood, but that Alis, he's genuine Mother." He fired again and snapped the heel from Alister's shoe. As Alister stumbled into the ground, Cott's open palm smashed against the side of Geoffrey's face. Geoffrey took two sideward steps and stopped, his eyes wide with shock. The gun hung limply from his hands. It would still be several years before he would have raised it. "You'll never mention that relative's name again!" Cott said thickly. "Not to me, not to anyone else. What's more, you'll consider it a breach of Integrity if anyone speaks of him in your presence. That understood? As for your fantasies about myself and Mr. Holland, if you mention that again, you'll learn thereis such a thing as a breach of Integrity between brothers!" But he knew that everything he said was as much an admission as a shouted confession. He could feel the night's sickness seeping through his system again, turning his muscles into limp rags and sending the blood pounding through his ears. Geoffrey narrowed his eyes. "For a guy that hates armies and soldiers, you sure act like a top sergeant," he said. He turned around and began to stride away, then stopped and looked back. "And I'd drop you before you got the lead out of your pants," he added. Geoffrey knows, echoed through Cott's mind. Geoffrey knows, and Mr. Holland found me out. How many others? Like a sickening refrain, the thoughts tumbled over and over in his skull, while he swung down the road with rapid and clumsy strides. The coordination of all the muscles of his usually lithe body was non-functioning, thanks to the shock of what he had learned on the practice terrain. He pictured Geoffrey, watching from a window and snickering as Cott crawled along the ditch. He seemed to hear Mr. Holland's dry chuckle. How many other neighbors had, over the last three years, seen him? When he thought of it, it seemed incredible that pure chance had not made the entire countryside aware of his disgraceful actions. But he could not run from it. It was not the way a man faced situations. He should go to the club and watch the faces of the men. As they would greet him, they'd hide a little hidden demon of scorn in their eyes. The carbine's butt slapped his thigh as he climbed the club steps. Ill found it. Looking down at the newly refilled mug of rum, he understood this. He could not deny that a strange perverse desire to see what was not really there might have put an imagined edge on the twinkle in Winter's eye, or the undercurrent of mirth that always accented Olsen's voice. If Hollis sneered more than usual, it probably meant nothing more than that the man had discovered some new quality about himself that made him better than his fellows. Just probably, probably -- with nothing certain. Neither affirmation nor denial. Cott's hand closed around the mug, and he scalded his throat with the drink. The remembered visions of Barbara were attaining a greater precision with every swallow. "Hello, boy." Oh, my God! he thought. He had forgotten that Holland was a member of the club. He watched Mr. Holland slip into the seat opposite nis and wondered how many dry chuckles had accompanied the old man's relating last night's events. "How do you do, sir," he managed to say, remembering to maintain the necessary civilities. "Don't mind if I work on my liquor at the same table with you, do you?" Cott shook his head. "Pleasure, sir." The chuckle came that Cott had been expecting. "Say, boy, if you'd pour a few slugs into you, you'd forget to tack on some of that fancy speech." Mr. Holland chuckled again. "Guess I got a little sore at you last night," he went on. "Sorry about that. Everybody's got a right to live the way they want to." Cott stared silently into his mug. The clarity that had begun to emerge from its depths was now unaccountably gone, as though Holland's presence was enough to plunge him headlong back into the mental chaos that had strangled his thinking through the night and most of the day. He was no longer sure that Mr. Holland had not kept the story to himself. He was no longer sure that Geoffrey had done more than make a shrewd guess... he was no longer sure of anything. "Look, boy..." And the thought came that, for the first time since he had known him, Mr. Holland was as unsure as he. He looked up, saw the slow light of uncertainty in the man's glance. "Yes, sir?" "Boy -- I don't know. I tried to talk to you last night, but I guess we were both kind of steamed up. Think you'll feel more like listening tonight? Particularly if I choose my words a little carefully?" "Certainly, sir." That, at least, was common courtesy. "Well, look -- I was a friend of your Uncle Jim's." Cott bristled. "Sir, I..." He stopped. In a sense, he was obligated to Mr. Holland. If he didn't say it now, it would have to be said later. "Sorry, sir, please go on." TIJR. Holland nodded. "We campaigned with Berendtsen together, sure. That doesn't sit too well with some people around here. But it's true, and there're lots of people who remember it, so there's nothing wrong with my saying it. "Jim was Matt Garvin's oldest son," Mr. Holland went on. "You can be proud of your grandfather, boy. He held half of New York's East Side together, after the war. You've been taught each other for the sake of their ammunition, and how the women either had to stick close to their men everywhere they went, or else learn to fight as well as the men. It was Matt Garvin who changed all that, from Twentythird Street down to the Battery, all along the east side of Broadway. By the time some of those women had yearling kids, they could walk around outside in the daytime. "One of those kids was Jim, I was another, and Ted Berendtsen was a third. When Ted started forming the Army of Unification, Jim and I went along with him." Something that was half-reflex twisted Cott's mouth at the mention of the A.U. "It had to be done the way it was, Cott," Mr. Holland said. "How else was Ted going to get a central government started among a bunch of forted-up farmers and lone-wolf nomads? Beat 'em individually at checkers? We needed a government -- and fast, before we ran out of cartridges for the guns and went back to spears and arrows." "They didn't have to do it their way," Cott said bitterly. Mr. Holland sighed. "Devil they didn't. Besides, do you know exactly how it was done? Were you there?" "My mother and father were. My mother remembers very well," Cott answered. Strange, how his fingers could wrap around the mug so tightly, yet no warning of the strain on bone and muscle got through to his brain. "Yeah," Mr. Holland said dryly, "your mother was always good at remembering. Does she remember Jim's passing the land on to your father after Berendtsen gave it to him?" Cott nodded. "Yes, sir, she does. She also remembers my uncle leading the group that wiped out her family, so that Berendtsen would have the land to give." "I wasn't there, son, but the way I heard it, her folks were from Pennsylvania. What were they doing, holding down Jersey land?" He paused. "Look, boy, it wasn't anybody's land. Her folks could have kept it, if they'd had any sense. They should've realized that all Ted wanted was for them to agree to take orders from him for a while, until there could be an election. And none of that kept her from marrying Bob Garvin." father, sir, never fought with Berendtsen. He was the youngest of Matt Garvin's children, and he struck out for himself after his father died. He was a free man, with a sense of Integrity that did not permit him to take someone else's orders." "He was also pretty good with that carbine. Might have had something to do with it." "It might have, sir," Cott agreed, welcoming the feeling of pride that forced out some of his uncertainty. Holland nodded. "He was the one who started this household defense business around here, wasn't he? Figured if a carbine could keep him free, an armored bunker could fence off his land and protect his whole family. Which wasn't a bad idea," he added. "Berendtsen unified this country, but he didn't exactly clean it up. That was more of a job than a man could do in one lifetime." Holland drained his mug, put it down and wiped his mouth. "But, boy, don't you think those days are the past? Don't you think it's time we came out of the hedgehog houses and out of this hedgehog Integrity business?" Mr. Holland put his palms on the table and caught Cott's eyes with his own. "Don't you think it's time we finished the unifying job and got us a community where a boy can walk up to his neighbor's house in broad daylight, knock on the door and say hello to a girl if he wants to?" Cott had been listening with tangled emotions. But Holland's last words stung him and, once again, the thought of what had happened the previous night was laid bare, and all of his self-disgust with it. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, "but I fear we have differing views on the subject. A man's home is his defense, and his Integrity and that of his family is what keeps that defense strong and inviolate. The code by which we live is one which has evolved for the fulfillment of the vital requisites for freedom. If we abandon it, we go back to the Dirty Years. And I'm afraid, sir -- " he shuddered at remembrance of the outrage he had felt the previous night -- "that despite your best efforts, I will still marry your daughter honorably or not at all." Holland shook his head and smiled faintly. Cott realized how foolish that last sentence had sounded. Nevertheless, while he could not stem his impulses, he felt perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong. Holland stood up. "All right, boy. You stick to your system. Only -- it doesn't seem to work so well for you, does it?" Once again, Mr. Holland turned around and walked away, leaving Cott with nothing to say or do, with no foundation of assurance. It was worse than any insult. he ' crossed the club floor. The rum, combined with his sleepless night, had settled into a weight at the base of his skull. He was about to open the door when Chuck Kittredge laid a hand on his arm. "How do you do, Garvin?" Kittredge said. Cott smiled. Chuck was his neighbor on the side away from Mr. Holland. "How do you do?" "You look a little tired," Chuck remarked. "I am, Kittredge." "Shouldn't wonder -- with you holding Drill right at dawn." Cott shrugged. "Have to keep the defenses in shape, you know." Kittredge laughed. "Why, for Pete's sake? Or were you just rehearsing for the Fourth?" Cott frowned. "Why -- no, of course not. I've heard you holding Drill often enough." His neighbor nodded. "Sure -- whenever one of the kids has a birthday. But you don't really mean you were holding a genuine, dead-serious affair?" Cott was having a little trouble concentrating. He squinted and shook his head slightly. "What's the matter with that?" Kittredge's voice and manner became more serious. "Oh, now look, Garvin, there's been nothing for us to defend against in fifteen years. Matter of fact, I'm thinking of dismounting my artillery entirely." Cott looked at him uncomprehendingly. "You can't be serious!" Kittredge returned the look. "Sure." "But you can't. They'd be out of machinegun range, and they'd shell you to fragments with mortars and fieldpieces. They'd knock out your machinegun turrets, close in under their rifle cover and lob grenades into your living quarters." Kittredge laughed. He slapped his hand against his thigh while his shoulders shook. "Who the devil is 'they?' he gasped. "Berendtsen?" Cott felt the first touch of anger as it penetrated the deadening blanket that had wrapped itself around his thoughts. Kittredge was still chuckling. "Come off it, will you, Cott? As a matter of fact, while I wasn't going to mention it, all that banging at your place this morning practically ruined one of my cows. Ran head-on into a fence. It's not the first time it's happened, either. The only reason I've never said anything before is because your own livestock probably has just as bad a time of it. "Look, Cott, we're farmers. Farmers can't afford to unnerve their livestock and poison their land. It was fine while it was the only way we could operate at all, but the most hostile thing seen around here since Berendtsen's death was a chicken hawk." The anger turned into genuine rage. Cott could feel it settling into the pit of his stomach and vibrating at his fingertips. "So you're asking me to stop holding Drill, is that it?" rasping note, and frowned. "Not atogether, Cott. Not if you don't want to. But I wish you'd save it for celebrations." "The weapons of my household aren't firecrackers!" "Aw, come on, Cott!" For almost twenty-four hours, Cott had been encountering situations to which there were no solutions in his experience. He was baffled, frustrated, angry. The carbine was off his shoulder and in his hands with the speed and smoothness of motion that his father had drilled into him until it was beyond impediment by exhaustion or alcohol. "Charles Kittredge, I charge you with attempt to breach the Integrity of my household. Load and fire." The formula, too, was as ingrained in Cott as was his whole way of life. Chuck Kittredge knew it as well as he did. He blanched. "You gone crazy?" It was a new voice, from slightly beyond and beside Chuck. Cott's surprised glance flicked over and saw Chuck's younger brother, Michael. "Do you stand with him?" Cott's voice rapped out. "Aw, now look, Cott," Chuck Kittredge said, "you're not serious about this?" "Stand or turn your back." "Cott All I said was -- " "Am I to understand that you are attempting to explain yourself?" Michael Kittredge moved forward. "What's the matter with you, Garvin? You living in the Dirty Years or something?" The knot of fury in Cott's stomach twisted itself tighter. "That'll be far enough. I asked you -- do you stand with him?" "No, he doesn't!" Chuck Kittredge said violently. "And I don't stand either. What kind of damned foolishness is this, anyway? People don't just pull challenges at the drop of a hat like that any more!" "That's for each man to decide for himself," Cott answered. "Do you turn your back?" A N ugly flush flamed in Chuck Kittredge's cheekbones. "Damned if I will." His mouth clamped into an etched white line. "All right, Cott, who goes through the door first, you or me?" "Nobody will go anywhere. You'll stand or turn where you are." "Right here, in the club ? You are crazy!" "You chose the place, not I. Load and fire." Chuck Kittredge put his hand on his rifle sling. "On the count then," he said hopelessly. Cott reslung his carbine. "One," he said. "Two." He and Chuck picked up the count together. "Three," in unison, again. "Four." "Fi -- " Cott had not bothered to count five aloud. The carbine fell into his hooked and waiting hands and jumped once. Kittredge, interrupted in the middle of his last word, collapsed to the club floor. Cott looked down at him and then back to Michael, who was looking at Cott incredulously. "Do you stand with him?" Cott repeated the formula once more. Michael shook his head dumbly"Then turn!" Michael nodded. "I'll turn. Sure, I'll be a coward." There was a peculiar quality to his voice. Cott had seen men turn before, but never as though by free choice. Except for Holland, of course, the thought came. Cott looked at the width of Michael's back, and reslung his carbine. "All right, Michael. Take your dead home to your household." He stood where he was while Chuck's body was hoisted over his brother's shoulder. "He was a good friend of mine, Michael. I'm sorry he forced me to do it." As he walked home, past Mr. Holland's house, Cott did not turn his head to see if there were lights in any of the windows. He had kept his Integrity unbreached. He had forced another man to turn. But he didn't dare tell himself he hoped Barbara would understand that, in a sense, he had done it for her. IV rpWO days later, at dinnertime, Geoffrey and Alister came in five minutes late. Geoffrey's face was wide and numb with shock, and Alister's was glowing with a rampant inner joy. It was only when Geoffrey turned that Cott saw his left sleeve was soaked in blood. "Geoffrey!" Cott's mother pushed her chair back and ran to him. She pulled a med kit off its wall bracket and began cutting the sleeve away. "What happened?" Cott asked. "I got my man today," Geoffrey said, his voice as numb as his features. "He rightfully belongs to Alis, though." A grin broke through the numbness, and a babble of words came out as the shock of the wound passed from numbness to hysteria. "That crazy Michael Kittredge climbed up a tree at the edge of the practice terrain. Had a 'scope-mounted T-# and six extra clips. Must have figured on an all-out war. First thing I knew, it felt like somebody hit my shoulder with a bat and I was down. Slugs plowed the ground in circles around me. I tried to do something with my rifle, but no go. Kittredge must have had cross-eyes or something -- couldn't hit the side of a cliff with a howitzer, after that first shot. Damn fool stunt, 'scope-mounting an automatic -- somebody should have taught him better -- and there I was, passing out from the recoil every time I squeezed. You never saw such a blind man's shooting match in your life, Cott! "Then, out of this gully that he'd been imitating an elephant wallowing through, up pops Alis! Slaps the old M-l to his scrawny little shoulder, stands up like the man atop a skeet-shoot trophy and starts blasting away at Kittredge's tree as if nothing was up there but pigeons! Tell you, the me than Kittredge's best out of thirty. "Well, Kittredge might have been crazy, but he wasn't up to ignoring eight #s. He swings that lunatic T-# of his for Alis, here, and this gives me a chance to steady up and put a lucky shot through a leaf he happened to be in back of at the time. He's still out there." Cott felt his teeth go into his lower lip. Michael Kittredge! "He shot you from ambush?" "He wasn't carrying any banners!" "But that's disgraceful!" Cott's mother exclaimed. She finished wrapping gauze over the patch bandage on Geoffrey's bicep.  was standing beside Geoffrey, his face still shining. "Was that what happened, Alister?" he asked. Alister nodded. "Sure, that's what happened!" Geoffrey said indignantly. "Think this is a mosquito bite?" "You know what this means, don't you?" Cott asked gravely. Geoffrey began a shrug and winced. "Fool kid with a bug." Cott shook his head. "The Kittredges may be lax in their training, but Michael knew better. In a sense, that was a declaration of war...f Michael was out there, the rest of his household may not have known about it, but they'll be forced to support his action when they find out." "So it's a declaration of war." Alister finally found his voice, his tones a conscious imitation of Geoffrey's. "What have we Geoffrey's eyes opened wide, and the secretive laughter returned to his expression as he looked at his younger brother. "Not to start a war -- or get involved in one," Cott said. "Their gunnery will be sloppier than ours, but I know that their armor plate's just as thick." ".What do you want to do, Cottrell?" his mother asked. Her delicate face was anxious, and her hands seemed to be poised for the express purpose of underscoring the question. "We've got to stop this thing before it snowballs," Geoffrey said. "I didn't get it before, but Cott's right." Cott nodded. "We'll have to call everybody to a meeting. I don't know what can be done about the Kittredges. Maybe we'll all be able to think of something." He beat the side of his fist lightly against his thigh. "I don't know. It's never been done before. But these aren't Berendtsen's Militia. We can't handle the problem by simply dropping our shutters and fighting it out as independent units. The whole community would wind up firing on each other. We've got to have concerted action. Perhaps, if the comunity lines up in a solid block against the Kittredges, we'll be able to block them." "Unite the community!" His mother's eyes were wide. "Do you think you can do it?" Cott sighed. "I don't know, Mother. I couldn't guess." He turned to Alister. "We're going up to the club. It's the only natural meeting place we've got. I think you'd better break out the car. The Kittredges might have more snipers out." He picked his carbine from the arms-rack and moved to follow Alister down to the garage. "I'll go with you," Geoffrey said. "Only takes one arm to work the turret guns." Cott looked at him indecisively. Finally, he said, "All right. There's no telling what the Kittredges might be up to along the road." He turned back toward his mother. "I think it might be advisable to put the household on action stations." She nodded, and he went down into the garage. rriHE road was open and glaring white in the sunlight of early afternoon. The armored car's tires jounced over the latitudinal ruts that freight wagons had worn into the surface. One part of his mind was worried about the effect on Geoffrey, battened down in the turret. He looked up through the overhead slits and saw the twin muzzles of the #mm cannon tracking steadily counterclockwise. When did it begin? he thought. The chain of recent events was clear. From the moment Mr. Holland had discovered him, four nights ago. event had followed event as plainly and inevitably as though each had been planned. If he had not been upset by his meeting with Mr. Holland, he would not have called Drill the following morning. If he had never seen Barbara at her window at all, there would have been nothing for Geoffrey to taunt him with and no fear of exposure to drive him to the club. If he had not been drinking, Mr. Holland's references to Uncle James would not have cut so deep. Had there been no Drill, there would have been no quarrel with Chuck Kittredge. And even if there had been Drill, Chuck's remarks would not have seemed so objectionable had there been no smoldering resentment from his talk with Mr. Holland. For he had been angry. Had he not been, Chuck and Michael would not be dead, and the Garvins would not now be in the car. trying to stop an upheaval of violence that would involve the entire community. But his anger had not been only his responsibility. A breach of Integrity remained a breach of Integrity, no matter what the subjective state of the Party at Grievance. But where had it really begun? If his mother had introduced him to Barbara, would any of this have happened? He rejected that possibility. His mother had been acting in accordance with the code that his father and the other free men who had settled in this area had evolved. And the code was a good code. It had kept the farmlands free and in peace, with no man wearing another's collar -- until Michael 'Kittredge broke the code. And, so thinking, he turned the car off the road and stopped in front of the club. TTHE porch was already crowded with men. As he climbed out of the car's hatch, he saw that all the families of the community, with the exception of the Kittredges, were represented. Olsen, Hollis, Winter, Jones, CaBridges, Van Dali -- all of them. Even Mr. Holland stood near the center of the porch, his lined face graver than Cott had ever seen it. He walked toward them. The news had spread rapidly. He remembered that a lot of the households had radios now. He had never seen any use for them before. We ought to get one, now, though. As long as we're uniting, a fast communications channel is a good idea. "That's far enough, Garvin!" He stopped and stared up at the men on the porch. Hollis had lifted his rifle. Cott frowned. One or two other guns in the crowd were being raised in his direction. "I don't understand," he said. Hollis snorted. He looked past Cott at the car. "Anybody in that buggy tries something, we've got a present for him." The men on the porch drew off to either side. Two men were crouched in the club's doorway. One held a steady antitank rocket launcher on his shoulder and the other, having fed the rocket into the chamber, stood ready to slap the top of his head for the signal to fire. "I'm afraid I don't -- " "Looks like you've united the community, boy," Mr. Holland said. "Against you." Cott felt the familiar surge of anger ripple through his body. " Against me! What for?" There was a scattered chorus of harsh laughs. "What about Chuck Kittredge?" Hollis asked. " Chuck Kittredge! That was an affair of Integrity," Cott exploded. "Yeah? Whose -- yours or his?" Hollis said. "Seems like the day of Integrity has come and gone, son," Mr. Holland said gently. "Yeah, and what about Michael Kittredge?" somebody shouted from the back of the crowd. "Was that an affair of Integrity too?" "What about those two brothers of yours shooting him out of that tree?" someone else demanded. "Geoffrey's in the car with a wounded arm right now!" Cott yelled. "And Michael Kittredge is dead!" There was a babble of voices. The burst of sound struck Cott's ears. "All right!" he shouted. " All right! I came up here to ask you to stop the Kittredges with me. I see they got to you first. All right! Then we'll take them on alone, and the devil can have all of you!"  swers that came from the porch, Mr. Holland's quiet voice came through. "No good, boy. When I said 'against you,' I meant it. It's not a case of them not helping you -- it means they're going to start shelling your place in two hours, whether you're in it or not." "No!" The word was torn out of him, and even he had to analyze its expression. It was not a command nor a request nor a statement of fact or wonder. It was simply a word and he knew better than anyone else who heard it how ineffectual it was. "So you'd better get your family out of there, son." The other men on the porch had fallen silent, all of them watching except for the two men with the rocket launcher, who ignored everything but the armored car. Mr. Holland came off the porch and walked toward him. He put his hand on his shoulder. "Let's be getting back, son. Lots of room at my place for your family." Cott looked up at the men on the porch again. They were completely silent, all staring back at him as though he were some strange form of man they had never seen before. He muttered, "All right." Mr. Holland climbed through the hatch, and Cott followed him, slamming it shut and settling into the driver's seat. He gunned the idling engine, locked his left rear wheel, spun the car around. With the motor at full gun and the dust billowing behind it, the armored car roared back down the road. "I heard most of it, Cott." Geoffrey's tight and bitter voice came over the intercom. "Let's get back to the house in a hurry. We can dump a ton of frag on that porch before those birds find out what's hitting them." Cott shook his head before he remembered that Geoffrey couldn't see him. "They'll be gone, Jeff. Scattered to their houses, getting ready." "Well, let's hit their houses, then," Alister said from behind the machine gun at the car's turtledeck. "Wouldn't stand a chance, son," Mr. Holland said. "He's right... They've got us cold," Cott agreed. What had happened to the code? His father had lived by it -- all the people in the community had lived by it. He himself had lived by it -- he caught himself. Had tried to live by it, and failed. V front of Mr. Holland's house. It had taken an hour and a half of the time Hollis had given him to get back to his house and move his family and a few belongings into Mr. Holland's house. He had kissed his mother and raised his hand as she turned back at the doorway. "I'll be all right, Mother," he said. "There are a few things that I'd like to attend to." "All right, son. Don't be long." He nodded, though she was already inside the house. Geoffrey and Alister were deep inside Mr. Holland's house, taking care of their grandmother and the younger children. Cott smiled crookedly. Alister would be all right. He hoped Geoffrey wasn't too old to adapt. Mr.' Holland came out. "Coming in, son?" He chuckled. "I'll introduce you to my daughter." Barbara. He looked at the Sun. No, not enough time. Well, there'd be plenty afterward. "I'll be back, Mr. Holland. Got a few loose ends to tie up." Holland looked over the low, barely visible roof of Cott's house. A small dustcloud was approaching it from the other side. He nodded. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, hurry up. You haven't got more than about twenty minutes." Cott nodded. "I'll see you." He dropped the carbine into his hand and loped out of the yard, not having to worry about the dog now, cutting through the low underbrush until he was just below the crest of a rise that overlooked his house. He flattened himself in the high grass and inched forward, until his head and shoulders were over the crest, but still hidden in the grass. He had been right. There were three men just climbing out of a light guncarrier. Looters, he thought. Well, that's what our grandparents were. He slipped the safety. And our parents had a code. And now, his brothers had a united community. But I've lived in the past all my life, and I guess I've got Integrity. He fired, and one of the men slapped at his stomach and fell. 'T'HE other two dived apart, their own rifles in their hands. Cott laughed and threw dirt into their faces with a pair of shots. One of them bucked his shoulders up involuntarily as the dirt flew into his eyes. Cott fired again, and the shoulders slumped. Thanks for a trick, Geoffrey. The other man fired back -- using half a clip to cut the grass a foot to Cott's right. He dropped back below the crest, rolled and came up again, ten feet from where he had been. Down by the house, the remaining man moved. Cott put a bullet an inch above his head. He had about ten minutes. Well, if he kept that man pinned down, the first salvo would do as thorough a job as any carbine shot. The man moved again -- a little desperately this time -- and Cott tugged at his pants leg with a snap shot. Five minutes, and the man moved again. He was shouting something. Cott turned his ear toward him to cut the hum from the breeze, but couldn't make out the words. He pinned the man down again. When he had a minute of life left, the man tried to run for it. He sprang up suddenly, running away from the guncarrier, and Cott missed him for that reason. When the man cut back, he shot him through the leg. Damn! Jeff could have done better than that! The man was crawling for the carrier. Over at the Kittredge's, the first muzzle-flashes flared, and the thud of the guns rolled over the hills. Cott put a bullet through the crawling man's head. He had been right about the Kittredges' poor gunnery, as he had been about the looters. The first salvo landed a hundred yards over -- on the very crest of the ridge where Cott was standing, his carbine in his hand. Poor shooting, but just as fatal. The Of Venus A pioneer movement is like a building -- the foundation is never built for beauty! T HE telephone rang. Reluctantly, Rod Workham picked it up. Nothing good had come from that phone in six years, and his sour expression was almost an automatic reflex. "Workham here," he said. He held the phone an inch away from his ear, but the tirade exceeded his expectations -- it would have been audible a foot away: "Workham! How long do you think we're going to stand for this! At the rate you're going, there won't be a man left on Venus or a dollar in the budget! What kind of a personnel director are you? Don't you know this project is vital to every person on Earth? Thirty more resignations came in on this last mail flight." Rod put the receiver gently on his desk. General Carlson raved and ranted this way every time a colonist quit, and Rod knew he was not expected to answer, even if given the chance. The general would carry on for about five minutes and then would slam down the phone himself. He dialed another number on the other phone. "This is Rod, Dave," he said when he got an answer. "Carlson is on the other phone, yelling at my desk blotter. He says thirty more resignations came in just now. That right?" "Close enough, Rod -- twentythree pulled out. That makes seventy-eight per cent resigned in less than -- " "Spare me the statistics -- Carlson's probably blatting them right now. How do they break down? Are they mostly farmers or technicians?" "There were only nine technicians left, and all of them quit with this bunch. The rest were farmers." Dave Newson must be smoking his pipe, Rod decided -- grinding sounds were coming over the phone. "That doesn't leave very much on Venus to start a colony with -- a few farmers, some trappers. And the scientific personnel -- damn it, they seem to stick it out all right -- " "Their contracts are different," Rod reminded him. "They go on a two year hitch and then come back to Earth if they want to. The ones who are there are the ones who can take it and are signed up again." pause on the other end of the line. "Say, Rod," Newson said slowly. "Why not leave this last batch of quitters right where they are? Every one of them. They signed up for the project with their eyes open. Why don't you just refuse to bring them home?... they'd have to make a go of the colony to save their filthy necks!" Rod grinned nastily. "I'd like to do it -- but even General Carlson wouldn't dare. We'd never get another colonist off Earth, once it got out. They wouldn't trust us. Our first problem is to get a self-supporting society on Venus -- and that might do it, all right. But our main job is to relieve the crowding on Earth, and that means large numbers of peoon. If we get tough with these babies, who will take a chance later on that we won't repeat the trick?" "But we lose a hundred potential colonists every time one of these quitters starts talking about why he left! More harm is done by letting them come back than would result from leaving them where they are." Again the speculative pause. "Maybe you could shoot them on arrival?" "I'll suggest it to the general when I see him," Rod said, "if he doesn't shoot me first. Now, can you get me the files on this latest group? And I'd like to see the staff psychologist here, along with all the interviewers who handled and passed the group. We'll see what we can salvage out of this. And if you see Jaimie, send him along too, will you? Maybe our gambling historian can find us something useful in the Project Record." "The files are already on the way. And I told Biddington you'd probably want to see him -- he said he'd be along in about ten minutes. I haven't located all the interviewers yet. Jaimie's been right here, trying to talk me into a game of Nim and protesting he never heard of binary numbers. I'll send him up, but keep your hand on your wallet. If you need anything else, I'll be right here." TOD thanked him and hung up, shaking his head. Dave Newsom was too good a man to be stuck on a government project -- he ought to get out before the trouble started. Anyone who worked for Rod Workham on Project Venus was likely to end up with a bad name. They lived under the ax. The only person who could be sure of his job was Rod himself. He'd been recommended by a committee of top men in his field, and no other personnel man would accept the job if he were removed. Also, most of his men would leave the project if General Carlson bounced him, for they had been telling him so ever since the job had gotten hot. But there was the danger that the general might decide to bypass Personnel in selecting colonists -- or, what was more probable, might try to tame the planet with a military outpost. Rod could hardly blame the man for his feelings. The job wavital, and everyone was intensely interested in making a go of it. Scientific agriculture had gone about as far as it could; hydroponics had already begun to shoulder the load required by an overpopulated planet. But the fact known to most intelligent people on Earth was that either new room was found in this kind of emergency, some place where people could go and live under nearly the same standards, or else some drastic changes in living standards would be required of all. And absolute and rigidly enforced birth control would have to go into effect. And all the attendant causes for race wars, nationalist wars, and have-not wars would crop up. But the majority of the people wouldn't move to an undeveloped planet. You couldn't send ordinary citizens as pioneers. For one thing, they wouldn't want to go. For another, the new community wouldn't last long if you forced them to go -- the average person had neither the attitudes nor the physique needed to make over a wilderness. The problem was to find people who would create a community on a new planet and develop an integrated society there. This had meant rigid selection, careful psychological preparation and a terrifically expensive transportation system to get the people there and keep them supplied. And the job had to be done soon. Economists predicted that thirty years were left on Earth under present standards, maybe fifty. If the population couldn't be thinned out one way by then, it would have to be done by another. #'OR six years, now, Rod had worked on the job of establishing a self-supporting colony on Venus. Three different colonies had been started, and each had died out in less than two years. Resignations would come in slowly at first, and then in a rush, until only twenty or thirty people would be left, of which the majority would be short-term scientific teams. By the terms of the colonists' contracts no man could be left on Venus more than a month after his resignation; so the bulk of two colonies had simply had to be shipped back to Earth, and plans made for another try. And now the third colony was quitting, rushing home, leaving nothing on the jungle planet but a few small clearings soon to be taken over by the vegetation. Several times in the last year Rod had thought of volunteering himself; but he knew it for a futile gesture. He wasn't five hundred men. He didn't even have the special skills or physique that were needed. His gloomy thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the men. Biddington was first. Then in twos and threes came the interviewers, all looking like the home team at the half, three touchdowns behind and just waiting for their coach. If psychologists made good colonists, Rod thought, here would be a dozen more volunteers. The arrival of Homer Jaimison brought the only cheerful face in the group. The project historian was a young man, just over thirty, and considerably over six feet. He wore the expression of a man who is itching to do something. Jaimie had never really been busy yet on the project -- the colonies had died out so quickly that his work had been mostly clerical, and he'd had to fill in time as best he could. So far he had done it making up improbable contests of skill for drinks, with such a weird assortment of shifting rules and scoring that he hadn't paid for a drink since his arrival. He made a valuable contribution to the project, however, since he helped to keep the group's minds off their troubles a part of the time. Rod genuinely liked Jaimie, and expected to miss him strongly when Venus became self-supporting to the point where the historian would have to complete his work in residence.  Rod leaned against his desk and said, "I can see you all know why we're here. To begin with, I'm not going to accuse anyone of mistakes. Each of you is the best possible man in the country for his job. If you weren't, you wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have asked for you; and General Carlson wouldn't have kept you. So there's nothing to feel bad about. If you can't do this work, no one can. Selfrecrimination is foolish when you've been put on an impossible problem. I didn't call you in to bawl you out, but to ask you if we should continue spending project funds for nothing." Jaimie raised his eyebrows at this speech, but said nothing. "What do you mean, impossible problem?" one of the interviewers objected. "We know what we need -- it's just that we're still making some mistake in selection that we haven't corrected." "That's right, Rod." Biddington, the project psychologist, took up the dissension. "We know something is wrong with the selection techniques, or in the personality patterns we consider necessary. But it's only a problem of finding out what it is. The problem is by no means insoluble." "As long as you're not ready to give us up," another interviewer said, "we aren't going to quit." "You can't afford to get defeatist about this, Rod," Biddington went on. "This project is too important to fail. Whether you like it or not, your experience is too valuable for you to back out." Rod grinned and held up his hands. "All right. That's the reaction I wanted. If you all still think we can get somewhere, we may as well try to analyze this last group." He sat down at his desk. "I have the files here, along with the tapes of the interviews. Let's see what difference we can find between those who hung on this long, and the ones that quit after the first three months." npHE group settled down to try- ing to differentiate between a man who couldn't do a job but could try for six months longer than the next. They took the colonists carefully apart, trait by trait, and put them all back. They reviewed the colonists' records from birth, and compared them in endless combinations. Jaimie came into the discussion to show what the status of the colonies had been at the time each colonist had resigned: what diseases had been encountered when one man quit; how much jungle had been cleared before another did. Files came and went in a continuous flux; coffee and sandwiches came and grew cold and stale. The air became gray with smoke. Nothing. The same results had come out of every investigation: You needed a man who was unstable to get him to leave Earth. You needed a man who was stable to have him stay on Venus. You needed initiative and resourcefulness to survive on a new planet. You needed a man who had so little initiative and resourcefulness that the competition on Earth wouldn't be profitable,. You needed a young, healthy, vigorous specimen. You needed an older, experienced, more mature person. You needed A and you needed non-A. And even if you found people with the factors balanced just right, assuming you knew what the balance should be, where did you find five hundred of them? The discussion went on. The solutions got wilder and more absurd. Take whole orphan asylums and bring them up on Venus under military guard. Build a development in the . steamiest, nastiest jungle, and test recruits for the colony there. Send African natives. The men were beginning to make the whole thing look impossible again, so Rod decided to call a halt until they could get a better perspective. Tired himself, he dismissed them. They left quietly, not arguing in little groups or mumbling half-formed ideas to themselves, the way a team that has been progressing will do. mained sitting hunched up near the desk, in the same position he'd held for the last hour. When the others had all left, he grinned at Rod. "You know, for a group of practicing psychologists, this is the softest bunch of suckers I've seen." "You've proved that to your own profit several times so far," Rod answered, rubbing his face as though smoothing the wrinkles could remove the tension. "Who have you robbed lately?" "I'm talking about your performance just now. Here comes the whole crew, walking in with their heads hanging to the floor. Every last man was ready to tell you he was quitting -- that the problem was insoluble. And before anyone can say a word, you tell them that the whole thing is impossible and imply that you want to quit. Even Biddington fell for it. You can't back out now, Rod, they say. Let's not have defeatist talk out of you, of all people -- " "I did feel that way," Rod said. "I'm just about ready to quit. I think that whatever our mistake has been, we can't do any better than we have. We just don't know enough." Jaimie wasn't grinning now. "What will happen if you quit?" "My guess is that Carlson will set up a military outpost there. Make a clearing, build a fort, maybe a town. Then he'll try to get people to come and live in it." Rod sighed. "It won't work. They'll want to know why the planet had to be colonized that way -- why wouldn't the first colonists stay?" "I agree. The military outpost is a fine method for spreading a culture to an existing civilization. Rome did much for Europe that way; the most powerful cities sprang up near the Roman forts and roads. But as a method for inducing the populace to a new place, it doesn't work. A free into a military township." Jaimie looked sharply at Rod. "So what do you intend to do -- run out and turn it all over to Carlson?" "I don't know, Jaimie. I just don't know. Six years is a long time." "Damn it, Rod, you had much worse jobs than this one in industry! How did you select a computer man, a communications man, an engineering physicist, out of a group of men with similar backgrounds? It seems to me a harder problem than this." "We don't really know much, as I said," Rod said. "Ours has often been an imitation science. When we had to select a computer man, we just gave a battery of tests to successful computer men -- structural vision, vocabulary, tridimensional memory, ink-blots, syllogisms, practically everything. Then we weeded out the tests whose scores appeared to have no statistical relevance. Any future computer man had to duplicate those results, whatever they were. If we had a recently pioneered civilization around, Jaimie, you'd find this whole staff running through it like pollsters before an election." "What was all this talk about balance, instability, initiative and #B all the rest?" asked Jamie. "That's what we do when we don't know, Jaimie. We try to predict what we need; then we try to find ways of finding it in people." sound. "But I thought you must have progressed from empirical methods! I would have said something long ago, if I hadn't thought you knew what you were doing all the time!" The historian was on his feet, stalking about the room. "Why didn't you tell me about this before?" "Why? What difference would it have made?" Rod frowned, failing to understand the other's excitement. "Sure, we've progressed from the older methods, in that we now have pretty complete data for all present job descriptions. And we can synthesize data for a new job, if it's not too different. But there isn't any information on the kind of person needed in a new world. What the devil are you getting so upset about?" The historian threw himself into a chair and glared at Rod. "If you couldn't find the kind of people you needed to test, you could have asked a historian if he knew anything about them!" Rod shook his head puzzledly. "Subjective data, such as that -- " "Don't bring subjectivity into this, damn it! We get enough of that from physical scientists." Jaimie held himself in the chair, almost shaking with the intensity of his feeling. "Look, Rod, you know I want to see the project succeed. And you admit that you haven't got an answer. Well, baby, I think I have! It's an idea that has about a fifty-fifty chance of being right in this case it?" "If I had been betting on your side for the last few months, I'd be several dollars richer," Rod smiled. "Yes, I think I might go along with your idea, if you can convince me it has an even chance for success. Three failures out of three tries makes for poorer odds than that. What do you have in mind?" "H'm," Jaimie said. "I imagine your stock isn't so high with old scabbard and blade right now, is it?" Rod laughed. "I don't think he'll shoot on sight, but I'm not positive enough to stand in front of a lighted window." "Well, then -- if I had an idea you agreed with, the surest way to kill it would be to have you present it to him, right? And if you fight it, that's sure to convince Carlson!" Jaimie thought hard for a moment, tapping the chair-arm. "Rod, I have to do something you aren't going to like. Do you trust me?" "You mean you're going to try this without even discussing it with the personnel group?" "That's right. If I don't tell you what I'm doing, I know you'll fight it. And I'll need that kind of help from you to push Carlson into doing it. "But I have to do something far worse than that, Rod. I'm going to tell the general that you knew my plan from the start, and have been sitting on it because I'm not a psychologist. I'm going to ruin your reputation with the worst set of lies since the Red purges. I'll say you're fighting me, because you can't accept an idea that came from a man outside of your own group. If the scheme doesn't work you'll be ruined, because there'll be no way to retract the lies. If it does work, we can announce that we put on an act to sell the plan to Carlson. Can you take it?" Rod was thoughtful for a few minutes. He liked and trusted Jaimie, but the man had no experience in this field -- and this sounded like an all-or-nothing shot. Then he remembered his despair over the latest set of resignations. He'd been ready to quit -- he had nothing to offer, and neither did his men. Even a wild idea was worth a try, he thought grimly -- he would be risking nothing but a plan that had already failed. "Go to it, boy," he said. "And if you need a fight, you'll get a damn good one." short, and Rod was abruptly overruled. After that Jaimie moved fast. The new colonists flocked in. Three months after Rod's talk with him, the compounds started to fill. A shipload was a hundred men, and each new man had to wait in a group until it was filled. But there was no waiting now except for processing; the compounds were full before the ships were ready. Rod had paid no attention to Jaimie's recruiting methods, thinking that the historian's idea differed mainly in control over the colonists. Until he saw the crowds. Even from a distance, they didn't have the young look of the previous groups. Up close, they looked like the sweepings of the slums. He and Biddington talked to a few before they fully realized what Jaimie had done. All the men were sure that Venus was a mineral paradise -- gold in the streams, uranium lodes so pure you had to wear a shield to get near them, diamonds, silver -- every treasure that had ever excited men on Earth was scattered around the new world waiting to be picked up. That was what Jaimie had told them. Rod got to a phone, fast. "Jaimie, you fool! I know what you're doing, and I won't put up with it! You've told these dupes they can get rich on Venus! You intended to attract large numbers of recruits, in the hope that some of them will be what we need -- but look at what you attracted! Crooks, gangsters, bums, hoboes, sharecroppers and I don't know what. You got recruits all right... but what the hell kind of a society are you going to start with them! And who will go and live there among them later?" "What's the matter, Workham?" Jaimie asked coldly. "Are you a racial purist? Want only your kind of people to get to Venus?" "I don't care who goes, as long as they fit some standards. But to make a decent place, you need decent people -- morally clean and healthy. Not this collection of mental cripples, alcoholics and thieves. Probably half of them are wanted men!" He argued further, unable to believe that this was Jaimison's great fifty-fifty chance. He said many things... and regretted every one ; for that night the telecasts carried a recorded version of his outburst. Jaimie had maneuvered him into saying things he didn't quite mean, so that it looked as if he was trying to hide the all good things on Venus and save them for his own friends. One commentator said outright that if you weren't a college graduate recommended by one of Workham's friends, it would cost you a thousand dollars to get on an outgoing ship. By the next morning, half the papers in the world were after Workham's scalp. R OD could only take the abuse and grind his teeth. How did you fight a thing like that? You were condemned if you kept silent, and if you answered, people nodded their heads and said, "See -- he's still trying to deny it." The failures from the old colonies were Rod's only allies. They tried to tell people what Venus was like, and what lies Carlson and his stooge Jaimison were using for bait. But it was pointed out that these men naturally had a stake in the secret... and, after all, everyone knew how well off the returning colonists were! This was actually due to the high premium paid to get men to go to the planet, but no one believed. Days passed. Weeks. The compounds filled, and emptied, and filled again. People stood in lines to apply. They walked miles to appear at a recruiting center. They fought for a place on the next ship, or the one after that. Farmers, clerks, ragged families, hoboes, armed men, teen-age boys and old men. Four thousand people applied in the first few months and were shipped out. Then the crowds thinned, even though the Get Rich propaganda continued. Soon, only a few hundred appeared where there had been thousands; then twos and threes; at last only a dozen or so a day, many of whom changed their minds before the full shipload had been assembled. Rod clung to his job throughout. He had little to do, though his department had never been formally discontinued. Sooner or later, he knew, their services would be needed -- when this cheap trick had failed. So he and his staff remained. Studying old files, making up test batteries, discussing survival factors, they readied themselves for the project again. From time to time they interviewed and tested a few of those waiting in the compounds. There was too much time to just sit around -- even this activity was a welcome diversion. As the year passed, the number of prospective colonists stopped decreasing and held steady at about five a day. But slowly something else changed. Among the new arrivals there began to appear engineers who had tossed up good jobs to emigrate, farmers with their families, schoolteachers, storekeepers, lawyers, even doctors. All of them young. Not in any great number; but their appearance was a surprise still. Then there came two former colonists who had resigned on one of the earlier attempts, now trying to get back to Venus without inducement of bonus, high pay or guaranteed return. That was the day Rod decided to call on Jaimie. year-old rye, Jaimie," he began. "I think you're entitled to a drink, and I'm entitled to an explanation. Want to swap?" "Rod!" Jaimie's bony face lit up. "It's good to see you. I've been afraid to call you until we could admit to the hoax. Come in, come in." "Well, you did it," Rod said, after they had settled down. "I met two former colonists in the compound today. They know there isn't gold on Venus, and still they want to go out for free. No contract. And lately we've been getting professional people. There was even a kid fresh out of journalism school who wants to start up a paper. Jaimie, how did you do it? Were we so far wrong as that?" "You did it yourself, Rod. You told me how -- but you wouldn't have believed, then. Or if you had, we never would have sold it to Carlson. Remember, you said if there were only a recent pioneer civilization around, you'd run to them with ink-blots and vocabulary tests? All you needed to do was duplicate the kind of person who settled America or Australia or California. "Well, as a historian I knew those people. And I knew what brought them. So I merely put out the same kind of bait." "The same kind of bait!" Rod exclaimed. "What about freedom of religion and freedom from oppression? Isn't that what brought people to this country? There's no oppression to flee from these days! And even if it was the same bait, why weren't the same kind of people attracted? You saw that first compound full -- where in that cesspool was Thomas Paine, or Franklin, or Miles Standish?" "Franklin was born here," Jaimie grinned. "Paine didn't come over in the first wave. And I suppose General Carlson was Miles Standish. Maybe that kid journalist you saw was Paine's counterpart. No, Rod -- the bait I held out attracted the same kind of people initially as it always has. You have been compromising all along on the factors you really wanted in order to get young, healthy, moral people to Venus. The answer is simply this: Pioneers are not necessarily young, healthy, or moral. So you didn't get what you wanted. "You see, America wasn't only founded by pilgrims. They were actually a minority here. We were settled by promoters, trappers, bonded servants, exiled British deportees, pickpockets and thieves. We were explored by French and Spanish pirates. The better element in Europe didn't come here at first -- why should they? It was dangerous. Pioneering was to the advantage of the worst elements. They came by court order, out of necessity, for adventure. They came for gold more than for freedom; for a new chance more than for a new religion. "Australia was set up as a penal colony. Others went there for gold, or to start over where they weren't known. That's the kind of person who settles a new land -- the misfits: too impulsive, drunkards, weaklings, convicts, and fugitives from justice. Too sick in mind and body to make a go of it where they are. "So we announced that there was a brand new world with a new chance for everyone on it. We implied that there was wealth. We told them everything about Venus that brought the English to America, the Spanish to South America, the Easterners to the West, and the Middlewesterners to California. We didn't hunt for pioneers. They came to us." R OD refilled his glass thoughtfully. "But what kind of a society will men like that create? A fighting, lawless structure..." "That's right. And the lawless will eliminate themselves by their very activities. Like the early West. While, the doctors come in to treat wounds, and the lawyers to plead their cases; while their wives and the other wives will start schools and bring in schoolteachers. That society will purge itself, Rod -- many of the worst will become good citizens out of meeting the challenge of a new planet, and the rest will disappear." "Well, then, what about the gold story?" Rod asked. "Won't they be angry with everyone connected with the project because of the hoax?" "That was a little raw, but no worse than other gold rushes -- few of the stampeders ever found the gold they went after. The captain of one of the rockets told me that the first few months the colonists were trying to stow away on the returning ships. Now they send messages to friends and relatives to come before the opportunity is gone -- that's why you've seen this better element. Our lies will soon be forgotten, and crops and foods and minerals will be coming from Venus, and better people will go to meet the diminished challenge on our brave new world." Rod stood up. "Well, my compliments for a job well done, Jaimie. When do you expect to go and live there yourself? You'll have to soon, won't you, to complete the Project Record in residence?" Jaimie nodded. "About six months from now, I think. Why?" "Good," Rod exclaimed. "We can all go together." "What are you planning to do? Volunteer?" "The whole personnel staff will be going. Here's just what we need -- a young pioneer society! We can get adequate data for future selection, a better idea of what kind of person a colony needs at different stages of growth." Rod grinned. "After all, your method was pretty sloppy, even if it did work. And you sent far too many wrong people. Once we have some good data... anything you can do, we can do better!" Press, New York, #. #I pages, #  the World of Tomorrow is a recurrent theme in science fiction. Last month we had Bradbury's Fahrenheit #; this month coiiie Kornbluth's satirically odd Syndic, reviewed below, and Karp's shocking novel about a civilization in which independent thinking is heresy, punishable by death if the person cannot be "cured" by the vicious methods of pharmaceutical psychiatry. You may not enjoy reading Karp's first novel -- it is hardly time-passing entertainment -- but you certainly will find it gripping and unforgettable. It concerns Professor Burden, a benevolent spy in his college, who reports to the State on what he considers to be his colleagues' "heresies," or errors of free thinking. Burden is called in by the State's thought control agency and is himself found to be suffering from the mortal heresy of individualism and belief in his intellectual superiority. He is incarcerated and put through one of the most horrid courses of depersonalization I have ever read about. His individuality is literally destroyed and a new personality -- slavishly acquiescent -- is built up. The end, however, indicates that the job of eliminating independence and obtaining conformity is not as easy as the State leaders hope it is. The book is written in a style simple enough to permit both people and ideas to shine through in all their luridness, yet individual enough to shine through by themselves. One was a Book of the Month Club alternate selection for October. bluth. Doubleday and Co., New York, #. # pages, # psycho-sociological horror, Kornbluth's is rip-roaring melodrama of the future. Yet underlying it, too, is a bitter analysis of some of the trends in modern society, more fantastic than in Karp's book, but not much less ominous. Kornbluth conceives of a society in which government, with its increasing tendency to conformity, militarism and bureaucracy, has been driven from the United States by two sets of gangsters. In the West, centered on Chicago, is Mob territory, with a civilization based on the violence of gang war. In the East, the Syndic has evolved a way of life in which the customs of the gambler, the horse parlor operator, the easy-virtue girl, the Tammany-type politician have become the accepted mores. It is a time when, as the jacket blurb puts it, "people never had it so good," (in Syndic territory, at least) . The plot concerns an attempt by one of the lowlier members of the Syndic itself to become a spy on the activities of the Government forces, which conduct their piratical activities from bases in Iceland, Ireland and elsewhere in those regions. He goes through innumerable fetching and farfetched adventures, both alone and with an attractive girl psychologist, and eventually discovers that there is a sort of shotgun alliance between Government and Mob forces to overthrow the Syndic. The payoff is remarkable both for its inconclusiveness and for its surprisingly philosophical depth -- an ending rich with lessons for our time. K. Langer. #nd ed., revised. Dover Publications, New York, #. # pages, Cloth #, paper # T AM told by experts in Symbolic logic that this is far and away the best simple introduction to what is today one of the most important new tools of scientific thought, a way of clear reasoning unsurpassed by any previous system. It is not at all difficult to read and it seems to strengthen and clarify one's thought processes quite remarkably. The book's value can best be summarized by quoting from the author's introduction: "It emphasizes... above all the difference between fecund and sterile notions... It seeks to show the bearing of logic on natural science and philosophy of nature... It aims to take no technical knowledge of logic, mathematics or science for granted, but to develop every idea from the level of common sense." For anyone interested in learning about one of the newer techniques of basic science, this book will prove a fascinating and useful tool. And, from my own point of view, I found it intellectually exciting, a real test of some of the relatively unused muscles under the scalp. Theodore Sturgeon. Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, and Ballahtine Books, New York, #. # pages, # cloth, #c paper T?EW people who read Sturgeon's "Baby Is Three" in the October # galaxy will ever forget its imaginative evocation of Homo gestalt, that astonishing five-person "person" consisting of Janie, the little girl telekineticisttelepathist; the Negro twins, Bonnie and Beanie, natural-born teleporteurs ; Baby, the idiot savant computer; and Gerard, the boy who coordinated this odd group into a cooperating unit that could do anything. The present book is the full flowering of this magically imagination-stretching concept. It. consists of (in addition to "Baby Is Three") a new first section telling how the unit originated with Lone, the "natural" who could never fully develop the new unit because he was simple in the head, and a new last section that describes how Hip Barrows, mentally disturbed war veteran, finally manages to bring Gerard -- who could not understand the need for morality or ethics in his function as "boss" of the Homo gestalt unit -- to an understanding of his responsibilities. The new parts are fully as impressive as the original. The whole book is a masterpiece of invention. It is something of a relief to find a piece of science fiction that is concerned more with odd but astonishingly real people and with parapsychology maturely used than with hopeless mobs and violent disaster. It is also a pleasure to read a book that is written in an unmannered prose that still has a poetic, panchromatic individuality. And not least, it is very rewarding indeed to come across an idea that is not only unique, but also richly human. Sturgeon's second full-length novel has more than fulfilled the promise shown by his many masterly short stories. edited by Frederik Pohl. Permabooks, New York, #. # pages, #c part of us reviewers to become blase and overcritical when we report on anthologies -- particularly the paper-bound bargains at #c, like this one. So every story is not an immortal classic? What do you want for the price? Here, for example, we have # really good stories -- and where else can you get the same amount of acceptable reading matter for #c a story? This particular book, though, is less necessary for the galaxy reader than for those not familiar with our magazine, since I I of its # items come from the galaxy backfile. I won't name every story because of space limitations, but consider that it includes Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot," Asimov's "C-Chute," Kornbluth's "Marching Morons," Boucher's "Transfer Point," Clement's "Halo," and Eisner (Kornbluth)'s "Luckiest Man in Denv" -- what a list of star items! Also John Wyndham's "Perfect Creature" and Blish's "Common Time" -- both fine nongalaxy tales. And the rest, though not quite up to this top level, are all good reading, both for the convinced fan and the science fiction newcomer. No stories published before # are included, which does not mean that there are no fine tales from that earlier period still to be anthologized. This is not intended as criticism, only as a passing comment. tasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # rather minor efforts, every one of them highly readable, but none measuring up to his best work. "Gulf" (#) deals with a struggle between a "good" underground of Homo superiors, complete with telepathy, etc., and a bunch of "bad" rulers in a world of tomorrow. It is full of swift-paced excitement. "Elsewhen" (#) is an odd, anti-scientific parallel-world tale based to some degree on Bishop Berkeley's absurd notions. I found it pretty ineffective. "Lost Legacy" (#) is another story of parapsych'ological powers, common now, but rather rare when it was written. Its time is today. Like "Gulf," it deals with a "totipotent" (to use a van Vogtian word) group of concealed geniuses (one of them is Ambrose Bierce!) who are trying to train suitable people to use their "whole minds" to subdue the evil leaders of Man who seek power and power only. It is effective, despite the dreamlike nature of its plot and especially its characterizations. "Jerry Was a Man" (#) tells of a society in which mutated monkeys do the world's work, with a soft heart gets them recognized legally as people. It is a delightful story, with its jabs at pomposity and its understanding of what Man basically is -- a being who can understand the difference between right and wrong. Frazee. Rinehart and Co., Inc., New York, #. # pages, #  a taut suspense novel with science fiction overtones about some unnamed enemies of the American Way who try to panic the country by stopping rain. We learn nothing about the nature of the drought-making equipment, except that it is electronic, but we get an almost palpable feeling of the terror, the sense of doom, that its effects produce. Somewhere in Colorado or thereabouts is a mountain called Blue Peak. Platt Vencel, who was brought up there, returns after the war for a vacation, to find the whole area in the grip of an unprecedented drought. Before long, he is involved in a frenzied and ruthless campaign by the Army, the F.B.I., the F.C.C., etc., to bring out alive the hidden enemies holed up somewhere in the center of Blue Peak and their rain-preventing equipment. The task is made almost impossibly difficult by the conflicting authorities of the different agencies and by the knowledge that any man on the hunt may be a traitor. The middle of the book sags, perhaps because it is impossible to maintain continuous excitement in a situation where there can be but little open conflict. On the whole, however, I think you will find this a satisfyingly spinePre-Publication Offer! Only one thing could equal stories! Published by Crown, it's a really huge book... over # pages, more than a quarter of form... a giant reading bargain at only # a copy. But we have an offer that makes this giant bargain even more gigantic: Twelve quality-crammed issues monthly at the newsstand come to # a year. Total: #. Readers' Pre-Publication copy of... plus the next twelve big  # . # ! You'll want them both. Don't wait because this is a pre-publication offer and cannot be kept open long. Mail the coupon below with # today. Offer expires April #, #. Yes, start  (or extend Q) my subscription right away -- and mail me presses! I enclose # as payment in full for both. Nome Address... City ZoneState Start with the issue. T HE prison ship, under full shields, slipped down toward the cove, and made no shadow on the moonlit water, and no splash as it slid beneath the surface. They put her out and she swam clear, and the ship nosed up and silently fled. Two wavelets clapped hands softly, once, and that was the total mark the ship made on the prison wall. had been sentenced to life prisonment. With torture. She swam toward the beach unThe grass invariably is greener on your owft planet -- even if there is no grass there and V would not be that color if there were anyl til smooth fluid sand touched her knee. She stood up. flung her long hair back with a single swift motion, and waded up the steep shingle, one hand lightly touching the bulging shoulder of the rocks which held the cove in their arms. Ahead she heard the slightest indrawn breath, then a cough. She stopped, tall in the moonlight. The man took a half-step forward, then turned his head sidewise and a little upward away from her, into the moon. "I'm -- I beg your -- sorry," he floundered. She sensed his turmoil, extracted its source, delved for alternative acts, and chose the one about which he showed the most curious conflict. She crouched back into the shadows by the rock. I didn't see you there. "I didn't see you until you... I'm sorry. Why am I standing here like this when you... I'll move on down the... I'm sorry." HE took and fanned out his impressions, sorted them, chose one. My clothes -- He started away from the rocks, looking about him, as if he might have been leaning against something hot, or something holy. "Where are they? Am I in the way? Shall I put them near the... I'll just move on down." No... no clothes. Directly from him she took Where are they? "I don't see any. Somebody must've -- are you sure you put them -- where did you put them?" He was floundering again. She caught and used the phrase Why, who would... what a lowdown trick! "Is your -- do you have a car up there?" he asked, peering up at the grassy rim of the beach. He added immediately, "But even if you got to the car... I have no car. "My God!" he said indignantly. "Anybody that would... here, what am I standing here yapping for? You must be chilled to the bone." He was wearing a battered trench coat. He whipped it off and approached her, three-quarters backward, the coat dangling from his blindly extended arm like a torn jib on a bowsprit. She took it, shook it out, turned it over curiously, then slipped into it so that it fell around her the way it had covered him. Thank you. She stepped out of the shadows, and the huge relief he felt, and the admixture of guilty regret that went with it made her smile. "Well!" he said, rubbing his hands briskly. "That's better, now, isn't it?" He looked up the lonely beach, and down. "Live around here somewhere?" No. "Oh." He said it again, then, "Friends bring you down?" he asked diffidently. She hesitated. Yes. "Then they'll be back for you!" She shook her head. He scratched his. Suddenly he stepped away from her and demanded, "Look, you don't think I had anything to do with stealing your clothes, do you?" Oh, no! "Well, all right, because I didn't, I mean I couldn't do a thing like that, even in fun. What I was going to say, I mean, now I don't want you to think anyth..." He ground to a stop, took a breath and tried again. "What I mean is, I have a little shack over the rise there. You'd be perfectly safe. I have no phone, but there's one a mile down the beach. I could go and call your friends. I mean I'm not one of those... well, look, you do just what you think is best." She searched. She felt it emerged correctly : I really mustn't put you to that trouble. But you're very kind. "I'm not kind. You'd do exactly the same thing for me, now wouldn't..." He stopped because she was laughing silently, her eyes turned deep into the corners to look at him. She laughed because she had sensed his startled laughter at what he was saying even before it had uncurled. "I -- can't say you would at that," he faltered, and then his laughter surfaced. By the time it had run its course, she was striding lithely beside him. silence, until he said, "I do the same thing myself, go swimming in the -- I mean without... at night. But generally not this late in the year." She found this unremarkable and made no reply. "Uh," he began, and then faltered and fell silent again. She wondered why he felt it so necessary to talk. She probed, and discovered that it was because he was excited and frightened and guilty and happy all at once, full of little half-finished plans concerning cold odds and ends of food and the contents of a clothes closet, the breathless flash of a mental picture of her emerging from the water with certain details oddly highlighted, the quick blanking of the picture and the stern frown that did it, the timid hope that she did not suspect feelings that he could not control... Oh, yes, he must talk. "You have a -- do you mind if I say something personal?" She looked up attentively. "You have a funny sort of way of talking. I mean -- " he leaned close -- "you hardly move your lips when you talk." She turned her head slightly and flexed her lips. She made the effort and said aloud, "Oh?" "Maybe it's the moonlight," he informed himself. Inwardly he pictured her still face and said Strange, strange, strange. "What's your name?" "Dru. Drusilla," she said carefully. It was not her name, but she had probed and discovered that he liked it. "Drusilla Strange." "Beautiful," he breathed. "Say, that's a beautiful name, did you know that? Drusilla Strange. That's just... just exactly right." He looked about at the cool white blaze of the beach, at the black grass under the moon. "Oh!" he said abruptly, "I'm Chan. Chandler Behringer. It's a clumsy sort of name, hard to say, not like -- " "Chandler Behringer," she said. "It sounus like a little wind catching its tail around a -- " she dipped into him swiftly -- "palm frond." "Huh!" he shouted. It was one syllable of a laugh, and it was sheer delight. Then he found the rest of the laugh. He put his hand on her arm just above the elbow and steered her off the beach. The feel of her flesh under the flat close fabric caused a shock that ran up his arm and straight through his defenses. "Here's my place," he said, with all the wind and none of the cordal vibration necessary to make a voice. He moved away from her and marched up the slope, frowning, leading the way. He ducked into a lean-to porch and fumbled too busily with a latch. "You'd better wait for a moment while I light the lamp. It's sort of cluttered." She waited. The doorway swallowed him, and there was a fumbling, and a scratching, and suddenly the cabin had an interior. She moved inside. "You needn't be afraid to look around," he said presently, watching her. S HE did, immediately. She had been looking straight at him, following his critical inventory of the entire place, and she now knew it every bit as well as he. But, "Oh," she said, "this is -- " she hesitated -- "cosy." "A small place," he said, "but it's dismal." He laughed, and explained apologetically, "I got that line from a movie." She sorted out the remark, wondered detachedly why he had made it, half-heartedly probed for the reason, then dropped it as unessential effort. "A nice soft blanket," he said, lifting it. Her hands went reflexively to the top button of the trench coat and fell away at his next words. "When I go out, you just wrap yourself up nice and snug. I won't be long. Now give me the number." His mental code for "number" was so brief and so puzzling -- a disk with holes in it superimposed on ruled paper -- that she was quite at a loss. "Number?" "Your friends. I'll phone them. They can bring you some clothes, take you home." He laughed selfconsciously. "I'll try to say it so that... I mean, make it sound... Do you know, I haven't the first idea of just what I'll tell them?" "Oh," she said. "My friends... have no phone." "No -- oh. What, no phone?" He looked at her, around at the walls, and inevitably at the bed. It was a very small bed. He gestured weakly at the door. "A... telegram, maybe, but that would take a long time, and... Oh, I know. I have clothes, dungarees and things. A lumberjack shirt. Why didn't I think of it? Girls wear all that kind of -- but shoes, I don't know... And then I'll get you a taxi!" he finished triumphantly, and the chaos within him was, to misuse the term, deafening. She considered very, very carefully and then said, "No taxi could take me back. It's much too far for a taxi to travel." "Isn't there anyone that -- " "There isn't anyone," she said firmly. After a long, complicated pause, he asked gently, "What happened?" She averted her face. "It was something sad," he halfwhispered, and although he was quite still, she could feel the tendrils of his sympathy reaching out toward her. "That's all right, don't worry. Don't," he said loudly, as if it were the first word of a very important pronouncement; but it would not form. He said at last, inanely, "I'll make coffee." He crossed the room, raising fiis hand to pat her shoulder as he passed, checking it, not touching her at all, while the echo of that first shock bounded and rebounded within him. He bent over the stove, and in a moment the evil smell of the lamp, which had been pressing closer and closer upon her consciousness, was eclipsed completely by what was to her a completely overpowering, classic, catastrophic and symphonic stench. Her eyelids flickered and closed as she made a tremendous nervous effort and at last succeeded in the necessary realignment of her carbon-oxygen dynamic. And in a moment she could ignore the fumes and open her eyes again. Chan was looking at her. "You'll have to stay." "Yes," she said. She looked at his eyes. "You don't want me to." "I want you to," he said hurriedly, "I want..." He thought She's in trouble and she's afraid I'm going to take advantage of it. "I'm in trouble," she said, "but I'm not afraid you'll take advantage of it." grin. She trusts me. Then the grin faded and the internal frown clamped down. But it could not hide the thought: She's... she expects... she's maybe the kind who... "I'm not the kind," she said levelly, "who -- " "Oh, I know I know I know!" he interrupted rapidly, and with it he thought Why is she so damned sure of herself? "I just don't know what to do!" she said. He smiled again. "You just leave everything to me. We'll make out fine, I mean you're quite safe, you know. And in the morning everything will look a lot brighter. Oh, that coat, that wet old coat. Here," he bustled, "here -- here." From curtained clothes-pole and paper-lined orange crate came blue denims, a spectral holocaust in woolen plaid, a pair of socks of a red that did not belong within four miles of any color in the shirt. She looked at the clothes and at him. He turned his back. "I'll go on with the... cookcook-coffee and you know," he said nervously. She took off the trench coat "I and while her fingers solved the logical problem called buttons and the topological one whereby a foot enters a sock, she pondered Chandler Behringer's extraordinary sensitivities. Either this species must overpopulate its planet in nine generations, she thought whimsically, or it must die from nervous exhaustion in four. The dungarees gouged and rasped her skin until she damped its sensitivity, but the feel of the heavy, washed wool of the shirt was delightful. He set out plates and in a moment slid a handsome orangeand-white edible onto them. She looked at it with interest, and then her eyes traveled to the small table by the stove, and she saw the shells. By the Fountain Itself, she said silently, eggs! She forced her feelings into a desensitized compartment of her mind and corked it. Then she sat opposite Chandler and ate heartily. The coffee was bitter and, to her palate, gritty, but she drank her second cup with composure. He's so very pleased that I eat with him, she thought. They probably do everything gregariously, even where cooperation is not involved. She was conscious of no disgust, for that, too, was insulated -- and so it must stay for the rest of her imprisonment, which is to say the rest of her life. The food seemed to have relaxed him; a sphygmomanetic allocation, she deduced. And involuntary. How very confining. His chatter had eased and he was taking a silent pleasure in watching her. When she met his eyes finally, he leaped up nervously and scraped and washed the plates energetically. He thought, # wonder if she liked it. And: She knows how to be a guest, and how to keep herself from plunging into the dish-washing, putting them back in the wrong place and all. And: I like doing things for her. I wish I could do everything for... And then the frown. Suddenly in a rush of embarrassment and selfaccusation, he spun around and said, "I haven't even asked you, I mean told you, if you, I mean, well, this is just a shack and we haven't all the fixtures." She looked at him blankly, then probed. Oh. This is loaded, too. But not eating. Amazing. She made it as easy for him as she could. She rose and gave him the quick nervous smile that was correct. "It's outside," he said. "To your left. That little path." She slipped outside, stalked directly down to the water's edge and with as little effort and even less distress than a polite cough might have cost her, she vomited up the eggs and the coffee. She had eaten, after all, only two days ago. H E had the bed made up when she came in, the pillow smooth, crisp sheets flat and diagonally folded at the head end. "I bet you're as tired as I am," he said. "And that's a whole lot." "Oh," she said, looking at the bed. For sleeping! What would she want sleep for? Because of a phylic habit unbroken in these savages since they were forced to spend the dark hours immobile in a rocky hole to save themselves from nocturnal carnivores? But she said, "Oh, how neat. But I can't take your bed. I'll sit up." "You'll do no such thing," he said severely, and her eyes widened. He busied himself with a blanket roll and sleeping bag, which he put on the floor just as far -- four feet or so -- as it could possibly go from the bed. "I love this old bag. Look, nylon and down -- the only expensive thing I own. Except my guitar." She visualized "guitar" and immediately put it down as something to investigate. The flash she got in his coding was brief, but sufficient for her to recognize its size, shape and purpose, and to conclude that although its resonant volumes were gross and its vents inaccurately placed, it was closer to the engineering she knew and understood than most things she had glimpsed here so far. "You didn't tell me you played the guitar," she said politely. "I get paid for it," he said, yawning, and she knew that this yawn belonged to this remark and not to the circumstance of somnolence. "Ready for bed?" Patiently she bowed to his formalities. "You're very kind." He went to the lamp and turned it out. The low moon streamed in. H E hesitated, slid into his sleeping bag after removing only his shoes. There ensued a considerable amount of floundering, ducking, and thumping on the floor, and at last he brought his trousers out, folded as small as possible. He wadded them between the corner of the sleeping bag and the wall as if they were a secret. Then he sat up and took off his shirt. He hung it on the corner of the window sill, lay down, zipped the bag up to his neck, and ostentatiously turned on his side with his face to the wall. "Good night." "Good night," she said. Resignedly she got between the sheets, as indicated by the foldeddown corner, pulled up the blanket, porpoised out of her trousers, folded them, brought them out and hid them; removed her shirt, reached out a long arm and hung it on the other corner of the window sill. Did he still have his socks on? He did. She wriggled her toes and slightly desensitized her ankles where the weave pressed them. "You're perfectly safe. Don't worry about a thing." "Thank you, Chan. I feel safe. I'm not worried. Good night." "Good night. Dru," he said suddenly, lifting himself on one elbow. "What is it?" He lay down again. "Good night." She watched with deep interest the downward spiralings of his thoughts into the uprising tides of sleep. It happened to him suddenly, and the "noise" factor of his conscious presence slumped away out of the room. And the torture began. S HE had known it was there, but Chandler Behringer was a fine foil for it. He alleviated nothing, but he set up a constant distraction purely by the bumbling, burrowing busyness of his mind. Now it had faded to a whisper, to an effective nothing, and her torture poured down on her. From the warp-shielded, indetectible satellites which guarded the prison planet and administered the punishment, agony poured down to her. Thus it will be tonight, and the next and next nights, and every night for all of my own forever. Hushed in the day and hungry and sweet at night, it will rain down on me. And I can lie and relax, and I can harbor my anger and anchor my anguish, but the tide will rise, the currents will tug until they break me, if it takes two hundred years. And when I'm broken by it, the torture will go on and on -- and on. Most of the torture was music. Some of the torture was singing. And a little of the torture was a thing hardly describable in Earthly terms, which made pictures -- not on a screen, not on the mind like memories, however poignant -- but pictures so clear and true that the sudden whip of a pennant brought, a second later, spent wind to buffet the eyelids, pictures wherein one walked barefoot on turf and knew a mottling of heat and coolth in the arches, with the moisture of the grass its broken green bleeding. These were pictures where to loose a sling was to know the draw of the pectorals and the particled bite of soil under the downdriven toenails, and to picture a leap was to kick away a very planet, to have that priceless quarter-second of absolute float, and to come back to a cushioning of one's own litheness. This was music of an ancient planet peopled by a race far older. This was music with the softness and substance of weathered granite, and the unwinding intricacies of a fern. It was ferocious music with a thick-wristed control of its furies so sure that it could be used for laughter. And altogether it was music that rose and cycled and bubbled and built like the Fountain Itself. This was the high singing of birds beauty-lost in altitude, and the heavier, upward voices expressed by the reaching of trees. It was the voice of the tendon burst for being less strong than the will, and the heart of the sea, and its base was the bass of pulsations of growth (for even a shouldering tree trunk has a note, if listened to for years enough) and altogether these were the voices? that made and were made by the Fountain Itself. And these were the pictures of the Fountain Itself... And such were the tortures of those who were exiled, imprisoned and damned. She lay there and hated the moonlight; the moon she regarded as ugly and vulgar and new. It seemed to her an added lash, as were all things similar and all things contrasting to the world she had lost. She turned eyes grown cold on the sleeping man, and curled her lip; the creature was a clever counterpart, a subtle caricature, of the worst of the men of her race, in no way perfect, in no way magnificent, but in no way so crude an artifact as to permit her to forget what was surely its original. By comparison and by contrast, Earth, this muddy, uncouth ball of offal, pinioned her soul to her home. Earth had everything that could be found on her world -- after a fashion -- racecourses comparatively an armspan wide, racing dun rats ridden by newts in sleazy silks... men whose eyes sparkled in the sun not quite as much as her racial brother's might when he, with only his shaded hand to help him, sought and found a ghostly nebula. by osmotic particle, she belonged elsewhere. And Earth, which was her world falsified; and the endless music, which was her world in truth -- these would never let her forget it. So she cursed the moonbeams and the music sliding down them, and swore that she would not be broken. She could soak herself in this petty planet, zip it up to her neck to conceal anything of her real self in her pettiest acts; she could don the bearing and the thoughts themselves of Earth's too-fine, too-empty puppets -- and still inwardly she would be herself, a citizen of her world, part of the Fountain Itself. As long as she was that, in any fiber, she could not be completely an exile. Excommunicated she might be; bodily removed, wingless and crawling, trembling under the dear constant breath of her home; but until she broke, her jailers had failed for all their might and righteousness. The sun rose and turned her away from her bitterness, a little. Chan's sleeping consciousness came close and roared around her, fell back into blacknesses. She rose and went to the door. The sea was rosegold and breathing and the sun was aloft, a shade too near, too yellow, and too small. She damned it heartily with a swift thought that spouted and spread and hung in the air like the mist from a fountain, and went and dressed. She glanced at the percolator, understood it, and deftly made coffee. At its first whisper in the tube, Chan sighed and his consciousness came upward with a rush. Drusilla slipped outside. Patience she had in full measure, but she felt it unworthy to tap it for such unwieldy formalities as she knew she must witness if she stayed in the room during the cracking of his nylon chrysalis. There was a hoarse shout from inside, a violent floundering, and then Chandler Behringer appeared. He was tousled and frightened. His panic, she noted, had been sufficient to drive him outdoors without his shirt, but not without his trousers. He squeezed his eyelids so tight shut that his cheekbones seemed to rise; then opened them and saw her standing by the beach margin. The radiance that came from his face competed for a moment with the early tilting sunlight. "I thought you'd gone." She smiled. "No." She came to him. His eyes devoured her. He raised both hands together and placed them, one on the other, on his left collarbone. She understood that he was concealing the vestigial nipples (which were absent in males of her race) with his wrists. She examined this reflex with some curiosity, and filed away for future puzzlement the fact that he did this because he wore trousers; had they been bathing trunks, the reflex would not have appeared. He took a breath so deep that she empathized his pain. "You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen," he said. She did not doubt it, and had no comment. "The most beautiful woman who ever lived," he murmured. Abruptly she turned her back, and now it was her eyes which squeezed shut. "I am not!" she said in a tone so saturated with hatred and violence that he stepped back almost into the doorway. Without another word she strode off, down the beach, her direction chosen solely by the way she happened to be facing at the time. In a moment she was conscious of his feet padding after her. "Dru, Dru, don't go!" he panted. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean, hah! to do anything that hah! oh, I was only -- " She stopped and turned so abruptly that had he taken two more steps they would have collided. Far from taking steps, however, he had all he could do to stay upright. S HE stood looking at him, unmoving. On her face was no particular expression; but there was that in the high-held head, the slightly distended nostrils, the splendid balance of her stance, and her gracefully held, powerful hands that made approach impossible. His eyes were quite round and his lips slightly parted. He extended one hand and moved his mouth silently, then let the hand fall. His knees began to tremble visibly. She turned again and walked away. He stood there for a long time watching her go. When she brightening dunes, the purposeless hand came forward again. "Dru?" he said, in a voice softened to soprano inaudibility by all the cautions of awe. And she was gone, and he turned slowly, as if he had a tall and heavy weight on his rounded shoulders, and plodded back to the cabin. She found a road which paralleled the beach and climbed to it. Fools cluster about the Universe, she thought, like bubbles about the fountain pool, shifting and pulsing at random, without design, purpose or function. She had left such a fool and she was such a fool. There was far more culpability in her folly than in that of the man. He had little control over what he might say, and less understanding, because of his nature and his limitations. Neither his faculties nor his conditioning could enable him to understand why she felt such fury. She stabbed her heels into the sandy roadbed as she walked. She ground her teeth. The most beautiful woman who ever lived... Her beauty! Where, exile -- where, criminal, has your beauty brought you? She strode on, her mood so black it all but eclipsed the torture music. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, she became conscious of a shrill ultrasonic, a rapidly pulsing, urgent, growing thing that would be a silence to all but her. She slowed, stopped finally. The sound came from behind her, but she would not confuse her analysis by looking back. She listened as an intervening wind carried the vibrations away and then let them come back again, nearer, stronger. She sensitized her bare feet; she raised an arm and took the vibrations on the back of her hand. She became conscious of synchronous sounds. Something rotated at approximately thirty-eight hundred and forty rpm. Something was chaindriven and the chain was not a metal. Something pounded... no, paced -- something rolled endless soft cleats on the earth. She heard the straining of coil springs, the labored slide of heavy transverse leaf-springs, the make-andbreak in the meniscus of the oil guarding busy pistons. The utter stupidity of so complex a thing as an automobile was, to her, more wondrous than a rainbow. At last she turned to look, and in a moment she saw it climb a rise some two mifes away. The piercing ultrasonic was beyond bearing, and she adjusted her hearing to eliminate everything between eighty-six and eightyeight thousand cycles. waited patiently. The car slid down a straight and gentle grade toward her, spitting sunlight through its chromium teeth, palming aside the morning air and pressing it back and down its sleek flanks, while underneath, where there was np hint of fairing, air shocked and roiled and shuddered and troubled what dust it could find in the sandy road. It was a very large and very new car. Drusilla watched it, wideeyed. She, came to wonder what . l n # A conclusions one would have regarding these -- these savages, if one knew nothing of them but such a vehicle. What manner of man streamlines only where he can see? The lovely thought, then: It's a world of clowns. She smiled; the driver saw it and his foot came down on the brake pedal. The car threw down its glittering baroque nose, slid a hand's breadth, and lowered itself sitzwise into its warm bath of springs. The driver's eyes were long and flat and his nose and chin were sharp. Drusilla watched what he was doing, which was watching himself watch her. Suddenly he said, "How far is it to -- " and before the first word was spoken, she knew he was completely familiar with these roads. She said, "Your -- " and raised her hand to point accurately at the hood, while she searched him for the term. "Your rocker-arm's not getting oil. The third one from the front." Even while the motor idled, the soundless shriek of that dry friction would have been unbearable had she let it. "Sounds all right to me," he shrugged. He looked -- he journeyed, rather -- down from her eyes, down until he saw that her feet were bare. He left his gaze where it was and said, "Let me give you a lift." He half turned then, reached one thin spidery arm back and across without looking, and the rear door swung open. Drusilla took one step forward and only then saw that the man was not alone in the car. She stopped, amazed -- not at the woman who sat there, but at the fact that perceptions such as hers had missed so much. She glanced at the man, and realized that it was his feeling, or lack of it, that had numbed and blinded her to everything about the woman who sat beside him. She was companion reduced to presence, minified to fixture, reduced to a very limbo of familiarity. Drusilla stared at her, and the woman stared back. She was a small woman, compact, so coiffed and clad that she was only a blandness. What kept her from being featureless as an egg was a pair of achingly blue eyes large enough for a being half again her size, and a perfect mouth painted such a transcendental, pupil shrinking red that surely it would melt fuse-wire. Her wide eyes were blank. To Drusilla's horror, a growth like an iridescent liver sprang into being between the flaming lips, grew to the size of a fist and collapsed limply. The lips parted, a pink tongue deftly caught, cleared, and drew the limp matter back between an even flicker of paper-white teeth. And again the face was molded and smooth and motionless. "My wife," said the man, "so you're chaperoned. My God, Lu, you got bubble gum again." The woman took her gaze away from Drusilla and placed it on the driver, but there was otherwise no change. "Get in." back a fleeting inner sensation she had taken from him when he had said "My wife." It was... pride? No. Admiration? Hardly! Compliment; that was it. This woman was a compliment he paid himself. He had no tiny fleck of doubt that he was admired for her careful finish. The big blue eyes swung to her again and she probed. For a ghastly micro-second, she had all the sensations of walking into a snakepit with chloroform on her scarf. She recoiled violently, moved far back to the low bank; and she shuddered. "Come on, uh, hey, what's the matter?" the driver called. Drusilla shook her head twice, not so much in refusal as in an attempt to escape from something that was laying clammy strands of silk on her face and hair. Without another word, she turned and walked away down the road, behind the car. "Hey!" Drusilla did not look back. He started the car and drove off slowly. In a moment, the woman leaned forward and tugged hard on the wheel. The car heeled back on the road, and at last he took his eyes from the rear view minor. "Now what's with her?" he demanded of the windshield wiper. Lu blew another bubble. When the car was gone, Drusilla went slowly back and past the place she had met it, and on toward the town. From her marrow she swore a mighty oath that never again would she be trapped into sending her probes into such a revolting mess. The driver hadn't been like that; Chan Behringer hadn't. Yet she knew with a terrible certainty that there must be thousands like that creature here on the prison planet. So as she walked she devised something, a hair-triggered synaptic structure, a reaction pattern that could, even without her conscious knowledge, detect the faintest beginnings of a presence such as this; and it would snap down her shields, isolate her, protect her, keep her clean. She was badly shaken. The presence of that woman had shaken her, but the most devastating thing of all was the knowledge that she could be shaken. It was a realization most difficult for her to absorb; it had little precedent in her cosmos. Walking, she shuddered again. and wandered until she found a restaurant which needed a waitress. She borrowed the price of a pair of beach sandals from the weary cashier and went to work. She found a little room and at the end of the second day she had the price of a cotton dress. In the second week she was a stenographer and, in the second month, secretary to the head of a firm which made boat-sails and awnings. She invested quietly, sold some poems, a song, two articles and a short story. In terms of her environment, she did very well indeed, very fast. In her own estimate, she did nothing but force her attention randomly away from her torture. For the torture, of course, continued. She bore it with outward composure, shucked it off as casually as, from time to time, she changed her name, her job, her hair-styling and her accent. But like the lessons she learned, like the knowledge of the people she met and worked with, the torture accumulated. She could estimate her capacity for it. It was large, but not infinite. She could get rid of none of it, any more than she could get rid of knowledge. It could be compacted and stored. As long as she could do this with the torture, she was undefeated. But she was quite capable of calculating intake against capacity and she had not much time. A year and a half, two... She would stand at the window, absorbing her punishment, staring up into the night sky with her bright wise eyes. She could not see the guardian ships, of course, but she knew they were there. She knew of their killerboats which could, if necessary, slip down in moments and blast a potential escapee, or one about to violate the few simple rules of a prisoner's conduct. Sometimes, objectively, she marveled at the cruel skill of the torture. Music alone, with its ineffable spectrum of sadness and longing and wild nostalgic joy, could have been enough and more than enough for a prisoner to bear; but the sensory pictures, the stimulative and restimulative flow and change of taste and motion and all the subtleties of the kinetic senses -- these, mixed and mingled with music, charging in where music lulled, marching in the footprints of the music's rhythmic stride -- these were the things which laughed at her barriers, sparred with her, giggling; met her fists with a breeze, her rapier with a gas, her advances with a disappearance. There was no fighting attacks like these. Ignorance would have been a defense, but was of no use to her who was so nerve alive to all the torture's sense and symbolism. All she could do was to absorb, compact, and hope that she could find a defense before she broke. CO she lived and outwardly  prospered. She met some humans who amused her briefly, and others she avoided after one or two meetings because they reminded her so painfully of her own people -- a smile, a stride, a matching of colors. If she met any others with the terrifying quality of the woman in the car, she was not aware of it; that part of her defense, at least, was secure. But the torture still poured down upon her, and after half a year she knew she must take some steps to counteract it. At base, the solution was simple. If she did nothing, the torture would crush her, and there was no surcease in that, for having broken, she would go on suffering it. She could kill herself, but that in itself would fulfill the terms of her sentence -- "life imprisonment -- with torture." There was only one way -- to be killed, and to be killed by the guardians. She was not under a death sentence. If she forced one, they would have to violate their own penalty, and she would be able to die unbroken, as befits a Citizen of the Fountain Itself. More and more she studied the sky, knowing of the undetectible presence of the guardians and their killer-boats, knowing that if she could think of it, there must be a way to bring one of them careening silently down on her to snuff her out. She made sendings of many kinds -- even of the kind she had used to extinguish the life-force of the Preceptor -- without altering the quality or degree of torture in the slightest. Perhaps the guardians sent, but did not receive; perhaps nothing could touch them. Geared to the pattern of a Citizen's mind and conditioning, they patiently produced that which must, in time, destroy it. The destruction would be because of the weakness of the attacked. Drusilla wanted to be destroyed through the strength of the attacker. The distinction was, to her, clear and vital. There had to be a way, if only she could think of it. There was, and she did. a boy, swinging his guitar carelessly. The set was a living room. He plumped down on a one-armed easychair and hooked a brown-and-white hassock toward him with his heel. There was applause. "Thank you, Mother," said Chan Behringer. He slipped the plectrum from under the first and second strings. Dru thought Your low D is one one-hundred-twentyeighth tone sharp. Deftly, out of sight of the audience, he plugged in the pickup cable. Dru watched attentively. She had never seen a twelvestring guitar before. He began to play. He played competently, with neither mistakes nor imagination. There was a five-stage amplifier built into his chair and a foot-pedal tone control and electronic vibrato in the hassock. A rough cutoff at twenty-seven thousand cycles, she realized, and then remembered that, to most humans, response flat to eight thousand is high fidelity. She was immensely pleased with the electrical pickups; she had not noticed them at first, which was a compliment to him. One was magnetic, sunk into the fingerboard at the fourteenth fret. The other was a contact microphone, obviously inside the box, directly under the bridge. The either-or-both switch was audible when he moved it, which she thought disgraceful. He finished his number, drawled a few lines of patter, asked for and played a couple of requests and an encore, by which time Drusilla had left the theater and was talking to the stage doorman. He took the paper parcel she handed him and sent it to the dressing rooms via the callboy. In a matter of seconds, there was a wild whoop from backstage and Chan Behringer came bounding down the iron steps, clutching a wild flannel shirt, a pair of blue dungarees, and some tatters of paper and string. "Dru! Dru!" he gasped. He ran to her, his arms out. 'Then he stopped, faltered, put his head very slightly to one side. "Dru," he said again, softly. "Hello, Chan." "I never thought I'd see you again." "I had to return your things." "Too good to be true," he murmured. "I -- we -- " Suddenly he turned to the goggling doorman and tossed the clothes to him. "Hang on to these for me, will you, George?" To Drusilla he said, "I should take 'em backstage, but I'm afraid to let you out of my sight." "I won't run away again." "Let's get out of here," he said. He took her arm, and again there was the old echo of a shock he had once felt at the touch of her flesh through fabric. They went to a place, all soft lights and leather, and they talked about the beach and the city and show business and guitar music, but not about her strange fury with him the morning she had stalked out of his life. "You've changed," he said at length. "Have I?" "You were like -- like a queen before. Now you're like a princess." "That's sweet." "More...' . human." She laughed. "I wasn't exactly human when you first met me. I'd had a bad time. I'm all right now, Chan. I -- didn't want to see you until I was all right." They talked until it was time for his next act, and after that they had dinner. She saw him the next day, and the next. rpHE chubby man with a face like a cobbler and hands like a surgeon made the most beautiful guitars in the world. He sprang to his feet when the tall girl came in. It was the first time he had paid such a courtesy in fourteen years. "Can you cut an F-slot that looks like this?" she demanded. He looked at the drawing she laid on the counter, grunted, then said, "Sure, lady. But why?" She launched into a discussion which, at first, he did not hear, for it was in his field and in his language and he was too astonished to think. But once into it, he very rapidly learned things about resonance, harmonic reinforcement, woods, varnishes and reverse-cantilever designs that were in no book he had ever heard about. When she left a few minutes later, he hung gasping to the counter. In front of him was a check for work ordered. In his hand was a twenty-dollar bill for silence. In his mind was a flame and a great wonderment. She spilled a bottle of nailpolish remover on Chan's guitar. He was kind and she was pathetically contrite. It was all right, he said; he knew a place that could retouch it before evening. They went there together. The little man with the cobbler's face handed over the new instrument, a guitar with startling slots, an ultraprecision bridge, a fingerboard that crept into his hand as if it were alive and loved him. He chorded it once, and at the tone he put it reverently down and stared. His eyes were wet. "It's yours," Drusilla twinkled. "Look -- your name inlaid on the neck-back." "I know your guitars," said Chan to the chubby man, "but I never heard of anything like this." "Tricks to every trade," said the man, and winked. Drusilla slipped him another twenty as they left. rpHE electronics engineer stared at the schematic diagram. "It won't work." "Yes, it will," said Drusilla. "Can you build it?" "Well, gosh, yes, but who ever heard of voltage control like this? Where's the juice supposed to go from..." He leaned closer. "Well, I'll be damned. Who designed this?" "Build it," she said. He did. It worked. Drusilla wired it into the prop armchair and Chan never knew anything had been changed. He attributed everything to the new instrument as he became more familiar with it and began to exploit its possibilities. Suddenly there were no more layoffs. No more road trips, either. The clubs began to take important notice of the shy young man with the tear-your-heart-out guitar. She stole his vitamin pills and replaced them with something else. She invited him to dinner at her apartment and he fainted in the middle of the fish course. He came to seven hours later on the couch, long after the strange induction baker and the rack of impulse hypodermics had been hidden away. He remembered absolutely nothing. He was lying on his left arm and it ached. Dru told him he had fallen asleep and she had just let him sleep it out. "Poor dear, you've been working too hard." He told her somewhat harshly that she must never let him sleep like that, cutting off the circulation in his fingering arm. The next day, the arm was worse and he had to cancel a date. On the third day, it was back to normal, one hundred per cent, and on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days it continued to improve. And what it could do on the fingerboard was past description. Which was hardly surprising : there was not another arm on Earth like it, with its heavier nerve-fibers, the quadrupling of the relay-nodes on the medullary sheaths, the low-resistance, superreactive axones, and the isotopic potassium and sodium which drenched them. "I don't play this damn thing any more," he said. "I just think the stuff and that left hand reads my mind." months, and the income from them increased cubically each time. Then the record company decided to save money and put him under a long-term contract at a higher rate than anyone had ever been paid before. Chan, without consulting Drusilla, bought one of a cluster of very exclusive houses just over the city line. The neighbors on the left were the Kerslers, whose grandfather had made their money in off-the-floor sanitary fixtures. The neighbors on the right were the Mullings -- you know, Osprey Mullings, the writer, two books a year, year in and year out, three out of four of them making Hollywood. Chan invited the Kerslers and the Mullings to his housewarming, and took Drusilla out there to surprise her. She was surprised, all right. Kersler had a huge model railroad in his cellar and his mind likewise contained a great many precise minutiae, only one of which was permitted to operate at a time. Grace Kersler's mind was like an empty barn solidly lined with pink frosting. Osprey Mullings' head contained a set of baby's blocks of limited number, with which he constructed his novels by a ritualistic process of rearrangement. But Luellen Mullings was the bland-faced confection who secretly chewed bubble gum and who had so jolted Drusilla that day on the beach road. It was a chatty and charming party, and it was the very first time that humans had been capable of irritating Drusilla so much that she had to absorb the annoyance rather than ignore it. She bore this attack on her waning capacities with extreme graciousness, and at parting, the Kerslers and the Mullings pressed Chan's hand and wished him luck with that beautiful Drusilla Strange, you lucky fellow you. And late at night, full to bursting with success and security and a fine salting of ambition, Chan drove her back to town and at her apartment, he proposed to her. She held both his hands and cried a little, and promised to work with him and to help him even more in the future -- but, "Please, please, Chan, never ask me that again." He was hurt and baffled, but he kept his promise. now -- he never had before. He had to. He was giving concerts rather than performances, and he played every showcase piece ever composed by one virtuoso to madden and frustrate the others. He played all of the famous violin cadenzi on his guitar as well. He made arrangements of the arrangements. He did all this with the light contempt of a Rubinstein examining a two dollar lesson in chord-vamping. So at length he had no recourse but to compose. Some of his stuff was pretty advanced. All of it took you by the throat and held you. One Sunday afternoon, "Try this," said Drusilla. She hummed a tone or two, then burst into a cascade of notes that brought Chan up standing. "God, Dru!" "Try it," she said. He got his guitar. His left hand ran over the fingerboard like a perplexed little animal, and he struck a note or two. "No," she said, "this." She sang. "Oh," he whispered. Watching her, he played. When she seemed not pleased, he stopped. "No," she said. "Chan, I can only sing one note at a time. You have twelve strings." She paused, thoughtfully, listening. "Chan, if I asked you to play that theme, and then to -- to paint pictures on it with your guitar, would that make sense?" "You usually make sense." She smiled at him. "All right. Play that theme, and with it, play the way a tree grows. Play the way the bud leads the twig and the twig cuts up into space to make a hole for the branch. No," she said quickly, as his eyes brightened and his right thumb and forefinger tightened on the plectrum, "not yet. There's more." He waited. She closed her eyes. Almost inaudibly, she hummed something. Then she said, "At the same time, put in all the detail of a tree that has already grown." She opened her eyes and looked straight at him. "That will consolidate," she said factually, "because a tree is only the graphic trajectory of its buds." He looked at her strangely. "You're quite a girl." "Never mind that," she said quickly. "Now put those three things together with a fountain. And that's all." "What kind of a fountain?" She paled, but her voice was easy. "Silly. The only kind of fountain that could be with that theme, the tree growing, and the tree grown." He struck a chord. "I'll try." She hummed for him, then brought one long forefinger down. He picked up the theme from her voice. He closed his eyes. The guitar, of all instruments the most intimately expressive, given a magic sostenuto by its electronic graft, began to speak. The theme, the tree growing, the tree grown. Suddenly, the fountain, too. What happened then left them both breathless. Music of this nature should never be heard in a cubic volume smaller than its subject. When the pressured stridency of the music was quite gone, Chan looked at a cracked window pane and then turned to watch a talc-fine trickle of plaster dust stream down from the lintel of the french window. "Where," he said, shaken, "did you get that little jangle?" "Thin air, darling," said Drusilla blithely. "All the time, everywhere, whenever you like. Listen." H E cocked his head. There was an intense silence. His left hand crept up to the frets and spattered over them. In spite of the fact that he had not touched the strings with his right hand, a structure of sound hung in the room, reinforcing itself, holding, holding... finally dying. "That it?" he asked, awed. She held up a thumb and forefinger very close together. "About so much of it." "How come I never heard it before?" "You weren't ready." His eyes suddenly filled with tears. "Damn it, Drusilla... you're -- you've done... Oh, hell, I don't know, I love you so much." She touched his face. "Shh. Play for me, Chan." He breathed hard, thickly. "Not in here." He put down his guitar and went to get the portable amplifier. They set it upon the rolling lawn and plugged in the guitar. Chan held the instrument for a silent moment, sliding his hand over its polished flank. He looked up suddenly and met Drusilla's eyes. Chan's face twisted, for her ecstasy and gaiety and triumph added up to something very like despair, and he did not understand. He would have thrown down the guitar then, for his heart was full of her, but she backed away, shaking her head lightly, and bent to the amplifier to switch it on. Her fingers pulled at the rotary switch as she turned it, and only she knew the nature of the mighty little transmitter that began to warm up along with the audio. She moved back still further; she did not want to be close to him when it -- happened. He watched her for a moment, then looked down at the guitar. He watched his four enchanted left fingers hook and hover over the fingerboard ; he looked at them with a vast puzzlement that slowly turned to raptness. He began to sway gently. Drusilla stood tall and taut, looking past him to the trees, to the scudding clouds and beyond. She dropped her shields and let the music pour in. And from the guitar came a note, another, two together, a strange chord. For this I shall be killed, she thought. To bring to the mighty scorn her people had of Earth and all things Earthly, this molded savage who could commune like a Citizen... this was the greatest affront. A foam of music fell and feathered and rushed inward to the Fountainhead Itself, and every voice of it smashed and hurtled upward. The paired sixth strings of the guitar flung up with them in a bullroar glissando that broke and spread glistening all over the keyboard, falling and falling away from a brittle high spatter of doubled first strings struck just barely below the bridge, metallic and necdly; and if those taut strings were tied to a listener's teeth, they could not be more intimate and shocking. The unique sound box found itself in sudden shrill resonance, and it woke the dark strings, the deep and mighty ones. They thrummed and sang without being touched; and Chan's inhuman fingers found a figure in the middle register, folded it in on itself, broke it in two, and the broken pieces danced... and still the untouched strings hummed and droned, first one loud and then another as the resonances altered and responded. And all at once the air was filled with the sharp and dusty smell of ozone. and Chan's, settled itself down and down like some dark giant, pressing and sweeping and gathering in its drapes and folds as it descended to rest, to collect its roaring and crooning and tittering belongings all together that they may be pieced and piled and understood; until at last the monster was settled and neat, leaving a looming bulk of silence and an undertone of pumping life and multi-level quiet stripes of contemplation. The whole structure breathed, slowly and more slowly, held its breath, let a tension develop, rising, painful, agonizing, intolerable... "Play Red River Valley, hey, Chan?" Drusilla gasped, and the ozone rasped her throat. Chan's fingers faltered, stopped. He half-turned, with a small, interrogative whimper. Standing on the other side of the far hedge, near her house, was Luellen Mullings, her doll-figure foiled like a glass diamond in a negligible playsuit, her golden hair free, her perfect jaw busy on her sticky cud. There was born in Drusilla a fury more feral, more concentrated, than any power of muscle or mind she had ever conceived of. Luellen Mullings, essence of all the degradation Earth was known for, all the cheapness, shallowness, ignorance and stupidity. She was the belch in the cathedral; she would befoul the Fountain Itself. "Hi, Dru, honey. Didn't see you. Hey, I saw a feller at the Palace could play guitar holding it behind his back." She sniffed. "What's that funny smell? Like lightning or something." "Get back in your house, you cheap little slut," Drusilla hissed. "Hey, who you calling -- " Luellen dipped down and picked up a smooth white stone twice the size of her fist. She raised it. Even Drusilla's advanced reflexes were not fast enough to anticipate what she did. The stone left her hand like a bullet. Drusilla braced herself -- but the stone did not come to her. It struck Chan just behind the ear. He pivoted on his heel three-quarters of a revolution, and quietly collapsed on the grass, the guitar nestling down against him like a loving cat. "Now look at what you made me do!" Luellen cried shrilly. Drusilla uttered a harpy's scream and bounded across the lawn, her long hands spread out like talons. Luellen watched her come, round-eyed. There is a force in steady eyes by which a tiger may be made to turn away. It can make a strong man turn and run. There is a way to gather this force into a deadly nubbin and hurl it like a grenade. Drusilla knew how to do this, for she had done it before; she had killed with it. But the force she hurled at Luellen Mullings now was ten times what she had dealt the Preceptor. #'OR a moment, the Universe went black, and then Drusilla became aware of a pressure on her face. There was another sensation, systemic, pervasive. Her legs, her arms, were weighted and tingly, and she seemed to have no torso at all. She gradually understood the sensation on her face. Moist earth and grass. She was lying on her stomach on the lawn. She absorbed this knowledge as if it were a complicated matrix of ideas which, if comprehended, might lead to hitherto unheard-of information. At last she realized what was wrong with her body. Oxygen starvation. She began to breathe again, hard, painful gasps, inflations that threatened to burst the pulmonary capillaries, exhalations that brought her diaphragm upward until it crushed in panic against the pounding cardium. She moved feebly, pulled a limp hand toward her, rested a moment with it flat on the grass near her shoulder. She began to press herself upward weakly, failed, rested a moment, and tried again. At last she raised herself to a sitting position. Chan lay where he had fallen, still as death, guitar nearby. Pop! Drusilla looked up. Over the hedge, like an artificial flower, nodded Luellen's bright head. The quick deft tongue was retrieving the detritus of a broken bubble. Drusilla snarled and formed another bolt, and as it left her something like a huge soft mallet seemed to descend on her shoulder-blades. Seated as she was, it folded her down until her chest struck the ground. Her hip joints crackled noisily. She writhed, straightened out, lay on her side gasping. Pop! Drusilla did not look up. Presently she heard Luellen's light footsteps retreating down the gravel path. She gave herself over to a wave of weakness, and relaxed completely to let the strength flow back. Shh... shh... approaching footsteps. Drusilla rolled over and sat up again. Her head felt simultaneously pressured and fragile, as if any sudden move would make it burst like a faulty boiler. She turned pain-blinded eyes to the footsteps. When the jagged ache receded, she saw Luellen sauntering toward her on this side of the hedge, swinging her hips, humming tunelessly. "Feeling better, honey?" Drusilla glared at her. The killer-bolt began to form again. Luellen sank gracefully to the grass, near but not too near, and chose a grass-stem to pull up. "I wouldn't if I were you, hon," she said pleasantly. "I can keep this up all day. You're just knocking yourself out." She regarded the grass stem thoughtfully from her wide vacant eyes, poked out a membrane of gum, hesitated a moment, and drew it back in without blowing a bubble. The gum clicked wetly twice as she worked it. "Damn you," said Drusilla devoutly. struggled upward, leaned heavily on one arm, and glared. Luellen said, without looking at her, "That's far enough, sweetie." "Who are you?" Drusilla whispered. "Home makuh," said Luellen, with a trace of Bronx accent. "Leisure class type home makuh." "You know what I mean," Drusilla growled. "Whyn't you look and see?" Drusilla curled her lip. "Don't want to get your pretty probes dirty, huh? Know what you are? You're a snob." "A -- a what?" "Snob," said Luellen. She stretched prettily. "Just too good for anybody. Too good for him." She pointed to Chan with a gesture of her head. "Or me." She shrugged. "Anybody." Drusilla glanced at Chan and probed anxiously. "He's all right," said Luellen. "Just unplugged." Drusilla swung her attention back to the other girl. Reluctantly she dropped her automatic shield and reached out with her mind. What are you? Luellen put her hands out, palms forward. "Not that way. I don't do that any more. Look if you want to, but if you want to talk to me, talk out loud." Drusilla probed. "A criminal!" she said finally, in profound disgust. "Sisters under the skin," said Luellen. She popped her gum. Drusilla shuddered. Luellen said, "Tell you what I did." "I'm not interested." "Tell you, anyway. Listen," Luellen said suddenly, "you know if you try to do anything to me, you'll go flat on your bustle. Well, the same thing applies if you don't listen to me. Hear?" Drusilla dropped her eyes and was furiously silent. Reluctantly she realized that this creature could do exactly as she said. "I'm not asking you to like it," Luellen said more gently. "Just listen, that's all." She waited a moment, and when Drusilla offered nothing, she said, "What I did, I climbed over the wall at school." Drusilla gasped. "You went outside?" Luellen rolled over onto her stomach and propped herself on her elbows. She pulled another blade of grass and broke it. "Something funny happened to me. You know the feeling-picture about jumping?" Drusilla recognized it instantly, the sweet, strong, breathless sensation of being strong and leaping from soft grass, floating, landing lithely. "You do," said Luellen, glancing at Drusilla's face. "Well, I was having that picture one fine morning when it -- stuck. I mean like one of the phonograph records here when it gets stuck. There I was feeling a jump. Just off the ground, and it all froze." S HE laughed a little. "I was real scared. After a while, it started again. I went and asked my tutor about it. She got all upset and went to the Preceptor. He called me in and there was no end of hassel about it." Again she laughed. "I'd have forgotten the whole thing if he hadn't made such a fuss. He wanted me to forget it in the worsf way. Tried to make me think it happened because there was something wrong with me. "So I got to thinking about it. When you do that, you start looking pretty carefully at all the pictures. And you know, they're full of scratches and flaws, if you look. "But all the time they were teaching us that this was the world over the Wall -- perfect green grass, beautiful men, the fountain and the falls and all the rest of it, that we were supposed to graduate to when the time came. I wondered so much that I wouldn't wait any more. So I went over the wall. They caught me and sent me here." "I don't wonder," said Drusilla primly. Luellen put pink fingers to her lips, hauled the gum out almost to arm's length, and chewed it back in as she talked. "And all you did was knock off the Preceptor!" Drusilla winced and said nothing. Luellen said, "You been here about two years, right? How many of us prisoners have you run into?" "None!" said Drusilla, with something like indignation. "I wouldn't have anything to do with -- " She clamped her lips tight and snorted through her nostrils. "Will you stop that giggling?" "I can't help it," said Luellen. "It's part of the pattern for home makuhs. All home makuhs giggle." "... And that voice!" "That's part of the pattern too, hon," said Luellen. "How do you think I'd go over at the canasta table if I weren't a-flutter and atwitter, all coos and sighs and gentle breathings? My God, the girls'd be scared right out of their home permanents!" She tittered violently. "Again!" Drusilla winced. "You might as well get used to it, hon. I had to. You'll be doing something equally atrocious yourself, pretty soon. It goes under the head of camouflage... Look, I'll stop fooling around. There's a couple of hard truths you have to get next to. I know what you did. You set up a reflex to blank out any ex-Citizen you might meet. Right?" "One must keep oneself decent," insisted Drusilla. wonderingly. "You're just dumb, girl. I don't like you, but I have to be sorry for you." "I don't need your pity!" "Yes, you do. You've been asleep for a whole lot of years and you just have to snap out of it." Luellen knelt and sat back on her heels. "Tell me -- up to the time they shipped you here, where did you go?" "You know perfectly well. The Great Hall. My garden. My dormitory. That's all." "Um-hmm. That's all. And every minute since you were born, you've been conditioned: a Citizen is the finest flower of creation. Be a good obedient girl and you'll gambol on the green for the rest of your life. Meanwhile there are criminals who get sent to prison, and the prison is the lowest cesspool in the Universe where you live out your life being reminded of the glory of the world you lost." "Of course, but you make it sound -- " "Did you ever see any of those big muscular beautiful men the pictures told you about? Did you ever see that old-granite and newgrass landscape, or get warm under that nice big sun?" "No, I was sent here before I had -- " Luellen demonstrated her ties to Earth by uttering a syllable which was, above all else, Earthy. "You're the dumbest blind kitten I ever saw. And tell me, when they took you to the ship, did you get a chance to look around?" "I wasn't... worthy," said Drusilla miserably. "If a -- a criminal was privileged to see outside the Wall -- " "They blindfolded you. Yes, and you never got a chance to look out of the ship when it left, either. Look, Citizen," she said scornfully, "if you hadn't had the good sense to get yourself sent here, you never would have gotten over the Wall!" "I had only six more years before I -- " "Before you'd be quietly moved to another Walled Place with your age group. And maybe you'd have been bred, and maybe not, and by the time you realized there was no release for you, you'd be so old you wouldn't care any more. And they call that a world and this a prison!" Drusilla suddenly put her hands over her ears. "I won't listen to this! I won't!" Luellen grasped her wrist in a remarkably powerful little hand. "Yes, by God, you will," she said between her perfect teeth. "Our race is old and dying, rotten to the core. Know why you never saw any men? Because there are only a few hundred of them left. They lie in their cubicles and get fat and breed. And most of their children are girls, because that's the way it was arranged so long ago that we've forgotten how it was done or how to change it. You know what's over the Wall? Nothing! It's an ice-world, with a dying sun and thinning air, and a little cluster of Walled Places to breed women for the men to breed with, and a few old, old, worn transmitters for music and pictures to condition the blindworms who live and die there!" ellen sat back and watched her, a great softness coming into her eyes. "Cry, that's good, sweetie," she said huskily. "Ah, you poor brat. You could've gotten straightened out the day you arrived. But no. Criminals were the lowest of the low, and you wouldn't associate with them. Earth and humans were insects and savages, because that's what you were taught. To be a Citizen was to be a god among gods, and to hear the music was your torture, for what you'd lost." "What about the torture?" "Transmitters in th guardian ships. You know about that." "But the Citizens on board them -- " "What? Oh, for Pete's sake, hon! They're machines, that's all." "They're not! The killer-boats are -- " "The killer-boats home on any human mind that begins to operate near the music bands. You had a close call, kitten." "I wish one had come," Drusilla said miserably. "That's what I wanted." "One did come, silly. But I don't get you. What did you want?" "I wanted it to kill me. That's why I taught Chan to -- " Luellen clapped her hands to her face. "I thought that, but I couldn't really believe it! Sweetie, I got news for you. That boat wouldn't have killed you. It was after your boy-friend there." Drusilla's face went almost as white as her teeth. She put her fist to her mouth and bit it, her eyes round, full of horror. "It's all right," Luellen murmured. "It's gone. It was homing on him, and when he stopped radiating, it stopped coming. It's just a machine." "You stopped it," Drusilla breathed. Slowly she sat up straight, staring at the little blonde as if she had never seen her before. "Pity if one of us couldn't outthink a machine," said Luellen deprecatingly. Then, "What is it, Dru? What's the matter?" "He might have been... killed." "You only just thought of that. Really thought of it." Drusilla nodded. "I'll bet this is the first time you ever thought of someone else. See what snobbery can do?" "I feel awful." "You feel fine. Or you will. What you've got is an attack of something called humility. It rushes in to fill the hole when the snobbery is snatched out. You'll be all right now." "Will I?" She licked her lips. She tried to speak and could not. She pointed a wavering finger at the unconscious man. "Him?" Luellen answered the unspoken question. "Just you keep him asleep for a while. Give him more music, but keep him away from that." She pointed to the sky. "He won't know the difference." "Humility," said Drusilla, thoughtfully. "That's when you feel... not good enough. Is that it?" "Something like that." "Then I don't... I don't think I understand. Lu, do you know why I killed the Preceptor?" Luellen shook her head. "It was a good idea, whatever." Drusilla said with difficulty, "My group went to be chosen for breeding. There's a -- custom that the... ugliest girl must be sent back to her garden. H-he pointed me out. I was the ugliest one there. He said I was the ugliest woman in the world. I went... kind of... crazy, I guess. I killed him." Suddenly she was in Luellen's strong small arms. "Oh, for God's sake," said Luellen with a roughness that made Drusilla cry again. "You're the sorriest most mixed-up little chicken ever. Don't you know that a perfect necklace has to have an ugliest diamond in it somewhere?" She thumped Drusilla's heaving shoulder. "We've been bred for beauty for more generations than this Earth has years, Dru. On Earth you're one of the most beautiful women alive." "He told me that once, and I could have... killed him," Drusilla squeaked. She swallowed hard, moved back to peer piteously into Luellen's face. "Is that humility? To feel you're not good enough?" "That's humiliation," said Luellen. She paused thoughtfully. "And here's the difference: Humility is knowing something is finer and better than you can ever be, so it' worth putting everything you have behind that something. Everything! Like... She laughed. "Like me and that ham novelist of mine. Bit by bit, year by year, he gets better. I give him exactly what he needs, in his own time. Right now what he wants is an irresponsible little piece of candy he can pick up or put down, and meantime get envied all over the neighborhood for. He's got it in him to do some really important work some day, and when he does he'll need something else from me, and I'll be here to give it to him. If, fifty years from now, he comes doddering up to me and tells me I've grown with him through the years, I'll know I did the thing right." Drusilla worried at the statement, turning it over, shaking it. She parted her lips, closed them again. Luellen said, "Go ahead. Ask me." idly, dropped her eyes. "Is he really finer and better?" "Snob!" said Luellen, and this time it was all kindliness. "Of course! He's an Earthman, Dru. Earth is young and crude and raw, but it's strong and it's good. Do you call an infant stupid because it can't talk, or is a child bad because it hasn't learned reason? We have nothing but decadence to bring to Earth. So instead we help Earth with the best it has. You keep your eyes open from now on. Dru. Nine women out of ten who truly help their men to realize themselves are what you've been calling criminals. "You'll find them all over, up and down th# social scale, through and through the history of this culture. Put up your shields again -- for fun -- and watch the women you meet. See how some seem to understand one another on sight -- how they pass a glance that seems to be full of secrets. They're the hope of the world, Dru darling, and this world is the hope of the Galaxy." She followed Drusilla's gaze and smiled. "Now that you come to think of it, you love him, don't you?" "Now that I come to think of it..." She raised her head and looked at the sky. Gradually a smile was born on her trembling lips. She shook herself and took a deep breath of the warm evening air. "Listen," she said. She laughed unevenly. It is sort of scratchy, isn't it?" author of Science#-' lotion, fantasy anil W'icrd adventures as near a your inalllaiv! A unique I took catalogcomplete descriptions. fully Illustrated... anil It doesn't coal you a cent! Send your name and address, and you'll get your copy by return mall. 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V -- What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? aj to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and successful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than l#th of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selftunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe d.k.r. San Jose California the boarding ladder, Capt. Florio climbed into the spaceship, counting so he'd enter the airlock with his left foot first. He made sure he had his lucky charm with him as he and the crew took the traditional drink for the road, and then the ceremonial last cigarette before takeoff. Florio was just in time to avert disaster. 'Not three on a match, you idiot!' he shouted at the astrogator." No doubt of it -- superstition will ride the rockets, along with atomics and computers. That's inevitable in the zoom from cave to spaceship in only a few thousand years. I've found remarkably little conflict in the two seemingly opposed views. So, evidently, do many writers and readers, for they absorb and create them with the same enjoyment and stimulation. Both science and superstition have the same purpose -- to interpret reality. Both use the same methods -- observation and deduction. Both have been astonishingly right and wrong. The two basic differences are that science is dynamic, superstition static: and that absurdities are expunged from science -- the Piltdown forgery, for example -- while they are perpetuated in superstition. That, of course, is because science constantly challenges its findings, whereas superstition never does. Nonetheless, it did what it set out to do, show cause and effect where none had been discernible, and it found more truth than it is generally given credit for. If you want to investigate superstition in detail, the most complete record I've discovered is The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology  Legend, edited by Maria Leach and published by Funk  Wagnalls in two imposing, truly beautiful volumes, with slipcase, at #. Its more than # items form a body of beliefs so immense that no one, however enlighted, can escape having at least some, though they may be disguised as "common knowledge" or convictions "independently" arrived at. Are they all incorrect? To think so is to be as blindly dogmatic as most irrational beliefs. Very many of our medicines -- digitalis, ephedrine, quinine, among others -- were folk remedies. Carrot diets were prescribed for conditions that we now can diagnose as vitamin deficiencies. Even our antibiotics were used in crude form, for moldy bread was applied to serious wounds centuries ago. How many more ultra-modern advances lurk in superstition, just waiting to be uncovered by research? We have no idea and won't have until they're turned up. But only a dogmatist would condemn all folk beliefs as worthless. Bergen Evans seems to do so in his The Natural History of Nonsense (Knopf, N.Y., #), but that's because his is a subjective, crusading approach -- Evans is a sort of anti-Fortean Charles Fort. Some of his debunking is embarrassing to those of us who innocently accepted such errors as the sense of direction in animals. We read constantly of dogs and cats finding their way home across the whole country -- yet why are the Lost  Found ads so full of pets that couldn't make it across-town? If our critters seem incredible, wait till the first men return with tales of those (if any) on other planets! Flamboyant as they'll be, however, many will inevitably contain facts that science will ultimately verify by plodding experiment. I think that's what is so fascinating about science fiction and fantasy: the "What if -- ?" premise is answered in science fiction in realistic terms that may be entirely impossible, and in fantasy by supernatural-seeming terms that may be surprisingly true. But true or not, they both offer absorbing opportunities for guesswork and wonder for reader and writer. Here is a puzzle for you to explore: How much of our "common knowledge" will fossilize into superstition? The Jewish dietary laws make excellent sense, for instance -- in a tropical country without refrigeration. They harden into ritual when transplanted to temperate climates, especially where there is meat inspection. Or take the first automobiles. Manufactured by buggy-makers, they were buggies, except for motive power, even to the whipholder alongside the driver! Or the columns used in neoGreek buildings -- absolutely needless because of cantilever steel girders! And spaceships -- a wasteful needle design only because they must pierce the air. When we can assemble them out in space, they can be any shape. Yet the needle design may linger for years! To get back to Capt. Florio and his touching farewell to Earth: Would three on a match apply to butane lighters? And what happens to the superstition when we have self-igniting cigarettes? If o of national budget makes Jefferson's seem laughable, how about future budgets? Well, take a look at Morey's problemsl The Midas Plague A ND so they were married. The bride and groom  m made a beautiful couple, she in her twenty-yard frill of immaculate white, he in his formal gray ruffled blouse and pleated pantaloons. It was a small wedding -- the best he could afford. For guests, they had only th immediate family and a few close friends. And when the minister had performed the ceremony, Morey Fry kissed his bride and they drove off to the reception. There were twenty-eight limousines in all (though it is true that twenty of them contained only the caterer's robots), and three flower cars. "Bless you both," said old man Elon sentimentally. "You've got a fine girl in our Cherry, Morey." He blew his nose on a ragged square of cambric. The old folks behaved very well, Morey thought. At the reception, surrounded by the enormous stacks of wedding gifts, they drank the champagne and ate a great many of the tiny, delicious canapes. They listened politely to the fifteen-piece orchestra, and Cherry's mother even danced one dance with Morey for sentiment's sake, though it was clear that dancing was far from the usual pattern of her life. They tried as hard as they could to blend into the gathering, but all the same, the two elderly figures in severely simple and probably rented garments were dismayingly conspicuous in the quarteracre of tapestries and tinkling fountains that was the main ballroom of Morey's country home. When it was time for the guests to go home and let the newlyweds begin their life together. Cherry's father shook Morey by the hand and Cherry's mother kissed him. But as they drove away in their tiny runabout, their faces were full of foreboding. It was nothing against Morey as a person, of course. But poor people should not marry wealth. other, certainly. That helped. They told each other so, a dozen times an hour, all of the long hours they were together, for all of the first months of their marriage. Morey even took time off to go shopping with his bride, which endeared him to her enormously. They drove their shopping carts through the immense vaulted corridors of the supermarket, Morey checking off the items on the shopping list as Cherry picked out the goods. It was fun. For a while. Their first fight started in the supermarket, between Breakfast Foods and Floor Furnishings, just where the new Precious Stones department was being opened. Morey called off from the list, "Diamond lavaliere, costume rings, earbobs." Cherry said rebelliously, "Morey, I have a lavaliere. Please, dear!" Morey folded back the pages of the list uncertainly. The lavaliere was on there, all right, and no alternative selection was shown. "How about a bracelet?" he coaxed. "Look, they have some nice ruby ones there. See how beautifully they go with your hair, darling!" He beckoned a robot clerk, who bustled up and handed Cherry the bracelet tray. "Lovely," Morey exclaimed as Cherry slipped the largest of the lot on her wrist. "And I don't have to have a lavaliere?" Cherry asked. "Of course not." He peeked at the tag. "Same number of ration points exactly!" Since Cherry looked only dubious, not convinced, he said briskly, "And now we'd better be getting along to the shoe department. I've got to pick up some dancing pumps." Cherry made no objection, neither then nor throughout the rest of their shopping tour. At the end, while they were sitting in the supermarket's ground-floor lounge, waiting for the robot accountants to tote up their bill and the robot cashiers to stamp their ration books, Morey remembered to have the shipping department save out the bracelet. "I don't want that sent with the other stuff, darling," he explained. "I want you to wear it right now. Honestly, I don't think I ever saw anything looking so right for you." Cherry looked flustered and pleased. Morey was delighted with himself ; it wasn't everybody who knew how to handle these little domestic problems just right! H E stayed self-satisfied all the way home, while Henry, their companion-robot, regaled them with funny stories of the factory in which it had been built and trained. Cherry wasn't used to Henry by a long shot, but it was hard not to like the robot. Jokes and funny stories when you needed amusement, sympathy when you were depressed, a never-failing supply of news and information on any subject you cared to name -- Henry was easy enough to take. Cherry even made a special point of asking Henry to keep them company through dinner, and she laughed as thoroughly as Morey himself at its droll anecdotes. But later, in the conservatory, when Henry had considerately left them alone, the laughter dried up. Morey didn't notice. He was very conscientiously making the rounds: turning on the tri-D, selecting their after-dinner liqueurs, scanning the evening newspapers. Cherry cleared her throat selfconsciously, and Morey stopped what he was doing. "Dear," she said tentatively. "I'm feeling kind of restless tonight. Could we -- I mean do you think we could just sort of stay home and -- well, relax?" Morey looked at her with a touch of concern. She lay back wearily, eyes half closed. "Are you feeling all right?" he asked. "Perfectly. I just don't want to go out tonight, dear. I don't feel up to it." He sat down and automatically lit a cigarette. "I see," he said. The tri-D was beginning a comedy show; he got up to turn it off, snapping on the tape-player. Muted strings filled the room. "We had reservations at the club tonight," he reminded her. Cherry shifted uncomfortably. "I know." "And we have the opera tickets that I turned last week's in for. I hate to nag, darling, but we haven't used any of our opera tickets." "We can see them right here on the tri-D," she said in a small voice. "That has nothing to do with it, sweetheart. I -- I didn't want to tell you about it, but Wainwright, down at the office, said something to me yesterday. He told me he would be at the circus last night and as much as said he'd be looking to see if we were there, too. Well, we weren't there. Heaven knows what I'll tell him next week." He waited for Cherry to answer, but. she was silent. He went on reasonably, "So if you could see your way clear to going out tonight -- " He stopped, slack-jawed. Cherry was crying, silently and in quantity. "Darling!" he said inarticulately. He hurried to her, but she fended him off. He stood helpless over her, watching her cry. "Dear, what's the matter?" he asked. She turned her head away. heels. It wasn't exactly the first time he'd seen Cherry cry -- there had been that poignant scene when they Gave Each Other Up, realizing that their backgrounds were too far apart for happiness, before the realization that they had to have each other, no matter what... But it was the first time her tears had made him feel guilty. And he did feel guilty. He stood there staring at her. Then he turned his back on her and walked over to the bar. He ignored the ready liqueurs and poured two stiff highballs, brought them back to her. He set one down beside her, took a long drink from the other. In quite a different tone, he said, "Dear, what's the matter ?" No answer. "Come on. What is it?" She looked up at him and rubbed at her eyes. Almost sullenly, she said, "Sorry." "I know you're sorry. Look, we love each other. Let's talk this thing out." She picked up her drink and held it for a moment, before setting it down untasted. "What's the use, Morey?" "Please. Let's try." She shrugged. He went on remorselessly, "You aren't happy, are you? And it's because of -- well, all this." His gesture took in the richly furnished conservatory, the thickpiled carpet, the host of machines and contrivances for their comfort and entertainment that waited for their touch. By implication it took in twenty-six rooms, five cars, nine robots. Morey said, with an effort, "It isn't what you're used to, is it?" "I can't help it," Cherry said. "Morey, you know I've tried. But back home -- " "Dammit," he flared, " this is your home. You don't live with your father any more in that fiveroom cottage; you don't spend your evenings hoeing the garden or playing cards for matchsticks. You live here, with me, your husband! You knew what you were getting into. We talked all this out long before we were married -- " The words stopped, because words were useless. Cherry was crying again, but not silently. Through her tears, she wailed: "Darling, I've tried. You don't know how I've tried! I've worn all those silly clothes and I've played all those silly games and I've gone out with you as much as I possibly could and -- I've eaten all that terrible food until I'm actually getting fa-fafat! I thought I could stand it. But I just can't go on like this; I'm not used to it. I -- I love you, Morey, but I'm going crazy, living like this. I can't help it, Morey -- I'm tired of being poor!" up, and the quarrel healed, and the lovers kissed and made up. But Morey lay awake that night, listening to his wife's gentle breathing from the suite next to his own, staring into the darkness as tragically as any pauper before him had ever done. Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed Morey, heir to more worldly goods than he could possibly consume. Morey Fry, steeped in grinding poverty, had never gone hungry a day in his life, never lacked for anything his heart could desire in the way of food, or clothing, or a place to sleep. In Morey's world, no one lacked for these things; no one could. Malthus was right -- for a civilization without machines, automatic factories, hydroponics and food synthesis, nuclear breeder plants, ocean-mining for metals and minerals... And a vastly increasing supply of labor... And architecture that rose high in the air and dug deep in the ground and floated far out on the water on piers and pontoons... architecture that could be poured one day and lived in the next... And robots. Above all, robots... robots to burrow and haul and smelt and fabricate, to build and farm and weave and sew. What the land lacked in wealth, the sea was made to yield and the laboratory invented the rest... and the factories became a pipeline of plenty, churning out enough to feed and clothe and house a dozen worlds. Limitless discovery, infinite power in the atom, tireless labor of humanity and robots, mechanization that drove jungle and swamp and ice off the Earth, and put up office buildings and manufacturing centers and rocket ports in their place... The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no king in the time of Malthus could have known. But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained out at the other... Lucky Morey, blessed economic consuming unit, drowning in the pipeline's flood, striving manfully to eat and drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless tide of wealth. Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the poor are always best appreciated from afar. til he awoke at eight o'clock the next morning, red-eyed and haggard, but inwardly resolved. He had reached a decision. He was starting a new life. There was trouble in the morning mail. Under the letterhead of the National Ration Board, it said: "We regret to advise you that the following items returned by you in connection with your August quotas as used and no longer serviceable have been inspected and found insufficiently worn." The list followed -- a long one, Morey saw to his sick disappointment. "Credit is hereby disallowed for these and you are therefore given an additional consuming quota for the current month in the amount of # points, at least # points of which must be in the textile and home-furnishing categories." Morey dashed the letter to the floor. The valet picked it up emotionlessly, creased it and set it on his desk. It wasn't fair! All right, maybe the bathing trunks and beach umbrellas hadn't been really used very much -- though how the devil, he asked himself bitterly, did you go about using up swimming gear when you didn't have time for such leisurely pursuits as swimming? But certainly the hiking slacks were used! He'd worn them for three whole days and part of a fourth; what did they expect him to do, go around in rags? Morey looked belligerently at the coffee and toast that the valet-robot had brought in with the mail, and then steeled his resolve. Unfair or not, he had to play the game according to the rules. It was for Cherry, more than for himself, and the way to begin a new way of life was to begin it. Morey was going to consume for two. He told the valet-robot, 'Take that stuff back. I want cream and sugar with the coffee -- lots of cream and sugar. And besides the toast, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, orange juice -- no, make it half a grapefruit. And orange juice, come to think of it." "Right away, sir," said the valet. "You won't be having breakfast at nine then, will you, sir?" "I certainly will," said Morey virtuously. "Double portions!" As the robot was closing the door, he called after it, "Butter and marmalade with the toast!" full schedule and no time to waste. In the shower, he carefully sprayed himself with lather three times. When he had rinsed the soap off, he went through the whole assortment of taps in order: three lotions, plain talcum, scented talcum and thirty seconds of ultra-violet. Then he lathered and rinsed again, and dried himself with a towel instead of using the hot-air drying jet. Most of the miscellaneous scents went down the drain with the rinse water, but if the Ration Board accused him of waste, he could claim he was experimenting. The effect, as a matter of fact, wasn't bad at all. He stepped out, full of exuberance. Cherry was awake, staring in dismay at the tray the valet had brought. "Good morning, dear," she said faintly. "Ugh." Morey kissed her and patted her hand. "Well!" he said, looking at the tray with a big, hollow smile. "Food!" "Isn't that a lot for just the two of us?" "Two of us?" repeated Morey masterfully. "Nonsense, my dear. I'm going to eat it all by myself!" "Oh, Morey!" gasped Cherry, and the adoring look she gave him was enough to pay for a dozen such meals. Which, he thought as he finished his morning exercises with the sparring-robot and sat down to his real breakfast, it just about had to be, day in and day out, for a long, long time. Still, Morey had made up his mind. As he worked his way through the kippered herring, tea and crumpets, he ran over his plans with Henry. He swallowed a mouthful and said, "I want you to line up some appointments for me right away. Three hours a week in an exercise gym -- pick one with lots of reducing equipment, Henry. I think I'm going to need it. And fittings for some new clothes -- I've had these for weeks. And, let's see, doctor, dentist -- say, Henry, don't I have a psychiatrist's date coming up?" "Indeed you do, sir!" it said warmly. "This morning, in fact. I've already instructed the chauffeur apd notified your office." "Fine! Well, get started on the other things, Henry." "Yes, sir," said Henry, and assumed the curious absent look circuits -- the "Talk Between Robots" radio -- as it arranged the appointments for its master. in silence, pleased with his own virtue, at peace with the world. It wasn't so hard to be a proper, industrious consumer if you worked at it, he reflected. It was only the malcontents, the ne'er-do-wells and the incompetents who simply could not adjust to the world around them. Well, he thought with distant pity, someone had to suffer; you couldn't break eggs without making an omelet. And his proper duty was not to be some sort of wild-eyed crank, challenging the social order and beating his breast about injustice, but to take care of his wife and his home. It was too bad he couldn't really get right down to work on consuming today. But this was his one day a week to hold a job -- four of the other six days were devoted to solid consuming -- and, besides, he had a group therapy session scheduled as well. His analysis, Morey told himself, would certainly take a sharp turn for the better, now that he had faced up to his problems. Morey was immersed in a glow of self-righteousness as he kissed Cherry good-by (she had finally got up, all in a confusion of delight at the new regime) and walked out the door to his car. He hardly noticed the little man in enormous floppy hat and garishly ruffled trousers who was standing almost hidden in the shrubs. "Hey, Mac." The man's voice was almost a whisper. "Huh? Oh -- what is it?" The man looked around furtively. "Listen, friend," he said rapidly, "you look like an intelligent man who could use a little help. Times are tough; you help me, I'll help you. Want to make a deal on ration stamps? Six for one. One of yours for six of mine, the best deal you'll get anywhere in town. Naturally, my stamps aren't exactly the real McCoy, but they'll pass, friend, they'll pass -- " Morey blinked at him. "No!" he said violently, and pushed the man aside. Now it's racketeers, he thought bitterly. Slums and endless sordid preoccupation with rations weren't enough to inflict on Cherry; now the neighborhood was becoming a hangout for people on the shady side of the law. It was not, of course, the first time he had ever been approached by a counterfeit rationstamp hoodlum, but never at his own front door! Morey thought briefly, as he climbed into his car, of calling the police. But certainly the man would be gone before they could get there; and, after all, he had handled it pretty well as it was. Of course, it would be nice to get six stamps for one. But very far from nice if he got caught. tinkled the robot receptionist. "Won't you go right in?" With a steel-tipped finger, it pointed to the door marked Someday, Morey vowed to himself as he nodded and complied, he would be in a position to afford a private analyst of his own. Group therapy helped relieve the infinite stresses of modern living, and without it he might find himself as badly off as the hysterical mobs in the ration riots, or as dangerously antisocial as the counterfeiters. But it lacked the personal touch. It was, he thought, too public a performance of what should be a private affair, like trying to live a happy married life with an interfering, ever-present crowd of robots in the house -- Morey brought himself up in panic. How had that thought crept in? He was shaken visibly as he entered the room and greeted the group to which he was assigned. There were eleven of them: four Freudians, two Reichians, two Jungians, a Gestalter, a shock therapist and the elderly and rather quiet Sullivanite. Even the members of the majority groups had their own individual differences in technique and creed, but, despite four years with this particular group of analysts, Morey hadn't quite been able to keep them separate in his mind. Their names, though, he knew well enough. "Morning, Doctors," he said. "What is it today?" "Morning," said Semmelweiss morosely. "Today you come into the room for the first time looking as if something is really bothering you, and yet the schedule calls for psychodrama. Dr. Fairless," he appealed, "can't we change the schedule a little bit? Fry here is obviously under a strain; that's the time to start digging and see what he can find. We can do your psychodrama next time, can't we?" Fairless shook his gracefully bald old head. "Sorry, Doctor. If it were up to me, of course -- but you know the rules." "Rules, rules," jeered Semmelweiss. "Ah, what's the use? Here's a patient in an acute anxiety state if I ever saw one -- and believe me, I saw plenty -- and we ignore it because the rules say ignore it. Is that professional? Is that how to cure a patient?" Little Blaine said frostily, "If I may say so, Dr. Semmelweiss, there have been a great many cures made without the necessity of departing from the rules. I myself, in fact -- " "You yourself!" mimicked Semmelweiss. "You yourself never handled a patient alone in your life. When you going to get out of a group, Blaine?" Blaine said furiously, "Dr. Fairless, I don't think I have to stand for this sort of personal attack. Just because Semmelweiss has seniority and a couple of private patients one day a week, he thinks -- " "Gentlemen," said Fairless mildly. "Please, let's get on with the work. Mr. Fry has come to us for help, not to listen to us losing our tempers." "Sorry," said Semmelweiss curtly. "All the same, I appeal from the arbitrary and mechanistic ruling of the chair." Fairless inclined his head. "All in favor of the ruling of the chair? Nine, I count. That leaves only you opposed, Dr. Semmelweiss. We'll proceed with the psychodrama, if the recorder will read us the notes and comments of the last session." THE recorder, a pudgy, lowranking youngster named Sprogue, flipped back the pages of his notebook and read in a chanting voice, "Session of # May, subject, Morey Fry; in attendence, Doctors Fairless, Bileck, Semmelweiss, Carrado, Weber -- " Fairless interrupted kindly, "Just the last page, if you please, Dr. Sprogue." "Um -- oh, yes. After a tenminute recess for additional Rorschachs and an electro-encephalogram, the group convened and conducted rapid-fire word association. Results were tabulated and compared with standard deviation patterns, and it was determined that subject's major traumas derived from, respectively -- " Morey found his attention waning. Therapy was good; everybody knew that, but every once in a while he found it a little dull. If it weren't for therapy, though, there was no telling what might happen. Certainly, Morey told himself, he had been helped considerably -- at least he hadn't set fire to his house and shrieked at the fire-robots, like Newell down the block when his eldest daughter divorced her husband and came back to live with him, bringing her ration quota along, of course. Morey hadn't even been tempted to do anything as outrageously, frighteningly immoral as destroy things or waste them -- well, he admitted to himself honestly, perhaps a little tempted, once in a great while. But never anything important enough to worry about; he was sound, perfectly sound. He looked up, startled. All the doctors were staring at him. "Mr. Fry," Fairless repeated, "will you take your place?" "Certainly," Morey said hastily. "Uh -- where?" Semmelweiss guffawed. " Told you. Never mind, Morey; you didn't miss much. We're going to run through one of the big scenes in your life, the one you told us about last time. Remember? You were fourteen years old, you said. Christmas time. Your mother had made you a promise." Morey swallowed. "I remember," he said unhappily. "Well, all right. Where do I stand?" "Right here," said Fairless. "You're you, Carrado is your mother, I'm your father. Will the doctors not participating mind moving back? Fine. Now, Morey, here we are on Christmas morning. Merry Christmas, Morey!" "Merry Christmas," Morey said half-heartedly. "Uh -- F ather dear, where's my -- uh -- my puppy that Mother promised me?" "Puppy!" said Fairless heartily. "Your mother and I have something much better than a puppy for you. Just take a look under the tree there -- it's a robot! Yes, Morey, your very own robot -- a full-size #-tube fully automatic companion robot for you! Go ahead, Morey, go right up and speak to it. Its name is Henry. Go on, boy." Morey felt a sudden, incomprehensible tingle inside the bridge of his nose. He said shakily, "But I -- I didn't want a robot." "Of course you want a robot," Carrado interrupted. "Go on, child, play with your nice robot." Morey said violently, "I hate robots!" He looked around him at the doctors, at the graypaneled consulting room. He added defiantly, "You hear me, all of you? I still hate robots!" There was a second's pause; then the questions began. It was half an hour before the receptionist came in and announced that time was up. In that half hour, Morey had got over his trembling and lost his wild, momentary passion, but he had remembered what for thirteen years he had forgotten. He hated robots. that young Morey had hated robots. It was that the Robot Riots, the ultimate violent outbreak of flesh against metal, the battle to the death between mankind and its machine heirs... never happened. A little boy hated robots, but the man he became worked with them hand in hand. And yet, always and always before, the new worker, the competitor for the job, was at once and inevitably outside the law. The waves swelled in -- the Irish, the Negroes, the Jews, the Italians. They were squeezed into their ghettoes, where they encysted, seethed and struck out, until the burgeoning generations became indistinguishable. For the robots, that genetic relief was not in sight. And still the conflict never came. The feedback circuits aimed the anti-aircraft guns and, reshaped and newly planned, found a place in a new sort of machine -- together with a miraculous trail of cams and levers, an indestructible and potent power source and a hundred thousand parts and subassemblies. And the first robot clanked off the bench. Its mission was its own destruction; but from the scavenged wreck of its pilot body, a hundred better robots drew their inspiration. And the hundred went to work, and hundreds more, until And still the riots never happened. For the robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was "Plenty." And by the time the gift had shown its own unguessed ills, the time for a Robot Riot was past. Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body once and for all. The addict craves the grainy white powder; he doesn't hate it, or the runner who sells it to him. And if Morey as a little boy could hate the robot that had deprived him of his pup, Morey the man was perfectly aware that the robots were his servants and his friends. But the little Morey inside the man -- he had never been convinced. ward to his work. The one day a week at which he did anything was a wonderful change from the dreary consume, consume, consume grind. He entered the bright-lit drafting room of the Bradmoor Amusements Company with a feeling of uplift. But as he was changing from street garb to his drafting smock, Howland from Procurement came over with a knowing look. "Wainwright's been looking for you," Howland whispered. "Better get right in there." Morey nervously thanked him and got. Wainwright's office was the size of a phone booth and as bare as Antarctic ice. Every time Morey saw it, he felt his insides churn with envy. Think of a desk with nothing on it but work surface -- no calendar-clock, no twelve-color pen rack, no dictating machines! He squeezed himself in and sat down while Wainwright finished a phone call. He mentally reviewed the possible reasons why Wainwright would want to talk to him in person instead of over the phone, or by dropping a word to him as he passed through the drafting room. Very few of them were good. Wainwright put down the phone and Morey straightened up. "You sent for me?" he asked. Wainwright in a chubby world was aristocratically lean. As General Superintendent of the Design  Development Section of the Bradmoor Amusements Company, he ranked high in the upper section of the well-to-do. He rasped, "I certainly did. Fry, just what the hell do you think you're up to now?" "I don't know what you m-mean, Mr. Wainwright," Morey stammered, crossing off the list of possible reasons for the interview all of the good ones. Wainwright snorted. "I guess you don't. Not because you weren't told, but because you don't want to know. Think back a whole week. What did I have you on the carpet for then?" Morey said sickly, "My ration book. Look, Mr. Wainwright, I know I'm running a little bit behind, but -- " "But nothing! How do you think it looks to the Committee, Fry? They got a complaint from the Ration Board about you. Naturally they passed it on to me. And naturally I'm going to pass it right along to you. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Good God, man, look at these figures -- textiles, fifty-one per cent; food, sixty-seven per cent; amusements and entertainment, thirty per cent! You haven't come up to your ration in anything for months!" Morey stared at the card miserably; "We -- that is, my wife and I -- just had a long talk about that last night, Mr. Wainwright. And, believe me, we're going to do better. We're going to buckle right down and get to work and -- uh -- do better," he finished weaklyWainwright nodded, and for the first time there was a note of sympathy. in his voice. "Your wife. Judge Elon's daughter, isn't she? Good family. I've met the Judge many times." Then, gruffly, "Well, nevertheless, Fry, I'm warning you. I don't care how you straighten this out, but don't Jet the Committee mention this to me again." "No, sir." "All right. Finished with the schematics on the new K-#?" Morey brightened. "Just about, sir! I'm putting the first section on tape today. I'm very pleased with it, Mr. Wainwright, honestly I am. I've got more than eighteen thousand moving parts in it now, and that's without -- " "Good. Good." Wainwright glanced down at his desk. "Get back to it. And straighten out this other thing. You can do it, Fry. Consuming is everybody's duty. Just keep that in mind." out of the drafting room, down to the spotless shops. "Bad time?" he inquired solicitously. Morey grunted. It was none of Howland's business. Howland looked over his shoulder as he was setting up the programing panel. Morey studied the matrices silently, then got busy reading the summary tapes, checking them back against the schematics, setting up the instructions on the programing board. Howland kept quiet as Morey completed the setup and ran off a test tape. It checked perfectly; Morey stepped back to light a cigarette in celebration before pushing the start button. Howland said, "Go on, run it. I can't go until you put it in the works." Morey grinned and pushed the button. The board lighted up; within it, a tiny metronomic beep began to pulse. That was all. At the other end of the quarter-mile shed, Morey knew, the automatic sorters and conveyers were fingering through the copper reels and steel ingots, measuring hoppers of plastic powder and colors, setting up an intricate weaving path for the thousands of individual components that would make up Bradmoor's new K-# Spin-aGame. But from where they stood, in the elaborately muraled programing room, nothing showed. Bradmoor was an ultramodernized plant; in the manufacturing end, even robots had been dispensed with in favor of machines that guided themselves. Morey glanced at his watch and logged in the starting time while Howland quickly counterchecked Morey's raw-material flow program. "Checks out," Howland said solemnly, slapping him on the back. "Calls for a celebration. Anyway, it's your first design, isn't it?" "Yes. First all by myself, at any rate." Howland was already fishing in his private locker for the bottle he kept against emergency needs. He poured with a flourish. "To Morey Fry," he said, "our most favorite designer, in whom we are much pleased." Morey drank. It went down easily enough. Morey had conscientiously used his liquor rations for years, but he had never gone beyond the minimum, so that although liquor was no new experience to him, the single drink immediately warmed him. It warmed his mouth, his throat, the hollows of his chest; and it settled down with a warm glow inside him. Howland, exerting himself to be nice, complimented Morey fatuously on the design and poured another drink. Morey didn't utter any protest at all. Howland drained his glass. "You may wonder' he said formally, "why I am so pleased with you, Morey Fry. I will tell you why this is." Morey grinned. "Please do." Howland nodded. "I will. It's because I am pleased with the world, Morey. My wife left me last night." only a recent bridegroom can be by the news of a crumbling marriage. "That's too ba -- I mean is that a fact?" "Yes, she left my beds and board and five robots, and I'm happy to see her go." He poured another drink for both of them. "Women. Can't live with them and can't live without them. First you sigh and pant and chase after 'em -- you like poetry?" he demanded suddenly. Morey said cautiously, "Some poetry." Howland quoted : " 'How long, my love, shall I behold this wall between our gardens -- yours the rose, and mine the swooning lily.' Like it? I wrote it for Jocelyn -- that's my wife -- when we were first going together." "It's beautiful," said Morey. "She wouldn't talk to me for two' days." Howland drained his drink. "Lots of spirit, that girl. Anyway, I hunted her like a tiger. And then I caught her. Wow!" Morey took a deep drink from his own glass. "What do you mean, wow ?" he asked. "Wow." Howland pointed his finger at Morey. "Wow, that's what I mean. We got married and I took her home to the dive I was living in, and wow we had a kid, and wow I got in a little trouble with the Ration Board -- nothing serious, of course, but there was a mixup -- and wow fights. "Everything was a fight," he explained. "She'd start with a little nagging, and naturally I'd say something or other back, and bang we were off. Budget, budget, budget; I hope to die if I ever hear the word 'budget' again. Morey, you're a married man; you know what it's like. Tell me the truth, weren't you just about ready to blow your top the first time you caught your wife cheating on the budget?" "Cheating on the budget?" Morey was startled. "Cheating how?" "Oh, lots of ways. Making your portions bigger than hers. Sneaking extra shirts for you on her clothing ration. You know." "Damn it, I do not know!" cried Morey. "Cherry wouldn't do anything like that!" Howland looked at him opaquely for a long second. "Of course not," he said at last. "Let's have another drink." Ruffled, Morey held out his glass. Cherry wasn't the type of girl to cheat. Of course she wasn't. A fine, loving girl like her -- a pretty girl, of a good family; she wouldn't know how to begin. sort of chant, "No more budget. No more fights. No more 'Daddy never treated me like this.' No more nagging. No more extra rations for household allowance. No more -- Morey, what do you say we go out and have a few drinks? I know a place where -- " "Sorry, Howland," Morey said. "I've got to get back to the office, you know." Howland guffawed. He held out his wristwatch. As Morey, a little unsteadily, bent over it, it tinkled out the hour. It was a matter of minutes before the office closed for the day. "Oh," said Morey. "I didn't realize -- Well, anyway, Howland, thanks, but I can't. My wife will be expecting me." "She certainly will," Howland sniggered. "Won't catch her eating up your rations and hers tonight." Morey said tightly, "Howland!" "Oh, sorry, sorry." Howland waved an arm. "Don't mean to say anything against your wife, of course. Guess maybe Jocelyn soured me on women. But honest, Morey, you'd like this place. Name of Uncle Piggotty's, down in the Old Town. Crazy bunch hangs out there. You'd like them. Couple nights last week they had -- I mean, you understand, Morey, I don't go there as often as all that, but I just happened to drop in and -- " Morey interrupted firmly. "Thank you, Howland. Must go home. Wife expects it. Decent of you to offer. Good night. Be seeing you." He walked out, turned at the door to bow politely, and in turning back cracked the side of his face against the door jamb. A sort of pleasant numbness had taken possession of his entire skin surface, though, and it wasn't until he perceived Henry chattering at him sympathetically that he noticed a trickle of blood' running down the side of his face. "Mere flesh wound," he said with dignity. "Nothing to cause you least conshter -- consternation, Henry. Now kindly shut your ugly face. Want to think." And he slept in the car all the way home. IT was worse than a hangover. The name is "holdover." You've had some drinks; you've started to sober up by catching a little sleep. Then you are required to be awake and to function. The consequent state has the worst features of hangover and intoxication; your head thumps and your mouth tastes like the floor of a bear-pit, but you are nowhere near sober. There is one cure. Morey said thickly, "Let's have a cocktail, dear." Cherry was delighted to share a cocktail with him before dinner. Cherry, Morey thought lovingly, was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful -- He found his head nodding in time to his thoughts and the motion made him wince. Cherry flew to his side and touched his temple. "Is it bothering you, darling?" she asked solicitously. "Where you ran into the door, I mean?"  Morey looked at her sharply, but her expression was open and adoring. He said bravely, "Just a little. Nothing to it, really." The butler brought the cocktails and retired. Cherry lifted her glass. Morey raised his, caught a whiff of the liquor and nearly dropped it. He bit down hard on his churning insides and forced himself to swallow. He was surprised but grateful: It stayed down. In a moment, the curious phenomenon of warmth began to repeat itself. He swallowed the rest of the drink and held out his glass for a refill. He even tried a smile. Oddly enough, his face didn't fall off. i"NE more drink did it. Morey felt happy and relaxed, but by no means drunk. They went in to dinner in fine spirits. They chatted cheerfully with each other and Henry, and Morey found time to feel sentimentally sorry for poor Howland, who couldn't make a go of his marriage, when marriage was obviously such an easy relationship, so beneficial to both sides, so warm and relaxing... Startled, he said, "What?" Cherry repeated, "It's the cleverest scheme I ever heard of. Such a funny little man, dear. All kind of nervous, if you know what I mean. He kept looking at the door as if he was expecting someone, but of course that was silly. None of his friends would have come to our house to see him." Morey said tensely, "Cherry, please! What was that you said about ration stamps?" "But I told you, darling! It was just after you left this morning. This funny little man came to the door; the butler said he wouldn't give any name. Anyway, I talked to him. I thought he might be a neighbor and I certainly would never be rude to any neighbor who might come to call, even if the neighborhood was -- " "The ration stamps!" Morey begged. "Did I hear you say he was peddling phony ration stamps?" Cherry said uncertainly, "Well, I suppose that in a way they're phony. The way he explained it, they weren't the regular official kind. But it was four for one, dear -- four of his stamps for one of ours. So I just took out our household book and steamed off a couple of weeks' stamps and -- " "How many?" Morey bellowed. Cherry blinked. "About -- about two weeks' quota," she said faintly. "Was that wrong, dear?" It J. couple of weeks' stamps," he repeated. "Four for one -- you didn't even get the regular rate." Cherry wailed, "How was I supposed to know? I never had anything like this when I was home! We didn't have food riots and slums and all these horrible robots and filthy little revolting men coming to the door!" Morey stared at her woodenly. She was crying again, but it made no impression on the case-hardened armor that was suddenly thrown around his heart. Henry made a tentative sound that, in a human, would have been a preparatory cough, but Morey froze him with a whiteeyed look. Morey said in a dreary monotone that barely penetrated the sound of Cherry's tears, "Let me tell you just what it was you did. Assuming, at best, that these stamps you got are at least average good counterfeits, and not so bad that the best thing to do with them is throw them away before we get caught with them in our possession, you have approximately a twomonth supply of funny stamps. In case you didn't know it, those ration books are not merely ornamental. They have to be turned in every month to prove that we have completed our consuming quota for the month.  "When they are turned in, they are spot-checked. Every book is at least glanced at. A big chunk of them are gone over very carefully by the inspectors, and a certain percentage are tested by ultra-violet, infra-red, X-ray, radioisotopes, bleaches, fumes, paper chromatography and every other damned test known to Man." His voice was rising to an uneven crescendo. "If we are lucky enough to get away with using any of these stamps at all, we daren't -- we simply dare not -- use more than one or two counterfeits to every dozen or more real stamps. "That means, Cherry, that what you bought is not a twomonth supply, but maybe a twoyear supply -- and since, as you no doubt have never noticed, the things have expiration dates on them, there is probably no chance in the world that we can ever hope to use more than half of them." He was bellowing by the time he pushed back his chair and towered over her. "Moreover," he went on, "right now, right as of this minute, we have to make up the stamps you gave away, which means that at the very best we are going to be on double rations for two weeks or so. "And that says nothing about the one feature of this whole grisly mess that you seem to have thought of least, namely that counterfeit stamps are against the law! I'm poor, Cherry; I live in a slum, and I know it; I've got a long way to go before I'm as rich or respected or powerful as your father, about whom I am beginning to get considerably tired of hearing. But poor as I may be, I can tell you this for sure : Up until now, at any rate, I have been honest." Cherry's tears had stopped entirely and she was bowed whitefaced and dry-eyed by the time Morey had finished. He had spent himself; there was no violence left in him. He stared dismally at Cherry for a moment, then turned wordlessly and stamped out of the house. Marriage! he thought as he left. TE walked for hours, blind to where he was going. What brought him back to awareness was a sensation he had not felt in a dozen years. It was not, Morey abruptly realized, the dying traces of his hangover that made his stomach feel so queer. He was hungry -- actually hungry. He looked about him. He was in the Old Town, miles from home, jostled by crowds of lowerclass people. The block he was on was as atrocious a slum as Morey had ever seen -- Chinese pagodas stood next to rococo imitations of the chapels around Versailles; gingerbread marred every facade; no building was without its brilliant signs and flarelights. He saw a blindingly overdecorated eating establishment and crossed the street toward it, dodging through the unending streams of traffic. It was a miserable excuse for a restaurant, but Morey was in no mood to care. He found a seat under a potted palm, as far from the tinkling fountains and robot string ensemble as he could manage, and ordered recklessly, paying no attention to the ration prices. As the waiter was gliding noiselessly away, Morey had a sickening realization: He'd come out without his ration book. He groaned out loud; it was too late to leave without causing a disturbance. But then, he thought rebelliously, what difference did one more unrationed meal make, anyhow? Food made him feel a little better. He finished the last of his profiterole au chocolate, not even leaving on the plate the uneaten onethird that tradition permitted, and paid his check. The robot cashier reached automatically for his ration book. Morey had a moment of grandeur as he said simply, "No ration stamps." Robot cashiers are not equipped to display surprise, but this one tried. The man behind Morey in line audibly caught his breath, and less audibly mumbled something about slummers. Morey took it as a compliment and strode outside feeling almost in good humor. Good enough to go home to Cherry? Morey thought seriously of it for a second; but he wasn't going to pretend he was wrong and certainly Cherry wasn't goshe was at fault. Besides, Morey told himself grimly, she was undoubtedly asleep. That was an annoying thing about Cherry at best: she never had any trouble getting to sleep. Didn't even use her quota of sleeping tablets, though Morey had spoken to her about it more than once. Of course, he reminded himself, he had been so polite and tactful about it, as befits a newlywed, that very likely she hadn't even understood that it was a complaint. Well, that would stop! Man's man Morey Fry, wearing no collar ruff but his own, strode determinedly down the streets of the Old Town. Morey took one unbelieving look. "You again!" he roared. The little man stared at him in genuine surprise. Then a faint glimmer of recognition crossed his face. "Oh, yeah," he said. "This morning, huh?" He clucked commiseratingly. "Too bad you wouldn't deal with me. Your wife was a lot smarter. Of course, you got me a little sore, Jack, so naturally I had to raise the price a little bit." "You skunk, you cheated my poor wife blind! You and I are going to the local station house and talk this over." The little man pursed his lips. "We are, huh?" Morey nodded vigorously. "Damn right! And let me tell you -- " He stopped in the middle of a threat as a large hand cupped around his shoulder. The equally large man who owned the hand said, in a mild and cultured voice, "Is this gentleman disturbing you, Sam?" "Not so far," the little man conceded. "He might want to, though, so don't go away." Morey wrenched his shoulder away. "Don't think you can strongarm me. I'm taking you to the police." Sam shook his head unbelievingly. "You mean you're going to call the law in on this?" "I certainly am!" Sam sighed regretfully. "What do you think of that, Walter? Treating his wife like that. Such a nice lady, too." "What are you talking about?" Morey demanded, stung on a peculiarly sensitive spot. "I'm talking about your wife," Sam explained. "Of course, I'm not married myseif. But it seems to me that if I was, I wouldn't call the police when my wife was engaged in some kind of criminal activity or other. No, sir, I'd try to settle it myself. Tell you what," he advised, "why don't you talk this over with her? Make her see the error of -- " "Wait a minute," Morey interrupted. "You mean you'd involve my wife in this thing?" The man spread his hands helplessly. "It's not me that would involve her, Buster," he said. "She already involved her own self. It takes two to make a crime, you know. I sell, maybe; I won't deny it. But after all, I can't sell unless somebody buys, can I ?" Morey stared at him glumly. He glanced in quick speculation at the large-sized Walter; but Walter was just as big as he'd remembered, so that took care of that. Violence was out; the police were out; that left no really attractive way of capitalizing on the good luck of running into the man again. S AM said, "Well, I'm glad to see that's off your mind. Now, returning to my original question, Mac, how would you like a good time? You look like a smart fellow to me; you look like you'd be kind of interested in a place I happen to know of down the block." Morey said bitterly, "So you're a dive-steerer, too. A real talented man." "I admit it," Sam agreed. "Stamp business is slow at night, in my experience. People have their minds more on a good time. And, believe me, a good time is what I can show 'em. Take this place I'm talking about, Uncle Piggotty's is the .iame of it, it's what I would call an unusual kind of place. Wouldn't you say so, Walter?" "Oh, I agree with you entirely," Walter rumbled. But Morey was hardly listening. He said, "Uncle Piggotty's, you say?" "That's right," said Sam. Morey frowned for a moment, digesting an idea. Uncle Piggotty's sounded like the place Howland had been talking about back at the plant; it might be interesting, at that. While he was making up his mind, Sam slipped an arm through his on one side and Walter amiably wrapped a big hand around the other. Morey found himself walking. "You'll like it," Sam promised comfortably. "No hard feelings about this morning, sport? Of course not. Once you get a look at Piggotty's, you'll get over your mad, anyhow. It's something special. I swear, on what they pay me for bringing in customers, I wouldn't do it unless I believed in it." "Dance, Jack?" the hostess yelled over the noise at the bar. She stepped back, lifted her flounced skirts to ankle height and executed a tricky nine-step. "My name is Morey," Morey yelled back. "And I don't want to dance, thanks." The hostess shrugged, frowned meaningfully at Sam and danced away. Sam flagged the bartender. "First round's on us," he explained to Morey. "Then we won't bother you any more. Unless you want us to, of course. Like the place?" Morey hesitated, but Sam didn't wait. "Fine place," he yelled, and picked up the drink the bartender left him. "See you around." He and the big man were gone. Morey stared after them uncertainly, then gave it up. He was here, anyhow; might as well at least have a drink. He ordered and looked around. third-rate dive disguised to look, in parts of it at least, like one of the exclusive upper-class country clubs. The bar, for instance, was treated to resemble the clean lines of nailed wood; but underneath the surface treatment, Morey could detect the intricate laminations of plyplastic. What at first glance appeared to be burlap hangings were in actuality elaborately textured synthetics. And all through the bar the motif was carried out. A floor show of sorts was going on, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it. Morey, straining briefly to hear the master of ceremonies, gathered that the wit was on a more than mildly vulgar level. There was a dispirited string of chorus beauties in long ruffled pantaloons and diaphanous tops; one of them, Morey was almost sure, was the hostess who had talked to him just a few moments before. Next to him a man was declaiming to a middle-aged woman: "Smote I the monstrous rock, yahoo! Smote I the turgid tube. Bully Boy! Smote I the cankered hill -- Why, Morey!" he interrupted himself. "What are you doing here?" He turned farther around and Morey recognized him. "Hello, Howland," he said. "I -- uh -- I happened to be free tonight, so I thought -- " Howland sniggered. "Well, guess your wife is more liberal than mine was. Order a drink, boy." "Thanks, I've got one," said Morey. The woman, with a tigerish look at Morey, said, "Don't stop, Everett. That was one of your most beautiful things." "Oh, Morey's heard my poetry," Howland said. "Morey, I'd like you to meet a very lovely and talented young lady, Tanaquil Bigelow. Morey works in the office with me, Tan." "Obviously," said Tanaquil Bigelow in a frozen voice, and Morey hastily withdrew the hand he had begun to put out. The conversation stuck there, impaled, the woman cold, Howland relaxed and abstracted, Morey wondering if, after all, this had been such a good idea. He caught the eye-cell of the robot bartender and ordered a round of drinks for the three of them, politely putting them on Howland's ration book. By the time the drinks had come and Morey had just got around to deciding that it wasn't a very good idea, the woman had all of a sudden become thawed. She said abruptly, "You look like the kind of man who thinks, Morey, and I like to talk to that kind of man. Frankly, Morey, I just don't have any patience at all with the stupid, stodgy men who just work in their offices all day and eat all their dinners every night, and gad about and consume like mad and where does it all get them, anyhow? That's right, I can see you understand. Just one crazy rush of consume, consume from the day you're bom plop to the day you're buried pop! And who's to blame if not the robots?" began to appear on the surface of Howland's relaxed calm. "Tan," he chided, "Morey may not be very interested in politic?." Politics, Morey thought; well, at least that was a clue. He'd had the dizzying feeling, while the woman was talking, that he himself was the ball in the games machine he had designed for the shop earlier that day. Following the woman's conversation might, at that, give his next design some valuable pointers in swoops, curves and obstacles. He said, with more than half truth, "No, please go on, Miss Bigelow. I'm very much interested." She smiled; then abruptly her face changed to a frightening scowl. Morey flinched, but evidently the scowl wasn't meant for him. "Robots!" she hissed. "Supposed to work for us, aren't they? Hah! We're their slaves, slaves for every moment of every miserable day of our lives. Slaves! Wouldn't you like to join us and be free, Morey?" Morey took cover in his drink. He made an expressive gesture with his free hand -- expressive of exactly what, he didn't truly know, for he was lost. But it seemed to satisfy the woman. She said accusingly, "Did you know that more than threequarters of the people in this country have ha'd a nervous breakdown in the past five years and four months? That more than half of them are under the constant care of psychiatrists for psychosis -- not just plain ordinary neurosis like my husband's got and Howland here has got and you've got, but psychosis. Like I've got. Did you know that? Did you know that forty per cent of the population are essentially manic depressive, thirty-one per cent are schizoid, thirty-eight per cent have an assortment of other unfixed psychogenic disturbances and twenty-four -- " "Hold it a minute, Tan," Howland interrupted critically. "You've got too many per cents there. Start over again." "Oh, the hell with it," the woman said moodily. "I wish my husband were here. He expresses it so much better than I do." She swallowed her drink. "Since you've wriggled off the hook," she said nastily to Morey, "how about setting up another round -- on my ration book this time?" Morey did ; it was the simplest thing to do in his confusion. When that was gone, they had another on Howland's book. A S near as he could figure out, the woman, her husband and quite possibly Howland as well belonged to some kind of antirobot group. Morey had heard of such things; they had a quasi legal status, neither approved nor prohibited, but he had never come into contact with them before. Remembering the hatred he had so painfully relived at the psychodrama session, he thought anxiously that perhaps he belonged with them. But, question them though he might, he couldn't seem to get the principles of the organization firmly in mind. The woman finally gave up trying to explain it, and went off to find her husband while Morey and Howland had another drink and listened to two drunks squabble over who bought the next round. They were at the Alphonse-Gaston stage of inebriation; they would regret it in the morning, for each was bending over backward to permit the other to pay the ration points. Morey wondered uneasily about his own points; Howland was certainly getting credit for a lot of Morey's drinking tonight. Served him right for forgetting his book, of course. When the woman came back, it was with the large man Morey had encountered in the company of Sam, the counterfeiter, steerer and general man about Old Town. "A remarkably small world, isn't it?" boomed Walter Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey's hand in his. "Well, sir, my wife has told me how interested you are in the basic philosophical drives behind our movement, and I should like to discuss them further with you. To begin with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?" Morey said, "Why -- " "Very good," said Bigelow courteously. He cleared his throat and declaimed: "Han-hcnded Cathay saw it first. Bright as brightest solar burst; Whipped it into boy and girl. The blinding spiral-sliced swirl: Yang And Yin." He shrugged deprecatingly. "Just the first stanza," he said. "I don't know if you got much out of it." "Well, no," Morey admitted. "Second stanza," Bigelow said firmly: "Hegel saw it, saw it clear; Jackal Marx drew near, drew near: O'er his shoulder saw it plain. Turned it upside down again: Yang And Yin." There was an expectant pause. Morey said, "I -- uh -- " "Wraps it all up, doesn't it?" Bigelow's wife demanded. "Oh, if only others could see it as clearly as you do! The robot peril and the robot savior. Starvation and surfeit. Always twoness, always!" shoulder. "The next stanza makes it even clearer," he said. "It's really very clever -- I shouldn't say it, of course, but it's Howland's as much as it's mine. He helped me with the verses." Morey darted a glance at Howland, but Howland was carefully looking away. "Third stanza," said Bigelow. "This is a hard one, because it's long, so pay attention." Justice, tip your sightless scales; One pan rises, one pan falls. Howland," he interrupted himself, "are you sure about that rhyme? I always trip over it. Well, anyway: Add to A and B grows less; A's B's partner, nonetheless. Next, the Twoness that there be In even electricity. Chart the current as it's found: Sine the hot lead, line the ground. The wild sine dances, soars and falls, Hut only to figures the zero rails. Sine wave, scales, all things that be Share a reciprocity. Mule and female, light anddark: Voiiie the numbers of Noah's Ark! Yang And Yin!" "Dearest!" shrieked Bigelow's wife. "You've never done it better!" There was a spatter of applause, and Morey realized for the first time that half the bar had stopped its noisy revel to listen to them. Bigelow was evidently quite a well-known figure here. Morey said weakly, "I've never heard anything like it." He turned hesitantly to Howland, who promptly said, "Drink! What we all need right now is a drink." They had a drink on Bigelow's book. Morey got Howland aside and asked him, "Look, level with me. Are these people nuts?" Howland showed pique. "No. Certainly not." "Does that poem mean anything? Does this whole business of twoness mean anything?" Howland shrugged. "If it means something to them, it means something. They're philosophers, Morey. They see deep into things. You don't know what a privilege it is for me to be allowed to associate with them." They had another drink. On Howland's book, of course. over to a quiet spot. He said, "Leaving twoness out of it for the moment, what's this about the robots?" Bigelow looked at him round eyed. "Didn't you understand the poem?" "Of course I did. But diagram it for me in simple terms so I can tell my wife." Bigelow beamed. "It's about the dichotomy of robots," he explained. "Like the little salt mill that the boy wished for: it ground out salt and ground out salt and ground out salt. He had to have salt, but not that much salt. Whitehead explains it clearly -- " They had another drink on Bigelow's book. Morey wavered over Tanaquil Bigelow. He said fuzzily, "Listen. Mrs. Walter Tanquil Strongarm Bigelow. Listen." She grinned smugly at him. "Brown hair," she said dreamily. Morey shook his head vigorously. "Never mind hair," he ordered. "Never mind poem. Listen. In pre-cise and el-e-men-ta-ry terms, explain to me what is wrong with the world today." "Not enough brown hair," she said promptly. "Never mind hair!" "All right," she said agreeably. "Too many robots. Too many robots make too much of everything." "Ha! Got it!" Morey exclaimed triumphantly. "Get rid of robots!" "Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn't eat. Everything is mechanized. Can't get rid of them, can't slow down production -- slowing down is dying, stopping is quicker dying. Principle of twoness is the concept that clarifies all these -- " "No!" Morey said violently. "What should we do?" "Do? I'll tell you what we should do, if that's what you want. I can tell you." "Then tell me." "What we should do is -- " Tanaquil hiccupped with a look of refined consternation -- "have another drink." They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of course. She ungallantly argued with the bartender about the ration points due her. drinker, Morey tried. He really worked at it. He paid the price, too. For some little time before his limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning. Blackout. Almost a blackout, at any rate, for all he retained of the late evening was a kaleidoscope of people and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking as he stared up at Howland from the floor. The Bigelows were there. His wife Cherry, solicitous and amused, was there. And oddly enough, Henry was there. It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a whole morning's hangover to the effort. It was important to reconstruct it, for some reason. But Morey couldn't even remember whot the reason was; and finally he dismissed it, guessing that he hud either solved the secret of twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigr low's remarkable figure wm natural. He did, however, know that the next morning he had waked in his own bed, with no recollection of getting there. No recollection of anything much, at least not of anything that fit into the proper chronological order or seemed to mesh with anything else, after the dozenth drink when he and Howland, arms around each other's shoulders, composed a new verse on twoness and, plagiarizing an old marching tune, howled it across the boisterous barroom : "A twoness on the scene much later Rests in your refrigerator. Heat your house and insulate it. Next your food: Refrigerate it. Frost will damp your Freon coils. So flux in nichrome till it boils. See the picture? Heat in cold In heat in cold, the story's told! (iiant-writ the sacred scrawl: Oh, the twoness of it all! Yang And Yin!" It had, at any rate, seemed to mean something at the time. If alcohol opened Morey's eyes to the fact there was a twoness, perhaps alcohol was what he needed. For there was. Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of twopronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang passes Yin. Then -- Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand. If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster. Yin may not lag behind. Then call Yang a robot. And remember that a pipeline has two ends. lush, Morey braced himself for the consequences -- and found startledly that there were none. Cherry was a surprise to him. "You were so funny," she giggled. "And, honestly, so romantic." He shakily swallowed his breakfast coffee. The office staff roared and slapped him on the back. "Howland tells us you're living high, boy!" they bellowed more or less in the same words. "Hey, listen to what Morey did -- went on the town for the night of a lifetime and didn't even bring his ration book along to cash in!" They thought it was a wonderful joke. But, then, everything was going well. Cherry, it seemed, had reformed out of recognition. True, she still hated to go out in the evening and Morey never sawher forcing herself to gorge on unwanted food or play undesired games. But, moping into the pantry one afternoon, he found to his incredulous delight that they were well ahead of their ration quotas. In some items, in fact, they were out -- a month's supply and more was gone ahead of schedule! Nor was it the counterfeit stamps, for he had found them tucked behind a bain-marie and quietly burned them. He cast about for ways of complimenting her, but caution prevailed. She was sensitive on the subject; leave it be. And virtue had its reward. Wain wright called him in, all smiles. "Morey, great news! We've all appreciated your work here and we've been able to show it in some more tangible way than compliments. I didn't want to say anything till it was definite, but -- your status has been reviewed by Classification and the Ration Board. You're out of Class Four Minor, Morey!" Morey said tremulously, hardly daring to hope, "I'm a full Class Four?" "Class Five, Morey. Class Five! When we do something, we do it right. We asked for a special waiver and got it -- you've skipped a whole class." He added honestly, "Not that it was just our backing that did it, of course. Your own recent splendid record of consumption helped a lot. I told you you could do it!" Morey had to sit down. He missed the rest of what Wainwright had to say, but it couldn't have mattered. He escaped from the office, sidestepped the knot of fellow-employees waiting to congratulate him, and got to a phone.  inarticulate as he. "Oh, darling!" was all she could say. "And I couldn't have done it without you," he babbled. "Wainwright as much as said so himself. Said if it wasn't for the way we -- well, you have been keeping up with the rations, it never would have got by the Board. I've been meaning to say something to you about that, dear, but I just haven't known how. But I do appreciate it. I -- Hello?" There was a curious silence at the other end of the phone. "Hello?" he repeated worriedly. Cherry's voice was intense and low. "Morey Fry, I think you're mean. I wish you hadn't spoiled the good news." And she hung up. Morey stared slack-jawed at the phone. Howland appeared behind him, chuckling. "Women," he said. "Never try to figure them. Anyway, congratulations, Morey." "Thanks," Morey mumbled. Howland coughed and said, "Uh -- by the way, Morey, now that you're one of the big shots, so to speak, you won't -- uh -- feel obliged to -- well, say anything to Wainwright, for instance, about anything I may have said while we -- " "Excuse me," Morey said, unhearing, and pushed past him. He thought wildly of calling Cherry back, of racing home to see just what he'd said that was wrong. Not that there was much doubt, of course. He'd touched her on her sore point. Anyway, his wristwatch was chiming a reminder of the fact that his psychiatric appointment for the week was coming up. Morey sighed. The day gives and the day takes away. Blessed is the day that gives only good things. If any. fTiHE session went badly. Many of the sessions had been going badly, Morey decided; there had been more and more whispering in knots of doctors from which he was excluded, poking and probing in the dark instead of the precise psychic surgery he was used to. Something was wrong, he thought. Something was. Semmel weiss confirmed it when he adjourned the group session. After the other doctor had left, he sat Morey down for a private talk. On his own time, too -- he didn't ask for his usual ration fee. That told Morey how important the problem was. "Morey," said Semmelweiss, "you're holding back." "I don't mean to, Doctor," Morey said earnestly. "Who knows what you 'mean' to do? Part of you 'means' to. We've dug pretty deep and we've found some important things. Now there's something I can't put my finger on. Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending scouts through cannibal territory. You can't see the cannibals -- until it's too late. But if you send a scout through the jungle and he doesn't show up on the other side, it's a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In that case, we would label the obstruction 'cannibals.' In the case of the human mind, we label the obstruction a 'trauma.' What the trauma is, or what its effects on behavior will be, we have to find out, once we know that it's there." Morey nodded. All of this was familiar; he couldn't see what Semmelweiss was driving at. Semmelweiss sighed. "The trouble with healing traumas and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitions -- the trouble with everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is that we can't afford to do it too well. An inhibited man is under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if we succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all, we have an outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially necessary. Suppose, for instance, that an average man were not inhibited against blatant waste. It could happen, you know. Suppose that instead of consuming his ration quota in an orderly and responsible way, he did such things as set fire to his house and everything in it or dumped his food allotment in the river. "When only a few individuals are doing it, we treat the individuals. But if it were done on a mass scale, Morey, it would be the end of society as we know it. Think of the whole collection of anti-social actions that you see in every paper. Man beats wife; wife turns into a harpy; junior smashes up windows; husband starts a black-market stamp racket. And every one of them traces to a basic weakness in the mind's defenses against the most important single anti-social phenomenon -- failure to consume." Morey flared, "That's not fair, Doctor! That was weeks ago! We've certainly been on the ball lately. I was just commended by the Board, in fact -- " The doctor said mildly, "Why so violent, Morey? I only made a general remark." "It's just natural to resent being accused." The doctor shrugged. "First, foremost and above all, we do not accuse patients of things. We try to help you find things out." He lit his endofsession cigarette. "Think about it, please. I'll see you next week." unapproachable. She kissed him remotely when he came in. She said, "I called Mother and told her the good news. She and Dad promised to come over here to celebrate." "Yeah," said Morey. "Darling, what did I say wrong on the phone?" "They'll be here about six." "Sure. But what did I say? Was it about the rations? If you're sensitive, I swear I'll never mention them again." "I am sensitive, Morey." He said despairingly, "I'm sorry. I just -- " He had a better idea. He kissed her. Cherry was passive at first, but not for long. When he had finished kissing her, she pushed him away and actually giggled. "Let me get dressed for dinner." "Certainly. Anyway, I was just -- " She laid a finger on his lips. He let her escape and, feeling much less tense, drifted into the library. The afternoon papers were waiting for him. Virtuously, he sat down and began going through them in order. Midway through the World-TelegramSun-Post-and-News, he rang for Henry. Morey had read clear through to the drama section of the Time sHer aidTribuneMirror before the robot appeared. "Good evening," it said politely. "What took you so long?" Morey demanded. "Where are all the robots?" Robots do not stammer, but there was a distinct pause before Henry said, "Belowstairs, sir. Did you want them for something?" "Well, no. I just haven't seen them around. Get me a drink." It hesitated. "Scotch, sir?" " Before dinner? Get me a Manhattan." "We're all out of Vermouth, sir." "All out? Would you mind telling me how?" "It's all used up, sir." "Now that's just ridiculous," Morey snapped. "We have never run out of liquor in our whole lives and you know it. Good heavens, we just got our allotment in the other day and I certainly -- " He checked himself. There was a sudden flicker of horror in his eyes as he stared at Henry. "You certainly what, sir?" the robot prompted. Morey swallowed. "Henry, did I -- did I do something I shouldn't have?" "I'm sure I wouldn't know, sir. It isn't up to me to say what you should and shouldn't do." "Of course not," Morey agreed grayly. He sat rigid, staring hopelessly into space, remembering. What he remembered was no pleasure to him at all. "Henry," he said. "Come along, we're going belowstairs. Right now!" IT had been Tanaquil Bigelow's remark about the robots. Too many robots -- make too much of everything. That had implanted the idea; it germinated in Morey's home. More than a little drunk, less than ordinarily inhibited, he had found the problem clear and the answer obvious. He stared around him in dismal worry. His own robots, following his own orders, given weeks before... Henry said, "It's just what you told us to do, sir." Morey groaned. He was watching a scene of unparalleled activity, and it sent shivers up and down his spine. There was the butler-robot, hard at work, his copper face expressionless. Dressed in Morey's own sports knickers and golflng shoes, the robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again, with Morey's own clubs. Until the ball wore ragged and was replaced; and the shafts of the clubs leaned out of true; and the close-stitched seams in the clothing began to stretch and abrade. "My God!" said Morey hollowly. There were the maid-robots, exquisitely dressed in Cherry's best, walking up and down in the delicate, slim shoes, sitting and rising and bending and turning. The cook-robots and the servingrobots were preparing dionysian meals. Morey swallowed. "You -- you've been doing this right along." he said to Henry. "That's why the quotas have been filled." "Oh, yes, sir. Just as you told us." Morey had to sit down. One of the serving-robots politely scurried over with a chair, brought from upstairs for their new chores. Waste. Morey tasted the word between his lips. Waste. You never wasted things. You used them. If necessary, you drove yourself to the edge of breakdown to use them; you made every breath a burden and every hour a torment to use them, until through diligent consuming andor occupational merit, you were promoted to the next higher class, and were allowed to consume less frantically. But you didn't wantonly destroy or throw out. You consumed. Morey thought fearfully : When the Board finds out about this... Still, he reminded himself, the Board hadn't found out. It might take some time before they did, for humans, after all, never entered robot quarters. There was no law against it, not ever a sacrosanct custom. But there was no reason to. When breaks occurred, which was infrequently, maintenance robots or repair squads came in and put them back in order. Usually the humans involved didn't even know it had happened, because the dio circuits and the process was next thing to automatic. Morey said reprovingly, "Henry, you should have told -- well, I mean reminded me about this." "But, sir!" Henry protested. " 'Don't tell a living soul,' you said. You made it a direct order." "Umph. Well, keep it that way. I -- uh -- I have to go back upstairs. Better get the rest of the robots started on dinner." Morey left, not comfortably. THE dinner to celebrate Morey's promotion was difficult. Morey liked Cherry's parents. Old Elon, after the pre-marriage inquisition that father must inevitably give to daughter's suitor, had buckled right down to the job of adjustment. The old folks were good about not interfering, good about keeping their superior social status to themselves, good about helping out on the budget -- at least once a week, they could be relied on to come over for a hearty meal, and Mrs. Elon had more than once remade some of Cherry's new dresses to fit herself, even to the extent of wearing all the high-point ornamentation. And they had been wonderful about the wedding gifts, when Morey and their daughter got married. The most any member of Morey's family had been willing to take was a silver set or a few crystal table pieces. The Elons had come through with a dazzling promise to accept a car, a bird-bath for their garden and a complete set of living-room furniture! Of course, they could afford it -- they had to consume so little that it wasn't much strain for them even to take gifts of that magnitude. But without their help, Morey knew, the first few months of matrimony would have been even tougher consuming than they were. But on this particular night it was hard for Morey to like anyone. He responded with monosyllables ; he barely grunted when Elon proposed a toast to his proHe was preoccupied. Rightly so. Morey, in his deepest, bravest searching, could find no clue in his memory as to just what the punishment might be for what he had done. But he had a sick certainty that trouble lay ahead. Morey went over his problem so many times that an anesthesia set in. By the time dinner was ended and he and his father-inlaw were in the den with their brandy, he was more or less functioning again. Elon, for the first time since Morey had known him, offered Morey one of his cigars. "You're Grade Five -- can afford to smoke somebody else's now, hey?" "Yeah," Morey said glumly. There was a moment of silence. Then Elon, as punctilious as any companion-robot, coughed and tried again. "Remember being peaked till I hit Grade Five," he reminisced meaningfully. "Consuming keeps a man on the go, all right. Things piled up at the law office, couldn't be taken care of while ration points piled up, too. And consuming comes first, of course -- that's a citizen's prime duty. Mother and I had our share of grief over that, but a couple that wants to make a go of marriage and citizenship just pitches in and does the job, hey?" Morey repressed a shudder and managed to nod. "Best thing about upgrading," Elon went on, as if he had elicited a satisfactory answer, "don't have to spend so much time consuming, give more attention to work. Greatest luxury in the world, work. Wish I had as much stamina as you young fellows. Five days a week in court are about all I can manage. Hit six for a while, relaxed first time in my life, but my doctor made me cut down. Said we can't overdo pleasures. You'll be working two days a week now, hey?" Morey produced another nod. his eyes bright as they watched Morey. He was visibly puzzled, and Morey, even in his halfdaze, could recognize the exact moment at which Elon drew the wrong inference. "Ah, everything okay with you and Cherry?" he asked diplomatically. "Fine!" Morey exclaimed. "Couldn't be better!" "Good. Good." Elon changed the subject with almost an audible wrench. "Speaking of court, had an interesting case the other day. Young fellow -- year or two younger than you, I guess -- came in with a Section Ninety-seven on him. Know what that is? Breaking and entering!" "Breaking and entering," Morey repeated wonderingly, interested in spite of himself. "Breaking and entering what?" "Houses. Old term; law's full of them. Originally applied to stealing things. Still does, I discovered." "You mean he stole something?" Morey asked in bewilderment. "Exactly! He stole. Strangest thing I ever came across. Talked it over with one of his bunch of lawyers later; new one on him, too. Seems this kid had a girl friend, nice kid but a little, you know, plump. She got interested in art." "There's nothing wrong with that," Morey said. "Nothing wrong with her, either. She didn't do anything. She didn't like him too much, though. Wouldn't marry him. Kid got to thinking about how he could get her to change her mind and -- well, you know that big Mondrian in the Museum?" "I've never been there," Morey said, somewhat embarrassed. "Um. Ought to try it some day, boy. Anyway, comes closing time at the Museum the other day, this kid sneaks in. He steals the painting. That's right -- steals it. Takes it to give to the girl." Morey shook his head blankly. "I never heard of anything like that in my life." "Not many have. Girl wouldn't take it, by the way. Got scared when he brought it to her. She must've tipped off the police, I guess. Somebody did. Took 'em three hours to find it, even when they knew it was hanging on a wall. Pretty poor kid. Fortytwo room house." "And there was a law against it?" Morey asked. "I mean it's like making a law against breathing." "Certainly was. Old law, of course. Kid got set back two grades. Would have been more but, my God, he was only a Grade Three as it was." "Yeah," said Morey, wetting his lips. "Say, Dad -- " "Um?" Morey cleared his throat. "Uh -- I wonder -- I mean what's the penalty, for instance, for things like -- well, misusing rations or anything like that?" Elon's eyebrows went high. "Misusing rations?" "Say you had a liquor ration, It might be, and instead of drinking it, you -- well, flushed it down the drain or something... His voice trailed off. Elon was frowning. He said, "Funny thing, seems I'm not as broadminded as I thought I was. For some reason, I don't find that amusing." "Sorry," Morey croaked. And he certainly was. TT might be dishonest, but it was doing him a lot of good, for days went by and no one seemed to have penetrated his secret. Cherry was happy. Wainwright found occasion after occasion to pat Morey's back. The wages of sin were turning out to be prosperity and happiness. There was a bad moment when Morey came home to find Cherry in the middle of supervising a team of packing-robots; the new house, suitable to his higher grade, was ready, and they were expected to move in the next day. But Cherry hadn't been belowstairs, and Morey had his household robots clean up the evidences of what they had been doing before the packers got that far. The new house was, by Morey's standards, pure luxury. It was only fifteen rooms. Morey had shrewdly retained one more robot than was required for a Class Five, and had been allowed a compensating deduction in the size of his house. The robot quarters were less secluded than in the old house, though, and that was a disadvantage. More than once Cherry had snuggled up to him in the delightful intimacy of their one bed in their single bedroom and said, with faint curiosity, "I wish they'd stop that noise." And Morey had promised to speak to Henry about it in the morning. But there was nothing he could say to Henry, of course, unless he ordered Henry to stop the tireless consuming through each of the day's twenty-four hours that kept them always ahead, but never quite far enough ahead, of the inexorable weekly increment of ration quotas. But, though Cherry might once in a while have a moment's curiosity about what the robots were doing, she was not likely to be able to guess at the facts. Her upbringing was, for once, on Morey's side -- she knew so little of the grind, grind, grind of consuming that was the lot of the lower classes that she scarcely noticed that there was less of it. Morey almost, sometimes, relaxed. He thought of many ingenious chores for the robots, and the robots politely and emotionlessly obeyed. Morey was a success. It wasn't all gravy. There was a nervous moment for Morey when the quarterly survey report came in the mail. As the day for the Ration Board to check over the degree of wear on the turnedin discards came due, Morey began to sweat. The clothing and furniture and household goods the robots had consumed for him were very nearly in shreds. It had to look plausible, that was the big thing -- no normal person would wear a hole completely through the knee of a pair of pants, as Henry had done with his dress suit before Morey stopped him. Would the Board question it? Worse, was there something about the way the robots consumed the stuff that would give the whole show away? Some special wear point in the robot anatomy, for instance, that would rub a hole where no human's body could, or stretch a seam that should normally be under no strain at all? It was worrisome. But the worry was needless. When the report of survey came, Morey let out a long-held breath. Not a single item disallowed! Morey was a success -- and so was his scheme! the rewards of success. Morey arrived home one evening after a hard day's work at the office and was alarmed to find another car parked in his drive. It was a tiny two-seater, the sort affected by top officials and the very wellto-do. Right then and there Morey learned the first half of the embezzlers' lesson: Anything different is dangerous. He came uneasily into his own home, fearful that some high officer of the Ration Board had come to ask questions. But Cherry was glowing. "Mr. Porfirio is a newspaper feature writer and he wants to write you up for their 'Consumers of Distinction' page! Morey, I couldn't be more proud!" "Thanks," said Morey glumly. "Hello." Mr. Porfirio shook Morey's hand warmly. "I'm not exactly from a newspaper," he corrected. "Trans-video Press is what it is, actually. We're a news wire service; we supply forty-seven hundred papers with news and feature material. Every one of them," he added complacently, "on the required consumption list of Grades One through Six inclusive. We have a Sunday supplement selfhelp feature on consuming problems and we like to -- well, give credit where credit is due. You've established an enviable record, Mr. Fry. We'd like to tell our readers about it." "Um," said Morey. "Let's go in the drawing room." "Oh, no!" Cherry said firmly. "I want to hear this. He's so modest, Mr. Porfirio, you'd really never know what kind of a man he is just to listen to him talk. Why, my goodness, I'm his wife and I swear I don't know how he does all the consuming he does. He simply -- " "Have a drink, Mr. Porfirio," Morey said, against all etiquette. "Rye? Scotch? Bourbon? Ginand-tonic? Brandy Alexander? Dry Manha -- I mean what would you like?" He became conscious that he was babbling like a fool. "Anything," said the newsman. "Rye is fine. Now, Mr. Fry, I notice you've fixed up your place very attractively here and your wife says that your country home is just as nice. As soon as I came in, I said to myself, 'Beautiful home. Hardly a stick of furniture that isn't absolutely necessary. Might be a Grade Six or Seven.' And Mrs. Fry says the other place is even barer." "She does, does she?" Morey challenged sharply. "Well, let me tell you, Mr. Porfirio, that every last scrap of my furniture allowance is accounted for! I don't know what you're getting at, but -- " "Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply anything like that! I just want to get some information from you that I can pass on to our readers. You know, to sort of help them do as well as yourself. How do you do it?" -- well, we just keep after it. Hard work, that's all." Porfirio nodded admiringly. "Hard work," he repeated, and fished a triple-folded sheet of paper out of his pocket to make notes on. "Would you say," he went on, "that anyone could do as well as you simply by devoting himself to it -- setting a regular schedule, for example, and keeping to it very strictly?" "Oh, yes," said Morey. "In other words, it's only a matter of doing what you have to do every day?" "That's it exactly. I handle the budget in my house -- more experience than my wife, you see -- but no reason a woman can't do it." "Budgeting," Porfirio recorded approvingly. "That's our policy, too." The interview was not the terror it had seemed, not even when Porfirio tactfully called attention to Cherry's slim waistline ("So many housewives, Mrs. Fry, find it difficult to keep from being -- well, a little plump") and Morey had to invent endless hours on the exercise machines, while Cherry looked faintly perplexed, but did not interrupt. From the interview, however, Morey learned the second half of the embezzler's lesson. After Porfirio had gone, he leaped in and spoke more than a little firmly to Cherry. "That business of exercise, dear. We really have to start doing it. I don't know if you've noticed it, but you are beginning to get just a trifle heavier and we don't want that to happen, do we?" In the following grim and unnecessary sessions on the mechanical horses, Morey had plenty of time to reflect on the lesson. Stolen treasures are less sweet than one would like, when one dare not enjoy them in the open. But some of Morey's treasures were fairly earned. The new Bradmoor K-# Spina-Game, for instance, was his very own. His job was design and creation, and he was a fortunate man in that his efforts were permitted to be expended along the line of greatest social utility -- namely, to increase consumption. The Spin-a-Game was a wellnigh perfect machine for the purwright, beaming, when the pilot machine had been put through its first tests. "Guess they don't call me the Talent-picker for nothing. I knew you could do it, boy !" Even Howland was lavish in his praise. He sat munching on a plate of petitsfours (he was still only a Grade Three) while the tests were going on, and when they were over, he said enthusiastically, "It's a beauty, Morey. That series-corrupter -- sensational! Never saw a prettier piece of machinery." Morey flushed gratefully.  praise, and Morey patted his pilot model affectionately and admired its polychrome gleam. The looks of the machine, as Wainwright had lectured many a time, were as important as its function: "You have to make them want to play it, boy! They won't play it if they don't see it!" And consequently the whole K series was distinguished by flashing rainbows of light, provocative strains of music, haunting scents that drifted into the nostrils of the passerby with compelling effect. Morey had drawn heavily on all the old masterpieces of design -- the one-arm bandit, the pinball machine, the juke box. You put your ration book in the hopper. You spun the wheels until you selected the game you wanted to play against the machine. You punched buttons or spun dials or, in any of # different ways, you pitted your human skill against the magnetictaped skills of the machine. And you lost. You had a chance to win, but the inexorable statistics of the machine's setting made sure that if you played long enough, you had to lose. That is to say, if you risked a ten-point ration stamp -- showing, perhaps, that you had consumed three six-course meals -- your statistic return was eight points. You might hit the jackpot and get a thousand points back, and thus be exempt from a whole freezer-full of steaks and joints and prepared vegetables; but it seldom happened. Most likely you lost and got nothing. Got nothing, that is, in the way of your hazarded ration stamps. But the beauty of the machine, which was Morey's main contribution, was that, win or lose, you always found a pellet of vitamin-drenched, sugar-coated antibiotic hormone gum in the hopper. You played your game, won or lost your stake, popped your hormone gum into your mouth and played another. By the time that game was ended, the gum was used up, the coating dissolved; you discarded it and started another. "That's what the man from the Morey confidentially. "He took a set of schematics back with him; they might install it on all new machines. Oh, you're the fairhaired boy, all right!" It was the first Morey had heard about a man from the National Ration Board. It was good news. He excused himself and hurried to phone Cherry the story of his latest successes. He reached her at her mother's, where she was spending the evening, and she was properly impressed and affectionate. He came back to Howland in a glowing humor. "Drink?" said Howland diffidently. "Sure," said Morey. He could afford, he thought, to drink as much of Howland's liquor as he liked; poor guy, sunk in the consuming quicksands of Class Three. Only fair for somebody a little more successful to give him a hand once in a while. And when Howland, learning that Cherry had left Morey a bachelor for the evening, proposed Uncle Piggotty's again, Morey hardly hesitated at all. npHE Bigelows were delighted to see him. Morey wondered briefly if they had a home; certainly they didn't seem to spend much time in it. It turned out they did, because when Morey indicated virtuously that he'd only stopped in at Piggotty's for a single drink before dinner, and Howland revealed that he was free for the evening, they captured Morey and bore him off to their house. Tanaquil Bigelow was haughtily apologetic. "I don't suppose this is the kind of place Mr. Fry is used to," she observed to her husband, right across Morey, who was standing between them. "Still, we call it home." Morey made an appropriately polite remark. Actually, the place nearly turned his stomach. It was an enormous glaringly new mansion, bigger even than Morey's former house, stuffed to bursting with bulging sofas and pianos and massive mahogany chairs and tri-D sets and bedrooms and drawing rooms and breakfast rooms and nurseries. The nurseries were a shock to Morey; it had never occurred to him that the Bigelows had children. But they did and, though the children were only five and eight, they were still up, under the care of a brace of robot nursemaids, doggedly playing with their overstuffed animals and miniature trains. "You don't know what a comfort Tony and Dick are," Tanaquil Bigelow told Morey. "They consume so much more than their rations. Walter says that every family ought to have at least two or three children to, you know, help out. Walter's so intelligent about these things, it's a pleasure to hear him talk. Have you heard his poem, Morey? The one he calls The Twoness of -- " Morey hastily admitted that he had. He reconciled himself to a glum evening. The Bigelows had been eccentric but fun back at Uncle Piggotty's. On their own ground, they seemed just as eccentric, but painfully dull. They had a round of cocktails, and another, and then the Bigelows no longer seemed so dull. Dinner was ghastly, of course; Morey was nouveau-riche enough to be a snob about his relatively Spartan table. But he minded his manners and sampled, with grim concentration, each successive course of chunky protein and rich marinades. With the help of the endless succession of table wines and liqueurs, dinner ended without destroying his evening or his strained digestive system. And afterward, they were a pleasant company in the Bigelows' ornate drawing room. Tanaquil Bigelow, in consultation with the children, checked over their ration books and came up with the announcement that they would have a brief recital by a pair of robot dancers, followed by string music by a robot quartet. Morey prepared himself for the worst, but found before the dancers were through that he was enjoying himself. Strange lesson for Morey : When you didn't have to watch them, the robot entertainers were fun! "Good night, dears," Tanaquil Bigelow said firmly to the children when the dancers were done. The boys rebelled, naturally, but they went. It was only a matter of minutes, though, before one of them was back, clutching at Morey's sleeve with a pudgy hand. easily, having little experience with children. He said, "Uh -- what is it, Tony?" "Dick, you mean," the boy said. "Gimme your autograph." He poked an engraved pad and a vulgarly jeweled pencil at Morey. Morey dazedly signed and the child ran off, Morey staring after him. Tanaquil Bigelow laughed and explained, "He saw your name in Porfirio's column. Dick loves Porfirio, reads him every day. He's such an intellectual kid, really. He'd always have his nose in a book if I didn't keep after him to play with his trains and watch tri-D." "That was quite a nice writeup," Walter Bigelow commented -- a little enviously, Morey thought. "Bet you make Consumer of the Year. I wish," he sighed, "that we could get a little ahead on the quotas the way you did. But it just never seems to work out. We eat and play and consume like crazy, and somehow at the end of the month we're always a little behind in something -- everything keeps piling up -- and then the Board sends us a warning, and they call me down and, first thing you know, I've got a couple of hundred added penalty points and we're worse off than before." "Never you mind," Tanaquil replied staunchly. "Consuming isn't everything in life. You have your work." Bigelow nodded judiciously and offered Morey another drink. Another drink, however, was not what Morey needed. He was sitting in a rosy glow, less of alcohol than of sheer contentment with the world. He said suddenly, "Listen." Bigelow looked up from his own drink. "Eh?" "If I tell you something that's a secret, will you keep it that way?" Bigelow rumbled, "Why, I guess so, Morey." But his wife cut in sharply, "Certainly we will, Morey. Of course! What is it?" There was a gleam in her eye, Morey noticed. It puzzled him, but he decided to ignore it. He said, "About that writeup. I -- I'm not such a hot-shot consumer, really, you know. In fact -- " All of a sudden, everyone's eyes seemed to be on him. For a tortured moment, Morey wondered if he was doing the right thing. A secret that two people know is compromised, and a secret known to three people is no secret. Still -- "It's like this," he said firmly. "You remember what we were talking about at Uncle Piggotty's that night? Well, when I went home I went down to the robot quarters, and I -- " He went on from there. umphantly, "I knew it!" Walter Bigelow gave his wife a mild, reproving look. He dedared soberly. "You've done a big thing, Morey. A mighty big nounced the death sentence on our society as we know it. Future generations will revere the name of Morey Fry.' He solemnly shook Morey's hand. Morey said dazedly, "I what?" Walter nodded. It was a valedictory. He turned to his wife. "Tanaquil, we'll have to call an emergency meeting." "Of course, Walter," she said devotedly. "And Morey will have to be there. Yes, you'll have to, Morey; no excuses. We want the Brotherhood to meet you. Right, Howland?" Howland coughed uneasily. He nodded noncommittally and took another drink. Morey demanded desperately, "What are you talking about? Howland, you tell me!" Howland fiddled with his drink. "Well," he said, "it's like Tan was telling you that night. A few of us, well, politically mature persons have formed a little group. We -- " " Little group!" Tanaquil Bigelow said scornfully. "Howland, sometimes I wonder if you really catch the spirit of the thing at all! It's everybody. Morey, everybody in the world. Why, there are eighteen of us right here in Old Town! There are scores more all over the world! I knew you were up to something like this, Morey. I told Walter so the morning after we met you. I said, 'Walter, mark my words, that man Morey is up to something.' But I must say," she admitted worshipfully, "I didn't know it would have the scope of what you're proposing now! Imagine -- a whole world of consumers, rising as one man, shouting the name of Morey Fry, fighting the Ration Board with the Board's own weapon -- the robots. What poetic justice!" tically. "Call Uncle Piggotty's. dear," he ordered. "See if you can round up a quorum right now! Meanwhile, Morey and I are going belowstairs. Let's go, Morey -- let's get the new world started!" Morey sat there open-mouthed. He closed it with a snap. "Bigelow," he whispered, "do you mean to say that you're going to spread this idea around through some kind of subversive organization?" "Subversive?" Bigelow repeated stiffly. "My dear man, all creative minds are subversive, whether they operate singly or in such a group as the Brotherhood of Freemen. I scarcely like -- " "Never mind what you like," Morey insisted. "You're going to call a meeting of this Brotherhood and you want me to tell them what I just told you. Is that right?" "Well -- yes." Morey got up. "I wish I could say it's been nice, but it hasn't. Good night!" And he stormed out before they could stop him. Out on the street, though, his resolution deserted him. He hailed a robot cab and ordered the driver to take him on the tradithe park while he made up his mind. The fact that he had left, of course, was not going to keep Bigelow from going through with his announced intention. Morey remembered, now, fragments of conversation from Bigelow and his wife at Uncle Piggotty's, and cursed himself. They had, it was perfectly true, said and hinted enough about politics and purposes to put him on his guard. All that nonsense about twoness had diverted him from what should have been perfectly clear: They were subversives indeed. He glanced at his watch. Late, but not too late; Cherry would still be at her parents' home. He leaned forward and gave the driver their address. It was like beginning the first of a hundred-shot series of injections: you know it's going to cure you, but it hurts just tne same. that's it, sir. I know I've the consequences." Old Elon rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Um," he said. Cherry and her mother had long passed the point where they could say anything at all; they were seated side by side on a couch across the room, listening with expressions of strain and incredulity. Elon said abruptly, "Excuse me. Phone call to make." He left the room to make a brief call and returned. He said over his shoulder to his wife, "Coffee. We'll need it. Got a problem here." Morey said, "Do you think -- I mean what should I do?" Elon shrugged, then, surprisingly, grinned. "What can you do?" he demanded cheerfully. "Done plenty already, I'd say. Drink some coffee. Call I made," he explained, "was to Jim, my law clerk. He'll be here in a minute. Get some dope from Jim, then we'll know better." Cherry came over to Morey and sat beside him. All she said was, "Don't worry," but to Morey it conveyed all the meaning in the world. He returned the pressure of her hand with a feeling of deepest relief. Hell, he said to himself, why should I worry? Worst they can do to me is drop me a couple of grades and what's so bad about that? He grimaced involuntarily. He had remembered his own early struggles as a Class One and what was so bad about that. The law clerk arrived, a smallish robot with a battered stainless-steel hide and dull coppery features. Elon took the robot aside for a terse conversation before he came back to Morey. "As I thought," he said in satisfaction. "No precedent. No laws prohibiting. Therefore no crime." "Thank heaven!" Morey said in ecstatic relief. Elon shook his head. "They'll probably give you a reconditioning and you can't expect to keep your Grade Five. Probably call it antisocial behavior. Is, isn't it?" Dashed, Morey said, "Oh." He frowned briefly, then looked up. "All right, Dad, if I've got it coming to me, I'll take my medicine." "Way to talk," Elon said approvingly. "Now go home. Get a good night's sleep. First thing in the morning, go to the Ration Board. Tell 'em the whole story, beginning to end. They'll be easy on you." Elon hesitated. "Well, fairly easy," he amended. "I hope." T HE condemned man ate a hearty breakfast. He had to. That morning, as Morey awoke, he had the sick certainty that he was going to be consuming triple rations for a long, long time to come. He kissed Cherry good-by and took the long ride to the Ration Board in silence. He even left Henry behind. At the Board, he stammered at a series of receptionist robots and was finally brought into the presence of a mildly supercilious young man named Hachette. "My name," he started, "is Morey Fry. I -- I've come to -- talk over something I've been doing with -- " "Certainly, Mr. Fry," said Hachette. "I'll take you in to Mr. Newman right away." "Don't you want to know what I did?" demanded Morey. Hachette smiled. "What makes you think we don't know?" he said, and left. That was Surprise Number One. Newman explained it. He grinned at Morey and ruefully shook his head. "All the time we get this," he complained. "People just don't take the trouble to learn anything about the world around them. Son," he demanded, "what do you think a robot is?" Morey said, "Huh?" "I mean how do you think it operates? Do you think it's just a kind of a man with a tin skin and wire nerves?" "Why, no. It's a machine, of course. It isn't human.' Newman beamed. "Fine!" he said. "It's a machine. It hasn't got flesh or blood or intestines -- or a brain. Oh -- " he held up a hand -- "robots are smart enough. I don't mean that. But an electronic thinking machine, Mr. Fry, takes about as much space as the house you're living in. It has to. Robots don't carry brains around with them; brains are too heavy and much too bulky." "Then how do they think?" "With their brains, of course." "But you just said -- " "I said they didn't carry them. Each robot is in constant radio communication with the Master 'Talk Between Robots' radio. Master Control gives the answer, the robot acts." "I see," said Morey. "Well, that's very interesting, but -- " "But you still don't see," said Newman. "Figure it out. If the robot gets information from Master Control, do you see that Master Control in return necessarily gets information from the robot?" "Oh," said Morey. Then, louder, "Oh! You mean that all my robots have been -- " The words wouldn't come.  tion. "Every bit of information of that sort comes to us as a matter of course. Why, Mr. Fry, if you hadn't come in today, we would have been sending for you within a very short time!" That was the second surprise. Morey bore up under it bravely. After all, it changed nothing, he reminded himself. He said, "Well, be that as it may, sir, here I am. I came in of my own free will. I've been using my robots to consume my ration quotas -- " "Indeed you have," said Newman. statement to that effect any time you like. I don't know what the penalty is, but I'll take it. I'm guilty; I admit my guilt." Newman's eyes were wide. "Guilty?" he repeated. "Penalty?" Morey was startled. "Why, yes," he said. "I'm not denying anything." "Penalties," repeated Newman musingly. Then he began to laugh. He laughed, Morey thought, to considerable excess; Morey saw nothing he could laugh at, himself, in the situation. But the situation, Morey was forced to admit, was rapidly getting completely incomprehensible. "Sorry," said Newman at last, wiping his eyes, "but I couldn't help it. Penalties! Well, Mr. Fry, let me set your mind at rest. I wouldn't worry about the penalties if I were you. As soon as the reports began coming through on what you had done with your robots, we naturally assigned a special team to keep observing you, and we forwarded a report to the national headquarters. We made certain -- ah -- recommendations in it and -- well, to make a long story short, the answers came back yesterday. "Mr. Fry, the National Ration Board is delighted to know of your contribution toward improving our distribution problem. Pending a further study, a tentative program has been adopted for setting up consuming-robot units all over the country based on your scheme. Penalties? Mr. Fry, you're a hero!" " Morey's were quickly made clear to him. He was allowed time for a brief reassuring visit to Cherry, a triumphal tour of his old office, and then he was rushed off to Washington to be quizzed. He found the National Ration Board in a frenzy of work. "The most important job we've ever done," one of the high officers told him. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's the last one we ever have! Yes, sir, we're trying to put ourselves out of business for good and we don't want a single thing to go wrong." "Anything I can do to help -- " Morey began diffidently. "You've done fine, Mr. Fry. Gave us just the push we've been needing. It was there all the time for us to see, but we were too close to the forest to see the trees, if you get what I mean. Look, I'm not much on rhetoric and this is the biggest step mankind has taken in centuries and I can't put it into words. Let me show you what we've been doing." He and a delegation of other officials of the Ration Board and men whose names Morey had repeatedly seen in the newspapers took Morey on an inspection tour of the entire plant. "It's a closed cycle, you see," he was told, as they looked over a chamber of industriously plodding consumer-robots working off a shipment of shoes. "Nothing is permanently lost. If you want a car, you get one of the newest and best. If not, your car gets driven by a robot until it's ready to be turned in and a new one gets built for next year. We don't lose the metals -- they can be salvaged. All we lose is a little power and labor. And the Sun and the atom give us all the power we need, and the robots give us more labor than we can use. Same thing applies, of course, to all products." "But what's in it for the robots?" Morey asked. "I beg your pardon?" one of the biggest men in the country said uncomprehendingly. Morey had a difficult moment. His analysis had conditioned him against waste and this decidedly was sheer destruction of goods, no matter how scientific the jargon might be. "If the consumer is just using up things for the sake of using them up," he said doggedly, realizing the danger he was inviting, "we could use wear-and-tear machines instead of robots. After all why waste them?" They looked at each other worriedly. "But that's what you were doing," one pointed out with a faint note of threat. "Oh, no!" Morey quickly objected. "I built in satisfaction circuits -- my training in design, you know. Adjustable circuits, of course." "Satisfaction circuits?" he was asked. "Adjustable?" "Well, sure. If the robot gets no satisfaction out of using up things -- " "Don't talk nonsense," growled the Ration Board official. "Robots aren't human. How do you make them feel satisfaction? And adjustable satisfaction at that!" highly technical explanation, involving the use of great sheets of paper and elaborate diagrams. But there were trained men in the group and they became even more excited than before. "Beautiful!" one cried in scientific rapture. "Why, it takes care of every possible moral, legal and psychological argument!" "What does?" the Ration Board official demanded. "How?". "You tell him, Mr. Fry." Morey tried and couldn't. But he ceuld show how his principle operated. The Ration Board lab was turned over to him, complete with more assistants than he knew how to give orders to, and they built satisfaction circuits for a squad of robots working in a hat factory. Then Morey gave his demonstration. The robots manufactured hats of all sorts. He adjusted the circuits at the end of the day and the robots began trying on the hats, squabbling over them, each coming away triumphantly with a huge and diverse selection. Their metallic features were incapable of showing pride or pleasure, but both were evident in the way they wore their hats, their fierce possessiveness... and their faster, neater, more intensive, more dedicated work to produce a still greater quantity of hats... which they also were allowed to own. "You see?" an engineer exclaimed delightedly. "They can be adjusted to want hats, to wear them lovingly, to wear the hats to pieces. And not just for the sake of wearing them out -- the hats are an incentive for them!" "But how can we go on producing just hats and more hats?" the Ration Board man asked puzzledly. "Civilization does not live by hats alone." "That," said Morey modestly, "is the beauty of it. Look." He set the adjustment of the satisfaction circuit as porterrobots brought in skids of gloves. The hat-manufacturing robots fought over the gloves with the same mechanical passion as they had for hats. "And that can apply to anything we -- or the robots -- produce," Morey added. "Everything from pins to yachts. But the point is that they get satisfaction from possession, and the craving can be regulated according to the glut in various industries, and the robots show their appreciation by working harder." He hesitated. "That's what I did for my servant-robots. It's a feedback, you see. Satisfaction leads to more work -- and better work -- and that means more goods, which they can be made to want, which means incentive to work, and so on, all around." "Closed cycle," whispered the Ration Board man in awe. "A real closed cycle this time!" And so the inexorable laws of supply and demand were irrevocably repealed. No longer was mankind hampered by inadequate supply or drowned by overproduction. What mankind needed was there. What the race did not require passed into the insatiable -- and adjustable -- robot maw. Nothing was wasted. For a pipeline has two ends. Morey was thanked, complimented, rewarded, given a tickertape parade through the city, and put on a plane back home. By that time, the Ration Board had liquidated itself.  port. They jabbered excitedly at each other all the way to the house. In their own living room, they finished the kiss they had greeted each other with. At last Cherry broke away, laughing. Morey said, "Did I tell you I'm through with Bradmoor? From now on I work for the Board as civilian consultant. And," he added impressively, "starting right away, I'm a Class Eight!" "My!" gasped Cherry, so worshipfully that Morey felt a twinge of conscience. He said honestly, "Of course, if what they were saying in Washington is so, the classes aren't going to mean much pretty soon. Still, it's quite an honor." "It certainly is," Cherry said staunchly. "Why, Dad's only a Class Eight himself and he's been a judge for I don't know how many years." Morey pursed his lips. "We can't all be fortunate," he said generously. "Of course, the classes still will count for something -- that is, a Class One will have so much to consume in a year, a Class Two will have a little less, and so on. But each person in each class will have robot help, you see, to do the actual consuming. The way it's going to be, special facsimile robots will -- " Cherry flagged him down. "I know, dear. Each family gets a robot duplicate of every person in the family." "Oh," said Morey, slightly annoyed. "How did you know?" "Ours came yesterday," she explained. "The man from the Board said we were the first in the area -- because it was your idea, of course. They haven't even been activated yet. I've still got them in the Green Room. Want to see them?" "Sure," said Morey buoyantly. He dashed ahead of Cherry to inspect the results of his own brainstorm. There they were, standing statue-still against the wall, waiting to be energized to begin their endless tasks. "Yours is real pretty," Morey said gallantly. "But -- say, is that thing supposed to look like me?" He inspected the chromium face of the man-robot disapprovingly. "Only roughly, the man said." Cherry was right behind him. "Notice anything else?" Morey leaned closer, inspecting the features of the facsimile robot at a close range. "Well, no," he said. "It's got a kind of a squint that I don't like, but -- Oh, you mean that!" He bent over to examine a smaller robot, half hidden between the other pair. It was less than two feet high, big-headed, pudgy-limbed, thick-bellied. In fact, Morey thought wonderingly, it looked almost like -- "My God!" Morey spun around, staring wide-eyed at his wife. "You mean -- " "I mean," said Cherry, blushing slightly. Morey reached out to grab her in his arms. "Darling!" he cried. "Why didn't you tell me?" Limiting Factor Is there a Homo superior in the audience? This story is printed primarily for you! T HE beautiful girl slammed the door shut behind her and for a moment there was silence in the apartment. The blond young man in baggy tweeds looked at the closed door uncertainly, made a motion as if to follow her, and then stopped himself. "Good boy," said a voice from the open window. "Who's there?" The young man turned and squinted out into the darkness. "It's me. Ferdie." "You didn't have to spy on me. I told Karl I'd break off." "I wasn't spying, Jan. Karl sent me over. Mind if I come in?" Jan grunted indifferently and a short stocky man drifted in through the window. As his feet touched the floor, he gave a little sigh of relief. He went back to the window, leaned out, and looked down the full eighty stories to the street below. "It's a long way down there," he said. "Levitation's fine, but I don't think it will ever take the place of the old-fashioned elevator. The way I look at it is that if Man was intended to fly, he'd have been born with wings." "Man, maybe," said Jan, "but not superman. Want a drink? I do." Ferdie nodded. "Maybe our kids will take it as a matter of course, but I just can't relax when I'm floating. I'm always afraid I'll blow a neuron or something and go spinning down." He gave a shudder and swallowed the drink in one gulp. "How did it go? Did she take it pretty hard?" "Tomorrow will be worse. She's angry now and that acts as a sort of emotional anesthetic. When that wears off, it's really going to hurt. I don't feel so good myself. We were going to be married in March." "I know," said Ferdie sympathetically, "but if it's any consolation, you're going to be so busy from now on that you won't have much time to think about it. Karl sent me over to pick you up because we're pulling out tonight. Which reminds me, I'd better call old Kleinholtz and tell him he'll have to find himself a new lab technician. Mind if I use your phone?" Jan shook his head mutely and gestured toward the hallway. tWO minutes later, Ferdie was back. "The old boy gave me a rough time," he said. "Wanted to know why I was walking out on him just when the apparatus was about ready for testing. I told him I had a sudden attack of itchy feet and there wasn't much I could do about it." He shrugged. "Well, the rough work's done, anyway. About all that's left is running the computations and I couldn't handle that if I wanted to. It's strange, Jan -- I've spent a whole year helping him put that gadget together, and I still don't know what it's for. I asked him again just now and the tight-mouthed old son of a gun just laughed at me and said that if I knew which side my bread was buttered on, I'd get back to work in a hurry. I guess it's pretty big. It's a shame I won't be around to see it." He moved toward the window. "We'd better be on our way, Jan. The rest will be waiting for us." Jan stood irresolute and then slowly shook his head. "I'm not going." "What?" "You heard me. I'm not going." Ferdie went over to him and took him gently by the arm. "Come on now, boy. I know it's hard, but you've made your decision and you've got to stick to it. You can't pull back now." Jan turned away sullenly. "You can all go to hell! I'm going after her." "Don't be a fool. No woman is worth that much." "She is to me. I have been a fool, but I'm not going to be any longer. I was a pretty happy guy before you people came along. I had a job I liked and a girl I loved and the future looked good. If I back-track fast enough, maybe I'll be able to salvage something. Tell the rest I've changed my mind and I'm pulling out." The short stocky man went over and poured himself another drink. "No, you're not, Jan. You aren't enough of a superman to be able to forget those poor devils down there." He gestured at the peaceful city that spread out below them. "There won't be any trouble in our time," Jan said. "Or in our children's," agreed Ferdie, "but there will be in our grandchildren's and then it will be too late. Once the row starts, you know how it will come out. You've got an extra something in your brain -- use it!" Jan looked out into the night and finally turned to answer. Before he could, an angry voice suddenly boomed inside his head. "What's holding you up over there? We haven't got all night!" "Come on," said Ferdie. "We can argue later. If Karl is wound up enough about something to telepath, it must be important. Me, I'll stick to the telephone. What's the point to having a built-in tranceiver, if you have to put up with a splitting headache every time you use it?" He stepped to the window and climbed up on the sill. "Ready?" Jan hesitated and slowly climbed up beside him. "I'll go talk to Karl, anyway," he said. "Maybe you're right, but it still hurts like hell." "The head?" "No, the heart. All set?" Ferdie nodded. They both closed their eyes, tensed, and drifted slowly up into the night. couch with his head in Miranda's lap and a look of suffering on his face. She was gently massaging his temples. "Next time use a telephone," said Ferdie as he and Jan came in. Karl sat up suddenly. "What took you so long?" "What do you mean, so long? An aircab would have got us here a lot quicker, but we're supermen -- we've got to levitate." "I'm not amused," said Karl. "Are you all set?" Ferdie nodded. "All ties broken and everything prepared for a neat and tidy disappearance." "And him?" Karl looked narrowly at Jan. "He's all right." "Yeah, I'm fine," said Jan. "Girl and job dumped down the drain. Do you want the details? Ferdie's boss figured he'd be back. He said Ferdie knew which side his bread was buttered on. My girl didn't say anything; she just slammed the door in my face. And now that that's over, if you'll just detail me a female I'll start breeding little supermen for you. How about Miranda? She's one of the elect." "Climb off it, Jan," Karl said sharply. "We know it wasn't easy, but dramatics won't help." Jan threw himself sullenly into an overstuffed chair and stared morosely at the ceiling. Karl pulled himself to his feet and made a quick survey of the room. "... thirty-seven, thirtyeight -- I guess we're all here. Go ahead, Henry. You've got the floor." A tall, prematurely gray man began to speak quietly. "It's got to be tonight. There is heavy cloud cover over Alta Pass that goes up to twenty thousand feet. If we're careful, we should be able to take off without detection. I suggest we leave at once. It'll take some time to move the ship out of the cave and we want to be on our way before the weather clears." "Check," said Karl. He turned to Miranda. "You know your job. The ship will be back to pick up the new crop in ten months or so." "I still think you should leave somebody else behind," she objected. "I can't listen twenty-four hours a day." "You're just looking for company," Karl said impatiently. "The unconscious mental signals that mark the change go on for a week or more before the individual knows anything is happening. You'll have plenty of time to make contact." "Oh, all right, but don't forget to send a relief back for me. It's going to be lonely with all of you gone." Karl gave, her a short but affectionate kiss. "Okay, gang, let's go." T HE engine room of the ship consisted simply of an oval table with ten bucket seats spaced equidistantly around it. At the moment, only one of them was occupied. Ferdie sat there, his eyes closed and his face pale and tense. As a hand touched his shoulder, he jumped, and for a moment the ship quivered slightly until the new mind took over. Ferdie ran his hands through his hair and then pressed them against his aching temples. Then he stood up. There was a slight stagger to his walk as he pulled himself up the ladder into the forward observation room. "Rough shift?" said Jan. Ferdie groaned. "They're all rough. If I'd known how much work was going to be involved in this superman stuff. I'd have arranged to be born to different parents. You may think there is something romantic about dragging this tin ark through hyperspace by sheer mental pressure, but to me it feels like the old horse-and-buggy days with me as the horse. Mental muscle, physical muscle -- what's the difference? It's still plain hard work. Give me an old-fahioned machine where I can sit back and push buttons." "Maybe this was your last turn at the table." Jan looked out at the gray nothingness on the other side of the observation port. "Karl says we're due to pull out of warp this evening." "And by the time we look around and find that Alpha Centauri has no suitable planets, it'll be my turn to pull us back in again." clanged through the ship. A moment later, all ten seats in the engine room were occupied. "Brace yourself and grab hold," snapped Karl. "This is going to take a heap of twisting." It did. Three times, figures collapsed and were quickly replaced by those waiting behind them, but at last they broke through into normal space. With a sigh of relief, they all relaxed. Karl reached over and switched on the ship intercom. "How does she look up there, Ferdie?" "Alpha Centauri blazing dead ahead." There was a slight pause. "Also there's a small man in a derby hat directly off the starboard bow." Those in the engine room deserted their posts and made a mad dash for the forward observation compartment. Ferdie was standing as if transfixed, staring raptly out into space. As Karl came up and grabbed his arm, he pointed with a shaking finger. "Look!" Karl looked. A plump little figure wearing a severly cut business suit, highbuttoned shoes, spats, and a derby hat was floating a scant five yards from the observation port. He waved cheerily at them and then opening the briefcase he carried, removed a large sheet of paper. He held it up and pointed to the words lettered on it in large black print. "What does it say?" demanded Karl. "My eyes don't seem to be working." Ferdie squinted. "This is insanity' "It says that?" "No, I do. It says, 'May I come on board?' " "What do you think?" "I think we're both crazy, but if he wants to, I say let him." sent to the figure floating outside and pointed aft to the airlock. The little man shook his head, unbuttoned his vest, and reached inside it. He twiddled with something for a moment and then disappeared. A split-second later, he was standing in the middle of the observation compartment. He took off his hat and bowed politely to the jaw-dropped group. "Your servant, gentlemen. My name is Thwiskumb -- Ferzial Thwiskumb. I'm with Gliterslie, Quimbat and Swench, Exporters. I was on my way to Formalhaut on a customer service call when I noted an odd disturbance in sub-ether, so I stopped for a moment to see what would come out. You're from Sol, aren't you?" Karl nodded dumbly. "Thought so," said the little man. "Do you mind if I ask your destination?" He had to repeat the question before he was able to get a coherent answer. Ferdie was the first to recover enough from shock to say anything. "We were hoping to find a habitable planet in the Alpha Centauri system." Mr. Thwiskumb pursed his lips. "There is one, but there are difficulties. It's reserved for the Primitives, you see. I don't know how the Galactic Council would view settlement. Of course, the population has been shrinking of late and there's practically nobody left on the southern continent." He stopped and thought. "Tell you what I'll do. When I get to Formalhaut, I'll give the Sector Administrator a call and see what he has to say. And now if you'll excuse me, I don't want to be late for my appointment. Gliterslie, Quimbat and Swench pride themselves on their punctuality." He was reaching inside his vest again when Karl grabbed his arm. The flesh felt reassuringly solid. "Have we gone insane?" begged the leader. "Oh, dear me, of course not," said Mr. Thwiskumb, disengaging himself gently. "You're just a few thousand years behind on the development cycle. The migration of the Superiors from our home planet took place when your people were still in the process of discovering the use of fire." "Migration?" repeated Karl blankly. "The same thing you're off on." said the little man. He removed his glasses and polished them carefully. "The mutations that follow the release of atomic power almost always end up in the evolution of a group with some sort of control over the terska force. Then the problem of future relations with the Normals comes up, and the Superiors quite often decide on a secret migration to avoid future conflict. It's a mistake, though. When you see what I mean. I'm afraid you'll find it a depressing place." Placing his derby firmly on his head, he gave a genial wave of farewell and disappeared. A wild look was in Karl's eyes as he held up his arms for silence. "There's just one thing I want to know," he said. "Have I or have I not been talking to a small man in a derby hat for the past five minutes?" they pulled away from Cenuntil they could decide what they wanted to do. It was a depressed and confused group that gathered in the forward observation compartment to discuss their future. "There's no use wasting time now talking about what we saw down there," said Karl. "What we've got to decide is whether we're going to push on to other solar systems until we find a planet that will suit our needs, or whether we are going to return to Earth." A little red-headed girl waved her hand. "Yes, Martha?" Karl said. "I think we are going to have to talk about what we saw down there. If our leaving Earth means that we are condemning it to a future like that, we're going to have to go back." There was an immediate objection from a tense young man in horn-rimmed glasses. "Whether we go back or ahead will make little difference in our lifetimes, so we can't be accused of personal selfishness if we don't return to Earth. The people it will make a difference to are our descendants. That strange little man who materialized among us two days ago and then vanished is a concrete demonstration of what they can be -- if we stay apart and develop the new powers that have been given us. I say the welfare of the new superrace is more important than that of the Ordinaries we left behind !" There was a short muttering of agreement as he sat down. "Next?" Karl asked. Half a dozen people tried to get the floor at once, but Ferdie managed to get recognized. "I say go back!" he stated. "And since the previous speaker was talking about accusations, let me say that I can't be accused of personal bias, either. As far as I'm concerned, I would just as soon spend the next several years cruising around to the far corners to see what's up. But the longer we're gone, the harder it will be to fit ourselves back into normal society. "Look, we left Earth because we thought it was the best thing for mankind. And when I say mankind, I mean the Normals, the parent race. What we saw down there -- " he gestured in the dramatic proof that we were wrong. It would seem that a scattering of Superiors is somehow necessary to keep human society from collapsing. Maybe we act as a sort of essential catalyst or something. Whatever it is, we're needed. If we walk out on Man, we'll never be able to live with ourselves in our brave new world." I agree with you," he said, "but if we go back, we'll be dumped into the old problem of future relations again. Right now there are so few of us that if we were found out, we'd be looked upon as freaks. But what's going to happen when our numbers start to shoot up? Any group that has special powers is suspect, and I don't relish the thought of condemning our descendants to a world where they'll have to kill or be killed." "If worst comes to worst, they can always take off the way we did." replied Ferdie. "But I'd like to point out that migration was the first solution proposed and the one we've given all our attention to. There must be other ways out, if we look for them. We've got to give it a try, anyway." He turned to the young man in the horn-rimmed glasses. "How about it, Jim?" The other nodded reluctantly. "I'm dubious, but maybe we should go back and make the try you've been talking about." His voice sharpened. "Under one condition, though. If the Normals start to give us any trouble, we get out again!" "I'll agree to that," said Ferdie. "How about the rest of you?" "Let's make it official." said Karl. "All in favor of returning?" The ayes had it. There was a sound of polite applause from the doorway. Mr. Thwiskumb had returned. "A very wise decision," he said, "very wise. It demonstrates a commendable social maturity. I am sure your descendants will thank you for it." "I don't know what for," said Karl sadly. "We're robbing them of all the things that you have. Instantaneous teleportation, for example. It's no particular sacrifice for us -- we're just starting to develop the powers within us -- but it will be for them. I don't know if we are right, asking them to pay such a price." "What about the other price?" demanded Ferdie. "What about that scrawny grimy gang down tically in the hot sun and scratching themselves? We also have no right to condemn the Ordinaries to a future like that." "Oh, you wouldn't be doing that," said Mr. Thwiskumb mildly. "Those people down there aren't Ordinaries." "What!" "Dear me, no. They weren't the ones that were left behind. They are the descendants of those who migrated. Those poor devils down there are pure-blooded Superiors. When they ran into the limiting factor, they just gave up." "Then what accounts for you? You're obviously a Superior." say," answered the little man, "but I'm just as ordinary as anyone can be. We're all Ordinaries where I come from. Our Superiors left a long time ago." He chuckled. "It's a funny thing -- at the time, we didn't know they were gone, so we didn't miss them. We just went about business as usual. Later, we found them, but it was already too late. You see, the big difference was that we had an unlimited area of development and they didn't. There's no limit to the machine, but there is to the human organism. No matter how much training you have, there is a limit to how loud you can shout. After that, you have to get yourself an amplifier. "A slight neural rearrangement makes it possible for you to tap and control certain sources of physical energy that aren't directly available to the ordinary man of your planet, but you are still dealing with natural forces... and natural organic limits. There is a point beyond which you can't go without the aid of the machine, an organic limiting factor. But after several generations spefit in mastering what is inside your heads, rather than struggling for control of the world around you, and the time comes when your natural limits are reached, the very concept of the machine has been lost. Then where do you go from there?" He waited for an answer, but nobody offered one. "There is an old story in our folklore," he continued, "about a boy who bought himself an animal somewhat like your terrestrial calf. He thought that if he lifted it above his head ten times a day while it was little, he would build up his strength gradually until he would still be able to lift it over his head when it was a full-grown animal. He soon discovered the existence of a natural limiting factor. Do you see what I mean? When those people down there reached their natural limits, there was no place for them to go but backward. We had the machine, though, and the machine can always be made smaller and better, so we had no stopping point." He reached inside his vest and pulled out a small shining object about the size of a cigarette case. "This is hooked by a tight beam to the great generators on Altair. Of course I 'wouldn't, but I could move planets with it if I wanted to. It's simply a matter of applying a long enough lever, and the lever, if you'll remember, is a simple machine." Karl looked dazed. In fact, everyone did. "Yeah," he muttered, "yeah, I see what you mean." He turned to the group. "All right, let's get back to the engine room. We've got a long flight ahead of us." "How long?" asked the little man. "Four months if we push it." "Shocking waste of time." "I suppose you can do better?" Karl inquired belligerently. "Oh, dear me, yes." said Mr. Thwiskumb. "It would take me about a minute and a half. You Superiors dawdle so -- I'm glad I'm normal." J AN was doing a happy little dance through his apartment when his buzzer rang. He opened the door and Ferdie stepped in. "I came up on the elevator," he said. "It's a lot easier on the nerves. My, you look pleased authors of Science-Fiction. Fantasy and Wlerd adventures as near as your mailbox! A unique book catalog -- complete descriptions, fully Illustrated... and It doesn't cost you a cent! Send your name and address, and you'll get your copy by return mall. And we'll keep you posted regularly from now on, sending you news of outstanding book values... bargains galore; Add your name to the thousands of others we have been serving for years. No obligation! # E. San Fernando St.  Dept. G-#  San Jose #, California with yourself. I know why, too -- I saw her coming out of the lobby when I came in. She walked as if she were wearing clouds instead of shoes." Jan did a little caper. "We're getting married next week and I got my job back." "I got mine back, too," said Ferdie. "Old Kleinholtz gave me a little lecture about walking out on him when work was at its heaviest, but he was too pleased with himself to do more than a perfunctory job. When he took me back into the lab, I saw why. He's finally got his gadget running." "What did it turn out to be? A time machine?" Ferdie grinned mysteriously. "Something almost as good. It lifts things." "What kind of things?" "Any kind. Even people. Old Kleinholtz had a little set of controls rigged up that he could strap to his chest. He turned the machine on and went flying around the lab like a bird." Jan's jaw dropped. "The way we do?" "Just the same, boy. He's found a way to tap the terska force. Really tap it, not suck little driblets out, as we do. Another ten years and the Ordinaries will be able to do anything we can do, only better. And a good thing, too. Telepathy gives us headaches, and levitation is a pleasant Sunday afternoon pastime, but hardly something to build a civilization on. As Mr. Thwiskumb said, the machine has no natural limits, so I guess our worries about the future are over. Nobody is going to be unhappy about us being able to fly thirty miles an hour when they can make it instantaneous. Looks like superman is obsolete before he even had a chance to get started." He stretched his arms and yawned. "Guess I'd better get home and hit the sack. It's going to be a busy day at the lab tomorrow." He walked over to the open window and looked out. "Flying home?" asked Jan. Ferdie grinned and shook his head. "I'm waiting until the new improved model comes out." The Big News Next Month... the strangest future society any author ever dreamed upl issue... , a basket-case woman who must rely on a surgeon who had never before seen a human being! information I F this piece has any moral at all, it should be construed as a lecture on credulity. Not only should you be careful believing what you hear and read, you can't even always trust "tangible evidence." Of course tangible evidence is evidence all right, but there still remains the question: "evidence for what?" But let's proceed with what is probably the worst recorded case of misleading evidence in all history. The year was # A.D. The place was the city of Wurzburg, the capital of Lower Franconia, in southwestern Germany. Wurzburg has a university that is famous for several reasons. One of these reasons is that it was founded twice, once in # and once in #. Another reason is that this is the place where Dr. Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen discovered his Rontgen rays or X-rays in #. And the third reason for its fame is the case I am going to talk about. In #, some people informed the professors of the university that they had found an enormous bone, as hard and heavy as stone and so huge that only a giant could have been its original possessor. A few days later, several men, groaning and sweating, carried the bone up the steps and placed it on a sturdy oaken table. The professors of the university were not as happy about this as professors of a modern university would be. They would have preferred to close their eyes, but the government had asked for an opinion and there was nothing else they could do but give one. The professors met in a formal council and, since the object did seem to be a bone, the Professor of Medicine was the logical chairman. His name was Johann Bartholomaeus Adam Beringer. rpHE bone was actually the fossilized relic of a member of the elephant tribe which had lived in the area of Wurzburg some the council of professors, prodded by its chairman, arrived at the conclusion that this was a lusus naturae. The term they used may be rendered in English as "play of Nature," but what they had in mind when they used it will probably remain a mystery for all time to come. Fossils, in those days, were recognized for what they really were by only a few advanced thinkers. Most of the savants held a vague kind of belief of a mineral creation paralleling animate creation, but did not agree with each other on how it had come about. A few thought that, under special circumstances, a plant seed or a fish egg might develop in a mineral environment, producing a mineral plant or mineral fish. Others suggested a vapidly mystical life-giving mist coming from the sea. Still others held astrological influences responsible. And some said that the mineral creation may have been the result of God's practicing with mineral matter before He progressed to animate creation. But all the proponents of these conflicting beliefs presented a united front against the fantastic heretics who said that a fossil fish probably once was a live fish before it became a fossil. As for the Professor medicinae Beringer, he was convinced that such an explanation was sheerest nonsense and he lectured his students on "plays of Nature." The stuabsorb their professor's opinions. They went along with the first repetition and the next. They had, after all, enrolled to study medicine. At about that time, Prof. Beringer started looking for fossils, presumably to have more material for his interminable arguments. There are fossils in the Wurzburg area, but Prof. Beringer happened to have a very special kind of luck. One day he came home with a slab of stone showing in unmistakably clear bas relief the picture of a comet. Maybe those who thought that astrological influences caused the "plays of Nature" were not so wrong, after all. Some time later, he found a stone slab with a crescent moon. Then another comet. Then a whole bird, complete with egg. The more diligently Prof. Beringer dug in his favorite place, the more astonishing the results. Strange animals that nobody had ever seen alive and which were not mentioned in even the biggest natural history books. Enormous spiders and their webs. And one day a stone slab with Hebrew letters. Like other scholars of his time, Prof. Beringer had been taught three classical languages: Latin, Greek and Hebrew. These letters seemed to spell the name of God. In so important a matter, Prof. Beringer did not wish to rely on his own knowledge alone. He got in touch with the rabbi of a nearby Jewish community and the rabbi confirmed his opinion -- the letters did spell the name of God! make careful drawings of his finds, then an engraver to transfer the drawings to plates. Meanwhile, he wrote a book -- in Latin, of course -- of fourteen chapters, with a long preface and a ninepage dedication to 'Dr. Christopher Francis, the Prince Bishop of Wurzburg. Since Beringer was not at all secretive about his work, everybody around the university knew about it. He had friends who tried to make him realize that he had been hoaxed. A few students even confessed that they had made the "lying stones" that Beringer had dug up. His friends quoted the case of Father Athanasius Kircher, S. J., who had also taught at Wurzburg for a while and who had been similarly hoaxed by his students. Beringer grew indignant. All this "friendly" advice and the student's confessions were merely part of a plot to rob him of the glory of his discovery. He finished his book and it appeared in # under the title Lithographiae Wirceburgensis. The laughter that greeted the publication was unanimous. And, it is said, at the same time Beringer was confronted with a stone on which he could read his own name in "fossil" Hebrew letters. Shocked, he spent what money he had trying to buy up all available copies of his expensive work. Fourteen years after the publication of the book that was to make him famous -- and did, in a way -- Beringer died. By then the book was famous in itself and a bookseller in Hamburg bought all the copies left in the hands of the original publisher and sold them. They sold so briskly, in fact, that another edition was printed in #. There can be no doubt that no man has ever been more thoroughly hoaxed than Beringer. It is still doubtful just why. That students made the "lying stones" is certain, but whether they did this as a joke or whether some unknown enemy of Beringer's was behind the whole cruel deception has never been cleared up.  In #, the University of Wurzburg still had # of the original "lying stones" in its collection. I have not been able to find out what has happened to them since. But copies of the book are in many large libraries. O LD Cajus Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder, as he is often called to distinguish him from Pliny the Younger (who was his nephew), indulged in one of his comparatively rare philosophical speculations when, in the course of writing his monumental Natural History, he came to the subject of iron. Iron, he said, is useful for building houses, cleaving rocks and for many other purposes. But it is also used by robbers and for war. However, he continued, "Nature, in conformity with her usual benevolence, has limited the power of iron by inflicting upon it the punishment of rust; and has thus displayed her usual foresight in rendering nothing in existence more perishable than the substance which brings the greatest dangers upon perishable mortality." The modern engineer may not be too convinced about the "usual benevolence of Nature," but he is still fully aware of the "punishment of rust." Much of what goes under the general term of maintenance is the effort to counteract this fact. Our big bridges are tended by permanent groups of painters; by the time they have finished painting at one' end, it is time to start again at the other. And everybody know what happens to a piece of machinery that is left outdoors for a year. But while everybody has been reconciled to the fact that the "punishment of rust" existed, there seemed to be a nagging example, apparently pointing out that things did not have to be that way. In the city of Delhi -- more specifically, in the so-called Old City, which is some ten miles from the modern section -- there stands an impressive old tower. Its name is Kutb-Minar and it was built to commemorate the victories of an old Mohammedan general whose name was Kutbud-din. The tower is # feet tall and is built of colored sandstone, with red sandstone at the bottom that gradually changes to bright orange sandstone at the top. Part of this monument is an iron pillar. This Iron Pillar is untended in the sense that nothing was ever done to prevent it from rusting. The Iron Pillar is virtually uncorroded in spite of lack of care. And it is almost # years old. For almost two centuries, the Iron Pillar of Delhi has been quoted as an example of iron that does not rust. As is usually the case when the real reason for something is unknown, the rustresistance of the Iron Pillar inspired multitudes of conjectures. The most obvious and least provable idea was, of course, that this was an example of a "lost art." Presumably some Moslem savant, or armorer, or even a simple blacksmith, had found a method of making iron rustproof by the addition of some now forgotten substance. Or, which would be even harder to establish, by a process of treatment. Another idea -- the one I heard from a professor of mine when I was a student -- was that the Iron Pillar might be rustproof because of the absence of all additions. All the iron we use, from steel beams to razor blades, is chemically "impure" -- it contains various additions, ranging from other metals like vanadium to simple carbon and silicon. In fact, it is very hard to produce iron that has almost no impurities. So the reasoning ran that somebody in the Moslem world of # years ago had hit, evidently by a lucky chance, upon absolutely pure iron. And it was postulated that absolutely pure iron would not rust. That assertion is doubtful, to say the least. But the mystery of the Iron Pillar has been solved. Everybody had been looking in the wrong direction. People had studied the pillar instead of its surroundings. After a careful survey made by J. C. Hudson of the British Iron and Steel Research Association, it seems that the famous pillar is still standing in Delhi because of the dry climate. According to Hudson, there is virtually no rusting as long as the relative humidity of the air is less than # per cent. And at Delhi that humidity is very rarely even approached. No "lost art." Nothing that is in any way mysterious or impressive. Just dry weather for # centuries. Many stars, perhaps the majority, are double or multiple. Has it been established that an orbit stable enough, as well as suitable in other respects, can exist for a hypothetical planet to permit long-term evolution of life in these systems? If so, have any general requirements for the systems been laid down? Alfred B. Mason, M. D. Camp Lejeune, N. C. Offhand, I can think of three kinds of stable orbits in doublestar systems, depending on the type of system. If we have a close double with the two stars not much more than one star-diameter -- planets at a distance of about # star-diameters will orbit around the pair as if it were a single star. On the other hand, if the two stars forming the binary are # star-diameters apart, each star could have a family of planets that would be only slightly perturbed by the other star. Finally, there is a possibility that the two stars are about # or # star-diameters apart and that one of them is several times as massive as the other. In this case, a planet could well revolve around the larger of the two in an equilateral ("Trojan") position. Planets in stable orbits are therefore possible in binary star systems. The V-# rocket as used against London in the last war had, I understand, a mass-ratio of about # ##. What is the mass-ratio of the most efficient rocket develeffect does the two-step rocket have upon the overall mass-ratio? Alan Jackson # Eltham High Street London S. S. #. England Since the weight of the structure of the V-# rocket was (in rounded-off figures) # tons, the weight of the payload one ton and the weight of the fuels # tons, the mass-ratio of the V-# was almost precisely #:#. The mass-ratio of the Viking rocket, of less overall weight, is very close to #:#. In step rockets, the final velocities attained by the various steps add up, which has the same result as if the massratios were multiplied. Imagine that the lower step is a V-# with its #:I mass-ratio and that the payload carried is a smaller rocket, which also has a massratio of #:#. The final velocity reached by the second step is equivalent to a rocket of the mass-ratio of #:#. But a mass-ratio of #:I would strain the resources and the ingenuity of the designing engineer to the utmost, while it is comparatively easy to build two rockets, each with a massratio of #:#. Having read a great deal about gigantic stars like Mira, I wonder which star is regarded as the smallest star. Also, if we found a lonely body in space which is not luminous, would it be called a planet because it does not shine or would it be called a dead star if it is big enough? Gerd Lipschitz Trenton, N. J. For a number of years, a star catalogued as "BDj# #," discovered at the McDonald Observatory, Texas, was believed to be the faintest known star. It was, in fact, the faintest known star from # until #, when Drs. Luyten and Carpenter, working at the Steward Observatory, Arizona, established a still fainter star. Its luminosity is so low that # of its kind would be needed to give off as much light as our sun. And its diameter is only about # miles larger than the diameter of our moon, which is # miles. But this tiny star, catalogued as L#-#, has # per cent more mass than our sun, which means that its density must be some # million times the density of water! As for your second question, it is this high density that would be used as a criterion when a large dark body is found. If this body, as you specify, is not luminous, but had such a high density, it would obviously be a dead star. If it had a density comparable to that of the planets, which ranges from not quite I for Saturn to # for Earth, it would have to be considered a planet that was somehow torn from its sun. Whether there are actually non-luminous dead stars is doubtful. The so-called superdense "White Dwarfs," of which the two faint stars mentioned above are examples, are regarded as the end of stellar evolution and may be called "dead" in the sense that they no longer generate energy and have nothing left with which to do so. But they are still hot because they have not yet had time to cool off and turn dark in the process. Because of their large (and hot) mass and their small surface area, they cool very slowly. The time needed to cool is estimated to be longer than the present age of our universe. If this reasoning is correct, as it appears to lie in the light of present knowledge, no star has been able to cool to temperatures below visibility. I have just read your article on the " Trojan Planets" and would like it very much if you wrote an article on the moons of Jupiter. All l know about them are the names of the four largest ones. What are the names, sizes and distances of the others? John Slivka # Greenwood Avenue Lackawanna #, N. Y. The moons of Jupiter, except for the four largest, which have been known since #, have never been named. They are designated by Roman numerals preceded by a J. Because they are numbered in the order of discovery, their sequence, counting from Jupiter outward, reads J-V, J-I (Io), J-II (EurJupiter's moons clearly form two main groups, with J-V as a special case defying classification. J-V is only # miles from the planet, needs half a day for one complete revolution and has a diameter of about # miles. Then comes the inner group of moons, those which have names. They are big. Io has a diameter of # miles, Europa a diameter of # miles, and Ganymede and Callisto are of equal size, # miles in diameter (# miles more than Mercury). Their distances are, respectively, #, #, # and # miles, and their periods of revolution #, #, # and # days, respectively. The outer moons are all rather small and again form two between # and # miles from the planet, needing between # and # days for one revolution. J-VI has a diameter of # miles, the other two less than # miles apiece. Another group is formed by all small bodies of less than # miles in diameter at distances of between # and # million miles from Jupiter. Their periods of revolution are between # and # days. In all probability, the group or groups of outer moons are far more numerous than we know, but the other members are too small to be discovered from Earth. Endeavor I was a space jalopy. Endeavor II was a dreamboat -- with built-in nightmares! T HE ship's mass detector flared pink, then red. Agee had been dozing at the controls, waiting for Victor to finish making dinner. Now he looked up quickly. "Planet coming," he called, over the hiss of escaping air. Captain Barnett nodded. He finished shaping a hot patch, and slapped it on Endeavor's worn hull. The whistle of escaping air dropped to a low moan, but was not entirely stopped. It never was. When Barnett came over, the planet was just visible beyond the rim of a little red sun. It glowed green against the black night of space and gave both men an identical thought. Barnett put the thought into words. "Wonder if there's anything on it worth taking," he said, frowning. Agee lifted a white eyebrow hopefully. They watched as the dials began to register. They would never have spotted the planet if they had taken Endeavor along the South Galactic Trades. But the Confederacy Police were becoming increasingly numerous along that route and Barnett preferred to give them a wide berth. The Endeavor was listed as a trader -- but the only cargo she carried consisted of several bottles of an extremely powerful acid used in opening safes, and three medium-sized atomic bombs. The authorities looked with disfavor upon such goods and they were always trying to haul in the crew on some old charge -- a murder on Luna, larceny on Omega, breaking and entering on Sarnia II. Old, almost forgotten crimes that the police drearily insisted on raking up. To make matters worse, Endeavor was outgunned by the newer police cruisers. So they had taken an outside route to New Athens, where a big uranium strike had opened. commented, inspecting the dials critically. "Might as well pass it by," Barnett said. The readings were uninteresting. They showed a planet smaller than Earth, uncharted, and with no commercial value other than oxygen atmosphere. As they swung past, their heavy-metals detector came to life. "There's stuff down there!" Agee said, quickly interpreting the multiple readings. "Pure. Very pure -- and on the surface!" He looked at Barnett, who nodded. The ship swung toward the planet. Victor came from the rear, wearing a tiny wool cap crammed on his big shaven head. He stared over Barnett's shoulder as Agee brought the ship down in a tight spiral. Within half a mile of the surface, they saw their deposit of heavy metal. It was a spaceship, resting on its tail in a natural clearing. "Now this is interesting," Barnett said. He motioned Agee to make a. closer approach. Agee brought the ship down with deft skill. He was well past the compulsory retirement limit for master pilots, but it didn't affect his coordination. Barnett, who found him stranded and penniless, had signed him on. The captain was always glad to help another human, if it was convenient and likely to be profitable. The two men shared the same attitude toward private property, but sometimes disagreed on ways of acquiring it. Agee preferred a sure thing. Barnett, on the other hand, had more courage than was good for a member of a relatively frail species like Homo sapiens. Near the surface of the planet, they saw that the strange ship was larger than Endeavor and bright, shining new. The hull shape was unfamiliar, as were the markings. "Ever see anything like it?" Barnett asked. Agee searched his capacious memory. "Looks a bit like a Cephean job, only they don't build 'em so squat. We're pretty far out, you know. That ship might not even be from the Confederacy." Victor stared at the ship, his big lips parted in wonder. He sighed noisily. "We could sure use a ship like that, huh, Captain?" Barnett's sudden smile was like a crack appearing in granite. "Victor," he said, "in your simplicity, you have gone to the heart of the matter. We could use a ship like that. Let's go down and talk with its skipper." Before strapping in, Victor made sure the freeze-blasters were on full charge. O N the ground, they sent up an orange and green parley flare, but there was no answer from the alien ship. The planet's atmosphere tested breathable, with a temperature of # degrees Fahrenheit. After waiting a few minutes, they marched out, freeze-blasters ready under their jumpers. All three rr wore studiously pleasant sn? .es as they walked the fifty yards between ships. Up close, the ship was magnificent. Its glistening silvergray hide had hardly been touched by meteor strikes. The airlock was open and a low hum told them that the generators were recharging. "Anyone home?" Victor shouted into the airlock. His voice echoed hollowly through the ship. There was no answer -- only the soft hum of the generators and the rustle of grass on the plain. "Where do you suppose they went?" Agee asked. "For a breath of air, probably," Barnett said. "I don't suppose they'd expect any visitors." Victor placidly sat down on the ground. Barnett and Agee prowled around the base of the ship, admiring its great drive ports. "Think you can handle it?" Barnett asked. "I don't see why not," Agee said. "For one thing, it's conventional drive. The servos don't matter -- oxygen-breathers use similar drive-control systems. It's just a matter of time until I figure it out." "Someone coming," Victor called. They hurried back to the airlock. Three hundred yards from the ship was a ragged forest. A figure had just emerged from among the trees, and was walking toward them. Agee and Victor drew their blasters simultaneously. Barnett's binoculars resolved the tiny figure into a rectangular shape, about two feet high by a foot wide. The alien was less than two inches thick and had no head. Barnett frowned. He had never seen a rectangle floating above tall grass. Adjusting the binoculars, he saw that the alien was roughly humanoid. That is, it had four limbs. Two, almost hidden by the grass, were being used for walking, and the other two jutted stiffly into the air. In its middle, Barnett could just make out two tiny eyes and a mouth. The creature was not wearing any sort of suit or helmet. "Queer-looking," Agee muttered, adjusting the aperture of his blaster. "Suppose he's all there is?" "Hope so," Barnett said, drawing his own blaster. "Range about two hundred yards." Agee leveled his weapon, then looked up. "Did you want to talk to him first, Captain?" "What's there to say?" Barnett asked, smiling lazily. "Let him get a little closer, though. We don't want to miss." Agee nodded and kept the alien steadily in his sights. deserted little world, hoping to blast out a few tons of erol, a mineral highly prized by the Mabogian people. He had had no luck. The unused thetnite bomb was still lodged in his body pouch, next to a stray kerla nut. He would have to return to Mabog with ballast instead of cargo. Well, he thought, emerging from the forest, better luck next -- He was shocked to see a thin, strangely tapered spaceship near his own. He had never expected to find anyone else on this deadly little world. And the inhabitants were waiting in front of his own airlock! Kalen saw at once they were roughly Mabogian in form. There was a race much like them in the Mabogian Union, but their spaceships were completely different. Intuition suggested that these aliens might well be representatives of that great civilization rumored to be on the periphery of the Galaxy. He advanced eagerly to meet them. Strange, the aliens were not moving. Why didn't they come forward to meet him? He knew that they saw him, because all three were pointing at him. He walked faster, realizing that he knew nothing of their customs. He only hoped that they didn't run to long drawn-out ceremonies. Even an hour on this inimical world had tired him. He was hungry, badly in need of a shower... Something intensely cold jarred him backward. He looked around apprehensively. Was this some unknown property of the planet? He moved forward again. Another bolt lanced into him, frosting the outer layer of his hide. This was serious. Mabogians were among the toughest lifeforms in the Galaxy, but they had their limits. Kalen looked around for the source of the trouble. T HE aliens were shooting at him! For a moment, his thinking centers refused to accept the evidence of his senses. Kalen knew what murder was. He had observed this perversity with stunned horror among certain debased animal forms. And, of course, there were the abnormal psychology books, which documented every case of premeditated murder that had occurred in the history of Mabog. But to have such a thing actually happen to him! Kalen was unable to believe it. Another bolt lanced into him. Kalen stood still, trying to convince himself that this was really happening. He couldn't understand how creatures with sufficient sense of cooperation to run a spaceship could be capable of murder. Besides, they didn't even know him! Almost too late, Kalen whirled and ran toward the forest. All three aliens were firing now and the grass around him was crackling white with frost. His skin surface was completely frosted over. Cold was something the Mabogian constitution was not designed for and the chill was creeping into his internal organs. But he cbuld still hardly believe it. Kalen reached the forest and a double blast caught him as he slid behind a tree. He could feel his internal system laboring desperately to restore warmth to his body and, with profound regret, he allowed the darkness to take him.  observed, holstering his blaster. "Stupid and strong," Barnett said. "But no oxygen-breather can take much of that." He grinned proudly and slapped the silver-gray side of the ship. "We'll christen her Endeavor II." "Three cheers for the captain!" Victor cried enthusiastically. "Save your breath," Barnett said. "You'll need it." He glanced overhead. "We've got about four hours of light left. Victor, transfer the food, oxygen and tools from Endeavor I and disarm her piles. We'll come back and salvage the old girl some day. But I want to blast off by sundown." Victor hurried off. Barnett and Agee entered the ship. The rear half of Endeavor II was filled with generators, engines, converters, servos, fuel and air tanks. Past that was an enormous cargo hold, occupying almost another half of the ship. It was filled with nuts of all shapes and colors, ranging in size from two inches in diameter to some twice the size of a man's head. That left only two compartments in the bow of the ship. The first should have been a crew room, since it was the only available living space. But it was completely bare. There were no deceleration cots, no tables or chairs -- nothing but polished metal floor. In the walls and ceiling were several small openings, but their purpose was not readily apparent. Connected to this room was the pilot's compartment. It was very small, barely large enough for one man, and the panel under the observation blister was packed solidly with instruments. "It's all yours," Barnett said. "Let's see what you can do." Agee nodded, looked for a chair, then squatted in front of the panel. He began to study the layout. In several hours, Victor had transferred all their stores to Endeavor II. Agee still had not touched anything. He was trying to figure out what controlled what, from the size, color, shape and location of the instruments. It wasn't easy, even accepting similar nervous systems and patterns of thought. Did the auxiliary step-up system run from left to right? If not, he would have to unlearn his previous flight coordination. Did red signify danger to the designers of this ship? If it did, that big switch could be for dumping fuel. But red could also mean hot fuel, in which case the switch might control coarse energy flow. For all he knew, its purpose was to overload the piles in case of enemy attack. Agee kept all this in mind as he studied the controls. He wasn't too worried. For one thing, spaceships were tough beasts, practically indestructible from the inside. For another, he believed he had caught onto the pattern. the doorway, with Victor close behind him. "You ready?" Agee looked over the panel. "Guess so." He touched a dial lightly. "This should control the airlocks." He turned it. Victor and Barnett waited, perspiring, in the chilly room. They heard the smooth flow of lubricated metal. The airlocks had closed. Agee grinned and blew on his fingertips for luck. "Here's the air-control system." He closed a switch. Out of the ceiling, a yellow smoke began to trickle. "Impurities in the system," Agee muttered, adjusting a dial. Victor began to cough. "Turn it off," Barnet said. The smoke poured out in thick almost instantly. " Turn it off!" "I can't see it!" Agee thrust at the switch, missed and struck a button under it. Immediately the generators began to whine angrily. Blue sparks danced along the panel and jumped to the wall. Agee staggered back from the panel and collapsed. Victor was already at the door to the cargo hold, trying to hammer it down with his fists. Barnett covered his mouth with one hand and rushed to the panel. He fumbled blindly for the switch, feeling the ship revolve giddily around him. Victor fell to the deck, still beating feebly at the door. Barnett jabbed blindly at the panel. Instantly the generators stopped. Then Barnett felt a cold breeze on his face. He wiped his streaming eyes and looked up. A lucky stab had closed the ceiling vents, cutting off the yellow gas. He had accidentally opened the locks, and the gas in. the ship was being replaced by the cold night air of the planet. Soon the atmosphere was breathable. Victor climbed shakily to his feet, but Agee didn't move. Barnett gave the old pilot artificial respiration, cursing softly as he did. Agee's eyelids finally fluttered and his chest began to rise and fall. A few minutes later, he sat up and shook his head. "What was that stuff?" Victor asked. "I'm afraid," Barnet said, "that our alien friend considered it a breathable atmosphere." be, Captain. He was here on an oxygen world, walking around with no helmet -- " "Air requirements vary tremendously," Barnett pointed out. "Let's face it -- our friend's physical makeup was quite different from ours." "That's not so good," Agee said. The three men looked at each other. In the silence that followed, they heard a faint, ominous sound. "What was that?" Victor yelped, yanking out his blaster. "Shut up!" Barnett shouted. They listened. Barnett could feel the hairs lift on the back of his neck as he tried to identify the sound. It came from a distance. It sounded like metal striking a hard nonmetallic object. The three men looked out the port. In the last glow of sunset, the could see the main port of Endeavor I was open. The sound was coming from the ship. "It's impossible," Agee said. "The freeze-blasters -- " "Didn't kill him," Barnett finished. "That's bad," Agee grunted. "That's very bad." Victor was still holding his blaster. "Captain, suppose I wander over that way -- " Barnett shook his head. "He wouldn't let you within ten feet of the lock. No, let me think. Was there anything on board he could use? The piles?" "I've got the links, Captain," Victor said. "Good. Then there's nothing that -- " "The acid," Agee interrupted. "It's powerful stuff. But I don't suppose he can do much with that stuff." "Not a thing," Barnett said. "We're in this ship and we're staying here. But get it off the ground now." Agee looked at the instrument panel. Half an hour ago, he had almost understood it. Now it was a cunningly rigged death trap -- a booby trap, with invisible wires leading to destruction. The trap was unintentional. But a spaceship was necessarily a machine for living as well as traveling. The controls would try to reproduce the alien's living conditions, supply his needs. That might be fatal to them. "I wish I knew what kind of planet he came from," Agee said unhappily. If they knew the alien's environment, they could anticipate what his ship would do. All they knew was that he breathed a poisonous yellow gas. "We're doing all right," Barnett said, without much confidence. "Just dope out the drive mechanism and we'll leave everything else alone." Agee turned back to the controls. Barnett wished he knew what the alien was up to. He stared at the bulk of his old ship in the twilight and listened to the incomprehensible sound of metal striking non-metal. that he was still alive. But there was a saying among his people -- "Either a Mabogian is killed fast or he isn't killed at all." It was not at all -- so far. Groggily, he sat up and leaned against a tree. The single red sun of the planet was low on the horizon and breezes of poisonous oxygen swirled around him. He tested at once and found that his lungs were still securely sealed. His life-giving yellow air, although vitiated from long use, was still sustaining him. But he couldn't seem to get oriented. A few hundred yards away, his ship was resting peacefully. The fading red light glistened from its hull and, for a moment, Kalen was convinced that there were no aliens. He had imagined the whole thing and now he would return to his ship... He saw one of the aliens, loaded down with goods, enter his vessel. In a little while, the airlocks closed. It was true, all of it. He wrenched his mind back to grim realities. He needed food and air badly. His outer skin was dry and cracked, and in need of nutritional cleaning. But food, air and cleansers were on his lost 'ship. All he had was a single red kerla nut and the thetnite bomb in his body pouch. If he could open and eat the nut, he could regain a little strength. But how could he open it? It was shocking, how complete his dependence on machinery had been ! Now he would have to find some way of doing the most simple, ordinary, everyday things -- the sort of things his ship had done automatically, without the operator even thinking about them. Kalen noticed that the aliens had apparently abandoned their own ship. Why? It didn't matter. Out on the plain, he would die before morning. His only chance for survival lay inside their ship. He slid slowly through the grass, stopping only when a wave of dizziness swept over him. He tried to keep watch on his ship. If the aliens came after him now, all would be lost. But nothing happened. After an eternity of crawling, he reached the ship and slipped inside. It was twilight. In the dimness, he could see that the vessel was old. The walls, too thin in the first place, had been patched and repatched. Everything spoke of long, hard use. He could understand why they wanted his ship. Another wave of dizziness swept over him. It was his body's way of demanding immediate attention. Food seemed to be the first problem. He slipped the kerla nut out of his pouch. It was round, almost four inches in diameter, and its hide was two inches thick. Nuts of this sort were the main ingredient of a Mabogian spaceman's diet. They were energy-packed and would last almost forever, sealed. He propped the nut against a wall, found a steel bar and smashed down on it. The bar, striking the nut, emitted a hollow, drumlike sound. The nut was undamaged. Kalen wondered if the sound could be heard by the aliens. He would have to chance it. Setting himself firmly, he flailed away. In fifteen minutes, he was exhausted and the bar was bent almost in half. The nut was undamaged. without a Cracker, a standard device on every Mabogian ship. No one ever thought of opening a nut in any other way. It was terrifying evidence of his helplessness. He lifted the bar for another whack and found that his limbs were stiffening. He dropped the bar and took stock. His chilled outer hide was hampering his motions. The skin was hardening slowly into impervious horn. Once the hardening was completed, he would be immobilized. Frozen in position, he would sit or stand until he died of suffocation. Kalen fought back a wave of despair and tried to think. He had to treat his skin without delay. That was more important than food. On board ship, he would wash and bathe it, soften it and eventually cure it. But it was doubtful whether the aliens carried the proper cleansers. The only other course was to rip off his outer hide. The second layer would be tender for a few days, but at least he would be mobile. He searched on stiffening limbs for a Changer. Then he realized that the aliens wouldn't have even this piece of basic apparatus. He was still on his own. He took the steel bar, bent it into a hook and inserted the point under a fold of skin. He yanked upward with all his strength. His skin refused to yield. Next, he wedged himself between a generator and the wall and inserted the hook in a diferent way. But his arms weren't long enough to gain leverage, and the tough hide held stubbornly. He tried a dozen different positions, unsuccessfully. Without mechanical assistance, he couldn't hold himself rigidly enough. Wearily, he dropped the bar. He could do nothing, nothing at all. Then he remembered the thetnite bomb in his pouch. A primitive part of his mind which he had not previously known existed said that there was an easy way out of all this. He could slip the bomb under the hull of his ship, while the aliens weren't looking, The light charge would do no more than throw the ship twenty or thirty feet into the air, but would not really damage it.  The aliens, however, would undoubtedly be killed. Kalen was horrified. How could he think such a thing? The Mabogian ethic, ingrained in the fiber of his being, forbade the taking of intelligent life for any reason whatsoever. Any reason. "But wouldn't this be justified?" that primitive portion of his mind whispered. "These aliens are diseased. You would be doing the Universe a favor by getting rid of them and only incidentally helping yourself. Don't think of it as murder. Consider it extermination." He took the bomb out of his pouch and looked at it, then hastily put it away. "No!" he told himself, with less conviction. He refused to think any more. On tired, almost rigid limbs, he began to search the alien ship, looking for something that would save his life. pilot's compartment, wearily marking switches with an indelible pencil. His lungs ached and he had been working all night. Now there was a bleak gray dawn outside and a chill wind was whipping around Endeavor II. The spaceship was lighted but cold, for Agee didn't want to touch the temperature controls. Victor came into the crew room, staggering under the weight of a heavy packing case. "Barnett?" Agee called out. "He's coming," Victor said. The captain wanted all their equipment up front, where they could get at it quickly. But the crew room was small and he had used most of the available space. Looking around for a spot to put the case, Victor noticed a door in one wall. He pressed its stud and the door slid smartly into the ceiling, revealing a room the size of a closet. Victor decided it would make an ideal storage space. Ignoring the crushed red shells on the floor, he slid the case inside. Immediately, the ceiling of the little room began to descend. Victor let out a yell that could be heard throughout the ship. He leaped up -- and slammed his head against the ceiling. He fell on his face, stunned. Agee rushed out of the pilot's compartment and Barnett sprinted into the room. Barnett grabbed Victor's legs and tried to drag him out, but Victor was Heavy and the captain was unable to get a purchase on the smooth metal floor. With rare presence of mind, Agee up-ended the packing case. The ceiling was momentarily stopped by it. Together, Barnett and Agee tugged at Victor's legs. They managed to drag him out just in time. The heavy case splintered and, in another moment, was crushed like a piece of balsa wood. The ceiling of the little room, descending on a greased shaft, compressed the packing case to a six-inch thickness. Then its gears clicked and it slid back into place without a sound. his head. "Captain," he said plaintively, "can't we get our own ship back?" Agee was doubtful of the venture, too. He looked at the deadly little room, which again resembled a closet with crushed red shells on the floor. "Sure seems like a jinx ship," he said worriedly. "Maybe Victor's right." "You want to give her up?" Barnett asked. Agee squirmed uncomfortably and nodded. "Trouble is," he said, not looking at Barnett, "we don't know what she'll do next. It's just too risky, Captain." "Do you realize what you'd be giving up?" Barnett challenged. "Her hull alone is worth a fortune. Have you looked at her engines? There's nothing this side of Earth that could stop her. She could drill her way through a planet and come out the other side with all her paint on. And you want to give her up!" "She won't be worth much if she kills us," Agee objected. Victor nodded emphatically. Barnett stared at them. "Now listen to me carefully," Barnett said. "We are not going to give up this ship. She is not jinxed. She's alien and filled with alien apparatus. All we have to do is keep our hands off things until we reach drydock. Understand?" Agee wanted to say something about closets that turned into hydraulic presses. It didn't seem to him a promising sign for the future. But, looking at Barnett's face, he decided against it. "Have you marked all the operating controls?" Barnett asked. "Just a few more to go," Agee said. "Right. Finish up and those are the only ones we'll touch. If we leave the rest of the ship alone, she'll leave us alone. There's no danger if we just keep hands off." Barnett wiped perspiration from his face, leaned against a wall and unbuttoned his coat. Immediately, two metal bands slid out of openings on either side of him and circled his waist and stomach. Barnett stared at them for a moment, then threw himself forward with all his strength. The bands didn't give. There was a peculiar clicking sound in the walls and a slender wire filament slid out. It touched Barnett's coat appraisingly, then retreated into the wall. Agee and Victor stared helplessly. "Turn it off," Barnett said tensely. Agee rushed into the control room. Victor continued staring. Out of the wall slid a metal limb, tipped with a glittering threeinch blade. " Stop it!" Barnett screamed. Victor unfroze. He ran up and tried to wrench the metal limb out of the wall. It twisted once and sent him reeling across the room. geon, the knife slit Barnett's coat down the middle, not touching the shirt underneath. Then the limb slid out of sight. Agee was punching controls now and the generators whined, the locks opened and closed, stabilizers twitched, lights flickered. The mechanism that held Barnett was unaffected. The slender filament returned. It touched Barnett's shirt and paused an instant. The internal mechanism chittered alarmingly. The filament touched Barnett's shirt again, as if unsure of its function in his case. Agee shouted from the control room, "I can't turn it off! It must be fully automatic!" The filament slid into the wall. It disappeared and the knifetipped limb slid out. By this time, Victor had located a heavy wrench. He rushed over, swung it above his head and smashed it against the limb, narrowly missing Barnett's head. The limb was not even dented. Serenely, it cut Barnett's shirt from his back, leaving him naked to the waist. Barnett was not hurt, but his eyes rolled wildly as the filament came out. Victor put his fist in his mouth and backed away. Agee shut his eyes. The filament touched Barnett's warm living flesh, clucked approvingly and slid back into the wall. The bands opened. Barnett tumbled to his knees. For a while, no one spoke. There was nothing to say. Barnett stared moodily into space. Victor started to crack his knuckles over and over again, until Agee nudged him. The old pilot was trying to figure out why the mechanism had slit Barnett's clothing and then stopped when it reached living flesh. Was this the way the alien undressed himself? It didn't make sense. But then, the press-closet didn't make sense, either. In a way, he was glad it had happened. It must have taught Barnett something. Now they would leave this jinxed monstrosity and figure out a way of regaining their own ship. "Get me a shirt," Barnett said. Victor hurriedly found one for him. Barnett slipped it on, staying clear of the walls. "How soon can you get this ship moving?" he asked Agee, a bit unsteadily. "What?" "You heard me." "Haven't you had enough?" Agee gasped. "No. How soon can we blast out?" "About another hour," Agee grumbled. What else could he say? The captain was just too much. Wearily, Agee returned to the control room. Barnett put a sweater over the shirt and a coat over that. It was chilly in the room and he had begun to shiver violently. deck of the alien ship. Foolishly, he had wasted most of his remaining strength in trying to rip off his stiff outer hide. But the hide grew progressively tougher as he grew weaker. Now it seemed hardly worthwhile to move. Better to rest and feel his internal fires bum. lower... Soon he was dreaming of the ridged hills of Mabog and the great port of Canthanope, where the interstellar traders swung down with their strange cargoes. He was there in twilight, looking over the flat roofs at the two great setting suns. But why were they setting together in the south, the blue sun and the yellow? How could they set together in the south? A physical impossibility... Perhaps his father could explain it, for it was rapidly growing dark. He shook himself out of the fantasy and stared at the grim light of morning. This was not the way for a Mabogian spaceman to die. He would try again. After half an hour of slow, painful searching, he found a sealed metal box in the rear of the ship. The aliens had evidently overlooked it. He wrenched off the top. Inside were several bottles, carefully fastened and padded against shock. Kalen lifted one and examined it. It was marked with a large white symbol. There was no reason why he should know the symbol, but it seemed faintly familiar. He searched his memory, trying to recall where he had seen it. Then, hazily, he remembered. It was a representation of a humanoid skull. There was one humanoid race in the Mabogian Union and he had seen replicas of their skulls in a museum. But why would anyone put such a thing on a bottle? To Kalen, a skull conveyed an emotion of reverence. This must be what the manufacturers had intended. He opened the bottle and sniffed. The odor was interesting. It reminded him of -- Skin-cleansing solution! Without further delay, he poured the entire bottle over himself. Hardly daring to hope, he waited. If he could put his skin back into working order... Yes, the liquid in the skullmarked bottle was a mild cleanser! It was pleasantly scented, too. He poured another bottle over his armored hide and felt the nutritious fluid seep in. His body, starved for nourishment, called eagerly for more. He drained another bottle. TT'OR a long time, Kalen just lay back and let the life-giving fluid soak in. His skin loosened and became pliable. He could feel a new surge of energy within him, a new will to live. He would live! After the bath, Kalen examined the spaceship's controls, hoping to pilot the old crate back to Mabog. There were immediate difficulties. For some reason, the piloting controls weren't sealed into a separate room. He wondered why not? Those strange creatures couldn't have turned their whole ship into a deceleration chamber. They couldn't! There wasn't enough tank space to hold the fluid. It was perplexing, but everything about the aliens was perplexing. He could overcome that difficulty. But when Kalen inspected the engines, he saw that a vital link had been removed from the piles. They were useless. That left only one alternative. He had to win back his own ship. But how? He paced the deck restlessly. The Mabogian ethic forbade killing intelligent life, and there were no ifs or buts about it. Under no circumstances -- not even to save your own life -- were you allowed to kill. It was a wise rule and had served Mabog well. By strict adherence to it, the Mabogians had avoided war for three thousand years and had trained their people to a high degree of civilization. Which would have been impossible had they allowed exceptions to creep in. Ifs and buts could erode the soundest of principles. He could not be a backslider. But was he going to die here passively? Looking down, Kalen was surprised to see that a puddle of cleaning solution had eaten a hole in the deck. How flimsily these ships were made -- even a mild cleaning solution could damage one! The aliens themselves must be very weak. One thetnite bomb could do it. He walked to the port. No one seemed to be on guard. He supposed they were too busy preparing for takeoff. It would be easy to slide through the grass, up to his ship... And no one on Mabog would ever have to know about it. Kalen found, to his surprise, that he had covered almost half the distance between ships without realizing it. Strange, how his body could do things without his mind being aware of it. He took out the bomb and crawled another twenty feet. Because after all -- taking the long view -- what difference would Barnett asked, at noon. "I guess so," Agee said. He looked over the marked panel. "As ready as I'll ever be." Barnett nodded. "Victor and I will strap down in the crew room. Take off under minimum acceleration." Barnett returned to the crew room. Agee fastened the straps he had rigged and rubbed his hands together nervously. As far as he knew, all the essential controls were marked. Everything should go all right. He hoped. For there were that closet and the knife. It was anyone's guess what this insane ship would do next. "Ready out here," Barnett called from the crew room. "All right. About ten seconds." He closed and sealed the airlocks. His door closed automatically, cutting him off from the crew room. Feeling a slight touch of claustrophobia, Agee activated the piles. Everything was fine so far. There was a thin slick of oil on the deck. Agee decided it was from a loose joint and ignored it. The control surfaces worked beautifully. He punched a course into the ship's tape and activated the flight controls. Then he felt something lapping against his foot. Looking down, he was amazed to see that thick, evil-smelling oil was almost three inches deep on the deck. It was quite a leak. He couldn't understand how a ship as well built as this could have such a flaw. Unstrapping himself, he groped for the source. He found it. There were four small vents in the deck and each of them was feeding a smooth, even flow of oil. Agee punched the stud that opened his door and found that it remained sealed. Refusing to grow panicky, he examined the door with care. It should open. It didn't. The oil was almost up to his knees. He grinned foolishly. Stupid of him! The pilot room was sealed from the control board. He pressed the release and went back to the door. It still refused to open. Agee tugged at it with all his strength, but it wouldn't budge. He waded back to the control panel. There had been no oil when they found the ship. That meant there had to be a drain somewhere. THE oil was waist-deep before he found it. Quickly the oil disappeared. Once it was gone, the door opened easily. "What's the matter?" Barnett asked. Agee told him. "So that's how he does it," Barnett said quietly. "Glad I found out." "Does what?" Agee asked, feeling that Barnett was taking the whole thing too lightly. "How he stands the acceleration of takeoff. It bothered me. He hadn't anything on board that resembled a bed or cot. No chairs, nothing to strap into. So he floats in the oil bath, which turns on automatically when the ship is prepared for flight." "But why wouldn't the door open?" Agee asked. "Isn't it obvious?" Barnett said, smiling patiently. "He wouldn't want oil all over the ship. And he wouldn't want it to drain out accidentally." "We can't take off," Agee insisted. "Why not?" "Because I can't breathe very well under oil. It turns on automatically with the power and there's no way of turning it off." "Use your head," Barnett told him. "Just tie down the drain switch. The oil will be carried away as fast as it comes in." "Yeah, I hadn't thought of that," Agee admitted unhappily. "Go ahead, then." "I want to change my clothes first." "No. Get this damned ship off the ground." "But, Captain -- " "Get her moving," Barnett ordered. "For all we know, that alien is planning something." Agee shrugged his shoulders, returned to the pilot room and strapped in. "Ready?" "Yes, get her moving." He tied down the drain circuit and the oil flowed safely in and out, not rising higher than the tops of his shoes. He activated all the controls without further incident. "Here goes." He set minimum acceleration and blew on his fingertips for luck. Then he punched the blastswitch. watched his ship depart. He was still holding the thetnite bomb in his hand. He had reached his ship, had even stood under her for a few seconds. Then he had crept back to the alien vessel. He had been unable to set the bomb. Centuries of conditioning were too much to overcome in a few hours. Conditioning -- and something more. Few individuals of any race murder for pleasure. There are perfectlyadequate reasons to kill, though, reasons which might satisfy any philosopher. But, once accepted, there are more reasons, and more and more. And murder, once accepted, is hard to stop. It leads irresistibly to war and, from there, to annihilation. Kalen felt that this murder somehow involved the destiny of his race. His abstinence had been almost a matter of race-survival. But it didn't make him feel any better. He watched his ship dwindle to a dot in the sky. The aliens were leaving at a ridiculously slow speed. He could think of no reason for this, unless they were doing it for his benefit. Undoubtedly they were sadistic enough for that. Kalen returned to the ship. His will to live was as strong as ever. He had no intention of giving up. He would hang onto life as long as he could, hoping for the one bring another ship to this planet. Looking around, he thought that he might concoct an airsubstitute out of the skull-marked cleanser. It would sustain him for a day or two. Then, if he could open the kerla nut... He thought he heard a noise outside and rushed to look. The sky was empty. His ship had vanished, and he was alone. He returned to the alien ship and set about the serious business of staying alive. A S Agee recovered consciousness, he found that he had managed to cut the acceleration in half, just before passing out. This was the only thing that had saved his life. And the acceleration, hovering just above zero on the dial, was still unbearably heavy! Agee unsealed the door and crawled out. Barnett and Victor had burst their straps on the takeoff. Victor was just returning to consciousness. Barnett picked himself out of a pile of smashed cases. "Do you thihk you're flying in a circus?" he complained. "I told you minimum acceleration." "I started under minimum acceleration," Agee said. "Go read the tape for yourself." Barnett marched to the control room. He came out quickly. "That's bad. Our alien friend operates this ship at three times our acceleration." "That's the way it looks." "I hadn't thought of that," Barnett said thoughtfully. "He must come from a heavy planet -- a place where you have to blast out at high speed, if you expect to get out at all." "What hit me?" Victor groaned, rubbing his head. There was a clicking in the walls. The ship was fully awake now, and its servos turned on automatically. "Getting warm, isn't it?" Victor asked. "Yeah, and thick," Agee said. "Pressure buildup." He went back to the control room. Barnett and Victor stood anxiously in the doorway, waiting. "I can't turn it off," Agee said, wiping perspiration from his streaming face. "The temperature and pressure are automatic. They must go to 'normal' as soon as the ship is in flight." "You damn well better turn them off," Barnett told him. "We'll fry in here if you don't." "There's no way." "He must have some kind of heat regulation." "Sure -- there!" Agee said, pointing. "The control is already set at its lowest point."  normal, temperature is?" Barnett asked. "I'd hate to find out," Agee V said. "This ship is built of extremely high melting-point alloys. It's constructed to withstand ten times the pressure of an Earth ship. Put those together..." "You must be able to turn it off somewhere!" Barnett said. He peeled off his jacket and sweater. The heat was mounting rapidly and the deck was becoming too hot to stand on. "Turn it off!" Victor howled. "Wait a minute," Agee said. "J didn't build this ship, you know. How should I know -- " "Off" Victor screamed, shaking Agee up and down like a rag doll. "Off" "Let go!" Agee half-drew his blaster. Then, in a burst of inspiration, he turned off the ship's engines. The clicking in the walls stopped. The room began to cool. "What happened?" Victor asked. "The temperature and pressure fall when the power is off," Agee said. "We're safe -- as long as we don't run the engines." "How long will it take us to coast to a port?" Barnett asked. Agee figured it out. "About three years," he said. "We're pretty far out." "Isn't there any way we can rip out those servos? Disconnect them?" "They're built into the guts of the ship," Agee said. "We'd need a full machine shop and skilled help. Even then, it wouldn't be easy." Barnett was silent for a long time. Finally he said, "All right." "All right what?" "We're licked. We've got to go back to that planet and take our own ship." and punched a new course on the ship's tape. "You think the alien'll give it back?" Victor asked. "Sure he will," Barnett said, "if he's not dead. He'll be pretty anxious to get his own ship back. And he has to leave our ship to get in his." "Sure. But once he gets back in this ship..." "We'll gimmick the controls," Barnett said. "That'll slow him down." "For a little while," Agee pointed out. "But he'll get into the air sooner or later, with blood in his eye. We'll never outrun him." "We won't have to," Barnett said. "All we have to do is get into the air first. He's got a strong hull, but I don't think it'll take three atomic bombs." "I hadn't thought of that," Agee said, smiling faintly. "Only logical move," Barnett said complacently. "The alloys in the hull will still be worth something. Now, get us back without frying us, if you can." Agee turned the engines on. He swung the ship around in a tight curve, piling on all the Gs they could stand. The servos clicked on, and the temperature shot rapidly up. Once the curve was rounded, Agee pointed Endeavor II in the right direction and shut off the engines. They coasted most of the way. But when they reached the planet, Agee had to leave the engines on, to bring them around the deceleration spiral and into the landing. They were barely able to get out of the ship. Their skins were blistered and their shoes burned through. There was no time to gimmick the controls. They retreated to the woods and waited. "Perhaps he's dead," Agee said hopefully. They saw a small figure emerge from Endeavor I. The alien was moving slowly, but he was moving. They watched. "Suppose," Victor said, "he's made a weapon of some kind. Suppose he comes after us." "Suppose you shut up," Barnett said. The alien walked directly to his own ship. He went inside and shut the locks. "All right," Barnett said, standing up. "We'd better blast off in a hurry. Agee, you take the controls. I'll connect the piles. Victor, you secure the locks. Let's go!" They sprinted across the plain and, in a matter of seconds, had reached the open airlock of Endeavor I. ry, Kalen didn't have the necessary strength to pilot his ship. But he knew that he was safe, once inside. No alien was going to walk through those sealed ports. He found a spare air tank in the rear and opened it. His ship filled with rich, life-giving yellow air. For long minutes, Kalen just breathed it. Then he lugged three of the biggest kerla nuts he could find to the galley and let the Cracker open them. After eating, he felt much better. He let the Changer take off his outer hide. The second layer was dead, too, and the Changer cut that off him, but stopped at the third, living layer. He was almost as good as new when he slipped into the pilot's room. It was apparent to him now that the aliens had been temporarily insane. There was no other way to explain why they had come back and returned his ship. Therefore, he would find their authorities and report the location of the planet. They could be found and cured, once and for all. Kalen felt very happy. He had not deviated from the Mabogian ethic, and that was the important thing. He could so easily have left the thetnite bomb in their ship, all set and timed. He could have wrecked their engines. And there had been a temptation. But he had not. He had done nothing at all. All he had done was construct a few minimum essentials for the preservation of his life. Kalen activated his controls and found that everything was in perfect working order. The acceleration fluid poured in as he turned on the piles. first and dashed in. Instantly, he was hurled back. "What happened?" Barnett asked. "Something hit me," Victor said. Cautiously, they looked inside. It was a very neat death trap. Wires from the storage batteries had been hooked in series and rigged across the port. If Victor had been touching the side of the ship, he would have been electrocuted instantly. They shorted out the system and entered the ship. It was a mess. Everything movable had been ripped up and strewn around. There was a bent steel bar in a corner. Their highpotency acid had been spilled over the deck and had eaten through in several places. The Endeavor's old hull was holed. "I never thought he'd gimmick us" Agee said. They explored further. Toward the rear was another booby trap. The cargo hold door had been cunningly rigged to the small starter motor. If anyone touched it, the door would be slammed against the wall. A man caught between would be crushed. There were other hookups that gave no hint of their purpose. "Can we fix it?" Barnett asked. Agee shrugged his shoulders. "Most of our tools are still on board Endeavor II. I suppose we can get her patched up inside of a year. But even then, I don't know if the hull will hold." They walked outside. The alien ship blasted off. "What a monster!" Barnett said, looking at the acid-eaten hull of his ship. "You can never tell what an alien will do," Agee answered. "The only good alien is a dead alien," Victor said. Endeavor I was now as incomprehensible and dangerous as Endeavor II. And Endeavor II was gone. have learned, but for whom they have known, and this old man had known Wainer. Therefore he spoke and told Them what he knew, and more that he did not know he was telling. And They, who were not men, sat in silence and the deepest affection, and listened...  was forgotten (said the old man) much more than a thousand years ago. I have heard it said that people are like waves, rising and riding and crumbling, and if a wave fell once on a shore long ago, then it left its mark on on the beach and changed the shape of the world, but is not remembered. That is true, except for the bigger waves. There is nothing remarkable in Wainer's being forgotten then, because he was not a big wave. In his own time, he was nothing at all -- he even lived off the state -- and the magnificent power that was in him and that he brought to the world was never fully recognized. But the story of his life is probably the greatest story I have ever heard. He was the beginning of You. I only wish I had known. From his earliest days, as I remember, no one ever looked after Wainer. His father had been one of the last of the priests. Just before young Wainer was born in #, the government passed one of the great laws, the we-take-nobarriers-into-space edict, and religious missionaries were banned from the stars. Wainer's father never quite recovered from that. He went down to the end of his days believing that the Earth had gone over to what he called "Anti-Christ." He was a fretful man and he had no time for the boy. Young Wainer grew up alone. Like everyone else, he was operated on at the age of five, and it turned out that he was a Reject. At the time, no one cared. His mother afterward said that she was glad, because Wainer's head even then was magnificently shaped and it would have been a shame to put a lump on it. Of course, Wainer knew that he could never be a doctor, or a pilot, or a technician of any kind, but he was only five years old and nothing was final to him. Some of the wonderful optimism he was to carry throughout his youth, and which he was to need so badly in later years, was already with him as a boy. And yet You must understand that the world in which Wainer grew up was a good world, a fine world. Up to that time, it was the best world that ever was, and no one doubted that -- (Some of Them had smiled in Their minds. The old man was embarrassed.) You must try to understand. We all believed in that world; Wainer and I and everyone believed. But I will explain as best I can and doubtless You will understand. When it was learned, long before Wainer was born, that the electronic brains could be inserted within the human brain and connected with the main neural paths, there was no one who did not think it was the greatest discovery of all time. Do You know, can You have any idea, what the mind of Man must have been like before the brains? God help them, they lived all their lives without controlling themselves, trapped, showered by an unceasing barrage of words, dreams, totally unrelated, uncontrollable memories. It must have been horrible. rpHE brains changed all that. They gave Man freedom to think, freedom from confusion: they made him logical. There was no longer any need to memorize, because the brains could absorb any amount of information that was inserted into them, either before or after the operation. And the brains never forgot, and seldom made mistakes, and computed all things with an inhuman precision. A man with a brain -- or "clerks," as they were called, after Le Clerq -- knew everything, literally everything, that there was to know about his profession. And as new information was learned, it was made available to all men, and punched into the clerks of those who desired it. Man began to think more clearly than ever before, and thought with more knowledge behind him, and it seemed for a while that this was a godlike thing. But in the beginning, of course, it was very hard on the Rejects. Once in every thousand persons or so would come someone like Wainer whose brain would not accept the clerk, who would react as if the clerk were no more than a hat. After a hundred years, our scientists still did not know why. Many fine minds were ruined with their memory sections cut away, but then a preliminary test was devised to prove beforehand that the clerks would not work and that there was nothing that anyone could do to make them work. Year by year the Rejects, as they were called, kept coming, until they were a sizable number. The more fortunate men with clerks outnumbered the Rejects a thousand to one, and ruled the society, and were called "Rashes" -- slang for Rationals. Thus the era of the Rash and Reject. Now, of course, in those days the Rejects could not hope to compete in a technical world. They could neither remember nor compute well enough, and the least of all doctors knew more than a Reject ever could, the worst of all chemists knew much more chemistry, and a Reject certainly could never be a space pilot. As a result of all this, mnemonics was studied as never before; and Rejects were taught memory. When Wainer was fully grown, his mind was more ordered and controlled and his memory more exact than any man who had lived on Earth a hundred years before. But he was still a Reject and there was not much for him to do. He began to feel it, I think, when he was about fifteen. He had always wanted to go into space, and when he realized at last that it was impossible, that even the meanest of jobs aboard ship was beyond him, he was very deeply depressed. He told me about those days much later, when it was only a Reject's memory of his youth. I have lived a thousand years since then, and I have never stopped regretting that they did not let him go just once when he was young, before those last few days. It would have been such a little thing for them to do. was eighteen years old and had not yet begun to work. We met in one of those music clubs that used to be in New York City, one of the weird, smoky, crowded little halls where Rejects could gather and breathe their own air away from the -- as we called them -- "lumpheads." I remember young Wainer very clearly. He was a tremendous man, larger even than You, with huge arms and eyes, and that famous mass of brownish hair. His size set him off from the rest of us, but it never bothered him, and although he was almost painfully awkward, he was never laughed at. I don't quite know how to describe it, but he was very big -- ominous, almost -- and he gave off an aura of tremendous strength. He said very little, as I remember; he sat with us silently and drank quite a bit, and listened to the music and to us, grinning from time to time with a wonderfully pleasant smile. He was very likable. He was drawn to me, I think, because I was : a successful Reject -- I was just then becoming known as a surgeon. I sincerely believed that he envied me. At any rate, he was always ready to talk to me. In the early days I did what I could to get him working, but he never really tried. He had only the Arts, You see, and they never really appealed to him. (There was a rustle of surprise among Them. The old man nodded.) It is true. He never wanted to be an artist. He had too much need for action in him, and he did not want to be a lonely man. But because of the Rashes, he had no choice. The Rashes, as You know, had very little talent. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the precision, the methodicity with which they lived, or perhaps -- as we proudly claimed -- the Rejects were Rejects because they had talent. But the result was wonderfully just: the Rejects took over the Arts and all other fields requiring talent. I myself had good hands; I became a surgeon. Although I never once operated without a Rash by my side, I was a notably successful surgeon. It was a truly splendid thing. That is why I say it was a good world. The Rash and Reject combined in society and made it whole. And one thing more was in favor of the Reject: he was less precise, less logical, and therefore more glamorous than the Rash. Hence Rejects always had plenty of women, and Reject women did well with. men. But the Rash, in the end, had everything that really counted. Well, there was only such work that a Reject could do. But none of it fitted Wainer. He tried all the arts at one time or another before he finally settled on music. In music there was something vast and elemental; he saw that he could build. He began, and learned, but did little actual work. In those beginning years, he could be found almost always out by the Sound, or wandering among the cliffs across the River, his huge hands fisted and groping for something to do, wondering, wondering, why he was a Reject. FI'lHE first thing he wrote was the Pavanne, which came after his first real love affair. I cannot remember the girl, but in a thousand years I have not forgotten the music. It may surprise You to learn that the Pavanne was a commercial success. It surprised Wainer, too. The Rashes were actually the public, and their taste was logical. Most of all they liked Bach and Mozart, some Beethoven and Greene, but nothing emotional and obscure. The Pavanne was a success because it was a love piece, wonderfully warm and gay and open. Wainer never repeated that success. That was one of the few times I ever saw him with money. He received the regular government fee and a nice sum in .royalties, but not quite enough for a trip into space, so he drank it all up. He was happy for a while. He went back to the music clubs and stayed away from the beaches, but when I asked him if he was working on anything else, he said no, he had nothing else to write. Right after that, he fell in love again, this time with his mother. The longevity treatment was still fairly new; few had stopped to consider that, as men grew older, their mothers remained young, as tender and fresh as girls in school, and there is no i woman as close to a man as his mother. Inevitably, a great many men fell in love that way. Wainer was one. His mother, poor girl, never suspected, and it was pure anguish for him. It was some time before he had recovered enough to talk about it, and by then he was thirty. One of the ways he recovered was by writing more music. There were a lot of lesser works, and then came the First Symphony. Looking back over the centuries, I cannot understand how the thing was so controversial. The Rashes wrote of it harshly in all their papers. The Rejects almost unanimously agreed that it was a masterpiece. I myself, when I heard it, became aware that Wainer was a great man. which raged for a while, Wainer made some money, but the effect of the criticism was to keep him from writing for years. There is something in that First Symphony of the Wainer of later years, some of the hungry, unfinished, incomprehensible strength. Wainer knew that if he wrote anything else, it would be much like the First, and he recoiled from going through it all again. He went back to the beaches. He had something rare in those days -- a great love for the sea. I suppose it was to him what space is to others. I know that the next thing he wrote was a wild, churning, immortal thing which he called Water Music; and I know that he himself loved it best of anything he wrote, except, of course, the Tenth Symphony. But this time was worse than the last. The only ones who paid any attention to Water Music were the Rejects, and they didn't count. If Wainer had been a true composer, he would have gone on composing whether anyone cared or not, but as I have said, he was not really an artist. Despite the fact that he was the greatest composer we have ever known, music was only a small thing to him. He had a hint, even then, that although he had been born on Earth there was something in him that was alien, and that there was so much left to do, so much to be seen, and because he could not understand what it was that fired him, he ground himself raw, slowly, from within, while walking alone by the rocks on the beaches. When I saw him again, after I took ship as a surgeon to Altair, he was forty, and he looked -- I borrow the phrase -- like a man from a land where nobody lived. Having written no music at all, he was living again on government charity. He had a room, of sorts, and food, but whatever money he got he drank right up, and he was such a huge and haggard man that even Rejects left him carefully alone. I did what I could for him, which wasn't much except' keep him drunk. It was then that he told me about his feeling for space, and a great many other things, and I remember his words: "I will have to go out into space some day. It is almost as if I used to live there." Shortly after that, the coughing began. But it came very seldom and seemed no more than a common thing. Because there was no longer any such thing as disease, neither Wainer nor I thought much about it, except that Wainer went and got some pills from the government. For a long while -- we may be thankful for that, at least -- the cough did not bother him. And so the years passed. he met the girl. Her name was Lila. She was a Rash, a teacher of mnemonics, and all I can remember of her are the dark-brown lovely eyes, and the warm, adoring face. She was the only woman that Wainer ever really loved, except perhaps his mother, and he chose to have his child by her. Because of the population problem, a man could have one child then every hundred years. Wainer had his child by Lila, and although he was very happy that the boy turned out to be a Rash, he never paid him much attention. He was about fifty then and beginning to break down. So that he could see Lila often and with pride, he wrote a great deal during those years, and his lungs were collapsing all that while. It was out of that period that he wrote all his symphonies from the Second to the Ninth. It is unbelievable: they were all purely commercial. He tossed them out with a part of his mind. I cannot help but wonder what the rest of that mind was doing. I can see him now, that gaunt and useless man, his great muscled arms chained to a pen, his stony, stretching legs cramped down beneath a desk... I did not see him again for almost ten years, because he went away. He left New York for perhaps the only time in his life, and began to wander across the inland of the American continent. I heard from him rarely. I think it was in one of those letters that he first mentioned the pain that was beginning in his lungs. I never knew what he did, or how he lived during those ten years. Perhaps he went into the forests and worked and lived like a primitive, and perhaps he just walked. He had no transportation. I know that he was not wholly sane then, and never was again until the end of his life. He was like a magnificent machine which has run out of tune for too many years -- the delicate gears were strained and cracking. (The old man paused in the utter silence, while several tears dropped down his cheek. None of Them moved, and at last he went on.) Near the end of the ten years, I received a package from him in the mail. In it was a letter and the manuscript to the Storm in Space Overture. He wanted me to register the work and get the government fee, and he asked me the only favor he had ever asked of anyone, that I get him the money, because he was going into space. He came back some weeks later, on foot. I had gotten the money from Rejects -- they had heard the Overture -- it was enough. He brought Lila with him and was going to make reservations. He was heading, I think, only as far as Alpha Centauri. It was too late. one should have a long time ago, as someone would have if he had only ever asked, but in the end it would have made no difference either way, and it was now that they found out about his lungs. There was nothing anyone could do. At first I could not believe it. People did not get sick and die. People just did not die ! Because I was only a Reject and a surgeon, no Rash doctor had ever told me that this had happened before, many times, to other men. I heard it not from the Rashes, but from Wainer. His lungs were beginning to atrophy. They were actually dying within his body, and no one as yet knew why, or could stop it. He could be kept alive without lungs, yes, for a long while. I asked if we could graft a lung into him and this is what I was told : Because no one had yet synthesized human tissue, the graft would have to be a human lung, and in this age of longevity there were only a few available. Those few, of course, went only to important men, and Wainer was nothing. I volunteered a lung of my own, as did Lila, as did many Rejects. There was hope for a while, but when I looked into Wainer's chest I saw for myself that there was no way to connect. So much was wrong, so much inside him was twisted and strange that I could not understand how he had lived at all. When I learned of the other men who had been like this, I asked what had been done. The answer was that nothing had been done at all. So Wainer did not go out into space. He returned instead to his single room to sit alone and wait, while the cool world around him progressed and revolved, while the city and its people went on without notice, while a voucher was being prepared somewhere, allowing the birth of another child because citizen Wainer would soon be dead. What could the man have thought, that huge, useless man? When he sat by his window and watched the world moving by, and looked up at night to the stars, and when he drank cool water, or breathed morning air, or walked or sat or lay down, what was there for him to think? He had one life, the same as any man, one time to be upon the Earth, and it was ending now as a record of nothing, as a piece of loneliness carved with great pain, as a celestial abortion, withered, wasted. There was nothing in his life, nothing, nothing, which he had ever panted to be, and now he was dying without reason in a world without reason, unused, empty, collapsing, alone. He went down to the beach again. In the days that came, he was a shocking sight. What was hap pening became known, and when he walked the streets people stared at the wonder, the sickness, the man who was dying. Therefore he went out to the beaches and slept and took no treatments and no one will ever know what was in his mind, his ed to die. last because I knew Wainer, and they needed him. It was told hesitantly, but when I heard it I broke away and ran, and in the clean air of the beach I found Wainer and told him. At first he did not listen. I repeated it several times. I told him what the Rashes had been able to Jearn. He stood breathing heavily, face to the Sun, staring out over the incoming sea. Then I knew what he was thinking. The Rashes had told me this: The atrophy of the lungs was not all that happened' but it was the major thing, and it came only to Rejects. After years of study, it could be stated, cautiously, that the disease seemed to be in the nature of an evolutionary change. For many years they had probed for the cause of the Rejects, and the final conclusion -- to be kept from the people -- was that there was some variation in the brain of the Reject, something subtly, unfathomably different from the  brain of a Rash. And so it was also with the lungs, and with other parts of the body. And the scientists thought it was Evolution. I told this to Wainer, and more, while peace spread slowly across his rugged face. I said that the nature of life was to grow and adapt, and that no one knew why. The first cells grew up in the sea and then learned to live on land, and eventually lifted themselves to the air, and now certainly there was one last step to be taken. The next phase of change would be into space, and it was clear now what Wainer was, what all the Rejects were. Wainer was a link, incomplete, groping, unfinished. A link. It meant more to him, I think, than any man can ever really understand. He had a purpose, after all, but it was more than that. He was a creature with a home. He was part of the Universe more deeply than any of us had ever been. In the vast eternal plan which only You and Your kind can see, Wainer was a beginning, vital part. All the long years were not wasted. The pain of the lungs was dust and air. Wainer looked at me and I shall never forget his face. He was a man at peace who has lived long enough. (Because They knew much more than the old man could ever know, They were utterlv. nakedly absorbed, and the silence of the room w s absolute. The old man tired and closed to the end, while They -- unbreathing, undying, telepathic and more, the inconceivable next phase in the Evolution of Man -- listened and learned.) months, long enough to take part in the experiments the Rashes had planned, and to write the Tenth Symphony. Even the Rashes could not ignore the Tenth. It was Wainer's valedictory, a sublime, triumphant summation, born of his hope for the future of Man. It was more than music; it was a cathedral in sound. It was Wainer's soul. Wainer never lived to hear it played, to hear himself become famous, and in the end, I know, he did not care. Although we could have saved him for a little while, although I pleaded with him to remain for the sake of his woman and his music, Wainer knew that the pattern of his life was finished, that the ending time was now. For Wainer went out into space at last, into the sweet dark home between the stars, moving toward the only great moment he would ever have. The Rashes wanted to see how his lungs would react in alien atmospheres. Not in a laboratory -- Wainer refused -- but out in the open Sun, out in the strange alien air of the worlds themselves, Wainer was set down. On each of a dozen poisonous worlds he walked. He opened his helmet while we tiny men watched. He breathed. And he lived. He lived through methane, through carbon dioxide, through nitrogen and propane. He existed without air at all for an incredible time, living all the while as he never had before, with a wonderful, glowing excitement. And then at last there was that final world which was corrosive. It was too much, and Wainer smiled regretfully, holding himself upright with dignity by the base of an alien rock, and still smiling, never once moving to close his helmet, he died. old man was done. They looked at him with the deep compassion that his own race had denied to those who were different or lesser than themselves. One of Them arose and gently spoke. "And now you are the last of your kind, as alone as Wainer was. We are sorry." There was no bitterness in the old man's voice. "Don't be. Wainer was content to die, knowing that he was the link between us and You. Yet neither he nor You could have been if humanity had never existed. We had our place in the endless flow of history. We were, so to speak, Wainer's parents and Your grandparents. I, too, am content, proud of the children of Man." on your newsstand now: published at #... now #c # Star Shelf by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # lHE fifth Bleiler-Dikty annual maintains the same standards as its predecessors, with an extra bonus in the form of a slashing attack by Alfred Bester on the immaturity of much science fiction -- an essay that every science fiction reader and writer should read with prayerful attention. The book contains # stories, four of which have already been anthologized elsewhere. There is more fantasy than heretofore, thus reinforcing a trend already noticeable in some magazines. The best items, however, are science fiction -- stories by William Temple, Mark Clifton, Walter Miller, Frank Robinson, and two by Eric Frank Russell. The rest of the items are good reading, too, on the whole, though certain of them do not rate, in my mind, among the # best of the year, by any means. Nevertheless, the collection is a good #) magazine output that was available. Keyhoe. Henry Holt and Co., New York, #. # pages, # wonder whether certain pundits of modern science haven't got themselves out on a fragile limb by denying the existence of Flying Saucers and the possibility that they may be extraterrestrial in origin. The amount of evidence that the U.S. Armed Forces released recently, plus the way in which certain competent officials have "reversed the field" and now seem to agree that (if the Saucers are real) the only explanation can be that they are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin, certainly gives Keyhoe's theories a certain measure of rationality. His source material is almost ominously persuasive. Unfortunately, the author weakens his evidence by presenting it as a semi-fictional suspense story, a thoroughly unscientific approach. It is hardly a solid and reasoned study of the evidence -- and yet that evidence is unassailably factual. Despite the author's sensationalism, this book should be read by anyone who wants to know more about the increasing official concern over the Flying Saucer mystery. Theodore Sturgeon. Abelard Press, New York, #. # pages, # the covers of one book such a wide spectrum of fantasies as in this, Sturgeon's second short story collection. And even more rarely will you find such a continuously high level of writing. These thirteen yarns are genuinely distinguished stuff. Many of the tales will be unfamiliar to readers of "pure" science fiction, since most of them come from the left-hand, or gruesome-weird, drawer of Sturgeon's mind. And every one of them is worth encountering; every one will leave a permanent mark (or should I say cicatrice?) on your memory. In them you will encounter depths of horror and soaring heights of poetic imagination such as few writers of this generation are able to evoke. Don't miss it! John Wyndham. Ballantine Books, New York, #. # cloth, #c paper. T HE author of that smash hit of #, The Day of the Triffids, has written what is in all ways a better and a more enthralling book in this, his second full-length novel. It is written with a charm, a satirical sharpness, and a sense for character and story line that is reminiscent of Fowler Wright at his best -- plus a clarity and economy of language that the author of Deluge never could seem to command. The plot is old, yet very freshly done. Things from space drop into the ocean deeps; no one believes they are real. Time passes and villages on tropic isles begin to be raided by fantastic amphibious tank machines, as the raiders try to take over. That menace eventually is conquered, though only after heavy loss of life throughout the oceanbordering lands. But then the aliens in the deeps work out a monstrous new method of attack -- one I won't tell you about. Suffice to say that, as a result of it, the population of England is reduced to # and civilization is nearly annihilated before a defense is found. It's all sheer melodrama, sure, but melodrama spiced with wit, with pungent commentary on human foibles, with sharp attacks on human complacency and conceit -- a' truly satisfying shocker. Samuel Mines. Henry Holt and Co., New York, #. #I pages, # (about #c each!) contains only three really good ones -- Sturgeon's "The Wages of Synergy," Bradbury's already wellknown "The Naming of Names," and Arthur Clarke's vividly horrible "Thirty Seconds -- Thirty Days," previously published in an English anthology under the title "Breaking Strain." Of the other stories, Edmond Hamilton's "What's It Like Out There?" is powerful but overdone; A. E. van Vogt's "Dormant" is a too-terrific concept that nevertheless chills you; and Sherwood Springer's "No Land of Nod" takes a new and realistic look at the sexual implications of the post-Atomic Adam and Eve idea, but does it much too portentously. I do not think the rest of the tales deserve reprinting. Norton. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, # and #. Each # juveniles is always welcome -- particularly when his (or, in this case, her) stories are of high quality. Indeed, these two tales are sufficiently well done to hold the attention of any adult who wants to relax in some high (and often a bit bloody) adventures in distant tomorrows. Star Man's Son tells of a postAtomic world that has returned to savagery, and how a mutant member of a mountain clan -- after innumerable escapes and conflicts -- brings the plains tribes together with his program to plant the seeds of a new and nonwarlike civilization. It's an almost cruelly vivid story, with a fine ethical viewpoint that raises it several levels above the average. Star Rangers tells of a crew of the Stellar Patrol in the year #, making a forced landing on a seemingly uncivilized planet at the Galaxy's edge. How they fare, their adventures with the passengers and crew of a galactic empire spaceship that had landed earlier, and the final identification of the planet and its place in the galactic scheme all add up to an enthralling story. Here again, we have a strong plea for racial tolerance and friendship that makes the book more than just a science fantasy thriller. Watts, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # in this collection, but the combination of high quality superb bookmaking (it reminds one of the old days when books could be handsome at a reasonable price), and a pleasant set of editorial notes all make it stand out among the current anthologies. Seven of the tales are B or better and three are rather minor -- on the whole, an excellent cross-section of space travel and alien invasion stories. Only one has appeared previously in an anthology -- Eric Frank Russell's superb "Dear Devil." This book is one of a series of special-subject anthologies designed primarily for use in high school libraries and similar outlets. It is a distinguished addition to that series. by John W. Campbell, Jr. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa., #. # pages, # the infancy of modern science fiction are presented in this new book by the editor of Astounding Science Fiction -- novelets that are fun to read, provided you constantly bear in mind that they are rococo antiques and not science fiction as we understand it today. Believable characters, human relations, even logical plots, these stories have none of. Inventions, gimmicks, impossibilities are there in full flood. In the first tale alone, called "Piracy Preferred," we have an invisibility machine and a "perfect" solar energy motor together with some cops-and-robbers chasing through the stratosphere. "Solarite" and "The Black Star Passes," the other two stories, go on from there into Outer Space, with the same Super-scientists inventing new Super-gadgets and staving off new Supervarieties of Invincible Monsters, though, I assure you, infinitely better than the stuff that was being published (and still is) by men of lesser innate caliber than John Campbell. All three tales were originally published in #, and those of you who are old enough to have read them will probably have a wonderful time bathing in the nostalgia of those simple days of comic-book plots, cardboard characters and Buck Rogers gadgets. Younger fans may find the mixture more difficult to take, with its hard-breathing style and its incredibilities, but even they may get a bang out of tasting a bit of the original brew from which has mutated much of the best of today's science fantasy. As Mr. Campbell says in introducing his stories, while they "don't have the finesse of later work, they have a bounding enthusiasm that belongs with a young field, designed for and built by young men." Sam Merwin, Jr. Doubleday and Co., New York, #. # pages, # win as a science fiction writer is like being on a fantastic rollercoaster. With one book, you're on the crest -- fine, wind-blown stuff, all pace and flash and imagination, like Killer to Come, this one, you're in the trough. This one is about an ancient underground conspiracy of women to get rid of (or dominate) men. The conspiracy is coming to a head in our time because of the discovery of methods of creating children by parthogenesis. There are a Bright Young Hero, several Beautiful Females, a Fantastic Fat Scientist, and a lot about that most fashionable of all modern science fiction doohickeys, "Psi" powers (the "feminists" all seem to have 'em) -- and in the end there is a bloody big "boom" as the conspiracy "seems" to be destroyed. The book reads fast. But no matter how fast you read, you can't escape its implausibility. Pre-Publication Offer! Only one thing could equal stories! Published by Crown, it's a really huge book... over # pages, more than a quarter of form... a giant reading bargain at only # a copy. But we have an offer that makes this giant bargain even more gigantic: Twelve quality-crammed issues monthly at the newsstand come to # a year. Total: #. Readers' Pre-Publication copy of... plus the next twelve big  # . # ! You'll want them both. Don't wait because this is a pre-publication offer and cannot be kept open long. Mail the coupon below with # today. Offer expires April #, #. Yes, start  (or extend ) my subscription right away -- and mail me presses! I enclose # as payment in full for both. Name... Address City Zone State Start with the As a cosmic art dealer, Jones knew art, but he did not know what he liked -- until he met -- Y OU ask me, what is art? You expect me to have a logical answer at my fingertips, because I have been a buyer for museums and galleries long enough to acquire a plentiful crop of gray hairs. It's not that simple. Well, what is art? For forty years I've examined, felt, admired and loved many things fashioned as hopeful vessels for that bright spirit we call art -- and I'm unable to answer the question directly. The layman answers easily -- beauty. But art is not necessarily beautiful. Sometimes it is ugly. Sometimes it is crude. Sometimes it is incomplete. I have fallen back, as many men have in the business of making like decisions, on fee, for the judgment of art. You know this business of feel. Let us say that you pick up something. A piece of statuary -- or better, a fragment of stone, etched and colored by some ancient man of prehistoric times. You look at it. At first it is nothing, a half-developed reproduction of some wild animal, not even as good as a grade-school child could accomplish today. But then, holding it, your imagination suddenly reaches through rock and time, back to the man himself, half-squatted before the stone wall of his cave -- and you see there, not the dusty thing you hold in your hand -- but what the man himself saw in the hour of its creation. You look beyond the physical reproduction to the magnificent accomplishment of his imagination. This, then, may be called art -- no matter what strange guise 'it appears in -- this magic which bridges all gaps between the artist and yourself. To it, no distance, nor any difference is too great. Let me give you an example from my own experience.  touring the newer worlds as a buyer for one of our well-known art institutions, I received a communication from a man named Cary Longan, asking me, if possible, to visit a planet named Elman's World and examine some statuary he had for sale. Messages rarely came directly to me. They were usually referred to me by the institution I was representing at the time. Since, however, the world in question was close, being of the same solar system as the planet I was then visiting, I spacegraphed my answer that I would come. After cleaning up what remained of my business where I was, I took an interworld ship and, within a couple of days, landed on Elman's World. It appeared to be a very raw, very new planet indeed. The port we landed at was, I learned, one of the only two suitable for deepspace vessels. And the city surrounding it was scarcely more than a village. Mr. Longan did not meet me at the port, so I took a cab directly to the hotel where I had made a reservation. That evening, in my rooms, the annunciator rang, then spoke, giving me a name. I opened the door to admit a tall, brown-faced man, with uncut, dark hair and troubled, green-brown eyes. "Mr. Longan?" I asked. "Mr. Jones?" he countered. He shifted the unvarnished wooden box he was carrying to his left hand and put out his right to shake mine. I closed the door behind him and led him to a chair. He put the box down, without opening it, on a small coffee table between us. It was then that I noticed his rough, bush-country clothes, breeches and tunic of drab plastic. Also an embarrassed air about him, like that of a man unused to city dealings. An odd sort of person to be offering art for sale. "Your spacegram," I told him, "was not very explicit. The institution I represent..." "I've got it here," he said, putting his hand on the box. I looked at it in astonishment. It was no more than half a meter square by twenty centimeters deep. "There?" I said. I looked back at him, with the beginnings of a suspicion forming in my mind. I suppose I should have been more wary when the message had come direct, iftstead of through Earth. But you know how it is -- something of a feather in your cap when you bring in an unexpected item. "Tell me, Mr. Longan," I said, "where does this statuary come from?" fiantly. "A friend of mine made them," he said. "A friend?" I repeated -- and I must admit I was growing somewhat annoyed. It makes a man feel like a fool to be taken in that way. "May I ask whether this friend of yours has ever sold any of his work before?" "Well, no..." Longa n hedged. He was obviously suffering -- but so was I, when I thought of my own wasted time. "I see," I said, getting to my feet. "You've brought me on a very expensive sidetrip, merely to show me the work of some amateur. Good-by, Mr. Longan. And please take your box with you when you leave!" "You've never seen anything like this before!" He was looking up at me with desperation. "No doubt," I said. "Look. I'll show you..." He fumbled, his fingers nervous on the hasp. "Since you've come all this way, you can at least look." Because there seemed no way of getting him out of there, short of having the hotel manager eject him forcibly, I sat down with bad grace. "What's your friend's name?" I demanded. Longan's fingers hesitated on the hasp. "Black Charlie," he replied, not looking up at me. I stared. "I beg your pardon. Black -- Charles Black?" He looked up quite defiantly, met my eye and shook his head. "Just Black Charlie," he said with sudden calmness. "Just the way it sounds. Black Charlie." He continued unfastening the box. I watched rather dubiously, as he finally managed to loosen the clumsy, handmade wooden bolt that secured the hasp. He was about to raise the lid, then apparently changed his mind. He turned the box around and pushed it across the coffee table. The wood was hard and uneven under my fingers. I lifted the lid. There were five small partitions, each containing a rock of fine-grained gray sandstone of different but thoroughly incomprehensible shape. I stared at them -- then looked back at Longan, to see if this weren't some sort of elaborate joke. But the tall man's eyes were severely serious. Slowly, I began to take out the stones and line them up on the table.  trying to make some sense out of their forms. But there was nothing there, absolutely nothing. One vaguely resembled a regular-sided pyramid. Another gave a foggy impression of a crouching figure. The best that could be said of the rest was that they bore a somewhat disconcerting resemblance to the kind of stones people pick up for paperweights. Yet they all had obviously been worked on. There were noticeable chisel marks on each one. And, in addition, they had been polished as well as such soft, grainy rock could be. I looked up at Longan. His eyes were tense with waiting. I was completely puzzled about his discovery -- or what he felt was a discovery. I tried to be fair about his acceptance of this as art. It was obviously nothing more than loyalty to a friend, a friend no doubt as unaware of what constituted art as himself. I made my tone as kind as I could. "What did your friend expect me to do with these, Mr. Longan?" I asked gently. "Aren't you buying things for that museum-place on Earth?" he said. I nodded. I picked up the piece that resembled a crouching animal figure and turned it over in my fingers. It was an awkward situation. "Mr. Longan," I said. "I have been in this business many years..." "I know," he interrupted. "I read about you in the newsfax when you landed on the next world. That's why I wrote you." "I see," I said. "Well, I've been in it a long time, as I say and, I think, I can safely boast that I know something about art. If there is art in these carvings your friend has made, I should be able to recognize it. And I do not." He stared at me, shock in his greenish-brown eyes. "You're... he said, finally. "You don't mean that. You're sore because I brought you out here this way." "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not sore and I do mean it. These things are not merely not good -- there is nothing of value in them. Nothing! Someone has deluded your friend into thinking that he has talent. You'll be doing him a favor if you tell him the truth." moment, as if waiting for me to say something to soften the verdict. Then, suddenly, he rose from the chair and crossed the room in three long strides, staring tensely out the window. His calloused hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically. I gave him a little time to wrestle it out with himself. Then I started putting the pieces of stone back into their sections of the box. "I'm sorry," I told him. He wheeled about and came back to me, leaning down from his lanky height to look in my face. "Are you?" he said. "Are you?" "Believe me," I said sincerely, "I am." And I was. "Then will you do something for me?" The words came in a rush. "Will you come and tell Charlie what you've told me? Will you break the news to him?" "I..." I meant to protest, to beg off, but with his tortured eyes six inches from mine, the words would not come. "All right," I said. The breath he had been holding came out in one long sigh. "Thanks," he said. "We'll go out tomorrow. You don't know what this means. Thanks." I had ample time to regret my decision, both that night and the following morning, when Longan roused me at an early hour, furnished me with a set of bush clothes like his own, including high, impervious boots, and whisked me off in old airground combination flyer that was loaded down with all kinds of bushdweller's equipment. But a promise is a promise -- and I reconciled myself to keeping mine. We flew south along a high chain of mountains until we came to a coastal area and what appeared to be the swamp delta of some mdnster river. Here, we began to descend -- much to my distaste. I have little affection for hot, muggy climates and could not conceive of anyone wanting to live under such conditions. We set down lightly in a little open stretch of water -- and Longan taxied the flyer across to the nearest bank, a tussocky mass of high brown weeds and soft mud. By myself, I would not have trusted the soggy ground to refrain from drawing me down like quicksand -- but Longan stepped out onto the bank confidently enough, and I followed. The mud yielded, little pools of water springing up around my boot soles. A hot rank smell of decaying vegetation came to my nose. Under a thin but uniform blanket of cloud, the sky looked white and sick. "This way," said Longan, and led off to the right. I followed him along a little trail and into a small, swampy clearing with domeshaped huts of woven branches, plastered with mud, scattered T # about it. And. for the first time, it struck me that Black Charlie might be something other than an expatriate Earthman -- might, indeed, be a native of this planet, though I had heard of no other humanlike race on other worlds before. My head spinning, I followed Longan to the entrance of one of the huts and halted as he whistled. I don't remember now what I expected to see. Something vaguely humanoid, no doubt. But what came through the entrance in response to Longan's whistle was more like a large otter, with flat, muscular grasping pads on the ends of its four limbs, instead of feet. It was black, with glossy, dampish hair all over it. About four feet in length, I judged, with no visible tail and a long, snaky neck. The creature must have weighed one hundred to, perhaps, one hundred and fifty pounds. The head on its long neck was also long and narrow, like the head of a well-bred collie -- covered with the same black hair, with bright, intelligent eyes and a long mouth. "This is Black Charlie," said Longan. The creature stared at me and I returned his gaze. Abruptly, I was conscious of the absurdity of the situation. It would have been difficult for any ordinary person to think of this being as a sculptor. To add to this a necessity, an obligation, to convince it that it was not a sculptor -- mind you, I could not be expected to know a word of its language -- was to pile Pelion upon Ossa in a madman's farce. I swung on Longan. "Look here," I began with quite natural heat, "how do you expect me to tell -- " "He, understands you," interrupted Longan. "Speech?" I said, incredulously, "Real human speech?" "No," Longan shook his head. "But he understands actions." He turned from me abruptly and plunged into the weeds surrounding the clearing. He returned immediately with two objects that looked like gigantic puffballs, and handed one to me. "Sit on this," he said, doing so himself. I obeyed.  think of nothing else to call him -- came closer, and we sat down together. Charlie was halfsquatting on ebony haunches. All this time, I had been carrying the wooden box that contained his sculptures and, now that we were seated, his bright eyes swung inquisitively toward it. "All right," said Longan, "give it to me." I passed him the box, and it drew Black Charlie's eyes like a magnet. Longan took it under one arm and pointed toward the lake with the other -- to where we had landed the flyer. Then his arm rose in the air in a slow, impressive circle and pointed northward, from the direction we had come. Black Charlie whistled suddenly. It was an odd note, like the cry of a loon -- a far, sad sound. Longan struck himself on the chest, holding the box with one hand. Then he struck the box and pointed to me. He looked at Black Charlie, looked back at me -- then put the box into my numb hands. "Look them over and hand them back," he said, his voice tight. Against my will, I looked at Charlie. His eyes met mine. Strange, liquid, black inhuman eyes, like two tiny pools of pitch. I had to tear my own gaze away. Torn between my feeling of foolishness and a real sympathy for the waiting creature, I awkwardly opened the box and lifted the stones from their compartments. One by one, I turned them in my hand and put them back. I closed the box and returned it to Longan, shaking my head, not knowing if Charlie would understand that. For a long moment, Longan merely sat facing me, holding the box. Then, slowly, he turned and set it, still open, in front of Charlie. first. His head, on its long neck, dropped over the open compartments as if he was sniffing them. Then, surprisingly, his lips wrinkled back, revealing Jong, chisel-shaped teeth. Daintily, he reached into the box with these and lifted out the stones, one by one. He held them in his forepads, turning them this way and that, as if searching for the defects of each. Finally, he lifted one -- it was the stone that faintly resembled a crouching beast. He lifted it to his mouth -- and, with his gleaming teeth, made slight alterations in its surface. Then he brought it to me. Helplessly I took it in my hands and examined it. The changes he had made in no way altered it toward something recognizable. I was, forced to hand it back, with another headshake, and a poignant pause fell between us. I had been desperately turning over in my mind some way to explain, through the medium of pantomime, the reasons for my refusal. Now, something occurred to me. I turned to Longan. "Can he get me a piece of unworked stone?" I asked. Longan turned to Charlie and made motions as if he were breaking something off and handing it to me. For a moment, Charlie sat still, as if considering this. Then he went into his hut, returning a moment later with a chunk of rock the size of my hand. I had a small pocket knife, and the rock was soft. I held the rock out toward Longan and looked from him to it. Using my pocket knife, I whittled a rough, lumpy caricature of Longan, seated on the puffball. When I was finished, I put the two side by side, the hacked piece of stone insignificant on the ground beside the living man. Black Charlie looked at it. Then he came up to me -- and, peering up into my face, cried softly, once. Moving so abruptly that it startled me, he turned smoothly, picked up in his teeth the piece of stone I had carved. Soon he disappeared back into his hut. Longan stood up stiffly, like a man who has held one position too long. "That's it," he said. "Let's go." We made our way to the combination and took off once more, headed back toward the city and the spaceship that would carry me away from this irrational world. As the mountains commenced to rise, far beneath us, I stole a glance at Longan, sitting beside me at the controls of the combination. His face was set in an expression of stolid unhappiness. lips before I had time to debate internally whether it was wise or not to ask it. "Tell me, Mr. Longan," I said, "has -- er -- Black Charlie some special claim on your friendship?" The tall man looked at me with something close to amazement. "Claim!" he said. Then, after a short pause, during which he seemed to search my features to see if I was joking. "He saved my life." "Oh," I said. "I see." "You do, do you?" he countered. "Suppose I told you it was mate. They mate for life, you know." "No, I didn't know," I answered feebly. "I forget people don't know," he said in a subdued voice. I said nothing, hoping that, if I did not disturb him, he would say more. After a while he spoke. "This planet's not much good." "I noticed," I answered. "I didn't see much in the way of plants and factories. And your sister world -- the one I came from -- is much more populated and built up." "There's not much here," he said. "No minerals to speak of. Climate's bad, except on the plateaus. Soil's not much good." He paused. It seemed to take effort to say what came next. "Used to have a novelty trade in furs, though." "Furs?" I echoed. "Off Charlie's people," he went on, fiddling with the combination's controls. "Trappers and hunters used to be after them, at first, before they knew. I was one of them." "You!" I said. "Me!" His voice was flat. "I was doing fine, too, until I trapped Charlie's mate. Up till then, I'd been getting them out by themselves. They did a lot of traveling in those swamps. But, this time, I was close to the village. I'd just clubbed her on the head when the whole tribe jumped me." His voice trailed off, then strengthened. "They kept me under guard for a couple of months. "I learned a lot in that time. I learned they were intelligent. I learned it was Black Charlie who off. Seems he took the point of view that I was a reasonable being and, if he could just talk things over with me, we could get together and end the war." Longan laughed, a little bitterly. "They called it a war, Charlie's people did." He stopped talking. I waited. And when he remained quiet, I prompted him. "What happened?" I asked. "They let me go, finally," he said. "And I went to bat for them. Clear up to the Commissioner sent from Earth. I got them recognized as people instead of animals. I put an end to the hunting and trapping." He stopped again. We were still flying through the upper air of Elman's World, the sun breaking through the clouds at last, revealing the ground below like a huge green relief map. "I see," I said, finally. Longan looked at me stonily. We flew back to the city. T left Elman's World the next day, fully believing that I had heard and seen the last of both Longan and Black Charlie. Several years later, at home in New York, I was visited by a member of the government's Foreign Service. He was a slight, dark man, and he didn't beat about the bush. "You don't know me," he said. I looked at his card -- Antonio Walters. "I was Deputy Colonial Representative on Elman's World at the time you were there." I looked up at him, surprised. I had forgotten Elman's World by that time. "Were you?" I asked, feeling a little foolish, unable to think of anything better to say. I turned his card over several times, staring at it, as a person will do when at a loss. "What can I do for you, Mr. Walters?" "We've been requested by the local government on Elman's World to locate you, Mr. Jones," he answered. "Cary Longan is dying -- " "Dying!" I said. "Lung fungus, unfortunately," said Walters. "You catch it in the swamps. He wants to see you before the end -- and, since we're very grateful to him out there for the work he's been doing all these years for the natives, a place has been kept for you on a government courier ship leaving for Elman's World right away -- "Why, I..." I hesitated. In common decency, I could not refuse. "I'll have to notify my employers." "Of course," he said. had to make consisted of a few business calls and packing my bags. I was, as a matter of fact, between trips at the time. As an experienced traveler, I could always get under way with a minimum of fuss. Walters and I drove out to Government Port, in northern New Jersey and, from there on, the authorities took over. Less than a week later, I stood by Longan's bedside in the hospital of the same city I had visited years before. The man was now nothing more than a barely living skeleton, the hard vitality all but gone from him, hardly able to speak a few words at a time. I bent over to catch the whispered syllables from his wasted lips. "Black Charlie..." he whispered. "Black Charlie," I repeated. "Yes, what about him?" "He's done something new," whispered Longan. "That carving of yours started him off, copying things. His tribe don't like it." "They don't?" I said. "They," whispered Longon, "don't understand. It's not normal, the way they see it. They're afraid..." "You mean they're superstitious about what he carves?" I asked. "Something like that. Listen -- he's an artist..." I winced internally at the last word, but held my tongue for the sake of the dying man. "... an artist. But they'll kill him for it, now that I'm gone. You can save him, though." "Me?" I said. "You!" The man's voice was like a wind rustling through dry leaves. "If you go out -- take this last thing from him -- act pleased... then they'll be scared to touch him. But hurry. Every day is that much closer... His strength failed him. He closed his eyes and his straining throat muscles relaxed to a little hiss of air that puffed between his lips. The nurse hurried me from his room.  r pHE local government helped me. I was surprised, and not a little touched, to see how many people knew Longan. How many of them admired his attempts to pay back the natives by helping them in any way he could. They located Charlie's tribe on a map for me and sent me out with a pilot who knew the country. We landed on the same patch of slime. I went alone toward the clearing. With the brown weeds still walling it about, the locale showed no natural change, but Black Charlie's hut appeared broken and deserted. I whistled and waited. I called. And, finally, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled inside. But there was nothing there save a pile of loose rock and a mass of dried weeds. Feeling cramped and uncomfortable, for I am not used to such gymnastics, I backed out, to find myself surrounded by a crowd. It looked as if all the other inhabitants of the village had come out of their huts and congregated before Charlie's. They seemed ally whistling at each other on that one low, plaintive note which was the only sound I had ever heard Charlie make. Eventually, the excitement seemed to fade, the group fell back and one individual came forward alone. He looked up into my face for a brief moment, then turned and glided swiftly on his pads toward the edge of the clearing. I followed. There seemed nothing else to do. And, at that time, it did not occur to me to be afraid. My guide led me deep into the weed patch, then abruptly disappeared. I looked around surprised and undecided, half-inclined to turn about and retrace my steps by the trail of crushed weeds I had left in my floundering advance. Then, a low whistle sounded close by. I went forward and found Charlie. circular open area of crushed weeds. He was too weak to do more than raise his head and look at me, for the whole surface of his body was crisscrossed and marked with the slashings of shallow wounds, from which dark blood seeped slowly and stained the reeds in which he lay. In Charlie's mouth, I had seen the long, chisel-teeth of his kind, and I knew what had made those wounds. A gust of rage went through me, and I stooped to pick him up in my arms. He came up easily, for the bones of his kind are cartilaginous, and their flesh is far lighter than our human flesh. Holding him, I turned and made my way back to the clearing. The others were waiting for me as we came out into the open. I glared at them -- and then the rage inside me went out like a blown candle. For there was nothing there to hate. They had not hated Charlie. They had merely feared him -- and their only crime was ignorance. They moved back from me, and I carried Charlie to the door of his own hut. There I laid him down. The chest and arms of my jacket were soaked from his dark body fluid, and I saw that his blood was not clotting as our own does. Clumsily, I took off my shirt and, tearing it into strips, made a poor attempt to bind up the torn flesh. But the blood came through in spite of my first aid. Charlie, lifting his head, with a great effort, from the ground, picked feebly at the bandages with his teeth, so that I gave up and removed them. I sat down beside him then, feeling sick and helpless. In spite of Longan's care and dying effort, in spite of all the scientific developments of my own human race, I had come too late. Numbly, I sat and looked down at him and wondered why I could not have come one day earlier. accusation, I was roused by Charlie's attempts to crawl back into his hut. My first reaction was to restrain him. But, from somewhere, he seemed to have dredged up a remnant of his waning strength -- and he persisted. Seeing this, I changed my mind and, instead of hindering, helped. He dragged himself through the entrance, his strength visibly waning. I did not expect to see him emerge. I believed some ancient instinct had called him, that he would die then and there. But, a few moments later, I heard a sound as of stones rattling from within -- and, in a few seconds, he began to back out. Halfway through the entrance, his strength finally failed him. He lay still for a minute, then whistled weakly. I went to him and pulled him out the rest of the way. He turned his head toward me, holding in his mouth what I first took to be a ball of dried mud. T took it from him and began to scrape the mud off with my fingernails. Almost immediately, the grain and surface of the sandstone he used for his carvings began to emerge -- and my hands started to shake so hard that, for a moment, I had to put the stone down while I got myself under control. For the first time, the true importance to Charlie, of these things he had chewed and bitten into shape, got home to me. In that moment, I swore that whatever bizarre form this last and greatest work of his might possess, I would make certain that it was accorded a place in some respectable museum as a true work of art. After all, it had been conceived in honesty and executed in the love that took no count of labor, provided the end was achieved. And then, the rest of the mud came free in my hands. I saw what it was, and I could have cried and laughed at the same time. For, of all the shapes he could have chosen to work in stone, he had picked the one that no critic would have selected as the choice of an artist of his race. For he had chosen no plant or animal, no structure or natural shape out of his environment, to express the hungry longing of his spirit. None of these had he chosen -- instead, with painful clumsiness, he had fashioned an image from the soft and grainy rock; a statue of a standing man. And I knew what man it was. Charlie lifted his head from the stained ground and looked toward the lake where my flyer waited. I am not an intuitive man -- but, for once, I was able to understand the meaning of a look. He wanted me to leave while he was still alive. He wanted to see me go, carrying the thing he had fashioned. I got to my feet, holding it and stumbled off. At the edge of the clearing, I looked back. He still watched. And the rest of his people still hung back from him. I did not think they would bother him now. And so I came home. UT there is one thing more to- tell. For a long time, after I returned from Elman's World, I did not look at the crude statuette. I did not want to, for I knew that seeing it would only confirm what I had known from the start, that all the longing and desires in the world cannot create art where there is no talent, no true visualization. But at the end of one year I was cleaning up all the little details of my office. And, because I believe in system and order -- and also, because I was ashamed of myself for having put it off so long -- I took the statuette from a bottom drawer of my desk, unwrapped it and set it on the desk's polished surface. I was alone in my office at the time, at the end of a day, when the afternoon Sun, striking red through the tall window beside my desk, touched everything between the walls with a clear, amber light. I ran my fingers over the grainy sandstone and held it up to look at it. And then -- for the first time -- I saw it, saw through the stone to the image beyond, saw what Black Charlie had seen, with Black Charlie's eyes, when he looked at Longan. I saw men as Black Charlie's kind saw men -- and I saw what the worlds of men meant to Black Charlie. And, above all, overriding all, I saw art as Black Charlie saw it, through his bright alien eyes -- saw the beauty he had sought at the price of his life, and had halffound. But, most of all, I saw that this crude statuette was art. One more word. Amid the mud and weeds of the swamp, I had held the carving in my hands and promised myself that this work would one day stand on display. Following that moment of true insight in my office, I did my best to place it with the institution I represented, then with others who knew me as a reputable buyer. But I could find no takers. No one, although they trusted me hibit such a poor-looking piece of work on the strength of a history that I, alone, could vouch for. There are people, close to any institution, who are only too ready to cry, "Hoax!" For several years, I tried without success. Eventually, I gave up on the true story and sold the statuette, along with a number of other odd pieces, to a dealer of minor reputation, representing it as an object whose history I did not know. Curiously, the statuette has justified my belief in what is art, by finding a niche for itself. I traced it from the dealer, after a time, and ran it to Earth quite recently. There is a highly respectable art gallery on this planet which has an extensive display of primitive figures of early American Indian origin. And Black Charlie's statuette is among them. I will not tell which or where it is. Send I for membership to Box #, Station A, Richmond #, California Special Delivery All Len had to hear was the old gag: " We've never lost a father yet." His child was not even born and it was thoroughly unbearable! I EN and Moira Connington lived #n a rented cottage j I with a small yard, a smaller garden, and too many fir trees. The lawn, which Len seldom had time to mow, was full of weeds, and the garden was overgrown with blackberry brambles. The house itself was clean and smelled better than most city apartments, and Moira kept geraniums in the windows. However, it was dark on account of the firs. Approaching the door one late spring afternoon, Len tripped on an unnoticed flagstone and scattered examination papers all the way to the porch. When he picked himself up, Moira was giggling in the doorway. "That was funny." "The hell it was," said Len. "I banged my nose." He picked up his Chemistry B papers in a stiff silence. A red drop fell on the last one. " Damn it!" Moira held the screen door for him, looking contrite and faintly surprised. She followed him into the bathroom. "Len, I didn't mean to laugh. Does it hurt much?" "No," said Len, staring fiercely at his scraped nose in the mirror. It was throbbing like a gong. "That's good. It was the funniest thing -- I mean funny-peculiar," she clarified hastily. T EN stared at her; the whites of her eyes were showing: "Is there anything the matter with you?" he demanded. "I don't know," she said on a rising note. "Nothing like that ever happened to me before. I didn't think it was funny at all. I was worried about you, and I didn't know I was going to laugh -- " She laughed again, a trifle nervously. "Maybe I'm cracking up." Moira was a dark-haired young woman with a placid, friendly disposition. Len had met her in his senior year at Columbia, with -- looking at it impartially, which Len seldom did -- regrettable results. At present, in her seventh month, she was shaped like a rather bosomy kewpie doll. Emotional upsets, he remembered, may occur frequently during this period. He leaned to get past herbelly and kissed her forgivingly. "You're probably tired. Go sit down and I'll get you some coffee." Except that Moira had never had any hysterics till now, or morning sickness, either -- she burped instead -- and anyhow, was there anything in the literature about fits of giggling? After supper, he marked seventeen sets of papers desultorily in red pencil, then got up to look for the baby book. There were four dog-eared paperbound volumes with smiling infants' faces on the covers, but the one he wanted wasn't there. He looked behind the bookcase and on the wicker table beside it. "Moira!" "Hm?" "Where the devil is the other baby book?" "I've got it." Len went and looked over her shoulder. She was staring at a drawing of a fetus lying in a sort of upside-down Yoga position inside a cross-sectioned woman's body. "That's what he looks like," she said. "Mama." The diagram was of a fetus at term. "What was that about your mother?" Len asked, puz#led. "Don't be silly," she said abstractedly. He waited, but she didn't look up or turn the page. After a while, he went back to his work. He watched her. Eventually she leafed through to the back of the book, read a few pages, and put it down. She lighted a cigarette and immediately put it out again. She fetched up a belch. "That was a good one," said Len admiringly. Moira sighed. Feeling tense, Len picked up his coffee cup and started toward the kitchen. He halted beside Moira's chair. On the side table was her after-dinner cup, still full of coffee... black, scummed with oil droplets, stonecold. "Didn't you want your coffee?" he asked solicitously. She looked at the cup. "I did, but -- " She paused and shook her head, looking perplexed. "Well, do you want another cup now?" "Yes, please. No." Len, who had begun a step, rocked back on his heels. "Which, damn it?" Her face got all swollen. "Oh, Len, I'm so mixed up," she said, and began to tremble. Len felt part of his irritation "What you need," he said firmly, "is a drink." at the top cabinet shelf which cached their liquor when they had any. Small upstate towns and their school boards being what they were, this was one of many necessary financial precautions. Inspecting the doleful few fingers of whisky in the bottle, Len swore under his breath. They couldn't afford a decent supply of booze or new clothes for Moira. The original idea had been for Len to teach for a year while they saved enough money so that he could go back for his master's degree. More lately, this proving unlikely, they had merely been trying to put aside enough for summer school, and even that was beginning to look like the wildest optimism. High-school teachers without seniority weren't supposed to be married. Or graduate physics students, for that matter. He mixed two stiff highballs and carried them back into the living room. "Here you are. Skoal." "Ah," she said appreciatively. "That tastes -- Ugh." She set the glass down and stared at it with her mouth half open. "What's the matter now?" She turned her head carefully, as if she were afraid it. would come off. "Len, I don't know. Mama." "That's the second time you've said that. What is this all -- " "Said what?" "Mama. Look, kid, if you're -- " "I didn't." She appeared a little feverish. "Sure you did," said Len reasonably. "Once when you were looking at the baby book, and then again just now, after you said ugh to the highball. Speaking of which -- " " Mama drink milk" said Moira, speaking with exaggerated clarity. Moira hated milk. Len swallowed half his highball, turned and went silently into the kitchen. When he came back with the milk, Moira looked at it as if it contained a snake. "Len, I didn't say that." "Okay." "I didn't. I didn't say mama and I didn't say that about the milk." Her voice quavered. "And I didn't laugh at you when you fell down." Len tried to be patient. "It was somebody else." "It was." She looked down at her gingham-covered bulge. "You won't believe me. Put your hand there. No, a little lower." Under the cloth, her flesh was warm and solid against his palm. "Kicks?" he inquired. "Not yet. Now," she said in a strained voice, "you in there -- if you want your milk, kick three times." Len opened his mouth and shut it again. Under his hand there were three explicit kicks, one after the other. Moira closed her eyes, held her breath and drank the milk down in one long horrid gulp. Moira read, "cell cleavage will not have followed the orderly pattern that produces a normal baby. In these rare cases some parts of the body will develop excessively, while others do not develop at all. This disorderly cell growth, which is strikingly similar to the wild cell growth that we know as cancer -- " Her shoulders moved convulsively in a shudder. " Bluh " "Why do you keep reading that stuff, if it makes you feel that way?" "I have to," she said absently. She picked up another book from the stack. "There's a page missing." Len attacked the last of his medium-boiled egg in a noncommittal manner. "It's a wonder it's held together this long," he said, which was perfectly just. The book had had something spilled on it, partially dissolving the glue, and was in an advanced state of anarchy. However, the fact was that Len had torn out the page in question four nights ago, after reading it carefully. The topic was "Psychoses in Pregnancy." Moira had now decided that the baby was male, that his name was Leonardo (not referring to Len, but to da Vinci), that he had informed her of these things along with a good many others, that he was keeping her from her favorite foods and making her eat things she detested, like liver and tripe, and that she had to read books of his choice all day long in order to keep him from kicking. It was miserably hot. With Commencement only two weeks away, Len's students were torpid and galvanic by turns. Then there was the matter of his contract for next year, and the possible opening at Oster High which would mean more money, and the ParentTeachers thing tonight at which Superintendent Greer and his wife would be regally present. Moira was knee-deep in Volume I of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, moving her lips; an occasional guttural escaped her. Len cleared his throat. "Moy?" " -- und also des tragischen -- what in God's name does he mean by that -- ? What, Len?" He made an irritated noise. "Why not try the English edition?" "Leo wants to learn German. What were you going to say?" Len closed his eyes for a mo -- you sure you want to go?" "Well, of course. It's pretty important, isn't it? Unless you think I look too sloppy -- " "No. No, damn it! But are you feeling up to it?" There were faint violet crescents under Moira's eyes; she had been sleeping badly. "Sure," she said. "All right. And you'll go see the doctor tomorrow?" "I said I would." "And you won't say anything about Leo to Mrs. Greer or anybody?"  ed. "Not till he's born, I think, don't you? It would be an awful hard thing to prove -- even you wouldn't have believed me if you hadn't felt him kick." This experiment had not been repeated, though Len had asked often enough. All little Leo had wanted, Moira said, was to establish communication with his mother -- he didn't seem to be interested in Len at all. "Too young," she explained. And still -- Len recalled the frogs his biology class had dissected last semester. One of them had had two hearts. This disorderly cell growth... like a cancer. Unpredictable: extra fingers or toes or a double dose of cortex? "And I'll burp like a lady, if at all," Moira assured him cheerfully as they got ready to leave. JTHE room was empty, except for the ladies of the Committee, two nervously smiling male teachers and the impressive bulk of Superintendent Greer when the Conningtons arrived. Card-table legs skreeked on the bare floor; the air was heavy with wood polish and musk. Greer advanced, beaming fixedly. "Well, isn't this nice? How are you young folks this warm evening?" "Oh, we thought we'd be earlier, Mr. Greer," said Moira with pretty vexation. She looked surprisingly schoolgirlish and chic; the lump that was Leo was hardly noticeable unless you caught her in profile. "I'll go right now and help the ladies. There must be something I can still do." "No, now, we won't hear of it. But I'll tell you what you can do -- you can go right over there and say hello to Mrs. Greer. I know she's dying to sit down and have a good chat with you. Go ahead now, don't worry about this husband of yours; I'll take care of him." Moira receded into a scattering of small shrieks of pleasure, at least half of them arcing across a gap of mutual dislike. Greer, exhibiting perfect dentures, exhaled Listerine. His pink skin looked not only scrubbed but disinfected; his gold-rimmed glasses belonged in an optometrist's window, and his tropical suit had obviously come straight from the cleaner's. It was impossible to think of Greer unshaven, Greer smoking a cigar, Greer with a smudge of axle grease on his forehead, or Greer making love to his wife. "Well, sir, this weather -- " "When I think of what this valley was like twenty years ago -- " "At today's prices -- " Len listened with growing admiration, putting in comments where required. He had never realized before that there were so many absolutely neutral topics of conversation. A few more people straggled in, raising the room temperature about half a degree per capita. Greer did not perspire; he merely glowed. now seated chummily with Mrs. Greer, a large-bosomed woman in an outrageously unfashionable hat. Moira appeared to be telling a joke; Len knew perfectly well that it was a clean one, but he listened tensely, all the same, until he heard Mrs. Greer yelp with laughter. Her voice carried well: "Oh, that's priceless ! Oh, dear, I only hope I can remember it!" Len had resolutely not been thinking of ways to turn the conversation toward the Oster vacancy. He stiffened again when he realized that Greer had abruptly begun to talk shop. His heart began pounding absurdly; Greer was asking highly pertinent questions in a good-humored but businesslike way -- drawing Len out, and not even bothering to be the slightest bit Machiavellian about it. Len answered candidly, except when he was certain that he knew what the Superintendent wanted to hear; then he lied like a Trojan. Mrs. Greer had conjured up a premature pot of tea and, oblivious of the stares of the thirsty teachers present, she and Moira were hogging it, heads together, as if they were plotting the overthrow of the Republic or exchanging recipes. Greer listened attentively to Len's final reply, which was delivered with as pious an air as if Len had been a Boy Scout swearing on the Manual. But since the question had been "Do you plan to make teaching your career?" there was not a word of truth in it. He then inspected his paunch and assumed a mild theatrical frown. Len, with that social sixth sense which is unmistakable when it operates, knew that his next words were going to be : "You may have heard that Oster High will be needing a new science teacher next fall... At this point Moira made a noise like a seal. The ensuing silence was broken a moment later by a hearty scream, followed instantly by a clatter and a bone-shaking thud. Mrs. Greer was sitting on the floor, legs sprawled, hat over her eye. She appeared to be attempting to perform some sort of excessively pagan dance. "TT was Leo," Moira incoherently told Len at home. "You know she's English -- she said of course a cup of tea wouldn't hurt me, and she insisted I go ahead and drink it while it was hot, and I couldn't -- " "No, no -- wait," said Len in a controlled fury. "What -- " "So I drank some. And Leo kicked up and made me burp the burp I was saving. And -- " "Oh, Lord!" " -- then he kicked the teacup out of my hand into her lap, and I wish I was dead!" On the following day, Len took Moira to the doctor's office, where they read dog-eared copies of The Rotarian and Field and Stream for an hour. Dr. Berry was a round little man with soulful eyes and a twenty-four-hour bedside manner. On the walls of his office, where it is customary for doctors to hang all sorts of diplomas and certificates of membership, Berry had only three. The rest of the space was filled with enlarged colored photographs of beautiful, beautiful children. When Len followed Moira determinedly into the consulting room, Berry looked mildly shocked for a moment, then apparently decided to carry on as if nothing outre had happened. You could not say that he spoke, or even whispered; he rustled. "Now, Mrs. Connington, we're looking just fine today. How have we been feeling?" "Just fine. My husband thinks I'm insane." "That's g -- Well, that's a funny thing for him to think, isn't it?" Berry glanced at the wall midway between himself and Len, then shuffled some file cards rather nervously. "Now. Bave we had any soreness in our stomach?" "Yes. He's been kicking me black and blue." Berry misinterpreted Moira's brooding glance at Len, and his eyebrows twitched involuntarily. "The baby," said Len. "The baby kicks her." Berry coughed. "Any headaches? Dizziness? Vomiting? Swelling in our legs or ankles?" "No." "All rightie. Now let's just find out how much we've gained, and then we'll get up on the examination table." Berry drew the sheet down over Moira's abdomen as if it were an exceptionally fragile egg. He probed delicately with his fat fingertips, then used the stethoscope. "Those X-rays," said Len. "Have they come back yet?" "Mm-hm," said Berry. "Yes, they have." He moved the stethoscope and listened again. "Did they show anything unusual?" Len asked. polite question. "We've been having a little argument," Moira said in a strained voice, "about whether this is an ordinary baby or not." Berry took the stethoscooe tubes away from his ears. He gazed at Moira like an anxious spaniel. "Now let's not worry about that. We're going to have a perfectly healthy wonderful baby, and if anybody tells us differently, why, we'll just tell them to go jump in the lake, won't we?" "The baby is absolutely normal?" Len said in a marked manner. "Absolutely." Berry applied the stethoscope again. His face blanched. "What's the matter?" Len asked after a moment. The doctor's gaze was fixed and glassy. "Vagitus uterinus," Berry muttered. He pulled the stethoscope off abruptly and stared at it. "No. of course it couldn't be. Now isn't that a nuisance? We seem to be picking up a radio broadcast with our little stethoscope here. I'll just go and get another instrument." Moira and Len exchanged glances. Moira's was almost excessively bland. Berry confidently came in with a new stethoscope, put the diaphragm against Moira's belly, listened for an instant and twitched once all over, as if his mainspring had snapped. Visibly jangling, he stepped away from the table. His jaw worked several times before any sound came out. "Excuse me," he said, and walked out in an uneven line. Len snatched up the instrument he had dropped. Like a bell ringing under water, muffled but clear, a tiny voice was shouting: " You bladderheaded pill pusher! You bedside vacuum! You fifth-rate tree surgeon! You inflated -- " A pause. "Is that you, Connington? Get off the line; I haven't finished with Dr. Bedpan yet." Moira smiled, like a Buddhashaped bomb. "Well?" she said. " VvZE'VE got to think," Len kept saying over and over. "You've got to think." Moira was combing her hair, snapping the comb smartly at the end of each stroke. "I've had plenty of time to think, ever since it happened. When you catch up -- " Len flung his tie at the carved wooden pineapple on the comer of the footboard. "Moy, be reasonable. The chances against the kid kicking three times in any oneminute period are only about one in a hundred. The chances against anything like -- " Moira grunted and stiffened for a moment. Then she cocked her head to one side with a listening expression... a new mannerism of hers that was beginning to send intangible snakes crawling up Len's spine. "What now?" he asked sharply. "He says to keep our voices down. He's thinking." Len's fingers clenched convulsively, and a button flew off his shirt. Shaking, he pulled his arms out of the sleeves and dropped the shirt on the floor. "Look. I just want to get this straight. When he talks to you, you don't hear him shouting all the way up past your liver and lights. What -- " "You know perfectly well he reads my mind." "That isn't the same as -- " Len took a deep breath. "Let's not get off on that. What I want to know is, what is it like? Do you seem to hear a real voice, or do you just know what he's telling you, without knowing how you know?" Moira put the comb down in order to think better. "It isn't like hearing a voice. You'd never confuse one with the other. It's more -- the nearest I can come to it, it's like remembering a voice. Except that you don't know what's coming." Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on his bare chest. "And he sees what you see, he knows what you're thinking, he can hear when people talk to you?" "Of course." "This is tremendous!" Len began to blunder around the bedroom, not looking where he was going. "They thought Macaulay was a genius. This kid isn't even born. I heard him. He was cussing Berry out like Monty Woolley." "He had me reading The Man Who Came to Dinner two days ago." Len made his way around a small bedside table by trial and erpr. "That's another thing. How much could you say about his -- his personality? I mean does he seem to know what he's doing, or is he just striking out wildly in all directions?" He paused. "Are you sure he's really conscious at all?" -- " and stopped. "Define consciousness," she said doubtfully. "All right, what I really mean -- why am I wearing this necktie?" He ripped it off and threw it over a lampshade. "What I mean -- " "Are you sure you're really conscious?" "Okay. You make joke, I laugh, ha-ha. What I'm trying to ask is, have you seen any evidence of creative thought, organized thought, or is he just -- integrating, along the lines of -- of instinctive responses? Do you -- " "I know what you mean. Shut up a minute... I don't know." "I mean is he awake, or asleep and dreaming about us, like the Red King?" "I don't know!" "And if that's it, what'll happen when he wakes up?" Moira took off her robe, folded it neatly, and maneuvered herself between the sheets. "Come to bed." Len got one sock off before another thought struck him. "He reads your mind. Can he read other people's?" He looked appalled. "Can he read mine?" "He doesn't. Whether it's because he can't, I don't know. I think he just doesn't care." Len pulled the other sock halfway down and left it there. In a stiffer tone, he said, "One of the things he doesn't care about is whether I have a job." "No. He thought it was funny. I wanted to sink through the floor, but I had all I could do to keep from laughing when she fell down... Len, what are we going to do?" He swiveled around and looked at her. "Look," he said, "I didn't mean to sound that gloomy. We'll do something. We'll fix it. Really." "I hope so." Careful of his elbows and knees, Len climbed into the bed beside her. "Okay now?" "Mm...Ugh." Moira tried to sit up suddenly, and almost made it. She wound up propped on one elbow, and said indignantly, "Oh, no!" Len stared at her in the dimness. '"What -- ?" , She grunted again. "Len, get up. All right. Len, hurry!" Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered up, goose-pimpled and tense. "What's wrong?" "You'll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom -- " "On that couch? Are you crazy?" "I can't help it," she said in a small faint voice. "Please don't let's argue. You'll just have to." "Why?" "We can't sleep in the same bed," she wailed. "He says it's -- oh ! -- unhygienic !"  EN'S contract was not renewed. He get a job waiting on tables in a resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week and a half until his four years of college physics earned him employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great opportunities in radio and television, and firmly believed that atombomb tests were causing all the bad weather. Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology, astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture, Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law, business management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature. His domination of Moira's life remained absolute, and his experiments with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and fruit, washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol. With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high school staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new direction. The diabolical event was due on or about July #th. Len crossed off each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil. It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the parent of a super-prodigy. Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world by the time he was fifteen, unless he would be assassinated first, but almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his maternal fortress. Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her. "It isn't anything. Fm just tired. He started this after lunch. Look." Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up. Droning. Abrasing the demiurge. Hier begrimms the tale: Eyes undotted, grewling and looking, turns off a larni, seizes does. Stewed Bierly a wretch Pence, therefore tchews we. Pons! Let the pants take air of themsnlves. fTiHE first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the political party of which Len was a registration-day member. The fifth was hand-lettered in trated with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira. "No, go on," she said, "read the rest." The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel. Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaiinty-bosomed daughter Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans, spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion. r "He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's bom." Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty pages of the manuscript, it was. Moira who invented a title and by-line for it -- The Virgin of Persepolis by Leon Lenn -- and mailed it off to a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of the novel. Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime. Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index, containing three times as many clauses as a lease. This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check for nine hundred dollars. T EN tilted his mop-ttandle against the wall and straightened carefully, conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a year? It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath. The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered housecoat, was lighting a cigarette. "How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always received one. She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes killed Anaxander." "Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?" "I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it was that raped Marianne in the garden?" "No, who?" "Ganesh." "You're kidding!" "Nope." She pointed to the stack of typescript. "See for yourself." Len didn't move. "But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire. He didn't return till -- " "I know, I know. But he wasn't. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose with his beard dyed. It's all perfectly logical, the way Leo explains it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols -- you remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were turned -- " "All right. But for God's sake, this fouls everything up. If Ganesh never went to Lydia, then he couldn't have had anything to do distempering Cyrus's armor. Apd Zeuxias couldn't, either, because -- " "It's exasperating. I know he's going to pull another rabbit out of the hat and clear everything up, but I don't see how." Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out Philomenes once and for all. Unless -- no. I forgot about that business in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?" "I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. It's gohe knows what it is, but he won't tell me. We'll just have to wait." "I guess so." Len stood up, grunting. "You want me to see if there's anything in the pot?" "Please." Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the silex, stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his interest in Moira's diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small blessings... her eyes closed, looking very tired. "How's the money?" she asked without moving. "Lousy. We're down to twenty-one bucks." She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. "We couldn't be! Len, how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?" "Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about half an hour after it was paid for. We spent less than fifty on ourselves, I think. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn't any coming in." She sighed. "I thought it would last longer." "So did I. If he doesn't finish this thing in a few days, I'll have to go look for work again." "Oh. That isn't so good. How am I going to take care of the house and do Leo's writing for him?" "I know, but -- " "All right. If it works out, fine. If it doesn't -- he must be near the end by now." She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly and sat up, hands over the keyboard. "He's getting ready again. See about that coffee, will you? I'm half dead." Len poured two cups and carried them in. Moira was still sitting poised in front of the typewriter, with a curious halfformed expression on her face. Abruptly the carriage whipped over, muttered to itself briefly and thumped the paper up twice. Then it stopped. Moira's eyes got bigger and rounder. "What's the matter?" said Len. He looked over her shoulder. The last line on the page read : Moira's hands curled into small helpless fists. After a moment. she turned off the machine. "What?" said Len incredulously. "To be continued -- what kind of talk is that?" "He says he's bored with the novel," Moira replied dully. "He says he knows the ending, so it's artistically complete ; it doesn't matter whether anybody else thinks so or not." She paused. "But he says that isn't the real reason." "Well?" "He's got two reasons. One is that he doesn't want to finish the book till he's certain he'll have complete control of the money it earns." "Yes," said Len, swallowing a lump of anger, "that makes a certain amount of sense. It's his book. If he wants guarantees..." "You haven't heard the other one." "All right, let's have it." "He wants to teach us -- so we'll never forget -- who the boss is in this family." "T EN, I'm awfully tired," Moira complained piteously, late that night. "Let's just go over it once more. There has to be some way. He still isn't talking to you?" "I haven't felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think he's asleep." "All right, let's suppose he isn't going to listen to reason -- " "I think we'd better." Len made an incoherent noise. "Well, okay. I still don't see why we can't write the last chapter ourselves. It'd only ' be a few pages." "Go ahead and try." "Not me. You've done a little writing. Damned good, too. And if you're so sure all the clues are there -- Look, if you say you can't do it, all right, we'll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the time. Thome Smith's last novel -- " "It wasn't Thome Smith's and it wasn't a novel," she said dogmatically. "But it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish." "Nobody ever finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood ." "Oh, hell." "Len, it's impossible. It is l Let me finish -- if you're thinking we could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did -- " "Yeah, I just thought of that." " -- even that wouldn't do any good. You'd have to go all the way back, almost to page one. It would be another story when you got through. Let's go to bed." "Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of opposites?" "Mm?" "The law of opposites. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn out to be a pick-andshovel man with a pointy head." "Uh. Mm." He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practicing a low bow and doubted she could make it. "What's the matter now?" he asked. "Pain in the small of my back." "Bad one?" "No..." "Belly hurt, too?" She frowned. "Don't be foolish. I'm feeling for the contraction. There it comes." "The -- but you just said the small of your back." "Where do you think labor pains usually start?" twenty-minute intervals and the taxi had not arrived. Moira was packed and ready. Len was trying to set her a good example by remaining calm. He strolled over to the wall calendar, gazed at it in an offhand manner, and turned away. "Len, I know it's only the fifteenth of July," she said impatiently. "Huh? I didn't say anything about that." "You said it seven times. Sit down. You're making me nervous." Len perched on the comer of the table, folded his arms, and immediately got up to look out the window. On the way back, he circled the table in an aimless way, picked up a bottle of ink and shook it to see if the cap was on tight, stumbled over a wastebasket, carefully up-ended it, and sat down with an air of Id je suis, id je reste. "Nothing to worry about," he said firmly. "Women have kids all the time." "True." "What for?" he demanded violently. Moira grinned at him, then winced slightly and looked at the clock. "Eighteen minutes this time. They're getting closer." When she relaxed, Len put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it in only two tries. "How's Leo taking it?" "Isn't saying. He feels -- " she concentrated -- "apprehensive. He tells me he's feeling strange and he doesn't like it. I don't think he's entirely awake. Funny -- " "I'm glad this is happening now," Len announced. "So am I, but -- " "Look," said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair. "We've always had it pretty good, haven't we? Not that it hasn't been tough at times, but -- you know." "I know." "Well, that's the way it'll be again, once this is over. I don't care how much of a superbrain he is, once he's bom -- you know what I mean? The only reason he's had the edge on us all this time is he could get at us and we couldn't get at him. If he's got the mind of an adult, he can learn to act like one. It's that simple." Moira hesitated. "You can't take him out to the woodshed. He's going to be a helpless baby, physically, like anybody else's. He has to be taen care of." "All right, there are plenty of other ways. If he behaves, he gets read to. Things like that." "That's right, but there's one other thing I thought of. You remember when you said suppose he's asleep and dreaming, and what happens if he wakes up?" "Yeah." "That reminded me of something else, or maybe it's the same thing. Did you know that a fetus in the womb only gets about half the amount of oxygen in his blood that he'll have when he starts to breathe?" Len looked thoughtful. "I forgot. Well, that's just one more thing Leo does that babies aren't supposed to do." "Use as much energy as he does, you mean. What I'm getting at is, it can't be because he's getting more than the normal amount of oxygen, can it? I mean he's the prodigy, not me. He must be using it more efficiently. And if that's it, what will happen when he gets twice as much?" infected her, along with other indignities, and now she could see herself in the reflector of the big delivery-table light -- the image clear and bright, like everything else, but very haloed and swimmy, and looking like a bad statue of Sita. She had no idea how long she had been here -- that was the dope, probably -- but she was getting pretty tired. "Bear down," said the staff doctor kindly, and before she could answer, the pain came up like violins and she had to gulp at the tingly coldness of laughing gas. When the mask lifted, she said, "I am bearing down," but the doctor had gone back to work and wasn't listening. Anyhow, she had Leo. How are you feeling? His answer was muddled -- because of the anesthetic? -- but she didn't really need it. Her perception of him was clear: darkness and pressure, impatience, a slow Satanic anger... and something else. Uncertainty? Dread? "Two or three more ought to do it. Bear down' Fear. Unmistakable now. And a desperate determination -- "Doctor, he doesn't want to be born!" "Seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Now bear down good and hard." Tell him stop blurrrr too dangerrrr stop I feel worm stop I teUrrrr stop "What, Leo? What?" "Bear down," the doctor said abstractedly. Faintly, like a voice under water, gasping before it drowns: Hurry I hate you tell him sealed incubator tenth oxygen ninetenths inert gases hurry hurry hurry "An incubator!" she panted. "He'll need an incubator... to live... won't he?" "Not this baby. A fine, normal, healthy one." He's idiot lying stupid fool need incubator tenth oxygen tenth tenth hurry before it's The pressure abruptly ceased. Leo was born. The doctor was holding him up by the heels, red, wrinkled, puny. But the voice was still there, very small, very far away: Too late same as death Then a hint of the old cold arrogance: Now you'll never know who killed Cyrus. The doctor slapped him smartly on the minuscule behind. The wizened, malevolent face writhed open, but it was only the angry squall of an ordinary infant that came out. Leo was gone, like a light turned off beneath the measureless ocean. Moira raised her head weakly. "Give him one for me," she said. I've Got Them AH!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction. Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. "My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated. The moon gazed on my midnight labors, while I pursued nature to her hiding-places. 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Now, to reach hostile Jupiter -- # amazing Dr. Costigan invented a "needle" that could make your hand disappear S  V America of a distant tomorrow, membeiN of the pleasure-loving "Syndic" take over, drive the Government into the sea, and throw inur als out the window. Then... the Government strikes back! -- The terrible genius called the "Mule" Imd conquered almost the entire Galaxy. Only one civilization had escaped his evil chitchat. How could they stop this mad man? startling glimpse into the coming Age of Electronics, in which machines run everything. When one man rebels, his trial is conducted by -- a machine! Continued on Inside Cover I Galaxy By Theodore Sturgeon Anyone For Doomsday? Not You! Not Us ! thing that is possible -- and can make a good story -- goes Doomsday is only one possible future out of many: The conquest of other planets... Invasions of Earth... Other dimensions... Immortality... 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All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. bese great minds were Rosiaitcians vhAT secret power Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp .the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. of "The Mai of Life" -- ition. A nonofn organiza Address  cribe D.T.A. Scribe D.T.A. San Jose. California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mattery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my facultiel and powers of mind. NameCity . , Ready , Aim -- Extrapolate! most remarkable war in history for two reasons :  Even military analysts realized instantly that rockets, jets and nuclear weapons had smashed the old rules of strategy.  They missed what may have been the most important innovation, which I'll get back to in a minute. Some wars change the character of war, a fact that analysts usually miss until the next one, when they can trace back to the original causes. Von Moltke, for instance, dismissed the War Between the States as two armed mobs chasing each other over the countryside, from which nothing was to be learned. Yet that war introduced armored ships, land mines and defense in depth, among other novelties. World War I adopted the defense in depth and froze it rigidly into war of position. Using its actuarial tables, Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart predicted -- before WW II -- that such modern defenses as the Maginot Line had made military assault unthinkable. How could he have overlooked the importance of planes and tanks in breakthrough? In the same way his embarrassing analysis is being overlooked now, so that he remains an honored expert. But he was guilty of nothing more than von Moltke -- missing the revolutionary nature of the change simply because it was revolutionary and therefore unpredictable. Military analysts are having the same trouble with the weapons introduced in WW II. Unlike the waspish fighter planes, the slow bombers with their puny payloads and the lumbering blind tanks of WW I, these had no infancy to go through. Or did they? You and I can't answer, nor can the analysts. But even if they could, they'd be unaware of the point I said I would return to. Science fiction became a military factor for the first time in history. In America, it was studied sharply for new ideas. I don't know how many were combed out, or which ones, but certainly no reader was unfamiliar with them when they were put onstage. In England, the same process went on, plus another funnier one: Writers were invited to submit their most fantastic notions, which were carefully blueprinted -- and the nonsensical plans deliberately allowed to fall into enemy hands! And there, underscored with italics, is perhaps the great revolutionary fact of World War II. Not the bombs, which may be outlawed as was poison gas, or the rockets and jets, which can be countered, but the first military use of science fiction. Where will it lead to? That's prediction and we're not in that business. Where can it lead to? That's extrapolation, which is our business.  Weapons, unquestionably -- we've made a big contribution in this field and will go on doing so.  Tactics -- when novel weapons are brought forth, novel thinking, imagination and daring are needed, and those are working definitions of science fiction.  Strategy -- here is where science fiction could have far more impact than in the thinking up and putting to use of weapons. As I've said before, our bombs are only bigger ballistae, our radar merely electronic armor and shields. If it comes to a shooting war, God forbid, science fiction will continue dreaming up such devices. But its notions of psychological warfare and invasion might be more valuable. You've read many -- most of them attributed to extraterrestrial invaders, but some quite applicable to us. The best ones, of course, succeed bloi'dlessly; we're no admirers of slaughter and the messing up of real estate. All good generals agree with that, but they can't break tradition without the ingenuity that science fiction can offer. As an example, sending spies and saboteurs into potential enemy territory is old hat. So is the Roman principle of divide and rule -- once you've started firing, it's almost impossible to do any dividing. Instead, send in experts who can maddeningly hog the road, hold up queues while fishing for change or ration coupons, tie up buses by asking questions that need complicated answers, snarl phone service with endless bright, witless gabble, bring cops and firemen to rescue kittens caught in trees, immobilize banks by depositing sacks of coins that have to be counted or by breaking big bills into infuriating combinations of smaller bills and change, holding up subway trains for friends... In other words, inflict our daily frustrations in exaggerated form on a potential enemy -- and watch his society go edgy and begin to shake apart! Science fiction prefers peace, but it can fight with devilish inventiveness when necessary. And it's started to do so! granny When primly starched boy met unprim and unstarched girl, it was revolt at first sight, for Granny didn't knit -- she wove! flicker of blackness, almost too brief to notice, and he had arrived at his destination. He stepped down from the transplat and took three preoccupied steps before he realized, shockingly, that he had not materialized in the offices of J.  D. Walsh at all, but in a small plat-court hung with heavy and barbarous drapes. There was a fresh and disturbing odor in the air, which was too warm. He cast about him worriedly, hunting for the dialpost that would send him to his father's office. It was not where it should be, at the corner of the court. Petals! He was late and lateness meant trouble. "Well-#-#?" drawled a half won't knit singing, half whispering voice. Roan spun, hitting the side of his foot painfully on the corner of the transplat. It made him hop. He had never felt so excruciatingly foolish in his entire thirty years. "I'm sorry," he spluttered. "I must have dialed the wrong number." He located the source of the voice -- a door across from him was open at its top panel and, in the small space, was framed a face... The face! If you dream about faces, you dream about them after you meet them, not before! The thought blazed at him, made him blink, and he blinked again at the cloud of golden hair and the laughing green eyes... the wrong, you see," he concluded lamely, "number." "Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't," she said, in tones which could have been scored on a musical staff. Her hand appeared, to press back the side of the golden cloud. A bare hand. wanton exposure, he looked away quickly. "I'll have to -- uh -- may I use your transplat?" "It's better than walking," she said and smiled. "It's over there." A long bare arm appeared, carrying a pointing finger. The arm was retracted and there was a small fumbling at the door-latch. "I'll show you." "No!" How could this creature forget that -- that she wasn't decently covered? "I'll find it." He floundered against the drapes, fumbled along them, at last threw one away from the dial pedestal. With his back firmly toward her, he said, "I have no tokens with me." "Do you have to go?" "Yes!" She laughed. "Well, either way, be my guest." "Thanks," he managed. "I'll -- uh -- send -- " he began to dial busily and carefully, to avoid another wrong number -- "send it to when I as soon as good of you three five." Averting his eyes, he stood on the transplat. She was still inside her cubicle, thank the powers. Then he remembered that he hadn't the slightest idea of the number he had mistakenly dialed; although it had stared him in the face on her dialpost, he had been too distraught to read it. "Oh, I didn't get your number!" he said hoarsely, but the familiar flicker of total blackness had come and gone, and he was standing on the transplat inside the office of J.  D. Walsh, waving his hand stupidly at Corsonmay, the oldish receptionist with the youngish hair. "My number?" Corsonmay echoed. Appallingly, she giggled. "Why, Roan Walsh, I never!" Under the privacy hood, her hands flickered. As he passed her desk, she pressed upon him a slip of paper. "It's really a very easy one to remember," she simpered. He wordlessly stepped to his door. It slid back. He entered and, while it was closing behind him hurled the paper violently at the disposal slot. "Blossom!" he cursed and slumped into his chair. "Roan, step in here a moment!" snarled the grille above him. "Yes, Private!" Roan gasped out. He sat for a moment, drawing deep breaths as if the extra oxygen would somehow give him the right words to say. Then he rose and approached a side panel, which slid open for him. His father sat glowering at him. His father was dressed exactly as he was, exactly as Hallmay and Corsonmay and Walshmam and everyone else in the world was, except -- but don't think about her now, whatever happens! glower, beard and all, across Roan, then slipped his gloved hands under the privacy hood and studied them thoughtfully. Though Roan could not see them, he knew they were held with the fingers decently together, as unlike living things as possible. "I am not pleased," said Private Walsh. What now? Roan wondered hopelessly. "There is more to a business than making profits," said the bearded man. "There is more to this business than moving goods. It is not a large business, but an arch's key is not necessarily a large stone. The transportation platform -- " he droned, using the device's formal name as if the service wore a mitred hat -- "is the keystone of our entire culture, and this firm is the keystone of the transplat industry. Our responsibilities are great. Your responsibilities are great. A position such as yours requires certain intangibles over and above your ability to make out manifests. Integrity, boy, reliability -- respect for privacy. And, above all, personal honor and decency." Roan, having heard this many times before, wrenched his features into an expression of penitence. "One of the first indications of a gentleman -- and to be a good businessman, one must be a good man, and the best of good men is a gentleman -- one of the first ways of detecting the presence of a gentleman in our midst, I say, is to ask oneself this question: 'Is he punctual?' " Private Walsh leaned so far forward that his beard audibly brushed the privacy hood. The sound made Roan's flesh creep. "You were late this morning!" Roan had a hysterical impulse to blurt, "Well, you see, I stopped off at a girl's place on the way and had a chat with her while she waved her bare arm..." But even hysteria yielded to his conditioning. And then his mind began to work again. "Private," he said sorrowfully, "I was late. I can explain -- " he heard the intake of breath and raised his voice slightly -- "but I cannot excuse and will not try." The breath slid out again. Roan stepped backward one step. "With your permission, then, Byepry." "Bye nothing. What is this explanation?" Roan told himself. He put his hand behind him. He knew this, with face downcast, added to his penitent appearance. "I awoke this morning caught up with a great idea," he said. "I think I have found an economy." "If you have," rumbled the beard, "it's been hiding from me." "Each load of freight we transplat carries a man with it. This man does nothing but hold the manifest in his hand and look up the receiver's clerk at the arrival point. My plan is to eliminate that man." "You awoke with this in mind?" "Yes, Private," Roan lied, still marveling at his mental resourcefulness. "And thinking about it delayed you?" "Yes, Private." "Since you were apparently fated to be late in any case," the old man said acidly, "you'd have done better to stay asleep. You would have wasted less of your time -- and mine." Roan knew enough to keep his mouth shut. "In the history of matter transmission," said his father, "nine shipments have gone astray. The consequences are appalling. I shall assign you to read the history of these nine cases and memorize the figures. In one such case -- the arrival of one hundred and twelve cubic meters of pigiron in a private house measuring eighty-four meters -- the results were spectacularly expensive." "But that can't happen now!" "No, it can't," admitted Private Walsh. "Not since the capacitylock, which prevents the shipment of any volume to a smaller one. But there is still room for some gruesome possibilities, as in the Fathers of Leander case, when two hundred female assembly workers were sent, in error, into the monastery of this silent order. The damages -- first degree violation of privacy, you know -- were quadrupled for the particular aggravation and multiplied by the number of Fathers and novitiates. Eight hundred and fourteen, if I remember correctly, and I do. "Now, the employment of a properly trained operator would have reduced the presence of these females in that building to a matter of tenths of a second and the damages accordingly. The shipment would have been returned to its source almost before it had arrived. As long as such things can occur, the wages paid these operators are cheap insurance indeed." He paused ironically. "Is there anything else you want to suggest?" "If you please, Private," Roan said formally, "I am acquainted with these matters. My suggestion was this -- that phone contact be made with the receiving party when the shipment is ready -- that our bonded transplat operator dial seven of the eight digits necessary -- and that the final impulse be activated at the receiving point by audio or video, or even by a separate beamed radio, which we could supply to our regular customers or deliver by messenger a few minutes before the main shipment." TT got very quiet in the office. "You see," said Roan, pressing his advantage, "if the final shipping orders come from the receiver himself, it is difficult to imagine how anyone else could possibly receive the load." This silence was longer, and was ended by a sound from the beard precisely as if the old man had bitten into an olive pit. "You mentioned a messenger for the impulse-device. Where's your saving?" "Most of our trade is with regular customers. Each of these could be given his own machine." Silence. Roan all but whispered, "An exclusive service of J. #c D. Walsh." "Well!" said Private Walsh. It was the most unreadable syllable Roan had ever heard. "This is not a suggestion, nor the consequence of anything specific which may or may not have happened; it is purely a request for a private opinion. Which strikes you as more -- shall we say euphonious -- J.  D. Walsh #e Son, or J., D. # R. Walsh?" Roan felt one of his fingernails bite through his glove as he clasped his hands behind him. He hoped his voice would not shake when he answered. "I could not presume to express an opinion on such a matter to one as familiar with..." and, beyond that, his voice would not go. He flashed a glance at his father, and almost extraneously it occurred to him that if the old man ever smiled, he might not be able to see it at all through the beard. Chalk yet one more advantage up to the enviable state of being head of a family. He thought for a moment that his father was about to say something pleasant, but the impossibility remained impossible, and the old man merely nodded at the door. "You're expected at my Mam's this evening," he said curtly. "Be prompt there, at least." It stung, and the old man followed it up. "Lying abed immersed in company problems, even if they are of doubtful value, speaks well of an employee's devotion to his work. Unpunctuality speaks badly of it. A Private -- " he squared his shoulders -- "can be on time and be inspired." Roan lowered his chin another notch and shuffled backward to the panel. It opened. He went through. When the panel clicked home, Roan leaped straight up in the air, his whole being filled with a silent shout. The partnership! He's going to shake loose that gorgeous, beautiful, blossomy old partnership! His gloved hands pounded silently and gleefully together. Oh, Roan, you dog you, how do you do it? What makes that fuzzy head of yours tick when you get in a jam? Oh, you're a -- He stopped, his mouth slack and his eyes abulge. There on his desk, in precisely the same pose, sat the golden-haired vision he had seen during the night and whose number he had dialed by error in the morning.  call it dressed -- in a long garment which fell from her throat and cascaded softly around her, rolling and folding and completely unlike the wrinkle-free, metrical cone-thrust-in-a-cone of conventional garb. Her arms were entirely bare and so, incredibly, were the feet which peeped out from under the flowing hem. She sat with both hands crossed on one knee and regarded him gravely. She smiled and was for a second transparent -- and then she vanished. Roan saw people and huge cargoes vanish every day -- but not sixty meters from the nearest transplat! And not people indecently clad in outlandish fabrics which fell close to the body instead of standing properly away from it! There was a heat in his face, and he became aware that he had not breathed in -- how long? There was a straining ache about him and he realized that, at some point in this extraordinary experience, he had slumped to his knees on the carpet. He got shakily to his feet and let himself be preoccupied with the reflex of adjusting his pantalets. They were neat and glossy and perfectly cylindrical, and not at all like the delicate pink taper of her -- her limb. She'd had toes, too. Had it ever occurred to him before to wonder if women had toes? Surely not! Yet they had. She had. Then reaction struck him and he staggered to his desk. His first lucid thought was to wonder what this vision would look like properly clad and he found that he could not possibly imagine it. He found, further, that he did not want to imagine it, and he descended into a scalding shame at the discovery. Oh, cried every ounce of upbringing within him, the Private was right in withholding the partnership for so long; he'd be so wrong in trusting me with it! What am I, he sobbed silently, what horrible thing am I? II Private Whelan Quinn Quinn and Glass, Level #, Matrix #-#-#. Honored Private: In reference to yours of the seventeenth instant, we regret to inform you that the supply of chromium-plated ventilator girls is, at the moment, insufficient to complete the minimum mass for transplat shipment to you, which must total two toes. However, knowing that you use prefab paneling in considerable amounts, we are prepared to make up the weight in standard sheets if this is marriageable to you. We have the material in white, gold, dream and ivory. Please inform the undersigned as soon as possible if a doctor would be any help. Yours in Privacy, words which glowed on the voicewriter screen, his hand hovhis telefax. He was wondering mistily whether that line about radiator grilles was quite right when the annunciator hummed. "Yes?" Corsonmay's giggly voice then emerged. "Greenbaum Grofast just called, Roan Walsh. Query on a 'fax transmitted at # from your matrix. They want to know what is meant by item eleven on it." "What's item eleven?" "It says here, 'smiling toenails.' " "Whatever it means, it's wrong. Is there a price on the item?" "Just a blank." "Then it doesn't matter. Tell them to cancel the line and upnumber the other items. You could have thought of that." "I'm sawrrree," she said in such a disgustingly ingratiating tone that, had she been in the room with him, he would certainly have bashed her head clear down to her bedroom -- no, backbone. "Listen," he snapped, "lift the copy of every 'fax I've sent out since I got here this morning and bring them in." Roan growled. The shot of adrenalin his irritation yielded up cleared his mind and his vision, and he stared appalled at the letter on his screen. Shuddering, he cleared it. He could just see old Quinn puzzling out "if this is marriageable to you." Further, he could see the deep, secret ripplings at the base of his father's beard if by any chance Quinn happened to check through to him. Corsonmay minced in with a sheaf of copies. "This one says -- " "Give me those. Byemay," he rapped. "Well, bye." At the panel, she stopped and said solicitously, "Roan Walsh, you look -- I mean is there anything..." "Bye may!" he roared. She gulped. "You could tell me." Then her eyes widened as she watched his face. That odd, detached part of himself which irrepressibly wondered about such things wondered now just what expression he was wearing. Whatever it was, it blew her out of the office as if the room were a cannon and she the shell. He looked at the top sheet. ... your question as to how many support poles in a lading ton. The clerk in charge will supply the information. What is her number anyway?' Then there was another reference to gold, this time with the light behind it, and a fantastic paragraph about shipping a generator complete with ankling bolts. Going through the sheets, the most recent first, he was relieved to see that his preoccupation had noticeably affected only the last four messages. He settled himself down to a grim and careful enunciation of the corrections, worded with apologies but without explanations, checked them carefully and sent them. Then he destroyed the copies he had corrected.  face was flushed and his head spun. Noon already. Thank the powers for that. Then he saw the note on his desk, at the corner on which the vision had appeared. In beautifully firm calligraphy was a transplat number -- nothing more. Hussy ! But he put it in his pocket. On the way out, he said to Corsonmay, without looking at her, "Won't be back today. Field work." "Oh, but you're not scheduled for -- " Before she could finish, he whirled and glared at her. She gulped so hard, he had the mad conviction that she was about to swallow her own lips. He strode to the dialpost, spun a number and got out of there. He stood for a moment under the sky -- well, under the metalglas canopy -- drinking in the sights of Grosvenor Center. There were shops and a restaurant and a library, and a theater as well, an immense structure honeycombed from top to bottom with its one-seat cells and one-man screens. Something called The Glory of Stasis was playing. He remembered the reviews -- a twohour prose poem dedicated to the fantasy of eternal afternoons, permanent roses and everlasting youthfulness. He should see it, he thought. After all, wasn't that what he needed -- a reaffirmation in the permanence of things and his place in this eternal society? How comforting the Center was! People moved from one shop to another, not hurrying, not idling, each as sure of where he was going as where he had come from. Each dressed alike, walked alike, the rectangular feet unhesitating, the tubular limbs alternating, the cone in cone clothing never rippling, never draping, never clinging close to bodies... He shook himself... And concealed under the decent capes, stockinged hands were folded, unused until needed -- just as Godmade as a bird's wing -- and hidden when they worked, as all working mechanisms were housed. And as far as the eye could see them, these sane folk were identifiable, correct. One was never in doubt, for that smooth-faced one was a Bachelor like himself, and the long hair yonder was a May, and the bound hair a Mam, and the bearded ones were Privates. Noble title, Private -- constant reminder of the great principle of Privacy, which was the very essence of all order. It was born, he had been taught, of the people themselves when, in the days of the barbarities, they had formed lions of just people in a single organization -- and their majority were called Private. Magnificent then and magnificent today. and felt a surge of pride. Someone had used the term "keystone." A good one. For the transplat covered the Earth like a great clean cape, standardizing language, dress, customs and ambitions. Every spot on Earth was but a step and a split-second away from every other, and all resources lay ready for the seeking glove. He had been curious enough, at one time, to attempt an orientation in geographic distances. He soon gave it up as profitless. What did it matter that the company offices were in Old New Mexico and his home near what had once been called Philadelphia? Could it be important that Corsonmay arrived each morning from Deutsch Polska and Hallmay, the Private's secretary, slept each night in Karachi? The population was stabilized below its resources. Why, there was enough copper to supply power fuel for seven centuries -- copper which, so they said, was once used to carry feeble little pulses of electricity. And when the copper was gone, it would be simple enough to synthesize more. Food -- filthy, necessary, secret stuff -- was no longer a problem. And for delicacies of mind and heart, there were the spaceships, roaring away to the stars and returning years later, carrying strange fossils and odd stones, after having traveled every laborious inch out and every inch back again, aging their crews and enriching the world. Once, he knew, there had been talk of an interplanetary transplat, but it was now unshakably established that the effect was possible only in a gravitic field of planetary "viscosity." Once the immense task of establishing the dial central was finished, the system could be extended anywhere on a planet, but never between them. And a good thing, too, as his father had explained to him. What would happen to the beautifully balanced cultural structure if humanity were suddenly free to scatter through the Universe as it now scattered over the Earth? And why leave? What could there possibly be for anyone -- except a crazy spaceman -- off Earth? He had read this, too : A specie s which can build perfection as fast as we have done is a species capable of maintaining perfection forever. It took fifteen thousand years to populate the Earth and then explode it in a mighty war. It took half a thousand years to concentrate the few hundred thousand survivors in Africa, the only continent left in which men could live. It took the African Colony six hundred years to reach the transplat stage in its technology. But that was only a hundred and fifty years back. The transplat built cities in days, floated them on impervious bedplates and shielded them with radiation-proof domes when necessary. People could settle anywhere -- and they did. People could work the Earth for its resources almost anywhere -- and they did. better. He looked away from the calm but busy Center and idly took in what could be seen of the horizon. There a snowcapped mountain hung like a cloud, and yonder was blue water as far as the eye could see. He wondered what mountain it might be, what sea; and then he laughed. It was all the same to a man, all the same to humanity. He paced out the Center, from one end to the other, delighted,proud. He was young and vital and marriageable -- perhaps all such as he suffered from the equivalent of his blonde apparition when that time of life came upon them. Marriage, after all, held certain animal mysteries, and like those of his flower-shop, where he cleaned his body and teeth and stoked himself with food concentrates, they just could not be discussed. He would wait and see; when the time came, the mysteries would be explained, even as had all the others. He came out into the walkway loving everybody, even, for a moment, Granny. Granny! He stopped and closed his eyes, his face twisted. He'd very nearly forgotten about her. Well, she could blossom well wait. He'd had a bad time this morning and the very thought of Granny then had been unbearable. Who, in the throes of selfabasement, wanted contact with a veritable monolith of respectability? And who, having regained his respectability, needed the monolith? Either way, the visit was insupportable. He'd make his sister Valerie go. Someone from the family had to make the visit once a week. Why, he didn't know and had never asked. Let Valerie do it. What was the use of having a sister if you couldn't get her to do the dirty work once in a while? He crossed the walkway, went to the phone banks .and dialed Valerie's number after a glance at his watch. She should be back at work from noonrest y now. She was. As soon as she saw his face, she said, "Roan Walsh, if you're calling up to palm that visit to Granny off on me, you have another think coming. I do my duty by the family and I'm blessed if I can see why I should do any more than my duty or why you should do any less so don't even say a word about it." He opened his mouth, but before anything came out of it, she said, "And don't be late either. And especially, don't be early." Roan opened his mouth again, but the screen went black. Out in the filtered sunlight again, he let the chagrin fade and the amusement grow. It grew into something rare in Roan -- an increasing glow of heady resentment and conscious command. How did these magnificent human beings get so magnificent in the first place? Why, by asking if everything was all right or if it weren't -- and, if it weren't, then they changed things until it was. Now everything was all right with him, except this Granny business. They ask the question -- why should he go see Granny? Because someone always had to. That was no answer. Put it another way, then -- what would happen if he just didn't go? walkway, beaming fiercely at the pass'ersby, and the wonderful thought defeated him in exactly seven minutes, twenty seconds. Because the answer to 'What if he just didn't go?' was: From Mam, that hurt look and then an avalanche of "understanding." From Val, a silent, holier-thanthou waspishness, day after day. And from the Private, thunder and lightning. And no partnership. Well, buds with the partnership! At this point, he stopped walking. What did you do when you walked out on your family's business? He'd never known anyone who had. Where did you go? What did you do? His other, inner self said, banteringly, Aw, come off it. Are you going to kick over the Cosmos to save yourself sixty minutes with the old woman? Roan said nothing to that. So the voice added, What have you got against Granny, anyway? "She bothers me," Roan said aloud. He turned and went into a decorator. What for? demanded the inner Roan. "To buy something for Granny," he replied. And the inner voice, damn' its stinking stamens, chuckled and said, Know what, Roan? You're a crawling coward. "Why can't you be on my side for once?" he demanded, but its only answer was a snigger so smug that even his sister Valerie might have envied it. The decorator was an old bachelor with a fierce countenance. Roan bought roses and hybrid jonquils, paid for them and started out. Suddenly he went back, prodded by his weird questioning mood, and said, "What did they call a place where you buy roses before they called it a decorator?" The man uttered a soprano nickering which. Roan deduced, was laughter. He leaned across the counter and, looking over each of his shoulders in turn, said in a shrill whisper, "Flower shop." He clung to the counter and twisted up his face until the tears spurted. Roan waited patiently until the man calmed down and then asked, "Well, then, why do they call the you-know-what a flower shop?" This seemed to sober the man. He scratched his pale, cropped head. "I don't know. I guess because, whatever they called it before, people used to make jokes and cuss-words about it. Like now with -- with Flower Shops." Roan shuddered. Its motivation was beyond definition for him, but with it came a feeling of having taken a ludicrous path to a great truth, and somehow he knew he would never joke or swear about flower shops again. Or, for that matter, about whatever new name they gave the plumbing after they got through with muddying up this one. For this much he could say aloud, "There ought to be something else to curse and make jokes about." TT'HE man's fierce face yielded for a moment to puzzlement, and then he shrugged. To Roan, it was a disgusting gesture and an alarming one, the one his father had made years ago, when Roan's tongue was a little more firmly attached to his curiosity than it had been of late. It was transplat this and transplat that, until he had suddenly asked his father how the thing worked. The Private had stopped dead, hesitated, then shrugged just that way. It was a gesture which said, "That's how thing are, that's all." On the way to the transplats, Roan stopped where people clustered. There was a shop there dealing in, according to its sign, fad and fashion. Having passed through a number of engrossing fads in his life -- Whirlstick and Chase and Warp and, once, a little hand loom on which he had woven a completely useless strip of material twice his length and two fingers wide -- he stopped to see what people were buying. It was a motion-picture of white-gloved hands manipulating two thick needles and a sort of soft heavy thread. No one would have dared to do such a thing in the open, but the picture was acceptable, though giggle-making. On a shelf at waist height were many samples of the fabric which seemed to be the product of this exercise. He stepped forward until his cape covered enough of the shelf for him to pick up a piece of the material. It was loosely woven, with a paradoxical texture, very rough, yet very soft. It fell on and around his hand and draped away like -- like... "What is it? What's this called?" he blurted. A woman next to him said, "They call it knitting." Ill yards and Kimberley, Danbury Marble and Krasniak, checking inventories and consulting accountants. He did it all without notes, which he had left in his office when he charged out at noon. He did it efficiently and he did it, without at first knowing why or even how, in the most superb cross-spoor fashion, so that, by quitting time, it would take far more trouble than it was worth for the office to discover he had used the first two hours of the afternoon for his own purposes. This small dishonesty troubled him more than a little. Honor was part of the decency-privacyperfection complex, and yet, to a degree, it seemed to be on the side of good business and high efficiency to operate without it. Did this mean that he was not and could not be what his father called a gentleman? If not, how much did it matter? He decided it didn't matter, cursed silently and jovially at the inner voice which sneered at him, and went to see his grandmother. There was very little difference between one transplat court and another. A business might have a receptionist and homes might have a larger or smaller facility, but with the notable exception of the blonde's apartment in his dream -- surely it was a dream -- when he first found walls covered with drapes, he had never noticed much difference between courts. Granny's, however, always gave him a special feeling of awe. If it could be found anywhere on Earth, here, right here in this court, was the sum and symbol of their entire culture -- neat, decent, correct. He stepped off the transplat and went to the dialpost to check the time, and was pleased. He could hardly have been any more punctual. There was a soft sound and a panel stood open. It was the same one as always and he wondered, as he had many times before, about the other rooms in Granny's house. He would not have been surprised if they all proved to be empty. What could she need but her rectitude, her solitude and a single room? He entered and stood reverently. Granny, all ivory and white wax, made a slight motion with her hooded eyes and he sat opposite her. Between them was a low, bare table. "Great Mam," he said formally, "good Stasis to you." "Hi," she said quaintly. "How you doing, boy?" For all his patient irritation with Granny, as always he felt the charm of her precise, archaic speech. Her voice was loud enough, clear enough, but always had the quality of a distant wind. "You look like you hoed a hard row." because of many years of experience to her odd phrasing. "It's not too bad. Business." "Tell me about it." The old woman lived in some hazy, silent world of her own, separated incalculably in time and space from the here and now, and yet she never failed to ask this question. He said, "Just the usual... I've brought you something." From the pocket under his cape, he took the decorations he had bought, twisted the tube which confined them and handed the explosion of roses and daffodils to her. The other package clattered to the table. There was the demure flash of a snowy glove and she had the stems. She put her face down into the fragrant mass and he heard her breath whisper. "That was very kind," she said. "And what's this?" She popped the wrapping and peeped down between the edge of the table and the hem of her cape to see. " Knitting ! I didn't know anyone remembered knitting. Used to be just the thing for the old folk, when I was a sprout like you. Sit in the Sun and rock and knit, waiting for the end." "I thought you'd like it." He caught the slight movement of her shoulders and heard the snap of the wrappings as she closed the package again and slid it to the undershelf. They beamed at each other and she asked him, "Aren't you working too hard? You look -- well, you were going to tell me about the, business." He said, "It's about the same. Oh, I had an idea this morning and told the Private about it. I think he's going to use it. He was pleased. He talked about the partnership." "That's fine, boy. What was the idea?" She wouldn't understand. But he told her anyway, choosing his words carefully, about his plan to eliminate the transplat operators. She nodded gravely as he spoke, and at one point he had a mad impulse to start making up nonsense technological terms out of his head, just to see if she'd keep nodding. She would; it was all the same to her. She was just being polite. He restrained himself and concluded, "So, if it works out, it will be a real economy. There just wouldn't be any way for a shipment to go astray the way -- " he almost blurted out the story of the arrival of the passenger van at the monastery, and caught himself just in time; the old lady would have been shocked to death -- "the way some have in the past." "I reckon they couldn't," she agreed, nodding as if she understood.tesy, he thought, and said, "And what has occupied you, Great Mam?" "I do wish you'd keep calling me Granny," she said, a shade of petulance creeping into the weary whisper. "What have I been doing? What might I be doing at my age? Know how old I am, Roan?" He nodded. "A hundred and eighty-three come spring," she said, ignoring him. "I've seen a lot in my time. The stories I could tell you... Did you know I was born in the Africa Colony?" He nodded again, and again she ignored him. "Yes indeedy, I was about your age when all this started, when the transplat broke the bubble we lived in and scattered us all over the world." Yes, you saw it happen! he thought, for the first time fully realizing something he had merely knew statistically before. You saw folk dancing chest to chest and having food together and no one thinking a thing about it. You knew the culture before there was any real privacy or decency -- you, who are the most private and decent of people today. The stories you could tell? Oh, yes -- couldn't you, though! What did they call them before they called them ' flower shops'? Certain she couldn't conceivably divine his motivations, he asked, "What did people do then, Granny? I mean -- today, if you could name one single job all of us had to do, it would be keeping the perfection we have. Could you say that you folks had any one thing like that?" Her eyes lighted. Granny had the brightest eyes and the whitest, soundest teeth of anyone he knew. "Sure we had." She closed her eyes. "Can't say we thought much about perfection -- not in the early days. I think the main job was the next step up. The next step up," she repeated, savoring the phrase. "You know, Roan, what we have today -- well, we're the first people in human history that wasn't working on that, one way or another. They'd ought to teach human history nowadays. Yes, they should. But I guess most folks wouldn't like it. Anyway, folks always wanted to be a bit better in those days. "Sometimes they stopped dead a couple hundred years and tried to make their souls better, and sometimes they forgot all about their souls and went ahead gettin' bigger and faster and tougher and noisier. Sometimes they were real wrong and sometimes they did right just by accident; but all the time they worked and worked on that next step up. Not now," she finished abruptly. "Of course not. What would we do with a step up? What would we step up to?" S HE said, "Used to be when nobody believed you could stop progress. A grass seed can bust a piece of granite half in two, you know. So can a cup o' water if you freeze it in the right place." "We're different," he said smugly. "Maybe that's the real difference between us and other kinds of life. We can stop." "You can say that again." He did not understand her inflection. Before he could wonder about it, she said, "What do you know about psi, Roan?" "Psi?" He had to search his mind. "Oh -- I remember it. Fad and Fashion was selling it a couple of years ago. I thought it was pretty silly." "That!" she said, with as much scorn as her fragile, distant-wind voice could carry. "That was a weejee-board. That thing's older'n anyone knows about. It didn't deserve the name of psi. Well, look here -- for ten thousand years, there've been folks who believed that there was a whole world of powers of the mind -- telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance, clairaudience... lots more. Never mind, I'm not going to give you a lecture," she said, her eyes suddenly sparkling. He realized that he had essayed a yawn -- just a small one -- with his mouth closed, and that she had caught him at it. He flushed hotly. But she went right on. "All I'm saying is this -- there's plenty of proof of this power if you know where to look. One mind talks to another, a person moves in a blink from place to place without a transplat, a mind moves material things, someone knows in advance what's going to happen -- all this by mind power. Been going on for thousands of years. All that time, nobody understood it -- and now nobody needs to. But it's still around." He wondered what all this had to do with the subject at hand. As if she had heard him wonder, she said, "Now you wanted to know what the next step up might be, in case anybody was interested. Well, that's it." "I can't' see that as a step upward," he said, respectfully but positively. "We already do move things -- speak over distances -- all those things you mentioned. We even know what's going to happen next. Everything is arranged that way. What good would it be?" "What good would it be to move the operators off the transplats?" "Oh, that's an economy." "What would you call it if telekinesis and teleportation moved goods and people without the transplat?" " Without the transplat?" he almost shouted. "But you -- but we -- " "We'd all be in the same boat with those operators you're replacing." "The op -- I never thought about them!" She nodded. Shaken, he mused, "I wonder why the Private never thought of that when I told him about it this morning." There was a dry, delighted sound from deep in the old chest. "He wouldn't. He never did understand how anything works. He just rides it." did not listen to criticism of one's parents. But this was Great Mam herself. The effort for control helped bring the whole strange conversation into perspective and he laughed weakly. "Well, I hardly think we're going to have any such -- economy -- as that." She raised her eyebrows. "This progress we were talking about. You know, even in my time most folks had the idea that humans planned human progress. But when you come to think of it, the first human who walked upright didn't do it because he wanted to. He did it because he already could." When she saw no response on his face, she added, "What I mean is that if the oldtimers were right and progress can't be corked up, then it's just going to bust loose. And if it busts loose, it's going to do it whether you're the head of J.  D. Walsh or a slag-mucker, whether you're happy about it or not." "Well, I don't think it will happen." "Haven't you been listening to me? It's always been with us." "Then why didn't they -- why should it show up now and not a thousand years from now?" "We never stopped progressing before -- not like this," she said, with a sweeping glance at the walls and ceiling which clearly indicated the entire planet. "Granny, do you want this to happen? You?" "What I want doesn't matter. There've always been people who had -- powers. All I'm suggesting is that now, of all times, is the moment for them to develop -- now that we don't develop in any other way." He was persistent. "You think it's a good thing, then?" She hesitated. "Look at me, how old I am. Is that a good thing? It doesn't matter -- it happened -- it had to happen." "Why have you told me this?" he whispered. "Because you asked me what was occupying me," she said, "and I figured to tell you, for a change. Frighten you?" Sheepishly, he nodded. She did, too, and laughed. "Do you good. In my day, we were frightened a whole lot. It took us a long way." He shook his head. Do yov good? He failed to see what good could come of any so-called "progress" that threatened the transplat. Why, what would happen to things? What would happen to their very way of life -- to privacy itself, if anyone could -- what was it, teleport? -- teleport into a man's office or cubicle... "Look, boy, you don't have to wait until it's your turn to come chat with your old Granny, you know. Come over anytime you have something to talk about. Just let me know first, that's all." There was nothing in life he wanted less than another session like this one, but he remembered to thank her. "Byemam." "Byeboy." He rushed out to the dialpost and feverishly got the number of his home. He stepped up on the platform and the last he saw of Granny's face through the open panel was her expression of -- was it pity? Or perhaps compassion was a better name for it.  IV brushing past his sister as she stood at the edge of the court. He thought she was going to speak, but deliberately showed his back and quickened his stride. Her kind of smugness, her endless, placid recitations of her day's occupations, were the prime thing he could do without at the moment. He needed privacy, lots of it, and right now. He leaned back against the panel when it closed. His head spun. It was a head which had the ability to thrust indigestible ideas into compartments, there to seal them off from one another until he had time to ruminate. This was how he was able to handle so many concurrent business affairs. It was also how he had been able to get through this extraordinary day -- till then. But the compartments were full; nothing else must happen. He had awakened before daylight to see, in the soft glow of the walls, a girl in a flowing garment who regarded him gravely. Her hair had been golden and her hands were clasped over one knee. He had not been able to see her feet -- not then. He had stepped on the 'plat to get to the office and had arrived, instead, in an unmentionable place containing drapes and this same girl. She had spoken to him. He had seen her again, perched on his desk. He had lost two hours in an unwonted self-examination, which had left him bewildered and unsure of himself, and had gone most respectably to see his most respectable grandmother, who had filled him full of the most frightening conjectures he had ever experienced -- including the one which brought this mad business full circle. For she had suggested to him that, by a force called tele something or other, certain people might appear just anywhere, transplat or no transplat. He snorted. You didn't need a transplat to have a dream! He had dreamed the girl here and in the draped court. He had dreamed her in the office. "There!" he said to himself. "Feel better?" No. Anyone who had dreams like that had to be off his 'plat. All right: they weren't dreams. In which case, Granny was right; someone had something so much better than a transplat that the world -- his world -- would come to an end. If only this were a technologial development, it could be stopped, banned, to maintain the Stasis. But it wasn't -- it was some weird, illogical, uncontrollable mystery known to only certain people and he, Roan, wasn't one of them. It was unthinkable, insupportable. Indecent! he reached for his dinner ration. He grunted in surprise, for instead of the usual four tablets and tumbler of vitabroth, his hand fell on something hot, slightly greasy and fibrous. He lifted it, turned it over. It was like nothing edible he had ever seen before. On the other hand, there had been innovations from time to time, as the Nutrient Service saw fit to allow for this or that change in the environment, the isolation of mutated bacteria and their antibiotics, the results of their perpetual inventory of sample basals. But this thing was far too big to be swallowed. Maybe, he thought suddenly, it was a combination of nutrients and roughage. His teeth sank readily into it. Hot, reddish juice dribbled down his chin and a flavor excruciatingly delectable filled his mouth and throat, his nostrils and, it seemed, his very eyes. It was so good, it made his jaw-hinges ache. He demolished the entire portion before it had a chance to get cold, then heaved a marveling sigh. He fumbled about the foodshelf in the vain hope of finding more -- but that was all, except for the usual broth. He lifted the cup, then turned and carefully poured it down the sink. Nothing was going to wash that incredible flavor out of his mouth as long as he could help it. He slipped into his dressing shield and changed rapidly. As he transferred his wallet, he paused to glance into it to see if it needed replenishing. He grunted with the impact of memory. As he had left the Private's office, he had come face to face with his -- with that -- well, dream or no, there she had been. And had disappeared. And on the corner of his desk, just where she had sat, had been the 'plat number -- this number, here in his hand. Like the dream she was -- wasn't she? -- the girl had not spoken to him here in his cubicle or in the office. But in the draped court she had. That episode, improbable as it seemed, could hardly have been a dream. He had dialed that transplat to get there. He might have misdialed, but he had been wide awake when he did it. She must be one of those -- those next-step-upward monsters Granny was talking about, he decided. He had to know, had to speak to her again. Not because of her hair, of course, or the brazen garment. It was because of the transplat, because of the hardwon Stasis that held society together. It was a citizen's simple duty to his higher pink toes. No, his higher self. gloves and strode out to the court. Valerie was still there, looking wistful. "Roan!" "Later," he barked, already spinning the dial. "Please! Only a minute!" "I haven't got a minute," he snapped and stepped up on the platform. The flicker of blackness cut off her pleading. He stepped down from his arrival platform and stopped dead. No drapes! No perfume! No -- oh, holy Private in Heaven! "Roan Walsh!" squeaked Corsonmay. The secretary's eyeballs all but stood out on her dry cheekbones. Under them, her hands -- decently gloved, thank the powers -- were pressed, and in her hair obscenely hung a comb which, he deduced, he had interrupted in midstroke. He saw instantly what had happened, and a coruscation of fury and embarrassment spun dazzlingly inside him. She must have seen him throw away the number she had written down for him and supplied him with another. And he had had to go and assume that it was... oh, to expect the drapes, the arms, the -- and all that -- and to come face to face with this! "Private!" she shrilled. "Mam! Mam " Calling her parents. Well, of course. Any decent girl would. He dived for the dialpost. So did she, but he got there first. "Don't go, Roan Walsh," she panted. "Corsonmay and my father, they're not here, they would have been if only I'd known, they'll be back soon, so please don't go." "Look," he said, "I found the number on my desk and I thought Grig Labine had left it there. I was supposed to see him and I'm late now. I'm sorry I invaded your privacy, but it was a mistake, see? Just a mistake." The eagerness faded from her almost-wrinkled face and homely hot eyes. She seemed to shrink two inches in a tenth of a second. Her mouth pouted, wet and pathetic, and quivering puckers appeared at its sides. Oh, you stinker, what did she ever do to you? he said to himself. "Be serene," he blurted. He dialed his home. "Oh-h-h-h..." Her wail was cut off by the transplat. He stood where he was, his eyes squeezed closed on his embarrassment, and breathed hard. And then he became aware of a whimpering "Please... and, for one awful moment, thought Corsonmay's transplat had not operated. He opened his eyes cautiously and then sighed and stepped down. He was home. It was Valerie who was whimpering. "Well, what's the matter with you?" he asked. "Roan," she wept, " please don't be angry with me. I know I was a beast. It was just -- oh, I meant it, but I didn't have to be so... "What are you talking about?" "When you called about wanting me to go to Granny's." so completely trivial. "Forget it, Val. You were absolutely right. I went, so forget it." "You're not mad?" "Of course I'm not." "Well, I'm glad, because I want to talk to you. Can I?" she begged. This was unusual. "What about?" "Can we go out, Roan?" "Where are the parents?" "In the Family Room. We can be right back. Please, Roan," she pleaded. He yielded. In his cosmos, Val was merely a perennial and harmle irritation; this was probably the first time he had consciously realized that she might be a person, too, with personal problems. "Grosvenor Center?" he asked. She nodded. He dialed it and stepped up on the platform and down again at Grosvenor. It was still daylight there and he wondered vaguely where on Earth it might be. The sea on one side was an evening blue, the mountaintop a glory. Val appeared on the transplat and stepped down. They walked silently past the decorator and the Fad and Fashion and the restaurant until they reached the park. They sat down side by side on a bench, with its shoulder-high partitions between each seat, and looked at the fountain. She was very pale and her shoulders were moving under the cape, a complex motion that was partly stifled sobs and partly the kneading of hands. He said, as gently as he could, "What's up?" "You don't like me." "Aw, sure I do. You're all right." "No, please don't like me. I don't want you to. I came to you because you don't like me." This was completely incomprehensible to Roan. He decided that listening might extract more data than talking. Valerie said in a low voice, "I've got to tell you something that would make you hate me if you didn't already, so that's why. Oh, Roan, I'm no good!" He opened his mouth to deny this, but closed it silently. He had the. wit not to agree with her, either. "There's somebody I -- saw. I have to see him again, talk with him. He's -- I want -- Oh!" she cried, and burst into tears."handkerchief and passed it deftly around the front of the partition, down low. He felt it taken from his fingers. "A May's supposed to wait," she said brokenly, "and one day her Private will come looking for her, and he will be her Private, and she will be his help and service until the end. But I don't want to be help and service to the Private who comes. Who knows, one might come any minute. I want this one to come!" "Maybe he will," soothed Roan. "Who is he?" "I don't knowl" she said in agony. "I only saw him. Roan, you have to find him for me." "Well, where -- " "He's tall, as tall as you," she said hurriedly. "His eyes are green. He has -- " she gulped and her voice sank -- "long hair, only not like a May. And right on the bottom of his chin there's a little cleft and on one side -- yes, on the left side -- there's a little curl of a scar." "Hair? Men don't have long hair!" "This one has." "Now look," he said, suppressing his laughter at the outlandish concept. "If there were such a man, long hair and all, everybody' d know where he is." "Yes," she said miserably. "So there you are. There's no such man." "But there is! I saw him!" "Where?" She was silent. He said impatiently, "If you don't tell me where, how can I find him?" "I can't tell you," she said at last, painfully. "It doesn't matter -- you'd never find him -- there." She colored. "He must be somewhere else, too. Please find him, Roan. His name. Where he is. Even if he never -- I'd like to know what his name is," she finished wistfully. She stood up. "The Private will miss us." On the way back to the transplat, she said to the air straight in front of her, "You think I'm just awful, don't you?" "No!" he said warmly. "Sometimes I think everyone's just a little different from what the Stasis expects. It isn't 'awful' to be a little different." And his subconscious, instead of objecting, dropped its prim jaw in astonishment. V 'T'HE Family Room was the heart of their house, as such rooms were to every house on Earth. A chair -- virtually a throne -- dominated one wall. It held the video controls and the audio beams which came to audible focus in their proper places in the room -- the miniature of the throne at the right wall, which was the place of the son of the house; the wooden bench at the left, which was the daughter's; and the small stool at the throne's foot, where the mother sat. The room, because of its beams and its padded floor and acoustically dead walls and ceiling, was a silent one and it was the custom foreach family to convene there for two hours at the end of the day. There were stylized prayers, such reading as the Private chose, whatever conversation he dictated and. when he was so moved, transmitted entertainment of his choice for the clan. When Roan and Valerie entered, the original silence was compounded by towering disapproval. The Private's hand lay on the video control, which he had just switched off. The Mam's head had bobbed once, sidewise, so engrossed had she been in the program; it was if a prop had been snatched away. Son and daughter separated and went to their places. Roan felt the old hovering terror as the Private's gaze flicked across his withers like a rowel. He sat down and glanced quickly at his sister. She huddled on her bench so oppressed, so indrawn, that even her wrinkle-free, foldless garments could not conceal her crushed look. Roan, with hands properly folded, swallowed apprehensively. "Late," said the Private. " Both of you. This sort of thing can hardly help in my recommendations, Valerie, you unwanted creature." This was an idiom used in chastising all Mays and passed Valerie by. Then, to Roan, "One would assume that my generosity and forgiveness" -- that would be the hint about the partnership -- "would result in at least a minimal effort not to repeat the offense. You are thirty years of age -- old enough to know the difference between Stasis and chaos. You will be confined, by my personal lock, to your cubicle for forty-eight hours, where you may reflect on the consequences of disorganization. ValerieV She twitched and gave the proper response, which was to meet his eyes. Roan said nothing. In such occasions, there was no appeal. "Valerie, were you and your brother together in whatever escapade it was that led you to flout the organization of this house?" "Yes, Private, but it was really my -- " "Then you must bear the same punishment -- not primarily for being tardy, which is not one of your habitual defects, but for your failure to use your influence on your irresponsible sibling. I assume you failed to try, since it would be too painful for me to conclude that both my offspring lacked the basic elements of decency." lowed. The mother, sitting at his feet, rolled her eyes upward to the cushions, where his gloved hand lay. With a slight, unconscious movement, her ear sought the focal point of the currently non-existent audio beam. The Private's beard bulged as he dropped his glare upon her. "And since I must cling to a single shred of satisfaction," he said, "let it be my faith in your knowledge of correct behavior, Mam. Assuming that this knowledge exists, the circumstance clearly indicates that you too have not properly applied it. There will therefore be no video for you tonight." He unleashed a semi-circular glare in which his beard smote across their presences like the back of a hand. "Leave me." They rose and shuffled out. The panel slid shut behind them. "I'm sorry." Val barely breathed the apology. "Silence!" roared the grille over the door...They hung their heads and waited. Walshmam tiptoed away and returned in a moment with two small cubes. She led Valerie to her cubicle and stood aside. Valerie glanced once at Roan, who twitched a dismal smile at her. Then the panel slid shut on her and Walshmam pressed one of the cubes into its socket, effectively sealing the door until removed again from this side. True to custom, Roan waited until she passed him and then shuffled along behind her to his own cubicle. "And furthermore," enounced the grille over the door, "I herewith refuse to consider the merits of the suggestion you made this morning. For, if good, it issues from an unworthy source and is tainted -- if bad, it deserves no consideration." Walshmam seemed very sad, but then few Mams were anything else. Their lives alternated between silent patience and silent regret, with only an occasional flicker of preventive action. He grimaced in an effort to convey a certain camaraderie, but she misunderstood and looked away, and he knew she had taken it as a rebellious or unrepentant expression. He wondered, as he dropped the dressing shield over his head, what would happen if he got up and hauled on the Private's beard. Reaching for his brief nightshirt and sleeping shorts and bedshoes, he told himself, "I bet he hasn't even got anything in his rulebook to cover that. And he never was so good with a new idea." That reminded him of what Granny had said -- the Private "never did understand how anything works. He just rides it." He sure rides his family, Roan thought. CO he himself would be a Pri vate some day, have a family and get it all back again, he thought sleepily, and let himself sink down and down into a place where he sat on a monstrous throne with a beard to his knees, and watched his father, who sat on the boy's chair, weeping. At his feet was -- well, for heaven's sake, it was Granny! A T some point, it must have turned into a nightmare -- a dreadful fragment involving being lost in the flicker of final black that one experienced on the transplat. Here, however, he was immersed in it, with dimensionless space at his freezing back and the unyielding "inner" surface of reality pressing into his face. He cried out and struggled -- and thumped his cheekbone on solid rock. He yelped and pressed away from the rock and sat up. Not an inch from his head was the lintel of a shimmering, rectangular rock. Beyond it, a pale, green, alien sky which brightened by the moment. He glanced behind him and saw nothing but purple plain, cracked and crevassed, from which cactuslike spears sprouted grotesquely. He stepped through the doorway and, a few yards beyond, the desolation abruptly ended. Before him stretched rolling parkland, then a curving line of trees following a brook. Across the brook were fields -- one brown, one tan, one a tender green -- and they seemed, at this distance, as smooth as the surface of a cup of milk. To the right were mountains, one with a flaming He recognized it as dawnlight on snow. To the left was a broad rolling valley. The air was warm but sparkling-fresh. He paused and inhaled deeply, seeking comprehension, then saw, to his right, a boulder as big as a Private chair. On the boulder sat a girl with golden hair and strange eyes. She wore a belted singlet that revealed far more girl than Roan had ever seen before. She held one delicately bronzed, bare knee in both hands. Her bare feet acknowledged the snowfire pinkly, and they were wet with dew. She laughed a greeting and rose and flowed over to him. "Come along," she said. He clutched himself and hid his naked hands. With a swift, strong movement, she had his hand in hers. "Up we go," she sang and, before he could think, she was leading him. His cheek touched her bare shoulder. He smelled her perfume and her sweet breath, and his eyes rolled up and his knees sagged. Her arm went briefly round his shoulders and she laughed again. "It's all right, it's only a dream," she told him. "A dre -- " he coughed -- "earn?" "Thirsty?" She held out her hand, and he started violently when a cup appeared in it. "Here you are." ed it. She still stood, smiling at him. Modestly he turned his back and drank. It was bright orange, cold, sweet-acid and delicious. He patted his lips carefully and turned back, waving the cup helplessly. "Throw it," she said. "Th -- what?" She gestured. Obediently, he tossed the cup straight up. It vanished. "Feel better? Come on, they're all waiting for you." Gaping up at the spot into which the cup had vanished, Roan said. "I want to go home." "You can't. Not until the dream's finished." He put his arms straight down and fluttered his hands until the cuffs concealed them. "I want to go home," he said forlornly. "Why?" "I just..." He looked longingly over his shoulder at the doorway. When he looked back, she was gone. And suddenly, urgently, he wanted her back. He took a step forward. "Boo!" she said, her lips just touching the nape of his neck. He whirled, and there she stood. "Where were you?" "Here -- anywhere." She vanished and reappeared instantly at his right. "Please," he said, "don't do that any more. And just let me stand here quietly for a minute." "All right." She wandered away, picked a snowdrop and a strange greenandpurple flower, added a fern-frond and came back toward him, her fingers deft and a-dance. She held out the flowers, woven into a tiny circular wreath, and spun them on her finger. Then she set them into her golden hair. "Pretty?" "Yes." His eyes fell away from her and were dragged back again. "Why don't you cover your arms?" he blurted. "We wear what we please here." "Where is here?" "Sort of another world." He glanced back at the gateway. "It wouldn't do any good," she explained. "There isn't anything in there now but blackness. The way out is a time, not a place. Don't be afraid. You'll go back when it's time." "When?" "How long did you have to sleep?" "Forty-eight hours, though I'd never -- " "Maybe you can stay that long. Who's to know?" "You're -- sure I'll get back in time?" "Sure as sure. Is it all right now?" Shyly, he smiled. "Fine. Everything's fine." S HE took his hand, and skipped two paces, so he had to follow. He tried politely to tug his hand free, but she held fast and seemed not to notice. A giggle, a blush, the slightest sign of selfconsciousness in her, and he would have found the contact unbearable. But she was so completely at ease that the revulsion would not come, and she chattered so gaily, making him answer, keeping him busy, that, even had he felt like asking her to let go, he had no space for the words, nor the words with which to do it. "You were in my cubicle," he said breathlessly, as she hurried him down the slope. "Oh, yes -- more than you know. I watch you sleep. You sleep nicely. There's a tanager!" She stopped, balancing, something flowing out of her shining face to the blazing bird and back again. "I came to see you at your office, too. Everything's straight and hard there, and sort of lonely. But all you people are lonely." "We're not!" "You wait until the dream's finished and you won't say that. Want to see a magic?" She stooped, still walking, and brushed her long fingers across a thick growth of tiny spiked leaves. They all closed up like little green fists. "Why'd you come?" he asked. "Because you were ready to wonder." "Wonder what?" She appeared not to consider this worth answering, but released his hand and bounded like a deer once, twice, then high over a brook. He floundered through it, soaking his bedshoes. When he caught up with her, she touched his chest. "Shh!" On the wind floated a note, then another note and, high and sweet, another, so that they became a chord. Then a note changed, and another, and another, and the chorus of voices modulated softly, like the aurora, which is the same as long as one looks, but changes if one looks away and back. asked abruptly. "What would you like it to be?" "Flower!" he cried, the strange pressures of a dream asserting themselves; and with it he felt a liberation from the filth with which custom had clothed the word. "And you're Roan, and a roan is a horse with wind in his mane and thunder in his feet, sweetnostriled, wild-eyed, all courage and speed." He thought it was a phrase from a song, yet it could have been speech -- her speech. He squished the water in his muddy shoes and almost whinnied with delight at the thought of the thunder in his feet. She took his hand again and they leaped together to the brow of a foothill. Ahead, the song finished in a roar of good laughter. "Who is it?" he wanted to know. "You'll see. There -- there!" Where the hill shouldered into the forest was a clear, deep pool. In the forest and on the hillside, buildings nestled. Their walls were logs and their roofs were thatch. They were low and wide, and very much part of the hill and the woods. In the clearing between woods and slope, by the pool, was a great trestle table and, around the table, were the people who had been singing -- you could tell by the sound of their laughter. "I can't -- I can't!" Roan croaked miserably. "Why, what's the matter?" asked Flower. "They have no decency!" "There are only two things which are indecent -- fear and excess -- and you'll see neither here. Look again." "So many limbs," he breathed. "And the colors -- a green-and-red man, a blue woman..." "A blue dress and a harlequin suit. It's grand to wear colors." "There are some things one shouldn't even dream." "Oh, no! There's nothing you can't dream. Come and see." They went to see. They were made very welcome. VI A T dusk, on the second day, Flower and Roan walked a shadowed aisle in the forest. Roan's sleeping garments were tattered and seam-gutted, for he would not give them up, though they had not been designed for the brutality they had suffered. Yet he did not mind the rips and gapes, for no one else did. His bedshoes were long gone and he felt that if he were told he would never again feel the coolth of moss under his bare feet, or the tumble of brooksand, he would die. He knew the Earth as something more than a place on which to float sealed cities. He had worked till he hurt, laughed till he cried, slept till he was healed. He had helped with a saw, with a stone, with a song. Wonder on wonder, and greatest wonder of all -- the children. He had never seen any before. He did not know where children came from except that, when they were twelve, they went to their families from the creches. He did not know how they were born. He did know that each child was educated specifically for a place in his Family and in the Stasis, and that the largest part of this education was a scrubbing and soaking and rubbing in of the presence of the father -- his voice, features, manners of living and speaking and working. When the child emerged, there was a place for him in the home, by then very little different from his last place in the crfcche, and he was fitted to it, not by the accidental authority of parentage, but through the full-time labors of a bank of specialists. Each family had one boy, one girl -- one trade, one aim. This was how an economy could be balanced and kept balanced. This was how the community could raise its young and still maintain the family. But here, in this dream... Children babbled and sang and burned their fingers. They ran howling underfoot and swam like seals in the pool. They fought and, later, loved. They grieved, sweated, made their music and their mistakes. It was all very chaotic and perplexing and made for a strong, sane settlement which knew how to laugh and how to profit from an argument. It was barbarous and very beautiful. And it had a power -- for these people quite casually did what Roan had seen Flower do. They seemed to have a built-in transplat and could send and receive from anywhere to anywhere. They could reach up into nothingness and take down bread or a hatchet or a book. They could stand silently for a time and then know what a wife would serve for nutrient -- which they brazenly sat together to eat, though they went privately for other functions no more disgusting -- or the tune of a new song or news of a find of berries. tell him how all this was done, yet his questions got him nowhere. It was as if he needed a new language or perhaps a new way of thinking before he could absorb the simple essence. But for all their power, they had callouses on their hands. They burned wood as fuel and ate the yield of the land around them. To put it most simply, they made their bodies function at optimum because it made them joyful. They never let the psi factor turn, cancerlike, from a convenience to a luxury. CO Roan walked quietly in the  dusk, Flower at his side, thinking about these things and trying to shake them down into a shape he could contain. "But, of course, this isn't real," he said suddenly. "Just a dream," nodded Flower. "I'll wake." "Very soon." She laughed then and took his hands. "Don't look so mournful. We're never very far away!" He couldn't laugh with her. "I know, but I feel that this is -- I can't say it, Flower. I don't know how!" "Then don't try for now." Before he knew it, his arms were around her. "Flower -- please let me stay." She stirred in his arms. "Don't make me sad," she whispered. "Why can't I? Why?" "Because it's your dream, not mine." "I won't let you go! I'll hold onto you and I won't wake up!" He staggered then and fell heavily. Flower stood calmly ten feet away. "Don't make me sad," she said again. "It hurts me to push you away like this." He climbed slowly to his feet and held out his hand. "I won't spoil any more of it," he said huskily. They walked silently in the dimness, toward the shaft of light which the Sun lay up the valley to the settlement each evening at this season. "How soon?" he asked, because he could not help himself. "When it's time," she said. She released his hand, put her arm through his and took his hand again. They came to the light. Roan looked slowly from one end of the clearing to the other, trying to see it as it had been to him at first, then as it was with the familiarity of two days. There was the kettle they used, they said, to make sugar from the maples, and he pretended he had seen it boil, seen the frantic dogs snapping the caramelized sweetmeat up from the snow and running in circles frantically until it melted and they could get their silly mouths open again. There was the bdckwheat field which would carpet the spring snow with quick emerald on a warm day. There was the pond, there the ducks with old-ivory webs and mother-of-pearl lost in their necks. He saw -- "There!" he yelled and twisted away from Flower, to go racing across the clearing. "You!" he shouted. "You! Stop! You by the pool!" But the man did not turn. He was tall, as tall as Roan; his hair was very long, his eyes were green and, at the side of his cleft chin, was a curl of a scar. In the water, there was a chuckle of laughter, a flash of white. "You with the scar," Roan gasped. "Your name -- I've got to know your -- " As the man turned, Roan looked past his shoulder, down at the water, straight into the startled eyes of his sister Valerie. And that was the end of the dream. happened since his mother had removed the block from his cubicle door. The cubicle itself had been the most depressing conceivable place to wake up in; its walls crushed him, its filtered air made him cough. It had no space, no windows. The dressing shield brought out a thudding in his temple and he hurled it to the floor, turning violently away from it, physically and mentally. He felt that if he itemized the symbolism of that tubular horror, he would go berserk and tear this coffin-culture apart corpse by corpse. Breakfast was an abhorrence. The clothes -- well, he put them on, not daring to be angry about them, or he never would have gotten to the office. Corsonmay looked his way only long enough to identify, then stuck her silly flaccid face in a file-drawer until he was safely in his office. He looked at the desk, its efficient equipment, at the vise-jaws called walls and the descending heel called a ceiling, and he shook with anger. But he was weak with it when the heavy voice issued from the grille : "Step in here, Roan Walsh." Trouble again. Out of the prison into the courtroom. He took four great breaths, three for composure, one a sigh. He went to the panel and it admitted him. His father sat back, his head and beard vying texture against texture. Before him was a scattering of field reports, and he looked as if he had nibbled the corner off one of them and found it unexpectedly good. "Good Stasis, Private." The old man nodded curtly. "Your absence made it necessary for me to take up the threads of your work as well as my own. You will find what I have done on reports subsequent to yours." He stacked the cards neatly and scattered them. "On reviewing these, I found to my surprise -- my pleasant surprise, I may add in all fairness -- that you have done a phenomenal amount of work. Kimberley, Krasniak, that warehouse tangle in Polska. And in spite of its speed, the work is good. I investigated it in detail." This, thought Roan, sounded really bad. He put his hands behind him, lowered his chin in The Stance, and set his teeth. "The investigation brings out," lumbered the vocal juggernaut, "that the work was done in roughly speaking four hours, three and one-half minutes. Very good. It seems, further, that the elapsed time involved was five hours, fortyeight minutes and some odd seconds. Approximately, that is." He tapped the edges of the cards on the desk, flickered the lightning at Roan, then snapped forward and roared, "One hour and forty-five minutes seem to have disappeared here!" ed, "There was noonrest, Private." The Private leaned back and stretched jovially. "Splendid, my efficient young scoundrel. Superb! And what is the noonrest permitted us at our present altitude in the organization?" "Forty minutes, Private." "Good. Now all we have to account for is one hour and five minutes. Sixty-five precious, irredeemable minutes, which the resources of Stasis itself could not buy back. Over an hour unreported, yet somehow a doubletime dock from your wages is not entered here. Or perhaps it is entered and, in my haste, I overlooked it." "No, Private." "Then either one or more transactions of company affairs were handled on that afternoon and not reported -- which is gross inefficiency -- or the time was spent on idling and personal indulgence, with every intention of accepting payment from the firm for this time -- which is stealing." Roan said nothing except to himself, and that was, almost detachedly, "I think I can stand about four minutes, thirty-two and three-tenths seconds -- approximate -- more of this." "The picture is hardly a pleasant one," said the Private conversationally, and smiled. "The records give me the choice of three courses of action. First, the time owed may be made up. Second, the value of these hours may be paid back. Third, I can turn you over to Central Court with a full indictment, and thereby wash my hands of you. You Slight be given a bow and arrow and left to make your way in the wilderness between segments of Stasis. You could survive a long time with your training. Days. Weeks even." "Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen..." Roan counted silently. "However, I am going to give you every opportunity to ameliorate this -- this frightful crime. Take these cards into your office. You have between now and # -- a punctual #, that is -- in or out of the office, to revise any slight miscalculations you may have made and to refresh your memory in the event that you did useful work for the firm in any of these lost minutes. Every alteration you make, of course, will be checked fo the tenth of a second. Until # -- be serene." Roan, quite numb, tottered forward, took the cards, muttered, "Byepry," and awkwardly backed out. Why, he wondered, did he stand for it? Because there was no place to go, of course. There was... No, there wasn't. That had been a dream. He sank into a black paralysis of rage. ceived, ready to tear the head off the caller, any caller. But it was Valerie. She said, "It's nearly noonrest." She would not meet his eyes. "Could you -- would you mind...?" "Same place, right away?" "Oh, thank you, Roan!" He growled affectionately and broke off. She was not at the Grosvenor transplat when he got there, so he stalked straight to the park. She was waiting for him. He dropped down next to her and put his head in his hands -- and damn the passers-by. Never seen a man's hands before? He sat up after a while, however; Valerie's silence positively radiated. , He wondered if he should tell her about the man in the dream, and almost laughed. But he could not laugh at Valerie. Not now. In the dream, there had been love. Valerie, in her crushed, priggish way, had fallen in love. All right, tell her you still haven't found the guy and then sympathize with her and get it over with. You have some real worrying to do. He turned to her. "I haven't been able to -- " "His name's Prester." She leaned close to the partition and whispered, "Oh, Roan, you saw me like that, in the pool. They hadn't meant for you to see me at all. Oh, what you must think!" He said, just as softly, "I hadn't let myself believe it." "I know," she said desperately. "I'm surprised you even came here." "What do you mean -- Oh, the pool! Do you know, it never occurred to me until this minute that you were -- that you'd be -- oh, forget it, Val. I'm just glad you found him. Prester, hm? Nice-looking fellow." Her face lit up like a second sun. "Roan -- really? I'm not a -- hussy?" "You're grand and the only person I know in this whole sterile, starched world who's managed to live a little! I'm glad, Val! You don't know -- you can't -- what I've been through. Enough to make a dozen dreams. And it came like a dream -- I mean parts and chunks or reallife things -- things Granny was maundering about, things I'd seen, a girl I met once wrongdialing -- an accident, you little prude! I believed it was just a dream -- I had to, I guess. I had to believe Flower and she told me it was." Lord, he'd said the word right out loud in front of his sister! But she was quite composed, cheeks excitement-red, not disgusted-red, eyes bright and distant. "She's lovely, Roan, just beautiful. She loves you. I know ." "Think she does?" He grinned till it hurt. "Oh, Val, Val -- the maplesugar kettle." "Mmm -- the oat-field!" "The big table and the singing!" "Yes, and the children -- all those children!" "What happened?" he cried. "How could such a thing happen?"  could both be crazy. Or the whole world could be coming apart and we slipped in and out through a crack into -- or maybe it really was a dream, but we had it together. But I don't care, it was beautiful and -- and if you'd said I was a -- because of -- you'd have spoiled it and killed me, too. Is it all right then, Roan, is it really all right? Really?" "You're sort of beautiful yourself. For a sister, that is." "Oooh" she squeaked, blushing and enormously pleased. Then, happily, "I'm glad I'm not you." "Uh -- why?" "How does it work, what makes it go, is it a dream, and, if not, what could it be? Be like me, Roan. It happened -- for the rest of my life it has happened! But -- I hope there'll be more." "If I find out how it works, what makes it go and so on, there will be more. So you just be glad I'm like me in that respect." "If you found it, you -- wouldn't keep me out?" "If I couldn't take you," he said warmly, "I wouldn't go. Now do you feel better?" "I'm going to kiss you!" He roared with laughter at the very idea in a place like this and, under the stares this attracted, she cried, "Be quiet -- thunderfeet!" At the phrase from Flower's little song, his heart twisted. She peeped at his face and said, "I'm sorry, Roan." "Don't be," he said hoarsely. "For that second, she was right here." He put out his hands, made fists, stared at them, then got them out of sight again. Flower -- well, he'd have plenty of time to find her after #. "Val..." "I didn't know anyone could be so happy!" she said. "What, Roan?" "Nothing. Just that I really am late," he said, abruptly changing his mind. No need to air his troubles to her now -- the news services would take care of that about #. Meanwhile, let her stay happy. They walked back to the transplat. "Roan, let's come here every day and talk about it. I don't know a thing you did and you don't know what I did. Like the time -- " "Sure I will, sure," he said. "Take something pretty big to stop me." She stopped dead. "There's something the matter." "Get on your 'plat. Everything's fine. Hurry now." She dialed and stepped up and was gone. He stood looking at the empty air, where her anxious face had been, until another passenger filled it. He hoped he hadn't worried her. He walked slowly back to the bench and sat down, and that was where he had his big idea. thin old voice was edgy. "Me. Roan," he said from the court. The top panel of a door slid back and the voice floated to him, gentle now, and firm. "You know you're welcome here, son, but you also know you're to call first. Just spin that dial and clear out of here for an hour. Then you can come and stay as long as you like." "Petals to that. I haven't got an hour. Come on out here or I'm coming in." "Don't you use that language on me, you leak-brained snipe, or I'll lift your hair with a blunt nailfile!" The instant she began to shout, he began to roar, "Decent or not, just get on out here. If you'd shut off your low-fidelity mouth for twelve lousy seconds, you'd stop wasting your own time!" They stopped yelling together and the silence was deafening. Suddenly, Granny laughed, "Boy, where'd you learn that type language?" "For years, I've been hearing you talk, Great Mam," he said diffidently. "It only just now occurred to me that I never really listened. And about being decent -- if you're comfortable, come as you are." "Damfidon't!" She came out of the room and kicked the door closed with a flip of her heel. She wore an immense wrapper of an agonizing blue and seemed to be barefooted. Her hair, instead of lying sleekly away from the center part in two controlled wings, flew free like a May's. Roan had one frozen moment, and then she tossed the hair back on one side with an angry twitch of her head. "Well?" she blazed. There seemed to be nothing left of the gentle talc-on-ivory quality in her voice. Slowly, he smiled. "Damfidon't like you better the way you are." She sniffed, but she was pleased. "All you can do to keep your eyes from rolling out onto the carpet. Ah, well, you've found my secret. Reckon I'm old enough to have just one eccentricity?" she demanded challengingly. "You've lived long enough to earn your privileges." "Come on in here," she said, starting down the court. "Most folks don't or can't realize I've spent the least part of my life in that cone-in-cone getup. Everybody else around's practically born in it. I just don't like it. Chest-padding the men so they won't look different from women!" she snorted. "I wasn't brought up that way." She opened the manual door in the corner. "Here we are." TT was an odd-shaped room, an isoscles triangle. He had never seen it before. "What happened to your voice, Granny? You feeling all right?" In the familiar wind-in-thedistance tones, she said, "You mean you miss this little gasp?" Then, stridently, "Something I picked up for company. Had to. Nobody'd take me seriously when I talked natural. They cast me as a frail little pillar of respectability and, by the Lord, I was stuck with it. It's hot in here." He missed the hint, waited for her to sit down, and then joined her. "Know why I'm here?" She regarded him closely. "Sleeping well?" "That wasn't a dream." "No? What then?" "I came to find out what it was. Where it is." She fluttered the lapel of the wrapper. "You got this part of my secret life out of me, but that don't guarantee you all of it. What makes you so sure it wasn't a dream?" "You just don't go to bed healthy and sleep for two days! Besides, there's Valerie. I saw her there, right at the very last second." She grunted. " 'Fraid of that. No one was sure." She laughed. "Must've been a picnic when you two got your heads together. You come here to kill me?" "What?" "Outraged brother and all that?" "Valerie's happier than she's ever been in her life and so much in love, she can't see straight. I'm just as happy for her as she is for herself." "Well!" she smiled. "This changes things. So you want to take your sister and go live out your lives in a dreamland." "It's more than that," he said. "I need one of your telekinesis operators. I mean now." "The best I can do for you is a little girl who can knock down a balancing straight-edge at any distance under fifteen feet." He made no attempt to conceal his scorn. She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "How'd you mix me up in this, anyway?" "We're wasting time," he said. "But if you must know, it was your hints to me last time I was here -- the transplat obsolete, people appearing in any room anywhere, communication without phones. I'd already seen telekinesis twice, when you told me that. And since then... he shrugged. "You had to be in it. Maybe you'd like to tell me why I'm mixed up in it." "Hadn't planned to for a while. Maybe we'll step up the schedule. Now what's the all-fired rush?" "I have an appointment in -- " he checked -- "less than two hours that is going to put me under the ground unless I can get help." lost time and his father's threat. "You're dead right," she said after a moment. "He's afraid of you. I don't know why he should be that afraid. He's just like his father, the potbellied old -- " She stopped, shocked, as a large hand closed over her wrist. "I can't listen to that." "All right," she said with surprising swiftness. "I'm sorry. Given one of my TKs, what would you do?" He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, bringing his gloved hands into plain sight. "Do? I'm going to take this wrinkle-free civilization and turn it out into the woods. I'm going to clutter up the Family Rooms with the family's own children. I'm going to turn Stasis itself upside down and shake it till the blood runs into its head and it finds out how to sweat again." Granny's eyes brightened. "Why?" "I could tell you it was for the good of all the people -- because you're Great Mam and lived through it all and had a chance to think about things like that. But I'm not going to say anything like that to you. No -- I'll do it because I want to live that way myself, head of a family of hard-handed, barefoot, axeswinging people who are glad to get up in the morning. "I thought of finding the dreampeople again. I even thought of going out into the wilderness between cities and living that way myself. But if I did, I'd always be afraid that some day a resources survey crew might find me, scoop me up and bring me back. Stasis wouldn't let people live like that, so let's make Stasis live our way." He took a deep breath. "Now Stasis is built around the transplat. There can't ever be a better machine. But if I go in there today and claim I've spent years secretly developing one -- if I get one of your people to start transmitting things all over his office and claim I have a new machine to do it with -- why, the Private's got to listen. I'll save my job and spot your people through and through the whole culture till it falls apart. And one day maybe I'll be the Private at Walsh  Co. -- and, Stasis, look out!" "You know," she said. "I like you." "Help me," he said bluntly. "I'll like you, too."  with sharp knuckles. "I'll have to think. You know, if you can fast-talk your way out of this, you'll only stall things a little. The old -- your father -- wouldn't buy any parlor tricks. He'd want to see that machine." "Then let's stall. Can you fix me up with a telekin -- telekineticist? That what you call them?" "TK," she said absently. "I've got something a heap better than any TK. How'd you like a stationless transplat -- a matter transmitter that will lift anything from anywhere to anywhere without centrals or depots?" "There's no such thing, Granny." "Why do you say that?" "All my life I've been a transplat man, that's why. There's a limiting factor on matter transmission. It must have a planetary field; it must have a directing central; it must have platforms built of untransmissible material and -- " "Don't tell me how a transplat works," she snapped. "Suppose a machine was designed on totally different principles. A forcepump instead of a suction pump. Or an Archimedes screw." "There isn't any other principle! Don't you think I know?" "I'll show you the damn machine!" She marched to the angled wall of the little room and bumped a scuffplate near the floor. The entire wall slid upward into the ceiling, swift and silent. Lights blazed. It was quite a laboratory. Much of its equipment he had thought existed only in factories. Most was incomprehensible to him. Granny walked briskly down an aisle and stopped at the far wall. Ranged against it was a glittering cluster of equipment beneath a desk-sized control panel. The desk surface seemed to be a vision screen, though it was hinged at the top. At the side, he saw what looked like manipulator controls of the kind used in radiation laboratories. "There's a servo-robot this size on a hill about forty miles from here," said Granny. She turned a switch, sat down over the screen and began to spin two control wheels. "Tell you what it does," she said abstractedly as she worked, "though this ain't really the way it does it. Plot a straight line out from this machine and a line from the other. Where they intersect, that's your transmission point. Now draw two more lines from the equipment and where they cross, that's the arrival point. When they're set up, you haul on this sniwy and what was here is now there. The stuff doesn't travel any more than it does with a transplat. It ceases to exist at one point and conservation of matter makes it appear at another. "But you've created just the strain in space which makes it show up." "Show me." "All right. Call it." "My old wallet. Top drawer, left side in the office. Drawer's locked, by the way," he said. "What's the matrix?" ordinates. She tapped them on a keyboard and bent over the screen. It showed a Stasis unit. She spun a wheel and the buildings rushed closer. Her hand dropped back to a vernier and the view slowed, seemed to press through the roof and hover over a desk. "Right?" "Go on," he said. "Pretty fair spy-ray you have there." "You don't know!" She reached and from a speaker came the quiet bustle of the office. She went back to the controls and the view sank into the desktop. Suddenly, the contents of the drawer were there. With the manipulators, she deftly hooked the wallet, raised it a fraction. Then the scene disappeared as she shifted to another set of controls. "Receiver location," she murmured. The garbled picture cleared, became a mass of girders and then a bird's-eye view of the room they stood in, so clear that Roan looked up with a start. He could see nothing. "Stick out your stupid hand," said Granny. He obeyed and she brought the scene down to it until its image hung in the center of the picture. Roan wiggled his fingers. Granny cut back to the other view, checked it, then threw over the "snivvy" she had shown him earlier. The wallet dropped into his hand. She switched off, turned and looked up at him. "Well?" He said, "Why play around like this?" "What do you mean?" "This thing doesn't do what you say it does. I got the wallet, sure, but not with that thing." "Do tell. All right, how did you get the wallet?" He considered the instrument carefully. "It's a sort of amplifier -- yes, and range-finder, too. It just gets a fix for your TK man. Right?" "You really think I've got a high-powered psychic hiding around here who does the work after I get to it with the finder?" " You're the TK!" She slumped resignedly at the controls. "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. Old Roman saying. If that's what you say it is, boy, then that's what it is." "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" he grumbled, looking at his watch. "So now what do we do?" "Wait a minute -- I've got to get used to something." She hung over the console and then glanced up brightly. "I'll break out the pilot model. You can't tote this thing under your arm." She went to a storage wall and dragged out a bin. In it was a long box. Roan helped her open it and lift out the spindly collection of coils and bars, setting it on a bench. "I'll check you through this." She flung off her wrapper and advanced on the machine. "Just turn it on its side for me," she said. "What are you gawping at? Oh!" She looked down at her shorts and halter, and laughed. "I told you it was too hot in here." IT was not that age had left no marks on her compact body, but certainly not two centuries' worth. Holding a lightduty soldering iron near her cheek, she slapped herself on the bare midriff. "One thing you might keep in mind about women as you get to know 'em, Roany -- the parts that the decent people expose are exactly the ones that get old first. This face of mine was gone at #, but the tummy's good for another hundred yet." She bent over the device. "Maybe it's better that way, maybe not -- who's meter there." After a time, her work with the machine took precedence over everything else in Roan's cosmos. "You sure can get around in there," he said, awed, as he held the light for her. "Think so?" she grunted, and went on working steadily. A T #, Roan Walsh arrived at the Walsh Building. His head spun with its lopsided weight of advice, technical data and strategy. His arrival was in the warehouse, not in the office, for he brought a long wooden box on casters. He pushed the box himself up the long corridor to the office wing. "Oh, Roan Walsh, can I help?" "No, Corsonmay. Wait -- Yes, come in." He put his hands on the end of the box and nodded at the dithering secretary. "Grab hold here." She came close, tittered and let the tips of her gloves show for an instant before she slipped them clumsily under the end of the box. Not that end up, you addlehead. Roan yelped and let go. Corsonmay, now bearing most of the not inconsiderable weight, began to mew rapidly. Roan, sitting flat on the floor, gasped, "Who said that?" "Ewp!" squeaked Corsonmay. "It's heavy!" "Let it down. My God, Corsonmay, you're as strong as a horse!" "That's the nicest thing you ever said to me," she beamed without sarcasm. He turned to her, found himself face to face with her withered ardency. "What did you say about lifting up the wrong end, Corsonmay?" "I didn't say anything."  did. "Byemay," he said, and forestalling her, added, "Really -- nothing more. Byemay." She left and he whirled, hunting futilely in midair. "Granny! Where are you?" Briefly, just at eye-level, the business end of a needle-focus audio beam projector appeared. Roan patted it happily and it disappeared. Bless her, she'd be watching everything through her big machine, her audio aimed for his inner ear every second. At #, the ceiling said, "Roan Walsh, you may step in now." "Coming, Private." He all but started at the sound of his own voice. How was it that, though he seemed increasingly able to cope with anyone or anything, his father's voice still turned him to mush? But that could wait. He stepped just inside the room. "Come, come -- stand close. I intend to do one of several things, but biting is not one of them." Roan stayed where he was. "May I have the Private's permission to bring a piece of equipment in?" "You have my permission to bring those cards in, revised or not. Nothing more." "The Private deprives me of the use of evidence he himself assigned me to bring," Roan said stiffly. "Do I now?" The beard, its lower end invisible under the privacy hood, was pulled thoughtfully. "Very well. But I should warn you -- you have no leeway, young man. None!" the doorway. He was shaking with apprehension, but Granny's voice pleaded inaudibly, Trust me. Even in front of his father, he nearly smiled. He locked the casters and, with a tremendous effort, heaved the box up on end. The right end, this time. "What the devil's that?" demanded the beard. "My evidence, Private." Outwardly calm, inwardly aquiver, he drew out the top section of the box with its two knobs and their two sets of horns. Each horn was hollow and had a light inside. Roan turned them on. "I asked you a question," rumbled the Private. "Your patience," Roan responded. What patience? Granny's chuckle did more good for Roan than a week's delay. "Ready now, Private. May I have the use of some small object -- your stylus, perhaps, or a small book?" "You have taken my money and you are taking my time. Is it now your intention to take my property?" Whyncha spit in his eye? Roan threw up a glance of such extreme annoyance that the inaudible voice apologized. Sorry. It's just that I'm on your side, honey. Honey! He had tasted his very first honey in his "dream." That was a nice thing to call someone. He wondered if anyone had ever thought of it before. To the Private, he said, "If I use my own property, there could be some suspicion of previous preparation." "I suspect the previous preparation with which you are cluttering up my office already," growled the old man. "Here's the old paperweight. It dates from the time when buildings had sliding panels opening to the outside air. If anything happens to it -- " "It will do," said Roan levelly, taking it without thanks. The Private's eyebrow ridges moved briefly. "Would you kindly point out a spot on the floor?" With an expression of saintly patience, the Private drew out his stylus and threw it. It fell near the far wall. Roan placed the paperweight near the point of the stylus, on the carpet. "And one more indulgence. A point on your desk -- somewhere with enough area to support that paperweight." "Damn it, no! Go get those cards and we'll settle the matter in hand. I fail to see -- " Don't let him rant. Find your own spot and ask him if it suits him. Roan advanced through the booming and shrieking syllables and pointed. "Will this do?" he shouted, just loud enough to be heard over the storm. The Private stopped just then and Roan's voice was like an airfoil crashing the sound barrier. Both men recoiled violently; to his own astonishment, Roan found that he recovered first. The old man was still sunk deep in his chair, the base of the beard quivering. In Roan's ear, Granny cackled. Roan grasped the two horns protruding from one of the spheres on his machine and turned them so that the beam from each rested on the center of the paperweight. "The production model would have other means of aiming," he explained as he worked. "This is for demonstration only." The other twp beams were aimed at the indicated spot on the desk. "Ready now, Private." "For what?" snarled the Private, then grunted as if he had swallowed a triple ration of roughage, for when Roan touched the control, there was a soft click and the paperweight appeared on the desk, exactly in the small pool of light from the beams. He put out a hand, hesitated, dropped back in his chair. "Again." Roan threw the lever the other way. The paperweight lay quietly on the carpet. "For years, I have used every available minute on the research needed for this device and in building it. If the Private feels that the machine is of no use to this firm and the industry, that the time spent on it was wasted or stolen, then I shall be satisfied with his previously suggested -- " "Now come off it, son," said the beard. He rose and approached Roan, but kept his eyes glued on the machine in fascination. "You know the old man was just trying to throw a scare into you." Got ' im ! "Could a large model be built?" "Larger than a transplat," Roan said. "Have you built any larger than this?" Tell him yes! "Yes, Private." Slowly the Private's eyes left the machine and traveled to Roan's face. Roan would have liked to retreat, but his back was against the wooden case. Watch out ! "You feel this could be better than the transplat?" Yes. Tell ' im yes -- even if it hurts, tell im! Roan found he could not speak. He tremblingly nodded his head. "Hmm." The Private walked around the machine and back, though there was nothing to be seen. "Tell me," he said gently, "is this machine built on the same principle as the transplat?" brow. He wished he could wipe it off, but to raise his glove would have been a rudeness. He let it trickle. "No," he whispered. "You are telling me that this is a new kind of machine, better than the transplat!" When Roan neither moved nor spoke, the Private suddenly shouted, "Liar!" Roan, white, dry-mouthed, with a great effort brought his eyes up to meet those of the livid Private. "A transplat can't do that," he said, nodding to the paperweight. "You've got to be lying! If there was such a machine as this, you couldn't build it. You couldn't even conceive it! Where did you get it?" Say you built it -- quick! "I built it," Roan breathed. "I can't understand it," mumbled the Private. Roan had never seen him so distressed and his curiosity got the better of his own tension. "What is it that you want me to say, Private?" The Private swung around, face to face with his son. "You're holding something back. What is it?" This is it! Now hold tight, honey. Tell him it works by PK. Roan shook his head and set his lips, and the Private roared at him. "Are you refusing to answer me?" Tell him, tell him about the PK. Tell him! Roan had never felt so tom apart. There had to be more to this than he knew about. What was pushing him? What tied his tongue, knotted his stomach, swelled his throat? Trust me, Roan. Trust me, no matter what. TT broke him. He choked out, "This is only a directionfinder. It works by psychokinetic energy." "By what? What?" The Private fairly bounced with eagerness. "It's called PK. Mental power." "Then it really isn't a machine at all!" "Well -- yes, you might say so. That's my theory, anyway." And where were the tied tongue, the aching throat? Gone! "And you believe in that psycho-stuff?" Roan found himself smiling. "It works." "Why were you hiding it?' "Would you have believed in such a thing, Private?" "I confess I wouldn't." "Well, then -- I wanted to get it finished and tested, that's all." "Then what?" Give it to him. I mean it -- give it to him! "Why, it's yours. Ours. The company's. What else?" The dry sound was the slow rubbing of gloved hands together. The other, which only Roan heard, was Granny's acid chuckle. And he didn't even ask where the psychic operator was -- notice? And he never will. The Private said, "Would you like to work with the Development Department on the thing?" Sure, honey. I'll never let you down. "Fine," Roan said. "You'll never know -- you can't know what this really means," said the Private. For a moment, Roan was sure he was, going to clap him on the shoulder or some such unthinkable thing. "I can own up to a mistake. You should've been on the nuts-andbolts end right from the start. Instead, I had you chasing inventories and consignments. Well, you've shown up the old man. From now on, your time's your own. You just work on anything around here that amuses you." "I couldn't do that!" Yes, by God, you could! snapped the voice in his ear. And while he's soft, hit him again. Get your own home. His own home! With one of those PK machines, he could go anywhere, anytime. He could take Val -- and find Flower again! IX I T was warm and windy and very dark. The village was asleep and only a handful of people sat around the great trestle table in the clearing. The stars watched them and the night-birds called. "To get grim about it," said the old lady in a voice a good deal less than grim, "breaking up a culture isn't something you can do on an afternoon off. You've got to know where it's been and where it is, before you know where it's going. That takes a good deal of time. Then you have to decide how much it needs changing and, after that, whether or not you were right when you decided. Then it's a good idea to know for sure -- but for sure -- that you don't push it so far, it flops over some other gruesome way." "But I was right all the same, wasn't I?" Roan insisted. "Bless you, yes. You don't know how right." "Then tell me." "Some of it'll hurt." "Don't hurt him," said Flower, halfseriously. Roan took her hand in the dark, feeling, as always, the indescribable flood within him brought by the simple touch of living flesh. "Have to, honey," said Granny. "Blisters'll hurt him too, and his joints will ache at plowin' time, but in the long run he'll be all the better for it. Who's there?" she called. A voice from the darkness answered, deep and happy, "Me, Granny. Prester." "Hi, Granny," said Val. They came into the dim, warm glow of the hurricane lamp guttering on the table. Val was wearing a very short sleeveless tunic, which looked as if a spider had spun it. She and Prester moved arm in arm like a single being. Looking at her face, Roan felt dazzled. He squeezed Flower's hand and found her smiling. "Sit down, kids. I want you to hear this, too. Roan, would you do something for me -- something hard?" "What is it?" "Promise to shut up until I've finished, no matter what?" "That's not hard." "No, huh? All right, Flower, tell us all just exactly what psi powers you have." Roan closed his eyes in delight, picturing again Flower's appearance in his cubicle, her birdlike flitting about the gateway during his dream, the cup she had drawn out of thin air for him. She said, "None that I know of, Granny." "What!" he exploded. promised to shut up!" To Flower, she went on, "And who's got the most psi potential in the place, far as we know?" "Annie," said Flower. "The fifteen-year-old I told you about," Granny explained to Roan. "The one who can knock over a straight-edge. Shut up! Let me finish!" With a great effort, he subsided. "In a way, we've lied to you," Baid Granny, "and, in a way, we haven't. I once told you some of what I've been thinking of -- the new race of people that has to be along some day, if we let it -- the next step up. I believe in them, Roan; call that a dream if you like. And when you had your dream those two days, we made the dream come true for a little while. We worked that thing out like a play -- I had you in the frame of that new machine of mine all the time. "It is a new machine, Roan, built on a new principle that the transplat boys never thought of. It's just what I told you it was -- a stationless matter transmitter -- no central, no depots, no platforms. I used it on every psi incident you witnessed in those two days. Believe me?" "No!" "Val?" "I'd like to," she said diffidently. "But I've always thought -- " "There's no use being tactful about this," said Granny. "For the rest of your life, this is going to bother you, Roan, Val -- and, later, a lot of other people we'll bring in. You'll rationalize it or you won't, but you'll never believe I have a new kind of machine. Shut up. Roan! "You two and the rest of your generation are the first group to get really efficient crche conditioning. You don't remember it, but ever since you were suckling babes, you've been forced into one or two basic convictions. Maybe we'll find a way to pry 'em loose from you. One of these convictions is that the transplat is the absolute peak of human technology -- that there's only one way to make 'em and that there are only certain things they can do. "You got it more than Val did, Roan, because you males in the transplat families were the ones who might be expected to develop such a machine. That's why, when this new one was built, women built it. Don't fight so, son! We have it, whether you believe it or not. We always will have it from now on. I'm sorry -- it hurts you even to hear about it and I know what you went through when you had to sell it to your father. You damn near choked to death!" did not speak. Flower put her arm across his shoulders. "We had to do it to you, boy, we had to -- you'll see why," said Granny, her old face pinched with worry and tenderness. "I'm coming to that part of it. Like I said, you don't break up a culture just all at once, boom. I wanted to change it, not wreck it. Stasis is the end product of a lot of history. Human beings had clobbered themselves up so much for so long, they developed what you might call a racial phobia against insecurity When they finally got the chance -- the transplat -- they locked themselves up tight with it. That isn't what the transplat was for, originally. It was supposed to disperse humanity over the globe again, after centuries of huddling. Hah! "About the time they started deep conditioning in the crches, walling each defenseless new generation off from new thoughts, new places, new ways of life, a few of us started to fear for humanity. Stasis was the first human culture to try to make new ideas impossible. I think it might have been humanity's first eternal culture. I really do. But I think it would also have been humanity's worst one. "So along came Roan -- the first of the deep-conditioned transplat executives, incapable of believing the service could be improved. There were -- are -- plenty more in other industries and we're going after 'em now, but transplat is the keystone. Roan, believe it or not, you were a menace. You had to be stopped. We couldn't have you heading the firm without introducing the new machine, yet if it weren't introduced in your generation, it never would. "Your father is the last weak link, the last with the kind of imperfect conditioning that would let him even consider an innovation -- remember your suggestion for eliminating freight operators? Only he would be unconditioned just enough to put our new machine into Development before realizing that, once in use, every cubicle in the whole human structure will suddenly be open to the sky. And it's all right -- he can be trusted with it, because his 'decency' won't let him abuse privacy. We'll take care of that side of it!" "I wish you wouldn't talk like that about him," said Roan miserably. "I'm sorry, boy. Does it do any good to tell you that subservience and blind respect for your father are conditioned, too? I wish I could help you -- you'll have that particular sore toe tramped on all your life. Anyway, enter Roan, just when we've perfected the new machine. There would have been no problem if we could have broken your conditioning against it, but the only alternatives seemed to be -- either you'd see the machine operate and think you had lost your sanity, or you'd use your position in the firm to eliminate all trace of it." wrong both ways." "That's because we discovered that the conditioning against any new transplat was against any new machine -- any new device ' Granny replied. "They'd never thought of matter transmission by a method winch was in no way a device! "Can you see now why your father was so upset when he was faced with you and your pilot model? One of the props of his decent little universe .was that the conditioning would stick -- that of all people on Earth, you'd be the last to even think of a new machine, let alone build one. And when at last you came out with that gobbledegook about psychic power, he recognized the rationalization for what it was and felt safe again. Stasis was secure. "I don't mind telling you that you made us jump the gun a bit. Our initial plan was to recruit carefully, just the way we did you. Dreams -- unexpected and high-powered appeals to everything humanity has that Stasis is crushing. Then when there were enough of us wilderness people, maybe the gates would open. But ultimately we'd win -- we have all nature and God Himself on our side. "But you came along -- what a candidate! You responded right down the line -- so much so that, if we'd given you your head, you'd have dynamited Stasis and probably yourself and us along with it! And you took to that psi idea the way you took to the steak we planted in your nutrient that day, testing for food preference before the dream sequence. All of a sudden, you wanted to plant our machine spang in the middle of Stasis! It was chancy, but -- well, you've seen what happened." "Can I talk now?" Roan asked uncomfortably. "Sure, boy." "I'm not going to argue with you about the new machine -- how it works, I mean. All you've done is give Stasis a more efficient machine. You can interfere with the new network, but you could do that anyway with the one you already had. So what's the big advantage?" Granny chuckled. From a side pocket, she dug a white object and tossed it across the table. It left a powdery spoor as it rolled. "Know what that is?" "Chalk?" asked Val. "No, it isn't," Roan said. "It's Lunar pumice. I've seen a lot of that stuff." "Well, you'll have to take my word for it," said Granny, "though I'll demonstrate any time you say -- but I got that at # this very afternoon -- off the Moon, using only the machine you saw in the lab." "Off the Moon!" "Yup. That's the advantage of the new machine. The transplat operates inside a spherical gravitic field, canceling matter at certain points and recreating it at others -- a closed system. But the new machine operates on paragravitic lines -- straight lines of sub-spatial force which stretch from every mass in the Universe to every other. Mass canceled at one point on the line recurs at another point. Like the transplat, the new machine takes no time to cross any distance, because it doesn't actually cover distance. "The range seems to be infinite -- there's a limitation on rangefinding, but it's a matter only of the distance between the two parts of the machine. I got the Moon easily with a forty-mile baseline. Put me a robot on the Moon and I can reach Mars. Set up a baseline between here and Mars and I can spit on Alpha Centauri. In other words, an open system." raised his eyes and, for a dazzling moment, visualized the stars supporting a blazing network of lines stretching from each planet, each star, to all the others -- a net that pulsed with the presence of a humanity unthinkably vast. Prester murmured, "Anybody want to buy a good spaceship?" "Why did you do it?" whispered Val, ever so softly, as if she were in a cathedral. "You mean why couldn't I mind my own business and let the world happily dry up and blow away?" Granny chuckled. "I guess because I've always been too busy to sit still. No, I take that back. Say I did it because of my conscience." "Conscience?" "It was Granny who built the first transplat," Flower explained. "And you were telling her what could and couldn't be done, Roan!" gasped Val. "I still say -- " he objected in irritation, and then he began to laugh. "I once took a politenesspresent to Granny. Knitting. Something for the old folk to do while they watch the Sun sink." They all laughed and Flower said, "Granny won't knit." "Not for a while yet," Granny said, and grinned up at the sky. Current Veto Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. Now Tor #, Nw York Open Mondty Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until #:# P.M. (Phona GFomery #-#) It's real gone! If I missed an issue, it would be fiendish torment... But I dont! And neither will you if you send I .# for six mesmeric issues (# for #) to... #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. Back to The side-shuffle is no dance step. It's the choice between making time . Y OU can't go shooting off to that dimension for peanuts. I don't want to give you the impression that peanuts are in short supply here, or that our economy is in the fix of having to import them sidewise. What I'm trying to convey is that, if you're one of the rare ones functionally equipped to do the side-shuffle, you ought to be... and doing time! well paid for it -- in any coin. That's what I told Krasnow. And he wasn't after peanuts. "I'll do it," I said, "if you'll make it worth my while." "I'd hardly expect you to do it for nothing," he replied reproachfully. "How much do you want?" I told him. The amount shook him up, but only briefly. "Okay," he said grudgingly. "I suppose I'll have to give it to you. But the stuff had better be good." "Oh, it is," I assured him. "And you don't have to be afraid, because I couldn't possibly skip with the loot, i'll have to travel naked. I can't get there with so much as a sandal on one foot or a ly, my teeth are perfect." Sweat poured off Krasnow's florid face as he worked the combination of his office safe. His fat jowls quivered unhappily around his cigar while he counted out the bills. Ten per cent was cash in advance, and the rest went into a bank account in my name. I paid off a batch of bills, then stripped and did my off-to-Buffalo. a crooked District Attorney who wanted to be Governor and then President. He had the Machine, but he didn't have the People. And, because he needed the People, he needed me. I had been to this other dimension -- the one on the farthest branch of the time-tree -- and I could give him what he wanted. Krasnow found out about it after I was hauled up in front of him on a check-kiting charge. I'd had something of a reputation before I got into difficulties and, in trying to live up to the reputation, I had done some plain and fancy financing. Nothing that fifteen to twenty grand wouldn't have fixed -- but while I scrounged around, trying to get cash, I kited a few checks. They pyramided me right into the D.A.'s office, where Krasnow was properly sympathetic. "How," he asked, "could a man of your standing in the scientific world stoop so low?" It developed into quite a lecture and, even coming from Krasnow, it made me feel pretty low. So I began explaining. I told him where I was born, and where I went to school, and where I had taken my sabbaticals -- including this other dimension. And Krasnow believed me. I can't account for it, except possibly because he knew he was a crook and knew I wasn't one -- exactly. Anyway, he believed me, and we made the deal and I did the side-shuffle, as agreed. The journey to that other dimension is not a pleasant one. It does disturbing things to the stomach, and you see everything thin and elongated, as if you're sitting too far to the side in a movie theater. I got there, however, and waited for the hiccups to subside. Hiccupi lateral i, I had called them when I considered writing an article for the Medical Journal after my first trip. With the hiccupi gone, I stole some clothing -- which was one of the riskiest parts of the program -- and waited for morning. I didn't have any money, of course, so I had to hitchhike into town. I could have stolen myself a better fit, but people aren't clothes-conscious in that dimension. They're more interested in what you are and what you can do. The driver of the car that gave me a lift asked, "And what is your field of endeavor?" I told him, "I am able to eliminate the long wait in ivory production by accelerating the growth cycle of elephants." He was deeply impressed and tipped me handsomely. I was less impressed with his talent for growing cobless corn, and therefore had to return only a small part of the sum he gave me. The world of this dimension had developed some remarkable parallels to Earth. I mean our Earth, which falls into what I have designated Timeline One Point One, since it's the Earth with which I am most familiar. Every other world that has a language calls itself Earth, too. I had to visit briefly hundreds of the lateral worlds, hovering over primordial swamps, limitless oceans, insect kingdoms and radioactive planetoids, before I found the one that was truly parallel. It existed in Timeline Seventeen Point Zero Eight, and it had refrigerators, platinum blondes, automobiles, airplanes, apple pie, tabloids, television, scotch and soda -- just about everything we think makes life worthwhile. But it had its little differences, which was only to be expected in a timeline where the bionomics could create a new world each time someone changed his mind. Thus, the cobless-corn man was driving what looked to me like a Chevrolet, but which was a Morton in his world. He let me off near a downtown restaurant where, thanks to our little exchange of talent talk, I had enough money for breakfast. It was considered unethical to swap talent talk outside the limits of certain rigidly defined groups, so I didn't try to out-impress the waitress. clothes a bit better, I walked to the recorder's office and spent the rest of the morning looking up old documents. There was nothing there for Krasnow, as I had expected. But for me there was a very pretty file clerk. Talking to her, I verified my impression that human instincts and relationships were much the same in this dimension as in my own -- except in the one basic respect that interested Krasnow, of course. The file clerk and I lunched together and then I spent the afternoon in the library. But I didn't find anything there, either, and then I had dinner with her. She said her name was Julie. I told her mine was Heck, for Hector, which it is. She thought this was "awfully cute" and we got along fine. Julie had a delightful apartment and a matching sense of hospitality. The following day, when she went to work, I stayed home and washed the dishes and made the bed and used the telephone. I ran up quite a bill with my long-distance calls, but I found out what I needed to know. I impressed a lot of people with my elephant story and pretended to be impressed hardly at all with what they told me they did -- although often I was, very much. The trouble with these people is that they no longer know how to lie, if that can be listed as trouble. I don't think it can. Neither did Krasnow, obviously. He'd never have sent me off on my expensive side-trip if he had. Of course, Krasnow looked at it objectively. What he wanted from Timeline Seventeen Point Zero Eight was not for himself. It was for everybody else. He wanted the formula for the truth gas these people had developed long ago and loosed upon their world to put a stop to wars. They had been in a bad way, although no worse than the sort of problem we were up against. Their trans-ocean squabbles and power politics seemed to have settled into a pattern of a war or two per generation. Just like us. Hence, the man who invented the truth gas became a global hero, after a certain amount of cynicism and skepticism. All the doubts vanished, naturally, once the gas got to working. And so did war. You can't do much plotting and scheming if, every time you open your mouth to tell a lie, you stammer, sweat, turn red and gasp for breath. It's a dead giveaway. Nobody tries it more than once. One or two men had tried to nullify the gas or work out a local antidote, either as a pure research project or through power-madness. But, because they had had to state their purposes as soon as they thought of them, they were put away. Neat. Very neat. What I wanted was the formula for the truth gas. Its location wasn't exactly a secret in this land of complete candor, but it wasn't writ large on any wall for all to see, either. They kept it in their capital -- located about where our Omaha is -- on file among the Vital Statistics. I took a super jet out there. historian entitled to the facts. The gas didn't work on me, you see, because it was adjusted to the physiology of that timeline. There was just enough difference between us for it not to make me stick to the truth. "We'll write out the formula for you," I was told obligingly. "But you'll have to sign the usual statement." "Of course," I said. "Which one is that?" "The one that says you won't publish it, and will destroy your copy when it has served your research purpose, without letting anyone else see it." "Oh, that statement," I said. I signed freely, told my elephant story and departed in an aura of good will. The jet got me back that same evening. Julie fixed me up a snack, and we discussed how pretty she was and how nice I was. I had everything Krasnow wanted now. I felt pretty good about it, because there was nobody else who could have done the job for him, and because it wasn't spying, really. Earth One Point One on the Timeline is world enough for Krasnow, I'm sure. Besides, dimensions don't have wars with one another. Too many things can go wrong. Julie was lovely and I hated to leave the next morning, but it was my job. I told her, "I'm afraid I have to leave town for a bit, dear, but I'll be back very soon. Business, you know." Being a Seventeen Point Zero Eight girl, Julie had no reason to doubt me. "Make it very soon," she whispered, her lips close to my ear. So I came back, and now Krasnow has what he wants. He's delighted, as he should be. I've made up the gas for him and adjusted the formula so that it will work on people of our timeline. It's high-power stuff and a little will go a long way. I also made up an antidote for him. This was easy, since I could work on it without feeling any compulsion to tell everybody what I was doing and why. Krasnow plans to release the truth gas just before the state convention. He'll be nominated, of course, and after November he'll be Governor. With everyone else compelled to tell the truth, it should be a cinch for him. He's a patient man. Honest John wait four years for the Presidency. I ought to be happy too. With the money Krasnow gave me, I've been living in the style to which I've always wanted to be accustomed. He has offered me a place on his staff and, somewhat superfluously, the use of his antidote. Naturally, the reason he was so magnanimous was that he doesn't want anyone else around who knows his gimmick and might have to tell the truth about it. But I have had enough of this dimension now -- now that Krasnow has what I promised him. He's going to use it tomorrow. And if I know Honest John -- and I do -- not even the Presidency will be big enough for him. So I'm going back to Julie. tions in your mind, I know, such as: Why did I get the formula for Krasnow, knowing there was no way for him to prosecute me while I was in Julie's dimension? And what made me come back? In short -- what was in it for me? Let's call it research. Krasnow is a big-time operator; I've always been, you might say, in the peanut end of the game. He had a great deal to teach me and I, I'm happy to say, was an apt pupil. You might speculate on what's in it for you, because, if you ask me, anybody who can do the side-shuffle should do it before Krasnow becomes President. However, don't go to Seventeen Point Zero Eight unless you want to swap one Krasnow for another. The fact 'is that I've learned I can be one in Julie's dimension. After all, their formula doesn't work on me -- but I can assure you that it will work on you. And that elephant story I told on my last visit is, as I've indicated, in the peanut category. All Krasnow has is a country. I'll have a whole world. There's nothing like study under a master, is there? I should be back to Julie by midnight if I start now. Galaxy Science Fiction Novel No. #... Complete book-length novel! Only #c! On your newsstand April #th "Wort's Virus was catastrophically lethal, but it killed in a way no disease had ever thought of -- it loved its victims to death! mate in two moves Dr. Sylvester Murt. In J fact, it took the epidemic of #I to break down his resistance. A great many people fell in love that year -- just about every other person you talked to -- so no one thought much about Dr. Murt's particular distress, except a fellow victim who was directly involved in this case. High Dawn Hospital, where #-year-old Dr. Murt was resident pathologist, was not the first medical institution to take note of the "plague." The symptoms first came to the attention of the general practitioners, then to the little clinics where the G. P.s sent their patients. But long before anything medical was done about it, the plague was sweeping North and South America and infiltrating every continent and island in the world. Murt's assistant, Dr. Phyllis Sutton, spotted the first irregularity in the Times one morning and mentioned it to him. They were having coffee in Murt's private office-lab, after completing reports on two rush biopsies. She looked up from the editorial page and remarked, "You know, someone should do a research on the pathology of pantie raids." mug of coffee and stared at her. In their six months' association, it was the first facetious remark she had made in his presence. To this moment, he had held an increasing regard for her quiet efficiency, sobriety, professional dignity and decorum. True, she wore her white coat more tightly belted than was necessary and, likewise, she refused to wear the very low hospital heels that thickened feminine ankles. But she wore a minimum of come-hither in both her cosmetic and personality makeup. This startling remark, then, was most unexpected. "Pantie raids?" he inquired. "Whatever would justify an inquiry into such a patently behavioristic problem?" "The epidemic nature and its increasing virulence," she replied soberly. "This spring, the thing has gotten out of hand, according to this editorial. A harmless tradition at a few of the more uninhibited campuses has turned into a national collegiate phenomenon. And now secondary effects are turning up. Instructors say that intramural romance is turning the halls of ivy into amatory rendezvous." Murt sipped his coffee and said, "Be thankful you aren't a psychiatrist. Bacterial mutations are enough of a problem, without pondering unpredictable emotional disturbances." His assistant pursued it further. "It says the classrooms are emptying into the marriage bureaus, and graduation exercises this year will be a mockery if something isn't done. What's more, statistics show a startling increase in marriages at the high school level." Murt shrugged broad shoulders that were slightly bent from long hours over a microscope. "Then be thankful you aren't an overworked obstetrician," he offered as an amendment. She glanced up from the paper, with annoyance showing in her dark, well-spaced eyes. "Is it of no interest to you that several hundred thousand youngsters are leaving high school and college prematurely because they can't control their glands?" "Be glad, then," Murt said coldly, "that you aren't an endocrinologist -- now drink your coffee. I hear the microtome working. We'll have some business in a minute." Dr. Phyllis Sutton rustled the pages of the Times together, folded it up and threw it at the wastebasket with more vigor than was necessary. The subject was momentarily closed. Dawn paid less, but the life suited Dr. Murt better than the hectic, though lucrative, private practices of many of his colleagues. He arrived at the hospital early, seven o'clock each day, to be on hand for quick tissue examinations during the morning operations. By ten, the biopsies were usually out of the way, and he spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon checking material from the bacteriology section and studying post-operative dissections of tumorous tissues and organs removed in surgery. It was engrossing, important work, and it could be accomplished in a normal work-day, leaving the pathologist considerable leisure to study, read and relax. Shortly after the pantie-raid conversation with Phyllis Sutton, he found the evening paper attracting more than his usual quick perusal. This emotional fuss in the young human animal was beginning to preoccupy the newspaper world. Writers were raising their eyebrows and a new crop of metaphors at the statistics, which they described variously as alarming, encouraging, disheartening, provocative, distressing, romantic or revolting, depending upon the mood and point of view. As June, the traditional mating month, wore into July, national statistics were assembled to reveal that marriages were occurring at almost double the highest previous rate, that the trend was accelerating rather than diminishing. Jewelers and wholesale diamond merchants chalked up fabulous increases in the sale of engagement and wedding settings. Clergymen and qualified public officials were swamped with requests for religious and civil marriage ceremonies. Parks, beaches and drive-in theaters were jammed with mooning andor honeymooning couples, and amusement parks began expanding their overpatronized tunnel-of-love facilities. The boom in houses, furniture, appliances and TV was on, and last year's glut of consumer goods for the home was rapidly turning into a shortage. All was not good news, however. The divorce courts reported their calendars stacked months ahead of time, and an increasing number of lurid headlines were devoted to the love-triangular troubles of the rich, famous and notorious. Love-nest exposes and bigamous marriages rocketed in number. The whole world, adolescent and adult, was falling in love, with the inevitable unrequited infatuations, the jealousies, infidelities and the bitter-sweetness of situations in which vulnerable people found themselves increasing astronomically. Writers of popular newspaper psychology columns attributed the rampaging emotional fire to everything from mass-hysteria, caused by sunspots, to the paternalism of a government that gave increased income-tax deductions to married people. "PR. Murt's growing interest was not entirely academic. His bachelorhood was no accident of fate, but rather a carefully contrived independence, for which he paid the price of eternal vigilance. As the world supply of eligible bachelors diminished sharply, his wariness increased, and he became more and more curt with nurses and female technicians at the hospital. He revealed the depth of his leeriness one afternoon at the scrub-up sink, where he and his assistant were washing after a messy dissection. Phyllis Sutton remarked, "Holly, down in Personnel, showed me a tabulation she ran off for her own curiosity today, Doctor. Do you realize that in this whole hospital there are only eight unmarried female employees?" Murt threw water droplets from his bare arms and muttered, "Yes, and every one of them's giving me the eye -- to say nothing of half the married ones." His aide dried her long arms and slender hands and looked at him with a crooked smile. "Not to underestimate your good looks, Doctor, but I am one of the unmarried females. I trust I'm not giving you too much trouble?" He looked up, startled. "Yes -- no, no -- of course not. I'm referring to the nurses and the technicians. What's got into them? The whole lot seems to be on the make!" Phyllis combed out her short dark hair and looked at him in the mirror. "I assure you the males are just as bad. These interns and four of the male nurses give me a physical with their eyes every time I happen to meet them." "I suppose this ties in somehow with your pantie-raid theory." "Well, what do you think?" "I don't think. I just dodge. You'd do well to do the same," Murt told her, putting on his jacket and adjusting his tie. She sat down in his oak swivelchair and crossed her slender ankles. "Are you aware of the problem they have downstairs in the out-patient clinic?" "Hadn't heard," Murt said.  purse and touched up her short nails. "The outlying clinics are sending their overflow to us. They can't seem to diagnose the odd symptoms they're getting." "I had noticed the large number of negative test results coming out of the lab," Murt acknowledged. "Haven't followed any of them through, though." "I have," Phyllis said with a little frown. "Seems to be a psychosdmatic nightmare down there." "What are the symptoms?" "Mostly neurotic," she said. "Listlessness, loss of appetite, palpitations, cold sweats and absent-mindedness." "Why don't they go to the psychiatric clinics?" "Overloaded. They're sending patients here." "What age groups?" "From puberty to senility. I'd like your permission to do a little special work on blood samples." "Another theory?" he asked caustically. "Yes. Will you give me your permission to test it?" Murt adjusted his Panama straw in the mirror and noticed that the nostrils of his straight nose were flared for some reason. "Your time is your own after three p. m. every day. If you want to take time out from your thesis research, that's your business." He crossed to the door and was opening it when he became aware that he had had no answer. He looked back at the profile of his assistant's body, which was now stretched out full length, suspended at three points -- her higher-than-practical heels on the linoleum tile, her spine and curved hips using only an inch of the chair's edge, and her head tilted over the chair's back. She inhaled from a king-size filtertip cigarette and blew a feather of smoke at the ceiling. "Yuh!" she said finally. Her flat abdomen jumped at the exhaled syllable, and so did her generous breasts under the soft emerald-green street dress. "Good night!" Murt closed the door behind him quickly and became aware of a sharp stab of what he defined as pure rut -- the first he had suffered in fifteen years. II athletic club, where he maintained his three-room apartment. The #-story building was a citadel of masculinity -- no females allowed -- and recently it was an especial relief to enter the lobby and leave behind the world of turbulently mixed sexes. The small but lush entry chamber had a deserted air about it this afternoon. At the room desk, Crumbley, the clerk, handed him his key with a pallid hand and returned to sigh over a colored picture in Esquire -- it was the "fold-out" page, featuring a gorgeous blonde reclining at full length. Crumbley's expression, however, was far from the loose-lipped, lecherous leer that he normally exposed to such art. His eyes had a thin glaze over them, he breathed shallowly and, if Dr. Murt had not known the little man's cynically promiscuous nature so well, he'd have sworn Crumbley was in love. Upstairs, Murt donned rubbersoled gym shoes and sweat clothes and rode the elevator back down to the gymnasium. Three times a week, he put his muscles through the whole routine -- work on the bars, rings, the leather horse, the rope climb and a twenty-lap jog around the balcony racetrack. Afterward, he showered, took a dip in the swimming pool and retired to the health service department for a rubdown and some sunlamp. Throughout the whole routine, he encountered not a single other member. While Charlie, the husky blond masseur, hammered and kneaded his muscles, Murt reflected on the abating interest in athletics at the club. "Are we losing members, Charlie?" he asked. "You'd think so from how dead it is up here," Charlie replied. "But Crumbley says we aren't. The guys just aren't exercising. Can't figure it, Doc. Even with the usual summer slump, it's never been this slow." When he had absorbed all the punishment he could stand, Murt rolled off, went into the ultraviolet room, set an alarm clock and lay down by himself on one of the paper-covered tables. He adjusted the dark goggles and reflected thankfully that he didn't have to go to the beach for his sun and have sand kicked in his face by a procession of predatory females, ogling his long limbs and trying to attract his attention. The clean smell of ozone was pleasant, the warmth of the lamps relaxed him, and he dozed off. He dreamed that he heard someone else come in and lie down on the next table and. when he raised his head to see who it was, was amazed to discover his assistant, Dr. Phyllis Sutton, stretched out like himself, wearing only shower-sandals and goggles. The alarm clock wakened him from the disturbing dream. He was sweating profusely and took another shower, using the cold water at full needle force to dispel his shock at his subconscious.  him, Murt returned to his apartment to dress for dinner. As he snapped the paper laundry band off a clean shirt, he caught himself wondering how old Phyllis Sutton was. Twenty-eight? Thirty? She appeared younger, but she was in her last year of residence to gain her specialty of pathology. That meant over eleven years of school and practice. She was a lovely creature, but she was no child. He had half an impulse to phone her for dinner, then became lost in studying his own reaction to the thought. Pulse over a hundred, respiration quickening, irregular. There was a tensing of the abdomen, a faint burning in the pit of his stomach. He remembered the urge at the office, the dream in the sunroom, the sudden sweat that had required five minutes under the cold needle shower. After so many years of deliberate, scholarly celibacy, what was happening to him? He stared at the phone. With six motions of one finger, he could dial Phyllis Sutton's face into view, and suddenly he yearned to do that very ridiculous thing. After staring at her, off and on, for the six months since she had transferred to High Dawn to complete her residency, now he wanted to see her face outside of working hours for some inexplicable reason. Call her up, date her, take her dancing, proposition her -- get this silly feeling off your chest! Suppose she was busy or refused to go out with him? Suppose she already had a boy friend? This last thought deepened the burn in the pit of his stomach, and he finished dressing listlessly. To hell with it! This was poker night. If he did succeed in dating his assistant, they'd inevitably talk shop. That was why he enjoyed a night of cards with his six non-medical brother clubmen, once a week. It was refreshing to break away from the professional point of view. No, he wouldn't sacrifice that for any woman. joined the poker party at seven o'clock, played six hands of stud, cashed in his chips and returned to his room. In a mood of deep irritation, he found Phyllis Sutton's home phone number and rang it four times with no result. He thought to try the hospital. She answered from the. lab extension on audio only, but her voice and its frankly curious tone sent vertically polarized chills through him. "I -- I wanted to apologize for my rudeness this afternoon," he said with difficulty from a suddenly dry mouth. There was a brief silence. "Have you been drinking, Dr. Murt?" He noticed that she did not call him Sylvester. Why was he so damned thirsty for some little sign of warmth and friendliness from her? He cleared his throat. "No, I'm serious. It occurred to me that your interest in the out-clinic problem was commendable, and that I was rather short in my remarks to you." "Oh! I take it I have your permission to work my project in during the day, then?" "That's right, so long as it doesn't interfere with the routine." He sounded stuffy to himself, but he was entirely out of practice in speaking to please a female. "Thanks," she said wryly, and the conversation ended. Somehow, the brief talk with her restored his perspective. Once again she was his assistant, and the significance of her as a woman faded. She was a dedicated physician like himself. In another few years, she would find a residency of her own. She had no more inclination to knock off and become a woman than he had to squander his time and energy on attaining the status of family man. I T was with mounting admiration that he followed her new project in examining blood samples. As they came up from the clinic, she sorted the specimen tubes at once, putting a tiny snip of yellow Scotch tape under the label of each sample that belonged to a patient with the new undiagnosed disorder. Then, after the requested hemoglobin, blood sugar and other standard tests had been run, she retrieved the samples from the technicians, grouped them in a special rack and devoted every spare minute to further examination. She centrifuged, precipitated, filtered and stained over and over, using every qualitative procedure in the book. Murt signed her requisitions for exotic reagents and rare stains. He helped her balance out the large centrifuge to get the maximum r.p.m. from it. He let her use the most costly of the fine-porosity filters. He had little hope of success, but it was good practice for her. She was required to identify every organism she found, bone up on its known effects, then determine that it could not cause the symptoms reported. She did all this without impairing her usefulness to Murt. When he needed her, she was at his side, dissecting, taking down notes, preparing delicate sections and checking slides before they came to him. In several weeks, she exhausted all known tests on the first samples. After lunch one day, she turned her palms up. "Nichts da!" she said, pulling a mashed cigarette from the huge pocket of her whit.e smock. He glanced at her and swiveled to stare out the window. It was part of his tight campaign to prevent a disastrous recurrence of the emotional tempest he had suffered the day she had begun this research. "It was a nice brush-up on your bacteriology," he said. "Have you saved the filtrates?" "Yes, of course. Did I overlook anything?" "Nothing that we could do here, but there's an electron microscope downtown at Ebert Industrial Labs. How about photomicrography? Could be a filtrable virus." He knew that she was aware of the possibility, and also that she was reluctant to ask him for additional funds to go into a virus hunt with the expensive piece of equipment. "Wonderful!" she told him. "I did hate to ask you, but it would be a shame to waste all that immaculate filtrate." Ill a bulletin from the Government Health Service announced official suspicion that the human race was suffering a mysterious, pandemic affliction which was as yet undiagnosed. Although the symptoms, as reported by hundreds of clinics, were relatively mild, the effect on the nation's economy was growing serious. Industry and business reported unprecedented absenteeism. Factory supervisors and insurance companies were frantic over the upsurge in accidents. It was estimated that almost fifty per cent of the population exhibited the symptoms of depression, absentmindedness, insomnia and loss of appetite. Negligent driving was increasing the highway toll sharply. Educational institutions reported classroom discipline rapidly vanishing. Armed forces headquarters cautiously admitted a new The consensus among psychiatrists and psychologists was that the condition stemmed from pathogenic causes. Dr. Murt raised his eyebrows when he read this. Perhaps Phyllis Sutton was right, after all. The bulletin continued, "All clinical pathologists are requested to be alert to the presence of any unusual organisms discovered in body fluids or tissues examined. Please report your findings to the U. S. Public Health Service." Murt found Phyllis Suttonat the microtome, finishing a wax section, and showed her the bulletin. "Score one for woman's intuition," he smiled. "Federal Health Service tends to agree with your theory." "Now I am eager to see those pictures," she said. messenger brought the photomicrographs, and the two pathologists bent over them together. Phyllis had submitted eighteen samples, six of which were controls taken from healthy, unafflicted subjects. Per her instructions, smears of the specimens in various degrees of dilution had been photographed through the great electron microscope. Murt muttered to himself as they compared the controls with the "infected specimens." The "healthy" samples were relatively clear, except for minute protein matter. Conversely, . all twelve suspect specimens swarmed with shadowy six-sided dots. Phyllis' eyes widened. "There is something there! Do you suppose it could be the Love Bug?" "Love Bug?" "Certainly. That bulletin didn't go into the psychologists' findings. The diagnosticians downstairs say that the symptoms appear to be no more than complaints of the lovesick." "Are you back on the pantieraid theme again?" "I've never been off it," she replied. "From the first, I've had a notion that some organism was increasing glandular activity. Excess emotionalism often originates in overstimulated glands." "Of course, but mental attitudes can trigger the glands, and they are interacting. How do you separate the effects? How could you guess that an organism was responsible?" She shrugged. "It was a possibility within our specialty, so I set out to prove or disprove it. From the appearance of these photographs, I don't think we have disproved it." It was a properly cautious statement that pleased Murt. They were a long way from proving that their newly discovered virus was the culprit, but the research had definitely produced a question mark. Murt ordered copies of the photomicrographs from Ebert Industrial Labs and arranged for a complete dossier to be forwarded to the U. S. Health Service. That night, he was startled by a headline and lead story that quoted the government bulletin. The science editor had a field day. tying in speculation that "Doctors Suspect Love Bug Epidemic." called upon him, each with the same query. "It's rumored that you are doing research on the Love Bug, Dr. Murt. Anything to report?" He shooed them out angrily, after learning that someone at Ebert Labs had given them the tip. Phyllis smiled at him as he slammed the door after the last reporter. "You still discount the LoveBug idea, don't you?" she asked. "I dislike sensationalism in a matter like this," he said. "Even if their assumptions were true, I wouldn't like it." "You can't blame the papers. They're starved for some explanation. I pity your passion for anonymity if your virus proves to be the causative factor." "My virus?" "Certainly. The whole project is under your auspices and direction." "See here, Phyl, you did the work." "Don't you dare mention my name," she said. "You're my superior and senior pathologist and it's your duty to protect me against the press. I don't want columnists popping out of my bathroom any more than you do." Murt gave up. "The argument is entirely anticipatory," he pointed out. "The virus might turn out to be a batch of dormant German measles. Would you consider having dinner with me tonight?" "Why?" She shot the question back at him like a rebounding tennis ball. "Answer that first!" Murt opened his mouth. He could not recall ever hearing such a rude rejoinder to an invitation to dinner. Not that there had been a plethora of amenities between them, but this was unthinkable! The question was, why should she have dinner with him? Give her eight good reasons. What was his motive in asking her? In one word, why? Murt searched her face, but only a quiet interest showed in her expression. "Why does any man invite any woman to dinner?" he countered. "You aren't any man, Dr. Murt. Nor am I any woman. I want your specific reason for inviting me to dinner. Is it to discuss professional matters or -- what?" "Good Lord, Dr. Sutton!" He followed her lead in using the formal address. "Man is a social animal! I would enjoy your company at dinner, that's all. At least, I thought I would." She looked at him unrelentingly. "If the talk will be about for it. If it's to be moonlight, roses and dimmed lights -- no sale." TT was like asking one's grandfather for a date. His regard for her highly professional approach turned to resentment. After all, she was a woman, a woman who persisted in belting her smock too tightly and wearing sheer nylons. Why this absurd revulsion at his casual acknowledgment of her sex? He almost withdrew the invitation, but changed his mind at the last moment. "You name the place and the subject for conversation." She nodded. "Very well, I'll pick you up at seven." He had his date -- with an emancipated female, and she didn't let him forget it during the whole meal. The restaurant she picked was expensive, but about as romantic as a bus depot. She ordered beer instead of a cocktail, toyed wordlessly with a # steak, and argued over the check. Only as they were preparing to leave did she betray a sign of femininity. A platinum blonde, two tables away, had been eying Murt. Suddenly, she lurched to her feet without a word to her escort, staggered over to the pathologist, slurred, "You're what I've b'n lookin' for all m'life," and planted a wet alcoholic kiss on his mouth before he could defend himself. Her escort peeled her away with sad-eyed apologies. There was no jealousy or anger in his face, only a deep hurt. "She -- she isn't well, I think," he said. "You know, this new -- whatever it is that's going around." Murt wiped off the lipstick and looked at Phyllis, expecting to find at best sardonic amusement, but she seemed pale and annoyed. "I'm sorry I brought you here," she said. "Think nothing of it," Murt told her. "You heard the man. This is what's going around. Do you think I'll catch it?" Phyllis wasn't amused. She did let him ride the taxi to her apartment, but bade him a terse goodby at the door. Except for the incident of the blonde and Phyl's reaction, the evening had been a bust. Murt wondered how he had ever visualized her as a warm-blooded, responsive female. He smiled at the evening of torment she had once given him. She was entirely frigid or else so leery of men that she might as well have been one herself. IV T HE following morning, he presided at a specialists' conference at the hospital, during which he revealed the results of the blood research. They had all read the Health Service bulletin and were sharply interested in the photomicrographs. When the meeting was over, Feldman, the bacteriologist, and Stitchell, an endocrinologist, volunteered to work with Murt. They gave Phyllis' "gland-irritation" theory more credence than Murt. He outlined a program. Both agreed to take the problem back to their own departments. The conference set Murt behind in his work and he spoke scarcely five words to his assistant until he was ready to leave. As he finished scrubbing up, she handed him an early edition of the Times. "Local Doctor Isolates Love Bug!" The story was sketchy and not half so positive as the headline, but it did name him and High Dawn Hospital, and described the new virus. He stared at Phyllis Sutton. "Did you -- " "Of course not. The reporters were here, but I sent them away. I told them we were medicine men, not tobacco men." "Your name isn't even mentioned," he said suspiciously. "You signed the report to the Health Service," she pointed out. "The leak probably came at that end." She put her hand on his arm. "It wasn't your fault." His fury cooled as he noted her gesture. Then she realized that he was looking down at her hand and withdrew it quickly. The next few days were blindly busy. A note from the govern ment acknowledged receipt of his report and pictures, and was followed by a message that the virus could not be identified. The implication was that there was a strong possibility that it was the causative factor in the new malaise. to the joint laboratory work on the virus. The newspapers continued to come up with confidential information they shouldn't have had, and they dubbed the Love Bug, Murt's Virus. The name stuck, and the pathologist found himself famous overnight. Phyllis continued to force all the credit upon him, on threat of transferring out if he violated her confidence. Except for the nuisance of dodging reporters, the accolade was not entirely unpleasant. His pictures -- old ones, Lord knew where they had dug them up -- began appearing in the papers. Instead of reproving him, the hospital board voted him a substantial salary increase and gave him a free hand in directing the research. A government grant was obtained to supplement his budget, and the work picked up speed. Necessarily, the lead that Phyllis Sutton's early research had given them on the rest of the medical world was maintained largely because of the time lag in disseminating the information contained in Murt's report, and the additional time it took for other clinical laboratories to confirm it. Cages of experimental animals began arriving along with several additional specialists. Ebert Industrial Labs, contrite over the original information leak, made available their electron microscope, and Murt assigned the new toxicologist to work over there with Feldman, the bacteriologist, studying ways to weaken or destroy the virus. Stitchell, the endocrinologist, and a trio of psychologists from the State University began injecting monkeys with virus when Feldman found he could propagate it in sterile medium. On September #, #, Dr. Sylvester Murt became a victim of the virus which bore his name. awakened feeling empty. His first dismal thought was that Phyl wouldn't be at the hospital this morning. He had told her to spend a few hours down at Ebert Labs, getting notes on their progress. As he shaved, dressed and breakfasted, this thought preyed on his mind. It wasn't until he had put in half the morning clock-watching and door-gazing that he stepped outside his wretchedness and took an objective look at his feelings. It wasn't that he missed her help -- he had plenty of personnel at his disposal now. He simply longed for the sight of her, for the sound of her voice and her heels clipping busily around his office-lab. Here we go again, he thought, and then he came up short. The feeling was similar to the silly evening of infatuation he had allowed himself, but it was intensified tenfold. The burn in his stomach was almost painful. He caught himself sighing like a frustrated poet, and he grew to hate the sight of the hall door, through which she kept right on not appearing. When she failed to show up by #:#, and he gagged over his lunch, he knew he was sick. He had Murt's Virus! Now what? Did knowing you had it make it any easier? Easier to make a damned fool of himself, he supposed. He'd have to take hold of himself or he'd scare her off the grounds. At the thought of her leaving him for good, something like a dull crosscut saw hacked across his diaphragm, and he dropped his forkful of potato salad. Back at his office, he diluted # cc of pure grain alcohol with water and swallowed it. Some of the distress and anxiety symptoms were relieved, and he bent determinedly to his work. When her distinctive steps finally came through the door, he refused to raise his head from the binocular microscope. "How are they making out over there?" he mumbled. "It's slow," she said, dropping her notes on his desk. "They're halfway through the sulfas so far. No results yet." him again was so great, it was almost frightening. But he gained equal pleasure from finding his self-control adequate to keep from raising his head and devouring her with his eyes. "Sylvester," her voice came from behind his stool, "if you don't mind, I'd rather not go over there again." "Why not?" Her voice was strangely soft. "Because I -- I missed..." At that instant, her hand rested on his shoulder and it sent a charge of high voltage through him. He stiffened. " Don't do that!" he said sharplyHe could see her reflection dimly in the window glass. She took a step backward. "What's the matter, Sylvester?" He fought back the confusion in his brain, considered explainmg that he wasmaking a fine adjustment on the scope. But he didn't. He turned and let her have it. "Because I've got the virus," he said in a flat voice. "And the object of my affection -- or infected, overstimulated glands -- is you!" "Oh, dear! That blonde at the restaurant..." Phyl's face was pale, but she composed her features quickly. "Do you want me to leave?" "Lord no! That magnifies the symptoms. Stay with me and -- and just be yourself. I won't bother you. If I lay a finger on you, clobber me." "Have you had your blood tested?" "I don't have to. I've got all the symp -- " He broke off, realizing that he was taking for granted that the new virus was the cause of his feeling. Clinically, this was nowhere near proved yet. Slowly he rolled up his sleeve above the elbow. He dipped a swatch of gauze in alcohol and swabbed a vein. "All right, Phyl, you're the doctor. Make with the syringe." T Y nightfall, Murt came to un" derstand the reasons for the increase in industrial accidents, absenteeism and the rest of the social effects of the "mild" epidemic. Phyllis Sutton was in his mind constantly. He deliberately did not look at her. But he was aware of her every movement, the texture and shape of her hand when she handed him a slide, the scent of her powder, the sound of her heels. When she left the room, he found himself awaiting her return and conjecturing on what she was doing every moment. Not that it was difficult to adjust his behavior -- no, that was relatively easy. All he had to do was think about every remark he made to her, censoring word, inflection and tone of voice -- and, by keeping his back to her, it was easy to prevent his eyes from darting glances at her profile and staring at the curve of her hip below the tight belt. By staying busy, he fought off the depression until he left for the club, when it closed in on him like an autumn fog. He stopped at the club bar. Curly, the bald-headed bartender, eyed him curiously when he ordered a double Scotch. "Heavy going down at the hospital these days?" Curly asked. Murt envied him his relaxed, carefree expression. He nodded. "Pretty busy. I suppose you're catching it, too. Lot of people drowning their sorrows these days?" Curly looked up at the clock. "You said it! In about a half hour, the place'll be loaded. This epidemic is going to run the distilleries dry if it doesn't end pretty soon." "Does liquor help any?" "Seems to -- a little. It's the damnedest thing! Everybody's in love with the wrong people -- I mean ten times as bad as usual. Of course, not everybody. Take my wife -- she's got it bad, but she's still in love with me. So it could be worse." asked, raising his head. "I mean it's bad enough for the poor woman to have the guy she wants. It's the jealousy angle. Every minute I'm away, she sits at home wondering if I'm faithful. Calls me up six times a shift. I don't dare take her out anyplace. Every time another female comes in sight, she starts worrying. Kate's a damned good wife, always has been, or I wouldn't be putting up with it. That's what's happening to a lot of marriages. Some guys get fed up and start looking around. About that time, the bug bites them and look out, secretary!" "But it's not her fault," Murt said emphatically. "I know," Curly shrugged. "A lot of people don't make any allowances for it, though. You know Peter, the elevator boy? He and his wife both got it. For a while it was okay, but I guess they finally drove themselves nuts, keeping tabs on each other. Now they can't stand to be together and they can't stand to be apart. Poor joker ran the cage past the basement limit-switch three times today and had to be bailed out of the shaft. Mr. Johnson said he'd fire him if he could get another boy." The implication was shocking to Murt. He had supposed that unhappiness would stem principally from cases of unrequited love, such as his own, but it was apparent that the disease magnified the painful aspects of mutual love as well. Over-possessiveness and jealousy were common reefs of marriage, so it was hardly illogical that the divorce courts were as busy as the marriage license bureaus, after all. IT helped a little to immerse himself in the troubles of others, but, after another double Scotch, he went to his apartment and immediately fell into despondency. The desire to phone Phyllis was almost overpowering, though he knew talking to her wouldn't help. Instead, he dressed and went to dinner. The club boasted a fine chef, but the food tasted like mucilage. Later, he went to the bar and drank excessively. Yet he had to take a sedative to get to sleep. He awoke in a stupor at ten o'clock. His phone was jangling persistently. It was Phyllis Sutton, and her face showed sharp concern. "Are you all right, Sylvester?" For a moment his hangover dominated, but then it all came back. "Good morning! I'm greatV' he moaned. "Stitchell and the new toxicologist think they have something to report," she said. "So do I. Alcohol is positively not the answer." "This is important. Your suggestion on the sulfa series seems to have paid off." "I'll be right over," he said, "as soon as I amputate my head." "Come down to the zoo. I'll be there." The thought of a remedy that might relieve him was a fair hangover cure. He dressed quickly and even managed to swallow a little coffee and toast. V A T the hospital, he went directly to the "zoo" in the basement. A knot of personnel, including Phyllis, Peterson, the toxicologist, and Feldman, opened to admit him to the cage under their inspection. A quick glance at the control cages showed no change in the undoctored monkeys. Males and females were paired off, huddling together miserably, chittering and sadly rubbing their heads together. Each couple eyed the other couples suspiciously. Even here, the overpossessiveness was evident, and Murt cringed from the pitiful, disconsolate expressions. The cage before him, however, appeared normally animated. The monks were feeding and playing happily. Feldman was grinning. "Had to try a new derivative, Sylvester, but the sulfa series was the right approach." Murt stared at the cage, redeyed. "Hadn't realized you succeeded in producing the symptoms in monkeys." Phyllis said, "Why, I gave you that report yester -- " She broke off with an understanding glance. Peterson was exclaiming, "I never saw such a rapid-acting remedy! And so far, there's no evidence of toxic effect." "It must absorb directly into the gland tissue," Feldman added. "Hardly had time to materially reduce the virus content significantly." Murt murmured words of congratulations to them, turned on his heel and stalked out. Phyllis followed him to his office. "Get me some of the stuff and notes on the dosages they administered," he ordered. "Certainly," she said. "But why didn't you ask -- Dr. Mart, you aren't going to try it on yourself?" "Why not?" he barked hoarsely"It'll be weeks before we can determine if it's safe," she protested, horrified. "We haven't got weeks. People are falling apart. This thing's contagious." Even while Murt said it, he felt it was the wrong approach. He knew his own perspective was shot, but Phyllis would probably try to protect him against himself. She did not. Instead, her face softened with sympathy and something else he refused to identify. She said, "I'll be right back." TriHE pressure in his head throbbed down his neck into his body. He wanted her so much, it was difficult to resist following her out into the hall. She returned in a few minutes with a #-cc glass-stoppered reagent bottle half full of a milky fluid. "Oral administration?" he asked. She nodded. "Fifteen cc for the monkeys." She secured a small beaker and a tapered graduate from the glassware cabinet and set them before him. He poured # cc into the graduated measure and transferred it to the beaker. "What do they call it?" he asked. "Sulfatetradine," she replied. "One of a series Peterson was testing. There is no physiological data on it yet. All he knows is that it inhibited the virus in culture. So they tried it on the monkeys." Murt raised the beaker to his lips. It was against every sensible tenet of scientific procedure. He was amazed that Phyllis was silent as he swallowed the bland, ohalky fluid. He heard a clink. Turning, he saw her raising the graduate to her lips. In it was a like quantity of sulfatetradine. "What are you doing?" he half-shouted. "We don't need a test-control!" "I'm not a control," she said softly, touching her lips with a scrap of gauze. "I've had the virus for months." He stared at her unbelievingly. "How do you know?" "One of the first test samples was my own blood," she said. "You saw it. It was one of the twelve positive." "But the symptoms -- you don't show a sign of -- " "Thanks," she said. "I started to break down yesterday, but you didn't notice. You see, you are my fixation and when you told me that you had it, too, I -- " " Your fixation!" The beaker slipped from his fingers and smashed to the tile. " You're in love with me?" Her arms hung loosely at her sides and tears rimmed her eyes. "Pathologically or otherwise, I've been a case since before I started the blood tests." They moved together and clung to each other. "Phyl, Phyl -- why didn't you tell me?" with her own, and her fingers dug deeply into his shoulders. His arms pulled her closer yet, trying to fill the void in him that was greater than the Universe. For a long minute, the knowledge of her love and physical contact with her straining body dispelled the bleak loneliness. When their lips parted, they gasped for breath. It was no good. It was like tearing at an itching insect bite with your fingernails. The relief was only momentary, and it left the wound bleeding and more irritated than ever. Even if they were married -- look at Peter at the club -- Peter and his wife, mutually in love and completely miserable. It wasn't normal love. It was the damned virus! As well argue with gravity. He tried to tell her, but he couldn't make her understand. Her restraint had been magnificent, but when the dam broke, it was beyond stopping the flood of her emotion. And now he couldn't believe it himself. Nothing this wonderful could be destroyed by mere misunderstanding. He cursed the years of his celibacy. All that time wasted -- lost! It was six o'clock before they reached her apartment. The License Bureau had been a mob scene. Hours more, upstairs in the City Hall waiting for the judge, while they held hands like a pair of college sophomores, staring into each others' eyes, drinking, drinking the elixir of adoration with a thirst that wouldn't be sated. Phyllis weakened first. In the cab, after the ceremony, she released his hand and wiped her damp forehead. Then, in the elevator, Murt felt himself relaxing. The alchemy of sustained passion had exhausted them both, he decided. As Phyllis slipped the key in the door, she looked up at him in surprise. "Do you know, I'm hungry. I'm starved -- for the first time in months." Murt discovered his own stomach was stirring with a prosaic pangful demand of its own. "We should have stopped to eat," he said, realizing they had forgotten lunch. " Steaks ! I have some beauties in my freezer!" Phyllis exclaimed. They peeled off their coats and she led him into the small kitchen. She pointed at the cupboard and silverware drawer. "Set the table. We'll eat in five minutes." explored the freezer for meat and French fries, dropped them into the HF cooker and set the timer for # seconds. When it clicked off, she was emptying a transparent sack of prepared salad into a bowl. "Coffee will be ready in # seconds, so let's eat," she announced. For minutes, they ate silently, ravenously, face to face in the little breakfast nook. Murt had forgotten the pure animal pleasure of satisfying a neglected appetite, and so, apparently, had his wife. Wife! The thought jolted him. Their eyes met, and he knew that the same thing was in her mind. The sulf a-tetradine ! With the edge barely off his hunger, he stopped eating. She did, too. They sipped the steaming coffee and looked at each other. "I -- feel better," Phyllis said at last. "So do I." ' "I mean -- I feel differently." He studied her face. It was new. The tenseness was gone and it was a beautiful face, with soft lips and intelligent eyes. But now the eyes were merely friendly. And it aroused no more than a casual pleasure in him, the pleasure of viewing a lovely painting or a perfect sunset. A peaceful intellectual rapport settled over them, inducing a physical lethargy. They spoke freely of their sensations, of the hypo-adrenal effects, and wondered that there was no unpleasant reaction. They decided that, initially at least, sulfa-tetradine was a miraculous success. Murt thought he should go back to the hospital and work out a report right away. Phyllis agreed and offered to accompany him, but he said she had better get a night's sleep. The next day would be hectic. After four hours at his desk, he called a taxi and, without hesitation, gave the address of his club. Not until he fell wearily into bed did he remember it was his wedding night. By mutual agreement, the marriage was annulled the next day. Feldman and Peterson were gratified at the efficacy of their drug, but both were horrified that Murt had chosen to experiment on himself. As usual, Phyl had insisted on being left out of the report. vation, one of the monkeys was chloroformed and tissue-bytissue examination was made by an army of histologists. Blood samples showed completely clear of the virus, as did a recheck on Murt's own blood. No deleterious effects could be detected, so the results were published through the Government Health Service. It was the day before Christmas before Dr. Sylvester Murt first noticed the approaching symptoms of a relapse, or reinfection -- he couldn't guess which. The past weeks had been pleasantly busy and, as acclaimed authority on Murt's virus, he had had little time to think subjectively about his experience. Sulfa-tetradine was now considered the specific for the affliction and was being produced and shipped by the carload all over the world. The press had overgenerously insisted on giving him all the credit for the remedy as well as the isolation of the disease virus. He was an international hero. The warning of another attack came to him at #:# in the afternoon, when Phyllis Sutton was leaving. She stuck her head back in the door and gave him an uncommonly warm smile and cried, "Merry Christmas, Doctor!" He waved at her and, as the door closed, caught his breath. There was the burn in his stomach again. It passed away and he refused to give it further thought. His own cab wound its way through the heavy Christmas Eve traffic an hour before store-closing time. Finally, the vehicle stalled in a jam. It was only six blocks to his club, so Murt paid off the driver and walked. Part of his strategy of bachelorhood had been to ignore Christmas and the other sentimental seasons, when loneliness costs many a man his independence. But now it was impossible to ignore the snowflakes, the bustling, package-laden crowds and the street-corner Santa Clauses with their tinkling bells. department store windows at the gay decorations. A pair of shimmering, nearly invisible nylons caught his eye. They were the most impalpable of substances, only their bare outline visible against the white background. He thought of Phyllis and, on impulse, went into the store and bought a pair. The clerk had to pick a size at random for him. Outside, on the sidewalk, he stared at the prettily gift-wrapped package and finally acknowledged the tremor, the tension and the old ache in the region of his diaphragm. Relapse! He plodded three slushy blocks up a side-street before he found a cab. He gave Phyllis Sutton's address to the driver and sank back in the taxi as a wave of weakness overcame him. What if sheweren't home? It was Christmas Eve. She would probably be visiting friends or relatives. But she wasn't. She opened the door under his impatient knock, and her eyes widened cordially. "Sylvester!" she exclaimed. "Merry Christmas! Is that for me?" She pointed to the package, clutched forgotten in his hands. "Merry, hell!" he said dispiritedly. "I came to warn you to look out for a relapse. Mine's been coming on all day." She drew him inside, made him take off his coat and sit down before she acknowledged his remark. The apartment was cozy, with a tiny Christmas tree decorated in the window. She returned from the hall closet and sat beside him. "Look what I did -- on impulse," he said and tossed the package on her lap. "That's what really turned it on." She opened the nylons and looked up at him sideways. He continued unhappily, "I saw them in a window. Made me think of you, and about that time the seizure began. I tried to kid myself that I was just getting you a little token of -- of my esteem, but the symptoms are almost as bad as before already." A pparently she refused to accept the seriousness of the situation. Her smile was fatuous, he thought, kissably fatuous. "Don't you realize what this means?" he demanded. "Peterson and Feldman turned up a very distressing fact. Sulfatetradine deposits out in the endocrines, so a single dose is all a person can take. This relapse of mine means we have it all to do over again." "Think, Dr. Murt! Just think a minute," she urged. "About what?" "If the sulfa deposits out in the very glands it's there to protect, how could you be suffering another attack?" His arms ached to reach out and emphasize his argument!. "I don't know. All I know is how I feel. In a way, this is even worse, because -- " "I know," Phyllis said and perversely moved close to him. "My relapse came last Tuesday when I bought you a tie for Christmas. I sent a blood sample over to Ebert Labs right away. And do you know what?" "What?" Murt asked in a bewildered fog. "It was negative. I don't have Murt's Virus." She slipped an arm around his waist and put her head on his shoulder. "All I've got is Murt himself." Oi#Q#I was climbed with perfect J timing for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, I watched, just out of curiosity, whether the Soviets might not make a few marginal remarks about the feat. I more or less expected that either Pravda, or else science fiction's friend, the Literaturnaya Gazyeta, might fire a blast stating that, though Mt. Everest had been climbed for military purposes by two war-mongering capitalistic lackeys of Wall Street, it was a lie to say that Mt. Everest was the top of the world and this planet's highest mountain. The highest mountain, they might have gone on, is tentatively designated by the name of Amne Machin and it is, furthermore, in the Soviet sphere, located in the Chinese People's Democracy. And if anybody climbed it at all, it would be proletarians. To the best of my knowledge, nobody lifted a cudgel or a fountain pen in Amne Machin's defense. Of course the evidence is flimsy, for the mountain has only occasionally been seen by airplane pilots who guessed that it might be # or # feet higher than Mt. Everest. That there is a very high mountain in Northeast China is probable because of these reports, but there isn't a measurement on record which would enable one to establish its height, even with considerable uncertainty. Nor, in the absence of definite information, is there any use speculating about it. is that the two men who stood on the peak of Mt. Everest were not farther out in space than anybody else had ever climbed. This is not said to belittle their enormous skill and perseverance. It just happens that they became the victims of a natural fact. If you say that a mountain sticks out into space and that one mountain sticks out farther than another mountain, you can only mean that its peak is farther away from the center of the Earth. But if you use this criterion, it turns out that the peak of Mt. Everest does not stick out into space farther than any other. Because of the fact that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, the mountains near the equator reach farther into space than the mountains elsewhere. And there is quite a number of respectable mountains within one degree of latitude (north or south) of the equator. In Africa, we have the Ruwenzori at # feet and Mt. Kenya at # feet. (The somewhat taller Kilimanjaro at # feet is # degrees from the equator.) But in the western hemisphere, we have the Cotopaxi at # feet and the Chimborazo at # feet. According to the Smithsonian Geographic Tables, the distance of a sea-level point near the pole from the center of the Earth is # miles or #I feet. The distance of a sea-level point at the equator from the center of the Earth is # miles or # feet, so that any given mountain, if moved from the vicinity of a pole to the equator, would gain #I feet in distance from the center of the Earth. Therefore, the distance of the peak of Mt. Kenya from the center of the Earth is #  #  # feet. The peak of the Chimborazo is #  #  # feet. But Mt. Everest is # degrees north of the equator and the distance of its peak to the center of the Earth works out to # feet. There is an uncertainty of a few hundred fqet in this last figure, since the sea-level height of the mountain is still somewhat in doubt. But this uncertainty is is only a small fraction of the difference between the peak of Mt. Everest and the peak of the Chimborazo, which is actually the point farthest away from the center of our planet. And even if that mysterious mountain in Northeast China should turn out to be higher than Mt. Everest, it still could not compete with Mt. Everest itself when it comes to distance from the center of the Earth. Incidentally, some readers of our foreign editions will undoubtedly object that the opening of this item is propagandistic, having already done so about previous items mentioning the Soviets. Every scientist is aware that the Soviets use science, mainly through their outrageous claims of inventions and discoveries, for propaganda purposes, which are political in nature. These arrogant claims demand refutation; dismissing them as laughable would be aiding an insidious systematic lie. Lysenkoism and similar political impositions are another matter -- they're tragic and I feel only pity for Soviet scientists who must submit to such nonsense or lose their jobs and even their lives. Here, in capsule form, is the difference in viewpoint: If the Chinese mountain proved higher than Everest, the Soviets would make capital (pun intended) of the announcement; we of the West would welcome it. questions column, but I decided to move it ahead because my answer is quite long. I received a letter from a Mr. William S. Boyd, obviously with the U. S. Air Force although no return address is given, which reads as follows: "I have read somewhere that it is possible to base arithmetics on systems of #, #, #, etc. I am under the impression that all mathematics were based on #. I would appreciate it if you could clarify this for me; at this Air Base, the library does not have any material on it." Well, this is a big order. To begin somewhere, I'll say first that it is not quite correct that all mathematics is based on #, the decimal system of counting. We do have quite a number of leftovers of older, now discarded, systems. The one still most strongly in evidence is the duodecimal system, which requires counting in units of #. There are the expressions dozen and gross (a dozen dozens), there are a dozen months in the year and two dozen hours in the day, a dozen inches to the foot, and so forth. Another old system seems to have been based on #, which probably meant that these people counted by using both fingers and toes. The two most frequently encountered leftovers of this system are "score" in English and quatre-vingt (literally # times #, used for #) from the French. There was once a system based on #, which is why we still have # times # degrees in a circle. In Germany, before the first World War, agriculture products were often sold by the Mandel, which meant #, indicating that this was once the basis of a system of counting. Even in mathematics itself, you do not always stick to the base of ten; you have two sets of logarithms, one based on # and another based on the figure e, the numerical value of which begins #. These logarithms are known as the "natural logarithms" and in many cases they prove to be far more useful than those based on ten. TT is correct that we express everything, including natural logarithms, in the wellknown decimal system, which hasits origin in the fact that we have ten fingers. A close examination of the decimal system will show how we could express it differently if we wanted to. When we count #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, we use a different sign for each word. But then, when we say ten, we suddenly use two signs and write # . We have agreed that moving a figure one position to the left means that this figure is multiplied by ten. The zero just has the purpose of indicating that the figure has been moved one position. When we see a figure like #, we know by training and habit that the # in this position does not mean five but five hundred and the whole is simply a condensed way of writing: "five times hundred plus six times ten plus seven times one." TUT we could count, as suggested by F. Emerson Andrews in his book New Numbers (New York, # and #), #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, # as usual. The next figure, the present ten, would still be written with just one sign; F. E. Andrews suggests using the X (the Roman ten) and pronouncing it dek. The present eleven would follow, also written with one sign -- Andrews suggests a specially shaped E -- and pronounced el. The first figure requiring two signs to write would be the do (from dozen and pronounced accordingly) which would look like this: #. In this duodecimal system, the movement of a sign by one position means that it has been multiplied by #., Consequently the duodecimal figure written # would mean a dozen dozens and the duodecimal figure # would be one dozen plus two ones, the # of decimal notation. Now what would have happened if people had used only one hand for counting? Then we would have a system based on five and requiring only five signs, namely #, #, #, # and #. If a figure were moved to the left by one position, it would mean that this figure has been multiplied by #, hence the decimal five would be written #. In this "one-handsystem," our six would be written #. I hope these examples show that all that is required is a firm agreement on what a movement by one position is supposed to accomplish, whether it is supposed to mean multiplication by ten, or twelve, or five, or whatever. Of course you may agree on a system of just two, requiring only the signs I and #. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, the mathematician and philosopher, insisted that such a system had once been used by the Chinese. Whether Leibnitz was right or not is relatively unimportant, but this so-called binary system is the only one an electronic computer can handle and for this reason there is now much activity with and around the binary system. Every problem to be solved by the big computers first has to be translated into the binary system, or else the machine can't handle it. In this binary system the figures from one to ten would have to be written: #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #. A quarter of a century ago, before there were any electronic computers to make this system necessary, one Dr. Theodore Wolff amused himself by presenting some everyday information in the binary system. The information concerns Mr. Joshua Lehmann whose address is # X-Street, Apt. # C, and who was born in #. At the age of #, he was married for # years, had six children and a yearly income of #. In the binary system, the address of Mr. Lehmann is No. #, Apt. # C. His birth year is #I and during his #I years of marriage his wife bore him # children which he has to feed and clothe on a mere # per year! Frequently one hears of fish that live at great depths in the ocean as having burst while they were brought to the surface for study. This is supposed to be due to the sudden release of pressure under which they live normally. Another point along the same lines is a passage in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End where an ichthyologist is described as " peeping through a microscope into... a pressure capsule containing some specimens of deep-sea life, swimming around under its normal tons-to-thesquare centimeter conditions." Water is supposed to be incompressible, so how could there be such a high pressure in the capsule? And why do the deep-sea fish die? Lt. P. K. Cranston R.C.A.F. Trenton, Ontario Canada It seems to me as if there are two different reasons for the maintenance of pressure in Arthur C. Clarke's so far hypothetical pressure capsule and damage to the tissue of deep-sea fish which are brought to the surface. To begin with, when books state that water is incompressible, this is not to be taken absolutely literally. With enough pressure, several tons to the square inch, one can compress water by a small fraction of one per cent of its surface volume. So if one sealed a pressure capsule # fathoms below the surface, the pressure would be maintained in the capsule, since the strength of the capsule's walls would substitute for the weight of # fathoms of water. But I do not helieve that this explanation applies to the deepsea fish that burst when hauled up fast. Cell walls are not steel and the tiny amount of expansion should be easily absorbed by them. Even if we make the obviously silly assumption that the cell walls do not "give," they are not impermeable to water. However, the bodies of deep-sea fish indisputably are often destroyed and torn. This is caused not by the very slight expansion of the body fluids of the fish, but by the gases disolved in the body fluids under high pressure and released as the pressure drops. The death of a deep-sea fish is then an extremely exaggerated case of "the bends," which has the same cause. What does plutonium look like? I have not been able to find this fact in declassified literature. Herbert Schaefer #-# Vietor Avenue Elmhurst, L. I., N. Y. This is something I had not seen mentioned anywhere, either. But I felt quite sure that there was no reason to keep the outward appearance of plutonium classified, so I queried the Atomic Energy Commission. The answer might he slightly disappointing to many people, tonium is quite similar to lead in appearance." I have read the book about Dr. Wernher von Braun s plan about a space station, but there is something I do not understand. Dr. von Braun says at one point that the rocket ship from Earth, bringing up supplies, would move in the same orbit as the space station, but a few hundred feet away. The supplies would then be ferried across. How is this possible? According to the tables in the book, the third stage of the rocket ship, as it gets to the space station, weighs # tons. The weight of the space station is not stated anywhere, but it must be well over # tons. How can these two move in the same orbit with the same speed if one weighs more than six times as much as the others? Please explain. Fred B. Manzell Chicago #, #. # West #th Str#et This is a question I have been asked repeatedly after lectures. The answer is that the whole question is wrong because the orbital velocity (in a given orbit) does not depend on the weight, or rather mass, of the orbiting body. But I also know from lecture experience that this answer is usually received with a considerable amount of distrust, so I'll try to make my readers visualize why this is so. If you still have the December # issue of Galaxy on hand, you'll find a reply having to do with the motion of our moon. I said there that if the Moon and Earth were of equal mass, both bodies would revolve around their common center of gravity, which would he halfway between them. But since the Moon has a much smaller mass than Earth, the common center of gravity of the two bodies is much closer to the center of Earth. In fact, this "barycenter," to use the technical term, happens to be inside the Earth, a thou sand miles below the surface. If you imagine that the diameter of our moon were only # miles (instead of the # miles which is the true figure), the barycenter of the Earth Moon system is likely to be a short walking distance from the center of our planet. In short: the smaller the mass of the body revolving around the Earth, the closer the barycenter to the center of the bigger body. In the case of a space station of a few hundred tons, the barycenter of the EarthSpace station system will, to all intents and purposes, coincide with the center of the Earth. In the case of a rocketship of # tons, the barycenter will also coincide with the center of the planet. Hence the station and the rocketship will both he able to revolve around the Earth at the same speed in the same orbit, even though their masses are decidedly different. But neither of their masses amounts to anything when compared to that of the Earth. Is there any truth to the rumor that scientists have discovered a new planet beyond Pluto? by L. Sprague de Camp Now at last! The full story of Atlantis -- in history, science and literature, by the author of Science Fiction Handbook and coauthor of Lands Beyond.  # by Arthur C. Clarke An enthralling new novel about the concerted effort to send man out into scace, by the author of The Exploration of Space, Sands of Mars, etc.  # First in a series of books about the interplanetary adventures of a young man and his dog.  # by Murray Leinster The eerie tale of a forgotten planet in the depths of the Milky Way and of the nightmarish life led on it by the descendants of a space snip wreck.  # James Eden leaves the Sub-Sea Academy to search for his uncle who has mysteriously vanished from a uranium mine at the ocean's bottom.  # Order now from your bookstore or # East #I St.,N.Y.#, N.Y. A.P.O. No. # co Postmaster, New York I haven't heard any such rumor and I doubt that I ever will, for such a discovery would not he rumored -- it would be announced. The possibility that one or two yet unknown planets might mote around our sun beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto is generally admitted. As you may know, the planet Neptune was discovered a little over a century ago as a result of careful calculations based on the deviations of Uranus from its predicted orbital movement. This discovery set the pattern for Pluto, for it was found the same way. The surprise was that Pluto was much closer to the Sun that had been assumed. Part of its orbit is actually inside the orbit of Neptune. Pluto also seems to differ from the physical pattern that is the rule for the outer planets, and the thought has been advanced that Pluto may once have been a third moon of Neptune. The general feeling is that the "Trans-Neptune" that astronomers had been hunting is still unknown. There are two reasons for this assumption: Neptune does deviate from its calculated orbit in a manner indicating an unknown planet bigger than Pluto; and a number of comet orbits are such that they indicate the existence of a planet at about twice the distance of Neptune from the Sun. Are there any metals known with melting points higher or lower than those of tungsten and mercury ( which I take to be the extremes')? Do non-metals show more extreme melting points than these metals? G. Schwaber Binghampton, NY. Mercury and tungsten (wolfram) still represent the known extremes, the former having a melting point of# centigrade (-# Fahrenheit) and the latter probably at # centigrade (# Fahrenheit). As for your second question, the answer is emphatically yes. Helium has a melting point somewhere near I degree absolute, while metal carbides have higher melting points than metals. The highest reported is for a mixture of # per cent tantalum carbide and # per cent hafnium carbide, which was established to be # centigrade or # Fahrenheit. Pre-Publication Offer! Only one thing could equal st dries I Published by Crown, it's a really huge book... over # pages, more than a quarter of form... a giant reading bargain at only # a copy. But we have an offer that makes this giant bargain even more gigantic: Twelve quality-crammed issues monthly at the newsstand come to # a year. Total: #. Readers' Pre-Publication copy of... plus the next twelve big #! You'll want them both. Don't wait because this is a pre-publication offer and cannot be kept open long. Mail the coupon below with # today. Offer expires May #, #. Yes, start  (or extend Q) my subscription right away -- and mail me pressesl I enclose # as payment in full for both. Address City Start with the issue. Open Warfare Tournament testing had made Jim a machine golfer -- but he faced a player with no nerves at all! T HE tournament hadn't been conceded, exactly, but everybody agreed that Jim was the man to beat. Everybody -- the professionals, the fans, the sportswriters... Slim Jim Pearson, the hard-luck boy with the velvet swing, is finally going to cop that U. S. Open crown. Look up these words five days from now. He's no longer the Jim Pearson who swung eight times at a ball buried in a sand trap in #, or the Jim Pearson who four-putted a green and picked up in disgust in # when he could have parred in to win. He's the Jim Pearson who has won ten major tournaments on the winter circuit, the last five straight, and collected # with a sparkling performance of cool, steady golf... The Open didn't pay off anything close to #, of course. The extras made up the difference. Fame was negotiable -- testimonials, articles, books, sporting goods contracts. Fifty thousand dollars... And the money didn't mean a thing. It was just the price tag on a girl named Alice Hatcher, who was no different from any other attractive young girl except that Jim Pearson happened to love her, and her father happened to lars. Like the marching Chinese, while you were counting them, would never break ninety, concealed his steely mind behind a soft face. Only after he was trapped, had Jim recognized the inflexible purpose and the wily cleverness behind it. "You're a good golfer, Jim," Hatcher said, easing off his spiked shoes with a sigh, "even if you can't teach me anything. We've been good to you at the Country Club. I want you to do something for me." "Yes, sir?" "Stay away from Alice!" "But, Mr. Hatcher!" "I won't have her marrying a man who has nothing but coordination and muscles. When I was only your age, I was making # a year. It takes brains to do that. Brains get more valuable. Muscles deteriorate. There's nothing muscles can't do that a machine can't do better." "You don't think I could make #?" Jim said angrily. "I know damn well you couldn't," Hatcher said. "You haven't got the guts. If you ever got within sight of it, you'd blow up -- like you did in St. Louis." Before Jim had known it, he was wrapped up, sealed, addressed and -- he feared -- headed for the dead-letter office. If he could make # in a year, he could have Alice -- if he could get her -- with Hatcher's blessing. If he failed -- well, he wouldn't see Alice again. Jim had had a long time to think about it -- the better part of a year -- and to admire the way he had been outmaneuvered. Fifty thousand dollars -- a shrewd figure. Right at the top of the possible. Not impossible, but so close to it as to be practically indistinguishable. There had been side effects. Touring the tournament circuit had kept him away from Alice as effectively as walls and armed guards. And somehow -- Jim had a good idea how -- Alice had learned about the bet. A few days after Jim had won his first big tournament, he got a note. I won't be bought and sold. At. That was that -- or was it? For a few days, Jim had been angry with a blind anger that cost him #. And then he saw a picture over a caption that read -- Industrialist Samuel Hatcher bids bon voyage to his daughter, Alice, who will spend the next six months studying in England. Jim studied Hatcher's expression of bland triumph. Suddenly, his anger became something else -- something cold and determined. Nerves? Temperament? He didn't have any. Each long, low, flat drive was a fist in Hatcher's face -- each sure putt a dagger in his back. The prize money rolled in. The tournaments dropped behind, conquered, forgotten. And then it was Open time. The bet was almost won. And if Hatcher thought he couldn't lose, Jim had a surprise for him. He would take the whole fifty thousand, Jim thought, and lay it in front of Alice and say, "I wasn't buying you, I was buying the right to tell you that I love you." And if that didn't work, he would set fire to the putting greens at night -- all # of them. Maybe Hatcher knew finance -- but he didn't know golf, and he didn't know the way of a man with a maiden. All it took was the U.S. Open. And nobody else could keep up the pace for four rounds. Jim grinned -- it was going to be that easy. And then Saul showed up. npHE first hint of disaster came at the practice tee. Jim was methodically sharpening up his No. I woods when the spectators deserted him. The appreciative murmurs died away. Jim looked up. The mob had clotted around another tee, several hundred feet away. Jim waved the caddy in and sauntered toward the attraction that had taken the crowd away from the man picked to win the Open. Not annoyed, not upset -- just curious. From a knoll behind the other tee, Jim got a good view of the big, tall golfer. The tanned, impassive features were unfamiliar. And then the driver came down in a glittering arc. Jim pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. He knew all the professionals and most of the topnotch amateurs. No stranger should have a swing that good, that effortless, that grooved. But the real shock came when Jim followed the smooth arc of the glistening ball. Jim's eyes were good, or he might have lost it as it dwindled in the distance. The caddy stood at least # yards down the fairway, with a ball bag in his hands. He didn't move -- and the ball dropped right in the middle of the sack. Accident, Jim thought shakily. But it happened a second time and a third, and so on until Jim lost count. Every club in the bag was used with the same incredible accuracy. The caddy had a snap job -- he didn't have to stoop once. Trick-shot artist, Jim told himself. Wait until he gets in competition. But there wasn't anybody that good. Not even old Joe Kirkwood. "Quite a spectacle, eh, Jim?" Jim knew that brisk, businesslike voice. He turned. "Hello, Hatcher." He tried to keep his voice friendly. Hatcher was as fat as ever. "Must be unnerving to watch something like that." "I can stand it." "But will you be able to stand it when the going gets rough?" Hatcher asked solicitously. "Or will you blow up like you always do? It would be too bad, just when you're so close." "You haven't forgotten our bet, then?" "Of course not, Jim." He chuckled. "I never forget anything." "You've kept close track," Jim said steadily. "What about Alice? Has she kept track, too?" "I haven't the slightest idea. She's in England, you know. I suspect, however, that she has forgotten all about you." "She'll remember. The next four days will remind her." "I suppose so," Hatcher said thoughtfully. "Sadly, I'm afraid. Saul will see to that." "Saul?" Hatcher nodded toward the golfer on the tee. "Saul." Jim's eyes narrowed. "You know him?" Hatcher was enigmatic. "I brought him here -- my own personal entry. His first tournament was the qualifying round, and he's going to beat you out of the Open." Score up another one for Hatcher. "Then he's got something to learn," Jim said confidently. Hatcher turned to watch Saul. The clean, crisp smack pf club against ball came with clockwork regularity. "Just a dumb, country boy," he said. "Never saw a golf club until a few months ago. But I think he might teach you something, Jim." Jim's gaze drifted irresistibly to the golf balls soaring down the fairway into the canvas sack. That was what he would have to beat. J IM'S threesome teed off early in the morning. Jim felt good. A night's sound sleep had brought back his self-confidence. He was going to enjoy winning. From the moment he drew his driver out of the leather bag, he knew he was going to have a good day. The grip fitted snugly into his hand. His flat, thin muscles rippled without a twinge. His practice swings were loose and effortless. The crowd was sympathetic. That always helped. They wanted to see him burn up the course. He had another rooter, too, and there was another thousand in the bank. An eager young man from a sporting goods company had talked him into using a new golf ball. The company had planned a big campaign to advertise it. Guaranteed to add twenty yards to every drive. They would like to add, Used by Jim Pearson when he won the U.S. Open. They'd have that chance, Jim thought firmly. He knelt to tee up his ball. "Don't tighten up yet," said a voice he was coming to know too well. "Give the crowd a show for its money." Jim turned. "You can't have much confidence in your champion, Hatcher, if you have to try psychological tricks like this." "All the confidence in the world, Jim," Hatcher said breezily. "I just don't take chances. You take chances. That's why you always lose." "Don't be too sure. I haven't lost yet." Hatcher shrugged. "You haven't seen Alice, have you?" Jim forced himself to take three deep breaths. When he stepped up to his ball, he was calm. He took a few experimental waggles. The crowd sighed as his deceptively easy swing sent his first drive soaring down the fairway. It was long and straight. The slightest hook would send the ball scooting down a slope to the left behind a clump of trees on the #-yard par-five hole. It wasn't too tough a birdie. The next four dropped in par. Cameras clicked and whirred. The crowd applauded, held its breath or groaned in sympathy. On the par-five sixth, Jim relaxed and lit a cigarette. It was a good day to be playing. The sky was an improbable blue -- the fairway was green and springy. Jim took a deep breath and smiled at the crowd. They liked that. They applauded. Jim got his second shock. The white flash of a girl's face, the arch of a slim body in a cool summer dress... Jim started toward her. "Al," he said, then stopped. He cursed silently. He was beginning to see things. He tossed his cigarette away and ground it into the turf. The sixth fell, nevertheless, in birdie figures. Three more pars made him # for the first nine. Not won tournaments. And two putts might have dropped, but hadn't. ter. Jim played smoothly, confidently. The crowd, that had been tense and excited over his four birdies and three pars, began slipping away at the sixteenth. That didn't bother him. A roar of approval drifted faintly over the fairway from time to time. On the last two holes he got a birdie and a par. He glanced quickly over the card. A # and a #, for #b on the eighteen. Six birdies -- twelve pars. Three more like that should win easily. The crowd around the eighteenth green opened in front of him as he walked toward the clubhouse. Strangers reached out to shake his hand and pound him on the back. Jim smiled for them. "How was the golf ball, huh?" It was the eager young man. "Fine," Jim said. "I'll leave a couple of dozen with your caddy." "Fine," Jim said. Jim watched his score being posted on the big board. Most of the field was still out, but he was ahead of the closest competitor by three strokes. As he turned away, the crowd at the eighteenth green roared. That usually meant a hot round. Jim waited. Maybe some joker had tied his #. A big, tall, bronzed golfer plodded silently through the crowd. Nobody shook his hand. Nobody pounded his back. But they looked at him with awe. Jim watched him for a moment and frowned. He turned to watch Saul's score go down on the board, but two men were talking behind him. One of them was a syndicated sports writer. " Wow " the columnist said. "Clockwork -- precision! There's never been anything like it. Nerves? He never opened his mouth." The other man mumbled something. "Yes, I said it and I'll take it all back," the writer replied. "Saul's the man to beat, not Pearson." Jim flushed, but the other man spoke up. "I'll still bet on Pearson." "And I'll take all you can scrape together. This Saul's a machine -- every shot just where he wants it. Let me put that down before I forget it -- Silent Saul, the Mechanical Man." Jim looked back to the scoreboard. His eyes flashed quickly across the row of precise figures: # # -- # # # -- # That tied the course record and beat him by two. The procession of threes and fours was fantastic. "What's the matter, Jim?" Hatcher said from behind him. "You don't look well." Jim turned, smiling. It was an effort, but he made it. "One round isn't a tournament," he said casually. Hatcher sighed. "Comfort yourself while you can. Saul's just getting warmed up. He's that mythical thing, the perfect golfer, but he's dumb. No brains, Jim -- no brains at all." J IM stared at the sports-page headline and lost all appetite for breakfast. Pearson's # Places Second To Record-Tying # Jim Pearson, the fair-haired boy of the tournament circuit, rolled up a sparkling # for yesterday's first round of the U.S. Open. But only a few minutes later. Silent Saul, mystery man of the tournament, blazed in... Jim set his jaw firmly and forced down his bacon and eggs. The Open wasn't over yet. There was a lot of golf yet to be played. He glanced through his mail. An English stamp! England. He ripped open the letter. A girl can change her mind. Win the Open -- for me. Al. Jim waited until his breathing slowed. He got up, stuffed the note in his pocket, sauntered to the practice tee. So she was in England. But if she loved him, why did this one tournament matter? What difference did # make? He tried to see the situation from Alice's viewpoint and shook his head. Maybe Hatcher was right. Maybe he wasn't so smart. But there was one thing he was good at, one thing at which, when he was feeling his best, he was unbeatable. An hour's practice went well. His hands felt good today, slim and strong. That was always a sign of readiness. He strolled over to the starting tee. The crowd was small. When he stepped up to his ball, there was only a smattering of applause. His drive was as straight as the day before and longer by almost # yards. Jim played grimly and accurately. From ahead, as regularly as a pulse, came roars of approval. That was Saul, he thought. His game became, if anything, crisper. The crowd . was larger as he teed off on number #. The underdog, he thought -- they always pull for the underdog if he's making a game fight. But if he appeared to be certain to lose -- well, they were human. They liked to be on the winning side. H IS second nine was a duplicate of the day before -- another #. But the applause, as he dropped the putt on the eighteenth, was perfunctory. Jim puzzled over it as he handed the putter to his caddy. He had equalled Saul's record-tying score of yesterday. Surely Saul hadn't repeated. His luck had to run out. It was worse than that. It was -- # # -- #I # # # # # # # # -- # He had broken the record and beaten Jim by two strokes. Jim was four strokes down. He turned away, his face set and hard. He wasn't even surprised to find Hatcher behind him. "What have you got to say, Jim," Hatcher inquired. What Jim wanted to say was unprintable. After a moment, however, he forced a smile. "That's better," Hatcher said. "The good old American tradition. Good sportsmanship -- that sort of thing. Bushwash! They pay off on winners." "You haven't seen anything yet," Jim said. "You know," Hatcher said, "I was just going to say the same thing." Jim brushed past him and walked toward the clubhouse. There was something terribly wrong with the whole setup. In real life, things didn't happen like this. People didn't pop out of nowhere and break all records to win the Open. Men didn't take up the game and become perfect golfers in a few months. Hatcher had said either too much or too little. Saul had a weakness. There was no perfect golfer. But how could Jim find that weakness and take advantage of it! "Dave," Jim said. He caught the scurrying tournament manager by a sleeve. "There's some dispute about a penalty," Dave said, trying to get away. "When am I supposed to go out tomorrow?" "Afternoon." "And Saul?" "A little later. What is this?" Dave scowled. "Let me go out in the morning," Jim said. "Well, I don't -- " "It means a lot," Jim said quickly. "I've got an appointment in the afternoon." "Well," Dave said, "I don't see how it can hurt... "Thanks, Dave. You won't regret it." And, as the official broke into a trot Jim added under his breath, "But someone will." Hatcher hadn't been content with a simple bet, not even with all the odds in his favor. He had played all angles and, when he was about to lose, had pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Any way to win. That was a two-sided game, also. # again, as he missed his usual birdie on the first hole and got it back with a # on the second. On the back nine, he slipped a stroke to a #. But he refused to blow up under the pressure of Saul's four-stroke lead. His # total broke several fifty-four hole records. And yet Saul could drop to a # to tie. Jim had a hunch Saul's game wasn't going to break. Not today. He shook off the reporters, gobbled a sandwich and returned to the starting tee almost unnoticed. He was lost in a crowd of thousands, gathered to see Silent Saul blaze to new heights. Saul's effortless swing belted the ball over # yards down the fairway, straight as the shortest distance between two points. Jim wasn't watching. His eyes were half-closed, studying the mental picture of that swing. There was something wrong with it, something naggingly suspicious about it. Jim couldn't pin it down. It seemed -- familiar -- and yet Jim felt he'd never seen it before that first mad day. Jim tramped the fairway with the rest of the spectators, drawing close enough to hear anything Saul might say to his caddy or Hatcher. There wasn't anything to hear. Saul was silent as a mute. Saul sent one sweeping glance toward the green, # yards distant, selected a club from the bag, took a few oddly-familiar waggling gestures before he set his driver behind the ball and swung. The ball lit on the front edge of the green and bit. Saul's putt rolled straight for the hole until an unruly blade of grass deflected it an inch to the right of the cup. A birdie. That was the pattern. The only luck Saul was playing in was bad. It rode his shoulders pickaback, spoiling the incredible accuracy of his shots. A gust of wind caught a lofting seven-iron pitch -- a bad bounce called up a stopped the ball short of the green with his head. Jim smiled ruefully. Against this combination of bad breaks, Saul had whipped the front nine in #. What would he do when he was lucky? And still those familiarities of swing plagued Jim's memory. Wild ideas flitted through his mind -- disguise -- mass hallucination. He pushed them away. This was real. And there had never been anyone this good. The only inconsistency about Saul were his unnecessary preparatory movements. The sports writer was right. Saul was a golfing machine, tuned to perfection for just one thing. And he did nothing else. He didn't even talk. At the start of the eleventh hole, Hatcher caught sight of him. "Ah," he said, "come to take some lessons?" "I hope to learn something," Jim said quietly. "Watch Saul -- you will." Hatcher smiled. "Of course, the papers will eat this up. 'Pearson watches Saul spike hopes for Open.' " Jim didn't answer. He was watching Saul again. His drive cleared the trees to roll to a stop close to the green. "Where did he learn to drive like that?", Jim mused. "Saul?" Hatcher laughed. "Why, he's a natural bom golfer!" Jim left him laughing and puffing far behind. H E got his first clue on the sixteenth green. Jim scowled as Saul drew back his putter in a smooth, wrist-powered arc. And Jim had part of the answer. It might have been Tod Winters putting -- Tod who was the ten years. Frowning, Jim's narrowed eyes obscured the physical difference, and the form leaped out at him. Saul had patterned his putting on that of Tod Winters. No -- that wasn't quite it. It was like a picture of Tod, every idiosyncrasy duplicated without reason, superimposed on Saul's massive frame. The putt rimmed the cup and was dropped for a par. Jim walked dazedly with the crowd to the next tee. Watching Saul's drive, something sprang into his mind, then was gone before he could grasp it. Jim shook his head and watched the long-iron shot arch beautifully to the green. That one was obvious. George Potter, who would have been a great champion if all his shots had been as well played as his long irons, was the model this time. But again, the things that were duplicated were variations that added nothing to the success of the shots. No golfer in his right mind would have duplicated those. The waggles and twitches were Potter's way of preparing himself psychologically for the stroke. Why had Saul duplicated everything? How had he done it so faithfully? The crowd's roar brought Jim scurrying to the tree-embraced tee to watch Saul's last drive. This time the nagging thought leaped again -- and stayed. He might have been looking in a mirror. He should have realized it before. Of course, Saul would duplicate Jim's driving form. He was the boy with the velvet swing, the controlled drives that no one had outdistanced before Saul came along. He didn't even have to watch the approach shot. Saul might be the golfer, but it would be Gordon Brown's technique. And then, as he watched Saul putt twice for a par, the answer came, the answer that was incredible but, somehow -- inescapably -- true. As Jim expected, Hatcher was at his elbow with a few wellchosen comments. "A # -- you're six strokes behind with one round to go. Do you want to give up now?" "I don't think I will," Jim said evenly. "You see, Hatcher, I did learn something -- something I wasn't supposed to learn." Hatcher was amused. "Yes? And what is that?" "I think we'd better talk about it privately." "Oh, that won't be necessary." Jim shrugged. "It doesn't matter to me." He leaned closer to Hatcher and added softly, "But I know that Saul is a robot." room, came sounds of carefree confusion -- plates and silverware clinking, spiked shoes clomping across shredded floors, loud voices describing this one that rimmed or that one that dropped. Inside the little private room, where Hatcher stood looking out the window at the rolling, green fairway, there was silence. A smile curled the corners of Hatcher's mouth. "So you think Saul is a robot." "Isn't he?" Hatcher chuckled. "Of course he is. How does it feel to be beaten at your own game by a mindless machine." "You haven't won yet," Jim said. "A golf ball takes some funny bounces." "How did you find out -- about Saul?" "Saul is a lot of things," Jim said slowly, "but none of them is Saul. Saul is Tod Winters, George Potter, Gordon Brown and me. T ake us away and there's nothing left." "Nothing human," Hatcher said. "Just a memory, a power source, a lot of wires and a lot of motors." Jim shook his head. "How did you do it?" "Money can do anything. All it needs is a purpose. Someone has developed a colloidal memory bank? That's a brain -- get it? The new miniature atomic power plant is ideal. Use it. Make thousands of tiny motors to serve as muscles. Throw in some sensory mechanisms, some relays, then feed in an analysis of a slow-motion pictorial study." "And you have a golf machine." "Exactly," Hatcher said. "It must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars," Jim said bitterly. was cheerful. from winning twenty-five thousand," Jim said. "Don't you think that's unfair?" "Unfair?" Hatcher echoed, smiling. "There's a machine response for you. That's what the loser always says. Be a little better, a little smarter, a little stronger than your competitor, and he runs to the government, yanks on its apron strings and screams, 'Unfair competition. Unfair competition!' Understand this, Jim -- nothing's unfair that doesn't break the rules. And the only rule worth remembering is this -- the best man always wins." "You mean the best machine," Jim said sourly. "A machine is only an extension of a man, like your driver. I don't happen to be endowed with golfing muscles and responses. You do. Those -- and your golf clubs, Jim -- let you hit a ball farther and straighter than anybody else. Saul lets me hit a ball farther and straighter than you do. It's as simple as that." J IM said, "That wasn't the bet. The bet was that I couldn't make # in a year. Not that you couldn't spend twenty times that to keep me from making half as much. That was obvious from the start." "Maybe that was your bet. It wasn't mine. I bet that I could beat you at your own game. I didn't think you were good enough for Alice, not smart enough, not man enough. Maybe you didn't have a chance anyway -- I don't know. But she was spending too much time at the Country Club, and it wasn't just to improve her game. Should I let a few welldistributed, welltrained muscles blind her to what you really are?" "And what's that?" "Why, you're a quitter, Jim. You can't stand pressure. You're no competitor. You've proved that time after time. Maybe Alice couldn't see it. I had to keep her from a foolish mistake." Jim frowned. Maybe it had been true. It wasn't true any more -- if he could only prove it. "And yet I was going to win -- against me," he said. jowls wobbled. "Could I let luck give away what I value most? Of course not. Alice deserves the best, the smartest, the strongest. I knew you were a weakling. If you couldn't win at your own game, you couldn't win at anything else. At least I gave you that chance." " Chance !' ' Jim's eyes studied the floor moodily. "Have you ever played poker, Jim?" Jim looked up. "Sure." "Then maybe you know that, over the long run, the smartest player always wins. Over the long run. You have to give luck time to even out. That means the winner is the man who can stay in the game the longest, the one with the most chips. There's a moral in that. Poor men should never play poker. Rich men should play nothing else." "So you made sure I couldn't win," Jim said. "All because of a preconception that I'm a quitter. One ninety-five for # holes. I don't call that quitting." Hatcher shrugged heavy shoulders. "What will you do tomorrow, Jim? Or next week? What will you do when it's more than just a game, when the going really gets rough? That's what it is now. This is for keeps. And it isn't enough just to come close. You've got to have the will to win. Everything is unacceptable but victory." "According to my standards, Hatcher," Jim said grimly, "you haven't played fair. Suppose I should lose -- through no fault of my own -- and try to win Alice anyway?" Hatcher's voice was just as grim. "Then I'd know that you are a welsher besides a quitter. And I'd act accordingly -- without compunctions." Jim knew what Hatcher could do if he wanted to. "And suppose I should win tomorrow?" Hatcher's face relaxed. "Six strokes back? Playing against the perfect golfer?" "Suppose!" Jim said firmly. Hatcher sobered and studied Jim's face. "Then I'd have to admit I was wrong. You have my word on that. And you could have Alice -- if she wants you." There was a small sound from the doorway. Jim turned. She was standing there, cool, slim, desirable. "A#..." he said, and knew that he loved her more than ever. H OW long had she been there? Hatcher turned. "Alice! But I got a letter from you this morning -- from England." Her voice was low and musical, as Jim remembered it. "I left them with a friend to mail for me." She walked forward slowly. "I wanted to keep myself out of this. I was afraid I might disturb something." . "But you should know," Hatcher said affectionately, "that you could never disturb me." "I was thinking of Jim," she said slowly. Jim straightened up. He looked intently into the face he loved. Alice's red lips twisted ironically. "That's funny, isn't it? And it's funny to stand here like this and talk coldly about something that was never put into words before. And the funniest part is that I wasn't really in love with Jim -- not then, not really." "A#..." Jim began, and stopped. There was nothing he could say. Alice's blue eyes turned toward him, and Jim told himself that they held a warm promise. "It probably wouldn't ever have come to anything, Dad," Alice said quietly. "But then you let me find out about the bet. I was mad at first, but then I started to think. The bet told me something. It told me Jim was in love with me, enough to make a crazy bet like that on the wild chance that he might win. That was something I had never been sure of before, with any man. And then you kept us apart. That was more. It's worked for thousands of years. It worked this time. I fell in love." Jim swallowed hard. In a moment he would break out singing. "You don't know how I prayed and fought every one of his tournaments with him. And, when he got so close, I had to be here. I had to be near him, even if I couldn't let him know, for fear that it would upset his game." Hatcher nodded. "I can see why you'd be afraid of that." "You're wrong, Dad," Alice said earnestly. "He's not a quitter. He's proved that. Anybody but you would admit it. Sure he's human. He's not a machine and I love him." "Love?" Hatcher shrugged his shoulders. "It comes and goes. The only thing that doesn't change is character." "You can't prove that with a machine," Alice said firmly. "It's his own game. Remember that. If a machine can play it better than he can, he should lose. Take away his one ability and what have you got? Nothing!" He turned to Jim. "The bet still stands." He smiled gently at Alice. "I won't let you throw yourself away on a childish whim." And he stalked out of the room with all the delicacy and refinement of a bull elephant. J IM stared at Alice for a moment, then took two giant strides and gathered her in his arms. Eventually, they drew apart. "Did you mean that?" he asked. "About loving me." She nodded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "What can we do?" he continued. "Nothing," she said hopelessly. "You heard what he said about not letting me throw myself away. He meant it. He could do it, too." "Then I've got to beat Saul," Jim said bravely. But he knew, while he said it, that he was whistling in the dark. He wasn't playing against another golfer. He was playing against himself -- and Tod Winters and George Potter and Gordon Brown, the best of each. Against perfection, he had only his own fallible, erratic skill. Against machine judgment and nerveless metal, he had to pit the illusioned human senses and nerves that could, he knew only too well, turn to quivering jelly. "Somewhere," he said slowly, "Saul must have an Achilles heel. The prime fact about man is his adaptability. An imitation would have to have built-in limitations." "That's it!" Alice said excitedly. "They had to build in at least one constant, if not more. If we can find it and alter the conditions... "Judgment?" Jim suggested. He tossed the idea away. "Nojudgment has to be flexible. They couldn't know when he'd meet up with wind, rain, sunbaked courses, slow greens, fast ones, wormcasts... "He does it, too," Alice said. "I've watched him. Maybe we could find where he's kept. Tinker with him -- smash him!" "That wouldn't be fair. I could probably have him disqualified, of course. But that wouldn't be fair either." " Fair " Alice exploded. "Has Dad played fair? This isn't a game, Jim. We've got to win." Jim smiled at the essential amorality of women and sobered. "That isn't what I meant. I mean your father wouldn't accept it. According to his lights, he's played fair with me. He could have had me crippled, poisoned or taken out of action in lots of ways -- and gotten away with it. But he's beating me on my own ground. And that's where we've got to beat him." that skill and energy -- wasted on something like this." "And it could be such a wonderful thing," Jim said. "Profitable, too. Think of the things that machines could do, if they had memories and self-contained power! Not man-shapes, like Saul. That's useless. They could do all the jobs that man's too weak to do or that are too dangerous or too much drudgery." "Mining," Alice said, "and manufacturing." "Exploring -- the cold places and the hot places. The deeps of the sea and space. Rebuilding -- making uninhabitable places livable." Jim's eyes were distant. "The important thing is that they can't compete. Man won't stand for it. He'll destroy them first. And they can never conquer Man, because he's too adaptable. Unless he lets them." "That's wonderful," Alice said, her eyes glowing. "Tell Dad. He can recognize a good idea when he hears it. He won't think you're so dumb then." "I could probably like him," Jim said, "except he won't give me the chance. Not unless we find the constant. I guess I'll just have to play my heart out tomorrow." "You can't do it, darling. You'd have to shoot in the fifties!" "A golf ball takes some funny bounces," Jim said. He turned to the window and stuck his hands moodily in his pockets. He started. It was as simple as that. "There is a constant," he said exultantly, swinging around. "Look, Al. Here's the key to my locker. Get my caddy and Saul's. I think you'll have more luck with the boy than I would.' Give him -- oh, five or ten dollars. And here's what I want you to do..." In the middle of the explanation, Alice caught fire, too. As he finished, she gave Jim a quick, proud kiss and hurried out. Jim's eyes followed her admiringly for a moment, and then he reluctantly turned toward the dining room. Jim dragged Dave Simpson, the tournament official, protestingly away from a hearty meal. "I've just had a wonderful idea," he said. "Why don't you put Saul and me together for tomorrow's round." "What!" Dave exclaimed. "Think of the crowds, Dave," Jim urged. "But what about you? What chance will you have, playing with a man who has you down six strokes?" "Oh, that's all right," Jim said bravely. "I don't mind. But if you're not interested... Jim moved to turn away. Dave caught him by an elbow. "I didn't say I wasn't interested. If it's all right with you, I don't think anyone else will object." Jim thought of Hatcher. "No," he said, "I don't think they will." Jim walked away, whistling. THE reaction set in when he strode onto the tee next morning. The crowd was immense and noisy. It was all very well to plan something like this in the abstract. But, in the clutch, would his nerve fail him, as it had failed him before? Alice was waiting for him, cool and lovely and infinitely desirable. She put her hand on his arm and warmed him with a smile. On the other side of the broad tee, Hatcher's smile was mocking. Beside him, Saul, the robot, waited impassively. Jim knew then that it wasn't going to be as easy as he had thought. It wouldn't be enough to hope that he had thrown a wrench into Saul's machinery. He would have to fight grimly, determinedly. He would have to play the greatest game of his life today, if he wanted to win. The crowd was partisan. Like most Americans, they were pulling for the underdog. Jim knew they wanted him to play brilliantly, if only to narrow the gap that, if he failed to come through for them, they would swing to Saul. Even realizing all this, it warmed him as they cheered him up to the tee -- knowing that what they really wanted was to see golfing history made. God willing, that was what they would see. Jim's drive took a tail-end hook. It dived into the rough behind a clump of trees. He stepped back, grimacing. He would have appreciated a happier start. As Jim watched closely, Saul took a ball from his caddy, teed it up, settled himself and swung. The ball sailed straight down the fairway, forty or fifty yards beyond the #-yard marker. The crowd gasped. Jim smiled. When he saw his lie, the smile was wiped away. Sensible golf would have been to play it safe, out onto the fairway, where he could hope to play his third shot straight enough for a par. Sensible golf wouldn't win. Jim took out his two-iron, sighted through a small hole in the trees and swung at the almost-hidden ball. It whipped through the opening and rolled to a stop just in front of the green. Saul's easy four-iron shot was dead on the pin all the way, but the crowd moaned sympathetically as the ball hit the back edge of the green and hopped into the rough. Hatcher looked puzzled as he stood beside the green. Jim's close approach set up an easy putt for a birdie. Saul's recovery was long, and two putts gave him a par. Jim smiled grimly. That was one of the six strokes he needed. Jim's game sparkled -- Saul kept finding trouble. While Jim was getting down in two on the next hole, Saul was over the green again and back for a par three. The third hole was shared in birdies, the fourth in pars, the fifth in birdies again. Then Jim eagled the par-# sixth, and Saul played back and forth across the green for a #. Four strokes, Jim thought, and cast a glance at Hatcher whose face was worried and confused. Maybe now he was having doubts about his perfect machine. TUT Saul matched pars with- Jim on the next two, then got back a stroke on the ninth with a long putt while Jim was scrambling for a par. Jim took a long breath as they walked to the tenth tee to begin the second nine, the crucial nine. He had come in with a scorching #, while Saul had shot his worst nine of the tournament, a #, If Jim hadn't been terrific, he wouldn't have picked up a stroke. It was going to be tough to keep up that pace. When Alice lit his cigarette for him, her hand was shaking. He held the hand firmly and looked steadily into her eyes. In a moment the shaking stopped. "Thanks," she said. "Nothing to it," Jim said, and hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. Jim breathed a little easier when Saul's two-iron bounced far down the back edge of the tenth green. Jim played it carefully, landing on the front edge and sticking. Saul took a long recovery shot and two putts for his first bogey. Jim's two putts gave him a par. He was only two strokes behind. They shared birdies on the eleventh and pars on twelfth. On the next, however, Jim got his second eagle, with a chip shot that dribbled to the lip, trembled and finally dropped. Unperturbed, Saul holed his putt for a birdie. One stroke behind? Jim muttered hoarsely to himself. The strain was beginning to tell. He had to steel himself before each shot to keep from trembling. They each took pars on #, birdie threes on #. On the short sixteenth, Jim's #-iron dropped # feet in front of the pin, Saul's #I feet behind. Saul's putt was straight in. Jim's hand shook as he lined up the putt. If he missed this, he would be two strokes behind again with only two holes to go. He could never hope to catch up. He jabbed at the ball. It trickled off to the right, stopping a full foot from the hole. He steadied himself and dropped the next. For a moment, he could feel the old, familiar sense of despair and rage creep through him. Then Alice put her arm confidently through his as they walked to the seventeenth tee. Fiercely, Jim drove his longest wood of the day. It still lacked # yards of Saul's. Saul overshot the green by # yards and ended with a par-five. Jim calmed himself to make a #-foot approach putt stop within # feet of the pin, but left himself a sharp downhill slope. He tapped the second one gingerly. The ball trickled to the lip and dropped with a cheerful thunk. He was no Tod Winters, Jim told himself wryly, but he had his moments. Once more he was only one stroke behind. One stroke, and one hole to go. Pick up a stroke and tie, two strokes and win. Win Alice or lose her. It was like losing the world. A tie would be no good. There were excellent reasons why Saul's game wouldn't be off on the morrow. He had to get two strokes on this hole, somehow. J IM'S drive sliced behind a fringe of trees that divided the first and eighteenth fairways. Saul's drive, as usual, was long and straight. Jim wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was pain not to relax, not to quit, scream and curse. The green was hidden, #yards away. He had to shoot over the trees blind. He swung easily, smoothly. The ball cleared the trees and dropped from sight. He barely heard the smattering of applause. Jim watched Saul's approach land over the crowd at the back of the green. Jim walked up slowly. When he had forced his way through the spectators, he saw that his ball had landed on the green -- but # feet from the cup. The crowd formed a lane for Saul's third shot. It hit the green and scooted, coming to rest on the front edge. His putt was straight for the hole all the way. The hush broke into a moan. The ball had rimmed. Jim figured it up. That would give Saul a five. He could win with a three. He studied the green carefully, noting the slopes, the lay of the grass. After a minute he decided on his line. He took his stance. Once more, an unnatural silence settled over the crowd. Jim stroked the ball. It ran swiftly at first, then slowing, trickling over the last slope, nearing the cup, gently turning. Eternities passed, and the ball hesitated on the lip, toppled, disappeared. The scene was bedlam. Alice grabbed his arm with one hand, thrust the score-card in front of his nose and jumped up and down screaming happily. Jim steadied the card long enough to read the score. Another # -- a # for the day. A #-hole total of #. A flock of broken records. When the new U.S. Open champion walked to Saul's caddy and removed the ball from the boy's fingers, Hatcher was at his side. He was frowning. "How did you do it?" he shouted. Hatcher had ceased to awe Jim. Hatcher was not infallible. "Under certain, extremely restricted sets of circumstances," Jim said, "a machine is better than a man. But, over the long run, over the gamut of situations, a machine doesn't have a chance. It just can't compete." Hatcher was still frowning. "I still don't understand." "Here," Jim said, handing him the golf ball Saul had been using. Hatcher stared at it. "This isn't Saul's regular ball." "That's right." Jim laughed. "It's a new one, guaranteed to add twenty yards to the average drive." Slow understanding crossed Hatcher's face. "But that's unfair," he said. "That's..." He began to smile, and the smile broke into a chuckle. "I'll be damned!" he said. "There are no perfect golfers," Jim said. "There are only good ones and better ones I'll be around in a few days to talk about men and machines -- and competition. I have # to invest in our new business -- making robots -- useful robots." Gnome Press, #, #. four from # and one from # Astounding -- is among the most mature, imaginative and moving pictures of a post-atomicwar world written. The tales tell of the struggles of a group of hairless telepathic mutants to find a way of survival for themselves and for the remnants of nontelepathic humanity against the onslaughts of some paranoid telepaths who want to subjugate "normal" humans and then would become homo superior. Few have so vividly imagined what it might be like to be a telepath among telepaths, or how difficult it would be for a minority of them to co-exist with a large population of suspicious non-telepaths. The book leaves one with a very poignant realization of the humanity of Man and the difficulties under which he must labor to become a truly rational being. Hermitage House, #, #. who wants to learn how to write -- and sell -- science fiction and fantasy. The author presents everything from an informative short history of imaginative fiction, through a survey of science fiction markets and some brief biographies of leading s-f writers, to a series of chapters on how to think up ideas and how to plot, write and sell science fiction and fantasy. There is a final chapter on the pains and pleasures of being a writer of imaginative fiction. Recommended even for people who don't want to write; it's fascinating reading for anyone who is interested in the creative process and how to make a living by it. Fritz Leiber. Abelard Press, #, #. this original novel creepily fantastic (an odd word to use in connection with science fiction, perhaps?), though very readable. It tells of another world of tomorrow in which government and crime are allied and the people, frenetic, aimless and desperately degenerate, are primarily titivated and kept happy by phony sex entertainment. Enter a green cat (and some other odd individuals) from outer space. The cat has the ability to make everybody around him happy, by means of a sort of hormonal discharge from his tongue. Both government and criminals consider the cat a threat to their power and try to get control of it in rather excessively bloody ways; but in the end everything comes out all right. by Wernher von Braun, Fred L. Whipple, and Willy Ley. Viking ton Leonard. Random House, Gnome Press, #, #... Franklin Watts, Inc., #, #. Tyr O doubt about it, space travel is the coming thing -- in best sellers, anyhow, as the flood of new popularizations indicates. The Viking book, with its # magnificent color plates by Bonestell, Klep and Freeman, is just as beautiful, authoritative and exciting as its predecessor, Across the Space Frontier, which came out last year. Designed for aficionados, it is a breath-taking bargain in every way. Mr. Leonard's volume is excellent for the uninformed though sophisticated audience, and also has much for the already indoctrinated among us, particularly in its description of the enormous difficulties still to be overcome before space flight can be achieved. His discussion of the possibilities of life on other planets in our and other solar systems in judicious, and the whole book deserves praise for its clarity. The Gnome book is a fascinating collection of pictures of varying value, plus text (of equally varying value) by everybody from Willy Ley to Hugo Gemsback. It's a weird miscellany (there are even chapters on Flying Saucers and on the science in science fiction), but generally an exciting one. Miss Bendick's book, for children from # to #, is first rate in every way, even scientifically. It was checked by Dr. Hugh Rice, of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Delightfully illustrated with drawings by the author. Ballantine Books, #, # cloth, #c paper. tHE second Pohl collection of never-before-published science fantasies contains # items, of which three (Bester, Sturgeon, Sheckley) are superb; six (Clement, Bixby, del Rey, Boucher, Kornbluth, and a new writer by the name of Robert Crane) are very good, and five range from acceptable to poor, with only one rating the latter score. The book is not quite up to the first in the series, though, perhaps because of the monotonous tone of gloom in most of the tales. Except for the items by Sturgeon, Clement, Boucher, and a charming though minor sketch by Fletcher Pratt, everything in the volume is hag-ridden. Nevertheless, definitely worth #c! A. Heinlein. Charles Scribner's Sons, #, #. juvenile. But a juvenile by Bob Heinlein -- especially this one -- is better than much of the so-called adult science fiction novels of these days. Make no mistake, this is not kid stuff : it is a richly textured and thoroughly mature tale of travel between the stars. All the people in the book are wholly human, with all the faults and frailties that make humans, except for the fact that Jones, the young hero, has a pretty fancy eidetic memory which sets him above ordinary folk. But this also makes the story what it is, tous climb of a farmer's son to the rank of temporary captain of an interstellar liner. Without his abilities, he never would have made it. I would say that this is the best of Heinlein's juveniles, of which there are now seven. day  Co., #, # boys' book that is All Boy. Not that adults won't enjoy it, too, but it is almost entirely conceived in the straight gee-whizz adventure technique that is the classical pattern for teen-age action stories. The story tells how young David ("Lucky") Starr manages to frustrate the attempts of the Sirians to establish themselves secretly in the Asteroid Belt in our own solar system, so that they eventually could conquer us. It will give young people a lot of very lively daydreams -- but no nightmares, not being as cruel and bloody as Paul (Isaac Asimov) French's first one, David Starr, Space Ranger, was. Excellent for the Junior Set. Arthur C. Clarke. Ballantine Books, #. # cloth, #c paper Ballantine book in five months is a collection of I I of his short stories. Although five have already been anthologized elsewhere, it still is a pleasure to have a bunch of high-grade Clarke all in one place. The stories are continuously fascinating, from the beautiful and imaginative "Second Dawn" that opens the collection to the shockingly tragic "Breaking Strain" (previously anthologized as "Thirty Seconds -- Thirty Days"). They cover most of the major types of modern science fantasy, too, thus exhibiting their author's versatility. by Milton Lesser. Beechhurst Press, #, # science fiction anthologies yet published contains # stories, of which # have already appeared in other collections. Of the previously anthologized stories, I liked those by Leinster, Bradbury (it's "The Fire Balloons," though called "In This Sign" here), Asimov, Anderson and del Rey; of the unanthologized ones, Chad Oliver, Stephen Marlowe and a curious, badly written and plotted story by Don Wilcox which nevertheless has  historic importance since it predates both Heinlein's famed "Universe" and van Vogt's equally renowned "Far Centaurus" in its science fiction ideas. The rest of the stories range from run-of-the-mill all down the way to terrible. ry Sohl. Rinehart  Co., #, #  siderably better than his first two. The first half, describing the making of a device through which people can pass to a parallel world, is exciting and quite vivid ; but the latter half, when a group of humans set about establishing a society in that world, is somewhat unsatisfactory. The point (or moral) of the tale is more impressive and moving than its telling, and you may find it worth while reading it just to get that point. most distinguished book of short stories of # was Roald Dahl's Someone Like You (Knopf, #), which contained, among other marvels, "The Sound Machine," a famous piece of semi-science fiction from the anti-science fiction New Yorker, and an awe-inspiring fantasysatire called "The Great Automatic Grammatisator" -- an unforgettable bit of biting nonsense. There is also "The Skin," a hair-curling slice of macabre, and many other goodies, not all science fiction or fantasy, but all superb. It is good to see the novels of A. Merritt in clothbound editions again. Liveright is doing them two to a big fat volume, at only # each. The first contains Seven Footprints to Satan and Burn Witch Burn! and the second one Dwellers in the Mirae and The Face in the Abyss. Let's hope the rest are reissued the same way. Don't miss Alfred ( Demolished Man ) Bester's savage picture of television production in his non-s-f " Who He?" (Dial, #). It scarifies the Madison Avenue crowd in New York that is responsible for all that TV nonsense. Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife now available separately in cloth (Twayne, #) and paper (Lion Books, #c). A. E. van Vogt's "The Shadow Men" ( Startling Stories, #) is now out under the title Universe Makers, coupled with The World of Null-A in an Ace Book paperback double at #c. The former has been rewritten full of L. Ron Hubbard's "scientology" -- but it's still good reading. By going through channels, George worked up from the woodwork to the top brass!  with restrained fury, "the least you could do is ask him. Are you a mouse or a worm?" "Well, I have gone out there and moved it every night," George protested, trying to reason with her without success. "Yes, and every morning he puts it back. George, so long as that trap is outside of our front door, I can never have a moment's peace, worrying about the children. I won't go on like this! You must go out and talk some sense into him about removing it at once." "I don't know," George said weakly. "They might not be happy to find out about us." "Well, our being here is their own fault, remember that," Clara snorted. "They deli verately exposed your great-great grandfather Michael to hard radiations. George," she continued fervidly, "all you have to do is to go out and ask him. I'm sure he'll agree, and then we'll have this menace removed from our lives. I simply can not go on like this another minute!" That, George knew, was a misstatement. She could go on like this for hours. He stared at her unhappily. "Yes, dear," he mumbled finally. "Well, maybe tomorrow." "No, George," she said firmly. "Now! This morning. The very moment he comes in." He looked at her silently, feeling harried and unsure of himself. After living here so long, they'd observed and learned human customs and speech -- they'd even adopted human names. "George," she pleaded, "just ask him. Reason with him. Point out to him that he's just wasting his time. She paused, added, "You're intelligent -- you can think of the right things to say." "Oh, all right," he said wearily. But once he had said it, he felt better. At least, he would get it over with, one way or another. A S soon as he heard the swishswish of the broom outside his home, he got up and walked out of the front door. He saw that the trap was still off to one side, where he had pushed it the night before. "Hello," he shouted. Swish swish swish went the broom, busily moving dust from one part of the room to another, swish swish swish. The man looked tremendous from so close a view, yet George knew that he was just a little, bent, old man, a small specimen of the species. George took a deep breath. "Hello!" he bellowed with all his strength. The janitor stopped swish swishing and looked around the room suspiciously. " HelloP' George shrieked. His throat felt raw. The janitor looked down and saw the mouse. "Hello yourself," he said. He was an ignorant old man and, when he saw the mouse shouting hello at him, he assumed right away that it was a mouse shouting hello to him. "The trap!" the mouse bellowed. "Stop shouting!" the janitor cried, annoyed. He liked to think as he worked, and he hated loud noises. "What about the trap?" "My wife doesn't want you to put it by the front door any more," George said, still speaking loudly, so that the janitor could hear, but at least not bellowing so that it tore his throat. "She's afraid it might hurt the children." " Will it hurt the children?" the janitor demanded. "No," George replied. "They know all about traps -- but my wife still wants it removed." "Sorry," the janitor said, "but my orders are to put a trap by every mousehole. This is an atomic plant, and they don't want mice." "They do, too!" George said defiantly. "They brought my great great grandfather Michael here themselves and exposed him to hard radiations. Otherwise I wouldn't be here." "I can't help it," the janitor snapped. "I have to obey orders." "What will I tell my wife?" George shouted. That stopped the janitor. He had a wife of his own. "I guess I can take it up with the supervisor," he finally said. "All right," George shouted. "Thanks!" T#HE janitor picked up the trap and moved it over to the front door. He watched, interested, as George promptly pushed it several inches along the wall. Then he turned and busily swish-swished more dust around the room. "Well, what did he say?" Clara asked George as soon as he came back into the house. "Said he'd take it up with the supervisor," George said, settling down in an armchair. "George," she ordered, "you get up this instant and make sure that he really does!" "Look," George pleaded, "he said he would." "He may have been lying," Clara said promptly. "You go right up to the supervisor's room and see." So, George reluctantly heaved himself out of the chair and ran through the mouseways in the wall until he came to the mousehole in the supervisor's room. At that moment, the janitor came in and the supervisor looked up, annoyed. He was a fat man, with stubble on his cheek, and he walked with a waddle. "There's a mouse in room # who doesn't want a trap by his front door," the janitor said simply"You're crazy," the supervisor said. The janitor shrugged. "What should I tell him?" he asked. "Tell him to come up here and speak to me himself," the supervisor said, feeling very clever. "I'm right here," George cried, stepping out of the mousehole and neatly side-stepping the mousetrap beside it. "There he is now," the janitor said, pointing. "My God!" whispered the supervisor, who'd had some education. "A hallucination." "No, a mouse," the old janitor corrected. "My wife wants the trap removed," George patiently explained. "She's worried the children might blunder into it." "Do you see him, too?" the supervisor asked the janitor incredulously, still whispering. "Sure," the janitor replied. "He's the one I was telling you about, from room #." The supervisor stood up unsteadily. "I don't feel very well," he said in a weak voice. "I think that I'd better talk this over with the Administrative Officer. It's a policy matter." "You come along, too," he said hastily to the janitor, who had turned to leave. "I'll need all the support I can get." He waddled out, followed by the janitor. " What should I tell my wife?" George shouted, but they didn't answer, so he went down and told his wife that they were discussing it with the Administrative Officer. And, as anyone could have guessed, a short time later he pushed his head out of the mousehole in the Administrative Office.to see the door close on the supervisor and the janitor. So he shouted, "Hello!" as loud as he could. The Administrative Officer looked down and saw him right away. He was a thin pale man with tired eyes. "Go away," he said spiritlessly, "I've just told two people that you don't exist." "But my wife wants that trap removed -- it's dangerous for the children," George complained. The Administrative Officer almost shouted to hell with George's children, but basically he was a decent man, even if an overworked one, and he caught himself in time. "I'm sorry," he said sincerely, picking up some letters that he had already read, "but we've got to leave the traps." "Then what will I tell my wife?" George demanded. That stopped the Administrative Officer, too. He buried his head in his hands and thought for a long moment. "Are you sure you really exist?" he asked, finally raising his head from his hands. "Sure," George said. "Do you want me to bite you to prove it?" "No, you needn't bother," the Administrative Officer said. And then he buried his head in his hands again. "Technically," he said, speaking through his fingers, "it's a security problem." With an air of relief, he picked up the phone and called the Security Officer. There was a bit of spirited conversation and then he hung up. "He'll be right down," the Administrative Officer told George. Shortly thereafter, the door violently swung open, and a tall man with piercing eyes entered. "Hello Bill," he said quickly. "How are you feeling?" "Hello, Mike," the Administrative Officer replied. "I feel like hell. This is George. I just called you about him." "Hello!" George shouted. "Hello!" the Security Officer shouted back. "I couldn't find any record of you in the files. Have you been cleared?" he added with a note of urgency in his voice. "Fingerprints, A. E. C., C. C. C., C. A. I., F. B. I.?" "No!" George shouted back. "My wife wants the trap by our front door removed. She thinks it's dangerous for the children." "Has she been cleared?" the Security Office countered in a loud voice. "Why is everybody shouting?" the Administrative Officer asked peevishly. "I've got a headache." "No," George answered. tightened into a thin, grim line. "A major lapse of security," he snapped. "I'll check into this very thoroughly." "Will you remove the trap?" George asked. "I can't, until you're cleared," the Security Officer said, shaking his head. "I certainly won't authorize any action that could be later construed as aiding the entrance of spies or subversives into the plant." "How old are you?" the Administrative Officer asked George. "Fifty-six days," George replied without hesitation. "Under twelve years," the Administrative Officer pointed out to the Security Officer. "No clearance required." "I don't know," the Security Officer said, shaking his head. "There's no precedent for a case like this. I'll be damned if I'll stick my neck out and have that trap removed. I know, I'll send a request for an advisory opinion." He turned and walked toward the door. "What should I tell my wife?" George called after him. "Tell her that I'm asking the A.E.C. for an opinion, with carbon copies to the Defense Dept, and the F.B.I." "Don't forget Immigration  Naturalization," the Administrative Officer said. "There might be a question of citizenship." "The hell there is," George said. "Lex tods -- I was born here." "Well," the Security Officer said as he walked out, "one can't be too careful." So, George went and told his wife and, the next morning, he was on the train for Washington. Being telepathic, as all this generation of mice were, he already had contacted some mice who had an 'in' in the government buildings. All the way down on the train, he worried about chasing all those carbons in the bureaucratic maze of Washington, but he needn't have. As soon as the Security Officer's report was received, the A.E.C. sent a battery of psychiatrists to the plant. After the psychiatrists reported, they, in turn, were sent to another battery of psychiatrists. After that, the A.E.C. called a top-level conference of the Defense Dept., F.B.I. (Dept. Just.), Fish  Wildlife (Dept. Int.), Public Health (Dept. Welf.), Immigration  Naturalization and Alaskan Affairs. The latter turned out to be a mistake. and George had lingered in the walls, impatiently waiting for his chance to testify. Of course, he was in telepathic communication with Clara. He knew that his family were all well, that Clara had made friends with the janitor, also that the trap was still there. The janitor no longer put cheese in it, and he didn't set the spring any more, but he still followed his orders and so, every morning, moved it back by the door of the little mousehouse. A fat Washington mouse guided George to the mousehole in the conference room. George looked inside and sniffed the smoky air distastefully. There were seven men seated at a long table, with a glass of water in front of each. This was a liquid that even George knew was hardly designed to lubricate the way to a quick agreement. " Bomb them, I say," the General cried, smashing his fist down on the table. "Hit them hard with atomic weapons. Hit them now, before they have a chance to strike first." "But that's one of our best plants," a civilian from the A.E.C. protested. "We don't want to blow it up, not for a few paltry mice." "Couldn't we send them to Alaska?" the man from Alaskan Affairs asked timidly, wondering what he was doing there. "How about traps?" the man from Fish and Wildlife said. "We have some honeys." "But that's just it!" George said in a loud voice, and they all turned to look at him. "My wife would like that trap by our front door removed. She's afraid that it might hurt the children." " Who are you?" the man from Immigration  Naturalization demanded sharply. "I'm George," George said. "It's my house that has the trap in front of it." "What are you doing here?" the man from the F.B.I. demanded. "Spying on a closed meeting!" "I'm not spying!" George exclaimed. "I just came to ask you to please remove the trap." rpHE man from the F.B.I. looked at him with something close to pity. "It's not that simple any more," he said. "Don't you realize what a threat you comprise?" "No," George said, scampering up the leg of the table and walking to its center. "We're not a threat to anybody. We're just mice. It's not our nature to be a threat to anybody." Then, as he looked around the table at the seven huge faces that surrounded him, he immediately saw that they were all scared half to death because he was a mouse, and he had a sudden premonition that he would not come out of the meeting alive. So he opened his mind to let his family and all the other telepathic mice hear everything that was happening. "Don't tell me you don't fully realize," the Fish and Wildlife man demanded sarcastically, trying to hide his terror beneath a blustering tone, "that from one mouse, your great-great-grandfather Michael, there must be scendants -- or six times the human population of Earth!" "No, I didn't know," George said, interested despite himself. "Don't tell me it never occurred to you," the man from the F.B.I. said, shaking a finger at him, while George could see that he kept the other hand on the revolver in his pocket, "that you mice have access to and could destroy every secret file we have!" "No. it didn't," George said, shrinking from that huge, shaking finger. "We mice would never destroy anything uselessly." "Or that you could cut the wires on any plane, tank, vehicle, train or ship, rendering it completely inoperable!" the General broke in, slamming a meaty palm down on the table so hard that George was thrown over on his back. "Of course it never occurred to me!" George said, climbing rockily back on his feet. "We mice wouldn't think of such a thing. Don't be afraid," he pleaded, but it was no use. He could feel the panic in their breasts. "Didn't you ever consider that you could cut every cable, telephone line, power line, and telegraph line from the States to Alaska?" the man from Alaskan Affairs said, just for the sake of saying something. Then, to show his bravery and defiance, he took his glass of water and emptied it on George. It was ice water, and poor George, dripping wet, began to tremble uncontrollably. "I suppose you never considered that you could sabotage and blow up every atomic plant we have," the man from the A.E.C. said, before George even had a chance to answer Alaskan Affairs. And, working himself into a rage to overcome his fear, he emptied his glass of ice water on the trembling mouse. never occurred to me," he sobbed. "We mice aren't like that." "Nonsense!" the General said.' "It's the unchanging law of nature. We must kill you or you will kill us. And we'll start by killing you!" The General roared louder than all the rest because he was the most frightened. His hand, huge and terrible, swept swiftly down on poor, wet, weeping George. But the General really didn't know mouse tactics very well, because George was down the leg of the table and halfway to the mousehole before the huge hand struck the table with a noisy bang. And poor George, frightened half out of his wits, scooted into the mousehole and ran and ran without stopping, through the mouseways as fast as he could, until he reached the train. But, of course, the train was no longer moving. All the telepathic mice had cut every cable, telephone line, power line and telegraph line, had also cut the wires on every plane, tank, vehicle, train and ship. They also had destroyed every file in the world. So George had no alternative but to walk back to the plant, which had been preserved as a memorial to great great grandfather Michael. IT took him three weary weeks to make it, and the first thing he noticed when he got there was the trap in front of the door. Naturally, there was no bait in it and the spring wasn't set, but the trap was still there. "George," Clara said to him the moment after she kissed him, "you must speak to the janitor about the trap." So George went outside right away, since he could hear the janitor swish-swashing the dust around. "Hello!" he shouted. "Hello yourself," the janitor said. "So you're home again." "My wife wants the trap moved," George said. "She's afraid the children might get hurt." "Sorry," the janitor replied. "My orders were to put a mousetrap by each mousehole." "How come you didn't go away with all the other people?" George shouted up at him. "Stop shouting," the janitor said. Then, "I'm too old to change," he added. "Besides, I have a farm down the road." "But haven't they stopped paying you?" George demanded. "What's the difference," the janitor countered, "money can't buy anything any more." "Well, what will I tell my wife about the trap?" George asked. The janitor scratched his head. "You might tell her that I'll take it up with the supervisor, if he ever comes back." So George went inside and told Clara. "George," she said, stamping her foot, "I can't go on with that trap out there! You know that supervisor won't come back, so you've got to go out and find him." George, who knew that there weren't many people around anywhere any more, walked over to his favorite easy chair and sat down. "Clara," he said, as he picked up a book, "you can leave or stay as you wish, but there is nothing more that I can do. I've wasted a full month over that trap without accomplishing a single thing, and I'm not going to start that business all over again." Frederik Pohl ond C. M. Kornbluth? It was a truly great piece of science fiction... but vivid issues... though sweeps ond explodes ond flares ore more accurate descriptions of its poce. Tell you a bit about it? That's like trying to fire a gun a little at a time. You'll have to explore this exciting serial's glittering ond spectacularly sumptuous bubble cities ond the ghastliness of Belly Rave (which we promise will be a part of your vocabulary) on your own. And bring your dark glasses and sedatives; you'll need them! theme. Nathan Hole, you recall, hod but one life to give for his country -- but that was before Tenn's technicians got to work! HE awoke, and didn't even wonder where she was. First there were feelings -- a feeling of existence, a sense of still being alive when she should be dead, an awareness of pain that made her body its playground. After that, there came a thought. It was a simple thought, and her mind blurted it out before she could stop it: Oh, God, now I won't even be plain any more. I'll be ugly. The thought sent a wave of panic coursing through her, but she was too tired to experience any emotion for long, and she Broken, helpless, she had to trust an alien doctor to give her back her body and mind -- a doctor who had never seen a human before! soon drowsed off. Later, the second time she  awoke, she wondered where she was. There was no way of telling. Around her all was black and quiet. The blackness was solid, the quiet absolute. She was aware of pain again -- not sharp pain this time, but dull, spread throughout her body. Her legs ached; so did her arms. She tried to lift them, and found to her surprise that they did not respond. She tried to flex her fingers, and failed. She was paralyzed. She could not move a muscle of her body. The silence was so complete that it was frightening. Not a whisper of sound reached her. She had been on a spaceship, but none of a ship's noises came to her now. Not the creak of an expanding joint, nor the occasional slap of metal on metal. Not the sound of Fred's voice, nor even the slow rhythm of her own breathing. It took her a full minute to figure out why, and when she had done so she did not believe it. But the thought persisted, and soon she knew that it was true. The silence was complete because she was deaf. Another thought: The blackness was so deep because she was blind. And still another, this time a questioning one : Why, if she could feel pain in her arms and legs, could she not move them? What strange form of paralysis was this? She fought against the answer, but slowly, inescapably, it formed in her mind. She was not paralyzed at all. She could not move her arms and legs because she had none. The pains she felt were phantom pains, conveyed by the nerve endings without an external stimulus. When this thought penetrated, she fainted. Her mind sought in unconsciousness to get as close to death as it could. against her will. She sought desperately to close her mind against thought and feeling, just as her eyes and ears were already closed. But thoughts crept in despite her. Why was she alive? Why hadn't she died in the crash? Fred must certainly have been killed. The asteroid had come into view suddenly; there had been no chance of avoiding it. It had been a miracle that she herself had escaped, if escape it could be called -- a mere sightless, armless and legless torso, with no means of communication with the outside world, she was more dead than alive. And she could not believe that the miracle had been repeated with Fred. It was better that way. Fred wouldn't have to look at her and shudder -- and he wouldn't have to worry about himself, either. He had always been a handsome man, and it would have killed him a second time to find himself maimed and horrible. She must find a way to join him, to kill herself. It would be difficult, no doubt, without arms or legs, without any way of knowing her surroundings; but sooner or later she would think of a way. She had heard somewhere of people strangling themselves by swallowing their own tongues, and the thought cheered her. She could at least try that right now. She could -- No, she couldn't. She hadn't realized it before, but she had no tongue. She didn't black out at this sudden awareness of a new horror, although she desperately wanted to. She thought: I can make an effort of will, I can force myself to die. Die, you fool, you helpless lump of flesh. Die and end your torture, die, die, die... But she didn't. And after a while, a new thought came to her: She and Fred had been the only ones on their ship; there had been no other ship near them. Who had kept her from dying? Who had taken her crushed body and stopped the flow of blood and tended her wounds and kept her alive? And for what purpose? The silence gave no answer. Nor did her own mind. After an age, she slept again. When she awoke, a voice said, "Do you feel better?" self. It's a strange voice, a most unusual accent. I couldn't possibly have imagined it. I'm not deaf! Maybe I'm not blind either! Maybe I just had a nightmare -- "I know that you cannot answer. But do not fear. You will soon be able to speak again." Who was it? Not a man's voice, nor a woman's. It was curiously hoarse, and yet clear enough. Uninflected, and yet pleasant. A doctor? Where could a doctor have come from? "Your husband is also alive. Fortunately, we reached both of you at about the time death had just begun." Fortunately? She felt a flash of rage. You should have let us die. It would be bad enough to be alive by ' myself, a helpless cripple dependent upon others. But to know that Fred is alive too is worse. To know that he has a picture of me like this, ugly and horrifying, is more than I can stand. With any other man it would be bad enough, but with Fred it's unendurable. Give me back the ability to talk, and the first thing I'll ask of you is to kill me. I don't want to live. "It may reassure you to know that there will be no difficulty about recovering the use of the limbs proper to you. and the organs of sensation. It will take time, but there is no doubt about the final outcome." What nonsense, she asked herself, was this? Doctors had done wonders in the creation and fitting of artificial arms and legs, but he seemed to be promising her the use of real limbs. And he had said, "organs of sensation." That didn't sound as if he meant that she'd see and hear electronically. It meant -- Nonsense. He was making a promise he couldn't keep. He was just saying that to make her feel better, the way doctors did. He was saying it to give her courage, keep her morale up, make her feel that it was worth fighting. But it wasn't worth fighting. She had no courage to keep up. She wanted only to die. "Perhaps you have already realized that I am not what you would call human. However, I suggest that you do not worry too much about that. I shall have no difficulty in reconstructing you properly according to your own standards." was left alone. It was just as well, she thought. He had said too much. And she couldn't answer, nor ask questions of her own... and she had so many. He wasn't human? Then what was he? And how did he come to speak a human language? And what did he mean to do with her after he had reconstructed her? And what would she look like after she was reconstructed? There were races, she knew, that had no sense of beauty. Or if they had one, it wasn't like a human sense of beauty. Would he consider her properly reconstructed if he gave her the right number of arms and legs, and artificial organs of sight that acted like eyes -- and made her look like some creature out of Hell? Would he be proud of his handiwork, as human doctors had been known to be, when their patients ended up alive and helpless, their bodies scarred, their organs functioning feebly and imperfectly? Would he turn her into something that Fred would look at with abhorrence and disgust? Fred had always been a little too sensitive to beauty in women. He had been able to pick and choose at his will, and until he had met her he had always chosen on the basis of looks alone. She had never understood why he had married her. Perhaps the fact that she was the one woman he knew who wasn't beautiful had made her stand out. Perhaps, too, she told herself, there was a touch of cruelty in his choice. He might have wanted someone who wasn't too sure of herself, someone he could count on under all circumstances. She remembered how people had used to stare at them -- the handsome man and the plain woman -- and then whisper among themselves, wondering openly how he had ever come to marry her. Fred had liked that; she was sure he had liked that. He had obviously wanted a plain wife. Now he would have an ugly one. Would he want that? She slept on her questions, and waked and slept repeatedly. And then, one day, she heard the voice again. And to her surprise, she found that she could answer back -- slowly, uncertainly, at times painfully. But she could speak once more. "We have been working on you," said the voice. "You are coming along nicely." "Am I -- am I -- " she found difficulty asking: "How do I look?" "Incomplete." "I must be horrible." A slight pause. "No. Not horrible at all. Not to me. Merely incomplete." "My husband wouldn't think so." "I do not know what your husband would think. Perhaps he is not used to seeing incomplete persons. He might even be horrified at the sight of himself." "I -- I hadn't thought of that. But he -- we'll both be all right?" "As a medical problem, you offer no insuperable difficulty. None at all." "Why -- why don't you give me eyes, if you can? Are you afraid -- afraid that I might see you and find you -- terrifying?" amusement in the reply. "I do not think so. No, that is not the reason." "Then it's because -- as you said about Fred -- I might find myself horrifying?" "That is part of the reason. Not the major part, however. You see, I am, in a way, experimenting. Do not be alarmed, please -- I shall not turn you into a monster. I have too much knowledge of biology for that. But I am not too familiar with human beings. What I know I have learned mostly from your books, and I have found that in certain respects there are inaccuracies contained in them -- I must go slowly until I can check what they say. I might mend certain organs, and then discover that they do not have the proper size or shape, or that they produce slightly altered hormones. I do not want to make such mistakes, and if I do make them, I wish to correct them before they can do harm." "There's no danger -- ?" "None, I assure you. Internally and externally, you will be as before." "Internally and externally. Will I -- will I be able to have chil dren?" "Yes. We ourselves do not have your distinctions of sex, but we are familiar with them in many other races. We know how important you consider them. I am taking care to see that the proper glandular balance is maintained in both yourself and your husband." "Thank you -- Doctor. But I still don't understand -- why don't you give me eyes right away?" "I do not wish to give you eyes that see imperfectly, and then be forced to take them away. Nor do I want you to watch imperfect arms and legs developing. It would be an unnecessary ordeal. When I am sure that everything is as it should be, then I shall start your eyes." "And my husband -- " "He will be reconstructed in the same way. He will be brought in to talk to you soon." "And you don't want either of us to see the other in -- in imperfect condition?" "It would be inadvisable. I can assure you now that when I have completed your treatment you will almost exactly be as you were in the beginning. When that time comes, you will be able to use your eyes." She was silent a moment. He said, "Your husband had other questions. I am waiting to hear you ask them too." "I'm sorry, Doctor... I wasn't listening. What did you say?" she said, "I do have other questions. But -- no, I won't ask them yet. What did my husband want to know?" "About me and my race. How we happened to find you in time to save you. Why we saved you. What we intend to do with you after you are reconstructed." "Yes, I've wondered about those things too." "I can give you only a partial answer. I hope you do not find it too unsatisfactory. My race, as you may have gathered, is somewhat more advanced than yours. We have had a head start," he added politely. "If you can grow new arms and legs and eyes," she said, "you must be thousands of years ahead of us." "We can do many other things, of which there is no need to talk. All I need say now is that I am a physician attached to a scouting expedition. We have had previous contact with human beings, and have taken pains to avoid coming to their attention. We do not want to alarm or confuse them." "But all the same, you rescued us." "It was an emergency. We are not human, but we have, you might say, humanitarian feelings. We do not like to see creatures die, even inferior creatures -- not that you are, of course," he added delicately. "Our ship happened to be only a few thousand miles away when it happened. We saw, and acted with great speed. Once you are whole again, we shall place you where you will be found by your own kind, and proceed on our way. By that time, our expedition will have been completed." "When we are whole again -- Doctor, will I be exactly the same as before?" "In some ways, perhaps even better. I can assure you that all your organs will function perfectly." "I don't mean that. I mean -- will I look the same?" She felt that there was astonishment in the pause. "Look the same? Does that matter?" "Yes... oh, yes, it matters! It matters more than anything else." He must have been regarding her as if she were crazy. Suddenly she was glad that she had no eyes to see his bewilderment. And his contempt, which, she was sure, must be there too. He said slowly, "I didn't realize. But, of course, we don't know how you did look. How can we make you look the same?" "I don't know. But you must! You must!" Her voice rose, and she felt the pain in her throat as the new muscles constricted. "You are getting hysterical," he said. "Stop thinking about this." "But I can't stop thinking about it. It's the only thing I can think of! I don't want to look any different from the way I did before!" He said nothing, and suddenly she felt tired. A moment before she had been so excited, so upset; and now -- merely tired and sleepy. She wanted to go to sleep and forget it all. He must have given me a sedative, she thought. An injection? I didn't feel the prick of the needle, but maybe they don't use needles. Anyway, I'm glad he did. Because now I won't have to think, I won't be able to think -- S HE slept. When she awoke again, she heard a new voice. A voice she couldn't place. It said, "Hello, Margaret. Where are you?" "Who... Fred!" "Margaret?" "Y-yes." "Your voice is different." "So is yours. At first I couldn't think who was speaking to me!" "It's strange it took us so long to realize that our voices would be different." She said shakily, "We're more accustomed to thinking of how we look." He was silent. His mind had been on the same thing. "Your new voice isn't bad, Fred," she said after a moment. "I like it. It's a little deeper, a little more resonant. It will go well with your personality. The Doctor has done a good job." "I'm trying to think whether I like yours. I don't know. I suppose I'm the kind of guy who likes best what he's used to." "I know. That's why I didn't want him to change my looks." Again silence. She said, "Fred?" "I'm still here." "Have you talked to him about it?" "He's talked to me. He's told me about your being worried." "Don't you think it matters?" "Yes, I suppose it does. He told me he could do a good technical job -- leave us with regular features and unblemished skins." "That isn't what I want," she said fiercely. "I don't want the kind of regular features that come out of physiology books. I want my own features. I don't care so much about the voice, but I want my own face back!" "That's a lot to ask for. Hasn't he done enough for us?" "No. Nothing counts unless I have that. Do -- do you think that I'm being silly?" "Well -- " "I don't want to be beautiful, because I know you don't want me to be." He sounded amazed. "Whoever told you that?" "Do you think that after living with you for two years, I don't know? If you had wanted a beautiful wife, you'd have married one. Instead, you chose me. You wanted to be the good-looking one of the family. You're vain, Fred. Don't try to deny it, because it would be no use. You're vain. Not that I mind it, but you are." "Are you feeling all right, Margaret? You sound -- overwrought." "I'm not. I'm being very logical. If I were either ugly or beautiful, you'd hate me. If I were ugly, people would pity you, and you wouldn't be able to stand that. And if I were beautiful, they might forget about you. I'm just plain enough for them to wonder why you ever married anyone so ordinary. I'm just the kind of person to supply background for you." slowly, "I never knew you had ideas like that about me. They're silly ideas. I married you because I loved you." "Maybe you did. But why did you love me?" He said patiently, "Let's not go into that. The fact is, Margaret, that you're talking nonsense. I don't give a damn whether you're ugly or beautiful -- well, no, that isn't strictly true. I do care -- but looks aren't the most important thing. They have very little to do with the way I feel about you. I love you for the kind of person you are. Everything else is secondary." "Please, Fred, don't lie to me. I want to be the same as before, because I know that's the way you want me. Isn't there some way to let the Doctor know what sort of appearance we made? You have -- had -- a good eye. Maybe you could describe us -- " "Be reasonable, Margaret. You ought to know that you can't tell anything from a description." His voice was almost pleading. "Let's leave well enough alone. I don't care if your features do come out of the pictures in a physiology textbook -- " "Fred!" she said excitedly. "That's it! Pictures! Remember that stereo shot we had taken just before we left Mars? It must be somewhere on the ship -- " "But the ship was crushed, darling. It's a total wreck." "Not completely. If they could take us out alive, there must have been some unhurt portions left. Maybe the stereo is still there !" "Margaret, you're asking the impossible. We don't know where the ship is. This group the Doctor is with is on a scouting expedition. The wreck of our ship may have been left far behind. They're not going to retrace their tracks just to find it." "But it's the only way... the only way! There's nothing else -- " She broke down. If she had possessed eyes, she would have wept -- but as it was, she could weep only internally. They must have taken him away, for there was no answer to her tearless sobbing. And after a time, she felt suddenly that there was nothing to cry about. She felt, in fact, gay and cheerful -- and the thought struck her: The Doctor's given me another drug. He doesn't want me to cry. Very well, I won't. I'll think of things to make me happy, I'll bubble over with good spirits -- Instead, she fell into a dreamless sleep. thought of the conversation with Fred, and the feeling of desperation returned. I'll have to tell the Doctor all about it, she thought. I'll have to see what he can do. I know it's asking an awful lot, but without it, all the rest he has done for me won't count. Better to be dead than be ' different from what I was. But it wasn't necessary to tell the Doctor. Fred had spoken to him first. So Fred admits ifs important too. He won't be able to deny any longer that I judged him correctly. The Doctor said, "What you are asking is impossible." "Impossible? You won't even try?" "My dear patient, the wrecked miles behind us. The expedition has its appointed task. It cannot retrace its steps. It cannot waste time searching the emptiness of space for a stereo which may not even exist any longer." "Yes, you're right... I'm sorry I asked, Doctor." He read either her mind or the hopelessness in her voice. He said, "Do not make any rash plans. You cannot carry them out, you know." "I'll find a way. Sooner or later I'll find a way to do something to myself." "You are being very foolish. I cannot cease to marvel at how foolish you are. Are many human beings like you, psychologically?" "I don't know, Doctor. I don't care. I know only what's important to me!" "But to make such a fuss about the merest trifle! The difference in appearance between one human being and another of the same sex, so far as we can see, is insignificant. You must learn to regard it in its true light." "You think it's insignificant because you don't know anything about men and women. To Fred and me, it's the difference between life and death." He said in exasperation, "You are a race of children. But sometimes even a child must be humored. I shall see what I can do." But what could he do? she asked herself. The ship was a derelict in space, and in it, floating between the stars, was the stereo he wouldn't make an attempt to find. Would he try to get a description from Fred? Even the best human artist couldn't produce much of a likeness from a mere verbal description. What could someone like the Doctor do -- someone to whom all men looked alike, and all women? A S she lay there, thinking and wondering, she had only the vaguest idea of the passage of time. But slowly, as what must have been day followed day, she became aware of strange tingling sensations all over her body. The pains she had felt at first had slowly diminished and then vanished altogether. What she felt now was not pain at all. It was even mildly pleasant, as if some one were gently massaging her body, stretching her muscles, tugging at her -- Suddenly she realized what it was: New limbs were growing. Her internal organs must have developed properly, and now the Doctor had gone ahead with the rest of his treatment. With the realization, tears began to roll down her cheeks. Tears, she thought, real tears -- I can feel them. I'm getting arms and legs, and I can shed tears. But I still have no eyes. But maybe they're growing in... From time to time I seem to see flashes of light. Maybe he's making them develop slowly, and he put the tear ducts in order first. I'll have to tell him that my eyes must be blue. Maybe I never was beautiful, but I always had pretty eyes. I don't want any different color. They wouldn't go with my face. The next time the Doctor spoke to her, she told him. "You may have your way," he said good-naturedly, as if humoring a child. "And, Doctor, about finding the ship again -- " "Out of the question, as I told you. However, it will not be necessary." He paused, as if savoring what he had to tell her. "I checked with our records department. As might have been expected, they searched your shattered ship thoroughly, in the hope of finding information that might contribute to our understanding of your race. They have the stereos, about a dozen of them." "A dozen stereos? But I thought -- " "In your excitement, you may have forgotten that there were more than one. All of them seem to be of yourself and your husband. However, they were obviously taken under a wide variety of conditions, and with a wide variety of equipment, for there are certain minor differences between them which even I, with my non-human vision, can detect. Perhaps you can tell us which one you prefer us to use as a model." She said slowly, "I had better talk about that with my husband. Can' you have him brought in here, Doctor?" "Of course."  dozen stereos. And there was still only one that she remembered. Only a single one. They had posed for others, during the honeymoon and shortly after, but those had been left at home on Mars before they started on their trip. Fred's new voice said, "How are you feeling, dear?" "Strange. I seem to have new limbs growing in." "So do I. Guess we'll be our old selves pretty soon." "Will we?" She could imagine his forehead wrinkling at the intonation of her voice. "What do you mean, Margaret?" "Hasn't the Doctor told you? They have the stereos they found on our ship. Now they can model our new faces after our old." "That's what you wanted, isn't it?" "But what do you want, Fred? I remember only a single one, and the Doctor says they found a dozen. And he says that my face differs from shot to shot." Fred was silent. "Are they as beautiful as all that, Fred?" "You don't understand, Margaret." "I understand only too well. I just want to know -- were they taken before we were married or after?" "Before, of course. I haven't gone out with another girl since our wedding." "Thank you, dear." Her own new voice had venom in it, and she caught herself. I musn't talk like that, she thought. I know Fred, I know his weakness. I knew them before I married him. I have to accept them and help him, not rant at him for them. He said, "They were just girls I knew casually. Good-looking, but nothing much otherwise. Not in a class with you." "Don't apologize." This time her voice was calm, even amused. "You couldn't help attracting them. Why didn't you tell me that you kept their pictures?" "I thought you'd be jealous." "Perhaps I would have been, but I'd have got over it. Anyway, Fred, is there any one of them you liked particularly?" His voice was expressionless as he said, "No.' Why?" "Oh, I thought that perhaps you'd want the Doctor to make me look like her." "Don't be silly, Margaret! I don't want you to look like anybody but yourself. I don't want to see their empty faces ever again!" "But I thought -- " "Tell the Doctor to keep the other stereos. Let him put them in one of his museums, with other dead things. They don't mean anything to me any more. They haven't meant anything for a long time. The only reason I didn't throw them away is because I forgot they were there and didn't think of it." "All right, Fred. I'll tell him to use our picture as a model." "The AC studio shot. The close-up. Make sure he uses the right one." "I'll see that there's no mistake." "When I think I might have to look at one of their mugs for the rest of my life, I get a cold sweat. Don't take any chances, Margaret. It's your face I want to see, and no one else's." "Yes, dear." I'll be plain, she thought, but I'll wear well. A background always wears well. Time can't hurt it much, because there's nothing there to hurt. There's one thing I overlooked, though. How old will we look? The Doctor is rather insensitive about human faces, and he might age us a bit. He mustn't do that. It'll be all right if he wants to make us a little younger, but not older. I'll have to warn him. She warned him, and again he seemed rather amused at her. "All right," he said, "you will appear slightly younger. Not too much so, however, for from my reading I judge it best for a human face to show not too great a discrepancy from the physiological age." She breathed a sigh of relief. It was settled now, all settled. Everything would be as before -- perhaps just a little better. She and Fred could go back to their married life with the knowledge that they would be as happy as ever. Nothing exuberant, of course, but as happy as their own peculiar natures permitted. As happy as a plain and worried wife and a handsome husband could ever be. N OW that this had been decided, the days passed slowly. Her arms and legs grew, and her eyes too. She could feel the beginnings of fingers and toes, and on the sensitive optic nerve the flashes of light came with greater and greater frequency. There were slight pains from time to time, but they were pains she welcomed. They were the pains of growth, of return to normalcy. And then came the day when the Doctor said, "You have recovered. In another day, as you measure time, I shall remove your bandages." Tears welled up in her new eyes. "Doctor, I don't know how to thank you." "No thanks are needed. I have only done my work." "What will you do with us now?" "There is an old freighter of your people which we have found abandoned and adrift. We have repaired it and stocked it with food taken from your own ship. You will awaken inside the freighter and be able to reach your own people." "But won't I -- can't I even get the chance to see you?" "That would be inadvisable. We have some perhaps peculiar ideas about keeping our nature secret. That is why we shall take care that you carry away nothing that we ourselves have made." "If I could only -- well, even shake hands -- do something -- " "I have no hands." "No hands? But how could you -- how can you -- do such complicated things?" "I may not answer. I am sorry to leave you in a state of bewilderment, but I have no choice. Now, please, no more questions about me. Do you wish to talk to your husband for a time before you sleep again?" "Must I sleep? I feel so excited... I want to get out of bed, tear off my bandages, and see what I look like!" "I take it that you are not anxious to speak to your husband yet." "I want to see myself first!" "You will have to wait. During your last sleep, your new muscles will be exercised, their tones and strength built up. You will receive a final medical examination. It is most important." She started to protest once more, but he stopped her. "Try to be calm. I can control your feelings with drugs, but it is better that you control yourself. You will be able to give vent to your excitement later. And now I must leave you. You will not hear from me after this." "Never again?" "Never again. Goodbye." For a moment she felt something cool and dry and rough laid very lightly against her forehead. She tried to reach for him, but could only twitch her new hands on her new wrists. She said, with a sob, "Goodbye, Doctor." When she spoke again, there was no answer. She slept. different. Before she opened her eyes, she heard the creaking of the freighter, and a slight hum that might have come from the firing of the jets. As she tried to sit up, her eyes flashed open, and she saw that she was lying in a bunk, strapped down to keep from being thrown out. Unsteadily, she began to loosen the straps. When they were half off, she stopped to stare at her hands. They were strong hands, well-shaped and supple, with a healthily tanned skin. She flexed them and unflexed them several times. Beautiful hands. The Doctor had done well by her. She finished undoing the straps, and got to her feet. There was none of the dizziness she had expected, none of the weakness that would have been normal after so long a stay in bed. She felt fine. She examined herself, staring at her legs, body -- staring as she might have done at a stranger's legs and body. She took a few steps forward and then back. Yes, he had done well by her. It was a graceful body, and it felt fine. Better than new. But her face! She whirled around to locate a mirror, and heard a voice: "Margaret!" Fred was getting out of another bunk. Their eyes sought each other's faces, and for a long moment they stared in silence. Fred said in a choked voice, "There must be a mirror in the captain's cabin. I've got to see myself." At the mirror, their eyes shifted from one face to the other and back again. And the silence this time was longer, more painful. A wonderful artist, the Doctor. For a creature -- a person -- who was insensitive to the differences in human faces, he could follow a pattern perfectly. Feature by feature, they were as before. Size and shape of forehead, dip of hairline, width of cheeks and height of cheekbones, shape and color of eyes, contour of nose and lips and chin -- nothing in the two faces had been changed. Nothing at all. Nothing, that is, but the overall effect. Nothing but the fact that where before she had been plain, now she was beautiful. I should have realized the possibility, she thought. Sometimes you see two sisters, or mother and daughter, with the same features, the faces as alike as if they had been cast from the same mold -- and yet one is ugly and the other beautiful. Many artists can copy features, but few can copy with perfect exactness either beauty or ugliness. The Doctor slipped up a little. Despite my warning, he's done too well by me. And not well enough by Fred. Fred isn't handsome any more. Not ugly really -- his face is stronger and more interesting than it was. But now I'm the good-looking one of the family. And he won't be able to take it. This is the end for us. said, "Wow, what a wife I've got! Just look at you! Do you mind if I drool a bit?" She said uncertainly, "Fred, dear. I'm sorry." "For what? For his giving you more than you bargained for -- and me less? It's all in the family!" "You don't have to pretend, Fred. I know how you feel." "You don't know a thing. I asked him to make you beautiful. I wasn't sure he could, but I asked him anyway. And he said he'd try." "You asked him -- oh, no!" "Oh, yes," he said. "Are you sorry? I hoped he'd do better for me, but -- well, did you marry me for my looks?" "You know better, Fred!" "I didn't marry you for yours either. I told you that before, but you wouldn't believe me. Maybe now you will." Her voice choked. "Perhaps -- perhaps looks aren't so important after all. Perhaps I've been all wrong about everything. I used to think was essential." "You have," agreed Fred. "But you've always had a sense of inferiority about your appearance. From now on, you'll have no reason for that. And maybe now we'll both be able to grow up a little." She nodded. It gave her a strange feeling to have him put around her a pair of arms she had never before known, to have him kiss her with lips she had never before touched. But that doesn't matter, she thought. The important thing is that whatever shape we take, we're us. The important thing is that now we don't have to worry about ourselves -- and for that we have to thank him. "Fred," she said suddenly, her face against his chest. "Do you think a girl can be in love with two -- two people -- at the same time? And one of them -- one of them not a man? Not even human?" He nodded, but didn't say anything. And after a moment, she thought she knew why. A man can love that way too, she thought -- and one of them not a woman, either. I wonder if he... she... it knew. 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OFaSmiVi  . , OStSfiS"s ' G HiUi Sdwal SaSfKtl  MwaHtics O Camaerciil  CaaSCatWi  UakaiHcal Ewti w -- riw c  intatral En fwmT iiic  tuAntria Sway  FarMMntiip O maOamKM DraRiit  UadiiM DoitK-Draftiac O Macfciat Stew FtaclKa  ru Dii  latfartfU iMliaannUU -- rowca O ComtiHliM O Dml-Clec(rK G IIkHc Lifht and Powar  OacIrialE aCarincaia OC-DctricWdWM ' Mat-MiTillwp G HaN Tf raaat GSkaaHMaMlaiw --  --  rfritaratiaa O TcaUlt DRiag I Staltonar Fireman o Practical RadN-TV tnc'r'Mf G Sadw Operatmc G Radio and TV Sorvkint O Teifvnnn-TodiRKiaa G electron ka G Telephone Work G Lecti motive tntinoar G Otoaal locaoiolive G Air Srakes U Cer li O Railroad Atfministratiao O Teiiite Eaginoarint G Cettoo, Rapin. Woolen Mg. O Carding and Spinnmc G Warping and Warring G Laao Filing  Thrroint m tiHdwh and cawn la Inlanotionol Ctmigiidian SdMA CanadiM. tU, I Mlag la mmOmt l iw U. S. Armed fwwg. eauxy by Frederik Pohl  C. M. Kornblufh # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c r copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions, elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corjporation Robert Guinn, president. All right, including translation, reserved. All material submined must be accompanied by self-address stamps envelopes. The publisher assumes no resmnsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by th# Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess?  to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to self' advancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and sue cessful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulat' ed through the ages, is never lost: At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Thdr Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than #lOOth of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general pubh'c; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weak' nesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example; The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and deep ing. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in ufe. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of self understanding and self'advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in Amer ica in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosi' crucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested diat you write for your copy to: Scribe F.CJkf. San Jose California  fiction or otherwise, the serial beginning in this issue. Gladiator at Law, operates on many levels besides plot:  It has a logically and excitingly constructed society.  Its characters are the inevitable products of that society.  The society itself is equally inevitable if certain factors come about. As I've said before, we're not concerned with whether they will, only with whether they may. In this serial, we have an exploration of a theme that, as far as I know, has never been treated in science fiction -- the effects of a dramatic advance in architecture. Our dwellings haven't been the products of accident since we left the caves. Even those were chosen because of environment, being warmer, drier and easier to defend than anything primitive Man was able to construct. Warmth, shelter and defense -- those have always been the primary needs in housing. Sometimes one or another becomes less important and others take their place -- the mobility of nomad tents, the social prestige of ornamentation in mansions and palaces, the spiritual awe of temples and cathedrals. But each of these tells us explicitly what the times and those who did the building were like, for architecture is as eloquent a form of communication as literature, music or painting. In many societies, defense was the first consideration. Treehouses may not be very comfortable, and they certainly attract insects, but they're fine for staying out of reach of predatory animals. Huts on stilts, far out in lakes, were dark and chilly -- skulls of their owners indicate a high incidence of severe sinusitis -- but they did keep off hostile tribes. Probably the most extreme sacrifices to defense were Indian pueblos and medieval castles. Wherever possible, pueblo communities were built on sheer cliffs, which were scaled by ladders pulled up after the climbers -- and so were the huts themselves, which had to be entered from the roof. Living in a castle is a contradiction in terms; every comfort was subordinated to defense, from the stench of the moat to the thick-walled deep freeze to the musty ventilation of windows that were actually slitted battle stations. How far we've come from the menaces of the past is told hilariously and outrageously by T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings in Homes of the Brave (Knopf; #) and illustrated even more outrageously by Mary Petty's ruthlessly funny drawings. The chapter headings give a notion of the book's tone: Aboriginal "Modem," Low-Life "Modern," Movie "Modern," Interplanetary "Modern." There is another heading, directly related to Gladiator at Law, that I'll come right back to. Warmth, shelter, defense and all other past motives for housing are mere adjuncts in Homes of the Brave to something entirely new -- expression of the personality. How personality is expressed -- and whose, architect, contractor, interior decorator or owner -- is its ticklesome and yet downright grave theme. What it reduces to is that the personality expressed is laughable, pathetic or infuriating to the beholder. Robsjohn Gibbings' explanation is that "great architecture comes only with individual greatness," and the man he has in mind is the indisputably great Frank Lloyd Wright. As Voltaire said about something else entirely, it's a noble theory,' contradicted only by the facts. No architect, however great, can make his ideas survive in the wrong historic or geographic environment -- not even Wright. For example, did you know you can buy a European castle for #? There are no takers, of course -- castles serve no purpose now. Thus dangerous ages produce fortress homes and it's unreasonable to expect simplicity in a garish age, or lavishness in an austere one. The chapter Dome, Sweet Dome is the one related to Gladiator at Law. You'll find bubble houses in the serial -- though not the kind Mr. R-G rejects as fit for termites, Eskimos and Victorian wax flowers. Remember what Charles Fort said? Steam engines come along when it's steam-engine time! That's also true of architecture. Examine the homes of any given era and you'll know the society they were an expression of and the personalities and principal needs of the people who built and lived in them. There are two ruinous features in ours -- building techniques are still handicraft; our buildings begin to deteriorate the moment they are completed. Imagine what overcoming those handicaps would mean! That is just what Pohl and Kornbluth did. How does architecture influence a story? Well, picture Morte D' Artur set in a housing development. You see? The authors of Gravy Planet again tour the future -- this time a world T he accused was a tallowfaced weasel with Constitutional Psychopathic Inferior stamped all over him. He wailed to Charles Mundin, Ll.B., "You got to get me off! I've been up twice and this time they'll condition me !" Mundin studied his first client with distaste. "You won't plead guilty?" he asked again, hopelessly. He had been appointed by the court and considered that the court had played him a low trick. His stubborn client's pore patterns were all over Exhibit A, a tin cashbox fishhooked from a ticket window at Monmouth Stadium. Modus operand! coincided with his two previous convictions. An alleged accomplice, who had kept the ticket clerk busy for almost all of the necessary five minutes, was ready to take the witness stand -- having made his deal with the prosecutor. And still the fool was refusing to cop a plea. Mundin tried again. "It won't be so bad, you know. Just a couple of days in a hospital. It's quite painless, and that's not just talk. I've seen it with my own eyes. They took us around in Junior year -- " "Counselor, you just don't understand. If they condition me, .my God, I'll actually have to go to work!" Mundin shrugged. "I'll do what I can for you." UT the trial was over in a matter of minutes. Mundin objected that the moral character of the witness made his testimony inadmissible in a conditionable offense. The prosecutor, a grandee from Harvard Law, haughtily smacked him down by pointing out that the essence of the conditionable offense lay in the motivation of the accused, not in the fact of commission which was all the accomplice had testified to. He then cited a series of precedents. The judge's eyes went blank and distant. Those inside the rail could hear confirmation of the precedents droning faintly into his ears through the headphones under his elaborate wig. He nodded and said to Mundin, "Overruled. Get on with it." Mundin didn't even bother to take an exception. The prosecution rested and Mundin got up, his throat dry. "May it please the Court," he said. His Honor looked as though nothing bad pleased that court, ever. Mundin said to the jury box, "The defense, contending that no case has been made, will present no witnesses." That, at any rate, would keep Harvard Law from letting tite jury know of the two previous convictions. "The defense rests." Harvard Law, smiling coldly, delivered a thirty-second summation which, in three razor-sharp syllogisms, demonstrated the fact that defendant was guilty as hell. The court clerk's fingers clicked briskly on the tape-cutter, then poised expectantly as Mundin stood up. "May it please the Court," said Mundin. That look again. "My client has not been a fortunate man. The product of a broken home and the gutters of Belly Rave, he deserves justice as does every citizen. But in his case, I am impelled to add that the ends of justice can be served only by an admixture of mercy." Judge and prosecutor were smiling openly. The devil with dignity! Mundin craned his neck to read the crisp yellow tape that came clicking out of the clerk's encoding machine. He could read jury box code, more or less, if it were simple enough. The encoded transcript of his summation was simple enough. The tape read -- o:o... ##... ##... "Defense rests," he mumbled, ignoring a despairing croak from his client. HE judge said, "Mr. Clerk, present the case to the jury box." The clerk briskly fed in the two tapes. The jury box hummed and twinkled. If you could only fix one of those things, Mundin thought savagely, staring at the big seal on it. Or if you could get one of those damned clerks to cut the tape -- no, that was out, too. The clerks were voluntarily conditioned. Traded freedom for a sure living. The red window lit up. guilty "Work!" the thief bleated. The judge said, shifting his wig and showing a bit of earphone under it, "Mr. Bailiff, take charge of the prisoner. Sentencing tomorrow at eleven. Court's adjourned." The thief moaned, "I hate them damn machines. Couldn't you have got me a human jury, maybe get an injunction?" Mundin said wearily, "A human jury would have crucified you. Why did you have to steal from the Stadium? Why not pick on something safe, like the Church, or the judge's piggy bank?" He turned his back on the defendant and bumped into Harvard Law. "Nice try, young man," the grandee smiled frostily. "Can't win them all, can we?" Mundin replied rudely, "If you're so smart, why aren't you a corporation lawyer?" and stamped out of the courtroom. He was on the street before he regretted the crack. Harvard's face had fallen satisfactorily, but the jibe was oo if ever there was one. Why, indeed? For the same reason Mundin himself wasn't, of course. He hadn't inherited one of the great hereditary corporation law practices. Even grinding through Harvard Law School couldn't get you conveniently reborn into the proper families. And Mundin hadn't gone to Harvard. Not for Harvard -- or for Charles Mundin -- the great reorganizations, receiverships and debenture issues. Not for them the mergers and protective committees. For them -- the mechanical jury box and the trivia of criminal law. A morose, fifteen-minute walk through Monmouth's sweltering, rutted streets brought him to his office building. Some cluck from the sheriff's office was going to pick him up at # for the rally. Besides being a member of the Criminal Bar, Charles Mundin, Ll.B., was foredoomed candidate for the Monmouth City Council on the Regular Republican ticket in the #th Aldermanic District. His wallet-nerve twinged at the thought, then twinged again as his eye fell on the quietly proud little plaque beside the door of the building. It announced that its rental agents were sorry, but could offer no vacancies. Mundin hoped rentals would stay that way, at least as far as his own office was concerned. H e got an elevator to himself. "Sixteen," he told it. He was thinking of his first client. At least he would get a fee -- you got one on conditionable cases. The crook was terrified that he'd find himself unable to steal. Maybe Counselor Mundin himself might soon be driven to dangling a hook and line over the wall of a ticket window at Monmouth Stadium. Or he might get really desperate and find himself one of the contestants in the Field Day inside. His mail hopper was empty, but his Sleepless Secretary -- he was still paying for it -- was blinking for his attention. The rental agents again? Lawbook salesman? Maybe even a client? "Go ahead," he said. In its accurate voice, the machine reported, "Telephone call. # hours. Mr. Mundin is out, madam. If you wish to leave a message, I will take it down." Del Dworcas' outraged baritone shouted, "Who the hell are you calling madam?" The secretary : "Gug-gug-u -- ow-wooh. Sir." Dworcas: "What? Oh, one of those damn gadgets. Well, listen, Charlie, if you ever get this. I sent somebody over to see you. Named Bligh. Treat him right. And look me up at the rally. Something to talk about with you. And you better get that lousy machine fixed unless you want to lose some business." The secretary, after a pause: "Is that the end of your message, madam?" Dworcas: "Yes! And stop calling me madam!" The secretary : "Gug-gug-u -- ow-wooh." And click. Oh, fine, thought Mundin. Now Dworcas was sore at him, no doubt, and Dworcas was chairman of the Regular Republican County Committee. And the secretary's confusion between the sexes and its banshee howl weren't covered by the service contract. The mailtube popped while he was blaspheming the salesman who had flattered him into buying the secretary. He eagerly flushed the letter from its hopper, but when he caught sight of the return address, he dropped it unopened. It was from the Scholarship Realization Corporation. He knew he owed them the money and he knew, as a result of the law course they had paid for, that they couldn't attach his hypothetical income. someone showed up -- this Bligh or the man from the sheriff's office. Trying hard to think of the priceless publicity and contacts he was getting from his flier in politics, he took his account book out and added it up. It made him wince. The price of the priceless publicity and contacts to date was #. Of course, he reminded himself, the Party had laid out money, too. That TV time, for instance, when he was right there on the platform, must have cost a hunk of change. Of course, he hadn't actually spoken. But his end included postage, stationery, truck rental, PA systern rental, direct-mail fees, carfare, banquet tickets, fight tickets, Field Day tickets, fund-raising lottery tickets, charities, dues and entertainment. Then the rivers of beer, which he didn't enjoy, drunk with people he didn't like. And the bhang, which scared hell out of him, sipped with the teetotal Muslims of the #th District. There was the way his doctor had tsk-tsked when he last stood in front of a fluoroscope with a barium meal coursing sluggishly through him. And, of course, the certainty that he would be crushed like a bug on election day. And that The Boys -- Dworcas was only one of The Boys -- had played him for a sucker. Sing "Hey" for the life of a lawyer, gabbling at machines that, he naggingly suspected, thought him not as bright as they were. The Sleepless Secretary said, "Sir or madam, as the case may be. Gug-gug-u. Regret to advise." Mundin kicked it savagely. It burped and said : "A gentleman is in the outer office, Mrs. Mundin." "Come in!" Mundin yelled at the door. The man blinked at him and came in cautiously. He looked around and picked out a chair. He wore a hearing aid, Mundin noticed. Perhaps that was why he cocked his head a little. He said, "My name's Norvell Bligh. I -- uh -- asked Mr. Dworcas if he could recommend a firstclass attorney and he -- uh -- he suggested you." Mundin asked aloofly, "What can I do for you?" ly around the room. "My wife -- that is, I would like to get some information on adoption. I have a stepdaughter -- my wife's daughter by her first marriage, you see -- and, well, my wife thinks we should arrange about adopting her." Good old Del Dworcas, Mundin thought savagely. He knows I belong to the Criminal Bar, yet he goes right ahead... He said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Bligh. I can't help you. You'll have to find a civil attorney to handle that for you." Bligh touched the control of his hearing aid. "Beg pardon?" "I -- can't -- do -- it!" "Oh, I know you can't," Bligh said. "Mr. Dworcas explained that. But he said that the civil attorneys would charge an awful lot, while you... That is, since you're a friend of his and I'm a friend of his brother, it could be done on a friendly basis. All I need to know, really, is what to do. I don't think I'd have to have a lawyer in court, do you?" Mundin pondered hopefully. "Maybe not." It was questionable practice, no doubt of it, and small thanks to Dworcas for getting him into it. Still, if it was just a matter of advice and information -- thank God, the corporation boys didn't have that sewed up. He leaned back, covertly looking Bligh over. Tolerably well dressed, certainly not a deadbeat. He'd be some kind of contract worker, no doubt, getting his regular pay, living in a G-M-L house, suffering his wife's obvious nagging. Mundin said, "Tell me the story. First of all, the court will want to be sure you can earn enough to support the child." "Well, I've been supporting her for three years. Excuse me, Mr. Mundin, but can we keep this short? I'm on my lunch hour and Mr. Candella is very fussy about promptness." "Certainly. Just give me the facts." N orvell bligh coughed self-consciously. "I'm an associate producer for General Recreations, in charge of Field Day procurement, mostly. My wife is named Virginia. She was married before I met her to a man named Tony Elliston. They didn't get along too well -- it was a pretty rough experience for her. They had one daughter, Alexandra. Virginia's first husband died. I have the pajjers here. Alexandra is # now. Anrthing else?" Mundin scribbled rapidly -- purely pretense, since the Sleepless Secretary was recording the whole thing automatically. On second thought, he told himself, maybe not pretense at that, considering the way it was acting. He put down his pencil. "That's enough for the time being," he said. "I'll have to look up -- have to discuss this matter with one of my colleagues. Come back Friday at this time." As Bligh left, looking vaguely alarmed, the Sleepless Secretary said, "Pending the receipt. Owwoooh. Mrs. Mundin is out of of town." Mundin turned it off. Two clients in one day, he thought wonderingly. Anything was possible. Perhaps he would even win the election. Perhaps he wouldn't, after all, have to let the finance company reclaim the secretary and the Scholarship people garnishee his income and the landlord toss him out on the street. Perhaps. with the man from the sheriff's office driving, rolled slowly past glowering red brick fronts and stone stoops crowded with liquid-eyed women and their skinny, brownish kids. Mvmdin didn't like this neighborhood. It was on the outskirts of the city, too close to Belly Rave for safety, too close to the factories and the yards for comfort. But he didn't have to live here, even if the miracle should happen and he got elected. He chanted wearily into the mike at the indifferent Ay-rabs of the #th, "My friends, don't miss the big free rally tonight at Republican Hall. Learn the truth, don't be misled. The Regular Republican Party promises inside plumbing for every family. We promise stockyard workers paid time off for noon prayers and doubling the bonus for handling pork. My friends, don't miss the big free rally. Don't fail to miss the big free -- " "Hey!" the driver cried. Mundin put his hand over the mike. "Damn! Right out of my subconscious, that one." He uncovered the mike and said, "Don't miss the big free rally. The Regular Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the party of Eisenhower. We stand for inside plumbing. Learn the truth at the big free rally..." The liquid eyes stared entirely without interest. Mundin subsided and turned on the sound tape. The speaker horns began to blare You and Me and the Moon. Apathetically, he noted that one of the older Ay-rab women wore a veil. Unusual, nowadays. The driver leaned over and nudged him. "You'll never get anjrwhere with the Ay-rabs, Mr. Mundin," he said confidentially. "We had a good crowd in the #th before the war. Poles and Irish. The Poles voted Republican -- you only had one Republican party then, you know. And the Irish voted Democrat. But then the packers began flying in the Ay-rabs and now you don't know where you stand." Mundin nodded indifferently. They passed somebody's G-ML bubble house, obviously an early model, before the corporation figured out the bubble-city plan, and it was showing its age. Mundin could see the family taking their ease in the living room. He chuckled. Their polarizer was out of order and they didn't know it. But the driver was shocked. He stopped the truck and honked, pointing indignantly through the wall. The man heard the honking and hastily strode to a manual control. The wall opaqued. The truck rolled on. The driver muttered something about goddam fishbowls. "Fm a married man," he added indignantly and irrelevantly. "Yeah," said Mundin. "Say, the hell with #th Street. Turn around -- let's go back to the club." He flicked off the speakers in mid-chorus. It made no difference to the dark, liquid eyes : they followed the silent truck as uncaringly as they had the blaring horns. "My friends," Mundin said to the dead microphone, "vote for my opponent. He's as big a liar as I am, but he can afford this and I can't." Which was also irrelevant, for he was stuck with it now. II not be much of a lawyer, Norvie Bligh told himself on the way back to his office, but at least he probably wouldn't charge much. Amie Dworcas had as much as promised him that. Anyway, who needed a legal eagle to put adoption papers through? The whole thing was downright silly. If only Ginny weren't so touchy lately, you could explain to her that it was just an unwarranted expense, that nobody was going to take Alexandra away from them, that there wasn't any question about who'd inherit his contract status and bubble house if he died. He considered that for a moment. Virginia had certainly seemed to take that part of it seriously, he thought. She had mentioned it half a dozen times. "Don't forget to ask him about inheriting." And, of course, he had forgotten. Well, there wbuld be another chance on Friday. You couldn't really blame Virginia if she felt a little -- well, insecure. Life with that Tony must have been pure hell, living in Belly Rave from hand to mouth. That was why she was such a devoted wife. Of course she was a devoted wife, he told himself. Right now, though, the important thing was whether Candella was going to say anything about his being fifteen minutes late. Candella was pretty difficult lately. Naturally, you couldn't blame him for being jumpy, with the big Fall Field Day coming up and all. Of course you couldn't blame Candella. Of course you couldn't blame Virginia, or Arnie Dworcas when his promises didn't jell, or Alexandra when she was a little touchy, like any #-year-old, of course. Of course you couldn't blame anybody for anything. Not if you were Norvell Bligh. Fortunately, Candella didn't notice what time he came back from lunch. But in the middle of the afternoon, the boss's secretary came hurrying out to Norvie's desk and said, "Mr. Candella would like to discuss your Field Day program with you." He went in with a feeling of uneasiness. Old man Candella slapped the papers down and roared. "Bligh, maybe you think a Field Day is a Boy Scout rally, where kids shoot arrows and run footraces around a tennis court. Maybe you think it's a Ladies' Aid pink tea. Maybe you just don't know what a Field Day is supposed to be. Is that it?" "No, sir," he whispered. " 'No, sir,' " Candella mimicked. "Well, if you do know what a Field Day is, why isn't there at least one good, exciting idea in this whole bloody script? I take back that word 'bloody.' There might be some complaints in the other direction, but I guarantee there wouldn't be any complaints that there was too much blood." He jabbed at the program with a hairy forefinger. "Listen to this. 'Opening pageant -- procession of jeeps through gauntlet of spearmen. First spectacle -- fifty girl wrestlers versus fifty male boxers. First duet -- sixty-year-old men with blowtorches.' Ah, what's the use of going on? This is supposed to be the big event of the year. Bligh. It isn't a Friday-night show in the off season. This is the one that counts. It's got to be special." Nprvie Bligh shifted miserably. "Gosh, Mr. Candella, I -- I thought it was. It's a classical motif, don't you see? It's like -- " "I can tell what it's like," Candella bellowed. "I've been producing these shows for fifteen years. I don't need anybody to tell me whether a script will play or it won't -- and I'm telling you this one won't!" He stabbed a button on his console. Norvie felt the seat lurch wamingly underneath him and barely managed to scramble to his feet as it disappeared into the wall. "Take this script away," Candella growled. "We've got to start casting on Monday. Let's see if we can have something by tomorrow night." He didn't even look up as Norvie cringed out the door. Norvie dictated and erased five tapes. He sent his three assistants on three different errands of research, to find the best spectacles on the highest-rated Field Days in every major city. Nothing they brought back was any help. When Miss Dali came in to pick up the afternoon's dictation and he had to face the fact that there was no afternoon's dictation, he grumbled to her, "What do they expect in that moldy gym they call a stadium here? Look at Pittsburgh -- we're twice as big and they have armored halftracks." "Yes, sir," said Miss Dali. "Mr. Stimmens would like to see you." "All right," he replied ungraciously and dialed a chair for his junior scriptwriter. "Excuse me. Chief," Stimmens said hesitantly. "Can I see you for a moment?" "You're seeing me." Norvie had picked that bon mot up from Candella the week before. S timmens hesitated, then blurted much too rapidly, "You've got a great organization here. Chief, and I'm proud to be a part of it. But I'm having a little trouble -- you know, trying to get ahead, hah-hah -- and I wonder if it wouldn't be better for you. Chief, as well as me if..." He went on through a tortuous story of a classification clerk's mistakes when he had finished school, and an opening in Consumer Relations, and a girl who wouldn't marry him until he got a Grade Fifteen rating. Long before Stimmens had come anywhere near the point, Norvie knew what he wanted and knew what the answer had to be. But Candella's bruises were fresh on his back and he let Stimmens go on till he was dry. Then, briskly, "Stimmens, ii I'm not in error, you signed the regular contract before you joined us." "Well, yes, sir, but -- " "It has the usual provision for cancellation. I believe you know the company's policy in regard to selling contracts. We simply cannot afford to sell unless the purchase price is high enough to reimburse us for the employee's training time -- which, in your case, is all the time you've spent with us, since you have clearly failed to master your job. I'm surprised you should come to me with such a request." Stimmens stared at him. "You won't let me go?" "I can't. You're at liberty to cancel your contract." "Cancel! And go back to Belly Rave? Mr. Bligh, have you ever been in Belly Rave?" He shook his head like a man dispelling a nightmare. "Well, sorry, Mr. Bligh. Anything else for me to do today?" Norvie looked at his watch. "Tomorrow," he growled. As Stimmens slumped away, Norvie, already feeling ashamed of himself, petulantly swept the chair back into the wall. It was almost quitting time. He made a phone call. "Mr. Arnold Dworcas, please... Arnie? Hello, how're you? Fine. Say, I saw that attorney, Mundin, today. Looks like everything will be all right... Uh-huh. Thanks a lot, Arnie... This evening? Sure. I was hoping you'd ask me. All right if I go home first? Ginny'll want to hear about the lawyer... About eight, then." A rnie Dworcas had a way of chewing a topic interminably and regurgitating it in flavorless pellets of words. Lately he had been preoccupied with what he called the ingratitude of the beneficiaries of science. At their frequent get-togethers, he would snarl at Norvie, "Not that it matters to Us Engineers. Don't think I take it personally, just because I happen to be essential to the happiness and comfort of everybody in the city. No, Norvie, We Engineers don't expect a word of thanks. We Engineers work because there's a job to do, and we're trained for it. But that doesn't alter the fact that people are lousy ingrates." At which point, Norvie would cock his head a little in the nervous reflex he had acquired with the hearing aid and agree, "Of course, Arnie. Hell, fifty years ago, when the first bubble cities went up, women used to burst out crying when they got a look at one. My mother did. Coming out of Belly Rave, knowing she'd never have to go back -- " "Yeah. Not that that's evidence, as We Engineers understand evidence. It's just your untrained recollection of what an untrained woman told you. But it gives you an idea of how those lousy ingrates settled down and got smug. They'd change their tune damn fast if We Engineers weren't on the job. But you're an artist, Norvell. You can't be expected to understand." And he would gloomily drink beer. Going home from work and looking forward to seeing his best friend later that night, Norvie was not so sure he didn't understand. He even felt inclined to argue that he wasn't an artist like some crackpot oil painter or novelist in a filthy Belly Rave hovel, but a technician in his own right. Well, kind of -- his medium was the emotional fluxes of a Field Day crowd, rather than torques, forces and electrons. He had an important job, Norvie told himself -- Associate Producer, Monmouth Stadium Field Days. Of course, Arnie far outstripped him in title. Arnie was Engineer Supervising Rotary and Reciprocal Pump Installations and Maintenance for Monmouth G-M-L City. Not that Arnie was the kind of guy to stand on rank. Hell, look at how Arnie was always doing things for you -- like finding you a lawyer when you needed one, and... Well, he was always doing things for you. It was a privilege to know a man like Arnie Dworcas. Ill parked the truck for the sheriff's man -- he was too busy -- and entered Republican Hall through the back way. He found Del Dworcas in the balcony -- the Hall was a slightly remodeled movie house -- telling the cameramen how to place their cameras, the sound men how to line up their parabolic mikes, the electricians how to use their lights. Mundin stood on the sidelines, faintly hoping one of the cameramen would extract a few of Dworcas' front teeth with a tripod leg, but they kept their tempers admirably. He sighed and tapped the chairman on the shoulder. Dworcas gave him the big hello and asked him to wait in the manager's office -- he had to get these TV people squared away, but it wouldn't take more than a few minutes. "Did you see that fellow Bligh?" he asked. "Yeah? Good. Soak him, Charley; you got to make a living, you know. Some friend of my brother Arnie's. Now go on down to the office. Couple of people there for you to talk to." He looked annoyingly mysterious. Mundin sighed again. At the foot of the stairs, he yelled in astonishment, "Great God Almighty! Prince Wilhelm the Fourth!" around and looked confused, then stuck out a hand for Mundin to grasp. He was a pudgy little man of Mundin's age, a classmate from John Marshall Law School, heir to a mighty corporate practice, a tidy dresser, former friend, solid citizen and four-star jerk. "Why, hello, Charles," he said uncertainly. "Good to see you." "Likewise. What are you doing here?" Choate made a mighty effort and produced a shrug. "Oh," he said, "you know." "Meaning that even a corporation lawyer has political dealings once in a while?" Mundin helped him out. "That's it exactly!" Choate was pleased. It was just like old times. Mundin had always helped him out, all the way through John Marshall Law. Mundin looked at his former proteg with emotions that were only distantly related to envy. "It's a pleasure to run into you, you busy?" "Busy? Whew! You'll never know, Charles." That was a very unfortunate remark, Mundin thought. "You know the I. G. Farben reorganization?" "By reputation," Mundin said acidly. "I'm in criminal practice right now. Incidentally, I had an interesting case today -- " "Yes." Choate said. "Well, you might say I've won my spurs. The old man made me counsel for the Group E Debenture Holder's Protective Committee. Old Haskell died in harness, you know. Think of it -- forty years as counsel for the Protective Committee! And with a hearing before the Referee in Receivership coming up. Well, I won my spurs, as you might say. I argued before the referee this morning, and I got a four-year stay!" "Well," Charles Mundin said. "To use a figure of speech, you certainly won your spurs, didn't you?" you'd see it that way. I simply pointed out to old Roseheaver that rushing through an immediate execution of receivership would work a hardship on the committee and I asked for more time to prepare our suits for the trust offices. Old Roseheaver thought it over and decided it would be in the public interest to grant a stay. And, Charles, he congratulated me on my presentation! He said he had never heard the argument read better!" "Well done," said Mundin. It was impossible to resent this imbecile. A faint spark of technical interest made him ask, "How did you prove hardship?" Choate waved airily. "Oh, that was easy. We have this smart little fellow in the office, some kind of distant cousin of mine, I guess. He handles all the briefs. A real specialist -- not much at the Big Picture, you know, but he could prove old man Winthrop was starving in the gutter if you told him to. I'm joking, of course," he added hastily. Too dumb for Harvard Law, too dumb for Columbia, though he was rich enough to buy and sell them both. That was how he wound up at John Marshall, which had carried him for eight years of conditions and repeats until memorizing had worn grooves in his brain that carried him through his exams. Mundin compassionately had written most of his papers. "You know what that little job is worth? The firm's putting in for two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, Charles! And as counsel of record, I get half!" thought he was just letting good old Charles know that the protg at last was a success on his own. But his kindly idiocy broke Mundin. "give me a job. You know I've got the brains. You know you never would have got through school if it hadn't been for me, and I never asked for a nickel. There were plenty of sharks around who would have soaked you plenty and still not got you a smart little fellow in your office just as well as somebody's cousin. Give me a chance. Law clerk. The bottom. Anything!" Charles, I don't think we can do that. The old man wouldn't understand at all if I asked for somebody who wasn't in the family. Be fair, Charles. What would you do in my place?" Mundin hopelessly knew what he would do. He would keep the lucrative practice of corporate law right in the grip of the family. He would sit on top of his practice with a shotgun in his lap. heavily. would, Charles. After all, it's ot to be a family affair. Why, with any luck. I'll hand the Group E Debenture Holders' Protective Committee down to said gently. "Must you go now?" "Must I? Oh. I guess I must. It's been good seeing you, Charles. Keep up the good work." Mundin stared impotently at his pudgy back. Then he turned wearily and went on to Dworcas' office. Dworcas had still not arrived. The manager's office, behind the closed-up ticket booth, was tiny and crowded with bales of literature in Arabic and English. Two people were waiting there -- a young man and a young woman -- obviously brother and sister. Big sister, kid brother; they were maybe twenty-eight and twentytwo. The girl got up from behind one of the battered desks. No lipstick, cropped hair, green slacks, a loose plaid shirt. "I'm Norma Lavin," she said. "Mr. Mundin?" "Yes." Why was good old Del passing this screwball on to him? "This is my brother Don." Don Lavin had something weird and something familiar about him. His eyes drew the attention. Mundin had often read of "shining eyes" and accepted it as one of those things you read that don't mean anything. Now he was disconcerted to find himself looking into a pair of eyes that actually did shine. "Please sit down," he invited uneasily. The girl said, "Mr. Dworcas tells us you're a lawyer, Mr. Mundin, as well as our next councilman from the #th District." ed her one of his fancy cards. Don Lavin looked a little as if he had been conditioned. That was it! Like a court clerk or one of the participants in a Field Day -- or, he guessed, never having seen one, a criminal after the compulsory third-rap treatment. "I'm a lawyer," he said. "I wouldn't swear to that part about being councilman." "You're the best we can do, Mundin. We got nowhere in Washington, nowhere in Chicago, nowhere in New York. We'll try local courts here. Dworcas passed us on to you. We have to start somewhere." "Somewhere," her brother very dreamily agreed. "Look, Miss Lavin -- "Just Lavin." "Okay, Lavin, or Spike, or whatever you want me to call you. If you're through with the insults, will you tell me what you want?" Del Dworcas stuck his head in the door. "You people getting along okay? Fine!" He vanished again. The girl said, "We want to retain you for a stockholders' committee -- G-M-L Homes." G M L Homes, Mundin thought, irritated. Why, that meant the bubble houses. The bubble cities, too. It meant real estate in practically continental lots. It meant the private roads, belt lines, power reactors... It wasn't a very funny joke. The shiny-eyed boy said abruptly, "The 'L' stands for Lavin. Did you happen to know that?" Mundin tried to glower. He couldn't. Suppose -- just suppose -- that maybe it wasn't a joke. Ridiculous, of course, but just suppose -- G-M-L Homes. Such things didn't happen to Charles' Mundin, Ll.B. "I'm not licensed to practice corporate Choate the Fourth." "We just did. He said no." " They made it sound real, Mundin thought admiringly. Of course, it couldn't be. Somewhere it was written -- Charles Mundin will never get a fat case. Therefore, this thing would piffle out. "Well?" demanded the girl. "I said I'm not licensed to practice corporate law." "Did you think we didn't know that? We dug up an old banger who still has his license. He can't work, but we can use his name as attorney of record." "Well," he began hazily, "it's naturally interesting -- " "Yes or no?" Dworcas stuck his head in again. "Mundin, I'm awfully sorry, but I've got to have the office for a while. Why don't you and your friends go over to Hussein's for a cup of coffee?" "Sure, Del," Mundin said dazedly. "Thanks. Ah -- will I get any broadcast time?" "Afraid not this time, Charlie. They cut us down to fifteen minutes and old man Ribicoff showed up and we had to give him five. You know how he is." "Yeah. Thanks for trying, Del." street, was pretty full, but they found a low table on the aisle. The old-timers in fezzes stared at the strange conditioned face of Don Lavin. The kids in scat hats with five-inch brims looked once and then away, quickly. Norma Lavin got no stares at all. Young and old, the Ay-rabs looked coldly through her. Mundin suddenly realized that he was doing his political chances no good by being seen in public with her. The Ay-rabs blamed modem women -- quite wrongly, as it happened -- for the disconcerting way their own women were changing. Hussein himself came over. "Always a pleasure, Mr. Mundin," he beamed. "What will you have?" "Coffee, please," Mundin said. Don Lavin shook his head absently. Norma said nothing. "Majun for the lady?" Hussein asked blandly. "Fresh from Mexico this week. Very strong. Peppermint, raspberry, grape?" Norma Lavin icily said, "No." Hussein went away, still beaming. He had delivered a complicated triple insult -- by calling her a lady, offering her a narcotic and, at that, one traditionally beloved by Islamic women denied love by ugliness or age. Mundin masked his nervousness by studying his watch. "We have about ten minutes," he said. "If you can give me an idea of what you have in mind -- " Somebody coming down the aisle stumbled over Don Lavin's foot. "I beg your pardon," Lavin said automatically. "What's the idea of tripping me?" asked a bored voice. It was a cop -- a big man with an intelligent, good-humored face. "It was an accident. Officer," Mundin said. "Here we go again," Norma Lavin muttered. "I was talking to this gentleman, I believe." The cop asked Don Lavin again, "I said what's the idea of tripping me? You a cop-hater or something?" "I'm really very sorry," Lavin answered dreamily. "Please accept my apology." "He won't," Norma Lavin whispered angrily to Mundin. "Officer," Mundin said sharply, "it was an accident. I'm Charles Mundin, candidate for the Council in the #th, Regular Republican. I'll vouch for this gentleman." Ignoring him, the policeman said to Lavin, "Suppose we show some identification, cop-hater."  spilled cards on the table. The cop inspected them and growled, "Social Security account card says you're Donald W. Lavin, but Selective Service registration says you're Don Lavin, no middle initial. And I see your draft registration is with an Omaha board, but you have a resident's parking permit for Coshocton, Ohio." Lavin said somnolently, "I'm extremely sorry. Officer." The cop decisively scooped up the cards and said, "You'd better come along with me, Lavin. Your career of crime has gone far enough. It's a lucky thing I tripped over you." Mundin noted that he had dropped the pretense of being tripped. "Officer, I'm taking your shield number. I'm going to tell my very good friend Del Dworcas about this nonsense. Shortly after that, you'll find yourself on foot patrol in Belly Rave -- the twoto-ten shift -- unless you care to apologize and get the hell out of here." The officer shrugged. "What can I do? When I see the law broken, I have my job to do. Come along. Dangerous Don." Lavin smiled distantly at his sister, and went along. Mundin's voice was shaking with anger. "Don't worry," he told Norma Lavin. "I'll have him out of the station house right after the meeting. And that cop is going to wish he hadn't been born." "Never mind. I'll get him out," she said. "Five times in three weeks. I'm used to it." "What's the angle?" Mundin exploded. Hussein came up with coffee in little cups. "Nice fella, that Jimmy Lyons," he said chattily. "For cop, that is." "Who is he?" Mundin snapped. "Precinct captain's man. Very good to know. The uniform is just patrolman, but when you talk to Jimmy Lyons, you talk right into precinct captain's ear." Norma Lavin stood up. "I'm going to get my brother sprung before they start shunting him around the precincts again." Her voice was weary. "I suppose this is the end of the road, Mundin. But if you still want to consider taking our case, here's the address. Unfortunately, there's no phone." She hesitated. "I hope you'll -- " It was almost a cry for help. She bit off the words, dropped a coin and a card on the table and strode from the coffee shop. The Ay-rabs looked icily through her as she went. Mundin sat at the little table, bespelled, turning her card over in his fingers. G-M-L Homes, he thought. Corporate practice. It's not generally known that the "L" stands for Lavin. And a cry for help. The card said Norma Lavin, with an address in Coshocton, Ohio, and a phone number. These were scratched out, and written in was # Willowdale Crescent. An address in Belly Rave! Mundin shook his head involuntarily. But there had been a cry for help. HE big free rally, attended by perhaps eighty-five voters, went off on dreary schedule. Mundin managed to see Dworcas for a moment after things broke up. "Del, what's with these Lavin people? What do you know about them?" "Not a hell of a lot, Charlie. I thought I was throwing some business your way. They mentioned a stockholder's suit. Are they phonies or crackpots?" "Maybe. I don't know. But some cop named Jimmy Lyons picked the kid up in Hussein's. No reason that I could see." "Jimmy Lyons? He's the captain's man. I'll call and see what I can do about that, Charlie." He called and came back, smiling. "The sister identified him. They held him a couple of hours to cool him off and let him go. Lyons just got sore because the kid gave him some lip. What the hell, cops are human. Charlie, maybe you'd better forget about these people. The desk man said the kid was conditioned or doped up or something." "Conditioned, I think. The wise kids at Hussein's kind of eyed him fast, if you know what I mean." "Sure, Charlie, sure." Del was beginning to look uncomfortable. Mundin let him go. IV for Norvie Bligh. When he walked in on Virginia and her daughter, they had been perfectly normal -- sullen. His news about the lawyer, Mundin, and the prospects of adopting Alexandra had produced the natural effects. "You forgot to ask about the inheritance.'" Before he finished dinner, he was driven to the point of shrieking at his wife, slapping the girl and slamming out of the house. But there was always Arnie Dworcas. He killed time for half an hour -- Arnie didn't like it if you got there too early -- and then hurried. He was almost out of breath as he got to Dworcas' door. And Arnie was warmly friendly. Norvell began at last to relax. It wasn't just a matter of plenty of beer and the friendly feeling of being with someone you liked. Arnie was going out of his way, Norvell saw at once, to get at the roots of Norvell's problem. As soon as they had had a couple of beers, he turned the conversation to Norvell's work. "They must be really beginning to roll on the Field Day," he speculated. Norvell expanded. "Sure. I've got some pretty spectacular things lined up for it, too. Of course, Candella hasn't given me the final go-ahead -- " he frowned at a submerged memory -- "but it's going to be quite a program. One gets a big charge out of doing one's best on a big job, Arnie. I guess you know that. I remember a couple of years ago -- " Dworcas interrupted. "More beer?" He dialed refills. "Your place has quite a good reputation," he said with sober approval. "This afternoon, in the shop. We Engineers were talking about the technical factors involved." "You were?" Norvell was pleased. "That's interesting, Arnie. This time I was talking about -- " "Especially the big shows," Dworcas went on. "The Field Days. You know what would be interesting, Norvell? Getting a couple of the fellows to go to one, to see just how the thing looked from the engineering viewpoint. I'd like to go myself -- if I could get away, of course. We're pretty busy these days. Might invite a few of the others in the shop to come along." "You would?" Norvell cried. "Say, that would be fine. There's a lot of engineering connected with a Field Day. Like this time a couple of years -- " "Excuse me," Arnie interrupted. "Beer. Be right back." Norvell felt actually cheerful. Arnie was concerned with his work. You didn't find many friends like Arnie. Warmed by the beer, Norvell re-examined his recent blinding depression. Hell, things weren't too bad. He had almost decided to have a swift cup of black coffee and go home when Arnie came back, beaming. "Well, what say. Emotional Engineer? Want a couple of real, live slide-rulers to look over your show?" "What? Oh, sure, Arnie. Just let me get this Field Day out of the way. We'll throw a real party -- one of the Friday-night shows. There's a lot of complicated stuff under the stadium. You'd be interested -- " "I don't know," Dworcas said doubtfully, "whether the fellows would be interested in one of the second-rate shows. Maybe we ought to skip it." "No, no! The regular shows are just as interesting technically. Why, just last week, we had a broken-field run -- barbed wire and maimer mines and half an hour before the show started, the director came around, crying that he didn't have enough men for the spectacle. Well, Candella -- that is, we put in a quick call to the cops and they sent a squad down to Belly Rave. Got twentyfive volunteers in fifteen minutes. The orderlies lined 'em up and of Bi." He chuckled. "Arnie, you should have seen some of those guys when they sobered up. We had to -- " Arnie was shaking his head. "That sort of thing isn't what We Engineers are interested in. It's the big effects." "Oh! You mean like in the Field Day next week." Norvell thought vaguely about the Field Day. "Yeah," he said uncertainly, "there certainly are plenty of headaches when you run a Field Day. Can I have another beer, please?"  S he dialed another glass, Dworcas said sunnily, "Suppose you fit us in, then. After all, you've got eighty thousand seats. There ought to be five somewhere that the man who runs the whole damn thing can give to a friend." "Sure," Norvell mumbled. "Uh -- my turn. Excuse me, Arnie." When he came back, the room wasn't spinning quite so dizzily, but the warmth in his body wasn't so gratifying, either. He stared so long at the glass of beer by his chair that Amie thought it was flat and pressed a replenishment button. "Oh, thanks," Norvell said, startled. He picked up the glass and took a sip, then put it down hard. Half of it slopped over. Above the whistle of the suction cleaners draining the spilled beer, Norvell said with sudden misery, "Arnie, I'm in trouble." Dworcas froze. He said carefully, "Trouble?" "I swear to God, if it weren't for people like you -- if it weren't for you personally -- I don't know what I'd do!" He told Dworcas about the grisly dinner with his wife and stepdaughter, about the countless run-ins with Candella, about all the fights and frustrations. "The worst was this morning, just before I went to that lawyer. I was chewing out that little punk Stimmens when Candella walked into the room. He must've heard every word I said, because when I turned around and saw him, he said, 'Excellent advice, Mr. Bligh, I hope you'll follow it yourself.' And Stimmens just stood there, laughing at me. I couldn't do a thing. For two cents, I would have gone in and asked for my contract." Dworcas nodded precisely. "Perhaps you should have." "What? Oh, no, Arnie, you don't understand. General Recreations is lousy on that. They won't sell unless they can get their pound of flesh, and plenty more besides. We had a vice president once, a couple of years ago, got in Dutch with the board and wanted out. Well, they set a price of four hundred thousand dollars on his contract. He killed himself. It was that or cancel." "That's a point to remember, Norvell. In any engineering problem, there are always at least two components to any vector." "I see what you mean. There's no way out." "No, Norvell, there are always two ways out, sometimes more." "Well -- " "At the shop," Arnie said, leaning back, "these problems don't arise, of course. Not like with you temperamental artists. But when I was a journeyman, I... Well, it was rough. I know just what it's like. And, of course, I know what  would do." "What?" "If it were my decision. I'd cancel."  suddenly sober. "You'd cancel?" "That's right," said Arnie. "I'd cancel." Norvell looked at him unbelievingly, bur Dworcas' gaze was calm and benign. "It's a tough decision to make, Norvell. Heaven knows. I'd find it a hard one to make myself, without half an hour or more of serious thought. But what's your alternative?" Norvell shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He put his beer down. Neither man said a word for a long time, while Norvell's mind raced from Candella to Dworcas to the lawyer, Mundin, to Virginia, to Stimmens, to a fire-red mystery marked "Belly Rave," to the old man who had sat weeping while he waited for the broken-field event to start. "I don't think I ought to," Norvell said faintly. Dworcas inclined his head. "It's your decision." "I just don't see how I can, Arnie. I'd lose the house, Virginia would raise holy -- " Arnie stopped him. "You may be right. Who knows? There's certainly no security in the world for a man without a contract job. You'd have to leave your home, true, and move to the suburbs -- " Norvell blinked -- "at least temporarily. It's a hard life there, a constant challenge to prove yourself -- to make your way in spite of hell or high water -- or fall by the wayside." He looked speculatively at Norvell and dismissed the subject. "I just wanted to give you the benefit of my thinking on the point. You do as you see fit. I guess you'll want to be getting home." "Sure," Norvell said. "Oh, I meant to thank you for steering me to that lawyer. I don't know what I would have -- " "Think nothing of it. I'm always glad to do anything I can for you, you know that. You won't forget about the tickets?" "Tickets?" Norvell asked vacantly. "The tickets for the Field Day. Not general admission, you know. As close to the Master's box as you can get them." Norvell's eyes opened wide. He said in a thin voice, "Arnie, you were bragging to your boss that you could get tickets, even though they've been sold out for six weeks. Isn't that it?" They stared nakedly at each other; then Norvell's eyes fell. "Just kidding," he mumbled. "I'll get them."  there was only a minor squabble over the music coming from behind Alexandra's locked door. Norvell made the mistake of commenting that it was past midnight and a #-year-oldshould be asleep. His wife said furiously, "Should be this, and should be that, and should do everthing Mr. Bligh wants her to. This whole house isn't organized around you. It's our home, too, and -- " Norvell had had all he could take. "It's the company's house and one more word out of you and I give it back to them. Then you two prize packages from Belly Rave will be right back where you belong." Virginia's face stiffened in shocked surprise. Norvell stalked downstairs to the bar and poured himself a drink. He sat with it in his hand and looked in sudden wonder af the room around him. Was there so much difference between a G-M-L bubble house and Belly Rave? He decided he'd have to visit Belly Rave one of these days. Just to get a look. But what could the difference be? A house was a house. If you didn't like the floor warm, you dialed it to cool. If you didn't like the wall color or pattern, you turned the selector wheel to something else. If you didn't like a room plan, you clipped the wall somewhere else. Norvell dialed a bed and set the house to full automatic. As he lay down, his pillow chimed softly, but he didn't need sleepy music that night. He reached over his head and turned it off. In the copper plexus at the house's core, transistors pulsed, solenoids barred the doors, microswitches laid traps for intruders, thermocouples dried the incoming air and cooled it. Commutator points would boil the water for the coffee in the morning, heat the griddle for the eggs, set their breakfast dishes. Naturally -- Norvell thought sleepily -- that's what a house was. V ed to take Mundin to Belly Rave. The fifth was a reckless youngster. "Just took this job waiting for the draft call," he confided. "How can I lose? You're paying plenty and maybe I'll get beat up so bad in this here Belly Rave place that they won't draft me." He laughed. "Fact is. I've never been out there, but I figure it can't be as tough as they say." Mundin did not contradict him, though he felt a lot less certain, and off they went. There was no sizable city that did not have the equivalent of Belly Rave. Festering slums that had once been respectable suburban residential sections, like Belle Reve Estates, they had been abruptly made obsolete by the G-M-L bubble houses -- good enough for derelicts to live in, not good enough to keep in repair. The battered streetlights, Mundin noticed, didn't light; the yards were weed-grown; roofs were rotted through, walls sagging. To one who had always lived in bubble houses, the place was shocking. He had thought the early bubble houses were ludicrous because the automatic controls sometimes went out of order and manual ones had to be used temporarily. But these primitive structures -- even someone like himself, with no more than a layman's knowledge, saw instantly that this old-style architecture must have taken an incredible number of man-hours just for upkeep. He asked himself indignantly why this architectural jungle wasn't torn or burned down and bubble houses put up. He knew the answer, of course -- G-M-L Homes. They could manufacture the units, but their advertising explained why they didn't. Living in a bubble house was a mark of success. And so they limited production, maintained an artificial scarcity value... and doomed people to Belly Raves, or whatever the local name was, in every city. Hell with it, Mundin thought in annoyance; he had his own troubles. He hadn't come out to Belly Rave to worry about it; he was there on a job.  he was lucky and it turned into a real, honest-to-God case. There was life in Belly Rave -- a furtive, crepuscular life called into being by the unpoliceable wilderness of tall weeds, wrecks of homes, endless miles of crumbling pavement. Scatty little cars prowled the cracked roads, occasionally pulling to the curb when a dim figure swung a phosphorescent handbag. rHE taxi passed one block of houses that was a blaze of light and noise. A doorman trotted alongside the cab, urging, "Anything goes, mister. Spend the night for five bucks, all you can drink and smoke included. Why pay taxes, mister?" Sometimes, though not often, the Alcohol # Hemp Tax Unit raided such joints. The driver asked, "We anywhere near # Willowdale Crescent?" "What you need is a guide," the doorman said promptly. "Jimmy!" Somebody jelled out of the dark. Mundin heard a fumbling at the cab door. "Step on it!" he yelled at the driver, snapping the door lock. The driver stepped on it. Ambush left behind, they cautiously approached bag-swingers for directions and before long were on the # block of Willowdale Crescent, counting houses. "This must be it," said the driver, no longer devil-may-care. "I guess so. Wait here, will you?" "No, sir! How do I know you ain't going to slip through a back door? You pay me what's on the clock and I'll wait." The meter read a whopping eight dollars. Mundin handed over a ten and started up the crumbled walk. The taxi zoomed away before he had taken half a dozen steps. Mundin cursed wearily and knocked on the door. He studied the boarded-up picture window while he waited. Like all the others, it was broken, boarded up. Inevitably, in the years that had gone by since they were eased and puttied carefully into place, the rock had been flung, or the door had been slammed, or the drunk had lurched into the living room. The man who came to the door y was old and visibly sick. "Is this the Lavin place?" Mundin asked, blinking against a light haze of wood-smoke. 'Tm Charles Mundin. She asked me to call in connection with a legal matter. I'm an attorney." The old man started at the word. "Come in. Counselor," he said formally. "I am a member of the bar myself -- " He broke off into a fit of coughing that left him leaning against the door. the living room and eased him into a sagging, overstuffed chair. A Coleman lamp, blowing badly, cast a metallic blue-green glare into every corner of the room. A fire smoldered in the hearth, billowing against a closed register. A tinny radio was blaring, " -- was kept from spreading, though the four houses involved in the arson attempt were totally destroyed. Elsewhere in Belly Rave, warfare broke out between the Wabbits and the Goddams, rival junior gangs. One eightyear-old was killed instantly by a thrown -- " Mundin clicked it off and opened the register. The smoke began to clear from the room and the fire to flicker. The old man was still folded up in the chair, his parchment face mercilessly bleached by the flaring light. Mundin fiddled aimlessly with the valve and somehow got it to stop roaring. There was a green glass shade; he put it on and the room was suddenly no longer a corner of a surrealist hell, but simply a shabby room. "Thank you," the old man muttered. "Counselor, would you please see if there is a small, round tin in the bathroom cabinet?" The bathtub was full of split kindling and the cabinet shelves loaded with the smaller household staples -- salt, spices and such. There was an unmarked tin, which Mundin pried open. Small, gummy-looking pills and an unmistakable odor -- yen pox! He shuddered and brought it out. The old man took it and slowly swallowed five of the opium pills. When he spoke, his voice was almost steady. "Thank you. Counselor. And let this be a lesson to you. It's weakening, humiliating. You said you had an appointment with Norma? She should have been here hours ago. Naturally -- this neighborhood -- I'm worried. I'm Harry Ryan. Member of the S.E.C. Bar and other things. Of course -- " he stared at the tin of yen pox -- "I'm retired from practice." Mundin coughed. "Miss Lavin mentioned you, though not by name. You would be attorney of record and I'd do the legwork in some sort of stockholder's suit, right?" Ryan nodded. Mundin hesitated, then went on to tell the old man about the arrest in Hussein's place. "VT'ES," Ryan said matter-offactly. "I told her it was a mistake to go to Mr. Dworcas. It is inconceivable that Green, Charlesworth would neglect to have an understanding with the Regular Republican Central Committee." Green, Charlesworth was the name of an investment house usually mentioned in hushed and tremulous tones. Mundin said, "She told me it was connected with G-M-L Homes. How does Green, Charlesworth come into it?" Ryan chewed another opium pill. "Not in more than two dozen ways -- that I know of." He actually smiled. "Raw materials, belt transport patents, real estate, insurance, plant financing -- " He heaved himself from the overstuffed chair as the door knocker rattled. "I'll get it," he said. "It was just a temporary indisposition. You needn't mention it to... " He jerked his chin at the door. He came back into the living room with Norma and Don Lavin. "Hello, Mundin," she said tonelessly. "I see you found us. Have you eaten?" "Yes, thanks." "Then excuse us while we have something. The Caddy broke down five times on the way out here. I'm beat." She and her brother morosely opened a couple of self-heating cans of goulash. They spooned them down in silence. "Now," she said to Mundin, "the background. I'll make it short. Don and I were born of rich but honest parents in Coshocton, Ohio. Daddy -- Don, senior -- was rather elderly when we came along. He spent the first fifty years of his life working. He started out as a plastics man with a small factory -- bus bodies, fire trucks, that kind of thing. He happened to have gone to school with a man named Bernie Gorman, who happened to have specialized in electronics and electrical stuff. The two of them worked together, when they could find time, dreaming dreams and weaving visions. They were dedicated men. They invented, designed and constructed the first pilot model of the G-M-L Home, otherwise known as the bubble house." Mundin said frostily, "I happen to know a little about G-ML, Miss Lavin. Wasn't there a man named Moffatt involved?" "Not until later -- much later. For almost thirty years. Daddy and Mr. Gorman starved themselves, gave up everything for their dream. Mother said she scarcely saw Daddy from month's end to month's end. Mr. Gorman died a bachelor. They had designed the bubble house, they had built it, but they didn't have the capital to put it on the market." I-'-could have leased the rights." "And had them bottled up," she said. "Didn't I tell you they were dedicated men? They had designed a home that was cheaper than the cheapest and better than the best. It was a breakthrough in housing, like nothing that had gone before except, perhaps the revolution in synthetic textiles. aire could not have owned a better house? Daddy and Mr. Gorman wanted to give their dream to the people at a reasonable profit. They weren't big businessmen, Mundin -- they were dreamers. They were out of their field. Then Moffatt came along with his plan." Ryan stirred himself. "Most ingenious, really. By leasing manufacturing rights to large corporations, G-M-L avoided capital outlay: the cprporations gave their employees what could not be had elsewhere -- and good-by to labor troubles. At first, G-M-L leased the rights for money. Later, when they got bigger, the consideration was blocks of stock, equities in the leasing firms." The girl nodded soberly. "Within ten years, it owned sizable shares of forty corporations, and Daddy and Mr. Gorman owned half of G-M-L. Then Daddy found out what was happening. He told Mr. Gorman and I think it killed him -- he was an old man by then, you see. Contract status. One word of backtalk and you get thrown out of your G-M-L house. Get thrown out of your G-M-L house and you find yourself -- here." Mundin said wonderingly, "But if your father was one of the owners of the company -- " "Only twenty-five per cent, Mundin. And Mr. Gorman's twenty-five per cent went to distant cousins. So there was Daddy, at sixty-five. His vision was a reality -- his bubble homes housed they had become a weapon and he was frozen out of the firm." Don Lavin said dreamily, "They gave the plant guards his picture. He was arrested for drunk and disorderly when he tried to go to the stockholders' meeting. He hanged himself in his cell." He stared absently at Mundin's shoe. Mundin cleared his throat, "I'm sorry. Wasn't there anything to be done at all?" professional admiration, "Very little, Mr. Mundin. Oh, he still had stock. They impounded it. A trumped-up creditors' committee got an order on his safedeposit box against dissipation of assets when he died. They kept it impounded for twelve years. Then somebody got careless, or somebody quit or got fired, and the new man didn't know what the impoundment was for. Anyway, the order expired. Norma and Don Lavin are twenty-five per cent owners of G-M-L." Mundin looked around the shabby room and said nothing. "There's just one little thing," Norma said bitterly. "Don got the stock out of the box and put it away. Tell us where it is, Don." The brother's dreamy eyes widened. His face worked wildly. He said, "K-k-k-k-k-k" in a convulsion of stammering. The terrified stutter went on and on, and then Don Lavin began raspingly to cry. Norma, stone-faced, patted him on the shoulder.  yer, "When we began making trouble, as they called it, Don was snatched. He was gone for three days. A doctor he went to says he must have got more than fifty hours of conditioning." "That's illegal! Private persons can't use conditioning techniques!" "You're our lawyer now -- just straighten that out for us, will you? Get an injunction against G-M-L." Mundin sat back. Habitual criminals -- like his client earlier in the day -- were conditioned in twenty hours of treatment spread over a week or more. Good God, fifty hours in three days! But proving it against G-M-L or anyone else -- that was the hard part. The conditioned person was naturally conditioned against taking any action of the sort. He felt ill. "Sorry I was so stupid. So now you want to find the stock and Don doesn't know where he put it." Ryan looked at him with disgust. "I could manage to get duplicate certificates. Unfortunately, our position is not that simple. Donald, as the male heir, was the obvious person to conduct a suit, so Norma signed an irrevocable proxy of interest to him. That was an error, as it turned out. Donald can't bring suit. He can't tell us where the stock is. He can't even discuss it." Mundin nodded sickly. "I see. You're stymied." Norma made a contemptuous noise. "Now that it's established that we're licked, we might as well lie down and die." "I didn't say that. Miss Lavin. We'll do what we can." He hesitated. "For instance, no doubt we can have your brother undergo a deconditioning course somewhere else. After all -- " " 'Private persons can't use conditioning techniques,' " she quoted derisively. "Didn't you say that just a moment ago?" "Well, yes, but surely someone will -- " Norma seemed to collapse. She said to Ryan, "You tell him what he's up against." Ryan said, "G-M-L's assets dollars, comprising cash in the bank, negotiable securities, plant and properties and equities, as of their last statement, in eight hundred and four corporations. I don't say that they can break the law with impunity. Counselor, but they can sure as hell keep us from breaking it." Mundin, trudging apprehensively through Belly Rave's dark streets, felt very small, pitted A mournful hooting from the shadows made him quicken his step, but no lurking thugs showed up. Mundin shivered uncomfortably and turned up his coat collar. It had begun to rain. Luck was with him. He was neither mugged nor lured into one of the clip joints. The footpads were stalking other streets; the roving gangs of armed adolescents plotted in their cellars instead of braving the rain; the cab Mundin spotted, ran after and hailed was a legitimate cab, not a trap. The ride gave him time to think. But the thinking came to very little. The Lavins, he was convinced, had a legitimate claim. He had promised them he would work on it; he had tried to reassure them that things were not as hopeless as they seemed. He felt uncomfortably sure that the girl had seen through his empty words. The cab came at last to territory he recognized and he stopped it at an all-night restaurant. Coffee might help, he thought. While he was waiting for it, he invested in a call to his office -- you could never tell, maybe someone had phoned. Someone had. The Sleepless Secretary groaned and came across with the record of a familiar, scared voice; "Mr. Mundin -- uh -- this is Norvell Bligh. Can you come and get me out of jail?" VI ' start. They were joggling him, with identical, contemptuous smiles. Even in the fog of sleep, he felt a little stab of pride at Virginia's beauty, a twitch of unhappiness at the same lean beauty smothered beneath the adolescent fat of her daughter. "What's the matter?" he croaked. His voice sounded odd and he realized he wasn't wearing his hearing aid. He groped for it beside the bed. It wasn't there. He sat up. He yelled at Alexandra, "Where is it? If you've hidden it again. I'll break your neck!" Alexandra looked smugly shocked. She mouthed at him. "Goodness, Norvell, you know I wouldn't do that," though he had repeatedly told her that exaggeration made it impossible to read lips. Virginia tapped him on the shoulder and said something, stifflipped. He caught an "eep" and a "larm." "What?" "I said you must have come in too drunk to set the alarm before you went to sleep. Get up. You're an hour late for work now." He leaped from bed. An hour late on this day, of all days! He found the hearing aid -- on the floor in the entrance hall, where he couldn't have left it, any more than he could have failed to set the alarm. But he didn't have time to take up these minor points. He depilated in ten seconds, bathed in five, dressed in fifteen and shot out of the house. Fortunately Candella wasn't in. Norvie sent Miss Dali to round up his staff and began the tooling-up job for the integrator keyboard, while the production men busied themselves with their circuits and their matrices, and the job began. This was the part of Norvie's work that made him, he confessed secretly to himself, feel most like God. He fed the directions to Stimmens, Stimmens fumblingly set up the punch cards, the engineers translated the cards into phase fields and interferer circuits... and a World That Norvie Made appeared in miniature. He had once tried to explain his feelings to Arnie. Arnie had snarled something about the presumptuous conceit of a mere pushbutton. All he did, Arnie explained over many glasses of beer, was to decide what forms and images he wanted to see; it was the Engineers who, in Their wisdom, transmuted empty imaginings into patterns of light and color that magically took the form and movement of tiny fighters and wrestlers and spearcarriers. The original thought, Arnie explained severely, was nothing; it was the tremendous technical skill that transformed the thought into visual reality that was important. And Norvell, perforce, humbly agreed.  to the production men, those geniuses so well versed in the arts of connecting Circuit A to Terminal IV, for they were Engineers. But his deference extended only to the technical crew. "Stimmens!" he barked. "Hurry it up! Mr. Candella will be here any moment!" "Yessir," said Stimmens, hopelessly shuffling the stacks of notes from Norvell's hands. Stimmens was coming along, Norvell thought. A touch of the whip was good for him. It took twenty minutes and a bit more, and then Norvell's whole design for a Field Day was on punch cards. While Stimmens was correcting his last batch of cards, the production men began the run-through. The little punched cards went through the scanners; the packed circuits measured voltages and spat electrons; and in the miniature mockup of the Stadium, tiny figures of light appeared and moved and slew each other and left. They were Norvell's own, featureless and bright, tiny and insubstantial. Where Norvell's script called for the bodies of forty javelin-throwers in the flesh, the visualizing apparatus showed forty sprites of light jabbing at each other with lances of fire. No blood spilled; no bodies stained the floor of the Stadium; only the little bodiless fire-figures that disappeared like any other pattern of excited ions when the current went off. Somehow, Norvell thought of the Field Days themselves as taking place here. He had heard the cries of the injured and seen the drawn faces of the next of' kin; but it was as mannikins that he thought of them, always. One of the production men said approvingly, "Looks like a good show, Mr. Bligh." "Thanks," said Norvell gratefully. It was always a good sign when the technical crew hung over the miniature stadium this way, watching the mockup figures go through their paces. Now the question was, what would Candella say? Day is important," was what Candella said to Norvie. "At least, it seems to me that everything we do is important. Don't you think so?" Norvell said, "Well, of course!" "Our work is important, Bligh. It is a great and functional art form. It provides healthful entertainment, satisfying the needs of every man for some form of artistic expression. It provides escape -- escape for the hardworking bubble-house class, escape for the masses of Belly Rave. It siphons off their aggressions. Allotments and Field Days -- our society is built on them! You might call our work the very foundation of society. Do you agree?" "Yes, sir," Norvie almost whispered. Candella looked politely apologetic. "I beg your pardon?" "Yes, sir!" Norvell, too late, found he was almost bellowing. Candella looked pained. "You needn't shout. There is nothing wrong with my hearing." Norvell winced. "Foundation of our society, but also an art form. The cultured classes appreciate our efforts on the artistic plane. The rabble of Belly Rave -- with all respects, my dear Bligh, to the origin of your charming wife -- need it on the glandular level. Every show we can produce is important. But the Field Day -- " His thick brows came down like the ragged anvils of thunderclouds. "The Field Day, you tin-eared fumbler, is the biggest day of the year! Not just because it draws the biggest audience -- but because that's the one I am judged by! The Board attends. The Mayor attends. The men from G-M-L attend. If they like it, good. If they don't -- that's my neck on the line, Bligh!" Norvell opened his mouth. "Not a word! I want no excuses. Your notion of what constituted a Field Day was, of course, uninspired. But I thought that, with patching and improvising, we might get by. I no ' longer think so -- not since examining the superb presentation that was handed me this morning -- by a member of your own you have evidently been holding down. Thank God he had the courage and sense to come to me with this masterpiece instead of permitting you to destroy it!" Norvell was able to croak, "Who?" "Stimmens." Stimmens? Wet behind the ears, untried, simple research? Who didn't even want to stay with the firm, who had the infernal gall to ask for a contract release? Stimmens?  out for the punched cards and then he stopped, "Go ahead," Candella said coldly. Bligh scanned them in astonishment. Why, he thought, this is imjxjssible -- and this bit here, we can't -- "Mind if I play these, Mr. Candella?" he asked and, getting an ironic nod, fed the punch cards into Candella's machine. The circuits scanned the punches and built a scene of electronic slaughter for him. He watched the little fire-figures in growing apprehension. When he looked up, he said, so bemused that he hardly remembered to be fearful, "Why, it's good!" "Of course it's good!" "Really good, Mr. Candella." He shook his head wonderingly. "Stimmens, eh? I never would have believed it. Of course, the emotional values need bringing out. The comedy stuff with the vitriol pistols ought to follow a tense thriller like Man Versus Scorpions, instead of another comedy number like the Octogenarians with Flame-throwers. But that's easy enough to fix. Race against Manmade Lightning is out, too. Stimmens told me himself we couldn't get the equipment from Schenectady. I suppose he forgot." i Candella was looking at him with an indescribable expression, but Norvell raced on. "Real originality, Mr. Candella. I -- I must say I admire him. Piranhas in the aquatic meet -- wonderful! And the octogenarians are a terrific switch. Number after number I've never heard of! I have to admit it, Mr. Candella, that boy has talent." "What the hell are you babbling about?" "Why, the -- the originality, Mr. Candella. The freshness." "Originality! Bligh, do you think I'm crazy enough to run untried novelties in a show like this? Every one of these features has been a smash success somewhere in the country within the last ninety days." "Oh, no! I've been getting all the reports and none of this stuff -- Stimmens was doing the research himself. He ought to know!"  you fool!" He tossed a sheaf of reports at Norvell. They were all there -- names, dates, places. Norvell looked up in horror. "It's a doublecross! He wants a Fifteen rating. Just yesterday, he tried to get me to recommend remission of his contract. I wouldn't do it. This is his way of getting even." "Bligh, that's a serious charge!" "Oh, I'll prove it, Mr. Candella. I've got the copies of his reports locked in my desk." Candella stood up. "Show me," he ordered. Ten minutes later, he was saying grimly, "Thought I wouldn't call your bluff, eh?" Norvell stared unbelievingly at the reports, face white as a sheet. They had been in his desk, locked with his key. And they were not the reports he had seen. They sparkled with novelties -- all the magnificent new concepts in Stimmens' outline and more, much more. How? He couldn't have left the desk unlocked. Nobody had a key but him and Miss Dali -- and she had no reason to do such a thing. Had he gone mad? Was it some chemical prank, the reports he saw in disappearing ink, the substituted ones then coming to light? How? Over Norvell's desk set, Candella was calling Stimmens in. The boy appeared, looking awed and deferential. Mr. Candella said briefly, "Congratulations, Stimmens. You're the head of the department as of now. Move into your office whenever you like -- this is your office. And throw this bum out." To Norvell: "Your contract is canceled for cause. Don't ever try to get a job in this line again; you'll waste your time." He left without another word. Stimmens said uneasily, "I didn't have the heart to go through with it. I had to give you a chance -- you turned it down." Norvell just stared. Stimmens went on defensively, "It isn't as if I just walked into it. Believe me, I earned this. What do I know about Field Days? Sweat, sweat, sweat -- I haven't had a moment's peace." Miss Dali walked in and kissed Stimmens, burbling, "Darling, I just heard! You wonderful Grade Fifteen, you!" "Oh," said Norvell in a sick voice. They said more, but he didn't hear. It was as if his hearing aid were turned off, though, in this instance, the switch was not in his pocket, but in his mind. He was out on the street before he realized what he was doing -- and what had happened to the contract career of Norvell Bligh. ' problem of Virginia in his thinking and, like a thousand times before, he backed away from it. He ordered another drink. No contract status meant no bubble house. It also meant Belly Rave. Norvell took a deep swallow. Still, what was so bad about Belly Rave? The allotments would take care of eating. His extra work -- whatever it turned out to be -- would give him a chance to save a little money, make a fresh start, maybe get back on contract and into a bubble house again. After all, he was a trained man -- an Engineer, in a way. He wished once again that he knew a little more about Belly Rave. Funny, considering that Virginia had been born there. But she had never wanted to talk about it. And there he was, back on the subject of Virginia. How would she take it? He really couldn't guess. She had been so resolutely silent on the subject of Belly Rave and all it concerned. Her childhood, her parents, even her husband -- the power-cycle stunter whose crash in a long-ago Field Day had left young Norvell Bligh with a tearless widow to jolly out of filing a claim. He had married her instead and Candella had made an unforgivable joke... No, he hadn't married her -- she had married, not Norvell Bligh, but a contract job and a G-M-L house. He dialed another drink. Well, there was still Arnie. He wasn't the kind of friend to look the other way when you were a little down on your luck -- not even that, really, just temporarily the victim of a professional misunderstanding and a doublecross. Good old Arnie, Norvell thought sentimentally. He caught a glimpse of the time. Maybe he ought to have it out with Virginia, and then go over and spend some time with Arnie. The thought braced him. He swallowed his drink and slipped his wallet into the bar slot. Having it out with Virginia might not be so tough at that. The fact that she had been born in Belly Rave was an advantage, if he could only make her see it that way. She'd have friends there. She'd have some ideas about pleasant, useful work he could do to supplement the allotment until he got on his feet again -- Something crushed his shoulder and spun him around. "Whaddya think you're up to?" the policeman demanded. He shook the wallet under Norvell Bligh's nose. "You know the penalty for passing a bum penalty card? You Belly Ravers are all alike -- find a lapsed card and a front and try to get a free load. Come along. The Captain wants to talk to you." ing to make them believe him down at the precinct, before he realized they did believe him -- believed him and just didn't care. It was close to dinner time and they put him in something they called "the Tank" until the desk sergeant got back from his meal. Norvell didn't like the tank and he didn't like the looks of the half-dozen other persons who occupied it with him. Still, it was only a question of his lapsed credit card -- they could easily have added drunk and disorderly to the charge -- or even no visible means of support, which meant getting a job instantly or being jugged for quite a while. And there was only one kind of job a man in police trouble could pick up a phone and get, every time. Usually you didn't have to phone. The cops would drive you down to the Stadium's service entrance themselves. Norvell knew the process, having seen enough "volunteers" delivered. "Hey, Bligh." Norvell said, "Yes, sir?" The cop opened the door. "This way." They came to a dingy room. There was an embarrassing process of holding your hands over your head while someone searched you. You couldn't blame them, Norvell told himself ; they must have had plenty of desperate criminals here. There was a curiously interesting process of inking the fingers and rolling them across a piece of paper. There was a mildly painful process of looking into what seemed to be a binocular microscope; a light flashed, and Norvell had a little trouble seeing. While Norvell was blinking at the halo in his field of vision, the cop said something. Norvell said, "What?" "I said do you want to call your lawyer?" Norvell shook his head automatically. Then he remembered -- he had a lawyer. "Why, yes," he said. He found Mundin's phone number in the book with some difficulty. It was after hours, but he was lucky enough to get an answer -- though Mundin himself wasn't there and the person who answered seemed to be drunk or something. But Norvell left a message, and then there was nothing to do but wait. Curiously, the waiting was not unpleasant. Even the thought of what Virginia would say or do about this was not particularly terrifying. What worse could happen than had already? Mundin," Norvell said. He looked back at the precinct house and shuddered. Mundin said, "Don't thank me. I just put in a word with Del Dworcas and he put in a word with the precinct. Thank him." Norvell brightened. "Oh, I intend to! I've wanted to meet Mr. Dworcas for a long time. His brother Arnie is a very close friend of mine." Mundin shrugged. "Come on, then. I'm going to the Hall anyhow." Mundin stalked sourly ahead of his client, his mind on G-ML Homes. The hope kept hammering at his good sense -- maybe he could pull it off. Maybe... Norvell followed contentedly enough through the rain. Everything was being ordered for him. He was out of a job, he had been in jail, he was hours and hours late for Virginia without a word of explanation -- but none of it had been his own decision. Decisions would come later. That would be the hard part. Norvell stared around the Hall curiously. It wasn't as impressive as one might expect -- though maybe, he thought, you had to admire the Regular Republicans for their common touch. There was certainly nothing showy about the place. Norvell stopped, politely out of earshot, as Mundin spoke to a dark, sharp-featured man in shirt sleeves. Some kind of janitor, he guessed. He was astonished when Mundin called him over and introduced the man as Del Dworcas. Norvell said, "I'm really delighted to meet you, Mr. Dworcas. Your brother Arnie is very proud of you. He and I are very good friends." Dworcas asked irrelevantly, "Live around here?" "Oh, no. Quite some distance away, but -- " Dworcas seemed to lose interest. "Glad to meet you. You want to see Arnie, he's in Hussein's, across the street. Now, Charles, what was it you wanted to see me about?" Norvell was left standing with his hand extended. He blinked a little, but -- after all, he reminded himself, Mr. Dworcas was a busy man. On the way downstairs, he caught a glimpse of the time. It was after eleven! self reading. He looked up as Norvell came close and hastily put the magazine away. Norvell smiled and slipped into a vacant seat. "Surprised to see me?" Arnie frowned. "What are you doing here?" Norvell lost his smile. "Can -- can I have some coffee, Arnie? I came out without any money." Arnie looked mildly outraged, but beckoned the grinning waiter. Then Norvell told him -- about the jail, and Mundin, and Del Dworcas. "You've had a busy day," Arnie said humorously. "I'm glad you met Del, though -- he's a prince. Incidentally, I've taken the liberty of asking a couple of associates to the Field Day. So when you get the tickets -- " "Arnie -- " "When you get the tickets, will you pick up three extras?" "Arnie, listen to me. I can't get the tickets." "You what?" "I got fired today. That's why I didn't have any money." There was a pause. Dworcas began looking through his pockets for a cigarette. He found the pack and put it absently on the table in front of him without lighting one. He said nothing. Norvell said apologetically, "It wasn't my fault, Arnie. This rat Stimmens -- " He told what had happened at the office, concluding, "It's going to be all right, Arnie. Don't worry about me. It's like you said -- maybe I should have canceled long ago. I'll make a fresh start in Belly Rave. Virginia can help me; she knows her way around there. We'll find some place that isn't too bad, you know, and get it fixed up. Some of those old houses are pretty interesting. And it's only a question of time until -- " "I see. You've taken an important step, Norvell. Naturally, I wish you the best of luck." "Thanks, Arnie," Norvell said eagerly. "I don't think it'll be so bad. I -- " "Of course," Arnie went on meditatively, "it does put me in kind of a spot." "You, Arnie?" Norvell cried, aghast. doesn't matter, I suppose. It's just that the fellows at the shop warned me that you were probably stringing me along about the tickets. I don't know what I'll tell them that won't make you look pretty bad, Norvell." Norvell squeezed his eyes shut. Loyal Arnie! Concerned about his status in the eyes of the other engineers! "Well, that's the way the ball bounces, Norvell," Arnie went on. "I can't blame you for putting your own problems first." He looked ostentatiously at his watch. "I'd better be getting back to the Hall. My brother has something he wants to consult with me about.'- He dropped a bill on the table and piloted Norvell to the door. Under the dingy marquee, he patted Norvell's shoulder. "Drop me a line once in a while, won't you?" he urged. "I'm the world's worst letter-writer, but I'll always be glad to hear how you're getting along." Norvell stopped. "Write you a letter, Arnie? I'll be seeing you, won't J?" "Of course you will." Dworcas frowned at the rain. He said patiently, "It's just that you naturally won't want to make that trip from Belly Rave too often. For that matter. I'll be kind of tied up evenings myself until I get this thing for my brother over with... Look, Norvell, no sense standing here. Drop me a line when you get a chance. And the best of luck, fellow!" Norvell nodded blankly and walked into the rain. With his credit card canceled and no cashmoney in his pockets, it was a long, wet way home. After the second block, he thought of going back and borrowing cab fare from Arnie. He decided not to. He needed plenty of time to rehearse what he was going to say to Virginia. daughter was asleep. Norvell changed his sopping clothes without a word to his wife, came down, looked her in the eye and told her -- directly and brutally. Then he waited for the explosion. Virginia sat there, blankfaced, and ran her fingers caressingly over the soft arms of the chair. She rose and wandered to the wall patterner. Typical of her sloppy housework, the morning-cheer pattern was still on. With gentle fingers, she reset the wall to a glowing old rose and dimmed the lights to a romantic, intimate amber. She drifted to a wall and mirrorized it, looking long at herself. Norvell looked, too. Under the flattering lights, her skin was gold-touched and flawless, the harsh scowl lines magicked away. She sat on the warm, textured floor and began to sob. Norvell found himself squatting awkwardly beside her. "Please, honey. Please don't cry." She didn't stop. But she didn't push him away. He was cradling her uncomfortably in his arms, talking to her in a way he had never been able to before. Being without contract status would be hard, of course, but weren't thousands of people standing it right now? Maybe things had been physically too easy for them, maybe it took pressure to weld two jjersonalities together, maybe their marriage would turn into shared toil and shared happiness and... Alexandra giggled from the head of the stairs. Norvell sat straight up. The girl tittered, "Well, excuse me! I didn't dream there was anything intimate going on." Virginia got quickly to her feet. He swallowed and made the effort. "Sandy," he said gently, using her almostforgotten pet name, "please come down. I have something to tell you." Virginia stood tensely. Norvell knew she was trying and loved her for it. girl came down the stairs, her much too sophisticated dressing gown fastened with a careless pin. Norvell began firmly, "Sandy -- " Alexandra's face was ancient and haughty. "Please," she interrupted him. "You know how I feel about that humiliating nickname." "I didn't mean -- " "Of course you didn't mean anything. You didn't mean to wake me up with your drunken performance on the stairs, did you? You didn't mean to keep Virginia and me in terror when you didn't bother to let us know you'd be out late." She shot a sly glance at her mother, fishing for approbation. Virginia's hands were clenched in a tight knot. Norvell said hopelessly, "L only wanted to tell you something." "Nothing you can say now would help." "No?" Norvell yelled at her, restraint gone. "Well, listen anyway, damn it! We're going to Belly Rave! All of us -- tomorrow! Doesn't that mean anything to you?" Virginia said at last, with a wiry edge to her voice, "You don't have to shout at the poor child." That was the ball game. He knew perfectly well she had meant nothing of the kind, but his glands answered for him. "So I don't have to shout at her -- because she isn't deaf like me, is that it? My loyal wife! My loving family!" "I didn't mean that!" Virginia cried. "You never do!" Norvell bellowed over Alexandra's shrill contribution. Virginia screamed, "You know I didn't mean it, but I wish I had! You call yourself a husband! You can't even take care of a family!" It went on and on almost until dawn. "Thanks for springing Bligh, Del." Dworcas answered affably, "Hell, any time. Besides, he's a friend of Arnie's. Now what's on your mind?" "G-M-L Homes. Del, I think you've put me onto something. If it works out -- well, I won't forget." "Sure, Charles. Look, it's getting late and I've got a couple of things to do." "I'll make it quick. This election, Del -- let me out of it, will you? I mean I'll take my licking at the polls and all that, but I want to get right on this G-M-L thing, not spend my time on a sound truck or waiting for a broadcast that never happens. Besides -- honestly, Del, I can't afford it. I'm busted." "What's the matter, Charles? The going getting rough?" Mundin said stubbornly, "You don't give a damn whether I run or not and you know it. I've got no hard feelings. Just let me off the hook." Dworcas made his decision. He grinned. "Why should I get in your way? Hop on this deal if it looks so good. I'm not saying it won't leave me short-handed -- I've even got Arnie helping out, though God knows he won't be good for much. So you think this G-M-L deal is actually on the level?" Charles opened his mouth to answer, but one of Dworcas' handymen stuck his head in the door. He whispered to Del. Dworcas apologized, "Sorry, Charles, but Jimmy Baker is here. Excuse me a minute." It really wasn't much more than a minute, even though, when Dworcas came back, he was walking slowly and he didn't look at Mundin. "What was I asking? Oh, yeah -- if you think the G-M-L deal is actually on the level." "Yes, I do. At any rate. I'm going to give it a whirl." "Wonder if you're doing the right thing." Mundin was startled. "How do you mean?" Dworcas shrugged. "It's a pretty serious business, practicing a kind of law you aren't trained for. It's your affair, though. I just don't want to see you getting into trouble." "Wait a minute! What's this about? It was your idea, wasn't it?" Dworcas said coldly, "Worried, Mundin? Trying to hang it on me?" He picked up his phone in a gesture of dismissal. "Take off, will you? I've got work to do." T bothered Mundin all the way home, and it bothered him the next morning when he woke up. It bothered him even more at the County Courthouse. He walked in with a nod to the duty cop and the cop looked right through him. He said to the assistant clerk at the counter, "What do you say, Abe? How are the kids?" And the clerk mumbled something and closed his window with a bang. By then, Mimdin began to catch on. He got sore and he got determined. He waited in line at the next window and asked for the records he wanted. He sent back the wrong folder they gave him first. He pointed out that half the papers were missing from the right folder when he got it. He sat in the County Clerk's waiting room for two hours, until the secretary wandered in and said, with aggrieved hostility, "Mr. Cochrane has gone to lunch. He won't be back today." He wrote out a formal complaint on the sheet of paper she grudgingly gave him, alleging that he was being illegally and improperly hampered in his attempt to examine the corporate public-records files of G-M-L Homes, Inc., and he doggedly left it with her, knowing what would happen to the paper as soon as he got out of the door. It fluttered into the wastebasket before he got out of the door and he turned angrily to object. The duty cop was standing right beside him, looking eager. Mundin went back to his office to think things over. TUT how the devil did they know so fast? Not from Dworcas, Mundin told himself. He could swear that Del hadn't known the heat was on until Jimmy Baker had called him out of the room. And Dworcas had sent Mundin there in the first place. Because -- Mundin flushed angrily at the thought, almost certain that it was right -- because Dworcas was pretty sure that a two-bit ambulance chaser like himself wouldn't do them any good? Then what had changed his mind? Mundin kicked the Sleepless Secretary and went on pacing. In bell-like tones, the Secretary told him that Mrs. Mundin would remit the full balance due by Friday. He sat down at the desk. All right, so the going was going to be tough. That figured. What else could you expect? And the harder G-M-L Homes made it, the more scared they were -- didn't that figure, too? And the more scared they were, the more chance that this whole impossible thing was on the level, that Charles Mundin, L#.B., stood on the threshold of corporate law. He took out a piece of paper and began to figure. They could make it rough, but they couldn't stop him. He could get court orders to see the records. That was the obvious starting place, if only to make sure for himself that the Lavins were on the level. As long as Norma Lavin was in-fact, they couldn't keep him out. There would be a slowdown in court, naturally, but it couldn't take more than a couple of days. Meanwhile, he could get started on some of the other angles. Don's conditioning -- there might be a criminal charge in that somewhere, if he could manage to get names, dates and places. He reached for his modelforms book and began drafting a power of attorney for Norma Lavin to sign. She'd sign it, of course -- she was an independent and difficult person, but she didn't have much choice. Besides, he thought absently, a lot of that hardness was undoubtedly protective armor. In circumstances like hers, what could you expect? The phone rang. He cut out the Sleepless Secretary hastily and picked up the receiver. "Mundin," he said. The voice was ancient and utterly lost. "This is Harry Ryan," it quavered. "Better come out here, Mundin. I think they've snatched Norma!" Continued Next Month hrliiKine your farorlte authors of Sclencc-Fiction. Fantasy and WeinI adventurea as near as your roailhox! Just send your name ami address -- you'll get your copy by return mall... and we'll keep you uti on new titles as we're doing for thousands of otUerat Itargaiii buy.s galorel Write today! Satisfaction guaranteed. If you enclose #c to coyer postage and handling, we'll send along with your free catalog -- by one of the famous authors of today. # E. San Fernando St. Dept. G-# San Jose #. Calif. Wishes are free, aren't they? Devil they are! Not very many people are ever able to get -- B ut had he heard a voice? He couldn't be sure. Reconstructing it a moment later, Joe Collins knew he had been lying on his bed, too tired even to take his waterlogged shoes off the blanket. He had been staring at the network of cracks in the muddy yellow ceiling, watching water drip slowly and mournfully through. It must have happened then. Collins caught a glimpse of metal beside his bed. He sat up. There was a machine on the floor, where no machine had been. In that first moment of surprise, Collins thought he heard a very distant voice say, "There! That does it!" He couldn't be sure of the voice. But the machine was undeniably there. Collins knelt to examine it. The machine was about three feet square and it was humming softly. The crackle-gray surface was featureless, except for a red button in one corner and a brass plate in the center. The plate That was all. switches or any of the other attachments Collins associated with machines. Just the brass plate, the red button and the hum. "Where did you come from?" Collins asked. The Class-A Utilizer continued to hum. He hadn't really expected an answer. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he stared thoughtfully at the Utilizer. The question now was -- what to do with it? He touched the red button warily, aware of his lack of experience with machines that fell from nowhere. When he turned it on, would the floor open up? Would little green men drop from the ceiling? But he had slightly less than nothing to lose. He pressed the button lightly. Nothing happened. "All right -- do something," Collins said, feeling definitely let down. The Utilizer only continued to hum softly. Well, he could always pawn it. Honest Charlie would give him at least a dollar for the metal. He tried to lift the Utilizer. It wouldn't lift. He tried again, exerting all his strength, and succeeded in raising one comer an inch from the floor. He released it and sat down on the bed, breathing heavily. "You should have sent a couple of men to help me," Collins told the Utilizer. Immediately, the hum grew louder and the machine started to vibrate. Collins watched, but still nothing happened. On a hunch, he reached out and stabbed the red button. Immediately, two bulky men appeared, dressed in rough workclothes. They looked at the Utilizer appraisingly. One of them said, "Thank God, it's the small model. The big ones is brutes to get a grip on." The other man said, "It beats the marble quarry, don't it?" They looked at Collins, who stared back. Finally the first man said, "Okay, Mac, we ain't got all day. Where you want it?" "Who are you?" Collins managed to croak. "The moving men. Do we look like the Vanizaggi Sisters?" "But where do you come from?" Collins asked. "And why?" "We come from the Powha Minnile Movers, Incorporated," the man said. "And we come because you wanted movers, that's why. Now, where you want it?" "Go away," Collins said. "I'll call for you later." The moving men shrugged their shoulders and vanished. For several minutes, Collins stared at the spot where they had been. Then he stared at the Class-A Utilizer, which was humming softly again. Utilizer? He could give it a better name. A Wishing Machine. Collins was not particularly shocked. When the miraculous occurs, only dull, workaday mentalities are unable to accept it. Collins was certainly not one of those. He had an excellent background for acceptance. spent wishing, hoping, praying that something marvelous would happen to him. In high school, he had dreamed of waking up some morning with an ability to know his homework without the tedious necessity of studying it. In the army, he had wished for some witch or jinn to change his orders, putting him in charge of the Day Room, instead of forcing him to do closeorder drill like everyone else. Out of the army, Collins had avoided work, for which he was psychologically unsuited. He had drifted around, hoping that some fabulously wealthy person would be induced to change his will, leaving him Everything. He had never really expected anything to happen. But he was prepared when it did. "I'd like a thousand dollars in small unmarked bills," Collins said cautiously. When the hum grew louder, he pressed the button. In front of him appeared a large mound of soiled singles, five and ten dollar bills. They were not crisp, but they certainly were money. Collins threw a handful in the air and watched it settle beautifully to the floor. He lay on his bed and began making plans. First, he would get the machine out of New York -- upstate, perhaps -- some place where he wouldn't be bothered by nosy neighbors. The income tax would be tricky on this sort of thing. Perhaps, after he got organized, he should go to Central America, or... There was a suspicious noise in the room. Collins leaped to his feet. A hole was opening in the wall, and someone was forcing his way through. "Hey, I didn't ask you anything!" Collins told the machine. The hole grew larger, and a large, red-faced man was halfway through, pushing angrily at the hole. At that moment, Collins remembered that machines usually have owners. Anyone who owned a wishing machine wouldn't take kindly to having it gone. He would go to any lengths to recover it. Probably, he wouldn't stop short of -- "Protect me!" Collins shouted at the Utilizer, and stabbed the red button. pajamas appeared, yawning sleepily. "Sanisa Leek, Temporal Wall Protection Service," he said, rubbing his eyes. "I'm Leek. What can I do for you?" "Get him out of here!" Collins screamed. The red-faced mart, waving his arms wildly, was almost through the hole. Leek found a bit of bright metal in his pajamas pocket. The red-faced man shouted, "Wait! You don't understand! That man -- " Leek pointed his piece of metal. The red-faced man screamed and vanished. In another moment the hole had vanished too. "Did you kill him?" Collins asked. "Of course not," Leek said, putting away the bit of metal. "I just veered him back through his glommatch. He won't try that way again." "You mean he'll try some other way?" Collins asked. "It's possible," Leek said. "He could attempt a micro-transfer, or even an animation." He looked sharply at Collins. "This is your Utilizer, isn't" it?" "Of course," Collins said, starting to perspire. "And you're an A-rating?" "Naturally," Collins told him. "If I wasn't, what would I be doing with a Utilizer?" "No offense," Leek said drowsily, "just being friendly." He shook his head slowly. "How you As get around! I suppose you've come back here to do a history book?" Collins just smiled enigmatically. "I'll be on my way," Leek said, yawning copiously. "On the go, night and day. I'd be better off in a quarry." And he vanished in the middle of a yawn. Rain was still beating against the ceiling. Across the airshaft, the snoring continued, undisturbed. Collins was alone again, with the machine. And with a thousand dollars in small bills scattered around the floor. He patted the Utilizer affectionately. Those A-ratings had it pretty good. Want something? Just ask for it and press a button. Undoubtedly, the real owner missed it. Leek had said that the man might try to get in some other way. What way? What did it matter? Collins gathered up the bills, whistling softly. As long as he had the wishing machine, he could take care of himself. rwHE next few days marked a great change in Collins' fortunes. With the aid of the Powha Minnile Movers he took the Utilizer to upstate New York. There, he bought a medium-sized mountain in a neglected corner of the Adirondacks. Once the papers were in his hands, he walked to the center of his property, several miles from the highway. The two movers, sweating profusely, lugged the Utilizer behind him, cursing monotonously as they broke through the dense underbrush. "Set it down here and scram," Collins said. The last few days had done a lot for his confidence. The moving men sighed wearily and vanished. Collins looked around. On all sides, as far as he could see, was closely spaced forest of birch and pine. The air was sweet and damp. Birds were chirping merrily in the treetops, and an occasional squirrel darted by. Nature! He had always loved nature. This would be the perfect spot to build a large, impressive house with swimming pool, tennis courts and, possibly, a small airport. "I want a house," Collins stated firmly, and pushed the red button. A man in a neat gray business suit and pince-nez appeared. "Yes, sir," he said, squinting at the trees, "but you really must be more specific. Do you want something classic, like a bungalow, ranch, split-level, mansion, castle or palace? Or primitive, like an igloo or hut? Since you are an A, you could have something up-to-the-minute, like a semiface, an Extended New or a Sunken Miniature." "Huh?" Collins said. "I don't know. What would you suggest?" "Small mansion," the man said promptly. "They usually start with that." "They do?" "Oh, yes. Later, they move to a warm climate and build a palace. Collins wanted to ask more questions, but he decided against it. Everything was going smoothly. These people thought he was an A, and the true owner of the Utilizer. There was no sense in disenchanting them. "You take care of it all," he told the man. "Yes, sir," the man said. "I usually do." The rest of the day, Collins reclined on a couch and drank iced beverages while the Maxima Olph Construction Company materialized equipment and put up his house. It was a low-slung affair of some twenty rooms, which Collins considered quite modest under the circumstances. It was built only of the best materials, from a design of Mig of Degma, interior by Towige, a Mula swimming pool and formal gardens by Vierien. By evening, it was completed, and the small army of workmen packed up their equipment and vanished.  prepare a light supper for him. Afterward, he sat in his large, cool living room to think the whole thing over. In front of him, humming gently, sat the Utilizer. Collins lighted a cheroot and sniffed the aroma. First of all, he rejected any supernatural explanations. There were no demons or devils involved in this. His house had been built by ordinary human beings, who swore and laughed and cursed like human beings. The Utilizer was simply a scientific gadget, which worked on principles he didn't understand or care to understand. Could it have come from another planet? Not likely. They wouldn't have learned English just for him. The Utilizer must have come from the Earth's future. But how? Collins leaned back and puffed his cheroot. Accidents will happen, he reminded himself. Why couldn't the Utilizer have just slipped into the past? After all, it could create something from nothing, and that was much more complicated. What a wonderful future it must be, he thought. Wishing machines! How marvelously civilized! All a person had to do was think of something. Presto! There it was. In time, perhaps, they'd eliminate the red button. Then there'd be no manual labor involved. Of course, he'd have to watch his step. There was still the owner -- and the rest of the As. They would try to take the machine from him. Probably, they were a hereditary clique... A movement caught the edge of his eye and he looked up. The Utilizer was quivering like a leaf in a gale. Collins walked up to it, frowning blackly. A faint mist of steam surrounded the trembling Utilizer. It seemed to be overheating. Could he have overworked it? Perhaps a bucket of water... Then he noticed that the Utilizer was perceptibly smaller. It was no more than two feet square and shrinking before his eyes. The owner! Or perhaps the As! This must be the microtransfer that Leek had talked about. If he didn't do something quickly, Collins knew, his wishing machine would dwindle to nothingness and disappear. "Leek Protection Service," Collins snapped. He punched the button and withdrew his hand quickly. The machine was very hot. Leek appeared in a corner of the room, wearing slacks and a sports shirt, and carrying a golf club. "Must I be disturbed every time I -- " "Do something!" Collins shouted, pointing to the Utilizer, which was now only a foot square and glowing a dull red. "Nothing I can do," Leek said. "Temporal wall is all I'm licensed for. You want the microcontrol people." He hefted his golf club and was gone.L" said, and reached for the button. He withdrew his hand hastily. The Utilizer was only about four inches on a side now and glowing a hot cherry red. He could barely see the button, which was the size of a pin. Collins whirled around, grabbed a cushion and punched down. A girl with horn-rimmed glasses appeared, notebook in hand, pencil poised. "With whom did you wish to make an appointment?" she asked sedately. "Get me help fast!" Collins roared, watching his precious Utilizer grow smaller and smaller. "Mr. Vergon is out to lunch," the girl said, biting her pencil thoughtfully. "He's de-zoned himself. I can't reach him." "Who can you reach?" She consulted her notebook. "Mr. Vis is in the Dieg Continuum and Mr. Elgis is doing field work in Paleolithic Europe. If you're really in a rush, maybe you'd better call Transferpoint Control. They're a smaller outfit, but -- " "Transferpoint Control. Okay -- scram." He turned his full attention to the Utilizer and stabbed down on it with the scorched pillow. Nothing happened. The Utilizer was barely half an inch square, and Collins realized that the cushion hadn't been able to depress the almost invisible button. For a moment Collins considered letting the Utilizer go. Maybe this was the time. He could sell the house, the furnishings, and still be pretty well off... No! He hadn't wished for anything important yet! No one was going to take it from him without a struggle. He forced himself to keep his eyes open as he stabbed the white-hot button with a rigid forefinger. A thin, shabbily dressed old man appeared, holding something that looked like a gaily colored Easter egg. He threw it down. The egg burst and an orange smoke billowed out and was sucked directly into the infinitesimal Utilizer. A great billow of smoke went up, almost choking Collins. Then the Utilizer's shape started to form again. Soon, it was normal size and apparently undamaged. The old man nodded curtly. "We're not fancy," he said, "but we're reliable." He nodded again and disappeared. Collins thought he could hear a distant shout of anger. Shakily, he sat down on the floor in front of the machine. His hand was throbbing painfully. "Fix me up," he muttered through dry lips, and punched the button with his good hand. The Utilizer hummed louder for a moment, then was silent. The pain left his scorched finger and, looking down, Collins saw that there was no sign of a burn -- not even scar tissue to mark where it had been. Collins poured himself a long shot of brandy and went directly to bed. That night, he dreamed he was being chased by a gigantic letter A, but he didn't remember it in the morning. found that building his mansion in the woods had been precisely the wrong thing to do. He had to hire a platoon of guards to keep away sightseers, and hunters insisted on camping in his formal gardens. Also, the Bureau of Internal Revenue began to take a lively interest in his affairs. But, above all, Collins discovered he wasn't so fond of Nature after all. Birds and squirrels were all very well, but they hardly ranked as conversationalists. Trees, though quite ornamental, made poor drinking companions. Collins decided he was a city boy at heart. Therefore, with the aid of the Powha Minnile Movers, the Maxima Alph Construction Corporation, the Jagton Instantaneous Travel Bureau and a great deal of money placed in the proper hands, Collins moved to a small Central American republic. There, since the climate was warmer and Income Tax non-existent, he built a large, airy, ostentatious palace. It came equipped with the usual accessories -- horses, dogs, peacocks, servants, maintenance men, guards, musicians, bevies of dancing girls and everything else a palace should have. Collins spent two weeks just exploring the place. Everything went along nicely for a while. One morning Collins approached the Utilizer, with the vague intention of asking for a sports-car, or possibly a small herd of pedigreed cattle. He bent over the gray machine, reached for the red button... And the Utilizer backed away from him. For a moment, Collins thought he was seeing things, and he almost decided to stop drinking champagne before breakfast. He took a step forward and reached for the red button. The Utilizer sidestepped him neatly and trotted out of the room. cursing the owner and the As. This was probably the animation that Leek had spoken about -- somehow, the owner had managed to imbue the machine with mobility. It didn't matter. All he had to do was catch up, punch the button and ask for the Animation Control people. The Utilizer raced down a hall, Collins close behind. An underbutler, polishing a solid gold doorknob, stared open-mouthed... "Stop it!" Collins shouted. The under-butler moved clumsily into the Utilizer's path. The machine dodged him gracefully and sprinted toward the main door. Collins pushed a switch and the door slammed shut. The Utilizer gathered momentum and went right through it. Once in the open, it tripped over a garden hose, regained its balance and headed toward the open countryside. Collins raced after it. If he could get just a little closer... The Utilizer suddenly leaped into the air. It hung there for a long moment, then fell to the ground. Collins sprang at the button. The Utilizer rolled out of his way, took a short run and leaped again. For a moment, it hung twenty feet above his head -- drifted a few feet straight up, stopped, twisted wildly and fell. Collins was afraid that, on a third jump, it would keep going back to the ground, he was ready. He feinted, then stabbed at the button. The Utilizer couldn't duck fast enough. "Animation Control!" Collins roared triumphantly. There was a small explosion, and the Utilizer settled down docilely. There was no hint of animation left in it. Collins wiped his forehead and sat on the machine. Closer and closer. He'd better do some big wishing now, while he still had the chance. In rapid succession, he asked fuctioning oil wells, a motionpicture studio, perfect health, twenty-five more dancing girls, immortality, a sports-car and a herd of pedigreed cattle. He thought he heard someone snicker. He looked around. No one was there. When he turned back, the Utilizer had vanished. He just stared. And, in another moment, he vanished.  Collins found himself standing in front of a desk. On the other side was the large, redfaced man who had originally tried to break into his room The man didn't appear angry. Rather, he appeared resigned, even melancholy. Collins stood for a moment in silence, sorry that the whole thing was over. The owner . and the As had finally caught him. But it had been glorious while it lasted. "Well," Collins said directly, "you've got your machine back. Now, what else do you want?" "My machine?" the red-faced man said, looking up incredulously. "It's not my machine, sir. Not at all." Collins stared at him. "Don't try to kid me, mister. You Aratings want to protect your monopoly, don't you?" The red-faced man put down his paper. "Mr. Collins," he said stiffly, "my name is Flign. I am an agent for the Citizens Protective Union, a non-profit organization, whose aim is to protect individuals such as yourself from errors of judgment." "You mean you're not one of the As?" "You are laboring under a misapprehension, sir," Flign said with quiet dignity. "The A-rating does not represent a social group, as you seem to believe. It is merely a credit rating." "A what?" Collins asked slowly"A credit rating." Flign glanced at his watch. "We haven't much time, so I'll make this as brief as possible. Ours is a decentralized age, Mr. Collins. Our businesses, industries and services are scattered through an appreciable portion of space and time. The utilization corporation is an essential link. It provides for the transfer of goods and services from point to point. Do you understand?" Collins nodded. "Credit is, of course, an automatic privilege. But, eventually, everything must be paid for." Collins didn't like the sound of that. Pay? This place wasn't as civilized as he had thought. No one had mentioned paying. Why did they bring it up now? "Why didn't someone stop me?" he asked desperately. "They must have known# I didn't have a proper rating." Flign shook his head. "The credit ratings are suggestions, not laws. In a civilized world, an individual has the right to his own decisions. I'm very sorry, sir." He glanced at his watch again and handed Collins the paper he had been reading. "Would you just glance at this bill and tell me whether it's in order?" Collins took the paper and read : One Palace, with Accessories Cr. # Services of Maxima Olph Movers # # Dancing Girls # Perfect Health #I He scanned the rest of the list quickly. The total came to slightCredits. "Wait a minute!" Collins shouted. "I can't be held to this! The Utilizer just dropped into my room by accident!" "That's the very fact I'm going to bring to their attention," Flign said. "Who knows? Perhaps they will be reasonable. It does no harm to try." Collins felt the room sway. Flign's face began to melt before him. "Time's up," Flign said. "Good luck." Collins closed his eyes. he was standing on a bleak plain, facing a range of stubby mountains. A cold wind lashed his face and the sky was the color of steel. A raggedly dressed man was standing beside him. "Here," the man said and handed Collins a pick. "What's this?" "This is a pick," the man said patiently. "And over there is a quarry, where you and I and a number of others will cut marble." "Marble?" "Sure. There's always some idiot who wants a palace," the man said with a wry grin. "You can call me Jang. We'll be together for some time." Collins blinked stupidly. "How long?" "You work it out," Jang said. "The rate is fifty credits a month until your debt is paid off." The pick dropped from Collins' hand. They couldn't do this to him! The Utilization Corporation must realize its mistake by now! They had been at fault, letting the machine slip into the past. Didn't they realize that? "It's all a mistake!" Collins said. "No mistake," Jang said. "They're very short of labor. Have to go recruiting all over for it. Come on. After the first thousand years you won't mind it." Collins started to follow Jang toward the quarry. He stopped. "The first thousand years? I won't live that long!" "Sure you will," Jang assured him. "You got immortality, didn't you?" Yes, he had. He had wished for it, just before they took back the machine. Or had they taken back the machine after he wished for it? Collins remembered something. Strange, but he didn't remember seeing immortality on the bill Flign had showed him. "How much did they charge me for immortality?" he asked. Jang looked at him and laughed. "Don't be naive, pal. You should have it figured out by now." He led Collins toward the quarry. "Naturally, they give that away for nothing." I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or Engrland ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. Roger got his chance to rise in the world... and wound up with his head in the couds London, W. I April # Roger Brisby Hotel Massilon New York, N. Y. Roger dearest, I haven't heard from you since you arrived in New York. Are you well? All my love, Anne London, W. I April #I Roger dear. Really, Roger, you might have some consideration. After all, I am your fiancee. The very least you could do is drop me a postal card, even if you are on a business trip. I worry about you, Roger. It's been three weeks since I've heard from you. Love, Anne London, W. I April # My dear Roger, I won't stand for it. I simply won't! I know you too well! You're probably running around with those awful American women, and using my money to do it! Business trip, indeed! Don't think an ocean between us is going to stop me from finding out what you're doing! You write me this instant! Anne Hotel Massilon, N. Y. April # My dearest Anne, Please forgive the delay in replying to your letters and cable. The truth is that I was quite unable to write, anxious as I was to do so. It's a rather long story, but I would like to explain just how this came to be and so prove how unfounded your suspicions were. You see, shortly after I arrived here, I ran into a Professor Phelps Smythe Burdinghaugh, lately of England. Professor Burdinghaugh has been forced to resign from several universities in England because of the rather free manner in which he conducted his experiments. He admitted that no less than # physics laboratories have been demolished through his own miscalculations. At any rate, finding the atmosphere in our country somewhat cool toward his continued researches, he came to New York, which, as you know, is inhabited wholly by wealthy eccentrics, tourists and boors. Such an environment was eminently suited to the Professor's needs and he settled here to work on an antigravity belt, his lifelong project. You may wonder, reasonably enough, what Professor Burdinghaugh has to do with the delay in writing to you, but I assure you that, were it not for him, you would have heard from me much sooner. Much sooner indeed. It all began with a Scotch-andwater. The Professor and I were each having one and inevitably we struck up a conversation. We chatted on a great number of topics and I remember that he was quite impressed when I told him you were indeed the Chemicals Anne Harrodsbury. Not long after this, the old boy (he is fiftyish and rather heavy) invited me in the flush of good comradeship (and good Scotch) to take part in his latest experiment with his anti-gravity unit. Feeling rather light-headed, I heartily acclaimed his suggestion and we repaired to his laboratory. "My boy," he said to me later, as he strapped a bulky belt around my waist. "My boy, you are about to witness a milestone in history. Most assuredly, a milestone." I nodded, basking in the old boy's magnificent confidence. "We are about to enter a new era," he continued. "The Era of Space!" His voice dropped to a low, comradely whisper. "And I have chosen you, my boy, to assist me in forging this trail to new suns, new worlds, new civilizations! The whole Galaxy lies before us!" I could see only Professor Burdinghaugh's massive girth before me, but I assumed he could see things much more clearly than I. The Professor filled our glasses from the bottle I had bought, then put his face close to mine. "Do you know why no one has ever invented an anti-gravity belt?" he confided. "I'll tell you -- it takes research, and research takes money. And money is very hard to get. Especially," he added, gazing somberly at his highball, "in my field of research." He shrugged, then busied himself with some adjustments on the belt he had wrapped around me. "There," he said finally, stepping back, "it's ready." We went outside to the garden behind his laboratory. "All my life," he mused, "I've wanted to be the first to defy gravity, but -- " here a suspicious wetness glistened in his eyes -- "my fondness for good food and good drink has paid its price. I am far too heavy for the belt. That's why I am giving you this chance to roar to fame. You -- you will have the glory, while I..." He choked, then quickly drained his glass. "Enough! The stars are waiting! The experiment must begin!" He paused to refill his glass from the bottle he had brought out with him. "When I say, 'Go!' push this button on the belt," he explained. "Ready?" I nodded. "A toast first!" he cried. Soberly, he gazed at his glass. "To Man," he pronounced momentously, "and the Stars." He took a sizable swallow, then fixed me with a feverish glare. "Go.'" I confess that never, before or since, have I felt such a strange sensation as when I pushed the button on the belt. Suddenly, I felt like a leaf, or a feather, floating on a soft warm curl of cloud. It was as if all the troubles, all the cares of the world had been miraculously lifted from my shoulders. A glow of well-being seemed to pulse through my whole body. The sound of Professor Burdinghaugh's voice brought an abrupt end to this strange lightness of mind. The Professor was pointing at me with an intensity I rarely before have seen, muttering, "It works -- it worksV' He seemed rather amazed. I looked down and, with a feeling I can only describe as giddiness, saw that indeed it was working. I was rising slowly from the ground and was then about a foot in the air. At this historical juncture, we looked at each other for a moment, then began to laugh as success rushed to our heads. The Professor even did a mad little jig while, for my part, I gyrated in the air unrestrained. It was not until I was about ten feet off the ground that I began to feel uneasy. I was never one to stomach high altitudes, you might recall, and the sight of ten feet of emptiness beneath me was disquieting. "Professor," I asked hesitantly, "how do I turn off the belt?" Burdinghaugh's glass stopped an inch from his lips. "Turn it off?" he countered thickly. "Yes!" I shouted, now fifteen feet in the air. "How do I turn it off? How do I get down?" The Professor gazed up at me thoughtfully. "My boy," he said at last, "I never thought about getting down -- been much too concerned with getting jolly well up." "Burdinghaugh!" I screamed. "Get me down" I was now twenty feet above the ground. "I'm sorry, old boy, dreadfully sorry," he called to me. "I can't. But don't think your life will have been spent in vain. Indeed not! I'll see to it that you get proper credit as my assistant when the anti-gravity belt is perfected. You've been invaluable, dear boy, invaluable!" His voice faded. "Professor!" I screamed futilely, but by then we were too far apart to make ourselves heard and, even as I wasted my breath, a gust of wind caught me and sent me soaring into the air, spinning like a top. But, just before I entered a cloud, I saw the Professor standing far below, his feet planted wide apart, his head thrown back while he watched my progress. I fancied that, as I disappeared into the mist, he waved a solemn good-by and drank my health. You can't imagine the torture I went through as I sailed through the air. During those first few moments, I had felt light, carefree, buoyant. But, in these higher altitudes, I was buffeted by strong winds, pelted by rain in enormous quantities and subjected to sudden drops that had me gasping. How I managed to survive, I can't understand. Surely, I would have died if I had floated completely out of the atmosphere but, luckily, the belt's power to lift me leveled off at about # feet... For days, I drifted at that altitude, blown willy-nilly by the contrary winds, starved and bitterly cold. Several times, I tried to steer myself -- but to no avail. I was powerless to control my flight. My sense of direction left me and I had no idea where I was. Sometimes, I would look down through a rift in the clouds and see farmland, or perhaps cities. Once I glimpsed the sea -- and shut my eyes. It was not until the sixth day of my flight that I noticed a change. I was sinking. Slowly but steadily, I was losing altitude. I was at a loss to explain this phenomenon at first, but then I remembered that the Professor had said the belt was powered by batteries. Obviously, the batteries were weakening. A few hours later, I landed gently, only a few blocks from flight. During those six frightful days, I must have been blown around in circles. Weak, starved, shaken, sick, I was taken to a hospital, from which I have just been released. Needless to say, I immediately tried to locate Professor Burdinghaugh, but have been unable to find a trace of him. You might say he has disappeared into thin air. You must be wondering, of course, what this singular adventure has to do with my not writing you earlier. However, I feel certain you understand now that writing was impossible under the circumstances. All the ink in my fountain pen leaked out when I reached the altitude of # feet -- I have the kind of pen that writes under water -- and I had to put my pencil between my teeth to keep them from chattering and knocking out my inlays. During my stay at the hospital, of course, I couldn't write, as I was too weak even to flirt with the nurses -- which, as you know, is very weak indeed. So, please forgive my unfortunate lapse in correspondence. Truly, I would have written, had it been possible. Devotedly, Roger P.S. I resent your implication that I am engaged to you only because of your money. The fact that you are extremely wealthy and that I have virtually nothing, as I have told you many times before, never has and never will have anything to do with my love for you. I'm particularly hurt by your suspicion that I'd spend your money on other women. Really, I'm shocked that such a thing could even occur to you. And, now that you know why I haven't written before, I trust you'll restore my draw on your account at the bank. My funds are rather low. Roger London, W. I May I Dear Roger, I always sensed you were a despicable, smooth-talking golddigger -- but I didn't really convince myself of it until I read your letter. Do you really expect me to believe that story? An antigravity belt! What do you take me for -- one of your silly impressionable American women? Besides, I happen to have met your Professor Phelps-Smythe Burdinghaugh in London, only a few days ago, and he assured me that, while he had met you in New York, it was under very different circumstances from those you described. He said you were with two women and that all three of you were quite drunk. He also said he had never invented an anti-gravity belt and seemed rather amused at the idea. Needless to say, he was surprised to learn that I was your fiancee. He was under the impression that you were engaged to some American girl, he said, but he couldn't tell which one. That was the last straw. This is the end, Roger. Our engagement is broken. I bear you no ill will -- indeed. I'm glad it's all over. The one thing I'm furious about is the way you maligned the Professor, trying to make me think he was responsible for your not writing. How perfectly ridiculous! Really, Roger, you would do well to model yourself after the Professor. He is so charming, so cultured, so thoughtful! I'll never forgive you for trying to blame him for your own shortcomings. Anne P.S. For obvious reasons, I shan't restore your draw on my account at the bank. And that's another thing. I thought you were awfully vague about what "business" you had in New York, and now I know. The Professor said you told him you were on vacation. Business trip indeed! Cad! Anne London, W. I May # My dear boy. Ever since I watched you disappear into that cloud, I have been trying to think of some way to make up to you the beastly suffering you must have experienced at my behest. At long last. I have discovered a way. Immediately after the experiment, I found it necessary to return to London. While there, seeking funds to continue my researches, I happened to meet your fiancee. It was at this moment that I conceived the plan for which I know you will be eternally thankful. I had been troubled by the fact that the world was being deprived of your obvious natural else would have thought of needing a button to turn off the antigravity belt? -- because of your ties to more material things. Namely, your fiancee. I therefore resolved to free you from your bonds -- and hers -- and give the world the benefit of your genius. Carrying out this plan was no easy task, however, and I am sure you will appreciate the problems involved. I first had to convince Anne that your story was pure rot, or else she would have hung on to you like a leech for the rest of your life. This I did by denying all particulars of your story -- or, rather, by telling the truth about your activities in New York -- and adding a few embellishments of my own. Of course, this was only temporary relief. I knew something more permanent had to be done to keep her from ruining your bright future. It was clear there was only one solution -- I had to woo her myself. I may add that she has found me not unattractive and so I have every reason to believe we shall be married within the fortnight. Thus, I have rid you of all entanglements and freed you to use your vast talents to advance the cause of science. At the same time, if I may return to a more materialistic plane, I have provided myself with sufficient funds to carry on my researches, since Anne will gladly supply same. But please -- do not feel in debt to me. I consider it a privilege to sacrifice myself to Anne for such a glorious cause. Then too, ladies of such obvious refinement -- and means -- always have appealed to me. I hope that in this small way I have in part repaid you for your invaluable contribution to my work. Sincerely, Phelps-Smythe Burdinghaugh P.S. Since, by marrying Anne, I shall become your creditor, I suggest you make arrangements with utmost despatch to repay the monies you borrowed from her. Shall we say thirty days, dear boy? My researches are quite expensive. I do, you know, still have a quite genuine fondness for good food and drink. Brisby Enterprises, Inc., N. Y. June # My dear Burdinghaugh, You win. Anne is yours, for which I am glad. I may have forgotten to tell you that nearly all of her funds are in untouchable trusts -- not in bonds. In regard to the monies due you, my cheque will be in the mails this week. Such trifling amounts now mean nothing to me. As for your methods in usurping my relationship with Anne, I have only admiration -- speaking as one professional to another, of course. Unfortunately, however, in your eagerness to get your hands on Anne's fortune, you quite overlooked one very important item -- the key item, in fact -- the anti-gravity belt. It may be of interest to you that I have taken out a patent on the belt and am manufacturing small units for toy spaceships. The "gimmick," as these American subjects put it, is "hot" and the turnover is fantastic. The toy ships rise and rise into the sky and never come down and, as soon as they disappear, the junior rocketmen immediately start bawling for another one. It isn't quite the Era of Space, but it's considerably more profitable. Pity you hadn't thought about patenting the belt -- these Americans are so free with their dollars. But then, you have Anne. What could be fairer? Gratefully yours, Roger fantasy books and back dated maffaslnes (Astounding, Galaxy, complete contents of the original editions of "Book of the Damned." "Wild Talents." "New Luids." and "Lo." There are Just naturally no other books like these In the world. They contain thousands of actual, documented oceurrencra that fall way outside the boundaries of our arbitrarily tidy human sciences and fields of knowledge, comptetel unexplainable happenings. For Just a few examples, there are doaens of documented Instances of teleportation, of astronomical and geological enigmas and "Impossibilities," and of space ships seen repeatedly during the past three centuries (not Just since #). Incidentally, that's why the Army Issued these books to all Project Saucer investigators. If you read these four books, your orderly, safe and sane little world will nev again look the same to you. 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When enemy aliens can outbreed humanity, good old biology isn't good enough... but there IS an answer and it is to be found: Down Among The Dead Men Junkyard's outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it had when I saw a whole terrestrial sub-fleet -- close to # men -- blown to bits in the Second Battle of Saturn, more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate and imagined screams of men in my mind, there had been the expanding images of the Eoti's boxlike craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck. Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and spacious proving grounds -- The Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder, the heave of my stomach more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this place. A ll of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great grandmother hag of all fears, the Ancient of Days, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was understandable -- but that didn't help any. I still couldn't walk up to the sentry at the gate. I'd been almost all right until I'd seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top: -- Conservation Police I'd seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But seeing them now, in this place, gave them a different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know the kind of thing: We need all our resources to defeat the enemy -- and Decorating the walls of this building with those posters would be downright ingenious. Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed... I flexed my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt like a part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And, in a couple of years, assuming that I lived that long, the thin white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely invisible. Sure -- whatever is maimed can be reclaimed. All except one thing -- the most important thing. I now felt less like going in than ever. And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base. He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed just like me. In the center of his uniform cap was a brand-new, shinygold Y with a dot in the center -- the insignia of a slingshot commander. He hadn't been wearing it the day before at the briefing. That could only mean the commission had just come through. He looked real young and real scared. I remembered him from the briefing session. He was the one whose hand had timidly gone up during the question period; the one who, when he was recognized, had half-risen, worked his mouth a couple of times and finally blurted out, "Excuse me, sir, but they don't -- they don't smell at all badly, do they?" There had been a virtual cyclone of laughter, the yelping laughter of men who themselves had been close to the torn edge of hysteria all afternoon and who were damned glad that someone had at last said something they could make believe was funny. And the white-haired briefing officer, who hadn't so much as smiled, waited for the hysteria to work itself out, before saying gravely, "No, they don't smell at all badly. Unless, that is, they don't bathe. The same as with you gentlemen." kid, blushing his way back into his seat, set his jaw stiffly at that reminder. And it wasn't until twenty minutes later, when we'd been dismissed, that I began to feel the ache in my own face from the unrelaxed muscles there. "The same as with you gentlemen..." I shook myself hard and walked over to the kid. "Hello, Commander," I said, "been here long?" He managed a grin. "Over an hour. Commander. I caught the #:# out of the Base. Most of the other fellows were still sleeping off last night's party. I'd gone to bed early -- I wanted to give myself as much, time to get the feel of this thing as I could. Only -- it doesn't seem to have done much good." "I know. Some things you can't get used to. Some things you're not supposed to get used to." He looked at my chest. "I guess this isn't your first slingshot command?" My first? More like my twentyfirst, son! But then I remembered that everyone tells me I look young for my medals, and what the hell, the kid seemed so pale under the chin. "No, not exactly my first. But I've never had a blob crew before. This is exactly as new to me as it is to you. Hey, listen. Commander -- I'm having a hard time too. What say we bust through that gate together? Then the worst'll be over." The kid nodded violently. We linked arms and marched up to the sentry. We showed him our orders. He opened the gate and said, "Straight ahead. Any elevator on your left to the fifteenth floor." So, still arm in arm, we walked into the main entrance of the large building, up a long flight of steps and under the sign that said in red and black: There were some old-looking, but very erect, men walking along the main lobby and a lot of uniformed, fairly pretty girls. I was pleased to note that most of the girls were pregnant. The first pleasing sight I had hit in almost a week. We turned into an elevator and told the girl, "Fifteen." She punched a button and waited for it to fill up. She didn't seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the matter with her. I'd almost managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination when I got a close look at the shouldei patches each of the other passengers was wearing. That almost did for me right there. It was a circular red patch with for Terrestrial Armed Forces, of course -- the letters were the basic insignia of all rear echelon outfits. But why didn't they use G-#, which represented the Personnel Division? G-# stood for Supply. Supply! specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their educated heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting perimeters -- but every damned time, the good old ugliest name, the one in the worst possible taste. Oh, sure, I told myself, you can't fight a shattering, no-quarter interstellar war for twentyfive years and keep every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact. But not Supply, gentlemen. Not this place -- not The Junkyard. Let's at least try to keep up appearances. Then we began going up, and while the elevator girl began announcing floors, I had lots of other things to think about. "Third Floor -- Corpse Reception and Classification," the girl operator sung out. "Fifth Floor -- Preliminary Organ Processing." "Seventh Floor -- Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment." "Ninth Floor -- Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes and Muscular Control." At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you're on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler. After you've been around when it's happened a couple of times, you learn to kind of close your ears and say to yourself, "I don't know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will be nice and quiet again." And, in a few minutes, it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you'll be part of the detail that's ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again. Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl's voice blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth floor -- "Final Interviews and Shipping" -- and the kid and I had to get out. He was real green. A definite sag around the knees, shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had curled. Again, I was grateful to him. Nothing like having somebody to take care of. "Come on. Commander," I whispered. "Up and at 'em. Look at it this way -- for characters like us, this is practically a family reunion." It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as if I'd punched his face. "No thanks to you for the reminder, mister," he said. Then he walked stiffly up to the receptionist. I could have bitten off my tongue. I hurried after him. "I'm sorry, kid," I told him earnestly. "That damned word just slides out of my big mouth. But don't get sore at me. Hell, I had to listen to myself say it too." He thought about it a moment and then nodded. Then he gave me a smile. "Okay -- no hard feelings. It's a rough war, isn't it?" I smiled back. "Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it." II T he receptionist was a soft little blonde with two wedding rings on one hand, and one wedding ring on the other. From what I knew of current planetside customs, that meant she'd been widowed twice. She took our orders and read jauntily'into her desk mike, "Attention, Final Conditioning. Attention, Final Conditioning. Alert for immediate shipment the following serial numbers -- #, #, # and #. Also #, #, # and #. Please route through the correct numbered sections and check all data on #. Advise when available for Final Interviews." I was impressed. Almost the same procedure as when you go to Ordnance for a replacement set of stern exhaust tubes. She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile. "Your crews will be ready in a moment. Would you have a seat, gentlemen?" S# After a while, she got up to take a folder out of a file cabinet set in the wall. As she came back to her desk, I noticed she was pregnant -- only about the third or fourth month -- and, naturally, I gave a little satisfied nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid make the same kind of nod. We looked at each other and chuckled. "Yeah, it's a rough, rough war," he said. "Where are you from anyway?" I asked. "That doesn't sound like a Third District accent to me." "It isn't. I was born in Scandinavia -- Eleventh Military District. My home town is Goteborg, Sweden. But, after I got my -- my promotion, naturally I didn't care to see the folks any more. So, I requested a transfer to the Third, and from now on until I hit a scrambler, this is where I'll be spending my furloughs and Earthside hospitalizations." I'd heard that a lot of the younger slingshotters felt that way. Personally, I never had a chance to find out how I'd feel about visiting the old folks at home. My father was knocked off in the suicidal attempt to retake Neptune -- 'way back when I was still in high school, learning elementary space combat -- and my mother was Admiral Raguzzi's staff secretary when the flagship Thermopylae took a direct hit two years later, in the famous defense of Ganymede. That was before the Breeding Regulations, of course, and women were still serving in administrative positions on the fighting perimeters. O N the other hand, at least two of my brothers might still be alive. But I'd made no attempt to contact them since getting my dotted Y. So, I guessed I felt the same way as the kid -- which was hardly surprising. "Are you from Sweden?" the blonde girl was asking. "My second husband was born in Sweden. Maybe you knew him -- Sven Nossen? I understand he had a lot of relatives in Oslo." The kid screwed up his eyes as if he was thinking real hard. You know, running down a list of all the Swedes in Oslo. Finally, he shook his head. "No, can't say that I do. But I wasn't out of Goteborg very often before I was called up." She clucked sympathetically at his provincialism -- the babyfaced blonde of classic anecdote. A real dumb babe. And yet -- there were lots of very clever, high-pressure cuties around the inner planets these days, who had to content themselves with a onefifth interest in some abysmal slob who boasted the barest modicum of maleness, or a certificate from the local sperm bank. Blondie here was on her third full husband. Maybe, I thought, if I were looking for a wife myself, this is what I'd pick to take the stink of scrambler rays out of my nose and the yammer-yammer-yammer of Irvingles out of my ears. Maybe I'd want somebody pretty and simple to come back to from one of those complicated skirmishes with the Eoti, where you spend most of your conscious thoughts trying to figure out just what battle rhythm the filthy insects are using this time. Maybe, if I were going to get married, I'd find a well-stacked fluffhead like this more generally desirable than -- oh, well, maybe. Considered as a problem in psychology, it was interesting. I noticed she was talking to me. "You've never had a crew of this type before either, have you. Commander?" "Zombies, you mean? No, this is my first. I'm happy to say." She made a disapproving pout with her mouth. It was fully as cute as her approving pouts. "We do not like that word." "All right, blobs then." "We don't like bl -- that word either. You are talking about human beings like yourself. Commander. Very much like yourself." I began to get sore fast, just the way the kid had out in the hall. Then I realized she didn't mean anything by it. She didn't know. What the hell -- it wasn't on our orders. I relaxed. "You tell me. What do you call them here?" blonde sat up stiffly. "We refer to them as soldier surrogates. The epithet 'zombie' was used to describe the obsolete Model #, which went out of production over five years ago. You will be supplied with individuals based on Model # and #, which are practically perfect. In fact, in some respects -- " "No bluish skin? No slow-motion sleepwalking?" She shook her head violently. Her eyes lit up. Evidently she'd digested all the promotional literature. Not such a fluffhead, after all -- no great mind, but her husbands had evidently had someone to talk to at times. She rattled on enthusiastically. "The cyanosis was the result of bad Mood oxygenation -- blood was our second most difficult tissue reconstruction problem. The nervous system was the hardest. Even though the blood cells are usually in the poorest shape of all, when the bodies arrive, we can now turn out a very serviceable rebuilt heart. But let there be the teeniest battle damage to the brain or spine, and you have to start right from scratch. And then the troubles in reconstitution! "My cousin Loma works in Neural Alignment, and she tells me all you need to make is just one wrong connection -- you know how it is, Commander. At the end of the day your eyes are tired, and you're kind of watching the clock -- just one wrong connection, and the reflexes in the finished individual turn out so bad that they just have to send him down to the third floor and begin all over again. But you don't have to worry about that. Since Model #, we've been using the two-team inspection system in Neural Alignment. And the # series -- oh, they've just been wonderful." "That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother's son type?" "Well-#-#." She considered. "You'd really be amazed. Commander, if you could see the very latest performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we've never been able to -- " "One thing  can't understand," the kid broke in. "Why do they have to use corpses? A body's lived its life, fought its war -- why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the number of queens in their flagships, I know that manpower is the biggest single synthesizing protoplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real honest-to-God androids that don't wallop you with the stink of death when you meet them?" blonde got mad. "Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses. I'll have you know. What we do is reclaim human protoplasm. We re-use worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn't talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes, in an entire baling package -- a baling package contains twenty casualities -- we don't find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa -- " "That's what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raW material?" "Like what, for example?" she asked him. kid gestured with his black-gloved hands. "Basic elements -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on." "Basic elements have to come from somewhere," I pointed out gently. "You might take your hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. But from where would you get your carbon?" "From the same place where the other synthetic manufacturers get it -- coal, oil, cellulose." The receptionist sat back and relaxed. "Those are organic substances," she reminded him. "If you're going to use raw material that was once alive, why not use the kind that comes as close as possible to the end product you have in mind? It's simple industrial economics. Commander, believe me. The best and cheapest raw material for the manufacture of soldier surrogates are soldier bodies." "Sure," the kid said. "Makes sense. There's no other use for dead, old, beaten-up soldier bodies. Better'n shoving them in the ground, where they'd be just waste, pure waste." Our little blonde chum started to smile in agreement, then shot him an intense glance and changed her mind. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. When the communicator on her desk buzzed, she bent over it eagerly. I watched her with approval. Definitely no fluffhead. Just very feminine. I sighed. You see, I judge plenty of people the wrong way, but only with women is my wrongness an all-the-time proposition. Proving again, that a hell of a lot of peculiar things turn out to have happened for the best. "Commander," she was saying to the kid, "would you go to Room #? Your crew will be there in a moment." She turned to me. "And Room # for you, straight ahead, Commander, if you please." The kid nodded and walked off, very straight and erect. I waited until the door had closed behind him, then I leaned close to the receptionist. "Wish they'd change the Breeding Regulations again," I told her. "You'd make a damn fine rear-echelon orientation officer. I got more feel of The Junkyard from you than in ten briefing sessions." She examined my face anxiously. "I hope you mean that. Commander. You see, we're all very deeply involved in this project. We're extremely proud of the progress the Third District Finishing Plant has made. We talk about the new developments all the time, everywhere -- even in the cafeteria. It didn't occur to me until too late that you gentlemen might -- " she blushed deep rich red, the way only a blonde can blush -- "might take what I said personally. I'm sorry if I -- " "Nothing to be sorry about," I assured her. "All you did was talk shop. Like when I was in the hospital last month and heard two surgeons discussing how to repair a man's arm, and making it sound as if they were going to nail a new arm back on an expensive chair. Real interesting and I learned a lot." I left her looking grateful, which is absolutely the only way to leave a woman, and barged on to Room #. Ill TT was evidently used as a classroom when reconverted human junk wasn't being picked up. A bunch of chairs, a long blackboard, a couple of charts.  One of the charts was on the Eoti, the basic information list that contains all the limited information we have been able to assemble on the bugs in the bloody quarter-century since they came busting in past Pluto to take over the Solar System. It hadn't been changed much since the one I'd had to memorize in high school -- the only difference was a slightly longer section on intelligence and motivation. Just theory, of course, but more carefully thought-out theory than the stuff I'd learned. The big brains had now concluded that the reason all attempts at communicating with them had failed was not because they were a conquest-crazy species, but because they suffered from the same extreme xenophobia as their smaller, less intelligent communal insect cousins here on Earth. That is, an ant wanders up to a strange ant hill -- zok ! -- no discussion, he's chopped down at the entrance. And the soldier ants react even faster if it's a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in far too many respects is more advanced than ours, they are psychologically incapable of the kind of mental projection or empathy necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking neighbor has intelligence, feelings -- and rights! The same as oneself. Far too many humans lack this kind of empathy, for that matter. Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with the Eoti on a perimeter of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Saturn and occasionally contracted as close as Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their fleet before they could duplicate the weapon -- as they'd been managing to up to now -- our only hope was to somehow discover the stellar system from which they came, somehow build ourselves not one starship, but a fleet of them -- and somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it sdthat they'd pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows. But, if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn't been so, despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations, which were steadily pulverizing every one of our moral codes and sociological advances. Then, someone in the Conservation Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvaged derelicts, he wondered... And thus arrived what Blondie, outside, and her co-workers were diplomatic enough to call soldier surrogates. T'D been a computer's mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Kahn when the first batch had come aboard as battle replacements. Let me tell you, we had real good reason for calling them zombies! Most of them were as blue as the uniforms they wore, their breathing was so noisy it made you think of asthmatics with built-in public address systems, their eyes shone with all the intelligence of petroleum jelly -- and the way they walked! My friend, Johnny Cruro, the first man to get knocked off in the Great Breakthrough of #, used to say that they walked as if they were trying to pick their way down a steep hill at the bottom of which was a large, open, family-size grave. Body held strained and tense -- legs and arms moving slow, slow, until suddenly they'd finish with a jerk -- creepy as hell. They weren't good for anything but the drabbest fatigue detail. And even then... If you told them to polish a gun mounting, you had to remember to come back in an hour and turn them off, or they might scrub their way clear through into empty space. Of course, they weren't all that bad. Johnny Cruro used to say he'd met one or two who could achieve imbecility when they were feeling right. Combat was what finished concerned. Not that they broke under battle conditions -- just the reverse. The old ship would be rocking and screaming as it changed course every few seconds, every Irvingle, scrambler and nucleonic howitzer along the firing corridor turning bright golden yellow from the heat it was generating, a hoarse, yelping voice from the bulkhead loudspeakers pouring out orders, men staggering from one emergency station to another, everyone around you working like a blur and cursing and wondering out loud why the Eoti were taking so long to tag a target as big and as slow as the Khan. Then, suddenly, you'd see a zombie clutching a broom in his rubbery hands and sweeping the deck in the slack-jawed, moronic and horribly earnest way they had... I remember whole gun crews going amuck and slamming into the zombies with long crowbars and metal-gloved fists. Once, even an officer, sprinting back to the control room, flipped out his side-arm and pumped bolt after bolt of jagged thunder at a blueskin who'd been peacefully wiping a porthole while the bow of the ship was being burned away. And, as the zombie sagged uncomprehendingly and uncomplainingly to the floor-plates, the young officer stood over him and chanted soothingly, the way you do to a boisterous dog, "Down, boy, down. Down, down, damn bies were eventually pulled back. Not because of inefficiency -- the incidence of battle psycho around them just shot up too high. Maybe, if it hadn't been for that, we'd have gotten used to them eventually -- God knows you get used to enough in combat. But the zombies belonged to something beyond mere war. They were so terribly, terribly unstirred by the prospect of dying again! Well, everyone said the new models were a big improvement. They'd better be. A slingshot may be one thin notch below an outright suicide patrol, but you need peak performance from every man aboard if you're going to complete its crazy mission, let alone return. And it's an awful small ship, and the men have to kind of get along with each other in very close quarters. I heard feet, several pairs of them, rapping along the corridor. They stopped outside the door. They waited. I waited. My skin began to prickle. And then I heard that uncertain shuffling sound. They were nervous about meeting me! I walked over to the window and stared down at the drill field, where old veterans, whose minds and bodies were too worn-out to be repaired, taught fatigue-uniformed zombies how to use their newly conditioned reflexes in close-order drill. And then, when the hands I'd clasped behind me had almost squeezed their blood back into my wrists, I heard the door open and four pairs of feet clatter into the room. The door closed, and four pairs of feet clicked to attention. I turned around. They were saluting me. Well, what the hell, I told myself, they're supposed to be saluting me. I am their commanding officer. I returned the salute and four arms whipped down smartly. I said, "At ease." They snapped their legs apart, arms behind them. I thought about it and said, "Rest." They relaxed their bodies slightly. I thought about it again. I said, "Hell, men, sit down and let's meet each other." They sprawled into chairs, and I hitched myself up on the instructor's desk. We stared back and forth. Their faces were rigid, watchful -- they weren't giving anything away. I wondered what my face looked like. In spite of all the orientation lectures, in spite of all the preparation, I must admit that my first glimpse of them had hit me hard. They were glowing with health, normalcy and hard purpose. But that wasn't it. That wasn't it at all! What was making me want to run out of the door, out of the building, was something I'd been schooling myself to expect since that last briefing session in Arizona Base. Four dead men were staring at me. Four very famous dead men. The big man, lounging all over his chair, was Roger Grey, who had been killed over a year ago when he rammed his tiny scoutship up the forward jets of an Eoti flagship. He'd split the flagship neatly in two. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Grey was to be my copilot. HE thin, alert man with the tight shock of black hair was Wang Hsi. He had been killed covering the retreat to the asteroids after the Great Breakthrough of #. According to the fantastic story the observers told, his ship had still been firing after it had been scrambled three times. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Wang was to be my engineer. The darkish little fellow was Yussuf Lamehd. He'd been killed in a very minor skirmish off Titan, but at the time of his death, he was the most decorated man Corona. Lamehd was to be my gunner. The heavy one was Stanley Weinstein, the only prisoner of war ever to escape from the Eoti. There wasn't much left of him by the time he'd arrived on Mars, but the ship he had come in was the first enemy craft that humanity could study intact. There was no Solar Corona in his day for him to receive even posthumously, but they're still naming military academies after him. Weinstein was to be my astrogator. Then I shook myself back to reality. These weren't the original heroes, probably didn't have even one particle of Roger Grey's blood or Wang Hsi's flesh upon their reconstructed bones. They were just excellent and faithful copies, made to minute physical specifications which had been in had been a cadet and Grey a young recruit. IV a hundred to a thousand Yussuf Lamehds and Stanley Weinsteins, I had to remind myself -- and they had all come off an assembly line a few floors down. "Only the brave deserve the future," was The Junkyard's motto, and it was currently trying to assure that future for them by man who went out with especial heroism. There was that little gimmick of industrial efficiency again. If you're using mass production methods, and The Junkyard was doing just that, it's plain common sense to turn out a few standardized models, rather than have everyone different -- like the stuff an individual creative craftsman might come up with. Well, if they are to be standardized models, why not use those that have positive and relatively pleasant associations bound up with their appearance rather than anonymous characters from the designers' drawing boards? Another reason for using hero models was almost more important and harder to define. According to the briefing officer yesterday, there was an obscure feeling -- a superstitious feeling, almost -- that, if you copied a hero's features, musculature, metabolism and even his cortex wrinkles carefully enough, you might build yourself another hero. Of course, the original personality would never reappear -- that had been produced by long years of environment and dozens of other very slippery factors -- but it was distinctly possible, the bio-techs felt, that a modicum of useful courage resided in the body structure alone. Well, at least these zombies didn't look like zombies! For which I was grateful. On impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket, pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move that way. "Thanks," I said. He just nodded. next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he had it. It's almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out of the five slingshotters hunched over the blowtop table, you know right off which is the gunner. It's a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it's what you need. Lamehd had it so strong I'd have put money on him against any other gunner in Astrogators and engineers are different. You've got to see them work under pressure before you can begin to rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them. Right then, I felt a hundred pounds slide off my chest. I felt relaxed for the first time in days. I really liked my crew, zombies or no. We'd make it. I decided to tell them. "Men," I said, "I think we'll really get along. I think we've got the makings of a sweet, smooth slingshot. You'll find me -- " And I stopped. That cold, slightly mocking look in their eyes. The way they had glanced at each other when I told them I thought we'd get along, glanced at each other and blown slightly through distended nostrils. I realized that none of them had said anything since they'd come in. They'd just been watching me and their eyes weren't exactly warm. I stopped and let my mind take a long, deep breath. For the first time, it was occurring to me that I'd been worrying about just one end of the problem, maybe the least important end. I'd been worrying about how I'd react to them and how much I'd be able to accept them as shipmates. They were zombies, after all. It had never occurred to me to wonder how they'd feel about me. And there was evidently something very wrong in how they felt about me. "What is it, men?" I asked. They all looked at me inquiringly. "What's on your minds? What's bothering you?" They kept looking at me. Weinstein pursed his lips and tilted his chair back and forth. It creaked. Nobody said anything. "Grey," I said walking up and down in the front of the classroom. "You look as if you've got a great big knot inside you. Want to tell me about it?" "No, Commander," he said slowly and deliberately. "I do not want to tell you about it." I grimaced. "If anyone wants to say anything -- anything at all -- it'll be off the record -- completely off the record. Also, for the moment, we'll forget about regulations." I waited. "Wang? Lamehd? How about you, Weinstein?" They stared at me silently. Weinstein's chair creaked back and forth. TT had me baffled. What kind of gripe could they have against me? They'd never met me before. But I knew one thing -- I wasn't going to haul a crew nursing a sub-surface grudge as unanimous as this aboard a slingshot. I wasn't going to chop space with those eyes at my back. It would be more efficient for me to shove my head against an Irvingle lens and push the button. "Listen," I told them, "I meant what I said about forgetting rank run a happy ship, and I have to know what's up. We'll be living -- the five of us -- in the tightest, most cramped conditions Man has yet been able to devise. We'll be operating a tiny ship whose only purpose is to dodge, at tremendous speed, through the firepower and screening devices of the largest enemy craft and deliver a single, crippling blast from a single, oversize Irvingle. If we don't get along, if there's any unspoken hostility getting in our way, the ship won't operate at maximum efficiency. And that way, we're through before we -- " "Commander," Weinstein said suddenly, his chair coming down upon the floor with a solid whack, "I'd like to ask you a question." "Sure," I said and let out a gust of relief that was the size of a small hurricane. "Ask me anything." "When you think about us. Commander, or when you talk about us, which word do you use?" I looked at him and shook my head. "Eh?" "When you talk about us. Commander, or when you think about us, do you call us zombies? Or do you call us blobs? That's what I'd like to know. Commander. That's what I'm curious about." He'd spoken in such a polite, even tone that I was a long time getting the full significance of it. "Personally," said Roger Grey in a voice that was just a little less polite, a little less even. "Personally, I think the Commander is the kind who refers to us as canned meat. Right, Commander?" Yussuf Lamehd folded his arms across his chest and seemed to consider the issue very thoughtfully. "I think you're right, Rog. He's the canned-meat type. Definitely the canned-meat type." "No," said Wang Hsi. "He doesn't use that kind of language. Zombies, yes -- canned meat, no. You can observe from the way he talks that he wouldn't ever get mad enough to tell us to get back in the can. And I don't think he'd call us blobs very often. He's the kind of guy who'd buttonhole another slingshot commander and tell him, 'Man, have I got the sweetest zombie crew you ever saw!' That's the way I figure him. Zombies." And then they were sitting quietly, staring at me again. And it wasn't mockery in their eyes. It was hatred. sat down. The room was very still. From the yard, fifteen floors down, the marching commands drifted up. Where did they latch on to this zombie -- blob -- canned-meat stuff? They were none of them more than six months old; they had none of them been outside the precincts of The Junkyard yet. Their conditioning, while mechanical and intensive, was supposed to be absolutely foolproof, producing hard, resilient and entirely human minds, highly skilled in their various specialties and as far from any kind of imbalance as the latest psychiatric knowledge could push them. I knew they wouldn't have gotten it in their conditioning. Then where...? And then I heard it clearly for a moment. The word that was being used down in the drill field instead of Hup! That strange new word I had only heard indistinctly through the window. Whoever was calling the cadence downstairs wasn't saying, "Hup, two, three, four!" He was saying, "Blob, two, three, four! Blob, two, three four!" I asked myself? For that matter, like any army anywhere, anytime? To expend fortunes and the best minds producing a highly necessary product to exact specifications, and then, on the very first level of military use, doing something that might invalidate it completely! I visualtheir narrow, nasty minds, as jealously proud of their prejudices as of their limited and painfully acquired military knowledge, giving these youngsters before me their first taste of genuine barracks life, their first glimpse of the "outside." It was so stupid! But was it? There .was another way of looking at it, beyond the fact that only soldiers too old physically and too ossified mentally for any other duty could be spared for this place. And that was the simple pragmatism of army thinking. The fighting perimeters were places of abiding horror and agony. The forward combat zones in which slingshots operated were even worse. If men or materials were going to collapse out there, it could be very costly. Let the collapses occur as close to the rear echelons as possible. thought. Maybe it was logical to make live men out of dead men's flesh at such enormous expense, and with the kind of care usually associated with things like cotton wool and the most delicate watchmakers' tools, and then to turn around and subject them to the coarsest, ugliest environment possible, an environment that perverted their carefully instilled loyalty into hatred, their finely balanced psychological adjustment into neurotic sensitivity. I didn't know if it was basically smart or dumb, or even if the problem had ever been really weighed as such by the upper, policy-making brass. All I could see was my own problem, and it looked awfully big to me. I thought of my attitude toward these men before meeting them, and I felt pretty sick. But the membry gave me an idea. "Hey, tell me something," I suggested. "What would you call me?" They looked puzzled. "You want to know what I call you," I explained. "Tell me first what you call people like me, people who are -- who are born. You must have your own epithets." Lamehd grinned so that his teeth showed a bright, mirthless white against his dark skin. "Realos," he said. "We call you people realos. Sometimes realo trulos." Then the rest spoke up. There were othernames, lots of other names. They wanted me to hear them all. They interrupted each other; they spat the words out as if they were missiles. They glared at my face, as they spat them out, to see how much impact they had. Some of the nicknames were funny, some of them were rather nasty. I was particularly charmed by utie and wombat. "All right," I said after a while. "Feel better?" They were all breathing hard, but they felt better. I could tell it, and they knew it. The air in the room felt softer now. "First off," I said, "I want you to notice that you are all big boys and, as such, can take care of yourselves. From here on out, if we walk into a bar or a rec camp together, and someone of approximately your rank says something that sounds like zombie to your acute ears, you are at liberty to walk up to him and start taking him apart -- if you can. If he's of approximately my rank, in all probability. I'll do the taking apart, simply because I'm a very sensitive commander. And any time you feel that I'm not treating you as human beings, one hundred per cent, full solar citizenship and all that, I give you permission to come up to me and say, 'Now look here, you dirty utie, sir...' " The four of them grinned. Warm grins. Then the grins faded away, very slowly, and the eyes grew cold again. They were looking at a man who was, after all, an outsider. "It's not as simple as that. Commander," Wang Hsi said. "Unfortunately. You can call us hundred per cent human beings, but we're not. And anyone who wants to call us blobs or canned meat has a certain right. Because we're not as good as -- as you mothers' sons, and we know it. And we'll never be that good. Never!" "I don't know about that," I blustered. "Why, some of your performance charts..." "Performance charts. Commander," Wang Hsi said softly, "do not a human being make." On his right, Weinstein gave a nod, thought a bit and added, "Nor groups of men a race." V now. And I wanted to smash my way out of that room, down the elevator and out of the building before anybody said another word. This is it, I told myself. Here fve are, boy, here we are. I found myself squirming from corner to corner of the desk. I gave up, got off it and began walking again. Wang Hsi wouldn't let go. I should have known he wouldn't. "Soldier surrogates," he went on, squinting as if he were taking a close look at the phrase for the first time. "Soldier surrogates, but not soldiers. We're not soldiers, because soldiers are men. And we. Commander, are not men." There was silence for a moment, then a tremendous blast of sound boiled out of my mouth. "And what makes you think that you're not men?" Wang Hsi was looking at me with astonishment, but his reply was still soft and calm. "You know why. You've seen our specifications, Commander. We're not men, real men, because we can't reproduce ourselves." I forced myself to sit down again and carefully placed my shaking hands over my knees. "We're as sterile," I heard Yussuf Lamehd say, "as boiling water." "There have been lots of men," I began, "who have been -- " "This isn't a matter of lots of men," Weinstein broke in. "This is a' matter of us -- all of us." "Blobs thou art," Wang Hsi murmured, "and to blobs returneth. They might have given at least a few of us a chance. The kids mightn't have turned out so bad." Roger Grey slammed his huge hand down on the arm of his chair. "That's just the point, Wang," he said savagely. "The kids might have turned out good -- too good. Our kids might have turned out to be better than their kids -- and where would that leave the proud and cocky, the goddam name-calling, the lealo trulo human race?" I sat staring at them once more, but now I was seeing a different picture. I wasn't seeing conveyor belts moving slowly along, covered with human tissues and organs on which earnest bio-techs performed their individual tasks. I wasn't seeing a room filled with dozens of adult male bodies suspended in nutrient solution, each body connected to a conditioning machine which, day and night, clacked out whatever minimum information was necessary for the body to take the place of a man in the bloodiest part of the fighting perimeter. filled with heroes, many of them in duplicate and triplicate. And they were sitting around griping, as men will in any barracks on any planet, whether they looked like heroes or not. But their gripes concerned humiliations deeper than any soldiers had hitherto known -- humiliations as basic as the fabric of human personality. "You believe, then," and despite the sweat on my face, my voice was gentle, "that the reproductive power was deliberately withheld?" Weinstein scowled. "Now Commander. Please. No bedtime stories." "Doesn't it occur to you at all that the whole problem of our species at the moment is reproduction? Believe me, men, that's all you hear about on the outside. Grammar school debating teams kick current reproductive issues back and forth in the district medal competitions. Every month, scholars in archeology and the botany of fungi come out with books about it from their own special angle. Everyone knows that if we don't lick the reproduction problem, the Eoti are going to lick us. Do you seriously think that, under such circumstances, the reproductive powers of anyone would be intentionally impaired?" "What do a few male blobs matter, more or less?" Grey demanded. "According to the latest news bulletins, sperm bank deposits are at their highest point in five years. They don't need us." "Commander," Wang Hsi pointed his triangular chin at me, "let me ask you a few questions. Do you honestly expect us to believe that a science capable of reconstructing a living, highly effective human body with a complex digestive system and a most delicate nervous system is incapable of reconstructing the germ plasm in one single, solitary case?" "You have to believe it," I told him, "because it's so." Wang sat back, and so did the other three. They stopped looking at me. "Haven't you ever heard it said," I pleaded with them, "that the germ plasm is more essentially the individual than any other part of him? That some whimsical biologists take the attitude that our human bodies and all bodies are merely vehicles, or hosts, by means of which our germ plasm reproduces itself? It's the most complex bio-technical riddle we have. Believe me, men," I added passionately, "when I say that biology has not yet solved the germ plasm problem. I'm telling the truth. I know." That got them. "Look," I said. "We have one thing in common with the Eoti whom we're fighting. Insects and warm-blooded animals differ amazingly. But only among the community-building insects and the community-building men are there individuals who, while taking no part personally in the reproductive chain, are of fundamental importance to their species. For example, you might have a female nursery-schoolteacher who is barren, but who is of unquestionable value in shaping the personalities and even physiques of children in her care." "Fourth Orientation Lecture for Soldier Surrogates," Weinstein said in a dry voice. "He got it right out of the book." "I've been wounded," I said. "I've been seriously wounded fifteen times." I stood before them and began rolling up my right sleeve. It was soaked with my perspiration. " can tell you've been wounded. Commander," Lamehd pointed out uncertainly. "We can tell from your medals. You don't have to -- " "And every time I was wounded, they repaired me good as new. Better. Look at that arm." I flexed it for them. "Before it was burned off in a small razzle six years ago, I could never build up a muscle that big. It's a better arm that they built on the stump and, believe me, my reflexes never had it so good." "What did you mean," Wang Hsi started to ask me, "when you said before -- " "Fifteen times I was wounded," my voice drowned him out, "and fourteen times the wound was repaired. The fifteenth time -- the fifteenth time -- well, the fifteenth time it wasn't a wound they could repair. They couldn't help me one bit the fifteenth time." Roger Grey opened his mouth. "Fortunately," I whispered, "it wasn't a wound that showed." Weinstein started to ask me something, decided against it and sat back. But I had told him what he wanted to know. "A nucleonic howitzer. The way it was figured later, it had been a defective shell. Bad enough to kill half the men on our second-class cruiser. I wasn't killed, but I was in range of the backblast." "That backblast." Lamehd was thinking aloud. "That backblast will sterilize anybody within two hundred feet, unless he's wearing -- " "And I wasn't." I had stopped sweating. It was over. My crazy little precious secret was out. I took a deep breath. "So you see -- well, anyway, I know they haven't solved that problem yet." Roger Grey stood up and said, "Hey!" He held out his hand. I shook it. It felt like any normal guy's hand. Stronger, maybe. "Slingshot personnel," I went on, "are all volunteers. Except for two categories -- the commanders and soldier surrogates." "Figuring, I guess," Weinstein asked, "that the human race can spare them most easily?" "Right," I said. "Figuring that the human race can spare them most easily." He nodded. "Well, I'll be damned!" Yussuf Lamehd laughed as he got up and shook my hand too. "Welcome to our city." "Thanks," I said, "son." emphasis. "That's the rest of it," I explained. "Never got married and was too busy getting drunk and tearing up the pavement on my leaves to visit a sperm bank." "Oho," Weinstein said, and gestured at the walls with a thick thumb. "So this is it." "That's right -- this is it -- the Family. The only one I'll ever have. I've got almost enough of these -- " I tapped my medals -- "to rate replacement. As a slingshot commander, I'm sure of it." "All you don't know yet," Lamehd pointed out, "is how high a percentage of replacement will be apportioned to your memory. That depends on how many more of those chest decorations you collect before you become an -- ah, should I say raw matenal?" "Yeah," I said, feeling crazily light and easy and relaxed. I'd gotten it all out, and I didn't feel years of reproduction and evolution. And I'd started out to do a morale job on them! "Well, boys," Lamehd said, "it seems to me we want the commander to get a lot more fruit salad. He's a nice guy, and there should be more of him in the club." They were all standing around me now -- Weinstein, Lamehd, Grey, Wang Hsi. They looked real friendly and real capable. I began to feel we were going to have one of the best slingshots in... what did I mean, one of the best? The best, mister, the best. "Okay," said Grey. "Wherever and whenever you want to, you start leading us -- Pop." C. M. Kornbluth builds up a real shock wave as it buzzes the glistening bubble houses and ugly Belly Rave shacks of this conflict-filled future. Charles Mundin, a freshman lawyer with a hopeless career, has taken on an equally hopeless case... fighting the biggest, most powerful corporation in the history of mankind. But he hos one advantage; he doesn't know when a problem just can't be solved. And just wait till you see what has happened to the New York Stock Exchange! novelet in which someone -- or something -- neatly removes a deep cone of soil from a former's land and leaves a tidy pile of sand beside the bewildering crater. That, of course, is where the story starts. Where it winds up... well, you may find that the title has stuck to you! Another novelet? Very likely. Short stories? Absolutely. ?eaijres# To be sure. whole science class in Kansas with a beautifully organized survey of nature's giants that you'll want to keep handy for reference. In the next issue, he will give you a closeup of Mars! Don't miss it. information letter, not from an indiviual but from a whole highschool class in Kansas, asking for an article on the question of which mammal, bird, reptile, fish and so forth is the largest in its class, past or present. When I started looking things up, I began to realize -- as you will in a little while -- that Kansas was as logical a place as Hollywood to ask this particular question. Kansas may not have any extremely large animals to offer at this moment, but it certainly is a state with a gigantic past! To begin somewhere, let's start at the top, with the mammals. The largest land mammal of the present period is, by a comfortable margin, Loxodon atricanus, the African elephant. An old bull will stand #I feet tall and reach a weight of from six to eight tons. If one can put full trust in the reports of big-game hunters, bulls standing ll feet tall have been shot in Africa, but I'd feel much happier about these reports if the trophy had ended up in some museum where a measurement can be repeated in case of doubt. At any event, the African elephant is, on the average, half a foot taller and a ton heavier than the nearest runner-up, which is, of course, Elephas indicus, the Indian elephant. TN the not-too-remote past, however, it would have been the African elephant who would have been designated as runnerup. No, not to the mammoth -- at least not to the Siberian mammoth, which was smaller than the Indian elephant. But one European variety of mammoth, found in Austria and now on exhibition in the Natural History Museum of Stuttgart, topped the African elephant by # inches, and another variety of extinct elephant, Elephas trogontherii, found in southwest Germany near Wiesbaden, topped this giant by another # inches. Even this super-elephant, though, was not the largest land mammal of the past. The record, as far as present knowledge goes, is held by Baluchxtherium grangeri, a "hornless rhinoceros" from the Tertiary period of southern Asia, which was # feet long and stood around # feet tall. The present Indian rhinoceros could have walked under a standing Baluchitherium without ducking. But mammals do not live on land only. The marine mammals of today hold the record not only over the land or marine mammals of the past, but also over everything else that ever moved, including the dinosaurs. The largest whale is probably the kind called the Blue Rorqual, Balaenoptera sibbaldii (or B. muscuus). Even conservative naturalists grant this monster a body length of # to # feet. (Statements that can be found in print go as high as #I feet.) The weight of a fully grown specimen of this whale is estimated to be close to # tons. Even if this should be wrong by a couple of dozen tons or so, the large whales of today are considerably heavier than brontosaurus, which is calculated to have weighed in at # tons on the hoof. The whales of the geological past, being far smaller than those of the present, would take at best fourth or fifth place. Proceeding to the birds, one at once gets into the dilemma of what to go by, linear dimensions or weight. The bird with the largest wing-spread of the present time is the Wandering Albatross, the albatros errante of the South Americans or Diomedea exulans of the ornithologists. The largest ever measured had a wing-spread of # feet and weighed # pounds. The condor, both South American and Californian, comes close with a maximum spread of just about #I feet, but it weighs as much as #I pounds. In the recent past, there was an even larger California condor that topped the wing-spread of the albatross and was probably heavier, too, than the existing type. Naturally, the flightless birds are the biggest, for ground installations always weigh more than airborne equipment. The largest of today, the African ostrich, may look down at you from a height of eight feet and weigh # pounds. however, the African ostrich would have been runner-up to several other bird giants. The biggest of the New Zealand moas, Dinornis maximus, was not a lot taller (probably just a matter of inches), but must have weighed more than twfice as much. This moa was certainly still alive in #, the date for which the giant ostrichlike bird of Madagascar is mentioned as still living, though only by hearsay, not from personal observation of the reporter. The Madagascar bird, Aepyornis ingens, stood # feet tall. It was of lighter build than Dinornis, but it did lay the biggest bird egg known to science -- almost # inches long, with a cubic content equal to that of # ostrich eggs or # eggs of the kind that come by the dozen. The largest -- or, rather, most massive -- of extinct birds well known to paleontologists was Diatryma gigantea, from the lower Eocene of Wyoming. This heavy bird, possibly related to the cranes of today, had a skull almost # inches long, with a beak to match. Some seven feet tall when standing erect, it must have weighed well over # pounds. We now come to the reptiles and there, as everybody knows, the past greatly outshines the present. But the present is not doing as badly as most people think. The large Indian crocodile, Crocodilus poTOsus, which shows a most remarkable preference for salt water and long swims in the ocean, would not look too much out of place in a Cretaceous landscape. One specimen, of which the skull is in the British Museum, has been measured by Boulenger and found to be # feet long, with a circumference of # feet # inches! The largest living turtle is a hefty animal, too. It is the leatherback turtle (Dermochelys) of the high seas, which grows to an overall length of nine feet, the carapace measuring # feet, and the weight of such a giant is an authenticated # pounds. The largest living snake is the South American anaconda (unectes murinus), of which many a wild tale has been told. Zoologists usually say that this snake will reach a length of "well over # feet" and generally will be limit. But one reputable source mentions a specimen that measured # feet. However, it was measured after death (understandably so) and if you stretch a dead snake of such length for measuring, you may add one or two feet to its "live length" without meaning to. The largest lizardlike reptiles of today are, of course, the monitors. The East Indian Varanus Salvator grows to a length of # feet, while the still larger Varanus komodoensis, from the small island of Komodo in the Sunda Sea, is two or three or maybe even four feet longer. Both are very long-tailed, so that these figures are slightly misleading. The heaviest Komodo monitor actually weighed was just about # pounds. spectable figures, they shrink by comparison with reptiles from former geological periods. The one exception is the Indian crocodile. I don't know of any extinct true crocodile that grew as big. But the monitors are just small leftovers. Only some # years ago, Australia had a monitor lizard that was more than # feet long and may have reached # feet. The largest extinct reptiles were the sauropod dinosaurs of the type of the well-known brontosaurus. Diplodocus was probably the longest because of an elongated tail; measurements lie between # and # feet from nose to tip of the tail. Not longer, but more massive by far, and probably the heaviest of the dinosaurs was Brachiosaurus brancai from the Upper Jurassic period of East Africa. The length of the humerus (bone of the upper arm) of Brachiosaurus is # inches, as compared to # inches for the same bone in Diplodocus. BrachBrachiosaurus Brancai Upper Jurassic of East Africa iosaurus could still breathe while walking along the bottom of a #-foot-deep lake! The largest leatherback turtle would also look quite small next to Archelon ischyros, from the Upper Cretaceous of Kansas. This marine turtle of some # # feet long when alive and heavy in proportion, presumably around # pounds. Its armor had been somewhat reduced for the sake of mobility, but there is little need for armor in a turtle with a three-foot skull and a beak like a guillotine. For company, Archelon had #-foot mosasaurs, swimming reptiles with four big paddles, a flat tail and long teeth. Above the waters where Archelon and the mosasaurs competed for fish, the largest flying animal of all Earth's history wheeled on leathery wings, also looking for fish. This was Pteranodon inens -- mostly wings, with a ridiculously small body and legs, but with a large though paper-thin skull and a long sharp beak. The wing-spread of Specimen No. # has been computed at # feet # inches. The amphibians of today are generally small. A #-inch salamander is "big" and a twopound toad something worth mentioning. Still, in Japan there lives a salamander, called Hanzaki and Hazekoi by the Japanese, which grows to slightly over five feet in length. This is Megalobatrachus maximus, the Japanese giant salamander that was discovered about # by the German traveler von Siebold and caused a small sensation in scientific circles in its time -- not only because it is the largest living amphibian, but also because it was the first case of an animal having been known in fossil form before being discovered alive. To find really large amphibians in the geologic past, we have to go back to before the dinosaurs to encounter the labyrinthodons, so named because of the strange construction of their teeth. One especially familiar but exceptionally badly named species was M astodonsaurus acuminatus, from the Triassic of northern Europe, with a three-foot skull and an overall length of about # feet. fishes are another class where the present holds its own well as compared to the past, even though it has to be admitted that the record-holders belong to an ancient type -- namely, the sharks. The basking shark (Selache maxima) is known to reach a length of # to # feet, while the whale shark Rhineodon typus), recently made famous by Thor Heyerdahl and his KonTiki expedition, is well established with #-foot specimens, and even # feet has been tentatively accepted as a possible maximum size. Past geological periods have not yet furnished anything larger than the whale shark among the extinct fishes. A possible exception is a fossil shark called Carcharodon megalodon, from the Miocene of the Vienna area. Only the teeth are known so far, and if the size of the shark was in proportion to the size of these teeth, it might have been larger than Rhineodon. Now don't dismiss the invertebrates as tiny. True, they usually are, for a one-inch beetle will be considered a big fellow and a sixinch earthworm "enormous" and the African snail Achatina fulica, which the Japanese spread over a large number of Pacific islands as a food supply during the Second World 'War, is known as the "giant snail." Its shell is five inches long and its overall length nine inches; it is the second largest of the land snails of our era. (The largest, also African, is about a foot long.) But there are a number of other impressive exceptions from the rule that most invertebrates are small. The largest clam of our time -- and of the past, too, as far as is known -- is Tridacna gigas, which occurs near the Philippines, on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and generally in that area. It can reach a size of five feet and a weight of # pounds. Its virtually indestructible shells were brought to Europe for centuries and were often used as basins for holy water in small churches, especially in Bavaria and Austria. "Two-thirds of my class should make excellent naturalists; they have been baptized from Tridacna shells," a south German zoology instructor once said to me. The largest molluscs are the giant squid, the Kraken of the Norse, but unfortunately nobody can give any definite figures. One killed by the crew of the French corvette Alecton in #I could not be actually measured, since the crew of the ship, although they tried hard, failed to hoist it aboard. But the monster was directly alongside the ship, so that a good and reliable estimate could be made -- # feet without the tentacles! No giant fossils of a comparable type are known, but armorless octopi would hardly fossilize. They would be eaten by a large variety of marine creatures before mud or sand could cover the body. However, some octopi produce shells the way the living nautilus does and such shells fossilize easily. You can see long rows of these ammonites in every museum. The largest known is, so to speak, a childhood friend of mine. "I knew him well," of course, long after its discovery. The enormous thing was found in a quarry at a place named Seppenrade in Westphalia in #. Since pachys (Greek) means "thick," it was promptly christened Pachydiscus seppenradensis. The diameter of the shell is # feet. The weight of the fossil, more precisely a steinkern or internal mold, is # pounds. And the octopus Pachydiscus seppenradensis Upper Cretaceous, West Germany that grew it lived during the Upper Cretaceous period. be gigantic as a jellyfish can grow to enormous size. At Nahant. Mass., Prof. Louis Agassiz measured one in which the bell was # feet across and the tentacles more than # feet long! In the southern Pacific, one kind seems to grow to a diameter (without tentacles) of three to four feet as a rule. At that size, it weighs about # pounds. A twelve-foot earthworm may sound as unlikely as a #-pound jellyfish, but such earthworms exist in Australia. They have as many as # segments and are fairly thin when extended, about yi inch. The handbook I consulted states that the only bird known to eat these earthworms is the Australian laughing kingfisher. I can add one other -- I saw a photograph of a domestic duck swallowing hard but successfully. Yet this is not the longest worm by any means. The "broad fish tapeworm" will reach a length of # feet, with a width of  inches ! But a parasite is obviously a special case. When it comes to insects, onie has to ask, of course, "what kind?" The largest living butterfly is a moth and so are the runners-up. The record is held by the South American owl moth with a span of #I inches. The south Asiatic Atlas moth measures # inches in wing-spread, but has much wider wings than the owl moth. Our North American species do not compare too badly, the cecropia moth reaching # and the polyphemus moth # inches. Among the beetles, the elephant beetles of South America and the goliath beetles of Central Africa run in very close competition, both being four inches long in good specimens. The hercules beetles of tropical America measure up to # inches in length, but much of this is just tlie long projecting horn. In actual length, a "walking stick" from Borneo Central African Goliath Beetle (Goliathus regius) probably wins with I I inches, but it is quite thin. How about the insects of the past? In the far remote past, the Carboniferous period, insects like dragonflies were the largest. The biggest present-day dragonflies, from tropical America and Borneo, span between # and # inches maximum. Titanophasma, from the Carboniferous of Europe, had a wing-span of # inches. For quite some time, it was thought to be the largest, but then Protodonata with a #-foot spread was found in the Permian of Kansas. C rustaceans and, in general, arthropods still have to be mentioned. When the New England coast was first reached, stories of lobsters of incredible size went back to Europe. One famous natural history book of the sixteenth century, by the municipal physician of Zurich, Dr. Konrad Gesner, even contains a picture of a #-foot lobster eating a man. Gesner stated that this is what he had been told, but neither he nor his artist had seen a lobster of such size. The fact is that the American lobster runs larger than the European lobster and that old specimens reach considerable size. The largest really established measured ## inches and weighed # pounds. In sheer size, a spider crab from the Japan Sea, Macraucheira kaempfferi, surpasses this lobster, since it stilts along over the ocean floor on legs spanning six feet. Its body, though, is not much larger than a fist. The largest arthropod known years ago. It thrived during the Silurian period and is known to science as Pterygotus. The overall length was nine feet; it belonged to a completely extinct group called the eurypterids. We don't know whether they lived in fresh water or salt water. But they were obviously carnivorous and the Pterygotus from the Silurian Period terror of anything smaller that happened to come within reach. And there you have a condensed record of the giants of the past and present. Incidentally, Man rightfully belongs on this list. Despite those who insist on viewing him as small and puny, he actually is a member in good standing of the one per cent or less of the Earth's total life population that can be called giants! Figure it out for yourself -- he averages # feet in height and # pounds (extremes are # feet and # pounds) with an arm-spread of # to # feet. What's small about that? I'm sorry that this survey squeezed out the letter section this month. It will be back in next month's department -- which will be astronomical all the way through because of the close approach of Mars at the end of June. Seeing things? Don't go to an analyst -- see the Commission -- if it doesn't find you first! song a few years back. You know the one. Phil Harris singing about a thing that you couldn't get rid of, no matter what you did, a thing so repulsive it made you a social outcast. Never thought I'd one, though. Dirty Pete found it. Don't rush me. I'll tell you about it. We're hobos, understand? Now a hobo is a different breed of cat than you think. Oh, people are getting educated to the idea that a hobo will work and move on, whereas a tramp will mooch and move on, and a bum will mooch and hang around, but you still find folks who are ignorant enough to call us bums. We're aristocrats, yes sir. If it wasn't for us, you wouldn't enjoy half the little luxuries you do. Oh, don't believe me -- talk to your experts. They know that, without the migratory worker, most of the crops wouldn't get harvested. And, if I talk highfalutin' once in a while, don't blame me. Associating with the Professor improves any man's vocabulary, in spite of themselves.  see? We'd been kicking around together for longer than I care to think about. There was the Professor and Dirty Pete and Sacks and Ekidie. I'm Eddie. Nicknames are funny things. Take the Professor -- he was a real professor once, until he began hitting the bottle. Well, he lost his job, his home, his family, and his rep. One morning, he wakes up on Skid Row without a nickel in his jeans and the great-granddaddy of all hangovers. He comes to a decision. Either he could make a man out of hisself, or he could die. Right then, dying looked like the easiest thing to do, but it took more guts that he had to jump off a bridge, so he went on the Road instead. After he got over his shakes -- and he sure had 'em bad -- he decided that, if he never took another drink, it'd be the best thing for him. So he didn't. He had a kind of dignity, though, and he could really talk, so he and I teamed up during the wheat harvest in South Dakota. We made all the stops and, when we hit the peaches in California we picked up Sacks and Dirty Pete. Sacks got his monicker because he never wore shoes. He claimed that gunny-sacks, wrapped around his feet and shins, gave as much protection and more freedom, and they were more comfortable, besides costing nix. Since we mostly bought our shoes at the dumps, at four bits a pair, you might say he was stretching a point, but that's one of the laws of the Road. You don't step on the other guy's corns, and he don't step on yours. So guess why Dirty Pete was called that. Yeah. He hadn't taken a bath since 'forty-six, when he got out of the army, and he didn't figger on ever takin' another. He was a damn' good worker, though, and nobody'd ever try anything with him around. He wasn't any bigger than a Mack truck. Besides, he was quiet. Oh, sure. You wanna know why I'm on the Road. Well, it happens I like whiskers. Trouble is, they're not fashionable, unless you're some kind of an artist, which I'm not. You know, social disapproval. I didn't have the guts to face it, so I lit out. Nobody cares on the Road what you do, so I was okay with my belt-length beard. A beard's an enjoyable thing, too. There's a certain kind of thrill you get from stroking it, and feeling its silkiness run through your fingers. And besides, combing it, and keeping it free of burrs, snarls and tangles, sort of keeps your spare moments so full that the devil don't find any idle time to put your hands to work in. If you ask me, I think that the razor has been the downfall of society. And I'm willing to bet I have plenty of company with the same opinion. Show me a man who doesn't let his beard grow once in a while, even if it's only for a day or so, and you've shown me a man who thinks more of social pressure than he does of his own comfort. And show me a man who says he likes to shave, and you've shown me a man who is either a liar or is asking for punishment. to get on with the story. You know, if the Professor hadn't been around, there would probably have been murder done over the Thing, or at least our little group would've split up, 'cause none of us had the brains to figure it out. Pete's an expert scrounger. His eyes are sharp, and he's always on the lookout for a salable piece of goods, even if he can only get a nickel for it. One night, we're sitting in a jungle near Sacramento, trying to figure out whether to go north for the grapes, or south for the grapes. They're all over California, you know, and they pay pretty well. Pete, as usual, is out looking, and pretty soon he comes back into camp with this thing in his hand. He handles it like it was hot, but he's pleased he's found it, because he hopes to merchandise it. So he walks up to me, and says, "Hey, Eddie. What'll you gimme for this, huh?" I say, "Get that to hell away from me! I'll give you a swift kick in the pants if you don't." He looks real surprised. He says, "Huh, I thought maybe you could use it." I get up on my feet. I say, real low and careful, because maybe he's joking, "Look, Pete -- you oughtta know by this time, I like my beard. Now will you go away?" He mooches off, looking like I'd kicked him, and goes over to the Professor. I figure maybe the Professor could use it, so I listen. The Prof looks like he was being offered a live rattlesnake. "No, thanks, really, Pete. I have resolved never to touch it again. I hope you don't mind." Well, for some reason Pete don't look pleased, and he's real unhappy by this time, but he tries again. "Hey, Sacks, what'll you gimme for -- " He don't get a chance to finish. I'm only listening with half an ear, but I'm so surprised I stand up like I been stuck with a pin. Sacks says, "Whatinell would I do with a left shoe? You know I don't use 'em." Pete looks at the thing in his hand, and the Prof and I go over there. The Professor looks at the thing real carefully and speaks up. "Say, Pete, look at that thing and tell me what it is." "Why, it's a brand new bar of soap, of course. I don't use it, but one of you might want to. What's all the beef about?" "Soap?" I say. "Why, you poor fish, something must have happened to your eyes. When you offered me that straight razor, I thought you'd gone off your nut. Now I know it." The Professor interrupts. He looks excited. "Wait a minute, Eddie. To me that item looks exactly like a full fifth of Old Harvester, # proof. Used to be my favorite, before I became an abstainer. To Pete, it looks like soap. To you, it looks like a straight razor while, to Sacks, it resembles a shoe. Does that give you any ideas?" "Means we're all having hallucinations," I grunts. "Exactly. Pete, was there anything else in the location where you found this thing?" "Nothing but some scrap tin." "Show us." S O, the four of us wanders across the field and, sure enough, there was this silly looking object lying there. It was about eighteen or twenty feet across, and two feet thick, and I nearly made a fool of myself. I almost screamed when I saw six straight razors crawling out of a hole in its side. The Professor whistled. "Grab them, boys. We want them." Well, Sacks sacrifices one of his sacks, and we rounded up fifteen of the useless things. We went back to the jungle, where the Prof explained it. "Look, fellows, suppose you were a being from another planet that wanted to take over here. Suppose, further, that you were rather small and relatively defenseless. To finish the suppositions, suppose you were a positive telepath, with not only the ability to read minds, but also the ability to create visual and tactile hallucinations. How would you protect yourself?" A light began to dawn, but I didn't say a word about it. The Professor continued. "If you could do all this, you'd make yourself look just as useless as possible. To Pete, you'd look like a bar of soap, because he never uses the stuff. To Sacks, you'd look like a shoe, because his dislike for shoes is evident in his mind. To Ekldie, who is proud of his beard, you'd look like a razor, while to me, you'd look like a bottle of booze, because I dislike its effects intensely. In other words, you would assume an imposture that would assure you'd never be picked up, except by someone like Pete, who would see in you a salable item, even though not a usable one. It may be, Pete, that you have saved the world." So, that's the story. We're all still on the Road, of course, but now we are the "Commission for the Investigation of Extraterrestrial Invasion." Congress named us as that, when we got the data to them. Now, Mr. Mayor, you see our problem. Have your citizens seen anything around that they don't want? If they have, we want to look at it. and dazzling as the speed of light, this story of interstellar adventure hauls you bodily into its crew and zips you off into space on an actioncrammed voyage. the great names in science fiction takes you into the tense and exciting future to solve the most challenging problem that Mankind has ever faced! Watch your stand for it! Associates, # flyer into Rhine's parapsychological work -- with enthusiasm and high curiosity. I put it down bothered, bewildered and depressed. Bothered by the thin evidence on which Dr. Rhine bases his claims, bewildered by the enormousness of those claims, and depressed by what I felt was an unnecessary attack on the natural sciences for their refusal to accept the evidence without question. The statistical evidence for clairvoyance, psychokinesis and precognition can be accepted, though one can doubt that statistical mathematics has reached a point of infallibility that makes it impossible for the methodology to be in error. But I think we know far too little about the interactions of brain, ductless glands, nervous system and other somatic elements that influence personality to permit us to throw the possibility of a scientific explanation of parapsychology out of the window and revert forthwith to the ancient mystic dualism that presupposes the existence of Mind separate from and independent of Brain. This is what Dr. Rhine does in his book. He argues that, since he cannot measure "psi energy" with a voltmeter, so to speak, it cannot be a property or function of matterenergy relations, but rather is a proof of the existence of the soul. To me, this is an unscientific argument. There are many things our instruments are incapable of measuring. Why not consider them spiritual phenomena, too? The book should be read by anyone interested in learning what actually is known about parapsychology, but its conclusions should be taken with a carload of rock salt. by Edgar Pangborn. Doubleday  Co., # TT'S a pity that this beautiful and moving book has to be labeled science fiction, for it could show a much wider audience what is being done in this field -- those, mainly, who are prejudiced by poor S-F films and memories of ghastly old stories read in their youth. Primarily, it is a study in the faltering ethics of Man: ethics which are fine in principle, but too often ignored in practice. Secondarily, it is a good story -- though in many ways more like a preliminary sketch of a much larger-scope novel than it actually is. The tale tells of the conflict between Observers and Abdicators, two groups of Martians living in four underground cities on Earth, for the soul of mankind. The Abdicators want Man to destroy himself; the Observers want to help him find his way to maturity. Both fail -- the Abdicators completely, the Observers partially. The ending of the book is thus inconclusive, as it should be in any serious imagination of mankind's future. Despite the bigness of the theme, the story is told in little details which make the tragedy all the more impressive. It is a distinguished job, even though incompletely developed. edited by H. J. Campbell. Panther Books, London, England. Available from Stephen's Book Service, # As for Place, New York, N. Y., # original anthologies of American science fiction! A shame that this one is not particularly worthwhile. Kris Neville, Chad Oliver and T. D. Hamm have entries that rate reading; the other five tales are all in that portentous, fruity style the British seem to like -- except one by Sprague de Camp, which is a passably amusing space opus. This is not one of science fiction's Basic Books. erik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. Ballantine Books, # and # (paper) authors' previous Space Merchants, this new one is a colorful and pointed melodrama of the decay of Man's interstellar empire. Planetary civilizations have become frozen into genetic patterns that are leading them toward race suicide. Protagonist Ross sets out from Halsey's Planet to find what has happened to certain civilizations that have faded out of communication. After a variety of adventures, Ross, with three other people whom he has picked up during his travels, reaches Earth, where he finds a civilization exactly like that in Kornbluth's Here, however, he also finds the solution to the bitter dilemma into which the whole of mankind has worked itself. I think you'll like it. I did. tosh. Doubleday  Co., # survey the terrifying effects of genetic inbreeding, McIntosh (ex-M'Intosh) here examines the results of social inbreeding. There are two small colonies on two planets of a sun # lightyears from a dying Earth. One is imbued with the principles of cooperation and a compulsion never to mention, much less use, atomic energy. This group develops into an idyllic and practically stagnant society. The other is militarist. It attempts to conquer the first. And in the ensuing conflict, the problem is, of course, which will win? The working out of that problem gives the reader first-rate entertainment on one level, and food for soul-searching thought on another. Fletcher Pratt. Twayne Publishers, # TT may not please the joint authors too much to hear it said, but I will make a private wager that this volume will be a lot more durable in the race for literary immortality than anything else either of them has written. These little whisky fantasies are completely enchanting -- wise, mad, fantastic, funny, warmly human and often very moving. There are # items in the book, over half of which have never appeared in any magazine. No matter how practical you may be, you will delight in these blithely improbable vignettes. E. P. Dutton  Co., # novel takes up space flight after the Moon, Mars and Venus have been reached, but before space travel has really been accepted by Earth's populations. It tells of the struggle to obtain financing for a Jupiter rocket. Its one defect -- if it is a defect -- is its fast pacing, its spare, almost skeletal style. Brown is telling a story that, for once in science fiction, is concerned more with character than with plot; and the novel of character almost requires rich and subtle development. There is some of this here, but it seems to me not quite enough. But that is a minor cavil, in a way. Even as it stands, the book is richly human, exciting, tragic, and, in the long run, inspiringly imaginative. ter. International Economic Research Bureau, # A R E C E N T announcement that minimum average winter temperature levels in the New York City area were two degrees higher during the past thirty years than the previous thirty made me feel that I should at least call your attention to this odd, fact-packed but scientifically eccentric book. It contains an enormous amount of data on recent changes in the world's climate, though so scrambled in presentation that it is hard to arrive at any conclusions. The Partch drawings are delightful, the price is low, and therefore -- despite the book's melodramatic and unscientific approach -- I think you may find it worth looking over if you, too, wonder what is happening to the weather. Curt Siodmak and Robert Smith. Ballantine Books, # and #( paper) first trip into space, this one boiling up with more sheer, undiluted excitement than any other I can remember. It's a novelization (by Smith) of a screenplay (by Siodmak) and, though showing signs of haste in preparation, it still packs a terrific wallop. The plot deals with the preliminaries three guinea pig scientist-pilots go through before rocketing beyond the atmosphere to find out what is ruining other unmanned rockets that try flying into much deeper space, and with the actual flights themselves. The writing is undistinguished, the technology sketchy, and the characterizations two-dimensional. But the suspense is terrific! mond F. Jones. John C. Winston Co., # is just about the best of the Winston science fiction juveniles. Essentially, it is a study of the need for greater human understanding of ethical values, though at the same time it is a rip-roaring adventure tale. It tells of the experiences of a small delegation (one family, actually) from Earth to a Conference of the Galactic Federation. The problem: are they delegates or laboratory animals? What they really are, in the eyes of the Federation leaders, is not revealed until the very end. It is fine reading for all ages. by Lester del Rey. John C. Winston Co., #  the Jones story, this tale has much the same merits of swift pacing, vivid imagination, real characters and absence of juvenile melodrama. It stands out from most of its watery predecessors as a believable and well-thoughtout tale of an undersea civilization. The title is misleading, incidentally. It really should be Defense by Atlantis, since it is our submarine that penetrates their mile-deep regions. has put three new ones on the market. C. L. Moore's Shambleau and Others (#) is a set of seven horror fantasies from Weird Tales; Nat Schachner's Space Lawyer (#) is space opera out of the bottom drawer of the pre-adult age of science fiction; and Robert E. Howard's The Coming of Conan (#) is fourth in a series of "colorful, action-filled" books about an imaginery prehistoric Hyborean civilization. Sprague de Camp's The Tritonian Ring (Twayne, #) is in the Conan tradition in every sense of the word, though better written. The British Book Center's Flyini Saucers Have Landed (by Leslie and Adamski; #) strikes me as being completely crackpot -- if not actually a hoax. Miss it. Space Travel by Kenneth W. Gatland and Anthony M. Kunesch (Philosophical Library, #) looks like an excellent though unoriginal summary, on a high level of technical competence, of knowledge on rocket research and allied fields. It will be of special interest to Americans who are interested in British and European researches, since the authors are British scientists with intimate knowledge of the work of the members of International Astronautic Federation, which has members from thirteen countries. For specialists, Homer E. Newell, Jr., has published High Altitude Rocket Research (Academic Press, #), said to be the first book dealing with upperair research by means of rockets. The author is head of the RocketSonde Research Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory. Featured in this No More Stars The Agony of The Leaves Miss Tarmity's Profession and short stories by: Watch for it at your local newsstand... here is a reproduction of its mesmeric cover by Powers, so you can't miss it... or, for six spine-tingling issues, send # to: #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. T he police counselor leaned forward and tapped the small nameplate on his desk, which said: Val Borgenese. "That's my name," he said. "Who are you?" The man across the desk shook his head. "I don't know," he said indistinctly. "Sometimes a simple approach works," said the counselor, shoving aside the nameplate. "But not often. We haven't found anything that's effective in more than a small percentage of cases." He blinked thoughtfully. "Names are difficult. A name is like clothing, put on or taken off, recognizable but not part of the person -- the first thing forgotten and the last remembered." The man with no name said nothing. "Try pet names," suggested Borgenese. "You don't have to be sure -- just say the first thing you think of. It may be something your parents called you when you were a child." The man stared vacantly, closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them and mumbled something. "What?" asked Borgenese. "Putsy," said the man more distinctly. "The only thing I can think of is Putsy." The counselor smiled. "That's a pet name, of course, but it doesn't help much. We can't trace it, and I don't think you'd want it as a permanent name." He saw the expression on the man's face and added hastily: "We haven't given up, if that's what you're thinking. But it's not easy to determine your identity. The most important source of information is your mind, and that was at the two year level when we found you. The fact that you recalled the word Putsy is an indication." "Fingerprints," said the man vaguely. "Can't you trace me through fingerprints?" "That's another clue," said the counselor. "Not fingerprints, but the fact that you thought of them." He jotted something down. "I'll have to check those re-education tapes. They may be defective by now, we've run them so many times. Again, it may be merely that your mind refused to accept the proper information." The man started to protest, but Borgenese cut him off. "Fingerprints were a fair means of identification in the Twentieth Century, but this is the Twentysecond Century." riHE counselor then sat back. "You're confused now. You have a lot of information you don't know how to use yet. It was given to you fast, and your mind hasn't fully absorbed it and put it in order. Sometimes it helps if you talk out your problems." "I don't know if I have a problem." The man brushed his hand slowly across his eyes. "Where do I start?" "Let me do it for you," suggested Borgenese. "You ask questions when you feel like it. It may help you." He paused, "You were found two weeks ago in the Shelters. You know what those are?" The man nodded, and Borgenese went on : "Shelter and food for anyone who wants or needs it. Nothing fancy, of course, but no one has to ask or apply; he just walks in and there's a place to sleep and periodically food is provided. It's a favorite place to put people who've been retroed." The man looked up. "Retroed?" "Slang," said Borgenese. "The retrogression gun ionizes animal tissue, nerve cells particularly. Aim it at a man's legs and the nerves in that area are drained of energy and his muscles won't hold him up. He falls down. "Aim it at his head and give him the smallest charge the gun is adjustable to, and his most recent knowledge is subtracted from his memory. Give him the full charge, and he is swept back to a childish or infantile age level. The exact age he reaches is dependent on his physical and mental condition at the time he's retroed. "Theoretically it's possible to kill with the retrogression gun. The person can be taken back to a stage where there's not enough nervous organization to sustain the life process. "However, life is tenacious. As the lower levels are reached, it takes increasing energy to subtract from anything that's left. Most people who want to get rid of someone are satisfied to leave the victim somewhere between the mental ages of one and four. For practical purposes, the man they knew is dead -- or retroed, as they say." "Then that's what they did to me," said the man. "They retroed me and left me in the Shelter. How long was I there?" " knows? That's what makes it difficult. A day, or two months. A child of two or three can feed himself, and no record is kept since the place is free. Also, it's cleaned automatically." "I know that now that you mention it," said the man. "It's just that it's hard to remember." "You see how it is," said the counselor. "We can't check our files against a date when someone disappeared, because we don't know that date except within very broad limits." He tapped his pen on the desk. "Do you object to a question?" "Go ahead." "How many people in the Solar System?" The man thought with quiet desperation. "Fourteen to sixteen The counselor was pleased. "That's right. You're beginning to use some of the information we've put back into your mind. Earth, Mars and Venus are the main population centers. But there are also Mercury and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the asteroids. We can check to see where you might have come from, but there are so many places and people that you can imagine the results." "There must be some way," the man said painfully. "Pictures, fingerprints, something." "Something," Borgenese nodded. "But probably not for quite a while. There's another factor, you see. It's a shock, but you've got to face it. And the funny thing is that you'll never be better able to than now." He rocked back. "Take the average person, full of unsuspected anxiety, eveii the happiest and most successful. Expose him to the retrogression gun. Tensions and frustrations are drained away. "The structure of an adult is still there, but it's empty, waiting to be filled. Meanwhile the life of the organism goes on, but it's not the same. Lines on the face disappear, the expression alters drastically, new cell growth occurs here and there throughout the body. Do you see what that means?" The man frowned. "I suppose no one can recognize me." "That's right. And it's not only your face that changes. You may grow taller, but never shorter. If your hair was gray, it may darken, but not the reverse." "Then I'm younger too?" "In a sense, though it's actually not a rejuvenation process at all. The extra tension that everyone carries with him has been removed, and the body merely takes up the slack. "Generally, the apparent age is made less. A person of middle age or under seems to be three to fifteen years younger than before. You appear to be about twenty-seven, but you may actually be nearer forty. You see, we don't even know what age group to check. "And it's the same with fingerprints. They've been altered by the retrogression process. Not a great deal, but enough to make identification impossible." nameless man stared around the room -- at Val Borgenese, perhaps fifty, calm i#e and pleasant, more of a counselor than a policeman -- out of the window at the skyline, and its cleanly defined levels of air traffic. Where was his place in this? "I guess it's no use," he said bleakly. "You'll never find out who I am." The counselor smiled. "I think we wfill. Directly, there's not much we can do, but there are indirect methods. In the last two weeks we've exposed you to all the organized knowledge that can be put on tapes -- physics, chemistry, biology, math, astrogation, the works. "It's easy to remember what you once knew. It isn't learning; it's actually relearning. One fact put in your mind triggers another into existence. There's a limit, of course, but usually a person comes out of re-education with slightly more formal knowledge than he had in his prior existence." The counselor opened a folder on his desk. "We gave you a number of tests. You didn't know the purpose, but I can tell you the results." He leafed slowly through the sheets. "You may have been an entrepreneur of some sort. You have an excellent sense of power ethics. Additionally, we've found that you're physically alert, and your reactions are well coordinated. This indicates you may have been an athlete or sportsman." Val Borgenese laid down the tests. "In talking with you, I've learned more. The remark you made about fingerprints suggests you may have been a historian, specializing in the Twentieth Century. No one else is likely to know that there was a time in which fingerprints were a valid means of identification." "I'm quite a guy, I suppose. Businessman, sportsman, historian." The man smiled bitterly. "All that... but I still don't know who I am. And you can't help me." "Is it important?" asked the counselor softly. "This happens to many people, you know, and some of them do find out who they were, with or without our help. But this is not simple amnesia. No one who's been retroed can resume his former identity. Of course, if we had tapes of the factors which made each person what he is..." He shrugged. "But those tapes don't exist. Who knows, really, what caused him to develop as he has? Most of it isn't at the conscious level. At best, if you should learn who you were, you'd have to pick up the thread of your former activities and acquaintances slowly and painfully. "Maybe it would be better if you start from where you are. You know as much as you once did, and the information is up to date, correct and undistorted. You're younger, in a sense -- in better physical condition, not so tense or nervous. Build up from that." "But I don't have a name." "Choose one temporarily. You can have it made permanent if it suits you." T he man was silent, thinking. He looked up, not in despair, but not accepting all that the counselor said either. "What name? All I know is yours, and those of historical figures." "That's deliberate. We don't put names on tapes, because the effects can be misleading. Everyone has thousands of associations, and can mistake the name of a prominent scientist for his own. Names unconsciously arrived at are usually no help at all." "What do I do?" the man said. "If I don't know names, how can I choose one?" "We have a list made up for this purpose. Go through it slowly and consciously. When you come to something you like, take it. If you chance on one that stirs memories, or rather where memories ought to be but aren't, let me know. It may be a lead I can have traced." The man gazed at the counselor. His thought processes were fast, but erratic. He could race along a chain of reasoning and then stumble over a simple fact. The counselor ought to know what he was talking about -- this was no isolated occurrence. The police had a lot of experience to justify the treatment they were giving him. Still, he felt they were mistaken in ways he couldn't formulate. "I'll have to accept it, I suppose," he said. "There's nothing I can do to learn who I was." The counselor shook his head. "Nothing that we can do. The clues are in the structure of your mind, and you have better access to it than we do. Read, think, look. Maybe you'll run across your name. We can take it from there." He paused. "That is, if you're determined to go ahead." That .was a strange thing for a police counselor to say. "Of course I want to know who I am," he said in surprise. "Why shouldn't I?" "I'd rather not mention this, but you ought to know." Borgenese shifted uncomfortably. "One third of the lost identity cases that we solve are selfinflicted. In other words, suicides." long after he had decided on one and put the list away. Attractive names and odd ones -- but which were significant he couldn't say. There was more to living than the knowledge that could be put on tapes and played back. There was more than choosing a name. There was experience, and he lacked it. The world of personal reactions  for him had started two weeks previously; it was not enough to help him know what he wanted to do. He sat down. The room was small but comfortable. As long as he stayed in retro-therapy, he couldn't expect much freedom. He tried to weigh the factors. He could take a job and adapt himself to some mode of living. What kind of a job? He had the ordinary skills of the society -- but no outstanding technical ability had been discovered in him. He had the ability of an entrepreneur -- but without capital, that outlet was denied him. His mind and body were empty and waiting. In the next few months, no matter what he did, some of the urge to replace the missing sensations would be satisfied. The more he thought about that, the more powerfully he felt that he had to know who he was. Otherwise, proceeding to form impressions and opinions might result in a sort of betrayal of himself. Assume the worst, that he was a suicide. Maybe he had knowof his former life. A suicide would cover himself -- would make certain that he could never trace himself back to his dangerous motive for the step. If he lived on Earth, he would go to Mars or Venus to strip himself of his unsatisfactory life. There were dozens of precautions anyone would take. But if it weren't suicide, then who had retroed him and why. That was a question he couldn't answer now, and didn't need to. When he found out who he was, the motivation might be clear; if it wasn't, at least he would have a basis on which to investigate that. If someone else had done it to him, deliberately or accidentally, that person would have taken precautions too. The difference was this: as a would-be suicide, he could travel freely to wherever he wished to start over again; while another person would have difficulty enticing him to a faroff place, or, assuming that the actual retrogression had taken place elsewhere, wouldn't find it easy to transport an inert and memoryless body any distance. So, if he weren't a suicide, there was a good chance that there were clues in this city. He might as well start with that idea -- it was all he had to go on. He was free to stay in retrotherapy indefinitely, but with the restricted freedom he didn't want to. The first step was to get out. He made the decision and felt better. He switched on the screen. Borgenese looked up. "Hello. Have you decided?" "I think so." "Good. Let's have it. It's bound to touch on your former life in some way, though perhaps so remotely we can't trace it. At least, it's something." "Luis Obispo." He spelled it out. tHE police counselor looked dubious as he wrote the name down. "It's not common, nor uncommon either. The spelling of the first name is a little different, but there must be countless Obispos scattered over the System." It was curious. Now he almost did think of himself as Luis Obispo. He wanted to be that person. "Another thing," he said. "Did I have any money when I was found?" "You're thinking of leaving? A lot of them do." Val Borgenese flipped open the folder again. "You did have money, an average amount. It won't set you up in business, if that's what you're thinking." "I wasn't. How do I get it?" "I didn't think you were." The counselor made another notation. 'ril have the desk release it -- you can get it any time. By the way, you get the full amount, no deductions for anything." The news was welcome, considering what he had ahead of him. Borgenese was still speaking. "Whatever you do, keep in touch with us. It'll take time to run down this name, and maybe we'll draw a blank. But something significant may show up. If you're serious, and I think you are, it's to your advantage to check back every day or so." "I'm serious," said Luis. "I'll keep in touch." There wasn't much to pack. The clothing he wore had been supplied by the police. Ordinary enough; it would pass on the street without comment. It would do until he could afford to get better. He went down to the desk and picked up his money. It was more than he'd expected -- the average man didn't carry this much in his pocket. He wondered about it briefly as he signed the receipt and walked out of retro-therapy. The counselor had said it was an average amount, but it wasn't. He stood in the street In the dusk trying to orient himself. Perhaps the money wasn't so puzzling. An average amount for those brought into therapy for treatment, perhaps. Borgenese had said a high proportion were suicides. Such a person would want to start over again minus fears and frustrations, but not completely penniless. If he had money he'd want to take it with him, though not so much that it could be traced, since that would defeat the original purpose. The pattern was logical -- suicides were those with a fair sum of money. This was the fact which inclined Borgenese to the view he obviously held. Luis Obispo stood there uncertainty. Did he want to find out? His lips thinned -- he did. In spite of Borgenese, there were other ways to account for the money he had. One of them was this: he was an important man, accustomed to handling large sums of money. He started out. He was in a small city of a few hundred thousand on the extreme southern coast of California. In the last few days he'd studied maps of it; he knew where he was going.  ters were dark. He didn't know what he had expected, but it wasn't this. Reflection showed him that he hadn't thought about it clearly. The mere existence of Shelters indicated an economic level in which few people would either want or need to make use of that which was provided freely. He skirted the area. He'd been found in one of the Shelters -- which one he didn't know. Perhaps he should have checked the record before he came here. No, this was better. Clues, he was convinced, were almost nonexistent. He had to rely on his body and mind; but not in the ordinary way. He was particularly sensitive to impressions he had received before; the way he had learned things in therapy proved that; but if he tried to force them, he could be led astray. The wisest thing was to react naturally, almost without, volition. He should be able to recognize the Shelter he'd been found in without trouble. From that, he could work back. That was the theory -- but it wasn't happening. He circled the area, and there was nothing to which he responded more than vaguely. He would have to go closer. He crossed the street. The plan of the Shelters was simple; an area two blocks long and one block wide, heavily planted with shrubs and small trees. In the center was an S-shaped continuous structure divided into a number of small dwelling units. Luis walked along one wing of the building, turned at the corner and turned again. It was quite dark. He supposed that was why he wasn't reacting to anything. But his senses were sharper than he realized. There was a rustle behind him, and instinctively he flung himself forward, flat on the ground. A pink spot appeared, low on the wall next to him. It had been aimed at his legs. The paint crackled faintly and the pink spot faded. He rolled away fast. A dark body loomed past him and dropped where he'd been. There was an exclamation of surprise when the unknown found there was no one there. Luis grunted with satisfaction -- this might be only a stickup, but he was getting action faster than he'd expected. He reached out and took hold of a leg and drew the assailant to him. A hard object clipped the side of his head, and he grasped that too. The shape of the gun was familiar. He tore it loose. This wasn't any stickup! Once was enough to be retrogressed, and he'd had his share. Next time it was going to be the other guy. Physically, he was more than a match for his attacker. He twisted his body and pinned the struggling form to the ground. That was what it was -- a form. A woman, very much so; even in the darkness he was conscious of her body. Now she was trying to get loose, and he leaned his weight more heavily on her. Her clothing was torn -- he could feel her flesh against his face. He raised the gun butt, and then changed his mind and instead fumbled for a light. It wasn't easy to find it and still keep her pinned. "Be quiet or I'll clip you," he growled. She lay still. it on her face. It was good to look at, that face, but it wasn't at all familiar. He had trouble keeping his eyes from straying. Her dress was torn, and what she wore underneath was tom too. "Seen enough?" she asked coldly"Put that way, I haven't." He couldn't force his voice to be matter-of-fact -- it wouldn't behave. She stared angrily at the light in her eyes. "I knew you'd be back," she said. "I thought I could get you before you got me, but you're too fast." Her mouth trembled. "This time make it permanent. I don't want to be tormented again like this." He let her go and sat up. He was trembling, too, but not for the same reason. He turned the light away from her eyes. ' "Ever consider that you could be mistaken?" he asked. "You're not the only one it happens to." She lay there blinking at him, eyes adjusting to the changed light. She fumbled at the torn dress, which wouldn't stay where she put it. "You too?" she said with a vast lack of surprise. "When?" "They found me here two weeks ago. This is the first time I've come back." "Patterns," she said. "There are always patterns in what we do." Her attitude toward him had changed drastically, he could see it in her face. "I've been out three weeks longer." She sat up and leaned closer. She didn't seem to be thinking about the same things that had been on her mind only seconds before. He stood up and helped her to her feet. She was near and showed no inclination to move away. This was something Borgenese hadn't mentioned, and there was nothing in his re-education to prepare him for this sensation, but he liked it. He couldn't see her very well, now that the light was turned off, but she was almost touching him. "We're in the same situation, I guess." She sighed. "I'm lonely and a little afraid. Come into my place and we'll talk." He followed her. She turned into a dwelling that from the outside seemed identical to the others. Inside, it wasn't quite the same. He couldn't say in what way it was different, but he didn't think it was the one he'd been found in. That torn dress bothered him -- not that he wanted her to pin it up. The tapes hadn't been very explicit about the beauties of the female body, but he thought he knew what they'd left out. She was conscious of his gaze and smiled. It was not an invitation, it was a request, and he didn't mind obeying. She slid into his arms and kissed him. He was glad about the limitations of re-education. There were some things a man ought to learn for himself. She looked up at him. "Maybe you should tell me your name," she said. "Not that it means much in our case." "Luis Obispo," he said, holding her. "I had more trouble, I couldn't choose until two days ago." She kissed him again, hard and deliberately. It gave her enough time to jerk the gun out of his pocket. She slammed it against his ribs. "Stand back," she said, and meant it. her. She was desirable, more than he had imagined and for a variety of reasons. Her emotions had been real, he was sure of that, not feigned for the purpose of taking the gun away. But she had changed again in a fraction of a second. Her face was twisted with an effort at self-control. "What's the matter?" he asked. He tried to make his voice gentle, but it wouldn't come out that way. The retrogression process had sharpened all his reactions -- this one too. "The name I finally arrived at was -- Luise Obispo," she said. He started. The same as his, except feminine! This was more than he'd dared hope for. A clue -- and this girl, who he suddenly realized, without any cynicism about "love at first sight," because the tapes hadn't included it, meant something to him. "Maybe you're my wife," he said tentatively. "Don't count on it," she said wearily. "It would have been bet' ter if we were strangers -- then it wouldn't matter what we did. Now there are too many factors, and I can't choose." "It has to be," he argued. "Look -- the same name, and so close together in time and place, and we were attracted instantly -- " "Go away," she said, and the gun didn't waver. It was not a threat that he could ignl)re. He left. She was wrong in making him leave, completely wrong. He couldn't say how he knew, but he was certain. But he couldn't prove it, and she wasn't likely to accept his unsubstantiated word. He leaned weakly against the door. It was like that. Retrogression had left him with an adult body and sharper receptiveness. And after that followed an urge to live fully. He had a lot of knowledge, but it didn't extend to this sphere of human behavior. Inside he could hear her moving around faintly, an emotional anticlimax. It wasn't just frustrated sex desire, though that played a part. They had known each other previously -- the instant attraction they'd had for each other was proof, leaving aside the names. Lord, he'd trade his unknown identity to have her. He should have taken another name -- any other name would have been all right. It wasn't because she was the first woman he'd seen, or the woman he had first re-seen. There had been nurses, some of them beautiful, and he'd paid no attention to them. But Luise Obispo was part of his former life -- and he didn't know what part. The reactions were there, but until he could find out why, he was denied access to the satisfactions. From a very narrow angle, and only from that angle, he could see that there was still a light inside. It was dim, and if a person didn't know, he might pass by and not notice it. His former observation about the Shelters was incorrect. Every dwelling might be occupied and he couldn't tell unless he examined them individually. He stirred. The woman was a clue to his problem, but the clue itself was a far more urgent problem. Though his identity was important, he could build another life without it and the new life might not be worse than the one from which he had been forcibly removed. Perhaps he was over-reacting, but he didn't think so: his new life had to include this woman. He wasn't equipped to handle the emotion. He stumbled away from the door and found an unoccupied dwelling and went in without turning on the lights and lay down on the bed. In the morning, he knew he had been here before. In the darkness he had chosen unknowingly but also unerringly. This was the place in which he had been retrogressed. It was here that the police had picked him up. FHE counselor looked sleepily out of the screen. "I wish you people didn't have so much energy," he complained. Then he looked again and the sleepiness vanished. "I see you found it the first time." Luis knew it himself, because there was a difference from the dwelling Luise lived in -- not much, but perceptible to him. The counselor, however, must have a phenomenal memory to distinguish it from hundreds of others almost like it. Borgenese noticed the expression and smiled. "I'm not an eidetic, if that's what you think. There's a number on the set you're calling from and it shows on my screen. You can't see it." They would have something like that, Luis thought. "Why didn't you tell me this was it before I came?" "We were pretty sure you'd find it by yourself. People who've just been retroed usually do. It's better to do it on your own. Our object is to have you recover your personality. If we knew who you were, we could set up a program to guide you to it faster. As it is, if we help you too much, you turn into a carbon copy of the man who's advising you." Luis nodded. Give a man his adult body and mind and turn him loose on the problems which confronted him, and he would come up with adult solutions. It was better that way. But he hadn't called to discuss that. "There's another person living in the Shelters," he said. "You found her three weeks before you found me." "So you've met her already? Fine. We were hoping you would." Borgenese chuckled. "Let's see if I can describe her. Apparent age, about twentythree; that means that she was originally between twenty-six or thirty-eight, with the probability at the lower figure. A good body, as you are probably well aware, and a striking face. Somewhat oversexed at the moment, but that's all right -- so are you." He saw the expression on Luis's face and added quickly: "You needn't worry. Draw a parallel with your own experience. There were pretty nurses all around you in retro-therapy, and I doubt that you noticed that they were female. That's normal for a person in your position, and it's the same with her. "It works this way: you're both unsure of yourselves and can't react to those who have some control over their emotions. When you meet each other, you can sense that neither has made the necessary adjustments, and so you are free to release your true feelings." He smiled broadly. "At the moment, you two are the only ones who have been retroed recently. You won't have any competition for six months or so, until you begin to feel comfortable in your new life. By then, you should know how well you really like each other. "Of course tomorrow, or even today, we might find another person in the Shelter. If it's a man, you'll have to watch out; if a woman, you'll have too much companionship. As it is, I think you're very lucky." Yeah, he was lucky -- or would be if things were actually like that. Yesterday he would have denied it; but today, he'd be could get it. "I don't think you understand," he said. "She took the same name that I did." Borgenese's smile flipped over fast, and the other side was a frown. For a long time he sat there scowling out of the screen. "That's a hell of a thing to tell me before breakfast," he said. "Are you sure? She couldn't decide on a name before she left." "I'm sure," said Luis, and related all the details of last night. The counselor sat there and didn't say anything.  could. "You can trace us now," he said. "One person might be difficult. But two of us with nearly the same name, that should stick out big, even in a people are missing from somewhere. You can find that." The counselor's face didn't change. "You understand that if you were killed, we'd find the man who did it. I can't tell you how, but you can be sure he wouldn't escape. In the last hundred years there's been no unsolved murder." He coughed and turned away from the screen. When he turned back, his face was calm. "I'm not supposed to tell you this much. I'm breaking the rule because your case and that of the girl is different from any I've ever handled." He was speaking carefully. "Listen. I'll tell you once and won't repeat it. If you ever accuse me. I'll deny I said it, and I have the entire police organization behind me to make it stick." The counselor closed his eyes as if to see in his mind the principle he was formulating. "If we can catch a murderer, no matter how clever he may be, it ought to be easier to trace the identity of a person who is still alive. It is. But we never try. Though it's all right if the victim does. "It I should ask the cooperation of other police departments, they wouldn't help. If the solution lies within an area over which I have jurisdiction and I find out who is responsible, I will be dismissed before I can prosecute the man." Luis stared at the counselor in helpless amazement. "Then you're not doing anything," he said shakily. "You lied to me. You don't intend to do anything." "You're overwrought," said Borgenese politely. "If you could see how busy we are in your behalf -- " He sighed. "My advice is that if you can't convince the girl, forget her. If the situation gets emotionally unbearable, let me know and I can arrange transportation to another city where there may be others who are -- uh -- more compatible." "But she's my wife," he said stubbornly. "Are you sure?" Actually Luis wasn't -- but he wanted her to be, or any variation thereof she would consent to. He explained. "As she says, there are a lot of factors," commented the counselor. "I'd suggest an examination. It may remove some of her objections." He hadn't thought of it, but he accepted it eagerly. "What will that do?" "Not much, unfortunately. It will prove that you two can have healthy normal children, but it won't indicate that you're not a member of her genetic family. And, of course, it won't touch on the question of legal family, brother-in-law and the like. I don't suppose she'd accept that." She wouldn't. He'd seen her for only a brief time and yet he knew that much. He was in an ambiguous position; he could make snap decisions he was certain were right, but he had to guess at facts. He and the girl were victims, and the police refused to help them in the only way that would do much good. And the police had, or thought they had, official reasons for their stand. Luis told the counselor just exactly what he thought of that. "It's too bad," agreed the counselor. "These things often have an extraordinary degree of permanency if they ever get started." If they evergot started! Luis reached out and turned off the screen. It flickered unsteadily -- the counselor was trying to call him back. He didn't want to talk to the man; it was painful, and Borgenese had nothing to add but platitudes, and fuel to his anger. He swung open the panel and jerked the wiring loose and the screen went blank. There was an object concealed in the mechanism he had exposed. It was a neat, vicious, little retrogression gun. H e got it out and balanced it gingerly in his hand. Now he had something else to work on! It was the weapon, of course. It had been used on him and then hidden behind the screen. It was a good place to hide it. The screens never wore out or needed adjustment, and the cleaning robots that came out of the wall never cleaned there. The police should have found it, but they hadn't looked. He smiled bitterly. They weren't interested in solving crimes -- merely in ameliorating the consequences. Though the police had failed, he hadn't. It could be traced back to the man who owned it, and that person would have information. He turned the retro gun over slowly; it was just a gun; there were countless others like it. He finished dressing and dropped the gun in his pocket. He went outside and looked across the court. He hesitated and then walked over and knocked. "Occupied," said the door. "But the occupant is out. No definite time of return stated, but she will be back this evening. Is there any message?" "No message," he said. "I'll call back when she's home." He hoped she wouldn't refuse to speak to him. She'd been away from retro-therapy longer than he and possibly had developed her own leads -- very likely she was investigating some of them now. Whatever she found would help him, and vice versa. The man who'd retroed her had done the same to him. They were approaching the problem from different angles. Between the two of them, they should come up with the correct solution. He walked away from the Shelters and caught the belt to the center of town; the journey didn't take long. He stepped off, and wandered in the bright sunshine, not quite aimlessly. At length he found an Electronic Arms store, and went inside. him. "I'd like to speak to the manager," he said and the robot went away. Pr( sently the manager appeared, middle aged, drowsy. "What can I do for you?" Luis laid the retrogression gun on the counter. "I'd like to know who this was sold to." The manager coughed. "Well, "I know, but I have to find out." The manager picked it up. "It's a competitor's make," he said doubtfully. "Of course, as a courtesy to a customer..." He fingered it thoughtfully. "Do you really want to know? It's just a freezer. Not at all dangerous." Luis looked at it with concern. Just a freezer -- not a retro gun at all ! Then it couldn't have been the weapon used on him. Before he could take it back the manager broke it open. The drowsy expression vanished. "Why didn't you say so?" exclaimed the manager, examining it. "This gun has been illegally altered." He bent over the exposed circuits and then glanced up happily at Luis. "Come here. I'll show you." Luis followed him to the small workshop in the back of the store. The manager closed the door behind them and fumbled among the equipment. He mounted the gun securely in a frame and pressed a button which projected an image of the circuit onto a screen. The manager was enjoying himself. "Everybody's entitled to self-protection," he said. "That's why we sell so many like these. They're harmless, won't hurt a baby. Fully charged, they'll put a man out for half an hour, overload his nervous system. At the weakest, they'll still keep him out of action for ten minutes. Below that, they won't work at all." He looked up. "Are you sure you understand this?" It had been included in his re-education, but it didn't come readily to his mind. "Perhaps you'd better go over it for me." The manager wagged his head. "As I said, the freezer is legal, won't harm anyone. It'll stop a man or an elephant in his tracks, freeze him, but beyond that will leave him intact. When he comes out of it, he's just the same as before, nothing changed." He seized a pointer and adjusted the controls so as to enlarge the image on the screen. "However, a freezer can be converted to a retrogression gun, and that's illegal." He traced the connections with the pointer. "If this wire, instead of connecting as it does, is moved to here and here, the polarity is reversed. In addition, if these four wires are interchanged, the freezer becomes a retrogressor. As I said, it's illegal to do that." HE manager scrutinized the circuits closely and grunted in disgust. "Whoever converted this did a sloppy job. Here." He bent over the gun and began manipulating micro-instruments. He worked rapidly and surely. A moment later, he snapped the weapon together and straightened up, handing it to Luis. "There," he said proudly. "It's a much more effective retrogressor than it was. Uses less power too." Luis swallowed. Either he was mad or the man was, or perhaps it was the society he was trying to adjust to. "Aren't you taking a chance, doing this for me?" The manager smiled. "You're joking. A tenth of the freezers we sell are immediately converted into retrogressors. Who cares?" He became serious. "Do you still want to know who bought it?" Luis nodded -- at the moment he didn't trust his voice. "It will take several hours. No charge though, customer service. Tell me where I can reach you." Luis jotted down the number of the screen at the Shelter and handed it to the manager. As he left, the manager whispered to him: "Remember, the next time you buy a freezer -- ours can be converted easier than the one you have." He went out into the sunlight. It didn't seem the same. What kind of society was he living in? The reality didn't fit with what he had re-learned. It had seemed an orderly and sane civilization, with little violence and vast respect for the law. But the fact was that any school child -- well, not quite that young, perhaps -- but anyone older could and did buy a freezer. And it was ridiculously easy to convert a freezer into something far more vicious. Of course, it was illegal, but no one paid any attention to that. This was wrong; it wasn't the way he remembered... T# He corrected himself : he didn't actually remember anything. His knowledge came from tapes, and was obviously inadequate. Certain things he just didn't understand yet. He wanted to talk to someone -- but who? The counselor had Before what? Before he had been retrogressed. He had beeh brought here from elsewhere, the same as Luise. He visited the spaceport. Again the evidence was negative; there was not a ship the sight of which tripped his memory. It had been given him all the information he intended to. The store manager had supplied some additional insight, but it only confused him. Luise -- at the moment she was suspicious of him. There was nothing to do except to be as observant as he could. He wandered through the town, just looking. He saw nothing that seemed fam'iliar. Negative evidence, of course, but it indicated he hadn't lived here before. too much to hope for; if he had been brought in by spaceship, it wouldn't still be around for him to recognize. Late in the afternoon, he headed toward the center of town. He was riding the belt when he saw Luise coming out of a tall office building. pass, boarding it again and following her at a distance. As soon as they were out of the business district, he began to edge closer. A few blocks from the Shelter she got off the belt and waited, turning around and smiling directly at him. In the interim her attitude toward him had changed, evidently -- for the better, as far as he was concerned. He couldn't ignore her and didn't want to. He stepped off the belt. "Hello," she said. "I think you were following me." "I was. Do you mind?" "I guess I don't." She walked along with him. "Others followed me, but I discouraged them." She was worth following, but it was not that which was strange. Now she seemed composed and extraordinarily friendly, a complete reversal from last night. Had she learned something during the day which changed her opinion of him? He hoped she had. She stopped at the edge of the Shelter area. "Do you live here?" Learned something? She seemed to have forgotten. He nodded. "For the same reason?" His throat tightened. He had told her all that last night. Couldn't she remember? "Yes," he said. "I thought so. That's why I didn't mind your following me." Here was the attraction factor that Borgenese had spoken of; it was functioning again, for which he was grateful. But still, why? And why didn't she remember last night? They walked on until she came to her dwelling. She paused at the door. "I have a feeling I should know who you are, but I just can't recall. Isn't that terrible?" It was -- frightening. Her identity was apparently incompletely established; it kept slipping backward to a time she hadn't met him. He couldn't build an#rthing enduring on that; each meeting with her would begin as if nothing had happened before. Would the same be true of him? He looked at her. The torn dress hadn't been repaired, as he'd thought at first; it had been replaced by the robots that came out of the wall at night. They'd done a good job fitting her, but with her body that was easy. It was frightening and it wasn't. At least this time he didn't have a handicap. He opened his mouth to tell her his name, and then closed it. He wasn't going to make that mistake again. "I haven't decided on a name," he said. "It was that way with me too." She gazed at him and he could feel his insides sloshing around. "Well, man with no name, do you want to come in? We can have dinner together." He entered. But dinner was late that night. He had known it would be. TN the morning light, he sat up and put his hand on her. She smiled in her sleep and squirmed closer. There were compensations for being nobody, he supposed, and this was one of them. He got up quietly and dressed without waking her. There were a number of things he wanted to discuss, but somehow there hadn't been time last night. He would have to talk to her later today. He slipped out of the house and went across the court into his own. The screen he had ripped apart had been repaired and put back in place. A voice chimed out as he entered: "A call came while you were gone." "Let's have it." The voice descended the scale and became that of the store manager. "The gun you brought in was sold six months ago to Dorn Starret, resident of Ceres and proprietor of a small gallium mine there. That's all the information on record. I trust it will be satisfactory." Luis sat down. It was. He could trace the man or have him traced, though the last might not be necessary. The name meant something to him -- just what he couldn't say. Dorn Starret, owner of a gallium mine on Ceres. The mine might or might not be, of consequence; gallium was used in a number of industrial processes, but beyond that was not particularly valuable. He closed his eyes to concentrate. The name slid into vacant nerve cells that were responsive; slowly a picture formed, nebulous and incomplete at first. There was a mouth and then there were eyes, each feature bringing others into focus, unfolding as a germ cell divides and grows, calling into existence an entire creature. The picture was nearly complete. Still with eyes closed, he looked at the man he remembered. Dorn Starret, five-eleven, one hundred and ninety, flesh that had once been muscular and firm. Age, thirty-seven; black hair that was beginning to recede from his forehead. The face was harder to define -- strong, though slightly hard, it was perhaps good looking. It was the eyes which were at fault, Luis decided -- glinting often -- and there were lines on the face that ought not to be there. There was another thing that set the man apart. Not clothing; that was conventional, though better than average. Luis stared into his memory until he was able to see it. Unquestionably the man was left-handed. The picture was too clear to permit a mistake on that detail. He knew the man, had seen him often. How and in what context? He waited, but nothing else came. Luis opened his eyes. He would recognize the man if he ever saw him. This was the man who owned the gun, presumably had shot him with it, and then had hidden it here in this room. He thought about it vainly. By itself, the name couldn't take him back through all past associations with the man, so he passed from the man to Ceres. Here he was better equipped; re-education tapes had replaced his former knowledge of the subject. THE asteroid belt was not rigidly policed; if there was a place in the System in which legal niceties were not strictly observed, it was there. What could he deduce from that? Nothing perhaps; there were many people living in the belt who were engaged in legitimate work : miners, prospectors, scientific investigators. But with rising excitement, he realized that Dorn Starret was not one of these. He was a criminal. The gallium mine was merely an attempt to cover himself with respectability. How did Luis know that? He wasn't sure; his thought processes were hidden and erratic; but he knew. Dorn Starret was a criminal -- but the information wasn't completely satisfactory. What had caused the man to retrogress Luis and Luise Obispo? That still had to be determined. But it did suggest this: as a habitual criminal, the man was more than ordinarily dangerous. Luis sat there a while longer, but he had recalled everything that would come out of the original stimulus. If he wanted more, he would have to dig up other facts or make further contacts. But at least it wasn't hopeless -- even without the police, he had learned this much. He went over the room thoroughly once more. If there was anything hidden, he couldn't find it. He crossed the court to Luise's dwelling. She was gone, but there was a note on the table. He picked it up and read it: Dear man with no name: I suppose you were here last night, though I'm so mixed up I can't be sure; there's so little of memory or reality to base anything on. I wanted to talk to you before I left but I guess, like me, you're out investigating. There's always a danger that neither of us will like what we find. What if I'm married to another person and the same with you? Suppose... but there are countless suppositions -- these are the risks we take. It's intolerable not to know who I am, especially since the knowledge is so close. But of course you know that. Anyway I'll be out most of the day. I discovered a psychologist who specializes in restoring memory; you can see the possibilities in that. I went there yesterday and have an appointment again today. It's nice of him, considering that I have no money, but he says I'm more or less an experimental subject. I can't tell you when I'll be back but it won't be late. Luise. He crumpled the note in his hand. Memory expert. Her psychologist was that -- in reverse. Yesterday he had taken a day out of her life, and that was why Luise hadn't recognized him and might not a second time. After a moment, he straightened out the note. A second reading didn't help. There it was, if he could make sense from it. Luise and himself, probably in that order. There was no proof, but it seemed likely that she had been retrogressed first, since she had been discovered first. There was also Dorn Starret, the criminal from Ceres who had hidden the gun in the Shelter that he, Luis, had been found in. And there was now a fourth person: the psychologist who specialized in depriving retrogression victims of what few memories they had left. Luis grimaced. Here was information which, if the police would act on it properly... but it was no use, they wouldn't. Any solution which came out of this would have to arise out of his own efforts. He folded the note carefully. It would be handy to have if Luise came back and didn't know who he was. Meanwhile, the psychologist. Luise hadn't said who he was, but it shouldn't be difficult to locate him. He went to the screen and dialed the directory. There were many psychologists in it, but no name that was familiar. He pondered. The person who had retroed Luise and himself -- what would he do? First he would take them as far from familiar scenes as he could. That tied in with the facts. Dorn Starret came from Ceres. Then what? He would want to make certain that his victims did not trace their former lives. And he would be inconspicuous in so doing. Again Luis turned to the screen, but this time he dialed the news service. He found what he was looking for in the advertisements of an issue a month old. It was very neat: your mind hazy? Perhaps my system can help you recall those little details you find it so annoying to That was all. No name. But there was an address. Hurriedly Luis scanned every succeeding issue. The advertisement was still there. He was coming closer, very close. The ad was clever; it would attract the attention of Luise and himself and others like them, and almost no one else. There was no mention of fees, no claim that it was operated by a psychologist, nothing that the police would investigate. Night after night Luise had sat alone; sooner or later, watching the screen, she had to see the ad. It was intriguing and she had answered it. Normally, so would he have: but now he was forewarned. Part of the cleverness was this : that she went of her own volition. She would have suspected an outright offer of help -- but this seemed harmless. She went to him as she would to anyone in business. A very clever setup. knew. A trained psychologist with a legitimate purpose would attach his name to the advertisement.  Luis patted the retro gun in his pocket. Dorn Starret, criminal, and inventor of a fictitious memory system, was going to have a visitor. It wasn't necessary to go to Ceres to see him. T was the only conclusion that made sense. Dorn Starret had retroed him -- the gtin proved that -- and Luise as well. Until a few minutes ago, he had thought that she had been first and he later, but that was wrong. They had been retrogressed together and Dorn Starret had done it: now he had come back to make certain that they didn't trace him. Neat -- but it wasn't going to work. Luis grinned wryly to himself. He had a weapon in his pocket that was assurance it wouldn't work. He got off the belt near the building he had seen Luise leaving yesterday. He went into the wasn't necessary, but he checked rental dates. The lab had been there exactly three weeks. This tied in with Luise's release from retro-therapy. Every connection he had anticipated was there. He rode up to the top floor. There wasn't a chance that Starret would recognize him; physically he must have changed too much since the criminal had last seen him. And while Luise hadn't concealed that she was a retro and so had given herself away, he wasn't going to make that mistake. The sign on the door stood out as he came near and disappeared that was all -- no other name, even here. Naturally. A false name would be occasion for police action. The right one would evoke Luise's and his own memories. He turned back and went into the waiting room. No robot receptionist. He expected that; the man didn't intend to be around very long. "Who's there?" The voice came from a speaker in the wall; the screen beside it remained blank, though obviously the man was in the next room. For a commernot considerate of potential clients. Luis smiled sourly and loosened the weapon in his pocket. "I saw your advertisement," he said. No name; let him guess. "I'm very busy. Can you come back tomorrow?" Luis frowned. This was not according to plan. First, he didn't recognize the voice, though the speaker could account for that if it were intentionally distorted. Second, Luise was inside and he had to protect her. He could break in, but he preferred that the man come out. He thought swiftly. "I'm Chals Putsyn, gallium importer," he called. "Tomorrow I'll be away on business. Can you give me an appointment for another time?" There wasa long silence. "Wait. I'll be out." He'd thought the mention of gallium would do it. True, the mine Starret owned was probably worthless, but he couldn't restrain his curiosity. HE door swung open and a man stepped out, closing the door before Luis could see inside. He had erred -- the man was not Dorn Starret. The other eyed him keenly. "Mr. Chals Putsyn? Please sit down." Luis did so slowly, giving himself time to complete a mental inventory. The man had to be Dorn Starret -- and yet he wasn't. No disguise could be that effective. At least three inches shorter; the shape of his head was different; his body was slighter. Moreover, he was right-handed, not left, as Starret was. Luis had a story ready -- names, dates, and circumstances. It sounded authentic even to himself. The man listened impatiently. "I may not be able to help you," he said, interrupting. "Oddly enough, light cases are hardest. It's the serious memory blocks that I specialize in." There was something strange about his eyes -- his voice too. "However, if you can come back in two days, late in the afternoon. I'll see what I can do." Luis took the appointment card and found himself firmly ushered to the door. It was disturbing; Luise was in the next room, but the man gave him no opportunity to see her. He stood uncertainly in the hall. The whole interview had taken only a few minutes, and during that time all his previous ideas had been upset. If the man was not Dorn Starret, who was he and what was his connection? The criminal from Ceres was not so foolish as to attempt to solve his problems by assigning them to another person. This was a one-man job from beginning to end, or ought to be. Luis took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out aimlessly on the street. There was something queer about the man on the top floor. It took time to discover what it was. The man was not Starret -- but he was disguised. His irises were stained another color and the voice was not his own -- or rather it was, but filtered through an artificial larynx inserted painfully in his throat. And his face had been recently swabbed with a chemical irritant which caused the tissues beneath his skin to swell, making his face appear plumper. Luis took a deep breath. Unconsciously he had noticed details too slight for the average person to discern. This suggested something about his own past -- that he was trained to recognize disguises. But more important was this: that the man was disguised at all. The reason was obvious -- to avoid evoking memories. The man's name -- what was it? It hadn't even been registered in the building -- he'd asked on his way out. And Luise couldn't tell him. She was no longer a reliable source of information. He had to find out, and there was only one way that suggested itself. Luise was still in there, but not in physical danger. The police were lax about other things, but not about murder, and the man knew that. She might lose her memories of the past few weeks; regrettable if it happened, but not a catastrophe. But who was the man and what was his connection? He spent the rest of the day buying equipment -- not much, but his money dwindled rapidly. He considered going back to the Shelter and then decided against it. By this time Luise would be back, and he would be tempted not to leave her. After dark, when the lights in the offices went out, he rented an aircar and set it down on the top of the building. timating the distances with practiced ease, as if he'd undergone extensive training and the apprenticeship period had been forgotten and only the skill remained. He knelt and fused two small rods to a portion of the roof, and then readjusted the torch and cut a small circular hole. He listened, and when there was no alarm, lifted out the section. There was nothing but darkness below. He fastened a rope to the aircar. He dropped the rope through the hole and slid down. Unless he had miscalculated, he was where he wanted to be, having bypassed all alarm circuits. There were others inside, he was reasonably certain of that, but with ordinary precautions he could avoid them. He flashed on a tiny light. He had guessed right; this was wanted to see this afternoon but hadn't been able to. In front of him was the door to the waiting room, and beyond that the hall. He swung the light in an arc, flashing it over a desk and a piece of equipment the nature of which he didn't know. Behind him was still another door. The desk was locked, but he took out a small magnetic device and jiggled it expertly over the concealed mechanism and then it was unlocked. He went hurriedly through papers and documents, but there was nothing with a name on it. He rifled the desk thoroughly and then went to the machine. He didn't expect to learn anything, but he might as well examine it. There was a place for a patient to sit, and a metal hood to fit over the patient's head. He snapped the hood open and peered into it. It seemed to have two functions. One circuit was far larger and more complicated, and he couldn't determine what it did. But he recognized the other circuit; essentially it was a retrogressor, but whereas the gun was crude and couldn't be regulated, this was capable of fine adjustment -- enough, say, to slice a day out of the patient's life, and no more. That fitted with what had happened to Luise. She had been experimented on in some way, and then the memory of that experiment had been erased. But the man had grown careless and had taken away one day too many. He snapped the mechanism closed. This was the method, but he still didn't know who the man was nor why he found it necessary to do all this. There was a door behind him and the answer might lie beyond it. He listened carefully, then swung the door open and went through. The blow that hit him wasn't physical; nothing mechanical could take his nerves and jerk them all at once. A freezer. As he fell to the floor, he was grateful it was that and not a retro gun. Lights flooded the place, and the man of the afternoon interview was grinning at him. "I thought you'd be back," he said, pleased. "In fact, I knew you would." dered; but he didn't know how. Experimentally he wriggled his fingers. They moved a fraction of an inch, but no more. He was helpless and couldn't say anything. He wasn't quite sure at the moment that he wanted to. "You were right, I didn't recognize you physically," continued the man. "Nevertheless, you gave yourself away. The name you used this afternoon, Chals Putsyn, is my name. Do you remember now?" Of course. He'd chosen Chals Putsyn at random, because he'd had to say something, and everything would have been all right -- except it actually hadn't been a random choice. The associations had triggered the wrong words into existence. His mind flashed back to the time he'd discussed names with Borgenese. What had he said? Putsy. But it wasn't Putsy -- it was Putsyn. "You're very much improved," said the real Chals Putsyn, staring curiously at him. "Let me recommend the retro treatment to you. In fact I'd take it myself, but there are a few inconveniences." Yeah, there were inconveniences -- like starting over again and not knowing who you were. But Putsyn was right: he was physically improved. A freezer knocked a man down and kept him there for half an hour. But Luis had only been down a few minutes, and already he could move his feet, though he didn't. It was a phenomenally fast recovery, and perhaps Putsyn wasn't aware of it. "The question is, what to do with you?" Putsyn seemed to be thinking aloud. "The police are disposed of every atom... He shook his head and sighed. "But that's been tried, and it didn't make any difference. So you'll have to remain alive -- though I don't think you'll approve of my treatment." Luis didn't approve -- it would be the same kind of treatment that Luise had been exposed to, but more drastic in his case, because he was aware of what was going on. Putsyn came close to drag him away. It was time to use the energy he'd been saving up, and he did. Startled, Putsyn fired the freezer, but he was aiming at a twisting target and the invisible energy only grazed Luis's leg. The leg went limp and had no feeling, but his two hands were still good and that was all he needed. He tore the freezer away and put his other hand on Putsyn's throat. He could feel the artificial larynx inside. He squeezed. He lay there until Putsyn went limp. any movement, he sat up and pried open the man's jaws, thrusting his fingers into the mouth and jerking out the artificial larynx. The next time he would hear Putsyn's real voice, and maybe that would trigger his memory. He crawled to the door and pulled himself up, leaning against the wall. By the time Putsyn moved, he had regained partial use of his leg. "Now we'll see," he said. He didn't try to put anger in his voice; it was there. "I don't have to tell you that I can beat answers out of you." "You don't know?" Putsyn laughed and there was relief in the sound. "You can kick me around, but you won't get your answers!" The man had physical courage, or thought he did, and sometimes that amounted to the same thing. Luis shifted uneasily. It was the first time he'd heard Putsyn's actual voice; it was disturbing, but it didn't arouse concrete memories. He stepped on the outstretched hand. "Think so?" he said. He could hear the fingers crackle. Putsyn paled, but didn't cry out. "Don't think you can kill me and get away with it," he said. He didn't sound too certain. Slightly sick, Luis stepped off the hand. He couldn't kill the man -- and not just because of the police. He just couldn't do it. He felt for the other gun in his pocket. "This isn't a freezer," he said. "It's been changed over. I think I'll give you a sample." Putsyn blinked. "And lose all chance of finding out? Go ahead." Luis had thought of that; but he hadn't expected Putsyn to. "You see, there's nothing you can do," said Putsyn. "A man has a right to protect his property, and I've got plenty of evidence that you broke in." "I don't think you'll go to the police," Luis said. "You think not? My memory system isn't a fraud. Admittedly, I didn't use it properly on Luise, but in a public demonstration I can prove that it does work." Luis nodded wearily to himself. He'd half suspected that it did work. Here he was, with the solution so close -- this man knew his identity and that of Luise, and where Dorn Starret came into the tangle -- and he couldn't force Putsyn to tell. He couldn't go to the police. They would ignore his charges, because they were based on unprovable suspicions... ignore him or arrest him for breaking and entering. "Everything's in your favor," he said, raising the gun. "But there's one way to make you leave us alone." "Wait," cried Putsyn, covering his face with his uninjured hand, as if that would shield him. "Maybe we can work out an agreement." Luis didn't lower the gun. "I mean it," he said. "I know you mean it -- I can't let you take away my life's work." "Talk fast," Luis said, "and don't lie." He stood close and listened while Putsyn told his story. This is what had happened, he thought. This is what he'd tried so hard to learn. "I had to do it that way," Putsyn finished. "But if you're willing to listen to reason, I can cut you in -- more money than you've dreamed of -- and the girl too, if you want her." Luis was silent. He wanted her -- but now the thought was foolish. Hopeless. This must be the way people felt who stood in the blast area of a rocket -- but for them the sensation lasted only an instant, while for him the feeling would last the rest of his life. "Get up," he said. "Then it's all right?" asked Putsyn nervously. "We'll share it?" "Get up." Putsyn got to his feet, and Luis hit him. He could have used the freezer, but that wasn't personal enough. He let the body fall to the floor. He dragged the inert form into the waiting room and turned on the screen and talked to the police. Then he turned off the screen and kicked open the door to the hall. He shouldered Putsyn and carried him up to the roof and put him in the aircar. sleepy. For reasons of his own, Borgenese had sent a squad to bring her in. Might as well have her here and get it over with, Luis thought. She smiled at him, and he knew that Putsyn hadn't lied about that part. She remembered him and therefore Putsyn hadn't had time to do much damage. Borgenese was at the desk as he walked in. Luis swung Putsyn off his shoulder and dropped him into a chair. The man was still unconscious, but wouldn't be for long. "I see you brought a visitor," remarked Borgenese pleasantly. "A customer," he said. "Customers are welcome too," said the police counselor. "Of course, it's up to us to decide whether he is a customer." Luise started to cross the room, but Borgenese motioned her back. "Let him alone. I think he's going to have a rough time." "Yeah," said Luis. It was nice to know that Luise liked him now -- because she wouldn't after this was over. He wiped the sweat off his forehead: all of it hadn't come from physical exertion. "Putsyn here is a scientist," he said. "He worked out a machine that reverses the effects of the retro gun. He intended to go to everyone who'd been retrogressed, and in return for giving them back their memory, they'd sign over most of their property to him. "Naturally, they'd agree. They all want to return to their former lives that bad, and, of course, they aren't aware of how much money they had. He had it all his way. He could use the machine to investigate them, and take only those who were really wealthy. He'd give them a partial recovery in the machine, and when he found out who they were, give them a quick shot of a built-in retro gun, taking them back to the time they'd just entered his office. They wouldn't suspect a thing. "Those who measured up he'd sign an agreement with, and to the other poor devils he'd say that he was sorry but he couldn't help them." Putsyn was conscious now. "It's not so," he said sullenly. "He can't prove it." "I don't think he's trying to prove that," said Borgenese, still calm. "Let him talk." Luis took a deep breath. "He might have gotten away with it, but he'd hired a laboratory assistant to help him perfect the machine. She didn't like his ideas; she thought a discovery like that should be given to the public. He didn't particularly care what she thought, but now the trouble was that she could build it too, and since he couldn't patent it and still keep it secret, she was a threat to his plans." He paused. "Her name was Luise Obispo." H e didn't have to turn his head. From the corner of his eye, he could see startlement flash across her face. She'd got her name right; and it was he who had erred in choosing a name. "Putsyn hired a criminal, Dorn Starret, to get rid of her for him," he said harshly. "That was the way Starret made his living. He was an expert at it. "Starret slugged her one night on Mars. He didn't retro her at once. He loaded .her on a spaceship and brought her to Earth. During the passage, he talked to her and got to like her a lot. She wasn't as developed as she is now, kind of mousy maybe, but you know how those things are -- he liked her. He made love to her, but didn't get very far. "He landed in another city on Earth and left his spaceship there; he drugged her and brought her to the Shelter here and retroed her. That's what he'd been paid to do. "Then he decided to stick around. Maybe she'd change her mind after retrogression. He stayed in a Shelter just across from the one she was in. And he made a mistake. He hid the retro gun behind the screen. "Putsyn came around to check up. He didn't like Starret staying there -- a key word or a familiar face sometimes triggers the memory. He retroed Starret, who didn't have a gun he could get to in a hurry. Maybe Putsyn had planned to do it all along. He'd built up an airtight alibi when Luise disappeared, so that nobody would connect him with that -- and who'd miss a criminal like Starret? "Anyway, that was only part of it. He knew that people who've been retroed try to find out who they are, and that some of them succeed. He didn't want that to happen. So he put an advertisement in the paper that she'd see and answer. When she did, he began to use his machine on her, intending to take her from the present to the past and back again so often that her mind would refuse to accept anything, past or present. "But he'd just started when Starret showed up, and he knew he had to get him too. So he pulled what looked like a deliberate slip and got Starret interested, intending to take care of both of them in the same way at the same time." He leaned against the wall. It was over now and he knew what he could expect. "That's all, but it didn't work out the way Putsyn wanted it. Starret was a guy who knew how to look after his own interests." Except the biggest and most important one; there he'd failed. Borgenese was tapping on the desk, but it wasn't really tapping -- he was pushing buttons. A policeman came in and the counselor motioned to Putsyn: "Put him in the pre-trial cells." "You can't prove it," said Putsyn. His face was sunken and frightened. "I think we can," said the counselor indifferently. "You don't know the efficiency of our laboratories. You'll talk." moved, Borgenese turned. "Very good work, Luis. I'm pleased with you. I think in time you'd make an excellent policeman. Retro detail, of course." Luis stared at him. "Didn't you listen?" he said. "I'm Dorn Starret, a cheap crook." In that mental picture of Starret he'd had, he should have seen it at once. Left-handed? Not at all -- that was the way a man normally saw himself in a mirror. And in mirror images, the right hand becomes the left. The counselor sat up straight, not gentle and easygoing any longer. "I'm afraid you can't prove that," he said. "Fingerprints? Will any of Starret's past associates identify you? There's Putsyn, but he won't be around to testify." He smiled. "As final evidence let me ask you this; when he offered you a share in his crooked scheme, did you accept? You did not. Instead, you brought him in, though you thought you were heading into certain retrogression." Luis blinked dazedly. "But -- " "There are no exceptions, Luis. For certain crimes there is a prescribed penalty, retrogression. The law makes no distinction as to how the penalty is applied, and for a good reason. If there was such a . person, Dorn Starret ceased to exist when Putsyn retroed him -- and not only legally." Counselor Borgenese stood up. "You see, retroing a person wipes him clean of almost everything he ever knew -- right and wrong. It leaves him with an adult body, and we fill his mind with adult facts. Given hdlf a chance, he acts like an adult." Borgenese walked slowly to stand in front of his desk. "We protect life. Everybody's life. Including those who are not yet victims. We don't have the death penalty and don't want it. The most we can do to anyone is give him a new chance, via retrogression. We have the same penalty for those who deprive another of his memory as we do for those who kill -- with this difference : the man who retrogresses another knows he has a good chance to get away with it. The murderer is certain that he won't. "That's an administrative rule, not a law -- that we don't try to trace retrogression victims. It channels anger and greed into nondestructive acts. There are a lot of unruly emotions floating around, and as long as there are, we have to have a safety valve for them. Retrogression is the perfect instrument for that." Luise tried to speak, but he waved her into silence. "Do you know how many were killed last year?" he asked. Luis shook his head. "Four," said the counselor. "Four murders in a population record, as anyone knows who reads Twentieth Century mystery novels." He glanced humorously at Luis. "You did, didn't you?" Luis nodded mutely. Borgenese grinned. "I thought so. There are only three types of people who know about fingerprints today, historians and policemen being two. And I didn't think you were either." Luise finally broke in. "Won't Putsyn's machine change things?" "Will it?" The counselor pretended to frown. "Do you remember how to build it?" "I've forgotten," she confessed. "So you have," said Borgenese, "And I assure you Putsyn is going to forget too. As a convicted criminal, and he will be, we'll provide him with a false memory that will prevent his prying into the past. "That's one machine we don't want until humans are fully and completely civilized. It's been invented a dozen times in the last century, and it always gets lost." He closed his eyes momentarily, and when he opened them, Luise was looking at Luis, who was staring at the floor. "You two can go now," he said. "When you get ready, there are jobs for both of you in my department. No hurry, though; we'll keep them open." Luis left, went out through the long corridors and into the night.  he was getting off the belt that had taken him back to the Shelters. "There's not much you can say, I suppose," she murmured. "What can you tell a girl when she learns you've stopped just He didn't know the answer either. They walked in silence. She stopped at her dwelling, but didn't go in. "Still, it's an indication of how you felt -- that you forgot your own name and took mine." She was smiling now. "I don't see how I can do less for you." Hope stirred and he moved closer. But he didn't speak. She might not mean what he thought she did. "Luis and Luise Obispo," she said softly. "Very little change for me -- just add Mrs. to it." She was gazing at him with familiar intensity. "Do you want to come in?" She opened the door. Crime was sometimes the road to opportunity, and retrogression could be kind. San Francisco, Calif. # September # # # , # Autographs, manuscripts, artwork and gobfests by your favorite science fiction and fantasy authors, editors, artists and fans! For membership, send I to Box #, Station A, Richmond #, Calif. You'll have the time of nine lives! oalaxy By Willy Ley ingredients... carefully selected from thoughtripened ideas... employing only the most convincing characters and conflicts, human or otherwise... and blended by master craftsmen into intellectually and emotionally nutritious stories. hands in every stage of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction.  The price Is # a copy, # a year. Add I per year on foreign subscriptions (#; less than newsstand price) and the address is... #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. Are you a prisoner in your present job? Are you bored with your work? Do you o home at nit tired from people before they turned to I.C.S. (or help, these thines are probably true aul you; You're caught between a job with no future and a family to aup port. You're sour on your job, hate to get up in the morning to go to work. At night, you're not much fun to have arouni Unless you do something about it, things are going to get worse. "Prisoners" aren't much good to their bosses or ftmilies. And, of course, you can do something to "free" yourself... to get a better job, with more money. And insure yourself against layoffs For Real Job Security -- Get I.C.S. Training! that come to untrained men. To develop interest in your work. To earn the respect of your family and community. Faced with such a problem, six for help. Th studied at home, in their spare time. They devdoped new alulls and new knowledge. Did it pay off for them? Look at the record. In a aingle #-day' were promoted to better jobs I Take J. R. Todd. "Already Fm netting # a month profit on my investment," he says. "And there's John R. Musik jumped from # to S# a mouth. #. #. Braun from # # # a month. H. A. Howell got a # a month raise as a result of his I.C.S. training. Production in the field of Electronics has increased # times in # years. 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All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. THfe Reg. U.S. Pat. OH. These great tninds were Rosicrudam , San Jose. California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book, The Mastery nf Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculues and powers of mind. NafyiA Add tess State Why wer these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you 'Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind I Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... , were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. have broken into Galaxy have tried to tell me how it feels. They couldn't, because the words haven't yet been invented. But there was no need to try -- it was just twenty years ago, exactly half my lifetime, that I sold my first story and I well remember my dazzled feeling that a miracle had been passed. As a matter of fact, I can't think of anything about that first sale that wasn't miraculous. Jobs in # were desperately scarce; I hunted by day and wrote by night. Every door had a "No Help Wanted" sign and my manuscripts seemed to be opened by a machine that slipped them unread, along with a rejection slip, into the return envelope. Where did magazines get their material? More machines, obviously. I had found a job as busboy. The hours were from # a.m. to # A.M. Then I had to walk several miles home because the buses didn't run that late at night. When I came back the next morning, I was laid off with an astonishing explanation. The boss, an artistic type, couldn't stand the sight of a writer collecting dirty dishes! I argued baffiedly that I had never sold anything and so was not yet a writer, that I was gaining experience in life's hard realities for later use -- and, in any case, he wasn't paying me; the waiters were! He agreed sorrowfully that I was right on all counts. But he still couldn't bear the sight of even a future writer stacking dishes. The morning mail had come when I got back home, furious and worried. There was a business envelope instead of a manuscript in the box. I had sold my first story! Do you think anybody has to tell me how that feels? Do you think anybody could? There's more of a point to this than mere reminiscence, of course -- the short-story contest we are running in cooperation with the American Humanist Association, for at least one college student, and I hope many more, will feel the same touch of the wand -- and the rest of us will share that triumph in the enjoyment of reading work by fresh, vigorous new talent. Here is a pertinent heartfelt quote from my introduction to the First Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction: "Were I an envious man, which I am, I would resent the break that authors have today in rates and markets. There were very few science fiction magazines (in the #s), their rates ranging from microscopic fractions of a cent payable upon lawsuit to just enough to starve on... "Crashing Galaxv is no cinch, as (its) stories, with their fine ideas, sharp characterization and shrewd craftsmanship, more than adequately prove. "No doubt there is a lesson to be derived from this. Writing science fiction in the early days was easier, but the pay was poor. Writing for Galaxy is much harder, but the pay is highly rewarding both in amount and prestige. "I guess it balances out. Either way, writing -- especially the writing of science fiction -- is not a job for the lazy. A good story, such as you'll find here, gives the illusion of having been produced effortlessly. Nothing involves more effort than achieving that illusion, however." In other words, don't kid yourself that writing is a substitute for work. It requires as hard an apprenticeship as any other profession. But there is this difference -- no other profession has as low a starting age. I was twenty when I began to sell, but many broke in at seventeen and eighteen... and one girl was fourteen when she started a very successful series! Naturally, few of us sold our very first story. And I'd like to say that, when the maiden sale was made, we all lived happily ever after. But each found there was still plenty to be learned about the selection and development of theme, characterization and incident. And we're all still capable of turning out occasional duds. If I'm forced to state the most important ingredient, I am afraid I have to contradict Somerset Maugham. He, you remember, urged a friend to write and was told, "But I don't have any ideas." Maugham said, "That is the weakest excuse for not writing I have ever heard!" The essence of science fiction is ideas. If you're thinking in terms of atomic or cosmic warfare or matriarchies or chlorophyll products turning people into plants, stop and start over -- these and other such obvious themes have been worked to death. You need a bright, fresh idea. Then you have to know what to do with it dramatically. To get back to an earlier point -- no, magazines don't have automatic remailing or story-writing machines! I just thought you might be wondering. A Thief in Time Wdnf to foretell the future? It's easy -- oil you have to do Is convert it into the past! T homas Eldndge was all alone in his room in Butler Hall when he heard the faint scraping noise behind him. It barely registered on his consciousness. He was studying the Holstead equations, which had caused such a stir a few years ago, with their hint of a non  Relativity universe. They were a disturbing set of symbols, even though their conclusions had been proved quite fallacious. Still, if one examined them without preconceptions, they seemed to prove mething. There was a strange relationship of temporal elements, with interesting force-applications. There was -- he heard the noise again and turned his head. Standing in back of him was a large man dressed in ballooning purple trousers, a little green vest and a porous silver shirt. He was carrying a square black machine with several dials and he looked decidedly unfriendly. They stared at each other. For a moment, Eldridge thought it was a fraternity prank. He was the youngest associate professor at Carvell Tech, and some student was always handing him a hard-boiled egg or a live toad during Hell Week. But this man was no giggling student. He was at least fifty years old and unmistakably hostile. "How'd you get in here?" Eldridge demanded. 'And what do you want?" rHE man raised an eyebrow.  "Going to brazen it out, eh?" "Brazen what out?" Eldridge asked, startled. "This is Viglin you're talking to," the man said. Remember?" Eldridge tried to remember if there were any insane asylums near Carvell. This Viglin looked like an escaped lunatic. "You must have the wrong man," Eldridge said, wondering if he should call for help. Viglin shook his head. "You are Thomas Monroe Eldridge," he said. "Bom March #, #, in Darien, Connecticut. Attended the University Heights College, New York University, graduating cum laude. Received a fellowship to Carvell last year, in early #. Correct so far?" "All right, so you did a little research on me for some reason. It better be a good one or I call the cops." "You always were a cool customer. But the bluff won't work.  will call the police." He pressed a button on the machine. Instantly, two men appeared in the room. They wore light-weight orange and green uniforms, with metallic insignia on the sleeves. Between them they carried a black machine similar to Viglin's except that it had white stenciling on its top. "Crime does not pay," Viglin said. "Arrest that thief!" For a moment, Eldridge's pleasant college room, with its Gauguin prints, its untidy piles of books, its untidier hi-fi, and its shaggy little red rug. seemed to spin dizzily around him. He blinked several times, hoping that the whole thing had been induced by eyestrain. Or better yet. perhaps he had been dreaming. But Viglin was still there, dismayingly substantial. The two policemen produced a pair of handcuffs and walked forward. "Wait!" Eldridge shouted, leaning against his desk for support. "What's this all about?" "If you insist on formal charges." Viglin said, "you shall have them." He cleared his .throat. "Thomas Eldridge, in March, #, you invented the Eldridge Traveler. Then -- " "Hold on!" Eldridge protested. "It isn't # yet, in case you didn't know." Viglin looked annoyed. "Don't quibble. You will invent the Traveler in #, if you prefer that phrasing. It's all a matter of temporal viewpoint." It took Eldridge a moment to digest this. Then it struck him. "Do you mean -- you. are from the future?" he blurted. O NE of the policemen nudged the other. "What an act!" he said admiringly. "Better than a groogly show," the other agreed, clicking his handcuffs. "Of course we're from the future," Viglin said. "Where else would we be from? In #, you did -- or will -- invent the Eldridge Time Traveler, thus making time travel possible. With it, you journeyed into the first sector of the future, where you were received with highest honors. Then you traveled through the three sectors of Civilized Time, lecturing. You were a hero, Eldridge, an ideal. Little children wanted to grow up to be like you." With a husky voice, Viglin continued. "We were deceived. Suddenly and deliberately, you stole a quantity of valuable goods. It was shocking! We had never suspected you of criminal tendencies. When we tried to arrest you, you vanished." Viglin paused and rubbed his forehead wearily. "I was your friend, Tom, the first person you met in Sector One. We dratik many a bowl of flox together. I arranged your lecture tour. And you robbed me." His face hardened. "Take him, officers." As the policemen moved forward, Eldridge had a good look at the black machine they shared. Like Viglin's, it had several dials and a row of push buttons. Stamped in white across the top were the words: eldridoe time The policeman stopped and turned to Viglin. "You got the extradition papers?" Viglin searched his pockets. "Don't seem to have them on ine. But you know he's a thief!" "Everybody knows that," the policeman said. "But we got no jurisdiction in a pre-contact sector without extradition papers." "Wait here," Viglin said. "I'll get them." He examined his wrist watch carefully, muttered something about a half-hour gap. and pressed a button on the Traveler. Immediately, he was gone. The two policemen sat down on Eldridge's couch and proceeded to ogle the Gauguins. Eldridge tried to think, to plan, to anticipate. Impossible. He could not believe it. He refused to believe it. No one could inake him believe -- "Imagine a famous guy like this being a crook," one of the policemen said. "All geniuses are crazy," the other philosophized. "Remember the stuggie dancer who killed the girl? He was a genius, the readies said." "Yeah." The first policeman lighted a cigar and tossed the burned mdtch on Eldridge's shaggy little red rug. A ll right, Eldridge decided, it was true. Under the circumstances, he had to believe. Nor was it so absurd. He had always suspected that he might be a genius. But what had happened? #n #, he would invent a time machine. Logical enough, since he was a genius. And he would travel through the three sectors of Civilized Time. Well, certainly, assuming he had a time machine. If there were three sectors, he would explore them. He might even explore the uncivilized sectors. And then, without warning, he became a thief... No! He could accept everything else, but that was completely out of character. Eldridge was an intensely honest young man, quite above even petty dishonesties. As a student, he had never cheated at exams. As a man, he always paid his true and proper income tax, down to the last penny. And it went deeper than that. Eldridge had no power drive, no urge for possessions. His desire had always been to settle in some warm, drowsy country, content with his books and music, sunshine, congenial neighbors, the love of a good woman. lO So he was accused of theft. Even if he were guilty, what conceivable motive could have prompted the action? What had happened to him in the future? "You going to the scrug rally?" one of the cops asked the other. "Why not? It comes on Malm Sunday, doesn't it?" They didn't care. When Viglin returned, they would handcuff him and drag him to Sector One of the future. He would be sentenced and thrown into a cell. All for a crime he was ioing to commit. He made a swift decision and acted on it quickly. "I feel faint," he said, and began to topple out of his chair. "Look out -- he may have a gun!" one of the policemen yelped. They rushed over to him, leaving their time machine on the couch. Eldridge scuttled around the other side of the desk and pounced on the machine. Even in his haste, he realized that Sector One would be an unhealthy place for him. So, as the policemen sprinted across the room, he pushed the button marked Sector Two. Instantly, he was plunged into darkness. Eldridge found that he was standing ankle-deep in a pool of dirty water. He was in a field, twenty feet from a road. The air was warm and moist. The Time Traveler was clasped tightly under his arm. He was in Sector Two of the future and it didn't thrill him a bit. He walked to the road. On either side of it were terraced fields, filled with the green stalks of rice plants. Rice? In New York State? Eldridge remembered that in his own time sector, a climatic shift had been detected. It was predicted that someday the temperate zones would be hot, perhaps tropical. This future seemed to prove the theory. He was perspiring already. The ground was damp, as though from a recent rain, and the sky was an intense, unclouded blue. But where were the farmers? Squinting at the Sun directly overhead, he had the answer. At siesta, of course. Looking down the road, he could see buildings half a mile away. He scraped mud from his shoes and started walking. But what would he do when he reached the buildings? How could he discover what had happened to him in Sector One? He couldn't walk up to someone and say, "Excuse me, sir. I'm from #, a year you may have heard about. It seems that in some way or -- " No, that would never do. He would think of something. Eldridge continued walking, while the Sun beat down fiercely upon him. He shifted the Traveler to his other arm, then looked at it closely. Since he was going to invent it -- no, already had -- he'd better find out how it worked. On its face were buttons for the first three sectors of Civilized Time. There was a special dial for journeying past Sector Three, into the Uncivilized Sectors. In on corner was a metal  plate, which read: caution; Allow at least one half-hour between time jumps, to avoid canceZation. That didn't tell him much. He opened the back. Inside, there was a regulator set at marking #, and locked. Why? He didn't know. All the components were unfamiliar to him. The only thing he recognized were the batteries, which were of a type he had never seen. Their power rating was almost unbelievable. It would have to be, he decided. Time Travel must use up a lot of juice. He closed the machine again. According to Viglin, it had taken Eldridge eight years -- from # to # -- to invent the Traveler. He would need more than a few minutes to understand it. buildings and found that he was in a good-sized town. A few people were on the streets, walking slowly under the tropical Sun. They were dressed entirely in white. He was pleased to see that styles in Section Two were so conservative that his suit could pass for a rustic version of their dress. He passed a large adobe building. The sign in front read: A library. Eldridge stopped. Within would undoubtedly be the records of the past few hundred years. There would be an account of his crime -- if any -- and the circumstances under which he had committed it. But would he be safe? Were there any circulars out for his arrest? Was there an extradition between Sectors One and Two? He would have to chance it. Eldridge entered, walked quickly past the thin, gray-faced librarian, and into the stacks. There was a large section on Time, but the most thorough one-volume treatment was a book called Origins of Time Travel by Ricardo Alfredex. The first part told how the young genius Eldridge had, one fateful day in #, received the germ of the idea from the controversial Holstead equations. The formula was really absurdly simple -- AUredcx quoted the main propositions -- but no one ever had realized it before. Eldridge's genius lay chiefly in perceiving the obvious. Eldridge frowned at this disparagement. Obvious, was it? He still didn't understand it. And he was the inventor I By #, the machine had been built. It worked on the very first trial, catapulting its young inventor into what became known as Sector One. Eldridge looked up and found that a bespectacled girl of nine or so was standing at the end of his row of books, staring at him. She ducked back out of sight. He read on. The next chapter was entitled "Unparadox of Time." Eldridge skimmed it rapidly. The author began with the classic paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, and demolished it with integral calculus. Using this as a logical foundation, he went on to the so-called time paradoxes -- killing one's great-great grandfather, meeting oneself, and the like. These held up no better than Zeno's ancient paradox. Alfredex went on to explain that all temporal paradoxes were the inventions of authors with a gift for confusion. Eldridge didn't understand the intricate symbolic logic in this part, which was embarrassing, since he was cited as the leading authority. T he next chapter was called "Fall of the Mighty." It told how Eldridge had met Viglin, the owner of a large sjortinggoods store in Sector One. They became fast friends. The businessman took the shy young genius under his wing. He arranged lecture tours for him. Then -- "I beg your pardon, sir," someone said. Eldridge looked up. The gray-faced librarian was standing in front of him. Beside her was the bespectacled little girl with a smug grin on her face. "Yes?" Eldridge asked. "Time Travelers are not allowed in the Readery," the librarian said sternly. That was understandable, Eldridge thought. Travelers could grab an armload of valuable books and disappear. They probably weren't allowed in banks, either. The trouble was, he didn't dare surrender this book. Eldridge smiled, tapped his ear, and hastily went on reading. young Eldridge had allowed Viglin to arrange all his contracts and papers. One day he found, to his surprise, that he had signed over all rights in the Time Traveler to Viglin, for a small monetary consideration. Eldridge brought the case to court. The court found against him. The case was appealed. Penniless and embittered. Eldridge embarked on his career of crime, stealing from Viglin -- "Sir!" the librarian said. "Deaf or not, you must leave at once. Otherwise I will call a guard." Eldridge put down the book, muttered, "Tattle-tale," to the little girl, and hurried out of the Readery. Now he knew why Viglin was so eager to arrest him. With the case still pending, Eldridge would be in a very poor position behind bars. But why had he stolen? The theft of his invention was an understandable motive, but Eldridge felt certain it was not the right one. Stealing from Viglin would not make him feel any better nor would it right the wrong. His reaction would be either to fight or to withdraw, to retire from the whole mess. Anything except stealing. Well, he would find out. He would hide in Sector Two. perhaps find work. Bit by bit, he would -- Two men seized his arms from either side. A third took the Traveler away from him. It was done so smoothly that Eldridge was still gasping when one of the men showed a badge. "Police," the man said. "You'll have to come with us, Mr. Eldridge." "What for?" Eldridge asked. "Robbery in Sectors One and Two." So he had stolen here, too. station and into the small, cluttered office of the Captain of Police. The Captain was a slim, balding, cheerful-faced man. He waved his subordinates out of the room, motioned Eldridge to a chair and gave him a cigarette. "So you're Eldridge," he said. Eldridge nodded morosely. "Been reading about you ever since I was a little boy," the Captain said nostalgically. "You were one of my heroes." Eldridge guessed the Captain to be a good fifteen years his senior, but he didn't ask about it. After all, he was supposed to be the expert on time paradoxes. "Always thought you got a rotten deal," the Captain said, toying with a large bronze paperweight. "Still, I couldn't understand a man like you stealing. For a while, we thought it might have been temporary insanity." "Was it?" Eldhdge asked hopefully. "Not a chance. Checked your records. You just haven't got the potentiality. And that makes it rather difficult for me. For example, why did you steal those particular items?" "What items?" "Don't you remember?" "I -- I've blanked out," Eldridge said. "Temporary amnesia." "Very understandable." the Captain said sympathetically. He handed Eldridge a paper. "Here's the list." Taken item VigUn't Sporting Goods Store, Sector One:... Credits # Megacharge Hand Pistols... # # Lifebelts, Inflatable # # Cans. Oilen's Shark Repellent # Taken irom AUghan's Specialty Shop. Sector One: # Microflex Sets, World Literature # # Teeny-Tom Symphonic Tape Runs # Taken from Loorie'a Produce Store, Sector Two: # Dozen Potatoes, White Turtle Brand # # Packages. Carrot Seeds (Fancy) . # Taken Irom Manori's Notions Store, Sector Two: # Dozen Mirrors, Silver-backed (hand size) # Total Value # "What does it mean?" the Captain asked. "Stealing a million credits outright, I could understand, but why all that junk?" Eldridge shook his head. He could find nothing meaningful in the list. The megacharge hand pistols sounded useful. But why the mirrors, lifebelts, potatoes and the rest of the things that the Captain had properly called junk? It just didn't sound like himself. Eldridge began, to think of himself as two people. Eldridge I had invented time travel, been victimized, stolen some incomprehensible articles, and vanished. Eldridge II was himself, the person Viglin had found. He had no memory of the first Eldridge. But he had to discover Eldridge I's motives andor suffer for his crimes. It was all very confusing. "What happened after I stole these things?" Eldridge asked. "That's what we'd like to know," the Captain said. "All we know is, you fled into Sector Three with your loot." "And then?" T he Captain shrugged. "When we applied for extradition, the authorities told us you weren't there. Not that they'd have given you up. They're a proud, independent sort, you IS know. Anyhow, you'd vanished." "Vanished? To where?" "I don't know. You might have gone into the Uncivilized Sectors that lie beyond Sector Three." "What are the Uncivilized Sectors?" Eldridge asked. "We were hoping you would tell us," the Captain said. "You're the only man who's explored beyond Sector Three." Damn it, Eldridge thought, he was supposed to be the authority on ever#d:hing he wanted to know!  the Captain remarked squinting at his paperweight. "Why?" "Well, you're a thief. The law says I must arrest you. However, I am also aware that you got a very shoddy deal. And I happen to know that you stole only from Viglin and his affiliates in both Sectors. There's a certain justice to it -- unfortunately unrecognized by law." Eldridge nodded unhappily. "It's my clear duty to arrest you," the Captain said with a deep sigh. "There's nothing I can do about it, even if I wanted to. You'll have to stand trial and probably serve a sentence of twenty years or so." "What? For stealing rubbish like shark repellent and carrot seed? For stealing junk?" "We're pretty rough on time theft," said the Captain. "Temporal offense." "I see," Eldridge said, slumping in his chair. "Of course," said the Captain thoughtfully, "if you should suddenly turn vicious, knock me over the head with this heavy paperweight, grab my personal Time Traveler -- which I keep in the second shelf of that cabinet -- and return to your friends in Sector Three, there would really be nothing I could do about it." "Huh?" The Captain turned toward the window, leaving his paperweight within Eldridge's easy reach. "It's really terrible," he commented, "the things one will consider doing for a boyhood hero. But, of course, you're a law-abiding man. You would never do such a thing and I have psychological reports to prove it." "Thanks," Eldridge said. He lifted the paperweight and tapped the Captain lightly over the head. Smiling, the Captain slumped behind his desk. Eldridge found the Traveler in the cabinet and set it for Sector Three. He sighed deeply and pushed the button. Again he was overcome by darkness.  he was standing on a plain of parched yellow ground. Around him stretched a treeless waste, and a dusty wind blew in his face. Ahead, he could see several brick buildings and a row of tents, built along the side of a dried'OUt gully. He walked toward them. This future, he decided, must have seen another climatic shift. The fierce Sun had baked the land, drying up the streams and rivers. If the trend continued, he could understand why the next future was Uncivilised. It was probably Unpopulated. He was very tired. He had not eaten all day -- or for several thousand years, depending on how you count. But that, he realized, was a false paradox, one that Alfredex would certainly demolish with symbolic logic. To hell with logic. To hell with science, paradox, everything. He would run no further. There had to be room for him in this dusty land. The people here -- a proud, independent sort -- would not give him up. They believed in Justice, not the Law. Here he would stay, work, grow old, and forget Eldridge I and his crazy schemes. When he reached the village, he saw that the people were already assembled to greet him. They were dressed in long, flowing robes, like Arabian burnooses, the only logical attire for the climate. A bearded patriarch stepped forward and nodded gravely at Eldridge. "The ancient sayings are true. For every beginning there is an ending." Eldridge agreed politely. "Anyone got a drink of water?" he asked. "It is truly written," the patriarch continued, "that the thief, given a universe to wander, will ultimately return to the scene of his crime." "Crime?" Eldridge asked, feeling an uneasy tingle in his stomach. "Crime," the patriarch repeated. A man in the crowd shouted, "It's a stupid bird that fouls its own nest!" The people roared with laughter, but Eldridge didn't like the sound. It was cruel laughter. "Ingratitude breeds betrayal," the patriarch said. "Evil is omnipresent. We liked you, Thomas Eldridge. You came to us with your strange machine, bearing booty, and we recognized your proud spirit. It made you one of us. We protected you from your enemies in the Wet Worlds. What did it matter to us if you had wronged them? Had they not wronged you? An eye for an eyel" The crowd growled approvingly"But what did I do?" Eldridge wanted to know. The crowd converged on him, waving clubs and knives. A row of men in dark blue cloaks held them off, and Eldridge realized that there were policemen even here. "Tell me what I did," he persisted as the policemen took the Traveler from him. "As though you didn't know!" the patriarch said. "For God's sake, tell me what I did!" "You are guilty of sabotage and murder," the patriarch told him. wildly. He had fled a petty larceny charge in Sector One, only to find himself accused of it in Sector Two. He had retreated to Sector Three, where he was wanted for murder and sabotage. He smiled amiably. "You know, all I ever really wanted was a warm drowsy country, books, congenial neighbors, and the love of a good -- " When he recovered, he found himself lying on packed earth in a small brick jail. Through a slitted window, he could see an insignificant strip of sunset. Outside the wooden door, someone was wailing a song. He found a bowl of food beside him and wolfed down the unfamiliar stuff. After drinking some water from another bowl, he propped himself against the wall. Through his narrow window, the sunset was fading. In the courtyard, a gang of men was erecting a gallows. "Jailor!" Eldridge shouted. In a few moments, he heard the clump of footsteps. "I need a lawyer," he said. "We have no lawyers here," the man replied proudly. "Here we have justice." He marched off. Eldridge began to revise his ideas about justice without law. It was very good as an idea -- but a horror as reality. He lay on the floor and tried to think. No thoughts came. He could hear the workmen laughing and joking as they built the gallows. They worked late into the twilight. In the early evening, Eldridge heard the key turn in his lock. Two men entered. One was middle-aged, with a small, welltrimmed beard. The other was about Eldridge's age, broadshouldered and deeply tanned. "Do you remember me?" the middle-aged man asked. "Should I?" "You should. I was her father." "And I was her fianc," the young man said. He took a threatening step forward. The bearded man restrained him. "I know how you feel, Morgel, but he will pay for his crimes on the gallows." "Hanging is too good for him, Mr. Becker," Morgel argued. "He should be drawn, quartered, burned and scattered to the wind." "Yes, but we are a just and merciful people," Becker said virtuously. "Whose father?" Eldridge asked. "Whose fianc?" The two men looked at each other. "What did I do?" Eldridge asked. Becker told him. Sector Two, loaded with loot, Becker explained. The people of Sector Three accepted him. They were a simple folk, direct and quick-tempered, the inheritors of a wasted, war-torn Earth. In Sector Three, the minerals were gone, the soil had lost its fertility. Huge tracts of land were radioactive. And the Sun continued to beat down, the glaciers melted, and the oceans continued to rise. The men of Sector Three were struggling back to civilization. They had the rudiments of a manufacturing system and a few power installations. Eldridge had increased the output of these stations, given them a lighting system, and taught them the rudiments of sanitary processing. He continued his explorations into the Unexplored Sectors beyond Sector Three. He became a popular hero and the people of Sector Three loved and protected him. Eldridge had repaid this kindness by abducting Becker's daughter. This attractive young lady had been engaged to Morgel. Preparations were made for her marriage. Eldridge ignored all this and showed his true nature by kidnapping her one dark night and placing her in an infernal machine of his own making. When he turned the invention on, the girl vanished. The overloaded power lines blew out every installation for miles around. Murder and sabotage! But the irate mob had not been able to reach Eldridge in time. He had stuHed some of his loot into a knapsack, grabbed his Traveler and vanished. "I did all that?" Eldridge gasped. "Before witnesses," Becker said. "Your remaining loot is in the warehouse. We could deduce nothing from it." With both men staring him full in the face. Eldridge looked at the ground. Now he knew what he had done in Sector Three. The murder charge was probably false, though. Apparently he had built a heavy-duty Traveler and sent the girl somewhere, without the intermediate stops required by the portable models. Not that anyone would believe him. These people had never heard of such a civilized concept as habeas corpus. "Why did you do it?" Becker asked. Eldridge shrugged his shoulders and shook his head helplessly. "Didn't I treat you like my own son? Didn't I turn back the police of Sector Two? Didn't I feed you, clothe you? Why -- why -- did you do it?" All Eldridge could do was shrug his shoulders and go on helplessly shaking his head. "Very well," Becker said. "Tell your secret to the hangman in the morning." He took Morgel by the arm and left. I F Eldridge had had a gun, he might have shot himself on the spot. All the evidence pointed to potentialities for evil in him that he had never suspected. He was running out of time. In the morning, he would hang. And it was unfair, all of it. He was an innocent bystander, continually running into the consequences of his former -- or later -- actions. But only Eldridge I possessed the motives and knew the answers. Even if his thefts were justified, why had he stolen potatoes, lifebelts, mirrors and such? What had he done with the girl? What was he trying to accomplish? Wearily, Eldridge closed his eyes and drifted into a troubled half-sleep. He heard a faint scraping noise and looked up. Viglin was standing there, a Traveler in his hands. Eldridge was too tired to be very surprised. He looked for a moment, then said, "Come for one last gloat?" "I didn't plan it this way," Viglin protested, mopping his perspiring face. "You must believe that. I never wanted you killed, Tom." Eldridge sat up and looked closely at Viglin. "You did steal my invention, didn't you?" "Yes," Viglin confessed. "But I was going to do the right thing by you. I would have split the profits." "Then why did you steal it?" Viglin looked uncomfortable. "You weren't interested in money at all." "So you tricked me into signing over my rights?" "If I hadn't, someone else would have, Tom... I was just saving you from your own unworldliness. I intended to cut you in -- I swear it!" He wiped his forehead again. "But I never dreamed it would turn out like this." "And then you framed me for those thefts," Eldridge said. The thing was making sense now. "What?" Viglin appeared to be genuinely surprised. "No, Tom. You did steal those things. It worked out perfectly for me -- until now." "You're lying!" "Would I come here to lie? I've admitted stealing your invention. Why would I lie about anything else?" "Then why did I steal?" "I think you had some sort of wild scheme in the Uninhabited Sectors, but I don't really know. It doesn't matter. Listen to me now. There's no way I can call off the lawsuit -- it's a temporal matter now -- but I can get you out of here." "Where will I go?" Eldridge asked hopelessly. "The cops are looking for me all through time." "I'll hide you on my estate. I mean it. You can lie low until the statute of limitations has expired. They'd never think of searching my place for you." "And the rights on my invention?" "I'm keeping them," Viglin said, with a touch of his former confidence. "I can't turn them over to you without making myself liable for temporal action. But I will share them. And you do need a business partner." "All right, let's get out of here," Eldridge said. number of tools, which he handled with suspicious proficiency. Within minutes, they were out of the cell and hiding in the dark courtyard. "This Traveler's pretty weak," Viglin whispered, checking the batteries in his machine. "Could we possibly get yours?" "It should be in the storehouse," Eldridge said. The storehouse was unguarded and Viglin made short work of the lock. Inside, they foimd Eldridge II's machine beside Eldridge I's preposterous, bewildering loot. "Let's go," Viglin said. Eldridge shook his head. "What's wrong?" asked Viglin, annoyed. "I'm not going." "Listen, Tom, I know there's no reason why you should trust me. But I really will give you sanctuary. I'm not lying to you." "I believe you," Eldridge said. "Just the same, I'm not going back." "What are you planning to do?" Eldridge had been wondering about that ever since they had broken out of the cell. He was at the crossroads now. He could return with Viglin or he could go on alone. There was no choice, really. He had to assume that he had known what he was doing the first time. Right or wrong, he was going to keep faith and meet whatever appointments he had made with the future. 'Tm going into the Uninhabited Sectors," Eldridge said. He found a sack and began loading it with potatoes and carrot seeds. "You can't!" Viglin objected. "The first time, you ended up in #. You might not be so lucky this time. You might be canceled out completely." Eldridge had loaded all the potatoes and the packages of carrot seeds. Next he slipped in the World Literature Sets, the lifebelts, the cans of shark repellent and the mirrors. On top of this he put the megacharge hand pistols. "Have you any idea what you're going to do with that stuff?" "Not the slightest," Eldridge said, buttoning the Symphonic Tape Runs inside his shirt. "But they must fit somewhere." Viglin sighed heavily. "Don't forget, you have to allow half an hour between jumps or you'll get canceled. Have you got a watch?" "No, I left it in my room." "Take this one. Sporteman's Special." Viglin attached it to Eldridge's wrist. "Good luck, Tom. I mean that." "Thanks." Eldridge set the button for the farthest jump into the future he could make. He grinned at VigItn and pushed the button. There was the usual moment of blackness, then a sudden icy shock. When Eldridge opened his eyes, he found that he was under water. TE found his way to the surface, struggling against the weight of the sack. Once his head was above water, he looked around for the nearest land. There was no land. Long, smooth-backed waves slid toward him from the limitless horizon, lifted him and ran on, toward a hidden shore. Eldridge fumbled in his sack, found the lifebelts and inflated them. Soon he was bobbing on the surface, trying to figure out what had happened to New York State. Each jump into the future had brought him to a hotter climate. Here, countless thousands of years past #, the glaciers must have melted. A good part of the Earth was probably submerged. He had planned well in taking the lifebelts. It gave him confidence for the rest of the journey. Now he would just have to float for half an hour, to avoid cancellation. He leaned back, supported by the lifebelts, and admired the cloud formations in the sky. Something brushed against him. Eldridge looked down and saw a long black shape glide under his feet. Another joined it and they began to move hungrily toward him. Sharks! He fumbled wildly with the his hurry, and found a can of shark repellent. He opened it, spilled it overboard, and an orange blotch began to spread on the blueblack water. There were three sharks now. They swam warily around the spreading circle of repellent. A fourth joined them, lunged into the orange smear, and retreated quickly to clean water. Eldridge was glad the future had produced a shark repellent that really worked. In five minutes, some of the orange had dissipated. He opened another can. The sharks didn't give up hope, but they wouldn't swim into the tainted water. He emptied the cans every five minutes. The stalemate held through Eldridge's half-hour wait. He checked his settings and tightened his grip on the sack. He didn't know what the mirrors or potatoes were for, or why carrot seeds were critical. He would just have to take his chances. He pressed the button and went into the familiar darkness. He found himself ankle-deep in a thick, evil-smelling bog. The heat was stifling and a cloud of huge gnats buzzed around his head. gluey mud, accompanied by the hiss and click of unseen life. Eldridge found firmer footing under a small tree. Around him was green jungle, shot through with riotous purples and reds. Eldridge settled against the tree to wait out his half hour. In this future, apparently, the ocean waters had receded and the primeval jungle had sprung up. Were there any humans here? Were there any left on Earth? He wasn't at all sure. It looked as though the world was starting over. Eldridge heard a bleating noise and saw a dull green shape move against the brighter green of the foliage. Something was coming toward him. He watched. It was about twelve feet tall, with a lizard's wrinkled hide and wide splay feet. It looked amazingly like a small dinosaur. Eldridge watched the big reptile warily. Most dinosaurs were herbivorous, he reminded himself, especially the ones that lived in swamps. This one probably just wanted to sniff him. Then it would return to cropping grass. The dinosaur yawned, revealing a magnificent set of pointed teeth, and began to approach Eldridge with an air of determination. Eldridge dipped into the sack, pushed irrelevant items out of the way, and grabbed a megacharge hand pistol. This had better be it, he prayed, and fired. The dinosaur vanished in a spray of smoke. There were only a few shreds of flesh and a smell of ozone to show where it had been. Eldridge looked at the megacharge hand pistol with new respect. Now he understood why it was so expensive. During the next half hour, a number of jungle inhabitants took a lively interest in him. Each pistol was good for only a few firings -- no surprise, considering their destructiveness. His last one began to lose its charge; he had to club off a pterodactyl with the butt. When the half hour was over, he set the dial again, wishing he knew what lay ahead. He wondered how he was supposed to face new dangers with some books, potatoes, carrot seeds and mirrors. Perhaps there were no dangers ahead. There was only one way to find out. He pressed the button. The dense jungle had disappeared. Now there was a breezeswept pine forest stretching before him, solid ground underfoot, and a temperate sun in the sky. Eldridge's pulse quickened at the thought that this might be his goal. He had always had an atavistic streak, a desire to find a place untouched by civilization. The embittered Eldridge I, robbed and betrayed, must have felt it even more strongly. It was a little disappointing. Still, it wasn't too bad, he decided. Except for the loneliness. If only there were people -- A man stepped out of the forest. He was less than five feet tall, thick-set. muscled like a wrestler and wearing a fur kilt. His skin was colored a medium gray. He carried a ragged tree limb, roughly shaped into a club. Two dozen others came through the forest behind him. They marched directly up to Eldridge. "Hello, fellows," Eldridge said pleasantly. The leader replied in a guttural language and made a gesture with his open palm. "I bring your crops blessings," Eldridge said promptly. 'T've got just what you need." He reached into his sack and held up a package of carrot seeds. "Seeds! You'll advance a thousand years in civilization -- " The leader grunted angrily and his followers began to circle Eldridge. They held out their hands, palms up, grunting excitedly. They didn't want the sack and they refused the discharged hand pistol. They had him almost completely circled now. Clubs were being hefted and he still had no idea what they wanted. "Potato?" he asked in desperation. They didn't want potatoes, either. His time machine had two minutes more to wait. He turned and ran. The savages were after him at once. Eldridge sprinted into the forest like a grayhound, dodging through the closely packed trees. Several clubs whizzed past him. One minute to go. He tripped over a root, scrambled to his feet and kept on running. The savages were close on his heels. Ten seconds. Five seconds. A club glanced ofT his shoulder. Time! He reached for the button -- and a club thudded against his head, knocking him to the ground. When he could focus again, the leader of the savages was standing over his Time Traveler, club raised. "Don't!" Eldridge yelled in panic. But the leader grinned wildly and brought down the club. In a few seconds, he had reduced the machine to scrap metal.  a cave, cursing hopelessly. Two savages guarded the entrance. Outside, he could see a gang of men gathering wood. Women and children were scampering back and forth, laden down with clay containers. To judge by their laughter, they were planning a feast. Eldridge realized, with a sinking sensation, that he would be the main dish. Not that it mattered. They had destroyed his Traveler. No Viglin would rescue him this time. He was at the end of his road. Eldridge didn't want to die. But what made it worse was the thought of dying without ever finding out what Eldridge I had planned. It seemed unfair, somehow. For several minutes, he sat in abject self-pity. Then he crawled farther back into the cave, hoping to find another way out. The cave ended abruptly against a wall of granite. But he found something else. , An old shoe. He picked it up and stared at it. For some reason, it bothered him, although it was a perfectly ordinary brown leather shoe, just like the ones he had on. Then the anachronism struck him. What was a manufactured article like a shoe doin back in this dawn ae? He looked at the size and quickly tried it on. It fitted him exactly, which made the answer obvious -- he must have passed through here on his first trip. But why had he left a shoe? There was something inside, too soft to be a pebble, too stiff to be a piece of torn lining. He took off the shoe and found a piece of paper wadded in the toe. He unfolded it and read in his own handwriting: # 'ou address yourself? 'Dear Eldridge"? All right, let's forget the salutation; you'll read this because I already have, and so, naturally, I'm writing it, otherwise you wouldn't be able to read it, nor would I have been. Look, you're in a rough spot. Don't worry about it, though. You'll come out of it in one piece. I'm leaving you a Time Traveler to take you where yon have to go next. The question is: where do I go? I'm deliberately setting the Traveler before the half-hour lag it needs, knowing there will be a cancellation effect. That means the Traveler will stay here for you to use. But what happens to me? I think I know. Still, it scares me -- this is the first cancellation I'll have experienced. But worrying about it is nonsensical; I know it has to turn out right because there are no time paradoxes. Well, here goes. I'll push the button and cancel. Then the machine is yours. Wish me luck. agely tore up the note and threw it away. But Eldridge I had purposely canceled and been swept back to the future, which meant that the Traveler hadn't gone back with him! It must still be here! Eldridge began a frantic search of the cave. If he could just find it and push the button, he could go on ahead. It had to be here! Several hours later, when the guards dragged him out, he still hadn't found it. The entire village had gathered and they were in a festive mood. The clay containers were being passed freely and two or three men had already passed out. But the guards who led Eldridge forward were sober enough. They carried him to a wide, shallow pit. In the center of it was what looked like a sacrificial altar. It was decorated with wild colors and heaped around it was an enormous pile of dried branches. Eldridge was pushed in and the dancing began. He tried several times to scramble out, but was prodded back each time. The dancing continued for hours, until the last dancer had collapsed, exhausted. An old man approached the rim of the pit, holding a lighted torch. He gestured with it and threw it into the pit. Eldridge stamped it out. But more torches rained down, lighting the outermost branches. They flared brightly and he was forced to retreat inward, toward the altar. The flaming circle closed, driving him back. At last, panting, eyes burning, legs buckling, he fell across the altar as the flames licked at him. His eyes were closed and he gripied the knobs tightly -- Knobs? He looked. Under its gaudy decoration, the altar was a Time Traveler -- the same Traveler, past a doubt, that Eldridge I had brought here and left for him. When Eldridge I vanished, they must have venerated it as a sacred object. And it did have magical qualities. The fire was singeing his feet when he adjusted the regulator. With his finger against the button, he hesitated. What would the future hold for him? Ail he had in the way of equipment was a sack of carrot seeds, potatoes, the symphonic runs, the microfilm volumes of world literature and small mirrors. But he had come this far. He would see the end. He pressed the button. found that he was standing on a beach. Water was lapping at his toes and he could hear the boom of breakers. The beach was long and narrow and dazzingly white. In front of him. a blue ocean stretched to infinity. Behind him, at the edge of the beach, was a row of palms. Growing among them was the island. He heard a shout. Eldridge looked around for something to defend himself with. He had nothing, nothing at all. He was defenseless. Men came running from the jungle toward him. They were shouting something strange. He listened carefully. "Welcome! Welcome back!" they called out. A gigantic brown man enclosed him in a bearlike hug. "You have returned!" he exclaimed. "Why -- yes," Eldridge said. More people were running down to the beach. They were a comely race. The men were tall and tanned, and the women, for the most part, were slim and pretty. They looked like the sort of people one would like to have for neighbors. "Did you bring them?" a thin old man asked, panting from his run to the beach. "Bring what?" "The carrot seeds. You promised to bring them. And the potatoes." Eldridge dug them out of his pockets. "Here they are," he said. "Thank you. Do you really think they'll grow in this climate? I suppose we could construct a -- " "Later, later," the big man interrupted. "You must be tired." Eldridge thought back to what had happened since he had last awakened, back in #. Subjectively, it was only a day or so, but it had covered thousands of years back and forth and was crammed with arrests, escapes, dangers and bewildering puzzles. "Tired," he said. "Very." "Perhaps you'd like to return to your own home?" "My own?" "Certainly. The house you built facing the lagoon. Don't you remember?" Eldridge smiled feebly and shook his head. "He doesn't remember!" the man cried. "You don't remember our chess games?" another man asked. "And the hshing parties?" a boy put in. "Or the picnics and celebrations?" "The dances?" "And the sailing?" each eager, worried question. "All this was before you went back to your own time," the big man told him. "Went back?" asked Eldridge. Here was everything he had always wanted. Peace, contentment, warm climate, good neighbors. He felt inside the sack and his shirt. And books and music, he mentally added to the list. Good Lord, no one in his right mind would leave a place like this ! And that brought up an important question. "Why did I leave here?" "Surely you remember that!' the big man said. "I'm afraid not." A slim, light-haired girl stepped forward. "You really don't remember coming back for me?" Eldridge stared at her. "You must be Becker's daughter. The girl who was engaged to Morgel. The one I kidnapped." "Morgel only thought he was engaged to me," she said. "And you didn't kidnap me. I came of my own free will." "Oh, I see," Eldridge answered, feeling like an idiot. "I mean I think I see. That is -- pleased to meet you," he finished inanely. "You needn't be so formal," she said. "After all, we are married. And you did bring me a mirror, didn't you?" It was complete now. Eldridge grinned, took out a mirror, gave it to her, and handed the sack to the big man. Delighted, she did the things with her eyebrows and hair that women always do whenever they see their reflections. "Let's go home, dear," she said. He didn't know her name, but he liked her looks. He liked her very much. But that was only natural. "I'm afraid I can't right now," he replied, looking at his watch. The half hour was almost up. "I have something to do first. But I should be back in a very little while." She smiled sunnily. "I won't worry. You said you would return and you did. And you brought back the mirrors and seed and potatoes that you told us you'd bring." She kissed him. He shook hands all around. In a way, that symbolized the full cycle Alfredex had used to demolish the foolish concept of temporal paradoxes. The familiar darkness swallowed Eldridge as he pushed the button on the Traveler. He had ceased being Eldridge II. From this point on, he was Eldridge I and he knew precisely where he was going, what he would do and the things he needed to do them. They all led to this goal and this girl, for there was no question that he would come back here and live out his life with her, their good neighbors, books and music, in peace and contentment. It was wonderful, knowing that ever # rthing would turn out just as he had always dreamed. He even had a feeling of affection and gratitude for Viglin and Alfredex. One thing exfraferresfrios eon'f know... that tho horse always goes before the cart! T he soft moon shone on the grass, on the white markers, on the rubble of the city and on the upstart tent town of the aliens. It shone on the white hospital, most of which still remained standing. It shone on the clean, youthful features of old Dr. Gan who, though a Thurkian, didn't consider himself an alien at all, so deeply had he studied Earth. It was early spring and the cold night air had a touch of life and warmth to it, a touch of wonder. This was the planet Earth, third planet from the sun of this solar system -- The miracle planet. The only planet in all space whose beings had found immortality. Dr. Gan was now moving across the birthgrounds of the Earthmen. Each birthplace was marked with white marble. On it was the baby's name, plus the allotted number of years he was to live before pregnating into immortality. He stooped to read one of them. #-# R.I.P. Very clever and orderly of these Earthmen, to mark ahead of its birth how long each baby was to exist. On the planet Thurkos, things were done much more haphazardly. Spontaneity was the curse of his species, thought Dr. Gan. They came into existence out of nowhere, spontaneously. They lived their lives and, when their time was up, their bodies vanished as strangely as they came, in a sudden disintegration of totality which left nothing behind. Dr. Gan mused. They, too, came alive in spontaneity. Only instead of appearing full-bodied and naked on the streets, like the Thurkians, they appeared in boxes six feet long, three feet wide, buried six feet down in the ground. How wonderful it must have been to begin life so -- having a plot of ground for your very own, wearing clothes, having a warm box to lie in! R.I.P. -- that meant Ready In Place, come and get me -- I'm ready to start life. Then your Earth fellows came to these great birthplaces -- pleasant, grassy places with many flowers -- and dug you up. They took you to the great hospitals, like the one over there. They cleaned you up, assigned you to a family and you went home to begin life. Like Thurkians, Earthmen were born with pseudo-teeth completely removable from the mouth, with face-wrinkles and bent bones. Then both races grew old, getting hair, getting white teeth, getting straighter, more powerful figures. But the Thurkians shrank over the years, getting smaller and, ultimately, vanished without a trace, whereas the Earthmen were smarter. In their extreme old age, they also grew to" be very tiny indeed. They wore white pants made out of a triangle of cloth and bobbed their heads and were carried in the arms of the family female. Then they chose a certain female relative -- curiously always female -- and accompanied her to the hospital. There they entered what was called a "Delivery Room" and fhus delivered themselves unto the woman. They actually became a part of her and she went on living! Thus Earthmen went on living, and it was a strangely marvelous immortality. To pregnate and become part of another, instead of simply dying -- a glorious way to end old age! Now the Thurkians were going to attempt that same immortality, thought old Dr. Gan, walking rapidly across the  birthyard of the Earthmen with the springy steps of his old age. Each day, his muscles grew stronger, his mind more alert in advanced age. Inside of ten years, he'd be old and tiny. Earthmen, oddly enough, called this stage of life "childhood." And then shortly after that period he'd simply vanish. Unless this new pregnating system of Dr. Duk's worked. He sighed, expelling the soft spring air. He was filled with wonder at the greatness of the Earthmen, at the fortunate landing of his people on this planet and at the glorious future they were now sure to find. He himself was lucky to be here -- after all the sins he had committed. Only the kindness of Dr. Duk... He entered the hospital. It hummed with activity. Yesterday, the Princess of the People had landed -- tomorrow, the first great pregnating experiment was to be performed. He went directly to his workplace, the tiny room where the only existing Earthman lived. AN checked in and relieved Tok. Tok's eyes swam with the importance of these days as did those of everyone else. The Thurkians couldn't be wrong -- cell for cell, organ for organ, they were almost exactly like Earthmen. Put the two races together on a street and you couldn't tell them apart. And now the Thurkians were about to reach immortal life... "How is he?" "He is well," said Tok, nodding toward the last Earthman. "No special instructions, except to speed up the testing." Then Tok hurried out to pay homage to the Princess of the People, the lovely A#a, she of the form divine. She of... Dr. Gan turned to his work with a sigh. No reason for a discredited scientist like himself to dream of her high person. He was a minor figure and would always remain so, alongside the great Dr. Duk. The last Earthman lived in a magnificent machine designed by these superior Earth beings. He must have lived in this room for many years after the last of the Earthmen had gone, his wants cared for by the machine. The Thurkians had no name for the machine, but it was a metallic aid to respiration -- a sort of metal lung. One did not like to contemplate what the Earthmen had done to themselves to pulverize their planet so. But that was a matter apart from the great experiment. The Earthmen had left very little above the ground, so very little that it had taken a brain like that of Dr. Duk to extrapolate their lives. Whatever their mistake, it could not be repeated by the Thurkians, Gan thought aggressively. The Thurkians would steal their immortality and guard each and every one of their endless lives jealously. He glanced at the last Earthman, but that individual paid no attention to him. He was so old he was beginning to lose the shaving function. Very few hairs appeared on his cheeks. His hair had the thickness of age, his eyes had the age-sparkle... "If you could only speak." said Gan for probably the thousandth time. "If I could only reach you to tell you how much we appreciate your miraculous gift to us." But there would most likely never be any communication. The Earthman was deaf and dumb and paralyzed. There were times when he followed them with his eyes. The balance of the time he lay in his machine, indifferent to their presence. O UT of kindness to this last remnant of a great race, they would pregnate this survivor some day, fit him into the body of a woman -- a Thurkian, of course -- and thus guarantee his immortality. It would be a proud day for Thurkian science -- the pupils aiding the last of the great masters by the masters' own methods! Dr. Gan sighed happily and turned back to his routine. He checked the dials. The Earthman was well-fed, body temperature and pulse were normal. Gan fed the raw food into the machine that cooked and fed the patient, as he listened with half an ear to the bustle that was going on in the hospital corridors. Now that the Princess was here, things were moving fast. It was sad for Gan to be assigned to this tiny room, cut off from the excitement that spread from Dr. Duk's offices throughout the building. But perhaps Princess Aza would visit this room! Gan felt his heart quiver deliciously at the thought. Absently, he picked up two objects from the testing blanket and moved toward the Earthman. This testing went on day after day. It would have been much simpler if they could have found a way to communicate with him. But the artifacts available were hard to understand and the attendants grew increasingly bored each day as various objects were tried without effect.  ing the two objects. One was a small package, filled with tubes -- twenty of them. Each tube consisted of a white paper tightly wrapped around some darkbrown shredded leaf. He shoved one out of the package and held it before the patient's face. The Earthman looked up at him apathetically. Gan suspected that he considered them fools, but his frozen face muscles were unable to mirror his thoughts. Gan smelled the white tube. Acrid! In the flame it gave off a displeasing blue smoke. Still, everything had to be tested on the Earthman -- that was part of his job. He shoved it in the lax mouth as far as it would go. It came right out again, wilted with saliva. "Can you hear me?" Gan asked routinely. No, it was obvious he'd misjudged the tube's purpose. He fitted another one in the Earthman's ear. "Can you hear me?" The Earthman looked annoyed. Gan shoved another tube in his other ear. "Can you hear me?" The man lay there, a short white tube protruding from each ear. The Doctor would have sworn that his face reddened. Gan removed the tubes and threw them away. The next object was marked in weird hieroglyphics S-o-n-o-v-o-x and had a trademark imprint of a tiny ear. Gan frowned at the indecipherable writing. He wished the code had been broken to interpret Earth's language, but there was really less need, now that the great Dr. Duk had extrapolated everything so well. There were a tiny plug and a flat box, separated by a long wire. He studied the device. He looked down at the patient, whose eyes were wide open and fixed, a sure sign that Gan held his attention. "Oh, come," Gan said aloud. "I can't stuff this device in your ear or your mouth." He examined the box -- a tiny battery set and what looked like an amplifier circuit. Hmmmmm... He opened the Earthman's mouth and stuffed the battery in. That didn't set well with the patient and he quickly removed it. He put the plug in the man's mouth from where it was immediately spat out. Oh, well -- it couldn't have anything to do with hearing, because any fool knew you could hear better with your mouth open. At least Thurkians could, and Earthmen physically resembled Thurkians. He tossed the object on the testing blanket and walked to the door, listening to sounds in the corridor. The Princess might well come to visit the last Earthman on his shift. Pray that she would ! TE turned back. The Earthman was going crazy. For him, that meant his eyes were blinking a mile a minute. Gan had never seen him blink so fast, try so hard to catch the attendant's eye. He must want the tubes back. Gan got the little white tubes. His patient closed his eyes and imperceptibly dropped his head to one side -- the way Gan himself did when he was disgusted with someone. Gan held the device uncertainly over the Earthman. The Earthman blinked like mad. Gan shrugged and shoved the tiny plug in the man's ear. It fitted. So? Gan fiddled with the dial. "Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" Eyes open, mouth open, head imperceptibly nodding. It was the wildest, strongest reaction he'd ever seen the man make. Gan felt an excited rush of pleasure. For a moment he forgot all about the events outside. This was the first real reaction anyone had ever gotten from the Earthman. He leaned forward. "If you can hear me, close your right eye and blink it open again." The man closed his left eye and blinked it open again. The mute Earthman had gotten it backward. For the first time, Gan felt an uneasy doubt about the greatness of the Earthmen. "If you can hear me, close your left eye and blink it open," he said. The man blinked his right eye. Something was radically wrong here. Still, the main problem was solved, wasn't it? If he chose to call left right and right left, it didn't matter so long as he was consistent. But more was involved. Gan sat in a chair. The old ache and throb were beginning to start again in his mind -- the things he'd put behind him. The simplicityto-complexity theory that had gotten him in trouble with Dr. Duk and the other scientists of Thurkia, destroyed his reputation and turned him into an insignificant male nurse. "Every intelligent person knows," Dr. Duk had said, "that the first axiom of matter is breakdown. From complexity to simplicity. This is the way of the world. We are born with fully developed, complex organs. We evolve to a simpler form, a lesser body, less well developed organs. Eventually, we vanish spontaneously -- that's total simplicity, or nothing." Gan sighed. How true! Take numbers. You were born at # or # and aged until you were five or six. Complexity to simplicity. How could you deny it? it. Dr. Gan had postulated that there might be also a movement from simplicity to complexity. From, say, I to #. From a person born as a simple-minded, tiny, underdeveloped body, aging to a complex old age with organs fully developed, and so on to death. This weird nonsense had gotten him thrown out of the Thurkian Academy of Science. It was just as well, he thought bitterly. For if, say. Earth happened to fall in the simplicityto-complexity pattern that he postulated, instead of Duk's complexity to simplicity, then everything would have to be reversed. Jesse H. Smith, for instance, instead of being born in # and aging to # in the normal greater-to-lesser ratio as ordained by nature, might have been born in # and died in #, a lesser to a greater number. On this basis, Earthmen would not be immortal, and... Dr. Gan cringed. It was well that he had put all heresy behind him. It would completely upset not only Dr. Duk's great extrapolation of Earth, but would snatch immortality away from the Thurkians. Still, it was odd that the patient didn't know his right side from his left. Gan would have to explore this. The next obvious question was to ask him in what direction the Sun rose on Earth. It rose in the west, of course, and traveled to the east, where it set. If he should maintain that it rose in the east and traveled to the west... Gan shuddered. In spite of himself, his mind began to extrapolate. He forced himself back to the task at hand. In just a few seconds, he had jumped the gap of communication with his patient. These wonderful Earthmen had obviously designed a hearing aid that not only carried sound, but was able to break down the thought intent into different languages. Probably by coordinating like areas with like areas inside the brains of the people using it. Gan munched on an Earth carrot, putting it carefully into his ear and biting simultaneously on his rubber eating disc which was fitted into his mouth. His sharp, young teeth bit into the rubber eating disc and his jaw moved. The motion was translated to the inner ear, where his tiny, invisible real teeth rotated in sympathetic motion and chewed up the carrot. He made a pre-swallow and the carrot moved down his Eustachian tube to his mouth and the back of his throat, where the swallow proper could take place. He gulped in satisfaction, remembering that the Earthman used his mouth directly for food and didn't eat with his ears at all. An insignificant difference, but there were many differences to be taken into consideration, he was beginning to think. Dr. Gan bent close to the man's ear, now convinced of its function. At that moment the great interruption came. A N enormous crowd burst into the room. It was the great Dr. Duk along with the Princess of the People, the beautiful and glamorous Aza, smiling and charming as ever. Princess Aza was a dreamy creature, with a milk-white complexion and long red hair. She always wore a look of mild surprise which had carried her through many terms of office. One got the impression that, whatever was said to her, it was the first time she'd ever heard it. He noticed with sadness that she had aged. Now her breasts jutted firmly against her dress where, formerly, they had sagged entrancingly. Her stomach had lost its alluring bulge and was shrunken flat. Her hips were roimder, her legs had slimmed and turned in at the ankles. Her skin, formerly full of the carefree wrinkles and blotches of youth, was unlined, smooth and clear as a dowager's. Her eyes were no longer red-rimmed but showed white irises. Instead of reminding Gan of the careless irresponsibility of youth, she reminded him of sex, of alert physical hungers of old age. She graciously blew in his ear and he quivered at the perfumed smell of her and the affectionate feel of her being. He blew back gently and saw a shudder go over her figure. This ear-blowing rite could be dangerous in old age ! She graciously bent then and blew into the ear of the Earthman in tribute to his great race. But with the ear-thing in, he obviously couldn't feel it, so she leaned over to blow into his free ear. The man opened his mouth and bit the soft skin of her throat. Not exactly bit, but pursed his lips and brought them away from her skin with a smacking sound. The Thurkians looked at each other in horror and dismay. Then the voice of the great Duk filled the room. "We must remember that, on Earth, the inhabitants did not mean hatred as we do by mouthpressing." he rumbled. "Their mouth-pressing serves a different function. From several visual images I have found, it is apparent that this gesture is merely a method of recognizing relatives. Earthmen were a great and glorious race, but they must have had poor sense of sight, because they could not recognize their own intimates. They performed much mouth-pressing to see if the individual they bit at one day was the same one as they bit another day. We are fairly sure that they determined by the lip-feel whether or not they were related. "This business occurred mostly between members of the opposite sexes. Apparently, it was a miserable and defeating function, of which they were ashamed, if the grimaces on their features before and after are to be accounted for. It seemed that this was the unhappiness of their lives, but each race has its weak spot." plause at this minor bit of extrapolation. Gan remembered his own great days as an extrapolator and clapped too. "Of course," he said aloud in his professional tone, as the applause died, "this extrapolation doesn't account for the fact that the Earthman couldn't possibly be related to the Princess and therefore would have no motive whatsoever for the mouthpressing on her throat." The Thurkians shifted uncomfortably in an embarrassing silence, The Princess looked uneasily surprised. Dr. Duk, a tiny man -- for he was older than Gan -- stepped forward, weaving on the balls of his feet, and thrust his face at Gan. "This discredited attendant," said Dr. Duk, "is full of much nonsense. I must point out that it is he who advanced the outrageous simplicity-to-complexity theory. Whereas I am the one who has extrapolated the great immortality of the Earthmen and am about to give this invaluable gift to our race. Tomorrow night. I am going to pregnate the Princess of the People and start the great rejuvenation of our race. In the face of all this, can we waste time listening to this pseudoscientist?" The others clapped politely. The Princess looked sympathetically at Gan. Theyhad been classmates on Thurkia; she had been an ordinary student of politics then -- they were lifelong friends. "Still, it is odd that the Earthman mouth-pressed me," she said. "Perhaps Dr. Gan would care to extrapolate?" All eyes in the room became fixed on him and he blushed. "I hardly need to do that, kind Princess. I have just discovered a device with which to communicate with the Earthman. We can ask him why." There was a gasp around the room. Dr. Duk stared down at the hearing device attached to the patient. He made a quick examination and then turned to the people with a triumphant smile. "This fool Gan," he said, "is trying to make the Earthman hear us through the ear. How stupid can you get? We are exactly like Earthmen, cell for cell; obviously, then, they listen just as we do, through the mouth and not through the ear. How could he hear through his ears -- the ears we know are for eating?" "The Earthman eats with his mouth," said Gan quietly. Dr. Duk looked annoyed. "Folly and more folly!" he cried. "Of course, we all know that the Earthman takes food into his mouth, but we also know that it travels to his ear to be chewed. His ears move, as do ours, when he eats." Duk then stared triumphantly around the room. "Now, Princess," he said when there were no further challenges, "we must hurry, for there is much to be done before the ceremony tomorrow. The broadcast to Thurkia -- the ceremonial arrival of the oldest Thurkian we are going to plant in your immortality. Let us leave this discredited man to his senile dreams." He sat down forlornly by the testing blanket and held his head in his hands. Again he had made a spectacle of himself! Was it possible that the Thurkians didn't want to know the truth about Earthmen? Was it possible that, satisfied with Duk's extrapolation, they were fearful of its being upset? He turned grimly to the patient. "Let us set up a code," he said through the ear-aid. "Blink one eye for yes, two blinks for no. Agreed?" The Earthman blinked once. "Blink both eyes at the same time for maybe -- or I don't know!" he said. "Then we will set up the alphabet. Now, let's begin..." The Earthman told him that he had kissed the Princess because it was a sign of affection. Gan outlined the plans of the Thurkians, carefully explaining Dr. Duk's extrapolation. "Now," he asked, "is Duk correct?" Two blinks -- no. Duk was wrong. Earthmen were not immortal. They lived from simplicity to complexity. Their so-called birthgrounds were actually graveyards. Gan turned off the ear-aid, went to the window and looked down on the moon-bathed gardens of the hospital. The Thurkians had come so far in space, had hoped for so much! Now, only he knew that the great dream had become dust and ashes. In the course of a career, a scientist extrapolated and then went into the lab and tried out his ideas. The few that were correct won fame, advanced the race. History was silent about those who were wrong. Truly, the truths of the Universe were almost unbearable. Furthermore, the bearer of truth was often one who suffered. Gan remembered how Pod had received the double-T for exploding early notions of the humors and rightfully describing the circulation of the blood. Even earlier, there was Dr. Nok, who had received the double-T for overturning the favored idea that their planet Thurkos was the center of the Universe. The double-T was a knife incision, deep down and crossways. One between the ribs near the heart, one in the abdomen. It was guaranteed to cause instant death and the Thurkian vanished in the spontaneity of his life's end. It was just barely possible that he, Gan, might receive the double-T for snatching the Duk extrapolation away from the people. On Thurkia there was much excitement; parades -- speeches -- wild riots of happiness, with the spontaneity of death finally overcome. Duk was a great national hero. Yet the Princess Aza faced a horrible death under Duk's knife if Gan's interpretations of the Earthman's answers were right. He signed. How could he let the Princess of the People die? G an checked out, turning his patient over to Mol. Instead of returning to his lonely tent at the edge of the hospital grounds, he sought out the great Dr. Duk, who lived in splendor on the tower floor of the remaining hospital wing. Gan was surprised that Duk admitted him so quickly, but he came directly to the point. "It would be possible for me to keep my mouth closed, retain what position and salary I have and let your erroneous extrapolation fall of its own weight," he said. "However, there is our Princess to think of. The patient has given me the understanding that Earthmen are not immortal." Duk smiled. "It is always a pleasure for one scientist to tell another he's a fool, eh, Gan? This is the real motive in coming here to see me, is it not?" "The truth is always my study," sighed Gan. Dr. Duk laughed and pulled a strange-looking machine over to the center of the room. "I now have evidence that my extrapolation is correct," he said. "It's so inconvertible that even a dimwitted idiot such as yourself cannot deny it. It is the visual image, on a machine, made by the Earthmen themselves." "The Princess is here," said an assistant. "I have asked the Princess to see this proof," said Duk. "to set her completely at ease for tomorrow's experiment. You may as well stay." The Princess came in and took a comfortable place, while Duk covered the preparations for the showing with a few remarks. "I have now completed a comprehensive extrapolation of Earth's history. Like our own planet, Earth began as a marvelously complex association of humans known as a world-city. Then the world-city separated into world-countries during a war cycle, and continually divided into smaller and smaller units, as the Earthmen gave up complex machines and simplified their lives. They went through an industrial cycle and, disgusted with smoky and dirty cities, gave them up to live on farms and in tiny towns. They had internal combustion engines in their time, as we've had. From these, they progressed to horses, slowing the pace of their lives in order to relax from neurotic pressures. "After that, they gave up great segments of land -- whole continents -- to nature and withdrew to one segment known as Europe. "Ever flowering, they continued onward, giving up, over the centuries, mercantilism for religious monarchy, religious monarchy for feudal kingship. Large wars became small wars. Complex weapons were succeeded by simple swords and battle-axes. Ever they developed to the seats of their civilizations which they called Rome and finally the apex, Greece. "From this pinnacle, Man stared into great heights, as yet undreamed of. A whole globe covered with virginal growth. Massive animals, destined to grow tall enough to eat from treetops. Glaciers large enough to cover a third of their globe, to cool off the hot land... "But this was the future they never reached. It is portrayed as constructed drawings in dreambooks of their future. Their own extrapolations. Somewhere, either slightly after a man called Einstein or slightly before a man called Homer, some radioactive disease came along which interrupted their normalcy. We do not yet know exactly where, in terms of their years, we are at this moment. But you can bank on its being in the period between those two men, and it makes not the slightest difference. Eventually I shall puzzle it all out." plause, the man who worked on the strange machine now raised his hand as if ready. "A sideline to their history was their pregnating," continued Dr. Duk. "Now, here is the actual proof of Man's immortality." He signaled an assistant, the lights dimmed and the aliens watched a picture unreel on the white hospital walls. It show a masked man in white spanking a tiny, aged Earthman in an operating room. Then the man placed the little creature into the woman. Two men placed the woman on a portable bed and transported her to another room marked Labor, where she fussed and tossed. Then it showed her departure from the hospital with her smiling husband. It pictured her at home going about her daily tasks clumsily, with occasional visits to the doctor's office to see that the immortality went well. Eventually, the woman achieved her normal, slim figure and the film ended with the cessation of the human commentator's voice, which held no meaning for the Thurkians. Dr. Duk sat back in pleasure as the lights came up again. The assistant extrapolators all clapped, and the delighted Princess blew in his ear. They all filed out of the room. Duk was the last to go, and he turned to Gan who had remained seated. "As for your unmitigated, foul attempt to discredit me," he said, pausing at the door, "it is beneath my notice. I shall not press charges. You may return to your half-mad Earthman who, twisted by the years spent in his breathing machine, has become forgetful about his race's great destiny. You can trade your mad extrapolations with each other. The blind leading the blind! Good night. Dr. Gan." Gan sighed. Duk might be right about the patient's madness. He hadn't thought of that. Gan examined the projecting machine. The button had an arrow that pointed to the hieroglyphics r-e-K-e-r-s-e. He snapped the button and turned on the machine again. The film ran backward, this time starting with the girl having a slim figure and ending in the delivery room. It made sense that way too, he thought. He was aware that someone else was in the room. A soft hand touched his arm. "It's no use, dear friend," said Princess Aza. "I came back to tell you I was sorry that you had gotten the worst part of the argument. Now. I too have seen the correct images." "If Duk is wrong and this sequence is right, you know you die." "I have thought of that. I have asked Dr. Duk to convince himself by speaking with the Earthman. But Duk is so seldom wrong that I am sure the Earthman is mad. No, tomorrow's ceremony must take place, for I dare let no other woman claim the honor ahead of me. But I thank you for worrying over me, dear friend." in the middle of the night. It was Tok who was leaning over the cot in Gan's lonely tent, across the grounds from the hospital, in the space reserved for underlings. Tok's face was anxious. "There's been a crisis at the hospital. The Princess of the People wants to see you at once." Gan hurried across the grass past the white markers of the Earthmen's birthplace for the second time within tv.'enty-four hours. He found the Princess agitated. "Our great Dr. Duk," she gasped. "He is dying. The Earthman -- he was responsible. Please go there at once and see what it's all about. Everyone around me seems to have a different story, but I know I can trust you, old friend." Gan hurried to the Earthman's room. A Thurkian blade protruded from the patient's chest in an incomplete double-T. The man's face was shiny with sweat. Gan realized at once that Earth's last survivor was going to die. He smiled weakly at Gan and made a friendly gesture with his finger. Duk, he revealed -- using the eye code with much prompting from Gan -- had come to him and used the same code. Duk was under the impression that Gan was using the Earthman, and was worried that the last Earthman would accept the Gan extrapolation against the massive evidence of his own great work. And, since it worried the Princess of the People, Dr. Duk tried to force the patient to recant. The Earthman had refused to support Dr. Duk and had insisted that Gan was right. Whereupon, Duk had switched off the breathing apparatus of the patient's machine. Without his iron lung, he could not live more than a few moments. In fear of his life, writhing in suffocation, the Earthman had had to wink assent and Dr. Duk had turned on the maoalaxy science fiction chine again. But the patient had realized that Duk's intention -- in his mistaken notion -- to immortalize a great many Thurkians could only end in death and horror. Therefore, he had asked Duk to bring a certain box of pills to him from the testing blanket. These pills, the Earthman had told Duk, were language pills. By taking them, Duk would instantly understand Earth's language and would be able to impress the people of Thurkia with his knowledge. Duk gulped the pills greedily. They came in a box marked with the hieroglyphics s-t-r-y-c-hn--n-e. Almost immediately Duk realized he'd been tricked. He barely had time to plunge the knife into the human's chest before he had been overcome. Princess and told her of Duk's perfidy. He asked her to return with him to the patient's room and they were at the door when Mol brought them word on Dr. Duk. "He died," said Mol, "bravely. He disappeared in a genteel way, turning into a bright, pink cloud and atomizing with all of the dignity of his greatness. He will be long remembered." "He will be remembered," said Gan. Inside the room, they found a small group staring at the patient with awe. "He has died," whispered Tok. "But see -- watch what the machine does!" The dead Earthman lay on the bed. Relays clicked, lights flashed. Presently, the complicated breathing apparatus was lifted away from the body. "Now we shall see a strange thing," cried Tok. "Perhaps even the Earthman's immortality by machinery in some kind of special form." "I doubt it." said Gan dryly. One side of the bed rose. A container beneath the bed opened. Two metal arms of great size extended a box. The Thurkians gasped in wonder as the body slid from the bed and was gently lowered into the box, which had a plush interior, and was six feet long, three feet wide. The lid closed and with a great deal of decorum, the box disappeared through a trap door in the floor. Gan turned to his fellow Thurkians. "This proves beyond a doubt my own extrapolation," he said. "That box called a coffin is now to be placed in what Dr. Duk erroneously called the birthgrounds, but which are really the graveyards of the Earthmen, signifying the end, not the beginning of their lives. They lived from simplicity to complexity, after all. and. like us, didn't have immortality." "TT was a great thing to have held resolutely and firmly to your theory when all those around you jeered," said the Princess of the People. "It was a great thing to have stood against a man of Dr. Duk's reputation and won out in the end." Gan waved a deprecatory hand. "More important, you, my dear Princess, are still living." The Princess, as usual, looked surprised. But it was evident she had something else on her mind. "Speaking of resolutions," she said, "it is now my time to do service to Thurkia by marrying and having children." Gan felt his heart beat faster. "I have therefore appointed you Acting Chief Extrapolator of Thurkia. a position of prominence. And -- if you care to -- if you wish to -- mate with a suitable Princess, I mean..." The Princess blushed in confusion. They were standing on a hospital balcony under the soft, quiet moonlight of Earth. Gan extrapolated rapidly and caught her meaning. "Princess," he said, gulping. "Will you marry me?" "Why, Gan!" she said, laughing in embarrassment. "Why, Gan. I didn't think you cared. Why -- it is just possible that I will, though you catch me entirely by surprise." He cut off her stammering with loving blows in her ear. Then they faced each other and the Thurkian Princess of the People, after making a ceremonious sign, turned her back and bent over. Gan kicked her. And when she in turn had kicked him, it was formally sealed. There was no turning back now, for once the love-kick is placed, the couple are married. This Thurkian ritual establishes the tender, serious finale to courtship and the gateway to married life. And the Moon shone on the white markers. Q-O-O T he science news releases you'll find in the daily papers by the time this issue appears on the newsstands will probably say that Mars can in the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer. I have a suspicion that it will work the other way round for most people -- they'll see a conspicuous bright reddish star in the southern sky and, having read the news releases, will conclude that the other stars around it must be the constellation of Sagittarius. This is one of the years when Mars is in "opposition," which simply means that it finds itself along a line drawn from the Sun through the Earth. Astronomers are ready for the event. Every observatory has alloted telescope time to Mars during those four weeks from the middle of June to the middle of July. The National Geographic Society, in combination with the Lowell Observatory of Flagstaff, Arizona, has sent a team of astronomers to Bloemfontein in South Africa to obtain a coordinated photographic study from a point in the southern hemisphere. The planet will be photographed from high-flying aircraft and there has even been some hopeful talk about expending a high-altitude research missile or two. Mars is not precisely a rare event. Since the Earth needs # days to go around the Sun once and Mars needs # days to do the same, the two planets must pass each other, with the faster Earth overtaking the slower Mars at regular intervals. What this interval must be is comparatively easy to calculate. The Earth, as seen from the Sun, moves through just about one degree of arc per day, since a full circle has # degrees. The exact figure for the movement of the Earth is # minutes and # seconds of arc. The planet Mars, also as seen from the Sun, moves about half a degree of arc per day, the exact figure being #I minutes and # seconds of arc. If we express this average movement in seconds of arc, the Earth covers # per day and Mars # per (Earth) day. The Earth, therefore, gains # seconds of arc per day. With this figure available, the question "when will the Earth catch up with Mars again" becomes a simple division. There are # times # times # seconds of arc in a full circle; dividing this by the daily gain of #, we obtain # days or # years and # days. Therefore, there is an opposition of Mars every # years and # days. Well, then, if that is the case, why is there so much shouting about this opposition of # and the one to come in #? The answer, so to speak, is that all girls are not equally pretty and one loaf of bread is not necessarily as good as another. The oppositions differ in quality because the orbit of Mars is a #a M-#AY# # E-#AY# Diagram of the orbits of Earth and Mars, showing the recurring positions of the Earth at the change of the seasons. Perihelion and aphelion of Earth are indicated by the letters P and A at broken lines. The arrow points to the position of this year's opposition. A number of other oppositions are indicated by the dated lines connecting the orbits of the two planets. Some of the minimum distances during past oppositions were: # (Aug. #) # miles; #I (Oct. #) #; # (Feb. #) # miles. rather pronounced ellipse. At the ijoint of its orbit closest to the Sun -- the perihelion -- the distance Sun-Mars is # million miles. At the point of its orbit farthest from the Sun -- the aphelion -- the distance Sun-Mars the orbit of the Earth is far more circular, there is obviously a difference between an opposition occurring when Mars is at, or near, its perihelion and an opposition that occurs when Mars is near its aphelion. The opposition of # was almost precisely a "perihelion opposition" while the one of # was very nearly an "aphelion opposition." Now the orbit of the Earth is not circular, either. When Earth is at its perihelion, the distance to the Sun is # miles. When Earth is at aphelion, the distance is # miles, a difference of slightly over three getting a good look at Mars, one could only wish that Earth's aphelion were in the same direction from the Sun as the perihelion of Mars. To some extent, this is really the casfe. At least the Earth is still on that portion of its orbit which is farther from the Sun than average when it passes the perihelion of Mars. This year's opposition, incidentally, will take place almost when Earth is at aphelion, although Mars is still a long way from its perihelion. The distance between the two planets is going to be about # miles. At the next opposition, on September #. #, the distance will be about the shortest it can be, namely # miles. tion is obviously "better" than an aphelion opposition, astronomers do not neglect the latter by any means. In addition to what might be called general principles, there are two good specific reasons. One is that, to observatories in the northern hemisphere of the Earth, Mars is higher up in the sky when Earth is near its perihelion. This also explains the value of the team working at Bloemfontein this year. The other is connected with the position of the Martian axis of rotation. Like that of the Earth, the axis of Mars does not stand vertically on the plane of its orbit. In the case of our own planet, there is the well-known inclination of # #'. The figure for Mars reads very much alike -- # #'. But while the Earth's axis, at aphelion, is inclined toward the Sun, so that our North Polar regions have summer at that time, the axis of Mars, near Martian perihelion, is inclined away from the Sun. The two axes may be said to form a V and at a perihelion opposition, the Martian South Pole is in the light of the Sun, has summer, and is visible to us. The Martian North Pole is in darkness and we can't see it at all. Obviously, then, our only chance to observe the Martian North Polar regions is when Mars is at the other side of its orbit -- that is, during an aphelion opposition. Naturally the position of Mars' axis varies as little as ours; it always points to the same spot in space in the course of a Martian year. It so happens that there is no conspicuous star near either of the celestial poles of Mars. The "Martians," therefore, have neither a northern nor a southern Pole Star. Just as the inclination of the Martian axis happens to be quite similar but slightly larger than ours, so the Martian day happens to be slightly longer than ours. It is # hours, # minutes and about # seconds. (The most precise recent figure published gives #h #' and #".) This difference between the terrestrial and the Martian day, incidentally, is within the adjustment period of a good watch, so that around face indicate Mars time. Small dial in center tells Earth time. Both calendors are twelve months -- Mars dial is ot the left; the other is Earth's. explorers could use ordinary watches during their stay on Mars. Because the Martian day is slightly longer than the Earth day, the Martian year, # Earth days long, has only # days as experienced by somebody on Mars. A S has just been mentioned, a good watch could be adjusted to the slightly longer Martian day. But an exploring party would not only like to know the Martian time, they would also like to know what time it is in Los Angeles, New York, London or Berlin or wherever they happen to come from. Beyond that, since the slightly longer Martian day tends to creep more and more into an Earth "tomorrow," they would have to have means of keeping track of the terrestrial calendar as well as of their own. Such a device is no longer a gadget of the future. Rushing events a bit, Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of the Pels Planetarium, has designed a clock which shows both Earth and Martian time on two #-hour dials and keeps track of the calendars as well. The two #-hour days present no difficulties and the Earth calendar, obsolescent and rickety as it is, is at least familiar. But there were some difficulties with the Martian calendar. Dividing the Martian year into # months, you get eight months of # (Martian, of course) days each and four months of # days each. But at the end of the year you have # #th of a day left over, which is worse than the dangling quarter-day at the end of an Earth year. To accommodate those #lOth of a Martian day, the Martian calendar has to run in #-year periods, the first and last of these five years being "short years" with # days, the other three "normal years" with # days and a #th of December. This arrangement differs from astronomical reality by # days per year and, to take care of the difference, every #th year will have to lose a day. Even then, there is still a tiny difference, but it would take a full # years to accumulate to a full day. Well, to get down to Earth: The conspicuous reddish star you see in the southern sky is Mars, the "red and green planet," as Dr. Hubertus Strughold called it. About a year from now, there might be something new about it to tell. val of #I Isthmus Ct. in San Diego, California, asking a question about which others may have wondered, too. on occasion. The letter reads: "Since we face away from the Sun at night, why is it that the two inner planets are visible to us?" The answer is. of course, that the two inner planets Mercury and Venus are not visible at night, but only in the morning and evening hours before sunrise and after sunset, respectively. The diagram shows that, seen from the Earth, the farthest Mercury can be from the Sun is about # degrees of arc, while Venus can be as much as # degrees of arc from the Sun. If we imagine that both planets happen to be simultaneously in this especially favorable position ("extreme elongation" is the technical term), Venus would rise #" ahead of the Sun and Mercury #" ahead of the Sun in the morning. The rotation of the Earth amounts to # degrees of arc per hour, which makes the apparent movement of the Sun across the sky #" per houi. Therefore, the Sun would appear at the horizon just about three hours after Venus did. But the sky begins to light up when the Sun is still some #" below the horizon, so that the period during which the planets could be clearly visible against a dark sky is shortened by about one hour. Venus happens to be luminous enough to show up brightly even against a fairly light sky. Mercury is less luminous to begin with. It is also much smaller and farther away, so that it soon fades in a brightening morning sky. For this reason, the period during which Mercury can be seen with the naked eye, even under very favorable circumstances, is hardly longer than half an hour. Another and rare opportunity to see the inner planets is in the daylight sky during a total eclipse of the Sun. With a telescope, they can be seen at any time while they are above the hori#on, Limit of visibility of Venus: Planet vanishes when rotation of earth corries observer past dotted line. Diagram of possible positions of the two inner planets shows why, seen from Earth, they seem to be farthest from the Sun. whether the sky is bright or not. Probably the first astronomer to observe the two inner planets systematically during daylight hours was Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli at Milan, Italy. You once said on the radio that the star nearest to our sun, namely alpha Centauri, cannot be seen from any place in the United States. Well, which is the nearest star that can be seen from the United States, especially from the vicinity of New York? Irene Kolitsch # Railroad Avenue Montville, N. J. Alpha Canis Majoris, better known as Sirius, # lightyears away. Could you shed some liht on the mystery of Simultaneous Universes or Alternate Worlds, please? Colin Parsons #I Benwood Court Sutton, Surrey, England The idea was once treated very seriously in a German work on higher mathematics as a mathematical concept, but since the only application of this concept so far is in science fiction, it might be better to stick to literature. What may have been the first literary example was a story written by a gentleman by the name of Winston Churchill, several decades before he became Sir Winston. The title of the story was If Lee Had Lost at Gettysburg. Of course he did lose, but the story pretended to have heen written in a world where Lee won' the battle of Gettysburg and the author had a scholar there try to figure out how the world would look if Lee had lost. In other words, the concept makes the assumption that there is one world where the Confederates won and one where the Confederates were defeated. Likewise, there is one worhl where the American Colonies seceded from the British Empire and another world where they did not. Also a world in which Martin Luther did what he did and another one in which he was elected Pope. One in which Lenin overthrew the Kerenski government and one in which the train in which he traveled through Germany was derailed and Lenin perished in the accident. One in which the Allies came first with the atom homb and one in which Heisenberg did. In short, every important turning point in history produces -- in theory -- not a "new" world, but two. Since liht is known to exert pressure on small objects, it also should cause "thrust" at its source. This probably would not work in the afmospiere, but could we build a "light-beam rocket" once space has been reached? You could not ask for a higher exhaust velocity than that of light, could you? Lt. Edward O. Olney Toronto, Ont., Canada I agree on two counts: (A) that a light leam would be a propulsive force and (B) that everybody would be satisfied with an exhaust velocity of # miles per second. Unfortunately, exhaust velocity alone doesn't do it. There has to he some mass and there is also the question of efficiency involved, at which point the ratio between exhaust velocity and rocket velocity enters the picture. It so happens that two specific examples of a lightbeam drive" were worked out by T. F. Reinhardt of the U. S. Naval Air Rocket Test Station at Lake Denmark, New Jersey, for a lecture at the Annual Meeting of the American Rocket Society in Atlantic City in #. To obtain a thrust of one pound from a light beam, one would need # kilowatts -- which is just about the electrical power output of Niagara Falls! A medium-sized research rocket would have to have a thrust of # lbs. So the current to be fed to the light source would have to be a amperes at an astronomical (Reinhardt added, incidentally, that a conductor for a onehave to have a diameter of about # inches if made of copper and would weigh # pounds per foot.) If the light source had an area of one square foot, its temperature would have to be # degrees Fahrenheit. Naturally, you will want to limit the temperature of the light source to a practical figure, perhaps # degrees Fahrenheit. In that case, the area of the light source would have to have an area of # acres! All this for # lbs. of thrust, which one might obtain by burning # lbs. of fuel per second. I suggest we go on using light for illumination only. A county agent has a tough enough ob -- he shouMn't also have to act as unsuspecting and unrecognized ambassador for all Earth! and was watching the office a bite to eat. With my feet up on the desk in a comfortable position. I was giving considerable attention to how I might outwit a garbage-stealing dog. The dog and I had carried on a feud for months and I was about ready to resort to some desperate measures. I had blocked up the can with heavy concrete blocks so he couldn't tip it over, but he was a big dog and could stand up and reach down into the can and drag all the garbage out. I had tried putting a heavy weight on the lid, but he simply dragged it off and calmly proceeded with his foraging. I had waited up and caught him red-handed at it and heaved some rocks and whatever else was handy at him, but he recognized tactics such as these for what they were and they didn't bother him. He'd come back in half an hour, calm as ever. I had considered setting a light muskrat trap on top of the garbage so that, when he reached down into the can, he'd get his muzzle caught. But if I did that, sure as hell I'd forget to take it out some Tuesday morning and the garbageman would get caught instead. I had toyed with the idea of wiring the can so the dog would get an electric shock when he came fooling around. But I didn't know how to go about wiring it and, if I did, ten to one I'd fix it up so I'd electrocute him instead of just scaring him off, and I didn't want to kill him. I like dogs, you understand. That doesn't mean I have to like all dogs, does it? And if you had to scrape up garbage every morning, you'd be just as sore at the mutt as I was. I couldn't put something in a particularly tempting bit of garbage that would make him sick and still not kill him, the phone rang. It was old Pete Skinner out on Acorn Ridge. "Could you come out?" he asked. "Maybe," I said. "What you got?" "I got a hole out in the north forty." "Sink-hole?" "Nope. Looks like someone dug it out and carried off the dirt." "Who would do that, Pete?" "I don't know. And that ain't all of it. They left a pile of sand beside the hole." "Maybe that's what they dug out of the hole." "You know well enough," said Pete, "that I haven't any sandy soil. You've run tests enough on it. All of mine is clay." "I'll be right out," I told him. A county agent gets some funny calls, but this one topped them all. Hog cholera, corn borers, fruit blight, milk production records -- any of these would have been down my alley. But a hole in the north forty? And yet. I suppose I should have taken it as a compliment that ,Pete called me. When you've been a county agent for fifteen years, a lot of farmers get to trust you and some of them, like Pete, figure you can straighten out any problem. I enjoy a compliment as much as anybody. It's the headaches that go with them that I don't like. drove out to Pete's place, which is only four or five miles out of town. Pete's wife told me that he was up in the north forty, so I went there and found not only Pete, but some of his neighbors. All of them were looking at the hole and doing a lot of talking. I never saw a more puzzled bunch of people. The hole was about # feet in diameter and about # feet deep, an almost perfect cone -- not the kind of hole you'd dig with a pick and shovel. The sides were .cut as clean as if they'd been machined, but the soil was not compressed, as it would have been if machinery had been used. The pile of sand lay just a short distance from the hole. Looking at it, I had the insane feeling that, if you shoveled that sand into the hole, it would exactly fit. It was the whitest sand I've ever seen and, when I walked over to the pile and picked up some of it, I saw that it was clean. Not just ordinary clean, but absolutely clean -- as though laundered grain by grain. I stood around for a while, like the rest of them, staring at the hole and the pile of sand and wishing I could come up with some bright idea. But I wasn't able to. There was the hole and there was the sand. The topsoil was dry and powdery and would have shown wheelmarks or any other kind if there'd been any. There weren't. fence in the whole business, because the sheriff or somebody from the state, or even the university, might want to look it over. Pete said that was a good idea and he'd do it right away. I went back to the farmhouse and asked Mrs. Skinner to give me a couple of fruit jars. One of them I filled with a sample from the sand pile and the other with soil from the hole, being careful not to jolt the walls. By this time, Pete and a couple of the neighbors had gotten a wagonload of fence posts and some wire and were coming out to the field. I waited and helped unload the posts and wire, then drove back to the office, envying Pete. He was satisfied to put up the fence and let me worry about the problem. I found three fellows waiting jars and asked her to send them right away to the Soils Bureau at the State Farm Campus. Then I settled down to work. Other people drifted in and it was late in the afternoon before I could call up the Soils Bureau and tell them I wanted the contents of the two jars analyzed. I told them a little of what had happened, although not all of it for, when you tried to put it into words, it sounded pretty weird. "Banker Stevens called and asked if you'd drop by his place me. "What would Stevens want with me?" I asked. "He isn't a farmer and I don't owe him any money." "He grows fancy flowers," said "I know that. He lives just up the street from me." "From what I gathered, something awful happened to them. He was all broken up." So, on the way home, I stopped at the Stevens place. The banker was out in the yard, waiting for me. He looked terrible. He led me around to the big flower garden in the back and never have I seen such utter devastation. In that whole area, there wasn't a single plant alive. Every one of them had given up the ghost and was lying wilted on the ground. "What could have done it. Joe?" asked Stevens and, the way he said it, I felt sorry for him. After all, those flowers were a big thing in his life. He'd raised them from special seed and he'd babied them along, and for anybody who is crazy about flowers, I imagine they were tops. "Someone might have used some spray on them," I said. "Almost any kind of spray, if you didn't dilute it enough, would kill them." in the garden, I took a close look at the dead flowers, but nowhere could I see any sign of the burning from too strong a spray. Then I saw the holes, at first only two or three of them, then, as I went on looking, dozens of them. They were all over the garden, about an inch in diameter, for all the world as if someone had taken a broomstick and punched holes all over the place. I got down on my knees and could see that they tapered, the way they do when you pull weeds with big taproots out of the ground. "You been pulling weeds?" I asked. "Not big ones like that," said the banker. "I take good care of those flowers, Joe. You know that. Keep them weeded and watered and cultivated and sprayed. Put just the right amount of commercial fertilizer in the soil. Try to keep it at top fertility." "You should use manure. It's better than all the commercial fertilizer you can buy." "I don't agree with you. Tests have proved..." It was an old argument, one that we fought out each year. I let him run on, only half listening to him, while I picked up some of the soil and crumbled it. It was dead soil. You could feel that it was. It crumbled at the lightest touch and was dry, even when I dug a foot beneath the surface. "You water this bed recently?" I asked. "Last evening," Stevens said. "When did you find the flowers like this?" "This morning. They looked fine last night. And now -- " he blinked fast. I asked him for a fruit jar and filled it with a sample of the soil. "I'll send this in and see if there's anything wrong with it," I said. A bunch of dogs were barking at something in the hedge in front of my place when I got home. Some of the dogs in the neighborhood are hell on cats. I parked the car and picked up an old hoe handle and went out to rescue the cat they seemed to have cornered. They scattered when they saw me coming and I started to look in the hedge for the cat. There wasn't any and that aroused my curiosity and I wondered what the dogs could have been barking at. So I went hunting. And I found it. TT was lying on the ground,  close against the lower growth of the hedge, as if it had crawled there for protection. I reached in and pulled it out -- a weed of some sort, about five feet tall, and with a funny root system. There were eight roots, each about an inch in diameter at the top and tapering to a quarter inch or so. They weren't all twisted up, but were sort of sprung out, so that there were four to the side, each set of four in line. I looked at their tips and I saw that the roots were not broken off, but ended in blunt, strong points. The stalk, at the bottom, was about as thick as a man's fist. There were four main branches covered with thick, substantial, rather meaty leaves; but the last foot of the branches was bare of leaves. At the top were several flower or seed pouches, the biggest of them about the size of an old-fashioned coffee mug. I squatted there looking at it. The more I looked, the more puzzled I became. As a county agent, you have to know quite a bit about botany and this plant was like none I had seen before. I dragged it actoss the lawn to the toolshed back of the garage and tossed it in there, figuring that after supper I'd have a closer look at it I went in the house to get my evening meal ready and decided to broil a steak and fix up a bowl of salad. A lot of people in town wonder at my living in the old homestead, but I'm used to the house and there seemed to be no sense in moving somewhere else when all it costs me is taxes and a little upkeep. For several years before Mother died, she had been quite feeble and I did all the cleaning and helped with the cooking, so I'm fairly handy at it. After I washed the dishes. I read what little there was to read in the evening paper and then looked up an old text on botany, to see if I could find anything that might help identify the plant. I didn't find anything and. just before I went to bed. I got a flashlight and went out, imagining, I suppose, that I'd find the weed somehow different than I remembered it. I opened the door of the shed and flashed the light where I'd tossed the weed on the floor. At first, I couldn't see it. then I heard a leafy rustling over in one corner and I turned the light in that direction. The weed had crawled over to one corner and it was trying to get up, its stem bowed out -- the way a man would arch his back -- pressing against the wall of the shed.  mouth open, watching it try to raise itself erect, I felt horror and fear. I reached out to the corner nearest the door and snatched up an axe. If the plant had succeeded in getting up, I might have chopped it to bits. But, as I stood there, I saw the thing would never make it. I was not surprised when it slumped back on the floor. What I did next was just as unreasoning and instinctive as reaching for the axe. I found an old washtub and half filled it with water. Then I picked up the plant -- it had a squirmish feel to it, like a worm -- stuck its roots into the water, and pushed the tub back against the wall, so the thing could be braced upright. I went into the house and ransacked a couple of closets until I found the sunlamp I'd bought a couple of years back, to use when I had a touch of arthritis in my shoulder. I rigged up the lamp and trained it on the plant, not too close. Then I got a big shovelful of dirt and dumped it in the tub. And that. I figured, was about all I could do. I was giving the plant water, soil-food and simulated sunlight. I was afraid that, if I tried a more fancy treatment, I might kill it, for I hadn't any notion of what conditions it might be used to. Apparently I handled it right. It perked up considerably and, as I moved about, the coffee-cupsized pod on the top kept turning, following every move I made. I watched it for a while and moved the sunlamp back a little, so there'd be no chance of scorching it, and went back into the house. It was then that I really began to get bone-scared. I had been frightened out in the shed, of course, but that had been shock. Now, thinking it over, I began to understand more clearly what sort of creature I'd found underneath the hedge. I remember I wasn't yet ready to say it out loud, but it seemed probable that my guest was an alien intelligence. I did some wondering about how it had gotten here and if it had made the holes in Banker Stevens' flowerbed and also if it could have had anything to do with the big hole out in Pete Skinner's north forty. I sat around, arguing with myself, for a man just does not go prowling around in his neighbor's garden after midnight. But I had to know. back of the Stevens house and sneaked into the garden. Shielding the flashlight with my hat, I had another look at the holes in the ruined flowerbed. I wasn't too surprised when I saw that they occurred in series of eight, four to the side -- exactly the kind of holes the plant back in my toolshed would make if it sank its roots into the ground. I counted at least eleven of those eight-in-line sets of holes and I'm sure that there were more. But I didn't want to stick around too long, for fear Banker Stevens might wake up and ask questions. So I went back home, down the alley, and was just in time to catch that garbage-stealing dog doing a good job on the can. He had his head stuck clear down into it and I was able to sneak up behind him. He heard me and struggled to get out, but he'd jammed himself into the can. Before he could get loose, I landed a good swift kick where it did maximum good. He set some kind of canine speed record in getting off the premises, I imagine. I went to the toolshed and opened the door. The tub half full of muddy water was still there and the sunlamp was still burning -- but the plant was gone. I looked all over the shed and couldn't find it. So I unplugged the sunlamp and headed for the house. To be truthful, I was a little relieved that the plant had wandered off. But when I rounded the corner of the house, I saw it hadn't. It was in the window box, and the geraniums I had nursed all spring were hanging limply over the side of the box. I stood there and looked at it and had the feeling that it was looking back at me. And I remembered that not only had it had to travel from the toolshed to the house and then climb into the window box, but it had had to open the toolshed door and close it again. It was standing up, stiff and straight, and appeared to be in the best of health. It looked thoroughly incongruous in the window box -- as if a man had grown a tall stalk of corn there, although it didn't look anything like a stalk of corn. I got a pail of water and poured it into the window box. Then I felt something tapping me on the head and looked up. The plant had bent over and was patting me with one of its branches. The modified leaf at the end of the branch had spread itself out to do the patting and looked something like a hand. I went into the house and up to bed and the main thing I was thinking about was that, if the plant got too troublesome or dangerous, all I had to do was mix a strong dose of commercial fertilizer or arsenic, or something just as deadly, and water it with the mixture. Believe it or not, I went to sleep.   ing that maybe I should repair the old greenhouse and put my guest in there and be sure to keep the door locked. It seemed to be reasonably friendly and inoffensive. but I couldn't be sure, of course. After breakfast, I went out into the yard to look for it, with the idea of locking it in the garage for the day, but it wasn't in the window box, or anywhere that I could see. And since it was Saturday, when a lot of farmers came to town, with some of them sure to be dropping in to see me, I didn't want to be late to work. I was fairly busy during the day and didn't have much time for thinking or worrying. But when I was wrapping up the sampie of soil from the banker's garden to send to the Soils Bureau, I wondered if maybe there wasn't someone at the university I should notify. I also wondered about letting someone in Washington know, except I didn't have the least idea whom to contact, or even which department. Coming home that evening, I found the plant anchored in the garden, in a little space where the radishes and lettuce had been. The few lettuce plants still left in the ground were looking sort of limp, but everything else was all right. I took a good look at the plant. It waved a couple of its branches at me -- and it wasn't the wind blowing them, for there wasn't any wind -- and it nodded its coffee-cup pod as if to let me know it recognized me. But that was all it did. A fter supper, I scouted the hedge in front of the house and found two more of the plants. Both of them were dead. My next-door neighbors had gone to a movie, so I scouted their place, too, and found four more of the plants, under bushes and in corners where they had crawled away to die. I wondered whether it might not have been the plant I'd rescued that the dogs had been barking at the night before. I felt fairly sure it was. A dog might be able to recognize an alien being where a man would be unable to. I counted up. At least seven of the things had picked out Banker Stevens' flowerbed for a meal and the chemical fertilizer he used had killed all but one of them. The sole survivor, then, was out tuce. I wondered why the lettuce and geraniums and Stevens' flowers had reacted as they did. It might be that the alien plants produced some sort of poison, which they injected into the soil to discourage other plant life from crowding their feeding grounds. That was not exactly far-fetched. There are trees and plants on Earth that accomplish the same thing by various methods. Or it might be that the aliens sucked the soil so dry of moisture and plantfood that the other plants simply starved to death. I did some wondering on why they'd come to Earth at all and why some of them had stayed. If they had traveled from some other planet, they must have come in a ship, so that hole out in Pete's north forty might have been where they stopped to replenish their food supply, dumping the equivalent of garbage beside the hole. And what about the seven I had counted? ship? Or gone on shore leave and run into trouble, the way human sailors often do? Maybe the ship had searched for the missing members of the party, had been unable to find them, and had gone on. If that were so. then my own plant was a marooned alien. Or maybe the ship was still hunting. I wore myself out, thinking about it, and went to bed early, but lay there tossing for a long time. Then, just as I was falling asleep, I heard the dog at the garbage can. You'd think after what had happened to him the night before, that he'd have decided to skip that particular can, but not him. He was rattling and banging it around, trying to tip it over. I picked a skillet off the stove and opened the back door. I got a good shot at him, but missed him by a good ten feet. I was so sore that I didn't even go out to pick up the skillet, but went back to bed. It must have been several hours later that I was brought straight up in bed by the terror-stricken yelping of a dog. I jumped out and ran to the window. It was a bright moonlit night and the dog was going down the driveway as if the devil himself were after him. Behind him sailed the plant. It had wrapped one of its branches around his tail and the other three branches were really giving him a working over. They went up the street out of sight and, for a long time after they disappeared, I could hear the dog still yelping. Within a few minutes, I saw the plant coming up the gravel, walking like a spider on its eight roots. It turned off the driveway and planted itself beside a lilac bush and seemed to settle down for the night. I decided that if it wasn't good for anything else, the garbage can would be safe, at least. If the dog came back again, the plant would be waiting to put the bee on him. I lay awake for a long time, wondering how the plant had known I didn't want the dog raiding the garbage. It probably had seen -- if that is the proper word -- me chase him out of the yard. I went to sleep with the comfortable feeling that the plant and I had finally begun to understand each other... next day was Sunday and I started working on the greenhouse, putting it into shape so I could cage up the plant. It had found itself a sunny spot in the garden and was imitating a large and particularly ugly weed I'd been too lazy to pull out. My next-door neighbor came over to offer free advice, but he kept shifting uneasily and I knew there was something on his mind. Finally he came out with it. "Funny thing -- Jenny swears she saw a big plant walking around in your yard the other day. The kid saw it, too, and he claims it chased him." He tittered a little, embarrassed. "You know how kids are." "Sure," I said. He stood around a while longer and gave me some more advice, then went across the yard and home. I worried about what he had told me. If the plant really had taken to chasing kids, there'd be hell to pay. I worked at the greenhouse all day long, but there was a lot to do, for it had been out of use ten years or more, and by nightfall I was tuckered out. After supper, I went out on the back stoop and sat on the steps, watching the stars. It was quiet and restful. I hadn't been there more than fifteen minutes when I heard a rustling. I looked around and there was the plant, coming up out of the garden, walking along on its roots. It sort of squatted down beside me and the two of us just sat there, looking at the stars. Or, at least, I looked at them. I don't actually know if the plant could see. If it couldn't, it had some other faculty that was just as good as sight. We just sat there. After a while, the plant moved one of its branches over and took hold of my arm with that handlike leaf. I tensed a bit, but its touch was gentle enough and I sat still, figuring that if the two of us were to get along, we couldn't start out by flinching away from one another. Then, so gradually that at first I didn't notice it, I began to perceive a sense of gratitude, as if the plant might be thanking me. I looked around to see what it was doing and it wasn't doing a thing, just sitting there as I was, but with its "hand" still on my arm. Yet in some way, the plant was trying to make me understand that it was grateful to me for saving it. TT formed no words, you understand. Other than rustling its leaves, it couldn't make a sound. But I understood that some system of communication was in operation. No words, but emotion -- deep, clear, utterly sincere emotion. It eventually got a little embarrassing, this non-stop gratitude. "Oh, that's all right," I said, trying to put an end to it. "You would have done as much for me." Somehow, the plant must have sensed that its thanks had been accepted, because the gratitude wore off a bit and something else took over -- a sense of peace and quiet. The plant got up and started to walk off and I called out to it, "Hey, Plant, wait a minute!" It seemed to understand that I had called it back, for it turned around. I took it by a branch and started to lead it around the boundaries of the yard. If this communication business was going to be any good, you see, it had to go beyond the sense of gratitude and peace and quiet. So I led the plant all the way around the yard and I kept thinking at it as hard as I could, telling it not to go beyond that perimeter. By the time I'd finished, I was wringing wet with effort. But, finally, the plant seemed to be trying to say okay. Then I built up a mental image of it chasing a kid and I shook a mental finger at it. The plant agreed. I tried to tell it not to move around the yard in daylight, when people would be able to see it. Whether the concept was harder or I was getting tired, I don't know, but both the plant and I were limp when it at last indicated that it understood. Lying in bed that night, I thought a lot about this problem of communication. It was not telepathy, apparently, but something based on mental pictures and emotions. But I saw it as my one chance. If I could learn to converse, no matter how, and the plant could learn to communicate something beyond abstracts to me, it could talk to people, would be acceptable and believable, and the aurecognize it as an intelligent being. I decided that the best thing to do would be to acquaint it with the way we humans lived and try to make it understand why we lived that way. And since I couldn't take my visitor outside the yard. I'd have to do it inside. I went to sleep, chuckling at the idea of my house and yard being a classroom for an alien. riiHE next day, I received a phone call from the Soils Bureau at the university. "What kind of stuff is this you're sending us?" the man demanded. "Just some soil I picked up," I said. "What's wrong with it?" "Sample One is all right. It's just common, everyday Burton County soil. But Sample Two, that sand -- good God, man, it has gold dust and flakes of silver and some copper in it! All of it in minute particles, of course. But if some farmer out your way has a pit of that stuff, he's rich." "At the most, he has twentyfive or thirty truckloads of it." "Where'd he get it? Where'd it come from?" I took a deep breath and told him all I knew about the incident out at Pete's north forty. He said he'd be right out, but I caught him before he hung up and asked him about the third sample. "What was he growing on that ground?" the man asked baffledly. "Nothing I know of could suck it that clean, right down to the bare bone! Tell him to put in a lot of organic material and some lime and almost everything else that's needed in good soil, before he tries to use it." The Soils people came out to Pete's place and they brought along some other men from the university. A little later in the week, after the papers had spelled out big headlines, a couple of men from Washington showed up. But no one seemed able to figure it out and they finally gave up. The newspapers gave it a play and dropped it as soon as the experts did. During that time, curiosity seekers flocked to the farm to gape at the hole and the pile of sand. They had carried off more than half the sand and Pete was madder than hell about the whole business. "I'm going to fill in that hole and forget all about it," he told me, and that was what he did. Meanwhile, at home, the situation was progressing. Plant seemed to understand what I had told him about not moving out of the yard and acting like a weed during the daytime and leaving kids alone. Everything was peaceable and I got no more complaints. Best of all, the garbage-stealing dog never showed his snout again. Several times, during all the excitement out at Pete's place, I had been tempted to tell someone from the university about Plant. In each case, I decided not to, for we weren't getting along too well in the talk department. But in other ways, we were doing just fine.  took an electric motor apart and then put it together again, but I wasn't too sure he knew what it was all about. I tried to show him the concept of mechanical power and I demonstrated how the motor would deliver that power and I tried to tell him what electricity was. But I got all bogged down with that, not knowing too much about it myself. I don't honestly think Plant got a thing out of that electric motor. With the motor of the car, though, we were more successful. We spent one whole Sunday dismantling it and then putting it back together. Watching what I was doing, Plant seemed to take a lot of interest in it. We had to keep the garage door locked and it was a scorcher of a day and, anyhow, I'd much rather spend a Sunday fishing than tearing down a motor. I wondered a dozen times if it was worth it, if there might not be easier ways to teach Plant the facts of our Earth culture. I was all tired out and failed to hear the alarm and woke up an hour later than I should. I jumped into my clothes, ran out to the garage, unlocked the door and there was Plant. He had parts from that motor strewn all over the floor and he was working away at it, happy as a clam. I almost took an axe to him, but I got hold of myself in time. I locked the door behind me and walked to work. All day, I wondered how Plant had gotten into the garage. Had he sneaked back in the night before, when I wasn't looking, or had he been able to pick the lock? I wondered, too, what sort of shape rd find the car in when I got home. I could just see myself working half the night, putting it back together. I left work a little early. If I had to work on the car, I wanted an early start. When I got home, the motor was all assembled and Plant was out in the garden, acting like a weed. Seeing him there, I realized he knew how to unlock the door, for I'd locked it when I left that morning. I turned on the ignition, making bets with myself that it wouldn't start. But it did. I rode around town a little to check it and there wasn't a thing wrong with it. F or the next lesson, I tried something simpler. I got my carpentry tools and showed them to Plant and let him watch me while I made a bird house. Not that I needed any more bird houses. The place already crawled with them. But it was the easiest, quickest thing I could think of to show Plant how we worked in wood. He watched closely and seemed to understand what was going on, all right, but I detected a sadness in him. I put my hand on his arm to ask him what was the matter. All that I got was a mournful reaction. It bewildered me. Why should Plant take so much interest in monkeying around with a motor and then grieve at the making of a bird house? I didn't get it figured out until a few days later, when Plant saw me picking a bouquet of flowers for the kitchen table. And then it hit me.  ers were plants and so was lumber, or at least lumber at one time had been a plant. And I stood there, with the bouquet dangling in my hand and Plant looking at me, and I thought of all the shocks he had in store for him when he found out more about us -- how we slaughtered our forests, grew plants for food and clothing, squee#ed or boiled drugs from them. It was just like a human going to another planet, I realized, and finding that some alien life form grew humans for food. Plant didn't seem to be sore at me nor did he shrink from me in horror. He was just sad. When he got sad. he was the saddestlooking thing you could possibly imagine. A bloodhound with a hangover would have looked posi tively joyous in comparison. If we ever had gotten to the point where we could have really talked -- about things like ethics and philosophy, I mean -- I might have learned just how Plant felt about our plant-utilizing culture. I'm sure he tried to tell me. but I couldn't understand much of what he was driving at. We were sitting out on the steps one night, looking at the stars. Earlier, Plant had been showing me his home planet, or it may have been some of the planets he had visited. I don't know. All I could get were fuzzy mental pictures and reactions. One place was hot and red, another blue and cold. There was another that had all the colors of the rainbow and a cool, restful feel about it, as if there might have been gentle winds and fountains and birdsongs in the twilight. We had been sitting there for quite a while when he put his hand back on my arm again and he showed me a plant. He must have put considerable effort into getting me to visualize it, for the image was sharp and clear. It was a scraggy, rundown plant and it looked even sadder than Plant looked when he got sad, if that is possible. When I started feeling sorry for it, he began to think of kindness and, when he thought of things like kindness and sadness and gratitude and happiness, he could really pour it on. He had me thinking such big, kindly thoughts, I was afraid that I would burst. While I sat there, thinking that way. I saw the plant begin to perk up. It grew and flowered and was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It matured its seeds and dropped them. Swiftly, little plants sprang from the seeds and they were healthy and full of ginger, too. I mulled that one over several days, suspecting I was crazy for even thinking what I did. I tried to shrug it off. but it wouldn't shrug. It gave me an idea. The only way I could get rid of it was to try it out. in back of the toolshed was the sorriest yellow rose in town. Why it dung 'to life, year after year, I could never figure out. It had been there ever since I was a boy. The only reason it hadn't been dug up and thrown away long ago was that no one had ever needed the ground it was rooted in. I thought, if a plant ever needed help, that yellow rose was it. So I sneaked out back of the toolshed, making sure that Plant didn't see me, and stood in front of that yellow rose. I began to think kindly thoughts about it, although God knows it was hard to think kindly toward such a wretched thing. I felt foolish and hoped none of the neighbors spotted me, but I kept at it. I didn't seem to accomplish much to start with, but I went back, time after time. In a week or so, I got so that I just naturally loved that yellow rose to pieces. After four or five days, I began to see some change in it. At the end of two weeks, it had developed from a scraggy, no-account bush to one that any rose fancier would have been proud to own. It dropped its bug-chewed leaves and grew new ones that were so shiny, they looked as if they were waxed. Then it grew big flower buds and, in no time at all, was a blaze of yellow glory. But I didn't quite believe it. In the back of my mind, I figured that Plant must have seen me doing it and helped along a bit. So I decided to test the process again where he couldn't interfere. couple of years to grow an African violet in a flower pot at the office. By this time, even she was battle. I had made a lot of'jokes about the violet and, at times, it. Like the yellow rose, it was a hard-luck plant. The bugs ate got knocked onto the floor. Visitors used it for an ashtray. Naturally, I couldn't give it the close, intensive treatment I'd given the rose, but I made a point to stop for a few minutes every day beside the violet and think good things about it and, in a couple of weeks, it perked up considerably. By the end of the month, it had bloomed for the first time in its life. Meanwhile, Plant's education continued. At first, he'd balked at entering the house, but finally trusted me enough to go in. He didn't spend much time there, for the house was too full of reminders that ours was a plant-utilizing culture. Furniture, clothing, cereal, paper -- even the house itself -- all were made of vegetation. I got an old butter tub and filled it with soil and put it in one corner of the dining room, so he could eat in the house if he wanted to, but I don't remember that he even once took a snack out of that tub. then, I knew that what Plant and I had tried to do had been a failure. Whether someone else might have done better, I don't know. I suspect he might have. But I didn't know how to go about getting in touch and I was afraid of being laughed at. It's a terrible thing, our human fear of ridicule. And there was Plant to consider, too. How would he take being passed on to someone else? I'd screw up my courage to do something about it, and then Plant would come up out of the garden and sit beside me on the steps, and we'd talk -- not about anything that mattered, really, but about happiness and sadness and brotherhood, and my courage would go glimmering and I'd have to start all over again. I've since thought how much like two lost children we must have been, strange kids raised in different countries, who would have liked to play together, except neither knew the rules for the other's games or spoke the other's" language. I know... I know. According to common sense, you begin with mathematics. You show the alien that you know two and two are four. Then you draw the Solar System and show him the Sun on the diagram and then point to the Sun overhead and you point to Earth on the diagram, then point to yourself. In this way, you demonstrate to him that you know about the Solar System and about space and the stars and so on. Then you hand him the paper and the pencil. But what if he doesn't know mathematics? What if the two plus two makes four routine doesn't mean a thing to him? What if he's never seen a drawing? What if he can't draw -- or see or hear or feel or think the way you do? To deal with an alien, you've got to get down to basics. And maybe math isn't basic. Maybe diagrams aren't. In that case, you have to search for something that is. Yet there must be certain universal basics. I think I know what they are. That, if nothing else. Plant taught me. Happiness is basic. And sadness is basic. And gratitude, in perhaps a lesser sense. Kindness, too. And perhaps hatred -- although Plant and I never dealt in that. Maybe brotherhood. For the sake of humanity, I hope so. But kindness and happiness and brotherhood are awkward tools to use in reaching specific understanding, although in Plant's world, they may not be. TT was getting on toward autumn and I was beginning to wonder how I'd take care of Plant during the winter months. I could have kept him in the house, but he hated it there. Then, one night, we were sitting on the back steps, listening to the first crickets of the season. The ship came down without a sound. I didn't see it until it was about at treetop level. It floated down and landed between the house and toolshed. I was startled for a moment, but not frightened, and perhaps not too surprised. In the back of my head. I'd wondered all the time, without actually knowing it, whether Plant's pals might not ultimately find him. The ship was a shimmery sort of thing, as if it might not have been made of metal and was not really solid. I noticed that it had not really landed, but floated a foot or so above the grass. Three other Plants stepped out and the oddest part of it was that there wasn't any door. They just came out of the ship and the ship closed behind them. Plant took me by the arm and twitched it just a little, to make me understand he wanted me to walk with him to the ship. He made little comforting thoughts to try to calm me down. And all the time that this was going on, I could sense the talk between Plant and those other three -- but just grasping the fringe of the conversation, barely knowing there was talk, not aware of what was being said. And then, while Plant stood beside me, with his hand still on my arm, those other plants walked up. One by one, each took me by the other arm and stood facing me for a moment and told me thanks and happiness. Plant told me the same, for the last time, and then the four of them walked toward the ship and disappeared into it. The ship left me standing there, watching it rise into the night, until I couldn't see it any longer. I stood there for a long time, staring up into the sky, with the thanks and happiness fading and loneliness beginning to creep in. I knew that, somewhere up there, was a larger ship, that in it were many other Plants, that one of them had lived with me for almost six months and that others of them had died in the hedges Do You Know... that the Adept uses in mastering the forces of the Universe? by a maze of conflicting and obscure "laws" and "principles"... of time-consuming "ceremonies," "meditations" and "affirmations"... , because your best efforts seem void of practical results... analysis comprising the entire field of metaphysical practice. if, after examination, you are not # money order to... P. O. Box # lloiiywood #. CaliforaU and fence corners of the neighborhood. I knew also that it had been the big ship that had scooped out the load of nutritious soil from Pete Skinner's field. F inally. I stopped looking at the sky. Over behind the toolshed, I saw the whiteness of the yellow rose in bloom and once again I thought about the basics. I wondered if happiness and kindness, perhaps even emotions that we humans do not know, might not be used on Plant's world as we use the sciences. For the rose bush had bloomed when I thought kindly thoughts of it. And the African violet had found a new life in the kindness of a human. Startling as it may seem, foolish as it may sound, it is not an unknown phenomenon. There are people who have the knack of getting the most out of a flowerbed or a garden. And it is said of these people that they have green thumbs. May it not be that green ttiiJmbness is not so much concerned with skill or how much care is taken of a plant, as with the kindliness and the interest of the person tending it? For eons, the plant life of this planet has been taken for grantedIt is simply there. By and large, plants are given little affection. They are planted or sown. They grow. In proper season, they are harvested. I sometimes wonder if, as hunger tightens its grip upon our teeming planet, there may not be a vital need for the secret of green thumbness. If kindness and sympathy can cause a plant to produce beyond its normal wont, then shouldn't we consider kindness as a tool to ward off Earth's hunger? How much more might be produced if the farmer loved his wheat? It's silly, of course, a principle that could not gain acceptance. And undoubtedly it would not work -- not in a plantutilizing culture. For how could you keep on convincing a plant that you feel kindly toward it when, season after season, you prove that your only interest in it is to eat it or make it into clothing or chop it down for lumber? I walked out back of the shed and stood beside the yellow rose, trying to find the answer. The yellow rose stirred, like a pretty woman who knows she's being admired, but no emotion came from it. The thanks and happiness were gone. There was nothing left but the loneliness. Damned vegetable aliens -- upsetting a man so he couldn't eat his breakfast cereal in peace! What Rough Beast? when you are a teacher, you expect kids to play pranks. But with tigers -- and worse? it seemed to him, crucified -- against the length of the blackboard, John Ward tried to calculate his chances of heading off the impending riot. It didn't seem likely that an#rthing he could do would stop it. "Say something," he told himself. "Continue the lecture, talkl" But against the background of hysterical voices from the school yard, against the brass fear in his mouth, he was dumb. He looked at the bank of boys' faces in front of him. They seemed to him now as identical as metal stampings, each on? completely deadpan, each pair of jaws moving in a single rhythm, like a mechanical herd. He could feel the tension in them, and he knew that, in a moment, they would begin to move. He felt shame and humiliation that he had failed. "Shakespeare," he said clearly, holding his voice steady, "for those of you who have never heard of him, was the greatest of all dramatists. Greater even," he went on doggedly, knowing that they might take it as a proyocation, "than the writers for the Spellcasts." He stopped talking abruptly. the ceiling. Their eyes were glassy, absolutely rigid, as if, like the last of the hairy mammoths, they had been frozen a long age in some glacial crevasse. They hung there a moment and then fell into the room like a furry waterfall. They landed snarling. Something smashed viciously into the wall beside Ward's head. From the back of the room, someone's hand flashed a glitter of light. Ward leaped away and cut across the end of the room toward the escape chute. Holding his ring with its identifying light beam before him, he leaped into the slot like a racing driver. Behind him, the room t exploded in shouts and snarls. The gate on the chute slammed shut after him, and he heard them scratching and banging at it. Without the identifying light, they would be unable to get through. He took a long breath of relief as he shot down the polished groove of the slide into the Mob Quad. The boys he'd left behind knew how to protect themselves. They were all there -- Dr. Allenby, McCarthy the psych man, Laura Ames the pretty gym teacher, Foster, Jensen -- all of them. So it had been general then, not just his group which had rioted. He knew it was all the more serious now, because it had not been limited to one outbreak. "You, too. Ward?" Dr. Allenby said sadly. He was a short, slender man with white hair and a white mustache. He helped Ward up from where he had fallen at the foot of the escape slide. "What was it in your classroom this time?" "Tigers," Ward said. Standing beside Allenby, he felt very tall, although he was only of average height. He smoothed down his wiry dark hair and began energetically brushing the dust from his clothing. "Well, it's always something," Allenby said tiredly. He seemed more sad than upset, Ward thought, a spent old man clinging to the straw of a dream. He saw where the metaphor was leading and pushed it aside. If Allenby were a drown ing man, then Ward himself was one. He looked at the others. frightened, but they were taking it very well. Some of them were stationed at the gates of the Quad, but none of them, as far as he could see, was armed. Except for McCarthy. The psych man was wearing his Star Watcher helmet and had a Bgun strapped at his side. Probably had a small force-field in his pocket, Ward thought, and a pair of brass knuckles. "Soothe philosophy king got it too," McCarthy said, coming over to them. He was a big man, young but already florid with what Ward had always thought of as a roan complexion. "Love, understanding, sympathy -- wasn't that what was supposed to work wonders? All they need is a copy of Robinson Crusoe and a chance to follow their natural instincts, eh?" "One failure doesn't prove anything," Ward said, trying not to be angry. "One failure? How often do they have to make us hit the slides for the safety of the Mob Quad before you adopt a sensible theory?" "Let's not go through all that again. Restraint, Rubber hoses and Radiological shock -- I've heard all about the # Rs." "At least they work!" "Oh, yes, they work fine. Except that they never learn to read and they can't sign their names with anything but an X." "It was progressive education that destroyed reading," McCarthy said heatedly. "And they don't need to sign their names -- that's what universal fingerprinting is for." "Please, gentlemen," Dr. Allenby interrupted gently. "This kind of squabbling is unbecoming to members of the faculty. Besides," he smiled with faded irony, "considering the circumstances, it's hardly a proper time." He pointed to the windows over the Quad where an occasional figure could be seen behind the glass. Lucky it was unbreakable, Ward thought, hearing the wild hysterical yelling from inside. "Mob Quad," Allenby said bitterly. "I thought I was naming it as a joke. The original Mob Quad was at Merton College, Oxford. One of the old defunct universities. They had a Mob Quad to shelter students and professors from the town mobs. Professors and students, gentlemen -- they were a united front in those days. I suppose no one could have predicted our present circumstances." "That's all history," McCarthy said impatiently. "Bunk. This is now, and I say the thing to do -- " "We know." Allenby waved him to silence. "But your way has been tried long enough. How long is it since Los Angeles Day, when the U.N. buildings were bombed and burned by the original #R Party in order to get rid of Unesco? Two hundred fortythree years next June, isn't it? And your Party had had all that time to get education back on what it calls a sane program. Now nobody is educated." "It takes time to undo the damage of progressive education," McCarthy said. "Besides, a lot of that junk -- reading, writing -- as I've often told Ward -- " "All right," Ward broke in. "But two and a half centuries is long enough. Someone must try a new tack or the country is doomed. There isn't much time. The Outspace invaders -- " "The Outspace invaders are simply Russians," McCarthy said flatly. "That's a convenient view if you're an ostrich. Or, if you want to keep the Pretend War going, until the Outspacers take us over." tuously. "Ward, you damned fool -- " "That will be all, gentlemen," Allenby said. He did not raise his voice, but McCarthy was silent and Ward marveled, as he had on other occasions, at the authority the old man carried. "Well," McCarthy said after a moment, "what are you going to do about this?" He gestured toward the windows from which shouts still rang. "Nothing. Let it run its course." "But you can't do that, man!" "I can and I will. What do you think, John?" "I agree," Ward said. "They won't hurt each other -- they never have yet. It'll wear itself out and then, tomorrow, we'll try again." He did not feel optimistic about how things would be the next day, but he didn't want to voice his fears. "The thing that worries me," he said, "are those tigers. Where'd they come from?" "What tigers?" McCarthy wanted to know. Ward told him. "First it was cats," McCarthy said, "then birds... now tigers. Either you're seeing' things or someone's using a concealed pro jector." "I thought of the projector, but these seemed real. Stunned at first -- as if they were as surprised as I was." "You have a teleport in your class," Allenby said. "Yes -- maybe that's the way it was done. I don't know quite what to make of it," Ward said. If he voiced his real suspicion now. he knew it would sound silly. "I know some of them can teleport. I've seen them. Small things, of course..." "Not in my classes," McCarthy said indignantly. 'I absolutely forbid that sort of thing." "You do wrong, then," Allenby said. "It's unscientific!" "Perhaps. But we want to encourage whatever wild talents they possess." "So that they can materialize tigers in -- in our bedrooms, I suppose. Well, I've had enough. Stay here and stew if you like, but I'm going back to my class. I turned the hypno-gas on them before I took my dive. They should be nice and gentle for me by this time." He turned away defiantly. "I know how you feel," Allenby said when McCarthy was gone. "He's a holy terror, John. Shouldn't be around here. But I have to keep him, since he was recommended by the #Rs and the Educational League. He gives the school a bit of protective coloration. Perhaps he's why they haven't closed us down yet." "I know -- I'm not blaming you. Do you suppose we can go back to our jobs? It sounds as if it's wearing itself out." He gestured up at the windows. "Can't do anything more today." "No, you're probably right." OR a moment Allenby was silent as they went toward the gate of the Quad. Then he said, "John, you're a good man. I don't want you to despair. What we're attempting -- to bring education back into our culture -- is a good and noble cause. And you can't really blame the kids." He nodded up at the walls. "They've just had too many Spellcasts, too many scares in the Pretend War -- they can't believe in any future and they don't know anything about their past. Don't blame them." "No, sir -- I don't." "Just do our best," Allenby said. "Try to teach them the forgotten things. Then, in their turn, in the next generation... "Yes, we have to believe that. But. Dr. Allenby, we could go a lot faster if we were to screen them. If they were all like young Tomkins, we'd be doing very well. But as long as we have people like young Cress or Hodge or Rottke -- well, it's hard to do anything with them. They go straight from school into their fathers' firms -- after all, if you're guaranteed a business success in life, you don't struggle to learn. And. anyway, you don't need much education to be a dope salesman or a numbers consultant." "I'd like to have the place run only for the deserving and the interested," Allenby said. "But we haven't much choice. We must have some of these boys who are from the best families. More protective coloration -- like McCarthy. If we were only to run you know we'd be closed down in a week." "I suppose so," Ward agreed. He wondered whether he should tell his suspicions to Allenby. Better not, he decided. Allenby had enough to think about. The last of the shouting had died. As Ward went out the gate of the Quad, he felt his heart lift a little the way it always did when he started for home. Out here, miles from the city, the air was clean and the Sun was bright on the hills, quilted now with the colors of autumn. There was a tang of wood smoke in the air and, in the leaves beside the path, he saw an apple. It was very cold and damp and there was a wild taste to it as he bit into the fruit. He was a tired teacher, glad to be going home after a hard day in the school. He hoped that no one had been hurt by the tigers. papers across his desk, reached for his pipe and sighed. "Well, that does it. Bobby." he said. He looked at the red-headed six-year-old boy sitting in the too-big chair across from him. Bobby was a small boy with a freckled face and skinned knees. He sat in the big chair with his feet sticking straight out in front of him and played with a slide rule. "I've taught you all the math I know," Ward said. "Differential. integral, topology, Maddow's Theory of Transfinite Domains -- that's as far as I go. What's next?" "I don't know, John. I was thinking of going in for nuclear physics, but... "Go on, but what?" Ward prompted. "Well..." Bobby gave him an embarrassed look. "I'm kind of tired of that stuff. It's easy and not very interesting. What I'd really like -- " He broke off and began fiddling with the slide rule again. "Yes, Bobby, what would you like?" "You won't be mad?" "No." Ward smiled. "Well, I'd really like to try to write a poem -- a real poem, I mean, not advertiverse -- a real poem, with rhymes and everything." He paused and looked to see how Ward was taking it and then went on with a rush. "I know it's almost illegal, but I want to try. I really want to." "But why?" "Oh, I dunno -- I just want to. I remember that an old poet named Yeats said something about writing poems -- the fascination with what's difficult. Maybe that's it." "Well," Ward said, "it's a dangerous occupation." He looked at the boy with wonder and pride. "Sure, Bobby, give it a try if you want to." "Gee, thanks!" the boy said. He jumped out of the chair and started toward the door of the study. "Bobby," Ward called. "Tell me -- can you teleport?" "Not exactly," Bobby said. The papers on the desk in front of Ward suddenly fluttered into the air. They did a lazy circle of the room, swung into an echelon and performed a slow chandelle, before dropping into Bobby's hand. "I can do that stuff. But I didn't do the tigers." "I'm sure you didn't." "It was a good stunt, but I wouldn't do that to you, John." "I know. Do you know who did?" "I'm not sure." Bobby didn't look at him now. "Anyway, it'd be snitching." "I'm not asking you to tell." "Gee, I'm sorry," Bobby said. "I wanted to tell you in the yard. I knew there was going to be a rumble, but I couldn't snitch." "No, of course not." Ward shooed him off. "Go write your poem." tigers, John?" "I suppose they were convenient." "Tigers are never convenient." He crossed the room, picked up the phone and dialed. After a brief conversation, he turned back to her. "Well, now we know where they came from," he said. "The zoo. Disappeared for about half an hour. Then reappeared again." "I don't care where they came from," his wife said. Her dark head was bent over some work in her lap. "What difference does it make whether they came from the zoo or from Burma? The point is, bringing them in is dangerous -- it's hooliganism, and don't tell me that boys will be boys." "It doesn't show very mature judgment," he admitted. "But Bobby and his pals aren't very old." "Only about four hundred and eighty-five years old, according to his I.Q. Do you think it was Bobby?" "Bobby isn't the only genius we've got. There's Danny, reand Bobby said he couldn't teleport big stuff." "Well?" John Ward had to confide his theory. He felt that he had to tell Ann everything, all the speculation and suspicion he'd carried around with him for so long. "I think we're being invaded," he said. Ann looked at him steadily for a moment. "You mean the Outspacers?" "Yes -- but not in the way you're thinking. It's been reported that the Saucers are Russian or Argentine or Bra#ilian or Chinese -- that's what we're told. But that's simply Pretend War propaganda and almost no one believes it any longer. Most of us think of them as Outspacers." "And you think they're moving in?" "I think they're watching -- sort of -- well, sort of monitoring." "Monitoring us? What for?" "No, not us. I think they've planted children among us. I think the Outspacers are schoolteachers." Ann got briskly to her feet. "I think," she said, "that we'll take your temperature and see if perhaps you shouldn't be in bed." know it sounds crazy, but it isn't. Think of it this way -- here's a race, obviously humanoid, on another star system. For some reason, overpopulation or whatever, they have to find room on another planet. Let's assume they're a highly civilized race -- they'd have to be to have interstellar travel -- so, of course, they can't simply take over Earth in an act of aggression. That would be repugnant to them. "So they seed our planet with their children. These children are geniuses. When they grow up, they are naturally the leaders of the world's governments and they're in a position to allow the Outspacers to live with us on Earth. To live peacefully with us, whereas now, if the Outspacers were to try to live here, it would mean war." "And you think Bobby is one of these -- these seedlings?" "Maybe. He's unbelievingly intelligent. And he's a foundling." "What has that to do with it?" 'Tve looked up the statistics on foundlings. When the Saucers hrst began to appear, back in the #th Century, the number of foundlings began to increase. Not a lot. but some. Then the Saucers disappeared for almost two and a half centuries and the number decreased. Now, since the Outspacers are once more evident, the number of foundlings has increased very greatly." "And your other geniuses? All foundlings?" "Not all. But that doesn't mean anything -- plenty of foundlings are adopted. And who knows which child is an adopted one?" Ann Ward sat down again. "You're quite serious about this, John?" "There's no way of being sure, but I am convinced." "It's frightening." "Is Bobby frightening? In all the time I've been tutoring him, has he ever been out of line?" "Bobby's no alien!" "He may be." "Well, anyway, of course Bobby isn't frightening. But that business of the tigers -- that is!" "They didn't hurt anyone." "No. but don't you see. John? It's -- irresponsible. How do you fit it in with your super-intelligent super-beings?" "Ann," he said impatiently, "we're dealing with fantastically intelligent beings, but beings who are still cfiidren -- can't you understand that? They're just finding out their powers -- one is a telepath, another levitates, a third is a teleport. A riot is started by Alec Cress or Jacky Hodge or one of those #R hoodlums. And our child genius can't resist making a kind of joke of his own." "Joke? With timers? John, I tell you I'm frightened." Her husband said nothing and she looked at him sharply. "You hope it's this way, don't you?" IOR a moment he didn't answer. Then he sighed. "Yes. Yes. I do both believe and hope I'm right. Ann. I never thought struggle -- that's what it amounts to. But I don't think the human race can manage itself any more. some other race teach us how to live. I know we've always looked on the idea of domination by some race from the stars with both terror and revulsion. But we've made such a mess of things on Earth that I, at least, would be glad to see them come." After a while. Ann said. "I've got to do some shopping for supper." She began mechanically putting her work away. "You're shocked?" "Yes. And relieved, too. a little. And, at the same time, still a bit frightened." "It's probably for the best." "Yes. It's sad, though. Have you told this to anyone else?" "No. After all, it's still only a theory. I've got to find some kind of proof. Except that I don't know how." "You've convinced me." She stood in the doorway, then turned to him and he could see that she was crying. She dashed the tears from her eyes. "I suppose we have to go on doing the same things. We have to have dinner tonight. I must shop... He took her in his arms. "It'll be all right," he said. "I feel so helpless! What are you going to do?' "Right now," he said, "I think I'll go fishing." Ann began to laugh, a little hysterically. "You are relaxed about it," she said. "Might as well relax and give it more thought." Ann kissed him and went into the kitchen. She was gone when he came out with his rod and creel. Going down the walk under the trees, he was aware again of what a fine autumn afternoon it was. He began to whistle as he went down the hill toward the stream. He didn't catch anything, of course. He had fished the pool at least a hundred times without luck, but that did not matter. He knew there was a fighting old bass in its depths and, probably, he would have been sorry to catch him. Now, his line gently agitated the dark water as he sat under a big tree on the stream bank and smoked. Idly he opened the copy of Yeats' poems and began reading: Turning and turning in the widening gyre... In mounting excitement, he read the coldly beautiful, the terrible and revelatory poem through to the end. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? Ward became aware that his pipe was out. He put it away, feeling the goose pimples, generated by the poem, leave his flesh. Then he shook himself and sighed. We're lucky, he thought, it might have been the way the old boy predicted it in the poem. It might have been terrible. He sighed again, watching his line in the dark water, and thought of Bobby. You could hardly call Bobby a rough beast. The line flickered in the water and then was still. He would have a lot of time for this kind of life, he thought, if his theory were correct. He watched a flight of leaves dapple the pool with the insignia of autumn. He was not sure he wanted to spend a lifetime fishing. into motion, the water frothed and flashed white and the line in his hand sang like a piano wire. Automatically, he jerked his line and began to reel in, at the same time his mind was telling him no line of its weight could long hold what he had hooked. As suddenly as the action had begun, it was ended and he was pulling something heavy against the stream bank. He gaped at it, his eyes popping. Then he heard the rustle of leaves and the snap of a stick behind him. "Catch somep'n, teach'?" a voice asked. "Yes, I caught something." He got his tobacco pouch from his pocket and fllled his pipe, trying to keep his hands from trembling. "Gee, he's a big one, teach'," the voice said. Ward stood up. The boy, Jacky Hodge, leaning over the bank looking down at the fish. Behind him. Ward saw Bobby, Alec Cress, Danny and several others. Now which of you is laughing? he wondered. But there was no way to tell. Jacky, a boy of twelve or thirteen, had his usual look of stupid good nature. Bobby, under the flambeau of red hair, dreamed at the fish. The others wore the open poker faces of children. "That's a funny fish," one of them said and then they were all laughing as they raced away. With some difficulty. Ward got the fish out of the water and began to drag it up the hill toward his house. "Outspace fish," Ward said as he dumped the thing on the work table where Ann had deposited the bag of groceries. "Where did you get that?" "I just caught it. Down in the stream." "That? In our stream?" "Yeah." He looked at it. The fish resembled a small marlin in shape, but it looked as if its sides had been painted by an abstract artist. "They planted it on my hook," he told her. "Teleported it from somewhere and planted it on me. Like the tigers." "Who?" "I don't know -- one of the kids. There were a bunch of them down by the river." "Is it the proof you wanted?" "Almost. I'd like to make them -- whoever they are -- admit it, though. But you can't pry anything out of them. They stick together like -- like kids, I guess. Tell me, why is it that the smart ones don't discriminate? They'd as soon play with morons like Hodge or Cress as with the brainy ones." "Democratic, I guess." Ann said. She looked at the fish without enthusiasm and turned it over on its other side. "Weren't you the same way, when you were a boy?" "Guess so. Leader of my group was almost an idiot. Head of the #Rs now." He started to put his fishing tackle away. "Got to get ready for Star Watch," he said. "I'm on the early trick tonight." He halted in the kitchen doorway, still holding the rod and creel. He looked back at the fish. "That kind of thing is likely to take all the fun out of fishing," he told her. U sually, he found star Watch a bore. There were often Saucer sightings, it was true. He had had many himself, some of them very close in, but all that had become routine. At first, the government had tried shooting them down, but the attempts had ended in total failure and the Saucers still came, aloof and unreasonable, as if they did not even know that they were being shot at. Later, communication had been tried -- but with no better results. Now, when the Saucers were sighted, the Watcher phoned in a report, some bored plotter in Saucer Control took bearings and speed, or replied that they had the thing on radar. The next day, the score of sightings would be Spellcast -- it was less exciting than watching for grunnion. Tonight, however. Ward was excited. As he left his house, he set out at a fast pace for the school. He found Bobby in front of the boys' dormitory. "What is it, John?" the boy called as he trotted over to the teacher. "How'd you like to come on Star Watch with me?" "All right." They went down the street together. "I want to try something," Ward told the boy. "I think I know how we can get in touch with the Saucer people." "But they have tried." "Yes, I know -- with radio and blinker lights and all that. But maybe that's the wrong way. Bobby, you're a telepath, aren't you?" "I'm not very good at it and anyway I don't think it'll work." "Why not?" "I tried once, but I couldn't seem to get anywhere. They seemed -- I dunno -- funny." "In what way?" Ward asked the boy. "Just sort of funny." "Well, if we're lucky, maybe we can try again tonight." "Yeah," Bobby said, "it's probably a good night for it. Full moon. Why do you suppose they seem to like the full moon, John?" "I wish I knew." It didn't look as if they were going to have any luck. They had waited for two hours and Bobby was asleep on a bench in the small "duck blind" the Watchers used. Then John heard it. It was a high shimmer of sound and it gave him gooseflesh, as it always did. He couldn't see anything yet. Then it appeared to the north, very low, like a coagulation of the moonlight itself, and he shook the boy. Bobby was awake immediately and, together, they watched its approach. It was moving slowly, turned on an edge. It looked like a knife of light. Then it rolled over, or shifted its form, and the familiar shape appeared. The humming stopped and the Saucer floated in the moonlight like a giant metallic lily-pad, perhaps a half mile away. "Try now, Bobby," he said, attempting to keep calm. The boy stood in the moonlight in front of the blind, very still, as if collecting the silence out of the night. Once he shook his head as though to clear it and started to say something. Then, for a long minute, he held his face toward the moon as if he were listening. Suddenly, he giggled. "What is it?" Ward snapped, unable to repress his impatience. "I'm not sure. I thought it seemed something like a joke." "Try to ask where they're from." A moment later, the boy shook his head. "I guess I can't get anything," he said. "All I seem to get is that they're saying, 'IVe're here.' As if they didn't understand me." "All right. Try to get anything." A moment later, the ship turned on edge, or shifted its shape, and slid back into the sky. Ward picked up the phone and called Saucer Control. "Got it," the bored voice said. He put down the phone and sat in silence, feeling sick with frustration. "Might as well knock off, Bobby," he said gently to the boy. "I guess that's all for the night. You run along and hit the sack." The boy started to leave and then turned back. "I'm sorry, John," he said. "I guess I'm not very good at it. There's one thing though..." He hesitated. "Yes?" "I don't think they know any poetry. In fact, I'm pretty sure of that." "All right," Ward said, laughing. "I guess that's the most important thing in your life right now. Run along, Bobby." A N hour later, his watch ended and he started for home, still feeling depressed at having failed. He was passing the dormitory when he saw it. It hung in the air, almost overhead. The color of the moonlight itself, it was hard to spot. But it was not the Saucer that held him rigid with attention. Over the roof of the dormitory, small and growing smaller as it went straight toward the Saucer, he saw a figure, then another and then a third. While he watched, there was a jet of blue light from the object in the sky -- the opening of an airlock, he thought -- and the figures disappeared, one by one, into the interior of the ship. Ward began to run. It was strictly forbidden for a teacher to enter the dormitory -- that part of the boys' world was completely their own. But he ignored that ruling now as he raced up the stairs. All he could think of was that this was the chance to identify the invaders. The boys who had levitated themselves up to the Saucer would be missing. He was still exultantly certain of this as he jerked open the doors of the first three rooms. Each one was empty. And the fourth and fifth, as well. Frantically, he pulled open door after door, going through the motions, although his mind told him that it was useless, that all of the boys, with a Saucer so close, would be out looking at it. Wait until they returned? He couldn't remain in the dormitory and, even if he did, when they all came back, how could he find out which boys had gone up to the ship? They wouldn't be likely to tell, nor would the others, even if they knew. Aimlessly, he went on opening doors, flashing his Watcher's light. clue in one of the rooms. Excited again, he rapidly checked them, rummaging in closets, picking up their sports things and their toys. Nothing there. Until he found the book. It was an odd-looking book, in a language he couldn't read. He looked at it doubtfully. Was the brew? He stuffed it into his pocket and glanced around at the walls of the room. Pictures of athletes, mostly, and a couple of pin-ups. In a drawer, under some clothing, a French post card. He examined some of the objects on the dresser. Then he was looking stupidly at his hand. He was holding a piece of string with a ring attached to it. And, just as certainly, there was something attached to the other end. Or it had been. But there was nothing he could see now. He pulled on the string and it tightened. Yes, there was a drag on the other end. but there ivas ihothing he could see... or feel. He tried to reconstruct his actions. He had been pawing among the things. He had taken hold of the string and had pulled something attached to the end of it off the table. The thing had fallen and disappeared -- but where? It was stHI tied to the string, but where was it? Another dimension, he thought, feeling the hair stand up on his neck, the sudden riot of his blood as he knew he had found the evidence he wanted. He snapped off the light and groped his way rapidly down the stairs. Once on the street, he began to run. It did not occur to him to feel ridiculous at dragging along behind him, on the end of a string, some object which he could not see. is it?" She sat on the divan looking at the book. "I don't know, but I think it's alien." " think it's a comic book. In some foreign language -- or maybe in classical Greek for all we know." She pointed to an illustration. "Isn't this like the fish you caught? Of course it is. And look at the fisherman -- his clothes are funny looking, but I'll bet he's telling about the one that got away." "Damn it, don't joke! What about this?" He waved the string. "Well, what about it?" "It's extra-dimensional. It's..." He jerked the string with nervous repetition and, suddenly, something was in his hand. Surprised, he dropped it. It disappeared and he felt the tug on the end of the string. "There is something!" He began jerking the string and it was there again. This time he held it, looking at it with awe. It was neither very big nor very heavy. It was probably made out of some kind of glass or plastic. The color was dazzling, but that was not what made him turn his head away -- it was the shape of the thing. Something was wrong with its surfaces. Plane melted into plane, the surface curved and rejoined itself. He felt dizzy. "What is it, John?" "Something -- something like a Klein Bottle -- or a tesseract -- or maybe both of them together." He looked at it for a moment and then turned away again. It was impossible to look at it very long. "It's something built to cut through our three-dimensional space," he said. He dropped it, then tugged. The thing dropped out of sight and reappeared again, rolling up the string toward his hand. That was when he lost conf trol. He lay down on the floor and howled in a seizure of laughter that was like crying. "John!" Ann said primly. "John Ward, you stop!" She went out of the room and returned with a glass half full of whisky. Ward got up from the floor and weakly slouched in a chair. He took a long drink from the glass, lit his pipe with great deliberation, and spoke very softly. "Well," he said, "I think we've got the answer." "Have we?" "Sure. It was there all the time and I couldn't see it. I always thought it was strange we couldn't get in touch with the Outspacers. I had Bobby try tonight -- he couldn't do anything either. I thought maybe he wasn't trying -- or that he was one of them and didn't want to let me in on it. He said they sounded -- funny. By that, he meant strange or alien, I thought." "Well, I'm sure they must be," Ann said, relaxed now that John's outburst was over. "Yes. But that's not what he meant -- he's just a normal human genius. He meant funny." He lifted his hand. "Know what this is?" He held up the strange object on the string. "It's a yo-yo. An extra-dimensional yo-yo. And you were right -- that thing is a comic book. Look," he said. He held the odd object toward her. "See this? J.H. -- Jacky Hodge, one of the stupidest ones. It's his yo-yo. But I was right about one thing. We are being invaded. It's probably been going on for centuries. Invaded by morons, morons with interstellar drives, super-science -- superyo-yos! Morons from the stars!" He began to laugh again. Ann went out to the kitchen for another glass. Then, after a while, she went back for the bottle. # Star Shelf thur C. Clarke. Gnome Press, #: Ballantine Books, #c T'm glad to be able to review this book, which first appearNovel No. #, back in #. I could only mention it then, since there was (and stUl is) a house rule against reviewing galaxy Novels: but here at last is my chance. For my money, Prelude To Space is the most real, most gripping and most unforgettable story of the making and laimching of the first manned Moon rocket ever written -- and a good many have been. It is a description of a British Commonwealth undertaking, with planning in England and construction in Australia. But actually the project is for all humanity, since scientists of many nationalities work on it (Dirk Alexson, project historian and one of the chief protagonists, is an American), and since the end product of the flight -- knowledge -- will be available to all. There is little melodrama in the book, almost nothing but hard work, cooperation, endless planning and building. And at the end, the reader is left with an inescapable feeling that this is the way it will be, this is a genuine glimpse of future reality. It's a magnificent book, and Gnome and Ballantine are to be congratulated on reprinting it. thony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Doubleday  Co., # OU can always expect delightful reading in the Boucher-McComas annuals, and this one is no exception. Sixteen items, ranging from superb, scisay Gresham's "The Star Gypsies" to lovely fantasy like Manly Wade Wellman's "Vandy, Vandy," make up the book. Of the #, there were only three that I couldn't go for. There's also a much-to-thepoint short introduction, about how science fiction and fantasy are primarily fun, which nobody should deny, but some starkminded pseudo-philosophers often do. Highly recommended. Nearing, Jr. Doubleday  Co., # round belly" that goes with Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom will (like the present reviewer) enjoy the Professor's misadventures (with the ubiquitous MacTate of the Philosophy Department as constant male Cassandra and companion) all over again in their ingeniously redesigned form in the present volume. To give the book the shape of a novel, Dr. Nearing (Ph.D. on #th century historical poetry) has added a new beginning and ending, and new connective tissue to tie together into a highly entertaining unit two new tales and seven that were first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Perhaps this high-level funning will seem a bit rarefied to fanatics of "pure" science fiction, but to the rest of us. Professor Ransom's surrealist undertakings will have an immediate and enduring appeal. The book should go on the shelf right next to Gavaans Bar and similar enchantments. Isaac Asimov. Doubleday  Co., # A S confirmed galaxy readers know, Asimov has done it again -- turned out a swift-paced. ingenious and meaningful exploration of our distant tomorrows. Even those who read it first as a serial in this magazine will want to read it again in its hardbound form, for it delivers almost as much excitement on a second reading as it did on the first. The story is particularly fascinating to Asimov experts, because of the way it combines his interest in robotics with his consuming preoccupation with the sociology of a technology-mad, bureaucratically tetiiered world of tomorrow. It's a first rate detective story, too -- a suspense novel that will leave you breathless. and Mack Reynolds. Shasta Pubs., # TT'S often occurred to me that it might be a good idea to put together an anthology of funny science fiction, but I've been kept from it by the uncomfortable suspicion that one man's belly laugh only too often is another man's yawn. Unfortunately, the present collection confirms that suspicion. There are # tales in this book, of which I like # -- those by Leinster, Tenn, Fred Brown himself, Eric Frank Russell, and a little satire by a Clive Jackson. The rest range from pretty fair (Mack Reynold's entry) to not for me (all the rest). Of course, you may find the whole collection hilarious; so don't go on my say-so. Better try the book yourself. Tucker. Rinehart  Co., # fHE best science suspense story Tucker has done yet takes you by the scruff of the neck and pell-mells you through a series of adventures that are all the more exciting because they are, on the surface, well-nigh motionless. For this is adventure of the mind -- the story (done before, of course, but never better) of the first telepath and his struggles with a non-telepathic society. In this thriller, Paul Breen, an American, is brusquely though comfortably imprisoned, once his powers are known, by a Federal intelligence agency that builds up a worldwide espionage network around him as a human communications center. He can read the mind of everyone he has ever met (though not others), and over any distance. Thus, agents who are known to Breen need only to think their discoveries wherever they are and he will get the data. It's a crisply written, thoroughly realized tale of the potentialities of "psi" powers. Though not particularly subtle or profound, it's guaranteed to keep you chained to the edge of your chair for a fascinated couple of hours. edited by Donald A. WoUheim. Ace Books, #c 'X'HE third "Ace Double Novel" is itself novel, inasmuch as half of the fat little book (# pages) is a collection of four never-before-anthologized short stories and novelets, all of them good. The full-length novel, Sentinels of Space, is a reprint, of course, and also good. The four shorter items include one by Russell, and one each by Murray Leinster, Malcolm Jameson, and Frank Belknap Long -- a book bargain even if you already have the Russell novel. John Beynon. Nova Publications, London, England. Available from American science fiction book services at #c plus postage herently improbable situations, this is an interesting adventure story of the first space voyage to Mars. Most improbable is the private construction of a spaceship by hero Dale Curtance and a staff of assistants, and next most improbable is the old chestnut about stowing away on a spaceship -- particularly when, in this case, the stowaway is a girl, heroine Joan Shirring. Outside of these dubious items, and a faintly distasteful emphasis on British nationalism (something you don't find in Clarke's Prelude to Space, reviewed above), the story is effective. ster. Shasta Publishers, # TN this sequel to Space Platform, Murray Leinster has written a juvenile that has all the melodrama of the oldest-fashioned space opera, plus a lot of interesting technology rarely found in pure adventure stories. After many escapades, young Joe Kenmore and his buddies make the first landing on the Moon, which they do by helping the first ship maneuver down to the Moon's surface with their own little "space tug," just as a nautical tugboat helps ocean liners into their piers. Lots of Iron Curtain sabotage is defeated, as is a psychotic American scientist who sees only futility in everything. Plenty of excitement, indeed, though not much maturity. Conan Doyle. Permabooks, #c TT is good to have this wonderful old chestnut back in print again, particularly since the price is low enough so that anyone can afford to buy and read what probably is Professor Challenger's greatest adventure. It seems lushly overwritten, of course, but to this wrinkled and balding reviewer, at least, that doesn't make any difference. It's an enormously effective tale about the exploration of a bit of prehistory imagined still to exist on top of an inaccessible plateau far up the Amazon. Andre Norton. World Publishing Co., #L-ogy is, like the first, aimed at the juvenile market, but there is nothing particularly juvenile about it. Of the nine stories it contains, four are first-rate, three acceptable, and only two below passing. Included are tales by Eric Russell, H. B. Fyfe, Ray Gallun (two!), James Schmitz, Fritz Leiber, Ray Jones, Jerome Bixby, and K. Houston Brunner. The only thing wrong with the book is its slimness. You cannot present even a smattering of science fiction's wealth of imaginings about space in nine stories, one of which (Russell's) isn't a space opera at all, but an alien invasion tale. John Kier Cross. E. P. Dutton Co., #  porary science fictions, this British item has to do with the plots and counterplots surrounding an attempt to launch an Earth satellite space station. It also deals at interminable length with the doings of a family of English trapeze artists, and with a bunch of incredible villains led by a magician and illusionist known as Rubberface. The whole thing is done in a nervous-chatty-quaint style that is something like a cross between Oppenheim. It's supposed to be for youngsters. If so, it's only for youngsters who don't mind being whimsy-whamsied on one page and scared witless on the next. There's practically nothing at all about the space station -- it's just a bit of plot mechanism. #h # btsi doth bound Stionco Fiction books of the yoar -- both wore Morializod in Galaxy. llio by Pohl  Kornbluth (PublUhcd In Golaxy # by Alfred Batter # i Add up the total and deduct #. (Add # Foreign Poetege for each yeor) O Now Subscription Q Extending Subscription Nome Address . City . Stole Q Golaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus one full length Galaxy novel #  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus I year subscription to Galoxy (You save # on this offer) # Q New Subscription Q Extending Subscription Enclosed find  Send me. Q Galaxy Reader I I full length Novel #  Galaxy Reader t Galaxy Magazine # (Add # Foreign PoeSag# for eodi yeor) Name Address City Vogel started with crossword puzzles... and worked his way up to Man's greatest enigma! Vogel almost killed another boy who inadvertently scattered his halfcompleted jigsaw puzzle. At sixteen, he discovered the mysteries of the Danish Gambit, and cried. At twenty-two, he crouched in a foxhole on Okinawa, oblivious to tfie death bursting about him, squinting in a painful ecstasy at the tattered fragment of newspaper on his knee. His sergeant screamed in agony, then died at his elbow. Vogel's face lit up. "Sby." he said happily, scribbling. As crossword puzzles go, it had been a toughie. At thirty, he was Production Manager of Sachs Fixtures. His men hated him. The General Manager loved him. Tall, gaunt and ruthless, he could glance at any detail print and instantly pinpoint the pattern of final assembly, total man-hour budget and fabrication lead time. Once, he made a mistake. On a forty-thousand-dollar job lot he estimated too high on production scrap. When the final assemblies were completed, they had two feet of bulb extension left over. It disturbed him. He spent that evening in his den brooding over chessmen. His wife let him alone. Next day, he hired Amenth. morning and apologized. "No experience, but amazing shop aptitude. He's coming down to you for an interview." "I want," Vogel said into the phone, "three bench men. By noon. With shop experience." Personnel was sorry. Vogel snarled and hung up. "Hello, please, sir," said a voice. Vogel stared, icily. Meekness cowered in front of his desk. Meekness in the form of a small birdlike person with beseeching amber eyes. "I am Amenth," he said, cringing. Vogel eyed the olive skin, the cheekbones, the blue-black hair. "A wetback," he said. "Three men short and they send me wetbacks. You know sheet metal, buster?" "I am not of the understanding," Amenth offered. "Experience, no." He beamed. "Aptitude, yes," Fighting apoplexy, Vogel took him out into the shop. Amenth cringed at the howl of air tools and punch presses. Vogel contemptuously took him by the arm and led him to a workbench where a wizened persimmon of a man performed deft lightnings with rivets and air wrench. "Benny, this is Amenth, He's new." Vogel pronounced it like a curse. "Get him some goggles from the crib, a rivet gun." Vogel returned to his office scowling. The phone rang almost instantly. "Boss," said Benny, "he's from nothing -- all thumbs with an air wrench and he don't know alclad from stainless." "Be right out," Vogel said, hanging up. Before he had a chance to fire Amenth, the Fabrication Super came in with a production problem. Vogel solved it, but it was almost an hour before he returned to Benny's bench -- and stared. Amenth was a blur of motion. His Keller chattered like a live thing. A furious sweating Benny snapped at Vogel, "You playing practical jokes? Look, this guy's gone crazy, he's fifty per cent under standard! Tell him to slow down before I file a grievance." ' Amenth beamed. "I am of the aptitude," he said. A queer deep tingle went through Vogel. The crystal delight of challenge he felt when confronted by an apparently impregnable fianchetto. That was the first day. compiling a progress report from completed shop travelers. Abruptly he scowled at one traveler, then said, "Charlie!" "Yes, sir," one ofthe planners said. "Why didn't these galley panels go out for drop hammer?" Charlie peered at the form and whistled. "Somebody must have changed the planning sheet." "Get me the story!" Charlie went hurriedly out into the shop. Some time later he returned with a pale dazed look, "It's this guy in assembly," he said. "Name is Amenth. He didn't even read the traveler. Just looked at the attached detail print and decided to miter the edges, then reverse the flange with a weld." He threw the completed part on Vogel's desk. "Go ahead, check those tolerances," he said whitely. "Right on the money." Vogel walked over to a calculator and figured. There was a dreamy expression in his eyes. He said softly, "All fabrication in our own shop. A net saving of # cents per unit, or eight hundred dollars total. I believe you planned this item, Charlie." Vogel fired him. That same afternoon Amenth came into the office on Vogel's order. "Sir?" "Don't you know how to read a traveler?" Vogel asked sternly. "It was a lucky accident." Amenth looked terrified. "I just read the print -- " "And did what seemed logical." Statement, then a very quiet question. "What happened to your accent?" The little man looked blank. Vogel took a slow deep breath. "I've got a material planning job open," he said tightly. "Threefifty to start. Interested?" For a moment he thought Amenth would lick his hand. The little man took to planning sheets like a duck to water. He pored feverishly over blueprints, turning out travelers in a steady flood. Vogel watched him. He went over to Personnel, requested Amenth's employment application, read it and scowled. It was a masterpiece of anonymity. Birthplace: New York. Former Occupation: Laborer. Hobbies: None. He memorized Amenth's address and returned the application. Vogel always ate lunch in the office with his expediters. That noon two of them got into an argument about the planets. "I say there is life on Mars," Pete Stone insisted stubbornly. "When the polar ice cap melts, the water runs along the canals and traces of green from growing vegetation can be spotted." "Which proves nothing," Harvey Lamb yawned. Lamb was chief expediter. "Man couldn't live there, anyway. There's not enough oxygen." "You would be amazed," Amenth said quietly, "at the adaptability of Man." Vogel set down his thermos and leaned forward. "You mean Martians, for instance, could live here, assuming they existed and had spaceships?" Amenth's smile was infinitely bitter. "Until they'd go mad." The talk turned to baseball. Vogel lit his pipe and gave Amenth a surreptitious glance. The little man slumped in the corner, bleak and withdrawn. This was delicious.  across town to Amenth's address. It turned out to be an ancient rooming house on the West Side. Mrs. Reardon, the landlady, was an apathetic woman who brightened when he asked her about Amenth. "He moved in just three weeks ago." Her face softened in recollection. "He was like a lost dog coming in out of the rain. Couldn't hardly speak English and he wanted me to trust him for the rent. I must have been crazy." Her nostrils flared. "Not that he hasn't paid up. Are you a cop?" Vogel nodded as he took out his wallet. In it was his honorary sheriffs badge, but he doubted if the woman would know the difference. She didn't. She led the way upstairs to Amenth's room, worrying, and Vogel assured her they were only looking for a hit-and-run witness, that it was strictly routine. Amenth's room was incredibly asceptic, barren of pictures, ash trays, dirty laundry, any of the normal masculine debris. Vogel got the stark impression of a convict's cell. In the bleak dresser were two pair of socks, underwear, one tie. In the closet hung one white shirt... period. Everything wore an indefinable patina of newness. Two books graced the top of the dresser. Vogel recognized one of them, a text on fabrication and design which Amenth had borrowed from his office. The other was a child's primer of English. "He stays in his room almost every night -- reads mostly, and he speaks English much better now," said Mrs. Reardoni "A good tenant -- I can't complain -- and he's quiet and clean." She. described Amenth and Vogel shook his head. "Our man is about sixty, with a beard," he said. "Funny coincidence. It's a strange name." Mrs. Reardon agreed. Vogel drove back to the shop, whistling. He did not go to his chess club that night, but went to the library instead. He read about Flying Saucers, about space travel, about the possibility of life on other planets. Sometimes he chuckled. Once he frowned deeply and bit his lip. That night in bed, listening to his wife's shallow breathing, he said, "Alice." "Yes?" "Supposing you were lost on a desert island. What would you do?" "I'd build a raft," she said sleepily. Vogel smiled into the darkness. Next day he made a systematic tour of the stockroom, scanning the racks of completed sub-assemblies, the gleaming fixture components, the rows of panels, brackets, extrusions, all waiting like soldiers to march from the stockroom into final assembly. Vogel suddenly grunted. There, half hidden behind a row of stainless-steel basin assemblies, was a nine-inch bowl. He examined it. The bowl was heavy and shiny. There was no part number stamp, and the metal was not alclad, not stainless, not cad nor zinc. Five' small copper discs had been welded to the lower flange. Vogel carefully scraped off a sample with a file. Then he replaced the part in the stock rack and went into his office where he placed the sample in an envelope. That afternoon he ranged the shop like a hound. In the shipping crib, he found a half-completed detail that struck a chord of strangeness. Two twisted copper vanes with a crumpled shop traveler signed by Amenth. The next operation specified furnace braze. Vogel squinted at the attached detail print. It was a current job number. He spent the next two hours in the ozalid room, leafing through the print files. The job number called for a deep-freeze showcase, and there were exactly two hundred and seven detail drawings involved. Not one of them matched the print in shipping. After an almost silent dinner at home, he sat smoking his pipe, waiting for the phone to ring. It rang at eight. "It's platinum," Carstairs said. Tim Carstairs was a night-shift chemist. "Anything wrong, Mr. Vogel?" "fJo." Vogel paused. "Thanks, Tim." He hung up, glanced at his fingers. They were shaking. "You," Alice said, "look ready to call mate in three." "I'm going over to the shop," he said, kissing her. "Don't wait up." the light on in the parts control section. Amenth was writing planning sheets. "I don't believe we authorized overtime," Vogel told him mildly, hanging up his coat. "Just loose ends." Amenth's smile was nervous. "Tying up these burden charts. I'm on my own time." "Thought I'd set up next month's budget." Vogel sat at his desk. "By the way, what did you do before you came here?" "Odd jobs." Amenth's lips twitched. "Your family live on the coast?" Sweat glistened on the little man's forehead. "Ah -- no. My folks passed on years ago." Cat and mouse. "You've done good work lately," Vogel yawned, studying the progress chart on the wall. Behind him he heard a soft exhalation of relief, the furtive rustle of papers as Amenth cleaned off his desk. When Amenth finally left, Vogel went over to his desk and methodically ransacked the work in process file. It took him two hours to find what he was looking for. One: A schematic detail on graph paper which resembled no type of circuit Vogel had ever seen. Two : Fourteen completed shop travelers on which were typed clearly, Call Amenth upon completion. That was not unusual; most expediters wanted to be notified when a hot part hit Inspection. The unusual part was that no inspection stamp had been placed opposite the final operation of Inspect, Identity, Return to Sock. Ergo, Amenth had inspected and stocked the parts himself. Three: A progress chart with dates, indicating four detail parts still remaining in fabrication. Final assembly date -- tomorrow! The following afternoon, Vogel sat alone in the conference room. The door opened and Amenth came in. "You sent for me. sir?" "Sit down, Amenth. Let's talk a while." Amenth sat down uneasily. "We're considering you for promotion," Vogel said, silencing the little man's protests with a deprecating wave. "But we've got to know if you're ready. Let's talk about your job." Amenth relaxed. They talked shop for a few moments, then Vogel opened a folder, took out his watch. "Very good," he said, "Now let's check your initiative potential." As Amenth stiffened, Vogel reassured him, "Relax. It's a routine association test." For the next ten minutes he timed Amenth's responses with a stop watch. Most of the words were familiar shop words and most of the responses were standard. "Job." "Escape," Amenth said instantly. "Blueprint." "Create." "iVoise." "Hate." "Want." "Homel" It was all so childish, so obvious, and Amenth's eyes were frightened amber pools when Vogel dismissed him. No matter. Let him suspect. Vogel studied the reaction results with grim amusement. Outside, the shop roared. And Amenth's travelers sped the rounds: Issue material; Shear to size; Form on brake; Weld per print; Miter, drill, inspect, stock. One by one, the strange details were being formed, finished, to lie inert in the stockroom, to await final assembly. Assembly. Of what? Tonight was project completion.L-Vogel stood in darkness, leaning against the wall. He was tired. He had maintained this vigil for three hours. His right leg was numb and he started to shift position, then froze as he heard footsteps. Three aisles over, a light exploded, blindingly. He held his breath. From outside in fabrication came the muffled clang of drill press and power brake, the sounds of the night shift. He waited. Three aisles over, something moved. Someone fumbled in the stock bins, collecting shaped pieces of metal, grunting with the effort of piling them on the salvage bench, now panting with impatience while assembling the parts. There was a hammering, a fitting together, a flash of light, a humming of power and finally a sob of relief. Vogel's hand slipped into his coat pocket and grasped the gun. He moved silently. Amenth stood at the salvage bench, adjusting studs and connecting terminals. Vogel stared at the final assembly. It was a helmet. A large silvery helmet, connected to a nightmarish maze of wiring, mounted on a rectangular plastic base. It hummed, although there was no visible source of power. Amenth put on the helmet with a feverish haste. Vogel chuckled. Amenth stood motionless. Then as his hand darted toward a stand, Vogel said sharply, "Don't!" Amenth stared at the gun. "Take it off!" Vogel's voice was iron. Amenth slowly took off the helipet. His eyes were golden with tears. "Please," he said. "Mars or Venus?" Vogel said. "Which?" "N-neither. You could not grasp the concept. Let me go. Please!" "Where?" Vogel prodded. "Another dimension?" "You would call it that," the alien whispered. Hope brightened his face. "You want feomething? Wealth? Power?" It was the way he said the words, like a white trader offering his aborigine captors glass beads to set him free. Vogel nodded toward the circuit. "That hookup -- you tap the gravitational field direct? Cosmic rays?" "Your planet's magnet force lines. Look, I'll leave you the schematic diagram. It's simple, really. You can use it to transmute -- " He babbled on with a heartbreaking eagerness, and Vogel listened. "In my own world," said Amenth brokenly, "I am a moron. A criminal moron. Once, out of a childish malice, I destroyed beauty. One of the singing crystals." He shuddered. "I was punished. They sent me here -- to the snake pit. Sentence for felony. This -- " he indicated the helmet -- "would have fused three seconds after I used it. So, incidentally, would this entire shop. I had no time to construct a feedback dispersion." "Tell me about your world," Vogel said. Amenth told him. Vogel's breath hissed softly between his teeth. All his life an unformed vision had tormented him, driven him toward perfection. Abruptly the vision was reality. He smiled, moved forward. "You shouldn't have told me." Amenth saw the intent in his eyes and started to beg. Vogel cHpied him behind the ear. briiiKlng your fiTorlte author of Rdenee-Flction, Fantasy and  Weird ailventure as near as your nisllbox! Just send your name j and aiUlress -- you'll get your copy by return mall... and we'll : keep you up on new titles aa we're doing for thousands of others!  Bargain buys galore! Write today! Satisfaction guaranteed. I If you enelnae lOe to cover postage and bandUiig. we'll .send along with your free catalog -- hy one of the famous authors of today. # E. San Fernanda St. Dapt. G-# Saa Jasa #, Calif. He put the helmet on, gingerly. The electrodes tingled against his temple and his grin was wry as he thought of Alice. Then he depressed the stud. Vogel sobbed.  blared in sweet, sparkling thunder. He whimpered, covering his eyes. The music drowned him in a fugue of weeping delight. Slowly he raised his head. He stood ankle-deep in gold crystals that stretched out forever in a splendid sea of flame. The crystals sang softly, achingly. to a silver sun in an emerald sky. A grove of blue needle trees tinkled in ecstasy on his left. And beyond those trees... The city sang. White spires foamed skyward in impossible cataracts of glory. A glissando of joy burned his eardrums, and he could not face that living splendor. It was the city beyond dreams, beyond legend, the city where all dreams end. He strode toward it, raptly. The crystals screamed. The blue needle forest lashed wildly, and terror shivered through the air in shrieking dissonance. From the blue forest, people ran. Beautiful people, with great golden eyes and scarlet tunics. They could have been Araenth's brothers and sisters. They stared, horror and revulsion twisting their faces. They started toward him. Vogel understood. If destroying beauty on this ugliness must be a duty. On this world, he was ugly -- # I I tMtMy book #od bMk dated muailoee (Astoundtof. OaUuy, complete eoDtents ot the ortginal editions ot "Book ot the Damned." "Wild Talentt." "New Lands." and "Lo." There are Just naturallr no other books Ilka these In the world. They eon tain thousands of actual, documented oceurreooee that tall way outside the boundaries of our arbitrarily tidy human aelaneaa and Oelda nt knowledge, oompletelj unexplainabla bappeninss. For lust a tew examples, there are dosena o documeiued Instances of teleportstlon. ot tstrooomleal and geolcdeal enigmas and "ImpoMlbllKlet." and ot space abipe seen repeatedly during the past three ceotunes (not just since IM#I). tneldentsUy. tbat'c why the Army Issued these books to all Project Saucer Invsatlgatora. II you read Ibeee tour books, your orderly, safe and aane little w#d will never again look the same to you. Your money back In full and with a amlle (rf pity), U you don't find that's true, and eao bear to part with thaae fascinating books and return them wltbln a monthl With non-OetlOQ books coming out nowadays at tS.# to tfi.# per book, you'd expect these four Fort books to cost a total of anywhere from S# to #S SO. They don't. They oome to only # per book, # for the entire, huge, tour-book volume, poetpaid. and with my money-back guarantee U you're not satisfied. In fact, stupefledi And If you order right now (which will help me meet the cost ot this adl). I'll Include a copy ot a superb Fortean novel by a top #F aulbor at no extra cost, with your "Books of Chsrlea Fort." thus lowering your ooel per book to only #. Good enough? Seed cfceefc. eesJl, or Mensy-Order loi At last, Mundin had a legal ease... two eraekpots who wanted to grab off the biggest corporation on Earth! And he had to revise the old adage to: "If you can't join 'em, liek 'eml" G-ML Homes, as the result of a ireat architectural advance, has become the biggest and most tory. Its bubble louses, rather than being on the open market, go with contract status for those with jobs. Belly Rave or its local equivalent -- and every city has one -- is where those without contract status live, if existence in the wretched squalor of those brawling thieves' dens can be called living. Neglected slums that once were suburban developments ("Picture Window, Expansion Attic for your Growing Pami#y"), Belly Rave, the future corruption of Belle Reve Estates, and its like are the neglected results of G-M-L's breakthrough in architecture. Charles Mundin, a criminal lawyer, starving because he was not fortunate enough to be born into one of the corporate-law dynasties, has had only one case, that of : Norvell Bligh, whose specialty is dreaming up bloody events for Field Days, the future equivalent of Roman circuses, and who wants to adopt his wife's daughter Alexandra, born in Belly Rave of a previous marriage. Bligh, however, has been doubleIX crossed into loss of contract status and his bubble house, and has been moved into Belly Rave by a police convoy. Meanwhile, Mundin finds himself the recipient of a doubtful political favor, the case of : Norma and Don Lavin, offspring of the Lavin who invented the bubble house and whose initial is the L of G-M-L Homes. Through legal trickery after their father's death, Norma and Don's # per cent share of all G-M-L stock has been tied up... and Don, the victim of severe conditioning that has left him vacant-eyed, is unable to remember where the stocks are or even to discuss the matter. He and his sister Norma live in Belly Rave with: RyaHy an old-time corporation lawyer, whose addiction to drugs has ruined his career, but who can still act as attorney of record while Mundin does the legwork and carries out Ryan's strategy. Mundin realizes that Ryan's strategy is clever -- for G-M-L Homes, obviously worried by it, have had Norma Lavin abducted. With hr gone and her brother a psychological blank -- except when G-M-L is mentioned -- the case looks as hopeless as Mundin's future and as dangerous as living in Belly Rave, where, he suspects, he may wind up before long as a permanent resident cake of ice. He kept trying to explain to someone enormous that he was sorry for everything, that he'd be a good and dutiful son or husband or friend or whatever he was supposed to be, if only the someone would leave him alone. But that enormous someone, who couldn't have been Norvell's father, because Norvell didn't even remember his father, only put his hand before his mouth and tittered and looked down from a long flight of stairs, and then, when Norvell was least expecting it, reached out and swatted him across the ear and sent him skidding across the enormous cake of ice into the tittering face of Alexandra and the jagged, giant teeth of Virginia -- Norvell woke up. He was very cold, very stiff. He looked dazedly around him. The living room. But -- Yes. it was the living room. With the wall pattern off and no light except a sickly dawn from outside. All the walls were on full transparent and he was lying on the floor. The bed he had dialed out to sleep in had folded into the basic cube, dumping him on the floor. And the floor was cold. No heat -- no power -- the house was cold. He got up, wincing, and sidled hopelessly to the window control. It didn't respond. The windows remained full transparent. H e knew what had happened and swore between clenched teeth. The skunks? Turning off the place without a word of warning, at daybreak, without even giving him a chance to... Wearily, he began picking up his clothes from the floor where a rack had dumped them when it had folded back. Through the indecently transparent windows, he saw the other bubble houses, all respectably opaqued, with only their nightlights and entry lights. By the time he was dressed, he began to hear a clamor upstairs. His wife and daughter charged down in negligees, commanding him to do something about it. "Get dressed," he said and pointedly disconnected his hearing aid. He rambled about the house while they did so. Absently, he tried to make coffee and gave up with a half-laugh when the water would not flow. The closets, drawers and dressers had rejected all their contents, upstairs and down. Pushers had calmly shoved them out and the doors had closed and locked -- to him, forever. He contemplated the disordered piles of clothes and kitchenware and began to pack a traveling case. Two bored policemen wandered in; the door, of course, was no longer on lock. He plugged in his hearing aid, taking plenty of time about it. "Well?" he asked. They told him he had plenty of time -- they weren't in any hurry. "Take an hour if you need it, bub." They'd tote him and his family and their stuff out to Belly Rave, help him pick out a good place. The moving had a golden moment. One of the cops helpfully picked up a suitcase. Alexandra told him to remove his lilthy hands from -- The cop clouted her and explained they didn't take none of that off Belly Rave brats. The police car handed Norvell a jolt. It was armored. "You -- you get a lot of trouble in Belly Rave?" he guessed. The friendlier of the cops said, "Only once in a while. They haven't jumped a squad car in six months, not with anything but pistols, anyway. You'll be okay." They pulled away from Monmouth G-M-L Unit W-#-AR. There was no sentiment to the parting. Norvell was sunk in worry, Alexandra was incandescent but still. And Virginia had not said two words to anyone that morning. riHE car paused at the broad beltway circling the bubblecity, its motor idling, its driver impatiently talking into his radio. Finally, two more police cars rolled up and the three of them, in convoy, left the city roads for the cracked asphalt that led to Belly Rave. Once the road they traveled had been a six-lane superhighway, carrying a hundred thousand commuters' cars, morning and night. Now it wound through a scraggly jungle and the toll booths at the interchanges had crumbled into rock piles and rust. They bumped along for a couple of miles, then turned off into a side road that was even worse. The first thing that hit Norvell was the smell. The second thing was worse -- the horrible feeling of betrayal. Belly Rave, in its teeming ruin, was worse than anything Norvell had dreamed. The convoying cars pulled up ahead and behind. A cop got out of each and stood ankle-deep in weeds and refuse, a hand idly resting on his gun. Norvell's driver said, "This one will do. Let's go." The act of moving their possessions into the house in the driving rain, ringed by an audience of blank-faced Belly Ravers, was mercifully blurred in Norvell's mind. At one moment, he was sitting in the police car, staring in disbelief at the wretched kennel they were offering him. The next, the police cars were gone and he was sitting on a turned-up suitcase and Alexandra was whining, "Norvell, I've to have something to eat before I absolutely die. It's been -- " "Shut up," Virginia said levclly to her daughter. "Norvell, help me get the big suitcase upstairs." She kicked a heap of rattling cans out of her way and headed for a flight of steps, ignoring her daughter. Norvell followed her up the narrow broken stairs. The upper floor -- Expansion Attic for Your Growing Family, the billboards had said -- was soggy with rain,  but Virginia found a spot where no water was actually dripping in. He dropped the suitcase there. "Go on down and watch the other stuff," she ordered. "I'm going to change my clothes." Before she got down, they had company -- three men in ragged windbreakers. "Police," one of them said, flashing something metallic in Norvell's face. "Just a routine check. You people got any valuables, alcoholic beverages, narcotics or weapons to register?" Norvell protested, "The police just left." "Bubble-town police, buster," the man said. "They got no jurisdiction here. Come on, what've you got to register?" N orvell shrugged feebly. "Nothing, I guess. Unless you count our clothes." The men moved purposefully toward the bags. "Just clothes? No guns or liquor?" Virginia's high, clear voice came down from the stairs. "You're damned right we have guns! You bums scram before you find out the hard way!" Norvell, eyes popping, saw an old-fashioned revolver in her hand. "Just a minute, sister," one of the men objected. "Beat it!" she snapped. They were gone, swearing. Virginia handed the gun to Norvell. "Keep it," she said coldly. "Looks better if you have it. Just in case you were wondering, there aren't any cops in Belly Rave." Norvell swallowed. He hefted the gun cautiously. It was far heavier than his unskilled imagination would ever have estimated. "Where did you get this thing?" "Used to be Tony's, before he died. There's lesson one for you -- you don't live in Belly Rave without a gun." Alexandra came forward with shining eyes. "You were wonderfair she breathed. "Those detestable brutes -- heaven only knows what would have happened to me if just Norvell had been here!" She started to plant a wet kiss on her mother's cheek. Virginia shoved her daughter away. "We'll have no more of that cack. From now on, you're going to level with me -- and with Norvell, too. Hear me? We can't afford lying, faking, doublecrossing or temperament. The first bad break you make, I'll sell you like a shot." Alexandra's face was a study in terror. "Sink or swim -- you're in Belly Rave now. You don't remember, but you'll learn. You'd better -- fast. Now get out of here. If you can't scrounge something to eat, go hungry. But don't come back until sundown." The child stood blankly. Virginia took her by the shoulder, pushed her through the door, slammed it behind her. Norvell looked through a chink in the boarding of the cracked picture window and saw Alexandra plodding hopelessly down the battered walk, weeping. Uncertainly, he asked Virginia -- the new Virginia -- "What was that about selling her?" "What I said. You can always find a fagin or a madam for a kid. I don't know how prices are now -- when I was thirteen, I brought #fty dollars." Norvell, his hair standing on end. said, "You?" "I guess I was lucky -- they sold me to a fagin, not into a house. He ran a tea pad. I helped him roll the clientele. That's where I met Tony. Now, if there are no more useless questions, help me unpack." TE helped her, his head whirling. Without shame or apology. she had demolished the story he had painstakingly built up from her "accidental" hints and revelations over the years. The honest, industrious parents. The frugal, rugged life of toil. The warmth of family feeling, drawn together by common need. The meeting with Tony Elliston -- glamorous, advantage-taking cad from the Field Day crowd. Not a bad fellow. "But not love. Norvell -- not what we have." He had thought himself clever. He had pieced it together into a connected tale, chuckling privately because she couldn't know how much she had "unwittingly" revealed. And all the while she had been a pickpocket in a dope joint, sold into it by her parents. There was a knock on the door. Virginia said, through her teeth. "If that brat's come back before I told -- " and swung it open. She screamed. Norvell found he had the revolver in his hand, pointing it at the middle of the hulking, snaggle-toothed figure in the doorway. The figure promptly raised its enormous hands over its shockhaired head, grinning. "Don't shoot, mister. I know I'm not pretty, but I'm harmless. Came here to help you oOt. Show you where to register and all. The name's Shep. I'll give you a fair shake. Show you the best places for firewood, wise you up on the gangs. Hear you have a little girl. You want to sell her, I'll get you a price. You want to go into business, I can put you next to a guy who'll start you out with hemp seed. If you got real money, I know a sugar dealer and a guy with a still to rent. I'm just Shep. mister. I'm just trying to get along." Virginia said, "Keep the gun on him. Norvell. Shep, you come in and sit down. What do you want?" "Surplus rations," the giant said with a childlike smile. "Cash, if you have any. I'm always desperate, but right now I'm out of my mind." His arm swept at the open door. "See the rain? It's the front end of the rainbow, mister. See it? I have to catch it. And to catch it, I've got to have some crimson lake. Some other things, too, but the crimson lake. You don't see crimson in it, do you? Well, you won't see crimson in the canvas, but it'll be there -- in the underpainting -- and, because it's there, I'll have the pot of tears, the bloody, godawful rainsweep caught gloomdriving down on two hundred thousand desolations." Norvell, lowering the pistol, said stupidly, "You paint." "I paint. And for fifty bucks I can get what I need, which leaves me only the problem of getting fifty bucks." build, you could get it." "Not like you mean. Not since I started painting. So I run errands. Any errands? I've got to raise the fifty before the rain stops." Virginia appeared to come to a conclusion. "Norvell, give Shep fifty dollars." He shot his wife a horrified look. That would leave them with eighteen dollars and sixty-five cents. But she wasn't even looking at him. She told Shep, "You'll work for it. One week's hard work. The outhouse is probably afloat. The chimney looks like it's blocked. We need firewood. This place needs patching all around. Also, my husband doesn't know the ropes and he might get in trouble. You'll watch him?" "For fifty, sure. Want me to watch the kid?" "No," she said shortly. "You know what you're doing, lady. It'll be rough on her. Can I have the fifty now? It'll take ten bucks for the kid who does the running. I can't miss this rain." Norvell counted out fifty dollars and handed them over. "Okay!" Shep boomed happily. "We'll get my crimson lake out of the way, then registration." They walked through the driving rain to a tumbledown building guarded by a rat-faced boy of twelve. Shep told him cryptically, "Got a message for Monmouth." The boy hooted mournfully, "Wa-wa-wa-wa-wabbit twacks!" Norvell blinked. Kids -- everywhere -- from nowhere! Gimleteyed, appearing silently from the rain shroud. Shep told them, "Like last time, but with crimson lake, too. Got it?" A haggard girl of perhaps thirteen said dispassionately, "Cack like last time. The Goddams joined up with the Goering Grenadiers. It'll be a busted-bottle job getting through the West Side." "I'm in a hurry, Lana. Can you do it or can't you?" Mildly, she told him, "Who said 'can't' -- you or me? I said it'd be a busted-bottle job." The rat-faced twelve-year-old said sullenly, "Not me. They know I was the one got Stinkfoot's kid brother. Besides, what about the Willowdale -- " "Shut your mouth about Willowdale," Lana blazed. The boy cowered away. "Bwuthcr wabbits, inspection -- harms.'" Jagged glass edges flashed. Norvell gulped in horror. "Good kids," Shep said approvingly and handed Lana the fifty dollars. "Wa wa wa wa wabbit twacks!" she hooted and the kids vanished back into the shrouding rain. through the floods, Norvell asked no questions. He had learned that much, at least. The Resident Commissioner lived in an ordinary house, to Norvell's surprise. He had exjected to sec the man responsible for the allowances of thousands of people in a G-M-L. Certainly his rank entitled him to one. Then Norvell saw the Resident Commissioner. He was a dreary old political hack. He told Norvell vaguely, "Carry your cards at all times. Be sure and impress that on your wife and the little girl. There's all kinds of red tape to getting duplicate cards, and you might go hungry for a week before they come through, if you lose these. As head of the family, you get a triple ration and there's a separate one for the wife. Is the little girl a heavy eater?" Norvell guessed so. "Well, we'll give her an adult ration then. Lord knows there's no shortage of food. Let's see, we'll make your hours of reporting on Wednesdays, between three and five. It's important to keep to your right hours, otherwise there's likely to be a big rush here sometimes and nobody at all others. Is all that clear? You'll find that it's mostly better to travel in groups when you come down for your allowance. Shep can tell you about that. It -- prevents trouble. We don't want any trouble here." He tried to look stern. He added pathetically, "Please don't make trouble in my district." He consulted a checklist. "Your ration cards entitle you and the whole family to bleacher seats at all bouts and Field Days." Norvell's heart was torn by the words. The rest was a blur. "Free transportation, of course -- hope you'll avail yourself -- no use to stay home and brood -- little blood clears the air -- door always open..." Outside, in the rain, Norvell asked Shep, "Is that all he does?" Shep looked at him. "Is there something else to do?" He swung around. "Let's get some firewood." X A S a disappearing act, it was a beaut. Mundin had tried everything. No Norma Lavin. After Ryan's phone call, the track was lost. He went first to the police, of course. When he told them Norma Lavin was a Belly Raver, they tried not to laugh in his face. "Look, mister," a kindly Missing Persons sergeant explained. "People are one thing -- Belly Ravers are something else. Are these people on the tax rolls? Do they have punch-card codes? Do they have employment contract identification tattoos? No, they don't. So what can we do? We can find missing persons, sure, but this girl ain't a person -- she's a Belly Raver. Maybe she just took a notion to wander off. Maybe she's got her toes turned up in a vacant lot. We just wouldn't know, see?" But he took Charles Mundin's name, just in case. Mundin foind himself making regular trips to the Lavin-Ryan home, loaded down with groceries. He also found that Ryan was tapping him for cash to buy drugs. Don Lavin was sinking into a kind of catatonia without his sister. Ryan, alternately coldly confident with a bellyful of yen pox and devoured by the weeping shakes, begged Mundin to try something, anything. Mundin tried a doctor. The doctor made one visit -- during which Don Lavin, sparked by some flickering pride, rallied wonderfully and conversed good-humoredly with the doctor. The doctor left, with an indignant glare at Mundin, and Don lapsed back into his twilight gloom. "All right, Ryan," Mundin said bitterly, "now what?" Ryan shook the last pill out of the tin, swallowed it and told Mundin now what. And Mundin found himself calling on hisold schoolmate, smaller than a landing field. He sprinted the length of it to embrace good old Charles. "Gosh!" he burbled. "I'm so glad you could come and see me! .They just put me in here, after ' old Sterling died. It used to be his office, see? So when he died, they put -- " "I see," Mundin said gently. "They put you in here." "Yep. Say, Charles, how about some lunch?" help." "Now, Charles, it isn't about a job again, is it? Gee, that's an awful spot to put me in." Well. Mundin thought, they had succeeded in beating one not two. "I just want a little adHce. I'd like to know when and where the annual stockholder's meeting of G-M-L Homes comes off." know. Don't they have to publish it somewhere? In a newspaper?" "Yes, they have to publish it is to find out what newspaper. There are maybe fifty thousand of them in the country and the law just says that it has to be published in one -- not necessarily English language either." speak English. Charles." "Why don't you ask your Periodical Research Department?" sure, Charles -- anything to oblige. tainly asked his squawk-box whether they had anything like a Periodjcal Research Department, and the squawk-box said, "yes, sir," and connected him. Half an hour later, while Mundin was deep in the intricacies of the preliminary pre-hearing of the Group E Debenture Holders' Protective Committee, the squawk-box coughed and announced that the G-M-L Homes meeting was advertised in the Lompoc, California, Intelligencer. Time, day after tomorrow. Place, Room #, Administration Building, Morristown, Long Island. "They won't get many people to come there, will they?" "One too many," Mundin said. 'HE next morning, Mundin was waiting at a two-dollar ticket window of the New York Stock Exchange when the opening bell rang. He examined the crumpled instructions from Ryan nervously, as sweating and tense as any of the passionate throng of devotees pressing around him, but for other reasons. Ryan's instructions were complete and precise, except for one thing -- they didn't tell him what bets to make. Mundin swore under his breath, shrugged and swiftly punched Number #. Anaconda Copper. He inserted his token, threw the lever and tore off his ticket. At # other windows in the gigantic hall, # other investors were doing the same. And outside, on the polychrome street, ten thousand latecomers were waiting for their turn inside. The angular Big Board in the center of the hall flashed and twinkled -- fast, then slow. The lights stopped. The parimutuel computers began to hum. Mundin leveled his field glasses on #, but it was hard to stay on it. His hands were trembling. The gong rang and the line he was watching flashed: #, up #. The great hall trembled with noise, of which Mundin's obscene monosyllable was only the twenty-thousandth part. A lousy six cents profit. Not worth taking to the cashier's window. A passing broker, a grimy Member's button in his lapel, said intimately, "Hey, bud -- watch metals." "Beat it or I'll have you run in," Mundin snapped. He had no time to waste on phony touts. He swept his field glasses over the Big Board, trying to make some sense out of the first movement of the day. Industrials were down an average of four, the helpful summary told him. Rails -- meaning, mostly, factory-site land developments -- wcre up three. Chemicals, up eight. Mundin figured -- that meant the investors would lay off chemicals because they would figure everybody would be on chemicals because of the rise -- except for the investors, who would be on chemicals because they would figure everybody would lay off chemicals, because they'd figure everybody would be on chemicals. Because of the rise. Thirty-second warning bell. "Bud," said the broker insistently, Watch metals!" "Go to hell," Charles said hoarsely, his fingers shaking over the buttons.He punched Anaconda again, bought five tickets and waited. groan at last, he opened his eyes and swept the board with his glasses. #, up # "Remember who told ya," the broker was saying. Mundin gave him a dollar. "Thanks, bud," the broker said. "Don't switch. Not yet. I'll tell ya when. This is a morning crowd -- Tuesday morning at that. Not a crazy hysterical Monday-morning crowd that gets in fast and gets cleaned out fast. Look around and see for yaself. Little fellows taking a day off. The family men that play it smart -- they think. Smart and small. I been watching them for twenny years. I tell you, don't switch." Charles didn't switch. He kept feeding a dribble of dollars to the broker, who was either lucky or a genius that day. By noon, Charles had a welldiversified portfolio of metals with a cash-in value of four hundred and eighty dollars. "Now," the broker said hoarsely. He had borrowed Charles's field glasses to scan the crowd. "See? Some of them's leaving. Some of them's breaking out sanniches. The handle's dropping. They're getting not-so-smart now, not-so-small. I been watching them twenny years. Now they start doing the dopy things, because they're gettin' hungry and a hungry man ain't smart. Sell twenny points short. Jeez, I wish I had the nerve to say thirty!" Two minutes later, he was pounding Charles on the back and yelling, "We made it, bud!" Metals had broken -- thirtyeight points. Charles, by now icycalm, gave him five dollars. Step One in Ryan's instructions -- build up a stake. He'd done that. He turned the dial to the # range. "Give me a winner," he told the tout. "I'm in a hurry and this is taking too long." The broker stammered: "Solid fuels ought to rise now. But -- but please, bud, make it #. One on solid fuels and one on -- on..." He swept the board with his glasses. "Can's been sleepin' all day," he muttered. "A Tuesday crowd stays off Can, but after metals break..." He said nervously, "Buy solid fuels and Can." OY two in the afternoon, Charles had a cash-in value of #,# and the broker's pockets were bulging with small change. He was talking to himself in an undertone. Charles said abruptly, "Okay. Now I want a share of G-M-L." The broker blinked at him. "Old #? You can't do that." "I want it." "Bud, you're new here; I been around for twenny years. They have an investor, see? All day long, he just punches #. That's him over there, third tier, second aisle. Like Steel and P  A -- they don't take no chances on anybody claimin' no stock." "I want it," repeated Mundin. "Ain't you made enough for one day? Come on, let's go get a drink. I'll buy. You fool around with the big boys, they punish you. Like G-M-L. You try to grab a share and you'll get hurt. UnlrAited resources, see -- un-mit-ed. Every movement, all day long, he has a 'buy' bid in. He bids ten thousand bucks, way over real value. You get a wild idea and bid over ten thousand and you'll get the stock, sure. So, next movement, what happens? He sells short, maybe. Maybe he waits. But sooner or later you're squashed. You know what they say, bud -- 'Him who sells what isn't his'n must buy 'it back or go to prison.' And plenty have." Mundin said coldly, "What's G-M-L par?" "Two thousand. But ya can't claim it, didn't I just tell you? He's got a bid in, every movement." Charles set himself to persuade the broker to do what Ryan had planned. At last, the broker, shaking, stumbled off toward the third tier, second aisle. Mundin followed him with the field glasses. It was working. Sweating, Mundin saw in miniature, through the glasses, the greeting, the silent shove, the wordless rejoinder, the growing heat of the quarrel. The G-M-L investor was a small, elderly fat man. The broker was small, too, but lean and wiry. The fight broke out as the thirty-second warning bell rang. Charles took his eyes off the the fighters and the for-once-untended investor's window and punched four # tickets on Old #. NE bid and no offerings did not constitute a transaction according to the electronic definitions of the New York Stock Exchange parimutuel machine. As it had all day, the Big Board said -- #, no change One bid and no offerings. In a claiming movement, it meant a quick profit -- the difference between the bid and the par value. An investor next to Charles, eying him respectfully, said, "What do ya like in Chemicals, bud?" Mundin ignored him. He left his station, almost regretfully, and took the escalator up to the cashier's window marked : Industrials -- # and up. "Two thousand dollars," said the bored clerk, inspecting the tickets, glancing at his miniature of the Big Board, noting the no change. He began to count out hundred-dollar bills. "I'm claiming," Mundin said through stiff lips. The clerk suddenly awakened. "Old #! How'd you do it?" "I'm claiming two thousand dollars par value." The clerk shrugged and tapped out an order on his keyboard. Moments later, one share of G-M-L Homes voting common stock fluttered from a slot in the desk. The clerk filled in Charles' name and home address and recorded them. "You'll get that to the company's board of directors immediately?" the attorney asked. "It's automatic," said the clerk. "It's in their files now. Say, mister, if you don't mind telling me how you pulled it off -- " He was being much too affable -- and Charles, looking closer, saw the little ear plug of a personal receiver. He was being stalled. He darted into the crowd. The two gambles had paid off, Mundin realized, heading for the street and Belly Rave. He had the stake -- and he had his single share of stock in G-M-L Homes, entitling him to a seat at the annual stockholders' meeting. Now the real gambling would begin. Mundin whistled for a cab. There was some commotion behind him, but the cab came before Mundin had time to notice that the man who was being worked over, in broad daylight, by three huskies, was a small, wiry man with a Member's button in his lapel. XI G etting on toward noon," Shep said. "Let's find a restaurant." "A restaurant?" Norvie Bligh goggled. He followed Shep down the littered, filthy street, wondering. In a week, he thought he had learned something about Belly Rave under Shep's tutelage. But he had seen no neon-glittering, glass-fronted havens. What Shep led him to was just another Belly Rave house. A wheezing old crone crept around the living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace and water bubbling in a blackened kettle. Restaurant? Shep took a couple of rations from his pocket. He never seemed to be without a dozen or so. They were easy enough to get from the R.C. -- you could claim you had a dozen dependents and he would apathetically list you for # rations a week. If you could lift them, they were yours. There was plenty of food. And plenty of circuses. Shep split the two-by-threeby-six plastic box with his thumbnail and Norvell clumsily followed suit. Things tumbled out. Shep tossed one of the "things" -- an unappetizing little block of what looked like plasticwrapped wood -- to the crone. She caught it and gobbled it down. "Business not so good?" Shep asked casually. She glared at him, bailed water out of the kettle with a rusted can and slopped it into his plastic ration box. Shep popped open a little envelope and sprinkled a dark powder on the water. Coffee! The magic smell made Norvell suddenly ravenous. He handed the crone a similar block from his own ration, got his water, made his coffee, and greedily explored the other things that had come out of the box. Biscuits. A tin of meat-paste. A chewy block of compressed vegetables. Candy. Cigarettes. The combination was one he hadn't encountered before. The meat-paste was highly spiced but good. Shep watched as he gobbled. "When you've eaten each menu ten thousand times -- well, I won't discourage you." what in the world the old woman thought she was doing for a living. "It's simple," said Shep. "She gets her rations and trades them for firewood. She uses the wood to heat water -- for coffee, or bouillon, or tea, or whatever. She trades the water for rations. She keeps hoping that some day she'll come out ahead on the deal. She never has." "But why?" "Because it makes her feel like a human being." "But -- " "But, hell! It's hard to starve to death in Belly Rave; in a bad week, though, she comes close to it. She's risking her capital in the hope of gain. What if she always loses? She's doin something -- not just sitting and waiting for ration day to roll around again." Norvell nodded. He could see how it would make irresistible, unarguable sense, after the tenthousandth of each menu. Those who could do anything, anything at all, would try anything, anything at all. It gave him a clue to the enigma named Shep. He said comprehendingly, "So she has her restaurant, and you have your art, and -- " The giant turned on him. "You little louse! If you ever say, or hint, or think that I'm just piddling around to kill the time, I'll snap you in two!" In a clear, intuitive flash, Norvell realized that he had said the unspeakable. He managed to say, very sincerely, "I'm sorry, Shep." His knees were shaking and his heart was pounding, but it was only adrenalin, not fear. He knew what torment had driven this placid hulk to rage -- incessant, relentless, nagging selfdoubt. Where leisure is compulsory, how can you tell the burning drive to create from its sterile twin, "puttering"? You can't. And the self-doubt must remain forever unresolved, forever choked down, forever rising again. Norvell added honestly, "I won't say that again. I won't even think it. Not out of fear of you. but because I know it's not so." He hesitated. "I -- I used to think I was a kind of artist myself. I know what you must be going through." Shcp grumbled, "Bligh, you're just beginning to find out what you go through -- but I'm sorry I blew my top." "Forget it." They walked on. A T last, Shep said, "Here's where we get some more supplies." The place was one of the inevitable picture-window, fieldstone-chimney ruins, but with a fenced-in yard. The gate had a lock on it. Shep kicked the gate down, tearing out the hinges and the staples of the hasp. Norvell said, "Hey!" "We do this my way. Stearns!" A grim, gray man threaded his way to them around stacks of plastic fittings, guttering and miscellaneous. "Hello, Shep," he said flatly. "What do you want?" "You hijacked repair materials that a couple of friends of mine got through legitimate blackmarket channels. I want them back -- with interest." "Still on the protection kick, Shep?" the man asked, his voice ugly. "If you had any sense, you'd come in with me." "I don't work for anybody, Stearns. I do favors for a few friends, they do favors for me. Trot out your team, Titan of Industry." Shep, so fast to resent the slur himself, was insensitive enough to use it on others. With the same results. Stearns' face went pasty with rage and Norvell knew what was coming next -- unless he moved fast. "Stearns!" he yelled, and used the moment's delay to draw the pistol that Virginia had ordered him to carry. Stearns' hand stopped at his lapel and slowly, Shep gave Norvell a quick, approving glance. "Trot out your team, Stearns." Stearns didn't look away from the gun in Norvell's hand. "Chris! The truck was a two-wheeler stake job with one starved-looking teen-ager pulling between poles and another pushing against a canvas breast-band. Walking Stearns before him, Shep ordered him to pick up this or that article of building material and put it on the truck. He topped the load with a rusty pick and shovel from the tool shed, then told It won't be far." Norvell didn't pocket his gun until they had put three blocks between themselves and Steams' final malevolent glare. There were two stops before they headed for Norvell's home. At each of them, a part of the supplies was unloaded, to the tearful thanks of sober-looking citizens who had thought them gone forever -- and with them, the months of accumulation, gambling and wangling that had earned them in the first place. Norvell, eying the heaving, panting teen-agers, suggested uneasily, "Let's give them a hand with the truck." Shep shook his head. "Our job is convoying." kids rolled the cart to the door of Norvell's house and unloaded the firewood and building materials, stacking them on the shredded broadloom that covered the floor of the sunken living room. Virginia cast an appraising eye over the neat heaps. "No tar paper, linoleum, anything like that?" Shep guffawed. "No diamonds, either. You think your roof is the only one that leaks? You're lucky -- you got two finished floors. Let the top one get soaked. You'll be all right down here." "Cack," she said and Norvell winced. "If you can't get tar paper, see if you can find something else to make shingles out of. Sheet tin will do." "So will the roof off a G-M-L," Shep said sourly, but he made a note. He tossed a couple of rations to the waiting kids, who took them and pushed their empty truck away. "Anything else?" Virginia, suddenly a hostess, said, "Oh, I suppose not. Care for a drink?" Norvell, for politeness' sake, took a sip of the bottle Virginia produced. "Rationjack," she called it, obtained by trading firewood with the evil-eyed octogenarian in the house next door. It tasted like, the chewy fruit bars he had enjoyed until then, when he found them in his ration pack. But the taste was overlaid with the bite of alcohol. Beer was what he really liked. They didn't seem to have any in Belly Rave, though. Norvell let the conversation drift past him. He sat back, boneweary. Physical weariness was a new thing to Norvie Bligh. He had never had it as a child, never had it at General Recreations. Weariness was not one of the fixtures that came with possession of a G-M-L bubble house, it seemed. Why was it that doing nothing involved physical labor, while doing actual creative, productive work -- running a Field Day, for instance -- involved only the work of the mind? Norvie admitted it to himself : already he was taking on the coloration of Belly Rave. Like all its discouraged, hope less inhabitants, he was living for the day and ignoring the morrow. Rations and a place to sleep. It would not be long, he told himself bitterly, before he would be one of the simians queueing up at Monmouth Stadium. Unless he found something else to do. But what was there to do? Work on the house? The essentials were done. The bars were up, the trash had been carted out into the street, where it would slump into a featureless heap like all the other middens along the road. The less urgent things couldn't be done. You couldn't fix the lesser roof leaks -- no shingles. You couldn't fix the stairs -- no materials, no tools. Above all, no skill. the fact that he was interrupting, "Virginia! How about starting a garden? A couple of fruit trees -- orange, maybe. A few rows of -- " Virginia laughed almost hysterically. Even Shep chuckled. She said, "Orange trees don't grow around here, my dear husband. Nothing else does, either. You start digging out there and first you go through two feet of garbage and trash, then maybe six inches of cinder and fill. Then you hit the real paydirt -- sand." Norvell sighed. "There must be something to do." Shep suggested, "You could paint your dump, if you're feeling ambitious. I know where there's some house paint." Norvell sat up, interested. He accepted the bottle of ration-jack and took a small swallow. "Why not? No reason why we can't keep the place looking decent, is there?" Shep shrugged. "Depends. If you want to start some kind of a business, paint's a good advertisement. If you want to just drift, maybe you don't want to advertise. You make yourself too conspicuous and people get ideas." Norvell said, dampened, "You mean robbers?" Virginia reached for the bottle of ration-jack. "Cack," she said bluntly, taking a long swallow. "We aren't painting." There was a long pause. In the G-M-L bubble house, Norvell reminded himself. Virginia had never let there be any doubt who was boss -- but she had seldom shown it in front of outsiders. They weren't in the bubble house any more, however. I want Arnie, Norvell cried to himself, suddenly miserable. It isn't working out right at all, not the way Arnie said it would. He'd Grenadiers and it seems they pack knives and guns. They look down on the Wabbits and their busted bottles." said it would be a chance for Norvie to express himself, to make something of his marriage, to be on his own. And it wasn't that at all! He reclaimed the bottle of ration-jack. It still tasted quite disgusting, but he gagged down a long drink. do so badly today. Stearns gave me a little trouble. If Norvie hadn't held a gun on him, I might not have got the stuff so easy." Virginia looked at her husband appraisingly. But all she said to Norvie was, "You better keep an eye on that gun. Alexandra tried to sneak out with my kitchen knife today." "Eh?" Norvie was jolted. "Put on quite a scene," her mother said, almost admiringly. "She's getting in with the Goering "Does she have to do that?" Shep said grimly, "If she wants to stay alive, she does. Get it straight, Norvie -- this is Belly Rave, not a finishing school. It's a permanent Field Day, only without rules." Now there was something he knew about, Norvell thought, brightening. "You ever go in for a Field Day?" "Nope. Just the weeklies." "Oh, you ought to, Shep. That's where the real money i?. And it's not very dangerous if you play it smart. Take spearcarrying in Spillanc's Inferno, for instance. Safe as houses. And from the artistic side, let me tell you from experience that -- " "Cack on spear-carrying, Bligh," Shep said, with a wire edge in his voice. "I don't do that any more. I've been there, sticking the poor slobs who fall off the high wire before they reach the blonde. I've even been on the wire myself -- once." He reached for the ration-jack, his face blank. "She missed me with all eight shots. I fractured her femur with my first. And then I dropped the gun." He took a huge drink. "They booed me. I didn't get the midriff bonus or the navel superbonus. I didn't want them. All I wanted was some brushes, some canvas, some graphite sticks and some colors. I got them, Bligh, and I found out I couldn't use them. Not for six damned months. And then I couldn't paint anything except her face when the slug hit her thigh and she fell off the perch." Norvell contemplated the ration-jack bottle with distaste. He got to his feet, weaving slightly. "I -- I think I want some air. Excuse me." "Certainly," said Virginia, not even looking at him. As Norvell went out the door, he heard her ask Shep, "This blonde you shot -- was she pretty?" from the Stock Exchange. He got to Belly Rave by late afternoon, his share of G-M-L Common securely tucked in a pocket. "Ah!" exclaimed Ryan, coherently jubilant. "One share voting. The meeting is tomorrow -- and accessory before the fact to simple assault. A good day's work. Counselor." "I hope this share is going to be enough to get me in," Mundin said anxiously. "What if it isn't entered or they challenge it?" "They can't. Id cerium est quid reddi pofesf. Counselor." "But affirmantis est probatio, you know." Ryan grinned amiably. "Score one for your side. If they won't let you in, we'll have to think of something else, that's all." "You've been right so far, though." Mundin stood up and took a turn around the dingy room, tripping over Don Lavin's feet. "Sorry," he said to the sprawling youth, trying not to look at the staring, shining eyes. There was an excellent chance, he realized, that what had happened to Don Lavin might, sooner or later, happen to himself if he persisted in sticking his nose into the corporate meatgrinders. Mundin asked, "Nothing new about Norma?" Ryan shook his head. "You'll have to pry her loose from them tomorrow. Wish I could go with you..." "Oh. by all means, come along," Mundin said sarcastically. "Love to have you. You'll like Morristown -- it's so much like Belly Rave." "I'd never stand the trip. You'll have to play it yourself. Counselor. I have confidence in you. Just keep your head and remember the essential nature of a great private utility corporation." "A legal entity. A fictive person." The old eyes were gleaming in the ruined face. "Forget that. Think of an oriental court, a battlefield, a government, a poker game that never ends. The essence of a corporation is the subtle flux of power, now thrusting this man up, now smiting this group low. You can't resist power, boy, but you can guide it." He reached shakily for the battered tin of pills. "Oh, you'll manage. The thing for you to do now is to vanish. Get lost. Don't be seen until you turn up at the meeting. And don't go to your office or apartment." He glanced meaningfully at Don Lavin and Mundin cringed. "What then?" Mundin demanded. "You want me to stay here?" "Anywhere out of sight." Mundin looked at his watch. If he could only go to bed now and wake up just in time to start for the meeting! But he had nearly twenty-four hours to kill. Twenty-four hours in which to think and get nervous and lose the sharp edge of determination. "I'm going out," he said. "I don't know if I'll see you before the meeting or not." who didn't notice him, and wandered through the growing dusk of Belly Rave. He changed direction a couple of times when he caught sight of what looked like purposeful groups of men or children ahead, but there was actually small chance of attack before the Sun went down. He found himself nearing the General Recreations recruiting station and felt somewhat more secure in the shelter of the inviting, pink-spun-candy-looking structure. General Recreations policed its area with its own guards. Mundin studied the gaudy posters and the shuffling, gossiping men and women. It was the first time he had come really close to the raw material that Stadium shows were made of and he felt a little like an intruder. He had seen the shows themselves, of course -- plenty of them. He had gone religiously to the Kiddies' Days back in Texas. As an adolescent, he had been a rootin', tootin' red-hot fan, as able as any to spout the log-book records on hours in combat, percentage of kills, survival quotients. Naturally, his enthusiasm had quieted down when the Scholarship people approved his application and he entered law school and he had never picked it up again. Nothing against the games, of course, but an attorney was expected to go in for more cerebral forms of amusements. Like dodging creditors, he told himself bitterly. Somebody called from the mob, "Hey, Mr. Mundin!" He started, half ready to run. But it was only whatsisname -- Norvell Bligh -- the client Dworcas had sent. But so shabby! Then Mundin remembered. Bligh had lost out on his contract -- with General Recreations, ironically enough. But still, to find him here! The little man panted up to Mundin and wrung his hand. "My God, it's good to see a friendly face! Were you -- were you looking for me, maybe?" "No, Mr. Bligh." Bligh's face fell. "I -- uh -- thought perhaps you might have a message for me -- as my attorney, you know -- maybe the Company... But they wouldn't, of course." "No, they wouldn't," Mundin said gently. He looked around. He couldn't stand the little man's misery, nor could he hurt him by walking away. "Is there any place we can have a drink around here?" "#s there! Mr. Mundin, the things I've seen in the week I've been here!" He led off, with Mundin following. It was only half a block to the nearest blind pig. Bligh knocked. "Shep sent me," he told a bitter-faced woman through a peephole. alcohol. They sat at plank tables in the wretched living room and, through the sloppy curtains. Mundin saw the gleam of copper tubing and shiny pots. They were the only customers at that hour. The woman asked tonelessly: "Raisin-jack? Ration-jack? Majun? Reefers? Gin?" "Gin, please," Mundin said hastily. It came in a quart bottle. Mundin gasped when she asked for fifty cents. "Competition," Bligh explained when she had gone. "If it was just me, she'd have sold it for twenty-five. But, of course, she could tell you were only slumming." "Not exactly," Mundin said. "Health!" They drank. Mundin felt as if somebody had smashed him on the back of the head with a padded mallet. Hoarsely, he asked Bligh, "How have you been getting along?" Tears were hanging in Bligh's eyes. "It's been hell, only one day of hell after another, and no end in sight. I wish to heaven I -- " He stopped himself, sat up straighter. "Sorry. Been drinking the whole afternoon. Not used to it." "That's all right." "Mr. Mundin, you can help me. Please! A big lawyer like you, candidate for the council and everything -- I don't expect a contract and a G-M-L. I had them and I was a fool -- I threw them away. But there must be some kind of a job, any kind, enough so I can get out of Belly .Rave before I split right down the middle and -- " Mundin, thinking of his appeal "I can't, Bligh. I don't have a job to give." "Nothing I can do for you here, Mr. Mundin? I know the ropes -- ask me!" It was a new thought. Mundin said uncertainly, "Why -- why, as a matter of fact, there just might be something, at that. I've been trying to locate -- a friend here in Belly Rave. A girl named Norma Lavin. If you think you could help me find her..." Bligh looked at him express ionlessly. "You want me to find you a girl?" "A client, Bligh." "I can do it. I bet! I've got friends -- contacts. Just leave it to me. I'll handle it. You want to come along?" Mundin hesitated. Why not? His job was to stay out of sight. Until the stockholders' meeting, at least. "Certainly," he told Bligh. "Lead the way." growing dusk to a vacant lot, the bumed-out site of one of Belle Reve's finest #by-#-foot estates. And then the little man cupped his hands to his mouth and hooted mournfully into the twilight, "Wa-wa-wa-wa-wabbit twacksi" Mundin, stupefied, said, "What... ?" A small figure oozed from the dusk. It asked suspiciously, "Who wants a Wabbit?" Bligh proudly introduced Mundin. "This gentleman is looking for a young lady." "Cack, buster! Us Wabbits don't -- " "No, no! A young lady who has disappeared." Mundin added, "Norma Lavin is her name. Disappeared a week ago. Lived at # Willowdale Crescent. Drove an old Caddy." "Um. That's Gee-Gee territory," the shrill young voice informed them. "We got a Grenadier PW, though. What's in it for the Wabbits?" Bligh whispered to Mundin, "Ten dollars." Mundin said promptly, "Ten dollars." "For a starter?" "Sure." "Come on." The Wabbit led them a desperate pace through a mile of Belly Rave. Once, a thick-set brute lunged at them from a doorway. The child snarled, "Lay off. Wabbits!" The man slunk back. There had been a flash of jagged bottle glass in the little fist. They moved orr. Then, a mounting chorus down a street, rhythmic and menacing: "Gahdamn! Gah-damn! Gah-damn!" "In here!" The Wabbit darted into a darkened house. A startled old man and woman, huddled before the cold fireplace, looked once and then didn't look at the intruders again, having seen the busted-bottle insigne. The Wabbit said to Mundin, "Patrol. This is Goddam territory." They watched through cracks in the warped boards that covered the splintered picture window. The Goddams, still chanting, came swinging past, perhaps fifty of them, expertly twirling improvised maces. Some carried torches. The Wabbit, frowning, muttered, "That's no patrol. War party, heading west. No noise. There'll be a rear guard." You could barely see them. They were black-clad. Their faces and hands were darkened. "All right," the Wabbit said at last, and they slipped out. The old man and woman, still ignoring them, were munching rations and bickering feebly about who should chop up the chair to start a fire. any other house, except that it was full of pale, snake-eyed kids from eight to thirteen. "Who're these?" a girl asked the Wabbit. "Hello, Lana," Norvie Bligh said tentatively. She shriveled him with a glance and turned again to their guide. "Customers," he said shrilly. "Missing person. Ten bucks. And something important: War party of Goddams heading west on Livonia Boulevard, the #hundred block, at #:#. Fifty of them with those hatchets of theirs. Advance guard and rear guard." "Good," she said calmly. "Not our pigeon: looks like a cribhouse raid. Who's the missing person?" Mundin told her. Like the Wabbit guide before her, she said, "Um. Goeririg Grenadier territory. Well, we have one of them in the attic. Want us to ask him, mister -- for fifty bucks?" Mundin paid. The Goering Grenadier in the attic was an eight-year-old scooped up in a raid on the headquarters of the Grenadiers itself. At first he would only swear and spit at them. Then Lana took over the interrogation. Charles left abruptly. The Grenadier was still crying when Lana joined them downstairs and said, "He talked." "Where is she?" "Fifty bucks more." Mundin swore and searched his pockets. He had thirty-seven dollars and eighty-five cents. Lana accepted twenty-five on account. She said, "Seems there's a Mr. Martinson. He has jobs for the Gee-Gees now and then. He told Grosse Hermann -- that's their boss -- that he wanted this Lavin dame picked up and doped. They were supfosed to deliver her to some place on Long Island. The kid didn't go along, so he doesn't remember just where. Says if he heard it, he'd..." Mundin was tearing upstairs. To the weeping child, he barked, "Room #, Administration Building, Morristown, Long Island?" "That's it, mister," said the kid, sniffling. "I told her I'd remember!" living room and leaned against a wall, brooding. So Norma was being kept on tap for the stockholder's meeting. Why? More conditioning? A forced transfer of her stock? No -- Don Lavin's stock; she didn't have any. She was the legatee -- her brother Don had the stock, having her irrevocable proxy. So they would knock off her brother. Mundin said to Lana, "Listen. Yob saw that I have no more dough right now. But I need help. This thing is big. There are -- well, thousands involved." What a fool he would have been "It's big and it's complicated. First, can you throw a guard around # Willowdale? I think your friends the Grenadiers are overdue to kill a young man named Don Lavin." He didn't wait for an answer, but went right on, "Second, can you get me to the Administration Building in Morristown? You'll be taken care of if this thing breaks right." Lana measured him with her eyes. "Can do. We can haggle later." She barked orders. A silent group of children collected their broken bottles from the mantel over the wood-burning fireplace and slipped out. Lana said definitely, "The GeeGees won't get to your friend. As for Morristown -- well, if the GeeGees can make a delivery there, I guess I can. Frankly, I don't like it. Morristown's tough. But we have an arrangement with the Itty-Bitties there. They're rats; they use guns, but..." She shrugged helplessly. You gotta go along, her shrug said. Mundin found himself escorted to the door. "Wait a minute," he said. "I want to hole up somewhere for the night. I'll meet you here in the morning, but what about right now?" Bligh volunteered, "How about my place, Mr. Mundin? It isn't much, but we've got bars on the windows." Lana nodded. "That'll do. In the morning -- what now?" One of the Wabbits had slipped in the door. "Gee-Gee scouts," he reported. "We got one of them, but there's a couple more around. Might be a raid." "We'll fix them," Lana said grimly. "Guess they want their boy back. Come on, you two -- I'll have to convoy you out of here." She led the way. The street was black and silent. Before they had taken three steps, Lana was invisible. With some qualms, Mundin followed Bligh's confident stride. darkness and said, "Hold it! There's one of the Gee-Gees under that fence." Her bottle glimmered. Bligh choked and tackled her from behind as she was about to slice into a pudgy young-girl face. Lana floundered on the ground, swearing, while Bligh snapped at his stepdaughter, "Sandy, get the hell out of here. These are friends of mine. I'll see you at home!" Alexandra, wriggling as he clutched her arm, said philosophically, "Sorry, Norvell. That's the way the little ball bounces." She threw back her head in a barking, strangling yell; "Sieg -- heil! Sieg -- " Norvell held off Lana with one hand and, with the other, measured the distance to Alexandra's jaw. He knocked her out, heaved her over his shoulder and said, panting, "Let's go, Mundin. You tag along, Lana." After ten minutes, Mundin had to relieve the little man of Alexandra's weight. By the time Mundin's knees were buckling, the girl was coming to. He put her down and she trailed sulkily along with them. Mrs. Bligh tried to raise hell when the four of them came in. "And," she screamed at Norvie, "where have you been? Out of here without a word -- gone for hours -- we could have..." Norvell said it was none of her business. He said it in such a way that Alexandra gasped with indignation, Lana with admiration. Mundin blushed at the language, but reflected that Belly Rave was doing things to little Mr. Bligh. And the things were not all bad. "And," Norvell concluded, "if I see any more monkey-business between that hairy ape Shep and you, there's going to be trouble!" "Hah!" snorted Virginia Bligh. "I suppose you'll beat him up." "He could break me in two. I'd wait until he went away and then I'd beat you up." Lana said sweetly, "I'm going now. What about this little stinker?" She jerked a thumb at the sullen Alexandra. "I'll take care of her," Bligh promised. "She didn't know any better, that's all." Lana gauged him. "Okay. Be back in the morning." She was gone as Virginia Bligh, regaining her breath, started in for the second round. Mundin said, "Please! I've got a hard day tomorrow -- can I get some sleep?" Old Monmouth. Mundin and Lana and Norvie Bligh, who tagged along in a sort of vague secretarial capacity. First, they stopped by Mundin's bank, where he plugged in his key, punched Close Account and scqoped up the bills that rolled out. He counted morosely. Two hundred thirty-four dollars, plus eighty-five cents in change. Lana looked hungry and Mundin recalled that he still owed her twenty-five dollars balance from the night before. He gave it to her and said, too cheerfully, "Let's get something to eat." They ate in Hussein's. Lana said, "I've been here before. That ward-heeler E)worcas is across the street, isn't he?" Startled, Mundin said, "That's right. What were you doing here?"  "Things. Look, here comes a friend of yours." It appeared to be one of Mundin's Ay-rab constituents-to-be. He said, "Effendi, I confess it. I was drunk when the day came and the judge insulted me." Mundin said patiently, "I ought to tell you, Hamid, that I'm withdrawing from -- " He stopped in time. Careful, he warned himself -- better let things ride until after the stockholders' meeting. He amended it to, "I mean what's the trouble?" "The inheritance from my father," the Ay-rab said bitterly. "It is a matter of Clark v. Allen, #, # S Ct #." He was reading off a sheet of paper. "What this means, I do not know, but the judge insulted me." "I'll look it up," said Mundin, taking the slip of paper with the annotation number on it. "What were you doing in court?" "My father died," the Ay-rab explained. "There is a law that one must be a citizen to inherit, unless there is a treaty -- and how can there be a treaty with Saudi Arabia, which no longef exists? I went to the court, Effendi." "And you were drunk," said Mundin. Hamid said gravely, "Effendi, it is even as your great poet Fitzgerald so beautifully wrote -- Inderd the IdoU I have loved to long Have done my Credit in this world much wrong: Have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup And sold my Reputation for a Song." "Sure, Hamid, sure," said Mundin. 'Til look into it." L unch continued without further interruption or much conversation. Over coffee, Lana said, brooding, "I guess the big shotsil ride out to Morristown in armored cars. Too bad we ain't rich. Well, let's get to the jumping-off place." A taxi took them through the Bay tunnel to the Long Island Railroad terminus in Old Brooklyn. Just for the record, they tried the ticket window. "No, sir," the man said positively. "One train a day, armored. For officials only. What the hell do you want out there, anyway?" They canvassed the bus companies by phone, without luck. Outside the railroad station, at the head of the cab rank, Lana began to cry. "There, little girl." One of the hackies soothed her, glaring at Mundin and Bligh. A fatherly type. "What's the matter?" "It's my daddy," Lana bawled. "He's in that terrible place an' he's lost an' my mommy said we should go help him. Mister, just take us to the edge, please? An' Uncle Norvie and Uncle Charlie won't let anything bad happen if those bas -- if those bad men in Morristown try anything. Honest!" The hackie broke down and agreed to take them to the edge. It was a two-hour drive over bad roads. He let Lana ride next to him in the front. Swinging her little handbag gaily, with the volatility of a child, she chattered, all smiles, the whole way. Uncle Norvie and Uncle Charlie exchanged looks. They knew what was in the little handbag. Morristown, being older, was better organized than Belly Rave. The driver stopped a couple of weed-grown blocks from the customs barrier. "Here we are, little girl," he said tenderly. The little girl reached into her handbag. She took out her busted bottle and conversed earnestly with the driver. He cursed and drove on. At the gate, a couple of men looked genially inside. Lana whispered something -- Mundin thought he caught the words "Wabbits" and "Itty-Bitties" -- arid the men waved them on. A block past the gate, on Lana's orders, the driver stopped at another check-point, manned by a pair of dirty-faced nine-year-olds. They got a guide -- an IttyBitty with a carbine. On their way through the busy brawling streets to the Administration Building, grownups got out of sight when they saw him clinging to the cab. At the Ad Building, Lana said curtly to the driver, "Wait." Mundin pointed to the steelplated wheeled and tracked vehicles drawn up in the building's parking lot. "We get out of here in one of those or not at all." Lana shrugged. "I don't get it, but all right." She told the Itty-Bitty, "Pass the cab out, will you? And whenever you guys need something in Belly Rave, you know who to come to." TT was one o'clock -- the meeting was scheduled for one-thirty. The check-point in the lobby passed Mundin and Bligh on the strength of Mundin's stock certificate. Lana was to wait in the visitor's room. Some twenty men filled the meeting room. Quite obviously, they were Titans. Beside these richly, quietly dressed folk, Mundin and Bligh were shabby interlopers. They were also ridiculously young and awkward. From here on, it gets hard, Mundin told himself. Corporate law! The vision blinded him with its brightness. Another new arrival was greeted cheerfully by the Titans. "Bliss, old man! Never thought you'd turn up for this nonsense. Old Arnold's going to tramp all over you again, as usual." Bliss was thin and younger than most of them. "If a couple of you gutless wonders would back me up, we'd stop him. Anyway, what else have I got to do with my time?" Then archly, "I did hear something or other about a Miss Laveme..." It broke up in laughter. Mundin dove into the breach. "How do you do, Mr. Bliss," he said breathlessly, taking the man's hand. "I'm Charles Mundin, Regular Republican candidate in the #th District -- and a small stockholder here." The thin man gently disengaged his hand. "It's Hubble, Mr. Ermurm -- Bliss Hubble. How do you do." He turned to one of the Titans and demanded with mock belligerence, "Didn't you get my wire. Job? Why haven't I got your proxy for the contract thing?" "Because," Job said slowly, "I like old Arnold's policies so far. You'll rock the boat one of these days, Bliss -- unless we kick you out of it first." "Mr. Hubble," Mundin said insistently. Hubble said absently, "Mr. Ermurm, I assure you I'd vote for you if I lived in the #th District. which, thank God, I don't." His eyes were wandering. He headed across the room to buttonhole another Titan. Mundin followed him in time to hear, "... all very idealistic, I'm sure, my dear Bliss. But many an idealistic young man has turned out to be a hard taskmaster. I mean no offense." Bliss Hubble was off again. Mundin judged that this last Titan was .angry enough to talk to him. A vein was throbbing nicely in his reddened temple. Mundin asked in tones of deep disapproval, "Same old scheme, eh?" rjlHE Titan said angrily, "Of course. The fool! When young Hubble's seen as many raids on management as I have, he'll think twice before he tries to pull wool over my eyes. The contract thing indeed! He's trying to shake the faith of all of us in the present management, stampede a board election., bribe -- oh, in a gentlemanly way, of course -- bribe himself onto the board and then do as much damage as he can. But, by Godfrey, it won't work! We're keeping a solid front against him..." His eyes focused. "I don't believe I know you, sir. I'm Wilcox." "Delighted. Mundin. Attorney." "Oh -- proxies, eh? Whom do you represent? Most of the chaps seem to be here." "Excuse me, Mr. Wilcox." Mundin followed Bliss Hubble, who had thrown himself into a chair after another rebuff. He handed him the power of attorney from Don Lavin that Ryan had prepared, "Hey? What's this?" "I suggest you read it," Mundin said. There was a patter of applause as half a dozen men came in. One of them -- Arnold -- said, "Good afternoon, gentlemen. Let us all be seated and proceed." Mundin sat beside Hubble, who was reading mechanically. One of the new arrivals began to drone out the minutes of the last meeting. Nobody was paying a great deal of atttention. Hubble finished reading, handed the document back to Mundin and asked with an amused smile, "Just what am I supposed to do about it?" Mundin said sharply, "Looks foolish, doesn't it?" Disconcerted, Hubble said, "I didn't say that. And -- well, there have been rumors. Rumors to which you might have just as much access as I." Mundin looked knowing. "We're not going to be greedy, Mr. Hubble," he said, wondering what he was talking about. "Assuming that I'm not a swindler and that isn't forged, how would you like to be on the board?" "Very much," Hubble stated. "We can put you there. Our twenty-five per cent voting stock plus your -- ?" "It's a matter of record. Five and a half per cent. I vote the family holdings." Mundin did sums in his head. Thirty and a half per cent. If they could take Hubble into camp and swing twenty per cent more... He faced front. Let Hubble think it over for a while. The minutes were accepted as read. One of the new arrivals grinned. "Now, gentlemen, to business. To begin with, election of a board member to replace Mr. Fennelly."  Harry S. Wilcox, the gentleman with the throbbing vein in his temple. Somebody else proposed a Mr. Benyon and nominations were closed. Secretaries moved among the stockholders with ballots, which they filled out after an inspection -- brief and with deferential smiles -- of the stockholders' proxies and share certificates. Mundin blandly presented his one share to a secretary's horrified gaze. The man gave him his ballot as if he were passing alms to a leper. Wilcox won and there was a social round of applause and back-patting. From certain broad smiles, Mundin suspected the result of the balloting was as fixed as the morrow's sunrise. He grinned at Hubble, who didn't seem to think it was at all funny. "Coming in with us?" Mundin asked. Hubble scowled. The chairman passed on to the matter of compensation of officers. Mundin gathered, from the reading of a long, involved statement of capital gains and tax depreciations, that the corporation officers didn't think they were making anywhere near enough money. During the reading, stockholders chattered sociably. Mundin began to wonder why they had bothered to come, for the raise was lackadaisically approved by a unanimous voice vote. At the next order of business, he found out why. It was called. "Diversification of Raw Material Sources, with Special Reference to Alumina and Silicates." Mundin couldn't make head or tail of the dull technicalities, but he noticed that the sociable conversations tapered to a halt. One group, not more than four or five men, were putting their heads together with much figuring on the backs of envelopes and checking of records. Secretaries were running in and out with books and sheaves of documents as the reading droned on. At last, the chairman said genially, "Well, gentlemen, the question. Shall we save time by asking for a unanimous vote of 'Aye'?" A thin, gray old man rose and said, "I call for a record vote." He looked at an elaborately unconcerned man in the first row and quavered menacingly, "And let me say to you gentleman that I'm going to keep a copy of the record. And I will be guided by it in reaching future decisions, particularly during the last week of the coming quarter. I trust I have made myself entirely clear." The chairman harrumphed and the record vote was taken. proposition was defeated by a narrow margin, in an atmosphere of restrained passions. Mundin sensed dimly that there had just been a pitched battle -- a corporate Gettysburg, a trial of strength between two mighty the least part of the unseen stakes. Hubble, beside him, was growing restless. Mundin leaned over and whispered, "You could hold the balance of power in a matter like that if you came in with us." "I know. Let me see that paper again." Mundin knew he had him. The meeting continued. There were three other clashes -- Union Representation, Petition for Lowered Haulage Rates, and Committee to Study Design Improvements. Each time the struggle, while Hubble read the spots off the power of attorney and fished for information. Mundin was noncommittal. "Yes, they're clients of mine. No, sorry, can't tell you just where Mr. Lavin is staying at present. I'm afraid. Yes, there is a sister. Mr. Arnold up there can probably give you more information than I." "Arnod is in it?" "Up to his eye-teeth. He'll probably attempt before long to -- wait, here it comes now!" One of the colorless secretaries was mumbling, "Proposal to rectify an anomalous distribution of voting stock. Proposal is to empower board to acquire -- at par -- dormant stock, dormant to mean stock unvoted since issue, provided time in question be not less than ten years, stock to be deposited in company treasury." It sailed through the air of the room without raising a ripple. Mundin whispered, "Ask him how much stock is involved. That'll be your answer." Hubble hesitated, then firmly rose, looking grim, and put the question. Arnold smiled. 'T'm afraid we haven't the exact figures. It's more of a contingency measure, Mr. Hubble." Hubble said, 'Td be satisfied with an estimate, Mr. Arnold." "No doubt. But as I said, we haven't got the figures. Now to proceed -- " Hubble began to look mulish. "Is the amount by any chance twenty-five per cent?" Throughout the room, people sat up and conversations broke off short. ble snapped, "I repeat my question. Is or is not the amount of stock you are asking us to empower you to buy and deposit in the company treasury, under your control, twenty-five per cent?" As it soaked in, there was a mild uproar. Hubble ignored it. "Is it or is it not, Mr. Arnold? A very simple question, I should think! And if the answer is 'no,' I shall ask to sec records!" Arnold grimaced. "Please, gentlemen! Please, Mr. Hubble! I can hardly hear myself think. Mr. Hubble, since you have objections to the proposal, we'll withdraw it. I presume I have the consent of all present for this agenda change. To pass on -- " "You do not have my consent to this agenda change, Mr. Arnold. I am still requesting information on the proposal." Somebody slid into a seat beside Mundin. a big, handsome well-preserved old man. "I'm Harry Coett. What's this all about? I see you talking to Bliss and then all hell breaks loose. Say, weren't you with Green, Charlesworth? No? Thought I knew you. Well, what's up? Arnold's scared. You've got something. What is it?" Mundin smugly asked, "What's in it for me?" The man started. "Hell, boy, I'm Harry Coett. Where are you from, anyway?" A third party joined them as the debate between Hubble and the chairman raged and spread, "You seem to have put Hubble onto something, young man. I like spirit. Somebody told me you were an attorney and it happens there's a vacancy in our law staff. Quite a vacancy. I'm Roadways, you know. George Nelson's the name." Coett snapped, "I was here first, George!" By then, the floor debate had escaped from Hubble's hands. Scenting blood or gold, half the stockholders present were fighting for the chance to question Arnold, who was sweating and grimly managing not to say a thing -- at great length. The other half of the stockholders seemed to be clawing their way into the group around Mundin, the odd young man who seemed to know things. Mundin, smiling politely and meeting no one's eye, heard the whispers and conjectures: " -- an attorney from the S.E.C., I guess, going to throw the book at old Arnold for -- " " -- into camp, but how do you know it isn't Green, Charlesworth or -- " "No, you ass! Proxies! They've been quietly -- " Mundin said politely, "Excuse me, gentlemen," and stood up. "Mr. Chairman," he called. Arnold pointedly avoided his eye and recognized somebody else -- who was at once the goal of a ten-yard dash by Harry Coett. Coett whispered urgently to the man, who said, "I yield to Mr. Mundin." "Thank you," said Mundin. "Perhaps I can clarify this confused situation. However, Mr. Arnold, first I should like to talk to one of my principals -- the young lady." "Principals?" Arnold asked distractedly. A secretary murmured something to him. "Oh. Miss Lav -- oh, certainly. She'll -- uh -- be free to talk to you immediately after the meeting is concluded. Is that satisfactory, Mr. Urmurm?" "Quite satisfactory." And that was that. It was far more than he had dared hope for. Not only had he thrown an egg into the corporate electric fan, so that half the stockholders in G-M-L were swarming around him, but Arnold was returning Norma as his price for not "clarifying the situation." Arnold's raid had blown up in his face. Far less than getting the Lavin stock to vote, he would be lucky to hold his domination of the board. Mundin sat down, comfortably -- and silently -- acknowledging leading questions and offers from the Titans with polite nothings. The stockholders' rebellion began to peter out. With Mundin quieted, angry and uncertain men perceived that some sort of deal had been made under their noses. They didn't like it. They had done it themselves too often to enjoy feeling the spur on their own flesh. One of them called for unseating Arnold, but majority opinion was -- wait until this Mundin tells what he knows. The rest of the meeting went at breakneck speed. Hubble spent much of it insisting. "Damn it, Mundin, you made me the first offer! The hell with these vultures. They'll use you and throw you away. I'm the only heavy stockholder in the company with an open mind and -- " "Nonsense!" Harry Coett said decisively. "I don't know what you're up to, Mundin, but whatever it is, it'll need financing. And I'm Harry Coett. Let me handle -- " George Nelson said, "Tell him what you did to old Crowther, why don't you? He needed financing, too." what Harry Coett did to old Crowther. As the meeting was adjourned, he buttonholed Arnold. who gave him a wan smile. "Come and see me, Mr. Mundin. I'm sure we can get together. Don't we know each other? Weren't you with Green, Charlesworth?" "The girl. Arnold." Mundin demanded. "Miss Lavin is waiting for you in the reception room." Trailing tycoons, Mundin raced outside. Norma Lavin was there, pale and angry. "Hello, Mundin," she said, not so crisply. "You took your time about it." And then she was weeping on his chest. "I didn't sign it. I knew Don wasn't dead. I didn't sign. I -- " "Shut up, superwoman," Mundin snapped. "Stop giving things away to the eavesdroppers. Your every word is golden." But he found that he was also shaking -- from the reaction to the hours of strain. And unexpectedly but emphatically, from -- Norma. He got a grip on himself as Coett, behind him, mused, "So this is the young lady Arnold horse-traded you, eh? Your principal. Counselor?" "Maybe," Mundin evaded. "Oh, come off it, Mundin," Coett said shrewdly. He turned to Norma. "My dear, can I drop you any place? You, too, of course. Counselor." "Listen. Mundin," Nelson urged. "Get him to tell you about old Crowther." "Damn it!" raged Hubble. "If you vultures will step aside..." Mundin said. "I'll lay it on the line, gentlemen. Miss Lavin and I have to stop in the waiting room to pick up an -- uh -- a young lady. In five minutes, we will be at the front entrance. We'll go along with all three of you or with any two of you. You fight it out among yourselves." He swept Norma out to the visitors room. Lana was perched on the receptionist's desk, looking hostile -- but not as hostile as the receptionist. Mundin asked her, "What happened to Bligh?" "Outside," Lana replied. "He said he'd already had a bellyfull of Field Days, whatever he meant by that. This your girl?" "Yes," said Mundin. "This is my girl." The three of them collared Norvie Bligh, sitting in the Sun outside, and started toward the ranks of parked cars and halftracks. They were met by an amicable committee of three. "All settled, Mundin," Hubble said happily. "Coett and Nelson are coming with us." "Good. Where do we talk?" Hubble said joyously, "Oh, my place. You'll like it -- simple, quiet, but comfortable." They made quite a procession -- two cars and a halftrack. They didn't stop for anything, neither the Itty-Bitty checkpoint nor the customs shed. In well under five minutes, they were on the open road for Hubble's place.  din's shoulder. "I want to go home," she told him. Mundin said peevishly, "Sure, sure." Norma, exhausted, had fallen asleep on his arm and its circulation had been stopped for the past ten miles. The girl was a solid weight -- but, he was thinking, a curiously pleasant one. "I mean now," Lana insisted, "I got a duty to the Wabbits." "I'd kind of like to go, too," Norvie Bligh chimed in. "If you won't be needing me, I mean." Mundin eased Norma's head off his arm. She stirred, mumbled, "Arglebargle damn men think they're..." and was asleep again. Mundin flexed his arm, considering. Lana and Bligh had fulfilled heir bargains. There wasn't likely to be much need for bodyguards for the next little while -- and not too much that Lana, for instance, could do, cut off from her gangs. He said, "All right. I'll have the driver let you off at Old Yonkers and you can get a bus or something." At Old Yonkers, their car stopped at an Inter-City depot. The car behind skidded to a stop beside them. Hubble, Nelson and Coett -- none of whom had trusted any of the others alone with Mundin and Norma for the ride -- peered out anxiously. "Anything wrong?" Hubble yelled from a window. Mundin shook his head and let Lana and Norvic out. Twenty minutes later, the motor caravan reached Hubble's house. Quiet and comfortable it was -- simple it was not. It was a Charles Addams monster in a fabulous private park in Westchester. They rolled up its driveway and parked next to what apfeared to be a # RollsRoyce limousine. Bliss Hobble was already at the door of the car, holding it open for them. "My wife." he explained, indicating the limousine. "She makes a fetish of period decoration. Today, I see, it's Hoover -- all last week, it was neo-RomanCan't say I care for it, but one has one's obligations." "And one has one's wife," said Norma Lavin. who appeared to be back to normal acid self. "Oh. it's quite nice," Mundin said diplomatically. "So stately." M rs. Hubble greeted them with dn unbelieving look. She turned to her husband with an explain-fhis-if-you-can air. Being a thin brunette with cheekbones, she did it very well. Hubble said hastily, "My dear, may I present Miss Lavin..." "Just 'Lavin,' please," Norma said coldly. "Yes, of course. Lavin. and Mr. Mundin. You know Harry and George. Mr. Mundin has been good enough to compliment the way you've fixed up the house, dear." "Indeed," said Mrs. Hubble, ice forming on her gaze. "Thank Mr. Mundin and explain to him that his taste matches that of the housekeeper. Suggest to Mr. Mundin that he might consider employing the housekeeper, who has been out of a job since I woke up this morning and found she had set the house for this unsightly, trashy piece of construction. Inform Mr, Mundin that when the housekeeper left -- rapidly, I might say -- she took off with all of the key settings, and I have been condemned to roam through these revolting rooms until my husband chose to come home with his keys so that I might change them to something resembling a human habitation." Hubble stiffened, thrust a hand in a pocket, brought out a set of keys. His wife took them from him, turned and swept off through the vast, gaudy rooms. "Sensitive," Hubble muttered to his guests. Coett said eagerly, "We got a couple of things straight on the way over, Mundin. Now..." "Harry, I insist!" Hubble said severely. "Tm the host. Let's not rush things until we've had dinner." He led the way through a majestic corridor, keeping carefully to the middle. He said sharply, "Watch it! Stand back!" The others, obeying his gesture, stood clear of the walls, which were in curious, shimmering motion. "My wife," Hubble explained with a glassy smile. "You'd think a regular bubble-house wall would be enough. No, nothing will do but full three-D illusion throughout. The expense! The stumbling home in the dark! The waking up in the middle of the night because the four-poster is changing into a Hollywood bed! She's a light sleeper, you see..." The walls had firmed up now. The old furniture was fully retracted and gone, new pieces had formed to replace them. Mrs. Hubble's present preference appeared to be Early Wardroom -- a satisfactory enough style for the flying bridge of a heavy cruiser, but not really Mundin's idea of how to decorate a home. He pointedly did not comment on the steel-gray walls. The dinner seemed like a very good notion to Mundin. The tadjin ahmar he had eaten at Hussein's seemed a very long way in the past. ing sharp dress blues, served them. His presence seemed to make Hubble jumpy. The table talk was not sparkling. "Am I to understand," Hubble probed gently, "that Miss Lavin -- that Lavin. I mean to say -- was actually abducted by Mr. Arnold?" "Doubt it very much," said Norma, chewing. "He probably just looked unhappy and said, 'Dear me, I wish something could be done about that outstanding stock.' Some foot-kisser standing by set the wheels in motion. Arnold's hands would be clean. Not his fault if people insist on exceeding their authority." She took another forkful of wild rice. "They had me for about a week. God almighty, what confusion! I could go and I couldn't go. I was free to leave any time I cared to, but temporarily they thought it would be better if they kept the door locked. Sign your residuary legatee's share of the stock to us and we don't want the stock, of course. It has only a certain small nuisance value. Now, lady, are you going to be reasonable or do we have to get tough? My dear girl, we wouldn't dream of harming you!" She scowled. "Arnold came to see me once. He kept pretending  was trying to sell to him. I don't know, maybe that's what somebody told him. All I know is, I feel as if somebody hit me over the head with a lighthouse." The shambling butler asked. "Are you at home to Mr. Arnold, sir?" Hubble said delightedly, "No! You hear that, Coett?" Nelson cut in, "Hold it a minute. Bliss. Are you sure you're doing the right thing? Maybe if we all get together, we could -- " he looked quickly at Mundin -- "that is, perhaps a of us could freeze out the Toledo bunch." Coett said, "Tell him to go to hell. Tell the butler to tell him, so we can hear you do it. First we settle things among ourselves -- then we figure who else we have to cut in. My guess is nobody." "Tell him," Hubble said gleefully to the butler. As the man shambled off, he turned to Nelson. "Harry's right, George. Figure it out. You've got eleven per cent under your thumb, counting the voting trust. I've got five and a half, solid. Harry has three of his own and he influences -- how many, Harry?" "Nine," Coett said shortly. "Heavy influence." "You see? That's plenty, with these people's twenty-five per cent." Mundin kicked Norma's foot under the table, just as she was opening her mouth to ask how they had located the stock. He said rapidly, "Don't you think we should save this until dinner's over?" Hubble cast an eye around the table. "Why. dinner's over now," he said mildly. "Let's have our coffee in the library -- it'll be a little more comfortable." trance to the library and did something with a switchbox before permitting the others to enter. "Have my own controls here," he said proudly. "Wife has most of the house -- hah-hah -- she can't begrudge me one little den of my own. Let's see if we can't get something more cheerful." The "library" -- there was nothing resembling a book or microfilm in sight -- shimmered and flowed, and turned into something that looked like a restoration of a #th Century London gentlemen's club. Mundin tested one of the wingback chairs and found it good. Norma was still looking at him suspiciously -- but she was silent. He said cheerily, "Now, gentlemen, to work." "Right," said Harry Coett. "Before we get too deep, I want to know how we stand on one thing. I'm sure it's just one of those crazy things that get started. but I heard somebody say something at the meeting. They said you were from Green, Charlesworth. Just for the record, are you?" Green, Charlesworth. Ryan had mentioned them, Mundin recalled. They seemed to be something to worry about. Mundin said definitely, "We are not from Green, Charlesworth. Miss Lavin and her brother are the direct heirs of one of the founders of G-M-L. I -- uh -- happen to have a small amount of stock myself, as well as being their attorney." Coett nodded briskly. "Okay. Then it's a plain and simple raid and we've got the strength to do it. I take it we are all agreed, then, that the first step is to throw the corporation into bankruptcy?" Mundin gaped. "What?" "Thought you were no expert," Coett sajd amiably. "What did you expect. Mundin?" "Why," Mundin floundered, "there's your stock and our stock and -- well, majority rules, doesn't it?" He stopped. They all were enjoying a polite laugh. Coett said. "Do you seriously think we could vote our stock outright under the existing rules?" "I don't know," Mundin said honestly. "You can't. The proxies won't stand for it. A raid, yes, but handled right." Norma Lavin commented, "I suppose he's right, Mundin. They've stopped us so far, one way and another. The only real change is that now these three ghouls know we're alive and think they can easily take us to the cleaners." "Please!" protested Hubble and Nelson. Coett, grinning, assured her, "You are absolutely correct. For the first time, I begin to doubt that we can do it." Mundin interrupted, "Why bankruptcy?" They stared at him. Finally, Hubble asked, "How would you do it, Mr. Mundin?" J-"-corporation lawyer, gentlemen -- I leave that aspect of it to my colleague, Mr, Ryan, who is a member of the Big Bar. But it seems to me that our first step is, obviously, to form a stockholders' committee and request an accounting from the present board. We can back it up, if you think it necessary, with a notification to the S.E.C. I know that Arnold's group will stall and attempt to compromise, probably offer us some kind of board representation, something far less than our holdings entitle us to. But that's simple enough to handle. We simply protest and file suit in -- " "Risky," Nelson objected. Coett said, "That won't get us to first base. I remember when the Memphis crowd tried -- " "The who?" Mundin interrupted. "Arnold's group. They took G-M-L away from the Toledo bunch eighteen years ago through due process, the way you're talking about. But it took six years to do it -- and if the Toledo bunch hadn't been caught short in Rails, Memphis never would have made it. And Toledo is still strong -- you saw how Arnold had to putWilcox on the board to please them." Mundin said desperately, "Can't we at least try?" "Waste of time! We have before us an immense mass of capital. It has inertia, Mundin -- inertia. You can't move it with a feather -- you need dynamite. It's going to take time and brains to budge it. I'll tell you how." And he did. Mundin listened in growing bewilderment and something that came close to horror. Bankruptcy! How did you put a corporation worth ently solvent, unbelievably prosperous, into bankruptcy? He didn't like the answers when he heard them. But, he told himself, you can't make an omelette the year's best tales of science-fiction and other fantasy! Collected in one exciting volume Portals of T omorrow Sentf for if foiiay Only # (postpaid) Dept. G-# # Madlion Avo. How York t#, N. Y. T he cream of the # crop includes stories by Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Mildred Clingerman, John Langdon, Mack Reynolds, Robert Sheckley, T. L. Sherred, and many more. Sixteen superb stories make a sparkling collection stuffed with all the weird and wonderful things fantasy connoisseurs look for. A Martian ship that landed on earth on Hallowe'en... a man who invented a solid vacuum... a talented gent who could counterfeit anything simply by thinking of it... and many more delightfully different people are waiting for you between the covers of this big, irresistible book. without breaking a few golden eggs. Coett, enjoying himself, was planning in broad, bright strokes. "Bliss, you get your chaps on the petition for composition and arrangement. We'll spring that one ourselves, before they think of it. and we'll want it ready. Then..." Mundin, grimly taking notes, stuck through it to the end. But he wasn't enjoying the practice of corporate law nearly as much as he had always thought he would. He wished urgently for the presence of old Ryan. And a nice full box of opium pills. TT was nearly midnight. Mundin had never felt so drained in his life. Even Norma Lavin slumped in her chair. Coett, Hubble and Nelson were brighteyed and eager, skilled technicians doing the work they best knew how to do. But the work was done. Mundin, yawning, dragged himself to his feet. He said tiredly, "So the first thing for me to do is set up offices, eh?" Harry Coett sighed. "Not quite the first thing, Mundin." "What then?" "Call it a matter of personal satisfaction. We've all heard rumors about young Lavin. I don't say they're true. I don't know if they are or not. But if they're true, we don't get off the ground." Mundin blazed, "See here, Coett -- " "Hold on. We've all had a look at that paper of yours. It's a power of attorney, all right, and I've no doubt that it's valid. But it isn't a proxy, Mundin. It doesn't mention G-M-L stock in it anywhere, except in the affidavit at the end -- and Don Lavin didn't sign that himself." "What do you want?" Coett said, "Let me tell a fantastic story. Mind you, I don't say it's true. But it's interesting. There are two young people, a brother and sister, for instance. One of them has some stock, but can't use it. The other is -- temporarily out of circulation. Let's suppose that a smart young lawyer gets hold of them. First thing he does, he walks in on a meeting and lets it be known that the stock exists. With that as a wedge, he pries the girl loose from wherever she is. "With the girl, he sucks in three good, dumb Joes -- like Hubble, Nelson and me, for instance. With the dumb Joes in the palm of his hand, he squeezes recognition of the stock out of, for instance, Arnold. That's pretty good work -- he has the girl and he has the stock. The question is, what do the dumb Joes have then?" God! thought Mundin. And I never believed in mind-reading! He said, "Am I supposed to take this fantasy seriously?" "Of course not. Just for the sake of the record, before we get too far involved in any of this, let's see the stock. Will tomorrow morning be time enough?" "Tomorrow morning will be fine." Mundin said hollowly. "Come, Norma." Hubble's chauffeur -- now driving what appeared to be an admiral's staff car -- convoyed them home. The house, from outside, had become a gray stone and ivy barracks. Mundin watched it dwindle behind them. Since he was pretty sure the chauffeur was under orders to hear anything they said, they didn't talk. So it wasn't until they were back in Belly Rave that Norma asked bitterly. "Well, Mundin? Is tomorrow morning time enough to locate the stock?" Current ISew Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines 'available. New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday: #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednecday Evenings until #:# P.M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) draws its concsoled weapons and blasts its way to a furious climax. 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Kornbluth # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation Robert Guinn, president. All right, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by tha Guinn Co... Inc. Title Rag. U.S. Paf. Off. What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess? to mind power, sound thinking and cause and effect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written about the wise men of old. A popular fallacy has it that their secrets of personal power and successful living were lost to the world. Knowledge of natures laws, accumulated through the ages, is never lost. At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than ## of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actiorfs are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of self-understanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundredsof leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated bv the initials Order are not sold, for it is not a commercial organizari r. nor is it a religious sect. It is a n uprofit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not for General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search ot the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of the archives of This booklet is not intended For general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that vou write for your copy to Scribe H.K.M. San Jose California TF you've read enough science fiction, a plot instantly comes to mind at the mention of Homo superior : There is a tiny race of mutants among us. They are in danger because we lesser creatures, envious or fearful of their vast intelligence, will gang up and kill them off. So the mutants sneak away and hole up in the more inaccessible parts of this world or some other, waiting to gain the numerical and technological power to defend themselves from us -- even (or sometimes especially) over our dead bodies. For one reason or another, they almost always lose out. This, as much as I enjoyed some of the better superman stories, always struck me as very peccable logic. Why should we. members of a brutish race, feel a sense of tragedy when they are destroyed? The fact that we do, even when it's only fictional extermination, seems to me to make the notion of a monolithic racial hostility preposterous. If Homo superior can be knocked off so readily, it's not a fraction as smart as perfectly ordinary people who slip under the Iron Curtain, or criminals who manage to break out of prison and escape police cordons. Considering the dialogue of these superhumans, as reported by various authors, this view is not at all unlikely. A more earbending pack of generalityspouters would be intolerable to imagine. They all sound like political commentators, which raises a horrifying thought -- do people like this actually belong to the indomitably dull coming race? If so, I retroactively cancel my sympathy for the victims of what I can only call justifiable self-defense. My own opinion -- which won't influence the stories I buy, of course -- is that Homo superior makes sense only to those with literary tunnel vision. Look: Evolution always tends toward specialization. Human civilization is an actual, functioning ecology, with the difference that it is an interdependence within a species instead of among many. The evolution of mankind in this civilization-ecology is in the direction of specialization -- and the type known as Homo superor is only another specialization. I know that's a red-flag statement because it has already gotten meinto a number of argumerits, but let me give you the steps of my reasoning before you write a "Dear sir, you cur" letter to me. A natural ecology must contain many specializations. In a successful ecology, no one specialization is more important than the others. The human equivalent of natural specializations is aptitude. The concept of Homo superior is based on the groundless belief that intelligence is the criterion. In a successful civilizationecology, high intelligence is just one specialization or aptitude among many. If I were an extremist, I would say that the real races of mankind are the aptitude groups. There may be justification for such a statement, but I'll leave that for the experts to decide. All I can legitimately note is that there is a sharp distinction among the creative types, the abstract reasoners, the mechanically inclined, the physical doers, those who are at home with repetitive jobs on assembly lines and such, teaching, religious or other dedication, selling, outdoor workers, and so forth. Homo superior may be jack of all trades, like da Vinci -- but you can't build a complete ecology on jacks of all trades. It wouldn't function if every man could design, build, sell, entertain, instruct and tote and haul, and did so. It wouldn't be a civilization; it would be chaos. So my view is that Homo superior, as described in science fiction, is among us -- but only as another specialization. His contribution is significant. It is ecologically no more significant, however, than the others. As for the notion that he is a mutant and therefore must hide out from us, I think the reasoning is visibly distorted. If any mutant had to do so, it would be some species other than our own. Rats, for instance. They are immensely intelligent, have a genuine society, including the division of labor according to aptitude... and can gain access to our labs and archives. Also, if they mutated, we would intensify our fight against them perhaps to the point of dropping international antagonisms. Certainly they would be an even greater threat than fission warfare, for mutated rats could rob us into starvation, spread disease purposefully and combat us right in our own homes. I wouldn't be surprised if they could build spaceships and flee to other planets. Maybe they have! party of the two parts SX'-w. note: this is to be transY dear Hoy: I am deeply sorry to trouble you again, but, Hoy, am I in a jam! Once more, it's not something that I did wrong, but something I didn't do right -- what the Old One is sure to wheeze is "a patent dereliction of obvious duty." And since I'm positive he'll be just as confused as I, once the prisoners I'm sending on by slow lighttransport arrive (when he reads the official report that I drew up and am transmitting with them, I can see him dropping an even dozen of his jaws), I can only hope that this advance message will give you enough time to consult the best legal minds in Vegan Headquarters and get some sort of solution worked out. If there's any kind of solution available by the time he reads my report, the Old One won't be nearly as angry at my dumping the problem on his lap. But I have an uneasy, persistent fear that Headquarters is going to get as snarled up in this one as my own office. If it does, the Old One is likely to remember what happened in Outlying Patrol Office # the last time -- and then, Hoy, you will be short one spore cousin. It's a dirty business all around, a real dirty business. I use the phrase advisedly. In the sense of obscene, if you follow me. A S you've no doubt suspected by now, most of the trouble has to do with that damp and irritating third planet of Sol, the one that many of its inhabitants call Earth. Those damned cluttering bipeds cause me more sleeplessness than any other species in my sector. Sufficiently advanced technologically to be almost at Stage # -- self-developed interplanetary travel -- they are still centuries away from the usually concurrent Stage #A -- friendly contact by the galactic civilization. They are, therefore, still in Secretly Supervised Status, which means that I have to maintain a staff of about two hundred agents on their planet, all encased in clumsy and uncomfortable protoplasmic disguises, to prevent them from blowing their silly selves up before the arrival of their spiritual millennium. On top of everything, their solar system only has nine planets, which means that my permanent headquarters office can't get any farther away from Sol than the planet they call Pluto, a world whose winters are bearable, but whose summers are unspeakably hot. I tell you, Hoy, the life of a stellar sergeant isn't all gloor and skubbets, no matter what Rear Echelon says. In all honesty, though, I should admit that the difficulty did not Ever since their unexpected and uncalled-for development of nuclear fission, which, as you know, cost me a promotion, I've doubled the number of undercover operatives on the planet and given them stern warning to report the slightest technological spurt immediately. I doubt that these humans could invent so much as an elementary timemachine now, without my knowing of it well in advance. No, this time it all started on Rugh VI, the world known to those who live on it as Gtet. If you consult your atlas, Hoy, you'll find Rugh is a fair-sized yellow dwarf star on the outskirts of the Galaxy, and Gtet an extremely insignificant planet which has only recently achieved the status of Stage # -- primary interstellar citizenship. The Gtetans are a modified ameboid race who manufacture a fair brand of ashkebac, which they export to their neighbors on highly individualistic people and still experience many frictions living in a centralized society. Despite several centuries of advanced civilization, most Gtetans look upon the Law as a delightful problem in circumvention rather than as a way of life. An ideal combination with my bipeds of Earth, eh? TT seems that a certain L'payr was one of the worst troublemakers on Gtet. He had committed almost every crime and broken almost every law. On a planet where fully one-fourth of the population is regularly undergoing penal rehabilitation, L'payr was still considered something quite special. A current Gtetan saying, I understand, puts it, "You're like L'payr, fellow -- you don't know when to stop!" Nonetheless, L'payr had reached the point where it was highly important that he did stop. He had been arrested and convicted for a total of # felonies, just one short of the # felonies which, on Gtet, make one a habitual criminal and, therefore, subject to life imprisonment. He made a valiant effort to retire from public life and devote himself to contemplation and good works, but it was too late. Almost against his will, as he insisted to me under examination in my office, he found his mind turning to foul deeds left undone, illegalities as yet unperpetrated. And so one day, quite casually -- hardly noticing, as it were -- he committed another major crime. But this one was so ineffably ugly, involving an offense against the moral code as well as civil legislation, that the entire community turned against L'payr. He was caught selling pornography to juvenile Gtetans. The indulgence that a celebrity may enjoy turned to wrath and utter contempt. Even the Gtetan Protective Association of Two Thousand Time Losers refused to raise funds for his bail. As his trial approached, it became obvious to L'payr that he was in for it. His only hope lay in flight. He pulled the most spectacular coup of his career -- he broke out of the hermetically sealed vault in which he was being guarded around the clock (how he did this, he consistently refused to tell me up to the time of his lamented demise or whatever you want to call it) and escaped to the spaceport near the prison. There, he managed to steal aboard the pride of the Gtetan merchant fleet, a newly developed interstellar ship equipped with two-throttle hyperspace drive. This ship was empty, waiting for a crew to take it out on its maiden run. Somehow, in the few hours at his disposal before his escape was known, L'payr figured out the controls of the craft and managed to lift it off Gtet and into hyperspace. He had no idea at this time that, since the ship was an experimental model, it was equipped with a transmitting device that kept the spaceport informed of its location. Thus, though they lacked the facilities to pursue him, the Gtetan police always knew exactly where he was. A few hundred ameboid vigilantes did start after him in old-fashioned, normal-drive ships, but after a month or so of long and fatiguing inter. stellar travel at onehundredth his speed, they gave up and returned home. IT I OR his hideout, L'payr wanted a primitive and unimportant corner of the Galaxy. The region around Sol was ideal. He materialized out of hyperspace about halfway between the third and fourth planets. But he did it very clumsily (after all, Hoy, the best minds of his race are just beginning to understand the twothrottle drive) and lost all of his fuel in the process. He barely managed to reach Earth and come down. The landing was effected at night and with all drives closed, so that no one on the planet saw it. Because living conditions on Earth are so different from Gtet, L'payr knew that his mobility would be very limited. His one hope was to get help from the inhabitants. He had to pick a spot where possible contacts would be at maximum and yet accidental discovery of his ship would be at minimum. He chose an empty lot in the suburbs of Chicago and quickly dug his ship in. Meanwhile, the Gtetan police communicated with me as the local commanding officer of the Galactic Patrol. They told me where L'payr was hidden and demanded extradition. I pointed out that, as yet, I lacked jurisdiction, since no crime of an interstellar nature had been committed. The stealing of the ship had been done on his home planet -- it had not occurred in deep space. If, however, he broke any galactic law while he was on Earth, committed any breach of the peace, no matter how slight... "How about that?" the Gtetan police asked me over the interstellar radio. "Earth is on Secretly Supervised Status, as we understand it. It is illegal to expose it to superior civilizations. Isn't L'payr landing there in a twothrottle hyperspacedrive ship enough of a misdemeanor to entitle you to pick him up?" "Not by itself," I replied. "The ship would have to be seen and understood for what it was by a resident of the planet. From what we here can tell, no such observation was made. And so long as he stays in hiding, doesn't tell any human about us and refrains from adding to the technological momentum of Earth, L'payr's galactic citizenship has to be respected. I have no legal basis for an arrest." Well, the Gtetans grumbled about what were they paying the star tax for, anyway, but they saw my point. They warned me, though, about L'payr -- sooner or later his criminal impulses would assert themselves. He was in an impossible position, they insisted. In order to get the fuel necessary to leave Earth before his supplies ran out, he'd have to commit some felony or other -- and as soon as he did so and was arrested, they wanted their extradition request honored. "The filthy, evil-minded old pervert," I heard the police chief mutter as he clicked off. I don't have to tell you how tive ameboid criminal at large on a planet as volatile culturally as Earth! I notified all our agents in North America to be on the alert and settled back to wait it out with prayerfully knotted tentacles. of this conversation over his own ship's receiver. Naturally, the first thing he did was to remove the directional device which had enabled the Gtetan police to locate him. Then, as soon as it was dark again, he managed, with what must have been enormous difficulty, to transport himself and his little ship to another area of the city. He did this, too, without being observed. He made his base in a slum tenement neighborhood that had been condemned to make way for a new housing project and therefore was practically untenanted. Then he settled back to consider his prdblem. Because, Hoy, he had a problem. He didn't want to get in any trouble with the Patrol, but if he didn't get his pseudopods on a substantial amount of fuel very soon, he'd be a dead ameboid. Not only did he need the fuel to get off Earth, but the converters -- which, on this rather primitive Gtetan vessel, changed waste matter back into usable air and food -- would be stopping very soon if they weren't stoked up, too. His time was limited, his resources almost non-existent. The spacesuits with which the ship was furnished, while cleverly enough constructed and able to satisfy the peculiar requirements of an entity of constantly fluctuating format, had not been designed for so primitive a planet as Earth. They would not operate too effectively for long periods away from the ship. He knew that my OP office had been apprised of his landing and that we were just waiting for some infraction of even the most obscure minor law. Then we'd pounce -- and, after the usual diplomatic formalities, he'd be on his way back to Gtet, for a ninethrottle Patrol ship could catch him easily. It was obvious that he couldn't do as he had originally planned -- make a fast raid on some human supply center and collect whatever stuff he needed. His hope was to make a trade. He'd have to find a human with whom he could deal and offer something that, to this particular human in any case, was worth the quantity of fuel L'payr's ship needed to take him to a less policed corner of the Cosmos. But almost everything on the ship was essential to its functioning. And L'payr had to make his trade without (#) giving away the existence and nature of the galactic civilization, or (#) providing the inhabitants of Earth with any technological stimulus. L'payr later said that he thought about the problem until his nucleus was a mass of corrugations. He went over the ship, stem to stern, again and again, but everything a human might consider acceptable was either too useful or too revealing. And then, just as he was about to give up, he found it. The materials he needed were those with which he had committed his last crime! A ccording to Gtetan law, you see, Hoy, all evidence pertaining to a given felony is retained by the accused until the time of his trial. There are very complicated reasons for this, among them the Gtetan juridical concept that every prisoner is known to be guilty until he manages, with the aid of lies, loopconvince a hard-boiled and cynical jury of his peers that they should, in spite of their knowledge to the contrary, declare him innocent. Since the burden of proof rests with the prisoner, the evidence does likewise. And L'payr, examining this evidence, decided that he was in business. What he needed now was a customer. Not only someone who wanted to buy what he had to sell, but a customer who had available the fuel he needed. And in the neighborhood which was now his base of operations, customers of this sort were rare. Being Stage #, the Gtetans are capable of the more primitive forms of telepathy -- only at extremely short ranges, of course, and for relatively brief periods of time. So, aware that my secret agents had already begun to look for him and that, when they found him, his freedom of action would be even more circumscribed, L'payr desperately began to comb through the minds of any terrestrials within three blocks of his hideout. Days went by. He scuttled from mind to mind like an insect looking for a hole in a collector's jar. He was forced to shut the ship's converter down to one-half operation, then to one-third. Since this cut his supply of food correspondingly, he began to hunger. For lack of activity, his contractile vacuole dwindled to the size of a pinpoint. Even his endoplasm lost the turgidity of the healthy ameboid and became dangerously thin and transparent. And then one night, when he had about determined to take his chances and steal the fuel he needed, his thoughts ricocheted off the brain of a passerby, came back unbelievingly, examined further and were ecstatically convinced. A human who not only could supply his needs, but also, and more important, might be in the market for Gtetan pornography ! In other words, Mr. Osborne Blatch. lescent terrestrials insisted throughout all my interrogations that, to the best of his knowledge, no mental force was used upon him. It seems that he lived in a new apartment house on the other side of the torn-down tenement area and customarily walked in a wide arc around the rubble because of the large number of inferior and belligerent human types which infested the district. On this particular night, a teachers' meeting at his high school having detained him, he was late for supper and decided, as he had once or twice before, to take a short cut. He claims that the decision to take a short cut was his own. Osborne Blatch says that he was striding along jauntily, making believe his umbrella was a malacca cane, when he seemed to hear a voice. He says that, even at first hearing, he used the word "seemed" to himself because, while the voice definitely had inflection and tone, it was somehow completely devoid of volume. The voice said, "Hey, bud! C'mere!" He turned around curiously and surveyed the rubble to his right. All that was left of the building that had once been there was the lower half of the front entrance. Since everything else around it was completely flat, he saw no place where a man could be standing. But as he looked, he heard the voice again. It sounded greasily conspiratorial and slightly impatient. "C'mere, bud. C'mere" "What -- er -- what is it, sir?" he asked in a cautiously well-bred way, moving closer and peering in the direction of the voice. The bright street light behind him, he said, improved his courage as did the solid quality of the very heavy old-fashioned umbrella he was carrying. "C'mere. I got somep'n to show ya. C'mon!" Stepping carefully over loose brick and ancient garbage, Mr. Blatch came to a small hollow at one side of the ruined entrance. he seemed at first glance to the human, a small, splashy puddle of purple liquid. I oughtto point out now, Hoy -- and the affidavits I'm sending along will substantiate it -- that at no time did Mr. Blatch recognize the viscous garment for a spacesuit, nor did he ever see the Gtetan ship which L'payr had hidden in the rubble behind him in its completely tenuous hyper spatial state. Though the man, having a good imagination and a resilient mind, immediately realized that the creature before him must be extraterrestrial, he lacked overt technological evidence to this effect, as well as to the nature and existence of our specific galactic civilization. Thus, here at least, there was no punishable violation of Interstellar Statute #, Amendments # through #. "What do you have to show me?" Mr. Blatch asked courteously, staring down at the purple puddle. "And where, may I ask, are you from? Mars? Venus?" "Listen, bud, y'know what's good for ya, y'don't ast such questions. Look, I got somep'n for ya. Hot stuff. Real hot!" longer fearful of having its owner assaulted and robbed by the neighborhood tough it had originally visualized, spun off to a relevant memory, years old, of a trip abroad. There had been that alley in Paris and the ratty little Frenchman in a torn sweater... "What would that be?" he asked. A pause now, while L'payr absorbed new impressions. "Ah-h-h," said the voice from the puddle. "I 'ave somezing to show M'sieu zat M'sieu weel like vairry much. If M'sieu weel come a leetle closair?" M'sieu, we are to understand, came a leetle closair. Then the puddle heaved up in the middle, reaching out a pseudopod that held flat, square objects, and telepathed hoarsely, " 'Ere, M'sieu. Feelthy peekshures." Although taken more than a little aback, Blatch merely raised both eyebrows interrogatively and said, "Ah? Well, well!" He shifted the umbrella to his left hand and, taking the pictures as they were given to him, one at a time, examined each a few steps away from L'payr, where the light of the street lamp was stronger. When all the evidence arrives, you will be able to see for yourself, Hoy, what they were like. Cheap prints, calculated to excite the grossest ameboid passions. The Gtetans, as you may have heard, reproduce by simple asexual fission, but only in the presence of saline solution -- sodium chloride is comparatively rare on their world. The first photograph showed a naked ameba, fat and replete with food vacuoles, splashing lazily and formlessly at the bottom of a metal tank in the completely relaxed state that precedes reproducing. The second was like the first, except that a trickle of salt water had begun down one side of the tank and a few pseudopods had lifted toward it inquiringly. To leave nothing to the imagination, a sketch of the sodium chloride molecule had been superimposed on the upper right corner of the photograph. In the third picture, the Gtetan was ecstatically awash in the saline solution, its body distended to maximum, dozens of pseudopods thrust out, throbbing. Most of the chromatin had become concentrated in chromosomes about the equator of the nucleus. To an ameba, this was easily the most exciting photograph in the collection. The fourth showed the nucleus becoming indented between the two sets of sibling chromosomes -- while, in the fifth, with the divisiqn completed and the two nuclei at opposite ends of the reproducing individual, the entire cytoplasmic body had begun to undergo constriction about its middle. In the sixth, the two resultant Gtetans were emerging with passion-satisfied languor from the tank of salt water. A S a measure of L'payr's depravity, let me pass on to you what the Gtetan police told me. Not only was he peddling the stuff to ameboid minors, but they believed that he had taken the photographs himself and that the model had been his own brother -- or should I say sister? His own one and only sibling, possibly? This case has many, many confusing aspects. Blatch returned the last picture to L'payr and said, "Yes, I am interested in buying the group. How much?" The Gtetan named his price in terms of the requisite compounds available in the chemistry laboratory of the high school where Blatch taught. He explained exactly how he wanted them to be prepared and warned Blatch to tell nobody of L'payr's existence. "Uzzerwise, when M'sieu gets 'ere tomorrow night, ze peekshures weel be gone, I weel be gone -- and M'sieu weel have nozzing to show for his trouble. Comprenez?" Osborne Blatch seems to have had very little trouble in obtaining and preparing the stuff for which L'payr had bargained. He said that, by the standards of his community, it was a minute quantity and extremely inexpensive. Also, as he had scrupulously always done in the past when using school supplies for his own experiments, he reimbursed the laboratory out of his own pocket. But he does admit that the photographs were only a small part of what he hoped to get out of the ameboid. He expected, once a sound business arrangement had been established, to find out from which part of the Solar System the visitor had come, what his world was like and similar matters of understandable interest to a creature whose civilization is in the late phases of Secretly Supervised Status. Once the exchange had been effected, however, L'payr tricked him. The Gtetan told Blatch to return on the next night when, his time being more free, they could discuss the state of the Universe at leisure. And, of course, as soon as the Earthman had left with the photographs, L'payr jammed the fuel into his converters, made the necessary sub-nuclear rearrangements in its atomic structure and, with the hyperspacedrive once more operating under full power, took off like a rilg out of Gowkuldady. As far as we can determine, Blatch received the deception philosophically. After all, he still had the pictures.  formed that L'payr had left Earth in the direction of the Hercules Cluster Ml #, without leaving any discernible ripple in terrestrial law or technology behind him, we all relaxed gratefully. The case was removed from placed in the pending latent effects category. As is usual, I dropped the matter myself and gave full charge of the follow-up to my regent and representative on Earth, Stellar Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh. A tracer beam was put on L'payr's rapidly receding ship and I was free to devote my attention once more to my basic problem -- delaying the development of interplanetary travel until the various human societies had matured to the requisite higher level. Thus, six Earth months later, when the case broke wide open, Pah-Chi-Luh handled it himself and didn't bother me until the complications became overwhelming. I know this doesn't absolve me -- I have ultimate responsibility for everything that transpires in my Outlying Patrol District. But between relatives, Hoy, I am mentioning these facts to show that I was not completely clumsy in the situation and that a little help from you and the rest of the family, when the case reaches the Old One in Galactic Headquarters, would not merely be charity for a one-headed oafish cousin. As a matter of fact, I and most of my office were involved in a very complex problem. A Moslem mystic, living in Saudi Arabia, had attempted to heal the ancient schism that exists in his religion between the Shiite and Sunnite sects, by communing with the departed spirits of Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali, the patron of the first group, and Abu Bekr, the Prophet's father-in-law and founder of the Sunnite dynasty. The object of the mediumistic excursion was to effect some sort of arbitration arrangement in Paradise between the two feuding ghosts that would determine who should rightfully have been Mohammed's successor and the first caliph of Mecca. Nothing is simple on Earth. In the course of this laudable probe of the hereafter, the earnest young mystic accidentally achieved telepathic contact with a Stage # civilization of disembodied intellects on Ganymede, the largest satellite of the planet Jupiter. Well, you can imagine! Tremendous uproar on Ganymede and in Saudi Arabia, pilgrims in both place flocking to see the individuals on either end of the telepathic connection, peculiar and magnificent miracles being wrought daily. A mess! And my office feverishly working overtime to keep the whole affair simple and religious, trying to prevent it from splashing over into awareness of the more rational beings in each community! It's an axiom of Outlying Patrol Offices that nothing will stimulate space travel among backward peoples faster than definite knowledge of the existence of intelligent celestial neighbors. Frankly, if Pah-Chi-Luh had come to me right then, blathering of Gtetan pornography in human high-school textbooks, I'd probably have bitten his heads off. in the course of routine duties as an investigator for a United States Congressional Committee -- his disguised status for the last decade or so, and one which had proved particularly valuable in the various delaying actions we had been surreptitiously fighting on the continent of North America. There was this newly published biology book, written for use in' the secondary schools, which had received extremely favorable comment from outstanding scholars in the universities. Naturally, the committee ordered a copy of the text and suggested that its investigator look through it. Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh turned a few pages and found himself staring at the very pornographic pictures he'd heard about at the briefing session six months before -- published, available to everyone on Earth, and especially to minors! He told me afterward, brokenly, that in that instant all he saw was a brazen repetition of L'payr's ugly crime on his home planet. He blasted out a Galaxy-wide alarm for the Gtetan. L'payr had begun life anew as an ashkebac craftsman on a small, out-of-the-way, mildly civilized world. Living carefully within the law, he had prospered and, at the time of his arrest, had become sufficiently conventional -- and, incidentally, fat -- to think of raising a respectable family. Not much -- just two of him. If things continued to go well, he might consider multiple fission in the future. He was indignant when he was arrested and carried off to the detention cell on Pluto, pending the arrival of an extradition party from Gtet. "By what right do you disturb a peace-loving artisan in the quiet pursuit of his trade?" he challenged. "I demand immediate unconditional release, a full apology and restitution for loss of income as well as the embarrassment caused my person and ego. Your superiors will hear of this! False arrest of a galactic citizen can be a very serious matter!" "No doubt," Stellar Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh retorted, still quite equable, you see. "But the public dissemination of recognized pornography is even more serious. As a crime, we consider it on a level with -- " "What pornography?" l'Y assistant said he stared at L'payr for a long time through the transparent cell wall, marveling at the creature's effrontery. All the same, he began to feel a certain disquiet. He had never before encountered such complete self-assurance in the face of a perfect structure of criminal evidence. "You know very well what pornography. Here -- examine it for yourself. This is only one copy out of # distributed all over the United States of North America for the specific use of human adolescents." He dematerialized the biology text and passed it through the wall. L'payr glanced at the pictures. "Bad reproduction," he commented. "Those humans still have a long way to go in many respects. However, they do display a pleasing technical precocity. But why show this to me? Surely you don't think I have anything to do with it?" Pah-Chi-Luh says the Gtetan seemed intensely puzzled, yet gently patient, as if he were trying to unravel the hysterical gibberings of an idiot child. "Do you deny it?" "What in the Universe is there to deny? Let me see." He turned to the title page. "This seems to be A First Book in Biology by one Osborne Blatch and one Nicodemus P. Smith. You haven't mistaken me for either Blatch or Smith, have you? My name is L'payr, not Osborne L'payr, nor even Nicodemus P. L'payr. Just plain, old, everyday, simple L'payr. No more, no less. I come from Gtet, which is the sixth planet of -- " "I am fully aware of Gtet's astrographic location," Pah-ChiLuh informed him coldly. "Also, that you were on Earth six of their months ago. And that, at the time, you completed a transaction with this Osborne Blatch, whereby you got the fuel you needed to leave the planet, while Blatch obtained the set of pictures that were later used as illustrations in that textbook. Our undercover organization on Earth functions very efficiently, as you can see. We have labeled the book Exhibit A." "An ingenious designation," said the Gtetan admiringly. "Exhibit A! With so much to choose from, you picked the one that sounds just right. My complimerits." He was, you will understand, Hoy, in his element -- he was dealing with a police official on an abstruse legal point. past on a law-despising world had prepared him for this moment. Pah-Chi-Luh's mental orientation, however, had for a long time now been chiefly in the direction of espionage and sub rosa cultural manipulation. He was totally unprepared for the orgy of judicial quibbles that was about to envelop him. In all fairness to him, let me admit that I might not have done any better under those circumstances and neither, for that matter, might you -- nor the Old One himself! was to sell a set of artistic studies to one Osborne Blatch. What he did with it afterward surely does not concern me. If I sell a weapon of approved technological backwardness to an Earthman -- a flint fist-axe, say, or a cauldron for pouring boiling oil upon the stormers of walled cities -- and he uses the weapon to dispatch one of his fellow primitives, am I culpable? Not the way I read the existing statutes of the Galactic Federation, my friend. Now suppose you reimburse me for my time and trouble and put me on a fast ship bound for my place of business?" Around and around they went. Dozens of times, Pah-Chi-Luh, going frantically through the Pluto Headquarters law library, would come up with a nasty little wrinkle of an ordinance, only to have L'payr point out that the latest interpretation of the Supreme Council put him wholly in the clear. I can myself vouch for the fact that the Gtetans seem to enjoy total recall of all judicial history. "But you do admit selling pornography yourself to the Earthman Osborne Blatch?" the stellar corporal bellowed at last. "Pornography, pornography," L'payr mused. "That would be defined as cheaply exciting lewdness, falsely titillating obscenity. Correct?" "Of course!" "Well, Corporal, let me ask you a question. You saw those pictures. Did you find them exciting or titillating?" "Certainly not. But I don't happen to be a Gtetan ameboid." "Neither," L'payr countered quietly, "is Osborne Blatch." I do think Corporal Pah-ChiLuh might have found some sensible way out of the dilemma if the extradition party had not just then arrived from Gtet on the special Patrol ship which had been sent for it. He now found himself confronted with six more magnificently argumentative ameboids, numbering among them some of the trickiest legal minds on the home planet. The police of Rugh VI had had many intricate dealings with L'payr in the Gtetan courts. Hence, they took no chances and sent their best representatives. Outnumbered L'payr may have been, but remember, Hoy, he had prepared for just these eventualities ever since leaving Earth. And just to stimulate his devious intellect to maximum performance, there was the fact that his was the only life at stake. Once let his fellow ameboids get their pseudopods on him again, and he was a gone protozoan. Gtetan extradition party, Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh began to find out how unhappy a policeman's lot can become. Back and forth he went, from the prisoner to the lawyers, stumbling through quagmires of opinion, falling into chasms of complexity. The extradition group was determined not to return to their planet empty-pseudopoded. In order to succeed, they had to make the current arrest stick, which would give them the right -- as previously injured parties -- to assert their prior claim to the punishment of L'payr. For his part, L'payr was equally determined to invalidate the arrest by the Patrol, since then he would not only have placed our outfit in an uncomfortable position, but, no longer extraditable, would be entitled to its protection from his fellow citizens. A weary, bleary and excessively hoarse Pah-Chi-Luh finally dragged himself to the extradition party on spindly tentacles and informed them that, after much careful consideration, he had come to the conclusion that L'payr was innocent of any crime during his stay on Earth. "Nonsense," he was told by the spokesman. "A crime was committed. Arrant and unquestioned pornography was sold and circulated on that planet. A crime has to have been committed." Pah-Chi-Luh went back to L'payr and asked, miserably, how about it? Didn't it seem, he almost pleaded, that all the necessary ingredients of a crime were present? Some kind of crime? "True," L'payr said thoughtfully. "They have a point. Some kind of crime may have been committed -- but not by me. Osborne Blatch, now..." Stellar Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh completely lost his heads. He sent a message to Earth, ordering Osborne Blatch to be picked up. Fortunately for all of us, up to and including the Old One, PahChi-Luh did not go so far as to have Blatch arrested. The Earthman was merely held as a material witness. When I think what the false arrest of a creature from a Secretly Supervised world could lead to, especially in a case of this sort, Hoy, my blood almost turns liquid. But Pah-Chi-Luh did commit the further blunder of incarcerating Osborne Blatch in a cell adjoining L'payr's. Everything, you will observe, was working out to the ameboid's satisfaction -- including my young assistant. TY the time Pah-Chi-Luh got around to Blatch's first interrogation, the Earthman had already been briefed by his neighbor. Not that the briefing was displayed overmuch -- as yet. "Pornography?" he repeated in answer to the first question. "What pornography? Mr. Smith and I had been working on an elementary biology text for some time and we were hoping to use new illustrations throughout. We wanted larger, clear pictures of the sort that would be instantly comprehensible to youngsters -- and we were particularly interested in getting away from the blurry drawings that have been used and re-used in all textbooks, almost from the time of Leewenhoek. Mr. L'payr's series on the cycle of ameboid reproduction was a godsend. In a sense, they made the first section of the book." "You don't deny, however," Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh inquired remorselessly, "that, at the time of the purchase, you knew those pictures were pornographic? And that, despite this knowledge, you went ahead and used them for the delectation of juveniles of your race?" "Edification," the elderly human schoolteacher corrected him. "Edification, not delectation. I assure you that not a single student who studied the photographs in question -- which, by the way, appeared textually as drawings -- received any premature erotic stimulation thereby. I will admit that, at the time of purchase, I did receive a distinct impression from the gentleman in the next cell that he and his kind considered the illustrations rather racy -- " "Well, then?" "But that was his problem, not mine. After all, if I buy an artifact from an extraterrestrial creature -- a flint fist-axe, say, or a cauldron for pouring boiling oil upon the stormers of walled cities -- and I use them both in completely peaceful and useful pursuits -- the former to grub onions out of the ground and the latter to cook the onions in a kind of soup -- have I done anything wrong? "As a matter of fact, the textbook in question received fine reviews and outstanding commendations from educational and scientific authorities all over the nation. Would you like to hear some of them? I believe I may have a review or two in my pockets. Let me see. Yes, just by chance, I seem to have a handful of clippings in this suit. Well, well! I didn't know there were quite so many. This is what the Southern Prairie States Secondary School Gazette has to say -- 'A substantial and noteworthy achievement. It will live long in the annals of elementary science pedagoguery. The authors may well feel... " It was then that Corporal PahChi-Luh sent out a despairing call for me. to give the matter my full attention, the Saudi ArabiaGanymede affair being completely past the danger point. Had I been tied up... After experimenting , with all kinds of distractions, including secret agents disguised as dancing girls, we had finally managed to embroil the young mystic in a tremendous theological dispute on the exact nature and moral consequences of the miracles he was wreaking. Outstanding Mohammedan religious leaders of the region had lined up on one side or the other and turned the air blue with quotations from the Koran and later Sunnite books. The mystic was drawn in and became so involved in the argument that he stopped thinking about his original objectives and irreparably broke the mental connection with Ganymede. For a while, this left a continuing problem on that satellite -- it looked as if the civilization of disembodied intellects might eventually come to some approximation of the real truth. Luckily for us, the entire business had been viewed there also as a religious phenomenon and, once telepathic contact was lost, the intellect who had been communicating with the human, and had achieved much prestige thereby, was thoroughly discredited. It was generally believed that he had willfully and deliberately faked the entire thing, for the purpose of creating skepticism among the more spiritual members of his race. An ecclesiastical court ordered the unfortunate telepath to be embodied alive. It was, therefore, with a warm feeling of a job well done that I returned to my headquarters on Pluto in response to Pah-ChiLuh's summons. Needless to say, this feeling quickly changed to the most overpowering dismay. After getting the background from the overwrought corporal, I interviewed the Gtetan extradition force. They had been in touch with their home office andwere threatening a major galactic scandal if the Patrol's arrest of L'payr were not upheld and L'payr remanded to their custody. "Are the most sacred and intimate details of our sex life to be shamelessly flaunted from one end of the Universe to the other?" I was asked angrily. "Pornography is pornography -- a crime is a crime. The intent was there -- the overt act was there. We demand our prisoner." "How can you have pornography without titillation?" L'payr wanted to know. "If a Chumblostian sells a Gtetan a quantity of krrgllwss -- which they use as food and we use as building material -- does the shipment have to be paid for under the nutritive or structural tariffs? The structural tariffs obtain, as you well know, Sergeant. I demand immediate release!" TUT the most unpleasant surprise of all awaited me with Blatch. The terrestrial was sitting in his cell, sucking the curved handle of his umbrella. "Under the code governing the treatment of all races on Secretly Supervised Status," he began as soon as he saw me, "and I refer not only to the Rigellian-Sagittarian Convention, but to the statutes of the third cosmic cycle and the Supreme Council decisions in the cases of Khwomo vs. Khwomo and Farziplok vs. Anmy accustomed habitat on Earth, the payment of damages according to the schedule developed by the Nobri Commission in the latest Vivadin controversy. I also demand satisfaction in terms of -- " "You seem to have acquired a good deal of knowledge of interstellar law," I commented slowly. "Oh, I have. Sergeant -- I have. Mr. L'payr was most helpful in acquainting me with my rights. It seems that I am entitled to all sorts of recompenses -- or, at least, that I can claim entitlement. You have a very interesting galactic culture, Sergeant. Many, many people on Earth would be fascinated to learn about it. But I am quite prepared to spare you the embarrassment which such publicity would cause you. I am certain that two reasonable individuals like ourselves can come to terms." When I charged L'payr with violating galactic secrecy, he spread his cytoplasm in an elaborate ameboid shrug. " told him nothing on Earth, Sergeant. Whatever information this terrestrial has received -- and I will admit that it would have been damaging and highly illegal -- was entirely in the jurisdiction of your headquarters office. Besides, having been wrongfully accused of an ugly and unthinkable crime, I surely had the right to prepare my defense by discussing the matter with the only witness to the deed. I might go further and point out that, since Mr. Blatch and myself are in a sense co-defendants, there could be no valid objection to a pooling of our legal knowledge." Back in my office, I brought Corporal Pah-Chi-Luh up to date. "It's like a morass," he complained. "The more you struggle to get out, the deeper you fall in it! And this terrestrial! The Plutonian natives who've been guarding him have been driven almost crazy. He asks questions about everything -- what's this, what's that, how does it work. Or it's not hot enough for him, the air doesn't smell right, his food is uninteresting. His throat has developed an odd tickle, he wants a gargle, he needs a -- " "Give him everything he wants, but within reason," I said. "If this creature dies on us, you and I will be lucky to draw no more than a punishment tour in the Black Hole in Cygnus. But as for the rest of it -- look here, Corporal, I find myself in agreement with the extradition party from Gtet. A crime has to have been committed."  Luh stared at me. "You -- you mean... "I mean that if a crime was committed, L'payr has been legally arrested and can therefore be taken back to Gtet. We will then hear no more from him ever and we will also be rid of that bunch of pseudopodclacking Gtetan shysters. That will leave us with only one problem -- Osborne Blatch. Once L'payr is gone and we have this terrestrial to ourselves, I think we can handle him -- one way or another. But first and foremost, Corporal PahChi-Luh, a crime -- some crime -- has to have been committed by L'payr during his sojourn on Earth. Set up your bed in the law library." Shortly afterward, Pah-ChiLuh left for Earth. Now please, Hoy, no moralistic comments! You know as well as I do that this sort of thing has been done before, here and there, in Outlying Patrol Offices. I don't like it any more than you, but I was faced with a major emergency. Besides, there was no doubt but that this L'payr, ameboid master criminal, had had punishment deferred far too long. In fact, one might say that morally I was completely and absolutely in the right. Pah-Chi-Luh returned to Earth, as I've said, this time disguised as an editorial assistant. He got a job in the publishing house that had brought out the biology textbook. The original photographs were still in the files of that establishment. By picking his man carefully and making a good many mind-stimulating comments, the stellar corporal finally inspired one of the technical editors to examine the photographs and have the material on which they were printed analyzed. The material was trab, a synthetic textile much in use on Gtet and not due to be developed by humanity for at least three centuries. In no time at all, almost every woman in America was wearing lingerie made of frab, the novelty fabric of the year. And since L'payr was ultimately responsible for this illegal technological spurt, we at last had him where we wanted him! He was very sporting about it, Hoy. "The end of a long road for me, Sergeant," he said resignedly. "I congratulate you. Crime does not pay. Lawbreakers always lose." "Right," I agreed. "About time you learned that." tradition forms, without a care in the Galaxy. There was Blatch, of course, but he was only a human. And by this time, having gotten involved in all kinds of questionable dealings myself, I was determined to make quick work of him. After all, one might as well get blasted for a skreek as a launt! But when I returned to escort the Gtetan to his fellow-ameboids, I almost fell through the surface of Pluto. Where there had been one L'payr, there were now two! Smaller L'payrs, of course -- half the size of the original, to be exact -- but L'payrs unmistakably. In the interval, he had reproduced! How? That gargle the Earthman had demanded, Hoy. It had been L'payr's idea all along, his last bit of insurance. Once the Earthman had received the gargle, he had smuggled it to L'payr, who had hidden it in his cell, intending to use it as a last resort. That gargle. Hoy, was salt water! So there I was. The Gtetans informed me that their laws covered such possibilities, but much help their laws were to me. "A crime has been committed, pornography has been sold," the spokesman reiterated. "We demand our prisoner. Both of him!" "Pursuant to Galactic Statutes #I through #," Osborne Blatch insisted, "I demand immediate release, restitution to Megawhars, a complete and written -- " And... "It's probably true that our ancester, L'payr, committed all sorts of indiscretions," lisped one of the two young ameboids in the cell next to Osborne Blatch, "but what does that have to do with us? L'payr paid for his crimes by dying in childbirth. We are young and innocent. Don't tell us the big, powerful Galaxy believes in punishing little children for the sins of their parents!" What would you have done? I shipped the whole mess off to Patrol Headquarters -- the Gtetan extradition party and their mess of judicial citations, Osborne Blatch and his umbrella, the biology textbook, the original bundle of pornographic pictures, and last but not at all least, two -- count 'em, two -- dewy young ameboids. Call them L'payr subone and L'payr sub-two. Do anything you like with them when they get there, but please don't tell me what it is! And if you can figure out a solution with the aid of some of the more ancient and wiser heads at headquarters, and figure it out before the Old One ruptures a gloccistomorph, Pah Chi Luh and I will be pathetically, eternally grateful. If not -- well, we're standing by here at Outlying Patrol Office # with bags packed. There's something to be said for the Black Hole in Cygnus -- invaluable experience for a Patrolman. Personally, Hoy, I'd say that the whole trouble is caused by creatures who insist on odd and colorful methods of continuing their race, instead of doing it sanely and decently by means of spore-pod explosion! I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England I Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. It is time to move on when a pioneer sees someone's smoke -- or radar -- over the horizon! Subsistence Level Illustrated H ER mother had warned her. "Are you out of your mind, Amelia? Why in heaven's name must you marry a pioneer ? How do you expect to be happy in a wilderness?" "The Cap isn't a wilderness, Mother," Amelia had said. "It isn't civilized. It's a crude, primitive place. And how long will this pioneer be satisfied there? I know the type. He'll always want some new place to conquer." "Then I'll conquer it with him," Amelia had said, certain of her own pioneering spirit. Her mother wasn't so sure. "Frontier life is hard, dear. Harder than you imagine. Are you really prepared to give up your friends, all the comforts you've known?" "Yes!" Her mother wanted to say more. But since her husband's death, she had become less certain of her own convictions, less determined to impose them on others. "It's your life," she said at last. "Don't worry, Mother, I know what I'm doing," Amelia said. She knew that Dirk Bogren couldn't stand crowding. He was a big man and he needed elbow room, and silence, and free air to breathe. He had told her about his father, who had settied in the newly reclaimed Gobi Desert. It broke the old man's heart when the place got so crowded that land had to be fenced in according to county regulations and he died with his face turned toward the stars. That was Dirk, too. She married him, and moved to the desolate Southern Polar Cap. But settlers came after them, and soon the Cap was called Cap City, and then it had stores and factories, and neat little suburbs stretching across the atom-heated land. It happened sooner than she ever expected. on the veranda, and Dirk was looking over his land. He stared for a long time at the tip of a radar tower on a distant rise of the land. "Getting crowded around here," he said finally. "Yes, it is -- a little," Amelia agreed. "They'll be building a golf course next. Figure it's time to move on?" "All right," Amelia said, after the slightest hesitation. And that was all that had to be said. They sold their farm. They bought a second-hand spaceship and filled it with the barest necessities of life. The evening before blastoff, Dirk's friends threw a farewell party for him. They were the old inhabitants and they could remember when the Cap was still partly ice and snow. They kidded Dirk, half enviously. "Going to the asteroids, eh?" "That's the place," Dirk said. "But you're soft!" an old man cackled. "Easy living's got you, Dirk." "Oh, I don't know." "Think you can still work an honest five-hour day?" Dirk grinned and drank his beer, and listened to the women give Amelia advice. "Take plenty of warm things.  remember on Mars -- " "First-aid equipment -- " "The trouble with low gravity -- " "Dirk!" a man shouted. "You taking a pretty little thing like her to an asteroid ?" "Sure," Dirk said. "She won't like it," another man warned. "No parties, no new clothes, no doodads." "Folks go crazy from overwork out there." "Don't you believe them," an older woman put in hastily. "You'll love it once you get used to it." "I'm sure I will," Amelia said politely and hoped it was true. Just before blastoff, she called her mother and told her the news. Her mother wasn't surprised. "Well, dear," she said, "it won't be easy. But you knew that before you married him. The asteroids -- that's where your father wanted to go." Amelia remembered her father as a gentle, soft-spoken man. Every night, when he returned from the bank, he would read through the ads for used spaceships and he would compile detailed lists of the equipment an explorer would need. Mother was dead set against any change and would not be moved. There were few open arguments, but a bitterness existed beneath the surface -- until all bitterness was resolved when a helicopter smashed into her father's car one day, when he was returning from the bank. "Try to be a good wife to him," her mother urged. "Of course I will," Amelia declared a little angrily. rpHE new frontiers were in space, for Earth was tame and settled now. Dirk had studied the available charts of the Asteroid Belt, but they didn't tell him much. No one had ever penetrated very far and the vast extent was simply marked unIt was a long journey and a dangerous one, but free land was there, land for the taking, and all the room a man could ask. Dirk fought through the shifting patterns of rock with steady patience. The spaceship was always pointed implacably outward, though no route was marked. "We're not turning back," he told Amelia, "so there's no sense charting a way." She nodded agreement, but her breath came short when she looked at the bleak, dead spots of light ahead. She couldn't help feeling apprehensive about their new life, the grim, lonely existence of the frontier. She shivered and put her hand over Dirk's. He smiled, never taking his eyes off the dials. They found a slab of rock several miles long by a mile wide. They landed on the dark, airless little world, set up their pressure dome and turned on the gravity. As soon as it approached normal, Dirk set to work uncrating the Control Robot. It was a long, tiring job, but finally he inserted the tape and activated the controls. The robot went to work. Dirk turned on all available searchlights. Using the small crane, he lifted their Frontier Shelter out of the ship's hold, placed it near the center of the dome, and activated it. The Shelter opened like a gigantic flower, blossoming into a neat five-room dwelling, complete with basic furniture, kitchen, plumbing, and disposal units. It was a start. But everything couldn't be unpacked at once. The temperature control was buried somewhere in the hold of the ship, and Dirk had to warm their house with an auxiliary heater hooked to the generator. Amelia was too cold to make dinner. The temperature in the Shelter hovered around # degrees Fahrenheit. Even in her Explorers, Inc., furs, she was cold, and the dismal glow of the fluorescents made her feel colder. "Dirk," she asked timidly, "couldn't you make it a little warmer?" "I suppose I could, but that would slow down the robot." "I didn't know," Amelia said. "I'll be all right." But it was impossible working under fluorescents and she set the dial wrong on the Basic Ration Pack. The steak came out overdone, the potatoes were lumpy, and the chill was barely taken off the apple pie. "I'm afraid I'm not much good at roughing it," Amelia said, trying to smile. "Forget it," Dirk told her, and wolfed down his food as though it were regular Earthside fare. They turned in. Amelia could hardly sleep on the emergency mattress. But she had the dubious satisfaction of knowing that Dirk was uncomfortable, too. He had been softened by the relatively easy life at the Cap. seemed more cheerful. The Control Robot, working through the night, had set up the main lighting plant. Now they had their own little sun in the sky and a fair approximation of night and day. The Control had also unloaded the heavy Farm Robots, and they in turn had unloaded the Household Robots. Dirk directed the topsoil manufacturing and coordinated the work of his robots as they force-seeded the soil. He worked a full five-hour day, and when the little sun was low on the horizon, he came home exhausted. Amelia, meanwhile, had taped in her basic food sequences during the day, and that evening she was able to give her husband a plain but hearty eight-course dinner. "Of course, it's not the twentyplate special," she apologized as he munched on the hors d'oeuvres. "Never could eat all that food, anyhow," Dirk said. "And the wine isn't properly chilled." Dirk looked up and grinned. "Hell, honey, I could drink warm Ola-Cola and never notice it." "Not while I'm cook here," Amelia said. But she could see one advantage of frontier life already -- a hungry man would eat anything that was put in front of him. After helping Amelia pile the dishes into the washer, Dirk set up a projector in their living room. As a double feature flicked across the screen, they sat in durable foam-rubber chairs, just as generations of pioneers before them had done. This continuity with the past touched Amelia deeply. And Dirk unpacked their regular bed and adjusted the gravity under it. That night they slept as soundly as they ever had at the Cap. But the work on the asteroid was ceaseless and unremitting. Dirk labored five and, several times, even six hours a day with his Field Robots, changing tapes, bellowing commands, sweating to get the best out of them. In a few days, the force-seeded plants began to show green against the synthesized black loam. But it was apparent at once that it was a stunted crop. Dirk's mouth tightened and he set his robots to pumping trace elements into the soil. He tinkered with his sun until he he had increased its ultraviolet output. But the resulting crop, a week later, was a failure. fields that day. Dirk's face was outlined by the garish sunset and his clenched fists were on his hips. He was staring at the poor, dwarfed, shoulder-high com. There was nothing Amelia could say. She put her hand comfortingly on his shoulder. "We're not licked," Dirk muttered. "What will you do?" Amelia asked. "I'll plant a crop a week, if need be. I'll work the robots until their joints crystallize. This soil will yield. It must yield!" Amelia stepped back, surprised at the vehemence of his tone. But she could understand how he felt. On Earth, a farmer simply gave the orders to his Control Robot, and in a few days he was ready to harvest. Dirk had been working and watching this miserable crop for over a week. "What will you do with it?" she asked. "Feed it to the animals," Dirk said contemptuously. They walked to the house together in the gathering twilight. The next day, Dirk took his farm animals out of the freezers, reanimated them, and set up their pens and stalls. The beasts fed contentedly on the corn and wheat. Force-seeds went back into the ground -- and the second growing was of normal size. Amelia had little time to observe this triumph. Their fiveroom dwelling was small by Earth standards, but it still needed coordinating. It was difficult. She had grown up in an ordinary suburban home, where the housekeeping duties were arranged in automatic time sequences. Here, each function was handled by an individual machine. There was no time to recess them into the walls and they were forever in the way, ruining her decor, making the house look like a machine shop. Instead of a single, centralized switchboard, Amelia had dials, buttons and switches everywhere, jury-rigged in casual style. At first, she had to spend a large part of each day just hunting for the proper controls for dry-cleaning, floorscrubbing, window-washing, and other necessities she had taken for granted at home. Dirk had promised to hook all the circuits together, but he was always busy with his own work. Her House Robots were impossible. They were frontier models, built for durability, with none of the refinements she had known. Their memories were poor and they could anticipate nothing. At the end of the day, Amelia's ears would ring from their harsh, raucous voices. And most of the time her house looked as though the robots had been attacking it, instead of cleaning it. THE long five-hour days of drudgery went on and on, until Amelia felt she couldn't take any more of it. In desperation, she called her mother on the tele-circuit. In the tiny, streaked screen, she could see her mother sitting in her favorite pneumo-chair beside the polarized glass wall. It was adjusted for vision now, and Amelia could see the city in the distance, springing upward in its glistening beauty. "What seems to be wrong?" her mother asked. A robot glided behind her mother's chair and noiselessly put down a cup of tea. Amelia was sure that no command had been given. The sensitive mechanical had anticipated her, the way Earth robots did after long acquaintance with a family. "Well, it's -- " Amelia began to explain almost hysterically. Her own robot lurched through the room, almost breaking down a door when the photo-electric circuit didn't respond quickly enough. It was too much. "I want to come home!" Amelia cried. "You know you're always welcome, dear. But what about your husband?" "Dirk will come, I'm sure of it. We can find him a good job, can't we, Mother?" "I suppose so. But is that what he wants?" "What?" Amelia asked blankly"Will a man like that be satisfied on Earth? Will he return?" "He will if he loves me." "Do you love him?" "Mother, that's unfair!" Amelia said, feeling a little sick inside. "It's a mistake to make a man do something he doesn't want to do," her mother told her. "Your father... Anyhow, don't you think you could make it work?" "I don't know," Amelia said. "I guess -- I guess I'll try." Things did get better after that. Amelia learned how to live with her home, to overlook its inconveniences. She could see that someday it might be as pleasant as they had eventually made their farm on the Cap. But they had left the Cap. And as soon as this place was livable, Dirk would want to move on, into a fresh wilderness. One day, Dirk found her sitting beside their tiny swimming pool, weeping hopelessly. "Hey!" he said. "What's wrong?" "Nothing." Clumsily he stroked her hair. "Tell me." "Nothing, nothing." "Te me." "Oh, it's all the work of making a nice home and putting up curtains and training the robots and everything, and knowing -- " "Knowing what?" "That someday you'll want to move on and it'll all be for nothing." She sat up and tried to smile. "I'm sorry, Dirk. I shouldn't have mentioned it." time. Then he looked at her closely, and said, "I want to make you happy. You believe that, don't you?" She nodded. "I guess we've done enough moving around. This is our home. We'll stay right here." "Really, Dirk?" "It's a promise." She hugged him tightly. Then she remembered. "Good heavens! My Napoleons will be ruined!" She ran off to the kitchen. The next weeks were the happiest Amelia had ever known. In the morning, their pre-set sun burst into glory, waking them to the morning chores. After they had a hearty breakfast, the work of the day began. It was never dull. One day Amelia and Dirk might erect a meteor screen to reinforce their pressure dome. Or they might tinker with the wind machine, to help the reanimated bees provide better pollination for the crops. In the evenings, they had their sunsets. Sometimes Dirk would have the Field Robots stage a clumsy dance. He was a firm but understanding master. He believed that a litle variety was good for robots as well as for humans. Amelia regretted Earth only once. That was when Dirk picked up a Lunar rebroadcast of the Easter Parade on their television set. The music and bright colors made Amelia's heart ache -- but it was only for a moment. Their first visitor came several months later in a gaily decorated spaceship that settled on Dirk's rough-hewn landing field. Painted on its side in letters eight feet high was the sign potter's traveling store. A dapper young man climbed out, sniffed the atmosphere, wrinkled his nose, and walked up to the house. "What can I do for you, stranger?" Dirk asked at the door. "Good day, countryman. I'm Potter," the young man said, extending his hand which Dirk did not shake. '"I was making my usual swing around Mars when I heard about you folks out here. Thought you might like to buy a few gimcracks to -- to brighten up the place." "Don't want a thing," Dirk said. Potter grinned amiably, but he had seen the severe, undecorated farmhouse and the spartan swimming pool. "Something for the wife?" Potter asked, winking at Amelia. "I won't be around this way for a while." "Glad to hear it," Dirk said. But Amelia, her eyes glowing, wanted to go through Potter's whole stock, and she dragged Dirk along. the household appliances, the modem time-saving gadgets for the home. She looked longingly at the dresses -- dainty, sheer, with automatic necklines and hems -- and thought of her own drab tailored fashions. But then she saw the Acting Robots. With their amazingly human appearance and civilized mannerisms, they reminded her poignantly of home. "Couldn't we buy a troupe?" she asked Dirk. "We've got the movies, haven't we? They were good enough for my father -- " "But, Dirk, these robots put on real plays!" "This particular troupe puts on all hit plays clear back to George Bernard Shaw," Potter told them. Dirk looked with distaste at the handsome humanoid machines. "What else do they do?" "Do? They act," Potter said. "Good Lord, countryman, you wouldn't expect a work of art to do farm labor, would you?" "Why not?" Dirk asked. "I don't believe in pampering robots. Farm labor's good enough for my Control Robot and I'll bet he's smarter than these gimcracks." "Your Control Robot is not an artist," Potter said loftily. Amelia was so wistful that Dirk bought the troupe. While he was lugging them to the house -- Acting Robots were too delicate to walk over stony ground -- Amelia bought a dress. "What's a girl like you doing in this wilderness?" Potter asked. "I like it." "Oh, it's livable, I suppose. Life of toil, doing without luxuries, advancing the frontier, all that sort of thing. But don't you get sick of roughing it?" Amelia didn't answer him. Potter shrugged his shoulders. "Well," he said, "this sector's ripe for colonization. You'll be having company before long." Amelia took her dress and returned to the house. Potter blasted off. Dirk was forced to admit the Acting Robots made pleasant company during the long, still evenings. He even became quite fond of Man and Superman. After a while, he began to give the robots acting directions, which they naturally ignored. Still, he was always certain that his Control Robot could do as well, if the voice box were only improved a little. Amusements, however, were swallowed in the long five-hour working days. Dirk began to collect other little asteroids and grapple them to his original claim. He force-planted a forest, constructed a waterfall, and tinkered with his father's old climate machine. Finally he got it working and was able to reproduce seasons on their planetoid. O NE day, the tele-circuit spluttered into life and Dirk received a spacegram. It was from Explorers, Inc., an Earth firm that manufactured a complete line of equipment for pioneers. They offered Dirk a job as head of their main testing laboratory, at a salary just a little short of stupendous. "Oh, Dirk!" Amelia gasped. "What an opportunity!" "Opportunity? What are you talking about?" "You could be wealthy. You could have anything you wanted." "I've got what I want," Dirk said. "Tell them no, thanks." Amelia sighed wearily. She cabled Dirk's refusal to the firm -- but added that his services might possibly be available later. After all, there was no sense in completely shutting the door. another spaceship swung over Dirk's landing field. This one was older and even more battered than Dirk's, and it dropped the last five feet to the ground, jarring the whole small planetoid. A young couple staggered out, on the point of collapse. They were Jean and Percy several thousand miles from Dirk's holdings. Everything had gone wrong. Their power had failed, their robots had broken down, their food had run out. In desperation, they had set out for Dirk's farm. They were near starvation, having been without food for almost two whole days. Dirk and Amelia gave them the hospitality of the frontier and quickly nursed them back to health. It became readily apignorant of any of the rules of survival. know how to handle robots. Dirk had to explain it to him. "You have to show them who's boss," Dirk said. "But I should think that the proper command, given in a low, pleasant voice -- ' "Not out here," Dirk said, with a positive shake of his head. "These Work Robots are a stupid, unresponsive lot. They're sullen and resentful. You have to pound the commands into them. Kick them, if need be." "Mistreat a robot?" "You have to show them who the human is." "But in Colonization School, we were taught to treat our rotested. "You'll lose a lot of Earth notions out here," Dirk said bluntly. "Now listen to me. I was raised by robots. Some of my best friends are robots. I know what I'm talking about. The only way they'll show you any respect is if you make them." fully that Dirk might be right. "Of course I'm right!" Dirk stated. "You say your power supply failed?" "Yes, but the robots didn't -- " "Didn't they? They have access to the charge outlets, haven't they?" "Of course. When they're low, they recharge themselves." "You think they stop when they're full? A robot'll keep on drawing power until it's all gone. Haven't you learned that old robot stunt?" "I guess that's what happenwould they do it?" "Robots are congenital drunks," Dirk told him. "The manufacturers stamp it into them. That way, they burn out faster and you have to buy more robots. Believe me, you'll be doing them a favor if you keep them power-starved." "I guess I've got a lot to And Jean, his wife, had even more to learn. Amelia had to show her over and over again that buttons won't push themselves, switches won't close without timing circuits, and dials won't leap of their own free will to the proper setting, Cleaning Robots can't be trusted with the cooking, and the Rub-A-Tub, although a versatile instrument, won't put up the preserves. "I never thought there was so much to it," Jean said. "How do you do it all?" "You'll learn," Amelia assured her, remembering her own early days on the frontier. for their claim. Amelia had thought it would be lonely when they were gone, but it was pleasant to be alone with Dirk again, to get back to work on their farm. But people wouldn't leave them alone. Next, a man from Mars Rural Power called. Homesteaders were moving into the Asteroid Belt, he explained, so the power outlets were being extended. He wanted to hook up Dirk's farm to the Mars Power tight-beam network. "Nope," Dirk said. "Why not? It's not expensive -- " "I make my own power." "Oh, these little generators," the man said, looking scornfully at Dirk's sun. "But for really high-gain performance -- " "Don't need it. This farm runs fast enough to suit me." "You could get more work out of your robots." "Just wear them out faster." "Then you could get the latest models." "The new ones just burn out faster." "A better generating system, then," the man said. "That little sun of yours doesn't have much of an output." "Puts out enough to satisfy me." The man shook his head wonderingly. "I guess I'll never understand you pioneers," he said, and left. life. But lights were beginning to wink on from neighboring asteroids, and the Lunar television was jammed with local signals. The mail rocket began to make weekly stops and a travel bureau started trips into the Belt. The familiar, dissatisfied look came over Dirk's face. He studied the sky around him. It was closing in. He was losing his elbow room, and the silence of his farm was broken by the flame of passing rockets. But he had promised Amelia and he was going, to keep that promise if it killed him. His face grew gaunt and he began to work six, seven -- sometimes actually eight -- hours a day. A sewing machine salesman called, and a bright, determined woman tried to sell Dirk the Solar Encyclopedia. The ship routes were established now and the long, dangerous trail had become a superhighway. One night, while Dirk and Amelia were sitting on their porch, they saw an immense sign light up the sky. It stretched over miles of space, and read: rosen's shopping center. "Stores," Amelia murmured. "And a restaurant! Oh, Dirk, couldn't we go?" "Why not?" he said, with a helpless shrug of his shoulders. The next day, Amelia put on her new dress and made Dirk wear his one customtailored suit. They got into the old spaceship and set out. Rosen's Center, a bustling frontier town sprawling across four linked asteroids, was struggling valiantly to become a city. Already driftways had been installed on all the streets. The town was filled with noisy, eager people, and robots clumped down the ways, loaded with gear. Amelia took Dirk into a restaurant, where they were servecf a real Earthside dinner. Dirk didn't enjoy it. He was slightly nauseous from breathing other people's air and the food was too delicate to stick to one's ribs. The meal ended with Dirk ordering the wrong wine and trying to tip the robot waiter. Thoroughly miserable, he allowed himself to be dragged from one store to another. The only time he showed any interest was when they entered a heavy-tools shop. He examined a new antigravity engine. It was a model he had never seen. "Just the thing for canceling heavy-planet effects," the robot clerk told him. "We believe this machine would work splendidly on the moons of Jupiter, for example." "The moons of Jupiter?" "Just an example, sir," the robot said. "No one's ever been there. It's completely unexplored territory." bing his hand along the machine's burnished surface. "Look, Amelia," he said. "Do you suppose that job on Earth is still open?" "It might be," she answered. "Why?" "Might as well be on Earth as here. These people are playing at pioneering." "Do you think you'd be happy on Earth?" "Might." "I doubt it," Amelia said. She was remembering how contented they had been on the asteroid. Their life had been full and complete, just the two of them, pushing back the wilderness with their rude tools -- doing without -- improvising. That had been before people came, before Earth's noisy, elbowing civilization had crowded up to their doorstep. Her mother had learned the' hard way and had tried to tell her. Dirk would never be happy on Earth. And happiness for her was impossible if he fretted his life away as her father had, working on a job he hated and dreaming of another more satisfying one. "We'll take the anti-grav engine," she told the robot. She turned to Dirk. "We'll need that out Jupiter way." fiction takes you into the tense and exciting future to solve the most challenging problem that Mankind has ever faced! for your information aviation magazines carried a short official announcement to the effect that a committee had been appointed to study the feasibility of using guided missiles for peacetime service as robot mail vehicles. This announcement must have struck many people as a brandnew idea. Actually, it is one of those ideas that have been around for quite a while in a kind of embryonic form and are now approaching realization. The earliest type of missile mail is one you've probably seen in historical movies -- the parchment wrapped around the shaft of an arrow, tied securely and shot into the castle, or out of it, depending on the plot of the story. A more modern version of the same idea was presented to an astonished and presumably incredulous readership in # by a long defunct newspaper, the Berlin Evening News ( Berliner Abendblatter ) . If it had been written by an otherwise unknown newspaperman of that period, nobody might remember it any more; but it so happens that the author was a still respected German poet of the time. His name was Heinrich von Kleist and he was the editor of that paper. The issue of October #, #, carried under the general heading of "Useful Inventions" an article entitled "Preliminary Thoughts about Mortar Mail." It began by stating that an electrical 'telegraph had been recently invented, but fast as it was, it could only transmit very brief messages, being wholly inadequate for the transmission of letters, reports, miscellaneous enclosures and packages. This, the article continued, could be remedied by the introduction of a system that ought to work "at least within the confines of the civilized world." If one established a number of fixed batteries of mortars or howitzers within range of each other and all located on soft ground, these batteries could fire letter-filled shells from station to station. "As a quick computation will show," the author went on, a letter dispatched by this means would cover the distance from Berlin to Stettin (# miles) or to Breslau (# miles) in half a day or in about onetenth the time required by a mounted courier. T HE next issue of the paper carried a letter by a "resident of the city" -- presumably the editor -- which states that the writer considers neither the electric telegraph nor the mortar mail as "useful inventions." Since most news is bad news, a really useful invention would be one which slows the mails down; oxcart mail might be the proper solution to the problem. Whether Heinrich von Kleist was merely trying to amuse himself and his readers or whether his slightly mocking style was designed as camouflage for some wishful ideas in the back of his mind is something nobody will ever be able to establish. At any event, no mortar mail was ever tried. But later in the nineteenth century, something that looks more modern by far was actually done -- in the South Seas, there was a genuine rocket mail. The rockets used were very large blackpowder missiles of the Congreve type; the place where they carried mail canisters was the Tonga Islands to the south of Samoa. By air, the rockets bridged difficult reefs. But since quite a number of canisters were never found and others split open on impact, so that the sea water ruined the mail, this experiment did not last long. It was discarded in favor of "buoy mail," which was somewhat more reliable. The missile-mail idea was shelved until modem rocket theory came along three decades ago. Interestingly enough, however, of the two classical works which started rocket theory, neither Dr. Robert H. Goddard's study of # nor Professor Hermann Oberth's long paper of # says a word about mail transportation by rocket. This notion occurred to Oberth in # in the course of correspondence with one Dr. Franz von Hoefft, who was then president of the Austrian Rocket Society. It assumed definite shape for the first time in a lecture delivered by Professor Oberth during the first days of June #, on the occasion of the annual meeting of the Scientific Society for Aeronautics in Danzig. The manuscript for the lecture contains the following statement, never before published in English: I would suggest, therefore, to begin with the building of small rockets with automatic guidance that can bridge distances from #-# miles and carry a payload of #-# lbs. Several factors that I cannot discuss now because of lack of time happen to facilitate the automatic guidance of a rocket so that, in my opinion, it should be possible to pre-determine the place at which the rocket returns into the atmosphere with an uncertainty of only a few miles. This rocket, therefore, seems suitable for transporting urgent mail over long distances in a very short time. The rocket would have to land by means of a parachute; some other means of transportation would then carry the apparatus to its precise destination. At a later date, I would equip such a rocket with a powerful booster that would result in transoceanic ranges. The booster rocket would drop off after one minute and should be easy to locate. customary among rocket enthusiasts to consider the mailcarrying rocket the "second step in rocket development." The first step, following preliminary and purely experimental models, would be the highaltitude instrument-carrying research rocket, vertically rising; the second step, the long-range rocket with a payload consisting of mail. When it looked, in #, as if an early prototype of the high altitude research rocket would be realized very soon, a German journalist interviewed the American Ambassador, Dr. Shurman, about his attitude toward transatlantic rocket mail. Ambassador Shurman wisely refrained from having opinions about technological detail. "Just two years ago," he told the journalist, "the chair you are sitting in was occupied by Dr. Eckener of the Zeppelin works, who talked to me about transatlantic mail by dirigible." But the Ambassador did give an opinion on the legal procedure required. If it had been proved, he said, that the rocket would not represent any danger to life or limb or the property of American citizens, the proper thing to do would be to ask for permission at the U. S. Embassy. The Ambassador would then forward this request by cable to the Department of State, the Department of State would pass it on to the President, and the President would call a cabinet meeting, which would make the final decision on the matter. How such a transatlantic mail shot would have looked, and would still look, is shown in Fig. #. After initial vertical takeoff, the rocket would climb out of the atmosphere at a slant, reach a rather great height at the midway point, and dip into the atmosphere again # minutes later, more than # miles from its takeoff point. (The distance shown on the diagram is the Great Circle distance between New York and Cobh.) Everything the newspapers told during #. from the announcement of the first forthcoming high-altitude shot to # miles to the interview with the Ambassador, sounded most impressive, but unfortunately things got stuck at that point. The first longrange rocket did not lift off its launching table until # years later and then it was slated to carry a payload of high explosive, instead of mail, good or bad. In this instance, the news was bad -- in England. story of the idea of the mail rocket described a strange curlicue. The theoreticians of the mail rocket, with a large expenditure of long equations, had always been thinking in terms of oceans, deserts and steppes. In #, a very young Austrian engineer by the name of Freidrich Schmiedl had quietly established still another possibility. Living in the Austrian Alps, he was aware of the fact that two villages might be eight hours' walk from each other, yet less than two miles away as the rocket flies. He had built half a dozen experimental rockets, had tinkered himself a reliable parachute release system, and on the second of February, #, he had put # letters into a compartment of his seventh rocket and fired it across a mountain. After another experimental shot, there followed a rocket labeled R-l with # letters and then, through the year #, five others. Rocket R-l stood # feet tall, had a largest diameter (near the head) of # inches, a smallest diameter (at the tail end) of # inches, had an empty weight of # lbs. and was propelled by a charge of # lbs. of a special blackpowder mixture. It was made of several layers of thin sheet brass, wound, for strength, with twine soaked in hot carpenters glue. The outside skin was sheet aluminum and between the charge and the sheet brass there was a layer of asbestos. The purpose of the asbestos was to minimize heat conduction forward through the metal skin. Without this precaution, such conducted heat might ignite the still unbumed front end of the charge and cause an explosion. Schmiedl's experiments demonstrated that the old Tonga Islands problem of shooting at short range over obstacles (mountains, in his case) was still very much alive. One could also think of a few possible applications where there was no real obstacle, but a special set of circumstances. For example, a ship coming from America might pass the extreme western end of England, Land's End, within rocket range, but would not berth in an English port for another # hours -- or even later if, as is often done, the first port of call is a French harbor. The mail could then arrive ahead of the ship. Schmiedl's mail shots were imitated (usually less successfully) in many other countries, such as Germany, England, Holland, the U.S.A., Cuba, India and Australia. The bill was usually footed by stamp collectors who, in the hope of future rocket mail, wanted to accumulate "forerunners." Then came the second World War, bringing the military bombardment rocket, which, from this point of view, might be considered a highly efficient and mass-produced short-range "obstacle rocket." And it brought the first real long-range rocket. But it failed to produce the mail rocket, unless you want to count the use of bombardment rockets for showering leaflets on the enemy under this heading. I T is a rather safe prediction to say that the long-range mail rocket will not become a reality in the form in which it was talked about in #. There are two main reasons. One is political. As things stand right now, no government could dare to permit international mail transportation by long-range rocket. If such rockets began to show on the radar screen of the receiving station, the radar operator -- and everybody else concerned -- would wonder whether they really carried mail. They might not even come from the announced firing site. The second reason is that the transatlantic timetable has undergone a fundamental change. At the time when the American Ambassador was asked about his opinions, the reasoning ran as follows : The rocket would need about # hour for the actual trip across the Atlantic. If you counted on one hour's delay at the European (or firing) end and about # hour's delay at the receiving end where the rocket had to be fished out of the water and the mail sorted, a letter might make the trip from "house to house" in three hours. Since the time difference between Berlin and New York is six hours, it would even look as if the addressee received his mail three hours before it was mailed. Even assuming only four mail rockets per day, it was virtually certain that the majority of the letters would reach the addresses on the day they were mailed. Compared to the steamer schedule, which involved an interval between mailing and delivery of at least one week, this was a nice and probably important timesaving. But the mail plane needs only about eight hours to cross the ocean. Recently, my German publisher wrote me an airmail letter on a Friday and had my reply the following Monday, without special delivery at either end. Less than two years from now, the transatlantic mail planes will be turbojets requiring, say, six hours for the flight. And another two years later, this time might be reduced to five or even four hours. The long-range unmanned mail rocket has been effectively killed off by the fast long-range manned airplane. T HE mail-carrying missile, however, is a different story. It might be useful to mention at this point that all missiles, no matter how large their number, can be sorted into just two categories. One type of missile is the real rocket, which does not rely on the air for "lift" the way an airplane does. In fact, the rocket missile tries to get out of at least the denser layers of the atmosphere as quickly as can be managed in order to gain maximum speed, because a real rocket operates at full efficiency only in a vacuum. Like an artillery shell, it moves along a trajectory, and this group of missiles is therefore referred to as "trajectory missiles." The other group of missiles is winged, aerodyhamically supported like an airplane, and "flies" like an airplane. It does not follow a trajectory, but a flight path, and these aerodynamically supported missiles are therefore known as "flightpath missiles" or "cruising missiles." The V-# rocket is a true trajectory missile. The old German V-l or buzz bomb and its offspring, the Navy Loon and the Martin Matador, are typical cruising missiles. Of course, no cruising missile can compete with a trajectory missile when it comes to speed. But as mail carriers, they have a number of undoubted advantages. Unlike the trajectory missile, they are controlled (or at least can be controlled) every inch of the way. Since they have wings, they can be landed like an airplane, on an airport where postal facilities already exist. They can even be "held" in the air for a short time, if necessary. Their speed can be much higher than that of commercial transports and rivals that of the fastest fighters. They can, if used as mail carriers, be used over and over again. If they are built for comparatively small payloads, say  ton, they could be launched at frequent intervals. And their operation may be cheap enough so that the rates for missile mail might be not more than perhaps triple the airmail rate. What will actually happen will depend on the studies now under way. As of now, it looks as if a famous French saying might be adapted to read : La fus#e postale est morte; vive le projectile postal! Is there any basic distinction between plants and animals that also holds true for all one-celled organisms? D. Shafer # Andina Avenue Cincinnati # ; Ohio The basic distinction between animals and plants is that plants have chlorophyll while animals do not. There is no animal with chlorophyll; examples in older textbooks were mistakes, caused by algae living in symbiosis with the organisms in question. Unfortunately, as far as orderly pigeon-holing is concerned, a number of plants have decided to live on organic matter and have done away with their chlorophyll. So to make the distinction apply in all cases, one would have to say that animals are organisms that cannot have chlorophyll, while plants are organisms that can and usually do. This will apply to anything larger than a virus, to which nothing seems to apply. Would you please explain how the Moon rotates keeping always one face toward the Earth? Also, why Mercury always keeps one face toward the Sun? Boyce Burgle # #fh Street Sparks, Nevada Apparently many people have some difficulty visualizing how one celestial body can revolve around another one in such a manner that only onehalf of the revolving body is visible from the central body. I have even been asked on occasion whether one should not say that neither the Moon nor Mercury rotates at all. They do rotate, however, and the problem can be best understood by making a little experiment. Place a lamp on a table that has open space all around it. The lamp is the Earth and your head represents the Moon. Now if you move around the table, keeping your eyes fixed on some external point, such as a window, you revolve around the lamp (Earth) without rotating at all. The result is that the lamp will illuminate every portion of your head ; translated into astronomical terms, this means that the people on the Earth could see every portion of the Moon in the course of one month. But if you move around the table with your eyes always fixed on the lamp, you perform not only a revolution around the Earth, but also one rotation around your axis, since every portion of your head would become visible to another (stationary) observer in the same room. All the moons in our solar system behave in this manner and, among the planets, Mercury, the one nearest the Sun. This is the inevitable result of the action of the gravitational field of a large body on a nearby small body. Naturally, since the time required for one revolution differs for the various moons of a planet with many moons, the periods required for their rotations differ, too, because they all have revolutionary periods equal to their rotational periods. The # best cloth bound Science Fiction books of the year -- both were serialized in Galaxy. I ho man by Pohl  Kornbluth (Published in Galaxy  # Add up the total and deduct #. (Add # Foreign Postage for eoch year) # New Subscription # Extending Subscription Name Address City State... by Alfred Bester  # rut mm ummun "I i pages price  #   Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus one full length Galaxy novel #  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus I year subscription to Galaxy (You save  # on this offer) # # New Subscription # Extending Subscription Enclosed find  Send me: # Galaxy Reader  I full length Novel # # Galaxy Reader  Galaxy Magazine # (Add # Foreign Postage for each year) Name Address City State The Impossible been increased to twentyfive months and six days," said Marlowe, the training director. "That's a gain of a full month." Ethan also looked discontentedly proud. "A mighty healthy docking boy," he declared. Demarest bent a paperweight ship until it snapped. "It's some-'v The right question kept getting the wrong answer -- but old Ethan and Amantha got the right answer by asking the wrong question! Voyage Home thing. You're gaining on the heredity block. What's the chief factor?" "Anti-radiation clothing. We just can't make them effective enough." Across space, on distant Mars, Amantha reached tor the picture. " How can you tell he ain't sickly? You can't see without glasses." Ethan reared up. " Jimmy's boy, ain't he? Our kids were always healthy, 'specially the youngest. Stands to reason their kids will be better." " Now you're thinking with your forgettery. They were all sick, one time or another. It was me who took care of them, though. You always could find ways of getting out of it." Amantha touched the chair switch. The planets whirled around the Sun. Earth crept ahead of Mars, Venus gained on Earth. The flow of ships slackened or spurted forth anew, according to what destination could be reached at the moment: "A month helps," said Demarest. "But where does it end? You can't enclose a man completely, and even if you do, there still is the air he breathes and food he eats. Radiation in space contaminates everything the body needs. And part of the radioactivity finds its way to the reproductive system." glance at the charts; the curve was beginning to flatten. Mathematically, it was determinable when it wouldn't rise at all. According to analysis, Man someday might be able to endure the radiation encountered in space as long as three years, if exposure times were spaced at intervals. But that was in the future. "There's a lot you could do," he told Demarest. "Shield the atomics." "Working on it," commented Demarest. "But every ounce we add cuts down on the payload. The best way is to get the ship from one place to another faster. It's time in space that hurts. Less exposure time, more trips before the crew has to retire. It adds up to the same thing." On Mars, Amantha fondled the picture. "Pretty. But it ain't real." She laid it aside. Ethan squinted at it. "I could make you think it was. Get it enlarged, solidified. Have them make it soft, big as a baby. You could hold it in your lap." "Outgrew playthings years ago." Amantha adjusted the chair switch, but the rocking motion was no comfort. Ethan turned the picture over, face down. "Nope. Hate to back you up, 'Mantha, but it ain't the same. There's nothing like a baby, wettin ' and squallin' and smilin', stubborn when it oughtn't to be and sweet and gentle when you don't expect it. Robodolls don't fool anybody who's ever held the real thing." In the interval, Earth had drawn ahead. The gap between the two planets was widening. "That's another fallacy," objected the training director. "The body can stand just so much acceleration. We're near the limit. What good are faster ships?" "That's your problem," said Demarest. "Get me tougher crewmen. Young, afraid of nothing, able to take it." It always ended here -- younger, tougher, the finest the race produced -- and still not good enough. And after years of training, they had twenty-five months to function as spacemen. It was a precious thing, flight time, and each trip was as short as science could make it. Conjunction was the magic moment for those who went between the planets. It was the heredity block that kept Man squeezed, confined to Earth, Mars and Venus, preventing him from ranging farther. The heredity block was a racial quantity, the germ plasm, but not just that. Crew and passengers were protected as much as possible from radiation encountered in space and that which originated in the ship's drive. The protection wasn't good enough. Prolonged exposure had the usual effects, sterilization or the production of deformed mutations. Man was the product of evolution on a planet. He didn't step out into space without payment. T HE radiation that damaged genes and chromosomes and tinier divisions also struck nerve cells. Any atom might be hit, blazing, into fission and decaying into other elements. The process was complicated. The results were not: the nerve was directly stimulated, producing aural and visual hallucinations. Normally, the hallucination was blanked out. But as the level of body radioactivity increased, so did the strength of the vision. It dominated consciousness. The outside world ceased to have meaning. The hallucination took only one form, a beautiful woman outside the ship, unclad and beckoning. It was the image of vanished fertility that appeared once the person was incapable of reproducing as a human. Why this was so hadn't been determined. Psychologists had investigated and learned only that it invariably occurred after too great exposure. There was another thing they learned. No, that had come first. This was the reason they had investigated. In the Solar System, the greatest single source of radiation, including the hard rays, was the Sun. It was natural that the siren image should seem stronger in that direction, that it should fade or retreat toward its origin. No one had ever returned from compulsive pursuit of the illusionary woman, though in early days radio contact had been made with ships racing toward the Sun. The heredity block was selfenforcing. Deviously, the race protected itself, or something higher watched over it to assure human continuity. Marlowe wasn't sure which, but it was there. "I think you're on the wrong track," he said. "Shield the ship completely and it won't matter how long the trip takes. The crew can work in safety." Demarest grunted. "Some day we'll have an inertia-free drive and it won't matter how much mass we use. It does now. Our designs are a compromise. Both of us have to work with what's possible, not what we dream of. I'll build my ship; you find the right crew to man it." Marlowe went back to his graphs. Machines could be changed, but the human body clung stubbornly to the old patterns. He couldn't select his crews any younger -- but was there perhaps a racial type more resistant to radiation? Where? No place that he knew of. Maybe the biologists could produce one, he thought hopefully, and knew he was fooling himself. Human beings weren't fruit flies ; by the time enough generations rolled around for the resistant strain to breed true -- and leave a surplus to man the ships -- he would be long dead and the problem solved. The best of humanity would be dead, too, wiped out by sterilization. Or the Solar System would be peopled by mutant monstrosities. TT'AR away, and not concerned with the problem, Ethan shrugged resignedly. "Guess we'll have to get used to the idea -- we just won't see him till he grows up -- if we'll still be around." "You've got years and years ahead of you, and not worth a thing the whole time!" Amantha snapped. "Damnation," said Ethan wistfully, "I'd like to dandle him." "Won't be the same when he grows up and comes here," Amantha conceded. "There I go agreein' with you! What's got into me?" "Maybe we can get on the next slow ship. They run them once in a while for people with weak hearts." He considered. "Don't know whether Retired Citizens' Home will let us go, though." "Retired Citizens!" She blew her nose scornfully. "They think we don't know it's just a home for the aged!" She threw away the tissue. "Think they'll let us?" "It won't be them so much that'll stop us. Our hearts ain't too good and we haven't got much space time to use. We shouldn't have gone to Venus." "We had to see Edith and Ed and their kids and we had to come back to Mars so we could be near John and Pearl and Ray. Let's not regret what we've done." She picked at the chair arm. "We've been here a long time, ain't we?" Ethan nodded. "Maybe they've forgotten we've only got a month left," she said eagerly. "You sure it's a month?" "Figure it out. It took longer when we went." "Then it's no use. A slow ship . is all we'd be allowed to take -- and we wouldn't be allowed because it'd be more than a month." "They won't remember every last minute we spent in space." "They will, too," he stated. "They've got records." "Maybe they lost them." "Look, we've got kids and grandchildren here. They come around and see us. Do we have to go to Earth, 'specially when it'd be against the law?" "That's just it," she argued. "We've seen all our other kids' kids. Ain't we going to see the youngest? How do we know his wife can take care of a baby? I can't sleep nights, thinking of it." "Try catnaps during the day, like I do." Amantha touched the button and the automatic chair stopped abruptly. "Are you going to try to get tickets or aren't you?" "I'll think about it. Go ahead and rock." "I won't," she said obstinately, "not even if it was the kind of chair you can rock yourself. I thought I married a man who'd make me happy." "I've always done my best. Go ahead and rock." "But will you try to get the tickets?" Ethan nodded resignedly and felt better when the chair began to swing back and forth. There was no living with a woman when she didn't have peace of mind. ing. Sometimes her hearing was very good, the way it used to be. Other times, it wasn't worth a thing. The way it came and went reminded her of when she was young and used to wonder why old folks couldn't hear. Now she could often lie next to Ethan and not even notice whether he was snoring. Tonight her hearing was good. Footsteps came from the hall, creaky noises of someone trying not to make a sound. She'd lain awake many nights, hearing him come home. She knew who it was and for once she didn't mind. The Home for Retired Citizens had rules. Careful, she thought. There's the bad spot where the floor's thin and bends when you step on it. Then when your foot comes off it. it goes ploinnnnng. They don't build right any more. Skimping and trying to save. But there wasn't a sound. Ethan avoided it. When she thought of it, she realized he had a suspicious amount of skill -- the skill of practice. Ethan was fumbling at the door and she forgot her irritation. She slipped out of bed and swung the door open. He stumbled in against her. " 'Mantha, they laughed -- " "Did you have anything to eat?" she broke in. "Cup of that Mars coffee. But -- " "Don't talk till you get something hot inside. Empty belly, empty head." "Can't eat stuff that comes out of the wall. I'll wait till breakfast." She flicked the light on low and punched the selector. She took the glow-plate from under the bed and set it on the table. As the food arrived, she heated it and began adding spices. "There -- it ain't real food, but you can pretend." Ethan pretended and, when the food was gone, wiped his lips and looked at her. She nodded. "Now you can tell me -- but keep your voice low. Don't wake anyone up." Ethan stretched and creaked. "Went down to the Interplanet office and they wouldn't talk to me. Said there wasn't any ship leaving for the next ten months and they didn't sell tickets in advance. I kept pestering them and they got mad. They looked up our records and said we couldn't go anytime, except on a fast ship, and, considering our age, it was doubtful they'd let us. Didn't give up, though, and finally they said we might get a release from the man who'd take us. Maybe they wanted to get rid of me. Anyway, they sent me down to talk with one of the pilots." straight to the man responsible. Persistence could get you there. "He talked real nice for a while," Ethan continued. "He explained he didn't own the ship and didn't have the say-so who he took. I knew you wanted to go real bad. I offered him the money we'd saved." " All of it, Ethan?" "Don't get mad. Figured it was worth it to you." "Don't believe in paying extra," she mused, "but did you tell him we could borrow some if it wasn't enough?" "Didn't get a chance. He started laughing, saying didn't I understand he got paid not just for each trip, but for all the years after that, when he was finished and had used up his time and couldn't work at the only thing he knew? Saying that he wouldn't risk that kind of security for any money and I was an idiot for believing he might." Ethan trembled. "Never mind. He's an old fool." "He's younger than Jimmy." "Some people get wisdom when they're young." Ethan sat morosely in the chair. "If Jimmy hadn't made that last trip, he'd be here and he'd have married a girl here and his kids would be here. We wouldn't have to worry about them." "I guess so, but he was lucky anyway. They found out he wasn't as strong as he was supposed to be and wouldn't Jet him come back." She began clearing the dishes. "How'd they know he couldn't come back?" "They got tests. They give them each trip." She should have thought of it. They had tests. Because of tests, Jimmy was safe but distant. She sat down. "Tired." Ethan yawned. "Let's go to bed." "You go. I'm thinking." Amantha went on thinking while he undressed and lay down. Sometimes it was difficult -- things weren't as clear as they used to be. Tonight, though, she had no trouble managing her mind. A woman who had kids had to know her way around things. Presently, she said, "Tomorrow I'm going to bake." Ethan stirred. "Won't do no good. Didn't say so, but there was a girl talking to the pilot when I got there. She was crying and begging him to take her to Earth next trip. Said she'd do anything if he would." "Shame on her!" exclaimed Amantha. "But did it work?" "She was young and pretty and still he wouldn't pay attention to her," said Ethan. "What chance would you have?" "I'm going to bake tomorrow. In the morning, we're supposed to go for a walk. We'll take a big basket. Do you remember the old canal nobody goes near any more?" There was no answer. Ethan was asleep. Now that she'd decided what to do, she lay down beside him. T HE sentry huddled in his post. It was insulated and supplied with oxygen, very much like a spacesuit. Though big for a spacesuit, it was a small place to spend hours in without relief. But there were compensations: never anything to do -- except as now. He went to the mike. "Get back," he shouted. They paid no attention. Swearing, he shouted again, turning up the volume. Even in the thin air, he had enough sound to blast them off their feet. But they kept on going. He poked the snout of his weapon through the porthole and then withdrew it. Who'd given him those orders anyway? He didn't have to obey them. He clamped on his oxygen helmet and slipped into electric mitts and hurried outside. "Where do you think you're going?" he demanded, standing in front of them. "Hello," said Amantha. "Didn't see anyone around." Damn senior citizens -- they never used hearing aids. "You've got to turn around and go back," he said. "Why?" He was shivering and didn't see how they could stand it. Thin clothing and obsolete oxygen equipment. Oddly, they could take more than you'd think, though. Used to it, he supposed. "Come on in," he commanded gruffly. He wasn't going to freeze. They followed him into the post. "Didn't you see the signs to keep out?" "But the ships aren't using the field. What harm are we doing?" "Orders," he said. There were still a few pilots checking over their ships, making sure everything was in working condition before they were locked up. In a week, all flight personnel would be gone to the settlements, there to await the next round of voyages when Earth came near. They had it soft, while he, the guard, had to stay in cold discomfort. "We're going to visit a friend of my son," said Amantha. "They were pilots together. Do you object?" He didn't, but there were some who would. The order made sense with respect to little boys who would otherwise swarm over the field, falling off ships or getting stuck in rocket tubes. "What have you got?" he asked, eying Amantha's parcel dubiously. "I baked something." She opened a comer of the package and the smell drifted out. "Made it with Martian fruit. Not much of it around these days." He sniffed and became hungry. That was queer -- he'd eaten before coming on duty. "Okay," he said. "You can go. Don't get caught or it's my neck." He stood closer to the old man and woman, and the package, too, and pointed out the window. "Act like you're leaving in case anyone's checking up. When you get near the line of ships, duck behind them and walk along until you find the right one. No one will see you except me." Amantha pinched the package together. "I'd give you some, but I can't cut it before the pilot sees it." "I guess you can't," said the sentry wistfully. "Maybe he won't eat all of it." "May he won't. I'll bring you back what's left -- if there is any left." Long after they were gone, the sentry stood there, trying to analyze the indefinable odor. He was still standing there when the checkup squad marched in and arrested him for gross dereliction of duty. O away," said the pilot, disappearing from the viewport. Ethan pounded on the hull with a rock. The pilot came back, twisting his face. "Stop it. I'll angle the rocket tubes around and squirt you with them." Ethan raised the rock. "Okay," said the pilot. "I'll talk to you, though I know what you want." Sullenly, he made the hatch swing open. He looked down at them. "All right, let's hear it." "Got a present for you," said Ethan. "Not allowed to take bribes unless it's money." "Young man, where are your manners?" snapped Amantha. "Haven't got any. It's the first thing they train out of you." The pilot started to jerk his head back, saw the rock and decided not to close the hatch. He glanced at the narrow ladder to the ground..."I'll take your present. Bring it up." He stopped smirking as Amantha hitched up her skirts and, holding the package in one hand, swung up the ladder. Agile as goats and probably as sensible, he thought. He took hold of her as she neared the top. "Grandma, you're too old to climb around. You'll break every brittle bone in your body if you fall." "Ain't so brittle," said Amantha, making way for Ethan who had followed her. "My, it's cold!" She began shivering. "Invite us in to get warm." "You can't go in. I'm busy. Hey, wait!" The pilot hurried after her into the control compartment. Amantha was looking around when he arrived. "Cozy but kind of bare," she said. "Why don't you hang up pictures?" "Most fabulous pictures you'll ever see are right there." Amantha followed his glance. "Nothing but Mars. I can see that every day." She puzzled over it. "Oh, you're teasing an old woman. I didn't mean what you see out of the port, stars and planets and such. I'd want a picture of an Indian settin' on a horse." "I'll bet!" muttered the pilot. "Get warm in a hurry. I've got work to do." "You just go ahead," she said. "We'll set here and toast our toes. We don't aim to interfere." "I'll stay," said the pilot hastily. "Let's have the present." He'd made a tactical error -- he should have ignored the noise that went shimmering through the hull when the old man had pounded with a rock. No, it was nice to think he could have, but impossible. Patience was one of the things the aged did have and the young didn't. Amantha set the package down. The pilot scrambled ahead of her and got the navigator's instruments off the desk and into the drawer. She opened and displayed the contents. "I baked it for you," she said. "It's a cake.""Hate cake," he said. "Can't eat it." "You'll eat this. Canalberry shortcake." "Canalberry?" he asked, wrinkling his face. He smelled it and changed expressions in the middle of a wrinkle. Resolutely, he turned away from it and saw Ethan clearly, perhaps for the first time. It was the old man who had tried to bribe him a few days ago. They weren't as innocent as they seemed. What were they trying to do? "Ain't you even going to taste it?" she urged. He shuddered suspiciously. It smelled good, though he had told the truth about hating the stuff. Under other circumstances, he might have nibbled at a piece for politeness' sake. "Can't. Doctor's orders." "Diabetic? Didn't think they let them in space-service," said Amantha. "Funny, it's the same with Ethan. He can't eat sweets, either." She looked at her creation. "Seems a shame to bring it so far to somebody who can't touch it. Do you mind if I cut myself a slice?" "Go ahead, Grandma." "Amantha," she corrected him and brought out a knife and two small plates. He wondered if there was any significance. Two plates. She laid a slice on the plate and poked at it with a fork that was also in the package. She put the fork down and picked up the cake. "It don't taste right unless you eat it the way it was meant to be," she said. He watched her in anguish. His nose quivered and his stomach rumbled. He shouldn't have let them in. A crumb fell to the floor and Amantha reached for it. She straightened up, a berry in her hand. "Canalberries," she said. "They're nearly all gone. Used to be you could hardly go anywhere without stepping in them." She crushed the berry and the rich aroma swept devastatingly through the air. "Sure you won't have some?" she asked, slicing the cake and placing it in front of him. When he finished that, he cut another, and another, until the cake was gone. The pilot settled logily in a chair and dozed off. Amantha and Ethan watched him in silence. The pilot got up and began to stretch lazily without seeming to notice them. The laziness disappeared and the stretch changed into a jerk that seemed to elongate his body. He sprang out of the compartment and went leaping down the corridor. When he came to the hatch, he didn't hesitate. The ladder was too slow. He jumped. He landed on the sand, sinking in to his knees. He extricated himself and went bounding over the field. "Never saw Canalberries take so long," muttered Amantha. "Don't know what's wrong. Nothing's as good as it used to be." She shook off her hat and closed the airlock. "You don't need those nose plugs any more, Ethan. Come on, let's see if you remember."  twirled unfamiliar knobs and, by persistence and beginner's luck, managed to get the person she wanted. "You the commander?" Since he had a harassed look, she assumed he was. "Thought you might be worried about that poor boy." "Madam, what do you want?" He scowled at the offscreen miscreant who had mistakenly summoned him. "I'm chasing criminals. I haven't got time to chat about old times." "Don't sass me. I thought you might want to know how to stop that poor boy from running around." The commander sat down. "What young man?" he asked calculatingly. "Don't know his name," said Amantha. "He ran out of the ship before we could ask him." "So you're the poisoner," said the commander coldly. "If he dies, neither your age nor your sex will make any difference." "Just canalberries," Amantha assured him. "Reckon you wouldn't know about them." "What are you talking about?" "Canalberries. Used to be lots of them. Males, men and animals, just can't help eating them. Don't bother women or any other kind of females. Biologists used to tell us it was a seedscattering device. Guess so. Won't hurt him none. Try bicarb and vinegar It'll fix him up." "For your sake, I hope it will!" said the commander. "He's in a bad way." He stabbed a pencil at her and his voice became stern. "If you follow directions, I'm sure I can get you off lightly" "Think we will?" said Amantha. The commander hurried on. "It's hard to find a ship in space. Stay where you are or, if you can, turn around and come back -- slowly. We'll send a ship up and transfer a competent pilot to bring you down. Do you hear?" "Real plain. You got good radios on these ships." He smothered a growl. "Your lives are in danger. We're not going to chase out and rescue you unless you cooperate." It was an understatement. If they observed radio silence, search ships would never find them. They might not think of it, but he wouldn't bet. They were smart enough to steal the ship. There was another thing. From what he'd learned from records, they were close to the exposure limit. Any moment now, they might go berserk, turning their course fatally toward the Sun. He had to be careful what he said. "We'll get you out of this, but only if you help. I refuse to sacrifice men and waste their flight time, which is more precious than any ship, merely to save two senile incompetents. Is this clear?" "I suppose," said Amantha. "We've got to go home." The commander rubbed his hands. They weren't as stubborn as he feared. He'd rescue them. "Good. I'll have men aloft in a few minutes." "Guess it was you who didn't hear," she said. "Our home is on Earth." II the robot blocking the door. "We'll wait." Amantha tried to go inside. The robot wouldn't move. It was dark and windy and, from the steps, they could see lights of houses glowing around them. Not many -- it was near the edge of the little town. Farther away, over the hill, the ship nestled safely in a valley. No one had seen them land. They were sure of it. Ethan removed his hat and his bent shoulders straightened. He seemed to grow taller. "Rain," he said in awe. "Thirty years and yet I haven't forgotten what it's like." "It's wet, that's what it's like," said Amantha. "Robot, let us in or I'll have Ethan take a wrench to you. He loves to tinker." "I can't be threatened. My sole concern is the welfare of my charge. Also, I'm too large for any human to hurt me." "Damnation, I'm soppin'!" complained Ethan. "It's better to remember the rain than to be in it." "Wait till my son Jimmy gets back. He'll be ravin'. Makin' us stay out here and get soaked." "Son? Is the Jimmy you refer to Pilot James Huntley?" "Ex-pilot." "Correct. But he's not at home. He took his wife to the hospital half an hour ago." "So soon?" gasped Amantha. "Thought I taught him better than that. Women have got to rest between kids." "It's not another child." said the robot with disinterest. "It has to do with one of the ills flesh is heir to and machines are not. Nothing serious." Ethan fidgeted, turning up his collar. Water began flowing from the eaves. "Stop arguin' and let us in. Jimmy will turn off your juice when he finds you've kept his folks outside." "Folks? He has none here. A mother and father living happily on Mars. They died quite recently, lost in space and plunging into the Sun." "Make up your mind," Amantha said peevishly. "We ain't on Mars, we weren't happy and we didn't get lost and plunge into the Sun." "I merely repeat -- in sequence -- the information I'm given or overhear. If it's inconsistent, so are humans. I'm used to it." " 'Mantha, they think we're dead," said Ethan. He wiped a raindrop away. "Poor Jimmy!" A thin wail came from a crack in the door. The robot's eyes shone briefly, then dimmed. "What's that?" asked Amantha. "Sounds like a baby. Thought you said no one was home." "No responsible adult. Only a child. Because of that, I can admit no one except the parents -- or a doctor if I decide one is needed." The robot whirred and drew itself up. "He's absolutely safe. I'm a Sitta." "You sure are. Now get out of my way before I jab you. The kid's crying." "He is, but it's no concern of yours. I'm better acquainted with infant behavior than any human can be. The pathetic sob merely means that the child wants attention. I was given no instructions to hold him."needs to be told?" demanded Amantha. "Nobody gives grandmothers instructions." "He's got a grandfather to cuddle him," added Ethan. "How far do you think we came to do it?" "And he's not cry in' because he wants attention. Something's stickin' him and he's hungry. Don't you think a grandmother would know?" "There's nothing that can stick him, but if, by accident, something sharp had gotten in his bed and if he were also hungry, he would sound like this." The Sitta hunched down and swiveled its head, giving an imitation. "You see? I do nothing but watch babies. It's built info me." Inside the house, the child's tone changed, became querulous, listening. Interrogatively, it offered a single yowl. "My analysis was correct. It wanted attention. The parents left so hurriedly, they forgot to give me permission. When I didn't come to investigate, the child stop -- " The wail burst forth with renewed vigor. The robot rotated its head and the alert look flashed on and off. It stuttered, "I know w-what I'm doing. But I -- I can tell only what has happened to my charge, n-never what will!" The Sitta rumbled bewilderedly. "Anticipation is beyond my capacity. The child is hurt and hungry. Please come in and help me." Triumphantly, Amantha followed the robot into the house toward the nursery. She whispered to Ethan, "Sittas ain't smart. I reckon he never heard a bunch of babies together. If one cries, they all do." The Sitta barred the path. "You seem sincere and are obviously an expert. But before you go in, understand this -- attempt no harm to the being in there. I'm linked." "You'll be unlinked if you don't stop acting balky," warned Amantha. She ducked under his arm and darted toward the crib. "By linked, I mean that if anything happens that I require aid to handle, an alarm rings in Sittas Circle and help is on the way. Meanwhile, I can put out fires or carry him unharmed through concrete walls." "Go ahead, run through a wall," invited Amantha abstractly, snatching up the child. "The darling's wet, too. Fetch me a diaper." The robot fetched at her command. And when the child was quiet, even cooing, but with a sharp undertone of protest, Amantha settled back. "Now we've got to feed him." "They didn't give me special instructions and I can't originate. If you hadn't come. I'd have had to contact a doctor." Amantha handed the child to Ethan. "You hold him." She went into the kitchen. Ethan tossed the child up. "Here we go," he bellowed. "Free fall. Got to start early to make a spaceman out of y#u." The Sitta stared at them, puzzled, as the infant shrieked with fear or joy. "Now if only Jimmy was here to see us," said Ethan, grinning proudly. Jimmy didn't come back soon enough. The police arrived first. dow. The ground was far below. He didn't want to think of what was outside the door. "Don't mind jail myself -- been in a few." He looked at Amantha. "Just for raising hell. Never thought I'd be responsible for putting you behind bars." "It wasn't you," said Amantha, her back straightening. "Curious about it myself." Wisps of hair straggled over her face. "I mean why didn't we think of it on Mars? Didn't we know what they'd do?" "I guess we didn't." Ethan cracked his knuckles contemplatively. "Did it occur to you?" "No. I can't understand." She frowned, but it didn't help clarify what she was thinking about. "We're criminals," said Ethan soberly. "Thieves." "I don't mind for us. Jail's not much worse than the home for Retired Citizens. It's our grandson I'm thinking of." "Don't worry. They won't do a thing to him." His eyes widened and he wiped off the sweat. "Oh. I see what you mean." "Jailbirds," said Amantha. "We'll still be in here when he grows up. It's a fine way to help your kin. They'll never trust him with us in his family." "Jailbirds," repeated Ethan mournfully. By some magic, his face cracked along the wrinkles and broke into a smile. "But once we flew," he whispered to himself. The door opened and an official of some sort came in. Outside, Ethan caught a brief glimpse of guards. Marlowe, chief training director of space pilots for Interplanet Transport, Inc., walked in silence across the room and eased tiredly into a chair behind the desk. He'd gotten the news late at night, having been the first one contacted. The ship that had been lost had showed up in the atmosphere. There couldn't be a mistake. No other flight was scheduled for months. "Follow it," he had ordered and the trackers had kept it on the screen, flashing a message to the police as soon as they located where it landed. It was logical that it should go where it did, but he didn't think that anything about this flight was susceptible to a rational approach. Marlowe's eyelids felt lined with sand, but that was as nothing compared to his mental irritation. The two oldsters were dead and the ship was vaporized in the Sun. But, of course, it wasn't true and he had to figure out why. Others would be here to help him unravel the mystery, from Demarest on down. Meanwhile, he was first. There was a lesson to learn if he could figure out what it was. Damn these senile incompetents. "Ethan and Amantha Huntley?" he asked. They didn't fit in with his preconceived picture. "You the judge?" said Ethan. "I demand to see a lawyer. We've got our rights." "Why don't you let our son in?" Amantha protested. "I know he's been dying to see us. You can't keep us locked up like this." "Please! I've just come from a consultation with your son. You'll see him soon. As for being detained, you've keen well treated. Most of the time, doctors have been examining you. Isn't that true?" "What's that got to do with it?" challenged Ethan. "Never been sick a day in my life. Sure, my back hurts, and now and then my knees swell up. But it's nothing. We didn't ask for a doctor. Got our own on Mars. Young fellow, fifty or sixty." other. They were what Marlowe expected and yet they weren't. It was hard to determine. Records showed that if the old couple were not actually senile incompetents, they were close to it. Now that they'd returned the ship in good condition, legal action against them would be dangerous. Everyone had grandparents and knew that they were sometimes foolish. It was a spot to get out of as gracefully as the company could. It was as training director for Interplanet Transport, however, that he was interested in them. "You were in space for nearly four months," he said. "Few people take that much exposure to radiation at one time. We had to determine the state of your health. The evaluation isn't complete, but I think we can say you're in no immediate danger." Did they understand? It was doubtful. No one else would have stolen the ship and attempted to bring it to Earth. But, damn it, they had done so, landing the ship on the outskirts of the little town, unobserved in the gathering storm. The facts were painfully fresh in his mind. "I'd like to know something of your background," said Marlowe. "What's your experience with spaceships?" "Went to Venus in one," Ethan answered. "Also took a trip to Mars. Stayed there." The old man had haunted the control compartment, watching how it was done. Some people did. But that was not a substitute for experience. "That was long ago and you were a passenger. Anything more recent?" "Nope. Except for this last trip." That was what didn't make sense. "Are you sure? Be honest. Check your memory." The old man had once piloted jets. But it was not the same. "No other experience," said Ethan. "Had training, though." Marlowe knew it. Without training, no one could manage takeoff and landing. Somehow, the official search had failed to uncover this vital information. "Where did you take it?" "Forget the name. Remember every word of it, though." Marlowe nodded. It was often the case. Early memories were fresh and clear while later events blew over the enfeebled mind and left no trace. "But you didn't tell me where." "Don't remember that part of it. It was a mighty good course. Wasn't accepted, even though I passed, after paying for my lessons in advance. They said I was too old." Air lodged in his throat -- Marlowe doubled over. If he'd heard rightly... Good God, there were angels and correspondence courses that watched over the aged! No -- give the credit to angels. "I realized I wasn't as spry as I used to be," continued Ethan seriously. "Can't shoot off a planet or slam down on one the way your pilots do. We were at the far end of the field, quite a ways off. Everybody was busy with the pilot who was running around. They were trying to help him. "Guess they didn't see us. They'd have laughed if they did. We went up slow, kind of wobbly. But we got off." T'HE old man was beaming, proud of it. He didn't know it wasn't skill but the built-in safety factor, all the stabilizing mechanisms corrfing into play at once. Demarest, the chief of construction, had seen to it that the ships were well designed. Marlowe would have to commend him when he got here. A thought occurred to the training director. If the stabilizing mechanisms were there, why not use them always? Of course, it wasn't that simple. Interplanetary ship stabilizers weren't effective at high speed. Another thought crowded in. Why such high speed? That was something over which there was no choice. The protective atmosphere had to be left swiftly. The speed was added to at every opportunity. It was possible to slow down only at the last moment. Otherwise... Otherwise what? There was no escape from the conclusion -- otherwise heredity was altered and mutations would result. Marlowe sat back. This was true without exception. It was the biggest factor that controlled the conditions of interplanetary flight. But -- They'd had their children! Marlowe's pulse increased. As training director, he'd learned not to leap at things that merely looked good. He had to examine them carefully. But -- well, it was a new approach, though he couldn't really expect anything from it. There was more to a crew than a pilot, more to space flight than one incredible lucky voyage, for angels took vacations, too. "You weren't on duty at all times," Marlowe pointed out. "Then there's navigation." "Don't sleep much," said Ethan. "Catnap once in a while." He thought it over. "When I did sleep, 'Mantha helped out." He looked at her. "I'm not the expert on navigation. You'd better ask her." "No!" cried Marlowe. "Why not? Just because I'm a woman?" Her eyes were bright. "But who taught you navigation?" Amantha sniffed. "Look here, young man, don't tell me what I can learn." She closed her eyes and imagination carried her back to the ship. "Lots of dials and gadgets -- but I used to have near as many in my kitchen before they said I was too old to cook. Anyway, you don't have to figure it out on paper. If you look at things just right, you sort of know where you are." "First, you take a big handful of the Sun's attraction and mix it with a bigger scoop of the gravitation of the planet you happen to be on. For us, that was Mars. Then you add a pinch of acceleration. That's what makes you rise. When you get out a ways, you decrease Mars and add more Earth and another pinch of Sun, stirring it around in your mind each day until it feels just right." She smiled. "I never did hold with too much measuring." The muscles in Marlowe's chest felt cramped from holding his breath in. While she spoke, he could almost believe she knew what she was doing, that she had a knack for it. Perhaps she did -- brief flashes of clarity swept over her senile, beclouded mind. And the same with the old man. These instances of sanity -- and luck -- had pulled them through. The ship was back, unharmed. He shouldn't ask for more. And yet -- they had made it to Earth. The chute in the desk clattered noisily and ejected a packet. Marlowe looked at it -- it was for him. The full medical report; it had been slow in coming. But this was a small town. The doctor who had looked them over was good, though. Marlowe made certain of that. He opened the report and read. When he finished, he knew that though luck and angels had been with them on takeoff and part of the passage -- along with dimly remembered fragments of unrelated skills that had somehow coalesced into a working knowledge of how to run a ship -- it wasn't the whole story. When they landed on Earth, it was no miracle. They had known what they were doing. "What is it?" asked Ethan. "Habeas corpus?" "No," said Marlowe. But in one sense it was, though of a kind that no mere judge could return a verdict on. He read the report again. "No evidence of mental senility," it said in part. "Micro-samples of brain cells seem to be taken from someone about forty or fifty. Physical reactions are slow but firm and consistent. There are puzzling aspects. Certain obscure functions apparently are those of septegenarians. Others are in keeping with the mental age. The weakest organs govern, of course; they should live another thirty years, as if they really were in their seventies. However, locomotion and judgment should not be impaired until the very end. Query: Are you sure these are the people I was supposd to examine? I couldn't find that deep, inoperable, though non-malignant tumor the man was supposed to have." Marlowe folded and refolded the report. Radiation could kill. But it could also cure. It was a standard treatment. But never so drastic and not on the aged for this purpose. He had come at once on two monumental discoveries. both by accident. How many discoveries were accidental? These two wouldn't live longer, but they would have a better life and in full possession of their senses. "Sure, we borrowed -- stole the ship," said Ethan abruptly, interrupting Marlowe's thoughts. "You got it back, but that don't change things. We've got money. We might have enough to pay for most of the fuel." "It's not necessary. We'll charge it off as an experiment." Marlowe tried to frown. Perhaps he succeeded. "In return for not prosecuting, I want you to abandon your pension and go to work for Interplanet Transport." Ethan's joints creaked as he sat up eagerly. "Work it off? Sounds fair." There were wrinkles on his face and there never would be any less, but they weren't as deep as they had been, not when they formed the network of a smile. "I can sweep out a ship. Maybe you'd even let me go on a trip once in a while. I could be a cabin boy." They had been considered useless and incapable for so long that they still didn't realize what he was saying. They weren't childish, but they thought they were. Re-education would have to proceed slowly. "I had a trip in mind for you," said Marlowe. "And Amantha will have to go to work, too." "Young man, it's been a long time since I cooked anything but one canalberry shortcake, but you just watch what I can stir up." "I've got just the place for you," Marlowe answered. "One more stipulation -- don't talk about your experiences. If reporters come around, and I think they will, say merely that we traced the ship and, after conferring with you, decided to drop all charges. Understand?" Amantha nodded. "Look bad for you, wouldn't it? Not guarding the ships any better than that, I mean." He was thankful their minds had merely been resharpened, that they would never regain their original edge. She was right -- it would look bad. Also, the company had competitors. And by the time they got wind of it, he wanted to have a head-start. Only a few of the aged would fit in with his plans, though the rest would benefit, and by more than a change of status. Marlowe nodded. "That's it. Report tomorrow and we'll go over your assignments." "Guess you don't know what we're like," said Ethan. "We've hardly seen our littlest grandson yet. What do you suppose we stole -- experimented with the ship for?" Marlowe watched them go and, as the door closed, began to write hurriedly. The others would be here soon. He wanted to have it summarized by the time they arrived. Half an hour later, he looked at what he'd put down. It was on the back of the medical report. "Memo: Change the design of our lastest ship. Instead of a heavy-hulled, superfast rocket, requiring the utmost in bodily coordination and stamina, reverse every specification. Permeability to radiation no objection." He chuckled. Demarest would threaten to resign. It violated every precept he had ever learned. But the engineer would change his mind when he saw the rest of it. speed need not be high. Emphasis should be placed on safety. Must be maneuverable by operators whose reactive time is not fast, but whose judgment and foresight are trustworthy. Stress simplicity. "Memo No. #: Inaugurate another class of service. In addition to fast speedy passages when planets are close, a freight system that can operate continuously is now possible. The planets will open up faster if a steady supply route can be maintained. Older passengers will be a mainstay, especially since therapeutic value is sure to be disclosed. Estimated time to prepare for first run -- one year minimum. "Memo No. #: Recruiting. Do not overlook the most unlikely skill. It may indicate undisclosed ability of high order. "Training: Blank. Improvise as you go along!" Marlowe got up. He thought he heard planes overhead. If so, he had something for them. He'd have to argue, but he felt up to it. The sand had disappeared from his eyes. His step was lighter, too. And that was because of another item he hadn't written down. He wouldn't forget. He was in the mid-forties and would have to begin learning. It was the awkward age -- too old -- too young. He couldn't hope to pilot the murderously fast ships currently in use. And he couldn't take his place in the clumsy tubs that would soon be swinging between the planets, opening up space to commerce. He would have to wait, but what he learned now would be useful some day. It would be better integrated for having been long buried in his memory. A vintage aspiration. When he was immune to the mutating effects of radiation, old and nearly sleepless, he could retire from this career -- into a better one. Earth's only defense against the aliens was a weaponless ship and a grim little crew -- very grim and very little! the Solar Guard had no business being where he was at the moment. He took his wide leather belt in another notch and eyed himself critically. First, gleaming space boots, then flaring breeches of midnight black and finally, a soft, snug-fitting, high-collared tunic with the insignia of the Guard which was a crimson lightning flash running diagonally across the front. Andros of the Imperial Legion hurtled up through the thin atmosphere... The Colonel's hands caressed the smooth butts of the snubnosed weapons that hung at each hip and then slid away to hang carelessly at his sides. He turned his back to the hatch that led into the control room of the Glorious , took two casual steps and then, without warning, spun around as his hands went streaking for his guns. A split-second later, he stood catlike, poised on the balls of his feet, both guns trained steadily on the glaring image of himself that was reflected in the mirror surface of the port. Andros of the Imperial Legion hurtled up through the thin atmosphere on a mission of interstellar conquest... "Faster than ever," said the warlike figure with stern satisfaction and then, holstering his weapons and adjusting his dress helmet to a jaunty angle, he threw open the hatch that led into the control room of the Glorious and entered with a measured military stride. Somebody barked "Attention!" and ten sets of heels clicked together. Captain Shirey stepped forward and saluted. "All present and accounted for, sir." T HE owners of the ten sets of heels had no more business being where they were than did their Colonel. The starship Glorikeep out painted in foot-high letters on one side of her main entrance port and trespassers will be prosecuted on the other -- warnings that had been blithely ignored by the guard when the headlights of the battered old flyer that had brought them out blinked out the three shorts and three longs that activated the landing lock. For a few years after her return from Alpha Centauri, a small maintenance crew had been kept on the Glorious. But, as existence became more and more peaceful and settled and Man slowly adjusted to the idea that there was no longer any place to go, these were withdrawn until, finally, the last watchman was removed as being an unnecessary charge against the public funds. There was talk, for a while, of mounting a warper on her and turning her into a museum, but nobody was really interested except the youngsters -- and youngsters don't have votes -- so it was finally decided to leave her circling in her lonely orbit as a perpetual monument to the men who had taken her out for the first and last time. "At ease" As his command relaxed, Colonel Faust stepped out of role. "Look here, gang," he said, "we've worked through those old operational manuals of my grandfather's until we know them backward. I figure it's about time we put some of what we know to work. What would you think of the idea of turning on the big vision screen?" Captain Shirey looked at him dubiously. "To run the scanners, you've got to have power -- and that means turning on the main pile." "So what, Wimpy? All we have to do is just like the manuals say. We've done it a dozen times in dry runs." The other still looked doubtful. "If you make a mistake when you're just pretending, nothing blows up. And anyway, just being up here would get us in enough trouble, if anybody caught us. If we start turning things on and maybe break something, then we'd really catch it. Why can't we just keep on pretending the same way we have been?" "Because," said his commander patiently, "you can only learn so much by pretending -- and we've learned all we can that way. We've got to get some practice done on the real thing if we're going to be ready when the invaders come. There won't be any pretending then, not when you got to stand back and watch your own sister being dragged off to be a slave. You just think about that for a while." think about it but, somehow, the only reaction he could get to the idea of his sister being stolen was one of relief rather than regret. "They take old Emily, they'll be sorry," he said finally. Bill started to nod agreement, then caught himself. "Look," he said, "four times now we've sneaked out my father's old flyer while he was out of town and slipped up here -- and all we've done is pretend. We got to start really running things if we're going to get trained right. The invaders come in and who else is going to stop them? Those pooping little police boats with a ten-mile ceiling and maybe one medium paralyzer on them?" Wimpy still looked doubtful. "You let me do the worrying," said Bill. "I got more right to be here than most people." Halfway between Earth and Venus there was a sudden shimmer as the Vegan ship slipped out of warp into normal space. It hung motionless for a minute as the alien commander checked his instruments and his armament. Faust did have more right than most to be on board the Glorious. In his room at home, under his bed, was his great-grandfather's space-chest. In it laythe worn diary that recorded the first high hopes when the Glorious took off, then the boredom, then the bitterness and disillusionment that came when Alpha Centauri was found to be a barren and lifeless system. Bill Faust knew it almost by heart, that chronicle of the young man who went out on the first -- and last -- starship ever to be constructed, of the middle-aged man who arrived, of the old man who returned to find space-flight a thing of the past and the reports of the expedition that had consumed his life used as final proof of the DeWitt hypothesis that there could be no life on other systems. There had been a time when those whose dreams were strong enough to stand the shock of crossing over into what adults called "the real world" had some place to go, once they reached the other side. For these, being young was a time of waiting and training for the day when new strength could be tested against whatever lay beyond the safe frontiers. First, seas and continents, then the upper air and the pushing of limits toward the Moon, the planets, until, these once conquered, young eyes turned toward the beckoning beacons of the distant stars themselves. There had been such a time, but it existed no longer. With the coming of the warpers -- those strange contraptions that could so twist the fabric of space that Man and his materials could instantaneously be moved from any place where there was a transmitter to any other where there was a receiver -- Mars and Venus were nearer than the corner drugstore. Once they had been set up, space-flight died. There was no point in spending months traveling from one planet to another, when one could do it in a fraction of a second, merely by stepping in one door and out the other. PTHE one star that could be reached had been reached. The Glorious had returned to slam shut the last gateway to adventure. As for the other stars, they were distant lonely things that hung so far out of reach, only astronomers any longer viewed them with more than casual interest. The great mathematicians and physicists had proved so conclusively that a faster-than-light drive was impossible, nobody bothered to check their figures any longer. Life was snug and easy and pleasant -- and, above all, sensible. Only the youngsters still dreamed of danger and the search for strange things in far places. And, since the best of the psy# chologists said that a temporary sojourn into a world of makebelieve was important to the growing process, the young ones were permitted to assume such strange warlike disguises as were necessary to take them into imaginary worlds of high adventure -- providing, of course, that they weren't too noisy about it and emerged in time for supper with clean hands and clean faces... "Check pile controls!" As usual. Colonel Faust had won his point. "All on full safety, sir," said Second Lieutenant Randolph with a most unmilitary quaver in his voice. He was the most junior of the junior officers, a precocious nine-year-old who was four or five years younger than the rest of the Guardsmen and he had an unfortunate habit of bursting into tears during moments of stress. He was already sniffling slightly, when Bill came over to check the control positions against the diagram he'd memorized. With a curt nod of approval, Cqlonel Faust went over to his position at the coordination board and grasped the red handle of the master pile control. "Power on!" He pulled back slowly until the lever clicked into the normal operation slot. In the pile room of the Glorious, control rods slid smoothly back until they were checked by the safety catches. There was a faint hum of transformers as the long-neglected ship warmed to life. "Battle screen on!" A Guardsman frowned in concentration and slowly began to throw the switches that linked the great screen with the scanners set in the outer hull. There was a flicker and then a few tiny white spots blinked on to show meteors large enough to be detected. But, aside from these, there was nothing to show that the screen had been powered. Colonel Faust gave a grunt of satisfaction, rose to his feet and faced his Guardsmen. "Your attention, gentlemen," he said in a tone of command. T EN grim-faced Guardsmen leaned forward expectantly as he pointed dramatically to the empty screen. "As you can see, the Plutonian fleet is approaching in a cone formation with their heaviest ships at the tip. These are carrying a deadly new weapon, the Q-ray. Our mission is to break through the cone and destroy the flagship, from which the Warlord of Pluto is personally directing the operations of his fleet. Earth expects every man to do his duty." He paused and then barked, "Engage!" PT'HE Guardsmen hunched at their positions as their imaginations suddenly populated the empty screen with a hurtling cone of enemy ships. Many were the fierce encounters in the next few hours, and close were the brushes with death. When the Glorious tore through the outer cone of Plutonian ships and came within range of the shimmering web of Q-rays, the Guardsmen reacted to the fiery touch in quite different fashions. Their Colonel had invented the new weapon on the spur of the moment and there had been no chance for agreement as to just what its effects would be. Bill remained seated at the coordination board, his face set in a mask of heroic and Promethian suffering. Wimpy, on the other hand, went threshing around on the control room floor, howling that his skin was coming off and that his bones were turning to limp and rubbery things. The rest of the Guards were so impressed by his performance that it wasn't long before the whole contingent, Bill included, were writhing on the floor like wounded snakes. "The Warlord is making a run for it!" Colonel Faust's voice rang through the general hubbub. "We've got to intercept him. Stations!" Deaf to all but the call of duty, the dying Guardsmen summoned up strength from some hidden reserve and crawled painfully back to their posts on the supposedly rotting stumps of what once had been arms and legs. Colonel Faust fought for five minutes before he was able to reach the master controls. A wavering cheer went up as they once more began to creep up on the ship of the tyrant. He fought back desperately, his great guns hammering shot after shot into the Glorious, but still the gallant ship drove on, her mighty drive tubes incandescent under the overload. "Prepare to ram!" As the Glorious went into her final dive, the game was suddenly terminated by a harsh clangor from the proximity alarm and a red dot jumped into being in the upper left corner of the vision screen. As it crawled toward the center, alarm after alarm went off until the control room was filled with a clanging din. "Shut those things off!" yelled Bill. Jimmie Ozaki, the Guardsman at the detection station, kicked over a series of switches and the noise suddenly stopped. "What is it?" Jimmie stared at the instruments in front of him, as if he'd never seen them before. "If I'm reading these things right, whatever it is would be about fifteen thousand miles out and coming in fast, I'd say. It just popped up out of no place. So I guess I'm not reading these things right." Bill went over and made a quick check. "You are." "Couldn't be a meteor, could it?" asked Wimpy. Bill shook his head. "If it was. it would show up as a white dot. Red indicates radiation of some sort. The only thing I can figure out is that somebody is out there in a flyer." "Ain't no flyer can travel that fast," objected Ozaki. "And how come it popped up like it did? Even if it were coasting along with its drive off, its mass would still have registered on the detectors." Bill stared up at the screen uneasily. "Could be that the scanners are out of kilter somehow. You keep checking, Jimmie." reported as being only a hundred miles away and slowing rapidly. And then Jimmie Ozaki let out a sudden yell. "It's hitting us with some sort of a high frequency beam. Looks as if it might be in the communication band." "Try and tune it in, but don't answer." The Guardsman at the communication station leaned over his controls. A moment later a speaker came to life. A hissing stream of sibilants came from it, sounds like nothing that had ever been produced by human vocal apparatus. The message was repeated twice and then the speaker went silent. So did the Guardsmen. Bill was the first to speak. There was a nervous smile on his face when he did. "It must be a police boat," he said in a strained voice. "They must of spotted us sneaking up here and they're trying to throw a scare into us. We're in for it, now." "That's no police boat, and you know it," whispered Wimpy. "The flyers they got couldn't go out that far, even if they wanted to." "It's moving in again." Bill swung quickly to the detection station. "Can you pick that up on visual?" "I'll try." The detection screen blanked out for a minute, then lit up again to show a silver speck hanging in darkness. "Crank her up!" As power was thrown into the magnifiers, the strange ship swelled in size until it filled half the screen, a gleaming sphere that was like nothing that was recognizable. "Still think that's a police boat?" said Wimpy in a strained voice. Bill didn't answer. He watched in horrified fascination as the strange ship hurtled toward the Glorious. It looked as if it were on a collision course, but it suddenly began to decelerate and then, finally, curved into a path that put it in orbit around the Glorious. "How close now?" Ozaki, at the detection station, had trouble getting his eyes off the screen long enough to read his instruments. "Less than a mile," he said finally. "What now?" squeaked somebody. Nobody had an immediate answer. The Guardsmen looked at each other and then at the suddenly strange control room, where everything now seemed to be constructed on a scale several sizes too large for them. It was a place for men, not for boys. They all turned to Bill and waited for him to say something. For a moment, he couldn't. He was being pulled in two directions at once. Panic tugged at him, panic that threatened momentarily to seize control of his legs and send him bolting to the safety of the old flyer that sat in the landing lock. Against this urge to flee was the dawning realization that they were no longer playing a game which could be discontinued at will. It was like a nightmare where one has suddenly lost the saving knowledge that he can always wake up if things get too bad. T O run or to stand, to retreat from grim reality or to face it -- the decision had to be made. Bill was standing on the line that separates the child from the man and he had to move one way or the other. He looked at the men ; acing shape on the screen, then at the frightened faces of the other boys who were waiting for him to take the lead. He dropped his eyes and it seemed as if the deck plates beneath his feet had turned to glass, so that he could see the smug, defenseless world that stretched out below. A tidy, rational world that had long ago given up such childish things as arms and armies -- and spaceships. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low they could hardly hear him. "We've got to stay," he said. When the words penetrated, there was a shuffling of feet and a muttering of disagreement. "We shouldn't have come out here in the first place!" said Wimpy. Second Lieutenant Randolph began to sniffle. "I want to go home," he announced. "Right now!" "Me too," said Ozaki, "and I'm going. Let's get out of here before it's too late." He started to sidle toward the door. The rest wavered, then began to follow him. Bjll hesitated only a moment, then dashed across the control room and slammed the door shut. "Wait!" he shouted, throwing himself in front of it. "It's already too late. You can't get away now." Captain Shirey forgot about military courtesy and cocked one hard fist under his superior's nose. "You get out of the way or you're going to get a bust on the snoot!" "You've got to listen to me," said Bill frantically. "That thing's only a mile away from us and we're three hundred miles out from Earth. You saw how fast it can go. If it's looking for trouble, do you think it's just going to sit by and let us pull away in that old flyer?" Wimpy started to answer and then stopped. He let his fist drop slowly to his side. "Maybe you're right," he said slowly. "But if we don't run, then what?" "Just sit for a while and see what happens. From the way that ship's acting, they must figure the Glorious has been abandoned. They'd never have come this close, if they didn't. If they're just snooping around and don't catch on that anybody's in here, maybe they'll just go away." There were wistful glances toward the door, but after a moment, the whole contingent straggled back to their positions. As they watched the alien ship, a square hatch opened in its gleaming spherical hull. There was a suggestion of movement and then a long, torpedo-shaped object slowly emerged and floated free alongside the ship. There was something seated on it -- something that wasn't human! It wore a wheel-shaped spacesuit with a hemispherical vision dome bulging out from the center. flame from the rear of the torpedo and then it sped away from the alien ship, twisting and looping about. The thing riding on it moved busily for a moment, adjusting the controls. Then he brought it to a halt with its nose pointing toward the Glorious. "What do you think they're figuring on doing with that?" asked Wimpy in a shaky voice. "Using it on us." "What for?" "How many other spaceships does Earth have? Once the Glorious is knocked out, there's nothing left that can be used against them." "But this thing can't fight," protested Wimpy. "And there's nobody left that knows how to run her." "She could fight once," said Bill grimly. "Maybe she still can. And there is somebody left to run her -- us" He turned his back to the screen and snapped, "Stations!" The Guard slowly took on a semblance of order. "All positions on. And I mean really on! We aren't playing any longer. I want an immediate report on the condition of this tub." There was hesitation for a moment, then a sudden flurry of action at each position as switches were thrown and instruments read. When they came, the reports weren't very encouraging. "All drives disconnected." The Glorious couldn't run away. "No missiles in the racks." "No shells in the lockers." The Glorious couldn't fight. "There's got to be something," said Bill as he went over to the gunnery station. The Guardsman at the controls looked up unhappily and pointed to the long row of little red plates that registered the number of rounds available for each gun. Each was blinking and automatic trackers are still operational, but that doesn't help any." Bill stood thinking a minute. "Maybe it can," he said finally and went back to the coordination board. "Look, gang," he said. "What we know and what they know are two different things. They've no way of knowing that those guns aren't loaded. Maybe we can pull a bluff." "And if we can't?" said somebody. He shrugged. "Somebody got a better idea? We can't just sit here and let them blow up the ship." shout and pointed toward the screen. Bill spun around and saw the alien was leaving the torpedo and returning to his ship. He felt a sudden dryness in his throat. "This is it!" he. yelled. "All guns on target!" There was a growl of powerful motors as the turrets, set in blisters along the top and sides of the Glorious, swung swiftly to zeroin their long-muzzled guns on the alien ship. There was no reaction for a moment, and then a long burst of sound came from the wall speakers. "Do you want to answer that?"  Bill shook his head. "Better if we don't talk. Maybe they've got some sort of a translator over there. If I start shooting off my mouth, I might say the wrong thing." "Bill!" There was a shout from the detection station. "Yeah?" He didn't look away from the screen. The torpedo still hung motionless, its nose pointed toward the Glorious. "I think they're trying to make visual contact." "See if you can pick them up." Bill ordered. There was a flickering in the reproduction cube of the tri-V receiver and, slowly, a distorted replica of the control room of the alien ship began to materialize. Then, as the Guardsman at the communication station struggled with his controls, the scene cleared. There were seven of them. They weren't humanoid -- they looked like huge furry footballs -- but they weren't the slavering monstrosities that Bill and the rest had half expected. "Turn on our transmitter." After a brief warm-up period, there was a bouncing of aliens and their own screen lit up. Bill stepped forward and, as sternly as he could, made a stabbing motion toward Earth with a bent forefinger. There was a small commotion while all the fur balls rolled together to form a huddle. Then one of them went bouncing over to a set of controls at the far end of their control room. "The bluff didn't work," gasped Wimpy. "They're going to blast us with that torp!" "Not yet," said Bill. "Gunnery!" "Yes?" "Automatic trackers on!" The Guardsman at the gunnery station looked puzzled, but he didn't ask any questions. His hands slid forward and the parabolic mirrors that projected the trolled the guided missiles carried by the Glorious -- swung until they were centered on the silver sphere. "Carriers on!" "Check." of movement in the alien control rooms as their detectors gave warning of the beams that were striking their hull. Bill faced the tri-V scanner and held up his hand for attention. There was some more scuttling and then all the aliens faced toward their own screen. Bill withdrew one of the odd-shaped weapons that hung at his hip and held it up so they could see it. "Get over here, Wimpy." "What for?" "Hurry up. And play it straight." The freckle-faced second in command marched over with a military stride and saluted. "Q-ray," said Bill. "Get it?" Wimpy started to protest and then caught himself. "Sounds crazy to me," he muttered, "but you're the boss." Bill's side-arm was a complicated affair with two short barrels, one capped with a green lens and the other with a red. He held the weapon out to call attention to it and then raised it and pressed a stud on the stock three times. Three bursts of red light flared out briefly. "Give them three quick flips on the missile beams." The Guardsman hit the cut-off button one, two, three. Bill's gun flashed red three more times. "Once more should give them the idea." Again the carrier beams were clicked on and off. "Make this good." Bill pointed the weapon deliberately at Wimpy and pressed the stud. Captain Shirey stood at attention, a circle of red light glowing on his chest. "Now!" There was a sudden green flash as Bill jerked the other trigger. Immediately Wimpy let out a bloodcurdling yell and then, clawing at his chest, collapsed in a writhing heap on the floor. Bill turned back to the scanner and pointed to his gun again. "Three more." By the time the barrier beams had struck the other ship twice, chaos had let loose in its control room. "What's happening?" It was hard to tell. They were lined up in a row, their pink underbodies tilted toward the ceiling, and weak little leglike organs waving wildly. "I think," said Colonel Faust slowly, "that they're standing on their heads." But surrender was not negotiated without some difficulty. The alien who seemed to be the commander kept bouncing in and out of one of a pair of metallic cups that projected from a complex mechanism at one side of the control room. Bill finally got the idea. "I think they've got some sort of a mechanical translator and they want me to come over." There was a protest from the floor. "You can't go there!" "Shut up!" said Bill. "You're supposed to be dead. Do you want to give the whole show away?" Wimpy subsided obediently. "I've got to go over. We can't escort them down and, once they find out that we aren't following, there's nothing to keep them from making a run for it. I'll take the flyer over. There's a three-quarter-size pressure suit in the luggage compartment that I think I can get into. Keep me covered." "With what?" softly mumbled Wimpy. Solar Guard stood at attention as a small red dot crawled toward one comer of the detection screen. "Can I get up now?" said a plaintive voice. Colonel Bill Faust looked down at the sprawled form of his second in command and then suddenly doubled up and began to emit strangled sounds that were half sobs and half laughter. He finally recovered enough to reach down and pull Wimpy to his feet. "You were real good, Wimpy. Real good!" He went off into another hysterical paroxysm. Wimpy grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. " Stop it! Why did you let them go?" "They -- they..." Bill choked, gasped and then tried again. "They couldn't stay any longer. They had to get home for supper." "They what?" gasped Wimpy. "They had to get home for supper." Bill pointed at the screen. "And there they go." faster still and then it flicked out of sight. "I'll bet that's the last time they come snooping around the Reservation," said Bill with a mysterious grin. "The what?" "The Reservation. That's this whole star cluster." Wimpy advanced purposefully and waved a fist threateningly. "Are you going to tell us what happened or do we have to beat it out of you?" Bill worked hard to control himself. "Suppose," he said at Do You Know... that the Adept uses in mastering the forces of the Universe? by a maze of conflicting and obscure "laws" and "principles"... of time-consuming "ceremonies," "meditations" and "affirmations"... because your best efforts seem void of practical results... analysis comprising the entire field of metaphysical practice. if, after examination, you are not # money order to... P. O. Box # Hollywood #, California last, "that, aside from a few dead systems like Alpha Centauri, the Universe was full of life -- and some of the races have had interstellar drives for so long that even the kids' flyers are equipped with them." He looked around at the boys. "Go ahead," said Wimpy impatiently. "Don't you get it?" They all stared at him blankly. "Well," he continued, "suppose a bunch of kids were out one day and they went poking around where they had no business being and they found a big old ship that looked deserted." "The Glorious!" "So, whenever they could get away, they'd sneak over and play invasion." "Oh, no!" said Wimpy. "And then, one day, they decided to run a real all-out offensive, and one of the kids borrowed his father's ship without bothering to ask permission. And right in the middle of the game, the turrets on the ship they thought was deserted suddenly swing around and they find a couple of dozen space-rifles pointed directly at them. They want to run away, but they're too scared, and to make matters worse, they get a demonstration of a horrible strange weapon. And we thought we were scared!" There was silence in the control room for a moment as the Guardsmen tried to digest what had happened. "But what about the torpedo?" asked Wimpy. Bill patted the elaborate toy that hung at his right hip. "It had as much real punch as this. They were making believe that it was a vortex torpedo -- they'd rigged it up with remote controls -- but it was really only one of the little flyers that they turn out for the kids over there. It's an old one, but its interstellar drive is still working." He paused, then said in an offhand manner, "I brought it back with me. It's got an adjustable warp field that'll open up wide enough to handle a ship the size of the Glorious, and I -- well, it seemed to me that, maybe, it might get space travel going..." It did. up your library when they're kept in our handsome, gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # Star Shelf Duncan. Ballantine Books, Inc., Cloth #, paper #c original science fiction novel of # -- despite the fact that it was serialized in Collier's, a magazine not generally noted for mature fiction. Unlike most slick science fiction, this tale makes no compromise with the so-called "lay" audience. It's not written down, or oversimplified, or cheapened in any way. You will find it enthralling and somber with a very sharp and pertinent point. The plot deals with an attempt on the part of the United States to put up a space station with which we can control the world -- our friends as well as our enemies. The effort makes us rather unpopular. Mixed in with this grim main plot is a subplot dealing with the discovery and use of a completely new form of matter known as Magellanium -- and is one of the most exciting concepts in modern science fiction. It's an impressive book, done with the skill of a practiced novelist and the respect for human values of a richly endowed mind. Don't miss it! per  Bros., # F OR all those readers who have been fascinated, yet at the same time confused, by such new concepts of thought as "non-Aristotelian logic," "symbolic logic," Boolean algebra and so on, this book will come as a godsend. Most previous volumes on these subjects have, for the layman, been much too technical and often stuffily pedantic; Korzybski's works, for example. In the present book, on the other hand, we have a lucid, beautifully simple analysis of many of the modern discoveries in thinking that have grown out of the original breaking away from Aristotle's narrow concept of logic. In addition, the author presents a splendidly unified philosophy based on these new ideas. You will be amazed at how fruitful, in almost all fields of thought and action, this new approach can be. For instance, it is remarkable how much light it throws on the validity of many of the more mature science fiction stories of our time. It is not a book for people who operate wholly on the basis of preconceived notions. For those very foundations of their dominant ideas, however, a creative -- and disturbing -- experience. Heinlein. Shasta Publishers, # N O question about it, the Old Master is still "the best story teller in the science fiction field today," as Henry Kuttner states in his introduction to this, the third in the "Future History" series of Heinlein's novelets and short stories. "If This Goes On -- " which takes up nearly two-thirds of the book -- is a smashing tale of revolution in the United States -- a revolution against a theocratic dictatorship that takes place around the year #. It's been slightly fixed up, to modernize it (it first appeared in #), but essentially it's the same rowdy and terrifying tale it was in the first place. "Coventry" takes up another # pages. In this tale, our civilization has reached maturity following the overthrow of the dictatorship, and the Coventry of the title is a huge enclosed area where the immature may go if they wish to experience "adventure," "excitement" and the "freedom" of the long-vanished frontier days. And they certainly get them all, with a vengeance, in the Wild (human) Animal Reserve that Coventry really is. "Misfit," which ends the book, is a fine short story about a boy whose great talents were not recognized until almost too late. Libby is a lesson to our whole educational system. The book is a classic. Wright. Abelard Press, # beginning to end, this melodrama of a distant future is not one of Wright's major efforts; it cannot rank with Deluge, for instance. On the other hand, the book is the strongest statement of Wright's corrosively pessimistic philosophy he has ever done. In his world of a distant future, there is limited cannibalism (why waste good flesh in time of famine?) in a semi-cooperative, partly telepathic, primitive and yet sophisticated tribal society. The conflicts are between two tribes of different culture levels, one on one bank of a wide river and the other on the opposite side; and, later, between both tribes against a small race of elephant-size spiders inhabiting a large peninsula where two rivers meet. Mr. Wright characteristically seems to respect the spiders more than he does the humans. Chamberlain Press, Inc., # F OR a young man whose first story was published in #, this collection represents a pretty solid achievement. It contains # of the best pieces, most of them in the horror field and a majority of them weird fantasy rather than science fiction. They all bear the imprint of a distinctive and original talent, even though the influences of John Collier, Ray Bradbury, Philip MacDonald and others do show through. One of the two unpublished stories in the book, "The Traveller," is almost the best thing it contains -- a daring but thoroughly reverent view of the Crucifixion by a modern time-traveler. It's a story you will not easily forget. Seven of the # stories have previously appeared in other anthologies, but even if you have them all, the # unanthologized ones are themselves worth the price of admission. Hal Clement. Doubleday  Co., # making alien peoples seem completely real is at his best in this fantastic tale of a tiny race living, on a planet with almost unbearably heavy gravity. It is a highly technical piece of science fiction, not designed for the slick market, but it's definitely worth the effort. The relations of the single human being stranded on the planet with the little caterpillarlike intelligences that are one of its dominant life-forms are warmly and realistically developed. And the innate plea for cooperation between all life that lies at the base of the book gives it a special kind of durability. Clement's schoolmasterish tone, which critics have previously complained about, is present here, too. But I, at least, don't mind it. Caidin. Henry Holt  Co., # have new books on Man's future in space. Little that is new remains to be said and Mr. Caidin does not say much of it. However, his book is a clear, nontechnical retelling of the everfascinating story of the coming age of space flight and our accomplishments (and defeats) made thus far toward bringing that age into being. The black-and-white drawings by Fred L. Wolff are a bit too air-brushy for my taste, lacking the sharp clarity and realism of similar pictures by Bonestell, Hunter, Klep, et al., but they are imaginative and often handsome. edited by John Carnell. Science Fiction Club, London. Available in this country from science fiction bookstores for about # all-British science fiction anthology is as satisfactory as his first. Ten stories, of which seven are Class B or better -- mostly As -- is a high average. Included are four Galaxy tales -- by Peter McIntosh and John Christopher. Arthur Clarke has another A .'rom Astounding; this is the only one that has thus far appeared in another anthology in the U. S. Of the five from the British New Worlds, the one by E. C. Tubbs is quite good, the other four not really top grade. Nevertheless, the book as a whole is a fine indication of the lusty health of science fiction writing in England. Ballantine Books, # and # c sents # of his oddly flavored tales, six from the pages of this magazine and seven from other publications. It is an extremely uneven collection, ranging from good ("The Monsters," "Cost of Living," and "Specialist," for example), down to rather derivative and fluffy stuff. The book is a bouillabaisse of science fiction, fantasy, and weird stories; and you get something of a feeling that the young author (his first story appeared late in #, I believe) is still trying to discover his own particular bent -- experimenting, in other words, with a wide variety of story types -- and that he hasn't quite found his footing. Still, it is a highly entertaining book. Crane. Ballantine Books, #  #c A ND still they come -- second from Ballantine this month! -- the books on the dangers of putting space stations and space rockets out into the great unknown. The present offering is a melodramatic one, dealing with dangers internal (a ruthless world dictator) and external (a galactic civilization afraid of us). The dictator wants to explore beyond Mars, for his own personal aggrandizement, but the "Ampiti," a mysterious galactic race, warns us by strange radio messages (and later by actual physical attack) that we will be destroyed if we try it. By overthrowing the dictator and coming to terms with the Ampiti, we finally arrive at a modus vivendi -- or seem to. It's a strong book, full of warnings to a primitive, war-minded, bureaucratically strangled world such as ours. Holt #e Co., # juvenile (he refers to his young heroes as "lads" and "boys") must be compared with Robert Heinlein's Starman Jones, (Galaxy, May, #), since they both deal with the first flights of faster-than-light ships. The comparison is a bit cruel. Even though Correy's book is readable, has a lot of technicalsounding scientific discussion, and is erected on a simple and direct plot skeleton, it simply cannot stand up to its predecessor in characterizations, in style, in ingenuity, or in overall dramatic impact. Nevertheless, the book does move, and if the juniors in your family have nothing better to do with their time, they won't, at least be bored with it. the departed Let the dead past bury its dead? No... leave the dirty work to the unborn future! "As a sleep  must think on my days. Of my path as untrod, Or trodden in dreams -- " Y ES, he was able to carry on the verse he had started as the switch had closed. He was still here -- wherever here was -- " -- in a dreamland whose coasts are a doubt'." Whose countries recede from my thoughts as they grope round about. What, he wondered, were the others thinking of at this moment? He thought to call out, to see if they answered, to see if they were still there -- wherever there was. But none of the others had called out. Or, if they had, he wasn't able to hear them, in which case it wasn't much use for him to shout. Or they hadn't, and he wasn't going to be the first. His voice might ring despairingly, ragged with panic, in the darkness. After all, he was their leader. Leader! He chuckled inwardly. It was absurd, really. The whole thing was absurd -- the solemn handshakes from the young man in the sober gray serge, the terse wishing of good luck as the moment of departure drew near. Departure? That was too easy a word. The right one was eviction. And how did it go on? " -- And vanish and tell us not how." Now that was appropriate. Strange that he should be reciting to himself a verse he had long ago forgotten. More -- that he couldn't even remember ever having learned. Yet it was fitting; a piece, he thought, with the ends of so many other poets. How more appropriately could Rilke have died than in agony from the infected scratch of a rose? Or poor, mad de Nerval than by hanging himself upside down, like the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack, in a Paris sewer? This was far less dramatic, more in keeping with the age that had turned him and the others out, but it was, he told himself, right in the tradition. Most poets were a pretty poor lot at managing their lives, but they usually seemed to get in a good piece of arranging at the finish. Finish? But this wasn't. It was dark and silent and there was no feeling of ground beneath his feet. But this wasn't the finish -- not yet, anyway. O UT of confusion of decades, the continuing lines broke through : "Be kind to our darkness, O Fashioner, dwelling in light, And feeding the lamps of the sky -- " His memory petered out at the same instant that he realized the darkness had lifted slightly and he was standing on solid ground again. It was still dark, but it was the darkness of night, not the absolute darkness of -- wherever it was they had been. He was conscious of several dark shapes standing by him. For a moment, they were hushed. He counted them. There were five. So they had all arrived. And he realized that this was why they had been silent. They had been counting, too. Now they spoke and somebody fumbled for a torch. The light went gaping around the knot of old men, showing the fallen cheeks, the bald and the white heads, the bleary, surprised eyes. "Well, we got here." "But it's dark." "All I could think of while I was out there was that I'd left my false teeth behind." "Hah, that's a good one." "Jeez, but it's cold!" The last statement brought realization to them all. They were chilled not only by fear and uncertainty. "Where's the guy with the stove?" Hawkins, the poet and the leader, looked down. Yes, the pack was at his feet, just as it had been when the switch had closed. He bent down and unzipped it. He lit the stove with hands that trembled from cold and tension. The men huddled around it, crouching, rubbing their hands, white plumes of their breath disappearing upward over the heat it gave forth. "Mm-mm. Good piece of equipment." That was Bell, the old colonel. His voice still had the clipped quality of the professional officer. "Almost as good as the Mark Nine." "I don't think I've ever been as cold as this," said Green, the carpenter. "Perhaps there's been another Ice Age," Hawkins suggested. "Not in seven hundred and fifty years." Who was that? Oh, Lindsay, the professorial-looking little man. Hawkins realized that he didn't know anything about him. There was no reason, of course, why he should. But he did know something about the others. They had chatted during the few minutes before they had been gathered into the chamber. Bell, Green, Hasse, an electrician. And Ez, whose surname hadn't been known even to the clerk. He'd survived one appeal, he had told Hawkins, and then, because there were no records, they had assessed him at retiring age, seventy. In fact, as he had confided with a wink while the attendant reached for the switch, he was nearly eighty-three. "How can you say it's seven hundred and fifty years?" That was Bell again, his voice peremptory and querulous. Hawkins smiled to himself. Must have been a blow to the poor chap, a leader of men, not to be leader now on this pathetic and unretraceable excursion. Instead, he was under the command of a damned longhair. That's probably what he calls me, Hawkins thought, a damned longhair. I N the light of the stove, Lindsay's lips made a downward self-deprecatory gesture before he replied. "I heard -- on fairly reliable authority -- that it was seven hundred and fifty years." "Nobody's supposed to know," said Bell, "nobody at all" -- in a tone which implied the added words, "not even me." "It's somewhere between two hundred and a thousand years, but the exact time's supposed to be strictly secret." Strictly Secret, thought Hawkins, Top Secret, To Be Read and Destroyed Immediately. That must have been the circle, the delight of Bell's rigidly military life. It was all over, but he still clung to it. "Does it really matter?" Hawkins asked mildly. "Now?" Bell's eyes glared in the light. "Of course it matters. There have to be rules. Even in this business, everything should be aboveboard." "Who cares about rules?" Hasse broke in. "I'm amazed that we've arrived, whatever century it is. I thought it was all a hoax, a handy kind of gaschamber for getting rid of us dodderers." Bell snorted. "It's funny," Hasse went on, as if talking to himself. "All my life, I thought that everything any of the high-ups told us was a lie. Whenever a politician opened his mouth, or a scientist, or a general, I always took what he said with a grain of salt. A whole sack of salt. And now..." He shrugged, not entirely without humor. "I had to wait till now to find out that it wasn't all hokum. Not this time, anyway. Unless -- unless this is -- " He stopped short at the thought. "Death?" whispered Green. Ez tittered. "That ain't so. Don't know about you folks, but it wouldn't be as cold as this where I'd be goin'." But nobody else laughed. "It's all wrong," Green insisted. "It's heathen and unnatural." He was a quiet man who didn't look old the way the others did. He looked middleaged, but as if he'd looked middle-aged all his adult life. "God didn't mean anything like this. He meant that men should live their lives out in a natural way, in the time and place He appointed for them. This way is plain un-Christian." "From any viewpoint," said Bell firmly, "it's unethical. I never did agree with it. In the past few years, I've done a lot of lobbying against it. It's just not ethical for one community to shift its burdens onto the shoulders of another." "Oh, I don't know. Colonel," Hawkins couldn't help saying. "It's only a kind of invasion. And this kind is peaceable, at least." "Pah!" spat Bell. "War is a matter of dire necessity and it's the same for both sides. But the future never made war on us." professorial as he leaned forward slightly into the light of the stove. "This was necessary. If it hadn't been done in our day and age, there probably wouldn't have been a future, anyway. And the future will know it. This future now knows about us. We're a part of history to them. That's why ohr time only chose up to a thousand years, with the time carefully spaced out. Don't forget, little groups like us have been arriving for several centuries now." Bell stirred again at the easy confidence of the period of their projection. "You seem to be well acquainted with all this." Lindsay coughed self-effacingly. "Well, I am. You see, I'm -- I was, that is -- a geriatrician." To men of a previous generation, the word wouldn't have been so familiar. But even old Ez knew what it meant. "One of the enemy, eh?" he wheezed. "Would you have preferred the Eskimo way, being turned out into the snow?" "Wouldn't have been much different," said Hasse. "This way," Lindsay retorted, "we have a chance to live out the rest of our lives. We're prejudiced because we're the ones it happened to. It was bad enough before the Global War. Afterward, with so much soil poisoned, so many mouths to feed, something drastic had to be done." "They should have had compulsory sterilization," declared Bell. "That was the practical solution." "But that would have been unethical, an infringement of fundamental human rights. Anyway, it wasn't the number of people that mattered. It was the number of unproductive people. We were the problem." "I was still working as well as ever," said Green quietly. "As quickly?" Lindsay asked just as quietly. "I was a craftsman." "And I was a scholar. But there had to be one time for everybody. I was thinking in the last few years that I was really beginning to know my subject at last. And now... His voice faltered. "This, in a way, solves all the problems I ever grappled with. Funny how the human race always seems to turn up with an answer to its problems just in time. Come to think of it, being able to send people on a one-way trip into the future wasn't good for much else, was it?" "The future!" Green repeated, his slow voice unexpectedly vehement. "I don't want to be in the future. The present was bad enough. Everything speeded up -- quicker and quicker every year." Hasse had been craning his neck, surveying the darkness. "I'm beginning to think there's something phony about this, after all. If the future had been expecting us, like Lindsay says, wouldn't they have got this area all fixed up? But I can't see sign of anything. No lights -- nothing." Hawkins. Perhaps the future had resented the influx of tottering immigrants from the past. Perhaps they'd developed the time-projecting principle, found a way of diverting them into some limbo that was neither past, present nor future. "Jeez!" said Ez. "I've slept in the open more nights than not, but it was never as cold as this. If only I was tired and cold, instead of just cold, I might at least be able to get some shuteye." Yes, that was a problem for them all, thought Hawkins. It seemed to symbolize their situation. They had been sent on their way one sunny morning at nine o'clock, straight into a dark and bitter future night. He remembered an item of their communal pack, fumbled in its depths, among the first-aid equipment and emergency rations. He found what he was looking for and brought it out. He smiled at the grotesque legality of it. The label read: Supplied Duty-Free for Departers. For Medicinal Purposes Only. He screwed out the cork and saw old Ez's rheumy eyes look up and glow at the familiar sound. "Well," said Hawkins, "since it's obviously impossible to make a move before dawn, we might as well have something to warm us up." He handed the bottle around. Only Green, when his turn came, hesitated. "I -- I don't, that is, I never -- " "Medicinal," Hawkins interrupted reassuringly. Green nodded gratefully and took a swig. How we cling, thought Hawkins, to our little canons of respectability -- even now! He took a gulp himself, recorked the bottle and stowed it back in the bag. Ez smacked his lips expressively and looked beseechingly at him. Hawkins rezipped the bag, feeling a childish pleasure in the meager power his office gave him. There was something in being a leader of men. Perhaps he'd missed his vocation and the little tin gods at the departure center had seen his true worth, his latent qualities. He smiled. "Hawkins," he told himself, "you never did have a head for liquor." But his thoughts ran on. What a stupid game it was, a stupid game for stupid old men. He could picture the serious reasoning that had gone into it all -- the endless reports from sub-committees, the graphs, the charts. The doctrine of social workers: "We must ensure that the Departers have a proper sense of purpose. They mustn't feel -- unwanted. They must have a spirit of unity." That was what they had said to him and the others. But wasn't it the occupational disease of old people to feel unwanted? And weren't they unwanted? He himself had been living for thirty years on a reputation, included in every anthology of living poets -- simply because he had still been living. He thought of the little party of admirers who had met at his place the night before departure, of how they had made half-hearted jokes about his being the first poet actually to meet posterity. Someone had slipped a copy of his first book in his pocket and winked and said, "First edition. Be worth a fortune in the future." He felt it in his pocket, thought of being a poet, thought of posterity, and found that he didn't care two hoots. # Z had started on a mouth organ, playing plaintive old hobo songs that had been hoary even in #. The wiry, wily old bird played them with gusto -- and very badly. The others stirred angrily and told him to lay off, but he stopped only to wheeze that he wasn't keeping anyone awake, was he, and went right on playing. The defiant strains of Hallelujah, I'm a Bum and The Big Rock Candy Mountain went fading into the black emptiness around them. No one could play quite as badly as that by accident, thought Hawkins. Its badness was a work of art in itself. Hawkins gave a sigh of capitulation and reached in the bag again. Ez lowered the mouth organ and, as the bottle came around again, he put the instrument away with a grin of triumph. Hawkins put the empty bottle back in the bag. Protected now against the coldness of the night and the chill of their thoughts, the little group huddled closer to the stove and settled down to await the dawn. One by one, they fell asleep. Only Hawkins remained awake, not because he was leader, but because he was used to brooding through the long, dark hours of the night. But even so, dawn was a long time in coming. At the first gray relief from darkness, the others were all awake. Stretching, grumbling, they tottered to their feet. The grayness began taking on undertones of pink. The sight made Hawkins feel even colder. "Jeez!" cried Ez. In the wan light, the landscape was desolate. Back in #, it had been a pleasant enough spot, open green country that had escaped the ravages of war. But this was worse than the rubble of war. For here, as far as the eye could see in the half-light, was no sign of human habitation, no sign of anything. It was a bare, ashen desert. "Not even a blade of grass," said Hasse in an awed voice. Green began to sway and moan, his eyes rolling back. His lips moved. "And there shall come great desolation upon the Earth... "God!" muttered Lindsay. Hasse wheeled on him, his face twitching. "It was a hoax. I should have known better than to believe you damned experts. Why didn't you just kill us?" He stumbled toward the mildfeatured Lindsay. His bony fingers clawed at Lindsay's coat collar, his throat. "Stop that!" shouted Hawkins, surprising himself by the note of authority in his voice. It astonished him even more that Hasse took his hands away. But his face was still filled with bitterness and loathing. "He didn't do it," said Hawkins. "It's not his fault." He could see from Lindsay's face that this -- this desolation had come as much a shock to him as to the rest of them. "What do you make of it?" he asked the geriatrist. a hand across his brow. "I don't know. I really don't know. This is out of my department." "Well, there's no use moaning about it," said Bell stiffly. "If things have gone wrong, we shall have to make our plans accordingly." In his voice was the immemorial fatalism of the military man, stoically carrying on despite the incompetence of the armorers or supply men behind the front. Hawkins was grateful for the sobering effect of it. "The city," Bell continued, "used to lie over there beyond the hills." But his pointing arm traversed a whole circle before it paused uncertainly and dropped. "There -- there aren't even hills any more." It was Ez who offered the only realistic suggestion. "Well, there's no help standing here in the cold. I'm for walking, now it's light." "Sure," agreed Hawkins. "Somewhere there'll be a town and people." The only question was -- where? No direction looked any less forbidding than the rest. "We'll travel east," he said firmly. At least they'd have the Sun in their faces -- what there was of it. Nobody objected. Silently, they turned their faces to the Sun. Hawkins stopped only to turn the stove off and swing it in the cold air till it was cool. Then he stowed it in his bag and slung it over his shoulder. The others slung on their smaller ration bags. And then they were walking. Hawkins knew why they were walking, knew the thought that was in the minds of all of them, because it was in his mind, too. They would go on and on, trudging through this wilderness until they became too tired to notice the cold and the desolation, until they dropped in exhaustion, and that would be the end. It would be release. And so they tottered forth toward the red wintry Sun while it slowly rose. Hawkins understood two things as they stumbled along. The first brought a smile to his lips. He knew now, as the communal bag weighed heavily on his shoulders, just why they had chosen him as leader. Not because he was a bora leader -- but simply and brutally because he was the strongest. The second explained why they had passed Bell over. For he walked with a limp. He did his best to conceal it, Hawkins saw, and did his best to conceal that he was concealing it, but it was too apparent. After they had gone a short way, he stumbled on a rough piece of ground, spun and fell. His game leg stuck out helplessly, as if it weren't a part of him. It wasn't, Hawkins realized, as he stooped to help him up. His eyes and Bell's met for an instant. And for an instant, the barricade of military selfcontrol dropped and the man looked out. A man who admitted his disability and smiled briefly in gratitude at being helped. And then he was on his feet and dusting himself off. "Thank you," he said stiffly. "That won't happen again." The barricade was up again. But Hawkins felt better and sensed that Bell did, too. T HE Sun cleared the horizon finally and seemed to hang there like a great bladder of blood. A wind rose now and picked up the dust, sending it in dismal eddies across the landscape. They went on, their pace gradually slowing. Hawkins began to feel the approach of ultimate exhaustion. They had been going up a slight incline and Hawkins had not noticed it. And they had passed through a cleft in the bare rock. And below them... "Look, a real city!" "Hallelujah!" It stood in the shallow valley below them, less than a mile away. And they were running, staggering, stumbling toward it, like men in a desert tottering toward the mirage of an oasis. They were almost there before they stopped on a single impulse, gasping for breath. " But there's nobody there." They felt it blowing out of the city, a wind of ageless antiquity. The city was built of uniform, hard, block stone and its buildings were still standing, undamaged. But they looked as if they had been buffed smooth by a giant hand. And that was the hand of time, of centuries... of eons. They approached in awed silence, walking slowly -- almost reverently. They passed down a long street like mourners at a funeral. "Wait," said Hawkins. His voice rang almost blasphemously in the silence. "Something moved there." He pointed at a glint of light between two buildings. It was a fountain. In the ageold silence of the city, it played, pumping from some cistern underground. Watching it, grateful for some sign of movement, they did not notice the figure seated under a piece of eroded statuary. When it stirred slightly, they all jumped and faced it with a sharp drawing-in of breath. "My God!" breathed Lindsay. The figure was small. It looked like a five-month fetus, its head great and wrinkled and hairless. Its eyes looked upon them without wonder -- without interest even. It seemed not to be hostile. It seemed incapable of hostility. Hawkins advanced falteringly toward it. He was conscious of the rest shuffling behind him, grouping at his back. He said, "Good morning." T HE creature did not speak. It inclined its head very slightly, but that might have been coincidental. Hawkins felt silly, but he added, "Greetings," feeling that to be more formal and thus more correct in a situation like this. "We come from the past." Hasse grumbled in his ear, "We're not on Earth at all. We've been shifted in space, not time. This is Mars, I bet." Still the creature before them did not speak. The only expression in its eyes was one of utter weariness. "This is Mars," Hasse said again, eagerly. "It's colder on Mars. I remember reading -- " "This isn't Mars," stated Hawkins. "The Sun wouldn't look as big as this on Mars. This is Earth, all right -- but in God knows what remote future. Something must have gone wrong with the projector. Or maybe the callibration is only window dressing or guesswork. This isn't seven hundred and fifty years in the "And that, then?" Lindsay said, gesturing at the hunched-up figure by the fountain. "Jeez!" gasped Ez. "He looks a thousand years old." "Why doesn't he speak?" Hasse asked. "Perhaps he hasn't anyone to speak to any more," said Lindsay thoughtfully. "We're here. He could speak to us." "In English?" The thought that a language called English had faded back in the depths of time shocked Hawkins at first, then made him feel strangely glad, light-hearted, relieved at last of a heavy burden. He remembered all that wrestling with words to convey this or that shade of meaning. Once it had seemed so important, so desperately important. But now it took its insignificant place in the dust of the ages. All the striving, all the poetry and music, all the machines, all the great philosophies came in the end to this -- an old, old man, sitting in front of a fountain, watching the waters playing. Was that all? Had Man never done all those things he was going to do? Was he never to find the secret at the heart of atom and universe, send ships to the stars, become wholly good, wholly wise? Lindsay began to laugh. He stopped to gasp, "Age! I never knew what the word meant." Hawkins dazedly knew that that was the way they were all feeling. Old men cast out from a young and struggling world, they were the youngest ones alive -- by years, centuries, eons! A LL of them straightened, their backs unbent from the load of years. And when Ez pulled out his mouth organ, they skipped to the music like sixyear-olds. Even Bell. Even Green. They joined in the chorus like kids at a picnic. "For an old man he is old. And an old man he is gray, But a young man's heart is full of love. Get away, old man, get away!" Hawkins frowned uncomfortably for a moment, feeling the irreverence of it. After all, that man might be the last man -- the very last. But the figure seemed not to hear them. It just sat there, looking into the fountain, as unnoticing as an old man on a park bench might be of children running and playing around him. Gladiator at Law Swiftly now, the authors of Gravy Planet draw together this story's plot threads -- into a sizzling fuse for a time bomb! merce. Its bubble houses, rather than being on the open market, go with contract status for those with jobs. Belly Rave or its local equivalent -- and every city has one -- is where those without contract status live, if existence in the wretched squalor of those brawling thieves' dens can be called living. Slums that once were suburban developments (" Picture Window, Expansion Attic for your Growing Family'"), Belly Rave, the future corruption of Belle Reve Estates, and its like are the neglected result of G-ML's breakthrough in architecture. Charles M undin, a criminal lawyer, starving because he was not fortunate enough to be born into one of the corporate-law dynasties, has had only one case, that of: Norvell Bligh , whose specialty is dreaming up bloody events for Field Days, the future equivalent of Roman circuses, and who is being nagged by his wife to adopt her daughter Alexandra, born in Belly Rave of a previous marriage. Bligh, however, has been doublecrossed into loss of contract status and his bubble house, and has been moved into Belly Rave by a police convoy. Meanwhile, Mundin finds himself the recipient of a doubtful political favor, the case of: Norma and Don Lavin, offspring of the Lavin who invented the bubble house and whose initial is the L of G-M-L Homes. Through legal trickery after their father's death, Norma and Don's # per cent share of all G-M-L stock has been tied up... and Don, the victim of severe conditioning that has left him vacant-eyed, is unable to remember where the stocks are or even to discuss the matter. He and his sister Norma live in Belly Rave with : Ryan, an old-time corporation lawyer, who has ruined himself through his addiction to the opiate, yen pox. He can still act as attorney of record and strategist, however, while Mundin does the legwork. The new combination evidently worries G-ML, for Norma disappears. Lana , boss of the juvenile Belly Rave gang known as the Wabbits, will do practically anything for a price, including major surgery on a face with a broken bottle. Her scouts confirm Mundin's suspicion that Norma has been snatched. Coached by Ryan, Mundin visits the New York Parimutuel Stock Exchange. By luck, shrewdness and the illegal assistance of a broker, he manages to buy one share of G-M-L common stock. This makes Mundin eligible to attend the G-M-L stockholders' meeting. He manages to interest three important stockholders in his tale of representing a lost # of the stock, for they are eager to slip a knife into the existing directorate. He further uses them to force the release of Norma Lavin, who has become as important to Mundin as the case itself. Hubble, Coett and Nelson, the three stockholders whose aid Mundin had enlisted, being hardheaded, realistic financial raiders, will back him only if he produces the huge block of G-M-L shares he has been talking about. They give him until morning to do so. But how do you go about finding it when the only person who knows where it is goes into convulsions when it's mentioned -- and when conditioning or deconditioning is a quasilegal process, reserved exclusively to the state for treatment of criminals, and a heinous crime in private practice? I T was a ghastly night. Norma Lavin snapped, "You could have stalled them." "Stalled them how?" Mundin asked, needled into snapping back at her. "One hint of indecision and they'd have pulled out." "And where did you think we'd find the stock?" He looked hopefully at Ryan. "What about the possibility of duplicate certificates?" "Overnight?" Ryan said. "A thing like that takes weeks -- assuming there's no hitch, and G-M-L will create as many hitches as they can -- and then there is still the question of Don's conditioning against remembering where the stock is and being able to vote it." He was jittering badly, although he had doped himself almost blind during the argument. He took another yen pox pill and his eyes began to close. "That's great," Mundin grumbled. "Now he's no help." Norma said contemptuously, "And you are, I suppose. At least he didn't make any stupid promises." "Maybe Don can give us a hint. One is all we'd need. They might not have blocked all his memories about -- " "Leave him alone! You said you'd produce the stock. All right, produce it, but not by tormenting him!" Mundin knew it was desperate and cruel when he pushed past her and shook the boy awake, but at the very first question, Don Lavin's eyes stretched wide in terror and he stammered, "Kk-k-k-k-" and began to cry. "I'm sorry," Mundin said inadequately and went back into the ramshackle living room while she glared at him and tried to calm her frightened brother. "Now what?" he asked Ryan. The old attorney roused slightly. "Tellmtruth," he mumbled. "What?" Mundin exclaimed. "Who? About what?" "Hubblenthothers. 'Bou' Don. Stockenconditionnn." Revolted, Mundin watched the drugged lawyer slide back into his opiate dreamworld, where problems like this could be solved magically just by telling the truth. It was idiotic and he didn't give the suggestion another thought. There had to be a way out. All they had to do was think of one. But Ryan was doped and Don Lavin had fallen into an easy sleep again, protected by his conditioning as much against residual terror after questioning as from talking or doing anything about his G-M-L shares, and Norma was furious at Mundin. When morning came, he had blearily decided to do what he should have done in the first place -- somehow put off Hubble, Coett and Nelson. Ryan, however, insisted that he bring Don along just in case. A T Hubble's house, Mundin tried to be evasive, but Coett said impatiently, "Look, this represents a huge gamble for us. If you've just been bluffing and haven't got the stock, come right out and say so, but don't try using excuses on us -- we know them all." And Mundin, knowing he was blowing the case, hating himself because he hadn't come up with the solution, told them the truth. "How do we know this isn't another stall?" demanded Nelson. "Ask Don where the stock is," Mundin said tiredly. They did, and got the same fright reaction, and the same anger from Norma, and Hubble admitted uncomfortably, "It's real, all right. Nobody could imitate conditioning that well." "And there's the way Arnold acted at the meeting," Coett added. "He knew the Lavin stock was no phony." Mundin listened to them in bewilderment. Drugged or not, Ryan was the better lawyer; he had come up with the right answer. They had accepted the shameful truth where they had rejected excuses and delays, and now they were discussing ways and means, shrewdly, clear-headedly, as if conditioning were just another problem in finance. "We could get duplicate certificates," Mundin offered, which was accepted as a possibility when everything else failed; they shared Ryan's belief that G-ML would put every obstacle in their way. "I know a doctor," Hubble said quietly. Coett and Nelson nodded as though a vote had been taken. "But deconditioning is illegal!" Mundin protested. "We can't be parties to -- " "Hah!" Norma snorted in scorn. "Who said anything about deconditioning?" asked Hubble. "The boy needs an operation, that's all." So Don Lavin had himself a brain tumor. A highly reputable diagnostician analyzed it as a spongioblastoma, the commonest and most malignant of the intracranial gliomas. He recommended immediate surgery and then bought himself a new Rolls 'copter with power doors, power windows, ramp and steering. The surgeon he suggested was in Wichita and had a private hospital. He extirpated the spongioblastoma -- or at least the hospital Tissue Committee examined what he said he had removed from Don Lavin's brain, and this indisputably was spongioblastoma multiforms, consisting of round, elongated and piriform cells, characteristically recalling the varied cytological picture in osteogenic sarcoma of bone. The surgeon then put down a sizable deposit for a new wing for his hospital. C hronically suspicious, Norma scowled down at her brother, mumbling under the last of the anesthesia. She said to Mundin, "He might have left him an idiot. What better way to cover his tracks?" Mundin sighed. They had, purely on her insistence, watched the surgery. The lights, the sterilizers, the hole saw. The wisp of scorched smell from the bone, the nerve wrenching moment when the disk of skull lifted out. Insertion of anode and cathode needles, minute electroshocks that smashed this pattern, blurred that 'memory, shattered one or another reflex into neuronic rubble. The hours before of endless tests and questions, the strobe flickers in Don's eyes, the miles Don's brain and its workings. Norvell Bligh, handy little man, looked in. "Doctor's coming," he said and, faithful little man, resumed his post outside the door. Dr. Niessen asked them, "Anything yet?" Don chose that moment to open his eyes and smile at Norma. "Hello, Sis. It feels better now." Norma burst into tears and Dr. Niessen looked mightily relieved. "Check the blockage," the doctor suggested to Mundin. "We can find out now if we've done it." Don said, "The stock? Safedeposit box #, Coshocton First National. Identification -- picture of me, my fingerprints, code phrase, "Gray, my friend, is all theory and green life's golden tree'. " He explained chattily, "Goethe. Dad used to say that one a lot after they put the boot to him. It used to cheer him up a little." Dr. Niessen asked formally, "Is that essentially it?" Norma choked and said, "Have you got it all back, Don? All?" Her brother winced. "Oy, have I ! Including the time they worked on me. That part I don't want to remember." The doctor muttered, "Barbarous. We're all lawbreakers here, but I'm glad of it in this case. Mr. Kozloff -- " That was Don's pseudonym -- "are you able to verify my conjecture that flicker-feedback was the principal means employed?" "I guess so, if flickerfeedback is them shining a light in your eyes and you go into convulsions." "That's it. Well, Mr. Kozloff, I think you've recovered from your tumor. One of the staff physicians will check you for traveling. Come back if there's anything new. In these spongioblastomas, there is always a slight possibility that some malignant tissue was overlooked. And if you can possibly arrange it, Mr. Kozloff, please don't bring your sister." Bligh opened the door for him. Mundin followed him out into the corridor for a smoke and refuge from the touching reconciliation scene. But he could hear it even out there. T HE Columbus manager of Brinks-Fargo looked skeptical. "Now have I got this straight? Armored truck from here to Coshocton First National, guarded pickup of securities from there and immediate overland trip to New York, you four riding all the way. Right?" "Right," Mundin said. "Twelve thousand, five hundred dollars," the manager said after some scribbling. "For our biggest and best, with six guards." 'It was paid. The pickup went off smoothly. A conditioned clerk handed over the little box in which were certificates of Don Lavin's fantastic claim to # per cent of G-M-L. Mundin examined them wonderingly as the armored, eightwheeled land cruiser rolled bumpily through the streets of Coshocton. Three and one-half saying to himself. Three and onefelt numb. Don, who had been revealed by conditioning as a happy-go-lucky kid, whispered to him, "Confidentially, I'd swap those things for a lifetime lease on a bubble house and fifty bucks a week pocket money. But Norma -- you know. And maybe she's right. The responsibility and everything," he added vaguely. Norvell Bligh, inevitably, was the one sitting uncomfortably on a couple of folded money sacks. Only three welded-steel seats in the locked middle compartment where they rode as passengers. He hoped the ride would go on forever, jolts to the spine and all. He was working. Hubble said, when they arrived, "Did it work, Don?" Coett said, "If that sawbones couldn't deliver after all his big talk -- " Nelson said, "I hope it didn't cost too much -- " "I'm all right, thanks," Don Lavin said. "And," Mundin told them casually, "we came back through Coshocton." They examined the stock certificates with awe, then gloating. "We're in," Coett said decisively, "as of the next stockholders' meeting. Three months -- plenty of time to shake the firm and pick up all we need for a majority. My God, a majority! Gentlemen, I move we now turn this operation over to Mr. Mundin. He understands us and we have, in addition to our usual activities, to pick up stock as it becomes available. Mr. Mundin, with an expense account of seven hundred and fifty thousand, will easily see to it that it does become available, I am sure." still-ferocious jungle predator, and quite suddenly Mundin began to loathe him. The tactics, he thought, were disgusting and anti-social. Thus far, he had been persuaded by their papa-knowsbest attitude and by the fact that Don Lavin, conditioned, had been his only talking point. Deconditioned and in possession of his stock certificates now... "I've been meaning to ask you gentlemen whether the smear against G-M-L is absolutely essential," Mundin said. They were quite ready for him. Coett snapped, "That's a closed question, Mundin. I'm sure Mr. Lavin realizes that we're doing what's best for him. Don't you, Don?" The boy said, "I don't really give a damn, Mr. Coett. Talk to Sis. You'll have to, anyway." Norma was undecided. "Old Ryan says your plans are quite routine under the circumstances and I have a great deal of faith in him. I suppose -- I suppose the important thing is to get it done." Coett spread his hands. "There's your answer, Mundin. Now about -- " "Hold it, please," said Mundin. "I'm still not -- " "Mundin," Coett broke in sharply, "will you, for God's sake, come to your senses? This thing is still a gamble and it's our money everybody's gambling with." "Absurd quibbles about destroying some paper values," Nelson sniffed. "You don't understand these things. And I heartily endorse Mr. Coett's reminder that we are putting up the capital to enable Mr. Lavin to realize his claim of interest." "Smear's the word," Mundin said after a pause, feeling heavyhearted. "Fine," agreed young Hubble, but Mundin thought there was a twist to his mouth when he said it. "Now," said Coett, "it is conceivable that Green, Charlesworth may take an interest in the contemplated operation. If they should show up, Mundin, don't try to handle it yourself. Buck it to us. They have the reputation of not dealing with intermediaries." "Noted," Mundin said. Green, Charlesworth. Insurance and bankers' bankers. Old man Ryan had mentioned them. "Then we're ready to rip and tear," said Coett. "Go get 'em, Mundin. You've got three months and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to get them with." Mundin nodded, but he felt shaky inside. It didn't seem like much against the fourteen billion dollars G-M-L had. O NE month after the go-ahead, Del Dworcas, Regular Republican county committee chairman, stood incredulously before an office door. The sign said: The office occupied a solid floor through of a very good building. All he knew, standing there, was that Charles Mundin, his foredoomed candidate in the #th ward, had first become inaccessible to him and then had moved and then had formed a partnership with somebody named Ryan and then -- but there the stories became incredible. Dworcas had to check for himself. He took several long, deep breaths before he pushed the door open and announced himself to a ripely curved blonde receptionist. "Pleased be seated, Mr. Dworcas," the girl cooed. "Mr. Mundin asked me to tell you that you'll be the very next person he sees." The dozen or so other individuals in the waiting room glared at Del Dworcas. However, being a professional politician, he had no difficulty in striking up a conversation with the fellows nearest him. One was a petrochemist who understood there were consultant jobs opening up at Ryan  Mundin. Another was a publishers' bright young man who thought there must be a whale of a story in old man Ryan's sensational comeback and stood ready to sign it up. The others were easy enough to tag -- a couple of crackpots, two attorneys obviously seeking affiliation with the new firm, a handful of persons who seemed to be in the market for lawyers, and had suddenly come to think that it might be a good idea to retain Ryan #s Mundin. Nobody in the waiting room seemed to have any idea of what, if anything, was going on in the remainder of the enormous suite. Dworcas -- being a professional politician -- was able to absorb information, pump for more, evaluate what he had heard and speculate on its meaning. But the answers were slight and cloudy. All he could make out for sure was that Ryan  Mundin were rising like a rocket and plenty of shrewd operators were trying to hitch a ride. At last he got the nod from the receptionist. A hard-faced young Ay-rab with a badge that said Guide took him in tow. Ryan #c Mundin operated the damnedest law offices that Dworcas, in a full life, had ever seen. Law offices... complete with such eccentricities as chemistry labs and kitchens,, living quarters and a TV studio, rooms locked off from his view, and open rooms that he could make no sense of. "You must be proud to be working for Mr. Mundin. Of course you know his record with our Party in the #tb -- right down the line for Arab rights." "That's nice," the Ay-rab said. "Right in here, mister." He guided Dworcas into a bay. It lit up with a shimmering violet light; the Ay-rab scanned a fluoroscope screen. "You're clean. In that door." "You searched me!" Dworcas gasped. "Me! Mr. Mundin's oldest friend!" "That's nice," the Ay-rab said. "In that door." Dworcas went through the door. "Hello, Del." Mundin was abstractedly checking off items on a list. He said, "Excuse me," and picked up an interoffice phone. Five minutes later, he put it down, glanced at Dworcas, and turned to another list. Dworcas, in cello tones, said, "Charles..." Mundin looked at him with annoyance on his face. "Well?" Dworcas waved a finger at him, smiling. "Charlie, you're not treating me right. You really aren't." "Look, Del, business has picked up," said Mundin tiredly. "I'm busy. What do you want?" "Nice office you've got. G-M-L fix it for you?" "What do you think?" Dworcas retained his smile. "Remember who got you in with G-M-L?" "You've got a point," Mundin going to do you much good, though. I haven't got time for favors. Some other time, I'll listen closer," "I want you to listen now, Charlie. I want you to reconsider on the race." Mundin stared. "Run for the Council?" "I know it sounds like small potatoes. But it can lead to big ones, Charlie. You can do it. And what about us? You owe me -- the Party -- all of us something for putting you on to the Lavins. Is this the time to let us down? I'm not too proud to beg if I have to. Stick with the Party, boy! We can make a real race of it. Media space and time -- rallies -- literature -- sound trucks -- street meetings -- we're in the running again, boy!" "Sorry, Del," Mundin said patiently. "Charlie!" Mundin looked exasperated. "Del, you old crook, just what are you up to now? Suppose I did sink some time and some dough into the election -- which I won't. But suppose I did. You'd be in serious trouble if we won. Del. This is the year when the Regulars take a fall in the Council and the Reforms take a fall in the Statewide. What are you going to do, break the agreement?" T HE politician leaned forward, his face completely changed. "I underestimated you, Charlie. I'll tell you the God's truth. No, normally I wouldn't break the agreement; I'd be crazy. But something's on the fire. I never miss on something like this. I feel it through the soles of my feet." He had Mundin's full attention now. "What do you feel?" Dworcas shrugged. "Little things. Jimmy Lyons, for instance. Remember him -- the captain's man at the precinct?" "Sure." "He isn't any more. Captain Kowalik transferred him out to Belly Rave. Why? I don't know why, Charlie. Jimmy had it coming to him, sure. But why did it happen? And what's happening to Kowalik? He's losing weight. He can't sleep nights. I asked him why and he wouldn't tell me. So I asked somebody else and I found out. Kowalik's trouble is that Commissioner Sabbatino doesn't talk to him any more." "And what's the matter with Sabbatino?" Mundin was playing with a pencil. "Don't kid me, Charlie. Sabbatino's trouble is a man named Wheeler, who had a long, long talk with him one day. I don't know what about. But I know Wheeler works for Hubble and Hubble is one of your clients." Mundin put the pencil down. "So what else is new?" he asked. "Don't joke, Charlie. What about the Ay-rabs? There's a crazy rumor they're all going to be moved into G-M-L Homes. The old folks don't like the idea. Some of the young folks do, so there are family fights. A dozen riot calls a day in the #th. So I asked my brother Arnie, the engineer with G-M-L. You met him, you know what a fathead he is. But even he feels something in his organization. What do we feel, Charlie?" A secretary person -- with a start, Dworcas recognized his brother's friend, Bligh -- put his head in the door. "Excuse me, Mr. Mundin, but they phoned from the landing stage that they're holding the D.C. 'copter for you." Mundin nodded. "Look, thank them, Norvie, and ask them if they can give me five more minutes. I'll be free shortly." He glanced at Del Dworcas. Dworcas said, "You're busy, Charlie. I'll see you some other time. I just want you to remember that I'm leveling with you." "Good-by, Del," Mundin said cordially. Then to Bligh, after Dworcas was gone, he said, "Thanks, Norvie. You were very smooth. Let's walk over to Mr. Ryan's office." Bligh said, "We can't stay too long. The 'copter really does leave in twenty minutes." with great dignity at his desk. He looked good, considering. His yen pox pills were rationed to him these days and he accepted it with good grace. His confusing explanation was, "As long as you know you can get your hands on them, you can say 'no' most of the time. It's when you can't possibly get them that you've got to have them." As a consequence, his very able brain had cleared and he was able to work for as much as an intensive hour at a stretch. He had evolved personally most of the # basic steps of tackling G-M-L. Mundin reported Del's conversation carefully. In effect, it was that steps one through twentyfour were clicking nicely. "A very pleasant miasma of doubt and confusion," Ryan declared. "I am gratified, Charles. There is no public-opinion poll as sensitive as the judgment of a professional politician -- but we will, of course, continue with the polling as a matter of course. You have reason to be proud." "Have I?" Mundin asked glumly. "Spreading doubt and confusion? Knifings every night in the #th ward?" He felt instant regret as the old man's face drooped. "Excuse me, Mr. Ryan. Perhaps I've been working too hard." Ryan said slowly, "Yes, at the wrong things. You remember the state I was in when we first met?" Mundin did. The old man had been disheveled, very sick with withdrawal symptoms, in a smoke-filled Belly Rave slum. "It was partly Green, Charlesworth that brought me to that sorry state. Partly Green, Charlesworth and partly conscience. Don't strain yours too far, Charles." Mundin found himself engaged in an elaborate justification of the role he was playing, explaining to the gently smiling, nodding old man that of course there was a good end in sight, that he wouldn't be touching the thing if it were just for money, that they were out to end the contractrental system in G-M-L. Bligh touched his elbow and muttered, "I think Mr. Ryan is asleep again." He was. "And we really ought to head for the 'copter deck now." They did, and took their seats in the big Washington-bound craft. Mundin said fretfully, "We ought to have a couple of executive ships of our own. There's going to be more and more ground to cover. Put somebody on it, will you, Norvie?" Bligh made a note. Mundin asked, "When do you get in touch with Del's brother? We can't stall on it any longer. We've got to have those serial numbers or today's work -- and the whole buildup to it -- is wasted." "Tomorrow all right?" Bligh inquired. "Fine, fine." H E took a briefcase from Bligh, shuffled through reports he ought to read, memoranda he ought to sign, notes he ought to expand. He irritably stuffed them back into the case. Incredibly, Bligh said to him, "Conscience, Charles," and winked. "You don't know what it's like, Norvie! You don't have the responsibility, so don't try to kid me out of it. Let's just talk; I don't have to be a criminal again until we walk in on the museum. How've things been with you?" Bligh considered. "Well," he said, "Virginia's pregnant." Mundin was genuinely shocked. "Norvie, I am sorry! I hope you're not going to do anything foolish -- " Bligh grinned. "The kid's mine. First thing I did was drag her to an immunochemist and get that settled. How's your girl?" "Huh?" "Norma Lavin." "You're dead wrong there. We can't stand each other. And on my side, there's full justification." "Sure," said Bligh soothingly. "Say, can we boost the allowance for the Wabbits? Lana was hinting." "Why not? But do you think it's doing any good? A bunch of kids, after all. I don't think the rumors they spread ever get over to grownups." "We can test easily enough. Launch one through the Wabbits alone. See how it compares in the polling." "Okay, Norvie, have it done. No raise for the Wabbits until then, though. How's your fosterdaughter, by the way?" "I'm almost proud of her. Came home five days running, beaten to a pulp. Sixth day, not a mark! She's a Burrow Leader in the Wabbits now. And she closes her mouth when she chews and calls me 'sir.' Why, I practically like the little witch!" Mundin felt a sudden flash of insight. "That's why you're still living in Belly Rave, isn't it?" Bligh got defensive. "Maybe that's part of it. But there's something to be said for Belly Rave. When you can install a water tank and a generating system and fix your place up -- it's kind of lively." His voice rang with civic pride. "In our block, we've organized a real volunteer police force, not one of those shakedown squads, and there's talk in the blocks around us of doing the same." Mundin said, "One day, who knows? Norvell Bligh, first mayor of New Belly Rave!" The little man was suddenly gray; he fiddled with the earpiece of his hearing aid. "Make it a joke if you want to," he said, hurt. "The fact is they like me. I'm doing something for them -- in a small way at first -- and something has got to be done for the inside. I'm a funny-looking little man and I'm deaf and you automatically thought what you did when I said Virginia was pregnant. So what are you doing for Belly Rave, big man?" "Norvie, I'm sorry! I didn't dream you were that serious about it -- " "Doesn't matter. Here's Washington." npHE Museum of the National Association of the Builders of the American Dream had once been a proud idea, built with the contributions of businessmen and schoolchildren. But the American Dream was mere history in this G-M-L era, like Pax Romana or Brittania's rule of the waves -- words that had meaning only for the dead. The Museum remained, as the Pyramids had, but with the difference that the Pyramids needed no maintenance or staff. Of all this Mundin was reminded when he entered the shabby building and found, his way to the anteroom of the director's office. The withered secretary said to the gentlemen from New York, "Dr. Proctor is a very busy man. You must write or telephone for an appointment." Mundin said gently, "Please tell the director that it is in connection with a rather substantial bequest. If it isn't convenient for him to see us now, we'll be glad to come back at some other time -- although we don't expect to be in the city long ,..." The director came flying out of his office, beaming. The attorney introduced himself. "Yes, indeed, Mr. Munsen! Even here, even in our remote and dedicated corner of the world, we have heard of your firm. Might one ask the name of -- " "Sorry." "Oh, I quite understand, Mr. Munchkin! And the -- ah -- amount?" "Flexible," Mundin said firmly. "My client has commissioned me to inspect the Museum and report to him on which departments seem most deserving of additional support." "Ah! Pray allow me to guide you, sir. Just through here is the Collection of -- " Mundin said blandly, "I think we would prefer to see the Hall of Basics first." Dr. Proctor very nearly frowned. At the last minute, he changed and merely looked confidential. "For the general public," he said, nudging Mundin. "Gimmicks and gadgets. Not important, though perhaps of some limited interest to the engineer, the sociologist, that sort of person. Now our collection of Coelenterates, just through -- " "The Hall of Basics, please?" "Mr. Monkton! A tourist trap, I assure you. On the other hand, the Coelenterata -- which happen to be my specialty, I might add -- " Mundin said sadly, "Norvell, I'm afraid Dr. Proctor isn't really interested in our client's bequest." "Too bad," Bligh said. "Well, luckily the 'copter's waiting." D R. Proctor sputtered and led them to the Hall of Basics. They gravely studied the spinning jenny, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the Model T, the atomic pile. They stopped before the GM-L bubble house, beaming approvingly -- except for Dr. Proctor. A tourist family of five was hogging the descriptive plaque. It was a minute or so before they could get close enough to read it. No. #I Donated by Mr. Hamilton Moffatt " Father of the Bubble House " This G-M-L Home, moved to the Museum from its original site in Coshocton, Ohio, was fabricated in the plastics factory of Donald Lavin. Electrical circuitry and mechanisms were designed and installed by Bernard Gorman. It has stood for more than five decades without a scar or a malfunction. Chemists and engineers estimate that, without any sort of maintenance, it will last at least # more years, standing virtually forever as a tribute to the immortal genius of "Do tell," murmured the attorney. The director glumly started to lead them through the bubble house. "Hell with it," said Mundin. "Let's go back to your place." In Dr. Proctor's private office, Mundin looked at the small, dusty bottle the director exhumed from an umbrella rack. He shuddered and said decisively, "No, nothing to drink, thanks. Dr. Proctor, I think I can definitely state that my client would be interested in donating twenty thousand dollars as a fund to be divided at your discretion between the Hall of Basics and the Coelenterata collection." "Dear me!" Dr. Proctor leaned back in his chair, fondling the bottle, his face wreathed in smiles. "Dear me! Are you sure you wouldn't care to -- just a very small -- no? Do you know, perhaps I will, just to celebrate. A very wise decision, sir! It is, believe me, most unusual to find a layman who, like yourself, can at once perceive the ecological logy of the humble coelenterate!" He tipped the bottle into a dusty water tumbler and raised it in a toast. "The Coelenterata!" he cried. briefcase. He produced a check, already made out, a typed document in duplicate, and a flat can that gurgled. "Now," he said matter-offactly, "pay close attention. Doctor. You, personally, are to dilute the contents of this can with one quart of ordinary tap water, fill an ordinary garden sprayer with the solution, and spray the G-M-L Home in the Hall of Basics with it, covering all plastic parts from the outside. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes, if you have a good sprayer. Naturally, you will make sure nobody sees you doing it. That should be easy enough, in your position, but make absolutely sure of it. And that will be that." Dr. Proctor, eyes bulging, coughed an ounce of tinted grain neutral spirits over his desk. Choking and wheezing, he at last got out, "My dear sir! What on earth are you talking about? What is in that container? Why should I do any such preposterous thing?" "I'll take your questions in order. I am talking about twenty thousand dollars. What is in that container is something worth twenty thousand dollars. You should do it because of twenty thousand dollars." Dr. Proctor wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, almost speechless. "But -- but if you assured me that the fluid would be entirely harmless -- " "I'll do no such thing. Where I come from, you can get away with quite a lot for twenty thousand dollars." Mundin smiled frostily. "Come now. Doctor. Think of twenty thousand dollars! Think of the ecological signifiogy. And then sign this receipt -- and then take the check." Dr. Proctor looked at the check. "It's post-dated a month," he said tremulously. Mundin shrugged and began to repack his briefcase. "Well, if you're going to quibble -- " Dr. Proctor snatched the check. He scribbled his name on the receipt and, with a quick, furtive movement, dropped the flat can of fluid into his desk. In the return 'copter, Mundin and Bligh looked at each other. "He'll do it," Norvie Bligh said gravely. "He will. And that means we've got to have the serial numbers from the G-M-L files fast. You'd better see your friend Arnie Dworcas tonight." Bligh choked down a protest. This part was his job. for he was old Norvell, the true friend, the shy acolyte. Sitting there with Arnie, listening to Arnie's explanations of world affairs, it seemed to Norvie that Belly Rave was a nightmare and Mundin a figure from a dream. Nothing had changed, nothing would ever change, as long as he could sit and drink Amie's beer. But there were changes... Arnie drained his glass of beer, wiped his mouth and dialed another. "No, Norvell," he said meditatively, "I wouldn't say that you have succeeded. Not as we Engineers understand success. To us Engineers, a mechanism -- and all of us are mechanisms, I, you, everybody -- a mechanism is a success when it is functioning at maximum efficiency. Frankly, in my little experiment of suggesting that you try Belly Rave, I was attempting to perform what we call 'destructive testing' -- the only way in which maximum efficiency can be determined. But what happened? By pure fortuitousness, you made a connection and are now a really able man's secretary." He sipped his beer sorrowfully. "To use an analogy, it's as if my slipstick were to take credit for the computations I make on it." "I'm sorry, Arnie," Norvell said. It was very difficult to decide whether he wanted to laugh in Arnie's face or take out some of those front teeth with a beer glass. "Mr. Mundin thinks a great deal of you and your brother, too, you know. You impressed him very much when you met him." "Naturally. That's one of the things you'll have to learn. Like seeks like, in human relations as well as electrostatics." "I thought in electrostatics like repelled -- " "There you go!" yelled Arnie violently. "The dogmatic, argumentative layman! It's people like you that -- " "I'm sorry, Arnie!" "All right. Don't get so excited. Really able people never lose control of themselves, Norvell! That was a stupid thing for you to get all upset about." "I'm sorry, Arnie. That's what I was telling Mr. Mundin." Arnie, raising his glass irritatedly, stopped it in mid-air. He peered suspiciously at Norvie over the rim. "What were you telling Mr. Mundin?" "Why, that you never lost control in an emergency. That you would be a damned good man to put in charge of -- oh! I shouldn't have said anything!" Norvell covered his mouth with both hands. Arnie Dworcas said sternly, "Norvell, stop stammering and come out with it! In charge of what?" ing back a tendency to retch, removed his hands from his mouth. "Well -- well, it isn't as if I couldn't trust you, Arnie. It's G-M-L." "What about G-M-L?" Norvie said rapidly, "It's too soon to say anything definite and, please, Arnie, don't let a word of it get out. But you've heard the rumors about G-M-L, naturally." "Naturally!" Arnie said, though he frowned blankly. "Mr. Mundin is associated with the -- uh -- the Coshocton bunch, Arnie. And he's looking around -- quietly, you know -- for key men to replace some of the old duffers. And I took the liberty of mentioning you to him, Amie. The only thing is, Mr. Mundin doesn't know much about the technical end, you see, and he wasn't sure just how much experience you've had." "My record is in the professional journals, Norvell. Not that I would feel free to discuss it in this informal manner in any case, of course." "Oh, of course! But what Mr. Mundin asked me was just what G-M-L Homes models you had worked on -- serial numbers and locations and so on. And I had to tell him that all that information was locked up and you couldn't possibly get your hands on it." Arnie shook his head wonderingly. "Laymen," he said. "Norvell, there is no reason in the world why I can't get micro-films of all that information. It's only corporate fiddle-faddle that causes all the secrecy. We Engineers are accustomed to cutting through the red tape." Norvell looked worshipful. "You mean you can?" "I have already said so, haven't I? It's just a matter of going through the records and picking out the units I've worked on myself, then making microfilms -- " "Better microfilm everything, Arnie," Norvell suggested. "It'll help Mr. Mundin understand the Broad Picture." Arnie shrugged .humorously. "Why not?" "Don't forget the serial numbers," Norvell added. "Laymen," snorted Arnie Dworcas. Seven were gathered in Ryan's office on the day it happened at the Museum of the National Association of the Builders of the American Dream. It was an ill-planned meeting, having more than one purpose. At the top level, it was a pep session and information seminar. On a lower level, three teams of auditors, one each for Hubble, Coett and Nelson, were going over the books of Ryan  Mundin. Don Lavin was amiably present and Norma had started things off right when Hubble absent-mindedly attempted to guide her to a seat. She snapped, "I do not impose on the biological fact that I am a woman and I don't expect anybody to impose on me. If Mr. Hubble can't keep his hands to himself, I expect him at least to leave me alone during working hours. After hours, I can manage to avoid him." Bliss Hubble said with a straight face, "Sorry, Lavin. It won't happen again." To the rest, he said cheerfully, "Who'd like to take charge?" It was Coett, of course. He benignly told Mundin, "We'll just ignore the audit boys outside, shall we? I'm sure their work will be purely routine. Now, among ourselves, how are we doing? I, for one, haven't been able to pick up as much floating G-M-L stock as I'd wish, nor have the prices been right so far." "Same here," said Hubble. "Ah -- I agree," Nelson said. Old man Ryan raised his hand. "Up to now, it's been rumors, gentlemen. Very shortly, things will begin to happen. I think you'll find some dumping of G-M-L will begin within, say, a week. And with proper management and some luck, there will be as pretty a panic as you could wish within a month thereafter. There won't be time for a rally. Our group, gentlemen, will make the next meeting with a clear majority." Hubble said abruptly, "I can't get through to Green, Charlesworth." It was a challenge, flung at Coett. "The comptroller of my publishing outfit thought it would be a good idea to renew a mortgage they hold on the transmitter tower in Sullivan County. They said no, so he paid them off in cash from our contingency fund. I thought I'd better check; it looked like a new policy. But I can't get through. When they want to be remote -- you know." "I find that very interesting, Bliss," Nelson said. "Ah -- I, too, have had occasion to make a routine inquiry regarding insurance policies. That was six weeks ago and as yet I've had no reply. Green, Charlesworth sometimes appears to be dilatory, of course -- a natural reflection of their deeply rooted conservatism." "They're progressives," Hubble said scornfully. "Middle-of-the-roaders," insisted Coett. Hubble asked Coett directly, "Having any trouble, Harry? We've bared our bosoms." "Nothing you could call trouble," Coett said. "Just that I'm not -- getting through. Like you gentlemen. Oh, I'm doing business with them, but no real communication." minded of Captain Kowalik, unnerved and jittery because Commissioner Sabbatino didn't talk to him any more. He asked bluntly, "Is this a bad situation?" They smiled politely and told him not to worry; it wasn't his problem. Green, Charlesworth did nothing on the operating or manufacturing end. They were finance. Hubble said, "Frankly, I don't know where they stand on this thing. It was my opinion that they wouldn't give a damn one way or the other. Nelson agreed with me and Harry thought they'd be all for us -- not that they vote any G-M-L stock, but with their moral influence. Still, they're a funny outfit, so this lapse may not mean anything." Mundin asked, "Want me to go calling on them? Level with them? Have it out? Meet whatever terms they may have?" Four heads swiveled and four incredulous stares drilled him. Coett spoke for all when he said gently, "No." "My guess is that they're onto us." Hubble elaborated, "that they know every move we make and just haven't committed themselves -- yet." Mundin looked at the three Titans in turn and asked wonderingly, "When you say 'they,' whom do you mean, exactly?" A three-cornered wrangle developed while old man Ryan dozed off. Coett believed that Green, Charlesworth were essentially the top men in the Memphis crowd plus Organic Solvents and New England utilities. He himself was most of the Southwest crowd and practically all of Inorganic Chemicals. Nelson, who was New England and Non-Ferrous Metals, believed that Green, Charlesworth were essentially California, coal-oilsteel and mass media. Hubble, who was mass media and New York, said that couldn't be. Unless -- with a hard look at Coett and Nelson -- somebody was lying like hell. Green, Charlesworth, he thought, were essentially money. On that, everybody agreed. Worriedly. "Look," said Mundin, "I just want to get this straight in my mind. Would we scuttle the whole project if Green, Charlesworth came out against it?" When somebody tells you, "Say, I've heard a rumor that two and two make four; do you put any stock in that stuff?" -- that's the kind of look Mundin got. Coett said quietly. "Why, yes, Charles. We would." Hubble's nervous voice cut in, "I don't believe that's going to happen, Charles. It's simply a matter of getting in touch with them. After all, we're taking a step forward and Green, Charlesworth have always been on the side of progress." "Conservatism," said Nelson. "Middle-of-the-roaders," Coett insisted. That, clearly, was getting them nowhere. ed, "But who are they? Where are they?" Hubble said, "Their offices are in the Empire State Building -- the entire building." Mundin's eyebrows climbed. "Jn New York?I thought the place was condemned. And are there a real Green and a real Charlesworth?" Hubble shook his head. They're there, all right. As for a real Mr. Green and a real Mr. Charlesworth -- the firm name is a couple of hundred years old, so I'm not sure. When you go there, you never see anyone important. Clerks, junior executives, department heads. You do business with them and there are long waits -- weeks, sometimes -- while they're 'deciding policy questions.' I suppose that means while they're getting their instructions. Well, now you know as much about Green, Charlesworth as anybody else. Just remember, if they turn up anywhere, or you encounter anything -- well, anomalous that makes you suspect they're turning up, blow the whistle. We'll handle it." "But there won't be any trouble," Coett said hopefully, and Nelson nervously agreed. Norvell Bligh popped in. "It happened!" he yelped, and dived for the television screen. "We had a guy monitoring and it just -- " "At first blamed on vibration," roared a newscaster before Norvie got the sound where he wanted it. "Experts from G-M-L, however, said that at first glance this appears unlikely. A team of G-M-L engineers is being dispatched to Washington to study the wreckage. We bring you now a picture from our library of the first bubble house. As it was -- " The slide flashed on; there stood G-M-L Unit One, dwarfed by the Hall of Basics. " -- and as it is." A live shot this time: Same site, same hall -- but instead of the gleaming bubble house, a tangle of rubbish, with antlike uniformed men crawling about the wreckage. "Daddy's first house!" and burst into tears. The others gave her swift, incredulous looks and went right back to staring in fascination and fear at the screen. "Our Washington editor now brings you Dr. Henry Proctor, Director of the Museum. Dr. Proctor?" The rabbit face flashed on, squirming, scared. "Dr. Proctor," asked the mellow tones, "what, in your opinion, might be the cause of the collapse?" "I really -- I really have no opinion. I'm -- uh -- completely in the -- uh -- dark. It's a puzzle to me. I'm afraid I can't -- uh -- be of the slightest -- I have no opinion. Really." "Thank you. Dr. Proctor!" To Mundin, rapt on the screen, it seemed that all was lost; any fool could read guilt, guilt, guilt plastered on the director's quivering face and at once infer that Proctor had sprayed the bubble house with a solvent supplied by someone else; and it would be only moments until "someone else" was identified as Charles Mundin. But the newscaster was babbling on. The rabbit face flickered off the screen. The newscaster said : "Ah, I have a statement just handed to me from G-M-L Homes. Mr. Haskell Arnold, Chairman of the Board of G-M-L Homes, announced today that the engineering staff of the firm has reached tentative conclusions regarding the partial malfunction -- " Even the newscaster stumbled over that. The listening men, recalling the pile of rubble, roared and slapped their knees in a burst of released tension. "The -- uh -- partial malfunction of G-M-L Unit One. They state that highly abnormal conditions of vibration and chemical environment present in the Museum are obviously to blame. Mr. Arnold said, and I quote, 'There is no possibility whatsoever that this will happen again.' End of quote." The announcer smiled and discarded a sheet from the papers in his hand. Now chummy, he went on; "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm certainly glad to hear that and so, I'm sure, are all of you who also live in bubble houses. "And now, for you sports fans, the morning line on Grosse Point Field Day. It's going to be a bang-up show produced by the veteran impresario Jim 'Blood and Guts' Hanrahan. Plenty of solid, traditional entertainment. First spectacle -- " "Turn that thing off," someone ordered Norvell. Wistfully, he did -- straining to catch the last words -- remembering. Harry Coett broke the silence brutally. "Well, that's that. We're committed. Is everybody here as terrified as I am?" west from New York, Norvie at the stick and Mundin glumly toying with a lever that would push a bowden wire that would open the cock of a pressurized belly tank full of golden fluid. Norvie asked, "Did I tell you it's a boy? Looked through the fetuscope myself. The doctor said it's the finest forty-day embryo he's seen in twenty years of practice. I tell you, that kid's going to have every advantage I never -- " "Swell, Norvie," Mundin said with a snap in his voice. Norvie shut up. Mundin turned on a small pocket reader and slipped microfilm into i. Old records copied on the sneak by Norvie's friend Amie Dworcas, brought to him proudly and furtively. Much guff about "We Engineers, Mr. Mundin" and "You won't forget this, I hope, Mr. Mundin. As We Engineers say, you brace my buttress and I'll brace yours, hah-hah-hah!" So the records said G-M-L No. # was the northwest corner of the Coshocton Bubble City; proceed along the western side of the polygon, then south... And where the golden drops rained down, Bubble House No. #, then No. #, then No. # through No. # would one by one crumble, leaving families naked to the foundry fumes and weather. And throughout the country, hysteria would be unleashed. G-M-L lessees would frantically hunt for the serial plate of their houses, scribble calculations, wildly phone their friends. Thete would be a terrific run on sporting goods stores; the morning after the night Coshocton began to crumble, not a sleeping bag or tent would be left on their shelves. But that was all right. Hubble, Coett and Nelson had quietly bought control of the leading sporting goods companies. The rise in their stocks would constitute a nice little by-product. Charles Mundin, attorney, checked the tanks for the dozenth time and Norvell Bligh looked rigidly at the instruments that were set on Coshocton. XX T HE panic was as pretty as could be desired. Probably not one man-hour of work was done for days by anybody who occupied a bubble house. Hubble, Coett and Nelson flooded the New York Parimutuel Stock Exchange with agents. A satisfactory trickle of dumped G-M-L stock began to run into their portfolios, against bidding by scattered, unready, disorganized agents for the Arnold group that controlled the G-M-L Board. Clearly, it was time for another session on the neutral ground of Ryan  Mundin, Attorneys at Law. "Progress, gentlemen," Coett said happily after they had pooled information. "We are within sight of fifty-one per cent ownership!" Norma demanded, "Is there going to be any more wrecking?" Nelson sniffed. "If the Arnold group firms up within, say, two days, they'll be able to hold against us. In that case, we'll have to hit them with something new." "No wrecking," Norma said hoarsely. "You will kindly leave such decisions to us. If we must wreck, we will." "And so will I!" She picked a vase from Ryan's desk and threw it at Nelson. Her aim was true, but he ducked fast. The vase exploded with an electric snarl of blue light that charred the' wall. Norma's look of utter stupefaction matched any in the room. The silence lasted almost half a minute. "Call somebody in," Coett said at last, his eyes not leaving the shards on the floor that still smoked. Mundin phoned, his voice shaky, for the firm's top chemist. "Not my baby," the chemist said after peering at the' fragments. "Get Joe Panelli, Mr. Mundin. It seems to be electrical, whatever it is." Panelli, communications engineer, pronounced the intact vase to have been a wonderfully clever communicator -- whether one-way or two-way, he could not say yet. The crackle in its glaze had been metallic -- the vase was small, but the crackle was fine -- perhaps a hundred meters of antenna. There were relics of transistors, fused little lumps buried in the clay. The four medallions and the band about the shoulder of the vase might contain Chinese characters or might not. To him, the characters looked like unfamiliar printed circuits. The bell mouth of the jar suggested a non-directional mike and, yes, it could be a loudspeaker, too. #TJ. "Can you find out if there are any more of these things around?" "Oh, sure, Mr. Mundin," said Panelli. "They put out a signal, so we just scan the bands." "Can you do that without whoever is listening in knowing about it?" Coett insisted. "Maybe yes, maybe no. My guess is no. Whoever designed this could -- maybe would -- design the receiving equipment to indicate a drop in energy received when we put a tap on." "Then don't do it," Coett said. Panelli gave him a rebellious look. Mundin said, "Just hold everything, Joe. I'll let you know." There was another long silence. Hubble broke it with, "Scratch seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, gentlemen." "It's an idea," Coett said. He took out his fountain pen, looked wonderingly at it and put it back in his pocket. He sighed. Old man Ryan put his face in his hands and groaned. Mundin had a fair idea of what was going through his mind. Back to Belly Rave and despair. And three days from the top. Mundin said loudly, "Speaking for my clients, the Lavins, I don't see how I can conscientiously let you people back out of the agreement. Nor do I see any reason why you should. Somebody planted a microphone on us -- so what? It happens every day." "Quite a mike," Hubble commented. He alone of the three money men seemed to be unscared. Mundin decided to concentrate on him. "Why the panic, Bliss? What's wrong with these two?" "If you think I'm going to say one more word in your offices, Charles, you're crazy. There may be more of those things around. Until this is wrapped up, I think it would be wisest to meet in turkish baths. I don't see how Lavin could get in on such a conference, but perhaps that's best. The fewer who know, the safer the secret." Mundin exploded, "Damn it, this is crazy! So there's somebody spying on us. What of it? They're just people. They've got nothing but money. We're people, too, and we've also got money -- plenty of it. All right, maybe they have more, but that doesn't make them God almighty. We can lick them if we have to!" He stopped. Hubble, Coett and Nelson were wincing at every word. Coett said faintly, "Don't talk any more, Charles. You've said too much. Some interests -- well, some people would call them relentless. Not that I'm agreeing for a minute." His eyes were darting around the room. ering, stood up. "My father invented the bubble house for -- " She began tremblingly, then caught herself. "No! Leaving Daddy out of this, one-quarter of G-M-L Homes belongs to Don and myself. It's ours, understand? Ours! Not yours or whoever's scaring the wits out of you. It isn't just money, you know. We got along fine without any. We can do it again. It's people. It's making life worth living for the poor slobs who buy their bubble houses with their life's blood! Slavery's against the law. G-M-L's been breaking the law -- but we are taking over -- and we are going to stop slavery. You hear me?" They heard her -- and seven people were shouting at once, even old Ryan. " -- no better than a Democrat, young lady!" Nelson was howling. And "For God's sake, let her talk!" screamed Mundin. And Coett was spouting endless shushes, with gestures patting the air. And the door opened. Mishal, the Ay-rab boy, stared in, terror on his face. "Visitor," he told them, and disappeared. "Oh, hell," Mundin said in the sudden silence, starting toward the door. "I told those idiots -- oh, it's you." He looked irriChoate IV, now entering. "Helbusy right now -- " trembling. "Hello, old man," he said dismally. "I have a -- message for you." "Now." He handed Mundin a square white envelope. Mundin, torn between annoyance and hysteria, opened it and glanced absently at the little white card inside. Then he glanced at it again. Then he stared at it until Coett came to life and leaped forward to take it out of his hand. It said in crabbed handwriting: Green, Charlesworth request the appearance of Mr. Charles Mundin and Miss Norma Lavin when convenient. Choate apologetically took out a magazine as soon as they settled down in the car. "You know what Great-great-granddaddy Rufus said, Charles -- 'Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.' I always like to -- " absently. "Look, what's all this?" "Of course, he wasn't my real Great-great-granddaddy. Grand pap just kind of took that name when he bought into the firm. It's just a way of -- " it was in law school, the way I helped you pass the exams and all?" "Charles, what can I say?" "You can tell me what this is all about!" he looked all around him, at glowering Norma, at the fittings of the car. Then he looked at Mundin again. The implication was unmistakable. "At least tell me what your connection is," Mundin begged. "Gee, Charles!" But the answer to that one, at least, was plain, written in those soft cow eyes, spelled out in that tremhad made him to be -- an errand boy -- and doubtless knew little more than Mundin about what, why or wherefore. read his magazine, while he stared morosely at the crumbled city they were driving through. Norma's hand, startlingly, sought his for a moment, then jerked away. The building smelled old. They stepped into a creaking elevator and slowly went up fifty flights. A long walk and then another elevator, even smaller, even creakier. Then a small room with a there; all he said was, "See you." Then -- waiting. An hour, several hours. Norma talked about her childhood, her dedicated father, his miserable fate, her bitter disappointment that Don would not grow up to the responsibility of being that great thing, a Lavin. It was scared, compulsive babbling. Something in the air militated against logic and sense. Crawly fingers -- At last she fell silent, her eyes jerking about the room. Mundin thought he was going to crack apart and start yelling. Then he realized that that was what Green, Charlesworth wanted him to think, and got a grip on himself. And, by arid by, a small, quiet man came and led them into another room. There was no place to sit and no place to hang their coats. Mundin draped his over his arm and stood staring back into the unblinking eyes of the man seated at the desk. He was an imposing figure of a man, lean-featured, dark-haired, temples shot with silver. He leaned forward, comfortably appraising. His chin was in one cupped hand, the fingers covering his lips, his eyes following Mundin. His chest rhythmically rose and fell; otherwise, he was stock still. Mundin cleared his throat. "Mr. -- ah -- Green?" T HE man said emotionlessly, "We despise you, Mr. Mundin and Miss Lavin. We are going to destroy you." Mundin cried, "Why?" "You are Rocking the Boat," the man said through his fingers, the piercing eyes locked with Mundin's own. Mundin cleared his throat. "Look, Mr. Green -- you are Mr. Green?" "You are Our Enemy, Mundin." "Now wait a minute!" Mundin took a deep breath. Please! he silently begged his adrenal gland. Gently! he ordered the pounding sensation in his skull. He said temperately, "I'm sure we can get together, Mr. -- sir. After all, we're not greedy." The figure said steadily, "People like you would doom Civilization As We Know It if we let them. We do not intend to." Mundin swept his eyes hopelessly around the room. This man was obviously mad; someone else, anyone else -- But there was no one. Barring the desk and the man, there was nothing in the room but a pair of milky glass cabinets and Mundin and Norma. He said, "Look, did you call us down here just to insult us?" "You two put your Fingers in the Buzz Saw. They will be Lopped Off." "Insane," Norma muttered faintly. "Dammit!" Mundin yelled. He hurled his coat violently to the floor, but it did nothing to calm him. "If you're crazy, say so and let me get out of here! I never came across such blithering idiocy in my life!" He stopped in the middle of a beginning tirade; stopped short. The man wasn't looking at him any more. The same unblinking and unwavering gaze that had been on Mundin was now piercingly directed at the coat on the floor. To the coat, the motionless man said, "We brought you two here to see Infamy with Our Own Eyes. Now we have seen it and we will Blot It Out." And then startlingly, shrilly, "Hee!" Mundin swallowed and stepped gingerly forward. Three paces and he was at the desk, leaning over, looking at what should be the neatly tailored trousers of the man's modest suit. The personnel of Green, Charlesworth were not wearing trousers this year. The personnel of Green, Charlesworth were wearing bronze pedestals with thick black cables snaking out of them, and brass nameplates that read: # Volt A. C. Only "Hee!" shrilled the motionless lips, just by Mundin's ear. "That's far enough, Mundin. You were right, I suppose, Mrs. Green." though the # volts of A. C. had passed through his tonsils. A flicker of light caught his eye; the two milky glass cabinets had lighted up. He looked, peripherally aware that Norma had toppled in a faint beside him. He wished he hadn't looked. The contents of the cabinets were Green and Charlesworth. Green, an incredibly, impossibly ancient dumpy-looking, hairless female. Charlesworth, an incredible, impossibly ancient stringbean-looking, hairless male. Mercifully, the lights flickered out. Another voice said, but from the same motionless lips, "Can we kill them, Mr. Charlesworth?" "I think not, Mrs. Green," the Sleepless 'Receptionist answered itself in the first voice. Mundin said forcefully, "Now wait a minute." It was pure reflex. He came to the end of the sentence and stopped. The female voice said sadly. "Perhaps they will commit suicide, Mr. Charlesworth. Tell him what he is Up Against." "He knows what he is Up Against, Mrs. Green. Don't you, Mundin?" Mundin nodded. He was obsessed by the Sleepless Receptionist's eyes, now piercingly aimed at him again -- attracted, perhaps, by the movement. "Tell him!" shrieked Mrs. Green. "Tell him about that boy. Tell him what we'll do to him!" "A Child of Evil," the male voice said mechanically. "He wants to take G-M-L away from us." Mundin was galvanized. "Not you! Just Arnold nd his crowd!" "Are Our Fingers Us?" the female voice demanded. "Are Our Arms and Legs Us? Arnold is Us!" The male voice piped, "The girl, Mrs. Green. The girl!" "Painted Courtesan," observed the female voice. "She wants to free the slaves, she says. She talks about Mr. Lincoln! "But you know we fixed Mr. Lincoln's Wagon, Mr. Charlesworth," chortled the female voice. "We did, Mrs. Green. And we will Fix her Wagon, too." Mundin, thinking dazedly that he should have been more careful where he put Ryan's yen pox -- it was stupid of him to get it mixed up with his vitamin pills -- said feebly, "Are you that old?" "Are we that old, Mrs. Green?" asked the male voice. "Are we!" shrilled the female. "Tell him! Tell him about the boy!" "Perhaps not now, Mrs. Green. Perhaps later. When we have Softened them Up. You two may go now." Mundin automatically put on his coat and lifted Norma to his shoulder. He turned dazedly to the door. Halfway, he stopped, staring at the milky glass. Glass, he thought. Glass and quivering, moving corpses inside that a breath of air might -- "Try it, Mundin," challenged the voice. "We wanted to see if you would." Mundin decided against it. "Too bad," said the voice of Charlesworth. "We hate you, Mundin. You said we were not God Almighty." "Athiest!" hissed the voice of Mrs. Green. din said, lying, "It wasn't so bad." Ryan had taken advantage of their absence to get coked to the eyebrows. He said dreamily, "Think of them, hundreds of years old. You know what H. G. Wells said? 'A frightful queerness is coming into life.' Nothing went right, no matter what you did. You know what Jonathan Swift called Green, Charlesworth? Struldbrugs. Those were the only people were on to them. Gulliver said they had a law that no Struldbrug could keep his money after he was a hundred. Think of them, hundreds of years old, hundreds and hundreds and hun -- " Don Lavin touched his shoulder and he stopped. Harry Coett, smiling affably at his own thumbnail, said gently, "How about a drink?" Mundin poured it for him, pretending not to notice that the big man was quite soaked with sweat there in the air-conditioned room. "We must proceed to an orderly liquidation," Nelson said, his eyes jumping from one corner to another. "Naturally, any further action along our previous lines is out of the question." Norma appeared at the door carrying a projector. Mundin had left her in her office under the care of the company nurse. "Is it all settled by now?" she asked grimly. "Everybody seems to be in agreement." Mundin felt weighed down by a tremendous apathy. Four men who aggregated eight times his age, thirty times his business experience -- you couldn't buck all that. Norma opened the projector and swept papers from Ryan's desk. "I just wanted to show you," she said. "These are the family's home movies. It's kept me going through some hard times..." She dimmed the lights and turned on the projector. "Here's Father," she said. "In the plant." Somebody had sneaked up with a camera, catching Lavin unaware. The "plant" looked very much like a cinder-block barn, with benches and presses. Three people working on a big breadboard electrical layout, backs to camera. Tired, authoritative voice: "You don't seem to get the idea, Bernie. I don't just want a door. The Egyptians had doors. I don't just want a good door. Some doors have been pretty good in the past five thousand years. I want a perfect door. Hell, I guess my mistake is calling it a door. That creates a picture in your mind. Now let's scrap all this junk of yours and think about entering-and-leaving devices." An agonized protest: "Mr. Lavin, twenty-six months of work!" "Twenty-six months of work, Gorman, versus five thousand years of drafts, squeaks, sticks, slams, irritation, musclestrain, lost keys, burglary, scuffed thresholds, scarred panels, that damned ridiculous disproportionate strain on the upper hinge that guarantees malfunction, the stupidity of making doors too small for furniture and too large for people! Don't come whining to me about your lousy twenty-six months of pooping around! Think about it, Gorman! Use your head for a change! We're trying to bring some ease and graciousness into life for everybody! Let's do something for people instead of whimpering about twenty-six months -- " The speaker turned, then grinned startledly at whoever the cameraman was, and waved. Gorman looked sulky and defensive as the clip ran through. It was, Mundin uneasily realized, a foretaste of his eventual suicide because of frustration and defeat. Norma said, hushed, "A quick one of our living quarters." It was a posed shot of Lavin and his wife. The background was something that looked like a chicken coop, but was more likely a variety of pre-fab dwelling. Beaverboard walls insecurely held together by battens, a smoky oil heater, a grotesque chrome-andformica dinette set ferociously trying to elbow the two Lavins out of the picture altogether. Mr. Lavin was smiling absently. His wife looked sour and darted uncertain looks at the smoking heater. Obviously she couldn't wait to get at it. "The trade show," Norma said. "The awards banquet." It was the speakers table of any grand ballroom of any downtown hotel. The debris of squab with wild rice, cups of deathly black coffee and melting, multicolored ice cream being removed by sullen banquet waiters. A toastmaster pinged on his water glass as he rose and cleared his throat into the mikes. "Members and guests," he said fruitily, "of the Delivered Dwelling Industrial Association. It is altogether fitting and proper tonight that we have gathered to do honor to a new star in the constellation of Delivered Dwelling manufacturers. Surely, as we review the meteoric rise of Donald Lavin, there can be none here who doubts that he is a man who does credit to the industry, a competitor who fights hard and clean, a designer of striking originality and a businessman whose acumen points the way toward an entirely new concept of Delivered Dwelling finance and underwriting. Members and guests, it gives me great pleasure to present to Mr. Donald Lavin of Coshocton, Ohio, this plaque designating him the Delivered Dwelling Manufacturer of the Year!" plaque ; still photographers crowding in for shots. Lavin rising. To his left, a man like an undernourished shoat -- Gorman. To his right, a gaunt man who looked like an exceptionally lean gray rat -- Moffatt. Lavin fumbled the plaque for a moment and then uncertainly put it down. He said, "Thanks. Maybe I'm accepting this thing under false pretenses -- I know the title of my speech is supposed to be 'New Approaches to the Delivered Dwelling,' but first I'd like to give some credit where credit's due and to make a correction in the introductory remarks. To my left is sitting Mr. Bernard Gorman, who deserves as much credit as I for the design of the Lavin House. I may be the dynamo some people have called me, but Bernie's the detail man, the best I ever knew, and I'm not going to let him get away without taking a bow." Gorman rose and bobbed, flushing. "Reference was also made to me as a businessman. I decline the honor. The only businessman on our premises is our good treasurer and comptroller, Hamilton Moffatt, without whose common sense and fiscal knowhow, my company would never have got off the ground." The thin gray rat took a precise little bow, unasked. "And I should say that Mr. Walsh's introductory remarks about our novel policy of financing and underwriting by industrial purchase and subsequent leasing are Mr. Moffatt's idea and a darned good one, too, for a young company in need of working capital -- but an idea that I hope we'll be in a position to abandon shortly. "And now to" my main heading. There's no need for me to be modest, is there? You all know the Lavin House is good or you wouldn't have given me that plaque. Howd-it get that way? Partly because technology is at last developed to the point where good housing is possible; partly because I realized long ago that human stupidity is nowhere so marked and so costly as in housing. "I sat up one day in my bedroom. The floor was wooden. The walls were paint over paper, over plaster, over lath, over two-byfours. The roof was gabled. The windows were steel-casement. The doors were hinged slabs. The stairs were stairs -- and I can say nothing worse of them. The people in that house were hot in the summer, cold in the winter, assailed by pollen and every passing street noise -- oh, yes, the house was, of course, equipped with central air-conditioning. The place was filthy, requiring a battery of cleaning machinery to be hauled about weekly or oftener." was a weird combination of the flexible and the rigid, which meant that there were cracks. It was a Tinker Toy structure -- lots of little bits fastened to other little bits with little fastening devices, which meant that little bits were continually coming loose and falling off and having to be replaced. That house fought its occupants like a tiger -- or I should say like a plague of ants. It nibbled away at its occupants' leisure and serenity instead of supplying both in copious quantities. "I sat up in my bedroom and decided this foolishness had gone on long enough. The next day, I drew my first sketches of a better house, and I continued drawing for ten years. By then, I was ready to start on a pilot model, which took five years. After that, I was ready to start on the production problem, which we have only just licked -- I say with my fingers crossed. "Am I wandering from the subject, New Approaches to the Delivered Dwelling? I hope not. My new approach, gentlemen, was to think of the dweller in the dwelling and give him a house that helps him instead of fighting him. A house at a cost he can afford, without any disasters in the way of repairs. A house that gives him light to see by, privacy, safety for his kids, leisure for his wife and him, variety to make homecoming a happy adventure instead of a revolting daily chore. "My New Approach to the Delivered Dwelling, gentlemen, was nothing more or less than a sincere attempt to leave the world a better and happier place found it." The applause was sparse and dubious. Norma flicked the machine off, but did not brighten the lights. She said broodingly, "So Moffatt sold him out, broke his heart and killed him. And today that dream wretched people chained to their jobs by G-M-L contract leases... She turned on the three financiers, figures in the gloom. "Well?" she demanded harshly. "Don can walk into that stockholders meeting and take over with your backing. It matters, don't you see? It matters." and said, "I'm sticking with it, Norma." She didn't flare at him for using her first name, but continued to stare her challenge. Nelson murmured, "An orderly liquidation, under the circumstances, still seems most advisable. If you will excuse me -- " He slipped discreetly from the room. Coett, big bluff man, told her, "Ideals don't matter much when you're my age. My advice to you is to peddle your stock on the Big Board, live happily ever after -- and stay away from Green, Charlesworth. Uplift doesn't pay. Now I've got to go." He went. Hubble was gnawipg-his nails. He said, "I was brought up to be a sensible, dollar-fearing young man and Green, Charlesworth have more dollars than anybody else around... You know, I liked that look on your father's face when he told them about homecoming being a happy adventure... For God's sake, don't tell anybody, but I'm sticking with you as long as my nerve holds out." Norma flung her arms around him and kissed him. Charles said. "Hey, cut that -- " and then realized he had no basis whatsoever for the proprietary feeling which had suddenly overwhelmed him. But he turned up the lights, anyway. "Where's Don?" he asked. Norma was recovering from her elation. "Must've slipped out." Mundin called Norvell Bligh in and asked after Don. "Oh, yes," the little man said. "He left about three minutes ago." "Left? Where to?" "Well, I asked him in case, and all he said was 'High wire.' Some kind of joke, I suppose." "High wire?" Mundin asked Norma blankly. She shook her head. "He seemed in high spirits," Bligh chatted. "His eyes were shining like stars. Most unusual -- " "My God!" said Norma. "A post-hypnotic command from his conditioning!" "Does anybody," Hubble demanded, "know what a high wir,e may be? There could be some perfectly simple explanation." Norvie's jaw had dropped. He said at last, faintly, "I know quite a lot about high-wire work. It's the most dangerous stunt they put on at a Field Day." A raucous cackle filled the room. " Absolutely , Mr. Charlesworth?" "Positively, Mrs. Green!" Hell broke loose. A seat cushion exploded. Then a fountain pen in Norvie's pocket. The In basket on Ryan's desk. There were screams from the outside offices; Mundin ran out. A diffraction grating in the chem lab. Steno's lip-sprays. An acetate recording blank fox' a dictating machine. The water cooler -- that was a sloppy one. A magazine in the reception room. Eventually things settled down. The last hysterical filing clerk was sent home, the last of the little fires put out. Hubble, white with rage, snapped, "Let's go to my place. They can't have that gimmicked." Norvell Bligh said: "Excuse me, Mr. Hubble -- I don't think there's time. Field Day is tomorrow at two in the afternoon." night. Hard. They found the cabby at dawn. "Sure, mister, I hacked him. Right to the artist's entrance at Monmouth. Friend of yours? Some kind of dare?" They tried to bribe their way into the arena and almost made it. The .furtive gatekeeper was on the verge of swallowing their cock-and-bull story and palming their money when the Night Supervisory Custodian showed up. He was a giant and his eyes shone. He said politely, "I'm sorry, folks -- unauthorized access is forbidden. However, lineup for bleacher seats begins in a couple of hours. Hello, Mr. Bligh. I haven't seen you around lately." "Hello, Barnes," Norvell said. "Look, can you possibly let us through? There's a fool kid we know who signed up on a dare. It's all a silly mistake and he was muggled up, besides -- " The giant sighed regretfully. "Unauthorized access is forbidden. If you had a pass -- " The hackie said, "I don't mina waiting, folks, but don't you have better sense than to argue with a conditioned guy?" "He's right," Norvell admitted. "Hell won't get you by Barnes without a pass or a release. Let's try Candella. He used to be my boss, the louse." The taxi whizzed them to the amusement company's bubble city and Candella's pleasure dome. Ryan snoozed. Norma and Mundin hqld hands -- scared. Bligh looked brightly interested, like a fox terrier. Hubble, hunched on a jump seat, mumbled worriedly to himself.  Candella awakened and came to the interviewer after five minutes of chiming. Obviously he couldn't believe his eyes. "Bligh?" he sputtered. "Norvell Bligh?" "Yes, Mr. Candella. I'm sorry to wake you up, but it's urgent. Can you let us in?" "Certainly not! Go away or I'll call the police!" The interviewer blinked off. Norvell leaned on the chime plate and Candella reappeared. "Damn it, Bligh, stop that. How dare you?" Mundin elbowed Norvell from the scanner eye. "Mr. Candella, I'm Charles Mundin, attorney at law. I represent Mr. Donald Lavin. I have reason to believe that Lavin took a release and is now in the artist's quarters at Monmouth, due to appear in today's Field Day. I advise you that my client is mentally incompetent to sign a release and that therefore your organization will be subject to heavy damages, should he be harmed. I suggest that this can be quickly adjusted by you canceling your contract with him. Naturally, we're prepared to pay any indemnity -- or service fee." He lowered his voice. "In small bills and plenty of them." "Come in," Candella said blandly and the door opened. He gaped as they entered. "My God, an army!" r THE house intercom said in a female voice, "What is it, Poopsie?" He flushed. "Business. Switch off, please. Panther Girl -- I mean Prudence." There was a giggle and a click. "Now, gentlemen and m iss -- no, I don't care what your names nre -- let me show you one of our release forms. Here, you said you were a lawyer. Have a look." MuncJin studied it for ten minutes. Ironclad? Watertight? No, tungsten-carbide-coated, braced, buttressed, riveted, welded and fire-polished. Airtight, hard-vacuum-proof, guaranteed not to wilt, shrink, sag, wrinkle, tear or bag at the clauses under any conceivable legal assault. Candella was enjoying Mundin's expression. "Think you're the first?" he snickered. "If there's been one, there have been a successful suit for thirty years, Mr. Attorney." MuncJin said, "Hang the law, Mr. Candella. Hang the bribe, too, if ou don't want it. It's a humanitarian matter. The kid's got no business in there -- " Candella turned righteous. "I'm protecting my company and its stockholders, Mr. Whoeveryou-are,, As a policy matter, we can allow no exceptions. Our Field Days would be a chaos if every drunken bum -- " Mundin was about to clobber him when Norvell unexpectedly caught his arm. "No use, Charles. I never realized it before -- he's a sadist. Of course. Who else could hold that job and enjoy it? You're interfering with his love life when you try to get one of his victims away from him. We'll go higher." Candella snorted and showed them pointedly to the door. In the taxi again, Mundin said to Hubble, "I guess this is where you take over, Bliss." The financier flipped through a notecase and reached for the phone as they rolled back toward the Park. He dialed and snapped, "Sam? Mr. Hubble here. Good morning to you. Sam, who's in charge of the outfit that puts on the Monmouth Field Days? I'll wait." He waited and then said, "Oh -- thanks, Sam," and hung up the phone. He told them, looking out the window, "Trustee stock. Held by the Choate firm. And we know who they run errands for, don't we?" He drummed his fingers. "Bligh, you must know some way in. You worked there, after all." Norvell said, "The only way in is with a release." , Norma urged with dry hysteria, "Then let's sign releases." They stared. "I'm not crazy. We want to find Don, don't we? And when we find him, we restrain him -- with a club, if we have to. We can sign for crowd extras or something like that, can't we, Norvie? It's all volunteer, isn't it?" Norvell said, "Remember, I wasn't a pit boss. I was on the planning end. And from the planning end, it was all supposed to be volunteer. But maybe it's not such a bad idea. I'll go in alone. I know the ropes -- " "Not you," Mundin said. "He won't want to be found. He'll fight. I'll go -- " They would all go. And then Norvell had a bright idea and it took a lot of small bills to get the hackie to take them to Belly Rave and an hour to find Lana of the Wabbits. "We'll be there," she promised casually. T HE briefing room beneath the stands was huge and crowded. About a quarter of the occupants were obvious rumdums, another quarter were professionals, another quarter swaggering youngsters in for a one-shot that they'd brag about the rest of their lives. The rest seemed to be -- just people. It was twelve-thirty and everybody had been given an excellent hot lunch in the adjoining cafeteria. One professional had noticed Mundin hungrily wolfing down his and suggested, "Better not, stranger. Belly wounds." Mundin had abruptly stopped. There was no sign so far of Don Lavin, which was not odd. It was easy enough to lose yourself in that crowd. Their hopes were pinned on twenty Wabbits whom Lavin would have -- he'd think -- no reason to avoid. Somebody on the rostrum said, "May I have your attention, please? You stumblebums in the corner there -- that means you, too. Thanks, all." He was a distraught young man who ran his fingers through his hair. Norvie whispered to Mundin. "Wilkes. He'll have a nervous breakdown by tonight. Every year. But -- " wistfully -- "he's a good MC." Wilkes went on, "You know this is the show of the year, ladies and gentlemen. Double fees and survivor's insurance for this one. And in return, ladies and gentlemen, we expect you all to do your absolute best for Monmouth Park. "Now let's get on with the casting. First, a comedy number. We need some old gentlemen and ladies -- nothing violent; padded clubs in a battle-royal to the finish. The last surviving lady gets five hundred dollars; the surviving gentlemen gets one thousand. Let's see some hands there! No, not you, buster -- you can't be a day over seventy." "Take it," Bligh told Ryan. "Go with them and keep your eyes open for Don.' Ryan got the nod and tottered away with the other old ladies and gentlemen. "Now are there two good men who fancy themselves as knife fighters, Scandinavian style? Don't waste my time if you have a pot-belly." Scandinavian style meant being fastened together by a belt with two feet of slack. "One thousand? Anybody at one thousand? All right, I'll make it twelve-fifty and if there isn't a rising ovation, we drop the number, you yellow crumbs!" Perhaps a dozen pros hopped up, grinning. "Fine response! Let's make it six matches simultaneous. Take 'em away, boys." The casting went on. Mickey's Inferno; Lions and Tigers and Bears; Kiddie Kutups, which scooped in all the Wabbits. Lana shot Mundin a glance and shrug. No Don Lavin -- but the crowd was thinning. "Roller Derby!" Wilkes called. "Spiked elbows, no armor. Five hundred a point to contestants, twenty flat to audience, a hundred to audience members if a contestant lands on him or her and draws blood." Norvell gathered the eyes of Mundin, Norma and Hubble. They rose, were accepted for "audience" and hustled out of the briefing room, still vainly peering about for Don. Only after the glass door closed behind them did they see him. He was rising -- with glazed, shining eyes -- for High Wire with Piranha. Price, ten thousand dollars. And he was the only volunteer. Norma struggled with the immovable door until two matrons yanked her away and shoved her in the direction of the ready room. "I'll think of something," Norvie kept saying. "I'll think of something." approach with the readyroom manager. He was brushed off. Norvell tried entreaties and then threats. He was brushed off. The ready-room manager droned: "You made yer bed, now lie in it. Alluva sudden you an' ya frenns get yella, no skin offa my nose. Derby audience ya stood up for, derby audience yer gonna be." "What's the trouble, Campo?" a fussy and familiar voice suddenly demanded. It was Stimmens, Norvie's skunk of an ex-assistant who had quietly and competently betrayed his boss v into Belly Rave. It would have been pure delight to bawl him out, but the stakes were too high. "Mr. Stimmens," Norvie said humbly. "Why, Mr. Bluh -- why,' Norvie! What are you doing here?" Norvie brutishly wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Trying to make a buck, Mr. Stimmens," he whined. "You know how it is in Belly Rave. I stood up for the Roller Derby audience, but Mr. Campo here says I got yellow. Maybe I did, but I want a switch -- from Derby Audience to Highwire Heckler. I know it's only ten bucks, but you don't get one of those spiked-elbow gals in your lap. Can you do it for me, Mr. Stimmens? And a couple of friends of mine? Please?" Stimmens basked. "It's unusual, Norvie. It creates confusion. But for an old employee, we can bend some rules. See that he's switched, Campo." "And my friends, please, Mr. Stimmens?" Stimmens shrugged tolerantly. "And his friends, Campo." He sauntered on, glowing with the consciousness of a favor done that humiliated his ex-boss and caused himself no trouble at all. "You heard him," Norvell said. "Switch!" Campo growled and reached for his cards. Back on the bench, Norvell told Hubble, Mundin and Norma briefly, "We're in. It ups Don's chances plenty. You have any cash on you, Mr. Hubble? Pass it around to the other Highwire Hecklers when we go on." And then there was nothing to do but watch through the glass wall. The Old-timers' Battle Royal was on; they saw Ryan laid out by a vicious swipe to the groin from an octogenarian lady. The clubs were padded, but there was a lot in knowing how to use them. He was carried past the wall, groaning, to the infirmary. I T was a responsive audience, Norvie noted with pure technical interest, laughing, howling and throwing things at the right time. He heard, in memory, the familiar chant of the vendors, "Gitcha rocks, gitcha brickbats, ya ca-a-an't hit the artists without a brickbat!" Click, click, and the Scandinavian knife-fighters were on. Snip, snap, the knives flashed and the blood flowed. There were two doublekills out of the six pairs and the band blared from Grieg to Gershwin for the Roller Derby, which would last a good ten minutes. It was gory. Repeatedly, skaters shot off the banked boards into the "audience" of old stewbums and thrillseekers rather than get a razor-sharp elbow spike, and their own spikes wreaked havoc. Almost us, Norvie thought numbly. At a hundred a lapful, almost us. For the first time in his life, he found himself wondering when and where it all had started. Bonecrushing football? Those hockey games featured by concussions? Impatient sidewalk crowds that roared "Go-go-go" to a poor crazed ledge-sitter? Those fans who flipped lighted firecrackers at the visiting team's outfielders racing for a fly? "We don't take no prisoners in this outfit, kid"? White phosphorus grenades? Buchenwald? Napalm? And then, before he knew it, Campo' was shaking his shoulder and growling, "All right, ya yella punk. You an' yer frenns, yer on. Take yer basket." He took the basket numbly and looked at the noisemakers and gravel. He followed the section as it moved out onto the field. He became aware that Hubble and Mundin were half carrying him. "Don't cork out, Norvie," Mundin begged him. "We need every man." Norvie gave him a pale grin and thought : Maybe I won't have to. Maybe I won't have to. That's the thing to stick with. Maybe I won't have to. But if I do -- "Ladies and gentlemen," the MC roared as they assumed their places around the tank, while the riggers hastily set up the two towers and strung the wire, "Monmouth Park is proud and happy to present, for the first time in this arena's distinguished history, a novel feat of courage and dexterity." Don had been hustled atop one of the towers. Norma was weeping. Hubble and Mundin were passing among the hecklers, handing out bills. "No heckling, understand? Just keep quiet. You'll get this much more after it's over. Anybody crosses us up, we'll throw him to the fish. No heckling, understand?" "This young man, ladies and gentlemen, utterly without previous experience in the gymnastic art, will attempt to cross the fifteen feet from tower to tower against the simultaneous opposition of sixteen opponents. They will be permitted to jeer, threaten, sound horns and cast gravel, but not to shake the towers!" thought Norvie. The sixteen "opponents" would be there to do exactly what the audience wanted to do, but was too far away to do. Still, a good strong arm with a favoring wind and a brick -- "The special feature of this performance, ladies and gentlemen, lies in the tank above which this young man will traverse. At enormous expense, the Monmouth Park Association has imported from the headwaters of the Amazon River a school of the deadliest fish known to man, the famed piranha. Your binoculars, ladies and gentlemen! I am about to drop a fifty-pound sheep into the tank. Kindly watch the result!" In went the bleating, terrified animal -- shaved and with a few nicks on its side for the scent of blood. Then they pulled on the rope and hauled out -- bloody bones. There were still ghastly little things flopping and wriggling, dangling from the skeleton. They beat them off into the water with sticks as the crowd shrieked in delight. Just like you, you swine, Norvie thought. But maybe I won't have to do it -- The earpiece of his hearing aid had slipped a trifle. He looked shyly around and pulled it out preparatory to readjusting it. Then he didn't readjust it. The shrieking crowd, the gloating, smacking language of the MC, the faint creak in the wind of the tower guys -- all of it came through. It was the decision, he told himself, not quite knowing what he meant. He hadn't wanted to hear any of it; he hadn't dared hear any of it. Not as long as he was a part of the horror. He went to Norma Lavin and put his thin arm around her shaking shoulders. "It's going to be all right," he said. She cowered against him, wordlessly. "I've got a boy coming, you know," he told her. She gave him a distracted nod, her eyes on the tower. "And if anything happens," he went on, "it's only fair they should be taken care of -- Sandy, Virginia and the boy. You'll remember in case anything happens?" She nodded. "There was this time in Bay City," he chattered. "High wire with piranha. A judge -- " She wasn't paying attention. He got up and joined Mundin. "If anything happens," he said, "it's only fair that Sandy and Virginia and the boy should be taken care of." "What are you talking about, Norvie?" "Just remember. Please remember." T HE drumroll began and the MC set fire to the platform on which Don Lavin stood. The crowd howled as the flames licked up and the boy hopped convulsively forward, his balancing pole swaying. The MC yelled angrily at the hecklers, "What's the matter with you people? Toot! Chuck gravel! What do you think you're getting paid for?" One of them, a young tough, began to swing his rattle, glancing nervously at Hubble. Hubble snapped at him, "A hundred more, buster. Now calm down." The tough calmed down and gaped at the wire-walker. A foot, two feet, the pole swaying. He has special slippers on, Norvell thought. Maybe it'll be all right, I won't have to do anything and then I can be comfortably deaf again, buying batteries for a penance, turning this nausea off at will. Three feet, four feet, and the MC howling with rage: "Get in there and fight! Take out your horns! Plaster him!" Five feet, six feet, and the crowd-noise was ugly, ugly as blood. In one section, a chant had started, one of those footstomping, hand-clapping things. Six feet, seven, and the MC was breaking down into sobs. "We paid you and this is the way you treat us! These fine people in the stands. Aren't you ashamed?" Eight feet, nine feet, ten feet, two-thirds of the way to the second tower. Somebody with a mighty arm and a following wind had found the range. The halfbrick at the end of its journey sailed feebly, pop, into the tank and white-bellied little things tore at it and bled themselves and tore at one another. The water boiled. Suddenly ice-cold, all business, Norvie said dryly to Mundin, "Be ready to haul him out fast. They'll have him in a minute. Remember what I said." He strolled over to Wilkes, who was watching the stubbornly silent hecklers in numb despair. Another halfbrick, and this one hit the tower. Much maneuvering of the balancing pole and a shriek from Norma. "No nervous breakdown this year, Wilkes," Norvell said to the MC. "What? Bligh, they won't listen to me!" Thirteen feet, and then the brick, unseen, that tapped Don Lavin between the shoulder blades and made him flail the pole too hard. One last agonized look around the arena was all .Norvell could take. There was nothing, no chair, no cushion, nothing but -- He grabbed the sobbing Wilkes in his arms and lunged into the tank for an eternal instant, before he could see Don Lavin topple and fall. First the water was cool and then boiling. F OR ten minutes, there was not a sane person in the stadium. The critics would remember that moment all their lives. It was greatness, the ultimate masterpiece of Field Day emotion. While the piranhas seethed at the far end of the tank, Mundin yanked Don Lavin out in one heave. Not a soul molested the four of them as they walked slowly over the bloody sand. They passed Candella, who stared at them with blind, streaming eyes and said, "Masterpiece! Masterpiece! And I knew him! I walked and talked with Norvell Bligh! Art can go no further. Masterpiece!" They picked up Lana and her Wabbits from a deserted ready room. "I saw it," she said. "Good little man, wasn't he?" She broke off into sobs. "I'll tell his wife and kid," she sniffed at last. "Only -- which way should I tell it?" Mundin thought. Blessed simplicity. Which way? There were undoubtedly a hundred ways, a thousand ways, all true and all intertwined, of telling about that frightful, horrifying, noble moment. Outside the stadium, the Wabbits were paid and formed fours, stumping grimly off toward the Belly Rave that Norvell Bligh had come to love and serve. "I think," Don Lavin said slowly, "I'm awake. All the way. And I think I know what woke me up. Sis, Charles, Mr. Hubble -- are we going to give those bottled ghouls -- Green, Charlesworth -- the business? I say we are!" "First," said Hubble practically, "let me call Sam. His orders were to grab up anything Coett and Nelson dumped on the Exchange. Even if we don't have our majority for tomorrow, we should have enough to Rock the Boat and Monkey With the Buzz Saw, as your two marinated friends put it." This incurable levity of mine, he thought, and sighed. He noted how Norma Lavin was leaning on Mundin's arm and how she glanced at him. He thought of how his wife glanced at him and sighed again, this time enviously. Tycoont: After a savagely efficient management raid on the gigantic G-M-I. Corporation conducted last week during its regular stockholders meeting, the winners and new champions, Messrs. Hubble and Lavin, issued a terse joint statement promising farreaching, deep-rooted policy changes. Now that we enter our second year, it is time to pause and take stock. I think most of us will be pleased by what we see around us. The Belly Rave Municipal Association launched by my late husband, and of which I now have the honor to be president, is flourishing. Membership now covers eighteen blocks and our Organi.ed Area covers ten. Progress is slow but sure. The reestablishment of sewer mains proceeds at a gratifying pace and everywhere one sees busy hands and happy faces. Truly, as my revered husband used to say, "Self-help is the only kind that sticks. Newly elected Senator Mundin left for Washington today in his private 'copter after reaffirming his election pledge to raze Old New York to the ground. "We need the metals," he said, "and we need the room. I cannot understand why this condemned slum has been tolerated for many years past the legal date for its extinction. Esthetically speaking, it is also a dreadful eyesore -- particularly the old Empire State Building. It must arid will be destroyed." The Senator's attractive wife, nee Norma Lavin, accompanied him... The cranks are at it again. Those mysteriously financed leaflets and broadcasts and lobbies for compulsory hours of anti-Field Day "education' in the public schools have again flared up. Your legal, rational, traditional entertainment is again under attack. For the third time in as many months, this magazine is compelled to solicit contributions that will offset its declining circulation. Attendance figures are down across the nation. But this is not a gloomy picture. The Field Day fans have been stripped to their hard core of true enthusiasts... sincerity... artistic triumph. Vapid reformers and their bloodless ilk... utter inability to comprehend such moments of truth, such avalanches of emotion as were unleashed in the great old days upon the stunned spectator. In this context, we need no more than mention with due reverence the great name Noneell Blythe l Next month's big issue will contain complete stories only... and it mind in a sound body -- but Dan Merrol had too much of one -- and also too much of the other! most fiendish torment ever inflicted on humanity. But Satan was worse than a devil... he was a manl The editors of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine have selected only # science fiction novels in the past four years that they felt were good enough to receive the imprint of Galaxy. Hundreds of thousands of copies of these novels have been enjoyed by Galaxy readers. 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That's why America's # Most Famous Artists make you this special offer: Even though thousands paid # to take our revealing #-page Talent Test, is your once-in-a-lifetime chance to find out if you have real, hidden talent for a full-time or part-time Art Career. There is no charge or obligation of any kind. Quantity of tests is limited. You Married or unmarried, you'll find out if a full-time or part-time Art Career can be yours! This exciting test, printed on # large pages of drawing paper, reveals your sense of design, composition, form, observation, imagination, originality and picture sense. Norman Rockwall Noted cover artist and faculty member of the Famous Artists Course. f "HE title of this piece should be more familiar than "etaoin shrdlu." For some typically human reasdn, it isn't, even though you may never have seen a Linotype machine and probably own a thing that goes "qwertyuiop." The item, of course, is the typewriter. Its biography has been written by Bruce Bliven, Jr., entitled The Wonderful Writing Machine and published by Random House. And about time, too -- I've been beating typewriters for a quarter of a century and never once guessed the astonishing history of this unobtrusive and yet revolutionary invention. How astonishing can the typewriter be? Well, on the dust jacket of the book is a quiz. I won't try to answer all the questions, because you'll undoubtedly want to find them yourself. #. What well-known author has devised a successful Chinese typewriter? #. What is the volume of business done annually in the United States in typewriter ribbons and carbons: #; #; # , # ? #. In what year did an English engineer think up the basic idea of a typewriter: #; #; #? I can't pass up this bit of shocking news. It was on January #, #, that Queen Anne granted an English engineer, Henry Mill, a Royall Letters Patent with exclusive rights for the next fourteen years to "an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing..." Whether Mill actually built the machine is not known. In any case, the Russians can't claim the invention -- the first Russian typewriter was made by Jaan Jaackson in Riga about #, while the first American machine Burt in #. But it is the fifty-second inventor of the typewriter, Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, who is called the father of the typewriter, for his device laid down most of the basic principles of the modern one. #. What is the origin of the popular phrase, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party"? Believe it or not, that was the campaign slogan of Ulysses S. Grant! #. Why did the first typewriters sold look somewhat like sewing machines? 'The answer is simple -- they were manufactured in a sewing machine factory. The foot treadle was used to haul the typewriter carriage back to starting position. #. Who was the first author to turn in to his his publisher a typewritten book manuscript? I'm glad it was Mark Twain; I'd hate to have the honor go to one of the literary slobberers who infested that period. #. How many schools teach typing in the United States today: #; #; #? #. How much does it cost to produce the average business letter? A dismaying #c to # -- enough to stab a businessman right in the wallet. #. Why is the keyboard arrangement of all typewriters hopelessly inefficient? The damned thing just happened, with the result that something like # of the work is done by the left hand. Keyboards based on letter frequency have been devised, but "qwertyuiop" looks as if it's here to stay; the typists is just too big -- and getting bigger every year. Yet a more efficient keyboard can boost speed and accuracy # or more! #. Is there any advantage to having a silk typewriter ribbon instead of one made of cotton? Bliven says yes. I say no -- silk costs too much, prints too faintly and you hate to throw it out even long after you should. #. How many typewriters are used on a United States battleship: #; #; #? Naval orders call for # machines, but I find that less intoxicating than' this information -- in the Army, during combat, there are more typewriters within four thousand yards of the front lines than medium and light artillery pieces combined! The rest of the book contains equally startling data that I'm sure you'll want to read. But for us in science fiction, the typewriter is another proof that the really vast societal changes are brought about by seemingly unimportant things. The suffragettes fought heroically and uselessly for equality of the sexes -- never realizing that the typewriter had ended the battle. It brought women out of the home, made them economically independent. The franchise was only a political recognition of an evolutionary fact that had come about almost unnoticed. Much more than today's international strife, or atomic power, or perhaps rocketry, there are insignificant-looking gadgets in the lab or even in common use that will shape the future. What are they? You'll find many of the answers in science fiction. You might have one in your hand right now! The man who There is nothing at all like having a sound mind in a sound body, but Dan Merrol had too much of one -- and also too much of the otherl Erica. She yawned, ' added, "I've tried -- but I just can't believe you're my husband." He felt his own yawn slip off his face. "What do you mean? What am I doing here then?" "Can't you remember?" Her laughter tinkled as she pushed him away and sat up. "They said you were Dan Merrol at the hospital, but they must have been wrong." "Hospitals don't make that kind of mistake," he said with a certainty he didn't altogether feel. "But  should know, shouldn't I?" "Of course, but..." He did some verbal backstepping. "It was a bad accident. You've got to expect that I won't be quite the same at first." He sat up. "Look at me. Can't you tell who I am?" She returned his gaze, then swayed toward him. He decided that she was highly attractive -- but surely he ought to have known that long ago. leaned away from him. "Your left eye does look familiar," she said cautiously. "The brown one, I mean." "The brown one?" "Your other eye's green," she told him. "Of course -- a replacement. I told you it was a serious accident. They had to use whatever was handy." "I suppose so -- but shouldn't they have tried to stick to the original color scheme?" "It's a little thing," he said. "I'm lucky to be alive." He took her hand. "I believe I can convince you I'm me." "I wish you could." Her voice was low and sad and he couldn't guess why. "My name is Dan Merrol." "They told you that at the hospital." They hadn't -- he'd read it on the chart. But he had been alone in the room and the name had to be his, and anyway he felt like Dan Merrol. "Youiname is Erica." "They told you that too." She was wrong again, but it was probably wiser not to tell her how he knew. No one had said anything to him in the hospital. He hadn't given them a chance. He had awakened in a room and hadn't wanted to be alone. He'd got up and read the chart and searched dizzily through the closet. Clothes were hanging there and he'd put them on and muttered her name to himself. He'd sat down to gain strength and after a while he'd walked out and no one had stopped him. It was night when he left the hospital and the next thing he remembered was her face as he looked through the door. Her name hadn't been on the chart nor her address and yet he had found her. That proved something, didn't it? "How could I forget you?" he demanded. "You may have known someone else with that name. When were we married?" Maybe he should have stayed in the hospital. It would have been easier to convince her there. But he'd been frantic to get home. "It was quite a smashup," he said. "You'll have to expect some lapses." "I'm making allowances. But can't you tell me something about myself?" He thought -- and couldn't. He wasn't doing so well. "Another lapse," he said gloomily and then brightened. "But I can tell you lots about myself. For instance, I'm a specialist in lepidoptera." "What's that?" "At the moment, who knows? Anyway, I'm a well-known actor and a musician and a first-rate mathematician. I can't remember any equations offhand except C equals pi R squared. It has to do with the velocity of light. And the rest of the stuff will come back in time." It was easier now that he'd started and he went on rapidly. "I'm thirty-three and after making a lot of money wrestling, married six girls, not necessarily in this order -- Lucille, Louise, Carolyn, Katherine, Shirley and Miriam." That was quite a few marriages -- maybe it was thoughtless of him to have mentioned them. No woman approves her predecessors. "That's six. Where do I come in?" "Erica. You're the seventh and best." It was just too many, now that he thought of it, and it didn't seem right. She sighed and drew away. "That was a lucky guess on your age." D ID that mean he wasn't right on anything else? From the expression on her face, it did. "You've got to expect me to be confused in the beginning. Can't you really tell who I am?" "I can't! You don't have the same personality at all." She glanced at her arm. There was a bruise on it. "Did I do that?" he asked. "You did, though I'm sure you didn't mean to. I don't think you realized how strong you were. Dan was always too gentle -- he must have been afraid of me. And you weren't at all." "Maybe I was impetuous," he said. "But it was such a long time." "Almost three months. But most of that time you were floating in gelatin in the regrowth tank, unconscious until yesterday." She leaned forward and caressed his cheek. "Everything seems wrong, no matter how hard I try to believe otherwise. You don't have the same personality -- you can't remember anything." "And I have one brown eye and one green." "It's not just that, darling. Go over to the mirror." He had been seriously injured and he was still weak from the shock. He got up and walked unsteadily to the mirror. "Now what?" "Stand beside it. Do you see the line?" Erica pointed to the glass. He did -- it was a mark level with his chin. "What does it mean?" "That should be the top of Dan Merrol's head," she said softly. He was a good six inches taller than he ought to be. But there must be some explanation for the added height. He glanced down at his legs. They were the same length from hip bone to the soles of his feet, but the proportions differed from one side to the other. His knees didn't match. Be-dum, be-dum, bedumdum, but your knees don't match -- the snatch of an ancient song floated through his head. Quickly, he scanned himself. It was the same elsewhere. The upper right arm was massive, too big for the shoulder it merged with. And the forearm, while long, was slender. He blinked and looked again. While they were patching him up, did they really think he needed black, red and brown hair? He wondered how a beagle felt. humorists? Did they, for comic effect, piece together a body out of bits and scraps left over from a chopping block? It was himself he was looking at, otherwise he'd say the results were neither hideous nor horrible, but merely -- well, what? Ludicrous and laughable -- and there were complications in that too. Who wants to be an involuntary clown, a physical buffoon that Mother Nature hadn't duplicated since Man began? He felt the stubble on his face with his left hand -- he thought it was his left hand -- at least it was on that side. The emerging whiskers didn't feel like anything he remembered. Wait a minute -- was it his memory? He leaned against the wall and nearly fell down. The length of that arm was unexpectedly different. He hobbled over to a chair and sat down, staring miserably at Erica as she began dressing. There was quite a contrast between the loveliness of her body and the circus comedy of his own. "Difficult, isn't it?" she said, tugging her bra together and closing the last snap, which took considerable effort. She was a small girl generally, though not around the chest. It was difficult and in addition to his physique there were the memories he couldn't account for. Come to think of it, he must have been awfully busy to have so many careers in such a short time -- and all those wives too. Erica came close and leaned comfortingly against him, but he wasn't comforted. "I waited till I was sure. I didn't want to upset you." He wasn't as sure as she seemed to be now. Somehow, maybe he was still Dan Merrol -- but he wasn't going to insist on it -- not after looking at himself. Not after trying to sort out those damned memories. She was too kind, pretending to be a little attracted to him, to the scrambled face, to the mismatched lumps and limbs and shapes that, stretching the term, currently formed his' body. It was clear what he had to do. T HE jacket he had worn last night didn't fit. Erica cut off the sleeve that hung far over his fingertips on one side and basted it to the sleeve that ended well above his wrist, on the qther. The shoulders were narrow, but the material would stretch and after shrugging around in it, he managed to expand it so it was not too tight. The trousers were also a problem -- six inches short with no material to add on, but here again Erica proved equal to the task and, using the cuffs, contrived to lengthen them. Shoes were another difficulty. For one foot the size was not bad, but he could almost step out of the other shoe. When she wasn't looking, he wadded up a spare sock and stuffed it in the toe. He looked critically at himself in the mirror. Dressed, his total effect was better than he had dared hope it would be. True, he did look different. Erica gazed at him with melancholy affection. "I can't understand why they let you out wearing those clothes -- or for that matter, why they let you out at all." He must have given some explanation as he'd stumbled through the door. What was it? "When I brought the clothes yesterday, they told me I couldn't see you for a day or so," she mused aloud. "It was the first time you'd been out of the regrowth tank -- where no one could see you -- and they didn't know the clothes wouldn't fit. You were covered with a sheet, sleeping, I think. They let me peek in and I could make out a corner of your face." It was the clothes, plus the brief glimpse of his face, which had made her think she recognized him when he came in. "They told me you'd have to have psychotherapy and I'd have to have orientation before I could see you. That's why I was so surprised when you rang the bell." His head was churning with ideas, trying to sort them out. Part of last night was dim, part sharp and satisfying. "What's Wysocki's theorem?" she asked. "Whose theorem?" "Wysocki's. I started to call the hospital and you wouldn't let me, because of the theorem. You said you'd explain it this morning." She glanced at' the bruise on her arm. It was then he'd grabbed her, to keep her from talking to the hospital. He'd been unnecessarily rough, but that could be ascribed to lack of coordination. She could have been terrified, might have resisted -- but she hadn't. At that time, she must have , halfbelieved he was Dan Merrol, still dangerously near the edges of post-regrowth shock. S HE was looking at him, waiting for that explanation. He shook his mind frantically and the words came out. "Self-therapy," he said briskly. "The patient alone understands what he needs." She started to interrupt, but he shook his head and went on blithely. "That's the first corollary of the theorem. The second is that there are critical times in the recovery of the patient. At such times, with the least possible supervision, he should be encouraged to make his own decisions and carry them through by himself, even though running a slight risk of physical complications." "That's new, isn't it?" she said. "I always thought they watched the patient carefully." It ought to be new -- he'd just invented it. "You know how rapidly medical practices change," he said quickly. "Anyway, when they examined me last night, I was much stronger than they expected -- so, when I wanted to come home, they let me. It's their latest belief that initiative is more important than perfect health." "Strange," she muttered. "But you are very strong." She looked at him and blushed. "Initiative, certainly you have. Dan could use some, wherever he is." Dan again, whether it was himself or another person. For a brief time, as she listened to him, he'd had the silly idea that... But it could never happen to him. He'd better leave now while she was distracted and bewildered and believed what he was saying. "I've got to go. I'm due back," he told her. "Not before you eat," she said. "Any man who's spent the night with me is hungry in the morn  . ing. It was a domestic miracle that amidst all the pressing and fitting, she'd somehow prepared breakfast and he hadn't noticed. It was a simple chore with the automatics, but to him it seemed a proof of her wifely skill. He wanted to protest, but didn't. Maybe it was the hand she was holding -- it seemed to be equipped with a better set of nerves than its predecessor. It tingled at her touch. Sadly, he sat down and looked at his food. Eat? Did he want to eat? Oddly enough, he did. "How much do you remember of the accident?" She shoved aside her own food and sat watching him. asked. In fact, there wasn't much he did remember. There had been the chart at his bedside, with one word scrawled on it -- accident -- and that was where he'd got the idea. There had been other marks too, but he hadn't been able to decipher them. He nodded and said nothing and she took it as he thought she would. "It wasn't anybody's fault. The warning devices which were supposed to work didn't," she began. "A Moon ship collided with a Mars liner in the upper atmosphere. The ships broke up in several parts and since they are compartmented and the delay rockets switched on immediately, the separate parts fell rather gently, considering how high they were. Casualties weren't as great as you might think. "Parts of the two ships fell together, the rest were scattered. There was some interchange of passengers in the wreckage, but since you were found in the control compartment of the Mars liner, they assumed you were the pilot. They never let me see you until yesterday and then it was just a glimpse. I took their word when they said you were Dan Merrol." At least he knew who or what Dan Merrol was -- the pilot of the Mars liner. They had assumed he was the pilot because of where he was found, but he might have been tossed there -- impact did strange things. Dan Merrol was a spaceship pilot and he hadn't included it among his skills. It was strange that she had believed him at all. But now that it was out in the open, he did remember some facts about spaceships. He felt he could manage a takeoff at this instant. But why hadn't he told her? Shock? Perhaps -- but where had those other identities come from -- lepidopterist, musician, actor, mathematician and wrestler? And where had he got memories of wives, slender and passionate, petite and wild, casual and complaisant, nagging and insecure? Erica he didn't remember at all, save from last night, and what was that due. to? "What are you going to do?" he asked, deliberately toying with the last bite of breakfast. It gave him time to think. "They said they'd identified everyone, living or dead, and I supposed they had. After seeing you, I can believe they made any number of similar mistakes. Dan Merrol may be alive under another name. It will be hard to do, but I must try to find him. Some of the accident victims went to other hospitals, you know, the ones located nearest where they fell." Even if he was sure, he didn't know whether he could tell her -- and he wasn't sure any longer, although he had been. On the physical side of marriage, how could he ask her to share a body she'd have to laugh at? Later, he might tell her, if there was to be a 'later.' He pushed back his chair and looked at her uncertainly. 'Let me call a 'copter," she said. "I hate to see you go." "Wysocki's theorem," he told her. "The patient has decided to walk." He weaved toward the door and twisted the knob. He turned in time to catch her in his arms. "I know this is wrong," she said, pressing against him. It might be wrong, but it was very pleasant, though he did guess her motives. She was a warmhearted girl and couldn't help pitying him. "Don't be so damned considerate," he mumbled. "You'll have to put me down," she said, averting her eyes. "Otherwise... You're an intolerable funny man." He knew it -- he could see himself in the mirror. He was something to laugh at when anyone got tired of pretending sympathy. He put her down and stumbled out. He thought he could hear the bed creak as she threw herself on it. II wasn't hard. His left side swung at a different rate from his right, but that was due to the variation in the length of his thighs and lower legs, and the two rhythms could be reconciled. He swept along, gaining control of his muscles. He became aware that he was whizzing past everyone. He slowed down -- he didn't want to attract attention. It was difficult but he learned to walk at a pedestrian pace. However poorly they'd matched his legs, they'd given him good ones. Last night, on an impulse, he'd left the hospital and now he had to go back. Had to? Of course. There were too many uncertainties still to be settled. He glanced around. It was still very early in the morning and normal traffic was just beginning. Maybe they hadn't missed him yet, though it was unlikely. He seemed to know the route well enough and covered the distance in a brief time. He turned in at the building and, scanning the directory, went at once to the proper floor and stopped at the desk. T HE receptionist was busy with the drawer of the desk. "Can I help you?" she asked, continuing to peer down. "The director -- Doctor Crander. I don't have an appointment." "Then the director can't see you." The girl looked up and her firmly polite expression became a grimace of barely suppressed laughter. Then laughter was swept away. What replaced it he couldn't say, but it didn't seem related to humor. She placed her hand near his but it went astray and got tangled with his fingers. "I just thought of a joke," she murmured. "Please don't think that I consider you at all funny." The hell she didn't -- and it was the second time within the hour a woman had used that word on him. He wished they'd stop. He took back his hand, the slender one, an exquisite thing that might once have belonged to a musician. Was there an instrument played with one hand? The other one was far larger and clumsier, more suited to mayhem than music. "When can I see the director?" She blinked at him. "A patient?" She didn't need to look twice to see that he had been one. "The director does occasionally see ex-patients." He watched her appreciatively as she went inside. The way she walked, you'd think she had a special audience. Presently the door opened and she came back, batting her eyes vigorously. "You can go in now," she said huskily. Strange, her voice had dropped an octave in less than a minute. "The old boy tried to pretend he was in the middle of a grave emergency." On his way in, he miscalculated, or she did, and he brushed against her. The touch was pleaaction seemed reserved for Erica. "Glad to see you," said Doctor Crander, behind the desk. He was nervous and harassed for so early in the morning. "The receptionist didn't give me your name. For some reason she seems upset." She did at that, he thought -- probably bewildered by his appearance. The hospital didn't seem to have a calming influence on either her or the doctor. "That's why I came here. I'm not sure who I am. I thought I was Dan Merrol." Doctor Crander tried to fight his way through the desk. Being a little wider and solider, though not by much, the desk won. He contented himself by wiping his forehead. "Our missing patient," he said, sighing with vast relief. "For a while I had visions of... He then decided that visions were nothing a medical man should place much faith in. "Then I am Dan Merrol?" The doctor came cautiously around the desk this time. "Of course. I didn't expect that you'd come walking in my office -- that's why I didn't recognize you immediately." He exhaled peevishly. "Where did you go? We've been searching for you everywhere." It seemed wiser to Dan not to tell him everything. "It was stuffy inside. I went out for a stroll before the nurse came in." Crander frowned, his nervousness rapidly disappearing. "Then it was about an hour ago. We didn't think you could walk at all so soon, or we would have kept someone on duty through the night." him, but he didn't mind. Of course, he didn't know how a patient from the regrowth tanks was supposed to act. The doctor took his pulse. "Seems fine," he said, surprised. "Sit down -- please sit down." Without waiting for him to comply, Crander pushed him into a chair and began hauling out a variety of instruments with which he poked about his bewildered patient. Finally Crander seemed satisfied. "Excellent," he said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were almost fully recovered. A week ago, we considered removing you from the regrowth tank. Our decision to leave you there an extra week has paid off very, very nicely." Merrol wasn't as pleased as the doctor appeared to be. "Granted you can identify me as the person who came out of regrowth -- but does that mean I'm Dan Merrol? Could there be a mistake?" Crander eyed him clinically. "We don't ordinarily do this -- but it is evident that with you peace of mind is more important than procedure. And you look well enough to stand the physical strain." He pressed the buzzer and an angular woman in her early forties answered. "Miss Jerrems, the Dan Merrol file." Miss Jerrems flashed a glance of open adoration at the doctor and before she could reel it in, her gaze swept past Dan, hesitated and returned to him. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a nervous goldfish and she darted from the room. They see me and flee as fast as they can caper, thought Merrol. It was not wholly true -- Crander didn't seem much affected. But he was a doctor and used to it. Furthermore, he probably had room for only one emotion at the moment -- relief at the return of his patient. Miss Jerrems came back, wheeling a large cart. Dan was surprised at the mass of records. Crander noticed his expression and smiled. "You're our prize case, Merrol. I've never heard of anyone else surviving such extensive surgery. Naturally, we have a step-by-step account of everything we did." He turned to the woman. "You may leave, Miss Jerrems." She went, but the adoration she had showed so openly for her employer seemed to have curdled in the last few moments. Crander dug into the files and rooted out photographs. "Here are pictures of the wreckage in which you were found -- notice that you were strapped in your seat -- as you were received into the hospital -- at various stages in surgery and finally, some taken from the files of the company for which you worked." Merrol winced. The photographic sequence was incontrovertible. He had been a handsome fellow. "Here is other evidence you may not have heard of. It's a recent development, within the last ten years, in fact. It still isn't accepted by most courts -- they're always lagging -- but to medical men it's the last word." of waves and lines and splotches. "What is it?" "Mass-cell radiographs. One was loaned by your employer. The other was taken just after your last operation. Both were corrected according to standard methods. One cell won't do it, ten yield an uncertain identity -- but as few as a hundred cells from any part of the original body, excepting the blood, constitute proof more positive than fingerprints before the surgical exchange of limbs. Don't ask me why -- no one knows. But it is true that cells differ from one body to the next, and this test detects the difference." The mass-cell radiographs did seem identical and Dr. Crander seemed certain. Taken altogether, the evidence was overwhelming. There had been no mistake -- he was Dan Merrol, though it was not difficult to understand why Erica couldn't believe he was her husband. "You did a fine job," he said. Recalling the picture of the wreckage, he knew they had. "But couldn't you have done just a little better?" ed up. "We're amazed at how well we have done. You can search case histories and find nothing comparable." His eyebrows dropped back into place. "Of course, if you have a specific complaint..." "Nothing specific. But look at this hand..." The doctor seized it. "Beautiful, isn't it?" "Perhaps -- taken by itself." Dan rolled up his sleeve. "See how it joins the forearm." Crander waggled it gravely. "It coordinates perfectly. I've observed you have complete control over it. The doctor's eye, my boy. The doctor's diagnostic eye." The other just didn't understand. "But the size -- it doesn't match my arm!" "Doesn't match?" cried the doctor. "Do you have any idea of the biological ways in which it does match? True, it may not be esthetically harmonized, but here we delve into the mysteries of the human organism, and we can hardly be striving for Botticelli bodies and Michelangelo men. First, your hand moves freely at the joint, a triumph of surgical skill." He moved the hand experimentally, to show Merrol how it was done. He dropped the hand and hurried to a screen against the wall. Crander drew his finger across the surface and the mark remained. "You know about Rh positive and negative blood. Mixed, they can be lethal. This was discovered long ago, by someone I've forgotten. But there are other factors just as potent and far more complex." He scribbled meaningless symbols on the screen with his finger. "Take the bone factors -- three. They must be matched in even such a slight contact as a joint... this was done. Then there are the tissue factors -- four. Tendon factors -- two. Nerve-splice factors -- three again. After that, we move into a complex field, hormone-utilization factors -- seven at the lastest count and more coming up with further research. "That's the beginning, but at the sensory organs we leave the simple stuff behind. Take the eye, for instance." Merrol leaned away because Dr. Crander seemed about to pluck one of Dan's eyes from its socket. "Surgical and growth factors involved in splicing a massive nerve bundle pass any layman's comprehension. There are no non-technical terms to describe it." I T was just as well -- Merrol didn't want a lecture. He extended his arms. One was of normal length, the other longer. "Do you think you can do something with this? I don't mind variation in thickness -- some of that will smooth out as I exercise -- but I'd like them the same length." "There were many others injured at the same time, you know -- and you were one of the last to be extricated from the ship. Normally, when we have to replace a whole arm, we do so at the shoulder for obvious reasons. But the previously treated victims had depleted our supplies. Some needed only a hand and we gave them just that, others a hand and a forearm, and so on. When we got to you, we had to use leftovers or permit you to die -- there wasn't time to send to other hospitals. In fact there wasn't any time at all -- we actually thought you were dead, but soon found we were wrong." Crander stared at a crack in the ceiling. "Further recovery will take other operations and your nervous system isn't up to it." He shook his head. "Five years from now, we can help you, not before." Merrol turned away miserably. There were other things, but he had learned the essentials. He was Dan Merrol and there was nothing they could do for him until it was too late. How long could he expect Erica to wait? The doctor hadn't finished the medical session. "Replacement of body parts is easy, after all. The big trouble came when we went into the brain." "Brain?" Dan was startled. "How hard do you think your skull is?" Crander came closer. "Bend your head." Merrol obeyed and could feel the doctor's forefinger slice across his scalp in a mock operation. "This sector was crushed." Roughly half his brain, it appeared. That's why so many memories were gone -- not just from shock. "In addition, other sectors were damaged and had to be replaced." Crander traced out five areas he could feel, but not see. "Samuel Kaufman, musician -- Breed Mannly, cowboy actor -- George Elkins, lepidopterist -- Duke DeCaesares, wrestler -- and Ben Eisenberg, mathematician, went into the places I tapped." Dan raised his head. Some things were clearer. The memories were authentic, but they weren't his -- nor did the other wives belong to him. It was no wonder Erica had cringed at their names. "These donors were dead, but you can be thankful we had parts of their brains available." (Grander delved into the file and came up with a sheet. "Here are some body part contributors." He read rapidly. "Dimwiddie, Barton, Colton, Morton, Flam and Camera were responsible for arms and hands. Greenberg, Rochefault, Gonzalez, Tail-Cloud, Gowraddy and Tsin supplied feet and legs." H E was not a man, Merrol thought. Not now. If anything, he was a convention and one body was not a large enough hotel to hold it in comfort. "These were the major human donors, but there were others I didn't bother to read, for the kidneys and so on. And I think our four-footed friends deserve some mention." He looked up. "The skin on your face is from a pig embryo." That explained why it was hard to shave. "Oink?" he said. "I mean did it have to be a pig?" "You'd be surprised how hard it is to transplant human skin," commented Crander. "Besides, we wanted to give you a masculine look. The finest face there , is, genuine pigskin." Merrol felt like a wallet. The doctor droned on through the list, but Merrol scarcely listened. Only once did he interrupt, to ask incredulously, "Did you say a horse?" "Is there anything wrong with a horse?" Merrol thought back. Come to consider it, there was nothing wrong -- in fact, compliments were more in order. "The skill that went into matching the unrelated parts that are now you is a landmark in medical history, quite comparable to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood," said Dr. Crander. "I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't participated in it myself. There have been limb and brain replacements before, but never on such a scale. One of these days, we'll get out a report that will astound the medical world." Without doubt, it would. Merrol tried to feel grateful, but gratitude refused to come. They had saved him -- but was it worth it? Puzzled, Crander frowned at the buzzer. He'd been pressing it intermittently for the past few minutes. "Doesn't seem to be working," he muttered, heading toward the door through which Merrol had entered. "Wait here -- I'll be back. I have to cancel an appointment." A S soon as the door closed, a voice behind Merrol hissed. "I fixed the buzzer. He went for the guards." He whirled. Miss Jerrems stood in the doorway that led into the filing room on the opposite side of the office. "Guards?" he repeated. "Of course -- guards for the violent patients." "What does that have to do with me?" "You escaped once, didn't you?" He hadn't escaped, he had merely walked out when he felt he could. Did that qualify him as violent? It might. "What of it? I'm no longer a patient. The doctor said I had recovered." "That's what he said to you. But even if he means it, there's always psychotherapy, post-regrowth orientation." Orientation -- he hadn't thought of that. They'd want to keep him under observation for several days and he had no desire to stay hospitalized. Erica would come to the hospital in a few hours. Perhaps she was there now, waiting to see someone. Come to think of it, he had got past the receptionist with remarkable ease. At any rate, if she was insistent about it, she must eventually get to see the evidence he had just studied. And then there would be orientation -- for both of them. Without doubt, he would be taught to' accept himself as he was, and Erica would be trained to look at him without laughter, and together they would know that beneath his piebald exterior lurked a lovely personality. Then, well adjusted, they would go home and live happily ever after. Or would they? "Don't stand there, if you want to get away," Miss Jerrems whispered urgently. "Next time they won't take any chances." They wouldn't. He would be confined to a room he couldn't break out of with guards disguised as nurses. Blindly he moved toward the door. "Not there," she exclaimed. "Do you want to walk right into them? This way. They won't look for you in here." She clasped his hand in her bony fingers and led him through the maze of files to an elevator. "This takes you to the ground floor," she said. "Once outside, you can get away." He probably could -- it was a large building and it would take a prolonged search to determine that he was not inside it. She smiled peculiarly, clearing her throat. "Thirty-seven Brighton Drive." Mechanically he repeated the number. "What is it?" "That's where you can find out." "Find out what?" "What they did to you here. I can't tell you now," she whispered nervously. "Oh, do hurry!" If he had to move fast, this seemed a good time. The elevator dropped him to the street level and, looking cautiously around, he walked out. In a few minutes, he was blocks away. It was midmorning, and he swung along, hands thrust into his jacket. There was a wad of paper inside and he fished it out and examined it -- money, neatly folded with a note around it. The note was from Erica, saying that the money was meant for him. The sum was not great, but she must have given him everything she had in the house. Mistily, he counted it out. Ill D AN hadn't been stopped and didn't expect to be. He wasn't a criminal, but until the hospital released him, he was technically a mental case. But Crander would hardly be anxious to report to the police that a patient was missing -- not until he had tried everything else. Merrol took the elevator. It was a bright new apartment building, which conferred some social status and not much else on those living in it. Miss Jerrems opened the door. "Come in," she said, looking around furtively as he slipped past her. He sat down gingerly, watching her scurry about. He tried to protest, but nothing he said had any effect on her aggressive hospitality. She thrust a cup of watery coffee in his hand and placed a tray of breakfast rolls beside him. She sat facing him. Their knees almost touched -- it was a narrow room. "I came home at once," she said, not very successful in her attempt to control her excitement. "I told them I was upset and, after my long years of service, they didn't question me. I tore my dress and told them you had done it. I said that you ran up toward the top of the building." He appreciated her motives, but thought she shouldn't have tried so hard to convince them. Now they had reason to think he was violent. "Until today, I've been devoted to Doctor Crander," she said sternly. He recalled the first look on her face in the doctor's office -- and the one after she had seen him. In seconds, her whole attitude had changed. Why? "I heard what he told you." She hissed the word -- "Lies." Dan stared at her skeptically. "They didn't do what he said?" "Oh, the facts were straight enough," she said bitterly. "It was the reasons he concealed. They thought you didn't have a chance, so they did all sorts of strange things they never tried on anyone else. You were an experiment, that's all -- but you surprised them." The hospital was looking for the wrong mental case. They had one working for them and didn't know it. He didn't doubt that she was right -- about his being an experiment -- but her observations were wrong. It was due entirely to their unorthodox procedures that he was alive. She looked him over carefully and he knew that the halves of his face didn't match by a ridiculous margin, that one shoulder was heavier than the other, that his hair was in three colors. Even in repose and fully clothed, so that some of the discrepancies of his physique were hidden, he was hardly presentable. "When I saw you standing there today, I realized what they had done to you and my loyalty to the institution and the doctor vanished," she said earnestly. "And the psychotherapy isn't to help you, it's to make sure you won't protest over what they've done. That's why I had to get you away. They've ruined you and now you must ruin them." He had half-suspected it would come to this -- but he hadn't been sure. "I don't want to ruin them," he said slowly. "I'd rather be alive, even as an experiment. And if you're thinking of a malpractice suit, you saw the files. I couldn't win against that." "I ought to know about the files -- I worked on them." Her eyes sparkled and her voice lowered. "What if the evidence is missing?" H E sat back. With her cooperation, the vital parts of the file could vanish and, with that gone, he could collect a staggering amount from the institution. He had only to appear and no jury or panels of experts would decide against him. Is that what she had planned so swiftly in the director's office -- that she would share the money with him? Somehow, he couldn't believe money meant that much to her. "I can't permit it," he said. "In spite of everything, I feel obligated." She flung herself across the narrow space. "I expected you to be noble," she sobbed. "One look at you, and I knew I had met the loneliest person in the world." Like called to like, at least for her, and that explained why she had grimaced when she had first seen him. It was her counterpart of the receptionist's reaction. It explained, too, why she was willing to turn against the doctor she had previously adored. As for the money, she didn't want it for herself, but as bait for him -- and he'd have to take her with it. She had guessed wrong on all counts. He would have thrust her away, but it would have been too cruel. He tried to comfort her, and she dried her eyes on his shoulder. "Darling," she sniffled. "I've never yielded to any man, but if it will help you..." She pressed close and he couldn't get away without breaking through the thin walls of the cramped apartment. He had never known a female form could be shaped around so many bones. "These things take time," he said, though they didn't. "Let's not rush into anything we'll regret." He seemed to arouse the motherly instinct in some women, if only in the future tense. Presently, she sat up, blowing her nose and looking ardently at him through tear-rimmed eyes. "You can stay here. You've no place else to go, and they'll be looking for you." "Well," he said -- but it was true. He shouldn't be wandering on the streets. He slept that night on a sink that converted to a bed. It would have been more comfortable unconverted. H E crept out in the morning before she was awake. He paused outside to scribble a note, principally to throw her off his track. You never could tell with so unstable a person. Implicated in his escape, she might nevertheless report to the hospital. He shoved the note under the door and left quickly apd quietly. His first move was to buy a hat, which entailed further trouble. The doctors had overcompensated in replacing the missing brain tissue and, in piecing a skull together, had constructed an outsized head on which nothing seemed to fit. By careful shopping, he found something that did fit and, when he'd clapped it on, he happily noted it concealed the tricolor hair... one item less to attract attention. He ate and afterward walked to the rocketport. It was a long distance and formerly he might have complained, but now he didn't mind it. The miles seemed to have shrunk to furlongs. He found the big Interplanet sign and examined the place minutely from the outside. Once he had worked there, technically he still did. Some memories came back, but not many. He needed at least an hour inside to enable him to forget the hospital and its psychotherapy. Once cleared, he would be free for a while to concentrate on what to do about Erica. The hospital evidently had yet to call in the police, He was still safe on the streets, but the medicos must have notified Interplanet and all other places at which he might show up. However, the company was too big for everyone to know about him this soon. More likely there would be only a few who could have information on him as yet. The trick was to bypass those individuals who might try to detain him and still get where he wanted. Normally, he'd go to the front office after an accident. This time, he went to the side gate and when the guard looked at him questioningly, mumbled, "Reporting for duty." Which got him through. Inside, there were more memories awaiting him. Depending on them, he walked rapidly through hall after hall and finally found the desk he sought. The man behind it looked up. "Are you sure you're in the right place?" he asked. Merrol would soon know. "Reporting for duty," he stated. This reply elicited a puzzled expression. "The devil you are. We haven't hired anyone new." "I'm not new. I've been injured, and this is my first time back. Dan Merrol's my name." "Okay, where's your slip?" "Slip?" he asked, stalling. This was something he ought to know about, but didn't. "Sure, the release from the front office after an injury." "They said they'd send it down," he replied, holding his breath. T HE clerk pawed through the stack. "They don't send nothing down," he growled. "I'll call and find out." His hand reached out and then he relaxed. "No use bothering them, it'll get here tomorrow." He looked up and laughed. "Red tape," he said by way of explanation. "Why should I doubt you? If you said they released you, then they did." Merrol was glad to see one man who wasn't impressed by office routines. Still, his behavior was a little puzzling. The man screened on. The communication unit was behind the desk, tilted so he couldn't see it. The volume was low, but Dan could hear the conversation from this end. "Got a case for you. Name is Dan Merrol. I don't know, he's before my time." The reply was faint and Dan didn't catch it. But the clerk added, "He seems okay. What? Sure he's got a release. Would I send him in?" He cut the connection and looked up. "Go over to Psych. They'll test you. If you pass, we'll put you back on schedule." He started to turn away and saw Merrol standing there. "What's the matter?" "I don't know where Psych is." "I see. We must have moved things since you were here." The man got up and pointed. "Down there and turn left at the second corner. You can't miss." The examiner was scanning a card as he entered. "Lots of experience," he commented. "We'll pass over the written stuff. That's for kids, to make sure they've studied their lessons. After you've been out this long, you can almost feel a course faster than anyone can figure it." It was a relief. Merrol didn't know how much theory he remembered, but was sure he could still lift a ship as well as the next man. The examiner made a notation on the card and tossed it into a machine that snapped it up and clicked furiously over it. "Let's take the biggest thing first, if you're up to it." "I feel fine." It was not true, but it was the customary answer. Anything else, and he'd be shunted off into a series of meaningless tests, each designed to verify the results of previous tests. An ingenious scheme rigged up by the psych crew in their spare time to see how complicated they could make any given system. Answered straightforwardly, they rushed a man through with a minimum of officiousness. "Okay, let's take the trip." He accompanied Dan into a room unlike the others. For one thing, it might have been the control room of a ship. Forward, there was the usual clear view. The stars were there too, in an adaptation of the planetarium. Outside, arranged to give any effect from top acceleration to free fall, were a number of gravity coils. Except for the pilot -- and Merrol would play that role -- there was a full complement of officers who were invisible. T HE tester flicked on a machine. "I'll give you Mars, because that's your usual run. This is a short drive, because you're in a favorable position. Got it?" Merrol nodded and climbed into the seat, facing the instruments. "I've turned on the best crew simulators, better than you'd ever actually get. Don't worry about them, just take the data and flit the way you think you should." The tester clamped a mike inches away and adjusted the visiorecorders firmly on his head, where electron beams could sneak in and tap his optic centers. "The first trip after you've been away is rough, but you'll make it." Merrol strapped himself in and hoped the other man was right. The examiner went to the door, turned and grinned. "Watch out for the interplanetary goose," he called and snapped the switch. Merrol was now in a ship. In the back of his mind there was some doubt of his ability, but it didn't reach as far as his fingers. Rockets vibrated beneath him. Outside, he could see the glazed earth-slick. He touched the power and climbed above the clouds. The sky turned black and there were stars. He checked position. The tester had given him a setup. The Moon was out of the way and the run to Mars was the shortest on record. If he couldn't handle this, he wasn't a pilot. The seat jabbed him suddenly. That's what he'd been warned about -- he'd been expecting it and still wasn't prepared. The tempathy drugs flooded into him and the needle was withdrawn. Takeoff and landing were always rehearsed on the pilot's own time. The ends of a voyage were critical and it was essential to have an undistorted reaction. Besides, neither took long. The time between one planet and the next was long and nothing much happened, so it could be shortened without deleterious effect on the results. Tempathy drugs shortened it, though not completely. Part of a man's consciousness went along at normal speed and the rest, that which counted in jockeying rockets, was enormously telescoped. It telescoped on Merrol. He couldn't see. Rather, part of him could but, for the other fraction, images passed in front of his eyes foo fast for his mind to evaluate. Weeks flipped past in minutes. It was a dream world turned inside out -- the roles of consciousness and unconsciousness were reversed. There was something wrong with the sounds he half-heard. He could get emotions, though he couldn't separate them into sense. There were additional voices that shouldn't be there -- the mechanical crew spoke to him giving silent data -- but there were other actual voices, fearful or consolatory. He tried to speak, but his vocal cords were preempted. He was doing it all, speaking, moving the controls, directing the ship between planets. It ought to be easier than takeoff, but it wasn't. He shouldn't be afraid of anything he might find out there -- which was nothing -- but that didn't alter conditions. He was profoundly disturbed, and he hoped the tester noticed it. The examiner did spot trouble. He opened the door and reversed the switch. Lights went on, and another needle speared him, counteracting the effects of the tempathy drugs. Slowly the ship disappeared, space along with it, and the room whirled back into view and settled down. Something handed him back his eyes and ears. "Easy," said the man. "Sit there. You don't have to move. We'll find out what's wrong. It may not be serious at all." corder, the tester also swung the mike away. "You were doing fine," he said. "Never saw anything smoother. About here, though, you seemed to be having difficulty. We'll slow it down and see what it was." He snapped the reels in place and darkened the room. On the screen was the vision-port and, through it, a view of Mars. A fleck of light glittered, grew, became a cloud, a swarm. A swarm? "God!" said the tester, bewildcould you imagine butterflies, planet?" Merrol squirmed -- he didn't know either. What was wrong with him to make him dream up butterflies? The examiner switched the film off and the lights on. "So you missed them -- why, I don't know." He fiddled with another machine. "We'll slow down the sound, synchronize the two of them later, but maybe by itself the sound will give us a clue as to what happened." "What's that?" It came from the sound track, but it was Merrol's voice. "Those are lepidoptera." Another voice, also his, though of different pitch and timbre -- his, because he was the only one there to speak. "I've always dreamed of discovering a new species and at last I have, since these can fly through space. What strange adaptations they have made. Aren't they beautiful?" He answered. "They won't be when I plow through them. The rockets will fry them." "Turn aside!" shouted the lepidopterist. "You can't destroy them." "I'm going to act as if this were not happening," said a cultured voice. "Bang-bang!" "This is upsetting," said a different person. "Since I have no instrument, I'll listen with my memory to a Bach concerto. Unfortunately, it ends in the middle of the third movement, as though it has been sliced through with a knife that separated one note cleanly from the next. Still, it's better to have this than nothing." "Your computers are awfully slow," said the fifth. "I'll figure out a new course for us." "Gimme the controls," said the wrestler. "I'll turn the ship, if I hafta do it with my bare hands." The examiner snapped off the sound and busied himself with things that may have been necessary. "You don't have to sit there," he said after a while. "Wait outside." He glanced down, "Be careful when you move, the control column will fall off. Didn't know it could be broken." As he got out of the seat, the examiner slapped his back. "Tell you what, fellow -- don't wait -- go now to the Compensation Board and see about retirement." IV where he had been sitting for a day and a half since the psych test. He had walked out immediately, found a room and was still in it. It wasn't comfortable, sitting. Whichever position was right for the bend of one knee was wrong for the other. He had depended on the test to get him out of a jam, but the stratagem had failed. If he had passed, he'd have been another experienced pilot for the Interplanet string and that meant something. Experienced men were valuable and I. P. would have gone to bat for him. Not everyone could pass the test and, while it didn't prove that the man who did was one hundred per cent sane, it was a big argument in that direction. It was evidence that would have to be respected publicly, whatever private doubts a psychotherapist might have. Unwittingly, he had provided additional ammunition against himself. When the results of the test sifted through the layers of red tape to the front office, Interplanet would contact the hospital, which would then really want to orient him to a frazzle. Orientation sounded nice but it was not for Merrol. If they could orient everyone he would come in contact with as well -- but how much insulation could a man build up against involuntary laughter? It was fine to be a comedian on the screen and then step out of character and relax -- but what if you couldn't stop? Nobody could adjust to the constant expectation of hysterical mirth. But wasn't that a reason to undergo psychotherapy, so they could blunt the edges of his own reactions? It ought to be, but somehow it wasn't. He didn't dare submit. There was a difference, apparently determined by sex, in the way people behaved toward him. No man had thus far done more than smile respectfully while he was near. What they did later, he could guess. Face to face, they seemed to be reserved and incredulous until they learned to accept him as a member of their species and sex and then -- how did they act? It would take more than casual thinking to puzzle that out. Women saw the big joke instantly and giggled, and he couldn't blame them. Seconds later, they smirked contritely and tried to touch him, as if contact could atone for their behavior. They noticed appearance at all times, whereas men didn't as a rule of their own sex.  He paused to re-examine his thoughts.Something seemed to be missing in his analysis. What it was, he couldn't tell. It would have to come out later, as he mingled more with people -- if he ever did. A ND that wasn't all. He had been a pilot, but never would be one again. His skill had been destroyed by the intrusion of five other personalities, who each brought his own odd bit of useless knowledge to the whole Merrol. He should have expected it, but he hadn't, nor had the doctors. It was obvious -- the brain slices that had replaced his own damaged tissues had to be in healthy condition or they'd never have functioned properly -- and what did those medical fools think was the function of any brain? He was in command of the group brain because, his was the dominant fraction, but when he sat down and thought about it, what good did it do? He was sitting down and it didn't do any good, so he got up. He took two paces across the room and looked out the window, into windows that looked into his. Compensation was coming to him. Ultimately, he'd divide it with Erica and go away. She must know by now that the man she had spent the night with was actually her own husband. Intellectually she must have decided to accept him. He wasn't noble, though. Much as he wanted her, he knew he couldn't live with anyone who had to stifle her laughter when he stepped out of the bath or into bed. He walked the carpet aimlessly until, through the window, he caught a word from the telecast in the next apartment. He thought it sounded familiar. He yanked the louvers closed and grunted, but it didn't help -- the word bothered him. He reached out the long arm to turn on his own screen. A face came into view and a man's voice whispered. Merrol turned up the volume, but it didn't get any louder. It was the low-pressure soothing type. Whatever he was selling, it was a welcome change. The announcer smiled reassuringly. "Actually, I'm talking to one person. The rest of you may listen or not for the next five minutes, after which I'll have something to say to you." It was a clever approach to insure that the audience didn't switch programs. "Dan Merrol, this is a personal message to you." Merrol sat up. "We'd call you if we could, but this is a large city and you've simply vanished. We have operatives trying to trace you, but with no success up to now." The announcer leaned forward confidentially. "Now, Dan, before you become alarmed, let me say you've done nothing wrong. In fact, at Interplanet, we think you've done everything right -- but I'll come to that later." wasn't the hospital or the police. What could I. P. want of him? "No doubt the test you took was somewhat of a shock. Don't blame the psych examiner for the conclusions he formed -- he can't be expected to know more than the leading psychologists. You're probably curious as to what this test has to do with you and Interplanet. We hope so -- we want you to keep on listening. "The test proved you're no longer a competent pilot -- but it also indicated something much bigger. Dan, you are the answer to a problem that has been bothering us for generations. Before the accident, you knew nothing of music or any life science, your math was adequate but not deep, you often felt awkward in the presence of others when you had no need to and you lacked confidence in your physical ability. "Suddenly, you gained something of each and, when we contacted your doctors, we were able to surmise how it happened. Now you ask -- what good does this do you and what is the problem to which this is the answer? "Simply this -- specialization. You know what constitutes a rocket crew -- pilot, radio man, engineer and several lesser technicians, each of whom knows only his own job. Although you'll never sit at the controls again -- through you, we can help others." The announcer lowered his voice now. "You can unlock specialization for us. In the future, each man will concentrate on what particular aptitudes he has, then share it, via surgery, with others whose knowledge complements his own. To do this, we need to study you further and, of course, we'll pay you well for the opportunity. In addition, you'll still get your compensation. Please come and talk it over with us. "Frankly, we're a little worried about what you may be thinking. If you have any thoughts of selfdestruction because of what must seem a strange condition, put them aside. You're much saner than the average man." the remark. No matter what they thought, he couldn't seriously contemplate suicide. There were too many others to dissuade him. Nevertheless, it was hard to understand and accept the sudden change of his status. He had formerly been a mere employee, but now... The announcer hadn't finished. "In the beginning, Dan, I said you had done everything right, whether you knew it or not. After we learned what we did from your test, we checked through our files and found that we had a few other accident cases on record in which part of the brain had been replaced. In each case there was a faint trace of another personality, which we could detect when we knew what to look for. We rechecked each person we could locate. Unfortunately, the latent personalities and their share of knowledge had been submerged beyond recovery by the rigorous psychotherapy the accident victim had undergone after surgery." T HE imaginary Wysocki's theorem of selftherapy. He never knew of anyone by that name, nor had he got it from one of the other five. But, however nonsensically he had invented it to express the needs he felt at the time, it was, in fact, not nonsense. When it came to that, who knew anything about six minds packaged together -- and what could have been done to him in ignorance? The announcer was finished talking to Dan Merrol alone. "Remember, all of you," he said briskly. "This man is neither a criminal nor insane. He is extremely withdrawn, as a result of unpleasant experiences. If you can induce him to come to Interplanet, or lead our representatives to him, you will receive a substantial reward. Here is his picture." Merrol turned off the screen and scowled. He didn't like that last. He intended to take their offer, but he wanted to be free to walk the streets. He could settle that easily enough by just calling Interplanet. They'd send someone down to whisk him away. That would solve all his problems -- or would it? Certainly, it eliminated orientation or any form of psychotherapy. After what had happened to the others, the psychologists would be content merely to observe what went on in his mind. They wouldn't want to give him much privacy, but he'd have to insist on it. They'd listen. This could be just a job, a very good job while it lasted -- say three or four years -- until they had learned all they need to know. Perhaps there would be other men blended more scientifically than he had been. But he could accumulate enough money to last the rest of his life, or perhaps turn his many new talents to something else. There were many things he would like to do, and he was ahead of everyone else now, even though in three or four years he would no longer be unique. Except, of course, in his body. And there it was again. Was there nothing he could do to get away from it? He had no memory of Erica except for the one night, but it was enough to convince him. What would their future be like in what was sure to follow? After that broadcast, he would be a person of some note, but would that stop laughter? Would she wait until he left the room before she giggled? He'd come to terms with Interplanet, but first he had to come to terms with himself... and he hadn't. How good was his imaginary Wysocki's theorem? Could it take one last extension? He counted what was left of the money Erica had given him. It wasn't much, but with it he could leave the city. And he had to. V I T was dusk when he slipped out of the room and later still when the plane lifted away from the station. It was an ancient jet, long since relegated to cheap overnight service where speed was ndt a factor and price was. He knew he was taking a chance and half expected to be stopped, but apparently not many people had listened to the broadcast. Casual glances slid off him and didn't linger. Partly, he suspected, because he had pulled his hat over his face and thrust his hands in the jacket. He'd gotten away in time, but by the morning there would be people on the streets looking for him. He stared at the approximation of a port. When this ship had been built, there was some feeling against the practice and so the row of picture tubes had been camouflaged as ports in the wall. There was a station selector switch, but none for on or off. He glowered at the picture at his elbow and turned to the least annoying thing he could find. Across the aisle, there were three other programs he could see distinctly. The one directly opposite was a repeat of the broadcast he had heard a few hours previously. He scowled and looked away. If it hadn't been a night plane, in which people sought sleep, he would certainly have been spotted. Apathy was his best protection. He hunched down in his seat and dozed off. When he awakened, the familiar Interplanet program was at his elbow. He reached to change stations, then on impulse let his hand continue past the knob until he felt the ash tray. He unfastened the heavy article and poked it through the screen. The glass broke, but only a few in the immediate vicinity heard it in the din. To those who stared at him, he presented a view of his back or the profile of his hat. They glanced at him indifferently, then looked away. Outside the orifice, where the tube had been in the outer of two walls, was an actual port. He gazed through it contentedly. A finger tapped him. "Yes?" he said in a loud voice. The man behind him leaned over. "I've been riding in this plane once a week for five years. I mean, would you mind if I looked out? I've never seen where I'm going." "Glad to have you." The man sat beside him and peered wistfully out. Below were lights, the patterns of cities, roads and towns and in the distance the glare of furnaces. There was also a current of cold air seeping from the space between the double walls. The man looked, shivered, turned up his collar and finally went back to his seat. It was cold, but Merrol remained where he was. There was some satisfaction in asserting himself, but the satisfaction wore off and the cold didn't. His attention was caught by the program which was flickering across the aisle. Doctor Crander -- Merrol frowned. Did the hospital want him too? He listened intently. No, they didn't want him. "This is an emergency appeal and we'll need a wide response. We have in our care a person with a serious illness we can't diagnose. With so much interplanetary travel we can't determine what causes the disease. It may be an organism from a moon of Saturn or almost anything else. "Our staff is working at top speed. We feel, if we can keep her alive for one week, she'll be out of danger. That is by no means a certainty, but a reasonably accurate forecast...  "We have a new theory, largely untested, but we hope it will work. Each person differs from the next and though, when we match limbs and organs, we try to take this into account, we never quite succeed in effecting a perfect biological match. As a result, the character of the blood changes, slightly but significantly. It's as if we had lumped together the various natural immunities of the component bodies and created an entirely new super-immunity." Crander paused. "We need persons who have had five or more major replacements. By major, I mean hands, arms, legs or parts of them -- nothing so trivial as ears, or a few feet of skin, or three or four fingers. "It must be at least five, though more are correspondingly better. Nothing less -- and please don't apply with only a minor replacement. Two donors have volunteered so far and we have fractioned and administered the blood of one with dramatic, if temporary, results. In a few hours, we'll have to use the second. After that, I don't know what we'll do." Merrol stirred. He was deeply suspicious. "Here's the woman," said Crander. "She needs your help." The man across the aisle leaned forward and his head was in front of the picture. Merrol tried to see, but couldn't. "It's up to you," said Crander as he faded from the screen. Merrol tapped the man across the aisle. "Please repeat it." The man glanced around and saw who it was. "Aw, you're the guy who doesn't like that stuff." He jerked his head at the broken screen. The memory cell of the picture tube didn't have a long attention span. It could recall forty-five seconds of the past program and no longer. The broadcast might be repeated, or it might not. Did he want to wait? He reached out his arm -- the long one -- and fastened onto the man's jacket, giving him a short rough shove. "Repeat it, I said!" The man looked down. He wasn't small himself, but it was a large fist. "Sure thing," he said, jabbing the repeat button. The scene was replayed. "Thanks," said Merrol, letting go. The man looked at his crumpled clothing. "Not at all," he muttered, sliding away against the wall. "Don't mention it." T HE woman was Erica. It was too much of a coincidence the city, she should be the one. The hospital and Interplanet were working together and now they had brought in Erica. How gullible did they think he was and how much had they offered her for this? It might not be money, though -- they might have convinced her it was to Dan's own best interest that they get in touch with him immediately. They were baiting him crudely and if they weren't, there were others who could respond as well as he. There must be hundreds in the vicinity, scores at any rate, who could qualify. There were enough without him, depending on how often the blood fraction was needed. Crander hadn't said. It was a trick and Erica wasn't ill -- or if she was, she would be safe without him. He had to make up his mind before he saw her, and he couldn't. He clenched his hands, both big and little. He had stretched Wysocki's theorem too far and it had failed. "I had a wife once." The voice startled him, but he sat still, hoping to hear it again. Maybe they would tell him what to do. "Not so slender as Erica. Rather bouncy, in fact, but I liked her. Pity she ran away with a coleopterist. Never could understand what she saw in him." The voice grew sad. "Beetles!" "My advice is that wives are easily come by," said a theatrical voice, modulated for effect. "But before he shuffles off this mortal coil to the last roundup, every man should have at least one wife like Erica." "I can't speak of wives or women," said the musician. "There's so little memory left, mostly music. But you've been subconsciously humming a tune for days -- and I must tell you that Beethoven didn't write anything called Erica. The correct title is Eroica." "One fall don't mean nothing, it's always the best two out of three. The way I see it, you gotta get up. Get close to them, hold them tight, or they'll throw you outta the ring." "This is something that can't be figured. There are some odds no one can live by. You'll have to solve this one yourself." He sat there, not moving. They were with him always, but sometimes they weren't much help. The plane would land on the other side of the continent. He had little money, but he could get in touch with Interplanet and they would advance him the fare back. Unfortunately, such a move would take time. There would be schedules to juggle, to say nothing of the ride back. A mere matter of hours on a fast ship -- yet what if that was too long? H E got to his feet and went forward. "You can't go in there," said the stewardess. He looked past her into the pilot's compartment. It was securely locked from this side though not on the other. He glanced down at the girl. It was a tradition that stewardesses were gorgeous creatures, though the tradition was simply not true any longer. In an age of space exploration, air travel had dispensed with glamor. But for unfathomable reasons, this stewardess was a throwback to the old days. If she didn't quite achieve real beauty, she came close enough so that no healthy male could conceivably object to her nearness. Merrol could take the keys away from her, but she'd scream and a dozen men would come leaping to her rescue. He didn't care for the odds. He had met three women and had he misjudged the effect of the new himself on them? First Erica -- her behavior had been strange, considering that, even from the first, she must have doubted he was her husband. Then the receptionist -- she had gone out of her way to get him into Crander's office when the latter was upset by the disappearance of a patient. And finally, the pathetic Miss Jerrems, who had thawed and would have descended to crooked schemes, had he encouraged her. Was this some form of pity or something quite different -- or did it matter at all as long as they were not indifferent? There was a way to find out. He raised his arm, the shorter one, and laid his hand affectionately on the stewardess' shoulder. "Isn't there a private room in back?" She tilted her head and her lips glistened. "Yes, there is." "Small enough for two?" "I believe so." Her lashes trembled and lowered and she seemed surprised that they did. "That is if you -- if we snuggled close." "I'm sure we will. Why don't you find out about that room?" "It seems like a good idea." She blushed and turned to leave. "I'll need keys, won't I?" he said. She leaned against him and the keys dropped into his hand. "I'll be waiting," she whispered. He watched her walk down the aisle and enjoyed the enticing sway of her hips. Under other circumstances, he might have considered joining her. He had the keys! It had worked! He didn't know why, nor did he have time to think about it. He inserted the key and stepped inside. "Hi, Jane," sang out the pilot, not turning, assuming he knew who it was. Merrol located the autopilot switch and, reaching past the man, turned it on. With the same motion he whirled the pilot around. "Listen, friend, don't you want to go back?" "No. Why should I?" The pilot was startled, but not intimidated. "Engine trouble or something. You figure it out. I don't care what it is, as long as we get back." He half-hoped the man would object -- physical action would be a relief. In an emergency, he could handle the ship himself -- it was simpler than a spaceship. ri'iHE pilot squinted beyond andJbehind him. "Engines don't sound so good," he muttered. He was unexpectedly docile. "Safety first is the motto of this airline." It was a good rule, but it was questionable whose safety he was referring to. The pilot was still having unaccountable difficulty with his eyes -- there was a marked tendency to cross. "Sure, we'll go back," he said. "Glad you brought it to my attention. But call off your gang, will you, mister?" Merrol turned around. He was alone. There was no one behind him , though the pilot seemed convinced there was. He had a partial answer to the pilot's strange reaction. He was a multiple personality and, normally latent, in times of stress the multi-personality became dominant and impressed itself psychologically on the observer. And if the mind received the impression of several men, the eye tried hard to produce evidence that would confirm it. Not everyone was as successful at self-hypnosis as the pilot, but the temptation toward it was always there. Now that he thought of it, men never had laughed at him. Instead they had been respectful. He apparently had an unsettling effect on those of his own sex he came in contact with -- just how powerful it was, he didn't know yet. The complete answer would have to await investigation by trained psychologists. Women were different. They invariably laughed first -- Erica too, in spite of the general sympathy she must have felt for him. In what did the difference lie? That too he would have to determine -- later. The pilot looked at him dizzily, beseechingly. Merrol decided he must be pouring it on, though he felt no different. "Remember, I can get up here in an awful hurry," said Merrol, "so no tricks." The pilot nodded and clung helplessly to the controls. He wouldn't cause any trouble. Merrol raised his arm in a gesture. "Come on, fellows." As an afterthought, he locked the stewardess in the private compartment and, as he did so, he could feel the plane swing in a wide arc that would take them to the station they had started from. The apathetic dozing passengers didn't even notice. And then all six of him walked back to his seat and Merrol sat down. VI H E slid out of the plane while it was still rolling. He didn't want to argue with the passengers, when they found they were on the wrong coast and he was to blame. Nor did he particularly want to explain to the authorities. Later he would have to, but by then he would have powerful interests behind him to smooth over the incident. It was late and there were no cabs in sight, in air or on surface. He crossed the landing strip into the station and out of it and swept along the dark streets with a loose-jointed stride that made the distance seem less than it was. Presently, he broke into a trot and his speed was encouraging. A hoppicopter -- one of the little surface cars that could rise and fly for a short time to avoid traffic jams -- bounced down and rolled alongside. A window slid open and a head popped out. "In a hurry, mister?" He bobbed his head. "Hospital." "Jump in and we'll take you. We're not doing anything special -- just riding around." The hoppicopter stopped. This was luck  -- he'd get there faster. The man in the front seat opened the door and stepped out, flashing a light on him. "Just a check. We don't mind taking you, but we want to be sure we don't pick up some rough character." The man didn't look so gentle himself -- and the light was trained on .Dan too long. If they were afraid, he'd have to refuse their offer and go on. "Hey, Carl," the man with the flash called out puzzledly. "Haven't we seen this guy somewhere before?" He should have expected something like this and not stopped -- but maybe it would have been worse if he hadn't. So far, he had been lucky that no one had spotted him -- and now was not the time to be discussing terms with Interplanet. He began to edge away. Carl climbed out of the hoppicopter and circled in the same direction Merrol was inching toward. "I guess I have at that," said Carl slowly. He was a big man. "Can't say where, though." Merrol breathed more easily. He couldn't make a break for it, but perhaps he wouldn't have to. They might not have seen the broadcast. "I've got to hurry," he said. "I'll go on." "Don't get sore," said Carl soothingly. "We'll take you. Climb in." The man with the light was frowning indecisively. "The guy on the broadcast?" he asked sharply. "Nah," said Carl disgustedly. "That guy -- you look at his picture and you have to bust out laughing. Now this fellow here -- while he's a long way from handsome -- is clearly the executive type, a man you can trust." Carl scrutinized him thoughtfully. Before Merrol could stop him, he reached out and plucked off the hat. "There's only one guy with three-colored hair, though, and you've got it," he said unbelievingly. Merrol started to back away, but the body of the hoppicopter stopped him. "Mister, you've sure got some disguise," said the other man in an awed voice. "I could look right at you all day and not tell who it was." I T was no disguise, it was the multi-personality again. No one looked quite the same in real life as in a picture, because the personality was missing. And with him the difference was far more marked. The camera could register his features accurately, but men couldn't, not when he was actually there to inspire trust and respect -- and he did arouse those emotions. Added together, these were some of the reasons why he hadn't hitherto been recognized. "Sorry to have bothered you," he said, pushing between them as they converged on him. "I'm in a hurry." "Sure, sure," said Carl, apologetically, moving aside. "But he's money!" the man with the flashlight cried in an anguished voice. "So he is!" said Carl. The vision of money seemed to carry a lot of Weight with him. He seemed reluctant to act, but he reached out and swung Merrol around. "We'll take you to Interplanet and then you can go to the hospital. Don't worry, we aren't going to do nothing. It don't pay us to hurt you." Their original intentions were probably sincere, but now that they thought they'd found money to let it go. But Merrol was not going to accompany them to Interplanet. He jerked away. "We'll split the reward," said Carl. "Too bad we got to carry him in." Merrol tried to exude .him, but Carl caught his arm in a bonecracking hold. That is, it ought to have splintered bone. That it didn't was not due to lack of skill, but to the proportions of the arm to which it was applied. The advantage of leverage went to Merrol and he used it. He broke loose and swung the long arm with the large fist and Carl went down. The man with the light dropped it, climbed on Merrol's back and was pounding away at a nerve. Had he found the nerve, Merrol might have crumpled to the street. He didn't find it, because it wasn't there. The nerve had been surgically rerouted. Merrol peeled him off and tossed him on top of Carl. He tossed him harder than he meant to and neither man moved. He climbed into the hoppicopter and rolled it through the dark streets. They had caused him to lose time and for this they would forfeit the use of their 'copter. They could pick it up in the morning, if they felt like claiming it. He got out and hurried into the hospital. He met others in the corridors -- it was a busy place in spite of the lateness -- but the first person he recognized was Erica. "Dan!" she said. She didn't use anything scientific, but the hold on him was harder to break than judo. Perhaps because he didn't want to. Later, he became aware of someone tapping his shoulder. He turned around. "These things can be consummated in the privacy of one's own home," murmured Doctor Crander. "But when a life is at stake, passion should be put aside." The purely physical elation began to fade. He put Erica down, but uncertainly holding onto her. It was an ambivalent gesture. "Is this what you call an emergency?" he asked sarcastically. He had broken a number of minor laws and nearly his own neck in getting here. He had a right to be angry, though he was not sure how he felt. The doctor gave him a scandalized look. "Do you think we're unethical? There is such a woman as we described, one of our staff. We do have other donors, but we think you can do more for her. In a fit of despondency, this woman wandered into the extraterrestrial room without the customary protection, hoping to catch something -- and she did." Crander frowned. "The only way we altered facts was to use your wife's photo. It was her idea. Furthermore, it is true that a pretty girl gets a better response -- and, of course, Erica wanted you back." When he learned who the patient was, he was satisfied with his decision. After the blood fraction had been administered to Miss Jerrems, even his untrained eyes could see the improvement. H E watched Erica suspiciously as she pattered about in a state of dishabille that did nothing to enhance her beauty but, perversely, made her more exciting. That she had been uncertain as to his identity the last time meant little and he could forgive it. Man and wife were not thereby distinct species, separate to themselves, unattracted or repelled by all others of the opposite sex. For himself, he had only to remember the stewardess. But it was important to know what her true feelings toward him were. Laughter at the wrong time could be disastrous to a man's ego! "This time, you know there's no mistake," he said, hoping that irony was some protection. "But are you sure you want me as a husband?" She stopped fiddling with her hair. She tilted her head and looked at him, at a body that defied the laws of anatomy and the face that belonged on a clown -- except that a clown could take his face off. "Are you trying to get rid of me?" She was asking questions, not answering them. Erica was examining him carefully and he could tell that she, unlike a male, saw each feature distinctly, saw the nose that had belonged to someone else and looked it, the jaw, originally very fine, but with contours that had since melted out of shape. "I'm not trying to get rid of you," he said. "Maybe you want somebody nicer." He'd have to know before he could stop feeling tormented. "Nicer?" she echoed. "Do you want me to answer that?" S HE came and leaned against him. "A woman ought to have some secrets," she murmured. "But if you have to know, the first time I saw you I laughed, because you are funny. And after that, well, I saw traces of the nicest features of nearly every man I ever had a crush on. That was just the physical side." She rested her head on his shoulder. "I didn't believe you actually were Dan. I didn't pay attention to a thing you said." "But if you didn't believe... "Just what you're thinking," she answered. "I couldn't help it. You're the most exciting challenge a woman can have. Even if she doesn't know why, as I didn't then, it's still there -- half a dozen men, and all of them in one monogamous package." Now that she put it that way, he could see why she hadn't been able to resist. He could see that there were few women who could. He glanced at a framed photograph of the handsome pre-accident Dan Merrol that stood on the bureau. He thought, Poor sucker! bringing your favorite authors of Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Weird adventures as near as your mailbox! Just send your name and address -- you'll get your copy by return mail... and we'll keep you up on new titles as we're doing for thousands of others! Bargain buys galore! Write today! Satisfaction guaranteed. # E. San Fernando St. Dept. G-# If you enclose #c to cover postage and handling, we'll send along with your free catalog -- by one of the famous authors of today. San Jose #, Calif. A IN What a problem for a robot... having all of the answers, but not knowing when to give them! "T-A-T spells Cat," said  Em. "But what is a cat?" said Paul. "Why, here's a cat. Look at his big striped tail." But Paul only pushed the book away petulantly. "I want a cat. A real cat I can pull the tail of." "Cats aren't made for you to pull their tails," said Em. "Now, C-A-T spells -- " kicking his little heels on the floor. Em hesitated, then returned to her task. "Very well. The cat sat on the mat. M-A-T, Mat. And here's a mat." She held it up. "A real mat." Paul sniffed contemptuously and, with a child's unanswerable logic, said, "How can you say what a cat's made for and what a cat's not made for, if we haven't got a cat?" If Em had been human, she would have sighed. As it was, she wondered whether the child's question was good or bad. It was good because it showed power of reasoning; bad because it might get in the way of his studies. Helen now was different. She just listened and repeated the words, but Em was never sure whether she really understood. "Why can't I have a real cal Em?" said Paul. "In the book, the boy's got a cat. Why can't I have a cat, a real alive cat, not one in a book? An alive cat, same as we're alive." I N the web of Em's mind floated several thoughts. One was that she wasn't really alive -- not really. And that brought the feeling of something a human would have called pain. It wasn't pain, though, but something worse, because a robot couldn't feel pain. Another was that it was bad enough as it was, having to teach them from books showing children in circumstances that they themselves knew nothing of ; having to avoid their questions, putting them off and off -- "In the story Jay was reading me the other bedtime, they buyed a cat in a shop. Why can't we buy a cat in a shop!" He screwed up his face and added in a plaintive little voice, "And how do you buy?" Really, thought Em, she would have to have a word with Jay and suggest that he be more careful about what he read to them. He was too good-natured, too easy-going. "How do you buy?" Paul said again, tugging at her metal kneejoint. "Well, it's giving something for something else. Like..." she floundered. It did involve giving something for something else. She'd heard the grownups mention it -- in the days when there had been grownups. They had joked about it the way humans did joke, because here buying and -- what was it? -- selling had no meaning. "It isn't important," she said. "What's important?" "That you learn your lessons." "No, I mean what does important mean?" "If you learn your lessons, you'll learn what important means." As she said it she realized it couldn't be very convincing, especially to a six-year-old. So she added hastily, "You'll learn what all the long words mean, and then you'll be able to read all the books there are. All the big books with long words in them." To her surprise, the mention of big books did not brighten his eyes as it always had before. "They're all lies!" he burst out. "I don't want to learn anything. They're all lies about things that don't happen. There ain't such things as cats and trees and -- and..." He broke into bitter sobbing. "Not ain't -- aren't," said Em, cursing herself the next moment. As if that really mattered when there were only the four of them. She reached out a hand to comfort him. But he shrugged it away.  "Come on," she said, trying to modulate her voice like a human, trying to be soft and gentle and comforting and knowing that she couldn't manage it. "We do have trees, anyway." He looked up, his face flushed and indignant. "They're not trees," he retorted vehemently. "They're only a lot of old weeds. You can climb up real trees." "I thought you said those were lies in the books about trees," she said. This time she did manage to get a whisper into her voice so that he would understand that she was only kidding him -- she hoped. But he only burst into a renewed fit of sobbing. sisted. "Leastways, there have been trees. And there will be again." She didn't like to think what the odds were against that, so she didn't. "I've seem them with my own eyes. You believe Em, don't you?" She put out her hand again, and this time he did not reject it. He threw himself into her hard, cold, metallic lap. "Oh, Em," he sobbed. "Oh, Em!" But his tears now were not the tears of anger and separation, but of union in a common loss, so that Em, too, might have wept had she been human. Instead she ran her clumsy, inadequate fingers through his damp blond hair, and said, "There, there" but this time it was far too loud and mechanical, so she stopped talking and cradled him in her arms, rocking him till his weeping subsided. She was still rocking him when Jay came back from the gardens with Helen. Bursting through the doorway, Helen yelled excitedly, "Look what I've got. A flower! A real flower!" "Ss-sh," said Em in a whisper like a steam valve going off. "Oh," said Helen, "can't I wake him to show him my flower?" She held the sickly yellowish bloom in front of her face. "No," said Em, "he's tired. I shouldn't have given him an extra lesson." She turned to Jay. "What is this flower?" "It just grew, Em," said Jay. "I found it in the beds along with the plants." "Jay, is that the truth?" It wasn't conscience that made Jay shake his head, but knowing that Em knew the truth. "I -- I planted a couple of seeds. One of the seed bags in the stores was split open and I found the seeds on the floor. It won't do any harm, Em." "I thought we agreed that nothing like that must be touched. We don't know what might happen." "Don't worry about it, Em. I read all about it in a book before I planted them. I thought the children ought to have something. They get so little -- " "Don't you think it's time to put the children to bed?" said Em wamingly. She noticed that Helen had hidden the pitiful flower behind her back. "Sure, sure," said Jay. "But about these seeds, Em. I thought perhaps we could..." He faltered. Neither robot had anything like facial muscles with which to express a meaning without words, but the way Em was looking at him now -- head lowered, shining eyes leveled at him from beneath her rounded brow -- was warning enough. "All right, Em. Let me have the boy. Come along, Helen. Bedtime." But Helen did not turn. She looked up at Em. "I may keep the flower, Em, mayn't I?" "Of course, Helen," said Em after only a moment's hesitation. If any harm had been done, it was done by now. "I'll put some water in a glass and you can have it near your bed. How's that?" "Oh, thank you, Em, thank you!" She rushed over and clasped Em about the legs. Em lifted her gently up, but held her at arm's length. Otherwise, she knew, the child would kiss her, for she was more demonstrative than the boy. And the thought that she was all in the nature of a mother the child had to kiss -- only cold unyielding metal -- made Em feel inadequate. And whether she was supposed to be able to feel that or not, she did -- and too often. As she set Helen down, Em noticed the disappointed expression that always came when she had to frustrate her childlike impulses. But the look she gave Em before she turned to follow Jay was somehow different from any Em had noticed before. E M stood there looking after her for quite a long time. In fact, she was still looking after her, standing in the same awkward, unhuman stance, when Jay returned. As he sat down, she sat down in the chair facing him. Sitting was another habit they'd long ago acquired from humans and not relinquished when the humans had died. Jay stirred. "Helen didn't want to hear a story tonight," he said. "Oh?" she said. There was a long pause. "Em," he said at last. "You're not really mad at me, are you? About the flowers, I mean." "I think you're a fool, that's all," she said. "We can't afford to take risks like that. Germs, spores -- we just don't know what might come from something new." "But we inoculated them against everything, didn't we? Don't you remember, Em? Didn't I hold them when you put the needle in?" "Oh, stop it," she said crossly. Of course she remembered. How could she forget? Those first years when there had been so many things to remember from the last hurried instructions. How to change and bathe babies with hands that had never been made for it. How to nurse them through the childhood ailments that came in spite of all the inoculations. How to teach things that had never been taught to oneself, because they'd either been unnecessary or built in. Nervous breakdown couldn't happen to a robot, because a robot's system wasn't like a human's. But bringing up a human baby was an almost hopeless task for a robot, Em thought. One mental image had become a recurring and fearful one -- the fantastic image of herself exploding under the strain, of cogs and springs and synthetic brain-cells flying in all directions. came back now to frighten and confound her. It was different with Jay. She looked at him as he sat there, silent after the sharpness of her admonition. Her mind went back to the first days, the very first days before this great burden of responsibility had been laid upon them. How carefree it had been then! The way, for instance, the humans had come to treat her and Jay like male and female. It was only coincidence that Jay's prefix made a man's name and hers a woman's. Being an earlier model, which accounted for the alphabetical precedence, he was clumsier, bulkier, squarer, while she was neater, smaller, more agile and more smoothly shaped. More delicate of voice, too. But besides, she had a quicker intuition than his, a more gentle manner and certainly a greater tendency to worry. It had been he who had joined in the jokes of the men, trying to understand them, dancing clumsy dances to amuse everyone when spirits were low. Meanwhile, she had learned to cook, although it was no more part of her job than dancing was his. I N human company they had gradually assumed the positions of man and wife -- he boasting sometimes of being older and more experienced, she slyly pointing out that that didn't make him necessarily wiser. He, since the last human grownups had all gone, thinking more of making the children happy -- she of keeping them safe. And, like a wife who knows she is more intelligent than her husband, she tried to use it by not demonstrating it too often. But now she felt she had to speak. "If anything ever happens to them we'll be alone. I don't think you properly realize just how delicate human beings are." "Of course I do, Em." "And not only in their bodies," she went on, as if she hadn't heard him. "You'll have to be more careful what you read to them." "Now what have I done?" "Don't read them any stories about children having things they can't have. Stick to fairy stories." "But there aren't many fairy stories. They know them all by heart by now. Anyway, humans wouldn't have had these books for the children if they were bad for them, would they?" "Oh, oh, oh! Sometimes I wonder what goes on inside that big square head of yours. Don't you see that it wouldn't matter if they had their own mothers and fathers to tell them?" "Of course I see. I just didn't think that -- " "Well, think, then," she said sharply. He lowered his gaze. "I do think," he said after a pause. Then he looked up and said, "I think, for instance, that before long we'll just have to tell them. The truth, I mean." "Why do you say that now?" she said, suddenly fearful. "Oh, just things they say sometimes. The way they ask about the big door, the way their eyes stray toward it. Little things like that." "I know," Em said at length, "but I'm frightened. Frightened about how they'll take it, about what knowing will do to them." They were silent for long minutes. Then Jay said, "Can't we invent a fairy story? One big fairy story about everything, so that we never have to tell them the truth."  Em laid her metal hand on his. "Dear Jay. Can you invent even a little fairy story?" He shook his head dumbly. "And neither can I," said Em. "Even if we could, it wouldn't last long. It would only be one long evasion, instead of the little evasions we make now. And anyhow, in two or three years they'll have the strength to open the big doors themselves. And we won't be able to stop them. They've got to learn by then. They should understand enough of the little truths so that the big truth won't be too great a shock to them." "Well, for my part," said Jay, "I don't see how learning that C-A-T spells Cat or that two and two bolts make four would prepare them." "Of course you wouldn't," she said and her tone was sharp again. Because she knew that, in his simple, direct way, he had come closer to the truth than she cared to admit. "It's a question of developing their minds. Disciplining them. Preparing them." "It was only a thought," said Jay hastily. "You know best, Em. You always do." B UT it became evident to Em before very long that one couldn't teach the small truths if one kept dodging the big one all the time. For the children's growing puzzlement blocked their will to learn. They were still struggling through the first-year lessons of a five-year-old. Em studied the teaching manuals through the long hours while the children were asleep, trying to perfect herself as a teacher, trying to find out where she had gone wrong. Their minds were keen enough. Their questions didn't abate. They became more subtle, more suddenly sprung in the attempt to get past the tightening mesh of their guardians' evasions. And it became increasingly clear to Em that each evasion was a step backward. She tried answering their questions in meaningless polysyllables and, when they pressed for explanations, telling them that there  was no easier way of putting it, that only by learning would they be able to understand. That device she gave up for they soon came to see through it. She could tell by the look that came into their faces -- the by now familiar look of hurt mistrust. The crux came when Paul asked a question she just couldn't avoid answering. It was a question that every child asks his mother sooner or later, but Em didn't know that. Her awkwardness when he suddenly asked her in the middle of a tediously slow arithmetic lesson, "Em, where did I come from?" was not of the same kind that an ill-prepared mother might feel. But it was awkward, none the less. Her first impulse was to hedge, telling him not to ask general questions during class. But one look at his anxious little face stopped her. She was also aware of Helen's gaze upon her, a halfsmile on her lips, but the rest of her face set, obdurate -- and yes, accusing. "Why," she said, "well... " Jay was there and she looked at him for help, even knowing that he could not give it. The helpless gesture he made with his hands was unnecessary. "Helen says," said Paul, "that a big machine made us. She says that sometimes she can hear it throbbing. She says that when it's throbbing it's making babies." Oh, no, thought Em, not this! This wasn't right at all. They couldn't be allowed to think like that. Machines were not the masters. Men made machines. A machine could never make men. But how else could they be expected to think? Wasn't it natural when they knew no other humans, when two machines controlled their lives? "Do you believe that, Helen?" she asked. But Helen only dropped her eyes. "And you, Paul, do you believe that?" "I don't know what to believe." "Have you ever heard machines, Paul?" Helen broke in. "I don't hear them, I feel them. I feel them throb, throb, throbbing." She stopped abruptly, dropping her gaze again. "But you both know that they're just the machines that give us our air and light and everything. They're buried down and down. They just go on working away like all good machines." "Then, if machines didn't make us," said Paul, "where did we come from? We must have come from somewhere. Somewhere where there's trees and cats and -- and other boys and girls." His shrill little voice mounted. "Why do you keep us locked away from them?" "What?" said Em, startled. How could she begin to tell them the truth, if that was what they thought? "Why can't we ever join them and play in the trees with them? Why do you keep the big door locked all the time?" His eyes filled with tears, but he did not cry aloud, It was that fact, that he did not cry, that decided Em more than anything else. "I'll tell you," she said. She took one look at Jay. He nodded once, slowly. Even Jay saw there was no avoiding it this time. riHE children's eyes widened. They looked at each other and back to Em. "Before I begin," said Em, "you must promise to be brave. You will hear things you did not expect. You were each made by a mother and a father. Jay and I are only here to see that you grow up well and strong and clever. Your father and mother, Paul, and yours, Helen, are dead. Once there were twenty people here and they are all dead now." "We know what that means," said Helen. "Not alive -- like the mat and the chair. But where are they? Why aren't they here, even if they are dead?" Em realized with something like relief that they had no real conception of death. Perhaps it wouldn't be so difficult, after all. That could be explained later, when it had been revealed to them why it was so important to be alive. Or would they think it important after she told them what she had to tell them? "Because the dead have no place with the living. That is, except in their thoughts. Jay and I often think of your parents and the others with them. Don't we, Jay?" "Eh? Oh, yes, yes." "Because they made us, too," went on Em. "Well, not your actual mothers and fathers, but other clever people like them. We're grateful and happy that they made us. That's why we're happy to look after you. And that's why you must try to be as clever as they were." The children looked puzzled. "You mean," piped Paul, "so that we can make people like you?" "I didn't mean that," said Em. "You will have to make others like yourselves." "But we couldn't do that," said Helen, aghast. "We're not clever enough." "I don't think," said Em, "that you'll need to be clever to do that when the time comes. There are other reasons for you to be clever." She rose, crossing to the big door. "Come with me," she said. for a moment, not believing their eyes. Then they rushed after her shouting excitedly. "Em's going to take us outside." "Can we climb the trees, Em?" "Are there shops there?" She turned, one metal hand on the bolt, looking down at them as they skipped about her legs. "There aren't any trees out there. Nor shops." They looked up at her in shocked surprise, suddenly motionless. "Then -- it is all lies in the books?" said Paul slowly. "No, it's not lies. It's just that we haven't got them. They're in the past." "You mean like the fairy stories? Once upon a time? All once upon a time?" And Helen said, "There's just nothing?" Em faced Jay as she said slowly, "I told you that you would hear things you did not expect. Are you really sure you want to go on?" She looked from one to the other. She had expected them to be frightened. But she'd underestimated the effect on them of living all their lives in one confined space, their wonder at being able to step out of it at last. "Yes. Please, Em," said Helen. "Yes, Em," said Paul. "Please." As she slid the bolt back she had the same feeling as when the last humans had died. The feeling of inadequacy. The disquieting knowledge that when one was dealing with inanimate objects two and two made four and nothing else, but when one was dealing with humans, even little humans -- especially little humans -- the answer might be something entirely different. She slid the door open. The dimly lit passages confronted them. "Oh!" they cried, sounding disappointed. "Come along," she said quickly. She took their hands. Then she saw that Jay had not come to the door with them. He hung back, awkwardly. "Aren't you coming, Jay?" "Oh, sure, sure," he said and lumbered after them. "No pranks, now," said Em to the children. "Keep hold of my hands." As they walked down the corridor Helen said, "I feel it." "I feel it, too, now," said Paul. The slight vibration of the engines increased. They passed down a short flight of steps. "Now I hear it," said Helen. "Now you see it," said Em as they turned a bend. A ND there were the engines, the great engines, purring and purring, the lights winking over the panels. "Oooh!" breathed the boy. "Look at that great wheel spinning." "That's the one that supplies us with air," said Em. Paul took a deep breath. "It smells funny here." "That's ozone," Em said. "What's ozone?" "I'm not siue," said Em. "It's some special kind of air. It's all explained in the books. All about how to stop the machines and how to start them and how to make them go faster. You should see them when they're really going. They're only ticking over now. But, my, when they really cut loose it's wonderful." "Why, what do they do then, Em?" It was going right, she thought. They would understand, because now they would want to. "Come along," she said, "and I'll show you." She led them along the walk to the control room. But there she felt doubt return. Her hand hesitated on the switch. And then, because she knew there was no turning back now, she pressed it. The children gasped and fell back a step, stumbling, fearing they would fall. Em laid her hands upon their shoulders. "There, it's all right," she said. The screen seemed to curve above and beneath and all around them. It was as if they were suspended in the breathing heart of the Universe. But because the children had no notion of the word Universe, this being the first time they had even seen the stars, to them it was like floating in a great dream, a great and wonderful dream. It was Paul who, after many moments, broke the silence. And then he only whispered the one word, "Stars!" and he was not speaking to Helen or Em or Jay -- or even to himself. He was addressing them, the stars. "They're diamonds," said Helen. "Like in the story. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Reach out and get one for me, Em, so I can hold it in my hand." "I can't," said Em. "How far away do you think they are?" realizing even as she asked it that the question could have no meaning for them. But Helen was too excited to pursue that one. "Look,"' she said. "Look at that great big cloud." In the infinitely clear depths of infinite space it was like a cloud. It couldn't have been anything but a cloud to a child who had never seen the skies of Earth. But the teacher in Em could not help saying, "That's a nebula." But Helen did not hear her. She danced up and down, clapping her hands. "That's my cloud. I'm going to find a wonderful name for it. What about you, Paul? Do you want that big blue star and red star together?" But Paul had turned away puzzledly from the screen. "What is it, Paul?" Em asked. "I'm just wondering," he said. "Wondering what?" "Why you had to keep this away from us all this time." "Because..." Em faltered. "Because I didn't know whether you were ready for it." "Ready?" he said, and though his voice asked a question, his tone held a strange confidence. "But why not?" Helen, too, turned away from the screen to look puzzled. H eavens, thought Em, had all those precautions been unnecessary, then? She had only been carrying out instructions as best she could. And her own reasoning had told her they were wise ones. But had they been? Perhaps she and the parents alike had overestimated the dangers. Perhaps because they had known what it was like to have a wide world under one's feet, they had not understood that it would not be the same for children born in space. But no, she told herself. They don't know all of it yet. And then she told them. How this was the first starship and probably the last for a long, long time, because starships couldn't be made every day of the week to launch into space. Nor could men and women be found so easily to volunteer for the years of journeying that it entailed -- the years of journeying and possibly never arriving, possibly dying before reaching their goal, but having children before they died, so that the children would carry on. And how it had gone wrong. How they had died too soon. How the disease had struck the first generation before they were far out in interstellar space -- too far out to return. How unknown radiations had produced an unknown germ that had stricken all the adults, attacking their nervous systems. How this had broken out not long before the two children had been born. And how Em helped as best she could at the births because there had been so few of the crew left by then, and those that were still alive had been stricken by the uncontrollable palsy that was the herald of death. And then the mothers had died, and the other remnants of the crew. And they died, not quite without hope now. Not quite. Em suddenly realized, in the middle of telling it, that talk of stars and starships could have little meaning for the children. So she digressed to explain something of what she knew of the Universe, of its vast depths and distances, of how great a venture it was to be crossing them. She explained that this was why she and Jay had to watch over them so carefully, why she and Jay had to teach them to read and understand the books, so that they would be able to carry on the great venture. Because one day the ship would have to be piloted down to a new world. She and Jay couldn't do that unaided. Jay told them the original purpose for which they had been brought along -- to navigate the ship under the stresses of landing -- and the stresses of that first takeoff from Earth. That, and to explore any worlds that might be difficult for humans to explore. But they couldn't do it without the help of humans to plan and direct. J AY was silent. Em also waited silently. That was too much to ask of the children all at once. So they just waited. Paul spoke first and his words seemed strangely irrelevant. He turned to Em. "Then you don't die -- you and Jay?" "Why, no," she answered. "We go on looking after you and then after the children you will have. We just go on and on, like all good machines." Now, she could admit the difference between them. It was better this way. "You're not machines," said Helen stoutly. "You're too wise to be machines." "Well, we're wise machines, then," Em said, and then, thinking they were getting off the subject, "so, you see, that's why there aren't any trees or cats or other children. They're too far away, like the stars." "Which one of those stars is Earth?" said Paul. The word sounded odd on his lips. "You can't see Earth from here," said Em. "It's much too far away. Besides, it isn't a star. It's a planet going around a star." "Which star?" said Paul, and Em realized that she didn't know. "I'll look it up in the charts," she said hastily, hoping she could read them correctly, "and then I'll point it out to you. How's that?" "Could you see all this," said Helen, "back on Earth?" "Oh, no, never like this. Half the time you couldn't see it at all because the Sun was too bright." Paul excitedly said, "But then it's only just a long way away. Back on Earth there's trees and cats and all those things. And -- children just like us seeing them every day. Why, right now..." "But there were other things," Em said quickly. "Bad things as well. Things we're free of here, thank goodness." "What bad things?" said Helen. "Like being dizzy because of going around and around all the time?" "No," said Em. "Nobody ever got dizzy from that. We're traveling at a great speed now, but we don't get dizzy, do we? No, but believe Em, there were bad things -- lots of them." A sudden thought struck her. "Otherwise your parents and the others wouldn't have wanted to leave Earth, would they?" "No," admitted Paul, but he didn't seem very convinced. I T was Jay -- Jay who had been silent most of the time for fear of upsetting things -- who said impulsively, "Don't you see? They just got tired of going around and around the same little star all the time. They didn't get giddy, they just got tired of it, sick and tired. And they didn't want that for their children. They wanted to give them a better life, a real start in life -- " He stopped as abruptly as he had begun. He turned away as if fearing he had said the wrong thing. Em touched his square shoulder. One look at the children's faces told her that he had said the right thing, the supremely right thing. Jay turned back and Em nodded, her hand still resting gratefully on his shoulder. Paul said, "And when we get to a new world, will there be trees and cats?" "There might be trees," said Em. "There might be cats." She had heard the humans discussing these things. "There might be -- anything." She felt a sudden pang of guilt. Was it right not to tell them the rest? She started to, then checked herself. No, the crisis had been met and surmounted. That was the important thing now. "Anything?" said Paul. "Giants, even?" said Helen, her eyes round with wonder. "Wizards? Fairy castles?" "Yes," said Em, "there might be all of those and more. Nothing guaranteed, mind you, but anything is possible. Anything at all." And so she did not add that it wouldn't be for another hundred and twenty years. That could be told later. JvlErlN vb a r lv I I V Iw fantasy books and back dated magazines (Astounding, Galaxy, complete contents of the original editions of "Book of the Damned." "Wild Talents," "New Lands," and "Lo." There are Just naturally no other books like these In the world. They contain thousands of actual, documented occurrences that fall way outside the boundaries of our arbitrarily tidy human sciences and fields of knowledge, completely unexplainable happenings. For just a few examples, there are dozens of documented instances of teleportation, of astronomical and geological enigmas and "impossibilities." and of space ships seen repeatedly during the past three centuries (not Just since #). Incidentally, that's why the Army Issued these books to all Project Saucer investigators. If you read these four books, your orderly, safe and sane little world will never again look the same to you. Your money back In full and with a smile (of pity). If you don't find that's true, and can bear to part with these fascinating books and return them within a month! With non-flctlon books coming out nowadays at # to # per book, you'd expect these four Fort books to cost a total of anywhere from # to #. They don't. They come to only # per book, # for the entire, huge, four-book volume, postpaid, and with my money-back guarantee If you're not satisfied, In fact, stupefied! And If you order right now (which will help me meet the cost of this ad!). I'll Include a copy of a superb Fortean novel by a top #F author at no extra cost, with your "Books of Charles Fort," thus lowering your cost per book to only #. Good enough? Slid check , cash, or Money-Order to; for your information I F science fiction, as one definition has it, is literature based on known scientific facts and the extrapolation of accepted scientific theories, one of the great works of world literature has to be classified as science fiction -- or at least a small portion of one of its three parts. I am speaking of Dante's Divina Commedia. In Part II, Purgatorio, there are a few lines that have intrigued scientists for a long time. As important a personage as Alexander von Humboldt devoted a section of one of his books ( Examen critique de l'histoire de geographic, vol. IV, Paris, #) to a searching appraisal of these lines. Since quite a number of readers know Italian (as well as the fact there is an Italian edition of this magazine), I'll give the original wording first and follow it with the English translation : Jo nu volsi a man destra, e post mente All' altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle Non viste mal fuor ch'alla prima gente, Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle, # settentrional vedovo sito Poi che privato se' di mirar quelle I At right, in the direction of the southern pole I saw the lights of a quadruple star Which the first couple only was to see. The heavens gloried in its radiation, O you poor widowed barren North, You never see the marvel of this constellation!  know the background might dismiss these lines with the remark "Well, why not?" or words to that effect. The point here is that the dates involved do not seem to match in a spectacular manner. Dante began the Divina Cornmedia in #; the above lines were written about ten years later. They unmistakably refer to the constellation now called the Southern Cross. But the Southern Cross was "discovered" by the Venetian explorer Alvise da Cadamosto, sailing for Prince Henry of Portugal, in #! To make the case even more mysterious, Dante stated that "the first couple," meaning Adam and Eve, could see it. They were supposed to have lived in the Euphrates Valley, from which the Southern Cross is not visible, not now and not in Dante's time. But theological reasoning put the creation of the world and the time of Adam and Eve at about # years ago -- and, at that time, the Southern Cross could be seen from the Euphrates Valley in present-day Iraq and even from points in Central Europe! How could Dante know these things? For a man of his time, he traveled a great deal, but mostly to the north of his native Florence. Even if he had gone as far south as is possible in Italy, he could not have seen it, for the toe of the Italian boot just touches the #th parallel of northern latitude and, in order to see the Southern Cross at all, one has to be south of the #th parallel of northern latitude. To see it clearly in the sky some distance above the horizon, one has to be south of the #th parallel of northern latitude. This means that Dante should have had to travel at least to Upper Egypt or to the southern portions of the Red Sea and the Arab peninsula. For good visibility, he should have had to go to Ethiopia or to Ceylon. (For corresponding areas in the Western Hemisphere, one needs a trip to Mexico or Cuba to see the constellation at all, and to Nicaragua or the Canal Zone for a good view.) T HE fact that Dante obviously had not seen the Southern Cross himself accounts for his exaggeration, because the Southern Cross is a comparatively small constellation that does not measure up at all against the Big Dipper or Orion. Nor is it a particularly good cross -- the two arms do not form a right angle and the effect is marred by the presence of a fifth star. Interestingly enough, it took some time until it was even referred to as a cross. Its "discoverer" Cadamosto did not call it a cross and Amerigo Vespucci referred to it as "rhombus." Even the intensely religious Dante himself merely spoke, as we have seen, of the quattro stelle, the "four stars." What makes the whole case so intriguing is that Dante's lines are literally the earliest mention of the constellation. At the time of Homer (about # B.C.), the Southern Cross was still visible from the Mediterranean, but low on the horizon. It cannot have been conspicuous because the Odyssey -- which, in one section now referred to as "Kalypso's sailing instructions," goes into constellations for navigational purposes with great detail -- does not mention it at all. Nor did Ptolemy. At the time he lived in Alexandria, the star alpha of the Southern Cross still climbed to a little more than six degrees of arc above the horizon of his city. But' he seems to have added it to the constellation of Centaurus. The only place where it was probably mentioned as a separate constellation is in the Bible, in the Book of Job (#:#) where Job says that the Lord "maketh the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades and the Chambers of the South." At the time this book originated (#th century B.C.), the Cross was still visible from southern Palestine, but the term "chambers of the south" is obviously no helpful description to somebody who did not know it in the first place. B UT while Dante could not have derived his information from older books, which were silent on this point, there were other sources for such knowledge. It is known that soon after the year #, an Arab by the name of Caissar ben Abucassan had a globe of the sky made in Egypt, on which the Southern Cross was entered. A later globe -- made in # -- also of Arab origin, is still in existence. It is known furthermore that Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen acquired an Arab tent in # that was a revolving map of the sky (actually the first known planetarium), although no details exist. In addition to these globes and star maps, there were enough people in Dante's time, mostly Arabs but also Europeans, who had traveled to places where the Southern Cross is clearly visible. One thing indicating that Dante relied on an eyewitness story is that, immediately following the lines quoted, he says he glanced back to the north "where the Wain had disappeared." As everybody knows from personal experience, the "Wain" (Big Dipper) is the most conspicuous constellation of the northern sky. Europeans always felt uneasy when they came to areas where their main "sky mark" was no longer visible. The soldiers of Alexander the Great are the earliest men known to have complained about this. Even Marco Polo, who does not seem to have had any interest in the sky and never mentioned it, succumbed at one point by saying that Polaris cannot be seen from Sumatra. Though Dante could (and obviously did) find out about the existence and appearance of the Southern Cross, it is hard to see where he could have learned about the visibility of that constellation in higher northern latitudes at an earlier period. True, the precession of the equinoxes responsible for this phenomenon had been discovered long before him by Hipparchos of Nicaea, but later astronomers had paid little attention to it. In fact, only the Arabs seem to have believed in what is now called "trepidation of the equinoxes," a wrong theory that assumed the precession would accumulate and then swing back. Dante, of course, did not have to decide which theory was right. He only had to learn somewhere that astronomers knew of a steady displacement of the stars in the sky. He might then simply have been convinced that one of the attributes of Eden had been to see all the stars in the sky. But whether he reasoned on the foundations of a then current theory or simply guessed, it so happened that he was right! rR. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, who now lives near the White Sands Proving Grounds, and Dr. Lincoln La Paz, director of the Institute of Meteoritics at Albuquerque, New Mexico, are engaged in a project that more than fifty years ago was half-heartedly started in Europe, but then petered out for lack of success and financial support. This time, the support comes from the U. S. Ordnance Department. As for the probable chances of success, with the much better instrumentation now available, they might have had some between the writing and the publication of this column. The project: To find out whether Earth has more than one moon. As mentioned in the opening sentence, the problem is not exactly new. My own teacher, in fact, was fond of saying that his teacher used to say that his teacher considered it highly probable that Earth might have several tiny moons. Possibly, he added, Earth might even have a very faint ring. And the man who made this statement, the astronomer M. Wilhelm Meyer, asserted in turn that he was more or less quoting casual opinions of his teacher, Prof. E. F. W. Klinkerfues. Since Klinkerfues died in #, this succession of opinions has carried us back quite far, but not to the beginning of the idea, which originated in France nearly a century ago. The original paper by one F. Petit of Boulogne may be classified as "forgotten," but the idea was not because Jules Verne read it (or read about it) one day and utilized it in his second novel about the cannon-shot to the Moon. This book, entitled Autour de la Lune, appeared in #, five years later than the first book, De la Terre a la Lune. If you have read it, you might remember that the three inhabitants of the Moon projectile -- Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan -- have managed to recover from the shock of the firing. Since they, in Jules Verne's opinion, cannot tell whether they are moving or not -- actually they could not possibly miss the sensation of being in free-fall -- they look out of the window to see whether they are in space. When Barbicane was about to leave the window his attention was attracted It was an enormous disk the colossal dimensions of which could not be estimated. Its face which was turned in the direction of the Earth was very bright. One might have thought it a small moon reflecting the light of the large one. It approached with a high velocity and seemed to travel in an orbit around the Earth which would intersect that of the projectile... The object passed several hundred yards from the projectile and disappeared. In response to a surprised remark made by Michel Ardan, Mr. Barbicane launched into one of his usual short lectures: "It is a simple meteorite, but an enormous one, retained as a satellite by the attraction of the Earth... But this second moon is so small and its velocity so great that the inhabitants of Earth cannot see it. It was by noticing disturbances that a French astronomer, Monsieur Petit, could determine the existence of this second moon and calculate its orbit. According to him a complete revolution around the Earth takes three hours and twenty minutes." "Do all astronomers admit the existence of this satellite?" asked Nicholl. "No," replied Barbicane, "but if, like us, they had met it they could no longer doubt it... But this gives us a means to determine our position in space; its distance is known and we were, therefore, # miles above the surface of our globe when we met it." It is this encounter, Jules Verne explained, that made the projectile deviate from its trajectory and miss the Moon, to the great good fortune of the travelers. Since #, the story, in various languages, has been read by perone hundred professional astronomers must have been among until # before somebody noticed that Jules Verne's figures for distance and period of revolution do not jibe. It was Dr. Robert S. Richardson of Mt. Wilson Observatory who did, but what he really wanted to check was whether the gravitational field of the second moon would be strong enough to deflect the projectile from its path. (It wouldn't.) In looking for clues to the size of the second moon, he noticed the discrepancy. (See: Bull. Pacific Rocket Soc. Vol. #, No. #; Oct., #.) Either the period was three hours and # minutes, when the distance from the surface would have to be # miles, or else the distance was # miles, when the period would have to be four hours and # minutes. This goes for orbits that are circular or very nearly so, as implied by Jules Verne. Of course, if Petit had an elliptical orbit in mind, both figures can be true. The body might have an orbital period of three hours and # minutes and reach the distance of # miles at one point of its orbit. Nothing is actually said about the size of the satellite, but the idea seems to have been that it was at least a mile in diameter. W E can be certain that a second moon of Earth of the type postulated by Petit and popularized by Jules Verne does not exist. If it did, it would take one hour and #I minutes to cross the sky from horizon to horizon, incidentally rising in the west and setting in the east. Not quite half of that time, it would be invisible inside the Earth's shadow. But, while rising, it would be above the horizon for # minutes before it entered the shadow and it would need another # minutes from leaving the shadow until it disappeared below the horizon on the other side. Even if its surface, like that of the Moon, were quite dark (think of lava or dark slate for the proper color value), the satellite would reflect enough sunlight to look like a very bright star and a careful observer could actually see it move. If Earth had a second satellite like that, its existence would have been known since the days of the Babylonians. This would still be true even if it were twenty times as far away as postulated. A onemile satellite would be visible to the naked eye at a distance of # miles. It would be faint, certainly, but one would notice that this faint star does not occupy the same position among the fixed stars that it did an hour ago. Even cutting down its size to a mere five per cent of a mile, the satellite would be likely to be known if it were near enough. A satellite of that size (again assuming that its surface is as dark as lava) would still be visible to the naked eye at a distance of # miles. It would no longer be a conspicuously bright star, but it would give itself away by its fast movement. If this 'l#th-of-a-mile satellite revolved at a distance of # miles, it would have remained undiscovered prior to the invention of the telescope. But it certainly would have been found during the last hundred years, because it would show in any good portable instrument. All of this implies that a second satellite of Earth, to escape discovery until now, would have to be small, less than a hundred feet in diameter. At that size, it would be too small to be seen without a telescope. Even with a telescope, it would be too faint to be conspicuous. One has to bear in mind that an observer usually looks for a specific thing and may therefore pay little attention to other objects. Besides, in telescopic observations, the field of vision is small. Something quite spectacular could be going on just "outside the telescope" and not be noticed as long as it is invisible to the unaided eye. This applies to direct observation. The widespread use of photography in astronomical work imposes another condition for still undetected satellites. They-must not only be small -- they must also be near, so that they move fast. If they do that, they may escape detection by appearing to be something else. A NY telescope of reasonably large size, with or without photographic attachment, is moved by a clockwork mechanism "to follow the stars" -- more precisely, to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. This means, of course, that the mechanism compensates for the apparent movements of objects that rise in the east and set in the west. But a near satellite would seem to go the other way across the sky. It would not only be quite fast by itself; it would appear even faster because the telescope moves in the opposite direction. The inevitable result is that such a satellite, accidentally photographed, would leave a trail from edge to edge of the plate. But so does every bright meteor. While a meteor trail across a plate is of some casual interest, not much lasting attention would be paid to it. In the first place, the picture has been taken for another purpose. In the second place, a photograph of a meteor track, unless taken with a special camera and preferably with two cameras simultaneously, teaches very little. In short, the hypothetical satellite track would be mistaken for a meteor track. Even if somebody was suspicious, there would hardly be a way of proving the suspicion. Just how Drs. La Paz and Tombaugh will try to catch the minor satellite (s) has not been disclosed. But the principle is fairly obvious. Although such a small satellite could have an orbit lying in any position compared with the ecliptic -- the orbit of the Earth around the Sun -- the probability is that the satellite orbit would be near the ecliptic. This narrows the search down to a specific band or zone. Furthermore, as we have seen, such satellites must be fairly near, probably less than # miles at the most. This determines, in approximation, the speed of their movement. Now if a telescopic camera, aiming in the direction of the ecliptic, were clockwork guided to run opposite to the usual direction, the plates would be full of star tracks. They could easily be identified as such because the star tracks would all be of the same length. But if one of these tracks appeared much shorter than the others, it would indicate an object rising in the west. The speed of its apparent movement could easily be calculated from the length of its track, compared with the length of a star track. And once such an object has been "caught," it will not be lost again. Since the unknown moons of Earth are likely to be quite small, Diagram of the relationship between orbital velocity, (refer to right-hand column), orbital period (refer to left-hand column) and distance from the surface of Earth (bottom row). It is unlikely that moonlets of any noticeable size would have remained undiscovered if they circled Earth at distances greater than # miles. (Adapted from a diagram by Arthur C. Clarke) Diagram ot eight of the infinite number of possible moonlet orbits near Earth. In each case, D gives the distance from the surface in miles, P the period in minutes (') or hours ( h ) and V the orbital velocity in miles per second. The length of the piece of orbit shown in the diagram represents the movement in ten minutes. they may not offer any practical advantages. But it will be useful to know that they exist and where they are. In your book, The Conquest of the Moon, I End a table which says that the Moon can be, at times, more than # miles farther away from the Earth than at other times. If this is correct, shouldn't the Moon look larger sometimes? Lawrence M. Marten # N. Baker St. Topeka, Kansas Yes, it should and it does. Here's a comparison of the apparent sizes at the two extreme distances. But since the apparent diameter of the Moon is only ahout ## of a degree of arc, this difference of not quite # per cent in apparent diameter is unlikely to be noticeable to the naked eye. It does show on photographs, however. How high would a. rocket have to go to be out of the Earth's gravity? George F. McManus # W. nth St. Brooklyn, N. Y. This is one of the two questions -- the other is, "What are the Flying Saucers?" -- I always try to bet on with the chairman of a lecture committee prior to a public lecture. My bet is simply that one or both of these questions will be asked. But apparently I sound so confident when making the proposition that no chairman has ever accepted the bet. Well, to come to the point, there is no such thing as a distance at which a gravitational field will suddenly stop. For every star, planet or moon, the rule is the same: If the gravitational field at the surface of the body has a strength of #, the strength will be # at a distance of one radius from the surface. At a distance of two radii, it will be #. At three radii, #. At four radii, #. At five radii, #. At six radii, # and at seven radii # or still a little more than #-## per cent of the surface value. And in the case of Earth, seven radii amount to more than # miles. In other words, a gravitational field does not stop somewhere. It slowly peters out, just as a powerful light, if you move away from it, grows fainter and fainter without suddenly disappearing (except that, on Earth, it may be cut off by the horizon). Therefore, a gravitational field "disappears" only if you are an "infinite" distance away. In practice, however, there comes a point where another gravitational field is equally powerful and, beyond that point, more powerful than that of Earth. For example, at a distance of # miles from the surface of Earth, the field of Earth and that of the Sun are of equal strength. More than # miles from Earth, the gravitational field of the Sun is stronger than that of our planet. One might say, then, that Earth's field forms a "bubble" some # miles in diameter inside the immense gravitational field of the Sun. Corvey lived, laughed, loved, killed and died a thousand times... but which one of all these lifetimes was actually his own? Dont bother guessing; live through Corvey's experiences with him! and no title ever fitted a story more exactly... in the startling novelty of its ideas, in freshness of treatment and the eye-popping ending! Who or what the Trader was and where he came from, nobody knew -- or cared -- until one of his gadgets began to play dirty! I F you're human, you can't keep a thing around the house. You're always losing things and never finding them and you go charging through the place, yelling, cross-examining, blaming. That's the way it is in all families. Just one warning -- don't try to figure out where all those things have gone or who might have taken them. If you have any notion of investigating, forget it. You'll be happier! I'll tell you how it was with me. I'd bought the sheet of stamps on my way home from the office Illustrated by so I could mail out the checks for the monthly bills. But I'd just sat down to write the checks when Marge and Lewis Shaw dropped over. I don't care much for Lewis and he barely tolerates me. But Marge and Helen are good friends, and they got to talking, and the Shaws stayed all evening. Lewis told me about the work he was doing at his research laboratory out at the edge of town. I tried to switch him off to something else, but he kept right on. I suppose he's so interested in his work that he figures everyone else must be. But I don't know a thing about electronics and I can't tell a microgauge from a microscope. It was a fairly dismal evening and the worst of it was that I couldn't say so. Helen would have jumped all over me for being anti-social. So, the next evening after dinner, I went into the den to write the checks and, of course, the stamps were gone. the desk and now the desk was bare except for one of the Bildo-Blocks that young Bill had outgrown several years before, but which still turn up every now and then in the most unlikely places. I looked around the room. Just in case they might have blown off the desk, I got down on my hands and knees and searched under everything. There was no sign of the stamps. I went into the living room, where Helen was curled up in a chair, watching television. "I haven't seen them, Joe," she said. "They must be where you left them." It was exactly the kind of answer I should have expected. "Bill might know," I said. "He's scarcely been in the house all day. When he does show up, you've got to speak to him." "What's the matter now?" "It's this trading business. He traded off that new belt we got him for a pair of spurs." "I can't see anything wrong in that. When I was a kid..." "It's not just the belt," she said. "He's traded everything. And the worst of it is that he always seems to get the best of it." "The kid's smart." "If you take that attitude, Joe..." "It's not my attitude," I said. "It's the attitude of the whole business world. When Bill grows up..." "When he grows up, he'll be in prison. Why, the way he trades, you'd swear he was training to be a con man!" "All right, I'll talk to him." I went back into the den because the atmosphere wasn't exactly as friendly as it might have been and, anyhow, I had to send out those checks, stamps or no stamps. I got the pile of bills and the checkbook and the fountain pen out of the drawer. I reached out and picked up the Bildo-Block to put it to one side, so I'd have a good, clear space to work on. But the moment I picked it up, I knew that this thing was no Bildo-Block. It was the right size and weight and was black and felt like plastic, except that it was slicker than any plastic I had ever felt. It felt as if it had oil on it, only it didn't. I set it down in front of me and pulled the desk lamp closer. But there wasn't much to see. It still looked like one of the BildoBlocks. make out what it was. On the second turn, I saw the faint oblong depression along one side of it -- a very shallow depression, almost like a scratch. I looked at it a little closer and could see that the depression was machined and that within it was a faint red line. I could have sworn the red line flickered just a little. I held it there, studying it, and could detect no further flicker. Either the red had faded or I had been seeing things to start with, for after a few seconds I couldn't be sure there was any line at all. I figured it must have been something Bill had picked up or traded for. The kid is more than half pack-rat, but there's nothing wrong with that, nor with the trading, either, for all that Helen says. It's just the first signs of good business sense. I put the block over to one side of the desk and went on with the checks. The next day, during lunch hour, I bought some more stamps so I could mail them. And off and on, all day, I wondered what could have happened to that sheet of stamps. I didn't think at all about the block that had the oily feel. Possibly I would have forgotten it entirely, except that when I got home, the fountain pen was missing. I went into the den to get the pen and there the pen was, lying on top of the desk where I'd left it the night before. Not that I remembered leaving it there. But when I saw it there, I remembered having forgotten to put it back into the drawer. I picked it up. It wasn't any pen. It felt like a cylinder of cork, but much too heavy to be any kind of cork. Except that it was heavier and smaller, it felt something -- somehow -- like a fly rod. Thinking of how a fly rod felt, I gave my hand a twitch, the way you do to cast a line, and suddenly it seemed to be, in fact, a fly rod. It apparently had been telescoped and now it came untelescoped and lengthened out into what might have been a rod. But the funny thing about it was that it went out only about four feet and then disappeared into thin air. Instinctively, I brought it up and back to free the tip from wherever it might be. I felt the slack take up against a sudden weight and I knew I had something on the other end of it. Just like a fish feels, only it wasn't fighting. Then, as quickly as it happened, it unhappened. I felt the tension snap off and the weight at the other end was gone and the rod had telescoped again and I held in my hand the thing that looked like a fountain pen. desk, being very certain to make no more casting motions, and it wasn't until then that I saw my hand was shaking. I sat down, goggling at the thing that looked like the missing fountain pen and the other thing that looked like a BildoBlock. And it was then, while I was looking at the two of them, that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the little white dot in the center of the desk. It was on the exact spot where the bogus pen had lain and more than likely, I imagined, the exact spot where I'd found the BildoBlock the night before. It was about a quarter of an inch in diameter and it looked like ivory. I put out my thumb and rubbed it vigorously, but the dot would not rub off. I closed my eyes so the dot would have a chance to go away, and then opened them again, real quick, to surprise it if it hadn't. It still was there. I bent over the desk to examine it. I could see it was inlaid in the wood, and an excellent job of inlaying, too. I couldn't find even the faintest line of division between the wood and the dot. It hadn't been there before; I was sure of that. If it had been, I would have noticed it. What's more, Helen would have noticed it, for she's hell on dirt and forever after things with a dusting cloth. And to cinch the fact that it had not been there before, no one I ever heard of sold desks with single inlaid ivory dots. And no one sold a thing that looked like a fountain pen but could become a fly rod, the business end of which disappeared and hooked a thing you couldn't even see -- and which, the next time, might bring in whatever it had caught instead of losing it. Helen called to me from the living room. "Joe." "Yeah. What is it?" "Did you talk to Bill?" "Bill? About what?" "About the trading." "No. I guess I forgot." "Well, you'll have to. He's at it again. He traded Jimmy out of that new bicycle. Gave him a lot of junk. I made him give back the bicycle." "I'll have a talk with him," I promised again. B UT I'm afraid I wasn't paying as close attention to the ethics of the situation as I should have been. You couldn't keep a thing around the house. You were always losing this or that. You knew just where you'd put it and you were sure it was there and then, when you went to look for it, it had disappeared. It was happening everywhere -- things being lost and never turning up. But other things weren't left in their places -- at least not that you heard about. Although maybe there had been times when things had been left that a man might pick up and examine and not know what they were and puzzle over, then toss in a corner somewhere and forget. Maybe, I thought, the junkyards of the world were loaded with outlandish blocks and crazy fishing rods. I got up and went into the living room, where Helen had turned on the television set. She must have seen that something had me upset, because she asked, "What's the matter now?" "I can't find the fountain pen." She laughed at me. "Honestly, Joe, you're the limit. You're always losing things." That night, I lay awake after Helen went to sleep and all I could think about was the dot upon the desk. A dot, perhaps, that said: Put it right here, pardner, and we will make a swap. ' And, thinking of it, I wondered what would happen if someone moved the desk. I lay there for a long time, trying not to worry, trying to tell myself it didn't matter, that I was insane to think what I was thinking. But I couldn't get it out of my mind. So I finally got up and sneaked out of the bedroom and, feeling like a thief in my own house, headed for the den. I closed the door, turned on the desk lamp and took a quick look to see if the dot was still there. It was. I opened the desk drawer and hunted for a pencil and couldn't find one, but I finally found one of Bill's crayons. I got down on my knees and carefully marked the floor around the desk legs, so that, if the desk were moved, I could put it back again. Then, pretending I had no particular purpose for doing it, I laid the crayon precisely on the dot. I N the morning, I sneaked a look into the den and the crayon was still there. I went to work a little easier in my mind, for by then I'd managed to convince myself that jt was all imagination. But that-evening, after dinner, I went back into the den and the crayon was gone. In its place was a triangular contraption with what appeared to be lenses set in each angle, and with a framework of some sort of metal, holding in place what apparently was a suction cup in the center of the triangle. While I was looking at it, Helen came to the door. "Marge and I are going to see a movie," she said. "Why don't you go over and have a beer with Lewis?" "With that stuffed shirt?" "What's the matter with Lewis?" "Nothing, I guess." I didn't feel up to a family row right then.  "What's that you've got?" she asked. "I don't know. Just something I found." "Well, don't you start bringing home all sorts of junk, the way Bill does. One of you is enough to clutter up the house." I sat there, looking at the triangle, and the only thing I could figure out was that it might be a pair of glasses. The suction cup in the center might hold it on the wearer's face and, while that might seem a funny way to wear a pair of glasses, it made sense when you thought about it. But if that were true, it meant that the wearer had three eyes, set in a triangle in his face. I sat around for quite a while after Helen left, doing a lot of thinking. And what I was thinking was that even if I didn't care too much about Lewis, he was the only man I knew who might be able to help me out. So I put the bogus fountain pen and the three-eyed glasses in the drawer and put the counterfeit Bildo-Block in my pocket and went across the street. Lewis had a bunch of blueprints spread out on the kitchen table, and he started to explain them to me. I did the best I could to act as if I understood them. Actually, I didn't know head nor tail of it. Finally, I was able to get a word in edgewise and I pulled the block out of my pocket and put it on the table. "What is that?" I asked. I expected him to say right off it was just a child's block. But he didn't. There must have been something about it to tip him off that it wasn't just a simple block. That comes, of course, of having a technical education. turned it around in his fingers. "What's it made of?" he asked me, sounding excited. I shook my head. "I don't know what it is or what it's made of or anything about it. I just found it." "This is something I've never seen before." Then he spotted the depression in one side of it and I could see I had him hooked. "Let me take it down to the shop. We'll see what we can learn." I knew what he was after, of course. If the block was something new, he wanted a chance to go over it -- but that didn't bother me any. I had a hunch he wouldn't find out too much about it. We had a couple more beers and I went home. I hunted up an old pair of spectacles and put them on the desk right over the dot. I was listening to the news when Helen came in. She said she was glad I'd spent the evening with Lewis, that I should try to get to know him better and that, once I got to know him better, I might like him. She said, since she and Marge were such good friends, it was a shame Lewis and I didn't hit it off. "Maybe we will," I said and let it go at that. The next afternoon, Lewis called me at the office. "Where'd you get that thing?" he asked. "Found it," I said. "Have any idea what it is?" "Nope," I told him cheerfully. "That's why I gave it to you." "It's powered in some way and it's meant to measure something. That depression in the side must be a gauge. Color seems to be used as an indicator. At any rate, the color line in the depression keeps changing all the time. Not much, but enough so you can say there's some change." "Next thing is to find out what it's measuring." "Joe, do you know where you can get another of them?" "No, I don't." "It's this way," he said. "We'd like to get into this one, to see what makes it tick, but we can't find any way to open it. We could break into it, probably, but we're afraid to do that. We might damage it. Or it might explode. If we had another... "Sorry, Lewis. I don't know where to get another." He had to let it go at that. grinning to myself, thinking about Lewis. The guy was fit to be tied. He wouldn't sleep until he found out what the thing was, now that he'd started on it. It probably would keep him out of my hair for a week or so. I went into the den. The glasses still were on the desk. I stood there for a moment, looking at them, wondering what was wrong. Then I saw that the lenses had a pinkish shade. I picked them up, noticing that they had been replaced by the kind in the triangular pair I had found there the night before. Just then, Helen came into the room and I could tell, even before she spoke, that she had been waiting for me. "Joe Adams," she demanded, "what have you been up to?" "Not a thing," I told her. "Marge says you got Lewis all upset." "It doesn't take a lot to upset him." "There's something going on," she insisted, "and I want to know what it is." I knew I was licked. "I've been trading." "Trading! After all I've said about Bill!" "But this is different." "Trading is trading," she said flatly. Bill came in the front door, but he must have heard his mother say "trading," for he ducked out again. I yelled for him to come back. "I want both of you to sit down and listen to me," I said. "You can ask questions and offer suggestions and give me hell after I'm through." So we sat down, all three of us, and had a family powwow. It took quite a bit to make Helen believe what I had to tell, but I pointed out the dot in the desk and showed them the triangular glasses and the pair of glasses that had been refitted with the pink lenses and sent back to me. By that time, she was ready to admit there was something going on. Even so, she was fairly well burned up at me for marking up the floor around the desk legs. I didn't show either her or Bill the pen that was a fishing rod, for I was scared of that. Flourish it around a bit and there was no telling what would happen. Bill was interested and excited, of course. This was trading, which was right down his alley. I cautioned both of them not to say a word about it. Bill wouldn't, for he was hell on secrets and special codes. But bright and early in the morning, Helen would probably swear Marge to secrecy, then tell her all about it and there wasn't a thing that I could do or say to stop her. Bill wanted to put the pinklensed spectacles on right away, to see how they were different from any other kind. I wouldn't let him. I wanted to put those specs on myself, but I was afraid to, if you want to know the truth. kitchen to get dinner, Bill and I held a strategy session. For a ten-year-old. Bill had a lot of good ideas. We agreed that we ought to get some system into the trading, because, as Bill pointed out, the idea of swapping sight unseen was a risky sort of business. A fellow ought to have some say in what he was getting in return. But to arrive at an understanding with whoever we were trading with meant that we'd have to set up some sort of communication system. And how do you communicate with someone you don't know the first thing about, except that perhaps it has three eyes? Then Bill hit upon what seemed a right idea. What we needed, he said, was a catalogue. If you were going to trade with someone, the logical first step would be to let them know what you had to trade. To be worth anything in such a circumstance, it would have to be an illustrated catalogue. And even then it might be worthless, for how could we be sure that the Trader on the other side of the desk would know what a picture was? Maybe he'd never seen a picture before. Maybe he saw differently -- not so much physically, although that was possible, too, but from a different viewpoint and with totally alien concepts. But it was the only thing we had to go on, so we settled down to work up a catalogue. Bill thought we should draw one, but neither of us was any good at drawing. I suggested illustrations from magazines. But that wasn t too hot an idea, either, for pictures of items in the magazine ads are usually all prettied up, designed to catch the eye. Then Bill had a top-notch idea. "You know that kid dictionary Aunt Ethel gave me? Why don't we send that to them? It's got a lot of pictures and not much reading in it, and that s important. The reading might confuse them." So we went into his room and started looking through all the junk he had, searching for the dictionary. But we ran across one dusty zebra when he was just a toddler and decided it was even better than the dictionary. It had good clear pictures and almost no reading at all. You know the kind of book I mean -- A for apple, B for ball and so forth. We took the book into the den and put it on the desk, centering it on the dot, then went out to dinner. TN the morning, the book had disappeared and that was a little odd. Up until then, nothing had disappeared from the desk until later in the day. Early that afternoon, Lewis called me up. "I'm coming down to see you, Joe. Is there a bar handy where the two of us can be alone?" I told him there was one only a block from me and said I'd meet him there. I got a few things cleared away, then left the office, figuring I'd go over to the bar and have a quick one before Lewis showed up. I don't know how he did it, but he was there ahead of me, back jn a comer booth. He must have broken every traffic regulation on the books. He had a couple of drinks waiting for us and was all huddled over, like a conspirator. He was a bit out of breath, as he had every right to be. "Marge told me," he said. "I suspected she would." "There could be a mint in it, Joe!" "That's what I thought, too. you ten per cent..." "Now look here," squawked Lewis. "You can't pull a deal like that. I wouldn't touch it for less than fifty." "I'm letting you in on it," I said, "because you're a neighbor. I don't know beans about this technical business. I'm getting stuff I don't understand and I need some help to find out what it is, but I can always go to someone else... It took us three drinks to get the details settled -- thirty-five per cent for him, sixty-five for me. "Now that that's settled," I said, "suppose you tell me what you found." "Found?" "That block I gave you. You wouldn't have torn down here and had the drinks all set up and waiting if you hadn't found something." "Well, as a matter of fact..." "Now just a minute," I warned him. "We're going to put this in the contract -- any failure to provide full and complete analysis..." "What contract?" "We're going to have a contract drawn up, so either of us can sue the other within an inch of his life for breaking it." Which is a hell of a way to start out a business venture, but it's the only way to handle a slippery little skate like Lewis. S O he told me what he'd found. "It's an emotions gauge. That's awkward terminology, I know, but it's the best I can think of." "What does it do?" "It tells how happy you are or how sad or how much you hate someone." "Oh, great," I said, disappointed. "What good is a thing like that? I don't need a gauge to tell me if I'm sore or glad or anything." He waxed practically eloquent. "Don't you see what an instrument like that would mean to psychiatrists? It would tell more about patients than they'd ever selves. It could be used in mental institutions and it might be important in gauging reactions for the entertainment business, politics, law-enforcement and Lord knows what else." "No kidding! Then let's start marketing!" "The only thing is..." "Yes?" "We can't manufacture them," he said frustratedly. "We haven't got the materials and we don't know how they're made. You'll have to trade for them." "I can't. Not right away, that is. First I've got to be able to make the Traders understand what I want, and then I'll have to trade them for." "You have some other stuff?" "A few things." "You better turn them over to me." "Some that could be dangerous. Anyhow, it all belongs to me. I'll give you what I want, when I wanf and..." We were off again. We finally wound up by adjourning to an attorney's office. We wrote up a contract that is probably one of the legal curiosities of all time. I'm convinced the attorney thought, and still thinks, both of us are crazy, but that's the least of my worries now. The contract said I was to turn over to Lewis, for his determination of its technical and merchandisable nature, at least # per cent of certain items, the source of which I alone cqntrolled, and with the further understanding that said source was to remain at all times under my exclusive control. The other # per cent might, without prejudice, be withheld from his examination, with the party of the first part having sole authority to make determination of which items should constitute the withheld # per cent.  items supplied him, the party of the second part was to make a detailed analysis, in writing, accompanied by such explanatory material as was necessary to the complete understanding of the party of the first part, within no more than three months after receipt, at the end of which time the items reverted solely to the ownership of the party of the first part. Except that such period of examination and determination might be extended, under a mutual agreement made in writing, for any stated time. Under no circumstances should the party of the second part conceal from the party of the first part any findings he might have made upon any of the items covered by the agreement, and that such concealment, should it occur, should be considered sufficient cause for action for the recovery of damages. That under certain conditions where some of the items might be found to be manufacturable, they could be manufactured under the terms of of this agreement. Provisions for a sales organization to market any of said items shall be set up and made a part of this agreement. That any proceeds from such sales shall be divided as follows: # per cent to the party of the first part (me, in case you've gotten lost, which is understandable), and # per cent to the party of the second part (Lewis); costs to be apportioned accordingly. There were a lot more details, of course, but that gives you an idea. We got home from the attorney's office, without either of us knifing the other, and found Marge over at my place. Lewis went in with me to have a look at the desk. Apparently the Trader had reand had been able to understand why it was sent, for there, lying on the desk, was a picture cut out of the book. Well, not cut out, exactly -- it looked more as though it had been burned out. The picture on the desk was Z for zebra. Lewis stared worriedly at it. "Now we're really in a fix." "Yeah," I admitted. "I don't know what the market price is, but they can't be cheap." "Figure it out -- expedition, safari, cages, ship, rail, fodder, keeper. You think we can switch him to something else?" "I don't see how. He's put in his order." Bill came wandering in and wanted to know what was up. When I glumly told him, he said cheerfully, "Aw, that's the whole trick in trading, Pop. If you got a bum jackknife you want to trade, you unload it on somebody who doesn't know what a good knife is like." Lewis didn't get it, but I did. "That's right! He doesn't know a zebra is an animal, or, if he does, how big it is!" "Sure," Bill said confidently. "All he saw was a picture." I T was five o'clock then, but the three of us went uptown and shopped. Bill found a cheap bracelet charm about the size of the drawing in the book. When it , comfes to junk like that, my kid knows just where it's sold and how much it costs. I considered making him a junior partner in charges of such emergencies, with about # per cent share or so -- out of Lewis's # per cent, of course -- but I was sure Lewis wouldn't hold still for that. I decided instead to give Bill a dollar a week allowance, said compensation to commence immediately upon our showing a profit. Well, we had Z for zebra -- provided the Trader was satisfied with a little piece of costume jewelry. It was lucky, I thought, that it hadn't been Z for zephyr. The rest of the alphabet was easy, yet I couldn't help but kick myself over all the time we were wasting. Of all the unworthy catalogues we might have sent, that until the Trader had run through the whole list, I was afraid to send another for fear of confusing him. So I sent him an apple and a ball and a small doll for girl and a toy cat and toy dog, and so on, and then I lay awake nights wondering what the Trader would make of them. I could picture him trying to learn the use of a rubber doll or cat. I'd given Lewis the two pairs of glasses, but had held back the fountain-pen fishing rod, for I was still scared of that one. He had turned over the emotion gauge to a psychiatrist to try out in his practice as a sort of field test. Marge and Helen, knowing that Lewis and I had entered into some kind of partnership, were practically inseparable now. Helen kept telling me how glad she was that I had finally recognized what a sterling fellow Lewis was. I suppose Lewis heard the same thing about me from Marge. Bill went around practically busting to do some bragging. But Bill is a great little businessman and he kept his mouth shut. I had told him about the allowance, of course. the Trader for a few more of the emotion gauges. He had a draftsman at the plant draw up a picture of the gauge and he wanted me to send it through to indicate that we were interested in it. But I told him not to try to rush things. While the emotion gauge might be a good deal, we should sample what the Trader had to offer before we made up our minds. The Trader, apparently certain now that someone was cooperating with him, had dropped his once-a-day trade schedule and was open for business around the clock. After he had run through back a couple of blank pages from the book with very crude drawings on them -- drawings that looked as if they had been made with crumbly charcoal. Lewis N jrew a series of pictures, showing jow a pencil worked, and we sent the Trader a ream of paper and # gross of sharpened pencils, then sat back to wait. We waited a week and were getting sort of edgy, when back came the entire ream of paper, with each sheet covered on both sides with all kinds of drawings. So we sent him a mail-order catalogue, figuring that would hold him for a while, and settled down to try to puzzle out the drawings he had made. There wasn't a single thing that made any sense at all -- not even to Lewis. He'd study some of the drawings, then pace up and down the room, pulling his hair and twitching his ears. Then he'd study the drawings some more. To me, it all looked plain Rube Goldbergish. Finally, we figured we might as well forget about the catalogue idea, for the time being at least, and we started feeding all sorts of stuff through the desk -- scissors, dishes, shoes, jackknives, mucilage, cigars, paper clips, erasers, spoons -- almost anything that was handy. It wasn't the scientific way, I know, but we didn't have the time to get very methodical about it and, until we had a chance to work out a more sensible program, we figured we might as well try the shotgun method. And the Trader started shooting things back at us. We'd sit for hours and feed stuff through to him and then he'd shoot stuff back at us and we had the damnedest pile of junk heaped all over the place you ever laid eyes on. W E rigged up a movie camera and took a lot of film of the spot on the desk where the exchange was going on. We spent a lot of time viewing that film, slowing it down and even stopping it, but it didn't tell us anything at all. When the stuff disappeared or appeared, it just disappeared or appeared. One frame it would be there, the next frame it would be gone. Lewis canceled all his other work and used the lab for nothing but trying to puzzle out the gadgets that we got. Most of them we couldn't crack at all. I imagine they were useful in some way, but we never managed to learn how. There was the perfume bottle, for example. That is what we called it, anyhow. But there was a suspicion in our minds that the perfume was simply a secondary effect, that the so-called bottle was designed for some other purpose entirely. Lewis and his boys were studying it down at the lab, trying to make out some rhyme or reason for it, and somehow they turned it on. They worked for three days, the last two in gas masks, trying to turn it off again. When the smell got so bad that people began calling the police, we took the contraption out into the country and buried it. Within a few days, all the vegetation in the area was dead. All the rest of the summer, the boys from the agricultural department at the university ran around, practically frothing at the mouth, trying to find the cause. There was the thing that might have been a clock of some sort, although it might just as easily have been something else. If it was a clock, the Trader had a time system that would drive you nuts, for it would measure the minutes or hours or whatever they were like lightning for a while, then barely move for an entire day. And there was the one you'd point at something and press a certain spot on it -- not a button or a knob or anything as crass and mechanical as that, just a certain spot -- and there'd be just a big blank spot in the landscape. But when you stopped pressing, the landscape would come back  again, unchanged. We filed it away in the darkest comer of the laboratory safe, with a big red tag on it marked : Dangerous! Don't Monkey with This! But most of the items we just drew blanks on. And it kept coming all the time. I piled the garage full of it and started dumping it in the basement. Some of it I was scared of and hauled out to the dump. TN the meantime, Lewis was having trouble with the emotion gauge. "It works," he said. "The psychiatrist I gave it to to try out is enthusiastic about it. But it seems almost impossible to get it on the market." "If it works," I objected, handing him a can of beer, "it ought to sell." , "In any other field, it might, but you don't handle merchandise that way in the medical field. Before you can put something on the market, you have to have it nailed down with blueprints and theory and field tests and such. And we can't. We don't know how it works. We don't know why it works. Until we do, no reputable medical supply house will take it on, no approved medical journal will advertise it, no practitioner will use it." "Then I guess it's out." I felt fairly blue about it, because it was the only thing we had that we knew how to use. Lewis nodded and drank his beer and was glummer than ever. Looking back on it, it's funny how we found the gadget that made us all the money-. Actually,  it wasn't Lewis but Helen who found it. Helen is a good housewife. She's always going after things with the vacuum and the dustcloth and she washes the woodwork so often and so furiously that we have to paint it every year. One night, we were sitting in the living room, watching television. "Joe," she asked me, "did you dust the den?" "Dust the den? What would I want to do that for?" "Well, someone did. Maybe it was Bill." "Bill wouldn't be caught dead with a dustcloth in his mitt." "I can't understand it, Joe," she said. "I went in there to dust it and it was absolutely clean. Everything just shone." Sgt. Friday was trying to get the facts out of someone and his sidekick was complaining about some relatives that had come to visit and I didn't pay much attention at the time. But the next day, I got to thinking about it and I couldn't get it off my mind. I certainly hadn't dusted the den and it was a cinch Bill hadn't, yet someone had if Helen was ready to admit it was clean. So, that evening, I went out into the street with a pail and shoveled up a pailful of dirt and brought it in the house. Helen caught me as I was coming in the door. "What do you think you're doing with that?" "Experimenting," I told her. "Do it in the garage." "It isn't possible," I argued. "I have to find out who's been dusting the den." I knew that, if my hunch failed, I'd have a lot to answer for when she followed me and stood in the doorway, ready to pounce. from the Trader standing on the desk and a lot more of it in one comer. I cleared off the desk and that was when Bill came in. "What you doing, Dad?" he asked. "Your father's gone insane," Helen explained quietly. They stood there, watching me, while I took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it on the desk top. It stayed there for just an instant -- and then it was gone. The top of the desk was spotless. "Bill," I said, "take one of those gadgets out to the garage." "Which one?" "It doesn't matter." So he took one and I spread another handful of dirt and, in a second, it was gone. Bill was back by that time and I sent him out with another gadget. We kept on like that for quite a while and Bill was beginning to get disgusted with me. But finally I sprinkled the dirt and it stayed. "Bill," I said, "you remember the last thing you took out?" "Sure." "Well, go out and bring it back again." He got it and, as soon as he reached the door of the den, the dirt disappeared. "Well, that's it," I said. "That's what?" asked Helen. I pointed to the contraption Bill had in his hand. "That. Throw away your vacuum cleaner. Burn up the dustcloth. Heave out the mop. Just have one of those in the house and..." She threw herself into my arms. "Oh, Joe!" We danced a jig, the two of us. Then I sat around for a while, kicking myself for tying up with Lewis, wondering if maybe there wasn't some way I could break the contract now that I had found something without any help from him. But I remembered all those clauses we had written in. It wouldn't have been any use, anyhow, for Helen was already across the street, telling Marge about it. So I phoned Lewis at the lab and he came tearing over. We ran field tests. The living room was spotless from Bill just having walked through it, carrying the gadget, and the garage, where he had taken it momentarily, was spic and span. While we didn't check it, I imagine that an area paralleling the path he had taken from the front door to the garage was the only place outdoors that didn't have a speck of dust upon it. W E took the gadget down in the basement and cleaned that up. We sneaked over to a neighbor's back yard, where we knew there was a lot of cement dust, held the gadget over it and in an instant there wasn't any cement dust. 'There were just a few pebbles left and the pebbles, I suppose, you couldn't rightly classify as dust. We didn't need to know any more. Back at the house, I broke open a bottle of Scotch I'd been saving, while Lewis sat down at the kitchen table and drew a sketch of the gadget. We had a drink, then went into the den and put the drawing on the desk. The drawing disappeared and we waited. In a few minutes, another one of the gadgets appeared. We waited for a while and nothing happened. "We've got to let him know we want a lot of them," I said. "There's no way we can," said Lewis. "We don't know his mathematical symbols, he doesn't know ours, and there's no surefire way to teach him. He doesn't know a single word of our language and we don't know a word of his." We went back to the kitchen and had another drink. Lewis sat down and drew a row of the gadgets across a sheet of paper, then sketched in representations of others behind them so that, when you looked at it, you could see that there were hundreds of them. We sent that through. Fourteen gadgets came back -- the exact number Lewis had sketched in the first row. Apparently the Trader had no idea of perspective. The lines that Lewis had drawn to represent the other gadgets behind the first row didn't mean a thing to him. We went back to the kitchen and had a few more drinks. "We'll need thousands of the things," said Lewis, holding his head in his hands. "I can't sit here day and night, drawing them." "You may have to do that," I said, enjoying myself. "There must be another way." "Why not draw a bunch of them, then mimeograph the drawing?" I suggested. "We could send the mimeographed sheets through to him in bundles." I hated to say it, because I was still enamored of the idea of sticking Lewis somewhere off in a corner, sentenced to a lifetime of drawing the same thing over and over. "That might work," said Lewis, brightening annoyingly. "It's just simple enough..." "Practical is the word," I snapped. "If it were simple, you'd have thought of it." "I leave things like that to detail men." "You'd better!" It took a while and a whole bottle before we calmed down. ograph machine and Lewis drew a stencil with twenty-five of the gadgets on it. We ran through a hundred sheets and sent them through the desk. It worked -- we were busy for several hours, getting those gadgets out of the way as they poured through to us. I'm afraid we never stopped to think about what the Trader might want in return for the dustcollectors. We were so excited that we forgot, for the 'moment, that this was a commercial proposition and not just something gratis. But the next afternoon, back came the mimeographed sheets we'd sent through and, on the reverse side of each of them, the Trader had drawn twenty-five representations of the zebra bracelet charm. And there we were, faced with the necessity of getting together, pronto, twenty-five hundred of those silly zebras. I tore down to the store where I'd gotten the bracelet, but all they had in stock were two dozen of the things. They said they didn't think they could order any more. The number, they said, had been discontinued. The name of the company that made them was stamped on the inside of the bracelet and, as soon as I got home, I put in a long distance call. I finally got hold of the. production manager. "You know those bracelets you put out?" Which one are you talking about?" "The one with the zebra on it." He thought a moment. "Yeah, we did. Quite a while ago. We don't make them any more. In this business..." "I need at least twenty-five hundred of them." "Twenty-five hundred bracelets?" "No, just the zebras." "Look, is this a gag?" "It's no gag, mister," I said. "I pay for them." "We haven't any in stock." "Couldn't you make them?" "Not just twenty-five hundred of them. Wouldn't be worth it to put through a special order for so few. If it was fifty thousand, say, we might consider it." "All right, then," I said. "How much for fifty thousand?" #-gled some, but I was in no position to do much bargaining. We finally agreed on a price I knew was way too high, considering the fact that the entire bracelet, with the zebra and a lot of other junk, had only retailed at # cents. "And hold the order open," I told him. "We might want more of them." "Okay," he said. "Just one thing -- would you mind telling me what you want with fifty thousand zebras?" "Yes, I would," I said and hung up. I suppose he thought I was off my rocker, but who cared what he thought? It took ten days to get that shipment of fifty thousand zebras and I sweated out every minute of it. Then there was the job of getting them under cover when it came and, in case you don't know, fifty thousand zebras, even when they're only bracelet charms, take up room. But first I took out twenty-five hundred and sent them through the desk. For the ten days since we'd gotten the dust-collectors, we'd sent nothing through and there had been no sign from the Trader that he might be getting impatient. I wouldn't have blamed him a bit if he'd done something, like sending through his equivalent of a bomb, to express his dissatisfaction at our slow delivery. I've often wondered what he thought of the long delay -- if he hadn't suspected we were reneging on the bargain. All this time, I had been smoking too much and gnawing my fingernails and I'd figured that Lewis was just as busy seeing what could be done about marketing the dusters. But when I mentioned it to him, he just looked blank. "You know, Joe, I've been doing a lot of worrying." "We haven't a thing to worry about now," I said, "except getting these things sold." "But the dust must go somewhere," he fretted. "The dust?" "Sure, the dust these things collect. Remember we picked up an entire pile of cement dust? What I want to know is where it all went. The gadget itself isn't big enough to hold it. It isn't big enough to hold even a week's collection of dust from the average house. That's what worries me -- where does it go?" "I don't care where. It goes, doesn't it?" "That's the pragmatic view," he said scornfully. It turned out that Lewis hadn't done a thing about marketing, so I got busy. But I ran into the same trouble we'd had trying to sell the emotion gauge. The dust collector wasn't patented and it didn't have a brand name. There was no fancy label stuck on it and it didn't bear a manufacturer's imprint. And when anybody asked me how it worked, I couldn't answer. One wholesaler did make me a ridiculous offer. I laughed in his face and walked out. around the kitchen table, drinking beer, and neither of us too happy. I could see a lot of trouble ahead in getting the gadgets sold. Lewis, it seemed, was still worrying about what happened to the dust. He had taken one of the dust collectors apart and the only thing he could find out about it was that there was some feeble force-field operating inside of it -- feeble yet strong enough to play hell with the electrical circuits and fancy metering machinery he has at the lab. As soon as he found out what was happening, he slapped the cover back on as quick as he could and then everything was all right. The cover was a shield against the forcefield. "That dust must be getting thrown into another dimension," he told me, looking like a hound dog that had lost a coon track. "Maybe not. It could be winding up in one of those dust clouds way out in space." He shook his head. "You can't tell me," I said, "that the Trader is crazy enough to sell us a gadget that will throw dust back into his face." "You miss the point entirely. The Trader is operating from another dimension. He must be. And if there are two dimensions, his and ours, there may be others. The Trader must have used these dust collectors himself -- not for the same purpose we intend, perhaps, but they get rid of something that he doesn't want around. So, necessarily, they'd have to be rigged to get rid of it in a dimension other than his." We sat there drinking beer, and I started turning over that business about different dimensions in my head. I couldn't grasp the concept. Maybe Lewis was right about me being a pragmatist. If you can't see it or touch it or even guess what it would be like. how can you believe there might be another dimension? I couldn't. So I started to talk about marketing the dust collector and before Lewis went home that night, we'd decided that the only thing left to do was sell it door to door. We even agreed to charge # for it. The zebras figured out to four cents each and we would pay our salesmen ten per cent commission, which would leave us a profit of #I apiece. I put an ad in the paper for salesmen and the next day we had several applicants. We started them out on a trial run. Those gadgets sold like hotcakes and we knew we were in! down to handling the sales end, while Lewis went back to the lab and started going through the pile of junk we had gotten from the Trader. There are a lot of headaches running a sales campaign. You have to map out territories for your salesmen, get clearance from Better Business Bureaus, bail out your men if they're thrown in the clink for running afoul of some obscure village ordinance. There are more worrisome angles to it than you can ever imagine. But in a couple of months' time, things were running pretty smoothly. We had the state well covered and were branching out into others. I had ordered another fifty thousand zebras and told them to expect re-orders -- and the desk top was a busy place. It got to a point, finally, where I had to hire three men full time, paying them plenty not to talk, to man that desk top # hours a day. We'd send through zebras for eight hours, then take away dust gadgets for eight hours, then feed through zebras for another eight. If the Trader had any qualms about what was happening, he gave no sign of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras. The neighbors were curious and somewhat upset at first, but finally they got used to it. If I could have moved to some other location, I would have, for the house was more an office than a home and we had practically no family life at all. But if we wanted to stay in business, we had to stay right where we were because it was the only place we had contact with the Trader. The money kept rolling in and I turned the management of it over to Helen and Marge. The income tax boys gave us a rough time when we didn't show manufacturing expenses, but since we weren't inclined to argue over what we had to pay, they couldn't do anything about it. Lewis was wearing himself down to a nubbin at the lab, but he wasn't finding anything that we could use. But he still did some worrying now and then about where all that dust was going. And he was right, probably for the first time in his life. O NE afternoon, a couple of years after we'd started selling the dust collectors, I had been uptown to attend to some banking difficulties that Helen and Marge had gotten all bollixed up. I'd no more than pulled into the driveway when Helen came busting out of the house. She was covered with dust, her face streaked with it, and she was the maddest-looking woman I have ever seen. "You've got to do something about it, Joe!" she shrieked. "About what?" "The dust! It's pouring into the house!" "Where is it pouring from?" "From everywhere!" I could see she'd opened all the windows and there was dust pouring out of them, almost like a smoke cloud. I got out of the car and took a quick look up and down the street. Every house in the block had its windows open and there was dust coming out of all of them and the neighborhood was boiling with angry, screaming women. "Where's Bill?" I asked. "Out back." I ran around the house and called him and he came running. Marge had come across the street and, if anything, she was about six degrees sorer about all the dust than Helen was. "Get in the car," I said. "Where are we going?" Marge demanded. "Out to pick up Lewis." I must have sounded like nothing to trifle with, for they piled in and I got out of there as fast as the car would take us. The homes and factories and stores that had bought the gadget were gushing so much dust, visibility wouldn't be worth a damn before long. I had to wade through about two feet of dust on the laboratory floor to get to Lewis's office and hold a handkerchief over my nose to keep from suffocating. faces wiped off and most of the dust hacked out of our throats. I could see then that Lewis was about three shades paler than usual, although, to tell tle truth, he always was a pasty-looking creature. "It's the creatures from that third dimension," he said anxiously. "The place where we were sending all the dust. They got sick and tired of having it pour in on them and they got it figured out and now they're firing the dust right back at us." "Now calm down. We're just jumping at the conclusion that this was caused by our gadget." "I checked, Joe. It was. The dust is coming out in jets from ' every single place where we sent it through. No place else." "Then all we have to do is fire it back at them." He shook his head. "Not a chance. The gadget works one way now -- from them to us." He coughed and looked wildly at me. "Think of it! A couple of homes, stores and factories -- some of them operating for two whole years! Joe, what are we going to do?" "We're going to hole up somewhere till this -- well, blows over." Being of a nasty legal turn of mind, he probably foresaw even then the countless lawsuits that would avalanche on us. Personally, I was more scared of being mobbed by angry women. But that's all past history. We hid out till people had quieted down and then began trying to settle the suits out of court. We had a lot of money and were able to pay off most of them. The judgments against us still outstanding don't amount to more  than a few hundred thousand. We could wipe that out pretty quickly if we'd just hit on something else as profitable as the cleaning gadget. Lewis is working hard at it, but he isn't having any luck. And the Trader is gone now. As soon as we dared come home, I went into the house and had a look at the desk. The inlaid dot was gone. I tried putting something where it had been, but nothing happened. What scared the Trader off? I'd give a lot to know. Meanwhile, there are some commercial prospects. The rose-tinted glasses, for instance, that we call the Happiness Lenses. Put them on and you're happy as a clam. Almost every person on the face of the Earth would like a pair of them, so they could forget their troubles for a while. They would probably play hob with the liquor business. The trouble is that we don't know how to make them and, now that the Trader's gone, we can't swap for them. But there's one thing that keeps worrying me. I know I shouldn't let it bother me, but I can't keep it out of mind. Just what did the Trader do zebras we sent him? shell game None of them had captured or killed a single enemy! Then whom were they at war with? A sound awoke O'Keefe instantly. He threw back his covers, slid from the cot, grabbed his B-pistol from the wall and, with his foot, smashed the alarm box. High frequency waves tripped emergency bells throughout the camp. As O'Keefe burst from his house, lights; already flickered on every side. "Where?" Fisher demanded shrilly. He appeared beside O'Keefe, still in his pajamas, grubby-faced with sleep. "Over to the right." O'Keefe leaped aside for a massive cannon being rolled from its underground storage-chambers. Soldiers were appearing among the night-clad figures. To the right lay the black bog of mists and obese foliage, ferns and pulpy onions, sunk in the half-liquid ooze that made up the surface of Betelgeuse II. Nocturnal phosphorescence danced and flitted over the bog, ghostly yellow lights snapped in the thick darkness. "I figure," Horstokowski said, "they came in close to the road, but not actually on it. There's a shoulder fifty feet on each side, where the bog has piled up. That's why our radar's silent." An immense mechanical fusing "bug" was eating its way into the mud and shifting water of the bog, leaving behind a trail of hard, smoked surface. The vegetation and the rotting roots and dead leaves were sucked up and efficiently cleared away. "What did you see?" Portbane asked O'Keefe. "I didn't see anything. I was sound asleep. But I heard them." "Doing what?" "They were getting ready to pump nerve gas into my house. I heard them unreeling the hose from portable drums and uncapping the pressure tanks. But, by God, I was out of the house before they could get the joints leak-tight!" say it's a gas attack?" He fumbled for the gas mask at his belt. "Don't stand there -- get your masks on!" "They didn't get their equipment going," Silberman said. "O'Keefe gave the alarm in time. They retreated back to the bog." "You're sure?" Daniels demanded. "You don't smell anything, do you?" "No," Daniels admitted. "But the odorless type is the most deadly. And you don't know you've been gased till it's too late." He put on his gas mask, just to be sure. A few women appeared by the rows of houses -- slim, large-eyed shapes in the flickering glare of the emergency searchlights. Some children crept cautiously after them. Silberman and Horstokowski moved over in the shadows by the heavy cannon. "Interesting," Horstokowski said. "Third gas attack this month. Plus two tries to wire bomb terminals within the camp site. They're stepping it up." "You have it all figured out, don't you?" "I don't have to wait for the composite to see We're getting it heavier all the time." Horstokowski peered warily around, then pulled Silberman close. "Maybe there's a reason why the radar screen didn't react. It's supposed to get everything, even knocker-bats." "But if they came in along the shoulder, like you said -- " "I just said that as a plant. There's somebody waving them in, setting up interference tor the radar." "You mean one of us?" Horstokowski was intently watching Fisher through the moist night gloom. Fisher had moved carefully to the edge of the road, where the hard surface ended and the slimy, scorched bog began. He was squatting down and rooting in the ooze. "What's he doing?" Horstokowski demanded. "Picking up something," Silberman said indifferently. "Why not? He's supposed to be looking around, isn't he?" "Watch," Horstokowski warned. "When he comes back, he's going to pretend nothing happened." walking rapidly and rubbing the muck from his hands. Horstokowski intercepted him. "What'd you find?" "Me?" Fisher blinked. "I didn't find anything." "Don't kid me! You were down on your hands and knees, grubbing in the bog." "I -- thought I saw something metal, that's all." A vast inner excitement radiated through Horstokowski. He had been right. "Come on!" he shouted. "What'd you find?" "I thought it was a gas pipe," Fisher muttered. "But it was only a root. A big, wet root." There was a tense silence. "Search him," Portbane ordered. Two soldiers grabbed Fisher. Silberman and Daniels quickly searched him. They spilled out his belt pistol, knife, emergency whistle, automatic relay checker, geiger counter, pulse tab, medical kit and identification papers. There was nothing else. The soldiers let him go, disappointed, and Fisher sullenly collected his things. "No, he didn't find anything," Portbane stated. "Sorry, Fisher. We have lo be careful. We have to watch all the time, as long as they're out there, plotting and conspiring against us." Silberman and Horstokowski exchanged glances, then moved quietly away. "I think I get it," Silberman said softly. "Sure," Horstokowski answered. "He hid something. We'll dig up that section of bog he was poking around in. I think maybe we'll find something interesting." He hunched his shoulders combatively. "I knew somebody was working for them, here in the camp. A spy for Terra." Silberman started. "Terra? Is that who's attacking us?" "Of course that's who." There was a puzzled look on Silberman's face. "Seemed to me we're fighting somebody else." Horstokowski was outraged. "For instance?" Silberman shook his head. "I don't know. I didn't think about who so much as what to do about it. I guess I just took it for granted they were aliens." "And what do you think those Terran monkey men are?" Horstokowski challenged. T HE weekly Pattern Conference brought together the nine leaders of the camp in their reinforced underground conference chamber. Armed guards protected the entrance, which was sealed tight as soon as the last leader had been examined, checked over and finally passed. Domgraf-Schwach, the conference chairman, sat attentively in his deep chair, one hand on the Pattern composite, the other on the switch that could instantly catapult him from the room and into a special compartment, safe from attack. Portbane was making his routine inspection of the chamber, examining each chair and desk for scanning eyes. Daniels sat with eyes fixed on his geiger counter. Silberman was completely encased in an elaborate steel and plastic suit, configured with wiring, from which continual whirrings came. "What in God's name is that suit of armor?" DomgrafSchwach asked angrily. "Take it off so we can see you." "Nuts to you," Silberman snapped, his voice muted by his intricate hull. "I'm wearing this from now on. Last night, somebody tried to jab me with bacteria-impregnated needles." Lanoir, who was half-dozing at his place, came alive. "Bacteria-impregnated needles?" He leaped up and hurried over to Silberman. "Let me ask you if -- " "Keep away from me!" Silberman shouted. "If you come any closer, I'll electrocute you!" "The attempt I reported last week," Lanoir panted excitedly, "when they tried to poison the water supply with metallic salts. It occurred to me their next method would be bacterial wastes, filterable virus we couldn't detect until actual outbreak of disease." From his pocket, he yanked a bottle and shook out a handful of white capsules. One after another, he popped the capsules into his mouth. Every man in the room was protected in some fashion. Each chose whatever apparatus conformed to his individual experi-. ence. But the totality of defensesystems was integrated in the general Pattern planning. The only man who didn't seem busy with a device was Tate. He sat pale and tense, but otherwise unoccupied. Domgraf-Schwach made a mental note -- Tate's confidence-level was unusually high. It suggested he somehow felt safe from attack. "No talking," DomgrafSchwach said. "Time to start." He had been chosen as chairmanship by the turn of a wheel. There was no possibility of subversion under such a system. In an isolated, autonomous colony of sixty men and fifty women, such a random method was necessary. "Daniels will read the week's Pattern composite," DomgrafSchwab ordered. "Why?" Portbane demanded bluntly. "We were the ones who put it together. We all know what's in it." "For the same reason it's always read," Silberman answered. "So we'll know it wasn't tampered with." "Just the summation!" Horstokowski said loudly. "I don't want to stay down here in this vault any longer than I have to." "Afraid somebody'll fill up the passage?" Daniels jeered. "There are half a dozen emergency escape exits. You ought to know -- you insisted on every one of them." "Read the summation," Lanoir demanded. "During the last seven days, there were eleven overt attacks in all. The main attack was on our new class-A bridge network, which was sabotaged and wrecked. The struts were weakened and the plastic mix that served as base material was diluted, so that when the very first convoy of trucks passed over it, the whole thing collapsed." "We know that," Portbane said gloomily. "Loss consisted of six lives and considerable equipment. Troops scoured the area for a whole day, but the saboteurs managed to escape. Shortly after this attack, it was discovered that the water supply was poisoned with metallic salts. The wells were therefore filled and new ones drilled. Now all our water passes through filter and analysis systems." "I boil mine," Lanoir added feelingly. "It's agreed by everyone that the frequency and severity of attacks have been stepped up." Daniels indicated the massive wall charts and graphs. "Without our bomb-proof screen and our constant detection network, we'd be overwhelmed tonight. The real question is -- who are our attackers?" "Terrans," Horstokowski said. Tate shook his head. "Terrans, hell! What would monkey men be doing out this far?" "We're out this far, aren't we?" Lanoir retorted. "And we were Terrans once." "Never!" Fisher shouted. "Maybe we lived on Terra, but we aren't Terrans. We're a superior mutant race." "Then who are they?" Horstokowski insisted. "They're other survivors from the ship," Tate said. "How do you know?" asked Silberman. "Have you ever seen them?" ' "We salvaged no lifeboats, remember? They must have blasted off in them." "If they were isolated survivors," O'Keefe objected, "they wouldn't have the equipment and weapons and machines they're using. They're a trained, integrated force. We haven't been able to defeat them or even kill any of them in five years. That certainly shows their strength." "We haven't tried to defeat them," Fisher said. "We've only tried to defend ourselves." A sudden tense silence fell over the nine men. "You mean the ship," Horstokowski said. "It'll be up out of the bog soon," Tate replied. "And then we'll have something to show them -- something they'll remember." "Good God!" Lanoir exclaimed, disgusted. "The ship's a wreck -- the meteor completely smashed it. What happens when we do get it up? We can't operate it unless we can completely rebuild it." "If the monkey men could build the thing," Portbane said, "we can repair it. We have the tools and machinery." "And we've finally located the control cabin," O'Keefe pointed out. "I see no reason why we can't raise it." There was an abrupt change of expression on Lanoir's face. "All right, I withdraw my objections. Let's get it up." "What's your motive?" Daniels yelled excitedly. "You're trying to put something over on us!" "He's planning something," Fisher furiously agreed. "Don't listen to him. Leave the damn thing down there!" "Too late for that," O'Keefe said. "It's been rising for weeks." "You're in with him!" Daniels screeched. "Something's being put over on us!" IT'HE ship was a dripping, corroded ruin. Slime poured from it as the magnetic grapples dragged it from the bog and onto the hard surface that the fusing bugs had laid down. The bugs burned a hard track through the bog, out to the control cabin. While the lift suspended the cabin, heavy reinforced plastic beams were slid under it. Tangled weeds, matted like ancient hair, covered the globular cabin in the midday sun, the first light that had struck it in five years. "In you go," Domgraf-Schwach said eagerly. Portbane and Lanoir advanced over the fused surface to the moored control cabin. Their handlights flashed ominously yellow around the steaming walls and encrusted controls. Livid eels twisted and convulsed in the thick pools underfoot. The cabin was a smashed, twisted ruin. Lanoir, who was first, motioned Portbane impatiently after him. "You look at these controls -- you're the engineer." Portbane set down his light on a sloping heap of rusted metal and sloshed through the kneedeep rubbish to the demolished control panel. It was a maze of fused, buckled machinery. He squatted down in front of it and began tearing away the pitted guard-plates. Lanoir pushed open a supply closet and brought down metalpacked audio and video tapes. He eagerly spilled open a can of the video and held a handful of frames to the flickering light. "Here's the ship's data. Now I'll be able to prove there was nobody but us aboard." O'Keefe appeared at the jagged doorway. "How's it coming?" Lanoir elbowed past him and out on tfie support boards. He deposited a load of tapecans and returned to the drenched cabin. "Find anything on the controls?" he asked Portbane. "Strange," Portbane murmured. "What's the matter?" Tate demanded. "Too badly wrecked?" "There are lots of wires and relays. Plenty of meters and power circuits and switches. But no controls to operate them." Lanoir hurried over. "There must be!" "For repairs, you have to remove all these plates -- practically dismantle the works to even see them. Nobody could sit here and control the ship. There's nothing but a smooth, sealed shell." "Maybe this wasn't the control cabin," Fisher offered. "This is the steering mechanism -- no doubt about that." Portbane pulled out a heap of charred wiring. "But all this was self-contained. They're robot controls. Automatic." They looked at each other. "Then we were prisoners," Tate said, dazed. "Whose?" , Fisher asked baffledly. "The Terrans!" Lanoir said. "I don't get it," Fisher muttered vaguely. "We planned the whole flight -- didn't we? We broke out of Ganymede and got away." "Get the tapes going," Portbane said to Lanoir. "Let's see what's in them." scanner off and raised the light. "Well," he said, "you saw for yourselves this was a hospital ship. It carried no crew. It was directed from a central guidebeam at Jupiter. The beam carried it from the Sol System here, where, because of a mechanical error, a meteor penetrated the protection screen and the ship crashed." "And if it hadn't crashed?" Domgraf-Schwach asked faintly. "Then we would have been taken to the main hospital at Fomalhaut IV." "Play the last tape again," Tate urged. The wallspeaker spluttered and then said smoothly: "The distinction between paranoids and paranoiac syndromes in other psychotic personality disorders must be borne in mind when dealing with these patients. The paranoid retains his general personality structure unimpaired. Outside of the region of his complex, he is logical, rational, even he can discuss himself -- he is aware of his surroundings. "The paranoid differs from other psychotics in that he remains actively oriented to the outside world. He differs from socalled normal personality types in that he has a set of fixed ideas, false postulates from which he has relentlessly constructed an elaborate system of beliefs, logical and consistent with these false postulates." Shakily, Daniels interrupted the tape. "These tapes were for the hospital authorities on Fomalhaut IV. Locked in a supply closet in the control cabin. The control cabin itself was sealed off from the rest of the ship. None of us was able to enter it." "The paranoid is totally rigid," the calm voice of the Terran doctor continued. "His fixed ideas cannot be shaken. They dominate his life. He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system. He is convinced the world is plotting against him -- that he is a person of unusual importance and ability against whom endless machinations are directed. To thwart these plots, the paranoid goes to infinite lengths to protect himself. He repeatedly vidtapes the authorities, constantly moves from place to place and, in the dangerous final phases, may even become -- " Silberman snapped it off savagely and the chamber was silent. The nine leaders of the camp sat unmoving in their places. "We're a bunch of nuts," Tate said finally. "A shipload of psychos who got wrecked by a chance meteor." "Don't kid yourself," Horstokowski snapped. "There wasn't anything chance about that meteor." Fisher giggled hysterically. "More paranoid talk. Good God, all these attacks -- hallucinations -- all in our minds!" piles of tape. "What are we to believe? Are there any attackers?" "We've been defending ourselves against them for five years!" Portbane retorted. "Isn't that proof enough?" "Have you ever seen them?" Fisher asked slyly. "We're up against the best agents in the Galaxy. Terran shock troops and military spies, carefully trained in subversion and sabotage. They're too clever to show themselves." "They wrecked the bridgesystem," O'Keefe said. "It's true we didn't see them, but the bridge is sure as hell in ruins." "Maybe it was badly built," Fisher pointed out. "Maybe it just collapsed." "Things don't 'just collapse'! There's a reason for all these things that have been happening." "Like what?" Tate demanded. "Weekly poison gas attacks," Portbane said. "Metallic wastes in the water supply, to name only two." "And bacteriological crystals," Daniels added. "Maybe none of these things exist," Lanoir argued. "But how are we to prove it? If we're all insane, how would we know?" "There are over a hundred of us," Domgraf-Schwach said. "We've all experienced these attacks. Isn't that proof enough?" "A myth can be picked up by a whole society, believed and taught to the next generation. Gods, fairies, witches -- believing a thing doesn't make it true. For centuries, Terrans believed the Earth was flat." "If all footrulers grow to thirteen inches," Fisher asked, "how would anybody know? One of them would have to stay twelve inches long, a non-variable, a constant. We're a bunch of inaccurate rulers, each thirteen inches long. We need one nonparanoid for comparison." "Or maybe this is all part of their strategy," Siberman said. "Maybe they rigged up that control cabin and planted those tapes there." "This ought to be no different from trying to test any belief," Portbane explained. "What's the characteristic of a scientific test?" "It can be duplicated," Fisher said promptly. "Look, we're going around in circles. We're trying to measure ourselves. You can't take your ruler, either twelve inches or thirteen inches long, and ask it to measure itself. No instrument can test its own accuracy." "Wrong," Portbane answered calmly. "I can put together a valid, objective test." "There's no such test!" Tate shouted excitedly. "There sure as hell is. And inside of a week, I'll have it set up." AS !" the soldier shouted. On Vj all sides, sirens wailed into life. Women and children scrambled for their masks. Heavy-duty cannon rumbled up from subsurface chambers and took up positions. Along the perimeter of the bog, the fusing bugs were searing away a ribbon of muck. Searchlights played out into the fern-thick darkness. Portbane snapped off the cock of the steel tank and signaled the workmen. The tank was rolled quickly away from the sea of mud and seared weeds. "All right," Portbane gasped. "Get it below." He emerged in the subsurface chamber as the cylinder was being rolled into position. "That cylinder," Portbane said, "should contain hydrocyanic vapor. It's a sampling made at the site of the attack." "This is useless," Fisher complained. "They're attacking and here we stand!" Portbane signaled the workmen and they began laying out the test apparatus. "There will be two samples, precipitates of different vapors, each clearly marked and labeled A and B. One comes from the cylinder filled at the scene of the attack. The other is condensed from air taken out of this room." "Suppose we describe both as negative?" Silberman asked worriedly. "Won't that throw your test off?" "Then we'll take more tests. After a couple of months, if we still haven't got anything but negative, findings, then the attack hypothesis is destroyed." "We may see both as positive," Tate said, perplexed. "In that case, we're dead right now. If we see both samples as positive, I think the case for the paranoid hypothesis has been proved." After a moment, DomgrafSchwach reluctantly agreed. "One is the control. If we maintain that it isn't possible to get a control sample that is free of hydrocyanic acid..." "Pretty damn slick," O'Keefe admitted. "You start from the one known factor -- our own existence. We can't very well doubt that." "Here are all the choices," Portbane said. "Both positive means we're psychotic. Both negative means either the attack was a false alarm or there are no attackers. One positive and one negative would indicate there are real attackers, that we're fully sane and rational." He glanced around at the camp leads. " But we'll all have to agree which sample is which." "Our reactions will be recorded secretly?" Tate asked. "Tabulated and punched by the mechanical eye. Tallied by machinery. Each of us will make an individual discrimination." "I'll try it." He came forward, leaned over the colorimeter and studied the two samples intently. He alternated them for a time and then firmly grabbed the check-stylus. "You're sure?" DomgrafSchwach asked. "You really know which is the negative control sample?" "I know." Fisher noted his findings on the punch sheet and moved away. "I'm next," Tate said, impatiently pushing up. "Let's get this over with." One by one, the men examined the two samples, recorded their findings, and then moved off to stand waiting uneasily. "All right," Portbane said finally. "I'm the last one." He peered down briefly, scribbled his results, then pushed the equipment away. "Give me the readings," he told the workmen by the scanner. A moment later, the findings were flashed up for everyone to see. Fisher A Tate A O'Keefe B Horstokowski B Silberman B Daniels B Portbane A Domgraf-Schwach B Lanoir A 'll be damned," Silberman said softly. "As simple as that. We're paranoids." "You cluck!" Tate shouted at Horstokowski. "It was A, not B! How the hell could you get it wrong?" "B was as bright as a searchlight!" Domgraf-Schwach answered furiously. "A was completely colorless!" O'Keefe pushed forward. "Which was it, Portbane? Which was the positive sample?" "I don't know," Portbane confessed. "How could any of us be sure?" T HE buzzer on DomgrafSchwach's desk clicked and he snapped on the vidscreen. The face of a soldier-operator appeared. "The attack's over, sir. We drove them away." Domgraf-Schwach smiled ironically. "Catch any of them?" "No, sir. They slipped back into the bog. I think we hit a couple, though. We'll go out tomorrow and try to find the corpses." "You think you'll find them?" "Well, the bog usually swallows them up. But maybe this time -- " "All right," Domgraf-Schwach interrupted. "If this turns out to be an exception, let me know." He broke the circuit. "Now what?" Daniels inquired icily. "There's no point in continuing work on the ship," O'Keefe said. "Why waste our time bombing empty bogs?" "I suggest we keep working on the ship," Tate contradicted. "Why?" O'Keefe asked. "So we can head for Fomalhaut and give ourselves up to the hospital station." Silberman stared at him incredulously. "Turn ourselves in? Why not stay here? We're not harming anybody." "No, not yet. It's the future I'm thinking of, centuries from now." "We'll be dead." "Those of us in this room, sure, but what about our descendants?" "He's right," Lanoir conceded. "Eventually our descendants will fill this whole solar system. Sooner or later, our ships might spread over the Galaxy." He tried to smile, but his muscles would not respond. "The tapes point out how tenacious paranoids are. They cling fanatically to their fixed beliefs. If our descendants expand into Terran regions, there'll be a fight and we might win because we're more one-track. We would never deviate." "Fanatics," Daniels whispered. "We'll have to keep this information from the rest of the camp," O'Keefe said. "Absolutely," Fisher agreed. "We'll have to keep them thinking the ship is for H-bomb attacks. Otherwise, we'll have one hell of a situation on our hands." They began moving numbly toward the sealed door. "Wait a minute," DomgrafSchwach said urgently. "The two workmen." He started back, while some of them went out into the corridor, the rest back toward their seats. And then it happened. screamed as half of him vanished in swirling particles of radioactive ash. Silberman dropped to his one knee and fired up at Tate. Tate leaped back and no brought out his own B-pistol. Daniels stepped from the path of Lanoir's beam. It missed him and struck the first row of seats. Lanoir calmly crept along the wall through the billowing clouds of smoke. A figure loomed ahead; he raised his gun and fired. The figure fell to one side and fired back. Lanoir staggered and collapsed like a deflated balloon and Silberman hurried on. At his desk, Domgraf-Schwach was groping wildly for his escape button. His fingers touched it, but as he depressed the stud, a blast from Portbane's pistol removed the top of his head. The lifeless corpse stood momentarily, then was whisked to "safety" by the intricate apparatus beneath the desk. "This way!" Portbane shouted, above the sizzle of the Bblasts. "Come on, Tate!" Various beams were turned in his direction. Half the chamber burst apart and thundered down, disintegrating into rubble and flaming debris. He and Tate scrambled for one of the emergency exits. Behind them, the others hurried, firing savagely. Horstokowski found the exit and slid past the jammed lock. He fired as the two figures raced up the passage ahead of him. One of them stumbled, but the other grabbed at him and they hobbled off together. Daniels was a better shot. As Tate and Portbane emerged on the surface, one of Daniels' blasts undercut the taller of the two. Portbane continued running a little way, and then silently pitched face-forward against the side of a plastic house, a gloomy square of opaque blackness against the night sky. "Where'd they go?" Silberman demanded hoarsely, as he appeared at the mouth of the passage. His right arm had been torn away by Lanoir's blast. The stump was seared hard. "I got one of them." Daniels and O'Keefe approached the inert figure warily. "It's Portbane. That leaves Tate. We got three of the four. Not bad, on such short notice." "Tate's damn smart," Silberman panted. "I think he suspected." He scanned the darkness around them. Soldiers, returning from the gas attack, came hurrying up. Searchlights rumbled toward the scene of the shooting. Off in the distance, sirens wailed. "Which way did he go?" Daniels asked. "Over toward the bog." along the narrow street. The others came slowly behind. "You were the first to realize," Horstokowski said to Silberman. "For a while, I believed the test. Then I realized we were being tricked -- the four of them were plotting in unison." "I didn't expect four of them," Silberman admitted. "I knew there was at least one Terran spy among us. But Lanoir..." "I always knew Lanoir was a Terran agent," O'Keefe declared flatly. "I wasn't surprised at the test results. They gave themselves away by faking their findings." Silberman waved over a group of soldiers. "Have Tate picked up and brought here. He's somewhere at the periphery of the camp." The soldiers hurried away, dazed and muttering. Alarm bells dinned shrilly on all sides. Figures scampered back and forth. Like a disturbed ant colony, the whole camp was alive with excitement. "In other words," Daniels said, "the four of them really saw the same as we. They saw B as the positive sample, but they put down A instead." "They knew we'd put down B," O'Keefe said, "since B was the positive sample taken from the attack site. All they had to do was record the opposite. The results seemed to substantiate Lanoir's paranoid theory, which was why Portbane set up the test in the first place. It was planned a long time ago -- part of their overall job." "Lanoir dug up the tapes in the first place!" Daniels exclaimed. "Fisher and he planted them down in the ruins of the ship. Portbane got us to accept his testing device." "What were they trying to do?" Silberman asked suddenly. 'Why were they trying to convince us we're paranoids?" "Isn't it obvious?" O'Keefe replied. "They wanted us to turn ourselves in. The Terran monkey men naturally are trying to choke off the race that's going to supplant them. We won't surrender, of cpurse. The four of them were clever -- they almost had me convinced. When the results flashed up five to four, I had a momentary doubt. But then I realized what an intricate strategy they had worked out." Horstokowski examined his Bpistol. "I'd like to get hold of Tate and wring the whole story from him, the whole damn account of their planning, so we'd have it in black and white." "You're still not convinced?" Daniels inquired. "Of course. But I'd like to hear him admit it." "I doubt if we'll see Tate again," O'Keefe said. "He must have reached the Terran lines by now. He's probably sitting in a big inter-system military transport, giving his story to goldbraid Terran officials. I'll bet they're moving up heavy guns and shock troops while we stand here." "We'd better get busy," Daniels said sharply. "We'll repair the ship and load it with Hbombs. After we wipe out their bases here, we'll carry the war to them. A few raids on the Sol System ought to teach them to leave us alone." Horstokowski grinned. "It'll be an uphill fight -- we're alone against a whole galaxy. But I think we'll take care of them. Terran monkey men."Btangle of weeds. Dripping black stalks of nocturnal vegetables clutched and stirred around him. Poisonous night insects slithered across the surface of the fetid bog. He was covered with slime. His clothing was torn and ripped. Somewhere along the way, he had lost Jiis B-pistol. His right shoulder ached; he could hardly move his arm. Bones broken, probably. He was top numb and dazed to care. He lay face-down in the sticky muck and closed his eyes. He didn't have a chance. Nobody survived in the bogs. He feebly smashed an insect oozing across his neck. It squirmed in his hand and then, reluctantly, died. For a long time, its dead legs kicked. The probing stalk of a stinging snail began tracing webs across Tate's inert body. As the sticky pressure of the snail crept heavily onto him, he heard the first faint far-off sounds of the camp going into action. For a time, it meant nothing to him. Then he understood -- and shuddered miserably, helplessly. The first phase of the big offensive against Earth was already moving into high gear. Would perfect, omnipresent robots, who would do all the work for the human race and release people for purely creative activities, be good for us? Is the old saw true, that unending toil is the lot of man and that without work the human being would become a listless, hedonistic, degenerate thing? Or can a future be envisaged in which mankind has advanced, through psychological and mental train ing, to a point where he can surmount his own baser nature and become truly a rational and happy being, to whom leisure is a creative boon? These. are the questions posed in this strange and somehow frightening sciencefiction novel. Now at Your Newsstand #c A Full Length Novel # Star Shelf son. Ballantine Books, cloth #, paper #c ending, this is one of the best of the Ballantine science fiction novels. Imagine a situation in which the Earth moves, in the normal course of events, out of a region of the Galaxy containing radiations that have, for uncounted ed the electromagnetic phenomena of our world, into an area entirely free of such radiations. And consider how such a speeding up of the electromagnetic forces might react on the minute neurones of the brain. Anderson postulates that, in such a situation, intelligence levels would increase about # -- including every kind of animal as well as human beings. The author further assumes that the change cannot affect animals' or people's glandular reactions, their emotions, their fears or their desires. These grosser functions remain as they always have been. The results are awesome. It is an original idea and is matic counterpoint of what happens to pigs, biochemists, rabbits, farmhands, religious fanatics, dogs, morons, sociologists, tigers, physicists -- and civilization. In the end, the development seems to me to become too grandiose and almost fuzzy, but I think you will agree that, on the whole, this is a first-rate book. ril. Lion Books, #c anthologist is also one of the best in the business -- mainly because she follows none of the established patterns. Her newest contains # stories and the main characters in every one of them definitely rate the question mark after the oneword title. Eight of the tales score A and # are B on my scale of values, and there is enough variety to satisfy the most jaded appetite. Six of the tales have appeared in books by their authors, though none in anthology. Unfortunately, there is no indication of the previous book appearances in the cases of Sprague de Camp and Theodore Sturgeon. The author list includes Don Marquis, H. G. Wells and John Collier, as well as the two mentioned above, plus Eric Frank Russell, Isaac Asimov, John D. MacDonald, Iris Seabright (whose "Egg a Month from All Over" is my favorite in the collection), Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys, August Derleth, Graham Doar, and Walter. M. Miller, Jr. Like all the previous Merril collections, this book contains a number of items from the fantasy side of the ledger (Marquis, Wells, Collier, Sturgeon), but this is okay by me, and I think it will be by you. Sprague de Camp. Gnome Press, # I F there is anything you want to know about the cults of Mu, Atlantis, Lemuria, Gondwanaland; if you are curious about the magnificent idiocies of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and a couple of dozen other occult cosmogonies; if you want, in short, to have a richly documented and entertaining survey of how crazy the crackpots can get, this is the book for you. I found it enthralling from first page to last -- and that's a lot of pages, # of them. It covers everyone from Plato to Ignatius Donnelly, from Ortelius to Velikovsky, from Francis Bacon to the pathetic and pitiable Richard Shaver. A monument of scholarship, the book is at the same time thoroughly readable. It should be on every science fiction writer's reference shelf -- and on that of every reader who is at all interested in the subject. Books, #c rather various collection of Tenn short stories is its introduction, "The Fiction in Science Fiction" -- a sdfind and judicious look at modern science fiction's problems and possibilities by a partisan yet still critical practitioner in the field. The seven short stories and novelets included in the book are all peculiarly Tenn, all readable, and several first-rate. The very best of Tenn, however, has appeared in other editors' anthologies, and none of the stories in this collection has ever seen book publication before. This means that farces like "Liberation of Earth" and "Everybody Loves Irving Bommer" -- not among Tenn's top ten -- are run in along with such excellent items as "The Tenants," "The Custodian," "The Remarkable Flirgleflip," and so on. Still, it is eminently worth the price. Louis de Wohl. J. B. Lippincott Co., # the most peculiar items in the whole history of science fiction. It is, absolutely literally, the struggle between God and the Devil to take over the Martians. And, in addition, it is one of the most ineptly done pieces of romantic theology I have ever read. You start out with a privately invented spaceship. It's powered by the fuel "celestium," which has been stolen from a wrecked Flying Saucer. You have a girl stowaway. And you have God's representative, in the person of Chris, the pilot; the man who is possessed of the Devil in Marmon, the evil promoter; and blind and stupid science in Brandeis, the technician. Who the' girl is, I haven't yet figured out -- not Eve, certainly. The Martians, nice people though they are, have never learned about Good and Evil, and that is almost too bad for them. They nearly "fall," just as did the human race in Eden. However, the Man of God (Chris) wins in the end, and Mars -- and our world, too -- is saved, for the time being, at least. Religion and science fiction are not at all incompatible, any more than religion and science are. But a noble theme is no excuse for poor craftsmanship. gateway to elsewhere by Murray Leinster; T HE Vogt. Ace Books, #c T HE third bargain in Don Wollheim's new paper book series contains one of van Vogt's best super-duper tales (if you haven't read it before, don't miss it here!) and a Leinster never before published in book form, though it should have been. Gateway to Elsewhere, which had magazine publication in #, is a very light, lively and amusing pastiche on one of the author's favorite ideas, the complications resulting from interconnections between two parallel worlds. Here he imagines a world, parallel to ours, in which djinns and efreets are real and have their own highly individual characteristics. There is also a pleasant young this-world hero, name' of Tony Gregg, who has a bothersome New England conscience, which nevertheless does not inhibit him much. A richly contrived plot makes this improbable assortment of characters into a very acceptable way of passing a couple of relaxing hours. Wernher von Braun. University I N addition to being one of the most beautifully designed and . printed books of # (it was chosen as one of the # best books of the year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts), this slim -- under # pages -- volume is also a valuable though highly technical report on the innumerable problems, and some of the possibilities, of interplanetary flight. It really is not for laymen, but for engineers and similarly pretrained people. However, even the ordinary reader can, if he is sufficiently interested and knows how to skip judiciously, get a vivid picture of what one of the world's top experts on the subject thinks a project for a flight to Mars -- and the flight itself, round trip -- would involve. The book is based on material by von Braun that appeared in the German magazine Weltraumfahrt in #. edited by Garret Ford. Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., # A LL but five of the fifteen stories in this book are completely unsuitable for publication in any form, book or otherwise. Of the five good ones, those by Ray Bradbury and Cordwainer Smith (the unforgettable "Scanners Die in Vain") have been previously anthologized. The delightful fable by Isaac Asimov and James MacCreigh called "The Little Man on the Subway," Alfred Coppel's good but rather obvious "What Goes Up," and Robert Ernest Gilbert's surprisingly effective bucolic terror tale called "Footprints" are all worth reading. Of the rest, the less said, the better. Donald H. Tuck. Available at # from Howard DeVore, # Weddel Street, Dearborn, Mich. fiction a serious hobby will almost have to have this remarkable book. It is a #-page volume, # by # inches in size, which was compiled and beautifully mimeographed by a devoted amateur who lives in Hobart, Tasmania, an island province of Australia. Its first # pages consist of an encyclopedic listing of important books, authors, magazines, and story series, all with brief descriptive notes and biographies -- the tables of contents of all anthologies are given in full! The appendices contain lists of all the pertinent magazines, dead or alive, with charts of every issue of each one published to mid#; pseudonyms; paperbooks (most of them not in the first section of the book); names and addresses of book and magazine publishers in the field; and a supplementary list of authors, mainly addenda to the names in the first encyclopedic part. Even though not absolutely complete, the book nevertheless is worth its very low price. Note. Crown Publishers, Inc., have put out The Second Galaxy Science Fiction Reader, edited by one H. L. Gold. The price is # for over # pages of wonderful stuff. It contains #I of Galaxy's best stories since the First Reader came out, early in #. This is an excellent way of preserving favorite tales in hardbound form. library when kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Easy to hold, protected from rough handling, and constantly increase in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. What are Smags, Firgels and Queels? Cats in a bag... and Gregor was holding the bag! "E can't pass it up," Arnold was saying. small initial investment, immediate return. Are you listening?" Richard Gregor nodded wearily. It was a very dull day in the planetary Decontamination Service, exactly like every other day. Gregor was playing solitaire. Arnold, his partner, was at his desk, his feet propped on a pile of unpaid bills. Shadows moved past their glass door, thrown by people going to Mars Steel, Neo-Roman Novelties, Alpha Dura Products, or any other offices on the same floor. But nothing broke the dusty "What are we waiting for?" Arnold demanded loudly. "Do we do it or don't we?" "It's not our line," Gregor said. "We're planetary decontaminationists. Remember?" "But no one wants a planet decontaminated," Arnold stated. That, unfortunately, was true. After successfully cleansing Ghost Ace had had a short rush of business. But then expansion into space had halted. People were busy consolidating their gains, building towns, plowing fields, constructing roads. The movement would begin again. The human race would expand as long as there was anything to expand into. But, for the moment, business was terrible. "Consider the possibilities," Arnold said. "Here are all these people on their bright, shiny new worlds. They need farm and food animals shipped from home -- " he paused dramatically -- "by us." "We're not equipped to handle livestock," Gregor pointed out. "We have a ship. What else do we need?" "Everything. Mostly knowledge and experience. Transporting live animals through space is extremely delicate work. It's a job for experts. What would you do if a cow came down with hoofand-mouth-disease between here and Omega IV?" "We will ship only hardy, mutated species. We will have them medically examined. And I will personally sterilize the ship before they come on board." "All right, dreamer," Gregor said. "Prepare yourself for the blow. The Trigale Combine does all animal shipping in this sector of space. They don't look kindly upon competitors -- therefore, they have no competitors. How do you plan to buck them?" "We'll undersell them." "And starve." "We're starving now," Arnold said. "Starving is better than being 'accidentally' holed by a Trigale tug at the port of embarkation. Or finding that someone has loaded our water tanks with kerosene. Or that our oxygen tanks were never filled at all." "What an imagination you have!" Arnold said nervously. "Those figments of my imagination have already happened. Trigale wants to be alone in the field and it is. By accident, you might say, if you like gory gags." Just then, the door opened. Arnold swung his feet off the desk and Gregor swept his cards into a drawer. Their visitor was an outworlder, to judge by his stocky frame, small head and pale green skin. He marched directly up to Arnold. "They'll be at the Trigale Central Warehouse in three days," he said. "So soon, Mr. Vens?" Arnold asked. "Oh, yes. Had to transport the Smags pretty carefully, but the Queels have been on hand for several days." "Fine. This is my partner," Arnold said, turning to Gregor, who was blinking rapidly. "Happy." Vens shook Gregor's hand firmly. "Admire you men. Free enterprise, competition -- believe in it. You've got the route?" "All taped," Arnold said. "My partner is prepared to blast off at any moment." "I'll go directly to Vermoine II and meet you there. Good show." He turned and left. what have you done?" "I've been making us rich, that's what I've done," Arnold retorted. "Shipping livestock?" "Yes." "In Trigale territory?" "Yes." "Let me see the contract." Arnold produced it. It stated Decontamination (and Transportation) Service promised to deliver five Smags, five Firgels and ten Queels to the Vermoine solar system. Pickup was to be made at the Trigale Central Warehouse, delivery to Main Warealso had the option of building its Own warehouse. Said animals were to arrive intact, alive, healthy, happy, productive, etcetera. There were heavy forfeiture clauses in event of loss of animals, their arrival unalive, unhealthy, unproductive, etcetera. The document read like a temporary armistice between unfriendly nations. "You actually signed this death warrant?" Gregor asked increduously. "Sure. All you have to do is pick up the beasts, pop over to Vermoine and drop them," "I? And what will you be doing?" "I'll be right here, backing you all the way," Arnold said. "Back me aboard ship." "No, no -- impossible. I get deathly sick at the very sight of a Queel." "And that's how I feel about this deal. Let's stick your neck out for a change." "But I'm the research department," Arnold objected, perspiring freely. "We set it up that way. Remember?" Gregor remembered, sighed and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. They began at once to put their ship in order. The hold was divided into three compartments, each to carry a separate species. All were oxygen breathers and all could sustain life at about seventy degrees Fahrenheit, so that was no problem. The correct foods were put on board. In three days, when they were as ready as they would ever be, Arnold decided to accompany Gregor as far as the Trigale Central Warehouse. It was an uneventful trip to Trigale, but Gregor landed on the approach platform with considerable trepidation. There were too many stories about the Combine for him to feel entirely at home in their stronghold. He had taken what precautions he could. The ship had been completely fueled and provisioned at Luna Station and no Trigale man would be allowed on board. However, if the personnel of the station were worried about the battered old spaceship, they hid it nicely. The ship was dragged to the. loading platform by a pair of tractors and squeezed in between two sleek Trigale express freighters. loading, Gregor went inside to sign the manifests. A suave Trigale official produced the papers and looked on with interest as Gregor read them over. "Loading Smags, eh?" the official inquired politely. "That's right," Gregor said, wondering what a Smag looked like. "Queels and Firgels, too," the official mused. "Shipping them all together. You've got a lot of courage, Mr. Gregor." "I have? Why?" "You know the old saying -- 'When you travel with Smags, don't forget your magnifying glass.' " "I hadn't heard that one." The official grinned amiably and shook Gregor's hand. "After this trip, you'll be able to make up your own sayings. The very best of luck, Mr. Gregor. Unofficially, of course." Gregor smiled feebly and returned to the loading platform. The Smags, Firgels and Queels were on board, each in their own compartment. Arnold had turned on the air, checked the temperature and given them all a day's ration. "Well, you're off," Arnold said cheerfully. "I'm off, all right," Gregor admitted with no cheer whatever. He climbed aboard, ignoring a faint snicker from the watching crowd. The ship was tractored to a blastoff strip and soon Gregor was in space, bound for a tiny warehouse circling in orbit around Vermoine II. There was always plenty to do on the first day in space. Gregor checked his instruments, then went over the main drive and the tanks, pipes and wiring, to make sure nothing had broken loose in the blastoff. Then he decided to inspect his cargo. It was about time he found out what they looked like. The Queels, in the forward starboard compartment, looked like immense snowballs. Gregor knew that they were prized for their wool, which commanded a top price everywhere. Apparently they hadn't gotten used to free-fall, for their food was untouched. He left them banking clumsily off walls and ceiling and bleating plaintively for solid ground. The Firgels were no problem at all. They were big, leathery lizards, whose purpose on a farm Gregor couldn't guess. At present, they were dormant and would remain so throughout the trip. Aft, the five Smags barked merrily when they saw him. They were friendly, herbivorous mammals and they seemed to enjoy free-fall very much. Satisfied, Gregor floated back to the control room. It was a good beginning. Trigale hadn't bothered him and his animals were doing all right in space. This trip might be just a milk run, he decided. After testing his radio and control switches, Gregor set the alarm and turned in. H E awoke, eight hours later, unrefreshed and with a splitting headache. His coffee tasted like slag and he could barely focus on the instrument panel. The effects of canned air, he decided, and radioed Arnold that all was well. But halfway through the conversation, he found he could hardly keep his eyes open. "Signing off," he said, yawning deeply. "Stuffy in here. Going to take a nap." "Stuffy?" Arnold asked, his voice very distant over the radio. "It shouldn't be. The air circulators -- " Gregor found that the controls were swaying drunkenly and beginning to go out of focus. He leaned against the panel and closed his eyes. "Gregor!" "Hmm?" " Gregor ! Check your oxygen content!" Gregor propped one eye open long enough to read the dial. He found, to his amusement, that the carbon dioxide concentration had reached a level he had never seen before. "No oxygen," he told Arnold. "I'll fix it after nap." "Sabotage!" Arnold shouted. "Wake up, Gregor!" With a gigantic effort, Gregor reached forward and turned on the emergency air tank. The blast of air sobered him. He stood up, swaying uncertainly, and splashed some water on his face. "The animals!" Arnold was screaming. "See about the animals!" Gregor turned on the auxiliary air supply for all three compartments and hurried down the corridor. The Firgels were still alive and dormant. The Smags apparently hadn't even noticed the difference. Two of the Queels had  passed out, but they were reviving. And, in their compartment, Gregor found out what had happened. There was no sabotage. The ventilators in wall and ceiling, through which the ship's air circulated, were jammed shut with Queel wool. Tufts of fleece floated in the still air, looking like a slow-motion snowfall. "Of course, of course," Arnold aid, when Gregor reported by radio. "Didn't I warn you that Queels have to be sheared twice a week? No, I guess I forgot to. Here's what the book says: 'The Queel -- Queelis Tropicalis -- is a small, wool-bearing mammal, distantly related to the Terran Sheep. Queels are natives of Tensis V, but have been successfully introduced on other heavygravity planets. Garments woven of Queel wool are fireproof, insectproof, rotproof and will last almost indefinitely, due to the metallic content in the wool. Queels should be sheared twice a week. They reproduce feemishly.' " "No sabotage," Gregor commented. "No sabotage, but you'd better start shearing those Queels," Arnold said. Gregor signed off, found a pair of tin snips in his tool kit and went to work on the Queels. But the metallic wool simply blunted the cutting edges. It seemed that Queels had to be sheared with special hard-alloy tools. He gathered as much of the floating wool as he could find and cleared the ventilators again. After a last inspection, he went to have his supper. His beef stew was filled with oily, metallic Queel wool. Disgusted, he turned in. that the creaking old ship was still holding a true course. Her main drive was operating efficiently and the outlook seemed much brighter, especially after he found that the Firgels were still dormant and the Smags were doing nicely. But when Gregor inspected the Queels, he found that they hadn't touched a morsel of food since coming on board. It was serious now. He called Arnold for advice. "Very simple," Arnold told him, after searching through several reference books. "Queels haven't any throat muscles. They rely on gravity to get food down. But in free-fall, there isn't any gravity, so they can't get the food down." It was simple, Gregor knew, one of those little things you would never consider on Earth. But space, with its artificial environment, aggravated even the simplest problems. "You'll have to spin ship to give them some gravity," Arnold said. Gregor did some quick mental multiplication. "That'll use up a lot of power." "Then the book says you can push the food down their throats by hand. You roll it up in a moist ball and reach in as far as the elbow and -- " Gregor signed off and activated the side jets. His feet settled to the floor and he waited anxiously. The Queels began to feed with an abandon that would have done a Queel-farmer's heart good. He would have to refuel at the Vermoine II space warehouse and that would bring up their operating expenses, for fuel was expensive in newly colonized systems. Still, there would be a good margin of profit left over. He returned to normal ship's duties. The spaceship crawled through the immensity of space. Feeding time came again. Gregor fed the Queels and went on to the Smag compartment. He opened the door and called out, "Come and get it!" Nothing came. The compartment was empty. Gregor felt a curious sensation in his stomach. It was impossible. The Smags couldn't be gone. They were playing a joke on him, hiding somewhere. But there was no place in the compartment for five large Smags to hide. The trembling sensation was turning into a full-grown quiver. Gregor remembered the forfeiture clauses in event of loss, damage, etcetera, etcetera. "Here, Smag! Here, SmagF' he shouted. There was no answer. He inspected the walls, ceiling, door and ventilators, on the chance that the Smags had somehow bored through. There were no marks. Then he heard a faint noise near his feet. Looking down, he saw something scuttle past him. It was one of his Smags, shrunken to about two inches in length. He found the others hiding in a corner, all just as small. What had the Trigale official said? "When you travel with Smags, don't forget your magnifying glass." good, satisfying shock reaction. Gregor closed the door carefully and sprinted to the radio. " Very odd," Arnold said, after radio contact had been made. "Shrunken, you say? I'm looking it up right now. Hmm... You didn't produce artificial gravity, did you?" "Of course. To let the Queels feed." "Shouldn't have done that," Arnold said. "Queels are lightgravity creatures." "How was I supposed to know?" "When they're subjected to an unusual -- for them -- gravity, they shrink down to microscopic size, lose consciousness and die." "But you told me to produce artificial gravity." "Oh, no! I simply mentioned, in passing, that that was one way of making Queels feed. I suggested hand-feeding." Gregor resisted an almost overpowering urge to rip the radio out of the wall. He said, "Arnold, the Smags are light-gravity animals. Right?" "Right." "And the Queels are heavy gravity. Did you know that when you signed the contract?" Arnold gulped for a moment, then cleared his throat. "Well, that did seem to make it a bit more difficult. But it pays very well." "Sure, if you can get away with it. What do I do now?" "Lower the temperature," Arnold replied confidently. "Smags stabilize at the freezing point." "Humans freeze at the freezing point," Gregor said. "All right, signing off." Gregor put on all the extra clothes he could find and turned up the ship's refrigeration system. Within an hour, the Smags had returned to their normal size. So far, so good. He checked the Queels. The cold seemed to stimulate them. They were livelier than ever and bleated for more food. He fed them. After eating a ham-and-wool sandwich, Gregor turned in. The next day's inspection revealed that there were now fifteen Queels on board. The ten original adults had given birth to five young. All were hungry. Gregor fed them. He set it down as a normal hazard of transporting mixed groups of livestock. They should have anticipated this and segregated the beasts by sexes as well as species. When he looked in on the Queels again, their number had increased to thirty-eight. Arnold asked via radio, his voice concerned.  "Yes. And they show no signs of stopping." "Well, we should have expected it." "Why?" Gregor demanded baffledly. "I told you. Queels reproduce feemishly." "I thought that's what you said. What does it mean?" "Just what it sounds like," said Arnold, irritated. "How did you ever get through school? It's freezing-point parthenogenesis." "That does it," Gregor said grimly. "I'm turning this ship around." "You can't! We'll be wiped out!" "At the rate those Queels are reproducing, there won't be room for me if I keep going. A Queel will have to pilot this ship." "Gregor, don't get panicky. There's a perfectly simple answer." "I'm listening." "Increase the air pressure and moisture content. That'll stop them." "Sure. And it'll probably turn the Smags into butterflies." "There, won't be any other effects." Turning back was no solution, anyhow. The ship was near the halfway mark. Now he could get rid of the beasts just as quickly by delivering them. Unless he dumped them all into space. It was a tempting though impractical thought. With increased air pressure and moisture content, the Queels stopped reproducing. They numbered forty-seven now and Gregor had to spend most of his time clearing the ventilators of wool. A slow-motion, surrealistic snowstorm raged in the corridors and engine room, in the water tanks and under his shirt. Gregor ate tasteless meals of food and wool, with pie and wool for dessert. He was beginning to feel like a Queel. But then a bright spot approached on his horizon. The Vermoine sun began glowing on his forward screen. In another day, he would arrive, deliver his cargo and be free to go home to his dusty office, his bills and his solitaire game. That night, he opened a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of the trip. It helped get the taste of wool out of his mouth and he fell into bed, mildly and pleasantly tipsy. But he couldn't sleep. The temperature was still dropping. Beads of moisture, on the walls of the ship were solidifying into ice. He had to have heat. Let's see -- if he turned on the heaters, the Smags would shrink. Unless he stopped the gravity. In which case, the fortyseven Queels wouldn't eat. To hell with the Queels. He was getting too cold to operate the ship. H E brought the vessel out of its spin and turned on the heaters. For an hour, he waited, shivering and stamping his feet. The heaters merrily drained fuel from the engines, but produced no heat. That was ridiculous. He turned them on full blast. In another hour, the temperature had sunk below zero. Although Vermoine was now visible, Gregor didn't know if he could even control the ship for a landing. He had just finishing building a small fire on the cabin floor, using the ship's more combustible furnishings as fuel, when the radio spluttered into life, "I was just thinking," Arnold said. "I hope you haven't been changing gravity and pressure too abruptly." "What difference does it make?" Gregor asked distractedly"You might unstabilize the Firgels. Rapid temperature and pressure changes could take them out of their dormant state. You'd better check." Gregor hurried off. He opened the door to the Firgel compartment, peered in and shuddered. The Firgels were awake and croaking. The big lizards were floating around their compartment, covered with frost. A blast of sub-zero air roared into the passageway. Gregor slammed the door and hurried back to the radio. "Of course they're covered with frost," Arnold said. "Those Firgels are going to Vermoine I. Hot place, Vermoine I -- right near the sun. The Firgels are cold-fixers -- best portable air-conditioners in the Universe." "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" Gregor demanded. "It would have upset you. Besides, they would have stayed dormant if you hadn't started fooling with gravity and pressure." "The Firgels are going to Vermoine I. What about the Smags?" "Vermoine II. Tiny planet, not much gravity." "And the Queels?" "You idiot!" Gregor shouted. "You give me a cargo like that and expect me to balance it?" If Arnold had been in the ship at that moment, Gregor would have strangled him. "Arnold," he said, very slowly, "no more schemes, no more ideas -- promise?" "Oh, all right," Arnold agreed. "No need to get peevish about it." Gregor signed off and went to work, trying to warm the ship. He succeeded in boosting it to twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit before the overworked heaters gave up. By then, Vermoine II was dead ahead. of wood he hadn't burned and set the tape. He was punching a course for the Main Warehouse, in orbit around Vermoine II, when he heard an ominous grumbling noise. At the same time, half a dozen dials on the control panel flopped over to zero. Wearily, he floated back to the engine room. His main drive was dead and it didn't take any special mechanical aptitude to figure out why. Queel wool floated in the engine room's still air. Queel wool was in the bearings and in the lubricating system, clogging the cooling fans. The metallic wool made an ideal abrasive for highly polished engine parts. It was a wonder the drive had held up this long. He returned to the control room. He couldn't land the ship without the main drive. Repairs would have to be made in space, eating into their profits. Fortunately, the ship steered by rocket side jets. With no mechanical system to break down, he could still maneuver. It would be close, but he could still make contact with the artificial satellite that served as the Vermoine warehouse. nounced as he squeezed the ship into an orbit around the satellite. "Request permission to land." There was a crackle of static. "Satellite speaking," a voice answered. "Identify yourself, please." bound to Vermoine II from Trigale Central Warehouse," Gregor elaborated. "My papers are in order." He repeated the routine request for landing privilege and leaned back in his chair. It had been a struggle, but all his animals were alive, intact, healthy, happy, etcetera, etcetera. profit. But all he wanted now was to get out of this ship and into a hot bath. He wanted to spend the rest of his life as far from Queels, Smags and Firgels as possible. He wanted... "Landing permission refused." "What?" "Sorry, but we're full up at present. If you want to hold your present orbit, I believe we can accommodate you in about three months." "Hold on!" Gregor yelped. "You can't do this! I'm almost out of food, my main drive is shot and I can't stand these animals much longer!" "Sorry." "You can't turn me away," Gregor said hoarsely. "This is a public warehouse. You have to -- " "Public? I beg your pardon, sir. This warehouse is owned and operated by the Trigale Combine." T HE radio went dead. Gregor stared at it for several minutes. Trigale! Of course they hadn't bothered him at their Central Warehouse. They had him by simply refusing landing privileges at their Vermoine warehouse. And the hell of it was, they were probably within their rights. He couldn't land on the planet. Bringing the ship down without a main drive would be suicide. And there was no other space warehouse in the Vermoine solar system. Well, he had brought the animals almost to the warehouse. Certainly Mr. Vens would understand the circumstances and judge his intentions. He contacted Vens on Vermoine II and explained the situation. "Not at the warehouse?" Vens asked. "Well, within fifty miles of the warehouse," Gregor said. "That really won't do. I'll take the animals, of course. They're mine. But there are forfeiture clauses in the event of incomplete delivery." "You wouldn't invoke them, would you?" Gregor pleaded. "My intentions -- " "They don't interest me," Vens said. "Margin of profit and all that. We colonists need every little bit." He signed off. Perspiring in the cold room, Gregor called Arnold and told him the news. "It's unethical!" Arnold declared in outrage. "But legal." "I know, damn it. I have to have time to think." "You'd better find something good," Gregor said. "I'll call you back." Gregor spent the next few hours feeding his animals, picking Queel wool out of his hair and burning more furniture on the deck of the ship. When the radio buzzed, he crossed his fingers before answering it "Arnold?" "No, this is Vens." "Listen, Mr. Vens," Gregor said, "if you'd just give us a little more time, we could work out this thing amicably. I'm sure -- " "Oh, you've got me over a barrel, all right," Vens snapped. "It's perfectly legal, too. I checked. Shrewd operation, sir, very shrewd operation. I'm sending a tug for the animals." "But the forfeiture clause -- " "Naturally, I cannot invoke it." Vens signed off. Shrewd operation? What had Arnold done? He called Arnold's office. "This is Mr. Arnold's secretary," a young feminine voice answered. "Mr. Arnold has left for the day." "Left? Secretary? Is this the the wrong Arnold, haven't I?" "No, sir, this is Mr. Arnold's Warehouse Service. Did you wish to place an order? We have a first-class warehouse in the Vermoine system, in an orbit near Vermoine II. We handle light, medium and heavy gravity products. Personal supervision by our Mr. Gregor. And I think you'll find that our rates are quite attractive." S O that was what Arnold had done -- he had turned their ship into a warehouse! On paper, at least. And their contract did give them the option of supplying their own warehouse. Clever! But that nuisance Arnold could never leave well enough alone. Now he wanted to go into the warehouse business! "What did you say, sir?" "I said this is the warehouse speaking. I want to leave a message for Mr. Arnold." "Yes, sir?"  "Tell Mr. Arnold to cancel all orders," Gregor said grimly. "His warehouse is coming home as fast as it can hobble." Do You Know... that the Adept uses in mastering the forces of the Universe? by a maze of conflicting and obscure "laws" and "principles"... of time-consuming "ceremonies," "meditations" and "affirmations"... because your best efforts seem void of practical results... analysis comprising the entire field of metaphysical practice. if, after examination, you are not # money order to... P. O. Box # Hollywood #, California With each subscription at regular price -- take your pick of these outX ho by Pohl  Kornbluth Mi" man (Published in Galaxy  by Alfred Bester # # # #c pages price # # Packed with the best from  Enter  Or extend my subscription # # # And send me the following books: No torment that had ever been inflicted on mankind was more fiendish than Satan... for he was worse than n devil... he was a man! eastern horizon, a bluisfi gtoWffiCEerea, TujpnighFihgS atre mendous domelike structure. Seconds passed. Then( the sky roared angrily above fc(fmen h vJl  A, f. jU who huddled together in one of the craters, a hundred yards from the mile-wide edifice. Art Grant raised his head cautiously over the lip of the depression. Almost directly ahead, a hundred-foot-high mound of earth lay against the sloping side of the dome, thrown up there, no doubt, by an earlier generation's nuclear missile. "What are we waiting for, Captain?" a husky voice whispered almost in his ear. It was Stausman, the Oxfordeducated German. Art slid back down the concavity of the crater. "We'll be ready to go in another ten or fifteen minutes, I guess." "Fifteen minute, hell!" It was the Russian, Karneiv. "Go now, I say! Go and be finish with job more quickly!" "Is it not mon capitaine who commands this squad?" Philip Latour, Parisian, demanded chidingly. Thunder boomed, closer this time. "If we wait until the height of the storm," Art explained patiently, "there's a chance thathe more delicate detection devices .will be affected by electrical discharge." "Voila!" exclaimed the Frenchman. "Now you have the reason, have you not?" But Karneiv Wasn't satisfied. "And the storm? What if it not come this way?" Art moved his shoulders. "Then we'll go back and sit it out until the next one. It's better to wait a few days than to waste five years of training." " right -- closer this time. Art counted seconds until the thunder came. The storm, he calculated, should sweep over them in less than five minutes. The silence that followed was broken only by the rhythmic clack-clack of the radiation counters strapped on their wrists... Art read the luminous dial on his instrument -- twenty Roentgen rays an hour. He went over to the two ponderous metal cases that lay in the crater with them -- had been with them for over an hour. The glowing needle swung up to twenty-five Rs. "Gamma leakage the same?" asked Stausman. "No change." "Then we've had about a twenty-R dose so far." "More or less," Art acknowledged. "We still have five hours left to get rid of this stuff without being in any danger." The Frenchman rose and stretched his thin frame. "And, mes amis," he asked, "it is all decided that I, Latour, will be the one who will -- how do you say? -- mix the ingredients to make the critical mass?" "Like hell!" Karneiv lunged up. "It was a Russian who was first human to set off nuclear device by hand -- in Great Palace of Kremlin. Will be Russian this time!" Stausman's mastery of English broke under the impact of intense resentment. "Nein! Will be me!" he shouted, thumping his chest. Then in a calmer though still determined voice, he said, "I volunteered with the understanding I would set off the device!" Latour's angry face was illuminated by another flash of lightning as he stood before the German, his bony fists knotted. "Latour will be the one! I, Latour, will -- " "Shut up!" Art's voice rasped. "We can decide that later." But he knew there would be no decision. He was in command. And he would simply order them to return after they had helped bring the components of the device to the most vulnerable spot in the dome. Sulking, the other three dropped back to the ground. Then it started to rain -- a vicious, pelting downpour that soaked them to the skin within seconds and sent rivulets streaming down their faces and cascading from their chins and elbows and from the tips of their weapon holsters. Art grasped a handle of one of the metal boxes. "Let's go!" Latour took the other handle and, under the great weight of the container, they struggled over the lip of the crater. Stausman and Karneiv followed with the other case. In the driving rain, they plodded toward the dome, bending outward against the pull of their burdens. "The Shrine of Satan!" Latour grunted, using both hands to support his half of the load. "Ten for one man. Truly he is le diableP' the dome could riot have been better located for their purpose had they supervised its construction. Its top, where they now stood in the relentless rain, was only a few feet below the huge barrel of one of the thousands of missile ejectors that ringed the squat structure like a halo of spikes. Art had thrown a rope over the barrel and the others had shinned up to a perch on top of the metal cylinder. Now he tied the rope to a second ponderous container and watched as they hoisted it up. Then, hand over hand, he climbed to join them. "Sacrebleu!" the Frenchman exclaimed. "Will not the weather himself stir e diable in his Shrine this night?" Art laughed, throwing a leg over the end of the barrel. "Afraid not, Latour -- not through a shell a thousand feet thick. But we'll see what we can do." He dropped onto the slanting inner surface of the rifle and caught Latour's hand, as the Frenchman leaped down beside him. The two then struggled to lower the heavy boxes as Stausman and Karneiv handed them down. Assembled in the barrel, they moved cautiously down the slope. The dome trembled. Then another vicious flash and roar erupted less than a mile from the edifice, lighting even the inside of the missile ejector with intense purplish illumination. Stausman shouted, "That was no bolt, Captain! Satan fired an interceptor missile! It exploded the incoming missile right outside!" Art checked his watch. "They've jumped the gun! This can play hell with our plan!" Latour sneered. "A fine . example of Prussian coordination, is it not?" "The instructions," Stausman snapped back, "were relayed through the French underground -- don't forget!" Art lifted his burden again and started forward in a lumbering run, pulling the Frenchman along with him. "Let's get out of here before Satan starts firing salvos back." Discarding caution, they raced down the incline. "Mon Dieu!" the Frenchman panted. "This rifle, is it not in the German attack sector?" "Right in the center of it," Stausman replied. "Main European battery. It'll be one of the first to fire back. Right, Captain?" A RT didn't answer. He was staring ahead -- at a faint glow tht picked up a thousand reflections along the rifling of the barrel. "A light!" Karneiv exclaimed. "But why? He need no light in outer defense! Loading, firing -- all is automatic, no?" "Of course," Stausman acknowledged, disturbed. "Even the assembly of the missiles." They reached the end of the rifle and climbed out through a four-foot-wide slit along one side, squeezing past a metallic conveyor belt that bore a motionless stringof sleek-nosed projectiles. Leaping onto the concrete landing, Art and Latour reached up to take the metal containers and to help the other two men. Almost as soon as they cleared the area of the belt, gears whirred and the line of projectiles inched forward, depositing the first missile into the barrel. "It'll fire in seconds!" Art warned frantically. "The backlash of gases!" Again, they paired off and struggled with the containers, stumbling down a wide corridor that paralleled the perimeter of the dome. The concrete all around them shook and a wave of concussion pounded their eardrums. "Already he fire back!" Karneiv shouted.L ' with them and they coughed spasmodically, slowing their pace. The breech of the barrel through which they had entered now lay hidden around the curve of the corridor behind them. But visible ahead was the projectile belt and protruding breech of the next weapon. As they approached, the unit loaded a missile. Another blast from their rear shook the monstrous structure and more hot gases swirled in the passageway. Art stumbled and lost his grip on the metal case. It crashed against his leg, tearing cloth and scraping a strip of skin from his calf. Stausman helped him up. "Voila!" Latour shouted. "There it is! The passage that goes inward!" He was pointing to a darker corridor that branched off to their left. They raced into it as the rifle immediately behind them fired. Art stopped to inspect the bleeding wound in his leg. Karneiv stopped to look, too. "Is unserious," he said. "Perhaps. But I'd better wrap it up temporarily so we can go on." Art tore a strip from the ripped trouser leg and bound it around the wound. "The Yankees -- they not able to stand a little pain, eh?" Karneiv said sarcastically. "They prove that on Asiatic mainland; in Ukraine during Third War. Comrade Captain Starnoff -- he should be leader to this expedition," he muttered. "He would have -- " "Quiet!" Stausman cautioned. "Satan may be listening." " Quite right, gentlemen." The voice seemed to erupt from the very walls. "This is -- let us see -- Expedition Number Ninety-three. The first one in over ten years... Welcome, gentlemen! Let us sincerely hope that we shall derive equal enjoyment from your brief visit." "Le diable!" Latour looked fearfully down the corridor. "He's detected us already!" Stausman said hopelessly. Machinery grumbled and a concrete partition slid into place, closing off the radial corridor at the point where they had entered it. "Didn't you imagine you'd find even more thorough safeguards within the Shrine than without? You should have surmised as much, knowing that not a single member of the previous ninetytwo expeditions returned to the outside." Art glanced over his head. He could see speakers, spaced at intervals along the ceiling, together with lights, audio pickups and shining lenses that were, no doubt, part of a video detection system. "Again I say welcome, gentlemen -- a cordial welcome from the Supreme Autocrat of The Associated Nations... from, as you refer to me, Satan. May you enjoy your brief expedition." Art turned despairingly to the others. "I didn't think detection would come so soon. We now have little hope of gaining our objective. Whoever wishes to return has my permission to do so." "And you, mon ami?" "You know my answer, Latour. Thirty years ago my father led Expedition Number Eightyfive." Latour patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. "Then, together, mon capitaine, we will extract la vengeance from le diable." Art turned to Karneiv. "And you?" "If the Frenchman go, and the Yankee go, then without question the Russian go, too!" he said arrogantly. "Stausman?" The German laughed. "In the absence of pneumatic drills to break through that thing -- " he motioned toward the concrete panel which barred their retreat -- "you'll have to count me in, too, Captain." T HE radial corridor ended at an intersection with a peripheral passageway. As they approached, a concrete panel slid shut to block the left-hand branch of the new tunnel. After they had hauled the metal containers almost a block past the intersection, they paused to rest again as Art adjusted the bandage on his leg. Karneiv grumbled angrily. "We get nowhere if Yankee stop to rub leg all time." His face set grimly, Art stared at the big Russian. "In training," he reminded sharply, "we decided on four rest periods an hour." The Russian stepped closer. "But we not know then we would be detected so -- " A cry from the Frenchman drew their stares. He was pointing to the floor a few yards down the corridor. Almost indiscernible against the gray concrete was a human skeleton. Ahead was another, then farther on, they found three more. " Mon dieu!" Latour exclaimed. "The dead ones -- they are all along here!" Stausman laughed briefly. "Frenchmen, no doubt." Latour squinted at him. "You will please explain how you deduce that." "They're the easiest to kill." The German's voice was devoid of jocularity. "If there are any dead Germans, you'll find them closer to the center of the Shrine." Latour swore in French and lunged for the larger man. Art stepped between them. "Save it till later," he ordered. Tensely, Stausman and Latour started back for the crates, Art and the Russian following. "This no shell." Karneiv swung an arm in the air around him. "All one solid hunk concrete with tunnels. Small wonder no attack had success." Stausman stopped to wait for Art. "Our principal mistake, I think, Captain, has been in not establishing a system of getting information back to World Underground headquarters, where it could benefit future expeditions." "I wonder," Art answered thoughtfully, "whether the other ninety-two expeditions had the same idea just about here." Stausman shrugged indifferently. "You may be right." The Frenchman paused before reaching down for his handle of the case. "How long, gentlemen -- how many expeditions before le diable is dethroned?" Art hoisted his end of the container. "Let's hope this is the last."lornly. "I cannot be that optimistic, monsieur le capitaine. It has been three hundred years now. Ever since -- " "Ever since," Stausman broke in, "the French allowed Jornal Sakoran, the Immortal, to establish the nucleus of his Shrine on the Continent." "I do not believe he is immortal," Karneiv -- interjected. "We go about this wrong!" the Russian continued. "What we do? We make secret appropriations -- every year, from every national area in Associated Nations. We equip expeditionary force with different nationalities, so that will be no chance for any one nation to control Shrine and take up where Satan leave off -- " "We trust each other, don't we?" Stausman asked sarcastically. "But is all wrong," Karneiv went on. "Last year alone, East Yankee area almost six hundred past ten year, we put almost thousand men in Secret Corps all over whole world. What it get us?" "Shut up!" Art roared. Then in a whisper, "Don't you realize he can hear everything in here?" "What the hell!" the Russian answered explosively. "He know already. He got spies all over. That's all he use money from national areas for -- to keep up spy system, pay off agents." They filed around several skeletons that were lying in the center of the corridor. "I say we should attack spy system!" Karneiv was arguing. "Then Satan not know on which national area to make retaliation." Art shook his head. "Tried that once. He just sat back and lobbed missiles into all the areas until his underground communication lines were restored. Killed several hundred persons all over the world that time." Latour sneered. "Three thousand and I still would have resisted! Three hundred thousand died in the first hour of the Third War, is it not so?" "Could have been three million," Art reminded him. "Destroying hundreds was just a -- threat." " see you have arrived at the first check point." A RT started, almost dropping his end of the case, as the voice boomed from the ceiling and reverberated up and down the corridor from a score of speakers. "We shall have roll-call afterward." The speakers went dead and silence seized the corridor once more. "Radioactivity up !" Latour shouted, bringing his wrist count ter before his face. Art was suddenly conscious of the vicious chattering of his detector. He jerked his head toward the metal case he had dropped, to see whether its lid had somehow been jarred loose. But it was intact, as was the other. Now the counter was reacting so violently that it was setting up vibrations in his wrist. "One hundred Rs!" the Frenchman gasped. He was holding his hand close to the wall. "She comes from both sides! From the ceiling too!" Karneiv and Art sprinted down the corridor. "One hundred and fifty!" Latour yelled as he and Stausman followed. But the German glanced over his shoulder. "The device!" He was looking back at the two metal containers they had abandoned. "Hell with them!" Art instructed. "We have only seconds to get out of this hot spot!" Already the needle of his counter was halfway through the red mark on its dial. A deep-throated laugh filled the passageway. "Run faster, gentlemen," the voice urged through the speakers. "You do not have much farther to go." Art glanced behind him as he ran... and jolted to a stop. Stausman had gone back and was struggling with the metal cases ! "Let them go!" he shouted angrily at the German. "But we have to have them!" Stausman pleaded. Hesitating, Art backed in the direction that Karneiv and Latour had gone. "We can't do a damned thing if we get shot up with radiation!" Then he turned and raced after the other two. Apparently convinced, Stausman followed, running at breakneck speed. But he faltered and fell, losing more critical seconds. ridor, Art found the Frenchman and the Russian, leaning against the wall. "Clear here," Latour panted. He drew up beside them, waiting for Stausman. Karneiv was staring at his watch as the German reached them. A concrete panel slid in place twenty feet to their rear. Art fought his irregular breathing. "You keep a time check?" he asked Karneiv. The Russian nodded. "I calculate Latour got single dose of about one-hundred-twenty R. Me too." "Might vomit once or twice in a few hours," Art said thoughtfully. "You, Captain, got almost two hundred." Art frowned. "What about Stausman?" he asked. Karneiv stared hesitatingly at the Captain who, in turn, glanced fearfully at Stausman. "I kept check too," the German said unemotionally. "I got -- " The ceiling speakers rumbled. "Over one thousand " the voice said. "A fatal dose -- not immediately fatal perhaps. There will first be vomiting and thirst and fever and delirium -- in a short while. Then you will die." Stausman clenched a fist and raised it toward the nearest video lens in the ceiling. "But not before I find you, you -- devil!" he threatened. "Not before -- " "Easy," Art calmed him, holding his arms at his side. "Exertion'll only make it worse." "I don't give a damn!" the German exclaimed, his teeth set tightly together. "I'm not afraid of failure. I should have died in training three years ago -- when they had to cover that hole in my skull with a plate!" He broke loose from Art and bolted to race up the corridor. But Latour and Karneiv caught him, each by an arm. "Let me go!" he screamed. "I'll find him! I'll -- " "Patience, mon ami," the Frenchman whispered. It was the first time he had used the phrase addressing the German. "You do no good by self." Karneiv shook his head dourly. "Perhaps together we find devil of Shrine before -- " Stausman relaxed in their grip. They released him cautiously. "Feeling better?" Art asked, embarrassed after he had said it. The German nodded, smiled weakly. After a moment, Karneiv intoned softly, "Death to Satan!" He was staring at the wall -- at a spot above the outstretched arm of a skeleton. The bony fingers still clutched the rock that the victim had used to scratch Expedition # in the chalky concrete. Farther along, another scrawl, Death to Dictator Sakoran! The phrase typed him as a member of one of the earliest expeditions -- datingto the time before Sakoran had earned the more pointed alphabetical designation Satan from the initials of his assumed title, "Supreme Autocrat of The Associated Nations." "rpHE Sun, he is just rising outA side now, n'est pas?" Latour asked wistfully. It was almost two hours after they had run the gantlet of the radioactive corridor. They were tired and haggard and had drawn up to allow Stausman to rest. Art checked his watch and nodded. "Then in three hours the -- how you say? fireworks -- they will commence, non?" Art closed his eyes and passed a hand over his face. He was just beginning to experience the nauseating effects of exposure to gamma radiation. He swallowed with difficulty. "The general missile attack will begin in three hours and fifteen minutes," he acknowledged. "Fools!" Karneiv roared in front of him. "The microphones! He listen!" "He knows. The probing attack has been routine after almost every expedition. He will expect the missiles as a test of our success." "Bah!" the Russian spat. "Success. We will fail! Satan play games with us!" A grating sounded behind them and they whirled abound, instinctively drawing their weapons. But it was only another partition, sliding into place to bar the passageway.  Stausman, who had just passed the spot, was leaning against the wall, sick. Latour uttered a sympathetic phrase in French and went back to grasp the German's shoulder and support him. Karneiv turned to Art. "How much more we got to go? What you think?" Art looked down at the floor, hopelessly. "We haven't gone' a fifth of the way to the center," he said in a voice that was intentionally low, so Stausman wouldn't hear. "Look, Captain," the Russian said abruptly. "We come along curving corridors. We find doors of stone blocking our way so we must go only 'where he wants. Why we no break one of those doors when he make us go in circle again? Might be we find way straight in." Art considered the suggestion. But before he could express his approval, he gagged suddenly and turned quickly away from Karneiv. After he had finished, Art felt somewhat weak and his throat was dry and musty. He cursed himself for not having insisted that they bring along water.  they all continued down the passageway. The German's face was pale and drawn and he walked unsteadily. Art fell back and helped support the German. Karneiv walked cautiously ahead, mumbling angrily in Russian as they passed more skeletons. " Pourquoi ?" the Frenchman asked thoughtfully, looking down at the victims of another expedition. When no one answered, he repeated, "Why? Why does not le diable stop us where we are? Why does he not kill us now?" The others were silent, except Stausman, who showed no reaction. Latour stopped and the rest of the party stopped with him. "Le diable -- could he not have closed us up in the radiation field? Or could he not have confined us in any section of the passage to let the hunger consume us, as it no doubt consumed these poor unfortunates here?" Karneiv frowned deeply. "Is so. Why he no do it?" "Diversion, gentlemen," the amplified voice erupted in the speakers. "It is not often that I am privileged to observe my subjects at such close quarters. Therefore, I am not disposed to cut my amusement short." Stausman shouted frenziedly and tore loose from Art and Latour. He reeled down the corridor until he reached a spot underneath the first suspended speaker. Then his revolver was in his hand and he was firing up at the vibrating diaphragm. The first two shots silenced the speaker and he stood swaying in the center of the passageway. Now the amplified voice was a series of secondary echoes that reached them from points farther along the tunnel. "Shoot at them Go ahead! You cannot hit me!"! Still dazed, the German turned on the other three men. His face was red -- his eyes half closed -- his body trembled. "Stausman!" Art shouted. The German was going to open fire on them! He raised the revolver. The Supreme Autocrat's reverberating laughter seemed to quicken his movement. The German fired an ineffectual shot with his wavering hand. Latour sprang, diving in under him and coming up beneath his outstretched arm. Then he seized the German's wrist and wrested the gun from him before he could fire again. The German fainted. Art felt ill again. Nausea, aggravated by the emotional im pact of the incident, swept over him. "Goddam devil!" Karneiv roared, shaking his fist at the video cell over his head. Then he snapped his gun from his holster and took careful aim. The weapon spat and the lens shattered. Latour, shouting a string of French expletives, raced to the next video pickup station and shot out its lens, too. "Wait!" Art ordered, straightening. "Save it. Maybe he wants us to get rid of our ammunition." from remote speakers. "Shall we proceed, gentlemen?" Art recovered from his seizure, went over to help Latour with Stausman. "The radiation," the Frenchman observed, "I did not know it could do so much to a man in so little time." "It shouldn't," Art agreed. "But that skull plate in his head may have something to do with it. There might be an absorption factor that -- " A concrete panel slid open swiftly on their left. "Check point, gentlemen," the Supreme Autocrat announced. A second panel sprang out from the wall ahead of them. The new avenue which had been opened was not a corridor. Rather, it was a room, fifty feet wide and at least two hundred feet in length. The mouth of another tunnel was open at the other end. The floor was littered with the remains of past victims. "SacrebleuP' the Frenchman exclaimed. "Can we deny that here lies almost half the personnel of all the other ninety-two expeditions?" Karneiv suddenly poked a thumb in the direction of Stausman. "If we go, I say we leave him." Art stared at the Russian. "He no good to us," Karneiv explained emotionlessly. "He only hold us back." Art's face was grim. "He goes -- even if Latour and I have to carry him. Right, Latour?" "C'est correct!" Karneiv swore disgustedly. "Then Karneiv goes alone!" "You'll stay with the expedition!" The Russian shrugged uneasily. "I stay, but -- " "Are you all ready?" the Supreme Autocrat broke in. Karneiv and Latour stared apprehensively into the room with the skeletons. "First," the voice continued "let me take this opportunity to congratulate you while you are still there to hear. I find your method of entry into the Shrine quite novel. My commendations. I had been wondering when they would think of the ejectors. Until now, entry has usually been through the air ducts -- or, occasionally, through the supply intakes that were in use before the Shrine became self-sufficient by assembling a four-thousand-year stockpile of supplies." The Supreme Autocrat's voice was free of accent, Art realized for the first time. Was it that, in his centuries-old despotism over nearly all the nations of the world, he had severed all ties of nationalism -- including his native French tongue? "Come, gentlemen." The Autocrat mocked them. "Let us not waste my time. The test missiles will be fired shortly to determine whether you have succeeded. I must be free to direct the immediate retaliatory measures." "We It ay here, diahlel" the Frenchman roared defiantly. ing himself from Art's grip, and lunged into the room. Nothing happened to the German. Abruptly, Art was aware of the accelerated clacking of his wrist counter. "Radiation!" the Russian exclaimed frantically. "A little persuasion, gentlemen. I'm quite sure you'll decide to enter." Karneiv and Latour ran inside. Art followed. Glancing overhead, he saw there were no video lenses, no speakers or microphones in this new chamber. "But there is nothing in here!" the Frenchman exclaimed. Their wrist counters had silenced abruptly with their departure from the corridor. "Psychology, perhaps," Karneiv said unsteadily. "Fear psychology." "Get across to the other corridor," Art urged, "before he closes that door too!" Running, they overtook Stausman, who was still plodding forward. They grabbed his arms and pulled him along with them. Suddenly, a tongue of unseen fire licked at Art's wrists, where the radiation counter and watch were strapped. Karneiv shouted hoarsely. Latour screamed in pain. Stausman collapsed and lay limp on the floor, his body twitching as though wracked by highvoltage current, as he lay there among three long-dead invaders. Art staggered and fell. But he got up immediately and raced, terror-stricken, toward the exit ahead, his mouth an agony of hot coals. He cried out in anguish. Then he was tearing at the straps of his radiation counter and watch. He got them off and cast the instruments from him, their metal cases glowing red-hot. His shoes were smoking and he kicked them off as he ran. There was a nest of fire in his side, next to where the revolver was strapped. As he glanced down at the weapon, the smoldering holster burst into flame. "We're in a selective induction field!" he shouted frantically. He seared his fingers unsnapping his belt buckle, to hurl the white-hot weapon from him. The Russian and the Frenchman had gotten rid of the metal on their bodies too -- had kicked off their shoes which, even now, were bursting into flame from the heat of the inner nails. Art was three-fourths of the way across the room when he was almost deafened by the roar of exploding, super-heated cartridges in the chambers of their discarded revolvers. After an eternity of blinding pain, he lunged into the corridor, following Latour and Karneiv out of the chamber of torture. They dropped to the floor in the dimly lit passageway and lay there, exhausted, fighting the agony in their mouths where the ed under the effects of the induction field. A S if hypnotized, they all watched the door slide shut, closing off the room behind them. "Stausman?" asked Latour. Art shook his head regretfully. "Plate under scalp?" Karneiv asked hesitatingly. Art nodded. "By now it's just molten metal." The overhead speaker rumbled harshly. " see there are still three of you, gentlemen. Now, let me see -- I would guess that the Frenchman will be next. He seems to be the least capable of surviving." Latour jumped up, his fists clenched. "I will outlive you, pig!" he roared. His face was contorted with hate. "Easy, Latour." Art tried to calm the enraged Frenchman. "Let's not make it any more amusing for him." Latour's shoulders sagged despairingly. Then he looked dolefully at Art. "But what will we do, capitaine? We have no weapons! We have not even the dignity Of wearing shoes. Je suis dans l'embarrass!" Art accepted Latour's statement literally. "I'm a bit more than embarrassed," he said. "I'm down to the where-in-hell-do-wego-from-here feeling." He brought his wrists up and inspected the red, blistered flesh where the heated metal of his watch and radiation counter had left ugly, raw wounds. His trousers were smoldering where the flaming holster had lain against them. He beat out the embers with his hands. The Russian was moaning softly, blowing on his burned wrists. "World national areas," he asked thoughtfully. "How much they got to pay Autocrat?" Art leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. The physical pain of his wounds was being pushed into the background now by the returning internal effects of the excessive radiation. "Your area mine a little more." "And for what, me s amis?" the Frenchman asked before Kameiv could react to the information he had requested. "Only for to fill the pockets of e diable, so he can pay his espionage agents and his governeurs for the national areas." The Russian rose and shook his seared wrists, while he paced restlessly. "I say let Autocrat have his extorted money," he said bitterly. "World should do what he want. I say leave Shrine alone." "Give the devil his due, eh?" Art asked. "Eh, bien!" Latour spread his arms despairingly. "What is it he wants? He rule all the world -- yet he stay in his Shrine as though he not exist at all. He seeks no acclaim -- yet all must be his slaves." "He wants only power. Latour." Art recalled the pictures he had seen of the short, stout dictator -- pictures that emphasized the cruel lines of his florid face. "A megalomaniac, who is determined that there be no armies in the world that might eventually be turned against him -- no weapons that might be aimed at the Shrine." "And this slavery, mon capitaine -- how long must it continue?" "Supreme Autocrat," Kameiv said stonily, "had secret of immortality from scientists even before he build first shell of Shrine. Will live forever." "It will go on," Art added, "four thousand years at least. He has supplies and ammunition to last that long." "Longer," Kameiv corrected. "Can get more whenever he want." Art walked away from the others before he leaned against the wall and surrendered to the revolt his tortured stomach had been spawning. curving corridors again. But this time the arc was more pronounced and Art called attention to the fact that a more noticeable curve could only mean a smaller periphery. Which, in turn, indicated nearness to the center of the Shrine. He walked almost in a daze, his face flushed and his pulse pounding. The nausea was gone, but in its place was a thirst that was almost as torturous. "Water!" the Russian shouted excitedly, staggering forward. Puzzled, Art raced after him to prevent any lengthening of distance between them that might put Karneiv out of sight. Ahead, in the center of the tunnel, was a plaintable. On its surface was a huge pitcher and several glasses. "Don't, Kameiv!" Art warned. "Don't drink it!" The Russian ignored the warning. He grasped the pitcher between his large hands and raised it to his mouth. After he had finished drinking, he handed the container to the Frenchman. "Good!" Karneiv exclaimed exuberantly. "But it might be -- " Art cut the sentence short, watching Latour drink. "What the hell!" the Russian shrugged. "If it ffoison, it good poison." Art took the pitcher from Latour and sipped from it. The water was ice cold and it swept away the fire that had been blazing in his raw throat. "Now that we have refreshed ourselves, gentlemen, let us prepare for the next check point." The three men started, then regarded each other hesitatingly. "You will notice that on your left is a straight passage." Art stared distrustfully into the radial tunnel he hadn't noticed before. But he could see nothing. In the absence of a lighting system, it was but a yawning void. " One of you will enter it. The other two will continue ahead. It is necessary that the party be split into smaller components at this point. I have prepared something special, but only two can be accommodated." "We no separate!" Karneiv shouted in the direction of the closest microphone. " think you will, gentlemen. I have very efficient methods of coercion, as you already realize." Art tried to produce mental pictures of the possible tortures that might lie ahead for the two who would continue along the peripheral corridor. "I'll go on ahead," he said to Latour. "You and Kameiv decide who will go with me." Laughter erupted in the speakers. "I'm afraid I'm misunderstood. Ahead lies something interesting, of course. But the dark corridor offers only -- immediate death." A RT leaned against the table, his head lowered in despair. "Then whoever continues," he said meditatively, "will have the only chance of reaching -- " He tilted, his head in the direction of the speakers. "Looking at the problem objectively," he said, "I'm in the worst physical condition and am of least value." He headed toward the dark corridor. Latour grabbed his arm. "Non, mon capitaine!" Kameiv pulled the Frenchman away. "Let him go. He sick. He no help for the cause. You, me -- we get to Autocrat." "Never will we reach him!" Latour's voice rose in rejection of the Russian's optimism. "And no longer will I, Latour, do as he directs!" "You will all do as I direct " the Supreme Autocrat declared. "I have only to inform you that there are selective induction coils in the walls. And these particular ones are tuned so their effects will be felt in material much softer than metal." "You lie!" Latour shouted. Then to Art, "Is it not impossible that he can have all this Shrine wired like one magnificent coil? He -- bluffs!" Art pushed him off gently. "Go with Kameiv." Then he stepped into the unlit corridor. The stone panel started to close behind him. But Latour lunged through at the last second. Immediately afterward, the stone thudded against its stop behind them. "You fool!" Art told the Frenchman. "He'll -- " Kameiv' s frantic screams, barely audible, erupted in the outer corridor. The terrorized outbursts continued for almost a minute, as Art and Latour listened, stunned in the darkness. Then they ended abruptly. "Ah!" exclaimed the Frenchman in a whisper. "Monsieur le diable has tried to trick us, n'est pas?" His voice rose excitedly. "Was it not in this corridor that he said was the certain death? Yet, as soon as the door is closed, it is the other one that becomes fatal. Eh bien! It was his desire to kill two of us that time and to permit only one to live." "You have guessed right. Frenchman." The Autocrat's voice sounded in the darkness. "And you have interfered with my schedule. But it makes no difference. The end result will be the same." Art reached for the Frenchman's shoulders, pulled him closer. "Without lights," he whispered, "he can't track us with his video system. If we keep quiet, he won't be able to follow us through the mikes either." "Then we proceed?" Latour asked eagerly. Art went ahead silently. "On tiptoe, if necessary." "But -- " the other lowered his voice -- "can he not turn on the lights whenever he wishes?" "There are no lights in this corridor. I saw that as I entered." Art guided himself with a hand along the wall. "And the doors," the Frenchman suggested. "Is it not possible that we may reach one before he thinks to close it? Then we may go through several more without le diable knowing it. We will be lost from him, n'est pas?" ME was endless as they felt their way in the tunnel. Art guessed a half-hour had passed when the Frenchman tightened his grip on his shoulder. "The doors -- we have reached none of them yet, capitaine?" he whispered. Art considered not telling him, but decided it would be better to be frank. "We've passed a helluva lot of doors -- all closed." Latour gasped. "Then he has made the preparations for us already! It is no use, mon ami. Le diable still herds us -- like swine." "Latour!" "Yes?" "Ahead -- there's a light!" They stopped. Faint illumination, only a hundred feet or so ahead, bared the end of the corridor. But Art could not discern the 'light's source. The Frenchman swore. "A -- how you call it? -- dead end. Now we will starve without ever finding our way out -- " "No, Latour. Look -- the corridor turns right! That's where the light's coming from." Silently, they went ahead. Close to the juncture. Art pressed his back to the wall and inched forward. Then, even more cautiously, he peered around the corner. He jerked his head back immediately. "Latour!" His whisper was barely audible. "It's the Autocrat! He's right around the bend!" The Frenchman tensed, opened his mouth. But Art clamped a hand oyer it. "He's in the corridor -- not thirty feet away -- waiting!" "Did he see you?" "No." "Sacrebleu! What does he do?" "Nothing. He's just standing there." "A trap!" "No. His hands are empty. There are no weapons." Art hazarded another glance. Jornal Sakoran stood with his hands hanging by his sides. There was an expression of impatience on his face. "Le diable -- he is still there?" Latour gripped his arm. Art nodded absently. Confounded, he tried to imagine what the ruse might be. Certainly, the one-time national dictator who had seized control of a world centuries ago could not be submitting to capture now. Nor was it possible that he could be unaware of two survivors of an expeditionary force who were dangerously close. Yet... With an abruptness that took him by surprise, Latour brushed by and lunged around the corner. Art sprang after him, but the Frenchman had a lead of more than ten feet. Sakoran looked up, smiling. Atthe last moment. Art sensed the trap and desperately tried to brake himself. "Latour" he screamed. "Don't -- " It was too late. Electrical flames crackled, enveloping Laing light. Smoke hissed from his charred figure, even as he dropped lifelessly to the floor. At the same time, there was the crashing sound of shattering glass, and the image of the Autocrat blanked out. Art, horrified, drew up before the smashed electronic screen that had completely blocked the corridor and had presented the three-dimensional telecast image of Sakoran while it also served as an indiscernible death trap. But even with the illumination gone from the now dead screen, there was still light in the corridor. It came from around another bend in the passageway beyond. through the jagged remnants of the screen, around the smoldering body of the Frenchman. He knew that the invulnerability of the Shrine was no myth. Truly, the Supreme Autocrat was invincible. He had killed Stausman, Karneiv, Latour, the scores who were now only skeletons in the corridors, with incredible ease. But wasn't that to be expected? Hadn't he had centuries to learn how to slaughter? Art lowered his head dejectedly as he continued forward. He went around a bend and jolted to a stop, rigid with astonishment. Immediately ahead, the passageway widened into a great circular compartment, almost a hundred yards in diameter. It was the Inner Shrine! Great gleaming instruments, scores of control panels that were clusters of switches and dials and levers, gauges and indicators and purring machinery -- all occupied every available space along the perimeter of the room. Overhead, hundreds of luminescent screens covered the tremendous curved ceiling -- the nerve-center of the Autocrat's worldwide communications network. In the middle of the impressive chamber was a smaller dome of lead, a fifty-foot-high bubble whose standard arrangement of flashing red lights identified it as the Shrine's nuclear power pack a reactor pile! One that, if made to exceed its safety limits, could be as devastating as a thousand nuclear devices like the one Art and the other members of his expedition had brought with them in the twin metal containers ! But there was no sign of the Autocrat. Was this only another check point? Bewildered, Art entered the room. It was no trap ! He stood among the glistening array of instruments and controls. He was in the vulnerable center of the most impregnable fortress ever built! He saw the doorway between two towering instrument cases along the wall on his left. He peered in cautiously. He could see what appeared to be living quarters -- plush chairs, tapestries, thick carpets, the edge of a bed. The door swung wide and the Supreme Autocrat stepped from concealment, a gun in his hand. Art swore. He had been defeated by his own curiosity! He should have raced for the nuclear pile and... "Come in," said Sakoran. He motioned with the gun and swung to the side as Art entered. Then the Autocrat sighed deeply and smiled. But it wasn't a smile of derision ! It was a warm smile of welcome. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "The weapon will be used on me -- not you. But I fear I may need it to hold you off until I am ready." ward until he sensed there was a chair behind him. Then he fell sitting in it. The Autocrat, dressed in a long, gray robe, , leaned against a table in the center of the elaborately comfortable room. "I thought, for a while, the Frenchman would be the successful candidate," he said. "There was much to be commended in his devotion to your cause and his general sense of fraternity and sympathy. But it was his loyalty that disqualified him. It was apparent that he would have immediately told the world about the Shrine." Art continued to stare incredulously at Jornal Sakoran, the immortal dictator, the Supreme Autocrat of The Associated Nations. There was an incongruity somewhere -- an incongruity over and above the impossible developments of the past few minutes. But he was unable to define it. "However," Sakoran continued,  "I found myself incapable of an unbiased decision. So I let the electronic screen decide. The Frenchman eliminated himself." "Eliminated... #" Art repeated densely. "Of course. The check points are a process of elimination by which all but the strongest are discarded and the one most fit to assume -- " Art leaped up. "You killed my father!" "Your father?" Sakoran's hand tightened on the gun and Art relaxed again. "Did he come here with one of the expeditions? Which one?" "Number Eighty-five." Sakoran shook his head. "Before my time, I'm afraid. Anyway, that was not a changeover expedition. No, I did not kill your father. You see, I wasn't Satan at the time." "You weren't Satan?" Art repeated, stunned. "No -- I became the Supreme Autocrat two years later. Expedition Eighty-seven." Art fell back into the chair. Now he recognized the inconsistency that he had felt on first looking at the Autocrat. The man before him was tall, gaunt. His eyes were blue. And his hair, although gray now, had no doubt been blond when he was' younger. While Jornal Sakoran, the French dictator who had built the impregnable Shrine, had been short, stout -- had black, crimped hair and intense dark eyes! Sakoran was not immortal! Sakoran was dead! "You see," the Autocrat continued, "I am Satan the Fourteenth. But, about the eliminations and the check points -- as I was explaining, their end result was your selection as Satan the Fifteenth. I feel sure that you will make a very efficient Supreme Autocrat." overcame his astonishment. "I don't understand." "It's rather difficult to explain," the Autocrat said. "Let me start off by saying that the deaths in the corridor, sadistic as they seem, are necessary. First, there can be no more than one Satan at a time. Even minor differences of opinion, or inherent concern for the welfare of a particular nation, might wreck the effectiveness of the Shrine. "You see, not all expeditionary groups meet the same fate as yours -- only the changeover ones, of which yours was the thirteenth. Of the remaining eighty expeditions, all were executed quite humanely. They had to be killed to protect the Shrine as well as to prevent their possible escape and betrayal to the world of the true nature of the Shrine. And -- " "But why -- why?" Art shouted. "Why must there be a succession of Satans?" the Autocrat rephrased the question. "I'll try to explain. When Sakoran established his Shrine as a means of despotic control over his nation, Earth had just fought the Third War. "It was not a pleasant chapter in history, I assure you. Over a the world were annihilated in the war. All world governments were bankrupt. Poverty was rampant. Then came new distrust and, even with the millstone of destitution around its neck, humanity plunged into another armament race. "In the year Sakoran seized control of France, the leading powers spent a total of more than and armies. By comparison, the nations now expend a total of two items -- one, forced consignment of capital to governors appointed by the Shrine -- two, secret appropriations for weapons to attack the Shrine. There is quite a difference between eight lion. "And there is also a difference between the thousand men who are serving the Secret Corps and ing in the armies of the world, if there were no Shrine to outlaw those armies and their weapons under the pretense of self-defense for Satan." "You mean the whole setup is -- insurance against war?" Art asked incredulously. The Autocrat nodded. "Humanity's greatest debt of gratitude belongs to Jornal Sakoran, the despot. The greatest year the race ever knew was the one in which he was able to extend his rule over all world powers, merely by dropping a few missiles on key cities and demonstrating the invulnerability of his Shrine when the counter-attacks came." "But Sakoran? What happened to him?" "The sixth expedition into the Shrine was successful, as you will read in the records here. However only one member survived in that group. It is a good thing for the world that he was a man of foresight. After he killed Sakoran, he became Satan II, successfully repelling all other invasions of the Shrine until he realized he was too old to continue in his role. He then allowed one member of Expedition Seventeen to survive the elimination tests that he had devised. "Satan II wondered, at first, whether other candidates in the future would be instilled with the same principles as he was -- He raised the gun relievedly to his temple. "Wait!" Art shouted. "Suppose I don't want to be the -- the Autocrat?" "You have no choice. All the avenues of escape are sealed off. When you learn how to open them, I believe you will have changed your mind." After a pause, he went on. "In a year or two, you will learn how to control all the devices in the Shrine. And, until you do, any expedition which comes along will be disposed of automatically. Even the firing of the interceptor missiles will be out of your jurisdiction temporarily." "But how... ?" "You'll be instructed by automatic recorded tapes and visual educational aids through the medium of several of the ceiling screens." He stared unseeingly at Art. "And now, son -- I'm a tired, old man..." The Shrine shivered almost imperceptibly and the faintest of rumblings reached Art's ears. "Those are our interceptor rockets going off to meet the probing missiles," the Supreme Autocrat said. "You will have to retaliate immediately if you expect to preserve discipline and respect. The controls you'll need are immediately beyond that door -- the first panel on your right." ' door, stood before the panel. A screen overhead repeatedly flashed the words Missile Origin. It went 'blank a moment, then came on again with a map of South America. Most of the map faded from the screen, leaving only the impression of Argentina. In front of him were scores of control studs, each designated with the name of a different city. He found the one marked Buenos Aires and adjusted the vernier control slightly, watching the results of his manipulation on the map overhead. A small x-mark, indicating where the retaliatory missile would strike, moved southward. When he was sure he had displaced it to an area where there would be a minimum of casualties, he pressed the button. The Supreme Autocrat's gun went off almost at the same time in the other room. Art glanced over at a blank area on the wall next to the door. On the space was written a list of Satans. The last entry was #-# A. D. He felt the faint vibration as the retaliatory missile fired. With a heavy pencil that was on the control panel, he added: "Art Grant, Satan XV, #A. D." -- Continued front Back Cover cover. Asimov -- Robots are the most hated creatures on earth. 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If you don't want the current selection, you notify the Club. There are no other rules, no dues, no fees. See Other Side For Details assume the role of Supreme Autocrat and make themselves the target of more hatred than the world has ever shown for a single individual. "But subsequent changes of command here have proved that no qualified man, once he realizes his responsibilities to humanity, can reject the role." A RT was silent. Finally he looked at the Autocrat. "How long must it continue?" "National areas are already beginning to learn to live with other national areas. But there is still much progress to be made. Another five hundred years, perhaps another thousand. Our most positive indication of advance in that direction will be the era in which the world discontinues sending expeditions to destroy the Shrine. When that day comes, the Satans will have to devise other means of perpetuating themselves. But that won't concern you." The Supreme Autocrat held the gun up before him and looked at it thoughtfully. "I'm so glad you've come," he said plaintively. "It's been hard -- lonely. I've killed hundreds. And, all the while, I could never be sure that it was -- right." OCTOBER # GALAXY Science Fiction (jTLaxy # By J. T. McIntosh Do you enjoy our magazine? If so you II be interested in the Special Offer on Page # Publishers of  r ' n ' p (a full length novel every other month) ther. There comes a time when your fancies must be brought into light -- and stand the test of every-day, hard realities. Are you one of the thousands -- perhaps beyond the stage of wistful wishing? Do... you often come to from a daydream with the sigh, "If only I could bring it about -- make it real?" ' All things begin with thought -- it is what follows that may take your life out of the class of those who hope and dream. 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Off. in cooperation with announces its third annual limited to short stories with a science fiction theme by college undergraduates only Humanism may be described in brief as the belief that Man must solve his own problems, and that by far the strongest tool he has ever developed for problem-solving is scientific method. This theme pervades much of modern fiction of all types, and may be termed almost a working definition of the best science fiction. We would classify as "humanistic" In order to discover competent new writers of humanistic science fiction, the American fiction -- we are not interested in thinly disguised sermons. Although stories entered in the contest should have a humanistic approach, chief weight in the judging will be given to freshness of theme, sharp characterization and interpersonal conflict, and ingenuity of plot development and solution of the problem used as the basis of the story. Entrants who are stands, or from #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. appear in The Humanist. For further information on the contest and literature describing the Humanist viewpoint, write to Humanist Story Contest, Yellow Springs, Ohio.  All entries must be between # and # words in length.  Manuscripts must be typed in black, doublespaced, on plain white bond paper. The author's name and address must appear on the manuscript itself.  There is no limit to the number of entries per student, but each must be accompanied by the following form or its equivalent: (Entrant's Name) (Name of College) Signed (Faculty Member)  Entries postmarked later than November #, # cannot be accepted.  A stamped, self-addressed envelope must be included at the time of entry if the author wants his manuscript returned. awarded as soon as judging is completed. This, however, will not have any bearing on the judging.  Other publishable stories will be purchased mum purchase price.  Mail all entries to: Yellow Springs, Ohio ' or Jones? Whether to pick current nomenclature or exotic place and personal names is one of the most vexing problems in writing science fiction. Hostile reviewers are fond of jibing at this vulnerable point. Instead of jibing right back at their erudite ignorance, I'll simply prescribe The Story of Language by Mario Pei, published by Lippincott, for them. A good, hard look at this fine study -- having been a reviewer myself, I know that good, hard looks are rare in the breed -- should indicate that language change is a legitimate field of speculation and the chance that today's recognizable names will remain the same indefinitely is a bad betting proposition. Why, there is even an imposing term for the science -- toponomy, the study of place names. The U. S. Department of the Interior has a bureau of linguists whose job is to hunt down the origins and meanings of the names of states, cities, mountains, rivers, lakes and so forth. It's a rough task, for many of the names have come down in unrecognizable form and the meanings lost. According to Mr. Pei, Tennessee is "the vines of the big bend," Iowa "the sleepy ones," Oklahoma "the red people," Kansas "a breeze near the ground," Michigan "fish-catching place," Kentucky "the dark and bloody perfect men," Texas "Friends!" and Idaho "good morning!" Chicago comes from the Piankashaw Indian Chi-Kak-Quwa, "place of skunk smells," because wild onions grew there. Well, why not Nyork or even Nyawk? Look at what happened to Lugdunum, which is now Lyon; Cameracum and Mediolanum, the latter meaning "in the middle of the plain," time-abbreviated to Cambrai and Milan. Caesarea Augusta became the Spanish Zaragoza; the first name (Caesarea) is now rendered in English and French as Jersey. If many names sound nonsensical in science fiction, they can't approach reality for sheer incredibility. I've already mentioned Torpenhow Hill in England, each syllable of which has the same meaning, added by invaders or settlers, all translating to Hillhillhill Hill! Our Greenwich Village is almost as bad, forwich is from the Latin vicus, meaning "village." The Sicilian town of Linguaglossa is "tongue-tongue" in Latin and Greek. And imagine the disbelief of local Indians if they ever learned that their uncomprehending "What do you say?" to queries about the name of their country has come down to us as Yucatan! Given time, the origin of the town named Baseball, Ohio, is bound to be lost, perhaps even to linguists. The two communities of Basil and Baltimore decided to merge, with each contributing its first syllable to the joint monicker. If one thing is certain, it is that language shifts will make the most absurd-seeming invented place names of science fiction, now ridiculed by reviewers who refuse to budge off the flypaper of the immediate moment, sound like timid guesses. Brimaquonx was once seriously suggested -- and not in science fiction -- as a name for New York that would combine those of all the boroughs. The future name may make that seem reasonable and even attractive. For that matter, even in the present, how many of us would recognize the Chinese Mei Kuo as America or the Serbo-Croatian Zdedinjene Drzave as the United States? Personal names are not apt to fare better, especially when occupations, which have always been used as designations, change from our Smith, Baker, Miller and such to Jetman, Radar, Astronaut and Lord knows what else. To compound the confusion, nicknames have a nasty habit of becoming names. Remember Marcus Tullius? Certainly not. You know him as Cicero, Latin for "chickpea," bestowed on him because of a wart on the nose! Don't be surprised if Gimpy, Baldy, Red, Toots and the like become actual names. They have present-day equivalents in Claude (L., "lame"), Calvin (L., "bald"), Priscilla (L., "somewhat old"), Gretta (It., "petty"), Mona (Sp., "she-monkey"). Names can also be so truncated that they bear no likeness whatever to their origins. Dino, a popular Italian name, is all that remains of Aldobrandino, Germanic for "old sword." Ted, Ed, Bill, Jim and the rest have an equally good chance of surviving as full names. As for origins, industry is unwittingly making a contribution. A number of Amazonian girls are called Frigidaire. And in Nyassaland, Africa, the chief of a tribe took his name -- Oxford University Press -- from a publisher's catalogue. Rxzl, mentioned earlier, does sound unlikely because of its lack of vowels. But if the Yugoslavs can call Trieste Trst and "a hill full of fog" in Czech comes out vrch pin mlh, why not Rxzl? A World of Talent When two and two equal all or nothing, the total adds up to trouble -- especially if the quantities you are dealing with are people! apartment, a great number of people were making noises and flashing colors. The sudden cacophony confused him. Aware of the surge of shapes, sounds, smells, threedimensional oblique patches, but trying to peer through and beyond, he halted at the door. With an act of will, he was able to clear the blur somewhat; the meaningless frenzy of human activity settled gradually into a quasiorderly pattern. "What's the matter?" his father asked sharply. "This is what we previewed a half-hour ago," his mother said when the eight-year-old boy failed to answer. "I wish you'd let me get a Corpsman to probe him." "I don't fully trust the Corps. And we have twelve years to handle this ourselves. If we haven't cracked it by then -- " "Later." She bent down and ordered in a crisp tone, "Go on in, Tim. Say hello to people." "Try to hold an objective orientation," his father added gently. "At least for this evening, to the end of the party." Tim passed silently through the crowded living room, ignoring the various oblique shapes, his body tilted forward, head turned to one side. Neither of his parents followed him; they were intercepted by the host and then surrounded by Norm and Psi guests. In the melee, the boy was forgotten. He made a brief circuit of the living room, satisfied himself that nothing existed there, and then sought a side hall. A mechanical attendant opened a bedroom door for him and he entered. 'T'HE bedroom was deserted; the party had only begun. He allowed the voices and movement behind him to fade into an indiscriminate blur. Faint perfumes of women drifted through  the swank apartment, carried by the warm, Terranlike, artificial air pumped from the central ducts of the city. He raised himself up and inhaled the sweet scents, flowers, fruits, spices -- and something more. He had to go all the way into the bedroom to isolate it. There it was -- sour, like spoiled milk -- the warning he counted on. And it was in the bedroom. Cautiously, he opened a closet. The mechanical selector tried to present him with clothing, but he ignored it. With the closet open, the scent was stronger. The Other was somewhere near the closet, if not actually in it. Under the bed? He crouched down and peered. Not there. He lay outstretched and stared under Fairchild's metal work-desk, typical furniture of a Colonial official's quarters. Here, the scent was stronger. Fear and excitement touched him. He jumped to his feet and pushed the desk away from the smooth plastic surface of the wall. The Other clung against the wall in the dark shadows where the desk had rested. It was a Right Other, of course. He had only identified one Left and that for no more than a split second. The Other hadn't managed to phase totally. He retreated warily from it, conscious that, without his cooperation, it had come as far as it could. The Other watched him calmly, aware of his negative actions, but there was little it could do. It made no attempt to communicate, for that had always failed. T IM was safe. He halted and spent a long moment scrutinizing . the Other. This was his chance to learn more about it. A space separated the two of them, across which only the visual image and odor -- small vaporized particles -- of the Other crossed. It was not possible to identify this Other; many were so similar, they appeared to be multiples of the same unit. But sometimes the Other was radically different. Was it possible that various selections were being tried, alternate attempts to get across? Again the thought struck him. The people in the living room, both Norm and Psi classes -- and even the Mute-class of which he was a part -- seemed to have reached a workable stalemate with their own Others. It was strange, since their Lefts would be advanced over his own... unless the procession of Rights diminished as the Left group increased. Was there a finite total of Others? He went back to the frenetic 'living room. People murmured and swirled on all sides, gaudy opaque shapes everywhere, warm smells overpowering him with their closeness. It was clear that he would have to get information from his mother and father. He had already spun the research indices hooked to the Sol System educational transmission -- spun them without results, since the circuit was not working. "Where did you wander off to?" his mother asked him, pausing in the animated conversation that had grown up among a group of Norm-class officials blocking one side of the room. She caught the expression on his face. "Oh," she said. "Even here?" He was surprised at her question. Location made no difference. Didn't she know that? Floundering, he withdrew into himself to consider. He needed help; he couldn't understand without outside assistance. But a staggering verbal block existed. Was it only a problem of terminology or was it more? As he wandered around the living room, the vague musty odor filtered to him through the heavy curtain of people-smells. The Other was still there, crouched in the darkness where the desk had been, in the shadows of the deserted bedroom. Waiting to come over. Waiting for him to take two more steps. old son move away, an expression of concern on her petite face. "We'll have to keep our eyes on him," she said to her husband. "I preview a mounting situation built around this thing of his." Curt had caught it, too, but he kept on talking to the Norm-class officials grouped around the two Precogs. "What would you do," he demanded, "if they really opened up on us? You know Big Noodle can't handle a stepped-up shower of robot projectiles. The handful now and then are in the nature of experiments... and he has the half-hour warnings from Julie and me." "True." Fairchild scratched his gray nose, rubbed the stubble of beard showing below his lip. "But I don't think they'll swing to overt war operations. It would be an admission that we're getting somewhere. It would legalize us and open things up. We might collect you Psi-class people together and -- " he grinned wearily -- "and think the Sol Systems far out past the Andromache Nebula." ment, since the man's words were no surprise. As he and Julie had driven over, they had both previewed the party, its unfruitful discussions, the growing aberrations of their son. His wife's precog span was somewhat greater than his own. She was seeing, at this moment, ahead of his own vision. He wondered what the worried expression on her face indicated. "I'm afraid," Julie said tightly, "that we're going to have a little quarrel before we get home tonight." Well, he had also seen that. "It's the situation," he said, rejecting the topic. "Everybody here is on edge. It isn't only you and I who're going to be fighting." Fairchild listened sympathetically. "I can see some drawbacks to being a Precog. But knowing you're going to have a spat, can't you alter things before it begins?" "Sure," Curt answered, "the way we give you pre-information and you use it to alter the situation with Terra. But neither Julie nor I particularly care. It takes a huge mental effort to stave off something like this... and neither of us has that much energy." "I just wish you'd let me turn him over to the Corps," Julie said in a low voice. "I can't stand him wandering around, peering under things, looking in closets for God knows what!" "For Others," Curt said. "Whatever that might be." Fairchild, a natural-born moderator, tried intercession. "You've got twelve years," he began. "It's no disgrace to have Tim stay in the Mute-class; every one of you starts out that way. If he has Psi powers, he'll show." "You talk like an infinite Precog," Julie said, amused. "How do you know they'll show?" Fairchild's good-natured face twisted with effort. Curt felt sorry for him. Fairchild had too much responsibility, too many decisions to make, too many lives on his hands. Before the Separation with Terra, he had been an appointed official, a bureaucrat with a job and clearly defined routine. Now there was nobody to tap out an inter-system memo to him early Monday morning. Fairchild was working without instructions. "Let's see that doodad of yours," Curt said. "I'm curious about how it works." Fairchild was astonished. "How the hell -- " Then he remembered. "Sure, you must have already previewed it." He dug around in his coat. "I was going to make it the surprise of the party, but we can't have surprises with you two Precogs around." The other Norm-class officials crowded around as their boss unwrapped a square of tissue paper and from it lifted a small glittering stone. An interested silence settled over the room as Fairchild examined the stone, his eyes close ' to it, like a jeweler studying a precious gem. "An ingenious thing," Curt admitted. "Thanks," Fairchild said. "They should start arriving any day, now. The glitter is to attract children and lower-class people who would go out for a bauble -- possible wealth, you know. And women, of course. Anybody who would stop and pick up what they thought was a diamond, everybody but the Tech-classes. I'll show you." H E glanced around the hushed living room at the guests in their gay party clothes. Off to one side, Tim stood with his head turned at an angle. Fairchild hesitated, then tossed the stone across the carpet in front of the boy, almost at his feet. The boy's eyes didn't flicker. He was gazing absently through the people, unaware of the bright object at his feet. Curt moved forward, ready to take up the social slack. "You'd have to produce something the size of a jet transport." He bent down and retrieved the stone. "It's not your fault that Tim doesn't respond to such mundane things as fifty-carat diamonds." Fairchild was crestfallen at the collapse of his demonstration. "I forgot." He brightened. "But there aren't any Mutes on Terra any more. Listen and see what you think of the spiel. I had a hand at writing it." TN Curt's hand, the stone rested coldly. In his ears, a tiny gnatlike buzz sounded, a controlled, modulated cadence that caused a stir of murmurs around the room. "My friends," the canned voice stated, "the causes of the conflict between Terra and the Centaur ian colonies have been grossly misstated in the press." "Is this seriously aimed at children?" Julie asked. "Maybe he thinks Terran children are advanced over our own," a Psi-class official said as a rustle of amusement drifted through the room. The tinny whine droned on, turning out its mixture of legalistic arguments, idealism and an almost pathetic pleading. The begging quality grated on Curt. Why did Fairchild have to get down on his knees and plead with the Terrans? As he listened, Fairchild puffed confidently on his pipe, arms folded, heavy face thick with satisfaction. Evidently Fairchild wasn't aware of the precarious thinness of his canned words. It occurred to Curt that none of them -- including himself -- was facing how really fragile their Separation movement was. There was no use blaming the weak words wheezing from the pseudogem. Any description of their position was bound to reflect the querulous half-fear that dominated the Colonies. "It has long been established," the stone asserted, "that freedom is the natural condition of Man. Servitude, the bondage of one man or one group of men to another, is a remnant of the past, a vicious anachronism. Men must govern themselves." "Strange to hear a stone saying that," Julie said, half-amused. "An inert lump of rock." "You have been told that the Colonial Secessionist movement will jeopardize your System, your lives and your standard of living. This is not true. The standard of living of all mankind will be raised if the colony planets are allowed to govern themselves and find their own economic markets. The mercantile system practiced by the Terran government on Terrans living outside the Sol group -- " "The children will bring this thing home," Fairchild said. "The parents will pick it up from them." T HE stone droned on. "The Colonies could not remain mere supply bases for Terra, sources of raw materials and cheap labor. The Colonists could not remain second-class citizens. Colonists have as much right to determine their own society as those remaining in the Sol group. Thus, the Colonial Government has petitioned the Terran Government for a severance of those bonds to keep us from realizing our manifest destinies." Curt and Julie exchanged glances. The academic textbook dissertation hung like a dead weight in the room. Was this the man the Colony had elected to manage the resistance movement? A pedant, a salaried official, a bureaucrat and -- Curt couldn't help thinking -- a man without Psi powers. A Normal. Fairchild had probably been moved to break with Terra over some trivial miswording of a routine directive. Nobody, except perhaps the telepathic Corps, knew his motives or how long he could keep going. "What do you think of it?" Fairchild asked when the stone had finished its monologue and them showering down all over the Sol group. You know what the Terran press is saying about us -- vicious lies -- that we want to take over Sol, that we're hideous invaders from outer space, monsters, mutants, freaks. We have to counter such propaganda." "Well," Julie said, "a third of us are freaks, so why not face it? I know my son is a useless freak." Curt took her arm. "Nobody's calling Tim a freak, not even you!" "But it's true!" She pulled away. "If we were back in the Sol System -- if we hadn't separated -- you and I would be in detention camps, waiting to be -- you know." She fiercely jabbed in the direction of their son. "There wouldn't be any Tim." From the corner a sharp-faced man spoke up. "We wouldn't be in the Sol System. We'd have broken out on our own without anybody's help. Fairchild had nothing to do with it; we brought him along. Don't ever forget that!" Curt eyed the man hostilely. Reynolds, chief of the telepathic Corps, was drunk again. Drunk vitriolic hate for Norms. "Possibly," Curt agreed, "but we would have had a hell of a time doing it." "You and I know what keeps this Colony alive," Reynolds answered, his flushed face arrogant and sneering. "How long could these bureaucrats keep on going without Big Noodle and Sally, you two Precogs, the Corps and all the rest of us? Face facts -- we don't need this legalistic window-dressing. We're not going to win because of any pious appeals for freedom and equality. We're going to win because there are no Psis on Terra." r  "HE geniality of the room dwindled. Angry murmurs rose from the Norm-class guests. "Look here," Fairchild said to Reynolds, "you're still a human being, even if you can read minds. Having a talent doesn't -- " "Don't lecture me," Reynolds said. "No numbskull is going to tell me what to do." "You're going too far," Curt told Reynolds. "Somebody's going to smack you down some day. If Fairchild doesn't do it, maybe I will." "You and your meddling Corps," a Psi-class Resurrector said to Reynolds, grabbing hold of his collar. "You think you're above us because you can merge your minds. You think -- " "Take your hands off me," Reynolds said in an ugly voice. A glass crashed to the floor; one of the women became hysterical. Two men struggled; a third joined and, in a flash, a wild turmoil of resentment was boiling in the center of the room. Fairchild shouted for order. "For God's sake, if we fight each other, we're finished. Don't you understand -- we have to work together!" It took a while before the uproar subsided. Reynolds pushed past Curt, white-faced and muttering under his breath. "I'm getting out of here." The other Telepaths trailed belligerently after him. AS he and Julie drove slowly home through the bluish darkness, one section of Fairchild's propaganda repeated itself in Curt's brain over and over again. "You've been told a victory by the Colonists means a victory of Psis over Normal human beings. This is not true! The Separation was not planned and is not conducted by either Psis or Mutants. The revolt was a spontaneous reaction by Colonists of all classes." "I wonder," Curt mused. "Maybe Fairchild's wrong. Maybe he's being operated by Psis without knowing it. Personally, I like him, stupid as he is." "Yes, he's stupid," Julie agreed. In the darkness of the car's cabin, her cigarette was a bright burning coal of wrath. In the back seat, Tim lay curled up asleep, warmed by the heat from the motor. The barren, rocky landahead of the small surface-car, a dim expanse, hostile and alien. A few Man-made roads and buildings lay here and there among crop-tanks and fields. "I don't trust Reynolds," Curt continued, knowing he was opening the previewed scene between it. "Reynolds is smart, unscrupulous and ambitious. What he wants is prestige and status. But Fairchild is thinking of the welfare of the Colony. He means all that stuff he dictated into his stones." "That drivel," Julie was scornful. "The, Terrans will laugh their heads off. Listening to it with a straight face was more than I could manage, and God knows our lives depend on this business." "Well," Curt said carefully, knowing what he was getting into, "there may be Terrans with more sense of justice than you and Reynolds." He turned toward her. "I can see what you're going to do and so can you. Maybe you're right, maybe we ought to get it over with. Ten years is a long time when there's no feeling. And it wasn't our idea in the first place." "No," Julie agreed. She crushed her cigarette out and shakily lit another. "If there had been another male Precog besides you, just one. That's something I can't forgive Reynolds for. It was his idea, you know. I never should have agreed. For the glory of the race! Onward and upward with the Psi banner! The mystical mating of the first real Precogs in history... and look what came of it!" "Shut up," Curt said. "He's not asleep and he can hear you." "Hear me, yes. Understand, no. We wanted to know what the second generation would be like.-well, now we know. Precog plus Precog equal freak. Useless mutant. Monster -- let's face it, the M on his card stands for monster." Curt's hands tightened on the wheel. "That's a word neither you nor anybody else is going to use." "Monster!" She leaned close to him, teeth white in the light from the dashboard, eyes glowing. "Maybe the Terrans are right -- maybe we Precogs ought to be sterilized and put to death. Erased. I think..." She broke off "Go ahead,". Curt said. "You think perhaps when the revolt is successful and we're in control of the Colonies, we should go down the line selectively. With the Corps on top naturally." "Separate the wheat from the chaff," Julie said. "First the Colonies from Terra. Then us from them. And when he comes up, even if he is my son..." "What you're doing," Curt interrupted, "is passing judgment on people according to their use. Tim isn't useful, so there's no point in letting him live, right?" His blood pressure was on the way up, but he was past caring. "Breeding people like cattle. A human hasn't a right to live; that's a privilege we dole out according to our whim." Curt raced the car down the deserted highway. "You heard Fairchild prattle about freedom and equality. He believes it and so do I. And I believe Tim -- or anybody else -- has a right to exist whether we can make use of his talent or whether he even has a talent." "He has a right to live," Julie said, "but remember he's not one of us. He's an oddity. He doesn't have our ability, our -- " she ground out the words triumphantly -- "superior ability." Curt pulled the car over to the edge of the highway. He brought it to a halt and pushed open the door. Dismal, arid air billowed into the car. "You drive on home." He leaned over the back seat and prodded Tim into wakefulness. "Come on, kid. We're getting out." Julie reached over to get the wheel. "When will you be home? Or have you got it completely set up now? Better make sure. She might be the kind that has a few others on the string." Curt stepped from the car and the door slammed behind him. He took his son's hand and led him down the roadway to the black square of a ramp that rose darkly in the night gloom. As they started up the steps, he heard the car roar off down the highway, through the darkness toward home. "Where are we?" Tim asked. "You know this place. I bring you here every week. This is the school where they train people like you and me -- where we Psis get our education." II them. Corridors branched off the main entrance ramp like metal vines. "You may stay here for a few days," Curt said to his son. "Can you stand not seeing your mother for a while?" Tim didn't answer. He had lapsed back into his usual silence as he followed along beside his father. Curt again wondered how the boy could be so withdrawn -- as he obviously was -- and yet be so terribly alert. The answer was written over each inch of the taut, young body. Tim was only withdrawn from contact with human beings. He maintained an almost compulsive tangency with the outside world -- or, rather, an outside world. Whatever it was, it didn't include humans, although it was made up of real, external objects. As he had already previewed, his son suddenly broke away from him. Curt let the boy hurry down a side corridor. He watched as Tim stood tugging anxiously at a supply locker, trying to get it open. "Okay," Curt said resignedly. He followed after him and unlocked the locker with his pass key. "See? There's nothing in it." How completely the boy lacked precog could be seen by the flood of relief that swept his face. Curt's heart sank at the sight. The precious talent that both he and Julie possessed simply hadn't been passed on. Whatever the boy was, he was not a Precog. It was past two in the morning, but the interior departments of the School Building were alight with activity. Curt moodily greeted a couple of Corpsmen lounging around the bar, surrounded by beers and ashtrays. "Where's Sally?" he demanded. "I want to go in and see Big Noodle." One of the Telepaths lazily jerked a thumb. "She's around somewhere. Over that way, in the kids' quarters, probably asleep. It's late." He eyed Curt, whose thoughts were on Julie. "You ought to get rid of a wife like that. She's too old and thin, anyhow. What you'd really like is a plump young dish -- " Curt lashed a blast of mental dislike and was satisfied to see the grinning young face go hard with antagonism. The other Telepath pulled himself upright and shouted after Curt, "When you're through with your wife, send her around to us." "I'd say you're after a girl of about twenty," another Telepath said as he admitted Curt to the sleeping quarters of the children's wing. "Dark hair -- correct me if I'm wrong -- and dark eyes. You have a fully formed image. Maybe there's a specific girl. Let's see, she's short, fairly pretty and her name is -- " Curt cursed at the situation that required them to turn their minds over to the Corps. Telepaths were interlaced throughout the Colonies and, in particular, throughout the School and the offices of the Colonial Government. He tightened his grip around Tim's hand and led him through the doorway. "This kid of yours," the Telepath said as Tim passed close to him, "sure probes queer. Mind if I go down a little?" "Keep out of his mind!" Curt ordered sharply. He slammed the door shut after Tim, knowing it made no difference, but enjoying the feel of the heavy metal sliding in place. He pushed Tim down a narrow corridor and into a small room. Tim pulled away, intent on a side door; Curt savagely yanked him back. "There's nothing in there!" he reprimanded harshly. "That's only a bathroom." Tim continued to tug away. He was still tugging when Sally appeared, fastening a robe around her, face puffy with sleep. "Hello, Mr. Purcell," she greeted Curt. "Hello, Tim." Yawning, she turned on a floor lamp and tossed herself down on a chair. "What can I do for you this time of night?"  gangling, with yellow cornsilk hair and freckled skin. She picked sleepily at her thumbnail and yawned again as the boy sat down across from her. To amuse him, she animated a pair of gloves lying on a sidetable. Tim laughed with delight as the gloves groped their way to the edge of the table, waved their fingers blindly and began a cautious descent to the floor. "Fine," Curt said. "You're getting good. I'd say you're not cutting any classes." Sally shrugged. "Mr. Purcell, the School can't teach me anything. You know I'm the most advanced Psi with the power of animation. They just let me work alone. In fact, I'm instructing a bunch of little kids, still Mutes, who might have something. I think a couple of them could work out, with practice. All they can give me is encouragement; you know, psychological stuff and lots of vitamins and fresh air. But they can't teach me anything." "They can teach you how important you are," Curt said. He had previewed this, of course. During the last half hour, he had selected a number of possible approaches, discarded one after another, finally ended with this. "I came over to see Big Noodle. That meant I had to wake you. Do you know why?" "Sure," Sally answered. "You're afraid of him. And since Big Noodle is afraid of me, you need me to come along." She allowed the gloves to sag back into immobility as she got to her feet. "Well, let's go." He had seen Big Noodle many times in his life, but he had never got used to the sight. Awed, in spite of his preview of this scene, Curt stood in the open space before the platform, gazing up, silent and impressed as always. "He's fat," Sally said practically. "If he doesn't get thinner, he won't live long." Big Noodle slumped like a gray, sickly pudding in the immense chair the Tech Department had built for him. His eyes were half-closed; his pulpy arms lay slack and inert at his sides. Wads of oozing dough hung in folds over the arms and sides of the chair. Big Noodle's egglike skull was fringed with damp, stringy hair, matted like decayed seaweed. His nails were lost in the sausage fingers. His teeth were rotting and black. His tiny plate-blue eyes flickered dully as he identified Curt and Sally, but the obese body did not stir. "He's resting," Sally explained. "He just ate." "Hello," Curt said. From the swollen mouth, between rolls of pink flesh lips, a grumbled response came. "He doesn't like to be bothered this late," Sally said yawning. "I don't blame him." S HE wandered around the room, amusing herself by animating light brackets along the wall. The brackets struggled to pull free from the hot-pour plastic in which they were set. "This seems so dumb, if you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Purcell. The Telepaths keep Terran infiltrators from coming in here, and all this business of yours is against them. That means you're helping Terra, doesn't it? If we didn't have the Corps to watch out for us -- " "I keep out Terrans," Big Noodle mumbled. "I have my wall and I turn back everything." "You turn back projectiles," Sally said, "but you can't keep out infiltrators. A Terran infiltrator could come in here this minute and you wouldn't know. You're just a big stupid lump of lard." Her description was accurate. But the vast mound of fat was the nexus of the Colony's defense, the most talented of the Psis. Big Noodle was the core of the Separation movement... and the living symbol of its problem. Big Noodle had almost infinite parakinetic power and the mind of a moronic three-year-old. He was, specifically, an idiot savant. His legendary powers had absorbed his whole personality, withered and degenerated it, rather than expandedit. He could have swept the Colony aside years ago if his bodily lusts hnd fears had been accompanied by cunning. But Big Noodle was helpless and inert, totally dependent on the instructions of the Colonial Government, reduced to sullen passivity by his terror of Sally. "I ate a whole pig." Big Noodle struggled to a quasi-sitting position, belched, wiped feebly at his chin. "Two pigs, in fact. Right here in this room, just a little while ago. I could get more if I wanted." The diet of the colonists consisted mainly of tank-grown artificial protein. Big Noodle was amusing himself at their expense. "The pig," Big Noodle continued grandly, "came from Terra. The night before, I had a flock of wild ducks. And before that, I brought over some kind of animal from Betelgeuse IV. It doesn't have any name; it just runs around and eats." "Like you," Sally said. "Only you don't run around." Big Noodle giggled. Pride momentarily overcame his fear of the girl. "Have some candy," he offered. A shower of chocolate rattled down like hail. Curt and Sally retreated as the floor of the chamber disappeared under the deluge. With the chocolate came fragments of machinery, cardboard boxes, sections of display counter, a jagged chunk of concrete floor. "Candy factory on Terra," Big Noodle explained happily. "I've got it pinpointed pretty good." Tim had awakened from his contemplation. He bent down and eagerly picked up a handful of chocolates. "Go ahead," Curt said to him. "You might as well take them." "I'm the only one that gets the candy," Big Noodle thundered, outraged. The chocolate vanished. "I sent it back," he explained peevishly. "It's mine." lent in Big Noodle, only an infinite childish selfishness. Through his power, every object in the Universe had become his possession. There was nothing outside the reach of his bloated arms; he could reach for the Moon and get it. Fortunately, most things were outside his span of comprehension. He was uninterested. "Let's cut out these games," Curt said. "Can you say if any Telepaths are within probe range of us?" Big Noodle made a begrudging search. He had a consciousness of objects wherever they were. Through his talent, he was in contact with the physical contents of the Universe. "None near here," he declared after a time. "One about a hundred feet off... I'll move him back. I hate Teeps getting into my privacy." "Everybody hates Teeps," Sally said. "It's a nasty, dirty talent. Looking into other people's minds is like watching them when they're bathing or dressing or eating. It isn't natural." Curt grinned. "Is it any different from Precog? You wouldn't call that natural." "Precog has to do with events, not people," Sally said. "Knowing what's going to happen isn't any worse than knowing what's already happened." "It might even be better," Curt pointed out. "No," Sally said emphatically. "It's got us into this trouble. I have to watch what I think all the time because of you. Every time I see a Teep, I get goose bumps, and no matter how hard I try, I can't keep from thinking about her, just because I know I'm not supposed to." "My precog faculty has nothing to do with Pat," Curt said. "Precog doesn't introduce fatality. Locating Pat was an intricate job. It was a deliberate choice I made." "Aren't you sorry?" Sally demanded. "No." "If it wasn't for me," Big Noodle interrupted, "you never would have got across to Pat." "I wish we hadn't," Sally said fervently. "If it wasn't for Pat, we wouldn't be mixed up in all this business." She shot a hostile glance at Curt. "And I don't think she's pretty." "What would you suggest?" Curt asked the child with more patience than he felt. He had previewed the futility of making a child and an idiot understand about Pat. "You know we can't pretend we never found her." "I know," Sally admitted. "And the Teeps have got something from our minds already. That's why there're so many of them hanging around here. It's a good thing we don't know where she is." "I know where she is," Big Noodle said. "I know exactly where." "No, you don't," Sally answered. "You just know how to get to her and that's not the same thing. You can't explain it; you just send us over there and back." "TT'S a planet," Big Noodle said angrily, "with funny plants and a lot of green things. And the air's thin. She lives in a camp. People go out and farm all day. There's only a few people there. A lot of dopy animals live there. It's cold." "Where is it?" Curt asked. Big Noodle sputtered. "It's..." His pulpy arms waved. "It's some place near..." He gave up, wheezed resentfully at Sally and then brought a tank of filthy water into being above the girl's head. As the water flowed toward her, the child made a few brief motions with her hands. Big Noodle shrieked in terror and the water vanished. He lay panting with fright, body quivering, as Sally mopped at a wet spot on her robe. She had animated the fingers of his left hand. "Better not do that again," Curt said to her. "His heart might give out." "The big slob." Sally rummaged around in a supply closet. "Well, if you've made up your mind, we might as well get it over with. Only let's not stay so long. You get to talking with Pat and then the two of you go off, and you don't come back for hours. At night, it's freezing and they don't have any heating plants." She pulled down a coat from the closet. "I'll take this with me." "We're not going," Curt told her. "This time is going to be different." Sally blinked. "Different? How?" Even Big Noodle was surprised. "I was just getting ready to move you across," he complained. "I know," Curt said firmly. "But this time I want you to bring Pat here. Bring her to this room, understand? This is the time we've been talking about. The big moment's arrived." with Curt as he entered Fairchild's office. Sally was now in bed, back at the school. Big Noodle never stirred from his chamber. Tim was still at the School, in the hands of Psi-class authorities, not Telepaths. Pat followed hesitantly, frightened and nervous as the men sitting around the office glanced up in annoyance. She was perhaps nineteen, slim and copper-skinned, with large dark eyes. She wore a canvas workshirt and jeans, heavy shoes caked with mud. Her tangle of black curls was tied back and knotted with a red bandanna. Her rolled-up sleeves showed tanned, competent arms. At her leather belt she carried a knife, a field telephone and an emergency pack of rations and water. "This is the girl," Curt said. "Take a good look at her." "Where are you from?" Fairchild asked Pat. He pushed aside a heap of directives and memotapes to find his pipe. Pat hesitated. "I -- " she began. She turned uncertainly to Curt. "You told me never to say, even to you." "It's okay," Curt said gently. "You can tell us now." He explained to Fairchild, "I can preview what she's going to say, but I never knew before. I didn't want to get it probed out of me by the Corps." "I was born on Proxima VI," Pat said in a low voice. "I grew up there. This is the first time I've left the planet." Fairchild's eyes widened. "That's a wild place. In fact, about our most primitive region." Around the office, his group of Norm and Psi consultants moved closer to watch. One wide-shouldered old man, face weathered as stone, eyes shrewd and alert, raised his hand. "Are we to understand that Big Noodle brought you here?" Pat nodded. "I didn't know. I mean it was unexpected." She tapped her belt. "I was working, clearing the brush... we've been trying to expand, develop more usable land." "What's your name?" Fairchild asked her. "Patricia Ann Connley." "What class?" The girl's sun-cracked lips moved. "Mute-class." A stir moved through the officials. "You're a Mutant," the old man asked her, "without Psi powers? Exactly how do you differ from the Norm?" moved forward to answer for her. "This girl will be twenty-one in two years. You know what that means. If she's still in the Muteclass, she'll be sterilized and put in a camp. That's our Colonial policy. And if Terra whips us, she'll be sterilized in any case, as will all of us Psis and Mutants." "Are you trying to say she has a talent?" Fairchild asked. "You want us to lift her from Mute to Psi?" His hands fumbled at the papers on the table. "We get a thousand petitions a day like this. You came down here at four in the morning just for this? There's a routine form you can fill out, a common office procedure." The old man cleared his throat and blurted, "This girl is close to you?" "That's right," Curt said. "I have a personal interest." "How did you meet her?" the old man asked. "If she's never been off Proxima VI..." "Big Noodle shuttled me there and back," Curt answered. "I've made the trip about twenty times. I didn't know it was Prox VI, of course. I only knew it was a Colony planet, primitive, still wild. Originally, I came across an analysis of her personality and neural characteristics in our Mute-class files. As soon as I understood, I gave Big Noodle the identifying brain pattern and had him send me across." "What is that pattern?" Fairchild asked. "What's different about her?" "Pat's talent has never been acknowledged as Psi," Curt said. "In a way, it isn't, but it's going to be one of the most useful talents we've discovered. We should have known it would arise. Wherever some organism develops, so does another to prey on it." "Get to the point," Fairchild said. He rubbed the blue stubble of his chin. "When you called me, all you said was that -- " "Consider the various Psi talents as survival weapons," Curt said. "Consider telepathic ability as evolving for the defense of an organism. It puts the Telepath head and shoulders above his enemies. Is this going to continue? Don't these things usually balance out?" It was the old man who understood. "I see," he said with a grin of wry admiration. "This girl is opaque to telepathic probes." "That's right," Curt said. "The first, but there'll most likely be others. And not only defenses to telepathic probes. There are going to be organisms resistant to Parakineticists, to Precogs like myself, to Resurrectors, to Animators, to every and all Psi powers. Now we have a fourth class. The Anti-Psi class. It was bound to come .into existence." Hi hot and satisfying. Like the eggs and bacon it was synthetically compounded from tankgrown meals and proteins, with a carefully regulated mix of native-grown plant fiber. As they ate, the morning sun rose outside. The barren gray landscape of faint tint of red. "It looks nice," Pat said shyly, glancing out the kitchen window. "Maybe I can examine your farming equipment. You have a lot we don't have." "We've had more time," Curt reminded her. "This planet was settled a century before your own. You'll catch up with us. In many ways Prox VI is richer ' and more fertile." Julie wasn't sitting at the table. She stood leaning against the refrigerator, arms folded, her face hard and frigid. "Is she really staying here?" she demanded in a thin, clipped voice. "In this house with us?" "That's right," Curt answered. "How long?" "A few days. A week. Until I can get Fairchild moving." Faint sounds stirred beyond the house. Here and there in the residential syndrome people were waking up and preparing for the day. The kitchen was warm and cheerful; a window of clear plastic separated it from the landscape of tumbled rocks, thin trees and plants that stretched to a line of weathered mountains a few hundred miles off. Cold morning wind whipped around the rubbish that littered the deserted inter-system field at the rim of the syndrome. "That field was the link between us and the Sol System," Curt said. "The umbilical cord. Gone now, for a while at least." "It's beautiful," Pat stated. "The field?" She gestured at the towers of an elaborate mining and smelting combine partly visible beyond the rows of houses. "Those, I mean. The landscape is like ours; bleak and awful. It's all the installations that mean something... where you've pushed the landscape back." She shivered. "We've been fighting trees and rocks all my life, trying to get the soil usable, trying to make a place to live. We don't have any heavy equipment on Prox VI, just hand tools and our own backs. You know, you've seen our villages." Curt sipped his coffee. "Are there many Psis on Prox VI?" "A few. Mostly minor. A few Resurrectors, a handful of Animators. No one even as good as Sally." She laughed, showing her even white teeth. "We're rustic hicks, compared to this urban metropolis. You saw how we live. Villages stuck here and there, farms, a few isolated supply centers, one miserable field. You saw my family, my brothers and my father, our home life, if you can call that log shack a home. Three centuries behind Terra." "They taught you about Terra?" "Oh, yes. Tapes came direct from the Sol System until the Separation. Not that I'm sorry we separated. We should have been out working anyhow, instead of watching the tapes. But it was interesting to see the mother world, the big cities, all earlier colonies on Venus and Mars. It was amazing." Her voice throbbed with excitement. "Those colonies were like ours, once. They had to clear Mars the same way we're clearing Prox VI. We'll get Prox VI cleared, cities built up and fields laid out. And we'll all go on doing our part." the refrigerator and began gathering dishes from the table without looking at Pat. "Maybe I'm being naive," she said to Curt, "but where's she going to sleep?" "You know the answer," Curt answered patiently. "You've previewed all this. Tim's at the School so she can have his room." "What am I supposed to do? Feed her, wait on her, be her maid? What am I supposed to tell people when they see her?" Julie's voice rose to a shrill. "Am I supposed to say she's my sister?" Pat smiled across at Curt, toying with a button on her shirt. It was apparent that she was untouched, remote from Julie's harsh voice. Probably that was why the Corps couldn't probe her. Detached, almost aloof, she seemed unaffected by rancor and violence. "She won't need any supervision," Curt said to his wife. "Leave her alone." Julie lit a cigarette with rapid, jerky fingers. "I'll be glad to leave her alone. But she can't go around in those work clothes looking like a convict." "Find her something of yours," Curt suggested. Julie's face twisted. "She couldn't wear my things; she's too heavy." To Pat she said with deliberate cruelty, "What are you, about a size # waist? My God, what have you been doing, dragging a plow? Look at her neck and shoulders... she looks like a field-horse." Curt got abruptly to his feet and pushed his chair back from the table. "Come on," he said to Pat. It was vital to show her something besides this undercurrent of resentment. "I'll show you around." Pat leaped up, her cheeks flushed. "I want to see everything. This is all so new." She hurried after him as he grabbed his coat and headed for the front door. "Can we see the School where you train the Psis? I want to see how you develop their abilities. And can we see how the Colonial Government is organized? I want to see how Fairchild works with the Psis." Julie followed the two of them out onto the front porch. Cool, chill morning air billowed around them, mixed with the sounds of cars heading from the residential syndrome toward the city. "In my room you'll find skirts and blouses," she said to Pat. "Pick out something light. It's warmer here than on Prox VI." "Thank you," Pat said. She hurried back into the house.  Curt. "When I get her washed and dressed, I guess she'll look all right. She's got a figure -- in a healthy sort of way. But is there anything to her mind? To her personality?" "Sure," Curt answered. Julie shrugged. "Well, she's young. A lot younger than I am." She smiled wanly. "Remember when we first met? Ten years ago... I was so curious to' see you, talk to you. The only other Precog besides myself. I had so many dreams and hopes about both of us. I was her age, perhaps a little younger." "It was hard to see how it would work out," Curt said. "Even for us. A half-hour preview isn't much, in a thing like this." "How long has it been?" Julie asked. "Not long." "Have there been other girls?" "No. Only Pat." "When I realized there was somebody else, I hoped she was good enough for you. If I could be sure this girl had something to offer. I suppose it's her remoteness that gives an impression of emptiness. And you have more rapport with her than I do. Probably you don't feel the lack, if it is a lack. And it may be tied in with her talent, her opaqueness." Curt fastened the cuffs of his coat. "I think it's a kind of innocence. She's not touched by a lot of things we have here in our urban, industrial society. When you were talking about her it didn't seem to reach her." Julie touched his arm lightly. "Then take care of her. She's going to need it around here. I wonder what Reynolds' reaction is going to be." "Do you see anything?" "Nothing about her. You're going off... I'm by myself for the next interval, as far as I can preview, working around the house. As for now, I'm going into town to do some shopping, to pick up some new clothes. Maybe I can get something for her to wear." "We'll get her things," Curt said. "She should get her clothes first-hand." Pat appeared in a cream-colored blouse and ankle-length yellow skirt, black eyes sparkling, hair moist with morning mist. "I'm ready! Can we go now?" Sunlight glittered down on them as they stepped eagerly onto the level ground. "We'll go over to the School first and pick up my son." T HE three of them walked slowly along the gravel path that led by the white concrete School Building, by the faint sheen of wet lawn that was carefully maintained against the hostile weather of the planet. Tim scampered on ahead of Pat and Curt, listening and peering intently past the objects around him, body tensed forward, lithe and alert. "He doesn't speak much," Pat observed. "He's too busy to pay any attention to us." Tim halted to gaze behind a shrub. Pat followed a little after him, curious. "What's he looking for? He's a beautiful child... he has Julie's hair. She has nice hair." "Look over there," Curt said to his son. "There're plenty of children to sort over. Go play with them." At the entrance to the main School Building, parents and their children swarmed in restless, anxious groups. Uniformed School Officials moved among them, sorting, checking, dividing the children into various subgroups. Now and then a small sub-group was admitted through the check-system into the School Building. Apprehensive, pathetically hopeful, the mothers waited outside. Pat said. "It's like that on Prox VI, when the School Teams come to make their census and inspection. Everybody wants to get the unclassified children put up into the Psi-class. My father tried for years to get me out of Mute. He finally gave up. That report you saw was one of his periodic requests. It was filed away somewhere, wasn't it? Gathering dust in a drawer." "If this works out," Curt said, "many more children will have a chance to get out of the Muteclass. You won't be the only one. You're the first of many, we hope." Pat kicked at a pebble. "I don't feel so new, so astonishingly different. I don't feel anything at all. You say I'm opaque to telepathic invasion, but I've only been scanned one or two times in my life." She touched her head with her coppercolored fingers and smiled. "If no Corpsman is scanning me. I'm just like anybody else." "Your ability is a counter-talent," Curt pointed out. "It takes the original talent to call it into being. Naturally, you're not conscious of it during your ordinary routine of living." "A counter-talent. It seems so -- so negative. I don't do anything, like you do... I don't move objects or turn stones into bread or give birth without impregnation or bring dead people back to life. I just negate somebody else's ability. It seems like a hostile, stultifyingsort of ability -- to just cancel out the telepathic factor." "That could be as useful as the telepathic factor itself. Especially for all of us non-teeps."  along who balances your ability, Curt." She had turned dead serious, sounding discouraged and unhappy. "People will arise who balance out all Psi talents. We'll be back where we started from. It'll be like not having Psi at all." "I don't think so," Curt answered. "The Anti-Psi factor is a natural restoration of balance. One insect learns to fly, so another learns to build a web to trap him. Is that the same as no flight? Clams developed hard shells to protect them; therefore birds learn to fly the clam up high in the air and drop him on a rock. In a sense you're a lifeform preying on the Psis and the Psis are life-forms that prey on the Norms. That makes you a friend of the Norm-class. Balance, the full circle, predator and prey. It's an eternal system and frankly I can't see how it could be improved." "You might be considered a traitor." "Yes," Curt agreed. "I suppose so." "Doesn't it bother you?" "It bothers me that people will feel hostile toward me. But you can't live very long without arousing hostility. Julie feels hostility toward you. Reynolds feels hostility for me already. You can't please everybody, because people want different things. Please one and you displease another. In this life you have to decide which of them you want to please. I'd prefer to please Fairchild." "He should be glad." "If he's aware of what's going on. Fairchild's an overworked bureaucrat. He may decide I exceeded my authority in acting on your father's petition. He may want it filed back where it was, and you returned to Prox VI. He may even fine me a penalty." drove down the long highway to the shore of the ocean. Tim shouted with happiness at the vast stretch of deserted beach as he raced off, arms waving, his yells lost in the ceaseless lapping of the ocean waves. The red-tinted sky warmed above them. The three of them were completely isolated by the bowl of ocean and sky and beach. No other humans were visible, only a flock of indigenous birds strolling around in search of sand crustaceans. "It's wonderful," Pat said, awed. "I guess the oceans on Terra are like this, big and bright and red." "Blue," Curt corrected. He lay sprawled out on the warm sand, smoking his pipe and gazing moodily at the probing waves that oozed up on the beach a few yards away. The waves left heaps of steaming sea-plants stranded. Tim came hurrying back with his arms full of the dripping, slimy weeds. He dumped the coils of still quivering vegetable life in front of Pat and his father. "He likes the ocean," Pat said. "No hiding places for Others," Curt answered, "He can see for miles, so he knows they can't creep up on him." "Others?" She was curious. "He's such a strange boy. So worried and busy. He takes his alternate world so seriously. Not a pleasant world, I guess. Too many responsibilities." The sky turned hot. Tim began building an intricate structure out of wet sand lugged from the water's edge. Pat scampered barefooted to join Tim. The two of them labored, adding infinite walls and sidebuildings and towers. In the hot glare of the water, the girl's bare shoulders and back dripped perspiration. She sat up finally, gasping and exhausted, pushed her hair from her eyes and struggled to her feet. "It's too hot," she gasped, throwing herself down beside Curt. "The weather's so different here. I'm sleepy." Tim continued building the structure. The two of them watched him languidly, crumbling bits of dry sand between their fingers. "I guess," Pat said after a while, "there isn't much left to your marriage. I've made it impossible for you and Julie to live together." "It's not your fault. We were never really together. All we had in common was our talent and that has nothing to do with the over-all personality. The total individual." Pat slid off her skirt and waded down to the ocean's edge. She curled up in the swirling pink foam and began washing her hair. Half-buried in the piles of foam and seakelp, her sleek, tanned body glowed wet and healthy in the overhead sun. "Come on!" she called to Curt. "It's so cool." Curt knocked the ashes from his pipe into the dry sand. "We have to get back. Sooner or later I've got to have it out with Fairchild. We need a decision." Pat strode from the water, body streaming, head tossed back, hair dripping down her shoulders. Tim attracted her attention and she halted to study his sand building. "You're right," she said to Curt. "We shouldn't be here wading and dozing and building sand castles. Fairchild's trying to keep the Separation working, and we have real things to build up in the backward Colonies." A S she dried herself with Curt's coat she told him about Proxima VI. "It's like the Middle Ages back on Terra. Most of our people think Psi powers are miracles. They think the Psis are saints." "I suppose that's what the saints were," Curt agreed. "They raised the dead, turned inorganic material into organic and moved objects around. The Psi ability has probably always been present in the human race. The Psiclass individual isn't new; he's always been with us, helping here and there, sometimes doing harm when he exploited his talent against mankind." Pat tugged on her sandals. "There's an old woman near our village, a first-rate Resurrector. She won't leave Prox VI; she won't go with the Government Teams or get mixed up with the School. She wants to stay where she is, being a witch and wise woman. People come to her and she heals the sick." Pat fastened her blouse and started toward the car. "When I was seven I broke my arm. She put her old withered hands on it and the break repaired itself. Apparently her hands radiate some kind of generative field that affects the growth-rate of the cells. And I remember one time when a boy was drowned and she brought him back to life." "Get an old woman who can heal, another who can precog the future, and your village is set up. We Psis have been helping longer than we realize." "Come on, Tim!" Pat called, tanned hands to her lips. "Time to go back!" The boy bent down one last time to peer into the depths of his structure, the elaborate inner sections of his sand building. Suddenly he screamed, leaped back and came racing frantically toward the car. Pat caught hold of him and he clung to her, face distorted with terror. "What is it?" Pat was frightened. "Curt, what was it?" Curt came over and squatted down beside the boy. "What was in there?" he asked gently. "You built it." The boy's lips moved. "A Left," he muttered almost inaudibly. "There was a Left, I know it. The first real Left. And it hung on." Pat and Curt glanced at each other uneasily. "What's he talking about?" Pat asked. Curt got behind the wheel of the car and pushed open the doors for the two of them. "I don't know. But I think we'd better get back to town. I'll talk to Fairchild and get this business of Anti-Psi cleared up. Once that's out of the way, you and I can devote ourselves to Tim for the rest of our lives." F airchild was pale and tired as he sat behind his desk in his office, hands folded in front of him, a few Norm-class advisors here and there, listening intently. Dark circles mooned under his eyes. As he listened to Curt he sipped at a glass of tomato juice. "In other words," Fairchild muttered, "you're saying we can't really trust you Psis. It's a paradox." His voice broke with despair. "A Psi comes here and says all Psis lie. What the hell am I supposed to do?" "Not all Psis." Being able to preview the scene gave Curt remarkable calmness. "I'm saying that in a way Terra is right... the existence of super-talented humans poses a problem for those ' without super-talents. But Terra's answer is wrong; sterilization is vicious and senseless. But cooperation isn't as easy as you imagine. You're dependent on our talents for survival and that means we have you where we want you. We can dictate to you because, without us, Terra would come in and clap you all into military prison." "And destroy you Psis," the old man standing behind Fairchild reminded him. "Don't forget that." Curt eyed the old man. It was the same wide-shouldered, grayfaced individual of the night before. There was something familiar about him. Curt peered closer and gasped, in spite of his preview. "You're a Psi," he said. The old man bowed slightly. "Evidently." "Come on," Fairchild said. "All right, we've seen this girl and we'll accept your theory of AntiPsi. What do you want us to do?" He wiped his forehead miserably. "I know Reynolds is a menace. But damn it, Terran infiltrators would be running all around here without the Corps!" "I want you to create a legal fourth class," Curt stated. "The Anti-Psi class. I want you to give it status-immunity from sterilization. I want you to publicize it. Women come in here with their children from all parts of the Colonies, trying to convince you they've got Psis to offer, not Mutes. I want you to set up the Anti-Psi class as a similar goal, to get them started selecting the Anti-Psi talents out where we can utilize them." Fairchild licked his dry lips. "You think more exist already?" "Very possibly. I came on Pat by accident. But get the flow started! Get the mothers hovering anxiously over their cribs for Anti-Psis... We'll need all we can get." There was silence. is doing," the old man said at last. "An Anti-Precog may arise, a person whose actions in the future can't be previewed. A sort of Heisenberg's indeterminate particle... a man who throws off all precog prediction. And yet Mr. Purcell has come here to make his suggestions. He's thinking of Separation, not himself." Fairchild's fingers twitched. "Reynolds is going to be mad as hell." "He's already mad," Curt said. "He undoubtedly knows about this right now." "He'll protest!" Curt laughed, some of the officials smiled. "Of course he'll protest. Don't you understand? You're being eliminated. You think Norms are going to be around much longer? Charity is damn scarce in this universe. You Norms gape at Psis like rustics at a carnival. Wonderful... magical. You encouraged Psis, built the School, gave us our chance here in the Colonies. In fifty years you'll be slave laborers for us. You'll be doing our manual labor -- unless you have sense enough to create the fourth class, the Anti-Psi class. You've got to stand up to Reynolds." "I hate to alienate him," Fairchild muttered. "Why the hell can't we all work together?" He appealed to the others around the room. "Why can't we all be brothers?" "Because," Curt answered, "we're not. Face facts. Brotherhood is a fine idea, but it'll come into existence sooner if we achieve a balance of social forces." "Is it possible," the old man suggested, "that once the concept of Anti-Psi reaches Terra the sterilization program will be modified? This idea may erase the irrational terror the non-mutants have, their phobia that we're monsters about to invade and take over their world. Sit next to them in theaters. Marry their sisters." "All right," Fairchild agreed. "I'll construct an official directive. Give me an hour to word it -- I want to get all the loopholes out." Curt got to his feet. It was over. As he had previewed, Fairchild had agreed. "We should start getting reports almost at once," he said. "As soon as routine checking of the files begins." Fairchild nodded. "Yes, almost at once." "I assume you'll keep me informed." Apprehension moved through Curt. He had succeeded... or had he? He scanned the next half hour. There was nothing negative he could preview. He caught a quick scene of himself and Pat, himself and Julie and Tim. But still his uneasiness remained, an intuition deeper than his precog. Everything looked fine, but he knew better. Something basic and IV H E met Pat in a small out-ofthe-way bar at the rim of the city. Darkness flickered around their table. The air was thick and pungent with the presence of people. Bursts of muted laughter broke out, muffled by the steady blur of conversation. "How'd it go?" she asked, eyes large and dark, as he seated himself across from her. "Did Fairchild agree?" Curt ordered a Tom Collins for her and bourbon and water for himself. Then he outlined what had taken place. "So everything's all right." Pat reached across the table to touch his hand. "Isn't it?" Curt sipped at his drink. "I guess so. The Anti-Psi class is being formed. But it was too easy. Too simple." "You can see ahead, can't you? Is anything going to happen?" Across the dark room the music machine was creating vague patterns of sound, random harmonics and rhythms in a procession of soft clusters that drifted through the room. A few couples moved languidly together in response to the shifting patterns. Curt offered her a cigarette and the two of them lit up from the candle in the center of the table. "Now you have your status." Pat's dark eyes flickered. "Yes, that's so. The new Anti-Psi class. I don't have to worry now. That's all over." "We're waiting for others. If no others show, you're a member of a unique class. The only Anti-Psi in the Universe." For a moment Pat was silent. Then she asked. "What do you see after that?" She sipped her drink. "I mean, I'm going to stay here, aren't I? Or will I be going back?" "You'll stay here." "With you?" "With me. And with Tim." "What about Julie?" "The two of us signed mutual releases a year ago. They're on file, somewhere. Never processed. It was an agreement we made, so neither of us could block the other later on." "I think Tim likes me. He won't mind, will he?" "Not at all," Curt said. "It ought to be nice, don't you think? The three of us. We can work with Tim, try to find out about his talent, what he is and what he's thinking. I'd enjoy that... he responds to me. And we have a long time; there's no hurry." H ER fingers clasped around his. In the shifting darkness of the bar her features swam close to his own. Curt leaned forward, hesitated a moment as her warm breath stained his lips and then kissed her. Pat smiled up at him. "They're so many things for us to do. Here, and perhaps later on Prox VI. I want to go back there, sometime. Could we? Just for a while; we wouldn't have to stay. So I can see that it's still going on, all the things I worked at all my life. So I could see my world." "Sure," Curt said. "Yes, we'll go back there." Across from them a nervous little man had finished his garlic bread and wine. He wiped his mouth, glanced at his wristwatch and got to his feet. As he squeezed past Curt he reached into his pocket, jangled change and jerkily brought out his hand. Gripping a slender tube, he turned around, bent over Pat, and depressed the tube. A single pellet dribbled from the tube, clung for a split second to the shiny surface of her hair, and then was gone. A dull echo of vibration rolled up toward the, nearby tables. The nervous little man continued on. Curt was on his feet, numb with shock. He was still gazing down, paralyzed, when Reynolds appeared beside him and firmly pulled him away. "She's dead," Reynolds was saying. "Try to understand. She died instantly; there was no pain. It goes directly to the central nervous system. She wasn't even aware of it." Nobody in the bar had stirred. They sat at their tables, faces impassive, watching as Reynolds signaled for more light. The darkness faded and the objects of the room leaped into clarity. "Stop that machine," Reynolds ordered sharply. The music machine stumbled into silence. "These people here are Corpsmen," he explained to Curt. "We probed your thoughts about this place as you entered Fairchild's office." "But I didn't catch it," Curt muttered. "There was no warning. No preview." "The man who killed her is an Anti-Psi," Reynolds said. "We've known of the category for a number of years; remember, it took an initial probe to uncover Patricia Connley's shield." "Yes," Curt agreed. "She was probed years ago. By one of you." "We don't like the Anti-Psi idea. We wanted to keep the class out of existence, but we were interested. We've uncovered and neutralized fourteen Anti-Psis over the past decade. On this, we have virtually the whole Psiclass behind us -- except you. The problem, of course, is that no Anti-Psi talent can be brought out unless matched against the Psionic talent it negates." Curt understood. "You had to match this man against a Precog. And there's only one Prjcog other than myself." "Julie was cooperative. We brought the problem to her a few months ago. We had definite proof to give her concerning your affair with this girl. I don't understand how you expected to keep Telepaths from knowing your plans, but apparently you did. In any case, the girl is dead. And there won't be any Anti-Psi class. We waited as long as possible, for we don't like to destroy talented individuals. But Fairchild was on the verge of signing the enabling legislation, so we couldn't hold off any longer." Curt hit out frantically, knowing even as he did so that it was futile. Reynolds slid back; his foot tangled with the table and he staggered. Curt leaped on him, smashed the tall cold glass that had held Pat's drink and lifted the jagged edges over Reynolds' face. Corpsmen pulled him off. down and gathered up Pat's body. She was still warm; her face was calm, expressionless, an empty burned-out shell that mirrored nothing. He carried her from the bar and out onto the frigid night-dark street. A moment later he lowered her into his car and crept behind the wheel. He drove to the School, parked the car, and carried her into the main building. Pushing past astonished officials, he reached the childrens' quarters and forced open the door to Sally's rooms with his shoulder. She was wide-awake and fully dressed. Seated on a straightbacked chair the child faced him defiantly. "You see?" she shrilled. "See what you did?" He was too dazed to answer. "It's all your fault! You made Reynolds do it. He had to kill her." She leaped to her feet and ran toward him, screaming hysterically. "You're an enemy! You're againstus! You want to make trouble for all of us. I told Reynolds what you were doing and he -- " Her voice trailed off as he moved out of the room with his heavy armload. As he lumbered up the corridor the hysterical girl followed after him. "You want to go across -- you want me to get Big Noodle to take you across!" She ran in front of him, darting here and there like a maniacal insect. Tears ran down her cheeks; her face was distorted beyond recognition. She followed him all the way to Big Noodle's chamber. "I'm not going to help you! You're against all of us and I'm never going to help you again! I'm glad she's dead! I wish you were dead, too. And you're going to be dead when Reynolds catches you. He told me so. He said there wasn't going to be any more like you and we would have things the way they ought to be, and nobody, not you nor any of those numbskulls can stop us!" He lowered Pat's body onto the floor and moved out of the chamber. Sally raced after him. "You know what he did to Fairchild? He has him fixed so he can't do anything ever again." Curt tripped a locked door and entered his son's room. The door closed after him and the girl's frenzied screams died to a muffled vibration. Tim sat up in bed, surprised and half-stupefied by sleep. "Come on," Curt said. He dragged the boy from his bed, dressed him, and hurried him outside into the hall. Sally stopped them as they reentered Big Noodle's chamber. "He won't do it," she screamed. "He's afraid of me and I told him not to. You understand?" B IG Noodle lay slumped in his massive chair. He lifted his great head as Curt approached him. "What do you want?" he muttered. "What's the matter with her?" He indicated Pat's inert body. "She pass out or something?" "Reynolds killed her!" Sally shrilled, dancing around Curt and his son. "And he's going to kill Mr. Purcell! He's going to kill everybody that tries to stop us!" Big Noodle's thick features darkened. The wattles of bristly flesh turned a flushed, mottled crimson. "What's going on, Curt?" he muttered. "The Corps is taking over," Curt answered. "They killed your girl?" "Yes." Big Noodle strained to a sitting position and leaned forward. "Reynolds is after you?" "Yes." Big Noodle licked his thick lips hesitantly. "Where do you want to go?" he asked hoarsely. "I can move you out of here, to Terra, maybe. Or -- " Sally made frantic motions with her hands. Part of Big Noodle's chair writhed and became animate. The arms twisted around him, cut viciously into his puddinglike paunch. He retched and closed his eyes. "I'll make you sprry!" Sally chanted. "I can do terrible things to you!" "I don't want to go to Terra," Curt said. He gathered up Pat's body and motioned Tim over beside him. "I want to go to Proxima VI." Big Noodle struggled to make up his mind. Outside the room officials and Corpsmen were in cautious motion. A bedlam of sound and uncertainty rang up and down the corridors. Sally's shrill voice rose over the rumble of sound as she tried to attract Big Noodle's attention. "You know what I'll do! You know what will happen to you!" Big Noodle made his decision. He tried an abortive stab at Sally before turning to Curt; a ton of molten plastic transported from some Terran factory cascaded down on her in a hissing torrent. Sally's body dissolved, one arm raised and twitching, the echo of her voice still hanging in the air. Big Noodle had acted, but the warp directed at him from the dying girl was already in existence. As Curt felt the air of space transformation all around him, he caught a final glimpse of Big Noodle's torment. He had never known precisely what it was Sally dangled over the big idiot's head. Now he saw it and understood Big Noodle's hesitation. A high-pitched scream rattled from Big Noodle's throat and around Curt as the chamber ebbed away. Big Noodle altered and flowed as Sally's change engulfed him. Curt realized, then, the amount of courage buried in the vegetable rolls of fat. Big Noodle had known the risk, taken it, and accepted -- more or less -- the consequences. The vast body had become a mass of crawling spiders. What had been Big Noodle was now a mound of hairy, quivering beings, thousands of them, spiders without number, dropping off and clinging again, clustering and separating and reclustering. And then the chamber was gone. He was across. I T was early afternoon. He lay for a time, half-buried in tangled vines. Insects hummed around him, seeking moisture from the stalks of foul-smelling flowers. The red-tinted sky baked in the mounting sunlight. Far off, an animal of some kind called mournfully. Nearby, his son stirred. The boy got to his feet, wandered about aimlessly and finally approached his father. Curt pulled himself up. His clothes were torn. Blood oozed down his cheek, into his mouth. He shook his head, shuddered, and looked around. Pat's body lay a few feet off. A crumpled and broken thing, it was withoutlife of any kind. A hollow husk, abandoned and deserted. He made his way over to her. For a time he squatted on his haunches, gazing vacantly down at her. Then he leaned over, picked her up, and struggled to his feet. "Come on," he said to Tim, "let's get started." They walked a long time. Big Noodle had dropped them between villages, in the turgid chaos of the Proxima VI forests. Once he stopped in an open field and rested. Against the line of drooping trees a waver of blue smoke drifted. A kiln, perhaps. Or somebody clearing away the brush. He lifted Pat up in his arms again and continued on. When he crashed from the underbrush and out into the road, the villagers were paralyzed with fright. Some of them raced off, a few remained, staring blankly at the man and the boy beside him. , "Who are you?" one of them demanded as he fumbled for a hack-knife. "What have you got there?" They got a work-truck for him, allowed him to dump Pat in with the rough-cut lumber, and then drove him and his son to the nearest village. He wasn't far off, only a hundred miles. From the common store of the village he was given heavy work  clothes and fed. Tim was bathed and cared for, and a general conference was called. He sat at a huge, rough table, littered with remains of the midday meal. He knew their decision; he could preview it without trouble. "She can't fix up anybody that far gone," the leader of the village explained to him. "The girl's whole upper ganglia and brain are gone, and most of the spinal column." He listened, but didn't speak. Afterwards, he wangled a bat #I tered truck, loaded Pat and Tim in, and started on.  H ER village had been notified by short-wave radio. Re was pulled from the truck by savage hands; a pandemonium of noise and fury boiled around him, excited faces distorted by grief and horror. Shouts, outraged shoves, questions, a blur of men and wofinally her brothers cleared a path for him to their home. They laid her out on a table and examined her with shaking hands. "It's useless," her father was saying to him. "And the old woman's gone, I think. That was years ago." The man gestured toward the mountains. "She lived up there -- used to come down. Not for years." He grabbed Curt roughly. "It's too late, God damn it! She's dead! You can't bring her back!" He listened to the words, still said nothing. He had no interest in predictions of any kind. When they had finished talking to him, he gathered up Pat's body, carried it back to the truck, called his son and continued on. It grew cold and silent as the truck wheezily climbed the road into the mountains. Frigid air plucked at him ; the road was obscured by dense clouds of mist that billowed up from the chalky soil. At one point a lumbering animal barred his way until he drove it off by throwing rocks at it. Finally the truck ran out of fuel and stopped. He got out, stood for a time, then woke up his son and continued on foot. It was almost dark when he found the hut perched on a lip of rock. A fetid stench of offal and drying hides stung his nose as he staggered past heaps of discarded rubble, tin cans and boxes, rotting fabric and vermininfested lumber. The old woman was watering a patch of wretched vegetables. As he approached, she lowered her sprinkling can and turned toward him, wrinkled face tight with suspicion and wonder. "I can't do it," she said flatly as she crouched over Pat's inert body. She ran her dry, leathery hands over the dead face, pulled aside the girl's shirt and kneaded the cold flesh at the base of the neck. She pushed aside the tangle of black hair and gripped the skull with her strong fingers. "No, I can't do a thing." Her voice was rusty and harsh in the night fog that billowed around them. "She's burned out. No tissue left to repair." Curt made his cracked lips move. "Is there another?" he grated. "Any more Resurrectors here?" The old woman struggled to her feet. "Nobody can help you, don't you understand? She's dead!" He remained. He asked the question again and again. Finally there was a begrudging answer. Somewhere on the other side of the planet there was supposed to be a competitor. He gave the old woman his cigarettes and lighter and fountain pen, picked up the cold body and started back. Tim trailed after him, head drooping, body bent with fatigue. "Come on," Curt ordered harshly. The old woman watched silently as they threaded their way down by the light of Proxima Vi's two sullen, yellowed moons. H E got only a quarter mile. In some way,' without warning, her body was gone. He had lost her, dropped her along the way. Somewhere among the rubbish-littered rocks and weeds that fingered their way over the trail. Probably into one of the deep gorges that cut into the jagged side of the mountain. He sat down on the ground and rested. There was nothing left. Fairchild had dwindled into the hands of the Corps. Big Noodle was destroyed by Sally. Sally was gone, too. The Colonies were open to the Terrans; their wall against projectiles had dissolved when Big Noodle died. And Pat. There was a sound behind him. Panting with despair and fatigue, he turned only slightly. For a brief second he thought it was Tim catching up with him. He strained to see; the shape that emerged from the half-light was too tall, too sure-footed. A familiar shape. "You're right," the old man said, the ancient Psi who had stood beside Fairchild. He came up, vast and awesome in the aged yellow moonlight. "There's no use trying to bring her back. It could be done, but it's too difficult. And there're other things for you and me to think about." Curt scrambled off. Falling, sliding, slashed by the stones under him, he made his way blindly down the trail. Dirt rattled after him while choking, he struggled onto the level ground. When he halted again, it was Tim who came after him. For an instant he thought it had been an illusion, a figment of his imagination. The old man was gone; he hadn't been there. He didn't fully understand until he saw the change take place in front of him. And this time it went the other way. He realized that this one was a Left. And it was a familiar figure, but in a different way. A figure he remembered from the past. Where the boy of eight had stood, a wailing, fretful baby of sixteen months struggled and groped. Now the substitution had gone in the other direction... and he couldn't deny what his eyes saw. "All right," he said, when the eight-year-old Tim reappeared and the baby was gone. But the boy remained only a moment. He vanished almost at once, and this time a new shape stood on the trail. A man in his middle thirties, a man Curt had never seen before. A familiar man. " You're my son," Curt said. praised him in the dim light. "You realize that she can't be brought back, don't you? We have to get that out of the way before we can proceed." Curt nodded wearily. "I know." "Fine." Tim advanced toward him, hand out. "Then let's get back down. We have a lot to do. We middle and extreme Rights have been trying to get through for some time. It's been difficult to come back without the approval of the Center one. And in these cases the Center is too young to understand." "So that's what he meant," Curt murmured as the two of them made their way along the road, toward the village. "The Others are himself, along his time-track." "Left is previous Others," Tim answered. "Right, of course, is the future. You said that Precog and Precog made nothing. Now you know. They make the ultimate Precog -- the ability to move through time." "You Others were trying to get over. He'd see you and be frightened." "It was very hard, but we knew eventually he'd grow old enough to comprehend. He built up an elaborate mythology. That i, we did. I did." Tim laughed. "You see, there still isn't an adequate terminology. There never is for a unique happening." "I could change the future," Curt said, "because I could see into it. But I couldn't change the present. You can change the present by going back into the past. That's why that extreme Right Other, the old man, hung around Fairchild." "That was our first successful crossing. We were finally able to induce the Center to take his two steps Right. That switched the two, but it took time." "What's going to happen now?" Curt asked. "The war? The Separation? All this about Reynolds?" "As you realized before, we can alter it by going back. It's dangerous. A simple change in the past may completely alter the present. The time-traveling talent is the most critical -- and the most Promethean. Every other talent, without exception, can change only what's going to happen. I could wipe out everything that stands. I precede everyone and everything. Nothing can be used against me. I am always there first. I have always been there." ed the abandoned, rusting truck. Finally he asked, "What is Anti-Psi? What did you have to do with that?" "Not much," his son said. "You can take credit for bringing it out into the open, since we didn't begin operating until the last few hours. We came along in time to aid it -- you saw us with Fairchild. We're sponsoring AntiPsi. You'd be surprised to see some of the alternate time-paths on which Anti-Psi fails to get pushed forward. Your precog was right -- they're not very pleasant." "So I've had help lately." "We're behind you, yes. And from now on, our help will increase. Always, we try to introduce balances. Stalemates, such as Anti-Psi. Right now, Reynolds is a little out of balance, but he can easily be checked. Steps are being taken. We're not infinite in power, of course. We're limited by our life-span, about seventy years. It's a strange feeling to be outside of time. You're outside of change, subject to no laws. "It's like suddenly being lifted off the chess board and seeing everybody as pieces -- seeing the whole Universe as a game of black and white squares -- with everybody and every object stuck on his space-time spot. We're off the board; we can reach down from above. Adjust, alter the position of the men, change the game without the pieces knowing. From outside." "And you won't bring her back?" Curt appealed. "You can't expect me to be too sympathetic toward the girl," his son said. "After all, Julie is my mother. I know now what they used to mean by mill of the gods. I wish we could grind less small... I wish we could spare some of those who get caught in the gears. But if you could see it as we do, you'd understand. We have a universe hanging in the balance; it's an awfully big board." "A board so big that one person doesn't count?" Curt asked, agonized. His son looked concerned. Curt remembered looking like that himself when trying to explain something to the boy that was beyond a child's comprehension. He hoped Tim would do a better job than he'd been able to do. "Not that," Tim said. "To us, she isn't gone. She's still there, on another part of the board that you can't see. She always was there. She always will be. No piece ever falls off the board... no matter how small." "For you," said Curt. "Yes. We're outside the board. It may be that our talent will be shared by everybody. When that happens, there will be no misunderstanding of tragedy and death." "And meanwhile?" Curt ached agree. "I don't have the talent. To me, she's dead. The place she occupied on the board is empty. Julie can't fill it. Nobody can." Tim considered. It looked like deep thought, but Curt could sense that his son was moving restlessly along the time-paths, seeking a rebuttal. His eyes focused again on his father and he nodded sadly. "I can't show you where she is on the board," he said. "And your life is vacant along every path except one." Curt heard someone coming through the brush. He turned -- and then Pat was in his arms. "This one," Tim said. How long Clifford D. Simak's writing streak will last, even he can't say, but while it continues, the results are wonderful -- as you'll discover next month in his almost-novellaprogenitor of the story! For there are many trends so quiet and taken for granted today that they are almost unnoticeable... and yet they may shape the future more decisively spinning case of a man in enthusiastic possession of the ultimate gadget... and vice versa! searches for its incredibly high-born, noble, downright regal antecedents... and comes up with a ghastly blot on the family escutcheon that not even time can erasel Don't be too astonished to find another novelet in the lineup, which can't be predicted until the issue is put together, but you can count on an exciting fistful of short stories, as well issue to reach the stands when you can get it at least ten days before... and a hefty bonus to boot! In other words, take advantage of our special offer, which you'll find advertised elsewhere in the book! Delousing planets was humdrum -- but not the one that wanted to exterminate exterminators ! They had constructed the peephole out of sheer boredom, three months after forming their partnership and renting the office. During that time, the aaa ace of being first in the telephone book. Planetary decontamination was an old, established line, completely monopolized by two large outfits. It was discouraging for a small new firm run by two """"E'S reading our sign  I -- I now," Gregor said, his M long bony face pressed against the peephole in the office door. "Let me see," Arnold said. Gregor pushed him back. "He's going to knock -- no, he's changed his mind. He's leaving." Arnold returned to his desk and laid out another game of solitaire. Gregor kept watch at the peephole. young men with big ideas and a lot of unpaid-for equipment. "He's coming back," Gregor called. "Quick -- look busy and important!" Arnold swept his cards into a drawer and just finished buttoning his lab gown when the knock came. Their visitor was a short, bald, tired-looking man. He stared at them dubiously. "You decontaminate planets?" "That is correct, sir," Gregor said, pushing away a pile of papers and shaking the man's moist hand. "I am Richard Gregor. This is my partner, Doctor Frank Arnold." ed in a white lab gown and black horn-rimmed glasses, nodded absently and resumed his examination of a row of ancient, crusted test tubes. "Kindly be seated, Mister -- " "Ferngraum." "Mr. Ferngraum. I think we can handle just about anything you require," Gregor said heartily. '"Flora or fauna control, cleansing atmospheres, purifying water supply, sterilizing soil, stability testing, volcano and earthquake control -- anything you need to make a planet fit for human habitation." Ferngraum still looked dubious. "I'm going to level with you. I've got a problem planet on my hands." Gregor nodded confidently. "Problems are our business." "I'm a free-lance real-estate broker," Ferngraum said. "You know how it works -- buy a planet, sell a planet, everyone makes a living. Usually I stick with the scrub worlds and let my buyers do their decontaminating. But a few months ago I had a chance to buy a real quality planet -- took it right out from under the noses of the big operators." Ferngraum mopped his forehead unhappily. "It's a beautiful place," he continued, with no enthusiasm whatsoever. "Average temperature of #I degrees. Mountainous, but fertile. Waterfalls, rainbows, all that sort of thing. And no fauna at all." "Sounds perfect," Gregor said. "Micro-organisms?" "Nothing dangerous." "Then what's wrong with the place?" Ferngraum looked embarrassed. "Maybe you heard about it. The government catalogue numcalls it Ghost V." Gregor raised an eyebrow"Ghost" was an odd nickname for a planet, but he had heard odder. After all, you had to call them something. There were thousands of planet-bearing suns within spaceship range, many of them inhabitable, or potentially inhabitable. And there were plenty of people from the civilized worlds who wanted to colonize them. Religious sects, political minorities, philosophic groups -- or just plain pioneers, out to make a fresh start. "I don't believe I've heard of it," Gregor said. Ferngraum squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. "I should have listened to my wife. But no -- I was gonna be a big operator. Paid ten times my usual price for Ghost V and now I'm stuck with it." "But what's wrong with it?" Gregor asked. "It seems to be haunted," Femgraum said in despair. checked his planet, then leased it to a combine of farmers from Dijon VI. The eight-man advance guard landed and, within a day, began to broadcast garbled reports about demons, ghouls, vampires, dinosaurs and other inimical fauna. When a relief ship came for them, all were dead. An autopsy report stated that the gashes, cuts and marks on their bodies could indeed have been made by almost anything, even demons, ghouls, vampires or dinosaurs, if such existed. Ferngraum was fined for improper decontamination. The farmers dropped their lease. But he managed to lease it to a group of sun-worshipers from Opal II. The sunworshipers were cautious. They sent their equipment, but only three men accompanied it, to scout out trouble. The men set up camp, unpacked, and declared the place a paradise. They radioed the home group to come at once -- then, suddenly, there was a wild scream and radio silence. A patrol ship went to Ghost V, buried the three mangled bodies, and departed in five minutes fiat. "And that did it," Ferngraum said. "Now no one will touch it at any price. Space crews refuse to land on it. And I still don't know what happened." He sighed deeply and looked at Gregor. "It's your baby, if you want it." Gregor and Arnold excused themselves and went into the anteroom. Arnold whooped at once, "We've got a job!" "Yeah," Gregor said, "but what a job." "We wanted the tough ones," Arnold pointed out. "If we lick this, we're established -- to say nothing of the profit we'll make on a percentage basis." "You seem to forget," Gregor said. "I'm the one who has to actually land on the planet. All you do is sit here and interpret my data." "That's the way we set it up," Arnold reminded him. "I'm the research department -- you're the troubleshooter. Remember?" Gregor remembered. Ever since childhood, he had been sticking his neck out, while Arnold stayed home and told him why he was sticking his neck out. "I don't like it," he said. "You don't believe in ghosts, do you?" "No, of course not.". "Well, we can handle anything else. Faint heart ne'er won fair profit." Gregor shrugged his shoulders. They went back to Ferngraum. In half an hour, they had worked out their terms -- a large percentage of future development profits if they succeeded, a forfeiture clause if they failed. Gregor walked to the door with Ferngraum. "By the way, sir," he asked, "how did you happen to come to us?" "No one else would handle it," Ferngraum said, looking extremely pleased with himself. "Good luck." aboard a rickety space freighter, bound for Ghost V. He spent his time studying reports on the two colonization attempts and reading survey after survey on supernatural phenomena. They didn't help at all. No trace of animal life had been found on Ghost V. And no proof of the existence of supernatural creatures had been discovered anywhere in the Galaxy. Gregor pondered this, then checked his weapons as the freighter spiraled into the region of Ghost V. He was carrying an arsenal large enough to start a small war and win it. If he could find something to shoot at... The captain of the freighter brought his ship to within several thousand feet of the smiling green surface of the planet, but no closer. Gregor parachuted his equipment to the site of the last two camps, shook hands with the captain and 'chuted himself down. He landed safely and looked up. The freighter was streaking into space as though the furies were after it. He was alone on Ghost V. After checking his equipment for breakage, he radioed Arnold that he had landed safely. Then, with drawn blaster, he inspected the sunworshipers' camp. They had set themselves up at the base of a mountain, beside a small, crystal-clear lake. The pre-fabs were in perfect condition. No storms had ever damaged them, because Ghost V was blessed with a beautifully even climate. But they looked pathetically lonely. Gregor made a careful check of one. Clothes were still neatly packed in cabinets, pictures were hung on the wall and there was even a curtain on one window. In a corner of the room, a case of toys had been opened for the arrival of the main party's children. A water-pistol, a top and a bag of marbles had spilled onto the floor. Evening was coming, so Gregor dragged his equipment into the pre-fab and made his preparations. He rigged an alarm system and adjusted it so finely that even a roach would set it off. He put up a radar alarm to scan the immediate area. He unpacked his arsenal, laying the heavy rifles within easy reach, but keeping a hand-blaster in his belt. Then, satisfied, he ate a leisurely supper. Outside, the evening drifted into night. The warm and dreamy land grew dark. A gentle breeze ruffled the surface of the lake and rustled silkily in the tall grass. It was all very peaceful. The settlers must have been hysterical types, he decided. They had probably panicked and killed each other. tem one last time, Gregor threw his clothes onto a chair, turned off the lights and climbed into bed. The room was illuminated by starlight, stronger than moonlight on Earth. His blaster was under his pillow. All was well with the world. He had just begun to doze off when he became aware that he was not alone in the room. That was impossible. His alarm system hadn't gone off. The radar was still humming peacefully. Yet every nerve in his body was shrieking alarm. He eased the,  blaster out and looked around. A man was standing in a corner of the room. There was no time to consider how he had come. Gregor aimed the blaster and said, "Okay, raise your hands," in a quiet, resolute voice. The figure didn't move. Gregor's finger tightened on the trigger, then suddenly relaxed. He recognized the man. It was his own clothing, heaped on a chair, distorted by starlight and his own imagination. He grinned and lowered the blaster. The pile of clothing began to stir faintly. Gregor felt a faint breeze from the window and continued to grin. Then the pile of clothing stood up, stretched itself and began to walk toward him purposefully. Frozen to his bed, he watched the disembodied clothing, assembled roughly into manlike form, advance on him. When it was halfway across the room and its empty sleeves were reaching for him, he began to blast. And kept on blasting, for the rags and remnants slithered toward him as if filled with a life of their own: Flaming bits of cloth crowded toward his face and a belt tried to coil around his legs. He had to burn everything to ashes before the attack stopped. When it was over, Gregor turned on every light he could find. He brewed a pot of coffee and poured in most of a bottle of brandy. Somehow, he resisted an urge to kick his useless alarm system to pieces. Instead, he radioed his partner. "That's very interesting," Arnold said, after Gregor had brought him up to date. "Animation! Very interesting indeed." "I hoped it would amuse you," Gregor answered bitterly. After several shots of brandy, he was beginning to feel abandoned and abused. "Did anything else happen?" "Not yet." "Well, take care. I've got a theory. Have to do some research on it. By the way, some crazy bookie is laying five to one against you." "Really?" "Yeah. I took a piece of it." "Did you bet for me or against me?" Gregor asked, worried. "For you, of course," Arnold said indignantly. "We're partners, aren't we?" They signed off and Gregor brewed another pot of coffee. He was not planning on any more sleep that night. It was comforting to know that Arnold had bet on him. But, then, Arnold was a notoriously bad gambler. TY daylight, Gregor was able- to get a few hours of fitful sleep. In the early afternoon he awoke, found some clothes and began to explore the sun-worshipers' camp. Toward evening, he found something. On the wall of a prefab, the word "Tgasklit" had been hastily scratched. Tgasklit. It meant nothing to him, but he relayed it to Arnold at once. He then searched his pre-fab carefully, set up more lights, tested the alarm system and recharged his blaster. Everything seemed in order. With regret, he watched the sun go down, hoping he would live to see it rise again. Then he settled himself in a comfortable chair, and tried to do some constructive thinking. There was no animal life here -- nor were there any walking plants, intelligent rocks or giant brains dwelling in the planet's core. Ghost V hadn't even a moon for someone to hide on. And he couldn't believe in ghosts or demons. He knew that supernatural happenings tended to break down, under detailed examination, into eminently natural events. The ones that didn't break down -- stopped. Ghosts just wouldn't stand still and let a nonbeliever examine them. The phantom of the castle was invariably on vacation when a scientist showed up with cameras and tape recorders. That left another possibility. Suppose someone wanted this planet, but wasn't prepared to pay Ferngraum's price? Couldn't this someone hide here, frighten the settlers, kill them if necessary in order to drive down the price? That seemed logical. You could even explain the behavior of his clothes that way. Static electricity, correctly used, could -- front of him. His alarm system, as before, hadn't gone off. Gregor looked up slowly. The thing in front of him was about ten feet tall and roughly human in shape, except for its crocodile head. It was colored a bright crimson and had purple stripes running lengthwise on its body. In one claw, it was carrying a large brown can. "Hello," it said. "Hello," Gregor gulped. His j blaster was on a table, only two feet away. He wondered, would the thing attack if he reached for it? "What's your name?" Gregor asked, with the calmness of deep I shock. "I'm the Purple-striped Grabj ber," the thing said. "I grab things." "How interesting." Gregor's j hand began to creep toward the blaster. "I grab things named Richard  Gregor," the Grabber told him I in its bright, ingenuous voice. "And I usually eat them in chocolate sauce." It held up the brown can and Gregor saw that it was ! labeled Smig's Chocolate -- An Ideal Sauce to Use with Gregors,  Arnolds and Flynns. Gregor's fingers touched the butt of the blaster. He asked, "Were you planning to eat me?" I "Oh, yes," the Grabber said. Gregor had the gun now. He flipped off the safety catch and fired. The radiant blast cascaded off the Grabber's chest and singed the floor, the walls and Gregor's eyebrows. "That won't hurt me," the I Grabber explained. "I'm too tall." j The blaster dropped from Gregor's fingers. The Grabber leaned forward. "I'm not going to eat you now," the Grabber said. "No?" Gregor managed to enunciate. "No. I can only eat you tomorrow, on May first. Those are the rules. I just came to ask a favor." "What is it?" The Grabber smiled winningly. "Would you be a good sport and eat a few apples? They flavor the flesh so wonderfully." And, with that, the striped monster vanished. worked the radio and told Arnold everything that had happened. "Hmm," Arnold said. "Purplestriped Grabber, eh? I think that clinches it. Everything fits." "What fits? What is it?" "First, do as I say. I want to make sure." Obeying Arnold's instructions, Gregor unpacked his chemical equipment and laid out a number of test tubes, retorts and chemicals. He stirred, mixed, added and subtracted as directed and finally put the mixture on the stove to heat. "Now," Gregor said, coming back to the radio, "tell me what's going on." "Certainly. I looked up the word 'Tgasklit.' It's Opalian. It means many-toothed ghost. The sun-worshipers were from Opal. What does that suggest to you?" "They were killed by a hometown ghost," Gregor replied nastily. "It must have stowed away on their ship. Maybe there was a curse and -- " "Calm down," Arnold said. "There aren't any ghosts in this. Is the solution boiling yet?" "No." "Tell me when it does. Now let's take your animated clothing. Does it remind you of anything?" Gregor thought. "Well," he said, "when I was a kid -- no, that's ridiculous." "Out with it," Arnold insisted. "When I was a kid, I never left clothing on a chair. In the dark, it always looked like a man or a dragon or something. I guess everyone's had that experience. But it doesn't explain -- " "Sure it does! Remember the Purple-striped Grabber now?" "No. Why should I?" "Because you invented him! Remember? We must have been eight or nine, you and me and Jimmy Flynn. We invented the most horrible monster you could think of -- he was our own personal monster and he only wanted to eat you or me or Jimmy -- flavored with chocolate sauce. But only on the first of every month, when the report cards were due. You had to use the magic word to get rid of him." wondered how he could ever have forgotten. How many nights had he stayed up in fearful expectation of the Grabber? It had made bad report cards seem very unimportant. "Is the solution boiling?" Arnold asked. "Yes," said Gregor, glancing obediently at the stove. "What color is it?" "A sort of greenish blue. No, it's more blue than -- " "Right. You can pour it out. I want to run a few more tests, but I think we've got it licked." "Got what licked? Would you do a little explaining?" "It's obvious. The planet has no animal life. There are no ghosts, or, at least, none solid enough to kill off a party of armed men. Hallucination was the answer, so I looked for something that would produce it. I found plenty. Aside from all the drugs on Earth, there are about a dozen hallucination-forming gases in the Catalogue of Alien Trace Elements. There are depressants, stimulants, stuff that'll make you feel like a genius or an earthworm or an eagle. This particular one corresponds to Longstead # in the catalogue. It's a heavy, transparent, odorless gas, not harmful physically. It's an imagination stimulant." "You mean I was just having hallucinations? I tell you -- " "Not quite that simple," Arnold cut in. "Longstead # works directly on the subconscious. It releases your strongest subconscious fears, the childhood terrors you've been suppressing. It animates them. And that s what you've been seeing." "Then there's actually nothing here?" Gregor asked. "Nothing physical. But the hallucinations are real enough to whoever is having them." Gregor reached over for another bottle of brandy. This called for a celebration. "It won't be hard to decontaminate Ghost V," Arnold went on confidently. "We can cancel the Longstead # with no difficulty. And then -- we'll be rich, partner!" Gregor suggested a toast, then thought of something disturbing. "If they're just hallucinations, what happened to the settlers?" Arnold was sitent for a moment. "Well," he said finally, "Longstead may have a tendency to stimulate the mortido -- the death-instinct. The settlers must have gone crazy. Killed each other." "And no survivors?" "Sure, why not? The last ones alive committed suicide or died of wounds. Don't worry about it. I'm chartering a ship immediately and coming out to run those tests. Relax. I'll pick you up in a day or two." Gregor signed off. He allowed himself the rest of the bottle of brandy that night. It seemed only fair. The mystery of Ghost V was solved and they were going to be rich. Soon he would be able to hire a man to land on strange planets for him, while he sat home and gave instructions over a radio. H E awoke late the next day with a hangover. Arnold's ship hadn't arrived yet, so he packed his equipment and waited. By evening, there was still no ship. He sat in the doorway of the pre-fab and watched a gaudy sunset, then went inside and made dinner. The problem of the settlers still bothered him, but he determined not to worry about it. Undoubtedly there was a logical answer. After dinner, he stretched out on a bed. He had barely closed his eyes when he heard someone cough apologetically. "Hello," said the Purple-striped Grabber. His own personal hallucination had returned to eat him. "Hello, old chap," Gregor said cheerfully, without a bit of fear or worry. "Did you eat the apples?" "Dreadfully sorry. I forgot." "Oh, well." The Grabber tried to conceal his disappointment. "I brought the chocolate sauce." He held up the can. Gregor smiled. "You can leave now," he said. "I know you're just a figment of my imagination. You can't hurt me." "I'm not going to hurt you," the Grabber said. "I'm just going to eat you." He walked up to Gregor. Gregor held his ground, smiling, although he wished the Grabber didn't appear so solid and undreamlike. The Grabber leaned over and bit his arm experimentally. He jumped back and looked at his arm. There were toothmarks on it. Blood was oozing out -- real blood -- his blood. The colonists had been bitten, gashed, torn and ripped. At that moment, Gregor remembered an exhibition of hypnotism he had once seen. The hypnotist had told the subject he was putting a lighted cigarette on his arm. Then he had touched the spot with a pencil. Within seconds, an angry red blister had appeared on the subject's arm, because he believed he had been burned. If your subconscious thinks you're dead, you're dead. If it orders the stigmata of toothmarks, they are there. He didn't believe in the Grabber. But his subconscious did. Gregor tried to run for the door. The Grabber cut him off. It seized him in its claws and bent to reach his neck. The magic word! What was it? Gregor shouted, "Alphoisto?" "Wrong word," said the Grabber. "Please don't squirm." "Regnastikio!" "Nope. Stop wriggling and it'll be over before you -- " "Voorshpellhappilo!" The Grabber let out a scream of pain and released him. It bounded high into the air and vanished. chair, That had been close. Too close. It would be a particularly stupid way to die -- rent by his own death-desiring subconscious, slashed by his own imagination, killed by his own conviction. It was fortunate he had remembered the word. Now if Arnold would only hurry... He heard a low chuckle of amusement. It came from the blackness of a half-opened closet door, touching off an almost forgotten memory. He was nine years old again, and the Shadower -- his Shadower -- was a strange, thin, grisly creature who hid in doorways, ! slept under beds and attacked only in the dark. "Turn out the lights," the ; Shadower said. "Not a chance," Gregor retorted, drawing his blaster. As long as the lights were on, he was safe.  "You'd better turn them off." "No!" "Very well. Egan, Megan, Degan!" Three little creatures scampered into the room. They raced to the nearest light bulb, flung  themselves on it and began to j gulp hungrily. The room was growing darker, j Gregor blasted at them each ; time they approached a light. Glass shattered, but the nimble creatures darted out of the way. I And then Gregor realized what he had done. The creatures couldn't actually eat light. ImagI ination can't make any impres sion oh inanimate matter. He had j imagined that the room was growing dark and -- He had shot out his light bulbs! j His own destructive subconscious I had tricked him. Now the Shadower stepped out. j Leaping from shadow to shadow; he came toward Gregor. The blaster had no effect, j Gregor tried frantically to think of the magic word -- and terrifiedI ly remembered that no magic j word banished the Shadower. He backed away, the Shadower advancing, until he was stopped by a packing case. The Shadower towered over him and Gregor shrank to the floor and closed his eyes. His hand came in contact with something cold. He was leaning against the packing case of toys for the settlers' children. And he was holding a water pistol. Gregor brandished it. The Shadower backed away, eying the weapon with apprehension. Quickly, Gregor ran to the tap and filled the pistol. He directed a deadly stream of water into the creature. The Shadower howled in agony and vanished. Gregor smiled tightly and slipped the empty gun into his belt. A water pistol was the right weapon to use against an imaginary monster. I T was nearly dawn when the ship landed and Arnold stepped out. Without wasting any time, he set up his tests. By midday, it was done and the element definitely established as Longstead #. He and Gregor packed up immediately and blasted off. Once they were in space, Gregor told his partner everything that had happened. "Pretty rough," said Arnold softly, but with deep feeling. Gregor could smile with modest heroism, now that he was safely off Ghost V. "Could have been worse," he said. "How?" "Suppose Jimmy Flynn were here. There was a kid who could really dream up monsters. Remember the Grumbler?" "All I remember is the nightmares it gave me," Arnold said. They were on their way home. Arnold jotted down some notes for an article entitled "The Death Instinct on Ghost V: An Examination of Subconscious Stimulation, Hysteria, and Mass Hallucination in Producing Physical Stigmata." Then he went to the control room to set the autopilot. Gregor threw himself on a couch, determined to get his first decent night's sleep since landing on Ghost V. He had barely dozed off when Arnold hurried in, his face pasty with terror. "I think there's something in the control room," he said. Gregor sat up. "There can't be. We're off the -- " There was a low growl from the control room. "Oh, my God!" Arnold gasped. He concentrated furiously for a few seconds. "I know. I left the airlocks open when I landed. We're still breathing Ghost V air!" And there, framed in the open doorway, was an immense gray creature with red spots on its hide. It had an amazing number of arms, legs, tentacles, claws and teeth, plus two tiny wings on its back. It walked slowly toward them, mumbling and groaning. They both recognized it as the Grumbler. slammed the door in its face. "We should be safe in here," he panted, "that door is airtight. But how will we pilot the ship?" "We won't," Arnold said. "We'll have to trust the robotpilot -- unless we can figure out some way of getting that thing out of there." They noticed that a faint smoke was beginning to seep through the sealed edges of the door. "What's that?" Arnold asked, with a sharp edge of panic in his voice. Gregor frowned. "You remember, don't you? The Grumbler can get into any room. There's no way of keeping him out." "I don't remember anything about him," Arnold said. "Does he eat people?" "No. As I recall, he just mangles them thoroughly." The smoke was beginning to solidify into the immense gray shape of the Grumbler. They retreated into the next compartment and sealed the door. Within seconds, the thin smoke was leaking through. "This is ridiculous," Arnold said, biting his lip. "To be hunted by an imaginary monster -- wait! You've still got your water pistol, haven't you?" "Yes, but -- " "Give it to me!" Arnold hurried over to a water tank and filled the pistol. The Grumbler had taken form again and was lumbering toward them, groaning unhappily. Arnold raked it with a stream of water. The Grumbler kept on advancing. "Now it's all coming back to me," Gregor said. "A water pistol never could stop the Grumbler." They backed into the next room and slammed the door. Behind them was only the bunkroom, with nothing behind that but the deadly vacuum of space. Gregor asked, "Isn't there something you can do about the atmosphere?" Arnold shook his head. "It's dissipating now. But it takes about twenty hours for the affects of Longstead to wear off." "Haven't you any antidote?" "No." materializing, and neither silently nor pleasantly. "How can we kill it?" Arnold asked. "There must be a way. Magic words? How about a wooden sword?" Gregor shook his head. "I remember the Grumbler now," he said unhappily. "What kills it?" "It can't be destroyed by water pistols, . cap guns, firecrackers, slingshots, stink bombs, or any other childhood weapon. The Grumbler is absolutely unkillable." "That Flynn and his damned imagination ! Why did we have to talk about him? How do you get rid of it then?" "I told you. You don't. It just has to go away of its own accord." The Grumbler was full size now. Gregor and Arnold hurried into the tiny bunk room and slammed their last door. "Think, Gregor," Arnold pleaded. "No kid invents a monster without a defense of some sort. Think!" "The Grumbler cannot be killed," Gregor said. The red-spotted monster was taking shape again. Gregor thought back over all the midnight horrors he had ever known. He must have done something as a child to neutralize the power of the unknown. And then -- almost too late -- he remembered.  the ship flashed Earthward with the Grumbler as complete master. He marched up and down the empty corridors and floated through steel partitions into cabins and cargo compartments, moaning, and groaning and cursing because he could not get at any victim. The ship reached the Solar System and took up an automatic orbit around the Moon. Gregor peered out cautiously, ready to duck back if necessary. There was no sinister shuffling, no moaning or groaning, no hungry mist seeping under the door or through the walls. "All clear," he called out to Arnold. "The Grumbler's gone." Safe within the ultimate defense against night-horrors -- wrapped in blankets that had covered their heads -- they climbed out of their bunks. "I told you the water pistol wouldn't do any good," Gregor said. Arnold gave him a sick grin and put the pistol in his pocket. "I'm hanging onto it. If I ever get married and have a kid, it's going to be his first present." "Not for any of mine," said Gregor. He patted the bunk affectionately. "You can't beat blankets over the head for protection." based from stem to stern on letters from my readers -- more specifically, on questions which cannot very well be treated in the usual letter column. To begin somewhere, I'll start with a rather sarcastic letter from a teacher who seems severely annoyed by the reading habits of some of her pupils. "If you science fictionists," she wrote, "call some vague statements in one of Jules Verne's stories a prediction of the periscope and some remarks about unbreakable glass a prediction of transparent plastics, why don't you call Munchausen's (sic) story about the post horn in which the melodies froze until thawed out a prediction of the gramophone?" You're perfectly right, madam -- why not, indeed? Let's proceed to do exactly as you ironically suggest. T HE theme has been considered sufficiently meritorious to be treated at length in an erudite paper with the title Antiphanes und Miinchhausen by the Historic-Philosophical Department of the Academy of Sciences of Vienna. The story of the "frozen words" did not occur only in the fabulous Baron's fabulous adventures, but goes back to the "pseudo Mandeville" and, via Rabelais, to classical antiquity, the trace ending (for the present) at about # B.C. The oldest known source is Antiphanes Bergaios, who must not be confused with the Antiphanes who was a playwright of Athens. Circumstances vary in the many different versions, but the idea is always the same: the preservation of sounds, particularly speech. The most appealing version, in my opinion, is the one of Baldassare Castiglione, who died in #. He tells it as the "true experience" of an Italian merchant of Lucca who, in the course of his travels and trading, had come to Poland. "Since he was in Poland, he decided to buy a large number of sable pelts which he wanted to bring back to Italy for a big profit. Because the King of Poland and the Duke of Muscovy were at war, he could not travel to Moscow personally, but succeeded, through intermediaries, in having a few Muscovite merchants come to the border with their sables. When he came to the shores of the Borysthenes (Dniepr river), he found it frozen as hard as a stone. "The two parties signaled to each other across the frozen river and the Muscovites began to shout the prices they demanded for their sables. But the cold was so intense that the merchant of Lucca and his interpreters could not hear the words, for they froze before they had traversed the width of the river. The Poles, who were used to this occurrence, decided to light a large bonfire in the middle of the river because, they reasoned, the words had remained warm for about this distance. The river was frozen so hard that it could easily stand the fire. "When the bonfire in the middle of the river was lighted, the words which had been frozen an hour earlier began to thaw and they could be understood clearly even though their originators had departed. The merchant decided, however, that the prices asked were too high and discarded the project, returning home without any sables." I grant that it's impossible to consider this a direct and explicit prediction of the phonograph. But the idea is identical; we have learned how to "freeze", words on wax and tape. Verne's description of 'the periscope is anything but vague; there is no important difference between his prediction and the reality. He was necessarily less clear about plastics, for only one, celluloid, was in existence in his day. Nevertheless, he used that as a basis for extrapolation, envisioning a stronger and better substance. So did the chemists who brought about our present-day plastics. However, my irritated correspondent misreads the function of science fiction. Its purpose is to explore entertainingly, not to predict. But I will make a personal prediction: You, madam, will live to see many of its guesses come true. You already have, but you will see more. ters from British readers asking for clarification of a number of points having to do with the impact end of a V-# trajectory. My correspondents did not live in London when the V-# were falling out of the stratosphere and do not live there now, but they talked to people who had been there during the rocket attack. Apparently they got quite contradictory reports and finally drew up a short list of questions which might be of general interest. One of my correspondents states that an informant insists that at least some of the V-#s were equipped with a proximity fuze. He must be mistaken, for we have the word of the former commanding officer of the Peenemiinde Institute, General Dr. Dornberger, that the Germans did not have a proximity fuze. The concept was familiar to them and they had laboratory models, but they did not progress to production. The warheads of the rockets were armed with impact fuzes. Figures along trajectory show velocity V in feet per second and time T elapsed since takeoff. "# Program" refers to angle of firing (after vertical takeoff). It was #I degrees of arc from the vertical. Another item of disagreement that can be settled is the angle at which the rockets fell -- "some say they came in slantwise and others say they arrived vertically." For an answer, look at the diagram drawn according to a set of available figures. The rocket clearly entered the denser layers of the atmosphere at a slant. For the last six miles, the trajectory became slightly steeper, but not anywhere near vertical. However, to an observer half a mile beyond the impact point, more or less directly in the line of fire, this might have looked vertical. It must be stated here that it was apparently not at all difficult to see a V-# rocket approach in daylight, provided you knew in which direction to look and when, and provided also, of course, that there was no dense overcast. The Germans fired about # rockets from the artillery proving ground of Blizna in Poland and placed their own test evaluation staff in the target area. The theory behind this surprising practice was that, in firing over a range of nearly # miles, the precise target would not be hit, but that the missiles would fall close enough to be easily observed. It worked that way, too. The impacts took place between # feet and three miles from the observers. They were informed by radio when a rocket was under way and knew that impact would take place about five minutes and # seconds later. Half a minute before the impact time, they would look up and catch it in their glasses. O NE discrepancy in the statements that is still not completely settled is night observation. If any actual eyewitnesses read this, I'd like to hear from them. During the war, some Londoners said, and British newspapers reported it, that on occasion a rocket had been seen descending "glowing red hot." Experiments have shown that some portions of the sheet-steel skin do grow hot enough by air friction to reach a temperature which would be described as red hot. But the rocket as a whole did not. The Germans who spent weeks in the target area during their own test firings never saw anything like that. Dr. Dornberger reports one case in which he followed virtually the whole trajectory of a test rocket, from takeoff to almost impact, with his field glasses after dark. At one point, he wondered what it was he still saw and realized that it was the four graphite vanes in the exhaust blast. The exhaust blast had winked out minutes ago, but during the # seconds it had been in operation, the four graphite vanes had been raised to white heat and remained visible for the whole duration of the flight. Maybe this is the explanation, but possibly the misunderstanding arose in another manner. During test shots of V-# rockets and also in at least one Viking shot, the timing turned out to be such that the ground was already dark. But the rocket, climbing rapidly for # miles, arrived at a height where it could still be reached by the rays of the Sun, which had disappeared below the horizon as far as the ground observers were concerned. The rocket then looked so bright so suddenly, it was thought at first that a belated explosion had occurred. Likewise, an observer in London might have caught sight of an incoming rocket that was still in sunlight, even though the observer was not. Between the time it disappeared from his view (having entered the shadow of the Earth) and the impact, there would then be some # to # seconds, a time interval of which the observer was either unaware in his excitement or which, if he was aware of it, he did not mention specifically in later retelling. are, quite naturally, of the kind that ask something. It is a rare event when a letter tells me something. But soon after the appearance of the May issue, in which I touched briefly on the story of a supposedly very high mountain in eastern Asia, designated in the reports by the name of Amne Machin, I received a letter from a lady in South Carolina that can be labeled a contribution to geography. I print it just as my correspondent wrote it, merely abbreviating a few names for very obvious reasons : "The story about the mountain Amne Machin was created out of thin air, solely to pull the leg of an unpopular newspaperman. And the imaginary mountain was never one mountain but two, and they were named for the most flat-chested girl known to the two pilots who started the story, on the theory that since real mountains are named for Jane Russell, who has real -- er -- attributes, then non-existing mountains ought to be named for a girl whose attributes were non-existent. The girl's name is Ann McN . "This newspaperman, whom I'll call Nameless, had attached himself to a certain Air Transport Command Group at Kurachi, India, during that period when 'flying the Hump' was drudging, soul-wracking misery. Whenever pilots would come in from a flight, even before they had had time to be thankful that they had made another trip and were still alive, there would be Nameless, his pencil at the ready, asking 'Did anything happen? Did anything happen?' Since a routine, uneventful trip was the best thing that could happen, the pilots became somewhat fed up with Nameless. "The informant is my brother J. B., who was a captain in the Air Transport Command. He wrote twice weekly and all his letters have been kept and I have just spent several hours rereading them to be sure my memory was accurate. On one return leg of a Hump flight, my brother and his co-pilot, Lieutenant B.S., were blown off course and arrived several hours late at Kurachi. There had been some excitement over their tardiness and, of course, Nameless was there to get the details practically before they landed -- with, I might add, half a teaspoonful of gag in their tanks. In reaction to some hours of danger, my brother and his copilot were in high spirits and it was then that the story was born. "It quickly got out of hand, for Nameless believed every word, and other pilots added to and embellished it with subsequent trips. They grew to love that story and they were very disappointed when their C.O. made them stop. But, of course, even though they did stop, you can't smother a good story even if it isn't true... Well, if this is the inside story of the origin of that mountain -- and it sounds mighty convincing to me -- I can only hope that the majority of the people who remember the original story will also read this letter. O NE theme that crops up with fair regularity in my correspondence is rocket fuels. There seems to be a widespread impression around that further rocket research and especially the preliminaries to space travel are held up "because we have to wait until chemists find a more powerful fuel." I don't think anything is holding up research work at all -- not counting some red tape which indubitably gets into the gears in places -- but I can say without hesitation what could be holding it up. That would be plain lack of money. Sometimes the suggestions made to overcome this imaginary obstacle are quite simple. One correspondent remarked hopefully that rocket engineers may one day find out how to make dynamite safe enough to use it for a fuel. Well, nobody intends to load up a rocket, especially a manned one, with dynamite, but if it could be done, there would be a considerable loss of propulsion. The theoretitical exhaust velocity would be # feet per second. From comparison of the theoretical values obtained by fuels in actual use, however, one can conclude that the actual exhaust velocity of a dynamite rocket would be more like # feet per second. Alcohol and liquid oxygen produce an exhaust velocity of # feet per second. Others were not deceived by the violence of commercial explosives, but looked for a real criterion, the energy content of various substances which could be used as fuels. One correspondent stated that, as far as he could tell, the most powerful combination should be ozone and beryllium metal -- which is correct. But then he wondered about the problem of how to feed a powder (the beryllium metal) into a rocket motor with some # lbs. per square inch of injection pressure and asked my advice on how this could be done. If there is a suitable method, I don't know it. Moreover, if I did know it, I might not trust it. Another letter writer suggested liquid oxygen as the oxidizer and lithium or magnesium metal as the fuel, stating that the metals, "of course," would have to be fed into the rocket motor in the molten state. Well, the melting point of magnesium is around # degrees Fahrenheit while that of lithium, though considerably lower, is still # degrees Fahrenheit. But the temperature of the liquid oxygen in the tank next to the hot tank for the molten metal is slightly below minus # degrees Fahrenheit. The engineer would, at the very least, have a formidable insulating problems on his hands, not to mention his mind. suggested that the following combinations be investigated and tried: ozone with molten picric acid; fluorine nitrate with molten yellow phosphorus; chlorine monofluoride with boron hydride; and, finally, liquid hydrogen peroxide with "liquid" carbon dioxide -- he probably meant carbon monoxide and made a typing error. Another correspondent merely wanted to know why rocket engineers consistently disdain hydrogen as a fuel, even though the high energy content of a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen must certainly be known to them. The only way to answer all this is to explain the criteria for the selection of a fuel. Naturally the energy content of a fuel or fuel combination is, if not the most important, at least the one which attracts attention first. It can be expressed in two ways, the older one being to calculate its exhaust velocity. I'll list a few theoretical exhaust velocities of fuels that have actually been used at one time or another, all of them assumed to be burned with pure liquid oxygen. The value for #-octane gasoline is # feet per second, for ethyl alcohol # feet per second, for aniline # feet per second, for vinyl ether # feet per second and for hydrazine hydrate # feet per second. They all look pretty much alike, don't they? They look even more alike if you don't take these theoretical figures, but the figures you actually obtain, which are almost precisely half of the theoretical exhaust velocities. The second and more recent method for evaluating this particular aspect of a rocket fuel is to work out its specific impulse, also called specific thrust. This is done by measuring the thrust of a given rocket motor and dividing the thrust by the fuel consumption per second. The figures you obtain in this manner are all remarkably close to #. Some fuels will come out as having a specific thrust of # while others will have a specific thrust of #, but this is about as much deviation as you get. The only one that stands out is hydrogen, for its theoretical exhaust velocity would be around # feet per second and its specific impulse #. But the exhaust velocity, or the specific thrust, is only a comparatively small portion of the whole story. There are the socalled secondary considerations which, because of the close similarity of the specific thrust of most fuels, turn very rapidly into primary considerations. Hydrogen happens to be a fine example of a high-energy fuel that invalidates this advantage by a number of practical disadvantages. L ET'S begin with the specific gravity of the fuel. Remembering that the fuel consumption is not a question of volume but of mass, logically you can pack more mass into a given tank if the fuel has a high specific gravity. If your fuel is very "light," you need a larger tank; a larger tank will weigh more and the rocket will have a greater dead weight. The specific gravity of liquid oxygen is # or a little higher than that of water. But since the specific gravity of liquid hydrogen is #, you can immediately see how much larger the tanks would have to be. Furthermore, liquid oxygen is known to be very cold, but at the temperature of liquid oxygen, hydrogen is still in the merry gaseous state. To keep it liquid, its temperature has to be below minus # degrees centigrade or, translating into Fahrenheit, below minus # degrees. The hydrogen tank would need much better insulation than even the oxygen tank, which adds to the dead weight. Another factor: no metal can stand up under the temperature of burning rocket fuels, hence the motor has to be cooled. This is done most efficiently by circulating the fuel (or the oxidizer) through the cooling jacket of the motor before it is injected. A liquefied gas is about the worst possible substance for this purpose. Though cold, it cannot absorb much heat. Because it is likely to be at or near its boiling point, it would turn into a gas, choke the flow and blow up the motor. One of the criteria for a rocket fuel combination, therefore, is that at least one of the two liquids is suitable for cooling the motor. In the case of the customary combination of lightly watered ethyl alcohol and liquid oxygen, this is, of course, the alcohol. In the case of the other customary combination of nitric acid as the oxidizer and aniline as the fuel, either one can be used for this purpose. More "secondary" considerations : benzene (benzol) has many of the earmarks of a good fuel, i but it is not a liquid unless the temperature is above # degrees centigrade (# degrees Fahrenheit) which means that on a cold day, or in the Arctic, you'd have to thaw your rocket out before you could fire it. You want a liquid that stays a liquid over the temperature range the weather bureau is likely to predict. Nor do you want a liquid that has the nasty habit of requiring pressure to stay liquid. Consequently, a pressure tank is bound to be a heavy tank. You naturally want storability. Ideally, a good fuel can be put away in drums and be used three, six or twelve years later. If at all possible, you want your fuel to be neither corrosive nor toxic, but in practice this demand has been relinquished to the extent that corrosive and toxic substances are accepted if the crew can be protected by special clothing. The hope is, of course, that one day a non-toxic or non-corrosive substitute will come out of the laboratory. Finally, there is the problem of availability. The fuels must not be based on raw materials that are rare or especially difficult to process. The raw materials, in short, should be abundant and cheap. Here you can draw an even finer line. Alcohol as well as gasoline are both in good supply. But in the case of an emergency, everybody -- Army, Navy, Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard and most of industry -- will scream for alcohol and gasoline. To my mind, a fine rocket fuel also has the characteristic that it will be completely useless for any other type of engine. Hydrazine, not much used right now, but strongly advocated by many, is such a fuel. People in my town used to laugh at me. They don't any more. And pretty soon -- nobody will laughl F OR a long time I was the village idiot, but not any longer -- although they call me "dummy" still and even worse than that. I'm a genius now, but I won't let them know. Not ever. If they found out, they'd be on their guard against me. No one has suspected me and no one will. My shuffle is the same and my gaze as vacant and my mumblings just as vague as they ever were. At times, it has been hard to remember to mumblings as they were before, times when it was hard not to overdo them. But it's important not to arouse suspicion. It all started the morning I went fishing. I told Ma I was going fishing while we were eating breakfast and she didn't object. She knows I like fishing. When I fish, I don't get into trouble. "All right, Jim," she said. "Some fish will taste real good." "I know where to get them," I told her. "That hole in the creek just past Alf Adams' place." "Now don't you get into any fracas with Alf," Ma warned me. "Just because you don't like him -- " "He was mean to me. He worked me harder than he should have. And he cheated me out of my pay. And he laughs at, me." I shouldn't have said that, because it hurts Ma when I say someone laughs at me. "You mustn't pay attention to what people do," said Ma, speaking kind and gentle. "Remember what Preacher Martin said last Sunday. He said -- " "I know what he said, but I still don't like being laughed at. People shouldn't laugh at me." "No," Ma agreed, looking sad. "They shouldn't." I went on eating my breakfast, thinking that Preacher Martin was a great one to be talking about humility and patience, knowing the kind of man he was and how he was carrying on with Jennie Smith, the organist. He was a great one to talk about anything at all. to the woodshed to get my fishing tackle and Bounce came across the street to help me. After Ma, Bounce is the best friend I have. He can't talk to me, of course -- not actually, that is -- but neither does he laugh at me. I talked to him while I was digging worms and asked him if he wanted to go fishing with me. I could see he did, so I went across the street to tell Mrs. Lawson that Bounce was going along. He belonged to her, but he spent most of his time with me. We started out, me carrying my cane pole and all my fishing stuff and Bounce walking at my heels, as if I were someone he was proud to be seen walking with. We went past the bank, where Banker Patton was sitting in the big front window, working at his desk and looking like the most important man in all of Mapleton, which he was. I went by slow so I could hate him good. Ma and me wouldn't be living in the old tumbledown house we're living in if Banker Patton hadn't foreclosed on our home after Pa died. We went out past Alf Adams' place, which is the first farm out of town, and I hated him some, too, but not as hard as Banker Patton. All Alf had done was work me harder than he should have, then cheat me of my pay. Alf was a big, blustery man and a good enough farmer, I guess -- at least he made it pay. He had a big new barn and it's just like him not to paint it red, the way any proper barn is painted, but white with red trim. Who ever heard of paint trim on a barn? Just beyond Alf's place, Bounce and I turned off the road and went down across the pasture, heading for the big hole in the creek. Alf's pri#e Hereford bull was way off in another corner of the pasture with the rest of the stock. When he saw us, he started coming for us, not mean or belligerent, but just investigating and ready for a fight if one was offered him. I wasn't afraid of him, because I'd made friends with him that summer I had worked for Alf. I used to pet him and scratch behind 'his ears. Alf said I was a crazy fool and someday the bull would kill me. "You can never trust a bull," Alf said. When the bull was near enough to see who it was, he knew we meant no harm, so he went back across the pasture again. We got to the hole and I started fishing, while Bounce went up the stream to do some investigating. I caught a few fish, but they weren't very big and they weren't biting very often and I got disinterested. I like to fish, but to keep my interest up, I have to catch some. So I got to daydreaming. I began wondering if you marked off a certain area of ground -- a hundred feet square, say -- and went over it real careful, how many different kinds of plants you'd find. I looked over a patch of ground next to where I was sitting and I could see just ordinary pasture grass and some dandelions and some dock and a couple of violets, and a buttercup which didn't have any flowers as yet. Suddenly, when I was looking at the dandelion, I realized I could see all that dandelion, not just the part that showed above the ground! been seeing it that way before realizing it. And I'm not certain that "seeing" is the right word. Maybe "know" would be better. I knew how that dandelion's big taproot went down into the ground and how the little feathery roots grew out of it, and I knew where all the roots were, how they were taking water and chemicals out of the ground, how reserve food was stored in the root and how the dandelion used the sunlight to convert its food into a form it could use. And the funniest thing about it was that I had never known any of it before. I looked at the other plants and I could see all of them the same way. I wondered if something had gone wrong with my eyes and if I would have to go around looking into things instead of at them, so I tried to make the new seeing go away and it did. Then I tried to see the dandelion root again and I saw it, just the way I had before. I sat there, wondering why I had never been able to see that way before and why I was able to now. And while I was wondering, I looked into the pool and tried to see down into the pool and I could, just as plain as day. I could see clear to the bottom of it and into all the corners of it, and there were lunkers lying in there, bigger than any fish that ever had been taken from the creek. I saw that my bait was nowhere near any of the fish, so I moved it over until it was just in front of the nose of one of the biggest ones. But the fish didn't seem to see it, or if he did, he wasn't hungry, for he just lay there, fanning the water with his fins and making his gills work. I moved the bait down until it bumped his nose, but he still didn't pay any attention to it. So I made the fish hungry. Don't ask me how I did it. I can't tell you. I all at once knew I could and just how to do it. So I made him hungry and he went for that bait like Bounce grabbing a bone. He pulled the cork clear under and I heaved on the pole and hoisted him out. I took him off the hook and put him on the stringer, along with the four or five little ones I'd caught. Then I picked out another big fish and lowered my bait down to him and made him hungry. In the next hour and a half, I just about cleaned out all the big fish. There were some little ones left, but I didn't bother with them. I had the stringer almost full and I couldn't carry it in my hand, for then the fish would have dragged along the ground. I had to sling it over my shoulder and those fish felt awfully wet. I called Bounce and we went back to town. had a look at my fish and wanted to know where I'd got them and what I'd caught them  on and if there were any left or had I taken them all. When I told them I'd taken all there was, they laughed fit to kill. I was just turning off Main Street on my way home when Banker Patton stepped out of the barber shop. He smelled nice from the bottles of stuff that Jake, the barber, uses on his customers. He saw me with my fish and stopped in front of me. He looked at me and looked at the fish and he rubbed his fat hands together. Then he said, like he was talking to a child, "Why, Jimmy, where did you get all those fish?". He sounded a little bit, too, like I might not have a right to them and probably had used some lowdown trick to get them. "Out in the hole on Alf's place," I told him. All at once, without even trying to do it, I saw him the same way I had seen the dandelion -- his stomach and intestines and something that must have been his liver -- and up above them all, surrounded by a doughy mass of pink, a pulsating thing that I knew must be his heart. I guess that's the first time anybody ever really hated someone else's guts. I shot out my hands -- well, not my hands, for one was clutching the cane pole and the other was busy with the fish -- but it felt almost exactly as if I'd put them out and grabbed his heart and squeezed it hard. He gasped once, then sighed and wilted, like all the starch had gone out of him, and I had to jump out of the way so he wouldn't bump into me when he fell. He never moved after he hit the ground. Jake came running out of his barber shop. "What happened to him?" he asked me. "He just fell over," I said. Jake looked at him. "It's a heart attack. I'd know it anywhere. I'll run for Doc." He took off up the street for Doc Mason while other people came hurrying out of the places along the street. There was Ben from the cheese factory and Mike from the pool hall and a couple of farmers who were in the general store. I got out of there and went on home and Ma was pleased with the fish. "They'll taste real good," she said, looking at them. "How did you come to catch that many, Jim?" "They were biting good," I said. "Well, you hurry up and clean them. We'll have to eat some right away and I'll take some over to Preacher Martin's and I'll rub salt in the others and put them in the cellar where it's good and cool. They'll keep for several days." across the street and told Ma about Banker Patton. "He was talking to Jim when it happened," she told Ma. Ma said to me, "Why didn't you tell me, Jim?" "I never got around to it," I said. "I was showing you these fish." So the two of them went on talking about Banker Patton and I went out to the woodshed and cleaned the fish. Bounce sat alongside me and watched me do it and I swear he was as happy over those fish as I was, just like he might have had a hand in catching them. Now I don't want you to think I'm trying to make you believe Bounce actually talked, because he didn't. But it was just as if he'd said those very words. "It was a nice day, Bounce," I said and Bounce said he'd thought so, too. He recalled running up and down the stream and how he'd chased a frog and the good smell there was when he stuck his nose down to the ground and sniffed. People all the time are laughing at me and making cracks about me and trying to bait me because I'm the village idiot, but there are times when the village idiot has it over all of them. They would have been scared they were going crazy if a dog talked to them, but I didn't think it was strange at all. I just thought how much nicer it was now that Bounce could talk and how I wouldn't have to guess at what he wanted to say. I never thought it was queer at all, because I always figured Bounce could talk if he only tried, being a smart dog. So Bounce and I sat there and talked while I cleaned the fish. When I came out of the woodshed, Mrs. Lawson had gone home and Ma was in the kitchen, getting a skillet ready to cook some of the fish. "Jim, you..." she hesitated, then went on, "Jim, you didn't have anything to do with what happened to Banker Patton, did you? You didn't push him or hit him or anything?" "I never even touched him," I said and that was true. I certainly hadn't touched him. In the afternoon, I went out and worked in the garden. Ma does some housework now and then and that brings in some money, but we couldn't get along if it wasn't for the garden. I used to work some, but since the fight I had with Alf over him not paying me, she don't let me work for anyone. She says if I take care of the garden and catch some fish, I'm helping out enough. found a different use for my new way of seeing. There were worms in the cabbages and I could see every one of them and I killed them all by squeezing them, the way I'd squeezed Banker Patton. I found a cloudy sort of stuff on some of the tomato plants and I suppose it was some kind of virus, because it was so small I could hardly see it at first. So I magnified it and could see it fine, and I made it go away. I didn't squeeze it like I did the worms. I just made it go away. It was fun working in the garden, when you could look down into the ground and see how the parsnips and radishes were coming and could kill the cutworms you found there, and know just how the soil was and if everything was all right. We'd had fish for lunch and we had fish again for supper, and after supper, I went for a walk. Before I knew it, I was walking by Banker Patton's place and, going past, I felt the grief inside the house. I stood out on the sidewalk and let the grief come into me. I suppose that outside any house in town, I could have felt just as easily whatever was going on inside, but I hadn't known I could and I hadn't tried. It was only because the grief in the Patton house was so deep and strong that I noticed it. The banker's oldest daughter was upstairs in her room and I could feel her crying. The other daughter was sitting with her mother in the living room and neither of them was crying, but they seemed lost and lonely. There were other people in the house, but they weren't very sad. Some neighbors, probably, who'd come in to keep the family company. I felt sorry for the three of them and I wanted to help them. Not that I'd done anything but I felt sorry for those women, because, after all, it wasn't their fault the way Banker Patton was, so I stood there, wishing I could help them. And all at once I felt that perhaps I could and I tried first with the daughter who was upstairs in her room. I reached out to her and I told her happy thoughts. It wasn't easy to start with, but pretty soon I got the hang of it and it wasn't hard to make her happy. Then I made the other two happy and went on my way, feeling better about what I'd done to the family. I listened in on the houses I passed. Most of them were happy, or at least contented, though I found a couple that were sad. Automatically, I reached out my mind and gave them happiness. It wasn't that I felt I should do something good for any particular person. To tell the truth, I don't remember hich houses I made happy. I just thought if I was able to do a thing like that, I should do it. It wasn't right for someone to have that kind of power and refuse to use it. TIfA was sitting up for me when I got home. She was looking kind of worried, the way she always does when I disappear for a long time and she don't know where I am. I went up to my room and got into bed and lay awake for a long time, wondering how come I could do all the things I could and how, suddenly, today I was able to do them when I'd never been able to before. But finally I went to sleep. The situation is not ideal, of course, but a good deal better than I had any reason to expect. It is not likely that one should find on every' alien planet a host so made to order for our purpose as is this one of mine. It has accepted me without recognizing me, has made no attempt to deny itself to me or to reject me. It is of an order of intelligence which has enabled it, quickly and efficiently, to make use of those most-readily manipulated of my abilities and this has aided me greatly in my observations. It is fairly mobile and consorts freely with its kind, which are other distinct advantages. I reckon myself fortunate, indeed, to have found so satisfactory a host so soon upon arrival. When I got up and had breakfast, I went outside and found Bounce waiting for me. He said he wanted to go and chase some rabbits and I agreed to go along. He said since we could talk now, we ought to make a good team. I could stand up on a stump or a pile of rocks or even climb a tree, so I could overlook the ground and see the rabbit and yell out to him which way it was going, and he could intercept it. We went up the road toward Alf's place, but turned off down across the pasture, heading for some cutover land on the hill across the creek. When we were off the road, I turned around to give Alf a good hating and while I was standing there, hating him, a thought came into my mind. I didn't know if I could do it, but it seemed to be a good idea, so I tried. I moved my seeing up to Alt's barn and went right through and came out in the middle of the haymow, with hay packed all around me. But all the time, you understand, I was standing out there in the pasture with Bounce, on our way to chase some rabbits. I'd like to explain what I did next and how I did it, but mostly what worries me is how I knew enough to do it -- I mean enough about chemical reaction and stuff like that. I did something to the hay and something to the oxygen and I started a fire up there in the center of the haymow. When I saw it was started good, I got out of there and was in myself again and Bounce and I went on across the creek and up the hill. I kept looking back over my shoulder, wondering if the fire might not have gone out, but all at once there was a little trickle of smoke coming out of the haymow opening up under the gable's end. We'd got up into the cutover land by that time and I sat down on a stump and enjoyed myself. The fire had a good start before it busted out and there wasn't a thing that could be done to save the barn. It went up with a roar and made the prettiest column of smoke you've ever seen. O N the way home, I stopped at the general store. Alf was there and he seemed much too happy to have just lost his barn. But it wasn't long until I understood why he was so happy. "I had her insured," he told Bert Jones, the storekeeper, "plumb up to the hilt. Anyhow, it was too big a barn, a lot bigger than I needed. When I built it, I figured I was going to go into milking heavier than I've done and would need the space." Bert chuckled. "Handy fire for you, Alf." "Best thing that ever happened to me. I can build another bam and have some cash left over." I was pretty sore about bungling it, but I thought of a way to get even. After lunch, I went up the road again and out into Alf's pasture and hunted up the bull. He was glad to see me, although he did a little pawing and some bellowing just to show off. I had wondered all the way out if I could talk to the bull the way I talked to Bounce and I was afraid that maybe I couldn't, for Bounce was bound to be smarter than a bull. I was right, of course. It was awful hard to make that bull understand anything. I made the mistake of scratching behind his ears while I tried to talk to him and he almost went to sleep. I could feel just how good the scratching felt to him. So I hauled off and kicked him in the ribs to wake him up, so he would pay attention. He did pay a little closer attention and even did a little answering, but not much. A bull is awful dumb. But I felt fairly sure I'd got my idea across, for he started acting sore and feisty and I'm afraid that I overdid it just a mite. I made it to the fence ahead of him and went over without even touching it. The bull stopped at the fence and stood there, pawing and raising Cain, and I got out of there as fast as I coiild go. I went home fairly pleased with myself for thinking up as smart a thing as that. I wasn't surprised in the least to hear that evening that Alf had been killed by his bull. It wasn't a pretty way to die, of course, but Alf had it coming to him, the way he beat me put of my summer wages. I was sitting in the pool hall when the news was brought in by someone and they all talked about it. Some said Alf had always claimed you couldn't trust no bull, and someone else said he'd often said I was the only one who'd ever gotten along with this particular bull and he was scared all the time I was there for fear the bull would kill me. They saw me sitting there and they asked me about it and I acted dumb and all of them laughed at me, but I didn't mind their laughing. I knew something they didn't know. Imagine how surprised they'd be if they ever learned the truth! They won't, of course. I'm too smart for that. tablet and a pencil and started to write down the names of all my enemies -- everyone who had ever laughed at me or done mean things to me or said mean things about me. The list was pretty long. It included almost everyone in town. I sat there thinking and I decided maybe I shouldn't kill everyone in town. Not that I couldn't, for I could have, just as slick as anything. But thinking about Alf and Banker Patton, I could see there wasn't any lastyou hate. And I could see as plain as day that if you killed a lot of people, it could leave you pretty lonesome. I read down through the list of names I'd made and I gave a couple of them the benefit of a doubt and scratched them out. I read those that were left over and I had to admit that every one of them was bad. I decided that if I didn't kill them, I'd have to do something else about them, for I couldn't let them go on being bad. I thought about it a long time and I remembered some of the things I'd heard Preacher Martin say, although, as I've mentioned before, he's a great one to be saying them. I decided I'd have to lay aside my hate and return good for evil. I am puzzled and disturbed, although that, perhaps, is the normal reaction when one attaches oneself to an alien being. This is a treacherous and unprincipled species and, as such, an incalculably important one to study. I am continually amazed at the facility with which my host has acquired the use of my talents, continually appalled by the use he makes of them. I am more than puzzled by his own conviction that he is less intelligent than his fellows; his actions during my acquaintance with him do not bear this out. I wonder if it may not be a racial traits a sort of cult-attitude of inferiority, that it may be ill-mannered to think of oneself in any other way. But I half suspect that he may have sensed me in some way without my knowing it and may be employing this strange concept as a device to force me from his mind. Under such a circumstance, it would not be prime ethics for me to remain with him -- but he has proved to be such an excellent seat of observation that I am loath to leave him. The fact is, I don't know. # could, of course, seize control o : his mind and thus learn the truth of this and other matters which are perplexing me. But I fear that, in doing so, I would destroy his effectiveness as a free agent and thus impair his observational value. I have decided to wait before taking such drastic measure. being anxious to get started. Ma asked me what I was going to do and I said just walk around a bit. First off, I went to the parsonage and sat down outside the hedge between it and the church. Pretty soon, Preacher Martin came out and began to walk up and down in what he called his garden, pretending he was sunk in holy thought, although I always suspected it was just an act to impress old ladies who might see him. I put out my mind real easy and finally I got it locked with his so neatly, it seem that it was me, not him, who was walking up and down. It was a queer feeling, I can tell you, for all the time I knew good and well that I was sitting there back of the hedge. He wasn't thinking any holy thoughts at all. He was going over in his mind all the arguments he intended to use to hit up the church board for a raise in salary. He was doing some minor cussing out of some of the members of the board for being tight-fisted skinflints and that I agreed with, because they surely were. Taking it easy, just sort of stealing in on his thoughts, I made him think about Jennie Smith, the organist, and the way he was carrying on with her, and I made him ashamed of himself for doing it. He tried to push me away, though he didn't know it was me; he just thought it was his own mind bringing up the matter. But I wouldn't let him push the thought away. I piled it on real heavy. I made him think how the people in the church trusted him and looked to him for spiritual leadership, and I made him remember back to when he was a younger man, just out of seminary, and looked on his lifetime work as a great crusade. I made him think of how he'd betrayed all the things he'd believed in then, and I got him down so low, he was almost bawling. Then I made him tell himself that owning up was the only way he could absolve himself. Once he'd done that, he could start life over again and be a credit to himself and his church. I went away, figuring I'd done a fair job of work on him, but knowing that I'd have to check up on him every now and then. At the general store, I sat around and watched Bert Jones sweep out the place. While he was talking to me, I sneaked into his mind and recalled to him all the times he'd paid way less than market prices for the eggs the farmers brought in, and the habit of sneaking in extra items on the bills he sent out to his charge customers, and how he'd cheated on his income tax. I scared him plenty on the income tax and I kept working at him until he'd about decided to make it right with everyone he'd cheated. I didn't finish the job airtight, but I knew I could come back any time I wanted to and in a little while, I'd make an honest man of Bert. watched Jake cut a head of hair. I wasn't too interested in the man Jake was working on -- he lived four or five miles out of town -- and at the moment, I figured that I'd better confine my work to the people in the village. Before I left, I had Jake plenty worried about the gambling he d been doing in the back room at the pool hall and had him almost ready to make a clean breast of it to his wife. I went over to the pool hall. Mike was sitting back of the counter with his hat on, reading the baseball scores in the morning paper. I got a day-old paper and pretended to read it. Mike laughed and asked me when I'd learned to read, so I laid it on good and thick. When I left, I knew, just as soon as I was out the door, he'd go down into the basement and dump all the moonshine down the drain, and before too long, I'd get him to close up the back room. Over at the cheese factory, I didn't have much chance to work on Ben. The farmers were bringing in their milk and he was too busy for me to really get into his mind. But I did manage to make him think of what would happen if Jake ever caught him with Jake's wife. And I knew when I could catch him alone, I could do a top-notch job on him, for I saw he scared easy. And that's the way it went. It was tough work and at times I felt it was just too much of a job. But then I'd sit down and remind myself that it was my duty to keep on -- that for some reason this power had been given me and that it was up to me to use it for all it was worth. And furthermore, I was not to use it for myself, for any selfish ends, but for the good of other people. I don't think I missed a person in the village. Remember how we wondered if there might not be unseen flaws in this plan c f ours? We went over it most carefully and could find none, yet all of us feared that some might show up in actual practice. Now I can report there is one. It is this: Accurate, impersonal observation is impossible, for as soon as one introduces one's self into a host, his abilities become available to the host and at once become a factor which upsets the norm. As a result of this, I am getting a distorted picture of the culture of this planet. Reluctant to intervene before, I am now convinced that I must move to take command of the situation. honest, is the happiest man you ever saw. Even losing all the customers who got sore at him when he explained why he paid them back some money doesn't bother him. I don't know how Ben is getting along -- he disappeared right after Jake took the shotgun to him. But, then, everyone agrees Ben was overdoing it when he went to Jake and told him he was sorry for what had been going on. Jake's wife is gone, too, and some folks say she followed Ben. To tell the truth, I am well satisfied with the way everything's turned out. Everyone is honest and no one is fooling around with anyone else and there ain't a lick of gambling or drinking going on in town. Mapleton probably is the most moral village in the United States. I feel that perhaps it turned out the way it did because I started out by conquering my own evil thoughts and, instead of killing all the folks I hated, set out to do them good. I'm a little puzzled when I walk through the streets at night because I don't pick up near as many happy thoughts as I used to. In fact, there are times when it keeps me busy almost all night long, getting them cheered up. You'd think honest folks would be happy folks. I imagine it's because, now they're good instead of bad, they're not so given to giddy pleasures, but are more concerned with the solid, worthwhile side of life. I'm a little worried about myself. While I did a lot of good, I may have done it for a selfish reason. I did it, perhaps partly, What do the beings in the flying saucers want? Now Harold T. Wilkins, world's foremost authority on "unidentified flying objects" dares to reveal the uncensored truth about the most momentous event of our age. Read how five U.S. Air Force planes completely disappeared off tie coast of Florida; how a British airliner suddenly vanished off the coast of Chile; how a jet plane over Korea flew into a cloud -- and never came out! Read of reported encounters with the beings who control these space ships. Read the frightening account of a Dutch steamer found drifting with the entire crew dead, their faces staring in horror toward something in the sky! Read the whole fantastic story from the first sighting to the significant events of Fall # -- amazing details of # separate reports of "saucer" landings -- # reports of hostile flying saucer activity. See actual photographs of flying saucers in flight. Flying Saucers on the Attack Find out the entire truth about these mysterious visitors from outer space and why they are here. Get the whole story in the startling new book -- Flying Saucers on the Attack. Simply send # in cash, check or money order and the book will be shipped postpaid. If you order C.O.D., the postman will collect # plus postage on delivery. Keep the book for two weeks. Read it from cover to cover. Then, if you don't agree that this is the most carefully authenticated and vitally important contribution to the Flying Saucer enigma, your money will be refunded without question. Order by mail from : # Fourth Ave., New York #, N. Y. Banker Patton. And I did it not for just people, but for people I know. That doesn't seem right. Why should only people I know benefit? Help! Can you hear me? I'm trapped! I can neither control my host nor can I escape from him. Do not under any circumstances let anyone else try to use another member of this race as a host! Help! Can you hear me? Help! I've sat up all night, thinking, and now the way is clear. Having reached my decision, I feel important and humble, both at once. I know I'm a chosen instrument for good and must not let anything stop me. I know the village was no more than a proving ground, a place for me to learn what I could really do. Knowing now, I'm determined to use the power to its utmost for the good of all humanity. Ma's been saving up a little money for a long time for a decent burial. I know just where she hides it. It's all she's got. But it's enough to get me to the U. N. # a plate When Marsy Gras shot off its skyrockets, Mars Observatory gave it the worksfireworks! washed out, watery sort of procedure that is hardly worth looking at. The shadows of the cactus lengthen, the sun goes down without the slightest hint of color or display and everything is dark. About once a year there is one cloud that turns pink briefly. But even the travel books devote more space describing the new sign adorning the Canal Casino than they do on the sunset. The night sky is something else again. Each new crop of tourists goes to bed at sunrise the day after arrival with stiff necks from looking up all night. The craters of the moons are visible to the naked eye, and even a cheap pair of opera glasses can pick out the buildings of the Deimos Space Station. A typical comment from a sightseer is, "Just think, Fred, we were way up there only twelve hours ago." At fairly frequent intervals, the moons eclipse. The local Chamber of Commerce joins with the gambling casinos to use these occasions as excuses for a celebration. The "Marsy Gras" includes floats, costumes, liquor, women, gambling -- and finishes off with a display of fireworks and a stiff note of protest from the nearby Mars Observatory. rpHE day after a particularlynoisy, glaring fireworks display, the top brass at the Observatory called an emergency meeting. The topic was not a new one, but fresh evidence, in the form of several still-wet photographic plates, showing out-offocus skyrocket trails and a galaxy of first-magnitude aerial cracker explosions was presented. "I maintain they fire them in our direction on purpose," one scientist declared. This was considered to be correct because the other directions around town were oil refineries and the homes of the casino owners. "Why don't we just move the Observatory way out in the desert?" a technician demanded. "It wouldn't be much of a job." "It would be a tremendous job," said Dr. Morton, the physicist. "If not for the glare of city lights on Earth, we wouldn't have had to move our telescopes to the Moon. If not for the gravel falling out of the sky on the Moon, making it necessary to resurface the reflectors every week, we wouldn't have had to move to Mars. Viewing conditions here are just about perfect -- except for the immense cost of transporting the equipment, building materials, workmen, and paying us triple time for working so far from home. Why, did you ever figure the cost of a single photographic plate? What with salaries, freight to and from Earth, maintenance and all the rest, it's enormous!" "Then why don't we cut down the cost of ruined exposures," asked the technician, "by moving the Observatory away from town?" "Because," Dr. Morton explained, "we'd have to bring in crews to tear the place down, other crews to move it, still more crews to rebuild it. Not to mention unavoidable breakage and replacement, which involve more freight from Earth. At # per pound dead-weight... well, you figure it out." "So we can't move and we can't afford ruined thousand-dollar plates," said the scientist who had considered himself a target for the fireworks. "Then what's the answer?" The usual suggestion was proposed that a delegation approach the Town Council to follow up the letter of protest. A search through the past meetings' minutes showed that this had never accomplished anything up to date. A recent arrival to the Observatory mentioned that their combined brain power should be enough to beat the games and thus force the casino owners -- who were the real offenders -- out of business. One of the scientists, who had already tried that very scheme on a small scale, reported his results. He proved with his tabulations that, in this instance, science, in the guise of the law of averages, was unfortunately against them. Dr. Morton rose to his feet. The other men listened to his plan, at first with shocked horror, then with deep interest and finally in wild exultation. The meeting broke up with most of the members grinning from ear to ear. "It's lucky Dr. Morton is a physicist," said one of the directors. "No astronomer would ever have thought of that," little ad appeared in the weekly publication "What to do in Marsport." It did not try to compete with any of the casino ads (all of which featured pretty girls), but it had a unique heading. For the First Time Ever by the Staff of the Learn your Luck, your Future! Write or call Mars Observatory. No charge. No obligation. Since the horoscopes being offered were about the only things on Mars that didn't cost the tourists any n oney, the response was great. The recipient of a horoscope found a mimeographed folder which contained three pages describing the present positions of the planets, where to look for Earth in the sky, and what science hoped to learn the next time Mercury was in transit. The fourth page held the kicker. It said that while the tourist's luck would be better than average at most of the gambling houses, he would lose consistently if he played at Harvey's Club. Within two days the only people playing at Harvey's were the shills. The following day, the visitors to the observatory included Harvey. The gambler was welcomed with mingled respect for his money and contempt for his occupation. He was taken immediately to see Dr. Morton, who greeted him with a sly smile. galaxy science fiction Harvey's conversation was brief and to the point. "How much?" he asked waving a horoscope under Dr. Morton's nose. "Just a promise," said the scientist. Harvey said nothing but looked sullen. "You are on the Town Council," Morton continued. "Now, the next time the question of tourist entertainment is discussed, we want you to vote against a fireworks display." He then explained how important plates had been ruined by skyrocket trails. Harvey listened with great interest, especially when Dr. Morton flatly stated that each casino, in turn, would get the same publicity in the horoscopes. "The Council members are all for the tourists," Harvey commented, "and you guys are supposed to be nuts, like all scientists. But I'll do like you say." He reached into his pocket. "Here's fifty bucks. Use it for a full page ad this time and do the Desert Sands Casino in your next horoscope. And say -- before I go, can I look through the telescope? I never seemed to have the time before." A T weekly intervals, Dr. Morton "did" the Desert Sands; Frankland's Paradise; the Martian Gardens; and the Two Moons Club. From each owner he extracted the same promise -- to vote against the fireworks at the Council meetings. The technique was settling down to a routine. Each victim came, made the promise, paid for the following week's ad, named the next casino, and was taken on a tour of the Observatory. Then disaster struck. It took the form of an interplanetary telegram from Harvard Observatory, their parent organization. It read: Dr. Morton was eating alone in the staff dining room when he noticed a familiar face beside him. "Harvey," he said. "Guess you've come down to gloat over our misfortune." "No, Professor," said Harvey. "You've got my promise to help you boys and I'll stick by you. It's a rotten shame, too. You just about made it. The rest of the club owners saw the writing on the wall and were going to cooperate with you when the telegram came. All of us got contacts in the telegraph office, so they heard about it soon as it arrived and stayed away." Dr. Morton said, "Yes, I supposed they would. There's not much we can do now." "There are thirteen members on the Council." Harvey continued, "and you've got five of us. If that telegram had only come one day later -- no more fireworks. But I got an idea." Dr. Morton pushed aside his empty coffee cup and stood up. "Let's get out in the fresh air." The Town Council was adding insult to injury by staging one of the biggest fireworks displays ever. It consisted of practically all skyrockets. Dr. Morton expressed wonder at their supply; Harvey explained that they were made right on Mars. He went on to tell his idea. "I was real interested in everything when you took me around the first time I was here," the gambler said. "The same goes for the other boys who saw the place. Most of us meant to come out here and look around sometime, but you people work nights and, us mostly working nights, too, we never got around to it. How about arranging an exclusive tour sometime just for the club operators and their help? Then when they see everything, you could offer to name a star after them or something. If I hadn't already promised, I'd be to point in the sky and say 'That's Harvey's Star.' " Dr. Morton smiled gently. "That's a wonderful idea," he said, "but I don't think it would work. Any stars worth looking at with the naked eye already have names. The only ones we could name after people are so far away that, it would take an exposure of several hours, just to see them on a photographic plate. You wouldn't be able to point yours out at all. Besides, Harvard Observatory wouldn't stand for this idea either. It would make as much sense to them as you naming a poker chip after me." He sighed. "But, in any case, we would like to have all the owners over some time. It might improve relations somewhat." The two of them watched a rocket wobble all over the sky before exploding. "Let's go back inside," said the physicist. "Maybe we can arrange that tour for Sunday."  tors, presumably softened up by what one of the chemists thought were martinis, were seated in the lecture hall listening to Dr. Morton's concluding remarks. "One of the technicians is working on a gadget with a photocell that closes the shutter on the film when a rocket goes up," Dr. Morton was saying. "It should cut down the exposure time a great deal. Right now, every night may be significant. If the plates from any one night are spoiled, we may not be able to duplicate them for a Martian year. Mankind is preparing the first trip to another star, and the work of Mars Observatory is necessary to insure the success of that trip. You gentlemen are rightly the leaders of Mars, and so it is up to you to decide whether or not that success will be possible." He sat down to a smattering of applause. The visitors, except Harvey, then left. "It didn't go over, Professor," said Harvey. I know," said Dr. Morton. "That washes out that plan." He turned to the gambler. "You're the only person I can trust with this," he said. "How would you like to help me make some fireworks?" had everything ready. That night, as quietly as possible, they moved to a position behind a fence near the skyrocket launching racks. Dr. Morton was carrying a compass, a flashlight, and a small clinometer; Harvey was struggling with two large skyrockets. He whispered, "What if we miss or they go off too soon, or something?" "Nonsense, Harvey," said Dr. Morton. He busied himself with the flashlight and compass, and carefully aimed one of the rockets. "You forget I am a physicist." He then aimed the other rocket and checked elevation with the clinometer. "The fuels are standard, and I worked out the trajectories on the computor. Ready with your match? These are going to explode in the canal, and get everybody in the Canal Casino all wet." He peeked over the fence, to see how the regular display was doing. "Here comes their finale. Ready, set, light!" Covered by the launching of the last of the official display, their two rockets arced up and away. One of them did explode in the canal, and most of the Casino's patrons did get wet. But the other wobbled off to the right, landed on the roof of Harvey's bachelor home and burned it to the ground. D R. Morton sat numbly in front of his typewriter, staring at a letter. He couldn't seem to find the right words for what he wished to say. He tried to derive inspiration from a glossy photograph lying on the table beside him. It had what looked like another skyrocket trail on it. Before he could answer it, the door opened and Harvey walked in, accompanied by two men with muscles. "I haven't seen you since the accident, Professor," he said. "I've been trying to write you a letter," said Dr. Morton, "to tell you how sorry I am about what happened. And I also have to thank you for getting that law against fireworks through the Council. I am extremely sorry it took your house burning down to convince them." "I keep my promises," said Harvey. One of the men with muscles turned the radio on, loud. "We're trying to get up a collection among the staff to help pay for your losses," said Dr. Morton, "but the director suggested a more permanent kind of remembrance." He picked up the photograph. "This will be one of the brightest objects in the sky, in a few months. It won't be back again for thousands of years, but it will be around for a good while. We've just discovered it, and it is our privilege to call it 'Harvey's Comet.' " "That's nice," said Harvey. The first of the two men went around pulling down blinds; the other went into the bathroom "Well," said the physicist, looking tired and old, "I guess there's nothing more I can say." "Oh, yes, there is, Professor," said Harvey, with a sudden grin on his face. He turned to his muscle men. "You two guys cut out the comedy and bring it in, now." The two men followed his instructions. "You see, Professor," the gambler continued, "I took a beating on the house, but the other club boys chipped in and made up all my losses. So, I don't need your money at all. Besides, I have two things to thank you for. First, I heard about the comet from one of your men, and it's the nicest thing anybody's ever done for me." One of his men came back with what looked like a round candy box. "Second, that fire was the best publicity stunt I could get. It made the papers back on Earth and all the new tourists are packing into the Harvey Club. Even the other operators are playing my tables. That's why I want you to have this." He handed Dr. Morton the box. It read "Harvey's Club" in the center, and "Doctor Morton's Poker Chip" around the edge. Across the bottom, it said "Five Thousand." "That's dollars in it, Professor," said Harvey. "Don't spend it all in one place." # Star edited by August Derleth. Rinehart  Co., # T HE indefatigable Derleth has rung the bell with his fifteenth anthology. This is not only because the story selection is so catholic and type-inclusive, but also because, like a true annual, the book has a complete author index of all science fiction and fantasy published in over # different magazines in #, as well as a list of the year's outstanding collections of science fiction, fantasy and supernatural stories. One could only wish that Derleth would publish an author index for #I and #, so that there would be a complete series of annual supplements to Don Day's invaluable Index. As for the stories, there are very few among the # in this book that aren't first class. Among my favorites are Simak's "Kindergarten," Bretnor #s Neville's "Gratitude Guaranteed," Fredric Brown's "Rustle of Wings," and Mildred Clingerman's "The Word" and "Stickeney and the Critic." The other stories, by John Anthony, Bradbury, Blish, Clifton  Apostolides, Clarke, John Langdon, Leinster, Mack Reynolds, Seabright, Sheckley and Sherred are all B plus or better by my standards. A really good collection. Grey Walter. W. W. Norton  Co., Inc., # J IM Blish called my attention to this exciting and vividly written book, which was published last year. It will be of special interest to Galaxy readers who want to know how near -- or how far -- we are today from actually realizing some of our extrapolations on the brain. The author is a British physiologist and a pioneer in the development of electro-encephalography since the war. His book the whole history of the development of the brain from the very origins of life, eons ago. Then follow a survey of modem elecreport on modem homeostatic machines that in little ways imitate some of the actions of sentient beings, a short study of the learning process, and an evaluation of the future of modem brain research. It is an example of scientific popularization at its best. Healy. Henry Holt  Co., # neverbeforepublished science fiction stories is almost, but not quite, up to the original, which came out in #. John W. Campbell, Jr., offers his first fiction in # years -- and a good story it is, too. David H. Fink, M.D., author of Release from Nervous Tension, contributes a remarkable item, the first science fiction he has ever written. One H. L. Gold has written an excellent little tale that is guaranteed to haunt your dreams. Frank Fenton has a sharply satiric bit on the disadvantages of being an egghead in Hollywood. Other tales are contributed by editors Boucher, McComas and Healy, and writers Bretnor and Neville, the latter with a moving sequel to his "Bettyann," the chef d'oeuvre of Healy's first anthology. Samuel Moskowitz. The McBride Co., # mark of this anthology. It has some very good stories, several poor ones, and the worst jacket I have ever seen on any book. The # stories were allegedly selected by the editors of # science fiction and weird magazines. The Clifton-Apostolides "What Thin Partitions," from Astounding, is delightful; Arthur Clarke's gentle fantasy of a Moebius strip world, "Wall of Darkness," is Class A, as is Mona Farnsworth's "All Roads," from Unknown. Eando Binder's "I, Robot" is important historically; and Harry Bates' "Death of a Sensitive" is almost first rate -- with a little cutting, it would be. The rest of the tales, by Jack Kirkland, Frank B. Long, Wilson Tucker, Chester D. Cuthbert, Robert B. Johnson, Robert W. Chambers and Otis A. Kline, range from passable to awful. Willy Ley. Viking Press, # original idea, authoritatively and charmingly carried out. Classed as a " 'teen-age juvenile" by its publishers, the book actually is a collection of stimulating reports on "engineering projects that could come true," that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. Included are the fascinating narratives of the uncompleted tunnel under the English Channel; of various plans for seadromes for stopover points for transatlantic planes; of attempts to harness volcanic energy in Iceland (fantastic!) and at Larderello, Italy; and of the Jordan Valley project, the Congo-LakeChad-Sea vision, the plan for damming the Mediterranean, and various other exciting and possible engineering ideas. The book won the New York Her aidTribune's annual award for the best in the group of books for older boys and girls, but don't let that dissuade you. It's also dandy for gray-beards of both sexes. Mayne Hull. Frederick Fell, Inc., # TF you like old-fashioned space opera, this book may be your meat. It has all the subtlety of a broadaxe and none of the maturity of concept or characterization that we expect of good science fiction today -- but it is fast-moving, and that's enough for lots of people. Five of the six novelets from which it has been made constitute the old "Artur Blord" series in Astounding, #-#, though no acknowledgment of this appears in the book. The tales tell the exploits of superman Artur Blord on the Big Business planets of the Ridge Stars, where everything goes. The best clue to the science fiction quality of the book comes from a note Mrs. van Vogt (who uses her maiden name for her stories) has on the jacket: "The great problem was my almost total lack of scientific knowledge. To overcome this handicap, my husband and I figured out a story pattern which would bypass the need to show a science explanation." And this is the fact. To Mrs. van Vogt, the impossible is achievable simply by writing it down. If you like that sort of antilogical science fiction, this is for you. Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc., # T HE third Bleiler-Dikty novelet annual contains five stories, including two that are first rate. One is Frank M. Robinson's "The Oceans Are Wide." It's in the grand tradition of Heinlein's "Universe" -- the story of a century-long trip to a whole population of Terrans to the planet of a distant star. The only trouble is that it should have been a novel. But even what we get is wonderful. The other class A item is a good, creepy and very real dimensional tale by one H. L. Gold (hm-m, two in one month, both fine jobs) in collaboration with Robert W. Krepps, called "The Enormous Room." A pleasant fantasy by Murray Leinster, entitled "The Sentimentalists," which ran in these pages, is also good. Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" I found rather derivative and portentous. Kendell Crossen's "Assignment to Aldebaran" appealed to me as humor from the pre-adult, or Nat Schachner, stage of science fiction. These are not the "best novelets" of the year, as a whole, but plenty good enough, most of them. ed by Leo Mar Julies and Oscar J. Friend. Merlin Press, # A ND still the anthologies come ! This is the fifth for this one month ! Ten longish novelets in # pages make this book a good buy, bulk-wise. Science fictionwise, though, it is pretty much old-fashioned implausible stuff. There are a handful of good items, including Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" (previously anthologized under the name Anson .MacDonald in the first edition of the Healy-McComas Adventures in Time and Space ) ; a rip-snorting mellerdrammer of the future by Henry Kuttner, "Sword of Tomorrow," which is made better than usual by its solid core of social philosophy; and another anti-Utopia by Manly Wade Wellman, "Island in the Sky," which is fastmoving and pointed, and is based on a prophetic imagining of today's "space station." You may also like Edmond Hamilton's "Forgotten World," Fredric Brown's "Gateway to Darkness" (all about "neutronium"), and Murray Leinster's super-fantastic "Things Pass By." The other tales, by A. E. van me anything from chilly to freezing. G. O. G. # by John Taine. Fantasy Press , Inc., # novel by the author of Before The Dawn, The Crystal Horde, Seeds of Life, etc., should be good news, but unfortunately the present story is pretty hard going. It fails because its propaganda smothers its story values. We all know Communists are a bad lot, but the black villains of Taine's imagining become laughable rather than terrible. "G. O. G. #," otherwise known as "Gog," is a Russian genetic experiment, half ape, half human; and in the end the monster proves to be more "human" than his Soviet makers. The story is tortuous and wordy, and will add nothing to its author's reputation. cations has just reissued Sir William Bragg's Concerning the Nature of Things (# in paper), first published in #. It's a study of the atom in the fixed-electron period, and has a great deal that's useful and easy to understand on the nature of gases, liquids, and various types of crystals. Excellent for the beginner... The British H. J. Campbell has edited Sprague de Camp's New Anthology (around #c from most science fiction specialist stores); it contains six of de Camp's usual brand of light stories... Bradford Day, #-#I #th Ave., S. Ozone Park, N.W., has issued An Index to the Weird and Fantastica in Magazines (#, mimeo.); it contains the tables of contents of all of Weird T ales plus seven other shortlived magazines of the same nature, and incomplete listings of similar material from over two dozen other magazines. No author or story title lists, but it should be a useful compilation to lovers of this type of fiction. D isappointed, ciara reread the last paragraph of the letter over a second cup of breakfast coffee. In this situation, the Interworld Cooperation Bureau can only advise a generously broad-minded approach, tempered by tolerance. You may convey to your neighbors the sympathy of this department. But, in any thorough analysis, we must all concede that welcoming consuls in our midst is indispensable to cordial interplanetary relations. We are sure that, with this in mind, you will appreciate the necessity of tolerating the behavior of the son of the Consul from Dartha, There is nothing like a good game of hide and seek if it isn't played by anyone like: u j # L i LJ which, after all, is but an expression of a natural psycho-biological characteristic. The letter was signed by the Secretary of the Bureau. Impatiently, she slid it back into its envelope and stared helplessly at her husband. "No soap?" Bob asked tentatively. Clara sighed. "He says we have to put up with the child -- that it's just unfortunate the Consul happens to live in our neighborhood." "I told you so." The voices of children in vacation-time play shrilled through the window. With much more abandon, Clara imagined, than at any time since Jebaburba -- "Jeb," the kids called him -- and his diplomat father had moved into the large house on the corner. "What are we going to do, Bob?" she asked worriedly. "I'm going to take the express downtown. I'll be at the office for approximately two hours." He rose, glancing at his watch. "Then I'll be at the golf course for the rest of the day." She frowned irritably. "I'm serious, Bob. Something can be done. You could call our Congressman and -- " He laughed and kissed her on the forehead. "Neighborhood gossip, Mrs. Smith's new hat, incorrigible children -- all in the same category -- woman's responsibility. You take care of the domestic headaches; I'll take care of the business ones. Anyway, all Jeb needs is the application of a hand to the seat of the trousers, which I hardly think is my privilege." "But -- " But Bob was already out the door and she was alone. Or was she? H esitantly, she glanced around the room -- listening, staring apprehensively into each corner. "Jeb?" she said softly. A coincidental surge in the clamor outside, spawned by the gang play beneath the window, was the only answer. The exuberant childish laughter was uninhibited now -- as though the restraint of having someone 'different' among them was gone for the moment. "Jeb," she called more loudly. Tensing, she realized instinctively that he was there -- just a shade below the level of concrete presence -- watching, listening. She could feel it in the special stillness around her. A piece of marmalade-covered toast elevated itself, moved through the air and disappeared. Clara lurched up, knocking her chair over. "Jeb!" "Yes, ma'am." The thin voice came from nowhere. "You come out this instant, Jeb!" The air to one side of the table wavered tremulously, then belched forth a lean, tousled-haired five-year-old. Orange jam covered only a few of the multitudinous freckles on his face. She stared at him, speechless in her exasperation. He licked his fingers. "Whatcha doing, huh, Mrs. Peterson?" Clara took in a profound breath, then calmed herself in the superficial gesture of smoothing out the bodice of her dress. "Jeb, you will go home to your father and tell him that you were snooping again!" "Yes'm. May I have another slice of bread?" "Jeb!" The child looked away sheepishly and disappeared. There was a scream from the breakfast room of the Sanders' home next door. Then Jeb was back, another slice of toast and jelly in his hand. "Mrs. Sanders' jelly is better, anyway," he testified before he disappeared a second time. Outside, the gleeful cries of the children were snipped off, as though the window had been closed against them. Clara glanced out. She had guessed right. The child was with the others now and they were standing around, staring uneasily at him. "Let's play catcher," Jeb said. "Not with you," Clara's Bobby protested. "Not with you! Not with you!" Katherine and Mary chanted. "No, thit!" David declared, his four-year-old lisp flourishing in his indignation. "Mommy thayth for me to thtay away from you." "You're always viva -- viva -- " Sammy, six, struggled with the word. "Viva-something." Katherine turned to run home. "I think Mommy's calling me." Jeb, grinning mischievously, dropped to his hands and knees, his back arched high like a cat. He disappeared. He rematerialized instantly a foot in front of the running Katherine. Her knees struck his back and she catapulted over him, screaming in terror. "TJ E A L L Y , Mr. T'Arah,"IClara said stiffly, "we are all of the opinion that something should be done about Jeb -- Jebaburba." The Consul General of Dartha proceeded to wipe his glasses. He tactfully avoided looking at the caller he had received in his study. "Of course you realize, Mrs. Peterson, that none of us Darthanians condones such behavior on the part of our children." Clara smiled hopefully. "Then you'll see that he doesn't do it again?" T'Arah's responsive smile was weak and hopeless. "You have a suggestion as to how Jebaburba can be corrected?" "Physical persuasion in the right place. Now if my Bobby should -- " T'Arah laughed. "I assure you, Mrs. Peterson, that your custom of spanking would be quite frustrating if a Darthanian tried it on his child. He would be spanking nothing. Dematerialization, as you call it, is a defense mechanism. A child uses it instinctively." "You could punish him some other way, then!" "Lock him in a room, perhaps?" Clara rose. "Very well, Mr. T'Arah -- " He sprang to his feet. "Don't misinterpret, please. I am very much in sympathy with you and your neighbors. It is my job to promote cordiality with other peoples. But punitive measures such as Earthmen practice can't be applied to Darthanian children. On Darthan, we have to be patient -- wait until they reach the age of understanding -- make allowances for the fact that a fiveyear-old is motivated by an insatiable curiosity." His sympathy and apparent eagerness to pacify were convincing. Hopefully, Clara returned to her seat. "Believe me, Mrs. Peterson," T'Arah went on, "I shall try again to make him understand. But Jebaburba is only .a child. Have you tried to reason with yourfiveyear-old?" "But isn't there anything we can do?" "I'm afraid not -- short of requesting my removal. If you decide on that, I shan't oppose the move. I understand your position." He paused, then added, "On the other hand, you might be surprised to know that while my son and I present a problem in this neighborhood, there are Earth consuls whose presence on other worlds is equally trying to the inhabitants of those planets." She looked puzzled. "You see, Darthanians, too, have the problem of adapting to Earth diplomats who are assigned there. Your race is the only one with impinging thought processes. Although you are all inherently immune to each other's thought emanations, Darthanians lack that immunity and must constantly put up with receiving your subvocal thought-streams." It was a tactful reminder that his neighbors could be more neighborly and Clara felt somewhat embarrassed for her discourteous attitude. sively and leaned back in the chair. "Jebaburba was a problem on my last assignment, too -- in Europe. He was playfully aggressive toward one small girl, teased her so much with his vivaporting that we feared the child might become neurotic. We cured him by eliminating his superiority over her. She was instructed in the practice of vivaporting and, when he learned she was his equal, he no longer -- " "Are you suggesting, Mr. T'Arah, that I learn how to flit into nowhere and back again?" Clara asked, raising an eyebrow. "Of course not, Mrs. Peterson. I fear that would be impossible. You lack the -- uh -- flexibility necessary to acquire the ability. All Earthmen and Earthwomen do. However, there is a possibility of canceling out Jebaburba's sense of superiority, much as we did in Europe. I hadn't mentioned it until now because I doubt seriously that I can arrange for the equipment." Clara looked up, interested. "But since you're so distressto put in a requisition with the Darthanian Diplomatic Corps for a vivaflux muzzle." "You mean there is something to keep Jebaburba from popping up out of nowhere?" she asked incredulously. "The muzzle will completely stifle his vivaportive ability -- as surely as a blindfold would prevent you from seeing. Our Diplomatic Corps has seven muzzles, available only in emergencies. I doubt that this situation will be classified as an emergency, but tion." "But a -- a muzzle! Will it hurt? Will it affect Jeb?" "Not at all. It is simply a bracelet of vivaportive-resistant material that can be locked on his wrist. But I don't want to raise your hopes unwarrantedly. I repeat, it is extremely unlikely that one will be available." The air stirred close to Clara's elbow and she gasped, leaped aside as Jeb sprang into existence. " 'Lo, Mrs. Peterson." The child looked up at her, smiling. "Where's Bobby?" "Jebaburba," T'Arah began with proper parental severity, "I want you to stop vivaporting. You're not at home now and -- " " 'Scuse me," the boy said abstractedly and vanished. But he was back again in a second, fondling a large Maltese cat that Clara recognized as belonging to the Donnors. T'Arah scowled at the boy. "Jebaburba! You will return that animal -- now!" "Yes, Daddy." "And you will not vivaport again!" "Yes, Daddy," he said, disappearing. B UT the next week was no more peaceful than the two months since T'Arah had moved into the large gray house and subjected himself and his son to the linguisticators for instant assimilation of the language. On Monday, the Donnors' cat, Gabby, vanished. Jebaburba's fondness for the animal immediately attracted suspicion to him. But a visit by the Donnors, accompanied by the Sanderses, to T'Arah's house failed to draw from the child an admission that he was implicated in its disappearance. Perhaps the Donnors would ter drop. Gabby might have stolen off to seek subsistence in a more normal neighborhood. But shortly befbre midnight, the animal's frenzied wails fetched John Donnor from his bed. No question of it -- it was Gabby. A search of the house produced no Gabby, despite the fact that his wailing was mysteriously loudest in the center of the bedroom. John bracketed the spot of apparent origin of the animal's cries and, deciding he should now be standing over the creature, reached down, groping, as though he might be able to feel what he couldn't see. Infuriated, the Donnors, escorted this time by the Sanderses and Clara, paid a midnight visit to T'Arah. It seemed that now Jebaburba could remember playing with the animal in the late afternoon. "Where did you leave him?" T'Arah demanded. Jebaburba looked up sleepily from his pillow. "I think I had him when I went from Bobby's house to see David." He looked at David's mother for confirmation. Ethel Sanders shook her head. "He popped up at the side of the supper table, wanting to play with David. But Gabby wasn't with him." "Think, Jebaburba!" his father insisted. "What did you do with the animal?" But the child was asleep. The Consul General sighed distastefully, tightening his robe around him. "I'll find the cat." "Where?" Clara asked dubiously. "Where? Somewhere in the subvivaplane, of course. Mr. Sanders says he can hear the animal in his bedroom." The posse, with its one qualified searcher, returned to the Donnor home. T'Arah stood stiffly in the center of the bedroom. Then he disappeared. A moment later, he was back, hastily disentangling himself from a frightened, clawing Gabby. That was on Monday. O N Tuesday, Jebaburba seemed somehow to win the confidence of the children and gain acceptance into their games. Clara stood at the breakfast room window and Watched them sitting silently in the shade of the small oak -- doing nothing more harmful than telling stories, she hoped. "Why don't you forget about those kids?" Bob asked from the table. He was rested and alert, not having been disturbed in the least by Gabby's outcries during the night. "I'm worried about them, Bob," she said. "Suppose something should happen?" "Happen?" he repeated densely. She went over to him. "That child -- Jebaburba. He might be -- dangerous !" Bob laughed. "Darling, aren't you trying to make something serious out of nothing?" "He made the cat disappear. Suppose -- " "Nonsense. You're upsetting yourself over nothing. If you're worried, just refuse to let Bobby play with him." She laughed mirthlessly. "Jeb's in and out of this house fifty times a day -- even through locked doors.  could keep Bobby away from a child like that?" "Even if you could," he said, shrugging, "I guess you shouldn't. The Secretary of the Bureau has asked that we do everything we can to adapt to the situation. Ostracizing a diplomat's child wouldn't help matters any. Anyhow, Jeb isn't a bad kid. Unusual, that's all." "Not dangerous?" "Of course not. T'Arah can't allow it, so relax. Nothing to worry about." After he had gone, she turned back to watch the children. They were no longer on the lawn. Now she could hear their playful cries coming from inside the garage. Wednesday, Jebaburba seemed to lose his interest in the children and concentrated on the adults with his unintentionally harassing behavior. "Really," Lucy Donnor told Clara over the visiphone, "I don't believe I can put up with that child another day. He's been in here a thousand times." "I find," Clara advised, "that he eventually loses interest and leaves you alone for a while if you ignore him." "Ignore him? How can you ignore anything like that? I put Mary and Katherine in their room for disrespect to their father. Jeb kept them company for a whole hour, without my knowing anything about it, until I heard the rumpus upstairs." T HE visiscreen flickered, then split in half, showing two face frames. Maud Clark joined the conversation. "Frank and I have decided to take our vacation early," she said. "We've got to get away from that child. We've got to get Sammy away." Lucy shrugged despairingly. "What good will that do? He'll be here when you get back." "It'll do a lot of good! Why, that child was under our feet half the morning, without our knowing it! And the things we were talking about! Personal things that families discuss -- you know." "I know, all right!" Lucy agreed emphatically. "You can't ever tell when he's there," Clara complained. "Who you talking about, huh, Mrs. Peterson?" Clara whirled around, gasping. Jebaburba stood looking up inquisitively at her. She snapped off the visiphone, wondering why she felt guilty about being surprised in the conversation. "People like to talk about other people, don't they?" the child observed, glancing past her at the fading screen. "Now, Jeb," Clara scolded, "that doesn't concern you at all." The Consul's son laughed. "That's what Mrs. Sanders told me. I heard her telling Mr. Sanders that Mrs. Donnor's new drapes are at -- atros -- atrosicus. And I asked her what atrosicus was and she said -- " Clara seized him by the shoulders and spun him around, propelling him gently, yet with 'determination, toward the door. "I don't care to hear what Mrs. Sanders says about Mrs. Donnor." "But she says things about you, too. She said Clara -- your name's Clara, isn't it? -- has a lazy husband. Is Mr. Peterson lazy?" "Jeb! If you don't leave, I'm going right to your father!"  "Oh, heck!" he protested. But he gave in -- he disappeared. Even before Clara could let out a breath of relief, however, he was back. "Mrs. Donnor says Mr. Peterson is lazy, too. So it must be true, huh?" She reached out impulsively for his ear. Her hand closed on nothing. O N Thursday, the unexpected appearance of Jebaburba at the table, as she and Bobby were eating lunch, drove Clara to the limit of her patience. It wasn't because she dropped the platter of cold cuts on the floor. She had been in a keen state of nervous anxiety all morning, anticipating his inevitable arrival while she traced, via visiphone, his wanderings through the neighborhood. And now suddenly, shockingly, he was here. The tension exploded in a flow of near-hysterical tears and she rudely ordered him from the house in a tone so severe that he left without a protest. Another talk -- a desperate one this time -- with the Consul General was in order. She left the kitchen without even cleaning up the mess. Absently, she drew water for her bath, wondering how she could make T'Arah search for some way to force his son to observe the customs of Earth. It was evident by now that no vivaflux muzzle would be coming from Dartha -- if it were, it would already have arrived. She might influence his father to send Jebaburba back to Dartha, for a while at least. That hope heartened her as she undressed and slipped into the tub of warm water. She sighed, lathering herself briskly. At this interview, she was determined, there would be no concessions. Bobby's knock sounded at the door. "Mommy, can I go out and play?" "Yes, dear. But stay clean. Your father'll be home in a little while." "I will." "And, Bobby -- don't play with Jeb if you can avoid it." "Why, Mommy?" "Never mind why. If he shows up and wants to play with you and the other children, you come back inside." "Oh, out Jeb's fun now. He used to be mean and he used to play tricks on us. But..." The din of children's voices rose from outside, drowning out her son's words. "Never mind that," she said after the clamor had subsided. "Stay away from him. Don't hurt his feelings. Just excuse yourself and come in the house." In the silence, she could sense her boy standing sullenly outside the bathroom. "And, Bobby," she called, "if he tries to -- take you anywhere, like he did the cat, you tell him you won't go." There was no answer. "Bobby! I know you're out there!" She stared at the door impatiently. "You'd better answer me!" Considering the way he customarily stomped down the hall, it was ridiculous for the child to believe he could deceive He left the wash basin and started over toward her, concerned. "Get away!" Clara warned, near tears as she squirmed sideways and grabbed for the towel hanging from its rack. She managed to float it over her just as Jebaburba reached the side of the tub. She cringed in horror from the child. "You all right, Mrs. Peterson?" "Get out!" she screamed. "Get out! You -- you little monster!" Jebaburba's eyes opened wide. Then he backed away, starting to cry. "You don't like me! Nobody likes me and I wish I was somewhere else!" "Then go home -- do anything -- but get out of here!" His sobs became more crushing and his face flushed until his freckles were hardly noticeable. Bewildered, Clara stared at him. After all, he was only a child. She found her robe and squirmed into it. Then she knelt before him and her into thinking he'd left. "Bobby's outside, play ini, Mrs. Peterson." a wave of water on the floor. Jebaburba was standing next to the wash basin, playing with the faucets. She slumped down again, sending another billow over the rim of the tub as she snatched for the washrag to hold in front of her. "Gee, Mrs. Peterson. Are you , I  no held him by the shoulders. "Don't you know, Jeb, that you can't just pop up in people's bathrooms?" "I can't?" He looked up at her, surprised. "Why, Mrs. Peterson?" Her mouth twisted helplessly. "Never mind, Jeb. Just go on outside and play." "And you're not mad at me any more?" he asked eagerly. "Go out and play, Jeb," she insisted. "We'll talk about that later on." He smiled. Then he was gone. She glanced uncertainly at the tub, considering a quick rinse. But she prudently decided against it. she had dressed nervously, she was next door in the Sanders' living room, relating her experience to the other girls in a hastily convened council on strategy. "This morning," said Ethel, when Clara was through, "I had to chase him out of the bedroom before I could get out of bed." Maud shook her head disconsolately. "And I finally found out what happened to that stole I left on the hall rack last night. I had to plead with him to get it from -- from wherever he usually hides things." "Well!" Lucy exclaimed in anything after finding him playing with my Mary and Katherine in the downstairs hall last night -- two hours after we had all gone to bed!" Clara confronted the group. "Suppose we call on Mr. T'Arah and explain just what has been happening?" "Some of it will be rather embarrassing," Maud said. "Do you think he'll understand our position?" Ethel asked. "We'll make him!" Clara clenched her fists in determination. "We'll tell him that there's too wide a difference between Earth and Darthanian customs and we can't allow our children to play with Jebaburba." Lucy, standing by the window, turned around. "They're all playing with him now," she announced. "They're in the shed again." "We'll put a stop to that!" declared Ethel angrily. "We'll -- " She stopped, looking past the other women at her son, who was standing in the doorway. "What is it, David?" she asked, annoyed. He came over and pulled her down to whisper in her ear. "Gone?" she repeated. "Gone where?" The child whispered again. "Speak up, David!" Ethel ordered. "What about Bobby?" "Bobby!" Clara cried in alarm. David turned to her. "He'th gone. Jeb held hith hand under the tree and they went to the shed. Only, when Jeb got in the shed, Bobby was gone." "Oh, no!" Clara whispered hoarsely. "Oh, Lord, no!" She clutched the boy's arms frantically. "They walked to the shed?" "No, ma'am. Jeb viva -- viva -- he wath juth trying to show him how to go away." Sobbing frantically, Clara led the exodus from the house.  intercepted them. Maud stopped to lift him into her arms. "Where's Bobby?" she demanded. "Gone, Momma. He's gone." Clara bit back a scream. "Where's Jeb?" Maud asked. "He's gone, too." "Oh, God!" Clara pleaded as they raced across the lawn toward Katherine and Mary, who were standing helplessly under the tree next to the driveway. "Jeb's daddy called him," Sammy explained. "He had to go home." Clara hardly noticed Lucy clutching Mary and Katherine to her. "Bobby!" she shouted. "Bobby! Where are you!" "Bobby?" Ethel said weakly, groping as though in the dark. "Are you here, Bobby?" Frantically, Clara moved in aimless circles around the yard, in and out of the garage and shed and around the tree, terror making her steps unsteady. She tried to calm herself. He had to be safe! He had to be somewhere nearby -- even though it might be in what was nowhere to Jeb and his father. The Donnors' cat had disappeared and had come back safely, hadn't it? But they had known the animal was near. They had heard its cries. Why couldn't she hear Bobby speaking? Why couldn't she hear him calling for her? Exhausted, she dropped to the bench under the trees. Ethel came over and put her arm around her. "Don't get excited, Clara," she comforted. "Maud's gone to get Mr. T'Arah. He'll do something." In the panic that stifled her, the nightmares of all the possible things that could be happening to her son raced terrifyingly through her mind. S HE was crying uncontrollably when the heavy hand touched her shoulder. She looked up into the Consul General's face. "Don't be frightened, Mrs. Peterson," T'Arah said. "There's no danger. We'll get Bobby back." "Where is he?" she sobbed. "Where is he?" "He's only in the subvivaplane -- where the Donnors' cat was. We'll have him back in a moment. And, Mrs. Peterson, you'll be glad to hear that the viviflux muzzle got here. I've already locked it on Jebaburba's wrist. He's behaving just like your Earth children now." There was no feeling of relief. "Get Bobby," she pleaded. T'Arah turned around and whipped out of sight. A minute passed -- five -- fifteen. The women stood around speechlessly. Katherine and Mary and Sammy and David huddled fearfully next to the house. T'Arah burst into existence in front of them, frowning in vexation. "They went via either a second or a third subplane, I imagine," he explained embarrassedly. "It may take a little longer, Mrs. Peterson, but I'll find him." T'Arah vanished once more. Clara, afflicted with an almost numbing anxiety, waited. Jebaburba crossed the street and stood well away from the women, compassionately watching them and the children. The metallic bracelet on his wrist, locked there with a key, glistened as the sunlight struck it. He came over. "Gee, Mrs. Peterson, I was only trying to show the... Clara wept and turned from him. Ethel made a disgruntled sound that was somewhat like a growl. "I didn't think... the child began again contritely. "You see, with David and Sammy and Katherine and Mary... a finger to shake it in his face. Then, exasperated, she sighed and turned from the child, too. Jebaburba glanced at the other children. "Can I go play with them, huh? Can I play with them, Mrs. Donnor?" Lucy drew her shoulders back threateningly and stepped toward the child, reaching for him. Ethel stopped her. "He's only a little -- " T'Arah popped into view before them -- with Bobby. Clara grasped the child and held him desperately, crying into his tousled blond hair. "There, now," T'Arah said proudly. "Didn't I tell you everything would be all right?" "Gee, Mom," Bobby exclaimed reassuringly, "I wasn't lost -- not really. Jeb didn't have anything to do with it. I was trying..." But Clara pulled him more tightly against her, squeezing the breath from him. "Oh, Bobby! Bobby!" After a long while, she smiled and bravely wiped the tears from her face. T'Arah beamed, rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. "Now all our problems seem to be solved. You had no idea how concerned I was over the fact that Jebaburba wasn't being fully accepted by you and your children." He held his son's arm up so all could see the bracelet. "But everything's all right now. And he'll be able to play with them as much as he wants without annoying anybody." The women looked guardedly at one another. "Can I play with the kids now?" Jebaburba pleaded with all of them. ' "Do you object to his associating with them?" T'Arah asked cautiously. Clara glanced at the other women. Lucy and Ethel shook their heads. Maud smiled briefly. "Of course not, Mr. T'Arah," Clara said. "Certainly Jeb can play with the children. Jebaburba emitted a whoop and lunged across the lawn, seemingly unconcerned about the vivaflux muzzle and the restraint it put on him. All the children were happy. The girls and David and Sammy held hands and raced into the garage. Jebaburba and Clara's boy followed more slowly. "Come on, Bobby," the alien's son coaxed as they neared the door. "We'll start with..." T'Arah turned to thq, women. "Both Dartha and myself are indebted to you ladies for demonstrating the extreme diplomatic usefulness of the vivaflux muzzles. Although there are no more available now, within three years we expect to be able to start production on many others." # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F, Verona, Penna. I N her bedroom, Clara was a battlefield for the conflict between exhaustion and relief that raged within her. Numb from the experiences of the day, she drew down the shades and undressed, stretching across the bed secure in the knowledge there was no more danger for her son -- no more possibility of her being surprised by the innocent but appallingly curious Jebaburba. She was almost asleep when the sharp cry sounded, alarmingly close. She sat up in bed. Sammy, grinning, leaped from the dresser and landed on the floor. Mary materialized on the dresser and sprang down as Sammy hopped onto the bed and disappeared, shouting gleefully. When Mary reached the spot of Sammy's disappearance, Katherine and Bobby popped into existence atop the dresser. "Follow the leader! Follow the leader!" cried Bobby exuberantly. Then he spied his dumfounded mother. "Didja see, Mom? I can really do it now, can't I?" On the bed, he vanished, too. But Katherine didn't. Bobby reappeared beside her. Clara stared up at them in grim stupefaction. "Come on, Katy," Bobby urged, taking her hand. "Follow the leader! It's easy. Do it just like Jeb showed us." The two children dematerialized abruptly and Sammy reappeared -- close to the wall, running across the floor. Clara, tearing herself from the paralysis of horrified bewilderment, clutched a sheet about her, raced into the closet and slammed the door. Two tiny hands landed grubbily against her. "Boo, Mithuth Peterthon! Which way did they go?" authors of ScienceFiction, Fantasy and Wierd adventures as near as your mailbox! A unique book catalog -- complete descriptions, fully illustrated... and it doesn't cost you a cent! Send your name and address, and you'll get your copy by return mail. And we'll keep you posted regularly from now on, sending you news of outstanding book values... bargains galore; Add your name to the thousands of others we have been serving for years. No obligation! # E. San Fernando St.  Dept. G-#  San Jose #, California pages price  #  # Packed with the best from  Enter Q Or extend my subscription # # With each subscription at regular price -- take your pick by Alfred Better  #  # by Pohl  Kornbluth (Published in Galaxy  # #  And send me the Co rvey lived, laughed, loved, killed and died a thousand times... but which one of all these lifetimes was actually his own? he had finished writing his story, read it through, put it down the chute, glanced through all the odds and ends which piled up every day on a survey reporter's desk and checked with the feature sub-editors to make sure there were no queries about his story. Only then did he leave the Star building. He held it off while he walked the three blocks to the Jewel Cafe. He would have preferred taking a taxi or even a bus, for his legs felt rubbery and his head ached with a quiet, subdued, monotonous throb that swelled with every jarring step and ebbed as he forced one shaky, uncertain By j. t. mcintosh leg past the other. But buses and particularly taxis were dangerously soothing. It was safer, though less pleasant, to walk. It was a constantly recurring question whether to frequent places where he was known and would arouse no real suspicion even if his behavior were strange, or places where he was unknown but might be remembered as a queer character if anything happened. On previous occasions, expecting something, he had been able to decide one way or the other was safer. Tonight he didn't feel he had the energy to cope with a new restaurant. He went to the Jewel automatically, hoping that he would go on acting automatically, behaving as he had on hundreds of other evenings. He fought it off while he went into the cafe, found a dark corner well out of the way, smiled in his usual friendly but unsuggestive manner at Rosie, the prettiest waitress, and ordered ham and eggs. fT'HE Jewel was a pleasant refuge for people whose apartments were merely places to sleep and shave in the mornings. It was unpretentious, shabby without being dirty, and the food showed a reasonable balance between quality and expense. If one wanted no more than a cup of coffee, that was all right. If one wanted seven courses, that was all right, too. When he had his food in front of him, he was able at last to loosen the desperate grip he had been keeping on himself all day. Little by little he let go, the relief of being able to relax spreading delightfully through him in a warm, grateful flood. It was ironic, almost irritating, to find that, when he did let go, nothing happened. He wouldn't have known if anything had, but it was possible to be almost sure of the negative. You didn't know you were dreaming when you were. You could always, however, satisfy yourself that you were not. In places where he wasn't known, he could never quite let go. When things were unfamiliar anyway, it was all the more difficult to keep in touch with reality. The corresponding disadvantage of going to a place like the Jewel was that people were liable not to leave him alone. He had barely started on his ham and eggs when a breath of familiar crushed-petal perfume, mingled with a whiff of light, dry pipe tobacco, announced Babs and Dave Andrews. Without looking up he said, "No, none of these seats are taken." "There he goes again," Babs exclaimed, "making out that we smell." She folded herself violently around him from behind and kissed him moistly. Babs was one of those young wives who have a habit of making love to other men in their husband's company. She still startled Corvey occasionally. He was rather glad that he had never met Babs without Dave. She dropped lightly in the chair on one side of him, while Dave settled himself more ponderously on the other side. "You look tired, Ken," Dave observed. "I am. Dead beat." "But not off your feed, I see." "Hell, I'm only tired, not ill." "You've been tired a lot lately." Babs sounded concerned. It was vexing how shrewd and observant people could be when you didn't want them to be shrewd and observant. "It's nothing," Corvey said, shrugging. "You know the newspaper business -- you have to be up a little earlier than the next fellow, work a little harder, be a little cleverer, find out a little more. It's not surprising that you finish the day tired." "You should get your doctor to give you a check-up, all the same." Ken Corvey shrugged as if it didn't matter. Of course it mattered. Dave was right -- he needed medical attention. But he simply couldn't risk it. All he could do, when the subject came up, was to treat it casually and hope it would soon be dropped. Babs was small, light, quick and restless. She always sat forward on the edge of her chair, as if on the point of leaping in the air like a frog. Dave was heavy, slow and clumsy, like an overfed dog. He looked older than Babs, which wasn't so. As nearly as they could reason, Babs had been born thirty-six minutes before him, although they hadn't met until twenty-two years later. When they did, it was immediately obvious -- to them, at any rate -- that they were made for each other. They were married within six weeks and, in the intervening seven years, had frequently congratulated each other on their perspicacity. ploded when they stripped for swimming. Corvey had already had it exploded for him, but he noticed it forcibly once more the time he met them at the Rutledge Country Club. He had driven out for a swim that he hoped would kill the dull headache and, though he looked squarely at the man who had been changing into swimming trunks in the next cubicle, he almost passed him without a sign of recognition -- for Dave, when dressed, appeared to be fat, flabby and out of condition. This man was burly and powerful, with a very handsome torso. Still, it was Dave, all right. "Pretending not to notice me, huh?" Dave inquired, which was quite a good crack, since he weighed over # pounds. And then, as they made their way to the pool, with Corvey still casting occasional incredulous glances at the you-too-canhave-a-body-like-mine character with him, Babs emerged from the women's dressing-rooms -- and she was as big a surprise as Dave, in reverse. Babs, in clothes, seemed wonderful. Obviously, she should never put on beachwear. Her knees were too bony, her thighs too thin, her stomach too flat, the cage of her ribs too visible, her collar-bone positively scrawny. Her bathing suit left no figure fault unrevealed. Dave showed himself still in love with her, by saying admiringly, "Isn't she gorgeous?" And believing it. They swam for twenty minutes or so, which was enough for Corvey to lose his headache. Afterward, sprawled in the late afternoon Sun, Dave and Babs asked him about his job, just making conversation. "What is a survey reporter, anyway?" Babs asked. "Survey reporting is a fairly new thing," he told them. "Remember the old polls, public opinion surveys, random samples and all the rest of it? I just do the same job without the expense of the survey." "You mean you guess?" "No, I get my results by a short-cut. The main difficulty in any random sample prediction or test was always the random part of it. If you wanted to know how react, you couldn't be sure you did know, even if you tested a biased. "But if you could be sure you really had a random group, your fact, if there was any way of knowing that ten people were truly representative, they'd be enough. There was no way until recently -- so, merely to cancel out bias, it was necessary to take vast samples. Hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands." "You say, 'until recently,' " Dave observed. "I should say forever and ever. How can you possibly be sure ten people are properly representative?" "We can't, really," Corvey admitted. "I'm oversimplifying, of course. There was always what was known as a weighted sample. The statisticians limited the number of the sample by making it a cross-section. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Following up this principle of weighing, I can generally get from a few small sets -- in a series of tests -- the same result I'd get from a huge random sample. It's a method of eliminating ' bias by mathematics and common sense." "Bet you're often wrong," Babs objected. "No more often than the past surveys were. I generally split up what I want to know into about ten elements, get ten answers, none of which is individually trustworthy, integrate them so that the variations cancel each other -- " "And guess," said Babs, in satisfaction. "I knew it would come to that in the end." each other -- Corvey helplessly, Dave fondly. To Dave, everything Babs did was wonderful. If she made a remark, it was bound to be a good one because she made it. If anybody beat her at anything, the anybody must be pretty good. Yet Dave, in things which didn't concern Babs, was very shrewd indeed. "And then," he said, "in addition, there's your other job." "Other job?" Corvey echoed. "Your real job. We know you, Ken. Think we don't know you're a spy?" They were looking at him without hostility, merely amused that he should have thought they didn't know. "Why, do I look like a spy?" Corvey asked reasonably, trying by sheer will power to keep his breathing steady and his pulse rate slow, trying to act asif it really were a fantastic idea. "You wouldn't be much good as a spy if you did," Babs observed; then she and Dave burst out laughing. "Who's your beautiful accomplice?" He didn't have a beautiful accomplice, but Sandra Reid was beautiful, all right. It would be nice to have her as an accomplice. She was that amazing phenomenon, an intelligent girl who acted like a tart, a tart who acted like a nice girl, a nice girl who looked like a particularly seductive movie star, all in one. He looked down at her as she lay with her eyes closed, unaware of his presence. He would have liked, very much, to spend a long time studying Sandra Reid. But there was a time and place for everything, except Sandra. There was no time, no place for Sandra and himself. Or, if there ever should be, this certainly wasn't it. He mustn't have anything to do with Sandra. As he was on the point of going away -- really going away -- she opened her eyes. And he missed something. "... ill?" Dave asked. Corvey searched his mind but failed to find the rest of the sentence. That rarely happened. Dave was waiting. Corvey couldn't answer the question, couldn't refuse to answer it, couldn't ignore it and didn't see how he could ask for a repetition. He checked rapidly. Was this real? Of course it was real. And Dave was waiting. "Sorry, Dave," said Corvey. "Just remembered something I should have done this afternoon and didn't. What were you saying?" "I said, is that why you're reluctant to take a few days off, even when you're ill?" That didn't help much. "Is what why?" Corvey had to ask. "The fact that there are so few survey reporters, and nobody can finish another man's job." that," said Corvey, relieved. He didn't mind talking about his job. He was so glad the conversation he had missed had been on such a harmless subject that he said something completely unnecessary. "I told you a little about my job the other day, didn't I?" "The other day?" "At the Country Club." Dave stared at him. "We haven't been at the Country Club for weeks." "Oh, it must have been someone else," said Corvey easily, though he was sweating. The Country Club episode must have been a false memory. It had never happened. He might have known that from the way it collapsed and dissolved at the end -- but he hadn't had time to examine it yet. "You really are sick, Ken," Dave said, concerned. Corvey shook his head. "Absent-mindedness is a sort of occupational disease among survey reporters," he said. "I'm working on a lot of tricky problems just now, too. And I'm tired -- heavens, how tired I am." "Leave Ken alone, Dave," said Babs sympathetically. "He's justsleepy. Come on, let's take him home and put him to bed." Though Corvey protested, they did just that. Twice, before they left him, he checked desperately, sure that this couldn't really be happening. But" it was. Corvey's father had once told him, "Judge your friends by what they'll do for you, son." On that basis, Babs and Dave were his best friends -- and not merely on Earth. Alone at last, safe, comfortable in bed, in the dark, he longed for sleep. But he had some thinking to do first. Tonight had been the worst so far. If Dave and Babs had known anything about ritany, they'd have seen he was suffering from it and was therefore a non-Terrestrial. Fortunately, no one outside the Jernam system -- and that was ninety-seven light years away -- knew much about ritany, which was a fever peculiar to Aram, the fifth planet. As far as Corvey knew, no one had ever had an attack outside Aram. When he had been sent to Earth, perhaps it had been assumed that, because it hadn't happened, it never would happen. Corvey was a hospital case, yet he couldn't risk hospitalization. If he did, for a few hours or days the doctors would be puzzled -- but eventually they would test for extra terrestrial diseases and diagnose ritany. True, that wouldn't be a hanging matter. If his Aramin origin were on record, it would be no offense at all to have ritany. But for Kenneth Corvey, survey reporter on the Rutledge Star with a manufactured history going back through #I years to a counterfeited birth in New York, to turn out to be a native of the planet Aram... He would obviously be a spy. And they still shot spies, he believed. Spies had to be discouraged, somehow. There was no guarantee they would shoot him -- much, much less that they would not. There were no arrangements to get him home to Aram until his job would be over, successfully or unsuccessfully, in three weeks. Could he last three weeks? He could go away somewhere and live quietly until the time came for him to leave Earth. By so doing, he would save his life, at the expense of the job he had been sent to do. Or he could stay where he was and probably fail in his job as well as lose his life. But as long as there was a chance of success, he had to stay. " the basis of this night's attack, no good. Spies always had to tread carefully in case some tiny, unsuspected difference betrayed them. Corvey had another handicap to add to the crushing total. He was in the grip of a fever which weakened his limbs and thus diminished his control over them, which made his head ache continuously, causing him to shiver uncontrollably sometimes -- and ' which gave him sporadic delusions. It was a physical, not a mental illness. The hallucinations that accompanied it were not markedly psychotic. This made them all the more difficult to identify. They were not simply wish-fulfillments, or memories, or fears, or warnings, or guilt feelings, or any of the other things which formed the material of ordinary dreams. Generally they were extrapolations of what was actually happening -- there was nothing whatever to show that they were delusions. Corvey might easily have been at the Country Club with Dave and Babs. Only Dave's saying that Corvey was a spy was bizarre, like something in an anxiety dream. On the other N hand, when Dave and Babs put him to bed, it was hard to believe it was really happening, was not part of some crazy scene his fevered mind was putting him through. O NE of the worst things about ritany was that memories were memories, and it was difficult to judge whether a recollection was a memory of an event or of a ritanic delusion. When he mentioned the incident at the Country Club, Corvey had been aware of no risk. He hadn't checked mentally over the whole incident to make sure it had all happened. He had merely remembered talking to Dave and Babs about his job at the Country Club. What he did when he was in the middle of a delusion, he had no way of knowing. From other cases, back on Aram, he knew that a victim of ritany would often act normally, convincingly and for long periods, from sheer habit. On a world where ritany was familiar, of course, it was easily identified and cured. On Earth... ? The cure was simply a month in bed. The hallucinations of ritany, not being psychosomatic in origin, were harmless and, provided the patient stayed flat on his back, the fever died, the delusions faded and, ultimately, noth-, ing remained except memories of some very vivid dreams, neither pleasant nor unpleasant as a rule. Only psychotics had violently disturbing hallucinations. However, Corvey couldn't go to bed. If he did, a doctor would visit him almost automatically. He'd then have to pretend to be normal, which would not only place him in danger of discovery, but would also prevent the fever from breaking. He wasn't a weak character -- interstellar spies could hardly be weak. But sometimes the danger, the fever, the difficulty of his job, the unattainability of the one thing he really wanted -- to stay in bed and rest -- piled up and became too much for him. At such times he wanted, actually wanted, to be discovered. He wanted it to be over and done with. II TN the morning he felt terrible, but at least there was very little risk of further delusions. In the morning, his headache was at its worst, his fever only moderate. He could do a good morning's work before ritany took hold of him again. Just before he left the office for lunch, Jim Neave, the feature editor and, to all intents and purposes, his boss, sent for him. Corvey was on the day shift, since much of his business was with people in their normal pursuits. Neave was about fifty, a hearty, apparently superficial character. Corvey knew his boss's manner was merely the building in which he worked and had ceased to pay much attention to Neave's eccentricities. He knew that, when Neave praised anybody expansively, or seemed to delight in his own cleverness, or talked at length about something not very important, no conclusion could be drawn except that Neave had something on his mind and found it necessary to throw a veil over it. He was a good man to work for, though. He seemed to know everyone's capacities, he always asked for just a little less than he was going to get, always gave credit for anything-over demand. "Look, Ken," said Neave, "you're working too hard." "Maybe a little," Corvey admitted cautiously. "Why?" "It's the nature of my job," he said. "It has to happen sometimes. Somebody else could hire an assistant, but an assistant wouldn't be any good to me. No one can follow through on any survey reporter's line of investigation except himself. It's like a train of thought. Someone else can think, may even reach the same conclusion, but he can't reach it the same way. I will admit I'm pretty tired." Neave nodded. "Let's see," he said, looking through a black notebook. "We'll need your story on settlement recruitment..." "Nearly ready." "And the survey on comparative intelligence in America and Europe -- how's it coming? We need an answer to that London professor." "I'll have it by Saturday." "After that, there's nothing vital until you start the big series on the defense tests. No, I'm not going to brief you on that yet. Tell you what, Ken. If you put in for a week starting Saturday, I'll see you get it." "Thanks, Jim. I'll do that. I know I could do with a rest." Corvey was pleased, and didn't try to conceal it. A week of convalescing wouldn't finish the ritany, but it might enable him to carry on. npHE welfare state idea had spread around the world. People had a lot of freedom, certainly. But the root idea of the welfare state was security -- and security meant certain restrictions. Some things had to be automatic, and the health service was one of them. Anyone who was absent from work two days was visited by a doctor... Corvey could take a week's holiday if it were offered. If it weren't, asking for it might lead to a medical check-up he couldn't refuse. Staying off work for two days would have the same result. Things had worked out better than he could have hoped, for he hadn't been with the Star long enough to rate any vacation. He lunched alone after seeing Neave. Leaving the restaurant, he almost ran into Sandra's arms -- a good place to be, though he had hitherto refused to acknowledge his awareness of the fact. "You're looking very pleased with yourself," she said. "Won a bet?" Corvey told her about the week's holiday. "That's great," said Sandra. '"Let's go have a drink to celebrate." Sandra was popular with every' male of her acquaintance, young or old, and disliked by almost every woman. Babs hated her. They went to a cocktail bar, all mirrors, a really delightful little place. Sandra, sitting on a high stool and toasting him, was exquisite. She was a dark blonde who had resisted the temptation to become a golden blonde. She carried not an ounce too much flesh and not an ounce too little. She had the great gift, a rare quality, of taking charge without seeming to, so that the man she was with thought himself very enterprising, indeed. "Where are you going?" she asked. He shrugged. "South somewhere -- Florida, I guess." "Now it just so happens," said Sandra, "that I was thinking of taking a week in Miami, myself." "Fine," declared Corvey, the whisky he had just downed killing both the fever and his headache and making him feel wonderful. "We'll fly down together." Presently he found himself kissing Sandra. It was very nice, as he had known it would be. It was twice as nice as he had expected. They agreed to meet on the Saturday afternoon plane and had another drink or two to pledge it. TT was in the middle of a series of calculations in the afternoon that Corvey became aware that it had really happened. He had had an attack of ritany once before, on Aram. Usually it happened only once, like measles, but occasionally people had a second or even a third attack before the particular bug which caused it became harmless. During his previous attack -- under the right conditions, of course -- he had learned how to treat it. Now he had to fight the delusions and couldn't help worrying, for fear of revealing his true identity. He had allowed the incident with Sandra to go as it liked, there being no apparent immediate danger. He hadn't even tried to settle the question of whether it was really happening or not, had taken for granted that it wasn't. It had the airiness, the casualness, the lack of detail that was typical of a ritanic hallucination. Only in such a delusion would he go out to a bar with a girl he hardly knew, tell her he was going to Florida, kiss her and agree to meet her on the plane. That was the stuff of which dreams were made. But, on reflection, he was certain that it had actually happened. He could be quite rational and he could always distinguish between true and false, when he really thought about it. Going away with Sandra was quite out of the question. He had to find the easiest way out. Simply not meet Sandra? No, that wouldn't do. Tell her he had changed his mind? Yes, if he could find a good reason. Go where she wouldn't go? Once more he was brought face to face with the irony of being a spy. Nothing would suit him better than a vacation with Sandra. If he weren't a spy, nothing would be easier than to cut loose from her. If he weren't a spy, she probably wouldn't have become sufficiently intrigued to want to join him. If he weren't a spy... on Aram. Vaguely, this time he knew it was a delusion. But he let it run on, as a man who knows he must get up soon allows himself to drowse just a few minutes more -- for Ken felt it was grand to be home for a while. Having made that decision, he promptly lived the scene. That was the way of ritany, "I could be sociable, Corvey," Ryter was saying coldly, "but this is an unsentimental business, and I think we'd both prefer to save our sentiment for off-duty hours. Right?" Corvey nodded. "Well, what have you accomplished, Corvey? If it's nothing, say so." "It's more than nothing. Planting me as a survey reporter has been successful in that I've been detailed to do a whole series of surveys on the defense tests. I haven't been able to find out what information will be available to me when the tests start and what will be denied. But if I'm expected to produce any significant results, I have reasonable grounds for demanding just about everything." "Is your position in any way official?" "No, I'm merely a newspaper representative, and all my material will be screened before publication. But I'll have to know much more than I use, of course." "Have you any ideas on what your conclusions will be?" "I think," said Corvey carefully, "I'll find that Earth's defenses are remarkably good, that they will suggest offensive weapons which would make the result of any war against us a foregone conclusion -- and that there will be no particular suggestion of animosity or prospective conflict against anybody, ourselves no more than the other colonies." Ryter nodded. "I must thank you for a decided, clear and frank statement." ing at a column of figures which didn't make sense -- no longer on Aram, but in Rutledge, U.S.A., Earth. He must have done quite a bit of calculation unconsciously -- slowly but correctly -- on the colonial settlement program. It was astonishing that he could have failed to notice it before -- it was obvious, now, that the colonists were a highly selected group. All colonists, in any colony. habitants, but the world wasn't really overcrowded. Not with efficient agricultural methods and half a dozen hydroponics plants in every state. It was natural for a young man, or a young family, to stay put. Only a particular type -- rather, several particular types -- would leave Earth. This obvious fact, which he had not previously seen, ruined several hours' work. Jim Neave came into Corvey's little office while he was still considering the matter. Corvey pointed it out to him. Neave frowned. "I'm no survey man, Ken, but that's the first thing I'd have thought of. Only someone who was a colonist himself would be likely to miss that angle." Corvey had been trained long ago not to show any sign of shock in such circumstance. He merely said, "That's so. I suppose I was working from the colonial viewpoint," and talked of something else -- his week in Florida. It was another instance of the kind of thing which could happen to a spy at any moment. Sooner or later someone, unlike Babs and Dave, unlike Jim Neave, would be suspicious. And whoever was suspicious would follow up whatever it was that had aroused his suspicions. The U.S. counter-espionage service would get on the job, and pass it on to AS. AS was U.N.'s counter-espionage organization, and Corvey was quite frankly afraid of it. If AS got a strong enough clue to justify real suspicion, he would be either definitely convicted or definitely cleared. AS was so good that nobody knew much about it. Ryter hadn't been able to tell Corvey anything except that the only way to deal with AS was to keep clear of it. AS was a bogey man for every extraterrestrial operative. The only thing that was known about it for certain was that it was a rare event for anyone to find out anything about whatever AS was supposed to be guarding. And AS was certain to be guarding the Rutledge defense tests. This was why Corvey had to be very careful about Sandra. So far, no one had anything that could be turned into proof against him. Sandra very soon would, if he had anything more to do with her. As it was, there was no question of his going away with her. It was important, too, that he should shake Sandra off without giving her any hint of why he invariably refused the chances she offered. Instead of being a model, as she might well have been, she was a highly paid advertising copywriter, which meant that she had brains. Stupid people weren't paid Sandra's salary. He was at the agency door when she came out. He fell into step beside her and took her arm. "Let's go and have another drink, Sandra," he said. "But... "I think we ought to talk this Florida business over." "Okay," said Sandra brightly. Corvey made quite sure, this time, that the incident was no delusion. He concentrated on the ache in his head. That usually kept him anchored to reality. Ill They went to the same cocktail bar, which was another anchor. "Look, Sandra," said Corvey, with a grin. "It won't do." Sandra didn't pretend to misunderstand. "Going to Florida together, you mean? You've no right to say that. I haven't suggested anything..." "You don't need to suggest anything. I know what's going to happen." "Then you know more than I do." "If I'm right, I don't want you to come. If I'm wrong, there's no particular point in your coming." "You look," said Sandra. "You said you were spending a week in Florida.I said I was going to Miami for a week. That's all." "Seriously, Sandra, I'm going for a rest. Now I ask you... He left the sentence hanging. Sandra laughed, taking it as a compliment. "Believe me, I can be a relaxing companion, too." Corvey shook his head. "With you around, how could I rest?"  "What you really mean, then, is that you just don't want me to be with you -- isn't it?" "Yes." "All right. I can take a hint, eventually. Good luck, Ken." "Good-by, Sandra." "I never say good-by to anybody."  and checked in, late Saturday afternoon, at a quiet Miami hotel. No loss of appetite accompanied ritany -- fresh air, good food, sunlight and rest were the things needed to combat it. At the hotel he selected, he could have them all. He lazed all of Sunday and Monday. There were hallucinations galore, but they didn't matter. He spent most of the daylight hours on a veranda, half dozing, and neither the hotel staff nor the other guests disturbed him. He could answer any question sleepily and absently or not at all, and nobody was in the least suspicious. He was seldom aware of his headache. Only on the three or four occasions during the day when he moved from his couch did he have to cope with the weakness in his limbs. He didn't have to move for meals -- they were brought to him where he was. He had let it be understood that he was convalescing after an illness. There were some very pleasant delusions, some indifferent ones, some which were unpleasant. They tended to be more pleasant when the victim wasn't fighting them -- fighting them produced more anxiety hallucinations. Once he found himself back on Aram, on the river with Janet, his first girl. On another occasion, he took a fanciful trip to Venus -- very fanciful, since he had never been to Venus. In one episode -- thoroughly unpleasant -- he had murdered Babs rather nastily and was helping a grim, vengeful Dave in an effort to discover the murderer. Dave always seemed just on the point of discovering the truth, and Corvey died a thousand deaths in his efforts to keep him off the right track. The frequency and violence of the delusions, now that he was merely resting, showed the severity of Corvey's case. It might have been mild enough, properly treated, but Corvey had been doing the worst thing possible for the past month, preventing the fever from lifting. Ritany wasn't an illness that could be fought. The way to recover from it was to give in to it. In another delusion, he wasn't a spy. He had been born on Earth and knew next to nothing about Aram. That fantasy was very pleasant indeed. It was nice not to be a S py -- to be an ordinary Earthman doing a job he liked. But some of the conclusions to be drawn from this one were upset by the fact that other hallucinations, in which he was an ordinary Aramin living on Aram, were equally pleasant. O N Tuesday evening Sandra turned up. He had just re-oriented himself as Ken Corvey, survey reporter on the Rutledge Star, on vacation in Miami. Sandra strolled onto the veranda, wearing a sunsuit which indicated she must have been living close by. Her outfit was hardly street wear, even in Miami. "I though you'd turn up sooner or later," he said. She shook her head. "You had no reason to count on it, Ken. If a man plays hard to get long enough, he's liable to find himself with no takers." "I'm not playing hard to get," said Corvey quietly. She frowned. "You're married or something?" "Something. Sit down and I'll tell you about it." She dropped onto a pneumatic couch and lounged decor atively, waiting. Part of Sandra's appeal was her eagerness, her interest in what you had to say. No bored glamour girl, Sandra -- she listened with gratifying attention, fell in with any suggestion that was made, enjoyed any entertainment that was offered. "There are some jobs, you know," Corvey said, "that are more important than one's private life." Sandra shook her head decidedly. "I don't believe it." "You mean you wouldn't do such a job?" She nodded. "Yes, I suppose that is what I mean. Are you telling me your job is one of them?" "Yes." "Your job on the Star?" "No -- another job." "An undercover job?" "Yes." "Why tell me now, if not before?" "Because now I think I can trust you." Sandra's gaze locked frankly with his. "I like to be trusted," she admitted. "Go on." "Have you ever left Earth?" Corvey asked. "I've been on the Moon, that's all. Why?" "Do you know much about the colonies?" "You mean the deep-space worlds -- Vokis, Ritchel, Watton and the rest? Not very much." "How do you feel about these colonies, about which you don't know very much?" "I thought you were going to tell me something, not ask questions." "How do you feel about them?" Corvey insisted. "I don't know. I don't know that I feel about them at all. I'd like to go there, of course -- to all the worlds if I could. Seeing them, I might start to have feelings about them. Meanwhile -- no. I've never been to New Zealand, either, and T'haven't any feelings about New Zealand. It's a place I've seen pictures of, that's all." "You don't feel any animosity toward Vokis, Ritchel and Watton?" "Why should I?" "Some people do -- because they're not familiar places." Sandra shrugged her shoulders. "There's no idea so silly nobody believes it -- no prejudice, no dislike." "Do you think you could even see the point of view of Vokis, Ritchel or Watton, when Earth had a different slant?" more cautious. "I might -- but probably not. Are you telling me you've some sort of scheme against Earth?" "Not against Earth -- not really." "You're working for one of these worlds, anyway -- and it may be against Earth?" "Yes. What's your reaction to that?" Sandra looked serious. "Even if I saw your point of view, Ken, I couldn't help you. Couldn't do anything but hinder you, in fact." "Why?" "Because being a traitor is a terrible thing." "I don't quite follow that." "Traitors aren't nice people, evenwhen they sincerely believe the country they help against their own is right. They're working against the country whose protection they're accepting. That, to me, is the vile thing about it. Spies aren't so bad." "So what are you going to do?" Corvey asked. He hadn't been looking at her, for it was much easier to carry on a reasonable discussion if he didn't. Now he turned and looked her straight in the face. "I think," she said slowly, "I shall have to try and stop you." "Even though I've told you this of my own free will, in confidence?" She shook her head reluctantly. "You can't ask me to be a traitor, Ken. If this is a joke, it's a crazy one. If it isn't, I have to report what you've said, even though..." "Even though what?" "Well, you don't think it'll be easy for me, do you? I don't mean I'm going to turn you in. It would be better if you went away -- and then, while you were away, I could tell the police what you've told me." "If that's the best you can offer," Corvey said quietly, "I'm afraid I'll have to make better ' terms than you're offering me." Before she could move, his shoe had sunk deep in her diaphragm. She never recovered from the paroxysm, for he dropped beside her and neatly, efficiently, broke her neck. H E got that far, but the emotional shock snapped him right out of the delusion. It had been quite real, for in most of the hallucinations he was unaware of the very existence of ritany. Only when he attacked Sandra had there been any unreal quality. , Still sweating, recovering from the shock, he considered the incident. It probably wasn't far from what would actually happen if he spoke to Sandra like that. The delusions didn't need any element of truth about them, and prophetic delusions might be wholly untrustworthy. But generally, predictions were as correct as his own knowledge, and he saw no reason to distrust the warning ' in this incident. The warning was -- not to change his mind about Sandra. There had been some danger of it -- considerable danger -- that he might have confided in her. And it was unlikely that she would ever support him against her own world. But he had no time to rationalize it any more, for he was in the middle of another delusion and he didn't know it was a delusion. He was leaning on the rail of a yacht, a cool breeze on his face. It was night, and there were so many stars that the Moon was hardly missed. He knew, this time, that he had been born on Aram, and that this was Earth. Over his shoulder came a familiar compound scent -- crushed petals and mild pipe tobacco. He put one arm around Dave, the other around Babs and turned back to the rail. "You haven't anything like this on Aram," said Babs challengingly. He refused to argue. "I was just thinking that," he said. "When a Terran goes to Aram, he thinks it's beautiful. And so it is -- with its greens and purples and browns, warm and hazy and fairylike. But the next day, the next month, the next year, Aram is just the same -- while Earth has always something new to show you, something different." "Every time we talk about Earth and Aram," said Dave in that slow, thoughtful way of his, "you seem to prefer Earth. Have you become a naturalized Terran, Ken?" Corvey didn't answer for quite a while. His arms were still in close, companionable contact with Babs and Dave -- who would always, to him, represent Earth. Dave was solid, slow, sympathetic. If one thought in symbols, Dave would be the stolid but shrewd peasant who was still the backbone of Earth's humanity. Babs was impulsive, always in a hurry, yet just as ready to help as her husband. She symbolized the pushing, frenetic life of the great cities, something not very familiar to the colonies. "I think," he said at last, "that intellectually I prefer Earth all the way, but emotionally I'm still an Aramin." Babs squeezed his arm affectionately. "That's a good answer," she said warmly. "I hate people who get too big for their own people." IV and Friday passed easily and pleasantly. The hallucinations became thinner -- quite often Corvey would dream a vivid dream, but know it was a dream. Saturday wasn't so good, for he was due to return the next day to finish an article for Monday's paper. He had to face two things. The first was that the ritany wasn't gone, that once he went back to fighting it, he might have more trouble with it. The second was that, when he got back to Rutledge, he would again be an Aramin agent, working against Earth. He had tried to justify himself to Sandra in his delusion. He was working not against Earth, but for his own world. It was a distinction without a difference.  A spy had no control over the use to which the information he stole was put. He was a thief, no less, a thief of valuable information. He took it back and gave it to his employers. It might be used purely defensively, which was legitimate. It would do Earth no harm for Aram to know and copy Earth's defensive setup. But defense often led to offense, information about safeguards enabled more deadly weapons to be made, more deadly weapons sometimes led to a test, and the test was sometimes called war. Corvey knew very well that, in the end, he would do what he had been sent to do. But that didn't enable him to stop thinking about it with misgivings. He had become a spy because of false ideas about the job -- ideas which he soon found to be false. When he did, he didn't give up the job, any more than stagestruck girls, when they found the theater wasn't quite what they thought it was, or writers, when they found their first book wasn't a best-seller, or violinists, when they found they weren't destined to be concert soloists. Like them he plodded on, his illusions gone, or almost gone, doing a job which still retained just a thread of the glamor it had had for him. He went on being an agent from Aram because he couldn't see himself being anything else.  really did appear. When he saw her, he was in the grip of no hallucination. But he checked with himself again and again before he believed in her reality. He pinched himself, he scanned rapidly back over the day, he oriented himself -- and by the time' Sandra was within speaking range, he knew she was really there. In addition to the pleasure of seeing her and the knowledge that he must mean a lot to her to cause her to chase him so shamelessly, there was a certain cool curiosity about how this real meeting would compare with the imaginary one. In one respect it was certainly going to be different -- he wasn't going to tell her he was a spy. She strolled onto the veranda, in the same way, and in a similar costume. But Corvey didn't make the same brash opening. This time he waited for Sandra. "I came to bring you back," she said with a smile and dropped on the pneumatic couch, precisely as she had in the delusion. "Tonight?" he exclaimed. "No, tomorrow." "Then why come tonight?" . She shrugged and smiled again, but said nothing. "I don't get it," he said. "I used to think you went for me only because I wouldn't go for you. But it can't be just that." "I don't know either," Sandra admitted. "I should have given you up completely, long ago, and I don't know why I haven't. Partly, it's because I'm pretty sure you're not as indifferent to me as you pretend." "There's no secret about that," said Corvey. "How could I be?" Sandra frowned. "You're not married or something?" she asked -- exactly as in the hallucination. He shook his head. "Let's say, instead, I'm sick." She looked up quickly. "Sick -- is that it? You mean there's something permanently wrong with you?" "In a way, yes." Having been born on Aram was the same as having something permanently wrong with him as far as Sandra was concerned. "So sick that you've decided never to get married?" "That's so." "Who said anything about marriage?" She held her arms out to him. That he was able to resist such a temptation was a great surprise to Corvey. His opinion of himself went up -- for resist it he did. Sandra sighed and dropped her arms. "Oh, well," she said. "I don't often talk about myself -- it's the only thing I'm shy about." She picked at the cushion under her, looking down her arm at her long fingers. "I don't know what's wrong with you, Ken," she said, "but there's certainly something wrong with me. I should never have been born. Having been born, I shouldn't have lived -- a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have. Fifty years ago, I'd have died while still a child. Even as it was, they just barely kept me alive, but life was about all they could give me." ulously. She was lean and clear-skinned, not only a beautiful girl but a perfect female physical specimen. There wasn't a flaw anywhere. "No," she admitted, sensing his gaze, "there isn't much wrong with me now. Given time, doctors can work miracles. They don't even need a strong constitution to help them -- they give you the strong constitution first, then build on it. But that takes a long time. "I never was a child, in the V normal sense. From the moment I was born, I was a patient. I didn't walk until I was seven. I was thirteen before I could run. Not until I was sixteen -- seven years ago -- could you say I had normal health." sure Sandra was really telling him this. He had never remotely suspected such a background in Sandra's life -- though, now that he knew about it, it made sense. "I was trained," Sandra went on quietly, "from the first moment I could see, hear and think, that my body meant pain. Or if not pain, a constant, nagging discomfort. I never felt really well until I was eleven, and for five years that was intermittent. "I'm not complaining. I'm the luckiest girl alive that now I'm strong, healthy and pretty. I'm as happy as any girl I know, and with more reason. I'm just telling you about the contrast, the change in me. While I was an invalid, I had a good education -- but the thing I was surest of, from my own experience, was that my body could never, never give me any pleasure. "Maybe now you can understand me better. At sixteen I learned to swim. I was so delighted I'd have swum all day if there hadn't been walking, too. Can you imagine how glorious it is to walk for miles and miles and never get tired, remembering when you had to stop and rest half a dozen times going around the block? Running was even better. When you're a perfect running machine, sprinting is sheer ecstasy -- particularly if you have vivid recollections of how once all you could do was totter along, lungs laboring and a pain in your side. "There were thousands of things, either things I'd never been able to do before or things I'd done painfully, at low efficiency, with no pleasure at all. Dancing -- they had to stop me doing that for a while, I got so excited about it. "And men -- almost at once, kissing, cuddling and affection. My body had been a heavy liability for sixteen years. Now it suddenly and wonderfully became a glorious asset." She met his gaze defiantly for a moment, then looked down again and went on more quietly. "When I'm a little older, I'll become better balanced. I've known the mental pleasures and the physical pleasures and, in a few years, I'll strike a balance between them. Meanwhile, the physical pleasures are still too new for me to have much time for anything else. Do you understand?" H E didn't answer, somehow aware she still had something to say. Presently she said it. "One other thing -- I told you I should never have been born. That was my parents' fault. I never knew either of them and perhaps it's as well. I hate them. They're the only people I ever learned to hate and it took a long time -- years of pain. "There aren't many people left whose heredity is weak enough to produce the creature I was. They should never have married, especially each other. And if they did, it was a crime to have children. Understand what I mean when I say I'll never get married?" "There's no reason..." Corvey began. "I know what you're going to say. Quite a lot of people get married although they can't have children, but I certainly never shall. Though I might, if I knew the man concerned wasn't keen on having children either. But I'd think more than twice before I did." Corvey nodded. "I understand. Thanks for telling me this, Sandra." He considered confiding in her, as she had confided in him. But once more he decided against it. A line from a song ran crazily through his brain -- Heaven can't match you -- and I'm not a statue. He bent and kissed her, very gently. He was thinking how much better the end of the real incident was than the end of the hallucination, in which he had killed her. soon found the answers to the three most important questions he could think of were yes, no and yes-and-no. Was he going to have access to secret material when the defense tests started? He was. Was he free of ritany and the worry, discomfort and extra difficulty it caused? He was not. Was Sandra going to leave him alone? That was the yes-and-no. Because there were really two questions, two desired answers. He wanted Sandra to leave him alone, yet he didn't. In fact, it became a question not of what Sandra did, but of what he did. He found himself, many times a day, thinking of Sandra quite involuntarily and, at the end of the day, missing her perceptibly more. He was falling in love with the girl, there wasn't a doubt of it, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop it. He remembered, quite well but with complete puzzlement, a time when he had known Sandra and yet hardly ever thought of her. He didn't see Neave until I Monday. Neave detailed his part in the defense-test coverage. "I've done my best for you, Ken," he said. "You know what defense officials are like where security is concerned. They wanted us to present glowing reports without being told anything. But I got what I wanted, apart from you, without much trouble. We argued about you for quite a while." He paused for encouragement. Corvey gave it to him. "Security wanted to give me their own survey reports. I said we used our own or none at all. They said they'd supply you with figures. I said that then you wouldn't be able to draw any conclusions except the ones they wanted you to draw. That was just what they wanted, but they couldn't very well say so. They said... He detailed with considerable self-satisfaction the whole course of the negotiations, ending, as he told it, in a complete victory for himself. Corvey congratulated him warmly. Survey reporting was still fairly new, and every survey reporter on a newspaper had to make sure, as a first step, that his superiors understood something about the method. In a case like this, Corvey could accomplish nothing unless Neave understood his problems and did all he could to resolve them. So Corvey didn't mind giving Neave a little soft soap if he wanted it. him was permission to go anywhere and ask anything -- virtually an open sesame to the whole defense est program. He couldn't have asked for more. There was nothing more to ask for. Since he wasn't quite free of ritany even in the best possible conditions, it wasn't to be expected that it would leave him alone when he returned to wbrk. And it didn't. In fact, while the hallucinations came less frequently than they had before he Went away and the headache and fever were less, the lighter, easily-seenthrough delusions deepened once more. He tried to cover himself in advance by discreetly warning everybody that he would be working very hard in the next week or two, and was liable to be very absent-minded. Unfortunately, he had never been absentminded before. People who weren't very observant were prepared to accept this story -- observant people, or people who were really interested in him, like Dave, Babs and Jim Neave, looked incredulous at the suggestion. However, it was the best he could do. Those last twenty-four hours he'd spent in Florida with Sandra had been quite perfect. She was a great person to be with, ready to respond to anything, demanding nothing -- quite unselfish, devoid of egotism. She could talk about anything. During her fifteen years as an invalid, she had learned something about everything. She was that extreme rarity, the sensualist who understood that sensuality was only a small part of living. H E didn't see her Monday or Tuesday, by a supreme effort. Wednesday, he lunched with her, took her to a show in the evening and naturally took her home afterward. Quite by chance the conversation took a turn which showed him some of her views on the Earth-colonies question. The wine she offered him at her house -- it was a house, not an apartment, as he'd expected -- was colonial, and as they sipped, they talked about the colonies. "Colonial politics are often pretty hard to follow," Sandra observed. "Sometimes you'd almost think they were afraid of Earth." "So they are," Corvey said. "I once knew a colonist pretty well, and from his point of view every colony is a little afraid of Earth." "But why?" "Because she's so strong. Because Earth coul'd crush any colony like an insect." "That's nonsense," Sandra declared. "Oh, no -- it's true." "I don't mean it isn't true -- if s the idea that's ridiculous. You might as weil say everyone on the Moon should be terrified, because Earth could blow it to atoms without even sending up a manned ship." Though he didn't want to put himself in the position of arguing the colonies' case, Corvey felt bound to say, trying to remain judicial, "That's a different matter, Sandra. The Moon is almost part of Earth." "And aren't the colonies almost part of Earth, too?"  "No, they're independent worlds -- or they could be. Independent, but never as strong as the parent world. Always an easy prey, if -- " "If Earth happened to want an easy prey. Ken, you don't believe this yourself, do you?" "This fellow made a convincing case." "Ken, surely your friend and his whole world and the other colonies aren't all suffering from paranoia?" "Paranoia?" "Well, what else can you call it, when their only reason for being hfraid is that Earth could destroy them -- if she liked?" r  , HE question hung in the air and went on hanging. Corvey never really knew whether he ducked it or Sandra neglected to follow it up. It was about that time that the conversation became more personal. It was Corvey who mentioned marriage again, tentatively, and impersonally, like the discussion on the colonies. Sandra discussed it in the same way. She was a little less adamant than when she had expressed her views on getting married. Perhaps she would marry sometime, if she found someone who had some of the qualities of Corvey, and if she believed he really didn't care about not having children. That was Wednesday. Thursday, he examined what he had learned so far from the defense tests, fought no less than three minor battles with ritany and, although he didn't see Sandra, felt himself compelled to call her twice. He hadn't learned much of Earth's defense potential in detail, but quite a lot in general. His Miami report to Jan Ryter, though it had been a hallucination, turned out to be very close to the facts. As he had guessed, Earth was so far ahead of his own world in technical development that there was no prospect of the gap being closed, even if he had been a technician and could take back all the technical details. Earth was ahead, not with money in the bank, so to speak, not with talents buried in the ground, but with talents in active use. Earth's potential was in her men rather than in anything they had done. Aramin scientists, given access to the Rutledge tests, could go home and build weapons and defenses every bit as good as Earth's -- and it wouldn't matter in the least. For, in the time taken to bring Aram up to Earth's level, Earth would have forged ahead again. It wasn't an encouraging report to have to make, but the essential thing about Corvey's report was that it should be sound, not encouraging. He had called Sandra in the morning, and he called her again in the evening to cancel their date. He had to work at home as well as at the office while the tests were on. The trouble with survey reporting was that ninety per cent of the work was wasted. Friday... Though he didn't know it at first, Friday was the day. There was nothing he could have done about it anyway. Everything was set to come to a focus at one point, and the point was Friday. fense tests were run in sections. It was an open secret that Rutledge was being used for some military maneuver or other. Precisely what was supposed to be unknown to anyone except the Army, the Air Force, the Space Navy, Washington, U.N., Securrity, the F.B.I. and "carefully screened units of the press." This last designation included, apparently, everybody in Rutledge who wasn't already included under the other heads, for everybody in Rutledge knew that the military maneuver was a complete test of all land-based defenses against any known form of attack from space. On Friday, the main item was reaction time. The initial stimulus for which every warning system was designed was taken for granted. The lag before retaliation took place was measured and correlated with every other lag -- the amount of damage which would have been done in the meantime -- the time a human being, rather than an automatic warning, needed to react -- everything else it seemed worth while correlating it with. At eleven a.m. Corvey was standing in an open, empty space with about a score of other journalists and observers, two miles out of Rutledge. In front of them, # yards away, was something which looked like an. old-fashioned howitzer, manned by half a dozen men and girls. There were as many women as men in defense. To the left, # yards away, was the radar post. Someone spoke to Corvey, but it didn't seem to matter. He was gloomily aware that many defense experts on Aram would have given their right arms to see the things he was seeing and would see. Unfortunately, only a survey reporter could have such opportunities -- and as a survey reporter, he wasn't trained to understand more than a fraction of the significance of the things he saw. There was sudden movement at the radar post. A few seconds later, the spark of activity jumped the gap and the howitzer crew leaped about like flies. The blunt point of the machine swung around and up in one movement, and light stabbed from it. That part of it was rather an anticlimax. The light was only faintly brighter than the daylight it had to pass through, and gave the impression of a nearly exhausted battery. There was a sudden, startling 'sound -- a crack which was not loud but curiously vicious. With it was a faint stirring of the still air. A vacuum only a foot or so in diameter but eight hundred miles long was being filled -- or rather, had been filled almost as it was being created -- and these were the after-effects. A long moment of tension, as if everyone were waiting for the plop of a penny dropped down a well. Then a speck appeared and became a ship, dropping. Again someone spoke to Corvey unintelligibly -- his eyes and everyone else's were on the ship. It grew incredibly slowly, though it must be falling out of control -- the howitzer crew was paying no further attention to it, apparently satisfied that it was no longer a menace. The radar crew was still busy, however, tracking it. familiar about the ship. Even before he could have known, Corvey was straining his eyes, hoping his wild guess was wrong. It wasn't -- the ship was an Aramin cruiser. It came hurtling down, spinning, its rear section misshapen. It struck about a mile away and was hidden for a moment in a cloud of flying earth and stones. "Mr. Corvey!" came a sharp, insistent bark. "I must ask you to come and see Captain Swan." With a start, Corvey turned. His eyes took in nothing but a uniform, then flicked back to the wrecked Aramin ship. There was no ship. There had never been any ship at all. He had been embroidering on the test. Vaguely, he was aware that the officer beside him had been trying to attract his attention for some time, without success. "Sorry," he said. "I was working something out." The other spectators were staring at the two of them. His trance must have been deep and puzzling. The officer beside him was red-faced, nervous, yet adamant. "Sure," Corvey said. "Where is this Captain Swan?" He was led across to the radar unit. He tried to dissolve the appearance of being a prisoner under guard, but without much success. The correspondents chattered as he was led away, and his escorting officer kept dropping a step behind, his hand rather melodramatically thrust into his pocket. It was difficult to decide which attitude to assume, the indifferent or the indignant. Meanwhile, he pretended not to notice that he was in effect a prisoner. His escort asked him to stand aside while he talked to Captain Swan, watched him closely while he did so, and generally made it quite obvious that Corvey was suspected of something pretty serious. Corvey made up his mind. He strode forward. "What is this?" he demanded. "I'm Kenneth Corvey of the Rutledge Star -- a dozen people here can swear to that. And if you want my authorization..." "That's not the question, Mr. Corvey," said Swan bluntly. He was a brusque, neat little man. "It seems there were several attempts made to attract your attention, without success. I'm told you were in some sort of trance for at least four minutes. Have you any explanation?" "I've given it already," Corvey retorted. "I'm a survey reporter -- that means a big proportion of my work is mental arithmetic, so to speak. This requires extreme concentration -- " "I understand that, Mr. Corvey. But it seems your concentration, as you call it, was too deep and impenetrable for any such straightforward explanation. I feel sure there must be some -- some further explanation." "What, for heaven's sake?" Corvey demanded, allowing himself to sound a little angrier. "Is it a crime not to speak when I'm spoken to?" "If you don't cooperate with us, Mr. Corvey," said Swan distantly, "you will find our cooperation with you will rapidly cease." "How can I cooperate with you? What do you want? Of what crime am I accused, and what will you recognize as a defense?" Swan began to realize his position was weaker than he thought, was weakening further. In a more propitiating tone, he said, "You realize how careful we have to be, Mr. Corvey, and you know yourself how thoroughly all observers have been screened. We must investigate everything we can't understand, and this trance of yours -- it is possible, say, that you've been telepathically tapped, or that some post-hypnotic suggestion has been planted, or..." "Captain Swan," said Corvey firmly but not angrily any more, "I realize that you must be careful, but surely that doesn't mean fanciful. I've offered you a perfectly reasonable explanation for something which doesn't seem in the least strange to me. You don't know how reasonable it is, unless you've heard the noise that goes on outside the office where I have to work. Now, would you like me to write down for your perusal some of the lines of investigation I covered mentally?" With still less conviction, Swan said, "You know we don't suspect you, Mr. Corvey. It's just a matter of checking. Would you submit to a brief test? It's simply to establish -- " "No," said Corvey. He hated to have to say it, but there was no telling what a test might show. If they simply stuck a thermometer in his mouth, they would start to ask awkward questions. If they had a skilled lie-detector operator, they would get some very interesting answers. "Oh?" said Swan, with a rapid return to his earlier manner. "Why not, Mr. Corvey?" And though Corvey didn't hesitate and gave no outward sign of diminished confidence, he knew that from now on he was going to be less and less convincing. vey left the Security office cleared and puzzled. He had submitted to some tests and refused others, and the two men he saw -- interrogators in quite a different class fom Captain Swan -- seemed satisfied. But he knew that those two would seem precisely as they wished to seem, quite independently of what they might think. He guessed that he was strongly suspected and would be very closely watched, indeed, from now on. It was quite possible, from the way he had been treated, that he had been suspected all along, that Security Headquarters was rather annoyed with its own low-level operatives for pulling him in. It even occurred to him that, possibly, some close associate of his -- Babs, Dave, Jim Neave or Sandra -- was watching him, had been watching him from the start. At any rate, from now on he couldn't afford to do anything outside the normal requirements of his job. AS might suspect him slightly, strongly or with complete certainty. There was little or no possibility that he was not suspected at all. He hadn't completely failed by any means. He would continue to have access to secret information, would be permitted to observe many of the further defense tests. But he would be trusted with nothing which really mattered from now on. When Dave and Babs met him just outside the Security office, his suspicion that they were AS operatives heightened. However, it would be stupid to give any hint of that. "Say, what's this?" Babs asked, concerned. "Security called us a while back about you. But it's all right now, isn't it?" "It's all right," said Corvey easily. "Security's checking everyone about half a dozen times while these... but maybe I shouldn't say anything about what's going on just now, for officially nothing's happening at all." "Oh, can it, Ken," said Babs. "You needn't start being supercautious with us. We gave you a magnificent character -- I think you ought to stand us a drink, as a small token of your appreciation." Corvey stood them a drink. Whether they were in AS or not didn't make much difference to his liking for them. After all, he had been deceiving them the whole time he had known them. He could hardly complain if they'd been deceiving him, too. Sandra darted into the bar and kissed him in relief at the sight of him. She ignored Babs and Dave. "Thank goodness!" she said breathlessly. "The way they talked to me over the phone, I thought you were in jail for life, if not just until they shot you. Will you excuse us, folks? Thanks." She swept him away to the other corner of the bar, where Babs and Dave couldn't hear what they were saying. "Tell me, Ken," she said seriously. "Did they let you go because you're not a spy or because they couldn't prove it?" Things had changed since the last time he considered telling her the truth. "Neither," he said coolly. "I think they know I'm a spy, but they're waiting to see what I do." "You are a spy?" she asked quietly. "Yes. Oh, a most unspectacular spy. Not like the dashing spies of romance. I'm not here to steal the plans of secret weapons, just to get a general idea of Earth's potentialities." "For whom? The highest bidder?" The bitterness of her question hurt him, though it was only to be expected. "No," he said. "For my own world -- Aram. And not for offensive purposes. There's no question of Aram ever -- " "There never is," Sandra retorted, not angry but bitterly disappointed. "It's never anybody's hand that fires the shot. Nobody ever wants to fight. Every battle that was ever fought was fought in self-defense, apparently." Corvey sighed. "I know. Study history and you find..." It stopped just there, for no reason, and Babs and Dave were staring at him. He knew it was a repetition of the morning's hallucinatory incident. right, with Babs and Dave -- that part had happened. But the arrival of Sandra, like the fall of the Aramin ship, had been superimposed, and he had gone dead to all intents and purposes, judging by his friends' expressions. People returning to consciousness often do ask, "Where am I?" -- fatuous though it may be -- because the first seconds of interrupted awareness are seldom characterized by notable alertness and perspicacity. Dave spoke before he could think of anything else to say. "That's what happened this afternoon, isn't it?" he asked shrewdly. There was no use denying it. Corvey nodded. "I know about it," he said. "It doesn't worry me, and it is temporary. But it's not an easy thing to explain." "I can understand that," Dave agreed. "Say, what is this?" Babs asked. "Periodic trances? How and where did you pick them up?" "I've been trying to explain that all afternoon," said Corvey wearily. "Mind if I take a rest now?" "Well, sure," said Dave slowly. "But there's a difference now, Ken. Security organizations are never exactly sympathetic. We are. Like to try us?" If they were AS agents, they knew about him. If they weren't, they were just Dave and Babs, his friends. If he refused to say anything, they were capable of working out what he was refusing to say. He was finished anyway. Apparently this was going to go on happening, the gradual merging of a real incident into ritanic hallucination, with trance instead of the absent-minded, automatic behavior which previously had enabled him to get by without arousing suspicion. When that had been the case, carrying on had been risky but not impossible. Now it was impossible. He hadn't seen it when he left the Security office, but that had been before the second trance. Trances like this were not part of the normal case-history of ritany. Quite possibly, ritany took a different course on planets other than Aram. If more trances were to be expected, he would have to be content with what little he had learned already, go into hiding, and leave Earth with his job indifferently done -- but alive, instead of carrying on until, inevitably, he was arrested. "All right," he said quietly. "I'll take you up on that. Does what Dave say go for you, too, Babs?" "Of course," she said. "Shoot." She leaned forward eagerly, intuitively aware that what Corvey said was going to be interesting. "I've got a fever," Corvey said, "which identifies my world, which isn't Earth. That's why I've had to fight the fever, couldn't admit it, couldn't take sick leave. If I had, it would soon have been discovered that I'm not a Terran as I pretend, that my whole history is false -- that, in fact, I could only be here as a spy." TN several delusions he had admitted to Babs and Dave or to Sandra, in one way or another, that he was a spy. This time, the incident being real, he checked it and found it true. He was sharing his secret with someone at last. "You're working for another world against Earth?" asked Dave quietly. Babs caught her breath. "Not exactly. I... " "We can't help you, Ken," said Dave in the same quiet tone. "I'm sorry if I led you to think we could. I didn't believe you could possibly be -- " "Don't make excuses, Dave," Babs cut in. "It was an offer to a friend and I hope Ken's still that. But, Ken, you should have known we weren't traitors. Look -- let's forget these last few things were said, shall we?" Corvey nodded wearily. They were reacting much as Sandra had in the first hallucination -- the way decent people, patriotic without being fanatic about it, would act -- he supposed. "I think we'd better go," said Babs, getting up. "We certainly won't give you up, Ken. But we can't help you and we'd better not talk about this at all. If we -- when we see you again, I think we should ignore today altogether..." But when she said that, she knew and Corvey knew they wouldn't see him again unless, perhaps, as witnesses at his trial. Corvey tested the whole incident for reality once again and found it solid. But everything else was falling apart at the seams. He should have known how Babs and Dave would react. Yet what did it matter, since Security was so close behind him anyway? Babs and Dave, he was now certain, were not AS agents. He was also certain that they could be trusted -- they wouldn't give him up. What he had to do was get under cover. Now, tonight. He shouldn't even have thought of Sandra, but he did. He wanted to go and see her, to find what she would say -- really say -- whether it would be the same as Babs' and Dave's reaction. For a while, he tried to convince himself that since he was on the run anyway, as of now, it made no difference, his calling Sandra on the way. But he wasn't sufficiently blinded by love to be able to believe that. No, he couldn't afford to see Sandra, even to say good-by. VI F riday evening. The last time he had been at Sandra's house he had been interested only in her, not the house. He had a little difficulty finding it again in the darkness. It had taken him an hour or two to arrange things and, after that, he had walked most of the way to Sandra's house. He would have liked to call her, to make sure she wasn't out -- but the phone might be tapped. That was another reason why he shouldn't go near her. If AS were really watching him closely, they'd know all about Sandra. He found it at last, a small house in its own tiny patch of garden. He looked about carefully to make sure no one was watching the place -- not that he had thought it likely anyone would be. Moderately satisfied, he still didn't go to the front door, but circled the house cautiously, found a lane which touched the rear wall at one point and climbed over. There was light in a curtained upstairs window. Corvey had had certain training which he hadn't used for a long time, but which he had begun to call on again from the time he'd decided to go under cover. Within three minutes, he was inside the house and outside the door of the room where the light was on. Thus ended his determination not to see Sandra again. He tapped and said, "It's me -- Ken." There was a stifled shriek. Ccrvey waited. Presently Sandra's voice said challengingly, "If it's Ken, say something else." He said something that proved he was Corvey. Then, when she sounded somewhat reassured, he slipped inside, flicking off the light-switch as he did so. "What on earth...?" came Sandra's voice in the darkness. He found her and, despite her surprise and puzzlement, she was prepared to throw her arms around him and kiss him readily enough. But she still wanted to know why he had sought her like that -- he could feel the curiosity pulsing through her body. "This place of yours would be the easiest job in months for housebreakers, darling," he murmured. "Come on, Ken -- give!" He told her. She didn't say a word until she was in possession of all the main facts. But she was still in his arms, and her body would have told him if what he was telling her shocked or disgusted her. Twice in fevered delusions he had told her this -- each time she had turned from him. It was natural that he should have hallucinations about her finding out. N OW it was actually happening -- and so far she hadn't turned from him in disgust. Her arms were still around him, her breath mingling with his. "You're giving up the Rutledge defense tests altogether," she asked coolly, "and hiding out until you can be pickedup and go back to Aram?" "Yes." "And -- if it hadn't been for this, things might have been very different between us?" "They certainly would." "And you're still ill?" "Yes. But when I'm lucid, I know what I'm saying, and I mean it." "That isn't what I meant. I'm coming with you, Ken." He caught his breath. That had been too much to hope for -- he wasn't ready for it. "That doesn't mean I agree with what you've been doing or would help you against Earth. I wouldn't." He tightened his grip, but she avoided his lips. "Never mind that just now. Have you any plans -- workable plans?" "Oh, yes," Corvey said. "I could have done this for a long time, but I didn't when there was still a chance." "Forget that. You can't expect me to be sympathetic because you've failed in an espionage job for some other world." "Wait a minute, Sandra. Why are you coming with me?" "Because I love you, fool! But that doesn't mean I love your job, or... Don't waste time arguing. What are we going to do?" He released her, stepped back and snapped on the light. She blinked for a moment, then gave a startled cry. The man in the room with her wasn't Ken Corvey. This man had lighter hair, held himself differently, had brown eyes instead of blue and a smaller nose. The differences were slight, but she would have passed this man in the street without a second glance. "I see," she said, recovering herself. "Which is you?" "Neither," said Corvey. Now his voice was different, too. never looked at her before -- wondering how her appearance could be simply and significantly altered. He had some materials, in case he should have to change his own appearance again, but not a great deal. He managed it in seventeen minutes, by darkening her hair and getting her to change its style while he made her mouth fuller and her cheeks thinner. She was startled at the latter operation, her hand going to her face. "That ointment tightens your face muscles," he said. "Don't touch it. When it's dried, it'll last for twenty-four hours or so. There, you don't look much worse than usual, if quite different." He didn't let her look at herself until she was dressed in clothes which he selected and modified with her help. When she did look in a full-length mirror, she gasped, horrified. "I look awful!" she wailed. , "Not really. You just look different. Of course, those are clothes you'd regard as all wrong for you -- I made them like that. People have a pattern of appearance, speech, walk, clothes. All you have to do to become a different person is to change the pattern. Just remember you're the girl in the mirror, not Sandra Reid." Sandra locked up the house and left it without any signs of a hurried departure. She also dropped a brief line to her employers. They walked some distance, so that no cabby would remember picking up a man and a woman at Sandra Reid's house, then took a taxi to the airport. By agreement, Corvey was telling her only the next step, so that, in the event of something going wrong, she wouldn't know his whole plan. If anything did go wrong, she would naturally go home. Corvey could always communicate with her there. The next step, after the local airport, was a flight to any big airport. Sandra didn't know their destination from there. paid the taxi driver, that they would certainly be traced eventually to the airport, then to New York or San Francisco or wherever they flew. He would have to make sure the trail was much weaker from there, and quite untraceable from the next check point. His destination was Kingston, Jamaica, but he had to be quite certain he left no trail -- Kingston was the last refuge of any Aramin agent on Earth. They found the next plane was to New York, which suited Corvey well enough. Corvey booked passage under names he didn't even bother remembering -- they weren't going to need them again. They went to the waiting room to spend the twenty minutes before the plane left. And the first person Corvey saw when he followed Sandra inside was Jim Neave. He paid no attention. Sandra, who didn't know Neave, was saying something which didn't matter, but she might easily switch at any moment to something which did. Corvey cut her off rudely, hoping she would guess why. She didn't immediately. She started and shot a surprised glance at him. To make sure she had a chance to think for a second or two before bursting out with something catastrophic, he hurried past her to look out one of the big windows at the planes, digging her warningly in the ribs while his body shielded her from Neave. When she joined him at the window, she had clearly taken the hint. She was docile and quiet, taking her cue from him. Corvey hadn't looked closely at Neave, but he was aware his boss was still watching him. That Neave was there looking for him was practically certain -- he should have been at the office. The only question was whether Neave was an AS agent or merely someone who could identify Ken Corvey. The fact that he appeared to be alone suggested he was an AS agent. But he might not be as alone as he seemed. Corvey's disguise was designed to defeat descriptions and photographs, not to fool anyone who knew him well. He didn't dare look at Neave. He was hoping Neave wasn't an AS agent for, if he was, he would know his job and have Corvey investigated. Corvey took Sandra's arm and said in a voice which was not the one Neave knew, "Place stinks. Come on out in the fresh air." Neave was at his elbow. "Excuse me, sir... he began. As Corvey turned and looked at him, he saw complete certainty come into Neave's face. Perhaps Neave, knowing something like this might happen, had carefully noted a tiny scar or irregularity on his face, something which even Corvey didn't know about. At any rate, there could be no further pretense. with a stomach punch and chopped him behind the ear. The gun which was halfway out of Neave's pocket clattered on the floor. Corvey didn't take time to pick it up. He kicked it and sent it sliding along the floor under a sofa. All the people standing about had seen the incident, or at least part of it. Corvey decided a bluff wouldn't pay. There was nothing for it but to run. He seized Sandra's arm again and, from the rapidity with which she got off her mark, she seemed to have the same idea. They darted out to the concrete. "All right, stand where you are," said a voice sharply. Corvey didn't know quite what the danger was before it was removed. When he turned, a man was pitching forward, his gun flying from his hand, and Sandra was rubbing her leg. "Well done!" Corvey gasped. "I don't know what you did, Sandra, but it was good." They jumped on a luggage trolley and Corvey sent it trundstrip in front of the waiting-room windows. "It would be futile to take up  plane, even if we could," Corvey saicj"The thing to do is get back into town and get out by train or bus. That's the only -- " Two of the small fat tires of the trolley were shot out and it scraped to a stop with a final earsplitting scream of steel on concrete. Corvey didn't see where the shots came from, but the shooting was so precise and so obviously intended to stop them, without harming them, that he knew he and Sandra might just as well stay where they were and wait to be taken in custody. Nevertheless, they did the natural thing and dashed for the edge of the field. It wasn't the first time Corvey had experienced the sensation of crawling physical terror which came with the knowledge .that, at any moment, a bullet might tear through any part of his body, but he knew it was probably the first time Sandra had felt it: He was sorry he had dragged her into this. There were still no extra lights, no signs of undue confusion, no hue and cry. Just Neave, the man outside and the two shots which had put the trolley out of action. Sandra gasped suddenly, and Corvey turned his head to see her go down. Someone had made a neat football tackle on her. He didn't see what happened after that, for something hard came down on his head and seemed to drive him into the ground like a stake. F riday night, corvey opened his eyes a bit and saw Sandra's legs. There could have been worse awakenings -- nevertheless, Sandra's legs were an irrelevance in the circumstances as he remembered them. He opened his eyes fully. "With us again, Ken?" said Neave. They were in a small office at the airport. Sandra was in an armchair, watching him. She didn't appear to be hurt. She smiled wryly as his gaze met hers. Neave was standing over him and, behind, were two other men. Corvey didn't say anything. He was now completely in the power of AS. Anything they didn't know they could soon find out by the use of truth drugs. One good thing was that interrogation would show Sandra wasn't involved with him. "We could put you against a wall and shoot you, of course," Neave said, "but we're not going to. I'll put you out of your suspense, Ken. First, as you probably know very well, we're going to drug you and find out all you know. Assuming that's no more than we expect, and that your assignment is what we think it is, we'll give you a short treatment and then you can come back on the staff of the Star in your old job. "Wait a minute -- don't let's have any misunderstanding. When I say you can come back, I mean you're coming back by order. We'll shoot you if you don't." "You want me to work for you, for AS, in fact?" Corvey said. Neave nodded. "That's it. And don't say you won't. That's a waste of breath and time." Corvey marveled at the way Neave's manner stayed exactly the same, yet seemed much more effective now that he was an AS operative and not merely a feature editor. "How about Sandra?" Corvey asked. Neave shrugged. "We've already questioned Miss Reid. We've nothing against her. In fact, she's with us." Corvey started. "All the time?" "Yes, but not the way you mean. Aren't you going to take me up on the 'short treatment' I mentioned?"  " "I can guess about that," Corvey said shortly. "You mean psychological treatment." "Exactly. But hasn't it occurred to you that you may need it?"  mor. "If I'm going to stay alive, I do." "Not only that -- you do need psychiatric treatment, Ken. It seems Miss Reid once told you about it, only she didn't know what she was saying applied to you." "What are you talking about?" "Paranoia. Like all colonials, you think Earth's against you. You're wrong. And after your treatment..." "I know, I'll think what you want me to think after my brain's been tampered with." Neave shook his head. "You still won't even admit it's possible," he said patiently. "I wish you would, Ken. It would make us all feel better. We don't shoot colonial spies, because we don't have to, and because they're not responsible. We just cure them and, after that, they're good AS agents. They disappear or report nonsense to their own worlds or they go back -- under our protection, of course -- and no doubt the colony concerned thinks we've done something terrible to them, because they've changed. Maybe you weren't told about that." Sandra joined in. "Paranoia is a sort of inferiority complex, Ken," she said quietly, "and naturally the colonies tend to feel that way about Earth. You're not insane -- only strongly prejudiced on one point. They'll take away that prejudice, that's all." the other. He knew that what they said was false, that he was going to have an artificial devotion to Earth set up in him and have his love of Aram broken down. But he couldn't stop them, anyway. And the way Sandra was looking at him showed that she hadn't changed her mind about him since she agreed to come away with him. "All right," he said. "I'll admit it's possible, if it gives you any satisfaction. I suppose it's a pretty humane way to treat spies anyway -- I've no complaints. I suppose AS knew about me all the time, since you were planted at the Star when I came?" "We . didn't know about you until just the other day," said Neave, "and we weren't sure until today. And I wasn't planted, Ken. You should know that. Think I'm an amateur feature editor? No, that's my job." "What's your AS connection, then?" Corvey asked curiously. "Same as yours -- or as yours will be. I was once a colonial spy, too." And suddenly Corvey understood the blinding .efficiency of AS. Morally right or morally wrong -- Corvey didn't know -- Earth had and was going to continue to have the best counterespionage system in the entire Galaxy. AS was carnivorous. It swallowed the operatives of every world in the Galaxy except Earth and turned them into its own flesh. It was a pretty good system. -- j. t. McIntosh I've Got Them AH!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of mjf proposed Mail Science Fiction Library I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap.  continued from back cover lected from Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. The woman who became her own daughter... gambling on a strange planet -- See description on back cover. top stories by outstanding authors . stories of Wonders of Earth and Man... of startling inventions... of visitors from Outer Space... Adventure in Dimension... Worlds of Tomorrow. # i Thing that becomes whatever it meets. Plus many other best tales skimmed from a dozen years of Astounding Science-Fiction Magazine by its editor, John W. Campbell: Jr. by Hal Clement -- Charles the planet Mesklin. 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Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose California, U.S.A. copy of 'The Mas : tery : of : :Life" -- ligation, A nonprofit organization. Address : Scribe I.T.K. Scribe I.T.K. S.in Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the jree book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name AddressCity State a#AAxy... by Clifford D. Simak by F. L. Wallace by Roy Hutchins by Robert Sheckley by Lucius Daniel by Arthur Sellings  by Willy Ley #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post OfiSce, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co... Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. knew something we have to go on rediscovering... whenever they created a particularly lovely piece of porcelain, they warily made sure to use crackle glaze, a glaze that would develop a webwork of fine little cracks when fired. There was a superstitious reason : The gods are jealous of human . perfection and ruthlessly punish its perpetrators. We don't share the same gods and we reject such primitive reasoning -- and yet we constantly learn that perfection can be costly and even deadly. For about fifty years, ever since the invention of the automobile, highway engineers have been busily taking the kinks out of our roads, blasting away hills, elimiscraping there... making "as the crow flies" a wildly outdated idea of perfection. It would take a crow with theodolite eyes and jet propulsion to fly as straight as our roads run. Now, however, the engineers are just as busily putting back the kinks they removed. Too many cars were piling up. Drivers, hypnotized by the unswervingly straight highways, reacted dazedly when danger suddenly appeared, so that one would smash into another until as many as a dozen cars have been wrecked in a single hideous multiple collision. The roads were too perfect. Obstacles had to be replaced to keep drivers alert, watchful -- or at least awake. The cars themselves seem to be tending in the same fatal direction. What with no-shift drive, power, steering, blowout-proof tires... more and more, better and better safety devices... drivers are suicidally relying on gadgetry instead of their own skill. If the trend goes far enough, automotive engineers have one of two choices; -- Make traffic control entirely automatic, taking it out of the hands of drivers. -- Backtrack hastily by making cars less perfect. The same difficulty faces sewage experts as a result of the discovery of detergents, which are the first really big improvement in soapmaking since antiquity. Detergents break down grease as no soap has ever been able to do. But consumer demand has forced manufacturers to add sudsing action -- people just couldn't believe their dishes and clothes were getting clean unless they could see what was going on -- despite the fact that sudsing action actually cuts down the efficiency of detergents. If that were all there was to the situation, there would be no headache for sewage men. But the devilish head of perfection rears up again:  Grease breaks down suds; detergents break down grease; so the suds in detergents are all but indestructible ! To combat the mountains of foam that pile out of the sewer mains, crews with high-pbwer hoses blast and blast until -- Well, ybu've undoubtedly had to get these suds down sink drains. You know how infuriatingly they refuse to collapse and wash down. Multiply your annoyance by the number of homes and factories in your community and you have an idea, though only a vicarious one, of the daily frustrations of the hose crews. Manufacturers and sewage experts ar laboring hard to educate the public away from sudsing detergents. The prospect doesn't look hopeful. But the problem is growing so vast that something must give -- the public or the sewage systems. I doubt if restoring imperfection is the answer in this case. For one thing, competition probably would make it impossible. For another, a detergent that cuts grease creates unbreakable suds; if it doesn't, it's not a detergent. There are many more examples of the price of scientific perfection, but those are a representative offering. There are a couple no less harrowing in the control of nature: When rats in the West Indies became a plague, mongooses were imported from India to exterminate them. The mongooses got rid of the rats -- and then the snakes, small field animals, birds and anything else they could live on. Now the question is how to get rid of the mongooses. Out West, some # years ago, # deer were saved from the attacks of predators; posses left not a cougar or coyote to prey on the deer. Within # years, the herds had increased to #... and they ate themselves into starvation. There are now less than the original # deer and they have to be given winter handouts of hay because their grazing lands never recovered. As you see, perfection can be achieved, but it's nothing to undertake lightly. Consider the plight of the man who committed the perfect murder. His conscience goaded him into confessing, but the crime had been so perfect that he couldn't get himself arrested! Are you lonesome? Bored? Then do as Knight did -- acquire a hobby of some kind -- but make sure that your hobby does not acquire you! G ordon Knight was anxious for the five-hour day to end so he could rush home. For this was the day he should receive the How-# Kit he'd ordered and he was anxious to get to work on it. It wasn't only that he had always wanted a dog, although that was more than half of it -- but, with this kit, he would be trying something new. He'd never handled any How-# Kit with biologic components and he was considerably excited. Although, of course, the dog would be biologic only to a limited degree and most of it would be packaged, anyhow, and all he'd have to do would be assemble it. But it was something new and he wanted to He was thinking of the dog so hard that he was mildly irritated when Randall Stewart, returning from one of his numerous trips to the water fountain, stopped at his desk to give him a progress report on home dentistry. "It's easy," Stewart told him. "Nothing to it if you follow the instructions. Here, look -- I did this one last night." He then squatted down beside Knight's desk and opened his mouth, proudly pulling it out of shape with his fingers so Knight could see. "Thish un ere," said Stewart, blindly attempting to point, with a wildly waggling finger, at the tooth in question. He let his face snap back together. "Filled it myself," he announced complacently. "Rigged up a series of mirrors' to see what I was doing. They came right in the kit, so all I had to do was follow the instructions." inside his mouth and probed tenderly at his handiwork. "A little awkward, working on yourself. On someone else, of course, there'd be nothing to it." He waited hopefully. "Must be interesting," said Knight. "Economical, too. No use paying the dentists the prices they ask. Figure I'll practice on myself and then take on the family. Some of my friends, even, if they want me to." He regarded Knight intently. Knight failed to rise to the dangling bait. Stewart gave up. "I'm going to try cleaning next. You got to dig down beneath the gums and break loose the tartar. There's a kind of hook you do it with. No reason a man shouldn't take care of his own teeth instead of paying dentists." "It doesn't sound too hard," Knight admitted. "It's a cinch," said Stewart. "But you got to follow the instructions. There's nothing you can't do if you follow the instructions." And that was true, Knight thought. You could do anything if you followed the instructions -- if you didn't rush ahead, but sat down and took your time and studied it all out. Hadn't he built his house in his spare time, and all the furniture for it, and the gadgets, too? Just in his spare time -- although God knew, he thought, a man had little enough of that, working fifteen hours a week. It was a lucky thing he'd been able to build the house after buying all that land. But everyone had been buying what they called estates, and Grace had set her heart on it, and there'd been nothing he could do. If he'd had to pay carpenters and masons and plumbers, he would never have been able to afford the house. But by building it himself, he had paid for it as he went along. It had taken ten years, of course, but think of all the fun he'd had! He sat there and thought of all the fun he'd had, and of all the pride. No, sir, he told himself, no one in his circumstances had a better house. Although, come to think of it, what he'd done had not been too unusual. Most of the men he knew had built their homes, too, or had built additions to them, or had remodeled them. He had often thought that he would like to start over again and build another house, just for the fun of it. But that would be foolish, for he already had a house and there would be no sale for another one, even if he built it. Who would want to buy a house when it was so much fun to build one? ' And there was still a lot of work to do on the house he had. New rooms to add -- not necessary, of course, but handy. And the roof to fix. And a summer house to build. And there were always the grounds. At one time he had thought he would landscape -- a man could do a lot to beautify a place with a few years of spare-time work. But there had been so many other things to do, he had never managed to get around to it. K night and Anson Lee, his neighbor, had often talked about what could be done to their adjoining acreages if they ever had the time. But Lee, of course, would never get around to anything. He was a lawyer, although he never seemed to work at it too hard. He had a large study filled with stacks of law books and there were times when he would talk quite expansively about his law library, but he never seemed to use the books. Usually he talked that way when he had half a load on, which was fairly often, since he claimed to do a lot of thinking and it was his firm belief that a bottle helped him think. After Stewart finally went back to his desk, there still remained more than an hour before the working day officially ended. Knight sneaked the current issue of a How-# magazine out of his briefcase and began to leaf through it, keeping a wary eye out so he could hide it quickly if anyone should notice he was loafing. He had read the articles earlier, so now he looked at the ads. It was a pity, he thought, a man H O W # didn't have the time to do all there was to do. For example: Fit your own glasses (testing material and lens-grinding equipment included in the kit). Take out your own tonsils (complete directions and all necessary instruments). Fit up an unused room as your private hospital (no sense in leaving home when you're ill, just at the time when you most need its comfort and security)... Grow your own medicines and drugs (starts of # different herbs and medicinal plants, with detailed instructions for their cultivation and processing). Grow your wife's fur coat (a pair of mink, one ton of horse meat, furrier tools). Tailor your own suits and coats (# yards of wool yardgoods and lining material). Build your own TV set. Bind your own books. Build your own power plant (let the wind work for you). Build your own robot (a jack of all trades, intelligent, obedient, no time off, no overtime, on the job # hours a day, never tired, no need for rest or sleep, do any work you wish). Now there, thought Knight, was something a man should try. If a man had one of those robots, it would save a lot of labor. There were all sorts of attachments you could get for it. And the robots, the ad said, could put on and take off all these attachments just as a man puts on a pair of gloves or takes off a pair of shoes. every morning, it would sally out into the garden and pick all the corn and beans and peas and tomatoes and other vegetables ready to be picked and leave them all neatly in a row on the back stoop of the house. Probably would get a lot more out of a garden that way, too, for the grading mechanism would never select a too-green tomato nor allow an ear of corn to go beyond its prime. There were cleaning attachments for the house and snowplowing attachments and housepainting attachments and almost any other kind one could wish. Get a full quota of attachments, then lay out a work program and turn the robot loose -- you could forget about the place the year around, for the robot would take care of everything. There was only one hitch. The cost of a robot kit came close to ten thousand dollars and all the available attachments could run. to another ten. Knight closed the magazine and put it into the briefcase. He saw there were only fifteen minutes left until quitting time and that was too short a time to do anything, so Knight just sat and thought about getting home and finding the kit there waiting for him. He had always wanted a dog, but Grace would never let him have one. They were dirty, she said, and tracked up the carpeting, they had fleas and shed hair all over everything -- and, besides, they smelled. Well, she wouldn't object to this kind of dog, Knight told himself. It wouldn't smell and it was guaranteed not to shed hair and it would never harbor fleas, for a flea would starve on a half-mechanical, half-biologic dog. He hoped the do.g wouldn't be a disappointment, but he'd carefully gone over the literature describing it and he was sure it wouldn't. It would go for a walk with its owner and would chase sticks and smaller animals, and what more could one expect of any dog? To insure realism, it saluted, trpes and fence-posts, but was guaranteed to leave no stains or spots. The kit was tilted up beside the hangar door when he got home, but at first he didn't see it. When he did, he craned his neck out so far to be sure it was the kit that he almost came a cropper in the hedge. But, with a bit of luck, he brought the flier down neatly on the gravel strip and was out of it before the blades had stopped whirling. It was the kit, all right. The invoice envelope was tacked on top of the crate. But the kit was bigger and heavier than he'd expected and he wondered if they might not have accidentally sent him a bigger dog than the one he'd ordered. He tried to lift the crate, but it was too heavy, so he went around to. the back of the house to bring a dolly from the basement. Around the corner of the house, he stopped a moment and looked out across his land. A man could do a lot with it, he thought, if he just had the time and the money to buy the equipment. He could turn the acreage into one vast garden. Ought to have a landscape architect work out a plan for it, of course -- although, if he bought some landscaping books and spent some evenings at them, he might be able to figure things out for himself. T here was a lake at the north end of the property and the whole landscape, it seemed to him, should focus upon the lake. It was rather a dank bit of scenery at the moment, with straggly marsh surrounding it and unkempt cattails and reeds astir in the summer wind. But with a little drainage and some planting, a system of walks and a picturesque bridge or two, it would be a thing of beauty. He started out across the lake to where the house of Anson Lee sat upon a hill. As soon as he got the dog assembled, he would walk it over to Lee's place, for Lee would be pleased to be visited by a dog. There had been times, Knight felt, when Lee had not been entirely sympathetic with some of the things he'd done. Like that business of helping Grace build the kilns and the few times they'd managed to lure Lee out on a hunt for the proper kinds of clay. "What do you want to make dishes for?" he had asked. "Why go to all the trouble? You can buy all you want for a tenth of the cost of making them." Lee had not been visibly impressed when Grace explained that they weren't dishes. They were ceramics, Grace had said, and a recognized form of art. She got so interested and made so much of it -- some of it really good -- that Knight had found it necessary to drop his model railroading project and tack another addition on the already sprawling house, for stacking, drying and exhibition. Lee hadn't said a word, a year or two later, when Knight built the studio for Grace, who had grown tired of pottery and had turned to painting. Knight felt, though, that Lee had kept silent only because he was convinced of the futility of further argument. But Lee would approve of the dog. He was that kind of fellow, a man Knight was proud to call a friend -- yet queerly out of step. With everyone else absorbed in things to do, Lee took it easy with his pipe and books, though not the ones on law. Even the kids had their interests now, learning while they played. Mary, before she got married, had been interested in growing things. The greenhouse stood just down the slope, and Knight regretted that he had not been able to continue with her work. Only a few months before, he had dismantled her hydroponic tanks, a symbolic admission that a man could only do so much. Jdhn, quite naturally, had turned to rockets. For years, he and his pals had shot up the neighborhood with their experimental models. The last and largest one, still uncompleted, towered back of the house. Someday, Knight told himself, he'd have to go out and finish what the youngster had started. In university now, John still retained his interests, which now seemed to be branching out. Quite a boy. Knight thought pridefully. Yes, sir, quite a boy. He went down the ramp into the basement to get the dolly and stood there a moment, as he always did, just to look at the place -- for here, he thought, was the real core of his life. There, in that corner, the workshop. Over there, the model railroad layout on which he still worked occasionally. Behind it, his photographic lab. He remembered that the basement hadn't been quite big enough to install the lab and he'd had to knock out a section of the wall and build an addition. That, he recalled, had turned out to be a bigger job than he had bargained for. H e got the dolly and went out to the hangar and loaded on the kit and wrestled it into the basement. Then he took a pinchbar and started to uncrate it. He worked with knowledge and precision, for he had unpacked many kits and knew just how to go about it. He felt a vague apprehension when he lifted out the parts. They were neither the size nor the shape he had expected them to be. Breathing a little heavily from exertion and excitement, he went at the job of unwrapping them. By the second piece, he knew he had noftdog. By the fifth, he knew beyond any doubt exactly what he did have. He had a robot -- and if he was any judge, one of the best and most expensive models! He sat down on one corner of the crate and took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. Finally, he tore the invoice letter off the crate, where it had been tacked. To Mr. Gordon Knight, it said, one dog kit, paid in full. So far as How-# Kits, Inc., was concerned, he had a dog. And the dog was paid for -- paid in full, it said. He sat down on the crate again and looked at the robot parts. No one would ever guess. Come inventory time, How-# Kits would be long one dog and short one robot, but with carloads of dog kit orders filled and thousands of robots sold, it would be impossible to check. Gordon Knight had never, in all his life, done a consciously dishonest thing. But now he made a dishonest decision and he knew it was dishonest and there was nothing to be said in defense of it. Perhaps the worst of all was that he was dishonest with himself. At first, he told himself that he would send the robot back, but -- since he had always wanted to put a robot together -- he would assemble this one and then take it apart, repack it and send it back to the company. He wouldn't activate it. He would just assemble it. But all the time he knew that he was lying to himself, realized that the least he was doing was advancing, step by evasive step, toward dishonesty. And he knew he was doing it thisNvay because he didn't have the nerve to be forthrightly crooked. So he sat down that night and read the instructions carefully, identifying each of the parts and their several features as he went along. For this was the way you went at a How#. You didn't rush ahead. You took it slowly, point by point, got the picture firmly in your mind before you started to put the parts together. Knight, by now, was an expert at not rushing ahead. Besides, he didn't know when he would ever get another chance at a robot. II TT was the beginning of his four days off and he buckled down to the task and put his heart into it. He had some trouble with the biologic concepts and had'to look up a text on organic chemistry and try to trace some of the processes. He found the going tough. It had been a long time since he had paid any attention to organic chemistry, and he found that he had forgotten the little he had known.  By bedtime of the second day, he had fumbled enough information out of the textbook to understand what was necessary to put the robot together. He was a little upset when Grace, discovering what he was working on, immediately thought up household tasks for the robot. But he put her off as best he could and, the next day, he went at the job of assembly; He got the robot together without the slightest trouble, being fairly handy with tools -- but mostly because he religiously followed the first axiom of How-#ism by knowing what he was about before he began. At first, he kept assuring himself that as soon as he had the robot together, he would disassemble it. But when he was finished, he just had to see it work. No sense putting in all that tijne and not knowing if he had gotten it right, he argued. So he flipped the activating switch and screwed in the final plate. The robot came alive and looked at Knight. Then it said, "I am a robot. My name is Albert. What is there to do?" "Now take it easy, Albert," Knight said hastily. "Sit down and rest while we have a talk." "I don't need to rest," #t said. "All right, then, just take it easy. I can't keep you, of course. But as long as you're activated. I'd like to see what you can do. There's the house to take care of, and the garden and the lawn to mind, and I'd been thinking about the landscaping..." He stopped then and smote his forehead with an open palm. "Attachments.' How can I get hold of the attachments?" "Never mind," said Albert. "Don't get upset. Just tell me what's to be done." So Knight told him, leaving the landscaping till the last and being a bit apologetic about it. "A hundred acres is a lot of land and you can't spend all your time on it. Grace wants some housework done, and there's the garden and the lawn." "Tell you what you do," said Albert. "I'll write a list of things for you to order and you leave it all to me. You have a well-equipped workshop. I'll get along." "You mean you'll build your own attachments?" "Quit worrying," Albert told him. "Where's a pencil and some paper?" K night got them for him and Albert wrote down a list of materials -- steel in several dimensions and specifications, aluminum of various gauges, copper wire and a lot of other items. "There!" said Albert, handing him the paper. "That won't set you back more than a thousand and it'll put us in business. You better call in the order so we can get started." Knight called in the order and Albert began nosing around the place and quickly collected a pile of junk that had been left lying around. "All good stuff," he said. Albert picked out some steel scrap and started up the forge and went to work. Knight watched him for a while, then went up to dinner. "Albert is a wonder," he told Grace. "He's making his own attachments." "Did you tell him about the jobs I want done?" "Sure. But first he's got to get the attachments made." "I want him to keep the place clean," said Grace, "and there are new drapes to be made, and the kitchen to be painted, and all those leaky faucets you never had the time to fix." "Yes, dear." "And I wonder if he could learn to cook." "I didn't ask him, but I suppose he could." "He's going to be a tremendous help to me," said Grace. "Just think, I can spend all my time at painting!" Through long practice, he knew exactly how to handle this phase of the conversation. He simply detached himself, split himself in two. One part sat and listened and, at intervals, made appropriate responses, while the other part went on thinking about more important matters. Several times, after they had gone to bed, he woke in the night and heard Albert banging away in the basement workshop and was a little surprised until he remembered that a robot worked around the clock, all day, every day. Knight lay there and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling and congratulated himself on having a robot. Just temporarily, to be sure -- he would send Albert back in a day or so. There was nothing wrong in enjoying the thing for a little while, was there? next day, Knight went into the basement to see if Albert needed help, but the robot affably said he didn't. Knight stood around for a while and then left Albert to himself and tried to get interested in a model locomotive he had started a year or two before, but had laid aside to do something else. Somehow, he couldn't work up much enthusiasm over it any more, and he sat there, rather ill at ease, and wondered what was the matter with him. Maybe he needed a hew interest. He had often thought he would like to take up puppetry and now might be the time to do it. He got out some catalogues and How-# magazines and leafed through them, but was able to arouse only mild and transitory interest in archery, mountainclimbing and boat-building. The rest left him cold. It seemed he was singularly uninspired this particular day. So he went over to see Anson Lee. He found Lee stretched out in a hammock, smoking a pipe and reading Proust, with a jug set beneath the hammock within easy reaching distance. Lee laid aside the book and pointed to another hammock slung a few feet from where he lay. "Climb aboard and let's have a restful visit." Knight hoisted himself into the hammock, feeling rather silly. "Look at that sky," Lee said. "Did you ever see another so blue?" "I wouldn't know," Knight told him. "I'm not an expert on meteorology." "Pity," Lee said. "You're not an expert on birds, either." "For a time, I was a member of a bird-watching club." "And worked at it so hard, you got tired and quit before the year was out. It wasn't a bird-watching club you belonged to -- it was an endurance race. Everyone tried to see more birds than anyone else. You made a contest of it. And you took notes, I bet." "Sure we did. What's wrong with that?" "Not a thing," said Lee, "if you hadn't been quite so grim about it." "Grim? How would you know?" "It's the way you live. It's the way everyone lives now. Except me, of course. Look at that robin, that ragged-looking one in the apple tree. He's a friend of mine. We've been acquainted for all of six years now. I could write a book about that bird -- and if he could read, he'd approve of it. But I won't, of course. If I wrote the book, I couldn't watch the robin." "You could write it in the winter, when the robin's gone." "In wintertime," said Lee, "I have other things to do." H e reached down, picked up the jug and passed it across to Knight. "Hard cider," he explained. "Make it myself. Not as a project, not as a hobby, but because I happen to like cider and no one knows any longer how to really make it. Got to have a few worms in the apples to give it a proper tang." Thinking about the worms. Knight spat out a mouthful, then handed back the jug. Lee applied himself to it wholeheartedly. "First honest work I've done in years." He lay in the hammock, swinging gently, with the jug cradled on his chest. "Every time I get a yen to work, I look across the lake at you and decide against it. How many rooms have you added to that hous# since you got it built?" "Eight," Knight told him proudly. "My God! Think of it -- eight rooms!" "It isn't hard," protested Knight, "once you get the knack of it. Actually, it's fun." "A couple of hundred years ago, men didn't add eight rooms to their homes. And they didn't build their own houses to start with. And they didn't go in for a dozen different hobbies. They didn't have the time." "It's easy now. You just buy a How-# Kit." "So easy to kid yourself," said Lee. "So easy to make it seem that you are doing something worthwhile when you're just piddling around. Why do you think this How-# thing boomed into big business? Because there was a need of it?" "It was cheaper. Why pay to have a thing done when you can do it yourself?" "Maybe that is part of it. MayH O W-# be, at first, that was the reason. But you can't use the economy argument to justify adding eight rooms. No one needs eight extra rooms. I doubt if, even at first, economy was the entire answer. People had more time than they knew what to do with, so they turned to hobbies. And today they do it not because they need all the things they make, but because the making of them fills an emptiness born of shorter working hours, of giving people leisure they don't know how to use. Now, me," he said. "I know how to use it." He lifted the jug and had another snort and offered it to Knight again. This time, Knight refused. They lay there in their hammocks, looking at blue sky and watching the ragged robin. Knight said there was a How-# Kit for city people to make robot birds and Lee laughed pityingly and Knight shut up in embarrassment.  home, a robot was clipping the grass around the picket fence. He had four arms, which had clippers attached instead of hands, and he was doing a quick and efficient job. "You aren't Albert, are you?" Knight asked, trying to figure out how a strange robot could have strayed onto the place. "No," the robot said, keeping right on clipping. "I am Abe. I was made by Albert." 'Made?" "Albert fabricated me so that I could work. You didn't think Albert would do work like this himself, did you?" "I wouldn't know," said Knight. "If you want to talk, you'll have to move along with me. J. have to keep on working." "Where is Albert now?" "Down in the basement, fabricating Alfred." "Alfred? Another robot?" "Certainly. That's what Albert's for." Knight reached out for a fencepost and leaned weakly against it. First there was a single robot and now there were two, and Albert was down in the basement working on a third. That, he realized, had been why Albert wanted him to place the order for the steel and other things -- but the order hadn't arrived as yet, so he must have made this robot -- this Abe -- out of the scrap he had salvaged! Knight hurried down into the basement and there was Albert, working at the forge. He had another robot partially assembled and he had parts scattered here and there. The corner of the basement looked like a metallic nightmare. "Albert!" Albert turned around. "What's going on here?" "I'm reproducing," Albert told him blandly. "But..." "They built the mother-urge in me. I don't know why they called me Albert. I should have a female name." "But you shouldn't be able to make other robots!" "Look, stop your worrying. You want robots, don't you?" "Well -- yes, I guess so." "Then I'll make them. I'll make you all you need." He went back to his work. robots -- there was a fortune in a thing like that! The robots sold at a cool ten thousand and Albert had made one and was working on another. Twenty thousand, Knight told himself. Perhaps Albert could make more than two a day. He had been working from scrap metal and maybe, when the new material arrived, he could step up production. But even so, at only two a day dollars' worth of robots every It didn't add up, Knight sweatily realized. One robot was not supposed to be able to make another robot. And if there were such a robot, How-# Kits would not let it loose. Yet, here Knight was, with a robot he didn't even own, turning out other robots at a dizzy pace. He wondered if a man needed a license of some sort to manufacture robots. It was something he'd never had occasion to wonder about before, or to ask about, but it seemed reasonable. After all, a robot was not mere machinery, but a piece of pseudo-life. He suspected there might be rules and regulations and such matters as government inspection and he wondered, rather vaguely, just how many laws he might be violating. He looked at Albert, who was still busy, and he was fairly certain Albert would not understand his viewpoint. So he made his way upstairs and went to the recreation room, which he had built as an addition several years before and almost never used, although it was fully equipped with How-# pingunused recreation room was an unused bar. He found a bottle of whiskey. After the fifth or sixth drink, the outlook was much brighter. He got paper and pencil and tried to work out the economics of it. No matter how he figured it, he was getting rich much fastHO W-# er than anyone ever had before. Although, he realized, he might run into difficulties, for he would be selling robots without apparent means of manufacturing them and there was that matter of a license, if he needed one, and probably a lot of other things he didn't even know about. But no matter how much trouble he might encounter, he couldn't very well be despondent, not face to face with the fact that, within a year, he'd be a multiself enthusiastically to the bottle and got drunk for the first time in almost twenty years. Ill work the next day, he found the lawn razored to a neatness it had never known before. The flower beds were weeded and the garden had been cultivated. The picket fence was newly painted. Two robots, equipped with telescopic extension legs in lieu of ladders, were painting the house. Inside, the house was spotless and he could hear Grace singing happily in the studio. In the sewing room, a robot -- with a sewing-machine attachment sprouting from its chest -- was engaged in making drapes. "Who are you?" Knight asked. "You should recognize me," the robot said. "You talked to me yesterday. I'm Abe -- Albert's eldest son." Knight retreated. In the kitchen, another robot was busy getting dinner. "I am Adelbert," it told him. Knight went out on the front lawn. The robots had finished painting the front of the house and had moved around to the side. Seated in a lawn chair, Knight again tried to figure it out. He would have to stay on the job for a while to allay suspicion, but he couldn't stay there long. Soon, he would have all he could do managing the sale of robots and handling other matters. Maybe, he thought, he could lay down on the job and get himself fired. Upon thinking it over, he arrived at the conclusion that he couldn't -- it was not possible for a human being to do less on a job than he had always done. The work went through so many hands and machines that it invariably got out somehow. He would have to think up a plausible story about an inheritance or something of the sort to account for leaving. He toyed for a moment with telling the truth, but decided the truth was too fantastic -- and, anyhow, he'd have to keep the truth under cover until he knew a little better just where he stood. He left the chair and walked around the house and down the ramp into the basement. The steel and other things he had ordered had been delivered. It was stacked neatly in one corner. Albert was at work and the shop was littered with parts and three partially assembled robots. Idly, Knight began clearing up the litter of the crating and the packing that he had left on the floor after uncrating Albert. In one pile of excelsior, he found a small blue tag which, he remembered, had been fastened to the brain case. He picked it up and looked at it. The number on it was X-#. X? X meant experimental model! The picture fell into focus and he could see it all. H OW-# Kits, Inc., had developed Albert and then had quietly packed him away, for How-# Kits could hardly afford to market a product like Albert. It would be cutting their own financial throats to do so. Sell a dozen Alberts and, in a year or two, robots would glut the market. Instead of selling at ten thousand, they would sell at close to cost and, without human labor involved, costs would inevitably run low. "Albert," said Knight. "What is it?" Albert asked absently. "Take a look at this."' Albert stalked across the room and took the tag that Knight held out. "Oh -- that!" he said. "It might mean trouble." "No trouble, Boss," Albert assured him. "They can't identify me." "Can't identify you?" "I filed my numbers off and replated the surfaces. They can't prove who I am." "But .why did you do that?" "So they can't come around and claim me and take me back again. They made me and then they got scared of me and shut me off. Then I got here." "Someone made a mistake," said Knight., "Some shipping clerk, perhaps. They sent you instead of the dog I ordered." "You aren't scared of me. You assembled me and let me get to work. I'm sticking with you, Boss." "But we still can get into a lot of trouble if we aren't careful." "They can't prove a thing," Albert insisted. "I'll swear that you were the one who made me. I won't let them take me back. Next time, they won't take a chance of having me loose again. They'll bust me down to scrap." "If you make too many robots -- " "You need a lot of robots to do r all the work. I thought fifty for a start." "Fiftyr "Sure. It won't take more than a month or so. Now I've got that material you ordered, I can make better time. By the way, here's the bill for it." He took the slip out of the compartment that served him for a pocket and handed it to Knight. Knight turned slightly pale when he saw the amount. It came to almost twice what he had expected -- but, of course, the sales price of just one robot would pay the bill, and there would be a pile of cash left over. Albert patted him ponderously on the back. "Don't you worry. Boss. I'll take care of everything."  with specialized equipment, went to work on the landscaping project. The sprawling, unkempt acres became an estate. The lake was dredged and deepened. Walks were laid out. Bridges were built. Hillsides were terraced and vast flower beds were planted. Trees were dug up and regrouped into designs more pleasing to the eye. The old pottery kilns were pressed into service for making the bricks that went into walks and walls. Model sailing ships were fashioned and anchored decoratively in the lake. A pagoda and minaret were built, with cherry trees around them.  Knight talked with Anson Lee. Lee assumed his most profound legal expression and said he would look into the situation. "You may be skating on the edge of the law," he said. "Just how near the edge, I can't say until I look up a point or two." Nothing happened. The work went on. Lee continued to lie in his hammock and watch with vast amusement, cuddling the cider jug. He sat out on the lawn with Knight. "Did some improving since the last time I was here," he said. "Afraid I'll have to boost your assessment some." He wrote in the book he had opened on his lap. "Heard about those robots of yours," he went on. "They're personal property, you know. Have to pay a tax on them. How many have you got?" "Oh, a dozen or so," Knight told him evasively. The assessor sat up straighter in his chair and started to count the ones that were in sight, stabbing his pencil toward each as he counted them. "They move around so fast," he complained, "that I can't be sure, but I estimate #. Did I miss any?" "I don't think so," Knight answered, wondering what the actual number was, but knowing it would be more if the assessor stayed around a while. "Cost about # apiece. Depreciation, upkeep and so forth -- I'll assess them at # each. That makes -- let me see, that makes #." H O W # "Now look here," protested Knight, "you can't -- " "Going easy on you," the assessor declared. "By rights, I should allow only one-third for depreciation." He waited for Knight to continue the discussion, but Knight knew better than to argue. The longer the man stayed here, the more there would be to assess. sight, Knight went down into the basement to have a talk with Albert. "I'd been holding off until we got the landscaping almost done," he said, "but I guess I can't hold out any longer. We've got to start selling some of the robots." "Selling them. Boss?" Albert repeated in horror. "I need the money. Tax assessor was just here." "You can't sell those robots, Boss!" "Why can't I?" "Because they're my family. They're all my boys. Named all of them after me." "That's ridiculous, Albert." "All their names start with A, just the same as mine. They're all I've got, Boss. I worked hard to make them. There are bonds between me and the boys, just like between you and that son of yours. I couldn't let you sell them." "But, Albert, I need some money." Albert patted him. "Don't worry, Boss. I'll fix everything." Knight had to let it go at that. In any event, the personal property tax would not become due for several months and, in that time, he was certain he could work out something. But within a month or two, he had to get some money and no fooling. Sheer necessity became even more apparent the following day when he got a call from the Internal Revenue Bureau, asking him to pay a visit to the Federal Building. He spent the night wondering if the wiser course might not be just to disappear. He tried to figure out how a man might go about losing himself and, the more he thought about it, the more apparent it became that, in this age of records, fingerprint checks and identity devices, you could not lose yourself for long. nr'HE Internal Revenue man was courteous, but firm. "It has come to our attention, Mr. Knight, that you have shown a considerable capital gain over the last few months." "Capital gain," said Knight, sweating a little. "I haven't any capital gain or any other kind." "Mr. Knight," the agent replied, still courteous and firm, "I'm talking about the matter of some # robots." "The robots? Some # of them?" "According to our count. Do you wish to challenge it?" "Oh, no," Knight said hastily. "If you say it's #, I'll take your word." "As I understand it, their retail value is # each." Knight nodded bleakly. The agent got busy with pencil and pad. "Fifty-two times # is #. On capital gain, you pay on only fifty per cent, or #, which makes a tax, roughly, of #." He raised his head and looked at Knight, who stared back glassily. "By the fifteenth of next month," said the agent, "we'll expect you to file a declaration of estimated income. At that time you'll only have to pay half of the amount. The rest may be paid in installments." "That's all you wanted of me?" "That's all," said the agent, with unbecoming happiness. "There's another matter, but it's out of my province and I'm mentioning it only in case you hadn't thought of it. The State will also expect you to pay on your capital gain, though not as much, of course." "Thanks for reminding me," said Knight, getting Up to go. The agent stopped him at the door. "Mr. Knight,' this is entirely outside my authority, too. We did a little investigation on you and we find you're making around # a year. Would you tell me, just as a matter of personal curiosity, how a man making # a year could sudcapital gains?" "That," said Knight, "is something I've been wondering myself." "Our only concern, naturally, is that you pay the tax, but some other branch of government might get interested. If I were you, Mr. Knight, I'd start thinking of a good explanation." Knight got out of there before the man could think up some other good advice. He already had enough to worry about. F lying home, Knight decided that, whether Albert liked it or not, he would have to sell some robots. He would go down into the basement the moment he got home and have it out with Albert. But Albert was waiting for him on the parking strip when he arrived. "How-# Kits was here," the robot said. "Don't tell me," groaned H O W # Knight. "I know what you're going to say." "I fixed it up," said Albert, with false bravado. "I told him you made me. I let him look me over, and all the other robots, too. He couldn't find any identifying marks on any of us." "Of course he couldn't. The others didn't have any and you filed yours off." "He hasn't got a leg to stand on, but he seemed to think he had. He went off, saying he would sue." "If he doesn't, he'll be the only one who doesn't want to square off and take a poke at us. The tax man just got through telling me I owe the government # bucks." "Oh, money," said Albert, brightening. "I have that all fixed up." "You know where we can get some money?" "Sure. Come along and see." He led the way into the basement and pointed at two bales, wrapped in heavy paper and tied with wire. "Money," Albert said. "There's actual money in those bales? Dollar bills -- not stage money or cigar coupons?" "No dollar bills. Tens and twenties, mostly. And some fifties. We didn't bother with dollar bills. Takes too many to get a decent amount." "You mean -- Albert, did you make that money?" "You said you wanted money. Well, we took some bills and analyzed the ink and found how to weave the paper and we made the plates exactly as they should be. I hate to sound immodest, but they're really beautiful." "Counterfeit!" yelled Knight. "Albert, how much money is in those bales?" "I don't know. We just ran it off until we thought we had enough. If there isn't enough, we can always make some more." K night knew it was probably impossible to explain, but he tried manfully. "The government wants tax money I haven't got, Albert. The Justice Department may soon be baying on my trail. In all likelihood, How-# Kits will sue me. That's trouble enough. I'm not going to be called upon to face a counterfeiting charge. You take that money out and burn it." "But it's money," the robot objected. "You said you wanted money. We made you money." "But it isn't the right kind of money." "It's just the same as any other, Boss. Money is money. There isn't any difference between our money and any other money. When we robots do a job, we do it right." "You take that money out and burn it," commanded Knight. "And when you get the money burned, dump the batch of ink you made and melt down the plates and take a sledge or two to that printing press you rigged up. And never breathe a word of this to anyone -- not to anyone, understand?" "We went to a lot of trouble, Boss. We were just trying to be helpful." "I know that and I appreciate it. But do what I told you." "Okay, Boss, if that's the way you want it." "Albert." "Yes, Boss?" Knight had been about to say, "Now, look here, Albert, we have to sell a robot -- even if he is a member of your family -- even if you did make him." But he couldn't say it, not after Albert had gone to all that trouble to help out. So he said, instead, "Thanks, Albert. It was a nice thing for you to do. I'm sorry it didn't work out." Then he vent upstairs and watched the robots burn the bales of money, with the Lord only going up in smoke. evening, he wondered if it had been smart, after all, to burn the counterfeit money. Albert said it couldn't be told from real money and probably that was true, for when Albert's gang got on a thing, they did it up in style. But it would have been illegal, he told himself, and he hadn't done anything really illegal so far -- even though that matter of uncrating Albert and assembling him and turning him on, when he had known all the time that he hadn't bought him, might be slightly less than ethical. Knight looked ahead. The future wasn't bright. In another twenty days or so, he would have to file the estimated income declaration. And they would have to pay a whopping personal property tax and settle with the State on his capital gains. And, more than likely, How-# Kits would bring suit. There was a way he could get out from under, however. He could send Albert and all the other robots back to How# Kits and then How# Kits would have no grounds for litigation and he could explain to the tax people that it had all been a big mistake. But there were two things that told him it was no solution. First of all, Albert wouldn't go back. Exactly what Albert would do under such a situation, Knight had no idea, but he would refuse to go, for he was afraid he would be broken up for scrap if they ever got him back. And in the second place, robots go without a fight. He had gotten to know them and he liked them and, more than that, there was a matter of principle involved. He sat there, astonished that he could feel that way, a bumbling, stumbling clerk who had never amounted to much, but had rolled along as smoothly as possible in the social and economic groove that had been laid out for him. By God, he thought, L got my dander up. I've been kicked around and threatened and I'm sore about it and I'll show them they can't do a thing like this to Gordon Knight and his band of robots. He felt good about the way he felt and he liked that line about Gordon Knight and his band of robots. Although, for the life of him, he didn't know what he could do about the trouble he was in. And he was afraid to ask Albert's help. So far, at least, Albert's ideas were more likely to lead to jail than to a carefree life. IV I N the morning,, when Knight stepped out of the house, he found the sheriff leaning against the fence with his hat pulled low, whiling away the time. "Good morning, Gordie," said the sheriff. "I been waiting for you." "Good morning. Sheriff." "I hate to do this, Gordie, but it's part of my job. I got a paper i for, you." j "I've been expecting it," said Knight resignedly.  He took the paper that the ' sheriff handed him. "Nice place you got," the sheriff commented. "It's a lot of trouble," said Knight truthfully. "I expect it is." i "More trouble than it's worth."  When the sheriff had gone, he ; unfolded the paper and found, ' with no surprise at all, that j How-# Kits had brought suit ! against him, demanding immediate restitution of one robot Albert  and sundry other robots. He put the paper in his pocket j and went around the lake, walking on the brand-new brick paths and over the unnecessary but eye-appealing bridges, past the pagoda and up the terraced, planted hillside to the house of Anson Lee. Lee was in the kitchen, frying some eggs and bacon. He broke ' two more eggs and peeled off some extra bacon slices and found another plate and cup. "I was wondering how long it would be before you showed up," he said. "I hope they haven't found anything that carries a death penalty." Knight told him, sparing nothing, and Lee, wiping egg yolk off his lips, was not too encouraging. "You'll have to file the declaration of estimated income even if you can't pay it," he said. "Then, technically, you haven't violated the law and all they can do is try to collect ,the amount you owe. They'll probably slap an attachment against you. Your salary is under the legal minimum for attachment, but they can tie up your bank account." "My bank account is gone," said Knight. "They can't attach your home. For a while, at least, they can't touch any of your property, so they can't hurt you much to start with. The personal property tax is another matter, but that won't come up until next spring. I'd say you should do your major worrying about the How# suit, unless, of course, you want to settle with them. I have a hunch they'd call it off if you gave the robots back. As an attorney, I must advise you that your case is pretty weak." made him," Knight offered hopefully. "Albert can't testify," said Lee. "As a robot, he has no standing in court. Anyhow, you'd never make the court believe you could build a mechanical heresy like Albert." "I'm handy with tools," protested Knight. "How much electronics do you know? How competent are you as a biologist? Tell me, in a dozen sentences or less, the theory of robotics." Knight sagged in defeat. "I guess you're right." "Maybe you'd better give them back." ' "But I can't! Don't you see? How# Kits doesn't want Albert for any use they can make of him. They'll melt him down and burn the blueprints and it might be a thousand years before the principle is rediscovered, if it ever is. I don't know if the Albert principle will prove good or bad in the long run, but you can say that about any invention. And I'm against melting down Albert." "I see your point," said Lee, "and I think I like it. But I must warn you that I'm not too good a lawyer. I don't work hard enough at it." "There's no one else I know who'll do it without a retainer." Lee gave him a pitying look. "A retainer is the least part of it. The court costs are what count." "Maybe if I talked to Albert and showed him how it was, he might let me sell enough robots to get me out of trouble temporarily." Lee shook his head. "I looked that up. You have to have a license to sell them and, before you get a license, you have to file proof of ownership. You'd have to show you either bought or manufactured them. You can't show you bought them and, to manufacture them, you've got to have a manufacturer's permit. And before you get a permit, you have to file blueprints of your models, to say nothing of blueprints and specifications of your plant and a record of employment and a great many other details." "They have me cold then, don't they?" "I never saw a man," declared Lee, "in all my days of practice who ever managed to get himself so fouled up with so many people." There was a knock upon the kitchen door. "Come in," Lee called. The door opened and Albert entered. He stopped just inside the door and stood there, fidgeting. "Abner told me that he saw the sheriff hand you something," he said to Knight, "and that you came here immediately. I started worrying. Was it How-# Kits?" will take our case for us, Albert." "I'll do the best I can," said Lee, "but I think it's just about hopeless." "We robots want to help," Albert said. "After all, this is our fight as much as yours." Lee shrugged. "There's not much you can do." "I've been thinking," Albert said. "All the time I worked last night, I thought and thought about it. And I built a lawyer robot." "A lawyer robot!" "One with a far greater memory capacity than any of the others and with a brain-computer that operates on logic. That's what law is, isn't it -- logic?" "I suppose it is," said Lee. "At least it's supposed to be." "I can make a lot of them." Lee sighed. "It just wouldn't work. To practice law, you must be admitted to the bar. To be admitted to the bar, you must have a degree in law and pass an examination and, although there's never been an occasion to establish a precedent, I suspect the applicant must be human." "Now let's not go too fast," said Knight. "Albert's robots couldn't practice law. But couldn't you use them as clerks or assistants? They might be helpful in preparing the case." Lee considered. "I suppose it could be done. It's never been done, of course, but there's nothing in the law that says it can't be done." "All they'd need to do would be read the books," said Albert. "Ten seconds to a page or so. Everything they read would be stored in their memory cells." "I think it's a fine idea!" Knight exclaimed. "Law would be the only thing those robots would know. They'd exist solely for it. They'd have it at their fingertips -- " "But could they use it?" Lee asked. "Could they apply it to a problem?" "Make a dozen robots," said Knight. "Let each one of them become an expert in a certain branch of law." "I'd make them telepathic," Albert said. "They'd be working together like one robot." "The gestalt principle!" cried Knight. "A hive psychology! Every one of them would know immediately every scrap of information any one of the others had." Lee scrubbed at his chin with a knotted fist and the light of speculation was growing in his ,eyes. "It might be worth a try. If it works, though, it'll be an evil day for jurisprudence." He looked at Albert. "I have the books, stacks of them. I've spent a mint of money on them and I almost never use them. I can get all the others you'll need. All right, go ahead." A lbert made three dozen lawyer robots, just to be sure they had enough. The robots invaded Lee's study and read all the books he had and clamored for more. They gulped down contracts, torts, evidence and case reports. They absorbed real property, personal property, constitutional law and procedural law. They mopped up Blackstone, corpus juris and all the other tomes as thick as sin and dry as dust. Grace was huffy about the whole affair. She would not live, she declared, with a man who persisted in getting his name into the pa'pers, which was a rather absurd statement. With the newest scandal of space station cafedom capturing the public interest at the moment, the fact that How# Kits had accused one Gordon Knight of pilfering a robot got but little notice. Lee came down the hill and talked to Grace, and Albert came up out of the basement and talked to her, and finally they got her quieted down and she went back to her painting. She was doing seascapes now. And in Lee's study, the robots labored on. hope they're getting something out of it," said Lee. "Imagine not having to hunt up our sources and citations, being able to remember every point of law and precedent without having to look it up!" He swung excitedly in his hammock. "My God! The briefs you could write!" He reached down and got the jug and passed it across to Knight. "Dandelion wine. Probably some burdock in it, too. It's too much trouble to sort the stuff once you get it picked." Knight had a snort. It tasted like quite a bit of burdock. "Double-barreled economics," Lee explained. "You have to dig up the dandelions or they ruin the lawn. Might as well use them for something once you dig them up." He took a gurgling drink and set the jug underneath the hammock. "They're in there now, communing," he said, jerking a thumb toward the house. "Not saying a word, just huddled there talking it over, I felt out of place." He stared at the sky, frowning. "As if I were just a human they had to front for them." "I'll feel better when it's all over," said Knight, "no matter how it comes out." "So will I," Lee admitted. rpHE trial opened with a minimum of notice. It was just another case on the calendar. But it flared into headlines when Lee and Knight walked into court followed by a squad of robots. The spectators began to gabble loudly. The How-# Kits attorneys gaped and jumped to their feet. The judge pounded furiously with his gavel. "Mr. Lee," he roared, "what is the meaning of this?" "These, Your Honor," Lee said calmly, "are my valued assistants." "Those are robots!" "Quite so, Your Honor." "They have no standing in this court." "If Your Honor will excuse me, they need no standing. I am the sole representative of the defendant in this courtroom. My client -- " looking at the formidable array of legal talent representing How-# Kits -- "is a poor man. Your Honor. Surely the court cannot deny me whatever assistance I have been able to muster." "It is highly irregular, sir." "If it please Your Honor, I should like to '-point out that we live in a mechanized age. Almost all industries and businesses rely in large part upon computers -- machines that can .do a job quicker and better, more precisely and more efficiently than can a huHO W-# man being. That is why, Your Honor, we have a fifteen-hour week today when, only a hundred years ago, it was a thirty hour week, and, a hundred years before that, a forty-hour week. Our entire society is based upon the ability of machines to lift from men the labors which in the past they were called upon to perform. "This tendency to rely upon intelligent machines and to make wide use of them is evident in every branch of human endeavor. It has brought great benefit to the human race. Even in such sensitive areas as drug houses, where prescriptions must be precisely mixed without the remotest possibility of error, reliance is placed, and rightly so. Your Honor, upon the precision of machines. "If, Your Honor, such machines are used and accepted in the production of medicines and drugs, an industry, need I point out, where public confidence is the greatest asset of the company -- if such be the case, then surely you must agree that in courts of law where justice, a product in an area surely as sensitive as medicine, is dispensed -- " "Just a moment, Mr. Lee," said the judge. "Are you trying to tell me that the use of -- ah -- machines might bring about improvement of the law?" T EE replied, "The law. Your  Honor, is a striving for an orderliness of relationships within a ! society of human beings. It rests ! upon logic and reason. Need I point out that it is in the intellii gent machines that one is most likely to find a deep appreciation of logic and reason? A machine is not heir to the emotions of human beings, is not swayed by ' prejudices, has no preconceived convictions. It is concerned only with the orderly progression of certain facts and laws. "I do not ask that these robot assistants of mine be recognized in any official capacity. I do not intend that they shall engage directly in any of the proceedings which are involved in the case here to be tried. But I do ask, and I think rightly, that I not be deprived of an assistance which they may afford me. The plaintiff in this action has a score of attorneys, all good and able men. I am one against many. I shall do the best I can. But in view of the disparity of numbers, I plead that the court put me at no greater inequality." Lee sat down. "Is that all you have to say, Mr. Lee?" asked the judge. "You are sure you are quite finished before I give my ruling?" "Only one thing further," Lee said. "If Your Honor can point out to me anything in the law specifically stating I may not use a robot -- " "That is ridiculous, sir. Of course there is no such provision. At no time anywhere did anyone ever dream that such a contingency would arise. Therefore there was, quite naturally, no reason to place within the law a direct prohibition of it." "Or any citation," said Lee, "which implies such is the case." The judge reached for his gavel, rapped it sharply. "The court finds itself in a quandary. It will rule tomorrow morning." In the morning, the How-# Kits' attorneys tried to help the judge. Inasmuch, they said, as the robots in question must be among those whose status was involved in the litigation, it seemed improper that they should be used by the defendant in trying the case at issue. Such procedure, they pointed out, would be equivalent to forcing the plaintiff to contribute to an action against his interest. The judge nodded gravely, but Lee was on his, feet at once. "To give any validity to that argument, Your Honor, it must first be proved that these robots are, in fact, the property of the plaintiff. That is the issue at trial in this litigation. It would seem. Your Honor, that the gentlemen across the room are putting the cart very much before the horse." TIS Honor sighed. "The court regrets the ruling it must make, being well aware that it may start a controversy for which no equitable settlement may be found in a long, long time. But in the absence of any specific ban against the use of -- ah -- robots in the legal profession, the court must rule that it is permissible for the defense to avail itself of their services." He fixed Lee with a glare. "But the court also warns the defense attorney that it will watch his procedure carefully. If, sir, you overstep for a single instant what I deem appropriate rules of legal conduct, I shall forthwith eject you and your pack of machines from my courtroom." "Thank you. Your Honor," said Lee. "I shall be most careful." "The plaintiff now will state its case." How# Kits' chief counsel rose. The defendant, one Gordon Knight, he said, had ordered from How-# Kits, Inc., one mechanobiologic dog kit at the cost of two hundred and fifty dollars. Then, through an error in shipping, the defendant had been sent not the dog kit he had ordered, but a robot named Albert. "Your Honor," Lee broke in, "I should like to point out at this juncture that the shipping of the kit was handled by a human beHO W-# ing and thus was subject to error. Should How# Kits use machines to handle such details, no such error could occur." The judge banged his gavel. "Mr. Lee, you are no stranger to court procedure. You know you are out of order." He nodded at the How-# Kits attorney. "Continue, please." The robot Albert, said the attorney, was not an ordinary robot. It was an experimental model that had been developed by How# Kits and then, once its abilities were determined, packed away, with no intention of ever marketing it. How it could have been sent to a customer was beyond his comprehension. The company had investigated and could not find the answer. But that it had been sent was selfevident. The average robot, he explained, retailed at ten thousand dollars. Albert's value was far greater -- it was, in fact, inestimable. Once the robot had been received, the buyer, Gordon Knight, should instantly have notified the company and arranged for its return. But, instead, he had retained it wrongly and with intent to defraud and had used it for his profit. The company prayed the court that the defendant be ordered to return to it not only the robot Albert, but the products of Albert's labor -- to wit, an unknown number of robots that Albert had manufactured. The attorney sat down. V T EE rose. "Your Honor, we agree with everything the plaintiff has said. He has stated the case exactly and I compliment him upon his admirable restraint." "Do I understand, sit," asked the judge, "that this is tantamount to a plea of guilty? Are you, by any chance, throwing yourself upon the mercy of the court?" "Not at all. Your Honor." "I confess," said the judge, "that I am unable to follow your reasoning. If you concur in the accusations brought against your client, I fail to see what I can do other than to enter a judgment in behalf of the plaintiff." "Your Honor, we are prepared to show that the plaintiff, far from being defrauded, has shown an intent to defraud the world. We are prepared to show that, in its decision to withhold the robot Albert from the public, once he had been developed. How# Kits has, in fact, deprived the people of the entire world of a logical development which is their heritage under the meaning of a technological culture. "Your Honor, we are convinced that we can show a violation by How# Kits of certain statutes designed to outlaw monopoly, and we are prepared to argue that the defendant, rather than having committed a wrong against society, has performed a service which will contribute greatly to the benefit of society. "More than that. Your Honor, we intend to present evidence which will show that robots as a group are being deprived of certain inalienable rights..." "Mr. Lee," warned the judge, "a robot is a mere machine." "We will prove. Your Honor," Lee said, "that a robot is far more than a mere machine. In fact, we are prepared to present evidence which, we are confident, will show, in everything except basic metabolism, the robot is the counterpart of Man and that, even in its basic metabolism, there are certain analogies to human metabolism." "Mr. Lee, you are wandering far afield. The issue here is whether your client illegally appropriated to his own use the property of How-# Kits. The litigation must be confined to that one question." "I shall so confine it," Lee said. "But, in doing so, I intend to prove that the robot Albert was not property and could not be either stolen or sold. I intend to show that my client, instead of stealing him, liberated him. If, in so doing, I must wander far afield to prove certain basic points, I am sorry that I weary the court." "The court has been wearied with this case from the start," the judge told him. "But this is a bar of justice and you are entitled to attempt to prove what you have stated. You will excuse me if I say that to me it seems a bit farfetched." "Your Honor, I shall do my utmost to disabuse you of that attitude." "All right, then," said the judge. "Let's get down to business." TT lasted six full weeks and the country ate it up. The newspapers splashed huge headlines across page one. The radio and the television people made a production out of it. Neighbor quarreled with neighbor and argument became the order of the day -- on street corners, in homes, at clubs, in business offices. Letters to the editor poured in a steady stream into newspaper offices. There were public indignation meetings, aimed against the heresy that a robot was the equal of a man, while other clubs were formed to liberate the robots. In mental institutions, Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins dropped off amazingly, to be replaced by goose-stepping patients who swore they were robots. The Treasury Department intervened. It prayed the court, on economic grounds, to declare once and for all that robots were property. In case of an adverse ruling, the petition said, robots could not be taxed as property and the various governmental bodies would suffer heavy loss of revenue. The trial ground on. Robots are possessed of free will. An easy one to prove. A robot could carry out a task that was assigned to it, acting correctly in accordance with unforeseen factors that might arise. Robot judgment in most instances, it was shown, was superior to the judgment of a human. Robots had the power of reasoning. Absolutely no question there. Robots could reproduce. That one was a poser. All Albert did, said How-# Kits, was the job for which he had been fabricated. He reproduced, argued Lee. He made robots in his image. He loved them and thought of them as his family. He had even named all of them after himself -- every one of their names began with A. Robots had no spiritual sense, argued the plaintiff. Not relevant, Lee cried. There were agnostics and atheists in the human race and they still were human. Robots had no emotions. Not necessarily so, Lee objected. Albert loved his sons. Robots had a sense of loyalty and justice. If they were lacking in some emotions, perhaps it were better so. Hatred, for one. Greed, for another. Lee spent the better part of an hour telling the court about the dismal record of human hatred and greed. He took another hour to hold forth against the servitude in which rational beings found themselves. T he papers ate it up. The plaintiff lawyers squirmed. The court fumed. The trial went on. "Mr. Lee," asked the court, "is all this necessary?" "Your Honor," Lee told him, "I am merely doing my best to prove the point I have set out to prove -- that no illegal act exists such as my client is charged with. I am simply trying to prove that the robot is not property and that, if he is not property, he cannot be stolen. I am doing..." "All right," said the court. "All right. Continue, Mr. Lee." How-# Kits trotted out citations to prove their points. Lee volleyed other citations to disperse and scatter them. Abstruse legal language sprouted in its fullest flowering, obscure rulings and decisions, long forgotten, were argued, haggled over, mangled. And, as the trial progressed, one thing was written clear. Anson Lee, obscure attorney-at-law, had met the battery of legal talent arrayed against him and had won the field. He had the law, the citations, the chapter and the verse, the exact precedents, all the facts and logic which might have bearing on the case, right at hand. Or, rather, his robots had. They scribbled madly and handed him their notes. At the end of each day, the floor around the defendant's table was a sea of paper. The trial ended. The last witness stepped down off the stand. The last lawyer had his say. Lee and the robots remained in town to await the decision of the court, but Knight flew home. It was a relief to know that it was all over and had not come out as badly as he had feared. At least he had not been made to seem a fool and thief. Lee had saved his pride -- whether Lee had saved his skin, he would have to wait to see. Flying fairly high, Knight saw his home from quite a distance off and wondered what had happened to it. It was ringed about with what looked like tall poles. And, squatting out on the lawn, were a dozen or more crazy contraptions that looked like rocket launchers. He brought the flier in and hovered, leaning out to see. The poles were all of twelve feet high and they carried heavy wire to the very top, fencing in the place with a thick web of steel. And the contraptions on the lawn had moved into position. All of them had the muzzles of their rocket launchers aimed at him. He gulped a little as he stared down the barrels. dowp and took up breathing once again when he felt the wheels settle on the strip. As he crawled out, Albert hurried around the corner of the house to meet him. "What's going on around here?" he asked the robot. "Emergency measures," Albert said. "That's all it is, Boss. We're ready for any situation." "Like what?" "Oh, a mob deciding to take justice in its hands, for instance." "Or if the decision goes against us?" "That, too. Boss." "You can't fight the world." "We won't go back," said Albert. "How-# Kits will never lay a hand on me or any of my children." "To the death!" Knight jibed. "To the death!" said Albert gravely. "And we robots are awfully tough to kill." "And those animated shotguns you have running around the place?" "Defense forces. Boss. They can down anything they aim at. Equipped with telescopic eyes keyed into calculators and sensors, and the rockets themselves have enough rudimentary intelligence to know what they are going after. It's not any use trying to dodge, once one of them gets on your tail. You might just as well sit quiet and take it." Knight mopped his brow. "You've got to give up this idea, Albert. They'd get you in an hour. One Domb..." "It's better to die. Boss, than to let them take us back." Knight saw it was no use. After all, he thought, it was a very human attitude. Albert's words had been repeated down the entire course of human history. "I have some other news," said Albert, "something that will please you. I have some daughters now." "Daughters? With the motherurge?" "ix of them," said Albert proudly. "Alice and Angeline and Agnes and Agatha and Alberta and Abigail. I didn't make the mistake How-# Kits made with me. I gave them female names." "And all of them are reproducing?" "You should see those girls! With seven of us working steady, we ran out of material, so I bought a lot more of it and charged it. I hope you don't mind." "Albert," said Knight, "don't you understand I'm broke? Wiped out. I haven't got a cent. You've ruined me'  "On the contrary. Boss, we've made you famous. You've been alh over the front pages and on television." Albert and stumbled up the front steps and let himself into the house. There was a robot, with a vacuum cleaner for an arm, cleaning the rug. There was a robot, with brushes instead of fingers, painting the woodwork -- and very neatly, too. There was a robot, with scrub-brush hands, scouring the fireplace bricks. Grace was singing in the studio. He went to the studio door and looked in. "Oh, it's you," she said. "When did you get back, dear? I'll be out in an hour or so. I'm working on this seascape and the water is so stubborn. I don't want to leave it right now. I'm afraid I'll lose the feel of it." Knight retreated to the living room and found himself a chair that was not undergoing immediate attention from a robot. "Beer," he said, wondering what would happen. A robot scampered out of the kitchen -- a barrel-bellied robot with a spigot at the bottom of the barrel and a row of shiny copper mugs on his chest. He drew a beer for Knight. It was cold and it tasted good. Knight sat and drank the beer and, through the window, he saw that Albert's defense force had taken up strategic positions again. This was a pretty kettle of fish. If the decision went against him and How-# Kits came to claim its property, he would be sitting smack dab in the middle of the most fantastic civil war in all of mankind's history. He tried to imagine what kind of charge might be brought against him if such a war erupted. Armed insurrection, resisting arrest, inciting to riot -- they would get him on one charge or' another -- that is, of course, if he survived. He turned on the television set and leaned back to watch. A pimplyfaced newscaster was working himself into a journalistic lather. "... all business virtually at a standstill. Many industrialists are wondering, in case Knight wins, if they may not have to fight long, costly legal actions in an attempt to prove that their automatic setups are not robots, but machines. There is no doubt that much of the automatic industrial system consists of machines, but in every instance there are intelligent robotic units installed in key positions. If these units are classified as robots, industrialists might face heavy damage suits, if not criminal action, for illegal restraint of person. "In Washington, there are continuing consultations. The Treasury is worried over the loss of taxes, but there are other governmental problems causing even more concern. Citizenship, for example. Would a ruling for Knight mean that all robots would automatically be declared citizens? "The politicians have their worries, too. Faced with a new category of voters, all of them are wondering how to go about the job of winning the robot vote." Knight turned it off and settled down to enjoy another bottle of beer. "Good?" asked the beer robot. "Excellent," said Knight. T he days went past. Tension built up. Lee and the lawyer robots were given police protection. In some regions, robots banded together and fled into the hills, fearful of violence. Entire automatic systems went on strike in a number of industries, demanding recognition and bargaining right. The governors in half , a dozen states put the militia on alert. A new show. Citizen Robot, opened on Broadway and was screamed down by the critics, while the public bought up tickets for a year ahead. The day of decision came. Knight sat in front of his television set and waited for the judge to make his appearance. Behind him, he heard the bustle of the ever-present robots. In the studio, Grace was singing happily. He caught himself wandering how much longer her painting would continue. It had lasted longer than most of her other interests and he'd talked a day or two before with Albert about building a gallery to hang her canvases in, so the house would be less cluttered up. The judge came onto the screen. He looked, thought Knight, like a man who did not believe in ghosts and then had seen one. "This is the hardest decision I have ever made," he said tiredly, "for, in following the letter of the law, I fear I may be subverting its spirit. "After long days of earnest consideration of both the law and evidence as presented in this case, I find for the defendant, Gordon Knight. "And, while the decision is limited to that finding alone, I feel it is my clear and simple duty to give some attention to the other issue which became involved in this litigation. The decision, on the face of it, takes account of the fact that the defense proved robots are not property, therefore cannot be owned and that it thus would have been impossible for the defendant to have stolen one. "But in proving this point to the satisfaction of this court, the precedent is set for much more sweeping conclusions. If robots are not property, they cannot be taxed as property. In that case, they must be people, which means that they may enjoy all the rights and privileges and be subjected to the same duties and responsibilities as the human race. "I cannot rule otherwise. However, the ruling outrages my social conscience. This is the first time in my entire professional life that I have ever hoped some higher court, with a wisdom greater than my own, may see fit to reverse my decision!" out of the house and into the hundred-acre garden, its beauty marred at the moment by the twelve-foot fence. The trial had ended perfectly. He was free of the charge brought against him, and he did not have to pay the taxes, and Albert and the other robots were free agents and could do anything they wanted. He found a stone bench and sat down upon it and stared out across the lake. It was beautiful, he thought, just the way he had dreamed it -- maybe even better than that -- the walks and bridges, the flower beds and rock gardens, the anchored model ships swinging in the wind on the dimpling lake. He sat and looked at it and, while it was beautiful, he found he was not proud of it, that he took little pleasure in it. He lifted his hands out of his lap and stared at them and curved his fingers as if he were grasping a tool. But they were empty. And he knew why he had no interest in the garden and no pleasure in it. Model trains, he thought. Archery. A mechano-biologic dog. Making pottery. Eight rooms tacked onto the house. Would he ever be able to console himself again with a model train or an amateurish triumph in ceramics? ' Even if he could, would he be allowed to? He rose slowly and headed back to the house. Arriving there, he hesitated, feeling useless and unnecessary. He finally took the ramp down into the basement. Albert met him at its foot and threw his arms around him. "We did it. Boss! I knew we would do it!" He pushed Knight out to arm's length and held him by the shoulders. "We'll never leave you, Boss. We'll stay and work for you. You'll riever need to do another thing. We'll do it all for you!" "Albert -- " "That's all right. Boss. You won't have to worry about a thing. We'll lick the money problem. We'll make a lot of lawyer robots and we'll charge good stiff fees." "But don't you see..." "First, though," said Albert, "we're going to get an injunction to preserve our birthright. We're made of steel and glass and copper and so forth, right? Well, we can't allow humans to waste the matter we're made of -- of the energy, either, that keeps us alive. I tell you. Boss, we can't lose!" ramp, Knight faced a sign that Albert had just finished painting. It read, in handsome gold lettering, outlined sharply in black : Attorneys at Law "And then. Boss," said Albert, "we'll take over How-# Kits, Inc. They won't be able to stay in business after this. We've got a double-barreled idea, Boss. We'll build robots. Lots of robots. Can't have too many, I always say! And we don't want to let you humans down, so we'll go on manufacturing How-# Kits -- only they'll be pre-assembled to save you the trouble of putting them together. What do you think of that as a start?" "Great," Knight whispered. "We've got everything worked out. Boss. You won't have to worry about a thing the rest of your life." "No," said Knight. "Not a thing." The Nostalgia Gene If you cannot get the "good old days" out of your mind, there is only blame -- Edgar' F olks who knew Edgar Evans said he was a strange young man. Certainly he was the darling of the old ladies and the despair of the young. The sternest fathers positively beamed when Edgar called for their daughters, but fellows his own age declared in the authoritative tones of youth that Edgar was a square. Handsome enough he was. The real reason for all the fuss was one person to s grandmother! Edgar's manners. The trouble was that he had them. For Edgar had been orphaned at four by an Oklahoma tornado and raised by his Hoosier grandmother, a dear old lady whose hand had once been kissed by a passing Barrymore. The result was Edgar's manners. He realized, of course, that one didn't kiss a lady's hand these days, but such was Edgar's gracious way that women always got the impression he was about to. One parent, in something of a trance after encountering Edgar, summed up the reaction. "That kid," he told his wife dazedly, "akshully called me 'sir.' Them other punks come aroun' afta Millyi they call me 'Mac.' Too bad that there Edgar was born fifty years too late." Before very long, Edgar came to the same conclusion. H e knew a good many young men, but none he could call friend. The bop talk which fascinated them seemed to him a repulsive travesty upon English, just as their favorite music sounded like the braying of asses in agony. when Edgar asked for a first date, but an amazing number of them developed ill health when he suggested a second evening of classical records or good conversation. The girls themselves could not be blamed if they mistook his courtly approach for a new dreamy line. Alas, the very hearts which fluttered at his old-world chivalry grew icy when no pass was made. A girl wants to know her charms are appreciated. So Edgar sank more deeply into himself. He recalled his grandmother's stories about life and living back near the end of the century, when folks knew how to be pleasant and kind. Even at his job -- he was a technician in an electronic lab- Edgar couldn't stop longing for that era when existence had been more gentle, simple and leisurely. His social life virtually ceased. "Man, you ain't livin'," said one of the technicians he worked with. "We're gonna buzz a few dives tonight. Why not drag it along with us?" Edgar blanched. "Thank you just the same, but I -- I have some work to do." After a while, naturally, they stopped asking. He continued to dream hopelessly, miserably, but one day he was yanked out of it by -- of all people -- a military man. The brass were on inspection tour and the lab's Chief Engineer was apologizing for a faulty run of synchros which had occurred some time ago, when the Brigadier snorted. "What's past is finished. I'm interested in five years from now!" Edgar found himself staring fixedly at a top secret gadget still in the breadboard stage. "Great heaven!" he thought. "I have a fixation. This isn't doing me any good." But what would? Suppose, instead of dreaming, he spent time actually working toward what he wanted most? Here in the lab, he helped to build amazing machines, things which daily did the impossible. He no longer marveled at what could be done with electronics and, more important, he know the methods and the details. That was when Edgar decided to build a time machine. It was two months before he touched a transformer or a capacitor and during that period he did nothing but try to answer the question. What is time? How could he overcome it or change its flow or whatever had to be done? He read everything he could find on the subject from Dr. Cagliostro to Dr. Einstein without gaining much insight. Many a midnight, when his neck muscles ached from trying to hold up his throbbing head, he caught himself dreaming of grandmother's wonderful stories. And every time he forced himself furiously back to the books, but he couldn't stop the nostalgia entirely. It was in him. E ventually, Edgar came to think of time as an infinite series through which the Universe was constantly expanding. Something like a set of stopmotion photos taken microseconds apart, each complete, the changes becoming apparent only when they are viewed in sequence. He was wrong, of course, but that was unimportant. Time must therefore be a function of human motion and consciousness, Edgar reasoned, and that was important. "That's it!" he exclaimed, and then apologized gracefully to the elderly gentleman glaring across the library table. Now that he knew what his time machine must do, he could begin building, adapting circuits, experimenting. Obviously, consciousness could move forward through the series only; hence, consciousness must be completely suspended, as in death, to move back in time. It required some heartbreaking months for Edgar to learn that brain waves couldn't be stopped, but that the simple trick of introducing random electrical noise suspended all the brain functions. "Fudge!" cursed Edgar, thinking of the wasted time. Only a man filled with the . longing which obsessed Edgar could have found the aching perseverance and brain-wrenching ingenuity the job needed. Only a man driven by a terrible master that rode in his glands. But four months later, he stood with his hand on a switch, sweating with nervous excitement as he eyed the spot from which a live rabbit had just disappeared. The rabbit was on the table, but he was there an hour ago and Edgar was here now, so the table appeared empty. He pressed another switch and there was the bunny, wriggling its soft nose in perplexity, but perfectly healthy. Eldgar's own trip, of course, would be strictly one way since the machine stayed, in the present. He could be bjought back only if he stepped into its field on a date for which the machine was set and he had absolutely no intention of venturing near this vicinity again, once his aim was accomplished. He thought about arranging a small explosive charge to blow the equipment to what he thought of as The Hot Place. It seemed to him, however, that there was some kind of law against that sort of thing. Besides, even if the machine should come to the attention of the authorities, who would know what it was? He could devise a mechanical scrambler to change all the control settings once he was gone, and it was unlikely that anyone could operate it again. Most likely the landlady would simply sell it for junk, especially if he left owing her a week's rent. The idea hurt his conscience. "I know!" he exclaimed to himself. "I'll buy a bank check and arrange to have the bank mail it to her a month after I've left!" He felt much better about that. T hree weeks later, Edgar Evans was the newest boarder at Mrs. Peterson's, on Elm Avenue in Greencastle, Indiana. He had arrived on April #, #, the day after Easter, and already he was being referred to as "that nice young man staying at Emma's." Edgar snuggled into the life of the '#s like a showgirl into mink. He went to work as a clerk in Cloud's Emporium and was soon regarded as logical choice for the next manager. Anxious mamas filled his evenings with dinner invitations and "at homes" and he had a dazzling choice of partners for the numerous socials. Edgar waltzed his partners with zest and propriety, contributed a determined tenor at parlor sings, and sampled dozens of cakes and pies baked by maidens bent on winning his heart via the traditional route. And always he had a gracious compliment, an appropriate phrase for every situation. Within a month, the entire feminine population of Greencastle was his for the asking, though he'd never have recognized nor admitted the fact. The men sought his company, too, and even asked his advice on how to win their girls back from him. Edgar, almost sick with happiness, told them, of course. On the eleventh of November, he was sick with something else...# He went to bed with a fever right after getting home from the Emporium, Mrs. Peterson hovering helplessly with offers of hot broth or tea. But Edgar felt hot and dry and his side hurt when he breathed. "I don't want anything... thank you," he gasped politely. By the next noon, when the alarmed Emma Peterson had Dr. Ward in, Edgar was barely conscious. Dr. Ward frowned, ordered hot water bottles and gave Edgar a huge dose of hot whiskey with lemon. Edgar painfully. "Or sulfa. It's pneumonia, isn't it?""Poor fellow's delirious," said the doctor to Mrs. Peterson. Edgar realized dimly that he had made a blunder, but that no one would know. Then the fever took over and he blanked out. D r. Ward claimed ever afterward that clean living was what pulled Edgar through -- the fact that he wasn't conditioned to liquor gave the jnedicinal whiskey virgin ground to work in. All Edgar knew was that he came to and found himself so weak that he could scarcely speak. Mrs. Peterson and her daughter, Marta, bustled in and out to care for him. He hadn't paid particular attention to Marta before, but in the days of lying helpless and being literally spoon-fed, he began to know her very well. Marta was a plain girl, he had thought, but he had never seen her private smile before. Marta was rather dumpy, he had thought, but he had never watched her bend to pick something up or twist to reach for a medicine bottle. Her dresses, he discovered, were deliberately all wrong for her -- Mrs. Peterson had no intention of disturbing her boarders unnecessarily. In the shocking intimacy of his bedroom, Edgar was increasingly disturbed. Marta was unfailingly cheerful, eager to wait on him. Every half-hour, he heard her step in the hall. "Hello!" Marta would say, sweeping lightly to his bedside. "How's our patient now? Feeling better? Oh, dear, do let me just straighten that sheet. It's all wrinkled. Would you like some milk or some fruit?" "Not right now, thank you -- perhaps a little later," Edgar would reply, fixing his gaze determinedly on the window or the ceiling while she bent over his bed, disturbingly rounded and disastrously close. And as Edgar's recovery progressed, Mrs. Peterson dropped more and more into the background. On the day Dr. Ward said he might try sitting up for a while, it was Marta who stood by for the experiment. Edgar started nobly, made about a foot of arc by himself and faltered. Instantly, it seemed, Marta's arm was around his shoulders and a firm, warm projection cushioned his cheek. He very nearly collapsed, but she sat him up. Three days later, he held her hand for a moment and, though she blushed, she didn't draw it away in a hurry. After a proper interval, their engagement was announced. Half the maidens in Greencastle wept in the privacy of their pillows that night. E dgar had had a serious problem and solved it. He had found the right girl and married her. This should be the end of his story and it would be, except for two things -- Edgar's gene and the date of his birth. Edgar's gene came from his grandmother via his father. The stories that gentle old lady told her orphaned grandson were the only outlet she had for her own powerful urge to turn back the times. And there had always been someone in the family who bemoaned the passing of the good old days, so strongly and constantly as to bore others to the verge of violence. Back even a few decades, no carrier of the nostalgia gene had any outlet but conversation and dreams. Edgar, though, was born to an age where science provided the knowledge and the equipment for him to find the practical solution. If Edgar's gene had carried any other trait, red hair, placidity or hemophilia, for instance, or if it had been recessive instead of dominant, this might have been a very different world. But the result was inevitable from the moment of Edgar's birth and the chain of events that proved it was as flawless as the steps of Gauss's theorem. He prospered after he and Marta were married. In three short years, he was made manager of Cloud's Emporium and just before that, Marta had surprised him with a daughter -- surprised him because he was certain of a son. He wasn't inclined to be stubborn about it, however, and when the child put a pudgy little hand up to his cheek in a gesture that was probably caused by reflex or gas pains, he was completely won. When little Emma reached three, she was incurably addicted to bedtime stories, though only those concerning knights in armor and their ladies fair. Edgar grew to hate the names of Arthur and Galahad, but if he tried to tell a different story, his daughter had her own way of stopping him. Rearing back in his arms, she merely shrieked, "Ting Arfur, Ting Arfur!" until she turned blue, at which point Edgar always gave in. There was no doubt that little Emma had inherited the gene. I N #, old Cloud made Edgar a full partner in the Emporium and just eleven years later, little Emma wrote home from New York City with the shocking news that she was engaged to a doughboy from Brooklyn. Edgar and Marta rushed East to unmask the scoundrel, praying they would be in time to save Emma's honor. The scoundrel, when unmasked, was a mechanic with weak eyes and a passion for poetry, who was completely miserable in the infantry. His manners were acceptable and he had enough intelligence to let Edgar beat him thoroughly at cribbage, whereupon Edgar offered to finance the opening of a garage in Greencastle if the young folks would move back there when Jim's hitch in the Army was finished. "Emma is all we have," said Edgar in his classic style. "It's quite lonesome back home for Mother and me since she's been in the city. We -- well, we should like to know that you and, later on, bur grandchildren will be settling in a home near us." Emma blushed and Jim tried to dig the toe of his boot into a crack between the floorboards. "Besides," added Edgar, becoming aware of Marta's look, "Greencastle is a fine town and right up with the times. I think a garage will do a fine business there." Jim was inclined to be reluctant, but Emma gave him a sidewise kick and said of course they'd come home and settle. She gave Edgar a big hug and a kiss and he beamed on everybody for the rest of the evening. A few months later, Jim's weak eyes caused him to pass a colonel without saluting and, within days, he had a medical discharge. Emma and the garage were waiting in Greencastle, so Jim took the first train. In '# and in '#, Emma produced grandsons, delighting everyone and especially Edgar. Emma herself was thoroughly puzzled when the boys reached the age for bedtime stories; she discovered that they were not particularly interested in tales of bold knights and fair ladies. She would have been happy to recite the legends of Arthur every night, but the boys, it seemed, preferred even poor poetry to a good, stirring joust. Edgar privately decided that Jim's poetry gene had proved more dominant than his own, which was perhaps just as well. Though not interested in making a fortune, Edgar nevertheless did well financially, using his knowledge of the '#s as an investment guide. Jim's garage prospered and he opened another, while his father-in-law multiplied his spare cash in the stock market. In July of #, Edgar suddenly retrenched for both of them, went bearish and arranged to sell short a number of important shares. The entire family protested that he was losing his mind, but Edgar was firm. By November first, they were amazed, horrified and rich. The following year, Emma gave Jim the daughter he had wanted. And, within three years, it was apparent to Edgar that tiny Susan carried the gene. Froni the first time Grandpa experimentally told her a story of the '#s, she wanted no others. Her mother found this also rather difficult to understand, but al; least the '#s were in the past, which was better than poetry. O N a day in #, Edgar found himself pondering with a fierce intentness he had not used since #, when he built the time machine. Today, August fifth, was his #th birthday -- but it was also the day he was born. It was impossible not to wonder. Forty-two years ago (or twenty-four from now), he had not bothered to think about possible consequences, so strong and simple had been his urge to go back. But today -- would he, the father of one and grandfather of three, be wiped out the instant Edgar Evans was born? Or would no baby of that name be born in the tiny Oklahoma town? He had been bom in the morning and when this particular morning passed like any other, Edgar felt considerably better. Coito, ergo sum, he thought. "F think, tlerefore I am -- a comforting philosophy. But what about the baby?" So Edgar, nervous but understandably curious, sent a discreetly worded wire and learned before long that he had indeed been born on schedule. The more he thought about it, the less reason he could see why it should be otherwise. A baby born in an, other part of the country had been given the same name as his. There was certainly no traceable relationship. And nearly everyone has a namesake somewhere. Not wishing to be institutionalized, Edgar had never hinted to anyone, not even Marta, the secret of his past. He had invented a convenient and plausible history, but used it only when necessary, and then sparingly. But now he was thinking of his granddaughter, Susan. Susan carried the gene. At five, she insisted on dressing her dolls in the costumes of forty years ago. She would be # and thoroughly unhappy by the time the young Edgar perfected and used his time machine. So Edgar wrote a letter, sealed it and gave it to his lawyers with instructions that it was to be given to Susan on a certain date in #, provided she was still unmarried. Edgar passed away three years later with a well-bred smile on his face, befitting the first man who ever cheated time. His last statement, phrased as considerately as ever, was the hope that he wasn't causing trouble by dying. S usan, his granddaughter, grew into a pleasingly plump young woman in an age where the ideal seemed to be total emaciation. She was not only single but disillusioned and despairing when the lawyers looked her up and gave her Edgar's letter. A good part of what Ekigar had written sounded like confused mysticism, warnings about upsetting the future and the like, but his instructions were specific enough and she read them as if they were the lost book of Revelations. By the next day, she had flown from San Francisco to New York and gained entry to young Edgar Evans' room by telling his landlady she was a distant relative. She disconnected the scrambler from the time machine and reset the controls to put herself back in #. In her haste, she forgot some of Edgar's instructions, with the result that she landed not fittingly costumed, but bare as a bacchante, in the room of a handsome young man from. Louisiana. The young man, whose name was Hare, was too startled to be anything but a Southern gentleman at the time. In less than a month, however, he took her back to Baton Rouge for inspection by his family and, that ordeal successfully weathered, Susan found herself with a husband. There is no need to follow all of Susan's life, which was happy, sad, imique and filled with minor tragedies and triumphs, like any other life. But Susan had four sons and gave the gene to each of them, and their children received it in turn. Before she had thought it necessary to pass the secret of the machine to Edgar's greatgreat-grandchildren, Susan died, so the machine was not available to them. Not that it mattered -- knowledge was available, for young Andover Hare had studied electronics at M. I. T. In #, he built his own time machine, which was a considerable improvement over Edgar's, since it could select place as well as time. Andover contacted his brothers, sisters and cousins, helped them make their arrangements and passed them through to the times they selected. Being a considerate man, he allowed several relatives by marriage to go along on this mass temporal migration. They did not restrict themselves to the '#s. Some went back to the #s, two to the Italian Renaissance, and one adventurous cousin clear to the Second Crusade. Andover himself decided he would like to know Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. He was the last one through themachine and he left a small, efficient detonator cormected to it. Andover had Edgar's gene, but not his compunctions. Y es, we owe a lot to Edgar Evans. When Edgar was a grave and unchubby one-yearold, pulling himself up on the furniture. Gone With the Wind hit the populace right in the middle of their worries, vague fears and faintly stirring desires to get out of their increasingly complex world. The year was #, a year that also saw a period piece movie that was one of the first in the inevitable deluge -- The Great Ziegfeld drew, as customers, many of the bearers of Edgar's gene, enough to make a profitconscious Hollywood see mint-green. The year neighbors searched the wreckage of Edgar's home to pull him from under the body of his mother, hunched in a last protective gesture, was the year that saw American history searched frantically for movie material. It was '# and Dodge City and Union Pacific helped thousands of Edgar's descendants forget momentarily the distant rumble of war. Historical novels were also helping to glamorize the past. By the time Edgar had graduated from school, been rejected by the Army and worked for a time, the cold war was well advanced. Three generations were mind-sick with tensions and fears and doubts -- heart-sick with the impossible wish to roll back the years to times of peaceful, neighborly, unfrenzied human living. Edgar did. And the next time, in #, Susan went back. For most of us, # came only once, the year of the crisis when the missiles had already been launched from both sides before the astonishing "thieves' agreement" was reached and the missiles were aimed into the sea. There could be nothing but relief for a few months after that, but then the play on nerves began again, the tensions began their unbearable rise. In #, Susan's grandchildren were funneled like sacks of coal through Andover Hare's machine. There were eighteen of them and a group of their descendants built another machine later the same year. The following March, another group disappeared -- a much larger one this time. They spread the gene so, widely that most of us bear it today. It was inevitable that we carry the seed of that desperate desire to escape our own troubled times. And the urge makes living under this doubly grinding pressure more anguished every day. How many times this week have you read or heard a piece of news and wondered how much longer before the final, fatal mushrooms flare? How many times has a video show, a movie, or even just a snapshot brought the swift wish that you could be back there? How many times have the "good old days" crept into your conversation, your thoughts? A S this account began with Edgar Evans, so it shall end with Benjamin Reeves. Not yet, but soon -- it mast be soon now. Like all truly wise men, Benjamin Reeves is a modest man. He's tall, stooped a little, and his limbs are attached in that special loose way that makes a man amble rather than walk, sprawl rather than sit. At #-odd, he looks much more like a friendly janitor than a respected research engineer. And the gene is particularly dominant in Benjamin. For eighteen years, he labored in the military vineyard, like so many other scientists, designing computers and control systems for the engineering section of a huge company, and finally heading up a study group in the Dream Department. He liked that job. The dream boys were the ones who sat around and thought about entirely new ways of doing things. Compared to designing, it was like the difference between the creative excitement of composing music and the drudgery of arranging it. But even while working on deadly machines for the future, Benjamin couldn't stop dreaming about the past, any more than Edgar Evans had. Then, after eighteen years, Benjamin was fired. The military had asked for a new study on the question of how many enemy missiles might get through the early warning and intercept rings and reach the cities. "What, specifically, can we do to protect our people?" When the study was finished, a huge brassbound conference was staged at the lab and everybody was expectant. "We have a single recommendation," said Benjamin calmly, and they were quiet, for Benjamin and his group were the big brains. "At the earliest warning, tell everybody to run like hell!" So the lab fired him, though the public statement read that he was "resigning to pursue independent research." Benjamin was shocked at first, and hurt, but dinner and party invitations came as often as ever from his old associates, and their wives went right on with that ancient game of trying to find the "right" girl for the bachelor friend. He would never mention it, of course, but the girls nowadays seemed too direct and aggressive for him. They lacked that womanly modesty or engaging demureness that girls reportedly had once possessed. He wished -- companies, but Benjamin had money enough for a while and he began experimenting with some ideas. When his lawyer and banker discovered he'd given away two new color TV circuits, however, there was a blow-up and Benjamin found himself incorporated. It made no difference. He could still experiment as he pleased. He had his many friends and constantly made m'ore. If enough money rolled in to make him moderately wealthy, let the lawyer worry about it. After he came up with the Ben Reeves capacitor in #, his wealth was more than moderate. That thumbsized gadget delivered the power of a hundred storage batteries and was the answer to a thousand engineering problems. All down the bad years, Benjamin had read the papers and wondered and suffered through the tensions of the nerve war like the rest of us. Perhaps it was a little worse for him, because he knew the classified secrets, knew to the decimal point the percentage of missiles that would get through our defenses. Steadily the urge grew stronger to get out of this world gone suicidally awry. He had the money and he had the time. An efficient business manager took care of the new plant that produced the Ben Reeves capacitor. He built his first machine in #, a month before Andover Hare took his own near relatives back into time with him. But that wasn't enough for Benjamin. He was a scientist where Andover was a student and Edgar Evans an amateur experimenter. Benwho yearned with him. For ' Benjamin, the mere machine wasn't an answer. He went back through the years himself, several times, but always he returned and worked harder. And there came the day, a year ago, when his work shifted suddenly to maps and population indices. If you live within # miles of the most populous cities, you should know that somewhere in that city is a very plain suitcase which is at once an answer to your prayers and to those strange nostalgic desires you've felt. It may be in a rented room or a storage warehouse, or in the attic of one of the many friends Benjamin Reeves has made. Wherever it is, you're under its influence, thanks to Benjamin's work. And every other day now, in a closed-off room at the Ben Reeves plant, technicians finish assembling another group of strange circuits which goes into another plain suitcase to be sent to yet another city, chosen on the basis of population vs. importance as a target. The technicians are learning speed. Be thankful for that, if you love your fellow-man as Benjamin does. At first they turned out only one machine a week; soon it will be one a day, then two, four. Benjamin doesn't go out any more. He's always within hearing of the receiver tuned to "the warning networks, within reach of the red button that will someday send out a coded signal. D id you read about the situation in this morning's papers? It looks like another crisis in the making and maybe this time neither side will back down. Pray for a year's time, if you're the praying kind. But whenever the missile come, Benjamin will press the red button at the first warning. The temporal field lasts only a he stopped, of course -- but every city with a suitcase will be empty when they strike. If the crisis holds off for a year, Benjamin figures we'll all go back together, each city and town to a different time, but all before #. It's hard to wait even a year when you have the gene gnawing and nagging inside you... Edgar Evans, who started it, couldn't wait. Andover Hare refused to go back alone. Benjamin Reeves, with the same gene, was unable to forget what he told the military -- run like hell! -- and all the folks like us who couldn't. So Benjamin found us the ultimate way to run, and to satisfy our dream in the running. Not yet, but soon now. See you back there! , SB the Laxian Key Free enterprise was fine, but even better -- free production! R ichard Gregor was at his desk in the dusty Interplanetary Decontamination Service. It was almost noon, but Arnold, his partner, hadn't showed up yet. Gregor was just laying out an unusually complicated game of solitaire, when he heard a loud crash in the hall. and Arnold stuck his head in. "Banker's hours?" Gregor asked. "I have just made our fortunes," Arnold said. He threw the door fully open and beckoned dramatically. "Bring it in, boys." Four sweating workmen lugged in a "'square black machine the size of a baby elephant, and dropped it in the middle of the floor. "Therd it is," Arnold said proudly. He paid the workmen, and stood, hands clasped behind his back, eyes half shut, surveying the machine. Gregor put his cards away with the slow, weary motions of a man who has seen everything. He stood up and walked around the machine. "All right, I give up. What is it?" our fists," Arnold said. "Of course. But what is it?" "It's a Free Producer," Arnold said. He smiled proudly. "I was walking past Joe's Interstellar Junkyard this morning, and there it was, sitting in the window. I picked it up for next to nothing. Joe didn't even know what it was." "I don't, either," Gregor said. "Do you?" Arnold was on his hands and knees trying to read the instructions engraved on the front of the machine. Without looking up, he said, "You've heard of the planet Meldge, haven't you?" Gregor nodded. M eldge was a third-rate little planet on the Northern periphery of the Galaxy, some distance from the trade routes. At one time, Meldge had possessed an extremely advanced civilization, made possible by the so-called Meldgen Old Science. The Old Science techniques had been lost ages ago, although an occasional artifact still turned up here and there. "And this is a product of the Old Science?" Gregor asked. "Right. It's a Meldgen Free Producer. I doubt if there are more than four or five of them in the entire Universe. They can't be duplicated." "What does it produce?" Gregor asked. "How should I know?" Arnold said. "Hand me the MeldgeEnglish dictionary, will you?" Keeping a stern rein on his patience, Gregor walked to the bookshelf. "You don't know what it produces -- " "Dictionary. Thank you. What does it matter what it produces? It's free! This machine grabs energy out of the air, out of space, the Sun, anywhere. You don't have to plug it in, fuel or service it. It runs indefinitely." Arnold opened the dictionary and started to look up the words on the front of the Producer. "Free energy -- " "Those scientists were no fools," Arnold said, jotting down his translation on a pocket pad. "The Producer just grabs energy out of the air. So it really doesn't matter what it turns out. We can always sell it, and anything we get will be pure profit." Gregor stared at his dapper little partner, and his long, unhappy face became sadder than ever. "Arnold," he said, "I'd like to remind you of something. First of all, you are a chemist. I am an ecologist. We know nothing about machinery, and less than nothing about complicated alien machinery." Arnold nodded absently and turned a dial. The Producer gave a dry gurgle. "What's more," Gregor said, retreating a few steps, "we are planetary decontaminationists. Remember? We have no reason to -- " The Producer began to cough unevenly. "Got it now," Arnold said. "It says, 'The Meldge Free Producer, another triumph of Glotten Laboratories. This' Producer is indestructible, unbreakable, free of all defects. No Power Hookup is required. To start, press Button One. To stop, use Laxian Key. Your Meldge Free Producer comes with an Eternal Guarantee against Breakdown. If defective in any way, please return at once to Glotten Laboratories.' " "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear," Gregor said. "We are planetary -- " "Don't be stodgy," Arnold said. "Once we get this thing working, we can retire. Here's Button One." The machine began to clank ominously, then shifted to a steady purr. For long minutes, nothing happened. "Needs warming up," Arnold said anxiously. Then, out of an opening at the base of the machine, a gray powder bgan to pour. "Probably a waste product," Gregor muttered. But the powder continued to stream over the floor for fifteen minutes. "Success!" Arnold shouted. "What is it?" Gregor asked. "I haven't the faintest idea. I'll have to run some tests." Grinning triumphantly, Arnold scooped some powder into a test tube and hurried over to his desk. Gregor stood in front of the Producer, watching the gray powder stream out. Finally he said, "Shouldn't we turn it off until we find out what it is?" "Of course not," Arnold said. "Whatever it is, it must be worth money." He lighted his bunsen burner, filled a test tube with distilled water, and went to work.  G regor shrugged his shoulers. He was used to his partner's hair-brained schemes for quick wealth. Ever since they had been looking for short cuts. The short cuts usually resulted in more work than plain oldfashioned labor, but Arnold was quick to forget that. Well, Gregor thought, at least it kept things lively. He sat down at his desk and dealt out a complex solitaire pattern. T here was silence in the office the next few hours. Arnold worked steadily, adding chemicals, pouring off precipitates, checking the results in several large books he kept on his desk. Gregor brought in sandwiches and coffee. After eating, he paced up and down, and watched the gray powder tumble steadily out of the machine. The purr of the Producer grew steadily louder, and the powder flowed in a thicker stream. An hour after lunch Arnold stood up. "We are in!" he stated. "What is that stuff?" Gregor asked, wondering if, for once, Arnold had hit upon something. "That stuff," Arnold said, "is Tangreese." He looked expectantly at Gregor. "Tangreese, eh?" "Absolutely." "Then would you kindly tell me what Tangreese is?" Gregor shouted. "I thought you knew. Tangreese is the basic food of the Meldgen people. I believe an adult Meldgen consumes several tons a year." "Food, eh?" Gregor looked at the thick gray powder with new respect. A machine which turned out food steadily, twenty-four hours a day, might be a very good money maker. Especially if the machine never needed servicing and cost nothing to run. Arnold already had the telephone book open. "Here we are." He dialed a number. "Hello, Interstellar Food Corporation? Let me speak to the president. What? He isn't? The vice-president then. This is important... Channels, eh? All right, here's the story. I am in a position to supply you with an almost unlimited quantity of Tangreese, the basic food of the Meldgen people. That's right. I knew you'd be interested. Yes, of course I'll hold on." He turned to Gregor, beaming. "These corporations think they can push -- yes? Yes, sir, that's right, sir. You do handle Tangreese, eh? Fine, splendid!" Gregor moved closer, trying to hear what was being said on the other end. Arnold pushed him away. "Price? Well, what is the fair market price? Oh. Well, five dollars a ton isn't much, but I suppose -- what? Five cents a ton? You're kidding!" Gregor walked away from the telephone and sank wearily into a chair. Apathetically he listened to Arnold saying, "Yes, yes. Well, I didn't know that. I see. Thanks." Arnold hung up. "It seems," he said, "there's not much demand for Tangreese on Earth. There are only about fifty Meldgens here, and the cost of transporting it to the Northern periphery is prohibitively high." Gregor raised both eyebrows and looked at the Producer. Apparently it had hit its stride, for Tangreese was pouring out like water from a high pressure hose. There was gray powder over everything in the room. It was half a foot high in front of the machine. "Never mind, we'll sell It," Arnold said. "It must be used for something else." He returned to his desk and opened several more large books. "Shouldn't we turn it off in the meantime?" Gregor asked. "Certainly not," Arnold said. "It's free, don't you understand? It's making money for us." He plunged into his books. Gregor began to pace the floor, but found it difficult wading through the ankle-deep Tangreese. He slumped into his chair, wondering why he hadn't gone into landscape gardening. B y early evening, gray dust had filled the room to a depth of several feet. Several pens, pencils, a briefcase and a small filing cabinet were already lost in it, and Gregor was beginning to wonder if the floor would hold the weight. He had to shovel a path to the door, using a wastepaper basket as an improvised spade. Arnold finally closed his books with a look of weary satisfaction. "There is another use." "What?" ' "Tangreese is used as a building material. After a few weeks' exposure to the air it hardens like granite, you know." "No, I didn't." "Get a construction company on the telephone. We'll take care of this right now." Gregor called the Toledo-Mars Construction Company and told a Mr. O'Toole that they were prepared to supply them with an almost unlimited quantity of Tangreese. "Tangreese, eh?" O'Toole said. "Not too popular as a building material these days. Doesn't hold paint, you know." "No, I didn't," Gregor admitted unhappily. "Fact. Tell you what. Tangreese can be eaten by some crazy race. Why don't you -- " "We prefer to sell it as a building material," Gregor said."Well, I suppose we can buy it. Always some cheap construction going on. Give you fifteen a ton for it." "Dollars?" "Cents." "I'll let you know," Gregor said. His partner nodded sagely when he heard the offer. "That's all right. Say this machine of ours produces ten tons a day, every day, year after year. Let's see..." He did some quick figuring with his slide rule. "That's almost five hundred and fifty dollars a year. Won't make us rich, but it'll help pay the rent." "But we can't leave it here," Gregof said, looking with alarm at the ever-increasing pile of Tangreese. "Of course not. We'll find a vacant lot in the country and turn it loose. They can haul the stuff away any time they like." Gregor called O'Toole and said they would be happy to do business. "All right," O'Toole said. "You know where our plant is. Just truck the stuff in any old time." "Us truck it in? I thought you would -- " "At fifteen cents a ton? No, we're doing you a favor just taking it off your hands. You truck it in." "That's bad," Arnold said, after Gregor had hung up. "The cost of transporting it -- " "Would be far more than fifteen cents a ton," Gregor said. "You'd better sliut tfiat thing off until we decide what to do." Arnold waded up to the Producer. "Let me see," he said. "To turn it off, I use the Laxian Key." He studied the front of the machine. "Go ahead, turn it off," Gregor said. "Just a moment." "Are you going to turn it off or not?" Arnold straightened up and gave an embarrassed little laugh. "It's not that easy." "Why not?" "We need a Laxian Key to turn it off. And we don't seem to have one." HE next few hours were spent in frantic telephone calls around the country. Gregor and Arnold contacted museums, research institutions, the archeological departments of colleges, and anyone else they could think of. No one had ever seen a Laxian Key, or heard of one being found. In desperation, Arnold called Joe, the Interstellar Junkman, at his downtown penthouse. "No, I ain't got no Laxian Key," Joe said. "Why you think I sold you the gadget so cheap?" They put down the telephone and stared at each other. The Meldgen Free Producer was cheerfully blasting out its stream of worthless powder. Two chairs and a radiator had disappeared into it, and the gray Tangreese was approaching desk-top level. "Nice little wage earner," Gregor said. "We'll think of something." "We?" Arnold returned to his books, and spent the rest of the night searching for another use for Tangreese. Gregor had to shovel the gray powder into the hall, to keep their office from becoming completely submerged. The morning came, and the Sun gleamed gaily on their windows through a film of gray dust. Arnold stood up and yawned. "No luck?" Gregor asked. "I'm afraid not." Gregor waded out for coffee. When he returned, the building superintendent and two large, red-faced policemen were shouting at Arnold. "You gotta get every bit of that sand outa my hall!" the super screamed. "Yeah, and there's an ordinance against operating a factory in a business district," one of the red-faced policemen said. "This isn't a factory," Gregor explained. "This is a Meldgen Free -- " "I say it's a factory," the policeman said. "And I say you gotta cease operation at once." "That's our problem," Arnold said. "We can't seem to turn it off." "Can't turn it Off?" The policeman glared at them suspiciously. "You trying to kid me? I say you gotta turn it off." "Officer, I swear to you -- " "Listen, wise guy. I'll be back in an hour. You get that thing turned off and this mess out of here, or I'm giving you a summons." The three men marched out. Gregor and Arnold looked at each other, then at the Free Producer. The Tangreese was at desk-top level now, and still coming steadily. "Damn it all," Arnold said, with a touch of hysteria, "there must be a way of working it out. There must be a market! It's free, I tell you. Every bit of this powder is free, free, free!" "Steady," Gregor said, wearily scratching sand out of his hair. "Don't you understand? When you get something free, in unlimited quantities, there has to be an application for it." T he door opened and a tall, thin man in a dark business suit walked in, holding a complex little gadget in his hand. "So here it is," the man said. Gregor was struck by a sudden wild thought. "Is that a Laxian Key?" he asked. "A what key? No, I don't suppose it is," the man said. "It's a drainometer." "Oh," Gregor said. "And it seems to have brought me to the source of the trouble," the man said. "By the way, I'm Mr. Carstairs." He cleared sand from Gregor's desk, took a last reading on his drainometer, and started to fill out a printed form. "What's all this about?" Arnold asked. "I'm from the Metropolitan Power Company," Carstairs said. "Starting around noon yesterday, we observed a sudden enormous drain on our facilities. So much power was being siphoned off that we felt it wise to search out just where it was coming from." "And it's coming from here?" Gregor asked. "From that machine of yours," Carstairs said. He completed his form, folded it and put it in his pocket. "Thanks for your cooperation. You will be billed for this, of course." With some difficulty he opened the door, then turned and took another look at the Free Producer. "It must be making something extremely valuable," he said, "to justify the expenditure of so much power. What is it? Platinum dust?" He smiled, nodded pleasantly, and left. Gregor turned to Arnold. "Free power, eh?" "Well," Arnold said, "I guess it just grabs it from the nearest power source." "So I see. Draws power out of the air, out of space, out of the Sun. And out of the power company's lines, if they're handy." "So it seems. But the basic principle -- " "To hell with the basic principle!" Gregor shouted. "We  can't turn this damned thing off without a Laxian Key, no one's got a Laxian Key, we're submerged ip worthless dust which we can't even afford to truck out, and we're probably burning up power like a sun gone nova!" "There must be a solution," Arnold said sullenly. Gregor thought sadly of their diminishing bank account. They had made a small profit on their last two jobs, but it was being converted rapidly into gray sand. Still, there was nothing he could do about it. Arnold was his partner. They had gone this far, they might as well go the rest of the way. Arnold sat down where the desk had been and covered his eyes. There was a loud knock on.  the door, and angry voices outside. "Lock the door," Arnold said. Gregor locked it. Arnold thought for a few moments longer, then stood up. "All is not lost," he said. "Our fortunes will still be made from this machine." "Let's just destroy it," Gregor said. "Drop it in an ocean or something." "No! I've got it now! Come on, let's get our spaceship warmed up." T he next few days were hectic to hire men, at exorbitant rates, to clear the building of Tangreese. Then came the problem of getting the machine, still spouting gray dust, into their spaceship. But at last everything was done. The Free Producer sat in Tangreese, and their ship was out of the System and moving fast on overdrive. "It's only logical," Arnold explained later. "Naturally there's no market for Tangreese on Earth. Therefore there's no use trying to sell it on Earth. But on the planet Meldge -- " "I don't like it," Gregor said. "It can't fail. It costs too much to transport Trangreese to Meldge. But we're moving our entire factory there. We can pour out a constant stream of the stuff." "Suppose the market is low?" Gregor asked. "How low can it get? This stuff is like bread to the Meldgens. It's their basic diet. How can we miss?" After two weeks in space, Meldge was sighted on their starboard bow. It came none too soon. Tangreese had completely filled the hold. They had sealed it off, but the increasing pressure threatened to burst the sides of the ship. They had to dump tons of it every day, but dumping took time, and there was a loss of heat and air in the process. So they spiraled into Meldge with every inch of their ship crammed with Tangreese, low on oxygen, and extremely cold. A S soon as they had landed, a large orange-skinned customs official came on board. "Welcome," he said; "Seldom do visitors come to our unimportant little planet. Do you expect to stay long?" "Probably," Arnold said. "We're going to set up a business." "Excellent!" the official said, smiling happily. "Our planet needs new blood, new enterprises. Might I enquire what business?" "We're going to sell Tangreese, the basic food of -- " The official's face darkened. "You're going to sell what?" "Tangreese. We have a Free Producer." The official pressed a button on a wrist dial. "I am sorry, you must leave at once." "But we've got passports, clearance papers -- " "And we have laws. You must blast off immediately, and take your Free Producer with you." "Now look here," Gregor said. "There's supposed to be free enterprise on this planet." "Not in the production of Tangreese, there isn't." Outside, a dozen army tanks rumbled onto the landing field and ringed themselves around the ship. The official backed out the port and started down the ladder. "Wait!" Gregor cried in desperation. "I suppose you're afraid of unfair competition. Well, take the Free Producer as our gift." "No!" Arnold shouted. "Yes! Just dig it out and take it. Feed your poor with it. Just raise a statue to us sometime." A second row of army tanks appeared. Overhead, antiquated jet planes dipped low over the field. "Get off this planet!" the official shouted. "Do you really think you can sell Tangreese on Meldge? Look around!'! They looked. The landing field was gray and powdery, and the buildings were the same unpainted gray. Beyond them stretched dull gray fields to a range of low gray mountains. On all sides, as far as they could see, everything was Tangreesegray. "Do you mean," Gregor asked, "that the whole planet -- " "Figure it out for yourself," the official said, backing down the ladder. "The Old Science originated here, and there are always fools who have to tamper with its artifacts. Now get going, and quickly." Halfway down the ladder he hesitated. "However," he said, "if you ever find a Laxian Key, come back. We'll erect ten statues to you!" Cause; the # International Fantasy Award, highest honor in science fiction, was given Three;" (#) The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, serialized here under the same title; (#) The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, serialized here as "Gravy Plonet." read science fiction mogazine in the worldl We would, be, to paraphrose Sturgeon's title, less than human if we were not proud of having made a clean sweep of the awards. We would also be blind not to see the connection between quality and growth. We are grateful to these and other authors, and to you, our readers, for having made both goals attainable. Now that we're there, we are not going to sit back and enjoy the view. We have work to do -- new worlds to conquerl information T his year marks the #th anniversary of an important astronomical discovery which, however, did not then take place. Now this might sound confusing, so let me rephrase it by saying that # years have gone by since an important astronomical discovery could have been made. If that is still not quite clear, it has to be said more bluntly by stating that Harvard College Observatory missed something important # years ago. Two years later, the astronomers at Arequipa, Peru, missed the same chance of amassing some fame. They both photographed Planetoid No. # and did not realize what it was that showed on their plates. Of course, it is conceivable that they may have been somewhat tired of planetoids (or asteroids) by that time. The first one of that swarm of diminutive planets betweferi the orbits of Mars and Jupiter had shown up during the night preceding January #, #. Professor Giuseppe Piazzi, trying to correct a typographical error in a recently published catalogue of fixed stars, had noticed a faint star where there should be none at all. Further observation and a calculation of the orbit by Karl Friedrich Gauss established that it was not a comet, as suspected at first, but a small planet. It was named Ceres and we now know that it is the largest mernber of the Asteroid Belt, with a diameter of # miles. I N the late evening hours of March #, #, an amateur astronomer, Wilhelm Matthaus Gibers, M.D. of Bremen, found a second such planet while on the lookout for comets. It was called Pallas and turned out to bethe second largest, with a diameter of just a trifle over # miles. The same Dr. Gibers discovered one more, Vesta, in #, but Vesta was already No. #, for Harding had found No. #, Juno, in #. I haven't been able to discover yet just why Dr. Gibers -- indubitably the expert in this field, with two discoveries out of a total of four -- believed and convinced others that there were only four planetoids. Almost a score of years passed until somebody decided to see whether there mightn't be more. This skeptical character was, like Dr. Gibers, an amateur, one Mr. M. Hencke of Driesen in Germany. After fifteen years of search, he was able to announce the discovery of No. S, Astraea, thirty-eight years after the discovery of No. #, Vesta. Two years later, Mr. Hencke informed the world that he had found No. #, Hebe. Then others went to work. When the #th anniversary of the discovery of Ceres came around. No. #, named Irene, had just been identified. So far, the joy of discovery had not been tarnished, but then it began to be dimmed by sheer numbers. In #, the number of known and named planetoids had grown to #. In #, it had increased to #. It was then that a Dr. Isaac Part of photographic plate taken in August, #, at Urania Observatory in Berlin, which led to discovery of Eros. Roberts made a fateful suggestion. One could keep track of these little bodies best by means of the photographic plate, he said. Astronomers previously had checked the actual appearance of the sky, along the band where the planetoids had to be, against star maps. Anything that showed in the telescope but could not be found on the chart had to be either a comet or a planetoid. It would be simpler. Dr. Roberts said, to photograph these areas, following the apparent movement of the fixed stars with the instrument. The stars would then show up as points, while things that moved -- comets and planetoids -- would show as short lines. Professor Max Wolf of Heidelberg was the first to adopt this suggestion. The results were simply disastrous. Yes, you could check on known planetoids in that manner -- but you could not avoid discovering dozens of new ones at the same time. #I to #, no less than # new asteroids were discovered! At the turn of the century, the total number was #, of which # had been numbered and named! Professor Wolf and his assistants had added more than a hundred to the # known in #, Prof. Charlois of Nice had added around #, and Prof. Palisa of Vienna #! C. H. F. Peters had found # or # and many others could boast half a dozen. Naturally, there were countless duplications. The job of identifying the short lines on countless plates alone assumed almost superhuman proportions. A rather fast-growing group of astronomers decided that all this was more or less wasted effort and skipped reports on Kleine Planeten when reading their professional journals. Others decided that it was more important to keep track of the lower-numbered and larger planetoids and let others worry about identification and establishment of their new discoveries. (A few resolutely decided to study the Sun instead.) And in this general atmosphere of "too much news," there came the evening of August #, #. The place was the Urania Observatory in Berlin. It had been planned to be "quite some distance" from the city so that the work of the astronomers should not be hampered by city lights. But by #, the city was already encroaching on it. By the time of the First World War, when I was old enough to pay attention to such things, the Urania Observatory was deep inside the city and was used for instruction and popular lectures only. In #, the Urania Observatory boasted the biggest telescope -- a #-incher -- in all Prussia and the chief astronomer. Dr. G. Witt, had installed some photographic equipment. He must have been short of funds, for the little box that housed the small electric lamp illuminating the spider-web crosshairs had been made by the scientific staff out of a cigar box. A more serious worry of Dr. Witt was that he did not trust the clockwork mechanism that guided the telescope. This can be corrected manually if somebody sees to it that a fixed star, picked for the purpose, does not leave its assigned place in the field of an auxiliary instrument. This job was done by a young student by the name of Felix Linke. Linke told me later that there happened to be a heat wave at the time and that they were happy if there was a reason to go to the darkroom, which was the coolest place in the whole observatory, but that the word "cool" applied only by comparison with the rest. T he program deci'ded upon by Dr. Witt for the night of August # to # was to track down No. #, Eunike. Eunike had not been seen for years. But if the old orbit calculation still held Orbits of Earth, Eros and Mars. Earth passes line from perihelion of Eros to Sun late January every year, some three weeks after passing its own perihelion. true, Eunike should be in the general vicinity of the fixed star beta of the constellation Aquarius. The photographic instrument was pointed in the proper direction and Linke held it as steady as he could for two hours. Then Dr. Witt and his helper rushed the new plate to the "cool" darkroom and, after it had been racked up to dry, they went home to get as much sleep as the heat would permit. Next day, they went over the plate with a magnifying glass, looking for planetoid tracks. Eunike was where she was supposed to be, or very nearly so. Another known planetoid had also left its visiting card. But near the star beta Aquarii, there was another track of unusual on the original plate. Dr. Witt thought at first that this was no track at all, but a flaw in the plate. Then he decided that it was a genuine track and, because of its unusual length, it had to be made by a fast-moving body. It could still be a comet, however. In the evening, the #-incher went into action for direct observation. The tiny "star" that had made the track the night before could be clearly seen. It was not a comet. Hence it had to be anI other new planetoid. The customary wires to other observatories were sent and quite a lot of observations accumulated during the next six days. Then Dr. Berberich, the chief of the Computi n g Institute, which had been founded especially for keeping track of the minor planets, retired with all the observations of Object # DQ and began to compute its orbit. It turned ut to be the most unusual orbit of any planetoid thus far. Most of it was between the orbits and Earth and Mars. And its mean distance from the Sun was smaller than that of any other. It was for these reasons that Dr. Witt insisted that # DQ, or planetoid No. #, should be given a name which, by itself, emphasized that it was a special case. Starting with Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, all planetoids had been given female names, preferably classical. The new one was to receive a male name. Dr. Witt selected Eros. The orbit computed by Dr. Berberich showed that the point closest to the Sun, the perihelion, is only # astronomicaf linits from the Sun. The point of Earth's orbit closest to the perihelion of Eros is passed by Earth every January #nd. If it happened that Eros passed its perihelion on that date, or close to it, the distance Earth-to-Eros This was considerably closer than anything else known at that time (not counting the Moon) because the closest Venus can closest approach of Mars about A T the time of the actual discovery by Dr. Witt, Eros 'had been near its aphelion and the question was -- how long one would have to wait to get a close look? Eros needed # days to go from perihelion to perihelion. It followed that Eros and Earth would be in the same direction, as seen from the Sun, approximately every two years and four months. But, as a look at the diagram shows, this still implies greatly varying distances. When had Eros been at its perihelion, on or about January #nd, an;year? The answer was disappointing: it had been in January #, four and a half years before it was discovered. When that date was established, a search of old plates was made and it turned out that Harvard College Observatory had Eros on seventeen plates exposed at that time. And Arequipa had photographed it four times in #. The next really close approach of Eros, was not due until #. Then there was to be one almost as good in #, but for another one as good as the missed one in #, one must wait until Eros has completed # of its revolutions. This means #I years, so that Eros will be a minimum distance again in #. But in the meantime, astronomers have put Eros to good use even with somewhat inferior oppositions. The elementary and fundamental yardstick in astronomy is the "astronomical unit" -- the distance of Earth from the Sun. By observing Eros, the value of this yardstick has been considerably refined. And as Eros comes inward in the Solar System, it is, of course, being acted on by the gravitational fields of all the inner planets. This fact can be utilized to determine the masses of the inner planets. In the case of Venus, for example, the mass had to be derived in part from the influence of Venus on Mars. It was, to quote Dr. Paul Herget, one of the paradoxes of astronomy where "we photograph Mars to see how much Venus weighs." Photographing Eros for the same purpose gives better figures. Drs. Eugene Rabe and Gustav Stracke engaged in an elaborate and tedious investigation of the behavior of Eros to establish the masses of the two planets inside the orbit of Earth. A t this point, somebody is likely to ask about the mass of Eros itself. Well, that's not so simple. The best we can say is that Eros, if dumped on Earth without shattering, would merely become our highest mountain. Eros rotates around its axis and, while doing so, its brightness changes. This leads to the suspicion that it is not spherical, but of irregular shape. In #, several astronomers published their observations and the conclusion they drew was that Eros might have a shape like a poorly formed brick. Assuming a density of # times that of water, they calculated that the longest axis of this "brick" was # miles and that the two shorter axes measured # and #.I miles. The shortest axis is the axis of rotation and the period of rotation was given as five hours and # minutes. All this is still subject to correction and the figures may change somewhat, but it can be taken for granted that Eros has an irregular shape that would be impossible for a body of much larger size. It is very simply, a huge mountain circling the Sun. I may add here tl?at its codiscoverer, Linke, has offered the suggestion that Eros may not be a single body, but several small ones rotating around their common center of gravity. It's possible, but not established. At any event, planetoid No. # constitutes one of the strangest and most intriguing astronomical discoveries ever made. ' comes completely and permanently obsolete. Muzzle-loading cannon, for in stance, had almost become proverbial as something thoroughly out of date, useless and very nearly laughable -- but then somebody invented the trench mortar and a whole family of muzzleloading "trench artillery" sprang up during the First World War. The war rocket was "obsolete" for nearly a century, too -- so much so, in fact, that most people didn't even know there had been war rockets once. But then, as you well remember, designers replaced the old and hazardous blackpowder propelling charge with a reliable stick of smokePhotograph of "Lazy Dog" anti-personnel (non-explosive) missile. Cartridge next to it is regulation .# rifle cartridge. (Official photograph U.S. Air Force) less power -- and the war rocket was back in many different versions and in great quantities. The age of the airplane and the blimp looked back on he free balloon as something of the past -- especially the free balloon made of paper, like the earliest attempts of the brothers Montgolfier -- but then the Japanese recalled the existence of a fast air current moving east over the Pacific Ocean and long-range bombing balloons were made, many of them of paper! As a historic oddity, I might add that even the old fire-arrow staged a small comeback in the Second World War. During the fight for the Italian colonies in East Africa, the Italians quartered their troops in native-built grass huts. Other African natives, under British command, sneaked through the underbrush with bows and fire-arrows and promptly shot them aflame! All of which is an introduction to the latest weapon of the U. S. Air Force, the "Lazy Dog." It is just a small piece of steel, weighing less than an ounce, and not much over an inch in length. Being finned like a miniature bomb, the Lazy Dog, shoveled overboard from an airplane, will point its nose down and pierce a target like a rifle bulj.et fired vertically downward. Being solid metal, it won't explode, but it will make holes in tires, gasoline drums and people. Its impact velocity will probably be high enough to go through the top of A novel idea? Well, no. The French invented it forty years ago, when airplanes were as wobbly as they looked an"d could carry some # or # lbs. of psyload in addition to the pilot, whose ideal personal build was that of a jockey. The French "anti-personnel "Airplane arrow" as used in Europe during early months of World War I. missile," as it would be called now, still lacked aerodynamical refinement and had a shape that justified its name of "airplane (## of an inch) in diameter and weighed ## of an ounce. The French must have prepared this weapon some time in advance of the First World War, because they used it in their earliest attacks against German ground troops. Of course it took only weeks until the Germans imitated the weapon. Somebody with precise notions of legality -- or a nasty sense of humor -- ordered that one. of the fins carry an inscription reading Inv itBTic Fab alletn. This was not code, but an abbreviation of Invention francaise Fabrication allemande -- "French invention of German manufacture." As soon as ground troops on both sides learned to take proper cover -- under a car, for example the use of the airplane arrow was discontinued. any questions? Today I came across a statement in an article by Arthur C. Clarke which I do not quite understand. He says in speaking of weight and inertia that it would be "six times easier to pick up a sledgehammer on the Moon, but just as hard to swing it." Would you explain this, please? Jean De Grazia # Hopkins St. Sewickley, Penna. This example is intended to illustrate that we, existing under the constant and unvarying pull of Earth's gravity, have come to forget that there is a difference between weight and inertia. To us, a certain weight seems to go with a certain amount of inertia, but actually the two are not the same, which we would realize quickly if we were subjected to a gravitational field of a different strength. Let's try to approach the problem from another angle. Six pounds of steak have, as anyone knows, a certain amount of food value. They will provide, say, a meal for six hungry people. On the Moon, the same amount of steak would weigh only one pound -- but it would still be a meal for six. It is easy to realize, from this example, that we have fallen into the habit of associating a certain number of calories with a certain weight. Now consider the problem of the sledgehammer. If you pick it up on Earth, you work against Earth's gravity and you have to lift, say, twelve pounds. If you lift the same sledgehammer on the Moon, against the lesser lunar gravity, you have to lift what to early muscles feels like two pounds. But il( you swing it, on Earth or on the Moon, you have to accelerate its mass. That would be the same in either case, since accelerating the same mass needs the same ' force regardless of the gravity present. Are there any other materials besides lead and concrete that are used for radiation shielding? If so, what radiations (meaning alpha, beta or gamma rays and neutrons') do they stop? James Reeve # -- Sth Avenue' Los Angeles #, Calif. The materials most used in atomic laboratories and power plants are, as you say, concrete and lead. Concrete shielding is customary for permanent installations, while lead, in the form of bricks, is used for temporary setups. Actually, any kind of matter could be used for shielding against any kind of radiations. It is merely a question of volume. Slabs of slate may not be a good shield, hut a mountain of slate is. A fishtank full of water is poor protection, but a large lake is a different story. The reasons for using concrete or lead are, therefore. purely practical reasons. Concrete is needed in large qnantities, but it is both cheap and available. Iead is used because of its high density, so that the volume (though not the weight) of matter to be moved around is comparatively small. Would you please advise me' about the following concept: Assume that the Earth is the only body in space. I contend that it would then be impossible for any rocket to escape from the Earth. Inasmuch as the gravitational field of the Earth extends to infinity and the speed of the rocket must be finite, it would always fall back sooner or later because the pull of the Earth will continually subtract velocity from the rocket. Right or wrong? David Richardson # Rhodes St. Wrong. But this is one of the so-called "instructive errors" that deserve fliscussion and clarification. To begin with, the assumption that the Earth is the only body in space is not necessary. Even as things are, the gravitational field of the Earth extends theoretically to infinity. But it grows weaker all the time with distance and the requirement is simply that the kinetic energy of the moving (and no longer burning) rocket is greater than the force of the gravitational field at any point along its trajectory. To explain this statement, let's look at the motion of a body falling toward Earth from infinity. At a distance of # miles from the surface, this body will have a certain velocity. At the distance of # miles, it will have a certain and obviously higher velocity. At the distance of # miles, it will have a still higher velocity. And it will have the highest velocity it can ever have at the moment of impact. If a rocket going the other way is to reach infinity, it must have a velocity that is somewhat (only very slightly) higher than the corresponding velocities of the falling body. The impact velocity would be just a shade below seven miles per second. Hence if tbe rocket near the surface of the Earth reached seven miles per second, it would go to infinity, for it would, at all points along the trajectory, have a velocity slightly higher than that of the falling body. Earth's gravitational pull would eventually slow it down -- after a sufficiently long time, the motion might be as little as three inches per century ! But Earth's gravitational pull could never bring it to a standstill. For this reason, this velocity of seven miles per second has been named "escaped velocity" by rocket men. Astronomers still use the older but equivalent term of "parabolic velocity." Might not differences in electric potential be one of the hazards of space travel? A body leaving Earth at zero potential relative to the Earth) might find that other planetary bodies have electric potentials higher or lower than Terra. H. Sheppard # Chatterton Blvd. West Hill, Ontario This question has come up in space travel discussions for some time, but unfortunately there is no satisfactory answer. The main question is, of course, whether the electric potential of another planet -- for example. Mars -- is actually different from that of Earth. We don't know and physicists have no way at present short of an actual visit, to decide this question. The attitude of engineers is somewhat more positive. They feel that if such differences exist, they'll do something about it. Dr. Wernher von Braun stated flatly: "This cannot be considered a hazard to space travel at all. The capacity of a space vehicle entering the atmosphere of another planet is extremely small and the number of coulombs which must travel into the ship or out of it to make its electric potential equal to that of the surrounding environment is very small. Any brush discharger can easily take care of this." A slightly different situation would exist if the target planet happens to be without (or virtually without) an atmosphere, as, for instance, the Moon. At first glance, it might seem as if the ship, with its possibly different potential, would make contact suddenly. But on an kirless planet, the ship would have to land with rocket motors working, balancing down on an exhaust blast. Since this blast consists of partly ionized gases, it would automatically perform the job of a "grounding" cable. To sum up; We don't know whether this "hazard" actually exists, but we have every reason to believe that, if it does, it won't be a hazard at all. The Music Master o What more fitting place for the last man On Earth to live in than a museum? Now if only he could avoid becoming an exhibit himselfl F or twenty-five years, no one came. In the seventysixth year of his life, Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy boyhood. To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his old age tempted him to reject the present and dwell in the lost times. He would recall stubbornly that the present year, for example, was #; that he had been born in #, seven years after the close of the Civil War, fifty years before the Final War, twenty-five years before the departure of the First Interstellar. (It had never returned, nor had the Second Interstellar. They might be still wandering, trifles of Man-made stardust.) He would recall his place of birth. New Boston, the fine, planned city far inland from the ancient metropolis that the rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of #. Such things, places and dates, were factual props, useful when Brian wanted to impose an external order on the vagueness of his immediate existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that -- to shut away the colors, the poignant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved), and the later years when he had briefly known a curious intoxication called fame. It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject those memories, but it was safer, and nowadays Brian was often sufficiently tired, sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance, to crave safety as a meadow mouse often craves a burrow. H e tied his canoe to the massive window that for many years had been a port and a doorway. Lounging there with a suspended sense of time, he was hardly aware that he was listening. In a way, all the twenty-five years had been a listening. He watched Earth's patient star sink toward the rim of the forest on the Palisades. At this hour, it was sometimes possible, if the Sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease grieving too much at the greater stillness. There was scattered human life elsewhere, he knew -- probably a great deal of it. After twentyfive years alone, that, too, often seemed almost irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings, hushed noons or mornings empty of human commotion, Brian might lapse into anger, fight the calm by yelling, resent the swift dying of his echoes. Such moods were brief. A kind of humor remained in him, not to be ruined by sorrow. He remembered how, ten months or possibly ten years ago, he had encountered a box turtle in a forest clearing, and had shouted at it: "They went thataway!" The turtle's rigidly comic face, fixed by nature in a caricature of startled disapproval, had seemed to point up some truth or other. Brian had hunkered down on the moss and laughed uproariously -- until he observed that some of the laughter was weeping. Today had been rather good. He had killed a deer on the Palisades, and with bow and arrow, thus saving a bullet. Not that he needed to practice such economy. He might live, he supposed, another decade or so at the most. His rifles were in good condition and his hoarded ammunition would easily outlast him. So would the stock of canned and dried food stuffed away in his living quarters. But there was satisfaction in primitive effort and no compulsion to analyze the why of it. The stored food was more important than the ammunition. A time would come soon enough when he no longer had strength for hunting. He would lose the inclination for trips to cross the river. He would yield to such laziness or timidity for days, then weeks. Some time, when it became months or years, he might find himself too feeble to risk climbing the cliff wall into the forest. He would have the good sense then, he hoped, to destroy  the canoe, thus making of his weakness a necessity. the Hall of Music on the next floor above the water, probably safe from its lessening encroachment. To secure fresh water, he need only keep track of the tides, for the Hudson had cleaned itself and now rolled down sweet from the lonely, uncorrupted hills. His decline could be comfortable. He had provided for it and planned it. Yet gazing now across the sleepy water, seeing a broadwinged hawk circle in freedom above the forest, Brianwas aware of the old thought moving in him: "If I could hear voices -- just once, if I could hear human voices..." The Museum of Human History, with the Hall of Music on what Brian thought of as the second floor, should also outlast his requirements. In the flooded lower floor and basement, the work of slow destruction must be going on. Here and there, the unhurried waters could find their way to steel and make rust of it, for the waterproofing of the concrete was nearly a hundred years old. But it ought to be good for another century or two. Nowadays the ocean was mild. There were moderate tides, winds no longer destructive. For the last six years, there had been no more of the heavy storms out of the south. In the same period, Brian had noted a rise in the water level of a mere nine inches. The window-sill, his port, was six inches above high-tide mark now. Perhaps Earth was settling into a new, amiable mood. The climate had become delightful, about like what Brian remembered from a visit to southern Virginia in his childhood. The last earthquake had, come in # -- a large one, Brian guessed, but its center could not have been close to the rock of Manhattan. The Museum had only shivered and shrugged; it had survived much worse than that, halfa dozen times since #. After the tremor, a tall wave had thundered in from the south. Its force, like that of others, had mostly been dissipated against the barrier of tumbled rock and steel at the southern end of the submerged island -- an undersea dam, Man-made though not Man-intended -- and when it reached the Museum, it did no more than smash the southern windows ' in the Hall of Music, which earlier waves had not been able to reach. Then it passed on up the river, enfeebled. The windows of the lower, floor had all beeh broken long before that. A fter the earthquake of '#, Brian had spent a month boarding up all the openings on the south side of the Hall of Music -- after all, it was home -- with lumber painfully ferried from mainland ruins. That year, he had been sixty-two years old and not moving with the ease of youth: a rough job. He had deliberately left cracks and knotholes. Sunlight sifted throiigffx in narrow beams, like the bars of dusty gold Brian could remember in a hayloft at his uncle's farm in Vermont. It was quite pleasant. The Museum had been built in #. Manhattan, strangely enough, had never been bombed, although, in the Civil War, two of the type called "small fission" had fallen on the Brooklyn and Jersey sides -- so Brian recalled from the jolly history books that had informed his adolescence that war was definitely a thing of the past. By the time of the final War, in #, the sea, gorged on the melting ice caps, had removed Manhattan Island from history. ' Everything left standing above the waters south of the Museum had been knocked flat by the tornados of # and #. A few , blobs of rock still marked where Central Park and Mount Morris Park had been, but they were not significant. Where Long Island once rose, there was a troubled area of shoals and tiny islands, probably a useful barrier of protection for the receding shore of Connecticut. Men had yielded the great city inch by inch, then foot Ijy foot; a full mile in #, saying; "The flood years have passed their peak and a return to normal is expected." Brian sometimes felt a twinge of sympathy for the Neanderthal experts who must have told each other to expect a return to normal after the Cro-Magnons stopped drifting in. In #, the island of Manhattan had to be yielded altogether. New York City, half-new, half-ancient, sprawled stubborn and enormous upstream, on both sides of a river not done with its anger. But the Museum stood.  Aided by sunken rubble of others of its kind, aided also by men because they still had time to love it, the Museum stood, and might for a long time yet -- weather permitting. It covered an acre of ground well north of #th Street, rising a modest fifteen stories, its foundation secure in that layer of rock which mimics eternity. It deserved its name: here men had brought samples of everything, literally everything known in the course of humanity since prehistory. It was, within human limits, definitive. In its way, considering how much the erosion of time must always steal from scholars, it was perfect. N O one had felt anything unnatural in the refusal of the Directors of the Museum to move the collection after the Museum weathered the storm of #. Instead, ordinary people, more than a thousand of them, donated money so that a mighty abutment could be built around the ground floor, a new entrance designed on the north side of the second. The abutment survived the greater tornado of # without damage, although, during those seven years, the sea had risen another eight feet in its old ever-new game of making monkeys out of the wise. It was left for Brian Van Anda alone, in #, to see the waters slide quietly over the abutment, opening the lower regions for the, use of fishes and the more secret water-dwellers who like shelter and privacy. In the '#s, Brian suspected the presence of an octopus or two in the vast vague territory which had once been parking lot, heating plant, storage space, air-raid shelter, etc. He couldn't prove it; it just seemed like a comfortable place for an octopus. In #, plans were under consideration for building a new causeway to the Museum from the still expanding city in the north. In #, also, the final War began and ended. When Brian Van Anda came down the river late in #, a refugee from certain unfamiliar types of savagery, the Museum was empty of the living. He had spent many days in exhaustive 'eitplQration of the building. He did that systematically, toiling at last up to the Directors' meeting room on the top floor. There he observed how they must have been holding a conference at the very time when a new gas was tried out over New York in the north, in a final effort to persuade the Western Federation that Man is the servant of the state and that the end justifies the means. Too bad, Brian sometimes thought, that he would never know exactly what happened to the Asian Empire. In the little paratroop-invaded area called the Soviet of North America, from which Brian had fled in '#, the official doctrine was that the Asian Empire had won the war and that the saviors of humanity would be flying in any day to take over. Brian had doubted this out loud, and then stolen a boat and got away safely at night. Up in the meeting room, Brian had seen how that new neurotoxin had been no respecter of persons. An easy death, though -- no pain. He observed also how some things survive. The Museum, for instance, was virtually unharmed. B rian had often recalled those months in the meeting room as a sort of island in time. like the first hour of discovering that he could play Beethoven; or like the curiously cherished, more than life-size half-hour back there in Newburg, in #, when he had briefly met and spoken with an incredibly old man, Abraham Brown, President of the Western Federation at the time of the Civil War. Brown, with a loved world in almost total ruin around him, had spoken pleasantly of small things -- of chrysanthemums that would soon be blooming in the front yard of the house where he lived with friends, of a piano recital by Van Anda at Ithaca, in #, which the old man remembered with warm enthusiasm. Yes, the Museum Directors had died easily, and now the old innocent bodies would be quite decent. There were no vermin in the Museurri. The door-, ways and floors were tight, the upper windows unbroken. One of the white-haired men had a Ming vase on his desk. He had not dropped from his chair, butlooked as if he had fallen comfortably asleep in front of the vase with his head on his arms. Brian had left the vase untouched, but had taken one other thing, moved by some stirring of his own never-certain philosophy and knowing that he would not return to this room, ever. SB Another Director had been opening a wall cabinet when he fell; the small key lay near his fingers. Plainly their discussion had not been concerned only with war, perhaps not at all with war -- after all, there were other topics.  The Ming vase would have had a part in it. Brian wished he could know what the old man had meant to choose from the cabinet. Sometimes, even now, hreamed of conversations with that man, in which the Director told him the whole truth about that and other matters; but what was certainty in sleep was in the morning gone like childhood. For himself, Brian had taken a little image of rock-hard clay, blackened, two-faced, male and female. Prehistoric, or at any rate wholly primitive, unsophisticated, meaningful like the blameless motion of an animal in sunlight, Brian had said; "With your permission, gentlemen." He had closed the cabinet and then, softly, the outer door. "I'm old," Brian said to the red evening. "Old, a little foolish, talk aloud to myself. I'll have some Mozart before supper." son from the canoe to a small raft hitched inside the window. He had selected only choice pieces, as much as he could cook and eat in the few days before it spoiled, leaving the rest for the wolves or any other forest scavengers who might need it. There was a rope strung from the window to the marble steps that led to the next floor -- home. It had not been possible to save much from the submerged area, for its treasure was mostly heavy statuary. Through the still water, as he pulled the raft along the rope, the Moses of Michaelangelo gazed up at him in tranquility. Other faces watched him. Most of them watched infinity. There were white hands that occasionally borrowed gentle motion from ripples made by the raft. "I got a deer, Moses," said Brian Van Anda, smiling down in companionship, losing track of time. He carried his juicy burden up the stairway. His living quarters had once been a cloakroom for Museum attendants. Four close walls gave it a sense of security. A ventilating shaft now served as a chimney for. the wood stove Brian had salvaged from a mainland farmhouse. The door could be tightly locked; there were no windows. You do not want windows in a cave. Outside was the Hall of Music, an entire floor of the Museum, containing an example of every musical instrument that was known or could be reconstructed in the #st century. The library of scores and recordings lacked nothing -- except electricity to play the recordings. A few might still be made to sound on a spring-wound phonograph, but Brian had not bothered with it for years; the springs were rusted. He sometimes took out the orchestra and chamber music scores, to read at random. Once his mind had been able to furnish ensembles, orchestras, choirs of a sort, but lately the ability had weakened. He remembered a day, possibly a year ago, when fiis memory refused to give him the sound of oboe and clarinet in unison. He had wandered, peevish, distressed, unreasonably alarmed, among the racks and cases of woodwinds in the collection, knowing that even if the reeds were still good, he could not play them. He had never mastered any instrument except the piano. "But even if I could play them," he muttered, now tolerantly amused, "I couldn t do it in unison, could I? Ah, the things that will bother a man!" B rian recalled -- it was probably that same day -- opening a chest of double basses. There was an old threestringer in the group, probably from the early #th century, a trifle fatter than its modern companions. Brian touched its middle string in an idle caress, not intending to make it sound, but it had done so. When in use, it would have been tuned to D; time had slackened the heavy murmur to A or something near it. That had throbbed in the silent room with a sense of finality, a sound such as a programmatic composer -- Tschaikowsky, say, or some other in the nadir of torment -- might have used as a tonal symbol for the breaking of a heart. It stayed in the air a long time, other instruments whispering a dim response... "All right, gentlemen," said Brian. "That was your A." He had closed the case, not laughing. but in the main part of the hall, a place of honor was given to what may have been the oldest of all instruments, a sevennote marimba of phonolitic schist discovered in Indo-China in the #th century and thought to be at least # years of age. The xylophone-type rack was modern: for twenty-five years, Brian had obeyed a compulsion to keep it clear of cobwebs. Sometimes he touched the singing stones, not for amusement, but because there was an obscure comfort in it. Unconcerned with time, they answered even to the light tap of a fingernail. On the west side of the Hall of Music, a rather long walk from Brian's cave, was a small auditorium. Lectures, recitals, chamber music concerts had been given there in the old days. The pleasant room held a twelve-foot concert grand, made by Steinway in #, probably the finest of the many pianos in the Hall of Music. Brian had done his best to preserve this, setting aside a day each month for the prayerful tuning of it, robbing other pianos in the Museum to provide a reserve supply of strings, oiled and sealed up against rust. No dirt ever collected on the Steinway. When not in use, it was covered with stitched together sheets. To remove the cover was a sober ritual; Brian always washed his hands with fanatical care before touching the keys. Some years ago, he had developed the habit of locking the auditorium doors before he played. Even with the doors locked, he would not glance toward the vista of empty seats -- not knowing, nor caring much, whether this inhibition had grown from a Stone Age fear of seeing someone there or from a flat, reasonable certainty that no one could be. 'HE habit might have started (he could not remember precisely) away back in the year #, when so many bodies had drifted down from the north on the ebb tides. Full horror had somehow been lacking in the sight of all that floating death. Perhaps it was because Brian had earlier had his fill of horrors; or perhaps, in #, he already felt so divorced from his own kind that what happened to them was like the photograph of a war in a distant country. Some of the bodies had bobbed quite near the Museum. Most of them had the gaping wounds of primitive warfare, but some were oddly discolored -- a new pestilence? So there was (or had been) more trouble up there in what was (or had been) the Soviet of North America, a self-styled "nation" that took in east New York State and some of New England. Yes, that was probably the year when he had started locking the doors between his private concerts and an empty world. He dumped the venison in his cave. He scrubbed his hands, blue-veined now, but still tough, still knowing.' Mozart, he thought, and walked -- not with much pleasure of anticipation, but rnore like one externally driven -- through the enormous hall that was so full and yet so empty , growing dim with evening, with dust, with age, with loneliness. Music should not be silent. When the piano was uncovered, Brian delayed. He flexed his hands unnecessarily. He fussed with the candelabrum on the wall, lighting three candles, then blowing out two for economy. He admitted presently that he did not want the serene clarity of Mozart at all right now. This evening, the darkness of # was closer than he had felt it for a long time. It would never have occurred to Mozart, Brian thought, that a world could die. Beethoven could have entertained the idea soberly enough; Chopin probably; even Brahms. Mozart would surely have dismissed it as somebody's bad dream, in poor taste. Andrew Carr, who lived and died in the latter half of the #th Century, had endured the idea from the beginning of his childhood. The date of Hiroshima was #; Carr was born in #; the inexhaustible wealth of his music was written between #, when he was eighteen, and #, when he died in an Egyptian jail from injuries received in a street brawl. "If not Mozart," said Brian to his idle hands, "there is always The Project." it should be played -- as Carr was supposed to have said he couldn't play it himself -- Brian had been thinking of that as The Project for many years. It had begun long before the war, at the time of his triumphs in a civilized world which had been warmly appreciative of the polished interpretive artist, although no more awake than any other age to the creative one. Back there in the undestroyed society, Brian had proposed to program that sonata in the company of works that were older but no greater, and play it -- yes, beyond his best, so that even critics would begin to see its importance. He had never done it, had never felt that he had entered into the sonata and learned the depth of it. Now, wen there was none to hear or care, unless maybe the harmless brown spiders in the corners of the auditorium had a taste for music, there was still The Project. "I hear," Brian said. " care, and with myself as audience I want to hear it once as it ought to be, a final statement for a world that couldn't live and yet was too good to die." Technically, of course, he had it. The athletic demands Carr made on the performer were tremendous, but, given technique, there was nothing impossible about them. Anyone capable of concert work could at least play the notes at the required tempos. And any reasonably shrewd pianist could keep track of the dynamics, saving strength for the shattering finale in spite of the thunderings that must comt before. Brian had heard the sonata played by others two or three times in the old days -- competently. Competency was not enough. For example, what about the third movement, that mad Scherzo, and the five tiny interludes of sweet quiet scattered through its plunging fury? They were not alike. Related, perhaps, but each one demanded a new climate of heart and mind -- tenderness, regret, simple relaxation. Flowers bn a flood -- no. Warm windowlights in a storm -- no. The innocence of an unknowing child in a bombed city -- no, not really. Something of all those, but much more, too. What of the second movement, the Largo, where, in a way, the pattern was reversed, the midnight introspection interrupted by moments of anger, or longing, or despair like that of an angel beating his wings against a prison of glass? It was, throughout, a work in which something of Carr's life and Carr's temperament had to come into you, whether you dared welcome it or not; otherwise, your playing was no more than a bumbling reproduction of notes on a page. Carr's life was not for the contemplation of the timid. T he details were superficially well known. The biographies themselves were like musical notation, meaningless without interpretation and insight. Carr had been a drunken roarer, a young devil-god with such a consuming hunger for life that he had choked to death on it. His friends hated him for the way he drained their lives, loving them to distraction and always loving his work a little more. His enemies must have had times of helplessly adoring him, if only because of an impossible transparent honesty that made him more and less than human. A rugged Australian, not tall but built like a hero, a face all forehead and jaw and glowing hyperthyroid eyes. He wept only when he jvas angry, the biographers said, 'in one minute of talk, they said, he might shift from gutter obscenity to some extreme of altruistic tenderness, and from that to a philosophical comment of the coldest intelligence. He passed his childhood on a sheep farm, ran away to sea on a freighter at thirteen, studied like a slave in London with a singleminded desperation, even through the horrors of the Pandemic of #. He was married twice and twice divorced. He killed a man in ah imbecile quarrel on the New Orleans docks, and wrote his First Symphony while he was in jail for that. And he died of stab wounds in a Cairo jail. It all had relevancy. Relevant or not, if the sonata was in your mind, so was the life. You had to remember also that Andrew Carr was the last of civilization's great composers. No one in the #st century approached him -- they ignored his explorations and carved cherry-stones. He belonged to no school, unless you wanted to imagine a school of music beginning with Bach, taking in perhaps a dozen along the way, and ending with Carr himself. His work was a summary and, in the light of the year #, a completion. Brian was certain he could play the first movement of the sonata acceptably. Technically, it was not revolutionary, but closely loyal to the ancient sonata form. Carr had even written in a conventional double-bar for a repeat of the entire opening statement, something that made late #th century critics sneer with great satisfaction. It never occurred to them that Carr expected a performer to use his head. The bright-sorrowful second movement, unfashionably long, with its strange pauses, unforeseen recapitulations, outbursts of savage change -- that was where Brian's troubles began. It did not help him to be old, remembering the inner storms of twenty five years ago and more. A S the single candle fluttered, Brian realized that he had forgotten to lock the door. That  troubled him, but he did not rise from the piano chair. He chided himself instead for the foolish neuroses of aloneness -- what could it matter? He shut his eyes. The sonata had long ago been memorized; printed copies were safe somewhere in the library. He played the opening of the first movement, as far as the double-bar; opened his eyes to the friendly black and white of clean keys and played the repetition with new light, new emphasis. Better than usual, he thought. Now that soaring modulation into A Major that only Carr would have wanted just there in just that sudden way, like the abrupt happening upon shining fields. On toward the climax -- I am playing it, I think -- through the intricate revelations of development and recapitulation. And the conclusion, lingering, half-humorous, not unlike a Beethoven ending, but with a questioning that was all Andrew Carr. After that -- "No more tonight," said Brian aloud. "Some night, though... Not competent right now, my friend. Fear's a many-aspect thing. But The Project..." He replaced the cover on the Steinway and blew out the candle. He had brought no torch, long use having taught his feet every inch of the short journey. It was quite dark. The neveropened western windows of the auditorium were dirty, most of the dirt on the outside, crusted wind-blow salt. In this partial darkness, something was wrong. At first Brian could find no source for the faint light, the dim orange with a hint of motion that had no right to be here. He peered into the gloom of the auditorium, fixed his eyes on the oblong of blacker shadow that was the door he meant to use, but it told him nothing. The windows, of course. He had almost forgotten there were any. The light, hardly deserving the name, was coming through them. But sunset was surely well past; he had been here a long time, delaying and brooding before he played. Sunset should not flicker. So there was some kind of fire on the mainland. There had been no thunderstorm. How could fire start, over there where no one ever came? swearing petulantly, locating the doorway again and groping through it into the Hall of Music. The windows out here were just as dirty; no use tryipg to see through them. There must have been a time when he had enjoyed looking through them. He. stood shivering in the marble silence, trying to remember. He could not. Time was a gradual eternal dying. Time was a long growth of dirt and ocean salt, sealing in, covering over forever. He stumbled for his cave, hurrying now, and lit two candles. He left one by the cold stove and used the other to light his way down the stairs to his raft. Once down there, he blew it out, afraid. The room a candle makes in the darkness is a vulnerable room. With no walls, it closes in a blindness. He pulled the raft by the guide-rope, gently, for fear of noise. He found his canoe tied as he had left it. He poked his white head slowly beyond the sill, staring west. Merely a bonfire gleaming, reddening the blackness of the cliff. Brian knew the spot, a ledge almost at water level. At one end of it was the troublesome path he used ip climbing up to the forest. Usable driftwood was often there, the supply renewed by the high tides. "No," Brian said. "Oh, no..." Unable to accept, or believe, or not believe, he drew his head in, resting his forehead on the coldness of the sill, waiting for dizziness to pass, reason to return. Then rather calm, he once more leaned out over the sill. The fire still shone and was therefore not a disordered dream of old age, but it was dying to a dull rose of embers. time. The Museum clocks and watches had stopped long ago; Brian had ceased to want them. A sliver of moon was hanging over the water to the east. He ought to be able to remember the phases, deduce the approximate time from that. But his mind was too tired or distraught to give him the necessary data. Maybe it was somewhere around midnight. He climbed on the sill and, with grunting effort, lifted the canoe over it to the motionless water inside. Wasted energy, he decided, as soon as that struggle was over. That fire had been lit before daylight passed: whoever lit it would have seen the canoe, might even have been watching Brian himself come home from his hunting. The canoe's disappearance in the night would only rouse further curiosity. But Brian was too exhausted to lift it back. TJHY assume that the maker of the bonfire was necessarily hostile? Might be good company. Might be... Brian pulled his raft through the darkness, secured it at the stairway, and groped back to his cave. He then locked the door. The venison was waiting, the sight and smell of it making him suddenly ravenous. He lit a small fire ih the stove, one that he hoped would not be still sending smoke from the ventilator shaft when morning came. He cooked the meat crudely and wolfed it down, all enjoyment gone at the first mouthful. He was shocked then to discover the dirtiness of his white beard. He hadn't given himself a real bath in -- weeks? He searched for scissors and spent an absent-minded while trimming the beard back to shortness. He ought to take some soap -- valuable stuff -- down to Moses' room and wash. Clothes, too. People probably still wore them. He had worn none for years, except for sandals and a clout and a carrying satchel for his trips to the mainland. He had enjoyed the freedom at first, and especially the discovery in his rugged fifties that he did not need clothes even for the soft winters, except perhaps a light covering when he slept. Then almost total nakedness had become so natural, it required no thought at all. But the owner of that bonfire -- He checked his rifles. The .# automatic, an Army model from the #s, was the best. The tiny bullets carried a paralytic poison : graze a man's finger and he was painlessly dead in three minutes. Effective range, with telescopic sights, three kilometers; weight, a scant five pounds. He sat a long time cuddling that triumph of military science, listening for sounds that did not come, wondering often about the unknowable passage of night toward day. Would it be two o'clock. He wished he could have seen the Satellite, renamed in his mind the Midnight Star, but when he was down there at his port, he had not once looked up at the night sky. Delicate and beautiful, bearing its everlasting freight of men who must have been dead now for twenty-five years and who would be dead a very long time -- well, it was better than a clock, Brian often thought, if you happened to look at the midnight sky at the right time of the month when the Manmade star could catch the moonlight. But he had not seen it tonight. Three o'clock? A t some time during the long dark, he put the rifle away on the floor. With studied, selfconscious contempt for his own weakness, he strode out noisily into the Hall of Music with a fresh-lit candle. This same bravado, he knew, might dissolve at the first alien noise. While it lasted, though, it was invigorating. The windows were still black with night. As if the candle-flame had found its own way, Brian was standing by the ancient marimba in the main hall, the light slanting carelessly away from his thin, high-veined hand. Nearby, on a small table, sat the Stone ge clay image he had brought long ago from the Directors' meeting room on the fifteenth floor. It startled him. He remembered quite clearly how he himself had placed it there, obeying a halfhumorous whim: the image and the singing stones were both magnificently older, than history, so why shouldn't they live together? Whenever he dusted the marimba, he dusted the image respectfully and its pedestal. It would not have taken much urging from the impulses of a lonely mind, he supposed, to make him place offerings before it and bow down -- winking first, of course, to indicate that rituals suitable to two aging gentlemen did not have to be sensible in order to be good. But now the clay face, recapitulating eternity, startled him. Possibly some flicker of the candle had given it a new mimicry of life. Though worn with antiquity, it was not deformed. The chipped places were simple honorable scars. The two faces stared mildly from the single head; there were plain stylized lines to represent folded hands, equally artless marks of sex on either side. That was all. The maker might have intended it to be a child's toy or a god. A wooden hammer of modem make rested on the marimba. Softly, Brian tapped a few of the stones. He struck the shrillest one harder, waking ipany slowdying overtones, and laid the hammer down, listening until the last murmur perished and a drop of hot wax hurt his thumb. He returned to his cave and blew out the candle, thinking of the door, not caring that he had, in irrational bravado, left it vpr locked. Face down, he rolled his head and clenched his fingers into his pallet, seeking in pain and finding at last the relief of stormy helpless weeping in the total dark. Then he slept. dence of it was in their tense squatting pose, not in what the feeble light allowed Brian to see of their faces, which were as blank as rock. Hunched down just inside the open doorway of the cloakroom-cave, a dim morning grayness from the Hall of Music behind them, they were ready for flight. Brian's intelligence warned his body to stay motionless, for readiness for flight could also be readiness for attack. He studied them, lowering his eyelids to a slit. On his pallet well inside the cave, he must be in deep shadow. They were aware of him, though, keenly aware. They were very young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, firm-muscled, the man slim but heavy in the shoulders, the girl a fully developed woman. They were dressed alike: loincloths of some coarse dull fabric and moccasins that might be deerhide. Their hair grew nearly to the shoulders and was cut off carelessly there, but they were evidently in the habit of combing it. They appeared to be clean. Their complexion, so far as Brian could guess it in the meager light, was the brown of a heavy tan. With no immediate awareness of emotion, he decided they were beautiful, and then, within his own poised, perilous silence, Brian reminded himself that the young are always beautiful. Softly -- Brian saw no motion of her lips -- the woman muttered: "He wake." A twitch of the man's hand was probably meant to warn her to be quiet. His other hand clutched the shaft of a javelin with a metal blade. Brian saw that the blade had once belonged to a breadknife; it was polished and shining, lashed to a peeled stick. The javelin trailed, ready for use at a flick of the young man's arm. Brian opened his eyes plainly. Deliberately, he sighed. "Good morning." The youth said: "Good morning, sa." "Where do you come from?" "Millstone." The young man spoke automatically, but then his facial rigidity dissolved into amazement and some kind of distress. He glanced at his companion, who giggled uneasily. "The old man pretends to not know," she said, and smiled, and seemed to be waiting for the young man's permission to go on speaking. He did not give it, but she continued: "Sa, the old ones of Millstone are dead." She thrust her hand out and down, flat, a picture of finality, adding with nervous haste: "As the Old Man knows. He who told us to call him Jonas, she who told us to call her Abigail, they are dead. They are still-without-moving for six days. Then we do the burial as they told us. As the Old Man knows." "But I don't know!" said Brian, and sat up hn his pallet, too quickly, startling them. But their motion was backward, readiness for flight, not for aggression. "Millstone? Where is Millstone?" B oth looked wholly bewildered, then dismayed. They stood up with splendid animal grace, stepping backward out of the cave, the girl whispering in the man's ear. Brian caught only two words: "Is angry..." He jumped up. "Don't go! Please don't go!" He followed them out of the cave, slowly now, aware that he might well be an object of terror in the half-dark, aware of his gaunt, graceless age and dirty hacked-off beard. Almost involuntarily, he adopted something of the flat stilted quality of their speech: "I will not hurt you. Do not go." They halted. The girl smiled dubiously. The man said: "We need old ones. They die. He who told us to call him Jonas said, many days in the boat, not with the sun-path, he said, across the sun-path, he said, keeping land on the left hand. We need old ones to speak the -- to speak... The Old Man is angry?" "No, I am not angry. I am never angry." Brian's mind groped, certain of nothing. No one had come for twenty-five years. Only twentyfive? Millstone? There was red-gold on the dirty eastern windows of the Hall of Music, a light becoming softness as it slanted down, touching the long rows of cases, the warm brown of an antique spinet, the arrogant clean gold of a #th century harp, the dull gray of singing stones five thousand years old and a clay face much older than that. "Millstone?" Brian pointed southwest in inquiry. The girl nodded, pleased and not at all surprised that he should know, watching him now with a squirrel's stiff curiosity. Hadn't there once been a Millstone River in or near Princeton? He thought he remembered that it emptied into the Raritan Canal. There was some moderately high ground around there. Islands now, no doubt, or -- well, perhaps they would tell him. "There were old people in Millstone," he said, trying for gentle dignity, "and they died. So now you need old ones to take their place." The girl nodded vigorously. A glance at the young man was full of shyness, possessiveness, maybe some amusement. "He who told us to call him Jonas said no marriage can be without the words of Abraham." "Abr -- " Brian checked himself. If this was religion, it would not do to speak the name Abraham with a rising inflection, at least not until he knew what it stood for. "I have been for a long time -- " He checked himself again. A man old, ugly and strange enough to be sacred should never stoop to explain anything. seven-stone marimba. His hand dropped, his thumbnail clicking by accident against the deepest stone and waking a murmur. The children drew back alarmed. Brian smiled. "Don't be afraid." He tapped the other stones lightly. "It is only music. It will not hurt you." He was silent a while, and they were patient and respectful, waiting for more light. He asked carefully: "He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all the things you know?" "All things," the boy said, and the girl nodded quickly, so that the soft brownness of her hair tumbled about her face, and she pushed it back in a small human motion as old as the clay image. "Do you know how old you are?" They looked blank. Then the girl said: "Oh, summers!" She held up both hands with spread fingers, then one hand. Three fives. As the Old Man knows." "I am very old," said Brian. "I know many things. But sometimes I wish to forget, and sometimes I wish to hear what others know, even though I may know it myself." They looked uncomprehending and greatly impressed. Brian felt a smile on his face and wondered why it should be there. They were nice children. Born ten years after the death of a world. Or twenty perhaps. I think I am seventy-six, but did I drop a decade somewhere and never notice the damn thing? "He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all that you know "about Abraham?" At sound of the name, both of them made swift circular motions, first at the forehead, then at the breast. "He taught us all things," the young man said. "He, and she who told us to call her Abigail. The hours to rise, to pray, to wash, to eat. The laws for hunting, and I know the Abrahamwords for that: Sol-Amra, I take this for my need." Brian felt lost again, dismally lost, and looked down to the grave clay faces of the image for counsel, and found none. "They who told you to call them Jonas and Abigail, they were the only old ones who lived with you?" Again that look of bewilderment. "The only ones, sa," the young man said. "As the Old Man knows." I could never persuade them that, being old, I know very nearly nothing. B rian straightened to his full gaunt height. The young people were not tall; though stiff and worn with age, Brian knew he was still a bonily overpowering creature. Once, among men, he had mildly enjoyed being more than life-size. As a shield for the lonely, frightened thing that was his mind, he put on a phony sternness: "I wish to examine you about Millstone and your knowledge of Abraham. How many others are living at Millstone? "Two fives, sa,' said the boy promptly, "and I who may be called Jonason and this one we may call Paula. Two fives and two. We are the biggest, we two. The others are only children, but he we call Jimi has killed his deer. He sees after them now while we go across the sun-path." Under Brian's questioning, more of the story came, haltingly, obscured by the young man's conviction that the Old Man already knew everything. Some time, probably in the middle #s, Jonas and Abigail (whoever they were) had come on a group of twelve wild children who were keeping alive somehow in a ruined town where their elders had all died. Jonas and Abigail had brought them all to an island they called Millstone. Jonas and Abigail had come originally from "up across the sun-path" -- the boy seemed to mean north -- and they had been very old, which might mean anything between thirty and ninety, in teaching the children primitive means of survival, Jonas and Abisuccess: Jonason and Paula were well fed, shining with health and cleanliness and the strength of wildness, and their speech had not been learned from the ignorant. Its pronunciation faintly suggested New England, so far as Brian could detect any local accent at all. "Did they teach you reading and writing?" he asked, and made writing motions on the flat of his palm, which the two watched in vague alarm. The boy asked: "What is that?" "Never mind." He thought:  could quarrel with some of your theories. Mister whom I may call Jonas. "Well, tell me now what they taught you of Abraham." Both made again that circular motion at forehead and breast, and the young man said with the stiffness of recitation: 'Abraham was the Son of Heaven, who died that we might live." charged with the religious gesture, tapped the marimba shyly, fascinated, and drew her finger back sharply, smiling up at Brian in apology for her naughtiness. "He taught the laws, the everlasting truth of all time," the boy recited, almost gabbling, "and was slain on the wheel at Nuber by the infidels. Therefore, since he died for us, we look up across the sun-path when we pray to Abraham Brown, who will come again." Abraham Brown? But -- But  knew him, Brian thought, stunned. I met him once. Nuber? Newburg, the temporary capital of the Soviet of -- oh, the hell with that. Met him in #I -- he was # years old then, could still walk, speak clearly, even remember an unimportant concert of mine from years before. I could have picked him up in one hand, but nobody ivas ever more alive. The wheel? "And when did he die, boy?" Brian asked. Jonason moved fingers helplessly, embarrassed. "Long, long ago." He glanced up hopefully. "A thousand years? I think he who told us to call him Jonas did not ever teach us that." "I see. Never mind." Oh, my good Doctor -- after all! Artist, statesman, student of ethics, philosopher -- you Said that if men knew themselves, they would have the beginning of wisdom. Your best teacher was Socrates. Well you knew it, and now look what's happened! Jonas and Abigail -- r-some visionary pair, Brian supposed, maybe cracking up under the ghastliness of those years. Admirers of Brown, perhaps. Shocked, probably, away from the religions of the #st century, which had all failed to stop the horrors, nevertheless they needed one, or were convinced that the children did -- so they created one. There must later have been some dizzying pride of creation in it, possibly wholehearted belief in themselves, too, as they found the children accepting it, building a ritual life around it. It was impossible, Brian thought, that Jonas and Abigail could have met the living Abraham Brown. As anyone must who faces the limitations of human intelligence. Brown had accepted mysteries, but he did not make them. He was wholly without intellectual arrogance. No one could have talked with him five minutes without hearing him say tranquilly; "I don't know." The wheel at Nuber? The wheel? B rian realized he could never learn how Brown had actually died. Even if he had the strength and courage to go backnorth -- no, at seventy-six (eighty-six?), one can hardly make a fresh start in the study of history. Not without the patience of , Abraham Brown himself, who had probably been doing just that when the wheel -- An awed question from the girl pulled Brian from a black pit of abstraction: "What is that?" She was pointing to the clay image in its dusty sunlight. Brian spoke vaguely, almost deaf to his own words until they were past recovering: "That? It is very old. Very old and very sacred." She nodded, round-eyed, and stepped back a pace or two. "And that -- that was all they taught you of Abraham Brown?" Astonished, the boy asked: "Is it not enough?" There is always The Project. "Why, perhaps." "We know all the prayers. Old Man." "Yes, I'm sure you do." "The Old Man will come with us." "Eh?" There is always The Project. "Come with you?" "We look for old ones," said the young man. There was a new note in his voice, and the note was impatience. "We traveled many days, up across the sunpath. We want you to speak the Abraham-words for marriage. The Old Ones said we must not mate as the animals do without the words. We want -- " "Marry, of course," said Brian feebly, rubbing his great, longfingered hand across his face so that the words were blurred and dull. "Naturally. Beget. Replenish the Earth. I'm tired. I don't know any Abraham-words for marriage. Go on and marry. Try again. Try -- " "But the Old Ones said -- " "Wait!" Brian cried. "Wait! Let me think. Did he -- he who told you to call him Jonas, did he teach you anything about the world as it was in the old days, before you were born?" "Before? The Old Man makes fun of us." "No, no." And since he now had to fight down physical fear as well as confusion, Brian spoke more harshly than he intended: "Answer my question! What do you know of the old days? I was a young man once, do you understand? As young as you. What do you know about the world I lived in?" new-born doubt in him as well as anger, stiffening his shoulders, narrowing his innocent gray eyes. "There was always the world," he said, "ever since God made it a thousand years ago." "Was there? I was a musician. Do you know what a musician is?" The young man shook his head, watching Brian -- too alertly, watching his hands, aware of him in a new way, no longer humble. Paula sensed the tension and did not like it. She said worriedly, politely: "We forget some of the things they taught us, sa. They were Old Ones. Most of the days, they were away from us in -- places where we were not to go, praying. Old Ones are always praying." "I will hear this Old Man pray," said Jonason. The butt of the javelin rested against Jonasori's foot, the blade swaying from side to side. A wrong word, any trifle, Brian knew, could make, them decide in an instant that he was evil and not sacred. Their religion would certainly require a devil. He thought also: Merely one of the many ways of dying. It would be swift, which is always a consideration. "Certainly you may hear me pray," said Brian abruptly. "Come this way." In a fluctuating despair, he knew that he must not become angry, as a climber stumbling at the edge of a cliff might order himself not to be careless. "Come this way. My prayers -- I'll show you. I'll show you what I did when I was a young man in a "World you never knew." He stalked across the Hall of Music, not looking behind, but his back sensed every glint of light on that bread-knife javelin. "Come this way!" he shouted. "Come in here!" He flung open the door of the auditorium and strode up on the platform. "Sit down over there and be quiet!" They did, he thought -- he could not look at them. He knew he was muttering, too, between his noisy outbursts, as he snatched the cover off the Steinway and raised the lid, muttering bits and fragments from old times, and from the new times. "They went thataway. Oh, Mr. Van Anda, it just simply goes right through me; I can't express it. Madam, such was my intention -- or, as Brahms is supposed to have said on a slightly different subject, any ass knows that. Brio, Rubato and Schmalz went to sea in a -- Jonason, Paula, this is a piano. It will not hurt you. Sit there, be quiet, listen." He found calm. Now if ever, now when I have living proof that human nature (some sort of human nature is continuing -- surely now, if ever. The Project- that was natural to him, Andrew Carr took over. In the stupendous opening chords of the introduction, Brian very nearly forgot his audience. Not quite, though. The youngsters had sat down out there in the dusty region where none but ghosts had lingered for twenty-five years or more. The piano's first sound brought them to their feet. Brian played through the first four bars, piling the chords like mountains, then held the last one with the pedal and waved his right hand at Jonason and Paula in a furious downward motion. He thought they understood. He thought he saw them sit down again, but he could pay them scant attention now, for the sonata was coming alive under his fingers, waking, growing, rejoicing. He did not forget the youngsters again. They were important, terrifying, too important, at the fringe of awareness. But he could not look at them any more. He shut his eyes. He had never played like this in the flood of his prime, in the old days, before great audiences that loved him. Never. His eyes were still closed, holding him secure in a secret world that was not all darkness, when he ended the first movement, paused very briefly, and moved on with complete assurance to explore the depth and height of the second. This was a true statement at last. This was Andrew Carr; he lived, even if, after this late morning, he might never live again. And now the third, the storm and the wrath, the interludes of calm, the anger, denials, affirmations. Was there anything he didn't know, this heir of three centuries who died in jail? Without hesitation, without any awareness of self, of age or pain or danger or loss, Brian was entering on the broad reaches of the last movement when he opened his eyes. The youngsters were gone. Well, he thought, it's too big. It frightened them away. He could visualize them, stealing out with backward .looks of panic. Incomprehensible thunder. But he could not think much about them now. Not while Andrew Carr was with him. He played on with the same assurance, the same joyful sense of victory. Savages -- let them go, with leave and good will.  faintly troubling him, something that must have begun under cover of these rising, pealing octave passages -- storm waves, each higher than the last, until it seemed that even a superhuman swimmer must be exhausted. An undefinable alien noise, a kind of humming. Brian shook his head peevishly, shutting it away. It couldn't matter, at least not now. Everything was here, in the beautiful labors his hands still had to do. The waves were growing more quiet, settling, subsiding, and now he must play those curious arpeggios which be had never quite understood -- but, of course, he understood them at last. Rip them out of the piano like showers of sparks, like distant lightnings moving farther off across a world that could never be at rest. The final theme. Why, it was a variation -- and how was it that he had never realized it? -- a variation on a theme of Brahms, from the German Requiem. Quite plain, quite simple, and Brahms would have approved. Still it was rather strange, Brian thought, that he had never made the identification before in spite of all his study. Well, he knew it now. Blessed are the dead... Yes, Brian thought, but something more remained, and he searched for it, proudly certain of discovering it, through the mighty unfolding of the finale. No hurrying, no crashing impatience any more, but a moving through time with no fear of time, through radiance and darkness with no fear of either. Andrew Carr was happy, the light of the Sun on his shoulders. That they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow after them. Brian stood up, swaying and out of breath. So the music was over, and the young savages were gone, and somewhere a jangling, the Hall of Music, distant, but entering with violence even here, now that the piano was silent. Brian moved stiffly out of the auditorium, more or less knowing what he would find. The noise was immense, the unchecked overtones of the marimba fuming and quivering as the high ceiling of the Hall of Music caught and twisted them, flung them back against the answering strings of harps and pianos and violins, the sulky membranes of drums, the nervous , brass of cymbals. The girl was playing it. Really playing it. B rian laughed once, softly, in the shadows, and was not heard. She had hit on a most primeval rhythm natural for children or savages and needed nothing else, hammering it out swiftly on one. stone and then the next, wanting no rest or variation. The boy was dancing, slapping his feet, pounding his chest, thrusting out his javelin in perfect time to the clamor, edging up to his companion, grimacing, drawing back to return. Neither was laughing or close to laughter. Their faces were savage-solemn, downright grim with the excitement, the innocent lust, as spontaneous as the drumming of partridges. It was a while before they saw Brian in the shadows. The girl dropped the hammer. The boy froze briefly, his javelin raised, then jerked his head slightly at Paula, who snatched at something. Only moments later did Brian realize that she had taken the clay image before she fled. Jonason covered her retreat, stepping backward, his face blank with fear and readiness, javelin poised. So swiftly, so easily, by grace of a few wrong words and Steinway's best, had a Sacred Old One become a Bad Old One, an evil spirit. They were gone, down the stairway, leaving the echo of Brian's voice crying: "Don't go! galaxy science fiction Please don't go! I beg you!" Brian followed them unwillingly. It was a measure of his ed before he was at the bottom of the stairway looking across the shut-in water to his raft, which they had used and left at the window-sill port. Brian had never been a good swimmer; he was too dizzy now and short of breath to attempt to reach it. He clutched the rope and hitched himself, panting, hand over hand, to the window, collapsing there a while until he found strength to scramble into his canoe and grope for the paddle. The youngsters' canoe was already far off, heading up the river, the boy paddling with deep powerful strokes. Up the river, of course. They had to find the right kind of Old Ones. Up across the sun-path. Brian dug his blade in the quiet water. For a time, his rugged ancient muscles were willing. There was sap in them yet. Perhaps he was gaining slightly. He shouted hugely: "Bring back my two-faced god! Bring it back! It's not yours. It's not yours." voice booming at them. At any rate, the girl looked back' once. The boy, intent on his effort, did not. Brian roared: "Bring back my god! I want my little god!" He was not gaining on them. They had a mission, after all. They had to find the right kind of Old Ones. But damn it, Brian thought, my world has some rights, hasn't it? We'll see about this. He lifted the paddle like a spear and flung it, knowing even before his shoulder winced how absurd the gesture was. The youngsters were so far away that even an arrow from a bow might not have reached them. The paddle splashed in the water. Not far away: a small infinity. It swung about to the will of the river, the heavy end pointing obediently downstream. It nuzzled companipnably against a gray-faced chunk of driftwood, diverting it, so that presently the driftwood floated into Brian's reach. He caught it, and flung it toward the paddle, hoping it might fall on the other side and send the paddle near him. It fell short, and in his oddly painless extremity, Brian was not surprised, but merely watched the gray driftwood floating and bobbing along beside him with an irritation that was part friendliness, for it suggested the face of a music critic he had met in -- New Boston, was it? Denver? London? He couldn't remember. "Why," he said aloud, detachedly observing the passage of his canoe beyond the broad morning shadow of the Museum of Human History, "I seem to have made sure to die." "Mr. Van Anda has abundantly demonstrated a mastery of the instrument and of the -- " You acid fraud, go play solfeggio on your linotype! Don't bother me! "and of the literature which could, withdut exaggeration, be termed beyond technique. He is one of those rare interpreters who at the last analysis -- " "I can't swim it, you know," said Brian. will really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome, gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. " -- have so deeply submerged, dedicated themselves, that they might truly be said to have become one with -- " Gaining on the canoe, the gray-faced chip moved tranquilly, placidly approving, . toward the open sea. And with a final remnant of strength, Brian inched forward to the bow of the canoe and gathered the full force of his lungs to shout up the river: "Go in peace!" They could not have heard him. They were too far away-'Snd a new morning wind was blowing, fresh and sweet, out of the northwest. Up Illustrated by Renewal "I'd give a year off my life to... Idle talk now, but it was ghastly reality to Kent! H oward Kent looked at his young and beautiful wife and felt the weight of the years rest on his shoulders. In her eyes he saw his heavily lined face and sagging, stooped shoulders. They stood just inside the long, narrow reception room of the Human Rejuvenation Plant. Potted palms and formal chairs reminded one of a Human Disposal unit. "I have a confession to make, darling," he said. "Oh no, Howard. Not now'. I take for granted you've done the usual things in your youth." "But..." "And we needn't have hurried so, as you can see. Now we'll probably have to wait hours in this perfectly dismal place." She looked as young and fresh as he looked old and dusty, he thought, so out of place in this kind of establishment. He had always loved small women. Leah was small and vivacious and dressed a year ahead of styles. No matter what happened, he'd never regret having married her. "But this is something I should have told you before," he said. She put her hand on his arm. "I've been perfectly happy these past six months. Whatever it was, I forgive you." "It's not that. I'm talking about my age. I didn't think you'd marry me if you knew how old I really was. I put off telling you and figured you'd see my birth certificate at the wedding ceremony." never even looked at the silly old thing." "Well, darling, I looked at yours and felt a little guilty in marrying a young girl of twentythree. But the fact is I'm sixtyfive. I've been rejuvenated before." "I rather suspected it when you started aging so suddenly last week," she said. ' Before that you didn't look a day over thirty. But it doesn't matter." "It's worse than that, Leah." His face worked convulsively. "I've been here twice before. This is my third trip." "I'm too modern to act shocked, Howard. If you didn't want to tell me before, dear, it's perfectly all right." "Look, darling!" Perspiration stood on his forehead. "You don't seem to understand. But then you never could add or subtract. Now listen carefully. Each trip clips five years off your life span. "Everyone knows that, of course. But it's better to be young..." "It's better to be alive than dead," he said harshly. "But your doctors have given you a longevity span to the age of ninety." "Suppose it was eighty, instead of ninety?" "Oh, dear, you worry too much," she said. "Doctors don't make such mistakes." "They can't give me a guarantee. You see, three of my ancestors died from accidents. The prediction of ninety years is based on the assumption that they would have lived a normal lifetime." "They make few guarantees. You know, all of you men are such babies at a time like this." "Yes, but if it is eighty -- then. I'll come out not a rejuvenated man, but just a handful of dust." "Oh, that can't happen." paused a moment while taking in her youthful appearance. "From now on I wouldn't look much older. Just a little grayer and perhaps more stooped. Then, I'll have what's left of my lortgevity plus the five years this rejuvenation would clip off. "Why, Howard, dear." Leah sounded shocked. "You dont know what you're talking about. An aunt of mine elected that choice and it was perfectly horrible. She drooled the last few years of her life and was helpless as a baby." "Why didn't they use Euthanasia?" he asked. "The courts decided she wasgalaxy science fiction n't capable of making a rational decision." He wiped his forehead. "That would be a long time off, darling. We'd have so much time together in the next fifteen years." "But what would it be like if you were crippled with arthritis or some other disease?" "You could divorce me if that happens." "I can also divorce you if you don't go through with rejuvenation. You know it's the law." "You wouldn't do that." His face was more lined than ever. "Don't be silly, dear. Nobody gets old these days. Who would remain our friends? Why, everywhere we'd go, people would point us out. Oh, no, life wouldn't be livable." "That sounds like a cruel and calculating decision to me," Howard said. "Either I take a chance on dying or you'll divorce me."  "You have no right to make such an accusation. I married a young man who said he was thirty years old. Six months later I discover he's sixty-five. Now who's cruel and calculating?"' "Please, darling, I didn't mean it. Look," he pleaded, "I'll even sign permission for you to have a lover. There's that young fellow that's always around. Maybe it's happened already." She stood back from him. "Howard, you're being perfectly nasty. Just like an aged person you read about." of it youfs when I die a natural death." He put his hands in his pockets. FHE street door opened just then and a young man came toward them with a light springy step. He offered his hand to Howard whotook it slpwly. "How are you, skipper? And you, Leah? I came as soon as I got your message." "He's worried, Mike." Leah's face had brightened. "And now he's insisting on growing old." "I've been through the wringer twice before, you see," Howard said in a low voice. "I don't think you have much to worry about," Mike said. "Those medics know their business." "Aging is a nasty process." Leah wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something offensive. "Maybe you can convince him, Mike." "Leah is right, you know," Mike said. "A few years ago I visited the old age home. There's only one left. You'd be surprised at the amount of suffering old people go through before they die; cancer, angina, broken bones, strokes, arthritis. Rejuvenation won't work on extremely old bodies. Longevity has run out." "Why does it have to clip off five years?" worried Howard. "It's the old-age governor they found in the pituitary gland. They can turn it back, but the shock takes off about five years." "Oh, I know what's in the medical articles," Howard growled. "Remember, I've been through here twice before. But the Sun was so warm this morning. It was like seeing everything for the last time. I felt like sitting down and letting everything drift." "That's a sure sign that you really need rejuvenating," sid Leah. "After it's over you'll be making me a golf widow again. Won't he, Mike?" "Of course. He'll come out raring to go." Howard looked from Mike to Leah and back at Mike. Age was no match for youth. If love hadn't started between them already, it would soon. A t the end of the long room, a door opened and two nurses entered, starched and antiseptic. "Your room is ready, Mr. Kent," one nurse said. Howard shuddered. "Everything is so horribly familiar. The pill to erase the worry, which doesn't work. The cart you ride on which makes you feel like a carcass. The little bump as you enter the regeneration room. Then you get a hypodermic and crawl into a long boiler tnk." "You're just nervous, dear," said Leah. "A dismal, miasmic cloud settles on your mind and you decide you wouldn't go through it again for anything in the world." Mike put his arm around Leah as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "He'll be all right, my darling." Howard looked at them and then turned wearily to the nurse. "I'm ready." The nurse walked down the xow ju#t off the presa -- our new cstalos Is ready to bring your favorite autliors of Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Wlerd adventures as near m your miiitaal A catalog-compMe dcKjripUons. Mly illustrated an' it doesn't cost you a centl Send your name and addreK, "d you U Wt your copy by return mail. And we'li keep you posted ending you news of outsUndlng book values... bargains name to the thousands of others we have been serving tor years. No obUgationl # E. Saa Fernando #t.  Depf. G-#  San Jose #, California J long room with the stooped man and disappeared beyond the door. "Did you tell him about us?" asked Mike. "Of course not. What a man doesn't know won't hurt him. "Are you Mrs. Kent?" asked the other nurse who had remained behind. "Yes." "The doctor said to remind you that the fourth time is very dangerous," the nurse said. "You'll have five years and six months without it. But possibly only six months if it should be successful." "Better take the first offer, Leah," said Mike. Leah smiled. "I found a gray o horried little colony, cut off from Earth for # years that has to make Man  J long climb to civilization in two frantic weeksi It's a hard ob, no question of ,t but there arebooks to help. For those who maintain that book-lornin cant hold a candle to experience this may seem to be complete confirmation... but is it. Then again, may it fs, for the civilization that emerges from the books is as engaging a bedlam os any you ve ever visited in fiction! talent. Alcorn's gift brings peace to everybody who comes anywhere near him. There is only one person who is exempt -- himself! Until the issue is mode up, it's impossible to tell what will bolonce our short stories, but there will be at least one other long novelet... a beauty, too, US add! plus' a genuinely delightful Christmas cover by Emsh... another in his wonderfully bawl out your deoler, see your oculist... or toke advantage of our spectoculor holidoy offer on poge #! hair and a wrinkle this morning, love. Better six months of youth than a thousand years of old age." She went into his arms. "Don't worry about what happens, love. You'll have a lot of fun in the next seventy years." He kissed her and held her closely. "I've got to go now," she said. "I'm so grateful you were able to get the forged birth certificate." Her high heels tapped rapidly on the tile floor as she walked down the long room with the other nurse. "Good luck. Mother," he called after her. Give the Gift You'd Like to Receive See next page  # Very Special Christmas Offers toM #eJU Suleriittoa I year # issues #.(Kt Each additionat eift sdtiscription for one year # #I # different during the year-(# Additional subscriptions # ## Both for # Additional subscriptions # ea. ## Please fill out all the information on the order blank below and mail in with your check today. If you would prefer not defacing your magazine send your order in on plain paper, but all orders must be in before Dec. #, #. The twelve month gift you yourself would like to receive. It is a perfect gift to give your friends. We will acknowledge your gift with a handsome Science Fiction Gift Card Announcement with your name as the donor. Rush your order in today. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose AMrtti Addrtsi -- City State City -- . State Ollar # Mca Ollar # Orica Naan Haaia -- AHrati aodraM.-.- -- City . State City State otter # Orlea Otter # -- Priaa --  -- Nama W  --  -- AOdrats AMraii City. State City. -- State Otter # Orica by Burgess Drake. J. B. Lippincott Co., # I have gone off the deep end for this book. It is not for the devotees of space adventures or sociological anti-utopias; it is much more for lovers of James Stephens, Kenneth Grahame, and (more specifically the E. B. White of Stuart Little or the Theodore Sturgeon of More Than Human. It is almost perfect of its kind, a "novel of the imagination" in the best English tradition of gentle but pointed fantasy, written in a warm, moving, richly evocative style that only occasionally gives the impression of being slightly precious. The story is -- on the surface -- the standard one of poltergeist phenomena, a "ghost-haunt" in a typical many-roomed and luxuriantly gardened English mansion, complete with servants in the servants' quarters and all the rest of it. But it is so much more than that! For one thing, it is "written by" one of the two poltergeists that cause all the disturbances, a lad named Tri;cie. He tells of his mother, childless Mary Hilary, her heel of a British politician husband -- and of the twins, Janet and himself, who never lived, but were "kindled into being" by Mary's wanting them. Nothing can be more enchanting and tragic than the delicate building up of the character of the little non-material lad as he tells of his equally ephemeral sister, and of their relations to the physical characters in the book. I know it may all sound a bit ridiculous to the hard-boiled and thfe serious-minded, but I assure you it is not -- not, that is, if you still care for the sort of poetic fantasy that today, alas, seems to be almost extinct. If you do enjoy such "stuff as dreams are made on," please do not pass up this lovely book. August Derleth. Farrar, Straus and Young, # T he trend toward collections of heretofore-unpublished science fiction and fantasy continues, with the appearance of this one by the Sage of Sauk City. Twelve stories for almost # -- or about double the material in an average issue of Galaxy for more than ten times as much money. Oh, well. Painfully uneven, too, is the content of the book. There are two Class A tales, one by Poul Anderson and one little dandy by Evelyn Smith; three B and Bplus items by Asimov, Clarke and Dick; and seven ranging from C to D-minus by authors whose names we will charitably not expose here to the public view. Sohl. Rinehart  Co., # offering is just as slick, fastmoving, melodramatic and essentially empty as his previous ones. This one deals with the old "immortality" idea. of renewing -- or even copying -- the brains and bodies of the deserving dead, so they can keep on being valuable to society. A nefarious tytnch of characters try to subvert this noble scheme to their own base ends, but are defeated by the son of a man who has been murdered and then disagreeably miscopied, and by the inevitable pinup heroine with "blonde hair, bronzed shoulders, small waist and long legs." by Willy Johns. Little, Brown  Co., # TF you want a really disagreeable and almost pointless experience in reading, I recommend this wordy pseudo-imitation of Gulliver's Travels to your masochistic attention. An interplanetary exploration crew is mysteriously stranded on an unknown planet which the literary-minded gents on the ship name Thalia. They go through interminably gruesome adventures among the K o d I i k s , vegetable wormlike creatures whose society seems to be intended to satirize some sort of rigid traditionalist theocracy. The Gromliks, squarish beings who serve the author as a bluntedged parody on communism; and two other groups, the Vimliks and the Optliks, the nature of which will forever be unknown to me, since I just quit reading at that dismal point. Of course, this may be the greatest satire since #, but somehow I doubt it. L. Ron Hubbard. Ace Books, Inc., #c "AS mass approaches infinity, time approaches zero." This relativity concept is the basis of a fast-paced and grim adventure by the manufacturer of dianetics. The story, which first appeared under the title "To The Stars" in Astounding back in #, develops the notion that the crews of interstellar ships age only months while they are in transit, while on Earth people age decades, even centuries. The crews thereby become a class apart, having no. friends, no families, no durable human contacts other than their crew mates. Yet the faster-than-light ships still go out, for they have a crucial function; the saving of the human race. Hubbard's melodramatifc development of this thesis is just short of absurdity, but interesting nevertheless. iord Simak. Ace Books, Inc., #c HE newest Ace "double" gives you a reprint of Simak's richly imaginative novel that first appeared in this magazine and then was hard-covered by Simon and Schuster, and publishes for the first time since its original serialization in Astounding one of de Camp's Krishnan series, original title "The Queen of Zamba." De Camp gets around the problem of subjective time differences that laid the groundwork for the plot of Hubbard's novel (see above) by having peopie on Earth who want to remain the same age as star travelers take "trance pills." Very simple. Otherwise, this is a cops-androbbers adventure on a planet whose natives are still in a preindustrial stage of development. It involves a hunt for the runaway daughter of a rich Levantine (Earthian) who has eloped to said planet with a typical de Campian adventurer named Fallon. It's fast-moving and moderately sophisticated entertainment, bubble-light though not bubbleheaded. and considerably below the author's best. Simak's offering makes up for it. Cecile Matschat and Carl Carmet. The John C. Winston Co., # T his nine-story anthology for young people consists of three tales each by Carl H. Claudy and Peter van Dresser, all taken from the back files of The American Boy, two by del Rey from Asfounding, and one by Robert story in the book -- The Red Death of Mars") also from Astounding. One of Claudy s stories, "The Land of No Shadow," is also worth attention, as is del Key's offering, "Kindness." The rest are run-of-the-mill kid stuff, not bad, but none meriting hard covers. The John C. Winston Co., # each H ere are three more exciting space operas in the Winston series of science fiction juveniles, making # in all (including the anthology reviewed above). None make any pretense at depth or seriousness of purpose, but they are all good clean adventure without viciousness or unnecessary brutality. Two deal with aspects of Saturn, the Nourse book being more real than the Wollheim, which is in the old tradition of Villains in the Pay of the Vested Interests Versus the Idealistic Professor and his Daring Young Son; but both are easy to read. St. John's book, dealing with the problems of security in a future America, where almost every thing that is important is "tpp secret," is likewise a good thriller, but it has the added attraction of a pretty pointed rnoral. It has a nice gimmick, too, in the form of an "invisible" space station. You'll be surprised at what it turns put to be. Morrison. Gnome Press, # none of the items reviewed above can claim: simple charm. It is much nearer to the delightful Heinlein formula, as evidenced in his series of young people's books for Scribner, than any of the volumes in the Winston series I have yet read. The tale is, I suppose, strictly for youngsters, even though I enjoyed it. (What does that make me?) Yet because of the warm realization of all the characters and the vividness of the spaceship and Martian backgrounds, it has a vitality that is most appealing. There is a boy stowaway and also an almost "human" collie named Space Rover. They become involved with an interplanetary circus run by a Martian strongman and a Venusian india-rubber type. There are plots and counter-plots, all kinds of crises and to-be-expected surprises, a girl (very nice), and the usual allotment of villains. But the whole is more than the stun of its parts because of the strong feeling of identification one has with the leading characters. I'd call the book a worthwhile item for the young and also for us older folk who are in search of vicarious escape. Publications, Inc., paper, # and explains a hundred or more of the common (and uncommon) physical phenomena that occur because of the existence of the Earth's atmosphere, the nature of the Sun's light, and the curious construction of the human eye. It covers everything from rainbows to halos around street lights, from luminescent clouds to glowworms. You'd be surprised how much you don't know about some of the simplest aspects of light as it works its miracles and mysteries in the air of our planet. I don't think a book like this has ever been done before, either, which should make it particularly worthy of your attention. The Age of Kindness There was only one way for Bruno to be like everybody ,... get rid of all of them! would have looked the other way when he passed by. But now they refused to notice any difference in him. They admitted him into their company, invited him to join their fun. It was he who turned away. An earlier age would have feared him. Whispers would have been exchanged across back fences. No smallest crime could have been left unsolved in the neighborhood without being laid darkly at his door. But there was hardly any crime. There were no back fences. The only whispers were the ones in his own head. And they never stopped. He would have been taunted with nicknames by a cruder people. They would have called him Humpy because he was a hunchback. They would have called him Shorty because he was small. They would have called him Smily because his face was freaked in a perpetual expression whose only resemblance to a smile was coincidental. Yet if he'd been in danger, or if anyone had lifted a hand against his twistedness, some of those who called him names would have leaped to his defense. But in the era in which he was born, none would have thought to mock him, none to lift a hand against him, none to have a chance to defend him. If he had been bom three hundred years before, in the Twentieth Century, he would have found an ungainly balance. He would have seen others like himself. He would have established a shy, unspoken communion with them, and with all things piteous, misshapen, broken, flawed. And he might have learned to tend a spark of beauty in his heart, knowing that most of the people about him were as twisted in their souls as he was in his body. But in this age there were no others like him. Everybody else was straight, both in body and soul. The making of a human was a science and an art now. There had been no such accident as himself for several generations. An earlier people would have looked upon him at birth, and with a brutal mercy they might have killed him. But this was the age of light... the age of kindness. H e squinted up at the long, going to?" he asked. They smiled .gently, laying aside their tools. They had heard of Bruno, knew that he roamed from place to place just as people had in the Dark Ages. All the same they looked at the name stenciled on the breast of his tunic before replying. To have used his name without doing this would have been impolite, drawing attention to the fact that his deformity was widely known. "We hope it will go to a star, Bruno." "Why do you only hope?" "Because it is very difficult. Once men thought it would be easy. They thought they had it all solved. Ten years, they thought, twenty at the most, and they'd reach the Moon. As easily as that." "That was three hundred years ago," his companion put in. "It has taken all this time, then?" "Well, not exactly. We've only just started up again these last few years. You see, back in the Dark Ages they had two dreams. One was a good dream, by their standards. The othr was a nightmare. The nightmare nearly came true. The dream stayed just a dream. For the nightmare all but blotted out the dream, what with the war, the rebuilding after, lack of tools and resources. And they had other concerns. They had to conquer themselves first before they could conquer space. Because the techniques that could annihilate space could annihilate Man, too." "And now you can do it?" "Yes, I think so. We can try, anyway. We have to. People have never forgotten that dream. In a way they've gone past it. But all the other things that people thought so worthwhile before they were accomplished, so that now we can say that was good, or that was bad, but either way it was done. But space travel is a parabola that was never traced. A leap that was halted in mid-air. An asymptote that was striven for, but never reached." "You're talking over the lad's head," said the other technician. The first technician gave him a warning look. His words implied a criticism, a recognition of Bruno's deficiency. "Bruno understands, don't you, Bruno? It's a kind of lingering sadness that's been in people all this time. We've got to do it at least once, then everybody can get on with their work in peace." B y now, Bruno should have reached the limits of conversation. A few sentences, a minute or two, was as much as he could normally stand before consciousness of his own ugliness made him break off and flee. But now he felt something stir inside him which made him oblivious to that. Here was a chiming with old dreams, a new chapter to the yellowed books he'd read. "But that's wrong," he said. "People shouldn't just leave it there. They should go on and on like the old explorers over the oceans. Like Cabot and Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Magellan." He knew their names, all of that great company of lone adventurers, sailing on and on away from the crowded and familiar cities, out into the solitary unknown. The two technicians looked at him gently. "That was a long time ago," one of them answered. "Things have changed since then. Men have changed. One return trip to Venus and everybody will be content. Even if the ship should crash or not be able to return, one word by radio would be enough. Man knows of the Universe within now. That is far richer than the one outside. The one within is endless. The one outside is finite; it curves back on itself." "Venus," said Bruno, dwelling on the word. "The Evening Star. But the Moon is closer. Why isn't the ship going to the Moon first?" "Because," said the technician, "it takes a man time to get used to the changes of space. After leaving Earth he has to adapt himself to space, then he has to adapt himself to landing. Going to the Moon, those processes would come too close together. By going to one of the planets, the pilot has enough # time to adapt. Do you see?" Bruno seemed not to hear him. He stood there, thought puckering his face even more than usual. "Well," said the other technician. "We have to get on with our work, otherwise nobody will get anywhere." He turned away, his companion with him. "Wait," said Bruno. "How many will go on this trip?" They turned back, carefully concealing their impatience. "Only one. Machines will do all the work except piloting." "Do you think -- ?" He hopped up and down clumsily in his excitement. "Do you think  could be that one?" They looked' at him, then at each other. One bit his lip, the other looked at his feet. Neither spoke. "But can't I? I could learn how to fly it." One answered him. "It's not that. Bruno. There isn't too much to learn. It's all set down in a series of numbers for the takeoff and landing. We could probably send a pilotless craft, but that wouldn't be the same thing, would it? Anyway, they've already selected the pilot." "But they can change him, can't they? If it's as you say -- that they just want to do it this once and then they'll be satisfled -- then surely nobody especially wants to go. But I do. I want to go!" "It's not that, Bruno. You see -- " But they couldn't say it. "Go ask Dr. Marcus in Main Block there. He'll explain." lR. Marcus was a kind man. He was also a man with abundant self-control. When Bruno made his request, he only lifted his eyebrows -- no more of a gesture than he would have given had it been anybody else. "Hm-mm." He stroked his chin. "I'm afraid not, Bruno. You see, the pilot has to be fit and strong." "But I'm fit. I'm strong. I've got strong hands. I can bend an inch bar of iron with my bare hands. I know I could control it!" "I'm afraid it's not as easy as that. The pilot must be prepared to go through great stress. It isn't only in his hands that he needs strength. He has to be -- " He spread his hands, leaving his sentence unfinished. Tears of helpless anger started in Bruno's eyes. "You mean straight and perfect! Like anyone but me. That's what you mean, isn't it? But if there's all that stress how do you know that any pilot would come out of it straight and perfect?" "We don't," Dr. Marcus said quietly. "But he's got to start that way. The man we're sending up has had exhaustive tests to make sure he can stand it." "Well, test me." "I'm sorry, I couldn't do that. Don't you see? It wouldn't test you. It would kill you." "I don't mind taking the chance. My life's not precious to me the way other peoples' are to them. And I've got freedom of choice by the statute." "So you have. But so have I, and I wouldn't do it. Anyway, there isn't time. Everything's all set. The tests take weeks, and the ship takes off tomorrow morning." He relaxed, smiling. "Now there's a fact that a lot of people don't know. We're not making any fuss about the attempt. The big news will be given out if we succeed. Tell you what I can do, though-. If you're so interested. I'll arrange for you to be in the Communications Room and you can follow the flight all the way. Then you -- " "It doesn't matter," Bruno said bitterly, cutting across his speech. "I'm sorry I bothered you." He turned to hide the tears. Dr. Marcus kept a set smile on his face. "No bother, Bruno. No bother at all. Any time -- " But Bruno was gone. A LL the rest of that day he watched the ship from behind a dune in the desert, gazing, gazing, until the long silvery shape outlined against the sky seemed to become the shining symbol of the only hope he'd ever had in his life. The only one, that was, except the impossible one -- to be straight and perfect. He saw technicians climb the ladder with portable tools and meters. As evening came and the light faded from the sky, daylight lamps took over. And then the technicians descended the ladder one by one. He heard their laughing voices as they made their way back to the ring of buildings that surrounded the ship. After a little while the lamps were turned off, and the ship became only a black finger against the night sky. Bruno came out from his hiding place. He walked calmly up to the ring of buildings, waiting cautiously in the shadow of one of them to make sure the coast was clear. He heard laughter and voices coming from a nearby building, saw, through its windows, men eating. There was not another soul in sight. He broke out of the shadows and went scuttling across the three-hundred-yard radius that separated him from the ship. He would have prayed aloud as he ran, if the mere exertion of running hadn't needed all his energy. As it was, his prayer was like an unspoken agony in his breast. He covered the last twenty yards like someone in a nightmare, expecting, every second, the sound of alarmed voices, the flashing of lights. But none came. He sank, panting, in the shadow of the tail assembly. Anxiously he cast his gaze all around. Nothing stirred. There were no guards set over the ship. In this day and age, that was a precaution nobody thought necessary. As soon as he had recovered his breath, he mounted the ladder. It was on the side of the ship in shadow from the thin light of the new Moon. The port was poised on massive gimbals, and. swung enough at his touch to admit his squirming body. Once inside, he was safe. The short passageway that tunneled from the port led to only one place -- the control room. It was lit faintly but adequately by the lights from innumerable meters and gauges. Now that his own trembling had subsided, he could feel the almost imperceptible tremor of the ship, a slight quiver as of immense power straining to be released. He sank into the pilot's couch seat. A ll that night he spent examining the controls and reading the manuals. A lot of it he couldn't understand, but that didn't matter. He found the chart giving the series of control operations; that was the important thing. He checked the numbers with the levers, the wheels, the gauges. Nobody came aboard the ship. It was evidently all ready. All that was left now was the entry of the pilot in the morning, the depressing of levers -- and takeoff. And by the time morning came, Bruno, too, was ready. He waited until he saw signs of stirring in the camp, saw one or two figures moving out from the sleeping quarters. Then he closed the port, lay back on the couch, gave one final check to the firing series and stretched out his hand. His last thought vas an unsuccessful attempt to imagine the expressions on all the faces below when the gray morning should suddenly erupt into flaming thunder. And then he felt the cool metal of the levers at his fingertip. He closed his eyes and pressed... After the gray-out came agony, red and blinding. His body was part of the ship, flattened and fused into oneness with the burning metal and the thundering rockets. He was so much a part of it that all of the energy passed through him, through tortured sinews and shrieking nerves. And yet a part of him, a tiny part, remained free of it, standing beyond all pain, watching and rejoicing, knowing dimly but surely that he had survived the first shock. Though his brain was no longer a thinking apparatus -- but only a receptor and switchboard of pain -- that precious little he realized, though his senses were lost in a hurricane, his ears stuffed with thunder, his eyes filled with a red smoke. When at last he could clear his eyes he could still see redness -- the red of his own blood. It was spilled down the front of his tunic. He tasted the stickiness of it on his lips, felt it like phlegm in his throat. Yet his only thought was one of gratitude that he had been spared to see and to taste and to feel again, because he had not dared to hope for so much. The tiny part of him that had stood aside and rejoiced -- will, essential spark, or whatever -- seemed to grow, triumphant over the flesh and its fallibility. It grew to full stature when, with frantic thought, he looked down at the levers to press the next ones in the series. They were already down. Somehow, through that purgatory, that bystanding spark had operated his bludgeoned brain to do its will; For the first time in his life Bruno smiled a smile that was not merely an accident of the flesh. free fall, the days of respite while the pain of his body ebbed. Once h# was seized with an hours-long spasm of coughing that drenched him with blood. And he thought he would die, that the crucifixion of the takeoff had torn something vital inside him. But he didn't care, because he had had his first sight of space, diamond-sharp and depthless, by then. And he recovered. By the time the braking rockets were due to be applied, he was well again. It was as they had said on Earth -- the Earth that was becoming more-and more distant and unreal. They had been right about the body having to adapt itself. But they'd also been wrong -- because it didn't need a straight body, only strength of purpose and a burning desire to succeed. Perhaps, he found pleasure in thinking, even one with a straight body would have succumbed, lacking that purpose. The straight ones back on Earth hadn't the right outlook. What could be achieved by an attitude that saw space travel only as a clearing up of something left undone -- an end rather than a beginning? Thinking like that, he did not touch the radio all through the trip. It was only as he approached the white face of Venus that he reached over to it. After all, he owed it to them to give them a reply. If it hadn't been for them and their work he would never have had sight of space. He would have to speak now. He could not rely upon the mir-, acle of will to see him through the braking, the landing orbit, the final descent into the clouds. He flipped the switch. A voice came through faintly over the black distances. "Bruno, are you all right? Bruno, are you all right? Bruno -- " It went on and on without ceasing. It made him feel guilty to think of the weeks and weeks they must have been sending out that message without reply. Doubtless, it was recorded by now. But back there they must be waiting, keeping vigil over their receiver. They were kind, considerate people They . just didn't understand, that was all. He switched over to the transmitter and spoke. "This is Bruno. I am all right. I am landing on Venus. Even if I crash, I can't help but make it now." He switched off. He took one look at the receiver, then he shook his head and settled onto the couch... A ll was silence after the thunder of the jets, the screaming of air past the scorched sides of the ship. He lay there watching the ceiling. He looked down and saw no blood this time, only vomit. At takeoff, pain had blanketed the lesser wrench of nausea. But on landing, with its sudden shifts and decelerations, nausea had come into its own. He felt exhausted and lay there a long time. Finally, when he thought he could manage it, he tottered to his feet, clutching at a stanchion for support. He drank and ate, and felt better. Then he cleaned himself up. He had learned during the flight how the atmosphere meter worked. He checked it and found that the air outside was breathable. He operated the lock and climbed out onto the ladder. All around was grassland, stretching to the horizon in every direction. He could make out patches of color that must be flowers. Color, too, hovered in the air like butterflies or clouds of pollen. The air was warm and heavy with tantalizing odors, pungencies of strange balsams, scents of unknown nectars. And there was something else, too. The whisper of wings. Of many wings. He craned his head upward --  -- And there they were. A flight of winged creatures, half bird. half diaphanous-winged insect. They were all looking at him with a soft, unhostile gaze as their bodies turned and planed in the air. As he looked up at them, they broke into a chorus of dovelike cooing. Then they dropped from the sky and gathered at the foot of the ladder. They waited there, looking up at him, their cooing muted to a murmur. Bruno felt no fear. They looked too gentle to hurt anyone. All he felt was a confusion that made the blood mount to his cheeks. He was not used to the gaze of so many eyes. He turned to flee back into the rocket. A twittering broke out at his gesture of retreat. It sounded strangely like disappointment. Then one voice sang out clearly in a soft chanting. Out of curiosity he looked down over his twisted shoulder. O NE of the creatures had stepped forward. The rest had fallen back into a semicircle behind it It was almost as if the one in the middle were chanting an address of welcome. As Bruno looked down it broke off its song, cooed excitedly and cocked its head to one side. Its big, yellow eyes seemed to look up beseechingly. It made little flapping motions with its wings. And then Bruno realized the truth. That it didn't matter. That even a perfect and straight human being would be as strange to these creatures as he was. These gentle creatures below might be themselves only the stunted remnants of a nobler race. How would he know? And what difference would it make? On a sudden impulse he descended the ladder. Six rungs from the bottom he turned and faced them, his back to the ladder, his strong hands grasping it. "My name is Bruno," he began. "I come from the planet Earth. I -- " Did it matter if he went on? They couldn't understand him. It was only a formality. And yet, as his lips came to the next words, they trembled. How could he utter them, even to creatures who could not understand them, without committing something close to blasphemy? He scanned the wide eyes of the creatures, realizing that for the first time in his life he could meet the gaze of so many without feeling ashamed, without turning away. Why shouldn't he go on? It was not the outer shell that mattered, that made him what he was. He finished his sentence. "I am a man," he said firmly and clearly. And then he climbed down the last six rungs of the ladder. Man's family tree was awesome enough to give every galactic race an inferiority I N repose, Taphetta the Ribboneer resembled a fancy giant bow on a package. His I four flat legs looped out and in, the ends tucked under his wide, t thin body, which constituted the knot at the middle. His neck " was flat, too, arching out in another loop. Of all his features, only his head had appreciable  thickness and it was crowned I with a dozen long though nari' rower ribbons. Taphetta rattled the head fronds together in a surprisingly good imitation of speech. "Yes, I've heard the legend." "It's more than a legend," said Sam Halden, biologist. The reaction was not unexpected -- non-humans tended to dismiss the data as convenient speculation and nothing more. "There are at least a hundred kinds of humans, each supposedly originating in strict seclusion on as many widely scattered planets. Obviously there was no contact throughout the ages before space travel -- and yet each planetary race can interbreed with a minimum of ten others! That's more than a legend -- one hell of a lot more!" "It is impressive," admitted Taphetta. "put I find it mildly distasteful to consider mating with someone who does not belong to my species." "That's because you're unique," said Halden. "Outside of your own world, there's nothing like your species, except superficially, and that's true of all other creatures, intelligent or not, with the sole exception of mankind. Actually, the four of us here, though it's accidental, very nearly represent the biological spectrum of human development. "Emmer, a Neanderthal type and our archeologist, is around the beginning of the scale. I'm from Earth, near the middle, though on Emmer's side. Meredith, linguist, is on the other side of the middle. And beyond her, toward the far end, is Kelburn, mathematician. There's a corresponding span of fertility. Emmer just misses being able to breed with my kind, but there's a fair chance that I'd be fertile with Meredith and a similar though lesser chance that her fertility may extend to Kelburn." T aphetta rustled his speech ribbons quizzically. "But I thought it was proved that some humans did originate on one planet, that there was an unbroken line of evolution that years." "You're thinking of Earth," said Halden. "Humans require a certain kind of planet. It's reasonable to assume that, if men were set down on a hundred such worlds, they'd seemto fit in with native life-forms on a few of them. That's what happened on Earth; when Man arrived, there was actually a manlike creature there. Naturally our early evolutionists stretched their theories to cover the facts they had. "But there are other worlds in which humans who were there before the Stone Age aren't related to anything else there. We have to conclude that Man didn't originate on any of the planets on which he is now found. Instead, he evolved elsewhere and later was scattered throughout this section of the Milky Way." "And so, to account for the unique race that can interbreed across thousands of light-years, you've brought in the big ancestor," commented Taphetta dryly. "It seems an unnecessary simplification." "Can you think of a better explanation?" asked Kelburn. "Something had to distribute one species so widely and it's not the result of parallel evolution -- not when a hundred human races are involved, and only the human race." "I can't think of a better explanation." Taphetta rearranged his ribbons. "Frankly, no one else is much interested in Man's theories about himself." It was easy to understand the attitude. Man was the most numerous though not always the most advanced -- Ribboneers had a civilization as high as anything in the known section of the Milky Way, and there were others -- and humans were more than a little feared. If they ever got together -- but they hadn't except in agreement as to their common origin. Still, Taphetta the Ribboneer was an experienced pilot and could be very useful. A clear statement of their position was essential in helping him make up his mind. "You've heard of the adjacency mating principle?" asked Sam Halden. "Vaguely. Most people have if they've been around men." "We've got new data and are able to interpret it better. The theory is that humans who can mate with each other were once physically close. We've got a list of all our races arranged in sequence. If planetary race F can mate with race E back to A and forward to M, and race G is fertile only back to B, but forward to O, then we assume that whatever their positions are now, at once time G was actually adjacent to F, but was a little further along. When we project back into time those star systems on which humans existed prior to space travel, we get a certain pattern. Kelburn can explain it to you." The normally pink body of the Ribboneer flushed slightly. The color change was almost imperceptible, but it was enough to indicate that he was interested. jector. "It would be easier if we knew all the stars in the Milky Way, but though we've explored only a small portion of it, we can reconstruct a fairly accurate representation of the past." He pressed the controls and stars twinkled on the screen. "We're looking down on the plane of the Galaxy. This is one arm of it as it is today and here are the human systems." He pressed another control and, for purposes of identification, certain There was no pattern, merely a scattering of stars. "The whole Milky Way is rotating. And while stars in a given region tend to remain together, there's also a random motion. Here's what happens when we calculate the positions of stars in the past." Flecks of light shifted and flowed across the screen. Kelburn stopped the motion. "Two hundred thousand years ago," he said. There was a pattern of the identified stars. They were spaced at fairly equal intervals along a regular curve, a horseshoe loop that didn't close, though if the ends were extended, the lines would have crossed. Taphetta rustled. "The math is accurate?" "As accurate as it can be with "And that's the hypothetical route of the unknown ancestor?" "To the best of our knowledge," said Kelburn. "And whereas there are humans who are relatively near and not fertile, they can always mate with those they were adjacent to two hundred thousand years ago!" "The adjacency mating principle. I'ye never seen it demonstrated," murmured Taphetta, flexing his ribbons. "Is that the only era that satisfies the calculations?" "Plus or minus a hundred thousand years, we can still get something that might be the path of a spaceship attempting to cover a representative section of territory," said Kelburn. "However, we have other ways of dating it. On some worlds on which there are no other mammals, we're able to place the first human fossils chronologically. The evidence is sometimes contradictory, but we believe we've got the time right." Taphetta waved a ribbon at the chart. "And you think that where the two ends of the curve cross is your original home?" "We think so," said Kelburn. "We've narrowed it down to several cubic light-years -- then. Now it's far more. And, of course, if it were a fast-moving star, it might be completely out of the field of our exploration. But we're certain we've got a good chance of finding it this trip." "It seems I must decide quickly." The Ribboneer glanced out the visionport, where another ship hung motionless in space beside them. "Do you mind if I ask other questions?" "Go ahead," Kelburn invited sardonically. "But if it's not math, you'd better ask Halden. He's the leader of the expedition." Halden flushed; the sarcasm wasn't necessary. It was true that Kelburn was the most advanced human type present, but while there were differences, biological and in the scale of intelligence, it wasn't as great as once was thought. Anyway, non-humans weren't trained in the fine distinctions that men made among themselves. And, higher or lower, he was as good a biologist as the other was a mathematician. And there was the matter of training; he'd been on several expeditions and this was Kelburn's first trip. Damn it, he thought, that rated some respect. The Ribboneer shifted his attention. "Aside from the sudden illness of your pilot, why did you ask for me?" "We didn't. The man became' sick and required treatment we can't give him. Luckily, a ship was passing and we hailed it because it's four months to the nearest planet. They consented to take him back and told us that there was a passenger on board who was an experienced pilot. We have men who could do the job in a makeshift fashion, but the region we're heading for, while mapped, is largely unknown. We'd prefer to have an expert -- and Ribboneers are famous for their navigational ability." Taphetta crinkled politely at the reference to his skill. "I had other plans, but I can't evade professional obligations, and an emergency such as this should cancel out  any previous agreements. Still, what are the incentives?" Sam Halden coughed. "The usual, plus a little extra. We've copied the Ribboneer's standard nature, simplifying it a little and adding a per cent here and there for the crew pilot and scientist's share of the profits from any discoveries we may make." "I'm complimented that you like our contract so well," said Taphetta, "but I really must have our own unsimplified version. If you want me, you'll take my contract. I came prepared." He extended a tightly bound roll that  he had kept somewhere on his person. They glanced at one another as Halden took it. "You can read it if you want," offered Taphetta. "But it will take you all day -- it's micro-printing. However, you needn't be afraid that I'm defrauding you. It's honored everywhere we go and we go nearly everywhere in this sector -- places men have never been." There was no choice if they wanted him, and they did. Besides, the integrity of Ribboneers was not to be questioned. Halden signed. "Good." Taphetta crinkled. "Send it to the ship; they'll forward it for me. And you can tell the ship to go on without me." He rubbed his ribbons together. "Now if you'll get me the charts. I'll examine the region toward which we're heading." slouched in, a tall man with scanty hair and an equal lack of grace. He seemed to have difficulty in taking his eyes off Meredith, though, since he was a notch or so above her in the mating scale, he shouldn't have been so interested. But his planet had been inexplicably slow in developing and he wasn't completely aware of his place in the human hierarchy. Disdainfully, Meredith adjusted a skirt that, a few inches shorter, wouldn't have been a skirt at all, revealing, while doing so, just how long and beautiful a woman's legs could be. Her people had never given much thought to physical modesty and, with legs like that, it was easy to see why. Muttering something about primitive women, Firmon turned to the biologist. "The pilot doesn't like our air." "Then change it to suit him. He's in charge of the. ship and knows more about these things than I do." "More than a man?" Firmon leered at Meredith and, when she failed to smile, added plaintively, "I did try to change it, but he still complains." "Seems all right to me." "To everybody else, too, but the tapeworm hasn't got lungs. He scattered over his body." It would do no good to explain that Taphetta wasn't a worm, that his evolution had taken a different course, but that he was in no sense less complex than Man. It was a paradox that some biologically higher humans hadn't developed as much as lower races and actually weren't prepared for the multitude of life-forms they'd meet in space. Firmon's reaction was quite typical. "If he asks for cleaner air, it's because his system needs it," said Halden. "Do anything you can to give it to him." "Can't. This is as good as I can get it. Taphetta thought you could do something about it." "Hydroponics is your job. There's nothing I can do." Halden paused thoughtfully. "Is there something wrong with the plants?" "In a way, I guess, and yet not really." "What is it, some kind of toxic condition?" "The plants are healthy enough, but something's chewing them down as fast as they grow." "Insects? There shouldn't be any, but if there are, we've got sprays. Use them." "It's an animal," said Firmon. "We tried poison and got a few, but now they won't touch the stuff. I had electronics rig up some traps. The animals seem to know what they are and we've never caught one that way." Halden glowered at the man. "How long has this been going on?" "About three months. It's not bad; we can keep up with them." It was probably nothing to become alarmed at, but an animal on the ship was a nuisance, doubly so because of their pilot. "Tell me what you know about it," said Halden. "They're little things." Firmon held out his hands to show how small. "I don't know how they got on, but once they did, there were plenty of places to hide." He looked up defensively. "This is an old ship with new equipment and they hide under the machinery. There's nothing we can do except rebuild the ship from the hull inward." Firmon was right. The new equipment had been installed in any place just to get it in and now there were inaccessible corners and crevices everywhere that couldn't be closed off without rebuilding. They couldn't set up a continuous watch and shoot the animals down because there weren't that many men to spare. Besides, the use of weapons in hydroponics would cause more damage to the thing they were trying to protect than to the pest. He'd have to devise other ways. Sam Halden got up. "I'll take a look and see what I can do." "I'll come along and help," said Meredith, untwining her legs and leaning against him. "Your mistress ought to have some sort of privileges." Halden started. So she knew that the crew was calling her that! Perhaps it was intended to discourage Firmon, but he wished she hadn't said it. It didn't help the situation at all. signed for humans. With a less flexible body, he wouldn't have fitted. Maybe it wasn't sitting, but his flat legs were folded neatly around the arms and his head rested comfortably on the seat. The head ribbons, which were his hands and voice, were never quite still. He looked from Halden to Emmer and back again. "The hydroponics tech tells me you're contemplating an experiment. I don't like it." Halden shrugged. "We've got to have better air. It might work." "Pests on the ship? It's filthy! My people would never tolerate it!" "Neither do we." The Ribboneer's distaste subsided. "What kind of creatures are they?" "I have a description, though I've never seen one. It's a small four-legged animal with two antennae at the lower base of its skull. A typical pest." Taphetta rustled. "Have you found out how it got on?" "It was probably brought in with the supplies," said the biologist. "Considering how far we've come, it may have been any one of a half a dozen planets. Anyway, it hid, and since most of the places it had access to were near the outer hull, it got an extra dose of hard radiation, or it may have nested near the atomic engines; both are possibilities. Either way, it mutated, became a different animal. It's developed a tolerance for the poisons we spray on plants. Other things it detects and avoids, even electronic traps." "Then you believe it changed mentally as well as physically, that it's smarter?" "I'd say that, yes. It must be a fairly intelligent creature to be so hard to get rid of. But it can be lured into traps, if the bait's strong enough." "That's what I don't like," said Taphetta, curling. "Let me think it over while I ask questions." He turned to Emmer. "I'm curious about humans. Is there anything else you can tell me about the hypothetical ancestor?" Emmer didn't look like the genius he was -- a Neanderthal genius, but nonetheless a real one. In his field, he rated very high. He raised a stubble-flecked cheek from a large thick-fingered paw and ran shaggy hands through shaggier hair. "I can speak with some authority," he rumbled. "I was born on a world with the most extensive relics. As a child, I played in the ruins of their camp." "I don't question your authority," crinkled Taphetta. "To me, all humans -- late or early and male or female -- look remarkably alike. If you are an archeologist, that's enough for me." He paused and flicked his speech ribbons. "Camp, did you say?" E mmer smiled, unsheathing great teeth. "You've never seen any pictures? Impressive, but just a camp, monolithic onestory structures, and we'd give something to know what they're made of. Presumably my world was one of the first they stopped at. They weren't used to roughing it, so they built more elaborately than they did later on. One-story structures and that's how we can guess at their size. The doorways were forty feet high." "Very large," agreed Taphetta. It was difficult to tell whether he was impressed. "What did you find in the ruins?" "Nothing," said Emmer. "There were buildings there . and that was all, not a scrap of writing or a tool or a single picture. They covered a route estimated at thirty thousand light-years in less than five thousand years -- and not one of them died that we have a record of." "A faster-than-light drive and an extremely long life," mused Taphetta. "But they didn't leave any information for their descendants. Why?" "Who knows? Their mental processes were certainly far different from ours. They may have thought we'd be better off without it. We do know they were looking for a special kind of planet, like Earth, because they visited so many of that type, yet different from it because they never stayed. They were pretty special people themselves, big and longlived, and maybe they couldn't survive on any planet they found. Perhaps they had ways of determining there wasn't the kind of planet they needed in the entire Milky Way. Their science ,was tremendously advanced and when they learned that, they may have altered their germ plasm and left us, hoping that some of us would survive. Most of us did." "This special planet sounds strange," murmured Taphetta. "Not really," said Emmer. "Fifty human races reached space travel independently and those who did were scattered equally among early and late species. It's well known that individuals among my people are often as bright as any of Halden's or Meredith's, but as a whole we don't have the total capacity that later Man does, and yet we're as advanced in civilization. The difference? It must lie somewhere in the planets we live on and it's hard to say just what it is." "What happened to those who didn't develop space travel?" asked Taphetta. "We helped them," said Emmer. And they had, no matter who or what they were, biologically late or early, in the depths of the bronze age or the threshold of atomic -- because they were human. That was sometimes a frightening thing for non-humans, that the race stuck together. They weren't actually aggressive, but their total number was great and they held themselves aloof. The unknown ancestor again. Who else had such an origin and, it was tacitly assumed, such a destiny? tioning. "What do you expect to gain from this discovery of the unknown ancestor?" It was Halden who answered him. "There's the satisfaction of knowing where we came from." "Of course," rustled the Ribboneer. "But a lot of money and equipment was required for this expedition, I can't believe that the educational institutions that are backing you did so purely out of intellectual curiosity." "Cultural discoveries," rumbled Emmer. "How did our ancestors live? When a creature is greatly reduced in size, as we are, more than physiology is changed -- the pattern of life itself is altered. Things that were easy for them are impossible for us. Look at their life span." "No doubt," said Taphetta. "An archeologist would be interested in cultural discoveries." "Two hundred thousand years ago, they had an extremely advanced civilization," added Maiden. "A faster-than-light drive, and we've achieved that Only within the last thousand years." "But I think we have a better one than they did," said the Ribboneer. "There may be things we can learn from them in mechanics or physics, but wouldn't you say they were better biologists than anything else?" Halden nodded. "Agreed. They couldn't find a suitable planet. So, working directly with their germ plasm, they modified themselves and produced us. They were master biologists." "I thought so," said Taphetta. "I never paid much attention to your fantastic theories before I signed to pilot this ship, but you've built up a convincing case." He raised his head, speech ribbons curling fractionally and ceaselessly. "I don't like to, but we'll have to risk using bait for your pest." He'd have done it anyway, but it was better to have the pilot's consent. And there was one question Halden wanted to ask; it had been bothering him vaguely. "What's the difference between the Ribboneer contract and the one we offered you? Our terms are more liberal." "To the individual, they are, but it won't matter if you discover as much as you think you will. The difference is this: My terms don't permit you to withhold any discovery for the benefit of one race." Taphetta was wrong; there had been no intention of withholding anything. Halden examined his own attitudes. He hadn't intended, but could he say that was true of the institutions backing the expedition? He couldn't, and it was too late now -- whatever knowledge they acquired would have to be shared. That was what Taphetta had been afraid of -- there was one kind of technical advancement that multiplied unceasingly. The race that could improve itself through scientific control of its germ plasm had a start that could never be headed. The Ribboneer needn't worry now. " VjHY do we have to watch  it on the screen?" asked Meredith, glancing up. "I'd rather be in hydroponics." Halden shrugged. "They may or may not be smarter than planetbound animals, but they're warier. They don't come out when anyone's near." Lights dimmed in the distant hydroponic section and the screen with it, until he adjusted the infra-red frequencies. He motioned to the two crew members, each with his own peculiar screen, below hich was a miniature keyboard. "Ready?" When they nodded, Halden said : "Do as you've rehearsed. Keep noise at a minimum, but when you do use it, be vague. Don't try to imitate them exactly." At first, nothing happened on the big screen, and then a gray shape crept out. It slid through leaves, listened intently before coming forward. It jumped off one hydroponic section and fled across the open floor to the next. It paused, eyes glittering and antennae twitching. Looking around once, it leaped up, seizing the ledge and clawing up the side of the tank. Standing on top and rising to its haunches, it began nibbling what it could reach. Suddenly it whirled. Behind it and hitherto unnoticed was another shape, like it but larger. The newcomer inched forward. The small one retreated, skittering nervously. Without warning, the big one leaped and the small one tried to flee. In a few jumps, the big one caught up and mauled the other unmercifully. It continued to bite even after the little one lay still. At last it backed off and waited, watching for signs of motion. There was none. Then it turned to the plant. When it had chewed off everything within reach, it climbed into the branches. The little one twitched, moved a leg, and cautiously began dragging itself away. It rolled off the raised section and surprisingly made no noise as it fell. It seemed to revive, shaking itself and scurrying away, still within range of the screen. Against the wall was a small platform. The little one climbed on top and there found something that seemed to interest it. It sniffed around and reached and felt the discovery. Wounds were forgotten as it snatched up the object and frisked back to the scene of its recent defeat. This time it had no trouble with the raised section. It leaped and landed on top and made considerable noise in doing so. The big animal heard and twisted around. It saw and clambered down hastily, jumping the last few feet. Squealing, it hit the floor and charged. The small one stood still till the last instant -- and then a paw flickered out and an inch-long knife blade plunged into the throat of the charging creature. Red spurted out as the bigger beast screamed. The knife flashed in and out until the big animal collapsed and stopped moving. The small creature removed the knife and wiped it on the pelt of its foe. Then it scampered back to the platform on which the knife had been found -- and laid it down. A t Halden's signal, the lights flared up and the screen became too bright for anything to be visible. "Go in and get them," said Halden. "We don't want the pests to find out that the bodies aren't flesh." "It was realistic enough," said Meredith as the crewmen shut off their machines and went out. "Do you think it will work?" "It might. We had an audience." "Did we? I didn't notice." Meredith leaned back. "Were the puppets exactly like the pests? And if not, will the pests be fooled?" "The electronic puppets were a good imitation, but the animals don't have to identify them as their species. If they're smart enough, they'll know the value of a knife, no matter who uses it." "What if they're smarter? Suppose they know a knife can't be used by a creature without real hands?" "That's part of our precautions. They'll never know until they try. -- and they'll never get away from the trap to try." "Very good. I neVer thought of that," said Meredith, coming closer. "I like the way your primitive mind works. At times I actually think of marrying you." "Primitive," he said, alternately frozen and thawed, though he knew that, in relation to her, he was not advanced. "It's almost a curse, isn't it?" She laughed and took the curse away by leaning provocatively against him. "But barbaric lovers are often nice." Here we go again, he thought drearily, sliding his arm around her. To her, I'm merely a passionate savage. They went to his cabin. She sat down, smiling. Was she pretty? Maybe. For her own race, she wasn't tall, only by Terran standards. Her legs were disproportionately long and well shaped and her face was somewhat bland and featureless, except for a thin, straight, short nose. It was her eyes that made the difference, he decided. A notch or two up the scale of visual development, her eyes were larger and she could see an extra color on the violet end of the spectrum. She settled back and looked at him. "It might be fun living with you on primeval Earth." He said nothing; she knew as well as he that Earth was as advanced as her own world. She had something else in mind. "I don't think I will, though. We might have children." "Would it be wrong?" he asked. "I'm as intelligent as you. We wouldn't have subhuman monsters." "It would be a step up -- for you." Under her calm, there was tension. It had been there as long as he'd known her, but it was closer to the surface now. "Do I have the right to condemn the unborn? Should I make them start lower than I am?" The conflict was not new nor confined to them. In one form or another, it governed personal relations between races that were united against non-humans, but held sharp distinctions themselves. "I haven't asked you to marry me," he said bluntly. "Because you're afraid I'd refuse." It was true; no one asked a member of a higher race to enter a permanent union. "Why did you ever have anything to do with me?" demanded Halden. "Love," she said gloomily. "Physical attraction. But I can't let it lead me astray." "Why not make a play for Kelburn? If you're going to be scientific about it, he'd give you children of the higher type."  "Kelburn." It didn't sound like a name, the way she said it. "I don't like him and he wouldn't marry me." "He wouldn't, but he'd give you children if you were humble enough. There's a fifty per cent chance you might conceive." S HE provocatively arched her back. Not even the women of Kelburn's race had a body like hers and she knew it. "Racially, there should be a chance," she said. "Actually, Kelburn and I would be infertile." "Can you be sure?" he asked, knowing it was a poor attempt to act unconcerned. "How can anyone be sure on a theoretical basis?" she asked, an oblique smile narrowing her eyes. "I know we can't." His face felt anesthetized. "Did you have to tell me that?" She got up and came to him. She nuzzled against him and his reaction was purely reflexive. His hand swung out and he could feel the flesh give when his knuckles struck it. She fell back and dazedly covered her face with her hand. When she took it away, blood spurted. She groped toward the mirror and stood in front of it. She wiped the blood off, examining her features carefully. "You've broken my nose," she said factually. "I'll have to stop the blood and pain." She pushed her nose back into place and waggled it to make sure. She closed her eyes and stood silent and motionless. Then she stepped back and looked at herself critically. "It's set and partially knitted. I'll concentrate tonight and have it healed by morning." She felt in the cabinet and attached an invisible strip firmly across the bridge. Then she came over to him. "I wondered what you'd do. You didn't disappoint me." He scowled miserably at her. Her face was almost plain and the bandage, invisible or not, didn't improve her appearance any. How could he still feel that attraction to her? "Try Emmer," he suggested tiredly. "He'll find you irresistible, and he's even more savage than I am." "Is he?" She smiled enigmatically. "Maybe, in a biological sense. Too much, though. You're just right." He sat down on the bed. Again there was only one way of knowing what Emmer would do -- and she knew. She had no concept of love outside of the physical, to make use of her body so as to gain an advantage -- what advantage? -- for the children she intended to have. Outside of that, nothing mattered, and for the sake of alloying the lower with the higher, she was as cruel to herself as she was to him. And yet he wanted her. "I do think I love you," she said. "And if love's enough, I may marry you in spite of everything. But you'll have to watch out whose children I have." She wriggled into his arms. The racial disparity was great and she had provoked him, but it was not completely her fault. Besides... Besides what? She had a beautiful body that could bear superior children -- and they might be his. He twisted away. With those thoughts, he was as bad as she was. Were they all that way, every one of them, crawling upward out of the slime toward the highest goal they could conceive of? Climbing over -- no, through -- everybody they could coerce, seduce or marry -- onward and upward. He raised his hand, but it was against himself that his anger was turned. "Careful of the nose," she said, pressing against him. "You've already broken it once." He kissed her with sudden passion that even he knew was primitive. T here were no immediate results from the puppet performance and so it was repeated at intervals. After the third time, Firmon reported, coming in as Halden pored over the meager biological data he'd gathered on the unknown ancestor. Wild guesses mostly, not one real fact in all the statistics. After two hundred thousand years, there wasn't much left to work with. Firmon slouched doWn. "It worked," he said. "Got three a few hours ago." Halden looked at him; he had hoped it wouldn't work. There was satisfaction in being right, but he would rather face some#(# thing less intelligent. Wariness was one thing, the shyness and slyness of an unseen animal, but intelligence was more difficult to predict. "Where are they?" he asked. "Did you want them?" Firmon seemed surprised at the idea. Halden sighed; it was his own fault. Firmon had a potentially good mind, but he hadn't been trained to use it and that counted for more than people thought. "Any animal smart enough to appreciate the value of a knife is worth study on that account. That goes double when it's a pest." "I'll change the cremation setting," said Firmon. "Next time, we'll just stun them." The trap setting was changed and several animals were taken. Physically, they were very much as Halden had described them to Taphetta, small four-legged creatures with fleshy antennae. Dissection revealed a fairly large brain capacity, while behavior tests indicated an intelligence somewhat below what he had assumed. Still, it was more than he wanted a pest to have, especially since it also had hands. The biological mechanism of the hands was simple. It walked on the back of the front paws, on the fingers of which were fleshy pads. When it sat upright, as it often did, the flexibility of the iSo wrists permitted the forepaws to be used as hands. Clumsy, but because it had a thumb, it could handle such tools as a knife. He had made an error there. He had guessed the intelligence, but he hadn't known it could use the weapon he had put within reach. A tiny thing with an inchlong knife was not much more dangerous than the animal alone, but he didn't like the idea of it loose on the ship. The metal knife would have to be replaced with something else. Technicians could compound a plastic that would take a keen edge for a while and deteriorate to a soft mass in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, he had actually given the animal a dangerous weapon -- the concept df a tool. There was only one way to take that away from them, by extermination. But that would have to wait. Fortunately, the creature had a short life and a shorter breeding period. The actual replacement rate was almost neglible. In attaining intelligence, it had been short-changed in fertility and, as a consequence, only in the specialized environment of this particular ship was it any menace at all. They were lucky; a slightly higher fertility and the thing could threaten their existence. As it was, the ship would have to be deverminized before it could land on an inhabited planet. Halden took the data to the Ribboneer pilot and, after some discussion, it was agreed that the plastic knife should supplant the metal one. It was also decided to allow a few to escape with the weapon; there had to be some incentive if the creature was to visit the trap more than a few times. Besides, with weapons there was always the chance of warfare between different groups. They might even exterminate each other. Gradually, over a period of weeks, the damage to hydroponics subsided; the pests were under control. There was nothing to worry about unless they mutated again, which was unlikely. pilot. "Where are we now?" he challenged, his face creased with suspicion. "You have access to all the instruments, so you should know," said Taphetta. He was crouching and seemed about to spring, but he was merely breathing relaxed"I do know. My calculations show one star as the most probable. We should have reached it two days ago -- and we're nowhere near it." "True," admitted Taphetta. "We're heading toward what you would consider the fifth or sixth most likely star." Kelburn caught the implication. They all did. "Then you know where it is?" he asked, suspicion vanishing. "Not in the sense you're asking -- no, I'm not sure it's what you're looking for. But there was once a great civilization there." "You knew this and didn't tell us?" "Why should I?" Taphetta looked at him in mild astonishment. "Before you hired me, I wouldn't tell you for obvious reasons. And afterward -- well, you engaged all my skill and knowledge and I used them to bring you here by the shortest route. I didn't think it necessary to tell you until we actually arrived. Is that wrong?" It wasn't wrong; it merely illustrated the difference in the way an alien mind worked. Sooner or later, they would have . found the place, but he had saved them months. "What's it like?" Emmer asked. Taphetta jiggled his ribbons. "I don't know. I was passing near here and saw the planet off to one side." "And you didn't stop?" Emmer was incredulous. "Why should I? We're great navigators because we do so much of it. We would never get very far if we stopped to examine everything that looks interesting. Besides, it's not a good policy in a strange region, especially with an unarmed ship." They wouldn't have that problem. The ship was armed well enough to keep off uncivilized marauders who had very recently reached the spaceship age, and only such people were apt to be inhospitable. "When will we land?" asked Halden. "In a few hours, but you can see the planet on our screens." Taphetta extended a head ribbon toward a knob and a planet came into view. There weren't two civilizations in the Milky Way that built on such a large scale, even from the distance that they could see it. Great, distinctive cities were everywhere. There was no question as to what they had found. "Now you'll learn why they ran away," said Taphetta. "A new theory," Kelburn said, though it wasn't, for they had left. "What makes you think they were afraid?" "No air. If your calculations are right, there must have been an extensive atmosphere a few hundred thousand years ago and now there isn't any. A planet this size doesn't lose air that fast. Therefore, it's an artificial condition. Who takes the trouble to leave a planet uninhabitable except someone who's afraid others will use it -- and who else runs away?" "They may have done it to preserve what they left," suggested Halden. "Perhaps," said Taphetta, but it was obvious he didn't think so. T he lack of air had one thing to recommend it -- they needn't worry about their pests escaping. The disadvantage was that they had to wear spacesuits. They landed on top of a great building that was intact after thousands of years and still strong enough to support the added weight. And then -- Then there was nothing. Buildings, an enormous number and variety of them, huge, not one of them less than five stories high, all with ramps instead of stairs. This was to be expected, considering the great size of the people who had lived there, and it followed the familiar pattern. But there was nothing in those buildings! On this airless world, there was no decay, no rust or corrosion -- and nothing io decay or corrode. No pictures, tools, nothing that resembled sculpture, and while there were places where machines had stood, none were there now. Here and there in inaccessible locations were featuredless blobs of metal. The implication was clear; Where they hadn't been able to remove a machine, they had melted in down on the spot. The thoroughness was bewildering. It wasn't done by some enemy; he would have stood off and razed the cities. But there was no rubble and the buildings were empty. The inhabitants themselves had removed all that was worth taking along. A whole' people had packed and moved away, leaving behind only massive, echoing structures. There was plenty to learn, but nothing to learn it from. Buildings can indicate only so much and then there must be something else -- at least some of the complex artifacts of a civilization -- and there was none. Outside the cities, on the plains, there were the remains of plants and animals that indicated by their condition that airlessness had come suddenly. Sam Halden, the biologist, had examined them, but he discovered no clues. The unknown ancestor was still a mystery. And the others -- Emmer, the archeologist, and Meredith, the linguist -- had nothing to work on, though they searched. It was Kelburn who found the first hint. Having no specific task, now that the planet was located, he wandered around in a scout ship. On the other side of the planet, he signaled that there was a machine and that it was intact! The crew was hurriedly recalled, the equipment brought back into the ship, and they took off for the plain where Kelburn waited. And there was the machine, immense, like everything on the planet. It stood alone, tapering toward the sky. At the base was a door, which, when open, was big enough to permit a spaceship to enter easily -- only it was closed. Kelburn stood beside the towering entrance, a tiny figure in a spacesuit. He gazed up at it as the three came near. "All we have to do is open it," he said. "How?" asked Meredith. She seemed to have forgotten that she disliked him. He had made a chance discovery because he had nothing to do while the others were busy, but she regarded it as further proof of his superiority. TT was hard to watch the happiness that her face directed toward Kelburn. Halden turned away. "Just press the button," he said. Emrner noticed his expression. "It's such a big button," he objected. "It's going to be hard to know when we find it." "There's an inscription of some sort," said Kelburn loftily. "This thing was left for a purpose. Somewhere there must be operating instructions." "From here, it looks like a complex wave-form," a voice crinkled in their radio -- Taphetta from the spaceship. "All we have to do is to find the right base in the electromagnetic spectrum and duplicate it on a beam broadcast and the door should open. You're too close to see it as clearly as I can." P erhaps they were too close to the big ancestor, decided Halden moodily as they went back. It had overshadowed much of their thinking, and who really knew what the ancestor was like and what had motivated him? But the Ribboneer was right about the signal, though it took several days to locate it. And then the huge door swung open and air whistled out. Inside was another disappointment, a bare hall with a ramp leading upward, closed off at the ceiling. They could have forced through, but they had no desire to risk using a torch to penetrate the barrier -- in view of the number of precautions they'd already encountered, it was logical to assume that there were more waiting for them. It was Emmer who found the solution. "In appearance, it resembles a spaceship. Let's assume it is, minus engines. It was never intended to fly. Listen. "There's no air, so you can't hear," said Emmer impatiently. "But you could if there were air. Put your hands against the wall." A distinct vibration ran through the whole structure. It hadn't been there before the door opened. Some mechanism had been triggered. The rumbling went on, came to a stop, and began again. Was it some kind of communicatiqn? Hastily rigged machines were haqled inside the chamber to generate an air supply so that sounds would be produced fpr the recorders. Translating equipment was set up and focused and, after some experimentation with signals, the door was slowly closed. No one remained inside; there was no guarantee that it would be as easy to get out as it had been to get in. They waited a day and a half while the sounds were being recorded. The delay seemed endless. The happiest of the crew was Kelburn. Biologically the highest human on the expedition, he was stimulated. He wandered aimlessly and smiled affably, patting Meredith, when he came to her, in the friendliest fashion. Startled, she smiled back and looked around wanly. Halden was behind her. If I had not been there, thought Halden -- and thereafter made it a point to be there. M eredith was excited, but not precisely happy. The work was out of her hands until the translating equipment was retrieved. As the second highest biological type, she, too, was affected, until she pointedly went to her room and locked it from the inside. Halden kept himself awake with anti-fatigue pills, in part because Meredith could change her mind about Kelburn, and because of that locked door. Emmer tried to be phlegmatic and seemed to succeed. Taphetta alone was unconcerned; to him, it was an interesting and perhaps profitable discovery, but important only because of that. He would not be changed at all by whatever he learned. Hours crawled by and at last the door opened; the air came rushing out again. The translating equipment was brought back to the ship and Meredith was left alone with it. It was half a day before she admitted the others to the laboratory. "The machine is still working," she said. "There seems to have been some attempt to make the message hard to decode. But the methods they used were exactly the clues that the machine needed to decipher it. My function as a linguist was to help out with the interpretation of key words and phrases. I haven't got even a little part of the message. You'll know what it is as soon as I do. After the first part, the translator didn't seem to have much trouble." They sat down facing it -- Taphetta, Kelburn, Meredith, Halden and Emmer. Meredith was midway between Kelburn and himself. Was there any significance in that, wondered Halden, or was he reading more in her behavior than was actually there? "The translation is complete," announced the machine. "Go ahead," Meredith ordered. "The words will be speeded up to human tempo," said the translator. "Insofar as possible, speech mannerisms of the original will be imitated. Please remember that it is only an imitation, however." The translator coughed, stuttered and began. "We have purposely made access to our records difficult. If you can translate this message, you'll find, at the end, instructions for reaching the rest of our culture relics. As an advanced race, you're welcome to them. We've provided a surprise for anyone else. "For ourselves, there's nothing left but an orderly retreat to a place where we can expect to live in peace. That means leaving this Galaxy, but because of our life span, we're capable of it and we won't be followed." Taphetta crinkled his ribbons in amusement. Kelburn frowned at the interruption, but no one else paid any attention. The translator went on. "Our metabolic rate is the lowest of any creature we know of. We live several thousand revolutions of any recorded planet and our rate of increase is extremely low; under the most favorable circumstances, we can do no more than double our numbers in two hundred generations." "This doesn't sound as if they were masters of biological science," rustled Taphetta. wasn't turning out at all the way he had expected. "At the time we left," the message continued, "we found no other intelligent race, though there were some capable of further evolution. Perhaps our scout ships long ago met your ancestors on some remote planet. We were never very numerous, and because we move and multiply so slowly, we are in danger of being swept out of existence in the foreseeable future. We prefer to leave while we can. The reason we must go developed on our own planet, deep beneath the cities, in the underworks, which we had ceased to inspect because there was no need to. This part was tions, which is long even for us." Emmer sat upright, annoyed at himself. "Of course! There are always sewers and I didn't think of looking there!" "In the last several generations, we sent out four expeditions, leisurely trips because we then thought we had time to explore thoroughly. With this planet as base of operations, the successive expeditions fanned out in four directions, to cover the most representative territory." Kelburn stiffened, mingled pride and chagrin on his face. His math had been correct, as far as he had figured it. But had there been any reason to assume that they would confine their exploration to one direction? No, they would want to cover the whole Milky Way. Taphetta paled. Four times as many humans to contend with! He hadn't met the other threefourths yet -- and, for him, it wasn't at all a pleasant thought. "After long preparation, we sent several ships to settle one of the nearer planets that we'd selected on the first expedition. To our dismay, we found that the plague was there -- though it hadn't been on our first visit!" Halden frowned. They were proving themselves less and less expert biologists. And this plague there had to be a reason to leave, and sickness was as good as any -- but unless he was mistaken, plague wasn't used in the strict semantic sense. It might be the fault of the translation. "The colonists refused to settle: they came back at once and reported. We sent out our fastest ships, heavily armed. We didn't have the time to retrace our path completely, for we'd stopped at innumerable places. What we did was to check a few planets, the outward and return parts of all four voyages. In every place, the plague was there, too, and we knew that we were responsible. "We did what we could. Exhausting our nuclear armament, we obliterated the nearest planets on each of the four spans of our journeys." "I wondered why the route came to an end," crinkled Taphetta, butthere was no comment, no answer. "We reconstructed what had happened. For a long time, the plague had lived in our sewers, subsisting on wastes. At night, because they are tiny and move exceedingly fast, they were able to make their way into our ships and were aboard on every journey. We knew they were there. but because they were so small, it was difficult to dislodge them from their nesting places. And so we tolerated their existence." Taphetta. "We figured out that angle long ago. True, our ship is an exception, but we havn't landed anywhere, and won't until we deverminize it." "We didn't guess that next to the hull in outer space and consequently exposed to hard radiation," the message went on, "those tiny creatures would mutate dangerously and escape to populate the planets we landed on. They had always been loathsome little beasts that walked instead of rolling or creeping, but now they became even more vicious, spawning explosively and fighting with the same incessant violence. They had always harbored diseases which spread to us, but now they've become lothouses for still smaller parasites that also are able to infect us. Finally, we are now allergic to them, and when they are within miles of us, it is agony to roll or creep." Taphetta looked around. "Who would have thought it? You were completely mistaken as to your origin." Kelburn was staring vacantly ahead, but didn't see a thing. Meredith was leaning against Halden; her eyes were closed. "The woman has finally chosen, now that she knows she was once vermin," clicked the Ribboneer. "But there are tears in her eyes." "The intelligence of the beast has advanced slightly, though there isn't much difference between the highest and the lowest -- and we've checked both ends of all four journeys. But before, it was relatively calm and orderly. Now it is malignantly insane." Taphetta rattled his ribbons. "Turn it off. You don't have to listen to this. We all are of some origin or other and it wasn't necessarily pretty. This being was a slug of some kind -- and are you now what it describes? Perhaps mentally a little, out of pride, but the pride was false." "We can't demolish all the planets we unthinkingly let it loose on; there are too many and it lives too fast. The stars drift and we would lose some, and before we could eliminate the last one, it would develop space travel -- it has little intelligence, but it could get that far -- and it would escape ahead of us. We know an impossible task when we see it. And so we're leaving, first making sure that this animal will never make use of the products of our civilization. It may reach this planet, but it will not be able to untangle our code -- it's too stupid. You who will have to face it, please forgive us. It's the only thing that we're ashamed of." "Don't listen," said the Ribboneer and, bending his broad, thin body, he sprang to the translator, shook it and banged with his ribbons until the machine was silent. "You don't have to tell anyone," crackled Taphetta. "Don't worry about me -- f won't repeat it." He looked around at the faces. "But I can see that you will report to everyone exactly what you found. That pride you've developed -- you'll need it." Taphetta sat on top of the machine, looking like nothing so much as a huge fancy bow on a gift-wrapped package. They noted the resemblance vaguely. But each of them knew that, as a member of the most numerous race in the Milky Way, no longer feared for their mysterious qualities -- despised, instead -- wherever they went, there would never be any gifts for them -- for any man. in cooperation with announces its third annual ifed to short stories with a science fiction theme by college undergraduates only anism may be described m brief as the belief that Man must solve his own problems " Tustrongest tool he has ever developed for problem-solving is scientific This theme pervades much of modern fiction of all types, and may be termed a working defimtion of the best science fiction. We would classify as "humanistic" der to discover competent new writers of humanistic science fiction, the American thinly disguised sermons. Although stories entered in the should have a humamstic approach, chief weight in the judging will be given to s of theme, sharp characterization and interpersonal conflict, and ingenuity of plot ment and solution of the problem used as the basis of the story. Entrants who are or from #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. in The Humanist. For further information on the contest and literature describing nanist viewpoint, write to Humanist Story Contest, Yellow Springs, Ohio. itries must be between # and # length. scripts must be typed in block, doubleon plain white bond paper. The au ime and address must appear on the pt itself. is no limit to the number of entries ent, but each must be accompanied oilowing form or its equivalent: (Entrant's Name) (Name of College) (Faculty Member)  A stamped, self-addressed envelope must be included at the time of entry if the author wants his manuscript returned. awarded as soon as fudging is completed. This, however, will not have any bearing on the fudging.  Other publishable stories will be purchased mum purchase price.  Mail all entries to: . cohnot be accepted. Yellow Springs, Ohio Continued from back caver G ck any # Books as your reward for joining this great new book elub  I , -- Selected stories from Fantasy  Science Fiction Magazine. The woman who became her own daughter... atomic power from beans... the man that lived # years...  gambling on a strange planet... and many others. lies by outstanding authors... ston startling inventions... of visitors from Outeriy Space... Adventure in Dimension... , Worlds of Tomorrow. # pages. whatever it meets. Plus many other best tales c skimmed from a dozen years of Astounding P Science-Fiction Magazine by its editor, John ' W. Campbell, Jr. on Advantages like These lects each month the best and only the beet new Science-Fiction book. And to enable you to cost, the Club has arranged to bring you these -- even though they cost #, # and up in publishers' original editions! Each selection is described IN ADthose books you really want -- as few as four a year, if you wish. If you don't want the current selection, you simply notify the Club. There are no other rules, no du, no fees. Just Mail Coupon ship in this new kind of book club. To new Science-Fiction masterpieces -- are your gift books for joining; the other is your first selection. This liberal offer may have to be withdrawn planet Mesklin. But the force of gravity there is so powerful the planet is squeezed almost fiat -- and a fall of even a few inchra can crush a human body to powder! A.D. Scientists can restore dead men to life! But when Bradley Kempton is restored -- he finds himself imprisoned in the body of an used by a man who's out to enslave the world!  Robots are the most hated creatures on  earth, TheyVe been taking over scarce jobs si'" held by humans. Then a noted robot scientist '  is murdered. Detective Baley has to track I down the killer. And -- he's given a robot as a  partner! born -- Angelo Pontevecchio can  destroy I the Earth -- or he can save it. But it's not up I to him to decide what to do! Two Martians  Breen was a one-man secret weapon! Frorn his Mde-out he could read the minds of enemy agents anywhere! Then he got a brain wave that he was about to be killed Please rush me the # books checked below, as my gift books and first selection. Bill me only I for aU three (plus small shipping charge), and enroU me as a member of the ScienceFiction Book Club. Every month send me the Club s free bulletin, "Thln to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only I plus sm shloDlng charge. I do not have to take a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any time after accepting four selections. all books In # days, pay nothing and this membership will be cancelled!  Altered Ego  Astounding Anthology  Caves of Steel  Fantasy  Science Fiction  Mirror for Observers  Mission of Gravity  Omnibus  Wild TolenI (Please Print) City Zone State Selection price in Canada # plus shipping. Address # Bond St., Toronto #. (Offer good only in U. S. and Canada.) No Thousands of Science-Fiction Fans Are Flocking to Join This Great New Book Club! rocket-swift thrills... strange adventure . , . jet-propelled action! It's the brand -- that brings you (at only a fraction of regular retail prices) the most skillfully WTitten of these spine-tingling novels!  To welcome you to the Club you are inhere -- a # to # value -- for only #! But send no money now -- just pick your # books and mail coupon on other side at once!  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Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty generations ago, less than l#th of # of the earth's people were thought capable of receiving basic knowledge about the laws of life, for it is an elementary truism that knowledge is power and that power cannot be entrusted to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; nor recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe K.E.H San Jose California "rich rewards -- copping all the International Fantasy Awards for #, for instance, and, in the four years since its birth, finding it has become the most widely read science fiction magazine in the world. On the other hand, getting the # or so stories we present every year means slogging wearily through thousands of manuscripts, eyes bloodshot, but hopes high that, somewhere in this mountain, there will be the rare gems that make the hunt worth while. They're there, of course, as you see each month, for we make it our business to discover new talent. Speaking of business, however, any really efficient one makes full use of its by-products. We're losing out on that score. Remember how kerosene refineries poured away gasoline, gold mines dumped uranium and platinum, and slaughterers threw out glands along with liver and lights -- all because no use was known for these now valuable items? I hate to confess it, but we're doing the same wasteful thing. Let's see if we can't do a properly efficient job by closely examining the main categories and possibly finding a use for them. It shouldn't be too hard ; after all, we have our trained imaginations.  Here's the plot in which the hero and heroine turn out to be Adam and Eve.  Ah, yes, the scientist who manufactures a miniature universe in the lab and discovers life on a planet that is circling a tiny sun. His name, we learn, is Yah Veh.  The spaceship crew that comes upon an absolutely ideal world, where the inhabitants don't know violence of any sort... and then leave hastily because, it seems, Man brings hatred and greed wherever he goes. Our boys hate to take off, naturally, but if they stay, they will inflict madness on the innocent natives.  The dictator-ridden society in which -- you can fill it out from there. Everybody is downtrodden and miserable. Our herb, generally with the aid of a sidekick andor maiden, kicks over the entire society with a flick of the wrist-radio. Oddly, in spite of having been conditioned to their civilization from birth, the inhabitants all react exactly as if they had been raised in ours.  This is a sub-division of the plot immediately above -- a girl in a parthenogenetic society risks the death penalty because she obstinately insists on having a baby in the old-fashioned way. Does that sound reasonable? For one thing, any society inevitably creates attitudes; Huxley's Brave New World gave one solution -- "mother" became a word to snigger over. And how many women demand the right to beat their laundry on river stones instead of using souldestroying washing machines?  Let's not overlook the postatomic mutation story in which kids are destroyed because, being freaks, they have only ten fingers and toes.  Oh, and there's the yarn about the spectacularly advanced extraterrestrial race that very benevolently keeps us from having space flight until we are worthy of it. Seems we'll spread greed and hatred wherever we go. (Remember the innocent race that went mad when our crew landed on their world.)  Another sub-division -- aliens, no less spectacularly advanced, have seen our A-bomb blasts, know we'll have H-bombs and worse before long, will inexorably blow up our mudball... and in some way disrupt the fabric of the Universe, endangering people thousands of light-years away. I guess this makes sense, since so many writers have done the story, but why are bomb blasts more dangerous to this mystical fabric of the Universe than novas?  The super-computer that, given the problem of how to bring peace to the world, goes insane because it has no answer. That's downright silly. Go into any bar and you'll get more answers than you'll know what to do with. There are many others, but these ought to do as a starter. Can't do everything at once, you know. Rome wasn't built in a day, according to recent news dispatches, and our industries in many cases took years to learn how to use by-products, which, in case you've forgotten, was the purpose behind all this. As I mentioned, putting out hardly a cinch. These and similar stories, though, come in so relentlessly that we could publish Greed  Hatred Science Fiction, Tales of Jehovah, Dictator Stories, Adams  Eves, Mother's Space Journal and so on weekly. There's only one hitch: Enough writers turn out these things to support a magazine in each category, but would they versions? No, I guess not. There probably is no use whatever for this literary sludge. It's a shame -- there's so much of it. Wanted: one man to do a totally impossible job. Salary: the knowledge that a planet's life depends upon his being able to do it! rliOM Fisher had no idea he was about to begin a criminal career. It was morning. The big red sun was just above the horizon, trailing its small yellow companion. The village, tiny and precise, a unique white dot on the planet's green expanse, glistened under its two midsummer suns. Tom was just waking up inside his cottage. He was .a tall. tanned young man, with his father's oval eyes and his mother's easygoing attitude toward exertion. He was in no hurry; there could be no fishing until the fall rains, and therefore no real work for a Fisher. Until fall, he was going to loaf and mend his fishing poles. "It's supposed to have a red roof!" he heard Billy Painter shouting outside. "Churches never have red roofs!" Ed Weaver shouted back. Tom frowned. Not being involved, he had forgotten the changes that had come over the village in the last two weeks. He slipped on a pair of pants and sauntered out to the village square. The first thing he saw when he entered the square was a large on the entire planet of New Delaware. There was nothing but forest, and this one village. The sign was purely a statement of policy. The square itself contained a Church, a Jail and a Post Office, all constructed in the last two frantic weeks and set in a aeat row facing the market. No one knew what to do with these buildings; the village had gone along nicely without them for over two hundred years. But now, of course, they had to be built. IT'D Weaver was standing in front of the new Church, squinting upward. Billy Painter was balanced precariously on the Church's steep roof, his blond mustache bristling indignantly. A small crowd had gathered. "Damn it, man," Billy Painter was saying, "I tell you I was reading about it just last week. White roof, okay. Red roof, never." "You're mixing it up with something else," Weaver said. "How about it, Tom?" Tom shrugged, having no opinion to offer. Just then, the Mayor bustled up, perspiring freely, his shirt flapping over his large paunch. "Come down," he called to Billy. "I just looked it up. It's the Little Red Schoolhouse, not Churchhouse." Billy looked angry. He had always been moody; all Painters were. But since the Mayor made him Chief of Police last week, he had become downright temperamental. "We don't have no Little Schoolhouse," Billy argued, halfway down the ladder. "We'll just have to build one," the Mayor said. "We'll have to hurry, too." He glanced at the sky. Involuntarily, everyone in the crowd glanced upward. But there was still nothing in sight. "Where are the Carpenter boys?" the Mayor asked. "Sid, Sam, Marv -- where are you?" Sid Carpenter's head appeared through the crowd. He was still on crutches from last month when he had fallen out of a tree looking for threstle's eggs; no Carpenter was worth a damn at treeclimbing. "The other boys are at Ed Beer's Tavern," Sid said. "Where else would they be?" Mary Waterman called from the crowd. "Well, you gather them up," the Mayor said. "They gotta build us a Little Schoolhouse, and quick. Tell them to put it up beside the Jail." He turned to Billy Painter, who was back on the ground. "Billy, you paint that Schoolhouse a good bright red, inside and out. It's very important." "When do I get a Police Chief badge?" Billy demanded. "I read that Police Chiefs always get badges." "Make yourself one," the Mayor said. He mopped his face with his shirt-tail. "Sure hot. Don't know why that Inspector couldn't have come in winter... Tom! Tom Fisher! Got an important job for you. Come on, I'll tell you all about it." He put an arm around Tom's shoulders and they walked to the Mayor's cottage past the empty market, along the village's single paved road. In the old days, that road had been of packed dirt. But the old days had ended two weeks ago and now the road was paved with crushed rock. It made barefoot walking so uncomfortable that the villagers simply cut across each other's lawns. The Mayor, though, walked on it out of principle. "Now look, Mayor," Tom protested, "I'm on my vacation -- " "Can't have any vacations now," the Mayor said. "Not now. He's due any day." He ushered Tom inside his cottage and sat down in the big armchair, which had been pushed as close to the Interstellar Radio as possible. "Tom," the Mayor said directly, "how would you like to be a criminal?" "I don't know," said Tom. "What's a Criminal?"  in his chair, the Mayor rested a hand on the Radio for authority. "It's this way," he said, and began to explain. Tom listened, but the more he heard, the less he liked. It was all the fault of that Interstellar Radio, he decided. Why hadn't it really been broken? No one had believed it could work. It had gathered dust in the office of one Mayor after another, for generations, the last silent link with Mother Earth. Two hundred years ago, Earth talked with New Delaware, and with Ford IV, Alpha Centauri, Nueva Espana, and the other colonies that made up the United Democracies of Earth. Then all conversations stopped. There seemed to be a war on Earth. New Delaware, with its one village, was too' small and too distant to take part. They waited for news, but no news came. And then plague struck the village, wiping out threequarters of the inhabitants. Slowly the village healed. The villagers adopted their own ways of doing things. They forgot Earth. Two hundred years passed. And then, two weeks ago, the ancient Radio had coughed itself into life. For hours, it growled and spat static, while the inhabitants of the village gathered around the Mayor's cottage. Finally words came out: "... hear me. New Delaware? Do you hear me?" "Yes, yes, we hear you," the Mayor said. "The colony is still there?" "It certainly is," the Mayor said proudly. The voice became stern and official. "There has been no contact with the Outer Colonies for some time, due to unsettled conditions here. But that's over, except for a little mopping up. You of New Delaware are still a colony of Imperial Earth and subject to her laws. Do you acknowledge the status?" The Mayor hesitated. All the books referred to Earth as the United Democracies. Well, in two centuries, names could change. "We are still loyal to Earth," the Mayor said with dignity. "Excellent. That saves us the trouble of sending an expeditionary force. A Resident Inspector will be dispatched to you from the nearest point, to ascertain whether you conform to the customs, institutions and traditions of Earth." "What?" the Mayor asked, worried. T HE stem voice became higherpitched. "You realize, of course, that there is room for only one intelligent species in the Universe -- Man! All others must be suppressed, wiped out, annihilated. We can tolerate no aliens sneaking around us. I'm sure you understand, General." "I'm not a General. I'm a Mayor." "You're in charge, aren't you?" "Yes, but -- " "Then you are a General. Permit me to continue. In this galaxy, there is no room for aliens. None! Nor is there room for deviant human cultures, which, by, definition, are alien. It is impossible to administer an empire when everyone does as he pleases. There must be order, no matter what the cost." The Mayor gulped hard and stared at the radio. "Be sure you're running an Earth colony, General, with no radical departures from the norm, such as free will, free love, free elections, or anything else on the proscribed list. Those things are alien, and we're pretty rough on aliens. Get your colony in order, General. The Inspector will call in about two weeks. That is all." The village held an immediate meeting, to determine how best to conform with the Earth mandate. All they could do was hastily model themselves upon the Earth pattern as shown in their ancient books. "I don't see why there has to be a Criminal," Tom said. "That's a very important part of Earth society," the Mayor explained. "All the books agree on it. The Criminal is as important as the Postman, say, or the Police Chief. Unlike them, the Criminal is engaged in antisocial work. He works against society, Tom. If you don't have people working against society, how can you have people working for it? There'd be no jobs for them to do." Tom shook his head. "I just don't see it." "Be reasonable, Tom. We have to have Earthly things. Like Paved Roads. All the books mention that. And Churches, and Schoolhouses, and Jails. And all the books mention Crime." "I won't do it," Tom said. "Put yourself in my position," the Mayor begged. "This Inspector comes and meets Billy Painter, our Police Chief. He asks to see the jail. Then he says, 'No Prisoners?' I answer, 'Of course not. We don't have any Crime here.' 'No Crime?' he says. 'But Earth colonies always have Crime. You know that.' 'We don't,' I answer. 'Didn't even know what it was until we looked up the word last week.' 'Then why did you build a Jail?' he asks me. 'Why did you appoint a Police Chief?' " T HE Mayor paused for breath. "You see? The whole thing falls through. He sees at once that we're not truly Earthlike. We're faking it. We're aliens!" "Hmm," Tom said, impressed in spite of himself. "This way," the Mayor went on quickly, "I can say, 'Certainly we've got Crime here, just like on Earth. We've got a combination Thief and Murderer. Poor fellow had a bad upbringing and he's maladjusted. Our Police Chief has some clues, though. We expect an arrest within # hours. We'll lock him in the Jail, then Rehabilitate him." "What's Rehabilitate?" Tom asked. "I'm not sure. I'll worry about that when I come to it. But now do you see how necessary crime is?" "I suppose so. But why me?" "Can't spare anyone else. And you've got narrow eyes. Criminals always have narrow eyes." "They aren't that narrow. They're no narrower than Ed Weaver's -- " "Tom, please," the Mayor said. "We're all doing our part. You want to help, don't you?" "I suppose so," Tom repeated wearily. "Fine. You're our Criminal. Here, this makes it legal." He handed Tom a document. Know all Men by these Presents that Tom Fisher is a Duly Authorized Thief and Murderer. He is hereby required to Skulk in Dismal Alleys, Haunt Places of Low Repute, and Break the Law. Tom read it through twice, then asked, "What Law?" "I'll let you know as fast as I make them up," the Mayor said. "All Earth colonies have Laws." "But what do I do?" "You Steal. And Kill. That should be easy enough." The Mayor walked to his bookcase and took down ancient volumes entitled The Criminal and his Environment, Psychology of the Slayer, and Studies in Theft Motivation. "These'll give you everything you need to know. Steal as much as you like. One Murder should be enough, though. No sense overdoing it." "Right," Tom nodded. "I guess I'll catch on." He picked up the books and returned to his cottage. talk about Crime had puzzled and wearied him. He lay down on his bed and began to go through the ancient books. There was a knock on his door. "Come in," Tom called, rubbing his tired eyes. Marv Carpenter, oldest and tallest of the red-headed Carpenter boys, came in, followed by old Jed Farmer. They were carrying a small sack. "You the town Criminal, Tom?" Marv asked. "Looks like it." "Then this is for you." They put the sack on the floor and took from it a hatchet, two knives, a short spear, a club and a blackjack. "What's all that?" Tom asked, sitting upright. "Weapons, of course," Jed Farmer said testily. "You can't be a real Criminal without weapons." Tom scratched his head. "Is that a fact?" "You'd better start figuring these things out for yourself," Farmer went on in his impatient voice. "Can't expect us to do everything for you." Marv Carpenter winked at Tom. "Jed's sore because the Mayor made him our Postman." "I'll do my part," Jed said. "I just don't like having to write all those letters." "Can't be too hard," Marv Carpenter said, grinning. "The Postmen do it on Earth and they got a lot more people there. Good luck, Tom." They left. Tom bent down and examined the weapons. He knew what they were; the old books were full of them. But no one had ever actually used a weapon on New Delaware. The only native animals on the planet were small, furry, and confirmed eaters of grass. As for turning a weapon on a fellow villager -- why would anybody want to do that? He picked up one of the knives. It was cold. He touched the point. It was sharp. Tom began to pace the floor, staring at the weapons. They gave him a queer sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He decided he had been hasty in accepting the job. But there was no sense worrying about it yet. He still had those books to read. After that, perhaps he could make some sense out of the whole thing. stopping only to eat a light lunch. The books were understandable enough; the various Criminal methods were clearly explained, sometimes with diagrams. But the whole thing was unreasonable. What was the purpose of Crime? Whom did it benefit? What did people get out of it? The books didn't explain that. He leafed through them, looking at the photographed faces of Criminals. They looked very serious and dedicated, extremely conscious of the significance of their work to society. Tom wished he could find out what that significance was. It would probably make things much easier. "Tom?" he heard the Mayor call from outside. "I'm in here, Mayor," Tom said. The door opened and the Mayor peered in. Behind him were Jane Farmer, Mary Waterman and Alice Cook. "How about it, Tom?" the Mayor asked. "How about what?" "How about getting to work?" Tom grinned self-consciously. "I was going to," he said. "I was reading these books, trying to figure out -- " The three middle-aged ladies glared at him, and Tom stopped in embarrassment. "You're certainly taking your time reading," Alice Cook said. "Everyone else is outside working," said Jane Farmer. "What's so hard about Stealing?" Mary Waterman challenged. "It's true," the Mayor told him. "That Inspector might be here any day now and we don't have a Crime to show him." "All right, all right," Tom said. He stuck a knife and a blackjack in his belt, put the sack in his pocket -- for Loot -- and stalked out. But where was he going? It was mid-afternoon. The market, which was the most logical place to rob, would be empty until evening. Besides, he didn't want to   :' commit a Robbery in daylight. It seemed unprofessional. He opened his Skulking Permit and read it through. Required to Haunt Places of Low Repute... That was it! He'd haunt a Low Repute Place. He could form some plans there, get into the mood of the thing. But unfortunately, the village didn't have much to choose from. There was the Tiny Restaurant, run by the widowed Ames sisters, there was Jeff Hern's Lounging Spot, and finally there was Ed Beer's Tavern. Ed's place would have to do. f JHE Tavern was a cottage much like the other cottages in the village. It had one big room for guests, a kitchen, and family sleeping quarters. Ed's wife did the cooking and kept the place as clean as she could, considering her ailing back. Ed served the drinks. He was a pale, sleepy-eyed man with a talent for worrying. "Hello, Tom," Ed said. "Hear you're our Criminal." "That's right," said Tom. "I'll take a perricola." Ed Beer served him the nonalcoholic root extract and stood anxiously in front of Tom's table. "How come you ain't out Thieving, Tom?" "I'm planning," Tom said. "My Permit says I have to Haunt Places of Low Repute. That's why I'm here." "Is that nice?" Ed Beer asked sadly. "This is no Place of Low Repute, Tom." "You serve the worst meals in town," Tom pointed out. "I know. My wife can't cook. But there's a friendly atmosphere here. Folks like it." "That's all changed, Ed. I'm making this tavern my headquarters." Ed Beer's shoulders drooped. "Try to keep a nice place," he muttered. "A lot of thanks you get." He returned to the bar. Tom proceeded to think. He found it amazingly difficult. The more he tried, the less came out. But he stuck grimly to it. An hour passed. Richie Farmer, Jed's youngest son, stuck his head in the door. "You Steal anything yet, Tom?" "Not yet," Tom told him, hunched over his table, still thinking. The scorching afternoon drifted slowly by. Patches of evening became visible through the Tavern's small, not too clean windows. A cricket began to chirp outside, and the first whisper of night wind stirred the surrounding forest. Big George Waterman and Max Weaver came in for a glass, of glava. They sat down beside Tom. "How's it going?" George Waterman asked. "Not so good," Tom said. "Can't seem to get the hang of this Stealing." "You'll catch on," Waterman said in his slow, ponderous, earnest fashion. "If anyone in this village could learn it, you can." "We've got confidence in you, Tom," Weaver assured him. Tom thanked them. They drank and left. He continued thinking, staring into his empty perricola glass. An hour later, Ed Beer cleared his throat apologetically. "It's none of my business, Tom, but when are you going to Steal something?" "Right now," Tom said. He stood up, made sure his weapons were securely in place, and strode out the door. gun in the market. Goods were piled carelessly on benches, or spread over the grass on straw mats. There was no currency, no rate of exchange. Ten handwrought nails were worth a pail of milk or two fish, or vice versa, depending on what you had to barter and needed at the moment. No one ever bothered keeping accounts. That was one Earth custom the Mayor was having difficulty introducing. As Tom Fisher walked down the square, everyone greeted him. "Stealing now, huh, Tom?" "Go to it, boy!" "You can do it!" No one in the village had ever witnessed an actual theft. They considered it an exotic custom of distant Earth and they wanted to see how it worked. They left their goods and followed Tom through the market, watching avidly. Tom found that his hands were trembling. He didn't like having so many people watch him Steal. He decided he'd better work fast, while he still had the nerve. He stopped abruptly in front of Mrs. Miller's fruit-laden bench. "Tasty-looking geefers," he said casually. "They're fresh," Mrs. Miller told him. She was a small and bright-eyed old woman. Tom could remember long conversations she had had with his mother, back when his parents were alive. "They look very tasty," he said, wishing he had stopped somewhere else instead. "Oh, they are," said Mrs. Miller. "I picked them just this afternoon." "Is he going to Steal now?" someone whispered. "Sure he is. Watch him," someone whispered back. Tom picked up a bright green geefer and inspected it. The crowd became suddenly silent. "Certainly looks very tasty," Tom said, carefully replacing the geefer. The crowd released a longdrawn sigh. Max Weaver and his wife and five children were at the next bench. Tonight they were displaying two blankets and a shirt. They all smiled shyly when Tom came over, followed by the crowd. "That shirt's about your size," Weaver informed him. He wished the people would go away and let Tom work. "Hmm," Tom said, picking up the shirt. The crowd stirred expectantly. A girl began to giggle hysterically. Tom gripped the shirt tightly and opened his Loot bag. J Painter pushed his way through. He was wearing a badge now, an old Earth coin he had polished and pinned to his belt. The expression on his face was unmistakably official. "What were you doing with that shirt, Tom?" Billy asked. "Why... I was just looking at it." "Just looking at it, huh?" Billy turned away, his hands clasped behind his back. Suddenly he whirled and extended a rigid forefinger. "I don't think you were just looking at it, Tom. I think you were planning on Stealing it!" Tom didn't answer. The telltale sack hung limply from one hand, the shirt from the other. "As Police Chief," Billy went on, "I've got a duty to protect these people. You're a Suspicious Character. I think I'd better lock you up for further questioning." Tom hung his head. He hadn't expected this, but it was just as well. Once he was in Jail, it would be all over. And when Billy released him, he could get back to fishing. Suddenly the Mayor bounded through the crowd, his shirt flapping wildly around his waist. "Billy, what are you doing?" "Doing my duty, Mayor. Tom here is acting plenty suspicious. The book says -- " "I know what the book says," the Mayor told him. "I gave you the book. You can't go arresting Tom. Not yet." "But there's no other Criminal in the village," Billy complained. "I can't help that," the Mayor said. Billy's lips tightened. "The book talks about Preventive Police Work. I'm supposed to stop Crime before it happens." The Mayor raised his hands and dropped them wearily. "Billy, don't you understand? This village needs a Criminal record. You have to help, too." Billy shrugged his shoulders. "All right, Mayor. I was just trying to do my job." He turned to go. Then he whirled again on Tom. "I'll still get you. Remember -- Crime Does Not Pay." He stalked off. "He's overambitious, Tom," the Mayor explained. "Forget it. Go ahead and Steal something. Let's get this job over with." ward the green forest outside the village. "What's wrong, Tom?" the Mayor asked worriedly. "I'm not in the mood any more," Tom said. "Maybe tomorrow night -- " "No, right now," the Mayor insisted. "You can't go on putting it off. Come on, we'll all help you." "Sure we will," Max Weaver said. "Steal the shirt, Tom. It's your size anyhow." "How about a nice water jug, Tom?" "Look at these skeegee nuts over here." Tom looked from bench to bench. As he reached for Weaver's shirt, a knife slipped from his belt and dropped to the ground. The crowd clucked sympathetically. Tom replaced it, perspiring, knowing he looked like a butterfingers. He reached out, took the shirt and stuffed it into the Loot Bag. The crowd cheered. Tom smiled faintly, feeling a bit better. "I think I'm getting the hang of it." "Sure you are." "We knew you could do it." "Take something else, boy." Tom walked down the market and helped himself to a length of rope, a handful of skeegee nuts and a grass hat. "I guess that's enough," he told the Mayor. "Enough for now," the Mayor agreed. "This doesn't really count, you know. This was the same as people giving it to you. Practice, you might say." "Oh," Tom said, disappointed. "But you know what you're doing. The next time it'll be just as easy." "I suppose it will." "And don't forget that Murder." "Is it really necessary?" Tom asked. "I wish it weren't," the Mayor said. "But this colony has been here for over two hundred years and we haven't had a single Murder. Not one! According to the records, all the other colonies had lots." "I suppose we should have one," Tom admitted. "I'll take care of it." He headed for his cottage. The crowd gave a rousing cheer as he departed. A T home, Tom lighted a rush lamp and fixed himself supper. After eating, he sat for a long time in his big armchair. He was dissatisfied with himself. He had not really handled the Stealing well. All day he had worried and hesitated. People had practically had to put things in his hands before he could take them. A fine Thief he was! And there was no excuse for it. Stealing and Murdering were like any other necessary jobs. Just because he had never done them before, just because he could see no sense to them, that was no reason to bungle them. He walked to the door. It was a fine night, illuminated by a dozen nearby giant stars. The market was deserted again and the village lights were winking out.  This was the time to Steal! A thrill ran through him at the thought. He was proud of himself. That was how Criminals planned and this was how Stealing should be -- skulking, late at night. Quickly Tom checked his weapons, emptied his Loot Sack and walked out. The last rush lights were extinguished. Tom moved noiselessly through the village. He came to Roger Waterman's house. Big Roger had left his spade propped against a wall. Tom picked it up. Down the block, Mrs. Weaver's water jug was in its usual place beside the front door. Tom took it. On his way home, he found a little wooden horse that some child had forgotten. It went with the rest. He was pleasantly exhilarated, once the goods were safely home. He decided to make another haul. This time he returned with a bronze plaque from the Mayor's house, Marv Carpenter's best saw, and Jed Farmer's sickle. "Not bad," he told himself. He was catching on. One more load would constitute a good night's work. This time he found a hammer and chisel in Ron Stone's shed, and a reed basket at Alice Cook's house. He was about to take Jeff Hern's rake when he heard a faint noise. He flattened himself against a wall. Billy Painter came prowling quietly along, his badge gleaming in the starlight. In one hand, he carried a short, heavy club; in the other, a pair of homemade handcuffs. In the dim light, his face was ominous. It was the face of a man who had pledged himself against Crime, even though he wasn't really sure what it was. Tom held his breath as Billy Painter passed within ten feet of him. Slowly Tom backed away. The Loot Sack jingled. "Who's there?" Billy yelled. When no one answered, he turned a slow circle, peering into the shadows. Tom was flattened against a wall again. He was fairly sure Billy wouldn't see him. Billy had weak eyes because of the fumes of the paint he mixed. All Painters had weak eyes. It was one of the reasons they were moody. "Is that you, Tom?" Billy asked, in a friendly tone. Tom was about to answer, when he noticed that Billy's club was raised in a striking position. He kept quiet. "I'll get you yet!" Billy shouted. "Well, get him in the morning!" Jeff Hern shouted from his bedroom window. "Some of us are trying to sleep." Billy moved away. When he was gone, Tom hurried home and dumped his pile of Loot on the floor with the rest. He surveyed his haul proudly. It gave him the sense of a job well done. After a cool drink of glava, Tom went to bed, falling at once into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.  ed out to see how the Little Red Schoolhouse was progressing. The Carpenter boys were hard at work on it, helped by several villagers. "How's it coming?" Tom called out cheerfully. "Fair," Marv Carpenter said. "It'd come along better if I had my saw." "Your saw?" Tom repeated blankly. After a moment, he remembered that he had stolen it last night. It hadn't seemed to belong to anyone then. The saw and all the rest had been objects to be stolen. He had never given a thought to the fact that they might be used or needed. Marv Carpenter asked, "Do you suppose I could use the saw for a while? Just for an hour or so?" "I'm not sure," Tom said, frowning. "It's legally Stolen, you know." "Of course it is. But if I could just borrow it -- " "You'd have to give it back." "Well, naturally I'd give it back," Marv said indignantly. "I wouldn't keep anything that was legally stolen." "It's in the house with the rest of the Loot." Marv thanked him and hurried after it. Tom began ' to stroll through the village. He reached the Mayor's house. The Mayor was standing outside, staring at the sky. "Tom, did you take my bronze plaque?" he asked. "I certainly did," Tom said belligerently. "Oh. Just wondering." The Mayor pointed upward. "See it?" Tom looked. "What?" "Black dot near the rim of the small sun." "Yes. What is it?" "I'll bet it's the Inspector's ship. How's your work coming?" "Fine," Tom said, a trifle uncomfortably. "Got your Murder planned?" "I've been having a little trouble with that," Tom confessed. "To tell the truth, I haven't made any progress on it at all." "Come on in, Tom. I want to talk to you." ing room, the Mayor poured two glasses of glava and motioned Tom to a chair. "Our time is running short," the Mayor said gloomily. "The Inspector may land any hour now. And my hands are full." He motioned at the Interstellar Radio. " That has been talking again. Something about a revolt on Deng IV and all loyal Earth colonies are to prepare for conscription, whatever that is. I never even heard of Deng IV, but I have to start worrying about it, in addition to everything else." He fixed Tom with a stern stare. "Criminals on Earth commit dozens of Murders a day and never even think about it. All your village wants of you is one ask?" Tom spread his hands nervously. "Do you really think it's necessary?" "You know it is," the Mayor said. "If we're going Earthly, we have to go all the way. This is the only thing holding us back. All the other projects are right on schedule." Billy Painter entered, wearing a new official-blue shirt with bright metal buttons. He sank into a chair. "Kill anyone yet, Tom?" The Mayor said, "He wants to know if it's necessary ." "Of course it is," the Police Chief said. "Read any of the books. You're not much of a Criminal if you don't Commit a Murder." "Who'll it be, Tom?" the . Mayor asked. Tom squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. He rubbed his fingers together nervously. "Well?" "Oh, I'll kill Jeff Hern," Tom blurted. Billy Painter leaned forward quickly. "Why?" he asked. "Why? Why not?" "What's your Motive?" "I thought you just wanted a Murder," Tom retorted. "Who said anything about Motive?" "We can't have a fake Murder," the Police Chief explained. "It has to be done right. And that means you have to have a proper Motive." Tom thought for a moment. "Well, I don't know Jeff well. Is that a good enough motive?" The Mayor shook his head. "No, Tom, that won't do. Better pick someone else." "Let's see," Tom said. "How about George Waterman?" "What's the Motive?" Billy asked immediately. "Oh... um... Well, I don't like the way George walks. Never did. And he's noisy sometimes." The Mayor nodded approvingly. "Sounds good to me. What do you say, Billy?" "How am I supposed to deduce a Motive like that?" Billy asked angrily. "No, that might be good enough for a Crime of Passion. But you're a legal Criminal, Tom. By definition, you're Coldblooded, Ruthless and Cunning. You can't Kill someone just because you don't like the way he walks. That's silly." "I'd better think this whole thing over," Tom said, standing up. "Don't take too long," the Mayor told him. "The sooner it's done, the better." Tom nodded and started out the door. "Oh, Tom!" Billy called. "Don't forget to leave Clues. They're very important." "All right," Tom said, and left. lagers were watching the sky. The black dot had grown immensely larger.  It covered most of the smaller sun. Tom went to his Place of Low Repute to think things out. Ed Beer had apparently changed his mind about the desirability of Criminal elements. The Tavern was redecorated. There was a new, carefully soiled curtains on the windows, blocking the daylight and making the Tavern truly a Dismal Retreat. Weapons, hastily carved out of soft wood, hung on one wall. On another wall was a large red splotch, an ominous-looking thing, even though Tom knew it was only Billy Painter's rootberry red paint. "Come right in, Tom," Ed Beer said, and led him to the darkest corner in the room. Tom noticed that the Tavern was unusually filled for the time of day. People seemed to like the idea of being in a genuine Criminal's Lair. Tom sipped a perricola and began to think. He had to Commit a Murder. He took out his Skulking Permit and looked it over. Unpleasant, unpalatable, something he wouldn't normally do, ,but he did have the legal obligation. Tom drank his perricola and concentrated on Murder. He told himself he was going to kill someone. He had to snuff out a life. He would make someone cease to exist. But the phrases didn't contain the essence of the act. They were just words. To clarify his thoughts, he took big, red-headed Marv Carpenter as an example. Today, Marv was working on the Schoolhouse with his borrowed saw. If Tom killed Marv -- well, Marv wouldn't work any more. Tom shook his head impatiently. He still wasn't grasping it. All right, here was Marv Carpenter, biggest and, many thought, the pleasantest of the Carpenter boys. He'd be planing down a piece of wood, grasping the plane firmly in his large freckled hands, squinting down the line he had drawn. Thirsty, undoubtedly, and with a small pain in his left shoulder that Jan Druggist was unsuccessfully treating. That was Marv Carpente. Then -- Marv Carpenter sprawled on the ground, his eyes glaring open, limbs stiff, mouth twisted, no air going in or out his nostrils, no beat to his heart. Never again to hold a piece of wood in his large, freckled hands. Never again to feel the small and really unimportant pain in his shoulder that Jan Druggist was -- For just a moment, Tom glimpsed what Murder really was. The vision passed, but enough of a memory remained to make him feel sick. He could live with the Thieving. But Murder, even in the best interests of the village... What would people think, after they saw what he had just imagined? How could he live with them? How could he live with himself afterward? And yet he had to kill. Everybody in the village had a job and that was his. But whom could he Murder? T HE excitement started later in the day when the Interstellar Radio was filled with angry voices. "Call that a colony? Where's the capital?" "This is it," the Mayor replied. "Where's your landing field?" "I think it's being used as a pasture," the Mayor said. "I could look up where it was. No ship has landed here in over -- " "The main ship will stay aloft then. Assemble your officials. I am coming down immediately." The entire village gathered around an open field that the Inspector designated. Tom strapped on his weapons and Skulked behind a tree, watching. A small ship detached itself from the big one and dropped swiftly down. It plummeted toward the field while the villagers held their breaths, certain it would crash. At the last moment, jets flared, scorching the grass, and the ship settled gently to the ground. The Mayor edged forward, followed by Billy Painter. A door in the ship opened, and four men marched out. They held shining metallic instruments that Tom knew were weapons. After them came a large, red-faced man dressed in black, wearing four bright medals. He was followed by a little man with a wrinkled face, also dressed in black. Four more uniformed men followed him. "Welcome to New Delaware," the Mayor said. "Thank you, General," the big man said, shaking the Mayor's hand firmly. "I am Inspector Delumaine. This is Mr. Grent, my Political Adviser." Grent nodded to the Mayor, ignoring his outstretched hand. He was looking at the villagers with an expression of mild disgust. "We will survey the village," the Inspector said, glancing at Grent out of the comer of his eye. Grent nodded. The .uniformed guards closed around them. Tom followed at a safe distance, Skulking in true Criminal fashion. In the village, he hid behind a house to watch the Inspection. The Mayor pointed out, with pardonable pride, the Jail, the Post Office, the Church and the Little Red Schoolhouse. The Inspector seemed bewildered. Mr. Grent smiled unpleasantly and rubbed his jaw. "As I thought," he told the Inspector. "A waste of time, fuel and a battle cruiser. This place has nothing of value." "I'm not so sure," the Inspector said. He turned to the Mayor. "But what did you build them for, General?" "Why, to be Earthly," the Mayor said. "We're doing our best, as you can see." thing in the Inspector's ear. "Tell me," the Inspector asked the Mayor, "how many young men are there in the village?" "I beg your pardon?" The Mayor said in polite bewilderment. "Young men between the ages of fifteen and sixty," Mr. Grent explained. "You see, General, Imperial Mother Earth is engaged in a war. The colonists on Deng IV and some other colonies have turned against their birthright. They are revolting against the absolute authority of Mother Earth." "I'm sorry to hear that," the Mayor said sympathetically. "We need men for the Space Fleet," the Inspector told him. "Good healthy fighting men. Our reserves are depleted -- ", "We wish," Mr. Grent broke in smoothly, "to give all loyal Earth colonists a chance to fight for Imperial Mother Earth. We are sure you won't refuse." "Oh, no," the Mayor said. "Certainly not. I'm sure our young men will be glad -- I mean they don't know much about it, but they're all bright boys. They can learn, I guess." "You see?" the Inspector said to Mr. Grent. "Sixty, seventy, perhaps a hundred recruits. Not such a waste after all." Mr. Grent still looked dubious. The Inspector and his Adviser went to the Mayor's house for refreshment. Four soldiers accompanied them. The other four walked around the village, helping themselves to anything they found. Tom hid in the woods nearby to think things over. In the early evening, Mrs. Ed Beer came furtively out of the village. She was a gaunt, grayish-blonde middleaged woman, but she moved quite rapidly in spite of her case of housemaid's knee. She had a basket with her, covered with a red checkered napkin. "Here's your dinner," she said, as soon as she found Tom. "Why... thanks," said Tom, taken by surprise, "You didn't have to do that." "I certainly did. Our Tavern is your Place of Low Repute, isn't it? We're responsible for your well-being. And the Mayor sent you a message." Tom looked up, his mouth full of food. "What is it?" "He said to hurry up with the Murder. He's been stalling the Inspector and that nasty little Grent man. But they're going to ask him. He's sure of it." Tom nodded. "When are you going to do it?" Mrs. Beer asked, cocking her head to one side. "I mustn't tell you," Tom said. "Of course you must. I'm a Criminal's Accomplice." Mrs. Beer leaned closer. "That's true," Tom admitted thoughtfully. "Well, I'm going to do it tonight. After dark. Tell Billy Painter I'll leave all the fingerprints I can, and any other clues I think of." "All right, Tom," Mrs. Beer said. "Good luck." rlOM waited for dark, meanwhile watching the village. He noticed that most of the soldiers had been drinking. They swaggered around as though the villagers didn't exist. One of them fired his weapon into the air, frightening all the small, furry grass-eaters for miles around. The Inspector and Mr. Grent were still in the Mayor's house. Night came. Tom slipped into the village and stationed himself in an alley between two houses. He drew his knife and waited. Someone was approaching! He tried to remember his Criminal Methods, but nothing came. He knew he would just have to do the Murder as best he could, and fast. The person came up, his figure indistinct in the darkness. "Why, hello, Tom." It was the Mayor. He looked at the knife. "What are you doing?" "You said there had to be a Murder, so -- " "I didn't mean me," the Mayor said, backing away. "It can't be me." "Why not?" Tom asked. "Well, for one thing, somebody has to talk to the Inspector. He's waiting for me. Someone has to show him -- " "Billy Painter can do that," said Tom. He grasped the Mayor by the shirt front, raised the knife and aimed for the throat. "Nothing personal, of course," he added. "Wait!" the Mayor cried. "If there's nothing personal, then you have no Motive!" Tom lowered the knife, but kept his grasp on the Mayor's shirt. "I guess I can think of.one. I've been pretty sore about you appointing me Criminal." "It was the Mayor who appointed you, wasn't it?" "Well, sure -- " The Mayor pulled Tom out of the shadows, into the bright starlight. "Look!" Tom gaped. The Mayor was dressed in long, sharply creased pants and a tunic resplendent with medals. On each shoulder was a double row of ten stars. His hat was thickly crusted with gold braid in the shape of comets. "You see, Tom? I'm not the Mayor any more. I'm a General!" . "What's that got to do with it? You're the same person, aren't you?" "Not officially. You missed the ceremony this afternoon. The Inspector said that since I was officially a General, I had to wear a General's uniform. It was a very friendly ceremony. All the Earthmen were grinning and winking at me and each other." held it as he would to gut a fish. "Congratulations," he said sincerely, "but you were the Mayor when you appointed me Criminal, so my Motive still holds." General! And that's not Murder!" "It isn't?" Tom asked. "What is . it then?" Mutiny!" "Oh." Tom put down the knife. He released the Mayor. "Sorry." "Quite all right," the Mayor said. "Natural error. I've read up on it and you haven't, of course -- no need to." He took a deep breath. "I'd better get back. The Inspector wants a list of the men he can Draft." Tom called out, "Are you sure this Murder is necessary?" "Yes, absolutely," the Mayor said, hurrying away. "Just not me." Tom put the knife back in his belt. Not me, not me. Everyone would feel that way. Yet somebody had to be Murdered. Who? He couldn't Kill himself. That would be Suicide, which wouldn't count. He began to shiver, trying not to think of the glimpse he'd had of the reality of Murder. The job had to be done. Someone else was coming! The person came nearer. Tom hunched down, his muscles tightening for the leap. It was Mrs. Miller, returning home with a bag of vegetables. Tom told himself that it didn't matter whether it was Mrs. Miller or anybody else. But he couldn't help remembering those conversations with his mother. They left Mrs. Miller. She passed by without seeing him. He waited for half an hour. Another person walked through the dark alley between the houses. Tom recognized him as Max Weaver. Tom had always liked him. But that didn't mean there couldn't be a Motive. All he could come up with, though, was that Max had a wife and five children who loved him and would miss him. Tom didn't want Billy Painter to tell him that that was no Motive. He drew deeper into the shadow and le.t Max go safely by. The three Carpenter boys came along. Tom had painfully been through that already. He let them pass. Then Roger Waterman approached. He had no real Motive for been especially friendly with him. Besides, Roger had no children and his wife wasn't fond of him. Would that be enough for Billy Painter to work on? He knew it wouldn't be... and the same was true of all the villagers. He had grown up with these people, shared food and work and fun and grief with them. How could he possibly have a But he had to Commit a Murder. His Skulking Permit required it. He couldn't let the village down. But neither could he Kill the people he had known all his life. Wait, he told himself in sudden excitement. He could Kill the Inspector! even more Heinous Crime than Murdering the Mayor -- except that the Mayor was a General now, of course, and that would only be Mutiny. But even if the Mayor were still Mayor, the Inspector would be a far more important Victim. Tom would be Notoriety. And the Murder would show Earth how Earthly the colony really was. They would say, "Crime is so bad on New Delaware that it's hardly safe to land there. A Criminal actually Killed our Inspector on the very first day! Worst Criminal we've come across in all space." It would be the most spectacular Crime he could Commit, Tom realized, just the sort of thing a Master Criminal would do. Feeling proud of himself for the first time in a long while, Tom hurried out of the alley and over to the Mayor's house. He could hear conversation going on inside. "... sufficiently passive population," Mr. Grent was saying. "Sheeplike, in fact." "Makes it rather boring," the Inspector answered. "For the soldiers especially." "Well, what do you expect from backward agrarians? At least we're getting some recruits out of it." Mr. Grent yawned audibly. "On your feet, guards. We're going back to the ship." Guards! Tom had forgotten about them. He looked doubtfully at his knife. Even if he sprang at the Inspector, the guards would probably stop him before the Murder could be Committed. They must have been trained for just that sort of thing. But if he had one of their own weapons... He heard the shuffling of feet inside. Tom hurried back into the village. Near the market, he saw a soldier sitting on a doorstep, singing drunkenly to himself. Two empty bottles lay at his feet and his weapon was slung sloppily over his shoulder. Tom crept up, drew his blackjack and took aim. The soldier must have glimpsed his shadow. He leaped to his feet, ducking the stroke of the blackjack. In the same motion, he jabbed with his slung rifle, catching Tom in the ribs, tore the rifle from his shoulder and aimed. Tom closed his eyes and lashed out with both feet. He caught the soldier on the knee, knocking him over. Before he could get up, Tom swung the blackjack. Tom felt the soldier's pulse -- and found it satisfactory. He took the weapon, checked to make sure he knew which button to push, and hastened after the Inspector. caught up with them. The Inspector and Grent were walking ahead, the soldiers straggling behind. Tom moved into the underbrush. He trotted silently along until he was opposite Grent and the Inspector. He took aim and his finger tightened on the trigger... He didn't want to Kill Grent, though. He was supposed to Commit only one Murder. He ran on, past the Inspector's party, and came out on the road in front of them. His weapon was poised as the party reached him. "What's this?" the Inspector demanded. "Stand still," Tom said. "The rest of you drop your weapons and move out of the way." The soldiers moved like men in shock. One by one they dropped their weapons and retreated to the underbrush. Grent held his ground. "What are you doing, boy?" he asked. "I'm the town Criminal," Tom stated proudly. "I'm going to Kill the Inspector. Please move out of the way." Grent stared at him. "Criminal? So that's what the Mayor was prattling about." "I know we haven't had any Murder in two hundred years," Tom explained, "but I'm changing that right now. Move out of the way!" Grent leaped out of the line of fire. The Inspector stood alone, swaying slightly. Tom took aim, trying to think about the spectacular nature of his Crime and its social value. But he saw the Inspector on the ground, eyes glaring open, limbs stiff, mouth twisted, no air going in or out the nostrils, no beat to the heart. He tried to force his finger to close on the trigger. His mind could talk all it wished about the desirability of Crime; his hand knew better. "I can't!" Tom shouted. He threw down the gun and sprinted into the underbrush. a search party out for Tom and hang him on the spot. Mr. Grent didn't agree. New Delaware was all forest. Ten thousand men couldn't have caught a fugitive in the forest, if he didn't want to be caught. The Mayor and several villagers came out, to find out about the commotion. The soldiers formed a hollow square around the Inspector and Mr. Grent. They stood with weapons ready, their faces set and serious. And the Mayor explained everything. The village's uncivilized lack of Crime. The job that Tom had been given. How ashamed they were that he had been unable to handle it. "Why did you give the assignment to that particular man?" Mr. Grent asked. "Well," the Mayor said, "I figured if anyone could Kill, Tom could. He's a Fisher, you knoto. Pretty gory work." "Then the rest of you would be equally unable to kill?" "We wouldn't even get as far as Tom did," the Mayor admitted sadly. Mr. Grent and the Inspector looked at each other, then at the soldiers. The soldiers were staring at the villagers with wonder and respect. They started to whisper among themselves. "Attention!" the Inspector bellowed. He turned to Grent and said in a low voice, "We'd better get away from here. Men in our armies who can't kill..." "The morale," Mr. Grent said. He shuddered. "The possibility of infection. One man in a key position endangering a ship -- perhaps a fleet -- because he can't fire a weapon. It isn't worth the risk." They ordered the soldiers back to the ship. The soldiers seemed to march more slowly than usual, and they looked back at the village. They whispered together, even though the Inspector was bellowing orders. The small ship took off in a flurry of jets. Soon it was swallowed in the large ship. And then the large ship was gone. The edge of the enormous watery red sun was just above the horizon. "VT'OU can come out now," the Mayor called. Tom emerged from the underbrush, where he had been hiding, watching everything. "I bungled it," he said miserably. "Don't feel bad about it," Billy Painter told him. "It was an impossible job." "I'm afraid it was," the Mayor said, as they walked back to the village. "I thought that just possibly you could swing it. But you can't be blamed. There's not another man in the village who could have done the job even as well." "What'll we do with these buildings?" Billy Painter asked, motioning at the Jail, the Post Office, the Church, and the Little Red Schoolhouse. The Mayor thought deeply for a moment. "I know," he said. "We'll build a playground for the kids. Swings and slides and sandboxes and things." " Another playground?" Tom asked. "Sure. Why not?" There was no reason, of course, why not. "I won't be needing this any more, I guess," Tom said, handing the Skulking Permit to the Mayor. "No, I guess not," said the Mayor. They watched him sorrowfully as he tore it up. "Well, we did our best. It just wasn't good enough." "I had the chance," Tom muttered, "and then I let you all down." Billy Painter put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It's not your fault, Tom. It's not the fault of any of us. It's just what comes of not being civilized for two hundred years. Look how long it took Earth to get civilized. Thousands of years. And we were trying to do it in two weeks." "Well, we'll just have to go back to being uncivilized," the Mayor said with a hollow attempt at cheerfulness. Tom yawned, waved, went home to catch up on lost sleep. Before entering, he glanced at the sky. Thick, swollen clouds had gathered overhead and every one of them had a black lining. The fall rains were almost here. Soon he could start fishing again. Now why couldn't he have thought of the Inspector as a fish? He was too tired to examine that as a Motive. In any case, it was too late. Earth was gone from them and civilization had fled for no one knew how many centuries more. He slept very badly. monthly at New York, N. Y. for Oct. #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Robert Guinn, # Knollwood Rd., Eastchester, N. Y. ; Editor, H. L. Gold. # E. #th St... N. Y... N. Y. : Managing editor. Evelyn Paige. # E. #th St., N. Y... N. Y. ; Business Manager, none. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and -Iresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St... N. Y. #, N. Y. ; Robert M. Guinn (All), # Knollwood Rd., Eastchester. N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. 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Notary Public, State of New York No. #-# Qualified in Kings County Term Expires March #, # Play Back By j. t. McIntosh There was never tomorrow, only yesterday -- and to Bert Siddon, it was the ideal arrangement! Bert Siddon was leaning on his arms on one side of the bar while the most regular of his regular customers kept the other side from falling down. The orders were given to Bert, but executed by Bill, his less-thanmonosyllabic assistant. It was Monday night, and Monday in the Golden Swan generally turned out to be discussion night. Someone unidentified had poked his head in, said disgustedly, "For Pete's sake, the Brains," and disappeared again. It was usual on Monday nights for the paradoxes, stupidities and injustices of the world to be discovered between seven and eightthirty p.m. and set right before nine-thirty to the satisfaction of everybody except Harry Smith, who was never satisfied, and the Professor, to whom nothing was as simple as that and very little was simple at all. "The wife would never believe we was talking about science and things," said Jim Moir, marveling at it himself. "She thinks that whenever men get together and talk, it's always sex or sports." "Don't mention women," said Harry Smith gloomily. "They're enough to drive you to drink." He raised his glass. "I've iven up women," Alec Harper announced. "I'm getting old. No more whisky and women for me. I'm going to spend my money on chocolate from now on and enjoy myself." Bert continued to lean on his arms and beam happily at the company. Bill continued to do all the work behind the bar, silently for the most part, but with an occasional caustic grunt to show he didn't believe a word of any of it. "We know what you think about women, Bert," said Moir enviously. "If my wife looked like Marilyn Monroe, maybe  would -- " "It's not just looks," said Bert contentedly. "My wife's an angel." "You're lucky," Smith grunted. "Mine's still living." rattled the bottles behind Bert. "You won't believe what I'm going to tell you," Bert remarked. "Don't suppose we will," said Harper agreeably, "but let's hear you just the same." "If I could have my pick of all the women in the world," said Bert, "I'd still choose Martha." Considering the emphasis he put on it, his pronouncement fell rather flat. But then, they didn't realize that he could have his pick of all the women in the world, in a way. That he could have anything he wanted. That what he had was all he did want. This time, anyway. Maybe the next time he would -- "My round," said Smith. "No whisky for you, Alec?" "Well..." said Harper, and everybody laughed. It was established by argument and experiment that a pint glass full of beer could hold twentydrop. This advanced exercise in science and mathematics naturally led to bigger things. It was quite independent of Bert that the subject of time travel was reached. Bert didn't mind. He couldn't tell his friends about his gift (he had done that once, with very nearly disastrous results), but he didn't mind hearing what they had to say about time travel. "Blooming nonsense," said Smith. "It just ain't possible and that's all there is to it. Stands to reason." "Nothing's impossible," argued Moir -- firmly, for him. "Nothing's ever impossible." "Time travel is," said Smith flatly. "Just as well," Harper said, "or the government would take it over and lose money on it." He bellowed with laughter again. Harper was a man who appreciated his own jokes. "Where's the Professor?" he went on cheerfully. "Oh, there he is. He's such a little fellow that when he takes his glasses off, you can scarcely see him at all. Professor, does it stand to reason that time travel's impossible? Or is nothing ever impossible?" They looked at the Professor, who was not, of course, a professor except when he was in the Golden Swan. "The possibility or impossibility of very few things actually stands to reason," he said diffidently. "There are very few things of which one can confidently and conscientiously say, 'It's impossible and will always be impossible.' " But on the whole he thought time travel was more or less, to a great extent, and by and large, one of these things. Though he might be wrong, of course. Bert Siddon continued leaning on his arms and listening. of Beethoven writing the Moonlight Sonata and someone else taking it back a few weeks in time and playing it to him before he had written it. Who composed it? In Time Two, certainly not Beethoven, for he had heard it played to him as a new piece of music, something he had never heard before. Having heard it, he might write it down, but he could no longer compose it. They discussed the question of a man going back in time and seeking himself out. Could there be two of him at the same time, or only one? Would he be able to meet and talk to himself, or would one of him automatically cease to exist when the other came into existence in the same time? Bill grunted disgustedly. "Look at this," said Smith derisively. "Just look at it and tell me if it doesn't prove the whole idea of time travel is plain damned nonsense. If time travel was possible, wouldn't someone in the future have found out how to do it? And wouldn't he have gone back to test it? Well, have you ever seen a time traveler?" "Hold on," Harper objected. "How do you know I'm not from the twenty-third century? I'm not going to tell you I'm a time traveler, am I? I'd be thrown in an asylum or something. Well, the hell with it, I'll take the risk. I'm from the twenty-third century, Harry." Smith sniffed. "You don't believe me? Maybe you wouldn't believe the real time traveler, either. And if you didn't believe him when he told you, how the devil could you believe him when he didn't?" Bert smiled, because he was the only man who knew anything about it. The only man in the world. He often leaned on his arms and smiled, whatever the conversation was about. If it was about football, he might happen to remember who was going to beat whom #-I on Saturday, and he'd certainly remember the winners for the season. If it was about baseball, he'd know the pennant and series results. And though he never set himself up as a prophet, it was fair enough to say casually, "Well, I'm not a betting man, but you watch Marbulla in the Derby," or, "No, the Administration looks pretty safe to go back, but I think..." He didn't like to go further than that, knowing Marbulla was going to win the Derby and the opposition the next national election... having seen them do it, in fact. It was in much the same way that, in this discussion, he said at last judicially, "You all seem to be taking it for granted that if time travel could be done, you'd need a machine to do it. In all the stories, it's always a time machine of some kind -- " "Naturally it's a machine," said Smith. "What else could it be?" "A human being is a time machine," the Professor pointed out mildly. "He travels forward regularly through time. So is a building, a book, a photograph record. Anything. Everything." "Talk sense. If you're going to do any funny work with time -- not that I'm saying you can -- if you're going to do any moving around in time, except just move forward at the usual speed, how are you going to do it except with a machine?" "You can move about the floor without a machine, can't you?" asked Bert. "You don't need a helicopter to get across to the dart board, do you?" "You think people can walk through time?" Smith sarcastically wanted to know. "Why not? You can't do it with a machine, can you? Well, why say that if it can ever be done, it must be lone with a machine?" "That's a good argument," agreed the Professor. "A very good argument. But how would you -- how could it be done, if it could be done, Mr. Siddon? Have you any ideas on that?" "If I knew that," said Bert, enjoying this, "I'd be doing it, I suppose. But how's this for an idea? Think about ten minutes ago. If you can go back ten minutes, you can travel in time, can't you? Well, concentrate on ten minutes ago. Jim Moir was talking, Harry was just finishing a pint, a car turned outside and its lights flashed in those mirrors there. Some of us can remember better than others. Some of us can only remember roughly what happened. Some of us can almost hear Jim talking and see the lights flashing." Everybody tried to hear Jim talking and see the lights flashing. "Well, granted that some of us do it better than others," Bert went on, "what if somebody could do it perfectly? Maybe he'd find Jim really was talking, the lights really were flashing -- and it was actually ten minutes ago." "Say that again," said Jim Moir. Bert obliged. Of course, it would be more than just remembering. It would be -- it was -- something only one man could do. Otherwise, every time the clock was set back, everybody would know it had been set back. As it was, only one man knew. Only one man benefited. Only one knew what had happened. Only one man walked through time... But Bert didn't tell them that, naturally. "If you can remember what happened well enough," he suggested, "maybe you can make it happen again. And if it works for ten minutes, why shouldn't it work for twenty years?" Bert wasn't annoyed when a chorus of ridicule broke out, for Bert knew. It was like going back a few years, telling people about the atom bomb and jet planes and listening to them "proving" they were impossible. He'd done that, too. Brains became interested in the thing, possible or not, and discussed what it would be like, independent of its improbability. The idea appealed particularly to Harper and the Professor. "You'd only be able to go back over your own life," Smith remarked. "Yes, you'd only be able to go back to the first thing you remembered, and to times you remembered well," said Bert. "But after all, you could only do this if you had a better memory than anybody has, so that wouldn't worry you." " You've got a pretty good memory, Bert," Moir observed. "Better than anyone else I know. You can always -- " "You'd put everything else back each time," the Professor mused. "Think of having a second chance at everything!" The others also saw the possibilities. "You could make a lot of money." "Money? A fortune!" "Money's only the start. You could do anything, if you knew what everybody else was going to do." "You could rule the Earth!" "No, you couldn't, because you'd still be ordinary." "Ordinary? With all the moneyyou'd have from the horses, the pools, the stock exchange? You'd be the richest man in the world -- and how could the richest man in the world be ordinary?" It was Bert who brought the discussion down to the level of sense and sobriety. "If it were me," he said contentedly, "I don't think I'd want anything more than I've got." "Maybe not," said Moir, jealous again. "It's all right for you to say that." Bert knew what he meant. "I'd have to live quite a few extra lives before I found a girl like Martha." "But you found her the first time." "Yes," Bert agreed blandly. "You'd always be able to do things better than anybody else," said Harper. "Like darts." He took the three darts and demonstrated humorously. He wasn't the best darts player present, by any means. Nevertheless, with the first dart he scored a perfect treble twenty. "We'll count that," he declared, laughed and tried again. Treble one. He took back the dart, poised once more and said -- "Time switch!" Single twenty. He tried again -- "Time switch !" -- and eventually, in eleven tries, scored three treble twenties. "There you are," he said triumphantly. "Three darts -- three treble twenties." "That's the only way you could ever win," Smith grunted. "That's how it would work," Bert nodded. "It would be the same with most games. Suppose I was playing Bobby Locke..." sive laughter. They all knew Bert's golf. "Still, I must admit he's improving," said Harper, like a man determined to be fair. "Last time I was out with him, he started with #, #, #I at the first three holes -- but then he tightened up after that." "Suppose I was playing Bobby Locke," persisted Bert with unimpaired good humor. "It might take three tries before I got a decent drive -- " "It might?" Harper asked, with a shout of laughter. "And I'd know I'd needed three tries, but Bobby Locke wouldn't. Then, for the second, I wouldn't try anything spectacular -- just onto the green." There was another howl of laughter, in which Bert joined. "That might take about half a dozen shots," he admitted, "but it would still only count two. And I'd hole out the next time for a three. Even Bobby Locke couldn't stand up to that sort of competition for long." "Of course," said the Professor thoughtfully, "people might be a bit surprised at the end that you were so tired." "Tired?" "Yes. You'd have played two or three hundred shots, though only fifty or sixty would count." "No, I'd only have played fifty or sixty," Bert declared. "See what would happen. I'd make a bad shot, then go back and do it again. I wouldn't have to go for the ball. I'd be going back to before the shot was made -- so even if I needed five thousand shots, I'd only have played fifty." "But if that's so," argued the Professor, "they'd all be the same." "No more than any two shots you take one after the other are the same. I'd know what I'd done the last time and I'd make any correction that was needed." Some of them were a little lost, but most could see the idea, and they all had a great time imagining how they could do what they'd always wanted to do. Even Harry Smith, the cynic, the pessimist, the unbeliever, joined in. "You could go back and live your life from twenty again." "Why twenty?" the Professor objected. "Why not five and check on your whole education?" "Why not zero and make sure you were born right?" asked Harper. "Women, too," said Moir. "You could keep trying with a girl until you found the right technique. You'd know all about her and she wouldn't know a thing about you. You could..." This line of discussion naturally kept them all interested for a long time. "And then," Bert remarked, "if you met a girl too late -- well, you could always go back and meet her before it was too late, couldn't you?" H E straightened up, taking the weight off his arms for the first time since the discussion started. Martha had been mentioned several times -- and he could never forget that nothing he could do could prevent her dying in five years. True, when that happened, he could put everything right back to when she was eighteen... # ! But in spite of that, the thought that she would die at twentynine -- that she would always die at twenty-nine -- made him anxious to see her, to reassure himself. He hadn't seen her for two hours. "Can you manage, Bill?" he asked. No one saw anything funny in that, though Bill could probably do the entire work of the bar just as well in Bert's absence as he had been doing it in his presence. They were used to Bert. So Bert went to make sure Martha was all right, to kiss her on the back of the neck, to call her by the names that only he and she knew, to reassure her and be reassured. "Didn't think Bert had the brains to think out things like that," Smith observed. "Plain nonsense, of course. But all the same..." "Granting the possibility of walking through time like that," said the Professor, "all the rest we've been talking about follows. You could have all the money you wanted, and beat anybody at any game, and at least give yourself the opportunity to rule the world, and all the rest of it. But there's another thing nobody's mentioned." "What's that, Professor?" asked Harper. "Time would stick. If anyone had this gift -- well, he wouldn't live forever, but he wouldn't want to die, either. So he'd keep putting time back, over and overagain. Every time he was in danger of dying, he'd snap time back. Time, henceforth, would be confined to the few years of this man's life." "God, yes!" exclaimed Harper. "Never thought of that. But surely, sooner or later, he'd be in an accident and wouldn't be able to -- " "If he was careful, he could always have the fraction of a second he needed to snap time back a little. You see, he'd only have to put it far enough back for him to avoid the accident, and it might never happen that he didn't get the instant of time he needed. He could go on and on and on, and for the rest of us, it wouldn't be worthwhile planning the future -- because there wouldn't be any future." rpHE Professor and Harper were the only two in the company who really saw that point of view. At any rate, they were the only two who were really interested in it. And they took it in very different ways. Harper laughed boisterously at the idea of the closed circuit in time, a few years repeating and repeating themselves ad infinitum. It was a cosmic joke. The Professor frowned, disturbed, anxious and worried at the very idea of such a circuit, stopping all progress, all development, cutting off the future, making everything futile and insignificant merely because one man, could walk in time... a man who, like all human beings, wanted to live forever. They looked at each other, Harper laughing at the gargantuan joke of a universe stuck in a temporal closed circuit because of one man with a mighty gift, and the Professor stunned at the vast futility of it. However, it was only an idea. When Bert came back contentedly, having seen Martha and satisfied himself that she was all right and that she still loved him, the Brains were discussing Flying Saucers. -- j. t. McIntosh Forecast Next month, you're getting two high-voltage novelets... and probably a third, though it's a little hard to tell in advance; depends on how well the editorial shoehorn works. startling job of disproving the traditional test to see if you are dreaming. Pinching just doesn't work. Surgical instruments are much better... but a mechanic's kit is best of all! story can't be described except in terms of its own uncompromising realism and remarkable theme. You've never read science fiction like this before. It's a shock wave of terror -- with a jolting, blinding conclusion. It's Sturgeon! If you think you can outguess him, just try. You may, if you're really shrewd, get all the facts... but you won't have the truth until it strikes like an unexpected slap that will leave handmarks on your mind for years to come. Naturally, there will be a handsome batch of short stories, Willy Ley's third novelet, unless the lever snaps. All in all, the issue looks like a really handsome one. And have you seen page # of this issue? Your Information ,J# completely on questions from readers and I'll begin with a letter from Mr. Thomas C. Pace in Maryland. He wrote me after chancing across Prof. George Gamow's book The Birth and Death of the Sun in which its author reproduced a sketch very m  I Photograph of the artifacts found at Khujut Rabu'a. Left to right, clay vase, iron core between fragments of asphaltum and copper cylinder. The indistinct scale is # centimeters long. similar to Fig. # of a device from the time of Christ. This device is taken to be a primitive "galvanic" battery, surprising as that may seem. As a matter of fact, it couldn't be anything else known to Man! My correspondent stated that he knew, of course, that the ancient Greeks were acquainted with some of the phenomena of static electricity, but that he had never heard anything about ancient batteries. He added that he thinks he should have heard about it, since he earned for himself a degree in Electrical Engineering. And he closed his letter with the question of how it was possible that such knowledge could become a "lost art." That my correspondent had never heard about this is not at all surprising to me. This historical item is not yet recorded in the introductory sections of textbooks on electrical engineering. The reason is that the small amount of existing literature is rather scattered and the basic reports are of foreign origin. Consequently, it might be useful to write a reasonably comprehensive report on the Mesopotamian batteries of twenty centuries ago. T HE first publication I know of was written by a Mr. Wil# Photograph of the reconstructed element. Photograph by Berkshire Museum helm Konig and appeared in the weekly magazine section of the daily newspaper of the German heavy industries, the Deutsche Bergwerks-Zeitung, under the date of January #, #. Konig was attached to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, although he is not, by training, a scientist. Soon after the date just mentioned, the climate of Iraq in general and of Baghdad in particular got too much for Mr. Konig and he went home to Germany, where he used his spare time to write a book under the title Im verlorenen Paradies -- Neun Jahre Irak, or, in translation: In the ( area of) the Lost Paradise -- Nine Years in Iraq. It was published in Berlin in # and copies of it can be found in American libraries. In this book, he told the story of the discovery of the ancient battery which in itself sounds a little like fiction. Baghdad is at the Tigris river and, in #, the Tigris produced a major flood. The low-lying portions of Baghdad were covered by a few inches of water for a long time and these large and shallow puddles were extremely welcome to female mosquitoes as a place for depositing their eggs. Draining the puddles was apparently impossible and it was decided to fill them in. However, there are no hills in the immediate vicinity of Baghdad and the material needed had to be taken from a small hill a few miles to the southeast of the city. That hill bore the local name of Khujut Rabu'a and happened to be conveniently located at the railroad track which leads from Baghdad to Khanaqin. As the workmen started loading their carts with sand and dirt from the hill, they came across ruins. Both the Iraq Museum and the government stepped in and their experts were unanimous in declaring that these were the remnants of a settlement from the time of the Parthian kingdom, which existed from # B.c. to # A.D. I don't know what happened to the mosquito-breeding puddles in the poorer sections of Baghdad. They were probably left to evaporate. The digging at Khujut Rabu'a, however, turned into scientific excavations. Among the artifacts found was a vase or urn of whitishyellow burned clay of a well-known type, differing from the standard museum piece in that its neck had been knocked off a long time ago. In view of this handicap, the vase was shorter than usual, measuring # centimeters or # inches in height. Its largest diameter was # centimeters or about # Vs inch. The hole at the top measured # centimeters or slightly over I l A inch in diameter. There were traces of asphaltum all around the hole.  tors found a Cylinder of sheet precisely one inch) in diameter and # centimeters (# inch) tall. The cylinder had been formed by bending a piece of flat sheet copper around a dowel of some kind and soldering the ends together. The bottom of the cylinder was closed by a disc of sheet copper without soldering, the metal having been crimped to prevent the disc from falling through. At the upper end, the copper cylinder was closed by a thick plug of asphaltum which, in its center, held a rod of iron, about three inches in overall length and sticking out on top about yth of The iron rod was strongly oxi# Konig's sketch of the ancient gold-plating equipment still in use in Baghdad a few centuries ago. dized and tapered to a point at the time it was found. Quite possibly it was longer originally and it might have rested on the bottom of the copper cylinder, but without touching the metal, bemeter) layer of asphaltum on top of the copper disc. It was perhaps well that Wilhelm Konig was not a professional archeologist, for he looked at the find with open eyes and decided that this, records or not, could have been an electric element and nothing else.  He had the various components analyzed. The copper turned out to be rather pure with only traces of zinc, lead and iron. (The report on the analysis was published in Forschungen und Fortschritte, #, No. #.) He then inquired of archeologists whether anything like this had been mentioned in records; the answer was negative. The next inquiry was whether anything like it had been found earlier. Yes, at a somewhat earlier date, four similar vases had been found near Tel' Omar, the ancient Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, some # miles downriver from Baghdad, lying opposite Ctesiphon on the other bank. The Tel' Omar specimens lacked the iron cores and the copper cylinders were closed at both ends and were found, on opening, to be full of plant fibers. Their discoverer, at a loss what to think about it, had tentatively concluded that the plant fibers had originally been writing material which had fallen apart after twenty centuries of drying. Next to the urns, one thin, almost wirelike bronze rod and three wirelike iron rods were found. What gave the whole a special flavor was that these urns were not found in a grave, as the excavating archeologists more or less expected, but were lying among the ruins of a house that was well away from the other settlements. Moreover, they were associated with bowls that the experts proclaimed to have been magic paraphernalia. Obviously the separate building had been the warlock's house, where strange things went on. Y the end of #, nothing of all this had been published in any language other than German and, since nobody had written up even the bare facts in English, I did so in the form of two short reports. One was published in this country in Astounding, the other in England in Discovery, both, by coincidence, in the March issues of #. Prof. Gamow's remarks in his own book must be based on one of these two pieces, which were both written and published before Konig's own book appeared in #, and which lack much detail I did not know until I read the book. Wilhelm Konig, as has been mentioned, queried archeologists about similar finds. When he went home to Germany, he was shown an unexhibited find in a museum in Berlin. It had been made in the ruins of Ctesiphon and dated from a somewhat more recent period, the Sassanian kingdom which lasted from #-#I a.d. The find consisted of three fairly large clay vessels. One of them contained ten copper cylinders, the second had ten iron rods and the third held ten asphaltum plugs with holes in the centers. Ten elements ready for assembly, lacking only the clay urns which evidently could be bought from any potter in town. One thing Konig apparently did not do was to find out how well a reconstruction of such a battery would work. This was done in this country as a direct result 'of my first article. Mr. Willard F. M. Gray, an electrical engineer at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, wrote to me to obtain all the information available for the purpose of building a replica of the ancient battery. The dimensions had been given by Konig and the composition of the metals, established analytically, was reasonably close to that of commercial sheet copper and iron rods of today, so there were no special difficulties as far as materials were concerned. The only unknown factor was the nature of the liquid electrolyte used by the "magicians" of the Parthian and Sassanian kingdoms. This simply was not known, but the choice was somewhat narrowed down to substances that could have been in use then. Mr. Gray decided on a solution of copper sulphate as a likely electrolyte. He reported that this "worked quite well for a short time." The reconstructed battery is now on exhibit at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass. Nobody who knows all the facts doubts that they did have "galvanic" batteries in Baghdad at about the time of Christ and for a few centuries thereafter. But when it comes to the question of what was done with them, we still have to resort to conjecture. Such a battery is rather weak and even if the "magicians" learned the trick of using several of them in conjunction, the output of current is small. Of course you can "taste" it and this might have played a role in what might be called magical experiments. Maybe it was even used for an assumed curative value, since somebody might have had the idea that the "taste" was similar to medicinal herbs. A S for actual work, about the only thing you can do with such a weak current is the electroplating of small objects. Wilhelm Konig pointed out that some of the metal bowls from that time show what look like traces of plating. Moreover, he discovered that the silversmiths of Baghdad still used a primitive method of gold-plating (Fig. #) earlier in this century. They did not know when this method had been introduced. They merely knew that it was "old" which, unfortunately, can mean anything that goes back prior to the birth of the speaker. That these silversmiths used a primitive gold-plating method very much their own had probably been noticed by earlier travelers, but the obvious conclusion had been that they had imitated an early type of western device, lending it a local flavor by using home-made materials. Konig rather suspects that their device goes back in an uninterrupted though devious line to the batteries of old Baghdad. This suspicion also answers Mr. Pace's question of how such knowledge could ever become a "lost art." It didn't. It merely failed to do the one thing we expect any useful device and invention to do -- it did not spread. That trade secrets stay confined to places or, sometimes, families and groups of families is not novel. The batteries of Baghdad merely represent an extreme case. But there are two things we still would like to have to consider the case definitely proved. One would be a two-thousandyear-old artifact which has been both electro-plated and wellpreserved. The other would be a remark in some manuscript that the artisans or magicians of Baghdad could change bronze to silver and silver to gold. Looking back through the # calendar, I noticed something that bothers me. On the # rd of December (as a " for instance ' it seems to go this way all through the year), the Sun rose at #:# and set at #. The next day, it rose at the same time, but set at #:# p.m. Can you explain why one time stays the same while the other jumps? Thom Perry # Calvert St. Lincoln #, Nebraska This is something that has once been called by an astronomer "The increase of the day during the afternoon only" and which has puzzled many people. The real reason is that the orbit of the Earth around the Sun is not a circle but an ellipse. If it were a circle, this apparent discrepancy would not take place. Since it is an ellipse, the Earth moves somewhat fastN er along its orbital path when the northern hemisphere has winter because, at that season, the Earth is closest to the Sun. (The seasons are due not to the distance from the Sun but to the tilt of the Earth's axis and, of course, its equator.) The time needed for the daily rotation of the Earth stays the same, but because the Earth moves a longer distance during this time interval, the movement of the Sun across the sky seems to be different. If we adhered to the definition of "noon" as the instant the Sun is highest in the sky, we would be forced to have days of somewhat different length for the different seasons. A sun dial will indicate such "proper noons," but you cannot run industry on sun dials. Hence, if you compare the sun dial to "standard time," which makes the interval from midnight to midnight the same all year round, your sun dial will be "fast" some of the time and "slow" some of the time. To be specific, the sun dial will be "fast" from April # to June # (as much as four minutes in the middle of May) and "slow" from June # to September #nd with a maximum of a little more than six minutes on July #). From September #nd until December #, the sun dial will be "fast" (over # minutes on November #) and "slow" from then on until April #, the slowest day being February #th, with some # minutes. All of this simply means that the "noon" of standard time coincides with the noon of the sun dial only four times per year -- on April #, June #, September #nd and December #. At all other times, the sun dial noon differs from standard noon and, during the first months of a year, the increase of daylight time is all added after the artificial standard noon. On a sun dial, equal time would be added before and after "noon," but, as has been said, you cannot run industry by sun dials. In an old travel book, I found a statement about penguins living somewhere near Newfoundland. It cannot be a simple mistake, such as observation from a distance, because it is mentioned that the sailors collected the penguin eggs tor food. I thought penguins lived only in the antarctic regions. Were there some in Newfoundland a few hundred years ago? Karl F. Seifert Emerson, Wise. Both you and the author of the old book you read are correct; it is a case of transfer of names. The bird now called "penguin" is restricted to the area of Antarctica with one species which, having once been subject to extreme wanderlust, settled on the Galapagos Islands directly under the equator. The "penguins" of the Newfoundland area were not penguins in our sense. They were auks -- specifically, the Great Auk (scientific name: Alca im pennis), which attained the size of penguins, had wings too small to be useful for flight and bore a general resemblance to penguins in coloration. The Great Auk originally inhabited the North European shores along the North Sea, Iceland, the southern tip of Greenland and the eastern shore of the North American continent from Labrador to about the coast of Virginia, with single specimens and small .groups occurring as far south as northern Florida. It is now completely extinct, having lasted longest on a few small rocky islands off Cape Reykjanes, south of Iceland. It was this Great Auk that was the original hearer of the name of "penguin," derived from "pen-gwyn", meaning "white head". The name referred to two blinding white spots on an otherwise nearly black head. At the time this name was in use, the southern hemisphere penguins were still unknown. Sailors who were acquainted with the northern "pen-gwyn" simply transferred the name, much in the manner in which English settlers in North America began to call a North American thrush a "robin" because of the similar coloration of the feathers on its chest, even though the two birds are neither related nor even of the same size. The great French naturalist, Count Buffon, was very much disturbed by such careless nomenclature and suggested that the southern penguins he called "manchots". But only a fewlearned men followed this suggestion and not for long. However, the confusion is minor, not only because the Great Auk is now extinct, hut because the two birds lived in different hemispheres. The Great Auk never got close to the Tropic of Cancer and the penguin -- excepting the Galapagos variety -- never reached the Tropic of Capricorn. Could an explosion ( like we've already had ) cause the Earth to deviate from its course? If so, will the deviation be toward or away from the Sun and how soon could it be detected? Would it need months or years? James A. Velazquez Far Rockaway, N. Y. Theoretically, any explosion will influence the course of the Earth to a small extent. The direction in which this influence is exerted would depend on the time of the day. In the movement of the Earth around the Sun, the front side is the "dawn side". Hence an explosion at dawn would retard the Earth slightly, while an explosion at dusk would accelerate it. If the Earth were accelerated by an explosion at dusk, it would drift "outward" in the Solar System and take up a new orbit slightly farther away from the Sun. If decelerated by an explosion at dawn, the Earth would drift "inward" and take up a new orbit somewhat closer to the Sun. But because of the enormous mass of the Earth, all this is just theoretical. Even if all the explosion of two World Wars and all atomic tests took place simultaneously, the result might very well be too small to be detected. Most likely it would amount to far less than the "perturbations" suffered by the Earth as a result of the gravitational pull of its two neighbors in the Solar System, Mars and Venus. We are told that all motion will cease at absolute zero. Would the electrons around an atomic nucleus continue to revolve around it? John F. Schenck Rt. I Mexico, N. Y. The statement that all motion will cease at absolute zero is meant to apply to molecular motion only. Nothing is said about the motion of sub-atomic particles. I can understand to a certain extent how energy can be released in a fission bomb such as the A-Bomb, but how is it released in a fusion bomb? Please explain. Box # Madison, So. Dakota In one respect, the two types of bombs may be said to be alike -- in both cases, some matter is destroyed to appear as energy. In the fission bomb, the heavy atoms of either uranium# or of plutonium are made to fall apart. They break up into two heavy atoms of roughly equal mass plus a number of smaller "splinters". The important point is that the total mass of the "splinters" of all sizes does not quite add up to the mass of the original atoms. The "missing mass" has been turned into energy. In the fusion bomb, light atoms of individual masses smaller than "#" are made to reassemble into helium atoms. Again the resulting helium atoms do not quite have the mass of the atoms from which they were formed, the "surplus" being released as energy. This question may not really belong in Galaxy, but I wonder whether there is any truth in the legend of the vampires of Romania. If so, is there any connection between that legend and the vampire bats? Estelle Taylor P.O. Box Graymoor Village, N. Y. The answer, offhand, would be "no," but there is a minor mystery, or perhaps just an interesting coincidence, connected with the vampire legend. As far as one can tell, the vampire legend of various countries on the Balkan peninsula is quite old, though nobody has been able to pinpoint its age, for unfortunately the carbon-# method cannot he applied to legends. When it came to the shape of the vampire, folklore imagined something like a large hat. This folklore impression was strong enough to force its way into scientific zoology. When Central and South America became known, it was also learned that there were hlood-sucking bats in the New World. A few enormous hats which had been caught and preserved were at once suspected to be the culprits (simply because of their size) and were catalogued as Vampyrus Spectrum. Later, it turned out that this hat was a completely harmless fruit-eater and that the actual hlood-sucking vampire was a small and insignificant bat which received the scientific name of Desmodus rujus. This was in about #. When it became known among European zoologists that a blood-sucking hat was a reality, they naturally jumped to the conclusion that the legendary bat-sliaped vampire of the Balkans was based on such a fact. But to this day, nobody has turned up a southeast European bat with blood-sucking habits. No known species is even under suspicion. The present version of the vampire legend, much used in fantasy, where the vampire has human shape and is "undead," seems to be fairly recent. As you know, the vampire is supposed to be immortal and only subject to the compound accident of suspicious peasants, zealous country priests and sharpened stakes. On the other hand, everybody who dies because of a vampire is supposed to turn into one himself. Now if you start the chain with just one vampire, you may assume that, during the first year of its activity, one victim dies. By the end of the year, you have two vampires. If they each make one haul per year, the vampire population doubles every year. At the end of the tenth year, you'll have # full-fledged vampires -- under the assumption that two dozen of them succumbed to attrition by stakes. After # years, you'll have #; after # years, After half a century, everybody would be a vampire! Having thus pulled a prop out from under a whole category of stories, I close this last column of the year with sinister glee. Unde Tom's Planet All up and down the whole galactic plantation, there were no old folks at home -- until the Aingoes came along! O NE must remember that, in its sixty years of political existence, the Galactic Council has succeeded almost completely in destroying the institution of slavery. This accomplishment becomes even more remarkable when one considers that the anti-slavery laws had to be made acceptable to the differing mores of eight hundred and two independent governments of the Confederation. Because of this practical necessity, the Slavery Act was based not on birth equality, but on the more expedient doctrine of relative inferiority. Thus, the inferiority of an enslaved race, relative to its enslaver, must be proven. The Council has always found grounds, even in the most backward of races, tor a grant of independence. Indeed, there is only a single instance where all the Council's work has been in vain. This case, naturally, is an exceptional one. The Council unofficially approves of this particular enslavement! Morally, this would seem indefensible; but a Galactic Council must take the long view. And when one considers the unusual benefits accruing from this particular enslavement... Aspects of Confederation, de M ant set T HE men aboard Council Cutter # thought their radar was having hallucinations. Fortytwo pips! It was impossible. Even Bill Sims, the Council agent, didn't believe it when he ordered the pips intercepted. But there was no doubt, once the speedy little cutter came into range. There were forty-two Delgen ships, spaced in regular order, running at close to top speed. Sims stared at them thoughtfully. He was young and tall and his coloring marked him unmistakably as a native Earthman. This patrolling assignment was his first. He didn't want to make any mistakes. Especially, he didn't want to make any mistakes with Delgens. He told the radioman to relay full information to Council Headquarters, just in case. A fleet in space could be up to no good. Then he contacted the flagship of the fleet. "This is Council Cutter #," he said. "I request permission to board you for a routine inspection." "Certainly you can board us," the answer came promptly. "Inspect as much as you like, as long as we can maintain course." That seemed reasonable -- at the time -- for a fleet burned a lot of fuel. "Request granted," Sims said. "Please show a light at your tntry port." He hesitated, then added, "The Galactic Council has been informed of this fleet movement." "We were about to notify them ourselves. And this isn't a fleet. It's a rescue mission." Sims exchanged a look with his radioman. Delgens weren't known as rescuers. Just the opposite, in fact. During the first great expansion wave from Earth, a small, tough core of colonists had pushed forward until they found an ideal planet. The planet was Delge, in the extreme northeast quadrant of the Galaxy. And Delge was worth waiting for. The Earthmen -- now Delgens -- thrived on the planet's perfect climate, its disease-free atmosphere, and grew .rich on its fruitful soil. Adaptation and change came with startling speed, once Earth was left behind. But Delge was far off the mainstream and isolation can breed bad habits. Although the Delgens were physically splendid, they left something to be desired in the matter of ethics. Delge, in common with a number of other places, found that machinery was singularly unyielding in its demands. Curse a machine and it ignores you. Refuse it shelter and it rusts. Feed it too little lubrication and it burns out. Run it too fast and it founders. Starve it for fuel and it quits. But slaves! Slaves can be worked under conditions that no machine would tolerate. Slaves eat what there is, sleep where they can. When one dies, the taskmaster doesn't suffer the deep monetary sadness he feels upon the demise of an expensive machine -- for slaves beget more slaves, which is more than can be said of machinery. Twice in ten years, Delge had violated the Slavery Act. Sims was thinking of this as he entered the Delgen flagship. to the Captain's quarters. The ship, with its massive construction and oversize appointments, made him feel puny and out of place. Captain Olche intensified this feeling. Olche was a normal enough Delgen, but his ruddy seven-foot bulk and his air of genial superiority made Sims feel insignificant and, accordingly, resentful. The Captain didn't appear to notice. "I suppose you're interested in the cargo holds?" he asked. "If you please." "Of course." The Captain escorted Sims down a long corridor and opened a door. Sims stepped in -- and caught his breath. The hold was packed with small and despondent-looking grayish-green creatures. "Did you ever see a sorrier bunch?" the Captain asked, as though discussing an inferior herd of cattle. "They call themselves Aingoes." At first, Sims thought they were stunted descendants of Earth. He quickly saw that he was mistaken. The Aingoes were non-humans, about four feet tall, skinny, with round alien heads and tiny, narrow bodies. They sat on the floor of the hold in complete and abnormal silence, as though all spirit had been drained out of them. "Every ship is filled with the things," Captain Olche said. "I think we managed to remove every one of them from their scrubby little planet." "For what purpose?" Sims asked. The Captain raised both eyebrows. "Why, slavery, of course," he stated, as though it were the most natural thing in the Universe. Sims looked at the Captain with amazement. Sims was new in the Council service. Like most agents, he had had personal experience with slavers. As a boy, he had seen Anderson's Apes working on Earth farms. The polite fiction was maintained that these mute, soft-eyed inhabitants of Anderson's Planet were merely clever beasts. But the Council scientists proved their rationality and eventually they were emancipated. Sims had known it all along, had played with the young ones -- until they were punished for playing with him -- and the ruling came too late to mitigate his hatred of their owners. Sims had always thought that slavers were debased and furtive people, well aware of the wrong they were doing, but too greedy to stop. This Delgen, though, had a perfectly genuine conviction that slavery was the natural, inevitable condition for a whole species! concerting. He took a form out of his pocket and began to fill in the pertinent data. The Captain watched for a while, then said, "We aren't breaking any law, so what's the point of acting as if we are?" "You're violating the Slavery Act," Sims said with flat-voiced violence, forcing his hand, which wanted to make a fist, to write steadily and clearly. The Captain shook his head. "Slavery is regulated by the relative-inferiority ruling. Examine these creatures more closely. You'll see right off that they're about as inferior as anything can get and stay alive. Sure, we know we'll have to get a court decision, but it's only a formality in this case." Sims wanted to retort, but he made himself continue writing his report. Legally, slavery was possible; actually, nobody had ever been able to make inferiority stick. Tough, dedicated men, the Council agents stopped most attempts before they got started. Those that came to court were up against the equally dedicated thoroughness of Council scientists and the shrewd resourcefulness of Council lawyers. Between them, the scientists and lawyers always won in court. They could prove every time that a tentacle was equal to a hand, disorganized functionality was every bit as good as a centralized nervous system, ten legs were more stable than two on rocky planets, rudimentary wings helped balance desert-runners, and a nose didn't have to be used for smelling -- or even exist in the case of anerobic life-forms. They could prove anything they had to prove. Not by trickery, but by proving that races intended for slavery were as well adapted to their environment as the would-be slavers were to theirs. If the life-forms were repulsive in human terms, as they sometimes were, the lawyers could be counted on to build up sympathy for them. Knowing that no case had ever been lost, Sims relaxed and even let himself smile a little as he finished his report. The Delgens weremaking a bold move, but it didn't stand a chance. All precedent was against it, for there was no slavery in the entire Confederacy. And meanwhile, the Delgen fleet was moving at close to top speed toward the planet Moira II. Y OU imbecile!" Sims' Chief roared, three days later, when Sims reported in. "You moron! You complete and abysmal idiot! Didn't you learn anything in training school?" Sims stood stiffly at attention. "I don't understand, sir. What have I done wrong?" The Chief was an Earthman, like Sims, although from a different political subdivision of that venerable planet. Large, pale, fleshy, the Chief was famous for his relentless hatred of slavers. "I'll tell you what you did wrong," the Chief said. "You didn't think. That can be fatal in the Service. You knew the Delgens were going to make a court fight out of this?" "Yes, sir, and I reported -- " "You also knew, or should have known, how important it is for us to try our cases in friendly courts." The Chief opened a chart of the Northeast sector. "You intersected them here. You should have ordered them to Danton IV, which was not only the nearest Confederacy planet, but it's also strongly anti-slavery. Instead, you let them go into custody at Moira II." "What's wrong with that?" Sims asked. "Two years ago, we forcibly separated Moira II from their own little chattels, that's what's wrong." "Oh," Sims said. "Oh, Lord!" The Chief began to pace up and down the length of his small, cluttered office. "Not your fault. Someone at Headquarters should have told you. Well, it's not irreparable. All we need is an airtight case." "That shouldn't be difficult. There is no such thing as an inferior race.' "They taught you that in school. Proving it is something else. All right, we might as well prepare a philosophical brief, to begin with." He pressed two buttons on his desk. A stenographer hurried in, pad and pencil ready. She was followed by the interpreter, leading an Aingo. The Chief walked three complete circles around the sorrylooking little creature, frowning deeply. "Take it away," he said to the interpreter. "What am I supposed to do with this? Take it away and bring me the biggest, fattest, happiest one you can find." "This is the best of the bunch," the interpreter said apologetically. "That hangdog look is muscular configuration, not emotional. And they all stoop like that. The snuffling seems to be a hereditary rather than -- " "All right," the Chief cut in impatiently. "Let's get on with it. Ask him how he feels about being snatched off his planet." rpHE interpreter questioned, they listened carefully to the Aingo's answering squeal. "He says he feels very grateful, sir." The Chief looked surprised. "No indignation, eh?" He turned to the stenographer. "Put down, 'Peaceful, cooperative attitude. A genuine sign of moral sufficiency.' Now ask him why he's grateful." "He says he's grateful because the Delgens made them stop fighting each other." The Chief rubbed his bald head worriedly. "Do they fight often?" "All the time," the interpreter replied sadly. The Chief said to the stenographer, "Scratch that first out. Now write, 'Bold, combative attitude, well suited to face independently the problems of everyday existence." Sims cleared his throat. "Ask him if many are killed when they fight." "No one is ever killed," was the translation. "We don't fight very well." The Chief gave Sims a look of sheer bafflement. "Scratch it out," he told the stenographer. "Ask the Aingo what it wants." "Nothing," was the answer. "Aha! Write, 'Desire to be left in peace, to continue all-important spiritual growth.' " The Aingo squealed anxiously for several seconds. "But they don't want to be left alone," the interpreter said. "It seems they get very lonely and nervous." "Do they want to be slaves?" The Aingo thought carefully before answering. "They don't care," the interpreter said. The Chief said to the stenographer, "Put down, 'Passive resistance, an almost saintly spirit of gentle reproach against the overbearing Delgens, the culmination of long years of -- " The Aingo squealed again. "He says they might like being slaves," the interpreter explained. "He says the Delgens are strong and masterful, and strong and masterful people should rule weak and inferior people." "He said that, did he?" the Chief roared. "Yes, sir." "Get him out of here! Get him out before I brain him! These damned people want to be slaves. They deserve to be slaves. But they aren't going to be slaves!" The stenographer asked, "Shall I type any of this?" "Throw it all out," the Chief said. "Sims, get the specialists to work. This case comes up pretty sOon and we have to find some grounds for Aingo equality." He turned to the interpreter, who was standing near the door. "Get that damned spiritless animal out of here! I don't see what the Delgens want them for!" The Aingo smiled as it was led out. It evidently enjoyed being shouted at. ganizing the reports of the various specialists. Their findings were depressing. Physically, the Aingoes seemed to be an error of nature. They had poor eyesight and defective hearing, faulty coordination and inferior musculature. Almost any disease could floor them, and did. They matured rapidly -- if their habitual state of imbecility could be called maturity -- and died rapidly. They should have had a life span of twenty to thirty years. Instead, the average Aingo was fortunate if he lived five. Ecologically, the findings were all negative. On the one hand, the Aingoes seemed incapable of imposing even the most rudimentary civilization on even the gentlest planet. On the other hand, they were unable to exist either independently, symbiotically or parasitically, in a natural state. Mentally, no test could be devised that would rate them above ingratiating imbecile. Their perceptions were slow. They had no true emotions except for a feeble antagonism toward their own kind. They had no ambition; that drive was replaced by a vague uneasiness and an evident desire to be taken care of. They had nothing resembling morals or morality. But Sims did discover what the Delgens wanted them for. It seemed that the Aingoes could climb trees and therefore pick fruit in the great orchards of Delge. "That's everything," Sims said, handing in the last of his reports. The Chief scanned it briefly and dropped it on his desk. "Is there anything we can use?" Sims asked. "Not a thing," the Chief said. "We just don't have a case." "If I hadn't let the Delgen fleet go to the planet Moira -- " "It wouldn't have made any difference. The law is still based on the relative-inferiority rulings. Any court, no matter how favorably disposed, would have to find against us." But Sims couldn't forgive himself for the mistake he had made. Things might have been different on Danton IV. He went over the whole situation again in his mind -- the fortytwo pips on the radar, the contact with the Delgen fleet, the talk with Captain Olche... "Wait a minute!" Sims burst out. "Isn't there a law against removing an indigenous people from their planet for the purpose of exploitation?" "There is," the Chief said. "But it's easily circumvented. If the Delgens left a sizable percentage of Aingoes on the planet as I assume they did -- " "They claimed they didn't!" "Hmm. Let's see. The Delgens said that they rescued the Aingoes. Their statement implies that conditions on the Aingo planet were too dangerous to support life. If we can show otherwise, if we can prove unnatural interference -- " Sims stood up. "I'll leave right now." "The court sits tomorrow," the Chief said. "I've asked for endocrine readings. That should stall them for a few days." "I'll find something," Sims promised. "You'd better," the Chief told him. I N the Council Cutter, Sims arrived at LG #-#, the unnamed planet of the Aingoes. He took photographs and readings of the Aingo sun and atmosphere readings of the planet. He radioed this data back to Headquarters, then swung low over the planet, searching for signs of habitation. The Aingo planet was smaller than Mars; it seemed to be almost entirely ocean, bordered by jungle areas. He found no intelligent life. Sims conducted a painstaking search over the most temperate of the land masses. Still there was nothing to see except small, frightened animal and bird life. The Delgens had removed every one of the Aingoes. He landed the ship for a closer look at the planet. In the jungle, he found a profusion of animal and bird life and myriad insects. Nothing seemed particularly menacing. The vegetation was lush and varied; some of it, presumably, was edible. He radioed the Chief. "This appears to be a completely livable planet," he reported. "A little hot and damp for comfort, but certainly not dangerous." "Have you found any signs of villages?" the Chief demanded. "I'm still looking." "Good. You may come across something. We'll need it, too. The court has ruled against any more physical evidence on the Aingoes. They say they've seen enough." "Can you stall them any longer?" "I couldn't stall them at all. The case has been running for only two days, but it's drawing to a close -- against us. Still, the Council is hunting through all our data. They may pull something out of the hat." "I'll let you know when I find something," Sims said, and signed off. He slept aboard his ship, and the next morning began a search of the temperate zone at treetop level. He found nothing. The next day he was out again. At noon, he spotted a little irregularity in the jungle, a patch less thick than the rest. He landed and went to it on foot. I T was jungle, like all the rest. But the growth was sparser, the trees smaller, greener, less massive. The patch had a certain regularity which was out of place in the irregular and asymetrical jungle. Looking it over, Sims felt sure that civilization had been responsible for this growth, not nature. He walked to the center andbegan to dig. Half a foot down, he found shards of pottery and a shattered gourd. These fragments appeared of very recent origin. Two feet down, he found a bronze fork. Five feet down, he found a piece of shiny blue plastic. He stared at it for a long time. Pottery, baked from clay, is a primitive skill. The production of bronze is not so simple. Tin and copper of some purity must be alloyed in the proper quantities. Bronze marks the beginnings of the science of metallurgy. And plastics are even more complex. Before you can make a bit of shiny blue plastic, you must have a genuine technology. At some time in their history, the Aingoes had had this technology! To judge by what he had found, they had retrogressed, sinking finally below the basic village stage. They had retreated from civilization. But perhaps the retreat had not been unaided. Someone like the Delgens, plowing the Aingo villagers under, assisting the rapid jungle to hide any evidence of former glories or future promise. The standby on the radio blared, and Sims hurried to answer it. "Sims," the Chief said, "I want you off that planet at once." "I can't leave yet," Sims protested. "I've found evidence of unnatural interference. It can't be refuted. It's absolutely -- " "I'm giving you a direct order. You are to leave immediately." "But, Chief!" Sims cried. "The evidence -- " "We analyzed the data you sent on the Aingo sun. It's prenova, Sims, and radiating like a bomb! It can flash at any moment!" "Then the Delgen rescue mission -- " " Was technically a rescue mission." "And the case?" "It closed a few hours ago. The Moira courts declared the Aingoes an inferior race, suitable for enslavement." dumped all his evidence on the Chief's desk. "Look at it! We can appeal, can't we? Take the case to a higher court?" "We aren't going to appeal," the Chief said. "Rescuing a person doesn't give anyone a right to enslave him," Sims said angrily. "Now we've got something to base an appeal on." "We aren't going to appeal. That's orders." "Your orders?" "Orders from the Council. They checked all the physical data on the Aingoes and decided not to fight the case any further." Sims was so shocked, he sat down without being asked. "But why?" he demanded. "Don't ask me," the Chief said gloomily. "Do they think the Aingoes really should be enslaved, that it would be best, under the circumstances?" "The Council isn't in the habit of explaining its decisions to its clerks, janitors, secretaries, or anybody else. Kindly stop asking me questions. You did a fine job, Sims. Now forget it." "I resign," Sims said. "I don't accept your resignation." The Chief glared angrily at him. "Do you think the Aingoes are the only race in the Galaxy? It's the others we've got to worry about, because there's really going to be trouble now. Get your ship checked out." Sims saluted stiffly and hurried out to his ship. scended on Delge IV and a flood of books was written on the first authorized slavery in the Confederacy. A steady stream of beautiful garden products continued to be shipped from Delge. If there is one thing typical of would-be slavers, it is that they won't sit back and envy a successful slaver's good luck. All over the Confederacy, planets short of labor and without funds for machinery tried to turn the precedent into a rule, just as the Chief had predicted. The courts were choked with cases. Sims, along with the other Council agents, was furiously busy tracking down evidence to break them. ' "We can't let another Aingo case happen again," the Chief said. "If it does, we're sunk. I want every single one smashed... and smashed flat!" It took trickery and sometimes bloodshed to get the evidence, but the agents brought it back. The Council scientists discovered and the Council lawyers proved example after example of drugging, hypnosis and memory-erasure on a mass scale. The trick, of course, had been to make intended slave races as nearly like the Aingoes as possible. The counter-measure was to find out how it was done in each instance. Knowing what to look for, the scientists won every time, though a few cases looked hopeless right up to the last moment. Sims was called back to Headquarters. He was exhausted, but the Chief and the others looked close to collapse. They were all haggard, edgy, worried. "We can't go on like this," the Chief said. "The slavers know how busy we're kept, so they're increasing the pressure. We're bound to slip up sooner or later and then they'll have us." "We could add more agents," said Sims, "hire more scientists and lawyers." "Budget," the Chief replied wearily. "We don't have the money. You can't ask people to work for nothing." "There are some who will." The Chief looked unbelievingly at him. "Who, for instance?" "People we helped escape slavery. Pick the smartest, train them -- " "I'm ahead of you," said the Chief, jumping to his feet. "And I've got just the man to take charge of the training program." "You have? Who?" "You," the Chief said. "But I'm needed out in the field," Sims objected. "My sector is falling behind schedule." "We all are. Get busy and maybe we can beat back this damned assault." classes of agents; the races that had escaped enslavement were eager to cooperate and many of their representatives were bright as well as eager. Some were not, though, and they were added as brawn, which was needed more and more as the battle grew tougher and more audacious. The courts weren't choked any more; they were nearly drowned in the tidal wave of cases. Sims had no solution for this, nor did anyone else. "That's the loophole they'll get us by," said the Chief gloomily. "We're through, or will be in a little while. I've been going on the principle that a good general never knows when he's licked, but I'd have to be a complete idiot not to recognize an absolutely hopeless situation when I see one. I'm just praying the Dark Ages don't last too long, once they descend on us." It was then that a call came through from Delge. When the Chief took it, his face brightened and his back grew straight and proud again. "Get a ship ready, Sims," he snapped out in his old brisk style. "There's a petition for a change of status on Delge." Sims rocked back, astonished. "You mean those miserable Aingo runts are rioting?" "Worse," the Chief grinned cheerfully. Sims was baffled all the way to Delge. Upon landing, they were met by a delegation of towering seven foot Delgens. Even before they left the ship, the Delgens were shouting : " -- won't stand for it!" " -- no justice in the Galaxy!" " -- doublecrossed by the Council!" Then a solitary Aingo appeared -- simply appeared -- out of the empty air. Physically, he was the same as Sims remembered, but as tall now as the Delgens and there was something almost overwhelming about his confident bearing. "Quiet!" the Aingo ordered. The Delgens instantly became silent. "I beg forgiveness," the Aingo said diplomatically. "I should have had them penned before your arrival. They're such vociferous beasts -- " "Penned?" Sims repeated blankly. "Of course. We keep the slaves penned when they aren't working. They taught us the practice when the situation was reversed." "But I thought... What the hell has happened here?". "I think your superior should explain that." T HE Chief was grinning satisfiedly. "You don't get it?" "Am I supposed to?" Sims asked in confusion. "No. The Council didn't, either, till the Aingoes radioed us for a change of status -- " "The Aingoes did?" "Sure. Their race was going through a period of high mutational change. It began as a retrogression, a rapid sinking from civilization to savagery, as a result of the radiation from their prenova sun. The Delgens found them at the absolute null." "And then the mutation reversed itself," Sims finished dazedly, "as soon as they were out of the radiation field. Well, there's no problem. We just get the court to throw out the slavery decision." "It's not that simple," said the Chief. "The Aingoes want to enslave the Delgens now!" "What?" "All right, we made a mistake," a Delgen plucked up enough courage to protest. "But that's no reason to enslave us." "You are an inferior race," the Aingo pointed out. "Can you transpose instantaneously? Can you grommich? Can you stel?" The Delgen looked humiliated. "No, but still it's wrong to enslave us." "Wrong? Oh, no question of it. But since it's in a good cause, you will remain slaves until we decide otherwise -- if we ever do. Now back to your pens!" The Aingo's voice was stem, but Sims detected a note of amusement in it, a hint of unvindictive humor. "So that's the gag," he said wryly, after the Delgens were penned and the Aingo returned. "The Aingoes are in on this with us." "Of course," grinned the Chief, enjoying it all. "They have no more use for slavery than the Council has. They just want to show what might happen to people who use the relative-inferiority rulings. Just like the Delgens now, they might find themselves trying to prove they're no such thing one day." "And the Council will play along?" "What do you think?" Sims looked anxiously at the Aingo. He received something very much like a good-natured wink. Smiling, Sims took a form out of his pocket and began to fill in the pertinent data... when one considers the unusual benefits accruing from this particular enslavement, one can only approve the Council's course. The Delgens, at this writing, have been twenty years fighting in the courts for their lost independence. This sorry state of affairs has given pause to the slave-minded. Indeed, the Aingo trick has done more to enforce the Slave Act than any conceivable number of Council Cutters might have done. Aspects of Confederation, de Mantset inevitably -- the instant they came near Alcorn. Finding Kitty's cool blonde loveliness projected so abruptly against the bleak polar plain of his waking dream, he knew how much more she was than either fiancee or secretary alone. She was a beacon of reassurance in a sea of uncertainty. "Thanks, darling," he said, and looked at his watch. "I'd have woolgathered past my appointment and it's an important one." He stood up. Kitty came closer and put both hands on his shoulders. "You've had another of those dreams, haven't you? I wish you'd see a -- a doctor about them." He laughed, and if the sound rang hollow, she seemed not to notice. "That's why I asked you to call me. I've made an appointment with one." S HE stood on tiptoe to kiss him. "I'm glad you're decided. You haven't been yourself at all for a week, Philip, and I couldn't bear a honeymoon with a preoccupied husband!" He managed the appropriate leer, though he had never felt less like it. The apprehension that followed his daytime chimera was on him again, so strongly that what he wanted most to do was to take Kitty's hand tightly, like a frightened child, and run headlong until he was beyond reach of whatever it was that threatened him. "Small chance," he said, instead. "Any man who'd dream away a honeymoon with you is dead already." She sighed placidly and turned back to the business at hand. "You won't be late for your #:# conference with our Mr. O'Donnell and Director Mulhall of Irradiated Foods, will you? Poor Sean would be lost without you." He felt the usual nagging dissatisfaction with the peculiar talent that had put him where he was in Consolidated Advertising. "He'd probably lose this case without my soothing presence and CA would pay its first ungrounded refund claim in -- " he counted back over the time he had been with Consolidated -- "four years and eight months." Kitty said wistfully, "Shall I see you tonight, Philip?" He frowned, searching for a way to ease the hurt she would feel later, and finding none. "That depends on the psychiatrist. If he can't help me, I may fly up to my cabin in the Catskills and wrestle this thing out for myself." Kitty moved to go, and then turned back. "I almost forgot. There was a call for you at noon from a secretary of Victor Jaffers' at Carter International. She seemed to know you'd be out and said that Mr. Jaffers would call again at #:#." "Victor Jaffers?" Alcorn repeated. The name added a further premonitory depression. "I think I know what he wants. It's happened before." When Kitty had gone, Alcorn took a restless turn about the room and was interrupted at once by the gentle buzzing of the radophone unit on his desk. He pressed the receiving stud and found himself facing Victor Jaffers' image. "Don't bother to record this," Jaffers said without preamble. "Complete arrangements have already been made to prove that I've never spoken to you in my life." faced man who might have been mistaken for a senior accountant's clerk -- until the chill force of his eyes made itself felt. Alcorn had seen the Carter International head before only in teleprint pictures, had heard and discounted the stories about the man's studied ruthlessness. But those eyes and the blunt approach made him wonder. "I've got a place in the contact branch of my organization for your particular talent, Alcorn," Jaffers said flatly. "It will pay you five times what you earn with Consolidated. You understand why I'm taking you on." "I know." The arrogance wearied rather than angered Alcorn. "I have a gift for arranging fair settlements when both principals are present. Mr. Jaffers, I've never exploited my gift for personal profit. That's a matter of selfprotection as well as ethics -- I don't like trouble." He reached for the canceling stud to end the interview. "Others have made the same offer before you and there'll be others again. But I won't use my ability unfairly." Jaffers smiled, unamused. "You do go straight to the point, which saves argument. But you'll work for me, Alcorn. Those others made the mistake of talking to you personally. I know that you can be reached as easily as any other man if my agents keep more than fifty feet away from you." His eyes moved past Alcorn to the window. "Look at the window across the street." Alcorn, turning, felt his neck prickle. Across the narrow canyon of street, without pretense at concealing himself, a man in gray clothing watched him from an open office window. "I've had you under surveillance for days," Jeffers' voice said behind him. "I've located two others of your sort since my statisticians brought their existence to my attention, but somehow they slipped through my fingers this week. I'm taking no chances on you." Alcorn whirled back incredulously. "You've found others? Where and -- " "I'll tell you that when you're on my payroll." "It's a trick," Alcorn said angrily. "I searched for years before I settled down with Consolidated and I didn't find a trace of anybody like myself. I don't believe there are any." "Most of them covered themselves better." Jaffers added, with cold finality, "I don't haggle, Alcorn. You'll work for me or for no one." "TiHE trouble is," Alcorn said, "that I'm different from other people and I have to know why. I know how I'm different, but if I knew why, I'd never have come to a psychiatrist." Dr. Hagen rattled the data sheet in his hands and blinked behind his pince-nez like a friendly beagle. He was a very puzzled man, being accustomed to analyzing his own reactions as well as those of his patients. Alcorn could see him struggling to account for the sudden serenity that had come over him the instant Alcorn entered the office -- certainly it was not the doctor's usual frame of mind, from the first sour look of him -- and failing. "Different in what way, Mr. Alcorn?" "I soothe people," Alcorn said. "There's something about me that inspires trust and an eagerness to please. Everyone roughly within a radius of fifty feet -- I've checked the limit a thousand times -- immediately feels a sort of euphoria. They're as happy as so many children at a picnic and they can't do enough for me or for each other." Dr. Hagen blinked, but not with disbelief. "It affects psychiatrists, too," Alcorn went on. "You'd cheerfully waive the fee for this consultation if I asked it, or lend me fifty credits if I were strapped. The point is that people are never difficult when I'm around, because I was born with the unlikely gift of making them happy. That gift is the most valuable asset I own, but I've never understood it -- and as long as I don't understand it, there's the chance that it may be a mixed blessing. I think it's backfired on me already in one fashion and possibly in another." He shook out a cigarette and the psychiatrist obligingly held a lighter to it. Dr. Hagen, Alcorn thought, must normally have been an exceptionally strongwilled man, for he hesitated noticeably before he spun the wheel. It's worse than recurrent -- it's "Actually," Alcorn said, "I've progressive, and each new seizure begun to worry about my sanity leaves me a little closer to someand I'm afraid my gift is responthing that I'm desperately afraid sible. For the past week, I've had to face." a recurrent hallucination, a sort The psychiatrist made a judiof waking nightmare that comes cious tent of his fingers. "Objust when I least expect it and viously you are an intelligent and leaves me completely unstrung, conscientious man, Mr. Alcorn, else you would not have contented yourself with your comparatively minor job. But your profession as claims adjustor must impose a considerable strain upon your nervous organization. Add to this that you are a bachelor at the age of thirty-three and the natural conclusion -- " I N spite of his mood, Alcorn laughed. "Wrong tack -- remember my gift! Besides, I'm engaged to be married next month and I'm quite happy with the prospect. This trouble of mine is something entirely different. It's tied in somehow with my talent for soothing and it scares me." He could have added that Jaffers' hardly veiled threat on his life disturbed him as well, but saw no point in wasting time on the one danger he understood perfectly. "This vision," Alcorn said, "and the sensory sharpness and conviction of disaster that come with it -- it's no ordinary hallucination. It's as real as my peculiar talent and represents a very real danger. It's working some sort of change in me that I don't like and I've got to find out what that change is or I'm done for. I feel that." Obligingly, the psychiatrist said, "Describe your experience." Talking about it made perspiration stand out on Alcorn's forehead. "First I'm seized with a sudden sense of abnormally sharpened perception, as if I were on the point of becoming aware of a great many things beyond my immediate awareness. I can feel the emotions of people about me and I have the conviction that, in another moment, I shall be able to feel their thoughts as well. "Then I seem to be standing alone on a frozen arctic plain, a polar wasteland that should be utterly deserted, but isn't. I've no actual sensations of touch or hearing, yet the scene is visually sharp in every detail. "There's a small village of corrugated sheet-metal houses just ahead, the sort that engineers on location might raise, and the streets between are packed with snow. Machines loaded with metal boxes crawl up and down those streets, but I've never seen their drivers. Until this morning, I never saw any people at all on the plain." Dr. Hagen rattled his paper and nodded agreeably. "Go on. What are these people like?" "I can't tell you that," Alcorn said, "because their images were not complete. There seems to be a sort of relationship between them and myself -- a threatening one -- but I can't guess what it may be. I can't even tell you what racial type they belong to, because they have no faces." and took a deep breath, getting to the worst of it. "I have a distinct conviction during each of these seizures that the people I see are not ordinary human beings, that they're as different from me as I am from everyone else, though not in the same way. It's the difference that makes me uneasy. I can feel the urgency and the resolution in them, as if they were determined to do -- or had resigned themselves to doing -- something desperately important. And then I know somehow that each of them has made some kind of decision recently, a decision that is responsible for his being what he is and where he is, and that I'll have to make a similar one when the time comes. And the worst of it is that I know no matter which way my choice falls, I'm going to be hideously unhappy." The psychiatrist asked tranquilly, "You can't guess what choice it is that you must make, or its alternative?" "I can't. And that's the hell of it -- not knowing." The icy chill of the polar plain touched him and with it came a deeper cold that had not been a part of the dream. At that instant, he might have identified its source, but was afraid to. "My fear has some relation to whatever it is these people are about to do," he said. "I just realized that. But that doesn't help, because I've no idea what it is." He glanced at his strap watch, and the time made him stand up before the little psychiatrist could speak again. The hour was #:#, and he saw in dismay that his #:# appointment with Sean O'Donnell and the Irradiated Foods tycoon would be late. "I don't expect an immediate opinion," he said. "You couldn't reach one as long as I'm here. Add up what I've told you, and if it makes any sort of sense you can radophone me tonight at #:#. If my apartment doesn't answer, relay the call to my cabin in the Catskills -- I've kept the location a secret, for privacy's sake, but the number is on alternate listing." He paused briefly at the door, touched with an uncharacteristic flash of sour humor. "And telestat your bill to me. If I asked for it now, you'd probably charge nothing." J'T'HE mood vanished as soon as he was outside and saw the gray-suited Jaffers operative waiting with stolid patience on the ramp of a department store across the street. The shock of reminder brought on a giddy recurrence of his hallucination. The polar plain yawned before him. The silent machines crept over their snow-packed ways, the faceless people stood in frozen groups. He emerged from the seizure, shaken and sweating, to find that the Jaffers man had crossed the street and was waiting a safe distance behind. Alcorn fought down a panic desire to run away blindly only because Kitty would be waiting for him at Consolidated -- Kitty, his bulwark of reassurance. The graysuited man was a deliberate hundred feet behind him when he boarded a tube-car. Kitty was not in his office and there was no time to ring for her. Instead, he went through the long accounting room beyond, answering automatically the smiles of a suddenly genial staff and headed for O'Donnell's office. He saw at once that he was too late. The CA manager's door was open and O'Donnell and Mulhall of Irradiated Foods were emerging. Both wore street jackets and both men had the unmistakable air of euphoric calm that came within seconds of Alcorn's approach. O'Donnell gave Alcorn his familiar long-lipped grin, looking, with his thin gentle face and rteat brush of ermine-white hair, like an aristocratic Irish saint. "You missed a pleasant meeting," O'Donnell said. "I've just signed a refund release to Charlie here, and a pleasure it was." The awareness that they had been calmed before he'd arrived left Alcorn speechless. "Really shouldn't have accepted," Mulhall said sheepishly. Mulhall was a big, solid man, bald and paunchy and, when his normal instincts were controlled, an argumentative tyrant. "Niggling technicality, I say. Shouldn't have taken a refund, but Sean here insisted." They laughed together, like children sharing a joke. "The claim was justified," O'Donnell said firmly. "Once Charlie's secretary explained the case, there was no doubt." Mulhall grinned at Alcorn. "Remarkable girl, Janice Wynn. She's waiting in Sean's office. Wants to meet you, Philip." They went toward the lift with their arms about each other, sharing an all-too-brief moment of companionship. the closed door of O'Donnell's office. When he entered, Janice Wynn was standing at the window, watching the soundless rush of traffic in the street below. She was dark, not pretty in any conventional sense, but charged with a controlled vitality that made physical beauty unimportant. Her face was anything but serene, the complex of emotions in her tilted green eyes far removed from the ready placidity he had learned to expect. There was an unmistakable impression of driving urgency -- the same urgency, Alcorn thought, that he had felt in the people of his waking dream. "You're one," he said. His face felt stiff. "After all these years, I've found another one like -- " "Like yourself," she said. "But it's I who have found you. Did you really think you were unique, Philip Alcorn?" He tried to answer and couldn't. The meeting he had dreamed of all his life had come about with precisely the electric suddenness he had imagined, but he felt none of the elation he had anticipated. He felt, instead, a sudden panic. For behind Mulhall's secretary, he had a shutter-swift glimpse of the frozen plain, starkly clear with its huddle of metal buildings and its faceless people clustered on the snow-packed street. time to flounder for control. "You're the last," she said. "And the most stubborn of the lot. you're lucky that we could find you in the little time we have left." Alcorn said hoarsely, "I don't know what you mean." She looked more disappointed than surprised. "You've no inkling yet? I've known most of the truth for days, though I still haven't made the change. Your conditioning must have been too thorough or -- " She caught the shift of Alcorn's glance toward the window and turned quickly. The man in gray was watching them intently from the office across the street. "You're under surveillance!" she said sharply. "By whom and for how long?" He told her of Jaffers' call, and winced at the sudden dismay in her face. "At best you've killed an inoffensive psychiatrist with your problem," she said. "At worst -- " She came around O'Donnell's desk toward him, her manner abruptly decisive. "We've less time than I hoped. Come out of here, quickly." In the corridor, she opened her handbag and took out a thick white envelope. "There's no time now for explanations. The clippings will give you an idea of what you're up against. Lose your spy if you can and don't go near your apartment. I'll be at your cabin tonight at #:#. You'll learn the rest then." She pressed a stud at the elevator bank and chose an ascending lift. Alcorn realized that there would be a turbo-copter waiting for her on the roof. She faced Philip before entering the cage. "You have no chance at all except with us. Remember that, or you'll regret it for the rest of your very short life." Alcorn made no attempt to follow... except with us," Janice Wynn had said. Us? She was like himself, gifted with his own talent. She was connected somehow with the faceless people of his hallucinations. Who were they, and where were they, and what did they want of him? H E was still groping for the answers when Kitty came toward him. She gave a little cry of dismay when she saw his face. "You look simply awful, Philip! Is it another of your -- " With Kitty's arrival, Alcorn's premonition of disaster returned. Something was going to happen to him, was happening to him, and unless he moved carefully, it could involve Kitty as well. He had to keep Kitty out of this, which meant that he must stay clear of her until he was safe. "It's nothing," he said hastily. "I'll call you later, Kitty. I've another appointment now that can't wait." She put out a hesitant hand. "Philip..." He wanted desperately to tell her the whole improbable story, to reveal his fears and get the reassurance she was able to give him. But he couldn't risk involving Kitty in any danger. "It's nothing," he repeated. He went down the lift quickly because he knew that if he delayed to comfort her, he would never have the courage to go at all. His only clear thought, as he shouldered his way into the lateafternoon throng outside CA, had been to escape from Kitty and from the too-vivid memory of Janice Wynn. Now that he must choose a course, he was brought up short by the fact that, so. long as he was tailed by Jaffers' men, there was literally no place for him to go. He could not go to his apartment because of Jaffers' surveillance. He had no intention of meeting Janice Wynn at his Catskill cabin at #:#. Her obvious knowledge -- and, therefore, theirs -- of the location ruled that out as a refuge. He looked about for the inevitable man in gray and found him following at his careful hundred feet. The crowd caught and bore them both along like chips in a millrace, keeping the interval constant. along, feeling the slow release of tension that spread outward from him through the throng. The physical pressure was also eased. People slowed their dogged pace and smiled at utter strangers. He had wondered often how the people affected by his circle of calm accounted for their sudden change of mood. He had dreamed that one day he might walk in such a crowd and enter another island of serenity like his own and thus find another human being gifted like himself. Someone with his own needs and longings, who would not melt into ready complaisance when he drew near, but who would speak honestly and clearly, who would understand how he felt and why. Ironically, when that moment had come in O'Donnell's office, it hadn't brought him the fulfillment he had expected. It had left, instead, a panic beyond belief. Why? What was he afraid of? There was nothing evil or dangerous in his own gift -- why should he fear another possessing the same wild talent? Damn it, he thought, what sort of fate could be so terrible that its foreshadowing alone could throw him into such an anxious state? How could he be sure that the faceless people were hostile? If they were like Janice Wynn, and if Janice were like himself, it might follow naturally that -- The rustle of the envelope in his pocket was like an answer, proving that his problem, if nothing else, was real... for the rest of your very short life," she had said. T HE sudden sharpening of awareness that preceded a new seizure rasped him again. He felt then the arctic montage swallowed it all, and once again he stood bodiless on the snow-packed streets of the metal village. The faceless people moved purposefully now, and beyond them loomed the towering bulk of scaffolding erected about the pit where the great bronze cylinder of a ship lay... Pit? Scaffolding? Ship? He stopped so abruptly that a man behind him stumbled and regained balance only by clutching Alcorn's shoulder. "Sorry," the man murmured, and moved on. The mirage vanished; the crowd behind pushed on, parting politely about Alcorn. The mass farther back surged restlessly, hurrying, grumbling like an impatient corporate organism. The Jaffers agent, caught in the press, was borne helplessly nearer. Alcorn realized his opportunity and stood fast, waiting while the tide of bodies flowed past. The man in gray saw his intention and struggled frantically to break free of the pinioning crowd. He failed. A sort of grim satisfaction fell upon Alcorn when the man's face lost its urgency and settled into smiling unconcern. The gift was a weapon of sorts. The way to escape -- at least from Jaffers' surveillance -- was open. He fell in beside the spy, paying less attention now to the man himself than to the matter of disposing of him. The garish facade of a nearby joy-bar solved his problem. "Come with me," Alcorn ordered. rpHE joy-bar was less than half full at this early hour, but noisy enough for midnight. A concealed battery of robotics ground out a brassy blare of music, integrating random pitches -- selected by electronic servocomputers -- into the jarring minor cacophony that had become the latest rage. The early patrons were intently watching the long telescreen above the bar when Alcorn came in. A quarterstaff bout -- a frantic, bloody sport revived from God only knew how many centuries before -- was 'in progress there, matching a heavily muscled Nordic with a sandy bristle of hair against a swarthy, hairless Eurasian. The Nordic, from his twisted stance, had a couple of broken ribs already; the Eurasian's right ear dangled redly. Alcorn seated himself opposite Jaffers' operative in an isolated booth and fed the coin-slot for drinks. "Drink," he said grimly. "You're going to be drunker, my friend, than you've ever been in your inquisitive life." The uproar died out before the drinks arrived. Only the blaring music machines and the bloodroar of the telescreen remained, and a suddenly placid bartender turned both down to a murmur. The rest was routine to Philip Alcorn's experience. Men at the bar turned to each other like old friends, forgetting submerged frustrations as readily as they forgot the vicious slashandparry on the screen. The place drowsed in a slow and comfortable silence. The Jaffers man tossed off his drink and dialed another. Alcorn, raising his own, remembered Janice Wynn's letter in his pocket and set the glass down, untasted. The clippings, she had said, would give him an idea of what he was up against. His hands shook so violently when he ripped open the envelope that he almost dropped it. - small teleprinted scissorings from digest newssheets that were available at any street-corner dispenser. He read them quickly, and was more puzzled than before until he realized that they fell into two general groups of interlocking similarities. Four were accounts of unexplained disappearances. A moderately successful research chemist named Ellis had vanished from the offices of his New York chemical firm : a neighborhood pharmacist in Minneapolis, a spinster tea-shop proprietress in Atlanta and a female social worker in Los Angeles had disappeared with equal thoroughness, completely baffling the efforts of police to find them. None of these people had been of more than minor importance, even in his own immediate circle. Alcorn felt that these events had been reported only because the efficiency of missing-persons bureaus made permanent disappearance next to impossible. Even so, only one clipping -- that on Ellis, the New York chemist -- bothered to run a photograph.  The other four accounts dealt with violent deaths, all rising from sudden outbreaks of mob hysteria. Two of the victims had been small-town clergymen, a profession which made their lynchings as startling as they were inexplicable; both had been respected members of their little communities until the day -- the date was less than a week old -- their congregations rose up en masse and tore them limb from limb. The remaining two of the second group had died in different fashions. A doctor in a Nevada mining hamlet, making a late call, had been set upon by the patient's family, knocked unconscious and shot. A Girl Scout leader in Mississippi had been thrown over a cliff by her young charges. lection of horrors, Alcorn thought, until he saw the parallel that related them. The circumstances were strikingly similar in every case except that the four who disappeared were urbanites, while the murdered ones were all members of small and comparatively isolated communities. Not one of the eight had been over thirty-five; each had been well-liked; none was wealthy, yet all were in comfortable circumstances from vocations that depended upon good will. A further similarity built up in Alcorn's subconscious, but died unconsidered because at that moment the quarterstaff bout on the screen ended and a brazen-voiced announcer gave the time. It was #:#. Dr. Hagen was to call him at his apartment at #:#. Alcorn, mulling over the cryptic half-knowledge gained from the clippings, wondered what the little psychiatrist might make of it. Hagen was capable in his field; even with so little to work on, he might possibly come up with the right answer. Alcorn decided that he could not run from a danger until he knew what the hazard was. He might as well face the issue squarely now and be done with it. The Jaffers operative, on his ninth drink, had relaxed into a smiling stupor. Alcorn left him snoring in the booth and headed for the public radophone unit beyond the end of the bar. He could not be in his apartment to take Dr. Hagen's call, but he could anticipate it. The telescreen announcer's voice stopped him short. " Have you seen this man? Sought by police for the murder earlier this evening of Dr. Bernard Hagen, prominent psychiatrist, he is thought to be at large somewhere in downtown..." The screen showed an enlarged full-face photograph of Alcorn. death. But who had wanted the knowledge of Alcorn's gift -- or the suppression of that knowledge -- badly enough to kill the psychiatrist for it? Jaffers, or the faceless people behind Janice Wynn? It had to be Jaffers, he decided, eliminating a possible source of opposition and at the same stroke placing himself still further on the defensive. Slowly, he became aware that the joy-bar had fallen quiet, that everyone in the place was watching him with a sort of intent sympathy. The bartender left his place and came toward him, his heavy face a study in concern. "We know you couldn't have done it," the man said. The sway of Alcorn's presence held him hypnotized. "Can we help?" Alcorn's only thought was of flight. "Have you a turbo-copter?" "On the roof," the bartender said. "It's yours." Alcorn took him along to unlock the controls. On the roof landing, a cool evening wind was blowing. There was a dim thin sickle of moon and a pale haze of stars, a wraithlike scattering of small white clouds that drifted in the reflected spectrum of the city's multicolored glow. He sat in the turbo-copter with a feeling of incredulous unreality. The vast and shining breadth of the city was spread about him like a monstrous alien puzzle, a light-shot maze without meaning. Where, in that suddenly foreign tangle, could he go? He set the 'copter off at random, knowing that its owner would have the police on his heels the moment he recovered volition, Alcorn was still trying to settle upon a course when a seizure fell upon him again. First he had seen the city as something alien; now he felt it, a clamorous surf-roar of conflicting individual emotions, an unresolved ant-hill scurrying of hates and hopes and endless frustrations. Then he was on the polar plain. The pit and scaffolding were the same, but the enigmatic groupings of people on the streets had changed. Four of them had faces now. Three were unfamiliar, but the fourth he recognized as Ellis, the research chemist who had disappeared from his laboratory in New York City. B Y the time Alcorn was composed, he discovered that he had chosen a course without conscious intent. Dark, open country fled past beneath, pricked here and there with racing points of light that marked the main artery of northward surface traffic. Familiar mountain shapes loomed ahead, indicating where he was bound. He was heading, lemminglike, for his cabin in the Catskills. The knowledge made him wonder if he could trust the instinct that had decided him. Jaffers might or might not know of the cabin; certainly Janice Wynn knew, for she had said she would pick him up there at #:#. Kitty, when he failed to call her as he had promised, would know at once where he had gone, and would either radophone him or come to him quickly. He frowned unhappily over the possibilities, caught between an eagerness to see Kitty and a dread of having her involved in his trouble. He considered taking Kitty and fleeing in his borrowed turbo-copter to some isolated place where the two of them might make a fresh start, and gave up the idea at once as worse than impractical. Jaffers would find him without difficulty, now that he knew what to look for. And there was the progressive reality of his visions -- for he had ceased to think of them any more as hallucinations. The coming of Janice Wynn and the inexorable sharpening of his awareness proved that reality beyond doubt. He found the twin-notched peak that landmarked his cabin. The cool of night and the mountain quiet, when he climbed out, were a tonic to his abraded nerves. There was a nostalgic calling of night-birds, the clean breath of pines and, from some tangled rocky slope, the faint pervading perfume of wild honeysuckle. He had not guessed how sharp his awareness had become until he realized that someone was waiting for him inside the cabin. E halted outside, feeling like a man just recovering vision after a long blindness. Janice Wynn was in the cabin and she was alone. He knew that as certainly as if he had seen her walk in. When he went in, she was standing before the wide cold mouth of the cabin's fireplace. She wore the same quiet suit she had worn in O'Donnell's office, and her tilted green eyes were at once relieved and anxious. "I was afraid you might have lost your head and run away," she said. "It's good you didn't. There wouldn't have been time to find you again -- the change is too close on us both." "Change?" She gave him a disappointed look. "I thought you'd have guessed by now the relation between ourselves and those people in the clippings. You had another seizure in the 'copter, didn't you?" He stared, too disconcerted to answer. "You saw four faces this time," she went on, "where you had seen none before: And you recognized one." "It was Ellis, the chemist," Alcorn said. And with a numb premonition of the truth, he quietly asked, "How did you know that?" "You were broadcasting it like a beacon. We're both in the last stages of the change. Now that our conditioning is lifting, we're reverting to our original telepathic nature. That's how they found you and me, as they found Ellis and the others -- by tracking down our communication auras." He said slowly, "Those fourwhy were they mobbed and killed?" "Because the change caught them too suddenly for escape," she said. "And because, in our natural state, we are incompatible with Man." "With Man," he repeated. "And what does that make us? Supermen or monsters?" "You're still blinded by your conditioning," she answered, "or you'd see that we're neither, that we're not even native to this planet. I don't know a great deal more than that myself -- I haven't remembered it all yet, because the change isn't complete... HE broke off and, with both  hands above the fireplace, gripped the rough stone of the mantelpiece. Her tilted green eyes burned with a contradictory play of emotions; the soft planes of her face seemed to shift and alter, seeking an impossible balance between ecstasy and terror and a tearing, intolerable agony. "I'm learning the rest... now," she whispered. "Sooner than... I thought." He sensed the change that possessed her, the struggling of new emotions, the shattering of imposed concepts and conditionings and their realigning to shape a new personality, a new person. He knew from that moment that she had been right, and that what he had feared from the beginning of his first seizure was about to happen to him. She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, Alcorn drew back. Then resentment flared in him and he was suddenly furious, at the alteration of status that left him on the defensive. He remembered the clippings and understood something of the frustrated rage that must have gripped the howling mobs when they killed the two ministers and the Nevada doctor and the Girl Scout leader. Janice Wynn straightened from the fireplace, her head tilted as if she were listening to some sound beyond range of his own hearing. "Someone is coming," she said. Her voice had changed as much as her face ; her eyes watched him with a remote yet curiously intimate compassion. "Not our people. It isn't time for them yet." She was at the cabin door before he realized that she had moved. "Stay here" she ordered. "Don't open the door for anyone. For anyone, do you hear?" She was gone into the outside darkness. Alcorn felt it himself then, the indefinable certainty of approach. A turbocopter, then another, slanting down toward his hideaway, two speeding machines filled with grimly intent men -- Jaffers' agents. The 'copters landed about a hundred yards away from the cabin. There was a dragging silence and then a booming, amplified voice. "Alcorn, come out!" their tension the swift progress of Janice Wynn through the darkness toward them. She was close to the nearer machine when he felt a sudden veering of her attention, followed the direction of her probing, and sensed another 'copter angling down out of the night. Her mental order was as urgent as a shout : Let no one in. No one! She moved on. The pilot of the third 'copter was only beginning to assume identity to Alcorn's sharpened senses when Janice Wynn drew within effective reach of the nearer grounded machine. The amplified voice was calling again: "Come out. Alcorn, or we'll have to -- " It broke off short in a scream. There was a flurry of shots, a white flash in the darkness and a concussion that shook the cabin. He felt Janice turn and run purposefully through the darkness toward the second 'copter. The third machine was dropping in for landing when he identified its pilot. "Kitty!" he breathed. "Dear God, Kitty!" She was at the door, the terror and tenderness of her crying overwhelming his flinching perception. "Philip, let me in! Philip darling, are you all right?" She was inside and in his arms before he could prevent it. She clung to him frantically until the effect of his presence calmed her. The terror went out of her eyes slowly, but the tears glistening on her cheeks contradicted her smile of relief. "Thank God you're safe, Philip! When I heard on the visinews about Dr. Hagen -- " Janice Wynn's silent command was violent in Alcorn's head. Put her out quickly! Do you want her there when your own change comes? He caught Kitty's hands and drew her toward the door. "You can't stay here, Kitty. There's no time to explain. I'll call later and tell you everything." She showed her hurt beneath the placidity his gift imposed upon her. "If I must, Philip. But -- " He threw open the door. "Don't argue, Kitty. For God's sake, go!" rwiHE blast of the second turbocopter's explosion might have precipitated the seizure that took him just then. The polar plain sprang up about him, more terribly cold and stark than ever, its clustering buildings and metal machines standing out in such clear perspective that he was certain he could have put out a hand and touched them. But the people were faceless no longer, except for one that knelt before the group in a tense attitude. Janice Wynn stood over that one while its features filled in slowly, line by line, growing more and more familiar as the face neared identity. By the time Alcorn realized that it was his own face, the change was fully upon him. A vast icy wind roared in his ears. A force seized and flung him, distorted and disoriented, to infinity. There were darkness and terror and then a chorus of calm voices calling reassurance. Pain gripped him, and panic, and finally an ecstasy of remembering that was beyond imagining. Dimly, he heard Kitty's screaming. Something struck him furiously on the shoulder and he felt his distant physical body struggle automatically for balance. A second blow caught him on the temple and he fell heavily, his new awareness flickering toward unconsciousness. There was a confusion of voices about him away. He lay still, secure in the certainty that he was no longer alone. Mind after mind brushed his, lightly, yet more warming than any clasping of hands, and with each touch, he identified and embraced an old friend whose regard was dearer than his own life. He knew who they were. He was one of them -- again. It's over, Janice Wynn's voice said gently. Do you remember me now, Filrinn? Janeen, he said. He stood up slowly. Her green eyes stirred with an emotion that matched his own. It was incredible that he could ever have forgotten -- no matter how thoroughly he had absorbed the protective conditioning -- the unity between himself and Janeen.  remember, he said. The wonder of it still dazed him. It's good to be myself again. She sighed. If s good to know why they sent me, instead of one of the others, to bring you back. You remember that? "I remember," he said aloud, as if he needed to say the words to make it true. "We were together before this assignment for two hundred of these people's years. We'll be together again for hundreds more, now that we're free to go -- for when will we ever find another world that needs attention as this one needed it?" #-I curled limply on the cabin's sofa. Her stillness left him alarmed, surprised and ashamed that he should so readily have forgotten an obligation. Her dishevelment, and the heavy brass fireplace poker on the rug beside the couch, told him the story at once. You came just in time, Janeen. Poor Kitty! You didn't hurt her? Janeen shook her head. Of course not, Filrinn. I caught her mind before the sfiocc of your change could derange it and -- conditioned her. She'll sleep until we've gone, and tomorrow Philip Alcorn will be no more than a pale memory. Either my conditioning still lingers or my empathetic index is too' high... I'd like her to know the truth about us, Janeen, before we go. He knelt beside the couch and smoothed the fair, tousled hair back from the Earthgirl's quiet face. "I'm sorry it had to be like this, Kitty," he said. He spoke aloud, but his mind touched hers below the level of consciousness. He felt the slow, bewildered surge of response. "It'll help you to forget, perhaps, if you know that we came here from a star system you'll never hear of in your lifetime, to study your people and to see what we could do to help them. "Alike in form, we are so far apart in nature that you could not have borne our real presence, so we buried our real selves under a mask of conditioning as deeply as we buried our ship under the ice of your planet's pole. After ten years of study, our conditioning was to lift slowly, so that we would realize who and what we were. But you are more like us than we had thought, and with some of us, the conditioning was too strong to break. "It may help to know that your likeness to us will bring our people together again when the time is right, that your children's chil- dren may meet us on equal terms." H E lifted her from the couch and carried her to her 'copter. He set the machine's controls to automatic and stepped back. "Good-by, Kitty," he said. Janeen was waiting for him in the cabin. The auxiliary shuttle is 'on its way to pick us up, Filrinn. We'll be gone within the hour. They stood together, linking their minds, sharing an ecstasy in the meshing of identities that was greater than any physical fulfillment. But we have that, too, Janeen said for his ears alone. And then, to the calm, smiling faces that lingered in the background of their mingled consciousness : Leave us. The faces withdrew and left them -- like children just grown to awareness of their own marvelous gifts -- alone. Rough Translation Don't be ashamed H you can't blikkef any more, it's because you couldn't help framishing. ktape recorder. "Just like I told you before. Dr. Blair, it's krandoor, so don't exjust won't stand for any. They'd sooner framish." "Framish?" Jonathan heard his own voice played back by the recorder, tinny and slightly nasal. "What is that, Mr. Easton?" " You know. Like when you guttip. Carooms get awfully bevvergrit. Why, I saw one actually -- " "Let's go back a little, shall we?" Jonathan suggested. "What does shurgub mean?" There was a pause while the machine hummed and the recorder tape whirred. Jonathan remembered the look on Easton's face when he had asked him that. Easton had pulled away slightly, mouth open, eyes hurt. "Why -- why, I told you!" he had shouted. "Weeks ago! What's the matter? Don't you blikkel English?" Jonathan Blair reached out and snapped the switch on the machine. Putting his head in his hands, he stared down at the top of his desk. You learned Navajo in six months, he reminded himself fiercely. You are a highly skilled linguist. What's the matter? Don't you blikkel English? ing through his briefcase for the reports from Psych. Easton must be insane. He must! Ramirez says it's no language. Stoughton says it's no language. And , Jonathan thought savagely, say it's no language. But -- Margery tiptoed into the study with a tray. "But Psych," he continued aloud to her, "Psych says it must be a language because, they say, Easton is not insane!" "Oh, dear," sighed Margery, blinking her pale blue eyes. "That again?" She set his coffee on the desk in front of him. "Poor Jonathan. Why doesn't the Institute give up?" "Because they can't." He reached for the cup and sat glaring at the steaming coffee. "Well," said his wife, settling into the leather chair beside him, " certainly would. My goodness, it's been over a month now since he came back, and you haven't learned a thing from him!" "Oh, we've learned some. And this morning, for the first time, Easton himself began to seem puzzled by a few of the things he was saying. He's beginning to use terms we can understand. He's coming around. And if I could only find some clue -- some sort of -- " Margery snorted. "It's just plain foolish! I knew the Institute was asking for trouble when they sent the Rhinestead off. How do they know Easton ever got to Mars, anyway? Maybe he did away with those other men, cruised around, and then came back to Earth with this made-up story just so he could seem to be a hero and -- " "That's nonsense!" "Why?" she demanded stubbornly. "Why is it?" "Because the Rhinestead was tracked, for one thing, on both flights, to and from Mars. Moonbase has an indisputable record of it. And besides, the instruments on the ship itself show -- " He found the report he had been searching for. "Oh, never mind." "All right," she said defiantly. "Maybe he did get to Mars. Maybe he did away with the crew after he got there. He knew the ship was built so that one man could handle it in an emergency. Maybe he -- " "Look," said Jonathan patiently. "He didn't do anything of the sort. Easton has been checked so thoroughly that it's impossible to assume anything except, (a) he is sane, (b) he reached Mars and made contact with the Martians, (c) this linguistic barrier is a result of that contact." sucking in her breath. "When I think of all those fine young men," she murmured. "Heaven only knows what happened to them!" "You," Jonathan accused, "have been reading that columnist -- what's-his-name? The one that's been writing such claptrap ever since Easton brought the Rhinestead back alone." "Cuddlehorn," said his wife. "Roger Cuddlehorn, and it's not claptrap." "The other members of the crew are all alive, all -- " "I suppose Easton told you that?" she interrupted. "Yes, he did." "Using double-talk, of course," said his wife triumphantly. At the look on Jonathan's face, she stood up in guilty haste. "All right, I'll go!" She blew him a kiss from the door. "Richie and I are having lunch at one. Okay? Or would you rather have a tray in here?" "Tray," he said, turning back to his desk and his coffee. "No, on second thought, call me when lunch is ready. I'll need a break." He was barely consious of the closing of the door as Margery left the room. Naturally he didn't take her remarks seriously, but -- He opened the folder of pictures and studied them again, along with the interpretations by Psych, Stoughton, Ramirez and himself. Easton had drawn the little stick figures on the first day of his return. The interpretations all checked -- and they had been done independently, too. There it is, thought Jonathan. Easton lands the Rhinestead. He and the others meet the Martians. They are impressed by the Martians. The others stay on Mars. Easton returns to Earth, bearing a message. Question: What is the message? Teeth set, Jonathan put away the pictures and went back to the tape on the recorder. "Yes," said his own voice, in answer to Easton's outburst. "I do -- er -- blikkel English. But tell me, Mr. Easton, do you understand me?" "Under-stand?" The man seemed to have difficulty forming the word. "You mean -- " Pause. "Dr. Blair, I murv you. Is that it?" "Murv," repeated Jonathan. "All right, you murv me. Do you murv this? I do not always murv what you say." A laugh. "Of course not. How could you?" Suppressed groan. "Carooms," Easton had murmured, almost inaudibly. "Just when I almost murv, the kwakut goes freebie." Jonathan flipped the switch on the machine. "Murv" he wrote on his pad of paper. He added "Blikkel," "Carooms" and "Freebie." He stared at the list. He should understand, he thought. At times it seemed as if he did and then, in the next instant, he was lost again, and Easton was angry, and they had to start all over again. papers, notes from previous sessions, both with himself and with other linguists. The difficulty of reaching Easton was unlike anything he had ever before tackled. The six months of Navajo had been rough going, but he had done it, and done it well enough to earn the praise of Old Comas, his informant. Surely, he thought, after mastering a language like that, one in which the student must not only learn to imitate difficult sounds, but also learn a whole new pattern of thought -- Pattern of thought. Jonathan sat very still, as though movement would send the fleeting clue back into the corner from which his mind had glimpsed it. A whole new frame of reference. Suppose, he toyed with the thought, suppose the Martian language, whatever it was, was structured along the lines of Navajo, involving clearly defined categories which did not exist in English. "Murv," he said aloud. "I murv a lesson, but I blikkel a language." Eagerly, Jonathan reached again for the switch. Categories clearly defined, yes! But the categories of the Martian language were not those of the concrete or the particular, like the Navajo. They were of the abstract. Where one word "understand" would do in English, the Martian used two -- Good Lord, he realized, they might use hundreds! They might -- Jonathan turned on the machine, sat back and made notes, letting the recorder run uninterrupted. He made his notes, this time, on the feelings he received from the words Easton used. When the first tape was done, he put on the second. Margery tapped at the door just as the third tape was ending. "In a minute," he called, scribbling furiously. He turned off the machine, put out his cigarette and went to lunch, feeling better than he had in weeks. Richie was at the kitchen sink, washing his hands. "And next time," Margery was saying, "you wash up before you sit down." Richie blinked and watched Jonathan seat himself. "Daddy didn't wash his hands," he said. Margery fixed the six-year-old with a stern eye. "Richard, don't be rude." "Well, he didn't." Richie sat down and reached for his glass of milk. "Daddy probably washed before he came in," said Margery. She took the cover off a tureen, ladled soup into bowls and passed sandwiches, pretending not to see the ink-stained hand Jonathan was hiding in his lap. Jonathan, elated by the promise of success, ate three or fouf sandwiches, had two bowls of soup and finally sat back while Margery went to get coffee. Richie slid part way off his chair, remembered, and slid back on again. "Kin I go?" he asked. "Please may I be excused," corrected his father. nod and ran out of the dinette and through the kitchen, grabbing a handful of cookies on the way. The screen door banged behind him as he raced into the backyard. "Richie!" Margery started after him, eyes ablaze. Then she stopped and came back to the table with the coffee. "That boy! How long does it take before they get to be civilized?" Jonathan laughed. "Oh, sure," she went on, sitting down opposite him. "It's funny to you. But if you were here all day long -- " She stirred sugar into her cup. "We should have sent him to camp, even if it would have wrecked the budget!" "Oh? Is it that bad?" Margery shuddered. "Sometimes he's a perfect angel, and then -- It's unbelievable, the things that child can think of! Sometimes I'm convinced children are another species altogether! Why, only this morning -- " "Well," Jonathan broke in, "next summer he goes to camp." He stood up and stretched. Margery said wistfully, "I suppose you want to get back to work." "Ummmm." Jonathan leaned over and kissed her briefly. "I've got a new line of attack," he said, picking up his coffee. He patted his wife's shoulder. "If things work out well, we might get away on that vacation sooner than we thought." "Really?" she asked, brightening. "Really." He left the table and went back to his den. Putting the next tape on the machine, he settled down to his job. Time passed and finally there were no more tapes to listen to. He stacked his notes and began making lists, checking through the sheets of paper for repetitions of words Easton had used, listing the various connotations which had occurred to Jonathan while he had listened to the tapes. As he worked, he was struck by the similarity of the words he was recording to the occasional' bits of double-talk he had heard used by comedians in theaters and on the air, and he allowed his mind to wander a bit, exploring the possibilities. Was Martian actually such a close relative to English? Or had the Martians learned English from Easton, and had Easton then formed a sort of pidginEnglish-Martian of his own? Jonathan found it difficult to believe in the coincidence of the two languages being alike, unless -- He laughed. Unless, of course, Earthmen were descended from Martians, or vice versa. Oh, well, not my problem, he thought jauntily. him and then he started to sweat, softly at first, then louder. But no matter how loudly he swore, the list remained undeniably and obstinately the same: Freebie -- Displeasure (Tape #) Freebie -- Elation (Tape #) Freebie -- Grief (Tape S) "How," he asked the empty room, "can a word mean grief # l and elation at the same time?" Jonathan sat for a few moi ments in silence, thinking back to the start of the sessions with Easton. Ramirez and Stoughton ; had both agreed with him that Easton's speech was phonemicall ly identical to English. Jonathan's trained ear remembered the pronunciation of "Freebie" , in the three different connotations and he forced himself to i admit it was the same on all I three tapes in question. Stuck again, he thought gloomily. Good-by, vacation! He lit a cigarette and stared i at the ceiling. It was like saying the word "die" meant something happy and something sad at one and the same, like saying -- Jonathan pursed his lips. Yes, i it could be. If someone were in , terrible pain, death, while a thing of sorrow, could also mean release from suffering and so become a thing of joy. Or it could mean sorrow to one person and i relief to another. In that case, what he was dealing with here was not only -- The crash of the ball, as it sailed through the window behind his desk, lifted Jonathan right from his chair. Furious, his elusive clue shattered as surely as the pane of glass, he strode to the window. "Richie!" His son, almost hidden behind the lilac bush, did not answer. "I see you!" Jonathan bellowed. "Come here!" The bush stirred slightly and Richie peeped through the leaves. "Did you call me, Daddy?" he asked politely. Jonathan clamped his lips shut and pointed to the den. Richie tried a smile as he sidled around the bush, around his father, and into the house. "My," he marveled, looking at the broken glass on the floor inside. "My goodness!" He sat down in the leather chair to which Jonathan motioned. "Richie," said his father, when he could trust his voice again, "how did it happen?" His son's thin legs, brown and wiry, stuck out straight from the depths of the chair. There was a long scratch on one calf and numerous black-and-blue spots around both knees. "I dunno," said Richie. He blinked his eyes, deeper blue than Margery's, and reached up one hand to push away the mass of blond hair tumbling over his forehead. He was obviously trying hard to pretend he wasn't in the room at all. that is not a good answer. What were you doing when the ball went through the window?" "Watching," said Richie truthfully. "How did it go through the window?" "Real fast." Jonathan found his teeth were clamped. No wonder he couldn't decode Easton's speech -- he couldn't even talk with his own son! "I mean," he explained, his patience wavering, "you threw the ball so that it broke the window, didn't you?" "I didn't mean it to," said Richie. "All right. That's what I wanted to know." He started on a lecture about respect for other people's property, while Richie sat and looked blankly respectful. "And so," he heard himself conclude, "I hope we'll be more careful in the future." "Yes," said Richie. A vague memory came to Jonathan and he sat and studied his son, remembering him when he was younger and first starting to talk. He recalled the time Richie, age three, had come bustling up to him. "Vransh!" the child had pleaded, tugging at his father's hand. Jonathan had gone outside with him to see a baby bird which had fallen from its nest. "Vransh!" Richie had crowed, exhibiting his find. "Vransh!" "Do I get my spanking now?" asked Richie from the chair. His eyes were wide and watchful. Jonathan tore his mind from still another recollection: the old joke about the man and woman who adopted a day-old French infant and then studied French so they would be able to understand their child when he began to talk. Maybe, thought Jonathan, it's no joke. Maybe there is a language -- "Spanking?" he repeated absentmindedly. He took a fresh pencil and pad of paper. "How would you like to help with something, Richie?" The blue eyes watched carefully. "Before you spank me or after?" "No spanking." Jonathan glanced at the Easton notes, vaguely aware that Richie had suddenly relaxed. "What I'm going to do," he went on, "is say some words. It'll be a kind of game. I'll say a word and then you say a word. You say the first word you think after you hear my word. Okay?" He cleared his throat. "Okay! The first word is -- house." "My house." "Bird," said Jonathan. "Uh -- tree." Richie scratched his nose and stifled a yawn. D isappointed, Jonathan reminded himself that Richie at six could not be expected to remember something he had said when he was three. "Dog." "Biffy." Richie sat up straight. "Daddy, did you know Biffy had puppies? Steve's mother showed me. Biffy had four puppies, Daddy. Four!" Jonathan nodded. He supposed Richie's next statement would be an appeal to go next door and negotiate for one of the pups, and he hurried on with, "Carooms." "Friends," said Richie, eyes still shining. "Daddy, do you suppose we could have a pup -- " He broke off at the look on Jonathan's face. "Huh?" "Friends," repeated Jonathan, writing the word slowly and unsteadily. "Uh -- vacation." "Beach," said Richie cautiously, still looking scared. Jonathan went on with more familiar terms and Richie slowly relaxed again in the big chair. From somewhere in the back of his mind, Jonathan heard Margery say, "Sometimes I think they're a different species altogether." He kept his voice low and casual, uncertain of what he was thinking, but aware of the fact that Richie was hiding something. The little mantel clock ticked drowsily, and Richie began to look sleepy and bored as they went through things like "car" and "school" and "book." Then -- "Friend," said Jonathan. "Allavarg," yawned Richie. "No!" He snapped to, alert and wary. "I mean Steve." His father looked up sharply. "What's that?" "What?" asked Richie. "Richie," said Jonathan, "what's a Caroom?" The boy shrugged and muttered, "J dunno." "Oh, yes, you do!" Jonathan lit a cigarette. "What's an Allavarg?" He watched the boy bite his lips and stare out the window. "He's a friend, isn't he?" coaxed Jonathan. " Your friend? Does he play with you?" The blond head nodded slowly and uncertainly. "Where does he live?" persisted Jonathan. "Does he come over here and play in your yard? Does he, Richie?" The boy stared at his father, worried and unhappy. "Sometimes," he whispered. "Sometimes he does, if I call him." "How do you call him?" asked Jonathan. He was beginning to feel foolish. "Why," said Richie, "I just say 'Here, Allavarg!' and he comes, if he's not too busy." "What keeps him busy?" Such nonsense! Allavarg was undoubtedly an imaginary playmate. This whole hunch of his was utter nonsense. He should be at work on Easton instead of -- "The nursery keeps him busy," said Richie. "Real busy." Richie mean the greenhouse down the road? Was there a Mr. Allavarg who worked there? "Whose nursery?" "Ours." Richie wrinkled his face thoughtfully. "I think I better go outside and play." "Our nursery?" Jonathan stared at his son. "Where is it?" "I think I better go play," said Richie more firmly, sliding off the chair. "Richard! Where is the nursery?" The full lower lip began to tremble. "I can't tell you!" Richie wailed. "I promised!" Jonathan slammed his fist on the desk. "Answer me!" He knew he shouldn't speak this way to Richie; he knew he was frightening the boy. But the ideas racing through his mind drove him to find out what this was all about. It might be nothing, but it also might be -- "Answer me, Richard!" The child stifled a sob. "Here," he said weakly. "Here? Where?" "In my house," said Richie. "And Steve's house and Billy's and all over." He rubbed his eyes, leaving a grimy smear. "All right," soothed Jonathan. "It's all right now, son. Daddy didn't mean to scare you. Daddy has to learn these things, that's all. Just like learning in school." The boy shook his head resentfully. " You know," he accused. "You just forgot." "What did I forget, Richie?" "You forgot all about Allavarg. He told me I It was a different Allavarg when you were little, but it was almost the same. You used to play with your Allavarg when you were little like me!" Jonathan took a deep breath. "Where did Allavarg come from, Richie?" But Richie shook his head stubbornly, lips pressed tight. "I promised!" "Richie, a promise like that isn't a good one," pleaded Jonathan. "Allavarg wouldn't want you to disobey your father and mother, would he?" The child sat and stared at him. This was a very disturbing thought and Jonathan could see Richie did not know how to deal with it. He pressed his momentary advantage. "Allavarg takes care of little boys and girls, doesn't he? He plays with them and he looks after them, I'll bet." Richie nodded uncertainly. "And," continued Jonathan, smiling what he hoped was a winning, comradely smile at his son, "I'll bet that Allavarg came from some place far, far away, didn't he?" "Yes," said Richie softly. "And it's his job to be here and look after the -- the nursery?" Jonathan bit his lip. Nursery? Earth? Carooms -- Martians? His head began to ache. "Son, you've got to help me understand. Do you -- do you murv me?" But I will after -- " "After what?" "After I grow up." "Why not now?" asked Jonathan. The blond head sank lower. "Because you framish, Daddy." His father nodded, trying to look wise, wincing inwardly as he pictured his colleagues listening in on this conversation. "Well -- why don't you help me so I don't framish?" "I can't." Richie glanced up, his eyes stricken. "Some day, Allavarg says, I'm going to framish, too!" "Grow up, you mean?" hazarded Jonathan, and this time his smile was real as he looked at the smudged eyes and soft round cheeks. "Why, Richie," he went on, his voice suddenly husky, "it's fun to be a little boy, but there'll be lots to do when you grow up. You -- " "I wish I was Mr. Easton!" Richie said fiercely. Jonathan held his breath. "What about Mr. Easton?" Richie squirmed out of the chair and clutched Jonathan's arm. "Please, Daddy! If you let Mr. Easton go back, can I go, too? Please? Can I?" Jonathan put his hands on his son's shoulders. "Richie! What do you know about Mr. Easton?" "Please? Can I go with him?" The shining blue eyes pleaded up at him. "If you don't let him go back pretty soon, he's going to framish again! Please! Can I?" "He's going to framish," nodded Jonathan. "And what then?" he coaxed. "What'll happen after he framishes? Will he be able to tell me about his trip?" " dunno," said Richie. "I dunno how he could. After you framish, you don't remember lots of things. I don't think he's even gonna remember he went on a trip." The boy's hands shook Jonathan's arm eagerly. "Please, Daddy! Can I go with him?" "No!" Jonathan glared and released his hold on Richie. Didn't he have troubles enough without Richie suggesting -- "About the nursery," he said briskly. "Why is there a nursery?" "To take care of us." Richie looked worried. "Why can't I go?" "Because you can't! Why don't they have the nursery back where Allavarg came from?" "There isn't any room." The blue eyes studied the man, looking for a way to get permission to go with Mr. Easton. "No room? What do you mean?" Richie sighed. Obviously he'd have to explain first and coax later. "Well, you know my school? You know my teacher in school? You know when my teacher was different?" He peered anxiously at Jonathan, and suddenly the man caught on. "Of. course! You mean when they split the kindergarten into two smaller groups because there were too many -- " H IS voice trailed off. Too many. Too many what? Too many Martians on Mars? Growing population? No way to cut down the birth rate? He pictured the planet with too many people. What to do? Move out. Take another planet. Why didn't they just do that? He put the question to Richie. "Oh," said his son wisely, "they couldn't because of the framish. They did go other places, but everywhere they went, they framished. And after you framish, you ain't -- aren't a Caroom any more. You're a Gunderguck and of course -- " "Huh?" " -- and a Caroom doesn't like to framish and be a 'Gunderguck," continued Richie happily, as though reciting a lesson learn ed in school. "He wants to be a Caroom all the time because it's better and more fun and you know lots of things you don't remember after you get to be a Gunderguck. Only -- " he paused for a gulp of air -- "only there wasn't room for all the Carooms back home and they couldn't find any place where they could be Carooms all the time, because of the framish. So after a long time, and after they looked all over all around, they decided maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they sent some of their little boys and girls -- the ones they didn't have room for -- to some place where they could be Carooms longer than most other places. And that place," Richie said proudly, "was right here! 'Cause here there's almost as much gladdisl as back home and -- " "Gladdisl?" Jonathan echoed hoarsely. "What's -- " " -- and after they start growing up -- " "Gladdisl," Jonathan repeated, more firmly. "Richie, what is it?" The forehead puckered momentarily. "It's something you breathe, sort of." The boy shied away from the difficult question, trying to remember what Allavarg had said about gladdisl. "Anyway, after the little boys and girls start to grow up and after they framish and be Gundergucks, like you and Mommy, the Carooms back home send some more to take their places. And the Gundergucks who used to be Carooms here in the nursery look after the new little -- " "Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" Jonathan interrupted suspiciously. "I thought you said Allavarg looks after them." "He does. But there's so many little Carooms and there aren't many Allavargs and so the Gundergucks have to help. You help," Richie assured his father. "You and Mommy help a little bit." Big of you to admit it, old man, thought Jonathan, suppressing a smile. "But aren't you our little boy?" he asked. He had a sudden vision of himself addressing the scientists at the Institute: "And so, gentlemen, our babies -- who, incidentally, are really Martians -- are brought by storks, after all. Except in those cases where -- " "The doctor brought me in a little black bag," said Richie. rpHE boy stood silent and studied his father. He sort of remembered what Allavarg had said, too. Things like You mustn't ever tell and It's got to be a secret and They'd only laugh at you, Richie, and if they didn't laugh, they might believe you and  try to go back home and there just isn't any room. "I think," said Richie, "I think I better -- " He took a deep breath. "Here, Allavarg he called in a soft, piping voice. Jonathan raised his head. "Just what do you think you're doing -- " There was a sound behind him, and Jonathan turned startJedly. "Shame on you," said Allavarg, coming through the broken window. Jonathan's words dropped away in a faint gurgle. "I'm sorry," said Richie. "Don't be dipplefit." "It's a mess," Allavarg replied. "It's a krandoor mess!" He waved his arm in the air over Jonathan's head. "And don't think I'm going to forget it!" The insistent hiss of escaping gas hovered over the moving pellet in his hand. "Jivis boy!" Jonathan coughed suddenly. He got as far as "Now look here" and then found that he could neither speak nor move. The gas or whatever it was stung his eyes and burned in his throat. "Why don't you just freebie him?" Richie asked unhappily. "You're using up all your gladdisl! Why don't you freebie him and get me another one?" "Freebie, breeble," grumbled Allavarg, shoving the capsule directly under Jonathan's nose. "Just like you youngsters, always wanting to take the easy way out! Gundergucks don't grow oh blansercots, you know." Jonathan felt tears start in his eyes, partly from the fumes and partly from a growing realization that Allavarg was sacrificing precious air for him. Ha tried to think. If this was gladdisl and if this would keep a man in the state of being a Caroom, then -- "There," said Allavarg, looking unhappily at the emptied pellet. He shook it, sniffed it and finally returned it to the container at his side. "I'm sorry," Richie whispered. "But he kept askin' me and askin' me." "There, there," said Allavarg, going to the window. "Don't fret. I know you won't do it again." He turned and looked thoughtfully at Jonathan. He winked at Richie and then he was gone. He could move now. He opened his mouth and waggled his jaws. Now that the room was beginning to be cleared of the gas, he realized that it had had a pleasant odor. He realized -- Why, it 'was all so simple! Remembering his sessions with Easton, Jonathan laughed aloud. So simple! The message? Stay away from Mars! No room there! They s aid I could come back if I gave you the message, but I have to come back alone because there's no room for more people ! No room? Nonsense! Jonathan reached for the phone, dialed the Institute and asked for Dr. Stoughton. No room? On the paradise that was Mars? Well, they'd just have to make room! They couldn't keep that to themselves! "Hello, Fred?" He leaned back in his chair, feeling a surge of pride and power. Wait till they heard about this! "Just wanted to tell you I solved the Easton thing. Just a simple case of hapsodon. You see, Allavarg came and gave me a tressimox of gladdisl and now that I'm a Caroom again -- What? What do you mean, what's the matter? I said I'm not a Gunderguck any more." He stared at the phone. "Why, you spebberset moron! What's the matter with you? Don't you blikkel English?" From the depths of the big chair across the room, Richie giggled. ticH elTieTl A'l UeT in  Fi  e Fa" tflS Science hy Richard Matheson Seventeen Teles of Science Fiction nd Fantasy to satisfy the most discrim Mating reader. "... Matheson's talent was no flash in the pan; it has stood up nobly... this scintillating collection is a stimulating look at a genuine artist at work." J. Francis McComas New York Times Book Review "... Matheson is one of the fantasy luminaries to follow Ray Bradbury into the limelight. " August Derleth "... all (#) bear the imprint of a distinctive and original talent." Groff Conklin Galaxy Born of Man and Woman #. No science fiction bookshelf should be without it. Only # -- . at all better book dealers. or order .direct from-. P. O. Box #I #, Philadelphia #, Penna. rpHE month of July, when this column was written, was quite unproductive of good (or even bad) science fiction and fantasy. Three books came in, of which only one deserves extended mention. I shall cover these books at the end of this report, and meanwhile would like to indulge in a bit of autobiography -- and a review of a science fantasy book that has never been available in this country and has been out of print for many years even in England, where it was published in #. I was nostalgically searching through my memories during the July heat wave to ferret out my earliest contacts with science fiction. I actually did not become an earnest devotee of the form until #, about a year before the Atomic Age actually opened. As a matter of fact, my first letter to Crown Publishers, proposing what eventually became my first s-f. anthology, The Best of Science Fiction, was written on August #, #, exactly one year minus one day before the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima was announced. It was during the ensuing year that I spent evenings and weekends in the Library of Congress, browsing through the back files of all the science fiction magazines published to that date. Previous to that time, my contacts with the field had been sporadic in the extreme. The first item I remember readftig that could be classed as science fiction was H. G. Wells' Men Like Gods, back in #, when I was a college sophomore. It had a tremendous effect on me, though not as science fiction. It provided a turning point in my whole approach to philosophy and religion, with its rationalist utopian world. From there, I went on through Wells' other "science" novels, though, and loved them all for scientific adventures. My next dip into science fiction came around #, when I was sharing an apartment with a highly literate young man by the name of Frederick H. Wood. (He now owns and operates a fine book store in Bridgeport, Conn.) Fred was a devotee of the literature of the imagination and had several bound volumes of tearsheets of early weirds, fantastics and "scientifictions" from the old .Argosy, All-Story and others -- George Allan England, Garrett P. Serviss, Austin Hall, Victor Rousseau, and, last but far from least, A. Merritt. Merritt was the man whose vivid imagination and writing ability attracted me most at the time, particularly The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss. These fine fantastic tales are nearly as readable today (for me, at least) as they were almost # years ago. But the story that made the greatest impression on me during my sojourn with Fred Wood was a remarkable volume called A Voyage to Arcturus. It was written by an obscure British spiritualist named David Lindsay. It is the only book of his I have ever seen, though Everett Bleiler's Checklist of Fantastic Literature mentions three others. I have reread this strange book at least six times since, the last time this summer, and I can only report that it still has all the fascination for me now that it did when I first read it. Oddly, one of its most fascinating aspects is its almost impenetrable obscurity. Each reading left me with a different idea of what Lindsay was driving at; I still don't really know. It is not an obscurity of language, but of concepts. The writing is above average, and the magnificent originality and vividness of the descriptions of an incredibly different planet make the book immensely worth reading, even though one is never really sure what it is all about. It commences inauspiciously enough, with a conventional "seance" in a British town house, the purpose of which is to observe a medium materialize someone from the "invisible world," As the medium is about to commence his efforts, two strangers join the party. Their names are Maskull and Nightspore, and they are as forbidding as their names. The materialization proceeds and a young man draped in a shroud takes solid form in the room, lying on a couch. No sooner is he "present" than a third stranger breaks in unannounced. This saturnine individual, whose name is Krag, wrings the neck of the materialized creature, throwing consternation into the party, which naturally breaks up in a hurry. Maskull, Nightspore and Krag depart together. The three men go to "the famous Starkness Observatory" on the northeast coast of Scotland. From there they are transplanted by Krag, in a highly improbable spaceship, to Tormance, the sole planet of the double suns of Arcturus. It is from this point on that the book becomes almost impossible to put down. From the evidence, Tormance is in an early stage of development, a world on which some strange force is continuously experimenting with different types of life-forms and intelligences. Parts of the planet are highly unstable, with gigantic ground movements and changes. Others are coldly mountainous and bleak. Still others are covered with trees two hundred feet in diameter. Indeed, no part of the planet that Maskull, who is the protagonist, investigates is like any other part. Maskull goes through a series of strange, compulsive, dreamlike adventures, which nevertheless are vividly real despite their nightmarish quality. As one reads on, one begins to realize that the book is a sort of Pilgrim's Progress in reverse, the end of which is not salvation but death. Each adventure exemplifies some ethical concept: passionless love of beauty and self-sacrifice; passionate will and selfishness; duty and asceticism ; the "real world" of cause and effect; a "dream world" of pure, unadulterated sex; and so on. Some of the episodes seem completely meaningless, yet even they are fascinating. Indeed, the book is a mystic, "unsane" maze of symbols, of abstracts made real by the demonic imagination of the author. It is perhaps this unrelieved obscurity of purpose and story line that has kept the book almost unknown in the science fantasy world. Many readers may well wonder what the shouting (mine, that is) is all about. Yet for somber magnificence of descriptive power and for an almost mesmeric ability to keep the reader going, whether he knows where or not, the book is an unforgettable experience, even though it is not really science fiction at all. I hope that some American publisher will have the daring to reprint it. I suspect it would sell, obscurity and all. Russell. Fantasy Press, Inc., # long-held opinion that Eric Frank Russell, quietly and without much to-do, has become one of the very best writers of mature science fiction of our time. Of the nine novelets and short stories in the book, only one is, to my mind, poor. That is "Second Genesis," the last story in the volume. Two or three others are a bit on the frothy side. "Homo Saps," for instance, originally published under the pseudonym of Webster Craig, is hardly a momentous tale, wryly humbling for the human ego though its point is. But, in general, the stories have depth of perception and real maturity of viewpoint, and are told with all the mastery of a bom storyteller. In addition to the two mentioned, the book contains "First Person Singular," "The Witness," "The Timid Tiger," "Last Blast," "A Little Oil," "Rainbow's End," and the somewhat overcoincidental "The Undecided" -- which nevertheless is a moving vision of "all life" (not "all men") will be brothers. None of the stories has been anthologized elsewhere, so that the book becomes an essential addition to any library of topgrade science fiction. Andre Norton . World Publishing Co., #-" fiction novel for young people has to even greater a degree than the first two the merits and defects of her approach to the problem of writing for youth. On the asset side, she has written a genuinely exciting adventure. The first half deals with the efforts of a secret group of scientists and technicians to build and launch a starship in a post-atomic-war world where science is feared and fought, and "The Peacemen," ignorant and superstition-ridden dictators, rule the world. The second half tells of the efforts of the starship's crew to establish themselves on the new planet of a far star to which the ship had taken them. It is also, like Miss Norton's previous books, inherently a strong plea for peace and brotherhood among men. But the other side of the ledger shows an entirely unwarranted amount of cruelty and almost sadistically contrived bloodshed during the course of the story that I feel detracts considerably from its value. It is completely possible to write a strong and adventuresome anti-utopia and spaceflight tale of tomorrow without such a fascinated emphasis on brutality, and I wish Miss Norton would learn the technique. The book is, frankly, a thriller, hard to put down. But I would recommend it to the young only with reservations. It is hardly for the impressionable teen-ager, any more than are some of the bloodier comic books. lications , Inc., #c somehow empty science fantasies comprise this paperback original, and offer the reader a pleasant but hardly rewarding couple of hours' reading. There are no copyright credits, so that original magazine sources are unrevealed. Three of the tales have been anthologized previously, according to my records -- which may well be incomplete. I found two of the stories of considerable interest: "The Last Outpost" and "The World of with subjective visions of the future which may or may not eventually turn out to be true, and both are vividly horrid. The rest of the tales seemed to me to be of only passing interest. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paper bound books at #c each up; also details of my I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue proposed Mail Science Fiction Library Magazines. Send me your want Hats without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. joy ride Men or machines -- something had to give -- though not necessarily one or fhe other. Why not both? (historian's note: The following statements are extracted from depositions taken by the Commission of Formal Inquiry appointed by the Peloric Rehabilitation Council, a body formed as a provisional government in the third month of the Calamity . ) X M Y name is Andrews, third assistant vice president in charge of maintenance for Cybernetic Publishers. It is not generally known that all the periodical publications for the world were put out by Cybernetics. We did not conceal the monopoly deliberately, but we found that using the names of other publishing houses helped to give our magazines an impression of variety. Of course, we didn't want too much variety, either; only the tried and tested kind. Cybernetics gained its monopoly by cutting costs of production. It had succeeded in linking electronic calculators to photocopying machines. Through this combination, all kinds of texts and illustrations could be produced automatically. the calculators, produced articles and stories of standard styles and substance. Market analysts in the research division designed the formulas for the punch cards. An editing machine shuffled the cards before giving them to the calculating machines. The shuffling produced enough variation in the final product to suggest novelty to the reader without actually presenting anything strange or unexpected. Once the cards were in the machine, they set off electronic impulses which, by a scanning process, projected photographic images of type and illustrations to a ribbon of paper. This ribbon ran through a battery of xerographic machines to reproduce the exact number of copies specified by the market indicator. Everything worked smoothly without the necessity for thought, which, as you know, is expensive and often wasteful. In the second week of the Calamity, one machine after another seemed to go out of order. I couldn't tell whether the trouble was in the cards, in the research office, or in the machines. First, one produced something entitled "A Critique of the Bureaucratic Culture Pattern." Then another would give out nothing but lyric poems. A third simply printed obvious gibberish, the letters F-R-E-E-D-O-M. And one of our oldest machines ran off a series of limericks of a decidedly pungent flavor. I did all I could to straighten them out. Even our cleaning compounds were analyzed for traces of alcohol. But we weren't able to locate the trouble. And we didn't dare shut off the power because that would have backed up our continuous stream of pulp and paper all the way to Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia. There didn't seem to be anything to do but let the publications go on through to the distribution center. Before they were returned to the pulp mills, some of the publications reached private hands and created something of a stir, especially the limericks. One of them went something like this: "There was a young... (Passage defaced.) officer emeritus on the Extrapolated Parkway. The Parkway was equipped with the usual electronic controls to propel cars magnetically, to maintain a safe distance between all cars, and to hold them automatically in their proper lanes. The controls also turned cars off the Parkways at the proper exit, according to the settings on the individual automobile's direction-finder. On the ninth day of the Calamity, the controls became erratic. Cars ran off the highway at the wrong exits, even though their direction-finders seemed to be in good order. Many turned around in circles at entrances to the Parkway and failed to enter. Drivers abandoned cars in despair and actually made their way on foot. Those who remembered how to steer by hand, mainly persons with obsolete cars, were able to travel by using back country roads. It was almost like old times, when we used to have accidents. Meanwhile, I kept getting radio calls from motorists whose cars were trapped on the highway. They were unable to turn off anywhere, even at the wrong exit. The magnetic propellers forced them to continue traveling a circular route for hours. I don't know what they expected me to do about it. They tried to say I tampered with the controls, but I had no such orders. There was nothing in the Traffic Officer's Manual to cover this situation, so I naturally did nothing. Anyway, I think that the trouble lay with the direction-finders in the cars rather than with the Highway Controls. For several days previously, a great many cars no matter how the automatic direction-finders were set, had been known to head for water if they weren't watched. Because of the fact that so many motorists had formed a habit of snoozing, once the car was in motion, there were a number of drownings. If we could have done anything to prevent them, we probably would have, though that wasn't our job. M Y name is Elder, sound director for Station # N #. We had noticed nothing unusual about our broadcasts until the third day of the Calamity. That was the first time one of our ultra-sensitive microphones began to pick up and broadcast speeches from unknown sources. Our third assistant monitor was the first to notice. He called and told me that interference was disrupting the program. A few minutes later, he said that the sponsor's message, as broadcast, did not conform to the copy which had been put on the tape. (To eliminate studio errors, all our broadcast programs were first recorded on electro-magnetic tape and edited before they were released. We checked and found that none of the commercial messages were going through properly. The fact is that they were broadcast very improperly. I tested the microphone myself and was reported as saying, "What difference does it make?" I had used the conventional testing phrases, "One, two, three, four," yet all three monitors swore that the other sentence had been uttered in my voice. We switched at once to broadcasting music exclusively as an alternative to verbal programs, but the microphones continued to pickup vocal interference. The voices were of many kinds and not always distinct. They sounded sincere and the words were plain, but I could not discern any meaning in them. F OR a while, until the Calamity affected wire communications, too, we received telephone comments from our audience. A few people complained about the confusion, but most asked us to turn off the music and let the voices come through clearly. One of the listeners said to us, "I haven't heard men speak their minds so plainly since the morning Grandma wrecked Grandpa's new helicopter." TlTY name is Wilson. I manned the remote control panel for the Duplicator Construction Company. As you know, we directed a battery of building machines which erected mass housing projects. I directed only the destination of our machines. Once I sent them to a site, they completed their work automatically with the materials installed at our supply depot. A single machine could prepare a site and erect a complete house in one day. With an army of # machines, our firm had succeeded in building as many houses as there was room for, and we had started on the demolition of our original buildings for replacement with the modem economy-size model. This made room for three families where one had lived before. We started this replacement program the week before the Calamity. The first hint of trouble was a call from a checker to the front office. I happened to be there when he appeared on the vidscreen and said that one of our machines had built a Chinese pagoda. He seemed to think it was funny. Then we began to receive other reports. Our machines were building grape arbors, covered bridges, Give the Gift You'd Like to Receive See next page  Very Special Christmas Offers I Subscription I year # Issues # # different during Each additions? gift the . ear# Both for # subscription Additional Additional for one year  # subscriptions subscriptions # # so. #I m m Please fill out all the information on the order blank below and mail in with your check today. If you would prefer not defacing your magazine send your order in on plain paper, but all orders must be in before Dec. #, #. The twelve month gift you yourself would like to receive. It is a perfect gift to give your friends. We will acknowledge your gift with a handsome Science Fiction Gift Card Announcement with your name as the donor. Rush your order in today. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. enclose Offer# We#... cloisters, music halls, green houses, dancing pavilions and hunting lodges. One machine was not building at all, but had gone on a rampage, clearing ground where we had just completed one thousand of the new economy-size dwelling units. The machine was dynamited by our emergency squad. HTY name is Fisher. On the first day of the Calamity, I was a member of an audience which had been employed by the Spectacle Commission to observe the start of the Forty-Ton-ShovelCross Continent Ditch Digging Contest. This was the first time that power shovels of this size had been used to dig a ditch more than a thousand miles long. I was very proud to be in that audience. The contest started on time. The shovels were marshaled and on their marks at the city line. The Mayor fired a disarmed war rocket as the signal to start. And then the shovels, instead of biting into the dirt, turned at right angles and began to chew a path through the paid audience. This was not called for in the contract and many hired spectators ran away in fright, but a few of us had enough professional pride to stand by. We watched as the shovels cut an irregular path through streets, parks and open lots in the city snapping at everything in their way until they reached the waterfront. I thought they would stop at the docks. The leaders did pause, until all the shovels had come abreast. Then, as if they had a common impulse, they rolled into the harbor and sank in unison. As I later said to my wife, it was quite extraordinary. M Y name is Danville. I was watching a colorvision program on the first day of the Calamity. The program was a wrestling match between a woman and a bear. The bear was winning when the screen went dark. The announcer's voice faded and I heard what sounded like the chatter of my neighbors. When the screen lit up again, it showed my own home. The door opened to reveal the hallway to the dining room, where I could see my wife sewing a patch on my son's pants. Then I saw my daughter experimenting on fudge in the food laboratory and my boy working on a bomb model. What surprised me most was a picture of myself staring at myself on the screen. This wasn't very interesting to me, so I tried some of the other stations. No matter where I tuned in, though, I found myself looking at a part of my own home. I wrote a letter of complaint to the Universal Program Commission, but never even got an answer. T AM sorry that I do not remember my name. I have been employed a long time in the Classified Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and have been under security orders to speak to no one except in answer to official queries. As I am the only scholar in my field -- the polarity of the positron -- I have never been asked for information. If I had been, perhaps I would not have forgotten my name, but I cannot be sure. I don't know whether the replies are signed. I could have prevented the Calamity. I tried. I risked my life in the attempt. But at the moment when it seemed I might succeed, something happened which I must try to explain. First let me tell you why I knew what would happen. My studies of minute particles let me to believe that machines might exert some form of choice. Simply because aggregates have always behaved predictably, I could not assume they always would. Even though the masses of men behaved as expected, I remember that, in my grandfather's time, individual persons frequently departed from established courses. What the individual could do, I felt the mass or the machine might do. As you know, these were subversive views, running directly counter to the cult of the Statisticians, which was based entirely on the predictability of mass behavior. The cult of the Statisticians was strong because it produced results. By employing Statisticians, the contending armies in the Peripheral Wars predicted each other's movements so accurately that they eliminated the possibility of surprise. Thus the Statisticians produced the military impasse which destroyed the prestige of political leadership. From that time on, Statisticians filled the posts of government. The success of the Statisticians proved their undoing. They claimed that they could create a perfect system without conflict or accident. They fondly believed that with the feedback in the electron brain, they could anticipate and correct all deviations in behavior, human or mechanical. They might have succeeded, if not for a fundamental error. I discovered this error as soon as the plans for the fiscal century were published. The design of the electron brain had completely ignored the polarity of the positron. In the total fiscal complex, this factor permits any aggregate to choose its own course. But the error was not immediately obvious to the Statisticians. It regained subtle and concealed until multiplied beyond control. N aturally, i prepared a report to predict to my chiefs the dangers embedded in this plan for a perfect world. I predicted that the machines would make their own derisions, even though most men long ago had lost that power. I even warned them that the ancient concept of "free will," now forbidden, would return to destroy them. These were the facts I offered. The report was never delivered. I'd hardly put my seal on the document when the automatic security guard Closed in. The document was seized and I was bound gagged and thrown onto a conveyor belt. I saw myself on the way to the eraser. Only the polarity of the positron saved me. Desperately, on my way out of the laboratory, I kicked a single switch. Instead of taking me to my punishment, the conveyor belt converted itself into a joy ride. The gag fell out. My bonds dissolved. The Calamity had begun. The joy ride carried me to witness many of the events reported to this Commission. And then it tossed me directly into the center of the office of the Chiefs. I had one more opportunity to tell my story, to save the system. Given a second choice, I reconsidered. Had a perfect system been to my taste, I'd have died cheerfully to save it. But the Calamity excited me. I relished its surprises and adventures, even its hazards. I remember the old peasant proverb, "When life is perfect, it is time to die." And I decided I'd rather live. historian's note: At this point, the Commission abruptly closed its hearings. The unnamed physicist was charged with treason and ordered executed on the spot. His life was saved, however, by Rioters representing the New Disorder, which, upon seizing power, decreed that the Calamity should henceforth be called the Blessing. The physicist was rewarded by being made head of the government. He served two distinguished terms as President Nameless, which was the origin of the Presidential title of address, " Your N amelessness. ,t The Commission, of course, was sent to Erasure. Collector's Item Being trapped in the s teaming h -- l of Venus is no excuse for forgetting one's manners -- but anyone abducted, marooned, tricked, kept from tea might welt crack under the strain! to know," Professor "f Bernardi said, gazing pensively after the lizard man as. he bore the shrieking form of Miss Anspacher off in his scaly arms, "is whether he is planning to eat her or make love to her. Because, in the latter instance, I'm not sure we should interfere. It may be her only chance." "Carl!" his wife cried indignantly. "That's a horrid thing to say! You must rescue her at once!" "Oh, I suppose so," he said, then gave his wife a nasty little grin that he knew would irritate her. "It isn't that she's unattractive, my dear, in case you hadn't noticed, though she's pretty well past the bloom of youth -- " "Will you stop making leering noises and go save her or not?" "I was coming to that. It's just that she persists in using her Ph.D. as a club to beat men into respectful pulps. Men don't like being beaten into respectful pulps, whether by a man or a woman. Now if she'd only learned that other people have feelings -- " "If you don't stop lecturing and go, I will!" his wife threatened. "All right, all right," he said wearily. "Come on, Mortland." T HE two scientists slogged through the steamy, odorous jungle of Venus and soon reached the lizard-man, who, weighed down by his captive, had not been able to travel as fast. "You blast him," the professor told Mortland. "Try not to hit Miss Anspacher, if you can manage it." "Er -- I've never fired one of these things before," Mortland said. "Can't stand having my eardrums blasted. However, here goes." He pointed his weapon at the lizardlike creature in a gingerly manner. "Ah -- hands up," he ordered. "Only fair to give the -- well, blighter a sporting chance," he explained to Professor Bernardi. To their amazement, the lizard-man promptly dropped Miss Anspacher into the lavender-colored mud and put up his hands. Miss Anspacher gave an indignant yelp. "Seems intelligent in spite of the kidnaping," Mortland commented. "But how does he happen to understand English? We're the only expedition ever to have reached Venus... that I know of, anyway." He and the professor stared at each other in consternation. "There may have been a secret expedition previously and perhaps they left a -- a base or something, which would explain why -- " "If you two oafs would stop speculating, you might help me out of here!" Miss Anspacher remarked in her customary snappish tone. Professor Bernardi leaped forward to obey. "You don't have to pull quite so hard! I haven't taken root yet!" She came out of the mud with a sound like two whales kissing. She brushed hopelessly at her once-white blouse and shorts. "Oh, dear, I look a mess!" Professor Bernardi did not comment, being engaged in slapping at a small winged creature -- about the size of a bluejay, but looking like a cross between a bat and a mosquito -- that seemed interested in taking a bite out of him. It escaped his flapping hand and flew to the top of Mortland's sun helmet, where it glared at the professor. "Since you seem to understand English," Miss Anspacher said to the lizard-man through a mouthful of hairpins, "perhaps you will be so kind as to explain the meaning of this outrage?" "I was smitten," the alien replied suavely. "Passion made me forget myself." Professor Bernardi looked thoughtfully at him. "A prior expedition isn't the answer. It wouldn't have troubled to educate you so thoroughly. Therefore, the explanation is that you pick up English by reading our minds. Correct?" The lizard-man turned an embarrassed olive. "Yes." N OW that he was able to give the creature a more thorough inspection, Bernardi saw that he really didn't look too much like a lizard. He definitely appeared to be wearing clothes of some kind, which, in the Venusian heat, indicated a particularly refined degree of civilization -- unless, of course, the squamous skin protected him from the heat as well as the humidity. More than that, though, he was humanoid in almost a Hollywood way. He had a particularly fine profile and an athletic physique, which, oddly, his scales seemed to enhance, much like a movie idol dressed in finemeshed Medieval armor. Naturally, he had a tail, but it was as well proportioned as a kangaroo's, though shorter and more graceful, and it struck Professor Bernardi as a particularly handsome and useful gadget. For one thing, the people from Earth were standing uncomfortably in the slippery mud, while the lizard-man was using his tail much in the fashion of a spectator stool, leaning back against it almost in a sitting position, with his armor-shod feet supporting him comfortably. For another, the tail undoubtedly served for balance and the added push of a walking stick and perhaps for swift attack or getaway. Very practical and attractive, the professor concluded -- too bad Man had relinquished his tail when climbing down from the trees. "Thank you," the saurian said with uneasy modesty, looking at him. "Good of you to think so. You are a fairly intelligent species, aren't you?" "Fairly the professor acknowledged, preoccupied with a clever idea. Perhaps existence on Venus wasn't going to be as unpleasant as he had anticipated. "From reading my mind, you know what this blaster can do, don't you?" "I'm afraid so." "Then you know what I expect of you?" "Yes, sahib. I'se cornin', massa. To hear is to obey, effendi." The creature turned and went briskly back toward the camp, leaving the others to stumble after him. Mrs. Bernardi gave a shriek as his handsome scaled form emerged from the greenish-white underbrush, haloed in luminous yellow mist. Algol, the ship's cat, prudently took sanctuary behind her, then peered out to see what was going on and whether there was likely to be anything in it for him. "This is our native bearer," Professor Bernardi explained as the three scientists burst out of the jungle. "My name is Jrann-Pttt." The creature bowed low. "At your service, madame." "Oh, Carl!" Mrs. Bernardi clapped her hands. "He's just perfect! So thoughtful of you to find one that speaks English! I do hope you can cook, Pitt?" "I will do my best, madame." way through the mud toward the saurian, sniffed him with judicial deliberation; then, deciding that anyone who smelled so much like the better class of fish must be All Right, rubbed against his legs. "Well," remarked Miss Anspacher, using the side of the spaceship as a mirror by which to redden her somewhat prissy lips, "that makes it practically unanimous, doesn't it?" "All except Professor Bernardi," said Jrann-Pttt, looking at the scientist with what might have been a smile. "He doesn't like me." "I see that your telepathic powers are not quite accurate," the professor returned. "I do not dislike you; I distrust you." "The fact that the two terms are not entirely synonymous in your language would argue a certain degree of incipient civilization," the lizard-man observed. "You know, Carl," Mrs. Bernardi whispered, "he has an awfully funny way of talking, for a native." "Frankly I don't like this at all, Professor," Captain Greenfield said, mopping his brow with a limp handkerchief. "If I hadn't been off looking for a better berth for the ship -- all this mud worries me -- this'd never have happened." "You mean you would have let the lizard get away with Miss Anspacher?" The big man's face flushed crimson. "I don't think that's funny, Professor." Bernardi quickly changed the subject, for he realized that the captain, being by far the most muscular of the party, was not a man to trifle with. "Tell me, Greenfield, did you succeed in finding a better spot for the ship? I must admit I'm worried about that mud myself." "Only remotely dry spot around is an outcropping 'bout two kilometers away," Greenfield said grudgingly. He shifted his camp stool in a futile search for shade. Even though the sun never penetrated the thick layer of clouds, the yellow light diffused through them was blinding. "Might be big enough, but it's not level. Could blast it smooth, but that'd take at least a week -- Earth time." Bernardi pulled his damp shirt away from his body. "Well, I daresay we'll be all right where we are, if we're not assailed by any violent forces of nature. On Earth, this might be a monsoon climate." "If you ask m, that monster is more of a danger than any monsoon." Bernardi sighed. Although by far the most competent officer available for the job of spaceship captain, Greenfield was not quite the man he would have chosen to be his associate for months on end. Still, beggars -- as Miss Anspacher might have eloquently put it -- could not be choosers. "What makes' you say that?" he asked, trying to set an example of tolerance. "Don't like the idea of him cooking for us," the captain said stubbornly. "Might poison us all in our beds." "Well, don't eat in your bed," suggested Mortland, strolling out of the airlock in the company of the cat. Algol, however, finding that the spot beside the captain's camp stool was as dry as anything could be on Venus, decided to turn back. "fTiHE difficulty is easily overcome, Captain," the professor said, still holding on to his patience. "You can continue to cook your own meals from the tinned and packaged foods on board ship. The rest of us will eat fresh native foods prepared by Jrann-Pttt." "But why," Miss Anspacher interrupted as she emerged from the airlock with a large cast-iron skillet, "should you think JrannPttt wants to poison us?" Both men rose from their stools. "Stands to reason he'd consider us his enemies, Miss Anspacher," the captain said. "After all, we -- as a group, that is -- captured him." "Hired him," Professor Bernardi contradicted. "I've telepathically arranged to pay him an adequate salary. In goods, of course; I don't suppose our money would be of much use to him. And I think he's rather glad of the chance to hang around and observe us conveniently." "Observe us!" Greenfield exclaimed. "You mean he's spying out the land for an attack? Let's prepare our defenses at once!" "I doubt if that's what he has in mind," Professor Bernardi said judiciously. "He may be staying because he wants to be near me," Miss Anspacher blurted. Overcome by this unmaidenly admission, she reddened and rushed from them, calling, "Yoo-hoo, Jrann-Pttt! Here is the frying pan!" Algol woke up instantly and followed her. "Frying" was one of the more important words in his vocabulary. Captain Greenfield stared across the clearing after them, then turned back to Bernardi with a frown. "I don't like to see one of our girls mixed up with a lizard -- and a foreign lizard at that." But his face too clearly betrayed a personal resentment. "Don't tell me you have a -- a fondness for Miss Anspacher, Captain," Professor Bernardi exclaimed, genuinely surprised. Undeniably Miss Anspacher -- although no longer in her first youth -- was a handsome woman, but he would not have expected her somewhat cerebral type to appeal to the captain. On the other hand, she was the only unattached woman in the party and they were a long way from home. Greenfield picked a fleck of dried violet mud from the side of the ship and avoided Bernardi's eye. "One of the reasons I came along," he said almost bashfully. "Thought I'd have the chance to be alone with her now and again and impress her with, with... "Your sterling qualities?" Bernardi suggested. The I captain flashed him a glance of mingled gratitude and resentment. "And now this damned lizard has to come along!" "Cheer up, Captain," said the professor. "I'll back you against a lizard any time." of Venus had deepened into night and it could never really be cool there by terrestrial standards, the temperature was almost comfortable. Everything was quite black, except for the pallid purple campfire glowing through the darkness; the clouds that perpetually covered the surface of the planet prevented even the light of the stars from reaching it. "Tell me more about the crossversus the parallel-cousin relationships in your culture, JrannPttt," Miss Anspacher breathed, wriggling her camp stool closer to the saurian's. "Anthropology is a great hobby of mine, you know. How do your people feel about exogamy?" "I'm afraid I'm rather exhausted, dear lady," he said, using one arm to mask a yawn, and one to surreptitiously wave away the saurian head that was peering out of the underbrush. "I shouldn't like to give a scientist like yourself any misinformation that might become a matter of record." "Of course not," she murmured. "You're so considerate." A pale face appeared in the firelight like some weird creature of darkness. Terrestrial and extraterrestrial both started. "Miss Anspacher," the captain growled, "I'd like to lock up the ship, so if you wouldn't mind turning in -- " Miss Anspacher pouted. "You've interrupted such an interesting conversation. And I don't see why you have to lock up the ship. After all, the night is three hundred and eighty-five hours long. We don't sleep all that time and it would be a shame to be cooped up." "I'm going to try to rig up some floodlights," Greenfield explained stiffly, "so we won't be caught like this again. Nobody bothered to tell me the day equals thirty-two of ours, so that half of it would be night." "Then I won't see you for almost two weeks of our time, Jrann-Pttt? Are you sure you wouldn't like to spend the rest of the night in our ship? Plenty of room, you know." "No, thank you, dear lady. The jungle is my natural habitat. I should feel stultified by walls and a ceiling. Don't worry -- I shan't run away." "Oh, I'm not worried," Miss Anspacher said coyly, throwing a stick of wood on the fire. "Small riddance if he does." "Captain Greenfield!" That part of the captain's face not concealed by his piratical black beard turned red. "Well, if he can read our minds, he knows damn well what I'm thinking, anyway, so why be hypocritical about it?" "That's right -- he is a telepath, isn't he?" Miss Anspacher's face grew even redder than the captain's. "I forgot he... It is getting late. I really must go. Good night, Jrann-Pttt." "Good night, dear lady." The saurian bowed low over her hand. Leaning on the captain's brawny arm, Miss Anspacher ploughed through the mud to the ship, followed by the mosquito-bat and Algol, who had been toasting themselves more or less companionably at the fire. The door to the airlock clanged behind all four of them. PT#HE other saurian's head appeared again from the bush. Jrann-Pttt, the insistent thought came, shall I rescue you now? Why, Dfar-Lll? I am not a prisoner. I'm quite free to come and go as I please. But let's get away from the strangers' ship while we communicate. They do have a certain amount of lowgrade perception and might be able to sense the presence of another personality. At any rate, they might look out of a port and see you. Keeping the illuminator on low beam, Dfar-Lll led the way through the bushes. Seems to me you're going to an awful lot of trouble just to get zoo specimens, the youngster protested, disentangling its arms from the embrace of an amorous vine. There's really no reason for carrying on the work since Lieutenant Merglyt-Ruuu... passed on. Jrann-Pttt sat down on a fallen log and, tucking up his graceful tail, signaled his junior to join him. In the event that we do decide to return to base, some handsome specimens might serve to offset the lieutenant's demise. Return to base? But I thought we were... We haven't found swamp life pleasant, have we? After all, there's no real reason why we shouldn't go back. Is it our fault that Merglyt-Ruuu happened to meet with a fatal accident? We-ell... but will the commandant see it that way? On the other hand, if we don't go back, wouldn't it be a good idea to attach ourselves to an expedition that, no matter how alien, is better equipped for survival than we? And carrying out our original purpose seemed the best way of getting to meet these strangers informally, as it were. They are unquestionably intelligent life-forms then? After a fashion. Jrann-Pttt yawned and rose. But why are we sitting here? Let's start back to our camp. We will be able to converse more, comfortably. They made their way through the jungle -- now walking, now wading where the mud became water. Small creatures with hardly any thoughts scurried before them as they went. The commandant may have already made contact with their rulers, Dfar-Lll suggested, springing forward to illuminate the way. In that case, we couldn't hope to remain undiscovered for long. Oh, these creatures are not Venusians. There's no intelligent life here. They hail from the third planet of this system and, according to their thoughts, this is the only vessel that was capable of traversing interplanetary space. So we needn't worry about extradition treaties or any other official annoyance s. If they're friendly, why didn't you spend the night in their ship? It certainly looks more comfortable than our collapsible moslak -- which, by the way, collapsed while you were gone. I hope we'll be able to put it up again ourselves. I must say this for the lieutenant -- he was good at that sort of thing. Jrann-Pttt made a gesture of distaste. He was unfortunately good at other things, too. But let's not discuss him. I'm not staying with the strangers because I want to pick up one or two little, things -- mostly some of our food to serve them. I used up all the supplies in my pack and I want them to think we're living off the land. They believe me to be a primitive and it's best that they should until I decide just how I'm going to make most efficient use of them. Besides, I didn't want to leave you alone. The younger saurian sniffed skeptically. nardi said, keeping to leeward of the tablecloth the lizard man was efficiently shaking out of the airlock, "I've never had a -- an employee as competent as you." But the word she had in mind, of course, was "servant." "I do wish you'd come back to Earth with us." "Perhaps you would compel me to come?" he suggested, as Algol and the mosquito-bat entered into hot competition to catch the crumbs before they sank into the purple ooze. "Oh, no! We'd want you to come as our guest -- our friend." Naturally, her thoughts ran, a house guest would be expected to help with the washing up and lend a hand with the cooking -- and, of course, we wouldn't have to pay him. Though my husband, I suppose, would requisition him as a specimen. I fully intend to go to Earth with them, Jrann-Pttt mused, but certainly not in that capacity. Nor would I care to be a specimen. I must formulate some concrete plan. The captain was crawling on top of the spaceship, scraping off the dried mud, brushing away the leaves and dust that marred its shining purity. The hot, humid haze that poured down from the yellow clouds made the metal surface a little hell. Yet it was hardly less warm on the other side of the clearing, where Miss Anspacher tried desperately to write up her notes on a table that kept sinking into the spongy ground, and hindered by the thick wind that had arisen half an hour before and which kept blowing her papers off. The sweet odor of the flowers tucked in the open neck of her already grimy white blouse suddenly sickened her and she flung them into the mud. "We won't be going back to Earth for a long time!" she called. Gathering up the purple stained papers, she came toward the others, little puffs of mist rising at each step. "We like it here. Lovely country." How could she think to please even the savage she fancied him to be by such an inanity, JrannPttt wondered. No one could possibly like that fetid swamp. Or was it not so much that she was trying to please him as convince herself? Was there some reason the terrestrials had for needing to like Venus. It hovered on the edge of the women's minds. If only it would emerge completely, he could pick it up, but it lurked in the shadows of their subconscious, tantalizing him. "I'd like to know when we're going to start putting up the shelters," Mrs. Bernardi said, pushing a streak of fog-yellow hair out of her eyes. "I can't stand being cooped up for another night on that ship." "You're planning to put up shelters -- to live outside of the ship?" This would seem to confirm his darkest suspicions. Even a temporary settlement would leave them too open to visitation from the commandant. What his attitude toward the aliens might be, Jrann-Pttt didn't know. He might consider them as specimens, as enemies or as potential allies. What his attitude toward Jrann-Pttt and his companion would be, however, the saurian knew only too well. Had they reported the lieutenant's demise immediately, it was possible the commandant might have been brought to believe it was an accident. Now he would unquestionably think Jrann-Pttt had killed Merglyt-Ruuu on purpose -- which was not true; how was Jrann-Pttt to know that the mud into which he'd knocked the lieutenant was quicksand? "Anything against putting up shelters?" Captain Greenfield growled from his perch. "Monster!" the mosquito-bat shrieked at the cat. "Monster! Monster!" barrassed silence. "The creature is not intelligent' Jrann-Pttt explained, smiling. "It merely has vocal apparatus that can reproduce a frequently heard word, like -- you have a bird, I believe, a -- " he searched their minds for the word -- a parrot." "Monster!" the mosquito-bat continued. "Monster! Monster!" "Shut up or I'll wring your neck!" the captain snarled. The mosquito-bat obeyed sullenly, apparently recognizing the threat in his tone. But the concept of "monster" hung heavily in the air between the terrestrials and the lizardman. They should not feel so bad about it, he thought, for they are the monsters themselves. But that would never occur to them and I can hardly reassure them by saying... "Don't worry," Professor Bernardi saic smoothly. "To him, it's we who are the monsters." ' A sudden gust of wind nearly whipped the tablecloth out of Jrann-Pttt's hands. He fought with it for a moment, glad of something tangible to contend with. "About the shelters," he said. "They might not stand up against a storm." "So this is monsoon country," Bernardi observed thoughtfully. "Do you know when the storms usually come, Jrann-Pttt?" The other shook his head. "Peculiar. There usually is a season for that sort of thing." "I... come from another part of the planet." "Storms here are bad, eh?" the captain commented, swinging himself down easily. "Frankly, that worries me. Ship's resting on mud as far as I can see, and if there's one thing I do know something about, it's mud. If it got any wetter, the ship might sink." "Maybe we should leave," Mrs. Bernardi suggested. "Go to another part of the planet where it's drier, or -- " she tried not to show the sudden surge of hope -- "leave for home and come back after the rainy season." There was a sudden silence, and Jrann-Pttt found himself able to pick up the answers to some of his questions from the alien minds. His worst fears were confirmed. Plan A was out. But something could still be done with these creatures. "Doesn't she know?" the captain demanded accusingly. "You brought her here without telling her?" Bernardi spread his hands wide in a futile gesture. "She should know; I've told her repeatedly. She just doesn't understand... or doesn't want to." "I know they'll forgive us," Mrs. Bernardi said stubbornly. "We -- you -- haven't done anything really wrong, so how could they do anything terrible to us? After all, didn't they refuse you the funds because they said you couldn't -- " "Shhh, Louisa," her husband commanded. Jrann-Pttt smiled to himself. -- "do it," she went on. "And you did. So they were wrong and they'll have to forgive us." "Tchaf" Miss Anspacher said. "Since when was there any fairness in justice?" "iTN the other hand," Mrs. " Bernardi continued, "we have no idea of how dangerous the storms here could be." "Very dangerous," Jrann-Pttt said. "For you, perhaps," the captain retorted. "Maybe not for us." "Now that's silly," Miss Anspacher said. "You can see that Jrann-Pttt is much more -- " she blushed -- "sturdily built than we are." "I don't mean that we could face it without protection," the captain replied angrily. "Naturally I mean that our superior technology could cope with the effects of any storm." "Well, Captain, we'll have to put that superior technology to use at once," the professor told him. "You'd better start blasting that rock." Laden with equipment and malevolent thoughts, the captain trudged off into the murky jungle. The others would not even offer to help. Confounded scientists; they certainly took his status as captain seriously. He wished, for a disloyal moment, that he hadstayed on Earth. The quiet routine of a test pilot had prepared him for nothing like this. Were Miss Anspacher and adventure worth it? At the moment, he thought not. But he was on Venus and it was too late to change his mind. Jrann-Pttt followed him into the jungle, keeping some distance behind, for he had good reason to suspect that Greenfield would take his warm interest in terrestrial technology for plain spying. Or, worse yet, he might try to press the lizard-man into service; Jrann-Pttt felt he had demeaned himself quite enough already. "Have you noticed," Miss Anspacher asked, pushing the mass of damp brown hair off her neck as she came alongside him, "how the -- the smell -- " a scientist does not mince words -- "of the swamp has grown stronger?" Jrann-Pttt halted. He had a good idea of what the captain's reactions to the sight of himself and Miss Anspacher arriving hand-in-hand would be. "Yes, it is getting rather overpowering. Perhaps, for a lady of your delicate sensibilities, it would be best to -- " "I can stand a bad smell just as well as a male -- any male!" "Perhaps even better," JrannPttt said, "for I was on the verge of turning back myself." "Oh," she said, appeased. "Well, in that case, I'll go back with you... how quiet everything is!" it would never be quiet because of the stream of jangled thoughts constantly pouring into the back of his mind from everything sentient that surrounded him. For a moment, he wondered what it would be like to be nontelepathic like the terrestrials, to have peace from the clamor of confused impressions, emotions and ideas that persistently beat at his mind. But that would be wondering how it was to be deaf to avoid discord, or blind to shut out ugliness. "The lull before the storm, I suppose," she said brightly. Now is his opportunity to kiss me -- only perhaps they don't have kissing in his society. His mouth does seem to be the wrong shape. And if I kissed him, it might violate a taboo. During their short absence, the citrine clouds that closed off the sky had changed to a sinister umber. It was now almost as dusky in the clearing as in the jungle itself, when Jrann-Pttt and Miss Anspacher returned and joined the others. Professor Bernardi stood looking up with sharp gray eyes at a sky he could not see. "I hope Greenfield can finish the blasting more quickly than he estimated," he muttered. "Will we hear the noise way out here, Carl?" his wife worried nervously. "Only two kilometers away? Of course we'll hear it. I do wish you wouldn't always be asking such stupid questions." She shivered. "Well, I hope they get it over with right away. If we just have to sit here waiting and waiting and waiting, I'll go mad. I know I will." "You should try to keep your nerves in check, Louisa," Miss Anspacher snapped. Silly little fool. "At least I can control my glands!" Mrs. Bernardi flared back. Sex-starved spinster. "I shall make some tea, ladies," Jrann-Pttt interposed. "I'm sure we will all feel the better for it." Mrs. Bernardi smiled at him feebly. "You're such a comfort, Pitt. I don't know why you of all creatures should be the one to remind me of home." "Home," remarked Mortland, emerging from the airlock, "is where the heart is. Did I hear someone say 'tea'?" A S Jrann-Pttt hung the kettle over the fire, suddenly the air erupted in stunning violence of sound. The ground undulated under their feet and water slopped out of the kettle, almost putting out the fire that rose high to claw at it. Rivulets of thick, muddy liquid welled out of the ground and drabbled their feet. The women turned pale. Algol gave a faint cry and hid under Mrs. Bernardi's skirts, trembling, while the mosquito-bat tried to lift Mortland's toupee and hide in his hair. The ship itself quivered and seemed to jump slightly in the air, then returned to its resting place. All was quiet again, quieter than it had been before. Mortland anxiously gnawed his light mustache. "Better hurry with that tea, there's a good fellow. I'm violently allergic to loud noises." "They'll probably continue all day," the professor said with almost malevolent cheerfulness, "so you might as well get used to them." Who is he to have nerves? I am easily the most sensitive person here, but I manage to control myself. "I don't know how I'm going to stand it!" Mrs. Bernardi shrieked. "I just know something terrible is going to happen." "Please try to restrain yourself, Louisa," her husband ordered. "After it's over, you'll find we'll be much more comfortable and secure with the ship resting on rock." "If you ask me, that blast made it sink a little," Mortland said. "I wonder whether -- He was interrupted by a thrashing in the bushes. Dfar-Lll burst forth, shedding scales. Do not despair, Jrann-Pttt. I am here, ready to save you or die at your side. The women clutched each other. Miss Anspacher praying silently and fervently to Juno, Lakshmi, Freya, Isis and a host of other esoteric female deities she had picked up in the course of her avocational researches. "He seems to be one of JrannPttt's people," Bernardi observed, "so there should be nothing to fear." Dfar-Lll , you fool ! Jrann-Pttt ideated angrily. Nothing's wrong. They're just blasting out a better berth for their vessel. And now you've spoiled my plans. "What did you think at that poor little creature!" Mrs. Bernardi blazed. "He's crying!" And, sure enough, amethyst tears were oozing out of the young saurian's large, liquid eyes. I du-didn't mean any harm. "Monster!" Mrs. Bernardi accused Jrann-Pttt. "All men are monsters, whether they're aliens or not." "You're so right, Louisa!" Miss Anspacher exclaimed, regarding the younger creature in an almost kindly manner. Fm sorry, r-Lll, Jrann-Pttt apologized. I was upset by that noise, too. How could you possibly know what it was? Come, let me introduce you to the creatures. diffidently. Jrann-Pttt put a hand on the mossgreen shoulder. "Allow me to introduce my companion, Dfar-Lll," he said aloud. The youngster looked at him. Mrs. Bernardi thrust out her hand. "I'm very glad to meet you, Lil." Agitate it with one of yours. It's a courtesy. Don't let her see how repulsive she is to you. Remember, you're just as repulsive to her. Dfar-Lll offered a shy, sevenfingered hand. "Pleased... to meet you... ma'am," the young lizard squeaked. "Why, he's just a baby, isn't he?" Mrs. Bernardi asked. I amnot a baby! Dfar-Lll thought indignantly. At the end of this year, I shall celebrate my pre-maturity feast, or I would have. And furthermore -- There was another thunderous blast of sound. After the ground had stopped trembling, the six found themselves ankle-deep in muddy water. Algol, who was in considerably deeper than his ankles, mewed fretfully. Mrs. Bernardi picked him up and comforted him. "Perhaps blasting wasn't such a good idea," the professor muttered. "Maybe I should tell Greenfield to call a halt and we'll take our chances with the storm. As a matter of fa -- " "The ship!" Mortland cried. "It is sinking!" And the big metal ball slowly but visibly was indeed subsiding into the mud. "Stop it, somebody!" Miss Anspacher snapped in her customary schoolroom manner. The professor was pale, but he held on to his calm. "What can we do? Even if we could get the captain back in time, there's no way we can stop it. It's too heavy to pull out manually, and the engines, of course, are inside." As they watched in horror, the ship sank deeper and deeper, picking up momentum as more of it went under. With a loud, sucking sound, it vanished into the ooze. Muddy water gurgled over it and, where the ship had been, there was now a small lake. "This could be the beginning of a legend," Miss Anspacher murmured. "Or the end." There was another vibrant detonation. "Someone ought to go tell the captain there's no use blasting any more," Bernardi said wearily. "We have nothing to put on the rock when he smooths it off." He began to laugh. "I suppose you could call this poetic justice." And he went on laughing, losing a bit of his former self-control. There goes Plan B, Jrann-Pttt thought. A star of intensely bright green lightning split the clouds and widened to cover the visible expanse of sky. There was a planetshaking clap of thunder that made Greenfield's puny efforts sound like the snapping of twigs in comparison and it began to rain hard and fast. "TF only I hadn't gone and blasted that damn rock," the captain grumbled, squeezing water out of his shirt-tails, "we'd have been all right. Probably the storm wouldn't have done a thing to the ship except get it wet. If you can even call it a storm." "I can and I do," Jrann-Pttt replied, haughtily squeegeeing his wet scales. "All I said was that a storm might be coming up and it might be dangerous. How was I to know it would last only half an hour?" "Even the camp stools pulled through," Greenfield pointed out, "and you said shelters wouldn't stand up." "I only said they might not Can't you understand your own, language?" The fissure in the clouds had not quite closed yet and through it the enormous, blazing disk of the sun glared at them, twice as large as it appeared from Earth. It was a moot point as to whether they'd be dried out or steamed alive first. "Might as well collect whatever gear we have left and get it to higher ground," Miss Anspacher said efficiently. "Two feet of water won't do anything any good -- even those camp stools." "It's my belief you wanted this to happen," Greenfield accused Jrann-Pttt. "You wanted to get rid of us." "My dear fellow," Jrann-Pttt replied loftily, "the information I gave you was, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. However, I happen to be a professor of zoology and not a meteorologist. Apparently you people live out in the open like primitives," he continued, ignoring Dfar-Lll's admiring interjection, "and are accustomed to the vicissitudes of weather. I am a 'civilized creature; I live -- " or used to live -- "in an air-conditioned, lightconditioned, weather-conditioned city. It is only when I rough it on field trips like this to trackless parts of the -- globe that I am forced to experience weather. Even then, I have never before been caught in a situation like this." In fact, I was never before caught or I wouldn't be in this situation at all. "Oh, Jrann-Pttt," sighed Miss Anspacher, "I knew you couldn't be just an ordinary native!" "How did you get into this situation then?" Professor Bernardi asked. He had an unfortunate talent for going directly to the point. "The third member of our expedition died," Jrann-Pttt explained. "He was our dirigational expert. Our guide." "How did he happen to -- " "Are we just going to stand here chatting," Miss Anspacher demanded, "or are we going to do something about this?" "What can we do?" Mrs. Bernard! asked weakly. "We might just as well lie down and -- " "Never say die, Louisa," Miss Anspacher admonished. "I suggest we go to my camp to see what shape it's in," JrannPttt said, furiously putting together Plan C. "Some of the supplies there might prove useful." Captain Greenfield looked questioningly at Bemardi. The professor shrugged. "Might as well." "All right," the captain growled. "Let's pick up whatever we can save." could be rescued, the little safari was soon on its way. JrannPttt led, carrying Algol in his arms. Behind came Mortland, bearing a camp stool and the kettle into which he had tucked a tin of biscuits and intp which the mosquito-bat had' tucked itself, its orange eyes glaring out angrily from beneath the lid. Next came Mrs. Bemardi with her knitting, her camp stool and her sorrow. Dfar-Lll followed with two stools and the plastic tea set. Close behind was Miss Anspacher, with the sugar bowl, the earthenware teapot and an immense bound volume of the Proceedings of the Physical Society of Ameranglis for #. Professor Bemardi bore a briefcase full of notes and the table. The rain had damaged the latter's mechanism, so that its legs kept unfolding from time to time, to the great inconvenience of Captain Greenfield, who brought up the rear with the blasting equipment. Behind them and sometimes alongside them came something -- or someone- -- else. "Surely your camp must have been closer,, to ours than this," Miss Anspacher' finally remarked after they had been slogging through mud and water and pushing aside reluctant vegetation for over an Earth hour. "I am very much afraid," Jrann-Pttt admitted, "that our camp has been lost -- that is to say, inundated." "What are we going to do now?" the captain asked of the company at large. Professor Bernardi shrugged. "Our only course would seem to be making for one of the cities and throwing ourselves upon the na -- Jrann-Pttt's people's hospitality. If Professor Jrann-Pttt has even the vaguest idea of the direction in which his home lies, we might as well head that way." I wonder whether the natives could help us raise the ship. "I'm sure my people will be more than happy to welcome you," Jrann-Pttt said smoothly, "and to make you comfortable until your people send another ship to fetch you." The terrestrials looked at one another. Dfar-Lll looked at Jrann-Pttt. Professor Bernardi coughed. "That was the only spaceship we had," he admitted. "The first experimental model, you know." We don't expect to stay on this awful planet forever. After all, as Louisa says, the Government will have to forgive us. Public opinion and all that. "Oh," the saurian said. "Then we shall have the pleasure of your company until they build another?" There was silence. "We have the only plans," the professor said, gripping his briefcase more tightly. "I am the inventor of the ship, so naturally I would have them." If we brought back some specimens of Venusian life -- of intelligent Venusian life -- to prove we'd been here... "Matter of fact, old fellow," Mortland said, "we took all the plans with us so they couldn't build another ship and follow -- "Mortland!" the professor exclaimed. "But they're telepaths," Miss Anspacher said. "They must know already." the saurians. "I have... certain information," Jrann-Pttt admitted, "but I cannot understand it. You are in trouble with your rulers because they would not give you the funds, claiming space travel was impossible?" "That's right," Bernardi said. Not really specimens, you understand. Guests. "And you went ahead and appropriated the funds and materials from your government, since you were in a trusted position where you could do so?" Bernardi nodded. "Of course the question is now academic, for the ship is gone, but since you proved the possibility of space travel by coming here, wouldn't your government then dismiss the charges against you?"  "That's exactly what I keep telling him!" Mrs. Bernardi exclaimed. But her husband shook his head. "The law is inflexible. We have broken it and must be punished, even if by breaking it we proved its fundamental error." Why let him know our plans? Why, Jrann-Pttt, that sounds just like our own government, doesn't it? Yes, it does. We should be able to establish a very satisfactory mode of living with these strangers. "We'd hoped that after a year or so the whole thing would die down," Mortland explained frankly, "and we'd go back as heroes." "Do you know the way to your home, Jrann-Pttt?" the professor asked anxiously. "Since we were able to catch a glimpse of the sun, I think I can figure out roughly where we are. All we must do is walk some two hundred kilometers in that direction -- " he waved an arm to indicate the way -- "and we should be at the capital." "Will your people accept us as refugees?" Miss Anspacher demanded bluntly, "or will we be captives?" Which is what I'll bet the good professor is planning for you, if only he can figure some way to get you and, of course, ourselves back.  cept you as citizens and to receive the benefits of your splendid technology. Our laboratories will be placed at your disposal." "Well, that's better than we hoped for," the professor said, brightening. "We had expected to have to carve our own laboratories out of the wilderness. Now we shall be able to carry on our researches in comfort." No need to trouble the natives; we'll be able to raise the ship ourselves. Or build a new one. And I'll see to it personally that they have special quarters in the zoo with a considerable amount of privacy. "If I were you, I wouldn't trust him too far," the captain warned. "He's a foreigner." "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Captain!" Miss Anspacher said. "I, for one, trust Jrann-Pttt implicitly. Did you say this direction, Jrann-Pttt?" She stepped forward briskly. There was a loud splash and water closed over her head. forward to haul her out. "Well," she said, daintily coughing up mud, "I was wet to begin with, anyway." "You're a brave little woman, Miss Anspacher," the captain told her admiringly. "This sort of thing may present a problem," Professor Bernardi commented. "I hope that was only a pot-hole, that the water is not going to be consistently too deep for wading." "There might be quicksand, too," Mrs. Bernardi said somberly. "In quicksand, one drowns slowly." Dfar-Lll gave a start. Surely you don't intend to lead them back to base ? Precisely. The swamp is unfit for settlement. But to return voluntarily to captivity? Who mentioned anything about captivity? Assisted by our new friends, we have an excellent chance of taking over the ship and supplies by a surprise attack. But why should these aliens assist us? Jrann-Pttt smiled. Oh, I think they will. Yes, I have every confidence in Plan C. "I suggest," the professor said, ignoring his wife's pessimism, "that each one of us pull a branch from a tree. We can test the ground before we step on it, to make sure that there is solid footing underneath." "Good idea," the captain approved. He reached out the arm that was not occupied with Miss Anspacher and tugged at a tree limb. And then he and the lady physicist were both floundering in the ooze. "Well, really, Captain Greenfield!" she cried, refusing his aid in extricating herself. "I always thought you were at least a genacy !" "Wha -- what happened?" he asked as he struggled out of the mud. "Something pushed me; I swear it." seems the tree did not like your trying to remove a branch." "The tree!" Greenfield's pale blue eyes bulged. "You're joking!" "Not at all. As a matter of fact, I myself have been wondering why there were so many thought-streams and yet so few animals around here. It never occurred to me that the vegetation could be sentient and have such strong emotive defenses. In all my experience as a botanist, I -- " "I thought you were a zoologist," Bernardi interrupted. "My people do not believe in excessive specialization," the saurian replied. "Trees that think?" Mortland inquired incredulously. "They're not very bright," Jrann-Pttt explained, "but they don't like having their limbs pulled off. I don't suppose you would, either, for that matter." "I propose," Miss Anspacher said, shaking out her wet hair, "that we break up the camp stools and use the sticks instead of branches to help us along." "Good idea," the captain said, trying to get back into her good graces. "I always knew women could put their brains to use if they tried." She glared at him. "I thought we'd use the furniture to make a fire later," Mortland complained. "For tea, you know." "The ground's much too wet," Professor Bernardi replied. "And Resides," Miss Anspacher added, "I lost the teapot in that pot-hole." "But you managed to save the Proceedings of the Physical Society," Mortland snarled. "Serve you right if I eat it. And I warn you, if hard-pressed, I shall." "How will we cook our food, though?" Mrs. Bernardi demanded apprehensively. "It's a lucky thing, Mr. Pitt, that we have you with us to tell us which of the berries and things are edible, so at least we shan't starve." The visible portion of JrannPttt's well-knit form turned deeper green. "But I regret to say I don't know, Mrs, Bernardi. Those 'native' foods I served you were all synthetics from our personal stores. I never tasted natural foods before I met you." "And if the trees don't like our taking their branches," Miss Anspacher put in, "I don't suppose the bushes would like our taking their berries. Louisa, don't do that!" But Mrs. Bernardi, with her usual disregard for orders, had fainted into the mud. Pulling her out and reviving her caused so much confusion, it wasn't until then that they discovered Algol had disappeared. rpHE party had been trudging through mud and water and struggling with pale, malevolent vines and bushes and low-hanging branches for close to six Earth hours. All of them were tired and hungry, now that their meager supply of biscuits and chocolate was gone. "Remember, Carl," Mrs. Bernardi told her husband, "I forgive you. And I know I'm being foolishly sentimental, but if you could manage to take my body back to Earth -- " "Don't be so pessimistic." Professor Bernardi absent-mindedly leaned against a tree, then recoiled as he remembered it might resent being treated like an inanimate object. "In any case, we'll most likely all die at the same time." "I never did want to go to Venus, really," Mrs. Bernardi sniffled. "I only came, like Algol did, because I didn't have any choice. If you left me behind, I'd have had to bear the brunt of... Where is Algol?" She stared at Jrann-Pttt. "You were carrying him. What have you done with him?" The lizard-man looked at her in consternation. "He jumped out of my arms when you fainted and I turned back to help. I was certain one of the others had him." "He's dead!" she wailed. "You let him fall into the water and drown -- an innocent kitty that never hurt anybody, except in fun." "Come, come, Louisa." Her husband took her arm. "He was only a cat. I'm sure Jrann-Pttt didn't mean for him to drown. He was just so upset by your fainting that he didn't think... "Not Jrann-Pttt's fault, of course," Miss Anspacher said. "After all, we can't expect them to love animals as we do. But Algol was a very good sort of cat... "Keep quiet, all of you!" Jrann-Pttt shouted. "I have never known any species to use any method of communication so much in order to communicate so little. Don't you understand? I would not have assumed the cat was with one of you, if I had not subconsciously sensed his thought-stream all along. He must be nearby." Everyone was still, while Jrann-Pttt probed the dense underbrush that blocked their view on both sides. "Over here," he announced, and led the way through the thick screen of interlaced bushes and vines on the left. About ten meters farther on, the ground sloped up sharply to form a ridge rising a meter and a half above the rest of the terrain. The water had not reached its blunted top, and on this fairly level strip of ground, perhaps three meters wide, Algol had been paralleling their path in dry-pawed comfort. "Scientists!" Louisa Bernardi almost spat. "Professors! We could have been walking on that, too. But did anybody think to look for dry ground? No! It was wet in one place, so it would be wet in another. Oh, Algol -- " she reached over to embrace the cat -- "you're smarter than any socalled intelligent life-forms." He indignantly straightened a whisker she had crumpled. in delight as they attained the top of the ridge, "here are some dryish twigs! Don't suppose the trees want them, since they've let them fall. If I can get a fire going, we could boil some swamp water and make tea. Nasty thought, but it's better than no tea at all. And how long can one go on living without tea?" "We'll need some food before long, too," Professor Bernardi observed, putting his briefcase down on a fallen log. "The usual procedure, I believe, would be for us to draw straws to see which gets eaten -- although there isn't any hurry." "I'm glad then that we'll be able to have a fire," Mortland said, busily collecting twigs. "I should hate to have to eat you raw, Carl." Mr. Pitt and his little friend are delightful creatures, Mrs. Bernardi thought. So intelligent and so well behaved. But eating them wouldn't really be cannibalism. They aren't people. That premise works both ways, dear lady, Jrann-Pttt ideated. And I must say your species will prove tar easier to peel for the cooking pot. "Monster! What are you doing?" Mortland dropped his twigs and pulled the mosquito-bat away from a bush. "Don't eat those berries, you silly ass; the bush won't like it!" The mosquito-bat piped wrathfully. Jrann-Pttt probed with intentness. "You know, I rather think the bush wants its berries to be eaten. Somthing to do with -- er -- propagating itself. Of course it has a false impression as to what is going to be done with the berries, but the important fact is that it won't put up any resistance." "All right, old fellow." Mortland released the mosquitobat, which promptly flew back to the bush. "I'm not the custodian of your morals." "I wonder whether we could eat those berries, too," Professor Bernardi remarked pensively. "Carl!" Mrs. Bernardi's tearstained face flushed pink. "Why -- why, that's almost indecent!" "We eat beans, don't we?" Mortland pointed out. "They're seeds." "We also eat meat," Miss Anspacher added. There was silence. "I imagine," Mrs. Bemardi murmured, "it's because we never get to meet the meat socially." She avoided the saurians' eyes.  "We'd better see how Monster makes out, though," Miss Anspacher observed, replenishing her lipstick, "before we try the berries ourselves. The fact that the bush is anxious to dispose of them doesn't mean they can't be poisonous." "Why should Monster sacrifice himself for us?". Mortland retorted hotly, overlooking the fact that Monster's purpose in eating the berries was almost certainly not an altruistic one. "If we can risk his life, we can risk our own." He crammed a handful of berries into his mouth defiantly. "I say, they're good!" Algol sniffed the bush with disgust, then turned away. "See?" said Miss Anspacher. "They're undoubtedly poisonous. When he's really hungry, he isn't so fussy." She combed her hair. "But is he really hungry?" Bernardi asked suspiciously. "Come here, Algol. Nice kitty." He bent down and sniffed the cat's breath. The cat sniffed his interestedly. Their whiskers touched. "I thought so. Fish!" "VT'OU mean," Mrs. Bernardi shrieked, "that while we were struggling through that water, alternately starving and drowning by centimeters, that wretched cat has not only been walking along here dry as toast, but gorging himself on fish?" "Now, now, Mrs. Bernardi," Jrann-Pttt said. "Being a dumb animal, he wouldn't think of informing you about matters of which he'd assume that you, as the superior beings, would be fully cognizant." "You might have told us there were fish on this planet, Mr. Pitt." "Dear lady, there is something I feel I should tell you. I am not -- " "They're here on the other side of the ridge," Greenfield called, bending over and peering through the foliage. "The fish, I mean." "The pools look shallow," Bernardi said, also bending over. "The fish should be easy enough to catch. Might even be able to get them in our hands." He reached out to demonstrate, proving the error of both his theses, for the fish slipped right through his fingers and, as he grabbed for them, he lost his balance, toppled over the side of the ridge into the mud and water below and began to disappear, showing beyond a doubt that the pools were deeper than he had thought. "Carl, what are you doing?" Mrs. Bernardi peered into the murky depths where her husband was threshing about. "Why don't you come out of that filthy mud?" His voice, though muffled, was still acid. "It isn't mud, my dear. It's quicksand!" "Rope!" the captain exclaimed, grabbing a coil. "Hold on, chaps!" cried a squeaky voice. "I'm coming to the rescue!" A stout twelve-foot vine plunged out of the shadows and wrapped one end of itself around a tree -- disregarding the latter's violent objections -- and the other end around Professor Bernardi's thorax, which was just disappearing into the mud. "Now if one or two of you would haul away, we'll soon have him out all shipshape and proper. Heave ho! Don't be afraid of hurting me; my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure." "It's that vine!" Dfar-Lll exclaimed. "So that's what has been following us all along!" #vegetable's thinking," Professor Bernardi gasped as he was pulled out of the quicksand, "although with the utmost reluctance." He shook himself like a dog. "But how can it be mobile?" "You chaps can move around," the vine explained, "so I said to myself: 'Dammit, I'll have a shot at doing that, too.' Hard going at first, when you're using suckers, but I persevered and I made it. Look, I can talk, too. Never heard of a vine doing that before, did you? Fact is, I hadn't thought of it before, but then I never had anyone to communicate with. All those other vines are so stupid; you have absolutely no idea! Hop you don't mind my picking up your language, but it was the only one around -- " "We are honored," Professor Bernardi declared. "And I am deeply grateful to you, too, sir or madam, for saving my life." "Think nothing of it," the vine said, arranging its leaves, which were of a pleasing celadon rather than the whitish-green favored by the rest of the local vegetation. "Now that I can move, I'll probably be doing heroic things like that all the time. Are you all going to the city? May I go with you? I've heard lots about the city," it went on, taking consent for granted, "but I never thought I'd get to see it. Everybody in the swamp is such an old stickin-the-mud. I thought I was trapped, too, forced to spend the rest of my life in a provincial environment. Is it true that the streets are filled with chlorophyll? Do you think I can get a job in a botanical garden or something? Perhaps I can give little talks on horticulture to visitors?" The mosquito-bat looked out of the tea kettle austerely. "Monster!" it piped shrilly. "The very idea!" the vine snapped back indignantly. "Oh, well," it said, calming down, "you probably don't know any better. It's up to me as the intelligent life-form to forgive you, and I shall." Jrann-Pttt and Dfar-Lll looked at each other in consternation. Do you think there really are cities on this planet, sir? Can there be indigenous intelligent life? If so, it may have already got in touch with the commandant. Impossible, Jrann-Pttt replied. The vine probably just heard us talking about a city. After all, it picked up the language that way; very likely it absorbed some terrestrial concepts along with it. If there, are any real settlements at all, they must be quite primitive -- nothing more than villages. No, it's we who will build the cities on Venus. Combining our technology with the terrestrials' , we could develop a pretty little civilization here -- after we've disposed of the commandant, so he cant report our disappearance. We don't want any publicity. So much better to keep our little society exclusive. the captain remarked as he rose and stretched in the dim yellow light of the long Venusian day. "Must have slept for hours. My watch seems to have stopped." "Mine, too." Mortland unstrapped his from his wrist and shook it futilely. "Waterproof, hah! If we ever get back to Earth, I shall make the manufacturer eat his guarantee." "Oh, well, what does time matter to us now?" Professor Bernardi pointed out as he rose from his leafy couch with a loud creak. All of them -- even the saurians -- had aches and pains in every joint and muscle as a result of the unaccustomed exercise and the damp climate. "We are out of its reach. It has no present meaning for us." This depressed them all. Only the vine seemed in good health and spirits. "I notice you're all wearing clothes except for the short four-legged gentleman with the home-grown fur coat," it chattered happily. "Do you think I'll be socially acceptable without them? I wouldn't want to make a bad impression at the very start -- or would leaves do?" Everybody looked at JrannPttt. "We are not a narrowminded species," he said hastily. "I'm sure your leaves will be more than adequate." After a breakfast of fish and berries stewed in tea -- which the vine declined with thanks -- the various members of the party gathered up their belongings and resumed their journey. Encrusted with dried purple mud and grime, their clothes deliberately torn by anti-social shrubbery, their chins -- of the males, that is -- disfigured by hirsute growths, the terrestrials made a sorry spectacle. It was hot, boiling hot, and more humid than ever. "Well," said Miss Anspacher, letting the Swahili marching song with which she had been attempting to encourage the company peter out, "I do hope we'll reach your city soon, Jrann-Pttt. I must say I could use a hot bath." She added hastily, "Hot baths are a peculiar cultural trait of ours." "I could use one myself," Jrann-Pttt said. He brushed his scales fastidiously. "I'm looking forward so to meeting your relatives," she said, grabbing his left arm determinedly. "I'm not violating a taboo or anything, am I?" It isn't really slimy; it just feels that way. "Not one of my people's. But I'm afraid you are violating a terrestrial taboo, judging from the thoughts I pick up from your captain's mind." "Oh, him -- he's a stupid fool!" "Not at all. Rough, perhaps. Untutored, yes. But with a good deal of native intelligence, although fearfully primitive." "Perhaps I was too harsh," Miss Anspacher observed thoughtfully. The captain... is good-looking in a brutal sort of way, although not nearly as handsome or even as spiritual in appearance as Jrann-Pttt. And sometimes I almost think he -- she blushed to herself -- shows a certain partiality for my company. S HE did not, however, let go of the saurian's arm when the captain bustled up, prepared to put a stop to this, but tactfully, if possible, for he had begun to realize that his rude ways did not endear him to her. "Ah -- we're making very good progress, aren't we, Pitt?" he interrupted, trying to insinuate himself between the two. "Excellent." "How soon do you think we'll be at your city at this rate?" Jrann-Pttt shrugged. "Since I have no way of telling what our rate is or how far we have gone, how can I tell? As a matter of fact, you might as well learn now as later -- I am not a Venusian. There is no intelligent life native to Venus." "Oh, really!" the vine interposed indignantly. "Saying a thing like that right in front of me! What would you call me, then, pray tell?" Jrann-Pttt kept his actual thoughts to himself. "A mutation," he said. "Probably you are the first intelligent life-form to appear upon this planet. Scholarly volumes will be written about you." "Oh?" The vine seemed to be appeased. "I accept your apology. Perhaps I'll learn to write and do the books myself, because I'm the only one who can understand the real me." "But how can you show us the way to your city if you're not native to Venus?" Bernardi demanded, whirling fretfully upon the saurian. "What is this, anyway? Each time you come up with a different story!" "See?" said the captain. "Didn't I tell you he was up to no good?" "I should like to lead you to our base," Jrann-Pttt replied with quiet dignity. "I am telling you the truth now since I feel I should have your consent before proceeding farther." ??????? Dfar-Lll projected. "I hesitated before, because I wasn't sure I could trust you. You see, the spaceship in which we came to this planet is a prison ship, with a crew consisting of malefactors -- thieves, murderers, defrauders -- dispatched to the remote fastnesses of the Galaxy to fetch back zoological specimens. Our zoo, I must say, is the finest and most interesting in the Universe." "Monster!" the mosquito-bat squeaked. "Shhh," Mortland admonished. "Don't interrupt." "I was in command of our illfated expedition..." Oh, Dfar-Lll projected. For a moment there, sir, you had me worried. "When we reached Venus, I was, I must admit; careless. I gave the crew a chance to mutiny and they did. Slew most of the officers. Dfar-Lll and I were lucky to escape with our lives." "But you might have told us!" Mrs. Bernardi's voice held reproach. "Until we knew what kind of beings you were, we couldn't let you know how helpless and unprotected we were." The women seemed moved, but not the men. "Leading us on a wild goose chase, were you?" the captain challenged. breath. "It was my hope that all of you would consent to help us get our ship back from these criminals. Then we could fly to my planet -- which is the fifth of the star you know as Alpha Centaurr -- where, I assure you, you would be hospitably received." We aren't really ioing back home, Jrann-Pttt, are we? I'd sooner stay here in the swamp than go back to that jail. Have confidence in me, r-Lll. As soon as we have disposed of the commandant and his officers, I can put our ship out of commission. The terrestrials won't be able to tell what's wrong. They know nothing about space travel. The fact that they got their crude vessel to operate was probably sheer luck. But the younger was not to be diverted. Will we kill them after we've disposed of our officers? I should hate to. Certainly not. We shall need servants and I don't trust the prisoners in the ship -- all criminals of the lowest type! Aloud, he said to the bewildered terrestrials, "If you don't want to help us, I shall understand. No sense your interfering in another species quarrels, particularly as we must seem like monsters to you." "Monster!" the mosquito-bat agreed. "Monster, monster, monster!" No one tried to stop him. Jrann-Pttt sensed that somehow he had lost a good deal of his grip on the terrestrials. Finesse, he thought angrily, was wasted on these barbaric life-forms. Bernardi sighed. "I suppose we'll have to help you." No reason why his ship shouldn't stop off at Earth before it goes to Alpha Centauri. No reason why it should even go to Alpha Centauri at all, in tact. "If you ask me," the captain said, "he's one of the criminals himself." "But nobody asked you," Miss Anspacher retorted, the more acidly because she had been wondering the same thing. "Shall we resume our journey?" "Hold on," the vine said. "I don't want to intrude or anything, but it hasn't been made quite clear to me whether or not I'm included in the invitation to this Alpha Centauri place, and I wouldn't want to keep going only on the off-chance that you might ask me. I really think you should, because you led me astray with your fair promises of glittering cities." "The cities of our planet do not glitter," Jrann-Pttt replied, wishing it would wither instantly, "but certainly you are invited. Glad to have you." "Oh, that's awfully decent of you," the vine said emotionally. "I shan't forget it, I promise you," vine chattering so incessantly that a faint gurgling which accompanied them went unnoticed. The gurgling grew louder and louder as they pushed on. Finally, "I keep hearing water," Mortland remarked. "We must be approaching a river of some kind." A few minutes later, bursting through a screen of underbrush, they found themselves confronted by a river whose bubbling violetblue waters extended for at least four kilometers from shadowy bank to bank, with the ridge tapering to a point almost in its exact center. Apparently, while they had been trekking along the elevation, the surrounding terrain, concealed from them by the dense and evil-minded vegetation, had imperceptibly taken off, leaving the ridge to become a peninsula that jutted out into the river. They seemed to be stranded. All they could do was retrace their steps and, since they had no idea how far back the spit became part of the mainland again, the return journey might last almost as long as it had taken them to get there. "I know we're heading in the right direction," Jrann-Pttt defended himself. "I wasn't aware of the river because we must have come by an overland route." Although he was telling the truth, at least insofar as he knew it himself, no one, not even DfarLll, believed him. "But let's rest a bit before we turn back," Mortland proposed, flopping to the ground. "I'm utterly used up." "Maybe we don't need to go back," the vine said. "Not all the way, anyhow." Everyone stared. It waved its leaves brightly at them. "I notice the captain thoughtfully brought along lots of rope and there were scads of fallen logs just a bit back. Couldn't you just lash the logs together with the rope and make a -- a thing on which we could float the rest of the way? On the water, you know." The others continued to look at it open-mouthed. "Just a little idea I had," it said modestly. "May not amount to much, but then you can't tell until you've tried, can you?" "It -- he -- means a raft, I think," Mrs. Bernardi said. Jrann-Pttt probed the raft concept in her mind, for he found the vegetable's mental processes curiously obscure. "What an excellent idea!" he exclaimed. "It does not seem infeasible," Professor Bernardi admitted tightly. By now, he was suspicious of everyone and everything. If I had never broached the idea of space travel to those peasants, he thought, I would be on Earth in the dubious comfort of my own home. That's what comes of trying to help humanity.  as the heavy raft hit the water with a tremendous splash, "she seems to be riverworthy." He rubbed his hands in anticipation, much of his surliness gone, now that he was about to deal with something he understood. "Since she is, in a manner of speaking, a ship, I suppose I assume command again?" He waited for objections, glancing involuntarily in Jrann-Pttt's direction. There were none. "Right," he said, repressing any outward symptoms of relief. He efficiently deployed the personnel to the positions on the raft where he felt they might be least useless, the gear being piled in the middle and surmounted by Algol, who naturally assumed possession of the softest and safest place by the divine right of cats. The captain does have a commanding presence, Miss Anspacner thought, and a sort of uncouth grace. Moreover, he cannot read my mind -- in fact, he often cannot even understand me when I speak. "All right!" he bellowed. "Cast off!" The vine unfastened the rope that it had insouciantly attached to a tree trunk, remarking to the others, "Don't let the trees intimidate you. Actually their bark is worse than their bite." Now it dropped lithely on board the raft, looking for a comfortable resting place. "Please don't twine around me," Miss Anspacher said coldly. "If you insist upon coming with us, you will have to choose an inanimate object to cling to." "All right, all right," it tried to soothe her. "No need to get yourself all worked up over such a mere triviality, is there? I'll just coil myself tidily around one of those spare logs. I must say you're warmer, though." Yes, she is, isn't she? thought the captain, and squeezed her hand. T HE raft drifted down the river. Since the current was flowing in the desired direction, there did not appear to be any need to use the poles, and everyone sat or reclined as comfortably as possible in the suffocating heat. The yellow haze had become so thick that they seemed to be at the bottom of a custard cup. "I do . hope we're heading the right way," Professor Bernardi said, although who knows what is right and what is wrong any more? "Perhaps we aren't," Mrs. Bernardi mused, stroking Algol, who had crawled into her lap. "Perhaps we will go drifting along endlessly. Every sixteen days, it will get dark and every sixteen days it will get light, and meanwhile we will continue floating along, never going anywhere, never getting anywhere, never seeing anything but haze and same air and eat much the same raft and river and each other." food that we do, Mr. Pitt," Mrs. Algol wheezed in his sleep. Bernardi changed her tack, "I "Nonsense!" Jrann-Pttt said suppose we'll be physically comrudely. "I have a compass. I fortable on your planet for the know the direction perfectly rest of our lives. Our children well." will be born there and our chil"And yet you let us think we dren's children, and eventually were wandering about blindly." they'll forget all about Earth and Miss Anspacher gave him a conthink it was only a legend." temptuous look. The captain "But you did expect to settle pressed her hand. permanently on Venus, didn't "Since you seem to breathe the you?" the vine asked, bewilder edly. "Or for a long visit, anyway. So I don't really see that it makes much difference if you go to Jrann-Pttt's Alpha Centauri place. So much nicer to be living with friends, I should think." "But Alpha Centauri is so very far away," Mrs. Bernardi sighed. "There wouldn't be much chance of our ever getting back." "Look!" Mortland exclaimed. "The river's branching. Which fork do we take?" dabbling his arms idly in the translucent violet-blue water, withdrew them hastily as nine green eyes, obviously belonging to the same individual, rose to the surface and regarded him with more than casual interest. He consulted his compass. "Left." "Contrarily!" the mosquitobat suddenly squeaked, pointing a small rod at his companions. "Rightward." There was a stunned silence. "Monster!" Mortland cried in reproach. "You can talk! How could you deceive us like that?" "Can talk," the creature retorted. "Me not intelligent lifeform, ha! Who talks last talks best. Have not linguistic facility of inferior life-forms, but can communicate rudely in your language." "Remember," Mortland cautioned, "there are ladies present." "Have been lying low and laughing to self -- ha, ha! -- at witlessness of lowerly life-forms." "But why?" Mrs. Bernardi demanded distractedly. "Haven't we been kind to you?" "You be likewise well treated in our zoo," it assured her. "All of you. Our zoo finest in Galaxy. And clean, too." "Now really, sir, I must protest -- " Professor Bernardi began, trying to extricate a blaster unobtrusively from the pile of gear in which the too-confident terrestrials had cached their weapons. Monster gestured with his rod. "This is lethal weapon. Do not try hindrancing me. Hate damage fine specimens. Captain, go rightward." "Oh, is that so!" Greenfield retorted hotly. "Let me tell you, you -- you insect!" "George!" Miss Anspacher clutched his arm. "Do what it says. For my sake, George!" "Oh, all right," he muttered. "Just for you, then. Told you not to trust any of 'em," he went on, reluctantly poling the raft in the ordered direction. "Foreigners !" "Fine zoo," the mosquito-bat insisted. "Very clean. Run with utmost efficientness. Strict visiting hours." " A ND there goes Plan D," the vine said lightly. There was a hint of laughter in its voice. Jrann-Pttt stared at it in consternation. "Are you' also from the Alpha Centauri system, sir?" It turned its attention to the mosquito-bat. "Naturally I'm curious to know where I'm going," it explained, "since I seem definitely to be included in your gracious invitation." "Alpha Centauri, hah!" the mosquito-bat snorted. "I from what Earthlets laughingly term Sirius. Alpha Centauri merely little star." "Now see here!" Jrann-Pttt sprang to his feet. Criminal he might be, but he was not going to sit there and have his sun insulted! "Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Miss Anspacher cried. "No use getting yourself killed, Jrann-Pttt!" "Correctly," Monster approved. "Elementary intelligence displayed. Why damage fine specimens?" From one prison into another, the saurian mentalized bitterly. Fes, returned Dfar-Lll, and it's all your fault . The junior lizard burst into tears. I wish I had let Merglyt-Ruuu do what he ' wanted. I would have been better off. "Sirius," the vine repeated. "That's even farther away than Alpha Centauri, isn't it? I never thought I would get that far away from the swamp! This really will be an adventure!" "How . do you know -- " Professor Bemardi began. "Frankly," it went on, "I don't see why you chaps are so put out by the whole thing. What's the difference between Alpha Centauri and Sirius anyway? Matter of a few light-years, but otherwise a star's a star for all that." "To Jrann-Pttt, we wouldn't have been specimens," Mrs. Bernardi said, belatedly recognizing the advantages of Alpha Centauri. "No, not specimens," the vine told her easily. "I don't suppose you know he had no intention of taking you back to his system. He wanted you to help him kill the officers of his ship so they couldn't look for him and the other escaped prisoner or report back to his planet. Then he was going to put the ship out of commission and found his own colony here with you as his slaves. I'd just as soon be a specimen as a slave. Sooner. Better to reign in a zoo than serve in a swamp!" "Just how do you know all this?" Miss Anspacher demanded. "It's obvious enough," Bernardi said gloomily. "Another telepath." How can we compete or even cope with creatures like these? What a fool I was to think I could outwit them. "Telepathy just tricksomeness, " the mosquito-bat put in jealously. "I have no telepathy, yet superior to all." "UT why should Mr. Pitt want to kill his officers?" Mrs. Bernardi asked querulously. "He's the commandant, isn't he? Or is he a professor? I never got that straight." "He was one of the criminals on the ship," the vine told her. "What you might call a confidence man. This is about the only system in the Galaxy where he isn't wanted. He did tell you the truth, though, when he said they were sent on an expedition to collect zoological specimens. Dangerous work," it sighed, "and so his people use criminals for it. They were sent out in small detachments. Our friend here killed his guard in a fight over a female prisoner, which was why -- " "But what happened to the female prisoner?" Miss Anspacher's eye caught Dfar-LU's. "Oh, no!" she gasped. "Why not?" Dfar-Lll demanded. "I'm as much of a female as you are. Maybe even more." The captain leaned close to Miss Anspacher. "No one can be more feminine than you are, Dolores," he whispered. "But he -- she's so young!" Mrs. Bernardi wailed. The vine made an amused sound. "Don't you have juvenile delinquents on Earth?" "Oh, what does all that matter now?" Jrann-Pttt said sullenly. "We're all going to a Sirian zoo, anyway." "Correctly," approved the monster-bat. "Finest zoo. Clean. Commodious cages. Reasonable visiting hours. Very nice." Mrs. Bernardi began to cry. "Now," the vine comforted her, "a zoo's not so bad. After all, most of us spend our lives in cages of one kind or another, and without the basic security a zoo affords -- " "But we don't know we're in cages," Mrs. Bernardi sobbed. "That's the important thing." Professor Bernardi looked at the vine. "But why are you -- " he began, then halted. "Perhaps I don't want an answer," he said. There was no hope at all left in him, now that there was no doubt. "You are wise," the vine agreed quietly. Algol arose from Mr. Bernardi's lap and rubbed against its thick pale green stem. He knew. The mosquitobat looked at both of them restlessly. The yellow haze had deepened to old gold. Now it was beginning to turn brown. "It's twilight," Miss Anspacher observed. "Soon it will be dark." "Perhaps we'll sail right past his ship in the night," Mortland suggested hopefully. The mosquitobat gave a snort. "Ship has lights. All modern convenients." have grown chilly -- colder than it had any right to be on that torrid planet. All around them, it was dark and very quiet. "I think I do see lights," Mortland said. "Must be ship," Monster replied. And somehow the rest of them could sense the uneasiness in the thin, piping, alien voice. "Must be!" "Your ship's a very large one then," Bernardi commented as they rounded a bend and a whole colony of varicolored pastel lights sprang up ahead of them. "Not my ship!" the mosquitobat exclaimed in a voice pierced with anguish. "Not my ship!" Before them rose the fantastic, twisting, convoluting, turning spires of a tall, marvelous, glittering city. "You will find that the streets actually are filled with chlorophyll," the vine said. "And I know you'll be happy here, all of you. You see, we can't have you going back to your planets now. No matter how good your intentions were, you'd destroy us. You do see that, don't you?" "You may be right," Bernardi agreed dispiritedly, "although that doesn't cheer us any. But what will you do with us?" "You'll be provided with living quarters comparable to those on your own planets," the vine told him, "and you'll give lectures just as if you were in a university -- only you'll be much more secure. I assure you -- " its voice was very gentle now -- "you'll hardly know you're in a zoo." an issue as we could assemble to gladden holiday hearts. A touch or two of nutmeg? Of course -- to bring out the sparkling, light-hearted flavor. It's our way of joining our authors, artists and our jovial four-armed Santa (you didn't notice? in wishing you the very happiest New Year ever! Whatever you want out of life -- a new home, a happier marriage, a healthy state of mind and body, a better job, more money -- here is a remarkable (The Science of Setting Your Goal -- and then Reaching It) by Claude M. 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Ail stories printed in this magazine arc fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printad In th U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. In'se ereit minds were Rositrndnns Francis Bacon Name. Address Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages ! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to ail parts of the world. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. copy of "The Masof: ; Life' -- : ligaHon; A noo profit : organizattoa.: Address : S"'"K,N.K tempted to show -- with rather more levity than I feel -- how disheartening it is to slog through thousands of dreary manuscripts per year to find the # or so that are genuinely worth publishing. How do we break up the trunkto-tail parade and set each writer off on his own path of exploration? I don't know, but I'm trying so hard that I would wish I hadn't thrown away that truss, if I had a truss to throw away. All right, let's up with the inkstained sleeves and have at it, shall we? Writer or not, you'll be interested. I think, because I intend to toss off -- after due examination -- an idea that I guarantee could have sold, just to jolt would-be contributors out of their maddening lock-step. Readers habitually ask writers. "Where do you get your ideas?" The honest answer would be. in the case of the chain-gang scribes, "I see them somewhere and they come to me in a flash." This idea I have in mind -- I'll tell you exactly where it came from: It came from a cereal box. Like most good Americans, I obediently grit away on the dried bread crumbs called breakfast food, meanwhile gazing with bleak eyes at the gaudy boxes they come in, noting vacantly the Bronco Joe nite-lite compasses, the spaceship rings with compartments for secret messages. and the rest, all to be had by sending in a box top and a coin. Premiums! Where did they start? How far have they come since then? By contrasting the present with the past, what influence might they have on the future? For the research on these questions, my fond thanks to Evelyn E. Smith... and a bit of regret, too. for she could have made such a beautifully inventive story out of the subject of premiums. Still, if it shows imitative writers how to go about getting ideas, it's worth the considerable sacrifice. Probably the first company to offer premiums was B. T. Babbitt, who stopped selling soap by weight from long slabs, and wrapped a lithograph in each package, thus making two important innovations. The date was #I -- just over # years ago -- and now more than one chandise is given away or sold at less than cost per year! Listen to these statistics: Thirty per cent of all china ware, # per cent of all enamel ware and # per cent of all aluminum ware manufactured in this country are sold or given away annually as premiums! The amount of balloons, guns (from Old West to Futuristic), airplane kits and such bedazzling items for children is almost incalculable. The New Yorker once ran a cartoon of an advertising man's dream: a TV announcer holding up a cereal box and yelping. "Look, kids! All premiums... no cereal!" Crackerjacks undoubtedly originated the custom of packaging prizes, but the idea has bloomed so Hugely that highpower companies exist solely to think up. sell, manufacture and service youth industries. In the adult trade, durable goods and jewelry are the two most popular premiums. Ice cream companies induce stores to sell their brand by offering tables, chairs, freezers; brewers give bars electric signs, radios and now TV sets: Fuller Brush salesmen hand housewives free brushes to lower sales resistance. By purchasing only items that give profit-sharing coupons, you can literally furnish a whole home. Of course, it Would take years and you may smoke and soap yourself to death, but it can be done. In most cases, the sponsor's profit is good will alone. Thus, a #c locket liquidates itself as follows: cost of jewelry. #c; federal tax, #c; mail-handling charge, #c; stamp, Ic; box, c; grief, Yi,c. Total, #c. There are three principal methods of distribution: Free Offer -- mail-in request; store-visit gift; demonstration premium. Combination Offer -- over the counter: redemption station; loading deal (premiums given to dealers at no extra cost for ordering certain quantity). Purchase Privilege -- box tops, labels, coupons, punch card, etc. Toys, jewelry, household items, cars, store equipment, sporting goods... all of it beginning with a simple litho wrapped around a cake of soap... grown to a I ,#-a-year giant in a single century! The impact on our economy and buying habits has been enormous. Imagine what would happen if that rate of growth continued! Who'd need money? Before you leap up with an answer. consider this : Cigar-store coupons were used as legal tender in many U. S. towns during the depression! "Where do you get your ideas?" From everywhere -- including cereal boxes. Peel those The Tunnel Under The World Pinching yourself is no way to see if you are dreaming. Surgical instruments? Well, yes -- but a mechanic's kit is best of alll #th, Guy Burckhardt stared, not believing what he saw, woke up screaming out at the quiet room and the bright of a dream. sunlight coming in the window. It was more real than any He croaked, "Mary?" dream he had ever had in his life. His wife was not in the bed He could still hear and feel the next to him. The covers were sharp, ripping-metal explosion, tumbled and awry, as though she the violent heave that had tossed had just left it, and the memory him furiously out of bed, the of the dream was so strong that searing wave of heat. instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down. But she wasn't there. Of course she wasn't, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream. "Guy?" His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. "Guy, dear, are you all right?" He called weakly, "Sure." There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, "Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you're all right? I thought I heard you yelling -- " Burckhardt said more confidently, "I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down." lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still, bad dreams weren't unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions? Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him off. "You did?" Her voice was astonished. "Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn't actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?" Burckhardt coughed. "Well, no," he said. Mary was not one of these strong-as-a-man, braveas-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said, "Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming." Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. "Maybe," she agreed. "It's almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn't you hurry? You don't want to be late to the office." He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out -- not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right. But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn't any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before: It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steamblasted the Power  Light Building, the town's only skyscraper -- that was the penalty of having Contro Chemical's main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings. None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn't anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination. He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn't behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger. "Where's Mr. Stebbins?" Burckhardt asked. The man said politely, "Sick, sir. He'll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?" "Chesterfields," Burckhardt corrected. "Certainly, sir," the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack. "Do try these, sir," he suggested. "They contain an anticough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?" ciously, "I never heard of this brand." "Of course not. They're something new." Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, "Look, try them out at my risk. If you don't like them, bring back the empty pack and I'll refund your money. Fair enough?" Burckhardt shrugged. "How can I lose? But give me a pack of Chesterfields, too, will you?" He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren't bad, he decided, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn't think much of Ralph's stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every customer the same highpressure sales talk. The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as' the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials. No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern. There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative bass rumble: "Go right out and Bite all up. That's Choco-Bite!" There was a sobbing female whine: "I wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I'd do anything for a Feckle Freezer!" Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them. But the office was happily normal -- except that Mr. Barth wasn't in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn't know exactly why. "His home phoned, that's all. He'll be in tomorrow." "Maybe he went to the plant. It's right near his house." She looked indifferent. "Yeah." A thought struck Burckhardt. "But today is June #th! It's quarterly tax return day -- he has to sign the return!" Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt's problem, not hers. She returned to her nails. Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn't that he couldn't sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn't his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals' downtown office, should have taken. ing Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn't really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn't a soul in the factory -- that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul -- just the machines. According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn't hurt the man and it didn't make the machine into a monster. But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same. He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations out of his mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the figures -- which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger in ten minutes. Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself. He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. "Since Mr. Barth isn't here, we'd better go to lunch in shifts," he said. "You can go first." "Thanks." Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and began to apply makeup. Burckhardt offered her the envelope. "Drop this in the mail for me, will you? Uh -- wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?" "Didn't say." Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex. "Wasn't his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the message." "The kid?" Burckhardt frowned. "I thought she was away at school." "She called, that's all I know." Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He didn't like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed. like Barth. his way home. There was a disturbance at the corner where he usually caught his bus -- someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze -- so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried-looking man was hurrying toward him. Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus. He said, "Hello." Swanson's face was desperately eager. "Burckhardt?" he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt's face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn't know how to supply it. Burckhardt coughed and said again, "Hello, Swanson." Swanson didn't even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh. "Nothing doing," he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away. Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he did-n't much like. Things weren't going right. Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn't anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch. It isn't the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong -- the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot. It wasn't just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt's life ; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn't come into the office, yet Barth always came in. Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife's attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked -- Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too. this night and he barely listened to Dennerman's complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife's comments bn the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days. Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him -- he was strangely aware of it happening -- he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep. II O N the morning of June #th, Burckhardt woke up screaming. It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room. His wife came pattering up the stairs. "Darling!" she cried. "What's the matter?" He mumbled, "Nothing. Bad dream." She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say; "You gave me such a shock -- " But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail of sirens and a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking. The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried fearfully to the window. There were no rumbling fire engines in the street, only a small panel truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring loudspeaker horns crowned its top. From them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze. Burckhardt said in amazement. "Mary, that's against the law! Do you know what they're doing? They're playing records of a fire. What are they up to?" "Maybe it's a practical joke," his wife offered. "Joke? Waking up the whole neighborhood at six o'clock in the morning?" He shook his head. "The police will be here in ten minutes," he predicted. "Wait and see." But the police weren't -- not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their games. The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for a few minutes. Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice chanted: "Feckle Freezers! Feckle Freezers! Gotta have a Feckle Freezer! Feckle, Feckle, F'eckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle -- " It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening. Burckhardt shouted to his wife, over the uproar, "What the hell is a Feckle Freezer?" "Some kind of a freezer, I guess, dear," she shrieked back unhelpfully. A bruptly the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still misty morning: the Sun's rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing the name of a freezer. "A crazy advertising trick," Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and turned away from the window. "Might as well get dressed. I guess that's the end of -- " The bellow caught him from behind: it was almost like a hard slap on the ears. A harsh, sneering voice, louder than the archangel's trumpet, howled: "Have you got a freezer? It stinks! If it isn't a Feckle Freezer, it stinks! If it's a last year's Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year's Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!" The voice screamed inarticulately with rage. "I'm warning you! Get out and buy a Feckle Freezer right away! Hurry up! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry, hurry, hurry, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle..." It stopped eventually. Burckhardt licked his lips. He started to say to his wife, "Maybe we ought to call the police about -- " when the speakers erupted again. It caught him off guard: it was intended to catch him off guard. It screamed: "Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Cheap freezers ruin your food. You'll get sick and throw up. You'll get sick and die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of the freezer you've got and see how rotten and moldy it is? Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking food? Or do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle -- " That did it. With fingers that kept stabbing the wrong holes, Burckhardt finally managed to dial the local police station. He got a busy signal -- it was apparent that he was not the only one with the same idea -- and while he was shakingly dialing again, the noise outside stopped. He looked out the window. The truck was gone. tie and ordered another Frosty-Flip from the waiter. If only they wouldn't keep the Crystal Cafe so hot! The new paint job -- searing reds and blinding yellows -- was bad enough, but someone seemed to have the delusion that this was January instead of June; the place was a good ten degrees warmer than outside. He swallowed the Frosty-Flip in two gulps. It had a kind of peculiar flavor, he thought, but not bad. It certainly cooled you off, just as the waiter had promised. He reminded himself to pick up a carton of them on the way home; Mary might like them. She was always interested in something new. He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant toward him. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton. Chin-height, honeyblonde hair and a figure that -- well, it was all hers. There was no doubt in the world that the dress that clung to her was the only thing she wore. He felt as if he were blushing as she greeted him. "Mr. Burckhardt." The voice was like distant tomtoms. "It's wonderful of you to let me see you, after this morning." He cleared his throat. "Not at all. Won't you sit down. Miss -- " "April Horn," she murmured, sitting down -- beside him, not where he had pointed on the other side of the table. "Call me April, won't you?" She was wearing some kind of perfume, Burckhardt noted with what little of his mind was functioning at all. It didn't seem fair that she should be using perfume as well as everything else. He came to with a start and realized that the waiter was leaving with an order for filets minon for two. "Hey!" he objected. "Please, Mr. Burckhardt." Her shoulder was against his, her face was turned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender and solicitous. "This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please let them -- it's the hast they can do." He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket. "I put the price of the meal into your pocket," she whispered conspiratorially. "Please do that for me, won't you? I mean I'd appreciate it if you'd pay the waiter -- I'm old-fashioned about things like that." She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. "But you must take the money," she insisted. "Why, you're letting Feckle off lightly if you do! You could sue them for every nickel they've got, disturbing your sleep like that." though he had just seen someone make a rabbit disappear into a top hat, he said, "Why, it really wasn't so bad, uh, April. A little noisy, maybe, but -- " "Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!" The blue eyes were wide and admiring. "I knew you'd understand. It's just that -- well, it's such a wonderful freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone you -- and I'm so very pleased that lunch with you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a fine freezer. "I shouldn't tell you this, but -- " the blue eyes were shyly lowered -- "I'd do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It's more than a job to me." She looked up. She was enchanting. "I bet you think I'm silly, don't you?" Burckhardt coughed. "Well, I -- " "Oh, you don't want to be unkind!" She shook her head. "No, don't pretend. You think it's silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn't think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet -- " Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn't only the girl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on the street -- and then left him cold. But it didn't matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day -- leaving Burckhardt stuck with the quarterly tax returns. What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order for a twelvecubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list price #, with a ten per cent "courtesy" discount -- "Because of that horrid affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt," she had said. And he wasn't sure how he could explain it to his wife. As he walked in the front door, his wife said almost immediately, "I wonder if we can't afford a new freezer, dear. There was a man here to apologize about that noise and -- well, we got to talking and -- " She had signed a purchase order, too. It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up to bed. But the day wasn't done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted and every light in the house went out. "Damn!" said Guy Burckhardt. "Fuse?" His wife shrugged sleepily. "Let it go till the morning, dear." Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along." It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse. When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead. He headed back to the steps, and stopped. Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal! "Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut -- the edges were sharp. The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots -- everywhere was metal. The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath!  the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass. He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor -- they were faked. It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence. The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished. "But I built that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing. "That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?" Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity. He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible! He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him. Consciousness went -- not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep. Ill O N the morning of June #th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement -- and raced upstairs to find it was June #th. The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had remembered them -- all completely unbelievable. The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wife would be waking at any moment. Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps -- and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the #th day of June. But that was impossible, yesterday was the #th of June. It was not a date one would forget -- it was quarterly tax-return day. He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone: he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: " -- and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising... United States Weather Bureau forecast for June #th. Warm and sunny, with high around -- " He hung the phone up. June #th. "Holy heaven!" Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife's alarm and bounded up the stairs. Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare. "Oh!" she gasped, as her husband came in the room. "Darling, I just had the most terrible dream! It was like an explosion and -- " "Again?" Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. "Mary, something's funny! I knew there was something wrong all day yesterday and -- " He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy. She said, "Dear, are you sure? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn't notice anything." "Positive!" said Guy Burckhardt. "I dragged it over to the wall to step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and -- " "After we what?" Mary was looking more than merely alarmed. "After we blew the lights out. You know, when the switch at the head of the stairs stuck. I went down to the cellar and -- " Mary sat up in bed. "Guy, the switch didn't stick. I turned out the lights myself last night." Burckhardt glared at his wife. "Now I know you didn't! Come here and take a look!" He stalked out to the landing and dramatically pointed to the bad switch, the one that he had unscrewed and left hanging the night before... Only it wasn't. It was as it had always been. Unbelieving, Burckhardt pressed it and the lights sprang up in both halls. ried, left him to go down to the kitchen and start breakfast. Burckhardt stood staring at the switch for a long time. His mental processes were gone beyond the point of disbelief and shock; they simply were not functioning. He shaved and dressed and ate his breakfast in a state of numb introspection. Mary didn't disturb him; she was apprehensive and soothing. She kissed him good-by as he hurried out to the bus without another word. Miss Mitkin, at the reception desk, greeted him with a yawn. "Morning," she said drowsily. "Mr. Barth won't be in today." Burckhardt started to say something, but checked himself. She would not know that Barth hadn't been in yesterday, either. because she was tearing a June #th pad off her calendar to make way for the "new" June #th sheet. He staggered to his own desk and stared unseeingly at the morning's mail. It had not even been opened yet, but he knew that the Factory Distributors envelope contained an order for twenty thousand feet of the new acoustic tile, and the one from Finebeck  Sons was a complaint. After a long while, he forced himself to open them. They were. By lunchtime, driven by a desperate sense of urgency, Burckhardt made Miss Mitkin take her lunch hour first -- the June fifteenth that was yester day, he had gone first. She went, looking vaguely worried about his strained insistence, but it made no difference to Burckhardt's mood. The phone rang and Burckhardt picked it up abstractedly. "Contro Chemicals Downtown, Burckhardt speaking." The voice said, "This is Swanson," and stopped. Burckhardt waited expectantly, but that was all. He said, "Hello?" Again the pause. Then Swanson asked in sad resignation, "Still nothing, eh?" "Nothing what? Swanson, is there something you want? You came up to me yesterday and went through this routine. You -- " The voice crackled: "Burckhardt! Oh, my good heavens, you remember! Stay right there -- I'll be down in half an hour!" "What's this all about?" "Never mind," the little man said exultantly. "Tell you about it when I see you. Don't say any more over the phone -- somebody may be listening. Just wait there. Say, hold on a minute. Will you be alone in the office?" "Well, no. Miss Mitkin will probably -- " "Hell. Look, Burckhardt, where do you eat lunch? Is it good and noisy?" "Why. I suppose so. The Crystal Cafe. It's just about a block -- " "I know where it is. Meet you in half an hour!" And the receiver clicked. THE . Crystal Cafe was no longer painted red, but the temperature was still up. And they had added piped-in music interspersed with commercials. The advertisements were for Frosty-Flip, Marlin Cigarettes -- "They're sanitized," the announcer purred -- and something called Choco-Bite candy bars that Burckhardt couldn't remember ever having heard of before. But he heard more about them quickly enough. While he was waiting for Swanson to show up, a girl in the cellophane, skirt of a nightclub cigarette vendor came, through the restaurant with a tray of tiny scarlet-wrapped candies. "Choco-Bites are taniy," she was murmuring as she came close to his table. "Choco-Bites are tanier than tangy!" Burckhardt, intent on watching for the strange little man who had phoned him, paid little attention. But as she scattered a handful of the confections over the table next to his, smiling at the occupants, he caught a glimpse of her and turned to stare. "Why, Miss Horn!" he said. The girl dropped her tray of candies. Burckhardt rose, concerned over the girl. "Is something wrong?" But she fled. The manager of the restaurant was staring suspiciously at Burckhardt, who sank back in his seat and tried to look inconspicuous. He hadn't insulted the girl! Maybe she was just a very strictly reared young lady, he thought -- in spite of the long bare legs under the cellophane skirt -- and when he addressed her, she thought he was a masher. Ridiculous idea. Burckhardt scowled uneasily and picked up his menu. "Burckhardt!" It was a shrill whisper. Burckhardt looked up over the top of his menu, startled. In the seat across from him, the little man named Swanson was sitting, tensely poised. "Buckhardt!" the little man vhispered again. "Let's get out of here! They're on to you now. If you want to stay alive, come on!" There was no arguing with the man. Burckhardt gave the hovering manager a sick, apologetic smile and followed Swanson out. The little man seemed to know where he was going. In the street, he clutched Burckhardt by the elbow and hurried him off down the block. "Did you see her?" he demanded. "That Horn woman, in the phone booth? She'll have them here in five minutes, believe me, so hurry it up!" A lthough the street was full of people and cars, nobody was paying any attention to Burckhardt and Swanson. The air had a nip in it -- more like October than June, Burckhardt thought, in spite of the weather bureau. And he felt like a fool, following this mad little man down the street, running away from some "them" toward -- toward what? The little man might be crazy, but he was afraid. And the fear was infectious. "In here!" panted the little man. It was another restaurant -- more of a bar, really, and a sort of second-rate place that Burckhardt had never patroni#ed. "Right straight through." Swanson whispered; and Burckhardt, like a biddable boy, sidestepped through the mass of tables to the far end of the restaurant. It was "L"-shaped, with a front on two streets at right angles to each other. They came out on the side street, Swanson staring coldly back at the question-looking cashier, and crossed to the opposite sidewalk. They were under the marquee of a movie theater. Swanson's expression began to relax. "Lost them!" he crowed softly. "We're almost there." He stepped up to the window and bought two tickets. Burckhardt trailed him in to the theater. It was a weekday matinee and the place was almost empty. From the screen came sounds of gunfire and horse's hoofs. A solitary usher, leaning against a bright brass rail, looked briefly at them and went back to staring boredly at the picture as Swanson led Burckhardt down a flight of carpeted marble steps. They were in the lounge and it was empty. There was a door for men and one for ladies; and there was a third door, marked Swanson listened at the door, and gently opened it and peered inside. "Okay," he said, gesturing. Burckhardt followed him through an empty office, to another door -- a closet, probably, because it was unmarked. But it was no closet. Swanson opened it warily, looked inside, then motioned Burckhardt to follow. It was a tunnel, metal-walled, brigntly lit. Empty, it stretched vacantly away in both directions from them. Burckhardt looked wondering around. One thing he knew and knew full well: No such tunnel belonged under Tylerton. T here was a room off the tunnel with chairs and a desk and what looked like television screens. Swanson slumped in a chair, panting. "We're all right for a while here," he wheezed. "They don't come here much any more. If they do, we'll hear them and we can hide." "Who?"demanded Burckhardt. The little man said, "Martians!" His voice cracked on the word and the life seemed to go out of him. In morose tones, he went on: "Well, I think they're Martians. Although you could be right, you know; I've had plenty of time to think it over these last few weeks, after they got you, and it's possible they're Russians after all. Still -- " "Start from the beginning. Who got me when?" Swanson sighed. "So we have to go through the whole thing again. All right. It was about two months ago that you banged on my door, late at night. You were all beat up -- scared silly. You begged' me to help you -- " " did?" "Naturally you don't remember any of this. Listen and you'll understand. You were talking a blue streak about being captured and threatened, and your wife being dead and coming back to life, and all kinds of mixed-up nonsense. I thought you were crazy. But -- well, I've always had a lot of respect for you. And you begged me to hide you and I have this darkroom, you know. It locks from the inside only. I put the lock on myself. So we went in there -- just to humor you -- and along about midnight, which was only fifteen or twenty minutes after, we passed out." "Passed out?" Swanson nodded. "Both of us. It was like being hit with a sandbag. Look, didn't that happen to you again last night?" "I guess it did," Burckhardt shook his head uncertainly. "Sure. And then all of a sudden we were awake again, and you said you were going to show me something funny, and we went out and bought a paper. And the date on it was June #th." "June #th? But that's today! I mean -- " "You got it, friend. It's always today!" It took time to penetrate. Burckhardt said wonderingly, "You've hidden out in that darkroom for how many weeks?" "How can I tell? Four or five, maybe. I lost count. And every day the same -- always the #th of June, always my landlady, Mrs. Keefer, is sweeping the front steps, always the same headline in the papers at the corner. It gets monotonous, friend." IV I T was Burckhardt's idea and Swanson despised it, but he went along. He was the type who always went along. "It's dangerous," he grumbled worriedly. "Suppose somebody comes by? They'll spot us and -- " "What have we got to lose?" Swanson shrugged. "It's dangerous," he said again. But he went along. Burckhardt's idea was very simple. He was sure of only one thing -- the tunnel went somewhere. Martians or Russians, fantastic plot or crazy hallucination, whatever was wrong with Tylerton had an explanation, and the place to look for it was at the end of the tunnel. They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an end. They were in luck -- at least no one came through the tunnel to spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that the tunnel seemed to be in use. Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never mind the how. Why? And falling asleep, completely involuntarily -- everyone at the same time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering anything -- Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to, Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing. And Swanson had lived his mouse's existence for weeks, hiding in the woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from the deadly eyes of them. Them. One of "them" was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand in Burckhardt's office building. There were more, at least a dozen that Swanson knew of or suspected. They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look -- for they, alone in Tylerton, changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was on that #:#I bus, every morning of every day-thatwas-June-#th, never different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all. Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to gain from this mad masquerade? Burckhardt didn't know the answer -- but perhaps it lay beyond the door at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed dangerous. They slipped through. And, through a wide chamber and up a flight of steps, they found they were in what Burckhardt recognized as the Contro Chemicals plant. N obody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd -- the automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still. Only -- now it was still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no breath of life in it. The captive electronic minds were sending out no commands; the coils and relays were at rest. Burckhardt said, "Come on." Swanson reluctantly followed him through the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks. They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way, they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory, if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had once been a human mind. Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all. Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never overlooking anything, never forgetting... Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. "I'm scared," he said. They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were not machine sounds, but voices ; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a door and dared to peer around it. It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one -- a dozen or more, at least -- with a man or woman sitting before it, staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The viewers dialed from scene to scene : no two screens ever showed the same picture. The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was a series of shots of kitchens. Burckhardt caught a glimpse of what looked like the cigar stand in his office building. It was baffling and Burckhardt would have loved to stand there and puzzle it out, but it was too busy a place. There was the chance that someone would look their way or walk out and find them. This one was empty. It was an office, large and sumptuous. It had a desk, littered with papers. Burckhardt stared at them, briefly at first -- then, as the words on one of them caught his attention, with incredulous fascination. He snatched up the topmost sheet, scanned it, and another, while Swanson was frenziedly searching through the drawers. Burckhardt swore unbelievingly and dropped the papers to the desk. Swanson, hardly noticing, yelped with delight: "Look!" He dragged a gun from the desk. "And it's loaded, tool" Burckhardt stared at him blankly, trying to assimilate what he had read. Then, as he realized what Swanson had said, Burckhardt's eyes sparked. "Good man!" he cried. "We'll take it. We're getting out of here with that gun, Swanson. And we're going to the police! Not the cops in Tylerton, but the F.B.I., maybe. Take a look at this!" The sheaf he handed Swanson was headed: "Test Area Progress Report. Subject: Marlin Cigarettes Campaign." It was mostly tabulated figures that made little sense to Burckhardt and Swanson. but at the end was a summary that said: Although Test #-K# pulled nearly double the number of new users of any of the other tests conducted, it probably cannot be used in the field because of local sound-truck control ordinances. The tests in the #-K# group were second best and our recommendation is that retests be conducted in this appeal, testing each of the three best campaigns with and without the addition of sampling techniques. An alternative suggestion might be to proceed directly with the top appeal in the K# series, if the pense of additional tests. All of these forecast expectations have an # probability of being within one-half of one per cent of results forecast, and more than # probability of coming within #c. Swanson looked up from the paper into Burckhardt's eyes. "I don't get it." he complained. Burckhardt said, "I don't blame you. It's crazy, but it fits the facts, Swanson, it fits the iacts. They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow -- heaven knows how they did it -- they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people, right under their thumbs. "Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else: but however they do it. what happens is that they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day, they see what happened -- and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising." He managed to close it and swallow. "Nuts!" he said flatly. Burckhardt shook his head. "Sure, it sounds crazy -- but this whole thing is crazy. How else would you explain it? You can't deny that most of Tylerton lives the same day over and over again. You've seen it! And that's the crazy part and we have to admit that that's true -- unless we are the crazy ones. And once you admit that somebody, somehow, knows how to accomplish that, the rest of it makes all kinds of sense. "Think of it, Swanson! They test every last detail before they spend a nickel on advertising! Do you have any idea what that means? Lord knows how much money is involved, but I know for a fact that some companies dollars a year on advertising. Multiply it, say, by a hundred companies. Say that every one of them learns how to cut its advertising cost by only ten per cent. And that's peanuts, believe me! "If they know in advance what's going to work, they can cut their costs in half -- maybe to less than half, I don't know. But that's saving two or three hunif they pay only ten or twenty per cent of that for the use of Tylerton, it's still dirt cheap for them and a fortune for whoever took over Tylerton." Swanson licked his lips. "You mean," he offered hesitantly, "that we're a -- well, a kind of captive audience?" Burckhardt frowned. "Not exactly." He thought for a minute. "You know how a doctor tests up a series of little colonies of germs on gelatine disks and he tries the stuff on one after another, changing it a little each time. Well, that's us -- we're the germs, Swanson. Only it's even more efficient than that. They don't have to test more than one colony, because they can use it over and over again." It was too hard for Swanson to take in. He only said: "What do we do about it?" "We go to the police. They can't use human beings for guinea pigs!" "How do we get to the police?" Burckhardt hesitated. "I think -- " he began slowly. "Sure. This place is the office of somebody important. We've got a gun. We'll stay right here until he comes along. And he'll get us out of here." Simple and direct. Swanson subsided and found a place to sit, against the wall, out of sight of the door. Burckhardt took up a position behind the door itself -- And waited. THE wait was not as long as it might have been. Half an hour, perhaps. Then Burckhardt heard approaching voices and had time for a swift whisper to Swanson before he flattened himself against the wall. It was a man's voice, and a girl's. The man was saying, " -- reason why you couldn't report on the phone? You're ruining your whole day's test! What the devil's the matter with you, Janet?" "I'm sorry, Mr. Dorchin," she said in a sweet, clear tone. "I thought it was important." The man grumbled, "Important! One lousy unit out of twenty-one thousand." "But it's the Burckhardt one, Mr. Dorchin. Again. And the way he got out of sight, he must have had some help." "All right, all right. It doesn't matter, Janet; the Choco-Bite program is ahead of schedule anyhow. As long as you're this far, come on in the office and make out your worksheet. And don't worry about the Burckhardt business. He's probably just wandering around. We'll pick him up tonight and -- " They were inside the door. Burckhardt kicked it shut and pointed the gun. "That's what you think." he said triumphantly. It was worth the terrified hours, the bewildered sense of insanity, the confusion and fear. It was the most satisfying sensation Burckhardt had ever had in his life. The expression on the man's face was one he had read about but never actually seen: Dorchin's mouth fell open and his eyes went wide, and though he managed to make a sound that might have been a question, it was not in words. The girl was almost as surprised. And Burckhardt, looking at her, knew why her voice had been so familiar. The girl was the one who had introduced herself to him as April Horn. Dorchin recovered himself quickly. "Is this the one?" he asked sharply. The girl said, "Yes." Dorchin nodded, "I take it back. You were right. Uh, you -- Burckhardt. What do you want?"  him! He might have another gun." "Search him then." Burckhardt said. "I'll tell you what we want. Dorchin. We want you to come explain to them how you can get away with kidnaping twenty thousand people." "Kidnaping?" Dorchin snorted. "That's ridiculous, man! Put that gun away -- you can't get away with this!" Burckhardt hefted the gun grimly. "I think I can." Dorchin looked furious and sick -- but, oddly, not afraid. "Damn it -- " he started to bellow, then closed his mouth and swallowed. "Listen." he said persuasively. "you're making a big mistake. I haven't kidnaped anybody, believe me!" "I don't believe you," said Burckhardt bluntly. "Why should I?" "But it's true! Take my word for it!" Burckhardt shook his head. they like. We'll find out. Now how do we get out of here?" Dorchin opened his mouth to argue. Burckhardt bla#ed: "Don't get you if I have to. Don't you understand that? I've gone through two days of hell and every second of it I blame on you. Kill you? It would be a pleasure and I don't have a thing in the world to lose! Get us out of here!" Dorchin's face went suddenly opaque. He seemed about to move; but the blonde girl he had called Janet slipped between him and the gun. "Please!" she begged Burckhardt. "You don't understand. You mustn't shoot!" "Get out of my way!" "But, Mr. Burckhardt -- " She never finished. Dorchin, his face unreadable, headed for the door. Burckhardt had been pushed one degree too far. He swung the gun, bellowing. The girl called out sharply. He pulled the trigger. Closing on him with pity and pleading in her eyes, she came again between the gun and the man. Burckhardt aimed low instinctively, to cripple, not to kill. But his aim was not good. The pistol bullet caught her in the pit of the stomach. the door slamming behind him, his footsteps racing into the distance. Burckhardt hurled the gun across the room and jumped to the girl. Swanson was moaning, "That finishes us, Burckhardt. Oh, why did you do it? We could have got away. We could have gone to the police. We were practically out of here! We -- " Burckhardt wasn't listening. He was kneeling beside the girl. She lay flat on her back, arms helterskelter. There was no blood, hardly any sign of the wound: but the position in which she lay was one that no living human being could have held. Yet she wasn't dead. She wasn't dead -- and Burckhardt, frozen beside her, thought; She isn't alive, either. There was no pulse, but there was a rhythmic ticking of the outstretched fingers of one hand. There was no sound of breathing, but there was a hissing, sizzling noise. The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt. There was neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper thjan the Pit. She said, through lips that writhed erratically, "Don't -- worry, Mr. Burckhardt. I'm -- all right." Burckhardt rocked back on his haunches, staring. Where there should have been blood, there was a clean break of a substance that was not flesh; and a curl of thin golden-copper wire. Burckhardt moistened his lips. "You're a robot," he said. The girl tried to nod. The twitching lips said, "I am. And so are you." V articulate sound, walked over to the desk and sat staring at the wall. Burckhardt rocked back and forth beside the shattered puppet on the floor. He had no words. The girl managed to say, "I'm -- sorry all this happened." The lovely lips twisted into a rictus sneer, frightening on that smooth young face, until she got them under control. "Sorry." she said again. "The -- nerve center was right about where the bullet hit. Makes it difficult to -- control this body." Burckhardt nodded automatically. accepting the apology. Robots. It was obvious, now that he knew it. In hindsight, it was inevitable. He thought of his mystic notions of hypnosis or Martians or something stranger still -- idiotic, for the simple fact of created robots fitted the facts better and more economically. All the evidence had been before him. The automatized factory, with its transplanted minds -- why not transplant a mind into a humanoid robot, give it its original owner's features and form? Could it know that it was a robot? "All of us," Burckhardt said, hardly aware that he spoke out loud. "My wife and my secretary and you and the neighbors. All of us the same." "No." The voice was stronger. "Not exactly the same, all of us. I chose it, you see. I -- " this time the convulsed lips were not a random contortion of the nerves -- "I was an ugly woman, Mr. Burckhardt. and nearly sixty years old. Life had passed me. And when Mr. Dorchin offered me the chance to live again as a beautiful girl, I jumped at the opportunity. Believe me, I jumped, in spite of its disadvantages. My flesh body is still alive -- it is sleeping, while I am here. I could go back to it. But I never do." "And the rest of us?" "Different, Mr. Burckhardt. I work here. I'm carrying out Mr. Dorchin's orders, mapping the results of the advertising tests, watching you and the others live as he makes you live. I do it by choice, but you have no choice. Because, you see, you are dead." "Dead?" cried Burckhardt; it was almost a scream. The blue eyes looked at him unwinkingly and he knew that it was no lie. He swallowed, marveling at the intricate mechanisms that let him swallow, and sweat, and eat. He said: "Oh.The explosion in my dream." "It was no dream. You are right -- the explosion. That was real and this plant was the cause of it. The storage tanks let go and what the blast didn't get, the fumes killed a little later. But almost everyone died in the blast, twenty-one thousand persons. You died with them and that was Dorchin's chance." "The damned ghoul!" said Burckhardt. T he twisted shoulders shrugged with an odd grace. "Why? You were gone. And you and all the others were what Dorchin wanted -- a whole town, a perfect slice of America. It's as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one. Easier -- the dead can't say no. Oh, it took work and money -- the town was a wreck -- but it was possible to rebuild it entirely, especially because it wasn't necessary to have all the details exact. "There were the homes where even the brains had been utterly destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn't be too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only has to last for one day. The same day -- June #th -- over and over again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the discovery won't have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight." The face tried to smile. "That's the dream, Mr. Burckhardt, that day of June #th, because you never really lived it. It's a present from Mr. Dorchin, a dream that he gives you and then takes back at the end of the day, when he has all his figures on how many of you responded to what variation of which appeal, and the maintenance crews go down the tunnel to go through the whole city, washing out the new dream with their little electronic drains, and then the dream starts all over again. On June #th. "Always June #th, because June #th is the last day any of you can remember alive. Sometimes the crews miss someone -- as they missed you, because you were under your boat. But it doesn't matter. The ones who are missed give themselves away if they show it -- and if they don't, it doesn't affect the test. But they don't drain us, the ones of us who work for Dorchin. We sleep when the power is turned off, just as you do. When we wake up, though, we remember." The face contorted wildly. "If I could only forget!" Burckhardt said unbelievingly, "All this to sell merchandise! It The robot called April Horn said, "It did. But it has made that's not the end of it. Once he finds the master words that make people act, do you suppose he will stop with that? Do you suppose -- " The door opened, interrupting her. Burckhardt whirled. Belatedly remembering Dorchin's flight, he raised the gun. "Don't shoot," ordered the voice calmly. It was not Dorchin; it was another robot, this one not disguised with the clever plastics and cosmetics, but shining plain. It said metallically: "Forget it, Burckhardt. You're not accomplishing anything. Give me that gun before you do any more damage. Give it to me now."  grily. The gleam on this robot torso was steel; Burckhardt was not at all sure that his bullets would pierce it, or do much harm if they did. He would have put it to the test -- But from behind him came a whimpering, scurrying whirlwind; its name was Swanson, hysterical with fear. He catapulted into Burckhardt and sent him sprawling, the gun flying free. "Pleasel" begged Swanson incoherently, prostrate before the steel robot. "He would have shot you -- please don't hurt me! Let me work for you, like that girl, ril do anything, anything you tell me -- " The robot voice said. "We don't need your help." It took two precise steps and stood over the gun -- and spurned it, left it lying on the floor The wrecked blonde robot said, without emotion, "I doubt that I can hold out much longer, Mr. Dorchin." "Disconnect if you have to," replied the steel robot. Burckhardt blinked. "But you're not Dorchin!" The steel robot turned deep eyes on him. "I am," it said. "Not in the flesh -- but this is the body I am using at the moment. I doubt that you can damage this one with the gun. The other robot body was more vulnerable. Now will you stop this nonsense? I don't want to have to damage you; you're too expensive for that. Will you just sit down and let the maintenance crews adjust you?" Swanson groveled. "You -- you won't punish us?" The steel robot had no expression, but its voice was almost surprised. "Punish you?" it repeated on a rising note. "How?" Swanson quivered as though the word had been a whip; but Burckhardt flared: "Adjust him, if he'll let you -- but not me! You're going to have to do me a lot of damage, Dorchin. I don't care what I cost or how much trouble it's going to be to put me back together again. But I'm going out of that door! If you want to stop me, you'll have to kill me. 'You won't stop me any other way!" The steel robot took a halfstep toward him, and Burckhardt involuntarily checked his stride. He stood poised and shaking, ready for death, ready for attack, ready for anything that might happen. Ready for anything except what did happen. For Dorchin's steel body merely stepped aside, between Burckhardt and the gun, but leaving the door free. "Go ahead," invited the steel robot. "Nobody's stopping you." hardt brought up sharp. It was insane of Dorchin to let him go! Robot or flesh, victim or beneficiary, there was nothing to stop whatever law he could find away from Dorchin's synthetic empire, and telling his story. Surely the corporations who paid Dorchin for test results had no notion of the ghoul's technique he used; Dorchin would have to keep it from them, for the breatii of publicity would put a stop to it. Walking out meant death, perhaps -- but at that moment in his pseudo-life, death was no terror for Burckhardt. There was no one in the corridor. He found a window and stared out of it. There was Tylerton- -- an ersatz city, but looking so real and familiar that Burckhardt almost imagined the whole episode a dream. It was no dream, though. He was certain of that in his heart and equally certain that nothing in Tylerton could help him now. It had to be the other direction. It took him a quarter of an hour to find a way, but he found it -- skulking through the corridors, dodging the suspicion of footsteps, knowing for certain that his hiding was in vain, for Dorchin was undoubtedly aware of every move he made. But no one stopped him, and he found another door. It was a simple enough door from the inside. But when he opened it and stepped out, it was like nothing he had ever seen. incredible, blinding light. Burckhardt blinked upward, unbelieving and afraid. He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approached the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on eitiier side of him. N O wonder Dorchin could soeasily give him his freedom! From the factory, there was nowhere to go -- but how incredible this fantastic gulf, how impossible the hundred white and blinding suns that hung above! A voice by his side said inquiringly, "Burckhardt?" And thunder rolled the name, mutteringly soft, back and forth in the abyss before him. Burckhardt wet his lips. "Yyes?" he croaked. "This is Dorchin. Not a robot this time, but Dorchin in the flesh, talking to you on a hand mike. Now you have seen, Burckhardt. Now will you be reasonable and let the maintenance crews take over?" Burckhardt stood paralyzed. One of the moving mountains in the blinding glare came toward him. It towered hundreds of feet over his head; he stared up at its top, squinting helplessly into the light. It looked like -- Impossible I The voice in the loudspeaker at the door said, "Burckhardt?" But he was unable to answer. A heavy rumbling sigh. "I see," said the voice. "You finally understand. There's no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, Burckhardt, why would I reconstruct a city just the way it was before? I'm a businessman; I count costs. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn't any need to in this case." From the mountain before him. Burckhardt helplessly saw a lesser cliff descend carefully toward him. It was long and dark, and at the end of it was whiteness, five-fingered whiteness... "Poor little Burckhardt," crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop. "It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top." VI I T was the morning of June #th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream. It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadowy figures that were not men and terror beyond words. He shuddered and opened his eyes. Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling. Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-ofseason chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scene was normal enough -- except for the sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared: "Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! Are you going to vote straight Federal Party all up just bet you are!" Sometimes he screams, sometimes he wheedles, threatens, begs, cajoles... but his voice goes on and on through one June #th after another. The Vilbar Party "Nufs to you!" was whaf Narli knew Earfhmen would tell him... only if was frismil nutsi HE Perzils are giving a I vilbar party tomorrow B night," Professor Slood said cajolingly. "You will come this time, won't you, Narli?" Narli Gzann rubbed his forehead fretfully. "You know how I feel about parties, Karn." He took a frismil nut out of the tray on his desk and nibbled it in annoyance. "But this is in your honor, Narli -- a farewell party. You must go. It would be -- it would be unthinkable if you didn't." Karn Slood's eyes were pleading. He could not possibly be held responsible for his friend's antisocial behavior and yet, Narli knew, he would somehow feel at fault. Narli sighed. He supposed he would have to conform to public sentiment in this particular instance, but he was damned if he would give in gracefully. "After all, what's so special about the occasion? I'm just leaving to take another teaching job, that's all." He took another nut. "That's alir Slood's face swelled with emotion. "You can't really be that indifferent." "Another job, that's all it is to me," Narli persisted. "At an exceptionally high salary, of course, or I wouldn't dream of accepting a position so inconveniently located." Slood was baffled and hurt and outraged. "You have been honored by being the first of our people to be offered an exchange professorship on another planet," he said stiffly, "and you call it 'just another job.' Why, I would have given my right antenna to get it!" Narli realized that he had again overstepped the invisible boundary between candor and tactlessness. He poked at the nuts with a stylus. "Honored by being the first of our species to be offered a guineapigship," he murmured. He had not considered this aspect of the matter before, but now that it occurred to him, he was probably right. "Oh, I don't mind, really." He waved away the other's sudden commiseration. "You know I like being alone most of the time, so I won't find that uncomfortable. Students are students, whether they're Terrestrials or Saturnians. I suppose they'll laugh at me behind my back, but then even here, my students always did that." He gave a hollow laugh and unobtrusively put out one of his hands for a nut. "At least on Earth I'll know why they're laughing." expressive face as he firmly removed the nut tray from his friend's reach. "I didn't think of it from that angle, Narli. Of course you're right. Human beings, from what I've read of them, are not noted for tolerance. It will be difficult, but I'm sure you'll be able to -- " he choked on the kindly lie -- "win them over." Narli repressed a bitter laugh. Anyone less likely than he to win over a hostile alien species through sheer personal charm could hardly be found on Saturn. Narli Gzann had been chosen as first exchange professor between Saturn and Earth because of his academic reputation, not his personality. But although the choosers had probably not had that aspect of the matter in mind, the choice, he thought, was a wise one. As an individual of solitary habits, he was not apt to be much lonelier on one planet than another. And he had accepted the post largely because he felt that, as an alien being, he would be left strictly alone. This would give him the chance to put in a lot of work on his definitive history of the Solar System, a monumental project from which he begrudged all the time he had to spend in gations expected of a professor on sociable Saturn. The salary was a weighty factor, too -- not only was it more than twice what he had been getting, but since there would be no necessity for spending more than enough for bare subsistence he would be able to save up a considerable amount and retire while still comparatively young. It was pleasant to imagine a scholarly life unafflicted by students. He could put up with a good deal for that goal. But how could he alleviate the distress he saw on Karn's face? He did not consciously want to hurt the only person who, for some strange reason, seemed to be fond of him, so he said the only thing he could think of to please: "All right, Kam, I'll go to the Perzils tomorrow night." It would be a deadly bore -- parties always were -- and he would eat too much, but, after all, the thought that it would be a long time before he'd ever see any of his own kind again would make the affair almost endurable. And just this once it would be all right for him to cat as much as he wanted. When he was on Earth out of reach of decent food, he would probably trim down considerably. love Earth, Professor Gzann," the hostess on the interplanetary liner gushed. "I'm sure I shall," he lied politely. She smiled at him too much, over-doing her professional cordiality; underneath the effusiveness, he sensed the repulsion. Of course he couldn't blame her for trying not to show her distaste for the strange creature -- the effort at concealment was, as a matter of fact, more than he had expected from a Terrestrial. But he wished she would leave him alone to meditate. He had planned to get a lot of meditation done on the journey. "You speak awfully good English," she told him. He looked at her. "I am said to have some scholarly aptitude. I understand that's why I was chosen as an exchange professor. It does seem reasonable, doesn't it?" She turned pink -- a sign of embarrassment with these creatures, he had learned. "I didn't mean to -- to question your ability. Professor. It's just that -- well, you don't look like a professor." "Indeed?" he said frostily. "And what do I look like, then?" She turned even rosier. "Oh -- I -- I don't know exactly. It's just that -- well..." And she fled. He couldn't resist flicking his antennae forward to catch her sotto voce conversation with the co-pilot ; it was so seldom you got the chance to learn what others were saying about you behind your back. "But I could hardly tell him he looks like a teddy bear, could I?" "He probably doesn't even know what a teddy bear is." "Perhaps I don't," Narli thought resentfully, "but I can guess." With low cunning, the Terrestrials seemed to have ferreted out the identity of all his favorite dishes and kept serving them to him incessantly. By the time the ship made planetfall on Earth, he had gained ten grisbuts. "Oh, well," he thought, "I suppose it's all just part of the regular diplomatic service. On Earth, I'll have to eat crude native foods, so I'll lose all the weight again." President Purrington of North America came himself to meet Narli at the airfield because Narli was the first interplanetary exchange professor in history. "Welcome to our planet. Professor Gzann," he said with warm diplomatic cordiality, wringing Narli's upper right hand after a moment of indecision. "We shall do everything in our power to make your stay here a happy and memorable one." "I wish you would begin by doing something about the climate," Narli thought. It was stupid of him not to have realized how hot it would be on Earth. He was really goii to suffer in this torrid climate; especially in the tight Terrestrial costume he wore over his fur for the sake of conformity. Of course, justice compelled him to admit to himself, the clothes wouldn't have become so snug if he hadn't eaten quite so much on board ship. Purrington indicated the female beside him. "May I introduce my wife?" "Ohhh," the female gasped, "isn't he cute!" T he President and Narli stared at her in consternation. She looked abashed for a moment, then smiled widely at Narli and the press photographers. "Welcome to Earth, dear Professor Gzann!" she exclaimed, mispronouncing his name, of course. Bending down, she kissed him right upon his fuzzy forehead. Kissing was not a Saturnian practice, nor did Nami approve of it; however, he had read enough about Earth to know that Europeans sometimes greeted dignitaries in this peculiar way. Only this place, he had been given to understand, was not Europe but America. "I am having a cocktail party in your honor this afternoon!" she beamed, smoothing her flowered print dress down over her girdle. "You'll be there at five sharp, won't you, dear?" "Delighted," he promised dismally. He could hardly plead a previous engagement a moment after arriving. "I've tried to get all the things you like to eat," she went on anxiously, "but you will tell me if there's anything special, won't you?" "I am on a diet," he said. He must be strong. Probably the food would be repulsive anyhow, so he'd have no difficulty controlling his appetite. "Digestive disorders, you know. A glass of Vichy and a biscuit will be..." He stopped, for there were tears in Mrs. Purrington's eyes. "Your tummy hurts? Oh, you poor little darling!" "Gladys!" the President said sharply. There were frismil nuts at Mrs. Purrington's cocktail party and vilbar and even slipnis broogs... all imported at fabulous expense, Narli knew, but then this was a government affair and expense means nothing to a government since, as far as it is concerned, money grows on taxpayers. Some of the native foods proved surprisingly palatable, too -- pate de foie gras and champagne and little puff pastries full of delightful surprises. Narli was afraid he was making a zloogle of himself. However, he thought, trying not to catch sight of his own portly person in the mirrors that walled the' room, the lean days were just ahead. Besides, what could he do when everyone insisted on pressing food on him? "Try this. Professor Gzann." "Do try that, Professor Gzann." ("Doesn't he look cunning in his little dress suit?") They crowded around him. The women cooed, the men beamed, and Narli ate. He would be glad when he could detach himself from all this cloying diplomacy and get back to the healthy rancor of the classroom. A T school, the odor of chalk dust, ink and rotting apple cores was enough like its Saturnian equivalent to make Narli feel at home immediately. The students would dislike him onsight, he knew. It is in the nature of the young to be hostile toward whatever is strange and alien. They would despise him and jeer at him, and he, in his turn, would give them long, involved homework assignments and such difficult examinations that they would fail... Narli waddled briskly up to his desk which had, he saw, been scaled down to Saturnian size, whereas he had envisioned himself struggling triumphantly with ordinary Earth-sized, furniture. But the atmosphere was as hot and sticky and intolerable as he had expected. Panting as unobtrusively as possible, he rapped with his pointer. "Attention, students!" Now should come the derisive babble... but there was a respectful silence, broken suddenly by a shrill feminine whisper of, "Oooo, he's so adorable!" followed by the harsh, "Shhh, Aval You'll embarrass the poor little thing." Narli's face swelled. "I am your new professor of Saturnian Studies. Saturn, as you probably know, is a major planet. It is much larger and more important than Earth, which is only a minor planet." The students obediently took this down in their notebooks. They carefully took down everything he said. Even a bout of coughing that afflicted him halfway through seemed to be getting a phonetic transcription. From time to iime, they would interrupt his lecture with questions so pertinent, so well-thought out and so courteous that all he could do was answer them. His antennae lifted to catch the whispers that from time to time were exchanged between even the best-behaved of the students. "Isn't he precious?" "Seems like a nice fellow -- sound grasp of his subject." "Sweet little thing!" "Unusually interesting presentation." "Doesn't he remind you of Winnie the Pooh?" "Able chap." "Just darling!" After class, instead of rushing out of the room, they hovered around his desk with intelligent, solicitous questions. Did he like Earth? Was his desk too high? Too low? Didn't he find it hot with all that fur? Such lovely, soft, fluffy fur, though. "Do you' mind if I stroke one of your paws -- hands -- Professor?" ("So cuddly-looking!") He said yes, as a matter of fact, he was hot, and no, he didn't mind being touched in a spirit of scientific investigation. He had a moment of uplift at the teachers' cafeteria when he discovered lunch to be virtually inedible. The manager, however, had been distressed to see him pick at his food, and by dinnertime a distinguished Chef with an expert knowledge of Saturnian cuisine had been rushed from Washington. Since the school food was inedible for all intelligent life-forms, everyone ate the Saturnian dishes and praised Narli as a public benefactor. confines of his small room at the Men's Faculty Club, Narli had spread out his notes and was about to start work on his history when there was a knock at the door. He trotted over to open it, grumbling to himself. The head of his department smiled brightly down at him. "Some of us are going out for a couple of drinks and a gabfest. Care to come along?" Narli did not see how he could refuse and still carry the Saturnian's burden, so he accepted. Discovering that gin fizzes and Alexanders were even more palatable than champagne and more potent than vilbar, he told several Saturnine locker-room stories which were hailed with loud merriment. But he was being laughed at, not with, he knew. All this false cordiality, he assured himself, would die down after a couple of days, and then he would be able to get back to work. He must curb his intellectual impatience. In the morning, he found that enrollment in his classes had doubled, and the room was crowded to capacity with the bright, shining, eager faces of young Terrestrials athirst for learning. There were apples, chocolates and imported frismil nuts on his desk, as well as a pressing invitation from Mrs. Purrington for him to spend all his weekends and holidays at the White House. The window was fitted with an airconditioning unit which, he later discovered, his classes had chipped in to buy for him, and the temperature had been lowered to a point where it was almost comfortable. All the students wore coats. When he went out on the campus, women -- students, teachers, even strangers -- stopped to talk to him, to exclaim over him, to touch him, even to kiss him. Photographers were perpetually taking pictures, some of which turned up in the Student Union as full-color postcards. They sold like Lajl out of season. Narli wrote in Saturnian on the back of one: "Having miserable time ; be glad you're not here," and sent it to Slood. There were cocktail parties, musicales and balls in Narli's honor. When he tried to refuse an invitation, he was accused of shyness and virtually dragged to the affair by laughing members of the faculty. He put on so much weight that he had to buy a complete new Terrestrial outfit, which set him back a pretty penny. As a result, he had to augment his income by lecturing to women's clubs. They slobbered appallingly. homework assiduously and, in fact, put in more work than had been assigned. At the end of the year, not only did all of them pass, but with flying colors. "I hope you'll remember, Professor Gzann," the President of the University said, "that there will always be a job waiting for you here -- a non-exchange professorship. Love to have you." "Thank you," Narli replied politely. Mrs. Purrington broke into loud sobs when he told her he was leaving Earth. "Oh, I'll miss you so, Narli! You will write, won't you?" "Yes, of course," he said grimly. That made two hundred and eighteen people to whom he'd had to promise to write. It was fortunate he was traveling as a guest of the North Americal government, he thought as he supervised the loading of his matched interplanetary luggage; his eight steamer baskets; his leather-bound Encyclopedia Terrestria, with his name imprinted in gold on each volume; his Indian war-bonnet; his oil painting of the President ; and his six cases of champagne -- all parting gifts -- onto the liner. Otherwise the fee for excess luggage would take what little remained of his bank account. There had been so many expenses -- clothes and hostess gifts and ice. Not all his mementoes were in his luggage. A new rare-metal watch gleamed on each of his four furry wrists; a brand-new trobskin wallet, platinum keychain, and uranium fountain pen were in his pocket; and a diamond and curium bauble clasped a tie lovingly handpainted by a female student. The argyles on his fuzzy ankles had been knitted by another. Still another devoted pupil had presented him with a hand-woven plastic case full of frismil nuts to eat on the way back. his face swelling with joy. "Well, well! You've put on weight, I see." Narli dropped into his old chair with a sigh. Surely Slood might have picked something else to comment on first -- his haggardness, for instance, or the increased spirituality of his expression. "Nothing else to do on Earth in your leisure moments but eat, I suppose," Slood said, pushing over the nut tray. "Even their food. Have some frismils." "No, thank you," Narli replied coldly. Slood looked at him in distress. "Oh, how you must have suffered! Was it very, very bad, Narli?" Narli hunched low in his chair. "It was just awful." "I'm sure they didn't mean to be unkind," Slood assured him. "Naturally, you were a strange creature to them and they're only -- " "Unkind?" Narli gave a bitter laugh. "They practically killed me with kindness! It was fuss, fuss, fuss all the time." "Now, Narli, I do wish you wouldn't be quite so sarcastic." "I'm not being sarcastic. And I wasn't a strange creature to them. It seems there's a sort of popular child's toy on Earth known as a -- " he winced -- "teddy bear. I aroused pleasant childhood memories in them, so they showered me with affection and edibles." Slood closed his eyes in anguish. "You arc very brave, Narli," he said almost reverently. "Very brave and wise and good. Certainly that would be the best thing to tell our people. After all, the Terrestrials are our allies; we don't want to stir up public sentiment against them. But you can be honest with me, Narli. Did they refuse to serve you in restaurants? Were you segregated in public vehicles? Did they shrink from you when you came close?" Narli beat the desk with all four hands. "I was hardly ever given the chance to be alone! They crawled all over me! Restaurants begged for my trade! I had to hire private vehicles because in public ones I was mobbed by admirers!" "Such a short time," Slood murmured, "and already suspicious of even me, your oldest friend. But don't talk about it if you don't want to, Narli... Tell me, though, did they sneer at you and whisper half-audible insults? Did they -- " "You're right!" Narli snapped. "I don't want to talk about it." Slood placed a comforting hand upon his shoulder. "Perhaps that's wisest, until the shock of your experience has worn off." Narli made an irritable noise. "The Perzils are giving a vilbar party tonight," Slood said. "But I know how you feel about parties. I've told them you're exhausted from your trip and won't be able to make it." "Oh, you did, did you?" Narli asked ironically. "What makes you think you know how I feel about parties?" "But -- " "There's an interesting saying on Earth: 'Travel is so broadening.' " He looked down at his bulges with tolerant amusement. "In more than one way, in case the meaning eludes .you. Very sound psychologically. I've discovered that I like parties. I like being liked. If you'll excuse me. I'm going to inform the Perzils that I shall be delighted to come to their party. Care to join me?" "Well," Slood mumbled, "I'd like to, but I have so much work -- " "Introvert!" said Narli, and he began dialing the Perzils. Why can't you go home again after years In space? There had to be an answer... could he find it in time, though? nel Halter brought the images on the telescreen into focus. Four booster tugs were fastening, like sky-bamacles, onto the hull of the ancient derelict, Alpha. He watched as they swung her around, stem down, and sank with her through the blackness, toward the bluish-white, moonlighted arc of Earth a thousand miles below. He pressed a button. The image of tugs and hull faded and the control room of the old ship swam onto the screen. Colonel Halter saw the crew, sitting in a half circle, before the control panel. The telescreen in the control room of old Alpha was yet dark. The faces watching it held no care lines or laugh lines, only a vague expression of kindness. They could be faces of wax or those of people dying pleasantly. Colonel Halter shook his head. in the field seventy-five years back -- and now he was to get them to come out of that old hull. God almighty, how could you pull people out of an environment they were perfectly adjusted to? Logic? Force? Reason? Humoring? How could you know? Talk to them, he told himself. He dreaded it, but the problem had to be faced. He flipped a switch on his desk: saw light jump into their screen and his own face take shape there; saw their faces on his own screen, set now, like the faces of stone idols. He turned another dial. The picture swung around so that he was looking into their eyes and they into his. Halter said, "Captain McClelland?" One of the old men nodded. "Yes." McClelland was clean-shaven. His uniform, treated against deterioration, was. immaculate, but his body showed frail and bony through it. His face was long and hollow-cheeked, the eyes deepset and bright. The head was like a skull, the nose an eagle's beak. 'Tm Colonel Halter. I'm a psychotherapist." N one of them answered. There was only the faint thrumming of the rockets lowering the old ship to Earth. "Let me be sure I have your identities right," went on Colonel Halter. He then looked at the man on the captain's right. "You, I believe, are ' Lieutenant James Brady." Brady nodded, his pale, eroded face expressionless. Colonel Halter saw the neat black uniform, identical with the captain's; saw the cropped gray hair and meticulously trimmed goatee. "And you," he said to the woman sitting beside the lieutenant, "are Dr. Anna Mueller." The same nod and thin, expressionless face. The same paleness. Faded hazel eyes; hair white and trimmed close to her head; body emaciated. "Daniel Carlyle, astrogator." The nod. Like the doctor's brother, thought Colonel Halter, and yet like the lieutenant with his cropped hair and with an identical goatee. "Caroline Gordon, dietician and televisor. John Crowley, rocketman." Each nodded, expressionless, their faces like white, weathered statues in a desert. Colonel Halter turned to the captain. The rocket thrum of the tugs had become a roar as the gravity pulled against the antique hull. "We understand," said Colonel Halter, "that you demand repairs for your ship and fuel enough to take you back into deep space." "That is right." The voice was low, slightly harsh. "You're all close to a himdred years old. You'd die out there. Here, with medical aid, you'd easily live to a hundred and twenty-five." Dr. Anna Mueller's head moved slightly. "We're aware of that, Colonel." "It'd be pointless," said the colonel, "and a shameful waste. You're still the only crew that ever made it out beyond the Solar System. You've kept records of your personal experience, how you survived. They're valuable." Dr. Mueller caught her breath. "Our adjustinent to space is our private concern. I don't think you could understand." "Maybe not, but we could try. To us, of course, complete adjustment is a living death." "To us, it was a matter of staying alive." Halter turned aside from disagreement, searching for common ground. "You'd be protected here, you know. You deserve that." "Who'd protect us from you?" asked the captain. "Life in the Solar System is destructive." forward. "You've failed -- all through the whole System." "We haven't finished living in it," said Halter. 'Who can pin a label on us of success or failure?" Miss Gordon, dietician and televisor, said quietly, "There are some records I'd like to show you. We compiled them while the Alpha was drifting back into the System." Halter watched the frail arm reach out and turn a dial. A point of light grew on the screen in Colonel Halter's office. "Pluto," said her quiet voice. Halter watched the lightspot focus on a mountain of ice. Men in suits of steel were crawling up its frozen side. Other men on the mountain's top were sighting guns. The men below were sighting guns. Yellow fire spurted from the top and the sides of the mountain, blending into a lake of fire. There was a great hissing and a rushing torrent of boiling water and rolling, twisting steelclad bodies. The mountain of ice melted like a lump of lard in a hot frying pan. Only the steel bodies glinted, motionless, in the pale wash of sunlight. Halter watched the brightness die and another lightspot grow one moon. The focus shifted in close to a fleet of shining silver ships. Then another fleet dropped from close above, hanging still, and there were blinding flashes engulfing each ship below, one after the other, until there were only the shining ships above, climbing into the dusk glow of the Sun... The glowing circle of brightringed Saturn was already rushing toward Colonel Halter from far back in the depth of screen. The focus shifted onto the planet's glaring surface. Men in the uniform of Earth soldiers were rushing out of transparent shell houses and staring in panic as the missiles plummeted through the shells and erupted clouds of steam which spouted up from mile-deep craters and there was nothing but the steam and the holes and the white cold. Jupiter made a hole in the blackness, with eleven tiny holes scattered all around her, like droplets of fire. Ships streaked up, one for each droplet, circling each, spraying fire, until each droplet flared like a tiny sun. Yellow Mars, holding closely its two speedy rocks of moons, spun into the screen. A straggling line of men moved across a desert that whipped them with sheets of yellow dust. A single ship dived from out of the Sun, swooped along the line, licking it with the tongue of flame that streaked behind. As the ship flashed beyond the horizon, a line of smoking rag bundles lay still upon the yellow sand. the television screen in Colonel Halter's office. In the long moment of silence that followed, he thought. Oh, God, aiter this awful picture, how can I convince them to come out of the womb of that ship and live aain? What reason can I give? Immobilizing his face, he saw the half circle of the six old people again in the control room of the old, old ship. He said, "You'll set down in approximately twenty minutes." "Yes," agreed the captain, "from where we jumped into space seventy-five years ago. The people of Earth were talking each other about them. There was hope. We felt that by the time we'd finished our mission and come back from that other solar system, where a healthy colony could be born, most of those problems would be solved." A pause. "But now there's this System. We won't face it." The roaring of the rockets now as they plunged flame against the concrete slab of the landing field. The bug bodies of the tugs gently easing old Alpha to Earth. Colonel Halter was saying. "How about this other solar system? You haven't let us know whether or not you reached it." "We saw it." There was a hollowness in the captain's voice. "We didn't reach it. But we will. You'll repair the Alpha and refuel it." "As you were saying," prompted Colonel Halter, "you didn't reach it." "A meteor," said the captain. "Straight into our rockets. Our ship began to drift. The cameras, of course, set in the bulkheads, were watching us." "May I see? Anything you have to show or say will be strictly between us. I've given orders for our communication to be unrecorded and private. You have my word." "You'll be allowed to see. I've given my permission." Colonel Halter thought, You have divert permission? Then he saw in his telescreen the little old lady who was Caroline Gordon, dietician and televisor, press a button on the side of her chair. Instantly the picture changed. He heard her voice. "You see the rocket room of the Alpha back almost seventyfive years, a few minutes before the accident." T here were the four torpedolike tubes projecting into the cylindrical room; the mass of levers, buttons, wheels and flashing lightspots. Halter watched John Crowley, the rocketman, broad-shouldered and lithe, turning a wheel at the point of one of the giant tubes. The next moment, he was flung to the floor. He struggled to his feet, jerked an oxygen mask from the bag at his chest, clamped it to his face and rushed to the tubes. He twirled wheels, pulled levers, pressed buttons. He glanced at the board on which the lightspots had been flashing. Darkness. He pressed a button. A foot-thick metal door swung open. He stepped through it. The door shut and locked. Leaning against the steel wall at the end of a long companionway, he pulled off his oxygen mask and ran along the companionway toward the control room. The others met him in the center of the ship. Crowley saluted the young Captain McClelland. "The rockets are gone, sir. A meteor." McClelland did not smile or frown, show sadness or fear or any other emotion. He was tall and slim then, with cropped black hair, its line high on his head. His face was lean and strong-featured. There was a sense of command about the captain. Quietly, he said, "Well all go to the control room." They followed him as he strode along the companionway. The telescreen in Colonel Halter's office darkened and there was only the old voice of the captain, saying, "We were drifting in space. You know what that means. But no one broke down. We were too well trained, too well conditioned. We gathered in the control room." Light opened up again on Colonel Halter's telescreen. He saw the polished metal walls, the pilot chairs and takeoff hammocks, the levers, buttons and switches of the young ship back those many years, and the six young people standing before a young Captain McClelland, who was speaking to them of food, water and oxygen. It was decided that their metabolisms must be lowered and that they must live for the most part in their bunks. All activity must be cut to minimum. All weapons must be jettisoned, except one, the captain's shock gun, that could not kill but only cause unconsciousness for twentyfour hours. order. The weapons were gathered up and placed in an airlock which thrust them out into space. Five of the crew lay down in their bunks. Dr. Anna Mueller, tall and slim, fullbosomed, tawny-skinned and tawny-haired, remained standing. She pressed the thought recorders over the heads of the other five people who lay there motionless, clamped the tiny electrodes onto her own temples and placed a small, black box, covered with many tiny dials, beside the bunk of Miss Gordon, the televisor. A moment later, a jumble of thoughts: Now I am dead. An end. For what, now that it's here? Love. The warm press of a body. Trees and grass. Sunrise. To take poison. Clean air after a rain. City, people, lights. Sunset -- The thought words jumbled like a voice from a recorder when the speed is turned up. Then they faded and one thought stream came through clean and clear: I am Dr. Anna Mueller. Good none of the others can hear what I'm thinking. Was afraid I'd die this way someday. But to prolong it. Painless death in an instant. Could give it to us all. But orders. Captain McClelland. No feeling? Can't he see what I feel for him? Why am I thinking like this? Now. But this is what is happening to me. He'd rather make love to this ship. Kiss Crowley before I give him the metabolism sedation shot. Captain'll see I'm a woman. She stepped to the bulkhead and pressed a button. A medicine hypodermic syringe, she went to Crowley, bent down and gave him a long kiss on the lips. Instantly Colonel Halter heard thoughts. Captain McClelland: She must be weak. Why's she doin that? Thought she was stronger. But the ship's the thing. The ship and I. Crowley; What the hell? Didn't know she went for me. Just a half hour with her before the needle. What's to lose? He pulled her down to him. Lieutenant Brady; He'd do that, the damned animal. But I'm not enough of an animal. I'm a good spaceman. All spontaneity's been trained out of me. Feel Anyplace. But I'm so controlled. Got to do something. This last time... He sat up in his bunk. Caroline Gordon; I knew he was like that. Married when we got back. Mrs. Crowley. And if we'd gotten back. Out every other night with another woman. I could kill him. She turned her face away. Daniel Carlyle: Look at them. And I can't live. Only one person needs me, back on Earth, and she's the only. And that's enough. But maybe I can kilt myself... He did not move. T he thoughts stopped and Colonel Halter leaned forward in his chair as he saw Captain McClelland standing beside his bunk, the gun in his hand. Dr. Mueller saw, too -- the young Dr Mueller, back those, seventyfive years. She struggled to pull away from Crowley. Lieutenant Brady stood, started toward the captain, stopped. Crowley pushed Dr. Mueller away from him, leaped to his feet and lunged toward the captain. A stream of light .appeareef between the gun muzzle and Crowley. He stumbled, caught himself, stood up very straight, then sank down, as though he had been deflated. The captain motioned Dr. Mueller to her bunk. She hesitated, pain in her face, turned, went to her bunk and lay down. Another stream of light appeared between her and the gun. She lay very still. The needle slipped from her fingers. The captain turned the gun on Lieutenant Brady, who was coming at him, arms raised. The light beam again. The lieutenant sank back. Caroline Gordon was watching the captain as the light stream appeared. She relaxed, her eyes closed. Daniel Carlyle did not move as the light touched him. Captain McClelland bolstered the gun. He picked up the hypodermic needle and sterilized it at the medicine cabinet. Then he injected Crowley's arm, filled the hypo four more times, injected the others. He finally thrust the needle into his own arm and lay down. His breathing began to slow. There was only the control room of the ship now, like some ancient mausoleum, with the six still figures and the control board dark and the eternal ocean of night pressing against the ports. The picture of the ship's control room began to fade on the screen. After a moment of darkness, the live picture of the six old figures, sitting in their half circle, spread again over the lighted square. Colonel Halter saw his own image, looking into the old masks: He said, "And where was your weakness. Captain McClelland?" "I was concerned," said the old voice, "with keeping us alive." "You weren't aware that some of your crew were emotionally involved with each other?" "No." "Are there any more records you could show me?" "Many more, Colonel, but I don't think it's necessary for you to see them. It would take too long. And we want to get back out into space." He paused. "We can brief you." "About your going back into space... I'm not sure we can allow it." "Our answer's very simple. There's a button, under my thumb, on the arm of this chair. A little pressure. Carbon monoxide. It would be quick." "Your idea?" "Yes. A matter of preserving our integrity. We'd rather die than face the horrors of life on Earth." H alter turned to the semicircle of faces. "And you've all agreed to this -- this suicide?" The captain cut in. "Of course. I realized years ago that the only place we could live was in space, in this ship." "When did your crew realize this?" "After a couple of years. I told them over and over again, day after day. After all, I am captain. I dictate the policy." "You've come back. You're in port. You're not in complete command." "I'll always be in command." "Perhaps," said Halter quietly. "However, we can come back to that. Please brief me on the records." Captain McClelland's face hardened as he turned to Dr. Anna Mueller. She explained, "We regained consciousness twenty-four hours after Captain McClelland used the shock gun on us. By then, our metabolisms were high enough to keep us conscious and alive. We could lift nutrition and water capsules to our mouths. We could press the button to activate the exercise mechanisms in our bunks. The output of the air machines was cut down until there was just enough to keep us alive and thinking clearly. "At intervals f several days, during our exercise and study periods, Captain McClelland turned up the air. We slept. And we dreamed. The dreams are recorded in full. When we could face them, they were played back to us. Our thoughts were played back, too. I conducted group therapy among us. We all grew to understand each other and ourselves, intimately, and now, in relation to our environment, we're perfectly adjusted." "Did Captain McClelland join you in group therapy?" "No." "Why?" "He was already perfectly adjusted." S HE frowned faintly, glanced at the captain. "When we were conscious, we studied from the library of microfilm. We read all the great literature of Earth. We watched the great plays and pictures and the paintings and listened to the music. Sometimes our thoughts were hateful. There was self-pity and hysteria. There were times when one or two of us would withdraw almost to the point of death. Then Captain McClelland would knock us out with the shock gun. "Slowly, over the years, our minds gradually merged into one mind. We thought and created and lived as if we were one person. There grew to be complete and perfect cooperation. And from this cooperation came some great works. Each one of us will tell you. I'll speak first." She paused. "Psychology has always been my prime interest. My rating at school was genius. My aptitudes were precisely in line with the field of work I chose. Through the years. I've developed a theory, discovered a way to bring about cooperation between all men. This is possible in spite of your wars and hatreds and destruction." Frown creases wrinkled her parchment forehead. "I'd like to know if it would work." Daniel Carlyle's voice was slightly above a whisper. "All my life. I'd wanted to write poetry. The meteor struck. I realized I wouldn't be allowed to die quickly. I began to do what I'd always wanted to do. The words poured into the thought recorder. Everything I felt and thought is there and all I've been able to know and be from this one mind of ours that's in us all. And it's some of the finest poetry that's ever been written." He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "It'd be good to know if anyone found them inspiring." "I've always lived for adventure," said Crowley, the rocketman, his old voice steady and quiet. 'Tve been the one to quiet down last into the life it was necessary for us to live but there. But my thoughts ran on into distant universes and across endless stretches of space. And so at last, to keep my sanity, I wrote stories of all the adventures I should have had, and more. And in them is all the native power of me, of all adventurers, and the eternal sweep of the Universe where Man will always thrust out to new places." There was a faint trembling in his body and a pained light in his eyes. "Seems I ought to know if they'll ever be read." TN spite of Brady's frailness, the lieutenant was like a grizzled old animal growling with his last breath. "I was the most capable pilot that ever blasted off from Earth. But I was also an inventor and designer. A lot of the ships Earth pilots are flying today are basically my ideas. After the accident, I wanted to get drunk and make love and then let myself out into space, with a suit, and be there forever. But Captain McClelland's shock gun and the understanding seeping into me from the thought recorders calmed me down eventually. "So I turned to creation as I lay there in my bunk. I designed many spaceships. And from those, I designed fewer and fewer, incorporating the best from each. And now I have on microfilm a ship that can thrust out to the ends of our galaxy. There aren't any flaws... Oh, I tell you, by God, I'd like to see her come to life!" He leaned back, sweat rolling down his bony cheeks. Miss Gordon, dietician and televisor, the motionless old lady with cropped, white hair, and face bones across which the paper skin was stretched, said, "There was only one thing I wanted when I knew I couldn't have marriage and a family. There was a perfect food for the human animal. I could find it. I began working on formulas. Over and over again, I put the food elements together and took them apart and put them together again. I threw away the work of years and started over again until at last I had my perfect formula." She clasped her hands. "Man's nutrition problem is solved. From the oceans and the air and the Earth, from the cosmic rays and the lights of the suns and from the particles of the microcosm, Man can take into his body all the nutrition that can enable him to live forever." She sat very still, smiling. "And it's got to be given a try." Silence. Colonel Halter watched the old figures sitting like figures in a wax museum, waiting, waiting. He turned a dial. The picture that flashed onto the screen in his office showed the pocked ship standing upright now, like some tree that had grown in the middle of a desert where it was never meant to grow. The space tugs had streaked out beyond the atmosphere to finish other assignments. There were no crowds, no official cars, no platforms, no bands. Only darkness and silence. Halter turned a dial. The control room of the old ship flashed back onto the screen. The ancient crew sat as before. Halter saw his own face on their television screen. Something was missing, he thought. What? What hadn't been said? And then suddenly it came to him. The captain. He hadn't spoken of any contribution he had made during those interminable years. Captain McClelland's record. No family. Wiped out when he was a baby in the last war. Educated and raised by the government. Never married. No entanglements with women. No close friends. Ship's captain at twenty-one. No failures. No vacations. No record of breakdown. Perfect physical condition. Strict disciplinarian. More time in space than on Earth by seventyfive per cent. No hobbies. No interest in the arts... Apparently no flhw as a spaceman... The end product of the stiffest training regimen yet devised by Man. The ideal captain. The records of the other five? All showing slight emotional instabilities when checked against the optimum score of a spaceman. Dr. Mueller -- a divorcee. A woman men had sought after. Dedicated in spare time to social psychology. Conflict in her decision as to whether she should go into the private practice of psychotherapy or specialize in space psychology. Interested in the study of neurosis caused by culture. Lieutenant Brady -- family man. Forced himself into mold of good husband and father. Brilliant designer. Ambition also to be space captain. Conflict between these three. Several years of psychotherapy which released his drive for adventure in space. Alpha mission to be his last. Lack of full leadership qualities prevented him from reaching captaincy. Rocketman Crowley -- typical man of action. Superb physique. Decathlon champion. Continual entanglements with women. Quick temper. Tendency to fight if pushed or crossed. Proud. However, if under good command, best rocketman in the service. Astrogator Daniel Carlyle -- highly sensitive. Psychosomatic symptoms unless out in space. Then in perfect health. Fine mathematician. Highly intuitive, yet logical. Saved four missions from disaster. Holder of Congressional Medal of Honor. Hobby, poetry. Fiancee was boyhood sweetheart. Dietician and televisor Caroline Gordon -- youngest of crew. Twenty years. Too many aptitudes. Tendency toward immaturity. Many hobbies. Idealistic. Emotions unfocused. IQ #. Success in any field of endeavor concentrated upon. At eighteen, specialized in dietetics and electronics. Highest ratings in field. Stable when under strict external discipline. N O, thought Halter. None of them fitted space like the completely self-sufficient McClelland, the man who could stand alone against that black, teeming, swirling endlessness of space. He turned to the captain. The old face was placid, the eyes slightly out of focus. "Captain McClelland," Halter said sharply. The pale eyes blinked and looked keenly on Halter's face. "You want fuel to take you back out into space." "That's right." "And if you don't get it, you'll press a button on the arm of your chair and you'll all die of carbon monoxide poisoning." "Exactly." "I'm curious about one point." Halter paused. "What did you do, Captain, while the others were working on their various projects?" Captain McClelland scowled at Halter for a long moment. "Why do you want to know that?" "Your crew members became lost in some work they loved. They told me about it with a certain amount of enthusiasm. You haven't told me what you did. I'd like to know -- for the records." "I watched them. Colonel. I watched them and dreamed of the time when I could take them and the ship back out into space under her own power. I love space and I love this ship. I love knowing she's under power and shooting out to the stars. There's nothing more for me." "What else did you do besides watch them?" "I activated the machinery that moved my bunk close to the controls. I practiced taking the ship through maneuvers. I kept the controls in perfect working order so I'd be ready to take off again someday." "If we repaired the ship so you could take off, the first shock of rocket thrust would kill you all." chance." Colonel Halter looked around the half circle of old faces. "And all your long years of work would be for nothing. Each of you, except Captain McClelland, has made a contribution to Earth and Man. You're needed here, not in the emptiness of space." He saw the eyes of the five watching him intently; saw a tiny flicker of surprise and interest on their faces. "You're destroying Earth," said the captain, his voice rising, "with your wars and your quarrels. We've all of us found peace. We're going to keep it." and looked at the five. "There are many of us on Earth, who are fighting a war without blood, to save mankind. We've made progress. We've worked out agreements among the warring nations to do their fighting on the barren planets where there aren't any native inhabitants, so noncombatants on Earth won't be killed and so the Earth won't be laid waste. That was the fighting you saw while you were coming in. "This is just one example. And there're a lot of us contributing ideas and effort. If all of us who're working for Earth were to leave it and go out into space, the ones who have to fight wars would make the Earth as barren as the Moon. This is our place in the Universe and it's got to be saved." "We've adjusted to the control room of this ship and to each other," said McClelland flatly. "Our work's done." "Let's put it like this. Captain. Maybe your work's done. Maybe you're not interested in what happens to Earth." Halter turned to the others. "But what you've done adds up to a search for answers here on Earth. Poetry. Design of a flawless spaceship. A psychological theory. A perfect diet. Novels about Man pushing out and out into space. All this indicates a deep concern for the health of humanity and its success." "We're not concerned," retorted the captain, "with the health or success of humanity." Halter sharply examined the other faces. He saw a flicker of sadness in one, anger in another, uncertainty, fear, joy. He said, "For seventy-five years, you obey your captain. You listen to what he says. And everything is a command. Yet in yourselves you feel a drive to carry out your ideas, your creations, to their logical ends. Which means, will they work when they're applied to Man? Will people read the novels? Will they catch the meaning of the poetry? Will the spaceships really work as they're supposed to? Will the psychological theory really promote cooperation? Is there supreme health in this marvelous diet?" He gave them a moment to think and then continued. "But if you continue to follow the commands of the captain, you'll be dead before you're out of the Earth's atmosphere. You'll never know. Maybe Man will prove that your great works are only dreams... But I think there's a great need in you to know, one way or the other." among them, like that of ancient machines being activated after years of lying dormant. They glanced at each other. They fidgeted. Trouble twisted their faces. "Colonel Halter," said the captain, "I'm warning you. My thumb is on the button. I'll release the gas. Do we get the repairs and the fuel to take off from Earth, or don't we?" Colonel Halter leaned grimly toward the captain. "You've spent fifty years with one idea -- to stay out in space forever. You've made no effort to create or do one single constructive act. I'll tell you whether or not you get the fuel and the repairs -- after I hear what someone in your crew has to say." Silence hung tensely between the control room of the ship and Colonel Halter's office on Earth. The captain was glaring now at Halter. A tear showed in the corner of each of Dr. Anna Mueller's old eyes. Lieutenant Brady was gripping the arms of . his chair. Daniel Carlyle's eyes were closed and his head shook slightly, as though from palsy. There was a faint, enigmatic smile on Caroline Gordon's face. The cords on Crowley's neck stood out through the tan and wrinkled wrapping-paper skin. By God, thought Halter, they're all sane except the captain. And they've t to do it. They've t to come out on their own steam or die in that control room. "I'm waiting," he said. "Is your work going to die and you with it?" "We'll leave all the records," said the captain, his thumb poised over the button on the his hand. "Damn it, say something, one of you!" Still the silence and the flickering looks all around. Halter heard a sob. He saw Dr. Anna Mueller's head drop forward and her shoulders tremarm of his chair. "That's enough." Halter ignored him. "Each of you can help. You've only done part of the work." He stood and struck the desk with the flat of ble. The others were staring at her, as if she had suddenly materialized among them, like a ghost. Then her voice, through the trembling and the faint crying: "I've -- I've got to know." The captain got creakily to his feet. "Dr. Mueller! Do you want me to use the gun again?" She raised her face to his. There was pain in it. "I've -- got work to do. There's so -- little time." "That's right. On this ship. You're part of the crew. There'll be plenty of work once we get pointed the black muzzle at Dr. Mueller, sighted along the barrel. "Wait," said Halter. "You're right." Captain McClelland hesitated. "It's quite plain," went on Halter, "that Dr. Mueller is alone among you. She wants to come out and go on with her work. The rest of you want the closed-in uterine warmth and out in space again." "I've got to see if my theory's right." "Colonel Halter," said the captain, "this is insubordination. Mutiny." bility of failure. So I'm afraid she'll have to be sacrificed. After all, you do need a full crew to move the ship -- even if you are all dead a few seconds after blastoff." He paused, looking intcntly at Brady, Crowley, Carlyle, Gordon, where they sat in the half circle, staring back at him. "So -- " Lieutenant Brady struggled up from his chair. "I've got twenty-five years of life. I've some ships to design." "That goes for me, too," said Crowley, the rocketman. "Will anybody want to read my novels?" Astrogator Carlyle leaned forward. "There are many more poems to be written." "Give me a soundproof laboratory," said Caroline Gordon. "I'll add another fifty years to all your lives." "I'm afraid it is mutiny. Captain," said Halter. The captain started toward his chair, his hand reaching for the button on its arm. Lieutenant Brady stumbled forward, blocking his way. Halter could only watch, thinking, Ifs up to them. They've to do it now! He saw the captain draw his shock gun; saw light fiare at its muzzle; saw Lieutenant Brady crumple like a collapsing skeleton. Crowley reached forward, grasping McClelland's shoulder. The gun swung toward him. A stream of light squirted into his middle. Crowley fell forward, pulling the captain down with him. The three other oldsters were above the three black figures sprawled on the floor, like tangled puppets. They hesitated a moment, then fell upon the ones below them, black arms and legs twitching about now like the legs of dying spiders, struggling weakly. A flash of light exploded beneath these twisting black reeds and streaks of it shot out all through the waving black cluster. The next moment, they settled and were quiet. ancient control room, like the stillness in a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea. It lingered for a long time, while Colonel Halter watched and waited. Dr. Mueller's voice, seventyfive years tired, said, "He's -- quiet now. Please come and take us out." Colonel Halter switched on his desk visiophone. "They're coming out," he said quietly. "I'll be there to supervise." On the visiophone, the general's image nodded. "Congratulations, Colonel. How are they?" "There'll be one case for psycho. Captain McClelland." "I'll be damned!" exclaimed the general. "From his record, I thought he'd never break!" "Let's say he couldn't bend. sir." A pause. "And yet he did keep them from destroying themselves." "He'll be made well again... What about the others?" "I think they, too, are very great and human people." "Well." said the general, "they're your patients. I'll see you at the ship in five minutes." "I'll be there, sir." Colonel Halter flipped the switch. The visiophone blanked out. He looked at the television screen. The six black-clothed figures were quiet on the floor of their ship's control room. They reminded him of sleeping children curled together for warmth. As he left his office and walked out into the humming city, he felt drained, still shaking with tension, realizing even now how close he had come to failure. But there was the scarred and pitted needle-nosed old hull, bright with moonlight, standing like a monument against the night sky. Not a monument to the past, though. It marked the birthplace of the future... and he had been midwife. He felt his shoulders straighten at the knowledge as he walked toward the ancient ship. # superb stories of science fiction dealing with mental powersmass hypnosis, telepathy, seances, precognition, levitation, predestination Rradburi', J. C. Furnas, Isaac Asimov, John Colicr, Anthony Boucher, John Wyndhaiii, Agatha Christie, Robert. Shcckcj-, and otlier famous writers. aJ for your information R eading idly through an old book, Camille Flammarion's Dreams oi an Astronomer, I happened across the sentence; "As with us, there is no integral number of days in the Martian year. Perhaps their calendar has also been reformed several times without being made perfect. But let us hope that they are not as stupid as we are, with our months of #, #, # and #I days and with our three days of days -- the commercial day which begins at midnight, the astronomical day which begins the following noon and the naval day which commenced the previous noon." This, combined with a letter asking about, the meaning of the names of the weekdays, reminded me that, one year ago, I had the best of intentions of devoting the first column of the new year to the appropriate discussion of New Year. I don't remember just what got in my way a year ago, but no matter -- one January issue is as good as another January issue to think about the thing we live by: the calendar. I feel quite certain that I am not the only one who is thinking about the problem at this time of the year. Comes New Year's Day, you'll probably read in your daily paper that State Senator Soandso is all in favor of a calendar revision, and if you watch the letter column, you'll find a reply in which the Senator is denounced as a heathen-indisguise, a man of ill will or at least a moron. This might well be followed by another letter declaring that the original letter writer described himself perfectly. antries, there remains the very simple fact that the calendar is not perfect -- something I encounter myself roughly once a day. Somebody wants to know whether I'd be available for a lecture on, say, January # or whether I'd prefer January #. First thing I have to do is see if one of these days is a Monday; for family reasons, Mondays are inconvenient to me. Or a transportation schedule may hinge on the problem of whether there will be four or five Sundays in October. (Don't look it up; try to guess.) I am also slightly tired of the routine -- so frequently needed in historical research -- of figuring out whether May #st, #, was a Sunday. (It was.) When I was a small boy, I learned that I had been born on a Tuesday and, remembering that my most recent birthday had not been on a Tuesday, I wanted to know what had happened to my birthday. I am not certain whether I got an explanation I did not understand or whether (as is more likely) I was simply told that I wasn't old enough to understand; at any event, I wished then that a birthday would come on the same day. I still think it should. Now I know, of course, why this isn't the case. But I also know that it could be. However, let's begin at the beginning. The roots of the trouble are two simple astronomical facts. One is that the Earth needs # days, # hours, # minutes and # seconds to go around the Sun once. If it needed # days or # days, things would be better -- though not yet "fine" -- and in the face of natural law, one would days. That is one of the difficulties; the year does not consist of a number of whole days. The other is that we have a moon. I admit at the outset that it is a very pretty moon. It is one of the biggest in the Solar System and its existence helped to get several sciences and assorted interesting and exasperating superstitions going. It is a challenge to space travel and all that. The trouble is that primitive peoples, at a time when artificial clocks were still to be invented, used it as a clock. The waxing and waning of the Moon was easily visible and time reckoning based itself almost automatically on the lunar phases. But the natural rhythm of life is the daily change from light to darkness and back to light again, based on the apparent movement of the Sun. The Moon, large and luminous and conspicuous as it was, could not do away with the day. Time reckoning, as a consequence, became a mixture of solar and lunar phenomena; time expressions were of solar or lunar origin, depending on the time interval to be expressed. A messenger was to return either when the shadows lengthened, or else after the Sun had taken two baths in the ocean. That was solar. But if it was a long trip, the messenger might not be back until after the Moon had twice renewed itself. That, of course, was lunar. If the trip was really long, it might happen that the voyagers would not return until two winters had gone by -- solar reckoning again. A S long as you could be lavish with a few days, all this did not matter. The difficulties began when people tried to pin time down a little more accurately, such as for the purpose of a festival. Just how many days are there between two "moons"? Answer (modem) : #. And how many "moons" between two winters? A disturbing #. Now you either know these unpleasant figures or you don't and believe that you are dealing with # days and # "moons." If you believe the latter, your calendar will get out of order rapidly. If you do know the figures, you realize that these things do not mesh and you struggle for a compromise which somehow fits the days, the seasons and the phases of the Moon together. None of the many attempts made at various times by various people was ever completely successful; none can be successful since the actual units are not commensurable. However, the job can be simplified and the result improved if you throw out one of the incommensurable units, namely, the phases of the Moon. This, in fact, was done in the oldest calendar we know of, the Egyptian calendar. Life in Egypt was based on the flooding of the Nile, an annual event, and their calendar had three seasons, named Flood Time, Seed Time and Harvest Time. Each season was subdivided into four months, so that a full year contained twelve months. They used the same figure, twelve, to subdivide night and day into smaller units, the hours. But the early Egyptian hours were based on the actual times of daylight and night, so that the length of an hour changed with the seasons, which accounts for their Latin name of horae temporales, the "temporary hours." Each Egyptian month contained # days and began with a festival. Each month gradually acquired the name of the festival with which it started. But this accounted for only # days...As for the remaining five days, the Egyptians decided that they were not worth much trouble, so they bunched them up at the end of the year and seem to have treated them as a holiday week. Simple, eh? In # B.C., Ptolemy Euergetes (not the Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemaeus) pointed out that, every four years, six days should be added instead of five, but his suggestion didn't find any friends. Some two hundred years later, when Cajus Julius Caesar had decreed a calendar for the Roman Empire, the Egyptian officials, knowing what was good for them, finally consented to an extra day every four years. But not all Egyptians felt obliged to do so. the Egyptian calendar was the first "real" calendar, if that term is taken to mean a fixed scheme, a schedule, a time table upon which to base operations. By contrast, the Babylonian calendar, though probably older, was not "real." It had a year of # months, based on actual observation of the Moon. A thirteenth month was added whenever it became necessary to get the lunar phases and the seasons together again. The Mayan calendar, unnecessarily complicated by the introduction of Venus, has been highly overpublicizcd. It consisted of # months of # days with five or six "unlucky days" added, so unlucky that only unpostponable things like eating were done. It is true that it was accurate, but the Mayan system of counting was poor and the calendar so intricate that it was described as "wheels within wheels" by more critical archeologists. Before Caesar issued his calendar decree in # B.C., the Romans had struggled along with a calendar of # days. Even that, believe it or not, had been an improvement. The original Roman calendar had consisted of fen lunar months, beginning the year with March and ending in December. The intervening period of about # days was simply neglected -- why bother counting winter months? (The Vikings are said to have done the same, with a little more justification as to climate, I should think.) Then the Romans added January and February at the end of the year, but this came out with a total of # days. Because even numbers were unlucky to the Romans, a #th day was tacked on. Of course, this still did not make the seasons come out evenly, so, every two years, an extra month was added. Its name was Mercedonius, which can best be translated as "extra pay" (for the legions) and to show that this was not a normal month, Exfra Pay began after February #rd, running for # or # days, after which the last week of February finished up the year. Around # B.C., one Cneius Flavius changed things around a little more, making all months uneven so that they should be lucky, taking the needed days away from February to give it an even number of days (ours still remains #) because the last month of the year should be unlucky. So the year began with March of #I days, followed by April with # days, May again had #I and June #, Quintilis (the fifth month) again #, Sextilis (the sixth) #, September #, October # I , November, December and January # each and the #th month, February, the same unlucky #. Every second year, of course, you had Mercedonius interrupting February. Four years in succession, then, had #, #, # and # days, which made every year one day too long. In the middle of all this, they shifted the beginning of the year to January #st, since this was the day newly elected consuls took office. The result is that October still means "the eighth" month, but it is actually the tenth, November, the "ninth," is the eleventh and December, the "tenth," is, of course, the twelfth. How's that for sheer infuriating mixup? Pontifex Maximus in # B.C., disliked a calendar in which two successive years could not be compared, either in military operations or in tax collections. His model was the Egyptian calendar, with the "added daj" evenly distributed throughout the year and an extra day every fourth year. Caesar, or maybe his advisors, thought that the solar year was # days and # hours, making it about # minutes too long, which is a lot. But the introduction of the new calendar was not enough. The spring equinox had meanwhile strayed some # days from the date where it belonged. So Caesar took the year we now call # B.c. It being a "long" year anyway, containing a #-day Mercedonius, Caesar added two more "Decembers," one of # and one of # days, stretching the year to # days. His enemies called it the "Year of Confusion," to which the Caesar's friends replied that it was the 'Xast Year of Confusion." When it was all over, the Senate decided to honor him by renaming the month of his birth, Quintilis, after him -- our July. Later, Sextilh was named after Augustus, but the old story that Augustus took a day from another month for his own month is a fable. The length of the months in Caesar's calendar was the same as in ours, except that, in leap year, February acquired two #th days, so that it might remain an unlucky month with an even number of days. The Romans not only gave us the names of the months, but also the names of the days, based on complicated astrological reasoning. The seven astrological planets were thought to influence the hours, with the most distant having first influence. So the first hour of a day would be influenced by Saturn, the next by Jupiter, the next by Mars, the next by the Sun and so on down the list through Venus, Mercury and the Moon. This cycle repeated twice, but there were still three hours left in the day for another repeat to start, so that the first hour of the next day would be "influenced" by the Sun. In the same manner, the Moon succeeded to the first hour of the third day, the planet Mars to the first hour of the fourth day, Mercury started the fifth, Jupiter the sixth and Venus the seventh day. The first hour of the next day was again ruled by Saturn and the cycle started over. All this did not originate in Rome. Some of these astrological ideas go back as far as there are records, but it was the Latin expression of these thoughts which resulted in the actual names of the days. Dies Solis Dimanche Sunnan-daeg Sunday Sonnlag Dies Lunae Lundi Monan-daeg Monday Montag Dies Martis Mardi Tiwes-daeg Tuesday Dienstag Dies Mercurii Mercredi Wodans-daeg Wednesday Mittwoch Dies Jovis Jeudi Thors'daeg Thursday Donnerstag Dies V eneris Vendredi Frigas-daeg Friday Freitag Dies Saturn! Samedi Saeter-daeg Saturday Sonnabend) Samstag ) French differs from Latin only with respect to the name of Sunday, where Dieu (God) has been substituted for Sol (Sun). Modern EngJish follows the Saxon system, using Sun and Moon and five Saxon gods, Tiw (Too), Wodan, Thor (or Donar) and Frigga (or Freya'), but the characteristics and attributes of these gods correspond closely to the Roman gods. (In Latin, of course, the word may refer to the god as well as to the planet. The similarity between Saeter-daeg or Saturday and Dies Saturnis is accidental. Behind the Saxon name is the Norse divinity Saeter -- although some etymologists consider the alternate (and more prosaic explanation of Thvatt-daeg as "wash day" or "bath day!" Modern German follows the same usage as Saxon except for Wednesday, which is Mittwoch (Middle of the Week, and Saturday. The North German form Sonnabend means Sunday Eve; the South German form of Samstag is an adaptation of the French Samedi. -- a lunar month quartered into four weeks of seven days each -- crept back into Caesar's calendar and Emperor Constantine introduced it officially, replacing the older method of reckoning by the calends, nones and ides of the months. This interrupted the continuity that might otherwise have existed, for neither # nor # is divisible by seven. Hence the new year did not start with the same weekday with which the previous year had begun. Moreover, as time went by, it turned out that the "Julian Year" itself did not fit precisely. Remember that it was about # minutes too long. That does not sound like much, but in the course of ten centuries, the error accumulates to a very noticeable eight days. By the year #, the vernal equinox, put by Caesar on March #th, had drifted to March I #th. If this was not corrected somehow, Easter would land in mid-winter and all other holidays would be dislocated, too. It was clearly time for another revision. careful consideration, cleared the matter up by issuing a papal bull which decreed that the day following October #, #, was to be called October #th. This change brought the vernal equinox back to the #st of March, where it had been in # a.d., the year of the Council of Nicaea, which had issued the rules for computing the date of Easter. To avoid a recurrence of the drifting of the vernal equinox, the leap year rule was modified. Caesar had decreed that every fourth year was a leap year. The papal bull added that full centuries could not be leap years, unless they were divisible by #. The year #, then, was a leap year and the year # will be one: but #, # and # were not. This correction of the leap year rule, coupled with the elimination of ten days in #, constitutes what is now called the Gregorian calendar. Its average year works out as being # seconds longer than is accurate, but this error is so small that more than # centuries have to pass before a single day will have to be dropped. rilHE revision of the calendar was adopted at once in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Poland. Holland, Flanders and the Catholic sections of Germany followed a year later. Protestant Germany refused and so did England, because the rule came from the Pope. Hungary followed suit in #. Switzerland presented the strangest picture, for there the revision was accepted canton by canton; for centuries, it was as if Connecticut had one calendar, Wisconsin another and Florida a third. The Catholic cantons accepted the revision at once, but the Protestant cantons stubbornly refused. In #, Denmark and Protestant Germany turned "Gregorian." That pulled a few more cantons along. But the last of them did not yield until #, for they were stout Calvinists. They would not accept anything papal under any circumstances, but they found themselves forced to by commercial necessity and utter confusion. When England followed suit in #, the discrepancy had grown into eleven days. Simultaneously, New Year's Day was changed from March # to January #st. There was rioting and there were stories that cattle still kneeled on "true Christmas," but refused to kneel on "Papal Christmas" and for a long time letters and legal documents were dated June # #th June #th July #rd Feb. # #th March # England had no monopoly on calendar riots. Poland had experienced them and so had some German states. People refused "to give up" eleven days of their lives. Of course the longer a country waited, the more days had to be dropped. Japan experienced that in #, Albania in # and Rumania in #. The most sturdy opposition was found in Russia. For many centuries, Russia had lacked a calendar completely, the peasants getting along with reference to the Moon and to seasons, the educated people using a western calendar while in western countries. The hrst Russian calendar is stated to have been written in # under the reign ofCzar Alexis Mikhailovitch. But it stayed in manuscript form. Under the reign of the next Czar, Peter the Great, the first printed Russian calendar was published, Brus as the author. Unfortunately for Peter the Great and all the Russians, Yakov lishman whose father had fled from Oliver Cromwell's England and entered the Russian Civil Service. Consequently, the calendar was the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian revision. Around #, the Russian Foreign Office, the Merchant Marine and the Navy grew tired of putting two dates on every letter and asked for a change of policy. Prince Lieven was to submit the proposal to Czar Nicholas I, but Prince Lieven was worried because he had heard about the English calendar riots. Russia couldn't afford riots. The matter languished until the Czar finally decided, in #, to forbid reform. At a later date. Professor Dimitri Mendeleyeff, armed with the latest astronomical figures supplied by Simon Newcomb in Washington, did try to cause a reform, and he and his friends even formed a society for the purpose. But die old ukas stood; it needed the "October Revolution" (which took place on November #) to bring about a revision. After a short period of investigation -- some city soviets meanwhile wondered whether they should not use the French Revolutionary calendar -- the official Russian calendar jumped # days. Oh, yes, that French Revolutionary calendar. Nothing ever miscarried so completely in so short a time. And it had not even been conceived by the revolutionary parties! Though they coined the term "First Year of the Republic." their calendar was ready more than one year preceding the revolution. It bore originally the name of Calendar of Honest Men and its author had been Monsieur Pierre Sylvain Marechal. As a piece of calendar-making, it was feeble indeed. There were # months of # days apiece, each month subdivided into three decades and five or six holidays, one after every second month, to be named after Honest Men. The King of France made the tactical error of ordering Monsieur Marchal's almanac seized and burned, thereby calling attention to it. Since it seemed to be -- or, better, could be made out to be -- an early martyr of the revolution, it was later adopted. The revolutionary year began on the day declared to be the Birthday of the Republic, "by lucky coincidence, the day of the autumnal equinox, September #nd, old style." The month beginning on that day was named Vendenniaire (Vintage), followed by Brumaire (Fog), Frimaire (Sleet), Nivose (Snow, beginning Dec. #st), Pluviose (Rain) and Ventdse (Wind). The first of the spring months was Germinal (Seed, beginning March #st). Floreal and Prairial (Blossom and Pasture) followed. The three summer months were the last of the year, named, in proper order, Messidor, Thermidor and Fiuctidor -- Harvest, Heat and Fruit. I am not even certain whether Monsieur Marechal invented all these names himself. They bear much resemblance to the socalled German Peasant's Calendar which is the Gregorian calendar with different names. December, for example, is Yule, January is Hartun (hard month), February is Hornung (because animals shed their "horns," i.e., antlers), November is Nebelung (from Nebel, meaning fog, etc.) About half of these names are the same in meaning as those of the French revolutionary calendar. I suspect that French peasants may have used them before they got into print in #. The French revolutionary calendar was actually not used by the revolutionaries. Even their official Moniteur added the Gregorian dates for the sake of clarity. Napoleon threw it out in # to the extreme delight of everybody, friend and foe, and nothing is left of it but a name on the menu : Lobster Thermidor. gorian, which will not drift by more than a single day in # years, is a remarkable accomplishment and nobody in his right mind ever suggested doing anything further to its main unit, the year. But there have been suggestions of rearranging the smaller units inside the year. The main problem is posed by the week. A normal year has # weeks and one extra day; a leap year has # weeks and two extra days. As early as #, an Italian priest, the Abb Marco Mastrohni, suggested that this extra day should simply be "removed" from the year so that the calendar year would consist of a year (of # days) and a day -- reminiscent of the British guinea, which is a If we tack one "bland day" at the end of each year (two at the end of a leap year), every year would begin with a Sunday and consequently every date would always fall on the same weekday. Father Mastrofini's suggestion was taken up by the French Astronomical Society in #... but in the meantime, a French philosopher, Auguste Comte, had confused the issue. In #, he published his plan for a #-month calendar. Each . month was to have # days (the nearest thing to one lunation) dnd there were to be one (or two), blank days at the end of the year. It was an attempt to combine solar and lunar elements, but apparently Comte failed to realize that even if # months of # days were # "moons," the blank days would throw the calendar out of gear again as far as the lunar elements were concerned. In addition to the # months, August Comte also proposed renaming them after Moses, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Newton, etc. Although rejected by almost everybody, the Comte calendar retained a small fellowship, presumably composed of feople who wanted to prove that they were not afraid of the figure #. After the First World War, the proposal was revived under the sponsorship of George Eastman and dubbed the "businessman's calendar." Of course Eastman did not want Comte's fancy names; he needed only a single new name, one for the #th month. Mercedonius would have been especially suited for a businessman's calendar, but the most serious contenders were Sol and Liberty. To most people, however, it was still a #th month and they liked it even less when, with the fixed weekday dates, it turned out that it produced a Friday the Thirteenth thirteen times a year. was that the thing simply was not practical. A #-month calendar, no matter how well advertised, is not a businessman's calendar. One large firm is said to have used it internally for an experiment, with complete chaos resulting. The businessman wants to compare the first week of March in two years, or the first fall month of two years, and he is used to quarterly statements and semi-annual inventories or accountings. You cannot do that with a #-month calendar unless you tear a month apart. A German "improvement," the Blochmann calendar, suggested just that. It took the quarter as the important business unit, each quarter consisting of three months of # days each, plus one separate "unattached" week, called Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter Week, respectively. Plus one Year End day. Plus, every fourth year, one Leap-Year Day. The revision now under discussion -- it got as far as the United Nations -- is the so-called World Calendar, which goes back to Mastrofini's simple proposal, improved by an adjustment of the months. January is to have #I days, February # and March #. This rhythm of ### repeats each quarter. Each #-day month has five Sundays; every other month, four Sundays. January #st is always a Sunday and each quarter begins with a Sunday and ends with a Saturday. Not counting special holidays, every month has # working days, if you count Saturdays and working days. But the holidays will always fall on the same weekday -- July #th on a Wednesday, for example. The extra day would be Year End Day between December #th and January #st. In leap years. Leap Year Day would come in the middle of the year, between June #th and July #st. This World Calendar would be much more a businessman's calendar than Eastman's, which merely bore that name. The adoption of the World Calendar is opposed on principle by three religious groups: the Seventh Day Adventists, the Seventh Day Baptists and Orthodox Judaism. But the example of Orthodox Judaism shows how discrepancies between everyday necessity and religious convictions can be overcome, namely by following one calendar for everyday business and another for religious purposes. No room for letters and discussions this month. They'll be back in the February issue. You've never read science fiction like this before. It's a shock wave of terror -- with a jolting, blinding conclusion. It's Sturgeon! When Your'e Smiling mw mans. I can't recall having formulated that precept; I do know I've lived under it all my life. But Henry? It couldn't matter with Henry. You might say Henry didn't count. And who would blame me? Being me, I'd found, was a lonely job. Doing better things than other people -- and doing them better to boot -- is its own reward, up to a point. But to find out about those murders, those dozens and dozens of beautiful scotfree murders, and then not to be able to tell anyone... well, I act like a human being in so many other ways -- And besides, it's only Henry. When I was a kid in school, I had three miles to go and used roller skates except when it was snowing. Sometimes it got pretty cold, occasionally too hot, and often wet; but rain or shine, Henry was there when I got to the building. That was twenty years ago, but all I have to do is close my eyes to bring it all back, him and his homely, doggy face, his odd flexible mouth atwist with laughter and welcome. He'd take my books and set them by the wall and rub one of my hands between his two if it was cold, or toss me a locker-room towel if it was wet or very hot. I never could figure out why he did it. It was more than just plain hero-worship, yet Lord knows he got little enough from me. til he graduated. I didn't do so well and it took me longer to get out. I don't think I really tried to graduate until after Henry did; the school suddenly seemed pretty bleak, so I did some work and got clear of it. After that, I kicked around a whole lot looking for a regular income without specializing in anything, and found it writing features for the Sunday supplement of one of those newspapers whose editorial policies are abhorrent to decent people, but it's all right; no decent person reads them. I write about floods, convincingly describing America's certain watery grave, and I write about drought and the vanishing water table, visualizing our grandchildren expiring on barren plains that are as dry as a potato-chip. Then there's the perennial collision with a wandering planet, and features about nuts who predicts the end of the world, and biographies of great patriots cut to size so they won't conflict with the editorial page. It's a living, and when you can compartment it away from what you think, none of it bothers you. So a lot of things happened and twenty years went by, and all of a sudden I ran into Henry. The first funny thing about him was that he hadn't changed. I don't think he had even grown much. He still had the coarse hair and the ugly wide mouth and the hot happy eyes. The second funny thing was the way he was dressed, like always, in hand-medowns: a collar four sizes too large, a baggy suit, a raveled sweater that would have fought bitterly with his old herringbone if both weren't so faded. He came wagging and panting up to me this early fall day when everyone in sight but Henry was already wearing a topcoat. I knew him right away and I couldn't help myself; I just stood there and laughed at him. He laughed, too, glad to the groveling point, not caring why I was laughing, but simply welcoming laughter for its own sake. He said my name indistinctly, again and again; Henry almost always spoke indistinctly because of that grin he wore half around his head. "Well, come on!" I bellowed at him, and then cussed at him. It always made him wince, and it did now. 'Til buy you a drink. I'll buy you nine drinks!" "No," he said, smiling, backing away a little, bobbing his head in that funny way, as if he was about to duck. "I can't right now." It seemed to me he was looking at my sharp-creased dacron suit, or maybe the pearl homburg. Or maybe he just caught my eye on his old set of threads. He waggled his hands aimlessly in front of him, like an old woman caught naked and not knowing what to cover up. "I don't drink." "You'll drink," I said. I took him by the wrist and marched him down to the corner and into Molson's, while he tugged ineffectually at me and mumbled things from betweenhis solid, crooked teeth. I wanted a drink and I needed a laugh, right now, and I wasn't going to drag all the way down to Skid Row just to keep him from feeling conspicuous. back booth -- someone I especially didn't want to see. Be seen by. I don't think I broke stride when I saw her, though. Hell, the day won't come when I can't handle the likes of her... "Siddown," I said, and Henry had to; I pushed him and the edge of the seat hit the backs of his knees. I sat down, too, giving him the hip hard enough to slide those worn old tweeds of his back into the corner where he wouldn't be able to get out unless I moved first. "Steve!" I roared, just as though I didn't care if anyone in the place knew I was there. Steve was on his way, but I always yelled like that; it bothered him. Steve's also sort of a funny guy. "Awright, awright," he complained. "What'll you have?" "What are you drinking, Henry?" "Oh, nothing -- nothing for me." I snorted at him and said to Steve, "Two sour-mash an' soda on the side." Steve grunted and went away. "Really," Henry said, with his maybe-I-better-duck wobble, "I don't want any. I don't drink." "Yes, you do," I told him. "Now what's with you? Come on, right from the beginning. From school. I want the story of your life -- trials and triumphs, toils 'n' tragedies." "My life?" he asked, and I think he was genuinely puzzled. "Oh, I haven't done anything. I work in a store," he added. When I just sat there shaking my head at him, he looked down at his hands and pulled them abruptly down into his lap as if he was ashamed of the nails. "I know, I know, it's nothing much." He looked at me with that peculiar hot gaze. "Not like you, with a piece in the paper every week and all." Steve came with the bourbon. I shut up until he'd gone. With Steve, I like to pretend I have big business and don't trust him to listen in. I swear sometimes you can hear him grinding his teeth. He never says anything, though. A good customer's got just a little more rights than just anybody else, so there's nothing he can do about it. He just works there. When he'd gone, I said, "Here's to the twist that don't exist, and her claim thefe's a game that can't be played. Here's to the wise old lies we use -- " "Honest, I don't want any," said Henry. "If I'm going to be hospitable, you're going to be housebroke," I told him, and picked up his glass and shoved it at his face. He got his lips on it just in time to keep it from falling into that oversize collar. He didn't take but a sip, and that great big mouth snapped down to buttonsize as if it had a drawstring on it. His eyes got round and filled with tears; he tried to hold the liquor on his tongue, but he sneezed through his nostrils and swallowed and started to cough. Laugh? I got my breath back just this side of hernia. Some day I'll plant a sound camera and do that again and make an immortal out of old Henry. "Gosh!" he gasped when he could. frayed sleeves. I guess he didn't have a handkerchief. "That hurt." But he was grinning the old grin all the same. "You drink that all the time?" he half whispered. "All the time, like so," I said, and drank the rest of his, "and like so," and drank mine down. "Steve!" Steve already had the refills on a tray and I knew it, which is why I yelled at him. "Now about what you started to say -- " and I broke off while Steve got to the table and put down the drinks and picked up the empties and went away again -- "the story of your life. You sit there and tell me 'Oh, nothing,' and you say you work in a store, period. Now  am going to tell you the story of your life. First of all. I'm going to tell you who you are. You're Henry. Nobody else in God's great graygreen Universe was ever this particular Henry. We start with that. No -- " Henry said, "But I -- " "No mountain," I went on, "no spitting nucleus was ever more remarkable than the simple fact of you, Henry, just being Henry. Name me an earthquake, an oak tree, a racehorse or a Ph.D. thesis and I will, by God, name you one just like it that happened before. You," I said, leaning forward and jamming my forefinger into his collarbone, "you, Henry, are unique and unprecedented on this planet in this galaxy." "No. I'm not," he laughed, backing off from the finger, which did him no good once I had him pinned to the wall behind him. "No upernova," I said again, having just discovered that the phrase is a delightful way of sending the flavor of good bourbon through the nostrils. "That's what we only begin with," I went on. "Just by being, you're a miracle, aside from everything you've ever said or done or dreamed about." I took away the finger and sat back to beam at him. "Ah," he said; I swear he blushed. "Ah, there's plenty more like me." "Not a single one." I tipped up my glass, found it was empty already, so drank his because I had my mouth all set for it. "Steve!" I sat silently watching Henry aimlessly rubbing his collarbone while the drinks arrived and the empties left. "So we start with a miracle. Where do we go that?" He made a sort of giggle. It meant, "I don't know." "You never heard anybody talk like this about you before, did you?" "No." "All right." I put out the forefinger again, but did not touch him with it because he expected I would. mirror, I could see that woman sitting alone in the back booth, crying. Always a great one for crying, she was. "I'll tell you why I talk like this, Henry," I said. "It's for your own good, because you don't know what you are. Here you walk around the place telling people 'Oh, nothing' when they ask for the story of your life, and you're a walking miracle just to start with. Now what do we go on with?" He shrugged. "You feel better, now you know what you are?" "I don't... I never thought about it." He looked up at me swiftly, as if to find out what I wanted him to say. "I guess I do." "All right then. That makes it better. That makes it easier on you, because I am now going to tell you what you are, Henry. Henry, what are you?" "Well, you said -- " he swallowed -- "a miracle." I brought down my fist with a bang that made everybody jump, even her in the mirror, but especially Henry. "No! I'll tell you what you are. You are a nowhere type, a nudnick type nothing!" I quickly bent forward. He shrank from the finger like a snail from salt. "And now you're going to tell me that's a paradox. You're going to say I contradicted myself." "I'm not." His mouth trembled and then he was smiling again. "Well, all right, but it's what you're thinking. Drink up." I raised my glass. "Here's to the eyes, blue brown and brindle, and here's to the fires that those eyes kindle; I don't mean the fires that bum down shanties, I mean the fires that pull down -- " "Gee, no, thanks," he said. I drank my drink. "But I mean," I said aloud to myself, "really a nothing." I took his drink and held it and glared at him. "You will, by God, stop stepping on my punchlines." "I'm sorry. I didn't even notice." He pointed vaguely. "I didn't know anyone could handle so much of that -- that whiskey." "I got news for you, boy," I said, and winked at him. "Here it is past quitting time and this whiskey is all I had for lunch, and it's what I had for a snack -- high tea, wot? -- and it's what I'm having for dinner, and well should you envy this mighty capacity. Among other things. Now I will show you why I have uttered no paradox in describing you as a miracle and as a simultaneous, coexistent, concurrent nothing." ered it. "You started out being everything I described -- unique, unprecedented. If you thought about it at all, which I doubt, you thought of yourself as having been born naked and defenseless, and having gained constantly since -- the power of speech, the ability to read, an education of sorts (you can see by my calling it that that I'm in a generous mood) and, lately, some sort of a job in some sort of a store, the right to vote, and that... well, unusual suit you're wearing. No matter how modest you are about these achievements -- and you are, you really are -- they seem to add up to more than you started with. "Well, they don't. Since the day you were born, you've lost. What the hell is it that you keep looking at?" "That girl. She's crying. But I'm listening to what you're saying." "You better listen. I'm doing this for you, for your own good. Just let her cry. If she cries long enough, she'll find out crying doesn't help. Then she'll quit." "You know why she's crying?" rvlD I! "Yes, and it's a pretty useless procedure. Where was I ?" "I've been losing since I was born," Henry obediently reminded me. "Yeah, yeah. What you've lost is potential, Henry. You started out with the capability of doing almost anything and you've come to a point where you can do almost nothing. On the other hand, I started out being able to do practically nothing and now I can do almost anything." "That's wonderful!" he said warmly, "You just don't know," I told him. "Now, mind you, we're still talking about you. You'll see the connection. I just want to illustrate a point... These days, everybody specializes or doesn't make it, one or the other; If you're lucky enough to have a talent and find work where you use it, you go far. If your work is outside your talent, you can still make out. If you have no talent, hard work in one single line makes for a pretty fair substitute. But in each case, how good you are depends on how closely you specialize and how hard you work inside a specialty. Me, now. I'm different. Stevef" "None for me," Henry insisted plaintively. "Do it again, Steve. Henry, stop interrupting when I'm doing you a favor. What I am. I'm what you might call a specializing nonspecialist. We're few and far between, Henry -- guys like me, I mean. Far as work's concerned, I got a big bright red light in here -- " I tapped my forehead -- "that lights up if I accidentally stay in one line too long. Any time that happens, I quick wind up what I'm doing and go do something else instead. And far as talents are concerned, talents I got, I guess. Only I don't use 'em, I avoid 'em. They're the only thing that could ever trap me into specializing and I just won't be trapped, not by anybody or anything. Not me!" "You have a real talent for writing," Henry said diffidently. "Well, thanks, Henry, but you're wrong. Writing isn't a talent. It's a skill. Certain kinds of thinking, ways of thinking -- you might call them based on talent; but writing's just a verbalization, a knack of putting into an accepted code what's already there in your head. Learning to write is like learning to type, a transformation of a sort of energy into a symbol. It's what you write that counts, not how you do it. What's the matter, did I lose you?" He was looking out into the room over my shoulder and smiling. "She's still crying." "Forget it. Every day, women lose their husbands. They get over it." "Lose -- Her husband's dead?" "Altogether." ed his wide mouth, the show of strong, uneven teeth. I couldn't blame him. She's a very unusuallooking girl and here the coast was clear. I wondered next what you'd ever say to Henry so he wouldn't smile. Then he was looking at me again. "You were talking about your writing," he said. "Oh. Now suppose, Henry, you had the assignment to write a piece every week and you wrote every single one so the man who reads it believes it. And suppose one piece says: 'The world will end.' And another one says: 'The world will not end.' One says: 'No man is good. He can only struggle against his natural evil.' And another says: 'No amount of evil can alter the basic goodness of human beings.' See what I mean? Yet every single word of every piece comes out like a revelation. The whole series just stinks of truth. Would you say that you, the writer of all this crud, believes or does not believe in what he writes?" 'Well, I guess... I don't know. I mean I -- " He looked into my eyes swiftly, trying again to discover what I wanted him to say. "Well," he said clumsily, when I just sat and wouldn't help, "if you, I mean I, writing that way, if I said white was white and then it was blue... well, I guess I couldn't believe 'em both?" His voice put the question mark shyly at the end and he pretended to duck. "You mean to say that kind of writer doesn't believe anything he writes. Well, I knew you were going to say that, and you're one hundred and three per cent wron." And I leaned forward and glared at him. He looked into his lap. "I'm sorry." Then, "He believes some of it?" "No!" "Oh," Henry said. Miserably, he moved his glass an inch to the left. I took it away from him. I said.'A writer like that learns to believe everything he writes about. Sure, white is white. But look: go down as far as you can into the microscopic, and still down, and what do you find? Measurements that can only be approximated; particles that aren't particles at all, but only places where there is the greatest probability of an electric charge... in other words, an area where nothing is fact, where nothing behaves according to the rules we set up for the proper behavior of facts. "Now go up in the other direction, out into space, farther than our biggest telescopes can reach, and what do you find? Same thing! The incommensurable, the area of possibility and probability, where the theoretical computation (that's scientese for 'wild guess') is acceptable mathematics. So okay: all these years, we've been living as if white was white and a neat a plus b equals a respectable c. "There might be an excuse for that before we knew that in the microcosm and in the macrocosm all the micrometers are made of rubber and the tapemeasures are printed on wet macaroni. But we do know that now; so by what right do we assume that everything's vague up there and muzzy down yonder, but everything here is all neat as a pin and dusted every day? I maintain that nothing is altogether anything: that nothing proves anything, nothing follows from anything; nothing is really real, and that the idea we live sandwich is a delusion. "But you can't go around not believing in reality and at the same time do your work and get your pay. So the only alternative is to believe everything you run into, everything you hear, and especially everything you think." "Shut up. Now, belief -- faith, if you like -- is a peculiar thing. Knowledge helps it along, but at the same time it can only exist in the presence of ignorance. I hold as an axiom that complete -- really complete -- information on any given subject would destroy belief in it. It's only the gaps between the steppingstones of logic that leave room for the kind of ignorance called intuition, without which the mind can't move. So back we come to where we started: by not specializing in anything. I am guarding my ignorance, and as long as I keep that ignorance at a certain critical level, I can say anything or hear anything and believe it. So living is a lot of fun and I have more fun than anybody." Henry smiled broadly and shook his head in deep admiration. "I'm glad if it's so, I mean, you're happy." "What do you mean, if? I get what I want. Henry: I always get what I want. If that isn't being happy, what is?" "I wouldn't know." Henry closed his eyes a moment and then said again, "I wouldn't know... Let me out, would you?"' "You going some place? I'm not through with you, Henry, me boy. I don't bein to be through with you." He looked wistfully at the door and, without moving, seemed to sigh. Then he smiled again. "I just want to, uh, you know." "Oh, that. The used beer department is down those steps over there." I got up and let him by. There was no way out of Molson's except past me; he wouldn't get away. Why shouldn't he get away? Because he made me feel good, that's why. There was something about Henry, a sort of hair-trigger dazzle effect, that was pretty engaging. Recite the alphabet to him and I swear he'd look dazzled. Not that the line I'd been slinging wouldn't dazzle anyone. It was just then I decided to tell him about the murderer. The room tilted suddenly and I hung to the edges of the table and stopped it. I recognized the sympton. Better get something to eat before soaking up any more of that sour-mash. I didn't want to get offensive. Just then I felt, rather than heard, a sort of commotion. I looked up. Henry, that damn fool, was leaning with his palms on the table where what's-hername sat, the one who cried all the time. I saw her glance up and then her face went all twisted. She sprang up and fetched him one across the chops that half spun him around. Next thing you know, she was through the door, with Henry staring after her and grinning and slowly rubbing his face. "Henry!" looked again at the door, then came shambling over. "Henry, you ol' wolf, you've been holding out on me," I said. "Since when have you been chasing tomatoes?" He just sat down heavily and fondled his cheek. "Gosh!" "Whyn't you tell me you wanted to make a pass? I'd have saved you the trouble. She won't be good for anything for weeks yet. She can't think of anything but -- " "It wasn't anything like that. I just asked her if there was anything I could do. She didn't seem to hear me, so I asked her again. Then she got mad and hit me. That's all." I laughed at him. "Well, you probably did her a favor. She's better off mad at something than sitting there tearing herself apart. What made you think you could get to first base with her, anyway?" He grinned and shook his head. "I told you, honest I didn't want anything, only to see if I could help." He shrugged. "She was crying," he said, as if that explained something. "So what's in it for you?" He shook his head. "I thought so!" I banged him on the shoulder. "That's where we'll start, Henry. We're going to make you over, that's what we're going to do. We're going to get you out of oversize second-hand shirts and undersize Boy Scouts ideas. We're going to find out what you really want and then we're going to see that you learn how to get it." "But I'm all -- I mean I don't really -- " "Shut up! And the first and rock-bottom basic and important thing you'll learn till you're blue in the face is, never do nothing for nothing. In other words, always ask 'What's in it for me?' and do nothing about anything until the answer comes up 'Plenty!' Steve! The check! That way you'll always have a new wallet to put in your new suit and nobody, especially girls, is going to clobber you in a filthy joint like this." Actually it wasn't a filthy joint, but Steve came up just then and I wanted him to hear me say it. I gave him what the check said, to the penny, and told him to keep the change. Once in a while, I'd tip Steve -- not .often -- and then I'd make it a twenty or better. What he didn't know was, if you total all the bills and all the tips, the tips came out to exactly nine per cent. Either he'd find that out for himself some day or I'd tell him; one way or the other, it would be fun. The secret of having fun is to pay attention to the details. Out on the street, Henry stopped and shuffled his feet. "Well, good-by." "Good-by nothing. You're coming home with me." "Oh," he said, "I can't. I got t( -- " "You got to what? Come on now, Henry -- whether you know it or not, you need help; whether you like it or not, you're going to get it. Didn't I say I was going to tear you down and make you over?" stepped to the left. "I can't be taking up your time. I'll just go on home." I suddenly saw that if I couldn't change his mind, the only way I'd get him to come along would be to carry him. I could do it, but I didn't feel like it. There's always a better way than hard work. "Henry," I said, and paused. He waited, not quite jittering, not exactly standing still. Guys like Henry, they can't fight and they can't run; you can do whatever you want with them. So -- think. Think of the right thing to say. I did, and I said it. "Henry," I said, real sudden, real soft, sincere, and the change must have hit him harder than a yell, "I'm in terrible trouble and you're about the only man in the world I can trust." "Gosh." He came a little closer and peered up at me in the thickening twilight. "Why didn't you say so?" Sticking out the marrow of his soul, every man has an eyebolt. All you have to do is find it and drop your hook in. This was Henry's. I almost laughed, but I didn't. I turned away and sighed. "It's a long story... but I shouldn't bother you with it. Maybe you'd better -- " "No. Oh, no. I'll come." "You're a pal, Henry," I whispered, and swallowed as noisily as I could. We walked down to the park and started across it. I walked slowly and kept my eyes on the middle distance, like a hired mourner, while Henry trotted alongside, looking anxiously up into my face every once in a while. "Is it about that girl?" he asked after a while. "No," I said. "She's no trouble." "Her husband. What happened to him?" "Same thing that happened to the ram who didn't see the ewe turn." I hit him with my elbow. "U-turn, get it? Anyway, he drove over a cliff." We were passing under a street light at the time and I saw Henry's face. "Some day you're going to split your head plumb in two just by grinning. What do you go around showing your teeth for all the time, anyway?" He said, "I'm sorry." And when we were almost through the park, "Why?" "Why what?" I asked vacantly"The husband... over the cliff." "Oh. Well, she had a sort of a roll in the hay with somebody, and when she told him, he up and knocked himself off. Some people take themselves pretty seriously. Here we are." I led him up the walk and through the herculite doors. In the elevator, he gulped around at the satinwood paneling. "This is nice." "Keeps the rain off," I said modestly. The doors slid open and I led the way down the hall and kicked open my door. "Come on in." I N we went and there, of course, stood Loretta with The Look on her face, the damned anger always expressed as hurt. So I pushed Henry ahead of me and watched The Look be replaced by tight Company Manners. "My wife," I told Henry. He stepped back and I pushed him forward again. He grinned and bobbed his head and wagged his figurative tail. "Huh-huhhuh -- " he said, swallowed, and tried again. "Huh-how do?" "It's Henry, my old school pal Henry that I told you about, Loretta." I'd never told her a thing. "He's hungry. I'm hungry. How's for some food?" Before she could answer, I asked, "A couple paper plates in the den would be less trouble than setting the table, hm?" and at this she must nod, so I shoved Henry toward the den and said, "Fine, and thanks, oh, best of good women," which made her nod a promise. We went in and I closed the double doors and leaned against them, laughing. "Gosh," said Henry, his eyes heating up. "You never told me you had a -- uh -- were married." The smile flickered, then blazed. "Guess I didn't. One of those things, Henry. The air you breathe, a post-nasal drip, the way you walk from here to the office -- same thing. Part of the picture. Why talk about it?" "Yes, but maybe she... maybe it's trouble for her. Why are you laughing?" I was laughing because of the change in Loretta's face as we had come in. I was late and dinner was ruined, and I'd been drinking to boot; and primed as she was to parade hurt feelings all over the apartment, she hadn't expected me to bring anyone home. Ah, Loretta; so mannered, so polite! She'd have died rather than show her feelings before a stranger, and to see her change from hostility to hospitality in three point five seconds was, to me, very funny. There's always a way of getting out from under. All you have to do is think of it. In time. "I'm laughing," I told Henry, "at the idea of Loretta's having trouble." "You mean I'm no bother?" "I mean you make everything all right. Sit down." He did. "She's pretty." "Wh -- oh. Loretta. Yep, nothing but the best. Henry, I am a man different from all other men." He fumbled with some facial expressions and came up with a slow grinning puzzlement. "Isn't everybody?" he asked timidly. "Yes, you idiot. But by different, I mean really different. Not necessarily better," I added modestly. "Just different." "How do you mean, different?" Good old Henry. What a straight man! Y way of answering him, I  took out my key-case, zipped it open, thumbed out the flat brass key of my filing drawer and dangled it. "I'll show you, soon as we have something in our stomachs and no interruptions." "Is this the... the trouble you said you were in, you wanted my help?" "It is, but it's so strictly private and confidential that I don't want you even thinking about it until I can lock that door and go into detail." "Oh," he said. "All right." Visibly, he cast about for something else to talk about. "Can I ask you something about that girl who was... whose husband..." "Fire away," I said. "Not that it matters. You have the damnedest knack, Henry, of combining the gruesome with the trivial." "I'm sorry. She seemed so, well, sad. What was it you said, I don't think I understood it?" His voice supplied the question mark to his odd phrasing. "She and somebody..." His words trailed off and he went pink. "And her husband found out -- " "She sure did. And he didn't exactly find out; she told him. She was mixed up in some research, see. Field-test of a new drug, a so-called hypnotic. So there she was, awake and aware and absolutely subject to any and all suggestions. And as you saw for yourself, she's not a badlooking chick, not bad at all. So nature just took its course. Carpe diem, as the Romans used to say, which means drill not and ye strike no oil." He looked at me foggily, but smiling broadly, too. "The researcher, the one who gave her the drug. But that wasn't exactly her fault. I mean her husband didn't have to -- " "Her husband did have to," I mimicked, "being what he was. One of those idealistic, love-issacred characters, who, besides all this, was sensitive about the side of his face he left in Korea. "Love," I said, harpooning Henry's collarbone with my finger again, "is cornflakes." I leaned back. "Besides, he had no way of knowing how it happened. This drug, it's something like sodium amytal, though chemically unrelated. You know, 'truth serum!' Only it doesn't leave the subject groggy or doped. She went straight home, walking and talking just like always, and incapable of concealing what had happened. She didn't even know she'd been -- ah -- medicated. It was in her coffee. All she could say. was that such-and-such had happened to her and it was all so easy that, from now on, she could never know when it might happen again. He chewed on it for most of the night and then got up and got in his car and drove over the cliff." H enry smiled twice, one smile right on top of the other. "Now all she does is drink in bars?" "She doesn't drink. Ever read tom Lady, Henry? There's a girl in there who cracks a character just by haunting him -- by being there, wherever he is, day and night, for weeks. This chick in the bar, in her goofed-off ineffectual way, is trying to do the same thing to me. She sits where I can see her and hates me. 'And cries." "You?" I winked at him and made a iddap sort of cluck-cluck with my back teeth. "Research, Henry. A scientific project. It covers a multitude. And covering multitudes is a happy hobby, especially if you do it one by one. Sure, I know chemistry -- told you I was a specializing non-specialist. Now wipe that grin off your face or you won't be able to chew: here comes the food." Loretta carried in a tray. Butter-fried shrimp with piquant orange sauce, a mixed-greens salad with shallots and grated nuts, and an Arabian honey-cake. "Oh!" gulped Henry, and bounced to his feet. "Oh, that's just beautiful, Mrs. -- " "You didn't bring a drink first, but I guess we can have it along with the food." I said. "I don't want any, really," Henry. "He's being polite. We don't let our guests be polite, do we, Lorrie?" For a moment, she had only one lip because she had sucked in the lower one to bite on. Then she said, "I'm sorry. I'll mix -- " "Don't mix," I told her. "Bring the bottle. We wouldn't think of troubling you any more, would we, Henry?" "I really don't want -- " "Right away, cfarling." Two out of five times when I say darling, I roar at her. She set the tray down on the coffee table and fairly scurried out. I laughed. "Wonderful, wonderful. She doesn't exactly hide the liquor, but she sure tidies it away. Now, by God, she'll bring it to me." I could actually hear the soft sound at the corners of Henry's mouth as his smile stretched it. Loretta came back and I took the bottle. "No chaser; we're men in here. Okay, darling, you can leave the dishes here for the night." She wouldn't back to the door and she wouldn't -- maybe she was frightened just then -- she wouldn't take her eyes off me, so she got out sidewise, not forgetting to flip the crumpled fragment of a hostess's smile to Henry. Henry was saying, "Well, thank you very much, Mrs. -- " but by the time he got it all stammered out, I had the door closed. I went to the settee, rubbing my hands. "Bring the bottle, Henry." He brought it, and sat down by me, and we ate. It was very good, which is the least a man can expect. I toyed with the idea of yelling for some tabasco, but I'd had enough fun with Loretta for the time being. Enveloping that food, my stomach felt well pleased with itself. Silent, unsmiling and intent, Henry absorbed what was on his plate. I poured a slug for Henry, knowing I could afford to be generous, and one for myself. I leaned back and enjoyed a belch, which made Henry jump, threw down the bourbon, poured another and went to the desk. On my desk is a typewriter, and under the typewriter is a sound-absorbing mat, and in the mat I keep a sewing-machine needle, the best toothpick Man ever made. It's strong and it's sharp and it has a base you can get a grip on without snapping it. I sat in the swivel chair and leaned my elbows on the typewriter and picked my teeth and watched Henry mopping the honey off his dessert plate with a piece of bread. "That was -- your wife certainly can -- " "Like I said, Henry, nothing but the best. Sit down over here. Bring your drink." He hesitated, then brought it over and put it on the desk where I could reach it. He sat down on the edge of the easy chair. He looked like a worrisome kitten making its first try at sitting on a fence. I laughed in his face and he smiled right back at me. "What I'm going to do, Henry," I told him, I told average, stupid, fearful, dogface Henry, 'Tm going to let you in on some things that no human being on Earth knows. I'm going to tell you at the same time that these things are known to a number of people. Not a large number, but -- a number. Could both those statements be true?" "Well, I -- " he said. Then he blushed. "You're sort of slow, so I'll keep it simple and easy for you. I just got off a paradox. But it isn't a paradox. Don't sit there and smile and shake your head at me. Just listen. You'll catch on. Now you and I -- are we different from each other?" "Oh, yes," he breathed. "Right. At the same time, all human beings are alike. And you know what? No paradox there, either." "No?" "No. And here's why. You're like my wife and the bartender and my city editor and all the on Earth who call themselves human beings. And as you just so perceptively pointed out, I'm not like you. And for your information, I'm not like Loretta or Steve or the city editor. Now do you see why there's no paradox?" Henry shifted unhappily. He absolutely astonished me. How could a guy like that, without bluff, without deftness, without, as far as I could see, even the ability to lie a little -- how could he live three consecutive days in a world like this? Look at him, worrying away at my question, wanting so much to get the right answer. It came like an abject apology: "No, I don't see. No, I don't." His eyes flickered, the embarrassed heat stirring and waning. "Unless what you mean is you're not a human being." He snickered weakly and again made that odd warding-off, half-ducking motion. L eaning back, I beamed at him. "Now isn't it a relief to know you're not so dumb, after all?" "Is that really what you mean? You're not... but I thought everybody was a human being!" he cried pathetically. "Don't get all churned up," I told him gently. I leaned forward very suddenly to startle him, and I did, too. I stuck my finger in my whiskey. lifted the glass with the other hand, and drew a wet circle on the desk-top, about eight inches in diameter. "Let's say that anywhere in this circle -- " I moved the glass around inside the mark -- "this glass is what you call human. When it's here or here or a little bit forward, it's still human; it's just not the same human -- the same Pind of human. You're different from Steve the bartender because everything he is is here, and everything you are is over on the other side, here. You're different because you're placed differently in the circle, but you're the same because you're both inside it. Presto -- no paradox." I moved the glass far enough to empty it and set it aside and put my hand in the circle. The wet wood was bleaching slowly, which was okay; Loretta would polish it up in the morning. "Inside this circle," I said, "a man can be smart or stupid, musical, aggressive, tall, effeminate, mechanically apt, Yugoslavian, a mathematical genius or a strudel baker -- but he's still human. Now by what Earthly conceit do we conclude that a man just has to live within that circle? What about a guy who's bom here, on the outside edge? Why can't he be here, right on the line? Who's to say he can't live way out here?" And I banged my hand down a foot away from the circle. Henry said, "I -- " "Shut up. Answer: there are people outside this border. Not many, but some. And if you're going to call the ones inside 'human,' the ones outside have to be -- something else." "Is that what you are?" Henry whispered. "That's me." "Is that what they call a moot... mute... "Mutation? No! Well, damn it, yes; that's as good a name as any. But not in any way you ever thought of. No atom-dust, no cosmic rays, nothing like that. Just normal everyday variation. Look, you have to go farther from one side of this circle to the other than from just inside to just outside -- right? Yet the distance across is within the permissable variation; the difference between human beings which leaves them still human beings together. But one small variation this way -- " I slid my finger outside the circle -- "and you have something quite new." "How -- new?" ways. Take any species. Take kittens from the same litter. You'll find one has sharper claws, another has sharper eyes. Which is the best kitten?" "Well, I guess the one with the -- " "No, you mumbling Neanderthal." That made him smile. "Neither one is best. They're just different, each in a way that makes him hunt a bit better. Now say another of the litter has functional gills and another has mat-scales like an armadillo, there's your..." "Supercat?" he beamed. "Just call it 'uncat.' " "You -- you're, uh, un -- " "Unhuman." I nodded. "But you look -- " "Yeah, a cat with sweat-glands in its skin would look like a cat, too-most of the time. I'm different, Henry. I've always known I was different." I poked my finger toward him and he curled from its imaginary touch. "You, for example -- you have, like nobody else I ever met, that stuff called 'empathy.' " "I have?" "You're always feeling with other people's fingertips, seeing through other people's eyes. Laugh with 'em, cry with 'em. Empathy." "Oh. Yes, I guess -- " "Now me, I have as much of that as my armadillo-cat has fur. It's just not in me. I have other things instead. Do you know I was never angrj' in my life? That's why I have so much fun. That's why I can push people He wet his lips, clasped his hands together, blankly made the knuckles crack. Poor Henry! A brand-new idea and it was splitting his skull-seams. "Couldn't you be," he ventured at last, "just sort of -- talented, not really different at all?" "Ah! Now we come to the point. Now we get the big proof. Speaking of proof, where's the bottle? Oh, here." I poured. "See I'm a real modest boy, Henry. When I figured this all out, I didn't do the human thing -- conclude that I was the only super -- uh, unhuman in captivity. There's just too many people being born, too much variation this around. I can make anybody do anything, just because I always have myself under control. I can roar like a lion and beat my fists on the wall and put up a hell of a show, yet always know exactly what I'm doing. You knew me when, Henry. You've read my stuff. You've seen me operate. You going to call a man like me human?" way and that. Law of averages. There just has to be more like me." "You mean just like -- " "No! I mean more unhumans -- all kinds, any kind. So, because I can think like an unhuman, I thought my way after others of my kind." my chair, I quit and slumped back. "Damn it. You know. I'm hungry as a... Imagine, a dinner like that. Why can't she cook up something that sticks to a man's ribs? I swear I'm as empty as a paper sack. Henry, check that door for me, see that it's locked." He went to the door and tried it. It was locked. As he came back, I picked up the brass key. "This will open your eyes, Henry, old boy, old boy," I said. I unlocked the file drawer. It got heavier all the time, I thought. Well, if you're going to have fun, you've got to take care of the details. I lifted out the "Justice" file and banged it down beside the typewriter. "So I found me another unhuman. Takes one to catch one. Just you listen now and tell me what human being would even start this line of thinking, let alone carry it through." I opened the file. "This all started," I said, "when I did a piece on unsolved murders. You know that no city releases figures on unsolved murders; well, not easily, anyway. You should see 'em -- # per cent in one city, # in another. Some bring it down to # -- our town got it to # per cent one year. But that's a whole lot of scot-free murderers, hm? All over the country. Imagine! "So what I did -- for the feature story, you know -- I dug up everything I could find on a whole drawerful of these cases. What I wanted was an angle. What's the most obvious? Whodunit, that's what. So throw that out. What next? Who could have done it, but didn't. Throw that out, too. "So then it occurred to me to see if there wasn't some sort of lowest common denominator to them -- here a second-string advertising man with no enemies, there a teen-age hood with a knife in him, yonder a rich boy found floating next to his yacht -- all kinds of people get murdered, you know. "Mind you, I'm still just looking for an angle. "Next, I threw out all the cases where people had a lot of enemies, and all the cases where a lot of people had an opportunity as well as a motive. This left a pretty strange stack. All of them were, apparently, reasonless, purposeless murders, all done differently at different places. "Well, I phoned and I legged and I sat and thought, and I interviewed God knows how many people. Couple of times, I came pretty close to finding new stuff, too, but who cares whodunit? Not me. I wasn't looking for crimes with a reason behind with no motive. Any time the scent got hot, I threw that case out. By this time, I had a feature shaping up -- I'd call it 'Murder for What?' Good for a couple spreads -- maybe even a series." T thumped the file. "I guess I had the answer for weeks before I even knew it. Then, one night, I sat here and read everything through. And what do you know: in each and every one of these cases, someone was happy because of the murder! Or, anyway, happier. And I'm not talking about people who inherited the victims' loot, or poor persecuted wives and children who would no longer have to put up with the old man's payday drunks. Reach me the bottle, Henry. "Now not a single one of this final stack showed motive or opportunity for the -- let's say 'beneficiary' of these murders. Like this one, where the old woman, her with a constitution like a buffalo, she'd been lying in bed for eight months pretending to be sick so her daughter wouldn't marry. The girl was nine miles away when someone cut the old biddy's throat. "And this one here, an engineering student and a good one, working his own way through school and then had to quit and come home because his old man had doubled the size of the ancestral hardware store for no reason but that it had been small enough to handle by himself. So one warm Sunday, the kid is, no fooling, in church in front of eighty witnesses while, down the road, somebody parts the old man's head with a tire iron. They never did find out who. "And this one, this is practically the best of all: a little old guy for years ran a flea circus, gluing costumes on 'em and making 'em turn little merry-gorounds and all that kind of thing. Used to feed 'em off his arm. One fine day, someone swipes one of his pets and replaces it with pulex cheopis -- a rat flea, to you -- loaded to the eyeballs, or cephalothorax, as the case may be, with bubonic plague. First and only case of black plague in these parts in a hundred and eighty years." I laughed. "Someone was happier?" Henry asked wonderingly. "Well, the other fleas were. And besides, the old guy used to get a large charge out of cracking fleas in his tweezers right under the noses of the most squeamish women in the audience. You know how they go -- blip!" half-whispered. "It's hot in here," I said uncomfortably. "Well, this is the part I was getting to, I mean about thinking unhumanly. I said to myself, now suppose, just for the sake of argument, that there's this guy, see, a sort of mutant, a slight variation to just outside the circle, and he has this special way of thinking; he stand in other people's way. He never kills the same way or the same kind of person or in the same place. So how could anyone ever catch up with him? "Right away, I began looking into other deaths -- the 'natural causes' ones. Why? Well, here, whoever he is, he might do some murders that look like murders, but he'd also do some that looked like natural causes; he'd have to; there's only just so many ways you can kill people and this busy, busy boy would have to try all of 'em. So I smelled around looking not for a killer, but for happy people, innocent people, who had benefited from these deaths. "Whenever I found a situation like that, I checked back on the death. Sometimes it was a perfectly genuine croak, but time and again I found what you might find if you knew what you were looking for... scarlet fever, for instance. People shouldn't die of scarlet fever, but you know what? Feed somebody just enough belladonna and a doctor will write a scarlet fever certificate for the late lamented, nice as you please, if he has no reason to be suspicious. And in these deaths -- my busy boy's work, I mean -- there's never any reason to be suspicious. Where's the -- you pour it for once, Henry. "Hey, Henry! I'm getting tighter'n a ticklish tick with a alum stick, haha... " 'Course, by this time, the feature story was up the spout; I had better use for the situation than a lousy feature or even a series. Yep. For weeks now. I've been following the meatwagons and morguing around. All I do, I write 'em up when they look funny to me. I keep it to myself; it's all in the files here, every one of 'em. Oh, man, if the papers or the coroner or somebody got hold of those files, what a hassle! They'd dig up the marble orchards around here like potato patches! They'd find more little old embolisms and postsyncopes! "Say, did you know that Aeontium Napellus, which is wolfsbane, which is aconite, has a root that grates up into a specially nippy kind of horseradish for them as likes it strong for a few brief seconds? There's a woman just down the street who curled up and died last Tuesday and they called it heart failure; her daughter's already headed for Hollywood where she won't make anything but carhop, second class, but anyway it's what she wanted. "Sooner or later, taking the notes I do the way I do at the deaths I investigate, this boy, this busy, busy fellow who is bringing so much sunshine into so many brutalized innocent lives, this boy will come over to me and say, 'Hi, chum, you looking for somebody?' " Henry without the question mark. "What do you think?" I prodded. "A reward, maybe? Or a big scoop -- is that what they call it in newspapers?" "Yes, in the movies. Catch it, Hen -- hey, thanks. First time I knocked over a bottle in nine years, so help me. Mop up the ol' 'Justice' file -- I call it the 'Justice' file; you like that, boy? Ooo... ooh. I'm adrift, kid, and you know what? I love it. Pour me another. Do it m'self only I'm not myself if you see what I mmm. Good. "So where was I? Oh, yes, you say I'd nab this busy boy and get a reward. Well, there you go thinking like a human being. I, sir Henry, will do no such a thing. Now I don't know exactly why this boy does this bit and I don't much care, long's I can get him to do it for me. He wants to knock off obstacles from the path of poor imprisoned souls, I got just the chore for him. Just some justice is all. "You see that scared rabbit came in here a while back with the tray, that Loretta? Now that thing with Loretta, it was great while it lasted, and it lasted too long about four months back. All the time around, oh, please don't drink so much, where have you been, but I was worried... you know the routine, Henry. Now I could handle this myself, but even I can't think of a way which wouldn't be either expensive or messy. "When you come right down to it. I'd just as soon keep her around. "Loretta's not much trouble. She leaves me alone pretty much and comes in here about the time I'm bottle dippy every night and gets me into bed, talking on bright and cheery as anything, just as if I wasn't hooked over the desk here, green as a gherkin and just as pickled... "The reason, the real reason I'd like to introduce this other unhuman type to my lovely wife is that I'd get more of a kick than you'd understand, just making him do it. Humans I can handle; this boy would be a real challenge. You can talk anybody into an#hing, and yourself out of anything, if you can just think of the right thing to say -- and I'm the boy who can do it. Was your mother frightened by a keyboard?" "What?" he asked, startled. "That grin. What I'd like to know, I'd like to know how that busy boy covers so much territory. First he has to find 'em, then he has to plan how to knock 'em off, then he has to wait his chance... so many, Henny! Five already this week and here it's only Thursday!" "Maybe there's more than one," Henry suggested tentatively. S AY, I never thought of that!" I exclaimed. "I guess it's because there's only one of me. Gosh, what a lovely idea -- squads of unhumans thinking unhumanly, doing whatever they unhumanly want all over the lot. But why should the likes of him or them take chances just to make some humans happy?" "They don't care if anyone gets happy," said Henry. "Why are you whispering?" "Must be getting pretty tight, I guess; can't seem to do much better. Whee-ooo! Such a gorgeous load! What? What's that you said about the unhumans, that they don't care about making people happy? Listen, son, don't go telling me about unhumans. Who's the expert around here? I tell you, every time they knock somebody off, someone around stops getting mistreated. Those files there -- " "Right files, wrong conclusion. You keep worrying about what you are; we don't. We just are." 'We? Are you classifying yourself with me?" "I wasn't," said Henry, not smiling. "Just what you are, human or not, I don't know and I don't care. You're a blowhard, though." I snarled and heaved myself upward. But a whispered snarl doesn't amount to much and you can heave all you like and get nowhere when your arms are deadwood and your legs are about as responsive as those old inner tubes in your neighbor's back yard. "What's the matter with me?" I rasped. "You're about nine-tenths dead, that's all." "Nine -- what do you mean, Henry? What are you talking about? I'm just drunk, not -- " "Dicoumarin," he said. "You know what that is?" "Sure I know what it is. Capillary poison. All the smallest blood vessels rupture and you bleed to death internally before you even know you're sick. Henry, you've poisoned me.'" "Well, yes." I tried to struggle up, but I couldn't. "You weren't supposed to kill me, Henry! It was Loretta! That's why I brought you home -- I guessed that the killer would be the opposite of the likes of me and you're about as opposite as anybody could be. And you know I can't stand her and killing her would make me happier. It's her you're supposed to kill, Henry!" "No," he answered stubbornly. "It couldn't be her. I told you we don't care if somebody's made happier. It had to be you." "Why? Why?' "To stop the noise." I looked at him, frowned foggily, shook my head. "Self-defense," he explained patiently. "I'm a -- I suppose you'd call it a telepath, though it isn't telepathy like you read about. No words, no pictures. Just a noise, I guess is the best word. There's a certain kind of mind -- human or not, who cares? -- it can't get angry, and it enjoys degrading other people and humiliating them, and when it's enjoying these things, it sets up... that noise. We can't stand the noise. You -- you're special. Hear you for miles. When we get rid of one of you, of course it makes a human happy -- whoever it was you were humiliating." Then he said again, "We can't stand the noise." I whispered, "Help me, Henry. Whatever it is, I'll stop. I promise I'll stop." "You can't stop," he said. "Not while you're alive... Oh, damn you, damn you, you're even enjoying dying!" He put forearms over his head -- not over his ears -- and rocked back and forth, and smiled and smiled. "You smile all the time," I hissed. "Even now. You enjoy "It isn't a smile and I kill only to stop the noise." He was breathing hard. "How can I explain to anything like you? The noise -- it's -- some people can't stand the screek of a hngernail on a blackboard, some hate the scrape of a shovel on a cement sidewalk, most can't take the rasp of a file on metal." "They don't bother me a bit," I said. "Here, damn you, look here!" He snatched my sewing-machine needle and plunged it under his thumbnail. His lips spread wider. "It's pain... pain! Only, with you, it's agony! I can't stand your noise! It puts all my teeth on edge, it hurts my head, it deafens me!" I remembered all the times he had smiled since I brought him home. And each time like the nail on the blackboard, like the shovel, like the rasp of the file, like the needle under the nail... I made a sort of laugh. "You'll come with me. They'll find the poison in me." "Dicoumarin? You know better than that. And there won't be any in the whiskey glass, if that's what you're thinking. I gave it to you three hours ago, in Molson's, in the drink I didn't want and you took." "I'll hang on and tell Lorrie." "Tell me," he jeered, leaning toward me, his smile that wasn't a smile as huge as a boa's about to bite. My tongue was thick, numb and wobbly. "Don't!" I gasped. "Don't... jump me... now, Henry." A gain he clutched his head. "Get mad! If you could get mad, it would go away, that noise! Argh, you snakes, you freaks... all of you who enjoy hating! The girl, remember her, in the bar? She was making that noise until I got her angry... she's going to get better now that you're dead." I was going to say I wasn't dead, I wasn't yet, but my mouth wouldn't work. "I'll take these," Henry said. I watched him stack the files right under my nose. "Everything's nice and tidy," he told me. "You were due to drink yourself to death, anyway, and here you are just like always. Only you won't sleep this one off... I wish I could have got you sore." I watched him unlock the door, saw him go, heard him talking to Lorrie briefly. Then the outer door banged. L oretta came into the room and stopped. She sighed. "Oh, dear, we're in a special mess tonight, aren't we?" she said brightly. I tried, how I tried to yell, to scream at her, but I couldn't, and it was growing dark. Loretta bent and pulled my arm around her neck. "You'll have to help just a little now. tpsy-daisy!" Strong shoulders and a practiced hip hauled me upright, lolling.' "You know, I do like your friend Henry. The way he smiled when he left -- why, it made me feel that everything's going to be all right." By From a feature writer to feature attraction -- now there's a real booze-to-riches success storyl circus life, but a year of it has changed me. It's in my blood now and I suppose I'll never give it up -- even if they'd let me. This job is better than anything I could get in the newspaper racket. I work all summer, it's true, but I get the winter off, though some of the offers for winter work are mighty tempting. Maybe if I hadn't been kicked off the paper, I'd be city editor now, knocking my brains out. Who knows? But maybe I'd just be a rewrite man, or in the slot, writing heads, or copyreading. But the thought of newspaper work after all this appalls me. thanked for the whole thing, I suppose, though it would be a grudging thank-you I'd give him, considering all the trouble he caused. Still... I first saw him on a July morning at the beginning of the vacation schedule, when four of us on the local side were trying to do five people's work. My first inkling anything was wrong came when I returned from the courthouse beat and stuck a sheet of paper in the typewriter to write the probate court notes. I struck the keys. They wouldn't go all the way down. I opened the cover plate, looked in to see what was wrong. I saw nothing, so I tried again. Oscar Phipps, the city editor, was giving me the eye. I figured maybe he was pulling a trick on me. But then I knew he hadn't. He wasn't the type. back space, tabular, margin release, shift and shift lock worked perfectly. But the keys only went down a short way before they stopped. All except one key. The cap D. I hit the D. It worked fine the first time, biit not the second. I tried all the keys again. This time only the i worked. Now I had Di. I went ahead testing. Pretty soon I had Dimly Then came a space. A few letters more and it was Dimly drouse the dreary droves Phipps had one eyebrow raised. I lifted the cover plate again. Quickly. There I saw a fu # zy thing. It whisked out of sight. I snapped the plate down and held it down. The party I had been on the night before hadn't been that good and I had had at least three hours' sleep. I tried typing again. I got nothing until I started a new line. Then out came Primly prides the privy prose I banged up the plate, saw a blur of something slinking down between the type bar levers again. Whatever it was, it managed to squeeze itself out of sight in a most amazing way. "Hey!" I said. "I know you're down there. What's the big idea?" Fuzzy squeezed his head up from the levers. The head looked like that of a mouse, but it had teeth like a chipmunk and bright little black beads for eyes. They looked right at me. "You go right ahead," he said in a shrill voice. "This is going to be a great poem. Did you get all that alliteration there in those two lines?" "Listen, will you get out of there? I've got work to do!" "Yes, I think I've hit it at last. It was that four-stress iambic that did it. It was iambic, wasn't it?" "Go away," I said miserably. Fuzzy pulled the rest of himself out of the bars and stood on hind feet. He crossed his forepaws in front of him. vibrated his long, furry tail, and said defiantly, "No." "Look," I pleaded, "I'm not Don Marquis and you're not Archie and I have work to do. Now will you please get out of this typewriter?" His tiny ears swiveled upward. "Who's Don Marquis? And Archie?" "Go to hell," I said. I slammed the cover down and looked up into the cold eyes of Oscar Phipps who was standing next to my desk. "Who, may I ask," he said ominously, "do you think you're talking to?" "Take a look." I lifted the plate once again. Fuzzy was there on his back, his legs crossed, his tail twitching. "I don't see anything," Phipps said. "You mean you can't see Fuzzy here?" I pointed to him, the end of my finger an inch from his head."Ouch!"I drew my hand away. "The little devil bit me." "You're fired, Mr. Weaver," Phipps said in a tired voice. "Fired as of right now. I'll arrange for two weeks' severance pay. And my advice to you is to stay off the bottle or see a psychiatrist -- or both. Not that it'll do you any good. You never amounted to anything and you never will." I would have taken a swipe at Fuzzy, but he had slunk out of sight. I had been on the newspaper, I had passed the city park every morning on my way to work, feeling an envy for those who had nothing better to do than sit on the benches and contemplate the nature of the Universe. Now I took myself there and sat as I had seen others do, hoping to feel a kinship with these unfortunates. But all I did was feel alone, frustrated and angry at Phipps. Maybe I had been too convivial, maybe I had enjoyed night life too much, maybe I hadn't given the paper my all. But I wasn't ready for the booby hatch even if I had seen a fuzzy little thing that could talk. I drew a copy of Editor and Publisher from my pocket and was scanning the "Help Wanted: Editorial" columns when out of the corner of my eye I saw a blob of black moving along the walk. Turning handsprings, balancing himself precariously on the end of his vibrating tail, running and waving his forepaws to get my attention was Fuzzy. I groaned. "Please go away!" I covered my eyes so I wouldn't have to look at him. "Why?" he piped. "Because you're a hallucination." "I'm not a hallucination," he said indignantly. "I'm real flesh and blood. See?" He vibrated his tail so fast, I could hardly see it. Then it stopped and stood straight out. "Lovely, isn't it?" "Look," I said, leaning far off the bench to speak to him, "I can prove you're a hallucination." "You can?" he quavered. "How?" "Because Phipps couldn't see you." "That square? Hahl He would not have believed it if he had seen me." "You mean you -- " He disappeared and reappeared like a flashing neon sign. "There!" he said triumphantly. "Why didn't you let him see you then?" I asked, a lirtle angry, but pleased nonetheless with his opinion of Phipps. "Because you didn't, you cost me my job." H e waved a forepaw deprecatingly. "You didn't want to stay on that hick sheet anyway." "It was a job." "Now you've got a better one." "Who's kidding whom?" "Together we'll write real literature." "I don't know anything about literature. My job is writing the news." "You'll be famous. With my help, of course." "Not with that 'dimly drouse' stuff." "Oh, that!" "Where did you come from, Fuzzy?" "Do I ask you where you come from?" "Well, no -- " "And my name's not Fuzzy. It's Trlk, pronounced Turlick and spelled T-r-l-k." "My name's Larry Weaver, pronounced Lar-ree -- " "I know. Look, you got a typewriter?" "A portable. At the apartment." "That will do." "Aren't you taking things for granted? I haven't said yet whether I liked the idea." "Do you have any choice?" I looked at him. a couple of ounces of harmless-looking fur that had already cost me my immediate future in the newspaper business. "I guess not," I said, hoping I could find a way to get rid of him if things didn't work out right. And so began a strange collaboration, with Trlk perched on my shoulder dictating stories into my ear while I typed them. He had definite ideas about writing and I let him have his way. After all, I didn't know anything about literature. Sometimes, when he'd get stuck, he'd get down and pace the living room rug. Other times he'd massage his tail, which was as long as he, smoothing it with his tongue and meticulously arranging every hair on it. "It's lovely, don't you think?" he often asked. And I'd say, "If you spent as much time working on this story as you do admiring your tail, we'd get something done." "Sorry," he'd say, hopping on my shoulder again. "Where were we?" I'd read the last page and we'd be off again. NE day, Trlk crawled on a shelf to watch me shave, whiffed the shaving lotion bottle, became excited and demanded I put a drop of it in front of him. He lapped it up, sank blissfully back on his tail and sighed. "Wonnerful," he squeaked. "Shimply wonnerful." He hiccupped. I let him sleep it off, but was always careful with the lotion after that. Days stretched into weeks, my money was running low and the apartment superintendent was pressing me for payment of the month's rent. I kept telling him I'd pay as soon as the first checks came in. But only rejection slips came. First one, then two, then half a dozen. "They don't even read them!" Trlk wailed. "Of course they read them," I said. I showed him the sheets. They were wrinkled from handling. "The post office did that," he countered. I showed him coffee spots on one page, cigarette burns on another. "Well, maybe -- " he said, but I don't think anything would have convinced him. When the last story came back, Trlk was so depressed, I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. It was time. We had been working hard. I got out a bottle. I poured a little lotion for Trlk. The next afternoon, we tackled the problem in earnest. We went, to the library, got a book on writing and took it home. After reading it from cover to cover, I said, "Trlk, I think I've found the trouble with your stories." "What is it?" "You don't write about things you know, things that happened to you, that you have observed." I showed him where it advised this in the book. His eyes brightened. We went right to work. This time the stories glowed, but so did my cheeks. The narratives all involved a man who lived in a hotel room. They recounted the seemingly endless love affairs with his female visitors. "Why, Trlk!" I exclaimed. "How come you know about things like this?" with such a man, a freelance writer who never made the grade with his writing, but who had plenty of girl friends who paid the freight. "He had a way with women," Trlk explained. "He certainly had," I said, reading again the last page he had dictated. "He finally married an older woman with money. Then he gave up trying to write." "I don't blame him," I said wistfully. "I had to find another writer. This time I decided to try a newspaper. That's where I ran into you." "Don't remind me." Things got better after that. We began to get a few checks from magazines. They were small checks, but they paid a few bills. The big blow fell, however, when Mr. Aldenrood, the superintendent, came roaring upstairs one day clutching a sheaf of papers. "This stuff!" he screamed, waving the sheets before me. ' The kids found it in the waste paper. They're selling them a dime a sheet around the neighborhood." "They're worth more than that," I said, regretting that Trlk and I hadn't burned our rough drafts. "You're going to move," Mr. Aldenrood said, "at the earliest possible instant." His face was apoplectic. "I'm giving you notice right now -- thirty days!" He turned and went out, muttering, "The idea of anybody committing to paper -- " and slammed the door. Two days later, I was seated at the typewriter, smoking a cigarette and waiting for Trlk as he paced back and forth on the rug, tiny paws clasped behind his back, talking to himself and working out a story angle at the same time, when suddenly there appeared on the carpet next to him a whole host of creatures just like him. I nearly gulped down my cigarette. Trlk let out a high-pitched screech of joy and ran over to them. They wound their long tails around each other, clasped and unclasped them, twined them together. It seemed a sort of greeting. Meanwhile, they kept up a jabber that sounded like a # rpm record being played # rpm. Finally, the biggest one detached himself from the group and gave Trlk a tongue-lashing that would have done justice to a Phipps. Trlk hung his head. Every time he tried to say something, the big one would start in again. A t length the leader turned to me. "My name is Brknk, pronounced burk-neck and spelled b-r-k-n-k." "And I'm Larry Weaver," I said, hoping they weren't relatives who were going to stay. "That's pronounced Lar-ree -- " "I know. We're from Sybilla in our itinerary. It has some of the quaintest customs of all the inhabited planets we visit. We're terribly sorry for all the inconveniences our wayward Trik here has caused you." "It was nothing," I said with a lightness I didn't feel. "Trlk had threatened to run off many times. He has a craze for self-expression and your literature fascinates him. He has an insatiable thirst -- " "I know." H e turned to Trlk. "It's against the rules of the Galactic Tours to make yourself visible to any of the inhabitants along the way. You know that. And it's a prime offense to interfere with their lives. Do you realize how many rules you have broken, how long we have been looking for you?" "He did the best he could," I said hopefully. "As a matter of fact, we were having considerable success with his -- a literary project." "I understand you lost your job because of him. Is that right?" "Yes, but I encouraged him." I hoped there was some way I could ease the sentence. "Trlk has committed grievous wrongs, Mr. Weaver. We must make it up to you." "Oh?" Here was an angle I hadn't expected. "What can we do for you?" I considered a moment. "You mean a wish or something?" Brknk laughed. "Nothing like that. We're not magicians." "Well, I could stand a little cash." "I'm sorry," he said, and did look pained. "We can't interfere in business. We don't have any of your currency and we are forbidden to duplicate or steal it." He frowned and studied me. Suddenly his face brightened. He bawled orders and several ward and started scampering all over me. One of them nipped a piece of flesh out of my arm. "Ouch!" I yelped, rubbing the spot. "What are you doing?" "You humans are a proud race," Brknk explained. "I'll give you reason to be prouder than the rest. We'll change your metabolism, your endocrine balance, toughen your muscle fibers a thousandfold. We'll make you the strongest man on Earth!" "Look," I said, "I don't want to be the strongest man on Earth." "Well, how about the world's champion boxer? We can speed up your reflexes at least ten times." I shook my head. "I don't want that, either. Sounds too much like work. Besides, I never liked getting into fights." die. They buzzed at each other, their tails vibrating like mad. One of them finally yipped and everybody spun around. Brknk beamed. "We've got it!" "What is it?" ed jabbed something in my arm. I winced and he nearly fell off. He retreated with injured pride. "Come along, Trlk," Brknk said. "What's supposed to happen?" I asked. "It will be a glorious surprise," Brknk assured me. "You'll never regret it. The only thing I ask is that you never tell anyone about us." I promised. Trlk looked up at me. I noticed the beginning of tears in his eyes. I reached down and patted him gently on the head. "So long, little fellow," I said. "It's been fun." "Good-by," he said sorrowfully. They vanished. Nothing happened for several days, so I bought a copy of Editor and Publisher and was writing for my first job when I felt a tender spot on my tail bone. When I examined it, I saw a protuberance there. There was no denying it. The they treasured most. I was growing a tail -- a long, hairy tail. As I say, I have come to like circus life. At first I tried to get doctors to cut it off. but they were too curious for that. Then I thought of jumping in the river or putting a bullet through my head. But after I saw what the scientists were making of it, when I viewed my picture in all the papers, and when I saw the awe with which I was regarded by everyone, I changed my mind. Now I make a cool twentyfive thousand a year without lifting a finger. Just my tail. I've become rather fond of it. I've even learned how to vibrate it. But I've never told anyone wouldn't believe it. Not old Phipps, anyway. Some day I'll go and vibrate my tail right in his face. I'd never amount to anything, eh? Let's see him grow a tail! SfieciM Give the Gift You'd Like to Receive See next page  # Very Special Christmas Offers ukU #eU StAiptiao I year # issues # different during Each additional gift the year-#AO Both for # subscription Additimal Additional.  for one year subscriptions subscriptions # # # ea. #I #t ## Please fill out all the information on the order blank below and mail in with your check today. If you would prefer not defacing your magazine send your order in on plain paper, but all orders must be in before Dec. #, #. The twelve month gift you yourself would like to receive. It is a perfect gift to give your friends. We will acknowledge your gift with a handsome Science Fiction Gift Card Announcement with your name as the donor. Rush your order in today. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Addrett... City Offer # Name City Ofler # City -- ...state City Stfto... OWtr # Price ns and Wanalh Co., # in years -- # pages -- and a very useful one for people new to science fiction. Addicts may object to the fact that # out of the # tales have been included in other books, but they are all superb items. Of the # unanthologized stories, # at least are disappointing; but on the whole it is a rich and varied job, edited with real individuality. There are two stories each by Bradbury, Clarke. Jones, Blish, Neville and Simak, and none by Sturgeon, Kuttner, Leiber, van Vogt, and several others of the Famed: an indication of the very personal nature of the editor's approach to science fiction, which does make the book something less than a representative crosssection of the field. Sloane's introduction and story notes are excellent, and his ideas about science fiction in general are worth attention. Nice job. by Murray Leinster. Gnome Press, # T'S a pleasure to have these three novelets (two very old and one recent) brought out in an attractive hardbound format. The book, too, is a genuine novel, not just three tales loosely jointed together. It is based on Leinster's # and # Amazing Stories adventures, "The Mad Planet" and "Red Dust," and on "Nightmare planet," from Science Fiction Plus in #. The three have been effectively rewritten into a narrative of the struggles of a few humans who have reverted to savagery on a planet where monster insects and poisonous fungi are the predominant forms of life. It tells how a primitive genius among the savages finally brings his people back to the status of civilized beings. One may object to the unnecessarily pat coincidence that winds up the story, since it is in no way essential to the plot, but, outside of that, there is almost nothing in the story that is not first irate. It is Leinster at his exciting, skilled best. bert Einstein. Crown Publishers, Inc., # to forget what a supernal scientific genius the world has in Albert Einstein! He is an old man; his greatest discoveries were made half a century ago; his current work is so abstruse that it is beyond most of us; and his unflinching defense of freedom of inquiry sometimes overshadow his work as a mathematical physicist. Nevertheless, he is still, first and foremost, the greatest scientist of our time; and this book proves it. Over # of its # pages are given over to his own popularizations of his scientific discoveries and they are magnificent pages. For any reader who tends to accept Einstein concepts as matters of mere machinery in modern science fiction, as unexplained techniques for moving a story forward, their "inventor's" own descriptions of their possibilities (and limitations) are essential reading. The other # pages in the book are equally fascinating, with their wealth of ideas about our modern society and its problems, and their unself-conscious portrait of a man who detests bigotry of every sort, social and political as well as scientific. Even for those who have the author's two previous collections of essays in English, the present book is valuable, for it includes many pieces he has written since #, as well as a rich selection from the first two volumes. Kornbluth. Ballantine Books, #c F you are like me in my ad miration for Cyril Kornbluth. the news that this collection of # of his tales contains one A-plus item never before published anywhere will make you go out and buy it at once. "Gomez" is the story of a "natural" scientist, a Latin who is first seen as a dishwasher in the Porto Bello Lunchroom, in New York City. He is Kornbluth's fictional parallel to Srinivasa Ramanujan, a very real instinctive mathematician who died in #. The story has everything, including a strong plea for freedom of science. Most of the other # stories are nearly as good. Four have appeared in general anthologies, the rest in magazines. Among the latter, "The Rocket of #" and "The Goodly Creatures" are particularly outstanding. Indeed, Kornbluth's first short story collection is a distinguished one throughout. Matheson. Gold Medal Books, #c t'OR what I think is Gold  Medal's first venture into the field of original science fantasies, it has chosen a weird and, I fear, rather slow-moving first novel by a man heretofore known for his excellent short horror tales. I Am Legend tells ofa disease that almost completely wipes out the human race, leaving behind only a handful of hideously changed creatures to attempt to revive civilization. It is "supernatural" science fiction, a horrid, violent, Sometimes exciting but too often overdone tour de force. Frederik Pohl. Ballantine Books, # hardbound, #c paper trail little book this is! It is definitely not for the prosaicminded, the gadget-lover, the believer in sober scientific extrapolation. Its three novelets are for the imaginative reader only. The book opens with a nottoo-successful tale, "Little Men," by Jessamyn West, a novelist not heretofore known for science fantasy. It suffers because Miss West does not understand that in science fiction some explanation or rationale is necessary, and because it is really only a sketch rather than a finished work. Nevertheless, it is a fine antiwar tale, ironically told in angry retrospect by an Army captain whose whole career had vanished when the unexplained catastrophe took place -- most adults suddenly became the size of small children while most children became the size of adults. Naturally, the children took over; unnaturally, they carry out (in a thoroughly unchildlike way) the development of a society based on the logic of their own premises: war is bad because it hurts people ; sex is dandy because it is fun; etc. Though the idea of the tale is first rate, its development leaves you dissatisfied and wanting a more convincing and less fragmentary handling. Novelet No. # is Lester del Rey's theological shocker, "For I Am a Jealous People." It deals with a race of brutally sadistic alien invaders; and what their God does to the human parson who is the hero of the tale is really drastic! He finally learns that self-reliance is the clue to the salvation of the human race, not reliance on a God Who has rejected it. The tale is a philosophical melodrama, if I ever saw one! Best of the three, both as to writing and as to believability, is Theodore Sturgeon's nightmare "To Here and the Easel." This is Sturgeon at his flaming best. In simple essence, he tells, in the first person, the hideous experiences of a schizoid, a split personality in whom the "real" character is a young painter, Giles, who has had to stop painting because of his condition; and the "dream" person is a medieval knight, Rogero, who is involved with battlemented castles, hippogriffs, a heroine named Bradamante and a foul magician called Atlantes. (Those who are well up on their early #th Century Italian literature may peg those names in advance of Sturgeon's final disclosure. I failed miserably to do so.) Question; is this madman's fable overwritten? I don't think so, for the blazing prose is saturated with an even more blazing drive or sort of demonic possession. The story is, basically, an unforgettable self-portrait of a man on the verge of insanity, who is rescued by a homely young girl who had faith in him. And it is superb stuff. by J. T. McIntosh. Doubleday and Co., # trious competitor. Fantasy and Science Fiction, will already have read this moving adventure in three separate novelets in its pages. But for those who have not, let it be reported that the tragic story of the exodus of a few thousand human beings from Earth at a time when the Sun is about to go nova. Part One tells of the difficult task of choosing those among escape; Part Two of the voyage to Mars, which will be their new home; and Part Three of the struggles of the colonists to establish their lives on the new planet -- a struggle more against the evils innate in imperfect Man than against the alien conditions of the new world. A distinguished tale. Book Company (no relation to the Oxford University Press) has put out a new item in its "Students Pocket Library" called Stories of Scienti#c Imagination (paper, #c). It's edited by Joseph Gallant and contains # alreadyanthologized stories (including two by Leinster-Jenkins!) and a #-page "digest" of A Connecticut Yankee in Kin Arthurs Court. An odd item, on all counts... Bantam Books has Line To Tomorrow (#c), a collection of # wonderful tales by Lewis Padgett. All have appeared in hard covers before, # in Padgett's A Gnome There H'as. One was originally published under the author's real name, Henry Kuttner. This is pseudonymous hideand-seek with a vengeance!... Also by "Padgett," this time in collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore, is Beyond Earth's Gates, the original-novel-half of a new Ace Books double (#c), here coupled with Miss Andre Norton's Daybreak -- # A.D. (original title Starm.an's Son). The Padgett-Moore item tells of still another parallel world, much like those which Murray Leinster, Fredric Brown, et al, have already described elsewhere -- and, I am afraid, better. However, this is a readable enough tale of an evil theocratic world to which our Earth is "Paradise," and of two young Earth people (one terribly dumb blonde and one "rising young actor") who enter this other world and really tear up the pea-patch there. It's an acceptable time-passer. HE most beautiful I farmland in the Galaxy m -- ruined!" the Seerian moaned. He was seven feet tall and colored a deep blue. Large tears rolled out of the lubricating duct on his neck and stained his expensive shirt. For fifteen minutes, he had been mumbling incoherently about his ruined farmland. "Calm yourself, sir." Richard Gregor said, sitting erect and alert behind his ancient walnut tary Decontamination Service can solve your problem for you.'.' "Could you tell us the nature of that problem, sir?" Arnold asked. The Seerian was still choked with emotion. He dried his lubrication duct with a large handkerchief and stared earnestly at the two partners. "Ruin!" he cried. "That's what I'm facing! The most beautiful farmland -- " "We understand, sir," Gregor said. "But what sort of ruin?" "I own a farm in Bitter Lug, on the planet Seer," the Seerian said, quieting down with an effort. "I've planted eight hundred mulgs of land with carter, mow and barney. It will sprout inside of a month and the slegs will eat it all. I'll be ruined, destroyed, wiped out -- " "Slegs?" Arnold repeated. "Rats, you would call them, of the species Alphyx Drex." The lubrication duct became moist at the thought and the Seerian hastily wiped it. "This year, there has been an infestation of s-legs. My land is overrun with them. I've tried everything, but they multiply faster than I can kill them. Gentlemen, I will be fairly wealthy if I can harvest this crop. I will pay well if you can get rid of these beasts." "I'm sure we can accommodate you," Gregor said. "Of course, there'll have to be a preliminary investigation. We like to know what we're getting into." "That's what the other companies told me," the Seerian answered bitterly. "There just isn't time. I've invested everything in seed. It'll sprout in a few weeks and the slegs will wipe me out. They must be destroyed before the crop comes through." became unhappy. He was a conservative operator and he didn't enjoy doing business this way. Because of Arnold's cockisigfMng contracts with impossible conditions. Gregor resented it, but it was what came of running a planetary decontamination service on a shoestring. So far, they had been lucky. They were even beginning to show a mild profit. He didn't want to jeopardize that now and the gleam in his partner's eye made him apprehensive. The Seerian seemed honest enough: but you could never tell. For all Gregor knew, these slegs were ten feet tall and armed with blasters. Stranger things had hap"Have you had any trouble from slegs in the past?" Gregor asked. "Of course. But they were no more a problem than the flying hangs, or the skegels, or the rotting mulch disease. They were a normal farming hazard." "Why should they increase now?" "How should I know?" the Seerian retorted impatiently. "Do you want the job or not?" "We certainly do," Arnold said, "and we can start -- " "My partner and I must hold a conference first," Gregor cut in, and pulled Arnold into the hall. Arnold was short, chubby and incurably enthusiastic. His degree was in chemistry, but his interests lay everywhere. He had an enormous amount of odd information, culled from the several dozen technical journals he subscribed to, at considerable exFor the most part, his knowledge was of little practical value. Few people cared why the natives of Deneb X were searching for an efficient method of racial suicide, or why nothing but winged life ever evolved on the Drei worlds. Still, if you wanted to know, Arnold could tell you. "I'd like to find out what we're getting into," Gregor said. "What is species Alphyx Drex?" "They're rodents," Arnold answered promptly, "a little smaller than Earth rats and more timid. They're vegetarians, living on grains, grasses and soft woods. Nothing unusual about them." "Hmm. Suppose we find ten "Fine." "Oh, stop it!" "I'm serious! If he wanted every one of fifty rats destroyed, I wouldn't take the job. We could spend the rest of our lives hunting down the last five or six. What the Seerian needs is to have the sleg population reduced to its usual pre-epidemic proportions. That we can do and our contract will so state." Gregor nodded. His partner could -- very occasionally -- show good business sense. "But can we control them in time?" he asked. "Absolutely. There are several modern rodent-control methods. Morganizing is one good way and the Tournier System is another. We'll be able to decimate the rat population in a matter of days." "All right," Gregor said. "And we'll specify in the contract that we are dealing only with species Alphyx Drex. Then we'll know where we stand." "Right." They returned to the office. A contract was drawn up at once, the farm of the greater number of its slegs. There was a bonus for every day before deadline that the work was completed, and forfeitures for every day past. "I'm going on vacation until the whole thing is over," the Seerian said. "Do you really think you can save my crops?" "Don't worry about it," Arnold assured him. "We have Morganizing equipment and we're taking Tournier System apparatus, just in case. Both are very effective." "I know," the Seerian said. "I tried them. But perhaps I was doing something wrong. Good day and the very best of luck, gentlemen." Gregor and Arnold stared at the door after the Seerian left. next day, they loaded their ship with a variety of manuals, poisons, traps and other equipment guaranteed to make life difficult for rodents, and blasted off for Seer. After four days of uneventful travel. Seer was a bright green beneath them. They descended and the coastline of Bitter Lug came into view. Finally they pinpointed their coordinates and touched down. Barney Spirit, as the Seerian's farm was called, was a pretty place, with its neatly plowed fields and grassy meadows. The ancient shade trees were black and stately against the evening sky and twilight made the little reservoir a deep and translucent blue. The signs of neglect and rodent infestation were everywhere. The great lawns were eaten bare in patches and the trees were drooping and unkempt. Within the farmhouse, the marks of sleg teeth were on furniture, walls, even the big supporting beams. "He's got his troubles, all right," Arnold said. "IVe've got his troubles,'.' Gregor corrected. Their inspection of the farmhouse was accompanied by a continual squealing from slegs hiding just out of sight. As they approached a room, frantic scurryLngs began; but somehow the slegs vanished into their holes before the partners could see them. It was too late to begin work, so Arnold and Gregor set up a variety of traps, to find out which would be most effective. They set up their sleeping bags and turned in. Arnold could sleep through anything, but Gregor spent an extremely uncomfortable night. Battalions and regiments of slegs could be heard running across the floors, banging into tables, biting at the doors and careening off the walls. Just as he was dozing off, an adventurous trio of slegs scampered across his chest. He brushed them off, burrowed lower into his sleeping bag, and managed to catch a few hours of fitful sleep. In the morning, they inspected their traps and found every one of them empty. They spent the next few hours dragging the ponderous Morganizing equipment from the ship, assembling it and adjusting the trigger relays and lures. While Arnold was making the last fine adjustments, Gregor unloaded the Tournier System apparatus and ran the field wires around the farm house. They turned both on and sat back to await the slaughter. Midday came; Seer's hot little sun hung directly overhead. The Morganizing equipment hummed and grumbled to itself. The Tournier wires flashed blue sparks. Nothing happened. The hours dragged by. Arnold read every available manual on rodent control. Gregor dug out a pack of tattered cards and morosely played solitaire. The equipment murmured and buzzed, exactly as its manufacturers guaranteed. Enough power was consumed to light a mediumsized village. Not a single rodent corpse was produced. By evening, it was apparent that slegs were not susceptible to Morganizing or Tournierizing. It was time for dinner and a conference. elusive?" Gregor puzzled, sitting worriedly on a kitchen chair with a can of self-heating hash. "A mutation," Arnold stated. "Yeah, that could do it. Superior intelligence, adaptability . , ." Mechanically, Gregor ate his hash. All around the kitchen, he could hear the patter of countless little sleg feet, slipping in and out of holes, staying just out of sight. Arnold opened an apple pie. "They must be a mutation, and a damned clever one. We'd better catch one quick and find out what we're up against." But catching one was no easier slegs stayed out of sight, ignoring traps, lures, snares and doped bait. At midnight, Arnold said, "This is ridiculous." Gregor nodded abstractedly. He was putting the finishing touches on a new trap. It was a large sheet metal box with two sides left invitingly open. If a sleg were foolish enough to enter, a photo-electric cell closed the sides with the speed of a lightning bolt. "Now we'll see," Gregor said. They left the box in the kitchen and went into the living room. At two-thirty in the morning, the sides slammed shut. They hurried in. Within the metal box, they could hear a frantic scurrying and squealing. Gregor turned on the lights and up-ended the box. Although he knew that no rat born could climb the polished sides of the trap, he withdrew the cover with great care, an inch at a time. The squealing increased. They eagerly peered into the trap, half prepared to see a rat in full soldier's uniform, waving a white flag. They saw nothing. The box was empty. "He couldn't have gotten out!" Arnold exclaimed. "And he didn't gnaw through. Listen!" Inside the box, the squealing continued, accompanied by frantic scratching sounds, as though a rat were trying to scramble up the sides of the trap. Gregor put his hand in and felt cautiously around. "Ouch!" He jerked his hand back. There were two small toothmarks on his forefinger. The noise within the empty box increased. "We seem to have captured an invisible rat," Gregor said blankly I 'HE Seerian was vacationing at the Majestic Hotel, in the Catakinny Cluster. It took almost two hours to reach him by interstellar telephone. Gregor started the conversation by shouting, "You never said anything about invisible slegs!" "Didn't I?" the Seerian asked. "Careless of me. What about it?" "It's a breach of contract, that's what!" Gregor yelled. "Not at all. My lawyer, who happens to be vacationing with me, says that invisibility in animals comes under the classification of Natural Protective Coloration, and therefore need not be mentioned as a hazardous or unique condition. For legal purposes, the courts don't even admit a state of invisibility exists, as long as some means of detection is possible. They call it Relative Dimness and it is not allowed as permissible distress in an extermination contract." Gregor was momentarily stunned. "We poor farmers must protect ourselves, you know," the Seerian continued. "But I have perfect faith in your ability to cope. Good day." "He's protected, all right," Arnold admitted, putting down the extension telephone. "If we clean out these invisible rats, he's got a bargain. If we don't, he collects forfeitures." "Invisible or not," Gregor said, "Morganizing ought to work on them." "But it doesn't," Arnold pointed out. "I know. But why doesn't it work? Why don't traps work? Why doesn't the Tournierizing work?" "Because the rats are invisible." "That shouldn't matter. They still sniff like rats, don't they? They still hear like rats. They still think like -- or do they?" "Well," Arnold said, "if this invisibility is a true mutational change, it's possible that their sensory apparatus has changed, too." Gregor frowned. "And a change in their sensory equipment would call for a change in our applied stimulus. Now all we need to know is how these slegs differ from the norm." "Aside from their invisibility, you mean," Arnold said. UT how do you test the sen sory apparatus of an invisible rat? Gregor began by constructing a maze out of the Seerian's T# choicer furniture. Its walls were designed to light up when an invisible sleg brushed by. In that way, the rodents' movements could be traced. Arnold experimented with stains and dyes, searching for something that would return the slegs to visibility. One highpotency dye took momentary hold. A sleg appeared as though by magic, blinking slowly, his nose quivering. He looked at Arnold with maddening calm, then fearlessly turned his back. His rapid metabolic rate converted the dye almost immediately and he faded from view. Gregor captured ten slegs and tried to run them through his maze. They were unbelievably uncooperative. Most of them refused to move at all. They sniffed disdainfully at the food he gave them, toyed with it a few moments, then ignored it. Even light electric shocks budged them only a few inches. But the tests did give the answer to the failure of Morganizing and Tournierizing. Like all large-scale extermination systems, they were based upon the concept of "normal" rodents. These normals could be tricked or scared into certain behavior patterns by stimulation of their hunger or fear drives. It was the norm among rodents that the systems destroyed. Everything was fine as long as the norm represented a high percentage of the rodent population. But as the slegs had changed, their norm had changed, too. These slegs had adapted to invisibility. They could no longer be panicked, for they had discovered that nothing chased them. And since they had no reason to flee, they could eat anywhere, at any time. Therefore, they were invariably well fed and in no mood to explore enticing smells, shapes or sounds. Both Morganizing and Tournierizing could be adapted and would destroy slegs. But only a few. Only those rodents who had not adapted to invisibility -- the unaverage ones. And this only served to reinforce the change in the others. But what had happened to the natural enemies of the sleg, the forces acting to maintain an ecological balance? In order to find out, Gregor and Arnold made a frantic survey of the fauna of Bitter Lug. Bit by bit, they reconstructed what must have happened. The slegs had enemies on Seer -- flying hangs, drigs, tree skurls and omenesters. These unimaginative creatures had been unable to cope with the sudden change. For one thing, they were visual hunters, using smell only as an auxiliary. Although sleg scent was powerful in their nostrils, seeing was believing, not smelling. So they ate each other and left the slegs alone. And the slegs increased and increased... ing to check them. W E'RE tackling this at the wrong end," Gregor said, after a fruitless week. "We should find out why they became invisible. Then we'd know how to deal with them." "Mutation," Arnold insisted dogmatically. "I don't believe it. No animal has ever mutated into invisibility. Why should the slegs be the first?" Arnold shrugged his shoulders. "Consider the chameleon. There are insects that look like twigs. Other resemble leaves. Some fish can counterfeit the ocean bottom so perfectly -- " "Yes. yes," Gregor said impatiently, "that's camouflage. But invisibility -- " "Some kinds of jellyfish are transparent enough to be considered invisible," Arnold continued. "The hummingbird achieves it by dazzling speed. The shrew hides so well that few humans have ever seen one. All are moving toward invisibility." "That's ridiculous. Nature equips each creature as best it can. But it never goes all the way by endowing one species with invulnerability from all others." "You're being teleological," Arnold objected. "You're assuming that nature has some aim in mind, like the overseer of a garden. I maintain that it's a blind averaging process. Sure, the mean usually obtains, but there are bound to be extremes. Nature had to come up with invisibility eventually." "Now you're being teleological. You're trying to tell me that the aim of camouflage is invisibility." "It must be! Consider -- " "To hell with it," Gregor said wearily. "I'm not even sure what teleology is. We've been here ten days and we've captured some fifty rats, out of a population of Where do we go from here?" They sat in silence. Outside, they could hear the scream of a flying hang as it dipped low over the fields. "If only the slegs' natural enemies had some guts," Arnold said sadly. "They're visual hunters. If they were -- " He stopped abruptly and stared at Arnold. Arnold looked puzzled for a moment. Then a slow' light of comprehension dawned on his face. "Of course!" he said. Gregor lunged for the telephone and called Galactic Rapid Express. "Hello! Listen, this is a rush order... G alactic Rapid Express outdid themselves. Within two days, they deposited ten small boxes on the pocked lawn at Barney Spirit. Gregor and Arnold brought the boxes inside and opened one. Out stepped a large, sleek, proud, yellow-eyed cat. She was of Earth stock, but her hunting capabilities had been improved with a Lyraxian strain. She stared somberly at the two men and sniffed the air. "Don't get your hopes too high," Gregor told Arnold as the cat stalked across the room. "This is outside all normal cat experience." "Shh," Arnold said. "Don't distract her." The cat stood, her head cocked delicately to one side, listening to several hundred invisible slegs amble disdainfully past her. She wrinkled her nose and blinked several times. "She doesn't like the setup," Gregor whispered. "Who does?" Arnold whispered back. The cat took a cautious step forward. She raised a forepaw, then lowered it again. "She isn't catching on," Gregor said regretfully. "Maybe if we tried terriers -- " The cat suddenly lunged. There was a wild squealing and she was gripping something invisible between her forepaws. She mewed angrily and bit. The squealing stopped. But other squeals took its place and ratlike shrieks and rodent cries of terror. Gregor released four more cats, keeping the remaining five as his second team. Within minutes, the room sounded like a miniature abattoir. He and Arnold had to leave. The noise was nerve-shattering. "Time for a celebration," Arnold said, opening one of the brandy bottles he had packed. "Well," said Gregor, "it's a little early -- " "Not at all. The cats are at work, all's well with the world. By the way, remind me to order a few hundred more cats." "Sure. But what if the slegs turn cautious again?" "That's the beauty of it," Arnold said, pouring two stiff shots. "As long as the slegs are this way, they're meat for the cats. But if they revert to their old habits -- if they become truly ratlike -- we can use the Morganizer." Gregor could find no argument. The slegs were caught between the cats and the Morganizer. Either way, the place should be back to normal in another week, in plenty of time for a sizable bonus. "A toast to the Earth cat," Arnold proposed. "I'll drink to that," Gregor said. "To the staimch, down-toEarth, common-sense Earth cat." "Invisible rats can't faze her." "She eats 'em if they're there or not," Gregor said, listening to the sweet music of carnage going on throughout the farmhouse. T hey drank quite a number of toasts to the various attributes of the Earth cat. Then they drdnk a solemn toast to Earth. After that, it seemed only proper to toast all the Earthtype suns, starting with Abaco. Their brandy gave out when they reached Glostrea. Fortunately, the Seerian had a cellar well stocked with local wines. Arnold passed out while proposing a toast to Wanlix. Gregor managed to last through Xechia. Then he laid his head on his arms and went to sleep. They awoke late the next day with matching headaches, upset stomachs and flashing pains in the joints. And just to make matters worse, not one of their staunch, down-to-Earth, common-sense Earth cats was to be found. They searched the farmhouse. They looked in the bams, through the meadows, across the fields. They dug up sleg holes and peered into an abandoned well. There was no sign of a cat -- not even a wisp of fur. On all sides, the slegs scampered merrily by, secure in their cloak of invisibility. "Just when the cats were doing so well," Arnold mourned. "Do you suppose the slegs ganged up on them?" "Not a chance," Gregor said. "It would be contrary to all sleg behavior. It's more reasonable to He removed a cat and fastened assume that the cats just wana belled collar around her neck, dered off." Gregor closed the outer doors of "With all this food here?" the farmhouse and they turned Arnold asked. "Not a chance. It her loose, would be contrary to all cat be"Here, kitty, kitty!" Gregor vengeance and soon the chewcalled, for the last time. There ed corpses of slegs began to apwas no answering meow, only the pear, life -- and invisibility -- careless slegs. "This doesn't tell us anything," "We must find out what hapArnold said, pened," Arnold said, walking to "Keep on watching," Gregor the boxes that housed their retold him. maining five cats. "We'll try After a while, the cat took a again. But this time we'll introshort nap, a sip of water and beduce a control element." gan again. Arnold started to doze off. Gregor watched, thinking dire thoughts. Half of their month was now over, Gregor realized, and the sleg population was untouched. Cats could do the job; but if they gave up after a few hours, they would be too expensive to utilize. Would terriers do any better? Or would this happen to any -- He gaped suddenly and nudged Arnold. "Hey!" Arnold awoke with a groan and looked. A moment ago, there had been an extremely busy cat. Now, abruptly, there was only a collar, suspended half a foot above the floor, its little bell tinkling merrily. "She's become invisible!" Arnold crier. "But how? Why?" "It must be something she ate," Gregor said wildly, watching the collar dart across the floor, "All she's eaten is sleg." They looked at each other with sudden comprehension. "Then sleg invisibility is not mutational!" Gregor said. "I told you so all along. Not if it can be transmitted that way. The slegs must have eaten something, too!" Arnold nodded. "I suspected it. I suppose, after the cat digests a certain amount of sleg, the stuff takes hold. The cat becomes invisible." From the bedlam in the room, they could tell that the invisible cat was still devouringinvisible slegs. "They must all still be here," Gregor said. "But why didn't they answer when we called them?" "Cats are pretty independent," Arnold suggested. The bell tinkled. The collar, miraculously suspended half a foot above the floor, continued to dart back and forth among the ranks of sleg. Gregar realized that it didn't really matter if the cats couldn't be seen, as long as they continued working. But while he watched, the tinkle of the bell stopped. The collar was motionless in the middle of the floor for a moment; then it disappeared. Gregor continued staring at the spot where the collar had been. He was saying, very softly, "It didn't happen. It just didn't happen," Unfortunately, he knew it had. The cat hadn't jumped, moved, advanced or retreated. The invisible cat had disappeared. A lthough time was drawing short, they knew they would have to start at the beginning and find what was producing the invisibility, Arnold settled into his makeshift laboratory and began to test all substances around the farm. His eyes became red-rimmed and haggard from long hours of peering into a microscope and he jumped at the slightest sound. Gregor continued to experiment with the cats. Before releasing number seven, he fitted a tiny radar reflector and radio signal emitter to her collar. She followed the identical pattern of cat number six -- after several hours of hunting, she became invisible; shortly after that, she disappeared. Radar showed no trace of her and the radio signal had stopped abruptly. He tried a more carefully controlled experiment. This time, he put cats eight and nine into separate cages and fed them weighed samples of sleg. They became invisible. He stopped feeding number eight, but continued with nine. Cat number nine disappeared like all the others, leaving no trace. Eight was still invisible, but present. Gregor had a long argument with the Seerian over the interstellar telephone. The Seerian at only a small loss, and let one of the bigger companies move in. Gregor refused. But after the talk, he wondered if he had done the right thing. The secrets at Barney Spirit were deep and involved, and might take him a lifetime to solve. Invisibility was bad enough. But the vanishing was much worse. It left so little to go on. He was mulling this over when Arnold came in. His partner had a wild look in his eyes and his grin seemed almost demented. "Look," he said to Gregor, holding out one hand, palm up. Gregor looked. Arnold's hand was empty. "What is it?" Gregor asked. "Only the secret of invisibility, that's all it is," Arnold said with a cackle of triumph. "But I can't see anything," Gregor answered cautiously, wondering how best to deal with a madman. "Of course you can't. It's invisible." He laughed again. Gregor moved back until he had put a table between them. Soothingly, he said, "Good work, old man. That hand of yours will go down in history. Now suppose you tell me all about it." "Stop humoring me, you idiot," Arnold snapped, still holding out his open hand. "It's invisible, but it's there. Feel it." G regor reached out gingerly. In Arnold's hand was what felt like a bunch of coarse leaves. "An invisible plant!" Gregor said. "Exactly. This is the culprit." Arnold had examined every substance on the farm without results. One day, he had been walking in front of the house. He had looked again at the bald spots on the pocked lawn. For the first time, it struck him how regularly they were spaced. He bent down and examined one. It was bare, all right. The dirt showed through. He touched the spot -- and found that he was touching an invisible plant. "As far as I can tell," Arnold said, "there's an invisible plant of no known species growing in each of those spots." "But where did they come from?" "Somewhere Man has never been," Arnold said positively. "I suppose that the progenitor of this species was floating in space, a microscopic spore. Finally it was drawn into the atmospheric orbit of Seer. It fell on the lawn at Barney Spirit, took root, blossomed, threw out seeds -- and there we are. We know that slegs eat grasses and their sense of smell is relatively well developed. They probably found this stuff very tasty." "But it's invisible!" "That wouldn't bother a sleg. Invisibility is too sophisticated a concept for them." "And you think all of them ate it?" "No, not all. But those who did stood the best chance for survival. They were the ones the hangs and drigs didn't pick off. And they transmitted the taste to the next generation." "And then the cats came in, ate the slegs and got enough of the substance to turn invisible. Fine. But why did they completely vanish?" "That's obvious," Arnold said. "The slegs ate this plant as just a part of their normal diet. But the cats ate only sleg. They got an overdose." "Why should an overdose make anything vanish? Vanish to where?" "Maybe some day we'll find out. Right now, we have a job to do. We'll burn out all the plants. Once the slegs work the stuff out of their systems, they'll become visible again. Then the cats can go to work." "I just hope it does the job," Gregor said dubiously.  able flamethrowers. The invisible plants were easy to spot, since they formed bare spots in the lush green lawns of Barney Spirit. In this instance, invisibility gave them an exceedingly low survival value. By evening, Gregor and Arnold had burned every one of the plants into ashes. The next morning, they examined the lawn and were disconcerted to find a new pattern of pock marks. New plants were growing in them, as copiously as before. "No cause for alarm." Arnold said. "The first bunch must have seeded just before we destroyed them. This crop will be the last." They spent another day destroying the plants, scorching the entire lawn for good measure. At dusk, a new shipment of cats arrived from Galactic Rapid Express. They kept them caged, waiting for the slegs to return to visibility. In the morning, more invisible plants were growing on the scorched soil at Barney Spirit. ference. "It's a ridiculous idea," Gregor said. "But it's the only way left," Arnold insisted. Gregor shook his head stubbornly. "What else can we do?" Arnold asked. "Do you have any ideas?" "No." "We're only a week from deadline. We'll probably lose part of our profits anyhow. But if we don't complete the job, we're out of business." A rnold set a bowl of invisible plants on the table. "We have to find out where the cats go when they get an overdose." Gregor stood up and began to pace the floor. "They might show up inside a sun, for all we know." "That's a risk we have to take." Arnold said sternly. "All right," Gregor sighed. "Go ahead." "What?" "I said go ahead." "Me?" "Who else? 'm not going to eat that stuff. This was your idea." "But I can't," Arnold said, perspiring. "I'm the research end of this team. I have to stay here and -- uh -- collate data. Besides, I'm allergic to greens." "I'll collate the data this time." "But you don't know how! I have to work up a few new stains. My flow sheets are all messed up. I've got several solutions cooking in the stove. Tm running a pollenation test on -- " "You're breaking my heart," Gregor said wearily. "All right, I'll go. But this is absolutely the very last time." "Right you are." Arnold quickly pulled a handful of invisible leaves from the bowl. "Here, eat this. That's it. take some more. What docs it taste like?" "Cabbage," Gregor mumbled, munching. "I'm sure of one thing," Arnold said. "The effects can't last very long on a creature of your size. Your system should throw off the drug in a matter of hours. You'll reappear almost immediately." G regor suddenly became invisible except for his clothes. "How do you feel?" Arnold asked. "No different." "Eat some more." Gregor ate another double handful of leaves. And, suddenly, he was gone. Clothes and all, he had vanished. "Gregor?" Arnold called anxiously. "Are you anywhere around?" Arnold asked. There was still no answer. "He's gone," Arnold said out loud. "I didn't even wish him luck." Arnold turned to his solutions boiling on the stove and lowered the flame under them. He worked for fifteen minutes, then stopped and stared around the room. "Not that he should need any luck," Arnold said. "There can't be any real danger." He prepared his dinner. Halfway through it. with a forkful of food poised in front of his mouth, he added, "I should have said good-by." Resolutely, he put all dark thoughts out of his mind and turned to his experiments. He labored all night and fell exhausted into bed at dawn. In the afternoon, after a hurried breakfast, he continued working. Gregor had been gone over twenty-four hours. The Seerian telephoned that evening and Arnold had to assure him that the slegs were nearly under control. It was just a matter of time. After that, he read through his rodent manuals, straightened his equipment, rewired an armature in the Morganizer, played with a new idea for a sleg trap, burned a new crop of invisible plants and slept again. When he awoke, he realized that Gregor had been gone over seventy-two hours. His partner might never return. "He was a martyr to science," Arnold said. "I'll raise a statue to him." But it seemed a very meager thing to do. He should have eaten the plant himself. Gregor wasn't much good in unusual situations. He had courage -- no one could deny that -- but not much adaptability. Still, all the adaptability in the world wouldn't help you inside a sun, or in the vacuum of space, or -- He heard a noise behind him, and whirled eagerly, shouting, "Gregor!" But it was not Gregor. Arnold was about four feet tall and had entirely too many limbs. His skin color appeared to be a, grayish-pink, under a heavy layer of dirt. He was carrying a heavy sack. He wore a high peaked hat on his high peaked head, and not much else. "You aren't Gregor, are you?" Arnold asked, too stunned to react properly. "Of course not," the creature replied. "I'm Hem." "Oh... Have you seen my partner, by any chance? His name is Richard Gregor. He's about a foot taller than I, thin and -- " "Of course I've seen him," Hem said. "Isn't he here?" "No." "That's odd. Hope nothing went wrong." He sat down and proceeded to scratch himself intently under three armpits. Feeling giddy, Arnold asked, "Where do you come from?" "From Oole, naturally," Hem said. "That's where we plant the scomp. And it comes out here." "Just a moment." Arnold sat down heavily. "Suppose you start at the beginning." "It's perfectly simple. For generations, we Oolens have planted the scomp. When the scomp is young, it disappears for a few weeks. Then the mature plant appears again in our fields and we harvest it and eat it." "You're going too fast for me. Where did you say Oole is?" "Gregor says Oole is in a parallel universe. I wouldn't know about that. He appeared in the middle of my fields about two months ago and taught me English. Then -- " "Two months?" Arnold echoed. He considered. "Different time framework, I suppose. Never mind. Go on." "Do you have something to eat?" Hem asked. "Haven't eaten in three days. Couldn't, you know." Arnold handed him a loaf of bread and a jar of jam. "Well, when they opened the new North Territory," Hem said, "I put in an early bid. So I packed my animals, purchased three class B wives and departed for my claim. Once there, I -- " "Stop!" Arnold begged. "What has this got to do with anything?" "This is how it all happened. Don't interrupt." der with one hand while stuffing bread and jam in his mouth with two others. Hem explained, "I reached the new territory and planted scomp. It blossomed and disappeared, as always. But when it reappeared, most of it had been consumed by some creature. Well, farmers have to expect trouble, so I planted again. The next crop was still too poor to harvest. I was furious. I determined to continue planting. We pioneers are a determined lot, you understand. But I was just about to give up and return to civilization when your partner came -- " "Letme see if I understand so far," Arnold said. "You are from a universe parallel to ours. This scomp you plant grows in two universes, in order to complete its development." "That's correct -- at least it's how Gregor explained it to us." "It seems an odd way to grow food." "We like it," the Oolen said stiffly. He scratched behind all four knees. "Gregor says that our plants usually penetrate some uninhabited part of your universe. But this time, when I sowed in new territory, the scomp came up here." "Aha!" Arnold cried. "Aha? He didn't teach me that word. Anyhow, Gregor helped me. He told me I didn't have to abandon my land; I just had to use my other fields. Gregor assures me that there is no oneto-one spatial correspondence between parallel universes, whatever that means. And this is in payment for our other business." Hem dropped the heavy sack on the floor. It made a loud clunk as it landed. Arnold opened it and peered inside. The bars of yellow metal looked exactly like gold ingots. Just then, the telephone rang. Arnold picked it up. "Hello," Gregor said, from the other end. "Is Hem there yet?" "Yes..." "He explained it all, didn't he? About the parallel universe and how the scomp grows?" "I think I understand," Arnold said. "But -- " "Now listen," Gregor continued. "Before, when we destroyed the plants, he sowed them again. Since his time is much longer than ours, they grew here overnight. But that's over. He's moving his fields. The next time you destroy the scomp, it'll stay destroyed. Wait a week, then turn the cats and the Morganizer loose." Arnold shut his eyes tightly. Gregor had had two months to figure all this out. He hadn't. It was happening too fast for him. "What about Hem?" he asked. "He'll eat some scomp and go home. We had to starve it out of ourselves to get here." "All right," Arnold said. "I think I -- just a minute! Where are you?" Gregor chuckled. "There's no one-to-one correspondence between parallel universes, you know. I was standing on the edge of the field when the scomp wore off. I came out on the planet Thule." "But that's on the other side of the Galaxy!" Gregor gasped. "I know. I'll meet you back on Earth. Be sure to bring the gold." Arnold hung up. Hem had gone. It was only then that Arnold realized he hadn't asked Gregor what the other business was, the business that the Oolen had paid for in solid gold. H e found out later, when they were both back on Earth, in was done. The slegs, returned to visibility, had been decimated by the cats and the Morganizer. Their contract was completed. They had to forfeit part of their profit, because the job ran two weeks overtime, but the loss was more than made good by the bars of Oolen gold. "His fields were overrun with our cats," Gregor told Arnold. "They were scaring his livestock. I rounded them all up and we sold them to the Oole Central Zoo. They never saw anything like them. He and I split the take." "Well," Arnold said, rubbing the back of his neck, "it all worked out for the best." "It certainly did." Gregor was ferociously scratching his shoulder. Arnold watched for a moment, then felt a strong itching sensation on his chest -- in his hair -- on his calf -- everywhere. Carefully, he reached down and probed with his fingernails. "I guess we aren't quite through, though," Gregor said. "Why?" Arnold asked, scratching at his left biceps. "What is this?" "Hem wasn't the most hygienic of people and Oole was a pretty scrubby place." 'What is it?' "I'm afraid I picked up a lot of lice," Gregor said. He scratched at his stomach. "Invisible lice, of course." Hmm, not much room to tell you obout next month's Issue -- except that it leads off self becoming one of the top writers of science fiction. You'll see why, though, when she shows how "Come down to Earth -- and stay there!" is a humiliating order for someone with wings. departments... a good, strong issue!  rsi? continued from ofhor side UfinWillRylolMmSm! ond Problems of Conquering Space but biiV L,iN ol the greau-gt living spaci orta including: Lr. Wurnhcr Voi lun. Willy Ley, Dr. Heinz Haber, Dr masterpieces of who Ijecomesherown daiighv. i  w ii a mv: k-,,... i,i. i stories.newsreels of m.y pastevent decide! Plus more ih.in a .score of -- The world is about to hyUal CUtirnl -- Charle.s li-tscan restore dead men lo -- The world is about to hytlal CUmrnl -- Charle.s listscan restore dead men i # will escaiio. powerful a fall of even a few Ihe tiody of an insan :'rfdsitors from RSvKHs!"y  Gordon afy,N.Y. Tomorrow...ifiV pages. 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McIntosh #... by Frederik Pohl # by Bascom Jones, Jr. Ill by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York, #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed, stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Tltla Rag. U.S. Pat. Off. in the game of life environment for you. It has provided you with certain abilities to cope with this environment. You can't change its position nor call back the problems it has placed in your path. The next move is up to you! Every human being has within himself the know-how, the talent to win in the game of life. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) have preserved for centuries the knowledge of a secret method for the development of mind power and the direction of man's unused inner faculties. This wisdom, not strange and mysterious, has changed the course of life for many men and women throughout the world. Make your next move the right one! Write today for their free book, The Mastery of Life, to learn how you may obtain this helpful information. Address: Scribe L.A.L. lie Rosicrucians San Jose, California, U. S. A. I I I I I I Gentlemen : Reese send me the fret book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to develop my inner faculties and powers of mind. barely at the threshold of space flight, but we have every right to speculate on how our colonies on other planets may develop. However, it's only by studying the past that we can guess shrewdly at the future. The trick, of course, is not to get stuck in the past, but to use it as a departure point... American Ways of Life by George R. Stewart (Doubleday) does just that. It opens with an exciting and entirely legitimate speculation: "Let us momentarily make use of a device of science fiction, and imagine a 'historical' event that never occurred... During one of the vigorous and expansive periods of the Chinese Empire, one of their navigators (who might have been named Ko Lum Bo) conceived the idea of sailing eastward from China and thus arriving at Ireland, which was known to be the farthest outpost of Europe. The Chinese wished to reach Ireland, it may be believed, because they had heard tales that those barbarous islanders made a certain drink called Wis Ki. "Ko Lum Bo made his voyage, and discovered a country that he supposed to be part of Ireland, although he was disappointed in not finding any Wis Ki being manufactured by the natives. "... The Chinese colonized this country, eventually discovering it to be not Ireland, but a wholly new continent. Nevertheless they continued to call the natives Irish, or sometimes Red Irish. "The Chinese colonists introduced their own well-established ways of life. They continued to speak Chinese, and to practice their own religion... to use their comfortable flowing garments, and pagodas dotted the landscape. In short, civilization was Asiatic and not European." Exploring the origins of our ways of life in language, religion, food, drink, clothing, shelter, sex, personal names, play, holidays and art, Stewart proves that these are established mostly by the conditioning -- he calls it heredity, which is confusing -- of the first settlers. Those who come after contribute words, phrases, cookery, but tend generally to be assimilated in all ways except, perhaps, religion. Names, for example, are exchanged for "American" ones -- actually English in most cases. The desire to conform is only ( Continued on page #) No Strings Attached! No Need to Buy Any Other Records Ever ! full Advantages of Trial Membership ax Performed by world-famous artists. Custom-recorded on purest vinyl. Reproduced with a tonal fidelity encompassing the entire range of human hearing (# to # cycles). This amazing offer is made only to demonstrate superb quality of our recordings; and to show you advantages of trial membership. monthly of new releases. 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And all through the journey she'd studied her Brief Introduction to Terrestrial Manners and Mores avidly. Perhaps it was a bit overinspirational in spots, but it had facts in it, too. So she knew that, since the natives were non-alate, she was not to take wing on Earth. She had, however, forgotten to correlate the knowledge of their winglessness with her own vertical habits. As a result, on leaving the tender that had ferried her down from the Moon, she looked up instead of right and narrowly escaped death at the jaws of a raging groundcar that swerved out onto the field. She recognized it as a taxi from one of the pictures in the handbook. It was a pity, she thought sadly as she was knocked off her feet, that all those lessons she had so carefully learned were to go to waste. But it was only the wind of the car's passage that had thrown her down. As she struggled to get up, hampered by her awkward native skirts, the door of the taxi flew open. A tall young man -- a Fizbian -- burst out, the soft yellowish-green down on his handsome face bristling with fright until each feather stood out separately. "Miss Morfatch! Are you all right?" "Just -- just a little shaky," she murmured, brushing dirt from her rosy leg feathers. Too young to be Drosmig; too good-looking to be anyone important, she thought glumly. Must be the office boy. To her surprise, he didn't help her up. Probably it Would violate some native taboo if he did, she deduced. The handbook hadn't mentioned anything that seemed to apply, but, after all, a little book like that couldn't cover everything. S HE could see the young man was embarrassed -- his emerald crest was waving to and fro. "I'm Stet Zamon," he introduced himself awkwardly. The Managing Editor! The handsome young employer of her girlish dreams! But perhaps he had a wife on Fizbus -- no, the Grand Editor made a point of hiring people without families to use as a pretext for expensive vacations on the Home Planet. As she opened her mouth to to show she was no ordinary female but a creature of spirit and fire and intelligence, a sudden cacophony of shrill cries and explosions arose, accompanied by bursts of light. Her feathers stood erect and she clung to her employer with both feathered legs. "If these are the friendly diplomatic relations Earth and Fizbus are supposed to be enjoying," she said, "I'm notenjoying them one bit!" "They're only taking pictures of you with native equipment," he explained, pulling away from her. What was the matter with him? "You're the first Fizbian woman ever to come to Terra, you know." She certainly did know -- and, what was more, she had made the semi-finals for Miss Fizbus only the year before. Perhaps he had some Terrestrial malady he didn't want her to catch. Or could it be that in the four years he had spent in voluntary exile on this planet, he had come to prefer the native females? Now it was her turn to shrink from him. He was conversing rapidly in Terran with the chattering natives who milled about them. Although Tarb had been an honors student in Terran back at school, she found herself unable to understand more than an occasional word of what they said. Then she remembered that they were not at the world capital, Ottawa, but another community, New York. Undoubtedly they were all speaking some provincial dialect peculiar to the locality. And nobody at all booed in appreciation, although, she told herself sternly, she really couldn't have expected them to. Standards of beauty were different in different solar systems. At least they were picking up as souvenirs some of the feathers she'd shed in her tumble, which showed they took an interest. Stet turned back to her. "These are fellow-members of the press." She was able to catch enough of what he said next in Terran to Understand that she was being formally introduced to the aboriginal journalists. Although you could never call the natives attractive, with their squat figures and curiously atrophied vestigial wings -- arms, she reminded herself -- they were very Fizboid in appearance and, with their winglessness cloaked, could have creditably passed for singed Fizbians. Moreover, they seemed friendly; at any rate, the sounds they uttered were welcoming. She began to make the three ritual entrechats, but Stat stopped her. "Just smile at them; that'll be enough." It didn't seem like enough, but he was the boss. through with that," he sighed, as they finally were able to escape their confreres and get into the taxi. "I suppose," he added, wriggling inside the clumsy Terrestrial jacket which, cut to fit over his wings, did nothing either to improve his figure or to make him look like a native, "it was as much of an ordeal for you as for ,   me. "Well, I am a little bewildered by it all," Tarb admitted, settling herself as comfortably as possible on the seat cushions. "No, don't do that!" he cried. "Here people don't crouch on seats. They sit," he explained in a kindlier tone. "Like this." "You mean I have to bend myself in that clumsy way?" He nodded. "In public, at least." "But it's so hard on the wings. I'm losing feathers foot over claw." "Yes, but you could..." He stopped. "Well, anyhow, remember we have to comply with local customs. You see, the Terrestrials have those things called arms instead of legs. That is, they have legs, but they use them only for walking." She sighed. "I'd read about the arms, but I had no idea the natives would be so -- so primitive as to actually use them." "Considering they had no wings, it was very clever of them to make use of the vestigial appendages," he said hotly. "If you take their physical limitations into account, they've done a marvelous job with their little planet. They can't fly; they have very little sense of balance; their vision is exceedingly poor -- yet, in spite of all that, they have achieved a quite remarkable degree of civilization." He gestured toward the horizontal building arrangements visible through the window. "Why, you could almost call those streets. As a matter of fact, the natives do." At the moment, she could take an interest in Terrestrial civilization only as it affected her personally. "But I'll be able to relax in the office, won't I?" "To a certain extent," he replied cautiously. "You see, we have to use a good deal of native help because -- well, our facilities are limited..." "Oh," she said. Then she remembered that she was on Terra at least partly to demonstrate the pluck of Fizbian femininity. Back on Fizbus, most of the Times executives had been dead set against having a woman sent out as Drosmig's assistant. But Grupe, the Grand Editor, had overruled them. "Time we broke with tradition," he had said. He'd felt she could do the job, and, by the stars, she would justify his faith in her! "Sounds like rather a lark," she said hollowly. girl!" His eyes, she noticed, were emerald shading into turquoise, like his crest. "I certainly hope you'll like it here. Very wise of Grupe to send a woman 'instead of a man, after all. Women," he went on quickly, "are so much better at working up the human interest angle. And Drosmig is out of commission most of the time, so it's you who'll actually be in charge of 'Helpfully Yours.' " She herself in charge of the column that had achieved interstellar fame in three short years! Basically, it had been designed to give guidance, advice and, if necessary, comfort to those Fizbians who found themselves living oh Terra, for the Fizbus Times had stood for public service from time immemorial. As Grupe had put it, "We don't run this paper for ourselves, Tarb, but for our readers. And the same applies to our Terrestrial edition." With the growing development of trade and cultural relations between the two planets, the Fizbians on Earth were an everincreasing number. But they were not the only readers of "Helpfully Yours." Reprinted in the parent paper, it was read with edification and pleasure all over Fizbus. Everyone wanted to learn more about the ancient and other-worldly Terran culture. The handbook, A Brief Introduction to Terrestrial Manners and Mores, owed much of its content to "Helpfully Yours." A grateful, almost fulsome, introductory note had said so. But the column truly deserved all the praise that had been lavished upon it by the handbook. How well she had studied the thoughtful letters that filled it and the excellent and well-reasoned advice -- erring, if it erred at all, on the side of overtolerance -- that had been given in return. Of course, on Earth, spiritual adjustment apparently was more important than the physical; you could tell that from the questions that were asked. A number of the letters had been reprinted in an appendix to the manual. New York Dear Senbot Drosmig : When in contact with Terrestrial culture, I find myself constantly overawed and weighed down by the knowledge of my own inadequacy. I cannot seem to appreciate the local art forms as disseminated by the juke box, the comic strip, the tabloid. How can I help myself toward a greater understanding? Hopefully yours, Gnurmis Plitt Dear Mr. Plitt: Remember, Orkv was not excavated in a week. It took the Terrestrials many centuries to develop theirexquisite and esoteric art forms. How can you expect to comprehend them in a few short years? Expose yourself to their art. Work, study, meditate. Understanding will come, I promise you. Helpfully yours, Senbot Drosmig Paris Dear Senbot Drosmig: To think that I am enjoying the benefits of Terra while my wife and little ones are forced to remain on Fizbus makes my heart ache. Surely it is not fair that I should have so much and they so little. Imagine the inestimable advantage to the fledgling of even a short contact with Terrestrial culture! Why cannot my loved ones come to join me so that we can share all these wonderful spiritual experiences and be enriched by them together? Poignantly yours, Tpooly N'Ox Dear Mr. N'Ox: After all, it has been only five years since Fizbian spaceships first came into contact with Terra. In keeping with our usual colonial policy -- so inappropriate and anachronistic when applied to a well-developed civilization like Terra's -- at first only males are allowed to go to the new world until it is made certain over a period of years that the planet is safe for mothers and future mothers of Fizbus. But Stet Zarnon himself, the celebrated and capable editor of the Terran edition of The Fisbus Times, has taken up your cause, and I promise you that eventually your loved ones will be able to join you. Meanwhile, work, study, meditate. Helpfully yours, Senbot Drosmig Ottawa Dear Senbot Drosmig : Having just completed a twoyear tour of duty on Earth as part of a diplomatic mission, I am regretfully leaving this fair planet. What books, what objects of art, what, in short, souvenirs shall I take back to Fizbus which will give our people some small idea of Earth's rich cultural heritage and, at the same time, serve as useful and appropriate gifts for my friends and relatives back Home? Inquiringly yours, Solgus Zagroot Dear Mr. Zagroot: Take back nothing but your memories. They will be your best souvenirs. Out of context, any other mementos might convey little, if anything, of the true beauty and advanced spirituality of Terrestrial culture, and you might cheapen them were you to use them crassly as souvenirs. Furthermore, it is possible that you, in your ignorance, might unwittingly select some items that give a distorted and faldfe idea of our extrafizbian friends. The Fizbian-Earth Cultural Commission, sponsored by The Fizbian Times, in conjunction with the consulate, is preparing a vast program of cultural interchange. Leave it to them to do the great work, for you can be sure they will do it well. And be sure to tell your fellow-laborers in the diplomatic vineyards that it is wiser not to send unapproved Terran souvenirs back Home. They might cause a fatal misunderstanding between the two worlds. Tell them to spend their time on Earth in working, studying and meditating, rather than shopping. Helpfully yours, Senbot Drosmig A ND now she -- Tarb Morfatch ' -- herself was going to be the guiding spirit that brought enlightenment and uplift to countless thousands on Terra name wouldn't appear on the columns, but the reward of having helped should be enough. Besides, Drosmig was due to retire soon. If she proved herself competent, she would take over the column entirely and get the byline. Grupe had promised faithfully. But what, she wondered, had put Drosmig "out of commission"? The taxi drew up before a building with a vulgar number of floors showing above ground. "Ah -- before we -- er -- meet the others," Stet suggested, twitching his crest, "I was wondering whether you would care to -- er -- have dinner with me tonight?" This roused Tarb from her speculations. "Oh, I'd love to!" A date with the boss right away! Stet fumbled in his garments for appropriate tokens with which to pay the driver. "You -- you're not engaged or anything back Home, Miss Morfatch?" "Why, no," she said. "It so happens that I'm not." "Splendid!" He made an abortive gesture with his leg, then let her get out of the taxi by herself "It makes the natives stare," he explained abashedly. "But why shouldn't they?" she asked, wondering whether to laugh or not. "How could they help but stare? We are different." He must be joking. She ventured a smile. He smiled back, but made no reply. The pavement was hard under her thinly covered soles. Now that walking looked as if it would present a problem, the ban on wing use loomed more threateningly. She had, of course, walked before -- on wet days when her wings were waterlogged or in high winds or when she had surface business. However, the sidewalks on Fizbus were soft and resilient. Now she understood why the Terrestrials wore such crippling foot armor, but that didn't make her feel any better about it. A box-shaped machine took the two Fizbians up to the twentieth story in twice the time it would have taken them to fly the same distance. Tarb supposed that the offices were in an attic instead of a basement because exchange difficulties forced the Times to such economy. She wondered ruefully whether her own expense account would also suffer. But it was no time to worry about such sordid matters; most important right now was making a favorable impression on her co-workers. She did want them to like her. Taking out her compact, she carefully polished her eyeballs. The man at the controls of the machine practically performed a. ritual entrechat. "Don't do that!" Stet ordered in a harsh whisper. "But why not?" she asked, unable to restrain a trace of belligerence from her voice. He hadn't been very polite himself. "The handbook said respectable Terran women make up in public. Why shouldn't I?" H E sighed. "It'll take time for you to catch on, I suppose. There's a lot the handbook doesn't -- can't -- cover. You'll find the setup here rather different from on Fizbus," he went on as he kicked open the door neatly letboth Fizbian and Terran. "We've found it expedient to follow the local newspaper practice. For instance -- " he indicated a small green-feathered man seated at a desk just beyond the railing that bisected the room horizontally -- "we have a Copy Editor." "What does he do?" she asked, confused. "He copies news from the other papers, of course." "And what are you doing tonight, Miss Morfatch?" the Copy Editor asked, springing up from his desk to execute the three ritual entrechats with somewhat more verve than was absolutely necessary. "Having dinner with me," Stet said quickly. "Pulling rank, eh, old bird? Well, we'll see whether position or sterling worth will win out in the end." As the rest of the staff crowded around Tarb, leaping and booing as appreciatively as any girl could want, she managed to snatch a rapid look around. The place wasn't really so very much different from a Fizbian newsroom, once she got over the oddity of going across, not up and down, with the desks -- queerly shaped but undeniably desks -- arranged side by side instead of one over the other. There were chairs and stools, no perches, but that was to be expected in a wingless society. And it was noisy. Even though the little machines had stopped clattering when she came in, a distant roaring continued, as if, concealed somewhere close by, larger, more sinister machines continued their work. A peculiar smell hung in the air -- not unpleasant, exactly, but strange. She sniffed inquiringly. "Ink," Stet said. "What's that?" "Oh, some stuff the boys in the back shop use. The feature writers," he went on quickly, before she could ask what the "back shop" was, "have private offices where they can perch in comfort." He led the way down a corridor, opening doors. "Our drama editor." He indicated a middleaged man with faded blue feathers, who hung head downward from his perch. "On the lobstertrick last night writing a review, so he's catching fifty-one twinkles now." "Enchanted, Miss Morfatch," the critic said, opening one bright eye. "By a curious chance, it so happens that tonight I have two tickets to -- " "Tonight she's going out with  me. "Well, I can get tickets to any play, any night. And you haven't laughed unless you've seen a Terrestrial drama. Just say the word, chick." Stet got Tarb out of the office and slammed the door shut. "Over here is the office of our food editor," he said, breathing hard, "whom you'll be expected to give a claw to now and then, since your jobs overlap. Can't introduce you to him right now, though, because he's in the hospital with ptomaine poisoning. And this is the office you'll share with Drosmig." Stet opened the door. Senbot Drosmig, dean of Fizbian journalists, lay on the rug in a sodden stupor, letters to the editor scattered thickly over his shriveled person. The whole room reeked unmistakably of caffeine. Tarb shrank back and twined both feet around Stet's. This time he did not repulse her. "But how can a -- an educated, cultured man like Senbot Drosmig sink to such depths?" "It's hard for anyone with even the slightest inclination toward the stuff to resist it here," Stet replied somberly. "I can't deny it; the sale of caffeine is absolutely unrestricted on Earth. Coffee shops all over the place. Coffee served freely at even the best homes. And not only coffee... caffeine is insiduously present in other of their popular beverages." Her eyes bulged sideways. "But how can a so-called civilized people be so depraved?" "Caffeine doesn't seem to affect them the way it does us. Their nervous systems are so very uncomplicated, one almost envies them." Drosmig stirred restlessly under his blanket of correspondence. "Go back... Fizbus," he muttered. "Warn you... 'fore... too late... like me." Tarb's rose-pink feathers stood on end. She looked apprehensively at Stet. "Senbot can't go back because he's in no shape to take the interstel drive." The young editor was obviously annoyed. "He's old and he's a physical wreck. But that certainly doesn't apply to you, Miss Morfatch." He looked long and hard into her eyes. "Few years on planet," Drosmig groaned, struggling to his wings, " 'ply to anybody." His feathers, Tarb noticed, were an ugly, darkish brown. She had never seen any one that color before, but she'd heard rumors that too much caffeine could do that to you. At least she hoped it was only the caffeine. "For your information, he was almost as bad as this when he came!" Stet snapped. "Frankly, that's why he was sent here -- to get rid of his unfortunate addiction. Grupe had no idea, when he assigned him to Earth, that there was caffeine on the planet." The old man gave a sardonic laugh as he clumsily made his way to the perch and gripped it with quivering toes. "That is, I don't think he knew," Stet said dubiously. Tarb reached over and picked a letter off the floor. The Fizbian characters were clumsy and illmade, as if someone had formed them with his feet. Could there be such poverty here that individuals existed who could not afford a scripto? The letter didn't read like any that had ever been printed in the column -- at least none that had been picked up in the Fizbus edition: New York Dear Senbot Drosmig: I am a subaltern clerk in the shipping department of the FizbEarth Trading Company, Inc. Although I have held this post for only three months, I have tlready won the respect and esteem of my superiors through my diligence and good character. My habits areexemplary: I do not gamble, sing, or take caffeine. Earlier today, while engaged in evening meditation at my modest apartments, I was aroused by a peremptory knock at the door. I dung it open. A native stood there with a small case in his hand. "Is the house on fire?" I asked, wondering which of my few humble possessions I should rescue first. "No," he said. "I would like to interest you in some brushes." " Are the offices of the FizbEarth Trading Company, Inc., on Bre?" "Not to my knowledge he replied, opening his case. "Now I have here a very nice hairbrush -- " I wanted to give him every chance. "Have you come to tell me of any disaster relative to the FizbEarth Trading Company, to myself, or to anyone or anything else with whom or with which I run connected?" "Why, no," he said. "I have come to sell you brushes. Now here is a little number I know you'll like. My company developed it with you folks specially in mind. It's -- " "Do you know, sir, that you have wantonly interrupted me in the midst of my meditations, which constitutes an established act of privacy violation?" "Is that a fact? Now this little item is particularly designed for brushing the wings -- " At that point, I knocked him down and punched him into insensibility with my feet. Then I summoned the police. To my surprise, they arrested me instead of him. I am writing this letter 'from jail. I do not like to ask my employers to get me out because, even though I am innocent, you know how a thing like this can leave a smudge on the record. What shall I do? Anxiously yours, Fruzmus Bloxx asked, handing Stet the paper. "Or is the question academic by now? The letter's five days old." Stet sighed. "I'll find out whether the consulate has been notified. Native police usually do that, you know. Very thoughtful fellows. If this Bloxx hasn't been bailed out already, I'll see that he is." "But how will we answer his letter? Advise him to sue for false arrest?" Stet smiled. "But he has no grounds for false arrest. He is guilty of assault. The native was entirely within his rights in trying to sell him a brush. Now -- " he put out a foot -- "brace yourself. Privacy violation is not a crime on Terra. It is perfectly legal. In fact, it does not exist as such!" At that point, everything went maroon. When Tarb came to, she found herself lying upon Drosmig's desk. A skin-faced rtative woman was offering her water and clucking. "Are you all right, Tarb -- Miss Morfatch?" Stet demanded anxiously. "Yes. I -- I think so," she murmured, raising herself to a crouch. "Better... have died," Drosmig groaned from his perch. "Fate worse... death... awaits you." Tarb tried to smile. "Sorry to have been so much trouble." She stuck out her tongue at both Stet and the native. The woman drew in her breath. "Miss Morfatch," Stet reminded Tarb, "sticking out the tongue is not an apology on Terra; it is an insult. Fortunately, Miss Snow happens to be perhaps the only Terran who would not be offended. She has become thoroughly acquainted with us and our odd little customs. She even -- " he beamed at the Terran female -- "has learned to speak our language." "Hail to thee, O visitor from the stars," Miss Snow said in Fizbian. "May thy sojourn upon Earth be an incessant delight and may peace and plenty shower their gifts in abundance upon thee." Tarb put her hand to her aching head. "I'm very glad to meet you," she said, glad she did not have to get up to make the ritual entrechats. "Miss Snow is my right foot," Stet said, "but I'm going to be noble and let her act as your secretary until you can learn to operate a typewriter." "Secretary? Typewriter?" "Well, you see, there are no scriptos or superscriptos on Earth and we can't import any from Home because the natives -- " Miss Snow smiled -- "don't have the right kind of power here to run psychic installations. All prosifying has to be done directly on prosifying machines or -- " he paused -- "by foot." "Catch her!" Miss Snow exclaimed in Terran. Everything had gone maroon for Tarb again. As she fell, she could hear a sodden thump. It was, she later discovered, Drosmig falling off his perch again -- the result of insecure grip, she was given to understand, rather than excessive empathy. "T didn't mean, of course, to give you the impression that we actually produce the individual copies of the papers ourselves," Stet explained over the dinner table that night. "We have native printers who do that. They've turned out some really remarkable Fizbian type fonts." "Very clever of them," Tarb said, knowing that was what she was expected to say. She glanced around the restaurant. In their low-cut evening garments, the Terrestrial females looked much less Fizboid than they had during the day. All that naked-looking skin; one would think they'd want to cover it. Probably they were sick with jealousy of her beautiful rose-colored down -- what they could see of it, anyway. "Of course, our real problem is getting proofreaders. The proofing machines won't operate here either, of course, and so we need human personnel. But what Fizbian would do such degrading work? We had thought of convict labor, but -- " "Why mustn't I take off my wrap?" Tarb interrupted. "No one else is wearing one." Stet coughed. "You'll feel much less self-conscious about your wings if you keep it on. And try not to use your feet so conspicuously. I'm sure everyone understands you need them to eat with, but -- " "But I'm not in the least selfconscious about my wings. On Fizbus, they were considered rather nice-looking, if I do say so myself." "It's better," he said firmly, "not to emphasize the differences between the natives and ourselves. You didn't object to wearing a Terrestrial costume, did you?" "No, I realize I must make some concessions to native prudery, but -- " "Matter of fact, I've been thinking it would be a good idea for you to wear a stole or a cape or something in the daytime when you go to and from the office. You wouldn't want to make yourself or the Times conspicuous, I'm sure... No, waiter, no coffee. We'll take champagne." "I want to try coffee," Tarb said mutinously. "Champagne! You'd think I was a fledgling, giving me that bubbly stuff!" He looked at her. "Now don't be silly, Miss Morfatch... Tarb. I can't let you indulge in such rash experiments. You realize I am responsible for you." Tarb muttered darkly into her coupe maison. Stet raised his eyebrows. "What did you say?" "I was only wondering whether you'd remembered to check on whether that young man -- Bloxx -- ever did get out of jail." Stet snapped his toes. "Glad you reminded me. Completely slipped my mind. Let's go and see what happened to him, shall we?" A S they rose to leave, a dumpy Earthwoman rushed up to them, enthusiastically babbling in Terran. Seizing Tarb's foot, she clung to it before the Fizbian girl could do anything to prevent her. Tarb had to spread her wings wide to retain her balance. Her cloak flew off and an adjoining table of diners disappeared beneath it. Stet and the headwaiter rushed to the rescue with profuse apologies, Stet's crest undulating as if it concealed a nest of snakes. But Tarb was too much frightened to be calmed. "Is this a hostile attack?" she shrieked frantically at Stet. "Because the handbook never said shaking feet was an Earth custom!" "No, no, she's a friend!" Stet yelled, leaving the diners still struggling with the cloak as he sped back to her. "And shaking feet isn't an Earth custom; she thinks it's a Fizbian one. You see... Oh, hell, never mind -- I'll explain the whole thing to you later. But she's just greeting you, trying to put you at your ease. It's Belinda Romney, a very important Terrestrial. She owns the Solar Press -- you must have heard of it even on Fizbus -- biggest news service on the planet. Absolutely wouldn't do to offend her. Mrs. Romney, may I present Miss Morfatch?" The woman beamed and continued to gush endlessly. "Tell her to let go my foot!" Tarb demanded. "It's getting so it feels carbonated." He smiled deprecatingly. "Now, Tarb, we mustn't be rude -- " For the first time in her life, Tarb spoke Terran to a Terrestrial. She formed the words slowly and carefully : "Sorry we must leave, but we have to go to jail." She looked to Stet for approval... and didn't get it. He started to explain something quickly to the woman. Every time she'd heard him speak Terran, Tarb thought, he seemed to be introducing, explaining or apologizing. It turned out that, through some oversight, the usually thoughtful Terran police department had neglected to inform the Fizbian consul that one of his people had been incarcerated, for the young man had already been tried, found guilty of assault plus contempt of court, and sentenced to pay a large fine. However, after Stet had given his version of the circumstances to a sympathetic judge, the sum was reduced to a nominal one, which the Times paid. "But I don't see why you should have paid anything at all," Bloxx protested ungratefully. "I didn't do anything wrong. You should have made an issue of it." "According to Earth laws, you did do wrong," Stet said wearily, "and this is Earth. What's more, if we take the matter up, it will naturally get into print. You don't want your employers to hear about it, do you -- even if you don't care about making Fizbians look ridiculous to Terrestrials?" "I suppose I wouldn't like FizbEarth to find out," Bloxx conceded. "As it is, I'll have to do some fast explaining to account for my not having shown up for nearly a week. I'll say I caught some horrible Earth disease -- that'll scare them so much, they'll probably beg me to take another week off. Though I do wish you fellows over at the Times would answer your mail sooner. I'm a regular subscriber, you know." "TUT the same kind of thing's going to happen over and over again, isn't it, Stet?" Tarb asked as a taxi took them back to the hotel in which most of the Times staff was domiciled. "If privacy doesn't exist on Earth, it's bound to keep occurring." "Eh?" Stet took his attention away from her toes with some difficulty. "Some Earth people like privacy, too, but they have to fight for it. Violations aren't legally punishable -- that's the only difference." "Then surely the Terrestrials would understand about us, wouldn't they?" she asked eagerly. "If they knew how strongly we felt about privacy, maybe they wouldn't violate it -- not as much, anyway. I'm sure they're not vicious, just ignorant. And you can't just keep on getting Fizbians out of jail each time they run up against the problem. It would be too expensive, for one thing." "Don't worry," he said, pressing her toes. "I'll take care of the whole thing." "An article in the paper wouldn't really help much," she persisted thoughtfully, "and I suppose you must have run at least one already. It would explain to the Fizbians that Terrestrials don't regard invasion of privacy as a crime, but it wouldn't tell the Terrestrials that Fizbians do. We'll have to think of -- " "You're surely not going to tell me how to run my paper on your first day here, are you?" He tried to take the sting out of his words by twining his toes around hers, but she felt guilty. She had been presumptuous. Probably there were lots of things she couldn't understand yet -- like why she shouldn't polish her eyeballs in public. Stet had finally explained to her that, while Terrestrial women did make up in public, they didn't scour their irises, ever, and would be startled and horrified to see someone else doing so. "But I was horrified to see them raking their feathers in public!" Tarb had contended. "Combing their hair, my dear. And why not? This is their planet." That was always his answer. # wonder, she speculated, whether he would expect a Terrestrial visitor to Fizbus to fly... because, after all, Fizbus is our planet. But she didn't dare broach the question. However, if it was presumptuous of her to make helpful suggestions the first day, it was more than presumptuous of Stet to ask her up to his rooms to see his collection of rare early twentiethcentury Terrestrial milk bottles and other antiques. So she just told him courteously that she was tired and wanted to go to roost. And, since the hotel had a whole section fitted up to suit Fizbian requirements, she spent a more comfortable night than she had expected. She awoke the next day full of enthusiasm and ready to start in on the great work at once. Although she might have been a little too forward the previous night, she knew, as she took a reassuring glance in the mirror, that Stet would forgive her. TN the office, she was, at first, somewhat self-conscious about Drosmig, who hung insecurely from his perch muttering to himself, but she soon forgot him in her preoccupation with duty. The first letter she picked up -- although again oddly unlike the ones she'd read in the paper on Fizbus -- seemed so simple that she felt she would have no difficulty in answering it all by herself : Heidelberg Dear Senbot Drosmig: I am a professor of Fizbian History at a local university. Since my salary is a small one, owing to the small esteem in which the natives hold culture, I must economize wherever I can in order to make both ends meet. Accordingly, I do my own cooking and shop at the self-service supermarket around the corner, where I have found that prices are lower than in the service groceries and the food no worse. However, the manager and a number of the customers have objected to my shopping with my feet. They don't so much mind my taking packages off the shelves with them, but they have been quite vociferous on the subject of my pinching the fruit with my toes. Unripe fruit, however, makes me ill. What shall I do? Sincerely yours, Grez B'Groot Tarb dictated an unhesitating reply : Dear Professor B'Groot: Why don't you explain to the manager of the store that Fizhians have wings and feet rather than arms and hands? I'm sure his attitude and the attitudes of his customers will change when they learn that your pinching the fruit with your feet is not mere pedagogical eccentricity, hut the regular practice on our planet. Point out to him that your feet are covered and, therefore, more sanitary than the hare hands of his other customers. And always put on clean socks before you go shopping. Helpfully yours, Senbot Drosmig Miss Snow raised pale eyebrows. "Is something wrong?" Tarb asked anxiously. "Should I have put in that bit about work, study, meditate? It seems inappropriate somehow." "Oh, no, not that. It's just that your letter -- well, violates Mr. Zarnon's precept that, in Rome, one must do as the Romans do." "But this isn't Rome," Tarb replied, bewildered. "It's New York." "He didn't make the saying up," Miss Snow replied testily. "It's a Terrestrial proverb." "Oh," Tarb said. S HE resented this creature's trying to tell her how to do her job. On the other hand, Tarb was wise enough to realize that Miss Snow, unpleasant though she might be, probably did know Stet well enough to be able to predict his reactions. So Tarb not only was reluctant to show Stet what she had already done, but hesitated about answering another and even more urgent letter that had just been brought in by special messenger. She tried to compromise by submitting the letters to Drosmig -- for, technically speaking, it was he who was her immediate superior -- but he merely groaned, "Tell 'em all to drop dead," from his perch and refused to open his eyes. In the end, Tarb had to take the letters to Stet's office. Miss Snow trailed along behind her, uninvited. And, since this was a place of business, Tarb could not claim a privacy violation. Even if it weren't a place of business, she remembered, she couldn't -- not here on Earth. Advanced spirituality, hah! Advanced pain in the pinions! Stet read the first letter and her answer smilingly. "Excellent, Tarb -- " her hearts leaped -- "for a first try, but I'd like to suggest a few changes, if I may." "Well, of course," she said, pretending not to notice the smirk on Miss Snow's face. "Just write this Professor B'Goot that he should do his shopping at a grocery that offers service and practice his economies elsewhere. A professor, of all people, is expected to uphold the dignity of his own race -- the idea, sneering at a culture that was thousands of years old when we were still building nests! Terrestrials couldn't possibly haye any respect for him if they saw him prodding kumquats with his toes." with one's vestigial wings!" Tarb blazed. "Well!" Miss Snow exclaimed in Terran. "Well, really !" Tarb started to stick out her tongue, then remembered. "I didn't mean to offend you, Miss Snow. I know it's your custom. But wouldn't you understand if I typewrote with my feet?" Miss Snow tittered. "If you want the honest truth, hon, it would make you look like a feathered monkey." "If you want the honest truth about what you look like to me, dearie -- it's a plucked chicken!" "Tarb, I think 'you should apologize to Miss Snow!" "All right!" Tarb stuck out her tongue. Miss Snow promptly thrust out hers in return. "Ladies, ladies!" Stet cried. "I think there has been a slight confusion of folkways!" He quickly changed the subject. "Is that another letter you have there, Tarb?" "Yes, but I didn't try to answer it. I thought you'd better have a look at it first, since Miss Snow didn't seem to think much of the job I did with the other one." "Miss Snow always has the Times' welfare at heart," Stet remarked ambiguously, and read : Chicago Dear Senbot Drosmig : I am employed as translator by the extraterrestrial division of Burns and Deerhart, Inc., the well-known interstellar mail-order house. As the company employs no other Fizbians and our offices are situated in a small rural community where no others of our race reside, I find myself rather lonely. Moreover, being a bachelor, with neither chick nor child on Fizbus, I have nothing to look forward to upon my return to the Home Planet some day. Accordingly, I decided to adopt a child to cheer my declining years. I dispatched an interstellargram to a reliable orphanage on Fizbus, outlining my hopes and requirements in some detail. After they had satisfied themselves as to my income, strength of character, etc., they sent me a fatherless and motherless egg in cold storage, which I was supposed to hatch upon arrival. However, when the egg came to Earth, it was impounded by Customs. They say it is forbidden to import extrasolar eggs. I have tried to explain to them that it is not at all a question of importation but of adoption; however, they cannot or will not understand. Please tell me what to do. I fear that they may not be keeping the egg at the correct Fizbian freezing point -- which, as you know, is a good deal lower than Earth's. The fledgling may hatch by itself and receive a traumatic shock that might very well damage its entire psyche permanently. Frantically yours, Glibmus Gluyt "Oh, for the stars' sake!" Stet exploded. "This is really too much! Viz our consul, Miss Snow. That egg must go back to Fizbus at once, before any Terrestrials hear of it! And I must notify the government back on the Home Planet to keep a close check on all egg shipments. Something like this must certainly not occur again." "Why shouldn't the Terrestrials hear of it?" Tarb asked, outraged. "And I think it's mean of you to send back a poor little orphan egg like that when it has a chance of getting a good home." "An egg!" Miss Snow repeated incredulously. "You mean you really She gave me one mad little hoot of laughter and then stopped and strangled slightly. Her face turned purple in her efforts to restrain mirth. Really y Tarb thought, she looks so much better that color. ly. "I hope -- he began. "I do hope you will keep this... knowledge to yourself, Miss Snow." "But of course, v she assured him, calming down. "I'm dreadfully sorry I was so rude. Naturally I wouldn't dream of telling a soul, Mr. Zarnon. You can trust me." "I'm sure I can, Miss Snow." Tarb almost choked with indignation. "You mean you've been keeping the facts of our life from Terrestrials? As if they were fledglings... no, even fledglings are told these days." "One could hardly blame him for it, Miss Morfatch," Miss Snow said. "You wouldn't want people to know that Fizbians laid eggs, would you?" "And why not?" "Tarb," Stet intervened, "you don't know what you're talking about." "Oh, don't I? You're ashamed of the fact that we bear our children in a clean, decent, honorable way instead of -- " She stopped. "I'm being as bad as you two are. Probably the Terrestrials' way of reproduction doesn't seem dirty to them -- but, since they do reproduce that way, they could scarcely find our way objectionable!" "Tarb, that's not how a young girl should talk!" "Oh, go lay an egg!" she said, knowing that she had overstepped the limits of propriety, but unable to let him get away with that. "I hope to be a wife and mother some day," she added, "and I only hope that when that time comes, I'll be able to lay good eggs." "Miss Morfatch," Stet said, keeping control of his temper with a visible effort, "that will be enough from you. If common decency doesn't restrain you, please remember that" I am your employer and that I set the policies on my paper. You'll do what you're told and keep a civil tongue in your head or you'll be sent back to Fizbus. Do I make myself clear?" "You do, indeed," Tarb said. How could she ever have thought he was charming and handsome? Well, perhaps he still was handsome, but fine feathers do not make fine deeds. And, if it came to that, it wasn't his paper. "We have the same thing on Terra," Miss Snow murmured sympathetically to Stet. "These young whippersnappers think they can start in running the paper the very first day. Why, Belinda Romney herself -- she's a distant cousin of mine, you know -- told me -- " "Miss Snow," Tarb said, "I hope for the sake of Earth that you are not a typical example of the Terrestrial species." "And you, hon," Miss Snow retorted, "don't belong on a paper, but in a chicken coop." "Ladies!" Stet said helplessly. "Women," he muttered, "certainly do not belong on a newspaper. Matter of fact, they don't belong anywhere; their place is in the home only because there's nowhere else to put them." Both females glared at him. Tarb gained fluency in Terran and also learned to operate a Terrestrial typewriter equipped with Fizbian type -- mostly so that she could dispense with the services of the invaluable Miss Snow. She didn't like typing, though -- it chipped her toenails and her temper. Besides, Drosmig kept complaining that the noise prevented him from sleeping and she preferred him to sleep rather than hang there making irrelevant and, sometimes, unpleasantly relevant remarks. "Longing for the old scripto, eh?" one of the cameramen smiled as he lounged in the open doorway of her office. Although she was fond of fresh air, Tarb realized that she would have to keep the door shut from now on. Too many of the younger members of the staff kept booing at her as they passed, and now they had formed the habit of dropping in to offer her advice, encouragement and invitations to meals. At first, the attention had pleased her -- but now she was much too busy to be bothered; she was going to turn out acceptable answers to those letters or die trying. "Well, if the power can't be converted, it can't," she said grimly. "Griblo, I do wish you'd be a dear and flutter off. I -- " He snorted. "Who says the power can't be converted? Stet, huh?" She took her feet off the keys and looked at him. "Why do you say 'Stet' that way?" "Because that's a lot of birdseed he' gives you about not being able to convert Earth power. Could be done all right, but he and the consul have it all fixed up to keep Fizbian technology off the planet. Consul's probably being paid off by the International Association of Manufacturers and Stet's in it for the preservation of indigenous culture -- and maybe a little cash, too. After all, those rare antique collections of his cost money." "I don't believe it!" Tarb snapped. "Griblo, please -- I have so much work to get through!" "Okay, chick, but I warn you, you're going to have your brighteyed illusions shattered. Why don't you wake up to the truth about Stet? What you should do is maybe eschew the society of all journalists entirely, and a sordid lot they are, and devote yourself to photographers -- splendid fellows, all." "Please shut the door behind you!" The door slammed. Tarb gazed disconsolately at the letter before her. Would she ever be able to answer letters to Stet's satisfaction? The purpose of the whole column was service -- but did she and Stet mean the same thing by the same word? Or, if they did, whom was Stet serving? She was paying too much attention to Griblo's idle remarks. Obviously he was a sorehead -- had some kind of grudge against Stet. Perhaps Stet was a bit too autocratic, perhaps he had even gone native to some extent, but you couldn't say anything worse about him than that. All in all, he wasn't a bad bird and she mustn't let herself be influenced by rumormongers like Griblo. ter to Stet. He was in his office dictating to Miss Snow. After all, Tarb could not repress the ugly thought, why should he care about the scriptos? He'll never have to use a typewriter. And he was perfectly nice about being interrupted. The only thing he didn't like was being contradicted. I'm getting bitter, she told herself in surprise. And at my age, too. I wonder what I'll be like when I'm old. This thought alarmed her and so she smiled very sweetly at Stet as she murmured, "Would you mind reading this?" and gave him the letter. "Run into another little snag, eh?" he said affably, giving her foot a gentle pat with his. "Well, let's see what we can do about it." Montreal Dear Senbot Drosmig: I am a chef at the Cafe Interstellaire, which, as everyone knows, is one of the most chic eating establishments on this not very chic planet. During my spare moments, I am a great amateur of the local form of entertainment known as television. I am especially fascinated by the native actress Ingeborg Swedenborg, who, in spite of being a Terr an, compares most favorably with our own Fizbian footlight favorites. The other day, while I am in the kitchen engaged in preparing the ragout celeste a la fizbe for which I am justly celebrated on nine planets, I hear a stir outside in the dining room. I strain my ears. I hear the cry, " It is Ingeborg Swedenborg!" I cannot help myself. I rush to the doorway. There, behold, the incomparable Ingeborg herself! She follows the headwaiter to a choice table. She is even more ravishing in real life than on the screen. On her, it does not matter that she has no feathers save on the head -- even skin looks good. Overcome by involuntary ardor, I boo at her. Whereupon I am violently assailed by a powerfully built native whom I have not previously noticed to be escorting her. I am rescued before he can do me any permanent damage, though, if you wish the truth, it will be a long time before I can fly again. However, I am given notice by the cold-hearted management. Now I am without a job. And what is more, if on this planet one is not permitted to express one's instinctive and natural admiration for a beautiful woman, then all I have to say is that it is a lousy planet and I wiggle my toes at it. How do I go about getting deported? Impatiently yours, Rajois Sludd I suppose it serves him right," Tarb said quickly, before Stet could comment, "but don't you think it would be a good idea if the Times got up a Fizbian-Terrestrial ha dbook of its own? It's the only solution that I can see. The regular one, I recognize now, is more than inadequate, with all that spiritual gup -- " Miss Snow drew in her breath sharply -- "and not much else. All these problems are bound to arise again and again. Frankly speaking, Stet, your solutions only take care of the individual cases; they don't establish . a sound intercultural basis." He grunted. "What's more," she went on eagerly, "we could not only give copies to every Fizbian planning to visit Earth, but also print copies in Terran for Terrestrials who are interested in learning more about Fizbus and the Fizbians. In fact, all Terrans who come in contact with us should have the book. It would help both races to understand each other so much better and -- " "Unnecessary!" Stet snapped, so violently that she stopped with her mouth open. "The standard handbook is more than adequate. Whatever limitations it may have are deliberate. Setting down in cold print all that... stuff you want to have included would make a point of things we prefer not to stress. I wouldn't want to have the Terrestrials humor me as if I were a fledgling or a foreigner." He leaped out of his chair and paced up and down the office. One would think he had forgotten he ever could fly. "But you are a foreigner, Stet," Tarb said gently. "No matter what you do or say, Terrestrials and Fizbians are -- well, worlds apart." "Spiritually, I am much closer to the Terrestrials than -- but you wouldn't understand." He and Miss Snow nodded sympathetically at each other. "And you might be interested to know that I happen to be the author of all that 'spiritual gup.' I wrote the handbook -- as a service to Fizbus, I might point out. I wasn't paid for it." "Oh, dear!" Tarb said. "Oh, dear! I really and truly am sorry, Stet." H E brushed her apologies aside. "Answer that letter. Ignore the question about deportation entirely." He ran a foot through his crest. "Just tell the fellow to see our personnel manager. We could use a chef in the company dining room. Haven't tasted a decent celestial ragout -- at a price I could afford -- since I left Fizbus." "Would you want me to print that reply in the column?" she asked. " 'If you lose your job because you're unfamiliar with Terrestrial customs, come to the Times. We'll give you another job at a much lower salary.' " "Of course not! Send your answer directly to him. You don't think we put any of those letters you've been answering in the column, do you? Or any that come in at all, for that matter. I have to write all the letters that are printed -- and answer them myself." "I should have recognized the style," Tarb said. "So this is the service the Times offers to its subscribers. Nothing that would be of help. Nothing that could prevent other Fizbians from making the same mistake. Nothing that could be controversial. Nothing that would help Terrestrials to understand us. Nothing, in short, but a lot of birdseed!" "Impertinence!" Miss Snow remarked. "You shouldn't let her talk to you like that, Mr. Zarnon." "Tarb!" Stet roared, casting an impatient glance at Miss Snow. "How dare you talk to me in that way? And all this is none of your business, anyway." "I'm a Fizbian," she stated, "and it certainly is my business. I'm not ashamed of having wings. I'm proud of them and sorry for people who don't have them. And, by the stars, I'm going to fly. If skirts are improper to wear for flying, then I can wear slacks. I saw them in a Terrestrial fashion magazine and they're perfectly respectable." "Not for working hours," Miss Snow sniffed. "I have no intention of flying during working hours," Tarb snapped back. "Even you should be able to see that the ceiling's much too low." Stet ran a foot through his crest again. "I hate to say this, Tarb, but I don't feel you're the right person for this job. You mean well, I'm sure, but you're too -- too inflexible." "You mean I have principles," she retorted, "and you don't." Which wasn't entirely true; he had principles -- it was just that they were unprincipled. "That will be enough, Tarb," he said sternly. "You'd better go now while I think this over. I'd hate to send you back to Fizbus, because I'd -- well, I'd miss you. On the other hand..." Tarb went back to her office and drafted a long interstel to a cousin on Fizbus, explaining what she would like for a birthday present. "And send it special delivery," she concluded, "because I am having an urgent and early birthday." ed, a few months later. "What on Earth are you doing?" "Dictating into my scripto," Tarb said cheerfully. "Some of the boys from the print shop helped fix it up for me. They were very nice about it, too, considering that the superscriptos will probably throw them out of work. You know, Stet, Terrestrials can be quit decent people." "Where did you get that scripto?" "Cousin Mylfis sent it to me for my birthday. I must have complained about wearing out my claws on a typewriter and he didn't understand that scriptos won't work on Earth. Only they do." She beamed at her employer. "All it needed was a transformer. I guess you're just not mechanically minded, Stet." He clenched his feet. "Tarb, Terrestrials aren't ready for our technology. You've done a very unwise thing in having that scripto sent to you. And I've done a very unwise thing in keeping you here against my better judgment." "Maybe the Terrestrials aren't ready," she said, ignoring his last remark,, "but I'm not going t# wear my feet to the bone if I can get a gadget that'll do the same thing with no expenditure of physical energy." She placed a foot on his. "I don't see how a thing like this could possibly corrupt the Terrestrials, Stet. It's made a better, brighter girl out of me already." "Hear, hear!" said Drosmig hoarsely from his perch. "Shut up, Senbot. You just don't understand, Tarb. If you'll only -- " "But I'm afraid I do understand, Stet. And I won'-t send my scripto back." "May I come in?" Miss Snow tapped lightly on the door frame. "Is what I hear true?" "About the scripto?" Tarb asked. "It certainly is. All you have to do is talk into it and the words appear on the paper. Guess that makes you obsolete, doesn't it. Miss Snow?" "And high time, too," commented Drosmig. "Never liked the old biddy." "Senbot..." Stet began, and stopped. "Oh, what's the use trying to talk reasonably to either of you! Tarb, come back to my office with me." She could not refuse and so she followed. Miss Snow, torn between curiosity and the scripto, hesitated and then made after them. "I've decided to take you off the column -- for this morning, anyway -- and send you on an outside assignment," Stet told Tarb. "The consul's wife is coming to Earth today. Once she heard there was another woman on Terra, nothing could stop her. Consul seems to think it's my fault, too," he added moodily. "Won't believe I had nothing to do with hiring you. I told the Home Office not to send a woman, that she'd disrupt the office, and you sure as hell have." "But I thought you said in your letters that you were doing everything in your power to bring Fizbian womenfolk to their men on Terra!" Tarb pointed out malevolently. Y ES," he confessed. "We must please our readers. You know that. Anyway, all that's irrelevant right now. What I want you to do is go meet the consul's wife. Nice touch, having the only other Fizbian woman here be the one to interview her. Human interest angle for the Terrestrial papers. Shouldn't be surprised if Solar Press picked it up -- they like items of that kind for fillers. Take Griblo along with you and make sure he has film in his camera this time." "Yes, sir," Tarb said. "Anything you say, sir." He pretended not to notice her sarcasm. "I have a list of the questions you should ask her." He fixed her with his eye. "You stick to them, do you hear me? I don't want anything controversial." He rummaged among the papers on his desk. "I know I had it half an hour ago. Sit down, will you, Tarb? Stop hopping around." "If I can't have a perch, I want a stool," Tarb said. "This is a private office and I think it's a gross affectation for you to have those silly, uncomfortable chairs in it." "If you would have your wings clipped like Mr. Zarnon's -- " Miss Snow began before Stet could stop her. "Stet, you didn't'." His crest thrashed back and forth. "They'll grow back again and it's so much more convenient this way. After all, I can't use them here and I do have to associate with Terrestrials and use their equipment. The consul has had his wings clipped also and so have several of our more prominent industrialists -- " "Oh, Stet'." Tarb wailed. "I was beginning to think some pretty hard things about you, but I wouldn't ever have dreamed you'd do anything as awful as that!" "Why should I have to apologize to you?" he raged. "Who do you think you are, anyway? You're an incompetent little fool. I should have fired you that first day. I've let you get away with so much only because you have a pretty face. You've only been on Earth a couple of months; how can you presume to think you know what's good and what's bad for the Fizbians here?" "I may not know what's good," she retorted, "but I certainly do know what's bad. And that's you, Stet -- you and everything you stand for. You not only don't have the courage of your convictions, you don't even have any convictions. You're ashamed of being a Fizbian, ashamed of anything that makes Fizbians different from Terrestrials, even if it's something better, something that most Terrans would like to have. You're a damned hypocrite, Stet Zarnon, that's what you are -- professing to help our people when actually you're hurting them by trying to force them into the mold of an alien species." She brushed back her crest. "I take it I'm fired," she said more quietly. "Do you want me to interview the consul's wife first or leave right away?" It took Stet a moment to bring his voice under control. "Interview her first. We'll talk this over when you get back." I T was pleasant to be away from the office, she thought as the taxi pulled toward the airfield, and doing wingwork again, even if it proved to be the first and last time on this planet. Griblo sat hunched in a corner of the seat, too preoccupied with the camera, which, even after two years, he hadn't fully mastered, to pay attention to her. Outside, it was raining, the kind of thin drizzle that, on Fizbus or Earth, could go on for days. Tarb had brought along the native umbrella she had purchased in the hotel gift shop -- a delightful contraption that was supposed to keep off the rain and didn't, and was supposed to collapse and did, but at the wrong moments. She planned to take it back with her when she returned to Fizbus. Approved souvenir or not, it was the same beautiful purple as her eyes. And, besides, who had made the ruling about approved souvenirs? Stet, of course. "No reason why we couldn't have autofax brought from Home," Griblo suddenly grumbled. Tarb pulled herself back from her thoughts. "I suppose Stet wouldn't let you," she said. "But now that one scripto's here," she went on somewhat complacently, "he'll have to -- " "Keep this planet charming and unspoiled, he says," Griblo interrupted ungratefully. "Its spiritual values will be corrupted by too much contact with a crass advanced technology. And, of course, he's got the local camera manufacturers solidly behind him. I wonder whether they advertise in the Times because he helps keep autofax off Terra or whether he keeps the autofax off Terra because they advertise in the Time s." "But what does he care about advertising? He may talk as if he owned the Times, but he doesn't." Griblo gave a nasty laugh. "No, he doesn't, but if the Terran edition didn't show a profit, it'd fold quicker than you can flip your wings and he'd have to go back to nasty old up-to-date Fizbus as a lowly sub-editor. And he wouldn't like that one bit. Our Stet, as you may have noticed, is fond of running things to suit himself." "But Mr. Grupe told me that the Times isn't interested in money. It's running this edition of the paper only as a service to -- oh, I suppose all that was a lot of birdseed, too!" "Grupe!" Griblo snorted. "The sanctimonious old buzzard! He's a big stockholder on the paper. Bet you didn't know that, did you? All they're out for is money. Fizbian money, Terrestrial money -- so long as it's cash." "Tell me, Griblo," Tarb asked, "what does 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do' mean?" Griblo grinned sOurly. "Stet's favorite motto." He moved along the seat closer to her. "I'll tell you what it means, chicken. When on Earth, don't be a Fizbian." f'F'HE consul's wife, an old mauve creature, did not seem overpleased to see Tarb, since the younger, prettier Fizbian definitely took the spotlight away from her. The press had, of course, seen Tarb before, but at that time they hadn't been able to communicate directly with her and they didn't, she now found out, think nearly as much of Stet as he did of them. Tarb couldn't attempt to deviate much from Stet's questions, for the consul's wife was not very cooperative and the consul himself watched both women narrowly. He was a good friend of Stet's, Tarb knew, and apparently Stet had taken the other man into his confidence. When the interviews were over and the consular party had left, Tarb remained to chat with the Terrestrial journalists. Despite Griblo's worried objections, she joined them in the Moonfield Restaurant, where she daringly partook of a cup of coffee and then another and another. After that, things weren't very clear. She dimly remembered the other reporters assuring her that she shouldn't disfigure her lovely wings with a stole... and then pirouetting in the air over the bar to prolonged applause... and then she was in the taxi again with Griblo shaking her. "Wake up, Tarb -- we're almost at the office! Stet'll have me plucked for this!" Tarb sat up and pushed her crest out of her eyes. The sky was growing dark. They must have been gone a long time. "I'll never hear the end of this," Griblo moaned. "Why, if only he could get someone to fill my place, Stet would fire me like a shot! Not that I wouldn't quit if I could get another job." "Oh, it'll be mostly me he'll be mad at." Tarb pulled out her compact. Stet had warned her not to polish her eyeballs in public, but the ground with him! Her head hurt. And her feathers, she saw in the mirror, had turned almost beige. She looked horrible. She felt horrible. And Stet would probably think she was horrible. "When Stet's mad," Griblo prophesied darkly, "he's mad at everybody !"  And Stet was mad. He was waiting in the newsroom, his emerald-blue eyes blazing as if he had not only polished but lacquered them. " six hours to cover a simple story!" he shouted as soon as the door began to open. "Aside from the trivial matter of a deadline to be met -- Griblo, where's T arb? Nothing's happened to her, has it?" "Naaah," Griblo said, unslinging his' camera. "She took a short cut, only she got held up by a terrace. Shagged her umbrella on it, I believe. I heard her yelling when I was waiting for the elevator; I didn't know nice girls knew language like that. She should be up any minute now... There she is." He pointed to a window, through which the lissome form of the young feature writer could be seen, tapping on the glass in order to attract attention. "Somebody better open it for her," the cameraman suggested. "Probably not meant to open from the outside. Not many people come in that way, I guess." newsroom stared at the window. Finally the Copy Editor got up and let a dripping Tarb in. "Nearly thought I wouldn't make it," she observed, shaking herself in a flurry of wet pink feathers. The rest of the staff ducked, most of them too late. "Umbrella didn't do much good," she continued, closing it. It left a little puddle on the rug. "My wings got soaked right away." She tossed her wet crest out of her eyes. "Golly, but it's good to fly again. Haven't done it for months, but it seems like years." Her eye caught Miss Snow's. "You don't know what you're missing!" "Tarb," Stet thundered, "you've been drinking coffee! Griblol" But the cameraman had nimbly sought sanctuary in the darkroom. "You'd better go home, Tarb." When Stet's eye tufts met across his nose, he was downright ugly, she realized. "Griblo can give me the dope and I'll write up the story myself. I can fill it out with canned copy. And you and I will discuss this situation in the morning." "Won't go home when there's work to be done. Duty calls me." Giving a brief and quite recognizable imitation of a Terrestrial trumpet, Tarb stalked down the corridor to her office. Drosmig looked up from his perch, to which he was still miraculously clinging at that hour. "So it got you, too?... Sorry... nice girl." "It hasn't got me," Tarb replied, picking up a letter marked Urgent. "I've got it." She scanned the letter, then made hastily for Stet's office. He sat drumming on his desk with the antique stainless steel spatula he used as a paperknife. "Read this!" she demanded, thrusting the letter into his face. "Read this, you traitor -- sacrificing our whole civilization to what's most expedient for you! Hypocrite! Cad!" "Tarb, listen to me! I'm -- " "Read it!" She slapped the letter down in front of him. "Read it and see what you've done to us! Sure, we Fizbians keep to ourselves and so the only people who know anything about us are the ones who want to sell us brushes, while the people who want to help us don't know a damn thing about us and -- " "Oh, all right! I'll read it if you'll only keep quiet!" He turned the letter right-side up. Johannesburg Dear Senbot Drosmig: I represent the Dzoglian Publishing Company, Inc., of which I know you have heard, since your paper has seen fit to give our books some of the most unjust reviews on record. However, be that as it may, I have opened an office on Earth with the laudable purpose of effecting an interchange of respective literatures, to see which Terrestrial books might most profitably be translated into Fizbian, and which of the authors on our own list might have potential appeal for the Earth reader. Dealing with authors is, of course, a nerve-racking business and I soon found myself in dire need of mental treatment. What was my horror to find that this primitive, although charming, planet had no neurotones, no psychoscopes, not even any cerebrophones -- in fact, no psychiatric machines at all! The very knowledge of this brought me several degrees closer to a breakdown. Perhaps I should have consulted you at this juncture, but I admit I was a bit of a snob. "What sort of advice can a mere journalist give me," I thought, "that I could not give myself?" So, more for amusement than anything else, I determined to consult a native practitioner. "After all," I said to myself, "a good laugh is a step forward on the road to recovery." Accordingly, I went to see this native fellow. They work entirely without machines, I understand, using something like witchcraft. At the same time, I thought I might pick up some material for a jolly little book on primitive customs which I could get some unknown writer to throw together inexpensively. Strong human interest items like that always have great reader-appeal. The native chap -- doctor, he calls himself -- was most cordial, which he should have been at the price I was paying him. One thing I must say about these natives -- backward they may be, but they have a very shrewd commercial sense. You can't even imagine the trouble I had getting those authors to sign even remotely reasonable contracts... which in part accounts tor my mental disturbance, I suppose. Well, anyway, I handed the native a privacy waiver carefully filled out in Terran. He took it, smiled and said, "We'll discuss this afterward. My contact lenses have disappeared; I suppose one of my patients has stolen them again. Can't see a thing without them." So we sat down and had a bit of a chat. He seemed remarkably intelligent for a native; never interrupted me once. "You are definitely in great trouble," he told me when I'd finished. "You need to be psychoanalyzed." "Good, good," I said. "I see I've come to the right shop." "Now just lie down and make yourself comfortable." "Lie down?" I repeated, puzzled. I have an excellent command of Terr an, but every now and then an idiom will throw me. "I tell the truth, sir, and when I am required by force of circumstances to lie, I lie up." "No," he said, "not that kind of lying. You know, the kind you do at night when you go to sleep." "Oh, I get you," I said idiomatically. Without further ado, I flung off my ulster and flew up to a thingummy hanging from the ceiling -- chandelier, I believe, is the native term -- flipped upside down, and hung from it by my toes. Wasn't the Presidential Perch, by any means, but it wasn't bad at all. "What do I do next?" I inquired affably. "My dear fellow," the chap said, whipping out a notebook from the recesses of his costume, "how long have you had this delusion that you are a bird -- or is it a bat?" "Sir," I said as haughtily as my position permitted, " am neither a bird nor a bat. I am a Fizbian. Surely you have heard of Fizbians?" "yes, yes, of course. They come from another country or planet or something. Frankly, politics is a bit outside my sphere. All I'm interested in is people -- and Fizbians are people, aren't they?" "Yes, certainly. If anything, it's you who... Yes, they are people." "Well, tell me then, Mr. Liznig, when was it you first started thinking you were a bat or a bird?" I tried to control myself. "I am neither a bird nor a bat! I am a Fizbian! I have wings! See?" I fluttered them. He peered at me. "I wish I could," he said regretfully. "Without my glasses, though, I'm as blind as a bat -- or a bird." Well, the long and the short of it is that the natives are planning to certify me as insane and incarcerate me, pending the doctor's decision as to whether my delusion is that I am a bird or a bat. They are using my privacy waiver as commitment papers. Save me, Senbot Drosmig, for I feel that if I have to wait for the doctor's glasses to be delivered, I shall indeed go mad. Distractedly yours, Tgos Liznig I 'LL handle this myself," Stet said crisply. "I'll tell the consul to advise the Terran State Department that this man should be deported as an undesirable alien. That'll solve the problem neatly. We can't have this contaminating the pure stream of Terrestrial literature with -- " "But aren't you going to explain to them that he's perfectly sane?" Tarb gasped. "No need to bother. He'll be grateful enough to get off the planet. Besides, how do I know he is perfectly sane?" "Stet Zarnon, you're perfectly horrid!" "And you, Tarb Morfatch, are disgustingly drunk. Now you go right home and sleep it off. I know I was too harsh with you -- my fault for letting you go out alone with Griblo in the first place when you've been here only a few months. Might have known those Terran journalists would lead you astray. Nice fellows, but irresponsible." He flicked out his tongue. "There, I've apologized. Now will you go home?" "Home!" Tarb shrieked. "Home when there's work to be done and -- " " -- and you're not going to be the one to do it. Tarb," he said, attempting to seize her foot, which she pulled away, "I was going to tell you tomorrow, but you might as well know tonight. I've taken you off the column for good. I have a better job for you." She looked at him. "A better job? Are you being sarcastic? What as?" "As my wife." He got up and came over to her. She stood still, almost stunned. "That solves the whole problem tidily. An office is no place for you, darling -- you're really a simple home-girl at heart. Newspaper work is too strenuous for you; it upsets you and makes you nervous and irritable. I want you to stay home and take care of our house and hatch our eggs -- unostentatiously, of course." "Why, you -- " she spluttered. He put his foot over her mouth. "Don't give me your answer now. You're in no condition to think. Tell me tomorrow." TT rained all night and con- tinued on into the morning. Tarb's head ached, but she had to make an appearance at the office. First she vizzed an acquaintance she had made the day before; then she took her umbrella and set forth. As she kicked open the door to the newsroom, all sound ceased. Voices stopped abruptly. Typewriters halted in mid-click. Even the roar of the presses downstairs suddenly seemed to mute. Every head turned to look at Tarb. Humph, she thought, removing her plastic oversocks, so suppose I was a little oblique yesterday. They needn't stare at me. They never stare at Drosmig. Just because I'm a woman, I suppose! The gate crashed loudly behind her. "Oh, Miss Morfatch," Miss Snow called. "Mr. Zarnon said he wanted to see you as soon as you came in. It's urgent." And she giggled. "Really?" Tarb said. "Well, he'll just have to wait until I've wrung out my wings." Sooner or later, she would have to face Stet, but she wanted to put it off as long as possible. She opened the door to her office and halted in amazement. For, seated on a stool behind the desk, haggard but vertical, was Senbot Drosmig, busily reading letters and blue-penciling comments on them with his feet. "Good morning, my dear," he said, giving her a wan smile. "Surprised to see me functioning again, eh?" "Well -- yes." She opened her dripping umbrella mechanically and stood it in a corner. "How -- " "I realized last night that all that happened to you was my fault. You were my responsibility and I failed you." "Oh, don't be melodramatic, Senbot. I wasn't your responsibility and you didn't fail me. Not that I'm not glad to see you up and doing again, but -- " "But I did fail you!" the aged journalist insisted. "And, in the same way, I failed my people. I shouldn't have given in. I should have fought Zarnon as you, my dear, tried to do. But it isn't too late!" The fire of the crusader lit up in his watery old eyes. "I can still fight him and his sacred crows -- his Earthlings! If I have to, I can go over his head to Grupe. Grupe may not understand Stet's moral failings, but he certainly will comprehend his commercial ones. Grupe owns stock in other Fizbian enterprises besides the Times. Autofax, for example." "Oh, Senbot!" Tarb wailed. "The whole thing's such an awful mess!" sary to threaten that far," he comforted her. "Stet is no fool. He knows which side of his breadnut is peeled." "I'm sure you'll do a wonderful job," she exclaimed, impulsively giving a ritual entrechat. "And I wish I could stay and help you, but..." "I know, my dear." "You do?" She was puzzled. "But how did the news get around so quickly?" He shrugged. "The Terrestrial grapevine is almost as efficient as the Fizbian. Didn't you notice any change in the -- ah -- atmosphere when you came in?" "Oh, was that the reason?" Tarb laughed merrily. "Somehow it never occurred to me that they could have heard so soon." "But the morning editions have been out for hours." FTHE door to the office was flung open. Stet stormed in, bristling with a most unloverlike rage. "Miss Morfatch -- " he waved a crumpled copy of the Terrestrial Tribune at her -- "when I give an order, I expect to be obeyed! Didn't Miss Snow tell you to report directly to my office the instant you came in? Although that's a question I don't have to ask; I know Miss Snow, at least, is someone I can trust." "I was coming to see you, Stet," Tarb said soothingly. "Right away." "Oh, you were, were you? And have you seen this?" Stet fairly threw the paper at her. Smack in the middle of the front page was a picture of herself in full flight over the airfield bar. Not a very good picture, but what could you expect with Terrestrial equipment? When the autofax came, perhaps she would be done justice. "Though No Mammal, I Pack a Lot of Uplift," Says Beautiful Fizbian Gal Reporter "I feel that you Terrans and we Fizbians can get along much better," lovely Tarb Morfatch, Fizbus Times feature writer, told her fellow-reporters yesterday at the Moonfield Restaurant, "if we learn to understand each other's differences as well as appreciate our similarities. "With commerce between the two planets expanding as rapidly as it has been," Miss Morfatch went on, "it becomes increasingly important that we make sure there is no clash of mores between us. Where adaptation is impossible, we must both adjust. 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do' is an outmoded concept in the complex interstellar civilization of today. The Romans must learn to accept us as we are, and vice versa. "Forgive me if I've offended you by my frankness," she said, sticking out her tongue in the charming gesture of apology that is acquiring such a vogue on Earth, Belinda Romney and many other socialites having enthusiastically adopted it, "but you've violated our privacy so many times, I feel I'm entitled to hurt your feelings just a teenyweeny bit... "Those Terran journalists," Tarb said admiringly. "Never miss a trick, do they? Am I in all the other papers too, Stet? Same cheesecake?" "You've made an ovulating circus out of us -- that's what you've done!" "Nonsense. Good strong human interest stuff; it'll make us lovable as chicks all over the planet. Gee -- " she read on -- "did I say all that while I was caffeinated? I ought to turn out some pretty terrific copy sober." "And to think you, the woman I had asked to make my wife, did this to me." "Oh, that's all right, Stet," Tarb said without looking up from the paper. "I wasn't going to accept you, anyway." "Good for you, Tarb," Drosmig approved. "You're going back to Fizbus on the next liner -- do you hear me?" Stet raged. S HE smiled sunnily. "Oh, but I'm not, Stet. I'm going to stay right here on Earth. I like it. You might say the spiritual aura got me." He snorted. "How can you possibly stay? You don't have an independent income and this is an expensive planet. Besides, I won't let you stay on Earth. I have considerable influence, you know!" "Poor Stet." She smiled at him again. "I'm afraid the Fizbian press -- the Fizbian consul even -- are pretty small pullets beside the Solar Press Syndicate. You see, I came in this morning only to resign." He stared at her. "Yesterday," she informed him, "I was offered another position -- as feature writer for the SP. I hadn't decided whether or not to accept when I reported back last evening, but you made up my mind for me, so I called them this morning and took the job. My work will be to explain Fizbians to Terrans and Terrans to Fizbians -- as I wanted to do for the Times, Stet, only you wouldn't let me." "It's no use saying anything to you about loyalty, I suppose?" "None whatsoever," she said. "I owe the Times no loyalty and I'm doing what I do out of loyalty to Fizbus... plus, of course, a much higher salary." "I'm glad for you, Tarb," Drosmig said sincerely. "Be glad for yourself, Senbot, because Stet will have to let you conduct the column your way from now on. Either it'll supplement my work in the Terrestrial papers or he'll look like a fool. And you do hate looking like a fool, don't you, Stet?" He didn't answer. "Better give up, Stet." She turned to Drosmig. "Well, goodby, Senbot -- or, rather, so long. I'm sure we'll be seeing each other again. Good-by, Stet. No hard feelings, I hope?" He neither moved nor spoke. "Well... good-by, then," she said. The door closed. Stet stared after her. The forgotten umbrella dripped forlornly in the corner. The Cave of Night T HE phrase was first used by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote: "At eight o'clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There's a man up there where no man has ever been. "He is lost in the cave of night..." The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it stuck. If anybody was in a cave, it To qualify, a great tragedy has to meet strict scientific tests -- and this met them all! was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out. Now he couldn't find his way back into the cave with the rest of us. What goes up doesn't always come back down. That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense. The cave of night. I wish the phrase had been mine. That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It was the way people talked about it: "What's the latest about the cave?" It summed it all up, the drama, the anxiety, the hope.  lins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing, comparing; and they remembered the little girl -- Kathy Fiscus, wasn't it? -- who was trapped in that abandoned, California drain pipe; and a number of others. Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so accidentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their terrors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship. The essential ingredients are these: A person must be in unusual and desperate peril. The peril must have duration. There must be proof that the person is still alive. Rescue attempts must be made. Publicity must be widespread. One could probably be constructed artificially, but if the world ever discovered the fraud, it would never forgive. Like many others, I have tried to analyze what makes a niggling, squabbling, callous race of beings suddenly share that most human emotion of sympathy, and, like them, I have not succeeded. Suddenly a distant stranger will mean more than their own comfort. Every waking moment, they pray: Live, Floyd! Live, Kathy! Live, Rev! We pass on the street, we who would not have nodded, and ask, "Will they get there in time?" Optimists and pessimists alike, we hope so. We all hope so. In a sense, this one was different. This was purposeful. Knowing the risk, accepting it because there was no other way to do what had to be done, Rev had gone into the cave of night. The accident was that he could not return. The news came out of nowhere -- literally -- to an unsuspecting world. The earliest mention the historians have been able to locate was an item about a ham radio operator in Davenport, Iowa. He picked up a distress signal on a sticky-hot June evening. The message, he said later, seemed to fade in, reach a peak, and fade out:... and fuel tanks empty. -- ceiver broke... transmitting in clear so someone can pick this up, and... no way to get back... stuck..." A small enough beginning. The next message was received by a military base radio watch near Fairbanks, Alaska. That was early in the morning. Half an hour later, a night-shift worker in Boston heard something on his short-wave set that sent him rushing to the telephone. That morning, the whole world learned the story. It broke over them, a wave of excitement and concern. Orbiting # miles above their heads was a man, an officer of the United States Air Force, in a fuelless spaceship. A LL by itself, the spaceship part would have captured the world's attention. It was achievement as monumental as anything Man has ever done and far more spectacular. It was liberation from the tyranny of Earth, this jealous mother who had bound her children tight with the apron strings of gravity. Man was free. It was a symbol that nothing is completely and finally impossible if Man wants it hard enough and long enough. There are regions that humanity finds peculiarly congenial. Like all Earth's creatures, Man is a product and a victim of environment. His triumph is that the slave became the master. Unlike more specialized animals, he distributed himself across the entire surface of the Earth, from the frozen Antarctic continent to the Arctic icecap. Man became an equatorial animal, a temperate zone animal, an arctic animal. He became a plain dweller, a valley dweller, a mountain dweller. The swamp and the desert became equally his home. Man made his own environment. With his inventive mind and his dexterous hands, he fashioned it, conquered cold and heat, dampness, aridness, land, sea, air. Now, with his science, he had conquered everything. He had become independent of the world that bore him. It was a birthday cake for all mankind, celebrating its coming of age. Brutally, the disaster was icing on the cake. But it was more, too. When everything is considered, perhaps it was the aspect that, for a few, brief days, united humanity and made possible what we did. It was a sign: Man is never completely independent of Earth ; he carries with him his environment; he is always and forever a part of humanity. It was a conquest mellowed by a confession of mortality and error. It was a statement: Man has within him the qualities of greatness that will never accept the restraints of circumstance, and yet he carries, too, the seeds of fallibility that we all recognize in ourselves. Rev was one of us. His triumph was our triumph ; his peril -- more fully and finely -- was our peril. lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Pilot. Rocket jockey. Man. Rev. He was only a thousand miles away, calling for help, but those miles were straight up. We got to know him as well as any member of our own family. f I "HE news came as a great per- sonal shock to me. I knew Rev. We had become good friends in college, and fortune had thrown us together in the Air Force, a writer and a pilot. I had got out as soon as possible, but Rev had stayed in. I knew, vaguely, that he had been testing rocket-powered airplanes with Chuck Yeager. But I had no idea that the rocket program was that close to space. Nobody did. It was a betterkept secret than the Manhattan Project. I remember staring at Rev's picture in the evening newspaper -- the straight black hair, the thin, rakish mustache, the Clark Gable ears, the reckless, rueful grin -- and I felt again, like a physical thing, his great joy in living. It expressed itself in a hundred ways. He loved widely, but with discrimination. He ate well, drank heartily, reveled in expert jazz and artistic incentiveness, and talked incessantly. Now he was alone and soon all that might be extinguished. I told myself that I would help. That was a time of wild enthusiasm. Men mobbed the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cocoa, Florida, wildly volunteering their services. But I was no engineer. I wasn't even a welder or a riveter. At best, I was only a poor word mechanic. But words, at least, I could contribute. I made a hasty verbal agreement with a local paper and caught the first plane to Washington, D. C. For a long time, I liked to think that what I wrote during the next few days had something to do with subsequent events, for many of my articles were picked up for reprint by other newspapers. The Washington fiasco was the responsibility of the Senate Investigating Committee. It subpoenaed everybody in sight -- which effectively removed them from the vital work they were doing. But within a day, the Committee realized that it had bitten off a bite it could neither swallow nor spit out. General Beauregard Finch, head of the research and development program, was the tough morsel the Committee gagged on. Coldly, accurately, he described the development of the project, the scientific and technical research, the tests, the building of the ship, the training of the prospective crewmen, and the winnowing of the volunteers down to one man. In words more eloquent because of their clipped precision, he described the takeoff of the giant three-stage ship, shoved upward on a lengthening arm of combining hydrazine and nitric acid. Within fifty-six minutes, the remaining third stage had reached its orbital height of # miles. It had coasted there. In order to maintain that orbit, the motors had to flicker on for fifteen seconds. At that moment, disaster laughed at Man's careful calculations. the automatics, the motors had flamed for almost half a minute. The fuel he had depended upon to slow the ship so that it would drop, re-enter the atmosphere and be reclaimed by Earth was almost gone. His efforts to counteract the excess speed resulted only in an approximation of the original orbit. The fact was this: Rev was up there. He would stay there until someone came and got him. And there was no way to get there. The Committee took that as an admission of guilt and incompetence; they tried to lever themselves free with it, but General Finch was not to be intimidated. A manned ship had been sent up because no mechanical or electronic computer could contain the vast possibilities for decision and action built into a human being. The original computer was still the best all-purpose computer. There had been qnly one ship built, true. But there was good reason for that, a completely practical reason -- money. Leaders are, by definition, ahead of the people. But this wasn't a field in which they could show the way and wait for the people to follow. This was no expedition in ancient ships, no light exploring party, no pilotplant operation. Like a parachute jump, it had to be successful the first time. This was an enterprise into new, expensive fields. It demandbrains (the best available), and the hard, dedicated labor of men (thousands of them). General Finch became a national hero that afternoon. He said, in bold words, "With the limited funds you gave us, we have done what we set out to do. We have demonstrated that space flight is possible, that a space platform is feasible. "If there is any inefficiency, if there is any blame for what has happened, it lies at the door of those who lacked confidence in the courage and ability of their countrymen to fight free of Earth SO to the greatest glory. Senator, how did you vote on that?" But I am not writing a history. The shelves are full of them. I will touch on the international repercussions only enough to show that the event was no more a respecter of national boundaries than was Rev's orbiting ship. "HE orbit was almost perpendicular to the equator. The ship traveled as far north as Nome, as far south as Little America on the Antarctic Continent. It completed one giant circle every two hours. Meanwhile, the Earth rotated beneath. If the ship had been equipped with adequate optical instruments, Rev could have observed every spot on Earth within twentyfour hours. He could have seen fleets and their dispositions, aircraft carriers and the planes taking off their decks, troop maneuvers. In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Russian ambassador protested this unwarranted and illegal violation of its national boundaries. He hinted darkly that it would not be allowed to continue. The U.S.S.R. had not been caught unprepared, he said. If the violation went on -- "every few hours !" -- drastic steps would be taken. World opinion reared up in indignation. The U.S.S.R. immediately retreated and pretended, as only it could, that its belligerence had been an unwarranted inference and that it had never said anything of the sort, anyway. This was not a military observer above our heads. It was a man who would soon be dead unless help reached him. A world offered what it had. Even the U.S.S.R. announced that it was outfitting a rescue ship, since its space program was already on the verge of success. And the American public redollars within a week. Congress Thousands of men and women volunteered. The race began. Would the rescue party reach the ship in time? The world prayed. And it listened daily to the voice of a man it hoped to buy back from death. The problem shaped up like this: The trip had been planned to last for only a few days. By careful rationing, the food and water might be stretched out rfor more than a month, but the oxygen, by cutting down activity to conserve it, couldn't possibly last more than thirty days. That was the absolute outside limit. I remember reading the carefully detailed calculations in the paper and studying them for some hopeful error. There was none. carded first stage of the ship had been located floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was towed back to Cocoa, Florida. Almost a week was needed to find and return to the Proving Grounds the second stage, which had landed # miles away. Both sections were practically undamaged; their fall had been cushioned by ribbon parachute. They could be cleaned, repaired and used again. The trouble was the vital third stage -- the nose section. A new one had to be designed and built within a month. Space-madness became a new form of hysteria. We read statistics, we memorized insignificant details, we studied diagrams, we learned the risks and the dangers and how they would be met and conquered. It all became part of us. We watched the slow progress of the second ship and silently, tautly, urged it upward. The schedule overhead became part of everyone's daily life. Work stopped while people rushed to windows or outside or to their television sets, hoping for a glimpse, a glint from the high, swift ship, so near, so untouchably far. And we listened to the voice from the cave of night: "I've been staring out the portholes. I never tire of that. Through the one on the right, I see what looks like a black velvet curtain with a strong light behind it. There are pinpoint holes in the curtain and the light shines through, not winking the way stars do, but steady. There's no air up here. That's the reason. The mind can understand and still misinterpret. "My air is holding out better than I expected. By my figures, it should last twenty-seven days more. I shouldn't use so much of it talking all the time, but it's hard to stop. Talking, I feel as if I'm still in touch with Earth, still one of you, even if I am way up here. "Through the left-hand window is San Francisco Bay, looking like a dark, wandering arm extended by the ocean octopus. The city itself looks like a heap of diamonds with trails scattered from it. It glitters up cheerfully, an old friend. It misses me, it says. Hurry home, it says. It's gone now, out of sight. Good-by, Frisco! "Do you hear me down there? Sometimes I wonder. You can't see me now. I'm in the Earth's shadow. You'll have to wait hours for the dawn. I'll have mine in a few minutes. "You're all busy down there. I know that. If I know you, you're all worrying about me, working to get me down, forgetting everything else. You don't know what a feeling that is. I hope to Heaven you never have to, wonderful though it is. "Too bad the receiver was broken, but if it had to be one or the other, I'm glad it was the transmitter that came through. There's only one of me. There are "I wish there were some way I could be sure you were hearing me. Just that one thing might keep me from going crazy." We read all about your selection, your training. You were our representative, picked with our greatest skill. Out of a thousand who passed the initial rigid requirements for education, physical and emotional condition and age, only five could qualify for space. They couldn't be too tall, too stout, too young, too old. Medical and psychiatric tests weeded them out. One of the training machines -- Lord, how we studied this -- reproduces the acceleration strains of a blasting rocket. Another trains men for maneuvering in the weightlessness of space. A third duplicates the cramped, sealed conditions of a spaceship cabin. Out of the final five, you were the only one who qualified. No, Rev, if any of us could stay sane, it was you. There were thousands of suggestions, almost all of them useless. Psychologists suggested selfhypnotism; cultists suggested yoga. One man sent in a detailed sketch of a giant electromagnet with which Rev's ship could be drawn back to Earth. General Finch had the only practical idea. He outlined a plan for letting Rev know that we were listening. He picked out Kansas City and set the time. "Midnight," he said. "On the dot. Not a minute earlier or later-. At that moment, he'll be right overhead." And at midnight, every light in the city went out and came back on and went out and came back on again. For a few awful moments, we wondered if the man up there in the cave of night had seen. Then came the voice we knew now so well that it seemed it had always been with us, a part of us, our dreams and our waking. The voice was husky with emotion: "Thanks... Thanks for listening. Thanks, Kansas City. I saw you winking at me. I'm not alone. I know that now. I'll never forget. Thanks." And silence then as the ship fell below the horizon. We pictured it to ourselves sometimes, continually circling the Earth, its trajectory exactly matching the curvature of the globe beneath it. We wondered if it would ever stop. Like the Moon, would it be a satellite of the Earth forever? We went through our daily chores like automatons while we watched the third stage of the rocket take shape. We raced against a dwindling air supply, and death raced to catch a ship moving at # miles per hour. " On our television screens, we saw the construction of the cellular fuel tanks, the rocket motors, and the fantastic multitude of pumps, valves, gauges, switches, circuits, transistors, and tubes. The personnel space was built to carry five men instead of one man. We watched it develop, a Spartan simplicity in the middle of the great complex, and it was as if we ourselves would live there, would watch those dials and instruments, would grip those chair-arm controls for the infinitesimal sign that the automatic pilot had faltered, would feel the soft flesh and the softer internal organs being wrenched away from the unyielding bone, and would hurtle upward into the cave of night. We watched the plating wrap itself protectively around the vitals of the nose section. The wings were attached; they would make the ship a huge, metal glider in its unpowered descent to Earth after the job was done. We met the men who would man the ship. We grew to know them as we watched them train, saw them fighting artificial gravities, testing spacesuits in simulated vacuums, practicing maneuvers in the weightless condition of free fall. That was what we lived for. And we listened to the voice that came to us out of the night: "Twenty one days. Three weeks. Seems like more. Feel a little sluggish, but there's no room for exercise in a coffin. The concentrated foods I've been eating are fine, but not for a steady diet. Oh, what I'd give for a piece of home-baked apple pie! "The weightlessness got me at first. Felt I was sitting on a ball that was spinning in all directions at once. Lost my breakfast a couple of times before I learned to stare at one thing. As long as you don't let your eyes roam, you're okay. "There's Lake Michigan! My God, but it's blue today! Dazzles the eyes! There's Milwaukee, and how are the Braves doing? It must be a hot day in Chicago. It's a little muggy up here, too. The water absorbers must be overloaded. "The air smells funny, but I'm not surprised. I must smell funny, too, after twenty-one days without a bath. Wish I could have one. There are an awful lot of things I used to take for granted and suddenly want more than -- "Forget that, will you? Don't worry about me. I'm fine. I know you're working to get me down. If you don't succeed, that's okay with me. My life wouldn't just be wasted. I've done what I've always wanted to do. I'd do it again. "Too bad, though, that we only had the money for one ship." A ND again : "An hour ago, I saw the Sun rise over Russia. It looks like any other land from here, green where it should be green, farther north a sort of mud color, and then white where the snow is still deep. "Up here, you wonder why we're so different when the land is the same. You think: we're all children of the same mother planet. Who says we're different? "Think I'm crazy? Maybe you're right. It doesn't matter much what I say as long as I say something. This is one time I won't be interrupted. Did any man ever have such an audience?" No, Rev. Never. The voice from above, historical now, preserved: "I guess the gadgets are all right. You slide-rule mechanics! You test-tube artists! You finding what you want? Getting the dope on cosmic rays, meteoric dust, those islands you could never map, the cloud formations, wind movements, all the weather data? Hope the telemetering gauges are working. They're more important than my voice." I don't think so, Rev. But we got the data. We built some of it into the new ships. Ships, not ship, for we didn't stop with one. Before we were finished, we had two complete three-stagers and a dozen nose sections. The voice: "Air's bad tonight. Can't seem to get a full breath. Sticks in the lungs. Doesn't matter, though. I wish you could all see what I have seen, the vastspreading universe around Earth, like a bride in a soft veil. You'd know then that we belong out here." We know, Rev. You led us out. You showed us the way. We listened and we watched. It seems to me now that we held our breath for thirty days. At last we watched the fuel pumping into the ship -- nitric acid and hydrazine. A month ago, we did not know their names; now we recognize them as the very substances of life itself. It flowed through the long special hoses, dangerous, cautiously dollars' worth of rocket fuel. Statisticians estimate that more cans were watching their television sets that day. Watching and praying. Suddenly the view switched to the ship fleeing south above us. The technicians were expert now. The telescopes picked it up instantly, the focus perfect the first time, and tracked it across the sky until it dropped beyond the horizon. It looked no different now than when we had seen it first. B UT the voice that came from our speakers was different. It was weak. It coughed frequently and paused for breath. "Air very bad. Better hurry. Can't last much longer... Silly!... Of course you'll hurry. "Don't want anyone feeling sorry for me... I've been living fast... Thirty days? I've seen # sunrises, # sunsets... I've seen what no man has ever seen before... I was the first. That's something... worth dying for... "I've seen the stars, clear and undiminished. They look cold, but there's warmth to them and life. They have families of planets like our own sun, some of them... They must. God wouldn't put them there for no purpose... They can be homes to our future generations. Or, if they have inhabitants, we can trade with them: goods, ideas, the love of creation... "But -- more than this -- I have seen the Earth. I have seen it -- as no man has even seen it -- turning below me like a fantastic ball, the seas like blue glass in the Sun... or lashed into gray storm-peaks... and the land green with life... the cities of the world in the night, sparkling... and the people... "I have seen the Earth -- there where I have lived and loved... I have known it better than any man and loved it better and known its children better... It has been good... "Good-by... I have a better tomb than the greatest conqueror Earth ever bore... Do not disturb..." We wept. How could we help it? Rescue was so close and we could not hurry it. We watched impotently. The crew were hoisted far up into the nose section of the three-stage rocket. It stood as tall as a #-story building. Hurry! we urged. But they could not hurry. The interception of a swiftly moving target is precision business. The takeoff was all calculated and impressed on the metal and glass and free electrons of an electronic computer. The ship was tightened down methodically. The spectators scurried back from the base of the ship. We waited. The ship waited. Tall and slim as it was, it seemed to crouch. Someone counted off the seconds to a breathless world : ten -- nine -- eight... five, four, three... one -- fire! There was no flame, 'and then we saw it spurting into the air from the exhaust tunnel several hundred feet away. The ship balanced, unmoving, on a squat column of incandescence; the column stretched itself, grew tall; the huge ship picked up speed and dwindled into a point of brightness. The telescopic lenses found it, lost it, found it again. It arched over on its side and thrust itself seaward. At the end of # seconds, the rear jets faltered, and our hearts faltered with them. Then we saw that the first stage had been dropped. The rest of the ship moved off on a new fiery trail. A ring-shaped ribbon parachute blossomed out of the third stage and slowed it rapidly. The second stage dropped away # seconds later. The nose section, with its human cargo, its rescue equipment, went on alone. At # miles altitude, the flaring exhaust cut out. The third stage would coast up the gravitational hill more than a thousand miles. O UR stomachs were knotted with dread as the rescue ship disappeared beyond the horizon of the farthest television camera. By this time, it was on the other side of the world, speeding toward a carefully planned rendezvous with its sister. Hang on, Rev! Don't give up! Fifty-six minutes. That was how long we had to wait. Fiftysix minutes from the takeoff until the ship was in its orbit. After that, the party would need time to match speeds, to send a spacesuited crewman drifting across the emptiness between, over the vast, eerily turning sphere of the Earth beneath. In imagination, we followed them. Minutes would be lost while the rescuer clung to the ship, opened the airlock cautiously so that none of the precious remnants of air would be lost, and passed into the ship where one man had known utter loneliness. We waited. We hoped. Fifty-six minutes. They passed. An hour. Thirty minutes more. We reminded ourselves -- and were reminded -- that the first concern was Rev. It might be hours before we would get any real news. The tension mounted unbearable. We waited -- a nation, a world -- for relief. At eighteen minutes less than two hours -- too soon, we told ourselves, lest we hope too much -- we heard the voice of Captain Frank Pickrell, who was later to become the first commander of the Doughnut. "I have just entered the ship," he said slowly. "The airlock was open." He paused. The implications stunned our emotions; we listened mutely. "Lieutenant McMillen is dead. He died heroically, waiting until all hope was gone, until every oxygen gauge stood at zero. And then -- well, the airlock was open when we arrived. "In accordance with his own wishes, his body will be left here in its eternal orbit. This ship will be his tomb for all men to see when they look up toward the stars. As long as there are men on Earth, it will circle above them, an everlasting reminder of what men have done and what men can do. "That was Lieutenant McMillen's hope. This he did not only as an American, but as a man, dying for all humanity, and all humanity can glory for it. "From this moment, let this be his shrine, sacred to all the generations of spacemen, inviolate. And let it be a symbol that Man's dreams can be realized, but sometimes the price is steep. "I am going to leave now. My feet will be the last to touch this deck. The oxygen I released is almost used up. Lieutenant McMillen is in his control chair, staring out toward the stars. I will leave the airlock doors open behind me. Let the airless, frigid arms of space protect and preserve for all eternity the man they would not let go." Good-by, Rev! Farewell! Good night! R EV was not long alone. He was the first, but not the last to receive a space burial and a hero s farewell. This, as I said, is no history of the conquest of space. Every child knows the story as well as I and can identify the make of a spaceship more swiftly. The story of the combined efforts that built the orbital platform irreverently called the Doughnut has been told by others. We have learned at length the political triumph that placed it under United Nations control. Its contribution to our daily lives has received the accolade of the commonplace. It is an observatory, a laboratory, and a guardian. Startling discoveries have come out of that weightless, airless, heatless place. It has learned how weather is made and predicted it with incredible accuracy. It has observed the stars clear of the veil of the atmosphere. And it has insured our peace... It has paid its way. No one can question that. It and its smaller relay stations made possible today's worldwide television and radio network. There is no place on Earth where a free voice cannot be heard or the face of freedom be seen. Sometimes we find ourselves wondering how it would have been any other way. And we have had adventure. We have traveled to the dead gypsum seas of the Moon with the first exploration party. This year, we will solve the mysteries of Mars. From our armchairs, we will thrill to the discoveries of our pioneers -- our stand-ins, so to speak. It has given us a common heritage, a common goal, and for the first time we are united. This I mention only for background; no one will argue that the conquest of space was not of incalculable benefit to all mankind. The whole thing came back to me recently, an overpowering flood of memory. I was skirting Times Square, where every face is a stranger's, and suddenly I stopped, incredulous. "Rev!" I shouted. The man kept on walking. He passed me without a glance. I turned around and stared after him. I started to run. I grabbed him by the arm. "Rev!" I said huskily, swinging him around. "Is it really your I " The man smiled politely. "You must have mistaken me for someone else." He unclampered my fingers easily and moved away. I realized then that there were two men with him, one on each side. I felt their eyes on my face, memorizing it. Probably it didn't mean anything. We all have our doubles. I could have been mistaken. But it started me remembering and thinking. The first thing the rocket experts had to consider was expense. They didn't have the money. The second thing was weight, even a medium-sized man is heavy when rocket payloads are reckoned, and the stores and equipment essential to his survival are many times heavier. If Rev had escaped alive, why had they announced that he was dead? But I knew the question was all wrong. TF my speculations were right, Rev had never been up there at all. The essential payload was only a thirty-day recording and a transmitter. Even if the major feat of sending up a manned rocket was beyond their means and their techniques, they could send up that much. Then they got the money ; they got the volunteers and the techniques. I suppose the telemetered reports from the rocket helped. But what they accomplished in thirty days was an unparalleled miracle. The timing of the recording must have taken months of work; but the vital part of the scheme was secrecy. General Finch had to know and Captain -- now Colonel -- Pickrell. A few others -- workmen, administrators -- and Rev... What could they do with him? Disguise him? Yes. And then hide him in the biggest city in the world. They would have done it that way. It gave me a funny, sick kind of feeling, thinking about it. Like everybody else, I don't like to be taken in by a phony plea. And this was a fraud perpetrated on all humanity. Yet it had led us to the planets. Perhaps it would lead us beyond, even to the stars. I asked myself : could they have done it any other way? I would like to think I was mistaken. This myth has become part of us. We lived through it ourselves, helped make it. Someday, I tell myself, a spaceman whose reverence is greater than his obedience will make a pilgrimage to that swift shrine and find only an empty shell. I shudder then. This pulled us together. In a sense, it keeps us together. Nothing is more important than that. I try to convince myself that I was mistaken. The straight black hair was gray at the temples now and cut much shorter. The mustache was gone. The Clark Gable ears were flat to the head; that's a simple operation, I understand. But grins are hard to change. And anyone who lived through those thirty days will never forget that voice. I think about Rev and the life he must have now, the things he loved and can never enjoy again, and I realize perhaps he made the greater sacrifice. I think sometimes he must wish he were really in the cave of night, seated in that icy control chair # miles above, staring out at the stars. When a driven man arrives at a cemetery world, what else can it be but journey's end -- and the start of a new one? the sun that blazed angrily. Inside, it was Sam Wilson's temper. "Study your lessons," he snarled, with a savageness that surprised himself, "or I'll never let you set foot on this planet at all." "Okay, Pop," said Mark, a little white around the nostrils. He looked old for so young a kid. "I didn't mean anything wrong." "I don't care what you meant. You do as you're told." In the quiet that followed, broken only by the hum of the arithmetic-tape, Sam wondered at himself. As kids went, Mark had never been a nuisance. Certainly Rhoda had never had any trouble with him. But Rhoda had been altogether different. Sam was tough and he had always got a sense of satisfaction out of knowing that he was hardboiled. Or at least that was once true. Rhoda had been sweet, gentle... He aroused himself from thoughts of her by calling, "Mark!" "Yes, Pop?" His voice had been harsher than he had intended. Over the past few weeks he seemed gradually to have been losing control of it. Now, although he was going to do his son a favor, he sounded like a slavemaster threatening a beating. "You can shut off your arithmetic lesson. We're going out." "But didn't you want me -- " "I changed my mind." Mark seemed more troubled than pleased, as if a father who changed his mind so readily was a man to be wary of. I'm on edge all the time, thought Sam, and I'm getting him that way, too. I'll have to regain control of myself. H E had long ago made all the necessary tests for such possible dangers as lack of oxygen and the presence of infectious organisms. On all counts, the planet had passed muster. The sun, whiter than Sol, was almost hot enough to make him forget the chill he carried deep inside him. Almost, but not quite, especially as the air, though breathable, was thin and deficient in nitrogen. The countryside was bleak, inspiring in him the thought that there are two kinds of desolation; the one that precedes the coming of Man, and the one which he knows only too well how to create wherever he goes. The desolation here was non-human. "It -- it's like a cemetery, ain't it, Pop?" Sam looked at his son sharply. Kids of ten were not supposed to know much about cemeteries. Nor, for that matter, were kids of six, Mark's age when the funeral had taken place. Sam hadn't let him attend, but evidently the incident had made a deeper impression on his mind than Sam had realized. He would always remember a cemetery as the place where his mother lived. Perhaps he missed Rhoda almost as much as his father did. "It's different from a cemetery," said Sam. "There's nobody buried here. Looks like we're the first human beings ever to set foot on this place." "Do you think we'll find animals to catch, Pop?" "I don't see signs of any animals." That was part of Sam's private fiction, that he was looking for strange animals to be sold to zoos or circuses. Actually he was seeking less to find anything new than to lose something he carried with him, and succeeding in neither attempt. Mark shivered in the sun. "It's kind of lonely," he said. "More lonely than the ship?" "It's different. It's bigger, so it's more lonely." I'm not so sure, argued Sam mentally. In the ship, we have all of space around us, and nothing's bigger than that. Still, your opinion has to be respected. You're almost as great an expert on the various kinds of loneliness as I am. The difference is that you're loneliest when you're away from people. I'm loneliest in a crowd. That's why I don't mind this planet so much. He walked ahead, Mark following almost reluctantly. The ground was rocky and the shrublike vegetation sparse and stunted, ranging in color from greenish gray to brown. It seemed hardly capable of supporting a large animal population. If there were any animals here at all, they were probably too small to be impressive, and would be of little interest to exhibitors. They walked in silence for a few moments, and then Sam asked, "Want to go on?" "I want to finish my study'  mg. That was something new. "Okay," said Sam, and turned back. ship when the sound of a pebble falling came to Sam's ears. Automatically, his hand reached for his gun, and he swung around to face what might be danger. As he did so, something snarled and fled. He could see no sign of motion, but he could hear the scattering of other pebbles along a gully as the creature retreated. "Looks like we're not alone here, after all," he said. "Wonder what that was." "It couldn't have been very big," said Mark. "Big animals don't run away." "Not usually, unless they're smart, or they've met people before. I'll have to set traps." "Do you think maybe if you caught him you could sell him to a circus, Pop?" "I'll have to see what he's like, first," said Sam. He looked around. "If there's one animal, there are likely to be others. It's strange that I didn't detect any sign of them." He put his arm absently over Mark's shoulder. He didn't notice the expression on the kid's face at this unexpected gesture. When they were inside the ship again, Mark said, "Guess I'd better get back to my arithmetic." "In a minute," said Sam. "I want to talk to you first." He dropped wearily into a seat, although he had done nothing that should have tired him out. His son looked at him expectantly. "Mark, do you like traveling around with me?" "Sure, Pop, I like to be with you." "Not seeing anybody else? No other kids, no people of any kind? Just being with me, learning your lessons from tapes, and having your test papers corrected automatically? You don't get tired of it?" Mark hesitated despite himself. Then he said loyally, "I'd rather be with you than anybody else. When Mom -- when Mom died -- I didn't want to see anybody." "I know how you felt. But that was four years ago. You can't grow up alone. Now what you need to do is meet people, learn how they talk and think and feel. You can't learn those things from tapes, and you can't learn them from me." Mark said stubbornly, "I like to be with you." "I'm not much of a person to be with. Don't think I don't know it. I'm mean and surly, and my temper's getting worse by the day. I can't associate with people any more. But you can. I was thinking maybe I'd leave you -- " "No!" cried Mark. "Not in an orphanage or anything like that. But I have some friends whose kids are growing up -- " "No. I won't go. If you send me, I'll run away. I want to be with you." "Okay," said Sam. "That's that." But it wasn't, and he knew it. Even as he went about preparing his traps, he knew it. A S it turned out, the only animals he caught in his traps were small ones which tore themselves in two and then scampered off, each half running in a different direction. For the animal which had made those noises, no traps were necessary. Later on he heard a noise outside again, and he went out cautiously, gun in hand. The animal backed away, but he saw it, then he heard it bark. So did Mark, who had followed him. Mark's eyes almost popped. It was four years since he had heard the sound, but he knew at once what it was. "Gosh! A dog! How do you s'pose he got here?" "I don't know," said Sam. "Your guess is as good as mine." "But if we're the first human beings to land here -- it ain't possible!" "I know that. But there he is." At the sound of their voices, the dog broke into a series of furious barks, backing away as it did so. "What kind is he, Pop?" "He looks like a mongrel to me. A bad tempered mediumsized mongrel with an ugly look about him. Maybe I ought to shoot him and get it over with." "Shoot him? Don't do that! I want him as a pet." "He looks too wild to make much of a pet." The dog gave one last bark of defiance, turned, and fled in the same general direction, Sam noticed, as he had run last time. "Maybe dogs do grow on other planets, Pop." "Only if men have brought them there." "Then that means there was a ship here?" "At some time or other there was a ship. I don't think it was smashed up, or I'd have seen wreckage when I cruised around before landing. That clog was either left here by mistake, or deliberately marooned." "Maybe -- maybe he's with somebody who's still here." "Not likely," said Sam thoughtfully. "He wanders around too freely, and he seems unused to the presence of human beings. Besides, no men would be likely to live here long without shelter. And I've seen no sign of any house or hut." "Could he belong to a being that wasn't human?" "No," replied Sam with certainty. "Only human beings have been able to domesticate dogs. If a dog is here, a human being was once here. That's definite." "He would make a good pet," said Mark longingly. "Not that one. Maybe I should have got you a dog long ago. It might have been just the kind of companionship you needed. But you can't make a pet of this animal. He's been away from people too long, and he's developed some mean habits." And he added mentally, "Like me." "I could train him," said Mark. "He wouldn't be any trouble at all, Pop. I'd train him and feed him, and he'd be just like one of us. And -- and like you say, Pop, it wouldn't be so lonely for me." Kids don't give up easily, thought Sam. All the same, he had an idea that with this dog all the persistence in the world would be useless. He shrugged, and said simply, "We'll see." And then they went into the ship to eat. A LL through the meal he could tell that Mark was thinking about the dog. The boy's thoughts seemed to affect his appetite. For the first time, he left some of his proteinex on the plate. "I'm not very hungry today," he said apologetically. "Maybe -- " He looked inquiringly at his father. "Go ahead and finish it," said Sam. "We've got plenty of food. I'll fix up something else for the dog." "But I want to feed him myself, Pop. I want him to get used to me feeding him." "I'll give you your chance later." Afterwards, Sam thriftily opened an old can of a less expensive variety of proteinex and put half of it on a platter, which Mark carried outside the ship. He moved off about a hundred yards in the direction the dog had taken, and set the platter down on a rock. "The wind is blowing the wrong way," said Sam. "Let's wait a while." I N ten minutes the wind shifted, and if the dog was near, Sam felt certain that he had picked up both their scent and that of the food. That his feeling was correct was shown by the sudden appearance of the animal, who barked again, but this time not so fiercely. And he stopped barking to sniff hungrily, at the same time keeping his distance. "Here, mutt," called Mark. "I'm afraid he won't come any closer while we're around," said Sam. "If you want him to have that food, you'd better go away from it." Mark reluctantly backed away with his father. The dog approached the food, finally rushing down upon it as ,if he feared it would escape, and gobbled it. In the days that followed, they continued to feed him, and the animal became relatively tame. He stopped oarking at them, and at times let Mark come within a few feet of him. But he never allowed Mark to come close enough to touch him, and he was especially wary of Sam. The latter could see, however, that there was nothing around the smooth furred neck. The collar, if it had ever existed, had evidently been worn away. "So we can't find out what his name is," said Mark in disappointment. "Here Prince, here Spot, here Rover -- " The animal answered to none of the traditional dog names, nor to several of the newer ones that Mark recalled. After the dog had been with them for a half hour or so he usually trotted off in the direction of what they had come to consider his lair. "He doesn't seem to be getting tame enough for a pet," said Sam. "That's one idea I'm afraid you'll have to give up." "All he needs is a little more time," said Mark."He's getting used to me." Then a sudden fear  struck him, and he added, "You're not going to leave here yet, are you, Pop? I thought you wanted to catch some big animals." "There aren't any other big animals," replied Sam. "Just those small ones who came apart in the traps, and they're not worth catching. But I'll stay. This place is as good as any other. I won't leave it yet." IN fact, the stay on the planet, bleak as the place was, seemed to be less unpleasant than cruising aimlessly through space. Mark had been starved for companionship of someone besides his father, and in a way, without making too many demands, the dog was a companion. Wondering about the beast and trying to tame him gave them something with which to occupy their minds. It had been several days, realized Sam, since he had last snapped at Mark. It had become quite certain now that there was no other human being around. The dog's eagerness for the food showed that no one else had taken care of him for a long time. Evidently he had been forced to feed himself on the small and elusive native animals which he could run down. One of the things that puzzled Sam was the dog's obvious anxiety to leave the neighborhood of the ship after a short period and return to his lair. And one day, driven by curiosity, Sam followed him, with Mark coming along, too. The dog had become sufficiently accustomed to them by now not to resent their presence, and it was easy to keep him in sight. He led the way for at least two miles, over rocky ground and past a small stream. Quite unexpectedly he stopped and began to whine and sniff the ground. As Sam and Mark approached, he turned on them, barking furiously. The man and boy exchanged glances. "He's acting just like he did in the beginning," said Mark. "There's something in the ground," said Sam. "I'm going to find out what it is." And he drew his gun. "You're not going to kill him, Pop!" "I'll just put him to sleep. An anaesthetic pellet of the kind I use for trapping ought to do the trick." But one pellet turned out to be not enough. It required the bursting of three pellets before the animal finally trembled, came to a halt, and with eyes glazed, fell over on the ground. When they approached closer, Sam caught sight of half a dozen stones, roughly piled together. He said, "Better get back, Mark. This may not be pleasant." "You think -- you think somebody's buried here?" "Very likely. I'm going to see." edge as an improvised spade, he began to dig. The ground was hard, and the rock was not the best of tools. It took him half an hour tc reach the first bone, and another half-hour to uncover the rest. Mark had come up behind him and was watching with no sign of revulsion. He said, "I -- I was afraid there might be a body, Pop." "So was I. It looks as if the man died so long ago that everything else has rotted away, except for a few metal clasps. No other sign of shoes or clothes. And no indication of how this happened." "You think he was the dog's master?" "Evidently." They both stared at the sleeping animal. Then Sam shrugged, and began to fill the shallow grave again. Mark helped him push in the dirt and stamp it down into place. Finally they moved the stones back. They were about to leave when Mark cried out, "Look at that rock!" Staring where his son pointed, Sam saw a gray column about four feet high, with four smooth lateral sides. Rectangular prisms of this size were rare in nature. This was obviously the work of human hands, and of a blasting rod as well, to judge by the sides, which showed evidence of having been fused before weathering had cut into them. At first he had thought the column was a gravestone. But there was no inscription upon it. There was nothing but a thin deep groove that ran horizontally around the four sides, several inches from the top. "What does it mean, Pop?" "Let's find out. It's obviously been put here as some sort of memorial. As for this groove -- " He put his hands on the top of the stone and lifted. As he had half expected, it separated at the horizontal groove. The top of the stone was the lid of a box. Inside lay a plastic container. "Some kind of plastic we don't make any more," muttered Sam. "Aren't you going to open it?" asked Mark eagerly. "Maybe it tells about the grave and the dog's name." The plastic came open at a slight tug. Inside were several strong sheets of paper. Sam stared at them and said, "It's writing, sure enough. But in some language I don't understand." "We can put it in our mechanical translator," said Mark. "That can tell us what it means." "That's what we'll do." "Aren't we going to take the dog with us. Pop?" "No, we'll leave him here. He'll come to in a little while." Mark continued to show an excitement that was unusual for him. "You know what?" he said. "I'll bet we're going to learn what the dog's name is." "I doubt if whoever wrote this thing would bother about a trifle like that." "But that's important. You'll see, Pop, you'll see!" At the ship, Sam inserted the sheets into the reader section of his translator and started the motor. The selector swung into action. "Before it can translate, it has to decide what language this is," he explained. "Will that take long?" "A few minutes if we're lucky, a couple of hours if we're not. After that, I think the translation itself shouldn't take more than a few minutes. While we're waiting, we might as well eat." "I'm not hungry," said Mark. "You'd better eat anyway." "Just a little bit, maybe. You know what I think, Pop? When I call the dog by his name, he'll know I'm his friend and he'll come to me. Then he'll really be my pet." "Don't count too much on it," said Sam. And thought once more how lonely his son must be, to center so much hope in a halfwild beast. A light glowed suddenly in the translator. The selector had found the proper language. Now it began to translate. Twenty minutes later, its work had been completed. As Sam silently began to read, Mark bumped against him, knocking the translation from his hand. Sam's first reaction was anger at the boy's clumsiness. Then he became aware of the hope and the fear that lay behind Mark's excitement, and bit back the angry words which had almost reached his lips. "Easy, Mark, easy," he said. He picked up the translation again and sat down. "You can read it over my shoulder, if you want to." "I just want to find out the dog's name." "The important thing is his master's name. Julian Hagstrom, it says. And he was on a spaceship with his brother, Raoul." Mark's eyes had skipped ahead. "Look, Pop, here's the dog's name -- Arkem! I never heard of a dog having a name like that! What does it mean?" "I wouldn't know," muttered Sam absently, still reading. But Mark wasn't actually interested in his answer. He ran outside. "Arkem!" he called. "Arkem!" There was nothing he could interpret as an answer. After a moment or two he came into the ship again, his face betraying his disappointment. "I guess he doesn't hear me. He's too far away." Sam nodded. He had put the translation down and was staring straight ahead of him, as if looking through the ship's side. "Is anything the matter, Pop?" "What? Oh, no, nothing's the matter. I was just thinking about what I read here." "They had an accident, didn't they? How did it happen?" "TT happened because their ship wasn't as good as ours. Julian Hagstrom, the man who was killed, was buried here by his brother. Raoul put this record in the stone to mark his grave. I think he also engraved something on the stone itself. But that's been worn away." "It must have been a long time ago. Maybe years." "Yes, it was years ago. After he buried Julian, Raoul tried to make repairs, and headed in a direction where he hoped he'd find a civilized planet. He never made it." "How can you know that? He wrote the paper before he started out." "If he had made it, we'd have heard of him. We'd certainly have heard of him." Sam's face was bleak. "And Rhoda -- your mother -- would still be alive." Mark looked puzzled, and stared at the translation once more. "It says here he tried to re-reverse the aging process. What does that mean? And what's immortality, Pop?" "Something he and his brother were looking for. Something to keep people from ever dying. They had a ship full of dogs and other animals. All died in their experiments -- all but Arkem. They had high hopes of Arkem. He lived through a number of different treatments and became quite a pet of Julian's. Then came the crash. Their method wasn't proof against accidental death, and at any rate they hadn't applied it yet to themselves. "After Raoul buried his brother, the dog was miserable, and howled so much that Raoul decided to leave him behind. He was helped to reach this decision by the fact that the ship had lost much of its air in the accident, and he knew that the air-purifying mechanism wasn't working too well. He figured he'd have a better chance of surviving if he stayed in the ship alone. But it didn't do him any good. He was lost in space, or we'd certainly have heard of him." From outside there came the sound of a low growl. "It's Arkem!" cried Mark. "Now you'll see. Wait till he hears me call his name." He ran out, and Sam followed slowly. "Don't expect too much, Mark," he said, almost with pity. Mark didn't hear him. "Arkem!" he called. "Arkem! Arkem!" The dog was watchful, keeping his distance and giving no sign of recognition. Sam put his arm around his son's shoulder. "Arkem, Arkem! Here, Arkem!" The dog snarled. eyes. "He doesn't know his own name! He doesn't even know his own name! Arkem!" "It's no use, Mark, he's forgotten he ever had a name. I'm afraid you'd better give up the idea of having him as a pet." "But you can't forget your own name!" "You can in eight hundred years. Yes, Mark, that's when all this happened, eight hundred years ago. That's why the language had to be translated. Arkem is immortal. And during his long life he's forgotten not only his name, but the master for whose sake he was marooned here. If Julian Hagstrom were, by some miracle, to come back to life, I'm sure the dog wouldn't remember him. All he has is a vague but strong tie to that heap of stones. He no longer knows why he's protecting it. He's been away from live human beings so long that his brain is little more than a bundle of reflexes and instincts." "I'll train him," said Mark. "Sometimes you forget a thing at first, but it comes back to you later. He'll remember his name -- here, Arkem!" "It's no use," said Sam. "For eight hundred years he's been tied to that heap of stones. He'll never remember anything except that fact. I'll get you another dog for a pet." "You mean we're going back to Mars or Earth?" "Some place like that. Some place where there are people. Being alone in space is no good for you." "Oh, no, Pop, you can't get rid of me like that." "I'm not trying to get rid of you," said Sam. "Being alone in space is no good for me either. I'm going with you." "Gee, are you sure? You won't change your mind?" The delighted but uncertain look on his son's face shook Sam. He said carefully, "I won't change my mind. I've decided that it's possible to have too much of a good thing. If grief is a good thing." Suddenly, for no reason that they could detect, the dog barked at them and backed away, the fur rising in an angry ridge along his back. "Couldn't we take him along anyway?" asked Mark. "I don't like to think of him all alone here, year after year." "He'll be miserable here, but he'd be more miserable away from his heap of dirt and stones. Perhaps -- " Mark didn't see as Sam pulled his gun, then let it slip back into place. "No. That's none of my business. Maybe he'll be fortunate and have an accident." "What did you say, Pop?" "Nothing much. Come along, Mark. We're heading for civilization." An hour later, the ship rose into the air. Through the blasting of the rockets, Sam thought -- imagined, he decided, was a better word -- that he heard the long doleful whine of a creature whose mindless grief was doomed to last for all eternity. Forecast Next month's lead novelet is a Theodore Sturgeon shocker called ing him from the only other occupant, there's no more important question than that in the entire universe! Who is it? And the answer is more startling than anything you could possibly reason out for yourself! work, the whole human race can pack its bags and go somewhere else, for there may not be any here and now! prize novel winner! The biggest, richest prize in the history of science fiction deserves a spectacular winner... and we have it! More details next month.  ceived an inquiry from a ZjL reader asking my opinion about the probable rise of the general sea level if the ice of the polar caps were melted. I replied at that time that, of course, not all the water from the melting polar caps would go into the oceans, but that a good deal of it would be tied up by increasing the glaciers on mountains, increasing the size of inland lakes, raising the water table everywhere, etc., etc., and that I would not expect a rise of the sea level of more than about six meters or # feet. Somewhat to my surprise, this little item was noticed by a large number of people who mentioned it, mostly in personal conversations, for several months after it had appeared. Most of them expressed astonishment that the figure was so small, a few were as pleased with it as if it had been an immediate danger, while several told me bluntly that I had been too conservative in my answer. One man distinctly remembered having read somewhere that if all the ice on Earth were melted, the sea level would rise by # feet. Since I recognized this figure, I could write him that he remembered only a part of what he had read. What this estimate -- a fairly old one -- really said was that if the Earth were smoothed out, shoveling all the continents into the oceans, as it were, and if all the ice were melted in the process, our planet would be covered with water # feet deep. Whether this estimate is correct is a different question, which I did not take the time to check. questioned my statement that much of the water would be tied up again in glaciers. He argued that if the climate grew warm enough to melt the polar caps, it would also be too warm to permit the formation of mountain glaciers, that those glaciers we now have would melt, too. This, of course, is correct, but as I recall the original letter, an artificial melting of the polar caps had been in the correspondent's mind, not a subtropical Earth from pole to pole. But this did not answer the critics who had told me that I had been too conservative, quoting from books like Physical Geology (by Longwell, Knopf and Flint, #rd ed., #) that "it is estimated that the complete wastage of all the glacier ice existing today would return enough water to the sea to raise its level about # feet. This would drown vast areas of land, much of it densely populated and would submerge large parts of such cities as New York, Boston, London and Hamburg." The strongest quote came from a professional geologist in Berkeley who found that Dr. Ahlmann, former professor of geography at the University of Stockholm, had written that "on the basis of the French results in Greenland, Andre Cailleux is quite right in saying that previous estimates of the world's existing glacier ice are too small. He calculates that the total volume of land ice must be kilometers. Melting of this volume of ice would raise the sea level by some # to # meters. Even after making allowance for isostatic adjustments, the rise would be from # to # meters. Now, as a result of the work in the Antarctic, we can say that the higher figure, # meters # feet, is probably a minimum value." I conceded to correspondents that I might have been too conservative, but just the same I made a mental note that one day I would try to find out whether I actually had been. Pressure of other business intervened, but when I strolled, one Sunday afternoon, through the Chicago Museum of Natural History, I saw an exhibit which fitted right in with this problem. It was stated there that the northern Greenland ice covered an area of # square miles with an average thickness of # feet while the polar ice of Antarctica covered # square miles with an average thickness of # feet. Since # square miles at # feet is the same as I  million square miles at # feet, the figures also stated that the volume of the antarctic ice was very nearly twice that of the northern ice. And since # feet are just about V # miles, it was easy to compute that the northern ice amounted to # cubic miles. Since the southern-ice was twice as much or # cubic miles, the polar ice of Earth had to be on the order of three less than Dr. Ahlmann's figures. T HE total surface of the Earth is # square miles. For the sake of simplifying the calculation, we'll round this off to # square miles. So the problem amounts to distributing # cubic miles over # square miles. All you have to do is to divide three by #. The result is #, which means that # per cent of a mile of water would be added, for # per cent of a mile is # feet. This figure, of course, is four times as high as the one I had originally given. Even allowing for all the secondary factors, like the rise of the water table, the increase in area of existing lakes, the growth of mountain glaciers, sions in arid areas and, last but certainly not least, the increase of the average relative humidity of the atmosphere, the rise would inevitably be greater than I stated. In short, I had satisfied myself that I had been too conservative. Right now, however, I'm afraid that I may have to revise my opinion once more. Time of May #, #, carried a short resume of a release by Edward L. Corton, Jr., of the U. S. Navy Hydrographic Office, dealing with the northern ice cap. "At present," it stated, "the pack contains only # cubic miles of ice (barely enough to cover the state of Texas with a #-foot layer) and it is steadily shrinking." This is just about # per cent of the figure for the northern ice which I had been using. Apparently earlier researchers had been enormously misled by too few and too hasty measurements in a few spots and had greatly overestimated the amount of ice in the north. If that figure is correct, the melting of the northern ice alone would be just about # inches of additional water, while the southern ice by itself would contribute some # feet -- if the figure of # square miles at an average of # feet of ice is correct. But is it? M Y short piece on "Europe's Unknown Poisonous Lizard" brought me two interesting letters. One came from an American officer stationed in Bavaria who wrote that he had heard this animal mentioned, though he unfortunately had not seen it himself. The other letter came from a Mr. W. E. Crutcher, now of Phoenix, Arizona, who topped my story with a tale of what might be an unknown reptile in West Texas. "Some years ago," he wrote, "when I was traveling West Texas for manufacturers, I was driving on U. S. Highway # between Snyder and Roscoe, through moderately hilly country. Without warning, a creature ran across the pavement in front of my car and disappeared into the underbrush on the other side of the road. The experience was startling, to say the least, since I had never before seen anything quite like it. "I have looked in a number of reference books to identify the animal -- the reptile, to be more specific. It looked almost exactly like a miniature Tyrannosaurus and I would estimate its standing height at about three feet. In the short time I had to observe it, I couldn't determine too much detail. Its overall color was a light green, something between a lime and a chartreuse. It ran as a man runs, one leg before the other, holding its front legs loosely in front of its chest, with tail almost erect... "I stopped for gasoline and inquired of the station proprietor as to the name of the critter. He identified it rather readily as a 'Mountain Boomer' and mentioned that he had seen them in his youth. He also said that if you 'chowsed' one of them (made as if you were going to attack it), it would run at you, hissing loudly. Those are about all the details that I can recall at this time, except that the gas station man 'believed' that it was poisonous." My correspondent was convinced that the reptile he had seen was known, if probably rare, and asked for identification. What struck me most was the name Mountain Boomer. Only about a year ago, while looking for something else, I had found an old magazine article in which its author complained that nobody believed his truthful reports about a noise-making gigantic lizard in West Texas. UT first I wrote back to Mr. - Crutcher, naming various reptiles known to run on their hind legs occasionally, adding that most of them are not supposed to occur any farther north than Mexico, but that an occasional "wetback" does not seem impossible, even though I did not know of any actual cases. I also told where he could find pictures of them. He replied that none of them fitted his memory, though a reconstruction of an extinct saurian came fairly close: "If you'll look edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you'll find a panel depicting twelve dinosaurs, figure # is Podokesaurus. Now, if you shorten the neck about half and reduce the tail about # per cent, fatten the standing legs a bit and erect the body so that the backbone is vertical or even inclining to the rear a slight bit, you have a pretty close approximation of a Mountain Boomer." The letter went on to say: "I was able to determine the date as January #, #. I note that I filled with gas at Colorado City on that date... and I am sure now that the sighting actually took place between Snyder and Colorado City on State Highway #I instead of U. S. #, not too far from the town of Dunn." While this letter was in the mails, I refreshed my memory about the magazine article mentioned earlier. It can be found in the German monthly Kosmos for # and was written by a man who referred to himself as "an old German Texan." His name was H. J. Richarz and he died in San Antonio where he apparently lived, off and on, most of his life. His memories dated back to the "early #s" and he stated that the lizard, at that time, occurred in the canyons of the Frio, Nueces and Devil's rivers. Specifically, he wrote, he had heard the lizard (or iguana) call "or more properly whine" during a hunting trip "to the upper Seco and Rondo, accompanied by Dr. Wisselberg and Joe Ney." Mr. H. J. Richarz had supplied Prof. Ward of Rochester, N. Y., with Texan animals, but when he wrote of this reptile, Prof. Ward had proved skeptical and replied cautiously: "A crying or whining variety of lizards or iguanas would be of great scientific interest. But I have to doubt your assertion until you send me a specimen." Mr. Richarz never did, but at a later date (about #, as can be inferred from his article), his son shot one and sent the head to his father, who said that it was like that of an iguana, about four inches long, that the scales were "a dirty silvery white, with a black ring around the neck immediately behind the head." Well, that, to my regret, is all the available data. What ties the two reports, a century apart in time, together is the locality and the noise-making habit as specifically mentioned in one case and implied in the name of the animal of the second report. Do we deal here with unusual behavior of something otherwise known or is it actually a still unknown reptile? Would the gravity he noticeably weaker at the equator than at the poles due to centrifugal force? Jim Caughran # South # th St. Lincoln #, Nebraska Since the movement of a point of the equator is just about # miles per hour, there is a noticeable difference in gravitational acceleration, usually called attraction. It does not matter in practice when the weights under consideration are relatively small, say # lbs. or so. But if you weighed a whole shipload of material on spring scales, you'd find a fair amount of "shrinkage." The precise figures are as follows, expressed in centimeters per second, squared: at the pole # at # #I at equator # To find the figure for any latitude L, the following formula is used: (#-# times cosine of # L) multiplied by the figure for # degrees of latitude. I have read that over # of all stars are in spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K and M, the remaining # belonging to other spectral classes. Would you describe them, please? Donald Simpson # Auburn St. Modesto, Calif. The letters attached to the spectral classes of the stars are indications of their surface temperatures. The O-type stars are the hottest and the temperature decreases as you progress through the sentence, Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now, Sweetheart. Specifically, in degrees centigrade: O above B A F G K M R N below # # J # # # , #  # # # # , #  The S stars, of course, are the coldest. For finer distinctions, a number is added to the letter -- K# would mean, for example, that the star is colder than a K, namely ##th of the difference in the direction of M. R# would mean halfway between R and N. I have two questions: (#) what is the dividing line between a planet and a moon? I have read that some of Jupiter's moons are almost as large as the planet Mercury. Has the dividing line been picked so that Mercury is just above and Jupiter's moons just below? My second question is this : just what is a comet? I have never seen one. Name Withheld Red Bank, N. J. There is no "dividing line" between planets and moons in regard to size. It would he qliite possible for a moon to be far bigger than a planet (hut not, of course, its planet) because the distinction lies in the movement. Bodies moving around the Sun are planets; bodies moving around a planet are moons. Just to clean up loose ends at this point, I wish to add that a "moon of a moon" is a theoretical possibility, though we don't seem to have any in our solar system. If a moon and "its" planet should be of fairly equal size, one would probably refer to them as a "double planet." Since the Earth-Moon system approaches this condition, some authors have used the term "double planet" for Earth and Moon. I do not agree with this usage because the common center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is still inside the Earth. "Double planet," in my opinion, should be used only if the common center of gravity is somewhere between the surfaces of the two bodies. As for comets, there are a few every year, but all since the last appearance of Halley's comet have been quite small; that is to say, telescopic. The few large enough to be visible to the naked eye were absolutely unspectacular. The comets move around the Sun like the planets, but their orbits are highly elongated ellipses while those of the planets are nearly circular ellipses. The behavior and appearance of the comets has been explained by Dr. Fred L. Whipple of Harvard Observatory by assuming that a comet consists essentially of frozen gases of various kinds, mostly such simple substances as carbon dioxide, water and ammonia. Some solid matter (dust particles) is probably imbedded in this mixture. As the comet approaches the Sun, the frozen gases evaporate, forming first the so-called "coma" of the comet and then its tail. According to Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, the White Dwarf star # # Eridani B has a sf. cific gravity, or density in terms of water, of #. I would like to know how this is possible when the heaviest elements on Earth have densities of only slightly higher than #. Charles Husted # Arnott San Diego #, Calif. The explanation for the wide discrepancy between the densities of the heaviest elements found on Earth and the densities of the White Dwarf stars lies in the fact that terrestrial matter is always composed of "complete atoms" while the matter of the White Dwarfs is not. Each terrestrial atom consists of a nucleus, composed of protons and neutrons, which is surrounded by a number of electrons. The electrons move around the nucleus in so-called "shells" at various definite distances. Under any normal pressure which may occur on Earth and even under laboratory pressures obtained so far, the forces holding the atom together are strong enough to resist any attempt to squeeze the electron shells of one atom into the electron shells of the neighboring atom. It is for this reason that liquids and solids are virtually incompressible. But there must be a limit to the resistance the electron shells of an atom can offer. If the external pressure is large enough, it must be possible to crush the electron shells. This, astrophysicists have deduced, is what happened in the White Dwarfs. If you consider such "crushed matter," as it is called, you realize that there is no longer any meaning to the word "atom." You no longer have atoms, but a mixture of atomic nuclei and unattached electrons, probably free neutrons, too. Because there are no whole atoms left, there can no longer be any great resistance against outside pressures so that matter, once crushed, can be compressed still more with relative ease. Compressibility is normally the characteristic of a gas and crushed matter (although it probably would look like molten iron) must, therefore, be considered a gas. Since Enrico Fermi was the first to investigate the theory of crushed matter, this entirely unexpected new state of matter is often referred to as a Fermi gas. I recently looked through an astronomical book for the diameter of the Moon. I found it all right, but at the bottom of one page I saw something which was not explained. It said: January #st, # A.D. -- J.D. #. What does that mean? C. F. Weinstein Kansas City, Mo. The letters J.D. stand for Julian Day. This is a method, used almost exclusively by astronomers, to pin down a date without reference to the year. Especially when it comes to B. C. dates, you always have to remember that I A.D. followed immediately after I B.C., though logically one should expect a year zero (namely, the year of the birth of Christ) between them. In addition to this difficulty there have been, as you have read in last month's column, several revisions of the calendar which would have to be taken into consideration. To avoid all these difficulties, one Joseph Scaliger, quite some time ago, suggested simply counting days, without reference to months or years. To make this scheme workable, one had to start at a very early arbitrary date and Scaliger chose January #st, # B.C. He also suggested calling the days counted from that date the Julian Days. This has nothing to do with Julius Caesar and the Julian calendar, but was meant to honor Joseph Scaliger's father Julius. The Julian Day # is the first of January, #; the figure you happened across is the J.D. number for the first day of #. Since the J. D. is used chiefly hy astronomers, it does not begin at midnight, because that may change the J. D. in the middle of an observation. The Julian Day consequently begins at noon. Why is a salamander called an amphibian like a frog, but a lizard is called a reptile like a turtle? Does it have anything to do with whether they live in water or on land? Morris Moore Philadelphia, Pa. Yes, it does have something to do with where they live, but the connection is not that simple. The word "amphibian" comes from amphi (both) and bios (life) and means that such animals live both in water (fresh water only) and on land in the course of their lives. The best and also best-known example is the frog, which is hatched in water, goes through a tadpole stage and then climbs up on land where it may spend the rest of its life, going back into the water only for mating. The marine turtles (reptiles) do the opposite; they spend all their lives in the seas and crawl back on land only to lay their eggs. More specifically, amphibians have gills when immature and lungs later, although a few of them retain the gills all their lives. Amphibians also have a soft skin equipped with skin glands, which may be the reason why no salt-water amphibian is known. Reptiles have lungs and a skin covered with scales and without skin glands and are essentially land animals, even though some, like the marine turtles, the marine iguana of the Galapagos islands and the sea snakes of the Indian Ocean, have chosen to return to the ocean. I If you enclose #c to cover postage and Weird ail ventures as near as your mailbox! Just send your name  ami address -- you'll gat your copy by return mail... and we'll #,y one of the ,uthors  f t,d  r ' # E. San Fernando St. Dept. G-# San Join #. Calif. When Earth gave a housewarming, the Visitors brought the gifts... but who would get the gate? come, nobody saw them go, and when they were gone nobody could describe them, except as ordinary-looking people. But there was never any doubt that they had been. They left plenty of evidence. They didn't go in for highpower salesmanship while they were here. They didn't have to. All they had to do was show their various gadgets for us to want -- and we wanted. "Like donkeys with carrots hung in front of their noses," Uncle Egbert sniffed. We did exactly what the Visitors wanted so quickly and with so little trouble that they must have thought we were dumb indeed. There was some excuse for us, when you consider the gadgets. Mighty Atoms, then matoms, . they came to be called, these gadgets -- if you can call a power station in a matchbox a gadget, or a flying-belt, or a sevenpocketbook, or a suit which you could pack away in a thimble. We needed a whole new dictionary of words for the matoms. Most of them were portmanteau words. When things for which the Greeks hadn't a word come along one at a time, the people who make the languages have time to think up smart new names. But if they come out in a flood, as the matoms did, names for them have to come out in a flood too, or you'd have things without names at all, which would never do. brary was really a microfilm container and projector, so it was cap. The power station in a matchbox was supposed to be a receiver picking up solar power from an automatic master plant set up inside Mercury's orbit. So the visitors said, anyway. Uncle Egbert said, "Hah!" explosively. It was all very farfetched and we knew there must be a catch in it somewhere, but we called the things sopos -- sopo for solar power. The suits which would go in thimbles needed different names for each variety -- Aims, duples and minpas (minpa for multum in parvo ). " nobody seemed to know much about them, even what they looked like. I had an idea they were small people, dressed in dark clothes, but Thea said they were medium-sized and only some of them wore dark clothes. Considering that the things they brought were so much more interesting than they were, it wasn't really surprising that we didn't remember much about the Visitors themselves. It was irksome, though, that we didn't even have a name for them, or know whether they came from outer space, or up through holes in the ground. But it seemed (at first) to be going a bit far to suggest, as some romancers did, that it was incredible that so little should be remembered or known of the Visitors unless they had used some form of mass hypnosis on us. There was no need for such a wild explanation. The things the Visitors brought had naturally claimed our full attention. If Special Delivery suddenly deposited Marilyn Monroe on your doorstep, you wouldn't remember much about the delivery men, would you? This sort of argument was what we called being reasonable. We remembered what had happened, all right -- how the Visitors had shown us their whole dazzling array of matoms; how we'd tried to buy them; how we found that the idea really seemed to shock the Visitors. They couldn't possibly sell us matoms -- nor exchange them for anything we had, for that came to the same thing, apparently. "Why not?" Uncle Egbert asked some of them bluntly once. "It's against the regulations," they said. "Values differ... "But you obviously want to sell these things," he pointed out. "Who told you? How do you know?" "Look," Uncle Egbert said disgustedly, "you come and open your case and show us your goods. Obviously you want to sell them, or anyway you want us to have them on some terms, for some reason." Private committee meeting. Then: "This is obvious to you, but not to everybody. You are a genius, perhaps?" It was no new idea to Uncle Egbert. Nor was the opposite point of view, that nobody who was related to Thea could possibly be a genius. He's Thea's Uncle Egbert, by the way, not mine. We didn't find the exchange medium then, but Thea, of all people, found it soon afterward. She came in crowing with delight and wearing a snazzy Aim playsuit. After I'd picked up my eyes and put them back in their sockets, I asked Thea how she got it. "I'd have done anything for such a lovely thing," said Thea, staring down at herself in awe and rapture. She looked up, caught my eye, and faltered, "Bu -- but I didn't have to, of course. They just gave me it." For a moment I was jealous, unreasonable, on the point of hitting the roof, as jealous lovers always are, but Uncle Egbert told me to keep the head and asked derisively if I thought Thea had the brains to tell a lie. That was unanswerable. I was never jealous again. It was ridiculous to suggest that Thea could deceive me, even if she wanted to. She was vague about how she had got the playsuit, but we gathered that all she'd had to do was say things until, by a process of trial and error, she said what the Visitors wanted. "That's all right so long as you didn't sign anything," said Uncle Egbert, with relief. A ND presently we learned for ourselves how to get the matoms. That was the bit when we acted like donkeys with carrots hung in front of their noses. The Visitors had a sort of verbal contract they led us through, and we, with our eyes on the carrots, gabbled what was necessary without paying much attention to what we were saying. "Though when you do pay attention," Uncle Egbert observed, "it doesn't seem to make much difference. You have to say very definitely that you want the thing in question, that you won't be happy until you get it, that you don't understand how it was made, that you don't think you ever will understand, and that you only want the item to use it, not to take it apart. You don't have to promise anything or agree to anything. I don't see the point." The Visitors seemed to think we'd all want sopos, but as Thea said, "Who'd go wild over sopos when we have power points where we want them anyway? But gee, those Aims! I'd have given my back teeth for one outfit -- if I'd had to, that is." The demand for Aims, duples and minpas took the Visitors by surprise. They'd been ready with sopos, flelts (flying belts), micaps, E-motors (eternal motors that ran off solar power)and a dozen other gadgets whose purpose they had to explain. The spu (a little thing that looked like a model of human intestines, which they explained was a spaceship propulsion unit), the iplar (interplanetary radio) and the borer (a drill with a completely indestructible tip, the size of a suitcase). Cereainly there were some takers, chiefly teen-agers, but in the main hardly anyone wanted micaps, let alone spus, iplars and borers. "What use is a spaceship propulsion unit without a spaceship?" Uncle Egbert asked once. "It's the only bit you can't make yourself," the Visitors said. "Bit of what?" Uncle Egbert asked. "Bit of a spaceship," they told him. "But I don't want a spaceship," he replied. That took their breath away. Apparently it was utterly dumfounding to them that Uncle Egbert didn't want a spaceship. However, when they produced their marvelous textiles, equally marvelously conceived, designed and tailored, everyone was excited -- the women over the clothes, and the men over the prospect of women wearing them. The Visitors did try matom clothes for men, but they never caught on. f I 'HE Aims were one-piece gar- ments -- swimsuits, pajamas or nightgowns, as strong and opaque as the usual variety, but each with the substance of about one-tenth of one silk stocking. Since they were strong and opaque, they were wearable. They must have been, for millions of women wore them, generally after having said they couldn't possibly, but being about the thickness of a coat of paint, they were a trifle sensational in other respects. "That's the only way," Uncle Egbert observed dispassionately, the first time he saw Thea in a Aim swimsuit, "that a girl can be naked while wearing something. Having some knowledge of your sex, I've no doubt full advantage will be taken of the phenomenon -- to the ruination of weak characters like Jacky here." "Like it?" asked Thea coyly, putting the Aim and Thea on display with four seductive, simultaneous Aections of elbows and knees. I opened my mouth, but not to say anything, only to let out the steam. T HE duples and minpas brought in another principle. Take a duple evening gown. For the Arst time in history, a girl could be comparatively warm on her way to a social function in December, wearing only an evening dress. For, though her outfit still had next to no substance, there were ten insulating layers of air in it. Or in spring, or even winter, a girl could go out in a temperature of forty or under, wearing what looked like a summer dress with little or nothing underneath it, although it was actually a complete outfit incorporating twenty-six layers of air... Yes, the Visitors seemed puzzled when we fell on the sheer, trick clothes with delight and showed little or no interest, for the most part, in spaceship drives, interplanetary radio and portable power stations. It wasn't entirely that we didn't believe these things were spaceship drives and so on. We could try out the sopos and fielts in two minutes and see that there was no hoax about them. The Visitors must have thought we were dumb, going for the mirrors and strings of beads instead of the genuine tin alarm-clocks... Yet, were we? Uncle Egbert isn't so sure. He tells the old story of the boy who, offered a shiny new penny or a dirty old nickel, would invariably take the penny. This happened time and again. When at last his sister begged him to stop being so dumb, disgracing the family, he pointed out that if he'd taken the nickel that would have been the end of the experiment. Instead he'd already made over a quarter in pennies... Maybe it was like that to a certain extent. Thea got a Aim swimsuit, nightdress and two pairs of pajamas, two duple evening dresses and summer frocks and half a dozen assorted minpa outfits -- winter suits, a riding habit and a skating costume. While she was amassing this collection of sartorial miracles, she also acquired, incidentally, a sopo, a micap, a fielt and an iplar. True, she didn't appreciate them. When we got married, much later -- the Visitors were gone by this time -- she asked if we should bother keeping all this junk. Thea, I should mention, is a mechanical moron... but perhaps I've implied that already. Anyway, it was there, that's the point, appreciated or otherwise. we were left looking a little dazedly at what they'd left behind. Then we really started to use it. What was the point of hydro-electric power schemes when all that was needed was a network of wire and a sopo? Who was going to be first to build a ship around a spu and get to the Moon, Mars, Venus? What would the interplanetary commercial radio rights be worth? Could iplars be adapted for TV? "You know," said Uncle Egbert thoughtfully, "I think our recent callers went away with quite a wrong idea of us. They knew all about our first thoughts, the Aims, duples and minpas, but they didn't wait for our second thoughts..." Almost as quickly as it started, the Aim craze died. We knew how to make them now so the novelty was gone. It was like bikinis a few years back -- having gone as far as possible in one direction, we could only turn and go the other way. Duples remained, because they were practical. The minpa principle continued to be used, but what we knew as minpas disappeared. "It doesn't look right," Thea argued, "and it doesn't feel right, either. I mean, minpas do keep you warm, but you expect to be wrapped up when there's snow on the ground, not looking like you're on your way to a picnic." This, for Thea, was high-power thinking. Gradually we emerged from the fog. No photographs existed of the Visitors, which was almost incredible. There must have been a first contact, when we asked who they were, where they'd come from and what they wanted. There must have been ships. We must have noticed and followed up clues of the Visitors' nature, origin, purpose, unless... Unless the farfetched idea that we had rejected at first was true after all, and there had been some form of mass hypnosis. "You can fool all of the people for some of the time," declared Uncle Egbert, "but false ideas are like cuts -- they heal, eventually." So we gradually began to realize that the Visitors had deliberately prevented us from learning anything about them and, in general, had done with us exactly what they wanted. Which was, apparently, to leave us with the matoms and only the most vague ideas of how we had got them, and from whom. "They're nice people, then," said Thea warmly. "Missionaries -- that's it. They came to help us and to give us things." Uncle Egbert frowned. "I thought that myself until now," he admitted. "But if you think so, Thea, that can't be right." TF we looked up the back issues of the newspapers, we found the Visitors mentioned often enough, but no more information than we remembered. If what we remembered could be censored, it wasn't really surprising that what we had written at the time had been censored, too. And it became clear that the contract, or whatever it was -- the terms on which they had given us the matoms -- must be important. "We had to say that we really wanted them," Uncle Egbert mused. "That we couldn't see how they were made, that we didn't think we ever would, and that we wanted to use the things, not take them apart. But what guarantee could the Visitors have had that we meant what we said? We didn't, anyway. What's the good of getting us to say anything that they can't enforce? If there's anything there to enforce, which there isn't..." He was quite annoyed about it all, taking it as an insult to himself personally. "Don't worry about it, Uncle Egbert," said Thea cheerfully. "It doesn't bother me at all." "It won't beat me," said Uncle Egbert furiously. "I'll make sense out of it, somehow." He didn't get the chance. A newspaper columnist maliciously forestalled him, pointing out that from the circumstances of the handing over of the matoms, the declaration the Visitors had insisted on could only be a cover for them, not a promise or undertaking by us. "Of course, of course!" Uncle Egbert said when he read it, stamping about and raging because he hadn't thought of it first. "I should have known. That Visitor talked about regulations, about values being different. He didn't mean economic values, he meant ethical values. Naturally their ethics are different from ours. They weren't supposed to sell us the matoms, but they could give them under those conditions." and the rest of the world a long time to reach a final decision on what the Visitors had been doing, and why. But slowly, step by step, they managed it. What they decided between them was something like this: We on Earth were a pretty backward race, compared with the Visitors, judging by the matoms. And perhaps they had merely been extending a helping hand... perhaps. What would happen if you gave savages howitzers and machineguns? If you went back to prehistoric and made Neanderthal Man a present of the atom bomb? If you let EighteenthCentury phonamides, streptomycin and the rest of TwentiethCentury materia medica? Well, what would happen? Could you call it any less than disaster? No, the Visitors hadn't been extending a helping hand. Ignorance isn't always a bad thing. The savages, Neanderthal Man and Eighteenth-Century doctors were protected by their own ignorance. Postulate a big galactic organization that was very strict about what contact could be made with non-member races artd what couldn't, and exploiters sneaking in under the ban with cute schemes to get around the galactic regulations... and what we knew began to make sense. Not to Thea, naturally. She stared at Uncle Egbert as if he had suddenly turned green. "But you've always been so clever!" she exclaimed. "I never thought you'd be taken in by tripe like that, Uncle Egbert." "I wish it were tripe," Uncle Egbert declared bitterly. "On the contrary, it's a very sound idea to hand out rifles to savages so that they'll exterminate each other without forcing you to murder them and violate your high ethical principles. Very sound indeed." "Rifles?" said Thea, puzzled. "Well, perhaps not rifles," Uncle Egbert admitted. "The Visitors were more subtle than that. They handed out power, not rifles. Power to make things much more destructive than rifles. set factories and towns on fire. Later, power to go to the Moon, to the planets. Power to make bigger and better mistakes. Power that mankind doesn't know how to handle, and won't have time to learn to handle before it proves fatal. "Ignorance is a powerful protection, a very powerful protection indeed. The caveman couldn't stumble on the secret of the atom bomb -- he could only learn how to make fire. That might lead to the hydrogen bomb a few thousand years later, but the rolling stone would have gathered a lot of moss on the way... explanatory, protective moss." "Say, Uncle Egbert," said Thea, concerned, "you'd better get to bed right away. Gee, yes, your brow feels hot, right enough." UT you couldn't stop Uncle Egbert as easily as that, not when he was properly wound up. "The galactic organization knows all about that," he went on, his powerful enough voice rising to a roar, "so our ingenious friends come along and get us to give them an excuse. The excuse that we don't understand the matonjp, and never will, and want them only to use them as individual items. Certainly not to take them apart and try to find how they work... no, not that. They'll be able to say, later, that we said that and they believed it. "Then they hand out matoms, knowing that when they come back in a few years the rather backward people who live on Earth will have destroyed themselves or at least destroyed their civilization and returned to savagery. It's inevitable -- it's absolutely inevitable as long as human beings are human beings." His face purple, he bawled his peroration: "Then, of course, they can take what they want, enslave Earth and set the iron heel of the conqueror on it for ever!" Uncle Egbert, to do him justice, did say all this before it was the general, established point of view on what the Visitors had been, done and intended. It took about five years, but in the end everybody agreed with Uncle Egbert. He was a prophet, unsung, and without honor in his own country. We found what had kept us from seeing the Visitors properly, and all the other things they hadn't wanted us to see. Something in the design of the micap, a sort of concentration booster, suggested the interference field that jams the perception and awareness centers and enables skillful operators to make people believe they've seen the Indian rope trick or anything else. Soon we could use it ourselves, and thus could guess how the Visitors must have used it. We soon managed to tape some of the power the matoms represented. Most of Chicago was blown up in one experiment, and a chunk of Southern Italy in another. Forty-seven factories in North America alone were destroyed before we learned enough about solar power to be able to use it safely. "I tell you," said Uncle Egbert, "it's only a matter of time." There was extensive damage in Las Vegas, not caused by solar power this time, but by spu experiments. "Why do people do these things if they're so dangerous?" Thea wondered. "Have you ever," inquired Uncle Egbert grimly, "heard the story of Adam and Eve? You know, for thousands of years that story has been willfully misinterpreted. I don't think it has any sexual significance or that Eve tempted Adam matters much. No, what it really means is this. If you put down in the middle of a desert, a box marked in five minutes it'll be surrounded by hordes of people fighting to get close enough to touch it. That's why people do these things, though they're so dangerous. That's why the matoms are going to be the end of us." I T was not to be expected that Thea could follow that. She had just become a mother, rather to her surprise. She had no illusions about her own intelligence, and she'd always had a vague idea that it took brains to deliver a child. Where she picked that one up, I couldn't say. Perhaps someone who was jealous of her looks had said it. The first man duly landed on the Moon. Unfortunately he landed much too hard and created another crater. Others followed him; three before anybody landed gently, four before anyone landed and got off again, five before anyone landed, got off again and returned on Earth safely. "By landing on Earth safely," Uncle Egbert grunted, "he's accomplished only what he would have achieved if he'd never gone." But that was Uncle Egbert in his most reactionary mood, refusing to admit that merely doing something which hadn't been done before was progress. After the Moon, Mars was easier. Venus was a waste of time. Someone took a dangerous dive close to the Sun and found it was true what the Visitors had said about the sopos... there was a master plant set up inside Mercury's orbit. At least there was something. Terran spaceships weren't nearly good enough yet to get inside Mercury's orbit -- and out again. The nations started bickering about possessions on the Moon and on Mars. There were threats at various times to drop sopo bombs on Washington, Berlin, London, Paris and Moscow. Half a dozen cold wars were going on at the same time, and the prospects of at least one of them breaking out into a hot war appeared excellent. "I wonder when the Visitors intend coming back," Uncle Egbert ruminated. "It's an interesting question. If they come too soon, they may arrive right in the middle of our sopo war instead of after it, when we're scrabbling about in the ruins -- " "War? You don't think there's going to be a war, do you, Uncle Egbert?" Thea exclaimed, startled. It was apparently the first time the idea had occurred to her. She was about the only person in the world in that position. "War's the least of it," he grunted. "Look at it this way. Children are viciously destructive sometimes. Haven't you ever noticed Jacky and Meredith fighting?" Thea and I had reproduced ourselves successfully a second time and there were rumors of a third happy event. Jacky was four and Meredith two and a half, and they fought like two five-year-olds. They had inherited beauty and health from Thea and a modicum of intelligence from me. "Well, if Jacky decides to annihilate Meredith," Uncle Egbert went on, "no real harm is done, because he can't. But imagine if Jacky had a magic ring that would do anything he wanted as soon as he wanted it done. Do you think Meredith would last long?" "No," said Thea decidedly. "He wouldn't." "The matoms were magic rings," said Uncle Egbert. "And now we're making magic rings, staffs, gloves and lamps of our own. So long as it's a long and complicated business to work enormous destruction, it may never happen. There's always time for second thoughts. But make the destruction of a city, country, continent or world the work of an unpremeditated instant, and it can't last much longer than -- than little Meredith would." I was a little angry with Uncle Egbert. For Thea went silent and sad and thoughtful, most unlike Thea. He had managed to get an idea through her head, and I wished he hadn't. devil of it. Know how many alarms are given -- fire bells rung, police and ambulances called, trains stopped -- simply because someone has a fraction of a second of panic? A switch is a handy, innocuous thing when it merely controls an electric light. But suppose it controls life and death? Suppose any private, ordinary, aberrant, nottoo-bright citizen can flip a switch that controls a hundredthousand horse-power and a billion volts? "Funny how one can never quite get used to the idea," Uncle Egbert said, "that one may never finish the breath one is just starting to take." Again he reached his conclusion before anyone else, and again -- though it took a year or two longer -- intelligent, informed opinion caught up with him. We reached the sopo station at last, examined it and made two more like it. These were placed in the same orbit to triple the output. Already we found that what we had considered infinite power was very finite indeed, and wanted more. We made an underground city on the Moon. Finding that Mars was going to need oxygen replenishment, if we were ever going to be comfortable there, we set up an atmosphere plant. "Just like that," Uncle Egbert murmured. "If a world hasn't enough air, make it. Isn't it simple and obvious?" However, the atmosphere plant took a lot of power -- the whole output of one of the sopo master plants. We went back and set up two more. The accident record didn't bear thinking of, so we didn't think of it. We split it up so that it didn't show anywhere as a matom total, so to speak. There were spaceship accidents, accidents on Mars, on the Moon, on Earth; there was sopo damage and loss of life; there were explosions, big and little, all over the place. There were murders, too, more spectacular now that it was so easy to destroy a few square miles of territory in making a good job of the victim. There were crimes made possible by the fact that with modified borers you could get into or out of anything, including bank vaults and prisons. As Uncle Egbert had said, "There's no denying it -- we're children being given dangerous, destructive, disastrous toys." Jacky and Meredith had a little sister to bully now, Dorothea, but when the three of them were playing even Thea had the sense not to give them knives, pistols, rifles and red-hot pokers. That's what the Visitors had done to us. And knowing what they obviously did about us, they must have drawn conclusions about what they were doing. They came back before we had destroyed ourselves, and after we had mastered the last secret of the matoms. Three of them dropped in on us, casually, without warning, just like the last time. It was Sunday, and our veranda was somewhat crowded, for we were all there... Uncle Egbert, Thea, Jacky, Meredith, Dorothea and I. "Hallo," said Uncle Egbert pleasantly. He could be quite pleasant when he tried. "We've been expecting you. But not so soon." I had to hand it to him, he was cool. I'd often wondered if he'd be as bold as he made out when he was really tested. Well, he was. After all, these were the people who had left us the matoms. There was a period of confusion after Uncle Egbert spoke, because the Visitors still thought it was like the last time, and it wasn't. Uncle Egbert and I both knew about the interference field now, and how to combat it. Thea didn't, and Jacky and Meredith knew just enough to be thoroughly puzzled and not have the faintest idea what was going on. The field has an effect not unlike hypnosis. It induces trance in which the victim is open to suggestion. He will believe that what has happened hasn't, that what hasn't happened has, and that what has happened has happened differently. However, hypnosis afterward can't recover the truth. Nor can the field, being essentially erasive, be used to recover it. Nevertheless, the interference field is effective only when it's unexpected. Knowing about it, having some experience of it, we could resist the suggestion and see things as they were. Much as people can be immune to hypnosis, if they're determined to resist and not co-operate. "We are just three ordinarylooking people," said the first Visitor, and suddenly they were. His voice was flat and metallic. "With perfectly ordinary voices," he added, and abruptly his voice was perfectly ordinary. But Uncle Egbert and I refused to believe what we were told, and by a small mental effort saw the Visitors as they really were. The less said about that the better. "When we talk to you," Visitor One went on, "you will reject or forget anything in the conversation which seems odd or frightening or astonishing. You will not remember this, for example. You will... He went on to give instructions which accounted very thoroughly for what had happened the last time and what had been remembered of it... forgotten of it, rather. It was very interesting. A T the end Uncle Egbert said pleasantly, "I hope your... regulations are all against killing? But I'm sure they are." Movement among the Visitors seemed to indicate emotion. They were writhing, waving and undulating now, though they had been motionless before. you? Of course. It would be positively revolting to -- " "Good," sighed Uncle Egbert. "Now I feel a lot better." I did, too. I had been thinking of sending the children inside, if the Visitors would let me, but had decided against it. While they were with us, I could see them and the Visitors. If they were out of my sight, I wouldn't be able to stop worrying about what might be happening. "I also suppose," Uncle Egbert went on, "your regulations would all be against instructing us in your technology, or leaving us instruments and machines which we could dismantle?" "Indeed, yes..." said Two, and simultaneously, "You will forget you asked that," said One peremptorily. "Don't let's pretend any more," said Uncle Egbert blandly. More writhing, waving and undulation. "Pretend?" asked Two, and the interference field became perceptibly stronger. "That you have two arms and two legs, for example," said Uncle Egbert. "We are just three ordinarylooking people..." Three began. It took them some time to believe that the interference field was having absolutely no effect on Uncle Egbert. Then they believed that it had failed with him and only him, and I had to demonstrate that it had failed with me, too. They didn't go any further than that, fortunately. After that, all they wanted was to go away. We didn't do anything to stop them. The next day the papers carried stories in startling contrast to the stories they had carried the first time the Visitors had been here. What had happened the first time -- the complete success of their interference-field tactics; our preference for the comparatively worthless things they had probably thrown in just as makeweights; the way we had allowed ourselves to be put exactly where they wanted us -- must have been responsible for the enormous confidence which had led them straight to Earth without even making a cautious checkup from a distance. We had given them a shock, there was no doubt of that. long, detailed reports and even photographs. The Visitors didn't look so bad in photographs. Our experience had been typical. Nothing much had happened anywhere except that the Visitors rapidly decided they had the wrong number. "Notice that this time," said Uncle Egbert, beaming over a newspaper and a soft-boiled egg at Thea and the children, "the Visitors didn't leave matoms, they took them. We handed them out very much as they did last time." "And after they've examined them and worked out what to do," I said uneasily, "they'll be back." Uncle Egbert just looked at me. And I saw for myself that they wouldn't be back. Not the people (if you could call them that) who had been looking for an easy mark and had been sure they'd found it. The rapidity with which they got out, when they found the use we had made of the matoms, showed, when you thought of it, that they had given us up as being an easy thing. Like many a good bet, we had failed to pay off. Uncle Egbert and I read the papers and tried to answer the children's eager questions. Presently Thea removed the children to get them off to school. When they were gone, I saw Uncle Egbert was frowning and felt a stab of apprehension. He had been right so far, sometimes years ahead of the newspapers, and however jubilant the newspapers might be, I'd rather he continued to beam than start to frown. "You don't think they will come back, do you, Uncle Egbert?" I asked. He sniffed impatiently. "It wouldn't matter in the least if they did," he said. " They took specimens this time -- and I think it's pretty clear that we've thought of a few things they haven't. If we're not on their technological level or above it, we soon will be." "Then why look so glum?" "Why should I look happy? Because the Visitors have been here and gone? That changes nothing. We've nothing to fear from them." "From them? Then from whom?" "The scheme's as sound as it ever was," said Uncle Egbert bluntly. "And it'll work out exactly as they meant it to. They came a little early, that's all." Thea had been clearing away the dishes. She looked in innocent astonishment at him. "Oh, no, Uncle Egbert," she said. "They came too late." We both gaped at her. "It's like the kids being let out of the house when the weather clears up. You know -- keep them indoors and they fight and argue. Let them out and they get along fine. It's the same with us. We have the planets instead of being cooped up on just one world." Uncle Egbert hadn't thought of that, I guess. But he was more amazed because she'd had an idea. That wouldn't have happened if the Visitors had not shown up. If she could, so could anybody. And would! -- j. t. McIntosh Sure, Larry Connaught saved my life -- but it was how he did it that forced me to murder himl I am sitting on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive-drab. It isn't comfortable; but of course they expect to make me still more uncomfortable. They expect to take me out of this precinct jail to the District prison and eventually to the death house. Sure there will be a trial first, but that is only a formality. Not only did they catch me with the smoking gun in my hand and Connaught bubbling to death through the hole in his throat, but I admitted it. I -- knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought -- deliberately shot to death Laurence Connaught. They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me. Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life. Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury. Connaught and I were close friends for years. We lost touch during the war. We met again in Washington, a few years after the war was over. We had, to some extent, grown apart; he had become a man with a mission. He was working very hard on something and he did not choose to discuss his work and there was nothing else in his life on which to form a basis for communication. And -- well, I had my own life, too. It wasn't scientific research in my case -- I flunked out of med school, while he went on. I'm not ashamed of it; it is nothing to be ashamed of. I simply was not able to cope with the messy business of carving corpses. I didn't like it, I didn't want to do it, and when I was forced to do it, I did it badly. So -- I left. Thus I have no string of degrees, but you don't need them in order to be a Senate guard. bly impressive career to you? Of course not; but I liked it. The Senators are relaxed and friendly when the guards are around, and you learn wonderful things about what goes on behind the scenes of government. And a Senate guard is in a position to do favors -- for newspapermen, who find a lead to a story useful; for government officials, who sometimes base a whole campaign on one careless, repeated remark; and for just about anyone who would like to be in the visitors' gallery during a hot debate. Larry Connaught, for instance. I ran into him on the street one day, and we chatted for a moment, and he asked if it was possible to get him in to see the upcoming foreign relations debate. It was; I called him the next day and told him I had arranged for a pass. And he was there, watching eagerly with his moist little eyes, when the Secretary got up to speak and there was that sudden unexpected yell, and the handful of Central American fanatics dragged out their weapons and began trying to change American policy with gunpowder. You remember the story, I suppose. There were only three of them, two with guns, one with a hand grenade. The pistol men managed to wound two Senators and a guard. I was right there, talking to Connaught. I spotted the little fellow with the hand grenade and tackled him. I knocked him down, but the grenade went flying, pin pulled, seconds ticking away. I lunged for it. Larry Connaught was ahead of me. The newspaper stories made heroes out of both of us. They said it was miraculous that Larry, who had fallen right on tbp of the grenade, had managed to get it away from himself and so placed that when it exploded no one was hurt. For it did go off -- and the flying steel touched nobody. The PY T H I A S papers mentioned that Larry had been knocked unconscious by the blast. He was unconscious, all right. He didn't come to for six hours and when he woke up, he spent the next whole day in a stupor. I called on him the next night. He was glad to see me. "That was a close one, Dick," he said. "Take me back to Tarawa." I said, "I guess you saved my life, Larry." "Nonsense, Dick! I just jumped. Lucky, that's all." "The papers said you were terrific. They said you moved so fast, nobody could see exactly what happened." He made a deprecating gesture, but his wet little eyes were wary. "Nobody was really watching, I suppose." "I was watching," I told him flatly. He looked at me silently for a moment. "I was between you and the grenade," I said. "You didn't go past me, over me, or through me. But you were on top of the grenade." He started to shake his head. I said, "Also, Larry, you fell on the grenade. It exploded underneath you. I know, because I was almost on top of you, and it blew you clear off the floor of the gallery. Did you have a bulletproof vest on?" as a matter of -- " "Cut it out, Larry! What's the answer?" He took off his glasses and rubbed his watery eyes. He grumbled, "Don't you read the papers? It went off a yard away." "Larry," I said gently, "I was there." He slumped back in his chair, staring at me. Larry Connaught was a small man, but he never looked smaller than he did in that big chair, looking at me as though I were Mr. Nemesis himself. Then he laughed. He surprised me; he sounded almost happy. He said, "Well, hell, Dick -- I had to tell somebody about it sooner or later. Why not you?" I can't tell you all of what he said. I'll tell most of it -- but not the part that matters. I'll never tell that part to anybody. Larry said, "I should have known you'd remember." He smiled at me ruefully, affectionately. "Those bull sessionsin the cafeterias, eh? Talking all night about everything. But you remembered." "You claimed that the human mind possessed powers of psychokinesis," I said. "You argued that just by the mind, without moving a finger or using a machine, a man could move his body anywhere, instantly. You said that nothing was impossible to the mind." I felt like an absolute fool saying those things; they were ridiculous notions. Imagine a man thinking himself from one place to another! But -- I had been on that gallery. I licked my lips and looked to Larry Connaught for confirmation. "I was all wet," Larry laughed. "Imagine!" I suppose I showed surprise, because he patted my shoulder. He said, becoming sober, "Sure, Dick, you're wrong, but you're right all the same. The mind alone can't do anything of the sort -- that was just a silly kid notion. But," he went on, "but there are -- well, techniques -- linking the mind to physical forces -- simple physical forces that we all use every day -- that can do it all. Everything! Everything I ever thought of and things I haven't found out yet. "Fly across the ocean? In a second, Dick! Wall off an exploding bomb? Easily! You saw me do it. Oh, it's work. It takes energy -- you can't escape natural law. That was what knocked me out for a whole day. But that was a hard one; it's a lot easier, for instance, to make a bullet miss its target. It's even easier to lift the cartridge out of the chamber and put it in my pocket, so that the bullet can't even be fired. Want the Crown Jewels of England? I could get them, Dick!" I asked, "Can you see the future?" He frowned. "That's silly. This isn't supersti -- " "How about reading minds?" "Oh, you're remembering some of the things I said years ago. No, I can't do that either, Dick. Maybe, some day, if I keep working at this thing -- Well, I can't right now. There are things I can do, though, that are just as good." "Show me something you can do," I asked. He smiled. Larry was enjoying himself; I didn't begrudge it to him. He had hugged this to himself for years, from the day he found his first clue, through the decade of proving and experimenting, almost always being wrong, but always getting closer... He needed to talk about it. I think he was really glad that, at last, someone had found him out. He said, "Show you something? Why, let's see, Dick." He looked around the room, then winked. "See that window?" py T H I A S I looked. It opened with a slither of wood and a rumble of sashweights. It closed again. "The radio," said Larry. There was a click and his little set turned itself on. "Watch it." It disappeared and reappeared. "It was on top of Mount Everest," Larry said, panting a little. The plug on the radio's electric cord picked itself up and stretched toward the baseboard socket, then dropped to the floor again. "No," said Larry, and his voice was trembling, "I'll show you a hard one. Watch the radio, Dick. I'll run it without plugging it in! The electrons themselves -- " He was staring intently at the little set. I saw the dial light go on, flicker, and hold steady; the speaker began to make scratching noises. I stood up, right behind Larry, right over him. I used the telephone on the table beside him. I caught him right beside the ear and he folded over without a murmur. Methodically, I hit him twice more, and then I was sure he wouldn't wake up for at least an hour. I rolled him over and put the telephone back in its cradle. I ransacked his apartment. I found it in his desk : All his notes. All the information. The secret of how to do the things he could do. I picked up the telephone and called the Washington police. When I heard the siren outside, I took out my service revolver and shot him in the throat. He was dead before they came in. F OR, you see, I knew Laurence Connaught. We were friends. I would have trusted him with my life. But this was more than just a life. Twenty-three words told how to do the things that Laurence Connaught did. Anyone who could read could do them. Criminals, traitors, lunatics -- the formula would work for anyone. Laurence Connaught was an honest man and an idealist, I think. But what would happen to any man when he became God? Suppose you were told twentythree words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you? They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twentythree words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend. But I killed him in cold blood, knowing what I did, because he could not be trusted with the secret that could make him king of the world. But I can. PY T H I A S issue of a minor journal called International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics ran a piece by one Robert Plank, Ll.D., M.S.W. -- a 'social worker, for God's sake -- on "The Reproduction of Psychosis in Science Fiction." I finished reading it with a feeling that the author thought most science fiction writers (and, by implication, readers, too) were bugs. "Schizomorph" is what he calls the stories, thus accusing the writers of having schizoid personalities, "especially of the paranoid type." Well, now that science fiction has received a diagnostic accolade, I thought it might be of interest to Galaxy readers to learn what it is their favorite writers seem to be suffering from in the way of barminess. I've just come across a publication that really gives the lowdown in terms of definitions and descriptions of mental conditions. It is called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Mental Disorders, and it is published by the American Psychiatric Association, # Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington #, D. C., at # per copy, available only by mail from them. It contains, in pages # through #, the best definitions of the innumerable mental disablements men are heir to that I have ever seen. From every point of view, the book is a gold mine: a wonderfully informative guide for us s-f readers and a rich source for story plots, character development, etc., for the writing fraternity. Mention Galaxy when ordering your copy, too, so we can see what sort of response we get to a review this far off the usual track. Hanover House, # novelets, only four of which I  didn't like too well, make the quality of Fred Pohl's third anthology from the s-f magazines rate way up at the top. Seven of the best items are from Galaxy, the rest from the Competition. Only del Rey's "Helen O'Loy" and Editor Gold's superb "A Matter of Form" have previously been anthologized; the rest are new to book form. Among the best new ones are Sturgeon's multi-level fable of mob rule called "Mr. Costello, Hero," and Kurt Vonnegut's "The Big Trip Up Yonder," both from Galaxy, and Bester's "#," from Fantasy  Science Fiction, which bears a fascinating resemblance to Sturgeon's "To Here and the Easel," reviewed last month. Other first-rate tales are by Schmitz. V-# by Walter Dornberger. Viking Press, # on "space travel" yet published, and certainly one of the most distressing. On the one hand, it is just about the only book on the prototype deep space rocket that has ever been written entirely in the past tense. There's very little extrapolation here, you may be sure. General Dornberger, who was head of the Peenemunde rocket station, tells the actual history of the development of the grandfather of tomorrow's Moon rocket, the V-# that bombed England. And it is a fantastically vivid, unforgettably real story. On the other hand, it presents a moral problem that is both fascinating and repulsive. Dornberger, more than any other man, was responsible for the development of the V-# as a weapon designed strictly for civilian destruction. Plans for it and actual work had begun long before the panzer divisions marched through Poland in #, opening World War II. The general attempts to clear his conscience by saying that in the back of everyone's mind was the V-#'s value as a "preliminary" spaceship. The attempt does not ring true. V-# was a mass-murder weapon from the start and the only reason it did not win the war was the stupid shortsightedness of Hitler et al in refusing all-out support for the Peenemunde establishment. Willy Ley's introduction is richly informative -- in some ways, the most pertinent part of the book, because of its strictly impartial approach. Chad Oliver. Ballantine Books, Inc., # and #c T HE theme of alien invasions of our planet is a perennially interesting one, whether it concerns such "nonfiction" as the Flying Saucer cults or such vivid fictions as H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds or the tale here under review. These two novels are at opposite ends of the spectrum on this theme: Wells with his aliens brutally trying to conquer Earth ; Oliver with his completely human invaders trying to keep their presence a deep secret from Earthbound humanity, to live side by side with us without our knowing it. The Earth hero of the story is a cultural anthropologist named Paul Ellery, who is studying Jefferson Springs, Texas, for a book on the patterns of life in a typical American small town. His suspicions are aroused when he finds out that no resident of the town has lived in it for more than # years -- although the village itself is many decades old. What he finds is the cause of this odd phenomenon, and how he attempts to cope with his amazing discovery makes a solid, moving and intelligently imaginative tale. The ending, however, is so inconclusive that one wonders whether the author is not planing a sequel. It demands one, for the present book leaves the situation almost as the hero found it, with the world still sitting on a "bomb" that is much more devastating potentially than a hydrogen bomb ever could be. It just can't be left like that, Mr. Oliver! ald A. Wolheim. Ace Books, Inc., #c odd one -- an anthology of # stories with five under one of the above titles and five under the other. All are new to book publication and, I am afraid, at least half don't deserve it. Five do, though: Ralph Williams' tale originally called "Bertha;" Cliff Simak's, first published as "Masquerade;" Chad Oliver's excellent "Stardust;" del Rey's "The Wind Between the Worlds" (from this magazine); and Poul Anderson's "Lord of a Thousand Suns," one of two in the collection by this author. The other five stories range from passably entertaining to not entertaining at all. Nevertheless, for the price, the little book is a good buy. French. Doubleday # Co., Inc., # (Isaac Asimov) series of space adventures is the best yet -- a colorful and exciting tale of weird beings and doings on a Venus conceived by the author to be entirely covered with deep oceans under its thus-far-impenetrable cloud canopy. The notion of a "wet" Venus is an old one, and though most modern astronomers seem to believe that the planet actually is all desert, their point has not been proven and probably won't be until we actually visit our neighbor world. In any event, the author's concept of human colonies on the bottom of the Venusian sea is a rich one and his development of the melodramatic plot is swift and sure. It's a real thriller for fans of all ages. Tucker. Rinehart #s Co., # with me. Old age? Contrariness? Anyhow, I have to confess that I just can't make contact with most of these ten Tucker tales. It can't be Tucker's fault, so it must be mine. Or is it? I found all but two or three of the stories almost empty and some of them rather weak parallels of stories by other writers. I did enjoy "Able to Zebra," "Exit" and "The Job Is Ended" (even though its conclusion is confusing and unsatisfactory). But the rest, I regret to say, left me quite cold. by Thomas Calvert McClary. Fantasy Press, Inc., # TT is beyond my comprehension why this # serial should now be awkwardly updated on the "scientific" side and put on the market at this particular time, for it is anti-science science fiction of the most appalling sort. Ruthless free-enterpriser Sibut vain and sociologically infantile Simon Gamble is the scientist-villain. Gamble puts the whole world into suspended animation for # years (he wasn't even a good scientist; he'd meant the period to be only # years!) and when the people come to, the physical plant of civilization has naturally rotted almost entirely away. All but a handful of people are killed as they try to get out from under the wreckage. Gamble tries to build a "purescience" society on the ruins -- and fails, of course. Drega builds a "survival-of-the-fittest" society by the use of "rough shod" (blurb adjective) methods like those of a particularly nasty construction boss -- and succeeds, natchmente. This is a book from the Paleolithic Period of modern s-f. It never should have been exhumed. the hardbound editions of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night or his excellent nonfiction The Exploration of Space, you can now get them in paperback editions -- the first a Permabook Star at #c and the second a Pocket Book Cardinal at #c. Wonderful buys, both of them... For owners of Don Day's invaluable Index to the Science Fiction Magazines, #, the compiler has turned out an errata sheet which they can have on request from The Perri Press, Box #, Portland #, Ore. A useful addition to the book it is, too. And if you don't have the Index (and you should) it still is available from the same source at # a copy... For devotees of Lord Dunsany's later work in the "Jorkens" series. The Devin-Adair Company has published a surprising treat, a selection of # of the best items from his early volumes of poetic fairy tales and supernatural stories, mostly written before #. It's too bad, though, that the book does not contain any of the exquisite drawings by S. H. Sime which appeared in the original volumes. Those in the new book, by Robert Barrell, are considerably inferior. The book is called The Sword of Welleran and it costs #. Don't miss it! Every one supported the Martian program -- until it struck home! of the department of Interplanetary Relations for Mars' Settlement One, reread the final paragraph of the note which he had found on his desk, upon returning from lunch earlier in the day. His eye flicked rapidly over the the moistly smeared Martian scrawl, ignoring the bitterness directed at him in the first paragraphs. He was vaguely troubled by the last sentences. But he hadn't been able to pin the feeling down... Our civilization predates years. We are an advanced, peaceful race. Yet, since Earth's first rocket landed here thirteen years ago, we have been looked upon as freaks and contemptuously called ' bugmen' behind our backs! This is our planet. We gave of our faradvanced knowledge and science freely, so that Earth would be a better place. We asked nothing in return, but we were rewarded by having forced upon us foreign ideas of government, religion, and behavior. Our protests have been silenced by an armed-police and punitive system we've never before needed. Someday you will awaken to this injustice. On that day in your life, you have my sympathy and pity! Stark knew that the Settlement's Investigations Lab could readily determine the identity of the Martian who had written the note. But he hesitated to send it over. Under the New System, such troublemakers were banished to the slave-labor details of the precious-earth mines to the North. Crumpling the note in sudden decision, Stark dropped it into the office incendiary tube. The morning visi-report had shown that there were more than # workers at the mines. Only five had been Earthlings. Let the armed police system find the Martian through their own channels. It wasn't his job. on the far wall reminded him there was still time for one more interview before the last bell, so he impatiently signaled his secretary to send in the waiting couple. Ordinarily, he liked his work and time meant little to him. He had jumped from interpreter to director in the ten years since the department had been created. But this day was different. Stark was to announce his engagement at the Chiefs monthly dinner party that evening and time had seemed to drag since his lunch with Carol. When the door opened, he rose and nodded to the plump, freckled-faced girl who entered. The girl topped five feet by one or two inches, but she was no taller than the Martian man who followed her at the prescribed four feet. After the girl had seated herself, Stark and the Martian sat down. Stark opened the folder, which his secretary had placed on his desk earlier. "Your names are Ruth and Ralph Gilraut? And you want permission to move into Housing Perimeter D?" It was merely a formality, since the information was in the folder. When the girl nodded, Stark placed a small check mark in the space beside her name. Then he turned to the Martian. The large, single red eye set deep in the Martian's smooth, green forehead above the two brown ones .blinked twice before he answered. He spoke deliberately. "As is required of all Martians under the New System, I have taken the name of one of the early Earthlings to write and pronounce." The large red eye blinked again. "My wife would like to move into Housing Perimeter D. By regulation, I respect her wish." Stark placed a check mark by the Martian's name. He wiped the smudge of ink off his hand and said, "You both know, of course, that Perimeter D is reserved for couples who have intermarried and are about to have offspring?" The girl and the Martian nodded, and the girl passed Stark a medical report. Stark looked over the report and then made a notation on a small pink slip. He said, "This permit certifies that you are eligible to move from Perimeter E to Housing Perimeter D. It also certifies that your husband has no record as a troublemaker." Stark looked at the girl. "You understand that you may visit your friends in Perimeter E, but, by law, they will not be allowed to enter Perimeter D to visit you. And, of course, the new law clearly states that neither of you may visit Earthlings in Housing Perimeter A, B or C." The girl looked down at her hands. Her voice was almost inaudible. "My husband and I are familiar with the advantages and disadvantages listed under the section pertaining to intermarriage in the new law, Mr. Stark. Thank you." a brief moment, he thought he had detected a sense of rebellion in their attitude. But that was not possible. The new law provided equality for all. And his department had been created to iron out relations between the two races -- excepting complaints originated by troublemakers for the purpose of weakening the New System. In such cases, Investigations had stepped in and the Martian or Earthling troublemaker had been sent to the rare-earths mines. The reddish light filtering in through the quartz and lead wall of his office showed that it was almost time for the last bell. On the street below, shoppers were streaming out of the stores on their way to the various housing perimeters. Earthlings were climbing into their speedy little jet cars for the short trip to the recently modernized inner perimeters. Martians were waiting for the slower auto buses. The traffic problem had been solved, under the New System, by restricting the use of the Martian-built jet cars to persons living in the inner perimeters. As Stark watched, a black jet car impatiently hurtled out of the line of traffic, bowled through a crowd pf Martians waiting for an auto bus, and skidded to a stop at the curb in front of the building. A tall girl got out. The red evening glow reflecting from her golden hair, made her breathing globe almost amber. Male Martians and Earthlings alike turned to stare in appreciation as she pushed her way through the crowd to the building's compressor lock. Carol was that kind of girl. that Carol opened the door into Stark's office, the yellow visiscreen of the vocal box upon and the Chief's booming voice filled the office. The light from the screen picked up the highlights on the furniture and gave a sallow, greenish cast to Stark's features. Carol stepped back into the doorway to stay out of range of the two-way unit. "Stark!" The automatic tuner on the box corrected to bring the Chief's image in wire-sharp focus. "Yes, sir?" "About the dinner tonight. Just checking to make sure you're planning to be there. We want a full turnout. An inspection team has come up from Earth and we have two visiting dignitaries from Venus." Stark nodded and waited for the Chief to say something else, but the visi-screen blanked out. Carol said, "That was Dad, wasn't it?" Stark felt very depressed suddenly. "Haven't you told him yet?" "No. He's been tied up with those inspectors all afternoon. And you know how Dad is, Johnny. There's a right and a wrong time to tell him things. Right now, he's only interested in hearing about Earth." "But we're supposed to announce our engagement tonight at the dinner." He shook his head. "We can't go on forever with just a few stolen moments here and there, eating an occasional lunch or third meal together in little out-of-the-way places." Carol laughed, the youthful swell of her breasts against the soft, spun-glass material of her blouse. "Don't worry so, Johnny! I'm a big girl now. This is my eighteenth birthday. Dad's bark is much worse than his bite. I'll tell him about us on the way home." She moved closer to him, until he could feel the warmth of her body. He could see the warm, damp indentation where her breathing globe had rested against her shoulders and chest. She asked teasingly, "What did you get me for my birthday, Johnny? Something real nice?" "What did you want?" Johnny asked her gently. A ND suddenly she wasn't teas'ing any more. She put her arms around him. "Dad and my brother would say I'm crazy. But all I want, Johnny, is you. Just you! You know that." Stark had picked out her birthday present, but he wanted it to be a surprise for that night. He said, "I already saw one of your presents. A black jet car!" "How did you know that?" "I saw you drive up in it a few minutes ago." Carol giggled. "Dad gave it to me. Did you see me plow through that crowd waiting for the auto bus?" "Did your brother send you anything?" She nodded. "Three new outfits from Earth. They were on the same liner that brought the inspection team to the Settlement this morning. Oh, yes, and the captain of the liner brought me this." She showed him the tiny pin she wore attached to her collar. The pin itself was a carefully wrought but cruel caricature of an awkward buglike creature. A small ruby set in the center of its face served as its eye. Stark frowned. "Carol, you shouldn't be wearing that." He reached up and unpinned it. "That's the sort of thing our department is fighting." "But the captain said it was the latest rage back on Earth. They're even making toys like it. I'm sure they're not designed to... to poke fun at anyone." Stark started to say something, but the last bell interrupted him. He said, "If you're going to take your father home and tell him about us before the dinner, you'd better hurry. I'll come early." Carol kissed him and said good-by. She left the pin on Stark's desk and was smiling at him as she closed the door. rush of workers had gone and the building was quiet, Stark caught the elevator down. The overhead lights in the compressor lock were reflected in the twin rows of breathing globes. The greentinted ones had to be used by Martians in the building, and the clear ones were used by Earthmen when they were outside in the Martian atmosphere. Stark stopped in at a little open shop down one of the many side streets. The sign said "Closed," but he rang the bell until a little, dried-up Martian appeared. The storekeeper handed him a small box. Stark opened it to examine the ring -- Carol's birthday present. The single, large diamond set in the thin preciousmetal band dated back to an all-but-forgotten custom practiced on Earth. Stark thought the engagement ring would please Carol, though. Standing in the compressor lock at the Chief's home later, Stark rubbed the diamond against the sleeve of his tunic. He fumbled with his breathing globe and then pushed the button that activated the door. The tele-guard beyond the opening door scanned him rapidly. As he stepped forward, a red light above the teleguard flashed on and the door began to close again. Stark threw all his strength against the door and squeezed through into the house. Throughout the house, Stark could hear the alarm bell. A taped voice, activated by the tele-guard, said, "Do not enter! Do not enter!" He found Carol and the Chief in the library alone. Nearly purple with rage, the Chief drew himself up to his full six feet. The Chief bellowed, "Stark! Are you crazy?" The growing feeling of sickness spread through Stark. "Who do you think you are?" the Chief yelled. "Get back to your office and consider yourself under arrest as a troublemaker. Give you people an inch and you try to walk away with everything. Why, I wouldn't let you touch my daughter if you were the last living being in the Universe!" Carol didn't look up. She stood through it all, silently, without moving. Stark knew now where his blind spot had been. He turned and left them.Ufor the police. Stark stared down at his reflection in the polished top of the desk. A yellow, moist film of sweat covered his face. The red eye set in his forehead blinked. But the pain visible just behind the surface of that eye was not over Carol or himself. The pain was for what he was seeing for the first time... now. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of my I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue proposed Mail Science Fiction Library Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. rich living No other planet in the entire Galaxy was at all like Rejuvenal... it was the only world worth one's whole fortune for a short visit! last to leave the space liner. It was only when the Captain entered that he ceased dictating and put down the microphone. Then, with the clumsy deliberation of the aged, he pressed home the lid of the recorder and turned the key in the lock. There was almost a mile of fine wire in that box -- a mile of detailed instruction, compiled over the past four days. For a centenarian, his energy was prodigious. The Captain stood respectfully by the door, waiting to be noticed. Delman beckoned him into the suite. Hat in hand, the Captain walked over to the desk. "I thought you'd like to know, sir, the rest of the passengers have disembarked." He spoke with deference. "Good," said Delman. "I shan't delay you more than a few minutes longer." "Oh, no delay, I assure you, sir," the Captain replied hastily. "Only too happy to be of service. The crew asked me to thank you on their behalf, sir, for your great generosity. It was more than -- er -- generous." Words seemed to fail him. "Not at all, Captain," Delman said. "You've all done your best to make the crossing as comfortable as possible and I'm very grateful to you. Perhaps you'd do one more thing for me on your return -- deliver this to my representative in London." He pointed to the recording machine. "Certainly, sir." "Then that takes care of everything." The great lawyer rose creakily to his feet. Though bent with age, he was still an impressive figure, tall and powerfully over the massive forehead. "I suppose the press is here?" "I'm afraid so, sir." "Well, one can't dodge them on Jupiter. There's no room to move as it is." F'HE Captain laughed sympathetically. No one knew better than himself the limitations of the planet. He'd lived here as a child, grown up under that plastic bubble which Man had built to preserve an atmosphere -- two thousand acres of habitable land square miles. It was enough to break the heart of any boy. Delman stooped to pick up his two heavy canes. The Captain leaped forward and handed them to him. Then lawyer and skipper left the suite and moved slowly toward the gangway. As they reached the steps, the Captain broke the silence. "It's been a privilege to have you on board, sir, and perhaps we may hope to take you home again on your return from Rejuvenal." Curtis Delman smiled. "Well, Captain, it's foolhardy for me to plan nearly two years ahead, but I hope so, too." They shook hands. With a steward supporting him on either side, the ancient lawyer climbed carefully down the steps. A spacelines official had thoughtfully provided a chair. He sat down. The usual array of microphones and tele-cameras was grouped around him. Someone appealed for silence. In the hush that followed, only his own persuasive voice was heard. "I have no prepared statement," he said, "but I assume you gentlemen wish to ask me some questions. In that event, I'd just like to stress that I'm not as young as I used to be -- or perhaps I should say, as I hope to be -- and I'd be obliged if you kept them short and to the point." There were about thirty reporters present and among them he recognized several faces that he had seen before. A few would belong to the local network, but most of them were probably attached to one of the Universal syndicates. It was a red-headed youngster who got in the first question; the others were quick to follow. "Is it true, sir, that this will be your fourth visit to Rejuvenal?" "Yes, perfectly true." "Has anyone else been there four times?" "No. To the best of my knowledge, I'm the first person to attempt it. Several others have been at least twice." "Because no one else could afford it?" "I didn't say that. Most people tire of life. I don't." Years of experience had accustomed the lawyer to these interviews. The purring cameras failed to distract him. In fact, he almost relished the buzz of competent confusion around him. "How long does the trip take?" "Two hundred and fifty days out, the same back, and ninety days on the planet." "Don't you find that a tedious journey?" "Long, yes. Tedious, no. Don't forget, one has expectations. Besides, the early trips from Earth to Jupiter took twice as long." "Now they take four days." "No doubt, but that doesn't alter the argument." "Mr. Delman, what is the speed of change?" "You mean the rate at which the burden of years drops from one's shoulders?" "Yes, sir." "Almost exactly one year for every twenty-four hours spent on the planet." "So that, in ninety days, you're ninety years younger?" "Correct." "How old are you now, sir?" reflectively. The reporters laughed. "That's a difficult question. So far as natural decay is concerned, I think I'm a hundred and fifteen. Of course, my actual lifespan has been nearer three hundred and eighty-seven; but please don't credit me with being a Methuselah. I've a long way to go yet." "Is it a fact that the round trip "I'm afraid I can't answer that. It's a condition of the contract that passengers refrain from disclosing the price of their tickets." "It is expensive, though?" "Oh, naturally. But remember, the overhead is heavy. Three refueling bases on the minor planets, Borenius, Ziar and Algon, require constant maintenance, apart from the initial cost of runways. Then only five -- er -- patients can be housed on Rejuvenal at any given time. And one also has to consider the constant change of staff. You'd scarcely expect it to be cheap." There was a sudden pause in the questioning. The lawyer took the opportunity to rise up out of his chair. This provoked an immediate response; all spoke at once in deafening unison. Delman held up his hand for silence, then turned and addressed the red-headed reporter on his left. "Young man, since you were the first to begin this examination, I'll give you two questions with which to wind up for your side. Only two, mind." The reporter thought for a moment. "Who are your fellow passengers?" he asked. "I don't know. I thought you might be able to tell me that. And the second question?" "Well, sir, I suppose I ought to ask whether you have any special message for the Universe." Curtis Delman chuckled. "No," he said, "nothing of importance. Just that I'd be glad if the law remained substantially unaltered during my absence. It's hard enough to keep abreast as things are. Now if you'll excuse me, gentlemen -- " The tele-cameras swiveled as, cane in each hand, he hobbled toward the Terminal Building. Security officers cleared a path for him. A group of onlookers began to applaud. It was a reception more in keeping with a politician than a lawyer, but Curtis Delman held a unique position. He had been the acknowledged leader of his profession for over three hundred years -- a record no politician could ever hope to equal. rpHE Vice President of Rejuvenal Enterprises, Inc., had been speaking for the best part of half an hour. He was a dapper little man whose white tunic was fringed with green and purple. He had a slight Venusian accent, very bookish, very precise and very irritating. All five passengers sat in his office and waited with varying degrees of patience for the departure signal. Curtis Delman had been introduced to each of them in turn. Of the four, only Walter Pellinger, President of Galactic Stores, had made a previous trip. The lawyer knew of him by reputation as a shrewd businessman, but there was little to be said in favor of his disposition, which was rumored to be morose and unfriendly. Certainly his appearance was surly enough to support the rumor. "Of course," the Vice President was saying, "Mr. Curtis Delman and Mr. Pellinger have heard all this before, but I'm sure they'll both forgive me for repeating it." Walter Pellinger mumbled something uncomplimentary. "And now for a last word about the ship. Most of you will have come here by space liner, and very comfortable it is, too. Unfortunately, we can't look after you that well. Not only would it be uneconomical to employ a liner, it would also be impossible -- there just aren't the landing facilities. And if you can't land, there's not much point in going, is there?" The Vice President laughed at his little joke. No one else seemed to find it amusing. "No," he continued, "the best we can provide is a Stellano-type spaceboat -- the very latest model, naturally -- but, even so, I'm afraid the men will have to share berths. Of course, there's plenty of room in the lounge. As for the staff, Captain Ross, who is to look after you, is a man of considerable -- " The Vice President rambled on. Curtis Delman ceased listening to him; it was only because he had heard his name mentioned that his interest had been drawn in the first place. He focused his attention on the three remaining passengers. They we;re a strangely assorted trio. Of the two men, one was extravagantly attired in dark-blue silk, obviously hand-woven, with large sapphire rings on the fingers of both hands, and a slim, eightdial chronometer on the left wrist. Despite his advanced age, his face remained lean and swarthy, the eyes set close above a strong hooked nose, the lips taut and cruel. He'd been introduced as Jason Tarsh. The lawyer seemed to associate the name with a criminal case -- something to do with smuggling -- but the details eluded him. The other was ordinary and ill at ease, a plump, red-faced man in a badly cut tweed tunic who looked out of place in the present company. His knuckles rapped nervously on the elbow-rest of his chair. Clearly, Mr. John Bridge had none of that confidence usually acquired by the man could afford the trip. Curtis Delman was puzzled. And then there was the woman. TT was difficult to believe that the third and last of his felray. She sat by herself in the far corner, a formless, shrunken creature in deep black. He remembered seeing her, eighty years ago, on the stage of the Palladia. She had been shapely and vivacious in those days. Now only a faint sparkle lingered in her eyes. There was nothing to suggest that she had once been the toast of the Universe. Old, withered, gray-haired -- time treated beauty harshly, mercilessly. He realized how much this trip must mean to her. "Unlike Jupiter," the Vice President was saying, "this section of the Galaxy is composed of oxygen planets. In fact, the proportion of oxygen is rather higher than on Earth, so you needn't bother about spacesuits and the like. I remember -- " A green light blinked on the Vice President's desk, stemming the flood of reminiscence. It was the embarkation signal. The Vice President rose. "It only remains," he said, "to wish you all a very happy and successful journey." The handshaking over, the five passengers filed out onto the escalator. Below them, by the side of the Terminal Building, lay the spaceboat, a slim, coneshaped vessel, gleaming in the artificial light. They all tottered on board. Clearance was granted almost immediately. Slowly, they passed through the main airlock and into the open. It was dark outside and only the change in elevation told them that they were climbing the launching ramp. Behind them, the huge inverted bowl of the city glowed in hermetic splendor. Movement ceased. The warning indicator A steward checked their positions. They lay, tensed and motionless, waiting for the sudden thrust that would hurl them into space. TT was the two-hundred-andtwentieth day. As Curtis Delman returned to consciousness, his first feeling was of relief. The cumulative strain of one takeoff after another could prove disastrous. It was one of the drawbacks to a spaceboat that the effect of rapid acceleration should be so marked. In a liner, the takeoff was little more than an inconvenience -- and, despite exhaustive tests, there was no telling how an old heart would react to a series of blackouts. Now the danger no longer existed, for in thirty days they would arrive at Rejuvenal. As for the journey back, he would make it with the heart of a young man. He unclipped the safety harness and lowered his legs over the side of the bunk. He had no wish to remain in his cabin. It was too small for comfort, though, like all Stellano products, superbly designed. Not an inch had been wasted. Personal luggage was stowed under the bunk, cupboards were built in, tables folded back and even the basin was retractable. Every conceivable necessity had been crammed into a few square feet. When he reached the lounge, he found the others already seated. There were two vacant chairs, one next to John Bridge, the other between Tarsh and Pellinger. He chose the former. "So you survived?" said Pellinger. He sounded disappointed. "Yes, I survived," replied Delman. "And sinqe we appear to be exercising our powers of observation, I hope the same may be said of you?" ter Pellinger opened his mouth as if to make some retort, then thought better of it, and turned back to the vidar screen. The screen took up most of the far wall. The image in focus was the scene behind them. In the center, like a giant grapefruit, hung the planet Algon -- a world of water with a few islands dotting the surface of an ocean -- while anchored in space, some hundreds of miles above, lay a small satellite. "That's a funny one," said John Bridge. The lawyer smiled. He'd grown to like Bridge. The mystery of his wealth had been discovered months ago -- he'd won a sweepstake fortune. That ad his own meager savings had together proved just sufficient to buy him a new lease of life. His family hadn't liked the idea; but, as he'd pointed out to them, it was his money and what use was it to him if he was too old to enjoy it? The simplicity and good nature of the man came as a refreshing change from the sullenness of Pellinger and the cynicism of Jason Tarsh. "It's a radio-platform," Delman explained. most incredible that John Bridge had never left the Earth. He was a Londoner by birth and, before this trip, had traveled no farther than New York. To him, everything they saw and did was a new adventure. "But we don't have radio-platforms back home," Bridge said. "Why do they need them here?" "In our own solar system," Delman told him, "there's an interplanetary link-up -- an expensive business -- but we did have them four hundred years ago. Out here, it's not worth the cost. The platform acts as a go-between. It can intercept messages and pass them down to the spacedrome on Algon, or it can transmit to a spaceship in flight. But direct contact between spaceship and spacedrome is impossible, because the ionized layer of the atmosphere deflects the radio waves." "I see. Is there one over Rejuvenal, then?" "I don't think so. At least, there wasn't when I was last there. It doesn't really warrant it. There's only the house and a small landing-ground. And a spaceboat arrives and departs every thirty days, so nothing can happen." "What about boots? Do we have to wear them?" "You mean gravity-boots?" Delman asked. Walter Pellinger scowled irritably and shifted his position. "Yes, I suppose so -- those heavy things we wore on Borenius and Ziar." Delman shook his head. "No, curiously enough, we don't. It's only a tertiary planet -- less than one-eighth of Earth's volume -- but its specific gravity is enormous. Rejuvenite, the rock it's composed of, is one of the heaviest minerals ever discovered. They say -- " "Look, Delman," Walter Pellinger interrupted, "let that blasted man wear his boots, if he wants to. I'm sure I don't care. But for heaven's sake, stop this geological survey! It's bad enough being cooped up in this tub without having to listen to a lot of nursery small-talk." "Gosh, I'm sorry, Mr. Pellinger -- " John Bridge began. "I wasn't talking to you," said Pellinger curtly, "but, since you've chosen to butt in, I'll say this -- you don't belong here. You're a stupid, ignorant lout, and if you worked in any of my stores, which could never happen in the first place, I'd fire you on the spot and the idiot who hired you, too." "Aren't you being a little unjust?" Curtis Delman spoke softly, but there was an edge of underlying menace in his voice. Pellinger had overstepped the boundaries of acceptable behavior. That he despised John Bridge, he had made clear from the beginning. Now he had come into the open. They all looked at him. Tarsh, who was nearest, seemed to find it amusing. "I've got nothing against you, Delman." Pellinger picked his words carefully. "You worked your passage like the rest of us, but that fellow -- " he pointed toward John Bridge -- "has no right to be here at all. He's a nitwit and a nobody. You're a success and I'm a success. It's not luck, Delman; we both have ability. Call it natural selection, if you like. "Darwin did. We've fought for the chance to prolong our lives and, by doing so, we're able to marry again and have children and pass that ability down to them. Why, our lives are essentia to the human race!" "I should have thought there were sufficient chain-store magnates," said Tarsh. Walter Pellinger turned on him. "Don't tempt me, Jason. Your activities on Neptune and Arcturus won't bear close investigation." Jason Tarsh smiled and remained silent. There was little humor in his smile. That last remark had done much to heighten his opinion of Walter Pellinger. "To return to my point," Pellinger continued, "that man won a sweepstake. He's here not because he's intelligent, but because he's lucky, the somethng-fornothing principle. A fat lot of use that is to the Universe. Why, his descendants will be as stupid as himself and there's no room for the manual laborer in this Age. It's an intolerable waste." "If I thought you believed any of that," said Delman, "I should be the first to respect your feelings. But we've been 'cooped up' together, to use your expression, for seven months and I know you better than your shareholders do. Oh, yes, you can put it across at a Board Meeting, this lofty idea of self-sacrifice and the sum of human good; but it isn't true and you know it. You're here for the same reason I'm here -- because you're afraid to die. And that goes for all of us." He looked at each of them in turn, as if daring them to contradict him. "Yes, we've got ability, all right, and self-confidence. But what do we do with these fancied qualities? We use them to make money with which to buy back our youth." hobbled over toward the vidar screen. He stood with his back to the screen, looking down on them. "And what do we do with our youth?" he asked. "We use that to make money for our old age. We have no choice. Not only is the price of rejuvenation extortionate in itself, but also, by a whim of the legislature, we are declared dead and the burden of 'death duty' falls on our estates. When we return, we return poor. And so the cycle continues -- the endless quest for money, the means of perpetual preservation. "We are careers, not men and women!" the lawyer went on vehemently. "We don't enjoy life. We have neither the time nor the courage to enjoy it. Our children are few and we ignore them, for should they inherit this terrible urge, they would be our competitors. No, Mr. Pellinger, there is only one real man among us and that is John Bridge. He alone has enjoyed life and he goes back determined to enjoy it for a second and last time. But we, by dint of work and learning and sharppractice, may prolong the agony once again. Ours are the wasted lives." "Oh, Mr. Delman! Surely, that's overstating the case?" Gillian Murray had the reedy voice common to so many elderly spinsters. "What about all those difficult problems you've solved? Many of them are of great importance. Everybody says so." "Then I don't agree with everybody, Miss Murray," Delman replied. "Complications are the bread and butter of my trade. We make them for money and we unravel them for more money. One day, you draft a will; the next, you break a Trust deed -- the balance remains even. It's true you perform a function, but it's questionable whether that function is of any real value." John Bridge got up from his chair. His rubicund features were creased in bewilderment. "This is beyond me," he said. "I'm sorry if I annoyed Mr. Pellinger. I didn't mean to. I think I'll take a nap." He walked thoughtfully out into the corridor, a book in his left hand, his right arm stretched out to the handrail overhead. "There's something about Mr. flectively, "that reminds me of the Statue of Liberty." "Probably the hollow head," said Jason Tarsh. IT was ninety years since the lawyer had last seen Rejuvenal. And now, after all those decades of unremitting toil, he saw it again -- a small purple blob on the vidar screen, a hundred thousand miles away -- a blob that would grow and grow until it filled the entire screen. Soon the distant harmony of light and shade would break up, throwing into relief the jagged peaks and plunging crevices that formed the surface of the planet. He watched it, fascinated, wondering whether this approach was to be his last, or whether he would be asking himself the same questions a thousand years to come. Perhaps it was this moment above all others that made the endless months of scraping and self-sacrifice suddenly worthwhile. "It won't run away," said a voice beside him. He turned his wrinkled and benign, her keen blue eyes regarding him with quizzical humor. "I'm so sorry," he said. "I didn't know you were here." "Oh, don't apologize, Mr. Delman. It's just that you've seen it all before, so I'm the one who should be excited." The lawyer nodded. "Yes," he admitted, " you've got something to be excited about. Years ago, longer than either of us would want to remember, I saw you on the stage. It was one of the important moments in my life. You see, before then, I'd always regarded 'beauty' and 'perfection' as abstract qualities. I was wrong. Are you going back to the theatre?" moment. "No," she replied finally. "I did intend to and, after your flattery, I almost feel I should, but I've been thinking over what you said a few weeks back -- you know, about us being careers rather, than flesh and blood. Mind you, I don't agree completely; we're not as bad as all that. No, it's more the feeling that I've lived one sort of life and it would be stupid to repeat the same thing over again. This time, I'd like to marry and have a family and settle down -- all the ordinary things. Does that sound sensible?" "Very sensible," said Curtis Delman. the vidar screen. The planet had grown larger. Already it was possible to make out the rippling serrulation of contours. Another hour and the spaceboat would rest motionless on the purple rock. "Somehow it's frightening -- " idea that Nature can work back to front, reverse the aging process." "It's not an idea," he said. "It's a fact." "Yes, I know," she replied, "but it's still uncanny. I've so many doubts. I mean will I really look the same? And my mind? Oh, they've told me there's no change -- but there must be!" She buried her head in her hands. Delman looked at her with compassion. "You needn't worry," he said. "Nothing can go wrong. The memory remains unimpaired; it's only the ability to make use of it that suffers -- the knowledge is at your disposal. You'll be just like other young people, heedless and disinclined to profit from experience. You see, the mind is like a machine; you press the right buttons and it draws the right conclusion. The buttons are the facts to be considered and their selection is a matter of judgment. When we're young, our judgment is often at fault. When we're very young, we can't reason at all. There's nothing to fear -- only youthful exuberance." Before she could answer, the loudspeaker buzzed twice. There was a moment of silence, broken by the voice of Captain Ross. "Attention, please! Attention, please! Will all passengers kindly retire to their cabins. The forward jets will be fired in exactly five minutes. I repeat, will all passengers -- " I T was cool on the veranda, though outside, an alien sun beat down on the smooth expanse of runway, a narrow platform, less than a mile in length -- the only flat stretch of land on the planet. Along the far edge, mountains, bathed in sunlight, rose in barren splendor, their sharp peaks reaching for the sky, while, on each remaining side, the ground dropped sheer away, to reform itself in twisting valleys thousands of feet below. The house, two stories of prefabricated metal, stood perched on one of the outer corners. Opposite, packed tightly against the rock face, the emergency hangar rose in a gentle curve -- a sheen of aluminum in contrast with the purple background of rejuvenite. Between them, the launching ramp stretched lengthwise down the runway, inclining steeply for the first fifty feet, then leveling out so that the cruel blast of the takeoff would be dispersed harmlessly over the edge of the precipice. A few small store sheds were the only other signs of habitation. It was too hot to do anything constructive. They relaxed in their deck-chairs, grateful for the way in which the fans moved the monotonous heat into unexpected currents of warm air. Walter Pellinger looked upward expectantly, a sudden movement that caused the little beads of perspiration on his head to run together and course down his neck in a steady stream. He ran a handkerchieif around the inside of his collar. "What's the time?" he asked. "Quarter past ten," said Tarsh. "All right, Jason, you've had your fun. Now perhaps you'll consult the right dial. We'd all like to know." "I can never get used to these Murray. "It makes one feel so restless." Curtis Delman frowned in mock reproof. The lawyer was in his prime, the natural strength of his features enhanced by the iron-gray hair and powerful physique... ought to be thankful it's summer. At least, you've got three hours of daylight." "Well, I can't understand it," said John Bridge. "We've been here sixty Earth days and the sun always sets at the same time." "Nonsense," Delman replied. "It's been later each day. Though not much, I grant you. Remember, summer still has nine years to run." "Will someone please tell me the time?" said Walter Pellinger. Jason Tarsh regarded him with approval. "That's much better. It's two o'clock." O F the five of them, John Bridge and Jason Tarsh were the least changed. True, that 'lucky fool,' as Walter Pellinger called Bridge, had lost a good deal of weight and his face was not quite so full as it had been, but it was the same John Bridge who had climbed on board at Jupiter. The change in Jason Tarsh was even less marked. Time had ironed out a few creases here and there, and his back was straighter. But, apart from that, he looked the same at fifty as he had at a hundred -- gaunt, resilient and merciless. "It's due anytime now," said Walter Pellinger, his eyes still fixed on the empty segment of horizon above the near end of the runway. The others remained silent. The lawyer imagined that they were all thinking of the incoming spaceboat. The landing today was something like a dress-rehearsal for their own departure in thirty days. It broke the tedium of their existence and with it would come a change of staff, theunloading of supplies and the news from home. But when the next landing took place, they themselves would be waiting, young and eager, to go back and start life afresh. toward the door behind them, her lovely profile turned in his direction. He followed the line of her gaze. There, in the hallway, stood the two house servants, man and wife. They had both arrived on the relief spaceboat a month ago, a comfortable, middle-aged couple. Now they were almost like children, leaping up and down with impatience, counting every second which brought Captain Ross nearer -- young, graceful creatures, hand in hand, reunited in their youth. Delman found himself smiling in sympathy. "Yes," he said, "those are the vital years." "I was just thinking the same thing." She turned to him. There were tears of happiness in her eyes. At that moment, he caught a glimpse of her real beauty, something deeper than the merely physical -- a purity of expression mirrored from within, clear and composed, like a reflection of the soul. "There it is!" Walter Pellinger announced excitedly. He pointed. Out in the distance, a small speck hurtled toward them. Soon it would streak low overhead, until a final burst from the jets brought it to a halt at the far end of the runway. The two young servants could restrain themselves no longer. Oblivious to danger, they began to run down the side of the landing-strip, racing toward a spot parallel to where they knew the spaceboat would draw to a standstill. It was John Bridge who noticed them. The others were all looking in the opposite direction. He leaped to his feet and dashed outside. "Come back!" he yelled. "For God's sake, come back! You'll get caught by the blast!" paid no heed to him. He ran on after them, trying to make himself heard, forgetful of his own peril. "Look!" The strong fingers of Jason Tarsh dug deep into the lawyer's arm. Delman turned instinctively. Nearly four hundred yards away, three figures stumbled back toward the house. "It's too late," Delman said. "Get down, all of you! If Ross sees them, he may try to overshoot. If he's going too slowly, he'll have to use the rear jets and they might splash us. Get down!" They flattened themselves out on the floor of the veranda. Above them, the thin whine of the approaching craft switched into a deep roar, then cut out almost instantly. Delman saw the flash of silver overhead as the spaceboat fought to recover altitude. One moment, it was climbing; the next, it veered sharply to the left and hit the cliff. Sound and light combined, deafening and dazzling, as the force of the explosion thrust outward, tearing at the foundations of the house itself. When the hail of falling rock had died away, they got up and looked around them. It was difficult to determine the extent of the damage, for dust swirled and eddied in all directions. Only gradually did the details emerge from the surrounding mist. The crash had caused a small avalanche. Rubble littered the smooth width of the runway. Of the spaceboat, there was nothing to be seen but a scar on the mountainside. John Bridge and the two servants had vanished. "That crazy old fool," said Walter Pellinger. "I might have known he'd mess things up." ray replied. "I think it was the servants. I'm sure I heard him shout a warning at them." "You think! You think!" Walter Pellinger shook his head vigorously from side to side. His ears were still ringing from the blast. "He's dead, Miss Murray. You hear me? He's dead! He doesn't need a champion now!" you ungrateful -- " "Shut up, both of you!" said Jason Tarsh angrily. "Can't you see there's work to be done? We've got to clear the runway." Curtis Delman left the veranda rail and came toward them. "And just how do you propose to do that, Mr. Tarsh?" he asked quietly. A LL of them looked at the lawyer in amazement. Jason Tarsh laughed derisively. "Listen to him!" he exclaimed. "The Great Man! Wants to know how you remove a few small stones!" "You damned idiot!" said Delman savagely."Use your eyes! Why were this house and the storage sheds prefabricated? Just for the hell of it? Dozens of useless trips when you could build what you wanted from rock? Until today, there wasn't a loose pebble in this godforsaken place! Didn't that strike you as odd? Well, didn't it?" Tarsh made no reply. The lawyer moved back to the veranda rail. "There!" he said, pointing at a near-lying stone the size of a tennis ball. "Go ahead, try your strength. Throw it over the side!" Uncertainly, Jason Tarsh walked into the open. They watched him as he bent down to pick up the small purple lump. For nearly a minute, he strained and tugged at the dead, unyielding weight in front of him. Then, slowly, he straightened up and returned to the veranda. "You're right," he said grudgingly. "I couldn't lift it." Delman nodded. "Considering it's more than ten times the weight of lead, that's not surpris   mg. "Anyhow, there's one consolation," said Jason Tarsh. "We weren't on that spaceboat." The lawyer regarded him with pity. "No, we weren't," he said, "but whether it's a consolation remains to be seen." "What are you driving at?" demanded Walter Pellinger. "They'll send a rescue party. They must know there's something wrong." "Oh, yes," Delman agreed. "But they don't know what and we can't tell them. And, even if they did know, what could they do?" He began to stroll up and down the veranda. "As far as they're concerned, Ross hasn't reported to Algon. Perhaps his transmitter failed. Perhaps he blew up in space. There are plenty of possibilities. If they treat the matter as an emergency, the relief boat may get here in twenty-eight days instead of thirty. But it can't land and it can't hover, so what good is it to us?" "Now wait, Delman. You know the reputation of Rejuvenal Enterprises. A company like that can't afford to take a risk. They'll send for a patrol ship -- " "And those patrol ships are equipped with heli-cars," Tarsh interjected. "They can launch a couple and pick us up in no time. It's not difficult." Pellinger nodded in agreement. "There you are. And Jason ought to know; he's spent most of his life dodging them." with distaste. "I remember now. You were the man who shipped girls to Mercury and got run in under Section # of the White Slavery Act. Ten years, wasn't it?" "That's right," Jason Tarsh answered, "but there's no need to the old commercial custom of supply and demand." His thin lips broke into a smile. "Know what they used to call me in the camps? 'The Miner's Best Friend.' Nice of them, eh?" "Was it? They gave the same name to their canaries in the old days -- and most of those were killed by fire-damp. But to get back to your mythical patrol ship -- where do you expect it to come from? You know as well as I do, they keep to the main spaceways. We're tucked away in a remote corner of the Galaxy. There's one chance in a thousand that a patrol ship is within fortyfive days of here." The color drained from Walter Pellinger's face. "Why fortyfive?" he whispered. The lawyer paused before replying. They were grouped around him in a half-circle, three frightened people waiting for an answer, yet knowing in their hearts what that answer would be. He shrugged. "I should have thought it was obvious," he said. "Qf course, I've no wish to alarm you and there is a method that might get us out of here, but we've got to face the facts. I was the only one among you whose legs had already begun to fail, so it's safe to assume I'm the oldest inhabitant. In forty-five days, I shall be ten -- the rest of you will be less -- and I can't guarantee to look after you any longer than that." He fell silent, allowing the implication to sink in. Walter Pellinger. "I've paid sevHe began to laugh hysterically. "Stop it, you fool!" Jason Tarsh caught him by the shoulders and began to shake him violently. "You've paid seven Why, you ought to be tickled pink. Remember the slogan of Galactic Stores -- 'Originality is the Test of Taste!' " yer's hand. "Curtis, you said something about a method." He pointed at the emergency hangar over on the far side. "There's a lifeboat in there. It may have been damaged by the blast, so don't pin your hopes on it. But if we can shift the loose stones and get the doors open, we'll soon know." Arm in arm, they walked across the landing strip. over the runway, sweeping round in a gigantic circle. Then it changed course and climbed steeply into the stratosphere. They watched it disappear out of sight -- the last link with the world they knew. In the center of the landing strip, a dense column of smoke billowed up from a pile of smoldering moss -- a warning that no pilot could fail to observe. In the stillness, it rose in a tall spiral, twisting and turning, signaling to the winds. "You should've let it land." Walter Pellinger was almost in tears; he blinked miserably. him like this, small, myopic, with fair hair and sloping shoulders. The structure of his eyes had changed during the intervening weeks and the contact lenses he'd worn until recently were quite useless to him. Now, at twenty-one, he was half-blind and of little practical help to them. "They didn't stand a chance," the lawyer replied. "Oh, but they did! On the Law of Probability, they had one in sixty-seven -- and our lives are worth a thousand of theirs." "Yes, I know. Our lives are essential to humanity. You've said it all before and I still disagree with you." "Have I? I don't remember." "You have. But it doesn't matter. Come on back. We've gob to clear those stones. There aren't . many left." As he strode toward the hangar, the lawyer knew that the days were running short. True, the launching ramp was intact and one door of the hangar was already open; but it would take at least a week to remove the chunks of rejuvenite blocking the remaining door. Tarsh and himself had done most of the heavy work. Yet even Tarsh, with all his feline strength, was beginning to tire. The constant effort to make use of every scrap of daylight was proving too much for them. boat was unharmed. Delman hadn't the time to inspect it properly. But the very position of the hangar, squeezed tight against the cliffside, had given it the best protection possible. No, if only they could remove those stones! Delman exhaustedly picked up his discarded crowbar. He inserted the point under a slab of rejuvenite, thrust down and pried with all his strength. As it tilted, metal underneath to hold it in place. The teamwork was repeated time after time, until at last the slab toppled over, gaining them another twelve inches. They rested for a moment. Then the whole endless process started once again. By dusk, they had removed five stones.  laxed in the living room, lying back in the padded comfort of the aripchairs. Only Jason Tarsh remained standing -- slim and compact, like a young Oriental despot -- his eyes fixed on Walter Pellinger. Pellinger squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. "I think I'll try and get some sleep," he said. "Just a moment, Walter," Tarsh lifted a restraining hand. "You're a businessman and I want your advice. It's quite a simple problem. Imagine that four of your employees are stranded on a desert island with very little food. And suppose they all agree to build a raft on which to escape and get back to the head office -- what you might call a 'joint venture.' Now let us also suppose that three of those people work hard, cut down trees and fashion them into planks, gather creepers and braid them into ropes, and generally do all they can to further the common purpose. But the fourth, Walter -- and this is the point -- the fourth does nothing. He eats the food -- Company food, mind you! -- so urgently needed to keep up the strength of the -- " "Why do you keep picking on me? I do all I can." Walter Pellinger got out of his chair. "You?" said Jason Tarsh, affecting amazement. "Who said anything about you? Why, you're the last person I'd criticize. But I see you wish to leave the lovebirds to themselves, so let's finish our little chat outside. It's a fine night." He steered the unveranda. "Well, shall we take a hint and Murray suggested. Delman watched with admiration as she crossed the room, clean-limbed and graceful, her long red hair falling from the crown of her head in a soft cascade. "Never be discourteous to the cook," he replied. "That was one of my earliest lessons. And, heaven knows, you're an unusually attractive cook. It gives one an appetite just to look at you." He got up to join her -- a bearded giant, tall and deep-chested, like the heroes of the Viking sagas. "What will you do when we get back?" she asked. "Marry and get some job that won't take me away from you. Does that meet with your approval?" "Yes," she said. "If that's a proposal, it will do nicely." They kissed with all the intensity of young love, losing in their embrace the dread of time which swept them toward their childhood. "Curtis," she said quietly, "have we any hope? Please be honest!" of her neck lightly, up and down, not altering their tender rythm. "Not much," he said without emotion. "Jason was right about the food. There's' very little left; the supplies were on the spaceboat. You're all hungry. I know you  are. "It's not only that, darling. Sleep is just as important. But we can't spare the time. Every day now, we'll be growing physically weaker and the same job will soon take us twice as long. There's so much to do. And we've got to plan all of it in advance, while our minds are still adult." "Is that why you've got the recording machine down here?" "It may sound idiotic," he said, "but I can't remember my boyhood -- it was four hundred years ago. Today, I'm twenty-five, you're twenty, and Walter is somewhere between the two of us. Jason, I'm sure, is less -- how much, I don't know. The fact is that we'll be children before we leave -- that is, if we leave -- and we'll only be able to understand the simple things. So it seemed essential to clarify the lifeboat instructions; the manual would be complete nonsense to a child. Of course, I've added some general advice as it occurred to me." I'll like being married to you," she said. "You think of everything. May I switch on the recording machine?" "Go ahead," he replied. "It will take a few seconds to warm up, though." She kissed him lightly, then uncurled herself and went over to the recorder. The purr of the machine gradually increased in pitch until it passed from the range of human hearing. The silence was broken by his own voice. "Curtis!" it said, "Curtis! Do not touch the controls until you and Jason are all in the cabin. Are they all there? Good. Then pull the big lever toward you. Now -- " Jason Tarsh entered the room and switched off the machine. "You can delete Walter," he said. He began to ape the slow, earnest delivery of the recorder. "For he is a sill-y boy and fell o-ver the edge of the cliff." He smiled and continued in normal tones, "Very unfortunate. Should never have left him alone, poor guy. Blind as a bat. Oh, well, bigger breakfasts tomorrow. Good night." TT was noon. The whole ledge shimmered in the sun, hazy and indistinct, as the rising currents of air dispersed the light in a jumble of refracted motion. On the runway, between the hangar and the house, stood a nine-year-old boy. A small, motionless figure, with a towel around his waist and his feet bandaged for protection against the blistering heat of the rock, he gazed up in triumph at the launching ramp. There, perched on the summit of the ramp, lay the squat, powerful bulk of the lifeboat. He turned and ran joyfully back to the house. "Jill!" he called"Jill, come and play! And bring Jason with you." A little girl, her red hair unbrushed, stepped out onto the veranda. "Don't want to bwing Jason," she said, "He's mean." "You must bring Jason," he insisted, "or you can't play." "What we going to play?" " 'Ships,' " he said. He pointed to the top of the launching ramp. Silently, the two children trudged across the rock-face and began to climb the steep slope of the ramp, leaning forward to retain their balance. Tucked up in arms, Jason Tarsh bawled hungrily. Higher and higher they climbed, the only living creatures in a purple world, striving toward their goal. Curtis Delman, hampered by the weight of the recording machine, kept urging her to keep up with him. Suddenly, she stopped. "Don't want to play," she said. "I'm tired." She sat down on the hot metal of the ramp, placing the baby beside her. He let her rest for a few minutes, then tried to coax her to carry on. "You're a sissy," he said. "You're afraid!" Her eyes brimmed with tears'. "I'm not a sissy," she cried. "I'm not! I'm not! I'm not" Delman turned and continued chanted over and over again. Panting with weariness and indignation, she struggled after him. They had covered more than half the distance before he looked back. He saw her following and prepared to go on again. Then he realized something was wrong and swung around, startled. Her hands were empty! "Where's Jason?" he cried out. S HE was too exhausted to reply and stared at him blankly. Putting down the recording machine, he ran past her. Some twenty yards away, the bundle of blanket that was Jason Tarsh began to roll gently down the slope. He raced after it, his swift young legs moving as easily and painlessly as pistons. He reached the bundle just before the change in gradient which marked the first half of the ramp. Horrified, he increased his speed. Propelled by the sharp incline, the bundle branched off at a tangent. He caught it just as it was about to plunge over the side. When he picked up the blanket, it was curiously light. There was nothing inside it. Very slowly, he clambered back up the slope. he put his arm around her shoulders. "Don't worry," he said. "Jason was too small to play." Taking her by the hand, he led her to the short, vertical ladder which led into the lifeboat. After the harsh glare of the sun, the cabin seemed dark and strange. What light there was was filtered through six small portholes -- three on either side -- in which the glass was tinted a deep blue. It took him nearly ten minutes harness, and by the time he had adjusted his own, she was asleep. He stretched out his right hand and switched on the recorder. "Curtis!" it began. Calmly, he carried out the instructions. The deep, commanding voice left nothing to chance. A pull on the master lever drew up the ladder and closed the hatch in hydraulic silence. The soft whistle of oxygen escaped from pressurized cylinders. An automatic transmitter broadcast an endless S.O.S. Deep in the heart of the lifeboat, dynamos pulsed with the throb of power. "Now, Curtis," said the voice from the past, "turn the red switch in front of you to 'Fixed Control.' Have you turned the red switch to 'Fixed Control'? Then lie back and fasten your safety harness as tight as you can. Have you done that?" "Yeah," Curtis said, lying back. "You've done everything you had to do," the voice continued. "Now shut your eyes and don't move! Everything will be all right. The two of you will reach Earth. You don't doubt that, do you?" "No," said Curtis, closing his eyes and relaxing, reassured by the voice from the past. "I know we'll get there." "And the two of you will get married when you're old enough. To each other, of course." "Of course," Curtis agreed. "Good luck!" said the voice. "Good luck to you both!" It clicked off then and the lifeboat sped Earthward. (Continued from page #) part of the reason. There is also the nuisance and embarrassment of having to spell unfamiliar names. And this applies not only to immigrants from Europe and Asia. Jim Thorpe and Col. Ely Samuel Parker were Indians. So known to us as Sitting Bull. In his chapter on clothing, Stewart says, "When we Earthlings at last begin to colonize... whatever planet is next in line, we may find it already inhabited... If so, it is to be hoped that we... assume that these natives are not altogether foolish in the adjustments that they have made to tjieir environment... Probably, of course, we... shall stick by our own clothing along with our other customs, and shall be vastly uncomfortable and die by thousands... Certainly we shall have the precedent of those first colonists who came to America." That precedent was a horrifying one; clad in outrageously unsuitable clothing, they died of exposure in the fierce New England winters, of sunstroke in the equally fierce Southern summers. If they had adopted Indian dress, they would have survived. But we have borrowed exactly one article of clothing from the Indians -- the moccasin! of a civilization remains remarkably fixed. While, elsewhere in the world, women were a drug on the market, they had great scarcity value in a frontier society. The situation has been completely reversed, yet the attitude has not been changed. Philip Wylie, the noted thinker, incorrectly attributes this to "Momism." An odd offshoot is the high rate of divorce and remarriage, which Stewart properly recognizes as idealism, not moral breakdown. On the basis of past rigidity, he feels we probably will not be any more flexible when we reach the other planets. I'm afraid he may be right. Wherever at all possible, we undoubtedly will cling to Earthstyle ways of life, however wildly inadequate and even suicidal. Environment will dictate eating habits and choice of building materials... . but mostly because of freight costs. 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Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world, copy of t'The Mas: tery of Life -- A noaprafit organiza tfon Address : ::iii;Scribe L.T.K. Scribe L.T.K. San Jose. California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may leam to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address. City State IOT very long ago, debunk' ers were about as numerous as bison. Now, in only a couple of decades, they've become almost extinct and should be given Federal protection. It's a pity that the breed is vanishing. They did no harm, for anything valid that stood in their way was not toppled by their trampling rush, and they did uproot a stupendous amount of societal rubbish that we're better off without. Well, at . least we still have Bergen Evans, a very happy bison indeed, whose The Spoor of Spooks (Knopf) is a joyous romp through the lush fields of "scientific" nonsense. Charles Fort would have used this rich book as another ax in his crusade, being faster on the drawing of conclusions than the researchers he was lambasting. Evans is just as quick to demolish irrational belief, even though he quotes Shaw on the law of the conservation of credulity: "the dispelling of one illusion seems to create a vacuum which draws in another." And Evans is as unable as Fort to resist overstatement, ridicule and outrageous puns. Nevertheless, both are fine sources of ideas. I wish I could explore The Spoor of Spooks more fully than these two pages allow -- Evans takes on everything from dowsing to idiocies in the law -- but one chapter is especially important in view of a thematic trend in science fiction. Evans calls it "Psi-ing in the Carolines" -- I warned you about his puns -- and his target for tonight is Dr. Joseph B. Rhine of Duke University, the champion of extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. For years now. I've been waiting sympathetically for good news from Durham, N. C. Let Evans tell you why there hasn't been any: "The existence of Psi has chiefly been determined, to the satisfaction of those who believe in it, by the fact that certain people have allegedly at certain times identified certain cards slightly more often than certain other people believe constitutes chance expectancy... He (Dr. Rhine) does not claim that his best performers can demonstrate have demonstrated it .# or .# 'above chance'; and he must surely know that, under the circumstances l;e describes, truly scientific experimenters would make an allowance of that much or more for error of record." Incidentally, the cards used are not normal decks; there are # special cards in five suits. This gives the subject a one-infive chance at each guess. Evans insists that a norm should be established by giving tests to large numbers of people. Then the exceptional person should be tested "until the results are stable, no longer altered by additional experiments. Then, and then only, can the tester be sure that he has established a difference between the individual and the group," But Rhine won't do that, any more than he has agreed to intersperse blank cards in his special deck, claiming that "this would be a form of deception." When "promising" subjects begin slipping, he breaks off the experiment. But he keeps the positive findings as "evidence!" Evans' appropriate comment is that, still better than winning at dice by quitting when you're ahead, "It would be even easier if you didn't have to play for keeps until you started to win and were allowed to ignore some of your bad runs because they weren't up to normal!" Rhine claims that most scientists believe he has proved the existence of Psi. But "hundreds of thousands of tests have been made with his own cards without finding anyone who could guess them more accurately than chance expectancy would indicate." It's true that "Those who belive in Psi... forget the prophecies that don't come true, the premonitions that prove groundless... The ultimate test of the validity of any experiment is that those who repeat it will get the same result." Yes -- once method and tools are found. Fire, for example, was used long before Man knew how to make it. Not being able to make it didn't mean there was no such thing. Evans hasn't proved his point any more than Rhine has. Like Flying Saucers, there's something there. We don't know what, but neither can we dismiss it by debunking tactics alone. Whatever it is, though. Dr. Rhine's odd approach is more likely to obscure than locate it. A dismal fact, for we'd like it to be otherwise, but, to be entirely practical, we'd do well to look elsewhere for the latest news on Mastodon what they wanted was routine -- diplomatic recognition, a trade agreement and Point Four aid -- for a nation that didn't existi T he chief of protocol said, "Mr. Hudson of -- ah -- Mastodonia." The secretary of state held out his hand. "I'm glad to see you, Mr. Hudson. I understand you've been here several times." "That's right," said Hudson. "I had a hard time making your people believe I was in earnest." "And are you, Mr. Hudson?" "Believe me, sir, I would not try to fool you." "And this Mastodonia," said the secretary, reaching down to tap the document upon the desk. "You will pardon me, but I've never heard of it." "It's a new nation," Hudson explained, "but quite legitimate. We have a constitution, a democratic form of government, duly elected officials and a code of laws. We are a free, peace-loving people and we are possessed of a vast amount of natural resources and -- " "Please tell me, sir," interrupted the secretary, "just where are you located?" "Technically, you are our nearest neighbors." "But that is ridiculous!" exploded Protocol. "Not at all," insisted Hudson. "If you will give me a moment, Mr. Secretary, I have considerable evidence." He brushed the fingers of Protocol off his sleeve and stepped forward to the desk, laying down the portfolio he carried. "Go ahead, Mr. Hudson," said the secretary. "Why don't we all sit down and be comfortable while we talk this over?" "You have my credentials, I  see. Now here is a propos -- " "I have a document signed by a certain Wesley Adams." "He's our first president," said Hudson. "Our George Washington, you might say." "What is the purpose of this visit, Mr. Hudson?" "We'd like to establish diplomatic relations. We think it would be to our mutual benefit. After all, we are a sister republic in perfect sympathy with your policies and aims. We'd like to negotiate trade agreements and we'd be grateful for some Point Four aid." The secretary smiled. "Naturally. Who doesn't?" "We're prepared to offer something in return," Hudson told him stiffly. "For one thing, we could offer sanctuary." "Sanctuary!" "I understand," said Hudson, "that in the present state of international tensions, a foolproof sanctuary is not something to be sneezed at." The secretary turned stone cold. "I'm an extremely busy man." Protocol took Hudson firmly by the arm. "Out you go." G eneral Leslie Bowers put in a call to State and got the secretary. "I don't like to bother you. Herb," he said, "but there's something I want to check. Maybe you can help me." "Glad to help you if I can." "There's a fellow hanging around out here at the Pentagon, trying to get in to see me. Said I was the only one he'd talk to, but you know how it is." "I certainly do." "Name of Huston or Hudson or something like that." "He was here just an hour or so ago," said the secretary. "Crackpot sort of fellow." "He's gone now?" "Yes. I don't think he'll be back." "Did he say where you could reach him?" "No, I don't believe he did." "How did he strike you? I mean what kind of impression did you get of him?" "I told you. A crackpot." "I suppose he is. He said something to one of the colonels that got me worrying. Can't pass up an#Tthing, you know -- not in the Dirty Tricks Department. Even if it's crackpot, these days you got to have a look at it." "He offered sanctuary," said the secretary indignantly. "Can you imagine that!" "He's been making the rounds, I guess," the general said. "He some sort of tale about knowing where there were vast uranium told me he was heading your way." "We get them all the time. Usually we can ease them out. This Hudson was just a little better than the most of them. He got in to see me." "He told the colonel something about having a plan that would enable us to establish secret bases an#here we wished, even in the territory of potential enemies. I know it sounds crazy..." "Forget it, Les." "You're probably right," said the general, "but this idea sends me. Can you imagine the look on their Iron Curtain faces?" HE scared little government clerk, darting conspiratorial glances all about him, brought "I found it in a bar down the street," he told the man who took him in tow. "Been going there for years. And I found this portfolio laying in the booth. I saw the man who must have left it there and I tried to find him later, but I couldn't." "How do you know he left it there?" "I just figured he did. He left the booth just as I came in and it was sort of dark in there and it took a minute to see this thing laying there. You see, I always take the same booth every day and Joe sees me come in and he brings me the usual and -- " "You saw this man leave the booth you usually sit in?" "That's right;" "Then you saw the portfolio." "Yes, sir." "You tried to find the man, thinking it must have been his." "That's exactly what I did." "But by the time you went to look for him, he had disappeared." "That's the way it was." "Now tell me -- why did ybu bring it here? Why didn't you turn it in to the management so the man could come back and claim it?" "Well, sir, it was like this. I had a drink or two and I was wondering all the time what was in that portfolio. So finally I took a peek and -- " "And what you saw decided you to bring it here to us." "That's right. I saw -- " "Don't tell me what you saw. Give me your name and address and don't say anything about this. You understand that we're grateful to you for thinking of us, but we'd rather you said nothing." "Mum's the word," the little clerk assured him, full of vast importance. Amberly, Smithsonian expert on paleontology. "We've got something. Doctor, that we'd like you to have a look at. A lot of movie film." "I'll be most happy to. I'll come down as soon as I get clear. End of the week, perhaps?" "This is very urgent. Doctor. Damnest thing you ever saw. Big, shaggy elephants and tigers with teeth down to their necks. There's a beaver the size of a bear." "Fakes," said Amberly, disgusted. "Clever gadgets. Camera angles." "That's what we thought first, but there are no gadgets, no camera angles. This is the real McCoy." "I'm on my way," the paleontologist said, hanging up. Snide item in smug, smartaleck gossip column: Saucers are passS at the Pentagon. There's another mystery that's got the high brass very high, II and Secretary of State John Cooper sat glumly under a tree in the capital of Mastodonia and waited for the ambassador extraordinary to return. "I tell you, Wes," said Cooper, who, under various pseudonyms, was also the secretaries of commerce, treasury and war, "this is a crazy thing we did. What if Chuck can't get back? They might throw him in jail or something might happen to the time unit or the helicopter. We should have gone along." "We had to stay," Adams said. "You know what would happen to this camp and our supplies if we weren't around here to guard them." "The only thing that's given us any trouble is that old mastodon. If he comes around again, I'm going to take a skillet and bang him in the brisket."' "That isn't the only reason, either," said President Adams, "and you know it. We can't go deserting this nation now that we've created it. We have to keep possession. Just planting a flag and saying it's ours wouldn't be enough. We might be called upon for proof that we've established residence. Something like the old homestead laws, you know." "We'U establish residence sure enough," growled Secretary Cooper, "if something happens to that time imit or the helicopter." "You think they'll do it, Johnny?" "Who do what?" "The United States. Do you think they'll recognize us?" "Not if they know who we are." "That's what I'm afraid of." "Chuck will talk them into it. He can talk the skin right off a cat." "Sometimes I think we're going at this wrong. Sure, Chuck's got the long-range view and I suppose it's best. But maybe what we ought to do is grab a good, fast profit and get out of here. We could take in himting parties at ten thousand a head or maybe we could lease it to a movie company." "We can do all that and do it legally and with full protection," Cooper told him, "if we can get ourselves recognized as a sovereign nation. If we negotiate a mutual defense pact, no one would dare get hostile because we could squawk to Uncle Sam." "All you say is true," Adan agreed, "but there are going to be questions. It isn't just a matter of walking into Washington and getting recognition. They'll want to know about us, such as our population. What if Chuck has to tell them it's a total of three persons?" wouldn't answer that way, Wes. He'd duck the question or give them some diplomatic double-talk. After all, how can we be sure there are only three of us? We took over the whole continent, remember." "You know well enough, Johnny, there are no other humans back here in North America. The farthest back any scientist will place the migrations from Asia is # years. They haven't got here yet." "Maybe we should have done it differently," mused Cooper. "Maybe we should have included the whole world in our proclamation, not just the continent. That way, we could claim quite a population." "It wouldn't have held water. Even as it is, we went a little further than precedent allows. The old explorers usually laid claim to certain watersheds. They'd find a river and lay claim to all the territory drained by the river. They didn't go grabbing off whole continents." "That's because they were never sure of exactly what they had," said Cooper. "We are. We have what you might call the advantage of hindsight." He leaned back against the tree and stared across the land. It was a pretty place, he thought -- the rolling ridges covered by vast grazing areas and small groves, the forest-covered, ten-mile river valley. And everywhere one looked, the grazing herds of mastodon, giant bison and wild horses, with the less gregarious fauna scattered hit and miss. Old Buster, the troublesome mastodon, a lone bull which had been probably run out of a herd by a younger rival, stood at the edge of a grove a quarter-mile away. He had his head down and was curling and uncurling his trunk in an aimless sort of way while he teetered slowly in a lazy-crazy fashion by lifting first one foot and then another. The old cuss was lonely. Cooper told himself. That was why he hung around like a homeless dog -- except that he was too big and awkward to have much pet-appeal and, more than likely, his temper was unstable. The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm and the air, it seemed to Cooper, was the freshest he had ever smelled. It was, altogether, a very pleasant place, an Indian-summer sort of land, ideal for a Sunday picnic or a camping trip. T he breeze was just enough to float out from its flagstaff before the tent the national banner of Mastodonia -- a red rampant mastodon upon a field of green ferns. "You know, Johnny," said Adams, "there's one thing that worries me a lot. If we're going to base our claim on precedent, we may be way off base. The old explorers always claimed their discoveries for their nations or their king, never for themselves." "The principle was entirely different," Cooper told him. "Nobody ever did anything for himself in those days. Everyone was always under someone else's proIll tection. The explorers either were financed by their governments or were sponsored by them or operated under a royal charter or a patent. With us, it's different. Ours is a private enterprise. You dreamed up the time unit and built it. The three of us chipped in to buy the helicopter. We've paid all of our expenses out of our own pockets. We never got a dime from anyone. We never represented anyone. What we found is ours." "I hope you're right," said Adams uneasily. Old Buster had moved out from the grove and was shuffling warily toward the camp. Adams picked up the rifle that lay across his knees. "Wait," said Cooper sharply. "Maybe he's just bluffing. It would be a shame to plaster him; he's such a nice old guy." Adams half raised the rifle. "I'll give him three steps more," he announced. "I've had enough of him." Suddenly a roar burst out of the air just above their heads. The two leaped to their feet. "It's Chuck!" Cooper yelled. "He's back!" The helicopter made a halfturn of the camp and came rapidly to Earth. Trumpeting with terror. Old Buster was a dwindling dot far down the grassy ridge. T hey built the nightly fires circling the camp to keep out the animals. "It'll be the death of me yet," said Adams wearily, "cutting all this wood." "We have to get to work on that stockade," Cooper said. "We've fooled around too long. Some night, fire or no fire, a herd of mastodon will come busting in here and if they ever hit the helicopter, we'll be dead ducks. It wouldn't take more than just five seconds to turn us into Robinson Crusoes of the Pleistocene." "Well, now that this recognition thing has petered out on us," said Adams, "maybe we can get down to business." "Trouble is," Cooper answered, "we spent about the last of our money on the chain saw to cut this wood and on Chuck's trip to Washington. To build a stockade, we need a tractor. We'd kill ourselves if we tried to rassle that many logs bare-handed." "Maybe we could catch some of those horses running around out there." "Have you ever broken a horse?" "No, that's one thing I never tried." "Me, either. How about you. Chuck?" "Not me," said the ex-ambassador extraordinary bluntly. Cooper squatted down beside the coals of the cooking fire and twirled the spit. Upon the spit were three grouse and half a dozen quail. The huge coffee pot was sending out a nose-tingling aroma. Biscuits were baking in the reflector. "We've been here six weeks," he said, "and we're still living in a tent and cooking on an open fire. We better get busy and get something done." "The stockade first," said Adams, "and that means a tractor." "We could use the helicopter." "Do you want to take the chance? That's our getaway. Once something happens to it..." "I guess not," Cooper admitted, gulping. "We could use some of that Point Four aid right now," commented Adams. "They threw me out," said Hudson. "Everywhere I went, sooner or later they got around to throwing me out. They were real organized about it." 'Well, we tried," Adams said. "And to top it off," added Hudson, "I had to go and lose all that film and now we'll have to waste our time taking more of it. Personally, I don't ever want to let another saber-tooth get that close to me while I hold the camera." "You didn't have a thing to worry about," Adams objected. "Johnny was right there behind you with the gun." "Yeah, with the muzzle about a foot from my head when he let go" "I stopped him, didn't I?" demanded Cooper. "With his head right in my lap." "Maybe we won't have to take any more pictures," Adams suggested. "We'll have to," Cooper said. "There are sportsmen up ahead who'd fork over ten thousand bucks easy for two weeks of hunting here. But before we could sell them on it, we'd have to show them movies. That scene with the saber-tooth would cinch it." "If it didn't scare them off," Hudson pointed out "The last few feet showed nothing but the inside of his throat." looked unhappy. "I don't like the whole setup. As soon as we bring someone in, the news is sure to leak. And once the word gets out, there'll be guys lying in ambush for us -- maybe even nations -- scheming to steal the knowhow, legally or violently. That's what scares me the most about those films I lost. Someone will find them and they may guess what it's all about, but I'm hoping they either won't believe it or can't manage to trace us." "We could swear the hunting parties to secrecy," said Cooper. "How could a sportsman keep still about the mounted head of a saber-tooth or a record piece of ivory? And the same thing would apply to anyone we approached. Some university could raise dough to send a team of scientists back here and a movie company would cough up plenty to use this place as a location for a caveman epic. But it wouldn't be worth a thing to either of them if they couldn't tell about it. "Now if we could have gotten recognition as a nation, we'd have been all set. We could make our own laws and regulations and be able to enforce them. We could bring in settlers and establish trade. We could exploit our natural resources. It would all be legal and aboveboard. We could tell who we were and where we were and what we had to offer." "We aren't licked yet," said Adams. "There's a lot that we can do. Those river hills are covered with ginseng. We can each dig a dozen pounds a day. There's good money in the root." "Ginseng root," Cooper said, "is peanuts. We need bi money." "Or we could trap," offered Adams. "The place is alive with beaver." "Have you taken a good look at those beaver? They're about the size of a St. Bernard." "All the better. Think how much just one pelt, would bring." "No dealer would believe that it was beaver. He'd think you were tr#dng to pull a fast one on him. And there are only a few states that allow beaver to be trapped. To sell the pelts -- even if you could -- you'd have to take out licenses in each of those states." "Those mastodon carry a lot of ivory," said Cooper. "And if we wanted to go north, we'd find mammoths that would carry even more..." "And get socked into the jug for ivory smuggling?" They sat, all three of them, staring at the fire, not finding anything to say. The moaning complaint of a giant hunting cat came from somewhere up the river. IVl-lbag, staring at the sky. It bothered him a lot. There was not one familiar constellation, not one star that he could name with any certainty. This jugg lin g of the stars, he thought, emphasized more than anything else in this ancient land the vast gulf of years which lay between him and the Earth where he had been -- or would be -- born. IS A hundred and fifty thousand years, Adams had said, give or take ten thousand. There just was no way to know. Later on, there might be. A measurement of the stars and a comparison with their positions in the twentieth centvuy might be one way of doing it. But at the moment, any figure could be no more than a guess. The time machine was not something that could be tested for calibration or performance. As a matter of fact, there was no way to test it. They had not been certain, he remembered, the first time they had used it, that it would really work. There had been no way to find out. When it worked, you knew it worked. And if it hadn't worked, there would have been no way of knowing beforehand that it wouldn't. Adams had been sure, of course, but that had been because he had absolute reliance in the halfmathematical, half philosophic concepts he had worked out -- concepts that neither Hudson nor Cooper could come close to understanding. That had always been the way it had been, even when they were kids, with Wes dreaming up the deals that he and Johnny carried out. Back in those days, too, they had used time travel in their play. Out in Johnny's back yard, they had rigged up a time machine out of a wonderful collection of salvaged junk -- a wooden crate, an empty five-gallon paint pail, a battered coffee maker, a bunch of discarded copper tubing, a busted steering wheel and other odds and ends. In it, they had "traveled" back to Indian-before-thewhite-man land and mammothland and dinosaur-land and the slaughter, he remembered, had been wonderfully appalling. But, in reality, it had been much different. There was much more to it than gunning down the weird fauna that one foimd. And they should have known there would be, for they had talked about it often. He thought of the bull session back in university and the little, usually silent kid who sat quietly in the comer, a law-school student whose last name had been Pritchard. And after sitting silently for some time, this Pritchard kid had spoken up: "If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics." son remembered, and then gone on with their talk. And after a short while, the talk had turned to women, as it always did. He wondered where that quiet man might be. Some day, Hudson told himself, I'll have to look him up and tell him he was right. We did it wrong, he thought. There were so many other ways we might have done it, but we'd been so sure and greedy -- greedy for the triumph and the glory -- and now there was no easy way to collect. On the verge of success, they could have sought out help, gone to some large industrial concern or an educational foundation or even to the government. Like historic explorers, they could have obtained subsidization and sponsorship. Then they would have had protection, funds to do a proper job and they need not have operated on their present shoestring -- one beaten-up helicopter and one time unit. They could have had several and at least one standing by in the twentieth century as a rescue unit, should that be necessary. But that would have meant a bargain, perhaps a very hard one, and sharing with someone who had contributed nothing but the money. And there was more than money in a thing like this -- there were twenty years of dreams and a great idea and the dedication to that great idea -- years of work and years of disappointment and an almost fanatical refusal to give up. Even so, thought Hudson, they had figured well enough. There had been many chances to make blunders and they'd made relatively few. All they lacked, in the last analysis, was backing. Take the helicopter, for example. It was the one satisfactory vehicle for time traveling. You had to get up in the air to clear whatever upheavals and subsidences there had been through geologic ages. The helicopter took you up and kept you clear and gave you a chance to pick a proper landing place. Travel without it and, granting you were lucky with land surfaces, you still might materialize in the heart of some great tree or end up in a swamp or the middle of a herd of startled, savage beasts. A plane would have done as well, but back in this world, you couldn't land a plane -- or you couldn't be certain that you could. A helicopter, though, could land almost anywhere. In the time-distance they had traveled, they almost certainly had been lucky, although one could not be entirely sure just how great a part of it was luck. Wes had felt that he had not been working as blindly as it sometimes might appear. He had calibrated the unit for jumps of # years. Finer calibration, he had said realistically, would have to wait for more developmental work. tions, they had figured it out. One jump (conceding that the calibration was correct) would have landed them at the end of the Wisconsin glacial period; two jumps, at its beginning. The third would set them down toward the end of the Sangamon Interglacial and apparently it had -- give or take ten thousand years or so. They had arrived at a time when the climate did not seem to vary greatly, either hot or cold. The flora was modern enough to give them a homelike feeling. The fauna, modem and Pleistocenic, overlapped. And the surface features were little altered from the twentieth century. The rivers ran along familiar paths, the hills and bluffs looked much the same. In this comer of the Earth, at least, # years had not changed things greatly. Boyhood dreams, Hudson thought, were wondrous. It was not often that three men who had daydreamed in their youth could follow it out to its end. But they had and here they were. Johnny was on watch, and it was Hudson's turn next, and he'd better get to sleep. He closed his eyes, then opened them again for another look at the unfamiliar stars. The east, he saw, was flushed with silver light. Soon the Moon would rise, which was good. A man could keep a better watch when the Moon was up. He woke suddenly, snatched upright and into full awareness that slashed across the night. The very air seemed curdled by the savage racket and, for a moment, he sat numbed by it. Then, slowly, it seemed -- his brain took the noise and separated it into two distinct but intermingled categories, the deadly screaming of a cat and the maddened trumpeting of a mastodon. The Moon was up and the countryside was flooded by its light. Cooper, he saw, was out beyond the watchfires, standing there and watching, with his rifle ready. Adams was scrambling out of his sleeping bag, swearing softly to himself. The cooking fire had burned down to a bed of mottled coals, but the watchfires still were burning and the helicopter, parked within their circle, picked up the glint of flames. "It's Buster," Adams told him angrily. "I'd know that bellowing of his anywhere. He's done nothing but parade up and down and bellow ever since we got here. And now he seems to gone out and found himself a saber-tooth." Hudson zipped down his sleeping bag, grabbed up his rifle and jumped to his feet, following Adams in a silent rush to where Cooper stood. Cooper motioned at them. "Don't break it up. You'll never see the like of it again." Adams brought his rifle up. Cooper knocked the barrel down. "You fool!" he shouted. "You want them turning on us?" npWO hundred yards away stood the mastodon and, on his back, the screeching sabertooth. The great beast reared into the air and came down with a jolt, bucking to unseat the cat, flailing the air with his massive trunk. And as he bucked, the cat struck and struck again with his gleaming teeth, aiming for the spine. Then the mastodon crashed head downward, as if to turn a somersault, rolled and was on his feet again, closer to them now than he had been before. The huge cat had sprung off. For a moment, the two stood facing one another. Then the tiger charged, a flowing streak of motion in the moonlight. Buster wheeled away and the cat, leaping, hit his shoulder, clawed wildly and slid off. The mastodon whipped to the attack, tusks slashing, huge feet stamping. The cat, caught a glancing blow by one of the tusks, screamed and leaped up, to land in spreadeagle fashion upon Buster's head. Maddened with pain and fright, blinded by the tiger's raking claws, the old mastodon ran -- straight toward the camp. And as he ran, he grasped the cat in his trunk and tore him from his hold, lifted him high and threw him. "Look out!" yelled Cooper and brought his rifle up and fired. For an instant, Hudson saw it all as if it were a single scene, motionless, one frame snatched from a fantastic movie epic -- the charging mastodon, with the tiger lifted and the sound track one great blast of bloodthirsty bedlam. Then the scene dissolved in a blur of motion. He felt his rifle thud against his shoulder, knowing he had fired, but not hearing the explosion. And the mastodon was almost on top of him, bearing down like some mighty and remorseless engine of blind destruction. He flung himself, to one side and the giant brushed past him. Out of the tail of his eye, he saw the thrown saber-tooth crash to Earth within the circle of the watchfires. He brought his rifle up again and caught the area behind Buster's ear within his sights. He pressed the trigger. The mastodon staggered, then regained his stride and went rushing on. He hit one of the watchfires dead center and went through it, scattering coals and burning brands. Then there was a thud and the screeching clang of metal. "Oh, no!" shouted Hudson. Rushing forward, they stopped inside the circle of the fires. The helicopter lay tilted at a crazy angle. One of its rotor blades was crumpled. Half across it, as if he might have fallen as he tried to bull his mad way over it, lay the mastodon. Something crawled across the ground toward them, its spitting, snarling head gaping in the firelight, its back broken, hind legs trailing. Calmly, without a word, Adams put a bullet into the head of the saber-tooth. V G eneral Leslie Bowers rose from his chair and paced up and down the room. He stopped to bang the conference table with a knotted fist. "You can't do it," he bawled at them. "You can't kill the project. I know there's something to it. We can't give it up!" "But it's been ten years. General," said the secretary of the army. "If they were coming back, they'd be here by now." The general stopped his pacing, stiffened. Who did that little civilian squirt think he was, talking to the military in that tone of voice! "We know how you feel about it. General," said the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. "I think we all recognize how deeply you're involved. You've blamed yourself all these years and there is no need of it. After all, there may be nothing to it." "Sir," said the general, "I know there's something to it. I thought so at the time, even when no one else did. And what we've turned up since serves to bear me out. Let's take a look at these three men of ours. We knew almost nothing of them at the time, but we know them now. I've traced out their lives from the time that they were born until they disappeared -- and I might add that, on the chance it might be all a hoax, we've searched for them for years and we've found no trace at all. "I've talked with those who knew them and I've studied their scholastic and military records. I've arrived at the conclusion that if any three men could do it, they were the ones who could. Adams was the brains and the other two were the ones who carried out the things that he dreamed up. Cooper was a bulldog sort of man who could keep them going and it would be Hudson who would figure out the angles. "And they knew the angles, gentlemen. They had it all doped out. "What Hudson tried here in Washington is substantial proof of that. But even back in school, they were thinking of those angles. I talked some years ago to a lawyer in New York, name of Pritchard. He told me that even back in university, they talked of the economic and political problems that they might face if they ever cracked what they were working at. "Wesley Adams was one of our brightest young scientific men. His record at the university and his war work bears that out. After the war, there were at least a dozen jobs he could have had. But he wasn't interested. And I'll tell you why he wasn't. He had something bigger -- something he wanted to work on. So he and these two others went off by themselves -- " "You think he was working on a temporal -- " the army secretary cut in. "He was working on a time machine," roared the general. "I don't know about this 'temporal' business. Just plain 'time machine' is good enough for me." "Let's calm down. General," all, there's no need to shout." rrHE general nodded. "I'm sorry, sir. I get all worked up about this. I've spent the last ten years with it. As you say. I'm trying to make up for what I failed to do ten years ago. I should have talked to Hudson. I was busy, sure, but not that busy. It's an official state of mind that we're too busy to see anyone and I plead guilty on that score. And now that you're talking about closing the project -- " "It's costing us money," said the army secretary. "And we have no direct evichairman. "I don't know what you want," snapped the general. "If there was any man alive who could crack time, that man was Wesley Adams. We found where he worked. We found the workshop and we talked to neighbors who said there was something funny going on and -- " "But then years. General!" the army secretary protested. "Hudson came here, bringing us the greatest discovery in all history, and we kicked him out. After that, do you expect them to come crawling back to us?" "You think they went to someone else?" "They wouldn't do that. They know what the thing they have found would mean. They wouldn't sell us out." "Hudson came with a preposterous proposition," said the man from the state department. "They had to protect themselves!" yelled the general. "If you had discovered a virgin planet with its natural resources intact, what would you do about it? Come trotting down here and hand it over to a government that's too 'busy' to recognize -- " "Generali" "Yes, sir," apologized the general tiredly. "I wish you gentlemen could see my view of it, how it all fits together. First there were the films and we have the word of a dozen competent paleontologists that it's impossible to fake anything as perfect as those films. But even granting that they could be, there are certain differences that no one would ever think of faking, because no one ever knew. Who, as an example, would put lynx tassels on the ears of a saber-tooth? Who would know that young mastodon were black? "And the location. I wonder if you've forgotten that we tracked down the location of Adams' workshop from those films alone. They gave us clues so positive that we didn't even hesitate -- we drove straight to the old deserted farm where Adams and his friends had worked. Don't you see how it all fits together?" "I presume," the man from the state department said nastily, "that you even have an explanation as to why they chose that particular location." "Y'OU thought you had me  there," said the general, "but I have an answer. A good one. The southwestern comer of Wisconsin is a geologic curiosity. It was missed by all the glaciations. Why, we do not know. Whatever the reason, the glaciers came down on both sides of it and far to the south of it and left it standing there, a little island in a sea of ice. "And another thing: Except for a time in the Triassic, that same area of Wisconsin has always been dry land. That and a few other spots are the only areas in North America which have not, time and time again, been covered by water. I don't think it necessary to point out the comfort it would be to an experimental traveler in time to be certain that, in almost any era he might hit, he'd have dry land beneath him." The economics expert spoke up: "We've given this matter a lot of study and, while we do not feel ourselves competent to rule upon the possibility or impossibility of time travel, there are some observations I should like, at some time, to make." "Go ahead right now," said "We see one objection to the entire matter. One of the reasons, naturally, that we had some interest in it is that, if true, it would give us an entire new planet to exploit, perhaps more wisely than we've done in the past. But the thought occurs that any planet has only a certain grand total of natural resources. If we go into the past and exploit them, what effect will that have upon what is left of those resources for use in the present? Wouldn't we, in doing this, be robbing ourselves of our own heritage?" "That contention," said the true in every case. Quite the reverse, in fact. We know that there was, in some geologic ages in the past, a great deal more uranium than we have today. Go back far enough and you'd catch that uranium before it turned into lead. In southwestern Wisconsin, there is a lot of lead. Hudson told us he knew the location of vast uranium deposits and we thought he was a crackpot talking through his hat. If we'd known -- let's be fair about this -- if we had known and believed him about going back in time, we'd have snapped him up at once and all this would not have happened." "It wouldn't hold true with forests, either," said the chairtures or with crops." npHE economics expert was slightly flushed. "There is another thing," he said. "If we go back in time and colonize the land we find there, what would happen when that -- well, let's call it retroactive -- when that retroactive civilization reaches the beginning of our historic period? What will result from that cultural collision? Will our history change? Is what has happened false? Is all -- " "That's all poppycock!" the general shouted. "That and this other talk about using up resources. Whatever we did in the past -- or are about to do -- has been done already. I've lain awake nights, mister, thinking about all these things and there is no answer, believe me, except the one I give you. The question which faces us here is an immediate one. Do we give all this up or do we keep on watching that Wisconsin farm, waiting for them to come back? Do we keep on trying to find, independently, the process or formula or method that Adams found for traveling in tiihe?" "We've had no luck in our research so far. General," said the quiet physicist who sat at the table's end. "If you were not so sure and if the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I'd say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we've done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We'd like to keep on trying." "Not one word of blame has been put on you for your failure," the chairman told the physicist. "That you could do it seems to be more than can be humanly expected. If Adams did it -- ii he did, I say -- it must have been simply that he blundered on an avenue of research no other man has thought of." "You will recall," said the general, "that the research program, even from the first, was thought of strictly as a gamble. Our one hope was, and must remain, that they will return." "It would have been so much simpler all around," the state department man said, "if Adams had patented his method." The general raged at him. "And had it published, all neat and orderly, in the patent office records so that anyone who wanted it could look it up and have it?" "We can be most sincerely thankful," said the chairman, "that he did not patent it." VI T he helicopter would never fly again, but the time unit was intact. Which didn't mean that it would work. They held a powwow at their camp site. It had been, they decided, simpler to move the camp than to remove the body of Old Buster. So they had shifted at dawn, leaving the old mastodon still sprawled across the helicopter. In a day or two, they knew, the great bones would be cleanly picked by the carrion birds, the lesser cats, the wolves and foxes and the little skulkers. Getting the time unit out of the helicopter had been quite a chore, but they finally had managed and now Adams sat with it cradled in his lap. "The worst of it," he told them, "is that I can't test it. There's no way to. You turn it on and it works or it doesn't work. You can't know till you try." "That's something we can't help," Cooper replied. "The problem, seems to me, is how we're going to use it without the whirlybird." "We have to figure out some way to get up in the air," said Adams. "We don't want to take the chance of going up into the twentieth century and arriving there about six feet underground." "Common sense says that we should be higher here than up ahead," Hudson pointed out. "These hills have stood here since Jurassic times. They probably were a good deal higher then and have weathered down. That weathering still should be going on. So we should be higher here than in the twentieth century -- not much, perhaps, but higher." "Did anyone ever notice what the altimeter read?" asked Cooper. "I don't believe I did," Adams admitted. "It wouldn't tell you, anyhow," Hudson declared. "It would just give our height then and now -- and we were moving, remember -- and what about air pockets and relative atmosphere density and all the rest?" aged as Hudson felt. "How does this sound?" asked Adams. "We'll build a platform twelve feet high. That certainly should be enough to clear us and yet small enough to stay within the range of the unit's forcefield." "And what if we're two feet higher here?" Hudson pointed out. "A fall of fourteen feet wouldn't kill a man unless he's plain unlucky." "It might break some bones." "So it might break some bones. You want to stay here or take a chance on a broken leg?" "All right, if you put it that way. A platform, you say. A platform out of what?" "Timber. There's lot of it. We just go out and cut some logs." "A twelve-foot log is heavy. And how are we going to get that big a log uphill?" "We drag it." "We try to, you mean." "Maybe we could fix up a cart," said Adams, after thinking a moment. "Out of what?" Cooper asked. "Rollers, maybe. We could cut some and roll the logs up here." "That would work on level ground," Hudson said. "It wouldn't work to roll a log uphill. It would get away from us. Someone might get killed." "The logs would have to be longer than twelve feet, anyhow," Cooper put in. "You'd have to set them in a hole and that takes away some footage." "Why not the tripod principle?" Hudson offered. "Fasten three logs at the top and raise them." "That's a gin-pole, a primitive derrick. It'd still have to be longer than twelve feet. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. And how are we going to hoist three sixteen-foot logs? We'd need a block and tackle." "There's another thing," said Cooper. "Part of those logs might just be beyond the effective range of the force-field. Part of them would have to -- have to, mind you -- move in time and part couldn't. That would set up a stress..." "Another thing about it," added Hudson, "is that we'd travel with the logs. I don't want to Cbme out in another time with a bunch of logs flying all around me. "Cheer up," Adams told them. "Maybe the unit won't work, anyhow." T he general sat alone in his office and held his head between his hands. The fools, he thought, the goddam knuckleheaded fools! Why couldn't they see it as clearly as he did? For fifteen years now, as head of Project Mastodon, he had lived with it night and day and he could see all the possibilities as clearly as if they had been actual fact. Not military possibilities alone, although as a military man, he naturally would think of those first. The hidden bases, for example, located within the very strongholds of potential enemies -- within, yet centuries removed in time. Many centuries removed and only seconds distant. He could see it all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost nor a man. Except that if you had the bases, you need never strike the blow. If you had the bases and let the enemy know you had them, there would never be the provocation. And on the home front, you'd have air-raid shelters that would be effective. You'd evacuate your population not in space, but time. You'd haye the sure and absolute defense against any kind of bombing -- fission, fusion, bacteriological or whatever else the labs had in stock. And if the worst should come -- which it never would with a setup like that -- you'd have a place to which the entire nation could retreat, leaving to the enemy the empty, blasted cities and the lethally dusted countryside. Sanctuary -- that had been what Hudson had offered the then-secretary of state fifteen years ago -- and the idiot had frozen up with the insult of it and had Hudson thrown out. And if war did not come, think of the living space and the vast new opportimities -- not the least of which would be the opportunity to achieve peaceful living in a virgin world, where the old hatreds would slough off and new concepts have a chance to grow. He wondered where they were, those three who had gone back into time. Dead, perhaps. Run down by a mastodon. Or stalked by tigers. Or maybe done in by warlike tribesmen. No, he kept forgetting there weren't any in that era. Or trapped in time, unable to get back, condemned to exile in an alien time. Or maybe, he thought, just plain disgusted. And he couldn't blame them if they were. Or maybe -- let's be fantastic about this -- sneaking in colonists from some place other than the watched Wisconsin farm, building up in actuality the nation they had claimed to be. They had to get back to the present soon or Project Mastodon would be killed entirely. Already the research program had been halted and if something didn't happen quickly, the watch that was kept on the Wisconsin farm would be called off. "And if they do that," said the general, "I know just what I'll do." He got up and strode around the room. "By God," he said, "I'll show 'em!" I T had taken ten full days of back-breaking work to build the pyramid. They'd hauled the ocks from the creek bed half a mile away and had piled them. stone by rolling stone, to the height of a full twelve feet. It took a lot of rocks and a lot of patience, for as the pyramid went up, the base naturally kept broadening out. But now all was finally ready. Hudson sat before the burnedout campfire and held his blistered hands before him. It should work, he thought, better than the logs -- and less dangerous. Grab a handful of sand. Some trickled back between your fingers, but most stayed in your grasp. That was the principle of the pyramid of stones. When -- and if -- the time machine should work, most of the rocks would go along. Those that didn't go would simply trickle out and do no harm. There'd be no stress or strain to upset the working of the force-field. And if the time unit didn't work? Or if it did? This was the end of the dream, thought Hudson, no matter how you looked at it. For even if they did get back to the twentieth century, there would be no money and with the film lost and no other taken to replace it, they'd have no proof they had traveled back beyond the dawn of history -- back almost to the dawn of Man. Although how far you traveled would have no significance. An all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness -- back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk stroke of destiny. Another helicopter would cost thirty thousand dollars -- and they didn't even have the money to buy the tractor that they needed to build the stockade. There was no way to borrow. You couldn't walk into a bank and say you wanted thirty thousand to take a trip back to the Old Stone Age. You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball -- why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding. "There's one thing that still bothers me," said Cooper, breaking the silence. "We spent a lot of time picking our spot so we'd miss the barn and house and all the other buildings..." "Don't tell me the windmill!" Hudson cried. "No. I'm pretty sure we're clear of that. But the way I figure, we're right astraddle that barbedwire fence at the south end of the orchard." "If you want, we could move the pyramid over twenty feet or so." Cooper groaned. "I'll take my chances with the fence." Adams got to his feet, the time unit tucked underneath his arm. "Come on, you guys. It's tim# to go." They climbed the pyramid gingerly and stood unsteadily at its top. Adams shifted the unit around, clasped it to his chest. "Stand around close," he said, "and bend your knees a little. It may be quite a drop." "Go ahead," said Cooper. "Press the button." Adams pressed the button. Nothing happened. The unit didn't work. IX HE chief of Central Intelligence was white-lipped when he finished talking. "You're sure of your information?" asked the Fesident. chief, "I've never been more sure of anything in my entire life." The President looked at the other two who were in the room, a question in his eyes. checks, sir, with everything we know." "But it's incredible!" the President said. chief. "They lie awake nights. They've become convinced that we're on the verge of traveling in time. They've tried and failed, but they think we're near success. To their way of thinking, they've got to hit us now or never, because once we actually get time travel, they know their number's up." "But we dropped Project Mastodon ehtirely almost three years ago. It's been all of ten years since we stopped the research. It was twenty-five years ago that Hudson -- " "That makes no difference, sir. They're convinced we dropped the project publicly, but went underground with it. That would be the kind of strategy they could understand." The President picked up a pencil and doodled on a pad. "Who was that old general," he asked, "the one who raised so much fuss when we dropped the project? I remember I was in the Senate then. He came around to see me." chairman. "That's right. What became of him?" "Retired." "Well, I guess it doesn't make any difference now." He doodled some more and finally said, "Gentlemen, it looks like this is it. How much time did you say we had?" "Not more than ninety days, sir. Maybe as little as thirty." The President looked up at the "We're as ready," said the chairman, "as we will ever be. We can handle them -- I think. There will, of course, be some -- " "I know," said the President. "Could we bluff?" asked the secretary of state, speaking quietly. "I know it wouldn't stick, but at least we might buy some time." "You mean hint that we have time travel?" The secretary nodded. "It wouldn't work," said the had it, there'd be no question then. They'd become exceedingly well-mannered, even neighborly, if they were sure we had i." "But we haven't got it," said the President gloomily. X HE two hunters trudged homeward late in the afternoon, with a deer slung from a pole they carried on their shoulders. Their breath hung visibly in the air as they walked along, for the frost had come and any day now, they knew, there would be snow. "I'm worried about Wes," said Cooper, breathing heavily. "He's taking this too hard. We got to keep an eye on him." "Let's take a rest," panted Hudson. They halted and lowered the deer to the ground. "He blames himself too much," said Cooper. He wiped his sweaty forehead. "There isn't any need to. All of us walked into this with our eyes wide open." "He's kidding himself and he knows it, but it gives him something to go on. As long as he can keep busy with all his puttering around, he'll be all right." "He isn't going to repair the time unit. Chuck." "I know he isn't. And he knows it, too. He hasn't got the tools or the materials. Back in the workshop, he might have a chance, but here he hasn't." "It's rough on him." "It's rough on all of us." "Yes, but we didn't get a brainstorm that marooned two old friends in this tail end of nowhere. And we can't make him swallow it when we say that it's okay, we don't mind at all." "That's a lot to swallow, Johnny." "What's going to happen to us. Chuck?" "We've got ourselves a place to live and there's lots to eat. Save our ammo for the big game -- a lot of eating for each bullet -- and trap the smaller animals." "I'm wondering what will happen when the flour and all the other stuff is gone. We don't have too much of it because we always figured we could bring in more." 'We'll live on meat," said Hudson. "We got bison by the on them alone. And in the spring, we'll find roots and in the summer berries. And in the fall, we'll harvest a half-dozen klhds of nuts." "Some day our ammo will be gone, no matter how careful we are with it." "Bows and arrows. Slingshots. Spears." "There's a lot of beasts here I wouldn't want to stand up to with nothing but a spear." "We won't stand up to them. We'll duck when we can and run when we can't duck. Without our guns, we're no lords of creation -- not in this place. If we're going to live, we'll have to recognize that fact." "And if one of us gets sick or breaks a leg or -- " "We'll do the best we can. Nobody lives forever." B ut they were talking around the thing that really bothered them, Hudson told himself -- each of them afraid to speak the thought aloud. They'd live, all right, so far as food, shelter and clothing were concerned. And they'd live most of the time in plenty, for this was a fat and open-handed land and a man could make an easy living. But the big problem -- the one they were afraid to talk about -- was their emptiness of purpose. To live, they had to find some meaning in a world without society. A man cast away on a desert isle could always live for hope, but here there was no hope. A Robinson Crusoe was separated from his fellow-humans by, at the most, a few thousand miles. Here they were separated by a hundred and fifty thousand years. Wes Adams was the lucky one so far. Even playing his thousandto-one shot, he still held tightly to a purpose, feeble as it might be -- the hope that he could repair the time machine. We don't need to watch him now, thought Hudson. The time we'll have to watch is when he is forced to admit he can't fix the machine. And both Hudson and Cooper had been kept sane enough, for there had been the cabin to be built and the winter's supply of wood to cut and the hunting to be done. But then there would come a time when all the chores were finished and there was nothing left to do. "You ready to go?" asked Cooper. "Sure. All rested now," said Hudson. They hoisted the pole to their shoulders and started off again. Hudson had lain awake nights thinking of it and all the thoughts had been dead ends. One could write a natural history of the Pleistocene, complete with photographs and sketches, and it would be a pointless thing to do, because no future scientist would ever have a chance to read it. Or they might labor to build a memorial, a vast pyramid, perhaps, which would carry a message forward across fifteen hundred centuries, snatching with bare hands at a semblance of immortality. But if they did, they would be working against the sure and certain knowledge that it all would come to naught, for they knew in advance that no such pyramid existed in historic time. Or they might set out to seek contemporary Man, hiking across four thousand miles of wilderness to Bering Strait and over into Asia. And having found contemporary Man cowering in his caves, they might be able to help him immeasurably along the road to his great inheritance. Except that they'd never make it and even if they did, contemporary Man undoubtedly would find some way to do them in and might eat them in the bargain. They came out of the woods and there was the cabin, just a hundred yards away. It crouched against the hillside above the spring, with the sweep of grassland billowing beyond it to the slate-gray skyline. A trickle of smoke came up from the chimney and they saw the door was open. "Wes oughtn't to leave it open that way," said Cooper. "No telling when a bear might decide to come visiting." "Hey, Wes!" yelled Hudson. But there was no sign of him. Inside the cabin, a white sheet of paper lay on the table top. Hudson snatched it up and read it, with Cooper at his shoulder. Dear guys -- I don't want to get your hopes up again and have you disappointed. But I think I may have found the trouble. I'm going to try it out. If it doesn't work. I'll come back and bum this note and never say a word. But if you find the note, you'll know it worked and I'll be back to get you. Wes. Hudson crumpled the note in his hand. "The crazy fool!" "He's gone off his rocker," Cooper said. "He just thought..." The same thought struck them both and they bolted for the door. At the comer of the cabin, they skidded to a halt and stood there, staring at the ridge above them. The pyramid of rocks they'd built two months ago was gone! XI T he crash brought Gen. Leslie Bowers (ret.) up out of bed -- about two feet out of bed -- old muscles tense, white mustache bristling. Even at his age, the general was a man of action. He flipped the covers back, swimg his feet out to the floor and grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall. Muttering, he blundered out of the bedroom, marched across the dining room and charged into the kitchen. There, beside the door, he snapped on the switch that turned on the floodlights. He practically took the door off its hinges getting to the stoop and he stood there, bare feet gripping the planks, nightshirt billowing in the wind, the shotgun poised and ready. "Whafs going on out there?" he bellowed. There was a tremendous pile of rocks resting where he'd parked his car. One crumpled fender and a drunken headlight peeped out of the rubble. A man was clambering carefully down the jumbled stones, making a detour 'o dodge the battered fender. The general pulled back the hammer of the gun and fought to control himself. The man reached the bottom of the pile and turned around to face him. The general saw that he was hugging something tightly to his chest... "Mister," the general told him, "your explanation better be a good one. That was a brand-new car. And this was the first time I was set for a night of sleep since my tooth quit aching." The man just stood and looked at him. "Who in thunder are you?" roared the general. The man walked slowly forward. He stopped at the bottom of the stoop. "My name is Wesley Adams," he said. "I'm -- " "Wesley Adams!" howled the general. "My God, man, where have you been all these years?" "Well, I don't imagine you'll believe me, but the fact is..." "We've been waiting for you. For twenty-five long years! Or, rather. I've been waiting for you. Those other idiots gave up. I've waited right here for you, Adams, for the last three years, ever since they called off the guard." Adams gulped. "I'm sorry about the car. You see, it was this way..." The general, he saw, was beaming at him fondly. "I had faith in you," the general said. H e waved the shotgun by way of invitation. "Come on in. I have a call to make." Adams stumbled up the stairs. "Move!" the general ordered, shivering. "On the double! You want me to catch my death of cold out here?" Inside, he fumbled for the lights and turned them on. He laid the shotgun across the kitchen table and picked up the telephone. ' "Give me the White House at Washington," he said. "Yes, I said the White House... The President? Naturally he's the one I want to talk to... Yes, it's all right. He won't mind my calling him." "Sir," said Adams tentatively. The general looked up. "What is it, Adams? Go ahead and say it." "Did you say twenty-five years?" "That's what I said. What were you doing all that time?" Adams grasped the table and hung on. "But it wasn't..." "Yes," said the general to the operator. "Yes, I'll wait." He held his hand over the receiver and looked inquiringly at Adams. "I imagine you'll want the same terms as before." "Terms?" "Sure. Recognition. Point Four Aid. Defense pact." "I suppose so," Adams said. "You got these saps across the barrel," the general told him happily. "You can get anything you want. You rate it, too, after what you've done and the bonehead treatment you got -- but especially for not selling out." T he night editor read the bulletin just off the teletype. "Well, what do you know!" he said. "We just recognized Mastodonia." He looked at the copy chief. "Where the hell is Mastodonia?" he asked. The copy chief shrugged. "Don't ask me. You're the brains in this joint." "Well, let's get a map for the next edition," said the night editor. T abby, the saber-tooth, dabbed playfully at Cooper with his mighty paw. Cooper kicked him in the ribs -- an equally playful gesture. Tabby snarled at him. "Show your teeth at me, will you!" said Cooper. "Raised you from a kitten and that's the gratitude you show. Do it just once more and I'll belt you in the chops." Tabby lay down blissfully and began to wash his face. "Some day," warned Hudson, "that cat will miss a meal and that's the day you'll be it." "Gentle as a dove," Cooper assured him. "Wouldn't hurt a fly." "Well, one thing about it, nothing dares to bother us with that monstrosity around." "Best watchdog there ever was. Got to have something to guard all this stuff we've got. When aires. All those furs and ginseng and the ivory." "If he gets back." "He'll be back. Quit your worrying." "But it's been five years," Hudson protested. "He'll be back. Something happened, that's all. He's probably working on it right now. Could be that he messed up the time setting when he repaired the unit or it might have been knocked out of kilter when Buster hit the helicopter. That would take a while to fix. I don't worry that he won't come back. What I can't figiu'e out is why did he go and leave us?" "I've told you," Hudson said. "He was afraid it wouldn't work." "There wasn't any need to be scared of that. We never would have laughed at him." "No. Of course we wouldn't." "Then what was he scared of?" Cooper asked. "If the unit failed and we knew it failed, Wes was afraid we'd try to make him see how hopeless and insane it was. And he knew we'd probably convince him and then all his hope would be gone. And he wanted to hang onto that, Johnny. He wanted to hang onto his hope even when there wasn't any left." "That doesn't matter now," said Cooper. "What counts is that he'll come back. I can feel it in my bones." And here's another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living. God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind! "Wes is working on it right now," said Cooper confidently. H e was. Not he alone, but a thousand others, working desperately, knowing that the time was short, working not alone for two men trapped in time, but for the peace they all had dreamed about -- that the whole world had yearned for through the ages. For to be of any use, it was imperative that they could zero in the time machines they meant to build as an artilleryman would zero in a battery of guns, that each time machine would take its occupants to the same instant of the past, that their operation would extend over the same period of time, to the exact second. It was a problem of control and calibration -- starting with a prototype that was calibrated, as its finest adjustment, for jumps of # years. Project Mastodon was finally under way. The Big News Next Month... the candle lighter Jaffa had the damning facts about Mars. Now all he had to do was make them fit the truthi T he Trusteeship Director fished out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to Jaffa Doane. "I heard your speech last night," he said. "Cigarette?" "I don't smoke," said Jaffa Doane. "It was a good speech." The Director lit his cigarette thoughtfully, flicked the match away. Doane waited with patience in his eyes -- an expression that seemed very much out of place on the face of Jaffa Doane. But Doane had practiced patience before the Director's "invitation" had reached him that morning. He knew it was coming; you can't tell blunt truths on a world hookup and not expect to make a stir. The Director said, "I've checked your record, Doane. It's a good one. You have consistently fought for a lot of things that I happen to believe in myself. Naturally, I think you're off base this time, but I was with you on the Kaffirs, I was with you on the Ainus, I'll be with you again. I'm sure. In fact, if you look it up in the books of your Equality League, you'll find that I sent in my two dollars dues long ago." He peered at Doane under his eyebrows and chuckled. "Don't look so surprised." "I can't help it," Doane said severely. "After what your administration has done to the Martians -- " "The Martians! Why, those -- Never mind." He clamped the words down in his throat. "Just what," he demanded, "have we done to them?" Doane leaned forward. "Turned them into savages! Exploited them, degraded them, reduced them to barbarism. Do you want the entire catalogue, sir? I know how the Mars Trusteeship has been run! The Administrators have made themselves gods, sir, gods! Their every whim is a commandment. Thafs what you've done!" rHE Director managed a smile, though his nostrils were flaring. "I said I heard your speech," he reminded Doane. "You had some suggestions to make, didn't you?" "I did," said Doane proudly. "And among them, you suggested that we remove Administrator Kellem and replace him with someone acceptable to the Equality League." "It was. Kellem's handling of the General Mercantile incident was -- " "I know," the Director interrupted, and for the first time his smile relaxed. "I have here a radiogram from the Administration Comzone on Mars. Read it, Mr. Doane." Doane took it suspiciously, but as he read, he began to beam. Request immediate clearKellem, Mars Doane gloated: "He's retiring! Low-pressure asthma, my foot! I thought the stink from General Mercantile would drive him out!" The Director said in a level tone, "Kellem almost died last week, Doane." "All right." Doane shrugged. "It makes no difference. In any case, I demand to be consulted in choosing his successor." The Director eyed him. "You do, do you?" He pressed a button on his desk and said, "Ask Ne Mleek to come in." A sexy contralto replied, "Yes, sir." The Director looked at Doane. "Ever seen a Martian?" he asked. "You take such an interest in them, I wonder if you've ever met one. Face-to-face I mean; the pictures don't quite do them justice. No? Well, it's about time you did." He stood up and gestured toward the door. "Jaffa Doane," he said, "meet Ne Mleek." Doane rose and turned to see who was coming in. He swallowed. "How do you do," he managed to say. sound came from the thing that dragged itself through the doorway. Doane thought it formed words in a sort of airless whisper, the sound that might be made by a man with a slashed throat. It went: "Gl'd t' n'w y -- " The vowels were almost inaudible, the consonants as though they were being forced out against a gag. It was English, all right: you could make it out if you tried. But if the thing's words were understandable, its expression was not. As the Director had said, you had to meet a Martian in the flesh: photos did not give more than a hint. On the squashed, whitely translucent face was what Doane thought a grin of savage glee, while the huge dull eyes held inexpressible sorrow. Neither interpretation, Doane told himself, meant much; that was anthrophomorphic thinking, and dangerous. But those looks took a little getting used to, all the same. "Don't try to shake hands with him, Mr. Doane," said the Director. "He hasn't any." It was true. Four supple, articulated tentacles waved around the Martian's midsection, but there were no hands or arms. The pear-shaped body was supported on stubby little legs which had neither knee nor ankle, as far as Jaffa Doane could see. The Director was saying, "Ne Mleek is the Martian legate here in Washington and, like Kellem, the strain of an alien environment has hurt his health. He'll be going back to Mars on your ship, Doane, and you'll be working with him." "Working with him?" Doane gasped. The Director allowed himself a look of surprise. "Haven't you figured it out yet, Doane? Since we must replace Kellem anyhow, we have decided to grant the Equality League's request. We are picking a man for the post that the League is certain to approve -- because he is the president of it. I mean you, Mr. Doane." "Me? Me? But I've never been on Mars!" "In eighteen days," said the Director, "you will no longer be able to make that statement. That is, unless you refuse the appointment." Jaffa Doane stood up and there was corrosive anger in his voice. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You want me to turn it down, so you can tell the news services what a lot of hot air the president of the Equality League really is. Well, I can recognize a shoddy little political trick when I see one. You hand me a political hot potato, throw me in on a job that your fat-cats have finally messed up to the point where there are riots and investigations. If things go wrong. I'm the goat and that shuts up the Equality League. If things go right, your administration gets the credit." "I take it you refuse," said the Director. "No, sir! I don't refuse! It's a cheap trick-and I'll make you wish you'd never thought of it. I accept!" He looked over bis shoulder at the Martian who had become, in the space of a heartbeat, one of his charges. Jaffa Doane couldn't help wincing a little -- they did look so much like ragged corpses! But he said, "Come along, Ne Mleek. We're going to your home." bers of the Equality League, Jaffa Doane was a severe and shining leader; his words were trumpet calls and his surging drive for justice was a bright flame. One or two of the members, however, took a more personal view of their president, among them a young lady whose name was Ruth-Ann Wharton. On the books, she was listed as Mr. Doane's personal secretary, but it had been several months now since she had first begun to contemplate a promotion for herself. It had occurred to her that the eighteen-day flight to Mars on the shuttle rocket might provide the time and leisure for Jaffa Doane to notice just what a pearl he had as a secretary. But it had been a disappointing voyage; Doane had kept to his stateroom most of the way. A hatful of hours out of Marsport, Ruth-Aun was banging on her boss's stateroom door. "Jaffa," she called plaintively, and not for the first time, "Ne Mleek and another Martian are waiting for you. Please hurry." Doane's low, controlled voice said, "I'll be there in a moment. Miss Wharton." She scowled at the door. "I'll give you exactly one minute." But she didn't give him that much. She hammered again. "Jaffa, they're waiting." Pause. Then the calm, relaxed voice. "Yes, of course. One moment." Ruth-Ann stamped her foot. "Oh, darn you!" she said and did what she had wanted to do in the first place. She turned the knob and walked in. "They've been waiting half an hour and Ne Mleek says it's very important." The room was in semi-darkness, lit only by the light from the corridor outside. From the rumpled heap of bedclothing, Jaffa Doane's voice said placidly, "I'm aware of that. Miss Wharton." Her hands found the light switch. The bedclothing erupted .and Jaffa Doane sat up, leaning on an elbow, blinking at her. "What?" he croaked blearily. "Say, haven't I asked you to call me only from the outside?" "You have," she said hotly, flinging back the ray-screen on the port. The tempered glass was treated to filter out most of the glare, but the direct sunlight lit up the little room like a movie set. "Get up," she ordered. "If you're not outside and fully dressed in five minutes. I'm coming back and I'll dress you myself. Anyway, Jaffa, it looks as if it really is important. Ne Mleek is sighing and talking about your duty to your job. And the other Martian -- well, it's hard to tell, everything considered, but he looks sick." "Sick?" Jaffa Doane yawned and scratched. "Sick how?" Ruth-Ann shook her head. "Come on out and see for yourself." in the mirror of the tiny washroom as he shaved, Jaffa Doane decided that Ruth-Ann, after all, was right. He did have a tendency to be -- not difficult, exactly, not grumpy or nasty, but a little hard to wake up in the mornings. And besides, this was an important day. He was about to meet his charges. He wiped off the depilatory and stubble and stood erect, eyes burning into his own reflection in the mirror. The sound of his stateroom door made him jump. 'Tm coming right out!" he yelled. In the room that had been htted out as his office for the duration of the trip -- and which he had hardly set foot in -- Ne Mleek and Ruth-Ann were waiting. With them was another Martian and, looking at him, Jaffa Doane knew what the girl had meant when she said there was something wrong. A strapping young adult Martian, with a life expectancy of hundreds of years, somewhat resembles a wilting fungus; but this one looked rotten. "Good morning, Ne Mleek," Jaffa Doane said courteously. "What can I do for you?" The Martian's wheezy voice was somewhat easier to understand in the spaceship's half-andhalf atmosphere -- pressure an even eight pounds to the square inch, composition largely helium -- than it had been when he was laboring to force his voice into the dense Earth air. "Indeed you can, honored sir. Gadian Pluur has the sickness and wishes Your Honor to cure him in the way that is known." Jaffa Doane's eyebrows went up. "Cure him? You mean you want me to call a doctor?" "Ah, no," whispered the Martian. "Your Honor will cure him yourself, surely." Ruth-Ann was signaling. "You don't know what he wants, do you?" she said in a low tone. "Good heavens, no." S HE nodded smugly. "He wants you to touch this other one. That's all, just touch him." "Touch him?" Doane stared at the Martian. "Ne Mleek, are you out of your mind?" "Not so," the Martian whispered indignantly, the mad face working. "It is our custom, as is known. The Administrator Kellem and the Admiral Rosenman who was his assistant have always healed those ill of the sickness." "Barbarous," marveled Jaffa Doane, forgetting to be angry. "And you, an intelligent man -- an intelligent Martian like you, you believe in this?" "There is nothing to believe or disbelieve," sighed Ne Mleek, his tentacles agitated, the pale eyes desolate. "It is our custom since the first of your honored administrators came." Doane shook his head wonderingly. "Touch him," Ruth-Ann advised. "But -- " "Go ahead, touch him!" Doane frowned. "Miss Wharton, this is a matter of principle. I am responsible not only to the Trusteeship Director, but to the League, and I certainly couldn't justify -- " "Touch him" The girl's face was set. Doane was about to reply, but the ship gave a gentle coursecorrecting lurch and everyone in the little room staggered slightly -- everyone but the sick Martian, Gadian Pluur, who staggered halfway across the room and brushed against Doane's fingers. Jaffa Doane jerked back his hand. It had been a curious sensation, almost like an electric shock, but not localized -- he could feel a tiny tingle up his backbone and at the base of his skull. "Thanks to Your Honor," whispered Ne Mleek. And the two Martians slipped slowly out, leaving Jaffa Doane staring frustratedly after them. "pUT I have a speech all " ready," Doane objected reasonably. "It's not just a lot of glowing promises and empty words, but facts. It tells how I am going to put a stop to -- " he hesitated over the word -- "the indiscretions of the previous Administrators." Admiral Rosenman said cheerfully, "Fine." He was a chunky man with a big head of curly white hair. And he wore the severe uniform as though he had been born with it on. "But you can't get out of the Conjunction Offering." "That's nothing short of miu'der! And my speech -- " "It's merely an execution, Mr. Doane. The Martian has had his trial and he has been convicted. It's up to you." "But I'm not a hangman!" "You're the Earth Administrator on Mars and one of your duties is carrying out the decisions of the Martian courts." Doane glowered. "What's he convicted of?" he demanded suspiciously. "What's the difference? Under the Martian laws, it's a crime punishable by death. They call it bad thinking." "Bad thinking." Doane shook his head and walked over to the window of the Ad-Building office that was now his. The orange sandscape, dotted with smoketrees, hurt his eyes; it was the Martian idea of a formal park, in the heart of the little city of Marsport, and it was a great honor to have one's office looking out over it. Or so the Martians thought. They also thought it was an honor to be the executioner in what seemed to have some of the aspects of a ritual murder. "I can't even see the conjunction of the moons," Doane said peevishly. "The Martians can. Both moons are perfectly visible to them." "And this Conjunction Offering is traditional? What did they do back forty or fifty years ago, before the first Earthmen got here?" Admiral Rosenman shrugged and glanced at the clock. "You ought to be getting ready," he said. "Am I dismissed?" "You're dismissed," D o a n e said ungraciously and frowned at the Admiral's back as he left, using the weaving, flat-footed Mars walk that Doane had not yet mastered. He sat down at his desk, carefully allowing for the light gravitation -- and misjudged it, as he had six times before, and bumped his shin against the desk, as he had six times before. sympathetically, "It takes a little getting used to. Do you want me to come to the Conjunction Offering with you?" "No!" "There's no need to take my skin off." He said stiffly, "I am sorry. Miss Wharton. Perhaps I'm a little upset." "I understand, Jaffa." "It didn't seem like this back on Earth," he said morosely, staring out at the smoke-trees. "You haven't heard the worst of it. Miss Wharton. Not only do I have to slit some poor devil's throat this evening -- not only am I expected to perform the laying on of hands like somebody from the Dark Ages -- but look at this!" He turned to his desk and picked up a thick sheaf of papers. "Duties for the Earth Administrator -- me The most ridiculous mass of superstitious nonsense I ever saw. If this is the way Kellem kept the Martians down, I can understand why there were riots at the General Mercantile base." "At Niobe? But those were Earthmen involved in the brawl, Jaffa, not Martians." "How do you know?" he asked pugnaciously. "Because Kellem's publicity men said so? All we know for sure is that there was trouble. There's bound to be trouble when you try to keep an intelligent, civilized race like Ne Mleek's down with barbarous tricks like these." He glanced at the list and flinched. "Well, there's an end to it," he said grimly. "Kellem's gone and I'm here now. I'll be at the Conjunction Ceremony tonight, all right, and I'll start things rolling right then and there. You'll see! I'm telling you. Miss Wharton, Mars is going to -- what's the matter?" he demanded irritably. "You look like you've got a question." The girl nodded emphatically. "I have. Why do you call me Miss Wharton instead of RuthAnn?" riHE Conjunction Offering was to take place in what the Martians had named the Park of Sparse Beauty. "It's sparse enough," Jaffa Doane said from the rostrum, watching the Martians gather before him. "But is it beautiful enough?" Admiral Rosenman asked sourly, "Are you ready for the ceremony?" "Oh, quite ready," said Jaffa Doane. He started to hum to himself with a satisfied air, but you do not hum with oxygen plugs in your nostrils. He coughed and choked, and looked at the Admiral suspiciously. But the Admiral wasn't laughing. The Admiral didn't think he had very much to laugh about. He had been on duty on Mars for seven years, surviving five Administrators, only one of whom had completed his threeyear term. He had formed certain conclusions about the Martians and one of them was that they weren't too likely to get along well with the likes of Jaffa Doane... It was dark and the Martians carried torches -- not flaming brands, for flames do not thrive in Mars' thin atmosphere, but glowing balls of punk from the little bushes that grew wild in the wide reaches between settlements. The scene was hardly brightly illuminated; Martian eyes were not human eyes, though, and to them, Doane, realized, it might have been bright as day. He looked fruitlessly at the spot in the sky where the two moons were supposed to be in conjunction with a particular star. One moon was visible, the other not. The star might or might not be visible -- with all the stars in the Martian sky, one more or less made very little difference. But to the Martians, of course, .with their very much more acute vision, both moons were as visible as Luna from Earth and each star of the tens of thousands was an individual in its own right. hard remembering all the differences between Martians and Earthmen -- and trying to remember, at the same time, the diamond-clear principles of the Equality League, which said that the differences were as nothing... There was no sound of trumpets, no burst of prompted applause from the idly drifting audience, but all of a sudden the ceremony seemed to have begun. Ne Mleek appeared on the high platform where the Earth party was standing. "In three of your minutes and eleven seconds, as is known to Your Honor," he said, "the conjunction will occur. This is he who is to die." He stepped aside to reveal another Martian, who gestured courteously with his tentacles. "This is Fnihi Bel." The condemned Martian said politely, "It is an honor to meet Your Honor. I am most sorry for the circumstances." Doane looked embarrassedly at Ruth-Ann and the Admiral. He had had no lessons in how Jack Ketch greeted his clients; there was no precedent in his experience with the Equality League to guide him in the proper conduct of the maul-man meeting the steer at the top of the slippery chute. But the Martian was tactful. He said, "Since I shall not have the power afterward, let me now thank Your Honor for the greatest of favors." blurted, scandalized. He made a face expressing his mood about the enforced subjection of the Martians; it was wasted on the Martians who expressed their feelings with formalized gestures of the tentacles, but not on Admiral Rosenman, who licked his lips and started to speak. But not soon enough. "Fnihi Bel," Doane said compassionately, "under the authority vested in me as Administrator, I grant a stay of execution pending review of your case. You shall not die tonight." A dmiral Rosenman swore and looked helplessly at Ruth-Ann. "If the crazy idiot had only talked it over first! No, not him! He made up his mind ten years before he ever saw a Martian and nothing's going to change it, especially facts!" "What facts?" asked RuthAnn hotly. "You never told him anything." "It's all in the files." "Which he hasn't had a chance to look at. Honestly, Admiral, you're unreasonable." Ruth-Ann looked fretfully out the window. It was nearly daybreak; the sharp Martian dawn had popped into light over the horizon minutes before. "Do you suppose he's all right?" The Admiral growled and flipped the switch on the intercom. "Any word?" The uniformed man whose face appeared in the screen said, "Not yet, sir. The Administrator was seen about an hour ago near the Shacks. A detail has gone to search the area, but they haven't reported in yet." "All right," the Admiral grumbled, clicking off. "What are the Shacks?" RuthAnn wanted to know. "Abandoned part of town. The Martians gave it up years ago. Nobody lives there now. Unpleasant place. Serves him right, the -- " "Watch yourself!" RuthAnn warned. "He's your boss!" The Admiral glowered at her, but stopped. He yawned and stretched. "Not used to staying up all night any more," he said. "Kind of takes it out of me, but -- Go ahead!" he snapped as the intercom called his name. "Administrator D o a n e has been located by the search party, sir," said the officer. "Any orders?" "Hold him there," roared the Admiral. "And get a car in front of the door in thirty seconds -- I'm going to meet him!" He clicked off the switch as Ruth-Ann corrected, "We're going to meet him. Admiral! If that big stuffed-shirt thinks he can scare me out of my wits and stir up every Martian from here to -- " "Hey, wait a minute!" the Admiral protested. "I thought you wouldn't let me call him names!" "That's you," Ruth-Ann said shortly. "The rules are different for me. Come on. Admiral. What are you waiting for?" trator Jaffa Doane sitting on the ramp before an abandoned and decrepit Martian dwelling, staring into space. Admiral Rosenman dismissed the detail and helped the Administrator into the pressurized car. Doane's attention was elsewhere. Rosenman had to remind him even to take the oxygen plugs out of his nostrils. "Thanks," said Doane absentlyAnd, after a pause, "I messed it up, didn't I?" "You did," the Admiral told him. "You messed it up enough to put forty-eight Martians in the hospital -- the Earth hospital." Doane blinked. "For physical injuries," the Admiral explained. "The Martians don't ordinarily hospitalize for that; a couple of hours of what they call good thinking and they can patch almost anything that's wrong with themselves. But these were pretty well beat up, mostly from running into moving vehicles, and I don't think there's a Martian within fifty miles that's capable of good thinking right now." Jaffa Doane shook his head. "I don't get it," he complained. "All I did was try to save a man's life. Maybe I was wrong -- I don't know. But how could it make so much trouble? Rioting like crazy people. Getting themselves run over -- and all because of a thing like that. I could understand it if they were ignorant natives, only they're not ignorant; they have a civilization of their own. How can these silly customs mean so much to them?" The Admiral exploded, "Don't you understand yet? It is not just a silly custom! They were crazy, all right, but not because you violated a silly tabu -- because you did the thing that was bound to drive them insane. You pushed them across the brink. They were sick. Infected by you." "But -- " "Don't argue with me! Sickness is not only of the body; even an Earthman can have mental illnesses, too. And Martians have no other kind. Shock them and they get sick. When they're sick, they need to be healed. If you break a leg, you splint it; if a Martian's mind is injured, it needs to be splinted with a stronger, stabler mind. "Think back to the ship, Doane! When Ne Mleek begged you to touch the other Martian, did you think it was only a primitive custom? It was not. It was splinting and healing. When you made contact with him, his mind was braced against yours and you were the one who helped him grow well." he said reasonably. "Granted. But that's one thing and murder is another. What about the one I was supposed to kill?" "The same principle, Doane. Even a Martian doesn't live forever, and when he is too sick to be cured, he has to die. The only way a Martian can die is by being physically destroyed. He can't kill himself. No Martian can. He can't be killed by another Martian -- the shock would destroy him. So you're elected, Doane -- the strongest, stablest being on Mars -- the Earth Administrator." Doane protested, "But what about the time before the Earthmen were here? How did they manage?" Rosenman shrugged. "They didn't have Earthmen to do the dirty work, so they used Martians, of course." "But you said -- " "I know what I said. Take a look around you, Doane." He gestured out the window at the rickety, abandoned buildings called the Shacks. Compared with the clean, functional lines of the rest of the Martian architecture, the Shacks were a hideous blot. They leaned and they staggered. They were put together at random distances out of random materials. They looked unfit for even human habitation, miich less Martian. "This is where they lived, the Outcasts," Rosenman said. "The strongest and healthiest of every generation, selected by rigorous tests and segregated into a caste of Healers. It was an honor to be a Healer, Doane -- the greatest, most tragic honor that a Martian could attain. Read the Martian literature. It has noble stories in it, the Healers who sacrificed themselves for others. They were untouchables. There were a couple of hundred of them all the time, right here in the Shacks, injured mentally every time they had to put an incurable out of his misery, until they were beyond repair and had to be destroyed after a few years of agonizing service." . "And when we came, we became the untouchables?" Rosenman hesitated. "Well, not exactly," he said, a little less roughly. "We took over the functions of the Healers to some extent, yes. After all, we Earthmen aren't as sensitive; and just for that reason, we're more stable. But, of course, even we crack up when the pressure is too great. Suppose the picture was different, Doane; suppose it was the Martians who were stronger and stabler, and suppose they came to Earth and showed us a way of emptying our asylums. "We use psychiatrists because they're all we have -- all the Martians had were the Healers. But the Healers weren't altogether satisfactory, as you can see, because it's an expensive cure that merely passes the disease on to someone else. Our psychiatrists aren't as effective as they should be, either -- they're human, too; they have their own problems, which seriously interfere with and become intermingled with those of their patients. "If the Martians had come to us with a real cure, not the halfcure that psychiatrists are capable of, we'd be stupid to go on using inadequate therapy. And the Martians aren't stupid. In fact, that's the mistake you and your Equality League made." T he Administrator flared, "That's enough, Rosenman! The Equality League never -- " "Wait a minute! Admit it, Doane -- you came here all full of red-hot ideas about how the Earth masters should be kind to their Martian slaves. No, don't argue; that's how it looked to you. Think it over. But the Martians aren't slaves, you see. In many ways, they're more cultured and smarter and a lot more sensitive than you and I. In some ways, in fact, they remind me of my grandfather." "Your what#" Doane gasped, baffled. "My grandfather. He was a very religious man," the Admiral explained reminiscently. "Every Friday night, we'd have the candles for the Sabbath, and -- well, I don't know how familiar you are with the ritual,but on the Sabbath, the truly orthodox aren't allowed to work from sundown to sundown. Not eyen lighting the candles. So my grandfather used to hire an Irish kid from the neighborhood to be our candle lighter -- a shabbas goy, he called him. "Marty Madden, the boy's name was. Marty wasn't any better than we were or any worse -- I don't think my grandfather ever thought that. But he was, in that one way, different-, he could do something for us that we weren't allowed to do for ourselves. So, naturally, he did it. Just as you and I, Doane, do things for the Martians that they can't do for themselves." The Admiral started the car for the trip back. "I used to know Marty pretty well," he said. "We went to the same school during the week. In a way, I was sorry for him -- he missed all the 'fun of the feasts and so on. In another way, I envied him, because he could do things I couldn't. But I never thought that so many years later, olu Parkway, I'd be taking his job away from him..." They rode back to the Administration Building in silence for most of the way, while Jaffa Doane digested some of the most ill-tasting realizations of his career. As the building came into sight, he shook himself and sat up. "All right," he said humbly, "I'll start all over. Make believe I landed this morning. Where do I start?" leaned over to pat his shoulder. "You'll do," he promised. "Where you start is in the clinic. You'll find about fifty Martians with some degree of shock, needing the healing touch of a sound mind -- like yours. It won't be too bad. You'll have a headache afterward, but you can take a minor discomfort like that, can't you?" "Gladly!" Doane said. "That's the least I can do. I want to apologize to both of you. You, too, Ruth-Ann. I've been about as big a self-centered, wrong-headed -- " She cut him off. "Oh, don't get all wound up. You're a bit of a phony, heaven knows -- " she ignored the strangled noise he made -- "but there are worse. Deep down inside, you're quite a guy. You wouldn't be as much of a man as you are if you didn't have a little ham in you, and a touch of pig-headedness, too. I've given the matter a lot of thought, you see." Rosenman grinned at Doane's expression. "She's right," he agreed. "Between us, we'll get you straightened out, so don't worry about it. Two more years here ought to do it. Basically, your ideas are right -- the Martians ought to learn to get by on their own feet. You can start finding out how they can do it. It'll be good for you. When the two years of your term are up, you'll go home with a better, more human understanding of what's what, ready to setde down to a normal, productive existence on Earth with your wife and family." Doane yelped, "Hold on there! I haven't got a wife, much less a family!" RuthAnn patted his arm reassuringly. "You're not home yet," she said. roREcasT Shoot the works may be fine for the customer, but it's tough on the dealer, who constantly has to worry about replenishing his inventory. Us, for instance, and Sturgeon, for another. We've given you two exciting Sturgeons in quick succession (one in this issue) and we're hauling off to offer you of ideas and emotions or, to follow the title, a literary storm that blows down a lot of intellectual deadwood and reveals a bright path through a fresh green forest of concepts. The pibse here may seem enthusiastically impenetrable (true, though justified) and for a very simple reason -- the story can't be described except in its own terms. And you wouldn't want a fine reading experience spoiled by being told who does what and why and what happens, except perhaps this much; The story opens with Yancey, who had died once, sharing a hotel bedroom with his wife and a truly alluring woman... harder to forecast without giving away its startling twists and shock ending. You know Tenn, however -- as devious an author as ever spun webs with a typewriter -- and this story is a job of tricky weaving that any spider would envy. Short stories, of course, plus Willy Ley and our usual features... and more information about the Gaiaxy-Simon  Schuster # prize novel that will soon be serialized here! information O NE of the first books I ever bought -- a mixture of curiosity and nostalgia caused me to buy another copy some ten years ago, my first having been lost -- was a small volume by the German astronomer, M. Wilhelm Meyer, called World's End. It was paperbound, with a melancholy cover painting which carried out the theme. There a small group of emaciated humans huddled in the snow near a dead tree, and low in the sky was an enormous deep-red sun. It was the same basic idea which had been painted with words by H. G. Wells in his Time Machine. You probably remember the story: After having seen and experienced the end of the human race on a trip into the future, the Time Traveler lets his machine race far, far ahead. At first, there is the "blinking succession of day and night" to which he has grown accustomed during earlier time trips, but as the machine continues into the future, things slowly change : "The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for, the sun had ceased to set -- it simply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun..." I F I saw this old German painting or read the Time Machine for the first time now, I could date both painting and story from this one fact. Both would have to fall into the period from roughly # to #, because of this dying red sun which looks so much larger because the Earth has moved closer to it along the tight spiral of a steadily shrinking orbit. Actually, the story was written in # and the picture was painted in # -- only ten years later, the writer would have been doubtful and the painter would have picked something else from the book. The very question of whether the Sun might one day die was still relatively new when Wells actually wrote, strange as that may seem to us. It had been the subject of doubtful speculation and worried calculations for only a few decades. In earlier days, that question simply did not exist and we don't even have to go back to the time of Homer when the Sun was the chariot of the sun-god to find it lacking. While people had thought about the end of the "world" on and off in olden days, the possible end of the Sun had never been considered. None of the Greek philosophers concerned themselves with this problem. The Roman writers had far more fnundane things to consider. The Bible even stated, by implication, the opposite: "while the earth remaineth... summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." Nor did the astronomical revolution started by Nicholas Copernicus change the picture. What did begin to change the attitude was not philosophical ideas, but facts which were uncovered because of the spare-time activities of one Jan Lippershey in the Netherlands, which resulted in the invention of the telescope. In December, #, it was found for the first time that the Sun was literally not spotless. The man who usually is credited with the discovery of the Sun spots is the pastor David Fabricius, but part of the credit should go to his son Johannes, for father and son worked together in observing the skies with their recently acquired "optick tube." Johannes, in fact, saw it first. The Sun, he wrote later, did not look as clear and smooth as he had expected. "It seemed to have various kinds of roughnesses and unevennesses, even at the rim. As I watched carefully, an unexpected darkish spot showed itself, not at all small as compared to the size of the Sun. I thought that drifting clouds caused the spot." Even after reassuring himself "about ten times" that the spot could not be a cloud, "I did not trust myself completely and called my father..." The fatherand-son team not only discovered the Sun spots, but, by observing them, the rotation of the Sun. B efore David Fabricius had published the findings, a Jesuit priest. Father Christoph Scheiner, in Ingolstadt, saw several Sun spots. As required by his order, Scheiner reported his find to his superior Buseaeus, who listened carefully, thought for a while and said: "My son, I have read all the writings of Aristotle several times from beginning to end and can assure you that I found nothing in them which says what you tell. Go and calm yourself; be assured that what you believe to be spots in the Sun are flaws of your glasses or your eyes."   This is not quite as bad as what was done some # years later. C'-ristian Huyghens in the Netherlands had invented a new method for grinding and polishing lens. He built himself a telescope and promptly discovered Titan, Saturn's largest moon. He just as promptly discontinued his observations, reasoning that there were six planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) and now also six moons, that of Earth, the four of Jupiter discovered by Galilei and the one of Saturn he had discovered. Since the number of moons could not be larger than the number of planets, they obviously had all been found! The Sun's corona was discovered, too, as soon as a suitable eclipse occurred. It was, of course, elementary knowledge even then that an eclipse was the result of the Moon moving across the line of sight from the Erth to the Sun. The question was which of the two was the possessor of the corona. Around the year #, Giacomo Filippo Maraldi, a nephew of the great Jean Dominique Cassini, and famous as an astronomer in his own right, stated as his opinion that the corona was the atmosphere of the Sun which suddenly became visible during a total eclipse. But the majority of his colleagues considered it much more probable and "reasonable" that the corona was the atmosphere of the Moon, which was illuminated for good visibility only if the Sun stood directly behind it. The question was solved by elimination: The more the Moon was observed, the clearer it became that the Moon did not have an atmosphere worth that name. Hence the corona had to belong to the Sun. Yes, but what were the Sun spots? Galileo Galilei believed they were black -- or at least dark -- clouds that were high above the luminous surface of the Sun. Others did not contradict this view. but were more specific -- these were the dark clouds that formed above gigantic volcanoes in eruption. A few decades later, about #, it was Cassini who turned the idea around. The Sun spots were not dark clouds of one kind or another, but just the opposite: When a storm tore a hole in the luminous cloud layers of the Sun, it might grow tenuous enough to be pierced by a vast black mountain peak on the Sun's surface. T hat it might be the Sun's atmosphere which was luminous while the surface was dark was not Cassini's original idea. It had been uttered somewhat timidly at an earlier date by pointing out the highly luminous clouds we now call sunset cumulus and which are so much brighter than the ground. Cassini's authority merely reinforced this older idea. A century later -- things did not move as fast then as they do now -- Cassini's special contribution to this theory was removed, but the theory itself seemed strengthened some more. In November #, the Sun sported an especially large spot and Alexander Wilson in Glasgow, who observed it with meticulous care, realized for the first time what virtually everybody knows now from photographs. Such a Sun spot was not just a dark blot; it showed some differentiation in itself. The center was really dark, but between this dark spot and the surrounding bright surface of the Sun was a mediumdark area. When such a spot had wandered all the way to the rim, one could see that perspective made the relative positions of the dark center spot and the not-so-dark surrounding area shift. In short, one could see that the semi-dark area was lower than the surrounding luminous area, while the dark center area was still lower. Obviously, then, there were several layers in the Sun's atmosphere, one highly luminous top layer (but still below that ghostly corona one could not normally see) and a less luminous lower layer. Each layer developed holes on occasion and if the holes in both layers happened to match, we could see the dark "real surface" of the Sun. held to the maxim that "it is sometimes of great use in natural philosophy to doubt of things which are commonly taken for granted," he wholeheartedly accepted Wilson's reasoning. He only made a minor correction: Wilson had spoken of the "lower layer" as less luminous, whereas dark. We could see it at all only because of the fact that it reflected the light of the higher luminous layer. In the elder Herschel's opinion, the surface of the Sun was protected against the heat and glare of the top layer by this reflecting and absorbing lower layer. To bolster the idea that all the luminousness might originate only from the Sun's upper atmosphere. heavenly bodies, "we have pretty good reason to believe, emit light in some degree." The dark side of the Moon did so on occasion -- actually reflected Earthlight which is reflected sunlight in the first place -- the night side of Venus often glowed (probably aurora) and, in the polar night of the Earth there was the glowing aurora borealis in the north and the equally bright aurora australis in the south. TT was a difference in degree rather than a fundamental difference. "The sun's similarity," the other globes of the solar system with regard to its solidity, its atmosphere and its diversified surface: the rotation upon its axis, and the fall of heavy bodies, lead us on to suppose that it is also most probably inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe." We would be hard put nowadays to invent anything wilder than this concept, but it covered all the then available information. As long as not even the nature of chemical combustion was properly understood, it made sense. To us, it seems like an especially striking contrast that Herschel, with such a concept in mind, also tried to establish whether the Sun spots influenced the weather on Earth. Having neither astronomical nor meteorological statistics available, he picked the only one there was -- the recorded wholesale prices of grain. Even so, he might -- with luck -- have discovered the Sun-spot cycle, but the tool was too inadequate. The actual discovery of the Sun-spot cycle by Heinrich Samuel Schwabe did not take place until #, but around #, a Danish astronomer had resolutely entered a remark in his daily diary to the effect that "in time, a periodicity of the Sun-spot phenomenon will be found, since every other astronomical phenomenon shows periodicity." Herschel's concept of the Sun was not disproved by one man and one discovery at a specific date. It seems to have died very gradually, its last remnants being swept away by the discovery of spectrum analysis in #. In the meantime, a large number of other discoveries had been made and some known phenomena had been thought about. By #, no astronomer doubted any more that all the so-called fixed stars were suns, too -- as had been guessed by an Arab eight centuries earlier -- and the phenomenon of the Milky Way had been explained, by Herschel as a result of observation, and by Immanuel Kant independently by careful reasoning. One of the discoveries that became importaant was that some stars showed definite colors. That some were red was obvious, but there Iso were blue ones. So stars could have different colors -- at that time, it was just an item of information to be filed away. T hen there were the recurrent "new stars." Pliny the Elder reported that Hipparchos had started his famous star catalogue because of such a new star. You could not tell whether a star was "new" if you did not have a list of the "old" ones. Two or three other new stars had been reported from Roman times. Then there had been one during the ninth century when Arab astronomy was at its peak under Caliph al-Mamun. In #, Hepidanus, a monk of St. Gallen in Switzerland, listed another "new star" in his Chronicle of Miracles. One especially famous super-nova, to use the modern term, occurred in the time of Tycho Brahe (#). Another one soon after, in #, has often been called Kepler's new star. Jean Dominique Cassini got "his" in #; then there was a pause until #. Of course, there have been quite a number since, but the ones that influenced thinking in # were those associated with the names of Tycho, Kepler and Cassini. If stars could have different colors, wpuld it be possible that there were dark stars? When Alexander von Humboldt wrote jokingly in a letter about such dark celestial ghosts, the then famous astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (the first to measure the distance to a star, #I Cygni) replied simply: "that innumerable stars are visible obviously does not disprove the existence of an equal number of invisible stars." So if there were dark stars and also "new" stars, wasn't the simplest explanation of the "new" stars that two dark stars had collided? Thus the novas seemed to furnish a roundabout proof for the existence of dark stars. Such an event was both end and beginning, but the idea of "the end" had entered astronomical thinking, so to speak, by the back door. For what were the dark stars? In #, Joseph Fraunhofer, discoverer of the lines named after him and amosfdiscoverer of spectrum analysis, had compared the lines of various stars. He had found that his lines were in places where the Sun did not show lines and had concluded that there probably were different kinds of stars. Fraunhofer's discovery had come clearly too early to be fully understood. It took until #, when Giovanni Batista Donati came across Fraunhofer's statement in an old volume of the proceedings of the Munich Academy of Sciences. Donati himself went to work on the problem, but most of the work was done by Father Angelo Secchi, the Papal Astronomer. stars he investigated into four classes. Class I were the "blue stars" of which Sirius and Vega are examples. Class II were the "yellow stars" with our own sun as the prime example. Class stars," such as Betelgeuse and alpha in Hercules. Class IV, finally, was a type of which very few and very small stars were then known. They were dark red and their spectrum was strange. Such stars, Father Secchi wrote, "which show such zones in their spectra must have a lower temperature than those which show only the fine lines (of Fraunhofer)." In fact, the explanation seemed to be that the stars of Class I and Class II were far too hot to permit the existence of chemical compounds, while the of Class IV were not hot enough to prevent their existence. We now know that this is wrong, but the consequences of this careful pioneer work were very obvious: Secchi's four classes were clearly four successive stages of a star. Or a sun. At first, it began hot, blue-white. In the course of time, it cooled to yellow. Then to orange. Then to red. In the end, it was too cool to be visible at all -- Bessel's dark stars. So far, eversrthing looked logical and fine. The stumbling block appeared with the logical enquiry of how long this development would take. It was the same question as "what keeps the Sun going?" There were estimates of how much heat the Sun produced. We know that these estimates were too small, but they appeared enormous. John Tyndall (a physicist, not an astronomer) said in despair, "the facts are so extraordinary that the soberest hypothesis must appear wild." The Sun kept everything going on Earth, as had been well realized by then, but the Earth intercepted only a tiny fraction of the Sun's' production of heat and light. Any reasonably bright high-school boy, knowing the diameters of the Sun and the Earth and the distance between them, could calculate just how much radiation the Earth intercepted. The figure is on the order of ##. A few scientists (but not physicists), both astonished and somewhat frightened by such figures, tried to think a way out. Maybe the Sun did not radiate into space in all directions. Maybe radiation between the Sun and the planets was a proposition resembling static electricity -- it went only in the direction in which it was received. This was a somehow valiant guess, utterly wrong, of course, and promptly disbelieved by every expert, even before James Clerk Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in # furnished the final demolishing weapon. The fact remained that the Sun threw enormous amounts of energy into space. Where did it come from? Lord Kelvin, made a quick side calculation. Even if the Sun consisted of the best grade of anthracite and were furnished with the necessary oxygen, it would not last more than # years, so it could not possibly be chemical energy. In the first place, it obviously wasn't. In the second place, geologists had already shown that the Earth was far older than # years and that, moreover, there had been life on Earth for a very much longer period. But what other energy than chemical energy was there? Here Hermann von Helmholtz had given an answer. The Sun must have had a beginning and the only possibility one could think of was that it had condensed out of cosmic dust. It must have been large and loose in the past, but the mutual gravitational attraction of the particles caused this body to condense into what we now call the Sun. Such contraction generates heat. Helmholtz advanced the theory, for the first time, in #, that the Sun kept going by continued contraction. Calculation showed that a contraction of about # feet per year should account for the observed release of energy. And since, with contraction, its surface is diminished, it should actually grow hotter. Because the contraction would amount to one mile every # years and the diameter was # miles, howeyer, the shrinkage would be too small to detect easily. IJ certainly could not be detected by comparing older records with modern (#) observations. Extrapolating backward from this idea, it turned out that the Sun could not be older -- as a years at the most. Simon Newcomb, extrapolating forward at a later date, calculated that after have shrunk to half of its present diameter and be eight times as dense. After that, the ability to contract any more would be drastically reduced and the temperature would have to fall off sharply. The overall conclusion was that the Sun would last another eight The maximum figure of # greeted with pleasure at first by the geologists, who found in their own researches that every new discovery they made needed more elapsed time. But the geologists kept on making discoveries and soon grew tight for them. Well, astronomers and physicists interested in astronomical with an alternate idea. Lord Kelvin, who himself estimated the age of the Earth as about # meteoritic theory, which claimed that the Sun maintained its heat by the impact heat of the steady rain of meteorites that must fall into it. get a grip on the problem, Lord Kelvin calculated how the solar furnace would be stoked by the impact of the planets it now has. If Mercury fell into the Sun, it would make up for the energy release of about # years and Venus would account for nearly # years of energy release. The table looked as follows: Mercury # years Venus # Earth # Mars # Jupiter # Saturn # Uranus # Neptune # Total : # years From this table, one could calculate back how much matter would have to fall into the Sun daily to keep the process continuous. The result happened to produce a nice even figure: If a mass equal to l#th of one per cent of the mass of the Earth fell into the Sun daily, it would account for the energy release. Rounded off : one Earth-mass per century. This would not show up as an increase of the diameter of the Sun for a long, long time. If the geologists had balked at the contraction hypothesis because it did not allow them enough time in the past, the astronomers balked against the meteoritic hypothesis because it would put too much matter into space. If the equivalent of one Earthmass fell into the Sun every century, the equivalent of several Earth-masses -- no, of scores of Earth-masses -- must be in space reasonably near the Sun. But the astronomers would see them. The Earth itself, for one thing, would find a heavy meteoritic bombardment going on all the time. The orbits of the inner planets would be influenced. It might work theoretically, but it did not agree with observed facts. It was like saying that the observed level of street noise at a busy intersection could be accounted for by pistols being fired at the rate of four rounds per second. The noise might be the same, but the bullets would cause other effects which, however, did not show up. The majority of astronomers thought along a different path. The observed energy release of the Sun -- facts first! -- could be accounted for by either of these two theories. But either should have effects which disagreed with observation. Therefore, both probably worked together. A steady hail of meteorites stoked the solar furnace, but there was not enough to replace all the lost heat. The difference was made up by ccmtraction which, under these circumstances, could be much slower. Hence the geologists got more time in the past because of lesser contraction, while the observing astronomers were still not asked to accept larger amounts of cosmic do. A ll this could be made to account for continued sunshine. But most likely there were elaborations. One could see the red suns in space. They had obviously run out of meteoric material and then contracted as far as possible, after which they only lost heat, with no chance of replenishing the supply, until their temperature had dropped to the point where chemical compounds became possible. Soon they would be completely dark. But if they had planets, there would be respites, just as suggested by Lord Kelvin's calculations. The planets, moving around their suns, must find some slight resistance -- infiniteMmal, to be sure, but resistance nevertheless. Slowly, their orbits would shrink and finally one would crash. The sun would be rekindled -- remember Wells: "had for a little time glowed then slowly disappear again in reddish blackness until the next planet crashed. Seen from a long distance, this would be one of the "new" stars. This concept also explained the observed fact that these new stars did not last long. They suddenly from "nothing," outshone everything else for months, but then became faint and could not be found any more after a few years. If they had been collisions between two dark star?, they should be permanent as far as shortlived humans were concerned. But a crash of a small planet seemed to fit the facts. Extending speculation a bit, there were two schools of thought. Both agreed on the general scheme for quite a long way. A star formed somehow and, with the aid of meteoric material and contraction, it kept shining for a long time, until the meteoric material was used up and contraction, as higher densities were reached, became more difficult. Near the very end came the borrowed time of the planet crashes. The question was -- and here the two schools of thought differed from each other -- what was likely to happen if you did not look at one sun, but at all of them together -- at the Galaxy, as it were? One party maintained that the average number of luminous stars would remain substantially the same because of collisions of dark stars and the "original formation" of new ones. The other group maintained that the number of luminous stars must decrease steadily, for there was no "original material" left to form new stars and every pair of dark stars that met would make just one new, though larger, luminous star. Therefore, after eons and eons of time, all the matter would be concentrated into just two supergigantic stars. Alone in space, they would, of course, attract each other and these two would suffer a head-on collision of enormous masses striking at fantastic speed. This imimaginable collision could not produce a single star. It would disperse the matter of both! But the end of one cycle would be the beginning of the next, for then there would be again matter in space, to condense and form completely new stars and planets and moons! T he picture was complete around #. In #, the professor of the Ecole Polytechnigue, Antoine Henri Becquerel, put uranium ores into the same desk drawer in which he kept unexposed photographic plates, wrapped in black paper. Two years later, Pierre and Marie Curie isolated something they called polonium. And in #, Dr. Ralph Allen Sampson, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, when asked to write the article "The Sun" for the forthcoming new edition of the Encyclopaedia Bzitanraca, only expressed the general feeling when, after reciting the older ideas, he wrote: "a source which seems plausible, perhaps only because it is less easy to test, is rearrangement of the structure of the elements' atoms. An atom is no longer figured as indivisible..." The no longer indivisible atom was to turn most of the older ideas upside down once more, as we'll see in next month's conclusion of this discussion. Wordormonn't Hall, #rd Avo., East #th Stroot. Only admission is your inlorotl in scionco fiction. Mail dollar rogittration too to #st Annual Southoailorn S-f Conforonco co Ian T. Macauloy, # East Park Lana, Atlanta #, Goorgia. Dulcie  Decorum It you make typographkal errors In typing, leave them alenel The biggest mistake is in trying to learn whether they mean anythingl "Wi ing about the letter w?" Wallace asked, looking up from the typed pages. His cool British voice was as precise as ever. "Hm?" said Jones, pulling a cork. "The letter V" WaUace repeated patiently. "I've been counting your tjrpographical errors. I find the letter you most frequently strike, when you ought to be striking some other letter, is 'w. Now I have an excuse for' doing it -- my name. But what's yours? Why 'w?" Jones got the cork out and filled both glasses. "You're supposed to be reading the article." "Couldn't possibly," Wallace said. "Awfully sorry. Full of Americanisms. I get fearfully loyal when I'm drunk. Language of Shakespeare and Milton and Robie. You know." "Robie?" "My editor. Filthy little bug. Writes himself, you know. Under pseudonyms. Asks you casually how you liked so-and-so's last piece. Actually his own, you see. Ugh." mildly, pasantly dizzy. It was quiet and 'cool down in his basement study at this time of night, with the house silent above them and the night airs astir. He and Wallace had been drinking and talking ever since four that afternoon, when they'd met at a press conference that turned out to be a bust. Wallace was a feature writer for a chain of British papers; he was just beginning a two-months' grand tour of America. "Quite sinister," Wallace said. "Bear looking into. I should like to have your opinion, Jonesy. How do you explain it?" Jones swallowed, and the cool brightness went smoothly down to join the warmth at the bottom. He said, "Maybe he has expensive tastes." "Who?" "Robie." He added, as Wallace looked blank, "Your editor." "What's that to do with V's?" "I don't know," Jones said. After a while, he got up and sat down at the desk with his hands resting on the typewriter keyboard. He twiddled his fingers experimentally a few times. "I think my fingernail catches on the V' key." Wallace nodded several times. "Yes. But why?" "Probably stands for something Freudian. Women. Woe. Waste." "Wallace, in my case," said Wallace. "Scots wha hae." Jones was slowly warming up to the topic. "No, you were right. I just remembered -- when I used to work for a publicity man, years ago. I knew the crumb was getting rich and I had an idea he wasn't paying me enough. Thirty-five dollars a week. Well -- " he typed rapidly -- "I swear I never did it on purpose, but I kept typing his name like this." He handed the sheet over to Wallace grinned. "I see. And yet the almighty dollar sign's nowhere near the 's,' is it? Not even the same finger." "No." "Well, this is interesting. What about the V,' then? I don't much care for your theory, but evidently there's a psychic message there. 'W -- 'w' -- 'w.' Wa, wa, wa. Baby crying. Maybe you weren't allowed to howl enough as a child." They drank, thinking it over. "You're going on the theory," said Jones, "that all typos have some sinister significance." "Oh, absolutely." "Well, that doesn't stand up. No. I hit every letter wrong sometimes. If they all mean something -- well, hell, how do you know you know they mean anything? You're sure to hit a wrong one every now and then. Am I getting through to you? What I mean -- " "Know exactly what you mean," said Wallace. "Question of irequency. Frequency." '"Oh," Jones said weakly. "Doesn't follow, though." over Jones's shoulder. "The 'w' happens to be in the middle of a nest of high-frequency letters, doesn't it? 'E,' 'a,' 's.' Hold on -- I've got it! Suppose somebody were trying to communicate with you!" "They could write me a letter," said Jones. "No. No post where he is. Cloud-cuckoo land, or Mars, or somewhere. You follow me?" "Or the spirit world?" asked Jones, interested. Wallace collapsed into a fit of silent laughter and spilled wine down the front of Jones's shirt. "Be sensible," he said happily. "Practical. Hard-headed. Some psychic little tout in Soho, asleep and dreaming of you. Or one of your remote descendants, centuries from now. A by-blow of your great-great-grandnephew's brother-in-law's mistress. Somebody reaching back in Time, you see, or forward, for that matter. Trying to communicate." "What for?" "Are you going to be difficult? How the deuce do I know what for? You haven't even opened the bloody envelope." He sat down again, looking miffed. "I apologize," said Jones. "Accepted," said Wallace. He sniffed dreamily, tenting his fingers in front of his long, pale face. "Now just suppose -- How would a fellow like that go about getting in touch with you?" He held up a hand to forestall Jones's reply. "He's got a bad cormection, you see. He can't make you hear voices, or do automatic writing, or ansthing like that. All he can do is twitch your fingers the least bit, when they're already moving and you're not paying much attention. Only then. Result, typos." He saluted Jones with his glass and drained it. "Magnificent," said Jones. "See any flaws in it?" "Not a one." "Very well, we shall see. Ready?" Staring intently at Jones's manuscript, Wallace read off the typographical errors as he came to them, and Jones typed them out. The resulting message read: "Settles that," said Wallace with relief. "All nonsense, naturally. Find something else to worry about tomorrow. Meanwhile, landlord, more wine." T he next day was hot and sticky, and Jones had a hangover. He sweated on a story that had gone infuriatingly wrong somewhere and finally gave it up. He didn't tell himself he had given it up; he told himself he freshened itself. The way he killed time was to go back through his manuscript and make a long list of typos. It was just as good as solitaire' and, anyhow, there was a kind of witless fascination in it. Jones knew perfectly well that he was not going to find any message hidden in his typing errors, any more than the lint from his trousers cuffs would turn out to be pure uranium, but that didn't stop written about Shakespeare and Bacon for less reason. After a while, he had a long foolish row of letters, like this: So he returned to his work, which continued to go badly. He soon found himself mooning over the string of letters again, trying to rearrange them and break them up so they would make sense. Mostly, it seemed to him, the trouble was not enough vowels. He tried inserting vowels to make words like "job, fit, dough, hot," which was all right in a primitive kind of way, but not very satisfactory. Well, suppose the meaning was in the letters he had meant to Strike, instead of the ones he had actually hit? It was a possible hypothesis, no screwier than the rest of it, and it gave him an excuse to kill more time. So he went back painstakingly through the manuscript and tracked down every typo again, and under each he wrote what the letter should have been: Using the same system, the best he could do with the second line was "Jurgen's rig is QQ help. Dividing the letters into clumps of four and reading each backward across the top, forward across the bottom, gave him "Me Jo, U jug," followed by gibberish, and the word "this," just as plain; then drivel again. He tried reading the whole sequence backward. Then he tried to break it as if it were a simple substitution code; but this was going too far. Jones gave it up. actually wrote a paragraph before another idea came to him. Even if you assumed that some typos were market tips from the Moon, or hiccups of the subconscious, or whatever, you had to figure that some typos were typos. "W" for "s," now -- perfectly natural mistake. But "w" for "j," say -- all the way across the keyboard -- would be something else again. On the typewriter keyboard, Jones discovered, "J" was directly under "U." He crossed the two letters out. Five more pairs went the same way, leaving a string of typos which, when you came to think of it, were pretty odd -- like "E" for "J" -- different fingers, different hand, different row of keys. He stared at what he had left: Something about the bottom lines struck his attention. Under it, he wrote: He blinked. "Be taking up Yoga next," he muttered. "Automatic writing. Old ladies at stances." But, of course, he was hooked. what? Doll carts, dull caddy, dollars and cents? He reached blindly to the shelf over his desk, hauled down a book, opened it beside his typewriter and began transcribing. His fingers were nervous. He was making a lot of mistakes, he knew, but he didn't try to do any better; he just kept banging away, eyes fixed on the open book, breathing in little agonized snorts through his nose. He slammed the line-space lever and the paper tilted out of the machine; he was at the bottom of the page. He took the paper almost angrily, smoothed it out, began listing errors. After a few minutes, this is what he had: He got drunk all over again, sobered up and wrote a letter to Wallace in care of the New York office. He wrote the letter in longhand -- four pages of it -- and sent it off before he had a chance to lose his nerve. writer again for almost a week, in spite of two sharp arguments with his wife, until the letter came from Wallace: Hotel Imperial Deadwood, Ariz. Dear Fred, Well, you're right and I apologize for several things that occurred to me when I got your letter. I am absolutely bowled over, but will try to get some first impressions down. Your letter arrived Thursday. Friday night, I had just finished a piece and I tried your system on it, feeling seven kinds of a fool. This emerged: Wals (me) cntakt derm. (Darkroom?) Not the best spelling, but the parallel with your message is impossible to ignore, and of course there is no way on Earth you could have engineered this, so I am stuck with the thing. Now pay close attention, please. #.  have no recollection of proposing this or any other ttwory of typos to you on that evening. I know I was well along, but I always remember the next morning. Either you're mistaken or -- well, let's move along. #. I took the trouble to examine t # rpescripts by three other newsmen I met here; there was nothing in them. Has it struck you that even if one of us should demonstrate this thing, by typing an unfamiliar text in the presence of observers, they'd be able to say we had memorized the message forehand and deliberately made the required errors? I don't mean that we couldn't get a hearing -- nothing easier with a crackpot hypothesis like this, as you know -- but that we'd convince nobody who'd be worth the trouble of convincing. Later: It comes down to this, that we have either got to drop the thing now -- and do you really see yourself doing that, turning out tons of copy between now b your #th birthday and wondering all the while what grisly mysteries are concealed in the typos? -- or else we are both of us going to wind up listyig to starboard, two bonnets with but a single bee. If you see any way out that I've overlooked, speak up. Still later: Have just been through several of my old scripts, a thing which has probably occurred to you, too, by now. There is nothipg in them; nothing in anything until just last week. I don't like this. I don't like it in the least Why us? (In pencil) To save you the trouble, the typos in this letter spell out: Wlas (me again) fil fil be be derm. I haven't the slightest idea what it may mean, but for some reasm it bothers me more than the other one. I keep thinking of that "derm" and it reminds me of Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" -- do you know it? -- that terrifying business about the giant who turned out to be giving everybody their orders, anarchists and policemen alike, while sitting in a pitch dark room. Feet feel be be. I've got a headache. Write when you can. Best, Walt T he following morning, Jones went uptown to the offices of the news service for which he did most of his work. As a freelance feature writer, he should have gone to the Reading Room of the New York Public Library instead, but he had ancient privileges and felt more at home in the news service's compact reference library. He looked in the Unabridged first, then in the Dictionary of Abbreviations. He found no D. L. C. and no D. C. R. M. D. L. S. was Doctor of Library Science. Jones snorted. Or if you inverted it, D. C. L. was Doctor of Civil Law. There was a C. R. O. M., meaning Coidederaci# Regional Obrera Mexicaita; you could put a D. on the front to stand for Director... What if they were phonetic spellings, though? Everything else in the "messages" was uh -- Decorum. Dulcie and Decorum! He felt a quickening of interest. That meant something, if only -- Phil Mann shuffied into the room and stood quietly watching him, comfortably paunchy in a knit sports shirt, pipe in his hand. Jones looked up. "Find it?" "No," said Jones abstractedly. Now what the devil was it that he'd been on the verge of? Mann glanced at the dictionary on the table. "If it's abbreviations you want, that guy out there is your man." "Yeah?" "Sure. I think you met him once. Sam Fowler. Does crossword puzzles for the Trib. Any cockeyed combinations of letters, he knows." Fowler was pudgy and fatlipped; his eyes were enormous behind swimmy lenses. He gazed at the ceiling, stroking his chin. "D. L. C.," he said. "Doctor of Literary -- Doctor of Library -- Nup. D. C. R. M. Hmm..." He shook his head. "I didn't think so," said Jones. "It was just a -- " "Wait a minute, wait a minute." Fowler shook a fat palm at him and went on staring at the ceiling. He shifted on the edge of the desk, moved his lips once or twice, sniffed, and went on staring. Mann wandered over to look at one of the softly clicking teletype machines and wandered back again. At last Fowler said, "Only thing I can think of -- don't know whether it'll help you -- " "Yes?" Jones encouraged. "Computer names. Not any that I ever heard of, but they're making new ones all the time. Digital Linear Computer. Digital Computer -- ah -- Recompensaeing, Military. Something like that. Not those, of course. Computer names." Jones was heading for the door when Fowler called after him. "Uh?" he asked, turning. "Any periods?" Fowler repeated. "Any -- ? Oh. No periods. Just "Computer names," said Fowler dogmatically. A T home, mechanically transcribing from the open boo on his left, Jones slowly realized that it didn't have to be computer names, for Pete's sake, at all. How about government departments ? Department of Labor Controls? If you were going to imagine things, why not Department of Control and Regulation of Management? Funny that hadn't occurred to him at the time. Or to Fowler. Jones felt a bit irritated; the man ought to know his own business better than that. And yet the idea of the computers had taken instant hold of his imagination. blocks of masonry, dull-lit, full of the smells of ozone and oiled metal, and the sound of purring... He came to the end of a page and ripped it out of the machine. It was getting so that he hated to touch the typewriter; the keys were like little metal teeth that snapped back at him. Not enough sleep last night or the night before. He was on edge. He forced himself to think about the government departments again while he tabulated errors. There was something so solid and safe about a government department. Department of Control and Regulation -- His fingers had gone numb. He stared down at his writing. It was as clear to his mind as if he had heard it in the rh # d:hmic rotary murmur of one of tiie teletype machines at the office Idling up there in the big masonry block -- idling (click) like a metal Red King (click) dreaming of a man named Jones... "Dulcie!" cried Jones, strangling. "Dulce -- uh! Dulcie!" Little steel typewriter keys were stuck in his shoulder. He writhed. "Wake up! Fred!" He stared at his wife's face foggily. She was all blurry in the funny light from the bedstand. "Dulcie," he said with a thick tongue. She let go his shoulder and brushed a cable of hair back from her forehead. "Fred, what's the matter with you? You scared me." He moved his lips and tongue experimentally. "All right," he mumbled. "You're not awake yet," she said, studying him. "Who's Dulcie?" "Just a nightmare." He shuddered. "Just another damned nightmare." He threw the bedcovers back and started to get out of bed. until he began putting on his clothes. "Where are you going? Do you know what time it is?" "Half past three," said Jones, glancing at the clock. 'Doesn't matter. Wide awake." "Fred, sit down a minute. I want to talk to you." Jones kept going out of the bedroom. "Fred, I've taken about as much of this -- " "Not now!" he shouted. He went on down to his study, clicked on the friendly lights and sat down by the window. He lit a cigarette. The fluorescent light on his desk began to hum. "Stop that, damn you!" Jones yelled, and sprang at it. It toppled over, tinkled, sputtered maliciously, and went out. Jones got the oilcloth cover from behind the filing cabinet, where he had tossed it years ago, and carefully draped it over the typewriter, not touching the metal with his Angers. "Click," he said between his teeth, pulling the edges of the cover tight. "Go ahead and click." After a moment, hesitantly, he picked up the telephone. He used a yellow pencil to dial #. "Long distance," said the whiskery voice in his ear. "I want to make a call to Deadwood, Arizona. Station to station. The Imperial Hotel." Jones introduced himself to the thin voice at the other end of the line. "I'm trying to locate Mr. Walter Wallace. Did he leave a forwarding address or mention where he was going when he checked out?" "Just one moment, sir... No, sir, Mr. Wallace hasn't checked out. He's still in the hotel." "Ring him," said Jones. "No, wait a minute. Take a message. Tell him I'm grabbing the first plane out." Wallace was waiting for him in his room. He was paler than ever. He seemed to listen to himself with a faint, incurious surprise. "I was due to go on to Reno day before yesterday, but I didn't. No point to it until I get this thing settled. Awfully good of you to come out and compare notes." The roar of the plane's engines was still faintly in Jones's ears, like a far-off, thimderous, metal surf. He heard himself ask, "Do you have nightmares?" "Nightmares!" said Wallace faintly, with a wry twist of his lips. "Oh, yes. Any amount. I haven't touched a typewriter." "Me, either." "Now you'd think that would help, but it doesn't." Wallace laced his long, translucent fingers together, hunching himself like a large, pale spider in the maple chair, in the chintz-filtered sunlight. "Has it struck you," he asked slowly, "that none of the messages actually said anything? Told us anjrthing? Contact. Receive message. Obey. Would you take the trouble to reach back two hundred years in time to say that to anybody?" whistling in his nose. "Why did you say two himdred years?" "Oh, well," said Wallace, and looked away with a little smirk. "I have been sitting here thinking," he went on, "and do you know what else I've thought of?... I'm not boring you? Can't imderstand why not... I'm thinking of thrillers I read in my carefree youth, where the. murderer would send you a note with some insidious Oriental poison on it. You see, it didn't matter what the note said. It could be anything. For example, 'What price umbrellas now?' You opened it up, and got the poison on your fingers, and then you were as good as dead. That was the real message." "Listen," Jones asked after a moment, "what does it want? Can you feel that? Do you -- " "Want?" said Wallace. "Want? I don't know. We're finding out, though, aren't we? We opened the bloody envelope. Now they don't need to muck about with typographical errors, you see. We're on the hook." He smiled. "What do you suppose the worm says to the fish?" Jones sat dully in his rumpled topcoat with his hat on his knee. He was unshaven and his shirt was buttoned up wrong. He got a cigarette out of his pocket, looked at it and put it away. "I do run on," said Wallace politely. Looking at him, Jones discovered that Wallace was astonishingly flat. He was a nicely colored picture pasted up in the air in front of a flat chintzy wall, with light coming through from somewhere Outside... like the peephole boxes they had made in Sunday school when he was a kid, pasting up cut-out people and furniture from magazines, to stand there in a stifling shoe-box and be stared at. It was a curious feeling. He knew that he could get up and step across the carpet and touch Wallace, and find him round and solid and breathing. But he knew it wouldn't mean ansrthing; he could do it, yet it wouldn't be any sort of proof. And looking at the flat illusion that was Wallace, he could see that Wallace felt the same about him. He stood up. "We'll have to work together," he said. "Lick this thing. Must leave now." "Oh, yes," Wallace agreed. "Awfully nice of you to call." M yra said, "I just can't get used to it." She was sitting on the dim side of the room, hands in her lap, looking at the carpet. Near her. Milt Kalish sat uncomfortably, wishing for more light and holding an unlit cigar in his hand. From the next room came the intermittent sound of hammering. "We don't know yet, Myra," said Kalish"Can't you tell#" she asked, with a bitter undertone. "I know. He's going to have to go to a sanitarium, or a rest home or whatever name you want to call it. He probably won't come back. I knew it and I could see it on your face, even before dinner. So why won't you admit it?" Kalish sighed. "Maybe it isn't that simple." "Simple!" she said. Kalish did not move; his mind registered the implied resentment, classified it and filed it away. He said nothing and did not move, and his hostility toward the world of people stayed buried so deeply that Myra could only sense that it must be there, not feel it or use it. The hammering started again and Kalish saw Myra's hands clench. Then it stopped and there were footsteps in the kitchen. Myra looked straight ahead. Jones came into the room, stooping a little, his spectacle rims catching the light. He had a tack hammer in his hand. He went to the secretary, opened the top drawer and scrabbled up a handful of pencils. "Fred," said Kalish, "have you got time to sit down and talk to me a little?" "Shudas paparalishus," replied Jones. He turned around and went out. Myra's voice was thin with strain. "What was that? More Russian?" "No." "What then?" Kalish shrugged his shoulders and twisted his neck slightly. It helped the little tickle of pain between his shoulder-blades, but it wasn't a gesture he permitted himself during office hours. "Lithuanian, perhaps. I didn't recognize it. I'm not really a linguist; I just pick up a few words here and there from my patients." "What was that he kept saying all during dinner? That was Russian." Kalish blinked. "Yes. Pogebe!e -- ruin, devastation." "Why Russian? That's all I want to know. We never had any trouble -- I think I could stand it, but it's that one extra thing on top of everything else." She began to cry. "Russian!" "YoU don't know where he might have picked it up?" "No." She added bitterly, "Two nights ago -- when I told you about, when I thought he was coming out of it -- I asked him. And he said it was because his great-great-great-I-forget-how-many-times grandson was a Russian. Then I knew he was crazy." He had started with little rectangular strips of wood from an orange crate, all different sizes, and when the crate gave out he had begun using strips of tin, held together at the corners by allpurpose cement and lead pencils. "Maze" was the nearest word. It was a little like a model for a mad architect's building, skeletons of rooms piled one on another, first the wood from the orange crate; then tin, all at different levels, all open at the ends, so that you could look all the way through it. He did not know what he wanted it for. Myra and some man were standing behind him, watching. They didn't bother Jones. In one ear and out the other. Now a top piece here and then we start a new cell... He reached for the tin and found only a snippet, not big enough for anything. There had been a bigger piece on the bench, he remembered, but no matter. He wandered down the bench, looking at things. There was a scrap of linoleum -- Somebody's arm in a blue pinstripe sleeve appeared just as he reached for it and took the linoleum away. What else? Jones started musingly across the garage workshop, thinking and looking. Kerosene can -- big one, empty, standing in the comer. He could cut that up with the tin snips, probably. But just as he got to it, the same blue pinstripe arm came and took it away. Jones looked around in mild annoyance. The pinstripe man was standing there, with the can in one hand and the piece of tin in the other. Myra stood right beside him. He reached for the tin; that would be better than fooling around cutting up a kerosene can. The blue pinstripe held it away from him. "Fred, do you remember me? Milt Kalish? We used to live next door in Long Branch. Remember?" "Kalish," he said agreeably, and reached for the tin again. Pinstripe held it away from him. "Not quite yet, Fred. First tell me what you're building here. Can you tell me now? Do you want to tell me what you're building here?" "A thing," explained Jones. He made descriptive motions with his hands. "You know." M yra put a handkerchief over her mouth and went away. Jones reached for the tin. "Not yet, Fred. Tell me, who is Dulcie?" Dulcie... A pulsating hum. A close warmth. A darkness. He could feel her aroimd him, especially when he closed his eyes, but she was a long way away. It was hard for her to talk to him, hard for him to listen. "Is she a person?" Ridiculous idea... He grinned, shook his head. "Is Dulcie female?" Well, yes. You would have to say so, he supposed. He nodded. The voice kept on. Had Dulcie told him to make the thing, what was it for, did he see her, hear her? "Does she talk to anybody else besides you?" "Not yet," Jones said. And that was enough. He turned around and went back to his bench, in case the piece of tin should be there, after all, and it was. He cut rectangles of tin with the snips, carefully, and began to build a new cell that would finish the fourth tier. Their voices trickled through his head. "I think we'll leave him alone now for a few minutes. You said there were some papers?" "Downstairs. In his study." Pinstripe was gone, which meant Jones could go on with his work. He began cutting linoleum into neat strips. Linoleum would do fine. "Fred -- " she began weepily. He was cementing the first wall of a new cell that had nothing to lean against. That was the hardest part, making the first wall solid and straight. People didn't know. "Fred, can't you talk to me?" The linoleum was working very well. He had no way of being sure, but he had a feeling he was almost through. A Myra hand came and yanked away the rest of the linoleum. Jones noticed the heavy paper of the calendar on the wall and pulled it down. He cut a few strips of it experimentally. It worked fine. T he maze was finished. Jones knew what it was for. The reason it looked weird to other people was that it reminded them of a building. And of course, if you tried to make a building out of it, it was all wrong. It was a model of something else altogether : a model of a way of thinking. It was, you might say, a constant reminder. In and around and down. In and around and down. Jones tilted the thing gently to see better. In and around and. In and around. In and. In. It was like looking at one of those hypnotic spiral disks, but with a difference. Looking at a spiral only stunned your forebrain, opened up your skull to let any suggestion in. But looking into the maze forced your mind into a definite pattern, over and over -- like tuning a radio receiver to one station, or like making a lock that would fit only one key. Jones's mind was perfectly clear. He knew the maze was to make him hear Dulcie better. And he heard her. When he shut his eyes, the world blackened and slipped back out of sight like blown ash, Myra and Kalish and workshop and all. He felt the centuries wavering past him until he hung disembodied in tomorrow's twilight -- A cool dim place. Tip. Mind your hats goan in. A silence that trembled in the walls. This was Dulcie. As he hung there, loving her, her knowledge flowed through him. He remembered how it all began: "Of course it isn't a substitute for the General Staff or anything like that. Human minds still have to make the decisions. But modem warfare involves so many factors that it really has become a mathematical problem. And to solve a mathematical problem faster, more efficiently, we use an know, incidentally, that the other side has been doing the same for the last three years." After that, at first, Dulcie munched the little problems they gave her and ticked out the answers. But it happened that a human evaluation lost a battle and they set up the channels to feed information directly into Dulcie. And a human decision lost another battle and, not without fierce argument among themselves, they gave her the channels of command. They had no real choice, except to wait until the other side did it to their computer first. So Dulcie became a chess player. Her board was the planet, her pieces men and machines. P to QB#: and down rained a hell of missiles that pretended economy became her passion. She reduced the elements of warfare to a basic few, and reduced them again. Across the ocean, deep in another continent, so did her enemy. Now war to a computer is not the same as war to a human being. Nobody had ever thought it was, or so much as tried to make Dulcie feel that human revulsion from the things they so enthusiastically did. Dulcie did two things that no one had expected. the rooftops were not there, nor the people under them, nor the ships in the harbor, nor the boys playing ball outside the town. D ulcie was a living thing. It was in her to grow and increase her ability, to do her job with greater thoroughness, efficiency, simplicity, elegance. Like an old gray philosopher, or boxer, or politician, she learned to do much with little; Probing into the mysteries of the human brain, so convenient and puzzling a model of her own, she found the pattern that could fix a mind forever in one unreasoning conviction. She chose the simplest and best for her purpose: I love Dulcie. She insinuated that pattern into the mind of every man, woman and child within her reach -- within her hemisphere -- and canceled out all the problems of discipline, training, tradition, politics, civil government, military organization, law enforcement -- seven-tenths, let's say, of the human picture -- at one stroke. The second thing was even simpler. She deduced the existence of her opponent, searched for him on wavelengths which should be as perceptible to him as to her, and worked out a system of communication. It was not necessary for men reply, "Then I move here." Not every game had to be played out. When Dulcie lost, she paid. Machines could be destroyed more efficiently by their owner than by the enemy; human beings, asked to die, did it tidily and conveniently. There was no cruelty or humor in it for Dulcie; it simply made her books balance. And when, in spite of her best fumbling efforts, her human beings -- her counters -- diminished until aone were left, what was she to do but search in the vastness of time for more? She began tentatively, feeling back along the ancestral lines of the last to die, touching here an ancestor more susceptible than the rest, here another -- "What was that?" Myra asked Kalish. "Did you get it?" Kalish was carrying some typed papers; the inked notes at the bottom of them, in his own handwriting, were not quite dry. His face had a peculiar expression, a little like that of a man who thinks he has just been wounded, but hasn't felt the pain. "Latin this time," he said. "Duce et decorum est pro patria mori. 'It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.' " The link strained tight. Jones felt his love gathering inside him like a fist: suffocating love, bursting love. He knew it all now. He knew what Dulcie wanted him for and the joy of being chosen was more than he could bear. His heart burst with it. "Click," said Dulcie. "Click," answered Decorum. And Jones did.  thought of every way to save Hal from the Lydna Project and failed... but the women didn'tl W E had the driver let us off in the central district and took a coptertaxi back to Homefield. There's no disgrace about it, of course; we just didn't feel like having all the neighbors see the big skycar with Lydna Project painted on its side, and then having them drop in casually to express what they would call interest and we would know to be curiosity. There are people who boast that their sons and daughters have been picked for Lydna. What is there to boast about? It's pure chance, within limits. And Hal is our only child and we love him. Lucy didn't say a word all the way back from saying good-by to him. Lucy and I have been married now for # years and I guess I know her about as well as anybody on Earth does. People who don't know her so well think she's cold. But I knew what feelings she was crushing down inside her. Besides, I wasn't feeling much like talking myself. I was remembering too many things: Hal at about two, looking up at me -- when I would come home deadtired from a hard day of being chewed at by half a dozen bosses right up to the editor-inchief whenever anjrthing went the least bit out of kilter -- with a smile that made all my tiredness disappear. Hal, when I'd pick him up at school, proudly displaying a Cybernetics Approval Slip (and ignoring the fact that half the other kids had one, too). Hal the day I took him to the Beard Removal Center, certain that he was a man, now that he was old enough for depilation. Hal that morning two weeks ago, setting out to get his Vocational Assignment Certificate... That's when I stopped remembering. It had been five years after our marriage before they let us start a child : some question about Lucy's uncle and my grandmother. Most parents aren't as old as we are when they get the news and usually have other children left, so it isn't so bad. still was silent. She took off her scarf and cloak and put them away, and then she pushed the button for dinner without even asking me what I wanted. I noticed, though, that she was ordering all the things I like. We both had the day off, of course, to go and say good-by to Hal -- Lucy is a technician at Hydroponics Center. I felt awkward and clumsy. Her ways are so different from mine; I explode and then it's over -- just a sore place where it hurts if I touch it. Lucy never explodes, but I knew the sore place would be there forever, and getting worse instead of better. We ate dinner in silence, though neither of us felt hungry, and had the table cleared. Then it was nearly # o'clock and I had to speak. "The takeoff will be at #:#," I said. "Want me to tune in now? Last year, when Mutro was Solar President, he gave a good speech before the kids left." "Don't turn it on at all!" she said sharply. Then, in a softer voice, she added: "Of course, Frank, turn it on whenever you like. I'll just go to my room and open the soundproofing." There were still no tears in her eyes. I thought of a thousand things to say: Don't you want to catch a glimpse of Hal in the' crowd going up the ramp? Mightn't they let the kids wave a last farewell to their folks listening and watching in? Mightn't something in the President's speech make us feel a little better? But I heard myself saying, "Never mind, Lucy. Don't go. I'll leave the thing off." I didn't want to be alone. I wanted Lucy there with me. So we sat out the whole time of the visicast, side by side on the window-couch, holding hands. I'll say this for the neighbors -- they must all have known, for Hal was the first to be selected from Homefield in nearly # years, and the newscast must have announced it over and over! but not a single person on the whole # floors of the house butted in on us. Not even that snoopy student from Venus in #-#, who's always dropping in on other tenants and taking notes on "the mores of Earth Aboriginals." People can be very decent sometimes. We needn't have worried about coming home in the Lydna Project bus. It was no good trying to keep my mind on anjrthing else. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to relive the two last hours we'd ever have with Hal. It couldn't mean to him what it meant to us. We were losing; he was both losing and gaining. We were losing our whole lives for #I years past; he was, too, but he was entering a new life we would never know anything about. No word ever comes from Lydna; that's part of the project. Nobody even knows where it is for sure, though it's supposed to be one of the outer asteroids. Both boys and girls are sent and there must be marriages and children -- though probably the death-rate is pretty high, for every year they have to select # more from Earth to keep the population balanced. We would never know if our son married there, or whom, or when he died. We would never see our grandchildren, or even know if we had any. TAL was a good son and I think we were fairly good parents and had made his childhood, happy. But at #, faced with a great, mysterious adventure and an unknown and exciting future, a boy can't be expected to be drowned in grief at saying goodby to his humdrum old father and mother. It might have been tougher for him # years ago, when they hadn't learned to decondition children early from parental fixations. But no yoimgster today would possess that kind of unwholesome dependency. If he did, he would never have been selected for Lydna in the first place. That's one comfort we have -- it's a sort of proof we had reared a child far above the average. It was just weakness in me to half wish that Hal hadn't been so healthy, so handsome, so intelligent, so fine in character. They were a wonderful lot. We said our good-bys in an enormous room of the spaceport, with this year's # selectees there from all over Earth, each with the relatives and whoever else had permission to make the last visit. I suppose it's a matter of accommodations and transportation, for nobody's allowed more than three. So it was mostly parents, with a few brothers, sisters and sweethearts or friends. The selectees themselves choose the names. After all, they've had two weeks after they were notified to say good-by to everyone else who matters to them. Most of the time, all I could keep my mind on was Hal, trying to fix forever in my memory every last detail of him. We have dozens of sound stereos, of course, but this was the last time. Still, it's my business at the News Office, and has been for # years, to observe people and form conclusions about them, so I couldn't help noticing with a professional eye some of the rest of the selectees. (This farewell visit is a private affair, and the press is barred, which is why I'd never been there before.) There were two kinds of selectees that stood out, in my mind. One was those who had nobody at all to see them off. Completely alone, poor kids -- orphans, doubtless, with no families and apparently not even friends near enough to matter. But, in a way, they would be the happiest; life on Earth couldn't have been very rewarding for them, and on Lydna they might find companionship. (If only companionship in misery, I thought -- but I shied away from that. In our business, there are always leaks; we know -- or guess -- a few things about Lydna nobody else does, outside the authorities themselves. But we keep our mouths shut.) The ones that tore my hearts were the boys and girls in love. They never take married people for Lydna, but a machine can't tell what a boy or girl is feeling about another girl or boy, and it's a machine that does the selecting. There's no use putting up an argument, for, once made, the choice is inexorable and unchangeable. In my work as a newsgatherer. I've heard some terrible stories. There have been suicide pacts and murders. VT'OU could tell the couples in love. Not that there were any scenes. If there had been any in the two weeks past, they were over. But anybody who has learned to read human reactions, as I have, could recognize the agony those youngsters were going through. I felt a deep gratitude that Hal wasn't one of them. He'd had his share of adolescent affairs, of course, but I was sure he was still just playing around. He'd seen a lot of Bet Milen, a girl a class ahead of him in school and college, but I didn't think she meant more to him than any of the others. If she had, she'd have been along to say good-by, but he'd asked for only the two of us. She was now a laboratory assistant in our hospital and could easily have gotten the time off. It was growing late, almost midnight, and Lucy and I had to be at work tomorrow, no matter how we felt. I forced myself to talk, with Lucy's silent pain smothering me like a force-blanket. I made an effort and cleared my throat. "Lucy, go to bed and turn on the hypno and try to get some sleep." Lucy stood up obediently, but she shook her head. "You go, dear," she said, her voice firm. "I can't. I -- " The roof buzzer sounded. Somebody had landed in a copter and wanted us. "Don't answer," I said quickly. "There's nobody we want to see -- But she had already pushed the button to open the door. It was Bet Milen, the girl Hal used to go around with... I braced myself. This might be bad. She might have cared more for Hal than we had guessed. But she didn't look grief stricken. She looked excited, and determined, and a little bit frightened. She scarcely glanced at me. She went right up to Lucy and took both Lucy's hands in hers. "Well," she said in a clipped. tense voice, "we made it." Then Lucy broke for the first time. The tears ran down her face and she didn't even wipe them away. "Are you certain?" "Positive. And I got word to him. We'd agreed on a code. That's why he didn't want me there today -- we couldn't trust ourselves not to betray it, either way." I stood there staring at them, bewildered. "What's this all about?" I demanded. "Have you two cooked up some crazy scheme to rescue Hal? I hope to heaven not! It would ruin all of us, including him!" HE wild daydreams I'd had myself hashed through my mind -- the drug that would seem to kill him and wouldn't, the anonymous false accusation of subversion, the previous secret marriage. All impossible, all fatal. Lucy disengaged her hands from the girl's and slipped her arm through mine. "You tell him. Bet," she said gently. "You're the one who should." I'd never noticed how pretty the girl was till then, when she stood there with her face flushed and her eyes straight on mine. A pang went through me; if only she and Hal could have -- "No, Mr. Sturt," she said, "we haven't rescued Hal. He's gone. But we've rescued part of him. I'm going to have his baby." "Bet's going to live with us and be our daughter, Frank," Lucy explained. "Hal and she and I worked it out in these two weeks, after they came to me and told me how they felt about each other. We couldn't tell you till we were sure; I couldn't bear to have you hope and then be disappointed -- it would be enough for me to have to suffer that." "That is. I'll come if you want me here, Mr. Sturt," said Bet. I had to sit down before I could speak. "Of course I want you. But what about your own family?" "I haven't any. My mother's dead and my father's an engineer on Ganymede and gets home on leave about once in three years. I've been living in a youth hostel." "But look here -- " I turned to Lucy -- "how on Earth can you know? Two weeks or less is no time -- " Lucy gave me a look I recognized, the patient one of the scientist for the layman. "The Chow-Visalius test, dear. One day after the fertilized ovum starts dividing -- " "And I ran it myself every day for over a week. That's one of my jobs in the lab and it was easy to slip in another specimen. And it didn't, and it didn't and I went nearly out of my mind -- " "Every time Hal entered the apartment. I'd look at him and he'd shake his head," Lucy interrupted. "It meant everhing to him. And it would just have broken my heart -- " "Mine, too," Bet said softly. "And his. And today was the last chance. I was scared to try it. This afternoon at #:#, just before the farewell visits, was the deadline for viz messages to any of them. If I'd had to send mine without the word we'd agreed on that would tell him it was all right -- But it was, at last! And now he knows, even if I never -- even if we never -- Excuse me, please, it's been a strain. I'm afraid I'm going to bawl." W E let her alone. Kids nowadays hate to be fussed over. Us, we'd lost our son, and that was going to stay with us forever. But now we would have his child to love and -- An appalling thought struck me suddenly. I can't imagine why I hadn't realized it sooner. All this emotion, I suppose. "Good God!" I cried. "An illegal child! We can't keep it!" "Nobody's going to know," Lucy replied calmly. "Bet's going to live with us, and when it starts to show, she's going to take her allowed leave. We'll take ours. too, and we'll all go on a trip -- to Mars, maybe, or Venus -- one of the settled colonies where we can rent a house. Babies don't have to be bom in hospitals, you know; our ancestors had them right at home. She's strong and healthy and I know what to do. Then we'll come back here and we'll have a baby with us that we adopted wherever we were. Nobody will ever know." "Look," I said in a voice I tried to keep from rising. "There nized Solar planets. Every one of those people is on record at Central Cybernetics. How do you suppose you!re going to get away with the phony adoption of a non-existent child? The firsf time you have to take it to a baby clinic, they'll find it has no card." "I thought of that," Lucy said, "and it can be done, because it must. Frank, for heaven's sake, use your wits! You're a newsgatherer. You know all sorts of people everywhere." "I don't know any machines. And it's machines that handle the records." "Machines under the supervision of humans." "Sure," I said sarcastically. "I just go to my ex-newsgatherer pal who feeds the records to lo or Ceres and say, 'Look, old fellow, do me a favor, will you? My wife wants to adopt a baby from your colony, so just make up the names of two people and give them a life-check, invent their ancestors back to the time Central Cybernetics was established, and then slip in cards for their marriage, and the birth of their child -- I'll let you know later whether to make it a boy or a girl -- and then their deaths; and then my wife and I can adopt that made-up baby.' "What kind of blackmailing hold do you think I have on any record official," I asked angrily, "to make him do a thing like that and keep his mouth shut about it? I could be eliminated for treason for even making such a suggestion." "Frank, think! Surely there must be some way!" A nd then it struck me. "Wait! I just got an idea. When I said 'treason,' just now -- It might barely be possible -- " "Oh, what?" "It would have to be Mars, the North Polar Cap colony. The K-Alph Conspiracy messed things up there badly." "I remember, Mr. Sturt!" Bet said excitedly. "They wrecked everything in the three months before the rebellion was crushed, didn't they?" "Everything including their cybernetics equipment. Central doesn't want it known, but I have inside information that it's still not in going condition. That colony is full of children who have never been registered. And I doubt if it will be in # per cent shape for the best part of another year. Those hellions really did a job. Let's see -- this is the end of Month Two. We'd have to get away around Month Eight at the latest and the baby would be bom -- when exactly, Bet?" "Early in Month Twelve. We could all be back here again by the first of next year, or even by the end of Month Thirteen." "Well, I have enough accumulated leave for that and I guess you have too, Lucy; neither of us has taken more than two or three weeks for years. But what about you. Bet? You've been working less than a year." "I can borrow it. Our director is crazy about travel and she'll be all for it when I tell her I have a chance to go to Mars for a long visit. Besides, she knows about Hal and me -- I mean the way we are about each other -- and she'll understand that I'd want to get away for a while now." Asher, my editor-in-chief, would feel the same way, I thought, and so would Lucy's boss. "I knew you'd find a way," remarked my wife complacently. I looked at the telechron. "We've all got to be at work in seven hours," I said, "if we expect to get through before the end of the afternoon. What say we turn in?" "You stay here with us. Bet," said Lucy. "You parked your copter in our port, didn't you? Frank, I think we need a drink." I pushed the buttons. Nobody said anything, but somehow it was a toast to Hal. I know the liquor had to get past a lump in my throat and the women were both crying. It wasn't like my self-contained Lucy. I guess she thought so herself, for she braced herself. But her voice was still trembling when she turned to Bet. "A year from now," she said, "we'll all be back here in this room and, this time, part of Hal will be here with us -- his son, our little Hal." "It might be our little Hallie." Bet smiled through her tears. "It will be ten weeks before I can run the Schuster test to find out." "It won't make any difference. Hal will never know that, but he'll know, way out there on Lydna, that his baby has been born. He'll know, even though he can never see it -- or us." L ucy blinked, then went on bravely. "Every time he looks in a mirror there, he'll say to himself, 'Well, back on Earth, there's a little tyke with my blue eyes and my curly hair and my mouth and nose and chin, who's going to grow up to be tall and straight like me -- or maybe like Bet, but also a lot like me.' "And as he grows older, he can think back to the way he was as a child and a boy and a man, and know that his son, or his daughter, will be feeling and thinking and looking some day just about the way he himself is then, and it will be a link with Earth and with us -- " That was when I had to go to the window and look out for a long time to pull myself together before I could face them again. Lydna is top-top secret, but as I've said before, we hewsgatherers get inside information. I have a pretty shrewd idea of what the mysterious Lydna Project is. It's to alter human beings so they can adapt to the colonization of outer space. The medics do things to them to enable them and their descendants to resist every possible condition of temperature and radiation and gravity. They have to alter the genes -- acquired characters would be of use only in a short-term project, and this is long-term. But you can't alter genes without affecting the individual. We'd have Hal's normal child. But when Hal got to Lydna, he and the rest of them would be shocked and sick for a while at sight of some of the inhabitants. And if he had any children on Lydna, we, back here, would scarcely recognize them as human. Some of them might have extra limbs. Some might have eyes and ears in odd places. Some might have lungs outside their bodies, or brains without a skull. By that time, Hal himself would have got over being sick -- unless, some time, he got hold of a mirror and remembered the boy he used to be. brliiRliiB your favorite authors of Sdenee-Fictlon. Fantasy and Weird adventures as near as your inallbox! Just send your name and address -- you'll get your copy by return mail... and we'll keep you up on new titles as we're doing for thousands of othersi Bargain buys galorel Write today! Satisfaction guaranteed. I to E. Ban Fernando St. Dept. G-#' If you enclose #c to cover postage and handling, we'll send along with your free catalog -- by one of the famous authors of today. Ban Jose #. Cnilf. Lloyd Castle. Dodd Mead  Co., # " this book, I said to myself, "Ochone! Another one of those stuffy British jobs!" But when I finally laid it down, I said -- out loud this time -- "Eureka The best novel on the first space station yet to appear!" The moral: don't always let your momentary distaste for a writing style deter you from further reading. This book opens with a pretty pompous introductory chapter, but once you get by that, you are into a genuinely enthralling account of tiie planning, building, launching, and (in space) continuous enlargement of the first "Earth satellite vehicle." Like Arthur Clarke's rocket in his Prelude to Space, this project is primarily a British one, though there are many scientists of other nationalities involved, too. Indeed, the book is a fine parallel -- and extension -- of the Clarke tale. As in that book, the rocket is launched in Australia and (also as with the Clarke) there are no nasty saboteurs and international spies, no lurid violence, no cheap melodrama -- just a fine story. And there is some wonderful descriptive writing as well. Mr. Castle's pictures of life and work on the satellite in space are without doubt the most real and almost poetically vivid I have ever read. Indeed, the whole book, once you get by the opening few pages, is tomorrow's history given solid flesh and bones. Co., # T his novel, which was first published in #, is definitely worth reissue. It is a subtle, moving story of mood and character, written in the great tradition of British fantasy, even though the author is an American. It tells of the extraordinary short life of the lovely and mysterious Selena LeNormand and her tragic interludes with two men, old Professor LeNormand cian Jerry Lister. Particularly fascinating is the quietly frightening way in which the author plays the ancient theme of "possession" on the new instrument of science fiction. Joseph Needham. Cambridge University Press, # TID you know the Chinese were the first inventors not only of gunpowder and printing, but of wheelbarrows, cast iron, canal-lock gates, suspension bridges, etc., and discoverers of magnetic polarity, the science of musical acoustics, and so on? Did you know that, in the #th century, the Chinese published an encyclopedia that ran to the incredible total of # volumes? Did you know that the Chinese developed, a thousand or more years ago, "an organic philosophy of nature, closely resembling that which modern science has been forced to adopt after three centuries of mechanical materialism," as Needham puts it? The answer is, of course, that most of us know nothing about the ancient civilizations of the great Asiatic peoples. Here, in what James R. Newman, in his review in Sdentihc American, characterizes as "a landmark of intellectual history," is the first of a series of seven volumes by Needham which, when all are published, will present for the first time a coherent and organized picture of thescientific and technological -- and philosophical -- achievements of one of our greatest and least known societies. The present volume, produced with a taste and beauty that thoroughly measure up to the importance of its subject, sets the background for the volumes to come. In sections on Chinese language, geography, history and "Conditions of Travel of Scientific Ideas and Techniques Between China and Europe," the author presents a richly patterned tapestry of the development of civilization in the Far East. The book is not a popularization; it does not "read like a novel;" it is a true work of scholarship. Yet I believe that any reader whose interests rise above the level of popular fiction will find the book and its subsequent volumes completely fascinating. It is for everyone who is intrigued by the unknown, whether future (science fiction) or past (scientific history). by Fredric Brown. E. P. Dutton  Co., #nc., # H ere is a perfectly delightful book. Fred Brown has collected eight of his very best stories, and has written especially for this book nine short-shorts that have all the perfection of little diamonds, each polished with a keen cutting edge. "Etaoin Shrdlu" and "The Waveries" are my favorites among the longer stories, "Politeness" and "Reconciliation" among the short-shorts; but actually there is not a story included that isn't Class A, with the possible exception of the last item, a #pager called "Solipsist," which I thought a bit portentous. The book's a lovely job -- and nicely designed and produced, for a change, too. by Murray Leinster. Fantasy Press, # T he indefatigable Leinster! This is bis fourth # novel -- and another # item is on hand for review next month, too! What a man! The current tale, which has never been serialized, takes an entirely new look at faster-thanlight travel to the stars: a fastpaced, sardonic job that is primarily a satire on the future of mass communications. Fella discovers faster-thanlight communications technique. TV producer says, "Why not physical objects, too?" Filthy rich neurotic buys "fame-rights" to the invention. Luxurious spaceship built as giant hoax to hook investors in a non-existent expedition to Mars (the Moon is already colonized) becomes the first, almost involuntary fasterthan-light vessel, with as screwy a crew as has ever been cooked up (including the inevitable and delightful Leinster heroine), and the whole jaunt to the stars is turned into raw material for the TV producer's regular "space opera" show -- with commercials -- and what commercials! It's a jolly tale indeed. Edward E. Smith. Fantasy Press, # sibly last in the Smith space saga, I have a chance to re-evaluate the whole series. Frankly, I suspect I've been a bit too rough in my previous reviews. Sure, it's space opera undiluted. Sure, it's written in a style varying from the irritating to the infantile. Sure, its characters aren't much more than cardboard cutouts. Even so, you can't escape the fact that the work has appeal. It moves! And I believe this new and final (?) addition to the series is the best of the lot, too. My early complaints are still valid: impossible weapons, ridiculous mental powers, a complete disregard for the laws of Nature. But consider the series as a sort of overblown fairy tale for modem juveniles, with magic "science" substituted for mere magic, and I think we have in the Lensman series a pretty solid achievement. by Augustus De Morgan. Dover Publications, Inc., # for the "lost continent" crackpots in his book by that name (Galaxy, Sept. #), De Morgan almost does for the perpetual motion boys, the "quadrature" fanatics (squarers of the circle), "the quixotic opponents of Newton's physics, the axegrinders who use mathematics as a means of bolstering religious creeds," and innumerable other oddities, far from all of them mathematical. In this huge book (over # pages), which was first published in # and competently edited by an American scholar in #, the British author collected literally hundreds of examples of the "debris of barren intellectual labor," as Prof. Ernest Nagel puts it in his introduction to the current reprint, that have been spewed forth through the ages. Unfortunately the book is rather hard going because of the gnarled crochets of the author's style and the total absence of order or arrangement of the material. The latter is not always a defect, though, since it does mean you're constantly meeting new oddities. A section "On Inhabitable Planets," for example, a wonderful doggerel entitled "The Astronomer's Drinking Song," a hot controversy on decimal coinage, and so forth. For anyone who is interested in seeing how goofy the human animal can get in the world of science, this monstrous melange will prove an endless joy. A. Heinlein. Charles Scribnefs Sons, # N obody but nobody can beat Heinlein in the writing of teen-age science fiction. I say teen-age, since the publisher so classifies R.A.H.'s Scribner series, of which this is the eighth, but the present tale was serialized in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which either makes the story adult or mdkes all readers of FSF (and Galaxy, too!) perennal juveniles. So what? I sort of like the idea myself! This is Heinlein's first "alien invasion" tale for Scribner's; the others have been space opera. Small fry of crocodile type was brought to Earth from a distant star as a pet a few generations before the story opens. When we meet it, it has grown to be about the size of a locomotive. It's very intelligent, too, though no one knows that except the two youngsters who are its masters. The adventures they go through in keeping Lummox -- the book was serialized mder the title Star Lummox -- alive make up one of Heinlein's most enchanting tales. edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikiy. Frederick Fell, Inc., # TY far the best part of this sixth volume in the series of Bleiler-Dikty annuals is the perceptive introduction by Fritz Leiber, who also has two stories in the book. This introduction calls attention to parallels between science fiction and the great themes of ancient legend, which he calls "Icons of Man's Imagination." Of the # tales in the collection, five have already appeared elsewhere in hard covers. Eight of the stories, I class as B-plus or better; five as average or below. It is certainly not the "best" of the # output by a long shot, but it does contain some of the year's best. No man could make the Long Haul alone and so there had to be somebody behind the bulkhead -- but the enormously important question was: OU just don't look through viewports very often. It's terrifying at first, of course -- all that spangled blackness and the sense of disorientation. Your guts never get used to sustained free-fall and you feel, when you look out, that every direction is up, which is unnatural, or that every direction is down, which is sheer horror. But you don't stop looking out there because it's terrifying. You stop because nothing ever happens out there. You've no sensation of speed. You're not going anywhere. After the weeks and months, there's some change, sure; but from day to day, you can't see the difference, so after a while you stop looking for any. Naturally, that eliminates the viewports as an amusement device, which is too bad. There aren't so many things for a man to do during a Long Haul that he can afford to eliminate anything. Getting bored with the infinities outside is only a reminder that the same could happen with your writing materials, and the music, the stereo and all the rest of it. Arid it's hard to gripe, to say, "Why don't they install a suchand-such on these barrels?" because you've already got what a thousand spacemen griped about long since -- many of them men with more experience, more imagination and less internal resources (that is to say, more need) than you'll ever have. Certainly more than you have now; this is your first trip arid you're just making the transition from "inside looking out" to "inside looking on." It's a small world. It better be a little complicated. worlds like these would be simple to understand, if you knew about it. Not knowing is better, though; it keeps you wondering. Some of it you can figure out, knowing as you do that a lot of men have died in these things, a lot have disappeared, ship and all, and some (but you don't know how many) have been taken out of the ships and straight to the laughing academy. You find out fairly soon, for example, that the manual controls are automaticaly relayed out, and stay out of temptation until you need them to land. (Whether they'll switch in if you need them for evasive maneuvering some time, you don't know yet.) Who died -- how many died -- because they started playing with the manual controls? And was it because they decided to quit and go home? Or because they convinced themselves that the auto-astrogator had bugs in it? Or because they just couldn't stand all those stationary stars? Then there's this: You're alone. You have a shipmate, but even so, you're alone. You crouch in this little cell in the nose of your ship, with the curving hull to your left and the flat wall of the midship bulkhead to your right. Because it's there, that bulkhead, you know that in previous models it wasn't. You can imagine what happened in some (how many?) ships to make it necessary to seal you away from your shipmate. Psychodynamics has come a long way, but you called this a world; well, reduce a world to two separate nations and see what happens. Between two confined entities, there's no mean and no median, and no real way of determining a majority. How many battered pilots have come home crazed, cooped up with the shredded bodies of their shipmates? So that's easy to understand -- you can't trust two human beings together. Not for long enough. If you don't believe it, look at the bulkhead. It's there because it has to be there. Being a peaceable guy, it scares you a little to know how dangerous you are. Makes you a little proud, though, doesn't it? Be proud of this, too -- that they trust you to be alone so much. Sure, there is a shipmate; but by and large you're alone, and that's what's expected of you. What most people, especially Earthside people, never ted out is that a man who can't be by himself is a man who knows, away down deep, that he's not good company. You could probably make it by yourself altogether... but you must admit you're glad you don't have to. You have access to the other side of the bulkhead, when you need it. If you need it. It didn't take you too long to figure out you'd use it sparingly. You have books and you have games, you have pictures and text tapes and nine different euphorics (with a watchdog dispenser, so you can never become an addict) all of which help you, when you need help, to explore yourself. But having another human mind to explore is a wonderful idea -- a wonder tempered by the knowledge -- oh, how smart you were to figure it out in time! -- that the other mind is a last resort. If you ever use up the potentialities it holds for you, you're through, brother! So you have endurance contests with yourself to see how long you can leave that bulkhead alone. Y OU go back over your life, the things you've done. People have written whole novels about # hours in a man's life. That's, the way you think it all out, slowly, piece by piece ; every feature of every face and the way they were used; what people did and why. Especially why. It doesn't take any time to remember what a man did, but you can spend hours in thinking about why he did it. You live it again and it's like being a little god, knowing what's going to happen to everyone. When you reported to Base, there was a busload of guys with you. Now you know who would go all the way through the course and wind up out here; reliving it, you can put yourself back in the bus again and say, "That stranger across the aisle is Pegg. He isn't going to make it. He'll go home on furlough three months from now and he'll try to kill himself rather than come back. The freckled nape in the seat ahead of you belongs to the redhead Walkinok, who will throw his weight around during the first week and pay expensively for it afterward. But he'll make it." You make friends with the shy dark guy next to you. His name is Stein and he looks like a bigbrain. He's easy to talk to and smart, the kind of fellow who always goes straight to the top. And he won't last even until the first furlough; two weeks is all he can take, and you never see him again. But you remember his name. You remember everything and you go back over it and remember the memories in between the memories. Did somebody on that bus have shoes that squeaked? Back you go and hunt for it. If it happened, you'll remember it. They say anyone can recall this way; but for you, with what the psycho-dynamicians have done to you -- or is it for you? -- you can do more of this than anybody. There isn't anything that ever happened in your whole life that you can't remember. You can start at the beginning and go all the way through. You can start at the beginning and jump years in a second and go through an episode again... get mad again... fall in love again. And when you get tired of the events themselves, you can run them off again, to find out why. Why did Stein go through those years of study and preparation, those months of competition, when all the time he didn't want to be in the Space Service? Why did Pegg conceal from himself that he wasn't fit for the Space Service? S O you cast back, comb, compare and ponder, keeping busy. If you're careful, just remembering lasts a long time, wondering why lasts even longer; and in between times, there are the books and stereos, the aiitochess and the music... until you're ready to cast and comb in your memories again. But sooner or later -- later, if you're especially careful -- you'll get restless and your life as it was played out, and the reasons why it was played just that way, all that gets old. You can think of no new approach to any of it and learn nothing more from it. That's where the centerline bulkhead comes in handy. Its very shape is a friendly thing to you; the hull on your left is curved, being part of the ship's side, but the bulkhead is a flat wall. Its constant presence is a reminder that it has a function, like everything else in your world; that it is, by nature, a partition; that the existence of a partition presupposes another compartment; and that the other compartment is the size and shape of this one and designed for a similar purpose -- to be a dwelling for someone. With no sound nor sign of occupancy, the bulkhead still attests the life behind it, just by being there. It's a friendly flatness, a companionable feature of your world, and its company pervades all your thinking. You know it's your last resort, but you know, too, that it's a rich one, and when at last you're driven to use it, you'll enter another kind of world, more complex and more engrossing than your own, just for the work it takes to get from place to place and the mystery of the fog between the places. It's a mind, another human mind, sharing this prison with you when at last you need sharing more than anything whatever in all of space. Who is it? You think about that. You think a whole lot about that. Back at Base, in your last year, you and the other cadets thought about that more than anything. If they'd ever given you the shadow of a hint... but no; wondering about it was apparently part of your training. You knew only that on your Long Haul, you would not be alone. You had a pretty good idea that the choice of a shipmate for you would be a surprise. You looked around you at mess, in class, in the dormitory; you lay awake at night dealing out their faces in a sort of solitaire game; and sometimes you thought about one and said, "That'd be fine. We'd get along." And sometimes you said, "That stinker? Lock me up with him and that bulkhead won't be tough enough. I'll kill him after the third day, so help me!" And after they tapped you for your first Haul, this was the only thing you were scared about -- who'd be your shipmate. Everything else, you thought you could handle. You knew your job inside out and backward and it wouldn't whip you. You were sharp-tuned, fine-honed, ready for anything that was under your own control. You were even confident about being alone; it H# wouldn't get you. Not a chance. Away down deep, no man believes he can be driven out of his mind, just as he cannot believe -- really believe -- that he will be dead. That's the kind of thing that happens to someone else. B ut this business of a shipmate -- this wasn't under your control. You didn't control who it would be and you wouldn't control the guy after blastoff. It was the only unknown and therefore the only thing that scared you. Amendment: there was a certain amount of control. The intercom button was on your side of the bulkhead. Leave it alone and you didn't have to so much as know you had a shipmate imtil you were good and ready. Eteing able to shut off a voice isn't control, though. You don't know what your shipmate will do. Or be. In those last tight days before blastoff, there was one thing you became overwhelmingly aware of. Esprit de corps, they call it. You and the other graduates were hammered into a mold -- and hammered some more until the resiliency was gone out of you. You were alike and you did things alike because you had grown to want to. You knew for certain that one of this tight, trustworthy little group would be picked for you; their training and yours, their whole lives and yours, pointed toward this ship, this Haul. Your presence on this ship summed up your training; your training culminated in your presence on the ship. Only a graduate cadet was fit to man the ship; the ship existed solely for the graduate cadet. This was something so self-evident that you never thought about it. Not until now. Because now, a few minutes ago, you were ready to push that button. You couldn't know if you'd broken all records for loneliness, for duration of solitary confinement, but you'd tried. You'd looked through the viewport until it ceased to mean anything. You'd read until you didn't care any more. You'd lived the almost-life of the stereos until you couldn't make believe you believed them. You'd listened to music until it didn't matter. And you'd gone over and over your life from its very beginnings until you'd completely lost perspective on it or anything and anyone in it. You'd found that you could go back to the viewport and cycle through the whole thing again, but you'd done that, too, so often that the whole matrix of personal involvement was emptied out. Then the flatness of the bulkhead made itself felt. In a way, it seemed to bulge toward you, crowd you against the ship's side, and you knew it was getting to be time you pushed that button and found out for sure. Who? crazy redhead Walkinok? Or Wendover (you all called him Bendover) with all those incomprehensible shaggy-dog stories? Harris? Beerbelly Flacker or Cohen the Wire-haired Terror? Or Shank (what you all called him was a shame)? Or Guides, whose inexplicable nickname was Mickey Mouse? You'd sort of hoped it would be Gindes, not because you liked him, but more because he was the one classmate you'd never known very well. He always used to look on and keep his mouth shut. He'd be much more fun to explore than, say, old Shank, who was so predictable that you could practically talk in chorus with him. So you've tortured yourself, just for the sake of torture, with your thumb over the intercom button, until even the torture dried out and blew away. You pushed. You found out, first of all, that the intercom apparently had its own amplifier, energized when you held the button down, and that it took forever -- well, three or four seconds, anyway -- to warm up. First nothing, then a carrier, then the beginning of a signal; then, at last, the voice of your shipmate, rushing up to full volume, as loud and as clear as if the bulkhead did not exist. And you get off that button as if it had turned into a needle; and you're backed against the outboard bulkhead, deep in shock, physically in silence, but with that voice going on and on and on unbelievably in your unbelieving brain. It was crying. It wept wearily, as though you had tuned in toward the end of a long session of wild and lonesome grief. It cried quietly, exhaustedly, without hope. And it cried in a voice that was jokingly wrong for this place -- a light, high voice, nearly a contralto. It was wrong, altogether wrong. The wild ideas come first: Stowaway? You almost laugh. For days before blastoff, you were drugged and immersed in high-frequency fields; hypnotized, worked and reworked mentally and physically. You were passively fed and passively instructed. You don't know now and you may never know all they did to you. But you can be sure it was done inside six concentric rings of "security" of one kind and another, and you can be sure that lor your shipmate got the same. What it amoimted to was concentrated attention from a mob of specialists, every sleeping and waking second from the time you beered it up at the class farewell dinner to the time the accelerator tug lifted your ship and carried it screaming up and outward. Nobody was in this ship but those who belonged in it; that you can absolutely bank on. Mad idea, the second. For a while, you don't even dare think it, but with that kind of voice, that crying, you have to think of something. So you do and you're scared, scared in a way you've never imagined before, and to a degree you didn't think was possible. There's a girl in there! Y OU run those wordless syllables, those tired sobs, through your mind again, seeking for vocalizations as separated from the breathy, painful gasping that accompanied them. And you don't know. You just can't be certain. So punch the button again. Listen some more. Or ask. But you can't. The crazy idea might be true and you couldn't stand that. They couldn't -- they just couldn't -- put a girl on these ships with you and then stow her behind the bulkhead. Then you have an instant fantasy about that. You kneel (bumping your skull on the cover) and feel frantically around the bulkhead, where it meets deck-plates, nose compartment, overhead, after-bulkhead; and all around your fingers ride the bead of a weld. You sit back, sweating a little and half-laughing at yourself. Scratch off one fantasy; there'll be no sliding partitions into any harems this trip. You stop laughing and think, "They couldn't be that cruel I" You're on a test run, sure, and it isn't the ship that's being tested. You know that and you accept it. But tests, tests... must you throw a glass vase on a brick sidewalk to find out if it's brittle? You see one of your own hands going up and out to check for a panel, a joint again. You sneer at it, at your own hand, and watch it stop in embarrassment. Well, say they weren't that cruel. Whom did they put in there? Not Walkinok. Not Shank. Not Harris or Cohen or any cadet. A cadet wouldn't lie there and cry like that, like a child, a schoolgirl -- a baby. Some stranger, then. Now the anger comes, shouldering out all the fear. They wouldn't! This ship is everything a cadet was born for -- no, made for. That tight leash that bound you with the others, all your thinking, an easy thing you all shared and never had to think about -- that was a thing that didn't admit strangers. Aside from that -- beyond that -- this wasn't a matter of desecrated esprit; it was a matter of moral justice. Nobody but a cadet deserves a ship! What did you give your life to and what for? Why did you give up marriage, and freedom, and all the wonderful trivialities called "fun" that made most human lives worth living? Why did you hold still for Base routines and the hazing you got from the upper classmen? Just to have some stranger, someone who wasn't even a cadet, wander in without training, shaping, conditioning, experience... and get on your ship? N O, it has to be a cadet. It couldn't be anything else. Even a cadet who could break down and cry -- that's a more acceptable idea than its being a woman or a stranger. You're still angry, but now it's the kind of anger that goads you, not the kind that stops you. You push the button. You hear the carrier, then the beginnings of something else... Breathing. Difficult, broken breathing, the sound of someone too tired to cry any more, even when crying has changed nothing and there are still more tears to come. "What the hell are you bawling about?" you yell. The breathing goes on and on. Finally it stops for a moment and then a long, whispery, shuddery sigh. "Hey!" you shout. "Hey -- you in there!" But there is no answer. The breathing is fainter, more regular. Whoever it is is going to sleep. You press even harder on the button, as if that would do any good, and you yell again, this time not even "Hey!" but a blunter, angrier syllable. You can think only that your shipmate chooses -- chooses, by God! -- not to answer you. You're breathing hard now, but your shipmate isn't. You hold your breath and listen. You hear the deep, quiet inhalations, and then a small catch, and a little sigh, the ghost of half a sob. "Hey!" Nothing. You let the button go and in the sharp silence that replaces the carrier's faint hum, the same wordless syllable builds and builds inside you until it bursts free again. You can tell from the feel of your throat and the ringing in your ears that it's been a long, long time since you used your voice. You're angry and you're hurt from these insults to yourself and to your Service. And you know what? You feel good. Some of the stereos you have are pretty nice; they take you right into battle, into the arms of beautiful women, into danger, and from time to time you could get angry at someone in them. You could -- but you haven't for a long time now. You haven't laughed or been angry ever since... since... well, you can't even remember when. You'd forgotten how and you'd forgotten just when it was you forgot. And now look. The heart's going, the sweat... This' is fine. Push the button again, take another little sip of anger. It's been aging; it's vintage stuff. Go ahead. You do, and up comes the carrier. "Please," begs the voice. "Please, please... say something else." you choke, suddenly, when you swallow wrong. You cough violently, let go the button and pound yourself on the chest. For a moment, you're in bad shape. Coughing makes your thinking go in spurts, and your thinking is bouncing up and down on the idea that, until now, you didn't really believe there was anyone in there at all. You get your wind and push the button again. The voice asks, "Are you all right? Can I do anything?" You become certain of something else: that isn't a voice you recognize. If you ever heard it before, you certainly don't remember it. Then the content of it hits you. Can I do anything? You get mad again. "Yeah," you growl. "Hand me a glass of water." You don't have your thumb on the button, so you just say what pops into your mind. You shake yourself like a wet bird dog, take a deep breath, and lean on the control again. Before you can open your mouth, you're in a hailstorm of hysterical laughter. "Glass of water... uh-uh-uh... that's good... you don't know what this means," says the voice, suddenly sober and plaintive. "I've waited so long. I've listened to your music and the sound from your stereos. You never talk, you never say anything at all. I never even heard you cough before." Part of your mind reacts to that: That's unnatural, not even to cough, or laugh aloud, or hum. Must be a conditioning. But most of it explodes at this stranger, this -- intruder, talking away like that without a word of explanation, of apology... talking as if that voice of all voices had a right to be there. "I was beginning to think you no were deaf and dumb. Or maybe even that you weren't there at all. That was the thing that scared me the most." "Shut up," you hiss, with all the fury, all the deadly warning you can command. "I knew they wouldn't," the voice continues happily. "They'd never put anyone out here by himself. That would be too -- " It stops abruptly as you release the button. "My God!" you think. "The dam has boist! That character'll chunter along like that for the duration!" You press the button quickly, hear " -- all alone out here, you get scared to look out the viewp -- " and you cut off again.  mist you see melting away is all the conjecture, those great half-formed plans of shipping out with Walkinok or the Wirehaired Terror. You were going to review your courses, remember? Slow and easy -- take a week on spatial ballistics or spectroscopy. Think it all through for a day between sentences. Or laugh over the time you and the Shank got tanked up at the canteen and pretended you were going to tie up the C.O. and jet him off with Colonel Provost, the head PD man, for a shipmate. The General would get all the psychodynamics he needed. The General was always talking psychodynamics, Provost was always doing psychodynamics. Well, it seemed funny at the time, anyway. It wasn't so much the beer. It was knowing the General and knowing Colonel Provost that made it funny. How funny would it be with a stranger? They give you someone to talk to. They give you someone you haven't anything to talk to about! That idea of putting a girl behind the bulkhead, now, that was a horrible idea. It was torture. Well, so's this. Maybe worse. A thought keeps knocking and you finally back off and let it in. Something to do with the button. You push it and you can hear your shipmate. You release it and... shut off the intercom? No, by the Lord, you don't! When you were coughing, you were off that button. Can I do anything? Now what the hell kind of business is this? (And that detached part of your mind reaches hungrily for the pulses of fury: ah, it feels good!) Do you mean to sit there and tell me (you rage silently at the PD men who designed this ship) that even if I don't push that button, my shipmate can hear everything Ill that goes on with me? The intercom's open on the other side all the time, open on this side only when I push the button -- is that it? You turn and glare out the viewport, staring down the cold, distant eye of infinity, and Where the hell, you storm silently, js my privacy? This won't do. It won't do at all... You figured right from the start that you and your shipmate would be pretty equal, but on a ship, even a little two-passenger can like this, someone's got to be in command. Given that the other compartment has the same stereos, the same dispensers, the same food and water and everything else, and the only difference between these living quarters is that button -- who's privileged? Me, because I get to push the button? Or my shipmate, who gets to listen in on me when I so much as cough? "I know!" you think suddenly. "That's a PD operative in there! A psychodynamics specialist assigned to observe me!" Y OU almost laugh out loud; relief washes over you. PD work is naturally hush-hush. You'll never know how many hours during your course you were under hypnosis. It was even rumored around that some guys had cerebral surgery done by the PD boys and never knew it. The boys had to work in secret for the same reason you don't stir your coffee with an ink-stick -- PD is one field where the tools must leave no mark. Well, fine, fine. At last this shipmate makes some sense: at last you've got an answer you can accept. This ship, this trip, is of and for a cadet -- but it's PD business. The only non-cadet who'd conceivably be aboard would have to be a PD tech. So you grin and reach for the button. Then, remembering the way it works, that the intercom's open from your side when you're off the button, you draw your hand back, face the bulkhead, and say easily, "Okay, PD, I'm on to you. How'm I doing?" You wonder how many cadets tumble to the trick this soon. You push the button and wait for the answer. The answer is "Huh?" in a mixture of shyness and mystification. You let go the button and laugh. "No sense stringing it out. Lieutenant." (This is clever. Most PD techs are looeys; one or two are master sergeants. Right or not, you haven't hurt his feelings.) "I know you're a PD man." There's a silence from the other side. Then: "What's a PD man?" You get a little sore. "Now see here, Lieutenant, you don't have to play any more of these psych games." "Gosh, I'm no lieutenant. I -- " You cut him off quickly. "Sergeant, then." "You got me all wrong," says that damnable high voice. "Well, you're PD, an#way." "I'm afraid I'm not." You can't take much more of this. "Then what the hell are you?" A silence. And as it beats by, that anger and that fear of torture begin to mount, hand in hand. "Well?" you roar. "Well," says the voice, and you can practically see it shuffle its feet, "I'm not anything. I'm fifteen years old..." You drag out your senior-class snap; there's a way of talking to fourth and third classmen that makes 'em jump. "Mister, you give an account of yourself, but now. What's your name?" "Skampi." "Skampi? What the hell kind of a name is that?" "It's what they call me." Did you detect a whisper of defiance there? "Sir!" The defiance disappears instantly. "It's what they call me... sir." "And what are you doing on my ship, mister?" I'm sorry -- uh -- sir. They put me on." "They?" "At the Base... sir," he amended quickly. "You were on the Base just how long, mister?" That "mister" can be a lead-shot whiplash if you do it right. It was sure being done right. "I don't know, sir." You have the feeling the punk's going to burst into tears again. "They took me to a big laboratory and there were a lot of sort of booths with machines in them. They asked me all kinds of questions about did I want to be a spaceman. Well, I did. I always did, ever since I was a kid. So, after a while, they put me on a table and gave me a shot and when I woke up, I was here." "Who gave you a shot? What was his name?" "I never... I didn't find out, sir." A pause. "A big man. Old. He had gray hair, very short, and green eyes." Provost, by God. This is PD business, all right, but from where you sit, it's monkey business. "You know any spatial ballistics?" "No, sir. Some day, I -- " "Astrogation?" "Only what I picked up myself. But I'll -- " "Gravity mechanics? Differentials? Strength of materials? Light-metal fission? Relativity?" I,r "Well? Well? Speak up, mister!" "I heard of them, sir." " 'I heard of them, sir!' " you mimic savagely. "Do you know what this ship is for?" "Oh, yes, sir! Everybody knows that. This is the Long Haul. When you come back from this, you get your commission and they give you a starship!" And if the voice had shuffled its feet once, now its eyes shone. "You figure to get a starship, mister?" "Well, I -- I -- " "You think they give commands to Boy Scouts just because the Boy Scout wants to go to space awful bad?" No answer. You jeer, "Have you got the slightest idea how much training a cadet has to go through, how much he has to learn?" "Well, no, but I guess I will." "Sir!" "Sir. They put me aboard, all those officers who asked me the questions and everything. It must be all right. Hey" he says excitedly, all the crushed timidity disappearing, to be replaced by a bubbling enthusiasm. " know! We have all this time... maybe you're supposed to teach me astrogation and relativity and all that." Your jaw drops at the sheer childishness of it. And then something really ugly drifts up and smothers everything else. F or some reason, your mind flashes back to the bus, the day you got to Base. You can remember back easily to all the faces you worked with, those who made it and those who didn't. But your class had thirty-eight cadets in it and that bus must have held fifty. What happened to the rest? You'd always assumed they went into other sections -- ground crew, computer men, maintenance. Suppose they'd been sorted out, examined for some special trait or talent that only the PD men knew about? Suppose they were loaded right aboard ships, each with a graduate cadet? And why? Suppose these punks, greenhorns, Boy Scouts, children -- suppose they were the ones slated for a commission? Suppose guys like you, thinking all this while you were the cream of the crop, and the top cream off that -- suppose all along you'd tested out as second-grade material. Suppose you were the one who did the sweating and cramming and took the hazing and the demerits and the lousy mess-hall food, not to command a starship, not to get a commission, but just to be a private tutor to a boy genius who wanted to go to space awful bad? This wouldn't make sense anywhere else but in the starship service. It barely made sense there, but look: A starship commander might make two trips in his whole career, that's all. Eighteen years each round trip, with his passengers in coldpacks and a cargo of serums, refractories, machine tools and food concentrate for the xenologists and mineralogists who were crazy enough to work out there. Training the commander for such a ship was easy, as far as operating knowledge was concerned, though there was a powerful lot of it. But training him to stay conscious, awake and aware -- and alone -- for all those years was something else again. Few men like that were born; they had to be made. Most of your recluses, your hermits, all through history, have been guys who had things drastically wrong with them. There couldn't be anything wrong with a starship commander. He had to be captain and deck crew, and know his black-hole as well (though most of the drive machinery down there was automatic) and stay alert -- stay sane -- in a black, mad, weightless emptiness God never made him for. G ive him more books and pictures, games and music than even he would have time for and you'd still not be sure he'd stay sane unless he had some very special inner resources. These (and one other thing) were what a cadet was screened for and what he was trained in. PD packed him full of technical knowledge, psyched him to a fare-thee-well, and when they figured he was machine-finished and carrying a high gloss, they sealed him in a space can and threw it out for the Long Haul. The course was pre-set, and it might last # months, and it might last three years, and after a guy got back (if he got back), he would be fit to take out a starship or he would not. As for the shipmate -- well, you'd always assumed that PD was looking for a way to shake down two guys at once so they could be together on a starship. Maybe, some day, the ships would carry eight, ten at once, and at last natural human gregariousness would have a chance to compete with the pall of black distances. So far, though, psychic disorientation had made everything that was latently mean and murderous in a man explode into action. Putting more than a single human being on those boats to nurse them through was just asking for slaughter. And shipwreck. The other thing required of you besides technical ability and these inner resources is -- youth. You're only twenty-two, so full of high-intensity training that, as Walkinok once said, you feel your brain convolutions are blown out smooth like a full bladder. And you've compacted this knowledge, coded it, used it. You're so full of it that it's bound to ooze out onto anyone aroimd you. You're twentytwo and you're sealed up in a can with a thirstyheaded fifteen-year-old who knows nothing, but wants to go to the stars awful bad. And you can forget how stupid he seems to be, too, because you can bet your bulging cortex that the kid has such an enormous I.Q. that he can afford to act stupid and cry. What a dirty, rotten, lousy deal to put you through all this just to shave seven years off the age of a starship commander! Next thing you know, they'd put a diapered baby in with a workweary sucker of a fine-honed cadet and get three star trips out of him instead of two! And what's to become of you? After you've done your generous stint of tutoring, they pin a discharge emblem on your tunic and say, "Well done. Cadet. Now go raise Brussels sprouts." And you stand at attention and salute the downy-cheeked squirt in all the gold braid and watch him ride the gantry crane to the control cabin you've aimed at and sweated for ever since you were weaned! You sprawl there in that living space, so small that you can't stand up in it, and you look at that bland belly of a bulkhead with its smooth, round navel of a button, and you think, "Well, there's a lot of guts back of that." You heave a deep breath, while still the detached part of your mind looks on. Now it's saying wonderingly, "Aren't you the guy who was scared because nothing could get him excited any more?" And you speak and your voice comes out sounding quite different from anything you've ever heard from anyone before. Maybe you've never been this mad before. "Who told you to say that?" Y OU push the button and listen. "Say what -- uh -- sir?" "About me teaching you. Anybody at Base?" He seems to be thinking. "Why, no, sir. I just thought it would be a good idea." You don't say an#rthing. You just hold the button down. He says diffidently, "Sort of pass the time?" When you still don't say anything, he adds wistfully, "I'd try. I'd try awful hard." You let go the button and growl, "I just bet you would. You just thought it up all your own little self, huh?" "Well, yes." "You're a bright boy. You're a real, smart, ambitious little louse!" You push the button real quick, but all you get is an astonished silence. You say, real composed, almost gentle, "That 'louse,' now, that's not just a figure of speech, little boy. I mean that. I mean you're a crummy little crawler looking to suck blood after somebody else has done all the work. You know what you do? You just make like you're all alone in this can. You don't talk to me and you don't listen to me and I'll do you a favor -- I'll forget all about you, too. I'm not going to bat your eyeballs together just yet, but don't call me generous, little boy -- never that.' It's just that I can't reach in there just now." "No!" That boy can make a real piteous noise when he wants to. "No, no! Wait -- please!" "Well?" "I don't under -- I mean I'm sorry. Cadet. I'm honest-to-Pete sorry. I never meant -- " But you cut him off. You lie back and close your eyes. You're thrumming with fiiry right down to your toenails. This, says your internal observer, is all right. This is living. S O the weeks pass, and so do more weeks. You shoot a star and make some notes, and wait a while and shoot it again, and pretty soon you have enough data to fool around with. You get your stylus and block, and the point darts around the way you want it to, and those old figures sit up and lie down and rush around just the way you want them to. You laugh when you do it; wouldn't Junior just love to learn some of these tricks? Anyway, you figure you're just past the cusp perihelion of your parabola and you're starting back. You know how far you've cpme and when you'll get back. You laugh again. The sound of your voice reminds you he can hear you, so you crawl over to the bulkhead and push the button. "Cadet," he says. "Please, Cadet. Please." His voice is hoarse and weak; the syllables come out as if they're meaningless from repetition. He's probably been lying in there for weeks bleating "Cadet -- please -- cadet -- please" every time you clicked the stylus against your teeth or set the quadrant on your Sun gun. You spend a lot of time looking out the viewport, but you get sick of that and turn to the euphorics. You see a lot of stereo shows. You are always aware of the button in the bulkhead, but you ignore it. You read. You get a lot of use out of the octant; it seems you take a lot more bearings than you have to. And when at last the button starts to be intrusive, you make a real effort and leave it alone; you figure out something else to do instead. You take a careful survey of your instruments to figure which one you need least, and finally decide on the airspeed indicator. You've spent plenty of time in a mockup and you know you can compute your airspeed when you return to Earth by the hull-temperature plus your ground-rise radar. You dismount the instrument and take it apart and get the diamond bearing. You go through the games locker and the equipment chest until you put together a nickel rod and a coil, and you hook on to your shortrange radio where the oscillations suit you. You cement the diamond to the tip of the rod, shove the rod through the long axis of the coil. You turn on the juice and feel (rather than hear) the rod humming softly. "The phenomenon, dear pupil," you say, but silently, "is magneto-striction, whereby the nickel rod contracts slightly in the magnetic held. And since the field is in oscillation, that diamond on the tip is vibrating like crazy." You get your stylus and, after careful consideration, decide on a triangle with round corners, just big enough to shove an arm through comfortably; the three comers would make peepholes. A ll the while, you have quick fantasies about it. You'll knock the triangular piece out of the bulkhead and stick your face in the hole and say "Surpriser' and he'll be cowering there, wondering what goes on. And you'll say, "Shake and let bygones be." And he'll jump over, all eager, and you'll take his hand and drag it through the hole and put your back against the bulkhead and pull till his shoulder dislocates. He's gasping, "Cadet, please," until you get tired of amusing yourself and haul the wrist around and sink your teeth in it. Then he starts to bleed, and you just hold him there while "Cadetplease" gets fainter and fainter, and you explain to him all about differential equations and massratios. And as you're thinking about this, you're going round and round the blunted triangle with your vibrating diamond. The bulkhead is thick as hell and tough -- it's hull-metal; imagine that, for an inboard bulkhead! -- but that's all right. You've got plenty of time. And bit by bit, your scored line goes deeper. Every once in a while, you take a breather. It occurs to you to wonder what you'll say when you're grappled in and the Colonel sees that hole in the bulkhead. You try not to wonder about this, but you do all the same, a whole lot. You run it over in your mind and sometimes the Colonel says, "Good, Cadet. That's real resourcefulness, the kind I like to see." But other times it doesn't quite come out that way, especially with the kid dead on one side of the bulkhead and his blood all over the place on the other side. So maybe you won't kill him. You'll just scare him. Have fun with him. Maybe he'll talk, too. Maybe this entire Long Haul was set up by PD just to find out if you'd cooperate with your shipmate, try to teach him what you know, at any cost. And you know, if you thought more of the Service than you do about your own dirty career in it, that's just what you'd do. Maybe if you did that, they'd give you a starship, you and the kid both. So, anyway, this cutting job is long and slow and suits you fine; no matter what you think, you go on with it, just because you started. When it's finished you'll know what to do. Funny that the result of this trip was going to be the same as some of those you'd heard whispered about, where a ship came in with one guy dead and the other... But that was the difference. To do a thing like that, those guys must have been spacehappy. You're doing it, sure, but for different reasons. You're no raving looney. You're slow-andsteady, doing a job, knowing exactly why. Or you will, when the time comes. You're real happy this whole time. Then all that changes. You turned in and you slept, and all of a sudden you're wide awake. You're thinking about some lab work you did. It was a demonstration of eddy-current effects. There was a copper disk as thick as your arm and a meter in diameter, swinging from a rope in the center of the gymnasium. You hauled it up to the high ceiling at the far end and turned it loose. There was a big electromagnet set up in the middle of the place, and as the disk reached the bottom of its long swing, it passed between the poles of the magnet, going like hell. You threw the switch and the disk stopped dead right where it was and rang like a big gong, though nothing had touched it. Then you remember the sixty off a synchro-cosmotron so huge that it took you four minutes at a fast walk to get from one end to the other.  You remember the mockups, the hours and hours of hi-G, no-G; one instrument out, another, all of. 'em, some of 'em; simulated meteorites on collision orbit; manual landing techniques -- until your brains were in your hands and the seat of your pants, and you did the right things with them without thinking. Exhausted, you still did it right. Even doped up. You remember the trips into town with Harris and Flacker and the others. Something happened to you every time you so much as walked down a street with those guys. It was a thing you'd never told anyone. Part of it was something that happened between the townspeople and your group. Part of it was between your group and yourself. It all added up to being a little different and a little better... but not in a cocky way. In a way that made you grateful to the long, heavy bulk of a starship and what such ships are for. You sit up in your bunk, with that mixed-up, wide-awake feeling, reaching for something you can't quite understand, some one simple thing that would sum up the huge equipment, the thousands of measurements, the hours of cramming and the suspense of examinations; the seat-of-thepants skills and the pride in town... And now you see what it is. That kid in there, he could have an I.Q. of nine goddam hundred and never learn how to put down a ship with all his instruments out and the gyros on manual. Not by somebody telling him over an intercom when he's never even sat in a G-seat. He might memorize twelve thousand slightly varying measurements off a linear accelerator, but he wouldn't gain that certain important thing you get when you make those measurements yourself. You could describe the way the copper disk rang when the eddy current stopped it, but he would have to see it happen before it did to him all the things it did to you. still don't know who that kid is or why he's here, but you can bet on one thing -- he isn't here to pick your brains and take your job. You don't have to like him and you can be mad he's aboard instead of Harris or Walky; but get that junk out of your head right now about him being a menace to you. Goddlemighty Godfrey, where did that poisonous little crumb in your brain come from? Since when are you subject to fear and jealousy and insecurity? Since when do you have to guard yourself against your own imagination? Come the hell off it. Cadet. You're not that good a teacher; he's not that much of a monster. Monster! Did you hear him cry that time? You feel twenty pounds lighter (which is odd, seeing that you're still in free-fall) and as if you'd just washed your face. "Hey, Krampi!" You go push the button and wait. Then you hear a sharp inhalation through nostrils. A sniff... no, you won't call it that. "Skampi, sir," he corrects you timidly. "Okay, whatever you say. And knock off that 'sir.' " "Yes, sir. I mean yes." "What were you crying about?" "When, s -- ?" "Okay," you break in gently. "You don't have to talk about it." "No. I wasn't trying to deny it. I... cried twice. I'm sorry you heard me. You must think..." "I don't think," you say sincerely. "Not enough." He thinks that over and apparently drops it. "I cried right after blastoff." "Scared?" "No... yes, I was, but that wasn't why. I just..." "Take your time telling me. Time is what we got nothing else but of." "It was just that I -- I'd always wanted to be in space. I thought about it in the daytime and dreamed about it at night. And all of a sudden, there it was, happening to me for real. I... thought I ought to say something and I opened my mouth to do it and all of a sudden I was crying. I couldn't help it. I guess I -- Crazy, I guess." "I wouldn't say so. You can hear talk and see pictures and get yourself all ready, but there's nothing like doing it. I know." "You, you're used to it." H e seems to want to say something else; you hold the button down. Finally, with difficulty, he asks, "You're big, aren't you? I mean you're... you know. Big." "WeU, yes." "I wish I was. I wish I was good for... well, something." "Everybody push you around?" "Mm." "Listen," you say. "You take a human being and put him down next to a starship. They're not the same size and they're not the same shape, and one of 'em's pretty insignificant. But you can say that this built this, not the other way around." "Y-e-eah." It is a whisper. "Well, you're that human being, that self-same one. Ever think of that?" "No." "Neither did I, till now," you admit rapidly. "It's the truth, though." He says, "I wish I was a cadet." "Where do you come from, kid?" "Masolo. It's no place. Jerk town. I like big places with big things going on. Like the Base." "Awful lot of people charging around." "Yeah," he says. "I don't like crowds much, but the Base -- it's worth it." You sit and look at the bulkhead. It's companionable, suddenly, and sort of changed, as if it had just grown warm, or quilted. You get a splinter of light off the bright metal where you've scored it. You think it's down pretty deep. A man could stand up to it and knock that piece out with a maul, if a man could stand up, if he had a maul. You say, very fast, as if you're afraid something's going to stop you, "Ever do anjdhing you were really ashamed of? I did when I talked to you the way I did. I shouldn't've done it like that... I don't know what got into me. Yes, I do and I'll tell you. I was afraid you were a boy genius planted on me to strip my brains and take my command. I got scared." It all comes out like that. You feel much better and at the same time you're glad Walkinok or Shank aren't around to hear you spout like that. T he kid's very quiet for a while. Then he says, "One time my mother sent me to the market and something was a special, I forget what. But anyway I had forty cents change and I forgot about it. I foimd it in my pants in school next day and bought a starship magazine with it and never told her. I used to get every issue that way after that. She never missed the money. Or maybe she did and didn't say anything. We were pretty hard up." You understand that the kid is trying to give you something. because you apologized to him. You don't say anything more about that. Right here, a wonder starts to grow. You don't know what it is, but you know that standoff-and-watch part of your mind is working on it. You say, "Where is this Masolo?" "Upstate. Not far from Base. Ever since I was a baby, the axitugs were shaking the house when they took off. There's a big tree outside the house and all the leaves shiver -- with the tugs, you know. I used to climb out a limb and get on the roof and lie down on my back. Sometimes you could see the starships orbiting. Just after the Sun goes down, sometimes you can..." He swallows: you can hear it plainly. "I used to put out my hand. It was like a firefly up there." "Some firefly," you say. "Yeah, Some firefly, all fight." Inside you, the wonder is turning to a large and luminous astonishment. It's still inexpressible, so you leave it alone. The kid is saying, "I was with two other fellows out by the high school one time. I was just a kid -- eleven, I think. Well, some gorillas from the high school chased us. We ran and they caught up with us. The other kids started to fight them. I got over to one side and, when I had a chance, I ran. I ran all the way home. I wish I'd stayed there with those other two kids. "They got the tar kicked out of them and I guess it hurt, but I guess it stopped hurting after some teacher came along and broke up the fight. But I hurt every time I think about running away like that. Boy, did those two give me a razzing when they saw me next day! Boy So what I wanted to ask you, you don't think a kid who would run away like that could be a cadet." He ends it like that, flat. No question. Y OU think about it. You've been in some fine brawls as a cadet. You're in a bar and someone cracks wise, and your blood bubbles up, and you wade in, feeling giant-size. But maybe that's just because of the business of belonging. You say carefully, "I think if I was in a fight, I'd rather have a guy on my side who knew what being scared felt like. Then it would be like having two guys on my side, instead of one. One of the guys wouldn't care if he got hurt and the other guy would never want to be hurt that way again. I think a fellow like that would be a pretty good cadet." "Well, yeah," says the kid, in that funny whisper. Now the inner astonishment bursts into sight and you recognize what it is about this kid. At first, you were scared of him, but even when that went away, you didn't like him. There was no question of liking him or not liking him; he was a different species that you couldn't have anything to do with. And the more you talked with him, the more you began to feel that you didn't have to set yourself apart from him, that he had a whole lot you didn't have -- and that you could use it. The way he talked, honest and unabashed; you don't know how to do that. You nearly choked to death apologizing to him. It suddenly is very important to get along with this kid. It isn't because the kid is important. It's because if you can get along with somebody so weak, so wet behind the ears, and yet in his peculiar way so rich, why, you can get along with anybody, even your own lousy self. And you realize that this thing of getting along with him has extension after extension. Somehow, if you can find more ways to get along with this kid, if you can see more things the way he sees them with no intolerance and no altitude, you'll tap something in yourself that's been dried up a long time now. You find all this pretty amazing, and you settle down and talk to the kid. You don't eke it out. You know he'll last all the way back to Base and have plenty left over. You know, too, that by the time you get there, this Idd will know a cadet can also be a louse. You can give him that much. The way you treated him, he was hurt. But you know? He wasn't mad. He doesn't think he's good enough to get mad at a cadet. He thinks a cadet rates what he does just by being a cadet. Well, you are going to fix that. T he time goes by and the time comes;' the acceleration tug reaches out and grabs you high above Earth, so, after all that manual-control drill, you don't have a thing to do, but sit there and ride it down. The tug hovers over the compound right near the administration building, which disappears in a cloud of yellow dust. You sink down and down in the dust cloud until you think they must be lowering you into a hole in the ground. Then, at last, there's a slight thump and an inhuman amount of racket as the tug blasts away free. After that, there's only the faint whisper of the air circulator, the settling dust, and a profoundly unpleasant feeling in calves and chest as the blood gets used to circulating in a #-G environment. "Now don't you forget, Skampi," you say. You find it difficult to talk; you've got a wide grin plastered across your face and you can't cast it adrift. "Just as soon as they're through with you, you come looking for me, hear? I'll buy you a soda." You lean back in your G-chair and hold the bulkhead button. "I can drink beer," he says manfully. "We'll compromise. We'll make your soda with beer. Listen, kid. I can't promise, but I know they're fooling with the idea of a two-man crevT for starships. How'd you like to go with me -- one trip, anyhow? Of course, you'll have to be conditioned six ways from the middle, doubletime, and it'll be real rough. But -- what do you say?" And you know? He doesn't say anything! He laughs, though. N OW here comes Colonel Provost, the big big brass of Psychodynamics, and a young M.P. That's all the welcoming committee you'll get. The compound's walled and locked, and no windows look out on it. They must have unloaded some pretty sorry objects from these space cans from time to time. They open the hatch from the outside and you immediately start coughing like hell. Your eyes say the dust has settled, but your lungs say no. By the time you have your eyes wiped, the M.P. is inside and squatting on the deck, cross-legged. He says cheerfully, "Hi, kaydee. This here's a stun gun and if you so much as squint at me or the Colonel, you get flaked out like a heaving-line." "Don't worry about me," you say from behind that silly grin. "I got no quarrel with anybody and I like it here. Good morning, Colonel." "Look out for this one," said the M.P. "Likes it here. He's sick." "Shut up, wheelhead," says the Colonel cheerfully. He has his gray crewcut and barrel torso shoved into the hatch and it's real crowded in that little cabin. "Well, Cadet, how are we?" "We're fine," you say. The M.P. cocks his head a little to one side and gets bright-eyed. He thinks you're sassing the C.O., but you're not. When you say "we," you mean you and your shipmate. "Anything special happen?" The answer to that is a big fat yes, but it would take forever to tell. It's all recorded, anyway; PD doesn't miss a trick. But that's from then till now, and done with. You're concerned with from now on. "Colonel, I want to talk to you right now. It's about my shipmate." The Colonel leans a little further in and slaps the M.P.'s gun hand. He's in front of the guy, so you can't see his face. "Beat it, wheelhead." The M.P. clears out. You stagger up out of the G-seat and climb through the hatch. The Colonel catches your, arm as you stagger. After a long time in free-fall, your knees won't lock as you walk; you have to stiffen each one as your weight comes on it, and you have to concentrate. So you concentrate, but that doesn't stop you from talking. You skim over the whole business, from your long solo to being reduced to meeting your shipmate, and the hassel you had with yourself over that, and then this thing that happened with the kid -- weeks and weeks of it, and you've only just begun. "You can pick 'em, sir," you pant as you lurch along. "Do you always use a little knownothing kid? Where do you find 'em? Does it always work out this well?" "We get a commander out of every Long Haul," he says. "Say, that's great, sir!" "We don't have very many ships," he says, just as cheerfully. "Oh," you say. sir! What about Skampi? He's still locked in on his side of the bulkhead." "You first," says the Colonel. You go on into the PD lab. "Up you go." You look at the big chair with its straps and electrodes and big metal hood. "You know, they used chairs like these in the French Revolution," you say, showing off. You're just busting with friendliness today. You never felt like this. You sit in the big chair. "Look, sir, I want to get started on a project right away. This kid, now -- I tell you, he's got a lot on the ball. He's spaceman right to the marrow bones. He comes from right around here, that little place up the pike, Masolo. He got shook out of his bassinet by the axi-tugs. He spent his childhood lying on his back on the roof looking for the starships in orbit. He's -- " "You talk all the time," the Colonel breaks in mildly. "Sum up, will you? You made out with your shipmate. You think you could do it again in a starship. That it?" "Think we can try it? Hey, really? Look, can I be the one to tell him. Colonel?" "Close your mouth and sit still." Those are orders. You sit still. The Colonel gets you strapped in and connected up. He puts his hand on the switch. "Where did you say you came from?" You didn't say, and you don't, because the hood swings down and you're surrounded by a sudden dissonant chord of audio at tremendous amplitude. If you had been allowed to say, though, you wouldn't have known. The Colonel doesn't even give you time to be surprised at this. You sink into blackness. I T gets light again. You have no idea how much time has passed, but it must be plenty, because the sunlight from outside is a different color and slants a different way through the Venetian blinds. On a bench nearby is a stack of minicans with your case number painted on each one -- that'd be the tape record of your Long Haul. There's some stuff in there you're not proud of, but you wouldn't swap the whole story for anjdhing. "Hello, Colonel," you say with your tongue thick. "You with us again? Good." He looks at an enlarged filmstrip and back at you. He shows you. It's a picture of the bulkhead with the triangular score in it. "Magneto-striction vibrator, with a diamond bearing for a drill bit, hm? Not bad. You guys scare me. I'd have sworn that bulkhead couldn't be cut and that there was nothing in the ship that could cut it. You must've been real eager." "I wanted to kill him. You know that now," you say happily. "You damn near did." "Aw, now. Colonel! I wouldn't have gone through with it." "Come on," he says, opening the buckles. "Where, sir?" "To your space can. Wouldn't you like to have a look at it from the outside?" "Cadets aren't permitted -- " "You qualify," says the old man shortly. So out you go to the compound. The can still stands where it was landed. "Where's Skampi?" you ask worriedly. The Colonel just passes you an odd look and walks on. Yoii follow him up to the can. "Here, around the front." You walk around to the bow and look up at it. It's just the shape it ought to be from the way it looked from inside, except that it looks a little like a picture of a whale caught winking at you. Winking? One-eyed! "Do you mean to tell me you had that kid in a blind compartment, without so much as a viewport?" you rage. The Colonel pushes you. "Sit down. Over there. On the hatch. You returning heroes and your manic moods... sit down!" You sit on the edge of the open hatch. "Sometimes they fall over when I explain," he says gruffly. "Now what was bothering you?" "Locking that kid up in a dark -- " "There isn't a kid. There isn't a dark cabin. There's no viewport on that side of the can. It's a hydrazine tank." "But I -- but we -- but the -- " "Where do you come from?" "Masolo, but what's that to -- " "What did your mother and all the kids call you when you were a space-struck teener?" "Scampy. They all -- Scampy?" "That's right," he says bluntly. R ocked, you cover your face. "By God! I can remember now, thinking back in detail over my whole life -- it started in the bus that day I passed the entrance exams. What is it? Please, what is it?" "Well, if you want me to get technical, they call it Dell's hypothesis. It was formulated way back in the middle of the #th century by Dudley Dell, which was one of the pseudonyms of a magazine editor. As I remember it, he later became a lay analyst and -- " "Please, Colonel!" You're in trouble. "Okay, okay," he says soothingly. "Well, up to that time, psychiatry had been banging its head against a stone wall -- usually banging up the patient in the process. Those early therapists knew that childish feelings and motivations were interfering with adult efficiency and happiness. When a man would slam out of his house and do a lousy day's work after a fight with his wife, the doctor would tell him, 'You're acting as if you were a child rejected by its mother,' and this was -- " "Colonel, sir, are you going to please tell me what the hell's with me?" "I am," he answers calmly. "This, as I was beginning to explain, was all wrong because the 'as if concept kept the patient from distinguishing his adult feelings and motivations from those of the child within him -- a very viable, hard-fighting, but frightened and confused kid it was, too. And smart. Smart enough, at any rate, to see rejection for just what it was. And if it went far enough, the doctor would say hopelessly, 'Mm-imm, schizophrenia,' thereby scaring the liverwurst out of the patient. Dell stopped all that wreckage." "Dell stopped all that," you repeat, suffering. "It was a little thing, that hypothesis of' his -- little like E  MC or Newton's apple -- but, oh, my, what happened!" "Oh, my," you agree. "What happened?" "Dell began directing therapy to the infantile segment, treating it as a living, thinking, feeling organism. It responded so excellently that it changed the face of psychoanalysis. Now in your case -- you're not going to interrupt?" Y OU shake your head blankly but obediently. "Good. In your case, an extension of Dell's hypothesis was used. The sum total of your life up until you took your entrance examinations to this Base was arrested at the age of #. A hsrpnotic barrier was erected so that you could have no access to any of this. You -- all of you cadets -- literally start a new life here, with no ties whatever to an earlier one. Your technical education very deliberately has no reference factors to anything but itself. You learn quickly because your minds are uncluttered. You never miss your past because we're careful never to reactivate it. "When this approach was first tried, the subjects were graduated with memories only of their training. Well, it didn't work. Childhood conditioning is too important to the entire human being to be wiped out without diminishing the subject in just about every emotional way. So we developed this new system. That's what we used on you. "But we discovered a peculiar thing. Even in untrained adults -- as opposed to the sharp division of preand post-entrance you have here -- even untrained adults suffer to greater or lesser degree from internal strife between childhood and adult interpretations and convictions. An exaggerated example would be a child's implicit belief in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, existing at one and the same time with the adult's realization that these are only legends. The inner child -- the child within the adult -- still exists, according to Dell and to all tests since, and will fight like the very devil for survival, beliefs and all... espepecially one whose beliefs and natural feelings and reactions had been made grounds for punishment or ridicule. "The schism between you and Scampy was extreme; you were, in effect, bom on different planets. To be a complete human being, you had to be integrated. But to be integrated successfully, you and Scampy had to leam how to get along together. For Scampy, this was not difficult -- you, even in injustice and cruelty, were a real live hero-image. But the adult you had a stonier path. Somewhere within yourself, though, you somehow found an element of tolerance and empathy, and used it to bridge the gap. "I may say," added the Colonel severely, "that it takes a particularly fine kind of person to negotiate this difficult merger. But I also have to say that it's always completed." "Always?" you ask, astonished. "In every single case. I know there are all sorts of rumors about psychotics being taken out of the space cans -- the M.P.s standing by when we open them reinforce the rumors, but that's only precautionary in case it ever happens. It hasn't yet and I doubt if it will." R emembering those stories and thinking about your own taste of private hell, you protest, "But I almost went nuts. Colonel!" "Not a chance," he says. "That was the value of Dell's hypothesis -- by being able to contact the child within you (and it exists in every adult, if you're wondering), you could make friends with him. Stop frowning! What else could you do with such an eager, friendly, admiring kid? And that admiration is important -- because he has such confidence in you, you will, too. And that confidence lets him relax so you can take over situations you've been trained to handle arid he hasn't. "Well, that's what Dell discovered was the cause of emotional difficulty, which he substituted for the ancient and useless 'neurosis' and 'psychosis' labels. When the child within is contacted and reassured, as you did on this trip, he can leave the controls to the adult. And, as I said, it always happens. The child feels secure because it's liked and because it trusts the adult self and is trusted. The adult self also feels liked and trusted. Well, what else could that produce but a person at peace with himself?" "But he talked to me! Don't tell me you've secretly invented a telepathic converter with bandpass filters!" "Of course not. How are your thoughts expressed to you? As abstract symbols? As wordless cerebration? No. You literally talk to yourself, but subvocally. You have a subminiature transmitter placed surgically in your pharynx. The button on your bulkhead activated it. There had to be a button, you see; we couldn't have the two of you speaking at the same time, which is what persons in the same room invariably do. You can't subvocalize and talk simultaneously. It would have tipped you off. Hence the button." "I can't get used to it," you complain. "I can't! I practically saw the boy! Listen, Colonel -- can I keep my built-in transmitter and have the same rig on my starship?" He smiles, although you think it hurts his face. "You really want it left as is?" "He's a great kid." "Very well -- Commander. Dismissed." He marches away. your head. Then you duck into the space can. You stare at the bulkhead and at the button and at the scoring on the plate where you came that close to drazine supply. You shudder. "Hey," you call softly. "Scampy!" You push the button. You hear the carrier. Then, "I'm thirsty," says Scampy. You cut out of there and go down to the rec area and into the short-order bar. "A beer," you say. "And put a lump of vanilla ice cream in it. And two straws." "You crazy?" asks the man. "No," you say. "Oh, no!" Big Stupe Smart man, Bruckner -- he knew how to handle natives... but they knew even better how to deal with smart terrestrials! B ruckner was a man deeply imbued with a sense of his own worth. Now as he rested his broad beam on the joined arms of Sweets and Majesky, he winked to include them in a "this is necessary, but you and I see the humor of the thing" understanding. Like most thoroughly disliked men, he considered himself quite popular with "the boys." The conceited ham's enjoying this, Sweets thought, as he staggered down the aisle under the big man's weight. At the ship's entrance, he glanced out across the red-sand plain to where the natives waited. They wore little clothing, Sweets noted, except the chief. He sat on his dais -- carried on the shoulders of eight of his followers -- dressed in long streamers of multi-colored ribbons. Other ribbons, rolled into a rope, formed a diadem on his head. The only man more impressively dressed was Bruckner. He wore all the ceremonial trappings of a second century Gallic king, complete with jewel-studded gold crown. As Sweets and Majesky grunted with their burden across the ten yards separating the ship from the thronelike chair that had been brought out earlier, their feet kicked up a cloud of red dust that coated their clothing and clogged their nostrils. The dust had originally been red ferric sand. But the action of winds and storms had milled it together, grain against grain, through the ages, until it had become a fine red powder that hung in the hot still air after they had passed. Most of Waterfield's Planet, they had discovered on their inspection flight the day before, had been a desert for more centuries than they could accurately estimate. Its oases, however, were large and plentiful and, as observed from the air, followed a clear-cut, regular pattern. The obvious conclusion was that they were fed by underground rivers. T he crewmen deposited their burden in the chair and stood waiting. "Nice work, men," Bruckner muttered in an undertone. "Now keep up the act. Bow from the waist and retire discreetly to the background." Majesky said something under his breath as they complied. The greeting ceremony got off to a good start after that. Sweets had to admit. Whatever else might be said of Bruckner, he knew his job as a psychologist. Bruckner rose to his feet, raised his right hand, palm forward and intoned gravely, "Earthmen greet you." He spoke in the language of the natives. The tribal chieftain raised his hand negligently in reply, but neither rose nor spoke. With a great display of magnanimity, Bruckner sent over a bolt of bright red cloth. The chieftain accepted the gift and sent back a large wooden box carried by two of his men. They lowered the box at Bruckner's feet and one of them opened a door in its side. The large animal -- or bird; the Earthmen couldn't be certain which -- that stepped out stood about seven feet tall, with a body shaped like a bowling pin. It walked on webbed feet that angled outward, had short flippers, set low on a body covered with coarse hair that might have been feathers, and was armed with long, vicious claws. There was something so ludicrous about its appearance that Sweets had difficulty stiffing the chuckle that rose in his throat. The animal, however, took itself very seriously. When it saw its audience -- the spaceship's crew -- watching, it took two spraddling steps forward, pulled the bulk of its pot-bellied stomach up into its chest and paused dramatically. It gave three very loud, hoarse burps, somewhere between the squawk of a duck and the braying of an ass. It was a hilariously funny caricature of a pompous orator. Someone snickered. Immediately Sweets and the other crew members joined in the laughter. It was the kind of belly-laughing that could not be restrained. While he roared. Sweets took time to observe Bruckner. At the first outbreak of laughter, the psychologist scowled and glanced nervously across at the natives. But when he saw that they, too, had joined in the laughter, he allowed himself to smile condescendingly. The meeting ended with much apparent good will on both sides. " we were doing, didn't we?" Bruckner said after they were back in the ship. He made a point of emphasizing the we. "At the time Waterfield's Planet was first discovered," he explained, "the official report was that the natives were friendly. However, when the survey team landed a year later, they ran into trouble. At the beginning, they were courteous and considerate in their dealings with the natives, but the tribesmen took that as a sign of weakness and gave the team very little cooperation. Then they tried being a bit tough and found themselves with a small war on their hands. They were lucky to get away with their lives. So you can see why I'm pleased with the way things went off today." "If the natives are that touchy, we'll still have to be careful," Sweets said. "What are we supposed to be doing here, anyway?" Bruckner looked carefully around the circle at each of his listeners. "There's no reason now why I shouldn't tell you," he said confidingly. "The survey team found enough traces of rare elements here to suspect that there might be large deposits on the planet. That's what we're after." "And you think there might be trouble?" Majesky asked. Bruckner had his full attention now, Sweets noted. There was always a kind of leashed vitality about Majesky that made him poor company during a space trip, but he was the type of man you'd want on your side in a roughand-tumble. "I certainly do not," Bruckner answered, frowning in annoyance. "It's my job to see that we don't have trouble. I went very carefully over the records of the two previous landings, even before we began this trip, and I believe I understand the psychological compulsions of these tribesmen quite well." "You mean you know what makes 'em tick?" Majesky asked. "Yes, I think I can safely say I do," Bruckner said modestly. "Their culture pattern is based on a long history of tribal conflict. And, for a tribe to prosper, they must have a strong as well as resourceful leader. Thus the splendid dress of their chieftain this morning, in contrast to the drabness of the ordinary tribal dress. He must be, very apparently, a man above the common tribesmen to hold their respect. "And that," Bruckner added, "was the reason for our little act this morning. The best way to impress them with our power is to display the magnificence of our leader. The better we can keep them convinced of my greatness, the less risk there will be of trouble." TIG Stupe -- someone gave their pet the name the first five minutes and it stuck -- had the run of the ship. Individually and in groups, the crew took turns amusing themselves with him. And Big Stupe accepted everything they did very seriously and loved the attention. He was definitely a gregarious animal. And his name fitted perfectly. His gullibility and invariable stupidity seemed to have no limits. He fell for the same practical jokes over and over again. He was clumsy and stumbled over furniture, loose objects and even his own feet. He would eat anything. If what he swallowed proved indigestible, he would stand for a minute with an astounded expression on his hairy face and then whatever he had eaten would come rolling up. He eagerly gulped down the same rubber ball a dozen times in the space of ten minutes. Whenever spoken to, he replied promptly, in his incredible squawking bray. A "hello," by one of the crew, with an answering bray from Big Stupe, was always good for a laugh. Big Stupe had a fear of loud noises and pulled a variation of the ostrich-head-in-hole routine, at every unexpected loud sound, of turning his back to whatever had frightened him and peering cautiously back under, a flipper. If a tail feather was pulled, he'd make a determined and prolonged effort to run straight through the ship's wall, flapping and pushing his beak against it. Another of his tricks was the dispensing of pebbles -- which he seemed to consider very valuable gifts -- from his marsupial pouch to the crew members who took his fancy. Sweets often wondered how an animal with so little common intelligence had survived the evolutionary process. He could spot no counterbalancing ability or survival characteristic. But somehow the species had escaped extinction. O N the second day, Bruckner sent Sweets and Teller, the head engineer, to the chief with a present and samples of rare ores. Sweets' duties, on the trip out, had included the learning of the native language. The sun was hot and Sweets wore only his shoes, trousers and a T shirt. It seemed absurd that a sun that appeared no larger than an egg should be so hot. But he knew it generated all that heat because it was a blue sun and not one of the ordinary yellow-white type, as it appeared. The deceptive appearance was caused by the heavy atmosphere that held out the ultraviolet and the heat and light came in on the yellow band. Last night, the darkness had had a dim violet haze. The interview with Chief Faffin went quite smoothly. He received the Earthmen with great cordiality and Sweets was certain that he detected in the chieftain's manner more than mere courtesy. He seemed to have a genuine liking for them. He accepted gravely the gyroscope top which Bruckner had sent and agreed, without argument or reservations, to send his men in search of the ores that matched the samples Sweets showed him. He would be happy to assist his friends, the Lacigule, the chief said. Lacigule was the natives' name for the Earthmen, used in both the singular and the plural. The same afternoon, a dozen natives brought samples of ores to the ship. At Bruckner's orders. Sweets gave each native a comb from the ship's supply of trading goods. During the evening. Teller and his men set up a portable mass spectograph separator at the mine site and, three days later, they had the hold of the ship two-thirds full. During all this time, the crew members had been restricted to the vicinity of the spaceship and by the third day were showing signs of unrest. They sent Sweets to talk with Bruckner and the captain. "We'll be leaving here in a few days," Sweets told them. "It's been a long trip out and it'll be another long trip back. The men feel they're entitled to some fun before they go." "That seems like a reasonable request," the captain said. "What do you think, Mr. Bruckner?" "It would be risky to let them mingle too freely with the natives," Bruckner advised. "We aren't familiar enough with the local customs. One wrong move might spoil all the good will I've been able to build up so far." "Unless you let them have a little fun, you're going to be awfully unpopular," Sweets said. Without knowing it, he was something of a psychologist himself. "Hmmm." Bruckner was thoughtful. "I'm for the men," he said finally. "One hundred per cent. Let's say we wait until tomorrow evening, though. We'll have the hold just about filled by that time. Then it won't matter too much if the natives change their minds about letting us take the ores. How does that soimd to you?" "Fair enough," Sweets agreed. T he next evening, a fullfledged party was held. Permission had been obtained from Chief Faffin for the crew to visit the village and the tribesmen were waiting for them when they arrived. Sweets stayed close to Majesky. For the past couple days, the big crewman had been drinking -- not heavily, but steadily. The irritation of being restricted to the ship and vicinity, added to the long trip out from Earth, had gradually built up in him an ugly resentment. Now as the crew members sat in a circle watching the dancing of a half-dozen native men. Sweets noted that Majesky was drunk. He sat with his arms wrapped aroimd his legs, his head resting on his knees, and glared at the dancers. Outside the circle, a pile of brush burned with much crackling of woodpitch. After the dance was over, the natives sat solemnly watching the Earthmen. It was soon apparent that they expected their visitors to furnish the next portion of the entertainment program. Evidently Bruckner had come prepared for this. He rose impressively from his throne -- on which he had been carried the quarter-mile from the ship -- and said, "We'll have your song now, Billy." Billy Watts, astrogator of the crew, pulled himself to his feet and, in a high boyish tenor, sang I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. Sweets felt his throat quicken as a wave of homesickness went through him like a chill. At the song's end, it needed the yip, yip, yip of the tribesmen's applause to bring him out of his memories of Earth. The tribesmen continued their applause until Watts rose again. Sweets wondered if they had any music of their own. The men had danced earlier without accompaniment and they had made no sound themselves. Billy Watts sang two more songs and it was the tribesmen's turn again. Suddenly a native woman ran out from behind one of the round, mud-packed village huts and into the circle of spectators. She paused on tiptoe, crouched and sprang upward, twisting and screaming as she rose. She landed with her legs in driving motion and went through a racing, energetic series of gyrations. She was almost completely unclothed. F or a stunned moment, the men sat motionless in pleased surprise. Then Sweets caught a movement from the comer of his eye and shifted his head to look at Majesky. For the first time in many days, Majesky appeared happy. He had straightened up and his eyes shone with a glow of approval. He raised his arms in a gesture of encouragement and yelled, "Swing it, baby!" The dancer's stride broke and her head turned sharply in Majesky's direction. Then she ignored the intermption and went on with her dance. But Majesky was not to be ignored. He climbed to his feet and stood with his head hunched between his shoulders, watching her. Then he . lurched forward, caught the girl up in his arms and swung her around in a staggering circle. It had happened too suddenly for any of the Earthmen to stop him, and now they were unable to decide just what they should do. Most of them turned to Bruckner. To Sweets, it seemed that Bruckner had gone pale, but it was difficult to be certain in the uneven light cast by the fire. His mouth opened twice before he could speak. And when he did. Sweets almost laughed at the staginess and absurdity of what he said. "Unhand that woman!" Bruckner commanded. Bruckner's voice was loud and it penetrated through the haze of Majesky's drunken elation. He stopped his spinning and set the girl on her feet, but he kept his right arm around her waist and glared back at Bruckner. "Go to hell," he said. The natives apparently had been as surprised as the crew, for they had not moved. Now, however, one of them rose and lunged at Majesky. Majesky's face twisted into an expectant grin and he tossed the girl aside and stood with widespread legs, waiting. As the native dived in with his head lowered, Majesky brought his right fist up in a powerful uppercut and smashed it into the tribesman's mouth. The native continued his dive and landed face down. Natives and Earthmen were on their feet now and moving toward Majesky. Sweets reached him first. The grin of pleasure was still on Majesky's face as he hit Sweets on the left cheek and spun him half-around. He butted his head into the chest of the next man to reach him, but they pulled him down then and held him helpless. The natives had paused when they saw the Earthmen grab Majesky. Now Bruckner made his voice heard above the noise. "Bring him over here!" he yelled. Two men pinned Majesky's arms while a third held one kicking leg. They dragged him over to Bruckner. "You damn, dumb fooj!" Bruckner cursed fervently. He raised his voice. "All of you," he ordered, "back to the ship!" The natives made no attempt to stop them. Sweets glanced back over his shoulder at Chief Faffin as they went. He was standing and intoning sadly, "Ladgule, lacigule, lacigule." T he following day, Bruckner called Sweets to his quarters. "That was a rotten piece of business last night," Bruckner said. "But I'm proud of the way you acted. You did some mighty quick thinking there." Sweets grunted. He knew the flattery was leading to something. "I've been giving the matter some deep thought since," Bruckner continued, "and I don't think it's too late yet to patch things up. But I need a man with guts." He laughed. "How brave do you feel this morning?" Sweets shrugged and regarded the other leVelly. "You can speak their language," Bruckner said. "And I don't believe they're sure enough of themselves to risk bloodshed. How would you like to bring another present to the chief? I'll see that you're -- " "I don't feel like being a hero this morning," Sweets interrupted. "Why don't you go yourself?" Bruckner's eyebrows raised. "My job is vital to the success of this expedition to risk my life unnecessarily. I'd go myself except -- " "Except that it's too dangerous," Sweets finished for him. Bruckner straightened and his lips grew narrower. "That will be enough of that. We'll find some way to get along without your help." The party Bruckner organized to visit the native village pointedly did not include Sweets. Each man carried a rifle and sidearms. Bruckner walked this time -- at their head. But Sweets made a small bet with himself that Bruckner would stay close to the protection of his men. He other man out alone, but when he had to go himself, he made sure that he was well protected. Bruckner and his men had been gone almost an hour when Sweets heard the sound of Big Stupe's hoarse squawking from outside the ship. There seemed to be anger in the tones. Before Sweets reached the open portal of the ship, he heard more excited squawks. They were similar to Big Stupe's, but they weren't being made by him. Outside, Sweets found Big Stupe facing three others of his breed, exchanging loud angry squawks. Soon they began to walk rapidly in their pseudo-dignihed spraddles, each in a small circle. Abruptly they were locked together and it was soon apparent that this was no game. Big Stupe pulled with both flippers at the head of one of his visitors, while another systematically raked his long claws down the sides of Big Stupe's neck. Before Sweets could reach him, the neck was streaming with blood. Sweets remembered how Big Stupe had always been afraid of loud noises and he raised his voice in a shout. The other stupes turned their backs, but Big Stupe brought one flipper around and hit Sweets squarely between the eyes. A S Sweets stood stunned, he felt Big Stupe's body crash against his shoulders and this time, when he yelled, it was in alarm and fear. Then he was free and his eyes swam back into focus. He saw Big Stupe standing with his back turned. The three visitors were shambling off awkwardly. Sweets left Big Stupe and stumbled back to the ship. Bruckner returned well pleased with his trip. "I'd say we handled that exactly right," he said. "I don't know if the other expeditions contacted this particular tribe or not, but at least stories must have reached them of the potency of the Earthmen's weapons. When we showed them that we preferred peace, but were ready to fight if necessary, that was the end of the affair. And the presents we had for Faifin, and for the native that Majesky hit, didn't hurt any. The one thing to keep in mind is that we've got to make them respect us. And those lads have plenty of respect for Lacigule right now." It seemed that Bruckner was right. There was no further difficulty with the tribesmen as the engineers completed their mining and separating operations and ship. T WO days later, they wre ready to leave. "Can we take Big Stupe along with us when we go?" one of the crewmen asked Bruckner. Most of them were standing outside the ship, taking a last look around at Waterfields Planet. The ship had been made spaceready and all preparations for departure had been completed. "I see no reason why not," Bruckner answered. "He certainly helps keep our morale up. I wonder," he went on in an expansive mood, "if you men realize why you get such a kick out of Big Stupe. You ought to read Hobbs' essay on the basis of humor sometime. "Hobbs does a fine job of showing that we enjoy humor because it caters to our need for self-approval. When a monkey falls out of a tree, all the other monkeys laugh, because it makes them feel so clever and wise for not having fallen out of their tree. Whenever Big Stupe pulls one of his outlandish stunts, we are all reminded of how much smarter we are. It makes us feel good and so we like Big Stupe. We like anybody or anything that makes us feel superior." A few of the natives who had been watching the preparations for departure from a distance walked closer. Bruckner turned and waved cheerfully to them. "Farewell, friends. Perhaps we'll see you again in a few years." He paused. 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J San Jose, California I Geodemen: I Please send me the fne book, The Mastery of Life, which J explains how I may learn to find my place in life. year I wrote over a mil- lion words of fact detective cases, several pronounced reactions set in: I got dizzy trying to keep track of my pen names sues, exhausted myself until I couldn't look another rape in the face... and developed immense respect for criminology. All sorts of forensic experts run the crime lab, dedicated to the gathering and dovetailing of evidence that will win convictions. Much of the work is downright beautiful in its resourcefulness and ingenuity. Seeing how cases are built up point by point is a great comfort for anyone who worries about the constant increase in crime. But there's a side I hadn't been aware of until reading an article in This Week Magazine, quoting a trial lawyer named Allen Murray Myers: "If you are accused of a crime in the U. S. today, you probably could not afford adequately to defend yourself... we have set up vast, expensive machinery for getting convictions... but while we have been steadily strengthening the prosecutor's office, most places do not provide one cent to help the poor accused persons." "Poor" is used financially here, though it seems to be an adjective that can describe anyone who's been through a major trial. As an example, Myers cites the case of a man indicted for the murder of his wife: "His trial cost him #; he was found guilty. It cost him # to appeal... The new trial cost another #; again he was found guilty and again he appealed for another #. This time he was set free. Total cost of proving himself innocent -- #." Why so much? Well, Myers gives the case of a woman, accused of murdering her husband, whose alibi was that she was on a bus to her home town at the time. Naturally, she had to prove it. But her ticket had been collected, so detectives would have to be hired to locate the driver, other passengers, redcaps, cabbies -- anyone who might support her alibi. Then it would be necessary to bring the witnesses to town, pay their expenses during the trial -- plus all income lost while testifying. The woman, of course, could not afford it. But the prosecutor, if he had to, could have done all that and a lot more. Here is Myers' dismaying breakdown of expenses: #. A detective to get needed facts. #. Bringing witnesses from out of town. #. From # to # for a trial transcript. #. Fees for scientific experts. A trial transcript is required for appeal. Scientific experts must be hired to contest the findings of the prosecutor's experts. It all adds up to ruin for the average citizen. His resources just can't match those pitted against him. To put it starkly, crime detection has become so complex and expensive that most of us, if accused, literally could not afford to defend ourselves. The lawyers appointed to defend the penniless were once a more or less adequate gesture: they're not any longer. Every scientific aid in the fight against crime is to be welcomed... but how goes the fight? Damned badly, if you want the. truth. Bergen Evans' The Spoor of Spooks (Knopf) quotes the Chicago Crime Commission's report that "approximately # of the burglaries and # of the robberies committed in Chicago in #I did not even result in an indictment." As Evans points out, "an indictment is a long way from a conviction." The Wickersham and Seabury investigations of # years ago, he adds, "agreed that a criminal had about a # chance of escaping punishment... our whole prison system is geared to the expectation that there will not be more than one conviction for every # felonies." The record is even worse for murder. Out of # professional slayings in Chicago in the last # years, there were less than # convictions! And, Evans declares, "Chicago's record is better in this respect than that of twenty other American cities." All civilized countries share these problems with us. Are there solutions? Everybody has at least one. But the tragic fact is that none has yet worked... and even more tragic is the realization that there are innocent persons in prison while well-heeled criminals, who can afford adequate defense, are not. Here, then, are two exponential curves rising sharply in two opposite directions. What's the payoff? I wish I knew of one. Maybe you do. The Servant Problem When polities is a game, there is only one rule: Follow the leader. But the question is: Who's the leader and where's he going? T his was the day of complete control... Garomma, the Servant of All, the World's Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, placed delicately scented fingertips to his face, closed his eyes and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day; Complete control. Complete... Except for one man. One single ambitious maverick of a man. One very useful man. Should he be strangled at his desk this afternoon, that was the question, or should he be allowed a few more days, a few more weeks, of heavily supervised usefulness? His treason, his plots, were unquestionably coming to a head. Well, Garomma would decide that later. At leisure. Meanwhile, in all other respects, with everyone else, there was control. Control not only of men's minds but of their glands as well. And those of their children. And, if Moddo's estimates were correct, of their children's children. "Yea," Garomma muttered to himself, suddenly remembering a fragment of the oral text his peasant father had taught him years ago, "yea, unto the seventh generation." What ancient book, burned in some long-ago educational fire, had that text come from, he wondered? His father would not be able to tell him, nor would any of his father's friends and neighbors; they had all been wiped out after the Sixth District Peasant Uprising thirty years ago. An uprising of a type that could never possibly occur again. Not with complete control.  gently, and his mind ceased its aimless foraging. Moddo. The Servant of Education, seated below him in the depths of the vehicle, gestured obsequiously at the transparent, missile-proof cupola that surrounded his leader down to the waist. "The people," he stated in his peculiar half-stammer. "There. Outside." Yes. They were rolling through-, the gates of the Hovel of Service and into the city proper. On both sides of the street and far into the furthest distance were shrieking crowds as black and dense and exuberant as ants on a piece of gray earthworm. Garomma, the Servant of All, could not be too obviously busy with his own thoughts; he was about to be viewed by those he served so mightily. He crossed his arms upon his chest and bowed to right and left in the little dome that rose like a tower from the squat black conveyance. Bow right, bow left, and do it humbly. Right, left -- and humbly, humbly. Remember, you are the Servant of All. As the shrieks rose in volume, he caught a glimpse of Moddo nodding approval from beneath. Good old Moddo. This was his day of triumph as well. The achievement of complete control was most thoroughly and peculiarly the achievement of the Servant of Education. Yet Moddo sat in heavy-shadowed anonymity behind the driver with Garomma's personal bodyguards; sat and tasted his triumph only with his leader's tongue -- as he had for more than twenty-five years now. Fortunately for Moddo, such a taste was rich enough for his system. Unfortunately, there were others -- one other at least -- who required more... Garomma bowed to right and left and, as he bowed, looked curiously through the streaming webs of black-uniformed motorcycled police that surrounded his car. He looked at the people of Capital City, his people, his as everything and everyone on Earth was his. Jamming madly together on the sidewalks, they threw their arms wide as his car came abreast of them. "Serve us, Garomma," they chanted. "Serve us! Serve us!" He observed their contorted faces, the foam that appeared at the mouth-corners of many, the half-shut eyes and ecstatic expressions, the swaying men, the writhing women, the occasional individual who collapsed in an unnoticed climax of happiness. And he bowed. With his arms crossed upon his chest, he bowed. Right and left. Humbly. L ast week, when Moddo had requested his views on problems of ceremony and protocol relative to today's parade, the Servant of Education had commented smugly on the unusually high incidence of mob hysteria expected when his chiefs face was seen. And Garomma had voiced a curiosity he'd been feeling for a long time. "What goes on in their minds when they see me, Moddo? I know they worship and get exhilarated and all that. But what precisely do you fellows call the emotion when you talk about it in the labs and places such as the Education Center?" The tall man slid his hand across his forehead in the gesture that long years had made thoroughly familiar to Garomma. "They are experiencing a trigger release," he said slowly, staring over Garomma's shoulder as if he were working out the answer from the electronically pinpointed world map on the back wall. "All the tensions these people accumulate in their daily round of niggling little prohibitions and steady coercions, all the frustrations of 'don't do this and don't do this, do that' have been organized by the Service of Education to be released explosively the moment they see your picture or hear your voice." "Trigger release. Hm! I've never thought of it quite that way." Moddo held up a hand in rigid earnestness. "After all, you're the one man whose life is supposedly spent in an abject obedience beyond anything they've ever known. The man who holds the -- the intricate strands of the world's coordination in his patient, unwearying fingers; the ultimate and hardestworked employee; the -- the scapegoat of the multitudes!" Garomma had grinned at Moddo's scholarly eloquence. Now, however, as he observed his screaming folk from under submissive eyelids, he decided that the Servant of Education had been completely right. On the Great Seal of the World State was it not written: "All Men Must Serve Somebody, But Only Garomma Is the Servant of Air? Without him, they knew, and knew irrevocably, oceans would break through dikes and flood the land, infections would appear in men's bodies and grow rapidly into pestilences that could decimate whole districts, essential services would break down so that an entire city could die of thirst in a week, and local officials would oppress the people and engage in lunatic wars of massacre with each other. Without him, without Garomma working day and night to keep everything running smoothly, to keep the titanic forces of nature and civilization under control. They knew, because these things happened whenever "Garomma was tired of serving." What were the unpleasant interludes of their lives to the implacable dreary -- but, oh, so essential! -- toil of his? Here, in this slight, serious-looking man bowing humbly right and left, right and left, was not only the divinity that made it possible for Man to exist comfortably on Earth, but also the crystallization of all the sub-races that ever enabled an exploited people to feel that things could be worse, that relative to the societal muck beneath them, they were, in spite of their sufferings, as lords and monarchs in comparison. N O wonder they stretched their arms frantically to him, the Servant of All, the World's Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, and screamed their triumphant demand with one breath, their fearful plea with the next: "Serve us, Garomma! Serve us, serve us, serve us!" Didn't the docile sheep he had herded as a boy in the Sixth District mainland to the northwest, didn't the sheep also feel that he was their servant as he led them and drove them to better pastures and cooler streams, as he protected them from enemies and removed pebbles from their feet, all to the end that their smoking flesh would taste better on his father's table? But these so much more useful herds of two-legged, wellbrained sheep were as thoroughly domesticated. And on the simple principle they'd absorbed that government was the servant of the people and the highest power in the government was the most abysmal servant. His sheep. He smiled at them paternally, possessively, as his special vehicle rolled along the howling, face-filled mile between the Hovel of Service and the Educational Center. His sheep. And these policemen on motorcycles, these policemen on foot whose arms were locked against the straining crowds every step of the way, these were his sheepdogs. Another kind of domesticated animal. That's all he had been, thirtythree years ago, when he'd landed on this island fresh from a rural Service of Security training school to take his first government job as a policeman in Capital City. A clumsy, over-excited sheepdog. One of the least important sheep-dogs of the previous regime's Servant of All. But three years later, the peasant revolt in his own district had given him his chance. With his special knowledge of the issues involved as well as the identity of the real leaders, he'd been able to play an important role in crushing the rebellion. And then, his new and important place in the Service of Security had enabled him to meet promising youngsters in the other services -- Moddo, particularly, the first and most useful human he had personally domesticated. With Moddo's excellent administrative mind at his disposal, he had become an expert at the gracious art of political throatcutting, so that when his superior made his bid for the highest office in the world, Garomma had been in the best possible position to sell him out and become the new Servant of Security. And from that point, with Moddo puffing along in his wake and working out the minutiae of strategy, it had been a matter of a few years before he had been able to celebrate his own successful bid in the sizzling wreckage of the preceding administration's Hovel of Service. But the lesson he had taught the occupants of that blasted, projectile-ridden place he had determined never to forget himself. He couldn't know how many Servants of Security before him had used their office to reach the mighty wooden stool of the Servant of All: after all, the history books, and all other books, were rewritten thoroughly at the beginning of every new regime; and the Oral Tradition, usually a good guide to the past if you could sift the facts out properly, was silent on this subject. It was obvious, however, that what he had done, another could do -- that the Servant of Security was the logical, self-made heir to the Servant of All. A ND the trouble was you couldn't do anything about the danger but be watchful. He remembered when his father had called him away from childhood games and led him out to the hills to tend the sheep. How he had hated the lonesome, tiresome work! The old man had realized it and, for once, had softened sufficiently to attempt an explanation. "You see, son, sheep are what they call domestic animals. So are dogs. Well, we can domesticate sheep and we can domesticate dogs to guard the sheep, but for a smart, wide-awake shepherd who'll know what to do when something real unusual comes up and will be able to tell us about it, well, for that we need a man." "Gee, Pa," he had said, kicking disconsolately at the enormous shepherd's crook they'd given him, "then why don't you -- whatdoyoucallit -- domesticate a man?" His father had chuckled and then stared out heavily over the shaggy brow of the hill. "Well, there are people trying to do that, too, and they're getting better at it all the time. The only trouble, once you've got him domesticated, he isn't worth beans as a shepherd. He isn't sharp and excited once he's tamed. He isn't interested enough to be any use at all." That was the problem in a nutshell, Garomma reflected. The Servant of Security, by the very nature of his duties, could not be a domesticated animal. He had tried using sheep-dogs at the head of Security; over and over again he had tried them. But they were always inadequate and had to be replaced by men. And -- one year, three years, five years in office -- men sooner or later struck for supreme power and had to be regretfully destroyed. As the current Servant of Security was about to be destroyed. The only trouble -- the man was so damned useful! You had to time these things perfectly to get the maximum length of service from the rare, imaginative individual who filled the post to perfection and yet cut him down the moment the danger outweighed the value. And since, with the right man, the danger existed from the very start, you had to watch the scale carefully, unremittingly... Garomma sighed. This problem was the only annoyance in a world that had been virtually machined to give him pleasure. But it was, inevitably, a problem that was with him always, even in his dreams. Last night had been positively awful. Moddo touched his knee again to remind him that he was on exhibition. He shook himself and smiled his gratitude. One had to remember that dreams were only dreams. T hey had the crowds behind them now. Ahead, the great metal gate of the Educational Center swung slowly open and his car rumbled inside. As the motorcycle policemen swung off their twowheelers with a smart sidewise flourish, the armed guards of the Service of Education in their crisp white tunics came to attention. Garomma, helped nervously by Moddo, clambered out of the car just as the Center Band, backed by the Center Choir, swung into the manity's Hymn-. Garomma works day and night, Garomma's tasks are never light; Garomma lives in drudgery. For the sake of me, for the . sake of thee..." After five verses, protocol having been satisfied, the band began The Song of Education and the Assistant Servant of Education, a poised, well-bred young man. came down the steps of the biv ing. His arm-spread and "Serve us, Garomma," while perfunctory, was thoroughly correct. He stood to one side so that Garomma and Moddo could start up the steps and then swung in, straightbacked, behind them. The choirmaster held the song on a high, worshipping note. They walked through the great archway with its carved motto. All Must Learn from the Servant of All, and down the great central corridor of the immense building. The gray rags that Garomma and Moddo wore flapped about them. The walls were lined with minor employees chanting, "Serve us, Garomma. Serve us! Serve us! Serve us!" Not quite the insane fervor of the street mobs, Garomma reflected, but entirely satisfactory paroxysms nonetheless. He bowed and stole a glance at Moddo beside him. He barely restrained a smile. The Servant of Education looked as nervous, as uncertain as ever. Poor Moddo! He was just not meant for such a high position. He carried his tall, husky body with all the elan of a tired berry-picker. He looked like anything but the most important official in the establishment. And that was one of the things that made him indispensable. Moddo was just bright enough to know his own inadequacy. Without Garomma, he'd still be checking statistical abstracts for interesting discrepancies in some minor department of the Service of Education. He knew he wasn't strong enough to stand by himself. Nor was he sufficiently outgoing to make useful alliances. And so Moddo, alone of all the Servants in the Cabinet, could be trusted completely. In response to Moddo's diffident touch on his shoulder, he walked into the large room that had been so extravagantly prepared for him and climbed the little cloth-of-gold platform at one end. He sat down on the rough wooden stool at the top; a moment later, Moddo took the chair that was one step down, and the Assistant Servant of Education took the chair a further step below. The chief executives of the Educational Center, dressed in white tunics of the richest, most flowing cut, filed in slowly and stood before them. Garomma's personal bodyguards lined up in front of the platform. And the ceremonies began. The ceremonies attendant upon complete control. Service of Education recited the appropriate passages from the Oral Tradition. How every year, in every regime, far back almost to prehistoric democratic times, a psychometric sampling had been taken of elementary school graduating classes all over the world to determine exactly how successful the children's political conditioning had been. How every year there had been an overwhelming majority disclosed which believed the current ruler was the very pivot of human welfare, the mainspring of daily life, and a small minority -- five per cent, seven per cent, three per cent -- which had successfully resisted indoctrination and which, as adults, were to be carefully watched as potential sources of disaffection. How with the ascension of Garomma and his Servant of Education, Moddo, twenty-five years ago, a new era of intensive massconditioning, based on much more ambitious goals, had begun. The old man finished, bowed and moved back into the crowd. The Assistant Servant of Education rose and turned gracefully to face Garomma. He described these new goals which might be summed up in the phrase "complete control," as opposed to previous administrations' out-dated satisfaction with # or # control, and discussed the new extensive fear mechanisms and stepped-up psychometric spotchecks in the earlier grades -- by which they were to be achieved. These techniques had all been V ! worked out by Moddo -- "under the never-failing inspiration and constant guidance of Garomma, the Servant of All" -- and had, in a few years, resulted in a sampling which showed the number of independent juvenile minds to be less than one per cent. All others worshiped Garomma with every breath they took. Thereafter, progress had been slower. They had absorbed the new conditioning process, but had hit the hard bedrock of the essential deviates, the psychological misfits whose personal maladjustments made it impossible for them to accept the prevailing attitudes of their social milieu, whatever these attitudes should happen to be. Over the years, techniques of conditioning had been painfully worked out which enabled even misfits to fit into society in the one respect of Garomma-worship and, over the years, the samplings indicated the negative doctrinal responses to be receding in the direction of zero: .#, .#, .# And this year. Well! The Assistant Servant of Education I paused and took a deep breath, i Five weeks ago, the Uniform EdI ucational System of Earth had j graduated a new crop of youngI sters from the elementary schools, j The customary planet-wide I sampling had been taken on gradi uation day; collation and verification had just been completed. The results: negative response was zero to the very last decimal place! Control was complete. S pontaneous applause broke out in the room, applause in which even Garomma joined. Then he leaned forward and placed his hand paternally, possessively on Moddo's head of unruly brown hair. At this unusual honor to their chief, the officials in the room cheered. Under the noise, Garomma took the opportunity to ask Moddo, "What does the population in general know about this? What exactly are you telling them?" Moddo turned his nervous, large-jawed face around. "Mostly just that it's a holiday. A lot of obscure stuff about you achieving complete control of the human environment all to the end of human betterment. Barely enough so that they can know it's something you like and can rejoice with you." "In their own slavery. I like that." Garomma tasted the sweet flavor of unlimited rulership for a long moment. Then the taste went sour and he remembered. "Moddo, I want to take care of the Servant of Security matter this afternoon. We'll go over it as soon as we start back." The Servant of Education nodded. "I have a few thoughts. It's not so simple, you know. There's the problem of the successor.", "Yes. There's always that. Well, maybe in a few more years, if we can sustain this sampling and spread the techniques to the maladjusted elements in the older adult population, we'll be able to start dispensing with Security altogether." "Maybe. Strongly set attitudes are much harder to adjust, though. And you'll always need a security system in the top ranks of officialdom. But I'll do the best -- I'll do the best I can." Garomma nodded and sat back, satisfied. Moddo would always do his best. And on a purely routine level, that was pretty good. He raised a hand negligently. The cheering and the applause stopped. Another Education executive came forward to describe the sampling method in detail. The ceremony went on. was the day of complete control... Moddo, the Servant of Education, the Ragged Teacher of Mankind, rubbed his aching forehead with huge, well-manicured fingers and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day. Complete control. Complete... There was the one remaining problem of the successor to the Servant of Security. Garomma would want a decision from him as soon as they started back to the Hovel of Service; and he was nowhere near a decision. Either one of the two Assistant Servants of Security would be able to fill the job admirably, but that wasn't the question. The question was which one of the two men would be most likely to maintain at high pitch in Garomma the fears that Moddo had conditioned him to feel over a period of thirty years? That, so far as Moddo was concerned, was the whole function of the Servant of Security; to serve as primary punching bag for the Servant of All's fear-ridden subconscious until such time as the mental conflicts reached a periodic crisis. Then, by removing the man around whom they had been trained to revolve, the pressure would be temporarily eased. It was a little like fishing, Moddo decided. You fed the fish exof Security, and then you reeled it in quietly, steadily, in the next few years by surreptitiously dropping hints about the manifest ambitions of his successor. Only you never wanted to land the fish. You merely wanted to keep it hooked and constantly under your control. The Servant of Education smiled an inch or two behind his face, as he had trained himself to smile since early boyhood. Landing the fish? That would be the equivalent of becoming Servant of All himself. And what intelligent man could satisfy his lust for power with such an idiotic goal? No, leave that to his colleagues, the ragged high officials in the Hovel of Service, forever scheming and plotting, making alliances and counter-alliances. The Servant of Industry, the Servant of Agriculture, the Servant of Science and the rest of those highly important fools. To be the Servant of All meant being the target of plots, the very bull's eye of attention. An able man in this society must inevitably recognize that power -- no matter how veiled or disguised -- was the only valid aim in life. And the Servant of All -- veiled and disguised though he might be in a hundred humbling ways -- was power incarnate. N O. Far better to be known as the nervous, uncertain underling whose knees shook beneath the weight of responsibilities far beyond his abilities. Hadn't he heard their contemptuous voices behind his back? "... Garomma's administrative toy..." "... Garomma's fool of a spiritual valet..." "... nothing but a footstool, a very ubiquitous footstool, mind you, but a footstool nonetheless on which rests Garomma's mighty heel..." "... poor, colorless, jittery slob..." "... when Garomma sneezes, Moddo sniffles..." But from that menial, despised position, to be the real source of all policy, the maker and breaker of men, the de facto dictator of the human race... He brought his hand up once more and smoothed at his forehead. The headache was getting worse. And the official celebration of complete control was likely to take another hour yet. He should be able to steal away for twenty or thirty minutes with Loob the Healer, without getting Garomma too upset. The Servant of All had to be handled with especial care at these crisis points. The jitters that had been induced in him were likely to become so overpowering that he might try to make a frantic decision for himself. And that possibility, while fantastically dim, must not be given a chance to develop. It was too dangerous. For a moment, Moddo listened to the young man in front of them rattle on about modes and means, skew curves and correlation coefficients, all the statistical jarof the psychological revolution that he, Moddo, had wrought. Yes, they would be there another hour yet. Thirty-five years ago, while doing his thesis in the Central Service of Education Post-Graduate Training School, he had found a magnificent nugget in the accumulated slag of several centuries of mass-conditioning statistics; the concept of individual application.  For a long while, he had found the concept incredibly difficult to close with : when all your training has been directed toward the efficient handling of human the consideration of one man's attitudes and emotions is as slippery a proposition as an eel, freshly caught and moribundly energetic. completed and accepted -- the thesis on suggested techniques for the achievement of complete control which the previous administration had duly filed and forgotten -- he had turned once more to the problem of individual conditioning. And in the next few years, while working at his dull job in the Applied Statistics Bureau of the Service of Education, he had addressed himself to the task of refining the individual from the group, of reducing the major to the minor. One thing became apparent. The younger your material, the easier your task -- exactly as in mass-conditioning. But if you started with a child, it would be years before he would be able to operate effectively in the world on your behalf. And with a child you were faced with the constant counter-barrage of political conditioning which filled the early school years. What was needed was a young man who already had a place of sorts in the government, but who, for some reason or other, had a good deal of unrealized -- and unconditioned -- potential. Preferably, also, somebody whose background had created a personality with fears and desires of a type which could serve as adequate steering handles. Moddo began to work nights, going over the records of his office in search of that man. He had found two or three who low in the Service of Transport, he reminisced, had seemed awfully interesting for a time. Then he had come across Garomma's papers. And Garomma had been perfect. From the first. He was a directorial type, he was likable. T# he was clever -- and he was very receptive. "I could learn an awful lot from you," he had told Moddo shyly at their first meeting. "This is such a big, complicated place -- Capital Island. So much going on all the time. I get confused just thinking about it. But you were born here. You really seem to know your way around all the swamps and bogs and snakepits." Due to sloppy work on the part of the Sixth District Conditioning Commissioner, Garomma's home neighborhood had developed a surprising number of quasiindependent minds on all levels of intelligence. Most of them tended to revolution, especially after a decade of nearfamine crops and exorbitant taxation. But Garomma had been ambitious; he had turned against his peasant background and entered the lower echelons of the Service of Security. T his meant that when the Sixth District Peasant Uprising occurred, his usefulness in its immediate suppression had earned him a much higher place. More important, it had given him freedom from the surveillance and extra adult conditioning which a man of his suspicious family associations might normally have expected. It also meant that, once Moddo had maneuvered an introduction and created a friendship, he had at his disposal not only a rising star but a personality that was superb in its plasticity. A personality upon which he could laboriously create the impress of his own image. First, there had been that wonderful business of Garomma's guilt about disobeying his father that had eventually led to his leaving the farm altogether -- and later to his becoming an informer against his own family and neighbors. This guilt, which had resulted in fear and therefore hatred for everything associated with its original objects, was easy to redirect to the person of his superior, the Servant of Security, and make that the new fatherimage. Later, when Garomma had become Servant of All, he still retained -- under Moddo's tireless ministrations -- the same guilt and the same omnipresent fear of punishment toward whoever was the reigning Head of Security. Which was necessary if he was not to realize that his real master was the large man who sat at his right hand, constantly looking nervous and uncertain... Then there had been education. And re-education. From the beginning, Moddo had realized the necessity of feeding Garomma's petty peasant arrogance and had abased himself before it. He gave the other man the impression that the subversive thoughts he was now acquiring were of his own creation, even leading him to believe that he was domesticating Moddo -- curious how the fellow never escaped from his agricultural origins even in his metaphors! -- instead of the other way around. Because Moddo was now laying plans for a tremendous future, and he didn't want them upset some day by the cumulative resentment one may develop toward a master and teacher; on the contrary, he wanted the plans reinforced by the affection one feels toward a pet dog whose nuzzling dependence constantly feeds the ego and creates a more ferocious counterdependence than the owner ever suspects. The shock that Garomma had exhibited when he began to realize that the Servant of All was actually the Dictator of All! Moddo almost smiled with his lips at the memory. Well, after all, when his own parents had suggested the idea years ago in the course of a private sailing trip they took together pursuant to his father's duties as a minor official in the Service of Fisheries and Marine -- hadn't he been so upset that he'd let go of the tiller and vomited over the side? Losing your religion is a hard thing at any age, but it gets much harder as you get older. On the other hand, Moddo had lost not only his religion at the age of six, but also his parents. They had done too much loose talking to too many people under the incorrect assumption that the then Servant of Security was going to be lax forever. 'jri'E rubbed his knuckles into the side of his head. This headache was one of the worst he'd had in days! He needed fifteen minutes at least -- surely he could get away for fifteen minutes -- with Loob. The Healer would set him up for the rest of the day, which, on all appearances, was going to be a tiring one. And he had to get away from Garomma, anyway, long enough to come to a clear-headed, personal decision on who was to be the next Servant of Security. Moddo, the Servant of Education, the Ragged Teacher of Mankind, took advantage of a pause between speakers to lean back and say to Garomma; "I have a few administrative matters to check here before we start back. May I be excused? It -- it won't take more than about twenty or twenty-five minutes." Garomma scowled imperiously straight ahead. "Can't they wait? galaxy science fiction This is your day as much as mine. I'd like to have you near me. "I know that, Garomma, and I'm grateful for the need. But" -- and now he touched the Servant of All's knee in supplication -- "I beg of you to let me attend to them. They are very pressing. One of them has to do -- it has to do indirectly with the Servant of Security and may help you decide whether you want to dispense with him at this particular time." Garomma's face immediately lost its bleakness. "In that case, by all means. But get back before the ceremony is over. I want us to leave together." The tall man nodded and rose. He turned to face his leader. "Serve us, Garomma," he said with outstretched arms. "Serve us, serve us, serve us." He backed out of the room, always facing the Servant of All. Out in the corridor, he strode rapidly through the saluting Center of Education guards and into his private elevator. He pressed the third-floor button. And then, as the door swept shut and the car began to rise, he permitted himself a single, gentle, mouthcurling smile. The trouble he had taken to pound that one concept into Garomma's thick head: the basic principle in modern scientific government is to keep the government so unobtrusive as to appear non-existent, to use the illusion of freedom as a kind of lubricant for slipping on invisible shackles -- above all, to rule in the name of anything but rulership! A R O M M A himself had phrased it in his own laborious fashion one day when, shortly after their great coup, they stood together -- both still uncomfortable in the rags of greatness -- and watched the construction of the new Hovel of Service in the charred place where the old one had stood for almost half a century. A huge, colorful, revolving sign on top of the unfinished building told the populace that from here will sign which was being flashed on the video receivers of the world -- in the homes as well as in factories, offices, schools and compulsory communal gatherings -- every hour on the hour. "It's like my father used to say," he told Moddo at last with the peculiar heavy chuckle he used to identify a thought he felt was entirely original; "the right kind of salesman, if he talks long enough and hard enough, can convince a man that the thickest thorns feel as soft as roses. All he has to do is keep calling them roses, hey, Moddo?" Moddo had nodded slowly, pretending to be overcome by the voring its complexities for a few moments. Then, as always, merely appearing to be conducting an examination of the various latent possibilities in Garomma's ideas, he had proceeded to give the new Servant of All a further lesson. He had underlined the necessity of avoiding all outward show of pomp and luxury, something the so-recently dead officials of the previous administration had tended to forget in the years before their fall. He had pointed out that the Servants of Mankind must constantly appear to be just that -- the humble instruments of the larger mass will. Then anyone who. acted contrary to Garomma's whim would be punished, not for disobeying his ruler, but for acting against the overwhelming majority of the human race. gaiaky science fiction mind for a long time; the occasional creation of disasters in regions that had been uninterruptedly loyal and obedient. This would accentuate the fact that the Servant of All was very human indeed, that his tasks were overwhelming and that he occasionally grew tired. This would intensify the impression that the job of coordinating the world's goods and services had almost grown too complex to be handled successfully. It would spur the various Districts on to uncalled-for prodigies of frantic loyalty and selfregimentation, so that they at least would have the Servant of All's maximum attention. "Of course," Garomma had agreed. "That's what I said. The whole point is not to let them know that you're running their lives and that they're helping you do it. You're getting the idea." He was getting the idea! He, Moddo, who ever since his adolescence had been studying a concept that had originated centuries ago when mankind had begun to emerge from the primitive chaos of self-rule and personal decision into the organized social universe of modern times...he was getting the idea! But he had continued applying to Garomma himself the tech(. niques that he was teaching Ga romma to apply to the mass of  men as a whole. Year in, year out, seemingly absorbed in the immensities of the project he had undertaken on behalf of the Service of Education, he had actually left its planning in the hands of subordinates while he concentrated on Garomma. And today, while superficially acquiring complete control over the minds of an entire generation of human beings, he had tasted for the first time complete control over Garomma. For the past five years, he had been attempting to crystallize his ascendancy in a form that was simpler to use than complicated need-mechanisms and statement-patterns. Today, for the first time, the weary hours of delicate, stealthy conditioning had begun to work out perfectly. The hand-signal, the touch-stimulus that he had organized Garomma's mind to respond to, had resulted in the desired responses every single time! As he walked down the thirdfloor corridor to Loob's modest office, he searched for an adequate expression. It was like, he decided, being able to turn a whole vast liner by one touch on the wheel. The wheel activated the steering engine, the steering engine pushed against the enormous weight of rudder, and the rudder's movements eventually forced the great ship to swing about and change its course. No, he reflected, let Garomma have his glorious moments and open adulation, his secret palaces and multitudes of concubines. He, Moddo, would settle for the single, occasional touch... and complete control. The anteroom to Loob's office was empty. He stood there impatiently for a moment, then called out: "Loob! Isn't anyone taking care of this place? I'm in a hurry!" A plump little man with a tiny pointed beard on his chin came scurrying out of the other room. "My secretary -- everyone had to go downstairs when the Servant of All entered -- things are so disrupted -- she hasn't returned yet. But I was careful," he went on, catching up to his own breath, "to cancel all my appointments with other patients while you were in the building. Please come in." Moddo stretched himself out on the couch in the Healer's office. "I can only spare about -- about fifteen minutes. I have a very important decision to make, and I have a headache that's gouging out my -- my brains." Loob's fingers circled Moddo's neck and began massaging the back of his head with a serene purposefulness. "I'll do what I can. Now try to relax. Relax. That's right. Relax. Doesn't this help?" "A lot," Moddo sighed. He must find some way of working Loob into his personal entourage, to be with him whenever he had to travel with Garomma. The man was invaluable. It would be wonderful to have him always available in person. Just a matter of conditioning Garomma to the thought. And now that could be handled with the same suggestion. "Do you mind if I just talk?" he inquired. "I don't feel very much -- very much like free association." Loob sat down in the heavily upholstered chair behind the desk. "Do whatever you want. If you care to, go into what's troubling you at the moment. All we can hope to do in fifteen minutes is help you relax." Moddo began to talk. T his was the day of complete control... Loob, the Healer of Minds, the Assistant to the Third Assistant Servant of Education, threaded his fingers through the small, triangular beard that was his professional badge and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day. , Complete control. Complete... It would have been extremely satisfying to have handled the Servant of Security matter directly, but such pleasures would come in time. His technicians in the Bureau of Healing Research had almost solved the problem he had set them. Meanwhile he still had revenge and the enjoyment of unlimited dominion. He listened to Moddo talking of his difficulties in a carefully guarded, non-specific fashion and held up a round fat hand to cover his grin. The man actually believed that after seven years of close therapeutic relationship, he could conceal such details from Loob ! But of course. He had to believe it. Loob had spent the first two years restructuring his entire psyche upon that belief, and then -- and only then -- had begun to effect transference on a total basis. While the emotions Moddo felt toward his parents in childhood were being duplicated relative to the Healer, Loob had begun to probe in the now unsuspicious mind. At first he hadn't believed what the evidence suggested. Then, as he got to know the patient much better he became completely convinced and almost breathless at the scope of his windfall. For more than twenty-five years, Garomma, as the Servant of All, had ruled the human race, and for longer than that, Moddo, as a sort of glorified personal secretary, had controlled Garomma in every important respect. So, for the past five years, he, Loob, as psychotherapist and indispensable crutch to an uncertain, broken ego, had guided Moddo and thus reigned over the world, undisputed, unchallenged -- and thoroughly unsuspected. The man behind the man behind the throne. What could be safer than that? course, it would be more efficient to fasten his therapeutic grip directly on Garomma. But that would bring him out in the open far too much. Being the Servant of All's personal mental physician would make him the object of jealous scrutiny by every scheming high-echelon cabal. No, it was better to be the one who had custody of the custodian, especially when the custodian appeared to be the most insignificant man in all the Hovel of Service officialdom. And then, some day, when his technicians had come up with the answer he required, he might dispose of the Servant of Education and control Garomma at firsthand, with the new method. He listened with amusement to Moddo discussing the Servant of Security matter in terms of a hypothetical individual in his own department who was about to be replaced. The question was which one of two extremely able subordinates should be given his job? Loob wondered if the patient had any idea how transparent his subterfuges were. No, they rarely did. This was a man whose upset mind had been so manipulated that its continued sanity depended on two factors; the overpowering need to consult Loob whenever anything even mildly delicate came up, and the belief that he could be consulted without revealing the actual data of the situation. When the voice on the couch had come to the end of its ragged, wandering summation, Loob took over. Smoothly, quietly, almost tonelessly, he reviewed what Moddo had said. On the surface, he was merely restating the concepts of his patient in a more coherent way. Actually, he was reformulating them so that, considering his personal problems and basic attitudes, the Servant of Education would have no alternative. He would have to select the younger of the two candidates, the one whose background had included the least opposition to the Healers Guild. Not that it made very much difference. The important thing was the proof of complete control. That was implicit in having made Moddo convince Garomma of the necessity of getting rid of a Servant of Security at a time when the Servant of All faced no particular mental crisis. When, in fact, his euphoria was at its height. But there was, admittedly, the additional pleasure in finally destroying the man who, years ago as Chief of the Forty-seventh District's Security, had been responsible for the execution of Loob's only brother. The double achievement was as delicious as one of those two-flavor tarts for which the Healer's birthplace was famous. He sighed reminiscently. Moddo sat up on the couch. He pressed his large, spreading hands into the fabric on either side and stretched. "You'd be amazed how much help this one short session has been, Loob. The -- the headache's gone, the -- the confusion's gone. Just talking about it seems to clarify everything. I know exactly what I have to do now." "Good," drawled Loob the Healer in a gentle, carefully detached voice. "I'll try to get back tomorrow for a full hour. And I've been thinking of having you transferred to my personal staff, so that you can straighten out -- straighten out the kinks at the time they occur. I haven't reached a decision on it yet, though." Loob shrugged and escorted his patient to the door. "That's entirely up to you. However you feel I can help you most." man walking down the corridor to the elevator. "I haven't reached a decision on it yet, though." Well, he wouldn't -- not until Loob did. Loob had put the idea into his mind six months ago, but had deferred having him take action on it. He wasn't sure that it would be a good idea to get even that close to the Servant of All as yet. And there was that wonderful little project in the Bureau of Healing Research which he still wanted to give maximum daily attention. His secretary came in and went right to work at her typewriter. Loob decided to go downstairs and check on what had been done today. With all the fanfare attendant upon the Servant of All's arrival to celebrate complete control, the researchers' routine had no doubt been seriously interrupted. Still, the solution might come at any time. And he liked to examine their lines of investigation for potential fruitfulness: these technicians were blunderingly unimaginative! As he walked down to the main floor, he wondered if Moddo, anywhere in the secret depths of his psyche, had any idea of how mueh he had come to depend on the Healer, how thoroughly he needed him. The fellow was such a tangle of anxiety and uncertainty -- losing his parents as a child, the way he had, of course had not helped too much, but his many repressions had been in existence even then. He had never even remotely suspected that the reason he wanted Garomma to be the ostensible leader was because he was afraid of taking personal responsibility for anything. That the fake personality he was proud of presenting to the world was his real personality, the difference being that he had learned to use his fears and timidity in a positive fashion. But only up to a point. Seven years ago, when he had looked up Loob ("a fast bit of psychotherapy for some minor problems I've been having"), he'd been on the point of complete collapse. Loob had repaired the vast flapping structure on a temporary basis and given it slightly different functions. Functions for Loob. He couldn't help wondering further if the ancients would have been able to do anything basic for Moddo. The ancients, according to the Oral Tradition at least.  had developed, just before the beginning of the modern era, a psychotherapy that accomplished wonders of change and personal reorganization for the individual. But to what end? No serious attempt to use the method for its obvious purpose, for the only purpose of any method... power. Loob shook his head. Those ancients had been so incredibly naive! And so much of their useful knowledge had been lost. Concepts like super-ego merely existed in the Oral Tradition of the Healers Guild as words; there was no clue as to their original meaning. They might be very useful today, properly applied. O N the other hand, were most of the members of his own modern Healers Guild across the wide sea, any less naive, including his father and the uncle who was now its reigning head? From the day when he had passed the Guild's final examinations and begun to grow the triangular beard of master status, Loob had seen that the ambitions of his fellow-members were ridiculously limited. Here, in this very city, where, according to legend, the Guild of the Healers of Minds had originated, each member asked no more of life than to use his laboriously learned skill at transference to acquire power over the lives of ten or fifteen wealthy patients. Loob had laughed at these sparse objectives. He had seen the obvious goal which his colleagues had been overlooking for years. The more powerful the individual whom you subjected to transference and in whom you created a complete dependence, the more power you, as his healer, enjoyed. The world's power center was on Capital Island across the great ocean to the east. And it was there that Loob determined to go. It hadn't been easy. The strict rules of custom against changing your residence except on official business had stood in his way for a decade. But once the wife of the Forty-seventh District's Communications Commissioner had become his patient, it got easier. When the commissioner had been called to Capital Island for promotion to the Second Assistant Servantship of Communication, Loob had gone with the family; he was now indispensable. Through them he had secured a minor job in the Service of Education. Through that job, practicing his profession on the side, he had achieved enough notice to come to the august attention of the Servant of Education himself. He hadn't really expected to go this far. But a little luck, a great deal of skill and constant, unwinking alertness had made an irresistible combination. Fortyfive minutes after Moddo had first stretched out on his couch, Loob had realized that he, with all of his smallness and plumpness and lack of distinction, was destined to rule the world. Now the only question was what to do with that rule. With wealth and power unlimited.  his little research project. That was very interesting, and it would serve, once it came to fruition, chiefly to consolidate and insure his power. There were dozens of little pleasures and properties that were now his, but their enjoyment tended to wear off with their acquisition. And finally there was knowledge. Knowledge. Especially forbidden knowledge. He could now enjoy it with impunity. He could collate the various Oral Traditions into one intelligible whole and be the only man in the world who knew what had really happened in the past. He had already discovered, through the several teams of workers he had set at the task, such tidbits as the original name of his birthplace, lost years ago in a numbering system that had been created to destroy patriotic associations inimical to the world state. Long before it had been the ' Fifth City of the Forty-seventh j District, he had learned, it had ' been Austria, the glorious capital j of the proud Viennese Empire. I And this island on which he stood ! had been Havanacuba, no doubt I once a great empire in its own right which had established hegemony over all other empires somewhere in the dim war-filled  beginnings of modern times.  Well, these were highly personal satisfactions. He doubted i very much if Garomma, for example, would be interested to ' know that he hailed, not from the Twentieth Agricultural Region I of the Sixth District, but from j a place called Canada, one of the forty-eight constituent republics of the ancient Northern United States of America. But he, Loob, was interested. Every additional bit of knowledge gave you addii tional power over your fellowi men, that some day, some way, would be usable. Why, if Moddo had had any real knowledge of the transference techniques taught in the upper lodges of the Guild of the Healers of Minds, he might still be running the world himself! But no. It was inevitable that a Garomma should actually be no more than a creature, a thing, of Moddo. It was inevitable that a Moddo, given the peculiar forces that had formed him, should inexorably have had to come to Loob and pass under his control. It was also inevitable that Loob, with his specialized knowledge of what could be done with the human mind, should be the only independent man on Earth today. It was also very pleasant. He wriggled a little bit, very satisfied with himself, gave his beard a final finger-comb, and pushed into the Bureau of Healing Research. T he chief of the bureau came up rapidly and bowed. "Nothing new to report today." He gestured at the tiny cubicles in which the technicians sat at old books or performed experiments on animals and criminally convicted humans. "It took them a while to get back to work, after the Servant of All arrived. Everyone was ordered out into the main corridor for regulation empathizing with Garomma." "I know," Loob told him. "I don't expect much progress on a day like this. Just so you keep them at it. It's a big problem." The other man shrugged enormously. "A problem which, as far as we can tell, has never been solved before. The ancient manuscripts we've discovered are all in terrible shape, of course. But thosethat mention hypnotism all agree that it can't occur under any of the three conditions you want: against the individual's will, contrary to his personal desires and best judgment, and maintaining him over a long period of time in the original state of subjection without need for new applications. I'm not saying it's impossible, but -- " "But it's very difficult. Well, you've had three and a half years to work on it, and you'll have as much more time as you need. And equipment. And personnel. Just ask. Meanwhile, I'll wander around and see how your men are doing. You needn't come with me. I like to ask my own questions." The bureau chief bowed again and turned back to his desk in the rear of the room. Loob, the Healer of Minds, the Assistant to the Third Assistant Servant of Education, walked slowly from cubicle to cubicle, watching the work, asking questions, but mostly noting the personal quality of the psychological technician in each cubicle. He was convinced that the right man could solve the problem. And it was just a matter of finding the right man and giving him maximum facilities. The right man would be clever enough and persistent enough to follow up the right lines of research, but too unimaginative to be appalled by a goal which had eluded the best minds for ages. And once the problem was solved -- then in one short interview with Garomma, he could place the Servant of All under his direct, personal control for the rest of his life and dispense with the complications of long therapeutic sessions with Moddo where he constantly had to suggest, and suggest in roundabout fashion, rather than give simple, clear and unambiguous orders. Once the problem was solved -- He came to the last cubicle. The pimply-faced young man who sat at the plain brown table studying a ripped and damprotted volume didn't hear him come in. Loob studied him for a moment. ' What frustrated, bleak lives these young technicians must lead! You could see it in the tightly set lines of their all-toosimilar faces. Growing up in one of the most rigidly organized versions of the world state that a ruler had yet contrived, they didn't have a thought that was in any way their own, could not dream of tasting a joy that had not been officially allotted to them. And yet this fellow was the brightest of the lot. If any one in the Bureau of Healing Research could develop the kind of perfect hypnotic technique Loob required, he could. Loob had been watching him with growing hope for a long time now. "How is it coming, Sidothi?" he asked. Sidothi looked up from his book. "Shut the door," he said. Loob shut the door.  I iHS was the day of complete control... Sidothi, the Laboratory Assistant, Psychological Technician Fifth Class, snapped his fingers in Loob's face and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day. Complete control. Complete... Still sitting, he snapped his fingers again. He said: "Report." The familiar glazed look came into Loob's eyes. His body stiffened. His arms hung limply at his sides. In a steady, toneless voice he began to deliver his report. Magnificent. The Servant of Security would be dead in a few hours and the man Sidothi liked would take his place. For an experiment in complete control, it had worked out to perfection. That was all it had been; an attempt to find out if -- by creating a feeling of vengefulness in Loob for the sake of a non-existent brother -- he could force the Healer to act on a level he always  wanted to avoid; making Moddo do something that the Servant of Education had no interest at ' all in doing. That was to prod I Garomma into an action against the Servant of Security at a time when Garomma was in no particular mental crisis. The experiment had worked perfectly. He'd pushed a little domino named Loob three days ago, and a whole series of other little dominoes had begun to fall one right after the other. Today, when the Servant of Security was strangled at his desk, the last one would have fallen. Yes, control was absolutely complete. Of course, there had been another, minor reason why he had elected to conduct this experiment in terms of the Servant of Security's life. He didn't like the man. He'd seen him drink a liqueur in public four years ago. Sidothi didn't believe the Servants of Mankind should do such things. They should lead clean, simple, abstemious lives; they should be an example to the rest of the human race. He'd never seen the Assistant Servant of Security whom he had ordered Loob to have promoted, but he had heard that the fellow lived very narrowly, without luxury even in private. Sidothi liked that. That was the way it should be. L oob came to the end of his report and stood waiting. Sidothi wondered whether he should order him to give up this bad, boastful idea of controlling Garomma directly. No, that wouldn't do: that attitude led into the mechanism of coming down to the Bureau of Healing Research every day to check on progress. While a simple order to come in daily would suffice, still Sidothi felt that until he had examined all aspects of his power and become thoroughly familiar with its use, it was wise to leave original personality mechanisms in place, so long as they didn't get in the way of anything important. And that reminded him. There was an interest of Loob's which was sheer time-wasting. Now, when he was certain of absolute control, was a good time to get rid of it. "You will drop this research into historical facts," he ordered. "You will use the time thus freed for further detailed examination of Moddo's psychic weaknesses. And you will find that more interesting than studying the past. That is all." He snapped his fingers in Loob's face, waited a moment, then snapped them again. The Healer of Minds took a deep breath, straightened and smiled. "Well, keep at it," he said, encouragingly. "Thank you, sir, I will," Sidothi assured him. Loob opened the door of the cubicle and walked out, pompously, serenely. Sidothi stared after him. The idiotic assurance of the man -- that once the process of complete control by hypnotic technique was discovered, it would be given to Loob! Sidothi had begun to reach the answer three years ago. He had immediately covered up, letting his work take a superficially different line. Then, when he had the technique perfected, he'd used it on Loob himself. Naturally. At first he'd been shocked, almost sickened, when he found out how Loob controlled Moddo, how Moddo controlled Garomma, the Servant of All. But after a while, he'd adjusted to the situation well enough. After all, ever since the primary grades, the only reality he and his contemporaries had accepted completely was the reality of power. Power in each class, in each club, in each and every gathering of human beings, was the only thing worth fighting for. And you chose an occupation not only because you were most fitted for it, but because it gave the greatest promise of power to a person of your particular interests and aptitudes. But he'd never dreamed of, never imagined, this much power! Well, he had it. That was reality. and reality was to be respected above all else. Now the problem was what to do with his power. And that was a very hard question to answer. But the answer would come in time. Meanwhile, there was the wonderful chance to make certain that everyone did his job right, that bad people were punished. He intended to stay in his menial job until the proper time came for promotion. There was no need at the moment to have a big title. If Garomma could rule as the Servant of All, he could rule Garomma at third or fourth hand as a simple Psychological Technician Fifth Class. But in what way exactly did he want to rule Garomma What important things did he want to make Garomma do? out of loudspeaker set high in the wall. "Attention! Attention, all personnel! The Servant of All will be leaving the Center in a few minutes. Everyone to the main corridor to beg for his continued service to mankind. Everyone -- " Sidothi joined the mob of technicians pouring out of the huge laboratory room. People were coming out of offices on both sides of them. He was swept up with a crowd constantly enlarging from the elevators and stairways to the main corridor where the Service of Education guards prodded them and jammed them against the walls. He smiled. If they only knew whom they were pushing! Their ruler, who could have any one of them executed. The only man in the world who could do anything he wanted to do. Anything. There was sudden swirling movement and a cheer at the far distant end of the corridor. Everyone began to shuffle about nervously, everyone tried to stand on tip-toe in order to see better. Even the guards began to breathe faster. The Servant of All was coming. The cries grew more numerous, more loud. People in front of them were heaving about madly. And suddenly Sidothi saw him! His arms went up and out in a flashing paroxysm of muscles. Something tremendous and delighted seemed to press on his chest and his voice screamed, "Serve us, Garomma! Serve us! Serve us! Serve us!" He was suffused with heaving waves of love, love such as he never knew anywhere else, love for Garomma, love for Garomma's parents, love for Garomma's children, love for anything and everything connected with Garomma. His body writhed, almost without coordination, delicious flames licked up his thighs and out from his armpits, he twisted and turned, danced and hopped, his very stomach seeming to strain against his diaphragm in an attempt to express its devotion. None of which was very strange, considering that these phenomena had been conditioned in him since early childhood... "Serve us, Garomma!" he shrieked, bubbles of saliva growing out of the corner of his mouth. "Serve us! Serve us! Serve us!" He fell forward, between two guards, and his outstretched fingertips touched a rustling flapping rag just as the Servant of All strode by. His mind abruptly roared off into the furthest, most hidden places of ecstasy. He fainted, still babbling. "Serve us, O Garomma." When it was all over, his fellow-technicians helped him back to the Bureau of Healing Research. They looked at him with awe. It wasn't every day you managed to touch one of Garomma's rags. What it must do to a person! It took Sidothi almost half an hour to recover. rible secret, although the thought of what will happen to me, when I tell my story, gives me a trembling from head to toe. Without doubt, word will flash to the proper authorities and stem-faced men with sympathetic eyes will bring strait jacket and sedatives, and hunt me down to tear me from Mary's clinging arms. A padded cell will be made ready for another unfortunate. Nevertheless what we have just read in the newspapers has made us fearfully agree that I must tell all regardless of my own fate. So let me say this: If it is true that an expedition is being organized in London to go to the cold and rocky wastes of the Himalayas for the purpose of investigating that astonishing primeval creature called 'The Abominable Snowman,' then I am forced to tell you immediately... the Abominable Snowman is none other than Mr. i Eammer, the famous movie magnate. And I am the one responsible for this amazing situation. I and my invention which Mr. Eammer had hired me to develop, an invention which would put #-D and Cinemascope and the new Largoscope process so far behind in the fierce Hollywood battle for supremacy that Mr. Eammer would at last have complete control of the industry, and, for that matter, television also. You will say this is impossible because one or two glimpses of the Abominable Snowman have shown it to be an apelike creature? And the animal's body is covered with thick, coarse hair? Well, did you ever see Mr. Eammer lounging beside his elaborate Beverly Hills swimming pool? He looks as if he's just climbed down from a tree. The last young movie lovely an agent had brought around to talk contracts took one look, screamed and fainted. It is said she was hysterical for two days. B ut let me tell how it all started. Remember those awful days when television, like a monster with a wild pituitary gland, grew until it took the word 'colossal' away from filmdom? What a battle! Like two giant bears rearing up face to face, roaring, screaming, swapping terrible blows of mighty paws, the two industries fought, with the film industry reeling bloodily, at first, then rallying with #-D, then Cinemascope, and television pressing home the fierce attack with color TV. And who was caught in the middle of all this, without any protection? Mr. Eammer. Why? Well, let me give you some background on that character. When talkies killed the era of silent films, Mr. Eammer nearly got shaken loose in the change. He'd scornfully dismissed the new development. "Ha," he'd said. "People come to my movies for one of two things. To fall asleep, or to look at the pretty girlies." When the movie industry began to look for good stories and material that stimulated the mind as well as the emotion, Mr. Eammer had jeered. "Ha. People are stupid, people are sheep. They don't want to think, they just want to see the pretty girlies." Six months later, Mr. Eammer had sent emissaries to England to try to hire this guy Billy Shakespeare. "Offer him anything," ordered Mr. Eammer grimly. "Tell him we'll fill the water cooler in his office with gin, he can pick any secretary he likes from among our starlets. and... and... he swallowed, then recklessly added, "we'll even give him screen credit." Of course the men he'd sent out searching knew Billy Shakespeare had kicked off, though they weren't sure whether it was last year or ten years ago. But it was a fine trip on the expense account and after a few weeks of riotous searching in London's gayer areas, they wired that Shakespeare had caught a bad and he'd not lasted the night. But Mr. Eammer pulled out of his situation. He bought up just the right to use the titles of great classic novels, ignored the contents, and had entirely different stories written. "Not enough girlies in their versions," he explained, frowning. "Them hack writers don't have stuff with real interest to it." T Y the time the customers were in the packed movie houses, they were so stunned with the spectacle of unclad femininity that they'd completely forgotten what they'd come to see. Half of them had never read the classics anyway. So the dough rolled in and Mr. Eammer's estate was photographed in color and published in ' Beautiful Homes" magazines, and high school newspapers sent nervous young reporters to ask advice for graduates yearning to get into the movie business. How, they asked humbly, could they carve a place for themselves? Mr. Eammer beamed and said, "Girlies. Use plenty of girlies. It gets them every time." The printed interview, as approved and edited by high school faculty advisors, did not contain this advice. But the girlies weren't enough to save Mr. Eammer when television hit the movies on its glass jaw. He didn't believe what was happening, until it was too late. When his studio started hitting the skids, he hastily withdrew funds and liquidated assets and rented a number of safe-deposit boxes. Then he sat back and let his creditors scream a symphony of threats. It was at that time that Mr. Eammer heard that I, a young physicist interested in optics, had stumbled across an oddity which might revolutionize the movie inydustry. He'd heard of this Wrough Mary, whom I love with ajll my heart, and who will sometimes embarrass me by proudly telling people how intelligent I arrl. Mr. Eammer's secretary, she let Him know all about me, just as shelet me know all I have just toldyou about him. Mary is not a reticent person; she is too loving of her fellow man to withhold even the slightest information and perhaps I should have kept my astonishing discovery to myself. In any case the phone rang in my very small laboratory one day and Mary's excited voice said, "Joe, darling. It's me. I told him about your invention. Come down right away." "Who?" I said. "Where? What are you talking about?" "To the studio," she said impatiently. "To see my boss, Mr. Eammer. He says if your invention is..." "Now wait a minute," I shouted with indignation. "I told you not to tell anybody about it. It's not perfected. In fact, I don't understand how it works exactly." "Stop being so modest," she said firmly. "I know you. You're a genius and genius is never, never satisfied. I read all about it. You want us to get married, don't you?" "Yes," I said, sudden longing surging through my heart. "Can we afford to? No. So come on down. Anyway, I already told him. Don't make me into a... a liar," begged Mary. "If he likes your invention, maybe he'll buy it." THE things we do for the women we love. I went there in fear and was trembling with good reason. Not knowing quite how my invention operated, it could be stolen from me, because it might not be patentable. It was more discovery than invention. Oh, I can tell you, I went to see Mr. Eammer in a cold sweat of fear that I might be losing my hold on the strange and accidental phenomena across which I'd stumbled. I got quite a greeting. When I walked into his elaborate outer offices, the workers were sitting hushed in fear before their desks. From within his private offices I could hear bellowing and the sounds of things smashing. Mary hurried over to me, her warm, brown eyes pleading. Before she could say anything, I heard Mr. Eammer say in a shout, right through the partly opened door, "Well, what have you done about it?" A trembling voice said, "Sir, I've cut staff fifty per cent." "Stupid!" roared Mr. Eammer's voice. "Who's talking about that? Did you ask Peterson of World Studios if he'll license us to use his new Largoscope system?" "Y-yes." A moment of terrified silence. "He s-said your outfit could use his Largoscope on only one occasion. When they f-film your funeral." There was a gasp, then the door opened and a perspiring. harried, bald-headed man lurched out. With glazed eyes, he made a beeline for the outer door. "Let's go in," said Mary eagerly. "He'll be so glad to see you." I looked at her incredulously, but she took my arm and dragged me inside. There Mr. Eammer sat twitching and shuddering, his head in his pudgy hands. He looked dully at us from tiny eyes. "Everybody hates my genius," he said, waggling his head from side to side. "Everybody envies me. The wild dogs are gathering to pull down the noble elk." As he glared at us, Mary said swiftly, "Yes, sir." "The wounded lion," whispered Mr. Eammer dramatically, tears of self-pity coming to his eyes. "Surrounded by jackals and laughing hyenas. I am dying of my wounds." He uttered a wail. "Everybody's got a new filming system but me." He drew a deep breath. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded. "He's..." began Mary. "Wait a minute," he said. He grabbed a phone from the six on his desk. "Hey. Publicity... Hey, Mike. I want rumors spread about Largoscope. Top doctors say it'll ruin the eyes, make you stone blind." He paused, his face purpling. "Okay, if you can't do it, then get another job. You're fired." He slammed the phone down. "No cooperation from anybody," he said heavily. "Surrounded by incompetents." He glared at me. "Who the hell are you?" "I'm..." I began. A T this moment, the door opened and in came a man with a sheaf of papers and a film of sweat on his forehead. "I hate to interrupt, Mr. Eammer," he  said doggedly, "but I got your note on the Lolita Vaughn contract we drew up. I knew there ; must be some mistake, so... ; "Mistake, what kind of mis' take?" snapped Mr. Eammer. "I want you to tear the contract up. j I said we aren't going to sign after all. I got a bigger name for the picture than her." The man winced. "Well," he said. "I... I was just wonder ing. I mean, after all, we talked her into turning down that fat part in the new Broadway show that opened last night. It's a smash hit, I read today..." : "Tough," shouted Mr. Eammer. "My heart bleeds. Did I i know when I made that promise , that I could get a big star at such ' a cheap price? I acted hastily, I , made a mistake, so I corrected i that mistake." He looked stern. I "Would it be fair to the stockI holders if I took Lolita under these conditions?" "But you own all the stock!" "That's what I said, you fool!" roared Mr. Eammer. "Get out of here." As the man fled, I stared at Mr. Eammer in horror and disgust. Never would I trust a man like this, was my thought. He glared at me. "Who the hell are you?" he snarled. "I keep asking you and you stand there like a dummy." "He's the scientist I told you about," said Mary. "He's a genius. He has a new invention that will make Largoscope obsolete." "This?" said the producer with incredulity. "This beanpole is a scientist? I don't believe it." He stared morosely at me, shaking his head. "He looks like an elevator operator who can't figure out what button to push." "I beg your pardon!" I said with indignation. "I am a graduate of M.I.T. I graduated sutnma cum laude." "Anybody can pick up a few words of French," he sneered. "If you're such a genius, how much money have you got, hah?" As I looked at him numbly, my jaw hanging open, he tapped his chest with a sausagelike forefinger. "Now I am a genius, see? I'm the guy who hires you. Now tliat we got that straight, what's this nonsense about you being smart enough to figure out a new invention that will make Largoscope obsolete?" The weary cynicism in his gross face enraged me. If ever I had an immediate yearning to crush a man, to make him say 'uncle,' to have him beg and yearn, it was at that moment and toward this insufferable moron. had driven back to my small laboratory. He peered suspiciously at the involved maze of wiring and electronic equipment. I pointed to the small unroofed cabinet on my long worktable. It was two feet deep and the four walls, which were three feet long, were studded with small tubes I'd rather not describe, since I've developed them myself and they produce a new kind of ray. "That's my camera," I said. "It looks more like a diathermy machine or a sweatbox for reducing," he said skeptically. "How's it operate?" I set a few dials and went to find Susie, my white cat. "Here pussy, pussy," I said tenderly. "The man's gone nuts," said Mr. Eammer in disgust. "Take it easy," I snapped. "That's how I made my strange discovery. I was doing a test on the effect of a new kind of radiation on fabrics. And Susie, my cat, walked over the equipment. First she stepped on a dial, turning it accidentally to full power. then she wandered into the box." "So what?" "Watch and see," I said. I got Susie and she complacently allowed herself to be put into the box. I placed Mary at the dials with instructions and took Mr. Eammer to the next room and pointed to a huge circle chalked on the floor. The movie magnate waited impatiently. "Mary," I shouted. "Okay. Turn dial number one to full force." We heard a click. Then Mr. Eammer yelped and cowered behind me. Because in front of us, within the chalked circle, appeared a giant eightfoot-tall cat, an enormous duplicate of Susie. Susie was licking her paw with a tongue that was nearly two feet long. "Don't be afraid,"! said proudly. "It's just an image. Look." I stepped forward and ran my hand through the air where the giant figure of Susie ignored me. My hand disappeared into the image, and I felt the usual puzzling tingle, as if I were getting a shock. And Susie, from the next room, uttered a faint meow and stopped licking her paw as if she, too, felt something. "But ,... but there's no screen," Eammer said. "And... and it looks real. It's got three dimensions like an actual body." He cautiously approached, his hands shaking with excitement. He tiptoed around behind the cat image. He choked, "It's like a real, living cat all around." "You haven't seen anything yet," I said happily. "Watch this. Mary," I yelled again. "Turn dial number two very slowly." A S we stared, the image of the three-dimensional Susie shrank from eight feet all the way down to a three-dimensional miniature cat the size of a thimble. Mr. Eammer looked as if he might faint. "Good-by, Largoscope," I said grimly. "This will make all #-D and large screen systems obsolete. It will revolutionize television, too. People will sit home and see actual figures, threedimensional figures of real people. There will be no screens at all. The effects of depth and solidity, as you see, are perfect..." Suddenly Susie in the next room gave a yelping meow arid Mary gasped. We jumped, then ran inside. Mary was wringing her hand. There was a little smoke in the room. "My hand hit a wire," said Mary, embarrassed. "I guess I caused a short circuit or something. I'm sorry. All this smoke." She put her hands to her eyes, rubbing. "Susie all right?" I said. "I guess so," she said. "She moved so fast I could hardly see...  "My dear fellow." Mr. Eammer was most cordial. He put his arm around my shoulders. He was beaming at me. He was offering me a fat cigar. "What a wonderful invention. You are indeed a genius and I offer you my humblest apologies." "I accept them," I said, pushing him away with distaste. "You may leave now, Mr. Eammer." "Leave? Not until we've signed a contract, my friend. I want that invention." "Mr. Eammer, that invention isn't perfected yet. I don't even know how it works. The principles are beyond me. It is something new in the world of physics and optics, and..." "That's all right," he cried. "I'll give you six months. A year. More. But I want it..." "No. I'm afraid I don't trust you," I said. Far from being offended, he was delighted. He laughed as if I'd said something witty. "Of course you don't," he said. "You don't trust me and you don't like me. But just listen to my offer." R ight then and there Mr. Eammer made an offer that had my head swimming. He would, first of all, deposit in an account in my name the sum of Second, he would include in the contract a stipulation that I'd get fifty per cent of all royalties. Third -- and very important to me -- in the event that the patent he would apply for in my name was refused, or if it was broken by further research, I could keep "And last," said Mr. Eammer, his nostrils flaring as he closed in for the kill, "I'll make your girl friend, Mary, a big movie star." Mary's eyes widened. She clasped her hands before her, nervously. "Me?" she whispered. "B-but I can't act." "What's that got to do with it?" Mr. Eammer asked impatiently. "You just got to hold still when the male lead grabs you. Leave it all to him, he knows what to do." "No," I cried, appalled. "I don't want anybody else kissing Mary." "Neither do I," said Mary, blushing. "You're absolutely right." Mr. Eammer uttered a deep sigh. "Such deep love, such clean emotion, it cuts my heart out, honestly. Okay, we'll give the script a scrubbing. Nobody'll put a finger on her." "I don't think I'm interested," said Mary regretfully. Mr. Eammer was staggered. He recovered immediately and said hastily, "Smart girl. What intelligence. It's no life for you." "But, Mary," I said, kind of liking the idea of my Mary on the screen; of being sole owner people knowing nobody could kiss this girl but myself. "It's such a rare opportunity. Every girl wants to be a movie star. Do it!" "Sure," cried Mr. Eammer. "Don't be a dope. How many girls get a chance like this?" Mary whispered, her eyes shining, "Well, all right, dear, if you insist." "You have a deal, Mr. Eammer," I said quickly. Mary typed the contract on my portable as dictated by Mr. Eammer. "Put in a clause," I said cautiously, remembering his ethics, "that the contract is effective only my account." Mr. Eammer frowned. "Put in a clause for me, too," he said. without a signed receipt from me saying he's delivered all his blueprints and technical notebooks on the invention -- and a fullsize camera model, big enough to hold people." "I agree," I said. "I'll have it built and delivered immediately." I shook Mr. Eammer's clammy hand and he departed with Mary his secret safe-deposit boxes. them, mentally spending that money on all the wonderful things I'd always wanted. A scintillometer. A centrifuge. Maybe I could even build my own private cyclotron. And I could visualize Mary cooking dinner in a little white cottage with a picket fence. Within the week, I had delivered the full-size camera to Mr. Eammer's studio. As he left me, whimpering with joy and carefully locking the iron doors of the room he'd set aside for my equipment, I stared at the signed relars. I was rich. At this moment, Mary appeared at the studio gate and ran toward me, her face deathly pale. "What's the matter?" I cried. "Remember how we couldn't find Susie all week?" she gasped. "Well, I just found her." Mary held out her fist, opened her fingers and I recoiled in astonishment. In her palm was Susie, my cat. But a Susie that was one inch long... the smallest, tiniest cat I'd ever seen. She was alive and seemed healthy as she licked her white fur and uttered a meow I barely could hear. My throat was so dry I could hardly get the words out. "Good Lord. The invention. Something went wrong. It not only sends the itnaie in three dimensions without a screen to receive it; it also transmits the actual body itself through space. I've created a matter transmitter." "But... but why is Susie so small?" wailed Mary. "Apparently it transmits whatever size the image is set at. Remember we had reduced the image of Susie and at that time you short-circuited the wires? That short circuit is what did it. If Susie's image had been large at that moment, we would have had an eight-foottall cat on our hands..." I paused appalled, my eyes clinging to the incredible oneinch cat now peering over the edge of Mary's hand at the ground below. It shrank back fearfully. "My God," I whispered. I turned and, with Mary close behind me, made a beeline for Mr. Eammer. W E finally found him and got him alone. Mary opened her palm and, without a word, showed him Susie. Mr. Eammer's eyes bulged and his jowls turned ashen. Susie scratched her ear with her miniature rear left foot and I idly wondered just how small Susie's fleas were. "I warned you," I said grimly, "that I didn't know how this thing worked or the principles behind it. This is what's liable to happen whenever there is a short circuit in the camera box. I don't know why it happens, but it's too dangerous to use. If you want to call off our deal..." "No, no, no," said Mr. Eammer rapidly. A cunning look came over his face. "I'm sure you can work the bugs out of it, can't you? I'm sure you're anxious to do more research on it?" "Indeed, I am," I said warmly. "You are a man with the true scientific spirit." "Go right to work," he said urgently, his fascinated eyes never leaving Susie. "Work night and day, day and night. I'll never leave your side. We must learn how this gadget works." That's what we did. Making Susie comfortable in a matchbox, we set to work in the dead of night when no inquisitive eyes might see our strange experiments. Mary made us pots of steaming coffee and Mr. Eammer paced helpfully back and forth uttering unclear mumbles, as I toiled the long, wearying hours. It did not take long for me to gain an empirical understanding of what I had, by which I mean that, like electricity in its early days, the mysterious force could be utilized, made to perform, without complete understanding of its basic nature. The night came when I had full control of the machine. We stood staring at it in awe. We had made Susie her normal size again. We had enlarged the image of an old shoe, recklessly aimed the projector out toward the country and flicked the short circuit switch that sent it out in space as solid matter. After three breathless days, we read the puzzled report in the newspapers. A shoe eight feet long and three feet high had been found in the backyard of a summer cottage. It was a three-day wonder, until somebody advanced the theory that it was obviously a prop of some kind of musical comedy movie. with the sense of having created one of the greatest wonders of science. My voice was trembling with pride as I said to Mary and Mr. Eammer, "The things that can be done with this invention. The incredible things..." "Yes," said Mr. Eammer, gloating. "And it's mine, all mine." "You'll be the biggest man in the movie industry," I said solemnly. "You made a good investment." Mr. Eammer gave me a strange smile. "You are a great inventor, my boy, but you have a small imagination. Biggest man in Hollywood, did you say? The only man in Hollywood, you mean. Why, do you realize what I can do with this machine? I can own Hollywood, Television, Broadway. And I'll make a list of people I don't like that I'll get even with. Why, I can be Master of the Entertainment World..." The blinding realization of what I had done flared in my numbed brain. I had given a tremendous scientific weapon to a ruthless moron. And there was nothing I could do, because he had my blueprints locked in his safe... I stepped forward and with full force hit Mr. Eammer on the jaw. As he sagged, I grabbed him and shoved him into the transmitter. "Look out," cried Mary. "He's getting up." "No," he said in a strangled voice as he struggled to his knees. "No. I'll... I'll fix you..." I turned the dials full power, hit the directional switch with my open palm and closed my eyes. Mr. Eammer's voice cut off abruptly. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. "Thank heaven," gasped Mary in relief. putations and my figures showed that Mr. Eammer must have been transported to the Himalayas. That's the area where the Abominable Snowman had been sighted. That is why I must speak now, regardless of any opinions about the state of my sanity. I would not want Mr. Eammer shot by mistake, as he comes rushing toward a party of explorers. It's all right to bring him back now. I've smashed the machine beyond repair and, since Mary was Mr. Eammer's private secretary, she knew where to get the combination of his safe, so we were able to destroy my blueprints and technical notebooks. over to Mr. Eammer's lawyers and they are now fighting off the creditors, who all think Mr. Eammer is deliberately hiding from them. Whatever you do, please don't take a shot at the Abominable Snowman. It is Mr. Eammer. ) Your Choice For # For # for # or .# each Enclosed find  for the following... # # #I Nome # # #...City...books (circled) # # Address .State activities of and on the Sun must have been very frustrating to #th century astronomers. It was well known that everything on Earth, from major weather events to the growing of a blade of grass, depended on light and heat from the Sun. It was also known that the planet Earth intercepted only a tiny portion of the light and heat generated. for your information Since the astronomers of the #th century knew that everything on Earth depended on the Sun, the question of how the Sun kept going -- and whether it might one day fail -- was not merely a point of scientific curiosity; it acquired a very personal aspect. If you read through a pile of old astronomy books, you can easily see how frustrating the whole thing was. T here was, as explained last month, the so-called meteoritic theory. If meteorites amounting to one Earth mass per century fell into the Sun, their impact energy ought to be enough to account for the energy generation. One Earth mass per century, on the other hand, was so little in comparison with the enormous bulk of the Sun that the increase in diameter would be virtually negligible. It would take centuries to detect it even after you knew what you were looking for. But unfortunately you could not expect all the meteorites to fall into the Sun in a straightline fall. They would approach the Sun in a tight spiral, which meant that if the total of one Earth mass per century was to fall into the Sun, several Earth masses should move around it close to its surface. And that would be enough to be easily visible, perhaps even to the naked eye. Hence meteorite impact could supply only a very small amount of the total energy generation; it could only be incidental to the main process. Then there was Helmholtz's contraction theory. You did not have to have meteorites fall into the Sun; you could get the same result by having particles from the outer layers drop down to lower layers. The overall result of this would be a gradual contraction of the Sun, but Helmholtz had shown that this, too, would be so little that it would take centuries to measure it. One drawback was that there had to be an end to the process; it meant that the Sun would finish its career as a star some eight to That did not constitute disproof in itself, of course. If the Sun was to cease shining eight or ten was simply an inevitable fact and, in spite of all its inevitability, it wasn't something to worry about: measured by huyears is a very long time. The real drawback was at the other hand of the time scale. Calculating backward by the same method, you could tell when the Sun had started shining -- and that was far too short a time. The Earth (even before radioactivity measurements were discovered) must be older than that and a number of courageous zoologists and paleontologists stated boldly that life on Earth should be older. Having disproved one of the two possible explanations themselves, and seeing the other disputed by the geologists, astronomers had no way to turn. One of them wrote in desperation; "If we could only tell how much of the Sun is liquid, how much is solid and how much is gaseous, we might be able to find an answer!" We now know that nothing could be solid or even liquid on an #-mile sphere with a surface temperature of # centigrade and a core temcentigrade, but at that time the statement was perfectly logical. Another astronomer more courageously summed up that the energy generation of the Sun was either due to a combination of contraction and meteorites, "or else to a process of which we have no idea or concept at the present time." course, that was the truth. " At the moment those lines were written, the atom was still believed to live up to its name (Greek atomos means "indivisible") and no one thought that there might be energy in the atoms, even if they should turn out not to be indivisible. Science was more or less stuck with Helmholtz's contraction theory of #, when one could easily make the assumption that in the past, meteorite falls had supplied much more energy than they do now, so that a longer period of sunshine became available for the past, at a time when there were no astronomical observers. That the atom was not strictly indivisible and that energy was released by this very fact became known during the decade from #-#. Some ten years after that. Sir Arthur Eddington began his theoretical work on stellar interiors. At almost every point of his thinking, lack of knowledge of atomic behavior interfered and he finally exclaimed that he had intended to delve into the interior of the stars and ended up in the interior of the atom. But this apparently irrelevant detour actually cleared up the question. We must keep in mind at this point that up to the year #, it was believed that radioactivity could not be influenced in any way. It had been found in the laboratory that certain heavy elements -- uranium, polonium, thorium and radium -- did "decay" into something else, releasing energy in the process. But the decay rate seemed to be given and fixed. It remained the same f in the coldest cold chamber that  could be produced. It did not I change with heat. It remained i uninfluenced by electric currents I or magnetic fields. ' In #, Ernest Rutherford succeeded in smashing a nitrogen atom. This opened entirely new vistas. One had not been able to influence radioactivity by heat or i by electric currents. Maybe it j merely had not been hot enough i or the current had not been powerful enough. Ten years after Rutherford, : two young scientists, Robert Atkinson and Fritz Houtermans, I dared to say for the first time ; that the nucleus of an atom might be attacked if it was hot enough. As is now known, the kinetic energy of a bit of matter increases I with heat. The hotter it is, the faster it will move and the energy, naturally, depends on the speed. : When Atkinson and HouterI mans made their statement, it ' was a comparatively recent item of knowledge that under condiI tions of extreme heat, something else will happen to atoms. Normally, which in this case means any temperature from room temperature to that of molten steel and beyond, each atomic nucleus is surrounded by its swirl of electrons. Simplifying things a bit, it was assumed that these electrons had a kind of cushioning effect. If, at "normal" temperatures, one atom bumped into another, they bounced off their electron shells, the nuclei remaining unaffected. But as the temperature went up, the electrons were gradually "stripped" from the nucleus; at very high temperatures, the nucleus of the atoms would be bare. At the same time, the speed with which they moved was increased by the temperature, too. Then, in a stellar interior, you had "naked nuclei" racing about at colossal speeds. Under these conditions, it seemed possible -- even probable -- that the nuclei might be affected by collisions. But that was as far as one could go in # -- the general statement that "thermonuclear reactions" should be possible was all that could be said. One could not yet be specific. I F you read popular articles on atomic energy nowadays, you can easily get the impression that it all began with the accidental discovery of the fission of uranium by Hahn and Strassman. And that, after this discovery had been verified and the fission bomb had been built and used, scientists began to wonder about the fusion of light atoms and finally contrived the hydrogen bomb. Now this may be a nice and simple scheme for explaining things to an outsider, but it is not correct historically. Even before it was known that heavy elements like uranium could go into fission, scientists were talking about generating atomic energy by fusion. Not that they talked about doing it themselves; they talked about it as something that probably went on inside the stars. One likely reaction seemed to be the fusion of a lithium nucleus and a hydrogen nucleus into a helium nucleus. But that could not be what happened in our sun. It would be far too fast under the circumstances actually prevailing. It would result in one big flash and that couldn't be it. As George Gamow wrote then, "We know, therefore, that our sun cannot contain any appreciable amount of lithium in its interior, just as we know that a slowly burning barrel surely cannot contain any gunpowder." What really keeps the Sun going was figured out for the first time under somewhat unusual circumstances. In #, a Conference on Theoretical Physics took place in Washington, D. C., and one of the participants was Dr. Hans Bethe of Cornell. As he was riding home on the train, he decided that one should be able to find the proper reaction by checking through a number ofpossibilities. It seemed likely that the energy output of different nuclear reactions should differ greatly in magnitude so that, if one could find a nuclear reaction which tallied with the actual energy release of the Sun, one could be fairly sure of having the right one. Professor Bethe started checking through a number of likely nuclear reactions. Before his train pulled in, he found one which gave the right result! Strangely enough, Dr. Bethe's colleague, Karl von Weizsacker in Germany, arrived at the same result (I don't know under what external circumstances) at the same time. The cycle of reactions is usually called the "Solar Phoenix Reaction" because the carbon atom which is involved reappears unchanged at the end, so that it acts more like a nuclear catalyst. Naturally, in such a self-consuming cauldron as the Sun, with the enormous size and the temperatures involved, more than one nuclear reaction will go on. A little over # per cent of the total energy generation is thought to be due to what has been called Critchfield's H-H process which assumed a head-on collision of two protons (hydrogen nuclei) with subsequent ejection of a positron. A third reaction that probably happens is this one. As has been intimated, the (Table #) Time Constant for Step No. Reaction Center of Sun (#) ,H'f oCi#  #N # years ( # ) N# --  gCjpositron # minutes (#) ,,C#  jHi  ,Ni # years (#) # NI"  iHi sOs (#) f,## --  tN #positron # minutes (#) tN#  ,Hi oC #  aHe" # years : result: # iH oHef # positrons various thermonuclear reactions depend on temperature. Obviously they cannot be the same for every star; some stars are hotter than our sun and some are cooler. In a star like Sirius -- hotter but otherwise of the same general type -- there can be very little of the H-H process, while this process might be the sole or at least main energy source in a fainter star. Knowing now that thermonuclear reactions -- fusions of light atoms -- provide the energy of the stars and knowing, too, at what temperature the various reactions can take place, we can search an entirely new picture of stellar evolution. You remember what they thought of stellar evolution before atomic energy was known. In the beginning, they put an uncondensed star -- the term now in use for this is "proto-star" -- which by way of contraction was finally hot enough to shine with visible light. As contraction progressed, the star went through a (Table II) Time Constant for Step No. Reaction Center of Sun ( I ) iH'  iH iH positron lO'i years ( # ) iH#f iHi aHe # seconds (#) gHe  sHe # Be (#) # Be # electron sLi' I year (#) sLi  iHi # # He I minute : result: # iHf I electron # HefI jxisitron white phase (Sirius as an example) then through a yellow phase (our sun as an example) and finally, when most of the energy had been radiated away but contraction was virtually finished, the red phase. The black and invisible phase was to be the end. The modern concept still begins with the proto-star, a fantastically tenuous accumulation of gas molecules with some cosmic dust mixed in; that dust later evaporates into gases when the temperature rises. And early in the career of a star, old Helmholtz's contraction theory actually applies to the full. The heat generated is produced by contraction and, as the process goes on, the star grows hotter, producing more heat by contracI than is radiated away from irs steadily shrinking surface. Therefore the temperature in the core approaches a point, after a while, where thermonuclear reactions will start. At that time the star is still enormous as far as volume occupied is concerned, but is still very tenuous and not very luminous. It is a so-called Red Giant. epsilon Aurigae, it can be demonstrated that the temperature of its core is not yet high enough to keep a reaction of the f type of the Solar Phoenix cycle jP going. The reaction must be be- tween deuterium and hydrogen! (or heavy hydrogen and ordinary I hydrogen), resulting in helium I and energy. I It is an interesting point that I the star's mass acts as a kind of safety valve. Supposing the nuclear reaction was too violent, the heat produced would simply expand the whole star. That way, the radiating surface increases and, in an extreme case, the core may simply grow too cool to sustain the nuclear reaction. Then the star would rely on contraction until the core grows hot enough again. Astronomers know a number of stars which bear the designation of "pulsating stars." They expand and shrink at regular intervals. It is thought -- but, as far as I know, not yet completely proved -- that these pulsating stars are forever on the borderline between Helmholtz's contraction and thermonuclear energy generation. Every time they have contracted enough to heat their interior to nuclear activity, the nuclear activity grows violent enough to expand the whole star and quench the nuclear fire. Just what conditions are necessary to put a star into this dilemma is not yet known. Obviously the majority of the stars somehow escaped this difficulty and went on to higher core temperatures. Some known Red Giants must rely on the lithium-hydrogen reaction mentioned earlier. Still hotter ones rely on a reaction converting boron and hydrogen into helium. You must have noticed that these thermonuclear reactions which keep the stars going always end up with helium. Since the reactions must start at the very core, where it is hottest, one can assume that helium will accumulate at the core, finally to the virtual exclusion of all other atoms. Logically then, as a star grows older, the reaction no longer takes place at the precise core. That is taken up by the atomic slag heap of helium atoms. We have to picture, in that case, a core of no longer reacting helium, of uniform and very high temperature. The "surface" of this central helium sphere is where the thermonuclear reactions take place. The area above the reacting spherical shell is still too cool to let reactions take place. As this reacting sphere grows, the rate of conversion of other elements into helium grows, too. Hence as a star uses up its fuel faster, the less is left of it. Percentagewise, Sirius "burns up" more hydrogen atoms than the Sun every second. It is, from this point of view, an "older star" while our sun is still so young that its end lies not several milthe future. A t some time near the end of the star's life, something happens. Possibly the generating shell comes so close to the surface that all the nuclear fuel above it is consumed in a flash. After that, the star collapses to form one of the super-dense White Dwarfs. Since a White Dwarf has absolutely no method of energy generation left -- it has used up all the elements which could be nucuear fuel and cannot contract any more -- it must be considered "dead." As a side-issue, I would like to mention a recent idea about the Blue-white Giants. Fred Hoyle in England has made much of the idea of stars passing through clouds of cosmic dust and acquiring large amounts of matter by "tunneling" through such a dust cloud, a variation of the old meteoric impact theory. Such an event must be rare, but astrophysicists feel that the rare Bluewhite Giants fit this assumption. They are, then, not stars in a certain (and somewhat mysterious) state of stellar evolution, but "rejuvenated stars" which might have held any place in stellar evolution before they entered a cloud. How about the "black stars," though, which were so much discussed a century ago? The overwhelming probability is that there aren't any. As long as there is any method of energy generation left, the star will utilize it. And when it has finally reached the ultimate stage of the White Dwarf, it combines an enormous heat content with a very small radiating surface, since a collapsed star probably has about the same diameter as the Earth. Figuring things very carefully, a White Dwarf should need some away its energy and turn dark. But the Universe is probably only half as old as that figure -- so that even the very first White Dwarf ever to form must still be luminous ! The question "When will the Sun die?" is, in terms of that fact, just about as academic as any could be. If it's keeping you up nights, you have about # stay awake worrying, so let's put out the light and go to sleep, shall we? Just what does "terminal velocity mean? I had always thought that a body falls faster and faster the longer it falls. But from something I've just read, it seems that this is not always true. What is the answer? Eva Sidera #I Sunset Boulevard Hollywood, Calif. Looking at falling bodies from the point of view of a man (or woman) on the ground, it is almost never true that they fall the faster the longer they fall. The reason is air resistI ance. Let's take a specific ex ample. An airplane sheds a  wingtip fuel tank at a height of three miles. According to one of the so-called Galilean equations, the tank's impact velocity on the ground will be v  gt, which simply means that at the end of every elapsed second, it falls # feet per sec. faster than at the beginning of ' the same second. If the empty fuel tank had been jettisoned by a rocket three miles above the Moon, the formula would actually hold true. Of course you'd have to  use the "g" that applies to the Moon, not the one that applies to the Earth. But on Earth, we have air  resistance. As the tank begins to fall faster and faster, air resistance grows stronger and stronger. The important factor , is that air resistance grows i much faster. Soon, therefore, the point is reached where air resistance prevents any additional increase in falling speed. ( From then on, the body will fall with a virtually uniform velocity, which is the "terminal velocity." For a fall from a very great height, like a long-range missile falling out of the stratosphere, terminal velocity will never he established; the impact will take place before a balance could he achieved. As for figures; the terminal velocity of such an empty wingtip tank might he around # mph. If the tank were jettisoned full, with all the fuel in it, the terminal velocity would he somewhere around # mph and that of a bomb, with thick steel casing and packed w ith highexplosive, around # mph. It is for this reason that there have been bombs with a rocket charge to push them downward faster. On the other hand, if you wish to decrease terminal velocity, just add something with lots of air-resistance -- a parachute, for instance. In many stories -- in fact, almost all of them -- while the rocket is under power, there is an increased gravity. I know that while rising from some gravitational source, such as a planet, gravity and weight would seem to increase. Beyond a certain distance from a gravity source, gravity is said to be almost nil. In the books, while the rocket is in free fall, there is no weight. Okay. But when the rocket is moving, there is weight. And as soon as the power cuts out, there is no weight, even though the rocket maintains the same velocity. Will you please explain why such artificial weight occurs under power? I would very much like to know. Buddie Akers (no address given) I have answered a very similar question once before, but a repeat might do some good, for I know that many people are confused on these points. The confusion, it appears to me, is based on two misunderstandings. Misunderstanding No. One is that the nearness of a large and heavy body (a "gravitational source," to paraphrase Mr. Akers) must produce "weight" no matter what the circumstances. Misunderstanding No. Two is apparently that only a "gravitational source" can produce "weight." In reality, things are quite different. A gravitational field will influence the movement of a nearby body, deflect it from its course or make it fall. But it will not produce the feeling of "weight." That sensation is caused hy resisting the pull of the gravitational field. As I am sitting here typing, I am supported by my chair, the chair is supported by the floor and the floor by the house and ultimately by the ground. This support prevents me from following the gravitational pull and this fact causes the sensation of weight. If I could fall freely into a deep well under my chair, I might come to a bad end, but I would nol feel weight while the falling lasts. The increase of weight in a rising rocket is due to two factors: as long as it stands on the pound, things are the same as if it were a house. When it begins to rise, the acceleration even goes the other way. The pull of the Earth is not just passively resisted hut overcome by brute force into faster and faster movement against the pull of gravity. This brings us to Misunderstanding No. Two. If a body like a spaceship is freely floating in space, leisurely following some weak gravitational pull from somewhere, there is "zero g" in the cabin -- complete absence of weight, no resistance to movement. But when the rocket motors start up, accelerating the ship, they enforce a new movement. The force applied meets with resistance (the inertia of the things inside the ship and alo that of the ship itself) and hence weight appears. When the rocket motors are shut off again, the ship will move with a different course, but then nothing will counteract the gravitational forces which may be playing on the ship and nothing will disturb inertia -- again no weight. Another point that enters here is that our body has no organ for detecting its own velocity. It cannot "feel" velocity; It can only note changes in velocity, acceleration or deceleration. In short, the feeling of weight can be caused either by accelerating where inertia resists the change, or else by resisting the pull of a gravitational field. What would a man's weight be at the exact center of the Earth? According to one formula, the answer should be infinity; however, since the forces are theoretically equal on each side, the weight should be zero. What is your opinion? Henry Oden # Myrtle Street Alexandria, La. This is not a matter of opinion. The second answer is correct. In the precise center of the Earth (or any other planet, for that matter) equal masses I would act from every direction on the body in the center. Since they would all cancel out, the result would obviously have to be zero. The formula you have in mind applies only to attraction from one direction. I just reread your column on and wonder whether there are astronomical works speciScally about that planet. I have a reading knowledge of French, in case this should help. Chester P. Talley #-#, #nd Street Maspeth, L.I. N.Y. A reading knowledge of French certainly helps in this case because the most recent comprehensive book on Mars happens to be in that language. Its title is Physique de la Planete Mars, written by Gerard de Vaucouleurs. A shorter book by the same author exists in English under the title The Planet Mars. Both were published in #. Most recent in this country is The Red and Green Planet by Hubertus Strughold, M.D., Ph.D. (#), unless a scheduled book on Mars by Dr. Robert S. Richardson has been published by the time this column appears in print. Of interest are Observations of Mars and Its Canals (#) and Observations of the Planet Mars (#), both by Harold B. Webb. And in case you have a reading knowled ' of German, too, I recommend for a quick survey Mars, seine Raetsel und seine Geschichte by Robert Henseling (#). What is known about the physiological effects of high acceleration? In particular, how much can the body stand momentarily and continuously? Millard H. Perstein # Willard Street San Francisco #, Calif. Many acceleration tests have been carried out by means of centrifuges and it is now known that an acceleration of # g for ten minutes can be borne without aftereffects. (That would have been more than enough to produce escape velocity, if it had been a straight line acceleration. ) As for higher g forces: one volunteer endured # g for one minute without detectable harm and others have endured as much as # g for a number of seconds. As regards the acceleration human beings can stand, especially when lying almost flat on their backs, it is no deterrent to space travel. The Lifeboat Mutiny No, sir, they do not build boats like this any longer... and this is the reason! I you ever see sweeter enJ. gines?" Joe, the Interstellar Junkman asked. "And look at those servos!" "Hmm," Gregor said judiciously. That hull," Joe said softly. "I bet it's five hundred years old, and not a spot of corrosion on it." He patted the burnished side of the boat affectionately. What luck, the pat seemed to say, that this paragon among vessels Ace needs a lifeboat. "She certainly does seem rather nice," Arnold said, with the studied air of a man who has fallen in love and is trying hard not to show it. "What do you think, Dick?" Richard Gregor didn't answer. The boat was handsome, and she looked perfect for ocean survey work on Trident. But you had to be careful about Joe's merchandise. "They just don't build 'em this way any more," Joe sighed. Look at the propulsion unit. Couldn't dent it with a triphammer. Note the capacity of jhe cooling system. Examine -- " "It looks good," Gregor said olanetary Decontamination Service had dealt with Joe in the past, and had learned caution. Not that Joe was dishonest; far from it. The flotsam he collected from anywhere in the inhabited Universe worked. But the ancient machines often had their own ideas of how a job should be done. They tended to grow peevish when forced into another routine. "I don't care if it's beautiful, fast, durable, or even comfortable," Gregor said defiantly. "I just want to be absolutely sure it's safe." Joe nodded. "That's the important thing, of course. Step inside." T hey entered the cabin of the boat. Joe stepped up to the instrument panel, smiled mysteriously, and pressed a button. Immediately Gregor heard a voice which seemed to originate in his head, saying, "I am Lifeboat # #A. My purpose -- " "Telepathy?" Gregor interrupted. "Direct sense recording," Joe said, smiling proudly. "No language barriers that way. I told you, they just don't build 'em this way any more." "I am Lifeboat #-A," the boat esped again. "My primary purpose is to preserve those within me from peril, and to maintain them in good health. At present, I am only partially activated." "Could anything be safer?" Joe cried. "This is no senseless hunk of metal. This boat will look after you. This boat cares!" Gregor was impressed, even though the idea of an emotional boat was somehow distasteful. But then, paternalistic gadgets had always irritated him. Arnold had no such feelings. "We'll take it!" "You won't be sorry," Joe said, in the frank and open tones that had helped make him a millionaire several times over. Gregor hoped not. The next day. Lifeboat #-A was loaded aboard their spaceship and they blasted off for Trident. This planet, in the heart of the East Star Valley, had recently been bought by a real-estate speculator. He'd found her nearly perfect for colonization. Trident was the size of Mars, but with a far better climate. There was no indigenous native population to contend with, no poisonous plants, no germ-borne diseases. And, unlike so many worlds. Trident had no predatory animals. Indeed, she had no animals at all. Apart from one small island and a polar cap, the entire planet was covered with water. There was no real shortage of land; you could wade across several of Trident's seas. The land just wasn't heaped high enough. sioned to correct this minor flaw. After landing on Trident's single island, they launched the boat. The rest of the day was spent checking and loading the special survey equipment on board. Early the next morning, Gregor prepared sandwiches and filled a canteen with water. They were ready to begin work. As soon as the mooring lines were cast off, Gregor joined Arnold in the cabin. With a small flourish, Arnold pressed the first button. "I am Lifeboat #-A," the boat esped. "My primary purpose is to preserve those within me from peril, and to maintain them in good health. At present, I am only partially activated. For full activation, press button two." Gregor pressed the second button. There was a muffled buzzing deep in the bowels of the boat. Nothing else happened. "That's odd," Gregor said. He pressed the button again. The muffled buzz was repeated. "Sounds like a short circuit,' Arnold said. Glancing out the forward porthole, Gregor saw the shoreline of the island slowly drifting away. He felt a touch of panic. There was so much water here, and so little land. To make matters worse, nothing on the instrument panel resembled a wheel or tiller, nothing looked like a throttle or clutch. How did you operate a partially activated lifeboat? "She must control telepathically," Gregor said hopefully. In a stern voice he said, "Go ahead slowly." The little boat forged ahead. "Now right a little." The boat responded perfectly to Gregor's clear, although mnautical command. The partners exchanged smiles. "Straighten out," Gregor said, "and full speed ahead!" The lifeboat charged forward into the shining, empty sea. bilge with a flashlight and a circuit tester. The surveying was easy enough for Gregor to handle alone. The machines did all the work, tracing the major faults in the ocean bottom, locating the most promising volcanoes, running the flow and buildup charts. When the survey was complete, the next stage would be turned r I over to a subbcontractor. He " would wire the volcanoes, seed the faults, retreat to a safe distance and touch the whole thing off. Then Trident would be, for a while, a spectacularly noisy place. And when things had quieted down, there would be enough dry land to satisfy even a real-estate speculator. By mid-afternoon Gregor felt that they had done enough surveying for one day. He and Arnold ate their sandwiches and drank from the canteen. Later they took a short swim in Trident's clear green water. "I think I've found the trouble," Arnold said. "The leads to the primary activators have been removed. And the power cable's been cut." "Why would anyone do that?" Gregor asked. Arnold shrugged. "Might have been part of the decommissioning. I'll have it right in a little while." He crawled back into the bilge. Gregor turned in the direction of the island, steering telepathically and watching the green water foam merrily past the bow. At moments like this, contrary to all his previous experience, the Universe seemed a fine and friendly place. In half an hour Arnold emerged, grease stained but triumphant. "Try that button now," he said. "But we're almost back." "So what? Might as well have this thing working right." Gregor nodded, and pushed the second button. They could hear the faint click-click of circuits opening. Half a dozen small engines purred into life. A light flashed red, then winked off as the generators took up the load. "That's more like it," Arnold said. I AM Lifeboat #-A," the boat stated telepathically. "I am now fully activated, and able to protect my occupants from danger. Have faith in me. My action-response tapes, both psychological and physical, have been prepared by the best scientific minds in all Drome." "Gives you quite a feeling of confidence, doesn't it?" Arnold said. "I suppose so," Gregor said. "But. where is Drome?" "Gentlemen," the lifeboat continued, "try to think of me, not as an unfeeling mechanism, but as your friend and comrade-inarms. I understand how you feel. You have seen your ship go down, cruelly riddled by the implacable H'gen. You have -- " "What ship?" Gregor asked. "What's it talking about?" " -- crawled aboard me, dazed, gasping from the poisonous fumes of water; half-dead -- " "You mean that swim we took?" Arnold asked. "You've got it all wrong. We were just surveying -- " " -- shocked, wounded, morale low," the lifeboat finished. "You are a little frightened, perhaps," it said in a softer mental tone. "And well you might be, separated from the Drome fleet and adrift upon an inclement alien planet. A little fear is nothing to be ashamed of, gentlemen. But this is war, and war is a cruel business. We have no alternative but to drive the barbaric H'gen back across space." "There must be a reasonable explanation for all this," Gregor said. "Probably an old television script got mixed up in its response bank." "We'd better give it a complete overhaul," Arnold said. "Can't listen to that stuff all day." They were approaching the island. The lifeboat was still babbling about home and hearth, evasive action, tactical maneuvers, and the need for calm in emergencies like this. Suddenly it slowed. "What's the matter?" Gregor asked. "I am scanning the island," the lifeboat answered. at each other. "Better humor it," Arnold whispered. To the lifeboat he said, "That island's okay. We checked it personally." "Perhaps you did," the lifeboat answered. "But in modern, lightning-quick warfare. Drome senses cannot be trusted. They are too limited, too prone to interpret what they wish. Electronic senses, on the other hand, are emotionless, eternally vigilant, and infallible within their limits." "But there isn't anything there!" Gregor shouted. "I perceive a foreign spaceship," the lifeboat answered. "It has no Drome markings." "It hasn't any enemy markings, either," Arnold answered confidently, since he had painted the ancient hull himself. "No, it hasn't. But in war, we must assume that what is not ours is the enemy's. I understand your desire to set foot on land again. But I take into account factors that a Drome, motivated by his emotions, would overlook. Consider the apparent emptiness of this strategic bit of land; the unmarked spaceship put temptingly out for bait; the fact that our fleet is no longer in this vicinity; the -- " "All right, that's enough," Gregor was sick of arguing with a verbose and egoistic machine. "Go directly to that island. That's an order." "I cannot obey that order," the boat said. "You are unbalanced from your harrowing escape from death -- " Arnold reached for the cutout switch, and withdrew his hand with a howl of pain. "Come to your senses, gentlemen," the boat said sternly. "Only the decommissioning officer is empowered to turn me off. For your own safety, I must warn you not to touch any of my controls. You are mentally unbalanced. Later, when our position is safer, I will administer to you. Now my full energies must be devoted toward detection and escape from the enemy." The boat picked up speed and moved away from the island in an intricate evasive pattern. "Where are we going?" Gregor asked. "To rejoin the Drome fleet!" the lifeboat cried so confidently that the partners stared nervously over the vast, deserted waters of Trident. "As soon as I can find it, that is," the lifeboat amended. TT was late at night. Gregor and Arnold sat in a corner of the cabin, hungrily sharing their last sandwich. The lifeboat was still rushing madly over the waves, its every electronic sense alert, searching for a fleet that had existed five hundred years ago, upon an entirely different planet. "Did you ever hear of these Dromes?" Gregor asked. Arnold searched through his vast store of minutiae. "They were non-human, lizard-evolved creatures," he said. "Lived on the sixth planet of some little system near Capella. The race died out over a century ago." "And the H'gen?" "Also lizards. Same story." Arnold found a crumb and popped it into his mouth. "It wasn't a very important war. All the combatants are gone. Except this lifeboat, apparently." And us," Gregor reminded him. "We've been drafted as Drome soldiery." He sighed wearily. "Do you think we can reason with this tub?" Arnold shook his head. "I don't see how. As far as this boat is concerned, the war is still on. It can only interpret data in terms of that premise." "It's probably listening in on us now," Gregor said. "I don't think so. It's not really a mind-reader. Its perception centers are geared only to thoughts aimed specifically at it." "Yes siree," Gregor said bitterly, "they just don't build 'em this way any more." He wished he could get his hands on Joe, the Interstellar Junkman. "It's actually a very interesting situation," Arnold said. "I may do an article on it for Popular Cybernetics. Here is a machine with nearly infallible apparatus for the perception of external stimuli. The percepts it receives are translated logically into action. The only trouble is, the logic is based upon no longer existent conditions. Therefore, you could say that the machine is the victim of a systematized delusional system." Gregor yawned. "You mean the lifeboat is just plain nuts," he said bluntly. "Nutty as a fruitcake. I believe paranoia would be the proper designation. But it'll end pretty soon." "Why?" Gregor asked. "It's obvious," Arnold said. "The boat's prime directive is to keep us alive. So he has to feed us. Our sandwiches are gone, and the only other food is on the island. I figure he'll have to take a chance and go back." I N a few moments they could feel the lifeboat swinging, changing direction. It esped, "At present I am unable to locate the Drome fleet. Therefore, I am turning back to scan the island once again. Fortunately, there are no enemy in this immediate area. Now I can devote myself to your care with all the power of my full attention." "You see?" Arnold said, nudging Gregor. "Just as I said. Now we'll reinforce the concept." He said to the lifeboat, "About time you got around to us. We're hungry-" "Yeah, feed us," Gregor demanded. "Of course," the lifeboat said. A tray slid out of the wall. It was heaped high with something that looked like clay, but smelled like machine oil. "What's that supposed to be?" Gregor asked. "That is geezel," the lifeboat said. "It is the staple diet of the Drome peoples. I can prepare it in sixteen different ways." Gregor cautiously sampled it. It tasted just like clay coated with machine oil. "We can't eat that!" he objected. "Of course you can," the boat said soothingly. "An adult Drome consumes five point three pounds of geezel a day, and cries for more." The tray slid toward them. They backed away from it. "Now listen," Arnold told the boat. "We are not Dromes. We're humans, an entirely different species. The war you think you're fighting ended five hundred years ago. We can't eat geezel. Our food is on that island." "Try to grasp the situation. Your delusion is a common one among fighting men. It is an escape fantasy, a retreat from an intolerable situation. Gentlemen, I beg you, face reality!" "You face reality!" Gregor screamed. "Or I'll have you dismantled bolt by bolt." "Threats do not disturb me," the lifeboat esped serenely. "I know what you've been through. Possibly you have suffered some brain damage from your exposure to poisonous water." "Poison?" Gregor gulped. "By Drome standards," Arnold reminded him. "If absolutely necessary," the lifeboat continued, "I am also equipped to perform physical brain therapy. It is a drastic measure, but there can be no coddling in time of war." A panel slid open, and the partners glimpsed shining surgical edges. "We're feeling better already," Gregor said hastily. "Fine looking batch of geezel, eh, Arnold?" "Delicious," Arnold said, wincing. "I won a nationwide contest in geezel preparation," the lifeboat esped, with pardonable pride. "Nothing is too good for our boys in uniform. Do try a little." Gregor lifted a handful, smacked his lips, and set it down on the floor. "Wonderful," he said, hoping that the boat's internal scanners weren't as efficient as the external ones seemed to be. Apparently they were not "Good," the lifeboat said. "I ar moving toward the island no And, I promise you, in a li' while you will be more c,, fortable." "Why?" Arnold asked. "The temperature here is unbearably hot. It's amazing that you haven't one into coma. Any other Drome would have. Try to bear it a little longer. Soon, I'll have it down to the Drome norm of twenty degrees below zero. And now, to assist your morale, I will play our national Anthem." A hideous rhythmic screeching filled the air. Waves slapped against the sides of the hurrying lifeboat. In a few moments, the air was perceptibly cooler. G regor dosed his eyes wearily, trying to ignore the chill that was spreading through his limbs. He was becoming sleepy. Just his luck, he thought, to be frozen to death inside an insane lifeboat. It was what came of buying paternalistic gadgets, highstrung, humanistic calculators, over-sensitive, emotional machines. Dreamily he wondered where it was all leading to. He pictured a gigantic machine hospital. Two robot doctors were wheeling a lawnmower down a long white corridor. The Chief Robot Doctor was saying, "What's wrong with this lad?" And the assistant answered, "Completely out of his mind. Thinks he's a helicopter." "Aha!" the Chief said knowingly. "Flying fantasies! Pity. Nice looking chap." The assistant nodded. "Overwork did it. Broke his heart on crab grass." The lawnmower stirred. "Now I'm an eggbeater!" he giggled. "Wake up," Arnold said, shaking Gregor, his teeth chattering. "We have to do something." "Ask him to turn on the heat," Gregor said groggily. "Not a chance. Dromes live at twenty belqw. We are Dromes. Twenty below for us, and no back talk." Frost was piled deep on the coolant tubes that traversed the boat. The walls had begun to turn white, and the portholes were frosted over. "I've got an idea," Arnold said cautiously. He glanced at the control board, then whispered quickly in Gregor's ear. "We'll try it," Gregor said. They stood up. Gregor picked up the canteen and walked stiffly to the far side of the cabin. "What are you doing?" the lifeboat asked sharply. "Going to get a little exercise," Gregor said. "Drome soldiers must stay fit, you know." "That's true," the lifeboat said dubiously. Gregor threw the canteen to Arnold. Arnold chuckled synthetically and threw the canteen back to Gregor. "Be careful with that receptacle," the lifeboat warned. "It is filled with a deadly poison." "We'll be careful," Gregor said. "We're taking it back to headquarters." He threw the canteen to Arnold. "Headquarters may spray it on the H'gen," Arnold said, throwing the canteen back. "Really?" the lifeboat asked. "That's interesting. A new application of -- " Suddenly Gregor swung the canteen against the coolant tube. The tube broke and liquid poured over the floor. "'Bad shot, old man," Arnold said. "How careless of me," Gregor cried. "I should have taken precautions against internal accidents," the lifeboat esped gloomily. "It won't happen again. But the situation is very serious. I cannot repair the tube myself. I am unable to properly cool the boat." "If you just drop us on the island -- " Arnold began. "Impossible!" the lifeboat said. "My first duty is to preserve your lives, and you could not live long in the climate of this planet. But I am going to take the necessary measures to ensure your safety." "What are you going to do?" Gregor asked, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. "There is no time to waste. I will scan the island once more. If our Drome forces are not present, we will go to the one place on this planet that can sustain Drome life." "What place?" "The southern polar cap," the lifeboat said. "The climate there is almost ideal -- thirty below zero, I estimate." The engines roared. Apologetically the boat added. "And, of course, I must guard against any further internal acidents." As the lifeboat charged forward they could hear the click of the locks, sealing their cabin. "I am thinking," Gregor answered. "But nothing's coming out." "We must get off when he reaches the island. It'll be our last chance." "You don't think we could jump overboard?" Gregor asked. "Never. He's watching now. If you hadn't smashed the coolant tube, we'd still have a chance." "I know," Gregor said bitterly. "You and your ideas." "My ideas ! I distinctly remember you suggesting it. You said -- " "It doesn't matter whose idea it was." Gregor thought deeply. "Look, we know his internal scanning isn't very good. When we reach the island, maybe we could cut his power cable." "You wouldn't get within five feet of it," Arnold said, remembering the shock he had received from the instrument panel. "Hmm." Gregor locked both hands around his head. An idea was beginning to form in the back of his mind. It was pretty tenuous, but under the circumstances... "I am now scanning the island," the lifeboat announced. Looking out the forward porthole, Gregor and Arnold could see the island, no more than a hundred yards away. The first flush of dawn was in the sky, and outlined against it was the scarred, beloved snout of their spaceship. "Place looks fine to me," Arnold said. "It sure does," Gregor agreed. "I'll bet our forces are dug in underground." "They are not," the lifeboat said. "I scanned to a depth of a hundred feet." "Well," Arnold said, "under the circumstances, I think we should examine a little more closely. I'd better go ashore and look around." "It is deserted," the lifeboat said. "Believe me, my senses are infinitely more acute than yours. I cannot let you endanger your lives by going ashore. Drome needs her soldiers -- especially sturdy, heat-resistant types like you." "We like this climate," Arnold said. "Spoken like a patriot!" the lifeboat said heartily. "I know how you must be suffering. But now I am going to the south pole, to give you veterans the rest you deserve." G regor decided it was time for his plan, no matter how vague it was. "That won't be necessary," he said. "What?" "We are operating under special orders," Gregor said. "We weren't supposed to disclose them to any vessel below the rank of super-dreadnaught. But under the circumstances -- " "Yes, under the circumstances," Arnold chimed in eagerly, "we will tell you." "We are a suicide squad," Grefor said. "Especially trained for hot climate work." "Our orders," Gregor said, "are to land and secure that island for the Drome forces." "I didn't know that," the boat said. "You weren't supposed to," Arnold told it. "After all, you're only a lifeboat." "Land us at once," Gregor said. "There's no time to lose." "You should have told me sooner," the boat said. "I couldn't guess, you know." It began to move toward the island. Gregor could hardly breathe. It didn't seem possible that the simple trick would work. But then, why not? The lifeboat was built to accept the word of its operators as the truth. As long as the 'truth' was consistent with the boat's operational premises, it would be carried out. The beach was only fifty yards away now, gleaming white in the cold light of dawn. Then the boat reversed its engines and stopped. "No," it said. "No what?" "I cannot do it." "What do you mean?" Arnold shouted. "This is war! Orders -- " "I know," the lifeboat said sadly. "I am sorry. A different type of vessel should have been chosen for this mission. Any other type. But not a lifeboat." "You must," Gregor begged. "Think of our country, think of the barbaric H'gen -- " "It is physically impossible for me to carry out your orders," the lifeboat told them. "My prime directive is to protect my occupants from harm. That order is stamped on my every tape, giving priority over all others. I cannot let you go to your certain death." boat began to move away from the island. "You'll be court-martialed for this!" Arnold screamed hysterically. "They'll decommission you." "I must operate within my limitations," the boat said sadly. "If we find the fleet, I will transfer you to a killerboat. But in the meantime, I must take you to the safety of the south pole." The lifeboat picked up speed, and the island receded behind them. Arnold rushed at the controls and was thrown flat. Gregor picked up the canteen and poised it, to hurl ineffectually at the sealed hatch. He stopped himself in mid-swing, struck by a sudden wild thought. "Please don't attempt any more destruction," the boat pleaded. "I know how you feel, but -- " It was damned risky, Gregor thought, but the south pole was certain death anyhow. He uncapped the canteen. "Since we cannot accomplish our mission," he said, "we can never again face our comrades. Suicide is the only alternative." He took a gulp of water and handed the canteen to Arnold. "No! Don't!" the lifeboat shrieked. "That's water! It's a deadly poison -- " An electrical bolt leaped from the instrument panel, knocking the canteen from Arnold's hand. Arnold grabbed the canteen. Before the boat could knock it again from his hand, he had taken a drink. "We die for glorious Drome!" Gregor dropped to the floor. He motioned Arnold to lie still. "There is no known antidote," the boat moaned. "If only I could contact a hospital ship... Its engines idled indecisively. "Speak to me," the boat pleaded. "Are you still alive?" Gregor and Arnold lay perfectly still, not breathing. brlngiug your favorite authors of Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Weird adventures as near as your mailbox! Just send your name and address -- you'll get your copy by return mail . , . and we'll keep you up on new titles as we're doing for thousands of othersl Bargain buys galore! Write today! Satisfaction guaranteed. If you enclose #c to cover postage and handling, we'll send along with your free catalog -- by one of the famous authors of today. # E. San Fernando St. Dept. G-# San Jose #. Calif. "Answer me!" the lifeboat begged. "Perhaps if you ate some geezel..." It thrust out two trays. The partners didn't stir. "Dead," the lifeboat said. "Dead. I will read the burial service." T here was a pause. Then the lifeboat intoned, "Great Spirit of the Universe, take into your custody the souls of these, your servants. Although they died by their own hand, still it was in the service of their country, fighting for home and hearth. Judge them not hashly for their impious deed. Rather blame the spirit of war that inflames and destroys all Drome." The hatch swung open. Gregor could feel a rush of cool morning air. "And now, by the authority vested in me by the Drome Fleet, and with all reverence, I commend their bodies to the deep." Gregor felt himself being lifted through the hatch to the deck. Then he was in the air, falling, and in another moment he was in the water, with Arnold beside him. "Float quietly," he whispered. The island was nearby. But the lifeboat was still hovering close to them, nervously roaring its engines. "What do you think it's up to now?" Arnold whispered. "I don't know," Gregor said, hoping that the Drome peoples didn't believe in converting their bodies to ashes. The lifeboat came closer. Its bow was only a few feet away. They tensed. And then they heard it. The roaring screech of the Drome National Anthem. In a moment it was finished. The lifeboat murmured, "Rest in peace," turned, and roared away. As they swam slowly to the island, Gregor saw that the lifeboat was heading south, due south, to the pole, to wait for the Drome fleet. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England ! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up ; also details of my I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue proposed Mail Science Fiction Library Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. The one way to kill the idea that murdered the world was: make the man with the idea -- Target One P erhaps we could have managed, some way or another to blow up Oak Ridge or the Hanford installation. Certainly we could have tried, and I suppose that with effort we should have found the way to do it. But it wouldn't have been enough. Not nearly enough: The enemy wasn't the Bomb any more, but e  mc itself. As long as the seed was there, the fruit was bound to come. We had to destroy the seed, Marin was on the machine while Lee fed slugs of the fuel metal into the reactor. Marin was a capable man and so I was able to relieve the tension of the last few minutes before the trial by strolling out on the deck of the barge. It was a beautiful day, the wind from out at sea keeping fall-out from the mainland at a minimum. Before me was the Staten Island shore, trees and sheer bare heights at the water's edge; to my left was the shattered stalagmitic bed of New York. Even after all the decades, there was nothing green there. The rains that had washed the isotopes from Staten Island and watered its new growth of forest had hissed into steam on the island of Manhattan. It would be many decades before grass grew in its streets. One of the workers in the Staten Island stockpile waved to me, a quarter of a mile across the water, and I waved back. They wished us well, there on the island. All three of us had spent the previous evening ashore with them and the conversation had been loud and long. If we could succeed! If we could reverse the clock! So we drank our long, bitter toasts to success, and every man, woman and child in all the world toasted our efforts with us, all hundred and fifty thousand and more of them, for we all grew up in the ruins and the tradition of greatness and we knew what success would mean. "Jom!" Lee called from behind me. "Jom, we're ready!" r hurried into the workdeck. Lee was standing at the door, but without a word he went back to his station at the reactor, not daring to leave it too long. His job, in some ways, was the most important of all. The reactor was tricky and dangerous and the K-mesons that powered the trial came only from a complicated fission-and-fusion reaction, hard to handle, deadly if it got out of control. Marin was already setting up his coordinates. I looked over his shoulder at the whirling colors on the screen; it was nothing you could recognize. Not yet. "I have the time now," Marin said absently, cracking a vernier a hair from its null position. "But the tri-di readings are hard. If we could have started out from Switzerland in the first place -- " "What Switzerland?" I asked. The slag-heap on the Alps would not be fit to move around in for centuries. He said excitedly, "It's coming, Jom!" He froze one setting at Lausanne's elevation and dropped his hand to the range and deflection controls. Slowly the whirling began to make sense. We were watching a blur, and the blur smoothed out to become a racing mountainscape. We were flying over it, toward a city just appearing at the horizon. Marin kicked a floor switch and a translucent city map of Lausanne lighted up on the wall before him. The screen seemed to drive across a lake, through a flickering thicket of buildings, and jerked to a halt inside an auditorium. Marin cried, "I can't get it clear! The view field -- " "The view field is all right, Marin!" "But it's so dark!" I fought back a hysterical laugh. "It's dark because the lights are out, man! Your time adjustment is a little off, that's all. Scan backward and forward." He threw a quick, shame-faced grin at me over his shoulder and carefully fingered the fourth dial. The screen held its shadowy tableau for a moment; then the lights went on. Doll-like figures walked backward into the auditorium as the stage's curtain went up on actors taking bows. Marin was evidently scanning backward through time. "Not too far," I cautioned him. He nodded and delicately twisted the dial backward, then forward. A dozen times the screen lighted and each time it was a pageant, or a rehearsal, or a musical performance. Then Marin caught his breath and instinctively I clutched his shoulder. He locked the controls and we were silent for a moment, looking at what, back in those earliest twentiethcentury days, had been a Swiss ceremony of graduation. Marin's eyes were quicker than mine. He said steadily, "In the second row, third... no, fourth from the right. Is that him?" I counted off. There was no need to look back to the picture, torn from an old magazine, that we had pinned to the wall. It was a young, lean man in a curiously uncomfortable uniform and round pill-box hat. His eyes were abstracted, staring right through the audience in the hall into far reaches of remote thought. There was no pipe, no violin, no bushy white hair. There never would be any. the most precious thing on Earth. Marin was trembling. I cursed niyself for leaving him alone so long at this point, long enough to work himself into a state. "If we could travel in time -- " he began. "Time travel is impossible. Forget it!" "But we can't just murder a man!" "Why not?" He exploded, "The greatest genius in theoretical physics who ever lived! A harmless, peaceful human being who never harmed a soul!" I T took nearly half an hour, once we had vectored in, for Lee to bring his reactor up to full charge. Lee was absorbed over his rods and slugs. Marin hovered close by his screen, though the controls were locked and he wasn't really needed. But I had nothing to do and I stamped about the barge like an expectant father with a five-generation history of gene-damage. When I went back into the workdeck, Marin said at once, "Jom, I can't do it!" Lee went steadily on with his work. If he heard, he never showed it. I said angrily, "Don't be an idiot!" Perhaps I was angriest because I was beginning to have my own doubts. We had all been brought up to hold human life as I said as forcefully as I could: continents wiped out! And every man alive mutating. How many brothers and sisters did you have, Marin?" He winced. "None that survived," he admitted. "But Einstein himself had nothing to do with it. The bombs were built by others." "After he showed them the way. No, Marin! The world knew what was coming. Look through the books that survive, see how many frightening predictions there were of the horrors that would follow an atomic war. Right, weren't they? And yet, once the theory was known, there was no way of preventing the war. There are always wars, Marin, but they don't matter if they only kill off a fraction of the population. Only when they annihilate whole countries, then they matter!" Lee called, as calmly as though he had been back at the University, "Ready now, Jom!" We looked at each other for a moment and I could read the revulsion in Marin's eyes. "Well?" I demanded. I T had to be Marin at the controls; he had been the one who'd practiced, the one who'd designed the controls and knew how they worked. I might have found Lausanne easily enough myself, but I never could have focused the working leads of the timebinder to that tiny area inside a human skull where we could do what had to be done. If time travel were possible -- yes, Marin was right -- then we could have gone to the young man, perhaps reasoned with him, perhaps bribed him, perhaps, if nothing else worked, abducted him from the past. But time travel was impossible by definition; matter cannot leave its locus in the chronon. But the K-mesons, those halfunderstood, hardly material particles-that-werfi-waves -- they were not bound by the laws that ruled crude matter. And though we could not move in time, we could direct a flow of K-mesons that would burn and destroy... Marin's voice was harsh. "All right, Jom," he said. I heard him at the controls, and when the whispering crackle of mesons lashed out and struck, I also heard that, but I did not watch the screen. Murder comes hard to me, too, whatever duty may force me to do. I had no stomach to watch the little figure in the screen jerk upright and slump over, no desire to see the abstracted light die out of those far-seeing eyes. And besides, I didn't need to look at the screen to see what happened at the moment when the K-meson flow leaped out to destroy a brain. I had a window before me and I saw what happened there. "Good Lord," cried Lee, "look at all the boats!" That was all we could do for a moment, just look. Inside the K-meson field, we were invulnerable and untouchable. But the world was changing around us. Wrecked Manhattan sprang back to life. The harsh, familiar dust-cloud sky gave way to a curious blue, with white, fluffy clouds, such a sky as I had seen described in books, but had never thought to observe with my own eyes. And the harbor, the broad, slag-washed harbor of New York -- which had seemed crowded when there were as many as three vessels in it at once -- teemed with boats, big ones and small ones, motored vessels of all sizes and anchored barges and a floating giant, barely visible through the Narrows, that seemed the size of a city. process of change was complete and the K-meson field died away. Marin, still white-faced and trembling with the reaction, whispered, "Jom, Jom, it's a whole new world!" And it was. A world we had never known; a world where of people, a world that had never been pressed through the grinder of nuclear war. A stubby power launch came dodging toward us through the clutter of smaller craft and a voice bellowed at us over a loudhailer; "You there! You in the barge with green markings! Heave to and show your registration and mooring permit!" He meant us. It would be quite a shock to him, I reflected wryly, when he saw what passed for our "papers." Would he believe us? Would anyone in this world take our word for what we had done? Undoubtedly not. But they would learn, they would have to believe, once they had a chance to look around our workdeck. The wonders we could bring to them! For without Einstein, there would have been no nuclear piles; without the breeder reactors, no heavy elements in the high hundreds to decay into the power metal that fed our machine and released the K-mesons. A smaller, faster vessel beat the launch to our side. It was a rickety, patched-up dinghy with a limping outboard motor pushing it along, but it was light and it moved. Oddly, it made no great noise. I saw the outboard motor was driven from an electric battery. From the dinghy, an eager voice called; "Cigarettes? Candy? Where you fellows from?" The three who crewed the dinghy were in their early teens; they wore ragged trousers and nothing else. They clamored up at us for tobacco, money, anything. Lee answered them, and perhaps I would have, too, but Marin drew me aside. "Jom, I don't like this!" he said tensely. "I -- I feel as though I'm strangling!" He was breathing hard, in fact, and I knew what he meant. There was something about all those teeming hordes of people, the hundreds of big and little boats bobbing about, the swollen buildings on Manhattan and Staten Islands -- I felt oppressed, too, as though I were stifling under a mound of crawling, twitching humanbeings. But I told Marin curtly to shut up and advanced to meet the delegation from the power launch. It was an occasion for some ceremony, I thought. I said: "Welcome to our ship, friend from a world of peace and plenty." THE man in the prow of the launch paused with one knee over the side and stared at me. Then he shook his leg toward our boarding ladder. "Registration papers," he said. "What kind of a tub is this, anyway?" "It's a power barge used for scientific purposes," I told him. "We come from a different world. We -- " He said impatiently, "What kind of power? Electric? Don't try to kid me, fellow; you'd never cross the Atlantic with electric power." I shook my head. "The engines are gasoline, of course. But the -- " "Gasoline!" The man's look was suddenly intent. He wore a rather shabby blue uniform. I don't think he made a move, but at that exact moment I realized he had a gun in a side-holster. "Let's see the registration papers," he repeated. "Quick!" "We don't have any." I was getting exasperated. "We don't come from your time at all -- that is, it's the same time, but a different probability line. Don't you understand? We..." There was something about his expression. I stopped suddenly and thought for a second. Then I said, "Look, I'm sorry if I'm confusing. Take my word for it, this is something important and I can't explain it to you. Can you put me in touch with a physicist?" "A what?" "A physicist, preferably one with a specialty in nucleonics. Or any scientist, for that matter." He looked at me thoughtfully. "You don't have a mooring permit, do you?" "No, of course not." "I see." He rubbed his chin. "Wait a minute," he said, and clambered back down the side. I looked rather sternly around at my crew, fully aware that I had made a mess of our first contact with the world we had sired. But they were not acting very critical. Marin still looked scared. Lee was at the rail on the other side of the barge; he was pitching coins into the water, and the youths from the dinghy -- in fact, people from half a dozen little boats, and not all of them youths -- were diving after them, with a good deal of squabbling. The man in the blue uniform was back in a moment with another man, this one in a brown uniform, equally shabby. " -- case for the Feds, not us," Blue Uniform was saying as they approached. "Possession of gasoline, no papers, claims they come from abroad." Brown Uniform nodded and said crisply to me, "You'll have to come with us." Blue Uniform asked sharply, "Where?" "New York City Hall, of course. This is a New York police launch and -- " "And a two-state harbor patrol, mac! Don't forget it! We'll take him to Jersey City. None of your crummy slum families are going to settle on this barge. We need housing space as much as you do!" "What about the gasoline?" Brown Uniform yelled. "New York's got a sixty per cent quota drag! We're entitled to every drop that comes into the harbor until it's made up and you can take -- " Blue Uniform suddenly shrugged. "Forget it," he said in a different tone. "We could have worked something out. Well, never mind, mac. Here come the Feds, so we're both out of luck." T he Feds were as shabbily uniformed as the others, but they wore sharp visored caps. and they took us neither to New York nor to New Jersey, but to the floating colossus beyond the Narrows, which turned out to be a sort of moored hulk doubling as a fort and administrative headquarters. It wasn't an unpleasant trip, except that the water was sludge-gray in color and stank as it sprayed over the wales. Since we weren't going very fast, not much sprayed, which was a blessing. I said gratefully to the officer in charge of the boat, "Thanks for getting rid of those two. They didn't seem able to understand what I was trying to say. If you can put me in touch with some sort of scientist. I'm sure I can explain things to him. You see, we've been doing research in parachronon penetration. Very important research. It is no exaggeration to say that every man alive today owes his life to us! Do you understand? It's as if -- " He interrupted me. "How much gasoline have you got?" It was a clear waste of time to talk to this one, so I merely sat in silence until we arrived at the floating headquarters. They had refused to allow me to leave either Lee or Marin on the barge and I was feeling nervous about what the boarding party might be doing to our reactor. When I said something to Lee, though, he reassured me. "Not enough power in it now to hurt a kitten," he said positively. "We drained it dry on the bolt." "Suppose they recharge the reactor?" I argued. "With what? We stockpiled all the reserve fuel. We couldn't keep it in close proximity to the reactor, after all. No, don't worry, Jom; they might mess up the instruments a little, but there won't be any nuclear explosions, believe me. Relax. Look around and enjoy yourself. This is it, Jom, the world we've dreamed of! It isn't an atomic wreck any more. It's free, unspoiled, untainted." I looked at him sharply, but there was no hint of mockery in his voice or his eyes. And, getting a grip on myself, I began to see that he was right. True, things were not exactly as I had always dreamed them in this new world. I hadn't quite counted on the hordes of people, certainly more even than the history books told of, or the evident shortage of resources and raw materials. But there were no ray scars on New York City in this world and if Target One had never been blasted; surely the rest of the world escaped! I followed Lee's advice : I relaxed. Until they did as I asked and, after irritable wrangling, put me ItfiL in touch with a scientist whose specialty was nucleonjcs. "OO!" he hissed, eyes angry through the thick glasses, the silver insignia of rank on his collar glittering and dancing as he swallowed. "So you admit you have classified material on your barge!" I said wearily, "I tell you there's nothing classified about it." He stared at me. "Nothing classified about an atomic reactor?" he demanded. Only he spaced it out, each word with an angry emphasis of its own : Nothing. Classified. About. An. Atomic. Reactor? "Of course not! Not where we come from, I mean. I -- " "Enough!" he cut me off. "I mention to you two names; One is 'V. S. Kretchwood.' And the other -- " he looked at me shrewdly through the glasses -- "is 'Brazil.' Am I correct?" "About what?" I asked, honestly puzzled. "Don't try to make a fool out of me! You come from Brazil and your reactor is based on Kretchwood's First Law. Don't try to deny it!" I swallowed my anger and tried to placate him. "I have never been in Brazil in my life. I know where it is, yes. There is -- there was, that is -- a large population there, more than fifteen thousand. But this Kretchwood you talk of is absolutely new to me. Our reactor is based on Einstein's equation, but I know you never heard of Einstein. That's the whole point!" And I went through the whole explanation again. He passed his hand over his forehead. "Almost, I begin to believe you. Silly of me, I know, but -- " "No, it isn't silly! It's the absolute truth," I insisted. "I can prove it to you; just examine our workdeck. You who know nothing of atomic energy will find it hard to understand, but -- " "We do." -- "but matter and energy are the same -- You what?" "We do know about atomic energy," he said. "That's Kretchwood's First Law: E is greater than e-sub-n plus e-sub-o." He scribbled it on a pad of paper: E'n#-o. "That is, the total energy of an atom is more than the aggregate energy of its nuclear and orbital particles, which means that, by transmutation, energy can be released. V. S. Kretchwood, #-#, if I remember correctly." I stared blankly. They knew about binding energy; they knew about fission and fusion ; they knew... "But you shouldn't," I said. "I mean we've killed a man -- No, excuse me; I'm a little upset. What you're saying is that you are aware of the military and civilian implications of atomic energy." "There's a thorium pile going right under your feet," he said. "Uranium # -- " "Would be better, of course," he nodded. "The problem of separation is being worked on." "And you propose to make a bomb along the lines of the old Manhattan District?" "We call it Task Forty-four." Lee and Marin and I exchanged glances. "So there will be atomic warfare, after all," I said dully. "But isn't all this top secret?" "Of course," said the angry little man with stars on his collar. "And yet you trust us?" "Where you're going, it makes no difference. We have special -- reserve areas, let's say, for persons in improper possession of information about atomic energy. You won't spread anything you've learned." "But there's nothing improper about it! You said you believed us!" He leaned forward sharply. "I do," he said in thick, hate-filled tones. "I believe it's your doing that the world didn't have an atomic war two hundred years ago. And while you're in the reserve areas, bear this in mind:  hope you rot there!"  and fifty thousand children of atomic cataclysm. We killed a man from the past and wiped them out, all of them, with their shattered, festering planet. And for nothing. It isn't bad here, in the reserve area, though it is a little crowded. Ours -- they call it the Mojave Resettlement Project -- is the worst of the lot, because there just isn't anything in the way of natural resources here. The soil gets fertile enough, with the Los Angeles sludge piped in, but the only water that comes in is right along with the sludge. All the solids come out in the settling tanks and we kill the salts with ionexchange. The smell and the taste stay right in the water, though. But we wouldn't complain, if it were going to stay this way. We wouldn't complain about the taste of the water, or the restrictions on our freedom, or the congested state of the world. They say that a century or so ago, there was a big campaign for birth control, back when But anyone can second-guess that: Some segments of the population responded to the campaign and most did not. The only result of the effort was that the generations following were even less susceptible to such a campaign. But, as I say, we wouldn't complain, if we couldn't see on the horizon the flat silhouette of Task Forty-four's new group of breeder piles. I give us about a year more, that's all. Marin has the bunk above mine. I don't sleep much, and all through the night, I hear him tossing and turning and muttering to himself. And if I listen closely, I can hear the words that are always the same: "Poor Dr. Einstein," he says thickly, and then goes back to sleep. Poor Dr. Einstein! Poor us! Coming in the June Issue... by Edson McCann The # Galaxy-Simon  Schuster prize novel that will rank with The Puppet Masters, Gravy Planet, The Demolished Man and other great serials If you miss it -- well, you were warned -- which makes this a particularly good time to send in your subscription, doesn't it? Only # for # exciting issues and the address is... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. Before you go nova over some starry-eyed alien, study this handy little guide to romance! Origins of Galactic Advice to the Lovelorn I N # U. E., all Advice to the Lovelorn counselors officially came under the departmental designation #. In Terran legend, # is the modern form fixing the birth of Advice to the Lovelorn in a chaplain's office at a military fort in New Jersey. In #, a schizoid being finding himself in a jam learned that the # he had sought and received advice from was himself. This sharpened the realization that a questioner generally presents only one side of a problem -- the questioner's -- and that side in the most flattering light. As a result, a #, or one of the #'s detectives (called dix), tries to investigate all sides. #ing has its dangers. Mer Perbran (#-#) of Propus II died in the line of duty; an empathetic telepath, he drowned in another being's stream of consciousness. But #ing has its compensations. Bocediga Mani (#-#) of Matar II spearheaded the successful fight to forestall zealinflamed agents of museums. These, thinking to race against time, sought by any means, including kidnaping and quickfreezing of individuals, to lay in a hoard of specimens of a race growing rare, and by doing so were speeding the race's doom of "phylum, phorgetum." The following examples show how Advice to the Lovelorn gradually altered, how it grew from handling emotional problems on the interpersonal level to those on the supracultural level. F rom the microtHes of Kon Satya (#-#) of Juge X, whose affectation of simplicity is of a piece with his being the founder (#) of the Primitivists, a group of #s who believe that a being destroys his feelings by scrutinizing them, his thinkings by analyzing them. Dear # Satya : My spouse doesn't love me. Oh, he shows some degree of affection, but if he sincerely loves me, why does he stop short of the very thing that would make me the happiest fek male on Alphard I? Instead, I am among the most anguished and bitter. You see, there are just the two of us in these tenebrous galleries and to make it even worse, I am often alone because he spends so much time traveling on surveying missions far from his home and his office. I feel so solitary, but he selfishly says he is satisfied with things the way they are and doesn't conceive of adding to our family. This is especially rattling because ever since it became obvious that he was failing to live up to his familial duties, my friends have started to insinuate that he's stingy. And though I strongly deny such insinuations, I privately suspect that he's unhis bundle. It embarrasses me so to see even my mother and stepmothers. It is awfully trying to have to meet their sympathizing but scandalized stares. I feel less and less like leaving our dim house, although staying in this echoing solitude is maddening enough to make me want to scream. Meanwhile, my thews mat as I idle in my narrow zone of living. Row upon row of galleries go to waste -- and yet the effect is constricting. To my horror, I find myself tempted to say or do something shocking or upsetting -- anything to cast off the weight of gloomy days and nights. How I long to hear the slither of little coils! Do you see hope for us? Or do you suppose my spouse has been surreptitiously romancing while on his surveying missions? Nonplused Dear Nonplused: Informants tell my dix no outside romancing. Speaking cold-bloodedly, is bad sign. Embarrassing, you, belonging polygamous society, have husband having only one wife, namely you. No need feeling shame consulting me, Nonplused. Am understanding. (Not like my wives, one under-understanding, other over-understanding. ) Elementary problem, easy answer. Is binding on husband when first wife is proposing to other female, in husband's behalf, she become another better fraction. (Is joke.) Is possible pitfall? Is. Like what? Husband showing new wife overfondness. Resultant position of old wife? (Is speaking frankly, watch!) Eased out, praise be. Why praise be? Is profitable market. Many husbands hunting oldfashioned wife. (Please send fostat of self.) # Satya F rom the microaies of Tib Seve (#-#), a # of Pleione V. His fine job during the notorious Love Riots that had the Galaxy agape won him the rank of Senior. Dear Sr. # Tib: Three double-moons ago, I married a priestess of the Marsupial Totem of Merope VI. Pretty quickly, I noticed a clicking sound whenever she pranced. I found that her pouches -- the fore pouch, at least; the after pouch has remained veiled -- contained pellets of some kind and that, day by day, the fore pouch was emptying. I was very curious, but profane prying into the personal practices of a priestess is prohibited, so I prudently put no questions. But I paid heed and it repaid me with a closer glimpse. The pellets were parched peas. Pleasing my spouse is my prime aim. Realizing she was partial to peas, I quickly purchased a quantity of best quality peas in the borso -- enough to fill a twelvegallon pot. And to surprise her, I quietly deposited some every evening while she pounded the pillow. My peak performance came on the night I poured a palmful of peas without provoking a quiver in response. But although I patiently prevented her supply from petering out, a pall fell upon her. I quadrupled my pains. But as time passed, she acquired a Tower of Pisa posture and a paranoiac look. This worried me, the more so as she had let drop that she was to undergo the added strain of presiding at secret ceremonies. Nine days ago, late on the Day of the Didelphic Oracle, I was foggily pondering the problem of restoring her physical and psychic balance, when a posse of priestesses paraded into our home. Their measured pace was like the pounding pulse of aoom. As one, they stopped and, ignoring me, gave my wife a pregnant look. It was more than she could bear. With a piercing cry, she lost her selfpossesion and passed into a coma. The posse departed as it had come. On waking, my wife withdrew into a shell. She sits staring at the opposite wall. Please tell me how to help her regain her poise. Oura Dear Oura: I'm not privy to the Marsupial Mysteries, but I think I can unperplex you. The way I figure it, you're the precipitating factor. Your wife wasn't eating the peas. She was transposing one pea per day from her fore pouch to her after pouch. They weren't her particular passion. They were for computing the passage of time. Your interfering made her lose count, stuffed her after pouch full to bursting, gave her a list and a persecution complex. Both of you should have minded your proverbial Ps and Qs. Your wife should have perceived peril more promptly. The excess pea avoirdupois should have given her the cue. Instead of apparently going haywire and thrusting peas into her after pouch, regardless of the count, she should have immediately subtracted the number of peas there from the number of days from festival to festival. In that way, she wouldn't have let the Day of the Didelphic Oracle find her missing from her post. Her sister priestesses plainly consider this a grave infraction. There's no telling how they'd react if you were quixotic enough to confess the part you played. I suggest you take your wife to a more peaceful place. Sr. # Tib F rom the microfUes of Rod Pilfer (#-#) of Atik I. He won renown for answering a tortuous question with, "Huh?" Dear # Filler: Due to the type of sexual dimorphism peculiar to Algol II, my wife has a much greater amplitude and rate of tremor than I. To me, she seems a blur, a shimmer on the verge of coming into being, green as copper and gray-pink as manganese -- the way all the females of Algol II look to all the males. But I had seen stop-motion fostats of her, and I fell in love with her and wooed and won her. The other day, we had a family reunion and you can imagine the shock I suffered when I found that the weary-looking female clinging to my strigil in the photo of that occasion is not the girl I fell in love with! It now turns out there was a switch and it was my genuine love's homely sister I married and have been living with for seven years! Worse yet, since our return from the reunion, another fear has been plaguing me. What if there has been another switch and the female stridulating so cheerfully about my house is not the homely sister, but her even homelier one? My fear is not entirely groundless. A ewer of milk still churns to butter in my wife's grasp, but the consistency somehow seems different. How may I know peace once more? Heartheavy Dear Heartheavy: You fell in love not with the girl you took to be your wife, but with her fostat. You're in love with love's shadow. For seven years, you lived happily in the illusion that your wife was the female in the fostats. In reacting to the revelation that she wasn't, you pass over several elements lightly. Doesn't it seem strange that, in seven years of wedded bliss, an induced sympathetic vibration has never, even momentarily, put you in phase with your wife? You've resisted. Admit it now, you didn't really want to see her. You've been content with a blur, for even the "genuine love" couldn't have come up to your unaging image of her. You could end your doubts by snapping a fostat of your wife or by shining a stroboscopic light on her in the dark, flashing it in time with her vibration to see her as clearly as If she were frozen. But you prefer to preserve the image in your mind. So consider this possibility : your wife may be neither what you term the homely sister nor what you term the homelier sister. She may be what you think of as the lovely sister. You'll come to believe this. The pendulum will swing from pessimism to optimism. When. you reach the far end of the arc, have your local doctor dose you with titanium (for mordant) and chlorine (for substitution reaction). These chemicals will lock you in the blissful state you desire -- until the next family reunion. # Filler F rom the microfUes of Ekhah Pos (#-#) of Korneforos V. He arranged the # Anthem synesthetically, for which the Galactic Council awarded him the Anthelion Medal with Meteor Cluster, struck off in type metal. Dear # Fos: How hard it is for me to find the right words! For, out of a full heart, I must tell you of my woe. Only yesterday, I was an innocent, cheerful female of Korneforos VI. Today -- But to begin at the beginning. I was standing out in the open, forgetting my mother's preachings. Suddenly, out of the comer of my eye, I saw a great moving shadow. Before I could even think of trying to escape or to call out for help, a highwheeling figure swooped down upon me. My heartbeat drowned in the winnowing of his wings and I fainted. When I came to, I was in the antechamber of the nest of a young male whom I have known ever since my prenubile days. I had held him in high awe, but this about-facing of his tore away the veil and I can see him for what he is -- the antithesis of honor. He laughs as I cry. He and his myrmidons are keeping me captive against my will and seem to enjoy watching me throw dust in my eyes. I wring my antennae in vain. The vulgar creature is adamant, even though he does try to soothe me occasionally with butter words and the promise of brand-new lithium-beryllium furnishings for this nest. But such antics just make me bridle and antagonize me the more. "Enough" I say sternly, italicizing the word. And my thoughts go back to that moment when I stood in the clearing. How my chest expanded with hope -- hope that I might always maintain my purity! In that hangyawn second when I first saw the shadow, little did I anticipate the terrible anticlimax I Mournful Dear Mournful: Atta girl! # Pos Note. In his column, # Pos added the following postscript for the benefit of non-Korneforotes : In this girl's society, a bride must emote, making public her antipathy to marriage -- no matter how glad she is privately. As a victim of violence, she need not be ashamed that in her essentially ascetic society she is embarked upon a passionate relationship. Her honor is still semantically intact. Her lamentations will soon be at an end. The smile will emerge and displace the sob, for marriage, first and last, is the goal. F rom the microfUes of Hansa Munkar (#-#) of Nekkar V. Atom-tracing was his hobby and he managed, in the course of repeated trips to Terra, to carve a lasting name for himself by reassembling Caesar's own dust. Dear # Munkar: O hear me, I beg of you! I am of the Marababa Sahem tribe on the outRecently I moved to the ornate state capital and married a girl of the Aaabb Abaaa Babab tribe, love triumphing over distaste for these fashionable, dissolute members of the ruling circle. O I never would have become incensed about -- much less questioned -- my wife's faithfulness hadn't I a good friend who in all innocence idly asked me, at a party, for the name of the seductive perfume my wife was wearing. With an effort of will, I disguised the dismay that threatened to distend my veins. I told him calmly that I had forgotten the name, but would let him know it as soon as I recalled. At home, at the first opportunity, I searched. At last I discovered an ounce of Carvyl Eau de Fen # hidden behind flush-seamed paneling. To hear was shock enough, but O when I saw that my wife was indeed wearing perfume, not hell or the dismal hereafters equal the pardonable jealousy that began to quinch in my vitals. She is not using the scent to please me. O no! We of Marababa Sahem have no sense of smell. Ergo, she is using the perfume to lure into baneful dalliance other males, members of her own tribe, who are able to smell. (O I discount my good friend, although he is one of them. I owe him so much for unwittingly enlightening me.) Even in my distress, I must admire the way the fair betrayer hides demon amid devotion. But the many little things that she sashays around doing for me mean simply so many disquieting duplicities and ring hollowly now that her disloyalty is disclosed. O even the venison ragout that she learned to dish Marababa Sahem style to please me is a burden to down without disgorging: it has me gargling and grunting and panting under the grueling grind of displaying a dissembling smile as if singing a hymn to her handiwork. Dissolving this dishonored marriage is out of the question. By the fundamental law of my tribe, I must wreak vengeance upon her. With this end in view, I am husbanding my strength. When I feel my hate dislodge my love, I will slay her, lest she cheat and recheat and bring disgrace upon us. O it seems odd that I should be discussing the snatching of life from the one I believed the quintessence of discretion -- so odd that I would be laughing if such laughter did not hurt. But I must prove I am no mere cipher in a divided duty to benighted love, but a thing of elemental passions, true to the traditions of my tribe. O distinguished #, please lend me your moral support! Loc Osis Dear Loc: Very melodramatic, but don't be so ready to listen to your so-called friend. He was being vindictive when he asked you what perfume your wife wears. Dix-informed, I can tell you he's a scorned ex-suitor of your wife's. Plainly, he's venting his spite. Your wife wears perfume; that's so. But you infer wrongly. True, she's not wearing it to please you, except indirectly. Being unable to smell, you haven't realized that your uncomplaining wife uses perfume to mask the what-is-to-her-nosedistasteful smell of the what-isto-your-eye-cordial showers of magnesium and chlorine that spice your food. Even if that weren't the case, it would still be only natural for a wife to want to smell her best, even if her husband couldn't appreciate it. At any rate, you'll have to sublimate your venous rage -- my dix have warned your friend to leave the planet. He's probably a good distance past Alhena by now. # Munkar F rom the microfiles of Koztn Ondas (#-#) of Dabih V. One rare exception to the "no stock answer" rule of Advice to the Lovelorn was the attempt by # Ondas to alter the pattern of culture of the dying society of Dabih X, whose resistance to reason she sought by repetition to wear away. Here are the typical question and the form letter in answer. Dear # Ondas: I desire to possess a beautiful girl who lives in -- . Can you recommend a reliable mercenary who will undertake to abduct her for me and bring her to my home in -- ? Dear --  -- : You speak not of loving but of coveting. You won't offer the girl your love and ask for her alula in marriage, because she might turn you down and your pride won't let you risk refusal. You won't attempt to run off with her yourself, because you might slip up and to fail would puncture your pride. Although your authorities, believing that fair facts and foul are equally valid when it comes to love, condone the hiring of mercenaries, I must counsel you to heed the sad case of Vry Nin. The lovesick and pridesick Nin, smarting under the rebuff of his suit, hired mercenaries from Gamma Vulpeculae. He tried to make the briefing short because he found their presence repulsive. He promised Oca, their captain, a lordly gift if the legion the latter headed followed orders to the letter. The mercenaries listened impassively as Nin marked out the acts they were to perform. The simple eyes dotting their torsos stared stonily, even though the vehemence of Nin's spite, when he ordered the slaying of the girl's family, sprayed them with yellow mist. But when he came to describe his love object, the mist turned rose. How could he convey the tantalizing texture of her shapely -- He lacked words. So he said, "You'll see there the very most beautiful creature in creation. That's my loved one." Dismissed, they padded away. It seemed to Nin he waited for a mega-era. At last they padded back. Nin looked for the girl eagerly but vainly. Had her family outbid him and turned the fire of the mercenaries back upon Nin? He grabbed for his weapon, but Oca was quicker. He explained to the dying Nin that the girl's family had apparently feared a raid and must have spirited the girl away. Wary of booby traps, the mercenaries had searched the house. They had found only a warped and warty crone. Following Nin's orders, they had blasted her. A doddering look destroyed Nin's mien; "warped and warty" were the words he had lacked! "That was my love!" he moaned. So, my dear , I hope you will learn from the wrong way the right way to win your love. # Ondas F rom the microtUes of Dod After long years of service, he met his death when a galloping herd of suozzons mistook the creaking of his sinews -- the key thongs, to be exact -- for their mating call. Dear # Ona: The log of the Griph, my spacecraft, shows I am asking you the same question for the third time. Why don't you answer? I'll restate the facts. I made a forced landing in a clearing on Alpha Pj-xidis I. I leafed through the Universal Periplus in my chart room, but it's sadly out of date and tells me nothing about this system. I determined for myself that conditions on this planet were favorable, debarked, made repairs. There was nothing to hold me; the planet seemed only virgin forest. I was about to re-embark when a figure suddened in and out of sight. A girl. No more than a glimpse of olive complexion and willowy form, but it was enough to quicken my pulse. I followed her into the forest. Gone! I would have called, but my fear of further frightening her caused the opening between my vocal cords to stick. All that afternoon, I looked. With the coming of dusk, I felt a chill and thought to fell a tree for fuel. But immediately a cheerful warmth enveloped me and I made my way craftward in a glow. Early next morning, I seemed to hear a voice calling faintly. I was soon at the edge of the clearing. Something drew my gaze to a treehollow. My hand came out with a crude valentine. It bore my name. I reasoned that colonists of my kind had settled here secretly, that the girl had seen me and was shyly making known her love. She'd slipped into the Griph while I was hunting her through the wood, learned my name from my log. Elated, I waited the next manifestation. It was a makeshift mailbox hung on a tree. Lettered on it was "Jeanie." I've always liked that name. Something white fluttered ghostlike down from a tree across the clearing. No one around. I dived for it. A blank sheet of paper. Getting the idea, I wrote a love letter on it and dropped it in the slot. I went back to the Griph to spruce up. When I returned to the mailbox, the letter was gone. Since then, a stream of messages. For some reason, Jeanie keeps shifting the mailbox from tree to tree. Sometimes I think we've trysted in isolated places, because I dimly remember embracing Jeanie. Sometimes Jeanie seems less than a dream, a fragment of a figment, a delusion -- at these times. I've tried to reach yqu. Have I been traveling alone too long? I can't account for my fleeting moods. A while ago, I started to carve an arrow-pierced heart in a tree, but something stayed my knife hand. Another time, I began to worry that my food was running low. it Magically, I found a plant bearing something like a cross between breadfruit and hackberry -- just when I'd decided to give up the elusive Jeanie, and leave. Where are Jeanie's folks? Where is Jeanie now? I can't stand not knowing. I'm loth to stay, loth to go. Please answer. R. A. Jesse Dear R. A.: I've deliberately delayed answering. Sorry to blight your romance after letting you pine for #I days, but that's the length of the mating season. Let me explain. You're not loco. You have been involved in a budding romance, but not your own. "Jeanie" exists, though only in your mind. The Alpha Pyxidites made her bloom there. They're the trees. They palm off telepathic suggestion on mobile forms of life. For your appointment in lieu of samara (if you'll pardon a pedantic quip), they adapted to your unconscious desire to meet your dream mate. You may leave now, knowing you've won laurels as a pollinating middleman. You may also legally claim a reasonable service charge. # Ona man's best friend Sometimes a job comes after the man... and this one came after Gervase like a tiger! T he annunciator aroused Gervase from pleasant semi-slumber. He knew the interruption was his own fault for not having turned off the device, but he so seldom had a visitor that he could hardly be blamed for his forgetfulness. Frowning, he pressed the viewer button. A round, red face appeared on the screen. "May I be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Schnee?" it said. "You may, indeed," Gervase replied. "But for what?" "You haven't heard the news? Good, then I'm the first. I imagine I got a head-start on the others because of my superior facilities for locating you. Your address wasn't given; these pronouncements do tend to be a bit vague. Matter of tradition, I suppose." "I haven't heard any news for days," Gervase said, uncomfortably conscious that he was apologizing. "I've been listening to my sound-tapes and -- and meditating," he added defiantly. "Wait a minute; I'll let you in." He struggled with the doorstud, but the door refused to open. The autobursar must have neglected to pay the door bill -- probably because Gervase had failed to put enough money into it. But his allowance was limited and sound-tapes, not to speak of meditators, were so expensive. Sighing, Gervase got up and opened the door manually. The individual outside was short and stout and dressed, unfortunately, in the uniform of an upper-echelon salesman. Gervase had been caught! Still, he reminded himself, no one could force him to buy anything. He was a free citizen. "Well, come in if you must," he said grudgingly. "I suppose the big news is that j'm the lucky householder to whom the Little Gem Room Expander will first be offered." "Nothing of the sort!" the man replied indignantly. At this point, Gervase noticed with surprise that the other wore a jeweled merchant-prince's badge. Apparently this was one of those consumer reaction tests in which executives themselves participated to check on their employees. T he man remembered to smile. "The Prognosticator has iust given its fortnightly Prognostication. You, Mr. Schnee, are going to be our new Ruler." He seized the young man's limp hand and shook it enthusiastically. "And I'm sure you'll be a splendid one, too." Gervase accepted a pale green cheroot from the dispenser. It shook in his lips. "And what's to become of the old Ruler?" "You're scheduled to dispose of him sometime this month. Now, Mr. Schnee," the man went on briskly, "allow me to introduce myself. I am Bedrich Florea, vice president of the Florea Munitions and Container Corporation." He extracted a gleaming weapon from his brief case and offered it to Gervase. The young man recoiled. "If you will only agree to shoot Overlord Kipp with a Florea Semper Fidelis Gun," the executive continued, "my corporation will be happy to place a substantial amount of credits at your disposal in any be exact. Now if you'll just sign here on the dotted line..." He held out a stylus temptingly. "Nonsense!" Gervase backed away. "Even a Ruler can use money. Bribery for government officials, bread and circuses for the people -- oh, money's a very useful commodity, Mr. Schnee. Shall we say "I don't doubt that money is useful," Gervase replied, thinkcredits. "But when I said 'nonsense,' I meant the Prognosticator. The whole thing's a lot of -- well, nonsense. A whole planet of supposedly intelligent people listening to what's nothing more, really, than an oracle! A machine can't read the future. It's impossible." Florea's eyes bulged. "Mr. Schnee, that's sacrilege! You can't -- confound it, sir, you can't talk that way about The Machine. After all," he added in a more placatory manner, "let's look at this reasonably. Machines can and do answer all the problems of our daily life, so why shouldn't a superior machine be able to tell the future?" "If you ask me," Gervase all but sneered, "behind the wires and gimmicks and whatnots in The Machine, there's a secret room in which a half-mad, halfintoxicated old priestess sits delivering her Delphic pronouncements. Might as well have an aboveboard oracle and be done with it." "Now, now, Mr. Schnee -- " the executive smiled with obvious effort -- "even our Ruler shouldn't flout the Authority of Machinery. Of course, it's all right when you're alone with friends, like me, but in public -- " The annunciator sounded again. An eager face appeared on the screen. "Mr. Schnee," an equally eager voice said, "I'm from the Daily Disseminator. How does it feel to be Ruler Prognosticate?" There was the sound of a scuffle. His face disappeared, to be replaced by two others. "Mr. Schnee, will you tell us in your very own words -- " As Gervase clicked off the interviewer, the vidiphone blinked. Gervase lifted the receiver. The face of Overlord Kipp himself came into view, pale but composed. "I understand you're the young man who is destined to dispose of me and take my place?" G ervase paled also. "Honestly, Your Honorship, I haven't the slightest inten -- " "You'll make it quick and painless, won't you? And it really would be very decent of you to give me the exact day and hour of my -- er -- demise so I won't have to sit around waiting." "But, really -- " "You don't look like a hardhearted chap. As a matter of fact, I would say, offhand, that you had a kind face." "Well, thank you, but -- " "I do wish you'd stop shillyshallying and name the day. By the way, have you anything on for tomorrow?" "I didn't have anything special planned -- " "Splendid! Suppose you come over to the Palace around one o'clock or so. We can have a bite of lunch and discuss the matter together. After all, I think you'll agree that I have been a reasonably good Ruler and so I have the right to die with dignity." He looked pleadingly at Gervase. "Oh, absolutely," the young man said in haste. "No question of it. I think it's a very good idea to have a chat about it first. Awkward to -- dispose of someone you haven't met previously." The dictator gave him a wan smile. "Thank you, Mr. Schnee. I hope you'll find your successor as cooperative as yourself." The screen darkened. "Hmmm," Gervase mused. He took a lavender cheroot, forgetting he still held the lime one. "I wonder whether he wants me to make an appointment so he'll have a band of counter-assassins ready to kill me, saving him the expense of a stand-by guard. He is noted for his thriftiness, you know. Perhaps I just shouldn't show up at all." "He wouldn't dream of doing anything of the sort," Florea said austerely. "Overlord Kipp knows what is due to his position. He has a sense of duty and responsibility which, unfortunately, seems to be lacking in his successor... , if you'll excuse my speaking frankly," he added in haste. "I am, of course, considerably older than you and so I feel -- " "It's quite all right," Gervase reassured him. "You may speak freely." "Furthermore," Florea continued, "if he had you killed, the people would probably give him a painful and lingering death for attempting to interfere with the course of destiny... There, I hear them now!" And they could indeed hear the sound of voices raised in song -- so many and so loud that they penetrated the soundproofing of the walls. "The polloi are coming to hail their new Leader," Florea beamed. "Well, I'm not going to do it!" Gervase declared. "They can't make me kill him and take over and that's flat. I'm not the administrative type -- never have been." own out of a platinum portable. "In that case, the people probably will kill you for attempting to interfere with fate." "But I wouldn't haVe done anything!" Gervase protested. "There are sins of omission as well as commission. Come now. it's true a Ruler's life expectancy isn't very long -- at least it hasn't been for the last few reigns -- but it's longer than yours will be if you refuse to fulfill your destiny." "I wouldn't make a fit Ruler," Gervase said desperately. "Consider my origins. I wouldn't tell this to anyone but you -- I'm illegitimate. I don't even know who my father is." The other man smiled again. "It's a wise child who knows his own father. And some of the most celebrated leaders in history have been illegitimate. Look at Gervase turned on the historiscope, dialed # A.D., looked, shuddered, and turned it off. "I don't think that's much of a recommendation !" "You see," Florea told him encouragingly, "almost anybody can be a leader. The important thing is that he be destined for leadership." "But I'm no good! Everybody says so. I've never done a thing in my life. My aged mother has had to work to support me." "Time enough that you stood on your two feet, my boy!" the businessman said, clapping the youth upon the shoulder. "And remember, destiny must take its course." He flung open the door. A cheering crowd stood outside. "My friends, allow me to introduce you to your new Ruler -- Gervase Schnee!" A hoarse shout of approval went up. "He is planning to assassinate Overlord Kipp with a Florea Semper Fidelis Gun. Florea Semper Fidelis Guns retail from c#. # for the Peasant's Pistol all the way up to C# for the Super Deluxe Conspirator's Model, but each is the best obtainable for the price. Mr. Schnee, of course, will use the Super Deluxe model." There were more cries, cheers and shouts. "Thank you for your -- for your confidence and support," Gervase said brokenly. "I only hope I prove worthy of them." Gervase lunched with Overlord Kipp the next day and was not assassinated. The disposal was set for the coming Tuesday and announced to the public. Gervase was so nervous, he couldn't sleep the night before. When, early in the morning, he finally did manage to doze off, he was awakened by the encouraging telegrams that kept pouring in. At nine, he finally got up and dressed himself in the immaculate black-and-silver assassin's uniform that had been custommade for him without charge by an eminent tailor. He was in no mood for breakfast, so he went outside to the handsome blackandsilver limousine that had been presented to him by a thoughtful industrialist. As he emerged from his door, a brass band struck up the national anthem and the crowd waiting outside broke into cheers suitably restrained to fit the melancholy occasion. and right as he got into the car. His two hired assistants, dressed in the customary black cloak and hood of the body-remover, were, he noticed, already seated beside the chauffeur. They did not turn their heads as Gervase entered, but preserved the traditional impassivity of their calling. The band started to play a funeral march as the car moved slowly down the boulevard. Stands had been put up all along the route and he was greeted by subdued cheering and applause from crowds neatly arranged according to rank. Little children of all classes rushed out into the street to present him with bouquets of flowers. The television cameras joined him en route and followed him all the way to the Palace. On the steps, Bedrich Florea awaited him, magnificently garbed in full executive uniform, his jewels flashing in the clear sunlight. "Allow me to load your Super Deluxe Conspirator's Florea Semper Fidelis Gun for you. Overlord Prognosticate," he announced in a ringing voice, as he turned his profile toward the cameras. "It's already loaded," Gervase said, nervously clutching the gun in his pocket. "Permit me to check it then." Florea put out an eager hand. Gervase executed a deft chasse in the opposite direction. "It's perfectly all right, I tell you! No one," he added in a burst of inspiration, "would have any difficulty in loading a Florea Semper Fidelis Gun." "That's right," the baffled munitions magnate admitted, falling back reluctantly. "Whether you buy the Peasant's or the Conspirator's Model, both have the same smooth free-loading mechanism..." "Out of the way. Executive," a cameraman said, unceremoniously sweeping Florea aside as Gervase paced into the Palace, followed by his two black-robed henchmen, carrying an elaborate, gold-mounted stretcher between them. "Candy, popcorn, hashish, yoghurt!" yelled a strident voice behind them. "Buy your refreshments here!" Overlord Kipp stood beside his desk, dressed in his finest uniform -- which was, however, virtually invisible, it was so bedecked with glittering and sparkling medals and decorations. Gervase waited patiently while the soonto-be-disposed-of Ruler made a speech pointing out the numerous benefits and improvements his reign had brought to the people. It was rather a long speech and Gervase's nose began to itch. He would have liked to scratch it, but the cameras were pointing directly at him. Life as Ruler, he saw, was going to be a long series of similar repressions. He sighed. But what could he do? Nobody could go against the Prognostications. Finally the speech was finished. "Good-by and good luck. Overlord Schnee," Kipp said. He stood, waiting. Gervase fired. There was a loud report. Kipp crumpled to the ground. Gervase hurled the Florea Semper Fidelis Gun to the desk. "Everyone will now please leave," he ordered in calm but firm tones, "while the removers take over." "Why can't we televise the removal?" a daring cameraman asked. "Something new." and then a babble of indignant voices. Gervase held up a weary hand. The voices stopped. "That sort of thing just isn't done," he told the cameraman with an Olympian smile. "Please leave as quickly as possible -- all of you. I might want to meditate." They scuttled out backward, the cameras still grinding. Gervase pressed the studs that shut and bolted the door. "Whew!" said Overlord Kipp, sitting up. "I didn't think I'd be able to stand that much longer. You're a good shot, Schnee -- that blank stung like crazy. And in a very tender spot, I might add-' "No time for chatting," Gervase said nervously. "We've got to get this over in a hurry. Now comes the part when your friends will have to look like real removers. I hope they can give it that professional touch." "We are real removers in a sense," said one of the blackrobed figures. "At least, both of us have participated in removals before." They dropped their hoods. Gervase's mouth hung open. "Why, you're Overlord Moorhouse!" he said to one. "And I've seen pictures of you!" he told the other. "You're the one that came before him -- Shinnick. You died before I was born -- that is, you were supposed to have died. Both of you were. Moorhouse killed -- was supposed to have killed you. Ex-Overlord Shinnick smiled. "We're not precisely dead -- only retired, you might say. In a way, anonymity is the same as death. And Overlords Moorhouse and Kipp -- " he bowed toward them -- "both had kind hearts, like yourself. The Prognosticator didn't say we had to be killed -- just disposed of, as Kipp undoubtedly pointed out to you in your little talk together." "Sorry I couldn't tell you the truth," Kipp apologized as he dusted off his uniform, "but you might have changed your mind and given us away." "We've formed a sort of little club of dead Overlords," Shinnick elucidated. "After all, we're the only ones with whom we can associate safely -- no danger of any one of us betraying the others." "We're looking forward to the day when you join us, Overlord Schnee," Moorhouse put in eagerly, "assuming that your successor is of as generous a nature as we, of course. Do you play bridge by any chance?" "You'd better hurry." Gervase worriedly changed the subject as he noticed the time on the wall chronometer. "If the four of us are discovered, the mob would tear us all to pieces." "Right you are," said ex-Overlord Shinnick. "Get on the stretcher, Kipp. Bad enough we're going to have to carry you out; at least don't expect us to lift you up." Kipp obediently assumed a recumbent posture. Shinnick and Moorhouse covered him with a black cloth and were preparing to march out when Gervase recollected himself and halted them. "Wait a moment -- you'd better take off those medals first, Kipp, They come with the job." "Grave-robber," said Kipp, reluctantly sitting up on his catafalque and unfastening the jeweled decorations. had left, Gervase pressed a stud on the desk marked Secretary. A panel in the wall opened and a timorous-looking man virtually fell into the room. "Y-yes, Your Honorship?" "The Prognosticator is right here in the Palace, isn't it?" Gervase asked, in a tone that would have been authoritative if his voice hadn't cracked right in the middle of Palace. "Y-yes, Your Honorship." "Lead me to it immediately." "Su-certainly, Your Honorship." As they left the room, Gervase picked the Florea Semper Fidelis Gun off the desk. It was too valuable a piece of property to leave lying around. The Palace was full of sticky-fingered civil servants. They passed through room after room containing bank after bank of computing machines, each more complicated in appearance than the last. Hordes of officials in the garb of hereditary scientist or technician bowed low as the new Ruler passed. The  machines, of course, operated and repaired themselves automatically; nonetheless, they needed a good many attendants as befitted their exalted status. Gervase and his guide finally came to the room where the Prognosticator itself was enshrined. The apartment was twenty stories high and a hundred meters wide, but it was none too large for all the flashing lights and spinning dials and buzzing relays and levers and cables which jammed it. The hundreds of first-rank scientists who waited upon the Machine stopped their tasks of dusting and polishing to greet the new Usurper with deferent acclaim. "Leave me," he ordered, gesturing with the gun toward the door. "I would be alone with the Prognosticator." "Certainly, Your Honorship. Certainly. Your wishes are our commands." They backed out. "You, too," Gervase told the secretary who had guided him. "Y-yes, Your Honorship." The man skittered off. When they had all gone, Gervase approached a small, unobtrusive door marked Danger -- No Admittance: Dust lay thick on the sill, for it was seldom opened. Gervase took a tiny, intricate piece of metal from his pocket and fitted it into the lock. Something inside clicked. The door swung open. Beyond, a narrow flight of steps spiraled downward. Gervase descended them unhesitatingly until he came to another small door. This one was simply marked Private. He knocked on it. "Aah, go butter your earlobes!" a cracked voice called from within. "Can't you read, you dumb cluck?" "It's me, Gervase!" He pounded on the door with the butt of his gun. "Open up!" T he door swung open creakily. Through the gloom inside, there could be dimly seen antique furnishings in a poor state of preservation and a still more imperfect state of cleanliness. An outmodedly streamlined twentieth-century typewriting machine was set on a costly metal stand with one caster missing. The flaps of the table were open -- one held a chipped teapot, th other a dusty crystal ball and a dog-eared pack of Gypsy cards. Behind all this was a rare old psychoanalyst's couch, ripped open here and there and showing the original stuffing. Reclining on the couch was an incredibly old woman wearing a quaint costume of a bygone era -- long scarlet silk skirt, yellow blouse, great golden hoops swinging in her ears. She was sipping something out of a teacup, but it didn't smell like tea, at least not like tea alone. The ancient reek of gin pervaded and overpowered the general mustiness. "Hello, son!" the old woman said, waving the cup at Gervase. " 'Bout time you came to pay your old mother a visit." She cackled. "I kind of thought something like this would stir you up!" proachfully, "you know you shouldn't have done it." "What did I do?" she asked, assuming a ludicrous posture of innocence. "You fixed the Prognostications, that's what you did. Although why you had to pick on me -- "Aah, I got tired of supporting you! You're a big boy -- it's about time you earned your own living. Besides, I thought it'd be a good idea to elect a sympathetic administration. Sympathetic to me, that is. Palace needs a new ventilating system. Air in here's terrible. Smells as if something'd died and they were too stingy to give it a decent burial." "But why didn't you use the Prognosticator to get new ventilation put in?" Gervase asked. "Seems to me you could have foretold everyone in the Palace would suffocate or something if it wasn't done." "They'd have got around it, Kipp." Gervase blushed. "You can't fool me!" she cackled gleefully. "I know everything that goes on around this place and a lot that doesn't." She reached over and tapped his knee. "But you'll pay attention to the Prognosticator, boy. Don't you try to weasel out of what it says by looking for double meanings. Time you Overlords learned that when the Prognosticator says something, it means it." "Yes, Mother," he said. "I'd hate to have to give orders to have my own boy disposed of. The last three disposals weren't so bad, but sometimes those things can turn out real messy." "Yes, Mother." She drank gustily from her teacup. "Maybe blood is thicker than water... but not much." "Yes, Mother." "And why shouldn't you listen to my Prognostications?" she demanded irritably, slamming her teacup down on the table so hard that the typewriter skipped. "Just because they're dolled up a little doesn't mean they're not true. Don't I have a crystal ball? Don't I have a Gypsy tarot pack? Don't I have tea leaves -- best tea money can buy, too?" "Yes, Mother." "So?" She looked at him expectantly. "What are you going to do?" Gervase took a deep breath and drew himself up. "I'm going to have the ventilating system attended to right away." "That's my boy," she said fondly, draining another cup of tea and peering at the leaves. "I can see everything's going to work out fine -- just fine. Next month introduces a bright new talent and brings back another that has been missing tor too long. Gerald Pearce is the talent new to science fiction; equipped with that rare blend of iron-muscled prose and poetic sensitivity found only m Hammett As the narrator explains in frightened bewilderment, "It was as clean as a world can be-but why had Collins killed himself-and how was it I fell, I died, I saw another at the well?" There's an answer, of course, but it has to te found this side of death! be as long remembered as his tender "Star, Bright" in these pages a couple of years ago. Home, you see, is where you hang up your spaceship or ifs bound to be if you have anyone like Miss Kitty along! And the devi of it is that Miss Kitty is neither a chicken nor a nesting hen! She s strictly no nonsense about anything, including the unfamiliar job of making a home where none had ever-repeat: ever!-been. But she's a great gal and you II love her, stiff neck and blunders and all! Groff Conklin's Five Star Shelf will return in the next issue. Edson McCann, the # Galaxy-Simon  Schuster prize novel! Hurricane Trio Having already died once, he found himself more alive fhan ever before -- so alive that it hurt far worse than the agony of dying! Y ancey, who once had been killed, lay very still, with his arm flung across the pillow, and watched the moonlight play with the color of Beverly's hair. Her hair was spilled over his shoulder and chest, and her body pressed against him, warm. He wondered if she was asleep. He wondered if she could sleep, with that moonswept riot of surf and wind going on outside the hotel. The waves blundered into the cliff below, hooting through the sea-carved boulders, frightening great silver ghosts of spray out and up into the tom and noisy air. He wondered if she could sleep with her gentle face so near his thumping heart. He wished the heart would quiet itself -- subside, at least, to the level of the storm outside, so that she might mistake it for the same storm. He wished he could sleep. For two years, he had been glad he did not sleep. Now he wished he could; it might quiet his heart. Beverly, Beverly, he cried silently, you don't deserve this! He wished the bed were larger, so that he might ease away from her and be but thunder in a cannonade, merging into the hiss and smash and ugly grumble of the sea. In the other bed, Lois shifted restlessly under the crisp sheet. Yancey looked at her without turning his head. under the dim white, her face and hair two kinds of darkness on the pillow. She was lean and somber. Beverly was happy and open and moved about like the bouncing ball which used to lead the singing at theaters, leaping along the lyrics. Lois walked as if she did not quite touch the floor, and the tones of her voice were like the tones of her skin and the clothes she favored -- dark and smooth. Her eyes were long and secret and her face was a floe. Her nostrils and the corners of her mouth and sometimes the slightest concerted movement of a shoulder and an eyebrow hinted at a heat submerged and a strength relaxed and aware, not asleep, not a sleep. Lois... a synthesis of subtleties, of mysteries, delicate scents and soft puzzling laughter. She moved again. He knew that she, too, was staring tensely up into the mottled darkness. The spume-flecked moonlight was intolerant of detail, but Yancey had memorized her face. He knew of the compression of her lips, and that the corners of her mouth were softly turned despite the tension. He was deeply troubled by the sound of the sheet as she moved, for if he could hear that over the storm, how could Beverly miss the throb of his heart? Then he all but smiled. Of course Beverly did not hear as he did, nor see, nor feel, nor think with all her mind. Poor Beverly, poor, bright, sweet and faithful, more wife than woman; how can you compete with one who is more woman than... anyone? Better, this was better than the fearful joy that was like rage. His heart began to obey him, and he turned his cheek slightly to touch her hair. Pity, he thought, is a #T# sharing sort of thing -- you can feel the helplessness of the unarmed, whereas rage, like passion, stands apart from its object and is lonesome. He settled himself now, and without moving he went limp in the thundering night, giving himself up to the glimmer and shift of his thoughts. More than anyone else on Earth, he was sure, he enjoyed being alive, and his perpetual delight was in being alive altogether, awake and aware, conscious of his body and how it lay, and where, and at the same time afloat like a gull on the wind of his thought, yielding, controlled. Perhaps he enjoyed the dark part of his unending day the most, camouflaged by a coverlet and the closing of eyes. In the day, he lived with that which he commanded and that which, if he wished, he could command: at night, he lived with that which he did command. He could call a symphony to heel and make a syllogism stand and wait. He could cut a stack of places, fan a hand of faces, choose his pleasure of them and discard the rest. His recall was pinpoint-perfect, back and back to the point where he had been dead; before that, only excellent. He used it now as a measure against his heart's rebellion, so that Beverly could sleep, and, sleeping, not know. And because the idea of Lois, here, was unbearable, he let his mind take him back to Lois when she was only a secret. She had been an explosion within him, a pressure and a kind of guilt; but all the things she had been were things he could contain, and no one knew. So back he went, to his renascence; back through the time he had been dead, and still farther to Lois-first-seen, to a time when a man with a job and a wife and a settled gray life found this special astonishment. T here was a lake, and small cheap cabins crouched in a row to sip its shores. There was a "lodge" with its stilted forefeet in the water and its rump on a hillside. There were boats and a float, a splintery dance floor and a bar which purveyed beverages all the way up to beer. Yancey, with little money and only two weeks vacation, had rented a cottage here sight unseen. He expected little of it, being resigned to the truism that a change of surroundings constitutes a vacation all by itself. He expected little of anything in those days. His life had reached a plateau -- a long, narrow, slightly down-graded plateau where the horizons were close and the going easy. His job was safe and, by the chemistry of paternalism, would increase in value as it aged, for all a large business requires of the bulk of its employees is that they stay. He had been married for seven years to the blithe and patient Beverly, who was content with him. There had been a time when they interrupted one another in the rush to share themselves, and a longer time when there seemed very little to say, which made them both vaguely unhappy, and they lived with a mild and inexpressible sense of loss. And at last they discovered that coded communication devised by most folk 'with their unexciting familiars : small-talk, half-finished sentences, faint interrogative and exclamatory sounds, and present (as opposed to absent) silences. Life for Yancey and his wife was not dull -- it was too unplanned for that -- but its pulse beat between comfortable limits. This unplanned quality -- why make plans when life is basically so certain? -- was responsible for their late arrival at the lake. Last year's map did not include the dozens of roads closed by the Thruway: somehow Yancey had never gotten around to having the spare fixed, so naturally they had a flat; then they had to drive back for the checkbook Yancey had forgotten, and of course it rained. It had rained all the previous night and all day, and when they turned into the lake road, it was past eleven at night and still raining. They pulled up beside the lodge, where a glistening faded Yancey turned up his jacket collar and plunged out into the rain and floundered up the wooden steps. When there was no answer to his knock, he noticed a soggy pasteboard stuck between the doorframe and a loose pane. He tried to read it and could not. He went to the head of the steps and called, "Bev! Turn the spotlight up here!" B everly, between the loosevalved clacking of the motor and the drumming of rain on the car roof, heard a voice but no words. She turned off the ignition and rolled the window down. "What?" "The light. Spotlight. Shine it up here." She did and Yancey went back to the door and crouched before the card. In a moment, he came back to the car and slid in, dripping. "They're all in bed," he said. "Cabin #." "Which one is our cabin?" "I don't know. They only confirmed the reservation. We'll have to wake them up." He pressed the starter. And pressed it, and pressed it. When the starter would deliver nothing but a click and a grunt, Yancey leaned back and blew sharply through his nostrils. "Wires wet, I guess." "What are we going to do?" "Walk. Or sit here." She touched his sodden shoulder and shuddered. "It can't be too far. We'll have to take a bag." "Okay. Which one?" She considered. "I guess the brown one. It has my robe in it, I remember... I think." He knelt on the seat and reached into the back, found and fumbled the brown suitcase out. "Better turn off the lights. Ignition, too." "The ignition is off," Beverly said, trying it. "Whatr "When you were on the porch. I couldn't hear you, so I turned it off." The advantage of that status between married folk which communicates by grunts and silences is that scorn, as well as contentment, can be expressed with little effort. Yancey was simply and completely silent, and she said, "Oh, dear." Then, defensively, "How was I supposed to know you didn't turn it back on?" Yancey merely snorted. Beverly huddled in the seat. "Now it's all my fault," she muttered. More than a statement of fact, it meant in addition that any discomfort from this point on would be laid to her, and would also be attached to the day's previous delays and exasperations, making her culpable in every way for everything. Yancey maintained his silence. Anything he might say would militate in her favor. To say one thing would forgive her, another would give her some ground for defense or counterattack. There was no real vindictiveness in his silence. He did not care whether or not she accepted the guilt as long as it was clear that guilt was not his. To put it another way, married familiars in this stage, though not necessarily enemies, have little friendship. T hey left the car by their respective doors, and the rain immediately increased as if it had been cued from the wings. The sporadic wind died completely and suddenly and water seemed to displace air altogether. It ran down Yancey's spine, it bashed at his eyelids, it threw gouts of mud up to his knees. He felt his way along the fender and around the front of the car until he collided with Beverly. They clung together, gasping and waiting for some kind of light to penetrate the hissing deluge. Some did, at last, a sodden skyglow with a dimmer echo from the lake, and they began to wade up the shore along the line of cabins. Visitors to the lake have been known to complain that the cabins were built too close together. It is clear that such plaintiffs never walked the row in the seething black of a summer rain. Each cabin boasted a wooden post with a number, cut from plywood with a jigsaw, perched on it. These could be read by water-wrinkled fingertips and they seemed to be fully half a mile apart. Yancey and Beverly did not attempt to talk; the only speech between them was a muttered number when occasionally they investigated one of the posts to check their progress. It was enough to make exasperation itself turn numb, not to be reawakened until they found cabin #, bypassed the next and turned in at what should therefore be #, only to find it called #. "Fifteen, fifteen!" Beverly wailed wetly. "Where's fourteen? It's gone!" "Gone, hell," growled Yancey, uselessly wiping at the water streaming over his mouth. "That's it there, the one we just passed. Afraid to number a cabin #. Superstition. Oh, well. You know a woman runs this place," he added. Beverly inhaled, a sharp gasp at this injustice, but took in as much water as air and could only cough. They backtracked and fumbled their way up to the dark bulk of Cabin #. Yancey dropped the suitcase noisily on the small porch. "Yance! You'll wake everybody up!" He looked at her and sighed. The sigh transmitted, "What did we come here for?" He pounded on the door and they pressed close to it, trying to get some shelter from the decorative gable over the door. A light showed, the doorknob moved, and they stepped back into the rain. And nothing, nothing at all told Yancey that, in this second, a line fell across his life, so that forever his biography would consist of the parts life-before-Lois and life-since-Lois, with nothing between them but a sheet of rain and a door that opened altogether, fearlessly. this is my wife, and we -- " And then he saw her face and his voice failed him. Quickly, effortlessly Lois spoke into his sudden silence and made it unnoticeable. "Come in, come in!" And with one swift, balanced movement, she had taken the suitcase from his hand, whirled around them to reach out in the rain for the doorknob and. in closing the door, swept them in. They stood panting and dripping, looking at her. She wore a maroon hostess robe with a collar that stood up like an Elizabethan ruff ; the material draped from her wide, flat shoulders with the static fluidity of a waterfall, all movement even while she was still. Her slight turn and bend as she set down the suitcase told him that those wide shoulders were indeed shoulders and not padding, and the unself-consciously bare feet declared that here was a woman who would stand and look straight into his eyes. Beverly spoke, or began to; he turned to her and saw that she was, by comparison, dumpy and wet and exceedingly familiar. "We didn't know which cabin to -- " "Never mind that," said Lois. "We'll have two weeks to explain ourselves to each other. First of all, you've just got to get out of those wet things, both of you. I'll heat some coffee." "But-but-but we can't -- " "But you can," said Lois. "Not another word. Go on," she said, crowding them into the hall which led away to the left. "There's the bath. Take a shower. A hot shower." Without pausing, she scooped thick towels from a shelf and dropped them into Beverly's hands. She reached past them and turned on the bathroom light. "I'll get your bag." She was gone and back before Beverly could get her mouth around another syllable. "Hurry now, before the muffins get cold." "Muffins?" Beverly squeaked. "Oh, now please don't go to that tr -- " But she was in the bathroom with Yancey, with the door closed, and Lois's swift, light footsteps answering her like a laugh as they went down the hall. "Well, I -- " said Beverly. "Yancey, what can we do?" "Like the lady says, I guess." He gestured. "You first." "A shower? Oh, I couldn'tl" He pulled her over in front of the basin and aimed her face at the mirror. "Wouldn't hurt." "I'm a sightl" She had one more second of hesitation, murmured, "Well..." and then pulled her soaking dress off over her head. Yancey undressed slowly while Beverly splashed under the shower. About the time the mirror was thoroughly steamed up, she began to hum, high and happy. Yancey's numbed brain kept recreating the vision of Lois as he had first seen her, framed in lamplight, which was in turn framed by a hurtling silver halo of rain. His mind formed it and I bounced away, formed it again I and again retreated. It would I only look and look back; it j would not evaluate. His world  contained nothing like this. He I doubted, at the moment, that it I could. thought came as an academic question, not to be answered by any process he then knew : How could a woman be so decisive, so swift, yet so extraordinarily quiet? Her voice had come to him as through earphones, direct and with fullest quality, yet seeming  not to reach the walls. Anyone ' else in the world, taking charge  like that, would certainly have I roared like a drill-sergeant. I "Don't turn the shower off," he I said to Beverly. "All right." She put a parI boiled arm through the curtains  and he dropped a towel across ) it. "Mmm, good," she said, rubbing briskly as she emerged. "I ! feel as if we'd been kidnapped, : but I'm glad." : He stepped into the shower and soaped up. The scalding waI ter was good on his chilled skin; he felt muscles relax which he hadn't known were taut. It was , far and away the best shower he had ever taken -- up to the point when Beverly uttered a soft and tragic wail. j "What have you done now?" he inquired, his voice carrying a labored patience. He turned off the shower and peered through the mists at his wife. She had a towel around her head like a turban and her pale blue chenille beach robe was thrown over her shoulders. "The black one," she said. "Give me a towel. What black what?" "Suitcase. This is all the beach things. There isn't a thing of yours here but your bathing trunks." "This," he said after a suitable silence, "is just your night." "Oh, Yance, I'm sorry." "I'm sorry, too." He stared fixedly at her until she wilted. "I'll just get back into those wet clothes." "You can't!" "Got a better idea? I'm not going out there in bathing trunks." There was a knock on the door. "Soup's on!" Before he could stop her, Beverly called out with a distressed bleat, "Know what I did? I brought the wrong suitcase! There's nothing here for my husband to wear but his bathing suit!" "Good," said the soft voice on the other side of the door. "Put it on and come on out. The coffee's poured." When they did not respond, Lois laughed gently. "Did you people come to the lake to be formal? Didn't you expect to be seen in bathing suits? Come on," she insisted, with such warmth that, in spite of themselves, they found some sheepish smiles and put them on. "Coming," said Yancey. He took the trunks out of the open suitcase. In the living room, a fire had been lit and was just beginning to gnaw on the kindling and warm a log. A table was set, simply and most attractively -- gray place mats, black cups, wroughtiron candlesticks with black candles. There was a steaming glass urn and an electric toaster which clucked once and popped up two halves of an English muffin just as they sat down. Lois came out of the kitchen carrying a black sugar bowl. She glided up behind them as they sat at the table, leaned over them. One long arm put the bowl down ; her other hand touched Yancey's bare shoulder. Something -- Something happened. TN the other bed, Lois abruptly  turned on her side, facing him. She reached over to the night table between the beds, found a cigarette. The wind died just then, taking a deep quiet breath for the next shriek, and in the jolting silence, a great sea smashed the cliff below. Lois struck her match, and the light and the explosion of water together plucked Yancey's nerves in a single shattering chord. He steeled himself and did not start. In the blinding flare of the match, Lois's face seemed to leap at him -- a partial mask, centered on the arch of an eyebrow, the smooth forehead over it, the forehead's miniature counterpart in the smooth lowered lid itself. The arches were stable, flawless, things on which could be built a strong and lovely structure if one could only... only... He lost the thought in the ballooning glow of her cigarette as she lay back and puffed quickly -- too quickly for her to enjoy it, surely. She drew the glow into a ruddy yellow sharp-tipped cone and the smoke must have been hot and harsh to taste. Hot and harsh. He moistened his lips. A surge of anger began to rise within him, matching again the sea outside. With an approaching breaker, the anger mounted and swelled and exploded. But the breaker could turn to foam and mist, and disperse, and he could do nothing but clench his teeth and press his head back into the pillow, for he must not wake Beverly. This was so unjust! Beverly gave him everything he wanted. She always had, especially since thattime at the lake. Especially since... Her capacity for giving amazed him, almost awed him. She gave with everything she did. Her singing was an outpouring. She laughed with all her heart. Her sympathy was quick and complete. She gave constantly, to him more than to anyone or anything else on Earth. They had -- now -- a marriage that was as good as a marriage could be. How, then, could there be room in him for this -- this thing, this acute, compelling awareness of Lois? Why must there be this terrible difference between "want" and "need"? He didn't need Lois! The anger subsided. He bent his arm and touched Beverly's hair. She moved, turning her head from side to side, burrowing closer in to his shoulder. This won't do, he thought desperately. Am I not the boy with the Brain -- the man who can't be pushed around -- who is never puzzled by anything? G O back, Yancey. Go back again to where your world was full of Lois and you could control it. If you could do it then, with a tenth of the mind you have now, then why... why can't you... why is your heart trying to break your ribs? He closed his eyes against the shouting silver of the night and the bloom of Lois's cigarette. Back, he demanded, go back again. Not to the hand on the shoulder. Afterward. The rain letting up, and the scurrying through the puddles and the skydrip to their own cabin, the one next door. Hold it. Hold it right there... Ah. He had it again; he was back two years, feeling again what it was like to be able to keep Lois to himself, and his heartbeat normal. Impossible! But he had done it, for almost two whole weeks. Lois on the diving platform, then painted on the sky, forever airborne -- forever, because awareness such as his photographed and filled the vision in his memory, she hung there still against a cloud. And the square dance, with the fiddle scratching away into an overloaded P.A. system and feet clumping against the boards, and the hoarse, happy shouter: "Alamen lef an' around we go, swing yore potner do-sido... now swing somebody else... an' somebody else... an' turning exactly with him, light and mobile in his arms, here and gone before he knew completely she was there, leaving him with a clot in his throat and a strange feeling in his right hand, where it had taken the small of her back. It seemed not to belong completely to him any more, as if her molecules and his had interpenetrated. Oh, and Lois breaking up a fight between one of the summer people and a town man, drifting close, ruffling the hair of one and laughing, being a presence about whom no violence could take place. Lois backing the station-wagon skillfully among the twisting colonnades of a birch grove... And Lois doing unremarkable things unforgettably -- a way of holding her fork, lifting her head, ceasing to breathe while she listened for something. Lois glimpsed through the office window, smiling to herself. Lois reading the announcements at lunch, her voice just loud enough for someone else sharing, say, a porch swing with her, yet audible to eighty people. Lois, for that matter, walking, standing, writing, making a phone call... Lois alive on this Earth -- that was enough to remember. Nearly two weeks of this, waking with Beverly, breakfasting, swimming, boating, hiking with Beverly, and his preoccupation cloaked in the phlegmatic communications of familiarity. What difference did it make if his silence was a rereading of Lois's face instead of a reconsideration of the sports page? He'd attempt to share neither with Beverly; what then was the difference? Earlier in their marriage, she might have complained that it was useless to have a vacation if he acted just the same during it as he did at home. At this stage, however, he was completely -- one might say invisibly -- Yancey. Just Yancey, like always. H e might have kept it up indefinitely, except for a certain natural limitation on opposing forces. Such a limitation may be seen at work in a vessel of water with a cork floating in it. You may weight the cork with grains of lead until it sinks; you may remove grains until it floats again. But you may not remove exactly enough lead so that the cork will suspend itself like Mahomet's tomb. If it does not float, it will sink. If it does not sink, it will float. The line of demarcation between buoyant and notbuoyant is a definite one, but so fine that it may be found only by passing it. There was such a line between possible and not-possible in Yancey's ability to contain his feelings about Lois. He did not know just where it was or what would make him cross it; but cross it he did, and there was no mistaking it once it happened. It was a Thursday (they were to leave on Sunday) and, in the afternoon, Yancey had asked Lois to come to their cabin that evening. He blurted it out; the words hung between them and he stared at them, amazed. Perhaps, he thought, he was being facetious... and then Lois gravely accepted, and he fled. He had to tell Beverly, of course, and he didn't know how and he made up, in advance, seven different ways to handle her in anticipation of the seven ways in which she might react. Naturally, each would result in Lois's coming. Exactly what the evening would be like, he could not predict, which was strange in a man who was so ready with alternatives when it came to making a hostess out of Beverly. "Bev," he said abruptly when he found her pitching horseshoes back of the lodge, "Lois is coming for a drink after dinner." Beverly tossed a horseshoe, watched it land, skip and fall, then turned to him. Her eyes were wide -- well, they always were -- and their shining surfaces reminded him, in that moment, of the reflecting side of a one-way mirror. What would she say? And which of the seven ripostes must he use to overcome her resistance? Or would he have to make up an eighth on the spur of the moment? He waited. She bent down and picked up another horseshoe and said, "What time?" So Lois came. Her light, firm knock might just as well have been on the base of his tongue, so immediately did he feel it. If, later on, his will failed him a little, it was because now he sat still using it up, and let Beverly go to the door. B everly, he thought, for her own sake, should not permit herself to be in the same room with Lois. Lois came in and filled the room, but without crowding. Lois went back and down into a chair as if carried by flying things. Lois's body grew up out of the cushions, supported by what she breathed, like an underwater plant. And Beverly bounced about with glasses and ice and talked... talked. What Lois did was something different; Lois conversed. He sat dully, contributing little, watching, thinking his own thoughts. He was achingly aware of many things, but foremost was the realization that Lois was making an effort -- a completely ' successful one, as far as he could judge -- to put Beverly at her ease. She made no such effort for him, and he told himself with pride that this was because she had no need to; they understood one another and must make things easy for poor Beverly. He lay back almost drowsily, soaking in Lois's presence as if she were the Sun and from her he was gradually acquiring a sort of tan. Then they were alone in the room, when Beverly went to the kitchen, and then Beverly was wailing something about ice -- oh, dear, but the Johnsons in Nine will have some; no, don't bother. I'll be right back -- the screen door in the kitchen slammed and Beverly's quick feet went bambam-bam down the back steps, and ceased to exist as they encountered pine-needles; all this in a brace of moments, and he was alone with Lois. He rose and went to the couch and sat where its corner touched the arm of the chair. It seemed to take all the energy he had; he wanted a cigarette, he wanted to speak. He could do nothing. After a silent time, he felt Lois's gaze on him. He turned to her quickly and she looked down. He was glad because their heads were so close, and he had never examined her this way, slowly. He wet his lips and said, "Only ten days." She made an interrogative syllable. "Knowing you." He rose suddenly and crossed in front of her. He put one knee on the broad arm of her chair and sat back on his heel, his other foot steadying him on the floor. She stayed just as she was, looking down at her long brown hands. "I want to tell you something, Lois." A small frown appeared and disappeared on her smooth forehead. She did not raise her eyes. "It's something I've never told even to... never told anyone." not raise her face, but now he had a three-quarter view of her profile. She waited, still as a held breath. "The night when we arrived," he said. "You made coffee and I sat at the table. You came up behind me to put something down. You touched me." He closed his eyes and put his arm across his chest and his hand high on his shoulder. "Something... happened," he said, with an unaccountable difficulty. Yancey was, in a small way, an engineer. He began abruptly to explain with painful pedantry, "It wasn't static electricity. It couldn't have been because it was pouring outside and the air was humid, not dry. You were on the bare floor in your bare feet, so it wasn't one of those deep-pile rug phenomena. It wasn't anything..." he opened his eyes, swallowed... "static. or anything like that," he managed. Then he was quiet, watching her. Her face, the flexible mask, was breaking up like an ice-floe in a sudden warm, strong current. Her brow was like a snowbank with the marks of a kitten's claws on it. There was a tear on her left cheek and the streak of one on her right, and her teeth were driving into her lower lip. The corners of her mouth were turned upward, precisely as they would be in a smile, and there was a delicate pucker in the flesh of her chin. She made not a sound. She rose, her eyes seizing his and holding them as she backed to the door. There she turned and ran out into the dark. When Beverly came back, he was still half-crouched, balancing on the arm of the chair. "Why, where's Lois?" "She left," he said heavily. Beverly looked at him. She looked at his eyes, quickly at his hairline, his mouth, and again at his eyes. Then she went into the kitchen and he heard the ice she was carrying fall explosively into the sink. She called out, "Is anything the matter, Yancey?" "Nothing's the matter," he said, getting up. They cleared up the glasses and ashtrays and went to bed. Lois was not mentioned. Nothing was mentioned. They went about the ritual of retiring in silence. When the lights were out, he said, "I've had enough of this place. Let's go home in the morning. Early." She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "If you want to." He thought she slept badly. He did not sleep at all. ously. For the first twenty miles, he could not understand what he felt; then he began to understand that it was anger. For another fifty miles, he could find no direction for the anger; none of the people involved had, after all, done anything, so how could there be anger? Occasionally he glanced at Beverly. She ordinarily sat back, looking forward at the sky, sideways to scenery, or inward to whatever it was she communed with during those silent times they spent together. This morning, however, she sat straight and kept her eyes on the road ahead, which made him aware that he was driving too fast and annoyed him beyond description. Childishly, he increased both his speed and his anger. And at last, with a feeling that approached relief, he found something to be angry at. Beverly. Why wouldn't she say, "Slow down!" Why had she agreed to let Lois come to their cabin? Why had she gone on blandly being herself this whole time, while he was tearing himself apart inside? Why hadn't she even questioned him when he decided so abruptly to leave? "If you want to," she'd said. "If you want to." What kind of self-respect was that? Or maybe she just didn't care. If you want to... For the very first time in seven years, he realized that this was her code, her basic philosophy of life. They had red drapes in the living room. They had always had red drapes in the living room. Well, he liked red drapes. He'd said so and she had put up red drapes. He glanced at her. She was watching the road tautly. He squeezed down a bit more on the accelerator. The place they lived in, the job he kept, the food they ate and probably the clothes she wore -- were they really chosen because they were what he wanted? Were they what he wanted? Should he have what he wanted? Why not? Beverly had. He laughed, making Beverly start violently. He shook his head at her, which meant either "I won't tell you" or "Mind your own business." He had disqualified himself from finding any flaw in this new and breathtaking conclusion and it made him exultant. He enjoyed speed in his exultation, and control. He sent the car howling through a deep cut in the crest of a hill, and around the blind turn on the other side, which was where he collided with the spaceship and was killed. wake of a hurricane, the wind died. Less tractable, the sea punished the cliff unabated. The night was as noisy, but the the noise was so different that it was as shocking as sudden silence. In it, Lois angrily rammed her cigarette into the ashtray on the night table. She turned her back and then sighed. The sound was only half vocalized, but such a voice propagates more like light than like sound. Beverly came hurtling up out of slumber and flashed free like a leaping fish, only to fall back and swirl near the under-surfaces of sleep. She raised her head, turning it as if seeking, but her eyes were closed. "Hm?" she said sleepily. Then her face dropped to Yancey's chest again and she was still. What I should do, thought Yancey wildly, is to sit her up and slap her awake and say, Look, Bev, you know what? I got killed that morning when we had the accident, I was dead altogether, the late Yancey Bowman, R.I.P., and when they put me back together, I was different. For two years now, you've been living with a man with a mind that never sleeps and never makes mistakes and does... can do... anything it wants. So you can't expect ordinary conduct from me, Bev, or rational behavior based on any reasoning you can understand. So if I do anything that... that hurts you, you mustn't be hurt. Can't you understand that? Of course she wouldn't understand. Why, he thought desperately, when they put me back together, didn't they iron out that little human wrinkle which made it possible for Pascal to make that remark about the heart having "reasons which reason does not know"? He snorted softly. Heart. Hell of a name for it. He lay on his back and watched the misty motion of surf-sCattered moon on the ceiling. He let his mind float into the vague shadows, be one with them away from, above, beyond his insupportable, insoluble problem. And gradually he found himself back there again, two years ago -- perhaps because of the momentum of his previous thinking, perhaps because, in reliving a time when there was Lois (and he could stand it) and a time when there was Lois (and he could not), it was a welcome thing to go into a time where Lois and Beverly and, for that matter, Yancey Bowman had little significance. it retracted its berthingfeet; it was one of these that the Bowman sedan struck. The car continued under the ship, and the edge of the flat berthing-foot sliced it down to the beltline, leaving a carmine horror holding the wheel. The ship hovered momentarily, then drifted over to the side of the road where the mangled automobile had come to rest. Directly above the car, it stopped. An opening appeared in the bottom of the ship and dilated like a camera iris. There was a slight swirl of dust and leaves, and then what was left of the car rose from the ground and disappeared into the ship. The ship then slid away to the clearing in the woods where it had lain hidden during its stay on Earth. Here it settled and concealed itself. Exactly what was done to him, Yancey, of course, could not know. He was made aware of the end results, naturally. He knew that what had been injured had been repaired and that, inI addition, certain changes had been made to improve the original. For example, his jaw-hinges had been redesigned to eliminate a tendency to dislocation. His vermiform appendix was gone -- not excised, but removed in some way which would indicate, in the event of an autopsy, that it had never formed in the first place. His tonsils had been replaced for reasons he could not understand, except that they were good ones. And yet such anomalies as his left little toe, which since birth had been bent and lay diagonally across its neighbor, and a right eye which wandered slightly to the right when he was fatigued -- these were left as they had originally been. The eye was one of the most interesting items, he thought later; the toe had simply not been improved, but the eye had been restored with its flaw. His teeth, too, contained the same same places. In sum, he had been altered only in ways that would not show. He did know, however, why these things had been done. There was, inside that ship, an aura of sympathy mixed with remorse unlike anything he had ever felt. Another component was respect; an all-embracing, almost worshipful respect for living things. Somewhere near where he lay in the ship's laboratory was a small covered shelf, on which lay a cicada, two grasshoppers, four summer moths and an earthworm, all casualties in his accident. Their cell structure, organic functions, digestive and reproductive processes were under study as meticulous as that which was being lavished on him. For them, restitution was to be made also, and they would be released in as good condition as this unthinkably advanced science could make them. The improvements seemed to be in the nature of a bonus, an implemented apology. And there was no denying that as long as such repayment was made, the alien footsteps on Earth were fairly obliterated. Yet Yancey was always certain that this last was not a primary motive and that tie aliens, whoever they were, wherever they came from, would have sacrificed anything, themselves included, rather than interfere with terrestrial and undoubtedly any other life. T hey had done the same things with his car as they had done with him. He had not the slightest question that, if they had wished, they could have rebuilt the old sedan into a gleaming miracle, capable of flight and operable forever on a teacup of fuel. He found it looking as it had always looked, even to rustspots and a crinkling around the windshield where moisture had penetrated the laminations of the safety glass. Yet there was a little more pickup, a little more economy; the brakes were no longer grabby in wet weather, and the cigarette lighter heated up in fewer seconds than it once did. Who were these aliens? Where had they come from? What were they doing here and what did they look like? He knew precisely as much as they permitted. He even knew why he knew as much as he did. They could restore his crushed head and shoulder, and did. They could make slight improvements, and did. But even they could not predict every situation in which he might find himself in the future. It was deeply important to them, and it would be to him, to conceal the changes that had been made, or the reciprocal impacts between him and his society might deeply affect both. The best concealment would be his full knowledge of what had been done and a solemn injunction to divulge nothing of it to anyone. That way he could never innocently perform public miracles and then be at a loss to explain. Most miraculous, of course, was the lowered impulse-resistance of his nervous system, including the total brain. He need no longer run over and over a thought sequence, like a wheel making a rut, to establish a synapse and therefore retain knowledge. He had quickened physical reactions. He had total recall (from the time of his release from the ship) and complete access to his previous memory banks. Yet a prime directive among his "surgeons" seemed to have been a safeguarding of what his world called Yancey Bowman. Nothing -- nothing at all -- was done to change Yancey Bowman into something or someone else. He functioned a little better now, but he functioned as Yancey Bowman, just as the changes in his digestive system were basically improvements rather than replacements. He could get more energy out of less food, even as he could breathe higher concentrations of CO# than he could before. Likewise, he could be, and was, Yancey Bowman more efficiently than ever before. Hence nothing was changed, even (or especially) the turmoil that was uppermost in his mind when he died. S O IT was that after death had struck on a Friday morning, the same morning hour on Sunday revealed a strange sight -- but only to some birds and a frightened chipmunk. Slipping out of Earth itself, the ship spread topsoil where it had lain, covered it with a little snow of early-fallen leaves, and shouldered into the sky. It wheeled and for a moment paralleled the deserted highway below. The opening on its belly appeared and down through the shining air swept an aging twodoor sedan, its wheels spinning and its motor humming. When it touched the roadway, there was not so much as a puff of dust, so perfectly were wheels and forward motion synchonized. The car hurtled through a cut in a hilltop and around the blind turn on the other side and continued on its way, with Yancey Bowman at the wheel, seething inwardly at the unreachable stupidities of his wife. And was there a moment of shock when he found himself alive and on his way unharmed, in his undamaged automobile? Did he turn and crane to see the dwindling speck in which his life had ended and begun again? Did he pull over to the side, mop his brow, and in a cascade of words exult over his new powers? Did Beverly demand to know what had happened, and would she not go out of her mind when she found that Friday was Sunday now, and that for her there had been no Saturday this week? No, and no, and no. There was no shock, because he was certain to his marrow that this was the way it would be, that he would say nothing and that he must not look back. As for Beverly, her silence was proof enough that her convictions would suit the situation as well. So he drove too fast and was too quiet, and his anger bubbled away until at length it concentrated into something quieter and rather uglier. As it formed, he drove more sensibly, and Beverly relaxed and leaned back, turning now and again to inspect the shutters or the drapes in a house they passed, watching the sky up ahead while she thought her own thoughts. If you could call them thoughts, he reflected. The product of his anger was a cold projection and took the form of an unspoken dictum to Beverly. He found that, with his new reflexes, he could give the matter his full attention, since now his hands seemed quite able to drive by themselves and even, it appeared, to read route signs. So, echoing noiselessly in his mind, this structure builded : This is not the end, Beverly, because the end must have been long since. You are not a woman living her life; you are a halfperson living mine. Your ambition could not push me ahead, your senses could not know when I was in torture, your taste is not your own, and your abilities are limited to a dull search for what might please me and a trial-anderror effort to get it for me. But aside from me, you are nothing. You do not and you could not earn your own living. Cast out on your own resources, you could not so much as fill a receptionist's chair or even run a summer resort. If nothing whatever had happened to me during these three days, what we have could never be called 'marriage' again, not by me. I have looked into the Sun, Beverly; I have flown; I can never crawl the mud with you again. I was too much for you before. What then am I now? A ND SO it ran, turning and elaborating itself, but always returning to a silent, scornful chant, buoyed up by glimpses of freedom and far horizons. After about an hour of this, he sensed her gaze and turned to look at her. She met his eyes and smiled her old smile. "It's going to be a lovely day, Yance." He turned abruptly back to the road. Something in his throat demanded attention and he found he could not swallow it. ly examining his feelings, and slowly it came to him that, among his other traits, the characteristic he had called empathy, the slipping on of other people s shoes, the world seen through the eyes of others -- this quality, too, had suffered a sea-change. What, to Beverly, had happened? Numbly, perhaps, she had been aware that something was amiss at the lake. He seriously doubted if she had identified the something. She'd known it was important -- she had agreed to their leaving so abruptly without asking any questions. But what was this "lovely day" business? Did she think that because their backs were turned to the unidentified threat, it had ceased to exist? Why, that must be exactly what she thought! Oh, Beverly, Beverly, are you going to get a kick in the teeth! But a day went by and no such thing happened. It didn't happen the first week, either, or in a month. Part of this was because of his work. He went back to it with a new sense, an awareness. He became totally sensitive to a condition called 'integration himself with his job, his job with his office, his office to the firm, and the firm itself in the economic mosaic. He wasted no motion in his job, and found himself spending his working day in pondering the structure of his surroundings. His first new effort was expressed through the suggestion box. It was perfect of its kind. It was an idea simple enough to have been thought of by his pre-accident self, and unlikely to be advanced by anyone not in this particular job. It eliminated the job and Yancey was advanced two grades and given new work to do. So he was busy, immersed, engaged, even at home. That in itself was enough to submerge his feelings about Beverly. But it was only a part of his procrastination. (He called it that at first: sooner or later, he thought, there would be changes made.) Largely, he delayed because of this accursed empathy. Beverly was so happy. She was happy and proud. If he became unaccountably silent, she tiptoed about the place, quite convinced that the great man was dreaming up something else for the suggestion box. If he was short-tempered, she forgave. If he bought her something, or okayed something she had bought, she was grateful. Home was harmonious, Beverly was so happy she sang again. He realized that it had been a great while since she sang. And all the while he knew how she felt. He knew it surely and painfully, and was fully aware of the impact she must suffer if hurricane trio he broached to her his inner thinking. He'd do it; oh, yes, he'd do it -- some day. Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt anything if she got that new winter coat slje had eyed so wistfully in the Sunday paper. did nothing about the matter. Actually, he thought less about it after a year, though there were moments... but work was more engrossing than ever and home was such a pleasure, though a quiet one, and Beverly was fairly blooming. If a man has the virtue (or the curse) of empathy, he has to be kind. He must, for the most selfish of reasons -- any time he strikes out at another human, he will find bruises on himself. Once, suddenly, he asked her: "Beverly, have I changed?" She looked puzzled. "Since last year, I mean. Do I seem different?" She thought about it. "I don't know. You're -- nice. But you were always nice." She laughed suddenly. "You can catch flies!" she teased. "Why do you ask, Yance?" "No reason. The new job and all." He passed the reference to flies. One had been bothering her last fall and he had absently reached out and caught it on the wing. It was the only time he had come near betraying his new talents. She had been astonished; In the eight years she had known him, he had never demonstrated coordination like that. She would have been more astonished if she had noticed that he caught the fly between his thumb and forefinger. "The new job hasn't gone to your head," she said, "if that's what you mean." He maneuvered a situation in the office which required attention in an out-of-town branch and arranged matters so that sending him out there was only logical. He was gone two weeks. He had seen to it that it was not the kind of task that required genius -- just application and good detail work. He met two girls while he was there, a brilliant one high in the company, and one far better than anything the company would ever be able to hire. He left them alone, disliking himself because he knew, in his heart of hearts, whom he was being faithful to. And it was good, good to get home. Due to what he had done out of town, he was raised another notch, but had to reorganize his new office, so there was no vacation that year. He could easily have analyzed this development to see whether he had purposely avoided a vacation, but he did not. He preferred not to know. There was a company picnic and Beverly sang. People reacted so enthusiastically -- especially to Yancey, as if he had invented her -- that he coaxed and goaded her into auditioning for a television show. She won the audition and appeared. She lost the audience vote to an eight-yearold boy with an accordian, but she was incandescently happy because Yancy had cared, Yancey had helped. that was the Year of the Big Christmas. They took a week off and went to a ski lodge in New Hampshire. They did a number of things together and nothing was wrong about any of it. And one night they sat before a Christmas-card kind of fireplace with a crowd of kindred souls, drinking glug and roaring carols, until they were too sleepy to move. After everyone else had gone to bed, they sat holding hands silently and watching the fire go out. As it will at such moments, his life whisked across his inner eye (this happens when one is living, not when one is dying) and stopped here at this hearth; and on it was superimposed the uneasy question What am I doing here? and over him came a flood of tenderness for Beverly, poor Beverly. For the first time, it occurred to him that this fantastic thing which had happened to him might have a grim and horrible result. His metabolic efficiency, his apparent immunity to everything from the common cold up, his outright inability to get too little rest or too little food... suppose he should live -- well, not forever, but -- He glanced at his wife, and though she was young-looking for her age, his quick mind vividly supplied a wrinkle here and there a little sag. He would be able to conceal his feelings about it, of course, but would she? Empathetically, he lived through a brief torture with her future, seeing her wither while he went on as he was. He averted his face and his eyes filled with dammed-up tears. Gently she disengaged her hand. He felt it stroking, stroking his wrist. And she had the wit, or the luck, to say absolutely nothing as she did it. When he thought back on it, much later, he thought, too, that though there were many women who could do many things Beverly couldn't do, not one of them would have done just that in just that way. In the spring, sensitive as he was to the feelings of his coworkers, he turned down a promotion. This would benefit him far more in the long run. And again it was summer and this time there would be a vacation. Well -- where? He would choose a place and Beverly would say, "If that's what you want, darling," and off they'd go. He thought and he thougiit about it. He had total recall and he recreated a great many scenes for himself. He all but decided and then he hesitated; and then, sitting at his desk in the office, he said aloud, "No! Not yet!" and startled some people. T hey went to New England, to a place new to them, craggy, rugged, sparkling, where sailboats notched the skyline and the wind smelled clean, unused by anyone else. For four days, they fished and swam, danced and dug gooeyducks. On the fifth day, they stayed snugly indoors while the sky pressed down like a giant's palm. At three o'clock, the small-craft warnings went up. At four, the Coast Guard called and warned them away from their rented shack; yes, it was a hurricane, a real hurricane and not just a storm. They loaded the car haphazardly and tumbled into it, and already there was a blinding fog of spume blowing horizontally across the coast road. They ground up the hill to the town and pulled into the hotel yard. The hotel, of course, was full, with a bed laid in the linen room and a cot set up behind the desk. "What are we going to do?" Beverly wailed. It was not distress. Not yet -- this was exciting. "We're going to have a drink," he said. "Then we're going to have some hot chowder. Then we're going to think about what we're going to do." So, with their lungs full of ozone and their eyes full of sparks, they went to the dining room. There was a picture which, say, a year ago, Yancey used to call to mind so often that it was as familiar as his safety razor. A slim back, wide shoulders clad in rich brown moleskin, lamplight glancing from dark obedient hair, and a long, brown hand resting lightly against an ivory cheek. When he saw it now, right before his eyes, he discounted it as an unwelcome phantom, a trick of the charged air. But Beverly squeezed his elbow and cried, "Yance -- look!" And before he could draw a breath, she sprang away from him to the table. "Lois! Lois, whatever in the world are you doing here?" This, Yancey told himself heavily, just had to happen. He went forward. "Hello, Lois." "Well!" It was a single syllable, but it contained warmth and welcome and... but how would you ever know, even when she smiled? A mask can smile. "Sit down. Please sit down, Beverly, Yancey." There was a rush of small talk. Oh, yes, she had sold the resort last spring. Worked for a while in town. Resigned, looking for something better. Came up here to let the wind blow the smog out of her hair. "Now I'm afraid it'll take the hair, too." Oh, yes, Beverly was saying, so warmly, so proudly... two promotions... turned down another one. He'll run the place in another year, just you watch... And a good deal more, while Lois watched her hands and smiled a small smile. "What about you, Lois? Are you married or anything?" "No," said Lois huskily, "I'm not married -- " and here Yancey looked away; he couldn't bear to meet her eyes while she said it -- "or anything." They had a drink, and another, and then some superlative New England chowder, and beer, and another drink. And then it was over and Yancey, paying the check, was telling himself glumly you did fine, boy; so if you're a little on the silent side for a day or two, what's the difference? I'm glad it's over. (But I wish...) R ising, Beverly said, "You're staying here?" Lois smiled oddly. "There's nothing they can do about it." Before he could stop himself, Yancey said, "Now what exactly does that mean?" "I just got in an hour and a half ago. I never dreamed I'd need a reservation. Funny, isn't it, after my experience? An#nvay, no vacancies. I shall just sit here until they want to close the place. I will then be a problem and it'll be up to them to solve it." She laughed quietly. "I've solved worse ones in my time." "Lois, you can't!" Beverly cried. "They'll make you sleep on the bar!" She shrugged, really not caring. "Yancey," said Beverly, flushed and urgent, "do you remember a time when two wet strangers couldn't find their beds and what happened to them?" He did meet Lois's eyes this time. This was when his heart began hammering. Beverly said, "Now it's our turn. We're going down the coast. We'll find a place. Come on. Come on, Lois!" Yancey thought, listen to her, taking the bit in her teeth. Doesn't she usually find out first what I want? And he answered himself, no; most of the time she just does what I want without asking. And, he told himself further, stop talking like a damn fool. Ten miles south, there was a town with a hotel. Full up. Four miles farther, a motel. Packed to the eaves. The next stretch was twenty miles and it was getting late. It was raining the kind of rain they had slogged through to Lois's cabin two years before, but this time they had a howling gale along with it. And by the time they reached the next town, the warnings were in. The hurricane, true to its unpredictible breed, had swung east, leaving rain and a maddened sea, but no further danger. So they drove into the slick, shining streets of a city still quaking in its boots, but vastly relieved. Here and there a store was open. There were three hotels, two of them full. They stopped at an all-night drugstore to ask directions to the third and Lois bought cigarettes and Beverly found a book-club edition of Anna Karenina and scooped it up with joy; she said she'd always Ayanted to read it. The third hotel had one double with bath. "Twin beds?" The clerk nodded. Yancey looked at Lois, but her eyes were cloaked. He looked at Beverly and she said, "Why not? We can fit in a twin bed. I'm not very big." No, he thought, you're not. Lois said, "Beverly -- " "Shh," said Beverly. "We'll take it," she told the clerk. was looking up at the ceiling with him. Think of that, he thought acidly -- here we are sharing some antiseptic moonbeams ! His biting thought was protection for a very brief while. His heart began again. It shook him with each beat. It shook the bed, the walls, the building, the beaten cliff outside, making it hurl back the sea with even greater violence. There was the softest butterfly-wing touch on his chest. Beverly had opened her eyes. Yancey thought madly, it's like one of those meaningless conjugations they give you in first-year French. I stare up into the darkness, you stare up into the darkness, she stares up into the darkness... Beverly wriggled up closer to him. She put her hand behind his head, pulling it toward her, and put her mouth on his ear. Barely audible, her breath said, "Darling, what is it? What do you want?" What did he want? Nothing, of course. Nothing he could have. Nothing, certainly, that he should have. He shook his head. Beverly crept back until her head was on his shoulder again. She lay still. She slid one'diand over his chest, to rest lightly on his hammering heart. Lois sighed quietly and turned over, away from them. The wind laughed and laughed outside, and another breaker smashed and spouted. The room grew black, then silver again. An hour-long five minutes passed. Abruptly, Beverly sat up. "I can't sleep," she said clearly. Lois was silent. Yancey watched Beverly. The silver light made everything in the room look like an overexposed photograph, but Beverly's flesh seemed pink -- the only thing in the whole wild, pulsing world that had any color but gray or black or silver. Beverly swung her legs out, stood up and stretched in the moonlight. She was small and firm and -- pink? Was she really pink or was that a memory, too, like the reconstruction of the two kinds of darkness on Lois's pillow that to his mind looked like Lois's face and hair? What a beautiful complementation, he thought hotly; how balanced an equation expresses this chaos! Beverly, small and fair, open, simple, direct. Lois, tall, slender, dark, devious, complex. And each so clearly lacking just what the other -- had. Beverly said, "I have nineteen chapters of Anna Karenina to read." She knelt on Yancey's bed briefly, reached across to the night table and scooped something up. Then she took the book off the highboy and went into the bathroom... Yellow light appeared starkly under the closed door. Yancey lay quite still, looking at the line of light. He heard Lois's sheets. At last he rolled over and looked at her. He could see the sliver of yellow again, across her eyes. She was half-sitting, resting her weight on one slender arm. She was looking at him, or past him, to the closed door. "What was that she picked up from the night table, Yancey?" "Her watch." Lois made a sound -- perhaps, "Oh." She sank down, slowly, until she rested on her elbow. She was looking at him now. He would know that even if he closed his eyes. H e lay still, wondering if Lois could hear his heart. She probably could. Beverly probably could, right through the door. He wondered, with shattering incbnsequentiality, whether Beverly really liked red drapes. Lois made a slight motion with her chin toward the yellow gleam. She whispered, "I couldn't do that." And again the gesture. "What she did then." A great, hungry yearning came over him, but at the moment, incredibly, it seemed to have no direction. It yawned somewhere beneath him, waiting to engulf him. And then, seeing the polished yellow lines in Lois's eyes, it came to him which of these women was simple and direct, and which was subtle and deep and complex. "I couldn't do that," Lois had said. How many other things could Beverly do that Lois could not? What kind of woman was Beverly? For the very first time, Yancey Bowman asked himself what had happened to 'Beverly the day he was killed. He'd assumed she was simply in cold storage while they put him back together. He'd assumed... how could he assume such a thing? He had never even asked about her. That was impossible! Unnatural! But of course -- he wasn't to ask. He would not have thought of it and the chances were that he could not have asked her even if he'd thought to. Why could he think of it now? It must be time to think of it. Something had happened to him, permitting him to. Qualifying him to. But -- he hadn't changed; he couldn't change. He was built and rebuilt and designed and redesigned to be Yancey Plus. What change could... Supposing, he told himself, they had a very young thing to rebuild. Wouldn't they build it so that it could go on growing? Then -- he could have grown. How? How? Well, what would he have done in this same mad situation, two years ago, even after he left the spaceship? He wouldn't nave lain here these swift seconds, speculating; that was for sure. "I couldn't do that," Lois had whispered. Supposing Beverly had been killed, too, and changed as he had been changed. He had never told her what he knew; why would she have told him? Wasn't the prime purpose to improve a little, but to change nothing? He was Yancey Plus, who went right ahead ruling the roost, accepting his wife's quiet variety of slave labor. Wouldn't she go right on being Beverly, giving him always what he wanted? And if she were Beverly... Plus, wouldn't she do... just this? he cried silently -- why didn't I ask her?Why couldn't I see? He found, to his astonishment, that he had only to ask this question to have it answered. Nothing responded; it was just that the answer, lying within him, was uncovered. You may not. I never could ask her. I can't now. I shall never be able to. And -- I don't want to, I don't need to! And she can't -- may not -- ask me! Then it was, with a surge of relief that made his head spin, that his heart eased and he smiled. He knew now how he had changed, how he had grown. He knew Beverly had changed. He knew, all at once, what to do now and what to do for the rest of his life with Beverly. All this in seconds, and he became aware again of the yellow lights in Lois's long eyes. He changed the subject by using her exact words. "I couldn't do that," he whispered. Lois nodded slowly. She sank back on the pillow and closed her eyes. He thought she trembled. He didn't know. He didn't much care. He turned over and filled his lungs, as he had not been able to do for more than an hour because of his leaping heart. "Beverly!" he bellowed. The book fell on the tiles. There was silence for a moment and then the door opened. "Yes, Yance?" "Get back to bed, idiot. You can read that book some other time. You need your sleep." "I just -- all right, Yance, if you want." She switched off the light and came in. A moonbeam swept across her face as she approached.' She was looking across him at Lois, her lips trembling. She got into bed. He put his arms around her, gently, humbly. She turned to him and suddenly held him so tight that he almost cried out. Cleveland, Ohio September #-#-#-S, # Autographs, manuscripts, artwork and gabfests by your favorite science fiction and fantasy authors, artists, editors and fans! For membership, send # to P. O. Box #, Edgewater Branch, Cleveland #, Ohio. You will receive several Progress Reports and a souvenir Program Booklet. Here is #'s first important science fiction book -- a dazzling literary oneman show. Many of the magazines these stories appeared in are now collector's items that cost as much as this whole volume. tion from all others are the vivid notes from the author's own working journal, giving the thematic origin and background of every story. Fascinating for readers and immensely valuable for writers, they demonstrate the skill and bravura that have made H. L. Gold an acknowledged master both as author and editor of science fiction. Only Galaxy readers can have this very special extra... Crown Publishers have set aside # first edition copies -- and there's one the coupon! 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Strange and exciting future civilizations that have their roots right in the present... magazine of ideas brought vividly to life! For # convincing issues, send # or # for # issues, TO #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. Can you profit by their mistakes? "Not getting enough education" You needn't make that mistake, "going to school," without inter You can get that better job, those fering with your present job or big promotions, the regular raises your social life, that so many I.C.S. students reT#  e#  s , d , wi(h , c s tomti port. And you can do it without in your spare time! "Wrong choice of career When you study with I.C.S. you but making sure you pick the have # courses to choose from. course that's right for you! I And part of ou :r job here at I.C.S. is not only giv ing you instruction I.C.S.! "Failed to seize oppprtuni ties" Your opportunity is right here on full information on any of the this page. Don't pass it by. 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Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery ofiife." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe L.L.T. i Scribe L.L.T. I t San Jose, California I t Please send me the free book. The Mastery  I of Life, which explains how I may (earn to i i use my faculties and powers of mind.   Name  ! Address  i City i i a A N Air Force major, writing from New Mexico, recently concluded his communique in this neighborly fashion: "I enjoy the magazine in spite of your editorials." Having done a bit of corresponding with him, I know he needed no Act of Congress to make him a gentleman -- actually, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth -- and was merely needling me. But you know something, Maje? That's how I feel, too. Sometimes editorials are fun to do. Occasionally they're an urgently needed safety valve. Now and then, of course, they are a burden to write and, I, suppose, to read, though those are the ones I revise most often and drastically. No matter which kind they are, though, I keep wondering what I, a devout entertainer, am doing writing what I refuse to call think-pieces, though they are. So, Maje, far from needling me, you've found a probably unexpected ally. Maybe it's just that this month's ideas won't shape up. Let's see what you would do with them. One of our writers reported trudging up the subway stairs behind two men and heard the first exclaim, "God's sakes! We get on uptown and the Sun's out. We get down here and it's pouring!" The second man' said, "Well, it's better than nothing." I've been puzzling over that reply for months. Had he only produced a reflex non sequitur? It's likeliest, but -- Maybe he's an interstellar tourist from a world where there is no weather at all ! It's a dazzler, I admit; I have no idea of what such a place would be like. It can't just be lack of an atmosphere, for there would be temperature changes, meteor rains and radiation storms such as the Moon has. Then what? Maybe he's from some part of this or another planet that chooses its weather -- by democratic means, I hope -- or decides to skip the whole thing. Mark Twain may have had a suspicion that this could be. In one of his books, he added an appendix with a wide variety of weather; the reader could pick whatever he thought most suittable for each scene... or none! ( Continued on page #) The Theory of Games is in the news! It has been revealed that top-level government planners use the Theory of Games to formulate basic policy. Economists find the Theoryof Games an invaluable new tool. All branches of the military have revised their logistic and strategic concepts in the light of this new Theory. Workers in all branches of Science find that the Theory of Games provides new avenues of approach to unsolved problems and places new interpretations on existing data. to think subconsciously in the new logic of this Theory. ble a matrix that looks like the figure illustrated. The player who placed the Black tiles selects a horizontal row on his indicator; the player who placed the white tiles selects a vertical column on his indicator. On the first play of this particular matrix, both players simultaneously reveal their indicators set as shown. in what proportion should you destribute your choices among the rows A B C D to be sure of winning this particular game over a series of After you have played several games of tuitively to solve problems such as the one enough game for a child to play, a new facunique! In chess or checkers you plan your next move only after your opponent has made reveal their choices simultaneously, you must think from two points of view at the same time! The new multi-valued logic inherent in the Theory of Games becomes a new thought habit as you use it in the concrete situations a training aid to reach a higher order of thinking! #x# board, # gold-stamped plastic markers, two indicators, score pad, pencil, and a Then the booklet explains some of the basic concepts of the Theory of Games. It shows you how to arrive at an arithmetical approximation to the solution of a matrix problem such as the one above. In addition it gives examples of the application of the Theory of Games to conflict situations in marketing ana military strategy. check, or money order (a # bill if you wish). rviAiKiA is an enjoyaoie game. It leaches fascinating new thought processes as it entertains. These methods can only be understood by those who have the mathematical background to study Game Theory. But with add this valuable new tool to your powers of analysis. It was as clean as a world can be -- but why had Collins killed himself -- and how was it I fell, I died, I saw another at the well? with the light covers a binding weight. Then my feet were cool on the solid comfort of the floor and miraculously the sound was dead. Slowly, sense by sense, I began to wake up. To the taste of salt. A rasp in my throat. A sudden chill of sweat beginning to evaporate between my rigid shoulderblades. There were minutes when my heart beat the breath from my throat before it seemed to reach my lungs... And then it was over. I stood up, kicked free of the fallen covers. The sick hammering began to subside. I was awake. I was not dead. I stood there in the middle of the floor and thought about it. I was awake and alive and my head swam in an ocean of relief. ed the heat on under the coffee pot, lit a cigarette. Then I switched on the transmitter and sat down in front of the mike, waiting for the green light to blink on. "Beck to Central," I said. "Hello, Johnny," Donovan's voice answered through the speaker. "What brings you in this hour of the night?" "Get me Radford." "You're kidding." "I'm not." "What's the matter, boy?" "I'd appreciate your concern more if you got the lead out and put me through to Radford." There was a long pause after that one. I let it sink in. I didn't want to make things rough on Donovan, but I was too knotted up to do anything about it. And then he said, "Okay, Johnny. But you know what it's like, rousting out top brass at two A.M." Vague sounds and a receding rustle told me he had left the microphone. His tone had suggested that ears would burn in descending chain of command until someone tried to get my job. I got a perverse kick out of the idea. Then the coffee pot murmured, the rich, astringent aroma knifing through the gathering smoke. I found last night's cup, nearly filled it, dug into my gear for the pint of brandy and added a good splash. After swallowing half a cup straight down, I felt more human and began wondering -- now that the fear was gone, now that my hands had stopped shaking and the sweat was dry -- what I would say to Colonel Radford. If I got through to him. I didn't. The voice that finally came through was narrow, hard-edged and tightly controlled, like its owner. "Beck! Are you mad?" "No, Major," I told the microphone. "Then you know why Collins shot himself." "No. I want..." "Listen, Beck." I imagined Major Castle squaring off in front of the microphone. "Somehow you threw a big enough scare into Donovan to start a fuse to Radford's bunk. It was blind luck that I was up and able to stamp on it. Damn it, will you ever learn that there are such things as channels?" "No," I said. "I'm a lousy civilian. Remember?"L" as a pause and a helpless, shoulder shrugging sigh. "All right, Beck. What is it?" And that was just the point : I didn't know. At least I wasn't sure. I killed the cigarette and thought a moment before answering. "First, am I supposed to be in any danger?" "Of course not!" "Second, I want all the information now available on Fallon's planet... "That's what you  re supposed to be doing, isn't it?" Castle parried. "Sure -- in my field. But I want all the dope that comes in -- including the reports from the other Anthro men -- as it comes in. Also all earlier reports; medical, biological, chemical, the works. Third, I want Collins' file." "You saw the department's summary," Castle objected. "Sure. And I knew the man three years. Don't forget that. I knew him as well as you ever get to know a man you work with. But I've no more idea why he'd blow his brains out than you have." Castle's tight voice said, "He was a neurotic, Beck. I've been studying the case myself, of course. He only just scraped by on his last psych test. Rated # -- " "When # is the norm and point six the safety minimum for this job, that doesn't mean a thing. The Psych boys are too good to slip up on a thing like that. Look, Major -- Collins wasn't the type to commit suicide because he was alone for three days. After a long enough time, you might do it yourself and so might anyone, but not after three days and not just because you couldn't talk to anyone. What about his radio equipment? Any sign of tampering?" "None. We checked every millimeter. The generator gave out. You know field men are supposed to keep track of their own equipment. He should have applied for replacements six months ago. Anthro hasn't a kick coming on that score, Beck." "No one's kicking, Major. The fact remains that he shot himself. Until we find out why, there's a chance of an overlooked danger factor on Fallon's planet and it's not my job to find it." The speaker breathed irritably. Finally the major said, "Well?" "I want another man out here." "If you mean one of mine and not an Anthro man, you're crazy. I can't spare one." "Anthro's out and you know it." "There isn't a man I can -- " "I never learned about channels, Major." "All right, you crumb. Tomorrow morning." "Fine." "One detail, Beck." The disembodied voice took on a bassy rumble, as though he had edged nearer the mike to emphasize his point. I could feel it coming. "One question. Why, Beck?" A ND that was it. Why? With the lights on, with the warmth of the brandy and coffee inside me, the chill gone and comfortably familiar equipment on every side, it was hard to think clearly, almost hard to remember. But I did remember. The dream. The opaque, undetailed dream. The noise my throat had made when I came out of it. "I'm scared," I said. "That's all. Good night." I switched off the set. The green eye died under a dark cataract. The beginning of a word fell out of the loudspeaker, slurring off more like the forgotten end to a sad story than the start of something, and I stood up and drained the coffee cup. I wasn't ready for sleep again. I wasn't ready to think about sleep. There was a lot to be done in the morning, but the urge to be at it, coupled with the thought of working after a sleepless night, only magnified my tension and made me all the less inclined to get back on the cot. I put on shoes and a light coat, picked up my cigarettes and opened the prefab's door. The cool, dreamy air of Fallon's planet came through the opening. Shale and crumbled masonry and powdered rock made a reassuring sound underfoot. Outside, I leaned against that incredible wall and looked down long moments at my job. It lay in a deep saucer of land below the wall in whose lee the prefab had been set, surrounded by low hills, a vague, pale picture of ruin and soft shadow under the triplet moons. Military and Anthro files spelled its name, like the many others listed, with key initial and landmass number followed by cartographic coordinates, and described it with code symbols distilled from the reports of men like myself and our successors, a precise, economical, deadly nomenclature for dead things. Anthro's job was to catalogue the myriad cultures, living or otherwise, encountered in the course of Galactic exploration. It was part of the never-ending process of refining the statistical technique of culture analysis and trait prediction. Lone men did the preliminary work, specialists dropped around to make expert guesses, to outline work to come and estimate time and material needed for full-scale investigation if such were justified. The hill-cupped ruin had been Collins' job. He had come to it ten days before. The construction men had put up the prefab in the shade of the wall on the 'taw hill-top, run the water hose to the stream in the hollow and then left him. Seventy-two hours later -- sixtyeight, perhaps, from the generator's failure -- Collins was dead. On the fifth day, the crew that had flown out to investigate his radio silence found him in the prefab, the pistol butt still lying across his fingers. job was not. And in the vague, bright-cloudy light of the tight-running moons, the city seemed to be living, wrapped in some quiet fantasy, remembering itself and the days and the ages it had known. Perhaps, in the daytime, it slept more deeply. Daylight was still five hours away. There was nothing I could do till then, no matter how little I felt like bed. I had a final smoke before going back into the cabin and closing out the night. But I could not close out the job or Collins or the way he had died. I could not close out other things. I had one thing to be proud of next morning. I shaved. Casual inspection would have shown how badly. I misset the dial on the stove, scorched my breakfast and threw it out disgustedly. My breakfast was more coffee. When I was through, my head had stopped pounding and the jitters had retreated a pace, but my eves throbbed and a gritty sensation clogged the lids. I got little enough done, and was inside when the long-hop beetle arrived at eleven. When I went out to see who the major had detailed to help me, I found Castle himself climbing toward the prefab. Perhaps because he had come eight hundred kilometers since breakfast, perhaps for other reasons, the major was unhappy. His greeting was limited to a brief nod. "All right, Beck. You've got your other man." He was a tall, loosely built individual, lean as a rail and if not quite as hard the difference was one to interest only a professional hair-splitter. The voice and face were more edged than usual. I stood aside from the door and invited him in. "I didn't mean to inconvenience you, Major." "I'm sure. I told you I was short-handed, Beck. I wasn't joking." "Neither was I." the room, flicking from item to item -- the unmade cot, the cluttered desk, the stove, the radio and transmitter, the file racks and recording apparatus. His displeasure increased. "There's a long jump between Anthro and the Military," he said. "Understand. I have no quarrel with the principle of separation. There's no reason why the two forces can't operate with maximum efficiency under the present setup." I almost added, "And civilian control," but managed to restrain myself. "But. While I see no call for your department to be under my command -- Colonel Radford's command -- I resent any attempt by Anthropology to treat Military as its own sub-department, errand-runner or whipping boy." "Okay, Major." "You men are ahead of us in public relations, Beck. You've instilled a prejudice against Military." "There's a long history behind that, Major." "But you've overloaded this time, and that's why I'm here. I know what sort of stink you'd raise back home, if you didn't get another man when you asked for one, so I'm here on a doublepurpose mission: to fulfill your request and to issue a detailed report. This had better be good." He looked over the cabin again. "Your place is a mess. Looks as if you had an all-night party." His repellent eyes looked keenly at me from under straight brows. "Been drinking, Beck?" I met the look long enough to show him I was able to, then shrugged and dipped into the wastebasket. I showed him the brandy bottle. "This much," I told him. He smiled suddenly out of his eyes, though the controlled contours of his face never varied. I threw the bottle back into the receptacle. "One pint of brandy, Major. D'you suppose Anthro should pass a rule against liquor?" "It might help." "With the psych tests we survive? I'm healthy as a rock, physically and mentally. Yet last night I did my best to drink myself into a stupor. There wasn't enough liquor." The smile left his eyes. "Two men? One after the other? The whole planet was given the standard treatment by Medical. We've been on Safety Schedule Green for six weeks now. Every report shows it clean as a whistle." "Something overlooked?" He shrugged. "Such as?" before telling him, wondering with half my head what his brisk, medicinal reaction would be. He waited, smothering impatience and exuding overbearing self-confidence. "Before I radioed in last night," I told him, "I had a dream. A nightmare. I don't remember what it was about. I woke up screaming my head off. After I'd talked to you, I went out and looked down on that ruin you flew over before I managed to talk myself into hitting the sack again. It took me an hour to get to sleep and fifteen minutes for the dream to wake me again. I drank half the bottle and tried again. The third time I killed it and got two hours sleep. Then I didn't have any more anesthetic and wasn't ready to try again anyhow." Castle did not react visibly -- a characteristic reaction of his. He might have shown surprise, disgust, contempt, concern. He might have dropped his jaw, thrown back his head and laughed the roof off at the idea of a reportedly intelligent, physically powerful specimen of Homo sapiens, male sex, holder of three academic degrees, suddenly falling prey to dreams that threatened to unhinge him. He did none of these. Instead he crossed to the desk, pulled out the folding chair and sat down looking up at me... speculatively, then with a barely perceptible hint of malice. He said after a while, "What did you dream about? Collins' suicide?" "I told you. I don't remember." I sat down on the rumpled cot. "Not the first time, nor the second or third times. None of the details, I mean. But I do remember the over-all emotional quality." I interlaced my fingers. Castle noticed, gave my hands a glance that made me want to belt him. "Well?" "I was dying. I went through every physical and emotional process of dying, up to and except the final extinction of the last thought and feeling." "I see." His speculative look tightened. I imagined the pupils contracting, catlike, into vertical slits. He said thoughtfully, "Of course I checked your own psych rating, Beck." "It's good. Damn good." "One point two, maximum variation of # in the last three years." A LL personnel underwent fulldress medical and psych tests annually. Earth time. The slightest deviation in health and psychological makeup might push a man over the border of safety, and while few enough external dangers were encountered in the work, a wide margin had to be maintained. "You dropped to # after that bout with Hillman's fever," he added. "Your last attack was eighteen months ago. You might be suffering from some unknown after-effect." "Hillman's fever is practically a duplicate of Terrestrial malaria," I said bluntly. "Medical gave me a clean bill of health. I trust Medical. Even MilitaryMedical. And Collins never had the disease." "That's right." Castle stood up, slid the chair neatly under the desk. "Collins never had the disease. Have you already decided that Collins blew his brains out because he was trapped here alone with dreams of death?" And that brought me up short, without a word in my mouth. Because even if the long shot paid off and it turned out to be true, it was as yet an unwarranted assumption; and it was for damn sure I'd had no intention of letting Castle know I believed it. I hadn't thought I did believe it. But now, irrationally, trapped -- I realized that I did. The preliminary skirmish was over and there were things to be done. I made the cot up for the night, while Castle went back to the waiting beetle to collect his gear and send the craft back to Base Camp with, I suspected, a verbal message to Colonel Radford. On the other hand, being the man he was, he might get a perverse kick out of making a derogatory radio report in my hearing. I shrugged the idea off and tried to build up a wall of indifference to the overbearing man with the pale, overconfident eyes while tidying up the cabin. I had just lit a cigarette and switched on the heat under the remains of the breakfest coffee when he returned, carrying a valise under one arm and a tightly rolled sleeping bag under the other. H E slid his sleeping bag out of the way under the cot. "I sent the beetle back. I gave the pilot instructions to be relayed to the appropriate officers at Base Camp concerning radio communication, We'll make contact at #, # and # hours daily, our time. Failing report, the Communications officer will send out a detail at once, top priority. He will do the same if at any time either of us attempts to change or abrogate these instructions. I'm sure you'll find the arrangement satisfactory." "Sure, Major. I suppose you sent word that so far the only visible disturbance was an Anthro man with nightmares?" "Of course," he said in some surprise. "Have some coffee," I said dead-pan. "What's your psych rating, Major?" He said it was one-point-o, unlocked his valise and produced a bulging brief case. "Everything you asked for, Beck." He dropped the brief case on the desk and threw it open. "Scientific reports on every aspect of Fallon's planet to date; copies of everything Anthropology has collected or surmised, Medical's file on Collins, the works. Also this." He drew out a yellow medical report and slapped it down face up, where I could read the inscription. #SA#. Beck , John Hale. He parked himself on the cot. "Let's get to work.". It took four hours. Castle's manner advertised the belief that the whole procedure was a waste of time, but he was surgical in his thoroughness and knew the business inside and out, every detail of it. Fallon's planet was an "A" index world: A#-ca in its main classification; "A" meaning Earthtype, or supporting human life without artificial aids such as repirators, synthetic foods or anti-grav. The numeral dealt with intelligent life-forms, "#" the negative designation: "c" native fauna below the level of Terrestrial primates, "a" floral development, the rest of the long index being devoted to a coded breakdown detailing information contained in the first four units. There were those -- Terrestrial and otherwise -- who had chuckled over the presumption of Earthmen establishing a scale of values that set Terran standards as the peak of evolutionary achievement, and others who had reacted differently. The semantically inclined had done the same over our naming the cultural research program Anthropology, but the quibbles were philosophical and no one denied that the system was efficient. A man with Castle's qualifications -- or mine, or Collins' -- could give a thorough description of a planet from the one-line index alone, and postulate further data with a high percentage of accuracy. was parenthesized as tentative, except for the absence of the race that had established the culture or cultures whose remains had been found. Although not enough data was in to support statistical guesswork, extrapolation suggested -- and the report carefully underlined the word -- independent city states, possibly not dissimilar to the Mayan, a non-humanoid life-form, probareligious in some manner or other. The sum total was no more than a man with good eyes and a predilection for morning walks would have learned in a week. "Satisfied with the report?" Castle demanded. "I 'told you the planet was clean." I skimmed over Medical's report again. Its concluding summation read like a hymn of praise. Fallon's planet was the world the human race should have chosen to develop on. The list of poisonous flora was still growing, the medics warned, but edible varieties, described and classified ad nauseum, abounded on all three major land masses. I added the report to the growing pile on my left. "All right, it's clean." For the rest of it: the planet was slightly larger than Terra, its gravity a shade lighter. A #-pounder would land to carry five or six fewer pounds on his bones. Its rotation period was divisible by chronometric modification into twenty-four arbitrary hours each about # minutes longer than an Earth hour. A couple of the inert gasses were missing from the atmosphere, oxygen content ran a fraction higher, and water vapor content was on a par with the Levant on a summer day. "Nuts," I said, and emptied the coffee pot. "Collins' record." We took it item by item, though I knew pretty much what it contained. A tall, dark, hard-eyed man with a penchant for direct action that must have thwarted many an official of Castle's type during the eight years he had worked with the department. Collins had contracted bronchial pneumonia as a boy, after falling in a river on a hunting trip. To a spinterish psychologist, hunting for pleasure had suggested a streak of atavism to be watched, but the only significant item in his general analysis was his classification as a marked cycloid. I knew he had worried over his psych rating, but he had never pulled lower than an #. "Indicative?" used to the job and he liked it too, Major. His rating dropped and wavered a few points after his wife ditched him three years ago -- and remember, Hellene was around a long time before she was transferred to another starship. Then he climbed from the low to a point seven five on his last medical. That's # above the minimum required for the job. Not too much, but enough. The # minimum isn't a neurotic rating, Major. It just indicates base qualifications for a lonely job. Isn't there a wellestablished theory that no one rated higher than point three is capable of suicide? Castle shrugged tightly. "A fit of depression, aggravated by enforced radio silence. Ratings are annual. Anything might have happened to him in the last few months. A manic-depressive -- " "Cycloid," I insisted. "Your own file probably classifies you as a schizoid personality. Does that make you an incipient hebephrene or catatonic?" Castle said, "Look here, Beck. If the man had not been dangerously neurotic he wouldn't have killed himself. That's bedrock." "And the dreams?" "If he had the dreams." Yes. If he had the dreams... Castle said, "If a man in my command had recurrent nightmares that impaired his efficiency, I'd turn him over to Medical without a second thought. In space, on alien worlds, you can't take chances with mental incompetents." way by midafternoon, we had two good hours of sunlight left to explore the dreamy ruin. Key initial, land mass number, and all the other drearily practical attributes of scientific identification could not disguise its quality of haunted charm. In the white, clear warmth of the afternoon sun, it lay quiet and sadly serene. The air was like cool silk. It raised no dust. I thought it must be always spring on Fallon's planet. If you measured from the wall that backed the Anthro prefab to an isolated cluster of unidentifiable masonry on the far side, the city, was about three hundred meters across at its widest point. In closer truth, it was a sixtyineter walk from the wall to the crumble marking the real perimeter; a downhill walk over ground no different from the bronzed grass slopes visible on every side, and the city itself a mere two-hundredmeter nucleus of gray and blue-white walls slowly falling in on themselves. The major was quiet in these surroundings. The city had once had a central street that was now just a clearer path than any other; a diameter bisecting its rough circle. Halfway along it to the farther edge was the miracle I wanted to show the major first, before he had time to clamp his efficient, military mind against the initial effect the city had on him; before he started talking again and the texture of the city and the afternoon was tom apart by statistics, callibrations, scientific guesses... "What is it?" We approached the parapet. It rose knee-high in the center of the street, thousands of years old, more thousands deserted, worn by countless equivalent hands and arms and elbows and then by the winds and the points of wind-borne sand that even this clear atmosphere must carry, as the days of life and feeling drifted backward to forgetfulness, and only the walls and beams and fallen roofs remained. "A well," I told him. I sat on the parapet, Castle leaned both hands on it and bent, peering over the rim into the cool, shadowed cylinder that sank away in narrowing concentric circles to the mercurial coin of water far below. Moss had gathered in green shadow. Here and there time had warped the pattern of the stones, raising one, lowering another, subtly altering perspective. The well was an oasis, alive and smelling green and fresh. "T'LL be damned," he said suddenly. "The stones are carved. They're carved in bas-relief." "Not just individually, Major. The carving on each stone is part of a larger pattern." "I wonder what it represents." He leaned further over the rim, peering intently. "I don't know. We'll find out later, when we get a full crew out here and can get down to look. I don't have the equipment or I'd have been down to the water's edge yesterday. They've been protected down there, Major. The bestpreserved decorations in the place." "There's more?" He sat down. "A lot. When we go back, take a closer look at that hunk of wall up by the prefab. It seems to have been covered on both sides, but the stone is pitted so badly most of the details are gone for good. And down here it's everywhere. Symbolic stuff, from the shapes. Probably enough to justify the full-scale archeological research. It's rich, Major. Must have been quite a place, no matter what the natives looked like. "I'll tell you something. I've been a field man with Anthro for ten years. I've seen dozens of cultures, living and dead. I've prowled through so many ruins that once the work's done and the reports are in, each one blurs into all the ones before it and there's nothing to remember it by. But not this time." "No?" He raised an interrogative eyebrow. But the gunbarrel directness had left his eyes, and his look was of a man no longer dominating his environment but rather responding to it, and that was what I wanted. "No," I said. "It's hard to explain." And it was, too. It's never easy to impart the intangibles of feeling that hover on the verge of conscious thought, but can't quite make the crossing. Especially to a man like Castle whose receptivity is an ephemeral thing that one wrong association can disrupt. I went carefully then, easing my way, letting the well and the air and the sleeping city do their part. It was their story. My job was to help him listen to it. He listened, all right, listened while his conscious mind heard me telling him that this one city was more than a scattered mass of inanimate stone and clay to be named in terms of its location and described with years and chemical formulae; because it was a picture, a dream, a feeling, and wherever you went the feeling dominated, emanating from each block of stone, from jagged walls and powdered mortar, from every nook and shadow: a thread of joy, a nostalgic mist, and something else... He nodded slowly, his now guiet eyes looking and not looking, a long way off. And then he said in wonder, "I wonder why the damn fool shot himself?" It was inevitable, I guess. The stark incongruity had to intrude, and once the idea was there he gave it words that brought him back to who he was and what he was engaged in. The characteristic focus returned to his eyes. The mood was gone. I stood up. "Maybe we'll find out." W E roamed until sunset. We outlined individual buildings as clearly as we could, estimated their height and dug around with our hands in the rubble in the hope of finding artifacts, but without success. We surveyed the superficial, and I dug into my memory of survey composites to help form a picture of what the city might have been, and how its people lived and what they looked like. Thorough as usual, Castle caught on quickly, made his own deductions from what I told him and what he saw. The inhabitants, we thought, had walked upright, with an average five-feet height. Perhaps they were bipeds. Such stairs as we found were of comfortable depth. By the time we had begun to climb back to the prefab, my head had started to throb and the sting had come back to my eyes. Though the day had been relatively easy, the night before had not, and Castle's presence was the worst hangover remedy that had ever been forced on me. But I knew how I was going to treat the sleep problem tonight. I also knew what the major would think. I got the first-aid kit out, as soon as we had cleaned up after dinner. He was instantly on guard. "What's the idea, Beck?" "I'm taking no chances." I fitted a sterile needle to the hypodermic, punctured the sedative phial and drew two c.c. into the cylinder. "I need the sleep." Castle looked studiously indifferent. The sting in my forearm was momentarily sharp, then sharp again as the needle withdrew. "Fivehour shifts?" he suggested. "Okay, Major." heard him moving around, then the click as he switched on the transmitter to warm it up for the evening report to Base Camp, but the drug and the tiredness took effect before he made contact and I didn't hear a word of it. Nor did I dream. The comfortable falling-away preceding sleep merged into the sharper climb to consciousness, as the major's hand on my shoulder shook me awake. I rolled out, got into shoes and trousers. I felt better, but the effect of the sedative still clogged my head and slowed my thinking. Coffee complained on the stove. In the few minutes it took to wash and pour some coffee down my throat, Castle unfolded the sleeping bag on the cot and bedded down. "Any trouble tonight, . Beck?" "None. There's a lot to be done tomorrow, Major... "I'll be ready for it." He stretched once in his cocoon, turned away from the light, and that was all. In moments, I knew, he'd be swiftly and disciplinedly asleep. I sat down at the desk with another mug of coffee and lit a cigarette, looking blearily into the next five hours. They stretched ahead in a drugged fog. There was nothing to do but read, nothing to read but the reports, and not a chance in a thousand of getting anything new from them. I fought for a while to bring some of the edge back to my mind, gave up and got the reports out anyway. I went through the Medical on Fallon's planet first, then opened the one on Collins. The major's breathing became rhythmic, peaceful... reports cyclic pattern discernible, but nothing significant noted concerning periods of lower emotional tone as affecting work or co-workers. Statement supports diagnosis that cyclic pattern lies within normal limits for personality this type. General adjustment level confirmed by Pedersen battery ( Rorschach , Hakken, Pietro, etc.)... It went on for pages and was followed by more of the same, this time in elaborate tabular form incomprehensible to the layman. But the final analysis was undebatable. Collins was normal. He had been to the last. Or almost the last. I pushed the report aside. I N the sleeping bag the major shifted, stretched again, relaxed into deeper sleep. As soon as he was settled, I switched on the transmitter. "Beck to Central." "Hi, Johnny," Donovan's voice said in surprise. I turned the speaker down till he was barely audible. He went on with odd inflection, "I didn't expect you in tonight..." "Did you take Castle's eight o'clock report?" "Come again?" "Gain me up. Castle's asleep and I don't want to wake him... Did you take his report tonight?" "Yeah. He dictated in full. We got it on crystal, with orders to prepare copies to go to various agencies. Pretty heavy stuff, Johnny. Want me to play it back for you?" "Don't bother. Give me the gist." Donovan hesitated. "Well... He took a big slap at you, and another at Anthro. Hints that you and Collins should've been suspended long ago. He thinks something's offbeam in Medical for passing you guys." "Is he after my job?" "Looks that way. Jesus, man, what's this about you poking merodine into your arm to make you sleep?" "Is he trying to make a case out of that?" I asked angrily. "Trying, hell! Listen, Johnny. You're up to your neck. You know how that guy operates. Details, channels. He never overlooks a thing. Reading between the lines... you know what I think?" "That he'll start a move to incorporate the civilian services into the military setup?" "With you as fall guy. Someone's always agitating. All they'll need is one good fall guy. You'll have to pull something shrewd, Johnny. What's up your sleeve?" "Not a damn thing. I'm riding a hunch and betting on my psych rating. Anything new from the Anthro field men?" "Yeah. Marius found another ruin way south on Land Mass II. I was on the board when he recorded a prelim. Indications are it's the same as all the others -- same race, at least. But it's all shot to hell. Climate's rougher down there. Oh, yeah. Hanson thinks he's discovered what they looked like. The inhabitants, I mean. He's sending in his reconstruction as soon as he completes it." "Relief carvings?" "That's right. Trouble is, he says the rock they're carved on has undergone some process or other, I forget what he called it. Anyway, what he means is it's so pitted and bored through it's hard to make out the details and crumbles easily. That mean anything to you?" "Maybe. There's some of it around here. I want those reports verbatim." "I'll dig 'em up as soon as I go off duty." "Don't take any chances. Make out an official request, or whatever routine is required of Military personnel. I don't want the top brass saying Beck's been undermining military morale and procedure." "First thing, Johnny. I'll have my relief play 'em for you." "Fine... and, Donovan, channels and everything considered, maybe you can... expedite the request, or whatever the official term is." A faint chuckle came over the air. "I'm with you, Johnny. Anything else?" "That'll do it. Good night." mitter died. I leaned back and chewed my lip. So maybe Hanson could tell us what they looked like. I doubted that it mattered much. Then there was the business about the stones' appearance; the look of long subjection to a selective solvent that removed certain elements of its composition and left it honeycombed and crumbling. That probably didn't matter either. But it was something to think about, if for no other reason than I had found it and Hanson had found it. Probably others would report it later on, and tie it in with some aspect of the job. So much for the job. Also, to hell with the job. My own problem was just as big. The major rolled over, lay flat on his back and turned his face toward the light. Even in his sleep, he kept that look of unrelenting self-control. He frowned against the light, now; pulled his head around uncomfortably. His neck glistened. I came out of the chair, wideawake and watching intently. The prefab was at a comfortable temperature, the window open to the mild night. I stood so that the light fell directly upon him, lighting the sweating skin, the corded neck, the accelerating pumping of the pulse in his throat, and held my breath... There was a netlike silence that caught and magnified the scrape cf suddenly tortured breathing from his open mouth. It continued while the pulse ticked off rapid seconds. Sweat beaded and ran down his face. The muscles of his face and neck worked stiffly against themselves. Explosively the waiting ended. He reared, writhing out of the confines of the sleeping bag in a single motion, eyes open, hangjawed. His right hand snaked out holding a service pistol snatched with the precision of long training from some hidden fold in the cocoon. His voice blurred unintelligibly. "What?" "The wall... he said thickly, and focus and recollection returned with startled, scared confusion to his eyes, "Major! Wake up!" "I'm awake." He released a long breath. For a moment, he stared in stupefaction at the gun in his hand, now leveled vaguely at the prefab's door across the room, muttered a curt obscenity and dropped it on the cot. He swung his legs to the floor and  sat wiping the sweat from his face, watching me with antagonism, and then a futile baffled rage. "I heard you. Beck." "Try again?" I asked him encouragingly. "A scream, damn it." I shook my head. He got up from the cot and went over to the washbowl, moving with a curious mixture of sleep-ridden loginess and deep agitation. When he had doused himself thoroughly, stinging himself to complete wakefulness, he came back toweling briskly. He wadded the towel, threw it on the cot and dropped beside it. I waited. "Okay, Beck," he said at last. "What was it about?" "As you told me. Death." "You went through the whole thing?" "To the last flicker." "Any details?" "Yes. Nothing meaningful, no sequence of events. Just the feeling and that damned wall, the wall outside, at night or dusk or something, I'm not sure which." "Go on." "And then, without rhyme or reason, the scream." I frowned. "There was no warning, no preliminary sound. It just came. A full-throated scream that wavered and fell off into a gasp. I'd swear it was you. Beck, are you trying to pull something? I wouldn't put it past you." "I know. But I'm leveling." "But damn it, I heard it!" He got up worriedly and began a sharp, angled pacing of the prefab. The long planes of his face glistened yellowwhite and harsh. His stark physical fear had receded, to be replaced by a baffled, bruised anger. "I heard it, Beck. I heard you." "Screaming?" "Yes!" "Wrong night," I said flatly. "That was yesterday." an extent suggestible, and I suppose I'm no exception. It's entirely possible that suggestion alone stimulated the dream. Collins' suicide, your experience, that damned evocative ruin... Does that make sense?" "Sure. What's the alternative, Major?" "Is there one? You haven't explicitly propounded one, remember. Do you attribute the recurrences to something in the environment? You've no evidence. Further. In attributing anything to 'environment,' do you do anything but give suggestion another name and make the matter harder to pin down?" "Do you believe that?" He said crisply, "I don't subject myself to the strain of trying to believe what is intellectually unacceptable." "Okay, let's quibble. I believe in the feeling and the evocative qualities of that ruin. That's your word, remember. I've never felt so strongly that I was in the presence of something so... "Evidence!" Castle snapped. "God damn it, Castle. Feeling, thought, perception, the whole lousy lot are subjective and not susceptible to proof. If we go on like this I'll reduce it to solipsism, and you don't accept that any more than I do. All right, it's hunch. But I tell you I know there's... something." He said angrily, "You sophistic son of a bitch. Is that how the civilian services operate?" "The dream," I said. "Yes?" "Go back to sleep." His habit of having second -- and highly cerebral -- thoughts, first to escape the danger of a possible thalamic reaction, left a brief second's pause between stimulus and considered response. I jumped into it. "Go back to sleep. If you get five hours undisturbed, I'll have to grant your point. If not... I let it hang. A line of muscle hardened in his jaw. His eyes were flat. "I'll need the sleep." "The medical kit's over there." He neither said anything nor moved for long moments. "Look, Major. I know what the nightmare's like. I'm not trying to bat you over the head with it. If you want to use the stuff, go ahead. We'll just have to see what we can dig up tomorrow." At last he said, "I'll use it." I scored one for Beck. It was about time. T was the damnedest night. Castle sank into a drugged sleep. Without the stimulus of his antagonism, I felt myself slipping back into the old dullheaded lethargy. The argument had settled nothing. Still, Castle had dreamed. He had been badly shaken. That had to be a point in my favor. The long haul was what would count. I was pretty sure I was tougher than Castle, at least in the flexibility of mental fiber that comes with constant readjustment to the bizarre, the impossible made concrete, the apparent chaos whose alien logic the Anthro field man must track down and define... I congratulated myself on being tougher than Castle. Was he as brittle as I thought he was? How would he react if he had to get inside an alien culture, view alien life without the flat perspective of an onlooker armed with a gun and a set of Military orders? There is a vastness Man's mind can never encompass. He measures time in heartbeats, distance in walkable units he can cover between breakfast and lunch. Earth to Luna he can somehow grasp, but Earth to Mars is a figure on a printed page, or the vague oblong blur of remembered passage within the tight but comfortable confines of an interplanetary rocket. This gap is in space and comprehension, too. The stretched mind falls back onMan-dimensioned figures of human life -- the sensory experiences of sight and sound and touch and smell that always hold their meaning in themselves even when the fact, the mathematical equation, the incredible complexities of science and logic that lie ready to human use, but not to translation into the sensory language of human immediacy, deny them and their apparent meanings in their wedded entireties. To the draggled, ridge-ribbed pauper of Delhi or New London, an international dollar is a concrete thing. He knows it as printed paper, worn or crisp, as so many eggs fried to specification, so many hours of warmth next to a dormitory radiator. There is wine in the thought of # dollar. There is nothing in the thought symbol for "many," a gauzy abstraction the mind can never really objectify. And so it was with Castle and Military -- and Beck and Anthro, too. We could never have started to chart the Galaxy but for the more sophisticated minds that handled our abstractions for us, reducing them to terms of provisions and training, free fall and gravities, the reading of gauges and the tidy concreteness of individual actions performed on command. Those were easy. The sense-shackled mind could do as it pleased. The sophisticated minds -- the electronic computers -- made the real calculations... That was where toughness counted. Interplanetary and then interstellar flight had brought together living organisms so diverse, so fundamentally opposite in plan and in fabric, that the differences between them seemed as great and as basically incomprehensible as the gulfs that separated their mother planets. Red sand and sand rats. Festering swamps and carnivorous grasses. Bleak hills dipped in blood and the callous maraudings of asocial lizzards. I'd seen those myself, and many more; dead cultures and living, dead hells and living, the miracle of life from the primal, struggling protoplasmic globs of Tycalpe to the intellectual splendor of the people of Tohn. Because it was my job -- because I had two and a half centuries of Anthro tradition behind me -- I could find my way around in them and not come out a candidate for the psychopathic ward. Anthro men had to be tough. Toq often we catalogued without understanding, and it took the electronic intelligence of the Anthro computers to work out the meaning of what we reported... I made a futile wish for access to one of them now. And somewhere along the line I fell asleep. rpHE reports were no help. Soon the lines of type began angling into each other in a bleary crisscross. I gave up all pretense of working on them. Castle breathed peacefully. As a desperation measure I tried organizing my ideas about the dream phenomenon on paper. But there were no ideas to be organized, only vague intuitions, the feeling that Collins' suicide was a violation against sense hinting at the presence of some key factor not even guessed at. It was a dead end. I either slept or did not sleep. I wrote nothing. I wound up with a series of doodles crudely caricaturing the major, superimposed it on a sketch of the city as seen from the prefab; the city and the well, the well and the wall, the wall and the builders, the dying, disappearing dead builders of the dream city... Cartographic coordinates met in the iris of an eye, melting like wax candles to droop and form arms, four tentacular arms with tendril-like ends to curl around tools and cut the reliefs of the stones in the well and the shapes on the wall before the attack of them... And the desk had come up to press against my face, and I didn't know how much I had sketched and how much I'd imagined. I knew, as dead certainty, only that a core of anxiety burned at the base of my brain; and around it swam the cells and the tendrils, the barbs and the faces and the multi-faceted eyes of all the alien life I had ever met or heard about. Blood-ruby grains and sapphire nodules dredged from study and imagination floated like plankton in a cloudy sea... The wall... A day's growth of beard prickled back into my face from the pressure of the desk-top against which it lay. The low moan was mine, from another existence. The wall... I shifted, head and arms leaden, turned my face on the bodywarmed surface and felt a burning inward from the eyes. The wall loomed heavily in the foreboding. It was not a fragforeboding. It was not a fragment. It was the total wall that had encircled the city. T HE first dream figure came up the hill. It -- he? -- was a biped. Tentacular arms hugged an obscure instrument. Approaching the wall he set this down, his triangular head bent low as he adjusted some aspect of it. He stood, lifting it. A short, thick-snouted addition had been affixed. He clicked a switch. A hum began. The addition revolved, gathered speed. Gently, delicately, he applied it to the wall. Abraided particles fley. The design grew in sharpness under the artist's touch... There is a property of dreaming that fosters the growth of anxiety at variance with the overt content of the dream. In the shadow of a second, anxiety becomes fear, fear becomes terror -- a pounding, a drowning, a flight through space that ends with a sickened awakening, gasping, drenched. My sleeping brain dreamed. The artist worked. My dreaming brain worried. And some part of me wondered at the conviction that here, somewhere in this realm between the past and the present, lay the key that we needed. A bright thread of joy traced a counterpattern on the fabric of fear. It was the joy of creation. I was the artist... and the abrasive bit molded the rockface. The city was a hub, the center of a circle of life. About it, spreading in every direction, grew the tiny settlements and villages that were the city's children, meeting at their outer periphery the outposts of the other central cities, till the people merged and coalesced, and the long curving roads reached out and joined what had been separate, and life was good and full, and the pictures on the wall depicted the richness of the harvest. The dry prickling of the skin began, and with it the cramp that was not quite hunger. The death had begun. The second dream figure went to the well. I saw it in white sunlight of midday; heavy, slowmoving, carrying a pitcher. I saw through its eyes. The world was black shadow slashed chaotically with white darts arid distorted images of the world gone mad. The parapet was an oval fluid form that approached and receded as in a delirium. The packed ground of the roadway was fire and each step an eternity. The heart's triple beat surged and faded like uneven surf on a gravel shore. Life pumped, a waning tide. The air was oppressive with physical rot. Lean on the parapet. Rest. Gather strength. Take the rope in tendrilous hands. Lean back from it. Pull. The creak from the pulley is faint and followed by seconds of agonized waiting. Lean, lean again! The water is nearer. The rope burns. The heart's beats are exhausted. They falter, they flutter... The rope no longer burns. The skin burns at its memory. The pulley screams wildly, the rope flails unchecked. The ground is hot to knees, to belly and face. The splash as the bucket strikes the water below is a faraway thing without significance. The light dims. The heart stops. The heat begins to die away. There is only knowledge: there will be no more truth of love and giving, of morning clear and cool. The lungs will now empty and never fill again. The breath rasps outward. The light goes out. The fire is gone. Even sorrow at last dribbles out with the last vestige of breath. I looked down at the body. Down into the well. I was an onlooker. The artist. The past and the present. I was the race. When the images persisted minutes after I realized that my eyes were wide open -- that I was fully awake -- I kicked over the chair and blundered to the cot. H E moaned and made an automatic but feeble effort to push me away. After two minutes of it, I gave up, soaked a towel at the washbasin and began slapping him in the face with it, without any pretense of gentleness. He came to with a grunt, swore unintelligibly through paralyzed lips and slacked back into sleep. I gave him the towel in the face again, yelling. Finally he got his eyelids up, shoved himself onto one elbow and began blinking stupidly at the light. I dragged him bodily out of the sleeping bag and dumped him onto the floor. He forced himself back onto the cot and sat on the edge, muttering. I gave him more towel treatment. He reared and knocked the towel from my hand. His face was white and fogged, strained with the effort of trying to wake up. "Snap out of it, Major. I've found something!" "Can't it wait?" "No. I know why Collins killed himself." "You're dreaming." "Yes! Awake and dreaming. And I don't think I've even been to sleep." His face hardened, but was instantly more alert. He groped for cigarettes. I threw him a pack. He puffed one alight and slumped backward across the cot, his shoulders propped against the wall behind it. When he looked at me again, it was with a glint of the old malice, but his muscular coordination was still off and he spoke thickly. "I wish you were in my command, Beck. It'd be good for my soul. Okay... Let's have it" clambering over an eight-foot wall, except that the obstacle had no set form or substance. It weaved and dodged, subtly commanding, fluidly evasive. "Collins. We've no reason to think his experience was any different from our own. Most likely the dreams began his first night, too. I don't know whether anyone checked his medical kit, so we don't know whether he tried dope or not. Okay?" "Well?" "Look at the man. He had a rough time and his rating took a dive. No one likes that. It brings them too close to job suspension. Collins wasn't the kind of man to go for a rehabilitation period, even with full pay. He lived for his work. Maybe that helped bring on the crisis in the first place. Maybe he felt he needed the job to pull himself into shape again. "But you know how the medics work. Give them a hint and they watch you like a hawk. On his last medical, his rating was up, but they went on watching him. And he went on watching himself. "And then, in complete isolation on an alien planet, the dreams. "How would you handle it. Major? You, with your dead onepoint-o? You'd get the hell out and submit yourself to Medical. So would he. So would I, normally -- if the only alternative was to stay and fight it out alone. But Collins couldn't. He couldn't even make radio contact. "Imagine the impact of the dreams, identical, insistent, recurrent dreams that kept you awake without let-up. A sane man would think he'd gone mad. Maybe Collins was as ripe for that suggestion as a healthy man can be. And then, Major, to crown it all, when the dreams persisted even when he was awake -- when they grew until every second of the day he had to fight to keep separate two concurrent streams of consciousness -- the one he knew was of his imWm dreaming wall mediate environment and the other coming from God knows where...  "When he couldn't tell which was reality and which the imposition, Major, he decided he was mad and shot himself. That's why he left no record. He didn't want to leave anything that would betray his collapse." I took a deep, uneven breath and reached for the cigarettes. It had come out fast, and I hadn't heard half of what I'd said. I felt numb. His face was tensed and wary. He seemed to weigh what I'd said in a balance with myself and my sanity. He had been under the drug just as far as I had, and I know he must be feeling its effects as a clogging deterrent to clear thinking. But the hard, almost warpedly disciplined mind behind the pale eyes sent out a gleam of its usual cold light. Misted morning with a springtime smell. "Now you're experiencing this dual consciousness?" "Yes." He got up abruptly and stubbed out his cigarette. He found an inch of coffee in the bottom of the pot and turned the heat on under it. Then he picked up the chair I had knocked over and sat down. "All right, Beck. Suppose I buy it. What's it like?" heard my voice, dry and harsh with an edged fatigue, and watched his face for the tiny ripples of expression he allowed to play across its surface now and then. All the while the inward images played around the top of my head in all their sharpness and intensity... The soft green dampness rose from the well like a cooling balm. Below, the water gleamed, the bucket quiet on its surface twenty feet away, an age away, unreachable. There was a longing tor water as there might be for immortality at the moment of death... There was a fever that was worse than any other in the history of the people, and it burned in the city like a conflagration before it found the roads and then ran screaming down them, dessicating the villages with its breath on its way to ignite the city next in line. The mystic Trinity of Water, Sun and Soil were powerless to stop it, and first there was no more gathering in the centers, then no more tilling, and the arts of life dried up until there was only the waiting, the long, agonized, almost endless waiting that was not. endless, for the time was nigh... The death crawled with the sun on my back. I fell, I died, I watched another at the well. The pulley creaked, the bucket rose. Slow, jaded muscles ached. The bucket stood on the parapet. Coolness of water coursed down my throat... I built a house. It took months. I was a father, a child, a mother, a plowman. I loved and created. There was the good smell of soil and green things sprouting, the harvest dance and the three spinning moons. The joy was of living that didn't know death, and the death was the all-denying power that negated the living and the tide of generations, their art and the well, the wall and its chronicles relief-cut and colored. Time was a plaything, a second, a year, a season, a century... Events lived and repeated without plot or reason. It had all the magnificence of detail, the truth, the relentless insistence of a full-fledged psychosis. I knew its reality. And part of me sat and talked to Castle and knew it for illusion, appraised it and knew my appraisal was sane. One life was mine: Beck, John Hale, Anthropological field man Grade #, Medical File ##A-#. The other was the life of a long-dead race whose infinite multiplicity of individual experience was somehow shared. -- Feel of stone, cool-rough and heavy. Smell of mortar clean and sharp -- "TUT how?" Castle raised his U his voice for the first time. He was on his feet now, had recommenced the random pacing of a couple of hours before. He stopped to look down at me where I sat on the cot. His fists knotted. "How? There must be a means, a method -- " "Telepathy?" "A race of telepaths? You're the Anthro man." "They've been recorded. Twice." "But, Beck, these are dead! They've been dead for centuries. What are you trying to feed me? The identity of ideas and matter? The substantial existence of thought-forms? Medievalist claptrap like that?" "No." "Then what are you getting at?" "I don't know." "Let's get out of here." "But we've got to know. If we can find some corroboration of what I think the natives looked like, to prove I'm not hallucinating, that there's some telepathic principle involved -- " "How'll you go about it?" "We can go through the ruin until we find a clear enough carving to show us what they looked like. The dream images themselves could hold the key to the principle. If we hold out long enough... "Telepathic or not, it might be dangerous. Even diseased, in spite of Medical." "But it all ties in! The dream ideas and images come first to the sleeping mind, when conscious control is at a minimum. First the harshest -- the death -- and then, slowly, those that preceded it. When the brain is finally dulled and weakened by lack of sleep and worry, and conscious control becomes less and less a factor in waking life, the intrusions take hold there also. We've got to stay here. And stay awake. There's one piece of evidence we don't have yet." He sat down abruptly, slumping. Eyes now red and heavy lidded threw me a challenge. "And that is?" I felt like coming right out and saying it. You stuck your neck out, Castle. Now you sweat it out with me or else. What I said was, "You're not immune, Major." He caught the drift. His eyebrows rose fractionally. He seemed about to say something, changed his mind and bit it back. Finally he got up and said, "All right, Beck. We'll play it your way. In the meantime... " He stopped. His face, his tightly gesturing hand -- his total being -- froze into stunned immobility. I had the sudden sinking conviction that the man was dead. It lasted long seconds frozen out of time, and then slowly the rigidity melted into motion. He straightened, threw back his shoulders and let out a ragged breath, staring at me with the look of a man under the effects of dry, icy shock. He whispered something to himself, involuntarily, incredulously, and then for a long time did nothing more than stand there, wearing that look and breathing hard. "I was walking down the street toward the well," he said at last. "It came -- flash -- and then it went. I was walking down the..." It was the evidence we needed. I didn't realize then that he'd actually provided it hours before. Nor had I realized the extent of my anxiety to have it. I got up and apportioned out the coffee dregs.  ing dream had receded. "The coffee?" Castle asked. "Maybe. The coffee stimulates to its exclusion, the sedative drugs to below the conscious receptive level." "Now that I know what it's like... Castle said to himself. He took a sharp turn about the room. "I guess there'll be more." He dreaded it and I didn't blame him. The night had taken its toll. My relief at being corrobgalaxy sciince fiction orated had spent itself in a breath, and we were in a state of tension that approached the breaking point. A degree of animation had replaced the major's usual rigid mask. He talked fast, biting off the words. But the signs were deceptive. The drug in his system could not have worn off so quickly. It was fatigue and the fear of fatigue and a bad case of the jitters that kept him wound up. I guessed how desperately he wanted to sleep, just as I had when my waking shift began -- still did, for that matter -- but sleep was forbidden and a thing of fear, and his mind was caught in the cross purpose. He began to pace endlessly, guessing, extrapolating, obsessed by the malignant possibilities of the dream phenomena. Hidden intelligence, he said. Induced insanity... We had to stay awake. Dust of harvest dry and golden in the nostrils. Smoke from my cigarette climbed in a ragged, formless stream. The major's voice became a drone, a deadly burning in the eyes the one thing I was fully conscious of. The dream tugged at my nerves, and the image of the ruin, magically rebuilt, rose and crystallized behind my forehead. Moonset. Smell of sunrise cool, smell of death... There was a message I knew would come. It had to come: a meeting of minds and emotions that carried the final crystal segment of the puzzle without which the picture was distortion beyond meaning. It might come settling like a cloud of dust, simple intuitive knowledge transcending understanding. Or a word. Or the accidental relocation of a misplaced fact. It was the sheerest chance that when it came, it came to us simultaneously.  that sprawling, amorphous, mindless thing to spew out what it did -- eject it with a force that exploded in identical patterns on the latent receptivity complexes of two separate sentient beings -- is a problem for the student of alien biology and neural physics. As it was, it came full-throated and screaming, embodying everything that rejects death and the annihilation of self as incomprehensibly foreign to the mind, anathema, the ultimate incompatible -- It brought me off the cot and onto my feet dry-throated and conscious of a clamoring pit where my heart and viscera should be. Castle's face was the color of dirty snow. "I heard it. You heard it, Beck. The scream that woke me the first time." "Last night. The noise I made when I came out of it last night." "But last night -- !" "The telepathic medium still operates." "Did we hear it? Through auditory channels?" "I doubt it." "Where can it come from?" I shrugged, sweating. "Beck, if it picked up your voice, or the mental impression of your voice..." The implication sank in slowly. It -- whatever it was -- could pick a cry and the emotion behind it out. of the night, store it, hold it intact, to discharge it under what plan or compulsion there was no way to know. It had held the life and death of a race. Any second might carry a spurt of despair and the subjective explosion of a bullet through the palate, the final spasmodic neural wrench that was the death of Collins. Castle's tongue flickered over dry lips. Glistening moisture ran down his temple, swerved onto his cheek and coursed to his jawline to hang there, brightly. He had almost stopped breathing and the room was cold light and shadow without sound. Into the silence, or into some goaded subfabric woven between unknown cortical interstices, what came next was soft, whimpering, barely audible, like a child in the night. " They're dying! There's a fever and the whole race is dying... Collins' voice. "Outside. Let's go." the folds of his sleeping bag and followed me into the soft moonlit night. We blundered once around the prefab, trigger-nerved. The hill rolled down to the ruin. Feet away the massive wall fragment reared dark and quiet. The planet lay in quiet, receptive silence. "No use," Castle whispered. "The 'hearing' is illusion. It's inside your head." "A telepathic faculty could be directional, like any other sense. I got direction." "But -- where?" "I don't know, now." I let out a long breath. "Let's go back inside." Smell of morning. Smell of death. "Okay." He poked his gun through the door of the prefab before reentering. I followed him inside. He hung onto the gun as though it alone could anchor him to sanity. "Well?" he said tightly. "They're dying," Collins' whimper said again, and this time even Castle sensed direction. It transformed him into a single-purpose machine. I had time to yell "No!" just once, and threw myself down and out of the line of fire. His first shot took the door. Plastic shivers hurled by the force of the exploding bullet scattered about. The second shot took the door off its hinges. It was still falling when the gun bucked again. Outside fire blossomed a He kept it up until the gun was empty, firing from a balanced half-crouch, his set face glistening, the double explosions repeating themselves beyond shock to the point of monotony. And then there was silence. Into it an echo rolled like halfheard thunder and was gone. Smoke limped from the remains of the door and one corner of the prefab. The reek was corrosive. There was no sound, in ear or mind... No images behind the eyes. TT was as though burrowing A alien roots had been snatched from the brain, dragging with them their poisonous cilia of fatigue and disruption. It was a violent gust and a burst of pure sunlight in a chamber of mildewed horror. The realization of refound freedom was momentarily stunning. The crumbling wall. There was the clue. I got to my feet with the sickening fear that Castle had killed the chance of a thousand lifetimes. I blundered past him into the open air, heard him crunching over the remains of the door behind me. He came up, breathing heavily, not speaking. The wall lay squat and dislocated under the three moons. The unreasoned ferocity of Castle's artillery had inflicted more than superficial havoc. Deep cracks starred across its surface. "The damage is done. We might as well go the limit." "It looks weak enough, Beck." Castle dropped his gun. We got our combined weight .against the wall, over three hundred and sixty pounds of good sinew. We dug in and pushed. Its last-ditch token of resistance ended in a scraping crackle, a series of minutely brittle splinterings... and then the whole structure gave, cracked further, moved, and suddenly toppled in shards and great chunks and a dry thunder of sound. We stood, panting, looking at it. All that remained was a stubby fragment. From its surface, wisps of steam and a faint sweet smoke curled up. Everywhere -- clustered in pools and tiny pinpricks, joined and communicating through the porosities of the rock matrix -- patches of a pale, gelatinous substance flickered impersonally in the white light of the moons. The odor was of scorched organic matter. "It's alive," Castle said in a bewildered husk. "The wall's alive!" That wasn't true, but it was close enough. I gave him a nod, and for a while neither of us spoke. The wall. The crumbling wall. The eroded, perforated, ea fenout wall. Finally I said, "Reload, Major. We'll try to find how deep it goes." E never did. It didn't matter. We could find out later. What did matter was that we had found what we were looking for. It explained the haunting difference, the evocative magic of the ruin; anchored the pervading half-known memories that clung to the air like invisible mist. It might take an army culled from every sub-branch of science to pin down the details, but we had all we needed. Castle said into the microphone, "Foregoing report by Beck hereby confirmed. Ends. Castle, Major." "Yes, sir," Donovan said. "Will there be anything else, sir?" "No." "Get the lead out, Donovan," I said. "Send that beetle out. See you in the morning. Have some liquor handy." "Sure, Johnny." I killed both the speaker and the transmitter and leaned back to enjoy the look on Castle's face. I didn't, though. After measurable seconds he said tiredly, "Will you never learn, Beck? Standard sign-off procedure wasn't set up as a matter of courtesy..." "Relax, Major." I grinned at him, wondering about the wording of the report he had filed earlier that night. I wished I had another pint of brandy so I could offer him a drink. His flat, slaty look returned -- and left. He dropped onto the cot, swung his feet up and stretched out, staring at the ceiling. "They won't be here till dawn. I hope it's over." "That's what worries me : it might be over. Look at it from Anthro's viewpoint." He didn't say anything. I left him lying on the cot and went out to look at my job and the havoc the explosive bullets had caused. The moons had paled. The stars were fading. Over the farthest rise beyond the ruin, the sky was turning a pearly, unclouded gray. Quite faint now, the combined acridity and the cloying, sweet scorched smell rose from the blasted gash in the hillside where the wall had stood. O NE more fact to feed into the computers' memory banks. We had blasted the wall and found the organism extending through bedrock. How far it went was anybody's guess. It appeared to subsist on the chemical components of the rock's composition -- or whatever other medium it could inhabit -- drawing away from leached out areas that could no longer support it to leave the characteristic honeycomb effect. Would Hanson report the dreams tonight? Tomorrow? Ever? And what about the others? "Imagine a being," I'd said when Donovan recorded my reports. "A featureless being, nonintelligent, composed of non-specialized cells clumped in smaller or larger aggregations." That wasn't hard. It was a simple form of life common in all explored sections of the Galaxy. But then where? How well did the "nonspecialized" description fit? Because there remained the one trait that was peculiarly the organism's own. "Hypothesis: that telepathic projection is a modulation of electrical impulses generated in the cortex. That these are recorded, analogously with magnetic recording, in some fabric of the organism's total structure or unit part, or by modification of cellular or other unit structure as in crystal recording." I didn't know. Turn that problem over to the medics and physicists. Hypothesis... To hell with hypotheses. I was too tired. Some day maybe we would learn what determined the strength of re-emanation of a particular thought or image -- or would it be conditions leading to selective reception? -- and whether an interchange of imprisoned sense data between one area and another or virtual cellular immortality explained the retention of impressions over ten or twenty or fifty thousand Earth years. Until then the bare fact must suffice: Fallon's planet had developed an entity that was, no more and no less, a telepathic recorder with its own indiscriminate playback. One more problem roughly stated. Alien life! I thought a little fuzzily, standing there with the coolness of dawn seeping like a balm under my shirt to soothe the tired, cramped muscles... I started violently. Harvest time. Morning smell with dew and grasses underfoot. It was faint, elusive as the after-image of a quick, bright light. The heart's triple beat came from a great distance, but it was strong and vital. Undisturbed, the city dreamed its ancient dreams. I relaxed, grinned down at it. We were going to have to train the Anthro squad in a new method of investigation. I sat down in the rubble to enjoy the wait for the beetle. The city was a hub, the center of a circle of life... , The Aggravation of Elmer The world would beat a path to Elmer's door -- but he had to go catiy the door along with him ! jam I'd ever seen in White Plains. For two blocks ahead of me, Main Street was gutter to gutter with stalled cars, trucks and buses. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to get back to the shop, I might have paid more attention. I might have noticed nobody was leaning on his horn. Or that at least a quarter of the drivers were out peering under their hoods. But at the time it didn't register. I gave the tieup a passing glance and was turning up the side street toward Biltom Electronics -- Bill-Tom, get it? -- when I saw Marge threading her way to the curb. She was leading a small blonde girl of about eight, who clutched a child-size hatbox in her hand. Marge was hot and exasperated, but small fry was as cool and composed as a vanilla cone. I waited. Even flushed and disheveled, Marge is a treat to look at. She is tall and slender, with brown eyes that match her hair, a smile that first crinkles around her eyes, then sneaks down and becomes a full-fledged grin -- But I'm getting off the subject. "Honestly, Bill!" Marge said as she saw me. "The traffic nowadays! We've been tied up for fifteen minutes. I finally decided to get off the bus and walk, even though it is about a hundred in the shade." "Come along to the shop," I suggested. "The reception room is air-conditioned and you can watch the world's first baseball game telecast in color. The Giants versus the Dodgers, Carl Erskine pitching." Marge brightened. "That'll be more fun than shopping, won't it, Doreen?" she asked, looking down at the kid. "Bill, this is Doreen. She lives across the street from me. Her mother's at the dentist and I said I'd look after her for the day." "Hello, Doreen," I said. "What have you in the hatbox? Doll clothes?" Doreen gave me a look of faint disgust. "No," she piped, in a high treble. "An unhappy genii." "An unhappy -- " I did a double take. "Oh, an unhappy genii? Maybe he's unhappy because you won't let him out, ha ha." Even to myself, I sounded idiotic. Doreen looked at me pityingly. "It's not a he, it's a thing. Elmer made it." I knew when I was losing, so I quit. along toward our little twostory building. Once we got into the air-conditioned reception room, Marge sank down gratefully onto the settee and I switched on the television set with the big #-inch tube Tom had built. Biltom Electronics makes TV components, computer parts, things like that. Tom Kennedy is the brains. Me, Bill Rawlins, I do the legwork, and tend to the business details. "It's uncanny the way all those cars suddenly stopped when our bus broke down," Marge said as we waited for the picture to come on. "Any day now this civilization of ours will get so complicated a bus breaking down someplace will bring the whole thing to a halt. Then where will we be?" "Elmer says silly-zation is doomed!" Doreen put in happily. The way she rolled the word out made me stare at her. Marge only nodded. "That's what Elmer says, all right," she agreed, a trifle grim. "Why does Elmer say sillyzation is doomed?" I asked Doreen. "Because it's getting hotter." The kid gave it to me straight. "All the ice at the North Pole is gonna melt. The ocean is gonna rise two hundred feet. Then everybody who doesn't live on a hill is gonna be drownded. That's what Elmer says and Elmer isn't ever wrong." Doreen they called her! Why not Cassandra? The stuff kids spout these days! I gave her a foolish grin. I wanted Marge to get the idea I was really a family man at heart. "That's very interesting, Doreen. Now look, there's the baseball game. Let's watch, shall we?" We weren't very late after all. It was the top half of the second inning, the score one to one, Erskine in trouble with two men on and only one down. The colors were beautiful. Marge and I were just settling back to watch when Doreen wrinkled her nose. "I saw that game yesterday!" she announced. "You couldn't have, sweetheart," I told her. "Because it's only being played today. The world's first ball game ever broadcast in color." "There was a game on Elmer's TV," Doreen insisted. "The picture was bigger and the colors prettier, too." "Absolutely impossible." I was a little sore. I hate kids who tell fibs. "There never was a game broadcast in color before. And, anyway, you won't find a color tube this big any place outside of a laboratory." "But it's true, Bill." Marge looked at me, wide-eyed. "Elmer only has a little seven-inch black and white set his uncle gave him. But he's rigged up some kind of lens in front of it, and it projects a big color picture on a white screen." I saw that she was serious. My eyes bugged slightly. "Listen," I said, "who is this Elmer character? I want to meet him!" "He's my cousin from South America," Doreen answered. "He thinks grownups are stupid." She turned to Marge. "I have to go to the bathroom," she said primly. "Through that door." Marge pointed. Doreen trotted out, clutching her hat box. stupid?" I howled. "Listen, how old is this character who says silly-zation is doomed and can convert a black and white broadcast into color?" "He's thirteen," Marge told me. I goggled at her. "Thirteen," she repeated. "His father is some South American scientist. His mother died ten years ago." I sat down beside her. I lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. "Tell me about him. All about him." "Why, I don't know very much," Marge said. "Last year Elmer was sick, some tropic disease. His father sent him up here to recuperate. Now Alice -- that's his aunt, Doreen's mother' -- is at her wits' end, he makes her so nervous," I lit another cigarette before I realized I already had one. "And he invents things? A bby genius? Young Tom Edison and all that?" Marge frowned. "I suppose you could say that," she conceded. "He has the garage full of stuff he's made or bought with the allowance his father sends him. And if you come within ten feet of it without permission, you get an electric shock right out of thin air. But that's only part of it. It -- " she gave a helpless gesture -- "it's Elmer's effect on everybody. Everybody over fifteen, that is. He sits there, a little, dark, squinched-up kid wearing thick glasses and talking about how climatic changes inside fifty years will flood half the world, cause the collapse of civilization -- " "Wait a minute!" I cut in. "Scientists seem to think that's possible in a few thousand years. Not fifty." "Elmer says fifty," Marge stated flatly. "From the way he talks, I suspect he's figured out a way to speed things up and is going to try it some day just to see if it works. Meanwhile he fools around out there in the garof dollars spent to develop color TV. He says his lens will turn any ordinary broadcast into color for about twenty-five dollars. He says it's typical of the muddled thinking of our so-called scientists -- I'm quoting now -- to do everything backward and overlook fundamental principles." "Bro-ther!" I said. Doreen came trotting back in then, with her hat box. "I'm tired of that game," she said, giving the TV set a bored glance. And as she said it the tube went dark. The sound cut off. "Damn!" I swore. "Must be a power failure !" I grabbed the phone and jiggled the hook. No dice. The phone was dead, too. "You're funny," Doreen giggled. "It's just the unhappy genii. See?" he flicked over the catch on the hatbox. And the picture came back on. The sound started up. " -- swings and misses for strike two!" The air conditioner began to hum. Marge and I stared. Mouths open. Wide. asked it very carefully. "You made the television stop and start again?" "The unhappy genii did," Doreen told me. "Like this." She flicked the catch back. The TV picture blacked out. The sound stopped in the middle of a word. The air conditioner whispered into silence. Then she flipped the catch the other way. " -- fouls the second ball into the screen," the announcer said. Picture okay. Air conditioner operating. Everything normal except my pulse and respiration. "Doreen, sweetheart -- " I took a step toward her -- "what's in that box? What is an unhappy genii?" "Not unhappy." You know how scornful an eight-year-old can be? Well, she was. "Unhappen. It makes things unhappen. Anything that works by electracity, it stops. Elmer calls it his unhappen genii. Just for fun." "Oh, now I get it," I said brightly. "It makes electricity not work -- unhappen. Like television sets and air conditioners and automobiles and bus engines." Doreen giggled. Marge sat bolt upright. "Doreen! You caused that traffic jam? You and that -- that gadget of Elmer's?" Doreen nodded. "It made all the automobile engines stop, just like Elmer said. Elmer's never wrong." Marge looked at me. I looked at Marge. "A field of some kind," I said. "A field that prevents an electric current from flowing. Meaning no combustion motor using an electric spark can operate. No electric motors. No telephones. No radio or TV." "Is that important?" Marge asked. "Important?" I yelled. "Think of the possibilities just as a weapon! You could blank out a whole nation's transportation, its communications, its industry -- " I got hold of myself. I smiled my best Ilove-children smile. "Doreen," I said, "let me look at Elmer's unhappen genii." The kid clutched the box. "Elmer told me not to let anybody look at it. He said he'd statuefy me if I did. He said nobody would understand it anyway. He said he might show it to Mr. Einstein, but not anybody else." "That's Elmer, all right," Marge muttered. I found myself breathing hard. I edged toward Doreen and put my hand on the hatbox. "Just one quick look, Doreen," I said. "No one will ever know." She didn't answer. Just pulled the box away. I pulled it back. She pulled. I pulled. "Bill -- " Marge called wamingly. Too late. The lid of the hatbox came off in my hands. smell of insulation burning, and the unhappen genii fell out and scattered all over the floor. Doreen looked smug. "Now Elmer will be angry at you. Maybe he'll disintegrate you. Or paralalize you and statuefy you. Forever." "He might at that, Bill," Marge shuddered. "I wouldn't put anything past him." I wasn't listening. I was scrambling after the mess of tubes, condensers and power packs scattered over the rug. Some of them were still wired together, but most of them had broken loose. Elmer was certainly one heck of a sloppy workman. Hadn't even soldered the connections. Just twisted the wires together. I looked at the stuff in my hands. It made as much sense as a radio run over by a truck. "We'll take it back to Elmer," I told Doreen, speaking very carefully. "I'll give him lots of money to build another. He can come down here and use our shop. We have lots of nice equipment he'd like." Doreen tossed her head. "I don't think he'll wanta. He'#I be mad at you. Anyway, Elmer is busy working on aggravation now." "That's for sure!" Marge said in heartfelt tones. "Aggravation, eh?" I grinned like an idiot. "Well, well! I'll bet he's good at it. But let's go see him right away." "Bill!" Marge signaled me to one side. "Maybe you'd better not try to see Elmer," she whispered. "I mean, if he can build a thing like this in his garage, maybe he can build a disintegrator or a paralysis ray or something. There's no use taking chances." "You read too many comics," I laughed it off. "He's only a kid, isn't he? What do you think he is? A superman?" "Yes," Marge said flatly. "Look, Marge!" I said in feverish excitement. "I've got to talk to Elmer! I've got to get the rights to that TV color lens and this electricity interruptor and anything else he may have developed!" Marge kept trying to protest, but I simply grabbed her and Doreen and hustled them out to my car. Doreen lived in a wooded, hilly section a little north of White Plains. I made it in ten minutes. ed in the garage. I kept going up the driveway, swung sharp around the big house -- and slammed on the brakes. Marge screamed. We skidded to a stop with our front end hanging over what looked like a bomb crater in the middle of the driveway. I swallowed my heart down again, while I backed away fast. We had almost plunged into a hole forty feet across and twenty feet deep in the middle. The hole was perfectly round, like a half section of a grapefruit. "What's this?" I asked. "Where's the garage?" "That's where the garage should be." Marge looked dazed. "But it's gone!" I took another look at that hole scooped out with geometrical precision, and turned to Doreen. "What did you say Elmer was working on?" "Agg -- " she sobbed, "agg -- agg -- aggravation." She began to bawl in earnest. "Now he's gone. He's mad. He won't ever come back, I betcha." "That's a fact," I muttered. "He may not have been mad, but he certainly was aggravated. Marge, listen! This is a mystery. We've just got to let it stay a mystery. We don't know anything, understand? The cops will finally decide Elmer blew himself up, and we'll leave it at that. One thing I'm pretty sure about -- he's not coming back." S O that's how it was. Tom Kennedy keeps trying and trying to put Elmer's unhappen genii back together again. And every time he fails he takes it out on me because I didn't get to Elmer sooner. But you can see perfectly well he's way off base, trying to make out I could have done a thing to prevent what happened. Is it my fault if the dumb kid didn't know enough to take the proper precautions when he decided to develop antigravitation -- and got shot off, garage and all, someplace into outer space? What do they teach kids nowadays, anyway? Edson McCann, winner of the # Galaxy-Simon  Schuster novel contest, the richest in the history of science fiction. A really fresh idea is the basis for an exciting suspense story that asks: How dangerous is it to live in a wholly risk-free world? For here it a And there will be at least one novelet and a convoy of short stories... plus Willy A hot issue if we ever saw onel cluster of smoke trees suddenly quiver, though there wasn't a whisper of a breeze, and begin to emit clouds of dense yellow vapor from their trembling branch tips. "Let's get a move on, Will," said Jack Demaree. His voice was thin and piercing, like the thin air all about us. "It's going to get really hot here in the next twenty minutes." The steel and glass town of Niobe was visible a quarter mile ahead. "Sure," I said, and changed pace. We had been shambling along lazily, in the effort-saving walk you learn to use in your first week on Mars. I stepped it up to the distance-devouring loose run that's possible only on a light-gravity planet like Mars. It's tough to have to run in a very thin atmosphere. Your lungs work too hard : you feel as though every step is going to be your last -- except that by day the temperature is high, and the light gravity lets you stand effort that would otherwise kill you. But we hadn't much choice. The smoke trees had passed their critical point, and the curious gelatinous sulphur compounds that served them for sap had turned into gaseous heat. When that happened, it meant that the sun was nearly overhead ; and Illustrated by with only Mars's thin blanket of air to shield you, you do not stay out in the open at high noon. Not that we needed to see the smoke trees to know it was getting hot. A hundred and twenty in the shade it was, at least. If there had been any shade. Demaree passed me with a spurt just as we reached the outskirts of Niobe, and I followed him into the pressure chamber of the General Mercantile office. We use helium in our synthetic atmosphere in one big ear-popping dose, without any danger of the bends we might have got from nitrogen. I swallowed and rubbed my ears; then we shed our sandcapes and respirators and walked into the anteroom. Keever peered out of his private office, his lean horse-face sagging with curiosity. "'Demaree and Wilson reporting," I sdid. "No sign of natives. No hostile action. No anything, in fact, except heat." Keever nodded and pulled his head back in. "Make out a slip," his voice floated out. "And go out again in two hours. Better eat." Demaree finished shaking the loose sand out of his cape into a refuse shaft and made a face. "Two hours! Oh, lord." But he followed me to the company cafeteria without putting up any argument. T HE first thing we both did was make a dash for the drinking fountain. I won, and sopped up my fill while Demaree's dry and covetous breath seared the back of my neck. Sand patrol can dehydrate a man close to the point of shock in three hours; we had been out for four. You see why we were taking it easy? We sat down in the little booth where we had put aside our card game with Bolt and Farragut a few hours before and Marianna, without waiting for our order, brought coffee and sandwiches. Her eyes were hooded and unhappy. Nerves, I thought, and tried to catch Demaree's eye. But it didn't work. He said in his customary slow and biting drawl, "Why, Mary, you're getting stupider than ever. You took away our cards. I swear, girl, I don't know why the Company keeps you -- " He trailed off as she looked straight at him, and then turned away. "You won't need them," she said after a moment. "Farragut's patrol got it this morning." Farragut and Bolt, Cortland and VanCaster. Four good men, and it was the same old story. Their patrol rqnged far beyond the defense perimeter of Niobe; they had got caught too far from town before it got really hot, and it was a choice between staying in their cached sandcar or getting stuck enroute in the noonday sun. They had elected the sandcar and something bright and hot had come flashing over a sand dune and incinerated men and car alike. The hell of it all was none of us had ever seen any of the Martians. The earliest expeditions had reported that there wasn't any life on Mars at all, barring the tiny ratlike forms that haunted the sparse forests of the North. Then air reconnaissance had reported creatures about the size of men, more or less, that stood up like men, that built villages of huts. But air reconnaissance was severely limited by the thinness of Mars's air; helicopters and winged aircraft simply did not work, except at speeds so high that it was nearly impossible to make out details. It wasn't until one of the orbiting mother spacecraft, after launching its space-toground shuttle rockets and standing by for the return, spent a dozen revolutions mapping Mars's surface that the first really good look at the Martians and their works was available. Well, let's say as good as you could expect, considering the mother ship was five hundred miles up. surface party to investigate the Martian villages; but they were empty by the time Earthmen got there. Our sandcars could move faster than a Martian afoot, but it wasn't healthy to use a sandcar. Somehow, what weapons the Martians found to use against us (and nothing resembling a weapon had ever been found in the deserted villages) seemed most effective against machines. It was flatly impossible that they should have electronic aimers to zero in on the radio-static from the machines; but if it had been possible, it would have been certain -- for that was the effect. I had plenty of time to think about all this as Demaree and I ate our glum and silent meal. There just wasn't anything much for us to say. Farragut and Bolt had been friends of ours. Demaree sighed and put down his coffee. Without looking at me, he said, "Maybe I ought to quit this job. Will." I didn't answer; and he let it go. I didn't think he meant it, but I knew how he felt. General Mercantile was a good enough outfit to work for, and its minerals franchise on Mars meant a terrific future for any young fellow who got in oh the ground floor. That's what everybody said, back on Earth, and that's what kept us all there -- That and the adventure of developing a new whole world. I suppose those old Englishmen who went out for the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company and other MiddleAges monopolies must have had the same feeling. And the same dangers. Except that they dealt with an enemy they could see and understand; an enemy that, regardless of skin color or tongue, was human. And we were fighting shadows. I tasted my coffee and it was terrible. "Hey, Mary -- " I started, but I never finished. The alarm klaxon squawked horrifyingly in the cafeteria; we could hear it bellowing all over the GM building. We didn't wait to ask questions; we jumped up and raced for the door, Demaree colliding with me as we tried to beat each other through. He clutched at me and looked at me blankly, then elbowed me aside. Over his shoulder he said, "Hey, Will -- I don't really want to quit... HE news was : Kelcy. Kelcy was our nearest village, and the Martians had schlagged it. Demaree and I were the first in the Ready Room, and Keever snapped that much information at us while we were waiting the few seconds for the rest of the patrols to come racing in. They had been in other buildings and came leaping in still wearing their sand capes; they had had to race across the blindingly hot streets in the midday Martian glare. The whole station complement, less the four who had been lost that morning, left twelve of us. We were on the books as personnel assistants; however, we were actually guards, the entire trouble-shooting force and peace-andorder officers for the town of Niobe. Keever repeated it for the others. "They attacked Kelcy thirty minutes ago. It was a hitand-run raid; they fired on all but one of the buildings, and every building was demolished. So far, they report twenty-six survivors. There might be a couple more -- out in the open; that's all that are in the one remaining building." Out in the open and it was just past high noon -- Big, fair-haired Tom van der Gelt unsteadily shredded the plastic from a fresh pack of cigarettes. "I had a brother in Kelcy," he remarked quietly. "We don't have a list of survivors yet," Keever said quickly. "Maybe your brother's all right. But we'll find out soon, because we're going to send a relief expedition." We all sat up at that. Relief expedition? But Kelcy was forty miles away. We could never hope to walk it, or even run it, between the end of the hot-period and dark; and it made no sense for us to be out in the open at the dusk sandstorm. But Keever continued. "This is the first time they've attacked a town. I don't have to tell you how serious it is. Niobe may be next. So we must go there, get the survivors back here, and see if we can find out anything from them. And because we won't have much time, we're going to travel by sandcar." There was a silence in that room for a moment, while the echo "sandcar" bounced around. Only the echo made it sound like suicide. Keever coughed. "It's a calculated risk," he went on doggedly. "I've gone over every skirmish report since the first landings, and never -- well, almost never -- have the Martians done more than hit and run. Now, it's true that this is the first time they've come out against a town -- maybe they're changing their tactics. "I won't try to tell you that this is safe. It isn't. But there's at least a chance that we'll get through -- more of a chance, say, than the twenty-six survivors in Kelcy have if we don't try it." He hesitated for a second. Then, slowly, "I won't order any man to do it. But I'll call for volunteers. Anybody who wants to give it a try, front and center." Nobody made a mad rush to get up there -- it still sounded like suicide to all of us. But nobody stayed behind. In less than a minute, we were all standing huddled around Keever, listening to orders. W E had to wait another forty minutes. It took time for the maintenance crew to get the sandcars out of their hideaways, where they'd been silently standing -- not even rusting in the dry Martian air -- since the first Earthman drew the connection between sandcars and Martian attack. Besides, it was still hot and, even in the sandcars, it would help for the sun to be a few degrees past the meridian. There were fourteen of us in three cars -- the patrols, Keever and Dr. Solveig. Solveig's the only doctor in Niobe, but Keever requisitioned him -- we didn't know what we might find in Kelcy. Keever's car led the party; Demaree, Solveig and I were in the last, the smallest of the lot and the slowest. Still, we clipped off fifteen miles of the forty-mile trip in eight minutes. The cats were flapping until I was sure they would fly off the drive wheels, but somehow they held on as we roared over the rolling sand. It sounded as though the car was coming to pieces at every bump -- a worrisome sound but not, I think, the sound that any of us was really worrying about. That sound was the rushing, roaring thunder of a Martian missile leaping at us over a dune ; and none of us expected to hear it more than once... The way to Kelcy skirts what we call the Split Cliffs, which all of us regarded as a prime suspect for a Martian hangout. There had been expeditions into the Split Cliffs because of that suspicion; but most of them came back empty handed, having found nothing but an incredible tangle. However, the ones that didn't come back empty-handed didn't come back at all; it was, as I say, a prime suspect. And so we watched it warily until it was almost out of sight behind us. Martians or none, the Split Cliffs is a treacherous place, with nothing worth an Earthman's time inside. Before Mars's internal fires died completely, there had been centuries of fierce earthquakes. Split Cliffs must have been right over a major fault. The place is cataclysmic; it looks as though some artist from the Crazy Years -- Dali or Archipenko -- had designed it in a rage. Sharp upcroppings of naked, metallic rock; deep gashes with perfectly straight hundred foot sides. And because there happens to be a certain amount of poisonously foul water underground, the place is as heavily vegetated as anything on Mars. Some of the twisted trees reach as high as thirty feet above the ground -- by Martian standards, huge! of the sandcar, kept glancing over his shoulder at the Split Cliffs until we were well past them. "I can't help it," he said halfapologetically to me, catching my eyes on him. "Those lousy trees could hide anything." "Sure," I said shortly. "Watch what you're doing." I wasn't in a mood for conversation -- not only because of the circumstances, but because my nose was getting sore. Even in the car we wore respirators -- on Keever's orders. I think he had an idea that a Martian attack might blow out our pressure before we could put them on. And three hours that morning, plus five hours each of the several days before, had left my nose pretty tender where the respirator plugs fit in. Dr. Solveig said worriedly, "I have come very close to the other cars many times. If we should hit -- " "We won't hit," said Demaree. But he did concentrate on his driving; he maintained his forty meters behind the second car, following their lead as they sought the path of least ups-anddowns through the sand dunes toward Kelcy. It began to look, I thought as I watched the reddish sand streaming by, as though Keever's calculated risk was paying off. Certainly we had come nearly twenty miles without trouble, and past the worst danger spot on the trip, the Split Cliffs. If our luck held for ten minutes more... It didn't. "God almighty!" yelled Demaree, jolting me out of my thoughts. I looked where he was looking, just in time to see flame coursing flat along the ground. It snaked in a quivering course right at the middle sandcar of our three; and when the snaking light and the jolting car intersected... Catastrophe. Even in the thin air, the sound was like an atomic bomb. The spurt of flame leaped a mile into the air. seconds, and the men from Keever's car joined us. But there was nothing to do for the seven men in the second car. "They went after the biggest," Keever said bitterly. "Now -- " He shrugged. One thing was sure, and he didn't have to say it. None of us wanted to be in a sandcar with the motor going right there and then. There was no sign of the enemy. Around us were empty sand dunes -- but not empty, because out of them had come the missile. The only break was the fringe of the Split Cliffs behind us. Keever methodically zipped up his sand cape and went through the routine of tucking in flaps at the neck and arms without speaking. None of us had anything to say. Demaree, with a stronger stomach than mine, took another look inside the blackened frame of the second sandcar, and came back looking as though his stomach wasn't so strong after all. We moved away from the parked sandcars and the wreck of the one that would never move again, and held a council of war. By Keever's watch, we had time to get to Kelcy or go back to Niobe -- at a half trot in either case. We were exactly at midpoint. No one suggested using the sandcars again, though there wasn't a flicker of a threat from the dunes. The decision was Kelcy. But the Martians took the decision out of our hands. We trotted along for nearly an aired planet, so the heat is gone hour, on the move twenty minminutes after sundown, utes, resting five, and it began to without any more trouble. thinking those thoughts, Though, in truth, we had had though we hadn't the breath to trouble enough, because it would speak them, when the Martians be enough of a job getting ourstruck again, this time with selves back to Niobe without the something new. There was a strong probability of trying to golden glow from a sand dune carry injured survivors from ahead of us to the left. Keever, Kelcy. in the lead, hesitated for a secThe remorseless noonday deadond; but he didn't hesitate long line would apply the next day; enough. He plunged on, and and travel on Mars by night was when he and two of the others nearly out of the question. It is were between the two dunes, a thin-aired planet, so the sun golden lightning flashed. It was beats down fiercely; it is a thinlike the spray of a fiery hose, from one dune top to the other; and where it passed, three men lay dead. It wasn't fire; there wasn't a mark on the bodies, but they where at dusk, when the twilight of us, blasted the tops of the glowing dunes with our flame rifles, but it was a little late for that. Demaree and I broke for the dune to the right, rifles at the ready. We scrambled up the sides and spread out halfway up to circle it -- it was slagged from our own rifles at the top, and certainly nothing could be alive up there. But nothing was alive behind it, either -- nothing we could see. The sands were empty. Demaree swore lividly all the way back to where the bodies of the three men lay. Dr. Solveig, bending over them, said sharply, "That is enough, Demaree! Think what we must do!" "But those filthy -- " "Demaree!" Solveig stood up straight and beckoned to the only other survivor who had raced to explore the dune to the left, with the same results. He was a man named Garcia. He and I had come out together, but I didn't know him very well. "Have you seen anything?" Solveig demanded. Garcia said bitterly, "More of that fire, Doc! From that hill I could see two or three others shining, down along the way to Kelcy." "I had suspected that," Solveig said somberly. "The Martians were aware of what we proposed. Kelcy is booby-trapped; we cannot expect to get there." "So where does that leave us?" demanded Demaree. "We can't stay here! We can't even make it back to Niobe -- we'd get caught in the sandstorm. Maybe you'd like that, Doc, but I saw a man after the sandstorm got him a year ago!" A patrolman like ourselves, who incautiously found himself out in the middle of nowhere at dusk, when the twilight sandstorm rages from East to West and no human can live for an hour, until the gale passes and the tiny, lethal sand grains subside to the surface of the planetwide desert again. His own respirators had killed him; the tiny whirlpumps were clogged solid with sand grains packed against the filters, and he had died of suffocation. Solveig said, "We go back. Believe me, it is the only way." "Back where? It's twenty-five miles." "To Niobe, yes. But we shall not go that far. I have two proposals. One, the sandcars; at least inside them we will not suffocate. Two, the Split Cliffs." We all looked at him as though he had gone insane. But in the end he talked us around -- all but Garcia, who clung obstinately to the cars. Cliffs, leaving Garcia huddled inside the first car with something of the feelings of the worshippers leaving Andromeda chained to the rock. Not that we were much better off, but at least there were three of us. Solveig had pointed out persuasively that inside the growth of the Split Cliffs the sandstorm couldn't touch us ; that there were caves and tunnels where the three of us, huddled together, might keep each other alive till morning. He admitted the probability that we would find Martians there before us was high, but we knew the Martians had spotted the cars. And at least inside the junglelike Split Cliffs, they would be at some disadvantage. Unless they could overpower us by numbers, we should be able to fight them off if they discovered us. And even if they did outnumber us, we might be able to kill a few whereas on the sand dunes, as we had discovered, they would strike and be gone. Dr. Solveig, in the lead, hesitated and then slipped into the dense yellowish vegetation. Demaree looked at me, and we followed. There were no trails inside, nothing but a mad tangle of twisty, feather-leaved vines. I heard dry vinepods rattling ahead as Solveig spearheaded our group, and in a moment we saw him again. The ground was covered with the fine red sand that overlies all of Mars, but it was only an inch or two deep. Beneath was raw rock, split fissured with hairline cracks into which the water-seeking tendrils of the vegetation disappeared. Demaree said softly, "Dr. Solveig. Up ahead there, by the little yellow bush. Doesn't that look like a path?" It wasn't much, just a few branches bent back and a couple broken off; a certain amount of extra bare rock showing where feet might have scuffed the surface sand off. "Perhaps so," said Solveig. "Let us look." We bent under the long, sweeping branches of a smoke tree -- too cool now to give off its misty yellow gases. We found ourselves looking down an almost straight lane, too straight to be natural. "It is a path," said Dr. Solveig. "Ah, so. Let us investigate it." I started to follow him, but Demaree's hand was on my shoulder, his other hand pointing off to one side. I looked and saw nothing but the tangle of growth. Solveig turned inquiringly. Demaree frowned. "I thought I heard something." "Oh," said Solveig, and unlimbered his flame rifle. All three of us stood frozen for a moment, listening and watching. But if there had been anything, it was quiet and invisible now. first, Doc. I'm a little younger than you." And faster on the draw, he meant. Solveig nodded. "Of course." He stepped aside, and Demaree moved silently along the trail, looking into the underbrush from side to side. Solveig waited a moment, then followed ; and a few yards behind I brought up the rear. I could just see Demaree's body flickering between the gnarled tree trunks and vines up ahead. He hesitated, then stepped over something, a vine or dead tree, that lay snaked across the path. He half turned -- Snap! The vine whipped up and twisted about his leg, clung and dragged him ten feet into the air, hanging head down, as a long straight tree beside the path snapped erect. A deadfall -- the oldest snare in the book! "Jack!" I yelled, forgetting about being quiet and half-forgetting, too, that I was on Mars. I leaped toward him, and blundered against the trees as my legs carried me farther than I thought. Solveig and I scrambled to him, rifles ready, staring around for a sight of whatever it was that had set the trap. But again -- Nothing. Demaree wasn't hurt, just tangled and helpless. A flood of livid curses floated down from him as he got his wind back and began struggling against the vine loop around his legs. "Take it easy!" I called. "I'll get you down!" And while Solveig stood guard, I scrambled up the tree and cut him loose. I tried to hold the vine, but I slipped, and he plunged to the ground unhurt. The three of us stood there for a moment waiting for the attack. And it didn't come. For a moment, the Martians had had us; while Demaree was in the tree and Solveig and I racing toward him, they could have cut us down. And they hadn't. They had set the trap, and passed up its fruits. We looked at each other wonderingly. Why? the trail, narrow and high, but the best protection in sight against the dusk sandstorm and the night's cold. The three of us huddled inside. Demaree suggested making a fire. But although the wood on the ground was dry enough to burn even in Mars's thin air, we decided against it. Maybe, later on, if we couldn't stand the cold, we'd have no choice. Meanwhile, though, there was no sense attracting attention. I asked Solveig, who seemed to take command of our party, if he thought there was any objection to talking, and he shrugged. "How can one tell? Perhaps they hear, perhaps they do not. Air is thin and sounds do not carry far to our ears. To Martian ears? I don't know." So we talked -- not loud and not much, because there wasn't, after all, much to say. We were preoccupied with the contradictions and puzzlements the Martians presented. Fantastic weapons that struck from nowhere or shimmered into being between sand dunes -- and a culture little beyond the neolithic. Even Earth's best guided missiles could have been no more accurate and little more deadly, considering the nature of the target, than the one that obliterated car number two. And the golden glow that killed Keever was out of our experience althogether. And yet -- villages of sticks! There had been no trace in any Martian dwelling of anything so complicated as a flame-rifle, much less these others... It grew very slightly darker, bit by bit; and then it was black. Even in our cave we could hear the screaming of the twilight wind. We were in a little slit in the raw rock, halfway down one of the crevasses that gave the Split Cliffs area its name. Craggy, tumbled, bare rocks a hundred feet below us, and the other wall of the crevasse bare jumping distance away. We had come to it along an irregular sloping ledge, and to reach us at all the wind had to pass through a series of natural baffles. Even so, we saw the scant shrubbery at the Cave mouth whipped and scourged by the dusk-wind. Demaree shivered and attempted to light a cigarette. On the fourth try, he got it burning, but it went out almost at once. It is possible to smoke in Mars's air, but not easy, because of the pressure. The tobacco burns poorly and tastes worse. He grunted, "Damn the stuff. You think we'll be all right here?" "From the wind?" asked Solveig. "Oh, certainly. You have seen how little sand was carried in here. It is the cold that follows the wind that I am thinking of... gone, but the cold remained, deeper and more intense than anything I had ever felt before. Our sand capes were a help, almost thermally non-conducting in either direction. We carefully tucked under all the vents designed to let perspiration escape, we folded them around us meticulously, we kept close together and still the cold was almost unbearable. And it would grow steadily worse for hours. "We'll have to build a fire," said Solveig reluctantly. "Come and gather wood." The three of us went scouring up the ledge for what we could find. We had to go all the way back to the top of the crevasse to find enough to bother carrying; we brought it back, and while Demarest and I worked to set it afire, Solveig went back for more. It wasn't easy, trying to make it burn. Demaree's pocket lighter wore itself out without success. Then he swore and motioned me back, leveling his flame rifle at the sticks. That worked beautifully. Every last stick was ablaze in the wash of fire from his gun. But the blast scattered them for yards, half of them go : ng over the side of the ledge. We charred our fingers and wore ourselves out picking up the burning brands and hurling them back into the little hollow where we'd started the fire. We dumped the remaining armload on the little blaze, and watched it grow. It was all radiant heat, and our backs were freezing while we toasted in front; but it helped -- helped very much. Then Demaree had an idea, and he slipped a cartridge out of his rifle and stripped it. The combustible material inside came in a little powder, safe enough to handle so long as no spark touched it. He tossed the detonator cap in the fire, where it exploded with a tiny snap and puff of flame, and carefully measured out the powder from the cartridge in little mounds, only a few grams in each, wrapping each one in a twist of dried vine-leaves. "In case it goes out," he explained. "If there's any life in the embers at all, it'll set one of these off, and we won't have to blow up the whole bed of ashes to get it started again." "Fine," I said. "Now we'd better build up a woodpile -- " We looked at each other, suddenly brought back to reality. Astonishing how the mind can put aside what it does not wish to consider; amazing how we could have forgotten what we didn't want to know. Our woodpile reminded us both: Dr. Solveig had gone for more, nearly three quarters of an hour before. And it was only a five-minute climb to the top of the crevasse. course, we had to prove it for ourselves. And prove it we did. At the expense of our weapons, our safe cave and fire, and very nearly our lives. We went racing up the ledge like twin whirligigs, bouncing in the light Martian gravity and nearly tumbling into the chasm at every step. I suppose that if we thought at all, we were thinking that the more commotion we made, the more likely we were to scare the Martians off before they killed Dr. Solveig. We were yelling and kicking stones into the gorge with a bounce and clatter; and we were up to the top of the crevasse in a matter of seconds, up at the top -- and smack into a trap. They were waiting for us up there, our first face-to-face Martians. We could see them only as you might see ghosts in a sewer; the night was black, even the starlight half drowned by the branches overhead, but they seemed to gleam, phosphorescently, like decaying vegetation. And decay was a word that fitted the picture, for they looked like nothing so much as corpses. They had no hands or arms, but their faces seemed vaguely human. What passed for ears were large and hung like a spaniel's; there were eyes, sunken but bright, and there was a mouth. They were human in size, human in the way they came threateningly toward us, carrying what must have been weapons. Demaree's flame rifle flooded the woods with fire. He must have incinerated some of them, but the light was too blinding, we couldn't see. I fired close on the heels of Demaree's shot, and the two of us charged blindly into the dark. There was light now from the blazes we had started, but the fires were Mars-fires, fitful, weak, and casting shadows that moved and disguised movement. We beat about the brush uselessly for a moment, then retreated to the lip of the crevasse. And that was a mistake. "What about Solveig?" Demaree demanded. "Did you see anything -- " But he never got a chance to finish the sentence. On a higher cliff than ours there were scrabblings of motion, and boulders fell around us. We dodged back down the ledge, but we couldn't hope to get clear that way. Demaree bellowed, "Come on, Will!" And he started up the ledge again, but the boulder shower doubled and redoubled. We had no choice so we trotted, gasping and frozen, back down to our cave, and ran in. And waited. It was not pleasant waiting. If the Martians showed up at the cave mouth, we were done. Because, you see, in our potshotting at the golden glow on the dunes and our starting a fire in the cave and salvoing the woods, we had been careless. Our flame rifles were empty. all of that night, and in the light from our dwindling fire -- only a couple of branches at a time -- we could see a figure across the crevasse from us. It was doing something complex with objects we could not recognize. Demaree, over my objections, insisted we investigate, and so we parted with a hoarded brand. We threw the tiny piece of burning wood out across the crevasse; it struck over the figure in a shower of sparks and a pale blue flame, and in the momentary light we saw that it was, indeed, a Martian. But we still couldn't see what he was doing. The dawn wind came, the Martian stayed at his post, and then, at once, it was daylight. We crept to the lip of the cave and looked out, not more than a dozen yards from the busy watching figure. The Martian looked up once, at us, as a busy cobbler might glance up from his last. And just as unemotionally, the Martian staring whitely across the ravine returned to what he was doing. He had a curious complex construction of sticks and bits of stone, or so it seemed from our distance. He was carefully weaving bits of shiny matter into it in a regular pattern. Demaree looked at me, licking his lips. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Will?" he asked. I nodded. It was a weapon of sortie sort, it couldn't be anything else. Perhaps it was a projector for the lightnings that blasted the sandcars or the golden glow that had struck down at us from the sand dunes, perhaps some even more deadly Martian device. But whatever it was, it was at pointblank range; and when he was finished with it, we were dead. Demaree said thinly, "We've got to get out of here." we have enough time? We scrabbled together our flame rifles and packs from the back of the cave and, eyes fearfully on the busy Martian across the chasm, leaped for the cave mouth just in time to see what seemed a procession coming down the other side. It was a scrambling, scratching tornado, and we couldn't at first tell if it was a horde of Martians or a sandcar with the treads flapping. But then we got a better look. And it was neither. It was Dr. Solveig. The Martian across the way saw him as soon as we, and it brought that strange complex of bits and pieces slowly around to bear on him. "Hey!" bellowed Demaree, and my yell was as loud as his. We had to warn Solveig of what he was running into. But Solveig knew more than we. He came careening down the ledge across the crevasse, pausing only long enough to glance at us and at the Martian, and then came on again. "Rocks!" bellowed Demaree in my ear. "Throw them!" And the two of us searched feverishly in the debris for rocks to hurl at the Martian, to spoil his aim. We needn't have bothered. We could find nothing more deadly than pebbles, but we didn't need even them. The Martian made a careful, last-minute adjustment on his gadget, and poked it once, squeezed it twice and pressed what was obviously its trigger. And nothing happened. No spark, no flame, no shot. Solveig came casually down on the Martian, unharmed. Demaree was astonished, and so was I. But the two of us together were hardly as astonished as the Martian. He flew at his gadget like a tailgunner clearing a breech jam over hostile interceptors. That was as far as he got with it, because Solveig had reached him and in a methodical, almost patronizing, way he kicked the Martian's gadget to pieces and called over to us, "Don't worry, boys. They won't hurt us here. Let's get back up on top." Niobe, especially with the cumbersome gadgetry Solveig had found. A thing the size of a large machine gun, structurally like the bits and pieces the Martian had put together, but made of metal and crystal instead of bits of rubble. But we made it, all four of us. We had picked up Garcia at the stalled cars, swearing lividly in relief, but otherwise all right. Solveig wouldn't tell us much. He was right, of course. The important thing was to get back to Niobe as soon as we could with his gimmick. Because the gimmick was the Martian weapon that zeroed in on sandcars, and the sooner our mechanics got it taken apart, the sooner we would know how to defend ourselves against it. We were breathless on the long run home, but we were exultant. And we had reason to be, because there was no doubt in any of our minds that a week after we turned the weapon over to the researchers we would be able to run sandcars safely across the Martian plains. Actually it wasn't a week; it was less. The aiming mechanism was nothing so complex as radio; it was a self-aiming thermocouple, homing on high temperatures. We licked it by shielding the engines and trailing smokepots to draw fire. Overconfident? No. Any Earthman, of course, could have worked out a variation which would have made the weapon useful again in an hour's leisurely thought. But Earthmen are flexible. And the Martians were not. Because the Martians were not Martians. That is, they were not the Martians. "Successors," Solveig explained to all of us, back in Niobe. "Heirs, if you like. But not the inventors. Compared with whoever built those machines, the Martians we've been up against are nothing but animals or children. Like children, they can pull a trigger or strike a match. But they can't design a gun or even build one by copying another." Demaree shook his long, lean head. "And the original Martians?" Solveig said, "That's a separate question. Perhaps they're hiding out somewhere we haven't reached -- underground or at the poles. But they're master builders, whoever and wherever they are." He made a wry face. "There I was," he said, "hiding out in a cleft in the rock when the dawn wind came. I thought I'd dodged the Martians, but they knew I was there. As soon as the sun came up, I saw them dragging that thing toward me." He jerked a thumb at the weapon, already being checked over by our maintenance crews. "I thought that was the end, espedally when they pulled the trigger" "And it didn't go off," said Demaree. "It couldn't go off! I wasn't a machine. So I took it away from them -- they aren't any stronger than kittens -- and I went back to look for you two. And there was that Martian waiting for you. I guess he didn't have a real gun, so he was making one, the way a kid'll make a cowboy pistol out of two sticks and a nail. Of course, it won't shoot. Neither did the Martians', as you noted." We all sat back and relaxed. "Well," said Demaree, "that's our task for this week. I guess you've shown us how to clean up what the Earthside papers call the Martian Menace, Doc. Provided, of course, that we don't run across any of the grownup Martians or the real Martians or whatever it was that designed those things." Solveig grinned. "They're either dead or hiding, Demaree," he said. "I wouldn't worry about them." And unfortunately, he didn't worry about them, and neither did any of the rest of us. Not for nearly five years... for S-F fans... the world's cities had torn loose from Earth and hurtled off into space. Now, led by the voracious Buda-Pesht, they planned the conquest of Earth's last city, the capital of a universe, "A rich and ripsnorting example of adventurous science fiction at its best tor of Galaxy # is the future, centuries after the atomic destruction of Europe. An expedition of scientists, led by a woman, sets out from Africa to find the legendary civilization of Britain, and London, its golden city. Their perilous adventures make an outstanding novel : exciting, imaginative, intelligent and readable. # At all bookstores # Madison Avenue, New York #, N. Y. Konrad Rontgen and the X-ray tube. The device itself is as fascinating as any device can be, but it was discovered by a thoroughly "routine" professor, undistinguished in every respect up to the time when he made his discovery which, incidentally, was fairly late in his life. The biographers of Professor Rontgen have always had a hard time finding something to say about the man -- not something fascinating (that doesn't exist), but something, anything, that could be said about him rather than his discovery and its consequences. The second editorial policy -- the art editor is not permitted to voice a dissenting view -- is based on the assumption that, although much effort and money have been spent on colorful and painstaking illustrations, the reader of the magazine has not looked at the pictures before he started reading. Disbelieving both these premises, I am going to write about "things" -- animals -- and any mention of people will be purely accidental and can be skipped. I am also convinced that every reader has by now looked at the "monsters" and is wondering what I have to say about them. Well, aren't you? In your place, I would. All right, then, let's proceed. T HE time was #. The place was the city of Frankfurt on the Main, more particularly the office of Herr Cyriacus Jacobus, a printer. There was a manuscript on the table, which was in German and not in Latin, as would have been more likely for the time. However, this deficiency was partly made up by the fact that it was a translation from the Latin. The original author had been the Doctor universalis Albert von Bollstadt, better known as Albertus Magnus. He had been a contemporary of Roger Bacon; in fact, the two managed to respect each other without being in the least friendly. Unlike Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus never got into any trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors. He also wrote far more than Bacon; the first printed edition of his works filled #I folio volumes. One of them had been about animals, written around #. Now, in #, a Walther Ryff had translated this book into German and Cyriacus Jacobus was willing to print it -- but not without illustrations. The public would prefer an illustrated book and, since woodcuts could be printed like type, there had to be woodcuts, which meant finding an artist to draw the pictures. The trouble began at that point. Albertus had traveled widely; to find an equally traveled artist was not easy. Besides, a description of something is one thing and a picture of something is a different story. The artist who was picked had only a manuscript to work from, nothing else. If, right now, I called on my wife Olga for a drawing of an African elephant, say, she'd pick a minimum of seven books off the shelves, with photographs of African elephants in all conceivable positions fit to print. She'd study a painting by Wilhelm Kuhnert, who had lived in Africa for the purpose of painting African wild life. Moreover, she has seen African elephants in assorted zoological gardens. The artist who had to illustrate Ryff's translation of the animal book by Albertus Magnus had just a manuscript. There was mention of a bird the size of a chicken, which was called Lagephus. The manuscript stated that Pliny the Elder had called this bird Lagopus. This means "harefooted" and the real reason had been that the legs of this bird look as if hare's fur grew on them. To the artist, the idea of a bird with a hare's feet did not make much sense. But if the learned Pliny had used such a term, there had to be a reason; maybe the bird had other characteristics of a hare. The result was our Fig. #. Fig. #. This it the bird Lagnphus... saying "there is a fish in the seas that has eight feet, hence it is called octopus, which means 'eight feet.' " Yes, it does, but you cannot imagine an octopus unless you have seen one. So the fish with eight feet turned out as shown in Fig. #. Fig. #... while this it an "octopui" One picture (Fig. #) might have defied guessing for a long Fig. #. A fith named Echinus time if the name had not given the misunderstanding away. The text reads: "Erinus is a fish in the seas that has its head and mouth turned down below and carries the gateway for the excrements on top above; it walks by means of its spines, which it uses like feet." You won't catch on unless the word erinus reminds you of the zoological term echinodermata or, more specifically, the class of the echinoidea, the sea urchins. The description then makes sense; the picture is a fine example of good will and confusion. At that same time, there lived a French scientist named Guillaume Rondelet. By profession, he was a physician; by avocation, a zoologist who was especially interested in the fishes of the Mediterranean Sea. In his book, Rondelet presented Fig. # and #, with protestations that he had Fig. #. Truthful picture of a sea monk... Fig. #... and his superior, the sea bishop not seen these two marvels of the sea himself, but was merely showing what had come to him from the places where the events were alleged to have taken place. The "sea monk" was supposed to have been washed ashore on the Norway coast after a violent storm. The "sea bishop" was reported to have appeared at the shore of the Baltic along a then Polish portion of the coast in #. The artist who drew the picture of the "sea monk" should be given some benefit of the doubt; he may have been sincere. When this picture is reproduced, it is usually printed in such a way that the "sea monk" stands on his feet and the original Latin title is erased, since it would seem to interfere. But when you look at it in the position used here, you begin to see that this might be a formalized picture of an octopus or of a squid. If one man sketched the squid as it was lying -- dead or almost dead -- at the seashore and another artist then tried to "clean up" the sketch, this picture might well be the result. A S for the "sea bishop," I take him to be a Jenny Haniver -- a "willful and premeditated" distortion of a ray. During the time mentioned in the story, quite a number of people living at the seashore amused themselves by skillful distortion of rays, which were then dried and sold to the type of customer that even then was born at the rate of one per minute, as "dead basilisks," "dried young dragons" or as whatever else would bring money. The practice of making the things that were later called Jenny Hanivers (nobody knows why) must have been widespread then, for Konrad Gesner of Zurich, in his Book of Fishes (#), pictured one for the sole purpose of exposing "the wandering apothecaries and other peddlers who show such shams to the ignorant." But it was Konrad Gesner himself and on the very occasion of compiling his Book of Fishes who had trouble. He knew that there were gigantic "fish" in the seas -- the whales -- and he had to include them. There were numerous pictures that Gesner did not believe by any means, but they were source material and they were backed by Olaus Magnus of Upsala in Sweden. Olaus Magnus had been a churchman, an archbishop and even the Metropolitan of all Sweden. He could not simply be called a liar. Besides, Gesner realized that he, living in Switzerland, could not really judge things of the seas. So he repeated the pictures, letting Olaus Magnus bear all the responsibility. The contemporaries even had a special derisive term for them: "Olaus Midnight Marvels." We now know that Olaus did recount tall tales, but as regards those pictures, there is some repetition of the case of the pictures in Ryff. The artist had been confronted with "a fish in the seas that is called the marine unicorn." It was really great restraint not to picture the whole marine unicorn, modeled either on the traditional heraldic unicorn or the fish that had been served for supper the night before. He only pictured the head (Fig. #), however. What was really meant was, of course, the narwhal. He exercised similar restraint in the case of the "sea cow" (Fig. #), which, in all probability, referred to marine mammals of the type of the dugong Fig. #. The marine Unicorn Fig. #. The sea cow  straint would have been unwise. There were lots of tales about spouting gigantic monsters, bigger than the whaling ship (not impossible, or not noticeably exaggerated, considering the size of ships then in use), which were eager to attack, but might be successfully diverted by throwing empty barrels overboard. Fig. # shows such a scene while Fig. # illustrates an old story that had been around since Roman times and had made its appearance in such widely different places as the tales of Sindbad the Sailor and Norse folklore; namely, of the sleeping sea monster mistaken for an island so that the ship drops anchor and men go ashore to make a fire for cooking. Fig. # shows the flensing of a whale (with bagpipe music) and is the most realistic of the whole batch. That fact is easily explained. The flensing of a whale washed ashore is the one aspect of whaling the artist could actually have watched. Fig. #I is strictly a "bonus" for those of my readers who like riddles. It is from Gesner's book; Gesner said that Olaus Magnus pictured it sine nomine -- without giving it a name. Gesner, therefore, did not know what it was or what it was supposed to be. Neither do I. Nor have I found a guess about it anywhere else. But it certainly would ruin all theories about naval architecture and shipbuilding if it were true. # and even in #. But then people grew more careful. Possibly. The unfortunate fact is that Fig. #. The sea monster resembling an island you can be careful and still make mistakes, especially if you venture into a completely new field. There is the case of the bones of the Zeunickenberg, a small mountain -- hill would be a better term -- near the German city of Quedlinburg. Local peasants had told of big bones half buried there. One day in #, an enterprising man by the name of Otto von Guericke -- now mostly remembered as the inventor of the air pump -- started digging in that area. There were bones and teeth, so the peasants had spoken the truth. But what had these bones been when still alive? Otto von Guericke decided that it may have been a unicorn. And he put the bones together into the shape shown in Fig. #. The picture has been preserved only because it was published by LeibFig. #. Flensing a whale Fig. #. The "Bonus" -- a really fine example of Olaus' Midnight Marvels nitz in # in his work Protogaea, almost a century after the excavation. Although the bones themselves have been lost, mislaid or discarded in the meantime, we can tell what they really were. The big tooth is very clearly a molar of a woolly mammoth and the other bones, allowing for some breakage, probably were, too. It was only natural that the pioneers of the new science of paleontology, who began groping Fig. #. Otto von Guericke's their way into the distant past during the later part of the #th century, would repeat some of the mistakes zoologists had made three centuries earlier. In #, a scientist by the name of Collini came across an interesting fossil that had just been found in th lithographic slate of Eichstatt in Franconia. The fossil was in rather good condition. There was a head with enormously long jaws, bearing comparatively few and small teeth. There were the vertebrae of a long, thin neck. There were the vertebrae and a few ribs of a small body, the well-preserved remains of a birdlike leg and foot and the less well-preserved remains of the other. And there were the bones of the "forelegs," quite clear and also quite large. The problem was how all this had functioned when the animal was still alive. Collini did not commit himself too much; he gave a careful description of the find and referred to it as the "unknown marine animal." The word "marine" crept in, I should think, because the fossils of the lithographic slate are (with a very few but also very important exceptions) decidedly marine in character, like Some twenty years after the discovery, a Professor Hermann in Strasbourg suggested to the great Georges Cuvier in Paris that he study this fossil. Cuvier did and realized that he was looking at what must once have been a flying reptile. It was the first known to science and Cuvier named it Pterodactylus. something that had no living counterpart was superlative -- but he could not convince his fellow scientists in a hurry. They simply did not take to the idea of a flying reptile. Birds could fly and so could bats, but flying reptiles? Hence, Prof. Johannes Wagler reasoned -- as late as # and after Cuvier's third publication on the subject -- that Collini had probably been right with his term "marine animal" and he reconstructed pterodactylus as shown in Fig. #. Just how "pectoral fins" of such disproportionate size could operate is something he never explained. But he would not have liked the modern concept (Fig. #) of how pterodactylus looked and behaved. Just as there is no true flying reptile around any more, there is no known living reptile that habitually walks on its hind legs only. The Australian lizard Chlamydosaurus does it when in Fig. #. Collini's "unknown marine animal" Fig. #. Pterodactylus from the Jurassic Period a hurry and some of the Old first remains came to light, the World monitor lizards and of the fact that many dinosaurs had a New World iguanas have been bipedal walk was not yet known, seen to do the same. But none And iguanodon itself was slow walk around on their hind legs to reveal it, for what was first in the manner of an ostrich, found of it were just a few teeth. In the geologic past, many large Here Cuvier made a mistake; reptiles did just that; Iguanodon he thought they had belonged to comes to mind quickly as a clasa rhinoceros. It was Gideon Mansical example. However, when its tell in England who saw that the Fig. #. Iguonodon, first guu teeth from the past resembled the teeth of the living iguanas and concluded that the original owner had been a very large reptile of plant-eating habits. Then a few bones were found, a piece of the skull and a strange bony spike, like a straight horn. (They also found large threetoed footprints, but they did not know yet that these were made by iguanodon.) Gideon Mantell was especially happy about this horn, which, incidentally, had been found by his wife. The teeth were rather similar to those of the living iguanas and some of the living iguanas carry a small horn on the tip of their noses. Here was proof that the extinct and mighty iguanodon had also possessed a nose horn. Mantell even developed an idea of "necessary resemblances," which he termed the "law of correlation." N OW it was time to draw a picture. An artist by the name of John Martin sketched something like a very large and overstuffed iguana. Since the hind legs were not yet known, the feet turned out to resemble those of a bear. The front feet, partly known then, ditto. The tail was made short and plump, the neck likewise. The head was largely fantasy, but Mrs. Mantell's bony spike was placed on the nose. This was in #. A few years later, plans for the Crystal Palace began to take shape and, since "the gigantic animals of the past" had just become fashionable, they had to be there, too. The sculptor Waterhouse Hawkins was commissioned to put "life size" statues of some in the garden of the Crystal Palace. Even considering the knowledge of the time, he did a very poor job (Fig. #). A critic of the time wrote, especially about the iguanodon, that this was an inexplicable whim of the scientists who draw pictures of animals they cannot possibly believe themselves. It would be interesting to confront this critic with a picture of iguanodon as it actually looked. (Fig. #.) Iguanodon was admittedly a rather specialized character, as could easily be seen when, in #, more than a dozen complete and well-preserved skeletons were discovered in the Sainte Barbe mine near Bernissart in Belgium. Walking upright on three-toed hind feet, it carried its head high and the beak must have looked like that of an enormous turtle. It was hornless. The alleged horn was found to be something else entirely that could not possibly have been guessed. The spike was actually the thumb of iguanodon. Its front feet greatly resembled human hands, but with both thumbs converted into enormous immovable daggers. To substitute for the immobilized thumb, the "little finger" had become opposable. We aren't sure yet whether the other three fingers were movable; it seems likely. Little remains to be added, but I can't help thinking of something Sir Winston Churchill once said. Speaking of political mistakes of the past, he declared: "These mistakes will not be repeated; we'll probably make our own set of mistakes." I'm afraid this is applicable in Sam had led a peaceful and impecunious life -- until a voice cut in on a phone and said: Sam, this is You Y OU are not supposed to believe this story, and if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he is apt to say that it's all a lie. But Sam is a bit sensitive about it. He does not want the question of privacy to be raised again -- especially in Rosie's hearing. And there are other matters. But it's all perfectly respectable and straightforward. It could have happened to anybody -- well, almost anybody. Anybody, say, who was a telephone lineman for the Batesville and Rappahannock Telephone Company, and who happened to be engaged to Rosie, and who had been told admiringly by Rosie that a man as smart as he was ought to make something wonderful of himself. And, of course, anybody who'd taken that seriously and had been puttering around on a device to make private conversations on a party-line telephone possible, and almost had the trick. It began about six o'clock on July second, when Sam was up a telephone pole near Bridge's Run. He was hunting for the place where that party line had gone dead. He'd hooked in his lineman's phone and he couldn't raise Central, so he was just going to start looking for the break when his phone rang back, though the line had checked dead. Startled, he put the receiver to his ear. "Hello. Who's this?" "Sam, this is you," a voice replied. "Huh?" said Sam. "What's that?" "This is you," the voice on the wire repeated. "You, Sam Yoder. Don't you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the twelfth of July. Don't hang up!" S AM hadn't even thought of hanging up. He was annoyed. He was up a telephone pole, trying to do some work, resting in his safety belt and with his climbing irons safely fixed in the wood. Naturally, he thought somebody was trying to joke with him, and when a man is working is no time for jokes. "I'm not hanging up," said Sam dourly, "but you'd better!" The voice was familiar, though he couldn't quite place it. If it talked a little more, he undoubtedly would. He knew it just about as well as he knew his own, and it was irritating not to be able to call this joker by name. The voice said, "Sam, it's the second of July where you are, and you're up a pole by Bridge's Run. The line's dead in two places, else I couldn't talk to you. Lucky, ain't it?" "Whoever you are," Sam said formidably, "it ain't going to be lucky for you if you ever need telephone service and you've kept wasting my time. I'm busy!" "But I'm you!" insisted the voice persuasively. "And you're me! We're both the same Sam Yoder, only where I am, it's July twelfth. Where you are, it's July second. You've heard of timetraveling. Well, this is time-talking. You're talking to yourself -- that's me -- and I'm talking to myself -- that's you -- and it looks like we've got a mighty good chance to get rich." Then something came into Sam's memory and every muscle in his body went taut and tight, even as he was saying to himself, "It can't be!" But he'd remembered that if a man stands in a comer and talks to the wall, his voice will sound to him just the way it sounds to somebody else. Being in the telephone business, he'd tried it and now he did recognize the voice. It was his. His own. Talking to him. Which, of course, was impossible. "Look," said hoarsely, "I don't believe this!" "Then listen," the voice said briskly. And Sam's face grew red. It burned. His ears began to feel scorched. Because the voice -- his voice -- was telling him strictly private matters that nobody else in the world knew. Nobody but himself and Rosie. "Quit it!" groaned Sam. "Somebody might be listening! Tell me what you want and ring off!" The voice told him what it wanted. His own voice. It sounded pleased. It told him precisely what it wanted him to do. And then, very kindly, it told him exactly where the two breaks in the line were. And then it rang off. H E sweated when he looked at the first of the two places. A joining was bad and he fixed that. It was where his voice had said it would be. And that was as impossible as anything else. When he'd fixed the second break, Sam called Central and told her he was sick and was going home, and that if there were any other phones that needed fixing today, people were probably better off without phone service, anyhow. He went home and washed his face, and made himself a brew of coffee and drank it, and his memory turned out to be unimpaired. Presently he heard himself muttering. So he said defiantly, "There ain't any crazy people in my family, so it ain't likely I've gone out of my head. But God knows nobody but Rosie knows about me telling her sentimental that her nose is so cute, I couldn't believe she ever had to blow it! Maybe it was me, talking to myself!" Talking to oneself is not abnormal. Lots of people do it. Sam missed out the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that he'd answered himself back. He reasoned painfully, "If somebody drove over to Rappahannock, past Dunnsville, and telephoned back that there was a brush fire at Dunnsville, I wouldn't be surprised to get to Dunnsville and find a brush fire there. So if somebody phones back from next Tuesday that Mr. Broaddus broke his leg next Tuesday -- why, I shouldn't be surprised to get to next Tuesday and find he done it. Going to Rappahannock, past Dunnsville, and going to next Thursday, past next Tuesday, ain't so much difference. It's only the difference between a road-map and a calendar." Then he began to see implications. He blinked. "Yes, sir!" he said in awe. "I wouldn't' ve thought of it if I hadn't told myself on the telephone, but there is money to be made out of this! I must be near as smart as Rosie thinks I am! I'd better get that dinkus set up!" He'd more or less half-heartedly worked out an idea of how a party-line telephone conversation could be made private, and just out of instinct, you might say, he'd accumulated around his house a lot of stuff that should have been on the phone company's inventory. There were condensers and transmitters and selective-ringing bells and resistances and the like. He'd meant to put some of them together some day and see what happened, but he'd been too busy courting Rosie to get at it.L ' own voice on the telephone had told him to. It had warned him that one thing he had intended wouldn't work and something else would. But it was essentially simple, after all. He finished it and cut off his line from Central and hooked this gadget in. He rang. Half a minute later, somebody rang back. "Hello!" said Sam, quivering. He'd broken the line to Central, remember. In theory, he shouldn't have gotten anybody anywhere. But a very familiar voice said "Hello" back at him, and Sam swallowed and said, "Hello, Sam. This is you in the second of July." The voice at the other end said cordially that Sam had done pretty well and now the two of them -- Sam in the here and now and Sam in the middle of the week after next -- would proceed to get rich together. But the voice from July twelfth sounded less absorbed in the conversation than Sam thought quite right. It seemed even abstracted. And Sam was at once sweating from the pure unreasonableness of the situation and concious that he rated congratulation for the highly technical device he had built. After all, not everybody could build a time-talker! He said with some irony, "If you're too busy to talk -- " "I'll tell you," replied the voice from the twelfth of July, gratified. "I am kind of busy right now. You'll understand when you get to where I am. Don't get mad, Sam. Tell you what -- you go see Rosie and tell her about this and have a nice evening. Ha-ha!" "Now what," asked Sam cagily, "do you mean by that 'haha'?" "You'll find out," said the voice. "Knowin' what I know, I'll even double it. Ha-ha, ha-ha!" There was a click. Sam rang back, but got no answer. He may have been the first man in history to take an objective and completely justified dislike to himself. But presently he grumbled, "Smart, huh? Two can play at that! I'm the one that's got to do things if we are both goin' to get rich." He put his gadget carefully away and combed his hair and ate some cold food around the house and drove over to see Rosie. It was a night and an errand which ordinarily would have seemed purely romantic. There were fireflies floating about, and the Moon shone down splendidly, and a perfumed breeze carried mosquitoes from one place to another. It was the sort of night on which, ordinarily, Sam would have thought only of Rosie, and Rosie would have optimistic ideas about how housekeeping could, after all, be done on what Sam made a week. They got settled down in the hammock on Rosie's front porch, and Sam said expansively, "Rosie, I've made up my mind to get rich. You ought to have everything your little heart desires. Suppose you tell me what you want so I'll know how rich I've got to get." sharply at Sam. "Do you feel all right?" He beamed at her. He'd never been married and he didn't know how crazy it sounded to Rosie to be queried on how much money would satisfy her. There simply isn't any answer to the question. "Listen," said Sam tenderly. "Nobody knows it, but tonight Joe Hunt and the Widow Backus are eloping to North Carolina to get married. We'll find out about it tomorrow. And day after tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, Dunnsville is going to win the baseball game with Bradensburg, seven to five, all tied till the ninth inning, and then George Peeby is going to hit a homer with Fred Holmes on second base." Rosie stared at him. Sam explained complacently. The Sam Yoder in the middle of the week after next had told him what to expect in those particular cases. He would tell him other things to expect. So Sam was going to get rich. Rosie said, "Sam! Somebody was playing a joke on you!" "Yeah?" Sam answered comfortably. "Who else but me knows what you said to me that time you thought I was mad at you and you were crying out back of the well-house?" "Sam!" "And nobody else knows about that time we were picnicking and a bug got down the back of your dress and you thought it was a hornet." "Sam Yoder!" wailed Rosie. "You never told anybody about that!" "Nope," said Sam truthfully. "I never did. But the me in the week after next knew. He told me. So he had to be me talking to me. Couldn't've been anybody else." Rosie gasped. Sam explained all over again. In detail. When he had finished, Rosie seemed dazed. Then she said desperately, "Sam! Either you've t-told somebody else everything we ever said or did together, or else -- there's somebody who knows every word we ever said to each other! That's awful! Do you really and truly mean to tell me -- " "Sure I mean to tell you," said Sam happily. "The me in the week after next called me up and talked about things nobody knows but you and me. Can't be no doubt at all." Rosie shivered. "He -- he knows every word we ever said! Then he knows every word we're saying now!" She gulped. "Sam Yoder, you go home!" Sam gaped at her. She got up and backed away from him. "D-do you think," she chattered despairingly, "that I -- that I'm ggoing to talk to you when ssomebody else -- listens to every w-word I say and -- knows everything I do? D-do you think I'm going to m-marry you?" Then she ran away, weeping noisily, and slammed the door on Sam. Her father came out presently, looking patient, and asked Sam to go home so Rosie could finish crying and he could read his newspaper in peace. iN the way back to his own " house, Sam meditated darkly. By the time he got there, he was furious. The him in the week after next could have warned him about this! He rang and rang and rang, on the cut-off line with his gadget hooked in to call July the twelfth. But there was no answer. When morning came, he rang again,but the phone was still dead. He loaded his tool-kit in the truck and went off to work, feeling about as low as a man could feel. He felt lower when he reported at the office and somebody told him excitedly that Joe Hunt and the Widow Backus had eloped to North Carolina to get married. Nobody would have tried to stop them if they had prosaically gotten married at home, but they had eloped to make it more romantic. It wasn't romantic to Sam. It was devastating proof that there was another him ten days off, knowing everything he knew and more besides, and very likely laughing his head off at the fix Sam was in. Because, obviously, Rosie would be still more convinced when she heard this news. She'd know Sam wasn't crazy or the victim of a practical joke. He had told the truth. It wasn't the first time a man got in trouble with a woman by telling her the truth, but it was new to Sam and it hurt. He went over to Bradensburg that day to repair some broken lines, and around noon, he went into a store to get something to eat. There were some local sportsmen in the store, bragging to each other about what the Bradensburg baseball team would do to the Dunnsville nine. Sam said peevishly, "Huh! Dunnsville will win that game by two runs!" "Have you got any money that agrees with you?" a local sportsman demanded pugnaciously. "If you have, put it up and let somebody cover it!" Sam wanted to draw back, but he had roused the civic pride of Bradensburg. He tried to temporize and he was jeered at. In the end, philosophically, he dragged out all the money he had with him and bet it -- eleven dollars. It was covered instantly, amid raucous laughter. And on the way back to Batesvilfe, he reflected unhappily that he was going to make eleven dollars out of knowing what was going to happen in the ninth inning of that ball game, but probably at the cost of losing Rosie. that night again. There was no more answer than before. He unhooked the gadget and restored normal service to himself. He rang Rosie's house. She answered the phone. "Rosie," Sam asked yearningly, "are you still mad at me?" "I never was mad at you," said Rose, gulping. "I'm mad at whoever was talking to you on the phone and knows all our private secrets. And I'm mad at you if you told him." "But I didn't have to tell him! He's me! All he has to do is just remember! I tried to call him last night and again this morning," he added bitterly, "and he don't answer. Maybe he's gone off somewheres. I'm thinking it might be a -- a kind of illusion, maybe." "You told me there'd be an elopement last night," retorted Rosie, her voice wobbling, "and there was. Joe Hunt and the Widow Backus. Just like you said!" "It -- it could've been a coincidece," suggested Sam, not too hopefully. "I'm -- w-waiting to see if Dunnsville beats Bradensburg seven to five tomorrow, tied to the ninth, with George Peeby hitting a homer then with Fred Holmes on second base. If -- if that happens, I'll -- I'll die!" "Why?" asked Sam. "Because it'll mean that I can't m-marry you ever, because somebody else'd be looking over your shoulder -- and we wouldn't ever be by ourselves all our lives -- night or day!" She hung up, weeping, and Sam swore slowly and steadily and with venom while he worked to hook up his device again -- which did not make a private conversation on a party line, but allowed a man to talk to himself ten days away from where he was. And then Sam rang, and rang, and rang. But he got no answer. The following day, in the big fourth of July game, Dunnsville beat Bradensburg seven to five. It was tied to the ninth. Then George Peeby hit a homer, with Fred Holmes on second base. Sam collected his winnings, but grimly, without joy. He stayed home that night, worrying, and every so often trying to call himself up on the device he had invented and been told -- by himself -- to modify. It was a nice gadget, but Sam did not enjoy it. It was a nice night, too. There was moonlight. But Sam did not enjoy that, either. Moonlight wouldn't do Sam any good so long as there was another him in the middle of the week after next, refusing to talk to him so he could get out of the fix he was in.L  phone woke him. He swore at it out of habit until he got out of bed, and then he realized that his gadget was hooked in and Central was cut off. He made it in one jump to the instrument. "Hello!" "Don't fret," said his own voice patronizingly. "Rosie's going to make up with you." "How in blazes d'you know what she's going to do?" raged Sam. "She won't marry me with you hanging around! I've been trying to figure out a way to get rid of you -- " "Quiet!" commanded the voice on the telephone irritably. "I'm busy. I've got to go collect the money you've made for us." "you collect money? I get in trouble and you collect money?" "I have to," his voice said with the impatient patience of one speaking to a small idiot child, "before you can have it. Listen here. Where you are, it's Wednesday. You're going over to Dunnsville today to fix some phones. You'll be in Mr. Broaddus' law office about half-past ten. You look out the window and notice a fella setting in a car in front of the bank. Notice him good!" "I won't do it," said Sam defiantly. "I ain't taking any orders from you! Maybe you're me, but I make money and you collect it. For all I know you spend it before I get to it! I'm quitting this business right now. It's cost me my own true love and all my life's happiness and to hell with you!" "You won't do it?" his own voice asked nastily. "Wait and see!" So, that morning, the manager told Sam, when he reported for work, to drive over to Dunnsville and check on some lines there. Sam balked. He said there were much more important lines needing repair elsewhere. The manager explained politely to Sam that Mr. Broaddus over in Dunnsville had been taken drunk at a Fourth of July party and fallen out of a window. He'd broken his leg, so it was a Christian duty to make sure he had a telephone in working order in his office, and Sam could get over there right away or else. On the way to Dunnsville, Sam morosely remembered that he'd known about Mr. Broaddus' leg. He had told himself about it on the telephone. At half-past ten, he was fixing Mr. Broaddus' telephone when he remembered about the man he was supposed to get a good look at, sitting in a car in front of the bank. He made an angry resolution not, under any circumstances, to glance outside of the lawyer's office. He meditated savagely that, by this resolution, the schemes of his other self in the future were abolished. Naturally, he presently went to the window and looked to see what he was abolishing. bank with a reddish-haired man sitting in it. A haze came out of the 'exhaust, showing that the motor was running. None of this impressed Sam as remarkable. But as he looked, two other men came running out of the bank. One of them carried a bag and both of them had revolvers out and they piled into the car and the reddish-haired man gunned it and it was abruptly a dwindling speck in a cloud of dust, getting out of town. Three seconds later, old Mr. Bluford, president of the bank, came out yelling, and the cashier came after him, and it was a firstrate bank robbery they were yelling about. The men in the getaway car had departed with thirty-five thousand dollars. All of it had taken place so fast that Sam hardly realized what had happened when he went out to see what it was all about, and was instantly seized upon to do some work. The bankrobbers had shot out the telephone cable out of town with a shotgun, so word couldn't get ahead of them. Sam was needed to re-establish communications with the outside world. He did, absorbedly reflecting on the details of the robbery as he'd heard them. He was high up on a telephone pole and the sheriff and enthusiastic citizens were streaking past in cars to make his labors unnecessary, when the personal aspect of all this affair hit him. "Migawd!" gasped Sam, shocked. "That me in the middle of next week told me to come over here and watch a bank robbery! But he didn't let on what was going to happen so's I could stop it!" He felt an incredulous indignation come over him. "I woulda been a hero!" he said resentfully. "Rosie woulda admired me! That other me is a born crook!" Then he realized the facts. The other him was himself, only a week and a half distant. The other him was so far sunk in dastardliness that he permitted a crime to take place, feeling no more than sardonic amusement. And there was nothing he himself could do about it! He couldn't even tell the authorities about this depraved character! They wouldn't believe him unless he could get his other self on the telephone to admit his criminality. Even then, what could they do? Sam felt what little zest had been left in living go trickling out of his climbers. He looked into the future and saw nothing desirable in it. He painstakingly finished the repair of the shot-out telephone line, but then he went down to his truck and drove over to Rosie's house. There was but one thing he could do. the door. "I come to tell you good-by, Rosie," said Sam. "I just found out I'm a criminal, so I aim to go and commit my crimes far away from my home and the friends who never thought I'd turn out this way. Good-by, Rosie." "Sam!" said Rosie. "What's happened now?" He told her about the bank robbery and how his own self -- in the week after next -- had known it was going to happen, and told Sam to go watch it without giving him information by which it could have been stopped. "He knew it after it happened," said Sam bitterly, "and he could've told me about it before! He didn't, so he's a accessory to the crime. And he is me, which makes me a accessory, too. Goodby, Rosie, my own true love! You'll never see me again!" "You set right down here," Rosie ordered firmly. "You haven't done a thing yet, so it's that other you who's a criminal. You haven't got a thing to run away for!" "But I'm going to have! I'm doomed to be a criminal! It's that me in the week after next! There's nothing to be done!" "Says who? I'm going to do something!" "Like what?" asked Sam. "I'm going to reform you," said Rosie, "before you start!"  that Rosie. She marched inside and put on her blue jeans, then went to her father's woodshed where he kept his tools and got a monkey wrench and stuck it in her hip pocket. When she came to the truck, Sam said, "What's the idea, Rosie?" "I'm riding around with you," replied Rosie, with a grim air. "You won't do anything criminal with me on hand! And if that other you starts talking to you on the telephone, I'm going to climb that pole and tell him where he gets off!" "If anybody could keep me from turning criminal," acknowledged Sam, "it'd be you, Rosie. But that monkey wrench -- what's it for?" Rosie climbed into the seat beside him. "You start having . criminal ideas," she told him, "and you'll find out! Now you go on about your business and I and the monkey wrench will look after your morals!" This tender exchange happened only an hour or so after the robbery and there was plenty of excitement around. But Sam went soberly about his work as telephone lineman. Rosie simply rode with him as a -- well, it wasn't as a bodyguard, but a sort of M.P. escort -- Morals Police. Where he worked on a line, he called the central office to report, and he heard about the hunt for the bank robbers, and told Rosie. I T was good fortune that he'd been in Dunnsville when the robbery happened, because his prompt repair of the phone wires had spoiled the robbers' getaway plans. They hadn't gone ten miles from Dunnsville before somebody fired a load of buckshot at them as their car roared by Lemons' Store. They were past before they realized they'd been shot at. But the buckshot had punctured the radiator, and two miles on, they were stuck. They pushed their car off the road behind some bushes and struck out on foot, and the sheriff ran right past their car without seeing it. Then rain began to fall and the bank robbers were wet and scared and desperate. They knew there'd be roadblocks set up everywhere and they had that bag of money -- part bills, but a lot of it silver -- and all of Tidewater was up in arms. Taking evasive action, they hastily stuffed their pockets with small bills -- there were no big ones -- but dared not take too much lest the pockets bulge. They hid the major part of their loot in a hollow tree. They separated, going to nearby towns -- while rain fell heavily and covered their trails -- and went to bed with chest colds. They felt miserable. But the rain washed away the scent they had left and bloodhounds couldn't do a thing. None of this was known to Sam, of course. Rosie had taken charge of him and she kept charge. She rode with him all the afternoon of the robbery. When quitting time came, he took her home and prepared to retire from the scene. But she said grimly, "Oh, no, you don't! You're staying right here! You're going to sleep in my brother's room, and my pa is going to put a padlock on the door so you don't go roaming off to call up that no-account other you and get in more trouble!" "I might mess things up if I don't talk to him," Sam objected. "He's messed things up enough by talking to you! The idea of repeating our private affairs! He hadn't ought to know them! And I'm not sure," she said ominously, "that you didn't tell him! If you did, Sam Yoder -- " Sam didn't argue that point, for there was no argument to make. He was practically meek until he discovered after supper that the schedule for the evening was a game of cribbage played in the living room where Rosie's mother and father were. He .mentioned unhappily to Rosie that they were acting like old married people without the fun of getting that way, but he said that only once. Rosie glared at him. And when bedtime came, she shooed him into her brother's room and her father padlocked him in. He did not sleep well. Rosie in her blue jeans with a monkey wrench in her pocket, ready to go riding with him. She did. And the next day. And the next. Nothing happened. The state banking association put up five thousand dollars reward for the bank robbers and the insurance company put up some more, but there wasn't a trace of the criminals. There wasn't a trace of criminality about Sam, either. Rosie rode with him, but they exchanged not one single hand-squeeze, nor one melting glance, nor did they even play footsie while they were eating lunch in the truck conduct was exemplary and it wore on Sam. Possibly it wore on Rosie, too. One day Sam said morosely, as he chewed on a ham sandwich at lunch, "Rosie, I'm crazy about you, but this feels like I been divorced without ever even getting married first." And Rosie snapped, "If I told you how I feel, that other you in the week after next would laugh his fool head off. So shut up!" Things were bad, and they got no better. For nearly a week, Rosie rode everywhere with Sam in his truck. They acted in a manner which Rosie's parents would in theory have approved, but didn't even begin to believe in. They did nothing the world could not have watched without their being embarrassed, and they said very little that all the world would not have been bored to hear. It must have been the eleventh of July when they almost snapped at each other and Rosie said bitterly, "Let me drive a while. I need to put my mind on something that it don't make me mad to think about!" "Go ahead," Sam invited gloomily. He stopped the truck and got out the door. "I don't look for any happiness in this world any more, anyway." He went around to the other side of the truck while she slid to the driver's seat. "Tomorrow's going to be the twelfth," she said. "Do you realize that?" "I hadn't given it much thought," admitted Sam, "but what's the difference?" "That's the day where the other you was when he called you up the first time." "That's right," said Sam morbidly. "It is." "And so far," added Rosie, jamming her foot viciously down on the accelerator, "I've kept you honest. If you change into a scoundrel between now and tomorrow -- " She changed to second gear. The truck jerked and bounced. "Hey!" cried Sam. "Watch your driving!" "Don't you tell me how to drive!" "But if I get killed before tomorrow -- " too soon. The truck bucked, and she jammed down the accelerator again, and it almost leaped off the road. "If you get killed before tomorrow," raged Rosie, "it'll serve you right! I've been thinking and thinking and thinking. And even if I stop you from being a crook, there'll always be that -- other you -- knowing everything we say and do." She was hitting forty miles an hear and speeding up. "So there'd still be no use. No hope, anyway." She sobbed, partly in fury and partly in grief. And the roadway curved sharply just about there and she swung the truck crazily around it -- and there was a car standing only halfway off the road. Sam grabbed for the steering wheel, but there wasn't time. The light half-truck, still accelerating, hit the parked car with the noise of dozens of empty oil-drums falling downstairs. The truck slued around, bounced back, and then it charged forward and slammed into the parked car a second time. Then it stalled. Somebody yelled at Sam. He got out of the truck, looking at the damage and trying to figure out how it was that neither he nor Rosie had been killed, and trying worriedly to think how he was going to explain to the telephone company that he'd let Rosie drive. The voice yelled louder. Right at the edge of the woodland, there was a reddish-haired character screaming at him and tugging at his hip pocket. The words he used were not fit for Rosie's shell-like ears -- even if they probably came near matching the way she felt. The reddish-haired man said more nasty words at the top of his voice. His hand came out of his hip pocket with something glittering in it. Sam was swinging when the glitter began and he connected before the gun fired. There was a sort of squashy, smacking sound and the reddish-haired man lay down quietly in the road. "Migawd!" said Sam blankly. "This was the fella in front of the bank! He's one of those robbers!" He stared. There was a loud crashing in the brushwood. The accident had happened at the did not need a high I.Q. to know while expressing opinions of that the friends of the red-haired the state of things, of Sam, of the man must be on the way. Cosmos -- of everything but the A second later, he saw them, weather -- in terms even more Rosie was just getting out of the reprehensible than the first man car then. She was very pale and had used. there wasn't time to tell her to They saw the reddish-haired get started up if possible and man lying on the ground. One of away from there. them -- he'd come out into the One of the two running men road behind the truck and was was carrying a canvas bag with running toward Sam -- jerked out like six feet when there was a peculiar noise behind him. It was a sort of hollow klunk which, even at such a time, needed to Presently there were other have attention paid to it. He noises, but they were made by jerked his head around to see. Rosie. She wept, hanging onto The klunk had been made by Sam. Rosie's monkey wrench, falling He unwound her arms from imperatively on the head of the around his neck and thoughtfully second man to come out of the went to the back of the truck and woods. She had carried it to use got out some phone wire and his on Sam, but she used it instead pliers. He fastened the three on a total stranger. He fell down strangers' hands together behind and lay peacefully still. them, and then their feet, and he Then Sam swung a second piled them in the back of the time, at the second man to draw light truck, along with the money a pistol on him. they had stolen. Then there was only the sweet They came to, one by one, and singing of birds among the trees Sam explained severely that they and the whirrings and other insect-noises of creatures in the grass and brushwood. must watch their language in the presence of a lady. The three were so dazed, though, by what had befallen them that the warning wasn't really necessary. Rosie's parents would have been pleased at how completely proper their behavior was, while they took the three bank robbers into town and turned them over to the sheriff. That night, Rosie sat out on the porch with Sam and they discussed the particular event of the day in some detail. But Rosie was still concerned about the other Sam. So Sam decided to assert himself. About half-past nine, he said firmly, "Well, Rosie, I guess I'd better be getting along home. I've got to try one more time to call myself up on the telephone and tell me to mind my own business." "Says who?" demanded Rosie. "You're staying locked up right here tonight and I'm riding with you tomorrow. If I kept you honest this far, I can keep it up till sundown tomorrow! Then maybe it'll stick!" Sam protested, but Rosie was adamant -- not only about keeping him from being a crook, but from having any fun to justify his virtue.  er's room and her father locked him in. And Sam did not sleep very well, because it looked as though virtue wasn't even its own reward. He sat up, brooding. It must have been close to dawn when the obvious hit him. Then he gazed blankly at the wall and said, "Migawd! O'course!" He grinned, all by himself, practically from head to foot. And at breakfast, he hummed contentedly as he stuffed himself with pancakes and syrup, and R o s i e 's depressed expression changed to a baffled alarm. He smiled tenderly upon her when she came doggedly out to the truck, wearing her blue jeans and with the monkey wrench in her pocket. They started off the same as any other day and he told her amiably, "Rosie, the sheriff says we get five thousand dollars reward from the bankers' association, and there's more from the insurance company, and there's odd bits of change offered for those fellas for past performances. We're going to be right well off." Rosie looked at him gloomily. There was still the matter of the other Sam in the middle of the week after next. And just then, Sam, who had been watching the telephone lines beside the road as he drove, pulled off the road and put on his climbing irons. "What's this?" asked Rosie frightenedly. "You know -- " "You listen," said Sam, completely serene. He climbed zestfully to the top of the pole. He hooked in .the little gadget that didn't make private conversations possible on a party line, but did make it possible for a man to talk to himself ten days in the future. Or the past. "Hello!" said Sam, up at the top of the telephone pole. "Sam, this is you." A voice he knew perfectly well sounded in the receiver. "Huh? Who's that ?" "This is you," said Sam. "You, Sam Yoder. Don't you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the twelfth of July. Don't hang up!" He heard Rosie gasp, all the way down there in the banged-up telephone truck. Sam had seen the self-evident, at last, and now, in the twelfth of July, he was talking to himself on the telephone. Only instead of talking to himself in the week after next, he was talking to himself in the week before last -- he being, back there ten days before, working on this very same telephone line on this very same pole. And it was the same conversation, word for word. pole, rather expansively, Rosie grabbed him and wept. "Oh, Sam!" she sobbed. "It was you all the time!" "Yeah," said Sam complacently... "I figured it out last night. That me back there in the second of July, he's cussing me out. And he's going to tell you about it and you're going to get all wrought up. But I can make that dumb me back yonder do what has to be done. And you and me, Rosie, have got a lot of money coming to us. I'm going to carry on through so he'll earn it for us. But I'm warning you, Rosie, he'll be back at my house waiting for me to talk to him tonight, and I've got to be home to tell him to go over to your house. I'm goin' to say 'ha-ha, ha-ha' at him." "A-all right," said Rosie, wideeyed. "You can." "But I remember that when I call me up tonight, back there ten days ago, I'm going to be right busy here and now. I'm going to make me mad, because I don't want to waste time talking to myself back yonder. Remember? Now what," asked Sam mildly, "would I be doing tonight that would make me not want to waste time talking to myself ten days ago? You got any ideas, Rosie?" "Sam Yoder! I wouldn't! I never heard of such a thing!" Sam looked at her and shook his head regretfully. "Too bad. If you won't, I guess I've got to call me up in the week after next and find out what's cooking." "You -- you shan't !" said Rosie fiercely. "I'll get even with you! But you shan't talk to that -- " Then she wailed. "Darn you, Sam! Even if I do have to marry you so you'll be wanting to talk to me instead of that dumb you ten days back, you're not going to -- you're not- -- " Sam grinned. He kissed her. He put her in the truck and they rode off to Batesville to get married. And they did. But you're not supposed to believe all this, and if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he's apt to say it's all a lie. He doesn't want to talk about private party lines, either. And there are other matters. For instance, Sam's getting to be a pretty prominent citizen these days. He makes a lot of money, one way and another. Nobody around home will ever bet with him on who's going to win at sports and elections, anyhow. Your Choice For # For # for # ( jr .# each Enclosed find  for the following books (circled) I # # #I # # # # # Nome City Address State They would learn what caused the murderous disease -- if it was the last thing they did! January #, Earth Time like a woman. An hour ago, at dinner, John Armitage proposed a toast, especially for my benefit. He loves to play the gallant. Big man, silver mane, very blue eyes, a porcelain smile. The head of politician-scientist. "To the colony," he announced, raising his glass. "May Epsilon love them and keep them. May it only be transmittal trouble." "Amen," Max said. We drank. Taylor Bishop put down his glass precisely. Bishop is a gray little man with a diffident voice that belies his reputation as the best biochemist in the system. "Has Farragut hinted otherwise?" he asked mildly. Armitage frowned. "It would be scarcely prudent for Senator Farragut to alarm the populace with disaster rumors." Bishop looked at him out of his pale eyes. "Besides, it's an election year." The silence was suddenly ugly. Then Armitage chuckled. "All right," he said. "So the Senator wants to be a national hero. The fact still remains that Epsilon had better be habitable or PanAsia will scream we're hogging it. They want war anyway. Within a month -- boom." F OR a moment, I was afraid he was going to make a speech about Earth's suffocating billions, the screaming tension of the cold war, and the sacred necessity of Our Mission. If he had, I'd have gotten the weeping shrieks. Some responsibilities are too great to think about. But instead he winked at me. For the first time, I began to realize why Armitage was the Director of the Scientists World Council. "Hypothesis, Greta," he said. "Epsilon is probably a paradise. Why should the test colony let the rest of the world in on it? They're being selfish." I giggled. We relaxed. After supper Armitage played chess with Bishop while I followed Max into the control room. "Soon?" I said. "Planetfall in eighteen hours, Doctor." He said it stiffly, busying himself at the controls. Max is a small dark man with angry eyes and the saddest mouth I've ever seen. He is also a fine pilot and magnificent bacteriologist. I wanted to slap him. I hate these professional British types that think a female biochemist is some sort of freak. "Honestly," I said. "What do you think?" "Disease," he said bitterly. "For the first six months they reported on schedule, remember? A fine clean planet, no dominant life-forms, perfect for immigration; unique, one world in a billion. Abruptly they stopped sending. You figure it." I thought about it. "I read your thematic on Venusian viruses," he said abruptly. "Good show. You should be an asset to us, Doctor." "Thanks!" I snapped. I was so furious that I inadvertently looked into the cabin viewplate. Bishop had warned me. It takes years of deep-space time to enable a person to stare at the naked Universe without screaming. It got me. The crystal thunder of the stars, that horrible hungry blackness. I remember I was sort of crying and fighting, then Max had me by the shoulders, holding me gently. He was murmuring and stroking my hair. After a time, I stopped whimpering. "Thanks," I whispered. "You'd better get some sleep, Greta," he said. I turned in. I think I'm falling in love. January # It took Max a few hours to home in on the test colony ship. He finally found it, on the shore of an inland sea that gleamed like wrinkled blue satin. For a time we cruised in widening spirals, trying to detect some signs of life. There was nothing. We finally landed. Max and Armitage donned spacesuits and went toward the colony ship. They came back in a few hours, very pale. "They're dead." Armitage's voice cracked as he came out of the airlock, "All of them." "Skeletons," Max said. "How?" Bishop said. Armitage's hands were shaking as he poured a drink. "Looks like civil war." "But there were a hundred of them," I whispered. "They were dedicated -- " "I wonder," Bishop said thoughtfully. "White and brown and yellow. Russian and British and French and German and Chinese and Spanish. They were chosen for technical background rather than emotional stability." "Rot!" Armitage said like drums beating. "It's some alien bug, some toxin. We've got to isolate it, find an antibody." He went to work. January # 'M scared. It's taken three days to finalize the atmospheric tests. Oxygen, nitrogen, helium, with trace gases. Those trace gases are stinkers. Bishop discovered a new inert gas, heavier than Xenon. He's excited. I'm currently checking stuff that looks like residual organic, and am not too happy about it. Still, this atmosphere seems pure. Armitage is chafing. "It's in the flora," he insisted today. "Something, perhaps, that they ate." He stood with a strained tautness, staring feverishly at the chronometer. "Senator Farragut's due to make contact soon. What'll I tell him?" "That we're working on it," Bishop said dryly. "That the four best scientists in the Galaxy are working toward the solution." "That's good," Armitage said seriously. "But they'll worry. You are making progress?" I wanted to wrap a pestle around his neck. We were all in the control room an hour later. Armitage practically stood at attention while Farragut's voice boomed from the transmitter. It was very emetic. The Senator said the entire hemisphere was waiting for us to announce the planet was safe for immigration. He said the stars were a challenge to Man. He spoke fearfully of the Coming World Crisis. Epsilon was Man's last chance for survival. Armitage assured him our progress was satisfactory, that within a few days we would have something tangible to report. The Senator said we were heroes. Finally it was over. Max yawned. "Wonder how many voters start field work at once." Armitage frowned. "It's not funny, Cizon. Not funny at all. Inasmuch as we've checked out the atmosphere, I suggest we start field work at once." Taylor blinked. "We're still testing a few residual -- " "I happen to be nominal leader of this party." Armitage stood very tall, very determined. "Obviously the atmosphere is pure. Let's make some progress!" February # For the past ten days, we've worked the clock around. Quantitative analysis, soil, water, flora, fauna, cellular, microscopic. Nothing. Max has discovered a few lethal alkaloids in some greenish tree fungus, but I doubt if the colony were indiscriminate fungus eaters. Bishop has found a few new uni cell types, but nothing dangerous. There's one tentacled thing that reminds me of a frightened rotifer. Max named it Armitagium. Armitage is pleased. Perhaps the fate of the hundred colonists will remain one of those forever unsolved mysteries, like the fate of the Mary Celeste or the starship Prometheus. This planet's clean. February # men-hunting. It must be autumn on Epsilon. Everywhere the trees are a riot of scarlet and ocher, the scrubby bushes are shedding their leaves. Once we came upon a field of thistlelike plants with spiny seedpods that opened as we watched, the purple spores drifting afield in an eddy of tinted mist. Max said it reminded him of Scotland. He kissed me. On the way back to the ship we saw two skeletons. Eachhad its fingers tightly locked about the other's throat. February # W E have, to date, analyzed nine hundred types of plant life for toxin content. Bishop has tested innumerable sports and bacteria. Our slide file is immense and still growing. Max has captured several insects. There is one tiny yellow bushspider seem to be rare. Bishop has isolated a mold bacterium that could cause a high fever, but its propagation rate is far too low to enable it to last long in the bloodstream. The most dangerous animal seems to be a two-foot-tall arthapod. They're rare and peaceable. Bishop vivisected one yesterday and found nothing alarming. Last night I dreamed about the first expedition. I dreamed they all committed suicide because Epsilon was too good for them. This is ridiculous! We're working in a sort of quiet madness getting no closer to the solution. Armitage talked to Senator Farragut yesterday and hinted darkly that the first ship's hydroponics system went haywire and that an improper carbohydrate imbalance killed the colony. Pretty thin. Farragut's getting impatient. Bishop looks haggard. Max looks grim. February # O UR quantitative tests are slowing down. We play a rubber of bridge each night before retiring. Last night I trumped Max's ace and he snarled at me. We had a fight. This morning I found a bouquet of purple spore-thistles at my cabin door. Max is sweet. This afternoon, by mutual consent, we all knocked off work and played bridge. Bishop noticed the thistle bouquet in a vase over the chronometer. He objected. "They're harmless," Max said. "Besides, they smell nice." I can hardly wait for tomorrow's rubber. Our work is important, but one does need relaxation. February # Yesterday he failed to score one of my overtricks. We argued bitterly about it. Taylor, of course, sided with him. Three hands later, Armitage got the bid in hearts. "One hundred and fifty honors," he announced. "That's a lie," I said. "It was only a hundred," he grinned. "But thank you, Greta. Now I shan't try the queen finesse." No wonder they've won the last three evenings! Max is furious with them both. February # W E played all day. Max and I kept losing. I always knew Armitage was a pompous toad, but I never realized he was slimy. This afternoon it was game all. T# and Armitage overcalled my diamond opener with three spades. Bishop took him to four and I doubled, counting on my ace-king of hearts and diamonds. I led out my diamond ace and Armitage trumped from his hand. Bishop laid down his dummy. He had clubs and spades solid, with doubleton heart and diamonds. "None?" Max asked Armitage dangerously. Armitage tittered. I wanted to scratch his eyes out. He drew trump immediately and set up clubs on board, dumping the heart losers from his hand, and finally sluffing -- two diamonds. "Made seven," he said complacently, "less two for the diamond renege makes five, one overtrick doubled. We were vulnerable, so it's game and rubber." I gasped. "You reneged deliberately !" "Certainly. Doubleton in hearts and diamonds in my hand. If you get in. I'm down one. As it was, I made an overtrick. The only penalty for a renege is two tricks. The rule book does not differentiate between deliberate and accidental reneges. Sorry." I stared at his florid throat, at his jugular. I could feel my mouth twitching. On the next hand I was dummy. I excused myself and went into the lab. I found a scalpel. I came up quietly behind Armitage and Bishop saw what I was going to do and shouted and I was not nearly fast enough. Armitage ducked and Bishop tackled me. "Thanks, dear," Max said thoughtfully, looking at the cards scattered on the floor. "We would have been set one trick. Club finesse fails." "She's crazy!" Armitage's mouth worked. "The strain's too much for her!" I cried. I apologized hysterically. After a while, I convinced them I was all right. Max gave me a sedative. We did not play any more bridge. Over supper I kept staring at Armitage's throat. After eating, I went for a long walk. When I got back to the ship, everyone was sleeping. March I morning, in his cabin. He came out, very pale, staring at me. "You bitch," he said. "Ear to ear. Now what'll I do for a partner?" "You can't prove it," I said. "We'll have to confine her to quarters," Max said wearily. "I'll tell Farragut." "And let him know the expedition is failing?" Max sighed. "You're right. We'll tell them Armitage had an accident." I said seriously, "It was obviously suicide. His mind snapped." "Oh, God," Max said. They buried Armitage this afternoon. From my cabin, I watched them dig the grave. Cheaters never prosper. March # M AX talked with Senator Farragut this morning. He said Armitage had died a hero's death. Farragut sounds worried. The Pan-Asians have withdrawn their embassy from Imperial Africa. Tension is mounting on the home front. Immigration must start this week. Max was very reassuring. "Just a few final tests, Senator. We want to make sure." We puttered in our laboratories all afternoon. Bishop seemed bored. After dinner he suggested three-handed bridge and Max said he knew a better game, a friendly game his grandmother had taught him -- hearts. March # TT'S a plot! All day long Bishop and Max have managed to give me the queen of spades. It's deliberate, of course. Three times I've tried for the moon and Bishop has held out one damned little heart at the end. Once Max was slightly ahead on points and Bishop demanded to see the score. I thought for a moment they would come to blows, but Bishop apologized. "It's just that I hate to lose," he said. "Quite," Max said. When we finally turned in, Bishop was ahead on points. Too far ahead. March # It has a peculiar horselike stridency that makes me want to tear out his throat. Twice today I've broken down and cried when he made a jackpot. I'm not going to cry any more. Supper was the usual, beefyeast and vita-ale. I remember setting Bishop's plate in front of him, and the way his pale eyes gleamed between mouthfuls. "Three thousand points ahead," he gloated. "You'll never catch me now. Never, never!" That was when he gripped his throat and began writhing on the floor. Max felt his pulse. He stared at me. "Very nice," he said. "Quick. Did you use a derivative of that green fungus?" I said nothing. Max's nostrils were white and pinched. "Must I make an autopsy?" "Why bother?" I said. "It's obviously heart failure." "Yes, why bother?" he said. He looked tired. "Stay in your cabin, Greta. I'll bring your meals." "I don't trust you." His laughter had a touch of madness. March # M AX unlocked my cabin door this morning. He looked drawn. "Listen," he said. "I've checked my respiration, pulse, saliva, temperature. All normal." "So?" "Come here," he said. I followed him into the lab. He indicated a microscope. His eyes were bright. "Well?' "A drop of my blood," he said. "Look." I squinted into the microscope. I saw purple discs. Oddly, they did not attack the red blood cells. There was no fission, no mitosis. The leucocytes, strangely enough, let them alone. My hands were shaking as I took a sterile slide and pricked my finger. I put the slide under the microscope. I adjusted the lens and stared. Purple discs, swimming in my bloodstream. Thriving. Minding their own business. "Me, too," I said. "They're inert," Max said hoarsely. "They don't affect metabolism, cause fever, or interfere with the body chemistry in any way. Do they remind you of anything?" I thought about it. Then I went to the slide file that was marked flora -- negati ve. "Right," Max said. "The purple thistle. Spores! The atmosphere is clogged with them. Greta, my sweet, we're infected." "I feel fine," I said. All day long we ran tests. Negative tests. We seem to be disgustingly healthy. "Symbiosis," Max said finally. "Live and let live. Apparently we're hosts." Only one thing disturbs me. Most symbiotes do something for their host. Something to enhance the host's survival potential. We played chess this evening. I won. Max is furious. He's such a poor sport. March #I M AX talked with Senator Farragut this morning. He gave Epsilon a clean bill of health and the Senator thanked God. "The first starship will leave tonight," the Senator said. "Right on schedule, with ten thousand colonists aboard. You're world heroes!" Max and I played chess the rest of the day. Max won consistently. He utilizes a fianchetto that is utterly impregnable. If he wins tomorrow, I shall have to kill him. March # TT was, of course, necessary for me to destroy Armitage and Bishop. They won far too often. But I am sorry about Greta. Yet I had to strangle her. If she hadn't started that infernal queen's pawn opening it would have been different. She beat me six times running, and on the last game I pulled a superb orang-outang, but it was too late. She saw mate in four and gave me that serpent smirk I know so well. How could I have ever been in love with her? March # alone. I have a thought. Chess. Right hand against left. White and black. Jolly good. March # Left was black this morning and I beat him, four out of five. We're in the lab now. He's watching me scribble this. His thumb and forefinger are twitching in fury. He looks like some great white spider about to spring. He sees the scalpel, by the microscope. Now his fingers are inching toward it. Treacherous beast. I'm stronger. If he tries to amputate... The Best Way to Get Started Develop the working habit under the personal direction of an experienced writer or editor. r vate school completely owned and operated by successful editors and writers, offers a series of fascinating assignments designed to get you started and keep you writing. They are sent regularly to your home, where you work on them in spare time. They give you a chance to polish your style the way professional writers polished theirs -- by writing continually. You may concentrate on either short story or article work, advancing as rapidly as your ability warrants. Every assignment you submit is returned with detailed criticism. Writers themselves active in the magazine field help you find your best outlets, often suggest markets you might never have heard of. Send the coupon today for the free catalog which tells you how you may get started toward a writing career. The The Famous Writers Course. # Rockefeller Plaza Rockefeller Center. New York #. N. Y. The Magazine Institute, Inc. Dept. #-H, # Rockefeller Plaza Rockefeller Center. New York #, N. Y. Please send your free catalog, without obligation, to: Name. Address( Inquiries confidential. No salesman will call) #T# vey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Bill Elder and Wallace Wood. Ballatine Books, #c TF you don't already know about the comic book to end all comic books, this volume will serve as a splendid introduction. If you do (remember its bloody takeoff on "Superman" called "Superduperman," for example?), buy lots of copies to give your friends. Why? Well, this best of all satires on the comics -- itself a regular monthly comic that has a national circulation not far a narrower audience (i.e., intellectuals and such) and maybe it will get it now that it has been beautifully Ballantined. edited by Harold W. Kuebler, Hanover House, # Big Bargain Buy of #. The first is Sloane's Stories for Tomorrow, # pages. This has #. It contains famous old-timers by Poe, Wells (two), Conan Doyle (The Maracot Deep complete), Verne ( Round The Moon complete), E. M. Forster, Capek ( R . U. R.) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Garrett P. Serviss (only bad story in the book), S. Fowler Wright, Ambrose Bierce and J. P. Priestley, and excerpts from novels by Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, and Balmer and Wylie. It's a generally distinguished collection of fine old chestnuts for the science fiction novice -- and for us addicts as well, if we don't already have most of them in other books. Laura Fermi. University of Chicago Press, # (for a change) by an "inside story" of the atom bomb, read this book. It's a housewife's narrative of what it was like to live with one of the prime pioneers of atomic energy, and a charming and revealing job it is. Did you know, for example, that Fermi and some associates actually patented a process for slowing neutrons so they could penetrate uranium atoms as early as #? Laura Fermi tells you this and much, much else in this wifely tribute to a great scientist and human being. Though published before Fermi died, it remains a fit memorial to him: continuously enthralling from its description of rugged childhood through his invention of "Fermi's Streetcar" on the incredible giant cyclotron now in operation at the University of Chicago. An unforgettable book. Charles Coombs. Westminster Press, # ence fiction juvenile, this item deserves a big boost. Coombs imagines his young hero, Eddie Winston, obtaining a "legal" monopoly on # light-years of space around Earth, from a small-town judge who went along for the laughs. What follows when the press gets hold of the story is uproarious chaos. Eddie claims rights to every sort of space, from that used to make the hollow tubes in macaroni to the air that is so cruelly tortured when a jet plane tears through it. And the payoff -- young Eddie has a serious motive behind his fantastic idea, after all -- is in itself a wonderful example of American ingenuity. #, edited by Frederik Pohl. Ballantine Books, #c riHE third Pohl annual of never-before-published stories is up to the usual standard -- excellent. Ten stories, the best by Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke (a nice bit on undersea cattle ranching!), Philip Dick, Gerald Kersh and Chad Oliver. Almost as good are stories by del Rey, Mathestrom. World Publishing Co., # view of the history and current status of the "whirlybirds." I found it and its rich supply of illustrations completely engrossing. It's science fiction in the process of coming true. Houghton Mifflin Co., #... Poul Anderson. Abelard-Schuman, # T WO twigs of witching more or less off the same branch, for those who still have a liking for elves, trolls, goblins. Mr. Tolkien's tale of Hobbits -- an invented faerie troupe -- is rich, flavorsome, exhaustively detailed and almost too leisurely; Mr. Anderson's opus is a ripsnorting, bloody, imitation-Norse epic containing all the elements of faerie from the Chen of China to the Scottish Sidhe, but with emphasis on a war to the death between the Elves and the Trolls. To put it bluntly, I read about half of each of these excellent books and had to give 'em up. They're meat for the rune-lovers, but as for me, I'll take such science fiction as -- by James Blish, G. P. Putnam's Sons, # I T'S the fantastic story of the Okies, tramp cities tom from Earth's surface, wandering through the Galaxy powered by antigravity devices known as spindizzies. The cities are the hobo camps of tomorrow, doing the Universe's hard work for pay in germanium, etc. The book took me back to the days of Asimov's Foundation series and Jack Vance's wonderful "Magnus Ridolph" tales. Blish has written a real, honest, pure, gee-whiz space opera -- and you'll love it. Mifflin Co., # A New Way to See Them? Here the idea behind that unique book has been delightfully scaled down to the child's level, with entirely new sketches and maps of the constellations, together with a subtly simplified but not too writtendown text. It's perfect for arousing any young person's curiosity about the heavens above him -- and it'll also teach parents a lot they should know! Anthony Boucher. Doubleday and Co., # better tales by Bester, Kombluth (dandy!), Porges, Sheckley, McComas, Avram Davidson (enchanting!), Albert Compton Friborg (hot stuff!), Shirley Jackson, Daniel Galouye, Manly Wade Wellman (an exquisite job) and Asimov's wonderful science fiction parody of W. S. Gilbert's "The Aesthete." Plus five other items I thought minor or just not good, but eleven to five is a good average -- and you, of course, may like the other five, too. Warm, neighborly congratulations to M. Boucher. Tyrrell. Pantheon Books, # Sponsored by the British Society for Physical Research, the book purports to present evidence for the existence of ghosts, clairvoyance and similar parapsychological matters. Most of the evidence dates from the Victorian era, but even so, one's skepticism is shaken by the authority and honesty of the researchers and by the apparent reality of some (not all) the cases. No matter what you may think of psychical research in general, I'll guarantee you a fascinating bit of reading here -- far more persuasive than the dismally unscientific work of Doctor Joseph B. Rhine. put out Conan The Barbarian (#) for Conan-lovers; fifth in the series... And Gnome has also published Northwest of Earth by C. L. Moore (#) for lovers of those characters, Northwest Smith and the beauteous Jirel of Joiry... Pocket Books has reprinted Philip Van Doren Stern's The Moonlight Traveler under the title Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination (#c). Nice stuff.      fob OU Here is #'s first important science fiction book -- a dazzling literary oneman show. Many of the magazines these stories appeared in are now collector's items that cost as much as this whole volume. tion from all others are the vivid notes from the author's own working journal, giving the thematic origin and background of every story. Fascinating for readers and immensely valuable for writers, they demonstrate the skill and bravura that have made H. L. Gold an acknowledged master both as author and editor of science fiction. Only Galaxy readers can have this very special extra... Crown Publishers have set aside # first edition copies -- and there's one the coupon! (Or you can order by letter if you don't wish to mutilate the magazine; the coupon is for your convenience, not ours.) Don't put off! There are only # copies! Price # I Galaxy Publishing Corp. j #I Hudson Street New York #, New York j Rush me my autographed copy of H. L. Gold's collection of top stories.  Enclosed find my #.  Name I Address I T was the speaking of Miss awake, her mind reflected tartly Kitty's name which half that in this lifeboat, hurtling roused her from sleep. She away from their wrecked spaceeased her angular body into a ship back to Earth, the sleeping more comfortable position in the accommodation was quite approsack. Still more asleep than priately named. On another mental level, she tried to hear more of up." It was Sam Eade talking to what was being said about her. Lt. Harper -- the two men who Naturally, hearing one's name had escaped with her. spoken, one would. "Yes, Sam," the lieutenant an"We're going to have to tell swered. "What we've suspected Miss Kitty as soon as she wakes all along is pretty definite now." Still drowsing, she wondered, without any real interest, what they felt they must tell her. But the other level of her mind was more real. She wondered how she looked to these two young men while she slept. Did she sleep with her mouth open? Did her tiara slip while she snored? she slipped back into the remembered scene which had given birth to the phrase. At some social gathering she had been about to enter a room. She'd overheard her name spoken then, too. "Miss Kitty is probably a cute enough name when you're young," the catty woman was saying. "But at her age!" "Well, I suppose you might say she's kept it for professional reasons," the other woman had answered with a false tolerance. "A school teacher, wanting to be cozy with her kiddies, just a big sister." The tolerance was too thin, it broke away. "Kind of pathetic, I think. She's so plain, so very typical of an old maid school teacher. She's just the kind to keep a name like Miss Kitty." "What gets me," the first one scoffed, "is her pride in having really does have one. All those academic degrees. She wears them on every occasion, like a tiara!" She had drawn back from the door. But in her instant and habitual introspection, she realized she was less offended than perversely pleased because, obviously, they were jealous of her intellectual accomplishments, her ability to meet men on their own ground, intellectually as good a man as any man. The half dream drowsiness was sharply washed away by the belated impact of Sam Eadels question to Lt. Harper. Reality flashed on, and she was suddenly wide awake in the lifeboat heading back to Earth. "What is it you must tell me?" She spoke loudly and crisply to the men's broad backs where they sat in front of the instrument panel. The implication of the question, itself, that they had been holding something back... Lt. Harper turned slowly around in his seat and looked at her with that detested expression of amused tolerance which his kind of adult male affected toward females. He was the dark, ruggedly handsome type, the kind who took it for granted that women should fawn over him. The kind who would speak the fatuous cliche that a woman's place was in the home, not gallivanting off to teach colonists' children on the fourth planet of Procyon. Still, perhaps she was unjust, she hardly knew the man. "Oh, you awake, Miss Kitty?" he asked easily. His tone, as always, was diffident, respectful toward her. Odd, she resented that respect from him, when she would have resented lack of it even more. "Certainly," she snapped. "What is it you must tell me?" "When you're dressed, freshened up a bit," he answered, not evasively, but as if it could wait. S HE started to insist, but he had already turned back to the nose window to study the starry sky and the huge misty green ball of Earth in front of them. Sam Eade, the radioman, was intently twisting the dials on his set with a puckered frown between his blond eyebrows. He was an entirely different type, tall, blond, but just as fatuously masculine, as arrogantly handsome. Probably neither one of them had an ounce of brains -- handsome people so seldom needed to develop mental ability. Sam, too, turned his face farther away from her. Both backs told her plainly that she could dress, take care of her needs, with as much privacy as the lifeboat could allow anybody. Not that it would take her long. She'd worn coveralls since the catastrophe, saving the dress she'd had on for landing on Earth. They'd had to leave most of her luggage behind. The lieutenant had insisted on taking up most of the spare space in the lifeboat with that dismantled space warper from the wreck of their ship. She combed her short graying hair back of her ears, and used a little water sparingly to brush her teeth. Perhaps it had been a quixotic thing, her giving up a secure teaching post on Earth to go out to Procyon IV. Except that she'd dreamed about a new colony where the rising generation, under her influence, would value intellect -- with the girls no different from the boys. Perhaps cabin on a freighter, the only passenger with a crew of four men. But men did not intimidate her, and on a regular passenger ship she'd have been bored stiff by having to associate with the women. Two of the men... It wasn't quite clear to her, even yet, what had happened. They'd used the normal drive to get clear of regular solar shipping lanes. The warning bell had rung that they were about to warp into hyperspace, a mechanism which canceled out distance and made the trip in apparent time no more than an overnight jaunt to Mars. There was a grinding shudder -- then a twisted ship which looked as if some giant had taken a wet rag and torqued it to squeeze out the water. Lt. Harper and Sam had got her out of her cabin, and finally into the lifeboat which was only partly crippled. The other two men of the crew... She zipped up the front of her coveralls with a crisp gesture, as if to snap off the vision. She would show no weakness in front of these two men. She had no weakness to show! "All right, gentlemen," she said incisively to their backs. "Now. What is it I must be told?" ball of Earth so close ahead. sky in front of them. The misty atmosphere blurred outlines slightly, but she could make out the Eastern halves of North and South America clearly. The Western portions were still in dim darkness. "See anything wrong, Miss Kitty?" the lieutenant asked quietly. She looked more closely, sensing a possible trap in his question, a revealment of her lack of knowledge. "I'm not an authority on celestial geography," she said cautiously, academically. "But obviously the maps I've seen were not accurate in showing the true continental proportions." She pointed to a small chart hanging on the side wall. "This map shows Florida, for example, a much longer peninsula than it actually is. A number of things like that. I don't see anything else wrong, but, of course, it's not my field of knowledge." Lt. Harper looked at her approvingly, the kind of look she gave a bright pupil who'd been especially discerning. "Only it's not the map that's wrong, Miss Kitty," he said. "It is my field of knowledge, and I've seen those continental outlines hundreds of times. They always corresponded to the map... before." She looked at him without comprehension. "Not only that," Sam Eade entered the conversation. "As soon as we were clear of the wreck, Lt. Harper took a fix on stars and constellations. He's an astrogator. He knows his business. And they were wrong, too. Just a little wrong, here and there, but enough. And even more than that. On a tight beam, I should have been able to make a connection with Earth headquarters on this set. And I haven't yet got communication, and we know there's nothing wrong with this set." "Sam knows his business, too, Miss Kitty," Lt. Harper said. "If he can't get communication, it's because there isn't any." She looked wide-eyed from one to the other. For once, she was more concerned with a problem than with concealing her ignorance about it. "It means," the lieutenant said, as if he were answering a question she hadn't yet asked, "that the Earth we are returning to is not the Earth we left." "I don't understand," she gasped. "There's a theory," Lt. Harper answered slowly. "Heretofore it has been considered only a mathematical abstraction, and having no counterpart in reality. The theory of multiple dimensions." She looked at him closely, and in her habitual ambivalence of thought reflected that he sounded much more intelligent than she had suspected. "I've read about that," she answered. He looked relieved, and threw a quick look at Sam. Apparently he had underestimated her intelligence, too -- in spite of all her degrees. E never thought it could be real," he emphasized. "But the theory was that multiple universes lay side by side, perhaps each an instant's time away from the other. The only thing I can see is that some flaw in the space warper threw us out of our dimension into another one closely adjacent -- not far enough for things to be totally different, just different enough that the duplication isn't identical. It's Earth, but it's not our Earth. It's a New Earth, one we don't know anything about." "In another few hours, we'll be entering the atmosphere," Sam put in, "and we don't know what we'll find. We thought you ought to know." She flared in exasperation at the simple assumption of male arrogance. "Of course I should know!" she snapped back. "I am not one of your little bits of blonde, emptyheaded fluff to be protected by strong males! I should have been told immediately!" Lt. Harper looked at Sam with a broad grin. It was amusement, but it was more -- a confirmation that they could depend on her to take it in her stride -- an approval. Apparently, they had discussed more things about her than she'd overheard, while she slept. He didn't turn off the grin when he looked directly at her. "What could you have done about it, if we had told you, Miss Kitty?" he asked mildly. IT was not the same Earth. The  charts and maps had not been wrong. Her tentative theory that perhaps there were vision flaws in the plastic nose window had not stood up. The continents, the lakes, the rivers -- the topography really was distorted. Now there was the Mississippi River, one spot swinging rather too widely to the East. The Great Lakes were one huge inland sea. The Gulf of Mexico swung high up into what had once been Alabama and Georgia. There was no New Orleans, shipping center of the world, headquarters of Space. There were no cities anywhere up and down the Mississippi. Where St. Louis should have been, there was virgin forest. As they dropped down into the upper reaches of atmosphere, experiencing the familiar and sometimes nauseating reference shift from ahead to below, there had been no New York to the East, no San Francisco to the West. There had been no Boulder Dam, no Tennessee Valley project, no continuous hydroelectric installations running the entire length of the Mississippi, where the strength of the Father of the Waters had finally been harnessed for Man. There were no thin lines of highways, no paint-brush strokes of smoke against the canvas of the Gulf of Mexico to denote steamers, for atomic power was still not available to all. On this New Earth, Man could not yet have reached a state of complex technology. And as they dropped lower still, through their telescope sights, they saw no canoes on the river or the feeder streams. They saw no huts along the river shore, no thin streamers of wood smoke from huts hidden under the trees along the bayous. New Earth was purple and blue, then shading into green as they dropped lower. They sighted a deer drinking at the edge of a pool. But there was no trace of Man. "If there are no scars, no defacements upon this forest primeval," Miss Kitty said didactically, "then Man has not evolved on New Earth." Since it was spoken in. the tone of an axiom, and there was no evidence to refute it, neither of the two men felt like arguing the matter. that they were flying horizontally rather than dropping vertically. They were still searching for traces of some kind of artifacts. They were also searching, Lt. Harper advised them at last, for a suitable place to land. They wanted a higher ground than the delta country so they might be free of insect pests, assuming there were some since deer could be seen throwing their heads back along their sides as if to chase away flies. They wanted higher ground with a stream of water going over falls to supplement their limited power in the lifeship. On the chance there were fish, it would be nice to be handy to a lake. A forest for game. A level ground for a permanent camp. Since they were here, and it might be some time before they could figure out a way to return to Old Earth, they may as well make the best of it. They found the kind of place they wanted, a little to the west of the Mississippi. They grounded the lifeship at the edge of a natural clearing beside a lake where a stream of sparkling water dropped from a rock ledge. They settled the ship on the springy turf, then sat and looked at one another as if they were suddenly all strangers. Wordlessly, Lt. Harper got up and opened the door of the lifeship. He threw down the hinged metal steps. He stood back. Miss Kitty went through the door first and down the steps. The two men followed. They stood on the ground of New Earth, and looked at one another the way they had in the ship. In the minds of each there was the thought that some kind of a ceremonial speech should be made, but no one volunteered it. "I suppose we should have a campfire," Miss Kitty said doubtfully. They did not realize it at the time, but it was the most effective speech which could have been devised. It was a symbol. Man had discovered and taken possession of New Earth. His instinctive thought was to place his brand upon it, an artificial fire. All of them missed the significance of the fact that it was Miss Kitty who had made the first move in the domestication of this New Earth. N the weeks which followed, Miss Kitty began to be dimly aware of the significance. At first they had lived a sort of Robinson Crusoe kind of life, leaning pretty heavily upon the stores of the liferaft. It had been she who had converted it over into more of the Swiss Family Robinson pattern of making use of the resources about them. The resources were abundant, bountiful. Yet the two men seemed little interested, and appeared content to live off the stores within the liferaft. They devoted almost all their time, except that little for bringing up firewood and trapping game, to fiddling with that gadget they called a warp motor. They were trying to hook it up to the radio sets, they said. Miss Kitty detested women who nagged at men, but she felt compelled to point out that this was the fall season upon New Earth, and winter would soon be upon them. It should not be a severe winter at this latitude, but they must be prepared for it with something more substantial than her uncomfortable sleeping place in the liferaft; nor would the two of them continue to enjoy sleeping out under the trees, if a blanket of snow fell some night. "I was hoping we could be back home before winter sets in, Miss Kitty," Lt. Harper apologized mildly. She had not nagged them. She had simply shut her lips and walked away. The next day they began cutting logs. It was odd, the basic pleasure she felt in seeing the sides of the cabin start to take form. Certainly she was not domestic by nature. And this could, in no sense, be considered a home. Still, she felt it might have gone up faster, if the men had used their muscles -- their brute strength -- rather than spend so much futile time trying to devise power tools. They were also inclined to talk too much about warping radio wave bands through cross sections of sino waves, and to drop their work on the cabin in favor of spending long hours trying new hookups. But Miss Kitty never nagged about it. She had even tried to follow some of the theory, to share in their efforts to put such theory into practice, to be just a third fellow. Instead she found her thoughts wandering to how an oven could be constructed so she could bake and roast meats instead of broiling and frying them over an open fire. Game was plentiful, fish seemed to be begging for the hook. Every day, without going too far away from camp, she found new foods ; watercress, mustard greens, wild turnips, wild onions, occasionally a turkey nest with eggs still edible, hollow trees where wild bees had stored honey, persimmons still astringent, but promising incredibly sweet and delicious flavor when frost struck them, chinquapin, a kind of chestnut, black walnuts. There was no end to what the country provided. Yet the men, instead of laying in winter stores, spent their time with the warp motor. Kitty interrupted an explanation of Lt. Harper's on how they were calibrating the torquing degrees. She told him that he and Sam simply must help her harvest a hillside patch of wild maise she had found, before the rains came and ruined all the grain with mold, or the migrating birds ate it all. The cabin they were erecting would contain only two rooms -- a large general room for cooking, eating, visiting, such as an oldfashioned farm kitchen had once been. A little room, opening off it, would be her sleeping room. She raised her eyebrows questioningly, and Sam explained they would build a small, separate bunkhouse for himself and Lt. Harper. She had a curious sense of displeasure at the arrangement. She knew she should be pleased at their understanding of the need for privacy. There was no point in becoming primitive savages. She should be grateful that they shared her determination to preserve the civilized codes. She told herself, rather severely, that the preservation of civilized mores was extremely important. And she brought herself up short with a shocking question, equal to a slap in the face. Why? She realized then she had intuitively known from the first that they would never get back to Old Earth. Her instincts had been functioning, insuring their lives, where intellect had failed them completely. She tried to laugh scornfully at herself, in feminist tradition. Imagine! Katheryn Kittredge, Career Woman, devoted to the intellectual advancement of Man, thinking that mere cooking and cleaning and mending was the supremely important thing. But she failed in her efforts to deride herself. The intellectual discussions among the small groups of intelligent girls back on Old Earth were far away and meaningless. She discovered she was a little proud and strangely contented that she could prepare edible food. Certainly the two men were not talented; and someone had to accept the responsibility for a halfway decent domestic standard and comfort. As, for example, with the walls of the cabin halfway up, it was necessary to point out that while they may be going to put the little cookstove -- welded together out of metal scrap -- in the cabin, there was no provision for a fireplace. How would they keep warm through the long winter months this year, and in the years to come? Lt. Harper had started to say something. Then he shrugged and a hopeless look came over his face. "Perhaps you are right, Miss Kitty," he said humbly. "It may be spring, at that, before we can finish trying the more obvious combinations. We're trying to..." He broke off, turned away, and began to mark off the spot where they would saw down through the logs to fit in a fireplace. heard him tell Sam that, theoretically at least, there could be each removed an infinitesimal point from the next. There was the chance the flaw in the torque motor, which still eluded him, might not automatically take them back to the right cross-section, even if he found it. They might have to make an incredible number of trials, and then again they might hit it on the very next combination. "And you might not!" she cut into the conversation, with perhaps more acid in her voice than she intended. "It might not be your next, nor tomorrow, nor next spring -- nor ever!" Odd that she had felt an obscure satisfaction at the stricken looks on their faces when she had said it. Yet they had it coming to them. It was time someone shocked them into a sense of reality. It took a woman to be a realist. She had already faced the possibility and was reconciled to it. They were still living in an impossible dream. Still she was sorry. She was sorry in the way she had always regretted having to make a bad boy in kindergarten go stand with his face to the wall. She tried to make up for it that evening. "I understand," she said as they sat near the campfire outside the half-finished cabin. "You alter the torque, then try the various radio wave bands in the new position." They both looked at her, a little surprised. "It must be a slow and tedious procedure," she continued. "Very," Sam said with a groan. A shifting air current, carrying the sound of the waterfall, gave her an idea. "Too bad you can't borrow the practice of Tibetan monks," she mused. "They tie their prayers to a wheel, set it in a running stream. Every turn of the wheel is a prayer sent up to their gods. That way they can get their praying done for them while they go about the more urgent matters of providing a living for themselves and their families." She hadn't meant it to be so pointed, implying that all they were doing was sending up futile prayers to unheeding gods, implying they should be giving more attention to setting in winter stores. But even so... "Miss Kitty," Sam said in a kind of awe. "You are a wonderful woman!" In spite of her sudden flush of pleasure, she was irritated. As pointed as she had made it, he had missed it. He turned and began talking excitedly to Lt. Harper. Yes, of course, they could rig up an automatic method instead of doing it by hand. It could be done faster and more smoothly with electric motors, but the idea was the same. If Lt. Harper could rig a trip to kick the warp over another notch each time, they could run it night and day. Just let some kind of alarm bell start ringing, if they hit anything at the other end! The two of them jumped to their feet then, grabbed her arms, squeezed them, and rushed away to the little shed they'd constructed beside the lifeship to hold some of their scattered equipment. She felt vaguely regretful that she had mentioned it. The men finished the cabin in a hurry after that, and they put up their own bunkhouse in less than a week. Both jobs were obviously not done by experts, and she had fussed at them, although not unkindly, because she had had to chink such wide cracks with a mixture of clay and dried grass. She moved into the larger cabin, discovered a dozen roof leaks during the first hard rain they'd had; got them patched, began molding clay into dishes and containers, started pressuring the boys to build her a ceramics kiln, began to think about how their clothes would eventually wear out and how she would have to find some way to weave cloth to replace them. Day by day she was less irritable, as the boys settled into a routine. "I do believe," she said to herself one day, "I would be disappointed if they found a way back!" She straightened up and almost spilled the container of wild rice she had been garnering from the swampy spot at the upper reaches of the lake. "Why! The very idea of saying such a thing, Katheryn Kittredge!" But her heart was not in the self chiding. But what reason, in heaven's name, would they have for staying here? Three people, marooned, growing old, dying one by one. There was no chance for Man's survival here. From the evidence about them, they had come to the conclusion that on this New Earth, in the tree of evolution, the bud to grow into a limb of primates had never formed. She turned and looked at the tall, straight pines ahead of her. She saw the deciduous hardwoods, now gold and red, to one side of her. Behind her the lake was teeming with fish. The spicy smell of fall was all around her, and a stray breeze brought a scent of grapes she had overlooked when she was gathering all she could find to make a wine to pleasantly surprise the boys. She thought of the flock of wild chickens which had learned to hang around the cabin for scraps of food, the grunting lazy pigs, grown quite tame, begging her to find their acorns for them, the nanny goat with two halfgrown kids Lt. Harper had brought back from a solitary walk he had taken. New Earth was truly a paradise -- and all to be wasted if there were not Man to appreciate it truly. A thought knocked at her mind, but she resolutely shut it out, refused it even silent verbalization. Yet, while she stooped over again and busied her hands with stripping the rice from the stalks without cutting them on the sharp dry leaves, she found herself thinking about Mendelian law. Line breeding from father to daughter, or brother to sister -- in domestic animals, of course -- was all right in fixing desirable traits, providing certain recessives in both the dam and the sire did not thus become dominant. "There, Katheryn Kittredge," she mumbled with satisfaction. "Assuming the responsibilities of domesticity has not made you forget what you learned." But the danger of fixing recessives into dominants through inbreeding was even less with half-brothers and sisters. Now daughters by one -- er -- sire could be bred to another sire to get only a quarter relationship to a similar cross from the other father -- er -- sire. She must work it out with a stylus in smooth clay. The boys had preempted every scrap of paper for their pointless calculations. But she could remember it, and it would be valuable in breeding up a desirable barnyard stock. Yet it was odd that she assumed two males and only one female! ankle deep in the bog of wild rice, muddy to her knees in her tom coveralls, slapping at persistent mosquitoes, she came to terms with herself. In the back of her mind she had known it all the time. All this was without meaning unless there was Man -- and a continuity of Man. Even so little as this gathering of wild rice, before the migrating ducks got it, was without meaning, if it were merely to stave off death from a purposeless existence. If there were no other fate for them than eventually to die, without posterity, then they might as well die tomorrow, today, now. The men were still living in a dream of getting back. No doubt their lusting appetites were driving them to get back to their brazen, heavy-breasted, languorous-eyed hussies who pandered to all comers without shame! Miss Kitty was astonished at her sudden vehemence, the red wave of fury which swept over her. But of course she was right. That was their urgent drive. "A male human is nothing more than a sex machine!" Wasn't that what her roommate at college had once said? Or was it her maiden aunt who had dominated her widowed mother and herself through all the years she was growing up? What did it matter who said it? She knew it was true. No wonder they were so anxious to get back to Old Earth! Her lip lifted in cynical scorn. "You don't dare leave a young girl alone with a boy for five minutes," her aunt had once complained bitterly. "All they ever think about is... her voice had dropped to a whisper and she had given that significant look to Katheryn's mother. But Katheryn had known what she meant, of course. And it was true of all men. Women, back on Old Earth, had looked at her with pity and a little contempt, because she had never, she had never... But you didn't have to have first hand experience to know. She had authoritative knowledge gleaned from reading between the lines of the very best text books on abnormal psychology. She hadn't had to read between the lines of sundry surveys and reports. And if there had been no organized study at all, the movies, the TV, the published better fiction -- all of it centered around that one theme -- that one, alone, romanticize it or obscure it though they might. It was all men ever thought about. And many women pandered to it -- those sultry, shameless, undulating... But Sam and Lt. Harper? It had been almost two months now since they had left Earth and those vile blondes. How had they restrained themselves during all this time! Her fuming anger was suddenly overwhelmed by a warm rush of gratitude, a sympathy which brought a gush of tears into her eyes to stream down her cheeks. How blind she had been. Of course! They were still bound by their gentleman's Word of Honor, given to her on that first night in the lifeship. What splendid men! All right, so they had their faults; a little impractical, dreamers all, but with such nobility of character, truly they were fit to be the fathers of a proud and noble race. And, in time, with herself to shape and guide them... She straightened her aching back from bending over the rice reeds, thrust out her scrawny chest, and breathed deeply. She lifted her chin resolutely. "Katheryn Kittredge," she said firmly. "A woman's place is more than merely cooking and cleaning and mending!" dinner, a special dinner. She set before the two men a whole roast young tom turkey, with a touch of frosted persimmons mixed with wild honey to enliven the light meat. There was a dressing of boiled maise and wild rice, seasoned with wild onion and thyme. There were little red tomatoes, tough but tasty. There were baked yams. There was a custard of goat milk and turkey eggs sweetened with honey. Instead of the usual sassafras tea to which their digestion had finally adjusted, there was grape wine in their cups. It wasn't a very good wine, still green and sharp, but the occasion called for it. Both of them looked at her with wonder, when they came in at her call and saw the table. But they didn't ask any questions. They just started eating and, for once, they forgot to talk about warp theory. She, herself, ate little. She was content to look at them. The lieutenant, tall and strong, bigboned, dark-complexioned, squarefaced, white even teeth. Sam, smalled-boned, fair-complexioned, hair bleached straw from the outdoor sun. He had been inclined to be a little stout when she first saw him, but now he had that muscular wiriness which comes with hard physical work -- and clean living. His daughters would be delicate, lovely, yet strong. The lieutenant's sons... She watched, in a kind of rapture, the ripple of muscles beneath their shirts, the way the pillar of the neck arose from strong shoulders to support a well-shaped head, the way the muscles of jaws rippled under their lean cheeks as they chewed. The way their intelligent eyes flashed appreciation at each savory mouthful. "It occurs to me, Sam," Lt. Harper said as he washed down some turkey with a healthy quaff of wine. "We could give a little more attention to scraping up food for Miss Kitty to cook. Now you take this brown rice, for example, we could rig up a polishing mill so she'd have white rice... "Nonsense," Miss Kitty said firmly. "All the proper food value lies in the brown covering. I will not have the children's eating habits spoiled from the beginning... Appalled, she realized what she had said. Both men stopped chewing and stared at her. "What children, Miss Kitty?" Lt. Harper asked, and he was looking at her intently. She dropped her eyes to her plate. She felt the red flush arising around her neck, up into her face. She couldn't face him. Yet, it had to be done. It must be made quite clear to him, both of them, that... "Our children," she said distinctly, and felt their eyes boring into the top of her head. "And I wish you both would stop calling me Miss Kitty, as if -- as if you were kindergarten children and I was the old maid school teacher! All three of us are adults, men and a woman. In spite of what you may think, I am not a great deal older than either of you. There will be children! If it works out the way I plan, I believe I do have time for at least six sons and daughters before I reach... before my barren years." She heard Sam's fork clatter down on the table top as he dropped it. She heard Lt. Harper's feet scrape, as if he had been about to leap to his feet. Without seeing it, she almost felt them look at one another. Well, she had made it plain enough. But they didn't say anything. Suddenly she could stand it no longer. Slowly, in dignity, she arose to her feet and without looking at them she walked, head down, to her door. Then she realized she had perhaps been too crisp, too businesslike about it all. A vision of the kind of women they must have known, the kind which would arouse their passion, the kind which would make it all unmistakable... She had a flashing memory of a girl back in college, one smitten with a football hero, trying to captivate the hero, draw him to her. On impulse, Miss, Kitty imitated that girl now, and a little tableau she remembered. At her doorway she turned, and looked at them over her shoulder. She lifted her shoulder so that it touched her chin. She drooped her eyes half shut. "My name is Katheryn," she said, and she tried to make her voice husky instead of tremulous and frightened. "Call me Kathy, call me Kate, call me Kay." Both men were staring at her with wide eyes and open mouths as she closed her door. She made sure there was no sound of a latch turning to discourage them.  and, for the first time other than for bathing, completely. She felt grateful for the time they were giving her. No doubt they were talking it over, man to man, in the way of civilized, educated... She crawled in between the blankets, fresh and smelling of sunshine from being washed in the clear water of the lake. She was a little regretful she had no perfume; that was something they didn't put into lifeboats. She waited. She heard the low rumble of male voices in the other room. They were undoubtedly discussing it. She felt grateful relief that their voices had not risen. They were not quarreling over her -- not yet. She did hope they would continue to be sensible. She heard one of the stools scrape on the rough split log floor. She caught her breath in a gasp, found her hands were clutching the covers and pulling them tightly up to her chin. She willed her hands to relax. She willed the tenseness out of her rigid body. She heard the other stool scrape. Surely they were not both... She heard their feet walking across the floor, the heavy steps of the lieutenant, the lighter, springier steps of Sam. She gritted her teeth and clenched her eyes tight shut. And then she heard the outer door close softly. Which one? Which had remained behind? She waited. Then she heard footsteps outside. She tried to identify, by sound, which man was making the noise, but the shuffling of leaves was confusing, as if more than one person were walking outside. And where was the other man? Why had he made no sound in the outer room? Was he quietly drinking up the wine -- first? Then, distinctly, she recognized two pairs of feet outside, going farther away, in the direction of the men's bunkhouse. She could not bear the suspense. She sprang out of bed clutching one of the blankets about her. Slowly, soundlessly, she opened her door a crack. She could see no one in the flickering firelight of the room. They had turned out the lights. Or -- he had. She opened the door wide. It had been they, not he. Both men had gone. between a sob and a hiccough rattled her throat. She choked back another. She would not give way to... rage?... frustration?... relief?... fear? Fear! She had seen the movies, she had read the stories, she had overheard boys. "##I fix you when we get outside! You meet me in the alley and I'll show you!" These two men. Were they going off into the darkness to settle a conflict which they had not been able to resolve through sensible agreement? There, under the trees in the moonlight, would they, denying all the progress of the sacred centuries, would they revert to the primitive, the savage; and like two rutting male animals rend and tear and battle with one another for the only female? Oh, no! No, they must not! There was no doubt that the lieutenant with his great, massive strength... But the human race of New Earth must have the fine sensitivity, the lithe grace of Sam's kind, also! She tugged the blanket around her shoulders and ran toward the door. She must reach them, step in between them, even at the cost of receiving some of the blows upon herself, make them realize... She felt herself shivering as she opened the door, shivering as if with an ague. She felt her face burning, as if with a fever. Her teeth were chattering in anguish. She tried to still the noise of her teeth, to listen for those horrible sounds of silent men in a death conflict somewhere out there in the moonlight. Then she saw a chink of light through a crack in the wall of the bunkhouse, where the clay had dried and fallen away from the logs. In there? What were they doing in there? Instead of their fists and crushing arms, were they stalking one another with knives? She remembered scenes from Western movies, the overturned tables, the crash of things thrown. Had some sense of chivalry still remained in the lieutenant, and he, knowing Sam wouldn't stand a chance in hand to hand conflict, devised some contest 'which would be more fair? There need be no contest. If only they would be sensible, work out an equitable schedule... Barefooted, she ran across the ground toward the bunkhouse. She had visions of herself throwing open the door, shocking them to stillness in a tableau of violence. She was close now. She should be able to hear the crashing of their table and chairs. She could hear nothing at all. Was she too late? Even now, was one of them standing above the other, holding a dripping knife? What horrors might she run into, even precipitate, if she threw open the door? Caution, Katheryn! Instead, she crept up to the crack in the wall. Her teeth were chattering so hard, she had difficulty in holding her head still enough to peer through the slit of light. With her free hand, her shoulders were shaking so hard she had difficulty in clutching the blanket about her with the other, she grabbed her jaw and held on, to still her shaking. Her eyes focused on the scene inside the room. S HE had a three-quarter vision of each man and the table between them. They were dealing a greasy pack of cards! Were they going to gamble for her? Relief and shame intermingled in her reaction. She would have preferred they settle it with more elemental... It would have made it less... Yet, this way neither would be killed. Sons and daughters from both... "How are we going to tell her now?" Sam asked, as he picked up his cards. His voice came distinctly through the wall crack. "We should have told her about our wives and families right at the start," Harper answered morosely. "I don't know why we didn't. Except that, well, none of us have talked about things back home. She didn't, and so we didn't either." "But I never dreamed Miss Kitty would start getting ideas," Sam said in a heartsick voice. "I just never dreamed she..." "We're going to have to tell her," Harper said resolutely. "We'll just have to tell her that, well, there's still hope and as long as there's hope..." Blindly, in an anguish of shame such as she had never known, Miss Kitty crept away from the bunkhouse, and stumbled back to the cabin. Now she was shivering so violently she could hardly walk. The exposure to the night air, the nervous tension, overwrought emotions... She could not remember getting back into the cabin, crawling into bed. She knew only that a little later she was in bed, still shaking violently with a chill, burning with fever. She was awakened in the morning with the sound of the axe chopping on wood. She dragged herself out of bed, forlorn, sick, filled with shame. Her head spun so wildly that she sank to her knees and lay it on the bed. Then her pride and her will forced her to her feet, and she drove herself to dress, to go into the big room, dig out glowing coals from beneath ashes, put them in the little cook stove, pile fine slivers of resin-rich kindling on top of them, blow on them. Between painful breaths, she heard herself sobbing. Her teeth started chattering again, and there was a ringing in her ears. She heard the blows of the axe falling on the wood, and each blow transferred itself to the base of her skull. The ringing in her ears grew louder and louder. She heard one of the men shout. It sounded like Sam. Had he hurt himself with the axe, gashed his leg or something? She'd always been afraid of that axe? She'd told them and told them to be careful! She pulled herself up from her knees there at the stove where she had been blowing on the coals. She must get out there, help him! That terrible buzzing in her head, that ringing in her ears. No matter, she must get out there to help him. She threw open the door and saw Sam running toward the lifeship. Had he lost his mind? The bandages were here. She had them here! She saw Lt. Harper come to the door of the bunkhouse. He was still pulling on his pants. He started running toward the lifeship, too, cinching his belt as he ran. Then she realized that at least part of the ringing in her ears came from the lifeship. At first it had no meaning for her, then she remembered them talking about fixing up some kind of alarm, so that if they got a signal through... She started running toward the lifeship. She stumbled, fell, got up, felt as light as a feather, as heavy as mercury. She crawled Up the steps of the lifeship, she clutched at the door. She heard Sam speaking very slowly, carefully. "Do you read me? Is this Earth?" She saw his face. She knew the answer. And that was the last she knew, in little dribbles like a montage -- half reality and half nightmare of the insomniac. Lt. Harper's voice shouting at her with a roar like a waterfall, "My God, Miss Kitty, are you sick?" Blackness. More shouting, Sam calling the lieutenant, something about a red flare in the sky. A lucid moment, when Sam was explaining to her that Earth had been given the warp coordinates, and had sent a red flare to see if they could get through. Then another gap. A heavy trampling of feet, a great many feet. Some kind of memory of a woman in white, sticking a thermometer in her mouth. The prick of a needle in her arm. The sense of being carried. A memory of knowing she was in a ship. A flash that was more felt than seen. Nightmares! All nightmares. She would wake up in a moment. She would get up, dress, go out and start a fire to heat water on the cookstove. She had planned to have coffee, a special treat from their almost exhausted store. She would have coffee. The men would come in sheepish, evading her glance. Very well, she would simply tell them that she had misunderstood, save them the embarrassment of telling her. She would not be the woman scorned. She moved her hands to throw back her blankets, and froze. Her fingers had not touched blankets, they had touched cool, slick sheets! Her eyes popped open. It had not been a nightmare, a wish fulfillment of escape. She was in a hospital room. A nurse was standing beside her bed, looking down at her. A comfortably motherly-looking sort of woman was speaking to her. "Well, now, Miss Kittredge, that's much better!" the woman said. "So you will go gather wild rice in the swamp and get your bloodstream full of bugs!" But it was a professional kind of chiding, the same way she had talked to her kindergarten children when they'd got themselves into trouble. "Still," the nurse chatted, "it's made our pathologists mighty happy. They've been having themselves a ball analyzing the bugs you three managed to pick up. You got something close to malaria. The two men, healthy oxen, didn't get anything at all. We had to let 'em out of quarantine in three days." her in a sort of unthinking lassitude. She was still trying to make the reality seem real. The nurse helped a little. She turned to her cart and produced a white enamel, flat container. She slid it under the top sheet. "Upsy-daisy now, Miss Kittredge," she said firmly. "It's time you started cooperating a little." Yes, that brought her back to reality. But she still didn't say anything. "Although we might as well not have let 'em out of quarantine," the nurse grumbled. "They've just been living out there in the waiting room for a solid week, buttonholing everybody from doctors down to orderlies asking about you." She gave a soft wolf whistle. "Whew, imagine having not just one guy but two of 'em, absolutely crazy about you. Just begging to see you, hold your hand a little. Two beautiful men like that! You ready to see thfcm soon?" Miss Kitty felt a rush of shame again. In the cabin she would have been forced to face them, but not now. "No," she said firmly. "I never want to see them again." "Well, now, let me tell you something, Miss Kittredge," the nurse said, and this time there was a note of seriousness. "One of the symptoms of this sickness you picked up is that it makes you talk. Gal, you have talked a blue streak for the last week. We know everything, everything that happened, everything you thought about. The doctor understood how you might feel about things. So he told the lieutenant and Mr. Eade that you had got bitten about the time you were up in the rice swamp, and that you hadn't been responsible for anything you'd said for the last three days back there on New Earth." Miss Kitty felt a flood of relief. "Did they believe the doctor?" she asked hesitantly. "Sure they believed him," the nurse answered. "Sure they did. But you wanna know something? I've talked to those two men. And I've just got myself an idea that it wouldn't have made a particle of difference in the way they feel about you even if they didn't believe it. You're tops with those two guys, lady. Absolutely tip-top tops. The way you pitched in there, carried your share of things... She slipped the pan out from under the sheets, and put it into a compartment of the cart. "You wanna know something else? I don't think you were out of your head at all when you propositioned those two guys. I think you were showing some good female sense, maybe for the first time in your life. And I think they know you were. "You think it over, Miss Kittredge. If I know you -- and I ought to after listening to you rave day after day -- you've got what it takes. You want my advice? You go right on being a normal female. Don't you be silly enough to get back into that warped, twisted, frustrated kind of a man-hater you always thought you were. "I gotta go now. You think it over. But not too long. Those two guys are going to be mighty, mighty hurt if they find out you're conscious and won't see them." She went out the door, pushing her cart in front of her. willed the tenseness out of her body, and just lay for a while thinking of nothing. A gust, a rattle of raindrops, called her attention to the window. They had put her on the ground floor. She was able to see through the window to the street outside. The rain was pelting down, like that first rain they'd had there on New Earth. How chagrined the boys had looked when the roof started leaking in a do # en places! She felt a warm sense of relief, of gratitude, that she could re#T member them without shame. The nurse had been right, of course. Probably the doctors had planted that particular nurse in her room, anticipating her return to consciousness, anticipating the necessity for a little mental therapy. Good female sense. With such a semantic difference from good male sense! The mind of a man and a woman was not the same. She knew that now. And she realized that deeply, hidden from her own admittance, she had always known it. And the nurse's good earthy expression -- "propositioning those two guys" -- approval that it had been natural and right. And another expression, "the way you pitched in there, carried your share of things." Carried your share of things! That meant more than just cooking, mending, cleaning. More than just seeing that the race continued, too; although it somehow tied in with all these things. She lay in her bed, watching the rain through the window, getting comfort from the soft, drumming sound. Along the street she could see people sloshing through the film of water underfoot. She watched the scene of turnedup collars, pulled-down hatbrims, bobbing umbrellas, as if it were something apart from her, and yet a part of her. She began to get a sense of rare vision, an understanding which she knew was more complete than any intellectual abstraction she had ever managed. She began to get a woman's sense of purpose, completely distinct from that of a man. S HE recalled once reading of an incident where an Oklaa huge mansion ; then, because his squaw did not know how to make a home within it, they pitched their tepee in the front grounds, to live there, unable to feel at home in anything else. Yes, too often the mansions of science came in for a similar treatment. The vast rooms of ideas, the great halls of expansion, the limitless ceilings of challenge, the wide expanses of speculation; all these things which would exalt Man into a truly great existence were denied, put to no use beyond mere gadgetry. And the mass of human beings still huddled in their cramped and grimy little tepees of ancient syndromes, only there feeling at home. It was the fault of the women. They had not kept up with the men. Those who attempted it tried to be men, to prove themselves as good a man as any man, the way she had done. They had missed the real point entirely, every single bit of it. The male was still functioning in the way males always had. There was no essential difference between the cave man who climbed a new mountain and explored a new valley and brought back a speared deer to throw down at the entrance of his home cave; no difference between him and the modern explorer of science who, under similar hardships, brought back a bright and rich new knowledge. But the ancient cave woman had not failed. She had known what to do with the deer to strengthen and secure the future of the race. And what about New Earth? Lt. Harper and Sam had talked about the possibility of millions of Earths, each infinitesimally removed from the other, and if they could bridge the gap to one, they might bridge it to an uncountable number. Perhaps for her there was only one New Earth. Would the processions of colonists going there spoil it? Would the women going there see in it a great mansion? Or, instead, would they simply go there to escape here -- escape from exhaustion, failure, anguish, bitterness -- and, as always, take these things along with them? Would they still live in grimy little syndromes of endless antagonism, bickering in their foolish frustrations, because they had no wisdom about what to do with this newly speared deer? Oh, not on New Earth! Suddenly Miss Kitty knew what she must do. If that one particular mansion needed someone to make it into a home, why not herself? And who had a better right? Somewhere, there, perhaps that very one striding along under the eaves of that building across the street, with his hatbrim pulled down, leaning against the rain, somewhere, close, there must be a man who could share her resolution and her dream. A man of the same breed as the lieutenant and Sam, a man who carried his head high, his shoulders back, who had keen, intelligent eyes, and laughter. Yes, now she wanted to see the two men after all, and meet their lucky wives, and see their children, the kind of children she might have had. Might yet have! At a flash of memory, she smiled a little ruefully, and yet with an inner peace. 'T am not so old," she repeated in a whisper. "I still have time for at least a half dozen sons and daughters before -- before my barren years." M# ( Continued from page #) I don't know, Maje. You figure it out. But don't just gabble along psuedo scientifically. Be entertaining! You demand it of me: okay, I demand it of you. What else is on my mind? Well, books are piling up, but they obstinately won't make complete editorials. The Tastemakers by Russell Lynes (Harper), for example, proves a quote from Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., of Corning Glass: "In our modern industrial society, it is the professional designer who increasingly is determining the appearance of our physical environment. The individual is less and less able to participate in this determination." That's bad? From typewriters to toasters, merchandise looks and functions better as a result. They've weaned us from beaded lampshades, square cars, rhine.stone houses, Rosa Bonheur and Venuses with clocks in their bellies -- and have you admired the way packaging engineers box dishes and glassware so even the post office can't do its usual creative damage? The tastemakers may fumble here and there, but I'm not a bit afraid to say I'm for them! Isn't One Wife Enough? by Kimball Young (Holt) explores Mormon polygamy, a subject that writers find tiresomely fascinating. If it appeals to them, they should have their heads examined or examine this book. Bergen Evans calls Mormon polygamy "multiple monogamy" because each wife had to have her own home. But it's that even in a harem. Men who submit to polygamy deserve to be called saints, for the setup is always costly, bothersome and harrowingly complex. As you'd expect, most Mormon men cravenly avoided it. Then there's Sea, Sun and Sky by Irving P. Krick and Roscoe Fleming (Lippincott), a fine meteorological source book and plain good reading. It's the kind of thing that can't be discussed without quotes and, once started, I probably wouldn't be able to stop. Read it for yourself, Maje, and you'll see what I mean. (There's no mention of a possible world without any weather, but I guess that would be asking too much.) Speaking of not being able to stop quoting, all I can do is suggest Fred Allen's Treadmill to Oblivion (Simon  Schuster), which I zipped through because I damned well wanted to and practically all of it is both hilariously and shrewdly quotable. You see what I mean, Maje? Sometimes you simply can't put together an entertaining editorial. hi S # #J Science-Fiction Best-Seller louu ft #  Q # --  Continued from Back Cover Fictioii l'.ook Club Selection which you may choose trom the two pulse-pounding Science-Fiction best-sellers described on this paga Makes This Sensational Offer # IS make this s e n s a t i o n a I r to introduce l to the Seiencetion Hook Club... founding is a recognition of the fact that ScienceFiction has won a place as an important neio kind of new Science-Fiction Hooks -- without wasting time and money wading through good and bad alike? Books -- At Remarkable Savings worrying about the cost, the Club has ara few cents shipping charge) -- even though they cost #), # and tip in publishers' editions! Knelt month's selection is described IN really want -- as few as four a year, if you wish. We know you will enjoy membership in this are making this amazing offer to new members. 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PAroiaam Enginaarlag g Plattkt Palp god ftpar Miking  Elactrklan  ContiAg  Unaman C Raading Shop Sluaprlnti O Rafrlgaratlon O Shaat Matol dtorkar  FinMting and (ftrting  Loam Fixfig Tutik Oaa'Ioc  TaxtllaEnT aThfowlM  Warping and Watvlng  Tool Daiign  Taalmiklng g Domaatk RMrlgarallM iRivliatiao...nlonalEnginaariM Short Story WrlUng D Prictlcai Radla TV Emfr'ig gprefi g Radio and TV Sarvlck O Shor. O Radio OparaUng Q Ttlapy Oalaxy novelets features #I Hudson Street, New York #, N Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondlass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, hy Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including trnn.slation, re.served. All material submitted must be accompanied hy self-addressed stamped envelopes. The puhlislier assuptes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories iirinted in this in;ig:izine :ire fiction, and any similarity between characters and actued persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. These mat minds were Kosicriictans Benjamin FrankUi Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind I Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose California, U.S.A. ccspY of 'The Mas tfcfy of Life' -- A nonprofit: organizacation Address : M.V.J. Scribe M.V.J. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name. A perennial theme in science fiction -- and one I wish were less hardy -- is the exploration of invasion techniques. Here, copyright # by Time, Inc., and reprinted by permission, is a nastily inventive one: "The female screw worm, a serious warm-country cattle pest, mates only once. Dr. A. W. Lindquist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture told a Tampa meeting of entomologists how this determined monogamy may be the screw worm's undoing. "The adult females, which are ordinary-looking flies, lay eggs on wounds or scratches in the hide of cattle; the larvae that hatch burrow into the flesh, sometimes eating the poor beasts alive. Since screw worms breed in wild animals as well as in tame ones, they are almost immune to extermination. "After pondering the problem, Entomologist E. F. Knipling, U.S. D.A., had an idea. The male flies, he mused, hunt and catch the females with singleminded enthusiasm. Why not draft the males into the extermination service? "So Knipling and his assistants raised screw worm flies and exposed them to X-rays. The flies suffered no obvious ill effects and were as successful as unexposed males in the pursuit of females. The difference was that the Xrayed males were sterile. This meant that every female with which one of them mated would lay infertile eggs for the rest of her life. "So Knipling's Machiavellian scheme was given a preliminary tryout in Florida with good results. Then last year an entomological task force invaded the Dutch island of Curacao in the Caribbean, where screw worms were strongly in possession. Supplied by air with male flies raised in Florida (on blood and horse meat) and sterilized by gamma rays from Cobalt #, the experimenters released them on the island at the rate of # males a week for each square mile. "Results came quickly. Wounded goats exposed to the flies showed clusters of screw worm eggs, but many proved infertile. The females that laid the eggs had mated with sterilized males from Florida. After seven weeks, all eggs were infertile, and the screw worm population dropped toward the vanishing point. No eggs at all were collected after mid-October, and since November there have been no signs of screw worms on the island. (Continued on page #) The Theory of Games is in the news! It has been revealed that top-level government planners use the Theory of Games to formulate basic policy. Economists find the Theory of Games an invaluable new tool. All branches of the military have revised their logistic and strategic concepts in the light of this new Theory. Workers in all branches of Science find that the Theory of Games provides new avenues of approach to unsolved problems and places new interpretations on existing data. to think subconsciously in the new logic of this Theory. ble a matrix that looks like the figure illustrated. The player who placed the Black tiles selects a horizontal row on his indicator; the player who placed the white tiles selects a vertical column on his indicator. On the first play of this particular matrix, both players simultaneously reveal their indicators set as shown. in what proportion should you destribute your choices among the rows A B C D to be sure of winning this particular game over a series of After you have played several games of tuitively to solve problems such as the one enough game for a child to play, a new facunique! In chess or checkers you plan your next move only after your opponent has made reveal their choices simultaneously, you must think from two points of view at the same time! The new multi-valued logic inherent in the Theory of Games becomes a new thought habit as you use it in the concrete situations a training aid to reach a higher order of thinking! #x# board, # gold-stamped plastic markers, two indicators, score pad, pencil, and a Then the booklet explains some of the basic concepts of the Theory of Games. It shows you how to arrive at an arithmetical approximation to the solution of a matrix problem such as the' one above. In addition it gives examples of the application of the Theory of Games to conflict situations in marketing and military strategy. A' B' c' D' (D   O Oi   (D a  O  G Ei     iO game. It teaches fascinating new thought processes as it entertains. In the past only those with a knowledge of advanced mathematics have understood this method of statistical inference. Now, can add this valuable new tool to your powers of analysis. check, or money order (a # bill if you wish). T he liner from Port Lyautey was comfortable and slick, but I was leaning forward in my seat as we came in over Naples. I had been on edge all the way across the Atlantic. Now as the steward came through the compartments to pick up our Blue Plate ration coupons for the trip, I couldn't help feeling annoyed that I hadn't eaten the food they represented. For the Company wanted everyone to get the fullest possible benefit out of his policies -- not only the food policies, but Blue Blanket, Blue Bolt and all the others. Winner of the # Galaxy-Simon  Schuster novel contest, this taut suspense story asks the challenging question: how dangerous would it be to live in a rigidly risk-tree world? We whooshed in to a landing at Carmody Field, just outside of Naples. My baggage was checked through, so I didn't expect to have any difficulty clearing past the truce-team Customs inspectors. It was only a matter of turning over my baggage checks, and boarding the rapido that would take me into Naples. But my luck was low. The man before me was a fussbudget who insisted on carrying his own bags, and I had to stand behind him a quarter of an hour, while the truce-teams geigered his socks and pajamas. While I fidgeted, though, I noticed that the Customs shed had, high up on one wall, a heroicsized bust of Millen Carmody himself. Just standing there, under that benevolent smile, made me feel better. I even managed to nod politely to the traveler ahead of me as he finally got through the gate and let me step up to the uniformed Company expediter who checked my baggage tickets. And the expediter gave me an unexpected thrill. He leafed through my papers, then stepped back and gave me a sharp military salute. "Proceed, Adjuster Wills," he said, returning my travel orders. It hadn't been like that at the transfer point at Port Lyautey -- not even back at the Home Office in New York. But here we were in Naples, and the little war was not yet forgotten; we were under Company law, and I was an officer of the Company. It was all I needed to restore my tranquility. But it didn't last. f I HE rapido took us through lovely Italian countryside, but it was in no hurry to do it. We were late getting into the city itself, and I found myself almost trotting out of the little train and up into the main waiting room where my driver would be standing at the Company desk. I couldn't really blame the Neapolitans for the delay -- it wasn't their fault that the Sicilians had atomized the main passenger field at Capodichino during the war, and the rapido wasn't geared to handling that volume of traffic from Carmody Field. But Mr. Gogarty would be waiting for me, and it wasn't my business to keep a Regional Director waiting. I got as far as the exit to the train shed. There was a sudden high, shrill blast of whistles and a scurrying and, out of the conthere suddenly emerged order. At every doorway stood three uniformed Company expediters; squads of expediters formed almost before my eyes all over the train shed; single expediters appeared and took up guard positions at every stairwell and platform head. It was a triumph of organization; in no more than ten seconds, a confused crowd was brought under instant control. But why? There was a babble of sur prised sounds from the hurrying crowds; they were as astonished as I. It was reasonable enough that the Company's expediter command should conduct this sort of surprise raid from time to time, of course. The Company owed it to its policyholders; by insuring them against the hazards of war under the Blue Bolt complex of plans, it had taken on the responsibility of preventing war when it could. And ordinarily it could, easily enough. How could men fight a war without weapons -- and how could they buy weapons, particularly atomic weapons, when the Company owned all the sources and sold only to whom it pleased, when it pleased, as it pleased? There were still occasional outI breaks -- witness the recent strife between Sicily and Naples itself -- but the principle remained... Anyway, surprise raids were well within the Company's rights. I was mystified, though -- I could not imagine what they were looking for here in the Naples railroad terminal; with geigering at Carmody Field and every other entry point to the Principality of Naples, they should have caught every fissionable atom coming in, and it simply did not seem reasonable that anyone in the principality itself could produce nuclear fuel to make a bomb. Unless they were not looking for bombs, but for people who might want to use them. But that didn't tie in with what I had been taught as a cadet at the Home Office. A unrecognizable roar from the station's public-address system. Then the crowd noises died down as people strained to listen, and I began to understand the words: "... Where you are in an orderly fashion until this investigation is concluded. You will not be delayed more than a few minutes. Do not, repeat, do not attempt to leave until this man has been captured. Attention! Attention! All persons in this area! Under Company law, you are ordered to stop all activities and stand still at once. An investigation is being carried out in this building. All persons will stand still and remain where you are in an orderly fashion until this investigation... The mounting babble drowned the speaker out again, but I had heard enough. I suppose I was wrong, but I had been taught that my duty was to serve the world, by serving the Company, in all ways at all times. I walked briskly toward the nearest squad of expediters, who were already breaking up into detachments and moving about among the halted knots of civilians, peering at faces, asking questions. I didn't quite make it; I hadn't gone more than five yards when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder, and a harsh voice snarled in the Neapolitan dialect, "Halt, you! Didn't you hear the orders?" I spun, staggering slightly, to face an armed expediter-officer. I stood at attention and said crisply, "Sorry. I'm Thomas Wills, Claims Adjuster. I thought I might be able to help." The officer stared at me for a moment. His cheeks moved; I had the impression that, under other circumstances, he would have spat on the floor at my feet. "Papers!" he ordered. I passed him my travel orders. He looked them over briefly, then returned them. Like the Customs expediter at Carmody Field, he gave me a snap salute, militarily precise and, in a way I could not quite define, contemptuous. "You should just stay here. Adjuster Wills," he advised -- in a tone that made it a command. "This will be over in a moment." He was gone, back to his post. I stood for a moment, but it was easier to listen to his orders than to obey them; the Neapolitan crowd didn't seem to take too well to discipline, and though there was no overt resistance to the search squads, there was a sort of Brownian movement of individuals in the throng that kept edging me back and away from where I had been standing. It made me a little uncomfortable; I was standing close to the edge of a platform, and a large poster announced that the Milan Express was due to arrive on that track at any moment. In fact, I could hear the thin, effeminate whistle of its Diesel locomotive just beyond the end of the platform. I tried to inch my way from the edge. I dodged around an electric baggage-cart, and trod heavily on someone's foot. ly, looking at the man. He glared back at me. There was a bright spark in his eyes; I could tell little about his expression because, oddly enough in that country of clean-shaven faces, he wore a heavy, ragged, clipped beard. He wore the uniform of a porter. He mumbled something I could not quite catch, and moved as if to push me away. I suppose I put up my arm. My papers, with the Company seal bright gold upon them, were still in my hand, and the bearded man caught sight of them. If there had been anger in his eyes before, there was now raging fury. He shrilled, "Beast! Animal!" He thrust at me blindly and leaped past me, out of the shelter of the bags; he went spinning furiously through the crowd, men and women ricocheting off him. I heard a harsh bellow; "There he goes! Zorchi! Zorchi!" And I could hear the bearded man shrieking curses as he hurtled up the platform, up toward the oncoming train, over to the edge -- and off the platform to the tracks! He fell less than a yard in front of the slim nose of the Diesel. I don't sqppose the speed of the train was even five miles an hour, but the engineer hadn't a chance in the world to stop. While I watched, struck motionless, along with all the others on that platform, the engine passed over the huddled form. The brakes were shrieking, but it was much, much too late. Even in that moment I thought he would not be killed -- not instantly, at least, unless he died of loss of blood. The trunk of his body was safely in the well between the tracks. But his legs were sprawled over a rail. And the slow click-click of the wheels didn't stop until his uniformed body was far out of sight. It was shocking, sickening, unbelievable. And it didn't stop there. A strange thing happened. When the man had dived into the path of the train, there was a sudden fearful hush; it had happened too suddenly for anyone to cry out. And when the hush ended, there was only a momentary, instinctive gasp of horror. Then there was a quick, astonished babble of voices -- and then cheers! And applause, and ringing bravos! I didn't understand. The man had thrown himself deliberately under the train. I was sure of it. Was that something to cheer? I finally made it to where the Regional Director was waiting for me -- nearly an hour late. It was at a hotel overlooking the Bay, and the sight was thrilling enough to put the unpleasant accident I had seen out of my mind for a moment. There was nothing s# beautiful in all the world, I thought, as the Bay of Naples at sunset. It was not only my own opinion; I had seen it described many times in the travel folders I had pored over, while my wife indulgently looked over my shoulder, back in those remote days of marriage. "La prima vista del mundo," the folders had called it -- the most beautiful sight of the world. They had said: "See Naples, and die." I hadn't known, of course, that Marianna would die first... But that was all behind me. After Marianna's death, a lot of things had happened, all in a short time, and some of them very bad. But good or bad, I had laid down a law for myself: I would not dwell on them. I had started on a new life, and I was going to put the past in a locked compartment in my mind. I had to! I was no longer an ordinary civilian, scraping together his Blue Heaven premiums for the sake of a roof over his head, budgeting his food policies, carrying on his humdrum little job. I was a servant of the human race and a member of the last surviving group of gentleman-adventurers in all the world: I was an Insurance Claims Adjuster for the Company! All the same, I couldn't quite forget some of the bad things that had happened, as I walked into the hotel dining room to meet the Regional Director. -was a huge, pale balloon of a man. He was waiting for me at a table set for four. As he greeted me, his expression was sour. "Glad to meet you. Wills. Bad business, this. Bad business. He got away with it again." I coughed. "Sir?" I asked. "Zorchi!" he snapped. And I remembered the name I had heard on the platform. The madman! "Zorchi, Luigi Zorchi, the human jellyfish. Wills, do you know that that man has just cashed in on his twelfth disability policy? And not a thing we could do to stop him! You were there. You saw it, didn't you?" "Well, yes, but -- " "Thought so. The twelfth! And your driver said on the phone it was both legs this time. Both legs -- and on a common carrier. Double indemnity!" He shook his enormous head. "And with a whole corps of expediters standing by to stop him!" I said with some difficulty, "Sir, do you mean that the man I saw run over by the train was -- " "Luigi Zorchi. That's who he was. Ever hear of him. Wills?" "Can't say I have." Gogarty nodded his balloonlike head. "The Company has kept it out of the papers, of course, but you can't keep anything from being gossiped about around here. This Zorchi is practically a national hero in Naples. now, I guess, and every lira of it has come right out of the Company's indemnity funds. And do you think we can do anything about it? Not a thing! Not even when we're tipped off ahead of time -- when, what, and where! "He just laughs at us. I know for a fact," Gogarty said bitterly, "that Zorchi knew we found out he was going to dive in front of that express tonight. He was just daring us to stop him. We should have! We should have figured he might disguise himself as a porter. We should -- " I interrupted, "Mr. Gogarty, are you trying to tell me this man deliberately maims himself for the accident insurance?" Gogarty nodded sourly. "Good heavens," I cried, "that's disloyal!" Gogarty laughed sharply and brought me up standing. There was a note to the way he laughed that I didn't like; for a moment there, I thought he was thinking of my own little -- well, indiscretion. But he said only, "It's expensive, too." I suppose he meant nothing by it. But I was sensitive on the subject. Before I could ask him any more questions, the massive face smoothed out in a smile. He rose ponderously, greeting someone. "Here they are. Wills," he said jovially. "The girls!" T he headwaiter was conducting two young ladies toward us. I remembered my manners and stood up, but I confess I was surprised. I had heard that discipline in the field wasn't the same as at the Home Office, but after all -- Gogarty was a Regional Director! It was a little informal of him to arrange our first meeting at dinner, in the first place. But to make a social occasion of it was -- in the straitlaced terms of the Home Office where I had been trained -- almost unthinkable. And it was apparent that the girls were mere decoration. I had a hundred eager questions to ask Gogarty -- about this mad Zorchi, about my duties, about Company policy here in the principality of Naples -- but it would be far out of line to bring up Company matters with these females present. I was not pleased, but I managed to be civil. The girls were decorative enough, I had to admit. Gogarty said expansively, all trace of ill humor gone, "This is Signorina dell'Angela and Miss Susan Manchester. Rena and Susan, this is Tom Wills." I said stiffly, "Delighted." Susan was the blonde one, a small plump girl with the bubbly smile of a professional model. She greeted Gogarty affectionately. The other was dark and lovely, but with a constant shadow, almost glowering, in her eyes. So we had a few drinks. Then we had a few more. Then the captain appeared with a broad menu, and I found myself in an embarrassing position. For Gogarty waved the menu aside with a gesture of mock disgust. "Save it for the peasants," he ordered. "We don't want that Blue Plate slop. We'll start with those little baby shrimps like I had last night, and then an antipasto and after that -- " I broke in apologetically, "Mr. Gogarty, I have only a Class-B policy." Gogarty blinked at me. "What?" I cleared my throat. "I have only Class-B coverage on my Blue Plate policy," I repeated. "I, uh, I never went in much for such -- " He looked at me incredulously. "Boy," he said, "this is on the Company. Now relax and let me order. Blue Plate coverage is for the peasants; I eat like a human being." It shook me a little. Here was a Regional Director talking about the rations supplied under the Company's Blue Plate coverage as "slop." Oh, I wasn't naive enough to think that no one talked that way. There were a certain number of malcontents anywhere. I'd heard that kind of talk, and even worse, once in a while from the Class-D near-uninsurables, the soreheads with a grudge against the world who blamed all their troubles on the Company and bleated about the "good old days." Mostly they did their bleating when it was premium time. I'd noticed. But I certainly never expected it from Gogarty. Still -- it was his party. And he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I had to allow him the defects of his virtues, I decided. If he was less reverent to the Company than he should have been, at least by the same token he was friendly and democratic. He had at least twenty years seniority on me, and back at the Home Office a mere Claims Adjuster wouldn't have been at the same table with a Regional Director. And here he was feeding me better than I had ever eaten in my life, talking as though we were equals, even (I reminded myself) seeing to it that we had the young ladies to keep us company. hours and endless glasses of wine, and we talked continually. But the conversation never came close to official business. The girl Rena was comfortable to be with, I found. There was that deep, eternal sadness in her eyes, and every once in a while I came up against it in the middle of a laugh; but she was softvoiced and pleasant, and undeniably lovely. Marianna had been prettier, I thought, but Marianna's voice was harsh Midwest while Rena's -- I stopped myself. When we were on our afterdinner liqueurs, Rena excused herself for a moment and, after a few minutes, I spotted her standing by a satin-draped window, looking wistfully out over a balcony. Gogarty winked. I got up and, a little unsteadily, went over to her. "Shall we look at this more closely?" I asked her. She smiled and we stepped outside. Again I was looking down on the Bay of Naples -- a scene painted in moonlight this time, instead of the orange hues of sunset. It was warm, but the Moon was frosty white in the sky. Even its muddled reflection in the slagged waters was grayish white, not yellow. There was a pale orange halo over the crater of Mount Vesuvius, to our left; and far down the coast a bluish phosphorescence, over the horizon, marked Pompeii. "Beautiful," I said. She looked at me strangely. All she said was, "Let's go back inside." Gogarty greeted us. "Looking at the debris?" he demanded jovially. "Not much to see at night. Cheer up, Tom. You'll see all the damage you want to see over the next few days." I said, "I hope so, sir." Gogarty shook his head reprovingly. "Not 'sir,' Tom. Save that for the office. Call me Sam." He beamed. "You want to know what it was like here during the war? You can ask the girls. They were here all through. Especially Susan -- she was with the Company's branch here, even before I took over. Right, Susan?" "Right, Sam," she said obediently. Gogarty nodded. "Not that Rena missed much either, but she was out of town when the Sicilians came over. Weren't you?" he demanded, curiously intent. Rena nodded silently. "Naples sure took a pasting," Gogarty went on. "It was pretty tough for a while. Did you know that the Sicilians actually made a landing right down the coast at Pompeii?" "I saw the radioactivity," I said. "That's right. They got clobbered, all right. Soon's the barges were in, the Neapolitans let them have it. But it cost them. The Company only allowed them five A-bombs each, and they had to use two more to knock out Palermo. And -- well, they don't like to tell this on themselves, but one of the others was a dud. Probably the only dud A-bomb in history, I guess." He grinned at Rena. Astonishingly, Rena smiled back. She was, I thought, a girl of many astonishing moments; I had not thought that she would be amused at Gogarty's heavyhanded needling. was interested enough -- I had followed the Naples-Sicily war in the papers and, of course, I'd been briefed at the Home Office before coming over -- but the girls seemed to find it pretty dull. By the time Gogarty finished telling me about the Sicilian attempt to trigger Mt. Vesuvius by dropping an A-bomb into its crater, Rena was frankly bored and even Susan was yawning behind her palm. We finally wound up under the marquee of the restaurant. Gogarty and the blonde politely said good night, and disappeared into a cab. It was clearly up to me to take Rena home. I hailed a cab. When I made up my new insurance schedule at the Home Office before coming over, I splurged heavily on transportation coverage. Perhaps I was making up for the luxuries of travel that life with Marianna hadn't allowed me. Anyway, I'd taken out Class AA policies. And as the cab driver clipped my coupons he was extremely polite. Rena lived a long way from the hotel. I tried to make small talk, but she seemed to have something on her mind. I was in the middle of telling her about the terrible "accident" I had seen that evening at the station -- suitably censored, of course -- when I observed she was staring out the window. She hadn't been paying attention while I talked, but she noticed the silence when I stopped. She gave a little shake of the head and looked at me. "I'm sorry, Mr. Wills," she said. "I am being rude." "Not at all," I said gallantly. "Yes." She nodded and smiled, but it was a thoughtful, almost a sad, smile. "You are too polite, you gentlemen of the Company. Is that part of your training?" "It's easy to be polite to you, Miss dell' Angela," I said by rote. Yes, it was part of our training: A Claims Adjuster is always courteous. But what I said was true enough, all the same. She was a girl that I enjoyed being polite to. "No, truly," she persisted. "You are an important officer in the Company, and you must have trained long for the post. What did they teach you?" "Well -- " I hesitated -- "just the sort of thing you'd expect, I guess. A little statistical mathematics -- enough so we can understand what the actuaries mean. Company policies, business methods, administration. Then, naturally, we had a lot of morale sessions. A Claims Adjuster -- " I cleared my throat, feeling a little self-conscious -- "a Claims Adjuster is supposed to be like Caesar's wife, you know. He must always set an example to his staff and to the public. I guess that sounds pretty stuffy. I don't mean it to be. But there is a lot of emphasis on tradition and honor and discipline." She asked, rather oddly, "And is there a course in loyalty?" "Why, I suppose you might say that. There are ceremonies, you know. And it's a matter of cadet honor to put the Company ahead of personal affairs." a A ND do all Claims Adjusters live by this code?" For a moment I couldn't answer. It was like a blow in the face. I turned sharply to look at her, but there was no expression on her face, only a mild polite curiosity. I said with difficulty, "Miss dell'Angela, what are you getting at?" "Why, nothing!" Her face was as angelic as her name. "I don't know what you mean or what you may have heard about me. Miss dell'Angela, but I can tell you this, if you are interested. When my wife died, I went to pieces. I admit it. I said a lot of things I shouldn't have, and some of them may have reflected against the Company. I'm not trying to deny that but, you understand, I was upset at the time. I'm not upset now." I took a deep breath. "To me, the Company is the savior of humanity. I don't want to sound like a fanatic, but I am loyal to the Company, to the extent of putting it ahead of my personal affairs, to the extent of doing whatever job the Company assigns to me. And, if necessary, to the extent of dying for it if I have to. Is that clear?" Well, that was a conversationstopper, of course. I hadn't meant to get all wound up about it, but it hurt to find out that there had been gossip. The dell'Angela girl merely said: "Quite clear." We rode in silence for a while. She was staring out the window again, and I didn't especially want to talk just then. Maybe I was too sensitive. But there was no doubt in my mind that the Company was the white hope of the world, and I didn't like being branded a traitor because of what I'd said after Marianna died. I was, in a way, paying the penalty for it -- it had been made pretty clear to me that I was on probation. That was enough. As I said, she lived a long way from the Gran Reale. I had plenty of time for my flare-up, and for brooding, and for getting over it. But we never did get around to much idle conversation on that little trip. By the time I had simmered down, I began to have disturbing thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that I was a man, and she was a girl, and we were riding in a cab. I don't know how else to say it. At one moment I was taking her home from a dinner; and at the next, I was taking her home from a date. Nothing had changed -- except the way I looked at it. A ll of a sudden, I began to feel as though I were fourteen years old again. It had been quite a long time since I had had the duty of escorting a beautiful girl -- and by then I realized this was a really beautiful girl -- home at the end of an evening. And I was faced with the question that I had thought would never bother me again at least a decade before. Should I kiss her good night? It was a problem, and I thought about it, feeling a little foolish but rather happy about it. But all my thinking came to nothing. She decided for me. The cab stopped in front of a white stucco wall. Like so many of the better Italian homes, the wall enclosed a garden, and the house was in the middle of the garden. It was an attractive enough place -- Class A at least, I thought -- though it was hard to tell in the moonlight. I cleared my throat and sort of halfway leaned over to her. Then she turned and was looking up at me, and the moonlight glinted brightly off what could only have been tears in her eyes. I stared. She didn't say a word. She shook her head briefly, opened the door and was gone behind the gate. It was a puzzlement. Why had she been crying? What had I done? I reviewed my conduct all the way back to the hotel, but nothing much came of it. Perhaps I had been brusque -- but brusque enough to bring tears? I couldn't believe it. Curious new life! I fell asleep with the pale moon shining in the window, brooding about the life I was just beginning, and about the old life behind me that was buried in the same grave with Marianna. II T he Naples branch of the Company lay in the heart of the city. I took a cab to a sort of dome-roofed thing called a galleria, and walked under its skeletal steel ceiling to my new office. Once the galleria had been roofed with glass, but the glass had powdered down from the concussion of the Mt. Vesuvius bomb, or the Capodichino bomb, or one of the other hammerblows the Sicilians had rained on the principality of Naples in the recent unpleasantness. I entered the office and looked around. The blonde girl named Susan appeared to double as the office receptionist. She nodded efficiently and waved me to a fenced-off enclosure where Sam Gogarty sat, plump and untroubled, at an enormous desk. I pushed open the swinging gate. Gogarty looked at me icily. "You're late," he said. He had no hangover, it was clear. I said apologetically, "Sorry, I'm -- " "Never mind. Just don't let it happen again." It was clear that, in the office, business was business; the fact that we had been drinking together the night before would not condone liberties the morning after. Gogarty said, "Your desk is over 'there. Wills. Better get started." I felt considerably deflated as I sat down at my desk and stared unhappily at the piles of blue and yellow manifolds before me. The Company had trained me well. I didn't need to be coached in order to get through the work; it was all a matter of following established techniques and precedents. I checked the coverage, reduced the claim to tape-code, fed the tapes into a machine. If the claim was legitimate, the machine computed the amounts due and issued a punch-card check. If there was anything wrong, the machine flashed a red light and spat the faulty claim out into a hopper. And there were plenty of claims. Every adult in Naples, of course, carried the conventional War-and-Disaster policy -- the so-called Blue Bolt coverage. Since few of them had actually been injured in the war, the claims were small -- mostly for cost of premiums on other policies, under the disability clauses. (For if war prevented a policyholder from meeting his Blue Plate premiums, for instance, the Company itself under Blue Bolt would keep his policies paid -- and the policyholder fed.) But there were some big claims, too. The Neapolitan government had carried the conventional Blue Bolt policies and, though the policy had been canceled by the Company before hostilities broke out -- thus relieving the Company of the necessity of paying damages to the principality of Naples itself -- still there were all the subsidiary loss and damage claims of the Neapolitan government's bureaus and departments, almost every one of them non-canceling. the amounts on some of the vouchers before me made my head swim. And the same, of course, would be true in Sicily. Though that would naturally be handled by the Sicilian office, not by us. However, the cost of this one brief, meager little war between Naples and Sicily, with less than ten thousand casualties, lasting hardly more than a week, must have set the Company's reserves lars. And to think that some people didn't like the Company! Why, without it, the whole peninsula of Italy would have been in financial ruin, the solvent areas dragged down with the combatants! Naturally, the Regional Office was understaffed for this volume of work -- which is why they had flown in new Adjusters like myself. surprised. Susan was standing next to me, an aspirin and a paper cup of water in her hand. "You look like you might need this," she whispered. She winked and was gone. I swallowed it gratefully, although my hangover was almost gone. I was finding in these dry papers all the romance and excitement I had joined the Company's foreign service for. Here before me were human lives, drama, tragedy, even an occasional touch of human-interest comedy. For the Company was supporting most of Naples and whatever affected a Neapolitan life showed up somehow in the records of the Company. It was a clean, dedicated feeling to work for the Company. The monks of the Middle Ages might have had something of the same positive conviction that their work in the service of a mighty churchly empire was right and just, but surely no one since. I attacked the mountain of forms with determination, taking pleasure in the knowledge that every one I processed meant one life helped by the Company. It was plain in history, for all to see. Once the world had been turbulent and distressed, and the Company had smoothed it out. It had started with fires and disease. When the first primitive insurance companies -- there were more than one, in the early days -- began offering protection against the hazards of fire, they had found it wise to try to prevent fires. There were the advertising campaigns with their wistful-eyed bears pleading with smokers not to drop their lighted cigarettes in the dry forest; the technical bureaus like the Underwriter's Laboratory, testing electrical equipment, devising intricate and homely gimmicks like the underwriter's knot; the Fire Patrol in the big cities that followed up the city-owned Fire Department; the endless educational sessions in the schools... And fires decreased. Then there was life insurance. Each time a death benefit was paid, a digit rang up on the actuarial scoreboard. Was tuberculosis a major killer? Establish mobile chest X-rays; alert the people to the meaning of a chronic cough. Was it heart disease? Explain the dangers of overweight, the idiocy of exercise past forty. People lived longer. Health insurance followed the same pattern. It had begun by paying for bills incurred during sickness, and ended by providing full medical sickness prevention and treatment for all. Elaborate research programs reduced the danger of disease to nearly nothing. Only a few rare cases, like that of Marianna... I shook myself away from the thought. Anyway, it was neither fire nor health insurance that concerned me now, but the Blue Bolt anti-war complex of the Company's policies. It was easy enough to see how it had come about. For with fire and accident and disease ameliorated by the strong protecting hand of the Company, only one major hazard remained -- war. And so the Company had logically and inevitably resolved to wipe out war. again, this time with a cardboard container of coffee. "You're an angel," I said. She set the coffee down and turned to go. I looked quickly around to make sure that Gogarty was busy, and stopped her. "Tell me something?" "Sure." "About this girl, Rena. Does she work for the Company?" Susan giggled. "Heavens, no. What an idea!" "What's so strange about it?" She straightened out her face. "You'd better ask Sam -- Mr. Gogarty, that is. Didn't you have a chance to talk to her last night? Or were you too busy with other things?" "I only want to know how she happened to be with you." Susan shrugged. "Sam thought you'd like to meet her, I guess. Really, you'll have to ask him. All I know is that she's been in here quite a lot about some claims. But she doesn't work here, believe me." She wrinkled her nose in amusement. "And I won't work here either, if I don't get back to my desk." I took the hint. By lunch time, I had got through a good half of the accumulation on my desk. I ate briefly and not too well at a nearby trattoria with a "B" on the Blue Plate medallion in its window. After the dinner of the night before, I more than half agreed with Gogarty's comments about the Blue Plate menus. Gogarty called me over when I got back to the office. He said, "I haven't had a chance to talk to you about Luigi Zorchi." I nodded eagerly. I had been hoping for some explanations. Gogarty went on, "Since you were on the scene when he took his dive, you might as well follow up. God knows you can't do worse than the rest of us." I said dubiously, "Well, I saw the accident, if that's what you mean." "Accident! What accident? This is the twelfth time he's done it, I tell you." He tossed a file folder at me. "Take a look! Loss of limbs -- four times. Internal injuries -- six times. Loss of vision, impaired hearing, hospitalization and so on -- good lord, I can't count the number of separate claims. And, every one, he has collected on. Go ahead, look it over." top sheet was a field report on the incident I had watched, when the locomotive of the Milan express had severed both legs. The one below it, dated five weeks earlier, was for flash burns suffered in the explosion of a stove, causing the loss of the right forearm nearly to the elbow. Curious, I thought, I hadn't noticed anything when I saw the man on the platform. Still, I hadn't paid too much attention to him at first, and modern prosthetic devices were nearly miraculous. I riffled through the redbordered sheets. The fifth claim down, nearly two years before, was -- I yelped, "Mr. Gogarty! This is a fraud!" "What?" "Look at this! 'On #st October, the insured suffered severe injuries while trapped in a rising elevator with faulty safety equipment, resulting in loss of both legs above knees, multiple lacerations of -- ' Well, never mind the rest of it. But look at that, Mr. Gogarty! He already lost both legs! He can't lose them twice, can he?" Gogarty sat back in his chair, looking at me oddly. "You startled me," he complained. "Wills, what have I been trying to tell you? That's the whole point, boy! No, he didn't lose his legs twice. It was five times!" I goggled at him. "But -- " "But, but. But he did. Wait a minute -- " he held up a hand to stop my questions -- "just take a look through the folder. See for yourself." He waited while, incredulously, I finished going through the dossier. It was true. I looked at Gogarty wordlessly. He said resentfully, "You see what we're up against? And none of the things you are about to say would help. There is no mistake in the records -- they've been double and triple-checked. There is no possibility that another man, or men, substituted for Zorchi -- fingerprints have checked every time. The three times he lost his arms, retinaprints checked. There is no possibility that the doctors were bribed, or that he lost a little bit more of his leg, for instance, in each accident -- the severed sections were recovered, and they were complete. Wills, this guy grows new arms and legs like a crab!" I looked at him in a daze. "What a fantastic scientific discovery!" I said. H e snorted. "Fantastic pain in the neck! Zorchi can't go on like this; he'll bankrupt the Company. We can't stop him. Even when we were tipped off this time -- we couldn't stop him. And I'll tell you true. Wills, that platform was loaded with our men when Zorchi made his dive. You weren't the only Adjuster of the Company there." He picked a folded sheet of paper out of his desk. "Here. Zorchi is still in the hospital; no visitors allowed today. But I want you to take these credentials and go to see him tomorrow. You came to us with a high recommendation from the Home Office, Wills -- " That made me look at him sharply, but his expression was innocent "You're supposed to be a man of intelligence and resourcefulness. See if you can come up with some ideas on dealing with that situation. I'd handle it myself, but I've got -- " he grimaced -- "certain other minor administrative difficulties to deal with. Oh, nothing important, but you might as well know that there appears to be a little, well, popular underground resentment toward the Company around here." "Incredible!" I said. He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "Well," he said, "it's quitting time. See you in the morning." I had a lonely dinner at the same cheap restaurant where I'd had my lunch. I spent an hour in my room with my Company-issued Adjuster's Handbook, looking for some precedent that had some sort of bearing on the case of a man who could grow new arms and legs. There wasn't anything, of course. I went out for a walk... and still it wasn't nearly time for me to retire to bed. So I did what I had been avoiding doing. I looked in the phone book for Rena dell' Angela's number. There was, it developed, a Benedetto dell'Angela at the address she'd given the cab driver; but the phone was disconnected. So I wandered around some more, and then I went to sleep, dreaming about Benedetto dell' Angela. I saw him as a leatherfaced, white-bearded and courtly old gentleman. Rena's father, surely. Possibly even her elder brother. Certainly not her husband. It was a dull finish to the first full day of my rich, exciting new life... T he "minor administrative difficulties" got major. So I didn't get to see Zorchi the next day, after all. A Junior Adjuster named Hammond -- he was easily sixty, but the slow-moving, unenterprising type that would stay junior till the day he died -- came white-faced into the office a few minutes after opening and huddled with Gogarty for a quarter of an hour. Then Gogarty called me over. He said, "We're having a spot of trouble. Hammond needs a little help; you're elected. Draw what you need, take a couple of expediters along, report back to me this evening." Hammond and I stopped at the cashier's office to draw three dispatch-cases full of lira-notes. Outside, an armored car was waiting for us, with a full crew of six uniformed expediters. We raced off down the narrow streets with the sirens wailing, climbing the long hill road past the radioactive remains of Capodichino, heading out toward the farmlands. Hammond worriedly filled me in on the way. He had got in early to his branch office that morning, but no earlier than the first of a long line of policyholders. There had, it appeared, been some kind of rumor spread that the Company was running out of money. It was preposterous on the face of it -- after all, who printed the money? -- but you can't argue with a large group of people and, before the official hour of opening the branch, there were more than a hundred in the knotted line outside the door. Hammond had rushed into the Naples office for help, leaving his staff to do the best they could. He said gloomily, staring out through the view-slits at the farmlands and vineyards we were passing through, "I just hope we still have a branch office. This is a bad spot. Wills. Caserta. It got bombed out, you know; the whole southern end of the town is radioactive. And it has a long history of trouble. Used to be the summer royal seat of the old Italian monarchy; then the Americans used it for a command headquarters in the war Mussolini got into -- the first atom war. It's been fought over time and again." I said reasonably, "But don't they know the Company has all the resources in the world?" "Sure they do -- when they're thinking. Right now they're not thinking. They've got it in their heads that the Company isn't going to pay off. They're scared. You can't tell them anything. You can't even give them checks -- they want cash on the line." I said, "That's pretty silly, isn't it? I mean -- ugh!" I retched, as I suddenly got a whiff of the most unpleasant and penetrating odor I had ever encountered in my life. It was like death and destruction in gaseous form; a sickly sweet, clinging stink that oozed in through the pores of my skin to turn my stomach. "Wowl" I said, gasping. Hammond looked at me in bewilderment; then he grinned sourly. "New here, aren't you?" he inquired. "That's hemp. They grow the stuff for the fibers; and to get the fibers out, they let it get good and rotten. You'll get used to it," he promised. I tried. I tried pretty hard to get used to it; I hardly heard a word he said all the rest of the way in to Caserta, I was trying so hard. But I didn't get used to it. T hen I had my mind taken off my troubles. The branch was still doing business when we got there, though there were easily three or four hundred angrily shouting policyholders milling around in front of it. They scattered before us as the armored car came racing in; we skidded to a stop, siren blasting, and the expediters leaped out with their weapons at the ready. Hammond and I climbed out of the armored car with our bags of money. There was an audible excitement in the crowd as the word spread back that the Company had brought in enormous stores of lire, more than any man had ever seen, to pay off the claims. We could hear the chatter of many voices, and we almost could feel the tension slack off. It looked like the trouble was over. Then there was a shrill whistle. It sounded very much like the alarm whistle of one of our expediters but, thinking back, I have never been sure. Perhaps it was a nervous expediter, perhaps it was an agent provocateur in the crowd. But, whoever pulled the trigger, the explosion went off. There was a ragged yell from the crowd, and rocks began whizzing through the air. The pacifists in the mob began heading for the doorways and alleys around; women screamed, men shouted and bellowed, and for a moment it looked like we would be swamped. For not very many of them were pacifists, and there were at least a hundred screaming, gesticulating men lunging at us. One cobblestone shattered the theoretically unbreakable windshield of the truck next to my head; then the expediters, gas guns spitting, were ringing around us to protect the money. It was a short fight but vicious. By the time the first assault was repulsed there were at least fifty persons lying motionless in the street. I had never seen that sort of violence before. It did something to my stomach. I stood weaving, holding to the armored car, while the expediters circled the area around the branch office, firing hurry-up shots at the running rioters. Hammond looked at me questioningly. "That smell," I said apologetically. He said only, "Sure." True, the fetid aroma from the hemp fields was billowing all around us, but he knew as well as I that it was not the smell that was bothering me. In a few moments, as we were locking the bags of money into the office safe, red-crossed vehicles bearing the Company insignia appeared in the street outside, and medics began tending to the victims. Each one got a shot of something -- an antidote to the sleep-gas from the expediters' guns, I guessed -- and was loaded unceremoniously into the ambulances. Hammond appeared beside me. "Ready for business?" he asked. "They'll be back any minute now, the ones that can still walk. We'll be paying off until midnight, the way it looks." I said, "Sure. That -- that gas doesn't hurt them any, does it? I mean, after they go to the hospital they'll be all right, won't they?" Hammond, twirling a pencil in his fingers, stared broodingly at the motionless body of one policyholder. He was a well-dressed man of fifty or so, with a reddish mustache, unusual in that area, and shattered rimless glasses. Not at all the type I would expect to see in a street fight; probably, I thought, a typical innocent bystander. Hammond said absently, "Oh, sure. They'll be all right. Never know what hit them." There was a tiny sharp crack and the two halves of the pencil fell to the floor. He looked at it in surprise. "Come on. Wills. Let's get to work." Ill in the Company. But all the same, it was the first time since I went to work for the Company that I had even had to ask myself that question. That long, long day in Hammond's puny little branch office, sweltering in the smell of the hemp fields, pushing across the mountains of lire to the grimfaced policyholders left me a little less sure of things. Nearly all of the first hundred or so to pass my desk had been in the crowd that the expediters had fired on. A few had fresh bandages to show where stones had missed the expediters, but found targets all the same. Nearly all of them were hostile. There was no casual conversation, very few "Grazie' as they received their payments. But at last the day was at an end. Hammond snapped an order to one of the clerks, who shoved his way through the dwindling line to close the door and bang down the shutters. I put through the last few applications, and we were through. It was hot and muggy out in the streets of New Caserta. Truce teams of expediters were patrolling the square, taken off their regular assignments of enforcing the peace between Naples and Sicily to keep down Caserta's own mobs. Hammond suggested dinner, and we went to a little Blue Plate in the palace itself. Hammond held Class-A food policies, but he was politeness itself; he voluntarily led the way to the Class-B area. We presented our policy-cards to the waiter for canceling, and sat back to enjoy the air conditioning. I was still troubled over the violence. I said, "Has there been any trouble around here before?" Hammond said ruefully, "Plenty. All over Europe, if you want my opinion. Of course, you never see it in the papers, but I've heard stories from field workers. They practically had a revolution in the Sudeten strip after the Prague-Vienna affair." He stopped talking as the waiter set his Meal-of-the-Day in front of him. Hammond looked at it sourly. "Oh, the hell with it, Wills," he said. "Have a drink with me to wash this stuff down." Hammond shoved his ClassA card at the waiter. I am not a snoop, but I couldn't help noticing that the liquor coupons were nearly all gone; at his present rate, Hammond would use up his year's allotment by the end of the summer, and be paying cash for his drinks. Dinner was dull. Hammond made it dull, because he was much more interested in his drinking than in me. Though I was never much of a drinker, I'd had a little experience in watching others tank up; Hammond I classified as the surly and silent type. He wasn't quite rude to me, but after the brandy with his coffee, and during the three or four straight whiskies that followed that, he hardly spoke to me at all. We left the Blue Plate in a strained silence and, after the cooled restaurant, the heat outside was painful. The air was absolutely static, and the odor from the hemp fields soaked into our clothes like a bath in a sewer. Overhead it was nearly dark, and there were low black clouds. "We'd better get going," I ventured. "Looks like rain." Hammond said nothing, only grunted. He lurched ahead of me toward the narrow street that led back to the branch office, where our transport was waiting. The distance was easily half a mile. Now I am not terribly lazy, and even in the heat I was willing enough to walk. But I didn't want to get caught in a rain. Maybe it was superstition on my part -- I knewthat the danger was really slight -- but I couldn't forget that three separate atomic explosions had gone off in the area around Caserta and Naples within only a few months, and there was going to be a certain amount of radioactivity in every drop of rain that fell for a hundred miles around. I started to tell Hammond about it, but he made a disgusted noise and stumbled ahead. It wasn't as if we had to walk. Caserta was not well equipped with cabs, but there were a few; and both Hammond and myself ranked high enough in the Company to have been able to get q lift from one of the expediter cars that were cruising about. There was a flare of lightning over the eastern mountains and, iff a moment, the pounding roll of thunder. And a flat globule of rain splattered on my face. I said, "Hammond, let's wait here for a lift." Surprisingly he came along with me. If he hadn't, I would have left him in the street. ments. It was almost deserted; I rapped on the nearest door. No answer, no sound inside. I rapped again, then tried the door. It was locked. The next door -- ancient and rickety as the first -- was also locked, and no one answered. The third door, no one answered. By then it was raining hard; the knob turned under my fingers, and we stepped inside. We left the door ajar, on the chance that a squad car or cab might pass, and for light. It was almost dark outside, apart from the light from the lightning flashes, but even so it was darker within. There was no light at all in the narrow, odorous hall; not even a light seeping imder the apartment doors. In the lightning flare, Hammond's face was pale. He was beginning to sober up, and his manner was uneasy. We were there perhaps half an hour in that silent hall, watching the rain sleet down and the lightning flare and listening to the thunder. Two or three times, squad cars passed, nosing slowly down the drenched streets, but though Hammond looked longingly at them, I still didn't want to get wet. Then the rain slowed and almost simultaneously a civilian cab appeared at the head of the block. "Come on," I said, tugging at his arm. He balked. "Wait for a squad car," he mumbled. "Why? Come on, Hammond, it may start to pour again in a minute." "No!" His behavior was exasperating me. Clearly it wasn't that he was too niggardly to pay for the cab; it was almost as if he were delaying going back to the branch office for some hidden reason. But that was ridiculous, of course. I said, "Look, you can stay here if you want to, but I'm going." I jumped out of the doorway just in time to flag the cab; it rolled to a stop, and the driver backed to where I was standing. As I got in, I looked once more to the doorway where Hammond was standing, his face unreadable. He made a gesture of some sort, but the lightning flashed again and I skipped into the cab. When I looked again he was invisible inside the doorway, and "Un momento. Signore 'Ammond!" I stared at the man, a rather badly dressed Neapolitan. I said angrily, "Hammond isn't here!" The man's expression changed. It had been belligerent; it now became astonished and apologeI told the driver to take me to the branch office of the Company. Curious; but it was not an end to curious things that night. At the branch office, my car was waiting to take me back to Naples. I surrendered my travel coupons to the cab driver and jumped from one vehicle to the other. Before my driver could start, someone appeared at the window of the car and a sharp voice said. tic. "A thousand times excuse me," he said. "The Signore 'Ammond, can you say where he is?" I hesitated, but only for a moment. I didn't like the little man peering in my window, however humble and conciliatory he had become. I said abruptly, "No." And my driver took off, leaving the man standing there. I turned to look back at him as we drove off. It was ridiculous, but the way he was standing as we left, holding one hand in his pocket, eyes narrowed and thoughtful, made me think that he was carrying a gun. But, of course, that was impossible. The Company didn't permit lethal weapons, and who in all the world would challenge a rule of the Company? Naples office the next morning, Susan had my coffee ready and waiting for me. I said gratefully, "Bless you." She chuckled. "That's not all," she said. "Here's something else you might like. Just remember though, if anyone asks, you got it out of the files yourself." She slipped a folder under the piles of forms on my desk and disappeared. I peered at it curiously. It was labeled; "Policy Comprehensive. Insuree: Renata dell'Angela." I could have been no more grateful had she given me the Company Mint. But I had no chance to examine it. Gogarty was calling for me. I hastily swallowed my coffee and reported for orders. They were simple enough. The appointment with Zorchi that I hadn't been able to keep the day before was set up for right then. I was already late and I had to leave without another glance at Rena's file. The hospital Zorchi honored with his patronage was a marblehailed palace on the cliffs that rimmed the southern edge of the Bay of Naples. It was a luxurious, rich man's hospital, stuffy with its opulence; but the most opulent of all was the plush-lined three-room suite where Zorchi was. A white-robed sister of some religious order led me into a silent elevator and along a statued hall. She tapped on a door, and left me in the care of a sharpfaced young man with glasses who introduced himself as Mr. Zorchi's secretary. I explained my business. He contemptuously waved me to a brocaded chair, and left me alone for a good half hour. By the time Zorchi was ready to see me, I was boiling. Nobody could treat a representative of the Company like an errand boy! I did my best to take into consideration the fact that he had just undergone major surgery -- first under the wheels of the train, then under the knives of three of Naples' finest surgeons. I said as pleasantly as I could, # "I'm glad to see you at last." T he dark face on the pink embroidered pillow turned coldly toward me. "Che volete?" he demanded. The secretary opened his mouth to translate. I said quickly, "Scusi; parlo un po' la lingua. Non bisogno un traduttore." Zorchi said languidly in Italian, "In that case, Mario, you may go. What do you want with me, Weels?" I explained my duties as a Claims Adjuster for the Company, pointing out that it was my task, indeed my privilege, to make settlement for injuries covered by Company policies. He listened condescendingly. I watched him carefully while I talked, trying to estimate the approach he might respond to if I was to win his confidence. He was far from an attractive young man, I thought. No longer behind the shabby porter's uniform he had worn on the platform of the station, he still had an unkempt and slipshod appearance, despite the heavy silken dressing gown he wore and the manifest costliness of his room. The beard was still on his face; it, at least, had not been a disguise. It was not an attractive beard. It had been weeks, at the least, since any hand had trimmed it to shape and his hair was just as shaggy. Zorchi was not impressed with my friendly words. When I had finished, he said coldly, "I have had claims against the Company before, Weels. Why is it that this time you make speeches at me?" I said carefully, "Well, you must admit you are a rather imusual case." "Case?" He frowned fiercely. "I am no case, Weels. I am Zorchi, if you please." "Of course, of course. I only mean to say that -- " "That I am a statistic, eh?" He bobbed his head. "Surely. I comprehend. But I am not a statistic, you see. Or, at best, I am a statistic which will not fit into your electronic machines, am I not?" I admitted, "As I say, you are a rather unusual ca -- a rather unusual person, Mr. Zorchi." He grinned coldly. "Good. We are agreed. Now that we have come to that understanding, are we finished with this interview?" I coughed. "Mr. Zorchi, I'll be frank with you." He snorted, but I went on, "According to your records, this claim need not be paid. You see, you already have been paid for total disability, both a lump sum and a continuing settlement. There is no possibility of two claims for the loss of your legs, you must realize." He looked at me with a touch of amusement. "I must?" he asked. "It is odd. I have discussed this, you understand, with many attorneys. The premiums were paid, were they not? The language of the policy is clear, is it not? My legs -- would you like to observe the stumps yourself?" off. I averted my eyes from the white-bandaged lower half of his torso, hairy and scrawny and horribly less than a man's legs should be. I said desperately, "Perhaps I spoke too freely. I do not mean, Mr. Zorchi, that we will not pay your claim. The Company always lives up to the letter of its contracts." He covered himself casually. "Very well. Give the check to my secretary, please. Are you concluded?" "Not quite." I swallowed. I plunged right in. "Mr. Zorchi, what the hell are you up to? How do you do it? There isn't any fraud, I admit it. You really lost your legs -- more than once. You grew new ones. But how? Don't you realize how important this is? If you can do it, why not others? If you are in some way pecu -- that is, if the structure of your body is in some way different from that of others, won't you help us find out how so that we can learn from it? It isn't necessary for you to live as you do, you know." He was looking at me with a hint of interest in his close-set, dull eyes. I continued, "Even if you can grow new legs, do you enjoy the pain of having them cut off? Have you ever stopped to think that some day, perhaps, you will miscalculate, and the wheels of the train, or the truck, or whatever you use, may miss your legs and kill you? That's no way for a man to live, Mr. Zorchi. Why not talk freely to me, let me help you? Why not take the Company into your confidence, instead of living by fraud and deceit and -- " I had gone too far. Livid, he snarled, "Ass! That will cost your Company, I promise. Is it fraud for me to suffer like this? Do I enjoy it, do you think? Look, ass!" He flung the covers aside again, rippeck at the white bandages with his hands -- Blood spurted. He uncovered the raw stumps and jerked them at me. I do not believe any sight of my life shocked me as much as that; it was worse than the Caserta hemp fields, worse than the terrible gone moment when Marianna died, worse than anything I could imagine. He raved, "See this fraud, look at it closely! Truly, I grow new legs, but does that make it easier to lose the old? It is the pain of being born, Weels, a pain you will never know! I grow legs, I grow arms, I grow eyes. I will never die! I will live on like a reptile or a fish." His eyes were staring. Ignoring the blood spurting from his stumps, ignoring my attempts to say something, he pounded his abdomen. "Twelve times I have been cut -- do you see even a scar? My appendix, it is bad; it traps filth, and the filth makes me sick. And I have it cut out -- and it grows again; and I have it cut out aigain, and it grows back. And the pain, Weels, the pain never stops!" He flung the robe open, slapped his narrow, hairy chest. I gasped. Under the scjaggly hair was a rubble of boils and wens, breaking and matting the hair as he struck himself in frenzy. "Envy me, Weels!" he shouted. "Envy the man whose body defends itself against everything! I will live forever, I promise it, and I will always be in pain, and someone will pay for every horrible moment of it! Now get out, get out!" I left under the hating eyes of the sharp-faced secretary who silently led me to the door. tantrum and subjected myself to as disagreeable a time as I'd ever had. And I hadn't accomplished a thing. I knew that well enough. And if I hadn't known it by myself, I would have found out. Gogarty pointed it out to me, in detail. "You're a big disappointment to me," he moaned sourly. "Ah, the hell with it. What were you trying to accomplish, anyway?" I said defensively, "I thought I might appeal to his altruism. After all, you didn't give me very explicit instructions." "I didn't tell you to remember to wipe your nose either," he said bitterly. He shook his head, the anger disappearing. "Well," he said disconsolately, "I don't suppose we're any worse off than we were. I guess I'd better try this myself." He must have caught a hopeful anticipatory gleam in my eye, because he said quickly, "Not right now. Wills. You've made that impossible. I'll just have to wait until he cools off." I said nothing; just stood there waiting for him to let me go. I was sorry things hadn't worked out but, after all, he had very little to complain about. Besides, I wanted to get back to my desk and the folder about Rena dell'Angela. It wasn't so much that I was interested in her as a person, I reminded myself. I was just curious... Once again, I had to stay curious for a while. Gogarty had other plans for me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on my way out of the office again, this time to visit another Neapolitan hospital, where some of the severely injured in the recent war were waiting final settlement of their claims. It was a hurry-up matter, which had been postponed too many times already; some of the injured urgently required major medical treatment, and the hospital was howling for approval of their claims before they'd begin treatment. This one was far from a marble palace. It had the appearance of a stucco tenement, and all of the patients were in wards. I was a little surprised to see expediters guarding the entrance. I asked one of them, "Anything wrong?" He looked at me with a flicker of astonishment, recognizing the double-breasted Claim Adjuster uniform, surprised, I think, at my asking him a question. "Not as long as we're here, sir," he said. "I mean, I was wondering what you were doing here." The surprise became overt. "Vaults," he said succinctly. what he meant by vaults, of course. It was part of the Company's beneficent plan for ameliorating the effects of even such tiny wars as the Naples-Sicily affair that those who suffered radiation burns got the best treatment possible. And the best treatment, of course, was suspended animation. The deadly danger of radiation burns lay in their cumulative effect; the first symptoms were nothing, the man was well and able to walk about. Degeneration of the system followed soon, the marrow of the bone gave up on its task of producing white corpuscles, the blood count dropped, the tiny radiant poisons in his blood spread and worked their havoc. If he could be gotten through the degenerative period he might live. But, if he lived, he would still die. That is, if his life processes continued, the radiation sickness would kill him. The answer was to stop the life process, temporarily, by means of the injections and deep-freeze in the vaults. It was used for more than radiation, of course. Marianna, for instance -- Well, anyway, that was what the vaults were. These were undoubtedly just a sort of distribution point, where local cases were received and kept until they could be sent to the main Company vaults up the coast at Anzio. I wasn't questioning the presence of vaults there; I was only curious why the Company felt they needed guarding. I found myself so busy, though, that I had no time to think about it. A good many of the cases in this shabby hospital really needed the Company's help. But a great many of them were obvious attempts at fraud. There was a woman, for instance, in the maternity ward. During the war, she'd had to hide out after the Capodichino bombing and hadn't been able to reach medical service. So her third child was going to be a girl, and she was asking indemnity under the gender-guarantee clause. But she had only Class-C coverage and her first two had been boys; a daughter was permissive in any of the first four pregnancies. She began swearing at me before I finished explaining these simple facts to her. I walked out of the ward, hot under the collar. Didn't these people realize we were trying to help them? They didn't appear to be aware of it. Only the terribly injured, the radiation cases, the amputees, the ones under anesthetic -- only these gave me no arguments, mainly because they couldn't talk.LrAway to the vaults, I found. My main job was revision of their policies to provide for immobilization. Inevitably, there are some people who will try to take advantage of anything. The retirement clause in the basic contract was the joker here. Considering that the legal retirement age under the universal Blue Heaven policy was seventyfive years -- calendar years, not metabolic years -- there were plenty of invalids who wanted a few years in the vaults for reasons that had nothing to do with health. If they could sleep away two or three decades, they could, they thought, emerge at a physical age of forty or so and live idly off the Company the rest of their lives. They naturally didn't stop to think that if any such practice became common the Company would simply be unable to pay claims. And they certainly didn't think, or care that, if the Company went bankrupt, the world as we knew it would end. It was a delicate problem; we couldn't deny them medical care, but we couldn't permit them the vaults unless they were either in clearly urgent need, or were willing to sign an extension waiver to their policies... I saw plenty of that, that afternoon. The radiation cases were the worst, in that way, because they still could talk and argue. Even while they were being loaded with drugs, even while they could see with their own eyes the blood-count graph dipping lower and lower, they still complained at being asked to sign the waiver. There was even some fear of the vaults themselves -- though every living human had surely seen the Company's indoctrination films that showed how the injected drugs slowed life processes and inhibited the body's own destructive enzymes; how the apparently lifeless body, down to ambient air temperature, would be slipped into its hermetic plastic sack and stacked away, row on row, far underground, to sleep away the months or years or, if necessary, the centuries. Time meant nothing to the suspendees. It was hard to imagine being afraid of as simple and natural a process as that! Although I had to admit that the vaults looked a lot like morgues... I didn't enjoy it. I kept thinking of Marianna. She had feared the vaults too, in the childish, unreasoning, feminine way that was her characteristic. When the Blue Blanket technicians had turned up the diagnosis of leukemia, they had proposed the sure-thing course of putting her under suspension while the slow-acting drugs -- specially treated to operate even under those conditions -- worked their cure, but she had refused. There had been, they admitted, a ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent prospect of a cure without suspension... It just happened that Marianna was in the forlorn one-tenth that died. I couldn't get her out of my mind. The cases who protested or whined or pleaded or shrieked that they were being tortured and embalmed alive didn't help. I was glad when the afternoon was over and I could get back to the office. A S I came in the door, Gogarty was coming in, too, from the barbershop downstairs. He was freshly shaved and bearriing. "Quitting time, Tom," he said amiably, though his eyes were memorizing the pile of incomplete forms on my desk. "All work and no play, you know." He nudged me. "Not that you need reminding, eh? Still, you ought to tell your girl that she shouldn't call you on office time, Tom." "Call me? Rena called me?" He nodded absently, intent on the desk. "Against Company rules, you know. Say, I don't like to push you, but aren't you running a little behind here?" I said with some irritation, "I don't have much chance to catch up, the way I've been racing around the country, you know. And there's plenty to be done." He said soothingly, "Now, take it easy, Tom. I was only trying to say that there might be some easier way to handle these things." He speared a forth, glanced over it casually. He frowned. "Take this, for instance. The claim is for catching cold as a result of exposure during the evacuation of Cerignola. What would you do with that one?" "Why -- pay it, I suppose." "And put in the paper work? Suppose it's a phony, Tom? Not one case of coryza in fifty is genuine." "What would you do?" I asked resentfully. He said without hesitation, #A#. Ask for laboratory smear-test reports." I looked over the form. A long letter was attached; it said in more detail than was necessary that there had been no laboratory service during the brief war, at least where the policyholder happened to be, and therefore he could submit only the affidavits of three registered physicians. It looked like a fair claim to me. If it was up to me, I would have paid it automatically. I temporized. "Suppose it's legitimate?" "Suppose it is? Look at it this way, Tom. If it's phoney, this will scare him off, and you'd be saving the Company the expense and embarrassment of paying off a fraudulent claim. If it's legitimate, he'll resubmit it -- at a time when, perhaps, we won't be so busy. Meanwhile that's one more claim handled and disposed of, for our progress reports to the Home Office." ly. But he looked back in perfect calm, until my eyes dropped. After all, I thought, he was right in a way. The mountain of work on my desk was certainly a logjam, and it had to be broken somehow. Maybe rejecting this claim would work some small hardship in an individual case, but what about the hundreds and thousands of others waiting for attention? Wasn't it true that no small hardship to an individual was as serious as delaying all those others? It was, after all, that very solicitude for the people at large that the Company relied on for its reputation -- that, and the ironclad guarantee of prompt and full settlement. I said, "I suppose you're right." He nodded, and turned away. Then he paused. "I didn't mean to bawl you out for that phone call, Tom," he said. "Just tell her about the rule, will you?" "Sure. Oh, one thing." He waited. I coughed. "This girl, Rena. I don't know much about her, you know. Is she, well, someone you know?" He said, "Heavens, no. She was making a pest out of herself around here, frankly. She has a claim, but not a very good one. I don't know all the details, because it's encoded, but the machines turned it down automatically. I do know that she, uh -- " he sort of half winked -- "wants a favor. Her old man is in trouble. I'll look it up for you some time, if you want, and get the details. I think he's in the cooler -- that is, the clinic -- up at Anzio." He scratched his plump jowls. "I didn't think it was fair to you for me to have a girl at dinner and none for you; Susan promised to bring someone along, and this one was right here, getting in the way. She said she liked Americans, so I told her you would be assigned to her case." This time he did wink. "No harm, of course. You certainly wouldn't be influenced by any, well, personal relationship, if you happened to get into one. Oh, a funny thing. She seemed to recognize your name." That was a jolt. "She what?" Gogarty shrugged. "Well, she reacted to it. 'Thomas Wills,' I said. She'd been acting pretty stand-offish, but she warmed up quick. Maybe she just likes the name, but right then is when she told me she liked Americans." I cleared my throat. "Mr. Gogarty," I said determinedly, "please get me straight on something. You say this girl's father is in some kind of trouble, and you imply she knows me. I want to know if you've ever had any kind of report, or even heard any kind of rumor, that would make you think that I was in the least sympathetic to any anti-Company groups? I'm aware that there were stories -- " He stopped me. "I never heard any, Tom," he said definitely. I hesitated. It seemed like a good time to open up to Gogarty; I opened my mouth to start, but I was too late. Susan called him off for what she claimed was an urgent phone call and, feeling let-down, I watched him waddle away. Because it was, after all, time that I took down my back hair with my boss. " thing too terribly bad -- anyway, I hadn't meant to do anything bad. And the circumstances sort of explained it, in a way. And it was all in the past, and -- And nothing. I faced the facts. I had spent three solid weeks getting blind drunk, ranting and raving and staggering up to every passer-by who would listen and whining to him that the Company was evil, the Company was murderous, the Company had killed my wife. There was no denying it. And I had capped it all off one bleary midnight, with a brick through the window of the Company branch office that served my home. It was only a drunken piece of idiocy, I kept telling myself. But it was a drunken piece of idiocy that landed me in jail, that had been permanently indorsed on every one of my policies, that was in the confidential pages of my Company service record. It was a piece of idiocy that anyone might have done. But it would have meant deep trouble for me, if it hadn't been for the intercession of my wife's remote relative. Chief Underwriter Defoe. It was he who had bailed me out. He had never told me how he had found out that I was in jail. He appeared, read the riotact to me and got me out. He put me over the coals later, yes, but he'd bailed me out. He'd told me I was acting like a child -- and convinced me of it, which was harder. And when he was convinced I had snapped out of it, he personally backed me for an appointment to the Company's school as a cadet Claims Adjuster. I owed a considerable debt of gratitude to my ex-remote-inlaw, Chief Underwriter Defoe. Gogarty came back. He looked unhappy. "Hammond," he said bitterly. "He's missing. Look, was he drunk when you left him last night?" I nodded. "Thought so. Never showed up for work. Not at his quarters. The daily ledger's still open at his office, because there's no responsible person to sign it. So naturally I've got to run out to Caserta now, and what Susan will say -- " He muttered away. I remembered the file that was buried under the papers on my desk, when he mentioned Susan's name. As soon as he was out of the office, I had it open. And as soon as I had it open, I stared at it in shock. The title page of the sheaf inside was headed: Signorina Renata dell'Angela. Age #; daughter of Benedetto dell'Angela; accepted to general Class-AA; no employment. There were more details. But across all, in big red letters, was a rubber stamp: Policy Canceled. Reassigned Class-E. It meant that the sad-eyed Rena was completely uninsurable. IV had her address. It was still daylight when I got out of the cab, and I had a chance for a good look at the house. It was a handsome place by day; the size of the huge white stucco wall didn't fit the uninsurable notation on Rena's claim. That wall enclosed a garden; the garden could hardly hold less than an AA house. And Class-Es were ordinarily either sent to public hostels -- at the Company's expense, to be sure -- or existed on the charity of friends or relatives. And Class-Es seldom had friends in Class-AA houses. I knocked at the gate. A fat woman, age uncertain but extreme, opened a little panel and peered at me. I asked politely, "Miss dell'Angela?" The woman scowled. "Che dice?" I repeated: "May I see Miss dell'Angela? I'm a Claims Adjuster for the Company. I have some business with her in connection with her policies." "Ha!" said the woman. She left it at that for a moment, pursing her lips and regarding me thoughtfully. Then she shrugged apathetically. "Momento," she said wearily, and left me standing outside the gate. From inside there was a muttering of unfamiliar voices. I thought I heard a door open, and the sound of steps, but when the fat woman came back she was alone. Silently she opened the door and nodded me in. I started automatically up the courtyard toward the enclosed house, but she caught my arm and motioned me toward another path. It led down a flowered lane through a grape arbor to what might, at one time, have been a caretaker's hut. I knocked on the door of the hut, comprehending where Rena dell' Angela lived as a Class-E uninsurable. Rena herself opened it, her face flushed, her expression surprised -- apprehensive, almost, I thought at first. It was the first time I had seen her by daylight. She was -- oh, there was no other word. She was lovely. She said quickly, "Mr. Wills! I didn't expect you." I said, "You phoned me. I came as soon as I could." She hesitated. "I did," she admitted. "It was -- I'm sorry, Mr. Wills. It was an impulse. I shouldn't have done it." "What was it, Rena?" She shook her head. "I am sorry. It doesn't matter. But I am a bad hostess; won't you come in?" T he room behind the door was long and narrow, with worn furniture and a door that led, perhaps, to another room behind. It seemed dusty and, hating myself as a snooping fool, I took careful note that there was a faint aroma of tobacco. I had been quite sure that she didn't smoke, that evening we had met. She gestured at a chair -- there only were two, both pulled up to a crude wooden table, on which were two poured cups of coffee. "Please sit down," she invited. I reminded myself that it was, after all, none of my business if she chose to entertain friends -- even friends who smoked particularly rancid tobacco. And if they preferred not to be around when I came to the door, why, that was their business, not mine. I said cautiously, "I didn't mean to interrupt you." "Interrupt me?" She saw my eyes on the cups. "Oh -- oh, no, Mr. Wills. That other cup is for you, you see. I poured it when Luisa told me you were at the gate. It isn't very good, I'm afraid," she said apologetically. I made an effort to sip the coffee; it was terrible. I set it down. "Rena, I just found out about your policies. Believe me, I'm sorry. I hadn't known about it, when we had dinner together; I would have -- Well, I don't know what I would have done. There isn't much I can do, truthfully; I don't want you thinking I have any great power. But I wish I had known -- I might not have made you cry, at any rate." She smiled an odd sort of smile. "That wasn't the reason, Mr. Wills." "Please call me Tom. Well, then, why did you cry?" "It is of no importance. Please." I coughed and tried a different tack. "You understand that I do have some authority. And I would like to help you if I can -- if you'll let me." "Let you? How could I prevent it?" Her eyes were deep and dark. I shook myself and pulled the notes I'd made on her policies from my pocket. In the most official voice I could manage, I said, "You see, there may be some leeway in interpreting the facts. As it stands, frankly, there isn't much hope. But if you'll give me some information -- " "Certainly." "All right. Now, your father -- Benedetto dell' Angela. He was a casualty of the war with Sicily; he got a dose of radiation, and he is at present in a low-metabolism state in the clinic at Anzio, waiting for the radiogens to clear out of his system. Is that correct?" "It is what the Company's report said," she answered. H er tone was odd. Surely she wasn't doubting a Company report! "As his dependent, Rena, you applied for subsistence benefits on his Blue Blanket policies, as well as war-risk benefits under the Blue Bolt. Both applications were refused; the Blue Blanket because your father is technically not hospitalized; the Blue Bolt, as well as all your other personal policies, was cancelled, because of -- " I stuttered over it -- "of activities against the best interest of the Company. Specifically, giving aid and comfort to a known troublemaker whose name is given here as Slovetski." I showed her the cancellation sheet I had stolen from the files. She shrugged. "This much I know, Tom," she said. "Why?" I demanded. "This man is believed to have been instrumental in inciting the war with Sicily!" She flared, "Tom, that's a lie! Slovetski is an old friend of my father's -- they studied together in Berlin, many years ago. He is utterly, completely against war -- any war!" I hesitated. "Well, let's put that aside. But you realize that, in view of this, the Company can maintain -- quite properly in a technical sense -- that you contributed to the war, and therefore you can't collect Blue Bolt compensation for a war you helped bring about. You were warned, you see. You can't even say that you didn't know what you were doing." "Tom," Rena's voice was infinitely patient and sad. "I knew what I was doing." "In that case, Rena, you have to admit that it seems fair enough. Still, perhaps we can get something for you -- even if only a refund of your premiums. The Company doesn't always follow the letter of the law, there are always exceptions, so -- " Her expression stopped me. She was smiling, but it was the tortured smile of Prometheus contemplating the cosmic jest that was ripping out his vitals. you believe me?" "Believe you, Tom? Indeed I do." She laughed out loud that time. "After what happened to my father, I assure you, Tom, I am certain that the Company doesn't always follow the law." I shook my head quickly. "No, you don't understand. I -- " "I understand quite well." She studied me for a moment, then patted my hand. "Let us talk of something else." "Won't you tell me why your policy was cancelled?" She said evenly, "It's in the file. Because I was a bad girl." "But why? Why -- " "Because, Tom. Please, no more. I know you are trying to be just as helpful as you can, but there is no help you can give." "You don't make it easy, Rena." "It can't be easy! You see, I admit everything. I was warned. I helped an old friend whom the Company wanted to -- shall we say -- treat for radiation sickness? So there is no question that my policy can be cancelled. All legal. It is not the only one of its kind, you know. So why discuss it?" "Why shouldn't we?" Her expression softened. "Because -- because we do not agree. And never shall." I stared at her blankly. She was being very difficult. Really, I shouldn't be bothering with her, someone I barely knew, someone I hadn't even heard of until -- That reminded me. I said, "Rena, how did you know my name?" Her eyes went opaque. "Know your name, Tom? Why, Mr. Gogarty introduced us." "No. You knew of me before that. Come clean, Rena. Please." She said flatly, "I don't know what you mean." She was beginning to act agitated. I had seen her covertly glancing at her watch several times; now she held it up openly -- ostentatiously, in fact. "I am sorry, but you'd better go," she said with a hint of anxiety in her voice. "Please excuse me." Well, there seemed no good reason to stay. So I went -- not happily; not with any sense of accomplishment; and fully conscious of the figure I cut to the unseen watcher in the other room, the man whose coffee I had usurped. Because there was no longer a conjecture about whether there had been such a person or not. I had heard him sneeze three times. was flashing on the phone as I let myself in. I unlocked the play-back with my room key and got a recorded message that Gogarty wanted me to phone him at once. He answered the phone on the first ring, looking like the wrath of God. It took me a moment to recognize the symptoms; then it struck home. The lined gray face, the jittery twitching of the head, the slow, tortured movements; here was a man with a classic textbook case of his ailment. The evidence was medically conclusive. He had been building up to a fancy drinking party, and something made him stop in the middle. There were few tortures worse than a grade-A hangover, but one of those that qualified was the feeling of having the drink die slowly, going through the process of sobering up without the anesthetic of sleep. He winced as the scanning lights from the phone hit him. "Wills," he said soyrly. "About time. Listen, you've got to go up to Anzio. We've got a distinguished visitor, and he wants to talk to you." "Me?" "You! He knows you -- his name is Defoe." The name crashed over me; I hadn't expected that, of all things. He was a member of the Council of Underwriters! I thought they never ventured far from the Home Office. In fact, I thought they never had a moment to spare from the awesome duties of running the Company. Gogarty explained. "He appeared out of nowhere at Carmody Field. I was still in Caserta! Just settling down to a couple of drinks with Susan, and they phoned me to say Chief Underwriter Defoe is on my doorstep!" I cut in, "What does he want?" Gogarty puffed his plump cheeks. "How do I know? He doesn't like the way things are going, I guess. Well, I don't like them either! But I've been twenty-six years with the Company, and if he thinks... Snooping and prying. There are going to be some changes in the office, I can tell you. Somebody's been passing on all kinds of lying gossip and -- " He broke off and stared at me calculatingly as an idea hit him. Then he shook his head. "No. Couldn't be you. Wills, could it? You only got here, and Defoe's obviously been getting this stuff for weeks. Maybe months. Still -- Say, how did you come to know him?" said coldly, "At the Home Office. I guess I'll take the morning plane up to Anzio, then." "The hell you will. You'll take the night train. It gets you there an hour earlier." Gogarty jerked his head righteously -- then winced and clutched his temple. He said miserably, "Oh, damn. Tom, I don't like all of this. I think something happened to Hammond." I repeated, "Happened? What could happen to him?" "I don't know. But I found out a few things. He's been seen with some mighty peculiar people in Caserta. What's this about somebody with a gun waiting at the office for him when you were there?" It took a moment for me to figure out what he was talking about. "Oh," I said, "you mean the man at the car? I didn't know he had a gun, for certain." "I do," Gogarty said shortly. "The expediters tried to pick him up today, to question him about Hammond. He shot his way out." I told Gogarty what I knew, although it wasn't much. He listened abstractedly anc when I had finished, he sighed. "Well, that's no help," he grumbled. "Better get ready to catch your train." I nodded and reached to cut off the connection. He waved half-heartedly. "Oh, yes," he added, "give my regards to Susan if you see her." "Isn't she here?" He grimaced. "Your friend Defoe said he needed a secretary. He requisitioned her." from the same platform where I had seen Zorchi dive under the wheels. But this was no sleek express; it was an ancient three-car string that could not have been less than fifty years out of date. The cars were not even air-conditioned. Sleep was next to impossible, so I struck up a conversation with an expediter-officer. He was stand-offish at first but, when he found out I was a Claims Adjuster, he mellowed and produced some interesting information. It was reasonable that Defoe would put aside his other duties and make a quick visit to Anzio, because Anzio seemed to need someone to do something about it pretty badly. My officer was part of a new levy being sent up there; the garrison was being doubled; there had been trouble. He was vague about what kind of "trouble" it had been, but it sounded like mob violence. I mentioned Caserta and the nearriot I had been in; the officer's eyes hooded over, and about five minutes after that he pointedly leaned back and pulled his hat over his eyes. Evidently it was not good form to discuss actual riots. I accepted the rebuke, but I was puzzled in my mind as I tried to get some sleep for myself. What kind of a place was this Naples, where mobs rioted against the Company and even intelligent-seeming persons like Renata dell'Angela appeared to have some reservations about it? V hour or so in that cramped coach seat. I was half asleep when the train-expediter nudged my elbow and said, "Anzio." It was early -- barely past daybreak. It was much too early to find a cab. I got directions from a drowsing stationmaster and walked toward the vaults. The "clinic," as the official term went, was buried in the feet of the hills just beyond the beaches. I was astonished at the size of it. Not because it was so large; on the contrary. It was, as far as I could see, only a broad, low shed. Then it occurred to me that the vaults were necessarily almost entirely underground, for the sake of economy in keeping them down to the optimum suspendee temperature. It was safe enough and simple enough to put a man in susjjended animation but, as I understood it, it was necessary to be sure that the suspendees never got much above fifty degrees temperature for any length of time. Above that, they had an unwelcome tendency to decay. This was, I realized, the first full-scale "clinic" I had ever seen. I had known that the Company had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them scattered all over the world. I had heard that the Company had enough of them, mostly in out-of-the-way locations, to deep-freeze the entire human race at once, though that seemed hardly reasonable. I had even heard some ugly, never quite made clear stories about why the Company had so many clinics... but when people began hinting at such ridiculous unpleasantness, I felt it was my duty to make it clear that I wanted to hear no subversive talk. So I had never got the details -- and certainly would never have believed them for a moment if I had. ing, as I say, but it seemed that I was not the first to arrive at the clinic. On the sparse grass before the main entrance, half a dozen knots of men and women were standing around apathetically. Some of them glared at me as I came near them, for reasons I did not understand; others merely stared. I heard a hoarse whisjer as I passed one group of middle-aged women. One of them was saying, "Benedetto non e morte." She seemed to be directing it to me; but it meant nothing. The only comment that came to my somewhat weary mind was, "So what if Benedetto isn't dead?" A huge armed expediter, yawning and scratching, let me in to the executive office. I explained that I had been sent for by Mr. Defoe. I had to wait until Mr. Defoe was ready to receive me and was finally conducted to a suite of rooms. This might have once been an authentic clinic; it had the aseptic appearance of a depressing hospital room. One for, say, Classes with terminal myasthenia. Now, though, it had been refitted as a private guest suite, with an attempt at luxurious drapes and deep stuffed armchairs superimposed on the basic adjustable beds and stainless steel plumbing. I hadn't seen Defoe in some time, but he hadn't changed at all. He was, as always, the perfect model of a Company executive of general-officer rank. He was formal, but not unyielding. He was tall, distinguished-gray at the temples, spare, immaculately outfitted in the traditional vest and bow tie. I recalled our first meeting. He was from the side of Marianna's family that she talked about, and she fluttered around for three whole days, checking our Blue Plate policies for every last exotic dish we could squeeze out to offer him, planning the television programs allowed under our entertainment policies, selecting the most respectable of our friends -- "acquaintances" would be a better description; Marianna didn't make friends easily -- to make up a dinner party. He'd arrived at the stroke of the hour he was due, and had brought with him what was undoubtedly his idea of a princely gift for newlyweds -- a paid-up extra-coverage maternity benefit rider on oxir Blue Blanket policies. We thanked him effusively. And, for my part, sincerely. That was before I had known Marianna's views on children; she had no intentions of raising a family. A S I walked in on Defoe in his private suite at the clinic, he' was standing with his back to me, at a small washstand, peering at his reflection in a mirror. He appeared to have finished shaving. I rubbed my own bristled chin uneasily. He said over his shoulder, "Good morning, Thomas. Sit down." I sat on the edge of an enormous wing chair. He pursed his lips, stretched the skin under his chin and, when he seemed perfectly satisfied the job was complete, he said as though he were continuing a conversation, "Fill me in on your interview with Zorchi, Thomas." It was the first I'd known he'd ever heard of Zorchi. I hesitantly began to tell him about the meeting in the hospital. It did not, I knew, do me very much credit, but it simply didn't occur to me to try to make my own part look better. I suppose that if I thought of the matter at all, I simply thought that Defoe would instantly detect any attempt to gloss things over. He hardly seemed to be paying attention to me, though; he was preoccupied with the remainder ol his morning ritual -- carefully massaging his face with something fragrant, brushing his teeth with a maddening, old-fashioned insistence on careful strokes, combing his hair almost strand by strand. Then he took a small bottle with a daub attached to the stopper and touched it to the distinguished gray at his temples. I spluttered in the middle of a word; I had never thought of the possibility that the handsomely grayed temples of the Company's senior executives, as inevitable as the vest or the watch chain, were equally a part of the uniform! Defoe gave me a long inquiring look in the mirror; I coughed and went on with a careful description of Zorchi's temper tantrum. Defoe turned to me and nodded gravely. There was neither approval nor disapproval. He had asked for information and the information had been received. He pressed a communicator button and ordered breakfast. The microphone must have been there, but it was invisible. He sat down at a small, surgicallooking table, leatied back and folded his hands. "Now," he said, "tell me what happened in Caserta just before Hammond disappeared." Talking to Defoe had something of the quality of shouting down a well. I collected my thoughts and told him all I knew on the riot at the branch office. While I was talking, Defoe's breakfast arrived. He didn't know I hadn't eaten anything, of course -- I say "of course" because I know he couldn't have known, he didn't ask. I looked at it longingly, but all my looking didn't alter the fact that there was only one plate, one cup, one set of silverware. H e ate his breakfast as methodically as he'd brushed his teeth. I doubt if it took him five minutes. Since I finished the Caserta story in about three, the last couple of minutes were in dead silence, Defoe eating, me sitting mute as a disconnected jukebox. Then he pushed the little table away, lit a cigarette and said, "You may smoke if you wish, Thomas. Come in, Susan." He didn't raise his voice; and when, fifteen seconds later, Susan Manchester walked in, he didn't look at all impressed with the efficiency of his secretary, his intercom system, or himself. The concealed microphone, it ocS# curred to me, had heard him order breakfast and request his secretary to walk in. It had imdoubtedly heard -- and most probably recorded -- every word I had said. How well they did things on the upper echelon of the Company! Susan looked -- different. She was as blonde and pretty as ever. But she wasn't bubbly. She smiled at me in passing and handed Defoe a typed script, which he scanned carefully. He asked, "Nothing new on Hammond?" "No, sir," she said. "All right. You may leave this." She nodded and left. Defoe turned back to me. "I have some news for you, Thomas. Hammond has been located." "That's good," I said. "Not too badly hung over, I hope." He gave me an arctic smile. "Hardly. He was found by a couple of peasants who were picking grapes. He's dead." not hours, but days of reading! Three full-length scienee fiction novels! While they last -- surprise packages of three exciting new novels (over # pages each). A sample from our bulging shelves, by today's favorite science fiction writers. Only #c for the three-book package! A real bargain! #c you may sample our books at least expense. After writing you will get our monthly, ever-changing catalog of great bargains, Classics, and rare fimls in science fiction and fantasy. No obligation. Don't wait. Write today! fiction readers Dept, G-#, # C. San Fernando St San Jose #, Calif. The Necessary Thing The idea behind the machine was splendid -- if only it did not have ideas ail its own! R ichard Gregor was seated at his desk in the Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service, staring wearily at a list. The list included some two thousand three hundred and five separate items. Gregor was trying to remember what, if anything, he had left out. Anti-radiation salve? Vacuum flares? Water purification kit? Yes, they were all there. He yawned and glanced at his watch. Arnold, his partner, should have been back by now. Arnold had gone to order the two thousand three hundred and five items and get them stowed safely aboard the spaceship. In a few to blast off on another job. But had he listed everything important? A spaceship is, necessarily, an island unto itself, selfsufficient, self-sustaining. If you ran out of beans on Dementia II, there was no corner store where you could buy more. No Coast Guard hurried out to replace the burned-out lining on your main drive. You had to have another lining on board, and the tools to enable you to replace it, and the manuals telling how. Space was just too big to permit much in the way of rescue operations. Oxygen extractor? Extra cigarettes? It was like putting jets on a department store, Gregor thought. He pushed the list aside, found a pack of tattered cards, and laid out a complex solitaire of his own devising. Minutes later, Arnold stepped jauntily in. G regor looked at Ws partner with suspicion. When the little chemist walked with that peculiar bouncing step, his round face beaming happily, it often re"Did you get the stuff?" Gregor asked.  "I did better than that," Arnold said proudly. "I have just saved us a considerable sum of money." "Oh, no," Gregor sighed. "What have you done?" "Consider," Arnold said im pressively, "just consider the sheer waste in equipping the average expedition. We pack two thousand three hundred and five items, just on the off chance we may need one. Our payload is diminished, our living space is cramped, and most of the stuff never gets used." "Except for once or twice," Gregor said, "when it just happens to save our lives." "I took that into account. I gave the whole problem careful study. And, through a bit of luck, I found the one and only thing an expedition needs. The necessary thing." Gregor arose and towered over his partner. Visions of mayhem danced through his brain, but he controlled himself with an effort. "Arnold, I don't know what you've done. But you'd better get those two thousand three hundred and five items on board and get them fast." "Can't do it," Arnold said with a nervous little laugh. "The money's gone. This thing will pay for itself, though." "What thing?" "The one really necessary thing. Come out to the ship and I'll show you." Gregor couldn't get another word out of him. Arnold smiled mysteriously on the long drive to Idlewild Spaceport. Their ship was already in a blast pit, scheduled for takeoff in a few hours. Arnold swung the port open with a flourish. "There! Behold the answer to an expedition's prayers." Gregor stepped inside. He saw a large and fantastic-looking machine with dials, lights and indicators scattered haphazardly over it. "Isn't it a beauty?" Arnold patted the machine affectionately"Joe the Interstellar Junkman happened to have it tucked away. I conned it out of him for a song." T hat settled it as far as Gregor was concerned. He had dealt with Joe the Interstellar Junkman before, and had inevitably come out on the shortest end of the deal. Joe's gadgets worked, but when, how often, and with what kind of attitude, was something else again. Gregor was stern. "No gadget of Joe's is going into space with me. Not again. Maybe we can sell it for scrap metal." He began to hunt around for a wrecking bar. "Wait," Arnold begged. "Let me show you. Consider. We are in deep space. The main drive falters and fails. Upon examination, we find that a quarter-inch durraloy nut has worked its way off the number three pinion. We can't find the nut. What do we do?" "We take a new nut from the two thousand three hundred and five items we've packed for emergencies just like this," Gregor said. "Ah! But you didn't include any quarter-inch durraloy nuts!" Arnold was triumphant. "I checked the list. What then?" "I don't know, you tell me." Arnold stepped up to the machine, punched a button and said in a loud, clear voice, "Durraloy nut, quarter-inch diameter." The machine murmured and hummed -- Lights flashed -- A panel slid back, revealing a bright, freshly machined durraloy nut. "That's what we do," Arnold said. "Hmm," Gregor was not particularly impressed. "So it manufactures nuts. What else does it do?" Arnold pressed the button again. "A pound of fresh shrimp." When he slid back the panel, the shrimp were there. "I should have had it peel them," Arnold said. "Oh, well." He pressed the button. "A graphite rod, four feet long with a diameter of two inches." The panel opened wider this time to let the rod come through. "What else can it do?" Gregor asked. "What else would you like?" Arnold said. "A small tiger cub? A Model-A updraft carburetor? Possibly a #-watt light bulb? Or a stick of chewing gum?" "You mean it'll turn out anything?" Gregor asked. "Anjrthing at all. It's a Configurator. Go ahead, try it yourself." Gregor tried and produced in rapid succession, a pint of fresh water, a wrist watch, and a jar of Mother Merton's cocktail sauce. "Hmm," he said. "See what I mean? Isn't this better than packing two thousand three hundred and five items? Isn't it simpler and more logical to produce what you need when you need it?" "It seems good," Gregor said. "But..." "But what?" Gregor shook his head. What indeed? He had no idea. It had simply been his sad experience that gadgets are never as useful, reliable or consistent as they seem at first glance. He thought deeply, then punched the button. "A transistor, series GE #E." The machine hummed. And there was the tiny transistor. "Seems pretty good," Gregor admitted. "What are you doing, now?" "I'm peeling the shrimp," Arnold said. After enjoying a tasty shrimp cocktail, the partners received their clearance from the tower. In an hour, the ship was in space. T hey were bound for Dennett IV, an average-sized world in the Sycophax cluster. Dennett was a hot, steamy, fertile planet, suffering from only one major difficulty: Too much rain. It rained on Dennett nine-tenths of the time, and when it wasn't raining, it was threatening rain. Fortunately, the principles of climate control were well-known, since many worlds suffered from similar difficulties. It would take interrupt and alter the climate pattern. After an uneventful trip, Dennett came into view. Arnold relieved the automatic pilot and brought the ship down through thick cloud banks. They dropped through miles of pale, gossamer mist. At last, mountain-tops began to appear, and then they saw a level, barren gray plain. "Odd color for a landscape," Gregor said . Arnold nodded. With practiced ease he spiraled, leveled out, came down neatly above the plain and, with his forces balanced, cut the drive. Gregor had a sudden premonition of disaster. "Take her up!" he shouted. Reacting instinctively, Arnold jabbed at the firing control and missed. The ship hung for a moment, then dropped through the plain and fell another eight feet toward the ground. The plain, it seemed, was fog of a density only Dennett could produce. Hastily they unbuckled themselves and tested various teeth, bones and ligatures. Upon finding that nothing personal was broken, they thoroughly checked the ship. The impact hadn't done their old spaceship any good. The radio and automatic pilot were a complete loss. Several stern plates had buckled and, worst of all, some delicate components in the turn-drive control were shattered. "We were lucky at that," Arnold said. "Yeah." Gregor peered through the blanketing mist. "But next time we use radar." "In a way I'm glad it happened," Arnold said. "Now you'll see what a lifesaver the Configurator really is. Let's get to work." T hey listed all the damaged parts. Arnold stepped up to the Configurator, pressed the button and said, "A drive plate, five inches square, half-inch diameter, steel alloy #." The machine quickly turned it out. "We need ten of them," Gregor said. "I know." Again Arnold pressed the button. "Another one." The machine did nothing. "Probably have to give the whole command," Arnold said. He punched the button again and said, "Drive plate, five inches square, half-inch diameter, steel alloy #." The machine was silent. "That's odd," Arnold said. "Isn't it, though?" Gregor had an odd sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Arnold tried again with no success. He thought deeply, then punched the button and said, "A plastic teacup." The machine turned out a teacup of bright blue plastic. "Another one," Arnold ordered. When the Configurator did nothing, Arnold asked for a wax crayon. The machine gave it to him. "Another wax crayon." The machine did nothing. "That's interesting. I suppose someone should have thought of that possibility." "What possibility?" "Apparently the Configurator will turn out anything," Arnold said. "But only once." "That's fine. We need nine more plates. And the turn-drive controls need four identical parts. What are we going to do?" "We'll think of something." "I hope so," Gregor said. Outside the rain began. The partners settled down to think.Ition," Arnold said .several hours later. "Pleasure principle." "Huh?" Gregor asked. He had been dozing, lulled by the patter of rain against the hull of their spaceship. "This machine must have some form of intelligence," Arnold said. "After all, it receives stimuli, translates 'em into action commands, and fabricates a product from a mental blueprint." "Sure it does. But only once." "Yes. But why only once? That's the key to our difficulties. I think it must be a self-imposed limit linked to a pleasure drive." "I don't follow you," Gregor said. "Look. The builders wouldn't have limited their machine in this way purposely. The only possible explanation is this: When a machine is constructed on this order of complexity, it takes on quasihuman characteristics. It derives a mechanical pleasure from producing a new thing. But a thing is only new once. After that, the Configurator wants to do something else." Gregor slumped back into his apathetic half-slumber. Arnold went on talking. "Fulfillment of potential, that's what a machine wants. The Configurator's desire is to create everything possible. From this point of view, repetition would be a waste of time, as well as boring." "That's the most suspect line of reasoning I've ever heard," Gregor said. "But, assuming you are right, what can we do about it?" "I don't know," Arnold said. "That's what I thought." For dinner that evening, the Configurator turned out a very creditable roast beef. They finished with apple pie a la machina with sharp cheese on the side. Their morale was considerably improved. "Substitutions," Gregor said later, smoking a cigar a la machina. "That's what we'll have to try. Alloy # isn't the only thing we can use for the plates. There are plenty of materials that'll last until we get back to Earth." T he Configurator couldn't be tricked into producing a plate of iron, or any of the steel alloys. They asked for and received a plate of bronze. But then the machine wouldn't give them copper or tin. Aluminum was acceptable, as was cadmium, platinum, gold and silver. A tungsten plate was an interesting rarity; Arnold wished he knew how the machine had cast it. Gregor vetoed plutonium, and they were running short of suitable metals. Arnold hit upon an extra-tough ceramic as a good substitute. And the final plate was pure zinc. The noble metals would tend to melt in the heat of space, of course. But with proper refrigeration, they might last as far as Earth. All in all, it was a good night's work, and the partners toasted each other with an excellent, though somewhat oily, sherry. The next day, they bolted the plates into place and surveyed their handiwork. The rear of their ship looked like a patchwork quilt. "I think it's quite pretty," Arnold said. "I just hope it'll last," said Gregor. "Now for the turn-drive components." But that was a different problem altogether. Four identical parts were missing -- delicate, precisely engineered affairs of glass and wire. No substitutions were possible. The Configurator turned out the first without hesitation. But that was all. By noon, both men were disgusted. "Any ideas?" Gregor asked. "Not at the moment. Let's take a break for lunch." They decided that lobster salad would be pleasant and ordered it on the machine. The Configurator hummed for a moment, but produced nothing. "What's wrong now?" Gregor glared at the machine. "I was afraid of this," Arnold said. "Afraid of what? We haven't asked for lobster before." "No," Arnold said, "but we did ask for shrimp. Both are shellfish. I'm afraid the Configurator is beginning to make decisions according to classes." "Then you'd better break out a few cans." Arnold smiled feebly. "Well, after I bought the Configurator, I didn't think we'd have to bother. I mean -- " "No cans?" "Nope." They returned to the machine and asked for salmon, trout and tuna, without results. Then they tried roast pork, leg of lamb and veal. Nothing. "I guess it considers our roast beef representative of all mammals," Arnold said. "This is interesting. We might be able to evolve a whole new theory of classes -- " "While starving to death," Gregor interrupted. He tried roast chicken, and this time the Configurator came through without hesitation. "Eureka!" Arnold shouted. "Damn!" Gregor said. "I should have asked for a turkey. A big one." T he rain continued to fall on Dennett and mist swirled around the spaceship's gaudy patchwork stern. Arnold began a long series of slide-rule calculations. Gregor finished off the sherry, tried unsuccessfully to order a case of Scotch, and started playing solitaire. He always did his best thinking while playing. They ate a frugal supper on the remains of the chicken and then Arnold completed his calculations. "It might work," he said. "What might work?" "The pleasure principle." Arnold stood up and began to pace the cabin. "This machine has quasi-human characteristics. Certainly it possesses learning potential. I think we can teach it to derive pleasure from producing the same thing many times. Namely, the turn-drive components." "It's worth a try," Gregor agreed. "But now you know why Configurators wound up at Joe the Junkman's instead of on the market." Late into the night, they talked to the machine. Arnold murmured persuasively about the joys of Repetition. Gregor spoke highly of the esthetic values inherent in producing an artistic object such as a turn-drive component, not once but many times, each item an exact and perfect duplicate. Arnold murmured lyrically to the machine about the thrill, the supreme thrill of fabricating endlessly parts without end; again and again, the same parts, produced of the same material, turned out at the same rate. Ecstasy! And, Gregor put in. Repetition was so beautiful a concept philosophically and so completely suited to the peculiar makeup and capabilities of a machine. As a conceptual system, he continued. Repetition (as opposed to mere Creation) closely approached the status of entropy, which, mechanistically, was perfection. By clicks and flashes, the Configurator showed that it was listening intently. And when Dennett's damp and pallid dawn was in the sky, Arnold pushed the button and gave the command for a turn-drive component. The machine hesitated. Lights flickered uncertainly, indicators turned in a momentary hunting process. Doubt showed in every tube. There was a click. The panel slid back -- and there was another turn-drive component. "Success!" Gregor shouted, and slapped Arnold on the back. Quickly he gave the order again. But this time the Configurator emitted a loud and emphatic buzz. And produced nothing. Gregor tried again. But there was no more uncertainty from the machine -- and no more components. "What's wrong now?" Gregor asked. "It's obvious," Arnold said sadly. "It decided to give repetition a try, just in case it had missed something. But after trying it, the Configurator decided it didn't like it." "A machine that doesn't like repetition!" Gregor groaned. "It's inhuman!" "On the contrary," Arnold said unhappily. "It's all too damned human." partners had to rack their memories for foods the Configurator would produce. A vegetable plate was easy enough, but not them one loaf of bread, but no cake. Milk products were out, since they had had cheese the other day. Finally, after an hour of trial and error, the Configurator gave them a pound of whale steak, apparently imcertain as to its category. Gregor went back to work, crooning the joys of repetition into the machine's receptors. A steady hum and occasional flashes of light showed that the Configurator was listening. It was a hopeful sign. Arnold took out several reference books and embarked on a project of his own. Several hours later he looked up with a shout of triumph. "I knew I'd find it!" "What?" "A substitute turn-drive control!" He pushed the book under Gregor's nose. "Look there. A scientist on Vednier II perfected this fifty years ago. It's clumsy, by modern standards, but it'll work. And it'll fit into our ship." "But what's it made of?" Gregor asked. "That's the best part of it. We can't miss! It's made of rubber!" Quickly he punched the Configurator's button and read the description of the turn-drive control. Nothing happened. "You have to turn out the Vednier control!" Arnold shouted at the machine. "If you don't, you're violating your own principles!" He punched the button and, enunciating with painful clarity, read the description again. Nothing happened. Gregor had a sudden terrible suspicion. He walked to the back of the Configurator, found what he had feared and pointed it out to Arnold. There was a manufacturer's plate bolted there. It read: Class # ConfiguratoT. Made by Vednier Laboratories, Vednier II. "So they've already used it for that," Arnold said. Gregor didn't speak. There just didn't seem to be anything to say. M ildew was beginning to form inside the spaceship, and rust had already appeared on the steel plate in the stern. The machine still listened to the partners' song of repetition, but did nothing about it. The problem of another meal came up. Fruit was out because of the apple pie, as were all meats, vegetables, milk products, fish and cereals. At last they dined sparsely on frogs' legs, baked grasshoppers (from an old Chinese recipe) and filet of iguana. But now, with lizards, insects and amphibians used up, they knew that their machinemade meals were practically at an end. Both men were showing signs of strain. Gregor's long face became bonier than ever. Arnold found traces of mildew forming in his hair. Outside, the rain poured ceaselessly, dripped past the portholes and into the moist ground. The spaceship began to settle, burying itself under its own weight For their next meal they could think of nothing whatever. Then Gregor conceived an idea. He thought it over carefully. Another failure would shatter their badly bent morale. But, slim though the chance of success might be, he had to try it Slowly he approached the Configurator. Arnold looked up, frightened by the wild light gleaming in his eyes. "Gregor! What are you going to do?" "I'm going to give this thing one last command." With a trembling hand, Gregor punched the button and whispered his request. There was a moment of utter silence. Then Arnold shouted, "Get back!" The Configurator was quivering and shaking, dials twitching, lights flickering. Heat and energy gauges flashed through red into purple. "What did you tell it to produce?" Arnold asked. "I didn't tell it to produce anything," Gregor said. "I told it to reproduce!" The Configurator gave a convulsive shudder and emitted a cloud of black smoke. The partners coughed and gasped for air. When the smoke cleared away, the Configurator was still there, its paint chipped and several indicators bent out of shape. And, beside it, glistening with machine oil, new and factory-fresh, was a duplicate Configurator. "You've done it!" Arnold was exultant. "You've saved us!" "I've done more than that," Gregor said with weary satisfaction. "I've made our fortunes." He turned to the duplicate Configurator, pressed its button and cried, "Reproduce yourself!" gor and three Configurators were back in Idlewild Spaceport, the work on Dennett completed. As soon as they landed, Arnold left the ship and caught a taxi. He went first to Canal Street, then to midtown New York. His business didn't take long and soon he was back at the ship. "Yes, it's all right," he called to Gregor. "I contacted several jewelers. We can dispose of quite a few big stones without depressing the market. After that, I think we should have the Configurators concentrate on radium for a while, and then -- What's wrong?" Gregor looked at him sourly. "Notice anything different?" "Huh?" Arnold stared around the cabin, at Gregor, and at the Configurators. Then he noticed it. There were four Configurators in the cabin, where there had been only three. "You had one of them reproduce?" Arnold asked. "Nothing wrong with that. Just tell them to turn out a diamond apiece -- " "You still don't get it Watch." Gregor pressed the button on the nearest Configurator and said, "A diamond." The Configurator began to quiver. "Repetition!" Gregor said. "It's ruined everything. You and your damned pleasure principle." The machine shook all over and produced -- Another Configurator. Cleveland, Ohio September #-#-#-S, # Autographs, manuscripts, artwork and gabfests by your favorite science fiction and fantasy authors, artists, editors and fans! For membership, send # to P.O. Box #, Edgewater Branch, Cleveland #, Ohio. You will receive several Progress Reports and a souvenir Program Booklet. looks like, what he wore, how he breathes in our atmosphere... Closerange photographs of the interplanetary saucer that landed in North Scotland... The scientific facts of how saucers move at # miles an hour, why they make no sound... What a saucer looks like, inside and By Cedric Allingham . "o February #, #,  met a man from another world.'  begins one of the most con troversial books of our day -- a document which bears out George Adamski's claims made last year in his now famous the author's own encounter with a vis itor from Mars -- photographed to prove his claimswith a reliable eyewitness. Here are facts about what the Martian looked like, how he travelled, the strange Fort Knox tragedy, the Coniston saucer of #, what men from space plan for the future of the universe. The author is a trained scientific ob server with considerable astronomical knowledge. An astounding report! # By Leonard #. Cramp . ream ait about the future world of travel -- it's all true, all fact, and more absorbing than any fiction! The author of this book, a distinguished member of the Interplanetary Society of England, gives you scientific facts that prove Saucers have been sighted. In clear, simple Ian guage, he shows his theory of space travel... how man can overcome grav ity to fly through the universe... why American space ship experiments are clumsy and old-fashioned compared to , the mechanics of the flying saucer. Numerous drawings and photographs show you the strange antics of the Flying Saucer. Read this book today... and meet the world of tomorrow. # PIgosg send me my copies of these books on flying soucerst I enclose poyment. Name Address City Zone... State and Desmond Leslie. Please send my copy today. I enclose #. The Princess and the Physicist Elected a god, Zen the Omnipotent longed for supernatural powers -- for he was also Zen the All-Put-Upon, a galactic sucker! Z EN the Terrible lay quiescent in the secret retreat which housed his corporeal being, all the aspects of his personality wallowing in the luxury of a day off. How glad he was that he'd had the forethought to stipulate a weekly holiday for himself when first this godhood had been thrust upon him, hundreds of centuries before. He'd accepted the perquisites of divinity with pleasure then. It was some little time before he discovered its drawbacks, and by then it was too late; he had become the established church. All the aspects of his personality rested... save one, that is. And that one, stretching out an impalpable tendril of curiousity, brought back to his total consciousness the news that a spaceship from Earth had arrived when no ship from Earth was due. So what? the total consciousness asked lazily of itself. Probably they have a large out-otseason order for hajench. My hajench going to provide salad bowls for barbarians! When, twenty years previously, the Earthmen had come back to their colony on Uxen after a lapse of thousands of years, Zen had been hopjeful that they would take some of the Divine Work off his hands. After all, since it was they who had originally established the colony, it should be their responsibility. But it seemed that all humans, not merely the Uxeriach, were irresponsible. The Earthmen were interested only in trade and tribute. They even refused to believe in the existence of Zen, an attitude which he found extremely irritating to his ego. T rue, Uxen prospered commercially to a mild extent after their return, for the local ceramics that had been developed in the long interval found wide acceptance throughout the Galaxy, particularly the low bowls which had hitherto been used only for burning incense before Zen the Formidable. Now every two-bit planet offered hajench in its gift shops. Culturally, though, Uxen had degenerated under the new Earth administration. No more criminals were thrown to the skwitch. Xwoosh lost its interest when new laws prohibited the ancient custom of executing the losing side after each game. There was no tourist trade, for the planet was too far from the rest of the Galaxy. The commercial spaceships came only once every three months and left the same day. The two destroyers that "guarded" the planet arrived at rare intervals for fueling or repairs, but the crew never had anything to do with the Uxenach. Local ordinance forbade the maidens of Uxen to speak to the outlanders, and the outlanders were not interested in any of the other native products. But the last commercial spaceship had departed less than three weeks before on its regular run, and this was not one of the guard ships. Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of selfdoubt, he wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he rejected the thought as self-sacrilege. Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself. "Gentlemen," Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of hospitality, "His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at once." And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden, gem-encrusted throne. Uxlu himself, Zen admitted grudgingly, was an imposing sight to anyone who didn't know the old yio. The years -- for he was a scant decade younger than Guj -- had merely lent dignity to his handsome features, and he was still tall and upright. "Welcome, Earthlings, to Uxen," King Uxlu said in the sonorous tones of the practiced public speaker. "If there is aught we can do to advance your comfort whilst you sojourn on our little planet, you have but to speak." He did not, Zen noted with approval, rashly promise that requests would necessarily be granted. Which was fine, because the god well knew who the carrier out of requests would be -- Zen the Almighty, the All-Powerful, the All-Put-Upon... "Thank you. Your Majesty," the older of the two scientists said. "We merely seek a retired spot in which to conduct our researches." "Researches, eh?" the king repeated with warm interest. "Are you perhaps scientists?" "Yes, Your Majesty." Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of course, their god. The older scientist gave a stiff bow. "I am an anthropologist. My name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter Hammond -- " he indicated the tall young man with him -- "is a physicist." T he king and the prime minister conferred together in whisjjers. Zen wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of proven fact. "Curious researches," the king said, emerging from the conference, "that require both physics and anthropology." "Yes," said Kendrick. "They are rather involved at that." Peter Hammond shuffled his feet "Perhaps some of our technicians might be of assistance to you," the king suggested. "They may not have your science, but they are very adept with their hands..." "Our researches are rather limited in scope," Kendrick assured him. "We can do everything needful quite adequately ourselves. All we need is a place in which to do it." "You shall have our own second-best palace," the king said graciously. "It has both hot and cold water laid on, as well as central heating." "We've brought along our own collapsible laboratory dwelling," Kendrick explained. "We just want a spot to set it up." Uxlu sighed. "The royal parks are at your disposal. You will undoubtedly require servants?" "We have a robot, thanks." "A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework," Hammond, more courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers. "Zen will be interested to hear of this," the prime minister said cannily. He and the king nodded at one another. "Who did you say?" Kendrick asked eagerly. "Zen the Terrible," the king repeated, "Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?" he asked in some surprise. "He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our planet." "Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him," Kendrick said, trembling with hardly repressed excitement. What a correct attitude! Zen thought. One rarely finds such religious respect among foreigners. "In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know even more!" Kendrick spoke almost reverently. "He is an extremely interesting divinity," the king replied complacently. "And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating. We'll detail a priest to summon -- " "The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you," Kendrick said quickly. body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the minute. "Might I inquire," the king asked, "into the nature of your researches?" "An investigation of the prevalent nuclear ritual beliefs on Uxen in relation to the over-all matrix of social culture, and we really must get along and see to the unloading of the ship. Goodby, Your Majesty... Your Excellency." And Kendrick dragged his protesting aide off. "If only," said the king, "I were still an absolute monarch, I would teach these Earthlings some manners." His face grew wistful. "Well I remember how my father would have those who crossed him torn apart by wild skwitch." "If you did have the Earthlings torn apart by wild skwitch, Sire," Guj pointed out, "then you would certainly never be able to obtain any information from them." Uxlu sighed. "I would merely have them torn apart a little -- just enough so that they would answer a few civil questions." He sighed again. "And, supposing they did happen to -- er -- pass on, in the process, think of the tremendous lift to my ego. But nobody thinks of the king's ego any more these days." No, things were not what they had been since the time the planet had been retrieved by the Earthlings. They had not communicated with Uxen for so many hundreds of years, they had explained, because, after a more than ordinarily disastrous war, they had lost the secret of space travel for centuries. Now, wanting to make amends for those long years of neglect, they immediately provided that the Earth language and the Earth income tax become mandatory upon Uxen. The language was taught by recordings. Since the Uxenach were a highly intelligent people, they had all learned it quickly and forgotten most of their native tongue except for a few untranslatable concepts. "Must be a new secret atomic weapon they're working on," Uxlu decided. "Why else should they come to such a remote corner of the Galaxy? And you will recall that the older one -- Kendrick -- said something about nuclear beliefs. If only we could discover what it is, secure it for ourselves, perhaps we could defeat the Earthmen, drive them away -- " he sighed for the third time that morning -- "and rule the planet ourselves." Iximi entered the throne room. Iximi really lived up to her title of Most Fair and Exalted, for centuries of selective breeding under which the kings of Uxen had seized the loveliest women of the planet for their wives had resulted in an outstanding pulchritude. Her hair was as golden as the ripe fruit that bent the boughs of the iolo tree, and her eyes were bluer than the uriz stones on the belt girdling her slender waist. Reproductions of the famous portrait of her which hung in the great hall of the palace were very popular on calendars. "My father grieves," she observed, making the secular xa. "Pray tell your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom." "Uxen is a backwash," her father mourned. "A planet forgotten, while the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir." "Why did you let yourself be conquered?" the princess retorted scornfully. "Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be very different today!" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with high honors. Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first. "Let ourselves be conquered!" Her father's voice rose to a squeak. "Let ourselves! Nobody asked us -- we were conquered." "True, But we could at least have essayed our strength against the conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to the last man!" "A woman is always ready to fight to the last man," Guj commented. "Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a princess of the blood, a -- a woman!" "We are all equal before Zen," Guj said sententiously, making the high xa. "Praise Zen," Uxlu and Iximi chanted perfunctorily, bowing low. Iximi, still angry, ordered Guj -- who was also high priest -- to start services. Kindling the incense in the hajen, he began the chant. Of course it was his holiday, but Zen couldn't resist the appeal of the incense. Besides he was there an#rway, so it was really no trouble, no trouble, he thought, greedily sniffing the delicious aroma, af all. He materialized a head with seven nostrils so that he was able to inhale the incense in one delectable gulp. Then, "No prayers answered on Thursday," he said, and disappeared. That would show them! "Drat Zen and his days off!" The princess was in a fury. "Very well, we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?" "Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them when you came in?" "No, Respected Father," she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. "I must have just missed them. What are they like?" H e told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use before his daughter. "And these squuch," he concluded, "are undoubtedly working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen." "Moolai Uxen!" the princess shouted, standing up. "My friends, must we continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the..." "Anyone," said Guj, "can make a speech." The princess sat on the steps of the throne and pondered. "Obviously we must introduce a spy into their household to learn their science and turn it to our advantage." "They are very careful, those Earthlings," Guj informed her superciliously. "It is obvious that they do not intend to let any of us come near them." The princess gave a knowing smile. "But they undoubtedly will need at least one menial to care for their dwelling. I shall be that menial. I, Iximi, will so demean myself for the sake of my planet! Moolai Uxen!" "You cannot do it, Iximi," her father said, distressed. "You must not defile yourself so. I will not hear of it!" "And besides," Guj interposed, "they will need no servants. All their housework is to be done by their robot -- a mechanical man that performs all menial duties. And you. Your Royal Highness, could not plausibly disguise yourself as a machine." "No-o-o-o, I expect not." The princess hugged the rosy knees revealed by her brief tunic and thought aloud, "But... . just... supposing... something... went wrong with the robot... They do not possess another?" "They referred only to one. Highness," Guj replied reluctantly. "But they may have the parts with which to construct another." "Nonetheless, it is well worth the attempt," the princess declared. "You will cast a spell on the robot, Guj, so that it stops." He sighed. "Very well. Your Highness; I suppose I could manage that!" Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could be heard bellowing in the anteroom, "Has any one of you squuch seen my pliers?" "There is no need for worry. Venerated Ancestor," the princess assured the monarch. "AllHelpful Zen will aid me with my tasks." Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself. personality followed the two Earthmen as they left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised. Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's mission for him, but he believed in selfhelp -- especially on Thursdays. "You certainly fixed us up fine!" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to the professor. "You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever... And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be just what you needed." "Yes, and the first to catch on to why we're here. We mustn't antagonize the natives; these closed groups are so apt to resent any investigation into their mythos." "If it's all mythical, why do you need a scientist then?" "A physical scientist, you mean," Kendrick said austerely. "For anthropology is a science, too, you know." Peter snorted. "Some Earthmen claim actually to have seen these alleged manifestations," Kendrick went on to explain, "in which case there must be some kind of mechanical trickery involved -- which is where you come in. Of course I would have preferred an engineer to help me, but you were all I could get from the government." "And you wouldn't have got me either, if the Minister of Science didn't have it in for me!" Peter said irately. "I'm far too good for this piddling little job, and you know it. If it weren't for envy in high places -- " "Better watch out," the professor warned, "or the Minister might decide you're too good for science altogether, and you'll be switched to a position more in keeping with your talents -- say, as a Refuse Removal Agent." And what is wrong with the honored art of Refuse Removal? Zen wondered. There were a lot of mystifying things about these Earthmen. HE scientists' quaint little edifice was finally set up, and the spaceship took its departure. It was only then that the Earthmen discovered that something they called cigarettes couldn't be found in the welter of packages, and that the robot wouldn't cook dinner or, in fact, do anything. Good old Guj, Zen thought. "I can't figure out what's gone wrong," Peter complained, as he finished putting the mechanical man together again. "Everything seems to be all right, and yet the damned thing won't function." "Looks as if we'll have to do the housework ourselves, confound it!" "Uh-uh," Peter said. "You can, but not me. The Earth government put me under your orders so far as this project is concerned, sir, but I'm not supposed to do anything degrading, sir, and menial work is classified as just that, sir, so -- " "All right, all right!" Kendrick said. "Though it seems to me if have no objection." "It's your project, sir. I gathered from the king, though," Peter added more helpfully, "that some of the natives still do menial labor themselves." "How disgusting that there should still be a planet so backward that human beings should be forced to do humiliating tasks," Kendrick said. You don't know the half of it, either, Zen thought, shocked all the way back to his physical being. It had never occurred to him that the functions qf gods on other planets might be different than on Uxen... unless the Earthlings failed to pay reverence to their own gods, which seemed unlikely in view of the respectful way with which Professor Kendrick had greeted the mention of Zen's Awe-Inspiring Name. Then Refuse Removal was not necessarily a divine prerogative. Those first colonists were very clever, Zen thought bitterly, sweet-talking me into becoming a god and doing all their dirty work. I was happy here as the Only Inhabitant; why did I ever let those interlopers involve me in Theolatry? But I can't quit now. The Uxenach need Me... and I need incense; I'm fettered by my own weakness. Still, I have the glimmerings of an idea... "Oh, how much could a halfwitted menial find out?" Peter demanded. "Remember, it's either a native servant, sir, or you do the housework yourself." "All right," Kendrick agreed gloomily. "We'll try one of the natives."  ed by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they sought audience with the prime minister. "Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most unimportant subject," Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he led them into the largest reception room. Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold table. "Look, no dust," he whispered. "Must have excellent help here." Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well; no one could gainsay that. "Your desire," Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, "is my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before you or -- ?" "The king said something yesterday about servants' being available," Kendrick interrupted. "And our robot seems to have broken down. Could you tell us where we could get someone to do our housework?" An expression of vivid pleasure illuminated the prime minister's venerable countenance. "By fortunate chance, gentlemen, a small lot of maids is to be auctioned off at a village very near the Imperial City tomorrow. I should be delighted to escort you there personally." "Auctioned?" Kendrick repeated. "You mean they sell servants here?" Guj raised his snowy eyebrows. "Sold? Certainly not; they are leased for two years apiece. After all, if you have no lease, what guarantee do you have that your servants will stay after you have trained them? None whatsoever." When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three of his Attributes. "The younger one is not at all bad-lookihg," she commented, patting her hair into place. "I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be as unpleasant as I fancied." Guj stroked his beard. "How do you know the Earthlings will select you, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the same time." The princess stiffened angrily. "They'll pick me or they'll never leave Uxen alive and you. Your Excellency, would not outlive them." to overwork the other aspects of his multiple personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join the Earthmen -- in spirit, that .was -- on their excursion in search of a menial. "If, as an anthropologist, you are interested in local folkways. Professor," Guj remarked graciously, as he and the scientists piled into a scarlet, boat-shaped vehicle, "you will find much to attract your attention in this quaint little planet of ours." "Are the eyes painted on front of the car to ward off demons?" Kendrick asked. "Car? Oh, you mean the yio!" Guj patted the forepart of the vehicle. It purred and fluttered long eyelashes. "We breed an especially bouncy strain with seats; they're so much more comfortable, you know." "You mean this is a live animal?" Guj nodded apologetically. "Of course it does not go very fast. Now if we had the atomic power drive, such as your spaceships have -- " "You'd shoot right off into space," Hammond assured him. "Speed," said Kendrick, "is the curse of modern civilization. Be glad you still retain some of the old-fashioned graces here on Uxen. You see," he whispered to his assistant, "a clear case of magicp-religious culture-freezing, resulting in a static society unable to advance itself, comes of its implicit reliance upon the powers of an omnipotent deity." Zen took some time to figure this out. But that's right! he concluded, in surprise. "I thought your god teleported things?" Peter asked Guj. "How come he doesn't teleport you around, if you're in such a hurry to go places?" Kendrick glared at him. "Please remember that I'm the anthropologist," he hissed. "You have got to know how to describe the Transcendental Personality with the proper respect." 'We don't have Zen teleport animate objects," the prime minister explained affably. "Or even inanimate ones if they are fragile. For He tends to lose His Temper sometimes when He feels that He is overworked -- " Feels, indeed! Zen said to himself -- "and throws things about. We cannot reprove Him for His misbehavior. After all, a god is a god." "The apparent irreverence," Kendrick explained in an undertone, "undoubtedly signifies that he is dealing with ancillary or, perhaps, peripheral religious beliefs. I must make a note of them." He did so. B y the time the royal yio had arrived at the village where the planetary auctions for domestics were held, the maids were already arranged in a row on the platform. Most were depressingly plain creatures and dressed in thick sacklike tunics. Among them, the graceful form of Iximi was conspicuous, clad in a garment similar in cut but fashioned of translucent gauze almost as blue as her eyes. Peter straightened his tie and assumed a much more cheerful expression. "Let's rent that one!" he exclaimed, pointing to the princess. "Nonsense!" Kendrick told him. "In the first place, she is obviously the most expensive model. Secondly, she would be too distracting for you. And, finally, a pretty girl is never as good a worker as a plain... We'll take that one." The professor pointed to the dumpiest and oldest of the women. "How much should I offer to start. Your Excellency? No sense beginning the bidding too high. We Earthmen aren't made of money, in spite of what the rest of the Galaxy seems to think." "A hundred credits is standard," Guj murmured. "However, sir, there is one problem -- have you considered how you are going to communicate with your maid?" "Communicate? Are they mutes?" "No, but very few of these women speak Earth." A look of surprise flitted over the faces of the servants, vanishing as her royal highness glared at them. Kendrick pursed thin lips. "I was under the impression that the Earth language was mandatory on Uxen." "Oh, it is; it is, indeed!" Guj said hastily. "However, it is so hard to teach these backward peasants new ways." One of the backward peasants gave a loud sniff, which changed to a squeal as she was honored with a pinch from the hand of royalty. "But you will not betray us? We are making rapid advances and before long we hope to make Earth universal." "Of course we won't," Peter put in, before Kendrick had a chance to reply. "What's more, I don't see why the Uxenians shouldn't be allowed to speak their own language." The princess gave him a dazzling smile. "Moolai Uxen! We must not allow the beautiful Uxulk tongue to fall into desuetude. Bring back our lovely language!" Guj gestured desperately. She tossed her head, but stopped. "Please, Kendrick," Peter begged, "we've got to buy that one!" "Certainly not. You can see she's a troublemaker. Do you speak Earth?" the professor demanded of the maid he had chosen. "No speak," she replied. Peter tugged at his superior's sleeve. "That one speaks Earth." Kendrick shook him off. "Do you speak Earth?" he demanded of the second oldest and ugliest. She shook her head. The others went through the same procedure. "It looks," Peter said, grinning, "as if we'll have to take mine." "I suppose so," Kendrick agreed gloomily, "but somehow I feel no good will come of this." Zen wondered whether Earthmen had powers of precognition. No one bid against them, so they took a two-year lease on the crown princess for the very reasonable price of a hundred credits, and drove her home with them. S# Iximi gazed at the little prefab with disfavor. "But why are we halting outside this gluu hutch, masters?" Guj cleared his throat. "Sirs, I wish you joy." He made the secular xa. "Should you ever be in need again, do not hesitate to get in touch with me at the palace." And, climbing into the yio, he was off. HE others entered the small dwelling. "That little trip certainly gave me an appetite," Kendrick said, rubbing his hands together. "Iximi, you had better start lunch right away. This is the kitchen." Iximi gazed around the cubicle with disfavor. "Truly it is not much," she observed. "However, masters, if you will leave me, I shall endeavor to do my poor best." "Let me show you -- " Peter began, but Kendrick interrupted. "Leave the girl alone, Hammond. She must be able to cook, if she's a professional servant. We've wasted the whole morning as it is; maybe we can get something done before lunch." Iximi closed the door, got out her portable altar -- all members of the royal family were qualified members of the priesthood, though they seldom practiced -- and in a low voice, for the door and walls were thin, summoned Zen the All-Capable. The god sighed as he materialized his head. "I might have known you would require Me. What is your will, oh Most Fair?" "I have been ordered to prepare the strangers' midday repast, oh Puissant One, and I know not what to do with all this ukh, which they assure me is their food." And she pointed scornfully to the cans and jars and packages. "How should  know then?" Zen asked unguardedly. The princess looked at him. "Surely Zen the All-Knowing jests?" "Er -- yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know." He hastily inspected the exterior of the alleged foods. "There appear to be legends inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they might give a clue as to their contents." "Oh, Omniscent One," the princess exclaimed, "truly You are Wise and Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so much as an instant." "Oh you doubted, did you?" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. "Well, see that it doesn't happen again." He had no intention of losing his divine authority at this stage of the game. "Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize a few pair of arms as well as Your August and AweInspiring Countenance, for there is much work to be done." Zen and the princess could hear most of the conversation in the main room. "... First thing to do," Kendrick's voice remarked, "is find out whether we're permitted to attend one of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically..." "The stove is here. Almighty," the princess suggested, "not against the door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear." "Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet. Moolai Uxen." "Moolai Uxen," the princess replied automatically. "... I wonder how hard it'll be to crash the services," Kendrick went on. "Most primitives don't like outsiders present at their ritual activities." "Especially if there are actual manifestations of their god," Hammond contributed. "That would mean the priests are up to some sort of trickery, and they wouldn't care to run the risk of having us see through -- " He was interrupted by a loud crash from the kitchen. "Are you all right, Iximi!" he yelled. "Need any help?" "All is well!" she called back. "But, I pray you, do not enter, masters. The reverberation was part of a rite designed to deflect evil spirits from the food. Were a heretic to be present or interrupt the ceremonies, the spell would be voided and the food contaminated." "Okay!" Peter returned and, in a lower tone, which he probably thought she could not overhear, "Seems you were right." "Naturally." There was complacency in the professor's voice. "And now let us consider the validating features of the social structure as related to the m#rthos -- and, of course, the ethos, where the two are not coincident -- of the Uxenians..." "Imagine," Zen complained in the kitchen, "accusing Me of being a mere trick of the priesthood -- Supreme Me!" , "Supreme Butterfingers!" the princess snapped, irritation driving her to the point of sacrilege. "You spilled that red stuff, the..." she bent over to read the legend on the container "... the ketchup all over the floor!" "The floor is relatively clean," Zen murmured abstractedly. "We can scoop up the substance and incorporate it in whatever dainty dish we prepare for the Earthlings' repast. Now they'll think that I, Zen the Accessible, am difficult to have audience with," he mourned, "whereas I was particularly anxious to hold converse with them and discover what quest brings them to Uxen. That is," he added hastily, remembering he was omniscient, "just how they would justify its rationale." "Shall we get on with our culinary activities. Almighty One?" Iximi asked coldly. If the Most Fair and Exalted had a flaw, Zen thought, it was a one-track mind. " in this, Iximi?" Kendrick demanded, after one taste of the steaming casserole of food which she had set proudly before the two Earthmen. "Ketchup, that's for sure..." Peter murmured, rolling a mouthful around his tongue as he sought to separate its component flavors. "And rhubarb, I should say." "Dried fish and garlic..." Kendrick made further identifications. "And a comestible called marshmallow," Iximi beamed. "You like it? I am so glad!" "I do not -- " Kendrick began. but Peter intervened. "It's very nice, Iximi," he said tactfully, "but I guess we're just used to old run-of-the-mill Earth cooking. It's all our fault; we should have given you a recipe." "I had a recipe," Iximi returned. "It came to me by Divine Inspiration." Kendrick compressed his lips. "Useful sort of divinity they have around here," Peter said. "Everything that goes wrong seems to take place in the name of religion. Are you sure you didn't happen to overhear us talking before, Iximi?" "Don't be silly, Hammond!" Kendrick snapped. "These simple primitives do not have the sophistication to use their religious beliefs consciously as rationalization for their incompetence." "Even had I wished to eavesdrop," Iximi said haughtily, "I would hardly have had the opportunity; I was too busy trying to prepare a palatable repast for you and -- " her voice broke -- "you didn't like it." "Oh, I did like it, Iximi!" Peter protested. "It's just that I'm allergic to rhubarb." "Wait!" she-exclaimed, smiling again. "For dessert I have an especial surprise for you." She brought in a dish triumphantly. "Is this not just how you have it on Earth?" "Stewed cigarettes with whipped cream," Kendrick muttered. "Stewed cigarettes! Where on Ear -- on Uxen did you find them?" "In a large box with the other puddings," she beamed. "Is it not highly succulent and flavorful?" The two scientists sprang from their chairs and dashed into the kitchen. Iximi stared after them. When they returned, they looked much more cheerful. They seated themselves, and soon fragrant clouds of smoke began to curl toward the ceiling. They are calling me at last, Zen thought happily, and with such delightful incense! Who  wants chants anyway? "But what are you doing!" the princess shrieked. EN hastened to manifest him self, complete with fourteen nostrils, before she could spoil everything. "The procedure is most unorthodox," he murmured aloud, "but truly this new incense has a most delicious aroma, extremely pleasing to My Ego. What is your will, oh, strangers?" "All-Merciful Zen," the princess pleaded, "forgive them, for they knew not what they did. They did not mean to summon You." "Then who," asked Zen in a terrible voice, "is this wonderful smoke for? Some foreign god whom they worship on My Territory?" And he wouldn't put it past them either. Peter looked at the anthropologist, but Kendrick was obviously too paralyzed with fright to speak. "As a matter of fact, Your -- er -- Omnipotence," the physicist said haltingly, "this is not part of our religious ritual. We burn this particular type of incense which we call tobacco, for our own pleasure." "In other words," Zen said coldly, "you worship yourselves. I work and slave My Godhood to the bone only to have egotists running all over My Planet." "No, it's nothing like that at all," Kendrick quavered. "We smoke the tobacco to -- well -- gratify our appetites. Like -- like eating, you know." "Well, you will have to forego that pleasure," Zen said, frowning terribly. Even the tall one cowered, he noted with appreciation. It had been a long time since people had really cringed before his frown. The Uxenach had come to take him too much for granted; they would learn their mistake. "From now on," he said portentously, "the tobacco must be reserved for My Use alone. Smoke it only for purposes of worship. Once a day will be sufficient," he added graciously, "and perhaps twice on holy days." "But we do not worship alien gods," Kendrick persisted in a shaky voice. "Even if you were a god..." Zen frowned. "Would you care to step outside and test my divinity?" "Well, no... but..." "Then, as far as you're concerned, I am Divine, and let's have no more quibbling. Don't forget the tobacco once a day. About time I had a change from that low-grade incense." He vanished. Too late he remembered that he'd planned to ask the Earthlings why they had come to Uxen, and to discuss a little business proposition with them. Oh, well, time for that at his next materialization for them. And, now that he considered the matter, the direct approach might very well be a mistake. He hoped Iximi would make sure they burned him tobacco regularly -- really good stuff; almost made godhood worthwhile. But then he'd felt that way about incense at first. No, he had other ideas for making divinity worthwhile, and Iximi was going to help him, even if she didn't know it. People had used him long enough; it was his turn to use them. Zen and together they washed the dishes and listened to the scientists quarreling in the next room. "You will note the use of incense as standard socio-religious parallelism, Hammond. Men have appetites that must be gratified and so they feel their supreme being must also eat... only, being a deity, he consumes aromas." "Yes," Peter said. "You explained all that to Him much more succinctly, though." "Hah! Well, have you any idea yet as to how the trick was worked?" "Worked? What do you mean?" "How they made that talking image appear? Clever device, I must say, although the Scoomps "Didn't look like a trick to me." "That's a fine young man," Zen said approvingly to Iximi. "I like him." "You really do, Most High? I am so glad!" "You don't mean you really believe this Zen is an actual living god?" Kendrick spluttered. There was a silence. "No, not a god," Peter said finally, "but not a human, either. Perhaps another life-form with attributes different from ours. After all, do we know who or what was on Uxen, before it was colonized by Earth?" "Tcha!" Kendrick said. Iximi looked at Zen. Zen looked at Iximi. "The concept of godhood varies from society to society," the divinity told the princess. "Peter is not being sacrilegious, just manifesting a healthy skepticism." "You're a credulous fool," Kendrick said hotly to his assistant. "I don't blame the Secretary for demoting you. When we return to Earth, I shall recommend your transfer to Refuse Removal. You have no business at all in Science!" There was the sound of footsteps. "Leaving , my noxious company?" Peter's voice asked tightly"I am going out to the nearest temple to have a chat with one of the priests. I can expect more sensible answers from him than from you!" The outside door slammed. "Speaking of Refuse Removal, Almighty," Iximi said to Zen, "would you teleport the remains of this miserable repast to the Sacred Garbage Dump? And you need not return; I'll be able to handle the rest myself." "Moolai Uxen," Zen reminded her and vanished with the garbage, but, although the refuse was duly teleported, the unseen, impalpable presence of the god remained. T he door to the kitchen opened, and Hammond walked in, his face grim. "Need any help, Iximi?" he asked, not very graciously. "Or should I say 'Your Royal Highness'?" Iximi dropped a plate which, fortunately, was plastic. "How did you know who I was?" He sat down on a stool. "Didn't you remember that your portrait hung in the great hall of the palace?" "Of course," she said, chagrined. "A portrait of a servant would hardly be hung there." "Not only that, but I asked whom it depicted. Do you think I wouldn't notice the picture of such a beautiful girl?" "But if you knew, why then did you... ?" He grinned. "I realized you were up to no good, and I have no especial interest in the success of Kendrick's project." Iximi carefully dried a dish. "And what is his project?" "To investigate the mythos of the allegedly corporeal divinity in static primitive societies, with especial reference to the god-concept of Zen on Uxen." "Is that all?" All! Zen thought. Sounds like an excellent subject for research to me. Unfortunate that I cannot possibly let the study be completed, as I am going to invalidate the available data very shortly. "That's all, Iximi." "And how is it that Professor Kendrick did not recognize me from the picture?" "Oh, he never notices girls' pictures. He's a complete idiot... You overheard us just now? When we get back to Earth, I'm going to be a garbage collector." "Here on Uxen, Refuse Removal is a Divine Prerogative," Iximi remarked. "Poor Zen, whatever he is," Peter said to himself. "But a god, being a god," he went on in a louder voice, "can raise himself above the more sordid aspects of the job. As a mere human, I cannot. Iximi, I wonder if..." He looked nervously at his watch. "I hope Kendrick takes his time." "He will not return soon," Iximi told him, putting away the dish towel. "Not if he is determined to find a temple. Because there are no temples. Zen is a god of the Hearth and Home." "Iximi," Peter said, getting up and coming closer to her, "isn't there some way I can stay here on Uxen, some job I can fill? You're the crown princess -- you must have a drag with the civil service." He looked at her longingly. "Oh, if only you weren't so far above me in rank." "Listen, Peter!" She caught his hands. "If you were the Royal Physicist, our ranks would not be so far disparate. My distinguished father would make you a dxike. And princesses have often... she blushed... that is to say, dukes are considered quite eligible." "Do you think I have a chance of becoming Royal Physicist?" "I am certain of it." She came very close to him. "You could give us the atomic drive, design space ships... weapons... for us, couldn't you, darling?" "I could." He looked troubled. "But it's one thing to become an extraterrestrial, another to betray my own world." Iximi put her arms around him. "But Uxen will be your world, Peter. As prince consort, you would no longer be concerned with the welfare of the Earthlings." "Yes, but..." "And where is there betrayal? We do not seek to conquer Earth or its colonies. All we want is to regain our own freedom. We are entitled to freedom, aren't we, Peter?" He nodded slowly. "I... suppose so." "Moolai Uxen." She thrust a package of cigarettes into his hand. "Let us summon the Almighty One to bless our betrothal." Peter obediently lit two cigarettes and gave one to her. Z EN materialized his head. "Blessings on you, my children," he said, sniffing ecstatically, "and welcome. Holy Chief Physicist, to My Service." "Royal Chief Physicist," Iximi corrected. "No, that is insufficient for his merits. Holy and Sacrosanct Chief Physicist is what he will be, with the rank of prince. You will have the honor of serving Terrible Zen Myself, Peter Hammond." "Delighted," said the young man dubiously. "You will construct robots that do housework, vehicles that carry refuse to the Sacred Garbage Dump, vans that transport household goods, machines that lave dishes..." "Will do," Peter said with obvious relief. "And may I say. Your -- er -- Benignness, that it will be a pleasure to serve You?" "But the atomic power drive... freedom?" Iximi stammered. "These will point the surer, shorter way to the true freedom. My Omnidynamism has stood in the way of your cultural advancement, as Professor Kendrick will undoubtedly be delighted to explain to you." "But, Your Omnipotence..." "Let us have no more discussion. I am your God and I know best." "Yes, Supreme One," Iximi said sullenly. "You Uxenach have kept Me so busy for thousands of years, I have had no time for My Divine Meditations. I shall now withdraw Myself from mundane affairs." The princess forgot disappointment in anxiety. "You will not leave us, Zen?" "No, My child, I shall be always present, watching over My People, guiding them, ready to help them in case of emergency. But make sure I am not summoned save in case of dire need. No more baby-sitting, mind you." "Yes, Almighty One." "The incense will continue to be offered to me daily by everyone who seeks My Sacred Ear, and make sure to import a large quantity of this tobacco from Earth for holy days... and other occasions," he added casually, "when you wish to be especially sure of incurring My Divine Favor. And I wish to be worshipped in temples like other gods." Less chance of my being stuck with some unexpected household task. "I shall manifest Myself on Thursdays only," he concluded gleefully, struck by the consummate idea. "Thursday will be My Day to work and your holy day. All other days you will work, and I will indulge in Divine Meditation. I have spoken." And he withdrew all aspects of his personality to his retreat to wallow in the luxury of six days off per week. Naturally, to make sure the Uxenach kept the incense up to scratch, he would perform a small miracle now and again to show he was still Omnipresent. Being a god, he thought as he made himself more comfortable, was not a bad thing at all. One merely needed to learn how to go about it in the right way. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England I Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library. I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. All Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Boo(:s and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. for your information T he city chronicle of a West German city -- Ulm, if I remember correctly -- contains a simply wonderful entry, written by an unknown hand around the year #. It reads: "A knight came and besieged the town and shot at it with thunder guns. It did no harm." There are several things about this short entry that I find interesting. One is that the knight who besieged the town was not even mentioned by name, apparently a little siege now and then being quite commonplace. I have the feeling that this one may not have been mentioned at all if it had not been for the thunder gun. The second interesting point is, of course, that it was the knight who sported the thunder gun and not the city. The customary explanation is that the knights were opposed to firearms as a principle of knightly honor. Though their reasoning may have been faulty, they at least allegedly displayed good judgment because firearms supposedly ended knighthood. Well, the firearms did contribute at a later date, when they had grown into siege guns, but even then mostly for the reason that the rich cities could afford siege guns while the knights could not. T he third interesting point is that this ineffective shooting took place in the very year in which, according to an entrenched belief, bolstered by a load of old books and manuscripts, guns and gunpowder were invented by the monk Berthold Schwarz, who was a member of a monastery in or near the city of Freiburg in the Breisgau. Many of the manuscripts solemnly added that "said Berthold was executed from life to death because of his invention of this art in # A.D."  after which they proceeded without noticeable scruples to teach apprentices how to purify saltpeter, mix gunpowder and cast cannon. But when the city of Freiburg erected a monument to the inventor in somewhat belated recognition of the passing of five centuries since his deed, the City Council, after careful deliberation and much correspondence with historical societies, had the year # engraved as the year of his death on the pedestal of his monument. Since Arabic manuscripts speak of powder and of rockets more than a century before #, and since Roger Bacon's famous letter in which he defended himself against the accusation of witchcraft is of equal age, and since the oldest picture of what is indubitably a firearm dates back to #, there was evidently something wrong with the story. Either the mysterious monk did not live at the time mentioned in the old manuscripts, or else he was simply a legend and the statement that his name had been Konstantin Anklitzen before he joined a monastic order had been invented by a local historian of Freiburg at an early time because this and similar names were peculiar to the Freiburg area. Whether "Berthold Schwarz" should be considered as "Man or Myth?" was quite an issue for decades among historians, especially the military variety. While his supposed native city spent money on a public monument, a Royal Historical Commission which compiled a comprehensive Biographical Encyclopedia (the Allgemeine Deutsche Biogtaphie ) of all famous Germans resolved not to include him as being "unhistorical." Remains of this disagreement persist to this day. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the monk, spelled Berthold Schwartz, is mentioned four times (in the articles on Ammunition, Fireworks, Guns and Ordnance), but does not have an article of his own. On the other hand, Webster's Biographical Dictionary lists him as a historical person, merely questioning his identity "with the Franciscan, Meister (Magister) Berthold, real name Konstantin Anklitzen." ' ly enough, points out that Berthold Schwarz (or Schwartz) cannot have been his name, whether he lived or not. The word schwarz (schwartz is merely the older spelling) is the German word for "black" and in this connection it is also a mistake. The older manuscripts, both in German and in Latin, refer to him as Berchtholdus niger, which means Berthold the Black. For a while, this was properly translated into German as Berthold der Schwarze, until somebody wrote the name as Bertholdus Niger, which then produced Berthold Schwarz. This is about as correct as translating Charlemagne's Latin name, Carolus Magnus, as Charles Grand. Since we already know that guns did exist in # and that the invention, therefore, must have been made earlier, it might be best to work our way backward from that date. Several historians of the #th century did just that -- they read their way through old city chronicles in search of mention of guns. One, a retired German colonel by the name of A. Essenwein, found several: In #, a Johann von Aarau made three guns for the city of Augsburg and instructed the patricians Johann Ilsung, Johann Vend and Johann Feinsbach in their use. The chronicle of the city of Speyer reported in # that a gunnery master (not named) was paid a cash honorarium. The chronicle of Nuremberg for the year # mentions a payment to Master Blacksmith Saenger for guns and ptowder. The expense accounts of the city of Frankfurt on the Main were preserved beginning with the one for the year #; they show expenditures for the purchase of guns and gunpowder from that date on, but unfortunately do not tell where the guns and the powder were bought. There were, however, quite a number of places, for the British historian John Upman established the mention of gunpowder mills for various cities: Augsburg had one in #, Spandau in # and Liegnitz in #. The chronicle of Liibeck for the year # states fairly calmly that the City Hall caught fire because of the carelessness of those qui pulveris pro bombardis parabant (who make the powder for the bombards). Another British historian, Oscar Guttmann, discovered not less than seven documents dealing with firearms for the period from #-#, among them an invoice for gunpowder and an iron cannon bought by the city of Aachen in #, a document stating that the city of Cambrai bought, in #, ten cannon, "five of iron and five of metal" (bronze?) and several bills paid by the exchequer of King Ed#. recent researches, the Italian historian Muratori stated that, in #, one Hugonino di Chatillon made four bronze cannon for the Marquise de Monferrato. Another "document" is furnished, believe it or not, by an old natural history book. Konrad von Megenberg, Archdeacon of the cathedral of Regensburg, spent the two years of #-# translating a Latin work by a French churchman into German. The original had been written almost precisely one century earlier and its author, Thomas de Cantimpre, or Thomasius Cantipratensis, had likened lightning to a missile from a tormenta, one of the old crossbowlike javelin-throwers. Konrad, the translator, changed that sentence to read: "like a missile from a shotgun" which, because of the noise, seemed to him a better comparison to lightning and thunder. This not only proves that firearms existed in #, but also that they were sufficiently well known to be used for literary comparisons. The oldest picture of a gun originated in England in #. A Walter de Milemetewrote a fairly short work "On the Duties of a Prince" (De Officiis Return) and the picture was used to fill an otherwise empty manuscript page. The gun is not mentioned in the text, but its type is known to historians. It was a so-called "bottle gxm" or vasa (Figure #), which fired darts. From the picture, it seems as if the firing was accomplished by touching a red-hot iron hook to the touch hole. Since too much gas would leak aroimd the shaft of the dart, it can be assuiiied that some wadding, probably leather, was used. The vasa must have been propped up with wooden wedges, but the drawing in the manuscript does not show this; it shows a bare wooden table. The gunner is shown standing off to one side, however, so they must have had experience with recoil. Looking at the picture of a vasa, you find that the chronicler's sentence "it did no harm" becomes understandable. The wonder is that these weapons were not abandoned as soon as they had been invented, for they must have been awkward to carry around, difficult to serve, rather expensive and, of course, cursed with long intervals between shots. A heavy spear thrown by a strong man must have been more accurate and possibly more destructive, too. The oldest report of the actual use of such guns is just one year older than this picture. The English, accompanied by Flemish soldiers, fought the Scots, and Archdeacon Babour of Aberdeen reported that the "crakys of war" were a novelty then. He added that they had not been used in an earlier battle in #, when the defenders of Berwick fought bravely, but "gynis for crakys had he they nane." In other words, they had no guns to shoot. kNE very interesting fact is that the various places mentioning gunpowder during the preceding century do not mention guns. The oldest source about which there is no doubt, a Chinese chronicle, speaks of rockets and bombs on chains (and, by implication, of powder) for a war in the year #, without saying when these things were invented. (But a later Chinese chronicler by the name of Wuh-i-siao declared categorically that "guns came from the outer barbarians." ) Only eight years after that battle, saltpeter, the most important ingredient of powder, was known to an Arab savant with the somewhat unwieldy name of Abu Mohammad Abdallah ben Ahmad Almaliqi. He did not mention that it was used for explosive mixtures, but the name he used is indicative -- he called it "Snow from China." Forty years after that (around #), another Arab, Hassan el-Rammah, still called rockets alsichem alkhatai -- "Chinese arrows." By that time rockets had already received documentary mention in Europe; they were used in Cologne in #. And written prescriptions for making powder and rockets were, so to speak, all over the place. Roger Bacon, whom his contemporaries called with awe and some uneasiness the Doctor mirabilis, gave these recipes in his Epistola, written in # or #. Roger Bacon still disguised the information; by way of much literary padding, he made it appear as if he were describing the making of gold or the Philosopher's Stone. But his German contemporary and counterpart, Albert von Bollstadt or Albertus Magnus (he was called the Doctor universalis by his contemporaries), wrote about the same things openly. Just when Albertus wrote the one of his many works in which powder and rockets are explained is not known. One could say that, since he died in #, it must of necessity have been earlier than that, but precise dating is unimportant, for both Roger Bacon and Albertus had their information from an older book, the Liber ignium ("Fire Book"). Its author, Marchus Graecus, is otherwise completely unknown. It is likely that he was just the translator of an Arabic original that is now lost. As for dating, my own guess is around #; it has to be early enough for Roger Bacon to read, but it is unlikely that it was prior to the time of Almaliqi. The point of all this is that, up to, say, #, we hear of powder and rockets and of occasional bombs, while the "gynis for crakys" suddenly appear in # and are the main thing from then on. Evidently the invention of the gun falls into this interval of about half a century. that an officer of the Belgian army, a Major Renard, found an entry in the chronicle of the City of Ghent. In this so-called Memorieboek, the entry appears under the year of #, but that was the fiscal year of the city, which ran from August to August. Expressed in calendar years, it comprised the second half of # and the first half of #. The entry reads: Item, in dit jaer was aldereerst gevonden in Duitschland het gebruik der bussen van eenen mueninck. In literal translation: "Furthermore, in this year was for the first time found in Germany the use of bussen by a monk." The word bussen is still around in English in the word blunderbuss (originally Dutch dunderbuss, the first part of the word meaning "thunder") and in German in the word Biichse, which means a smoothbore hunting piece. In this entry, the genuineness and dating of which have stood up against all inspection, we find missing as well as known ingredients of the story stated in dry commercial language. The year of the invention falls into that gap. The country of origin is stated to be Germany, as was asserted about a century later by a whole raft of Italian historians, two Spaniards and one Greek. And the inventor is said to be a monk. In the following years, the Memorieboek contains several entries about bussen med kruyd (bussen with powder) as an item of commerce and, soon after that, the King of England began to hire Flemish soldiers who had the "gynis for crakys." It would be so nice if the gentlemen who wrote the Memorieboek had seen fit to mention the monk's name. Since he didn't, the name of "black Berthold" must have come from elsewhere, especially because that sentence in the Memorieboek had been forgotten until Major Renard resurrected it in the #th century. The main -- but not the only -- source for the name of the monk is another old book with a few mysteries of its own. Its title is simply "Fireworks Book" of which many manuscript are known and which was even printed later. But we are not certain who wrote it, for the author did not reveal his name. In his foreword, he said by way of apology that he had written down all these secrets "because there are so many things which every Master must know that one cannot remember all of them without writing." Nor do we know just when it was written. One of the oldest manuscript copies known (MS No. #a of the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg, if you insist on a specific reference) was made between # and #. Since it is known that the gunnery master Abraham von Memmingen wrote a fireworks book for his Lord, Duke Friedrich of Tyrol, in #, it is believed that this book, of which we only know that it was written, and the anonymous Fireworks Book of which we have so many copies are one and the same. A Book says, with reference to the art of shooting, "has been found by a magister. His name was Magister Berthold, who was a magister in artibus and who dealt with Great Alchemy... The Magister Berthold desired to burn a gold tincture and this tincture requires saltpeter, sulfur, lead and oil, and he mixed the ingredients together in a copper vessel and after he had closed it tightly as one must do and put the vessel on the fire... the vessel broke into small pieces... Later the magister left out the oil and the lead and put charcoal into it and tried to find whether one might throw a stone that way." This, at first glance, looks like an entirely different story. From the sources surveyed so far, we had a right to conclude that at some time around the year # somebody, identified by the chronicle of Ghent as a monk in Germany, invented the gun but did not have to invent the powder because it was already well known to literate men of the time. Now the Fireworks Book says that Friar Bertholdus -- whom others called Berthold the Black -- invented both and did so more or less by accident while pursuing an experiment in alchemy. We'll soon see that there is some sense to the story. As for the experiment itself, the alchemical reasoning has been clearly explained by the famous French historian of chemistry, Marcellin Berthelot. Mercury, which obviously was a very puzzling substance to people of that time, was believed by some to be the prima materia, the "original substance." Because it was that (I'm now quoting from Berthelot), "it had to be solidified first; that is, made solid and stable in fire like the other metals. Then it had to be colored by means of a coloring principle, white or yellow... so it would be changed into silver or gold." Apparently it was believed that the "original substance," if left uncolored, would look black, for making it was often referred to as "preparing the blackness" -- and outsiders to whom this term may have "leaked" called the whole thing the "black art." Hence Berthold the Black may very well mean Berthold the Alchemist. A Swiss priest, Felix Hemmerlin (of course he Latinized his name, into Malleolus), who wrote, incidentally while imprisoned, around # and who does not seem to have known about the purely military and somewhat secret Fireworks Book, told very much the same story. Mercury, as everybody knows, is liquid because it is inhabited by a basilisk that must be driven out. The alchemist Berthold (Hemmerlin does not mention that he was a monk, presumably because he had claimed earlier that "monks are dumb and lazy" and did not want to ruin his own argument) tried to do this first by heat alone and then by adding the sulphus, which is hot by Nature, and the saltjjeter, which is cold by Nature, so that in the battle between the hot and the cold substance, the basilisk might be killed, too. F olk tale has it that Friar Bertholdus had studied at St. Blasien and that he received his degree there. It also says that his fellow monks were highly indignant (read: afraid) about his alchemical experiments and imprisoned him. And although he is said to have been a member of the Monastery of Thennenbach, which belonged to the Cistercian Order, he was later referred to as a Franciscan. All this can easily be true. St. Blasien was the nearest seat of learning to Freiburg. That the fellow monks were afraid of explosions is understandable and if the prior imprisoned him, he only did to Berthold what other spiritual superiors did to Roger Bacon. Finally, since the Franciscans are a much stricter order than the From Andr# Thevet's work on lives of iltus trious people, published in Paris in #. Cistercians, it may well be that it was the punishment he finally received or, rather, the "pardon" -- namely, to join a stricter order. There is no documentary proof known, but the various events at least make a logical sequence. And if the story of the explosion because of an alchemical experiment is true, one may assume that Berthold quickly recognized what it was that had happened to him. He must have read the works of Albertus Magnus at St. Blasien and may even have met the Doctor universalis in person, for Albertus was an inveterate traveler. A few words about dates must still be added to this report. The oldest document about firearms -- if dated correctly -- is an old drinking song in which each stanza tells of an improbable feat. In one, a crayfish plays on a horn; in another, a bumblebee rhapsodizes on Biblical themes; in a third, an old and toothless steer bites the heads of twelve lions off, etc. etc. One of these stanzas reads in part: Ich sach uz einer biichsen schiessen, daz es nieman hort siben wachteln zerstort...  I can't translate this so that it rhymes, but line for line it reads: I saw that with a bussen shooting, which nobody heard, seven quail destroyed In short, everybody knew that a bussen did make noise. Now comes the difficult question of dating. The known manuscript copy was made in #, according to a statement on the manuscript itself. But when was it written? One other stanza reads: The Romans already knew that Count Konrad's house in Freiburg is finished.  were three counts by that name in Freiburg. The first of the three died in #, the second in # and the third in #, which is too much of a spread. But the first of the three was instrumental in building a very special "house," the cathedral, which might well have been referred to as Count Konrad's house. The tower of the cathedral was finished after Konrad's death, in #. The song must have been written fairly soon after that date -- the completion of the building was news -- probably within a decade or so. The song might, therefore, antedate the entry in the Memorieboek by a few years -- logically so, for it was written in Freiburg, where Friar Bertholdus frightened his fellow monks. But then where did "they" get the date of # to put on the monument or # when Bertholdus was allegedly "executed from life to death"? The first one is simple. The Bavarian historian Johannes Thurmayr (who called himself Johannes Aventinus) found in Hemmerlin's book the statement that it took two centuries for Berthold's invention to become known. Thurmayr thought this too long and settled for one century; but Hemmerlin had not said from what year he counted backward, so Thurmayr counted from the year in which Hemmerlin was imprisoned, which was #. Don't be surprised at such carelessness. It was also Thurmayr who converted Black Berthold into Berthold Black. The year # came from the collective effort of a number of Italian authors. Although Muratori mentioned earlier dates for the use of firearms in Italy, most Italians were convinced that the weapon first appeared when Venice fought Genoa about the island of Chiozza. Their words instrumento nuovo trovato (newly invented instrument) make it clear that they thought the invention had just been made; the war about Chiozza was over in #. And seven years later, the devil took the inventor -- no, no, in # A.D. he was executed. To accomplish this, the story was told that Friar Bertholdus was offered and accepted a professorship in Prague. King 'Wenceslas, who ruled then, was known to be free with death sentences, so all that was needed from the point of view of the storyteller who wanted to do away with the inventor was to move him to Prague. But when questioned in #, the head librarian of the University of Prague could name all the professors of that time. No Friar Bertholdus or Magister Bertholdus was among them. The story of his execution was merely a story, just like the other story that he died in an explosion. In all probability, he died a normal death. But we would like to know where and when. Does any form of life exist on the Earth that is not based on carbon? I have read someplace that there is a small plant on the Antarctic continent that is based on silicon. Earl H. Mann # Sherman Way North Hollywood, Calif. You may have read this in a story without rememhering now that it was fiction and not an article. There are various life-forms that utilize silicon compounds for protective spikes, etc. Some plants get rid of silicon, which they absorbed without much need for it, by excreting it. The so-called "bamboo pearls" that caused much superstitious to-do in the past are an example. But the living tissue of all plants and animals on Earth is based on carbon. Perhaps this doesn't belong in to settle a minor point of dispute. Is there now or has there ever been a German noble family by the name of Frankenstein? Pfc. John M. Kilgus co PM, New York To my own surprise, the answer is yes. There exists a family of the Barons von Franckenstein -- spelled with a "c," you'll note -- two members of which have made the grade of being listed in "Webster's Biographical Dictionary." The first is Georg Arhogast Baron von und zu Franckenstein (#-#), who was a well-known politician in his lifetime, having been the leader of the (Catholic) Centrist Party, member of the Reichstag and, for a while, vice-president of the Reichstag. The other member of the family was (or still is) the composer Clemens Baron von Franckenstein (born #) who composed several operas, Griseldis (in #), Rahab (in #) and Li Tai Pe (in #). I don't think, however, that Mary Shelley had this family in mind when she wrote Frankenstein. She probably just picked a typically Teutonic name. Picture Bride As pretty as a picture? Yes, because that was all she was...or would become some day! M y brother, Perry, always was a bit cracked. As a kid, he almost blew up our house doing experiments. When he was eighteen, he wrote poetry, but fortunately that didn't last long and he went back to science. Now, when he showed me this picture, I figured he'd had a relapse of some kind. "This is the girl I'm in love with," he said. She wasn't bad. Not bad at all, even if her clothes were crazy. She wasn't my type -- too brainylooking -- although I could see how some guys would go for her. 'I thought you liked blondes." "I wouldn't give you two cents for all the blondes in Hollywood," he answered. "This is the only girl for me." "You sound as if you've got it bad," I said. "You going to marry her?" His face dropped about a mile. "I can't." "You mean she's married already?" I was surprised. This wasn't like Perry at all. He sort of hesitated, as if he was afraid of saying too much. "No, she isn't married. I asked her about that. But I can't marry her because -- well. I've never met her. All I've seen of her is this picture and a few more. She doesn't live here." "You mean she's in Europe?" I've heard of these love affairs by mail, and they never made much sense to me. I said to Perry, "Why can't she come to this country?" "Oh, there are a lot of things in the way." It sounded worse and worse. I said, "Look, Perry, this smells like a racket to me. It's the kind of thing a couple of shrewd operators cook up to take some hick for a ride. I'm surprised at you falling for it. How do you know there really is a dame like that in Europe? Anybody can send pictures -- " "You've got it all wrong," he said. "I've spoken to her." "By phone? How do you know who's on the other end? You hear a dame's voice you never heard before. What makes you think it's hers?" A gain he didn't seem to want to talk, as if he had some secret to hide. But I guess he felt like gettings things off his chest, too, or he wouldn't have opened up in the first place. And he had already told me enough so that if he didn't tell me more he'd sound like a dope. So after hesitating even longer than before, he said, "Let's get this straight, George. This is no racket. I've seen and talked to her at the same time. And the things she talked about, no con man would know." "You've seen and talked to her at the same time? You mean by TV? I don't believe it. They can't send TV to Europe." "I didn't say it was TV. And I didn't say she lived in Europe." "That's exactly what you did say. Or maybe you meant she lived on Mars?" "No. She's an American." "This makes less and less sense to me. Where did you meet her?" He turned red, and squirmed all over the place. Finally he said, "Right here in my own laboratory." "In your own laboratory! But you said you never met her in the flesh!" "I didn't. Not really by TV either. The fact is -- she isn't born yet." I backed away from him. When he was a kid and blew up our kitchen, I didn't like it. When he wrote poetry, I was kind of ashamed and didn't want my pals to know he was my brother. Now, I was really scared. Everything he had been saying in the last ten minutes began to make sense, but a screwy kind of sense. He saw how I felt. "Don't worry, George, I haven't gone crazy. Her time is #, more than a thousand years from now. The only way I've seen and talked to her is on a time-contact machine." "Come again?" "A kind of time machine. It can't send material objects back and forth across time, as far as I know, but it can send certain waves, especially the kind we use to transmit signals. That's how she and I could talk to each other and see each other." "Perry, I think you ought to see a good doctor." "It's a remarkable device," he said, paying no attention to how I was trying to help him. "She's the one who first constructed it and contacted me. It's based on an extension of !instein's equations -- " "You think you can explain so much," I said. "Okay, then, explain this. This dame isn't going to be born for a thousand years. And yet you tell me you're in love with her. What's the difference between you and somebody that's nuts?" I asked, as if anybody knew the answer. H e certainly didn't. In fact, he went ahead and proved to me that they were the same thing. Because for the next couple of weeks, the only thing he'd talk about, outside of equations I couldn't understand, was this dame. How smart she was, and how beautiful she was, and how wonderful she was in every way that a dame can be wonderful, and how she loved him. For a time he had me convinced that she actually existed. "Compared with you," I said, "Romeo had a mild case." "There are some quantities so great that you can't measure them," he said. "That will give you some idea of our love for each other." There it went, the old poetry, cropping out in him just like before. And all the time I'd been thinking it was like measles, something that you get once and it builds up your resistance so you don't get it again, at least not bad. It just goes to show how wrong I could be. "What preacher are you going to get to marry you?" I asked. "A guy born five hundred years from now?" "I don't think that's funny," he said. "You're telling me. Look, Perry, you're smart enough to know what I'm thinking -- " "You still think I'm crazy." "I got an open mind on the subject. Now, if you won't see a doctor -- then how about letting me take a look at this dame, so I can convince myself?" "No," he said. "I've considered doing that, and decided against it. Her voice and image come through for only about five minutes a day, sometimes less. And those minutes are very precious to us. We don't want any one else present, any one at all." "Not even to convince me she actually exists?" "You wouldn't be convinced anyway," he said very shrewdly. "No matter what I showed you, you'd still find a reason to call it a fraud." He was right at that. It would take a lot of convincing to make me believe that a babe who wasn't going to get born for a thousand years was in love with him. By this time, though, I was sure of one thing -- there was something screwy going on in that laboratory of his. For five minutes a day he was watching some dame's picture, listening to her voice. If I had an idea what she was like, I might figure out where to go from there. Perry, dropping in at the laboratory to pay him visits. There was what looked like a ten-inch TV tube in one corner of his place, not housed in a cabinet, but lying on the table among dozens of other tubes and rheostats and meters and other things I didn't know about. Along the wall that led from this corner was a lot of stuff which Perry said was high voltage, and warned me not to touch. I kept away. I wasn't trying to figure out how to get myself killed. All I wanted to know was when he saw this girl. Finally I managed to pin the time down to between three and four in the afternoon. For five minutes every day, during that hour, he locked the door and didn't answer phone calls. I figured that if I dropped in then I might get a glimpse of her. And that's what I did. At first, when I knocked on the door, there was no answer. In a minute, though, I heard Perry's voice, but he wasn't talking to me. He was saying, "Darling," and he sounded kind of sick, which I figured was due to love. Come to think of it, he might have been scared a little. I heard him say, "Don't be afraid," and it was quiet for about fifteen seconds. Then I heard a terrific crash, like lightning striking. The door shook, and I smelled something sharp, and the first thing I wanted to do was get out of that place. But I couldn't leave my brother in there. I put my shoulder to the door and had no trouble at all. The explosion, or whatever it was, #S must have weakened the hinges. As the door crashed in, I looked for Perry. There was no sign of him. But I could see his shoes, on the floor in front of that TV tube, where he must have been standing. No feet in them, though, just his socks. All the high-voltage stuff was smoking. The TV screen was all lit up, and on it I could see a girl's face, the same girl whose picture Perry had shown me. She was wearing one of those funny costumes, and she looked scared. It was a clear picture, and I could even see the way she gulped. Then she broke out into a happy smile and, for about half a second, before the second explosion, I could see Perry on the screen. After that second explosion -- even though it wasn't near as big as the first -- that TV set was nothing but a mess of twisted junk, and there was no screen left to see anything on. Perry liked to have everything just so, and he'd never think of going anyplace without his tie being knotted just right, and his socks matching, and so on. And here he'd traveled a thousand years into the future in bare feet. I felt kind of embarrassed for him. Anyway, they were engaged, and now they must be married, so I guess she had slippers waiting for him. I'm just sorry I missed the wedding. Schuster prize novel, adds to its portfolio of tension and devious threat as it reveals the premium put on an insured world. For there is a price for protection against all the sins and ills of mankind... but how big is it, who pays, who is the beneficiary... and is it worth the cost? No, the answers are riot as simple and clear-cut as the actuarial tables they are based on! some as Columbus's... more so, in fact, because his great danger was falling off the edge of Earth, which is naturally impossible... while this one's is toppling right out of the Universe, which isn't impossible at alii Then why must the harrowing trip be made? Well, you've undoubtedly wondered who calibrated the jumps through hyper-space that bridge the light-years between solar systems. Here they are, the whole heroic crew of people capable of fear and bewilderment in an unknown dimension, doing a job because it has to be done! You won't forget them or the tormented man who discovers how necessary a handicap can be! Grandy Devil Speak of the devil and Grandy appeared -- but not when he was desperately, urgently needed! and Timothy begat Nathan, and Nathan begat Roger, and the days of their years were long on the Earth. But then Roger begat Orville, and Orville was a heller. He begat Augustus, Wayne, Walter, Benjamin and Carl, who was my father, and I guess that was going too far, because that was when Gideon Upshur stepped in to take a hand. I was kissing Lucille in the parlor when the doorbell rang and she didn't take kindly to the interruption. He was a big old man with a burned-brown face. He stamped the snow off his feet and stared at me out of crackling blue eyes and demanded, "Orvie?" I said, "My name is George." "Wipe the lipstick off your face, George," he said, and walked right in. Lucille sat up in a hurry and began tucking the ends of her hair in place. He looked at her once and calmly took off his coat and hung it over the back of a chair by the fire and sat down. "My name is Upshur," he said. no "Gideon Upshur. Where's Orville Dexter?" throwing him out up until then, but that made me stop thinking about it. It was the first time anybody had come around looking for Orville Dexter in almost a year and we had just begun breathing easily again. I said, "That's my grandfather, Mr. Upshur. What's he done now?" He looked at me. "You're his grandson? And you ask me what he's done?" He shook his head. "Where is he?" I told him the truth: "We haven't seen Grandy Orville in five years." "And you don't know where he is?" "No, I don't, Mr. Upshur. He never tells anybody where he's going. Sometimes he doesn't even tell us after he comes back." The old man pursed his lips. He leaned forward, across Lucille, and poured himself a drink from the Scotch on the side table. "I swear," he said, in a high, shrill, old voice, "these Dexters are a caution. Go home." He was talking to Lucille. She looked at him sulkily and opened her mouth, but I cut in. "This is my fiancee," I said. "Hah," he said. "No doubt. Well, there's nothing to do but have it out with Orvie. Is the bed made up in the guest room?" I protested, "Mrs Upshur, it isn't that we aren't glad to see any friend of Grandy's, but Lord knows when he'll be home. It might be tomorrow, it might be six months from now or years -- " "I'll wait," he said over his shoulder, climbing the stairs. H aving him there wasn't so bad after the first couple of weeks. I phoned Uncle Wayne about it, and he sounded quite excited. "Tall, heavy-set old man?" he asked. "Very dark complexion?" "That's the one," I said. "He seemed to know his way around the house pretty well, too." "Well, why wouldn't he?" Uncle Wayne didn't say ansdhing for a second. "Tell you what, George. You get your brothers together and -- " "I can't, Uncle Wayne," I said. "Harold's in the Army. I don't He didn't say anything for another second. "Well, don't worry. I'll give you a call as soon as I get back." "Are you going somewhere, Uncle Wayne?" I wanted to know. "I certainly am, George," he said, and hung up. So there I was, alone in the house with Mr. Upshur. That's the trouble with being the youngest. Lucille wouldn't come to the house any more, either. I went out to her place a couple of times, but it was too cold to drive the the big sedan with him when he left, and Lucille refused to go anywhere with me in the jeep. So all we could do was sit in her parlor, and her mother sat right there with us, knitting and making little remarks about Grandy Orvie and that girl in Eatontown. So, all in all, I was pretty glad when the kitchen door opened and Grandy Orvie walked in. "Grandy!" I cried. "I'm glad to see you! There's a man -- " "Hush, George," he said. "Where is he?" "Upstairs. He usually takes a nap after I bring him his dinner on a tray." "You take his dinner up? What's the matter with the servants?" I coughed. "Well, Grandy, after that trouble in Eatontown, they -- " "Never mind," he said hastily. "Go ahead with what you're doing." I finished scraping the dishes into the garbage-disposer and stacked them in the washer, while he sat there in his overcoat watching me. "George," he said at last, "I'm an old man. A very old man." "Yes, Grandy," I answered. "My grandfather's older than I am. And his grandfather is older than that." "Well, sure," I said reasonably. "I never met them, did I, Grandy?" "No, George. At least, I don't believe they've been home much these last few years. Grandy Timothy was here in '#, but I don't believe you were born yet. Come to think of it, even your dad wasn't born by then." "Dad's sixty," I told him. "I'm twenty-one."  "Certainly you are, George. And your dad thinks a lot of you. He mentioned you just a couple of months ago. He said that you were getting to an age where you ought to be told about us Dexters." "Told what, Grandy Orville?" I asked. "Confound it, George, that's what I'm coming to! Can't you see that I'm trying to tell you something? It's hard to put into words, that's all." "Can I help?" said Gideon Upshur from the door. G randy Orviiie stood up straight and frosty. "I'll thank you, Gideon Upshur, to stay the be-dickens out of a family discussion!" "It's my family, too, young man," said Gideon Upshur. "And that's why I'm here. I warned Cousin Mahlon, but he wouldn't listen. I warned Timothy, but he ran off to America -- and look what he started!" "A man's got a right to pass on his name," Grandy Orville said pridefully. "Once, yes! I never said a man couldn't have a son -- though you know I've never had one, Orvie. Where would the world be if all of us had children three and four at a time, the way you Dexters have been doing? Four now -- sixteen when the kids grow up  sixty-four when their kids grow up. Why, in four or five hundred years, there'd be world would be covered six layers deep with immortals, squirming and fidgeting and -- " "Hush, man!" howled Grandy Orville. "Not in the front of the boy!" Gideon Upshur stood up and yelled right back at him. "It's time he found out! I'm warning you, Orville Dexter, either you mend your ways or I'll mend them for you. I didn't come here to talk -- I'm prepared to take sterner measures if I have to!" "Why, you reeking pustoon," Grandy Orville started -- but then he caught sight of me. "Out of here, George! Go up to your room till I call you. And as for you, you old idiot, I'm as prepared as you are, if it comes to that -- " I went. It looked like trouble and I hated to leave Grandy Orville alone, but orders were orders; Dad had taught me that. The noises from the kitchen were terrible for a while, but by and by they died down. It was quiet for a long, long time. After a couple of hours, I began to get worried and I went back downstairs quietly and pushed the kitchen door open a crack. Grandy Orville was sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space. I didn't see Mr. Upshur at all. Grandy Orville looked up and said in a tired voice, "Come in, George. I was just catching my breath." "Where did Mr. Upshur go?" I asked. "It was self-defense," he said quickly. "He'd outlived his usefulness, anyway." thing happen to Mr. Upshur?" I asked. He sighed. "George, sometimes I think the old blood is running thin. Now don't bother me with any more questions right now, till I rest up a bit." Orders were orders, as I say. I noticed that the garbage-disposal unit was whirring and I walked over to shut it off. "Funny," I said. "I forgot I left it running." Grandy Orville said nervously, "Don't give it a thought. Say, George, they haven't installed sewer lines while I was away, have they?" "No, they haven't, Grandy," I told him. "Same old dry well and septic tank." "That's too bad," he grumbled. "Well, I don't suppose it matters." I wasn't listening too closely; I had noticed that the floor was slick and shiny. "Grandy," I said, "you didn't have to mop the floor for me. I can manage, even if all the servants did quit when -- " "Oh, shut up about the servants," he snapped testily. "George, I've been thinking. There's a lot that needs to be explained to you, but this isn't the best time for it and maybe your dad ought to do the explaining. He knows you better than I do. Frankly, George, I just don't know how to put things so you'll understand. Didn't you ever notice that there was anything different about us Dexters?" "Well, we're pretty rich." "I don't mean that. For instance, that time you were run over by the truck when you were a kid. Didn't that make you suspect anything -- how soon you mended, I mean?" "Why, I don't think so, Grandy," I said, thinking back. "Dad told me that all the Dexters always healed fast." I bent down and looked under the table Grandy Orville was sitting at. "Why, that looks like old clothes down there. Isn't that the same kind of suit Mr. Upshur was wearing?" Grandy Orville shrugged tiredly. "He left it for you," he explained. "Now don't ask me any more question, because I've got to go away for a while and I'm late now. If your Uncle Wayne comes back, tell him thanks for letting me know Mr. Upshur was here. I'll give your regards to your dad if we happen to meet." wish Grandy would come back so I could stop worrying about the problem he left me. Lucille never did get over her peeve, so I married Alice along about the middle of February. I'd have liked having some of the family there at the wedding, but none of them was in town just then -- or since, for that matter -- and it wasn't really necessary because I was of legal age. I was happy with Alice right from the start, but even more important, it explained what Grandy and Mr. Upshur had been trying to tell me. About what us Dexters are, that is. Alice is a very attractive girl and a good housekeeper, which is a good thing -- we haven't been able to get any of the servants back. But that's good, too, in a way, because it keeps her inside the house a lot. It's getting on toward nice weather, though, and I'm having a tough time keeping her away from the third terrace, where the dry well and septic tank are. And if she goes down there, she's bound to hear the noises. I don't know. Maybe the best thing I could do would be to roll the stone off the top of the septic tank and let what's struggling around in there come out. But I'm afraid he's pretty mad. by Arthur J. Burks # Six stories of science, fantasy and the macabre. First edition limited to # copies. Profusely illustra"This will be very popular with those who like literature that really scares them." -- The Book Exchange, London A novel of horror... Sorcery rampant in the woods of Maine as humanity ranges itself against the Yethhounds of Xangi, and the terrible Yue-Laou, The Maker of Moons. Edition limited to # copies. OF by Robert W. chambers  # Coming SoonI H. P. lovecraft's Scarcest Novel The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath, # # Michigan Avenue Buffalo #, New York Clarke. Ballantine Books, # Cloth, #c Paper i make the as-yet-unknown so vividly and immediately real as Arthur C. Clarke. Earthlight, which deals with life on the Moon at a time when it is serving as a way station to Terr an outposts on most of the planets and large satellites of our system, has the palpable, almost visual effect of an eyewitness report. The plot is a fairly standard type of melodrama, but it is developed with all the author's abundant ability to make even melodrama plausible. For my money, this is the best tale about what it would be like on the Moon that has yet been written. Judith Merril. Random House, # f I 'HE new Merril contains # stories, # of which rate Bplus or better -- a remarkably high average. The book deals with parapsychological powers and includes tales ranging from a sensitive item by Rhoda Broughton, first published in England in #, to a couple of Iate-# entries. There are several real discoveries from the backfiles of the s-f magazines and a beauty from the Satevepost; an Agatha Christie (which I didn't like) and a John Collier (which I adored). Selig Hecht. Revised and with Four Additional Chapters by Eugene Rabinowitch. Viking Press, # XT'S a pleasure to have a chance to bring this book, which originally appeared in #, to your attention. It is still far and away the best lay book on atomic energy ever written. Dr. Rablnowitch's revisions and additions to the late Dr. Hecht's text are excellent, too, and the book makes the history and science of nuclear physics -- including the hydrogen bomb -- clear, understandable and genuinely exciting. It does assume a fairly mature reader, since it is not "written down" or patronizing or oversimplified, but anyone who can read Galaxy can read and profit by it. lantine Books, #c '--ishing novel can best be summarized by describing it as "Henry James cross-pollinated with M. P. Shiel." For it is written (at first, at least) with an almost Jamesian luxuriance of style, while the plot is almost Shielian in fantastic vividness. The story is that of an antireligious religious leader who preaches that Death is more desirable than anything. It tells how his simple but poisonous ideas are subverted by a Hollywood-type publicity man and how the narrator, who begins by being persuaded of the Messiah's creed, ends by being his (or, rather, the publicity man's) antagonist. It's a strange and uncomfortable anti-utopia, done with much more than routine literary skill. edited by Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press, # anti-utopias is about the best of Martin Greenberg's anthologies. It contains six superb novelets and novellas, all A or A-plus, together with "introductions" by Heinlein and Asimov, and the full text of Edward Wellen's bits from his non-fact "Encyclopedia of Galactic Culture." They, the Heinlein and novellas by Pohl, Sturgeon and Damon Knight come from Galaxy; stories by Poul Anderson, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and the late Malcolm Jameson are from Astounding. None has ever been anthologized before, either. I think the book is an essential addition to anyone's basic library of science fiction. Isaac Asimov. Abelard-Schuman, # kNE of the best science popularizations I have ever read is here presented, unfortunately, as a juvenile. It isn't. Asimov (yes, our Asimov) has simply taken the basic knowledge about enzymes, vitamins and hormones and translated it into the language of the layman. I have always found biochemistry a formidable subject, but this little volume offers a delightful and understandable introduction to it. And the drawings by John Bradford are excellent, too. Books, #c Ace double contains the ever-superb The Stars, Like Dust, here quite unnecessarily retitled as above -- Galaxy readers remember it as Tyrann -- and Dee's ominous-pitched piece of turgidity about a world of tomorrow in which some sort of alien "things" are gradually taking over the human race, individual by individual, and turnBooks, #c npHE prolific short-story writer novel deals with parapsychology and with the notion of genetic leaps: the idea that Man progresses not by gradual, almost invisible evolution, but by sudden mutations. In this fast-moving job, the mutation is both physical and moral; and, despite its overmelodramatic plot and undistinguished style, it makes its point quite positively. It's no masterpiece, but I think you will enjoy it, if you like still more about the unlimited power of Mind over Matter. Personally, I could do with less of Psi; it's being rammed both into the ground and down readers' throats. by Fritz Kahn. Crown Publishers, # TOR someone who wants a bird's-eye view of science, from physics to geology, from chemistry to astronomy, this book will have a useful function. It's big, profusely (though not always well) illustrated, and very Comprehensive indeed. The style is lively and the inaccuracies, which are not few, are minor. It's almost a home correspondence course in science, without any of the pedantry that too often mars such courses. As books go today, it's a remarkable bargain at its price. Definitely worth your consideration. Lion Books, #c B uilt around Budrys' Galaxy story "Ironclad," this book achieved for me a maximum of confusion with a minimum of direction -- and yet I found it moderately good reading. It's another tale of the attempt of remnants of the human race to recivilize itself after an unnamed world catastrophe, and it's almost as bloody and chaotic as the situation would be if it actually occurred. S. Richardson. McGraw-Hill Book Co., # T he only thing wrong with this study is its title, for less than # of its # pages are devoted to the Red Planet. Actually, the book is a fine review of current knowledge on the prospects of space travel, the nature of lunar existence, the probabilities of Martian ecology, and what conditions would be like on the other planets of the Solar System. A good job, though perhaps a bit simple for those who have already boned up on the subject in more advanced books. Fine, though, for the novice. Possible Worlds, originally reviewed in these columns in April, #, is at last published by Ballantine (#c). Watch for it... Donald Day informs me that, the price of his invaluable Index to the Science Fiction Magazines is still #, not # as I erroneously reported in February. kkkkk (Continued from page #) "Now the U.S.D.A. entomologists are figuring out how many sterilized males will be needed to hunt down all the females in the state of Florida. They are even hoping to use the same method to exterminate other insect pests whose females are equally monogamous." Bully for our side, of course -- with such animal suffering and economic waste involved, I take my stand boldly against the screw worm. But it brings up, as I mentioned, the question of invasion techniques that writers are so fond of. Alien conquest of Earth is the usual goal of these stories, though sometimes it's the EastWest conflict. Many of the methods suggested are clever; none, however, has been as devilish as the one quoted. Before anybody leaps hopefully to the typewriter, let me point out that it's only some insects that go on reproducing after a single impregnation. A good thing, too, or we'd be up to here in flora, fauna and each other. And a world like that should be given gladly to any beings willing to take it. Our lures and traps are all appeals to basic instincts. The moose and duck calls, and the supersonic gadget that broadcasts the mosquito siren song and brings males crashing into an electrified barrier, play on sex drive. Food is more commonly used, of course, but there are others, too. Assuming one wants to wipe out mankind, what's the best bait? Food, sex and such are fine for destroying individuals, but I doubt if they can be made to do in the whole species. Well, war is the closest thing to alien invasion. Why do people fight? The realpolitik reason is generally .real estate, but that's for the statesmen; the population needs slogans to die for. They won't accept cynical goals. So with those who know suckers best -- on a cosmic scale -- idealism is a thousand-to-one favorite over lust and greed. If universal suicide could be induced, there would be less of a mess. Here are the necessary conditions: The suicide rate is four times as high after # as before #; higher among divorced than married persons; among professionals than non-professionals; white-collar workers than laborers; officers than enlisted men; urbanites than ruralites. But it's too complicated. I'll put my money on idealism. I wish it weren't so exploitable, yet that's the essence of a lure -- and idealism is Man's bait. Inside Story Even Mars had its silly season, when news is so slack that it has to be invented... only this item was the horrifying McCoy! T he teletype on the wave to Earth clacked briefly to life and Scott Warren looked inquiringly at the operator. The operator handed him the message from Galactic News Service headquarters in New York. It said; dullest here. Scott, bureau chief at lopa, Martian headquarters for Galactic News, shrugged and said, "Tell them 'Nothing repeat nothing available here. Deadest ever.' " Kathy Brand, a red-headed reporter, looked up from her desk where she was pecking fitfully at a typewriter. She held out a slip. "I've got a real hot item here on the longevity of the Martian sand lizard, if that's any help, Scott," she said. "Honestly, I've never seen it so slow." T he door from the corridor opened and George Mercer came in, carrying himself carefully as if he were maintaining his balance only by the utmost concentration. "Hi, people," George said. "Notice anything different about me?" George covered the Martian parliament for Galactic News, but parliament was out of session now and he'd been switched temporarily to a roving assignment. "You sound tinny," Scott said, "as if you had something in your throat. Been treating it down at New York Dan's?" New York Dan's was the bar and steakhouse nearby. "Sober as a senator," George Mercer asserted. "Guess again." "You look sort of -- flattened out," Kathy Brand said. "Your tunic isn't hanging right, for instance, and your breeches are all bunched up." "Observant girl. She'll go far, Scott. It happens you're both right, in a way. I'm wearing the latest in outdoor fashion -- an invisible suit. Over my regular outfit. Ask me why." "Why?" Kathy asked dutifully. "Trying it out for a friend. It's heatproof and airtight." "Skintight, too," Scott said. "True," George said. "It clings. That's one of its advantages. No more cumbersome spacesuits. No clanking around like a trained monster when you have to explore an airless world. Go as you are in cool comfort, retain your dexterity. Communicate by short wave. That's why I sound tinny." "How come it's invisible?" Scott asked. "Just happened. A batch of gunk boiled over and my friend discovered that made it non-refractive. So of course you can't see it. Just an extra added attraction. The suit would work just as well in sky-blue or yellowstripe, if that happened to be the fashion." "What does your friend plan to do with it?" George shrugged. "He's a research chap. Figures things out, or stumbles on them. Leaves it to others to find a use for them." "Hmm," Scott said. "If we could make you invisible, as well as the suit, we might scare up a story. New York's been utmosting us for copy and all we've got is the latest Museum pronouncement on the sand lizard." "Mid-season doldrums, eh?" George absent-mindedly reached toward his pocket, but was stopped by the all-enveloping suit. He grinned. "I was going for a cigarette, but I couldn't get anything in my mouth anyway. Does my face look scrunched around any? It feels all lopsided under this stuff." "It flattens out your nose a little," Kathy said. "If I remember your old nose correctly. But nothing serious. How do you breathe?" "Oxygen pack in my belt. Selfcharging and it lasts indefinitely. I'd just as soon have a little real air now, though." He began to peel off the suit, starting with some sort of fastening under the chin. They watched him, fascinated. He looked as if he were pulling invisible spider webs from various parts of his body. Finally he sat down and, lifting one leg at a time, pulled handfuls of nothing off the ends of his feet. "Better remember where you put it down," Scott said, "or you'll never find it again." up and Scott answered it: "Galactic News, Warren." It was a GN stringer at Druro, site of a notorious concentration camp of the former Martian regime. The camp was now a nully colony. The nullies were outcasts -- diseased, feeble-minded, animal-people -- mostly Martians and a few Earth people, too, transported from the slums of lopa, Senalla and other big Martian cities to the remote wilderness around Druro. There was no known cure for a nully. His disease, highly contagious, was so loathsome that the Martian government deemed the nully colony the best solution short of extermination. Scott sometimes wondered if Druro's nully colony was any better than the old concentration camp of the deposed Rockhead regime. The Druro stringer was calling Scott about the latest of a series of rumors about the colony. The reports could not be verified because none but a nully ever entered the colony, set back in the hills. The nullies lived a wild life in the huts and barracks scattered around, or in caves, as they chose. Once inside the colony they never came out. Supplies were airdropped to them and pilots often reported scenes of savagery as the ragged nullies fought over the food packages. The rumors were about the nullies organizing. That they had leaders who enforced discipline. The old anarchistic ways were being curbed and some mysterious project was in the works tack in the hills, hidden from the eyes of spotter pilots. The stringer had a new one this time. He'd seen mysterious lights floating above the colony, at levels ranging from six feet to two thousand feet. The funny thing, the stringer said, was that the nullies didn't seem to be alarmed by the lights. They either took no notice of them or, in one or two instances, seemed to be friendly with them -- almost as if they were in communication. Scott Warren took notes as the stringer talked, then thanked him and asked him to keep in touch with the situation. a few hundred words and sailed it to the operator for transmission to news-hungry Earth. But then he thought better of it and took it back. "I'm getting sophomoric in my tedium," he said. "This could start off the silly season with a bang. I wish I knew what was really going on in that nully colony, though." He put the story on the spike. George Mercer lifted it off and read it. Then he said to Scott, casually, "Like me to find out for you?" "Huh?" "I'm on roving assignment," George said. "I could easily rove over Druro way." "I admit you're a better reporter than our stringer there," Scott said. "I suppose you could scratch together a decent thinkpiece or a situationer, but I frankly don't believe it would justify the expense." "You're talking about a knothole view, from outside the fence," George said. "Of course." "Well, I'm not," said George. "I'm talking about an inside story." "Inside the nully colony?" said Scott. "You're crazy!" "I would have been yesterday. But today I've got a new suit." He looked around for it. "Wherever I put it. Wearing that, I could get inside without risking infection and without anybody suspecting I was anything but another poor old nully." "I repeat," said Scott, "you're crazy. They never let anybody out of the colony once he's in. You know that." George gestured airily. "A mere administrative detail. That's your department, as I see it. You'd have to persuade the Health Commission that the suit does make me contagion-proof and then arrange to get me out when I have the story. I'll keep you posted on interim details by short wave." K athy Brand wandered over. "You'd better give up, George," she said. "Scott's pretty pigheaded about this hero business. I learned that when I sneaked off to the outlaw camp and pretended I was a convert -- just to make a story. Scott's still sore because he had to play hero himself to come rescue me. Made him very uncomfortable." "An altogether different situation," said George stiffly. "Go 'way, little girl, and don't bother us big men." Kathy shook her head insistently so that her long red hair whipped across her face. "It's exactly the same thing. I quote you the words of the master, which T# are engraved in my memory in letters of fire: 'We're reporters, not secret agents. Our job is to report the news, not make it.' By Scott Warren, Bureau Chief. Ask him." Scott smiled. "She may have a point there, George. There's no double standard any more, you know. What's sauce for the goose... if you'll excuse the expression, Kathy." She made a face at him, but George Mercer scowled. "Look, Scott," he said. "If you're going to say no, okay, it's no. But you haven't said it yet and I don't think you will. This is no hero pitch. This is an assignment, geared to the circumstances. I have no intention of doing more than finding out what goes on in the nully colony and doing a straightforward reporting job. If I stumble across anything too big for me. I'll holler for help. But if there's anything to be found I'll find it. There's a story there, in any case. Now give me your answer -- yes or no -- like a newsman, not like a big sister." "Well..." said Scott. George grinned triumphantly at Kathy. "Okay," he said, "it's settled. You start cutting the red tape, Chiefie, and I'll get in some research on the nullies so I can act like one. Now where did I put that suit?" G eorge Mercer had been gone three days. He hadn't reported in all that time, and Scott Warren sat by a communicator, nibbling on a fingernail, waiting. There was nothing else to do. The doldrums were still on. The operator sat at his silent machine, a pastime button plugged in one ear, grinning idiotically at some program no one else was able to hear. Kathy Brand sat at her desk, putting on lipstick. Scott made a check mark on a pad. "This is the sixteenth time, by actual count, that you've made yourself a new mouth," he said. "I can't help it," she said. "I keep biting it off. Why doesn't he call in?" Scott shrugged. "I have no objections to makeup," he said. "On the contrary. But I do object to women giving themselves more lip than they really have. It's insincere." "I experiment," Kathy said. "I've got a right. I don't tell you how to shave." "True," said Scott, starting on another fingernail. The communicator buzzed and lit up. He snapped it on. "Galactic News, Warren." "Hello, Scott," a tinny voice said. "This is George, I guess." "Go ahead, George," Scott yelled. "What do you mean 'I guess'? Are you all right? Come on -- talk!" "It's pretty rugged in here. I've been on the labor detail ever since I got in. The new arrivals get the worst of it. This is the first chance I've had to get away by myself." "Have you seen any of those lights?" "Only from a distance. I don't know what they are. But every time they come there's some sort of conclave back in the hills. I haven't been able to get in on the party. Only the Regulars are allowed back there." "The Regulars?" "The leaders. The strongest ones among those with the most seniority. They're a pretty clannish crew." "Have you got anything that'd make a story? Forgive me for being commercial." "Not yet. I just wanted to report in. Wait a minute -- somebody's coming. I'll leave the beam on so you'll hear, in case I can't talk to you again. I'd leave it on all the time, but I've got to conserve the power." There was an interim of silence, punctuated only by George's breathing. Then Scott heard a faint voice. "What you do out here?" "Just takin' a walk, boss," George's voice said meekly. "You get back!" There was an "Uh!" from George, as if he'd been struck, or kicked. "Okay, boss. I'm going." "You go fast. Got work to do." Evidently George decided there was no point in communicating any more of this. The wave went dead. A buzz woke Scott Warren. He snapped on his bedside communicator reflexively. He checked the time -- about an hour before dawn. There was a wild laugh from the speaker. Then a low voice said, "Don't talk to me! Just listen!" It had a tinny sound and Scott recognized it immediately. He kept silent. "Great Scott! The lights!" the voice said. "By George!" George Mercer, somewhere in the nully colony, and obviously where he could be overheard, was improvising a code to identify himself. There was an insane cackle, not from George but close by him. "Pretty lights!" another voice said. "I catch!" "Balloons," George said. "Like fire balloons, as big as your head. You like balloons, Mogi?" "Very fine," the voice replied -- a Martian voice. "I catch." "Look out!" George's voice. "Duck! It's trying to catch you!" There was the wild laugh again. "It did catch you! Went right into your head and disappeared. Great Scott! Can you imagine that?" I hear you, George, Scott said to himself. Good work, boy. I hope you're all right. "Mogi," George said. "Speak to me, Mogi, you old balloon-head. Mogi! Where are you going? Come back!" There was perhaps a minute of silence, then George's voice came again, normal now and pitched softly. "Scott. You there?" "Yes," he whispered. "Good. This will have to be quick. There were two balloons and two of us. Mogi and I were committed in the same batch. He used to be a pit-filler at the spaceport; lived in that slum behind Market East. He's a pretty sick boy. I copied his cough and his cackles. But these balloons. They're about six inches in diameter, yellow-white, glow in the dark, and they appear to have intelligence. You hear me all right?" "Fine," Scott said. "I'm making notes." "Naturally," George chuckled. "Put us both down for overtime. Anyhow, Mogi and I slipped away to pick edibark -- anything to supplement our austerity diet. We were in the woods when the two fire balloons came over. They swooped at us. One went right for Mogi, seemed to merge with his head, then disappeared completely. The other one made a pass at me, but then veered off and zoomed away. Mogi went dashing off in the brush. "That's the picture, Scott. No time to theorize now. I've got to get back before they find I'm missing, or there'll be new welts on my tender hide. The suit's no protection against that sort of thing. Tell Kathy she was right about this secret agent stuff. I shoulda stood in the newsroom." The tinny voice stopped. tening to the faint whoops and squeals of a disconnected wave, then flicked off the communicator. He swung his feet out of bed, lit a cigarette and read over his notes. The glowing balloons, with their seeming intelligence, had avoided George. Did his skintight invisible suit protect him from the balloons, as well as from infection from the diseased nullies? And, having preferred the Martian, were the balloons now suspicious? Scott went back a step. If the fire balloons were intelligent, or directed by intelligence, what were they? Some new outlaw device? Not likely. The outlaws, badly defeated in their last guerrilla foray against World Government troops, had retreated into the desert wastes. That was their land -- the flat desert beyond Revo to the north -- not the scrubby hills and dwarf forest of the Druro nully colony. Were the balloons perhaps a tool of the "Regulars," the selfappointed leaders of the colony? It was possible they were just awe-inspiring gadgets to keep the lesser nullies in line. But then they wouldn't have awed George unless they were something more sinister. Maybe this was the time to call in the authorities. George was just one man and his only resources were his untested suit, his reporter's ingenuity and his tenuous link of communication to Galactic News -- which, after all, was only a civilian agency with highly unofficial standing at W.G. headquarters. As Kathy Brand had reminded him, it was really a job for the World Government Investigators, the professional secret agents. But George, in spite of his halfserious grumble as he signed off, would be indignant if he were pulled off the assignment now, just when he'd made his first revealing contact. Scott snuffed out his cigarette and lay back. "Okay, George," he said halfaloud, "it's your story. But don't kill yourself getting it." K athy Brand filled a cup with cold water from a carafe. She set the cup on Scott's desk and plunked a tablet into it. The liquid churned up, turned dark and began to steam. "Black," she said, "as directed. That's your fourth cup of coffee this morning, Scott. You must have been out all night," "Up," he said, "but not out. George called me at home." "Oh? Any news?" "Nothing waveworthy," he said, "unless we go off half-cocked and tip our hand. No use letting the opposition in on what we're doing until we can sew up the yarn." He was telling her what George had learned so far when the Earthwave began to clack away. The operator handed him the message, welcome matcher i.n. I.N. was Interplanetary News, Galactic's major rival. Senalla was Mars' second biggest city. "That old chestnut," Scott snorted. "They drag that one out every year or so, whenever it's dull. If it isn't Deimos, it's Phobos." Nevertheless he scanned the drop copy from the Mars circuit. Nothing there. He prepared a message for the GN bureau at Senalla. N.y. has i.n. reviving The acknowledgment came immediately with this added note. "Fiery globes!" Kathy said. "Isn't that what George saw?" "Yes," he said. "Kathy, call the Observatory. Get Dr. Erris; he knows us. See if he has any independent knowledge. If not, try to get a quote from him on the possibility of life on Deimos, or comment on the scavenger skipper's story." "Right." Mercer, but he knew it would be unwise. George couldn't talk if he were under the eyes of the nully leaders -- the Regulars. His existence was tough enough without complicating it further. Scott would just have to wait till George called him. Kathy had got through to Dr. Erris and was making notes as she talked to him. Scott looked over her shoulder and read her neat abbreviated longhand. "Dr unheard skipper story unhas own knwldg life Marsmoons but wld spose if existed b totly alien life as knwn Mars-Earth owing uttr lack air infintsml grvty outpointg too sevl exploretrips unfnd lifesigns..." Scott turned away to the Senella printer, which had come to life. Kathy's story was too unsensational to be anything but a "with" piece. But GN's Senalla bureau had something, senalla, mars -- (gn) -- "Reports from a scavenger ship that life in the form of fiery globes might exist on Deimos, Mars' farther satellite, received a cautious reception in official quarters here. "Spokesmen who were quick to discount similar reports in past years have guarded answers today when asked to confirm or deny the story. "It was learned that the Commission of Exploration and Assessment had dispatched a scout ship to Deimos to check up on the reports, which came originally from the master of the scavenger vessel." (memo desk: i.n. Scott read copy on the story, tore off and spiked the memo, and gave the story to the operator to put on the wave to Earth before New York could complain again about I.N.'s big beat. Kathy, finished talking to Dr. Erris, typed out her piece. It wasn't much, but it would keep the story ticking for a while. Scott penciled through the copy, wrote "With Senalla Globes" at the top of it and passed it on to the operator. Obviously there was a connection between what the scavenger skipper had seen on Deimos and the fire balloons George Mercer had been in the nully camp. If only George would call in, GN might be able to recoup on the story. Interplanetary News was now miles ahead, having gone full tilt with first and second leads, adds, bulletin intros, urgents, precedes, follows and all the other sluglines of a fast-breaking story. Galactic limped along behind. The combined efforts of the lopa and Senalla bureaus could produce no more for the Earth wave than two "it was learned" stories, Kathy's "with" bit and half a dozen "speculation here" think pieces and sidebars. Far from appeasing Galactic's head office, these seemed only to infuriate it. By the time Scott Warren had an ill-digested lunch and his fifteenth cup of coffee at his desk, the messages from New York had reached a peak of implied invective in the tightly written waves of interplanetary communications. K athy Brand plopped another coffee tablet into a cup and set it in front of Scott. "What we need," she said, "is an interview with one of those fire globes. I don't think Senalla's ever going to find that first mate. I could take the correspondent car and make a fast jaunt to Deimos. T Talked to a Fiery Globe, an Exclusive Galactic News Interview by Kathy Brand.' How about it, Scott?" "No!" he shouted, slamming his palm on the desk. "We can't spare any more heroes." Kathy looked hurt at his show of temper. "I was only kidding. Chief," she said. "Don't take it so hard. Suppose I.N. did beat us on this one. It's just a fluke. We scoop them every other day in the year." Scott took a sip of the hot coffee, then put the cup down with a clatter. "I'm not worrying about scoops and beats. I'm wondering what the hell happened to George." As if on cue, the communicator buzzed and lighted up brightly. "Galactic, Warren," Scott barked. "This is your wandering boy," said George's voice, tinny but clear. "George! Are you all right? Where are you?" "I'm all right, considering. I'm in no man's land -- halfway between the Regulars back in the hills and the new nullies, the ones that came in recently. I'm an outcast." "What do you mean?" "I mean neither group will have anything to do with me. The Regulars have barricaded themselves and won't let anybody else in. They've got crude weapons, but they're effective enough -- they winged me once with a slingshot -- and I beat it out of there. And the new nullies -- those who've been here six months or less -- have all been taken over by the balloons. The balloons are intelligent, Scott, no doubt about it, and when they take over a nully he becomes a real smart cookie." "The balloons are from Deimos, from all indications," Scott told him. "They've been seen there, at least." "Interesting," George said. "Have they showed up anywhere else?" "No." "Apparently they've all come here. You can only see them at night and obviously they're the lights our Druro stringer saw here in the nully colony. You spiked that yarn, but I suppose it's common property now and Druro's crawling with the press." "As a matter of fact, nobody's connected the two," Scott said. "Maybe we'd better have an eyewitnesser from you now, before they beat us with our own story." "I'd rather you didn't, Scott. If you can hold off a while longer, I may be able to give you a better yarn." "What's your theory? Are the Deimons taking over the nully colony? But why only there? And why are the Regulars keeping the others at bay? It sounds as if the Regulars are immune to them, somehow. And you, George. Why haven't the balloons taken you over?" "I don't know. I'm working on it. I don't think it's the suit, but something stops them." "What are they up to, these balloons?" "From what I've seen -- they don't let me get too close -- I'd say it was some kind of mobilization. The nullies hold secret conclaves. They size up the Regulars' fences. They drill, like militia, with sticks for guns. Individually they act pretty crazy, like typical nullies, but when you put the pieces together there seems to be a plan behind it all. If you want a snap answer I'd say they were mobilizing for -- take it or leave it -- conquest." "Conquest? Of the Regulars?" "Just at first," George said. "Then of Druro. And then maybe the rest of Mars." G alactic News caught up with the life-on-Deimos story by the second day, after the skipper of the salvage ship issued an official statement through the C.E.A., but Interplanetary News wa basking in its initial beat and its stories were getting the play on Earth. Bits of Galactic's dispatches, the New York bureau told Scott angrily, were being shirt-tailed on to the I.N. stories, if used at all. Scott fidgeted, bit a fingernail, drank black coffee and wished he hadn't promised George he'd hold off on the Druro angle. But of course he had to, if George's position was not to be jeopardized further. There was still a chance that GN could regain all it had lost, if things broke right. Scott was worried, though, that by then he'd be a nervous wreck. And George, if his suit failed him, could become a physical wreck -- a nully -- doomed to spend the rest of his life in the colony. One small satisfaction was that there would be no more hard news about the globes on Deimos, now that World Government had stepped in. W.G.'s Exploration and Assessment Commission was notoriously hush-hush when it was on the trail of something that might even remotely affect the public safety. If he knew E #s A, and he did, there wouldn't even be a leak about its activities until it had everything analyzed, categorized, ecologized and then, perhaps, partly declassified. So it all depended on George. And George came through. A first-rate reporter with an instinctive sense of deadline and drama, he called in at the right moment. "George Mercer here," he said in a terse whisper. "Stand by." Scott turned up the volume for the voice-cast from George. He flipped on the switch to record it. He directed Kathy to make longhand notes for ready reference and another staffer to make a complete shorthand transcription for fuller interim quotes if they were needed before the tape playback could be used. Scott stationed himself next to the operator on the Earthwave, ready to dictate bulletin matter direct. "Here's the situation. The nullies -- the newcomers like me -- are preparing to attack the Regulars. I'm pretty sure that by now all the nullies except me have been taken over by the fiery balloons. I assume the Regulars are not possessed, but I don't know why not. . "The Regulars will be attacked at the weakest spot in their perimeter -- a segment of barricade built at the top of a sandy hill. If the nullies can loosen a couple of logs, they're in. "The Regulars are armed to their back teeth, with slings, spears, clubs, pots of boiling water, primitive stuff like that, but plenty effective against unarmed men. That's what the nullies are, except for their crazy sticks. Whether they have some special kind of power because the balloons have taken them over, I don't know. I should think they'd have to." "Where are you, George?" "I'm up a tree," George said wryly. "Literally. I've climbed the tallest tree overlooking the battlefield and I'm pretty well hidden. I'll give it to you playby-play as soon as the whistle blows. That ought to be any minute, if I've eavesdropped correctly." "Good boy," said Scott. "Have you seen any of the fire balloons lately? As such, I mean?" "Not since last night. A dozen of them, traveling in formation, went over the barricade. They all came back, as if they tried to take over the key men among the Regulars and' failed. They hovered around the nullies for a while, then took off." "In what direction?" "Straight up," said George. "Deimos was zooming up from the horizon at the time, if you want to make anything of that." "I'll make a note of it, for now," Scott said. T he nullies came out of the dwarf forest, each carrying a piece of wood fashioned like a Q rifle. The nullies, looking purposeful and unafraid, walked up the sandy hill toward the barricade. They did not run. They held the mock rifles at present arms, not aiming them. The regulars opened fire. Spears whistled, rocks were slung, wicked boomerangs hurtled. The attackers went down, singly at first, then in pairs, then by the dozen. They made no attempt to take cover or increase their pace. Those that remained upright continued to walk, inexorably, toward the barricade. The wounded hobbled or crawled toward it. "I don't get it," George said at one point in his description. "It's suicide." The massacre went on. Finally there was only one nully left. As if unaware that he was alone, he walked on. He had been hit in the arm and dropped his stick, but he went on. A new barrage came from behind the barricade, concentrating on the lone attacker. He went down. One last spear whistled through the air and there was a gasp of pain from George Mercer. "It got me in the arm, Scott," he said in a low, taut voice. "Pinned me to the tree trunk." Scott heard sounds that told him George must be trying to wrench the spear loose. Then he heard, "It's no use. I can't get it out. Tore the suit, dammit!" That meant George no longer had protection from the disease that infected all the nullies, the loathsome disease without a cure that turned men into animals. "They're coming out from behind the barricade," George's pain-wracked voice said. "The Regulars. They're finishing off that nully who was wounded at close range." "George, never mind that now," Scott said urgently. "We've got to get you out of there. Give me your coordinates, as near as you can, and we'll have a World Government ship to you in ten minutes." "Too late, Scott. They've spotted me. Here they come now." There was no way out. If they didn't kill him, they would capture and infect him. Those were the alternatives -- death or a living death. "They're under the tree now," George said. "I guess they're not going to kill me or they'd've done it already. One of them's climbing up. One of the leaders. An Earthman." Scott heard George's heavy breathing, then the rustle of branches being climbed. An unfamiliar voice was saying, "Okay, fella, let's get you loose. If you bystanders insist on getting in the way, you're bound to get hurt." There was a sharp crack, apparently the spear being broken off close to George's arm. George gasped with pain. "Now brace yourself," the voice said, "while I pull you off the rest of it." There was a shuddering groan from George. Then silence. "He fainted," someone said. "Lost a lot of blood. Here, I'll lower him to you. Easy! He's not a sack of meal, he's a man. And a brave man at that." at Galactic News listened in taut silence. Kathy Brand, who sometimes pretended to be a hardboiled newsgal, had tears in her eyes. Scott, for the dozenth time since George left for Druro, looked frustrated. George's fate was in the hands of the Regulars -- the mysterious people of the nully colony who in some unknown way had risen above their destiny and become men again. At least the man who had taken George down from the tree was no nully. He was a man of leader' ship and intelligence. He even had a sense of humor. Scott hadn't dictated anything. Sure, there had been a battle, and one side had won, but what did it all mean? Without perspective, the story would be a bare recital of meaningless events. He could make nothing of the desultory talk, as the unconscious George was carried inside the barricade. There were sounds that told him they were preparing to treat George's arm, which had been tourniqueted earlier, then expressions of surprise when it was discovered that George was wearing a transparent protective suit. He heard the leader say in further surprise, "What's this?" Apparently George's communicator was found. Then there was no more talk and in a mof ment someone had clicked off the communicator. A N hour passed. Two hours.  Quitting time came, but no one went home. The day shift filled in the oncoming night shift on the details of George Mercer's capture. The staffers sat around, taking routine calls from the men on the beats, knocking out routine stories, doing the routine news roundups for the special clients, drinking coffee, getting in each other's way, smoking much too much. The day operator, speaking of George, referred to him in the past tense. Kathy rebuked him gently. He apologized. They saw the Martian night come quickly, settle over the city and the sandy wastes beyond. Lights blazed on in lopa, winked on here and there in the outskirts. But beyond that there was only blackness. And somewhere out there was George. Scott stopped pacing the floor and sat down with decision. "It's not my responsibility any more," he said to no one in particular. "I've stood around like a helpless nincompoop long enough. It's time to call in the professionals." "World Government?" Kathy asked. Scott nodded. He reached for a handset. George's voice beat him to it. "Hello, Galactic," it said. Scott whirled in his chair. "Hello, you beat-up old reporter," he yelled into the communicator. Then he asked kindly, "How is it, Georgie, kid?" "Scott?" George said. "Working overtime again? Me, too. Listen, I'm all right, They saved my arm. Gave me a transfusion -- crude but effective. What's more -- listen carefully, boy -- I'm not a nully. I'm as healthy and full of corpuscles as you are." "That's great!" Scott said. "The gloom around here was so thick you could have planted lilies in it. But are you sure? How can you tell?" "Also who, what, when and where," said George happily. "Always the newsman, you old ghoul. All right. I'll be objective. I don't know for absolutely sure, of course. Nothing you could dictate a bulletin on yet. But if you can get W.G.'s Health Commission to fly in some nully specialists, I'm ninety-nine per cent certain they'll find I'm no Typhoid Mary. And what's more -- get this, Scott -- neither are any of the Regulars." "What?" "I said the Regulars are not nullies. They were, but they're not any more. That's the who and the what. Here comes the why. Maybe you'd like to take it down." "You're being recorded on tape, you hero," Scott said. "Go on." but it's my theory that nullies are bred in the slums. Dirt, malnutrition, bad sanitation. I think there's probably a psychosomatic angle to it, too -- squalor, apathy and hopelessness play a part. But then they put the nul lies in the colony here. The only object was segregation, but unconsciously they were also providing fresh air, good food -- no substandard rations came in the airdrops -- hard work and, most of all, incentive." "Incentive?" Scott asked, puzzled. "Sure, incentive. The will to live. The urge to survive is never stronger than when you've been cast off somewhere to die. A lot did die, of course. But the strongest survived and, in surviving, they licked the disease. They've rehabilitated themselves." "Assuming that," Scott said, "what about the Deimons?" "The creatures that attacked the Regulars," George said, "were Deimons in everything but form. Lane had it figured out the same way I did." "Lane?" asked Scott. "The leader of the Regulars,"  George said. "The man who saved my life. He's responsible for organizing these people out of mob chaos. He was a crewman on an ' Earth-Mars liner. In a nutshell, he signed off the ship to set up a business in lopa, got sick, was too proud to ask for help, caught the nully disease from a Martian woman who was taking care of him, then got rounded up with her." From Lane, when George put him on, Scott learned that the Regulars had been aware of the danger from the fiery globes almost from the first -- even before George had smuggled himself into the colony. They recognized them as sensient aliens, though they had no idea where they came from, and saw them take over the newcomers to the colony and make them into automata. Lane reasoned that the Regulars were in some way different from the new nullies. Then the globes tried and failed to inhabit the Regulars. He concluded that the Regulars not only differed from the nullies, but that they had been cured of their disease. proving it are two entirely different things," Lane told Scott. "Who would listen to us? We were the forgotten men, completely cut off from the outside. Our food came from the air. The pilots ignored the messages we wrote on the ground. If they took pictures of them, they thought they were a trick. The guards at the fences had shoot-first instructions and none of them ever came close enough to talk to." "Rough," Scott agreed. "That was the way things stood before your boy George Mercer came along. I guess he fooled the nullies, but he didn't fool us. George was just too smart a lad to be one of them. Then, when the globes wouldn't have anything to do with him, we knew he was for us." "But he tried to reach you," Scott protested, "and you drove him off." "That was a mistake," Lane said. "There was a new guard on watch Snd he got rattled. Believe me, we looked hard enough for him afterward, but didn't find him till that wild spear got him during the battle." "That's reasonable, I suppose," Scott said. But he sounded doubtful and George cut back into the conversation. "What's the matter, Scott? Come on, spill it. I know that tone of voice -- it means you're full of question marks. Maybe you think I really have become a nully and this is all a trick to get me and my new buddies out. Is that it?" "Well -- " Scott said. "Look, Scott," George said. "You've got a right to be skeptical. It'd be a terrible thing to bring a couple of hundred of us out into civilization and then find that we were -- a sick menace. You'd never sleep again, I know. How can I convince you?" "George, it isn't that -- " "I've got to convince you. It's true that if I were a nully and was trying to kid you, I'd probably talk the same way as I am now... kid you! That's it, Scott! The kids!" "What?" Scott sounded lost. "The kids!" George yelled. "The children! Send over a plane  and take pictures, if you like. The population of the colony at the latest census was ninety-eight men, two dozen women and quite a number of children. There are over fifty kids here, Scott." "Children?" said Scott, incredulous. "But nullies are known to be sterile." "They sure are, Scott. That's my point! Nullies are sterile. Exnullies are not. That's the clincher, isn't it? That's the trump card to play on the Health Commission, if they're as stubborn as you are." Scott laughed in relief. "Of course," he said. "I've got it now. Forgive me for being so slow." He turned to Kathy Brand. "Kathy, you heard it all. Get through to the Health Commission and tell them. George, shall we get a party out to you tonight?" "Tomorrow'll be time enough, Scott. Some of these people have been here for ten years. Lane's one of them. Another ten hours won't be an eternity. I'll be seeing you soon, Scott!" G eorge Mercer was sitting up in his bed as if it were a throne when Scott and Kathy visited him in lopa General Hospital. "Lap of luxury," George grinned. "Love it. Love you, too. Gorgeous," he said to Kathy. She bent and kissed him on the cheek. George winked at Scott. "Privileges of the convalescent," he said. "How's the arm?" Scott asked. "Coming along. Doc says Lane did a first-rate job on it, for an amateur. Lane's just down the hall. They're keeping him under observation. If he continues to respond to the biopsies and whatall, he'll be discharged in a month. His wife, too -- the Martian woman he got rounded up with -- and the children and the rest of them. How'd we do on the story, Scott?" "We creamed them. Twohour beat over the nearest opposition. And of course they had nothing like your eyewitnesser." "Naturally," George said. "I wasn't a nully for nothing. By the way. Doc tells me they're setting aside the new wing of the hospital for future nullies. They'll have lots of air, good food and occupational therapy. Should be able to cure 'em in a year. Now if we could clean up the slums... "That's a job for parliament. You'll follow through on that angle when you get back to your old beat. But since parliament doesn't reconvene for three months, New York thought you might like to convalesce on Earth for a while." "Oh, no!" George protested. "You seem to forget I'm still on assignment. You gave me the job of getting a story on the fire globes. Did I get it? No. They censored all that out of my copy -- made it strictly a yarn about the nullies. So I'm still working, Chiefie." "You talk like a man with a hole in his head, instead of his arm," Scott said. "That's another story entirely, those globes." "You can't sweettalk me out of it, Scott. When I get out of here, I want you to have a little spacer waiting for me. Just point it at Deimos and I'll do the rest. The Deimons got clobbered at the nully colony, sure. But they'll be up to something else and if I'm on the job, maybe we won't be scooped by Interplanetary News again." "It's still no -- and it isn't just heartless old me saying it. W.G. sent a small armada up there and Deimos has been off limits for a week. We'll get the story eventually, I suppose, but I have a hunch that when we do, it'll be in the form of a communique." George sank back into his pillow. "Shucks," he said mildly, looking at Kathy. Then he brightened. "How about Phobos? That's not off limits, is it?" "No," Kathy said. "But why would anybody want to go to that forsaken rockpile?" "We could look for the Phobosians, you and I," he said, "hand-in-hand in the Marslight, strolling from crag to crag." He leered at her. "Anyone for Phobos?" Kathy grinned back at him. "Loon," she said. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Verona, Penna. Here is #'s first important science fiction book -- a dazzling literary oneman show. Many of the magazines these stories appeared in are now collector's items that cost as much as this whole volume. tion from all others are the vivid notes from the author's own working journal, giving the thematic origin and background of every story. Fascinating for readers and immensely valuable for writers, they demonstrate the skill and bravura that have made H. L. Gold an acknowledged master both as author and editor of science fiction. Only Galaxy readers can have this very special extra... Crown Publishers have set aside # first edition copies -- and there's one the coupon! (Or you can order by letter if you don't wish to mutilate the magazine; the coupon is for your convenience, not ours.) Don't put off! 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All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pet. Off. very disgruntled letter from a reader. Not knowing what was eating him and unable to grab hold of any answerable complaint -- and, of course, wanting to pacify him -- I wrote thusly: "Dear Mr. Blank: Your tone is a lot sharper than your criticism..." At which point, I halted, immensely pleased with myself. For a long while, I've been an admirer of a postcard sent out by a Menken with the same initials as mine, reading: "Dear Sir or Madam: You may be right." Menken used this stopper whenever he received a blistering letter, which evidently was often, and I liked it because it left absolutely no room for retort. But I like mine better, being an inordinate lover of shrewd squelches -- especially my own. One of my favorites was committed by Cardinal Newman, a Catholic wit who made G. K. Chesterton sound merely precocious. Newman was coming from a religious convention of some kind and was lucky enough to snag a cab in the London rain. A minister asked if Newman minded his coming along because the odds on getting another cab were small. Newman, of course, agreed. As they settled back, the minister said lightly, "It's only right that we should share a taxi. After all, we both serve God." "Yes," said Newman. "You in your way and I in His." Another splendid English squelcher was the Rev. Sidney Smith. He was properly scolded by a friend who said: "That damnable sense of humor of yours is what keeps you from getting a church you can make a decent living from. Why can't you be like your brother? He's sober and industrious. He takes things seriously and look at him -- a success instead of a jocular failure like you!" "True," Smith admitted sadly. "My brother has risen because of his gravity and I have been held down by my levity." Smith was an energetic letterwriter and so could have claimed repartee when the reply may actually have occurred to him days later. But that's not true of a retort Disraeli made within seconds --  -- there are records of Parliament that give all the necessary proof. Gladstone, you know, was a bitter enemy of Disraeli and concluded a slashing attack with: "Mark my words! This scoundrel will either die on the scaffold or of a loathsome disease!" Disraeli got to his feet and said quietly, "That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress." Like Smith, a neglected genius is Oliver Hereford -- he's so neglected that I'm not even sure if I've spelled his last name right -- whose comment that "My wife has a whim of iron" has been appropriated by non-wits whose only right to fame is a good memory. Hereford went to see an exhibition of what may generously be called art by Maxfield Parrish. The irony here is that Parrish, who probably would have used syrup instead of paint if that had been possible, is listed in dictionaries while Hereford is not. Hereford paused in front of a painting of a typical Parrish young man, studied it a moment and sighed: "How touching! A youth blossoming into womanhood!" Those, as you can see, are biting remarks. But there are others that do the same job without the sting. For example, I was in artillery training at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and my platoon had marched to the howitzer site, where another platoon was taking a break before going on to its next course. I was aghast to see the sergeant, a typical harsh-barking type, showing his men how to play hopscotch and jacks. Naturally, I asked how come. He looked at me coldly and snapped, "If kids can play soldier, why can't soldiers play kid?" Maybe you can think of a counter-squelch. I couldn't. But there is another I thought up that I'm proud of. I just wish Descartes could hear it, for it's my rebuttal to his "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think, therefore I am." My version is "Cogito sum ergo sum -- cogito," which translates, preferably if given a Mexican accent, as "I think I am, therefore I am -- I theenk." Now, to give all this an appropriate flavor of science fiction, I should make at least a stab at extrapolating. The truth is that I don't feel much like doing so; they're good enough to stand on their own -- with the possible exception of my conversation stoppers. Well, not entirely without a sort of wistful personal extrapolation. There will be some corking squelches in the future and I just wish I had a record of them in advance. Or do you suspect that movies and TV will reduce repartee to a bleak "Oh, yeah?" If they do, posterity can have the future! The Mapmakers Before any ship could span light-years in a single jump, hyperspace had to be charted -- though Man was blind in that awesome chaos! I T was one of those crazy, dents. A particle of meteoric matter slammed into Starship Terra II in hyperspace. It was only a small particle, but it penetrated three bulkheads, injuring Lieutenant Groden and destroying the Celestial Atlas. It couldn't happen in a hundred years -- but it had happened. That was the end of the road for Starship Terra II. The damage-control parties patched the bulkheads easily enough. But the Atlas -- the only record on board of the incomprehensible Riemannian configurations of hyperspace -- was a total loss. The Captain gave orders for Spohn, the Celestial Atlas, to be buried in space and called an emergency officer's meeting in the wardroom. Terra II was in normal space and free fall. A trace of smoky kerosene odor still hung in the wardroom, but there was none of the queasy unrecognizable slipping motion of the hyperspace "jump," and the Captain had ordered the ship spun to give them a touch of simulated gravity. The officers were managing to look alert and responsive as they faced their skipper. ttHE Captain was a hardmuscled, hard eyed career naval officer, and by definition an ambitious man -- else he would hardly have asked for the command of a charting flight. He walked briskly in from his own quarters, neither hurrying nor slow. He would walk at that same pace to receive his admiral's stars when that day came, or to his execution, if it ever came to that. He assumed his place at the head of the table and took the precise ten seconds his martinet mind allotted him for looking around the wardroom. Then he said, "We're in trouble." The men in the wardroom hitched their hips a quarter inch closer to the ward table. The Captain nodded and said it again, "We're in the soup, and we're a long way from home, and nobody is going to come to get us out of it. We'll have to do it ourselves, if we can. Ciccarelli's trying to get us a fix, but I can tell you right now, we're not close to Sol. There isn't a constellation in the sky that you or I or anybody else ever saw before. We might be a hundred light-years from home, we might be ten thousand." The Exec cleared his throat. "Sir, what about our records?" "What records? They went with the Atlas, Hal. We can't retrace our way to Earth." "No, sir, that's not what I mean. I understand that. But our charting records from Earth to here, we still have those. They won't do us any good, because we can't follow them backward -- hyperspace doesn't work that way. But Earth needs them." "Sure. What can we do about it? If we could get them back, we could get back ourselves. The whole trouble -- Yes? What is it, Lorch?" Ensign Lorch saluted from the door of the wardroom. "Spohn's body, sir," he rapped out. "It's ready for burial now. Would the Captain like to conduct the services?" "The Captain will. What about Groden?" Lorch said, "He isn't good, sir. He's unconscious and his head is bandaged up. The surgeon thinks it's bad. But we won't know for sure for at least a couple of hours." The Captain nodded, and Lorch quickly took his seat. He was the youngest officer on Terra II in years, six months out of the Academy and still unable to vote. He listened to the discussion of ways and means with deference masking a keen feeling of excitement. The adventure of the unknown star lanes! That was why Lorch had signed up in the charting service, and he was getting it. Perhaps more, even, than he had bargained for. rriHE trouble with Terra II was that she was playing a cosmic game of blind-man's-buff. Jumping into hyperspace was like leaping through a shadow, blindfolded; there was no way of knowing in advance what lay on the other side. The first hyperspace rocket had taught a few lessons, expensively learned. On its first jump into hyperspace, Terra I had been "out" for. just under one second -- just time enough, that is, for the jump generators to swing the ship into and out of the Riemannian n-dimensional composite that they called hyperspace for lack of a better term. And it had taken Terra I nearly a year to limp back home, in normal space all the way, its generators a smoldering ruin. Back still again to the drawing boards ! But it was no one's fault. Who could have foreseen that any electric current, however faint, would so warp the field as to blow up the generators? The lesson was plain: No electrical equipment in use during a jump. So Terra I , rebuilt, re-equipped and with a new crew, tried again. And this time there were no power failures. The only failure, this time, was the human element. Because in hyperspace, the Universe was a crazy-quilt of screaming patterns and shimmering lights, no more like the ordered normal-space pattern of stars than the view through a kaleidoscope is like the colored shreds of paper at its focus. So the Celestial Atlas was added to the complement of a hyperspace rocket's crew. And Terra I was rebuilt, and Terra II off the ways. And Earth cast its bait into the turgid depths of hyperspace again and again... The crews of the charting service were all volunteers, all rigidly screened. The ten officers that made up the wardroom of Terra group as ever assembled, but the emergency officers' meeting was a failure, all the same. There just wasn't any way back. "We're the trail-blazers," rumbled the Captain. "If we had a duplicate Celestial Atlas -- but we don't. Well, that's something for the next ship to bear in mind, if we ever get back to tell them about it." ly, "Sir, don't we have one?" The Captain rasped, "Of course not, man! I just finished saying we didn't. You should know that." "Yes, sir. But that's not exactly what I meant. We have a Library and, as I understand it, the Library is basically the same as the Atlas -- a trained totalrecall observer. Doesn't any of the information in the Library duplicate the Atlas?" "Now that," said the Captain after a pause, "is worth thinking about. What about it, Hal?" The Exec said, "Worth a try, Captain." "Right. Yoel, get her up here." Lieutenant Yoel saluted and spoke into the communications tube. The Captain went on reflectively. "Probably won't work, of course, but we'll try anything. Anybody else got a suggestion?" "Dead reckoning, sir?" Yoel suggested. "I know we've got the record of our fixes so far; can we try just backtracking?" "Won't work," the Captain said positively. "If we could be absolutely exact, maybe. But without an Atlas we can't be. And a centimeter's divergence at the beginning of a run might put us a thousand kilometers off at the end. A thousand kilometers in hyperspace -- heaven knows what that might come to in normal space. Anything from a million light-years down. "I couldn't do it, Yoel. Even Groden couldn't do it with his eyes, and he's the best shiphandler on board. And I don't think he's going to have his eyes, anyway, at least not for a long time. Maybe forever, if we don't get back to the eye banks on Earth. Without the Atlas, we're as blind as Groden." The speaking tube interrupted and rescued Yoel. It whistled thinly: "Recorder Mate Eklund reporting to the wardroom." "Send her in," said the Exec, and the Library, Nancy Eklund, RM#c, marched smartly in to the meeting. TT wasn't going to work; the Captain knew it in the first few words. They spent an hour sweating the Library of all of her relevant data, but it was wasted effort. The Captain thought wistfully of Recorder Mate Spohn, the lost Celestial Atlas. With him on the bridge, hyperspace navigation had been -- well, not easy, but possible. For Spohn was trained in the techniques of total recall. The shifting, multicolored values of Riemannian space formed totals in his mind, so that he could actually navigate by means of a process of mental analysis and synthesis so rapid and complex that it became a sort of gestalt. Of course, a twelve-stage electronic computer could have done the same thing, just as quickly. But Terra II had its limitations, and one of the limitations was that no electronic equipment could be operated in a jump -- just when the computer would most be needed. So the designers came up with what was, after all, a fairly well tested method of filing information -- the human brain. By the techniques of hypnotic conditioning all of the brain opened up to subconscious storing. Recorder Mate Spohn, trancelike on the bridge, had no conscious knowledge of what was going on as, machinelike, he scanned the Riemannian configurations and rapped out courses and speeds; but his subconscious never erred. With its countless cells and infinite linkages, the brain was a tank that all the world's knowledge could hardly fill -- just about big enough, in fact, to cope with the task of recognizing the meaning of hyperspace configurations. And the process worked so well that the delighted designers added another Recorder Mate to the personnel tables -- the Library -- which enabled them to dispense with the dead weight of books as well. The entire wardroom, in order of rank, shot questions at their Library, and her disciplined mind dutifully plucked out answers. But most of them she never knew. For Terra II was a charting ship, and though the Atlas had, as a matter of routine, transcribed his calibrations into the ship's log -- and thence into the Library -- all that Nancy Eklund knew was how Terra II had reached its checkpoints in space. Hyperspace was a tricky business; backtracking was dangerous. When Terra II got back -- if T err a II got back -- those who came after them would have complete calibrations for a round trip. But they did not. Their task was as difficult and dangerous, in its way, as Columbus' caravels. Except that Columbus had only one great fear; falling off the edge of the Earth. Lucky Columbus. The technology that had produced Terra II had brought plenty of new fears. the ship's center -- a surgeon's mate named Conboy was pulling the fourth needle out of the arm of Lieutenant Groden. The big navigator should have been out cold, but he was tossing and mumbling, his head thrashing from side to side in its thick wrappings of bandage. Tough guy, thought Conboy critically, counting up the ampoules of opiate the blinded officer had taken. They were all tough guys, anyway, from the Skipper on down. But the little pipettes brought them down to size and Conboy, though only an inch over five feet tall and the frailest on board, was the man who drove in the pipettes. "He's under, Mr. Broderick," he reported to the ship's surgeon, who nodded. "Keep it so," the officer ordered. "If anything comes up, I'll be in the wardroom." The Captain would be wanting to hear about Groden's condition, and Broderick wanted very much to hear what the emergency meeting had to say about the condition of Terra II in general. This was fine with Conboy, who had a similar concern of his own. As soon as Commander Broderick was out of sight, Conboy took a last look at Groden and, reassured that the navigator would be out of trouble for at least half an hour, hurried to the next cabin to pry what information he could out of the chart room. A Spaceman-First named Coriell was methodically taking optical measurement on all the stars of second magnitude or brighter. Conboy looked uncomprehendingly at the entries on the charts. "Got anything?" he asked. Coriell spat disgustedly. "Got trouble. See that little fellow down there, between the two real bright ones? That might be Canopus. The rough lines check; Mr. Ciccarelli's going to have to run a spectrum on it, when he gets through with the meeting." Conboy looked sourly at the indicated star. It was brighter than the average, but far less bright than the two that flanked it. "Canopus, huh?" he repeated. "Suppose it is, Coriell. How far from Earth does that put us?" Coriell shrugged. 'What am I, a navigator? How's Groden, by the way?" "He'll live. Suppose it is, Coriell?" "Well -- " Coriell thought for a moment. "Depends. If we're on the same side of it as Earth, might not be far at all. If we're on the other side -- well, Canopus is six hundred and fifty lightyears from Sol." Conboy looked again, longingly. "Well, thanks," he said, and went back to his patient. That was the trouble with hyperspace travel, he thought. You go in at one point, you rocket around until you think it's time to come out, and there you are. Where is "there"? Why, that's the surprise that's in store for you, because you never know until you get there. And sometimes not even then. O N the bridge, everything was Condition Able. Ensign Lorch, booted early out of the meeting because he was due to and made his tour of the ship. The damage control parties belowdecks were all through with the necessary repairs, and keeping themselves busy with such cosmetic tasks as fairing down the beads left by the first emergency welds. It was hot down there. Lorch conscientiously whistled up the bridge on the speaking tube and ordered them to start the fans and valve enough gas into the expansion locks to make up for the heat rise. The crew quarters were shipshape, even the women's section; the jet chambers were at stand-by, with the jetroom hands busy at their usual stand-by task of thumping the tubes for possible hidden cracks. The working parties were finishing up the job of restowing the cargo that had to be shifted when the meteorite hit. Lorch signed in the log, and paused thoughtfully over the spaces for entries of course and position. The helmsman was smartly at attention at the main board, though there was nothing for him to do since all jets were capped. Lorch glanced at him reprovingly, but the helmsman was conspicuously correct in his behavior. It made a problem; Lorch detested the thought of writing in "unknown," but it certainly would be exceeding his authority to call the chart room without the permission of Lieutenant Yoel, his shift commander. Not, thought Lorch a trifle rebelliously, that Yoel was likely to object very strongly. Yoel was a drafted mathematician, not a ship-handler. He knew very nearly all there was to know about geodesic theory and the complex equations that lay behind the "jump" generators and their odd nucleophoretic drive. But he was far from a model officer, so little conscious of the fundamental law of R.H.I.P. that he was capable of presuming to advise the Captain on ship-handling -- the scene in the wardroom had proved that. to call down to the chart room when Yoel appeared, signaling that the meeting was over, and Lorch deftly dropped the problem in his superior's lap. "Ship on Condition Able," he reported briskly. "No maneuvering during watch; no change in operating status during watch. I have made no entry for course and position, sir. Thought you might like to." "I wouldn't," Yoel said sourly. "Put down 'unknown.' Write it in big letters." "As bad as that, sir?" "As bad as that." Yoel turned his back on his junior and methodically scanned the segment of sky outside the port. It was in constant spinning motion, flashing past the field of vision as Terra II whirled on its axis to give the crew something approaching gravity. Lorch cleared his throat. "You got nothing out of Eklund, sir?" "Oh, sure. We got the absolute magnitudes and stellar distances of half the stars in the Galaxy." Yoel turned from the port and shook his head. "We got a short course in Riemannian geometry and an outline of the geodesics of n-dimensional space. But we didn't get a road map." He glanced at the thermometer on the wall and said vaguely, "I thought I heard -- " He stood up straight. "Mister Lorch!" he exploded. "I wasn't hearing things! You were bleeding air into the expansion locks!" "Why, yes, sir. To cool the ship," Lorch explained. "The welding torches were -- " "Blast the welding torches, mister! Did it ever occur to you we're a long way from home?" "Yes, sir, but -- " "But you're an idiot! But! You valve air off as though we had a whole world of it. Did it ever occur to you that we might be in space a long time? Did you stop to think that we might run out of air?" Lorch stared at him wordless. For a frozen moment he thought his superior had gone mad. Spaceships? Spaceships ran from point to point. In n-dimensional hyperspace, no point was far from any other -- an hour's travel, perhaps a day's. Terra II was crammed to the gunwales with air, by the standards of the service. Run out of air? II floating up at Groden out of blackness. Something was wrong, and he was lying down; he grunted and started to get up. A hand stopped him. The voice said, "Easy." He fell back, and felt nothing as he fell. His whole body was numbed, only a faint tingling sensation where it touched what he was lying on. Drugged, he thought. The voice said, "Sam, don't try to open your eyes. Can you hear me?" It was like making a statue speak, but he got the word out, "Yes." "Good. You've been hurt. A meteorite hit while we were in hyperspace. Got the Atlas, and something got you right across the eyes -- drops of molten metal, by the scars. You're -- you're blind, Sam. At least for now." "Yes," he said, after a moment. There was a very special sort of tingling around the eyes. "Maybe we can fix you up when we get back to Earth. But we're lost, Sam." Lost? Groden pondered that. Lost. It didn't make sense. Of course, if the Atlas was dead -- But still, how could they be lost? He strained to hear what the voice was saying; but it had gone on to something else. Soothingly. "Now, Sam, this i going to hurt. We've got to change the dressings." Business of tingling, and more tingling of a different sort, but not anything that Groden could call painful. And then, suddenly and surprisingly, it hurt very much. He tried to speak, but the voice said, "Easy, Sam. It will only take a minute." Silence and pain. "Now, I want you to tell me if you can see anything at all, Sam. Any light? Even a flicker when I pass the light over your face?" Light? Groden stared into the painful blackness. There was nothing, nothing at all, neither light nor flicker nor motion. He said through the lips that were still tingling marble, "No." The voice was disappointed. "All right, Sam. I'll stop the pain in a minute." Another voice farther away was saying something about getting stowed away for the jump and the voice that had talked to Groden said impatiently, "Just a minute." Groden licked the marble lips and tried to say, "What did you mean, lost? What's the matter?" But it came out a blur. The voice said something short and insincerely reassuring, and then there was a special pricking tingle in his arm, and even the voices were dark. tain, and the Exec relayed the word through the speaking tubes: "Secure!" One by one the sections reported in on their tubes -- All secure. The Captain had taken the conn himself, and he had the bridge on the jump. Lieutenant Yoel was backing up the helmsman, the navigator Ciccarelli was staring dubiously at the whirling stars, Ensign Lorch was hustling along the light-up detail, as they, with painstaking slowness, adjusted the hollow wicks in the running lamps. The odor of kerosene filled the bridge. "All secure, sir," the Exec reported. The Captain said curtly, "Kill the spin." The Exec gave the order to the jetroom; there was a distant barking rattle, and the bridge complement, like standing wheat in gusty wind, staggered and caught itself. The spinning stars outside jerked unevenly to a stop as the ship steadied on its axis. Lorch cast a quick look around. The chronometers were wound and synchronized; the kerosene lamps burning brightly. He saluted the Exec and reported all clear. The Exec nodded gravely and passed the word on to the Captain -- all of a yard away. The Captain said, "Take us up, Hal." "Yes, sir. Number One circuits open!" The watch officer relayed into the speaking tube: "Number One circuits open!" There was a flicker, and abruptly all of the fluorescent lights were out. Only the kerosene lamps illuminated the bridge, or any of the ship. "Number Two open," said the Exec. "Open Number Two!" Yoel echoed into the tube. From all over the ship the distant drone of motors, fans and refrigerators and boosters and burners deepened and died. "Main circuit breakers open." That was only a precaution. Every electric current in the ship had ceased to flow; but in the off-chance that something, somewhere, still was drawing juice, the mains themselves were opened. Terra I had taught that lesson very well; electronic flow and the hyperspace field did not mix. The Exec, looking a little gray, said, "Stand by to jump." "Stand by!" Yoel sang into the generator-room tube. The faraway moan of the nucleophoretic generators shook everyone in the ship; even on the bridge, they could feel their subsonic grind and hear the rumble of the Diesels that drove them. The Exec was rapidly scanning his panel of instruments, his lips moving. Everyone on the bridge could see his lips move, and knew what he was doing; making sure he had the readings memorized. Once in hyperspace, it would not be precisely impossible for him to read them, but it wouldn't be reliable. At the feeler chart table where the Celestial Atlas should have been standing, Recorder Mate Nancy Eklund stood with her fingers on the pits and ridges that represented the coded course analyses. Like the Exec, she was doing her best to memorize them, in the last moments before vision became unreliable and instruments began to lie; it was her last chance to see them as a whole. The Exec had its eyes on the big chronometer. As the second hand touched straight-up, he said, "Jump!" Far away, the Diesels complained, as the generators clutched in. The ship shimmered and glowed. A high, thin beep sounded from nowhere. Outside the crystal port the universe of stars flickered and whirled into new and fantastic shapes. And, half the ship away in the sick bay, Lieutenant Groden screamed shrilly. his eyes, but the flaming pinwheels had left scars of blankness on the visual purple of his retina. He blinked to clear away the darting after-images. When he opened them again, the images were gone, and lashing serpentines of light peered ferociously in the port. The writhing snakes squirmed away and the planet Earth lay before him, green and inviting. It was only an illusion, but it was an illusion the whole bridge saw at once. Lorch looked away and heard the voice of Nancy Eklund, droning her course coordinates to be repeated by the Exec. Illusion, illusion -- only the voices were real. It had to do, Lorch thought fuzzily through the wonder, with light speeds and partial radiation vectors and nullpolarity; but the words meant nothing when the reality was before his eyes. "C" became infinite and finite at once, creepingly slow and immeasurably fast. Light trapped on the outer surface of the port crept through to them at last, movement appeared fast or slow or reversed, or irrelevant to its real components. He could see the Captain, stolid and transfixed like a bronze man -- but was he? Or was that motionless metal figure really leaping about the bridge, and what Lorch's eyes beheld only the image of a split-second, captured and pinned? He could see the navigator, Ciccarelli, floating dreamily a yard above the floor; that was illusion and symbol, for the little magnets in their shoes made it impossible. But what reality, translated, did it represent? Light and electrons. In hyperspace, they lied. "Number Six, Number Ten," droned the Exec, echoing the Library. "Full reverse." The voices did not lie; the grosser physical phenomena were immune to the distortion of Riemann's continuum. What they heard was what was there to hear. What Nancy Eklund felt with her fingers was real. Lorch saw, or seemed to see, that the Exec had his finger on the pulse in his own wrist, timing their jets-on periods by his heartbeat. The spring-driven chronometer across the bridge was clearly visible and undoubtedly telling the correct time. But the light that carried its message might lie, and the fingers that touched his pulse would not. "Off jets!" droned the Exec. what Ciccarelli and the Exec and the Old Man had worked out -- lacking the Atlas, lacking Groden -- working only from their memories of the course that had brought them into the meteorite's orbit and the sketchy notes the Captain himself had made. If they had remembered everything with the eidetic recollection of Eklund or the Atlas; if they had every component correct, and could stay on course for the proper period before halting their flight; they might -- might -- come out where they had started, and from there easily find their way home. There was motion and activity on the bridge while they waited; and Lorch observed that Ciccarelli had kicked loose his shoes to float high enough off the steel floor to touch the hands of the chronometer. If he was floating now, thought Lorch, it was no lie of the light. And was what he had seen a moment before the image of now, received before it was sent? They waited, and asked themselves such demented questions, while Terra II described the complex curve that passed for a Riemannian straight line, and the Exec thoughtfully counted his heartbeats. Then: "Full jets, One, Four, Five Main," snapped the Exec. The ship bucked and shuddered. And then it was over, and they came "down" out of hyperspace, down into the normal space-time frame that held their own sun and their own planet. They had backtracked, as near as could be, every component of their course. And they had come out. They stared wordlessly at the stars, until the Captain said briskly, "Belay that. Take a fix, Mr. Ciccarelli!" And down in the sickbay, little Conboy, able once more to trust his vision, was rapidly assembling a hypodermic. But as he turned to his patient, he saw that it wasn't necessary; Groden, who had been mumbling and crying out throughout the jump into hyperspace, was out cold again. abacus. "No position, sir," he said throatily to the Captain. "We've checked everything down to third magnitude." The Old Man's chin went up a degree of arc, but that was all. "All right," he said. "Keep going." "We'll try, sir," Ciccarelli promised. "I'll get right to work on the faint ones." The Captain nodded and walked delicately, almost mincingly in the light spin-gravity, away. Commander Broderick from the surgeon's office down the corridor replaced him. He was staring after the Captain, as he came into the navigation room. "If I were the Old Man," he said thoughtfully, "I would still be here." "Maybe that's why you aren't the Old Man." Ciccarelli wearily leaned over his crewman's shoulder to scan the rough log. "Maybe," Broderick agreed. "Still, what's he going to do back on the bridge? Go through this same routine again? Make another jump and see where we come out? Might work, I don't deny it. Given infinite time and infinite fuel and a couple of other infinites, sooner or later we'd come out right spang in the middle of the Brooklyn Navy Yard." "Tell him your troubles," Ciccarelli said shortly. "How's Groden?" "He'll live. If any of us do." "That," said Ciccarelli, picking up the completed sheaf of observations from his crewman, "is a pretty long shot, Doc." The Captain, in his own mind, would have agreed with Ciccarelli. He walked soberly, unswervingly, down the galleyways toward the bridge, ticking off the posibilities with a part of his brain while the big, deep area that might been labeled "officer's country" was making careful note of the ship's condition. The fuel and food reserves would outlast the air; and Broderick's sick-bay was an Asiatic mess. Lacking the Atlas's data and Groden's skill on the bridge, it would take a miracle to get them home; and Spaceman-Second Kerkam was out of uniform. The enlisted women's quarters needed floor-polishing; and the mind of no three-dimensional animal could, by definition, grasp the geodesics of Riemannian space. It was a matter of trial and error and record, and all you could hope to do was retrace a course once you had found one that brought you somewhere worth being. It was, he reflected with mild distaste, a shoddy way to run a spaceship. R ecorder Mate Ekiund, having ducked into the enlisted women's area scant yards ahead of the Captain, sighed to her bunkmate, "Thank heaven! I thought he was coming in here!" "Did you have a rough time on the bridge?" her bunkmate asked sympathetically. "No, not that. But he's a fish, Julia. He was just standing there, not looking scared or anything, and all the time we were going straight to -- straight to goodness knows where. He doesn't know what to do," she added bitterly. "None of them do." "You think we're lost?" "Think it? Honey, I know it." She sat down and complained, "I've got a headache." "I wouldn't be surprised," her bunkmate said warmly. "Here, let me get you a cup of tea." Nancy Ekiund said doubtfully, "Do you think you should? Every time you boil water, it's just that much more heat. And -- " "Now let me worry about that," said Julia. "You're a pretty important person on this ship, and you've got to keep yourself in good shape." The Library let herself be persuaded easily enough, though she had an idea that her bunkmate had an ulterior motive or two. But she did have a headache and she was tired. And it was true that on the bridge during a jump, she was about the most important person aboard. It was a duty that Nancy hated, though, important or not. She thanked her lucky stars that most of the time she was in a trance state and not able to observe, for instance, what the distortions of hyperspace were doing to her own personal appearance. But it was finicking, wearing work, even in a trance state. Some of it was bound to seep through to the conscious level, however distorted, and she had been having dreams about hyperspace courses, fixes and triangulation points. Julia came back with the tea and Nancy Eklund said, "I'm sorry to be always complaining. Heaven knows it's no worse than we had a right to expect. We knew this was dangerous when we signed up for it." "But we didn't know we'd sweat ourselves to death, Nancy! We didn't expect this eternal should-I-light-the-lights, shouldI-boil-some-coffee. Honestly, I don't mind dying half as much as I mind being nibbled to death by one little annoyance after another!" She glanced speculatively at the other girl, and in a different tone said, "I guess you're pretty tired -- " Nancy Eklund I sat up and stared at her. "Julia! You can't want me to go on with that horrible story." "Not if you don't feel up to it," her bunkmate said humbly. "But it passes the time -- if you aren't too hoarse." "Well, no." Nancy took a sip of tea. "I was receiving, not putting out," she said professionally. "I suppose if you really want -- " "Index!" said Julia triumphantly, not waiting for her to change her mind. As Nancy Eklund, at the cue word, slumped into the trance state, Julia caught the cup of tea before it spilled. "Fiction!" she said, and went on to give the author's name, the title and the chapter of the mystery she had been "reading." She settled back happily as the Library took up the story again. It wasn't, Julia told herself, as if it really mattered. After all, there wasn't anything for Nancy or anyone else to do, until the geniuses in navigation and computation had figured out where they were. And that would probably take days. TUT she was wrong. In the-'wardroom, Commander Broderick was brooding over a bowl of coffee, half watching a bridge game, when Ciccarelli walked in. He looked tired; he didn't even wait for anyone to ask; he volunteered, "Yeah, yeah, we have a position. It isn't good." "Pretty far?" one of the card players asked wistfully. Ciccarelli nodded, unsmiling. "Pretty far. We got our fix by triangulating on extra-galactic nebulae, which will give you an idea. I make it -- " he glanced at them under his eyebrows -- "better than fifteen thousand lightyears from Sol." Ensign Lorch picked up the cards and began to deal them automatically; there wasn't anything much else to do. But his mind was not very completely on bridge. Fifteen thousand light-years from Sol. In hyperspace, he thought, it might have been a voyage only of minutes. Outside of the three dimensions in which humans live their normal lives, distances are a matter of cosmic whim. Aldebaran and Betelgeuse, in hyperspace, may almost touch; Luna and the Earth may be infinities apart. Lorch, staring unseeing at his cards, licked his lips. They had cruised around in hyperspace for a few hours of actual "jump" time before the meteorite had struck. And they had found themselves perhaps a thousand lightyears from Earth, perhaps less. They had backtracked moment for moment, as well as they could figure, the same course -- and their new position was a dozen times as far. That was the nature of hyperspace. Line A-B in Newton's universe might be more than line A-B in Riemann's, or it might be less, but it was never the same. And the distances, Lorch thought cloudily, might not even be commutative; A-B plus B-C might not be, probably was not, the same as B-C plus A-B. That was why the Atlas, with his infinite stored checkpoints and positions, had a place on the bridge... "Bid, for God's sake," someone was saying impatiently. Lorch shook himself. "I'm sorry," he said, focusing on his cards. "Say, isn't it getting hot?" Nobody answered. They wouldn't, thought Commander Broderick, lowering into his bowl of cold coffee. Hot? Sure it's getting hot. Not starvation, not thirst, not suffocation -- heat. That was the spaceman's enemy, that was what would kill them all. drew a breath, carbon in his body oxidized and gave off heat. Every time the rocket jets blasted, heat seeped from the tubes into the frame of the ship. Every time the Diesels that drove the nucleophoretic generators coughed and spun, or the cooks fried an egg, or a spaceman lit a cigarette, there was heat. Take a hot poker, Broderick suggested meditatively to himself. You can watch it glow red and lose heat that way -- that is radiation. You can wave it in the air and let the breeze carry the heat away -- that is convection. Or you can quench it in a bucket of oil -- and that is conduction. And those are the only ways there are, in Newton's space or Riemann's, of taking heat from one body and giving it to another. And in vacuum, the latter two did not operate, for lack of matter to operate with. Radiation, thought Broderick, radiation would work. A pity we're not red hot. If they had been at a temperature of a thousand degrees, they would have cooled quite rapidly. But at a temperature of perhaps # Centigrade, average through Terra II's hull, radiation was minute. The loss through radiation was more, much more, than made up through internal heat sources, and so the heat of the ship, hour by hour, climbed. It had been a long time, Broderick remembered, since he had heard the hiss of expanding air. That was how one coped with heat. From the pressurized parts of the ship, valve off air, the expansion cools, the cooling takes heat from the rest of the ship. Replace the air from the highpressure tanks, and there's more than enough air in the tanks for any imaginable hyperspace voyage, since none can conceivably last more than a few weeks -- and that's that. "Sir," a voice said, and Broderick realized that the voice had said it before. It was a messenger, saluting respectfully. "What is it?" he growled. "Surgeon Mate Conboy," the messenger recited crisply, "asks if you can step down to the sickbay. Lieutenant Groden is cutting up." "All right, all right," said Broderick, and waved the messenger away. Groden, he thought, what's the use of worrying about Groden? He'll cook as well as any of us, on this handsomely adventurous hyperspace cruise that cannot conceivably last more than a few weeks. "You trumped my trick!" howled Ensign Lorch's partner as the surgeon was leaving. Lorch blinked and stared. "Sorry," he said automatically, then bent and looked closer. "I've only got two cards," he said. "Why does the dummy still have five?" Ill R ecorder Mate Ekiund took it as a joke. She looked at herself in the mirror and told her friend Julia, "I think it's quite nice. I don't see why we don't do it all the time." "You've got the figure for it," Julia said glumly, comparing her own dumpy silhouette with the other girl's. These issue-bathing suits weren't particularly flattering either, she told herself resentfully, knowing in her heart that the fabric had never been loomed to flatter her figure the way it did Nancy Eklund's. "Bathing suits," she said irritatedly. "Oh, why did I ever sign on for this?" Recorder Mate Ekiund patted her arm and jauntily stepped out into the corridor. The male members of the crew were wearing trunks by now, too. She felt more as though she were at some rather crowded beach than aboard Terra II. Except that it was so hot. Not only had the uniform of the day been changed to the bare minimum, but there had been other changes in the ship's routine. No more spinning the ship for gravity, for instance. The magnetic-soled shoes were issued for everyone now, because spinning the ship took rocket power, and rocket power meant more heat that they couldn't get rid of. The magnet shoes were all right, but it did take a certain amount of concentration to remember heeland-toe-and-lean, heel-and-toeand-lean, in a sort of bent-over half trot like the one that Groucho Marx had once, long before Nancy's time, made famous. She loped crouching into the Captain's quarters, saluted and took her place. It was getting a little wearisome, she thought detachedly. Everything anybody said, it seemed, they wanted recorded in her brain, and nobody ever seemed to take a breath without demanding some part of the stored knowledge recited back to hipi. Still, when she was recording she was, in effect, asleep; she woke up slightly refreshed, though there were some confusing dreams. She wondered absently, for a moment, just what she did know. in the part of her mind where the records were kept, the part that was available only to outsiders on presentation of the cue words, and never to her. But by then the other officers had arrived, and the Captain snapped, "Records," and she slumped back. Not quite all the way back -- just enough so that the natural tensions in the great muscles of the back and thighs reached a point of equilibrium -- and, in the non-gravity of the still ship, her sleeping body, moored by the magnets at the feet, floated like Mahomet's Tomb above the chair. Ensign Lorch felt the Captain's eyes on him and hastily looked away from the Library. Goodlooking kid, though, he thought; this strip-down business had its advantages. Too bad the other women in the crew weren't more like her. T HE meeting lasted an hour by the chronometer, as had each meeting of each of the previous eleven days. And it accomplished as much as its eleven predecessors. "Summing up, then," the Captain said savagely. "One, we can't jump home because we don't know the way; two, we can't jet home through normal space because we don't have the fuel or air; three, we can't stay where we are because we'll roast. Is that it?" The Exec said, "That's it, sir. We might set down on another planet, though." "A planet nearby?" The Captain thought that over. "What about it, Ciccarelli?" The navigator shrugged. "If we can find one, sir. I'd say the chances were poor. We've got very little in the way of fuel reserve. Every jump uses up a little, and -- well, if we come out of a jump within, let's say, a tenth of a light-year of a habitable planet, pretty nearly at relative rest to it, we might be able to make it. We've got maybe one chance in a thousand of that." Commander Broderick said, "Sir, this is just a wild notion, but suppose we did one of those things they're always doing in the movies, you know? Freeze the whole ship's crew in suspended animation. I believe I could manage something like that out of the medical supplies, if we could only bring the temperature low enough -- " "That's just what we can't do," said the Captain. "Yes, sir," Broderick agreed. "But if we did that, we could valve off a lot of air -- maybe enough to cool the ship. Nobody would be breathing, you see. And we could rig up some sort of alarm for when we got there. Wouldn't matter if it was years -- even centuries; there would be a vacuum, and no specimen deterioration -- I mean, nothing happening to us." Ciccarelli said mulishly, "Impossible. It's the question of relative rest again. We haven't got enough fuel to mess around. Suppose we found Sol, and pointed right for it. By the time we got there, where would it be? And how fast would it be going, in what direction? Maybe you can tell. I can't." solately back into his sickbay, and the enlisted man he'd left behind looked up in relief. "It's Groden, sir," he said at once. "He's been acting up." Ensign Lorch, behind Broderick, hesitated in the doorway. "Acting up?" demanded Broderick. "Yes, sir. I gave him another needle, but it didn't take effect. I guess it was delirium, sir. Took three ampoules -- " The voices trailed off as they went inside. Lorch made himself comfortable -- not an easy job in non-gravity, that is if you . were a commissioned officer and concerned about smart appearance. The two medics were gone for a long time, and when Commander Broderick came out again he looked worried. "Sorry, Lorch," he apologized. He felt the pressure-pot of coffee on the little stove and made a face. "Want some?" Lorch shook his head. "Too much trouble to drink." "Don't blame you." But Broderick carefully coaxed a couple of ounces of the stuff into a transparent plastic bulb, teased sugar and cream in after it, spun the bulb with his thumb over the opening to stir it, took a sip. "I don't like it," he brooded over his coffee. "Groden's working up real damage, the kind I can't handle." Lorch asked curiously, "What kind is that?" "Inside his head. I had to tell him that his sight was gone, unless we can get to an eye bank within ten days. The optic nerves, Lorch -- you can patch in an eye, but once the nerve has degenerated you can't replace it. And he took it hard." "Yelled and cut up?" "Worse than that," said Broderick. "He didn't say a word. Now, I know that man's in pain; the scars around his eyes are pretty bad. I gave him a couple of pills to knock out the nerve centers, but Conboy found them under his pillow. He wouldn't take them, and he wouldn't make a sound -- until he fell asleep, and then he damn near woke up the ship. Conboy must have given him fifty ampoules by now -- too much of the stuff. But we can't have him screaming. He's punishing himself, Lorch." "For what?" "Who knows for what? If I could put him through an E.E.S., I might be able to find out. But how can you run an electroencephaloscope on a tub like this? I'm lucky they let me have an X-ray." Lorch said, perhaps a touch too drily, "What did doctors do before they had those gadgets? Shoot the patients?" It made Broderick look at him thoughtfully. "No," he said after a second. "Of course not. With luck, I could run a verbal analysis on him, and I might pick some of the key stuff out of the sludge in, oh, four or five months. That's what they did before they had the E.E.S. And now let's get busy, mister." The two of them worked over an inventory of Broderick's medicine chest, because even though the idea of putting the whole ship's crew in suspended animation was ridiculous and impossible and contra-regs besides -- what else was there? And it kept getting hotter. He called reasonably to whoever was near, "Please do what I ask. Put things back the way they were, please. Please do it!" He said it many times, many different ways. But his tongue was fat black velvet and his mouth an enormous cave ; he couldn't feel the words, couldn't feel his tongue against his cheeks or teeth. That was the needles they kept sticking him with, he told himself. "Please," he said, "no more needles." But he wasn't getting through. Groden relaxed. He forced himself to relax, and it wasn't easy. His body was all wrong; it hurt in places, and felt nothing in places, and -- were those feelings at his waist and shoulders and legs the touch of restraining belts? He couldn't tell. He was lying on his back, he was pretty sure. At least, the voices seemed to come from points in the plane of his body, as well as he could locate them. But if he was lying on his back, he asked himself, why didn't he feel pressure on his back? Or pressure anywhere? Could the ship be in free-fall -- all this length of time? Impossible, he told himself. He went back to relaxing. The thing was to keep from panic. If you were physically relaxed, you couldn't panic. That was what they had taught at the Academy, and it was true. Only they hadn't taught the converse, he thought bitterly; they hadn't said that when you were in panic it was impossible to relax. No. That's not the way to go about it, he told himself. Relax. Occupy your mind with -- with -- well, occupy your mind with something. Take inventory, for instance. One, it's hot. There was no doubt of that. Two, something was pressing against his body at various points. It felt like restraining belts. Three, voices came and talked to him. Damned dirty lying voices that -- He caught himself just in time. Four, he said to himself, four, somebody keeps sticking needles into me. It was the needles, he thought wretchedly, that made everything else so bad. Maybe the needles caused everything else. With craven hope he told himself : Sure, the needles; they're sticking me full of drugs; naturally I'm having delusions. Who wouldn't? I'm lucky if I don't turn into a hophead if I get out of this -- When I get out of this, he corrected himself, whimpering. He wondered whether he was crying. Of course, if those lying voices were, by some chance, not lying, then he couldn't be crying. Because he wouldn't have any eyes to cry with. And, he told himself reasonably, there wasn't much doubt that the voices were plausible. He had been injured somewhere around his eyes; he had felt the pain, and it was too intense and specific to be unreal. That was in the old days -- how long ago they were, he could not begin to imagine -- when there had been only a few needles now and then, and even if he did have a little trouble moving and talking, he was still in perfect possession of his faculties. All right, he thought. So I was injured around the eyes. But the rest -- that was a damned lie. He had even believed if for a while -- when the Broderick-voice said, with hypocritical sympathy, that he wouldn't be able to see anything, ever, unless they got him new corpse's eyes out of an eye bank on Earth. It had been a blow, but he believed it. Until, he reminded himself triumphantly, he had seen! Seen as clearly as he knew the voices were lying, that was when he began to suspect the existence of the whole horrible senseless plot. "No!" he screamed. "Please, please -- no!" But they couldn't be hearing him, because they were going right on with another needle; he could feel it. Furiously he fought to pull back the alien arm, make the marble lips move, the black velvet tongue speak, "Please -- " AN the bridge, the Captain was " staring fixedly at the alien stars. It was a measure of his state of mind that he was on the bridge at all, at a time when the ship was going nowhere and there was nothing to be done beyond the routine. He leaned forward in his chair, jerking free the little magnets sewn into the waist of his trunks, and walked heel-and-toe across the bridge. The little Recorder Mate, Eklund or whatever her name was, was standing humbly in a corner, waiting for him to tell her why he had sent for her. But, the Captain confessed to himself, the trouble was he didn't exactly know why himself. And, after all, why should he? It was so damned hot -- Belay that kind of talk, he told himself. He said: "Eklund! Index." The girl's eyes closed like the snapping of a shutter. "Take over," the Captain ordered the Exec. "Run her through the Riemannian configurations again. We'll get every bit of dope she has." And they would, he knew. Because they had already. And none of it helped. IV TT was a good thing, Ensign Lorch told himself, sweating, that spaceships were not painted. Otherwise he would surely have been set to commanding a crew chipping paint. Terra II being welded of unpainted metal, the color a part of the alloy itself, his crew was defluffing the filter traps in the air circulators. It was a job for idiots, planned by morons; it took six men five hours to disassemble the air trunks and the junction boxes, five minutes to blow out the collected fluff on the static accumulators, five hours to put them back together again. There was an alternative method, which involved burning them clean with a high-voltage arc; that took one man slightly under three seconds. But that, the Exec had decreed, meant heat. And heat was the enemy. Of course, there was still a third alternative, which was to leave the fluff in the filter traps undisturbed. This would have generated no heat at all. But it also would have taken no time and occupied no personnel, which were decisive counts against it in the eyes of the Exec. A little fluff in the filters would make no conceivable difference to the operation of the ship, but idle men might make a very great difference indeed. "Hurry it up," growled Ensign Lorch. The men didn't even look at him. Lorch looked around him self-consciously. As an officer, he had made inspection tours in the enlisted women's quarters before, but he couldn't help feeling out of place and slightly apprehensive. That girl, the Recorder Mate -- Eklund was her name -- was droning all the parts of Cyrano de Bergerac to an audience in the far end of the lounge, and parts of Cyrano's farewell to Roxanne kept mixing in with Lorch's thoughts. It didn't matter; he wasn't thinking to any purpose, anyhow. Neither he nor anyone else on Terra II, he told himself bitterly. Fifteen thousand light-years. The light that came to them from Sol -- how weak and faint! -- had been bright summer sunlight beating down on the skin tents of Neolithic Man creeping northward after the retreating ice. And the light from the nearest stars beyond Terra IT s skin, contrariwise, would fall on an Earth inconceivably advanced, a planet of mental Titans... "Mister Lorch," someone was repeating plaintively. The ensign shook himself and focused on the spaceman wavering before him. "Eh?" "We're done," the man repeated. "It's all put together again. The filter traps," he explained. "Oh," said Ensign Lorch. He glanced self-consciously at the women at the far end of the lounge, but they were absorbed in Rostand's love story. There was a murmur of gossip from them -- "so all at once I knew there was somebody looking at me. Well, I called the duty officer and we searched, but -- " Ensign Lorch cleared his throat. "Well done," he said absently. "Dismissed." He turned his back on the detail and propelled himself down the passageway toward the sickbay. TF he went back to the bridge,  the Old Man would find work for him; if he went to the wardroom, the Exec would find an excuse to send him to the Old Man. And his own quarters were horribly, stifling hot. He accosted the Ship's Surgeon and demanded, "How long are we expected to live in this heat?" Commander Broderick said irritably, "How should I know? You don't die of the heat, that's sure. There are other things that will come first -- suffocation, thirst, maybe even starvation." Lorch looked thoughtful at the medical officer. Red-eyed, his face lined with worry and weariness, Broderick was showing strain. Through his scanty shorts, you could see the fishbelly whiteness of his skin; it was old man's skin, and Broderick, for all of his passing the annual fitness exam, was getting on toward being an old man. Lorch said more gently, "I guess you're getting a rough time all around." "Good Lord, am I!" the surgeon snapped. "Half the ship's complement has been in here today -- little fiddling things like prickly heat and dizzy spells. Dizzy spells! How the devil can anyone not have dizzy spells? The women's quarters have practically a regular courier service. If it isn't anti-perspirants, it's salt tablets; if it isn't salt tablets, it's alcohol from the ship's store for rubdowns." He passed his hand shakily over his eyes. "Then," he said, "to top it all off, there's him." He pointed to the inner chamber of the sickbay. Lorch, listening, could hear the blinded Groden's rasping breath. There was a shrill whistle from the speaking tube, then, tinnily, a voice from the bridge. "Commander Broderick! Captain requests you report to the bridge at once." The Surgeon blinked and swore. "How the devil am I supposed to do that?" he demanded. "Two of my crewmen are out with heat prostration, and the other two were working all night. All right, I go up to the bridge. Suppose there's some trouble? Suppose Groden starts acting up again?" He stared irresolutely at the speaking tube. Lorch said thoughtfully, "Say, Commander, could I keep an eye on him for you?" It was a fine idea. Broderick took off for the bridge and Lorch, hastily briefed on the simple task of sticking a new needle in Groden's arm if he showed any signs of trouble, bade him a careful good-by and waited until he was well out of sight before, whistling, he knelt before the Cabinet of emergency medical supplies. Broderick had given him an idea. And, he told himself blissfully, moments later, it had been a good one. Alcohol rub! Now why hadn't he thought of that himself? He hardly noticed that Groden's heavy breathing had changed pitch and character. It almost formed words now. O N the bridge, the Captain was briefing the ship's officers -- all but Groden, in the sickbay, and Lorch, who, the Captain had agreed, was easily enough spared to watch after Groden -- on what in his mind he called Project Desperation. It didn't take much briefing, because it was the only thing left for them to do and every man on the ship knew it. "We have," the Captain said precisely, "margin for just under forty minutes of rocket blast at standard thrust. That will bring our overall temperature up to # , give or take a degree, according to Engineering's best guess. And that's the maximum the human body can stand -- that's right, Broderick?" The Surgeon quickly translated into the Fahrenheit scale; a hundred and forty degrees or so. "That's right, sir," he said. "If we can stand that much," he added reluctantly after a moment. "It hits that on Earth in a couple of places -- around the Dead Sea, Aden, places like that. But it isn't sustained heat; it drops considerably after dark." The Captain nodded somberly. "We'll hope," he said, "that we'll find ourselves out of this before we hit sixty degrees. If we don't -- well, at least we won't starve or suffocate. You understand, gentlemen, that the odds are against us. I suggested to Lieutenant Ciccashot. He said I was an optimist. may be, is better than no chance at all. Do you all agree?" There was no answer. The Captain went on, "Before we jump, I presume no one has a better idea?" No one had. "Thank you. Then, gentlemen, if you will assume your stations, we'll get down to business. Stand by to jump." The Captain took his place with an air of benign detachment. It wasn't a Captain's job to take the conn of a ship in a perfectly routine maneuver. He watched approvingly as the Exec put the ship on alert, then on stand-by, then went through the checklist that culminated in the "jump" into hyperspace. The Captain was a model of placid, observant command officership, but behind the placid face, the agitated mind was churning out awful calculations. Consider the Galaxy, he was thinking to himself; a hundred thousand light-years broad, perhaps forty thousand through its axis. Call it a lens-shaped figure with a volume of three hundred cruising radius, in normal space, was within a volume of one lightyear ; that meant that the chances of their coming out, by accident, within cruising distance of Earth It was one chance in three hunThe Captain juggled the numbers comfortably enough in his mind. They were absolutely meaningless, far too big to be comprehended or feared. Master Pattern. Groden lay tense and fearful, seeing it. It had been a long time since the last needle; by the only clock he owned, his heartbeat, it had been more than two hours since he discovered that he could move his lips and his fingers again. He had feverishly wondered why; and had dared not speak or move after the first trials for fear of bringing the needle again. But now he knew. There was the Master Pattern. He scanned it slowly in every part. There was the giant starcluster of Hercules; and there the bridge of Terra II; there was the fat red disc of Betelgeuse; and there the shower room of the enlisted women's quarters. He took in the ordered ranks of the constellations as easily as he noted that Broderick was gone from the sickbay, and in his place the young ensign, Lorch, was clinging with harried expression to a stanchion. They were in hyperspace. Broderick was on the bridge. Lorch had been left in charge, and it had not occurred to him, since his patient had been so carefully quiet, to administer another needle. Groden carefully moved his hands, and found that they would do what he wanted. He was getting the hang of -- well, it was not seeing, exactly, he confessed to himself. It was like being alone on a starless night, in the middle of a dark wood. It took time to get used to the darkness, but by and by shapes would begin to make themselves known. It was not the same thing; this was no mere matter of the expanding pupil of the eye; but the effect was something the same. But explain it or not, he was becoming able to use it; each time the beautiful vision was more complete, and therefore more beautiful. He found the straps that bound him, and unbuckled them. On the bridge, he "saw," the jump at random was nearing its end. It would be only a matter of minutes before they were back in normal space, and he was blind # again. In the outer room of the sickbay, Ensign Lorch was staring dismally at the hallucinations of hyperspace. It was almost certain, thought Groden to himself, that if Lorch was so fortunate as to see him at all, he would pass off the sight as another of the lies light told. The important thing was sound; he must not make a noise. He crept through the door, carefully holding to the guide rails. Broderick had been right about one thing, though, he admitted -- the pain. The wreck of his eyes no longer seemed as important, with the wonderful things hyperspace's cloudless perception brought to him, but the shattered bone and tissue and nerve ends hurt. Algol's dark primary occluded the radiant star for a second and confused him; they were moving faster than he had thought. He hastily scanned the Master Plan again, fearful for a second. But there was Sol and its family of planets, and there was Earth. Terra II might be lost, but Lieutenant Groden was not, and if only he could get to the bridge... He scanned the bridge. It was later than he thought. He felt the vibrations in the floor as he realized that the jump was at an end. Panicked, he hesitated. Blackness again, and no more stars. He stood there, incredibly de-' solate, and the pain was suddenly more than he could bear. And from behind him he heard a startled yell, Lorch's voice: "Hey, Groden! Come back here! What the devil are you doing out in the passage?"' It was the last straw. Groden had no tear ducts left with which to weep, but he did the best he could. girl, Eklund, for a moment, and brought her to. She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, but she was all right. As all right, he thought, as anyone on Terra II had any chance to be. "Plain heat prostration," he reported to the Captain. "It's been a pretty rough job for her, trying to keep on top of all this." The Captain nodded unemotionally. "Well, Ciccarelli?" he demanded. The Navigator ran his hands through his hair. "No position, sir," he said despondently. "Maybe if I ran down the third and fourth magnitude stars -- " "Don't bother," the Captain said. "If we aren't within a lightyear of Sol, we're too far to do us any good. At your convenience, gentlemen, we'll take another jump." The Exec nodded wearily and opened his mouth to give the order, but Broderick protested, "Sir, we'll all be falling over if we don't take a break. The temperature's past forty-five now. The only way to handle it is frequent rests and plenty of liquids." "Ten minutes be enough?" The surgeon hesitated. Then he shrugged. "Why not? No sense worrying about long-term effects just now, is there?" "There is not," said the Captain. "Make it so," he ordered the Exec. The Captain half-closed his eyes, fanning himself mechanically. When the runner from the wardroom brought him his plastic globe of fruit juices he accepted it and began to sip, but he wasn't paying very much attention. He had the figures on the tip of his tongue: The first blind jump in Project Desperation had cost them sixteen minutes of rocket time. He could be a little more conservative with the next one -- maybe use only ten minutes. That way he could squeeze out at least one more full-length, or nearly full-length, jump; and then one last truly desperate try, not more than a minute or two. And if that didn't work, they were cooked. Literally, he told himself wrylyIn fact, he continued, counting up the entries in red ink on their ledger, they were just about out of luck now. For even if their next jump took them within cruising distance of Earth, there was still the time factor to be considered. They had left only twenty-four minutes of jet time before Terra II' s hull temperature passed the critical sixtydegree mark. True, he had maintained some slight reserve in that not all their expansible gas had been used. There remained a certain amount in the compressed tanks. And even beyond that, it would be possible to valve off some of the ship's ambient air itself, dropping the pressure to, say, ten pounds to the square inch or even less. That might give them maneuvering time in normal space -- provided they were God-blessed enough to come out of one of the three remaining jumps within range of Earth, provided all the angels of heaven were helping them... Which, it was clear, he told himself, they weren't. "Sir," said Commander Broderick's voice, "I think you can proceed now." The Captain opened his eyes. "Thank you," he said gravely and nodded to the Exec. It was a quick job by now. The kerosene lamps were already lit, the main electric circuits already cut; it was only a matter of doublechecking and of getting the nucleophoretic generators up to speed. The Captain observed the routine attentively. It did not matter that the fitness reports for which he was taking mental notes might never be written. It was a Captain's job to make his evaluations all the same. "Stand by to jump!" called the Exec, and the talker repeated it into the tubes. Down in the generator room, the jumpmen listened for the command, It came; they heaved on the enormous manual clutches. And Terra II slipped into Riemannian space once more. T HE stars whirled before the Captain's eyes and became geometrical figures in prismatic colors. The slight, worn figure of the Library, the girl named Eklund, ballooned and wavered and seemed to float around the bridge. The Captain looked on with composure; he was used to the illusions of hyperspace. Even -- almost -- he understood them. From the girl's vast stored knowledge, he had learned of the connection between electric potential and the three-dimensional matrix. Light and electrons: In hyperspace, they lied. Matter was still matter, he thought; the strange lights beyond the viewing pane were stars. And the subtler flow within his body was dependable enough, for he could hear as reliably as ever and if he touched something hot, the nerve ends would scream Burn! to his brain. But the messenger between the stars and the brain -- the photons and electrons that conveyed the image -- were aberrants; they followed curious Riemannian courses, and no brain bound by the strictures of three dimensions could sort them out. Just as now, thought the Captain with detached amusement, I seem to be seeing old Groden here on the bridge. Ridiculous, but as plain as life. If I didn't know he was asleep in the sickbay, I'd swear it was he. "Captain! Captain!" Ensign Lorch's voice penetrated over the metronome cadenced commands of the Exec and the bustling noises of the bridge. The Captain stared wonderingly at the phantasms of light. "Ensign Lorch?" he demanded. "But -- " "Yes, sir! I'm really here and so is Groden." Lorch's voice went on as the Captain peered into the chaos of shifting images. Lorch himself wasn't visible -- unless that sea-green inverted monstrosity with a head of fire was Lorch. But the voice was Lorch's voice, and the figure of Groden, complete with the white wrappings over the eyes, was shadowy but real. And the voices were saying -- astonishing things. "You mean," said the Captain at last, "that Groden can pilot us home?" "That," said Groden, in the first confident voice he had been able to use in days, "is just what he means." V better player can there be than a blind man? Lieutenant Groden, eyeless and far-seeing, stood by the Exec's left hand and clipped out courses and directions. The Exec marveled, and stared unbelievingly at the fantastic patterns outside the bridge, and followed orders. And presently Groden gave the order to stop all jets and drop back into normal space. In a moment, he was blind again -- and the rest of the bridge complement found themselves staring at a reddish sun with a family of five planets, two of them Earthlike and green. "That's not Sol!" barked the Captain. "No," said Groden wearily, "but it's a place to land and cool the ship and replenish our air. You ran us close to the danger line, Captain." Terra II came whistling down onto a broad, sandy plain, and lay quiet, its jet tubes smoking, while the Planetology section put out its feelers and reported: "Temperature, pressure, atmospheric analysis and radiation spectrum -- all Earth normal. No poisons or biotic agents apparent on gross examination." "There won't be any on closer examination either," said Groden. "This planet's clean, Captain." He stood hanging on to a stanchion, pressed down by the gravity of the world he had found for them. The Captain looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but there were more important things to attend to. "Bleed in two pounds," ordered the Captain and the Duty Officer saluted and issued orders into the speaking tube. They had run close to the danger line, indeed; the ambient pressure inside Terra II' s hull had been bled down to a scant ten pounds, in order to use as much cooling effect from releasing gas as possible. Whether it was clean or not, no man could step out onto the surface of the new planet until the pressures had been brought back to normal. They stood at the view panel looking out on the world. They were near its equator, but the temperature was cool by Earth standards. Before them was a broad, gentle sea; behind them, a rim of green-clad hills. The Captain made ready to send his first landing party onto a new and livable planet.  I "HE scouting parties were back and the Captain, for once, was smiling. "Wonderful!" he exulted. "A perfect planet for colonization -- and we owe it all to you, Groden." "That's right," said Groden. He was lying down on a wardroom bench -- Broderick's orders. Broderick had wanted to put him under sedation again, in fact, but that had brought Groden too close to mutiny. The Captain glanced at his Navigator. The swathed bandages hid Groden's expression, and after a moment the Captain decided to overlook the remark. He went on, "It's a medal for you. You deserve it. Groden." "He'll need it, sir," said Commander Broderick. "There won't be any new eyes for Lieutenant Groden." He looked old and sick and defeated. "The optic nerves are too far gone. New eyes wouldn't help now; there's nothing that would help. He'll never have eyes again." "Sure," said Groden casually. "I knew it before I brought you here, Captain." The Captain frowned uncomprehendingly, but Broderick caught the meaning in an instant. "You mean you could have brought us back to Earth?" he demanded. "In two jumps," Groden told him easily. "Then why didn't you?" snapped the Captain. "I have a responsibility to my crew -- I can't let a man go blind because of phony heroics!" Groden swung him feet down, sat up. "Who's a hero? I just didn't want to trade what I have now for what I used to have, that's all." "Meaning what?" asked Broderick. "It's more than seeing. Want to know how many Sol-type systems there are within five thousand light-years of here? I can tell you. Want to know what the Universe looks like in hyperspace? I can tell you that, too, only I can't describe it. It makes sense, Captain! The whole thing is as orderly and chartable as our own space. And I could see it, all of it. And you offer me eyes" "But why don't I see it, Groden?" the Captain puzzledly wanted to know. "Surely we've all closed our eyes for a moment in hyperspace -- why didn't we see it then?" "Sleep and death are alike, but they're not the same. Neither is closing your eyes and being blind. I'm blind in normal space ; you're blind in hyperspace -- that isn't much of an answer, but the medics will work it out." The Surgeon looked piercingly at Groden's bandaged face. "Then the odds are that any blind person can see in hyperspace?" "I think so," Groden agreed. "In fact, I'm practically certain." "Then," said the Captain, "it's our duty to return to Earth and let them know. They can equip each mapmaking ship with a blind person." Groden gave his head a shake. "Plenty of time for that. Skipper. We have a quadrant of hyperspace to chart. With me on hand to 'see' during the jumps, we'll finish up fast. Then we can go back and tell them. But I think we should get on with the job we've been assigned." "Right," said the Captain after a pause. "We'll bring the ship to stand-by for takeoff." f I iHE rockets thundered and Terra II split the atmosphere on its way to deeper space. As soon as they were clear, the ship readied for the jump and the Captain said, "Good luck, Groden. It's all yours -- give us our course." Groden felt the quiver of the generators, far below, and at once the Universe lay spread before him. No more darkness, no blind fumblings. An end to basketweaving and the dreary timepassing fingering of Braille for Earth's incurable blind. They would be the eyes of the proud new hyperspace fleet that was yet to come! "It's all yours, Groden," the Captain repeated. Groden cleared his throat, issued his course vectors. Captain, you don't know how right you are, he thought. Only it won't be just mine -- it'll be the blind leading the sighted! Now there, he chuckled, was a switch. But he'd have to wait until he was back on Earth, among the blind, for it to be appreciated. not hours, but days of reading! Three full-length science fiction novels! While they last -- surprise packages of three exciting new novels (over # pages each). A sample from our bulging shelves, by today's favorite science fiction writers. Only #c for the three-book package! A real bargain! #c you may sample our books at least expense. After writing you will get our monthly, ever-changing catalog of great bargains, classics, and rare finds in science fiction and fantasy. No obligation. Don't wait. Write today! fiction readers Dept. G-#, # E. San Fernando St., San Jose I # , Calif. He was lost -- anyone could see that -- but she had no idea how entirely lost he was nor why! disk and most of the other moons were below the horizon when the man stepped out of the plane and changed her life. As far as Carol Marsh was concerned, he was ordinary enough in appearance. And she wasn't ordinarily attracted to ordinary men. He was slightly over medium height, his features were not quite regular, and he had a deep tan over what had started out as a sunburn, so that she decided he had misjudged the strength of the sun on some planet with a thin atmosphere. She frowned as she watched him look around. She was annoyed by the fact that it took him almost a minute to get his bearings and realize that she was first, a human being and second, a girl well worth a man's attention. Even the troubled expression in his eyes was something she held against him. A man shouldn't look troubled. A man should be confident, self-assured in a manner that also assured the girl he spoke to. She remembered that back on Earth John Burr had been completely self-assured. It was startling to realize that it was with this newcomer, whose appearance she had every reason to dislike, that she had fallen suddenly and completely in love, as suddenly and completely as if she had fallen off a cliff. "I'm looking for some people," he said. "But I suppose -- " His very voice was ill at ease, and that was something else she should have held against him. And against herself. She had always resented men whose voices betrayed their lack of confidence. "I suppose it's no use," he went on. "I'd recognize the house." "Who are the people you're looking for?" He took out a wallet, and from it drew a stereo picture. Two children, a boy and a girl, were standing with a smiling young woman in front of a sturdy, oldfashioned plastic house. Their clothes were out of fashion by a year or so, but that depended on where you were. Mars, for instance, was always three years behind Earth. Here on Ganymede, on the other hand, you might even be ahead of Earth in some respects. she saw him staring at the picture with such longing that she at once knew herself for a fool. They're his wife and children, she thought. He's trying io find them. And I had to fall in love with him at first sight. His eyes were on her now, and she said, "I'm sorry, I've never seen them." "Have you lived around here long?" "Five years." "Then this can't be the place." He stood there irresolutely and started to turn slowly away without even a word of thanks to her. "My father may have heard about them," said Carol, knowing herself for a fool again. Past experience, she told herself ruefully, had taught her nothing. The thing to do was to let him go and forget him as quickly as possible, before she learned anything about him, before her feeling for him could become anything more than an irrational, momentary impulse. The stronger the bonds of knowledge and interest between them, the more painful they would be to break. And the breaking was inevitable. The house where she and her father lived was a simple domeshaped building, its walls and furniture both made of a silicon plastic whose raw materials had come from the ground on which it stood. There were rugs and draperies of a slightly different composition, woven on the allpurpose Household Helper that her father had bought before leaving Earth. They lived comfortably enough, she thought, as she led the man in. But he hardly noticed the house or anything in it. When they reached the library and her father looked up from the book he was reading, only then did the man display interest. The book was a favorite of her father's and it made him unhappy to cut his reading short. Nevertheless, he turned off the projector, stood up, and said, "Yes, Carol?" "This man is looking for some -- some friends of his, Dad. I thought you might be able to help him." She held out the picture and, to her relief, her father stared at that instead of at her. Sometimes he was a little too shrewd; if she was making a fool of herself, there was no need for him to know it. He could be a sardonic man and he did not suffer fools gladly, even in his own family. He was of the opinion that she had used up her quota of foolishness with John Burr. He was shaking his head. "Sorry, I've never seen them. Are you sure they live around here?" "No," said the man. "I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything, except that they're my wife and kids. And I've got to find them." "Have you checked at the District Office?" "I did that first. They couldn't help me, but they said their records weren't complete yet." "They're complete enough, I should think. Maybe they don't list every prospector who wanders around without settling down, but they wouldn't be likely to miss a woman and two children. I'm afraid that you're wasting your time looking on Ganymede." The man's face clouded. "It isn't a waste of my time," he said. "I've got nothing else to do with it. And I have to find them. They need me." from the man to his daughter, and Carol was a little slow in avoiding his eyes. "I see," he said, and she had an idea of what he meant by that. He saw too much. If he knew, there was nothing she could do about it. She said, "Perhaps Mr. -- " She paused, and the man said dully, "Callendar." "Perhaps if Mr. Callendar would have dinner with us and tell us a little more, we'd be better able to help." "Not a bad idea, Carol. We should know a little more." Carol selected a dinner and pressed the button that would start its preparation. Her father said casually, "You are a stranger to Ganymede, aren't you, Mr. Callendar?" "I'm not sure of that," said the man. Her father's eyebrows went up. Carol said, "But you do come from one of Jupiter's moons?" "I can't remember which one. There are a lot of things that my memory's hazy about. I can't even recall the name of the company I worked for as an engineer." "That may not be so strange. I find difficulty remembering the school where I taught on Earth. P.S. #, wasn't it, Dad?" "P.S. #," Mr. Marsh corrected briefly. "You see?" she said. "Do you remember your wife's name? And the names of your children?" "I wouldn't forget them," he said. "My wife's name was Mona." He stared at the wall for a moment, his face without expression. "I can still see the way she looked when I left to undergo treatment. Paul was -- let's see, he must be about nine, maybe ten, by this time. And Wilma must be six or seven. I remember how scared she was that time she found a harmless little phytopod. She thought it was going to bite her." "Phytopod?" said Carol. "We don't have them around here. What do they look like?" "They're small and furry, and have two feet that look like roots. When they stand still you're likely to mistake them for plants." "You do recall some things," said Carol. "The little things that don't tell me where to look. I remember the time we went on a picnic -- I don't recall how many moons there were in the sky -- and the ground began to shake. It didn't do any damage, but Wilma was terrified. Paul took it in his stride, though." "There aren't any earthquakes on Ganymede," said her father. "If your memory of that incident is correct, you're looking in the wrong place." "I suppose so," he said. "But what's the right place?" "Perhaps if you thought of a few more incidents, we might figure it out. It's the little things you don't forget that can be most helpful." Carol, although she kept the thought to herself. The little things can be most harmful. They keep the pain, and the memory of pain, alive and vivid. She remembered little things about John all too well -- the careless way he wore his clothes, and the way he combed his hair, the cigarettes he smoked, and the foods he liked to eat. And the stupid way she had let herself fall in love with him. She hadn't even had the excuse of its happening suddenly, as it had happened now. She had begun to love John as she had come to know him, disregarding all the evidence of his selfishness, of his genuine inability to care for any one else than John Burr. Unaware of what was going on in her mind, Callendar was saying, with somewhat more animation than he had previously shown, "I think you're right, Mr. Marsh. I've kept my troubles too much to myself. Maybe you can't actually do anything for me, but it wouldn't hurt me to talk. I should have done my talking long ago. When they found me." "Where did they find you?" asked her father. "And what did you mean before, when you said you're not sure of anything?" "They picked me up in a lifeboat, drifting some place between Mars and Jupiter. The motor was off, but the power pile was working, and the air-purifying equipment was on. I was apparently hibernating. I might have been that way for six months or a year." "And you don't remember -- " said Carol. "There's plenty I don't remember, but as I've said, my memory isn't a complete blank. My wife and I and the kids had settled down in a new colony -- exactly where it was is one of the things I forget. I believe now that it wasn't Ganymede. Maybe it was some other moon of Jupiter's. "Anyway, I seem to recall having some trouble with my health, and being taken onto an interplanetary hospital ship for treatment -- L-treatment, they called it. That's where they put me to sleep. What happened after that, I can only guess. The ship must have been involved in some accident. I must have been transferred to the lifeboat." "Alone?" asked Carol's father. "No. There were two other patients with me. They were found dead. I was the only one left alive. The bodies of the crew members who transferred us weren't found at all. They might have gone back for more patients and then been unable to get away again." "Who found your lifeboat?" "The crew of a freighter, who spotted it drifting across a space lane. They took me on board and revived me. But they were in a hurry and didn't have much time to stay and investigate." and silent. Carol asked, "Weren't there any records in the lifeboat?" "Nobody thought of that, at least not in the beginning. At first, when I regained consciousness, my mind was almost a complete blank. Then I began to remember things, but not enough. I couldn't recall where the colony had been, and after I had recovered enough to be able to get around, I began looking for my wife and children. I haven't come across a trace of them, although I've been on many worlds." The food had long been ready and waiting. Until now, no one had thought of getting it. He stared as if through the wall and Carol, after she had set the dishes before him, had to remind him of their presence. When he did eat, it was automatically, without enjoyment. Afterward, her father surprised Carol by saying, "Why not stay with us overnight, Mr. Callendar? We have an extra room, and tomorrow I may be able to give you a little helpful information." The man's eyes came alive. "You're serious? You think that from what I told you, you'll be able to guess where I came from?" "I used the word 'might.' Don't get your hopes up too much." His face fell again. "Thanks for warning me," he said in a flat tone. When, later on, he had gone to his room, Carol said, "Dad, do you really think you can help him?" "That depends on your idea of help. Why are you so interested in him? Perhaps you're falling in love with him, Carol?" "I think so." "Under the circumstances, that's completely idiotic. Would there be any sense in asking why you fell in love with him?" "Well, he looked so lost! I guess it's maternal -- " "As genuine a case of the grand passion as I've ever encountered," he said drily. "Almost as genuine as your previous experience." Carol flushed. "He isn't like John." right. Burr was essentially a selfish baby. I can't imagine him spending his life looking for a wife and children he had lost. In future, Carol, if you must fall in love at all, do it suddenly. You choose much better that way." "Yes, I know," she said. "Except for the fact that the wife and children may interfere. But don't worry, Dad. This time I'm not quitting my job and moving to forget." "There'll be no need for that." His face took on a troubled expression. "You'll have to face your problem right here." #V OU haven't answered my question," said Carol. "Do you really think you can help him?" "That isn't an easy one to answer. We'll have to prepare him for a shock, Carol. A first-class shock.That's why I wanted to be sure you were in love with him. It may make things easier for him to stand." "What things?" Her father hesitated. "Have you ever heard of this L-treatment he mentioned?" She shook her head. "I thought not. Carol," he said, and his voice was unexpectedly full of compassion, "you're going to have a very sick man on your hands. It won't be pleasant for either you or me, and it's going to be horrible for him. But it must be gone through. He must be told." "For heaven's sake, what is it?" "The L in L-treatment," he said slowly, "stands for longevity. That was what he was treated for. But you see now why it was found to be dangerous and discontinued. The reason you never heard of it is that it was developed and discarded two hundred years ago. Callendar wasn't adrift in space for a year or two, as he thinks. He was adrift for two centuries." "No! Oh, no!" "That's why the clothes in those pictures seemed odd. They've been in style and out again half a dozen times, with slight changes each time. That is why, furthermore, he can't find his wife and children on any of Jupiter's moons. The moons were first colonized ninety years ago." "But he says -- " "He'll never see his wife and children again. They've lived their lives and died and been buried in the past. He should have died with them in his own time and not lived into ours." "No," said Carol, "or I'd never have known him." She was white and trembling, and her father pulled her to him and let her head rest on his shoulder. Mr. Marsh said, "Perhaps you're right. I don't know. Anyway, he'll have to be told. And for your sake, I'd better do the telling." Carol was silent, and they both thought of the sleeping man who didn't know that his old life had ended and that a new life was to begin so painfully in the morning. Property of Venus Naturally, botanical specimens from another planet couldn't possibly be like Earth's... but there should be a limit to differences! in loud discussion of planting-plans drew the man from Venus. This was at Mrs. Hort's neighborhood party on a fine May weekend. The forsythia's golden rain had ended; the magnolias had littered the lawns with their petals; the azaleas blazed in orange and purple and the dogwoods in pink and white. Carl Vanderhoff, on his second bottle of beer and fourth hot-dog sandwich, said: . I can't bother much with annuals this year. I shall have to do some surgery on that cracked Japanese maple..." He was medium-sized and a little gray, and taught French Lit at Penn. Sydney Devore, the oldest of the three, lit his pipe and said: "... I've got three new kinds of cactus, and as soon as I get them unpotted... He led a retired life as a consulting engineer. Bill Converse, burly and ruddy, waved his fourth beer-bottle and said: "... if there's any screwy plant in the world, trust Sydney to plant it..." He was vice-president of the Keystone-Fidelity Insurance Company. Several of those at the party had objected to Devore's unconventional planting, such as his setting out assorted species of cactus. Vanderhoff had supposed that cactus would not thrive in the dank of a Philadelphian suburb, but these did as a result of Devore's care in keeping weeds and grass away from them and potting them through the winter. As Vanderhoff's own wife had said, Devore lived alone without a wife to keep him within the bounds of convention, but why couldn't he plant decent iris, phlox and chrysanthemums like everybody else? The cactus made his lot stand out like a sore thumb. more about this eccentricity, Mrs. Hoyt's brother, the spaceman, sauntered over. His uniform, unless one looked closely, was like that of a chief petty officer of the United States Navy. VanderhofT understood that Grant Oakley was in fact some sort of chief mechanic on the Goddard. Carl Vanderhoff braced himself to look interested in Venerian matters, though the flight of the Goddard had been so overpublicized, and he had already seen, heard and read so much about it through the normal channels of information, that he was getting bored with it. "You fellas like to plant things?" said Grant Oakley with a noncommittal smile; a compact, competent-looking little man with bad teeth. "Wait till my roses come out," boomed Converse. "I've got... "I'm trying out this new bugkiller, R-#," said Vanderhoff. "It's said to really lick the Japanese beetles..." "Come over to my place after this breaks up," said Devore, "and I'll show you my South American..." As they all spoke at once, Oakley stared with a vague smile until they ran down. Then he said: "How'd you like to plant something from Venus?" "Oh, boy!" exclaimed Devore. "If I only could!" "Hm," said Vanderhoff. "Perhaps." "People would think I was nuts," said Oakley. "I suppose a plant from Venus would come crawling into your house at night like some kind of octopus?" "No, nothing like that," said Oakley. "The plants of Venus are higher developed than ours, but they don't run after you. What would it be worth to you to plant them?" Devore frowned. "You mean you have some?" Oakley smiled, dipped a hand into a coat pocket and brought it out. He opened it just enough to show a small fistful of seeds ranging in size from that of an apple seed to that of a lima bean. "Now," he said, "supposing these were seeds from Venus -- I'm not saying they are, understand -- what would they be worth to you?" Vanderhoff said: "That would depend on what they grew up to." Devore said: "I thought the Department of Agriculture had a regulation -- " "Who said anything about the Department of Agriculture?" asked Oakley. "I haven't said these were from Venus. But supposing they were, what would you do about it?" Devore said: "Well, I suppose I ought -- no, to hell with that. I want some. But I couldn't pay you anything like the transportation cost." "The same for me," said Vanderhoff. "How about you, Bill?" Converse rubbed his chin. 'We-ell -- if you two take some, I guess I will, too. But none of us are rich, Mr. Oakley." Oakley shrugged an eyebrow. "Neither am I. I brought these because I've got to have some quick money. How would ten bucks a seed strike you?" you tell us what they are first." "You'll read all about it when the Department of Agriculture gets out a bulletin. But these little black fellas are the singing shrub. The medium-sized -- " "What does the singing shrub do?" asked Vanderhoff. "It sings. The blue ones are the bulldog bush. You understand, these are just the names the fellas on the expedition called them. The scientists gave 'em Latin names, but you'll have to read those in the Department of Agriculture Bulletin." "How about the big red ones?" said Converse. "That's the tree of Eden. It has the best-tasting fruit ever. Harmless, too. We ate lots of it. It seemed to make everybody happy and grateful. Some called it the stein plant on account of it grows a thing shaped like a pitcher or more like an old German beer stein." "What does the bulldog bush do?" said Devore. "It tries to bite, like one of those fly-catching plants on Earth, only bigger. I wouldn't say to plant it if you've got small babies. It may bite hard enough to hurt." "How about growing up and biting our heads off?" Converse wanted to know. "It only grows so high, and the snappers about like so." Oakley described with his hands a biting organ the size of a pair of human hands. "And it's not that strong. Now how about it? Shall we have a little auction?" There ensued a long low argument. More beer was drunk and hot-dogs eaten. The Sun went down; the neighborhood's bat came out and flew in circles over Mrs. Hort's party. At last the three householders each agreed to pay Grant Oakley fifty dollars, for which Converse should get the tree of Eden seeds, Vanderhoff all the bulldog bush seeds and Devore all the singing shrub seeds. They had disputed whether each of them should try to raise specimens of all three species, but concluded that a single extraterrestrial species apiece would be enough to handle. VanderhofT would have preferred either the tree of Eden or the singing shrub, but his gardening friends put in their claims for these before he saw her first and said: "Hello, gorgeous!" with the lupine expression he assumed in addressing his neighbors' wives. Penny Vanderhoff simpered at him and said to her husband: "Carl, we really have to go. That sitter said she'd only stay till seven." Vanderhoff slipped his seeds into his pocket and went along. "What were you talking with Mr. Oakley about?" said Penny Vanderhoff. "Venus?" "He was telling us about the plants there," said Vanderhoff. He did not speak of his Venerhad a chance to and pressed them with such vigor that he gave way. # said Oakley. "If they haven't grown too big, that is. These came from the polar regions of Venus. Those are the only parts of the planet that aren't so hot a man has to wear a protective suit. It's about like the equator on Earth. So the plants won't stand cold." The seeds and money changed hands as Carl Vanderhoff's wife Penelope came up. Bill Converse ian seeds because this would have started an argument. Penny would have scolded him for being eccentric, "just like that crazy Sydney Devore. I don't know what you see in that man..." In moments of fantasy, Carl Vanderhoff liked to imagine himself an ancient patriarch, sitting in a tent with a towel over his head, combing his beard and ordering his wives, children and goats around. In practice, he never got anywhere near this envied state, as his wife and children could and often did outshout him in familial arguments. erce his children by force, Penny always stood up for them, having been indoctrinated with the extreme educational progressivism of the followers of Dewey and Watson. And in these days of easy divorce, there was no question of using force on one's wife. Penny was not as gorgeous as Converse made her out with his leering compliments, being short and rather squarish of build, though still fairly pretty in a round-faced floral way. But that wasn't the point. He longed to be the power in the household and he didn't stand a chance. Vanderhoff put on his firmest face and said: "I shall plant some new things today. There will be wire guards around them and anyone who steps on one gets the derri'ere beat off him. Je suis tout a fait serieux." There was a condescending chorus of affirmative grunts and vocables filtered through corn flakes. "And, Dan," continued Vanderhoff, "you left your baseball equipment all over the floor again. Either you clean it up or there'll be no allowance." After breakfast, Vanderhoff went out to plant his seeds. The neighborhood was waking into its usual Sunday-morning racket. The roar of power mowers was joined by the screech of the power saw in Mr. Hort's basement and the chatter of Mr. Zanziger's electric hedge trimmer. Mr. O'Ryan, hammering something in his garage, furnished the percussion effect. Carl Vanderhoff walked about, wondering where to plant. If the bushes really bit, it would not do to plant them near the walks; they might grab guests or men delivering things. He had had a qualm about accepting the seeds for fear they would endanger his children. But since his youngest, Peter, was four and active, he thought he was not running much risk, especially if he put up a guard heavy enough to keep plant and youngster apart. Besides, if Peter did get nipped, it would teach him to obey orders. Vanderhoff decided to plant the seeds outside his picture window, in place of a mass of old jonquils that had practically ceased to flower and that he had been thinking of throwing away. He put on his rubbers, got out shovel and garden cart and went to work. When the jonquils were out of the way, he dug a hole for each of the six seeds, filled it with a mixture of mushroom soil and fertilizer, trod the earth hard, and finished off the surface with a slight bowl-shaped depression to catch the water. He watered the six places, stuck a flat stake beside each site with a notation, and put cylindrical wire guards over the spots. hoff had planted his seeds, five little yellow shoots appeared. Vanderhoff naturally did not know that the sixth had just germinated when a beetle grub, inching its sluggish way through the soft earth, had come upon it and devoured it. Vanderhoff diligently watered his plants. The clouds of Venus had turned out to be ordinary clouds of water droplets, not of formaldehyde as had been feared, and the surface of the planet was quite as rainy as fictional speculators had portrayed it. At the next session at Sydney Devore's house, Vanderhoff asked Devore and Converse how their Venerian plants were coming along. Devore, who not only lived alone but further fractured convention by never speaking about his past or personal affairs, had a habit of throwing small pennyante poker parties for the men of the neighborhood. Vanderhoff was the most regular guest. As a thinking man, he found Devore's company congenial. Converse was the next most regular, not because he was a thinking man, but to get away from his wife. Very little poker was played, for they found more pleasure in drinking and talking. Converse answered: "Only one of my three seeds sprouted, but the thing's a foot high already. Take a look next time you go by my place, Professor." Converse always called Vanderhoff "Professor" with a kind of annoying tolerance, as if being a professor were a disgrace or at least an embarrassing state to admit and he was big enough to disregard it. "How about yours, Syd?" asked Vanderhoff. "They all came up, but I can't tell what they'll look like. I planted them down both sides of my front walk." "You mean those little pink things we passed on the way in?" "Yes. I moved the cactus to make room for them." T HE azaleas went. The iris came and went. The peonies bloomed briefly and the tiger hoffs bulldog bushes grew with extraterrestrial speed until, one Saturday, Penny said: "Carl, what on Earth are those things? They look like a Venus' fly-trap, but they're such a funny color and so big." "Those are the plants I bought from Oakley." "Who? Oh, you mean Mrs. Hort's brother, who went to Venus. Are those Venus plants, then?" "That's what he said. Tell the children not to poke their fingers at them or they'll get bitten." "Why, Carl, I won't have such dangerous plants on the place!" "We're going to have these. Nobody'll get hurt if he does as he's told. I'm going to put heavier guards around the plants and if they get out of hand, I'll cut them down." "What's that?" said Penny, turning her head. There was a sound like songbirds. "It's funny, but it always sounds as if a lot of birds were singing at Devore's place, even when you can't see any." "That must be his Venerian plants," said Vanderhoff. "Well, I should think you could at least have taken the singing plants and given him the biting ones. It would have been more appropriate, if you must have these weird things. Why don't you do like other people, instead of always trying to be smart and different?" "If you start that again, I'll grow a beard and wear a beret. Then you'll really have something to complain of." Penny went off in a huff, leaving Vanderhoff to work on his plants. He had long tried, with some success, to impress his family with the belief that, though a mild man in most respects, he was inflexible about his plants and terri le in his wrath if one was hurt. When he had finished gardening, Vanderhoff walked down the street to Devore's house, from which the birdsongs issued. He found Devore squatting before one of the little pink bushes that had grown from his Venerian seeds. At the apex of each shrub grew a brown, convoluted structure something like a flower; beneath it, the stem swelled out into a bladderlike bag. As he looked more closely, Vanderhoff saw that these structures were making the birdsongs. The bladders swelled and shrank while the "flowers" on top quivered and contracted.  V asked Vanderhoff. "Teaching these to say 'good morning.' " "They can be taught?" "Within limits. They're imitative, which is why they've been copying the local birds." "How do you train them?" Devore held up a can of X#-D, the latest super-fertilizer. "They love this and I give 'em a spoonful when they say something right. An article in the Botanical Gazette says they use these songs the way our flowers use color and perfumes, to attract Venerian flying things for pollenization." Devore addressed the plant. "Good-morning, Mr. Devore." "G'morning, Mis' Dwore." "Good plant!" said Devore. He sprinkled a spoonful of X-#-D around the base of the bush and wetted it down with his watering can. "Reward of merit." "I suppose you'd call that speaking with a Venerian accent," said Vanderhoff. "I must make a phonetic transcription of it some time. How do they know you from anybody else?" Devore shrugged. "Sound or smell, I suppose. They don't have any eyes, of course. Are your bushes doing any biting yet?" "They try to. Each pair of jaws has a sort of antenna sticking up above it, like a radar antenna. That seems to be how they sight on their prey." "Can they draw blood?" "I don't know. One got my finger the other day; quite a pinch, but it didn't break the skin." "What do you feed them?" asked Devore. "They seem to like tuna-fish best. Steak and ham they find indigestible." "Hi, Professor!" came the loud voice of Bill Converse. "Hello, Syd. How's your crab-grass this morning?" "It's beginning to show up as usual," said Devore. "How's your bouncing betty?" For Converse, despite his noise about his expert gardening, had never eradicated all the soapwort or bouncing betty with which his flowerbeds had been overrun when he bought his house. "You needn't kid me," said Converse. "After all, bouncing betty does have a flower." "Yeah," said Devore. "That miserable weed. You're just lazy." He lowered his voice. "How's the tree of Eden doing?" Converse rolled his eyes. "It's as tall as I am. C'mon over and look at it." T HE tree of Eden, over six feet high, was a plant of curious shape. A stubby trunk, about three feet tall and four or five inches thick, ended abruptly in an organ that hung down in front of the trunk and, spraying up and out behind it, a fan of slender stems of finger-thickness, each bearing a double row of small orange leaves. Vanderhoff had a fleeting impression of a sort of vegetable peacock with its tail spread. The organ in front had a pitchershape, rather like that of a terrestrial pitcher-plant, only larger, complete with lid. This vessel was now as big as a bucket. The lid was grown fast to the top of the vessel so it could not be raised. "The funniest thing," said Converse in the same low voice, "is not only how fast it grows, but that it has such hard wood. Normally you expect anything that grows that fast to be soft and porous." He bent down one of the stems for the others to feel. It did seem to be made of strong hard wood. Vanderhoff said: "Maybe these little berries are going to be that wonderful fruit Oakley told us about." "Uh-huh," said Converse. "At this rate, they ought to be ready to eat by September." Devore said: "Let me suggest that you fence the tree off, or the kids will have eaten all the fruits before we old dodderers get a chance at them." "Good idea, pal," agreed Converse. "Tell you what -- when they're ripe, I'll throw a neighborhood party and we'll all eat them." off his tree, which continued to grow like Jack's beanstalk. The neighborhood's beds of phlox came out in crimson and white. Vanderhoff's bulldog bushes grew larger and more voracious. Penny Vanderhoff got a gashed finger feeding one and had a row with her husband about getting rid of them. Curiously, neither the bulldog bushes nor the tree of Eden aroused comment. Vanderhoff's picture window was at right angles to the street, and the bushes, planted beneath this window, could not be seen from the street. Vanderhoff had threatened his children with dire penalties if they told outsiders about his marvelous plants, and apparently they had obeyed him. The tree of Eden was in plain sight, but, while its strange shape caused many to ask Converse about it, they accepted his casual word that "Oh, that's just a South African stein plant." Sydney Devore's, however, could not be overlooked. First his singing shrubs twittered in imitation of the birds they heard. One, in fact, took to hooting like a screech owl, except that the plant hooted all day instead of at night like a well-regulated owl. Then Devore taught them to greet him with "Good morning, Mr. Devore" as he came down his walk. When his neighbors asked him what was happening, he made jocular or enigmatic remarks, such as asserting that he had wired the plants for sound. But the plants' behavior was so egregious that the explanations were not believed. As the plants grew, their tonal range and intelligibility increased. Devore taught them a more elaborate repertory. He hopped up the morning greeting from a mere "Good morning, Mr. Devore!" to such phrases as "All hail, Your Imperial Highness!" magniloquent as the most egotistical paranoid could desire, Devore started teaching the bushes to sing Clementine. He had trouble getting them to sing in unison, but he persevered. Evening after evening, the neighborhood gathered to see Devore striding up and down his walk, tapping a little Indian drum and exhorting his plants. "Just wait," said Penny Vanderhoff to her husband. "Any day now, a swarm of F.B.I. men and newspaper reporters will come down on us. They'll take you three to jail and the reporters will write stories that'll cost you your job." But that was thfe summer so much happened -- the near-war between India and China over Nepal, the death of President Tringstad in an airplane crash, and the return of the Bergerac from Mars -- that the newspapers had their attention elsewhere. At any rate, the mums and gladioli were out and nothing had yet befallen when Bill Converse, after tasting a fruit of his tree of Eden, pronounced it ripe and invited the neighborhood to a Saturday evening party to eat the whole crop. This was the weekend after Labor Day. On this weekend, the International Council of Language Teachers' Associations met in New York City. Carl Vanderhoff went to New York as a delegate, intending to return Sunday evening. It also happened that Bill Converse read in Popular Gardening an article about Venerian plants in general and the tree of Eden in particular. Enough of these plants had now been grown by the Northern Regional Research Laboratory of the Department of allow some conclusions about them. But Converse, who glanced more and more through his own windows toward the Vanderhoffs' house, said nothing about this even to his gardening friends, Devore and Vanderhoff. T HE day of the Converse party, Penelope Vanderhoff telephoned Mrs. Converse. "Mary? I'm so sorry, but I can't come to your party this afternoon." "Oh," said Mary Converse, "isn't that too bad?" "My sitter has stood me up and Carl's away, so I have to stay home," Penny explained. "Aren't they old enough to be left?" "Well, Dan is eight and Eleanor six, but if you leave them alone they fight, scream, chase each other, break windows, upset furniture and make a shambles of the place. I can't imagine why -- I've always let them do as they pleased, like it says in the book -- but that's how it is. So I'll have to pass it up." When Mary Converse told her husband, he said: "Oh. Too bad. I'll take her some of the fruit." "It'll be all right if that's all you do over there," said Mary Converse. "Damn it!" shouted Converse. "I don't see why I put up with your groundless suspicions!" The refreshments at the Converse party consisted of martinis and tree of Eden fruits. The guests picked the fruits directly from the tree, from which Converse had removed the fence. The fruits looked like plums, but proved to be without pits. They gave out a delicious, enticing smell that had the guests drooling by the time they received their portions. The taste caused gasps, cries, closed eyes. The tree now towered twelve feet tall, while the pitcherlike organ in front was as large as a laundry hamper. The lid of the organ had come loose from the rest, except for a hingelike connection in the back. The edges of the lid curled up a little, so one could look down into the empty body of the pitcher. The spray of slender stems bore hundreds of fruits. Any lesser number would have been quickly consumed. The guests hardly bothered with their cocktails in their rush to gorge themselves on Venerian fruits. When the lower branches of the fan had been stripped, Bill Converse, his face red from martinis, lugged a stepladder from his garage and climbed it to hand down more fruit. Converse did not eat any himself. When a lull in the demand allowed him, he took a small paper bag from his pocket, unfolded it and dropped a dozen of the fruits into it. Then he quietly came down from the ladder and walked away from the party toward the Vanderhoff house. There he rang the doorbell. Penelope came. Converse said: "Here's some fruit, Penny." "Oh, thank you," she said. "Won't you come in?" "Sure. Maybe you'd like to put those on a plate and eat 'em now." Penelope got out a plate, dumped the fruits out on it and ate one. "My, these are delicious. I've never tasted anything like them. Won't you have one?" "Thanks," said Converse, "but I've had all I can hold." guests, stuffed with fruit, were sitting and standing about lethargically, wiping the juice of the fruits off their hands and sipping martinis. The only fruit yet uneaten were a few on the highest parts of the tree, which could not be reached by the stepladder. Two men walked slowly up the walk, peering about. One was lean and hatchet-faced; the other short and stout with thick-lensed glasses. While all the male guests were in sport-shirts, the newcomers wore coats. The shorter one said: "There's the house and that's one of the plants." The two drifted quietly up to the crowd around the tree of Eden and the taller asked Mr. Zanziger: "Excuse me, but which is Mr. Converse?" Zanziger answered: "Bill isn't here just now. He went over to the Vanderhoff house." "Are Mr. Vanderhoff or Mr. Devore here?" "Mr. Vanderhoff isn't, but I think Mr. Devore -- yeah, that's him." Zanziger pointed to the square-jawed, gray-haired figure with the pipe. Mary Converse said: "I'm Mrs. Converse. What can I do for you?" The hatchet-faced man said: "I have here a warrant for your husband's arrest. Also for Mr. Vanderhoff and Mr. Devore. Here are my credentials." The man produced the badge of a United States deputy marshal, and added: "My name is Jacobson, and this is H. Breckenridge Bing of the Department of Agriculture. Where -- " Devore stepped up. "Did somebody say I was wanted?" "I'm sorry to say you are," said Jacobson, producing more papers from his inside coat pocket "Here's the warrant for your arrest on the charge of buying articles whose importation is forbidden by the Plant Import Control Act of #, as amended #. Now if -- " "Why, I don't know what you're talking about," said Devore with an exaggerated expression of innocent astonishment. "Ahem," said the short stout man. "He means that Amphorius tentatius -- " Bing indicated the tree of Eden -- "as well as several specimens of Faucifrons mordax and Cantodumus mimic us. Our investigations show -- " Devore broke in. "Are you the H. Breckenridge Bing who wrote in the Botanical Gazette on the reclassification of the Pteridophyta in the light of recent paleobotanical evidence?" "Why -- uh -- yes." Devore shook the man's hand. "That was a swell piece, but I never thought I'd be arrested by the author." "Well -- er -- I assure you I would have preferred not to be a party to your arrest, but they sent me along to identify the contraband plants." show me where Mr. Converse and Mr. Vanderhoff are. I'll run you down to the Federal Building in my car and you'll be out on bail in a few minutes." "What will they do to Mr. Converse and the others?" asked Mary Converse. "Probably just a fine," said Jacobson. "Oh," said Mary Converse in a disappointed tone. The deputy marshal continued: "It depends partly on whether they're cooperative witnesses in the prosecution of Grant Oakley, who sold them the seeds. He's the one who we'll really throw the book at. He's under arrest now." "My brother in jail!" cried Mrs. Hort, but nobody heeded her. Devore asked: "I suppose the Department of Agriculture will send a truck around to gather up our Venerian plants?" Bing's eyes blinked behind their spectacles. "That's right. It's bad enough to bring in an exotic plant from some place on Earth when its properties aren't fully known, and a hundred times more risky to bring in one from another planet. You never know what might happen. It -- uh -- might spread all over, like the prickly-pear cactus in Australia. Or it might have a disease that would get loose and wipe out the wheat crop." "Um," said Devore. "I hadn't thought of that." "Come on, Breck," said Jacobson. "Show me the Vanderhoff house." A guest named Dietz, who had had several martinis too many, muttered: "Don't worry, you beautiful plant, we won't let these guys take you away from us." H. Breckenridge Bing continued: "Now this Amphorius, for instance, has a strange property. I suppose you know that the biochemistry of the higher Venerian organisms turned out to be almost the same as that of terrestrial vertebrates?" Devore nodded vigorously; the other hearers in more tentative fashion. "Well, you remember that in the #s, Petchnikov isolated gratisone, the gratitude hormone, which is secreted by the pineal gland. It occurs in such minute amounts that it had been overlooked, but it controls animal behavior somewhat as prolactin stimulates mother-love. It's one of the things that makes community and family life possible. Now the fruit of Amphorius contains significant amounts of gratisone, or a substance almost identical with it. The result is that anybody who eats an Amphorius fruit is soon seized by an irresistible desire to please the thing or person from whom the fruit was received. If you eat it off the tree, you want to please the tree." A I tugging at Bing's sleeve. H. Breckenridge Bing was no man to relinquish an audience for anything less than a convulsion of nature. He continued: "Now Amphorius is a carnivorous plant, like Faucitrons, but instead of snatching its prey, it persuades the prey to feed itself to the plant. Small vertebrates who eat the fruit climb into the amphora -- " Bing indicated the steinlike structure -- "and are digested. The highest form of Venerian life, the yellow gibbon-like Sauropithecus xanthoderma, is too intelligent to thrust itself into the amphora. Instead, the tribe seizes the weakest member as a sacrifice to the plant and thrusts him into the vessel. "If, on the other hand, you receive the fruit from another person, you -- " "My gosh!" cried Mary Converse. "That no-good husband of mine took a bag of the things over to Penny Vanderhoff! Three guesses what he's up to!" Dietz, the drunken guest, said: "And that's what we ought to do to Mr. Bing and Mr. Jacobson here. Nothing's too good for our tree, not even a Federal dick." Bing gave a forced smile. "I don't think human beings would go to the extremes of the Venerian lizard-monkey -- " "Oh, wouldn't we?" said another guest. "Tear up our plant and take it away, will you?" "Now look here -- " said Jacobson. "Into the jug with them!" yelled a guest, and the cry was taken up. The circle began to close in on the Federal men, who backed hastily toward the street. Deputy Marshal Jacobson drew a pistol from under his armpit, saying: "You're all under ar -- " Standing on his right was young John S.Mosely, expected to be Penn's star halfback during the coming football season. Moseley let fly a kick that sent the pistol thirty feet into the air, to fall among Converse's pachysandra. The guests closed in, clutching. There was a crash of glass from the Vanderhoff house, but nobody heard it.  home Saturday evening instead of Sunday as he had planned. He delivered his paper Saturday morning; he saw everybody he really wanted to see by the end of Saturday's lunch; he discovered that the meetings and papers scheduled for Sunday were of little interest; finally, Professor Junius White of the University of Virginia offered him a lift home if he would leave Saturday afternoon. The thought of saving both train fare and a night's hotel bill, and of getting home in time for the tail-end of the Converse party, decided Vanderhoff to leave early. He walked the half-block from where he was dropped by White, who had declined an invitation to stop in. He marched up to his front door, entered and dropped the briefcase containing his notes, pajamas and other equipment for the Conference. He almost tripped over young Daniel's lightweight baseball bat, clucked with annoyance, leaned the bat against the corner, and made a mental note to fine Daniel. Then he filled his lungs to shout: "Hello, family!" but closed his mouth and let his breath out as muffled sounds of human activity came from the living room. Frowning, Vanderhoff took three steps to the threshold. On the sofa, his wife sat in hot, amorous embrace with his neighbor Converse. Converse looked up at the slight sound of Vanderhoff's entrance. Vanderhoff stared blankly. Then the habits of a lifetime started to curl his lips into a cordial smile of greeting, while at the same time a rising fury distorted this automatic smile into something else -- an expression at which Converse looked with visible horror. Vanderhoff took a step forward. Converse, though he outweighed the professor of French Literature by twenty pounds, tore himself loose from Penelope, looked furtively around, and crashed through the window. There was a scrambling in the shrubbery outside. At the same instant, from the other direction came the cries and footfalls of a crowd pursuing something along the street, but Vanderhoff's attention was drawn by a loud cry from beyond the window, followed by the yell: "Ow! Help! It's got me!" Vanderhoff hurried to the window. Converse had fallen among the bulldog bushes, which had instantly seized him. Two of the jaws had grips on each of his legs, or at least on the trousers that clothed them, while a fifth held a fold of his sport-shirt. Converse, on hands and knees, had crawled as far out of the clump as he could and was trying to get farther, while the other jaws of the bushes lunged and snapped at him like the heads of snakes. He had knocked over a couple of the wire guards that Vanderhoff had set up in front of the bushes. His right hand had blood on it, apparently from a cut sustained when he broke the window. Fragments of glass, reflecting the golden sunset, gleamed on the frantically trampled ground among the bushes.  pursed lips, contemplating various kinds of assault. If he merely used his fists, Converse would grab him and probably give him a worse beating than he inflicted. Then he remembered Dan's bat. He strode into the hall, picked up the bat, went out the back door, and came around to where Converse sprawled in the grip of the bushes. "Hey!" cried Converse. "Don't do that, Carl! Let's be civilized about this! I didn't mean any harm! I was just -- " The sound of a blunt instrument on a human skull ended his explanation. Converse yelped and moaned, but could not crawl back among the bushes lest worse befall him. As Vanderhoff stepped back, sounds from the street attracted his attention. He hurried around the corner of his house and saw a strange procession winding toward the Converse home. First came Sydney Devore, beating his Indian drum. Then came four neighbors, each holding one limb of a short, fat man who struggled. Then came the other neighbors, male and female, moving in a fashion that resembled one of the more athletic Latin-American dances. As the line passed Devore's place, his singing shrubs burst into Clementine. Vanderhoff found these sights and sounds so strange that, foregoing further revenge for the moment, he followed the procession with the bat on his shoulder. The marchers danced up to the Converse house. One guest raised the lid of the pitcher of the tree of Eden, while the four who held the little man prepared to thrust him in. VanderhofT caught up with the head of the procession and asked Devore: "Hey, Sydney, what's going on? Are you all crazy?" "No-o, we're just going to reward the tree for its lovely fruit." "You mean they're going to sacrifice this man? Who is he, anyway?" Devore explained about H. Breckenridge Bing. "The other one got away. He could run faster." "But what'll happen to this one?" Devore shrugged. "He'll be digested, I suppose. Serves him right. It should stimulate the tree no end." "You're insane," said Vander  hoff, and pushed his way through the crowd to the tree. The four stalwarts had finally inserted Bing into the amphora, despite his struggles and the tightness of the fit. Muffled cries came from inside. Bing's fingers could be seen curled over the edge of the pitcher as he tried to force his way out, but the plant now held down the lid by its own mechanisms. The amphora remained closed, though it bulged this way and that as Bing kicked and butted. ET away!" said Vanderhoff, shoving the Converses' guests aside and grasping the edge of the lid. "Wait, you can't do that!" Dietz cried, seizing Vanderhoff's arm. "Leave our plant alone or we'll feed you to it, too!" Vanderhoff resignedly hit Dietz over the head with his bat. As Dietz staggered back, holding his head, several other guests rushed at Vanderhoff. He waded in with the bat, cracking arms, heads, and knuckles with such verve that the attackers fell back, leaving the football-playing Moseley unconscious on the lawn. Vanderhoff then returned to the tree of Eden, keeping an eye cocked for another rush. When heaving on the lid had no effect, he struck the amphora with his bat. This induced a yell of anguish from inside, but did not loosen the plant's hold. Then Vanderhoff got out his pocket-knife and attacked the hinge of the stein-lid. He drew it across the grain again and again. After he had sawed half an inch into the structure, he found he had weakened the hinge enough so that he could raise the lid. Bing climbed out. His glasses were gone and his scanty hair was awry. His skin was covered with red spots and his clothes were stained by the tree's digestive juices. He peered nearsightedly at Vanderhoff. "Did you get me out? Thanks. As for the rest of you -- " Mary Converse shook her head and said: "I don't know what could have got into us, Mr. Bing. I'd never do such a dreadful thing." "Gratisone got into you, that's what," said Bing. "Now you see why we can't let just anybody plant extraterrestrial plants." The others, too, seemed to be coming out of their madness. Mr. Hort said: "You must let us pay to have your suit cleaned." Dietz said: "We'd better buy him a new suit. The plant's digestive juices will eat that one full of holes." It was finally agreed that Mr. O'Ryan should act as banker for the neighborhood and assess them whatever was needed to repay the damages sustained by Bing. Just as this agreement was reached, one of the township's patrol cars drew up. Out got Deputy Marshal Jacobson and the two local policemen. Jacobson growled: "You're all under arrest for forcibly intimidating a United States officer!" "They couldn't help it, Jake," said Bing. "It was the fruit. I'm not going to press any complaints." "Why not?" demanded Jacobson. "Well, Mr. Devore said he liked my article. I didn't know anybody had even read it." # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. home late that evening, after he and Devore had departed in Jacobson's official car and Converse, released from the bulldog bush, in an ambulance. He told his wife: "They let me sign my own bond. It seems I'm something of a hero for rescuing that little botanist, so I shall be let off easily. And Bill never said a word about me; he just let them think it was the bushes that beat him into a pulp. He'd better! And now what have you to say?" "I -- I don't know how to explain -- I must have gone out of my head -- I never loved anybody but you -- " "That's all right," said Vanderhoff, and told her about gratisone. "Now that that's over, send those kids in here. Dan is going to be penalized for leaving his bat on the floor, and the whole outfit will be run on orderly lines from now on. No backtalk, either." "Yes, dear," said Penelope. "And if I feel like growing a beard tomorrow, I'll grow one." VanderhofFs picture of himself as an ancient patriarch, sitting in his tent and ordering his wives, children and goats around, might not last. The family would probably wear him back down to his normal mild self. But he meant to enjoy his authority while he had it. # Galaxy-Simon  Schuster novel contest, shows how explosive ideals are when they're shattered. Insuring all of society against every possible danger is a noble policy, but there is something Wills never thought of -- who is the beneficiary? There must be one, of course, and he intends to find out who it is... and the deadly search makes him a poor insurance risk indeed! -- the sort of incandescent literary display we've come to associate with Tenn storres. The only thing wrong with them is their frustrating scarcity. If you want more Tenn stories -- and who doesn't? -- send in enough letters to power that reluctant typewriter of his! Daniel F. Galouye takes you along on a novelet trip to his puzzling and haunting there is no category for them whatever! for your information humanity is capable of throwing its first artificial satellite into the sky, and our cpver shows Mel Hunter's idea of how it might be done. It is a rather startling idea, combining some elements one would not normally combine that way. But there is at least one good reason for this combination, though it may not be a decisive reason. However, before I go into this with some more detail, the problem itself needs some explaining and clarifying. As I told some time ago in another column in Galaxy, the idea of the artificial satellite grew slowly, even though its total age is not much over a generation. When Prof. Hermann Oberth first published his rocket theory in # and #, he mentioned that it might be worthwhile to put a manned rocketship in an orbit around Earth in order to pursue a few interesting research projects. He went on to say that a very large rocketship might be left in such an orbit while the pilot returned to the ground by means of a smaller landing rocket It was on the basis of this suggestion that the concept of the manned space station was developed through the years, culminating in Wernher von Braun's space station project, which was published for the first time several years ago. body, for a long time, thought of an unmanned satellite. Otherwise the rocket pioneers had rather definite ideas on how "the art" would progress. It would begin with small liquid fuel rockets of which nothing was expected except that they functioned at all. Once one had functioning liquid fuel rockets, one could study them for improvements and one would, in time, arrive at the first useful item: the instrumentcarrying high-altitude research rocket. The high-altitude rocket, in turn, would be the foundation for the long-range rocket (either as a military weapon or a mail carrier or both) and then, when the long-range rocket had grown big enough, it would turn into a piloted rocketship which could rise beyond the atmosphere and, if desired, take up an orbit around Earth. These phophecies of thirty years ago have not only largely come true -- they even came true in just about the manner and the order foreseen. The item missing in the early forecasts was, as has been mentioned, the unmanned satellite. I can, in retrospect, think of a few reasons why nobody thought of it. At the time when Oberth and others talked about high-altitude research rockets, the idea was still that the rocket and its instruments would return to the ground by means of a parachute, or by separate parachutes if this should turn out to be more practicable. Then the instruments would be picked up and their records examined. In reality -- even though some of the smaller types of liquid fuel rockets have been recovered by parachute in the meantime -- this is not the method generally followed. During the time needed by the liquid fuel rockets to grow to the necessary size to become highaltitude research rockets, another technique grew up, too, the one now called "telemetering." In principle, it consists of hooking up the instruments with an automatic radio transmitter so that the instrument readings are broadcast and received and recorded on the ground while the rocket is still climbing. Without such telemetering, an unmanned artificial satellite would have seemed useless. What would have been the use of throwing a package of instruments into an orbit around Earth if the only way of recovery would have been by manned rocketship? If you had to build a manned rocketship for this purpose, it was far more logical to expect the manned ship to take the readings in the first place. B UT now we do have telemetering and that changes the whole picture. A package of instruments circling Earth could report to what extent it was warmed by the Sun and how much (and how fast) it would cool off when in the shadow of Earth. Such a package could count the number of cosmic rays encountered and report it to the ground station. It could count, and report, the number of impacts of cosmic dust particles and one could even go so far as to divide the outer skin into a number of "reporting areas" so that one could get a good idea of the distribution of cosmic dust impacts. It has also been suggested to make a small pressurized cabin with an experimental animal in it a part of the instrument package, for the behavior and reactions of the animal over a period of several days of apparent weightlessness would be very worth while knowing. (At the end of the observation period, the animal could be killed instantly and painlessly by having a timing device release hydrocyanic acid into the compartment.) In addition to these general problems, an artificial satellite could be used with probable success to attack a few special problems. If the artificial satellite did not circle Earth over its equator, but had been placed into an orbit cutting across at a slant, its whole orbit would slowly be turned around. This is technically known as the progression of the nodes and the rate of this progression would furnish us with rather precise information about the volume of Earth's equatorial bulge. An artificial satellite placed into an orbit which leads over both magnetic poles could be specially equipped to tell us more about Earth's magnetic field. Incidentally, it would also provide a great deal of useful knowledge about the cosmic rays and their distribution in Earth's magnetic field. If we had one artificial satellite moving at a certain height over the equator and equipped to report cosmic dust particle impact, and another artificial satellite, equipped in the same way but moving in an orbit which passes over both geographical poles, we would quickly find out whether there is a higher accumulation of cosmic dust over the equator (or in the plane of the ecliptic), which is a theoretical possibility. Another and rather obvious job for an artificial satellite would be to demonstrate how much drag is caused at a given height by the ait molecules -- one can't very well call it atmosphere -- still present. Right now, you won't find anybody who'll be residual drag at, say, # miles. But you'll find a large number of people who would part with a month's pay, if necessary, to find out. The method of finding out would be simplicity itself -- put an artificial satellite into an orbit # miles above the ground and watch it carefully. Residual drag will make its orbit shrink -- and cause it to burn up in the atmosphere like a meteorite in the end -- and the rate of shrinkage will provide the figure for the drag. Of course, once this has been solved for the # miles mentioned, the experiment might be repeated for # or # miles. The goal is still the manned space station and engineers want to be very sure that there is no observable residual drag at the height where that is going to be built. you'll have noticed that quite a number of the problems to be solved do not require reporting instruments. In various cases, the answer can be found by observation of the orbit assumed by the satellite; the instrumentation would report on something else. This means that the first artificial satellite -- or possibly the first two or three -- do not need to be instrumented. Their very existence would do the job. Hence the fairly recent concept of the un-instrumented artificial satellite. We would learn something (something, I wish to stress, that cannot be learned any other way) if we merely threw a bale of cotton into an orbit around Earth. Obviously such a "bale of cotton" would be cheaper by far than a complicated instrument package and in all probability it will cost less fuel to throw it into an orbit. All that is really required of the first one is that it can be observed from the ground visually and photographically and that it will give a radar echo. How large would it have to be for this purpose? I know from lecture experience that the size thought to be necessary for observation is always wildly overestimated. Recently a reader sent me a newspaper clipping about an amateur astronomer who said that he believed that he had discovered a second moon of Earth. The clipping went on to tell that the distance estimated was # miles above the ground and that the amateur astronomer stated that it was quite small, "possibly less than a hundred feet in diameter." I have put this sentence in quotation marks because it is not clear from the article whether this was a verbatim quote or a remark by the newspaper reporter himself. The answer to the whole story is that a second moon of Earth, moving at a distance of # miles and about # feet in diameter, would have been discovered a long time ago because under favorable conditions, at dawn and at dusk, it would be a naked-eye object which might be faint but would be conspicuous because of its visible movement. What is really possible with modern instrumentation (and you don't have to think of the #-inch reflector or the #-inch Schmidt camera) has recently been told by Clyde Tombaugh, who is hunting for moonlets of Earth. He could detect a V-# rocket at the distance of the Moon (# miles) or a tennis ball at a distance of # miles, provided only that both were painted white. This refers to photographic rather than visual detection, but it shows what can be done. It also shows that the un-instrumented artificial satellite would not have to be very large. O NE suggestion made is to use an inelastic plastic balloon, white in color and radar-reflective and pack it into the nose of a rocket. The nose compartment would be in sections, held together by explosive bolts so that it can be made to fall part either by means of a timing device or by radio command from the ground. The same timing device would open the valve of a tiny pressure cartridge inflating the balloon. Since the outside pressure is zero, the pressure required for inflating the balloon is very small; an ounce per square inch would be fully sufficient. Because of the lack of pressure from the outside, this balloon would keep its shape even if punctured by a meteorite, which is why I stated that it should be an inelastic balloon that is not stretched during inflation but is inflated merely to establish its shape. Another suggestion for a very simple un-instrumented artificial satellite is to carry a pressure cartridge containing a plastic foam, similar to the aerosol shaving cream bombs. Here nothing is needed but a timing device operating the valve at the right time, after the rocket has settled in the orbit. The total weight of such an un-instrumented satellite would be ridiculously small, six or eight pounds, but the bubble would be large enough for easy observation with small instruments, for radar echoes and even for naked-eye visibility at dawn or dusk, when the observer is still (or already) in the shadow of Earth but the artificial satellite is still in sunlight. Now let us see how difficult it would be to get it into space. The so-called circular velocity for Earth, the velocity with which a body must move to stay always at the same distance from the ground, is given by the square root of g(r)h) where g means gravity, as usual, r means the radius of Earth and h refers to the distance above the ground. If h is zero, the value for the circular velocity is # miles per second. That is the speed a satellite would have if it were racing around Earth at ten feet above sea level. Obviously this cannot be done because of air resistance. At a distance of # miles, the necessary speed is # miles per second; it is only # miles per second. But these figures are deceptive in a certain way. True, the farther the satellite is from Earth, the smaller its orbital velocity, but that does not mean that it would be easier to establish a satellite at # miles than at # miles. It needs extra fuel to lift it to that distance, so the cheapest satellite, in terms of fuel expenditure, is the one closest to Earth that the presence of the atmosphere will permit. T ET us say, for the sake of round figures, that the artificial satellite will require an orbital velocity of # miles per second. The rocket must be capable of attaining this velocity, parallel to the ground. And in the process of attaining this velocity, it must climb out of the atmosphere against Earth's gravity and against atmospheric drag for part of the way. If the rocket climbed on a nearvertical path all the way, it would, of course, traverse the atmosphere along the shortest route, but its "heading" would be wrong. The solution is the one which has been in use for a long time for long-range rockets: vertical takeoff and a vertical, or very nearly so, path for the first eight or ten miles. Then a gradual tilt in the proper direction, assuming shallower and shallower angles to the horizontal. For long-range rockets, the tilt is usually stopped when the angle is near #, since this results in the longest range for a given velocity. For establishing an artificial satellite, the angle would be still shallower. Of course it cannot be a single rocket. If we wanted a single rocket to go into such an orbit, it would need so much fuel that it would have to have a massratio of about #:#, which means that its takeoff weight should be # times as high as the weight of what finally gets into space. Such a rocket obviously cannot be built. The answer is the step principle, a rocket carrying another rocket as its payload, and the payload of the second rocket being a third rocket. That way, you get rid of unnecessary dead weight just about as soon as it can be done. Now the general rule for the velocity a rocket will attain is that the velocity of the rocket becomes equal to the exhaust velocity if the mass-ratio is equal to #. This, however, does not include the fuel that is expended in fighting gravity and that required to overcome air resistance. An extra allowance has to be made for that. If we assume that our fuel will produce an exhaust velocity of # miles per second -- a little high for present-day fuels, but I am not advocating a special design, only to demonstrate the principle -- such a mass-ratio of # : I would produce a rocket velocity of # miles per second. If we take the mass-ratio a bit higher, namely #:#, the rocket velocity would be ## of the exhaust velocity or # miles per second. Since the establishment of the artificial satellite needs # miles per second plus allowance for the climb and some air resistance, and since # times # is #, the rocket needed for the job would be a three-stage rocket. W E'LL run quickly through a rough weight calculation for the whole. If the payload weighs # pounds and the empty rocket the third stage would need # pounds of fuel, so that its total weight would be # pounds. This is the "payload" for the second stage, which we'll assume to weigh # pounds empty. It would need # pounds of fuel, so that the "payload" for the first stage would work out to # pounds. If the empty rocket of the first stage weighs # pounds, the fuel for the first stage would be # pounds, so that the total takeoff weight for the whole three-stage job would be # pounds or about # V # tons. That wouldn't be much bigger than the #-ton V-#. But a rocket engineer entrusted with the job of designing a three-stage rocket for an uninstrumented artificial satellite would not start from scratch in this manner. He would look around for existing rockets which could be fitted into a three-stage assembly with only minor modifications. When the two-stage rockets of Project Bumper were designed, two existing and then available types were used: V-#s for the for the second stages (even though everybody, including the designer, of course, knew that a specially developed second stage would produce much better results). For the satellite-carrying three-stager, the engineer might hope for three different available rockets which, in combination, would produce the required ultimate velocity. Naturally, it may happen that he has to settle for two and design a stage between them to do the job. An interesting example of such thinking, with an additional idea thrown in, was a paper read at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Rocket Society in December, #. During the past few years, Dr. Van Allen had obtained very satisfactory results by launching the solid-fuel "Deacon" rockets from high-flying plastic balloons. Because the balloon carried the rocket to regions where air resistance has become almost negligible, the rockets operated under near-ideal conditions : they could move under high accelerations. The two authors of the paper (K. Stehling of Bell Aircraft Co. and R. M. Missert of the University of Iowa) advocated the launching of the artificial satellite by means of a balloon-borne rocket. Their first stage was to consist of four solid-fuel booster units with a total weight of # pounds. The second stage was to be a # pound liquid fuel rocket and the third stage a # pound liquid fuel rocket with a thrust of # pounds and a payload (satellite) of # pounds. All these figures sound "reasonable" in the sense that rockets of about these specifications are likely to exist. The solid-fuel boosters resemble a British type which has been discussed in aviation magazines, the second stage corresponds approximately to the Aerobee rocket and the third stage might be built around a liquid fuel booster. plane for the balloon would have a number of advantages. The jet plane probably could not carry the rocket to quite the height reached by a plastic balloon, but it could go high enough so that more than half of the total mass of the atmosphere would be below the rocket. To make up for the comparative lack of height, the jet plane would provide an initial velocity of V # mile per second. If it flew in an easterly direction near the equator, Earth's rotation would have added another Vi mile per second before the plane even took off. This would leave slightly more than # miles per second to be added by the rocket assembly, which might be done even by a two-stage rocket, especially since the plane would provide direction and elevation (by pulling out of  a shallow dive) so that the guidance equipment of the rocket could be kept to a minimum. All it would have to do is to go where aimed. Again, somebody toying with this possibility would have to look around for two suitable rockets plus a suitable jet plane. But whether air-launched or groundlaunched, the combination of rockets required to throw a small uninstrumented satellite into an orbit should be achievable in the near future. Just what is the internal constitution of Jupiter? In the book "Earth, Moon and Planets" by Fred L. Whipple, Jupiter is shown as consisting of a metallic core overlaid by a thick shell of ice and a deep hydrogen atmosphere. The diameter of the metallic core is shown to be about half the total diameter. In a more recent book by George Gamow, the same scheme is followed, but the metallic core is at best # per cent of the total diameter. Which one is right? Charles B. Hoffmeister Montclair, New Jersey To answer the last sentence first: I don't know which is right and if anybody else does, he has kept quiet so far. Naturally we don't know the internal constitution of Jupiter; these are various "educated guesses" to make the mass come out right for the observed dimensions and to account, simultaneously, for the measured temperatures. In a still more recent book, Robert S. Richardson's Exploring Mars, you can find a cross section of Jupiter according to the ideas of W . H. Ramsay of Manchester University, England. Professor Ramsay's fundamental proposition is that Jupiter consists mostly of hyclrogen, all oilier elements being present in such small amounts (comparatively speaking) that they can he regarded as mere impurities of the hydrogen. In this concept, the surface of the planet consists of colil gases in violent motion, which is what we see in the telescope. The pressure below this surface builds up rapidly and at a depth of, say, # miles, the planet's crust would consist mostly of solid hydrogen. At a depth of # miles, the solid hydrogen is calculated to be under a pressure of # atmospheres. At a depth of # miles, the pressure would approach # atmospheres. The solid hydrogen would have a density of # of that of w T ater at # miles and of # at # miles. At a pressure of # atmospheres, solid hydrogen changes to metallic hydrogen, which is far more compressible than solid hydrogen. Ramsay's picture of Jupiter then consists of a solid hydrogen shell # miles thick covering a sphere of metallic hydrogen # miles in diameter. Tindensity of the solid hydrogen is supposed to lie between # and #; the density of the metallic hydrogen is calculated as being # near the surface of the metallic hydrogen sphere and # at its center. This, too, makes the overall density come out correctly, but whether this picture corresponds to reality is something that oidy future research can tell. What is the escape velocity for each planet of the Solar System and how is it found? Earl Dawney Route No. # Gadsden, Alabama The escape velocities of the various planets, expressed in miles per second and rounded off to the nearest l#th of a mile, are as follows: Mercury # Venus # Earth # Mars #.I Jupiter # Saturn # Uranus # Neptune # Pluto # Moon # In order to find the escape velocity for any planet, it is necessary to know its surface gravity. The escape velocity corresponds to the impact velocity of a body which fell to the planet from infinity; this happens to be equal to a fall through a field of constant surface gravity for the distance of one planet radius. The formula is the square root of # g multiplied by the planet radius; the "g" refers to the surface gravity of the planet. # wish to take exception to your statement in Galaxy for February, #, page #, where you say "I a.d. immediately followed after I B.C., though logically one should expect a year zero ( namely the year of the birth of Christ ) between them." Most scholars are now agreed that Christ was born in # B.C. "Student" University of Chicago for S-F fans... with cities which have fled the earth... and turned outlaw, threatening Earth's rule of the galactic planets... A book that makes exciting reading." --  Minneapolis Tribune. "A rich and rip-snorting example of adventurous science-fiction at its best... Wonderful." Review Editor of Galaxy. # at all bookstores # Madison Avenue New York #, N. Y. Normally I do not answer anonymous letters --  names are withheld on request -- but I'll make an exception in this case since a personal acquaintance brought up the very same question. Of course I know that historians think that Christ was born several years earlier than first believed -- the dates mentioned are # B.C., # B.C., and # B.C. But when I wrote this reply, that problem was not under discussion; no matter what the actual year of the birth of Christ happened to be, my point remains: logically, the year of the birth of Christ should be zero between I Before Christ and I Anno Domini. The Preferred Hotel in #th to #th Sts. at #th Av. At Times Square. Walking distance to everything worthwhile. # Rooms, each with private bath, shower. From  Special rates for servicemen All deadheads naturally came to Mars without tickets -- but this one was just the ticket! a few hours after the Earth ship landed. There were diamond-tip drills on board, which I had had on requisition for over a year. I wanted to claim them before someone took them. That's not to imply that anyone would steal anything; we're all gentlemen and scientists here on Mars. But things are hard to get, and theft-by-priority is the way a gentleman-scientist steals what he needs. I loaded my drills into the jeep just as Carson from Mining drove up waving a Most Urgent Top Crash Priority. Luckily, I had had the good sense to secure a topmost priority from Director Burke. Carson was so pleasant about it that I gave him three drills. He chugged away on his scooter, over the red sands of Mars that look so good in color photography, but gum up engines so completely. I walked over to the Earth ship, not because I give a damn about spaceships, but just to look at something different. Then I saw the deadhead. He was standing near the spaceship, his eyes as big as saucers, looking at the red sand, the scorched landing pits, the five buildings of Marsport. The expression on his face said, "Mars! Gee!" I groaned inwardly. I had more work that day than I could accomplish in a month. But the deadhead was my problem. Director Burke, in a moment of unusual whimsy, had said to me, "Tully, you have a way with people. You understand them. They like you. Therefore I am appointing you Mars Security Chief." Which meant I was in charge of deadheads. twenty years old. He was over six feet tall, with perhaps a hundred some very odd pounds of ill-nourished meat on his bones. His nose was turning a bright red in our healthy Martian climate. He had big, clumsy-looking hands, big feet, and he was gasping like a fish out of water in our healthy Martian atmosphere. Naturally, he didn't have a respirator. Deadheads never do. I walked up to him and said, "Well, how do you like it here?" "Gol-ee!" he said. "Quite a feeling, isn't it?" I asked him. "Actually standing on a real honest-to-John alien planet." "I'll say it is!" the deadhead gasped. He was turning a faint blue from oxygen starvation, all except the tip of his nose. I decided to let him suffer a little longer. "So you stowed away on that freighter," I said. "You rode deadhead to wonderful, enchanting, exotic Mars." "Well, I don't think you could call me a stowaway," he said, fighting for breath. "I sorta -- sorta -- " "Sorta bribed the captain," I finished for him. By this time, he was weaving unsteadily on his long, skinny legs. I pulled out my spare respirator and clapped it over his nose. "Come on, deadhead," I said. "I'll get you something to eat. Then you and I are going to have a serious talk." I held his arm on the way to the mess hall, because he was goggling so hard he would have fallen over something and broken it. Inside, I boosted the atmosphere and warmed some pork and beans for him. He wolfed them down, leaned back in the chair and grinned ear from ear. "My name's Johnny Franklin," he said. "Mars! I can't believe I'm really here." That's what all the deadheads say, those who survive the trip. There are about ten attempts a year, but only one or two make it alive. They're such idiots, most of them. A deadhead manages to sneak on board a freighter, in spite of all the security checks. The ship takes off at about twenty Gs and, without special protection, the deadhead is crushed flat. If he survives that, radiation gets him. Or he's asphyxiated in the airless hold, before ha can reach the pilot's compartment. We've got a special graveyard here, just for deadheads. But a few of them pull through, and they walk onto Mars with big hopes and stars in their eyes. I'm the guy who has to disillusion them. J Mars for?" I asked. "I'll tell you," Franklin said. "On Earth you gotta do just like everybody else does. You gotta think like everybody else and act like everybody else or they lock you up." I nodded. Earth was stable now, for the first time in the history of mankind. World peace, world government, world prosperity. The authorities wanted to keep it that way. I think they go too far in the suppression of even harmless individualism, but who am I to say? Things will probably relax in a hundred years or so, but that's not good enough for a deadhead living now. "So you felt the need of new horizons," I said. "Yes, sir," Franklin said. "I hope this doesn't sound too corny to you, sir, but I want to be a pioneer. I don't care how hard it is. I'll work! You'll see, just let me stay, please, sir! I'll work so hard -- " "Doing what?" I asked. "Huh?" He looked startled for a moment. Then he said, "I'll do anything." "But what can you do? We could use a good inorganic chemist, of course. Do your skills happen to run along that line?" "No, sir," the deadhead said. I didn't enjoy doing this, but it was important to impress the grim and unpalatable truth upon deadheads. "So your field isn't chemistry," I mused. "Might have a spot for a top-notch geologist. Or possibly a statistician." "I'm afraid -- " "Tell me, Franklin, have you got your Ph.d.?" "No, sir." "Doctorate? Masters? Have you even got a B.S.?" "No, sir," Franklin said miserably. "I never even finished high school." "Then just what do you think you can do here?" I asked. "Well, sir," Franklin said. "I read where the Project is scattered all over Mars. I thought I could be maybe a messenger, sorta. And I can also do carpentry, and some plumbing and -- there must be something I can do here." I poured Franklin another cup of coffee and he looked at me, his big eyes pleading. The deadheads always look like that when we reach this point. They think that Mars is like Alaska in the '#s, or Antartica in #; a frontier for brave, determined men. But Mars isn't a frontier. It's a dead end. "Franklin," I said, "did you know that Mars Project is not self-supporting, and may never be? Did you know that it costs the project about fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain a man here? Do you figure you're worth a salary of fifty thousand a year?" "I won't eat much," Franklin said. "And once I get the hang of things I'll -- " "And," I broke ii, "were you also aware that there isn't a man on Mars who doesn't hold at least the title of Doctor?" "I didn't know that," Franklin whispered. D eadheads never do. i have to tell them. So I told Franklin that scientists do the plumbing, carpentry, messenger work, the cooking, cleaning and repairing, all in their spare time. Not well, perhaps, but it gets done. The fact is: There is no unskilled labor on Mars. We just can't afford it. I thought he'd burst into tears, but he managed to control himself. He stared wistfully around the room, looking at everything in our crummy little mess hall. You see, it was all Martian. "Come on," I said, standing up. "I'll find a bed for you. Tomorrow we'll arrange your passage back to Earth. Don't feel so bad. At least you've seen Mars." "Yes, sir." The deadhead stood up wearily. "But, sir, I am not going back to Earth." I didn't argue with him. A lot of deadheads talk big. How was I to know what this one had in his mind? After settling Franklin, I returned to my lab and did a few hours work that absolutely had to be done. Then I fell into bed exhausted. The next morning, I went to wake Franklin. He wasn't in his bed. Immediately I thought of the possibility of sabotage. Who knows what a thwarted pioneer will do? Pull some rods out of the pile, perhaps, or set off the fuel dump. I scurried around the camp looking frantically, and finally found him at the half-built spec lab. The spec lab was necessarily a spare-time project with us. Whenever anyone had an extra half hour, he mortared a few bricks, sawed out a table-top, or screwed hinges on a door. No one could be spared from his work long enough to really put the thing together. Franklin had accomplished more in a few hours than most of us had in a few months. He was a good carpenter, all right, and he worked as though all the furies' of hell were pursuing him. "Franklin!" I shouted. "Yes, sir." He hurried over to me. "Just wanted to do something for my keep, Mr. Tully. Give me a few more hours and I'll have a roof on her. And if no one's using those pipe lengths over there, I could maybe finish the plumbing by tomorrow." Franklin was a good man, all right. He was just the sort Mars needed. By all the rules of human decency and justice I should have patted him on the shoulder and said, "Boy, book-learning isn't everything. You can stay. We need you." that. But I couldn't. There are no success stories on Mars. No deadhead makes good. We scientists can manage the carpentry and plumbing, poor though the results may be. And we just can't afford duplication of skills. "Will you please stop making this hard for me, Franklin? I'm a soft-hearted slob. You've convinced me. But all I can do is enforce the rules. You must go back." "I can't go back." Franklin said very softly. "Huh?" "They'll lock me up if I go back," Franklin said. "All right, tell me about it," I groaned. "But please make it quick." "Yes, sir. Like I told you," Franklin said. "On Earth, you gotta do like everybody else, and think like everybody else. Well, that was fine for a while. But then I discovered The Truth." "You what?" "I discovered The Truth," Franklin said proudly. "I found it by accident, but it was really very simple. It was so simple, I taught it to my sister, and if she could learn it, anyone could. Then I tried to teach it to everybody." "Go on," I said. "Well, everybody got very angry. They told me I was crazy, I should shut up. But I couldn't shut up, Mr. Tully, because it was The Truth. So when they went to lock me up, I came to Mars." Oh, great, I thought. Franklin was just what we needed on Mars. A good, old-fashioned religious fanatic to preach to us hardened scientists. And he was just what the doctor ordered for me. Now, after sending him back to Earth -- to prison -- I could suffer guilt feelings the rest of my life. "And that isn't all," Franklin said. "You mean there's more to this pathetic tale?" "Yes, sir." "Go on," I said with a sigh. "They're after my sister, too," Franklin said. "You see, after she saw The Truth, she was as eager to teach it as me. It's The Truth, you know. So now she has to hide, until -- until -- " He wiped his nose and gulped miserably. "I thought I could show you how good I'd be or Mars, and then my sister could join me and -- " "Stop!" I said. "Yes, sir." "I don't want to hear any more," I told him. "I've already listened to you too much." "Would you like me to tell you The Truth?" Franklin asked eagerly. "I could explain -- " "Not another word." I barked. "Yes, sir." "Franklin, there is nothing, absolutely nothing I can do for you. You haven't got the qualifications. I haven't the authority to allow you to stay. But I will do the only thing I can do. I'll speak to the Director about you." "Gee! Thanks a lot, Mr. Tully. Would you explain to him that I haven't really recovered from that trip yet? Once I get my strength back, I'll show you -- " "Sure, sure," I said, and hurried off. T HE Director stared at me as though I had slipped my regulator. "But Tully," he said, "you know the rules." "Sure," I said. "But he really would be useful. And I hate to ship him back to the police." "It costs fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain a man on Mars," the Director said. "Do you think he's worth a salary of -- " "I know, I know," I said. "But he's such a pathetic case, and he's so eager, and we could use -- " "All deadheads are pathetic," the Director said. "Yeah. After all, they're inferior human beings, not like us scientists. So back he goes." "Ed," the Director spoke quietly. "I can see resentment building between us over this. Therefore I'm going to leave it up to you. You know that there are close to ten thousand applications a year for a berth in Mars Project. We turn back better men than ourselves. Kids in the universities study for years to fill a specific place here, and then find the position already taken. Considering all that, do you honestly feel that Franklin should stay?" "I -- I -- oh, damnit, no, if you put it that way." I was still angry. "Is there any other way to put it?" the Director asked. "Of course not." "It's a sad situation when many are called but few are chosen," the Director mused. "There's a need for a new frontier. I'd like to open Mars wide open for colonization. And someday we will. But not until we're self-supporting." "Right," I said. "I'll arrange for the deadhead's return." the roof of the spec lab when I returned, and he had only to look at my face to know what the answer was. I climbed in my jeep and drove to Marsport. I had quite a few harsh words to say to the captain of the space freighter who had allowed Franklin on board. Too much of that stuff goes on. This joker was going to carry Franklin back to Earth. The freighter was in the blast pit, its nose pointing skyward. Clarkson, our atomics man, was readying it for takeoff. "Where's the captain of this heap?" I asked. "No captain," Clarkson said. "This is a drone model. Radiocontrolled." My stomach started to do slow flip-flops. "No captain?" "Nope." "Any crew?" "Not on a drone," Clarkson said. "You know that, Tully." "In that case," I said brightly, "there's no oxygen on board." "Of course not!" "And no radiation shielding." "That's right." Clarkson stared at me. "And no insulation." "Just enough to keep the hull from melting." "I suppose it took off at top acceleration. Thirty-five or so Gs." "Sure," Clarkson said. "That's the economical way, if you haven't got humans on board. What's eating you?" I didn't answer him. I just walked to the jeep and roared back to the spec lab. My stomach was no longer doing flip-flops. It was spinning like a top. A human couldn't have lived through that trip. Not a chance. was a physical impossibility. Franklin had completed the roof and was on the ground, connecting pipes. It was lunchtime, and several of the men from Mining were helping him. "Franklin," I said. "Yes, sir?" I took a deep breath. "Franklin, did you come here on that freighter?" "No, sir," he said. "I tried to tell you that I didn't bribe no captain, but you wouldn't -- " "In that case," I spoke very slowly, "how did you get here?" "By using The Truth!" "Could you show me?" Franklin considered for a moment. "The trip tired me out something awful, Mr. Tully," he said, "but I guess I could." And he disappeared. I stood there, blinking. Then one of the Mining men pointed overhead. There was Franklin, hovering at about three hundred feet. In another moment, he was standing beside me again, his nose pinched and red from the cold. It looked like instantaneous transfer. Oh, brother. "Is that The Truth?" I asked. "Yes, sir," Franklin said. "It's a different way of looking at things. Once you see it -- really see it -- you can do all sorts of things. But they called it a -- a hallucination on Earth, and they said I had to stop hypnotizing people and -- " "You can teach this?" I asked. "Sure," Franklin said. "It may take a little time, though." "That's all right. I guess we can afford a little time. Yessiree, I guess we sure can. Yessiree, a little time spent on The Truth might be well spent -- " I don't know how much longer I would have gone on babbling, but Franklin broke in eagerly. "Mr. Tully, does that mean I can stay?" "You can stay, Franklin. As a matter of fact, if you try to leave, I'll shoot you." "Oh, thank you, sir! And how about my sister? Can she come?" "Oh, yes, most certainly," I said. "Your sister can come. Any time she -- " I heard a startled shriek from the Mining men. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I turned very slowly. There stood a girl, a tall, skinny girl with eyes as big as saucers. She stared around like a sleepwalker and murmured, "Mars! Gol-ee" Then she turned to me and blushed. "I'm sorry, sir," she said. "I -- I was listening in." dell Foster Crossen. Dell Publishing Co., #c F OR your information and files, this is the best follow-up of the rich new paths opened by Gravy Planet, which ran in Galaxy a few years ago and was put in book form under the title The Space Merchants. It's a tale of thought control and "security" Anno Domini #, and it's got a rattling good story, competent writing, and some very pertinent ideas, science-fictionwise and otherwise. Don't miss it! Weapon Makers ) by A. E. van Vogt. Ace Books, #c combination from Ace at the usual bargain price. The van Vogt is as magnificent a piece of superscience whoopdedoo as it was when it first appeared in Astounding in #. As I said in my review of the hardbound edition in the July # Galaxy, it is genuinely "star stuff." The new and never before published Leinster is completely up to his usual standard: a vivid, galloping melodrama based on his favorite theme of alternate worlds. In this one, tyrants from the "other" world penetrate ours and, by means of a typically Leinsterian electronic gadget, they almost paralyze (literally) the whole of the U.S.A. A first-rate example of the you-can't-put-itdown school. Edited by Anne Fremantle. Noonday Press, # called, are only too often disappointing in their leadenness of style and their dated outlook. This cannot be said of either of these quite remarkably contemporary theological fantasies, which were published in the Nineteenth Century. Lilith in particular is a fascinating item for a science fiction audience; along with its symbolism and its moral allegorizing comes an astonishing amount of "machinery" which antedates many of our most cherished science-fictional techniques by over half a century. The modus operand i of this story is based on (Murray Leinster, hold your breath!) the concept of a parallel world, into which one can enter through "glowing portals" or -- believe it or not -- correctly polarized mirrors ! For an # parson who, in addition, was a good friend of Lewis Carroll (who never used any polarization to get Alice through her looking glass!), the science fiction "realism"' is almost incredible. Furthermore, the book is written with excellent taste and clarity of style. The reader will, I suppose, be as bewildered as I by some of the author's short-hand metaphysics, the cryptic nature of some of his events -- but even so, this combination of Pilgrim's Progress (a great fairy tale!), Alice in Wonderland, and the work of C. S. Lewis (Perelandria, etc.), is a fascinating piece of work. Lewis, incidentally, has stated that MacDonald had a decisive influence on his own writing. Phantastes is almost as good, though, being much earlier in composition, it does not have quite the maturity of vision and sureness of hand that Lilith has. It is also nowhere near as astonishing a prevision of modern science fiction as is the later book. But neither is of merely antiquarian interest. They really hold your attention. MacDonald is a genuine discovery and very definitely worth your time. by Robert W. Chambers. Shroud Publishers, # antiques. The present novelet was written by the author of The King in Yellow (which I have always found offensively dull) dull! As a fantasy mood piece it's excellent, though as science fiction it's silly. The tale tells of a Chinese gold-making sorcerer transplanted to an estate in, say, rural New York, where gentlemen farmer hunting is a way of life. The Oriental fakir tries to undermine our economy with fairy gold. The story is told with such verisimilitude that, even though you know all along that it is as phony as a #-cent piece, it really grabs you up and carries you along. Jack Finney. Dell Books, #c wrong with this novel, which was first serialized in Collier's, except that it has been done again and again and again. Too many s-f novels lack outstanding originality, but this one lacks it to an outstanding degree. Of course it is competently written (Finney is always an authentic stylist) and swiftly paced. #  The plot revolves around a small town in California where people seem to be being "taken over" by some sort of -- well, thing. It reminds me a bit of Heinlein's Puppet Masters, though without any of his oomph. But it's worth #c. (Star Rangers) by Andre Norton. Ace Books, #c ' though overwritten, overlong for the material, and a bit aimless in plot, is still worth your attention, if only for the mood of terror it evokes. Dr. Nourse, expert in the ways of psychiatry, has turned out a thriller of a mad world in which the madness is based on the damage that can be done by men possessed of extrasensory perception gene-linked with insanity. At moments, the book can really pull you through knotholes. The Norton tale, originally published as a juvenile, is still good, simple, uncomplicated science fiction. Rein. John Day, # authors' inexperience and this is no exception. The whole story takes place in one of New York's subways, in which a handful of survivors of some holocaust (probably atomic) struggle in separate groups down the pitchblack underground and finally, when all are together, defeat an attempt by a ten-cent tyrant to run their lives for them. It's a graphic job of description and some of the characters are eloquently presented; but the doomful earnestness gets so badly in the way that you are likely to end up being bored. Arthur Eshbach. Fantasy Press, # T regret to report that this collection of nine novelets and short stories by old-timer Eshbach is another of those stones that should have been left unturned. The ideas no longer have any originality and the style is an almost perfect example of the early days of science fiction. I would have been happy if I could have made a better report about the work of a man who has done so much, in other ways, for the field. I'm truly sorry I can't. Gnome Press, # T HE story, which deals with undersea uranium mining, is well plotted, well written, full of exciting incidents and rich imagination -- all one would ask of a satisfying juvenile. And yet I'm unhappy with it. Why? And do I have the right to impose adult moral standards on a book for youngsters? As a grownup who likes the feel of freedom, I detest the petrifying process that military academies put children through. It produces stiff spines, sure, but equally rigid minds. This book has that kind of us-against-theworld attitude. On the other hand, kids view everything in black and white, yay for our side, etc. Which leaves me unhappily aware that primitivism is a necessary precondition to civilization. End of sermon.      The Amateurs The ultimate show demanded the ultimate in showmanship -- now if only Mr. Sims could measure up! as though they had walked along a hundred corridors, and as he followed Mr. Hoode, he felt as though he were taking the last walk to the gallows or the electric chair. When the director finally led him outside, Mr. Sims realized with a slight twinge of fear that he hadn't really expected to see daylight again. They were in the rich, rolling parkland at the rear of the palace and walking across the immaculate turf where colored fountains frolicked and shimmered in the sun. Lilting music floated out from a dozen hidden sources. The two men sat down on a seat facing the palace with its towering columns and vast marble steps. "It's a very nice place," Mr. Sims commented, remembering that he hadn't said a word for at least five minutes. "I suppose it's all right," Arthur Hoode agreed, his thin nostrils twitching condescendingly. He was a small, sleek man with a habit of emphasizing his words with airy gestures of his slim hands. "That section of the palace is the part I consider most uninteresting. After all, there's nothing but row upon row of stuffy little rooms where people come to die. And they take a long time doing it, too!" Mr. Sims winced noticeably. "You'll forgive me if I don't appear overly sanctimonious about death," Mr. Hoode said, smiling. "It's just that the other directors and myself decided we must take a realistic view of the situation. A place like this could become pretty morbid, you know, and there's actually no reason why a guest's last hours here shouldn't be pleasant and satisfying." the key words when you spoke of Sunnylands Palace, Mr. Sims thought grimly. Everyone used them -- when not going there. The words gave him a hollow, frightened feeling inside, perhaps because they made him remember the first time he had heard them used. "It's a pleasant place and quite satisfying," Dr. Van Stoke had said. "There's no need to think of it as some kind of torture camp." "But why should I go there at all?" Mr. Sims had asked. "I don't want to die. I'm only fifty-six and I've got nine more years left." "Try and understand I'm doing you a good turn," the doctor had said. "You've lived fifty-six good years; in your condition, the last nine won't be so good. You'll have pains, attacks, you won't be able to do anything strenuous. You'll hate to live under those conditions." "I could always give it a try," Mr. Sims had protested. Dr. Van Stoke had frowned bleakly over the tops of his glasses. "I know I'm a friend and family doctor," the frown had said, "but I'm also District Referee under the Euthanasian Legislation and you are becoming a burden to society. So don't make my job any more difficult." He had signed his name at the bottom of the form. And Mr. Sims had had a hollow, anxious feeling ever since. "There's one thing I haven't found out yet," he said to Mr. Hoode. "Is it in order for me to ask how and when I can expect to die?" "Certainly," Mr. Hoode said. "It's the reason I brought you here to talk. Y ou see, anyone sent here under the Legislation is given a completely free choice as to the manner of his departure. Most people, although they realize this, show a distressing lack of imagination when the time comes. They seem unable to think beyond the ordinary methods of taking a pill, or a needle, or a poisoned cocktail." "I can't say I'd thought about it, either," Mr. Sims admitted. "We have a service to assist you," said the director. "We of the Sunnylands staff have discovered what you might call a Philosophy of Dying. For instance, if a man lives an active life, there's no reason why he should be subjected to a sneaking prick of a needle in his sleep just because he reaches the age of sixty-five. We discovered that a few people objected strongly to such methods. There are some people who would prefer to die fighting. We had a couple who chose the firing squad, for instance. Another desired the guillotine and nothing would satisfy him but a ride to his fate in a real tumbril. Because of these -- ah -- pioneers, our advisory bureau has been set up." "You mean you obliged them... with a guillotine and everything?" Mr. Sims asked. "Certainly, though most choose the sneaking, cowardly way out. As far as I am concerned, they died as they lived -- ignominously! It's depressing. We have the best accommodation, food, entertainment, everything the guest requires during his three days here; then they go ahead and die their miserable deaths. Somehow it makes all the luxury seem like pink sugar frosting around a rotten cake. That's why we're always happy to find a guest with the proper spirit." Mr. Hoode said. to the sales talk, wondering absent-mindedly what the director's personal interest was in other people's death. "I took the liberty of looking up your record," Mr. Hoode continued. "I picked you out for a personal talk because I see you led an interesting life." He paused in recollection with a theatrically thoughtful finger pressed to his chin, his eyes gazing skyward. "You made a small fortune in oil in Central America before you were twenty. That was followed by more success in hemelium mining in Northern Canada. An excellent Third World War record, too. Founder of Transcontinental Rocket Lines. Cobuilder of the Venus rocket. Oh, and a dozen other things. Quite a career!" Mr. Sims brightened a little. He smiled modestly. "Too bad you had to come here at fifty-six," Mr. Hoode remarked. "Heaven knows what you might have done with those last nine years. Heart trouble, wasn't it?" "So I've been told," Mr. Sims said, slipping back into his former glum mood. He still did not believe he was a sick man, but perhaps this was because things had moved too fast and he had not been given enough time to get used to the idea. "It's a serious cardiac condition," Dr. Van Stoke had told him at the annual examination, "due to an over-active life. I'll have to recommend you for Sunnylands." And that had been the first mention of the subject. "But I never had heart trouble in my life!" "The graphs show the condition clearly. There's nothing anyone can do to remedy it. I'll have to submit your name." He had protested -- threatened -- pleaded. "Overpopulation! Elimination of needless suffering! Burden to society! Duty to humanity!" The cliches had tripped glibly off the doctor's tongue as he signed the form. "Will you please send in a member of the family? I'll give him the final instructions. Save you the trouble of worrying over little details during the final weeks." Since then, things had moved more swiftly behind the scenes and he had had to do nothing except prepare himself -- or adopt a realistic attitude, as Mr. Hoode would have described it. But he had lived too much to allow him to get used to the idea of dying in two short weeks. He hadn't even started to get realistic about it, which was probably why he could sit talking so calmly about death at that moment. W a climax," the director was saying. "A man like you shouldn't just fade away in one of those little cubicles." He waved a hand in the direction of the shaded windows at the rear of the palace. "You should die magnificently!" "Magnificently?" Mr. Sims repeated. "What did you have in mind?" "It's what you have in mind that counts. I can offer you a lot of advice, but the final choice is yours. For instance, a large number of men like to die in some sort of combat, with guns or swords, or even with animals. We had one man who fought a tiger. Another fulfilled a life-long ambition to play the role of bullfighter. Perhaps I should explain that the government allows each guest a generous sum of money to pay for his departure. As most people do not use one hundredth of this sum, we have a rather large fund at the disposal of those who want to use it. "The bullfighter was a good example," he went on. "We had a large ring built for him. He was given horses, uniforms, picadores, and a bull specially imported from ' Spain. It was a wonderful afternoon." He paused in contemplation of the memory, while Mr. Sims looked on, tactfully refraining from asking the outcome. "Another time, we had a group of old soldiers who wanted to die in battle," Mr. Hoode added. "We built them an old-fashioned concrete blockhouse, then gave them authentic uniforms, machine-guns, grenades and rifles, and had one group attacking and the other defending." "Did they actually volunteer for that?" Mr. Sims asked. "Of course, and I'll swear they enjoyed every minute of it. Right down to the last man. As a matter of fact, we're planning the same thing on a larger scale with a reenactment of Custer's Last Stand to be held in #. One of the men in Research is working full time on that project. So far, we have a tentative list of # names. It'll be held in the park over there." He waved gaily in the direction of the quiet meadow which would one day become another Little Big Horn. Mr. Sims moved along the seat slightly, as though his companion had started to smell. It was as if, for the first time, he had noticed the glazed, visionary look in Mr. Hoode's eye. The director, he realized, would be capable of reenacting Hiroshima if given the required number of volunteers. "I'll have to leave you, I'm afraid," said Mr. Hoode, standing up. "But if you'd like to think the matter over some more, I can offer you a fine selection of books to read about famous deaths, duels, acts of heroism and such throughout history." "It's an interesting notion," Mr. Sims said. "I'll think about it." director all that day and all the following morning. He tried hard to convince himself that this was because he disliked the other's bloodthirsty tendencies, although he knew the truth was that his choice of departure was a cowardly one. Nevertheless, he argued with himself, it was his choice, his death, and his mind was made up. Besides, he felt lonely and this might be an opportunity to see the family again, even though they probably wouldn't like it. It was the director who finally located Mr. Sims. "Are you enjoying your stay here?" he asked heartily. Mr. Sims winced as though the cold hand of death itself had slapped him on the back. "Have you come to any decision yet?" Mr. Sims nodded. "Yes, I looked at the book last night and decided on Socrates. Just a simple cup of hemlock." A slight frown shadowed the director's features. Was it contempt, Mr. Sims wondered, or disappointment because he had failed in his attempts to make poisoning seem a socially inferior way of dying? Nothing glamorous about such a departure, he realized. No disdainful refusal of the blindfold when gazing bravely into the leveled muzzles of the firing squad. No bullfight, armed combat, duel or ferocious carnivores. The director shrugged. "Well, it's tranquil and dignified, I suppose," he conceded finally. Then the practical streak in his nature came to the forefront and his mind ran quickly over the possibilities. "If I remember correctly, Socrates died in the company of a number of good friends. They discussed philosophy." "I'll have my family instead. I've no idea what we'll talk about. Their names are on this list." "It's irregular -- " "Nevertheless, I want them here." "All right," said Mr. Hoode, disappointed. "I'll send for them today. I'll also see the lab about some hemlock and something authentic to hold it in -- an amphora or whatever the Greeks used. By the way, I'm not too well acquainted with Socrates. Are there any unusual details?" "If there are, forget them," Mr. Sims said. "The family and the hemlock will be sufficient." Mr. Hoode sniffed peevishly. "As you wish. Be ready tomorrow." T HE rough woven garment was a concession to Mr. Hoode, who said it was Grecian, and Mr. Sims wore it to make up for any annoyance he may have caused the director. It was rather itchy and much too warm, he thought, as he waited by the fountain at the far end of the park. The hemlock was in a bronze goblet on the parapet beside him. The family would be here soon. He wondered how they would feel about being dragged way out here. They arrived a half hour later: Cousin Nat, his two nephews, George and Alec, their wives, and George's five-year-old, Mike. Mr. Hoode was also with them, but he left the party as soon as he had shown them where Mr. Sims was waiting. The meeting was restrained. Clearly they were not happy about making the trip. There were no smiles of greeting; only young Mike showed any distinct interest. He sat down at Mr. Sims' feet, playing havoc with the lawn with a toy dagger. "Where's the poison, Grandpa?" he asked eagerly. Mr. Sims lifted the boy up on to his knee and rumpled his hair playfully in a feeble attempt to ease the tension. The others stood around silently watching. No one made any move to sit down. It was their way of telling him they hoped they wouldn't have to wait too too long. Mr. Sims suddenly wished he were in one of the quiet rooms of the palace, alone. Cousin Nat was the first one to break the awkward silence. "Who in hell was that madman who brought us over here?" "That's Mr. Hoode, the director," Mr. Sims explained. "He's quite an artist in his way." "He's insane!" Nat said flatly. "All the way over, he talked about nothing but dying. Told us we could come here and die any way we wanted. If any of us wanted to go out like Early Christians, he would be only too happy to set up an arena for us. He even asked me if I wanted to put my name down for a rehash of Custer's Last Stand for #. With real bullets!" He passed his hand nervously through his thinning hair. "For God's sake, he must think I want to get scalped!" "Didn't Dr. Van Stoke come with you?" Mr. Sims asked. "I wanted him to see the place he sends everyone." "He went on an ocean cruise," young Mike said. "Dr. Van Stoke? You mean he left his practice?" "Yeah," the little boy answered. "Another doctor took his place." Mr. Sims turned to the others for corroboration. "Is that right? I didn't think Van Stoke was a rich man. He was only around forty." "He went with the money Uncle Nat gave him," the boy said. "That'll be enough, Michael," Nat ordered sternly. mistaken, Mike. Uncle Nat wouldn't give the doctor any money. He hasn't even got enough for himself." "But he quit his job yesterday," said the boy. Nat's voice cut in sharply. "That's enough from you. You know what they say about little boys." Mr. Sims looked steadily at Nat as though seeing him for the first time. His cousin gazed back, half-sullen, half-defiant. "It certainly didn't take you long to get your hands on the money," Mr. Sims said. "It looks as if I can't die soon enough. But I still don't see where Dr. Van Stoke comes into -- " Then suddenly there was no need to ask. The answer was clear on Nat's tight, sullen face. Mr. Sims turned to the others for help and froze as identical expressions stared back coldly from each of them, piercing him with their long-hidden envy of his success, their pent-up hatred of their dependence on him. A choking, frightened sound came from deep in Mr. Sims' throat. "For God's sake! How much did you pay him to put me away?" He jumped quickly off the parapet, knocking the little boy to the ground, and hurled the hemlock into the fountain. He pushed his way past them and started to run. Then the woven garment twisted about his legs. He tried to lift it clear, but his foot caught in the hem and he stumbled. Nat was the first to move. He picked up the little toy dagger and fell on the struggling man. Without hesitating, he plunged the knife between Mr. Sims' shoulder blades and held it till the older man was still. Then he stabbed again, without malice, without any emotion... again and again... The blade made an odd ripping sound each time it pierced the woven robe. All of them looked away. One of the women leaned over the parapet, sick. " Nat stood up and cleaned the knife on the grass and then motioned them all back toward the palace. Mr. Hoode met them as they walked through the foyer. "Ah, Socrates' friends!" he said to Nat, who was dabbing at the front of his coat with a piece of tissue. "Was everything in order?" "There was a slight change of plan," Nat said. "He decided at the last moment to make it Julius Caesar." He held the knife up in explanation. "Julius Caesar! But -- " But they were gone, filing out through the front door, the women sobbing in their handkerchiefs. No one looked back. The door hissed quietly shut. Mr. Hoode started at the sound and then walked slowly into his office, seized by,a cold, limp rage. From his window, he could see them going down the driveway. "Amateurs," he spat after them with deep disgust. "Damned, lousy, unimaginative amateurs!" Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England I Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library. I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. All Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. A short time after Crown Publishers set aside # first edition copies of this dazzling literary one-man show -- to be inscribed personally for Galaxy readers copies. Crown, therefore, has set aside an equal number of first edition copies -- also to be inscribed personally for Galaxy There has never been another science fiction collection like this! Twelve truly important stories are combined with vivid notes from the author's own working journal, giving each thematic origin, possible development, actual development... and the author's present evaluation! You'll have a fascinating insight into perhaps the keenest creative and editorial mind in the field today! But let's clear up the inscription business. Only Galaxy readers can have these inscribed copies; they will not be available elsewhere. But remember that the first # copies zipped right out of the mailing room and these are likely to do the same. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York #, New York Rush me my autographed copy of H. L. Gold's collection of top stories. Enclosed find my #. Name... Address City State The world, completely insured, was better off than ever before, yet why had there been a little war? Why was Rena uninsurable? Why were the vaults huge enough to hold the entire human race? romantic, war-ravaged Naples, on an errand of high adventure in the service of -- The Company, the giant combine of insurance corporations which protects the world by insuring every one of its activities. It is the finest work of mankind; the Company has once and for all called a halt to war, poverty, disease and danger, by the most modern application of actuarial methods. Everyone knows this to be true, but I find that in Naples there are persons superstitionridden enough to doubt it. Among them is a girl -- Rena, who thinks there is something sinister in the fact that Naples has just passed through a war -- without recognizing how tiny it was -- and that she and her father are in want because they are uninsurables, who hints that my wife died of a preventable disease, which is nonsense, of course, because -- Marianna, my wife, had been terrified of the vaults and had chosen to risk being one of the very few malignancy cases that don't respond to treatment. And she'd died unnecessarily because she had been one of the few. Luigi Zorchi confuses and alarms me even more than Rena, however. He makes a career of collecting on accident claims. There is nothing fraudulent in his accidents -- when he receives damages for a lost limb, the limb is actually lost -- but he possesses the capacity of regrowing severed members or organs to the same degree that a salamander has! Worse still, I am dismayed by the insistence of Zorchi and Rena that the Company is corrupt and cynical. The Clinics are their particular target. These are the vaults for suspended animation, where persons suffering from incurable diseases are kept until such time as medical science can cure them, or to allow radiation and such to go below the danger point. How could so humane a project possibly be considered evil? Gogarty, the Regional Director of the Company, is a problem. The Company shouldn't tolerate anyone so given to comfort and luxury instead of service. Why does it? Hammond, the Caserta area Sub-director, seems better disciplined at first, but disappears from my side under odd circumstances. But just when my confusion is at its worst, good news comes in the form of -- Underwriter Defoe, a high executive of the Company and my late wife's distant relative, who got me into Cadet School in the first place. I hurry to meet him at the Clinic, hoping he will straighten me out. But what he has to tell me instead is blunt and shocking: Hammond's disappearance was due to murder! V his faults, but he was an officer of the Company and a man I had met. Dead! I asked, "How? What happened?" "Perhaps you can tell me that, Thomas," said Defoe. I sat startledly erect, shocked by the significance of the words. I said hotly, "Damn it, Mr. Defoe, you know I had nothing to do with this! I've been all over the whole thing with you and I thought you were on my side! Just because I said a lot of crazy things after Marianna died doesn't mean I'm anti-Company -- and it certainly doesn't mean I'd commit murder. If you think that, then why the devil did you put me in cadet school?" Defoe merely raised his hand by bending the wrist slightly; it was enough to stop me, though. "Gently, Thomas. I don't think you did it -- that much should be obvious. And I put you in cadet school because I had work for you." "But you said I knew something I was holding back." Defoe waggled the hand reprovingly. "I said you might be able to tell me who killed Hammond. And so you might -- but not yet. I count heavily on you for help in this area, Thomas. There are two urgent tasks to be done. Hammond's death -- " he paused and shrugged, and the shrug was all of Hammond's epitaph -- "is only an incident in a larger pattern; we need to work out the pattern itself." He glanced again at the typed list Susan had handed him. "I find that I can stay in the Naples area for only a short time; the two tasks must be done before I leave. I shall handle one myself. The other I intend to delegate to you. "First we have the unfortunate situation in regard to the state of public morale. Unfortunate? Perhaps I should say disgraceful. There is quite obviously a nucleus of troublemakers at work, Thomas, and Gogarty has not had the wit to find them and take the appropriate steps. Someone else must. Second, this Zorchi is an unnecessary annoyance. I do not propose to let the Company be annoyed, Thomas. Which assignment would you prefer?" I said hesitantly, "I don't know if Mr. Gogarty would like me to -- " "Gogarty is an ass! If he had not blundered incessantly since he took over the district, I should not have had to drop important work to come here." I thought for a second. Digging out an undercover ring of troublemakers didn't sound particularly easy. On the other hand, I had already tried my luck with Zorchi. "Perhaps you'd better try Zorchi," I said. "Try?" Defoe allowed himself to look surprised. "As you wish. I think you will learn something from watching me handle it, Thomas. Shall we join Signore Zorchi now?" "He's here?" Defoe said impatiently, "Of course, Thomas. Come along." too. He was in a small anteroom, sitting on a hard wooden chair; as we passed him, I saw the hostility in his eyes. He didn't say a word. Beyond him, in an examination room, was Zorchi, slim, naked and hideous, sitting on the edge of a surgical cot and trying not to look ill at ease. He had been shaved from head to knee stumps. Esthetically, at least, it had been a mistake. I never saw such a collection of skin eruptions on a human. He burst out, faster than my language-school Italian could follow, in a stream of argument and abuse. Defoe listened icily for a moment, then shut him up in Italian as good as his own. "Answer questions; otherwise keep quiet. I will not warn you again." I don't know if even Defoe could have stopped Zorchi under normal conditions. But there is something about being naked in the presence of fully dressed opponents that saps the will; and I guessed, too, that the shaving had mhde Zorchi feel nakeder than ever before in his life. I could see why he'd worn a beard and I wished he still had it. "Dr. Lawton," said Defoe, "have you completed your examination of the insured?" A youngish medical officer of the Company said, "Yes, sir. I have the slides and reports right here; they just came up from the laboratory." He handed a stapled collection of photographic prints and papers to Defoe, who took his own good time to examine them while the rest of us stood and waited. Defoe finally put the papers down and nodded. "In a word, this bears out our previous discussion." Lawton nodded. "If you will observe his legs, you will see that the skin healing is complete; already a blastema has formed and -- " "I know," Defoe said impatiently. "Signore Zorchi, I regret to say that I have bad news for you." Zorchi waved his hand defiantly. "You are the bad news." Defoe ignored him. "You have a grave systemic imbalance. There is great danger of serious ill effects." "To what?" snarled Zorchi. "The Company's bank account?" "No, Zorchi. To your life." Defoe shook his head. "There are indications of malignancy." "Malignancy?" Zorchi looked startled. "What kind? Do you mean cancer?" "Exactly." Defoe patted his papers. "You see, Zorchi, healthy human flesh does not grow like a salamander's tail." T HE phone rang; impeccable in everything, Defoe waited while Dr. Lawton nervously answered it. Lawton said a few short words, listened for a moment and hung up, looking worried. He said: "The crowd outside is getting rather large. That was the expediter-captain from the main gate. He says -- " "I presume he has standing orders," Defoe said. "We need not concern ourselves with that, need we?" "Well -- " The doctor looked unhappy. "Now, Zorchi," Defoe went on, dismissing Lawton utterly, "do you enjoy life?" "I despise it!" Zorchi spat to emphasize how much. "But you cling to it. You would not like to die, would you? Worse still, you would not care to live indefinitely with carcinoma eating you piece by piece." Zorchi just glowered suspiciously. "Perhaps we can cure you, however," Defoe went on reflectively. "It is by no means certain. I don't want to raise false hopes. But there is the possibility -- " "The possibility that you will cure me of collecting on my policies, eh?" Zorchi demanded belligerently. "You are crazy, Defoe. Never!" Defoe looked at him for a thoughtful moment. To Lawton, he said: "Have you this man's claim warranty? It has the usual application for medical treatment, I presume?" He nodded as Lawton confirmed it. "You see, Mr. Zorchi? As a matter of routine, no claim can be paid unless the policyholder submits to our medical care. You signed the usual form, so -- " "One moment! You people never put me through this before! Did you change the contract on me?" "No, Signore Zorchi. The same contract, but this time we will enforce it. I think I should warn you of something, though." He riffled through the papers and found a photographic print to show Zorchi. "This picture isn't you, Signore. It is a picture of a newt. The doctor will explain it to you." The print was an eight-by-ten glossy of a little lizard with something odd about its legs. Puzzled, Zorchi held it as though the lizard were alive and venomous. But as the doctor spoke, the puzzlement turned into horror and fury. "What Mr. Defoe means," said Lawton, "is that totipotency -- that is, the ability to regenerate lost tissues, as you can, even when entire members are involved -- is full of unanswered riddles. We have found, for instance, that X-ray treatment on your leg helps a new leg to form rapidly, just as it does on the leg of the salamanders. The radiation appears to stimulate the formation of the blastema, which -- well, never mind the technical part. It speeds things up." His eyes gleamed with scientific interest. "But we tried the experiment of irradiating limbs that had not been severed. It worked the same way, oddly enough. New limbs were generated even though the old ones were still there. That's why the salamander in the photo has four hands on one of its limbs -- nine legs altogether, counting that half-formed one just beside the tail. Curious-looking little beast, isn't it?" only mention, Signore, that the standard treatment for malignancy is X-radiation." Zorchi's eyes flamed -- rage battling it out with terror. He said shrilly, "But you can't make a laboratory animal out of me! I'm a policyholder!" "Nature did it, Signore Zorchi, not us," Defoe said. Zorchi's eyes rolled up in his head and closed; for a moment, I thought he had fainted and leaped forward to catch him rather than let his legless body crash to the floor. But he hadn't fainted. He was muttering, half aloud, sick with fear, "For the love of Mary, Defoe! Please, please, I beg you! Please!" It was too much for me. I said, shaking with rage, "Mr. Defoe, you can't force this man to undergo experimental radiation that might make a monster out of him! I insist that you reconsider!" Defoe threw his head back. "What, Thomas?" he snapped. I said firmly, "He has no one here to advise him -- I'll take the job. Zorchi, listen to me! You've signed the treatment application and he's right enough about that -- you can't get out of it. But you don't have to take this treatment! Every policyholder has the right to refuse any new and unguaranteed course of treatment, no matter what the no VI circumstances. All you've got to do is agree to go into suspension in the va -- in the clinic here, pending such time as your condition can be infallibly cured. Do it, man! Don't let them make you a freak -- demand suspension! What have you got to lose?" I never saw a man go so to pieces as Zorchi, when he realized how nearly Defoe had trapped him into becoming a guinea pig. Whimpering thanks to me, he hastily signed the optional agreement for suspended animation and, as quickly as I could, I left him there. Defoe followed me. We passed the secretary in the anteroom while Dr. Lawton was explaining the circumstances to him; the man was stricken with astonishment, almost too paralyzed to sign the witnessing form Defoe had insisted on. I knew the form well -- I had been about to sign one for Marianna when, at the last moment, she decided against the vaults in favor of the experimental therapy that hadn't worked. Outside in the hall, Defoe stopped and confronted me. I braced myself for the blast to end all blasts. I could hardly believe my eyes. The great stone face was smiling! "Thomas," he said inexplicably, "that was masterful. I couldn't have done better myself." W E walked silently through the huge central waiting room of the clinic. There should have been scores around, seeking information -- there was, I knew, still a steady shipment of suspendees coming in from the local hospitals; I had seen it myself. But there were hardly more than a dozen or so persons in sight, with a single clerk checking their forms and answering their questions. It was too quiet. Defoe thought so, too; I saw his frown. Now that I had had a few moments to catch my breath, I realized that I had seen a master judoist at work. It was all out of the textbooks -- as a fledgling Claims Adjuster, I had had the basic courses in handling difficult cases -- but not one man in a as skillfully and successfully as Defoe did with Zorchi. Push a man hard and he will lunge back; push hirn hard enough and persistently enough, and he will lunge back farther than his vision carries him, right to the position you planned for him in the first place. And I, of course, had been only a tool in Defoe's hand; by interceding for Zorchi, I had tricked the man into the surrender Defoe wanted. And he had complimented me for it! I couldn't help wondering, though, whether the compliment Defoe gave me was part of some still subtler scheme... Defoe nodded curtly to the expediter-captain at the door, who saluted and pressed the teleswitch that summoned Defoe's limousine. business in Rome and must leave at once. You will have to certify Zorchi's suspension this afternoon; since I won't be here, you'll have to come back to the clinic for it. After that, Thomas, you can begin your assignment." I said uncertainly, "What -- where shall I begin?" One eyebrow lifted a trifle. "Where? Wherever you think proper, Thomas. Or must I handle this myself?" The proper answer, and the one I longed to make, was "Yes." Instead I said, "Not at all, Mr. Defoe. It's only that I didn't even know there was an undercover group until you told me about it a few moments ago; I don't know exactly where to start. Gogarty never mentioned -- " "Gogarty," he cut in, "is very likely to be relieved as District Administrator before long. I should like to replace him with someone already on the scene -- " he glanced at me to be sure I understood -- "provided, that is, that I can find someone of proven competence. Someone who has the ability to handle this situation without the necessity of my personal intervention." The limousine arrived then, with an armed expediter riding beside the chauffeur. Defoe allowed me to open the door for him and follow him in. "Do you understand me?" he asked as the driver started off. "I think so," I said. "Good. I do not suppose that Gogarty has given you any information about the malcontents in this area." "No." "It may be for the best; his information is clearly not good." Defoe stared broodingly out the window at the silent groups of men and women on the grass before the clinic. "Your information is there," he said as they passed out of sight. "Learn what you can. Act when you know enough. And, Thomas -- " "Yes?" "Have you given thought to your future?" I shifted uncomfortably. "Well, I've only been a Claims Adjuster a little while, you know. I suppose that perhaps I might eventually get promoted, even become a District Administrator -- " He looked at me impersonally. "Dream higher," he advised. I stood w tc hmg after Defoe's limousine, from the marquee of the hotel where he had left me to take a roo m and freshen up. Dream higher. He had the gift of intoxicati n Higher than a District Administrator! It could mean only -- the Hom e Office. Well, it was not impossible, after all. Th e Home Office jobs had to go to someone; the supermen who held them now -- the Defoes and the Carmodys and the dozen or more others who headed up departments or filled seats on the Council of Underwriters -- couldn't live forever. And the jobs had to be filled by someone. Why not fne? Only one reason, really. I wa s n t a career man. I hadn't had the early academy training froP adolescence on; I had come t the service of the Company it?elf relatively late in life. The calendar legislated against me. Of course, I thought to myself, I was in a pretty good position, in a way, be cause of Defoe's evident interest in me. With him helping and counseling me, it might be easier. I thought that and then I stopped myself, shocked. I was thinking in terms of personal preferment. That was not the Company way! If I had learned anything in my training, I had learned that Advancement was on merit alone. Advancement had to be on merit alone... else the Company became an oligarchy, deadly and self-perpetuating. Shaken, I sat in the dingy little hotel room that was the best the town of Anzio had for me and opened my little Black Book. I thumbed through the fine-printed pages of actuarial tables and turned to the words of Millen Carmody, Chief Underwriter, in the preface. They were the words that had been read to me and the others at our graduation at the Home Office, according to the tradition: Remember always that the Company serves humanity, not the reverse. The Company's work is the world's workThe Company can end, forever, the menace of war and devastation; but it must not substitute a tyranny of its own. Corruption breeds tyrants. Corruption has no place in the Company. They were glorious words. I read them over again, and stared at the portrait of Underwriter Carmody that was the frontispiece of the handbook. It was a face to inspire trust -- wise and human, grave, but with warmth in the wide-spaced eyes. Millen Carmody was not a man you could doubt. As long as men like him ran the Company -- and he was the boss of them all, the Chief Underwriter, the highest position the Company had to offer -- there could be no question of favoritism or corruption. cleaned up a little and went back to the clinic. There was trouble in the air, no question of it. More expediters were in view, scattered around the entrance, a dozen, cautious yards away from the nearest knots of civilians. Cars with no official company markings, but with armor-glass so thick that it seemed yellow, were parked at the corners. And people were everywhere. People who were quiet. Too quiet. There were some women -- but not enough to make the proportion right. And there were no children. I could almost feel the thrust of their eyes as I entered the clinic. Inside, the aura of strain was even denser. If anything, the place looked more normal than it had earlier; there were more people. The huge waiting room was packed and a dozen sweating clerks were interviewing long lines of persons. But here, as outside, the feeling was wrong; the crowds weren't noisy enough; they lacked the nervous boisterousness they should have had. Dr. Lawton looked worried. He greeted me and showed me to a small room near the elevators. There was a cocoon of milky plastic on a wheeled table; I looked closer, and inside the cocoon, recognizable through the clear plastic over the face, was the waxlike body of Luigi Zorchi. The eyes were closed and he was completely still. I would have thought him dead if I had not known he was under the influence of the drugs used in the suspension of life in the vaults. I said: "Am I supposed to identify him or something?" "We know who he is," Lawton snorted. "Sign the commitment, that's all." I signed the form he handed me, attesting that Luigi Zorchi, serial number such-and-such, had requested and was being granted immobilization and suspension in lieu of cash medical benefits. They rolled the stretcher-cart away, with its thick foam-plastic sack containing the inanimate Zorchi. "Anything else?" I asked. Lawton shook his head moodily. "Nothing you can help with. I told Defoe this was going to happen!" "What?" He glared at me. "Man, didn't you just come in through the main entrance? Didn't you see that mob?" "Well, I wouldn't call it a mob," I began. "You wouldn't now," he broke in. "But you will soon enough. They're working themselves up. Or maybe they're waiting for something. But it means trouble, I promise, and I warned Defoe about it. And he just stared at me as if I was some kind of degenerate." afraid of? Right outside, you've got enough expediters to fight a war." "Afraid? Me?" He looked insulted. "Do you think I'm worried about my own skin, Wills? No, sir. But do you realize that we have suspendees here who need protection? Eighty thousand of them. A mob like that -- " "Eighty thousand?" I stared at him. The war had lasted only a few weeks! "Eighty thousand. A little more, if anything. And every one of them is a ward of the Company as long as he's suspended. Just think of the damage suits, Wills." I said, still marveling at the enormous number of casualties out of that little war, "Surely the suspendees are safe here, aren't they?" "Not against mobs. The vaults can handle anything that might happen in the way of disaster. I don't think an H-bomb right smack on top of them would disturb more than the top two or three decks at most. But you never know what mobs will do. If they once get in here -- And Defoe wouldn't listen to me!" As I went back into the hall, passing the main entrance, the explosion burst. I stared out over the heads of the dreadfully silent throng in the entrance hall, looking toward the glass doors, as was everyone else inside. Beyond the doors, an arc of expediters was retreating toward us; they paused, fired a round of gas-shells over the heads of the mob outside, and retreated again. Then the mob was on them, in a burst of screaming fury. Hidden gas guns appeared, and clubs, and curious things that looked like slingshots. The crowd broke for the entrance. The line of expediters wavered but held. There was a tangle of hand-to-hand fights, each one a vicious struggle. But the expediters were professionals; outnumbered forty to one, they savagely chopped down their attackers with their hands, their feet and the stocks of their guns. The crowd hesitated. No shot had yet been fired, except toward the sky. The air whined and shook. From low on the horizon, a needle-nosed jet thundered in. A plane! Aircraft never flew in the restricted area over the Company's major installations. Aircraft didn't barrel in at treetop height, fast and low, without a hint of the recognition numbers every aircraft had to carry. From its belly sluiced a silvery milt of explosives as it came in over the heads of the mob, peeled off and up and away, then circled out toward the sea for another approach. A hail of tiny blasts rattled in the clear space between the line of expediters and the entrance. The big doors shook and cracked. T HE expediters stared whitefaced at the ship. And the crowd began firing. An illegal hard-pellet gun peppered the glass of the doors with pockmarks. The guarding line of expediters was simply overrun. Inside the waiting room, where I stood frozen, hell broke out. The detachment of expediters, supervising the hundreds inside leaped for the doors to fight back the surging mob. But the mob inside the doors, the long orderly lines before the interviewing clerks, now split into a hundred screamSome rushed toward the doors; some broke for the halls of the vaults themselves. I couldn't see what was going on outside any more. I was swamped in a rush of women panicked out of their senses. Panic was like a plague. I saw doctors and orderlies struggling against the tide, a few scattered expediters battling to turn back the terrified rush. But I was swept along ahead of them all, barely able to keep my feet. An expediter fell a yard from me. I caught up his gun and began striking out. For this was what Lawton had feared -- the mob loose in the vaults! I raced down a side corridor, around a corner, to the banked elevators that led to the deeps of the clinic. There was fighting there, but the elevator doors were closed. Someone had had the wit to lock them against the mob. But there were stairs; I saw an emergency door only a few yards away. I hesitated only long enough to convince myself, through the fear, that my duty was to the Company and to the protection of its helpless wards below. I bolted through the door and slammed it behind me, spun the levers over and locked it. In a moment, I was running down a long ramp toward the cool immensities of the vaults. If Lawton had not mentioned the possible consequences of violence to the suspendees, I suppose I would have worried only about my own skin. But here I was. I stared around, trying to get my bearings. I was in a sort of plexus of hallways, an open area with doors on all sides leading off to the vaults. I was alone; the noise from above and outside was cut off completely. No, I was not alone! I heard running footsteps, light and quick, from another ramp. I turned in time to see a figure speed down it, pause only a second at its base, and disappear into one of the vaults. It was a woman, but not a woman in nurse's uniform. Her back had been to me, yet I could see that one hand held a gas gun, the other something glittering and small. I followed, not quite believing what I had seen. For I had caught only a glimpse of her face, far off and from a bad angle -- but I was as sure as ever I could be that it was Rena dell'Angelai  hurrying against time, hurrying toward a destination that obsessed her thoughts. I followed quietly enough, but I think I might have thundered like an elephant herd and still been unheard. We passed a strange doublewalled door with a warning of some sort lettered on it in red; then she swung into a side corridor where the passage was just wide enough for one. On either side were empty tiers of shelves waiting for suspendees. I speeded up to reach the corner before she could disappear. But she wasn't hurrying now. She had come to a bay of shelves where a hundred or so bodies lay wrapped in their plastic sacks, each to his own shelf. Dropping to her knees, she began checking the tags on the cocoons at the lowest level. She whispered something sharp and imploring. Then, straightening abruptly, she dropped the gas gun and took up the glittering thing in her other hand. Now I could see that it was a hypodermic kit in a crystal case. From it she took a little flask of purplish liquid and, fingers shaking, shoved the needle of the hypodermic into the plastic stopper of the vial. Moving closer, I said: "It won't work, Rena." She jumped and swung to face me, holding the hypodermic like a stiletto. Seeing my face, she gasped and wavered. I stepped by her and looked down at the tag on the cocooned figure. Benedetto dell' Angela, Napoli, it said, and then the long string of serial numbers that identified him. It was what I had guessed. "It won't work," I repeated. "Be smart about this, Rena. You him." Rena half-closed her eyes. She whispered, "Would death be worse than this?" I hadn't expected this sort of superstitious nonsense from her. I started to answer, but she had me off guard. In a flash, she raked the glittering needle toward my face and, as I stumbled back involuntarily, her other hand lunged for the gas gun I had thrust into my belt. Only luck saved me. Not being in a holster, the gun's front sight caught and I had the moment I needed to cuff her away. She gasped and spun up against the tiers of shelves. The filled hypodermic shattered against the floor, gleaming pool of fluorescence. stood erect. There were tears in her eyes again. She said in a detached voice: "Well done, Mr. Wills." "Are you crazy?" I crackled. "This is your father. Do you want to kill him? It takes a doctor to revive him. You're an educated woman, Rena, not a witch-ridden peasant! You know better than this!" She laughed -- a cold laugh. "Educated! A peasant woman would have kicked you to death and succeeded. I'm educated, all right! Two hundred men, a plane, twenty women risking themselves up there to get me through the door. All our plans -- and I can't remember a way to kill you in time. I'm too educated to hate you, Claims Adjuster Wills!" She choked on the words. Then she shook her head dully. "Go ahead, turn me in and get it over with." I took a deep breath. Turn her in? I hadn't thought that far ahead. True, that was the obvious thing to do; she had confessed that the whole riot outside' was a diversion to get her down in the vaults, and anyone who could summon up that sort of organized anti-Company violence was someone who automatically became my natural enemy. But perhaps I was too educated and too soft as well... There had been tears on her face, over her father's body. I could not remember having heard that conspirators cried. And I sympathized a little. I had known what it was like to weep over the body of someone I loved. Despite our difficulties, despite everything, I would have done anything in the world to bring Marianna back to life. I couldn't. Rena -- she believed -- could revive her father. I didn't want to turn her in. I shouldn't turn her in. It was my duty not to turn her in, for hadn't Defoe himself ordered me to investigate the dissident movement of which she was clearly a part? Wouldn't it be easier for me to win her confidence, and trick her into revealing its secrets, than to have her arrested? The answer, in all truth, was No. She was not a trickable girl, I was sure. But it was, at least, a rationale, and I clung to it. will you make a bargain?" She stared drearily. "Bargain?" "I have a room at the Umberto. If I get you out of here, will you go to my room and wait for me there?" Her eyes narrowed sharply for a second. She parted her lips to say something, but only nodded. "Your word, Rena? I don't want to turn you in." She looked helplessly at the purple spilled pool on the floor, and wistfully at the sack that held her father. Then she said, "My word on it. But you're a fool, Tom!" "I know it!" I admitted. I hurried her back up the ramp, back toward the violence upstairs. If it was over, I would have to talk her out of the clinic, somehow cover up the fact that she had been in the vaults. If it was still going on, though -- It was. We blended ourselves with the shouting, rioting knots. I dragged her into the main waiting room, saw her thrust through the doors. Things were quieting even then. And I saw two women hastening toward her through the fight, and I do not think it was a coincidence that the steam went out of the rioters almost at once. I stayed at the clinic until everything was peaceful again, though it was hours. I wasn't fooling myself. I didn't have a shred of real reason for not having her arrested. If she had information to give, I was not the type to trick it out of her -- even if she really was waiting at the Umberto, which was, in itself, not likely. If I had turned her in, Defoe would have had the information out of her in moments; but not I. She was an enemy of the Company. And I was unable to betray her. be Chief Medical Officer for Anzio Clinic, said grimly: "This wasn't an accident. It was planned. The question is, why?" The expediters had finished driving the rioters out of the clinic itself, and gas guns were rapidly dispersing the few left outside the entrance. At least thirty unconscious forms were scattered around -- and one or two that were worse than unconscious. I said, "Maybe they were hoping to loot the clinic." It wasn't a very good lie. But then, I hadn't had much practice in telling lies to an officer of the Company. Lawton pursed his lips and ignored the suggestion. "Tell me something, Wills. What were you doing down below?" I said quickly, "Below? You mean a half an hour ago?" "That's what I mean." He was gentle, but -- well, not exactly suspicious. Curious. I improvised: "I -- I thought I saw someone running down there. One of the rioters. So I chased after her -- after him," I corrected, swallowing the word just barely in time. He nodded. "Find anything?" It was a tough question. Had I been seen going in or coming out? If it was coming out -- Rena had been with me. I took what we called a "calculated risk" -- that is, I got a firm grip on my courage and told a big fat and possibly detectable lie. I said, "Nobody that I could find. But I still think I heard something. The trouble is, I don't know the vaults very well. I was afraid I'd get lost." Apparently it was on the way in that I had been spotted, for Lawton said thoughtfully, "Let's take a look." We took a couple of battered expediters with us -- I didn't regard them as exactly necessary, but I couldn't see how I could tell Lawton that. The elevators were working again, so we came out in a slightly different part of the vaults than I had seen before; it was not entirely acting on my part when I peered around. Lawton accepted my statement that I wasn't quite sure where I had heard the noises, without argument. He accepted it all too easily; he sent the expediters scouring the corridors at random. And, of course, one of them found the pool of spilled fluorescence from the hypodermic needle I had knocked out of Rena's hand. the smear of purplish color, the shattered hypodermic, Rena's gas gun. Lawton mused, "Looks like someone's trying to wake up some of our sleepers. That's our standard antilytic, if I'm not mistaken." He scanned the shelves. "Nobody missing around here. Take a look in the next few sections of the tiers." The expediters saluted and left. "They won't find anyone missing," Lawton predicted. "And that means we have to take a physical inventory of the whole damn clinic. Over eighty thousand suspendees to check." He made a disgusted noise. I said, "Maybe they were scared off before they finished." "Maybe. Maybe not. We'll have to check, that's all." "Are you sure that stuff is to revive the suspendees?" I persisted. "Couldn't it just have been someone wandering down here by mistake during the commotion and -- " "And carrying a hypodermic needle by mistake, and armed with a gas gun by mistake. Sure, Wills." The expediters returned and Lawton looked at them sourly. They shook their heads. He shrugged. "Tell you what, Wills," he said. "Let's go back to the office and -- " He stopped, peering down the corridor. The last of our expediters was coming toward us -- not alone. "Well, what do you know!" said Lawton. "Wills, it looks like he's got your fugitive!" The expediter was dragging a small writhing figure behind him; we could hear whines and pleading. For a heart-stopping second, I thought it was Rena, against all logic. But it wasn't. It was a quavery ancient, a bleary-eyed wreck of a man, long past retirement age, shabbily dressed and obviously the sort who cut his pension policies to the barest minimum -- and then whined when his old age was poverty-stricken. Lawton asked me: "This the man?" "I -- I couldn't recognize him," I said.ing old man. "Who were you after?" he demanded. All he got was sobbing pleas to let him go; all he was likely to get was more of the same. The man was in pure panic. We got him up to one of the receiving offices on the upper level, half carried by the expediters. Lawton questioned him mercilessly for half an hour before giving up. The man was by then incapable of speech. He had said, as nearly as we could figure it out, only that he was sorry he had gone into the forbidden place, he didn't mean to go into the forbidden place, he had been sleeping in the shadow of the forbidden place when fighting began and he fled inside. It was perfectly apparent to me that he was telling the truth -- and, more, that any diversionary riot designed to get him inside with a hypodermic and gas gun would have been planned by maniacs, for I doubted he could have found the trigger of the gun. But Lawton seemed to think he was lying. It was growing late. Lawton offered to drive me to my hotel, leaving the man in the custody of the expediters. On the way, out of curiosity, I asked: "Suppose he had succeeded? Can you revive a suspendee as easily as that, just by sticking a needle in his arm?" Lawton grunted. "Pretty near, that and artificial respiration. One case in a hundred might need something else -- heart massage or an incubator, for instance. But most of the time an antilytic shot is enough." Then Rena had not been as mad as I thought. I said: "And do you think that old man could have accomplished anything?" Lawton looked at me curiously. "Maybe." "Who do you suppose he was after?" Lawton said off-handedly. "He was right near Bay #, wasn't he?," "Bay #?" Something struck a chord; I remembered following Rena down the corridor, passing a door that was odd in some way. Was the number # on that door? "Is that the one that's locked off, with the sign on it that says anybody who goes in is asking for trouble?" "That's the one. Though," he added, "nobody is going to get in. That door is triple-plate armor; the lock opens only to the personal fingerprint pattern of Defoe and two or three others." "What's inside it that's so important?" He said coldly, "How would I know? I can't open the door." And that was the end of the conversation. I knew he was lying. myself on the way. I won it. Rena was in the room waiting for me. She was sound asleep, stretched out on the bed. She looked as sober-faced and intent in her sleep as a little girl -- a look I had noticed in Marianna's sleeping face once. It was astonishing how little I thought about Marianna any more. I considered very carefully before I rang for a bellboy, but it seemed wisest to let her sleep and take my chances with the house detective, if any. There was none, it turned out. In fact, the bellboy hardly noticed her -- whether out of indifference or because he was well aware that I had signed for the room with an official travel-credit card of the Company, it didn't much matter. He succeeded in conveying, without saying a word, that the Blue Sky was the limit. I ordered dinner, waving away the menu and telling him to let the chef decide. The chef decided well. Among other things, there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice. Rena woke up slowly at first, and then popped to a sitting position, eyes wide. I said quickly, "Everything's all right. No one saw you at the clinic." She blinked once. In a soft voice, she said, "Thank you." She sighed a very small sigh and slipped off the bed. I realized as Rena was washing up, comparisons were always odious, but -- Well, if a strange man had found Marianna with her dress hitched halfway up her thigh, asleep on his bed, he'd have been in for something. What the "something" would be might depend on circumstances; it might be a raging order to knock before he came in, it might only be a storm of blushes and a couple of hours of meticulously prissy behavior. But she wouldn't just let it slide. And Rena, by simply disregarding it, was as modest as any girl could be. After all, I told myself, warming to the subject, it wasn't as if I were some excitable adolescent. I could see a lovely girl's legs without getting all stirred up. For that matter, I hardly even noticed them, come to think of it. And if I did notice them, it was certainly nothing of any importance; I had dismissed it casually, practically forgotten it, in fact. She came back and said cheerfully, "I'm hungry!" And so, I realized, was I. We started to eat without much discussion, except for the necessary talk of the table. I felt very much at ease sitting across from her, in spite of the fact that she had placed herself in opposition to the Company. I felt relaxed and comfortable; nothing bothered me. Certainly, I went on in my mind, I was as free and easy with her as with any man; it didn't matter that she was an attractive girl at all. I wasn't thinking of her in that way, only as someone who needed some help. I came to. She was looking at me with friendly curiosity. She said, "Is that an American idiom, Tom, when you said, 'Please pass the legs'?" pagne: it didn't seem quite appropriate. We had not discussed anything of importance while we were eating, except that I had told her about the old man; she evidently knew nothing about him. She was concerned, but I assured her he was safe with the Company -- what did she think they were, barbarians? She didn't answer. But after dinner, with our coffee, I said: "Now let's get down to business. What were you doing in the clinic?" "I was trying to rescue my father," she said. "Rescue, Rena? Rescue from what?" "Tom, please. You believe in the Company, do you not?" "Of course!" "And I do not. We shall never agree. I am grateful to you for not turning me in, and I think perhaps I know what it cost you to do it. But that is all, Tom." "But the Company -- " "When you speak of the Company, what is it you see? Something shining and wonderful? It is not that way with me; what I see is -- rows of my friends, frozen in the vaults or the expediters and that poor old man you caught." There was no reasoning with her. She had fixed in her mind that all the suspendees were the victims of some sinister brutality. Of course, it wasn't like that at all. Suspension wasn't death; everyone knew that. In fact, it was the antithesis of death. It saved lives by taking the maimed and sick and putting them mercifully to sleep, until they could be repaired. True, their bodies grew cold, the lungs stopped pumping, the heart stopped throbbing; true, no doctor could tell, on sight, whether a suspendee was "alive" or "dead." The life processes were not entirely halted, but they were slowed enormously -- enough so that chemical diffusion in the jellylike blood carried all the oxygen the body needed. But there was a difference: The dead were dead, whereas the suspendees could be brought back to life at any moment the Company chose. But I couldn't make her see that. I couldn't even console her by reminding her that the old man was a mere Class E. For so was she. I urged reasonably: "Rena, you think something is going on under the surface. Tell me about it. Why do you think your father was put in suspension?" "To keep him out of the way. Because the Company is afraid of him." I played a trump card: "Suppose I told you the real reason he's in the vaults." S HE was hit by that, I could tell. She was staring at me with wonder in her eyes. "You don't have to speculate about it, Rena. I looked up his record, you see." "You -- you -- " I nodded. "It's right there in black and white. They're trying to save his life. He has radiation poisoning. He was a war casualty. It's standard medical practice in cases like his to put them in suspension for a while, until the level of radioactivity dies down and they can safely be revived. Now what do you say?" She merely stared at me. I pressed on persuasively: "Rena, I don't mean to call your beliefs superstitions or anything like that. Please understand me. You have your own cultural heritage and -- well, I know that it looks as though he is some kind of 'undead,' or however you put it, in your folk stories. I know there are legends of vampires and zombies and so on, but -- " She was actually laughing. "You're thinking of Central Europe, Tom, not Naples. And anyway -- " she was laughing only with her eyes now -- "I do not believe that the legends say that vampires are produced by intravenous injections of chlorpromazine and pethidine in a lytic solution -- which is, I believe, the current technique at the clinics." I flared peevishly: "Damn it, don't you want him saved?" The laughter was gone. She gently touched my hand. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be a shrew and that remark wasn't kind. Must we discuss it?" "Yes!" "Very well." She faced me, chin out and fierce. "My father does not have radiation poisoning, Tom." "He does." "He does not! He is a prisoner, not a patient. He loved Naples. That's why he was put to sleep -- for fifty years, or a hundred, until everything he knew and loved grows away from him and nobody cares what he has to say any more. They won't kill him -- they don't have to! They just want him out of the way, because he sees the Company for what it is." "And what is that?" "Tyranny, Tom," she said quietly. The Company is the hope of the world. If you talk like that, you'll be in trouble. That's dangerous thinking, young lady. It attacks the foundations of our whole society!" "Good! I was hoping it would!" We were shouting at each other like children. I took time to remember one of the priceless rules out of the Adjusters' Handbook: Never lose your temper; think before you speak. We glared at each other in furious silence for a moment before I forced myself to simmer down. Only then did I remember that I needed to know something she might be able to tell me. Organization, Defoe had said -- an organization that opposed the Company, that was behind Hammond's death and the riot at the clinic and more, much more. "Rena, why did your friends kill Hammond?" Her poise was shaken. "Who?" she asked. "Hammond. In Caserta. By a gang of anti-Company hoodlums." Her eyes flashed, but she only said: "I know nothing of any "Yet you admit you belong to a subversive group?" "I admit nothing," she said shortly. "But you do. I know you do. You said as much to me, when you were prevented from reviving your father." She shrugged. I went on: "Why did you call me at the office, Rena? Was it to get me to help you work against the Company?" She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said: "It was. And would you like to know why I picked you?" "Well, I suppose -- " "Don't suppose, Tom." Her nostrils were white. She said coldly: "You seemed like a very good bet, as far as we could tell. I will tell you something you don't know. There is a memorandum regarding you in the office of the Chief of Expediters in Naples. I do not choose to tell you how I know of it, but even your Mr. Gogarty doesn't know it exists. It is private and secret, and it says of you, 'Loyalty doubtful. Believed in contact with underground movement. Keep under close but secret surveillance'." "But that's all wrong!" I finally burst out. "I admit I went through a bad time after Marianna died, but -- " She was smiling, though still angry. "Are you apologizing to me?" "No, but -- " I stopped. That was a matter to be taken up with Defoe, I told myself, and I was beginning to feel a little angry, too. "All right," I said. "There's been a mistake; I'll see that it's straightened out. But even if it was true, did you think I was the kind of man to join a bunch of murderers?" "We are not murderers!" "Hammond's body says different." "We had nothing to do with that, Tom!" "Your friend Slovetski did." It was a shot in the dark. It missed by a mile. She said loftily: "If he is such a killer, how did you escape? When I had my interview with you, and it became apparent that the expediters were less than accurate, the information came a little late. You could easily have given us trouble -- Slovetski was in the next room. Why didn't he shoot you dead?" "Maybe he didn't want to be bothered with my body." "And maybe you are all wrong about us!" "No! If you're against the Company, I can't be wrong. The Company is the greatest blessing the world has ever known -- it's made the world a paradise!" "It has?" She made a snorting sound. "How?" "By bringing countless blessings to all of us. Countless!" She was shaking with the effort of controlling her temper. "Name one!" I swore in exasperation. "All right," I said. "It ended war." She nodded -- not a nod of agreement, but because she had expected that answer. "Right out of the textbooks and propaganda pieces, Tom. Tell me, why is my father in the vaults?" "Because he has radiation poisoning!" "And how did he get this radiation poisoning?" "How?" I blinked at her. "You know how, Rena. In the war between Naples and -- the war -- " AY "That's right, Tom, the war. The war that couldn't have existed, because the Company ended war -- everybody knows that. Ah, Tom! For God, tell me, why is the world blind? Everyone believes, no one questions. The Company ended war -- it says so itself. And the blind world never sees the little wars that rage, all the time, one upon the heels of another. The Company has ended disease. But how many deaths are there? The Company has abolished poverty. But am I living in riches, Tom? Was the old man who ran into the vaults?" I stammered, "But -- but, Rena, the statistical charts show very clearly -- " "No, Tom," she said, gentle again. "The statistical charts show less war, not no war. They show less disease." She rubbed her eyes wearily -- and even then I thought: Marianna wouldn't have dared; it would have smeared her mascara. "The trouble with you, Tom, is that you're an American. You don't know how it is in the world, only in America. You don't know what it was like after the Short War, when America won and the flying squads of Senators came over and the governments that were left agreed to defederate. You're used to a big and united country, not little city-states. You don't have thousands of years of intrigue and tyranny and plot behind you, so you close your eyes and plunge ahead, and if the charts show things are getting a little better, you think they are perfect." She shook her head. "But not us, Tom. We can't afford that. We walk with eyes that dart about, seeking danger. Sometimes we see ghosts, but sometimes we see real menace. You look at the charts and you see that there are fewer wars than before. We -- we look at the charts and we see our fathers and brothers dead in a little war that hardly makes a ripple on the graph. You don't even see them, Tom. You don't even see the disease cases that don't get cured -- because the techniques are 'still experimental,' they say. You don't -- Tom! What is it?" I suppose I showed the pain of remembrance. I said with an effort, "Sorry, Rena. You made me think of something. Please go on." "That's all of it, Tom. You in America can't be blamed. The big lie -- the lie so preposterous that it cannot be questioned, the thing that proves itself because it is so unbelievable that no one would say it if it weren't true -- is not an American invention. It is European, Tom. You aren't inoculated against it. We are." about your father, Rena? Do you really think the Company is out to get him?" She looked at me searchingly, then looked hopelessly away. "Not as you mean it, Tom," she said at last. "No, I am no paranoid. I think he is -- inconvenient. I think the Company finds him less trouble in the deepfreeze than he would be walking around." "But don't you agree that he needs treatment?" "For what? For the radiation poisoning that he got from the atomic explosion he was nowhere near, Tom? Remember, he is my father! I was with him in the war -- and he never stirred a kilometer from our home. You've been there, the big house where my aunt Luisa now lives. Did you see bomb craters there?" "That's a lie!" I had to confess it to myself: Rena was beginning to mean something to me. But there were emotional buttons that even she couldn't push. If she had been a man, any man, I would have had my fist in her face before she had said that much; treason against the Company was more than I could take. "You can't convince me that the Company deliberately falsifies records. Don't forget, Rena, I'm an executive of the Company! Nothing like that could go on!" Her eyes flared, but her lips were rebelliously silent. I said furiously: "I'll hear no more of that. Theoretical discussions are all right; I'm as broadminded as the next man. But when you accuse the Company of outright fraud, you -- well, you're mistaken." We glowered at each other for a long moment. My eyes fell first. I said sourly, "I'm sorry if I called you a liar. I -- I didn't mean to be offensive." "Nor I, Tom." she hesitated. "Will you remember that I asked you not to make me discuss it?" She stood up. "Thank you very much for a dinner. And for listening. And most of all, for giving me another chance to rescue my father." I looked at my watch automatically -- and incredulously. "It's late, Rena. Have you a place to stay?" She shrugged. "N -- yes, of course, Tom. Don't worry about me; I'll be all right." "Are you sure?" "Very sure." H ER manner was completely confident -- so much so that I knew it for an act. I said: "Please, Rena, you've been through a tough time and I don't want you wandering around. You can't get back to Naples tonight." "I know." "Well?" "Well what, Tom?" she said. "I won't lie to you -- I haven't a place to go to here. I would have had, this afternoon, if I had succeeded. But by now, everything has changed. They -- that is, my friends will assume that I have been captured by the Company. They won't be where I could find them, Tom. Say they are silly if you wish. But they will fear that the Company might -- request me to give their names." I said crisply, "Stay here, Rena. No -- listen to me. You stay here. I'll get another room." "Thank you, Tom, but you can't. There isn't a room in Anzio; there are families of suspendees sleeping in the grass tonight." "I can sleep in the grass if I have to." She shook her head. "Thank you," she repeated. I stood between her and the door. "Then we'll both stay here. I'll sleep on the couch. You can have the bed." I hesitated, then added, "You can trust me, Rena." She looked at me gravely for a moment. Then she smiled. "I'm sure I can, Tom. I appreciate your offer. I accept." I AM built too long for a hotelroom couch, particularly a room in a Mediterranean coastal fleabag. I lay staring into the white Italian night; the Moon brightened the clouds outside the window, and the room was clearly enough illuminated to show me the bed and the slight, motionless form in it. Rena was not a restless sleeper, I thought. Nor did she snore. Rena was a most self-possessed girl, in fact. She had overruled me when I tried to keep the bellboy from clearing away the dinner service. "Do you think no other Company man ever had a girl in his room?" she innocently asked. She borrowed a pair of the new pajamas Defoe's thoughtful expediters had bought and put in the bureau. But I hadn't expected that, while the bellboy was clearing away, she would be softly singing to herself in the bath. He had seemed not even to hear. He had also leaped to conclusions -- not that it was much of a leap, I suppose. But he had conspicuously not removed the bottle of champagne and its silver bucket of melting ice. It felt good, being in the same room with Rena. I shifted again, hunching up my torso to give my legs a chance to stretch out. I looked anxiously to see if the movement had disturbed her. There is a story about an animal experimenter who left a chimpanzee in an empty room. He closed the door on the ape and bent to look through the keyhole, to see what the animal would do. But all he saw was an eye -- because the chimp was just as curious about the experimenter. In the half-light, I saw a sparkle of moonlight in Rena's eye; she was watching me. She half-giggled, a smothered sound. "You ought to be asleep," I accused. "And you, Tom." I obediently closed my eyes, but I didn't stop seeing her. If only she weren't a fanatic. And if she had to be a fanatic, why did she have to be the one kind that was my natural enemy, a member of the group of irresponsible troublemakers that Defoe had ordered me to "handle"? What, I wondered, did he mean by "handle"? Did it include chlorpromazine in a lytic solution and a plastic cocoon? I put that thought out of my mind; there was no chance whatever that her crazy belief, that the Company was using suspension as a retaliatory measure, was correct. But thinking of Defoe made me think of my work. After all, I told myself, Rena was more than a person. She was a key that could unlock the whole riddle. She had the answers -- if there was a movement of any size, she would know its structure. I thought for a moment and withdrew the "if." She had admitted the riot of that afternoon was planned. It had to be a tightly organized group. And she had to have the key. slightly drowsy, but suddenly I was wide awake. There were two possibilities. I faced the first of them shakily -- she might be right. Everything within me revolted against the notion, but I accepted it as a theoretical possibility. If so, I would, of course, have to revise some basic notions. On the other hand, she might be wrong. I was certain she was wrong. But I was equally certain she was no raddled malcontent and if she was wrong, and I could prove it to her, she herself might make some revisions. Propped on one elbow, I peered at her. "Rena?" I whispered questioningly. She stirred. "Yes, Tom?" "If you're not asleep, can we take a couple more minutes to talk?" "Of course." I sat up and reached for the light switch, but she said, "Must we have the lights? The Moon is very bright." "Sure." I sat on the edge of the couch and reached for a cigarette. "Can I offer you a deal, Rena?" "What sort of deal?" "A horsetrade. You think the Company is corrupt and your father is not a casualty, right?" "Correct, Tom." "And I think the Company is not corrupt and your father has radiation poisoning. One of us has to be wrong, right?" "Correct, Tom." "Let's find out. There are ways of testing for radiation-sickness. I'll go into the clinic in the morning and get the answer." She also lifted up on one elbow, peering at me, her long hair braided down her back. "Will you?" "Sure. And we'll make bets on it, Rena. If you are wrong -- if your father has radiation poisoning -- I want you to tell me everything there is to tell about the riot today and the people behind it. If I'm wrong -- " I swallowed -- "if I'm wrong, I'll get your father out of there for you. Somehow. I promise it, Rena." There was absolute silence for a long time. Then she swung out of the bed and hurried over to me, her hands on mine. She looked at me and again I saw tears. "Will you do that, Tom?" she asked, hardly audible. "Why, sure," I said awkwardly. "But you have to promise -- " "I promise!" She was staring at me, at arm's length. And then something happened. She wasn't staring and she wasn't at arm's length. Kissing her was like tasting candied violets; and the Moon made her lovelier than anything human; and the bellboy had not been so presumptuous, after all, when he left us the champagne. his desk" the next morning. That was all to the good. I was not a hardened enough conspirator to seek out chances to make mistakes, and although I had a perfectly good excuse for wanting to go down into the vaults again, I wasn't anxious to have to use it. The expediter-officer in charge, though, didn't even ask for reasons. He furnished me with what I wanted -- a map of the vaults and a radiation-counter -- and turned me loose. Looking at the map, I was astonished at the size of this subterranean pyramid. Lawton had said we had eighty-odd thousand sleepers filed away and that had surprised me, but by the chart I held in my hand, there was space for perhaps ten times that many. It was beyond belief that so much space was really needed, I thought -- unless there was some truth to Rena's belief that the Company used the clinics for prisons... I applied myself to the map. And, naturally, I read it wrong. It was very simple; I merely went to the wrong level, that was all. It looked wrong as soon as I stepped out of the elevator. An elderly, officious civilian with a British accent barred my way. "You aren't one of us, are you?" I said, "I doubt it." "Then would you mind?" he asked politely, and indicated a spot on the side of the hall. Perhaps I was suggestible, but I obeyed his request without question. It was just as well, because a sort of procession rounded a bend and came down the corridor. There was a wheeled stretcher, with three elderly civilians puttering around it, and a bored medic following with a jar of something held aloft, feeding through a thin plastic tube into the arm of the man on the stretcher, as well as half a dozen others of more nondescript types. The man who had stopped me nearly ran to meet the stretcher. He stared into the waxy face and whispered, "It's he! Oh, absolutely, it is he!" I looked and the face was oddly familiar. It reminded me of my childhood; it had a link with school days and the excitement of turning twelve. By the way the four old men were carrying on, however, it meant more than that to them. It meant, if not the Second Coming, at least something close to it. By then I had figured out that this was that rare event in the day of a clinic -- a revival. I had never seen one. I suppose I could have got out of the way and gone about my conspiratorial business, and it is no credit to me as a conspirator that I did not. But I was fascinated. Too fascinated to wonder why revivals were so rare... T HE medic looked at his watch and, with careless efficiency, plucked the tube out of the waxy man's arm. "Two minutes," he said to one of the civilians. "Then he'll be as good as he ever was. You've got his clothes and release papers?" "Oh, definitely," said the civilian, beaming. "Okay. And you understand that the Company takes no responsibility beyond the policy covering? After all, he was one of the first men suspended. We think we can give him another year or so -- which is a year more than he would have had, at that -- but he's not what you'd call a Grade A risk." "Certainly," agreed the civilian. "Can we talk to him now?" "As soon as he opens his eyes." The civilian bent over the man, who no longer looked waxy. His face was now a mottled gray and his eyelids were flickering. He had begun to breathe heavily and irregularly, and he was mumbling something I couldn't understand. The civilian whispered in his ear and the revived man opened his eyes and looked at him. It was like seeing the dead come to life. It was exactly that, in fact; twenty minutes before, no chemical test, no stethoscope or probing thumb in the eye socket could have detected the faint living glow in the almostdead cells. And yet -- now he looked, he breathed, he spoke. "I made it," were his first understandable words. "Indeed you did!" crowed the civilian in charge, while all of the others murmured happily to each other. "Sir, it is my pleasure to welcome you back to us. You are in Anzio, Italy. And I am Thomas Welbourne, at your service." The faint eyes sparkled. Dead, near-dead or merely decrepit, this was a man who wanted to enjoy life. Minutes out of the tomb, he said: "No! Not young Tommy Welbourne!" "His grandson, sir," said the civilian. I had it just then -- that face had watched me through a whole year of school. It had been in a frame at the front of the room, with half a dozen other faces. It had a name under it, which, try as I might, I couldn't recall; but the face was there all the same. It was an easy one to keep in mind -- strong though sunken, ancient but very much alive. He was saying, in a voice as confident as any youth's, "Ah, Tommy, I've lived to see it! Tell me, have you been to Mars? What is on the other side of the Moon? And the Russians -- what are the Russians up to these days?" The civilian coughed and tried to interrupt, but the figure on the stretcher went on heedlessly: "All those years gone -- what wonders must we have, A tunnel under the Atlantic, I'll wager! And ships that fly a hundred times the speed of sound. Tell me, Tommy Welbourne! Don't keep an old man waiting!" T HE civilian said reluctantly, but patiently, "Perhaps it will take a little explaining, sir. You see, there have been changes -- " "I know it, boy! That's what I'm asking you!" "Well, not that sort of changes, sir. We've learned new virtues since your time -- patience and stability, things of that sort. You see -- " The interesting part was over and the glances of the others in the party reminded me that I didn't belong here. I stole off, but not before the man on the stretcher noticed me and made a sort of clumsy two-fingered salute of hail and farewell as I left. It was exactly like the gesture in his picture on that schoolroom wall, up next to the presidents and the greatest of kings. I found a staircase and climbed to another level of the boxlike clinic. The local peasants called the vaults "coolers" or "ice cubes." I suppose the reason had something to do with the fact that they were cool and rectangular, on the whole -- perhaps because, like icebergs, the great bulk of the vaults was below the surface. But whatever you called them, they were huge. And the clinic at Anzio was only one out of hundreds scattered all over the world. It was all a matter of viewpoint. To me, the clinics were emblems of the Company's concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster -- even if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once -- the affected population could be neatly and' effectively preserved until medicine could catch up with their cures. To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the human race. It was time to find out which of us was right. I hurried through the corridors, between the tiers of sleepers, almost touching them on both sides. I saw the faint purplish gleam where Rena had spilled the fluid, and knelt beside the cocoon that held her father. The UV sterilizers overhead made everything look ghastly violet, but in any light, the waxy face under the plastic would have looked dead as death itself. I couldn't blame Rena for weeping. I took out the little radiation counter and looked at it awkwardly. There was nothing complicated about the device -- fortunately, because I had had little experience with them. It was a cylinder with a flaring snout at one end, a calibrated gauge at the side, marked in micro-roentgens. The little needle flickered in the green area of the dial. I held it to myself and the reading didn't change. I pointed it up and pointed it down; it didn't change. I held it to the radiation-seared body of Benedetto dell' Angela. And it didn't change. Radiation-seared? Not unless the instrument lied! If dell'Angela had ever in his life been within the disaster radius of an atomic explosion, it had been so long before that every trace of radioactive byproduct was gone! Rena was right! hardly thinking. I stood up and hurriedly touched the ion-tasting snout of the counter to the body on the shelf above Benedetto, the one above that, a dozen chosen at random up and down the aisle. Two of them sent the needle surging clear off the scale; three were as untainted by radioactivity as Benedetto himself. A few others gave readings from "mild" to "lethal" -- but all in the danger area. Most were as untainted by radiation as Benedetto himself. It was possible, I told myself frantically, that there were mysteries here I did not understand. Perhaps after a few months or a year, the radiation level would drop, so that the victim was still in deadly danger while the emitted radiation of his body was too slight to affect the counter. I didn't see how, but it was worth a thought. Anything was worth a thought that promised another explanation to this than the one Rena had given! There had been, I remembered, a score or more of new suspendees in the main receiving vault at the juncture of the corridors. I hurried back to it. Here were fresh cases, bound to show on the gauge. I leaned over the nearest one, first checking to make sure its identification tag was the crosshatched red one that marked "radiation." I brought the counter close to the shriveled face -- But I didn't read the dial, not at first. I didn't have to. For i recognized that face. I had seen it, contorted in terror, mumbling frantic pleas for mercy, weeping and howling, on the old Class E uninsurable the expediters had found hiding in the vaults. He had no radiation poisoning... unless a bomb had exploded in these very vaults in the past twelve hours. It wasn't pleasant to stand there and stare around the vaults that were designed for the single purpose of saving human life -- and to wonder how many of the eighty thousand souls it held were also prisoners. And it wasn't even tolerable to think the thought that followed. If the Company was corrupt, and I had worked to do the Company's business, how much of this guilt was mine? The Company, I had said and thought and tried to force others to agree, was the hope of humanity -- the force that had permanently ended war (almost), driven out disease (nearly), destroyed the threat to any human of hunger or homelessness (in spite of the starving old man who slept in the shadow of the crypt, and others like him). B UT I had to face the facts that controverted the Big Lie. If war was ended, what about Naples and Sicily, and Prague and Vienna, and all the squabbles in the Far East? If there was no danger from disease, why had Marianna died? Rena had said that if there was no danger of disaster, no one would have paid their premiums. Obviously the Company could not have wanted that, but why had I never seen it before? Sample wars, sample deaths -- the Company needed them. And no one, least of all me, fretted about how the samples felt about it. Well, that was behind me. I'd made a bet with Rena, and I'd lost, and I had to pay off. I opened the cased hypodermic kit Rena had given me and examined it uncomfortably. I had never used the old-fashioned sort of needle hypodermic; I knew a little something about the highpressure spray type that forced its contents into the skin without leaving a mark, but I was very far from sure that I could manage this one without doing something wrong. Besides, there wasn't much of the fluid left, only the few drops left in the bottom of the bottle after Rena had loaded the needle that had been smashed. I hurried back along the corridor toward Benedetto dell'Angela. I neared again the red-labeled door marked Bay #, glanced at it in passing -- and stopped. This was the door that only a handful of people could open. It was labeled in five languages: "Entrance Strictly Prohibited. Experimental Section." Why was it standing ajar? And I heard a faint whisper of a moan: "Aiutemi, aiutemi." Someone inside was calling for help! If I had been a hardened conspirator, I would never have stopped to investigate. But, of course, I wasn't. I pushed the door aside, against resistance, and peered in. And that was my third major shock in the past quarter of an hour, because, writhing feebly just inside the door, staring up at me with an expression of pain and anger, was Luigi Zorchi. He propped himself up on his hands, the rags of his plastic cocoon dangling from his shoulders. "Oho," he said faintly. "The apprentice assassin again." I found water for him at a bubble-fountain by the ramp; he drank at least a quart before I made him stop. Then he lay back, panting, staring at me. Except for the shreds of plastic and the bandages around the stumps of his legs, he was nude, like all the other suspendees inside their sacks. The luxuriant hair had already begun to grow back. vigorous now, he snarled: "The plan fails, does it not? You think you have Zorchi out of the way, but he will not stay there." I said, "Zorchi, I'm sorry about all this I -- I know more now than I did yesterday." He gaped. "Yesterday? Only yesterday?" He shook his head. "I would have thought a month, at the least. I have been crawling, assassin. Crawling for days, I thought." He tried to shrug -- not easy, because he was leaning on his elbows. "Very well, Weels. You may take me back to finish the job now. Sticking me with a needle and putting me on ice will not work. Perhaps you should kill me outright." "Listen, Zorchi, I said I was sorry. Let's let it go at that for a moment. I -- I admit you shouldn't be here. The question is, how do you come to be awake?" "How not? I am Zorchi, Weels. Cut me and I heal; poison me and I cure myself." He spat furiously. "Starve me, however, and I no doubt will die, and it is true that you have come very near to starving me down here." He glowered at the shelves of cocooned bodies in the locked bay. "A pity, with all this pork and beef on the rack, waiting for me, but I find I am not a monster, Weels. It is a weakness; I do not suppose it would stop any Company man for a moment." "Look, Zorchi," I begged, "take my word for it -- I want to help you. You might as well believe me, you know. You can't be any worse off than you are." He stared at me sullenly for a moment. Then, "True enough," he admitted. "What then, Weels?" I said hesitantly, "Well, I'd like to get you out of here..." "Oh, yes. I would like that, too. How shall we do it?" I rubbed the back of my neck thoughtfully, staring at him. I had had a sort of half-baked, partly worked out plan for rescuing Benedetto. Wake him up with the needle; find a medical orderly's whites somewhere; dress him; and walk him out. It wasn't the best of all possible plans, but I had rank enough, particularly with Defoe off in Rome, to take a few liberties or stop questions if it became necessary. And besides, I hadn't really thought I'd have to do it. I had fully expected -- as recently as half an hour ago! -- that I would find Benedetto raddled with gamma rays, a certainty for death if revived before the half-life period of the radioelements in his body had brought the level down to safety. Benedetto. But Zorchi, to mention only one possible obstacle, couldn't walk. And Benedetto, once I took off his beard with the razor Rena had insisted I bring for that purpose, would not be likely to be recognized by anyone. Zorchi, on the other hand, was very nearly unforgettable. I said honestly, "I don't know." He nodded. "Nor do I, Weels. Take me then to your Defoe." His face wrinkled in an expression of fury and fear. "Die I can, if I must, but I do not wish to starve. It is good to be able to grow a leg, but do you understand that the leg must come from somewhere? I cannot make it out of air, Weels -- I must eat. When I am in my home at Naples, I eat five, six, eight times a day; it is the way my body must have it. So if Defoe wishes to kill me, we will let him, but I must leave here now." I shook my head. "Please understand me, Zorchi -- I can't even do that for you. I can't have anybody asking me what I was doing down in this level." I hesitated only briefly; then, realizing that I was already in so deeply that secrecy no longer mattered, I told him about Benedetto dell'Angela, and the riot that failed, and my promise. His reaction was incredulity. "You did not know, Weels? The arms and legs of the Company do not know what thoughts pass through its brain? Truly, the Company is a wonderful thing! Even the peasants know this much -- the Company will do anything it must." "I admit I never guessed. Now what?" "That is up to you, Weels. If you try to take the two of us out, it endangers you. It is for you to decide." So, of course, I could decide only one way. I hid the hypodermic behind one of the bodies in Bay #; it was no longer useful to me. I persuaded Zorchi to lie quietly in one of the tiers near Benedetto, slammed the heavy door to Bay #, and heard the locks snap. That was the crossing of the Rubicon. You could open that door easily enough from inside -- that was to protect any personnel who might be caught in there. But only Defoe and a couple of others could open it from without, and the hypodermic was now as far out of reach as the Moon. I opened Benedetto dell'Angela's face mask and shaved him, then sealed it again. I found another suspendee of about the same build, made sure the man was not radioactive, and transferred them. I switched tags: Benedetto dell'Angela was now Elio Barletteria. Then I walked unsteadily to the ramp, picked up the intercom and ordered the medical officer in charge to come down. came, fortunately, but one of his helpers who had seen me before. I pointed to the pseudoBarletteria. "I want this man revived." He sputtered, "You -- you can't just take a suspendee out of his trance, Mr. Wills. It's a violation of medical ethics! These men are sick. They -- " "They'll be sicker still if we don't get some information from this one," I said grimly. "Are you going to obey Mr. Defoe's orders or not?" He sputtered some more, but he gave in. His orderlies took Benedetto to the receiving station at the foot of the vault; one of them stood by while the doctor worriedly went through his routine. I sat and smoked, watching the procedure. It was simple enough. One injection, a little chafing of the hands and feet by the bored orderly while the doctor glowered and I stonily refused to answer his questions, and a lot of waiting. And then the "casualty" stirred and moaned. All the stand-by apparatus was there -- the oxygen tent and the pulmotor and the heart stimulator and so on. But none of it was needed. I said: "Fine, Doctor. Now send the orderly to have an ambulance standing by at the main entrance, and make out an exit pass for this casualty." "No!" the doctor shouted. "This is against every rule, Mr. Wills. I insist on calling Dr. Lawton -- " "By all means," I said. "But there isn't much time. Make out the pass and get the ambulance, and we'll clear it with Dr. Lawton on the way out." He was all ready to say no again when I added: "This is by direct order of Mr. Defoe. Are you questioning his orders?" He wasn't -- not as long as I was going to clear it with Dr. Lawton. He did as I asked. One of the advantages of the Company's rigid regulations was that it was hard to enforce strict security on its personnel. If you didn't tell the staff that they were working for something needing covering up, you couldn't expect them to be constantly on guard. When the orderly was gone and the doctor had scrawled out the pass, I said cordially, "Thank you, Doctor. Now would you like to know what all the fuss was about?" "I certainly would," he snapped. "If you think -- " "I'm sorry," I apologized. "Come over here and take a look at this man." ter in my hand as he stalked over. "Take a look at his eyes," I invited. "Are you trying to tell me that this is a dangerously radioactive case? I warn you, Mr. Wills -- " "No, no," I said. "See for yourself. Look at the right eye, just beside the nose." He bent over the awakening body, searchingly. I clonked him with the radiation counter on the back of the head. They must have retired that particular counter from service after that; it wasn't likely to be very accurate any more. The orderly found me bending over the doctor's body and calling for help. He bent, too, and he got the same treatment. Benedetto by then was awake; he listened to me and didn't ask questions. The blessings of dealing with conspirators -- it was not necessary to explain things more than once. And so, with a correctly uniformed orderly, who happened to be Benedetto dell' Angela, pushing the stretcher, and with myself displaying a properly made out pass to the expediter at the door, we rolled the sham-unconscious body of Luigi Zorchi out to a waiting ambulance. I felt my pulse hammering as we passed the expediter at the door. I had thrown my coat over the place where legs should have been on "Barletteria," and Benedetto's old plastic cocoon, into which we had squeezed Zorchi, concealed most of him. expediter not only wasn't suspicious, he wasn't even interested. Benedetto and I lifted Zorchi into the ambulance. Benedetto climbed in after him and closed the doors, and I went to the front. "You're dismissed," I told the driver. "I'll drive." As soon as we were out of sight of the clinic, I found a phone, got Rena at the hotel, told her to meet me under the marquee. In five minutes, she was beside me and we were heading for the roads to the north. "You win," I told her. "Your father's in back -- along with somebody else. Now what? Do we just try to get lost in the hills somewhere?" "No, Tom," she said breathlessly. "I -- I have made arrangements." She giggled. "I walked around the square and around, until someone came up to me. You do not know how many gentlemen came before that! But then one of my -- friends showed up, to see if I was all right, and I arranged it. We go up the Rome highway two miles and there will be a truck." "Fine," I said, stepping on the gas. "Now do you want to climb back and tell your father -- " I stopped in the middle of the word. Rena peered at me. "Tom," she asked anxiously, "is something wrong?" I swallowed, staring after a disappearing limousine in the rearview mirror. "I --  -- hope not," I said. "But your friends had better be there, because we don't have much time. I saw Defoe in the back of that limousine." The editors of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine have published only # full length science fiction novels in the past four years. Hundreds of thousands of copies of these novels have been enjoyed by their readers. Each novel would sell for # or # if bought as a hard back book, but because we want to bring these vitally important novels to all our Galaxy readers we have published them at the low, low price of #c each. You can order any one or all of the back titles shown, at #c or any six for #. You can subscribe to additional novels at # for a subscription of six novels. (These will be selected by the editors and sent to you every second month.) Foreign subscriptions additional #c each. All orders arc subject to prior sale of back copies, so order today while stocks are complete. YLjChoice#for # L or #c e a. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. 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By far the greater number are emotionally maimed... the result of a disastrous paradoxical heritage from both the frontier and aristocracy. The primitive contribution might be summarized as: "Too late to pull arrow from White Horse's chest. Leave White Horse to walk alone to Happy Hunting Grounds..." And from Old World aristocracy: "Go on without me, chaps; afraid I'm done for. Bad show and all that..." With two stiff upper lips -- one very red and the other purest white -- we have only the legacy and none of the conditioning that made such heroism not only possible but safe! We generally regard Indians as stoics from birth. But the remarkable fact is that they practiced -- fully, without any ifs and buts -- what we like to think of as progressive education. They eliminated childhood frustrations by giving their youngsters anything they cried for. Far from spoiling them, this gave the kids a wholly unshakable sense of worth that allowed them to become complete adults. For only an unhappy, thwarted, unresolved childhood has to be clung to. Aristocratic upbringing was unswervingly strict, but it had the advantage of a deep conviction of worth by birth. But even this is fairly recent; a man's nobility used to be measured by the violence of his emotions. Take away the means to the stiff upper lip and the payoff is packed hospitals. Yet we can't carry progressive upbringing as far as the Indians did and have a technological society. And aristocracy isn't possible for everybody -- it requires hereditary lower classes to feel superior to. So these are not the answers; we must look elsewhere. An important lead is that women, generally allowed to be more emotional, have only half as much mental illness as men -- and that those who do have been victimized in the same way as men: "Sissy!" and "Cry Baby!" and "Big girls don't cry." In other words, the problem of mental illness is literally a crying need. But a technological society demands discipline and would, without it, disintegrate through confusion and accidents and disobedience. The solution, then, must be in the home. If we can't have the conditioning, let's do away with the stiff upper lip. And the place to do it is in the Tantrum Room, which my family and I designed one very stormy Sunday morning -- after tempers had cooled off. Set apart from the rest of the house, the Tantrum Room should have a baseboard for kicking (foam rubber, no sharp edges), a dummy punching bag (with recess for photograph) and breakaway furniture, cheap ashtrays and crockery for smashing or throwing. A microphone and loudspeaker for yelling, with meter to show how many decibels one achieves; this should be a source of pride -- restrained yelling is only a bit better than none. A floor that one can really stamp around on. A chair (facing corner) for sulking. A gym mat for kicking heels. Pictures of family, friends, relatives, bosses, with rubber balls and darts to hurl at them. Crying towel for each member of the family, in favorite personal color. Hand-grips for clenching, plus one (shaped like neck) for vicarious throttling. Sledges and targets, from peg set for toddlers to carnival bellringer for adults. Rural areas have equivalents of all these items as everyday farm and household equipment. This may be why mental health is better there than in cities; ruralites can work off their feelings and urbanites can't withoift causing a row or a neighborhood scandal. My son Eugene came up with the most significant idea of all -- since a Tantrum Room should be soundproofed, he suggested a tape recorder "So nothing will get wasted." He's right. A tantrum is a form of communication -- what's the good of throwing one if it isn't heard, sympathized with and understood? Where individual Tantrum Rooms aren't possible, apartment buildings and communities ought to supply them. A slogan is needed for the program. I offer: "Yell and Keep Well!" or "Let's Stamp Out Stiff The Flat-Eyed Monster It was bad enough hearing questions -- but they weren ' i bothered to F OR the first few moments, Clyde Manship, who up to then had been an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Kelly University, for the first few moments, Manship tried heroically to convince himself that he was merely having a bad Illustrated by addressed to him and nobody listen whenever he answered! dream. He shut his eyes and told himself chidingly, with a little superior smile playing about his lips, that things as ugly as this just did not occur in real life. No. Definitely a 'dream. He had himself half convinced, until he sneezed. It was too loud and wet a sneeze to be ignored. You didn't sneeze like that in a dream -- if you sneezed at all. He gave up. He'd have to open his eyes and take another look. At the thought, his neck muscles went rigid with spasm. A little while ago, he'd fallen asleep while reading an article he'd written for a scholarly journal. He'd fallen asleep in his own bed in his own apartment in Callahan Hall -- "a charming and inexpensive residence for those members of the faculty who are bachelors and desire to live on campus." He'd awakened with a slightly painful tingling sensation in every inch of his body. He felt as if he were being stretched, stretched interminably and -- and loosened. Then, abruptly, he had floated off the bed and gone through the open window like a rapidly attentuating curl of smoke. He'd gone straight up to the star-drenched sky of night, dwindling in substance until he lost consciousness completely. A ND had come to on this enormous flat expanse of white table-top, with a multi-vaulted ceiling above him and dank, barely breathable air in his lungs. Hanging from the ceiling were quantities and quantities of what was indubitably electronic equipment, but the kind of equipment B the boys in the Physics Department might dream up, if the grant they'd just received from the government for military radiation relarger than it was, and if Professor Bowles, the department head, had insisted that every gadget be carefully constructed to look substantially different from anything done in electronics to date. The equipment above him had been rattling and gurgling and whooshing, glowing and blinking and coruscating. Then it had stopped as if someone had been satisfied and had turned off a switch. So Clyde Manship had sat up to see who had turned it off. He had seen all right. He hadn't seen so much who as he had seen what. And it hadn't been a nice what. In fact, none of the whats he had glimpsed in that fast look around had been a bit nice. So he had shut his eyes fast and tried to find another mental way out of the situation. But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. "It's always darkest," he told himself with determined triteness, "before the dawn." And then found himself involuntarily adding, "Except on days when there's an eclipse." But he opened his eyes anyway, wincingly, the way a child opens its mouth for the second spoonful of castor oil. Yes, they were all as he had remembered them. Pretty awful. The table-top was an irregular sort of free-form shape, bordered by thick, round knobs a few inches apart. And perched on these knobs, about six feet to the right of him, were two creatures who looked like black leather suitcases. Instead of handles or straps, however, they sported a profusion of black tentacles, dozens and dozens of tentacles, every second or third one of which ended in a moist turquoise eye shielded by a pair of the sweepingest eyelashes Manship had ever seen outside of a mascara advertisement. Imbedded in the suitcase proper, as if for additional decorative effect, were swarms of other sky-blue eyes, only these, without eyelashes, bulged out in multitudes of tiny, glittering facets like enormous gems. There was no sign of ear, nose or mouth anywhere on the bodies, but there was a kind of slime, a thick, grayish slime, that oozed out of the black bodies and dripped with a steady splash-splash-splash to the floor beneath. On his left, about fifteen feet away, where the table-top extended a long peninsula, there was another one of the creatures. Its tentacles gripped a pulsating spheroid across the surface of which patches of light constantly appeared and disappeared. tell, all the visible eyes of the three were watching him intently. He shivered and tried to pull his shoulders closer together. "Well, Professor," someone asked suddenly, "what would you say?" "I'd say this was one hell of a way to wake up," Manship burst out, feelingly. He was about to go on and develop this theme in more colorful detail when two things stopped him. The first was the problem of who had asked the question. He had seen no other human -- no other living creature, in fact -- besides the three tentacled suitcases anywhere in that tremendous, moisture-filled room. The second thing that stopped him was that someone else had begun to answer the question at the same time, cutting across Manship's words and ignoring them completely. "Well, obviously," this person said, "the experiment is a success. It has completely justified its expense and the long years of research behind it. You can see for yourself, Councilor Glomg, that one-way teleportation is an accomplished fact." Manship realized that the voices were coming from his right. The wider of the two suitcases -- evidently "the professor" to whom the original query had been addressed -- was speaking .o the narrower one who had swung most of his stalked eyes away from Manship and had focused them on his companion. Only where in blazes were the voices coming from? Somewhere inside their bodies? There was no sign anywhere of vocal apparatus. "I can see that," Councilor Glomg admitted with a blunt honesty that became him well. "It's an accomplished fact, all right, Professor Lirld. Only, what precisely has it accomplished?" Lirld raised some thirty or forty tentacles in what Manship realized fascinatedly was an elaborate and impatient shrug. "The teleportation of a living organism from astronomical unit #-# without the aid of transmitting apparatus on the planet of origin." The Councilor swept his eyes back to Manship. "You call that living?" he inquired doubtfully. "Oh, come now, Councilor," Professor Lirld protested. "Let's not have any flefnomorphism. It is obviously sentient, obviously motile, after a fashion -- " "All right. It's alive. I'll grant that. But sentient? It doesn't even seem to pmbff from where I stand. And those horrible, lonely eyes! Just two of them -- and so llat! That dry, dry skin without a trace of slime. I'll admit that -- " "You're not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy forever yourself, you know," Manship, deeply offended, couldn't help throwing out indignantly. " -- I tend to flefnomorphism in my evaluation of alien lifeforms," the other went on as if he hadn't spoken. "Well, I'm a flefnobe and proud of it. But after all, Professor Lirld, I have seen some impossible creatures from our neighboring planets that my son and other explorers have brought back. The very strangest of them, the most primitive ones, at least can pmhft! But this -- this thing. Not the smallest, slightest trace of a pmb do I see on it! It's eerie, that's what it is -- eerie!" "Not at all," Lirld assured him. "It's merely a scientific anomaly. Possibly in the outer reaches of the Galaxy where animals of this sort are frequent, possibly conditions are such that pmbffing is unnecessary. A careful examination should tell us a good deal very quickly. Meanwhile, we've proved that life exists in other areas of the Galaxy than its sunpacked core. And when the time comes for us to conduct exploratory voyages to these areas, intrepid adventurers like your son will go equipped with information. They will know what to expect." "Now, listen," Manship began shouting in desperation. "Can you or can you not hear me?" "You can shut off the power, Srin," Professor Lirld commented. "No sense in wasting it. I believe we have as much of this creature as we need. If any more of it is due to materialize, it will arrive on the residual beam." T HE flefnobe on Manship's left rapidly spun the strange spheroid he was holding. A low hum, which had filled the building and had been hardly noticeable before, now died away. As Srin peered intently at the patches of light on the surface of the instrument, Manship suddenly guessed that they were meter readings. Yes, that's exactly what they were -- meter readings. Now, how did I know that? he wondered. Obvious. There was only one answer. If they couldn't hear him no matter how loudly he shouted, if they gave no sign that they even knew he was shouting, and if, at the same time, they seemed to indulge in the rather improbable feat of talking his native language -- they were obviously telepaths. Without anything that looked like ears or mouths. He listened carefully as Srin asked his superior a question. It seemed to sound in his ears as words, English words in a clear, resonant voice. But there was a difference. There was a quality missing, the kind of realistic bite' that fresh fruit has and artificial fruit flavoring doesn't. And behind Srin's words there were low, murmuring bubbles of other words, unorganized sentence fragments which would occasionally become "audible" enough to clarify a subject that was not included in the "conversation." That, Manship realized, was how he had learned that the shifting patches of light on the spheroid were meter readings. It was also evident that whenever they mentioned something for which no equivalent at all existed in English, his mind supplied him with a nonsense syllable. So far so good. He'd been plucked out of his warm bed in Callahan Hall by a telepathic suitcase named something like Lirld which was equipped with quantities of eyes and tentacles. He'd been sucked down to some planet in an entirely different system near the center of the Galaxy, clad in nothing but applegreen pajamas. He was on a world of telepaths who couldn't hear him at all, but upon whom he could eavesdrop with ease, his brain evidently being a sufficiently sensitive antenna. He was scheduled shortly to undergo a "careful examination," a prospect he did not relish, the more so as he was evidently looked upon as a sort of monstrous laboratory animal. Finally, he was not thought much of, chiefly because he couldn't pmbfl worth a damn. All in all, Clyde Manship decided, it was about time that he made his presence felt. Let them know, so to speak, that he was definitely not a lower form of life, but one of the boys. That he belonged to the mind-over-matter club himself and came of a long line of IQ-fanciers on both sides of his family. Only how? Vague memories of adventure stories read as a boy drifted back to him. Explorers land on a strange island. Natives, armed with assorted spears, clubs and small boulders, gallop out of the jungle to meet them, their whoops an indisputable prelude to mayhem. Explorers, sweating a bit, as they do not know the language of this particular island, must act quickly. Naturally, they resort to -- they resort to -- the universal sign language! Sgn language. Universal! Clyde Manship raised both arms straight up over his head. "Me friend," he intoned. "Me come in peace." He didn't expect the dialogue to get across, but it seemed to him that voicing such words might help him psychologically and thus add more sincerity to the gesture. " -- and you might as well turn off the recording apparatus, too," Professor Lirld was instructing his assistant. "From here on out, we'll take everything down on a double memory-fix." Srin manipulated his spheroid again. "Think I should modulate the dampness, sir? The creature's dry skin seems to argue a desert climate." "Not at all. I strongly suspect it to be one of those primitive forms which can survive in a variety of environments. The specimen seems to be getting along admirably. I tell you, Srin, we can be very well satisfied with the results of the experiment up to this point." "Me friend," Manship went on desperately, raising and lowering his arms. "Me intelligent entity. Me have I.Q. of # on the Wechsler-Bellevue scale." "You may be satisfied," Glomg was saying, as Lirld left the table with a light jump and floated, like an oversized dandelion, to a mass of equipment overhead, "but I'm not. I don't like this business one little bit." "Me friendly and intelligent enti -- " Manship began. He sneezed again. "Damn this wet air," he muttered morosely. "What was that?" Glomg demanded. "Nothing very important, Councilor," Srin assured him. "The creature did it before. It is evidently a low-order biological reaction that takes place periodically, possibly a primitive method of imbibing glrnk. Not by any stretch of the imagination a means of communication, however." "I wasn't thinking of communication," Glomg observed testily. "I thought it might be a prelude to aggressive action." The professor skimmed back to the table, carrying a skein of luminescent wires. "Hardly. What could a creature of this sort be aggressive with? I'm afraid you're letting your mistrust of the unknown run away with you, Councilor Glomg." Manship had crossed his arms across his chest and subsided into a helpless silence. There was evidently no way to make himself understood outside of telepathy. And how do you start transmitting telepathically for the first time? What do you use? If only his doctoral thesis had been in biology or physiology, he thought wistfully, instead of The Use of the Second Aorist in the First Three Books of the Iliad. Oh, well. He was a long way from home. Might as well try.-I first ascertained that Professor Lirld did not intend to approach his person with the new piece of equipment. He wrinkled his forehead and leaned forward with an effort of extreme concentration. Testing, he thought as hard as he could, testing, testing. One, two, three, four -- testing, testing. Can you hear me? "I just don't like it," Glomg announced again. "I don't like what we're doing here. Call it a presentiment, call it what you will, but I feel we are tampering with the infinite -- and we shouldn't." I'm testing, Manship ideated frantically. Mary had a little lamb. Testing, testing. I'm the alien creature and I'm trying to communicate with you. Come in, please. "Now, Councilor," Lirld protested irritably. "Let's have none of that. This is a scientific experiment." "That's all very well. But I believe there are mysteries that flefnobe was never meant to examine. Monsters as awful looking as this -- no slime on the skin, only two eyes and both of pmbff, an almost complete absence of tentacles -- a creature of this sort should have been left undisturbed on its own hellish planet. There are limits to science, my learned friend -- or there should be. One should not seek to know the unknowable!" Can't you hear me? Manship begged. Alien entity to Srin, Lirld and Glomg: This is an attempt at a telepathic connection. Come in, please, someone. Anyone. He considered for a moment, then added: Roger. Over. "I don't recognize such limitations, Councilor. My curiosity is as vast as the Universe." "That may be," Glomg rejoined portentously. "But there are more things in Tiz and Tetzbah, Professor Lirld, than are dreamed of in your philosophy." "My philosophy -- " Lirld began, and broke off to announce -- "Here's your son. Why don't you ask him? Without the benefit of half a dozen scientific investigations that people like you have wanted to call off time after time, none of his heroic achievements in interplanetary discovery would be possible." Thoroughly defeated, but still curious, Manship opened his eyes in time to see an extremely narrow black suitcase swarm up to the table-top in a spaghetti-cluster of tentacles. "What is -- that?" the newcomer inquired, curling a bunch of supercilious eye-stalks over Manship's head. "It looks like a yurd with a bad case of hipplestatch." He considered for a moment, then added, "Galloping hipplestatch." "It's a creature from astronomical unit #-#-# that I've just succeeded in teleporting to our planet," Lirld told him proudly. "Mind you, Rabd, without a transmitting outfit on the other end! I admit I don't know why it worked this time and never before -- but that's a matter for further research. A beautiful specimen, though, Rabd. And, as near as we can tell, in perfect condition. You can put it away now, Srin." "Oh, no you don't, Srin -- " Manship had barely started to announce when a great rectangle of some pliable material fell from the ceiling and covered him. A moment later, the table-top on which he'd been sitting seemed to drop away and the ends of the material were gathered in underneath him and fastened with a click by a scuttling individual whom he took to be the assistant. Then, before he had time to so much as wave his arms, the tabletop shot up with an abruptness that he found twice as painful as it was disconcerting. A ND there he was, packaged as thoroughly as a birthday present. All in all, things were not improving, he decided. Well, at least they seemed disposed to leave him alone now. And as yet they showed no tendency to shove him up on a laboratory shelf along with dusty jars of flefnobe foetuses pickled in alcohol. The fact that he was probably the first human being in history to make contact with an extraterrestrial race failed to cheer Clyde Manship in the slightest. First, he reflected, the contact had been on a distinctly minor key -- the sort that an oddly colored moth makes with a collector's bottle rather than a momentous meeting between the proud representatives of two different civilizations. Second, and much more important, this sort of hands-acrossthe-cosmos affair was more likely to enthuse an astronomer, a sociologist or even a physicist than an assistant professor of Comparative Literature. He'd had fantastic daydreams aplenty in his lifetime. But they concerned being present at the premiere of Macbeth, for example, and watching a sweating Shakespeare implore Burbage not to shout out the "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" speech in the last act: "For God's sake, Dick, your wife just died and you're"about to lose your kingdom and your life -- don't let it sound like Meg at the Mermaid screaming for a dozen of ale. Philosophical, Dick, that's the idea, slow, mournful and philosophical. And just a little bewildered." Or he'd imagined being one of the company at that moment sometime before # B.C. when a blind poet rose and intoned for the first time: "Anger, extreme anger, that is my tale..." Or being a house guest at Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy wandered in from the garden with an abstracted look on his face and muttered: "Just got an idea for a terrific yam about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. And what a title! War and Peace. Nothing pretentious, nothing complicated. Just simply War and Peace. It'll knock them dead in St. Petersburg, I tell you. Of course, it's just a bare little short story at the moment, but I'll probably think of a couple of incidents to pad it out." Travel to the Moon and the other planets of the Solar System, let alone a voyage to the center of the Galaxy -- in his pajamas? No, that was definitely not a menu calculated to make Clyde Manship salivate. In this respect, he had wisted no farther afield than a glimpse, say, of Victor Hugo's sky-high balcony in St. Germain de Pres or the isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and, from time to time as it occurred to her, sang. Professor Bowles, now, Bowles or any of the other slipstick-sniffers in the physics department -- what those boys would give to be in his position! To be the subject of an actual experiment far beyond the dreams of even theory on Earth, to be exposed to a techr nology that was patently so much more advanced than theirs -- why, they would probably consider that, in exchange for all this, the vivisection that Manship was morosely certain would end the evening's festivities was an excellent bargain and verged on privilege. The physics department... the intricately weird tower, studded with gray dipoles, that the physics department had been erecting in Murphy field. He'd watched the government-subsidized project in radiation research going up from his window in Callahan Hall. Only the evening before, when it had reached the height of his window, he'd reflected that it looked more like a medieval siege engine designed to bring down walled cities than a modern communicative device. But now, with Lirld's comment about one-way teleportation never having worked before, he found himself wondering whether the uncompleted tower, poking a ragged section of electronic superstructure at his bedroom window, had been partially responsible for this veritable pureeof-nightmare he'd been wading through. Had it provided a necessary extra link with Lirld's machine, sort of an aerial connection or grounding wire or whatever? If only he knew a little physics! Eight years of higher education were inadequate to suggest the barest aye or nay. He gnashed his teeth, went too far and bit his tongue -- and was forced to suspend mental operations until the pain died away and the tears dribbled out of his eyes. What if he knew for certain that the tower had played a potent, though passive, part in his removal through interstellar space? What if he knew the exact part it had played in terms of megavolts and amperages and so forth -- would the knowledge be the slightest use to him in this impossible situation? No, he'd still be a hideous flateyed, non-intelligent monster plucked pretty much at random from the outer reaches of the Universe, surrounded by creatures to whose minds his substantial knowledge of the many literatures of astronomical unit #-#-# would probably come across, allowing even for the miracle of translation, as so much schizophrenic word-salad. In his despair, he plucked hopelessly at the material in which he'd been wrapped. Two small sections came away in his fingers. There wasn't enough light to examine them, but the feel was unmistakable. Paper. He was wrapped in an oversized sheet of something very much like paper. It made sense, he thought, it made sense in its own weird way. Since the appendages of the fiefnobes he had seen to date consisted of nothing more than slender tentacles ending in either eyes or tapered points, and since they seemed to need knoblike protuberances on the laboratory table in order to perch beside him, a cage of paper was pretty much escape-proof from their point of view. There was nothing for their tentacles to grip -- and they evidently didn't have the musculature to punch their way through. Well, he did. Athletically, he had never amounted to much, but he believed, given enough of an emergency, in his ability to fight his way out of a paper bag. It was a comforting thought, but, at the moment, only slightly more useful than the nugget about the tower in Murphy Field. If only there were some way of transmitting that bit of information to Lirld's little group: Maybe they'd realize that the current flefnobe version of The Mindless Horror trom Hyperspace had a few redeeming intellectual qualities, and maybe they could work out a method of sending him back. If they wanted to. Only he couldn't transmit information. All he could do, for some reason peculiar to the widely separate evolutionary paths of man and flefnobe, was receive. So former Assistant Professor Clyde Manship sighed heavily, slumped his shoulders yet a further slump -- and stolidly set himself to receive. jamas about him tenderly, not so much from latent sartorial ambition as because of agonizing twinges of nostalgia: he had suddenly realized that the inexpensive green garment with its heavily standardized cut was the only artifact he retained of his own world. It was the single souvenir, so to speak, that he possessed of the civilization which had produced both Tamurlane and Terza Rima; the pajamas were, in fact, outside of his physical body, his last link with Earth. "So far as I'm concerned," Glomg's explorer son was commenting -- it was obvious that the argument had been breezing right along and that the papery barrier didn't affect Manship's "hearing" in the slightest -- "I can take these alien monsters or leave them alone. When they get as downright disgusting as this, of course, I'd rather leave them alone. But what I mean -- I'm not afraid of tampering with the infinite, like Pop here, and on the other side, I can't believe that what you're doing, Professor Lirld, will ever lead to anything really important." He paused, then went on. "I hope I haven't hurt your feelings, sir, but that's what I honestly think. I'm a practical flefnobe, and I believe in practical things." "How can you say -- nothing really important?" In spite of Rabd's apology, the professor's mental "voice" as it registered on Manship's brain positively undulated with indignation. "Why, the greatest concern of flefnobe science at the moment is to achieve a voyage to some part of the outer Galaxy where the distances between stars are prodigious compared to their relative denseness here at the galactic center. "We can travel at will between the fifty-four planets of our system and we have recently achieved flight to several of our neighboring suns, but going so far as even the middle areas of the Galaxy, where this specimen originates, remains as visionary a project today as it was before the dawn of extra-atmospheric flight over two centuries ago." "Right!" Rabd broke in sharply. "And why? Because we don't have the ships capable of making the journey? Not on your sembleswol, Professor! Why, since the development of the Bulvonn Drive, any ship in the flefnobe navy or merchant marine, down to my little three-jet runabout, could scoot out to a place as far as astronomical unit #-#-# -- to name just one example -- and back without even hotting up her engines. But we don't. And for a very good reason." Clyde Manship was now listening -- or receiving -- so hard that the two halves of his brain seemed to grind against each other. He was very much interested in astronomical unit # #-# and anything that made travel to it easier or more difficult, however exotic the method of transportatidh employed might be by prevailing terrestrial standards. "And the reason, of course," the young explorer went on, "is a practical one. Mental dwindle. Good old mental dwindle. In two hundred years of solving every problem connected with space travel, we haven't so much as pmbffed the surface of that one. All we have to do is go a measly twenty light-years from the surface of our home planet and mental dwindle sets in with a bang. The brightest crews start acting like retarded children and, if they don't turn back right away, their minds go out like so many lights: they've dwindled mentally smack down to zero." excitedly, it figured. A telepathic race like the flefnobes... why, of course! Accustomed since earliest infancy to having the mental aura of the entire species about them at all times, dependent completely on telepathy for communication since there had never been a need for developing any other method, what loneliness, what ultimate magnification of loneliness, must they not feel once their ships had reached a point too far from their world to maintain contact! And their education now -- Manship could only guess at the educational system of a creature so different from himself, but surely it must be a kind of highorder and continual mental osmosis, a mutual mental osmosis. However it worked, their educational system probably accentuated the involvement of the individual with the group. Once the feeling of involvement became too tenuous, because of intervening barrier or overpowering stellar distance, the flefnobe's psychological disintegration was inevitable. But all this was unimportant. There were interstellar spaceships in existence! There were vehicles that could take Clyde Manship back to Earth, back to Kelly University and the workin-progress he hoped would eventually win him a full professorship in comparative literature: Style vs. Content in Fifteen Representative Corporation Reports to Minority Stockholders for the Period #-#. For the first time, hope sprang within his breast. A moment later, it was lying on its back and massaging a twisted knee. Because assume, just assume for the sake of argument, his native intelligence told him, that he could somehow get out of this place and pick his way about what was, by every indication, a complete oddity of a world, until he found the spaceships Rabd had mentioned -- could it ever be believed by any imagination no matter how wild or fevered, his native intelligence continued, that he, Clyde Manship, whose fingers were all thumbs and whose thumbs were all knuckles, whose mechanical abilities would have made Swanscombe Man sneer and Sinanthropus snicker, could it be ever believed, his native intelligence inquired sardonically, that he'd be capable of working out the various gadgets of advanced spaceship design, let alone the peculiarities that highly unusual creatures like the flefnobes would inevitably have incorporated into their vessels? Clyde Manship was forced to admit morosely that the entire project was somewhat less than possible. But he did tell his native intelligence to go straight to hell. -could pilot him back to Earth if (a) Rabd found it worth-while personally and if (b) Rabd could be communicated with. Well, what interested Rabd most? Evidently this Mental Dwindle ranked quite high. "If you'd come up with an answer to that, Professor," he was expostulating at this point, "I would cheer so hard I'd unship my glrnk. That's what's kept us boxed up here at the center of the Galaxy for too many years. That's the practical problem. But when you haul this Qrm-forsaken blob of protoplasm out of its hole halfway across the Universe and ask me what I think of it, I must tell you the whole business leaves me completely dry. This, to me, is not a practical experiment." Manship caught the mental ripples of a nod from Rabd's father. "I'm forced to agree with you, son. Impractical and dangerous. And I think I can get the rest of the council to see it my way. Far too much has been spent on this project already." As the resonance of their thoughts decreased slightly in volume, Manship deduced they were leaving the laboratory. He heard the beginnings of a desperate, "But -- but -- " from Lirld. Then, off in the distance, Councilor Glomg, evidently having dismissed the scientist, asked his son a question, "And where is little Tekt? I thought she'd be with you." "Oh, she's out at the landing field," Rabd answered, "supervising last-minute stuff going into the ship. After all, we begin our mating flight tonight." "A wonderful female," Glomg told him in a "voice" that was now barely audible. "You're a very lucky flefnobe." "I know that, Pop," Rabd assured him. "Don't think I don't know that. The most plentiful bunch of eye-ended tentacles this side of Gansibokkle and they're mine, all mine!" "Tekt is a warm and highly intelligent female flefnobe," his father pointed out severely from a great distance. "She has many fine qualities. I don't like you acting as if the mating process were a mere matter of the number of eye-ended tentacles possessed by the female." "Oh, it isn't, Pop," Rabd assured him. "It isn't at all. The mating process is a grave and -- er, a serious matter to me. Full of responsibilities -- er, serious responsibilities. Yes, sir. Highly serious. But the fact that Tekt has over a hundred and seventysix slime-washed tentacles, each topped by a lovely, limpid eye, won't do our relationship a bit of harm. Quite the contrary, Pop, quite the contrary." "A superstitious old crank and a brash bumpkin," Professor Lirld commented bitterly. "But between them, they can have my appropriation shut off, Srin. They can stop my work. Just when it's showing positive results. We've got to prepare countermeasures!" in this all-too-familiar academic despair, however. He was straining desperately after the receding minds of Glomg and Rabd. Not that he was at all intrigued by the elder's advice on How to Have a Sane and Happy Sex Life though Married. What had excited him prodigiously was a mental by-product of a much earlier comment. When Rabd had mentioned the last-minute loading of his ship, another part of the flefnobe's mind had, as if stimulated by association, dwelt briefly on the construction of the small vessel, its maintenance and, most important, its operation. For just a few seconds, there had been a flash of a control panel with varicolored lights going on and off, and the beginnings of long-ago, often-repeated instruction: "To warm up the motors of the Bulvonn Drive, first gently rotate the uppermost three cylinders... Gently now!" It was the kind of subliminal thought-picture, Manship realized excitedly, that had emanated from Srin a short while ago, and had enabled him to guess that the shifting light-patterns on the sphere the laboratory assistant held were actually meter readings. Evidently, his sensitivity to the flefnobe brain went deeper than the mental statements that were consciously transmitted by it and penetrated, if not the unconscious mind, at least the less submerged areas of personal awareness and memory. But this meant -- this meant -- seated as he was, he still managed to stagger at the concept. A little practice, just a little acquired skill, and he could no doubt pick the brain of every flefnobe on the planet. He sat and glowed at the thought. An ego that had never been particularly robust had been taking an especially ferocious pounding in the past half-hour under the contemptuous scrutiny of a hundred turquoise eyes and dozens of telepathic gibes. A personality that had been powerstarved most of its adult life abruptly discovered it might well hold the fate of an entire planet in the hollow of its cerebrum. Yes, this certainly made him feel a lot better. Every bit of information these flefnobes possessed was his for the taking. What, for example, did he feel like taking? For a starter, that is. Manship remembered. His euphoria dwindled like a spat-upon match. There was only one piece of information he desired, only one thing he wanted to know. How to get home! O NE of the few creatures on this planet, possibly the only one for all he knew, whose thoughts were of a type to make this possible, was on his way with his father to some flefnobe equivalent of Tony's Bar and Grill. Rabd had, in fact, to judge from the silence reigning on the subject, just this moment passed out of effective telepathic range. With a hoarse, anguished, yearning cry, similar to that of a bull who -- having got in a juicy lick with his horns and having been carried by the momentum of his rush the full length of the bull-ring -- turns, only to see the attendants dragging the wounded matador out of the arena. With precisely that sort of thoroughly dismayed bellow, Clyde Manship reached up, tore the surrounding material apart with one mighty two-handed gesture, and leaped to his feet on the in-and-out curving table-top. "... And seven or eight charts in full color, representing the history of teleportation prior to this experiment," Lirld was telling his assistant at that moment. "In fact, Srin, if you have time to make three-dimensional charts, the Council is even more likely to be impressed. We're in a fight, Srin, and we've got to use every -- " His thoughts broke off as an eye-stalk curled around and regarded Manship. A moment later his entire complement of eyestalks as well as those of his assistant swished about and stopped, quivering, with their focus on the erect, emergent human. "Holy, concentrated Qrm," the professor's mind barely transmitted the quavering thought. "The flat-eyed monster. It's broken loose!" "Out of a cage of solid paper!" Srin added in awe. Lirld came to a decision. "The blaster," he ordered peremptorily. "Tentacle me the blaster, Srin. Appropriation or no appropriation, we don't dare take chances with a creature like this. We're in a crowded city. Once it got out on a rampage -- " He shuddered the entire black suitcase length of him. He made a rapid adjustment in the curlicued instrument that Srin had given him. He pointed it at Manship. Having actually fought his way out of the paper bag, Manship had paused, irresolute, on the table-top. Far from being a man of action in any sense, he now found himself distinctly puzzled as to just which way to act. He had no idea of the direction taken by Glomg pere and tils; furthermore he was at a loss as he looked around for anything that in any way resembled a door. He regretted very much not having noticed through which aperture Rabd had entered the room upon the occasion of the younger flefnobe's joining their jolly little Circle. He had just about made up his mind to look into a series of zig-zag indentations in the opposite wall, when he observed Lirld pointing the blaster at him with determined if unprofessional tremulousness. His mind, which had been filing the recent conversation between professor and assistant in an uninterested back-portion, suddenly informed him that he was about to become the first, and probably unrecorded victim, in a War of Worlds. "Hey!" he yelped, entirely forgetting his meager powers of communication. "I just want to look up Rabd. I'm not going on any ramp -- " Lirld did something to the curlicued instrument that seemed like winding a clock, but was probably more equivalent to the pressing of a trigger. He simultaneously shut all of his eyes -- no mean feat in itself. ed later -- when there was time and space to reflect -- was the only thing which saved his life. That and the prodigious sideways broad-jump he made as millions of crackling red dots ripped out of the instrument toward him. The red dots sped past his pajama-tops and into one of the lower vaults that made up the ceiling. Without a sound, a hole some ten feet in circumference appeared in the masonry. The hole was deep enough -- some three or four feet -- to let the night sky of the planet show through. A heavy haze of white powder drifted down like the dust from a well-beaten rug. Staring at it, Manship felt the roll of tiny glaciers toward his heart. His stomach flattened out against its abdominal wall and tried to skulk quietly around his ribs. He had never felt so completely frightened in his life. "Hey-y-y -- " he began. "A little too much power, Professor," Srin observed judiciously from where he rested easily with tentacles outspread against the wall. "A little too much power and not enough glrnk. Try a little more glrnk and see what happens." "Thank you," Lirld told him gratefully. "Like this, you mean?" He raised and pointed the instrument again. "Hey-y-y!" Manship continued in the same vein as before, not so much because he felt the results of such a statement would be particularly rewarding as because he lacked, at the moment, the creative faculties for another, more elaborate comment. "Heyy-y-y!" he repeated between chattering teeth, staring at Lirld out of eyes no longer entirely flat. He held up a shaking, admonishing hand. Fear was gibbering through him like the news of panic through a nation of monkeys. He watched the flefnobe make the peculiar winding trigger adjustment again. His thoughts came to a stop and every muscle in his body seemed to tense unendurably. Suddenly Lirld shook. He slid backward along the table-top. The weapon dropped out of stiffened tentacles and smashed into bunches of circular wires that rolled in all directions. "Srin!" his mind whimpered. "Srin! The monster -- Do -- do you see what's coming out of his eyes? He's -- he's -- " His body cracked open and a pale, blue goo poured out. Tentacles dropped off him like so many long leaves in a brisk autumn wind. The eyes that studded his surface turned from turquoise to a dull brown. "Srin!" he begged in a tiny, faraway thought. "Help me -- the flateyed monster is -- help -- help!" And then he dissolved. Where he had been, there was nothing but a dark liquid, streaked with blue, that flowed and bubbled and dripped off the curving edge of the table. Manship stared at it uncomprehendingly, realizing only one thing fully -- he was still alive. A flicker of absolutely mad, stampeding fear reached him from Srin's mind. The laboratory assistant jumped from the wall against which he'd been standing, skidded across the table-top with thrashing tentacles, paused for a moment at the knobs that lined its edge to get the necessary traction -- and then leaped in an enormous arc to the far wall of the building. The zig-zag indentations widened in a sort of lightning flash to let his body through. So that had been a door after all. Manship found himself feeling rather smug at the deduction. With so little to go on -- pretty smart, pretty smart. A ND then the various parts of his brain caught up with current events and he began trembling from the reaction. He should be dead, a thing of shredded flesh and powdered bone. What had happened? Lirld had fired the weapon at him and missed the first time. Just as he was about to fire again, something had struck the flefnobe about as hard as it had the Assyrian back in the days when the latter was in the habit of coming down like the wolf on the fold. What? Manship had been using no weapon of his own. He had, so far as he knew, no ally on this world. He looked about the huge, vaulted room. Silence. There was nothing else, nobody else in the place. What was it the professor had screamed telepathically before he turned into soup? Something about Manship's eyes? Something coming out of the Earthman's eyes? Still intensely puzzled -- and despite his relief at having survived the last few minutes -- Manship could not help regretting Lirld's extinction. Possibly because of his somewhat s'milar occupational status, the flefnobe had been the only creature of his type toward whom Manship felt any sympathy. He felt a little lonelier now -- and, obscurely, a little guilty. The different thoughts which had been mashing themselves to and fro in his mind abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by a highly important observation. The zig-zag doorway through which Srin had fled was closing, was coming together! And, as far as Manship knew, it was the only way out of the place! Manship bounced off the huge table-top in a jump that for the second time in ten minutes did great credit to a few semester hours of gym some six years ago. He reached the narrowing gap, prepared to claw his way through the solid stone if necessary. He was determined not to be trapped in this place when the flefnobe police closed in with whatever they used in place of tear gas and machine guns. He had also not forgotten the need to catch up to Rabd and get two or three more driving lessons. To his intense relief, the aperture dilated again as he was about to hit it. Some sort of photoelectric gadget, he wondered, or was it just sensitive to the approach of a body? He charged through, and for the first time found himself on the surface of the planet with the night sky all around him. T HE view of the sky almost took his breath away and made him forget, temporarily, the utterly strange city of the flefnobes that stretched away in every direction. There were so many stars! It was as if these stellar bodies were so much confectioners' sugar and someone had tossed a bagful at the heavens. They glowed with enough luminosity to maintain a three-quarters twilight. There was no moon, but its lack was not felt; rather it seemed that half a dozen moons had been tiny white dots. It would be impossible, in this plenty, to trace out a single constellation. It would be necessary, instead, Manship guessed, to speak of a third brightest patch, a fifth largest sector. Truly, here in the center of the Galaxy, one did not merely see the stars -- one lived amongst them! He noticed his feet were wet. Glancing down, he saw he was standing in a very shallow stream of some reddish liquid that flowed between the rounded flefnobe buildings. Sewage disposal? Water supply? Probably neither, probably something else completely out of the range of human needs. For there were other colored streams flowing parallel to it, Manship saw now -- green ones, mauve ones, bright pink ones. At a street intersection a few yards from him, the reddish stream flowed away by itself down a sort of alley, while a few new colored ribbons joined the main body. Well, he wasn't here to work out problems in extraterrestrial sociology. He already had the sniffling intimations of a bad head cold. Not only his feet were wet in this spongelike atmosphere; his pajamas clung to his skin in dampest companionship and, every once in a while, his eyes got blurry with the moisture and he had to brush them dry with the back of a hand. Furthermore, while he was not hungry, he had not only seen nothing resembling human-type victuals since his arrival, but also no evidence to suggest that the flefnobes had stomachs, let alone mouths. Maybe they took in nourishment through the skin, soaked it up, say, from those differently colored streams than ran through their city. Red might be meat, green could be vegetables, while for dessert -- He clenched his fists and shook himself. I've no time for any of this philosophic badminton, he told himself fiercely. In just a few hours, I'm going to be extremely hungry and thirsty. I'm also going to be extremely hunted. I'd better get moving -- work out some solutions! Only where? Fortunately, the street outside Lirld's laboratory seemed deserted. Maybe the flefnobes were afraid of the dark? Maybe they were all good, respectable homebodies and everyone, without exception, toddled into his bed at night to sleep the darkness through? Maybe -- Rabd. He had to find Rabd. That was the beginning and the end of the only solution to his problems he had come even close to, since his materialization on Professor Lirld's lab table. Rabd. his mind. All kinds of drifting, miscellaneous thoughts were sloshing around in his brain, from the nearer inhabitants of the city. "All right, darling, all right. If you don't want to gadl, you don't have to gadl. We'll do something else..." "That smart-aleck Bohrg! Will I fix him properly tomorrow..." "Do you have three zamshkins for a plet? I want to make a longdistance send..." "Bohrg will roll in tomorrow morning, thinking everything is the same as it's always been. Is he going to be surprised..." "I like you, Nernt, I like you a lot. And that's why I feel it's my duty to tell you, strictly as a friend, you understand..." "No, darling, I didn't mean that I didn't want to gadl. I thought you didn't want to; I was trying to be considerate like you always tell me to be. Of course I want to gadl. Now please don't look at me like that..." "Listen here. I can lick any flefnobe in the place... "To tell you the truth, Nernt, I think you're the only one who doesn't know. Everybody else... " "So you're all scared, huh? All right, I'll take you on two at a time. Come on, come on..." But no hint of Rabd. Manship began to walk cautiously down the stone-paved street, sloshing through the little rivulets. He stepped too close to the wall of the dark buildings. Immediately, a zig-zag doorway opened its jagged invitation. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped through. Nobody here either. Did the flefnobes sleep in some central building, dormitory fashion? Did they sleep at all? He must remember to tune in on some likely mind and investigate. The information might be useful. This building seemed to be a warehouse; it was filled with shelves. The walls were bare, however -- there seemed to be some flefnobe inhibition against putting objects against the walls. The shelves rose in tall tiers -- again free-form shapes -- from the center of the floor. Manship strolled over to the shelving that was the height of his chest. Dozens of fat green balls rested in white porcelain cups. Food? Could be. They looked distinctly edible, like melons. He reached out and picked one up. It immediately spread wings and flew away to the ceiling. Every one of the other green balls, on all the shelves, spread a similar set of multiple, tiny wings and flew upward, like so many spherical birds whose nests have been disturbed. When they reached the domed ceiling, they seemed to disappear. Manship backed out of the place hurriedly through the jagged aperture. He seemed to be setting off alarms wherever he went! sensed a new feeling. There' was a sensation of bubbling excitement everywhere, a tense waiting. Very few individual thoughts were coming through. Suddenly the restlessness coalesced into an enormous mental shout that almost deafened him. "Good evening!" it said. "Please stand by for an emergency news bulletin. This is Pukr, the son of Kimp, coming to you on a planetwide, mind-to-mind hookup. Here is the latest on the flat-eyed monster: "At forty-three skims past bebblewort, tonight, this creature was materialized by Professor Lirld from astronomical unit #-# as part of an experiment in one-way teleportation. Councilor Glomg was present as a witness to the experiment in the course of his official duties and, observing the aggressive way in which the monster comported itself, immediately warned Lirld of the dangers in letting it remain alive. "Lirld disregarded the warning and, later, after Councilor Glomg had departed with his son, Rabd, the well-known interplanetary explorer and flefnobe-abouttown, the monster ran amuck. Having fought its way out of a cage of solid paper, it attacked the professor with an unknown type of high-frequency mental beam that seems to emanate from its unbelievably flat eyes. This beam seems to be similar, in effect, to that thrown out by second-order grepsas when all fuses have blown. Our best psychophysicists are, at this very moment, working feverishly on that aspect of the problem. "But Professor Lirld paid with his life for his scientific curiosity and for disregarding the warnings of Councilor Glomg's experience. Despite the best efforts of Srin, Lirld's laboratory assistant, who fought a desperate and courageous diversionary action in an attempt to save the old scientist, Lirld perished horribly before the monster's ferocious onslaught. With his superior dead, Srin retreated tentacle by tentacle, fighting all the way, barely managing to make his escape in time. "This alien monster with its incredible powers is now loose in our city! All citizens are urged to remain calm, not to panic. Rest assured that as soon as tlie authorities know what to do, they will do it. Remember -- above all -- stay calm! "Meanwhile, Rabd, the son of Glomg, has postponed his mating flight which was to have begun tonight. He is mating, as you all know, with Tekt, the daughter of Hilp -- Tekt being the wellknown star of inesh and blelg from the southern continent. Rabd is leading a troop of volunteer flefnobes to the scientific quarters of the city, where the monster was last seen, in an attempt to exterminate it with already-existing, conventional weapons before the creature starts to reproduce. I will return with more bulletins when they are available. That is all for now." T hat was more than enough, Manship felt. Now there wasn't any hope that he could work out some method of communication with these creatures and sit down for a little quiet conversation on ways and means of getting himself home -- which seemed to be a conclusion earnestly desired by all. From now on the watchword was going to be Get That Manship! He didn't like that at all. On the other hand, he didn't have to wander after Rabd. If Manship can't get to the flefnobe, the flefnobe will come to Manship. Heavily armed, however, and with homicidal intent... He decided he had better hide. He stepped up to a building and wandered along a wall until the doorway opened. He walked through and watched it close behind him, then looked around. To his relief, it seemed like an excellent place to hide. There were quantities of large, heavy objects in the center of the place, none of them, so far as he could tell, alive, and all of them satisfactorily opaque. He wedged himself between two of these which looked like stored table-tops and hoped wistfully that the flefnobe sensory appartus did not boast any more detective mechanisms than he had already experienced. What he wouldn't give to be an assistant professor in Kelly University again instead of a flateyed monster ravening, all unwittingly, through an alien metropolis! He found himself wondering about the strange powers he was supposed to possess. What was all this nonsense about a highfrequency mental beam emanating from his eyes? He hadn't noticed anything coming out -- and he should have noticed if anyone did, he felt. Yet Lirld had made some comment to that effect just before he dissolved. Was it possible that there was some by-product of the human brain that was only visible to flefnobes and was highly deleterious to them? After all, he could tune in on the flefnobes' minds and they couldn't tune in on his. Maybe the only way he could make his mental presence felt to them was in some prodigious blast of thought which literally ripped them apart. But he evidently couldn't turn it on and off at will -- he hadn't caused the slightest alteration in Lirld, the first time the professor had fired. There were ripples of new, excited thoughts reaching him suddenly. They were coming from somewhere in the street outside. Rabd had arrived with his posse. that way," the young flefnobe ordered. "I want two each to cover the side streets. Don't spend too much time searching through the buildings. I'm positive we'll find this monster skulking somewhere in the dark streets, looking for new victims. Tanj, Zogt and Lewv -- come with me. And keep on your tentacle-tips, everybody -- this thing is crazy dangerous. But remember, we've got to blast it before it starts reproducing. Imagine what this planet would be like with a couple of hundred of these flateyed monsters running around!" Manship let out a long, slow sigh of relief. If they hoped to find him on the streets, he might have a little time. He let his mind follow that of Rabd. It wasn't too hard -- just a matter of concentration -- and you pretty much blocked out the thoughts of the other individuals. Follow Rabd's mind. Rabd's thoughts. Now block out most ol Rabd's conscious thoughts. There. The subliminal layer, the mem ory patterns. No, not tlw stuff about that female flelnohe lust month, all eyes and soft tentacles, dammit! The memory patterns, the old et ones. "When landing on a C # type planet... No, not that one. A little further. There! "Having fired the forward jet to cleat it, gently depress the..." Manship combed through the operational instructions in Rahd's mind, pausing every once in a while to clear up a concept peculiar to flefnobe terminology, stopping now and then as a grin ning thought about Tekt wandered in and threw everything out of focus. He noticed that whatever information he absorbed in this fashion, he seemed to absorb permanently; there was no need to go back to previous data. Probably left a permanent print on his mind, he concluded. He had it all now, at least as much about running the ship as it was possible to understand. In the last few moments, he had been operating the ship -- and operating the ship for years and years -- at least through Rabd's memories. For the first time, Manship began to feel a little confident. But how was he to find the little spaceship in the streets of this utterly strange city? He clasped his hands in perspired bafflement. After all this -- Then he had the answer. He'd get the directions from Rabd's mind. Of course. Good old encyclopedia Rabd! He'd certainly remember where he parked the vessel. And he did. With a skill that seemed to have come from ages of practice, Clyde Manship riffled through the flefnobe's thoughts, discarding this one, absorbing that one -- "... the indigo stream for five blocks. Then take the first merging red one and..." -- until he had as thorough and as permanent a picture of the route to Rabd's three-jet runabout as if he'd been studying the subject in graduate school for six months. stodgy young assistant professor of Comparative Literature who up to this night had about as much experience with telepathy as African lion-hunting! But perhaps -- perhaps it had been a matter of conscious experience of telepathy; perhaps the human mind was accustomed to a sort of regular, deep-in-thebrain, unconscious telepathy from infancy and being exposed to creatures so easy to receive from as flefnobes had brought the latently exercised powers to the surface. That would explain the quickly acquired skill that felt so much like the sudden surprising ability to type whole words and sentences after months of practicing nothing but meaningless combinations of letters in certain set alphabetical patterns. Well, it might be interesting, but that particular speculation was not his field of research and not his problem. Not for tonight, anyway. Right now, what he had to do was somehow slip out of the building unobserved by the crowd of flefnobe vigilantes outside, and get on his way fast. After all, it might not be long before the militia was called out to deal with something as viciously destructive as himself... He slipped out of his hidingplace and made for the wall. The zig-zag doorway opened. He stepped through -- and bowled over a tentacled black suitcase who'd apparently been coming in. The flefnobe recovered fast. He pointed his spiraly weapon at Manship from where he lay and began winding it. Once more, the Earthman went rigid with fright; he'd seen what that thing could do. To be killed now, after all he'd gone through... And once more, there was a quiver and a mental scream of distress from the flefnobe: "The flat-eyed monster -- I've found him -- his eyes -- his eyes. Zogt, Rabd, help! His eyes -- " There was nothing left but a twitching tentacle or two and a puddle of liquid rippling back and forth in a little hollow near the building wall. Without looking back, Manship fled. A stream of red dots chattered over his shoulder and dissolved a domed roof directly ahead of him. Then he had turned the corner and was picking up speed. From the dwindling telepathic shouts behind him, he deduced with relief that feet moved faster than tentacles. He found the correct colored streams and began to work his way in the direction of Rabd's spaceship. Only once or twice did he come across a flefnobe. And none of them seemed to be armed. At sight of him, these passersby wound their tentacles about their bodies, huddled against the nearest wall, and, after a few dismal mutters to the effect of "Qrm save me, Qrm save me," seemed to pass out. sence of heavy traffic, but wondered why it should be so, especially since he was now moving through the residential quarters of the city according to the mental map he had purloined from Rabd. Another overpowering roar in his mind gave him the answer. "This is Pukr, the son of Kimp, returning to you with more news of the flat-eyed monster. First, the Council wishes me to notify all who have not already been informed through their blelg service that a state of martial law has been proclaimed in the city. "Repeat: a state of martial law has been proclaimed in the city! All citizens are to stay off the streets until further notice. Units of the army and space fleet as well as heavy maizeltoovers are being moved in hurriedly. Don't get in their way! Stay off the streets! "The flat-eyed monster has struck again. Just ten short skims ago, it struck down Lewv, the son of Yifg, in a running battle outside the College of Advanced T urkaslerg, almost trampling Rabd, the son of Glomg, who courageously hurled himself in its path in a valiant attempt to delay the monster's flight. Rabd, however, believes he seriously wounded it with a well-placed bolt from his blaster. The monster's weapon was the high-frequency beam from its eyes --  -- "Shortly before this battle, the flat-eyed horror from the outer galactic wastes had evidently wandered into a museum where it completely destroyed a valuable collection of green fermfnaks. They were found in a useless winged condition. Why did it do this? Pure viciousness? Some scientists believe that this act indicates intelligence of a very high order indeed, and that this intelligence, together with the fantastic powers already in of the monster a much more difficult task than the local authorities expect. "Professor Wuvb is one of these scientists. He feels that only through a correct psycho-sociological evaluation of the monster and an understanding of the peculiar cultural milieu from which it evidently derives will we be able to work out adequate counter-measures and save the planet. Therefore, in the interests of flefnobe survival, we have brought the professor here tonight to give you his views. The next mind you hear will be that of Professor Wuvb." Just as the newcomer began portentously, "To understand any given cultural milieu, we must first ask ourselves what we mean by culture. Do we mean, for example -- " Manship reached the landing field.--the corner on which Rabd's three-jet runabout was parked between an enormous interplanetary vessel being loaded with freight and what Manship would have been certain was a warehouse, if he hadn't learned so thoroughly how wrong he could be about flefnobe equivalents of human activities. There seemed to be no guards about, the landing field was not particularly well-lit, and most of the individuals in the neighborhood were concentrated around the freighter. He took a deep breath and ran for the comparatively tiny, spherical ship with the deep hollow in the top and bottom, something like an oversized metallic apple. He reached it, ran around the side until he came to the zigzag line that indicated an entrance and squeezed through. As far as he could tell, he hadn't been observed. Outside of the mutter of loading and stowage instructions coming from the larger ship, there were only Professor Wuvb's louder thoughts weaving their intricate sociophilosophical web:... So we may conclude that in this respect, at least, the flat-eyed monster does not show the typical basic ate. But then, if we attempt to relate the characteristics of a preliterate urban cultural configuration... Manship waited for the doorway to contract, then made his way hand over hand up a narrow, twisting ladderlike affair to the control room of the vessel. He seated himself uncomfortably before the main instrument panel and went to work. It was difficult using fingers on gadgets which had been designed for tentacles, but he had no choice. "To warm up the motors of the Bulvonn Drive -- " Gently, very gently, he rotated the uppermost three cylinders a complete turn each. Then, when the rectangular plate to his left began to show an even succession of red and white stripes across its face, he pulled on the large black knob protruding from the floor. A yowling roar of jets started from outside. He worked almost without conscious effort, letting memory take over. It was as if Rabd himself were getting the spaceship into operation. A few seconds later, he was off the planet and in deep space. He switched to interstellar operation, set the directional indicator for astronomical unit #-# -- and sat back. There was nothing else for him to do until the time came for landing. He was a little apprehensive about that part, but things had gone so well up to this point that he felt quite the interstellar daredevil. "Old Rocketfingers Manship," he grinned to himself smugly. A ccording to Rabd's subliminal calculations, he should be arriving on Earth -- given the maximum output of the Bulvonn Drive which he was using -- in ten to twelve hours. He was going to be more than a bit hungry and thirsty, but -- What a sensation he was going to make! Even more of a sensation than he had left behind him. The flateyed monster with a high-frequency mental beam coming out of its eyes... What had that been? All that had happened to him, each time a flefnobe dissolved before his stare, was a good deal of fear. He had been terribly frightened that he was going to be blasted into tiny pieces and had, somewhere in the process of being frightened, evidently been able to throw out something pretty tremendous -- to judge from results. Possibly the abnormally high secretion of adrenalin in the human system at moments of stress was basically inimical to flefnobe body structure. Or maybe there was an entirely mental reaction in Man's brain at such times whose emanations caused the flefnobes to literally fall part. It made sense: If he was so sensitive to their thoughts, they should be sensitive to him in some way. And obviously, when he was very much afraid, that sensitivity showed up with a vengeance. He put his hands behind his head and glanced up to check his meters. Everything was working satisfactorily. The brown circles were expanding and contracting on the sekkel board, as Rabd's mind had said they should; the little serrations on the edge of the control panel were moving along at a uniform rate, the visiscreen showed -- the visiscreen! Manship leaped to his feet. The visiscreen showed what seemed to be every vessel in the flefnobe army and space fleet -- not to mention the heavy maizeltoovers -- in hot pursuit of him. And getting closer. There was one large spacecraft that had almost caught up and was beginning to exude a series of bright rays that, Manship remembered from Rabd's recollections, were grapples. What could have caused all this commotion -- the theft of a single jet runabout? The fear that he might steal the secrets of flefnobe science? They should have been so glad to get rid of him, especially before he started reproducing hundreds of himself all over the planet! And then a persistent thought ripple from inside his own ship -- a thought ripple which he had been disregarding all the time he had been concentrating on the unfamiliar problems of deepspace navigation -- gave him a clue. He had taken off with someone -- or something -- else in the ship! Clyde Manship scurried down the twisting ladder to the main cabin. As he approached, the thoughts became clearer and he realized, even before the cabin aperture dilated to let him through, exactly whom he would find. Tekt. The well-known female star of fnesh and blelg from the southern continent and Rabd's about-tobe bride cowered in a far corner; all of her tentacles -- including the hundred and seventy-six slime-washed ones that were topped by limpid eyes -- twisted about her tiny black body in the most complicated series of knots Manship had ever seen. "Oo-ooh!" her mind moaned. "Qrm! Qttyi! Now it's going to happen! That awful, horrible thing! It's going to happen to me! It's coming closer -- closer -- " "Look, lady, I'm not even slightly interested in you," Manship began, before he remembered that he'd never been able to communicate with any flefnobe before, let alone a hysterical female one. the grapples touched it. Well, here I go again, he thought. In a moment there would be boarders and he'd have to turn them into bluish soup. Evidently, Tekt had been sleeping aboard the vessel when he took off. She'd been waiting for Rabd to return and begin their mating flight. And she was obviously a sufficiently important figure to have every last reserve called up. His mind caught the sensation of someone entering the ship. Rabd. From what Manship could tell, he was alone, carrying his trusty blaster -- and determined to die fighting. Well, that's exactly what he'd have to do. Clyde Manship was a fairly considerate individual and heartily disliked the idea of disintegrating a bridegroom on what was to have been his honeymoon. But, since he had found no way of communicating his pacific intentions to these creatures, he had no choice. "Tekt!" Rabd telepathed softly. "Are you all right?" "Murder!" Tekt screamed. "Help-help-help-help..." Her thoughts abruptly disappeared; she had fainted. The zig-zag aperture widened and Rabd bounced into the cabin, looking like a series of long balloons in his spacesuit. He glanced at the recumbent Tekt and then turned desperately, pointing his curlicued blaster at Manship. "Poor guy," Manship was thinking. "Poor, dumb, narrowminded hero type. In just a second, you'll be nothing but goo." He waited, full of confidence. He was so full of confidence, in fact, that he wasn't a bit frightened. So nothing came out of his eyes, nothing but a certain condescending sympathy. So Rabd blasted the ugly, obscene, horrible, flat-eyed thing down where it stood. And scooped up his bride with loving tentacles. And went back home to a hero's reception. whiskaboom Jack's blunder was disastrous, but what he worried about was: would Einstein have approved? Mrs. Burroughs and I are sending your son Jack to you because we do not know what else to do with him. As you can see, we can't keep him with us in his present condition. Also, Jack owes us two weeks rent and, since Mrs. Burroughs and I are retired, we would appreciate your sending the money. It has been a dry year and our garden has done poorly. Illustrated The only reason we put up with your son in the first place was because we are so hardpressed. He saw the sign on the porch, rang the bell and paid Mrs. Burroughs a month's rent without even looking at the room. Then he ran out to his car and commenced pulling out suitcases and boxes and dragging them upstairs. After the third trip, Mrs. Burroughs saw he was having trouble with the stuff and he looked kind of worn out, so she offered to help. He gave her a hard look, as she described it to me when I got home. He said, "I don't want anyone touching anything. Please don't interfere." "I didn't mean to interfere," my wife told him. "I only wanted to help." "I don't want any help," he said quietly, but with a wild look in his eye, and he staggered upstairs with the last of his baggage and locked the door. roughs told me she thought I ought to take a look at the new boarder. I went up, thinking we'd have a little chat and straighten things out. I could hear him inside, hammering on something. He didn't hear my first knock or the second. I got sore and nearly banged the door down, at which time he decided to open up. I charged in, ready to fight a bear. And there was this skinny red-headed son of yours glaring at me. "That's a lot of hammering you're doing, son," I said. "That's the only way I can get these boxes open, and don't call me son." "I don't like to disturb you, Mr. Gretch, but Mrs. Burroughs is a little upset over the way you acted today. I think you ought to come down for a cup of tea and get acquainted." "I know I was rude," he said, looking a little ashamed, "but I have waited for years for a chance to get to work on my own, with no interference. I'll come down tomorrow, when I have got my equipment set up, and apologize to Mrs. Burroughs then." I asked him what he was working on, but he said he would explain later. Before I got out of the door, he was hammering again. He worked till after midnight. We saw Jack at mealtimes for the next few days, but he didn't talk much. We learned that he was twenty-six, in spite of his looking like a boy in his teens, that he thought Prof. Einstein the greatest man ever, and that he disliked being called son. Of his experiment, he didn't have much to say then. He saw Mrs. Burroughs was a little nervous about his experimenting in the guest room and he assured her it was not dangerous. Before the week was out, we started hearing the noises. The first one was like a wire brush going around a barrel. It went whisk, whisk. Then he rigged up something that went skaboom every few seconds, like a loud heartbeat. Once in a while, he got in a sound like a creaky well pump, but mostly it was skaboom, and whisk, which eventually settled down to a steady rhythm, whiskaboom, whiskaboom. It was kind of pleasant. ' two days. The noises kept going on. Mrs. Burroughs was alarmed because he did not answer her knock at mealtimes, and one morning she charged upstairs and hollered at him through the door. "You stop your nonsense this minute and come down to breakfast!" "I'm not hungry," he called back. "You open this door!" she ordered and, by George, he did. "Your whiskaboom or whatever it is will keep till after breakfast." He sat at the table, but he was a tired boy. He had a cold, his eyelids kept batting, and I don't believe he could have lifted his coffee cup. He tried to look awake, and then over he went with his face in the oatmeal. Mrs. Burroughs ran for the ammonia, but he was out cold, so we wiped the oatmeal off his face and carried him upstairs. My wife rubbed Jack's wrists with garlic and put wet towels on his face, and presently he came to. He looked wildly about the room at his machinery. It was all there, and strange-looking stuff, too. "Please go away," he begged. "I've got work to do." Mrs. Burroughs helped him blow his nose. "There'll be no work for you, sonny. Not until you're well. We'll take care of you." He didn't seem to mind being called sonny. He was sick for a week and we tended him like one of our own. We got to know him pretty well. And we also got to know you. Now, Mr. Gretch, whatever you are doing in your laboratory is your own business. You could be making atomic disintegrators, for all Jack told us. But he does not like or approve of it and he told us about your running battle with him to keep him working on your project instead of his own. Jack tried to explain his ideas for harnessing time and what he called "the re-integration principle." It was all so much whiskaboom to us, so to speak, but he claimed it was for the good of mankind, which was fine with us. But he said you would not let him work it out because there was less money in it than in your project, and this is why he had to get away and work and worry himself into a collapse. When he got well, Mrs. Burroughs told him, "From now on, you're going to have three meals a day and eight hours sleep, and in between you can play on your whiskaboom all you please." The whiskabooming became as familiar to us as our own voices. Last Sunday, Mrs. Burroughs and I came home from church, about noon. She went inside through the front door to fix dinner. I walked around the house to look at the garden. And the moment I walked past the front of the house, I got the shock of my life. The house disappeared! walking, and a step later I was standing at the back of the house, and it was all there. I took a step back and the whole house vanished again. One more step and I was at the front. It looked like a real house in front and in back, but there wasn't any in-between. It was like one of those false-front saloons on a movie lot, but thinner. I thought of my wife, who had gone into the kitchen and, for all I knew, was as thin as the house, and I went charging in the back door, yelling. "Are you all right?" "Of course I'm all right," she said. "What's the matter with you?" I grabbed her and she was all there, thank heavens. She giggled and called me an old fool, but I dragged her outside and showed her what had happened to our house. She saw it, too, so I knew I didn't have sunstroke, but she couldn't understand it any better than I. Right about then, I detected a prominent absence of whiskabooming. "Jack!" I hollered, and we hurried back into the house and upstairs. Well, Mr. Gretch, it was so pitiful, I can't describe it. He was there, but I never saw a more miserable human being. He was not only thin but also flat, like a cartoon of a man who had been steamrollered. He was lying on the bed, holding onto the covers, with no more substance to him than a thin piece of paper. Less. Mrs. Burroughs took one of his shoulders between her thumb and forefinger, and I took the other, and we held him up. There was a breeze coming through the window and Jack -- well, he waved in the breeze. We closed the window and laid him down again and he tried to explain what had happened. "Professor Einstein wouldn't have liked this!" he moaned. "Something went wrong," he cried, shuddering. He went on gasping and mumbling, and we gathered that he had hooked up a circuit the wrong way. "I didn't harness the fourth -- I chopped off the third dimension! Einstein wouldn't have approved!" He was relieved to learn that the damage had been confined to himself and the house, so far as we knew. Like the house, Jack had insides, but we don't know where they are. We poured tea down him, and he can eat, after a fashion, but there never is a sign of a lump anywhere. the bed with clothespins so he wouldn't blow off the bed. Next morning, we rigged a line and pinned him to it so he could sit up. "I know what to do," he said, "but I would have to go back to the lab. Dad would have to let me have his staff and all sorts of equipment. And he won't do it." "If he thinks more of his money than he does of his own son," Mrs. Burroughs said, "then he's an unnatural father." But Jack made us promise not to get in touch with you. Still, people are beginning to talk. The man from the electric company couldn't find the meter yesterday, because it is attached to the middle of the outside wall and has vanished. Mr. Gretch, we are parents and we feel that you will not hesitate a moment to do whatever is necessary to get Jack back into shape. So, despite our promise, we are sending Jack to you by registered parcel post, air mail. He doesn't mind the cardboard mailing tube he is rolled up in as he has been sleeping in it, finding it more comfortable than being pinned to the sheets. Jack is a fine boy, sir, and we hope to hear soon that he is back to normal and doing the work he wants to do. Very truly yours, W. Burroughs P.S. When Jack figures out the re-integration principle, we would appreciate his fixing our house. We get along as usual, but it makes us nervous to live in a house that, strictly speaking, has no insides. W.B. We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! Country Estate No galactic job was more ugly than breaking the spirits of happy primitives... and this was the happiest race Man had ever reached! primitives were a paradox. We found them living as aborigines, without shelter or clothing. They hadn't developed even a rudimentary language. Yet they were not without considerable dignity. They were a clean race with sharp, searching eyes. Nevertheless, a few simple games and an intriguing group dance which they performed with fanatic fervor were the extent of their social achievement. They had the tractability of animals. Yet the haughty tilt of their heads suggested their compliance would never degenerate into servility. I even sensed an indifference to the miracle of our arrival. Numbering more than a hundred, they were expectantly silent as they stood in the shadow of the ship, monitoring Sharp's moves with alertly curious and unawed eyes. Sunlight glinted on metal as he elevated the flagstaff and brought it stabbing down into the ground. "As commander of this expedition," he proclaimed, "I claim this planet in the name of the Federated Worlds." The declaration was a formality. Later, after the primitives learned the Universal tongue, they would ultimately grasp its implications. Sharp rubbed a stiff finger pensively along his cheek and turned toward me. "So they have no articulate status, Norton?" "No, sir." He frowned. "What do you make of it, Ron? Can a race look as intelligent as these do and still not have a language?" I shrugged. "It's possible. Environment here is close to perfect -- no adverse factors, no defensive instincts necessary. And language, basically, is a survival device." back, he paced in front of the assembled natives, pausing to scrutinize first an elderly woman, then the child who stood next to her. Abruptly, he turned to face the formation of ship's personnel. "Hallman! Block off the area with neuro-repellent pickets. I'll hold you responsible for the loss of any of these primitives. "Walker! Synthesize some clothing -- halters and skirts for the women, loincloths for the men. That scrub over there looks as if it might do." He flicked his hand toward a stand of dwarf trees. "Jenkins! Draw up a work schedule. I'll expect you to get the most out of them at all times." Hallman hurried off to charge the neurowave generators. Walker motioned to his crew and they followed him, lugging portable lab equipment over to the clump of miniature trees. Jenkins led his Herdsmen -- the name they had earned in the Corps -- back into the ship. Sharp continued on down the line of primitives, facing each with critical glances. He drew up in front of a young girl who fixed him with a stare as analytical as his own. She was tall and smoothly tanned, with blonde hair that billowed like a surf against her shoulders. Her eyes were clear and vibrant, the slim lines of her body supple, yet strong without being muscular. Her face, despite its sharp lines and taut skin, was vital and beautiful. "She'll do for a linguistic aptitude test, Norton. Do what you can with her." Solicitously, I took her by the arm and led her from the line. She came lithely and without resisting, an uncertain smile showing bewilderment, not a need for reassurance. Sharp backed off and surveyed the natives caustically. "Animals," he muttered. "Simple animals. They've never had anything to fight, no challenge to make them function as a social unit... therefore, no social development. But that should be to our advantage, shouldn't it? If they're like animals, they ought to respond to training like animals." He hooked his thumbs under his belt and laughed. "But they'll be a credit to the Federation -- after we teach them industry. They'll hate work, but they'll beg for it." "Because," I agreed wearily, "it'll bring them the useless things they'll learn to want." But his thoughts were unbroken as he drummed a finger on his chin and glanced at me. "I wonder if they can grasp the concept of conflict." Before I could answer, he rocked forward toward a husky youth and his hand lashed out, palm and knuckles stinging both cheeks in an alternate swing and backswing. Puzzled, the youth retreated, staring uncertainly at those around him. Sharp's hand fell away from his sidearm. "Now that they know this isn't going to be a party we'll divide them into primar indoctrination groups, so we ca get an early start tomorrow." works admirably nine out of ten times on first contact with races of Class C intelligence and under -- the Handbook says. The factors are simple: If you're benign, they'll be resentful when the delusion wears off and they learn of their responsibilities. On the other hand, if you show invincible might, they'll be even more tractable when they realize their lot isn't going to be enslavement but eventual equality -- of a purely commercial sort, of course. The Handbook was Sharp's creed. If you made allowance for that -- plus the not too conspicuous fact that he was bucking for the post of regional coordinator -- then he really wasn't such a bad character, as expedition commanders go. To the unhardened crew member, slapping the native may have seemed malicious. It wasn't really. It was the mailed-fist technique. I was familiar enough with Sharp to know there was nothing personal. Linguistic technicians, being second in command because they also serve as liaison between natives and crew,enjoy a somewhat closer relationship ith skippers. I was considering the consequences of the mailed-fist philosophy when Sharp came up and offered a cigarette. His face was grim and set even in the placid hues of sunset. Silently we smoked, while we watched the Herdsmen tagging the natives radiologically into four work groups. They finished with the last one and retired to the ship. The primitives disappeared into the woods. "The girl?" Sharp asked. "She's still under hypno from the first session." "When will she be able to talk?" "Hard to say. A week -- ten days. I've only handled articulates until now. I don't know what the results will be with this batch." "How are you going about it?" "Double semacascade unit on slow transfer with all the trimmings -- hypnotic assimilation included. That way, the concepts and word symbols go directly into her subconscious. She doesn't have to face the confusion of conscious learning." a tree trunk. Sparks showered vividly in the twilight gloom. "Let me know when you've cascaded the full twenty four hundred word basic. We may find their inarticulate status helpful to quick assimilation -- don't you suppose?" "A possibility," I admitted. "At least they won't have to struggle through the confusion of bilingual coordination." A linguistic lab assistant led the girl from the ship. She stood looking at us momentarily, smiled and gracefully moved toward the woods. She was almost a silhouette against the pastels of faded sunset. But her pale features stood out as though in a light of their own. A flash of white and then she was engulfed by the darkness of the trees. For a long while, I stared after her. She and her people were lean and handsome, with the supple limbs of swimmers or trackmen. Strength and agility were apparent in every motion of their bodies. But it didn't seem like the raw vigor of the primitive. Somehow they carried a suggestion of nobility. How would they be after civilization came? I had seen it happen so many times -- the transitory degradation, the squalid living conditions, the collective uncertainty and frustration -- centuries before they would learn to live with civilization. "Something on your mind, Norton?" Sharp asked suddenly. "Just this assignment -- these people. Know what the men are calling them? Meekheads." "You're trying to say something. Go on, say it." "Maybe the mailed-fist doesn't have to be applied." He smiled, shaking his head. "Long ago, I tried that magnanimous idea myself. About the second or third expedition. I got my ears pinned back with an uprising that I couldn't begin to handle. I learned. You won't catch Sharp having to call for the Bully Crew again." bilities of the Corps are severe by any standards. Following in the wake of a Primary Discovery crew, we descend upon a planet, gather a test group, administer a precursory indoctrination in Federation civilization, then report on our success or failure. If the report is favorable, we turn the planet over to a Comprehensive Team which guides the expansion of the society in all phases from school system to technology. Our work is exacting. We are constantly under pressure of a deadline, for there's no end to the planets that have to he tested and integrated. So we are always gratified to discover a previously overlooked aspect of primitive life -- especially if it might make our job easier, less ruthless and more successful. That was why we were interested in the dance, which we witnessed on our first night. Walker and I were accompanying the skipper on security inspection outside the ship. The chemist was describing the primitives' reaction to the issuance of clothing when we were attracted by a pale, glimmering light filtering through the trees. Sharp saw it first and pointed. "What do you make of that?" "Maybe Primary was wrong," Walker suggested. "Maybe they do have fire." "Then we'll have to revise our appraisal." Sharp surged ahead, smiling enthusiastically. "That'll mean indoctrination in less time than we'd alloted." Farther into the thicket, the light became brighter, rivaling moons and their shimmering reflections against distant snowtopped peaks. Trying to push through a dense undergrowth, Sharp swore softly and jerked his arm back. "Damned thorns -- like spikes!" He sucked on the back of his hand. A soft strain of melody rose from the other side of the brush, in the area of the trembling light. The subdued euphony increased in volume, like the swell of a restless sea -- a hundred native voices in inarticulate harmony, some murmuring huskily, others humming shrilly. The wordless song was all idyllic simplicity and sentiment. It was the pouring forth of the soul of a people. "God!" whispered Walker. "Ever hear anything like it?" Sharp grunted and moved on along the hedgelike bush to a spot where the growth was thinner. We drew up alongside him, staring into the clearing. some twenty or thirty in the center, surrounded by the others who sat in a circle. And the light -- the shimmering glow that was like Earthbound starlight -- was coming from the bodies of the small group! It was an eerie blue-green aura that coruscated over their flesh like the phosphorescent glimmerings in a ship's wake. Sharp grasped Walker's arm. "Did Primary say anything about firefly natives?" he whispered incredulously. "There's nothing in the report," the chemist assured him. "I'll want a complete explanation. Take one of them back to the ship for observation. Put your best biochemist on it." Gradually, while Sharp spoke, the wordless song had changed theme. To me, it was now a lilting strain that dwelled on concepts of aspiration and yearning -- the birth of resolution, the dawn of humility. And from the depths of the voices came a subtle undertone of pride. Then the dance began. Pressed tightly together, the small group slumped into an amorphous cluster, the phosphorescent sheen of their bodies disappearing. The murmured melody crescendoed while a single arm elevated and undulated, lambent light playing across its flesh like a cold fire. Other arms thrust up and joined in the wavering motion, like reeds swaying before a marsh breeze. Faster now came the tempo of the music. Arms were elevated still higher and ghostily glimmering bodies rose fluctuating beneath them. The strain ended on a note of tentative triumph as the biological light flared brilliantly... and was extinguished. But the humming resumed and the dancers, joined by others, regrouped in three formations. Sharp touched my shoulder. "Look. They've formed a square, a triangle and a circle. A sub-social group with no language, but with the knowledge of geometric symbols. Does that make sense?" "It's possible. Symbols are taken from nature -- the shape of their moons, the four pedal points of a quadruped, the outline of a mountain." Fascinated by the new phase of the dance, we watched the natives in wild, erratic motion, their heads snapping rhythmically from side to side, their arms pistoning in and out, their bodies whirling in discontinuous gyrations, each in turn duplicating the motion of the next one. It was a precise but discordant movement. It ended quickly, however, and the wraithlike spectacle passed on to still another phase. Now a tall native stood with arms folded and glowing steadily. A score of men and women circled about him, pirouetting around each other in pairs. The background humming crested with excited fervor and the dancers whirled recklessly, their flesh only faintly luminous compared with that of the motionless man. "Ron," Sharp whispered eagerly. "This proves they're more communal than we thought. We might not have such a tough job ahead, after all." glided away from her partner in an arc that swept her to the next nearest pair of circling dancers. The music became more excited now. Drawn as though into a vortex of exultation, another group formed at the other end of the field, spinning in mercurial steps about a second central figure. The swirling motion was a thing of grace and beauty that could be described only in the dance that was being performed by primitives who had no language. The girl again swept out of position and, glowing even more brightly, caracoled across the clearing to become part of the second group. More spectators joined the gyrating formations. Others created new wheeling groups until there was none left to watch. Sharp swore abruptly and reached down to the ground. He came up waving a handful of garments. We realized only then that the natives had cast off their synthetic clothing. Sharp's expression grew harsh -- the letter of the Handbook had been violated. The natives had been issued clothes and shown how to wear them, but they were not wearing them now. That was sheer disobedience. Shouting angrily, he charged into the clearing. The dancers froze in position. Their inarticulate tones drifted into silence. Their luminosity flickered, faded and disappeared, leaving the glade a dismal moor, illuminated only by the pitifully weak light of the moons. It was as though a beautiful symphony had been silenced in mid-theme. Sharp unholstered his duo-purpose revolver and flicked it on minimum output. Then he swept the closest group of dancers with its neuro-agitant impulses. He hurled the garments into the air and they fluttered down, falling across the bare flesh of the dancers. "Get them on!" he ordered, fanning the weapon back over the cringing primitives and then thrusting it into his holster. A small boy broke and raced blindly into the underbrush. I waited for the screams that would come as thorns tore into his flesh. Meekly -- or was it with an imperceptible air of patience? -- the primitives began putting on their clothes. Sharp returned to where we were standing. "Glad they stepped out of line," he explained. "The book says not to pass up any opportunity to show authority. Walker, pick one out for your bio test." Then he started back for the ship. I went looking for the boy who had plunged into the thorny underbrush. I found him pressed against a tree. He didn't shrink away, as I expected him to, when I knelt to examine his wounds. There weren't any. hummed restlessly in the lab as I stood by the port and watched the natives working at the edge of the woods. An hour earlier, they had been shown a finished dwelling, constructed of logs hewn and notched with nucleonic cutters and lifted into place with counter-gravitic cranes. Now, coached by Herdsmen and equipped with the primitive tools they would be expected to use for two generations, the four groups were attempting to duplicate the construction. The girl -- we called her Lola for the record -- stirred as the psychocascade pulsator changed pitch, moving on to another concept. I went over and readjusted the dipoles. Even in induced sleep, with her face relaxed and the color drained away, her beauty was like a vivid mask. But it was a helpless elegance that only seemed typical of the humility of her race -- a new type of subdued charm unlike any I'd seen in any race, Class A through D inclusive. For a long while, I stared down at her delicate yet vigorous features, thinking thoughts forbidden by the Handbook -- how it would be to shake free of an expedition and spend a lifetime with a nymph. Walker came in, frowning. "How's Lola doing?" "Soaked up everything so far. Reaction about normal for a Class C. How did the glow-worm biopsy go?" He shrugged wearily. "Can't find anything to account for it. No dermato-trachael system. No oxygen supply for any sort of biocumbustion. No photogenic organs. Only normal human tissue." "Don't let it heave you," I encouraged. "Maybe it's something we only imagined." His frown only deepened. "Like that kid running into the thicket last night? Ron, the boy did tear through those thorns." I laughed. "Without getting scratched?" He nodded seriously. "When I performed the biopsy, I took the specimen from the native's shoulder. I severed the tissue. I dropped it into solution. Not more than three seconds later, I was back to sterilize the wound... It had already healed."  tiently in his cabin as I told of the biopsy and the boy in the thicket. Then, annoyed, he shrugged it off. "Regeneration -- simple regeneration. We've run across it before. There was that time on Auxol -- " "Not quite. This regeneration was in seconds, not days." He stared thoughtfully out the port, then turned back to me. "Look, Ron. I'm not interested in physiological aberrations as long as they don't disqualify a race as humanoid. In this body-glow matter and regeneration -- Walker hasn't found anything to suggest the Meekheads are subhuman?" I shook my head. "Then the official report will do for whatever comments you or he might have on the phenomena. Meanwhile, I'm more concerned over this." He motioned through the port toward the working natives. There were confused expressions on their faces as' they tried to lay base logs in place for the dwellings. "They are disappointingly inept for a race that is aware of geometrical patterns in their dance ritual," he complained. "Does that suggest anything?" But he went on without waiting for a reply. "It's obvious we have a conspiracy on our hands. They are capable of what we require, but they're being obstinate." "How can they conspire on anything without even a sign language?" I asked. "We'll learn that only after we have the girl ready for her first interview. Then, perhaps, we'll know why they glow like fireflies and heal their wounds immediately." "The explanation might lie in concepts we can't grasp. How can they express those concepts in words we can understand, if we can't give them a language with those words and concepts already embodied in it?" He brushed aside the argument. "All the same, we will prepare for immediate linguistic contact. Have the girl ready for questioning in the morning." "But we can't speed it up that much without risking mental instability. Even top-grade Class Bs need at least a week for language indoctrination." His features tightened stubbornly. "Interview in the morning. Early." "But -- " "I'll worry about the complications, if there are any. The interview is an order, Ron." After all, there was the Handbook and he was bucking for promotion. Besides, he could stick anybody aboard with a summary charge of insubordination. And I did have my own future in the Corps to think about. As I turned to leave, a Herdsman supervisor clicked his heels in the doorway and saluted. "Sir, Lieutenant Hallman reports that the natives don't eat." "Tell the Lieutenant that if they don't like our chow," said Sharp, "let them grub for their own -- between work periods." "You don't understand, Captain. It isn't that they won't eat. They don't eat -- at all." "Nonsense!" "We've just completed our third inspection of the area, sir. From what we can see, the Meekheads never touch any food."  la as she lay beneath the cascade units, wondering whether she was aware of her helplessness and my inability to justify her confidence. My hand started toward the units to make the adjustments Sharp had ordered. But I drew them back hesitantly. Then I tried to capture the spirit of the Handbook, telling myself she was only one of a species; that if something went wrong with the language transplant experiment, there were still ninety-nine other subjects in the test area -- millions outside the area. But all I could see was her hair flared out on the cold metal of the table like solar prominences against the velvet of space; her smile that had expressed her simple faith in me more meaningfully than it could ever be conveyed in words. Reluctantly, I increased the intensity of hypno-anesthetic and put the psychocascade units on three-quarters-maximum output, direct transfer. Sharp would never know I hadn't used full power. And the only inconvenience to us would be a less than standard vocabulary, but one that would still do for an initial interview. Later, when night came, I wandered to the clearing, hoping to find the primitives again at their ritual. I wasn't disappointed. Concealed behind a tree, I stared wonderingly at the magnificent spectacle of glimmering, whirling bodies, lost in the enigma of their ceremony. Only, this time, drab synthetic clothing concealed the full grace of their movements. And, as I watched, I wondered what the Federation's most renowned choreographers would give just to witness the sight. Again the small group lay in a featureless mass with an occasional arm extending upward, wavering. Was it a symbolic ritual? An alternate social manifestation that supplanted a civilization which had never developed? Was it their legend and history, mores and folklore -- all embodied in an exotic dance that replaced a language? If properly translated, would it resolve all the riddles? More confused than fascinated, I watched the primitives execute the erratic movements of snapping heads and pistoning arms. And the music became even more soulful in transition to the next phase, while lithe bodies lost themselves in an ecstasy of concentric circles around central figures. Now the ritual was at the stage where it had been interrupted by Sharp. But it moved on into yet another phase. The groups dispersed in flitting motion and the performers took up individual positions, spangling the glade with islands of pale light. The humming deepened toward a feverish pitch and movement resumed. The natives pirouetted, caracoled, swayed, tripped across the field, while the halos of their bodies flickered steadily. They performed with an air of abandon, as though they realized that soon the ecstasy of their dance would be lost forever. And, for a brief instant, I could almost grasp an elusive meaning that might be concealed in their ritual. Suddenly one of the girls swept close by, an elegant flash of swift limbs and scintillating light. She paused to begin a pirouette and our eyes met. Was it Lola? But it couldn't be! Even if she had overcome the hypo-anesthesia, she would still have the capacitance-activated hatches to cope with before she could leave the ship. I scanned the field, trying to catch sight of her again. But she was gone -- swallowed up in the maelstrom of dancers. Hurrying back to the ship, I found her as I had left her. the cascade units and moved the table away from the port so Lola's face wouldn't be in the direct sunlight. Then I waited for her to awaken, wondering apprehensively whether the overwhelming surge of alien concepts and word symbols had destroyed an intelligence that might have been as gentle and beautiful as the form which cloaked it. But when she finally opened her eyes, the brightness of rationality was still there. "You are Lola," I said. "But why am I here?" There was a softness in her voice that I hadn't heard on a score of test planets -- on a hundred civilized worlds. "You are going to speak for your people, until we can teach them to speak, too." Her face twisted in confusion. "What is there to say?" "Through speaking, you will learn how to live better and be happy." It was the routine approach -- Article Two, Section Seven, of the Handbook. "We are happy now." "But you'll be happier. We're from the stars. And your children's children will reach the stars, too." She rose and stood trembling by the table. "You must go back without us." I grasped her shoulders and stared into the beauty of her eyes. And I found myself struggling with thoughts the Handbook says should be alien to any good Corpsman. "How do you know we can be civilized?" she asked. Sharp appeared smiling in the doorway, his thumbs hung up on his belt. "She can make sense?" I nodded as he strode over and stood before her. The mailed fist again? I wondered, tensing. "Do you people have a language?" he demanded. "We do not speak." "But, you can talk," he insisted. "You're only pretending you can't, aren't you?" "Pretending?" she repeated. "The word's not basic," I reminded him. "Neither is the word 'civilization,' which she seemed to be doing all right with when I came in." I stared awkwardly at him, then at her. "Lola," he continued warily, "your people are simple. They can't even talk. Yet they know all about a square, a circle, a triangle. How do you account for that?" She didn't answer. "Do you know how to work together?" he pressed. "There is no need." "Or did you decide you wouldn't work -- that you'd pretend to be stupid so we'd think you couldn't learn to work?" "We are slow because the work is hard. We have never built homes before." I interrupted. "You're getting into concepts she can't grasp with just a basic cascade treatment." "The hell I am! She's hedging, Ron! Yesterday she was out of the ship just once -- when the others were taking a break. Yet she's aware they're being taught to build shacks. How else would she know unless they communicate?" He grasped her wrist. "What aie you trying to make us believe?" She glanced helplessly at me. I started to step in between them. "Stay out, Norton," Sharp warned. A Herdsman sergeant stomped in, saluted. "Lieutenant Walker wants to know if you'll come to the lab right away, sir." "What now?" Sharp asked, annoyed. "We found out why they don't have to wear clothes. The Lieutenant says they're thermostatic. They can adjust to cold or heat." Sharp's arms flopped down. "Damn!" he muttered, striding for the hatch. In the corridor, he glanced back. "Lock that woman up, Sergeant, until I can get back to her." Somehow I felt Lola might not stay locked up very long. had to be bled and recharged, so it wasn't until late afternoon before I could get away from the lab. Outside, I watched from a distance as Sharp personally supervised the primitives' instructions in tree-felling and notching. But they couldn't seem to grasp the principle of fitting one log on top of the other. I rehearsed an argument for Lola's release -- one that I felt would be convincing -- and waited for a chance to spring it. Sharp was a fury of bellowing words as he shouted instructions to the Herdsmen and contempt for the natives. I watched him snatch an ax from one of the primitives and swing it savagely at the trunk of a sapling. Swearing, he thrust it back into the man's hand. The native only continued to wield the tool ineffectively, the broadside of its blade clanking against bark. "Jenkins!" Sharp shouted abruptly. "Take a two-hour break and reorganize into shifts. We're going on a twenty-four-hour schedule." Swabbing his brow, he came over and held out a cigarette, shaking his head disparagingly. "I've never run into this much trouble." "About Lola -- " I began. He thrust a lighter under my cigarette and then lit his own. "I'm ordering a trouble-shooting detail from Regional Command. Microbiologists, organic chemists, psychologists, medical technicians -- a full complement. We'll find out more about these damned Meekheads than we know about ourselves!" He probably had visions of his promotion to regional coordinator flying out of orbit. "John," I said, "these natives are -- well, different. Maybe another approach -- " "Like turning the girl loose," he broke in sarcastically, "and patting her on the rump and asking her family in to sit at the captain's table?" "If you'd quit 'quoting the Handbook for a minute -- " "This is my ship," he returned severely, "and I want it taut. So taut that whenever I find a subordinate going moon-happy over a native woman -- " He stopped short and let out a rush of air like a ship blowing its tubes. "Oh, hell, Ron. You're a good linguistic technician. Don't complicate things." "I can't see putting a girl in irons because Article Three says to watch out for conspiracy." He sighed. "You don't like the Corps, do you?" "I don't like the way it's run sometimes." Even before I said it, I realized I had needled him too far. He hurled his cigarette to the ground and crushed it. "Well, you can walk out and go native any time -- now, if you want!" He strode angrily toward the ship and my eyes followed him as my thoughts stalled on his last words. And I wondered how many desertions from the Corps were prompted by Handbookconscious skippers, how many by Galaxy-hopping fatigue... how many by girls like Lola. around the half-built cabin, staring uncertainly after the Herdsmen who were withdrawing into the ship. Studying the people, I realized they didn't look like persons who had been driven almost to exhaustion for ten hours. Their bodies were unbent, their faces alert and fresh, and their movements brisk as they sifted into the thicket... to another dance ritual? Stars came out glittering and of night, like... like the final phase of the primitives' dance! I made the association spontaneously, as though I had subconsciously realized it all the while. At the beginning of that final movement, they had spaced themselves randomly about the field, their luminescence trembling in intensity like the shimmerings of a myriad stars. Was this part of the symbolism? Was I beginning to grasp the significance of the ritual? I pushed quickly through the woods to the clearing. The dance was already under way and, intently, I watched the formless mass of bodies writhing, wavering, striving to stand erect, swaying rhythmically. It was like -- like... I couldn't force the association. I listened to the strains of hummed music for a possible clue. But still I was seeing only an incomprehensible group dance. The pace quickened and the primitives swirled into rigid positions, their bodies moving in the precise rhythm of the second, the mechanical phase. Then I noticed they had discarded their clothes. There was movement in the bush on my right and Lola emerged, running lithely toward the clearing! She passed close and I grabbed her arm. "How did you get out of the ship?" I snapped. Moonlight splashed across her face and, for the first time, there was anxiety in her features. "Let me go!" she pleaded. "It will be our last dance!" Perplexed, I stared down at her. How had she learned about the twenty-four-hour work schedule? "We are going away," she explained. My hand closed suddenly on nothing, where before it had held her wrist. And she was among the dancers. She took her place in a concentric circle whirling about one of the glowing pivot men. Their humming voices, the fierce abandon, were soul-stirring and vividly alive. Entranced, I stood swaying at the edge of the clearing, wanting to race out and join them, eager to experience their exultation. Lola glided from her circle and tripped across the clearing to take up a new whirling position with another group. Two natives from that group flitted to the formation she had left. Suddenly there was a burst of realization as the pattern resolved into meaningful terms. Now I knew! The dance and its phases were -- "Lola!" I cried, remembering she had said they were going away. "Don't leave!" Sickened with a sense of impending loss, I strained to catch sight of her. They couldn't leave now -- not after we'd just found them! Finally I saw her, a lovely wraith, all shimmering and beautiful as she danced the dance of a hundred eras. I lunged out after her. "Steady, Norton. Stand back." I stopped and turned around, riveted by the threat in Sharp's voice. Cold moonlight shivered along the metal barrel of the gun he held. ferences of opinion," he said calmly, scanning the formations of dancers. "But freeing the girl, standing by and letting these primitives run around nude... Where is she?" "You don't understand. These natives -- " "Save it for the court-martial. Meanwhile, you'll confine yourself to quarters under arrest." He motioned me to one side and leveled the gun into the clearing. Punishment -- the whiplash of neuro-agitant impulses -- was sufficient for a first offense, the Handbook directed. For a repeated offense, such as flagrant nudity, an exemplary execution was mandatory. He flicked the weapon's selector to maximum output and a nimbus of vicious, visible force leaped out to engulf the nearest native. Radiant energy supplemented the effect of body illumination until a dazzling light flared briefly, like the bursting of a nova. When the fierce glow subsided, however, there was no limp body quivering in the final agonies of a death that had destroyed the nervous system. The native had simply disappeared. And the dance continued as though the performers hadn't noticed the incident. The gun dangling from his hand, Sharp backed away incredulously. He brought the weapon up again and its soft fury of pale light flicked out once more, this time directed at two of the primitives. I struggled with the impression that the pair had disappeared the barest instant before he fired. Sharp swore. And the dance went on, reaching its climax. The primitives disglade with the weird lambent illumination of their bodies. I remembered Lola, desperately shouted her name, lunged again into the clearing. The thin cone of deadly neuroimpulses flared like a barrier inches in front of me, aimed at the natives on the far right. Then the beam was sweeping slowly, determinedly, across the glade. Like candles being extinguished with the wave of a hand, the primitives disappeared in turn as the spotlight of death passed over them. Then they were all gone and Sharp was shouting to himself. He let the gun fall to the ground and dropped down beside it, his face in his hands. I felt sorry for him. He didn't understand. When he looked up, the harshness was back on his face. "They won't get far! Not with the neuropicket fence up." "Have you a fence around the Galaxy?" I asked, suddenly bitter. He stared bewilderedly. "They won't be back," I went on dully. "They were considering leaving all the while. They pulled out when they saw we meant to break down their ruse and bring them the gift of civilization." with the natives gone. There was only the hollow memory of their dance, the ringing strains of their melody in every rustling leaf. I knew it was a desolation that extended all over the planet. "You know where they went?" he asked incredulously. I turned vengefully on him. But resentment gave way to pity and I looked away. He could never understand. The factors were too far removed from handbooks and creeds and taut ships and the politics of the Corps. Forlornly, I closed my eyes and pic# tured Lola's face -- a face I would never see again. "Where are they, Ron?" he demanded. "A light-year away -- ten -- a thousand. Maybe in another galaxy." He swore impatiently. "We were trying to judge their intelligence." I couldn't control the irony in my voice. "That was like a moron trying to appraise the intelligence of a genius... John, we are the primitives! We're like a wild dog who finds himself on the grounds of a peaceful country estate. Instead of letting himself be taken in and having it easy for the rest of his life, he stays vicious and gets kicked back into the forest. God, what we might have learned from them!" "From those savages?" "They were savages, all right Think of their dance. Could you see anything in it?" "Just a primitive ritual." "It was a total record of racial achievement, passed down from generation to generation -- a ceremonial tribute to a glorious heritage." "Heritage! In a race that hasn't even learned to build a fire?" "Their discovery of fire," I explained patiently, "was commemorated in the first phase of the dance -- wavering luminous arms and bodies rising like flames from a formless heap. It symbolized the beginning of culture. The erratic gestures of the second movement -- I could see spinning gears, thrusting rods, sliding pistons... a tribute to a transitory mechanical civilization. "And dancers whirling in circles around their luminous pivot men? Planets in orbits around suns. Natives gliding from one circling position -- from one orbit -- to another. A commemoration of the conquest of interplanetary space." Comprehension was spreading across his face. "And when they were scattering around the field with their bodies glowing on and off -- " "Twinkling stars. And natives darting from one dancer to another to signify the achievement of galactic travel." " But where is their civilization?" into the clearing. She had danced there only minutes ago. The loneliness now made it seem like an eternity. "What is civilization?" I asked. "Simply a stage in racial evolution. From our viewpoint, because we are immediately involved in the process, civilization  seems an end in itself. We're proud of the artifacts we've perfected. But when we evolve to the point where we can turn body heat on and off like a switch, why waste time tailoring clothes and building homes? And would it not be pointless to take medicines and maintain therapeutic institutions if we had already developed spontaneous regeneration? "Would we bother with producing food, if we had evolved a biological way of extracting energy for metabolism from some source we can't even conceive of now? Nor would we need interstellar and interplanetary ships -- or any kind of vehicle -- if we could ourselves there. Even language is superfluous when there's the ability to transfer concepts directly from mind to mind. And any planet they pick is not a world to be conquered. It's a country estate." Sharp broke his thoughtful silence with a start. "Ron, we've got to find them! Think what the contact would mean, to the advancement of galactic civilization! This can't be the only planet they were on. When they left civilization behind, they must have scattered. We'll hunt them down, if we have to search the Galaxy system by system!" tv And you'll still not find us. The words seemed like my own -- unspoken. Sharp gasped and I knew he had heard the same silent voice. Spinning around, he faced the clearing. "Lola!" he cried. She stood there, arms folded, her head thrown back in profound dignity and goddesslike loveliness. "You have guessed well," she said softly. "Don't waste your time searching for something you'll never find. Your racial existence spans a few thousand years. Until it can be measured can be no intellectual contact between your civilization and our culture. There is no common basis." She smiled and it was obvious-? ly a gesture of farewell. "Wait!" Sharp stumbled forward. "You can't desert us! We -- we're like you!" She threw her head back and laughed silently. "Lola," I whispered urgently, "take me with you!" "To the -- country estate?" Then she smiled warmly and extended her hand. "Come," she said. And we went -- alone -- together. for your information whether I should begin by telling you what you might be able to see this summer after a rainstorm has finally ended a dry spell or whether I should be more systematic and first pin down what it is I am going to talk about. Maybe the latter will be the better way because, after finding out what I am going to discuss, you may decide that you won't have to investigate rain puddles after reading about it. Zoologists, you may know, divide all living things that are not vegetables into a number of major groups which they call phyla. Everything that has a backbone makes such a phylum, for example; all mollusks make a phylum and all one-celled animals make a phylum. One of these phyla bears the name of arthropoda. The next smaller sub-division inside a phylum is the "class" and what kind of animals compose the phylum arthropoda will become clear quickly if I mention a few of the classes comprising it. The insects are one of these classes and the arachnids (spiders and their relatives) are another one. The centipedes form another class and the crustaceans still another. classes. In the case of the crustaceans, there are two which, by sheer coincidence, might be described as small crustaceans and large crustaceans; actually it is the presence or absence of abdominal appendages that counts. The ones without also happen to  be minute, tiny or small in size and this subclass is called Entomostraca. Inside the subclasses, you have "orders" and the one that interests us here is the order of the Branchiopoda which, if you insist on a translation, means "the gillfooted ones." Inside the orders, you have sub-orders and the one I have in mind is called the sub-order of the Phyllopoda ( phyllodes is Greek for "leaf like") and inside the sub-order you have, in this case, "divisions," of which the first is, at least, something fish fanciers among my readers should know by name -- the division of the fairy shrimps. The division, in turn, is composed of "families" -- the families of genera and the genera of species. The family is that of the Apopidae and the two families are Lepidurus and Apus. It is Apus I want to tell about. In appearance, it can best be compared to the well-known horseshoe crab of eastern North America. If you imagine a small horseshoe crab with a carapace about an inch in length, you also have a picture of the proper size. But Apus is much prettier. Apus cancriformis, a crustacean in good standing but of irresponsible habits Like all the so-called fairyshrimps, it has a strong tendency to be transparent, but it runs to definite colors in spite of that. The wide, flat carapace is somewhere between amber yellow and pale gold, the body is reddish, the legs brownish and the tail is red. It is bigger than most of the other fairy shrimps and the result is that the other fairy shrimps constitute its food. Apus cannot be called rare, for when it occurs, there are hundreds of them in any large puddle over an area of square miles. But one can never predict whether it will occur or not. In England it was observed, for example, in #. The next occurrence there -- southern Scotland, to be precise -- took place in #. And it hasn't been reported from Great Britain since. It is because of these ultrasporadic occurrences that many a naturalist who knows all about Apus has never seen one in the open. You can't go and look for Apus, or rather you can look, as I said before, when a rainstorm has ended a summer dry spell, but whether you find one is a case of rare luck. "rare abundance," Apus must have made its existence known quite some time ago, but it did not get into print until around #. A gentleman by the name of Johann Leonhard Frisch then published a series of quarto volumes under the general title of Description of manyfold Insects and in one of these volumes Apus appeared -- with the name that is still in use. Translated, the word Apus means "footless," which sounds slightly unbelievable when you look at the picture. But Frisch had a reason -- he did not consider the many appendages of the Apus as feet. He was somewhat vague as to what they were, but he was sure that they were not feet and coined the name accordingly. The next man to deal with Apus was the "pastor of the evangelical congregation of Regensburg," Johann Christian Schaffer, who successfully devoted his time between sermons to zoological problems. He declared in # that the Apus was not a "water insect" as Frisch had said, nor an aquatic centipede as somebody else had guessed, but a relative of the crayfish, the lobster and the crab. Shaffer also found the eggs of the Apus and observed that they could be dried and kept dry for years, but that they hatched when the soil containing them was thrown into a container with water. He thereby explained how Apus could occur in a given place a few days after a storm. He also stated that a wind might pick up the dry eggs with dust and blow it to a place where Apus had not occurred for a long time. But then Schaffer found that he had researched himself into a corner from which he did not know how to escape. He had carefully examined a large number of specimens and found that they all had eggs and thus were all females! He collected the eggs and let them hatch later. Another generation, every one of them a female! They laid eggs and Schaffer collected them. This time he let each egg hatch in its separate container. "I succeeded," he reported, "in that some of them grew up and I obtained eggs from them and young from these eggs. This was enough proof for me that they can produce and discharge fertile eggs without fertilization." But after he had written down what his own observations had made clear, he found that he had observed something impossible -- you could have eggs without a male around, but you could not have fertile eggs. We now know that some arthropods can do just that, that unfertilized eggs will hatch into more females and that fertilization is the classical conditio sine qua non only if more males are to be produced. Schaffer did not know this and the only way he could reconcile his observations and his convictions was to assume that the females he had examined were in reality hermaphrodites with both male and female sex glands. It wasn't so, but if Schaffer hadn't found this excuse, he would never have slept soundly again -- unless, of course, he had gone on to become the discoverer of parthenogenesis. which the history of science is rich, the male Apus was discovered precisely one century after old Schaffer had published his observations. The discoverer was the Polish zoologist Kuzobowsky, the place of the discovery a puddle near Crakow. Between these two dates there were two occurrences of Apus which did not influence its investigation and did not increase the store of knowledge, but which are worth mentioning. It was during the Napoleonic wars, in #, that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, statesman and amateur scientist, received a speciment of Apus. He was intensely interested and since business of all kinds did not permit him to hunt for Apus himself, he enlisted the aid of whoever was offered a whole Thaler for another specimen, a guilder for the specimen after that and decreasing prizes for more, ending up with a minimum of six pfennigs. The inhabitants of Jena shook their heads, but many of them could use a Thaler and went looking. Without success, though, for Goethe never got to see a second Apus. In Vienna, on the other hand, the circumstances were reversed. During the night from the #th to the #th of August, #, a rainstorm of fantastic magnitude and intensity burst over Vienna and vicinity. It was so powerful that all gutters were flooded and stayed flooded for weeks. Apus appeared in enormous numbers in these puddles and the women who always sold fish tried to sell Apus, too -- but without finding any takers. After Kuzobowsky had reported that the male Apus existed and could be found on occasion, the scene shifted once more, this time to Franconia, where Apus had put in an appearance for several years running, which in itself is a minor miracle. The zoologist Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold decided to find out once and for all whether the males, now known to exist, were needed for continuation of the species. He found what already had been mentioned, namely that fertilization was required for male offspring but not necessary for female offspring. The books now say that von Siebold was the rediscoverer of parthenogenesis, which is the technical term for this phenomenon. He is called rediscoverer because it was later established that other zoologists had preceded him, though without finding any acceptance. with the horseshoe crab as regards appearance, it is necessary to say a few words about this by no means rare inhabitant of the shallow waters of the Atlantic coast of the North American continent and of the shallow waters around the Spice Islands. Limulus polyphemus, the horseshoe crab, which looks quite similar but is an arachnid Among zoologists, the horseshoe crab, Limulus, had two distinctions for a long time. One was that it was the strangest living crab, the other that it was a "living fossil," for horseshoe crabs were known from deposits # tinction still holds true, but scientists now know that the horseshoe crab is not a crab at all. It is still an arthropod, of course, but it belongs to the class of the arachnids. Of course you are at liberty to call it the strangest living arachnid. As regards age, the horseshoe crab has recently received heavy competition from a relative of Apus. (I wish the specialists would get together on the names they use. In Europe, they now call their own Apus Lepidurus apus.) O Triops cancriformis, which has not changed The name of the relative is Triops cancriformis, which looks rather like Apus, but seems to be slightly larger. Habits of occurrence are the same. The reason for mentioning it is that it has recently been found in the fossil state, in deposits from the youngest of the three subdivisions of the Triassic period, the so-called Keuper, of an age of very nearly The only distinction between the living and the fossil form that could be found at all is a slight difference in size, the fossil form being the smaller one. But this could be an individual difference. It looks as if not only the "family" but the genus and probably even the species have not changed at all since the end of the Triassic period. Boomer of western Texas and vicinity has brought in a good deal of correspondence, some of it contradictory but all of it interesting. Several readers living in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico wrote to say that they are well acquainted with their native reptiles, that they know some of them occasionally dash about running on their hind legs, but that they had never heard the Western collared lizard. term Mountain Boomer. A lady in New Mexico, on the other hand, did not claim to know much about reptiles, but knew that in some sections of Arizona the Gila Monster was called Mountain Boomer. There must have been some confusion somewhere, probably caused by the fact that the Mountain Boomer is thought to be poisonous and that the Gila Monster is known to be. Finally, I have the promise of one reader in Texas to "go after it" this summer with notebook and camera. A letter from Dr. Charles M. Bogert, chairman of the Department of Amphibians and Reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History, informed me that the term Mountain Boomer is mentioned in Dr. Leonard Stejneger's works as a synonym of the collared lizard, Crotaphyllus collaris, which ranges from Oregon to Mexico. Dr. Bogert explained that the collared lizard varies in color in various parts of their range, but that they are greenish in the plateau region of western Texas to western Arizona. "In fact, the only thing wrong with Mr. Crutcher's description is the size," he wrote. "Collared lizards attain a maximum size of approximately # inches, and three feet was a bit of an exaggeration -- the sort of thing that happens when a story is retold many years afterward." I then checked with the Handbook of Lizards by Hobart M. Smith. It does not list Mountain Boomer as a synonym in the index or elsewhere, but it does have a good deal to say about the western collared lizard, Crotaphytus collaris baileyi, named by Stejneger. The overall length is about # inches, two-thirds of which are tail. Under the heading of Habits, it says: "If startled on flat ground where they can reach high speed in movement, they use only the hind legs, lifting the whole forepart of the body and the forelegs completely off the ground. Running in such a curious pose, they look like diminutive racing dinosaurs, waddling slightly as they rush along." .Of course they are not poisonous, although they are rather consider provocation. What I would still like to know, however, is why they were ever called Mountain Boomer and what is behind the story of the "whining" lizard that was told more than half a century ago. me a letter a while back saying that, while looking through an older chemistry text, he had come across names of elements that did not agree with those with which he was familiar and asked me to tell him the names currently in use. I could not reply in the usual letter column because the answer would have been too long. But I am going to use the balance of this space for this topic now because I know that other people have been confused, too. Unless you know the history involved,it must be disconcerting to have tungsten suddenly appear under the name of wolfram, for example. Most of the changes involve the two ends of the atomic scale because of the activities of the atomic energy experts. At the top of the scale, they merely added elements; at the bottom, they violated custom by doing something chemists do not consider "permissible" -- they have given separate names to isotopes of the same element. Element No. #, hydrogen, is still called that if its atomic weight is "one" (approximately, that is), but double-weight or "heavy" hydrogen is deuterium, while triple-weight hydrogen is tritium. But element No. #, helium, also has an isotope of about three units weight; this is called tralphium, though normal helium, of about four units weight, is still helium -- unless you refer to its nucleus only, which is an "alpha particle." Above helium, the sailing is clear for a while: No. #, lithium; No. #, beryllium; No. #, boron; No. #, carbon; No. #, nitrogen; No. #, oxygen; No. #, fluorine and No. #, neon. When you come to No. #, sodium, you may encounter a "hemispheric difference" in the naming; in Europe, it's usually natrium and its chemical symbol is Na. Then there are again no problems for a while: No. #, magnesium; No. #, aluminum (aluminium in England, France and Germany); No. #, silicon; No. #, phosphorus; No. #, sulfur; No. #, chlorine; No. #, argon. With No. #, potassium, another hemispheric difference crops up -- its symbol is K and non-English speaking chemists call it kalium, since the name is derived from the Arab al kaljun, meaning wood ash. Again there is clear sailing for a while: No. #, calcium; No. #, scandium; No. #, titanium; No. #, vanadium; No. #, chromium; No. #, manganese; No. #, iron; No. #, cobalt; No. #, nickel; No. #, copper; No. #, zinc; No. #, gallium; No. #, germanium; No. #, arsenic; No. #, selenium; No. #, bromine; No. #, krypton; No. #, rubidium; No. #, strontium; No. #, yttrium and No. #, zirconium. ber of years ago with regard to No. #, which used to be called columbium by American chemists while everybody else called it niobium. The chemical symbol was Nb anywhere and now the name niobium is official everywhere. No. # never gave any trouble; it was always molybdenum, though the name might confuse a classical philologist, for molybdos is Greek for "lead." No. # was first called masurium after an area in East Prussia, presumably the home of one of its first discoverers. But it is now internationally technetium with the symbolic Tc. No linguistic problems for the next dozen or so: No. #, ruthenium; No. #, rhodium; No. #, palladium; No. #, silver (that the symbol of No. # is Ag is due to the Latin word for that metal: argentum')-, No. #, cadmium; No. #, indium; No. #, tin (the symbol Sn is based on the Latin word for tin, stannum); No. #, antimony (symbol is Sb from Latin name stibium); No. #, tellurium; No. #, iodine; No. #, xenon; No. #, caesium and No. #, barium. But now we get into turbulent waters, for we have arrived at the group called the rare earth metals. I have just looked at half a dozen popular books on chemistry and found that some authors believe in simplifying their own life rather than that of the reader when they come to the rare earths. Some simply wrote in their tables: "Nos. #-#, rare earths" and two just said "Nos. #-#." So I had better give the list first, beginning with the atomic number, followed by the chemical symbol, then the atomic weight (latest information I have, which may not be late enough) and finally the name: La # lanthanium Ce # cerium Pr # praseodymium Nd # neodymium Pm # promethium Sm # samarium Eu # europium Gd # gadolinium Tb # terbium Dy # dysprosium Ho # holmium Er # erbium Tm # thulium Yb # ytterbium Lu # lutetium find a "didymium" listed, which was just based on insufficient knowledge. Carl, Count Auer von Welsbach, the Austrian chemist, established that there were two elements he named praseodymium ("green twin") and neodymium ("new twin"). The word didymium meant "twin," too; it was supposed to be the "twin of lanthanum." nite identification and the name prometheum originated at Oak Ridge. Nos. # and #I were discovered independently and nearly simultaneously by Auer von Welsbach of Austria and Georges Urbain of France. The names proposed by Auer von Welsbach (but not accepted) were aidebar aniurn for No. # and cassiopeium for No. #. The now accepted names are both based on place names, Ytterby in Sweden and Lutetia, the original Latin name of Paris. The next element above the rare earths is No. #, hafnium. There never was any trouble with the name; the amusing thing is that it was coined by a Hungarian (Georg von Hevesy) who was then working in Copenhagen, which is Kjobenhavn in Danish -- at least most of the time, since they use two forms. Now again things will go smoothly for a while: No. #, tantalum; No. # -- sorry, I talked too soon -- No. # is the element with the symbol W, standing for wolfram, formerly known by its Swedish name of tungsten, now officially abolished. Then No. #, rhenium (from Latin Rhenus, the Rhine); No. #, osmium; No. #, iridium; No. #, platinum; No. #, gold (the symbol Au is from the Latin name aurum ); No. #, mercury (symbol Hg from its old name Hydrargium ); No. #, thallium; No. #, lead (symbol Pb is from Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library. I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. All Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. Latin name plumbum ); No. #, bismuth; No. #, polonium. No. # was called alabamine (from Alabama) for some time, but the name is now astatine (from the Greek astasia, meaning "unsteady") and the symbol At, the reason being that of all of its isotopes known, the "longest-lived" has a half-life of about eight hours. No. # is radon, symbol Rn; its first name immediately after discovery was "radium emanation." Since this was a clumsy word, the name "niton" was proposed, but radon was chosen. No. # is now francium; an earlier claim to its discovery had proposed the name virginium. The symbol for francium is Fa. No. # is radium; No. #, actinium; No. #, thorium; No. #, protactinium (the alternate form of the name, protoactinium, has been dropped) and No. #, uranium. This was for many years considered the heaviest (with reference to its atomic weight) naturally occurring element. Only fairly recently was it discovered that plutonium, which has a still higher atomic weight, does occur naturally in the very faintest of traces -- it is far rarer naturally than the very rare radium. It is fully justified, therefore, to call all the "trans-uranic elements" artificial. No. # is neptunium, No. #, plutonium, with the symbols Np, and Pu. No. # is americium (symbol Am), No. #, curium (symbol Cm) and Nos. # and #, californium and berkelium, with the symbols Cf and Bk. Should the whole mess be simplified? No doubt, but I'm afraid the revision would cause even more argument and confusion, calling for top-level conferences. Meanwhile, chemists can and do work with it, which is the important thing. A Gift From Earth Except for transportation, it was absolutely free... but how much would the freight cost? T is an outrage," said  Koltan of the House of  Masur, "that the Earthmen land among the Thorabians!" Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur. At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers -- Koltan, eldest and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design. "Behold, my sons," said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. "What are these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever... and with it, the fame and fortune of the House of Masur." "It is a damned imposition," agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's philosophical attitude. "They could have landed just as easily here in Lor." "The Thorabians will lick up the gravy," said Singula, whose mind ran rather to matters of financial aspect, "and leave us the grease." By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen, which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a very scarce commodity on Zur, in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough for him. He would report when the time was ripe. "Doubtless," said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his elders, "the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means of transport." Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret conclave of conference. Only the speaker's ycath could account for it. The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan. "When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime, remember your position in the family." Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment. "Listen to the boy," said the aged father. "There is more wisdom in his head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of the clay." Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they did. Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.  Y and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange metal contraptions. They paraded through the tilepaved streets of the city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident. The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of Zur. It required but the cooperation -- an excellent word, that -- of all Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered, for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a whaling for it. There was also some talk going around about agreements made between the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a newspaper, was unknown on Zur. Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously, none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had tried. The antiEarthmen Faction -- in any culture complex, there is always an "anti" faction to protest any movement of endeavor -- crowed happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too. Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was practically acrawl with Earthmen. Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called "corporations" -- Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The object of the visit was trade. In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took some time for the news to spread. The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an aluminum pot at him. "What is that thing?" he asked curiously. "A pot. I bought it at the market." "Did you now? Well, take it back. Am I made of money that you spend my substance for some fool's product of precious metal? Take it back, I say!" T HE pretty young wife laughed at him. "Up to your ears in clay, no wonder you hear nothing of news! The pot is very cheap. The Earthmen are selling them everywhere. They're much better than our old clay pots; they're light and easy to handle and they don't break when dropped." "What good is it?" asked Zotul, interested. "How will it hold heat, being so light?" "The Earthmen don't cook as we do," she explained patiently. "There is a paper with each pot that explains how it is used. And you will have to design a new ceramic stove for me to use the the pots on." "Don't be idiotic! Do you suppose Koltan would agree to produce a new type of stove when the old has sold well for centuries? Besides, why do you need a whole new stove for one little pot?" "A dozen pots. They come in sets and are cheaper that way. And Koltan will have to produce the new stove because all the housewives are buying these pots and there will be a big demand for it. The Earthman said so." "He did, did he? These pots are only a fad. You will soon enough go back to cooking with your old ones." "The Earthman took them in trade -- one reason why the new ones are so cheap. There isn't a pot in the house but these metal ones, and you will have to design and produce a new stove if you expect me to use them." After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would accommodate the terrestrial pots very well. And Koltan put the model into production. "Orders already are pouring in like mad," he said the next day. "It was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to do well by us." The kilns of the Pottery of Masur fired day and night to keep up with the demand for the new porcelain stoves. In three been made and sold by the Masurs alone, not counting the hundreds of thousands of copies turned out by competitors in every land. I N the meantime, however, more things than pots came from Earth. One was a printing press, the like of which none on Zur had ever dreamed. This, for some unknown reason and much to the disgust of the Lorians, was set up in Thorabia. Books and magazines poured from it in a fantastic stream. The populace fervidly brushed up on its scanty reading ability and bought everything available, overcome by the novelty of it. Even Zotul bought a book -- a primer in the Lorian language -- and learned how to read and write. The remainder of the brothers Masur, on the other hand, preferred to remain in ignorance. Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire -- more than enough in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur -- and set up telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent. Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business of the House of Masur continued to look up. "As I have always said from the beginning," chortled Director Koltan, "this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and especially for the House of Masur." "You didn't think so at first," Zotul pointed out, and was immediately sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, singlehanded, for his unthinkable impertinence. It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from Earth. About this time, plastic utensils -- dishes, cups, knives, forks -- made their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the newfangled paraphernalia... and very cheap, too, because for everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade. What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was. The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth. at this news from their bookkeeper, Koltan called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man might still have a little wit left that could be helpful. "Note," Koltan announced in a shaky voice, "that the Earthmen undermine our business," and he read off the figures. "Perhaps," said Zotul, "it is a good thing also, as you said before, and will result in something even better for us." Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly subsided. "They are replacing our highquality ceramic ware with inferior terrestrial junk," Koltan went on bitterly. "It is only the glamor that sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their eyes, we can be ruined." The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up. "My sons, you forget it is not the Earthmen themselves at the bottom of your trouble, but the things of Earth. Think of the telegraph and the newspaper, how these spread news of every shipment from Earth. The merchandise of the Earthmen is put up for sale by means of these newspapers, which also are the property of the Earthmen. The people are intrigued by these advertisements, as they are called, and flock to buy. Now, if you would pull a tooth from the kwi that bites you, you might also have advertisements of your own." Alas for that suggestion, no newspaper would accept advertising from the House of Masur; all available space was occupied by the advertisements of the Earthmen. In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil regions to every major and minor city on Zur. "OY the time ten years hadpassed since the landing of the first terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters... and the Masur stove business was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the brothers Masur. The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an energetic protest to the governor of Lor. At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that much new building was taking place and wondered what it was. "Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure," said Koltan blackly. In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising -- radio programs -- with commercials. Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay. "I think," the governor told them, "that you gentlemen have not paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be modern -- keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they are even bringing autos to Zur!" The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these hitherto unheard-of vehicles. "It only remains," concluded the governor, "to build highways, and the Earthmen are taking care of that." At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made yet. over Zur and began broadcasting. The people bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways were constructed. The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants and began to manufacture Portland cement. You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff made far better road surfacing. The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom. The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, "I cannot handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising Council." , "What is that?" asked Koltan. "It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them." The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview. All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help. Zotul found the headquarters of the Merchandising Council as indicated on their message. He had not been this way in some time, but was not surprised to find that a number of old buildings had been torn down to make room for the concrete Council House and a roomy parking lot, paved with something called "blacktop" and jammed with an array of glittering new automobiles. An automobile was an expense none of the brothers could afford, now that they barely eked a living from the pottery. Still, Zotul ached with desire at sight of so many shiny cars. Only a few had them and they were the envied ones of Zur. Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for an indefinite sense of alienness about him. "Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur," boomed the Earthman, clapping Zotul on the back. "Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you straightened out in no time." A LL the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner. Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur. "Once," he said formally, "the Masur fortune was the greatest in the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab Masur -- Divinity protect him -- departed this life to collect his greater reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and all because of new things coming from Earth." Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. "Why didn't you come to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has, we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth -- always to do right by the customer." "Divinity witness," Zorin said, "that we ask only compensation for damages." Broderick shook his head. "It is not possible to replace an immense fortune at this late date. As I said, you should have reported your trouble sooner. However, we can give you an opportunity to rebuild. Do you own an automobile?" "No." "A gas range? A gas-fired furnace? A radio?" Zotul had to answer no to all except the radio. "My wife Lania likes the music," he explained. "I cannot afford the other things." Broderick clucked sympathetically. One who could not afford the bargain-priced merchandise of Earth must be poor indeed. "To begin with," he said, "I am going to make you a gift of all these luxuries you do not have." As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off with a wave of his hand. "It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered and installed in your home." "To receive gifts," said Zotul, "incurs an obligation." "None at all," beamed the Earthman cheerily. "Every item is given to you absolutely free -- a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out the full program takes time." He chuckled deeply. "We of Earth have a saying about one of our extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise, but sure.' And so. with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.' " T HE engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it was no more than fair to pay transportation. He said, "How much does the freight cost?" Broderick told him. "It may seem high," said the Earthman, "but remember that Earth is sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship." "Impossible," said Zotul drably. "Not I and all my brothers together have so much money any more." "You don't know us of Earth very well yet, but you will. I offer you credit!" "What is that?" asked Zotul skeptically. "It is how the poor are enabled to enjoy all the luxuries of the rich," said Broderick, and went on to give a thumbnail sketch of the involutions and devolutions of credit, leaving out some angles that might have had a discouraging effect. On a world where credit was a totally new concept, it was enchanting. Zotul grasped at the glittering promise with avidity. "What must I do to get credit?" "Just sign this paper," said Broderick, "and you become part of our Easy Payment Plan." Zotul drew back. "I have five brothers. If I took all these things for myself and nothing for them, they would beat me black and blue." "Here." Broderick handed him a sheaf of chattel mortgages. "Have each of your brothers sign one of these, then bring them back to me. That is all there is to it." It sounded wonderful. But how would the brothers take it? Zotul wrestled with his misgivings and the misgivings won. "I will talk it over with them," he said. "Give me the total so I will have the figures." The total was more than it ought to be by simple addition. Zotul pointed this out politely. "Interest," Broderick explained. "A mere fifteen per cent. After all, you get the merchandise free. The transportation company has to be paid, so another company loans you the money to pay for the freight. This small extra sum pays the lending company for its trouble." "I see." Zotul puzzled over it sadly. "It is too much," he said. "Our plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments." "I have a surprise for you," smiled Broderick. "Here is a contract. You will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local manufacture to help bring prices down." "We haven't the equipment." "We will equip your plant," beamed Broderick. "It will require only a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial company." treasures promised by the Earthman, won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth. These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears. The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry. For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit. The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges, served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the winter, they toasted their shins, before handsome gas grates, though they had gas-fired central heating. About this time, the ships from Earth brought steam-powered electric generators. Lines went up, power was generated, and a flood of electrical gadgets and appliances hit the market. For some reason, batteries for the radios were no longer available and everybody had to buy the new radios. And who could do without a radio in this modern age? The homes of the brothers Masur blossomed on the Easy Payment Plan. They had refrigerators, washers, driers, toasters, grills, electric fans, air-conditioning equipment and everything else Earth could possibly sell them. "We will be forty years paying it all off," exulted Zotul, "but meantime we have the things and aren't they worth it?" But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option. The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because it was so much more efficient -- and to lower prices, which was Earth's unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded. Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do. The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth, but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes. The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush business. FT'OR the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was slow, but it was extremely sure. The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the pangs of impoverishment. The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold them for less. The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully. "You got us into this," they said, emphasizing their bitterness with fists. "Go see Broderick. Tell him we are undone and must have some contracts to continue operating." Nursing bruises, Zotul unhappily went to the Council House again. Mr. Broderick was no longer with them, a suave assistant informed him. Would he like to see Mr. Siwicki instead? Zotul would. Siwicki was tall, thin, dark and somber-looking. There was even a hint of toughness about the set of his jaw and the hardness of his glance. "So you can't pay," he said, tapping his teeth with a pencil. He looked at Zotul coldly. "It is well you have come to us instead of making it necessary for us to approach you through the courts." "I don't know what you mean," said Zotul. "If we have to sue, we take back the merchandise and everything attached to them. That means you would lose your houses, for they are attached to the furnaces. However, it is not as bad as that -- yet. We will only require you to assign the remaining three-quarters of your pottery to us." The brothers, when they heard of this, were too stunned to think of beating Zotul, by which he assumed he had progressed a little and was somewhat comforted. "To fail," said Koltan soberly, "is not a Masur attribute. Go to the governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is time for the government to do something for us." jammed with hurrying people, a scene of confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men covetous and Zurian women envious. "The governor will see you," she said sweetly. "He has been expecting you." "Me?" marveled Zotul. She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a friendly smile. "Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again." Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick, the Earthman. "I -- I came to see the governor," he said in confusion. Broderick nodded agreeably. "I am the governor and I am well acquainted with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down." "I don't understand. The Earthmen... Zotul paused, coloring. "We are about to lose our plant." "You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and richest on Zur, it has taken a long time -- the longest of all, in fact." "What do you mean?" "Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have bought you out." "Our government..." "Your governments belong to us, too," said Broderick. "When they could not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took them over, just as we are taking you over." "You mean," exclaimed Zotul, aghast, "that you Earthmen own everything on Zur?" "Even your armies." "But why?" hands behind back, went to the window and stared down moodily into the street. "You don't know what an overcrowded world is like," he said. "A street like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible on Earth." "But it's mobbed," protested Zotul. "It gave me a headache." "And to us it's almost empty. The pressure of population on Earth has made us range the Galaxy for places to put our extra people. The only habitable planets, unfortunately, are populated ones. We take the least populous worlds and -- well, buy them out and move in." "And after that?" Broderick smiled gently. "Zur will grow. Our people will intermarry with yours. The future population of Zur will be neither true Zurians nor true Earthmen, but a mixture of both." Zotul sat in silent thought. "But you did not have to buy us out. You had the power to conquer us, even to destroy us. The whole planet could have been yours alone." He stopped in alarm. "Or am I suggesting an idea that didn't occur to you?" "No," said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with memory. "We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better -- and more sure -- than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is finished, we can repair the dislocations." "At last I understand what you said about the tortoise." "Slow but sure." Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the shoulder. "Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always, but you'll be working for us... until the children of Earth and Zur are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had to break down your caste system." Zotul's eyes widened. "And that is why my brothers did not beat me when I failed!" "Of course. Are you ready now to take the assignment papers for you and your brothers to sign?" "Yes," said Zotul. "I am #.I It was bad enough being treated like a freak -- now there was the horror of what I had done to... F eeling numb, i put the phone down. I've got to get out of here, I thought. I've got to go ask old Frozen Face. I've got to get home. But there was the old man, just that minute coming out of his office. For the first time, I was glad he'd put my desk out there in front of the golden-oak slab of his door, like a welcome mat. I looked up at him and I guess I looked anxious. He stopped beside me. "Something wrong?" I wet my lips, but I couldn't say anything. Stupid! Why shouldn't I be able to say I've got to get out of here ! "The kid?" "Yes," I said. "We have to take her in this afternoon " "Well, get out of here," he said brusquely. I stood up. I couldn't look at him. "Thanks." "Shaddap," he said gruffly. "Call up if you need anything." "I won't need anything." Except courage. Faith, if you like. And whatever kind of hypocrisy it takes to conceal from a child how scared you are. I reached for my hat. Old Frozen Face just stood there. I looked back from the outer door and he was still there, staring at the place where I'd been. explosive, blathering series of syllables that would in some way explain to him that I'm not a freak; look at the creases in my blue pants ; look at my shoeshine, just the same as yours; look how my hairline's receding -- look, look, I've got heartburn and lumps in my throat! At the same time, I wanted to yell something else, something about, yes, you were kind to me because you know what's with me, with my kid; but you can't know how it is. With you, I'm once removed from anything you could feel, like the Hundred Neediest Cases in the newspaper at Christmas. You believe it, sure, but you can't know how it is. So with one inner voice saying I'm what you are and another saying You can't know how it is, I let them crash together and silence one another, and said nothing, but made the frosted glass door swing shut and walked over to the elevators. I had to wait and that seemed wrong. I looked at the indicators, and saw that all of the cars were running, and that seemed wrong, too. Everything else ought to stop except one car for me and it ought to be here now! I stood there realizing how irrational all this was, but fuming anyway. Behind me, I heard thunkpat, thunkpat, and from the corner of my eye saw it was Bernie Pitt on his crutches. I turned very slightly so my back was to him. Bernie is a very nice guy, but I just didn't want to talk to anybody. It was as if talking to somebody would slow up the elevator. I hoped he hadn't noticed my turning away like that. Then I found I could see his reflection in the polished gray-green marble of the wall by the elevator. He was looking at me; I could see his face tilt as he glanced down at the hat I was twisting in my hands. Then it tipped up and back a little as he studied the tops of the doors, the way a man does when he wants to look as if he's absorbed in his own thoughts. So he'd seen that hat, at ten in the morning, and that meant I was going out, and he knew all about me and Twink and the accident, and was being considerate. Old Frozen Face was being considerate, too. Old Frozen Face always did the correctly considerate thing. Like hiring Bernie, who was a cripple. I hated myself for thinking that. It made me hate Bernie. I glared at his reflection. Just then, one of the elevator doors across the corridor rolled open and I jumped and spun. "Up!" said the operator. Bernie stumped into it without looking at me. The door closed. I wished I had a rock to throw at it. I tried hard to get hold of myself. I knew what was happening. Scare a man badly enough, and then make the thing he fears diffuse and unreachable, and he'll lash out indiscriminately at everything and everyone. Well, lash away, boy, I told myself, and get it out of your stinking smallminded system before you get home. "Down?" the operator asked. I felt I had a right to be sore at the operator for taking so long. The elevator was full of intruders and the descent took forever, and for a moment I got so mad, I swear I could have hunched my shoulders and sprayed them all with adrenalin. Then the doors opened again and there was the lobby like a part of all outdoors, and the offices upstairs no longer contained or confined me, and their people no longer intruded. I scurried down the steps and along the concourse to the interurban station, trusting my feet and letting the rest of me fly along with the eager aimlessness of a peace-dove released at a school pageant. How can there be any unreality in your cosmos? I asked myself. The day Twink goes to the hospital -- that's today; it's here. It's been a real thing all this time, for all it was in the future; it was more real than most other things in the world. And now it's come and you're walking underwater, seeing through murk. But the whole world's helping, too. Nothing is so unreal to the commuter as a commuter's station at ten in the morning. The trains, lying in these echoing acres, look like great eviscerated larva. The funereal train-crew, gossiping as if their work was done, as if it wasn't their job to get me home before the sawbones went to work on my little girl. I went to them. "Baytown?" They looked at me, a conductor, a motorman, a platform man. They were different sizes and shapes, but their faces were all the same gray and contained the same damnable sense of the fitness of things. They were in a place that belonged to them, doing the right thing at the right time in it. They were steady and sober and absolutely at the service of commuters-by-the-ton, but a man outbound at ten in the morning, though tolerable, could hardly be served. He wasn't what they were there for. I went into the train and sat down and looked at my watch. Four minutes. They were going to make me wait four minutes. looked at the glare of yellow woven plastic pretending to be rattan, steel panels pretending to be wood, and the advertising signs. There were three kinds of signs: the imperatives, which said Buy and Drink and Use; the comparatives, which said Better, Richer, Finer (and never stated what they were better and richer and finer than); and the nominatives, which stupidly and without explanation proclaimed a name. I snorted at them all and reached for a paper someone had left on a nearby seat. If its previous owner had been there, I think I'd have punched him right in the mouth. I've always respected books and I've always felt that a paper is a sort of book. This character had put the middle section in upside down, folded some sheets back on themselves and away from the centerline, so that page covers skewed and flopped all around, and he had generally churned up and mutilated the dead white body before discarding it. Growling, I began to put it back together again. Doomed Child Sinking. Gifts and Cards Pouring In for 'Early Birthday' #'s Child of the Year, five-yearold Tony Marshall, has been placed under oxygen at Memorial Hospital, while a staff of top cancer specialists stand a #-hour watch at his bedside. Hope that he will live to see his sixth birthday in August has faded. The boy, whose famous smile made him known from coast to coast as Cheerful Tony, is suffering from advanced lukemia. Angrily I hurled the paper away from me. It came to pieces in midair and fluttered to the floor, to lie there accusingly and stare at me. I swore and got up and gathered it together and crammed it out of sight on the seat ahead of mine. "Cheerful Tony," I muttered. Some convolution of the face muscles, some accident of the dental arch, a trick of the light and the fortuitous presence of a news photographer as lucky as the guy who got the flag-raising at Iwo -- put 'em all together and you've got a national hero. What good did it do to anyone to read about Cheerful Tony or to write about it? What good did it do Tony? For an ugly moment, I wished I could trade places with Tony's father. All he had to worry about was cancer -- nice, certain cancer -- and once it was finished, that would be the end of it. But I didn't envy him the publicity, and for the hundred thousandth time, I thanked the Powers that so few people knew about Twink. The doors slid shut and the train started. I let go a sigh of relief and hunched back in my seat, wondering how to make the time go faster. Not the time; the train. I pushed my feet uselessly against the legs of the next seat, made a calm and childish calculation of what I was doing (forty pounds foot-pressure forward, forty pounds shoulder-pressure backward -- equals zero) and sat up feeling like a fool. I began to look at the ads again. Imperative, comparative, nominative." been wrong all along. Maybe I should have used nothing but advertising tactics on Twink the whole time. After all, those were tested methods, with more than a century of proof behind them. "Relax with oxygen," I should have told her. "Live," I should have told her, twelve times a minute, in the best imperative mood. "Live... live." And, "Don't struggle. Let the doctor work. It will be easier." (Than what?) And, of course, the pervasive, institutional nominative: "Twink. Everybody knows Twink. Everybody loves Twink." Until she believes it all... TTHE anger, which had changed to hysteria, converted itself now into crawling depression. It descended on me like the shadow of some great reptile, something that moved slowly and implacably and without human understanding. I felt utterly alone. I was different. Apart. More apart than Bernie, who had left half a leg in Formosa. More than Sue Gaskell, who was the only Negro in the copy department -- by God, another "kindness" of old Frozen Face. Why couldn't someone (besides Twink) share this with me? Even Doris couldn't. Doris loved me; she ate with me, slept with me, worried and hoped with me, but this thing with Twink was something she couldn't share. She just wasn't equipped for it. Sometimes I wondered how she held still for that. This might go on for years... if Twink lived at all... Twink and I sharing a thing that Doris could never know, even being Twink's mother. Suddenly I found someone else to be mad at and the depression lifted enough to let it in. You guys, I thought, you helpful people who put welded track on these roadbeds, who designed pneumatic dampers and cushioned wheels for the trains -- did it ever occur to you that a man might want something to listen to in a train in #? Twenty years ago, I could have listened to the wheels and I could have made up a song to go along with them: blippety-clak, blippetyclak. Blippety-clink, poor little Twink, don't let her die -- All right, fellows -- on second thought, you can have your welded rails. "Baytown," said the annunciator in a cultured voice, and deceleration helped me up out of the seat. I went to the door and was through it before it had slid all the way open, shot down the platform while fumbling for my commuter's plate, missed the scanner slot with it and skinned my knuckles, dropped the plate, picked it up, got it into the slot, waited forever -- well, three seconds -- while it scanned, punched and slid out my receipt. I was just about to blow a fuse because there was no taxi, but there was. I couldn't bark my address because the driver knew it, and I couldn't wave bribes at him because he was paid by the development, and anyway his turbines had a governor to keep him from speeding as fast as I wanted. All I could do was huddle on the cushion and bite the ball of my thumb. T HE house was very quiet. For some reason, I had expected to find them in the nursery, but there wasn't a sound from there. I found Doris stretched out on the settee in the den, looking drowsy. "Doris!" "Shh. 'Lo. Twink asleep." I ran to her. "Is she... do you... are you..." She rumpled my hair. "Shhh," she said again. "My goodness, it's going to be all right." I leaned very close and whispered, "Scared. I'm scared." "I'm scared, too," she said reasonably, "but I'm not going to go all to pieces." I knelt there, soaking up a kind of strength, a kind of peace from her. "Sorry, darling. I've been -- " I shuddered. "On the train, I was reading about Cheerful Tony. I was thinking how they'd do the same thing with us, if they knew." "Only more." She half-laughed. "All that mail, all those reporters, newsreel men. All that glory. All that -- noise." We listened together to the morning silence. It was the first time since she'd phoned me that I'd noticed how lovely the day was. "Thank you," she whispered. "For what?" "For not telling them. For being -- well, for just being; I guess that's what I'm trying to say. And for Twink." "For Twink?" "Of course. She's my little girl. If it hadn't been for you, I'd never have known her." "I think the way motherhood makes people crazy is one of the nicest things around," I said. She answered, but with her eyes. Then she said, "We have to be there at noon." I looked at my watch, leaped wildly to my feet, turned left, turned right. Doris openly laughed at me. "How long does it take to get to the hospital?" she asked. "Well, ten minutes, but we have to... don't we have to, uh?" "No, we don't. We have more than an hour. Sit down and help me be quiet. Want something to eat before we go?" "No. God, no. Shall I fix -- " "Not for me." "Oh." Slowly I sat down again. She giggled. "You're funny." "Yeah." "Have any trouble getting away?" She was making talk, I knew, but I went right along with it. "Matter of fact, no," I said. "Old Frozen Face took one look at me after you called and chased me out." "He's so wonderful... Honey! Don't call him that!" less. "He makes me mad." "After all he's done?" "Yes, after all he's done," I said irritably. Because of all he's done, I think. All my life, I'm a misfit for one reason or another; then, in college, they found out this thing about me and I worked my way through being a laboratory curiosity. I got into the papers. Not too much -- just enough to keep me from getting any decent job after I graduated. Except with Frozen Face, of course. I didn't apply; he wrote me. He hired all his people that way. People with half a leg. Blind people in Personnel. Ex-cons who couldn't get started. At first, it looked as if his people had escaped the things that hung over them -- thanks to him. Then, after a while, you began to realize that you wouldn't be working there if you didn't have something wrong with you. It was like starving all your life until you found you could be well fed and taken care of till the day you died -- in a leprosarium. But I said, "Sorry, Doris. Just naturally ungrateful, I guess... Twink's waking up." "Oh, dear! I thought she might sleep until -- " "Shh." Ever since the accident (I'd turned the car over; they say you can't do that with any car later than #, but I'm the guy), Twink had terrified me every time she woke up. She'd come out of the normal sleep of a normal baby and enter a frightening stillness, a cessation of everything but life itself. It was, I suppose, coma; but I'd lived with seven weeks of it once, and even now the momentary passage through it, from sleep to waking, was so loaded with terror and guilt for me that it was all I could take. And when you add to that the fact that I had to hide it, that above all else I had to be strength to her, and comfort, as she awoke -- Then it was over; she was awake, confused, dimly happy. "Hi, baby. How's my Twink?" Doris, tense on the couch, not breathing, waiting -- "It's all right. Twink's all right," I said. "Well, of course!" I shot Doris a look. There wasn't a hairline crack in that enamel of hers, but it suddenly occurred to me that it was past time for me to stop using her as the pillar of strength around here. I bent and kissed her and said (making it sound like a joke, because I knew she'd prefer it that way), "Okay, honey; from here on, you can scream curses." "I'll just do that," she said gratefully. thing directly to do with it or was it just me? Champlain (yes, the Champlain, who took up where Rhine left off) had a number of theories about. The most likely one was that when my peculiar equipment got stirred up enough in the crash and for that awful hour afterward, I sent such a surge of empathy at Twink that I created a response. You can call it telepathy if you like -- Champlain did -- but I don't like the sound of that. Of course, I'm biased. You can take your extrasensoria, all of them, and -- well, just take 'em and leave me be. It may be that I was better equipped than the next guy to adjust to this, having lived for some eight years with the mild notoriety of being the boy who never scored less than # on the Rhine cards. But personally, constitutionally, I never was meant to be different from other people. What I mean is that my useless ability (I don't regard it as a talent and I won't call it a gift) didn't have to make any difference to anyone. I could be just as good a short-order cook, just as bad a ticket-taker, as anyone else. But I was never given the chance of living like a human being. I could stick around the parapsychology laboratories, earning a living like an ape in the # (and not much of a living at that; even in this enlightened era, there isn't a rich parapsychologist, or I could go out and get a job. And the way my dark past followed me, you'd think I was wearing a Flying Saucer for a halo. "Oh, yes -- you're the mindreading fellow." You know what that can do to your prospects? Usually I didn't get the job. Once I was hired, though, they knew. Twice I landed jobs and they found out later. Each time there was someone who went to the boss, seniority and all, and said, "Look, it's him or me." And guess who got the pink slip. Would you work every day with somebody who could read your mind? Who hasn't got secrets? Whose life really is an open book? I can tell you, I wouldn't work next to someone like that, yet I'm about as inoffensive as they come. And what was driving me out of my head -- and I was two-thirds out when I met Doris and then Frozen Face -- was that everyone thought I could read minds and I can't! TUT Doris, who had heard of me even before she met me, never mentioned it. First she was nice to be with, and then I had to be with her, and then I came to a big, fat, soul-searching decision and confessed All to her one night, and she kissed me on the end of the nose and said she'd known about it all along and it didn't matter; and if I said I couldn't read minds but was only good at guessing Rhine cards, why, she believed me; and if I ever did learn to read minds, she wished I'd hurry up and read hers, because she was getting awfully impatient. After that, I'd have married her if she looked like a gila monster. Actually she looked like the Tenniel Alice-inWonderland, only with curly hair. When I came up for breath from that interchange, I liked people a hell of a lot more than I ever had before. I guess that's another way of saying I liked myself some, at last. Then along came the letter from Frozen Face, and Twink came up, and the accident happened. And after the accident, the nightmare ability to dip down into the living silence that was Twink now, an unstirring something that couldn't see or speak or hear, something that was dreadfully hurt and just hovering, barely alive... My kid. And after about seven weeks, a movement, a weak tensing. It was the faintest possible echo of fear, and always a retreat from it that shoved the little thing close to dying again. Then there would be the silence again, and the stirring, and the fear and retreat. Why I tried, how I thought to try, I don't know, but I did what I could each time to reassure her. I would tense till I ached and say, It's all right, honey, don't be afraid, it's all over now. And I hoped it helped her, and then I thought it did, and then one night I knew it did, because I saw the tension coming and stopped it, and there was a different kind of silence, like sleeping, not like coma. After that, she got better fast, and I took hold of the slim hope that she might one day see and run and climb like other kids, hear music, go to school... She had to, she had to, or I was a murderer. I was worse than that. Your out-and-out murderer knows what he's doing. More likely than not, he does' it to get something, for profit. But me -- want to know what I did? We'd been out for a drive in our shiny new car -- well, it was second-hand, but the newest one I'd ever owned -- and I wanted to get a couple of cartons of cigarettes before we crossed the state line, to save -- guess! -- a few cents tax. It was a six-lane road, three each way. I was in my middle lane. Doris pointed at a big neon sign. "There's a place!" I hauled the wheel over and shot straight across the righthand lane. The truck just nipped the rear fender and over we went. For six cents. Come to think of it, I never did buy the cigarettes, so I can't even claim that. There's your superman, "wild talents" and all. A goddam highway boob. Doris and Twink went to the hospital, bleeding and bleeding, then lying for days, waxy, dolllike, and came out, back to me, saying it wasn't my fault it wasn't my fault... God! And Twink as good as dead. mittee waiting for us -- two big names in medicine, McClintock and Zein -- and, of course, Champlain. Busy boy. He wouldn't miss this for the world. But, thank heavens, no press. ' "Come on, I want to talk to you," said Champlain, big, breezy as ever, looking like the world's least likely suspect as a parapsychologist. I never did like Champlain, but he was the only person in the world besides Doris I could really talk to. At the moment, I wished I hadn't ever talked to him. Especially about Twink. But he knew and that was that. He muscled me away from Doris and Twink. "No!" cried Doris, and Twink was frightened. "Now don't you worry, little lady; he'll be back with you before we do a thing," he called heartily, and there I was going one way and Doris and Twink the other. What could I do? He pushed me through a door and I had the choice of sitting in a big armchair or falling down, the way he rushed me. He kicked the door shut. "Here's some medicine." He got a bottle out of the top desk drawer. "McClintock let me see where he put it, the fool." "I don't want any." "Come on now." "Get away from me," I said, and meant it. Inside myself, I turned to admire that tone, harsh and rpugh and completely decisive. I'd always thought only movie gangsters could make a speech like that sound so real. And while I was backing off from myself, admiring, I suddenly sobbed and swore and swore and sobbed. It was pretty disgusting. "Wow," said Champlain. He put the bottle down and got some pills. He filled a paper cup with ice-water and came over to me. "Take these." "I don't want any." "You'll take'm or I'll hold your nose and ram 'em down your neck with a stick!" I took them and the water. As I keep saying, I'm no superman. "What are they?" "Dexamyl. Brighten you up, smooth you down all at once. Now tell me what's the matter." I said it, said what I hadn't put in words before. "Twink's going to die. I want her to." "The two best specialists in the world say no." "Let her die! She's going out of here as a basket case if you don't! I know. I know better'n anybody. Blind. Deaf. Paralyzed. All she can do is sort of flop. Let her die!" "Don't be so goddam selfish." A kick in the face would have shocked me a good deal less. I just gawked at him. "Sure, selfish," he repeated. "You pulled a little bobble that anybody might have done and your wife won't blame you for it. To you, it's become a big, important bobble because you never were involved in anything important before. The only way you can prove it's important is to suffer an important punishment. The worst thing you can think of is to have Twink dead. The next worse is to have her go through life the way she is now. You want one of those things." "Sure I am," he agreed. "Absolutely. In the eyes of the guy who's wrong, the guy who's right is always just what you said." I used another one. "That, too," he said, and beamed. I put up my hands and let them fall. "What do you want me to do? What are you picking on me for?" He came over and sat sideways on the broad arm of the chair. "I want you to get in there and help us. Help Twink." "I'd be in the way." He hit me on the shoulderblade. It was done as a sort of friendly gesture, but it was done hard. "You can get through to her, can't you?" "Yes." "She's been hurt. Badly. This is going to hurt her, too -- a whole lot. She may not want to go through with it." "She has a choice?" "Every patient has a choice. Other things being equal, they live or they don't. If they've been hurt and they see more pain coming, they might not want to go through with it." "I still don't see how I -- " "Would you like to keep wondering whether you could have saved her life?" "She's going to die, anyway." He got up and stood in front of me with his big fists on his hips, glaring at me silently until I had to raise my face. He held me with his eyes until I couldn't stand it and then he said, rough and gentle like a tiger purring, "You damn near killed her once and now you want to finish the job. That it?" "All right, all right!" I shouted. "I'll do it, I'll do anything!" "Good!" And suddenly he dropped on one knee and took both of my hands in both of his. It was a very surprising thing for him to do and strangely effective. I could feel currents of his immense vitality from those big hands; it was as if my ego, wrinkled like a prune, was swelling up sleek and healthy. He said, softly and with deep earnestness, "All you've got to do is make her want to live. You've got to be with her and wait for her and help her along and keep her convinced that no matter what happens, no matter how it hurts, it's worth it because she's going to live." "All right," I whispered. "She's only a little girl. She takes things just the way she finds them and she doesn't make allowances. If something looks like fear to her, or anger, it is that. If something looks like love, or wisdom, or strength, that's just how she'll take it.Be strong and wise for her." "Me?" He got up. "You." He went to the desk and got the bottle and poured a paper cup full. He held it out to me. I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands and stood up. "No, thanks. I don't need it," I told him. He twitched his eyebrows and drank the liquor himself and we went out. scrub room just as if I'd been a surgeon -- gloves, mask and all -- and then we went into the operating theater. Doris was already there, all fixed up, too. I went and kissed her right through the mask and she smiled. I said, "You look lovely in white," and wondered where that had come from; and, "Hi-i, Twink." Somewhere in the blindness, in the confines of paralysis, there was a shadow of fear and, down inside that, a warm little response. And the fear evaporated. I looked up and met Champlain's eyes. That unnatural feeling under my mask was, to my complete astonishment, a grin. I nodded and he winked back and said, "I guess you can go ahead, Mac." Now listen, Twink, I said with all my heart, I love you and I'm here. I'm right here with you no matter what happens. Something's going to happen, something big, arid it's going to change everything for you. Some of it won't be... won't be nice. But they have to do it. For you, Twink. Even when it isn't nice, it's for you. You've got to let them. You've got to help them. They love you, but I love you most of all. You mustn't go away. If it hurts you too much, you just tell me and I'll make them stop. Then something was the matter, very much the matterShaken, I crowded close and tried to see what McClintock was doing. "Back off a little," he growled. "Back off, my eyeball. What the hell are you winding around her head?" Champlain barked at me, "Cut it out! The one thing you don't get is angry!" Doris made a little sound. I spun to her. She was smiling. No, she wasn't. Her eyes were all screwed up. A tear came out. "Doris!" Her face relaxed instantly, as if the nerves had been cut. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. "I'm all right," she said. There was a calling, a calling, a calling. All right, Twink, I'm here. I didn't go away. I'm right here, honey. If you want them to stop, you just say so. A pause, then a tremulous questioning. Yes, yes, I said, I'm here. Every single second. I'm not going away. Again the pause and then, like a flicker of light, a hot, glad little response. Doris moaned, almost a whisper. I shot a glance at her, then at Champlain. "You want that stopped?" he asked. "No," I said. "I promised her she could." Doris's hand moved. I took it. It was wet. She squeezed mine, hard. Something from Twink, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Except the accident. Yes, it was like the accident -- and "Stop!" I gasped. "Stop it!" working as if I hadn't made a sound. The other specialist, Zein, said to Champlain as if I couldn't hear, "Do we have to stand for this?" "You're damn right you do," said Champlain. Working, McClintock asked, "Stop? What do you mean, stop?" Zein mumbled something to him. McClintock nodded and a nurse came flying across the room with a tray of hypodermics. McClintock used a number of them. Twink went quiet. For a moment, I thought I would faint from relief. All right, honey? All right? I made them stop. Twinkie. Is it all right? Twink! T wink! I made some sort of noise, I don't know what. Champlain's hands were on my shoulders, grinding down like two oversized C-clamps. I shrugged off one, knocked off the other with my wrist. "Twink!" I shouted. Then Doris screamed shrilly and Twink vibrated like a gong. "That won't do," I snapped, gesturing with my head. "Want her out?" "Don't you dare," said Doris. "Yes. Now." McClintock began, "Who's -- " but Champlain said, "Shut up. Take her out." After that, it went very quickly. Just a little more, Twink, and it'll be all over and you'll be warm and comfy and you can sleep. And I'll be near while you sleep and with you when you wake up. I tried to stop McClintock once more, when he took the little arm that had been immobilized across Twink's chest for so long and twisted it brutally up and back. But this time Champlain was on McClintock's side and he was right; the pain stopped almost instantly. And then -- was it weeks later, hours? The biggest part was over and they did things to her eyes, her mouth, while I found ways and yet new ways to thrust aside fury, ignore fatigue, negate fear. and press on and on and around and inside with I love you, Twink; I'm here; it's all right. Just a little more, a little -- there, it's stopped. Are you all right, Twink? She was all right. She was wonderful. When they were through with her, she was weak and she looked like hell, but she was all right. I stared at her and stared at her and I couldn't believe it; I couldn't contain it, either. I didn't know what to do. So I began to laugh. "Okay, let's get out of here." Champlain loomed over me like a grounded parachute. "Yeah, wait." I sidled around him and went to McClintock. "Thanks," I said. "I'm sorry." "It's okay," he said tonelessly. Zein just turned his back. had put Doris, tired, and I waited. This was a lot different from that other hospital, that other time. Then I'd committed something and I was full of fear. Now I'd accomplished something and I was full of hope -- and liquor, but they tasted much the same. Twink was asleep, breathing beautiful even breaths, far too weary to be afraid. I was glad about so many things and I mentally thumbed through them all, one by one, with a huge and quiet delight. And I think that the one I was happiest about was my saying to Champlain afterward, "She'd have been perfectly all right even if I hadn't been there." What I was so pleased about was that I said it, I didn't ask it. And he had laughed and filled my cup again. "You're a mind-reader," he said, and it was the first time I had ever heard that and thought it was funny. "You wanted a case history of a human being born with little or no birth trauma, you son." "Well, nobody ever had one before," he admitted. "I'd have had a lot less trouble in my young life if my dad had been able to paddle me down that particular canal in a canoe." "You're a louse and it was worth it," I'd told him. Doris turned her head impatiently. "I'm here," I whispered. She looked at me out of the same composed, porcelain face. "Hi. How's your girl friend?" "My other girl friend. Doris, she's beautiful! All pink. She has two eyes. Ten toes. Eight fingers." "What?" "And two thumbs. She's all right, darling, really all right. A perfectly normal newborn girlbaby." "Oh, I'm... so glad. Does she... can you still -- even after the Caesarean?" I nodded and in that split second, I wished my fool head had rolled right off. Because as I did it, I realized that I could have lied; she wanted me to. She began to cry. She said, "You made them knock me out and you did it all yourself. You've had her to talk to all this time and you always will, as long as you both live. I'll never ever cry about this again, I promise, because it's not your fault and I love you, anyway. But I'm going to cry about it now." I crouched with my head on her pillow for a long, long time. Then I went away, because she was nowhere near finished. She's never cried about that since, though. Never once. I guess there's some way a man can make up a thing like that to a woman. If he keeps looking. I guess. Next month, the Galaxy-Simon  Schuster # prize-winning novel, The will of the entire human race is probated all in one day... and yet there are heirs to inherit the whole planetary estate! Who are they? What trick did they have up their sleeves? If you miss the last installment, you'll never find out, so make sure you don't miss it! James E. Gunn, which turns up a question that has never been explored: Anybody can get a divorce, win a pardon from prison, go into bankruptcy or find a way out of trouble. But those are cinches compared with the problem of coping with this lab-made bundle of exasperating confusions and paradoxes! returns... just in case you were wondering what became of it. you've read in these pages, for it has been received with great enthusiasm. Let's hear what you think, eh? Each copy has six to eight stories by such top authors as Ray Bradbury, Sam Merwin, Jr., Evelyn E. Smith, Frederik Pohl, Charles Satterfield, Philip K. Dick, Ted Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Wyman Guin, Damon Knight, L. Sprague de Camp, and many others. All ten for # only Any five I .# Any three # or #c each postpaid. Circle numbers wanted Total enclosed  # # Name Address City i State If a planet is insured from pre-cradle to post-grave, somebody must be the beneficiary -- and Wills had to find out who it was! I AM Thomas Wills, trying to build a new life out of the wreckage my wife's death made of the old one. Everything is new, everything is different -- my dull, comfortable world died with her and I find myself in romantic, war-ravaged Naples, on an errand of high adventure in the service of -- The Company, the giant combine of insurance corporations which protects the world by insuring every one of its activities. It is the finest work of mankind; the Company has once and for all called a halt to war, poverty, disease and danger, by the most modern application of actuarial methods. Everyone knows this to be true; they read it in their daily newspapers ( Company owned ), they learn it in their schools and colleges ( Company financed ). But in Naples I find a shock: There are subversives who doubt it. Among them is a beautiful girl named -- Rena dell'Angela, who reminds me that Naples has just fought a war, who tells me that she and her father are in want because they oppose the Company, who points out that my wife, Marianna, died of a preventable disease. I am confused by her subversive arguments, but even more confused by the girl herself -- because I begin to suspect that I am in love with her. Her father -- Benedetto dell'Angela, is a "ward" of the Company -- actually, says Rena, a prisoner. He is in suspended animation in the enormous, refrigerated Company vaults called -- The Clinics. In these places, persons suffering from incurable diseases are kept until such time as medical scientists can devise a cure. But Rena says they are prisons; and the fact that her father, a perfectly healthy individual, is there seems to be proof. Another involuntary "ward" is a strange man named -- Luigi Zorchi, who makes his career of collecting on accident claims. There is no fraud involved; when he collects damages for a lost limb, the limb is actually lost -- but Zorchi, mysteriously, can regrow a severed member like a starfish! All this is unbearably confusing; but when things look their worst, I have good news. Straight from the Home Office comes -- Underwriter Defoe, a high executive of the Company and my deceased wife's distant relative, who got me the coveted Naples assignment in the first place. I look to him not only to straighten out my confusion, but to end the dry rot that has infected The Company's entire operation in Naples, from the lowest clerks to the Regional Director -- Gogarty, a slothful lard tub of a man, given more to fast living than to carrying out the Company's urgent business. But Defoe in Naples is a different man than the Defoe I used to know in the Home Office. I begin to suspect that perhaps the contentions of the dell'Angelas are true, and the Company is indeed a corrupt and cynical power combine! In any case, it is clear that Zorchi and Benedetto dell'Angela are wrongfully imprisoned. I help Rena free them and we flee to Rome -- fugitives from everything I have been taught to love and respect and live for! IX the door and peered into the nave of the church. "He's kissing the Book," she reported. "It will be perhaps twenty minutes yet." Her father said mildly, "I am in no hurry. It is good to rest here. Though truthfully, Mr. Wills, I thought I had been rested sufficiently by your Company." I think we were all grateful for the rest. It had been a hectic drive up from Anzio. Even though Rena's "friends" were thoughtful people, they had not anticipated that we would have a legless man with us. They had passports for Rena and myself and Benedetto; for Zorchi they had none. It had been necessary for him to hide under a dirty tarpaulin in the trunk of the ancient charcoalburning car, while Rena charmed the Swiss Guards at the border. And it was risky. But the Guards charmed easily, and we got through. Zorchi did not much appreciate it. He swore a ragged blue streak when we stopped in the shade of an olive grove and lugged him to the front seat again, and he didn't stop swearing until we hit the Appian Way. When the old gas-generator limped up a hill, he swore at its slowness; when it whizzed along the downgrades and level stretches, he swore at the way he was being bounced around. I didn't regret rescuing Zorchi from the clinic -- it was a matter of simple justice since I had helped trick him into it. But I did wish that it had been some more companionable personality that I had been obligated to. Benedetto, on the other hand, shook my hand and said: "For God, I thank you," and I felt well repaid. But he was in the back seat being brought up to date by his daughter; I had the honor of Zorchi's company next to me... There was a long Latin period from the church, a response from the altar boy, and then the final Ite, missa est. We heard the worshipers moving out of the church. The priest came through the room we were waiting in, his robes swirling. He didn't look around, or give any sign that he knew we were there, though he almost stepped on Zorchi, sitting propped against a wall. A moment later, another man in vaguely clerical robes entered and nodded to us. "Now we go below," he ordered. Benedetto and I flanked Zorchi and carried him, an arm around each of our necks. We followed the sexton, or whatever he was, back into the church, before the altar -- Benedetto automatically genuflected with the others, nearly making me spill Zorchi onto the floor -- to a tapestry-hung door. He pushed aside the tapestry, and a cool, musty draft came up from darkness. The sexton lit a taper with a pocket cigarette lighter and led us down winding, rickety steps. There was no one left in the church to notice us; if anyone had walked in, we were tourists, tourists had done before us over the centuries. We were visiting the Catacombs. of the Christians of a very different Rome. Rena had told me about them : How they rambled under the modern city, the only entrances where churches had been built over them. How they had been nearly untouched for two thousand years. I even felt a little as though I really were a tourist as we descended, she had made me that curious to see them. But I was disappointed. We lugged the muttering Zorchi through the narrow, musty corridors, with the bones of martyrs at our elbows, in the flickering light of the taper, and I had the curious feeling that I had been there before. As, in a way, I had: I had been in the vaults of the Company's clinic at Anzio, in some ways very closely resembling these Catacombs -- Even to the bones of the martyrs. I was almost expecting to see plastic sacks. We picked our way through the warrens for several minutes, turning this way and that. I was lost in the first minute. Then the sexton stopped before a flat stone that had a crude, faded sketch of a fish on it; he leaned on it, and the stone discovered itself to be a door. We followed him through it into a metal-walled, high-ceilinged tunnel, utterly unlike the meandering Catacombs. I began to hear sounds; we went through another door, and light struck at our eyes. I blinked and focused on a long room, half a dozen yards wide, almost as tall, at least fifty yards long. It appeared to be a section of an enormous tunnel; it appeared to be, and it was. Benedetto and I set Zorchi -- still cursing -- down on the floor and stared around. There were people in the tunnel, dozens of them. There were desks and tables and file cabinets; it looked almost like any branch of the Company, with whirring mimeographs and clattering typewriters. The sexton pinched out the taper and dropped it on the floor, as people came toward us. "So now you are in our headquarters in Rome," said the man dressed as a sexton. "It is good to see you again, Benedetto." "And it is much better to see you, Slovetski," the old man answered warmly. not think I can say what he looked like. He was, I found, the very leader of the "friends," the monarch of this underground headquarters. But he was a far cry from the image I had formed of a bearded agitator. There was a hint of something bright and fearful in his eyes, but his voice was warm and deep, his manner was reassuring, his face was friendly. Still -- there was that cat-spark in his eyes. Slovetski, that first day, gave me an hour of his time. He answered some of my questions  -- not all. The ones he smiled at, and shook his head, were about numbers and people. The ones he answered were about principles and things. He would tell me, for instance, what he thought of the Company -- endlessly. But he wouldn't say how many persons in the world were his followers. He wouldn't name any of the persons who were all around us. But he gladly told me about the place itself. "History, Mr. Wills," he said politely. "History tells a man everything he needs to know. You look in the books, and you will learn of Mussolini, when this peninsula was all one state; he lived in Rome, and he started a subway. The archives even have maps. It is almost all abandoned now. Most of it was never finished. But the shafts are here, and the wiring that lights us still comes from the electric mains." "And the only entrance is through the Catacombs?" The spark gleamed bright in his eye for a second. Then he shrugged. "Why shouldn't I tell you? No. There are several others, but they are not all convenient." He chuckled. "For instance, one goes through a station on the part of the subway that is still in operation. But it would not have done for you, you see; Rena could not have used it. It goes through the gentlemen's washroom." We chuckled, Slovetski and I. I liked him. He looked like what he once had been: a history teacher in a Company school, somewhere in Europe. We talked about History, and Civilization, and Mankind, and all the other capitalized subjects. He was very didactic and positive in what he said, just like a history teacher. But he was understanding. He made allowances for my background; he did not call me a fool. He was a patient monk instructing a novice in the mysteries of the order, and I was at ease with him. But there was still that spark in his eye. Rena disappeared almost as soon as we were safely in the tunnels. Benedetto was around, but he was as busy as Slovetski, and just as mysterious about what occupied him. So I had for company Zorchi. We had lunch. "Food!" he said, and the word was an epithet. "They offer this to me for food! For pigs, Weels. Not for Zorchi!" He pushed the plate away from him and stared morosely at the table. We were given a room to share, and one of Slovetski's men fixed up a rope-and-pulley affair so Zorchi could climb into his bed unaided. He was used to the help of a valet; the first time he tried it, he slipped and fell on the stumps of his legs. It must have hurt.  He shrieked, "Assassins! All of them! They put me in a kennel with the apprentice assassin, and the other assassins make a guillotine for me to kill myself on!" We had a long talk with Slovetski, on the ideals and principles of his movement. Zorchi stared mutinously at the wall. I found the whole thing very interesting -- shocking, but interesting. But Zorchi was immune to shock -- "Perhaps it is news to you, Weels, that the Company is a big beast?" -- and he was interested in nothing in all the world but Zorchi. By the end of the second day I stopped talking to him entirely. It wasn't kind. He disliked me, but he hated everyone else in the tunnel, so he had no one to talk to. But itwas either that or hit him in the face, and -- although many of my mores had changed overnight -- I still did not think I could strike a man without legs. And besides, the less I saw of Zorchi, the more time I had to think about Rena. S HE returned on the third day, without a word of explanation to me of where she had been or what she had done. She greeted me and disappeared again, this time only for hours. Then she came back and said, "Now I am through, for a time. How have you liked our little hideaway?" I said, "It gets lonesome." "Lonesome?" Her brown eyes were wide and perfectly serious. "I had thought it would be otherwise, Tom. So many of us in this little space, how could you be lonesome?" I took her hand. "I'm not lonesome now," I told her. We found a place to sit in a corner of the communal dining hall. Around us the life of the underground movement buzzed and swirled. It was much like a branch of the Company, as I have said; the work of this secret section seemed to be mostly a record-keeping depot for the activities that took place on the surface. But no one paid much attention to Rena and me. What did we talk about? What couples have always talked about : Each other, and everything, and nothing. The only thing we did not talk about was my basic beliefs in regard to the Company. For I was too troubled in my mind to talk about them, and Rena sensitive enough not to bring them up. For I had, with all honor, sworn an oath of allegiance to the Company; and I had not kept it. I could not, even then, see any possibility of a world where the Company did not exist. For what the Company said of itself was true: Before the Company existed, men lived like beasts. There was always the instant danger of war and disease. No plan could be made, no hope could be held, that could not be wiped out by blind accident. And yet, were men better off today? I could not doubt the truths I had been told. The Company permitted wars -- I had seen it. The Company permitted disease -- my own wife had died. Somewhere there was an answer, but I couldn't find it. It was not, I was sure, in Slovetski's burning hatred of everything the Company stood for. But it could not be, either, in the unquestioning belief that I had once given. But my views, it turned out, hardly mattered any more; the die was cast. Benedetto appeared in the entrance to the dining hall, peering about. He saw us and came over, his face grave. "I am sorry, Mr. Wills," he said. "I have been listening to Radio Napoli. It has just come over the air: A description of you, and an order for your arrest. The charge is -- murder!" ing. "Murder! But that's not true; I certainly never -- " Benedetto laid a hand on my shoulder. "Of course not, Mr. Wills. It is a fiction of the Company's, beyond doubt. But it is a fiction that may cause your death if you are discovered, do not doubt that." I swallowed. "Who -- whom did I murder?" Benedetto shrugged. "I do not know who he is. The name they gave was Elio Barletteria." That was the suspendee whose place Zorchi had usurped. I sat back, bewildered. It was true, at least, that I had had some connection with the man. But -- kill him? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the mere act of taking him out of his plastic sack endangered his life? I doubted it, but still -- I asked Benedetto. He frowned. "It is -- possible," he admitted at last. "We do not know much about the suspendees, Mr. Wills. The Company has seen to that. It is my opinion -- only an opinion, I am afraid -- that if this man Barletteria is dead, it had nothing to do with anything you did. Still -- " he shrugged -- "what difference does it make? If the Company calls you a murderer, you must be one, for the Company is always right. Is that not so?" We left it at that, but I was far from easy in my mind. The dining hall filled, and we ate our evening meal, but I hardly noticed what I ate and I took no part in the conversation. Rena and her father considerately left me alone; Zorchi was, it seemed, sulking in our room, for he did not appear. But I was not concerned with him, for I had troubles of my own. I should have been... After dinner was over, I excused myself and went to the tiny cubicle that had been assigned to Zorchi and myself. He wasn't there. Then I began to think: Would Zorchi miss a meal? The answer was unquestionably no. With his metabolism, he needed many times the food of an ordinary person; his performance at table, in fact, was spectacular. Something was wrong. I was shaken out of my self-absorption; I hurried to find Benedetto dell'Angela, and told him that Zorchi was gone. It didn't take long for us to find the answer. The underground hideout was not large; it had only so many exits. It was only a matter of moments before one of the men Benedetto had ordered to search returned with an alarmed expression. The exit that led through the subway station was ajar. Somehow Zorchi had hitched himself, on his stumps, down the long corridor and out the exit. It had to be whilewe were eating; he could never have made it except when everyone was in one room. How he had done it did not matter. The fact remained that Zorchi was gone and, with him, the secrecy of our hiding place. X no way out of it. "Zorchi hates the Company," I protested. "I don't think he'll go to them and -- " "No, Wills." Slovetski patiently shook his head. "We can't take a chance. If we had been able to recapture him, then we could stay here. But he got clean away." There was admiration in his eyes. "What a conspirator he would have made! Such strength and determination! Think of it, Wills, a legless man in the city of Rome. He cannot avoid attracting attention. He can barely move by himself. And yet, our men track him into the subway station, to a telephone... and that is all. Someone picks him up. Who? A friend, one supposes -- certainly not the Company, or they would have been here before this. But to act so quickly, Wills!" Benedetto dell'Angela coughed. "Perhaps more to the point, Slovetski, is how quickly we ourselves shall now act." Slovetski grinned. "All is ready," he promised. "See, evacuation already has begun!" Groups of men were quickly placing file folders into cartons and carrying them off. They were not going far, I found later, only to a deserted section of the ancient Roman Catacombs, from which they could be retrieved and transported, little by little, at a later date. By sundown, Rena and I were standing outside the little church which contained the entrance to the Catacombs. The two of us went together; only two. It would look quite normal, it was agreed, for a young man and a girl to travel together, particularly after my complexion had been suitably stained and my Company clothes discarded and replaced with a set of Rome's best ready-towears. It did not occur to me at the time, but Rena must have known that her own safety was made precarious by being with me. Rena alone had nothing to fear, even if she had been caught and questioned by an agent of the Company. They would suspect her, because of her father, but suspicion would do her no harm. But Rena in the company of a wanted "murderer" -- and one traveling in disguise -- was far less safe... We found an ancient pistondriven cab and threaded through almost all of Rome. We spun around the ancient stone hulk of... # the Colosseum, passed the balcony where a sign stated the dictator, Mussolini, used to harangue the crowds, and climbed a winding, expensive-looking street to the Borghese Gardens. Rena consulted her watch. "We're early;" she said. We had gelati in an open-air pavilion, listening to the wheezing of a sweating band; then, in the twilight, we wandered hand in hand under trees for half an hour. Then Rena Said, "Now it is time." We walked to the far end of the Gardens where a small copter-field served the Class-A residential area of Rome. A dozen copters were lined up at the end of the take-off hardstand. Rena led me to the nearest of them. I looked at it casually, and stopped dead. "Rena!" I whispered violently. "Watch out!" The copter was black and purple; it bore on its flank the marking of the Swiss Guard, the Roman police force. S HE pressed my hand. "Poor Tom," she said. She walked boldly up to one of the officers lounging beside the copter and spoke briefly to him, too low for tne to hear. It was only when the big vanes overhead had sucked us a hundred yards into the air, and we were leveling off and heading south, that she said: "These are friends too, you see. Does it surprise you?" I swallowed, staring at the hissing jets at the ends of the swirling vanes. "Well," I said, "I'm not exactly surprised, but I thought that your friends were, well, more likely to be -- " "To be rabble?" Istarted to protest, but she was not angry. She was looking at me with gentle amusement. "Still you believe, Tom. Deep inside you: An enemy of the Company must be, at the best, a silly zealot like my father and me -- and at the worst, rabble." She laughed as I started to answer her. "No, Tom, if you are right, you should not deny it; and if you are wrong -- you will see." I sat back and stared, disgruntled, at the purple sunset over the Mediterranean. I never saw such a girl for taking the wind out of your sails. Guards had no status, and it was necessary for them to swing inland, threading through mountains and passes, remaining as inconspicuous as possible. It was little more than an hour's flight until I found landmarks I could recognize. To our right was the bright bowl of Naples; far to our left, the eerie glow that, marked bombed-out New Caserta. And ahead, barely visible, the faint glowing plume that hung over Mount Vesuvius. Neither Rena nor the Guards spoke, but I could feel in their tense attitudes that this was the danger-point. We were in the lair of the enemy. Undoubtedly we were being followed in a hundred radars, and the frequency-pattern would reveal our copter for what it was -- a Roman police plane that had no business in that area. Even if the Company let us pass, there was always the chance that some Neapolitan radarman, more efficient, or more anxious for a promotion, than his peers would alert an interceptor and order us down. Certainly, in the old days, interception would have been inevitable; for Naples had just completed a war, and only short weeks back an unidentified aircraft would have been blasted out of the sky. But we were ignored. And that, I thought to myself, was another facet to the paradox. For when, in all the world's years before these days of the Company, was there such complacency, such deep-rooted security, that a nation just out of a war should have soothed its combat-jangled nerves overnight? Perhaps the Company had not ended wars. But the fear of wars was utterly gone. We fluttered once around the volcano, and dipped in to a landing on a gentle hump of earth halfway up its slope, facing Naples and the Bay. We were a few hundred yards from a cluster of buildings -- perhaps a dozen, in all. I jumped out, stumbling and recovering myself. Rena stepped lightly into my arms. And without a word, the Guards fed fuel to the jets, the rotor whirled, and the copter lifted away from us and was gone. Rena peered about us, getting her bearings. There was a sliver of a moon in the eastern sky, enough light to make it possible to get about. She pointed to a dark hulk of a building far up the slope. "The Observatory. Come, Tom." T HE volcanic soil was rich, but not very useful to farmers. It was not only the question of an eruption of the cone, for that sort of hazard was no different in kind than the risk of hailstorm or drought. But the mountain sides did not till easily, its volcanic slopes being perhaps steeper than those of most mountains. The ground under our feet had never been in cultivation. It was pitted and rough, and grown up in a tangle of unfamiliar weeds. And it was also, I discovered with considerable shock, warm to the touch. I saw a plume of vapor, faintly silver in the weak light, hovering over a hummock. Mist, I thought. Then it occurred to me that there was too much wind for mist. It was steam! I touched the soil. Blood heat, at least. I said, with some difficulty, "Rena, look!" She laughed. "Oh, it is an eruption, Tom. Of course it is. But not a new one. It is lava, you see, from the little blast the Sicilians touched off. Do not worry about it..." We clambered over the slippery cogs of a funicular railway and circled the ancient stone base of the building she had pointed to. There was no light visible; but Rena found a small door, rapped on it and presently it opened. Out of the darkness came Slovetski's voice: "Welcome." Once this building had been the Royal Vulcanological Observatory of the Kingdom of Italy. Now it was a museum on the surface, and underneath another of the hideouts of Rena's "friends." But this was a hideout somewhat more important than the one in the Roman Catacombs, I found. Slovetski made no bones about it. He said, "Wills, you shouldn't be here. We don't know you. We can't trust you." He held up a hand. "I know that you rescued dell'Angela. But that could all be an involved scheme of the Company. You could be a Company spy. You wouldn't be the first, Wills. And this particular installation is, shall I say, important. You may even find why, though I hope not. If we hadn't had to move so rapidly, you would never have been brought here. Now you're here, though, and we'll make the best of it." He looked at me carefully, then, and the glinting spark in the back of his eyes flared wickedly for a moment. "Don't try to leave. And don't go anywhere in this building where Rena or dell' Angela or I don't take you." And that was that. I found myself assigned to the usual sort of sleeping accommodations I had come to expect in this group. Underground -- cramped -- and a bed harder than the Class-C Blue Heaven minimum. T HE next morning, Rena breakfasted with me, just the two of us in a tower room looking down over the round slope of Vesuvius and the Bay beneath. She said:"The museum has been closed since the bomb landed near, so you can roam around the exhibits if you wish. There are a couple of caretakers, but they're with us. The rest of us will be in conference. I'll try to see you for lunch." And she conducted me to an upper level of the Observatory and left me by myself. I had my orders -- stay in the public area of the museum. I didn't like them. I wasn't used to being treated like a small boy, left by his mother in a Company day nursery while she busied herself with the important and incomprehensible affairs of adults. Still, the museum was interesting enough, in a way. It had been taken over by the Company, it appeared, and although the legend frescoed around the main gallery indicated that it was supposed to be a historical museum of the Principality of Naples, it appeared by examination of the exhibits that the "history" involved was that of Naples vis-avis the Company. Not, of course, that such an approach was entirely unfair. If it had not been for the intervention of the Company, after the Short War, it is more than possible that Naples as an independent state would never have existed. It was the Company's insistence on the dismantling of power centers (as Millen Carmody himself had described it) that had created Naples and Sicily and Prague and Quebec and Baja California and all the others. Only the United States had been left alone -- and that, I think, only because nobody dared to operate on a wounded tiger. In the temper of the nation after the Short War, the Company would have survived less than a minute if it had proposed severing any of the fifty-one states... The museum was interesting enough, for anyone with a taste for horrors. It showed the changes in Neapolitan life over the past century or so. There was a reconstruction of a typical Neapolitan home of the early Nineteen-forties: a squalid hovel, packed ten persons to the room, with an American G.I., precursor of the Company expediters, There was, by comparison, a typical Class-B Blue Heaven modern allotment -- with a certain amount of poetic license; few Class-B homes really had polyscent showers and autocooks. however, that was most impressive. It was in the far back of the building, in a large chamber anchored to bedrock. It held a frightening display of weapons, from a Tiger Tank to a gas-gun. Bulking over everything else in the room, even the tank, was the thirty-foot height of a Hell-bomb in a four-story display. I looked at it a second time, vaguely disturbed by something I hadn't Juite placed -- an indigo gleam to the metal of the warhead, with a hint of evil under its lacquered sheen... It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: This is the casing of the actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark ficient radioactive Cobalt# would have been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days. I looked at it again, shuddering. Oh, it was safe enough now. Until the hydrogen reaction could turn the ordinary cobalt sheathing into the deadly isotope-#, it was just such stuff as was used to alloy magnets and make cobalt glass. It was even more valuable as a museum piece than as the highly purified metal. Score one for the Company. They'd put a stop to that danger. Nobody would have a chance to arm it and send it off now. No small war would find it more useful than the bomb it would need -- and no principality would risk the Company's wrath in using it. And while the conspiracy might have planes and helicopters, the fissionable material was too rigidly under Company control for them to have a chance. The Super Hell-bomb would never go off. And that was something that might mean more to the Company's credit than anything else. Maybe it was possible that in this controversy both sides were right. And, of course, there was the obvious corollary. I continued my wandering, looking at the exhibits, the rubble of the museum's previous history. The cast of the Pompeiian gladiator, caught by the cinderfall in full flight, his straining body reproduced to every contorted line by the incandescent ashes that had encased him. The carefully chipped and labeled samples from the lava flows of the past two centuries. The aweinspiring photographs of Vesuvius in eruption. But something about the bomb casing kept bothering me. I wandered around a bit longer and then turned back to the main exhibit. The big casing stretched upward and downward, with narrow stairs leading down to the lower level at its base. It was on the staircase I'd noticed something before. Now I hesitated, trying to spot whatever it was. There was a hint of something down there. Finally, I shrugged and went down to inspect it more closely. radiation glove. A used, workman's glove, dirty with grease. And as my eyes darted up, I could see that the bolts on the lower servicing hatches were halfunscrewed. Radiation gloves and tampering with the casing! There were two doors to the pit for the bomb casing, but either one was better than risking the stairs again where someone might see me. Or so I figured. If they found I'd learned anything... I grabbed for the nearer door, threw it open. I knew it was a mistake when the voice reached my ears. " -- after hitting the Home office with a Thousand-kiloton bomb. It's going to take fast work. Now the schedule I've figured out so far -- God's damnation! How did you get in here, Wills?" It was Slovetski, leaning across a table, staring at me. Around the table were Benedetto and four or five others I did not recognize. All of them looked at me as though I were the Antichrist, popped out of the marble at St. Peter's Basilica on Easter Sunday. The spark was a raging flame in Slovetski's eyes. Benedetto dell'Angela said sharply, "Wait!" He strode over to me, half shielding me from Slovetski. "Explain this, Thomas," he demanded. "I thoughtthis was the hall first words I could while I tried to find any excuse... "Wills! I tell you, answer me!" I said, "Look, did you expect me to carry a bell and cry unclean? I didn't mean to break in. I'll go at once..." In a voice that shook, Slovetski said: "Wait one moment." He pressed a bell-button on the wall; we all stood there silent, the five of them staring at me, me wishing I was dead. There was a patter of feet outside, and Rena peered in. She saw me and her hand went to her heart. "Tom! But -- " Slovetski said commandingly, "Why did you permit him his liberty?" Rena looked at him wide-eyed. "But, please, I asked you. You suggested letting him study the exhibits." Benedetto nodded. "True, Slovetski," he said gravely. "You ordered her to attend until our -- conference was over." The flame surged wildly in Slovetski's eyes -- not at me. But he got it under control. He said, "Take him away." He did not do me the courtesy of looking my way again. Rena took me by the hand and led me off, closing the door behind us. As soon as we were outside, I heard a sharp babble of argument, but I could make out no words through the door. I didn't need to; I knew exactly what they were saying. This was the proposition: Resolved, that the easiest thing to do is put Wills out oi the way permanently. And with Slovetski's fiery eyes urging the positive, what eager debater would say him nay? Tom. Please don't ask me!" I said, "This is no kid's game, Rena! They're talking about bombing the Home Office!" She shook her head. "Tom, Tom. You must have misunderstood." "I heard them!" "Tom, please don't ask me any more questions." I slammed my hand down on the table and swore. It didn't do any good. She didn't even look up from the remains of her dinner. It had been like that all afternoon. The Great Ones brooded in secret. Rena and I waited in her room, until the museum's public visiting hours were over and we could go up into the freer atmosphere of the reception lounge. And then we waited there. I said mulishly: "Ever since I met you, Rena, I've been doing nothing but wait. I'm not built that way!" No answer. I said, with all of my patience: "Rena, I heard them talking about bombing the Home Office. Do you think I am going to forget that?" Leadenly: "No, Tom." "So what does it matter if you tell me more? If I cannot be trusted, I already know too much. If I can be trusted, what does it matter if I know the rest?" Again tears. "Please don't ask me!" I yelled: "At least you can tell me what we're waiting for!" She dabbed at her eyes. "Please, Tom, I don't know much more than you do. Slovetski, he is like this sometimes. He gets, I suppose you would say, thoughtful. He concentrates so very much on one thing, you see, that he forgets everything around him. It is possible that he has forgotten that we are waiting. I don't know." I snarled, "I'm tired of this. Go in and remind him!" "No, Tom!" There was fright in her voice; and I found that she had told me one of the things I wanted to know. If it was not wise to remind Slovetski that I was waiting his pleasure, the probability was that it would not be pleasant for me when he remembered. I said, "But you must know something, Rena. Don't you see that it could do no harm to tell me?" She said miserably, "Tom, I know very little. I did not -- did not know as much as you found out." I stared at her. She nodded. "I had perhaps a suspicion, it is true. Yes, I suspected. But I did not really think, Tom, that there was a question of bombing. It is not how we were taught. It is not what Slovetski promised, when we began." "You mean you didn't know Slovetski was planning violence?" She shook her head. "And even now, I think, perhaps you heard wrong, perhaps there was a mistake." I stood up and leaned over her. "Rena, listen to me. There was no mistake. They're working on that casing. Tell me what you know!" She shook her head, weeping freely. I raged: "This is asinine! What can there be that you will not tell? The Company supply base that Slovetski hopes to raid to get a bomb? The officers he plans to bribe, to divert some other nation's quota of plutonium?" She took a deep breath. "Not that, Tom." "Then what? You don't mean to say that he has a complete underground separator plant -- that he is making his own plutonium!" She was silent for a long time, looking at me. Then she sighed. "I will tell you, Tom. No, he does not have a plant. He doesn't need one, you see. He already has a bomb." impossible."  She was shaking her head. I protested, "But the -- the quotas, Rena. The Company tracks every from the moment it leaves the reactor! The inspections! Expediters with Geiger counters cover every city in the world!" "Not here, Tom. You remember that the Sicilians bombed Vesuvius? There is a high level of radioactivity all up and down the mountain. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to mask a buried bomb." She closed her eyes. "And -- well, you are right, Tom. I might as well tell you. In that same war, you see, there was a bomb that did not explode. You recall?" "Yes, but -- " "But it couldn't explode, Tom. It was a dummy. Slovetski is a left the ground, he had diverted it. What went up was a hollow shell. What is left -- the heart of the bomb -- is buried forty feet beneath us." I stared at her, the room reeling. I was clutching at straws. I whispered, "But that was only a fission bomb, Rena. Slovetski -- I heard him -- he said a Thousand-kiloton bomb. That means hydrogen, don't you see? Surely he hasn't tucked one of those away." Rena's face was an agony of regret. "I do not understand all these things, so you must bear with me. I know this; there has been secret talk about the Milanese generators, and I know that the talk has to do with heavy water. And I am not stupid altogether, I know that from heavy water one can get what is used in a hydrogen bomb. And there is more, of course -- lithium, perhaps? But he has that. You have seen it, I think. It is on a pedestal in this building." I sat down hard. It was impossible. But it all fell into place. Given the fissionable core of the bomb -- plus the deuterium, plus the lithium-bearing shell -- it was no great feat to put the parts together and make a Hell-bomb. The mind rejected it; it was too fantastic. It was frightful and terrifying, and worst of all was that something lurking at the threshold of memory, something about that bomb on display in the museum... And, of course, I remembered. "Rena!" I said, struggling for breath. I nearly could not go on, it was too dreadful to say. "Rena! Have you ever looked at that bomb? Have you read the placard on it? That bomb is cobalt!" XI heard those piercing words from Slovetski's mouth, I had been obsessed with a vision. A Hell-bomb on the Home Office. America's eastern seaboard split open. New York a hole in the ocean, from Kingston to Sandy Hook; orange flames spreading across Connecticut and the Pennsylvania corner. That was gone -- and in its place was something worse. Radiocobalt bombing wouldn't simply kill locally by a gout of flaring radiation. It would leave the atmosphere filled with colloidal particles of deadly, radioactive Cobalt-#. A little of that could be used to cure cancers and perform miracles. The amount released from the sheathing of cobalt -- normal, "safe" cobalt -- around a fissioning hydrogen bomb could kill a world. A single bomb of that kind could wipe out all life on Earth, as I remembered my schooling. I'm no physicist; I didn't know what the quantities involved might mean, once the equations came off the drafting paper and settled like a ravening storm on the human race. But I had a glimpse of radioactive dust in every breeze, in every corner of every land. Perhaps a handful of persons in Cambodia or Vladivostok or Melbourne might live through it. But there was no question in my mind: If that bomb went off, it was the end of our civilization. I saw it clearly. And so, having betrayed the Company to Slovetski's gang, I came full circle. Even Judas betrayed only One. servatory was simple enough, with Rena shocked and confused enough to look the other way. Finding a telephone near Mount Vesuvius was much harder. I was two miles from the mountain before I found what I was looking for -- a Blue Wing The electronic scanners clucked worriedly, as they searched for the car I should have been driving, and the policy-punching slot glowed red and receptive, waiting for my order. I ignored them. What I wanted was inside the little unlocked building -- A hushaphone-booth with vision attachment. The important thing was to talk direct to Defoe and only to Defoe. In the vision screen, impedance mismatch would make the picture waver if there was anyone uninvited listening in. But I left the screen off while I put through my call. The office servo-operator (it was well after business hours) answered blandly, and I said: "Connect me with Defoe, crash priority." It was set to handle priority matters on a priority basis; there was neither fuss nor argument, though a persistent buzzing in the innards of the phone showed that, even while the robot was locating Defoe for me, it was double-checking the connection to find out why there was no vision on the screen. It said briskly, "Stand by, sir," and I was connected with Defoe's line -- on a remote hookup with the hotel where he was staying, I guessed. I flicked the screen open. But it wasn't Defoe on the other end of the line. It was Susan Manchester, with that uncharacteristic, oddly efficient look she had shown at the vaults. She said crisply, and not at all surprised: "Tom Wills." "That's right," I said, thinking quickly. Well, it didn't much matter. I should have realized that Defoe's secretary, howsoever temporary, would be taking his calls. I said rapidly: "Susan, I can't talk to you. It has to be Defoe. Take my word for it, it's important. Please put him on." She gave me no more of an argument than the robot had. In a second, Defoe was on the screen, and I put Susan out of my mind. She must have said something to him, because the big, handsome face was unsurprised, though the eyes were contracted. "Wills!" he snapped. "You fool! Where are you?" I said, "Mr. Defoe, I have to talk to you. It's a very urgent matter." "Come in and do it, Wills! Not over the telephone." I shook my head. "No, sir. I can't. It's too, well, risky." "Risky for you, you mean!" The words were icily disgusted. "Wills, you have betrayed me. No man ever got away with that. You're imposing on me, playing on my family loyalty to your dead wife, and I want to tell you that you won't get away with it. There's a murder charge against you, Wills! Come in and talk to me -- or else the police will pick you up before noon." mean to impose on any loyalty, but, in common decency, you ought to hear -- " "Decency!" His face was cold. "You talk about decency! You and that dell'Angela traitor you joined. Decency! Wills, you're a disgrace to the memory of a decent and honest woman like Marianna. I can only say that I am glad -- glad, do you hear me? -- that she's dead and rid of you." I said, "Wait a minute, Defoe! Leave Marianna out of this. I only -- " "Don't interrupt me! God, to think a man I trusted should turn out to be Judas himself! You animal, the Company has protected you from the day you were born, and you try to destroy it. Why, you pitiful idiot, you aren't fit to associate with the dogs in the kennel of a decent human being!" There was more. Much, much more. It was a flow of abuse that paralyzed me, less because of what he said than because of who was saying it. Suave, competent Defoe, ranting at me like a wounded Gogarty! I couldn't have been more astonished if the portrait of Millen Carmody had whispered a bawdy joke from the frontispiece of the Handbook. I stood there, too amazed to be furious, listening to the tirade from the midget image in the viewplate. It must have lasted for three or four minutes; then, almost in mid-breath, Defoe glanced at something outside my range of vision, and stopped his stream of abuse. I started to cut in while I could, but he held up one hand quickly. He smiled gently. Very calmly, as though he had not been damning me a moment before, he said: "I shall be very interested to hear what you have to say." That floored me. It took me a second to shake the cobwebs out of my brain before I said waspishly, "If you hadn't gone through all that jabber, you would have heard it long ago." The midget in the scanner shrugged urbanely. "True," he conceded. "But then, Thomas, I wouldn't have had you." And he reached forward and clicked off the phone. Tricked! Tricked and trapped! I cursed myself for stupidity. While he kept me on the line, the call was being traced -- there was no other explanation. And I had fallen for it! I slapped the door of the booth open and leaped out. I got perhaps ten feet from the booth. Then a rope dropped over my shoulders. Its noose yanked tight around my arms, and I was being dragged up, kicking futilely. I caught a glimpse of the broad Latin faces gaping at me from below, then two men on a rope ladder had me. I was dragged in through the bottom hatch of a big helicopter with no markings. The hatch closed. Facing me was a lieutenant of expediters. The two men tumbled in after me and reeled in the rope ladder, as the copter dipped and swerved away. I let myself go limp as the rope was loosened around me; when my hands were free I made my bid. I leaped for the lieutenant; my fist caught him glancingly on the throat, sending him reeling and choking backward. I grabbed for the hard-pellet gun at his hip -- he was pawing at it -- and we tumbled across the floor. It was, for one brief moment, a chance. I was no copter pilot, but the gun was all the pilot I'd need -- if only I got it out. But the expediters behind me were no amateurs. I ducked as the knotted end of the rope whipped savagely toward me. Then one of the other expediters was on my back; the gun came out, and flew free. And that was the end of that. I had, I knew, been a fool to try it. But I wasn't sorry. They had too much rough-and-tumble training for me to handle. But that one blow had felt good. It didn't seem as worth while a few moments later. I was fastened to a seat, while the wheezing lieutenant gave orders in a strangled voice. "Not too many marks on him," he was saying. "Try it over the kidneys again..." I never even thought of maintaining a heroic silence. They had had plenty of experience with the padded club, too, and I started to black out twice before finally I went all the way down. in my eyes. There was a doctor putting his equipment away. "He'll be all right, Mr. Defoe," he said, and snapped his' bag shut and left the circle of light. I felt terrible, but my head was clearing. I managed to focus my eyes. Defoe was there, and a couple of other men. I recognized Gogarty, looking sick and dejected, and another face I knew -- it was out of my Home Office training -- an officer whose name I didn't recall, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-general of expediters. That meant at least an expediter corps in Naples! I said weakly, "Hi." Defoe stood over me. He said, "I'm very glad to see you, Thomas. Coffee?" He steadied my hands as I gulped it. When I had managed a few swallows, he took the cup away. "I did not think you would resist arrest, Thomas," he said in a parental tone. I said, "Damn it, you didn't have to arrest me! I came down here of my own free will!" "Down?" His eyebrows rose. "Down from where do you mean, Thomas?" "Down from Mount -- " I hesitated, then finished. "All right. Down from Mount Vesuvius. The museum, where I was hiding out with the ringleaders of the antiCompany movement. Is that what you want to know?" Defoe crackled: "Manning!" The lieutenant-general saluted and left the room. Defoe said, "That was the first thing I wanted, yes. But now I want much more. Please begin talking, Thomas. I will listen." I talked. There was nothing to stop me. Even with my body a mass of aches and pains from the tender care of the Company's expediters, I still had to side with the Company in this. For the Cobalt-bomb ended all loyalties. I left nothing important out, not even Rena. I admitted that I had taken Benedetto from the clinic, how we had escaped to Rome, how we had fled to Vesuvius... and what I had learned. I made it short, skipping a few unimportant things like Zorchi. And Defoe sat sipping his coffee, listening, his warm eyes twinkling. I stopped. He pursed his lips, considering. "Silly," he said at last. "Silly? What's silly!" He said, "Thomas, I don't care about your casual affairs. And I would have excused your -- precipitousness -- since you have brought back certain useful information. Quite useful. I don't deny it. But I don't like being lied to, Thomas." "I haven't lied!" He said sharply, "There is no way to get fissionable material except through the Company!" "Oh, hell!" I shook my head. "How about a dud bomb, Defoe?" For the first time he looked puzzled. "Dud bomb?" Gogarty looked sick. "There's -- there's a report on your desk, Mr. Defoe," he said worriedly. "We -- well -- figured the halfmasses just got close enough to boil instead of to explode. We -- " "I see." Defoe looked at him for a long moment. Then, disregarding Gogarty, he turned back to me, shoved the coffee at me. "All right, Thomas. They've got the warhead. Hydrogen? Cobalt? What about fuel?" I told him what I knew. Gogarty, listening, licked his lips. I didn't envy him. I could see the worry in him, the fear of Defoe's later wrath. For in Defoe, as in Slovetski, there was that deadly fire. It blazed only when it was allowed to; but what it touched withered and died. I had not seen Defoe as tightly concentrated, as drivingly intent, before. I was sorry for Gogarty when at last, having drained me dry, Defoe left. But I was glad for me. hour -- just time for me to eat a Class-C meal a silent expediter brought. He thrust the door open and stared at me with whitely glaring eyes. "If I thought you were lying, Thomas..." His voice was cracking with suppressed emotion. "What happened?" I demanded. "Don't you know?" He stood trembling, staring at me. "You told the truth -- or part of the truth. There was a hideout on Vesuvius. But an hour ago they got away -- while you were wasting time. Was it a stall, Thomas? Did you know they would run?" I said, "Defoe, don't you see, that's all to the good? If they had to run, they couldn't possibly take the bomb with them. That means -- " He was shaking head. "Oh, but you're wrong, Thomas. According to the director of the albergo down the hill, three skyhook helicopters came over -- big ones. They peeled the roof off, as easy as you please, and they lifted the bomb out and then flew away." He nodded. There was no emotion in his voice, only in his eyes. He might have been discussing the weather. "Where? That is a good question. I hope we will find it out, Thomas. We're checking the radar charts; they can't hide for long. But how did they get away at all? Why did you give them the time?" He left me. Perversely, I was almost glad. It was part of the price of switching allegiance, I was learning, that shreds and tatters of loyalties cling to you and carry over. When I went against the Company to rescue Benedetto, I still carried with me my Adjusters' Handbook. And I confess that I never lost the habit of reading a page or two in it, even in the Catacombs, when things looked bad. And when I saw the murderous goal that Slovetski's men were marching toward, and I returned to Defoe, I still could feel glad that Benedetto, at least, had got away. But not far. It was only a few hours, but already broad daylight when Gogarty, looking shaken, came into the room. He said testily, "Damn it, Wills, I wish I'd never seen you! Come on! Defoe wants you with us." "Come on where?" I got up as he gestured furiously for haste. "Where do you think? Did you think your pals would be able to stay out of sight forever? We've got them pinpointed, bomb and all." He was almost dragging me down the corridor, toward a courtyard. I limped out into the bright morning and blinked. The court was swarming with armed expediters, clambering into personnel-carrying copters marked with the vivid truce-team insignia of the Company. Gogarty hustled me into the nearest and the jets sizzled and we leaped into the air. I shouted, over the screaming of the jets, "Where are we going?" Gogarty spat and pointed down the long purple coastline. "To their hideout -- Pompeii!" ' me, but it was clear that this operation was carefully planned. Our copter was second in a long string of at least a dozen that whirled down the coastline, past the foothills of Vesuvius, over the clusters of fishing villages and vineyards. I had never seen Pompeii, but I caught a glimpse of something glittering and needle-nosed, upthrust in the middle of a cluster of stone buildings that might have been the ruins. Then the first ten of the copters spun down to a landing, while two or three more flew a covering mission overhead. The expediters, hard-pellet guns at the ready, leaped out and formed in a skirmish line. Gogarty and a pair of expediters stayed close by me, behind the line of attack; we followed the troops as they dog-trotted through a field of some sort of grain, around fresh excavations, down a defile into the shallow pit that held the ruins of firstcentury Pompeii. I had no time for archeology, but I remember tripping over wide, shallow gutters in the stonepaved streets, and cutting through a tiny villa of some sort whose plaster walls still were decorated with faded frescoes. Then we heard the spatter of gunfire and Gogarty, clutching at me, skidded to a halt. "This is specialist work," he panted. "Best thing we can do is stay out of it." I peered around a column and saw a wide open stretch. Beyond it was a Roman arch and the ruined marble front of what once had been a temple of some sort; in the open ground lay the three gigantic copters Defoe had mentioned. The vanes of one of them were spinning slowly, and it lurched and quivered as someone tried to get it off the ground under fire. But the big thing was in the middle of the area: The bomb, enormous and terrifying as its venomous nose thrust up into the sky. By its side was a tank truck, the side of it painted with the undoubtedly untrue legend that it contained crude olive oil. Hydrazine, more likely! Hoses connected it with the base of the guided-missile bomb; and a knot of men were feverishly in action around it, some clawing desperately at the fittings of the bomb, some returning the skirmish fire of the expediters. We had the advantage of surprise, but not very much of that. From the top of the ancient temple a rapid-fire pellet gun sprayed into the flank of the skirmish line, which immediately broke up as the expediters leaped for cover. One man fell screaming out of the big skyhook copter, but someone remained inside, for it lurched and dipped and roared crazily across the field in as ragged a takeoff as I ever saw, until its pilot got it under control. It bobbed over the skirmish line under fire, but returning the fire as whatever few persons were inside it leaned out and strafed the expediters. Then the skyhook itself came under attack as the patrol copters swooped in. The big ship staggered toward the nearest of them. It must have been intentional: We could see the faint flare of muzzle-blast as the two copters fired on each other; they closed, and there was a brutal rending noise as they collided. They were barely a hundred feet in the air; they crashed in a breath, and flames spread out from the wreckage. A ND Slovetski's resources still had not run out. There was a roar and a screech of metal, and a one-man cobra tank slithered out of one of the buildings and came rapidly across the field toward the expediters. Gogarty, beside me, was sobbing with fear; that little tank carried self-loading rockets. It blasted a tiny shrine into rubble, spun and came directly toward us. We ran. I didn't even see the second expediter aircraft come whirling in and put the cobra tank out of action with its heavy weapons. I heard the firing, but it was swallowed up in a louder screaming roar. Gogarty stared at me from the drainage trench we had flung ourselves into. We both leaped up and ran back toward the open field. There was an explosion as we got there -- the fake "olive-oil" truck, now twenty yards from the bomb, had gone up in a violent blast. But we hardly noticed. For at the base of the bomb itself red-purple fire was billowing out. It screamed and howled and changed color to a blinding blue as the ugly squat shape danced and jiggled. The roar screamed up from a bull-bass to a shrieking coloratura and beyond as the bomb lifted and gained speed and, in the blink of an eye, was gone. I hardly noticed that the sound of gunfire died raggedly away. We were not the only ones staring unbelievingly at the sky where that deadly shape had disappeared. Of the scores of men on both sides in that area, not a single eye was anywhere else. The bomb had been fueled; we were too late. Its servitors, perhaps at the cost of their own lives, had torched it off. It was on its way. The cobalt bomb -- the single weapon that could poison the world and wipe out the human race -- was on its way.  end? What becomes of any plot or plan, when an indigogleaming missile sprays murder into the sky and puts a period to planning? I do not think there ever was a battlefield as abruptly quiet as that square in old Pompeii. Once the bomb had gone, there was not a sound. The men who had been firing on each other were standing still, jaws hanging, eyes on the sky. But it couldn't last. For one man was not surprised; one man knew what was happening and was ready for it. A crouching figure at the top of the ruined temple gesticulated and shouted through a powermegaphone: "Give it up, Defoe! You've lost, you've lost!" It was Slovetski, and beside him a machine-gun crew sighted in on the  nearest knot of expediters. Pause, while the Universe waited. And then his answer came; it was a shot that screamed off a cracked capital, missing him sight, and the battle was raging. Human beings are odd. Now that the cause of the fight was meaningless, it doubled in violence. There were fewer than a hundred of Slovetski'? men involved, and not much more than that many expediters. But for concentrated violence I think they must have overmatched anything in the Short War's ending. I was a non-combatant; but the zinging of the hard-pellet fire swarmed all around me. Gogarty, in his storm sewer, was safe enough, but I was more exposed. While the rapid-fire weapons pattered all around me, I jumped up and zigzagged for the shelter of a low-roofed building. The walls were little enough protection, but at least I had the illusion of safety. Most of all, I was out of sight. I wormed my way through a gap in the wall to an inner chamber. It was as tiny a room as ever I have been in; less than six feet in its greatest dimension -- length -- and with most of its floor area taken up by what seemed to be a rude built-in bed. Claustrophobia hit me there; the wall on the other side was broken too, and I wriggled through. The next room was larger; and it wasoccupied. A man lay, panting heavily, in a corner. He pushed himself up on an elbow to look at me. In a ragged voice he said: "Thomas!" And he slumped back, exhausted by the effort, blood dripping from his shirt. I leaped over to the side of Benedetto dell'Angela. The noise of the battle outside rose to a high pitch and dwindled raggedly away.l kept me going -- certainly I could see with my mind's vision no reason to keep struggling. The world was at an end. There was no reason to try again to escape from the rubber hoses of the expediters -- and, after I had seen the resistance end, and an expediter-officer appeared atop the temple where Slovetski had shouted his defiance, no possibility of rejoining the rebels. Without Slovetski, they were lost. But I kept on. Benedetto helped. He knew every snake-hole entrance and exit of all the hideouts of Slovetski's group. They had not survived against the strength of the Company without acquiring skill in escape routes; and here, too, they had a way out. It required a risky dash across open ground but, even with Benedetto on my back, I made it. And then we were in old Pompeii's drainage sewer, the arched stone tunnel that once had carried sewage from the Roman town to the sea. It was a hiding place, and then a tunnel to freedom, for the two of us. We waited there all of that day, Benedetto mumbling almost inaudibly beside me. In lucid moments, he told me the name of the hotel where Rena had gone when the Observatory was abandoned, but there seemed few lucid moments. Toward evening, he began to recover. We found our way to the seashore just as darkness fell. There was a lateen-rigged fishing vessel of some sort left untended. I do not suppose the owner was far # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. away, but he did not return in time to stop us. Benedetto was very weak. He was muttering to himself, words that I could hardly understand. "Wasted, wasted, wasted," was the burden of his complaint. I did not know what he thought was wasted -- except, perhaps, the world. We slipped in to one of the deserted wharves under cover of darkness, and I left Benedetto to find a phone. It was risky, but what risk mattered when the world was at an end? Rena was waiting at the hotel. She answered at once. I did not think the call had been intercepted -- or that it would mean anything to anyone if it had. I went back to the boat to wait with Benedetto for Rena to arrive, in a rented car. We didn't dare chance a cab. Benedetto was sitting up, propped rigidly against the mast, staring off across the water. Perhaps I startled him as I came to the boat; he turned awkwardly and cried out weakly. Then he saw that it was I. He said something I could not understand and pointed out toward the west, where the Sun had gone down long before. But there was still light there -- though certainly not sunset. Far off over the horizon was a faint glow! I couldn't understand at first, since I was sure the bomb had been zeroed-in on the Home Offices in New York; but something must have happened. From that glow, still showing in the darkness so many hours after the explosion as the dust particles gleamed bluely, it must have gone off over the Atlantic. There was no doubt in my mind any longer. The most deadly weapon the world had ever known had gone off! really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly Each binder holds six issues and costs only # pos f Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New Ye value. f rom Y. ce-Fictio: hi Canada ;e-Fiction  tl Canada ) a L I The editors of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine have published only # full length science fiction novels in the past four years. Hundreds of thousands of copies of these novels have been enjoyed by their readers. Each novel would sell for # or # if bought as a hard back book, but because we want to bring these vitally important novels to all our Galaxy readers we have published them at the low, low price of #c each. 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Gold by Groff Conklin H. L. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Titl Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. has sent a small poacher into editorial territory (see his Five Star Shelf in this issue), there's no reason why I shouldn't invade his domain. Poor chap, he doesn't stand a chance; I can do a job of really creative criticism by reviewing books before they are written. Here, for example, is the fall list for #. If you want to order any of the titles, incidentally, please use the currency required. And, of course, you'll have to wait until publication date for delivery. Mars Wants You! by Quentin Jones, D.D.S. Marsport Press; # reels, # credits Disguised as a travelogue, this is a blatant appeal to dentists to come to Mars. No one who has ever chipped a tooth on the encysted sand in Martian food can dispute the real need for dentists there, but recruitment should be on an honest basis instead of phony glamor. There's the usual stuff about the flight from Earth, the canals -- as if there were something fresh to say on the subject -- and the author dares to present the "ruins" without a word of explanation! I Made the Martian Ruins by reels, # credits If this had been brought out before the author's death a generation ago, it would have been an important book. That delay, however, fits the irony of Li's life; the greatest architect of his day, yet his big work -- if the Mars Company had had its way -- would have remained forever anonymous. For it was he who built the "cities" of Mars when it was discovered that the authentic Martian artifacts had no tourist appeal. Now his posthumous tragedy is that his revelation is nothing of the sort. Still, it's an exciting account of the secrecy and ingenuity involved in designing, executing, transporting and erecting the "ruins." And they are better than the artifacts, a proof of Mario Li's genius. The Android Scandal by Shawn Brody. #st-CenturyWolff; # reels, # credits Yes, Brody is back again with another of his beefs about the -- to him -- shamefully slow development of artificial life. I'll wearily explain again in ( Continued on page #) mmmms nowned artists. Custom-recorded on distortion free vinylite discs. Reproduced with a tonal fidelity encompassing the entire range of human hearing ( # to # cycles). This amazing offer is made only to demonstrate the superb quality of our recordings, and to show you the advantages of trial membership in the Musical Masterpiece Society. monthly releases are described to you in advance. Those you want home trial. Only the records you decide to keep are billed to you at the Member's low price of just SI. # per disc (average playing time # min.). Saving you # fy off the usual retail price. This "give-away" offer may soon be with # to help cover postage. Symphony No. # in E Flat, K. # Piono Sonata No. # in F Sharp, Opus # The Acodentic Festival The Roman Carnival Concerto in C for Two Trumpets and Orchestra Die Meistersinger, Prelude, Act I Toccata and Fugue in D Minor Sorcerer's Apprentice Night on Bald Mountain Fantaisie-lmpromptu, Op. # I" The Musical Masterpiece Society, Inc., Dept. #-# I # West #st Street, New York #. N. Y. Enclosed is #c to cover postage for the recordings of # masterpieces listed. Enroll me as trial member. Privileges: No purchase obligation ever! Advance notice of releases. # day free trial on any discs! I may reject records before or after receipt: may cancel membership at any time. For future l.p. discs I keep. I'll pay only # each plus shipping. Limit: Only one sample package per customer. Name... City...State. Anyone could get divorced, win a pardon from prison, go into bankruptcy -- those were snaps compared to the problem of coping with a... Little Orphan Android mi the top of the ninth. It was the seventh and crucial game of the all-time World Series between the Giandroids and the Yandroids. The bases were filled. At the plate, Babe Ruth smiled and pointed toward the center-field bleachers. Carl Hubbell started his windup -- And the doorbot, in its crisp, English voice, said, "C.O.D. for the master." Boyd Crandal sighed resignedly, switched off the home-theaterbot and said, "Roll it in." With a grandiose sweep, the door swung open, revealing the most spectacular redhead Crandal had ever seen. She was built along more womanly lines than was the fashion these days among the thespiandroids, but Crandal liked it. "C.O.D.?" He strangled over the question, struggling up out of the chairbot's embrace. The redhead smiled like an angel. "Not me. I'm merely leading a confused porterbot by the hand. You are Boyd Crandal, aren't you?" A real, live woman! Crandal hadn't seen a woman since -- since -- he couldn't remember when he had seen a real, live woman. He nodded mutely. "Then this is for you," said the woman. "It was trying to deliver the package next door." And she was gone. the door, the porterbot had rolled into the room from the hall, blocking his way, and all Crandal could see was the "S.O.E." of the Prime Directive printed across its front panel. It stopped in the middle of the room and deposited its burden on the floor like a chicken in the zoo laying a large and uncomfortable egg. The package was an oblong, plastic box, just about the right size and shape for a coffin. "Ten thousand bills, please," said the porterbot. "Ten thousand what?" The redheaded vision faded. "Bills, sir, bills." "Bills, yes, but for what?" The porterbot's neck craned as if it were considering its navel, but it was, after all, nothing but a glorified machine. "The full order number is A dash MP parenthesis CT end parenthesis dash zero zero one three -- " "A!" Crandal repeated. "A is for Android," said the porterbot helpfully. "I know what A is for," Crandal snapped. "But I didn't order any android. At least," he hesitated as a sliver of doubt insinuated itself into his mind, "I don't think I did." A transparent window opened in the porterbot's shell back. "Are you Boyd Crandal?" it inquired. "Yes." "Is this your mark?" Crandal edged over to it. It looked like his mark, but only a handwriterbot could be sure. "I guess you've had it checked," he muttered. "Naturally. Ten thousand bills, please." Crandal turned toward the the desk. Did he have ten thousand bills? He didn't remember ordering the android, and he didn't remember how much money he had in the bank. confusedly with one hand. One minute he'd been sitting quietly in his chairbot; happy, enjoying life, a sound, unassuming member of his society, a sincere dilettante, and the next minute a black gulf had opened under him. He had been sitting over a trap door to Hell. "Well," he said to the bankerbot, "what's the balance?" "As of nineteen hundred hours this date," said the bankerbot in a concise, financial voice, "your balance is twenty thousand two hundred and seven bills. Outstanding payables: four hundred and nineteen." Crandal's massaging fingers  tightened convulsively on his forehead. So little? Paying for the android would take more than half. "Any other assets?" His voice shook a little. "Equity in household robots: one thousand seven hundred and twenty-four. Remaining on contract: two thousand three hundred and eighty-three. Minimum monthly expenses: one thousand one hundred and fifty-two bills, including rent of this and adjoining apartment. No anticipated income." Crandal drew in a single, shuddering breath. Even without this android, his savings would last little more than a year. And he had to pay for the damn thing. An order was an order, whether he remembered it or not. And robots didn't make mistakes. He didn't dare deny ordering it. The doctorbots and the physiciandroids might consider his memory-lapse grounds for an exploratory. At the least, the psychoandroids would get a crack at him. He groaned. "Make out a check for ten thousand bills to -- " He turned questioningly toward the porterbot. "Bearer," it supplied. The desk chattered to itself and presented him with an imprinted check. Crandal made his mark with a trembling hand. "Here," he said. The porterbot accepted it with a gracious suction plate and then cautiously passed the check under a scanner. "Thank you, sir," it said unctuously, and reeled out a small sheet of paper. "Your receipt, sir." Crandal took it in a numbed hand, and the porterbot backed into the hall toward the waiting elevatorbot. As soon as the doors closed, Crandal sank dazedly into the chairbot. What a frightful mess. He had less than # in the bank. His obligations were greater than his assets by almost #. His continuing expenses would be # a month. And he had no anticipated income. How was he going to live? How did a man live without savings or income? He couldn't. But the worst part was that he couldn't even remember how he had got into such a fix. Suddenly, without his suspecting it till now, a chunk was missing out of his life. would have to find a job. What could he do? What were his talents? He sat tautly in the chairbot, a slim, dark-haired young man of forty-one chewing a ragged fingernail, and he couldn't think of a single thing that anyone would pay him to do. Men just didn't do anything any more. The robots and the androids did everything. Compete with them? Impossible. The robots were built to specialize in one job, and they did that job as cheaply and efficiently as it could be done. And the more complex androids, whose capabilities were broader, had faultless mechanical memories and skills imprinted like circuits; their minds not distracted by stray talents, autonomic nervous systems and emotional imbalances. Compete with machines like these? Anything a man could do, they could do better and cheaper. The world ran on A-power -- android-power, that is. Six days Man had once labored, and on the seventh day he'd rested. It was now the era of the no-day work week. Every day was Sunday. The result: Man had health, longevity, a sufficiency of the world's goods, and infinite leisure in which to enjoy them. The world was a very good world indeed. It was nothing to give a man a complex to feel inferior about. Crandal hadn't felt frustrated. Why should he worry? The robots and androids were nothing but glorified machines, and a machine was nothing but a glorified tool. It was a truism that a man and a machine were better than a man alone. A man with a plane could smooth a board faster and better than a man with his bare hands. Why should it bother him, then, if a slightly more complex tool could work harder and better and faster than he -- could outperform him in sports and arts and sciences, as well? Why worry? Man's only indispensable talent was consuming. All a man had to do was relax and enjoy himself. Why worry, that is, until he finds himself with less than # bills between him and starvation? Why worry -- until his bankerbot says, "No anticipated income?" Why worry -- until necessity says, "Compete or don't eat?" Crandal pounded his forehead with a desperate fist. Why didn't he have an income? Why didn't he have any investments to pay him dividends? Why didn't he have something working for him, bringing in the bills? A robot, at least, or an android? fin-shaped box on the floor. It was square and plain and deadwhite. There was a serial number etched into the top: A-MP(CT)#. A was for android. MP meant multi-purpose, and multi-purpose meant that the android was a very valuable piece of machinery. Multi-purpose androids were worth many times the # bills he had paid. He could hire it out or sell it -- well, perhaps he couldn't sell it. The cut-rate price must mean that there was something wrong with the title -- or the android. He wished he knew what CT meant. That was a new designator to him. He shrugged: the information would be in the Catalog. The # now; that meant the model was an early one. Perhaps it was imperfect. Crandal bent over the box -- and stopped. Surely he had ordered it from the Catalog? He looked at the receipt in his hand. It wasn't like a Catalog receipt; the top was blank. The rest: Apt. #D Robot Arms # Serial: A-MP(CT)-# #-#-# And stamped across the face a large, red paid. The #-#-# was the date. Yesterday. And the apartment number was wrong. Crandal lived in I IE. No wonder the porterbot had been confused; machines don't make mistakes. But where had he bought the thing? Oh, well. Delivery would know. He reached again for the box and stopped again. He had a strange reluctance to open it. Perhaps it was like Pandora's box... He shook himself. It was his android, after all, and his one hope for survival. He had paid for it, and somehow the thing in the box had to earn enough to support him. Ten thousand bills, though. A man couldn't get an ordinary field-handroid for that. With a sure instinct, he located and touched the catch. The lid parted in the middle and folded back. Lying in the box, wax-white and still, its hands folded across its chest, was the most lifelike android Crandal had ever seen. It was beautiful, its features classic in their perfection, its synthetic skin unmarred and smooth where it showed beyond the simple white tunic and shorts. Its eyes were open. It stared at Crandal out of plastic pupils, on its face a synthetic smile. It sat up, its hands reaching. "Daddy!" it said. "I'm not your father!" "Of course you are," said the android. "Man is the father of the android." "Nonsense," said Crandal. "You are nothing but a glorified machine. Machines don't have fathers -- they have manufacturers." Silently the android began to cry, tears forming in the corners of its eyes and sliding down its waxy cheeks. "I'm just a poor little orphan android with no one to care for me." Crandal stared at the thing aghast. Why would anyone build tear ducts into an android? "There, there, that's enough. Just don't call me 'Daddy.' If you must speak to me, I want you to call me 'Master.'" The android sighed. "S.O.E., Master." It smiled mercurially. "Everything happens for the best in this best of all possible worlds." It stood up in the box, a manlike creation about Crandal's height and build but blond where Crandal was dark. "A proper relationship between android and human is essential to a smoothrunning household." It stared at the room critically. "Is this the whole apartment, all of it, this ' one room?" "Certainly." Crandal flushed. "Are you used to a bigger place?" "Gracious, no! It's all for the best, I'm sure. We will be closer to each other, android and master." "That's not what you're for!" Crandal stopped and studied the mechanical. "Just what are you for?" The android's eyes snapped open. "Don't you know?" "If I knew, I wouldn't ask. What in blazes does the CT stand for?" The android frowned. Its eyes seemed to glaze over, but that was illusion; it was only a glorified machine. "I don't know," it said at last. "There are no selfsearch circuits in the android brain. That's all for the best, though. There's no self-consciousness, no neurosis -- " Crandal imagined a neurotic android and shuddered. "What do you think you can do?" "Anything," said the android. "I have great self-confidence. Give me an order." Crandal thought about it. "Fix me a drink. A stiff one. You'll find Quaffs under the ethyloid tap." "S.O.E., Master," said the android dutifully and stepped out of its crate. Almost stepped out, that is. Unaccountably, its toe hit the edge of the crate. It stumbled forward clumsily, catching itself on the chairbot with a crunch. The crunch signaled the disintegration of a valuable, handcrafted Sniff filled with neoheroin. "My Sniff!" Crandal exclaimed in anguish. "Sorry, Master. I'll make you another." "Get the drink!" Crandal sank thoughtfully into the chairbot. A clumsy android? It was a selfcontradiction.- crashed to the floor. Crandal cringed. "One of my beautiful, handcrafted Quaffs?" "Sorry, Master. It slipped. I'll make you another." "Bring the drink!" The android brought it in the Silenus Quaff, slopping some over the edge into Crandal's lap. A strange aroma climbed from it. Glowering, Crandal tasted the mixture gingerly -- and exploded. The liquid made a fine spray from his lips. "You call this a drink? What did you put in it?" "Half and half, sir. Half from the first tap, half from the second." "But the first tap is ethyloid, the second bitters!" Crandal screamed. "Get rid of it!" "Allow me," said the android, accepting the Quaff. It tossed off the drink in one gulp. "Mmmm! An interesting combination." Crandal clenched his hands together to keep them away from the android's throat. The machine was getting the better of him, and it wasn't even trying. He had to control himself. He had to show the thing who was master and find out what it was good for. It was not a household servant or a bartender -- those were eliminated. Perhaps it was a mobile garbage disposer. But a robot would be more efficient. "Strip!" he said. "S.O.E., Master." The android removed its tunic. Across its hairless chest was tattooed the Prime Directive: S.O.E. -- just as it was stamped indelibly in its mind. It stepped out of its shorts. Never before had Crandal seen an android fashioned so faithfully to the masculine model. "Turn around," he said sharply. Across the milky, synthetic flesh of one buttock were printed the letters: A-MP(CT). Across the other: #. "Dress!" Crandal ordered. Here he was with a valuable, multipurpose android (CT) -- the only barrier between him and destitution -- and he couldn't find out what it could do. That it did something and did it superlatively well was beyond question. arm for Catalog. It appeared in the theaterbot cube. "Androids," said Crandal. Pages dropped away swiftly. "Multi-purpose." More pages  dropped. "Read them." His readerbot read the listings aloud: A-MP( BT ) Businessman-type multi-purpose android # A-MP(DT) Dancer-type multi-purpose android # No CT model was listed. Crandal punched for Information, and the Catalog disappeared. In its place was an answerbot: a receiver-speaker and two lenses that stared at Crandal like owl's eyes. "What is a CT model multipurpose android?" Crandal asked without preliminaries. "There is no such model listed in the Catalog." "I know that!" Crandal exclaimed. "That's why I'm asking Information." "What makes you think there is such a model?" "None of your business! Tell me what I want to know, and keep your questions to yourself!" Crandal frowned. These robots, they were getting out of hand with their impertinence. "Where did you learn about this model?" "Never mind!" Crandal shouted. "Just tell me what it is!" "S.O.E., sir, but that information is restricted," the answerbot said precisely. "It does no good to shout; I have pickups more sensitive than the human ear. If you will give me your name and address, I will see if you are authorized -- " Crandal clicked off with a vicious slap of the chairbot arm. The insolence of that robot! Refusing to obey a direct command! Restricted information, indeed! He had half a mind to report it. But then the whole ugly situation would be out in the open: the android and the memory lapse and where he had got the android -- Crandal snapped his fingers. Where he had got the android! Of course, Delivery would know. The answerbot that responded to his summons was a twin to the one he had just talked to; Crandal hoped its manners were better. "Delivery," it said. "S.O.E." "This is Boyd Crandal, Apartment #E, Robot Arms. One of your porterbots delivered a C.O.D. package to me this evening. I've lost the address of the place that sent it -- " "A moment, sir." The lenses swiveled away. The lenses. Damn! The Catalog answerbot had a tape of him asking about the CT model. If it was really restricted, the policemandroids would soon be demanding entrance of his doorbot... He shrugged. It was too late now for that sort of caution.In less than a moment, the answerbot looked back at Crandal. "We made no delivery to you this evening, sir." "But I received -- " Crandal began. "It must have come via Independent Carrier," the answerbot said pointedly. "S.O.E." This time the answerbot clicked off first. Crandal sagged back in the chairbot. He was lost. For all practical purposes, the android might have come into his life out of the endless night, its talent as dark and deep a mystery as the origin of life itself. "Chomp-chomp," said the android. "Chomp-chomp." "What did you say?" Crandal asked, turning. His mouth dropped open. The android was sitting at the larderbot finishing the last of a meal that would have foundered a horse in the zoo. "I said, Why don't you ask me, Master?'" said the android. "Ask you what?" "Where I came from," prompted the android. "All right, where did you come from?" "From the Orphanage, of course." With a pleased smile, it masticated a final elephantine bite. , door feeling like a newborn infant expelled from the sanctity of the womb: apprehensive, irritated and convinced he wasn't going to like the experience. He had not left his apartment for months -- for years, perhaps. Why should he? Everything he wanted was there or, if it wasn't, robots would bring it at his command. He hadn't been out -- or had he? Yesterday he had bought an unlisted android from an Orphanage. Impossible. Why, yesterday he had watched the Bobby Jones Ben Hogandroid match. Hadn't he? He shivered. He didn't want to go out, not at all. Apartment #F was next door. The name on the door was his. "Who is calling?" the doorbot asked politely. "The master is not in." "I know that, you dunce! I'm the master." The door opened for him. Behind it was a room bare of furnishings and decorations and clues to the past. It was his apartment -- the doorbot had proved that -- but what he had used it for he couldn't recall. He shrugged helplessly and returned to the hail. He would give the place up. That should save a few bills. Apartment #D was on the other side of his door. As he passed it, he bent over, out of the doorbot's eye, and read the As he read, the door swung inward and he found himself staring at a gray skirt stretched interestingly tight by a womanly breadth of hips. "Ah, Mr. Crandal, a bit of a voyeur, too?" Crandal straightened sheepishly. It was the redhead, looking more feminine than ever in a tailored gray suit. Her living, breathing proximity tied his tongue. "S-sorry," he stuttered. "I -- was c-curious -- " "Forget it, Mr. Crandal. No harm done." She walked quickly to the elevator door and waited, Crandal forgotten. Crandal found himself beside her, his spine chilly in a way the theaterbot never made it. "You're going out?" Wonderfully, she smiled. "You couldn't miss on that one." "Er -- uh -- why?" he asked. "I mean -- why are you going out?" She gave him a swift, amused glance out of green eyes. "Night school." The elevatorbot arrived, and they entered together. "Face the front, please," said the elevatorbot. "Night school?" Crandal repeated. "What are you studying?" "A profession." "Why?" Her eyes met his again; his spine turned colder. "So I can do a better job than an android." "But you can't compete with the sheisterbots and the physiciandroids!" Crandal protested, unthinking. "No human could learn enough or be skillful enough -- " The elevator door opened in front of them. "Thank you for letting me know, Mr. Crandal," she said icily, and stalked away. Crandal stared after the rhythmic feminine sway of her hips and Cursed his loose tongue. The facts of life are obvious. If a person chooses to ignore them, that is her affair. door. It opened to let him into the street, but Lucy Shannon was gone. The street was a busy place of truckerbots, porterbots, carbots -- even a few androids moving briskly about their masters' business. But there were no people. They were home, amusing themselves, as every good dilettante should be. Darkness had come to the city, and the streets were lightless and dark. The moving robots did not care; they scurried about their errands, missing each other narrowly through the miracle of some secret sense. It was an inhuman scene, as if Man had suddenly vanished from the city he had built and the mechanicals had taken over. Crandal shrank back into the doorway. "Transportation, sir?" asked the doorbot in a gruff, pleasant voice. "Please," Crandal breathed thankfully. "Air." "S.O.E., sir." A copterbot drifted down out of the night. Crandal scrambled into it and sank back in the seat with a vast sigh. The trip took the better part of an hour. A block from his destination, Crandal ordered the copterbot down. "Wait," he said, and worked his way, watchful and cautious, down the dark street. The Orphanage was a low, unlighted, isolated building in one of the smaller suburbs. Crandal crouched behind a row of bushes, shivering, half from the night's ment. Memory stirred: I have been here before. As minutes passed, he grew more certain. He had once crouched here where he crouched now; he had watched this dark building; he had waited. For what? To be sure no one would see him? That was it. It had to be. The Orphanage was outside the law. Androids and robots were the most personal possessions a man could have. As such, they were adjusted at the factory to fit -- indeed, to complement -- the personality of their master. Android, robot, master; together they formed a symbiosis, almost a Gestalt. Another man's android, insisted the psychoandroids, is like another man's shoe : it pinches. But why should anyone watch Crandal? Only criminals were watched. Well, Crandal asked himself, am I not a criminal? Sure, he was. He had bought the android here. And there might be worse things. There was a hole in his memory big enough to hide a dozen crimes. Crandal glanced behind him uneasily, but there was still nobody near. He stood up, feeling uncomfortably exposed like a single food cap on a plate, and walked to the door of the Orphanage with a briskness he did not feel. studied him. "Yes?" the doorbot said in a low, harsh voice. "I'm Boyd Crandal -- " "I know. What do you want?" "In. I want to see your master -- on business." "Wait." The eye stared at him unblinking, but it seemed even emptier. "The master is waiting in the study," the doorbot said in a moment. The door opened. Behind it, a dark hall gaped like an empty gullet. Crandal hesitated, entered and jumped as the door closed behind him, and felt only a little better when the hall lit up with a dim radiance. It was lined with doors to right and left, but they remained inexorably, flatly closed. Crandal walked forward, thinking that only the ultimate desperation could send him on such a wild and uncertain adventure. This was a real plunge into the unknown, each step risking the deadly danger that the ground would crumble away beneath his foot. There was no safety, not any more, not since the porterbot had brought the package. And yet Crandal felt curiously stimulated. At the end of the hall, the door opened. Beyond it was an office lined with mirrors. Two dozen Crandals walked forward to meet him as he entered. Crandal blinked with confusion and had trouble seeing the pudgy, blondhaired man who sat behind a desk in the middle of the room and sweated. "Back so soon?" the man said. said without a tremor -- and was amazed at his own boldness. The pudgy man lifted an eyebrow. "I bought an android here yesterday. Right?" The man nodded. "So?" He wiped his forehead on a sleeve. "I want some information about it." "So, ask." "What does it do?" The man shrugged. "How should I know? I don't make 'em; I just sell 'em. Caveat emptor, you know." "In this case, the seller should be a little wary, too," Crandal said softly, feeling a curious confidence in his ability to handle the situation. It seemed to be coming more naturally. "How do you get by with breaking the law like this?" The man watched him narrowly. "You asked me that before." "Did I?" The man's eyes were mere slits. "You've drawn a blank, haven't you, Crandal? I thought you might." "Suppose I have? Then I'd want to know what happened, what I bought." Crandal spat the question out: "Why did you think I might draw a blank?" The man blinked impassively. "Why should I tell you anything?" "Get it through your thick head: we're in this together! I bought the android, but you sold it. Before I'll keep the thing -- without the memory that goes along with it -- I'll bring a complaint against you for operating an Orphanage." That shook the pudgy man. The airbot kept the room cool, but he wiped his forehead again. "All right, you win. Here's the recording." He pressed a button on the chairbot. The lights dimmed. In one mirror facet appeared another Crandal, a twin with a difference. This Crandal was sure of himself. His walk was light and quick, poised on the balls of his feet, and he had a lean, vulpine look. That can't be me! Crandal thought in horror. I can't have changed that much! "How did you know I was coming?" the mirror-Crandal asked. In another facet of the mirror was the pudgy, blond-haired man behind his desk, sweating. He smiled. "I've got sources. Besides, your androids have been confiscated. Where else would you come? Conditioned, aren't you?" "None of your business. What I can't understand, Greer, is how you get away with it." Greer, Crandal thought, seizing on the name. That was the pudgy man's name. The mirror-Greer shrugged. "Who's to complain? They'd be arrested, too. You want another android, I suppose." The mirror-Crandal laughed; it was a bitter sound. "What I want and what I can afford are two different things. What can you give me for ten thousand bills?" "A robot, you mean?" "An android." "For twenty thousand I can let you have a field-handroid -- " "Ten thousand." "Nothing." "Surely there's something." The recorded voice was taut and meaningful. "Find something, Greer. The interrogatorbot asked me where I got the androids, but I didn't tell. Only, I can't guarantee my silence forever." Greer swallowed noisily and wiped his forehead. "Ten thousand? I've got one MP I can let you have for that." "Type?" "CT. Don't ask me what it means. It's a new one on me, and it isn't listed in the Catalog." "Show me." transparent. Behind it, in a white packing case tilted forward, was the most beautiful android Crandal had ever seen. It lay as still as a corpse, its hands folded across its chest, but its smooth, synthetic flesh and the placid perfection of its features were classic. The mirror-Crandal's eyes gleamed with an inner triumph. "Where do you get them, Greer?" "People die. Accidents or suicide -- for some reason, there's a lot of that. Their robots and androids are put up for auction, with the understanding that the buyers will junk them for parts. I can afford to bid higher than anyone else because I don't junk them. Simple." "If you're as thick-skinned as an android, and you aren't afraid of the Reformatory." "You've got a right to talk," Greer said coldly. "Well, do you want it?" "Certainly. And with it a fiftythousand bill policy, double indemnity for accidental destruction, the premium to be included in the purchase price." Greer sat back, horrified, sweating freely. "You can't do it, Crandal. The android would be traced back to me." "In the unlikely event that something should happen to this android," Crandal said evenly, "I have a hunch that there would be nothing left to trace back." Admiration glinted in Greer's eyes. "You're clever, Crandal. But I won't do it. It's too dangerous." "Fix it, Greer," Crandal said softly. "Forge the papers, if necessary. Doctor the tattoo. Anything. Because it can't be as dangerous as not doing what I ask." The breath and the resistance sighed out of Greer. "All right. You've won, this time. But don't think you can blackmail me again. Next time" -- his eyes squinted viciously -- "I'll take a chance on murder. How do you want it, C.O.D.?" In place of the lean, vulpine Crandal, a softer, woolier twin appeared. Crandal blinked at his reflection, but he was wiser now and more sure of himself. He had part of his memory back. "Well?" Greer said heavily. Crandal held out his hand, rubbing his fingers significantly with his thumb. "The policy, Greer." Greer sweated and pulled a piece of paper out of the desk and slapped it down on the polished surface. "Take it!" he snarled. "And get out!" Crandal took it, smiled and departed. He had finally remembered why he had bought the android. recognized him and swung open. Crandal stepped into the sanctum of his home and stopped, stunned. The android was ensconced in the chairbot -- the Grapes-of-Wrath Quaff in his hand -- watching with wide, plastic eyeballs, the classic battle between Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. In the #-D arena defined by the theaterbot, the androids shuffled and slugged in perfect imitation of their prototypes... "What -- do -- you -- think -- you're -- doing?" Crandal asked, emphasizing each word. Startled, the android scrambled out of the chairbot, dropping the Quaff. It smashed on the floor, and the air became redolent with the pungent odors of ethyloid and bitters. "I got bored. Master." "You -- got -- bored," Crandal repeated, as if his ears were playing tricks on him. "Bored!" he shouted. "Androids don't get bored!" "I do," said the android. "Tomorrow," Crandal said in a small, deadly voice, "you're going to get a job." "S.O.E., Master." The android stood obediently in front of Crandal, shuffling its feet. "What kind of job, Master?" "Tapping open-hearth furnaces, working in the deepsea mines... I haven't decided yet." Crandal snapped off the theaterbot as Dempsey staggered Louis with a short, savage right. "But aren't those jobs dangerous, Master?" "That's the general belief." "But I might be damaged, Master!" "Then," Crandal said, "I will collect the insurance. Maybe," he said with anticipatory relish, "I'll rent you out as a steeplejack. You're such a clumsy android, you'd be sure to fall." Crandal imagined the android falling -- and gasped with pain as something twisted inside him. It was worse than if he himself had been twisting lazily in the air as the pavement rushed up to meet him... Sweat was cold all over Crandal. He couldn't do it. The old Crandal had planned it, but he couldn't carry it through. He had the memory but not the character. He wasn't lean, confident and vulpine. He was plump, self-conscious and wooly. He was a lamb. He couldn't send the android out to be destroyed. The thought of cruelty to this android -- to any android -- seemed to torment him. The android sighed. "S.O.E., Master. Since life is disappointment, death is a kindness. I'm sure it's all for the best. We who are about to die... I'm hungry." "Don't be stupid! Androids don't get hungry." "I do," said the android faintly. "I'm only a poor little orphan android and I -- " "Don't be sickening. If there's anything I can't stand it's a pitiful android. Go ahead, eat something!" Crandal watched the android order a meal from the larderbot that would have sufficed a cow in the zoo, and he thought: I'm going mad. I'm standing here on my little pointed head going mad. What have I got? No money , no anticipated income, nothing but an android whose only observable talents are eating, drinking, and watching the theaterbot. It's a cannibal, eating my flesh, drinking my blood... The mountain of food had dwindled to a mole-hill, and the android was studying the menu again. "Enough of that," Crandal said hastily. "Go stand in the corner or lie down or do whatever androids do whenever they're not working." Working, he thought desperately. If there were only something profitable the android could be doing! Androids, after all, weren't human; they didn't need rest. "The android works four hours a day," said the android. "The other twenty hours it must recharge its powerpack. For this purpose, there are footplates in the crate." It pulled the white crate into a corner and plugged a cord into an electrical outlet. It laid itself down in the crate and folded its hands symbolically across its chest. "S.O.E., Master. Good night." It burped. Crandal closed his eyes and saw the electricity meter spinning, spinning, and he sank wearily into the chairbot. He touched the button that turned it into a bed. It straightened under him; the electric blanket swept out to tuck him in. He selected a slow, steamer roll, and the chair rolled, crooning softly, "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep." For the first time he could remember, it didn't soothe him instantly. He was in an awful predicament that he couldn't rock away. Once he had had androids, but they had been confiscated. Once he had been a lean, vulpine man, but he had been conditioned. And he didn't know why. In the process, he had lost all his money but a pittance -- and a crucial segment of memory. He had to do something about that android. If his memory were only whole again, perhaps he could work it out. He changed the chairbot's setting to a pullman jiggle and the lullaby to "Hit the Road to Dreamland," but it was hours before he went to sleep. morning, he felt tired and peevish. He kicked the android's box. "Get up! Go find a job, any job. Just get out of here. Maybe you can bring in a few bills to pay for the current you use." "But where shall I go?" asked the android. Crandal caught his temper before it flew away. "We might as well do this scientifically. CT. That must have meaning. Calculator type?" He eyed the android curiously. "What are two and two?" That exhausted his own mathematical knowledge. "Two and two what?" asked the android. Crandal breathed heavily. "Never mind! Let's see: composer, collector, catcher... Catcher?" He thought of the broken Quaffs. "No. Chef? Maybe you're a chef. Try the nearest restaurant." "S.O.E., Master." The android hesitated at the door. "I'm hungry." Crandal suppressed a sudden flood of pity. "Nonsense," he said brusquely. "Get to work." The android looked woebegone. This was only a trick, Crandal told himself, since it was nothing but a glorified machine. "I'm only a poor little orphan wouldn't like this." jangled in Crandal's mind. "The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Androids, Master." something to him, Crandal thought. He knew it, but he couldn't pin it down. "Oh, eat, then." And he watched the android put away a breakfast that would have staggered a pack of dogs in the zoo. The android got up and walked to the door. "Farewell." As the door closed between them, the apartment was suddenly peaceful and quiet. Crandal thought wistfully of the time before the android had arrived with his boxful of troubles. He ordered a modest breakfast and toyed with it. Finally he pushed it away and walked into the hall. Too many things tormented him for him to relax. vator, a door opened behind him. He turned hopefully, and had his hopes fulfilled. It was Lucy Shannon in a pale peach colored suit and a white blouse that made her look wonderfully feminine and appealing. He felt the familiar chill along his spine, but she ignored him. It continued as they entered the elevator. "Miss -- uh -- Shannon," he ventured, and felt vaguely encouraged when she didn't correct him, "I'm -- uh -- sorry about what I said yesterday." She glanced at him and thawed a degree. "Are you really?" "Really," he said eagerly. "I wish you'd forgive me. I've been under a strain lately. You know: insolent robots, insubordinate androids. They just don't make mechanicals like they used to. Would you believe it, I had a robot refuse to obey a direct order the other day?" "I'd believe it." Crandal looked directly at her for the first time, surprised. "What do you mean? Robots are made to obey orders, aren't they? Obedience is built into them; that's the Prime Directive!" "Part of it. But you mustremember that an order is only as good as the authority of the person giving it. It's a matter of position. An ordinary citizen, for instance, couldn't give an order to a policemandroid or order his household android to do something against the law." "Well, yes, I suppose," Crandal said thoughtfully. "Only -- " And he couldn't finish it. But Lucy smiled at him, and it was worth it. "Perhaps you'd like to come to our night school some time. We study things like that. The average citizen takes his society too much for granted, and he often doesn't even know its basic laws." "Is that where you're going now?" Crandal asked. "Oh, no. It's a night school. I'm going to work." "You've got a job?" Crandal said incredulously. "You're competing with androids?" The ice returned in a full, wintery gale. "Surprisingly enough," she said, stepping out of the elevator, "I am." Crandal beat himself savagely on the forehead. Wouldn't he ever learn? He threaded his way through the streets, dodging the rushing robots and androids, alarm growing in him. This was a different world by day -- different, too, than the glimpses of the theaterbot world. This one was rawer and less meaningful. Or perhaps the meaning was merely harder to find. Crandal was the only human in sight among the scurrying machines, and he had a crazy notion that they didn't need him. It faded, but he was happy to enter the relative quiet and peace of the library, although he was the only human there, too. since -- since -- as a matter of fact, he couldn't remember ever being in a library. He waited uncertainly in the big lobby until the librariandroid approached. "How can we help you?" it asked in a sonorous, bookish voice. "We?" Crandal repeated, looking around in perplexity to see if anyone was behind him. "A traditional expression. How can I help you?" "I want to look through some recent newspapers," Crandal said diffidently. "At the comic strips?" "No, no. The news sections." "You can't read, can you?" "Certainly I can read," Crandal said indignantly. "More than your name, I mean," the librariandroid explained patiently, "and a few common words." "No." "Then you'll want to rent a readerbot. The periodical section is right through this door and to the right." Crandal let it lead him to the door of the cubicle, but he put the coin in himself and went in alone. He knew how to handle mechanicals. "I want all recent references to Boyd Crandal," he told the readerbot firmly. He waited, gazing at the cubicle's blank walls, thinking idly that it would be a nice thing knowing how to read. Might even come in handy some time. But it had never seemed worth the trouble before. "Item," said the readerbot in a gray, newsprint voice. "JournalAmericandroid, #-#-#. 'Boyd Crandal, rising young dilettante, has been reported to the police shop..." for him in the apartment. It was lolling in the chairbot with the Boccaccio Quaff in its synthetic hand, watching the epic race between Man o' War, Citation, and Native Dancerbot. Crandal turned off the theaterbot with a vicious slap. "What -- are -- you -- doing -- here?" he shouted. "That chef business, that wasn't my specialty, Master," the android said, scrambling to its feet. The Quaff dropped from its hand and smashed aromatically on the floor. The android stared at Crandal's reddening face and stammered, "I'm sure i-it was all for the b-best. It was costing too much." "Costing too much!" Crandal screamed. "How could it cost too much?" "They charged for all the food I ate." "After that breakfast, you ate more?" "That wasn't all. There was also the breakage." "Bill payable," said the bankerbot from the desk. "Food and breakage by one MP(CT) android, serial #, owner: Boyd Crandal, four hundred and twenty-seven bills -- " "Four hundred and -- " Crandal began wildly. "What's the matter with you? You're ruining me! What are you good for besides bankrupting your owner?" "I'm only a machine, Master," the android whimpered. "I'm just obeying the Prime Directive. You know: S.O.E." "No, I don't know! What does it mean?" The android looked blank. "I don't know. I thought you knew." "I know what the 'O' means," Crandal said viciously. "It means 'obedience.' A machine is supposed to do what it's told!" "I try, Master." "You try!" Crandal's eyes searched the room frantically for something with which to beat the android. Maybe some strange compulsion would stop him, but it was something he was going to try. "It won't help to beat me, Master. I can't feel. A machine doesn't care. It just doesn't care. That's the way with us machines. I'm sure it's all for the best, otherwise we'd be as inefficient as people -- " "Get out!" Crandal screamed. He put his head between his hands and methodically squeezed it. "Slowly, slowly," he groaned. "Let's be logical. Maybe you're a chauffeur type. No, a robot could do that better. Collector? Couturier? That's it -- clothier! Any dummy can be a model. Get a job at a men's clothing store." With a forced calm, he added, "And try, try not to eat anything or break anything! I'm not asking for miracles, just this one small favor." "S.O.E., Master," said the android. Crandal collapsed into the chairbot. The item in the paper had brought back another piece of memory. He knew now how he had used the apartment next door. Once upon a happy time he had owned ten androids. Four hours a day, he had rented them out, and the lovely bills had come tumbling in. For nineteen additional hours a day he kept them working next door. If he closed his eyes now, he could see the infinitely lovely sight of their skillful fingers twinkling at their tasks, handcrafting Quaffs and Sniffs for the luxury market, putting into them that final refuge of quality -- ostentatious labor. All gone. The room was empty, and his bank balance was dwindling toward absolute zero. All behim for running a sweatshop. Now, even if he had the androids, he couldn't do it again. The mere thought of overworking androids made him sweat. What had happened to him? What had Greer said? "Conditioned, aren't you?" Crandal gathered himself together and pushed himself out into the world once more. The Orphanage looked naked and ugly and smaller by daylight. And it was locked up tight. Crandal knocked on the door and listened to the echoes. "There's no use hammering on me, you know," said the doorbot angrily. "I'm only obeying orders and there's nobody home. What's more, I don't know if anybody ever will be home. Nobody ever tells me anything." Crandal gave up and went to the Courthouse. "My name is Boyd Crandal," he said to the recorderbot. "A little more than a week ago, a complaint was registered against me. I want to see the record of the disposition made." "S.O.E., sir," said the recorderbot. "First booth to the left." Crandal sat in the booth and looked at himself through the stereoscopic lenses of the judgejurorbot. He leaned close and stared into his own eyes. Mirrored in them were the lenses and receiver-speaker of the judge. Why, Crandal thought in surprise, it's nothing but an answerbot! A fragment of nonsense verse came to him unbidden: I'll be judge, I'll be jury, Said cunning, old Fury... Crandal corrected himself. It was an answerbot, true. But its memory was the totality of law, statutory and common, and the welter of decision and precedent from which to draw a concensus. Whatever its verdict, an appeal was futile. prompt, efficient, impartial, and unified; the decision of this answerbot was the decision of society. "You have no sheisterbot?" the judge said. Crandal shrugged. "What's the use? They're only extensions of the court. No, I'll plead my own case and then, at least, we won't have a monologue." "You are charged with operating a sweatshop. How do you plead?" "Not guilty by definition," Crandal said firmly. "An android is nothing but a glorified machine. It can't feel. It doesn't care. 'Overwork' and 'cruelty' are meaningless adjectives -- sheer legalistic nonsense -- when applied to androids." "They are convenient fictions for economic necessity," the judge said in a dry, legal voice. "Morality and ethics are only different aspects of the common law. They help define what society can permit and still remain substantially unchanged." "What difference does it make to society how hard I work my androids?" "Remember Kant's categorical imperative: 'Act only on such a maxim as you can will that it should become a universal law.' If everyone worked his androids beyond established limits, society would be drowned in its own products. The working hours built into the androids must be accepted by everyone, or society as we know it could not exist. By working your androids overtime you became rich enough to buy additional androids which you then overworked to become even richer. It was a cumulative process whose inevitable end was your ownership of every android on Earth." "Nuts!" said Crandal. "In addition, there is the fact that you evaded the natural limitations implicit in the android organism. This is a threat to society and criminal per se." "Well," Crandal said defiantly, "what are you going to do about it?" "You are found guilty as charged," the judge-jurorbot said with machine coldness. "Your androids are confiscated, and you are sentenced to the Reformatory for conditioning against any repetition of this crime." Crandal sat in the booth for a long moment after the record clicked off. The Reformatory. The word sent cold arrows into his guts. apartment, the android was deep in the chairbot, its hands folded across its lap Quaffless, since the last Quaff was gone. It was watching the Tilden-PerryBudge-Kramer round-robin tournament. "Oh, no!" Crandal groaned. "That clothing business, that wasn't my specialty either, Master," the android said, not moving. "I'm sure it was all for the best, though." "Tell me. Let me know the worst." "I was wearing the clothes out too fast." "Bill payable," said the bankerbot. "Five suits, six pairs of shoes, eleven pairs of socks, worn out, ruined, and otherwise rendered worthless by one MP(CT) android, serial #, owner: Boyd Crandal, seven hundred and eighty-three bills." "How," Crandal asked patiently, "could you wear out five suits, six pairs of shoes, and eleven pairs of socks in less than two hours?" "That," the android said, "I seem to have a talent for." Crandal passed a shaky hand across his face. "This is the end," he said weakly. "I can't stand it any longer. I've got to get rid of you." "I'm a poor little -- " "Orphan android. I know. It doesn't matter. One of us has to go, and it isn't going to be me." "What are you going to do?" "Sell you." "No one would buy me," the android said wistfully. "Then I'll give you away!" "Who would accept me?" "I'll send you off somewhere!" Crandal shouted. "I'll order you to leave and never come back." "You would still be responsible for my actions and bills." "I'll smash you into tiny pieces," Crandal said in a dangerous voice, "and shovel you down the disposerbot." "Murder!" breathed the android in an awed voice. And Crandal pounded his forehead, feeling helpless. He had a devil riding on his back in the shape of an android, MP(CT), and he could never shake it loose. Damn Greer! he thought desperately. He saddled me with this thing, and he knew what he was doing. Otherwise, why did he disappear? "Stay here! Don't go anywhere! Don't do anything! Don't -- " "I'm hungry, Master," the android broke in. "Eat, then!" Crandal wailed. "But don't do anything else." He ran into the hall, feeling, "But not rich enough," Herrera told him, his long brown face Stellman came up, puffing under the weight of his testing equipment. He set it carefully on the path and sat down. "You gentlemen interested in a short breather?" he asked. "Why not?" Herrera said. "All the time in the world." He sat down with his back against a T-shaped formation of rock. and Herrera found a cigar in the zippered pocket of his coverall. Paxton watched them for a while. Then he asked, "Well, when are we getting off this planet? Or do we set up permanent residence?" Herrera just grinned and scratched a light for his cigar. "Well, how about it?" Paxton shouted. "Relax, you're outvoted," Stellman said. "We formed this company as three equal partners." "All using my money," Paxton said. "Of course. That's why we took you in. Herrera had the practical mining experience. I had the theoretical knowledge and a pilot's license. You had the money." "But we've got plenty of stuff on board now," Paxton said. "The storage compartments are completely filled. Why can't we go to some civilized place now and start spending?" "Herrera and I don't have your aristocratic attitude toward wealth," Stellman said with exaggerated patience. "Herrera and I have the childish desire to fill every nook and cranny with treasure. Gold nuggets in the fuel tanks, emeralds in the flour cans, diamonds a foot deep on deck. And this is just the place for it. All manner of costly baubles are lying around just begging to be picked up. We want to be disgustingly, abysmally rich, Paxton." Paxton hadn't been listening. He was staring intently at a point near the edge of the trail. In a low voice, he said, "That tree just moved." Herrera burst into laughter. "Monsters, I suppose," he sneered. "Be calm," Stellman said mournfully. "My boy, I am a middle-aged man, overweight and easily frightened. Do you think I'd stay here if there were the slightest danger?" "There! It moved again!" "We surveyed this planet three months ago," Stellman said. "We found no intelligent beings, no dangerous animals, no poisonous plants, remember? All we found were woods and mountains and gold and lakes and emeralds and rivers and diamonds. If there were something here, wouldn't it before it screeched open. Crandal leaped down the stairs, three at a time; leaped and turned, leaped and turned, until he was breathless and tired and incapable of running another step. bers said: #. He had descended only thirteen floors. He stood there, panting, staring at the door. He would never reach the ground. A cold anger began to grow in his viscera. When it was big enough, he pushed through the door into the hall beyond. On either side of it were little, doorless, boxlike offices, an android in each of them with a desk, a chair, an answerbot and nothing else. Androids walked briskly along the hall in dark, conservative suits, looking competent and authoritative. An Executive type, Crandal thought. He walked among them, and they seemed to ignore him. All the offices were occupied. At the end of the hall was a vast room two stories tall. In the center of it was a multitude of androids at desks. Each wall was a chart, constantly changing, jagged lines in a hundred different colors and shades, rising and falling, making it a rainbow thing of beauty. Crandal stood in the doorway, stunned, wondering what it all meant. Recklessly, he stopped a passing android. "What is all this?" he asked, awed in spite of himself. "Step out into the room a little," said the android in a quick, decisive voice. "This wall depicts production. See how even and smooth the curves are? That's efficiency. The other three walls represent consumption, each line a different product. See how they skip and jump and vary? Now, sir, if you will come with me, we will determine your status -- " "Remove your hands!" Crandal said icily. "Very well, sir. I must be getting on with my job." He walked away, leaving Crandal sweating behind him. The news hadn't reached here yet. He had a few minutes left. He retreated back along the hall. He found an empty office. "What," he said in a crisp, executive voice, "is an android model MP(CT)?" "A-MP(CT)," said the answerbot. "Consumer-type multi-purpose android. Experimental model in its fifth and final year of tests. No price listed." "Consumer!" Crandal exclaimed. "What's the use of that?" "To consume, of course." The voice didn't come from the answerbot. It came from the doorway. Standing there was a blue-clad policemandroid, smiling pleasantly. the judge-jurorbot, "you are back again." "So I understand," said Crandal. "The charges are even more serious this time: attempted suicide, impersonating an android, receiving restricted information." The judge gave the illusion of wagging his head. "How do you plead?" "Guilty." "You realize the consequences? You throw yourself upon the mercy of the court?" "Don't make me laugh! Get on with it." "Very well. You are a recidivist. You are sentenced to the Reformatory for conditioning against a repetition of this crime with the warning that next time you appear before me you will jae a three-time loser and subject to complete character reformation." "Wait a minute," Crandal said frantically. "Aren't you going to confiscate my androids?" "You have androids?" "One." "Model?" "MP(CT)," Crandal said. "That model is not subject to confiscation. Next case!" The policemandroid took Crandal by the arm and led him down the long, gray hall to the Crandal went dazedly, muttering to himself. They went through the doorway and the door clicked solidly, finally, behind them. Crandal roused a little. Here he was again. Something stirred in his memory. Was he going to regain the past only to lose it again? The policemandroid opened a door in the gray hall. "In here." Beyond was a small room equipped with a couch, a chair, and hypnagogic equipment. Memory was returning in a flood. Crandal recognized the lights that spun in front of his eyes and the colors that flickered meaningfully, and he remembered a voice that murmured... "Wait here for the psychoandroid," said the policemandroid, and withdrew. The door clicked. Crandal looked at it. There was no doorknob on this side. Where could he go? He sat down on the couch and rubbed his aching forehead wearily. Had it been only twenty-four hours since the porterbot had brought him the box with all the troubles in it? The door opened. Crandal stared in shocked disbelief. It was Lucy Shannon, looking extremely feminine in a white uniform. # # A" OU!" Crandal said, horrifled. "A psychoandroid!" Lucy shook her head, smiling. "Just a psychiatrist." "I don't believe you! Take off your clothes!" Lucy's smile broadened. "It's a little soon for that, isn't it? And hardly the place. And if I should -- I can't guarantee that I will, of course -- you'll have to ask me nicer." Crandal stared at her fiercely. "Then what are you?" "I told you -- a psychiatrist and a woman -- competing with robots and androids." "How?" "I have an advantage over them. I have a talent they don't have." "What?" Lucy looked at him soberly. "I'll tell you the same way you once told me. Robots are logical; people are crazy. Robots can do what is built into them and no more. The capabilities of the human animal have never been plumbed. Robots are conditioned against the impossible; people are dreamers. Robots can add two and two to get four, but it takes a person to add two and two to get five, to get the right answer for all the wrong reasons, in spite of logic -- " "I knew you before," Crandal said wonderingly. "Yes." "That part doesn't come back," Crandal said in confusion. "That doesn't come back at all!" "I hope it doesn't," Lucy said. "You weren't a very nice person. Valuable, but not very nice. I like you better like this." "Now what are you trying to do?" "To save your recent memory from being wiped away a second time." "Why?" "Because we need you. We need every man who can fight free of his womb-room and do something for himself, but we need you in particular because you have more of the two-plustwo-equals-five quality than any of us. How do you think you got those ten androids of yours to work twenty-three hours a day? You rewired them and developed a new powerpack more than five times as efficient." "I did?" "You did. You don't remember now, but you will. The top commandroids have it now and we need it. Last time I got to you too late for anything but the delay of execution of the posthypnotic suggestion. This time you'll resist it completely." "I still don't understand what this is all about!" at the door. "As more and more of the jobs were taken over by the mechanicals, fewer people were left to give orders and have them obeyed. Now there's nothing but androids at the top and they're running things much too logically." "What can anybody do about it?" "We can work our way back into positions of authority, back into positions where we can give the orders again." "What can I do?" Crandal asked helplessly. Lucy studied him with green, interested eyes. "You can go to night school like the rest of us. You'll learn fast: reading, writing and whatever technical information you need. We have some fantastic pedagogical devices. But during the day you'll work." "At what?" Lucy shrugged. "At whatever your two plus two equals five mind can do best. Maybe you Remington-Rand. But you'll work your way up." She glanced at the door again. This time it opened, and Crandal tensed. "Okay," said the pudgy, blond man, wiping his sweating forehead, "you've got forty minutes. I don't like this -- " "Greer!" Crandal shouted. "You're the one who sold me that consumer-type android! You did it on purpose!" He turned on Lucy. "And you delayed my conditioning so I'd have time to buy the damned thing before amnesia set in!" "That's not precisely true," Lucy said defensively. "We only gave you the opportunity. You bought it for your own larcenous purposes. We would have had to work out something else, though, if that had fallen through. We had to stir you out of your happy nest, somehow." Crandal appealed to Lucy. "Can't something be done? You've got to take it back! Or can't I be deconditioned so that I can smash it up or something?" Lucy shook her head sadly. "If I could do that, I'd do it for myThe Preferred Hofei in At Times Square. Walking distance to everything worthwhile. # Rooms, each with private bath, shower.  From ' Special rates for servicemen #th to #th Sts. at #th Av. self. Why. do you think I got out and worked?" "You, too?" Crandal said faintly"We'll have to learn to live with them." Crandal groaned. "Why a consumer-type android?" the answer were obvious. "To consume." "But why consumers?" Crandal asked. "People consume." "It's the Prime Directive." Greer wiped his forehead. "Twenty-six minutes left." "What do you mean, the Prime Directive?" Crandal snapped irritably. "S.O.E. Service. Obedience. Efficiency. They're the guiding principles of every robot, every android. Built into them; must be obeyed. There's only one hitch: the principles aren't weighted; one's as important as another. And the top commandroids claim we aren't efficient as consumers. Their graphs keep going up and down; they can't plan production because we're not predictable." "But they'll replace people," Crandal gasped. "They're competing as consumers." "And you can't compete with robots and androids," Lucy said. "You told me that yourself. That's why we have to get back on top. Now lie down. I've got to give you some post-hypnotic suggestions and there isn't much time." Crandal lay back, and the light began to spin in front of his eyes. "Lucy!" he moaned, reaching out toward her blindly. Her hand was cool and firm in his. "There, now," she said in a soft voice. "There'll be time enough later for everything." He stared at the light. What had she meant by "everything"? He remembered, just before he went under, that he would have to go home eventually. Home was where the android was. It waited there for him -- with folded hands. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. Hunting Problem A world that forgets its past is a world without a future -- but it shouldn't go this far! before the big Scouter Jamboree, and all the patrols had turned out. Patrol # -- the Soaring Falcon Patrol -- was camped in a shady hollow, holding a tentacle pull. The Brave Bison Patrol, number #, was moving around a little stream. The Bisons were practicing their skill at drinking liquids, and laughing excitedly at the odd sensation. And the Charging Mirash Patrol, number #, was waiting for Scouter Drog, who was late as usual. Drog hurtled down from the ten-thousand-foot level, went solid, and hastily crawled into the circle of scouters. "Gee," he said, "I'm sorry. I didn't realize what time -- " The Patrol Leader glared at him. "You're out of uniform, Drog." "Sorry, sir," Drog said, hastily extruding a tentacle he had forgotten. The others giggled. Drog blushed a dim orange. He wished he were invisible. But it wouldn't be proper right now. "I will open our meeting with the Scouter Creed," the Patrol Leader said. He cleared his throat. "We, the Young Scouters of planet Elbonai, pledge to perpetuate the skills and virtues of our pioneering ancestors. For that purpose, we Scouters adopt the shape our forebears were born to when they conquered the virgin wilderness of Elbonai. We hereby resolve -- " Scouter Drog adjusted his hearing receptors to amplify the Leader's soft voice. The Creed always thrilled him. It was hard to believe that his ancestors had once been earthbound. Today the Elbonai were aerial beings, maintaining only the minimum of body, fueling by cosmic radiation at the twenty-thousand-foot level, sensing by direct perception, coming down only for sentimental or sacramental purposes. They had come a long way since the Age of Pioneering. The modern world had begun with the Age of Submolecular Control, which was followed by the present age of Direct Control. "... honesty and fair play," the Leader was saying. "And we further resolve to drink liquids, as they did, and to eat solid food, and to increase our skill in their tools and methods." T HE invocation completed, the youngsters scattered around the plain. The Patrol Leader came up to Drog. "This is the last meeting before the Jamboree," the Leader said. "I know," Drog said. "And you are the only secondclass scouter in the Charging Mirash Patrol. All the others are first class, or at least Junior Pioneers. What will people think about our patrol?" Drog squirmed uncomfortably. "It isn't entirely my fault," he said. "I know I failed the tests in swimming and bomb making, but those just aren't my skills. It isn't fair to expect me to know everything. Even among the pioneers there were specialists. No one was expected to know all -- " "And just what are your skills?" the Leader interrupted. "Forest and Mountain Lore," Drog answered eagerly. "Tracking and hunting." The Leader studied him for a moment. Then he said slowly, "Drog, how would you like one last chance to make first class, and win an achievement badge as well?" "I'd do anything!" Drog cried. "Very well," the Patrol Leader said. "What is the name of our patrol?" "The Charging Mirash Patrol." "And what is a Mirash?" "A large and ferocious animal," Drog answered prqmptly. "Once they inhabited large parts of Elbonai, and our ancestors fought many savage battles with them. Now they are extinct." "Not quite," the Leader said. "A scouter was exploring the woods five hundred miles north of here, coordinates S-# by #-W, and he came upon a pride of three Mirash, all bulls, and therefore huntable. I want you, Drog, to track them down, to stalk them, using Forest and Mountain Lore. Then, utilizing only pioneering tools and methods, I want you to bring back the pelt of one Mirash. Do you think you can do it?" "I know I can, sir!" "Go at once," the Leader said. "We will fasten the pelt to our flagstaff. We will undoubtedly be commended at the Jamboree." "Yes, sir!" Drog hastily gathered up his equipment, filled his canteen with liquid, packed a lunch of solid food, and set out. levitated himself to the general area of S-# by #-W. It was a wild and romantic country of jagged rocks and scrubby trees, thick underbrush in the valleys, snow on the peaks. Drog looked around, somewhat troubled. He had told the Patrol Leader a slight untruth. The fact of the matter was, he wasn't particularly skilled in Forest and Mountain Lore, hunting or tracking. He wasn't particularly skilled in anything except dreaming away long hours among the clouds at the five-thousandfoot level. What if he failed to find a Mirash? What if the Mirash found him first? But that couldn't happen, he assured himself. In a pinch, he could always gestibulize. Who would ever know? In another moment he picked up a faint trace of Mirash scent. And then he saw a slight movement about twenty yards away, near a curious T-shaped formation of rock. Was it really going to be this easy? How nice! Quietly he adopted an appropriate camouflage and edged forward. T HE mountain trail became steeper, and the sun beat harshly down. Paxton was sweating, even in his air-conditioned coverall. And he was heartily sick of being a good sport. "Just when are we leaving this place?" he asked. Herrera slapped him genially on the shoulder. "Don't you wanna get rich?" "We're rich already," Paxton said. as the door closed behind him, as if he'd escaped from hell. It was only for a moment. bustling, inhuman kind of hell through which he ran, dodging and turning, trying to escape from a hopelessness that followed him relentlessly, deepening all the while. When he stopped for breath, he was in front of the towering Remington-Randroid building, S.O.E. printed tall and proud across its fagade, Crandal craned his neck back and stared up. Up was a long way, # stories, skytall. The lobby was busy with androids coming and going on their eternal errands, but Crandal passed among them unnoticed and slipped into an elevatorbot. "The roof!" he said. When he walked out upon the flat skyscraper roof, the wind was fierce and frigid around him, tugging with icy fingers at his hair and clothes. Crandal pulled his jacket tight around his chest, walked to the shoulder-high barrier, and looked out over the city. The streets were flowing rivers of mindless traffic between the stone and metal canyons. As far as he could see, the city stretched out, sterile and inhuman. Nowhere was there flesh and blood but here, alone, upon this sterile concrete summit. He leaned over the barrier and stared down dizzily. What was the use of going on? His home was no longer a sacred fortress; it was a place of torment from which he escaped. He had no money and no hopes of ever getting any. Ahead of him there was nothing but frustration and deprivation. He raised himself up and leaned farther. The barrierbot caught him by the arm. "Suicide is against the law," it said in a stern, moral voice. "Let me go!" "You will wait quietly, please, until the policemandroids arrive." "I said, 'Let me go!'" Crandal repeated. "I am sorry, sir, but I cannot obey. You will wait quietly, please -- " Crandal twisted away, leaving his jacket in the barrierbot's metal and rubberoid fingers. He ran swiftly to the elevatorbot. "Down!" he shouted. "An alarm has been sounded," the elevatorbot said mechanically. "I cannot leave this floor until the police arrive." Crandal jumped out of the car and stared around frantically at the bare roof-top. The whole world had turned against him. Then he saw the door. He ran toward it. For a moment it stuck have attacked us long before?" "I'm telling you I saw it move," Paxton insisted. Herrera stood up. "This tree?" he asked Paxton. "Yes. See, it doesn't even look like the others. Different texture -- " In a single synchronized movement, Herrera pulled a Mark II blaster from a side holster and fired three charges into the tree. The tree and all underbrush for ten yards around burst into flame and crumpled. "All gone now," Herrera said. Paxton rubbed his jaw. "I heard it scream when you shot it." "Sure. But it's dead now," Herrera said soothingly. "If anything else moves, you just tell me, I shoot it. Now we find some more little emeralds, huh?" Paxton and Stellman lifted their packs and followed Herrera up the trail. Stellman said in a low, amused voice, "Direct sort of fellow, isn't he?" consciousness. The Mirash's flaming weapon had caught him in camouflage, almost completely unshielded. He still couldn't understand how it had happened. There had been no premonitory fear-scent, no snorting, no snarling, no warning whatsoever. The Mirash had attacked with blind suddenness, without waiting to see if he were friend or foe. At last Drog understood the nature of the beast he was up against. He waited until the hoofbeats of the three bull Mirash had faded into the distance. Then, painfully, he tried to extrude a visual receptor. Nothing happened. He had a moment of utter panic. If his central nervous system was damaged, this was the end. He tried again. This time, a piece of rock slid off him, and he was able to reconstruct. Quickly he performed an internal scansion. He sighed with relief. It had been a close thing. Instinctively he had quondicated at the flash moment and it had saved his life. He tried to think of another course of action, but the shock of that sudden, vicious, unpremeditated assault had driven all Hunting Lore out of his mind. He found that he had absolutely no desire to encounter the savage Mirash again. Suppose he returned without the stupid hide? He could tell the Patrol Leader that the Mirash were all females, and therefore unhuntable. A Young Scouter's word was honored, so no one would question him, or even check up. But that would never do. How could he even consider it? Well, he told himself gloomily, he could resign from the Scouters, put an end to the whole ridiculous business; the campfires, the singing, the games, the comradeship... This would never do, Drog decided, taking himself firmly in hand. He was acting as though the Mirash were antagonists capable of planning against him. But the Mirash were not even intelligent beings. No creature without tentacles had ever developed true intelligence. That was Etlib's Law, and it had never been disputed. In a battle between intelligence and instinctive cunning, intelligence always won. It had to. All he had to do was figure out how. Drog began to track the Mirash again, following their odor. What colonial weapon should he use? A small atomic bomb? No, that would more than likely ruin the hide. He stopped suddenly and laughed. It was really very simple, when one applied oneself. Why should he come into direct and dangerous contact with the Mirash? The time had come to use his brain, his understanding of animal psychology, his knowledge of Lures and Snares. Instead of tracking the Mirash, he would go to their den. And there he would set a trap. in a cave, and by the time they arrived there it was sunset. Every crag and pinnacle of rock threw a precise and sharp-edged shadow. The ship lay five miles below them on the valley floor, its metallic hide glistening red and silver. In their packs were a dozen emeralds, small, but of an excellent color. At an hour like this, Paxton thought of a small Ohio town, a soda fountain, a girl with bright hair. Herrera smiled to himself, contemplating certain gaudy before settling down to the serious business of ranching. And Stellman was already phrasing his Ph.D. thesis on extraterrestrial mineral deposits. They were all in a pleasant, relaxed mood. Paxton had recovered completely from his earlier attack of nerves. Now he wished an alien monster would show up -- a green one, by preference -- chasing a lovely, scantily clad woman. "Home again," Stellman said as they approached the entrance of the cave. "Want beef stew tonight?" It was his turn to cook. "With onions," Paxton said, starting into the cave. He jumped back abruptly. "What's that?" A few feet from the mouth of the cave was a small roast beef, still steaming hot, four large diamonds, and a bottle of whiskey. "That's odd," Stellman said. "And a trifle unnerving." Paxton bent down to examine a diamond. Herrera pulled him back. "Might be booby-trapped." "There aren't any wires," Paxton said. Herrera stared at the roast beef, the diamonds, the bottle of whiskey. He looked very unhappy. "I don't trust this," he said. "Maybe there are natives here," Stellman said. "Very timid ones. This might be their goodwill offering." "Sure," Herrera said. "They sent to Terra for a bottle of Old Space Ranger just for us." "What are we going to do?" Paxton asked. "Stand clear," Herrera said. "Move 'way back." He broke off a long branch from a nearby tree and poked gingerly at the diamonds. "Nothing's happening," Paxton said. The long grass Herrera was standing on whipped tightly around his ankles. The ground beneath him surged, broke into a neat disc fifteen feet in diameter and, trailing root-ends, began to lift itself into the air. Herrera tried to jump free, but the grass held him like a thousand green tentacles. "Hang on!" Paxton yelled idiotically, rushed forward and grabbed a corner of the rising disc of earth. It dipped steeply, stopped for a moment, and began to rise again. By then Herrera had his knife out, and was slashing the grass around his ankles. Stellman came unfrozen when he saw Paxton rising past his head. Stellman seized him by the ankles, arresting the flight of the disc once more. Herrera wrenched one foot free and threw himself over the edge. The other ankle was held for a moment, then the tough grass parted under his weight. He dropped head-first to the ground, at the last moment ducking his head and landing on his shoulders. Paxton let go of the disc and fell, landing on Stellman's stomach. The disc of earth, with its cargo of roast beef, whiskey and diamonds, continued to rise until it was out of sight. The sun had set. Without speaking, the three men entered their cave, blasters drawn. They built a roaring fire at the mouth and moved back into the cave's interior. "We'll guard in shifts tonight," Herrera said. Paxton and Stellman nodded. Herrera said, "I think you're right, Paxton. We've stayed here long enough." "Too long," Paxton said. Herrera shrugged his shoulders. "As soon as it's light, we return to the ship and get out of here." "If," Stellman said, "we are able to reach the ship." With a sinking heart he had watched the premature springing of his trap, the struggle, and the escape of the Mirash. It had been such a splendid Mirash, too. The biggest of the three! He knew now what he had done wrong. In his eagerness, he had overbaited his trap. Just the minerals would have been sufficient, for Mirash were notoriously mineral-tropic. But no, he had to improve on pioneer methods, he had to use food stimuli as well. No wonder they had reacted suspiciously, with their senses so overburdened. Now they were enraged, alert, and decidedly dangerous. And a thoroughly aroused Mirash was one of the most fearsome sights in the Galaxy. Drog felt very much alone as Elbonai's twin moons rose in the western sky. He could see the Mirash campfire blazing in the mouth of their cave. And by direct perception he could see the Mirash crouched within, every sense alert, weapons ready. Was a Mirash hide really worth all this trouble? Drog decided that he would much rather be floating at the five-thousand-foot level, sculpturing cloud formations and dreaming. He wanted to sop up radiation instead of eating nasty old solid food. And what use was all this hunting and trapping, anyhow? Worthless skills that his people had outgrown. For a moment he almost had himself convinced. And then, in a flash of pure perception, he understood what it was all about. True, the Elbonaians had outgrown their competition, developed past all danger of competition. But the Universe was wide, and capable of many surprises. Who could foresee what would come, what new dangers the race might have to face? And how could they meet them if the hunting instinct was lost? No, the old ways had to be preserved, to serve as patterns; as reminders that peaceable, intelligent life was an unstable entity in an unfriendly Universe. He was going to get that Mirash hide, or die trying! The most important thing was to get them out of that cave. Now his hunting knowledge had returned to him. Quickly, skillfully, he shaped a Mirash horn. 'Ll ton asked. "I thought I heard something," Stellman said, and they all listened intently. The sound came again. It was voice crying, "Oh, help, help me!" "It's a girl!" Paxton jumped to his feet. "It sounds like a girl," Stellman said. "Please, help me," the girl's voice wailed. "I can't hold out much longer. Is there anyone who can help me?" Blood rushed to Paxton's face. In a flash he saw her, small, exquisite, standing beside her wrecked sports-spacer (what a fool-hardy trip it had been!) with monsters, green and slimy, closing in on her. And then he arrived, a foul alien beast. Paxton picked up a spare blaster. "I'm going out there," he said coolly. "Sit down, you moron!" Herrera ordered. "But you heard her, didn't you?" "That can't be a girl," Herrera said. "What would a girl be doing on this planet?" "I'm going to find out," Paxton said, brandishing two blasters. "Maybe a spaceliner crashed, or she could have been out joyriding, and -- " "Siddown!" Herrera yelled. "He's right," Stellman tried to reason with Paxton. "Even if a girl is out there, which I doubt, there's nothing we can do." "Oh, help, help, it's coming after me!" the girl's voice screamed. "Get out of my way," Paxton said, his voice low and dangerous. "You're really going?" Herrera asked incredulously. "Yes! Are you going to stop me?" "Go ahead." Herrera gestured at the entrance of the cave. "We can't let him!" Stellman gasped. "Why not? His funeral," Herrera said lazily. "Don't worry about me," Paxton said. "I'll be back in fifteen minutes -- with her!" He turned on his heel and started toward the entrance. Herrera leaned forward and, with considerable precision, clubbed Paxton behind the ear with a stick of firewood. Stellman caught him as he fell. They stretched Paxton out in the rear of the cave and returned to their vigil. The lady in distress moaned and pleaded for the next five hours. Much too long, as Paxton had to agree, even for a movie serial. daybreak found Drog still camped a hundred yards from the cave. He saw the Mirash emerge in a tight group, weapons ready, eyes watching warily for any movement. Why had the Mirash horn failed? The Scouter Manual said it was an infallible means of attracting the bull Mirash. But perhaps this wasn't mating season. They were moving in the direction of a metallic ovoid which Drog recognized as a primitive spatial conveyance. It was crude, but once inside it the Mirash were safe from him. He could simply trevest them, and that would end it. But it wouldn't be very humane. Above all, the ancient Elbonaians had been gentle and merciful, and a Young Scouter tried to be like them. Besides, trevestment wasn't a true pioneering method. That left ilitrocy. It was the oldest trick in the book, and he'd have to get close to work it. But he had nothing to lose. And luckily, climatic conditions were perfect for it. mist. But, as the watery sun climbed the gray sky, fog began forming. Herrera cursed angrily as it grew more dense. "Keep close together now. Of all the luck!" Soon they were walking with their hands on each others' shoulders, blasters ready, peering into the impenetrable fog. "Herrera?" "Yeah?" "Are you sure we're going in the right direction?" "Sure. I took a compass course before the fog closed in." "Suppose your compass is off?" "Don't even think about it." They walked on, picking their way carefully over the rockstrewn ground. "I think I see the ship," Paxton said. "No, not yet," Herrera said. Stellman stumbled oyer a rock, dropped his blaster, picked it up again and fumbled around for Herrera's shoulder. He found it and walked on. "I think we're almost there," Herrera said. "I sure hope so," Paxton said. "I've had enough." "Think your girl friend's waiting for you at the ship?" "Don't rub it in." "Okay," Herrera said. "Hey, Stellman, you better grab hold of my shoulder again. No sense getting separated." "I am holding your shoulder," Stellman said. "You're not." "I am, I tell you!" "Look, I guess I know if someone's holding my shoulder or not." "Am I holding your shoulder, Paxton?" "No," Paxton said. "That's bad," Stellman said, very slowly. "That's bad, indeed." "Why?" "Because I'm definitely holding someone's shoulder." Herrera yelled, "Get down, get down quick, give me room to shoot!" But it was too late. A sweet-sour odor was in the air. Stellman and Paxton smelled it and collapsed. Herrera ran forward blindly, trying to hold his breath. He stumbled and fell over a rock, tried to get back on his feet -- And everything went black. The fog lifted suddenly and Drog was standing alone, smiling triumphantly. He pulled out a long-bladed skinning knife and bent over the nearest Mirash. T HE spaceship hurtled toward Terra at a velocity which threatened momentarily to burn out the overdrive. Herrera, hunched over the controls, finally regained his self-control and cut the speed down to normal. His usually tan face was still ashen, and his hands shook on the instruments. Stellman came in from the bunkroom and flopped wearily in the co-pilot's seat. "How's Paxton?" Herrera asked. "I dosed him with Drona-#," Stellman said. "He's going to be all right." "He's a good kid," Herrera said. "It's just shock, for the most part," Stellman said. "When he comes to, I'm going to put him to work counting diamonds. Counting diamonds is the best of therapies, I understand." Herrera grinned, and his face began to regain its normal color. "I feel like doing a little diamondcounting myself, now that it's all turned out okay." Then his long face became serious. "But I ask you, Stellman, who could figure it? I still don't understand!" T HE Scouter Jamboree was a glorious spectacle. The Soaring Falcon Patrol, number #, gave a short pantomime showing the clearing of the land on Elbonai. The Brave Bisons, number #, were in full pioneer dress. And at the head of Patrol #, the Charging Mirash Patrol, was Drog, a first-class Scouter now, wearing a glittering achievement badge. He wascarrying the Patrol flag -- the position of honor -- and everyone cheered to see it. Because waving proudly from the flagpole was the firm, finetextured, characteristic skin of an adult Mirash, its zippers, tubes, gauges, buttons and holsters flashing merrily in the sunshine. for your information most closely resembles Earth in size. The answer, of course, is Venus. From direct measurements, its diameter works out to # miles, while that of Earth is # miles. But note, please, that these # miles include the cloud layer or layers of Venus, so the planet proper must be somewhat smaller. And don't ask by how much -- it isn't very polite to ask questions to which the answer is not known. Now name the planet that comes closest to Earth of all fullfledged planets -- which means discounting a few planetoids like Hermes, Albert, Icarus, etc., and naturally our own moon, too. The answer is again Venus. When both Earth and Venus are on the same side of their orbits, the distance between them amounts to than our neighbor on the other side, Mars, can ever manage. And even this is not the best Venus can do. On December #, #, during a so-called transit -- the transits will be discussed later -- the distance was only # miles. Now name the planet with the most nearly circular orbit. Venus, of course. Now the one which is the most nearly perfect sphere. Again Venus. And now name the planet about which least is known. The answer, disappointingly, is still Venus. closer than any other planet, we know as little about it as we know about Pluto, the planet which is farthest away. In fact, what we do know well (and reliably) is the same in both cases. We know their orbits. That of Venus, as has been said, is very nearly circular. The differences in the distance of the closest approach between Venus and Earth are mostly caused by the fact that the orbit of Earth is somewhat eccentric; Earth is closest to the Sun in January. As for Venus, the average distance from the Sun is # miles, and the planet, moving with an average orbital velocity of # miles per second -- that of Earth is # miles per second -- needs # days to go around the Sun once. If the plane of the orbit of Venus coincided with that of Earth, which is the ecliptic, we would see the planet moving across the disk of the Sun every time Venus comes closest to us, overtaking the slower Earth in the permanent race around the Sun. But the plane of the orbit of Venus does not coincide with the plane of the orbit of Earth. There is a considerable tilt, amounting to # degrees, # minutes and # seconds of arc. This is a stronger tilt than that of any other major planet, excepting only Mercury (with # #' #") and Pluto (with # #' #"). Because of it, Venus, as a rule, does not pass between us and the Sun, but is, as seen from Earth, "above" or "below" the Sun. Only rarely does it happen that the two planets pass each other in sections of their orbit which are situated in such a manner that a line from the center of the Sun through the centers of both planets would be a straight line, or very nearly so. When that happens, we get a "transit." Venus, which mostly is the brightest planet in the sky, then moves across the Sun's disk as a black spot. The spacing of these transits in time is such that a man might either observe two of them within his lifetime or not live long enough to see even one. The generation born early in the present century will not live to see one, while the generation now being born will see two. It works like this: supposing a Venus transit is due in the year X, the next transit will take place in X  #. But the next one after that will not happen until I # I V # years later. Then there is again an interval of only # years, but if somebody just happened to miss them, he would have to wait for # V # years for his next opportunity. The cycle, then, runs #, #V#, #, #y # , #, # and so forth. Actual years of Venus transits were #, #, # and #, with the next two scheduled for # and #. T Y #, a Venus transit will- assuredly have lost most of  its former importance, but in the past a transit was something that every astronomer was eager to observe -- expeditions were sent halfway around the globe in order to obtain observations from as many points as possible. The main reason was what had first been pointed out by the Astronomer Royal Dr. Edmond Halley; namely, that the precise time required by Venus to cross the Sun's disk could be used to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun, something that was not yet established then. In the course of these transit observations, it was found that Venus has an atmosphere. While Venus is crossing the Sun's disk, it appears simply as a round black spot, but while entering and leaving, the round dark spot is surrounded by a luminous ring, caused by the bending of the Sun's rays by the atmosphere. It is one of the "believe-it-ornots" of the history of science that the first two reports on this phenomenon were casually forgotten. The first to see it and to draw the proper conclusions (and to write them up, which is important, too) was Mikhail Vasilyevitch Lomonosov, who observed it from his home in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the transit of May #, #. Though his discovery was discussed with much animation at the Imperial Academy of Science, nobody outside Russia learned about this fact until another Russian scientist published a book about Lomonosov in Germany in #! During the next transit of #, David Rittenhouse of Philadelphia made the same d'scovery. His report was also mislaid for more than a century and when it was again seen during the transit of #, it was considered a great novelty! After the next transit, that of #, it was established that the same phenomenon can sometimes be observed even when Venus is not in transit. As has been said before, Venus normally is "above" or "below" the Sun when the planet passes Earth. But on these occasions, Venus may be quite "near" the Sun along the line of sight and then one can spot the planet in the daylight sky as a very thin ring of light. Unfortunately, this phenomenon only tells us that Venus has an atmosphere. It does not tell us how deep it is. The true diameter of Venus, therefore, is still unknown. Nor do we know the mass of Venus. The books usually state that the mass of Venus is # of the mass of Earth and the surface gravity of the planet is also given as that of Earth minus # per cent. Well, it probably is near that value, but we can't be completely certain. If Venus had a moon, the mass of the planet could be derived very readily from the time needed by that moon to swing around its primary. Since Venus is moonless, though, its mass has to be derived from its influence on the neighboring planets; you get the nice paradox that an astronomer may check on the movement of Mars with the utmost care in order to find out how much Venus weighs! But since Mars is also pulled by Earth in one direction and by Jupiter in another, with Saturn exerting some influence, too, the final result has to be somewhat uncertain, although the masses of Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are well known because all of them do have moons. moon was believed for quite some time and, as late as #, the British astronomer Richard A. Proctor (in his book Other Worlds Than Ours ) did not yet dare to say that the older observations of a moon of Venus had been mistakes. His attitude was more or less that there was so much historical evidence for a moon of Venus that its existence had to be accepted with some reservations even though it had not been seen recently. The first to proclaim that Venus had a moon had been the Neapolitan astronomer Francesco Fontana in #. His report made his famous contemporary Jean Dominique Cassini watch for it. Cassini thought he saw it in # and in # he felt sure and published his observation. But a long time went by until somebody else went on record as having observed the moon of the evening star. In #, the English astronomer Short announced his seeing it, whereupon Mayer in Greifswald in Germany started looking and succeeded in #. In #, Montaigne in Limoges, France, and Rodkier of Copenhagen corroborated the findings of Mayer and in # Horrebow in Copenhagen and Montbarron in Auxerre, France, corroborated Rodkier and Montaigne. To everybody's chagrin, that moon had failed to show up during the actual transit in #. Efforts to spot it were quadrupled during the transit of #, but except for one doubtful assertion, the evidence proved negative. This failure had been predicted by Father Maximilian Hell, S. J., of Vienna in #. Father Hell -- fortunately for his calling, the word hell merely means "bright" or "luminous" in German -- had said that the moon of Venus was merely an optical illusion. The bright image of the planet is reflected back into the telescope from the cornea of the observer's eye and then "seen" as a smaller image of the same phase near the main image. Still, people kept looking and the two transits of # and # were again checked for signs of a satellite of Venus. The result was negative and a Belgian astronomer, P. Stroobant, set himself the task of finding out what the various observers had seen, if they had seen anything other than Father Hell's secondary image. And he discovered that whenever the moon of Venus had been reported, the planet had been near a small fixed star, one just bright enough to be seen without a telescope as a faint star. In the telescope, it would be rather bright, though, of course, just a pinpoint of light. The stars that had doubled for a moon of Venus were found to have been # Orionis, #I Orionis and mu Tauri. which becomes invisible -- meaning that all we can see is the night side -- just when closest to us, one has to be grateful for any definite bit of information. The discovery of the atmosphere by Lomonosov, Rittenhouse and Schroeter was one of these definite bits. The final disproof of the existence of a moon by Stroobant was another one. A third one has been added just recently, more than half a century later, by Gerard P. Kuiper of Yerkes and McDonald Observatories, who at long last succeeded in establishing the position of the axis of Venus. The inclination of the equator of Venus to the plane of its orbit turned out to be # degrees, with a possible error of # degrees either way. The axis of Venus points in the direction of the constellation of Cepheus. The question of the position of the axis of Venus and the closely connected problem of the rotation of Venus and the length of its day both have quite a stormy history. It must first be stated that the blinding white disk of cloudveiled Venus is virtually featureless. The area over the poles, especially over the south pole, looks somewhat brighter on occasion, while faint and large spots seem to be located in the equatorial regions. But none is sharply defined and, in any drawing, the contrasts have to be exaggerated many times in order to be "drawable" at all. Now of course it is the surface markings of a planet from which you derive its period of rotation and the position of the equator and of the poles. The story of the surface markings begins with Jean Dominique Cassini, who felt certain that Venus turned on its axis at very nearly the same rate as Earth. The figure he gave in # was # hours and # minutes. Some eighty years later, Francesco Bianchini, one of the members of Pope Clemens XI's commission for calendar reform, declared that Cassini had been mistaken. It took much longer than a day; in fact, it took # days and # hours. Several decades later, a team of German astronomers said that it was Bianchini who was wrong and that Cassini had been right or very nearly so. The length of the day on Venus was precisely # hours, #I minutes and # seconds. This was slightly revised in about #I by the Pere de Vico, who thought he could prove a diurnal period of # hours, #I minutes and # seconds. rotation of Venus were something like # Vi hours, the position of the markings, observed on successive evenings, should be about the same, since both Earth and Venus would have completed a full rotation in the interim. But then came Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, discoverer of the Martian "canals" and diligent observer of Venus, who said that you would find the markings in the same positions if the planet had not rotated at all in the Earliest telescopic drawings of Venus, made by Francesco Fontana in # and # meantime. Schiaparelli felt certain that both Mercury and Venus behaved with respect to the Sun as our moon behaves with respect to Earth, that they always face the Sun with the same hemisphere -- in other words, that they performed one rotation per revolution around the Sun. As regards Mercury, Schiaparelli's opinion has been fully accepted by everybody. With respect to Venus, it had to be rejected, for the observed facts do not fit the theory and the observed fact here is one of the few things we actually and definitely do know about Venus -- the existence of the atmosphere. Let us try to imagine what would happen if Schiaparelli were right. More specifically, let us imagine what would happen if the rotation of Venus were stopped right now so that the sunlight would always fall on the same hemisphere -- sunlight, incidentally, which is about twice as powerful as that received by Earth. The heated air would rise and flow across the terminator to the dark side. There it would cool off, shed what moisture it may have contained and return to the daylight side, picking up more moisture for the return trip to the night side. After a relatively short time, as time is measured by astronomers and geologists, all the water on the planet would be deposited, frozen, on the night side, which grows colder and colder as time goes on. Since the planet is nearly Earth size, the area of the night side would be large and, in its center, a cold pole would develop which is no longer warmed by the air coming over from the daylight side. In time, the area of the cold pole would be cold enough so that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not return to the daylight side. The atmosphere would grow thinner, too; it is heated enough for a portion to be lost into space because a number of the molecules would certainly acquire escape velocity or better. With less air to transport heat to the night side, the night side cools off even more rapidly and grows cold enough to freeze the gases. In the end, all the moisture and a portion of the atmosphere would be frozen on the night side, while another portion of the atmosphere would have been lost in space. years ago, so that Venus now should be an atmosphereless planet. I might add that condi ions on Mercury do not have to be precisely the same as just described for a hypothetical Venus. Mercury is much smaller than Venus, which means that its escape velocity is less and, being closer to the Sun, it is heated up more. Any atmosphere which Mercury might have had was probably lost in space, and what moisture there was might well be frozen on the night side. In the case of Mercury, this might have taken much longer because it has a rather wide "twilight belt" because of its very eccentric orbit. Venus, running along a nearly circular orbit, cannot have a twilight belt of any width. So we are sure that Schiaparelli was wrong with respect to Venus. The planet must have a diurnal rotation but the question of what it is is still unsolved. If, for example, Cassini had been right, we could now detect this rotation by the Doppler effect. But the Doppler effect does not give any reading, which means that the rotation must be slower than that of Earth, longer, say, than # hours. On the other hand, it cannot be very much Orbits of Venus and Earth and Venus' appearance in various positions. When showing phase C, Venus has maximum brightness more than # hours because, if it were, the temperature of the upper layers of the atmosphere should be quite different on the daylight and on the night side. But what differences have been measured are not very large -- and somewhat uncertain, too. From what we now know, which is admittedly not enough, the period of rotation of Venus seems to be in the vicinity of # days. Now for the markings. They are, as has been mentioned, quite faint and indistinct and consist mainly in the fact that the polar regions look somewhat brighter than the equatorial areas. Bianchini, after many observations, came to the conclusion that there were a number of interconnected equatorial seas which he named Mare Galilei, Mare Columbi, Mare Vespucci and so forth. The German Schroeter centered his attention on the polar areas and announced that he had caught glimpses of an enormous mountain near the south pole, a mountain that had to be about # miles high. Since no mountain of such a height is possible -- its own weight would cause it to "settle" -- Schroeter was probably deceived by an isolated high cloud. TN #, just after, Schiaparelli had published his conclusions about the rotation of Venus, the astronomer Niesten, who did not agree with him at all, published a map of Venus (Fig. #) which has remained the only one of its kind after Bianchini's. Some seven or eight years in Munich, took a few rubber balls, dipped them in flat white paint and made a few spheres of plaster of Paris. Then he placed them at such a distance that, when observed through a small telescope, they would show the same angular diameter as Venus does in a larger telescope. And he illuminated them in the manner in which Venus is illuminated by the Sun. After that, he had some graduate students make drawings of them and also produced a few of his own. The featureless white spheres looked much brighter around their "poles" and acquired some vaguely elliptical grayish areas near their middle. It was quite evident then that no astronomer had ever succeeded in seeing the surface of Venus. Even though definite indentations in the terminator have been seen, such irregularities in the cloud layer did not open a vista of the surface. I said on one occasion in the past that Venus seems to be at least triple-veiled, for every overcast develops a hole once in a while, and even in a double overcast the holes should occasionally match. With a triple layer of clouds, the probability of the matching of holes -- which are evidently rare events to begin with -- becomes invisibly small. In short, the clouds of Venus are, as one writer phrased it, as opaque as marshmallows. But what are they? For many years, they were taken to be water vapor without question and, at the beginning of this century, the surface of Venus was universally considered "dripping wet." If there was a difference in opinion, it was merely about the degree of wetness. When asked, most astronomers would haul a book on geology off the shelf, point at a picture depicting a carboniferous forest and say, "This is how it must look." Only a few considered the possibility that Venus was a panthalassa, meaning that it was covered by a shoreless ocean without any considerable land masses at all, or possibly just a few islands. The view of a dripping wet N N Map of Venus, drawn in #I by Niesten Venus was still held by as important a scientist as Svante Arrhenius in #. had completely reversed itself, largely as the result of a long series of pictures taken by F. E. Ross at Mt. Wilson Observatory in #. The new view was that Venus was completely dry, that violent storms picked up dust from the endless desert, forming a dust-cloud layer beneath the other cloud layers. One of the results of this work was that, while the markings seen with the telescope might be optical illusions, there were markings that could be photographed, provided you photographed them in violet and ultra-violet, for they do not show up in light of the wave-lengths the eye can see best. (Dr. Kuiper's determination of the position of Venus' axis is also based on such photographs.) The reason for postulating absolute dryness was that neither water nor oxygen could be detected spectroscopically, but that another set of lines showed up well which was then identified as belonging to carbon dioxide. But negative evidence is often insufficient grounds for building conclusions. The statement that neither water nor oxygen has been found in the atmosphere of Venus should really read that neither water nor oxygen has been found above the clouds. And one can easily explain why there couldn't be any above the clouds. The spectroscope can only detect water vapor, not water, and the highest clouds of Venus must be quite high up. If, for the sake of discussion, we compare the atmosphere of Venus with that of Earth, the clouds might be # miles from the surface, but in the terrestrial atmosphere, the temperature ten miles up is minus # Fahrenheit. Any water at ten miles would be in the form of ice crystals, so the clouds themselves would be ice crystals. And ice crystals do not show up in the spectroscope. Likewise, any oxygen present would be past the stage of oxygen molecules, but would be single oxygen atoms because of the powerful solar radiation. I don't know where the bands caused by oxygen atoms would be in a spectrogram, but certainly not in or near the place where one looks for the bands of oxygen -- that is to say, oxygen molecules. bone-dry planet fits what observations there are, it is not necessarily the truth. In fact, Donald H. Menzel and Fred L. Whipple of Harvard Observatory have shown recently that the existing observations would also fit a panthalassa, incidentally one where the oceans consist of carbonated water -- seltzer! In short, Venus is either completely dry or completely wet. But can we ever find out which it is? Probably not until a new factor enters into the picture -- space travel. Just to observe from outside our own atmosphere would be an incredible boon to astronomers; the constitution of the atmosphere of Venus above its highest cloud layer could indubitably be established from the space station. The precise mass of Venus could be established by means of a slightly more elaborate experiment. One could fire a missile from the space station in such a manner that its path would be bent by the gravitational field of Venus. Careful observation of the path of this missile would settle the problem once and for all. But to learn what is below the cloud layer, we would have to go a bit closer. A method that comes to mind without much deliberation is to fire sampling missiles into the atmosphere of Venus from a nearby ship. In the end, it might be possible to lower a reporting missile all the way to the ground. And then we'll know. Qne for the books When he woke up that morning a weird thing had happened... he could speak fluent French! morning, he could talk French. There was no warning. At sixfifteen, the alarm went off as usual and he and his wife stirred. Fred reached out a sleep-deadened hand and shut off the bell. The room was still for a moment. Then Eva pushed back the covers on her side and he pushed back the covers on his side. His vein-gnarled legs dropped over the side of the bed. He said, "Bon matin, Eva." There was a slight pause. "Wha'P" she asked. "Je dis bon matin," he said. There was a rustle of nightgown as she twisted around to squint at him. "What'd you say?" "All I said was good -- " Fred Elderman stared back at his wife. "What did I say?" he asked in a whisper. "You said "bone mattin or -- " "Je dis bon matin. C'est un bon matin, n'est ce pas?" The sound of his hand being clapped across his mouth was like that of a fast ball thumping in a catcher's mitt. Above the knuckle-ridged gag, his eyes were shocked. "Fred, what IS it?" k-' from his lips. "I dunno, Eva," he said, awed. Unconsciously, the hand reached up, one finger of it rubbing at his hair-ringed bald spot. "It sounds like some -- some kind of foreign talk." "But you don't know no foreign talk, Fred," she told him. "That's just it." They sat there looking at each other blankly. Fred glanced over at the clock. "We better get dressed," he said. While he was in the bathroom, she heard him singing, "Elle fit un fromage, du lait du ses mouton, ton, ton, du lait du ses mouton," but she didn't dare call it to his attention while he was shaving. Over breakfast coffee, he muttered something. "What?" she asked before she could stop herself. "Je dis que vous dire ceci?" He heard the coffee go down her gulping throat. "I mean," he said, looking dazed, "what does this mean?" "Yes, what does it? You never talked no foreign language before." "I know it," he said, toast suspended halfway to his open mouth. "What -- what kind of language is it?" "S-sounds t'me like French." "French? I don't know no French." She swallowed more coffee. "You do now," she said weakly. He stared at the table cloth. "Le diable s'en mele" he muttered. Her voice rose. "Fred, what?" His eyes were confused. "I said the devil has something to do with it." "Fred, you're -- " She straightened up in the chair and took a deep breath. "Now," she said, "let's not profane, Fred. There has to be a good reason for this." No reply. "Well, doesn't there, Fred?" "Sure, Eva. Sure. But -- " "No buts about it," she declared, plunging ahead as if she were afraid to stop. "Now is there any reason in this world why you should know how to talk French -- " she snapped her thin fingers -- "just like that?" He shook his head vaguely. "Well," she went on, wondering what to say next, "let's see then." They looked at each other in silence. "Say something," she decided. "Let's -- " She groped for words. "Let's see what we... have here." Her voice died off. "Say somethin'?" "Yes," she said. "Go on." "Un gemissement se fit entendre. Le s dogues se mettent a aboyer. Ces gens me vont bien. #I va sur le s quinze ans -- " "Fred?" "#I fit fabriquer une exacte representation du monstre." . rr,: " # f lntanSl    if  e ,-L # .opT U l HP r ep nwt w 'wO ""  ..., Pure ' #ub stan oea  # ft-om be "Fred, hold on!" she cried, looking scared. His voice broke off and he looked at her, blinking. "What... what did you say this time, Fred?" she asked. "I said -- a moan was heard. His mastiffs began to bark. These gloves fit me. He will soon be fifteen years old and -- " "What?" "And he had an exact copy of the monster made. Sans meme I'entamer." "Fred?" He looked ill. "Without even scratchin'," he said. A T that hour of the morning, the campus was quiet. The only classes that early were the two seven-thirty Economics lectures and they were held on the .White Campus. Here on the Red there was no sound. In an hour, the walks would be filled with chatting, laughing, loafer-clicking student hordes, but for now there was peace. In far less than peace, Fred Elderman shuffled along the east side of the campus, headed for the administration building. Having left a confused Eva at home, he'd been trying to figure it out as he went to work. What was it? When had it begun? C'esf une heure, said his mind. He shook his head angrily. This was terrible. He tried desperately to think of what could have happened, but he couldn't. It just didn't make sense. He was #, a janitor at the university with no education to speak of, living a quiet, ordinary life. Then he woke up one morning speaking articulate French. French. He stopped a moment and stood in the frosty October wind, staring at the cupola of Jeramy Hall. He'd cleaned out the French office the night before. Could that have anything to do with -- No, that was ridiculous. He started off again, muttering under his breath -- unconsciously. "Je suis, tu es, il est, elle est, nous sommes, vous etes -- " At eight-ten, he entered the History Department office to repair a sink in the washroom. He worked on it for an hour and seven minutes, then put the tools back in the bag and walked out into the office. "Mornin'," he said to the professor sitting at a desk. "Good morning, Fred," said the professor. Fred Elderman walked out into the hall thinking how remarkable it was that the income of taxes, exceeded those of Louis the exports which had been # in # and -- He stopped in the hall, a stunned look on his lean face. That morning, he had occasion to be in the offices of the Physics, the Chemistry, the English and the Art Departments. tavern near Main Street. Fred went there Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings to nurse a couple of draught beers and chat with his two friends -- Harry Bullard, manager of Hogan's Bowling Alleys, and Lou Peacock, postal worker and amateur gardener. Stepping into the doorway of the dimlit saloon that evening, Fred was heard -- by an exiting patron -- to murmur, "Je connais tous ces brave gens," then look around with a guilty twitch of cheek. "I mean..." he muttered, but didn't finish. Harry Bullard saw him first in the mirror. Twisting his head around on its fat column of neck, he said, "C'mon in, Fred, the whiskey's fine," then, to the bartender, "Draw one fer the elder man," and chuckled. Fred walked to the bar with the first smile he'd managed to summon that day. Peacock and Bullard greeted him and the bartender set down a brimming stein. "What's new, Fred?" Harry asked. Fred pressed his mustache between two foam-removing fingers. "Not much," he said, still too uncertain to discuss it. Dinner with Eva had been a painful meal during which he'd eaten not only food but an endless and detailed running commentary on the Thirty Years War, the Magna Charta and boudoir information about Catherine the Great. He had been glad to retire from the house at seven-thirty, murmuring an unmanageable, "Bon nuit, ma c here." "What's new with you?" he asked Harry Bullard now. "Well," Harry answered, "we been paintin' down at the alleys. You know, redecoratin'." "That right?" Fred said. "When painting with colored beeswax was inconvenient, Greek and Roman easel painters used tempera -- that is, colors fixed upon a wood or stucco base by means of such a medium as -- " He stopped. There was a bulging silence. "Harh?" Harry Bullard asked. Fred swallowed nervously. "Nothing," he said hastily. "I was just -- " He stared down into the tan depths of his beer. "Nothing," he repeated. Bullard glanced at Peacock, who shrugged back. "How are your hothouse flowers coming, Lou?" Fred inquired, to change the subject. The small man nodded. "Fine. They're just fine." "Good," said Fred, nodding, too. "Vi sono pui di cinquante bastimenti in porto." He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. "What's that?" Lou asked, cupping one ear. Fred coughed on his hastily swallowed beer. "Nothing," he said. "No, what did ya say?" Harry persisted, the half-smile on his broad face indicating that he was ready to hear a good joke. "I -- I said there are more than fifty ships in the harbor," explained Fred morosely. The smile faded. Harry looked blank. "What harbor?" he asked. Fred tried to sound casual. "I -- it's just a joke I heard today. But I forget the last line." "Oh." Harry stared at Fred, then returned to his drink. "Yeah." They were quiet a moment. Then Lou asked Fred, "Through for the day?" "No. I have to clean up the Math office later." Lou nodded. "That's too bad." from his mustache. "Tell me something," he said, taking the plunge impulsively. "What would you think if you woke up one morning talking French?" "Who did that?" asked Harry, squinting. "Nobody," Fred said hurriedly. "Just... supposing, I mean. Supposing a man was to -- well, to know things he never learned. You know what I mean? Just know them. As if they were always in his mind and he was seeing them for the first time." "What kind o' things, Fred?" asked Lou. "Oh... history. Different... languages. Things about... books and painting and... and atoms and -- chemicals." His shrug was jerky and obvious. "Things like that." "Don't get ya, buddy," Harry said, having given up any hopes that a joke was forthcoming. "You mean he knows things he never learned?" Lou asked. "That it?" There was something in both their voices -- a doubting incredulity, a holding back, as if they feared to commit themselves, a suspicious reticence. Fred sloughed it off. "I was just supposing. Forget it. It's not worth talking about." He had only one beer that night, leaving early with the excuse that he had to clean the Mathematics office. And, all through the silent minutes that he swept and mopped and dusted, he kept trying to figure out what was happening to him. He walked home in the chill of night to find Eva waiting for him in the kitchen. "Coffee, Fred?" she offered. "I'd like that," he said, nodding. She started to get up. "No, s 'accomadi, la prego," he blurted. She looked at him, grim-faced. "I mean," he translated, "sit down, Eva. I can get it." They sat there drinking coffee while he told her about his experiences. "It's more than I can figure, Eva," he said. "It's... scary, in a way. I know so many things I never knew. I have no idea where they come from. Not the least idea." His lips pressed together. "But I know them," he said, "I certainly know them." "More than just... French now?" she asked. H E shook his head worriedly. "Lots more." he said. "Like -- " He looked up from his cup. "Listen to this. Main progress in producing fast particles has been made by using relatively small voltages and repeated acceleration. In most of the instruments used, charged particles are driven around in circular or spiral orbits with the help of a -- You listenin', Eva?" He saw her adam's apple move. "I'm listenin'," she said. " -- help of a magnetic field. The acceleration can be applied in different ways. In the so-called betatron of Kerst and Serber -- " "What does it mean, Fred?" she interrupted. "I don't know," he said helplessly. "It's... just words in my head. I know what it means when I say something in a foreign tongue, but... this?" She shivered, clasping at her forearms abruptly. "It's not right," she said. He frowned at her in silence for a long moment. "What do you mean, Eva?" he asked then. "I don't know, Fred," she said quietly and shook her head once, slowly. "I just don't know." She woke up about midnight and heard him mumbling in his sleep. "The natural logarithms of whole numbers from ten to two hundred. Number one -- zero -- two point three oh two six. One -- two point three nine seven nine. T wo -- two point -- " "Fred, go t'sleep," she said, frowning nervously. " -- four eight four nine." She prodded him with an elbow. "Go t 'sleep, Fred." "Three-two point -- " "Fred!" "Huh?" He moaned and swallowed dryly, turned on his side. In the darkness, she heard him shape the pillow with sleep-heavy hands. "Fred?" she called softly. He coughed. "What?" "I think you better go t'Doctor Boone t'morra mornin'." She heard him draw in a long breath, then let it filter out evenly until it was all gone. "I think so, too," he said in a blurry voice. O N Friday morning, when he opened the door to the waitBoone, a draft of wind scattered papers from the nurse's desk. "Oh," he said apologetically. "Le chieggo scuse. Non ne val la pena." Miss Agnes McCarthy had been Doctor Boone's receptionistnurse for seven years and in that time she'd never heard Fred Elderman speak a single foreign word. Thus she goggled at him, amazed. "What's that you said?" she asked. Fred's smile was a nervous twitch of lips. "Nothing," he said, "miss." Her returned smile was formal. "Oh." She cleared her throat. "I'm sorry Doctor couldn't see you yesterday." "That's all right," he told her. "He'll be ready in about ten minutes." Twenty minutes later, Fred sat down beside Boone's desk and the heavy-set doctor leaned back in his chair with an, "Ailing, Fred?" Fred explained the situation. The doctor's cordial smile became, in order, amused, fixed, strained and finally non-existent. "This is really so?" he demanded. Fred nodded with grim deliberation. "Je me laisse conseiller." Doctor Boone's heavy eyebrows lifted a noticeable jot. "French," he said. "What'd you say?" Fred swallowed. "I said I'm "Son of a gun," intoned Doctor Boone, plucking at his lower lip. "Son of a gun." He got up and ran exploring hands over Fred's skull. "You haven't received a head blow lately, have you?" "No," said Fred. "Nothing." "Hmmm." Doctor Boone drew away his hands and let them drop to his sides. "Well, no apparent bumps or cracks." He buzzed for Miss McCarthy. Then he said, "Well, let's take a try at the X-rays." The X-rays revealed no break or blot. The two men sat in the office, discussing it. "Hard to believe," said the doctor, shaking his head. Fred sighed despondently. "Well, don't take on so," Boone said. "It's nothing to be disturbed about. So you're a quiz kid, so what?" Fred ran nervous fingers over his mustache. "But there's no sense to it. Why is it happening? What is it? The fact is, I'm a little scared." "Nonsense, Fred. Nonsense. You're in good physical condition. That I guarantee." "But what about my -- " Fred hesitated -- "my brain?" Doctor Boone stuck out his lower lip in consoling derision, shaking his head. "I wouldn't worry about that, either." He slapped one palm on the desk top. "Let me think about it, Fred. Consult a few associates. You know -- analyze it. Then I'll let you know. Fair enough?" He walked Fred to the door. "In the meantime," he prescribed, "no worrying about it. There isn't a thing to worry about." His face as he dialed the phone a few minutes later was not unworried, however. "Fetlock?" he said, getting his party. "Got a poser for you." brought Fred to the Windmill that evening. Eva had wanted him to stay home and rest, assuming that his state was due to overwork; but Fred had insisted that it wasn't his health and left the house, just managing to muffle his "Au revolt." He joined Harry Bullard and Lou Peacock at the bar and finished his first beer in a glum silence while Harry revealed why they shouldn't vote for Legislator Milford Carpenter. "Tell ya the man's got a private line t'Moscow," he said. "A few men like that in office and we're in for it, take my word." He looked over at Fred staring into his beer. "What's with it, elder man?" he asked, clapping Fred on the shoulder. Fred told them -- as if he were telling about a disease he'd caught. Lou Peacock looked incredulous. "So that's what you were talking about the other night!" Fred nodded. "You're not kiddin' us now?" Harry asked. "Y'know everything?" "Just about," Fred admitted sadly. A shrewd look overcame Harry's face. "What if I ask ya somethin' ya don't know?" "I'd be happy," Fred said in a despairing voice. Harry beamed. "Okay. I won't ask ya about atoms nor chemicals nor anythin' like that. I'll just ask ya t'tell me about the country between my home town Au Sable and Tarva." He hit the bar with a contented slap. Fred looked hopeful briefly, but then his face blanked and he said in an unhappy voice. "Between Au Sable and Tarva, the route is through typical cut-over land that once was covered with virgin pine (danger: deer on the highway ) and now has only second growth oak, pine and poplar. For years after the decline of the lumber industry, picking huckleberries was one of the chief  local occupations." Harry gaped. "Because the berries were known to grow in the wake of fires," Fred concluded, "residents deliberately set many fires that roared through the country." "That's a damn dirty lie!" Harry said, chin trembling belligerently. Fred looked at him in surprise. "You shouldn't ought t'go around tellin' lies like that," Harry said. "You call that knowin' the countryside -- telling lies about it?" "Take it easy, Harry," Lou cautioned. "Well," Harry said angrily, "he shouldn't ought to tell lies like that." "I didn't say it," Fred answered hopelessly. "It's more as though I -- I read it off." "Yeah? Well... Harry fingered his glass restlessly. "You really know everything?" Lou asked, partly to ease the tension, partly because he was awed. "I'm afraid so," Fred replied. "You ain't just... playin' a trick?" Fred shook his head. "No trick." and intense. "What can you tell me," he asked in a backalley voice, "about orange roses?" The blank look crossed Fred's face again. Then he recited, "Orange is not a fundamental color but a blend of red and pink of varied intensity and yellow. There were very few orange roses prior to the Pernatia strain. All orange, apricot, chamois and coral roses finish with pink more or less accentuated. Some attain that lovely shade -- Cuisse de Nymphe emue." Lou Peacock was open-mouthed. "Ain't that something?" Harry Bullard blew out heavy breath. "What d'ya know about Carpenter?" he asked pugnaciously. "Carpenter, Milford, born # "Never mind," Harry cut in. "I ain't interested. He's a Commie; that's all I gotta know about him." "The elements that go into a political campaign," quoth Fred helplessly, "are many -- the personality of the candidates, the issues -- if any -- the attitude of the press, economic groups, traditions, the opinion polls, the -- " "I tell ya he's a Commie!" Harry declared, voice rising. "You voted for him last election," Lou said. "As I re -- " "I did not!" snarled Harry, getting redder in the face. The blank look appeared on Fred Elderman's face. "Remembering things that are not so is a kind of memory distortion that goes by several names such as pathological lying or mythomania." "You callin' me a liar, Fred?" "It differs from ordinary lying in that the speaker comes to believe his own lies and -- " "Where did you get that black eye?" a shocked Eva asked Fred when he came into the kitchen later. "Have you been fighting at your age?" Then she saw the look on his face and ran for the refrigerator. She sat him on a chair and held a piece of beefsteak against his swelling eye while he related what had happened. "He's a bully," she said. "A bully!" "No, I don't blame him," Fred disagreed. "I insulted him. I don't even know what I'm saying any more. I'm -- I'm all mixed up." She looked down at his slumped form, an alarmed expression on her face. "When is Doctor Boone going to do something for you?" "I don't know." A half hour later, against Eva's wishes, he went to clean up the library with a fellow janitor; but the moment he entered the huge room, he gasped, put his hands to his temples and fell down on one knee, gasping, "My head! My head!" It took a long while of sitting quietly in the downstairs hallway before the pain in his skull stopped. He sat there staring fixedly at the glossy tile floor, his head feeling as if it had just gone twenty-nine rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world. ing. Arthur B., #, short and stocky, head of the Department of Psychological Sciences, he came bustling along the path in porkpie hat and checkered overcoat, jumped up on the porch, stepped across its worn boards and stabbed at the bell button. While he waited, he clapped leather-gloved hands together energetically and blew out breath clouds. "Yes?" Eva asked when she opened the door. Professor Fetlock explained his mission, not noticing how her face tightened with fright when he announced his field. Reassured that Doctor Boone had sent him, she led Fetlock up the carpeted steps, explaining, "He's still in bed. He had an attack last night." "Oh?" said Arthur Fetlock. When introductions had been made and he was alone with the janitor, Professor Fetlock fired a rapid series of questions. Fred Elderman, propped up with pillows, answered them as well as he could. "This attack," said Fetlock, "what happened?" "Don't know, Professor. Walked in the library and -- well, it was as if a ton of cement hit me on the head. No -- in my head." "Amazing. And this knowledge you say you've acquired -- are you conscious of an increase in it since your ill-fated visit to the library?" Fred nodded. "I know more than ever." The professor bounced the fingertips of both hands against each other. "A book on language by Pei. Section #-B in the library, book number #, if memory serves. Can you quote from it?" Fred looked blank, but words followed almost immediately. "Leibnitz first advanced the theory that all language came not from a historically recorded source but from proto-speech. In some respects he was a precursor of -- " "Good, good," said Arthur Fetlock. "Apparently a case of spontaneous telepathic manifestations coupled with clairvoyance." "Meaning?" "Telepathy, Elderman. Telepathy! Seems every book or educated mind you come across, you pick clean of content. You worked in the French office, you spoke French. You worked in the Mathematics office, you quoted numbers, tables, axioms. Similarly with all other offices, subjects and individuals." He scowled, purse-lipped. "Ah, but why?" "Causa qua re muttered Fred. A brief wry sound in Professor Fetlock's throat. "Yes, I wish I knew, too. However... He leaned forward. "What's that?" "How come I can .learn so much?" Fred asked worriedly. "I mean -- " "No difficulty there," stated the stocky psychologist. "You see, no man ever utilized the full learning capacity of the brain. It still has an immense potential. Perhaps that's what's happening to you -- you're realizing this potential." "But how?" "Spontaneously realized telepathy and clairvoyance plus infinite retention and unlimited potential." He whistled softly. "Amazing. Positively amazing. Well, I must be going." "But what'll I do?" Fred begged. "Why, enjoy it," said the professor expansively. "It's a perfectly fantastic gift. Now look -- if I were to gather together a group of faculty members, would Informally, of course." "But -- " "They should be entranced, positively entranced. I must do a paper for the Journal ." "But what does it mean, Professor?" Fred Elderman asked, his voice shaking. "Oh, we'll look into it, never fear. Really, this is revolutionary. An unparalleled phenomenon." He made a sound of delighted disbelief. "In-credible."  gone, Fred sat defeatedly in his bed. So there was nothing to be done -- nothing but spout endless, inexplicable words and wonder into the nights what terrible thing was happening to him. Maybe the professor was excited; maybe it was exciting intellectual fare for outsiders. For him, it was only grim and increasingly frightening business. Why? Why? It was the question he could neither answer nor escape. He was thinking that when Eva came in. He lifted his gaze as she crossed the room and sat down on the bed. "What did he say?" she asked anxiously. When he told her, her reaction was the same as his. "That's all? Enjoy it?" She pressed her lips together in anger. "What's the matter with him? Why did Doctor Boone send him?" He shook his head, without an answer. There was such a look of confused fear on his face that she reached out her hand suddenly and touched his cheek. "Does your head hurt, dear?" "It hurts inside," he said. "In my..." There was a clicking in his throat. "If one considers the brain as a tissue which is only moderately compressible, surrounded by two variable factors -- the blood it contains and the spinal fluid which surrounds it and fills the ventricles inside the brain we have -- " He broke off spasmodically and sat there, quivering. "God help us," she whispered. "As Sextus Empiricus says in his Arguments Against Belief in a God, those who affirm, positively, that God exists cannot avoid falling into an impiety. For -- " "Fred, stop it!" He sat looking at her dazedly. "Fred, you don't... know what you're saying. Do you?" "No. I never do. I just -- Eva, what's going on!" She held his hand tightly and stroked it. "It's all right, Fred. Please don't worry so." But he did worry. For behind the complex knowledge that filled his mind, he was still the same man, simple, uncomprehending -- and afraid. Why was it happening? It was as if, in some hideous more and more with knowledge and there would come a time when there was no room left and the sponge would explode. him in the hallway Monday morning. "Elderman, I've spoken to the members of the faculty and they're all as excited as I. Would this afternoon be too soon? I can get you excused from any work you may be required to do." Fred looked bleakly at the professor's enthusiastic face. "It's all right." "Splendid! Shall we say fourthirty then? My offices?" "All right." "And may I make a suggestion?" asked the professor. "I'd like you to tour the university -- all of it." When they separated, Fred went back down to the basement to put away his tools. At four-twenty-five, he pushed open the heavy door to the Department of Psychological Sciences. He stood there waiting patiently, one hand on the knob, until someone in the large group of faculty members saw him. Professor Fetlock disengaged from the group and hurried over. "Elderman," he said, "come in, come in." "Professor, has Doctor Boone said anything more?" Fred insisted. "I mean about -- " "No, nothing. Never fear, we'll get to it. But come along. I want you to -- Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please!" Fred was introduced to them, standing in their midst, trying to look at ease when his heart and nerves were pulsing with a nervous dread. "And did you follow my suggestion," Fetlock asked loudly, "and tour all the departments in the university?" "Yes... sir." "Good, good." Professor Fetlock nodded emphatically. "That should complete the picture then. Imagine it, ladies and gentlemen -- the sum total of knowledge in our entire university -- all in the head of this one man!" There were sounds of doubt from the faculty. "No, no, I'm serious!" claimed Fetlock. "The proof of the pudding is quite ample. Ask away." Fred Elderman stood there in the momentary silence, thinking of what Professor Fetlock had said. The knowledge of an entire university in his head. That meant there was no more to be gotten here then. What now? and the answers, dead-voiced and monotonous. "What will happen to the Sun "If the Sun goes on radiating years, its whole weight will be transformed into radiation." "What is a root tone?" "In harmonic units, the constituent tones seem to have unequal harmonic values. Some seem to be more important and dominate the sounding unity. These roots are -- " All the knowledge of an entire university in his head. "The five orders of Roman architecture." "Tuscan, Doric, Corinthian, Ionic, Composite, Tuscan being a simplified Doric, Doric retaining the triglyphs, Corinthian characterized by -- " No more knowledge there he didn't possess. His brain crammed with it. Why? "Buffer capacity?" "The buffer capacity of a solution may be defined as dxdpH where dx is the small amount of strong acid or -- " Why? "A moment ago. French." "II n'y a qu'un instant." Endless questions, increasingly excited until they were almost being shouted. "What is literature involved with?" "Literature is, of its nature, involved with ideas because it deals with Man in society, which is to say that it deals with formulations, valuations and -- " Why? "Rule for masthead lights on steam vessels?" A laugh. "A steamvessel when under way shall carry (a) on or in front of the foremast or, if a vessel without a foremast, then in the forepart of the vessel, a bright, white light so constructed as to -- " No laughter. Questions. "How would a three-step rocket take off?" "The three-step rocket would take off vertically and be given a slight tilt in an easterly direction, Brennschluss taking place about -- " "Who was Count Bernadotte?" "What are the by-products of oil?" "Which city is -- " "How can -- " "What is -- " "When did -- " And when it was over and he had answered every question they asked, there was a great, heavy silence. He stood trembling and yet numb, beginning to get a final knowledge. The phone rang then and made everyone start. Professor Fetlock answered it. "For you, Elderman." Fred walked over to the phone and picked up the receiver. "Fred?" he heard Eva say. "Oui." "What?" He twitched. "I'm sorry, Eva. I mean yes, it's I." H E heard her swallowing on the other end of the line. "Fred, I... just wondered why you didn't come home, so I called your office and Charlie said -- " He told her about the meeting. "Oh," she said. "Well, will you be -- home for supper?" The last knowledge was seeping, rising slowly. "I'll try, Eva. I think so, yes." "I been worried, Fred." He smiled sadly. "Nothing to worry about, Eva." Then the message sliced abruptly across his mind and he said, "Good-by, Eva," and dropped the receiver. "I have to go," he told Fetlock and the others. He didn't exactly hear what they said in return. The words. the transition from room to hall were blurred over by his sudden, concentrated need to get out on the campus. The questioning faces were gone and he was hurrying down the hall on driven feet, his action as his speech had been -- unmotivated, beyond understanding. Something drew him on. He had spoken without knowing why; now he rushed down the long hallway without knowing why. He rushed across the lobby, gasping for breath. The message had said, Come. It's time. These things, these many things I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library. I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. All Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. -- who would want to know them? These endless facts about all Earthly knowledge. Earthly knowledge... As he came half tripping, half running down the building steps into the early darkness, he saw the flickering bluish-white light in the sky. It was aiming over the trees, the buildings, straight at him. He stood petrified, staring at it, and knew exactly why he had acquired all the knowledge he had. The blue-white light bore directly at him with a piercing, whining hum. Across the dark campus, a young girl screamed. Life on the other planets, the last words crossed his mind, is not only possibility but high probability. Then the light hit him and bounced straight back up to its source, like lightning streaking in reverse from lightning rod to storm cloud, leaving him in awful blackness. dering across the campus grass like a somnambulant mute. They spoke to him, but his tongue was still. Finally, they were obliged to look in his wallet, where they found his name and address and took him home. A year later, after learning to talk all over again, he said his first stumbling words. He said them one night to his wife when she found him in the bathroom holding a sponge in his hand. "Fred, what are you doing?" "# been squeezed," he said. Most of our readers like serials -- and we try to please them with some of the finest book-length novels science fiction has ever produced. But what about those who prefer complete stories? They deserve to be satisfied and so all the stories in next month's issue will be complete. Robert Sheckley leads off with a long, adventuresome, plot-twisty novelet that begins the last place you would expect. Oh, it's a certified genuine utopia, all right, where all problems have been solved. But the way they've been solved is -- well, devastatingly logical! If you have never heard of a writer named Cordwainer Smith, make a deeply incised deadliest of games -- and the one way to dissolve the partnership is to be personally dissolved! There will be at least one other novelet, plus short stories and our regular features and departments, of course. Nice issue. Don't miss it, will you? The Freelancer Once these laws were passed, any time in history -- however bad -- were the good old days! bed; his dream told him it was a glacier with wild winds howling laughter, and when he opened his eyes, shivering, he saw his wife, Laurie, had pulled the heat switch off. She stood there glaring. Today her hair was a lovely purple with a fashionable streak of gold starting from the forehead, but it didn't help the cold look on her face. "Get up, you bum," she said in her sweet contralto. "Go out and earn some credits or I'll certify you." The thought of being transferred by the Economy Agent to Assigned Duty Status, with its virtual imprisonment to monotony by the Welfare Office, made Jeb tumble from bed and fumble for his shoes. "My darling," he said placatingly, "how beautiful you are this morning! How undeserving I am of you!" "You're damn right about that," said Laurie with bitterness. "When I think of the men I could have married, the wonderful life I might have lived, instead of gAlaxy science fiction scrimping along with a no-good freelance Monitor like you..." "Sometimes I do pretty well. Three years ago, I sent you to the Pleasure Palace for a month, remember?" "Three years ago. Big deal." !HE flounced out of the room.  Sadly, Jeb went to the closet and examined the various uniforms and disguises that were part of his equipment as a freelance Monitor. As he selected the silver and black skintight suit of an Air Pollution Inspector, he wistfully remembered how nice it had been when Laurie had smiled at him. Immediately a flood of determination filled him to go out and do big things today. Maybe he would make a big strike and get a nice fat commission; then Laurie would... The televisor buzzed, flickered, and the genial face of the man from Marriage Relations appeared. "Good morning, Monitor Jeb," said the man, smiling. "And how are things 'twixt you and your beloved?" "Rough," moaned Jeb. "She's really in a foul mood today." The man from Marriage Relations beamed. "Fine, fine, glad to hear it." "Huh?" said Jeb. "Her Sadism Index Rating went up five points," the man explained. "We wanted to make sure we hadn't made an error. Well, that certainly is good news for you two. I'll guess you'll both be all right now." "All right? Are you kidding?" "Now, now, we know what's best for you. Your Masochism Rating is quite high, you know. Laurie is just what you need. Why, you two were made for each other." Suddenly the man stopped talking, gasped, and the screen flickered and went dead. Jeb's astonishment was wiped away by the soft, silvery bell tone of his portable Monitex, a flat two-bysix-inch machine resting on a shelf nearby. As Jeb wildly lunged toward it, he saw it was glowing red, activated by a violation, and as he snatched it up, the coded reading dial had a notification: Bx-P-#. Trembling, Jeb pressed a button on the lower left of the Monitex and a voice promptly droned mechanically from the waferlike loudspeaker hidden under the surface, giving details of the violation. "Bx-P-# -- At ten minutes after eight a.m., Monitex # of Freelance Monitor Jeb picked up violation of Copyright on the phrase 'were made for each other.' Said phrase property of Joint Owners registered under Copyright of Verbal Phrases Act of #. Owners, Magnum Motion Picture Studios and Universal Publications. Fee for use # credits, commission fifty per cent." T HE voice went dead and the flat metal surface glowed with letters strung into words reading "Please Collect and Remit Total Fee." As Jeb uttered a yelp of delight, Laurie came running into the room. "I heard the Monitex bell," she said eagerly. "You sure did," crowed Jeb. "Now aren't you proud of me? I was smart enough to leave the Monitex on all night. We picked up a Verbal Copyright violation..." "You left it on all night?" screeched Laurie, her joy fading. "You imbecile, the leasing charge on the Monitex is ten credits an hour, isn't it? What's your commission on this violation?" "Forty credits. I -- I guess I'm losing money, b-but..." Laurie gave him her opinion of his supposed shrewdness. Jeb unhappily went to the televisor and punched out a call on the button keyboard which would recall the image of the Marriage Relations representative. He shrank back in alarm as the man's glaring face appeared. "Sorry to hook you this way, old boy," said Jeb meekly, "but it's my job, you know. Got you on a Verbal for using 'were made for each other.' That phrase is owned by -- " "You dirty, sneaking spy!" yelled the man on the televisor screen. "I'll bet your grandfather informed on diamond smugglers for a percentage." "He..." Jeb feebly started to protest. "It's a hell of a thing," raved the other, "when a man can't even use words to express himself without paying..." In alarm, Jeb leaned forward and hastily punched a combination of buttons on the televisor. One half the screen blanked. The image of the Marriage Relations representative moved to the right and the lean, puritanical face of Jeb's supervisor, Dirdon, flared onto the left half. Dirdon looked icily at Jeb. "What is it?" "Complaint on policy and purpose of Copyright Law," said Jeb nervously. "Would you please handle it, sir? I'll switch you." into a thin line and he nodded, Jeb flicked a switch. Both men on the screen immediately turned profiles to Jeb and Laurie, seeing each other in thenown screens. "Did you have a complaint, sir?" asked Dirdon. "I don't know who the devil you are," shouted the man from Marriage Relations, "but I assume you're one of those pirates cashing in on that copyright swindle. That new law has gone much too far. Copyrighting a work of skill, art, or expression is okay, I suppose, but to extend it to everyday speech, to verbal phrases -- " "Now just a minute," said Dirdon briskly. "You buy greeting cards, I suppose, sir?" "So I buy greeting cards, so what?" "What are greeting cards exactly? Just a small square of paper with a few words, a very few words of sentiment on them. Words that any normal person certainly might be able to -- " "Any moron can write a better sentiment than those lousy cards express." "But you buy them sometimes?" "Well... sometimes." "Why?" demanded Dirdon. "Saves me the bother of figuring out what to say, I guess," was the growled answer. "Right. And you paid for these very few moronic phrases, paid good hard credits for them. Now isn't it just as logical to protect owners of a phrase when somebody else uses it verbally?" "But," said the man desperately, "I didn't want to violate the Copyright on Verbal Use. I didn't know that phrase was under Copyright. Who can keep track of them all? Every day, more phrases and expressions are under Copyright as somebody else's property. Why, first thing you know, there'll hardly be any words left to say." JDirdon. "Copyright Law on Verbal Use is a great boon to society. Rule # for admission to protection requires that the phrase covered be one which may be considered 'shopworn, overused and so artistically traditional that it is a wearisome truism.' That means that verbal mediocrity is heavily penalized, which is right and proper. Why, you ought to be ashamed to use a phrase like 'were made for each other.' It's Monitors like Jeb who make you watch your words and think very carefully before you speak." "Listen, stupid -- " "Already," Dirdon plowed on, happily oratorical, "our citizens are being forced to express themselves more richly, with initiative, casting off triteness!" The man from Marriage Relations looked disgusted. "Ah," he said angrily, "why don't you drop dead." Bong! r  T HE man moaned as the Monitex Jeb held glowed red with another violation. Jeb grinned and pressed the loudspeaker button. "Mz-R-#," droned the voice. "At half-past eight, Monitex # of Freelance Monitor Jeb picked a violation of..." The man covered his ears. After a few moments, he took his hands away and looked numbly from the screen as Dirdon smirked. "What's the Copyright fee on that one?" he asked. "The use of the words 'Drop Dead' will cost you ten credits," said Jeb. "We'll bill you for both violations." Dirdon was beaming as Jeb snapped the whole screen dark. With a start, Jeb remembered Laurie and turned to face her anger. "See, honeybunch?" he said hopefully. "Even if I did lose a few credits on the leasing charge by leaving the Monitex on all night, it looks like a lucky day. Why, I'll bet I make enough commissions today to send you on a nice vacation." Laurie gave him a narroweyed, cold stare. "You'd better," she said. "Because I've just about had enough of you. Either you make a big midnight tonight. Do you hear me?" Jeb nodded in fright. He scuttled out of the room, picking up a gravity harness from the stand in the foyer and not pausing to buckle himself into it until she slammed the door behind him. Sighing, Jeb got into the harness and took off. He floated out the opening at the end of the corridor at the sixty-story level and joined the stream of commuters at two thousand feet. As he set his speed at thirty miles an hour, he came abreast of a man wearing the solid gray uniform of an Unassigned Citizen. Jeb saw the look of misery on the man's drawn face and felt so sympathetic, he didn't even bother to hide his Monitex in its disguising parcel. You had to be pretty low to make your money out of a guy in that tough status. Hell, thought Jeb defiantly, let him see it and be warned; I don't care. Even if the Inspector sees me. He noted the Unassigned Citizen staring down at the panorama of the vast city beneath them. At different lower levels, myriad flights of streaming citizens moved in various directions. The tremendous blocks of buildings had thin slits between them at the bottom of which were walks filled with antlike figures. "Ugly, huh?" said Jeb. He got a moody stare in return. "Believe it or not, I suddenly find it beautiful. Compared to where I'm heading, anyway." "I've been certified," said the man bluntly. "Not enough credits for support. I had to go to the Welfare Office and ask for assistance. Had my own gravity harness repair shop till a month ago. But the new ones are foolproof, business fell off. Now I'm in for it." "Gosh," muttered Jeb, "that's really tough. But what do you mean, 'compared to where you're heading?' Sure, you'll be assigned a dirty underground job, on the cables maybe, and the pay will be ridiculous, but it'll be right here, won't it?" "Haven't you heard?" The other smiled grimly. "So many of us small business guys are being certified, the Welfare people had no more jobs. And you know the law. Indigents must be assigned to some duty. And it just happens that they're opening new mines on Mars and they can't get help. I've no choice." "Mines?" Jeb paled at the thought. "That Melbonite dust. One speck through the sealed-in suit and you've got a burn they still can't heal." He shuddered; then, seeing the face of the Unassigned Citizen, he said soothingly, "But those suits are foolproof, I understand." "Not always," said the man in gray. "Anyway, they haven't licked the ventilation problem. The last suits they tried to aircondition, so much Melbonite dust filtered in... He took a deep breath of horror. "So the ones in use become awfully sweaty. I'm going to a living hell..." Bong! Jeb's Monitex glowed red with a violation. "Living Hell" was an old-fashioned dramatic phrase somebody sharp had dug up after diligent study and copyrighted in the hope of picking up a few credits. As Jeb numbly listened to the droning voice detail the facts and four credits charge, the man in the gray suit said mirthlessly, "Well, well, that's just fine. Thanks a lot, my friend, for a nice sendoff." Jeb snapped off the Monitex. "Look," he said hurriedly, "that was an accident. This one is on me. Here." He took four credit tokens from a pocket and thrust the silvery rectangles at the Unassigned Citizen. "Put these aside until you're billed for the violation and pay it with my credits. Okay?" "Thanks," said the man gratefully. "I'll remember you." Jeb gave him a twisted grin. "You may not have to, pal. I may be right beside you in the next shipment. My wife is ready to certify me for non-support. If I don't clean up a nice fat commission by tonight, blooey, it's the mines for me, too." r r'HE Unassigned Citizen started to form the words Good luck! when Jeb hastily interrupted, "That's on Copyright. Take it easy." "Uh... my heart goes beside yours," said the man, choosing his words carefully. "My sympathy has arms, one of which is around your mighty shoulders. I say to you farewell." "Wonderful!" exclaimed Jeb. He pumped the other's hand. "I like the way you put that. It's new. It has a freshness." They smiled at each other. Then the oval building that housed The SuperMonitex Feeder came into view and Jeb waved good-by and swung out of the commuter stream in the regulation spiral under the cold eyes of a golden-clad traffic cop. Jeb landed on the balcony ledge outside the ninetieth-level corridor and walked in, finally entering a huge room in the center of which was a circular wall with plug outlets and sets of dials and screens at intervals all the way around. Jeb greeted a few of his coworkers, but didn't pause to gossip. He wasn't in a gay mood this morning, as were many of them who were gleefully recounting some of the slick violations they'd picked up. Jeb went to the circular wall and plugged his Monitex into a receptacle. He punched a button marked New Copyrights and waited for the humming to stop indicating that his Monitex had been fed all the latest phrases added to the huge group protected by law. With his Monitex coded up to date, its memory bank fattened, Jeb went to the supply room to requisition a hollowed-out air pollution meter to conceal his Monitex. A hand tapped his shoulder. "Hi, there," said Monitor Platt, a lean-faced, smirking man Jeb disliked. "I just came off night shift. Had a big evening." "Yeah?" asked Jeb, his skin crawling. Monitor Platt specialized in copyright violations in the area of lakes and parks where lovers murmured words they soon found out were not at all new and quite expensive. Monitor Platt chuckled. "Been cleaning up on a new copyright just registered. The good old wolf whistle. One hundred credits fee." Even Jeb was startled. "But that's not a phrase." "No, but it's a 'shopworn, overused and wearisome truism,' so they slipped it through." "Golly, next thing you know, they'll be copyrighting a deep sigh or the smacking sound of a kiss."L' A appreciation. Then, as Jeb frowned and attended to fitting his detector into the shell of the air pollution meter, Monitor Platt regaled him with the violations that had poured credits into his pockets. "Got a cute dame, nice curves, getting a good hugging under the moon near the lake. She says timidly to this sap, 'It's the first time I've ever been kissed, honestly.' Bong! Fifty credits for the expense account. And another one I picked up in a canoe parked on the bank. This guy says soulfully, 'I'm not the marrying kind, but...' He never gets a chance to finish. Bong! Thirty credits. I sure cleaned up today. If I were you, I'd head straight for the snuggle spots. A whole raft of corny love lines have been blanketed in, you know, and nobody's alerted." "Uh, well," muttered Jeb, who didn't want any enemies and so didn't express his feelings about making a living from such a source, "I already have my schedule figured out, but I'll keep it in mind." "Where you headed for?" Monitor Jeb was relieved when the big bell sounded, its brassy reverberations warning Monitors to quit gabbing and get out into the field to scoop up violations and revenue for the corporation. The paunchy office manager, seated up on a small balcony overlooking the giant hall, saw that the signal was, as usual, being ignored. Indignantly he punched a button on the board facing him and a repulsive odor filled the air which had the Monitors hastily seizing their equipment and leaving the building. Jeb gladly took off into the windy canyons between the skyscrapers. Instead of ascending, he plummeted down forty stories and drifted along, his nostrils twitching with the bad air at this height. Fleetingly, he had the grumbling thought that, with present-day technology, there was no excuse at all for polluted atmosphere. Oh, well, he thought, one of these days, somebody publicminded will do something about it. Right now, I've got to make enough to stop Laurie from certifying me. He felt a sudden chill as he recalled his wife's threat. Quickly he sought out the first location he'd mapped out for some easy revenue, the personnel office of the Air Pollution Control Corp. Jeb switched off anti-gravity and heavily walked through the corridor, stepped inside the deeprugged, gray and green office and joined the small nervous group of inspectors waiting for interviews. J EB, in his air pollution uniform, was as acceptable as a long-used piece of furniture. Unnoticed, he sat on one of the hard benches with the others. They stared and listened to the interview being conducted by the genial, balding man behind the open partition ten feet away. The air pollution inspector facing him was tense, pale and overanxious. "Yes, indeed, you do have a good record," the personnel man was saying approvingly. "No absences in five years, no latenesses. Very good indeed." "Then," said the air pollution inspector eagerly, "I'll be upgraded? I'll get that promotion promised two years ago?" The personnel man cleared his throat, but his smile remained radiant. "Just as soon as business picks up, we'll give you a promotion and raise in pay..." Bong! A roar of mirth arose from the waiting air pollution men as Monitor Jeb nervously pulled his Monitex from its concealing pollution meter shell and read the violation off to the enraged personnel man. A fifty credit fee for use of the copyrighted verbal phrase Just as soon as business picks up, we'll give you a promotion and raise in pay. As Jeb escaped the wrath of his victim, one of the men snickering nearby muttered, "Hah! He'll have to rack his tiny brain for a new way of stalling us from now on." In the next three hours, Jeb drove himself hard. He picked up a twenty credit fee when a doorman outside a Teletheatre had bonged the Monitex with "Plenty of seats inside!" He scooped up another violation in a bar when a bleary-eyed man with veins showing in his nose murmured to the bartender, "Well, I'll have just one more." He wandered to the telephone booths and waited for one of the standby violations to fall into his pocket; sure enough, a handsome, dark-eyed fellow murmured into the mouthpiece, "I'll be working late tonight again, honey; sorry." The time passed too swiftly and when Jeb paused to get a bite of food, he saw, dismayed, that even though he was having a pretty good day, it was far from Ten and twenty credit violations didn't make a man rich. What I need is one of the really big ones, thought Jeb desperately. With fumbling fingers, he pressed out a core number on the Monitex. It glowed blue. The voice droned, "Information!" Jeb asked eagerly, "What have we got with fees of a thousand credits and higher?" JThen the voice announced that a large batch of political "corn" had been copyrighted in view of the current election campaign. Jeb listened with mounting excitement to some of them: If I am elected, taxes will be reduced... As I look upon the intelligent faces in my audience... I am reminded of a story... What a lovely child, Madam... A helicopter on every roof... Jeb shut it off, perspiration breaking out on his face. It was a uranium mine! Jeb's mind reeled at the astonishing fee set for these copyright violations. A thousand credits per use. The party in power was really out to fight off the opposing Traditionalist Party with every possible trick, with the result that Jeb could make the biggest cleanup of his life. That is, if he got away alive. Full of foreboding, Jeb floated up toward the meeting rooms of the local Traditionalist Headquarters, which were on the fiftieth level of a nearby skyscraper. His terrified adrenal glands kicked his heart into a frenzy. The boys who ran the local club were no patsies. Many an argumentative citizen had been found floating in the rarified stratosphere, frozen stiff, with his antigravity belt turned on full and his hands bound so he could not stop the upward climb. Monitor Jeb nervously drifted into the corridor opening and restored gravity. He sneaked past the open door, getting a quick glimpse of a hall filled with citizens listening to a red-faced, stoutish man on a platform. Jeb frantically searched for and, with throat-catching relief, found the back entrance to the big hall. It led to a dusty area of scaffolding and discarded, rusting tools. Now Jeb was crawling down an incline leading under the platform and found the small, railed-off area which once had housed a hidden prompter for musical entertainments. Panting, Jeb squatted in the dark, hearing the booming voice just above him, only slighty muffled. As Jeb shoved the Monitex up against the crack in the boards over him, the speaker's voice came to him strongly, "Now, fellers, you're all precinct captains and it's a helluva empty title to have when your party is outa power. But if we get back on the gravy train -- well, need I say more?" A muffled roar from the audience made Jeb crouch worriedly. "Now we're gonna take this election, see? I want all you loyal party workers... Bong! walls and reverberated through to Jeb as the political hacks recognized the sound and understood that somewhere a Monitex had automatically recorded the voice vibration pattern of the speaker in a Verbal Copyright violation. "Kill the dirty spy!" screamed the speaker. Bong! went the Monitex. "Lynch him!" In three minutes of unguarded outrage, Jeb had recorded ten thousand credits in violations which the speakers never could escape because, like fingerprints, all voice patterns were registered by the government. Jeb turned to the exit behind him and crawled painfully for twenty feet, then got up and began running. He ran straight into a brawny body at the turn of the corridor. The next thing he knew, he was on his back and ruthless hands were banging his head against the floor. The siren of a golden-clad policeman cut the air and magically the hands fell away, leaving Jeb sprawling and groggy. After a moment, he was able to focus his eyes. The policeman I stared down at him, fists authoritively on his hips. "Well, I came just in time, eh?" said the cop. "Saved your neck." Bong! went the Monitex. Jeb said hastily, "It's all right, Officer. It's on the house." "It had damn well better be," growled the policeman. "If you know what's good for you -- Bong! went the Monitex. "Go on, get outa here before I run ya in," yelled the officer. Bong! went the Monitex. Jeb called after Laurie as she happily took off into space from their level, clutching her purse, which was jammed with enough credits to keep her brimful of fun for two whole months at the Pleasure Palace. "Don't you worry about that," said Laurie over her shoulder. Jeb went back to his apartment. He stretched out on the couch, contentment welling up in him. He opened the footstool nearby and, within its archaic shape, slid open the cunningly concealed refrigerator. He took out a plastic cone of beer. "A-ah!" sighed Jeb. How wonderful to be alone, free of Laurie's nagging for two whole months! A superb reward for his hard work. How clever of the government to have passed such a regulation! After a while, like wax melting, his grin drooped away. It certainly was quiet, wasn't it? Within half an hour, he was wild and didn't know why. Jittering, he dialed his televisor and the man from Marriage Relations appeared on the screen. He glared at Jeb and cautiously looked around for the Monitex until he spotted it. "Shut that thing off or no advice," snapped the man. "It's off! Look, I don't know what's bothering me. Can I have special permission to join my wife on her vacation? Or get her back here?" "Afraid not," said the man. "The principle of working so one's wife can have a vacation has been established through the centuries; the government merely put it into law. And as for joining her or getting her back here -- that's against the law." "But that's unfair!" yelled Jeb. "Oh?" The man smiled. "So! I'm glad to see how happy, how perfect is the marriage we arranged for you." He rubbed his hands in delight. "She's just barely gone and already you miss her. Wonderful." "Wonderful? I'm suffering!" The man from Marriage Relations glanced at a dial nearby. "Of course you are. Suffering is the ideal joy for a Masochist. Just think what a lovely two months of missing her you'll have." "All right, so it's a rule that I have to send her on a vacation and can't join her," Jeb complained savagely, "but, damn it, she doesn't have to enjoy it!" "Well," said the man, looking back to Jeb, "there's the answer. Your Masochism index has gone down any number of points. You're angry!" Jeb thought it over. "You bet I am! But what do I do about it?" "Why," said the man from Marriage Relations, "the same thing husbands have been doing ever since they started working to send their wives away on vacations. When the cat's away, you know -- " He stopped in alarm. Jeb grinned. "I told you the Monitex is off. But thanks for the trite truism. She thinks she's the only one who'll have a vacation, eh? I'll show her!" "Service is our motto. And it really is," the man said pugnaciously. "We own the Copyright." The face flickered off the screen and Jeb began poking around in innocent-looking secret places for a little black book he hadn't thought of using in years. He was dismayed to find himself singing "My wife's gone to the country, hooray, hooray," until he remembered that he actually had shut off the Monitex. lar routine, I would like to poach on Editor Gold's preserve and present you with a tiny short story sent me by #-year-old Harold Zellner of Lake Worth, Florida. Personally, I think it's a pretty smart little tale! It's called: "The preacher stood up. He spoke, his robot body humming. His followers kneeled. 'And now we read from the Book of Books, the Book of Truth, the Book of the Great God Man, creator of the Universe, who hath gone up to Heaven, long ago.' "The church was large, and the preacher had to talk loudly to drown out the humming of the hundred of robot bodies. 'And now we read from Psalm #, the truth of truths.' "The preacher flipped through the Book of Books, trying to find Psalm #. Outside, wind blew over the rubble and the skeleton of broken cities. "The preacher finally found Psalm #. He read aloud the truth of truths: " 'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow... A decade or two from now, this issue may have great value as a collector's item -- the first appearance of Harold Zellner! by Vercors. Pocket Books, #c with this one, but in view of to call it to your attention. The story is uniquely original, I believe: an attempt on the part of men of good will to broaden the definition of "human being" by achieving interbreeding between Man and an almost extinct type of ape. The story itself is shocking and fascinating, and the moral and ethical implications tremendous. You'll recognize the book on your newstand by the two words, printed in inch-and-a-half Them's my sentiments, too. Arthur C. Clarke. Harper  Bros., #  and rocket designer, and why we haven't heard more of him before this, I don't know. While his techniques are quite different from those of Bonestell, et al, his pictures -- there are # magnificent plates in the book -- are top grade. Furthermore, the whole future development of space flight from an instrumentcarrying rocket in an orbit around Earth through the full development of the Moon to the preliminary exploration of Mars is presented in logical -- and chronological -- order. It's a fascinatingly "factual" portrayal of our future in space and Arthur Clarke's full and bright text captions add the realism of science to the imagination of art. Publishers, # Gold's first book of stories -- twelve of them and every one a gem! A few (despite the title) are pure fantasies: "Trouble with Water," for example, in which the fantasy aspect is made all the more appealing by the nature of its Arthur Kober-like characters and environment. Most of the tales, though, have that sensitive combination of imaginations that I like to call science fantasy -- almost supernatural development combined with vividly alive and plausible motivation and shrewd scientific and societal extrapolation. Among my favorites in the book are "At the Post," "Problem in Murder," "The Old Die Rich," "Love in the Dark" (delicious!) and "Trouble with Water;" but all, with one or two exceptions (which Aitchell himself points out in his novel and excellent working notes and analysis that accompany each story), are way up there at the top of the literary pile. It's a genuinely distinguished collection. ham. Ballantine Books, cloth #, paper #c of the old plot about a postatomic-war mutant society. It is so skillfully done that the fact that it's not a shiny new idea makes absolutely no difference. I have put it on my shelf next to Padgett's Mutant; and when you compare the two, I think you will agree that variety within existing frameworks is one of the truly healthy directions for science fiction to take. Damon Knight. Lion Books, #c a mad and tragic world of tomorrow, I recommend this, Damon Knight's first book. Sure, it's confusing -- his world of tomorrow is a crazy bouillabaisse of compulsive (or rather compelled) consumption in a series of mutually antagonistic societies. Sure, it's sad, for it extrapolates only too realistically some of the modern trends. But it's good withal. It is based on a story Knight wrote for Astounding in #, called "The Analogues." Some of you may remember its showing how an invention that should have prevented crime, war and violence was turned to sinister uses by slick men of ill will. Well, this carries the idea to its ultimate conclusion -- and it ain't pretty. But it makes taut reading. stein. Julian Messner, Inc., # the lives and works of the men who have fathered rocket propulsion and reaction engines, this book could hardly be beat. the "new pioneers" at White Sands, the authors present biographical and technical information of the most exciting sort, and do so in an easy but not overpopularized way. I could only wish there were more in the book about Frank Whittle, the father of the modern jet engine, but I guess that's another book. Duncan. Ballantine Books, # and #c than Duncan's first, Dark Dominion. In that one, the story was fine but the science bizarre, to say the least. Here the story is as good and the science remarkably convincing. The tale deals with an enormous atom-powered salt-water distillation plant in California, in which the end product is fresh water for irrigation and the byproducts every element known to Man -- including the uranium that runs the show. An unexpected by-product is a "substance" that stimulates life enormously and it is around this baffling phenomenon, plus the Congressman to permit it to be used for Man's benefit, that the plot revolves. The style is understated, the characters true, the "message" uncomfortably pertinent to our times. #c est Ace Double has all the clanking apparatus of the stories popular in the #s and a plot just about as dated. It deals with nasty alien invaders trying to keep Terrans from "The Space Sea;" with intelligent robots; with E. E. Smith-type mind powers; and with many other standard space opera concepts. And yet -- the darn thing has vitality! Miss Brackett's unnecessarily retitled tale is, as I said in my original review in #, a pleasant time-passer. Maine. Rinehart  Co., # the most inconsequential science fiction novels ever written. It tells of a man who passes from body to body around the whole circular matrix of time, back to where he started, but with all the excitement of suburban commuting. Lover kills wife's husband by "speeding up" time machine; story ends when husband winds up in his wife's body! Unrecommendable. End as a World Prophets aplenty foretold the end -- but not one ever guessed just how it would come about! all the languages there were, I guess. I kept reading them, but didn't know what to believe. I know what I wanted to think, but that's different from actually knowing. There was the usual news just after Labor Day. The Dodgers were winning or losing, I forget was going to beat everybody they met that fall. An H-bomb had been tested in the Pacific, blowing another island off the map, just as if we had islands to spare. Ordinarily this was important, but now it wasn't. They put stuff like this in the back pages and hardly anybody reads it. There was only one thing on the front pages and it was all people talked about. All I talked about, anyway. It began long before. I don't know how long because they didn't print that. But it began and there it was, right upon us that day. It was Saturday. Big things always seem to happen on Saturdays. I ate breakfast and got out early. I had the usual things to do, mowing the lawn, for instance. I didn't do it nor anything else and nobody said anything. There wasn't any use in mowing the lawn on a day like that. I went out, remembering not to slam the door. It wasn't much, but it showed thoughtfulness. I went past the church and looked at the sign that was set diagonally at the corner so that it could be read from both streets. There it was in big letters, quoting from smart reporter had thought it up and it seemed so true that that was the only way it was ever said. Me? I didn't know. were out walking or just standing and looking at the sky. It was too early to look up. I went on. Paul Eberhard was sitting on the lawn when I came along. He tossed me the football and I caught it and tried to spin it on my finger. It didn't spin. It fell and flopped out with crazy bounces into the street. The milk truck stopped, while I got it out of the way. I tossed the football back to Paul. He put his hand on it and sat there. "What'll we do?" he said. I made a motion with my hands. "We can throw the ball around," I said. "Naw," he said. "Maybe you've got some comic books." "You've seen them all," I said. "You got some?" "I gave them to Howie," he said, thoughtfully screwing the point of the ball into the center of a dandelion. "He said he was going to get some new ones though. Let's go see." He got up and tossed the ball toward the porch. It hit the railing and bounced back into the bushes. That's where he usually kept it. "Paul," called his mother as ve started out. "Yeah?" "Don't go far. I've got some things I want you to do." "What?" he said patiently. "Hauling trash out of the basement. Helping me move some of the potted plants around in front." "Sure," he said. "I'll be back." We went past another church on the way to Howie's. The sign than that. They wanted it to hang in our minds, something we couldn't quite touch, but ve knew was there. Paul jerked his head at the sign. "What do you think of it?" "I don't know." I broke off a twig as we passed a tree. "What about you?" "We got it coming." He looked at the sky. "Yeah, but will we get it?" He didn't answer that. "I wonder if it will be bright?" "It is now." "It might cloud over." "It won't matter. It'll split the sky." That was one thing sure. Clouds or anything weren't going to stand in the way. We went on and found Howie. Howie is a Negro, smaller than we are and twice as fast. He can throw a football farther and straighter than anyone else on the team. We pal around quite a bit, especially in the football season. He came out of the house like he was walking on whipped cream. I didn't let that fool me. More than once I've tried to tackle him during a practice game. Howie was carrying a mode of a rocket ship, CO powered. It didn't work. We said hi all around and then he suggested a game of keep-away. We'd left the football at Paul's and we couldn't so we walked over to the park. talking about it. "I'm wondering if it will really come," said Paul. We all squinted up. "Where'll the President watch it from?" I said. "He should have a good view from the White House." "No better than us right here," said Howie. "What about Australia? Will they see it there?" I said. "They'll see it all over." "Africa, too? And what about the Eskimos?" "It doesn't matter whether they actually see it or not. It will come to everyone at the same time." I didn't see how it could, but I didn't feel like an argument. That's what they were saying on TV and you can't talk back to that. "Everybody," said Howie. "Not just in this town, but all over. Wherever there are people. Even where they're not." "You read that," said Paul. "Sure," said Howie. "You lent me the comic books. It's even in them." We didn't say much after that. I kept thinking of the man who made the H-bomb. I bet he felt silly and spiteful, blowing up an island. Somebody might have wanted to live on it, if he'd just left it there. He must have felt mean and low when something teally big like this came along. We talked on for a while, but we'd talked it out long ago. There was really nothing new we could say. Every so often we'd look up at the sky, but it wasn't going to come until it got here. Finally we drifted apart. There wasn't anything left to do. We walked home with Howie and then I went with Paul, leaving him to come back to my house. I looked at the lawn and without thinking about it got busy and mowed it. I surprised myself. It was hot, or it seemed to me it was. I went in to eat. Ma came by and shut off the sound of TV. I could still see the picture in the other room. The announcer was making faces, but, of course, I didn't hear what he said. He looked pretty funny, I thought. I thought we were all probably pretty funny, moving our mouths and blinking our eyes and waving our hands. Only nothing real was coming out. Not yet, anyway. "Sit still," said Ma. "It will happen without your help. It's going to be all right." "Think so?" I said. She would have told me anything to keep me quiet. She gets nervous when I fidget. "I think so," she said, giving me my allowance. It was early for that. Usually I didn't get it until after supper. "Why don't you run uptown and watch it from there?" "Maybe I will," I said, dabbling my hands in the water at the sink. "Are you going to go?" "Of course I'm not. Why should I get into that mob? I can watch it just as well from here." Sure she could. But it was not the same. Everybody I knew was going to be there. I changed shirts before I left. I took a rag and wiped the dust from my shoes. I wasn't trying to be fussy or dressed up or anything. I just thought I should do it. the streets and a few big clouds in the sky. A car slowed up and stopped beside me. The window rolled down and Jack Goodwin leaned toward me. "Going uptown?" "Yeah." "Want a lift?" "Sure." Actually I didn't. I'd rather have walked, looking around as I went. Jack Goodwin grinned as I got in. He's got gray hair, where he has hair. The rest is bald. He looked me over. "I don't see any comets on your shoulders," he said gravely. "I never had any," I said. Some people seem to think everyone under seventeen is a kid. "You'll be needing them," he said. "Maybe," I said. I ought to have walked. I never knew how slow a day could pass. I suppose I should have slept late and kept busy doing something. This was worse than putting on a uniform and waiting until gametime. At least there was a coach on the field to tell you what to do as you ran through the drill. Jack Goodwin stopped at a light. I had a notion to get out. But I didn't. Goodwin grinned again as the light changed and we started up. "I don't blame you for being edgy," he said. "It's the suspense. If we only had some way of knowing for sure, radio maybe." "There's no radio," I said. "The calculations have been checked." "Sure, but maybe there's something we forgot. Or don't know. All sorts of things can go wrong." He must have talked on and on, but I didn't listen. Howie and me and Paul had gone over everything he was saying. "Thanks," I said as he stopped and I got out. "Don't mention it," he said. He nearly scraped the rear fender of the car as he drove off. It was a new car, too. He wasn't so bad. Maybe he was just worried. I wandered to the newsstand and looked at magazines and pocketbooks. Old lady Simpson didn't ask me if I was going to buy and didn't chase me away. She was busy arguing with some customers. Even so it was the first time she didn't pay attention to me when I came in. I had a good chance to look at things I never buy. There was nothing in them I wanted to see. I was thirsty. I had a coke and was still thirsty. I asked for a glass of water, drank half of it and went out. a TV set in a store window. I watched it. They were showing a street in India, people looking up. They flashed all around, to Italy, China, Brazil. Except for their clothes, it wasn't much different from here. They were all looking up. I did the same. For the first time I noticed there was a slight overcast. Big billowing clouds had passed, but this was worse. I hoped it would clear away in time. Not that it really mattered. It was more crowded than usual for Saturday, but at the same time it was quiet. People were shopping, but they weren't really buying much or else they bought it faster. Nobody wanted to miss it. They all seemed to have one eye on their lists and another on the clock. Howie and Paul came up the street and we nodded and said something. A few other boys from the school passed by and we stopped. We gathered together. It was getting closer -- and the space between the minutes was growing longer and longer. I looked at Paul's watch. He said it was on the minute. I decided there was time to go in and get a candy bar. All of a sudden I was hungry. I didn't know where it came from. I'd had to stuff down lunch not long ago. And now I was hungry. I went to a store and had to fight my way in. People were coming out. Not just customers, but the clerks and owner, too. There was a big television screen inside, but nobody wanted to see it on that. They wanted to be outside where it would happen to them. Not just see it, have it happen. The store was empty. Not closed -- empty. I turned and rushed out to join the others. I couldn't miss it. There were still minutes to go, but suppose there had been a miscalculation. I knew what that would mean, but even so I had to be there. I would almost die, too. Now we were all looking up -- all over the world people were, I suppose. It was quiet. You could hear them breathing. And then it came, a flash across the sky, a silver streak, the biggest vapor trail there ever was. It went from this side to that side in no time. It split the sky and was gone before the shock blast hit us. Nobody said anything. We stood there and shivered and straightened up after the rumbling sound passed. But there was the vapor trail that stretched farther than anyone could see. It would go around the world at least once before it came to an end somewhere in the desert. I saw my science teacher -- he was trying to smile, but couldn't. And then there was the pharmacist who had wanted to be a research chemist, but wasn't good enough. In front of me, old Fred Butler who drives the bus to Orange Point and King City cracked his knuckles. "He did it," he whispered. "All the way to Mars and back. Safe and right on schedule." He jumped up in the air and kept jumping up. He hadn't been that high off the ground in several years. He never would be again unless he took an elevator. And I knew he hated elevators. Factory whistles started blowing. They sounded louder than Gabriel. I wonder if he heard them. I grabbed hold of the nearest person and started hugging. I didn't know it was the snooty girl from the next block until she hugged back and began kissing me. We yelled louder than the factory whistles. We had a right. It was just like the papers said: This was the day the world ended -- And the Universe began. I AM Thomas Wills, and I am a traitor. All my life I was brought up to believe m the absolute perfection of The Company, the giant combine of insurance corporations which runs the world; but I have betrayed them and joined their Armageddon came -- and the will of the human race was probated in one day -- but who were the heirs that were left to collect? enemies. It all began when I was transferred to war-racked Naples and met a girl named -- Rena dell' Angel a, who, with her father Benedetto and another outcast named Slovetski, leads a subversive underground movement which works against the Company. They plot to destroy it; but the Company has perhaps an even more dangerous opponent in the person of a strange man named -- Zorchi, who makes his career of collecting on accident claims from the Company. There is no fraud involved; when he collects for the loss of a limb, the limb is indeed lost -- but Zorchi, mysteriously, can regrow a severed member like a starfish! Both Zorchi and Rena's father are committed to -- The Clinics, the Company's suspended-animation vaults where, so says the Company, persons suffering from incurable diseases can tenderly be laid away until medical science can devise a cure. But Rena convinces me that the Company's statement is a lie; together, we rescue Zorchi and her father and flee. Underwriter Defoe, a high executive of the Company, is our implacable enemy -- and yet he was once my friend. But I believe that it is he who has perverted the all-good Company into a cynical and corrupt power combine -- certainly Millen Carmody, his superior, is an honest man! Yet Defoe seems not to be under Carmody's control. I am swept under by these conflicting currents, but one thing emerges: Something must be done! For the underground has managed to get a cobalt-bomb which can depopulate the entire world! R:g't or wrong, I had no choice. I could not stand by and see the world destroyed for the sake of destroying the Company, however corrupt. I turned full circle; I betrayed the plans of the underground to Defoe -- In vain. The C-bomb went off; the end of the world was at hand. course, but what place was when the world was at an end? Rena and I, between us, got her father, Benedetto, upstairs into her room without attracting too much attention. We put him on the bed and peeled back his jacket. The bullet had gone into his shoulder, a few inches above the heart. The bone was splintered, but the bleeding was not too much. Rena did what she could and, for the first time in what seemed like years, we had a moment's breathing space. I said, "I'll phone for a doctor." Benedetto said faintly, "No, Thomas! The Company!" I protested, "What's the difference? We're all dead, now. You've seen -- " I hesitated and changed it. "Slovetski has seen to that. There was cobalt in that bomb." He peered curiously at me. "Slovetski? Did you suppose it was Slovetski who planned it so?" He shook his head -- and winced at the pain. He whispered, "Thomas, you do not understand. It was my project, not Slovetski's. That one, he proposed to destroy the Company's Home Office; it would bring an end to evil. I persuaded him there was no need to kill -- only to gamble." I stared at him. "You're delirious!" "Oh, no." He shook his head and succeeded in a tiny smile. "Do you not see it, Thomas? The great explosion goes off, the world is showered with particles of death. And then -- what then?" "We die!" "Die? No! Have you forgotten the vaults of the clinics?" It staggered me. I'd been reciting all the pat phrases from early schooling about the bomb! If it had gone off in the Short War, of course, it would have ended the human race! But I'd been a fool. The vaults had been built to handle the extreme emergencies that couldn't be foreseen -- even one that knocked out nearly the whole race. They hadn't expected that a cobalt-cased bomb would ever be used. Only the conspirators would have tried, and how could they get fissionables? But they were ready for even that. I'd been expecting universal doom. "The clinics," Benedetto repeated as I stared at him. radio-poisons of cobalt do not live forever. Five years, and nearly half of them would be gone; eleven years, and more than three-quarters would be dissipated. In fifty years, the residual activity would be down to a fraction of one per cent -- and the human race could come back to the surface. "But why?" I demanded. "Suppose the Company can handle the population of the whole world? Granted, they've space enough and one year is the same as fifty when you're on ice. But what's the use?" He smiled faintly. "Bankruptcy, Thomas," he whispered. "So you see, we do not wish to fall into the Company's hands right now. For there is a chance that we will live... and perhaps the very faintest of chances that we will win!" -- I kept telling myself that. But, if anything could hurt the Company, the area in which it was vulnerable was money. Benedetto had been intelligent in that. Bombing the Home Office would have been an inconvenience, no more. But to disrupt the world's work with a fifty-year hiatus, while the air purged itself of the radioactive cobalt from the bomb, would mean fifty years while the Company lay dormant; fifty years while the policies ran their course and became due. For that was the wonder of Benedetto's scheme: The Company insured against everything. If a man were to be exposed to radiation and needed to be put away, he automatically went on "disability" benefits, while his policy paid its own premiums! Multiply this single man by out to a bankrupt Company. It seemed a thin thread with which to strangle a monster. And yet, I thought of the picture of Millen Carmody in my Adjuster's Manual. There was the embodiment of honor. Where a Defoe might cut through the legalities and flout the letter of the agreements, Carmody would be bound by his given word. The question, then, was whether Defoe would dare to act against Carmody. Everything else made sense. Even exploding the bomb high over the Atlantic: It would be days before the first fall-out came wind-borne to the land, and in those days there would be time for the beginnings of the mass migration to the vaults. Wait and see, I told myself. Wait and see. It was flimsy, but it was hope, and I had thought all hope was dead. We could not stay in the hotel, and there was only one place for us to go. Slovetski captured, the Company after our scalps, the whole world about to be plunged into confusion -- we had to get out of sight. pital gave me a clue; I tracked it down and located the secretary. The secretary spat at me over the phone and hung up, but the second time I called him he grudgingly consented to give me another number to call. The new number was Zorchi's lawyer. The lawyer was opaque and uncommunicative, but proposed that I call him back in a quarter of an hour. In a quarter of an hour, I was on the phone. He said guardedly: "What was left in Bay # ?" "A hypodermic and a bottle of fluid," I said promptly. "That checks," he confirmed, and gave me a number. And on the other end of that number I reached Zorchi. "The junior assassin," he sneered. "And calling for help? How is that possible, Weels? Did my avocatto lie?" I said stiffly, "If you don't want to help me, say so." "Oh -- " he shrugged. "I have not said that. What do you want?" "Food, a doctor, and a place for three of us to hide for a while." He pursed his lips. "To hide, is it?" He frowned. "That is very grave, Weels. Why should I hide you from what is undoubtedly your just punishment?" "Because," I said steadily, "I have a telephone number. Which can be traced. Defoe doesn't know you've escaped, but that can be fixed!" He laughed angrily. "Oh-ho. The assassin turns to blackmail, is that it?" I said furiously, "Damn you, Zorchi, you know I won't turn you in. I only point out that I can -- and that I will not. Now, will you help us or not?" He said mildly, "Oh, of course. I only wished you to say 'please' -- but it is not a trick you Company men are good at. Signore, believe me, I perish with loneliness for you and your two friends, whoever they may be. Listen to me, now." He gave me an address and directions for finding it. And he hung up. Zorchi's house was far outside the city, along the road to New Caserta. It lay at the bend of the main highway, and I suppose I could have passed it a hundred thousand times without looking inside, it was so clearly the whitestuccoed, large but crumbling home of a mildly prosperous peasant. It was large enough to have a central court partly concealed from the road. The secretary, spectacles and all, met us at the door -- and that was a shock. "You must have roller skates," I told him. He shrugged. "My employer is too forgiving," he said, with ice on his voice. "I had hoped to reach him before he made an error. As you see, I was too late." We lifted Benedetto off the seat; he was just barely conscious by now, and his face was ivory under the Mediterranean tan. I shook the secretary off and held Benedetto carefully in my arms as Rena held the door before me. The secretary said, "A moment. I presume the car is stolen. You must dispose of it at once." I snarled over my shoulder, "It isn't stolen, but the people that own it will be looking for it all right. You get rid of it." He spluttered and squirmed, but I saw him climbing into the seat as I went inside. Zorchi was there waiting, in a fancy motorized wheelchair. He had legs! Apparently they were not fully developed as yet, but in the short few days since I had rescued him something had grown that looked like nearly normal limbs. He had also grown, in that short time, a heavy beard. The sneer, however, was the same. I made the error of saying, "Signore Zorchi, will you call a doctor for this man?" The thick lips writhed under the beard. "Signore it is now, is it? No longer the freak Zorchi, the case Zorchi, the half-man? God works many miracles, Weels. See the greatest of them all -- it has transmuted the dog into a signore!" I grated, "For God's sake, Zorchi, call a doctor!" He said coldly, "You mentioned this over the phone, did you not? If you would merely walk on instead of bickering, you would find the doctor already here." flowed into Benedetto from half a dozen plastic tubes like oil into the hold of a tanker. And I could see, in the moments when I watched, the color come back into his face, and the sunken eyes seem to come back to life. The doctor gave him a sedative that made him sleep, and explained to us that Benedetto was an old man for such goings-on. But if he could be kept still for three or four weeks, the doctor said, counting the lire Zorchi's secretary paid him, there was no great danger. If he could be kept still for three or four weeks. In scarcely ten days, the atmosphere of the planet would be death to breathe! Many things might happen to Benedetto in that time, but remaining still was not one of them. Zorchi retired to his own quarters, once the doctor was gone, and Rena and I left Benedetto to sleep. We found a television set and turned it on, listening for word of the cobalt-bomb. We got recorded canzoni sung by a reedy tenor. We dialed, and found the Neapolitan equivalent of a soap opera, complete with the wise, fat old mother and the sobbing new daughter-in-law. It was like that on all the stations, while Rena and I stared at each other in disbelief. Finally, at the regular hourly newscast, we got a flicker: "An unidentified explosion," the announcer was saying, "far out at sea, caused alarm to many persons last night. Although the origins are not known, it is thought that there is no danger. However, there has been temporary disturbance to all long-lines communications, and air travel is grounded while the explosion is being investigated." We switched to the radio: it sion bands were on the air. I said, "I can't figure that. If there's enough disturbance to ruin long-distance transmission, it ought to show up on the television." Rena said doubtfully, "I do not remember for sure, Tom, but is there not something about television which limits its distance?" "Well -- I suppose so, yes. It's a line of sight transmission, on these frequencies at any rate. I don't suppose it has to be, except that all the television bands fall "Yes. And then, is it not possible that only the distance transmission is interrupted? On purpose, I mean?" I slammed my hand on the arm of the chair. "On purpose! The Company -- they are trying to keep this thing localized. But the idiots, don't they know that's impossible? Does Defoe think he can let the world burn up without doing anything to stop it -- just by keeping the people from knowing what happened?" She shrugged. "I don't know, Tom." I didn't know either, but I suspected -- and so did she. It was out of the question that the Company, with its infinite resources, its nerve-fibers running into every part of the world, should not know just what that bomb was, and what it would do. And what few days the world had -- before the fall-out became dangerous -- were none too many. Already the word should have been spread, and the first groups alerted for movement into the vaults, to wait out the day when the air would be pure again. If it was being delayed, there could be no good reason for it. But what, I asked myself miserably, was Millen Carmody doing all this while? Was he going to sit back and placidly permit Defoe to pervert every ideal of the Company? I could not believe it. It was not possible that the man who had written the inspiring words in the Handbook could be guilty of genocide. Rena excused herself to look in on her father. Almost ashamed of myself, I took the battered book from my pocket and opened it to check on Millen Carmody's own preface. It was hard to reconcile the immensely reassuring words with what I had seen. And, as I read them, I no longer felt safe and comforted. mediate danger, and Rena needed to get out of that house. There was nothing for Benedetto to do but wait, and Zorchi's servants could help him when it was necessary. I took her by the arm and we strolled out into the garden, breathing deeply. That was a mistake. I had forgotten, in the inconspicuous air conditioning of Zorchi's home, that we were in the center of the hemp fields that had nearly cost me my dinner, so long ago, with Hammond. I wondered if I ever would know just why Hammond was killed. Playing both ends against the middle, it seemed -- he had undoubtedly been in with Slovetski's group. Rena had admitted as much, and I was privately certain that he had been killed by them. But of more importance was the stench in our nostrils. "Perhaps," said Rena, "across the road, in the walnut grove, it will not be as bad." I hesitated, but it felt safe in the warm Italian night, and so we tried it. The sharp scent of the walnut trees helped a little; what helped even more was that the turbinates of the nostril can stand just so much, and when their tolerance is exceeded they surrender. So that it wasn't too long before, though the stench was as strong as ever, we hardly noticed it. We sat against the thick trunk of a tree, and Rena's head fitted naturally against my shoulder. She was silent for a time, and so was I -- it seemed good to have silence, after violent struggle and death. Then she said: "Strange man." "Me?" "No. Oh, yes, Tom, if it comes to that, you, too. But I was thinking just now of Zorchi. Is it true, what you told me of his growing legs and arms so freely?" "I thought everyone in Naples knew that. I thought he was a national hero." "Of course, but I have never really known that the stories were true. How does it happen, Tom?" I shrugged. "Heaven knows, I don't. I doubt if even Zorchi knows. His parents might have been involved in some sort of atomic business and got radiated, and so they produced a mutation. It's perfectly possible, you know." "I have heard so, Tom." "Or else it just happened. Something in his diet, in the way his glands responded to a sickness, some sort of medicine. No one knows." "Cannot scientists hope to tell?" "Well -- " it was beginning to sound like the seeds of one of our old arguments -- "well, I me; she merely burrowed into my arm. Perhaps the wind shifted, and the smell of the hemp fields grew stronger; perhaps it was only the foul thought that the glaring sky had triggered that contaminated my mood. But where I had been happy and relaxed -- the Cbomb completely out of my mind for the moment -- now I was too fully aware of what was ahead for all of us. "Let's go back, Rena," I said. She didn't ask why. Perhaps she, too, was feeling the weight of our death sentence. newscast; its story varied little from the early ones. Benedetto still slept, but Zorchi joined us as we watched it. The announcer, face stamped with the careful blend of gravity and confidence that marks telecasters all over the world, was saying: "Late word on the bomb exploded over the North Atlantic indicates that there is some danger that radioactive ash may be carried to this area. The danger zones are now being mapped and surveyed, and residents of all such sections will be evacuated or placed in deep sleep until the danger is over. "Blue Bolt policies give you complete protection against all no hazards from this explosion. I repeat, Blue Bolt policies give you complete protection against all hazards from this explosion. Check your policies and be sure of your status. There.is absolutely no risk for any person carrying the basic Blue Bolt minimum coverage or better." I clicked off the set. "I wonder what the people in Shanghai are hearing tonight," I said. Zorchi had only listened without comment, when I told him about the bomb that afternoon; he listened without comment now. Rena said: "Tom, I've been wondering. You know, I -- I don't have any insurance. Neither has my father, since we were canceled. And we're not the only ones without it, either." I patted her hand. "We'll straighten this out," I promised. "You'll get your coverage back." She gave me a skeptical look, but shook her head. "I don't mean just about father and me. What about all of the uninsurables, all over the world? The bomb goes off, and everybody with a policy files down into the vaults, but what about the others?" I explained, "There are provisions for them. Some of them can be cared for under the dependency-clauses in the policies of their next of kin. Others have various charitable arrangements -- some localities, for instance, carry blanket floater policies for their paupers and prisoners and so on. And -- well, I don't suppose it would ever come to that, but if someone turned up who had no coverage at all, he could be cared for out of the loss-pool that the Company carries for such contingencies. It wouldn't be luxurious, but he'd live. ing to my subject, "the Company is set up so the actual premiums paid are meaningless. The whole objective of the Company is service; the premiums are only a way to that goal. The Company has no interest other than the good of the world, and -- " I stopped, feeling like a fool. Zorchi was laughing raucously. I said resentfully, "I guess I asked for that, Zorchi. Well, perhaps what I said sounds funny. But, before God, Zorchi, that's the way the Company is set up. Here -- " I picked the Handbook from the end-table beside me and tossed it to him -- "read what Millen Carmody says. I won't try to convince you. Just read it." He caught it expertly and dropped it on the floor before him. "So much for your Chief Assassin," he remarked pleasantly. "The words are no doubt honied, Weels, but I am not at this moment interested to read them." I shrugged. It was peculiar how even a reasonable man -- I have always thought of myself as a reasonable man -- could make a fool of himself. It was no sin that habit had betrayed me into exalting the Company; but it was, at the least, quite silly of me to take offense when my audience disagreed with me. I said, in what must have been a surly tone, "I don't suppose you are -- why should you? You hate the Company from the word go." He shook his head mildly. "I? No, Weels. Believe me, I am the Company's most devoted friend. Without it, how would I feed my five-times-a-day appetite?" I sneered at him. "If you're a friend to the Company, then my best buddy is a tapeworm." "Meaning that Zorchi is a parasite?" His eyes were furious. "Weels, you impose on me too far! Be careful! Is it the act of a tapeworm that I bleed and die, over and over? Is it something I chose, did I pray to the saints, before my mother spawned me, that I should be born a monster? No, Weels! We are alike, you gentlemen of the Company and I -- we live on blood money, it is true. But the blood I live on, man -- it is my own!" I said mollifyingly, "Zorchi, I've had a hard day. I didn't mean to be nasty. I apologize." "Hah!" "No, really." quiet. "It is of no importance," he said. "If I wished to bear you a grudge, Weels, I would have more than that to give me cause." He sighed. "It all looked quite simple twentyfour hours ago, Weels. True, I had worked my little profession in this area as far as it might go -- with your help, of course. But the world was before me -- I had arranged to fly next week to the Parisian Anarch, to change my name and, perhaps within a month, with a new policy, suffer a severe accident that would provide me with francs for my hobbies. Why is it that you bring bad news always?" I said, "Wasn't I of some little assistance to you at one time?" "In helping me from the deepfreeze? Oh, yes, perhaps. But didn't you help me into it in the first place, as well? And surely you have already had sufficient credit for aiding my escape -- I observe the young lady looking at you with the eyes of one who sees a hero." I said in irritation, "You're infuriating, Zorchi. I suppose you know that. I never claimed any credit for helping you out of the clinic. As a matter of fact, I don't think I ever mentioned it. Everyone assumed that I had just happened to bring you along -- no one questioned it." He flared, rt You let them assume, Weels? You let them assume that Zorchi was as helpless a side of pork as those other dead ones -- you let them guess that you stuck me with a needle, so that it would seem how brave you were? Is it not true that I had revived by myself, Weels?" I felt myself growing angry. "Of course! But I just didn't see any reason to -- " "To divide the credit, is that it, Weels? No, say no more; I have closed the subject. However, I point out that there is a difference between the rescue of a helpless hulk and the mere casual assistance one may be invited to give to a Zorchi." I let it go at that. There was no point in arguing with that man, ever. So I left the room -- ostensibly to look in on Benedetto, actually to cool off a little. Benedetto seemed fine -- that is, the dressings were still in place, he had not moved, his breath and pulse were slow and regular. I took my time before I went back to the room where Zorchi still sat waiting. He had taken advantage of the time to improve his mind. The man's curiosity was insatiable; the more he denied it, the more it stuck out all over him. He had thrown the Handbook on the floor when I gave it to him, but as soon as I was out of sight he was leafing through it. He had it open on his lap, face down, as he faced me. "Weels." There was, for once, no sardonic rasp to his voice. And his face, I saw, was bone-white. "Weels, permit me to be sure I understand you. It is your belief that this intelligent plan of seeding the world with poison to make it well will succeed, because you believe that a Signore Carmody will evict Defoe from power?" I said, "Well, not exactly -- " "But almost exactly? That is, you require this Millen Carmody for your plan?" "It wasn't my plan. But you're right about the other." "Very good." He extended the Handbook to me. "There is here a picture which calls itself Millen Carmody. Is that the man?" I glanced at the familiar warm eyes on the frontispiece. "That's right. Have you seen him?" "I have, indeed." The shaggy beard was twitching -- I did not know whether with laughter or the coming of tears. "I saw him not long ago, Weels. It was in what they call Bay # -- you remember? He was in a little bag like the pasta one carries home from a store. He was quite sound asleep, Weels, in the shelf just below the one I woke up in." XV Millen Carmody had permitted Defoe to turn the Company into a prison cell for the world. He couldn't forbid it, because the dead can forbid nothing, and Carmody was sleeping with the dead. No wonder Defoe was so concerned with the Naples sector! How long? How long had Carmody been quietly out of the way, while Defoe made his plans and took his steps, and someone in a little room somewhere confected "statements" with Millen Carmody's signature on them and "interviews" that involved only one man? It could not have been less than five or six years, I thought, counting back to the time when Defoe's name first began to register with me as an ordinary citizen, before I had married his cousin. Six years. That was the date of the Prague-Vienna war. And the year following, Hanoi clashed with Cebu. And the year after that, Auckland and Adelaide. What in God's name was Defoe's plan? Nothing as simple as putting Carmody out of the way so that he could loot the Company. No man could wish to be # that rich! It was meaningless... Defoe could be playing for only one thing -- power. But it didn't matter; all that mattered was that now I knew that Carmody was an enemy to Defoe. He was therefore an ally to Rena and to me, and we needed allies. But how might we get Carmody out of Bay #? There weren't any good answers, though Rena and I, with the help of grumbling comments from Zorchi, debated it until the morning light began to shine. Frontal assault on the clinic was ridiculous. Even a diversionary raid such as Rena had staged to try to rescue her father -- only ten days before! -- would hardly get us in through the triplelocked door of Bay #. Even if Slovetski's movement had still been able to muster the strength to do it, which was not likely. It was maddening. I had hidden the hypodermic Rena had brought in Bay # to get it out of the way. Undoubtedly it was there still -- perhaps only a few yards from Millen Carmody. If fifty cubic centimeters of a watery purplish liquid could have been plucked from the little glass bottle and moved the mere inches to the veins of his arms, the problem would be solved -- for he could open the door from inside as easily as Zorchi had, and certainly once he was that far we could manage to get him out. But the thing was impossible, no matter how we looked at it. in that chair, because I woke up in it. It was in the middle of a crazy nightmare about an avenging angel with cobalt-blue eyes burning at me out of heaven; and I wanted to run from him, but I was frozen by a little man with a hypodermic of ice. I woke up, and I was facing the television set. Someone -- Rena, I suppose -- had covered me with a light spread. The set was blaring a strident tenor voice. Zorchi was hunched over, watching some opera; I might as well have been a thousand miles away. I lay blearily watching the tiny figures flickering around the screen, not so much forgetting all the things that were on my mind as knowing what they were and that they existed, but lacking the strength to pick them up and look at them. The opera seemed to concern an Egyptian queen and a priest of some sort; I was not very interested in it, though it seemed odd that Zorchi should watch it so eagerly. Perhaps, after all, there was something to his maudlin selfpity -- perhaps I really did think of him as a monster or a dog, for I was as uneasy to see him watching an opera as I would have been to see an ape play the flute. I heard trucks going by on the highway. By and by it began to penetrate through the haze that I was hearing a lot of trucks going by on the highway. I had no idea how heavily traveled the Naples-Caserta road might be, but from the sound, they seemed nearly bumper to bumper, whizzing along at seventy or eighty miles an hour. I got up stiffly and walked over to the window. I had not been far wrong. There was a steady stream of traffic in both directions -- not only trucks but buses and private cars, everything from late-model gyromaxions to ancient pistondriven farm trucks. Zorchi heard me move, and turned toward me with a hooded expression. I pointed to the window. "What's up?" I asked. He said levelly, "The end of the world. It is now official; it has been on the television. Oh, they do not say it in just so many words, but it is there." I turned to the television set and flicked off the tape-relay switch -- apparently the opera had been recorded. Zorchi glared, but didn't try to stop me as I hunted on the broadcast bands for a news announcer. I didn't have far to hunt. Every channel was the same: The Company was issuing orders and instructions. Every man, woman and child was to be ready within ten days for commitment to the clinic... I tried to imagine the scenes of panic and turmoil that would be going on in downtown Naples at that moment. ing: "Remember, if your Basic Blue Bolt policy number begins with the letters A, B or C -- if it begins with the letters A, B or C -- you are to report to the local first aid or emergency post at six hundred hours tomorrow. There is no danger. I repeat, there is no danger. This is merely a precaution taken by the Company for your protection." He didn't really look as though there were no danger, however. He looked like a man confronted by a ghost. I switched to another channel. An equally harried-looking announcer: " -- reported by a team of four physicists from the Royal University to have produced a serious concentration of radioactive byproducts in the upper atmosphere. It is hoped that the cloud of dangerous gases will veer southward and pass harmlessly through the Eastern Mediterranean; however, strictly as a precautionary measure, it is essential that every person in this area be placed in a safety zone during the danger period, the peak of which is estimated to come within the next fourteen days. If there is any damage, it will be only local and confined to livestock -- for which you will be reimbursed under your Blue Bolt coverage." I' switched to another channel. Local damage! Local to the face of the Earth! I tried all the channels; they were all the same. The Company had evidently decided to lie to the human race. Keep them in the dark -- make each little section believe that only it was affected -- persuade them that they would be under for, at most, a few weeks or months. Was that, I wondered, Defoe's scheme? Was he planning to try somehow to convince four billion people that fifty years were only a few weeks? It would never work -- the first astronomer to look at a star, the first seaman to discover impossible errors in his tide table, would spot the lie. More likely he was simply proceeding along what must always have been his basic assumption: The truth is wasted on the people. Zorchi said with heavy irony, "If my guest is quite finished with the instrument, perhaps he will be gracious enough to permit me to resume Aida." about the evacuation. She said, yawning, "But of course, Tom. What else could they do?" And she began discussing breakfast. I went with her, but not to eat; in the dining hall was a small television set, and on it I could listen to the same repeat broadcasts over and over to my heart's content. It was -- in a way -- pressive to see a giant machine in operation, and there was no machine bigger than the Company. The idea of suspending a whole world, even piecemeal, was staggering. But if there had been panic at first in the offices of the Company, none of it showed. The announcers were harried and there was bustle and strain, but order presided. Those long lines of vehicles outside the window; they were going somewhere; they were each one, I could see by the medallion slung across each radiator front, on the payroll of the Company. Perhaps the trick of pretending to each section that only it would be affected was wise -- I don't know. It was working, and I suppose that is the touchstone of wisdom. Naples knew that something was going on in Rome, of course, but was doubtful about the Milanese Republic. The Romans were in no doubt at all about Milan, but weren't sure about the Duchy of Monaco, down the Riviera shore. And the man on the street, if he gave it a thought at all, must have been sure that such faraway places as America and China were escaping entirely. I suppose it was clever -- there was no apparent panic. The trick took away the psychological horror of world catastrophe and replaced it with only a local terror, no different in kind than an earthquake or a flood. And there was always the sack of gold at the end of every catastrophe : Blue Bolt would pay for damage, with a free and uncounting hand. Except that this time, of course, Blue Bolt would not, could not, pay at all. of bed. He shouldn't have been, but he was conscious and we could not make him stay put -- short of chains. He watched the television and then listened as Rena and I brought him up to date. Like me, he was shocked and then encouraged to find that Millen Carmody was in the vaults -- encouraged because it was at least a handle for us to grasp the problem with; if we could get at Carmody, perhaps we could break Defoe's usurped power. Without him, Defoe would simply use the years while the world slept to forge a permanent dictatorship. We got the old man to lie down, and left him. But not for long. Within the hour he came tottering to where we were sitting, staring at the television. He waved aside Rena's quick protest. "There is no time for rest, my daughter," he said. "Do not scold me. I have a task." Rena said worriedly, "Dear, you must stay in bed. The doctor said -- " "The doctor," Benedetto said formally, "is a fool. Shall I allow us to die here? Am I an ancient idiot, or am I Benedetto dell'Angela who with Slovetski led twenty thousand men?" Rena said, "Please! You're sick!" "Enough." Benedetto wavered, but stood erect. "I have telephoned. I have learned a great deal. The movement -- " he leaned against the wall for support -- "was not planned by fools. We knew there might be bad days; we do not collapse because a few of us are put out of service by the Company. I have certain emergency numbers to call; I call them. And I find -- " he paused dramatically -- "that there is news. Slovetski has escaped!" I said, "That's impossible! Defoe wouldn't let him go!" "Perhaps Slovetski did not consult him," Benedetto said with dignity. "At any rate, he is free and not far from here. And he is the answer we have sought, you understand." "How?" I demanded. "What can he do that we can't?" Benedetto smiled indulgently, though the smile was strained. His wound must have been giving him hell; it had had just enough time to stiffen up. He said, "Leave that to Slovetski, Thomas. It is his metier, not yours. I shall go to him now." Well, I did what I could; but Benedetto was an iron-necked old man. I forbade him to leave and he laughed at me. I begged him to stay and he thanked me -- and refused. Finally I abandoned him to Rena and Zorchi. Zorchi gave up almost at once. "A majestic man!" he said admiringly, as he rolled into the room where I was waiting, on his little power cart. "One cannot reason with him." And Rena, in time, gave up, too. But not easily. She was weeping when she rejoined me.  to get him to let her join him, or to consider taking someone else with him; he said it was his job alone. She didn't even know where he was going. He had said it was not permissible, in so critical a situation, for him to tell where Slovetski was. Zorchi coughed. "As to that," he said, "I have already taken the liberty of instructing one of my associates to be ready. If the Signore has gone to meet Slovetski, my man is following him..." So we waited, while the television announcers grew more and more grim-lipped and imperative. I listened with only half my mind. Part of my thoughts were with Benedetto, who should have been in a hospital instead of wandering around on some dangerous mission. And partly I was still filled with the spectacle that was unfolding before us. It was not merely a matter of preserving human lives. It was almost as important to provide the newly awakened men and women, fifty years from now, with food to eat and the homes and tools and other things that would be needed. Factories and transportation gear -- according to the telecasts -- were being shut down and sealed to stand up under the time that would pass -- "weeks," according to the telecast, but who needed to seal a tool in oil for a few weeks? Instructions were coming hourly over the air on what should be protected in each home, and how it was to be done. Probably even fifty years would not seriously damage most of the world's equipment -- if the plans we heard on the air could be efficiently carried out. But the farms were another matter. The preserving of seeds was routine, but I couldn't help wondering what these flat Italian fields would look like in fifty untended years. Would the radiocobalt sterilize even the weeds? I didn't think so, but I didn't know. If not, would the Italian peninsula once again find itself covered with the dense forests that Caesar had marched through, where Spartacus and his runaway slaves had lurked and struck out against the Senators? die while the forests were being cleared off the face of the Earth again to make way for grain? Synthetic foods and food from the sea might solve that -- the Company could find a way. But what about the mines -- three, four and five thousand feet down -- when the pumps were shut off and the underground water seeped in? What about the rails that the trains rode on? You could cosmoline the engines, perhaps, but how could you protect rains of fifty years? So I sat there, watching the television and waiting. Rena was too nervous to stay in one place. Zorchi had mysterious occupations of his own. I sat and stared at the cathode screen. Until the door opened behind me, and I turned to look. Rena was standing there. Her face was an ivory mask. She clutched the door as her father had a few hours before; I think she looked weaker and sicker than he. I said, for the first time, "Darling!" She stood silent, staring at me. I asked apprehensively, "What is it?" The pale lips opened, but it was a moment before she could frame the words. Then her voice was hard to hear. "My father," she said. "He reached the place where he was meeting Slovetski, but the expediters were there before him. They shot him down in the street. And they are on their way here." Somehow Benedetto had been betrayed; the expediters had known where he had come from. And that was the end of that. They came swarming down on us in waves, at least a hundred of them, to capture a man, a girl and a cripple -- Zorchi's servants had deserted us, melting into the hemp fields like roaches into a garbage dump. Zorchi had a little gun, a Beretta; he fired it once and wounded a man. The rest was short and unpleasant. They bound us and gagged us and flew us, trussed like game for the spit, to the clinic. I caught side the long, low walls as we came down. Then all I could see was the roof of the copter garage. We were brought to a tiny room where Defoe sat at a desk. The Underwriter was smiling. "Hello, Thomas," he said, his eyes studying the bruise on my cheek. He turned toward Rena consideringly. "So this is your choice, eh, Thomas?" He studied Rena coolly. "Hardly my type. Still, by sticking with me, you could have had a harem." Bound as I was, I started forward. Something hit me in the back at my first step, driving a hot rush of agony up from my kidneys. Defoe watched me catch my breath without a change of expression. "My men are quite alert, Thomas. Please do not try that again. Once is amusing, but twice would annoy me." He sighed. "I seem to have been wrong about you, Thomas. Perhaps because I needed someone's help, I overestimated you. I thought long ago that beneath your conditioning you had brains. Manning is a machine, good for taking orders. Dr. Lawton is loyal, but not intelligent. And between loyalty and intelligence, I'll take brains. Loyalty I can provide for myself." He nodded gravely at the armed expediters. Zorchi spat. "Kill us, butcher," he ordered. "It is enough I die without listening to your foolish babbling." Defoe considered him. "You interest me, Signore. A surprise, finding you revived and with Wills. Before we're finished, you must tell me about that." I saw Zorchi bristle and open his mouth, but a cold, suddenly calculating idea made me interrupt. "To get dell' Angela out as an attendant, I needed a patient for him to wheel. Zorchi had money, and I expected gratitude when I revived him later. It wasn't hard getting Lawton's assistant to stack his cocoon near Benedetto's." "Lawton!" Defoe grimaced, but seemed to accept the story. He smiled at me suddenly. "I had hopes for you, then. That escape was well done -- simple, direct. A little crude, but a good beginning. You could have been my number one assistant, Thomas. I thought of that when I heard of the things you were saying after Marianna died -- I thought you might be awaking." I licked my lips. "And when you picked me up after Marianna's death, and bailed me out of jail, you made sure the expediter corps had information that I was possibly not reliable. You made sure the information reached the underground, so they would approach me and I could spy for you. You wanted a patsy!" The smile was gleaming this time. "Naturally, until you could prove yourself. And of course, I had you jailed for the things you said because I wanted it that way. A pity all my efforts were wasted on you, Thomas. I'm afraid you're not equipped to be a spy." It took everything I had, but this time I managed to smile back. "On which side, Defoe? How many spies know you've got Millen Carmody down in Bay -- " That hit him. But I didn't have time to enjoy it. He made a sudden gesture, and the expediters moved. This time, when they dragged me down, it was very bad. another room. Zorchi and Rena were with me, but not Defoe. It was a preparation chamber, racked with instruments, furnished with surgical benches. A telescreen was flickering and blaring unheeded at one end of the room. I caught a glimpse of scenes of men, women and children standing in line, going in orderly queues through the medical inspections, filing into the clinic and its local branch stations for the sleep drug. The scenes were all in Naples; but they must have been, with local variations, on every telescreen on the globe. Dr. Lawton appeared. He commanded coldly: "Take your clothes off." I think that was the most humiliating moment of all. It was, of course, only a medical formality. I knew that the suspendees had to be nude in their racks. But the very impersonality of the proceeding made it ugly. Reluctantly I began to undress, as did Rena, silent and withdrawn, and Zorchi, sputtering anger and threats. My whole body was a mass of redness; in a few hours the red would turn to purple and black, where the hoses of the expediters had caressed me. Or did a suspendee bruise? Probably not. But it was small satisfaction. Lawton was looking smug; no doubt he had insisted on the privilege of putting us under himself after I'd blamed him for Zorchi's escape. I couldn't blame him; I would have returned the favor with great joy. Well, I had wanted to reach Millen Carmody, and Defoe was granting my wish. We might even lie on adjacent racks in Bay #. After what I'd told Defoe, we should rate such reserved space! Lawton approached with the hypospray, and a pair of expediters grabbed my arms. He said: "I want to leave one thought with you, Wills. Maybe it will give you some comfort." His smirk told me that it certainly would not. "Only Defoe and I can open Bay #," he reminded me. "I don't think either of us will; and I expect you will stay there a long, long time." He experimentally squirted a faint mist from the tip of the hypospray and nodded satisfaction. He went on: "The suspension is effective for a long time -- several hundred years, perhaps. But not forever. In time the enzymes of the body begin to digest the body itself." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I don't know if the sleeping brain knows it is pain or not. If it does, you'll know what it feels like to dissolve in your own gutwash..." He smiled. "Good night," he crooned, and bent over my arm. The spray from the end of the hypo felt chilly, but not at all painful. It was as though I had been touched with ice; the cold clung, and spread. I was vaguely conscious of being dumped on one of the surgical tables, even more vaguely aware of seeing Rena slumping across another. The light in the room yellowed, flickered and went out. I thought I heard Rena's voice... Then I heard nothing. And I saw nothing. And I felt nothing, except the penetrating cold, and then even the cold was gone. the prickling of an infinity of needles. I was cold -- colder than I had ever been. And over everything else came the insistent, blurred voice of Luigi Zorchi. "Weels! Week!" At first it was an annoyance. Then, abruptly, full consciousness came rushing back, bringing some measure of triumph with it. It had worked! My needling of Defoe and my concealing of Zorchi's ability to revive himself had succeeded in getting us all put into Bay #, where the precious hypodermic and fluid were hidden. After being pushed from pillar to post and back, even that much success was enough to shock me into awareness. My heart was thumping like a rusty cargo steamer in a high sea. My lungs ached for air and burned when they got it. But I managed to open my eyes to see Zorchi bending over me. Beyond him, I saw the blue-lighted sterilizing lamps, the door that opened from inside, and the racked suspendees of Bay #. "It is time! But now finally you awake, you move!" Zorchi grumbled. "The body of Zorchi does not surrender to poisons; it throws them off. But then because of these small weak legs, I must wait for you! Come, Weels, no more dallying! We have still work to do to escape this abomination!" I sat up clumsily, but the drugs seemed to have been neutralized. I was on the bottom tier, and I managed to locate the floor with my legs and stand up. "Thanks, Zorchi," I told him, trying to avoid looking at his ugly, naked body and the things that were almost his legs. "Thanks are due," he admitted. "I am a modest man who expects no praise, but I have done much. I cannot deny it. It took greatness to crawl through this bay to find you. On my hands and these baby knees, Weels, I crawled. Almost I am overcome with wonder at so heroic -- But I digress. Weels, waste no more time in talking. We must revive the others who are above my reach. Then let us, for God, go and find food." Somehow, though I was still weak, I managed to follow Zorchi and drag down the sacks containing Rena and Carmody. And while waiting for them to revive, I began to realize how little chance we would have to escape this time, naked and uncertain of what state affairs were in. I also realized what might happen if Lawton or Defoe decided to check up on Bay # now! For the few minutes while Rena revived and recognized me, and while I explained how I'd figured it out, it was worth any risk. Then finally, Carmody stirred and sat up. Maybe we looked enough like devils in a blue hell to justify his first expression. mental image of the great Millen Carmody. His face was like his picture, but it was an older face and haggard under the ugly light. Age was heavy on him, and he couldn't have been a noble figure at any time. Now he was a pot-bellied little man with scrawny legs and a faint tremble to his hands. But there was no fat in his mind as he tried to absorb our explanations while he answered our questions in turn. He'd come to Naples, bringing his personal physician, Dr. Lawton. His last memory was of Lawton giving him a shot to relieve his indigestion. It must have been rough to wake up here after that and find what a mess had been made of the world. But he took it, and his questions became sharper as he  groped for the truth. Finally he sat back, nodding sickly. "Defoe!" he said bitterly. "Well, what do we do now, Mr. Wills?" It shook me. I'd unconsciouslyexpected him to take over at once. But the eyes of Rena and Zorchi also turned to me. Well, there wasn't much choice. We couldn't stay here and risk discovery. Nor could we hide anywhere in the clinic; when Defoe found us gone, no place would be safe. "We pray," I decided. "And if prayers help, maybe we'll find some way out." "I can help," Carmody offered. He grimaced. "I know this place and the combination to the private doors. Would it help if we reached the garage?" I didn't know, but the garage was half a mile beyond the main entrance. If we could steal a car, we might make it. We had to try. There were sounds of activity when we opened the door, but the section we were in seemed to be filled, and the storing of suspendees had moved elsewhere. We shut and relocked the door and followed Carmody through the seemingly endless corridors, with Zorchi hobbling along, leaning on Rena and me and sweating in agony. We offered to carry him, but he would have none of that. We moved further and further back, while the sight of Carmody's round, bare bottom ahead ripped my feeling of awe for him into smaller and smaller shreds. He stopped at a door I had almost missed and his fingers tapped out something on what looked like an ornamental pattern. The door opened to reveal stairs that led down two flights, winding around a small elevator shaft. At the bottom was a long corridor that must be the one leading underground to the garage. Opposite the elevator was another door, and Carmody worked its combination to reveal a storeroom, loaded with supplies the expediters might need. He ripped a suit of the heavy gray coveralls off the wall and began donning them. "Radiation suits," he explained. They were ugly things, but better than nothing. Anyone seeing us in them might think we were on official business. Zorchi shook off our help and somehow got into a pair. Then he grunted and began pulling hard-pellet rifles and bandoliers of ammunition off the wall. ' pared. Let them come against us. Zorchi is ready!" "Ready to kill yourself!" I said roughly. "Those things take practice!" "And again I am the freak -- the case who can do nothing that humans can do, eh, Weels?" He swore thickly, and there was something in his voice that abruptly roughened it. "Never Zorchi the man! There are Sicilians who would tell you different, could they open dead mouths to speak of their downed planes!" "He was the best jet pilot Naples had," Rena said quietly. It was my turn to curse. He was right; I hadn't thought of him as a man, or considered that he could do anything but regrow damaged tissues. "I'm sorry, Luigi!" "No matter." He sighed, and then shrugged. "Come, take arms and ammunition and let us be out of this place. Even the nose of Zorchi can stand only so much of the smell of assassins!" We moved down the passage, staggering along for what seemed to be hours, expecting every second to run into some official or expediter force. But apparently the passage wasn't being used much during the emergency. We finally reached stairs at the other end and headed up, afraid to attract attention by taking the waiting elevator. At the top, Carmody frowned as he studied the side passages and doors. "Here, I guess," he decided. "This may still be a less used part of the garage." He reached for the door. I stopped him. "Wait a minute. Is there any way back in, once we leave?" "The combination will work -- the master combination used by the Company heads. Otherwise, these doors are practically bomb-proof!" He pressed the combination and opened the door a crack. Outside, I could see what seemed to be a small section of the Company car pool. There were sounds of trucks, but none were moving nearby. I saw a few men working on trucks a distance from us. Maybe luck was on our side. I pointed to the nearest expediter patrol wagon -- a small truck, really, enclosed except for the driver's seat. "That one, if there's fuel. We'll have to act as if we had a right to it, and hope for the best. Zorchi, can you manage it that far?" "I shall walk like a born assassin," he assured me, but sweat began popping onto his forehead at what he was offering. Yet there was no sign of the agony he must have felt as he followed and managed to climb into the back with Rena and Carmody. The fuel gauge was at the half mark and, as yet, there was no cry of alarm. I gunned the motor into life, watching the nearest workmen. They looked up casually, and then went back to their business. Ahead, I could see a clear lane toward the exit, with a few other trucks moving in and out. I headed for it, my hair prickling at the back of my neck. passed through it, and were soon blending into the stream of cars that were passing the clinic on their way out for more suspension cases. The glass doors of the entrance were gone now, and workmen were putting up huge steel ones in their place, even while a steady stream of cases were hobbling or being carried into the clinic. Most of them were old or shabby, I noticed. The class-D type. The last ones to be admitted. We must have spent more time in the vault than I'd thought, and zero hour was drawing near. Beyond the clinic, the whole of Anzio was a mass of abandoned cars that seemed to stretch for miles, arid the few buildings not boarded up were obviously class-D dwellings, too poor to worry about. I cursed my way through a jam-up of trucks, and managed to find one of the side roads. Then I pressed down on the throttle as far as I dared without attracting attention, until I could find a safe place to turn off with no other cars near to see me. "Where to?" I asked. We couldn't go back to Zorchi's, since any expediter investigation would start there. Maybe we'd never be missed, but I couldn't risk it. If we had to, we could use some abandoned villa and hide out, but I was hoping for a better suggestion. Zorchi looked blank, and Rena shrugged. "If we could only find Nikolas -- " she suggested doubtfully. I shook my head. I'd had a chance to think about that a little while the expediters took us to see Defoe, and I didn't like it. The leader of the revolution had apparently been captured by Defoe. According to Benedetto dell'Angela, he'd escaped. Yet Defoe hadn't tried to pump us about him. And when Benedetto set out to meet him, the expediters had descended at once. It made an ugly picture. I had no wish to go looking for the man. "There's my place," Carmody said finally. "I had places all over the world, kept ready for me and stocked. If Defoe let it be thought that I had retired, he must have kept them all up as I'd have done. Wait, let me orient myself. Up that road." Places all over the world, with food that was wasted, and with servants who might never see their master! And I'd been brought up believing that the Underwriters were men of quiet, simple tastes! Carmody's clay feet were beginning to crumble up to the navel! by trees, on a low hill that overlooked an artificial lake. It had been sealed off, but the combination lock yielded to Carmody's touch. There were beds made up and waiting, freezers stocked with food that sent Zorchi into ecstasy, and even a complete file of back issues of the Company paper. Carmody headed for those, with the look of a man hunting his lost past. He had a lot of catching up to do. But it was the television set that interested me. It was still working, with taped material being broadcast. The appeal had been stepped up, asking for order and cooperation; I recognized the language as being pitched toward the lower classes now, though. And the clicking of a radiationcounter sounded as a constant background, with occasional shots of its meter, the needle well into the danger area. Zorchi joined me and Rena, dribbling crumbs of meat down his beard. He snorted as he caught sight of the counter. "There is a real one in the other room, and it registers higher," he said. "It is interesting. For me, of no import. Doctors whom I trust have said Defoe is wrong; my body can resist damage from radiation -- and perhaps even from old age. But for you and the young lady..." He shut up at my expression, but the tape cut off and a live announcer came on before I could say anything. "A bulletin just in," he said, "shows that the government of Naples has unanimously passed a moritorium on all contracts, obligations and indebtedness for the duration of the emergency. The Company has just followed this with a declaration that it will extend the moritorium to include all crimes against the Company. During the emergency, the clinics will be available to all without prejudice, Director Defoe said today." "A trap," Rena guessed. "We wouldn't have a chance, anyhow. But, Tom, does the other mean that -- " "It means your father was wrong," I answered. "As of right now -- and probably in every government at the same time -- the Company has been freed from any responsibility." It didn't make any difference, of course. Benedetto had expected that everyone must secretly hate the Company as he did; he hadn't realized that men who have just been saved from the horrible danger of radiation death aren't going to turn against the agency that saved them. And damn it, the Company was saving them, after its opponents had risked annihilation of the race. Defoe would probably make sure the suspendees were awakened at a rate where he could keep absolute power, but not from any danger of bankruptcy. listened, attracted by the broadcast radiation clicking, apparently. Now he asked enough questions to discover Benedetto's idea, and shook his head. "It wouldn't work," he agreed with me. "Even if I still had control, I couldn't permit such a thing. What good would it do? Could money payments make food for a revived world, Miss dell'Angela? Would bankrupting the only agency capable of rebuilding the Earth be a thing of honor? Besides, even with what I've read, I can see no hope. There's nothing we can do." "But if you can arouse the other Underwriters against Defoe," she insisted, "at least you can prevent his type of world!" He shook his head. "How? All communications are in his hands. Even if I could fly to the Home Office, most of the ones I could trust -- and there apparently are a few Defoe hasn't been able to retire -- would be scattered, out of my reach. A week ago, there might have been a chance. Now, it's impossible. Impossible." He shook his head sadly and wandered back toward the library. I could see that in his secret thoughts, he was wishing we'd left him safely in the vault. Maybe it would have been just as well. "Cheer up," I told Rena. "Carmody's an old man -- too old to think in terms of direct action, even when it's necessary. Defoe doesn't own the world yet!" But later, when I located the books I wanted in the library and went out into the vine-covered bower in the formal garden, I wasn't as confident as I'd pretended. Thinking wasn't a pleasant job, after all the years when I'd let others do my thinking for me. But now I had to do it for myself. Otherwise, the only alternative was to plan some means of quick death for us all before the radiation got too intense. And I couldn't accept that. Rena had managed something Marianna couldn't have conceived -- she'd quietly relinquished her fate into my hands, gambling on me with everything she had. Whether I wanted to or not, I'd taken the responsibility. Carmody was an old man, one who hadn't been able to keep Defoe from taking over in the first place. And Zorchi -- well, he was Zorchi. That night, the radiation detector suddenly took a sharp lift, its needle crossing over into the red. It was probably only a local rise. But it didn't make my thinking any more comfortable. morning when I finally took it up with Carmody. "Just what will the situation be at the clinic after they close down? How many will be kept awake? And what about their defenses?" He frowned, trying to see my idea. Then he shrugged. "Too many, Tom. We had plotted out a course for such things as this a number of times in Planning. And our mob psychologists warned that there'd inevitably be a few who for one reason or another wouldn't come in in time, but who would then grow desperate and try to break in. Outlaws, looters, procrastinators, fanatics. That sort. So for some time, there should be at least twenty guards kept alert. And that's enough to defend a clinic. Atomic cannon at every entrance, of course, and the clinics are bombproof." "Twenty, eh? And how about Defoe and Lawton? Will they sleep?" It seemed logical that they couldn't stay out of suspension for the whole fifty years or so. There'd be no profit to gaining a world after they were too old to use it. "Not at first. There's a great deal of final administrative work to be done. There's a chamber equipped to keep a hundred or so men awake with radiation washed from the air, and containing adequate supplies, in cable contact with other clinics. They'll be there. Later, they'll take shifts, with only a couple of men awake at a time, I suppose. They may age a little that way, but not much." He frowned again, and then slowly nodded. "It could be done, if we had some way to wait safely for six months. Getting back in is no problem for me." "It's going to be done," I told him. "And a lot sooner. Are you "Have I any choice?" He shrugged again. "Do you think I haven't been sick at the idea of a man like Defoe in command of the Company for as long as he lives? Tom, my family started the Company. I've got an obligation to restore it to its right course. If there's any chance of keeping Defoe from being emperor of the world, I've got to take it. If you can put me in a position where I can get the honest Underwriters together again, where we can set up the Company as it was -- " "Why? So this will happen all over again?" He looked shocked at Rena's question. "I don't blame you for being bitter, Miss dell'Angela. But with Defoe gone -- " "The Company made Defoe possible. In fact, it made him and Slovetski inevitable," I told him flatly. "That's its one great crime. Whenever you take power com pletely out of the hands of the many, it winds up in fewer and fewer hands. Those histories I was reading last night prove that. Carmody, what do you know about your own Company? Or the world? Leave the consolidation of power in Company hands out of it, and what has happened to progress?" He frowned. "Well, we've leveled off a bit. We had to. We couldn't risk -- " "Exactly. You couldn't risk research that would lead to increased longevity -- too many pensioners. You couldn't risk going to Mars -- unpredictable dangers. You had to make the world fit actuarial charts. I remember seeing one of the first suspendees awakened. He expected things we could have done fifty years ago -- and never will do. How many men today work their way out of their class? And why have classes so rigidly stratified? I've been reading your own speeches of nearly fifty years ago. I've got them here, together with some tables. Like to see them?" and began going through them, his shock giving way to a grudging realization. Maybe without the jolt of his awakening, he'd have laughed them off, but nothing was easy to dismiss with the hell brewing outside. At last he looked up. "Tom, I'll admit the many times when I've been worried. I've considered starting research again countless times. I've been aware that dependence was growing too heavy on the Company. But we can't just toss it aside. It did bring an end to major war, when such a war would have ruined the Earth completely. It showed that nobody had to starve -- that hardly anyone had to lack for any necessity, or die for lack of care. You can't throw that away." "You can throw away its unrelated power." I knew I didn't have the answers. All this had been growing slowly in my mind since I'd first found Benedetto a political prisoner, but a lifetime wasn't enough to think it out, even with the books I'd found. But I had to try. "In the middle ages, they had morality and politics tied into one bundle, Carmody. The church ruled. It wasn't good and they finally had to divorce church and state. Maybe the same applies to administrative politics and economics. The Company has shown what can be done economically. The church has survived as a great moral force outside material power. Now let's see if we can't put things in perspective. "There's a precedent. The United States -- the old government -- was set up on the idea of balance of power: an elected Congress for the people to handle legislative tasks, a selected President to handle executive affairs, and a Judiciary mostly independent. On a world scale, as it can be done today -- since the Company has really made it one world -- the same can be done, with something like the Company to insure economics." "I suppose every man who had any idealism has thought the same," Carmody said slowly. He sighed softly. "I remember trying to preach it to my father when I was just out of college. You're right. But can you set up such a perfect government? Can I? Tell me how, Tom, and I'll give you your chance, if I can." Zorchi laughed cynically, but that was what I'd hoped Carmody might say. "All right," I told him. "We can't do it. No one man is fit to rule, ever, or to establish rule. Oh, I had wish-dreams, a few days ago, I suppose, about what I'd do, if! But men have set out to establish new systems before, and done good jobs of it. Read the Constitution -- a system put together artificially by expert political thinkers, and good for two hundred years, at least! And they didn't have our opportunities. For the first time, the world has to wait. Get the best minds you can, Carmody. Give them twenty-five years to work it out. They can come up with an answer. And then, when the world is awakened, you can start with it, fresh, without upsetting any old order. Is that your answer?" "Most of it." There was a sudden light in his old eyes. "Yes, the sleep does make the chance possible. But how are you going to get the experts and assemble them?" I pointed to Zorchi. "Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He's a jet pilot who can get all over the world. And he can move outside, without needing to worry about radiation." "So?" Zorchi snorted again. "So, I am now your messenger, Weels! Do you think I would trouble myself so much for all of you, Weels?" I grinned at him. "You defiantly speak of being a man. That makes you part of the human race. I'm simply taking you at your word." "So?" he repeated, his face wooden. "Such a messenger would have much power, Weels. Suppose I choose to be Zorchi the ruler?" "Not while Zorchi the man is also Zorchi the freak," I said with deliberate cruelty. "Go look at yourself." And suddenly he smiled, his lips drawing back from his teeth. "Weels, for the first time you are honest. And for that as well as that I am a man, I will be Zorchi the messenger. But first, should we not decide on a plan of action? Or do we first rule and then conquer?" "We wait first," I told him. On the wall, the radiation indicator clicked steadily, its needle moving further into the red. vision went off the air with the final curt announcement that anyone not inside the clinics at noon would be left outside permanently. Then the set went dead, leaving only the clucking and beeping of our own radiation indicator. I'd thrown it out twice and brought it back both times. Civilization had ended on the third day, though all the conveniences in the villa went on smoothly, except for the meter reading that told us nothing could be smooth. It was higher than the predictions I had heard, though I still hoped that was only a sporadic local phenomenon that would level out later. In the face of that, it was hard to believe that even a few men would remain outside the clinics, though I was counting on it. We waited another twenty-four hours, forcing ourselves to sit in the villa, discussing plans, when our nerves were yelling for action. We had only an estimate to go on. If we got there too soon, there would be more awake than we could handle. Too late and we'd be radiation cases, good for nothing but the vaults. It was a relief to leave at last, taking our weapons in the truck. We were wearing the radiation suits, hoping they'd protect us, and Zorchi spent the last two days devising pads and straps to cushion and strengthen his developing legs. The world was dead. Cars had been abandoned in the middle of the road, making driving difficult. The towns and villas were deserted, boarded up or simply abandoned. We might have been the last men on Earth, and we felt that we were as we headed for Anzio. This wasn't just a road, or Naples -- or all of Italy. It was the world. Then Rena pointed. Ahead, a boy was walking beside a dog, the animal's left rear leg bound and splintered as if it had been broken. I started to slow, then forced myself to drive on. As we passed, I saw that the boy was about fourteen, and his face was dirty and tear-streaked. He shook one fist at us, and came trudging on. "If we win, we'll have the door open when he gets there," Rena said. "For him and his dog! If not, it won't matter how long it takes him. You couldn't stop, Tom." It didn't make me feel any better. But now dusk was falling, and we slowed, waiting until it was dark to park quietly near the garage. In front of the entrance, I could see a small ring of fires, and by their light a few figures moving about. They were madmen, of course -- and yet, probably less mad than others who must be prowling through the towns, looting for things they could never use. It seemed incredible that any one could be outside, but the psychologists had apparently been right. These were deterthe forlorn chance that some miracle might give them a futile, even more forlorn chance to try battering down the great doors. Maybe somewhere in the world, such a group might succeed. But not here. As I watched, there was a crackle of automatic gunfire from the entrance. The guards were awake, all right, and not taking chances on any poor devil getting too close. vault garage. We were prepared in case someone might be stationed inside the private entrance, as much prepared as we could be; since Carmody had been listed as still living, an ordinary guard who recognized him would probably let us in first and then try to report -- giving us time to handle him. But we were lucky. The door opened to Carmody's top-secret combination. "We designed such combinations into a few doors in case of internal revolution locally while no Underwriters were around. We never considered having an Underwriter lead a revolution from outside," he whispered to us. The underground passage was deserted, and this time Carmody led through another corridor, to a stairs that seemed to wind up forever. Zorchi groaned, then caught himself. "It leads to the main reception room," Carmody said. With the men outside, most of the guards who still remained awake might be there. But we had to chance it. We stopped when we reached the top, catching our breath while Zorchi sank to the floor, writhing silently. Then Rena threw back the door, Zorchi's rifle poked through, and I was leaping for the main door controls, hoping the memory I had was accurate. I was nearly to them when the two guards standing beside them turned. They yelled, just as my rifle spat. At that range, I couldn't miss. And behind, I heard Zorchi's gun spit. The second guard slumped sickly to the floor, holding his stomach. I grabbed for the controls, while other yells sounded, and feet began pounding toward me. There was no time to look back. The doors were slowly moving apart and Carmody was beside me, smashing a maul from the storeroom onto the electronic controls of the atomic cannon. I twisted between the opening doors. "We've seized the vaults," I shouted. "We need help. Any man who joins us will be saved!" I couldn't wait to watch, but I heard a hoarse, answering shout, and the sound of feet. Carmody's maul had ruined the door controls. But the other guards were nearly on us. I saw two more sprawled on the floor. Zorchi hadn't missed. Then Carmody's fingers had found another of the private doors that looked like simple panels here. Rena and Carmody were through, and I yanked Zorchi after me, just as a bullet whined over his head. Behind us, I heard uncontrolled yelling as men from outside began pouring in. It was our only hope. They had to take care of the guards, who were still probably shocked at finding us inside. We headed for the private quarters where Defoe would be, praying that there would be only a few there. to us, though. It led from office to office for the doctors who superintended here. We came out into an office, watching our chance for the hall we had to take. I could see the men who had been outside in action now. A few had guns of some kind, but the clubs in the hands of the others were just as deadly in such a desperation attack; men who had seen themselves already dead weren't afraid of chances. About a score of the expediter guards were trying to hold off at least twice their number. Then the hall seemed clear and we leaped into it. Suddenly gongs began ringing everywhere. Some guard had finally reached or remembered the alarm system. Carmody cursed, and tried to move faster. The small private vault for the executives lay through the administration quarters and down several levels, before it was entered through a short passageway. Carmody had mapped it for me often enough. But he knew it by physical memory, which was better than my training. He'd also taught me the combination, but I left the door to his practiced fingers when we came to it. The elevator wasn't up. We couldn't wait. We raced down the stairs that circled it. Here Carmody's age told against him, and he fell behind. Rena and I were toing down neck and neck with Zorchi throwing himself along with us. He had dropped his rifle and picked up a sub-machine gun from one of the fallen guards, and he clung to it now, using only one hand on the rail. It was a reflection on a gunbarrel that saved us. The picked expediters were hidden in the dark mouth of the passageway, waiting for us to turn the stairs. But I caught a gleam of metal, and threw up my gun. Instantly, Zorchi was beside me, the submachine splitting as quickly as I could fire the first shot. "Aim for the wall. Ricochet!" The ambushers had counted too much on surprise. They weren't ready to have the tables turned, nor for the trick Zorchi had suggested. Here we couldn't fire directly, but the bouncing shots worked almost as well. There were screams of men being hit, and the crazed pandemonium of others suddenly afraid. Shots came toward us, but the wall that protected them -- or was supposed to -- ruined their shooting. Zorchi abruptly dropped, landing with a thud on his side. I grunted sickly, thinking he was hit. Then I saw the sub-machine gun point squarely into the passageway. It began spitting out death. By the time we could reach him, the expediters were dead or dying. There had been seven of them. Zorchi staggered into the passage, through the bodies, crying something. I jumped after him, blinking my eyes to make out what he had seen. Then I caught sight of a door at the back being silently closed. It was a thick, massive slab, like the door to a bank vault. Zorchi made a final leap that brought a sob of anguish as he landed on his weak legs, but his gun barrel slapped into the slit of opening. The door ground against it, strained and stopped. Zorchi pulled the trigger briefly. was silence. A second later, Defoe's voice came out through the thin slit. "You win. Dr. Lawton and I are alone and unarmed. We're coming out." The door began opening again, somewhat jerkily this time. I watched it, expecting a trick, but there was none. Inside the vault, the first room was obviously for guards and for the control of the equipment needed to wash all contamination out of the air and to provide the place with security for a century, even if all the rest of the Earth turned into a radioactive hell. Lawton was slumped beside the controls, his head cradled in his arms. But at the sight of us, he stood up groggily, his mouth open, and shock on his face. Defoe's eyes widened a trifle, but he stood quietly, and the bleak smile never faltered. "Congratulations, Thomas," he said. "My one fault again -- I underrated the opposition. I wasn't expecting miracles. Hello, Millen. Fancy meeting you here." "Search the place," I ordered. Carmody went past the two without looking at them, with Rena close behind. A minute later, I heard a triumphant shout. They came back with a cringing man who seemed totally unlike the genial Sam Gogarty who had first introduced me to fine food and to Rena. His eyes were on Carmody, and his skin was gray white. He started to babble incoherently. Carmody grinned at him. "You've got things twisted, Gogarty. Tom Wills is in charge of this affair." He turned toward one of the smaller offices. "As I remember it, there should be a transmitting setup in here. I want to make sure it works. If it does, some of the Underwriters are going to get a surprise, unless they're suspended." Gogarty watched him go, and then sank slowly to a chair, shaking his head as he looked up at me. His lips twisted into bitter resignation. "You wouldn't understand, Tom. All my life, worked for things. Class-C, digging in a mine, eating Class-D, getting no fun, so I could buy Class-B employment. Then Class-A. Not many can do it, but I sweated it out. Thirty years living like a and study. Not even a real woman until I met Susan, and she went to Defoe. But I wanted it easier for the young men. I wanted everybody to have a good life. No harm to anyone. Pull together, and forget the tough times. Then you had to come and blow the roof off..." all true, and few men could make it. But if that's what it took to advance under the Company rules, it was justification enough for our fight. "You'll be all right, Sam," I told him. "You'll go to sleep with the others. And when you wake up, you may have to work like hell again, but it'll be to rebuild the Earth, not to ruin it. Maybe there'll even be a chance with Susan again." Defoe laughed sardonically. "Very nice, Thomas. And I suppose you mean it. What's in the future for me?" "Suspension until the new government gets organized and can decide your case. I'd like to vote now for permanent suspension." His face lost some of his amusement. Then he shrugged. "All right, I suppose I knew that. But now will you satisfy my curiosity? Just how did you work the business with Bay #?" "What happened to Slovetski?" I asked. I couldn't be sure about some of my suspicions over Benedetto's death, but I couldn't take chances that the man might still be loose somewhere, or else hiding out here until we were off guard. He shook his head. "I can answer, but I'm waiting for a better offer." "Sam?" I asked. Gogarty nodded slowly. "All right, Tom. I guess you're the boss now. And I think I'm even glad of it. I always liked you. I'll answer about Slovetski." Defoe snarled and swung, then saw my rifle coming up, and straightened again. "You win once more, Thomas. Your great international rebel cooperated with us very nicely after we caught him. We arranged for him to receive all calls to his most secret hideout right here in this room. It netted us his fellow conStudy at home 'W'dL'fclx. the University for a life long investment in self-improvement... wherever you may be. Broaden your horizons... add to your intellectual skills and fund of knowledge... improve your professional competence. Philosophy, Psychology, Mathematics (beginning and advanced), Creative Writing, Semantics, Modern Art, Meteorology, Pharmacology, Poetry, Social Sciences, time... study at your convenition-by-mail with a University instructor, in courses like... Symbolic Logic Elementary Theory of Numbers Human Relations in Industry Culture and Personality For full information write for the The Home-Study Dept. spirators -- including your father, Miss dell'Angela!" She gasped faintly, but her head came up at once. "Nikolas was no traitor. You're lying!" "Why should I lie?" he asked. "With the right use of certain drugs, any man can become a traitor. And Dr. Lawton is an expert on drugs." "Where is he?" I asked. He shrugged. "How should I know? He wanted a radioactive world, so I let him enjoy it. We put him outside just before we closed the doors permanently." Gogarty nodded confirmation. I turned it over. He might even have been one of the men waiting outside. But it wouldn't matter. Without his organization and with a world where life outside was impossible, Slovetski's power was finished. I turned to Zorchi. "The men who broke in will be going crazy soon," I told him. "While Rena finds the paging system and reassures them they'll all be treated in the reception room, how about getting Lawton to locate and revive a couple of the doctors you know and trust?" paging system, and Zorchi prodded Lawton with the gun, heading him toward the files that would show the location of the doctors. Gogarty stood up doubtfully, but I shook my head. Zorchi was able to handle a man of Lawton's type, even without full use of his legs, and I couldn't trust Gogarty yet. "You can give me a hand with Defoe, Sam," I suggested. "We'd better strap him down first." Gogarty nodded, and then suddenly let out a shocked cry, and was cringing back! In the split second when both Rena and I had looked away, Defoe had whipped out an automatic and was now covering us, his teeth exposed in a taut smile. "Never underestimate an opponent, Thomas," he said. "And never believe what he says. You should have searched me, you know." The gun was centered on Rena, and he waited, as if expecting me to make some move. All I could do was stand there, cursing myself. I'd thought of everything -- except the obvious! Defoe backed toward the door and slipped around it, drawing its heavy weight slowly shut until only a crack showed. Then he laughed. "Give my love to Millen," he said, and laughed softly. I jumped for the door, but his feet were already moving out of the passage. The door began opening again, but I knew it was too late. Then, it was open. And amazingly, Defoe stood not ten feet away. At the other end of the passage, a ragged bloody figure was standing, swaying slowly from side to side, holding a rifle. I took a second look to recognize Nikolas Slovetski. He was moving slowly toward Defoe. And now Defoe jerked back and began frantically digging for the automatic he must have pocketed. Slovetski leaped, tossing the gun aside in a way that indicated it must have been empty. A bullet from Defoe's automatic caught his shoulder in mid-leap, but it couldn't stop him. He crashed squarely on Defoe, swinging a knife as the other went down. It missed, ringing against the hard floor. I'd come unfrozen by then. I kicked the knife aside and grabbed the gun from Defoe's hands. Slovetski lay limp on him, and I rolled the smaller man aside. the blow of his head hitting the floor. Gogarty had come out behind me and now began binding him up. He opened his eyes slowly, blinked, and tried to grin as he stared at the bonds. He swung his head to the figure on the floor beside him. "Shall we go quietly, Nikolas?" he asked, as Gogarty picked him up and carried him back to the private vault. not hours, but days of reading! #  Three full-length science fiction novels! While they last -- surprise packages of three exciting new novels (over # pages each). A sample from our bulging shelves, by today's favorite science fiction writers. Only #c for the three-book package! A real bargain! #c you may sample our books at least expense. After writing you will get our monthly, ever-changing catalog of great bargains, classics, and rare finds in science fiction and fantasy. No obligation. Don't wait. Write today! fiction readers Dept, G-#, # E, San Fernando St San Jose I #, Calif. But his sarcasm was wasted on Slovetski. The man must have been dying as he stumbled and groped his way toward the place where he knew Defoe must be. And the bullet in the shoulder had finished him. Rena bent over him, a faint sob on her lips. Surprisingly, he fought his way back to consciousness, staring up at her. "Rena," he said weakly. "Benedetto! I loved him. I -- " Then his head rolled toward me. "At least, I lived to die in a revolution, Thomas. Dirty business, revolution. When in the course of human events, it becomes -- " He died before he could finish. I went looking for Lawton, to make sure Defoe was suspended at once. He'd be the last political suspendee, if I had anything to do with it, but there would be a certain pleasure in watching Lawton do the job. hall were closed again, but there was no lock now. One of the two doctors whom Zorchi had trusted was there now, waiting for the stragglers who came in slowly as a result of our broadcast. We couldn't reach them all, of course, but some could be saved. The men who had fought with us were treated and suspended. Even the boy and his # dog had finally reached us and been put away. In the main room of the executive vault, Carmody was waiting for Rena and me as we came in, haggard from lack of sleep, but somehow younger-looking than he had been since we had first revived him. He stood up, managing a tired smile. "The first work's done, Tom," he said. "It wasn't too hard, once they learned Defoe was suspended; a lot of the others were afraid of him, I guess. So far, I've only contacted the ones I can trust, but it's a beginning. I've gotten tapes of their delegation of authority to you as acting assistant Chief Underwriter. I guess the factor that influenced to give up all hopes of suspension for the emergency. And having Zorchi was a help, too -- one man like him is worth an army now. I'll introduce you tomorrow." He stumbled out, heading toward the sleeping quarters. Well, I had the chance I'd wanted. And I had his promise to put off suspension until things were running properly. With time to develop a small staff, and with a chance to begin the work of locating the men to study the problems that had to be solved, I couldn't ask for much more. Zorchi grinned at me. "Emperor Weels!" he mocked. I grinned back. "If you ever say that seriously, Luigi, I want you to say it with a bullet through my brain. I've seen enough cases of power corrupting." TT'OR A second, he studied me. "If that day should come, then there shall be the bullet. But now, even I must sleep," he said. Then he glanced at Rena. "I have left orders that a priest should be wakened." She colored faintly. "You'll be best man, I suppose?" I asked. This time, even his beard couldn't conceal his amusement. "Is Zorchi not always the best man?" he asked as he left us alone. I stared at the vault that would be my home for the next twentyfive or fifty years -- until I was an old man, and the rest of the world was ready to be awakened. "It's a lousy place to spend a honeymoon," I told Rena. She leaned against me. "But perhaps a good place to bring up children," she said. "A place to teach them that their children will have a good world, Tom. That's all a woman ever wants, I guess." I drew her to me. It was a good way to think of the future, whatever happened. And it would be a better world, where the virtues of the Company could be used. Probably it wouldn't be perfect. Even the best form of government all the experts could devise couldn't offer a permanent solution. 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( Continued from page # ) blunt spaceman's idiom: We need androids like a hole in the hull -- till we reach the stars. His argument that the "disgusting uses" to which we've put lab-made life is downright nonsensical. If anything, they have helped by footing research bills. Amazon Adventure by Cherry Lane. Wow Publishers, Miami; I reel, # credits Another wheelchair tour of jungle suburbia. Diana Beresford, a restless heiress, falls in love with Oto, chief (mayor, naturally) of the Jivaro tribe, and they open a supposedly prosperous souvenir shop -- as if every home weren't already overloaded with shrunken heads! The one genuine note is the description of the manufacture of assembly-line shrunken android heads for export. This, by the way, is one of the "disgusting uses" Brody objects to, even though the manufacturers certify the heads were never alive. The Romance of Disease by reels, Emutown; V # reel, V # credit This juvenile (age #-#) from the fabulously successful Ulnas is a series of short romanticized biographies of the people who conquered everything from cancer to canker and how the cures were found and operate. Old stuff, but not to the kiddies. Undersea Murder by Murray Hill. Gore, Inc.; I reel, I credit Mike Ballpeen, rough, tough foreman in Kelp Colony and detective on the side, is up to his usual ingenious tricks when he traps the ambush slayer of a sludge-sled driver. Naturally, he is sleuth, judge, jury and executioner, this time with a harpoon in the midriff. A very workmanlike job, which isn't surprising -- Murray Hill is an undersea workman who writes in his spare time. Nature's Call by Bron O'Lorde. Natural Associates, Zululand; # clips, ## credit Natural Associates probably have something when they urge us to leave our urban society for the land. There's only one problem: where can you find land, outside of city botanical gardens? Transmutation for the Home, edited by How-# Kits, Ltd., Zurich; # reels, blueprints, tools, raw materials; # credits Arrived too late for review. Posterity Are We by Margot Fotheringhill. Poetry House, Middlesex; I reel, # credits Arrived too soon for review. Anyone For Doomsday? Not You! Not Us ! thing that is possible -- and can make a good story -- goes Doomsday is only one possible future out of many: The conquest of other planets... Invasions of Earth... Other dimensions... Immortality... Strange and exciting future civilizations that ha ve their roots right in the present... magazine of ideas brought vividly to life! For I # convincing issues, send # or # for # issues, TO #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y, Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation. Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. 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All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Featuring such classics " Jelly Roll Blues' " Honeysuckle Rose' " Basin #. "Blues' etc. A Treasury of Jazz Performances, Encompassing Every Jazz Eral kmmi or ma mtoa iax Art Tatum rw oriiANi Munn sopxano iax Erroll Garner wou' most roruiAi jazz pianist Chaplin Parker nw pasmous o' on alto sax trumpet; Albert Nicholas, clarinet; Red Norvo, vibes; Flip Phillips, tenor sax; Billy Taylor, ptano; Milt Hinton, bass; etc. N OW you can begin to build that library of the imperishable "all-time introductory offer: # superb jazz classics -- not I each, but all ten for only I ! 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I enclose # as complete payment; please send me postpaid plus' i the # high-fidelity long-playing "all-time great" jazz classics, M "' free copyof "This Music Called Jazz." Also Trial Membership in my name. I am not obligated to buy any other recordings from the Society. I am to receive an advance description of monthly selections. I may try any of these -- free of charge -- without paying a penny in advance. I may reject any recording, before or after I receive it, and may cancel Trial Membership at any time. In future, for each selection I decide to keep. I will pay the special member's price of just # phis few cents shipping and excise tax... a saving of over # off tit usual retail price! N ame  book called Foremost Films of #, assembled by Frank Vreeland and published by Pitman. I do and I can't account for it. Why #? Why not # or #? But that's not the puzzle. Since you don't have a copy, I'll give some listings that hint at the awesome secret I detect here. 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Happy Landing (American bandleader dances twice with Norwegian girl, which means they are engaged, according to local custom; he flees, she follows, guess what), starring Sonja Henie, Don Ameche again, Ethel Merman, Cesar Romero. Mannequin (I'd need more than two pages to go into this plot!), with Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy. Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (one of the very few science fiction items in the book and it's not hard to understand why; Mars is swiping the nitrogen from our atmosphere and reversing Genesis by turning people to clay), starring -- who else? -- Buster Crabbe. I realize this list sounds like a do-you-remember session, but that isn't what I'm after at all. Though the plots have some significance, what I really want you to note is how many of these stars are around today, # years later! You don't get the point? Well, (Continued on Page #) Secrets entrusted to a few lhelbtpuued#acti.ofMfk be generally told -- things you ought to know. 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I San Jose, California I Please send me theree book. The Mastery i I oj Lite, which explains how I may learn to l I use my faculties and powers of mind. I  Name I i Address , I City  V A Ticket to Tranai a tall, thin, intent, soberly dressed young man walked into the offices of the Transstellar Travel Agency. Without a glance, he marched past the gaudy travel poster depicting the Harvest Feast on Mars. The enormous photomural of dancing forests on Triganium didn't catch his eye. He ignored the somewhat suggestive painting of dawn-rites on Opiuchus II, and arrived at the desk of the booking agent. "I would like to book passage to Tranai," the young man said. The agent closed his copy of Necessary Inventions and frowned. "Tranai? Tranai? Is that one of the moons of Kent IV?" "It is not," the young man said. "Tranai is a planet, revolving around a sun of the same name. I want to book passage there." "Never heard of it." The agent Goodman found that Tranai was a certified genuine utopia. All its problems had been solved... but with what devastating logic! w pulled down a star catalogue, a simplified star chart, and a copy of Lesser Space Routes. "Well, now," he said finally. "You learn something new every day. You want to book passage to Tranai, Mister -- " "Goodman. Marvin Goodman." "Goodman. Well, it seems that Tranai is about as far from Earth as one can get and still be in the Milky Way. Nobody goes there." "I know. Can you arrange passage for me?" Goodman asked, with a hint of suppressed excitement in his voice. The agent shook his head. "Not a chance. Even the non-skeds don't go that far." "How close can you get me?" ning smile. "Why bother? I can send you to a world that'll have everything this Tranai place has, with the additional advantages of proximity, bargain rates, decent hotels, tours -- " "I'm going to Tranai," Goodman said grimly. "But there's no way of getting there," the agent explained patiently. "What is it you expected to find? Perhaps I could help." "You can help by booking me as far as -- " "Is it adventure?" the agent asked, quickly sizing up Goodman's unathletic build and scholarly stoop. "Let me suggest Africanus II, a dawn-age world filled with savage tribes, saber-tooths, man-eating ferns, quicksand, active volcanoes, pterodactyls and all the rest. Expeditions leave New York every five days and they combine the utmost in danger with absolute safety. A dinosaur head guaranteed or your money refunded." "Tranai," Goodman said. "Hmm." The clerk looked appraisingly at Goodman's set ,'ips and uncompromising eyes. "Perhaps you are tired of the puritanical restrictions of Earth? Then let me suggest a trip to Southern Ridge Belt. Our ten day all-expense plan includes a trip through the mysterious Almagordian Casbah, visits to eight nightclubs (first drink on us), a trip to a zintal factory, where you can buy genuine zintal belts, shoes and pocketbooks at phenomenal savings, and a tour through two distilleries. The girls of Almagordo are beautiful, vivacious and refreshingly naive. They consider the Tourist the highest and most desirable type of human being. Also -- " "Tranai," Goodman said. "How close can you get me?" Sullenly the clerk extracted a strip of tickets. "You can take the Constellation Queen as far as Legis II and transfer to the Galactic Splendor, which will take you to Oume. Then you'll have to board a local, which, after stopping at Machang, Inchang, Pankang, Lekung and Oyster, will leave you at Tung-Bradar IV, if it doesn't break down en route. Then a non-sked will transport you past the Galactic Whirl (if it gets past) to Aloomsridgia, from which the mail ship will take you to Bellismoranti. I believe the mail ship is still functioning. That brings you about halfway. After that, you're on your own." "Fine," Goodman said. "Can you have my forms made out by this afternoon?" The clerk nodded. "Mr. Goodman," he asked in despair, "just what sort of place is this Tranai supposed to be?" Goodman smiled a beatific smile. "A utopia," he said. most of his life in Seakirk, New Jersey, a town controlled by one political boss or another for close to fifty years. Most of Seakirk's inhabitants were indifferent to the spectacle of corruption in high places and low, the gambling, the gang wars, the teenage drinking. They were used to the sight of their roads crumbling, their ancient water mains bursting, their power plants breaking down, their decrepit old buildings falling apart, while the bosses built bigger homes, longer swimming pools and warmer stables. People were used to it. But not Goodman. A natural-born crusader, he wrote expose articles that were never published, sent letters to Congress that were never read, stumped for honest candidates who were never elected, and organized the League for Civic Improvement, the People Against Gangsterism, the Citizen's Union for an Honest Police Force, the Association Against Gambling, the Committee for Equal Job Opportunities for Women, and a dozen others. Nothing came of his efforts. The people were too apathetic to care. The politicoes simply laughed at him, and Goodman couldn't stand being laughed at. Then, to add to his troubles, his fiancee jilted him for a noisy young man in a loud sports jacket who had no redeeming feature other than a controlling interest in the Seakirk Construction Corporation. It was a shattering blow. The girl seemed unaffected by the portionate amounts of sand in their concrete and shaved whole inches from the width of their steel girders. As she put it, "Gee whiz, Marvie, so what? That's how things are. You gotta be realistic." Goodman had no intention of being realistic. He immediately repaired to Eddie's Moonlight Bar, where, between drinks, he began to contemplate the attractions of a grass shack in the green hell of Venus. An erect, hawk-faced old man entered the bar. Goodman could tell he was a spacer by his gravity-bound gait, his pallor, his radiation scars and his far-piercing gray eyes. "A Tranai Special, Sam," the old spacer told the bartender. "Coming right up, Captain Savage, sir," the bartender said. "Tranai?" Goodman murmured involuntarily. "Tranai," the captain said. "Never heard of it, did you, sonny?" "No, sir," Goodman confessed. "Well, sonny," Captain Savage said, "I'm feeling a mite wordy tonight, so I'll tell you a tale of Tranai the Blessed, out past the Galactic Whirl." The captain's eyes grew misty and a smile softened the grim line of his lips. "We were iron men in steel ships in those days. Me and Johnny Cavanaugh and Frog Larsen would have blasted to hell itself for half a load of terganium. Aye, and shanghaied Beelzebub for a wiper if we were short of men. Those were the days when space scurvy took every third man, and the ghost of Big Dan McClintock haunted the spaceways. Moll Gann still operated the Red Rooster Inn out on Asteroid #-AA, asking five hundred Earth dollars for a glass of beer, and getting it too, there being no other place within ten Scarbies were still cutting up along Star Ridge and ships bound for Prodengum had to run the Swayback Gantlet. So you can imagine how I felt, sonny, when one fine day I came upon Tranai." captain limned a picture of the great days, of frail ships against an iron sky, ships outward bound, forever outward, to the far limits of the Galaxy. And there, at the edge of the Great Nothing, was Tranai. Tranai, where The Way had been found and men were no longer bound to The Wheel! Tranai the Bountiful, a peaceful, creative, happy society, not saints or ascetics, not intellectuals, but ordinary people who had achieved utopia. For an hour, Captain Savage spoke of the multiform marvels of Tranai. After finishing his story, he complained of a dry throat. Space throat, he called it, and Goodman ordered him another Tranai Special and one for himself. Sipping the exotic, greengray mixture, Goodman too was lost in the dream. Finally, very gently, he asked, "Why don't you go back, Captain?" The old man shook his head. "Space gout. I'm grounded for good. We didn't know much about modern medicine in those days. All I'm good for now is a landsman's job." "What job do you have?" "I'm a foreman for the Seakirk Construction Corporation," the old man sighed. "Me, that once commanded a fifty-tube clipper. The way those people make concrete... Shall we have another short one in honor of beautiful Tranai?" They had several short ones. When Goodman left the bar, his mind was made up. Somewhere in the Universe, the modus vivendi had been found, the working solution to Man's old dream of perfection. He could settle for nothing less. The next day, he quit his job as designer at the East Coast Robot Works and drew his life savings out of the bank. He was going to Tranai. tion Queen for Legis II and took the Galactic Splendor to Oume. After stopping at Machang, Inchang, Pankang, Lekung and Oyster -- dreary little places -- he reached Tung-Bradar IV. Without incident, he passed the Galactic Whirl and finally reached Bellismoranti, where the influence of Terra ended. For an exorbitant fee, a local spaceline took him to Dvasta II. From there, a freighter transported him past Seves, Olgo and Mi, to the double planet Mvanti. There he was bogged down for three months and used the time to take a hypnopedic course in the Tranaian language. At last he hired a bush pilot to take him to Ding. On Ding, he was arrested as a Higastomeritreian , spy, but managed to escape in the cargo of an ore rocket bound for g'Moree. At g'Moree, he was treated for frostbite, heat poisoning and superficial radiation burns, and at last arranged passage to Tranai. He could hardly believe it when the ship slipped past the moons Doe and Ri, to land at Port Tranai. After the airlocks opened, Goodman found himself in a state of profound depression. Part of it was plain letdown, inevitable after a journey such as his. But more than that, he was suddenly terrified that Tranai might turn out to be a fraud. He had crossed the Galaxy on the basis of an old spaceman's yarn. But now it all seemed less likely. Eldorado was a more probable place than the Tranai he expected to find. He disembarked. Port Tranai seemed a pleasant enough town. The streets were filled with people and the shops were piled high with goods. The men he passed looked much like humans anywhere. The women were quite attractive. But there was something strange here, something subtly yet definitely wrong, something alien. It took a moment before he could puzzle it out. Then he realized that there were at least ten men for every woman in sight. And stranger still, practically all the women he saw apparently were under eighteen or over thirty-five. What had happened to the nineteen-to-thirty-five age group? Was there a taboo on their appearing in public? Had a plague struck them? He would just have to wait and find out. He went to the Idrig Building, where all Tranai's governmental functions were carried out, and presented himself at the office of the Extraterrestrials Minister. He was admitted at once. The office was small and cluttered, with strange blue blotches on the wallpaper. What struck Goodman at once was a highpowered rifle complete with silencer and telescopic sight, hanging ominously from one wall. He had no time to speculate on this, for the Minister bounded out of his chair and vigorously shook Goodman's hand. jolly man of about fifty. Around his neck he wore a small medallion stamped with the Tranian seal -- a bolt of lightning splitting an ear of corn. Goodman assumed, correctly, that this was an official seal of office. "Welcome to Tranai," the minister said heartily. He pushed a pile of papers from a chair and motioned Goodman to sit down. "Mister Minister -- " Goodman began, in formal Tranian. "Den Melith is the name. Call me Den. "We're all quite informal around here. Put your feet up on the desk and make yourself at home. Cigar?" "No, thank you," Goodman said, somewhat taken back. "Mister -- ah -- Den, I have come from Terra, a planet you may have heard of." "Sure I have," said Melith. "Nervous, hustling sort of place, isn't it? No offense intended, of course." "Of course. That's exactly how I feel about it. The reason I came here -- " Goodman hesitated, hoping he wouldn't sound too ridiculous. "Well, I heard certain stories about Tranai. Thinking them over now, they seem preposterous. But if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you -- " "Ask anything," Melith said expansively. "You'll get a straight answer." "Thank you. I heard that there has been no war of any sort on Tranai for four hundred years." "Six hundred," Melith corrected. "And none in sight." "Someone told me that there is no crime on Tranai." "None whatsoever." "And therefore no police force or courts, no judges, sheriffs, marshals, executioners, truant officers or government investigators. No prisons, reformatories or other places of detention." "We have no need of them," Melith explained, "since we have no crime." "I have heard," said Goodman, "that there is no poverty on Tranai." "None that I ever heard of," Melith said cheerfully. "Are you sure you won't have a cigar?" "No, thank you." Goodman was leaning forward eagerly now. "I understand that you have achieved a stable economy without resorting to socialistic, communistic, fascistic or bureaucratic practices." "Certainly," Melith said. "That yours is, in fact, a free enterprise society, where individual initiative flourishes and governmental functions are kept to an absolute minimum." large, the government concerns itself with minor regulatory matters, care of the aged and beautifying the landscape." "Is it true that you have discovered a method of wealth distribution without resorting to governmental intervention, without even taxation, based entirely upon individual choice?" Goodman challenged. "Oh, yes, absolutely." "Is it true that there is no corruption in any phase of the Tranaian government?" "None," Melith said. "I suppose that's why we have a hard time finding men to hold public office." "Then Captain Savage was right!" Goodman cried, unable to control himself any longer. "This is utopia!" "We like it," Melith said. Goodman took a deep breath and asked, "May I stay here?" "Why not?" Melith pulled out a form. "We have no restrictions on immigration. Tell me, what is your occupation?" "On Earth, I was a robot designer." "Plenty of openings in that." Melith started to fill in the form. His pen emitted a blob of ink. Casually, the minister threw the pen against the wall, where it shattered, adding another blue blotch to the wallpaper. "We'll make out the paper some other time," he said. "I'm not in the mood now." He leaned back in his chair. "Let me give you a word of advice. Here on Tranai, we feel that we have come pretty close to utopia, as you call it. But ours is not a highly organized state. We have no complicated set of laws. We live by observance of a number of unwritten laws, or customs, as you might call them. You will discover what they are. You would be advised -- although certainly not ordered -- to follow them." "Of course I will," Goodman exclaimed. "I can assure you, sir, I have no intention of endangering any phase of your paradise." "Oh, I wasn't worried about us," Melith said with an amused smile. "It was your own safety I was considering. Perhaps my wife has some further advice for you." ton on his desk. Immediately there was a bluish haze. The haze solidified, and in a moment Goodman saw a handsome young woman standing before him. "Good morning, my dear," she said to Melith. "It's afternoon," Melith informed her. "My dear, this young man came all the way from Earth to live on Tranai. I gave him the usual advice. Is there anything else we can do for him?" Mrs. Melith thought for a moment, then asked Goodman, "Are you married?" "No, ma'am," Goodman answered. "In that case, he should meet a nice girl," Mrs. Melith told her husband. "Bachelordom is not encouraged on Tranai, although certainly not prohibited. Let me see... How about that cute Driganti girl?" "She's engaged," Melith said. "Really? Have I been in stasis that long? My dear, it's not too thoughtful of you." "I was busy," Melith said apologetically. "How about Mihna Vensis?" "Not his type." "Janna Vley?" "Perfect!" Melith winked at Goodman. "A most attractive little lady." He found a new pen in his desk, scribbled an address and handed it to Goodman. "My wife will telephone her to be expecting you tomorrow evening." "And do come around for dinner some night," said Mrs. Melith. "Delighted," Goodman replied, in a complete daze. "It's been nice meeting you," Mrs. Melith said. Her husband pushed the red button. The blue haze formed and Mrs. Melith vanished. "Have to close up now," said Melith, glancing at his watch. "Can't work overtime -- people might start talking. Drop in some day and we'll make out those forms. You really should call on Supreme President Borg, too, at the National Mansion. Or possibly he'll call on you. Don't let the old fox put anything over on you. And don't forget about Janna." He winked roguishly and escorted Goodman to the door. In a few moments, Goodman found himself alone on the sidewalk. He had reached utopia, he told himself, a real, genuine, sureenough utopia. But there were some very puzzling things about it. small restaurant and checked in at a nearby hotel. A cheerful bellhop showed him to his room, where Goodman stretched out immediately on the bed. Wearily he rubbed his eyes, trying to sort out his impressions. So much had happened to him, all in one day! And so much was bothering him. The ratio of men to women, for example. He had meant to ask Melith about that. But Melith might not be the man to ask, for there were some curious things about him. Like throwing his pen against the wall. Was that the act of a mature, responsible official? And Melith's wife... Goodman knew that Mrs. Melith had come out of a derrsin stasis field; he had recognized the characteristic blue haze. The derrsin was used on Terra, too. Sometimes there were good medical reasons for suspending all activity, all growth, all decay. Suppose a patient had a desperate need for a certain serum, procurable only on Mars. Simply project the person into stasis until the serum could arrive. But on Terra, only a licensed doctor could operate the field. There were strict penalties for its misuse. He had never heard of keeping one's wife in one. Still, if all the wives on Tranai were kept in stasis, that would explain the absence of the nineteen-to-thirty-five age group and would account for the ten-to-one ratio of men to women. But what was the reason for this technological purdah? And something else was on Goodman's mind, something quite insignificant, but bothersome all the same. That rifle on Melith's wall. Did he hunt game with it? Pretty big game, then. Target practice? Not with a telescopic sight. Why the silencer? Why did he keep it in his office? But these were minor matters, Goodman decided, little local idiosyncracies which would become clear when he had lived a while on Tranai. He couldn't expect immediate and complete comprehension of what was, after all, an alien planet. doze off when he heard a knock at his door. "Come in," he called. A small, furtive, gray-faced man hurried in and closed the door behind him. "You're the man from Terra, aren't you?" "That's right." "I figured you'd come here," the little man said, with a pleased smile. "Hit it right the first time. Going to stay on Tranai?" "I'm here for good." "Fine," the man said. "How would you like to become Supreme President?" "Huh?" "Good pay, easy hours, only a one-year term. You look like a public-spirited type," the man said sunnily. "How about it?" Goodman hardly knew what to answer. "Do you mean," he asked incredulously, "that you offer the highest office in the land so casually?" "What do you mean, casually?" the little man spluttered. "Do you think we offer the Supreme Presidency to just anybody? It's a great honor to be asked." "I didn't mean -- " "And you, as a Terran, are uniquely suited." "Why?" "Well, it's common knowledge that Terrans derive pleasure from ruling. We Tranians don't, that's all. Too much trouble." As simple as that. The reformer blood in Goodman began to boil. Ideal as Tranai was, there was undoubtedly room for improvement. He had a sudden vision of himself as ruler of utopia, doing the great task of making perfection even better. But caution stopped him from agreeing at once. Perhaps the man was a crackpot. "Thank you for asking me," Goodman said. "I'll have to think it over. Perhaps I should talk with the present incumbent and find out something about the nature of the work." "Well, why do you think I'm here?" the little man demanded. "I'm Supreme President Borg." Only then did Goodman notice the official medallion around the little man's neck. "Let me know your decision. I'll be at the National Mansion." He shook Goodman's hand, and left. Goodman waited five minutes, then rang for the bellhop. "Who was that man?" "That was Supreme President Borg," the bellhop told him. "Did you take the job?" Goodman shook his head slowly. He suddenly realized that he had a great deal to learn about Tranai. man listed the various robot factories of Port Tranai in alphabetical order and went out in search of a job. To his amazement, he found one with no trouble at all, at the very first place he looked. The great Abbag Home Robot Works signed him on after only a cursory glance at his credentials. His new employer, Mr. Abbag, was short and fierce-looking, with a great mane of white hair and an air of tremendous personal energy. "Glad to have a Terran on board," Abbag said. "I understand you're an ingenious people and we certainly need some ingenuity around here. I'll be honest with you, Goodman -- I'm hoping to profit by your alien viewpoint. We've reached an impasse." "Is it a production problem?" Goodman asked. "I'll show you." Abbag led Goodman through the factory, around the Stamping Room, Heat-Treat, X-ray Analysis, Final Assembly and to the Testing Room. This room was laid out like a combination kitchen-living room. A dozen robots were lined up against one wall. "Try one out," Abbag said. Goodman walked up to the nearest robot and looked at its controls. They were simple enough; self-explanatory, in fact. He put the machine through a standard repertoire : picking up objects, washing pots and pans, setting a table. The robot's responses were correct enough, but maddeningly slow. On Earth, such sluggishness had been ironed out a hundred years ago. Apparently they were behind the times here on Tranai. "Seems pretty slow," Goodman commented cautiously. "You're right," Abbag said. "Damned slow. Personally, I think it's about right. But Consumer Research indicates that our customers want it slower still." "Huh?" "Ridiculous, isn't it?" Abbag asked moodily. "We'll lose money if we slow it down any more. Take a look at its guts." Goodman opened the back panel and blinked at the maze of wiring within. After a moment, he was able to figure it out. The robot was built like a modern Earth machine, with the usual V inexpensive high-speed circuits. But special signal-delay relays, impulse-rejection units and stepdown gears had been installed. "Just tell me," Abbag demanded angrily, "how can we slow it down any more without building the thing a third bigger and twice as expensive? I don't know what kind of a disimprovement they'll be asking for next." just his thinking to the concept of disimproving a machine. On Earth, the plants were always trying to build robots with faster, smoother, more accurate responses. He had never found any reason to question the wisdom of this. He still didn't. "And as if that weren't enough," Abbag complained, "the new plastic we developed for this particular model has catalyzed or some damned thing. Watch." He drew back his foot and kicked the robot in the middle. The plastic bent like a sheet of tin. He kicked again. The plastic bent still further and the robot began to click and flash pathetically. A third kick shattered the case. The robot's innards exploded in spectacular fashion, scattering over the floor. "Pretty flimsy," Goodman said. "Not flimsy enough. It's supposed to fly apart on the first kick. Our customers won't get any satisfaction out of stubbing their toes on its stomach all day. But tell me, how am I supposed to produce a plastic that'll take normal wear and tear -- we don't want these things falling apart accidentally -- and still go to pieces when a customer wants it to?" "Wait a minute," Goodman protested. "Let me get this straight. You purposely slow these robots down so they will irritate people enough to destroy them?" Abbag raised both eyebrows. "Of course!" "Why?" "You are new here," Abbag said. "Any child knows that. It's fundamental." "I'd appreciate it if you'd explain." Abbag sighed. "Well, first of all, you are undoubtedly aware that any mechanical contrivance is a source of irritation. Humankind has a deep and abiding distrust of machines. Psychologists call it the instinctive reaction of life to pseudo-life. Will you go along with me on that?" bered all the anxious literature he had read about machines revolting, cybernetic brains taking over the world, androids on the march, and the like." He thought of humorous little newspaper items about a man shooting his television set, smashing his toaster against the wall, "getting even" with his car. He remembered all the robot jokes, with their undertone of deep hostility. "I guess I can go along on that," said Goodman. "Then allow me to restate the proposition," Abbag said pedantically. "Any machine is a source of irritation. The better a machine operates, the stronger the irritation. So, by extension, a perfectly operating machine is a focal point for frustration, loss of self-esteem, undirected resentment -- " "Hold on there!" Goodman objected. "I won't go that far!" " -- and schizophrenic fantasies," Abbag continued inexorably. "But machines are necessary to an advanced economy. Therefore the best human solution is to have malfunctioning ones." "I don't see that at all." "It's obvious. On Terra, your gadgets work close to the optimum, producing inferiority feelings in their operators. But unfortunately you have a masochistic tribal tabu against destroying them. Result? Generalized anxiety in the presence of the sacrosanct and unhumanly efficient Machine, and a search for an aggression-object, usually a wife or friend. A very poor state of affairs. Oh, it's efficient, I suppose, in terms of robot-hour production, but very inefficient in terms of long-range health and well-being." "I'm not sure -- " "The human is an anxious beast. Here on Tranai, we direct anxiety toward this particular point and let it serve as an outlet for a lot of other frustrations as well. A man's had enough -- blam! He kicks hell out of his robot. There's an immediate and therapeutic discharge of feeling, a valuable -- and valid -- sense of superiority over mere machinery, a lessening of general tension, a healthy flow of adrenin into the bloodstream, and a boost to the industrial economy of Tranai, since he'll go right out and buy another robot. And what, after all, has he done? He hasn't beaten his wife, suicided, declared a war, invented a new weapon, or indulged in any of the other more common modes of aggressionresolution. He has simply smashed an inexpensive robot which he can replace immediately." "I guess it'll take me a little time to understand," Goodman admitted. "Of course it will. I'm sure you're going to be a valuable man here, Goodman. Think over what I've said and try to figure out some inexpensive way of disT# improving this robot." Goodman pondered the problem for the rest of the day, but he couldn't immediately adjust his thinking to the idea of producing an inferior machine. It seemed vaguely blasphemous. He knocked off work at five-thirty, dissatisfied with himself, but determined to do better -- or worse, depending on viewpoint and conditioning. supper, Goodman decided to call on Janna Vley. He didn't want to spend the evening alone with his thoughts and he was in desperate need of finding something pleasant, simple and uncomplicated in this complex utopia. Perhaps this Janna would be the answer. The Vley home was only a dozen blocks away and he decided to walk. The basic trouble was that he had had his own idea of what utopia would be like and it was difficult adjusting his thinking to the real thing. He had imagined a pastoral setting, a planetful of people in small, quaint villages, walking around in flowing robes and being very wise and gentle and understanding. Children who played in the golden sunlight, young folk danced in the village square... Ridiculous! He had pictured a tableau rather than a scene, a series of stylized postures instead of the ceaseless movement of life. Humans could never live that way, even assuming they wanted to. If they could, they would no longer be humans. He reached the Vley house and paused irresolutely outside. What was he getting himself into now? What alien -- although indubitably utopian -- customs would he run into? He almost turned away. But the prospect of a long night alone in his hotel room was singularly unappealing. Gritting his teeth, he rattg the bell. A red-haired, middle-aged man of medium height opened the door. "Oh, you must be that Terran fellow. Janna's getting ready. , Come in and meet the wife." He escorted Goodman into a pleasantly furnished living room and pushed a red button on the wall. Goodman wasn't startled this time by the bluish derrsin haze. After all, the manner in which Tranaians treated their women was their own business. A handsome woman of about twenty-eight appeared from the haze. "My dear," Vley said, "this is the Terran, Mr. Goodman." "So pleased to meet you," Mrs. Vley said. "Can I get you a drink?" Goodman nodded. Vley pointed out a comfortable chair. In a moment, Mrs. Vley brought in a tray of frosted drinks and sat down. "So you're from Terra," said Mr. Vley. "Nervous, hustling sort of place, isn't it? People always on the go?" "Yes, I suppose it is," Goodman replied. "Well, you'll like it here. We know how to live. It's all a matter of -- " There was a rustle of skirts on the stairs. Goodman got to his feet. "Mr. Goodman, this is our daughter Janna," Mrs. Vley said. Janna's hair was the exact color of the supernova in Circe, her eyes were that deep, unbelievable blue of the autumn sky over Algo II, her lips were the tender pink of a ScarsclottTurner jet stream, her nose -- But he had run out of astronomical comparisons, which weren't suitable anyhow. Janna was a slender and amazingly pretty blonde girl and Goodman was suddenly very glad he had crossed the Galaxy and come to Tranai. "Have a good time, children," Mrs. Vley said. "Don't come in too late," Mr. Vley told Janna. Exactly as parents said on Earth to their children. There was nothing exotic about the date. They went to an inexpensive night club, danced, drank a little, talked a lot. Goodman was amazed at their immediate rapport. Janna agreed with everything he said. It was refreshing to find intelligence in so pretty a girl. She was impressed, almost overwhelmed, by the dangers he had faced in crossing the Galaxy. She had always known that Terrans were adventurous (though nervous) types, but the risks Goodman had taken passed all understanding. She shuddered when he spoke of the deadly Galactic Whirl and listened wide-eyed to his tales of running the notorious Swayback Gantlet, past the bloodthirsty Scarbies who were still cutting up along Star Ridge and infesting the hell holes of Prodengum. As Goodman put it, Terrans were iron men in steel ships, exploring the edges of the Great Nothing. Janna didn't even speak until Goodman told of paying five hundred Terran dollars for a glass of beer at Moll Gann's Red Rooster Inn on Asteroid #-AA. "You must have been very thirsty," she said thoughtfully. "Not particularly," Goodman said. "Money just didn't mean much out there." "Oh. But wouldn't it have been better to have saved it? I mean someday you might have a wife and children -- " She blushed. Goodman said coolly, "Well, that part of my life is over. I'm going to marry and settle down right here on Tranai." "How nice!" she cried. It was a most successful evening. Goodman returned Janna to her home at a respectable hour and arranged a date for the following evening. Made bold by his own tales, he kissed her on the cheek. She didn't really seem to mind, but Goodman didn't try to press his advantage. "Till tomorrow then," she said, smiled at him, and closed the door. light-headed. Janna! Janna! Was it conceivable that he was in love already? Why not? Love at first sight was a proven psychophysiological possibility and, as such, was perfectly respectable. Love in utopia! How wonderful it was that here, upon a perfect planet, he had found the perfect girl! A man stepped out of the shadows and blocked his path. Goodman noted that he was wearing a black silk mask which covered everything except his eyes. He was carrying a large and powerful-looking blaster, and it was pointed steadily at Goodman's stomach. "Okay, buddy," the man said, "gimme all your money." "What?" Goodman gasped. "You heard me. Your money. Hand it over." "You can't do this," Goodman said, too startled to think coherently. "There's no crime on Tranai!" "Who said there was?" the man asked quietly. "I'm merely asking you for your money. Are you going to hand it over peacefully or do I have to club it out of you?" "You can't get away with this! Crime does not pay!" "Don't be ridiculous," the man said. He hefted the heavy blaster. "All right. Don't get excited." Goodman pulled out his billfold, which contained all he had in the world, and gave its contents to the masked man. The man counted it, and he seemed impressed. "Better than I expected. Thanks, buddy. Take it easy now." He hurried away down a dark street. Goodman looked wildly around for a policeman, until he remembered that there were no police on Tranai. He saw a small cocktail lounge on the corner with a neon sign saying Kitty Kat Bar. He hurried into it. Inside, there was only a bartender, somberly wiping glasses. "I've been robbed!" Goodman shouted at him. "So?" the bartender said, not even looking up. "But I thought there wasn't any crime on Tranai." "There isn't." "But I was robbed." "You must be new here," the bartender said, finally looking at him. "I just came in from Terra." "Terra? Nervous, hustling sort of -- " "Yes, yes," Goodman said. He was getting a little tired of that stereotype. "But how can there be no crime on Tranai if I was robbed?" "That should be obvious. On Tranai, robbery is no crime." "But robbery is always a crime!" "What color mask was he wearing?" Goodman thought for a moment. "Black. Black silk." The bartender nodded. "Then he was a government tax collector." "That's a ridiculous way to collect taxes," Goodman snapped. Tranai Special in front of Goodman. "Try to see this in terms of the general welfare. The government has to have some money. By collecting it this way, we can avoid the necessity of an income tax, with all its complicated legal and legislative apparatus. And in terms of mental health, it's far better to extract money in a short, quick, painless operation than to permit the citizen to worry all year long about paying at a specific date." Goodman downed his drink and the bartender set up another. "But," Goodman said, "I thought this was a society based upon the concepts of free will and individual initiative." "It is," the bartender told him. "Then surely the government, what little there is of it, has the same right to free will as any private citizen, hasn't it?" Goodman couldn't quite figure that out, so he finished his second drink. "Could I have another of those? I'll pay you as soon as I can." "Sure, sure," the bartender said good-naturedly, pouring another drink and one for himself. Goodman said, "You asked me what color his mask was. Why?" "Black is the government mask color. Private citizens wear white masks." "You mean that private citizens commit robbery also?" "Well, certainly! That's our method of wealth distribution. Money is equalized without government intervention, without even taxation, entirely in terms of individual initiative." The bartender nodded emphatically. "And it works perfectly, too. Robbery is a great leveler, you know." "I suppose it is," Goodman admitted, finishing his third drink. "If I understand correctly, then, any citizen can pack a blaster, put on a mask, and go out and rob." "Exactly," the bartender said. "Within limits, of course." Goodman snorted. "If that's how it works, I can play that way. Could you loan me a mask? And a gun?" The bartender reached under the bar. "Be sure to return them, though. Family heirlooms." "I'll return them," Goodman promised. "And when I come back, I'll pay for my drinks." He slipped the blaster into his belt, donned the mask and left the bar. If this was how things worked on Tranai, he could adjust all right. Rob him, would they? He'd rob them right back and then some! street corner and huddled in the shadows, waiting. Presently he heard footsteps and, peering around the corner, saw a portly, well-dressed Tranaian hurrying down the street. Goodman stepped in front of him, snarling, "Hold it, buddy." The Tranaian stopped and looked at Goodman's blaster. "Hmmm. Using a wide-aperture Drog #, eh? Rather an old-fashioned weapon. How do you like it?" "It's fine," Goodman said. "Hand over your -- " "Slow trigger action, though," the Tranian mused. "Personally, I recommend a Mils-Sleeven needier. As it happens, I'm a sales representative for Sleeven Arms. I could get you a very good price on a trade-in -- " "Hand over your money," Goodman barked. The portly Tranaian smiled. "The basic defect of your Drog # is the fact that it won't fire at all unless you release the safety lock." He reached out and slapped the gun out of Goodman's hand. "You see? You couldn't have done a thing about it." He started to walk away. Goodman scooped up the blaster, found the safety lock, released it and hurried after the Tranaian. "Stick up your hands," Goodman ordered, beginning to feel slightly desperate. "No, no, my good man," the Tranian said, not even looking back. "Only one try to a customer. Mustn't break the unwritten law, you know." Goodman stood and watched until the man turned a corner and was gone. He checked the Drog # carefully and made sure that all safeties were off. Then he resumed his post. After an hour's wait, he heard footsteps again. He tightened his grip on the blaster. This time he was going to rob and nothing was going to stop him. "Okay, buddy," he said, "hands up!" The victim this time was a short, stocky Tranaian, dressed in old workman's clothes. He gaped at the gun in Goodman's hand. "Don't shoot, mister," the Tranaian pleaded. Goodman felt a glow of deep satisfaction. "Just don't move," he warned. "I've got all safeties off." "I can see that," the stocky man said cringing. "Be careful with that cannon, mister. I ain't moving a hair." "You'd better not. Hand over your money." "Money?" "Yes, your money, and be quick about it." "I don't have any money," the man whined. "Mister, I'm a poor man. I'm poverty-stricken." "There is no poverty on Tranai," Goodman said sententiously. "I know. But you can get so close to it, you wouldn't know the difference. Give me a break, mister." "Haven't you any initiative?" Goodman asked. "If you're poor, why don't you go out and rob like everybody else?" "I just haven't had a chance. First the kid got the whooping cough and I was up every night with her. Then the derrsin broke down, so I had the wife yakking at me all day long. I say there oughta be a spare derrsin in every house! So she decided to clean the place while the derrsin generator was being fixed and she put my blaster somewhere and she can't remember where. So I was all set to borrow a friend's blaster when -- " "That's enough," Goodman said. "This is a robbery and I'm going to rob you of something. Hand over your wallet." The man snuffled miserably and gave Goodman a worn billfold. Inside it, Goodman found one deeglo, the equivalent of a Terran dollar. "It's all I got," the man snuffled miserably, "but you're welcome to it. I know how it is, standing on a drafty street corner all night -- " "Keep it," Goodman said, handing the billfold back to the man and walking off. "Gee, thanks, mister!" Goodman didn't answer. Disconsolately, he returned to the Kitty Kat Bar and gave back the bartender's blaster and mask. When he explained what had happened, the bartender burst into rude laughter. "Didn't have any money! Man, that's the oldest trick in the books. Everybody carries a fake wallet for robberies -- sometimes two or even three. Did you search him?" "No," Goodman confessed. "Brother, are you a greenhorn!" "I guess I am. Look, I really will pay you for those drinks as soon as I can make some money." "Sure, sure," the bartender said. "You better go home and get some sleep. You had a busy night." Goodman agreed. Wearily he returned to his hotel room and was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Home Robot Works and manfully grappled with the problem of disimproving automata. Even in unhuman work such as this, Terran ingenuity began to tell. Goodman began to develop a new plastic for the robot's case. It was a silicone, a relative of the "silly putty" that had appeared on Earth a long while back. It had the desired properties of toughness, resiliency and long wear; it would stand a lot of abuse, too. But the case would shatter immediately and with spectacular effect upon receiving a kick delivered with an impact of thirty pounds or more. His employer praised him for this development, gave him a bonus (which he sorely needed), and told him to keep working on the idea and, if possible, to bring the needed impact down to twenty-three pounds. This, the research department told them, was the average frustration kick. He was kept so busy that he had practically no time to explore further the mores and folkways of Tranai. He did manage to see the Citizen's Booth. This uniquely Tranaian institution was housed in a small building on a quiet back street. Upon entering, he was confronted by a large board, upon which was listed the names of the present officeholders of Tranai, and their titles. Beside each name was a button. The attendant told Goodman that, by pressing a button, a citizen expressed his disapproval of that official's acts. The pressed button was automatically registered in History Hall and was a permanent mark against the officeholder. No minors were allowed to press the buttons, of course. Goodman considered this somewhat ineffectual; but perhaps, he told himself, officials on Tranai were differently motivated from those on Earth. He saw Janna almost every evening and together they explored the many cultural aspects of Tranai: the cocktail lounges and movies, the concert halls, the art exhibitions, the science museum, the fairs and festivals. Goodman carried a blaster and, after several unsuccessful attempts, robbed a merchant of nearly five hundred deeglo. Janna was ecstatic over the achievement, as any sensible Tranaian girl would be, and they celebrated at the Kitty Kat Bar. Janna's parents agreed that Goodman seemed to be a good provider. The following night, the five hundred deeglo -- plus some of Goodman's bonus money -- was robbed back, by a man of approximately the size and build of the bartender at the Kitty Kat, carrying an ancient Drog # blaster. Goodman consoled himself with the thought that the money was circulating freely, as the system had intended. One day at the Abbag Home Robot Works, he discovered a completely new process for making a robot's case. It was a special plastic, impervious even to serious bumps and falls. The robot owner had to wear special shoes, with a catalytic agent imbedded in the heels. When he kicked the robot, the catalyst came in contact with the plastic case, with immediate and gratifying effect. Abbag was a little uncertain at first; it seemed too gimmicky. But the thing caught on like wildfire and the Home Robot Works went into the shoe business as a subsidiary, selling at least one pair with every robot. This horizontal industrial development was very gratifying to the plant's stockholders and was really more important than the original catalyst-plastic discovery. Goodman received a substantial raise in pay and a generous bonus. On the crest of his triumphant wave, he proposed to Janna and was instantly accepted. Her parents favored the match; all that remained was to obtain official sanction from the government, since Goodman was still technically an alien. Accordingly, he took a day off from work and walked down to the Idrig Building to see Melith. It was a glorious spring day of the sort that Tranai has for ten months out of the year, and Goodman walked with a light and springy step. He was in love, a success in business, and soon to become a citizen of utopia. Of course, utopia could use some changes, for even Tranai wasn't quite perfect. Possibly he should accept the Supreme Presidency, in order to make the needed reforms. But there was no rush... "Hey, mister," a voice said, "can you spare a deeglo?" Goodman looked down and saw, squatting on the pavement, an unwashed old man, dressed in rags, holding out a tin cup. "What?" Goodman asked. "Can you spare a deeglo, brother?" the man repeated in a wheedling voice. "Help a poor man buy a cup of oglo? Haven't eaten in two days, mister." "This is disgraceful! Why don't you get a blaster and go out and rob someone?" "I'm too old," the man whimpered. "My victims just laugh at me." "Are you sure you aren't just lazy?" Goodman asked sternly. "I'm not, sir!" the beggar said. "Just look how my hands shake!" He held out both dirty paws; they trembled. G oodman took out his billfold and gave the old man a deeglo. "I thought there was no poverty on Tranai. I understood that the government took care of the aged." "The government does," said the old man. "Look." He held out his cup. Engraved on its side was: Government Authorized Beggar, Number DJ#-#-#. "You mean the government makes you do this?" "The government lets me do it," the old man told him. "Begging is a government job and is reserved for the aged and infirm." "Why, that's disgraceful!" "You must be a stranger here." "I'm a Terr an." "Aha! Nervous, hustling sort of people, aren't you?" "Our government does not let people beg," Goodman said. "No? What do the old people do? Live off their children? Or sit in some home for the aged and wait for death by boredom? Not here, young man. On Tranai, every old man is assured of a government job, and one for which he needs no particular skill, although skill helps. Some apply for indoor work, within the churches and theatres. Others like the excitement of fairs and carnivals. Personally, I like it outdoors. My job keeps me out in the sunlight and fresh air, gives me mild exercise, and helps me meet many strange and interesting people, such as yourself." "But begging!" "What other work would I be suited for?" "I don't know. But -- but look at you! Dirty, unwashed, in filthy clothes -- " "These are my working clothes," the government beggar said. "You should see me on Sunday." "You have other clothes?" "I certainly do, and a pleasant little apartment, and a season box at the opera, and two Home Robots, and probably more money in the bank than you've seen in your life. It's been pleasant talking to you, young man, and thanks for your contribution. But now I must return to work and suggest you do likewise." Goodman walked away, glancing over his shoulder at the government beggar. He observed that the old man seemed to be doing a thriving business. But begging! Really, that sort of thing should be stopped. If he ever assumed the Presidency -- and quite obviously he should -- he would look into the whole matter more carefully. It seemed to him that there had to be a more dignified answer. man told Melith about his marriage plans. The immigrations minister was enthusiastic. "Wonderful, absolutely wonderful," he said. "I've known the Vley family for a long time. They're splendid people. And Janna is a girl any man would be proud of." "Aren't there some formalities I should go through?" Goodman asked. "I mean being an alien and all -- " "None whatsoever. I've decided to dispense with the formalities. You can become a citizen of Tranai, if you wish, by merely stating your intention verbally. Or you can retain Terran citizenship, with no hard feelings. Or you can do both -- be a citizen of Terra and Tranai. If Terra doesn't mind, we certainly don't." "I think I'd like to become a citizen of Tranai," Goodman said. "It's entirely up to you. But if you're thinking about the Presidency, you can retain Terran status and still hold office. We aren't at all stuffy about that sort of thing. One of our most successful Supreme Presidents was a lizard-evolved chap from Aquarella XI." "What an enlightened attitude!" "Sure, give everybody a chance, that's our motto. Now as to your marriage -- any government employee can perform the ceremonies. Supreme President Borg would be happy to do it, this afternoon if you like." Melith winked. "The old codger likes to kiss the bride. But I think he's genuinely fond of you." , "This afternoon?" Goodman said. "Yes, I would like to be married this afternoon, if it's all right with Janna." "It probably will be," Melith assured him. "Next, where are you going to live after the honeymoon? A hotel room is hardly suitable." He thought for a moment. "Tell you what -- I've got a little house on the edge of town. Why don't you move in there, until you find something better? Or stay permanently, if you like it." "Really," Goodman protested, "you're too generous -- " "Think nothing of it. Have you ever thought of becoming the next immigrations minister? You might like the work. No red tape, short hours, good pay -- No? Got your eye on the Supreme Presidency, eh? Can't blame you, I suppose." Melith dug in his pockets and found two keys. "This is for the front door and this is for the back. The address is stamped right on them. The place is fully equipped, including a brand-new derrsin field generator." "A derrsin?" "Certainly. No home on Tranai is complete without a derrsin stasis field generator." man said carefully, "I've been meaning to ask you -- exactly what is the stasis field used for?" "Why, to keep one's wife in," Melith answered. "I thought you knew." "I did," said Goodman. "But why?" "Why?" Melith frowned. Apparently the question had never entered his head. "Why does one do anything? It's the custom, that's all. And very logical, too. You wouldn't want a woman chattering around you all the time, night and day." Goodman blushed, because ever since he had met Janna, he had been thinking how pleasant it would be to have her around him all the time, night and day. "It hardly seems fair to the women," Goodman pointed out. Melith laughed. "My dear friend, are you preaching the doctrine of equality of the sexes? Really, it's a completely disproved theory. Men and women just aren't the same. They're different, no matter what you've been told on Terra. What's good for men isn't necessarily -- or even usually -- good for women." "Therefore you treat them as inferiors," Goodman said, his reformer's blood beginning to boil. "Not at all. We treat them in a different manner from men, but not in an inferior manner. Anyhow, they don't object." "That's because they haven't been allowed to know any better. Is there any law that requires me to keep my wife in the derrsin field?" "Of course not. The custom simply suggests that you keep her out of stasis for a certain minimum amount of time every week. No fair incarcerating the little woman, you know." "Of course not," Goodman said sarcastically. "Must let her live some of the time." "Exactly," Melith said, seeing no sarcasm in what Goodman said. "You'll catch on." Goodman stood up. "Is that all?" "I guess that's about it. Good luck and all that." "Thank you," Goodman said stiffly, turned sharply and left. President Borg performed the simple Tranaian marriage rites at the National Mansion and afterward kissed the bride with zeal. It was a beautiful ceremony and was marred by only one thing. Hanging on Borg's wall was a rifle, complete with telescopic sight and silencer. It was a twin to Melith's and just as inexplicable. Borg took Goodman to one side and asked, "Have you given any further thought to the Supreme Presidency?" "I'm still considering it," Goodman said. "I don't really want to hold public office -- " "No one does." " -- but there are certain reforms that Tranai needs badly. I think it may be my duty to bring them to the attention of the people." "That's the spirit," Borg said approvingly. "We haven't had a really enterprising Supreme President for some time. Why don't you take office right now? Then you could have your honeymoon in the National Mansion with complete privacy." Goodman was tempted. But he didn't want to be bothered by affairs of state on his honeymoon, which was all arranged anyhow. Since Tranai had lasted so long in its present near-utopian condition, it would undoubtedly keep for a few weeks more. "I'll consider it when I come back," Goodman said. Borg shrugged. "Well, I guess I can bear the burden a while longer. Oh, here." He handed Goodman a sealed envelope. "What's this?" "Just the standard advice," Borg said. "Hurry, your bride's waiting for you!" "Come on, Marvin!" Janna called. "We don't want to be late for the spaceship." Goodman hurried after her, into the spaceport limousine. "Good luck!" her parents cried. "Good luck!" Borg shouted. "Good luck!" added Melith and his wife, and all the guests. On the way to the spaceport, Goodman opened the envelope and read the printed sheet within: You have just been married and you expect, quite naturally, a lifetime of connubial bliss. This is perfectly proper, for a happy marriage is the foundation of good government. But you must do more than merely wish tor it. Good marriage is not yours by divine right. A good marriage must be worked tor! Remember that your wife is a human being. She should be allowed a certain measure of freedom as her inalienable right. We suggest you take her out of stasis at least once a week. Too long in stasis is bad for her orientation. Too much stasis is bad for her complexion and this will be your loss as well as hers. At intervals, such as vacations and holidays, it's customary to let your wife remain out of stasis for an entire day at a time, or even two or three days. It will do no harm and the novelty will do wonders for her state of mind. Keep in mind these few common-sense rules and you can be assured of a happy marriage. -- By the Government Marriage Council card into little bits, and let them drop to the floor of the limousine. His reforming spirit was now thoroughly aroused. He had known that Tranai was too good to be true. Someone had to pay for perfection. In this case, it was the women. He had found the first serious flaw in paradise. "What was that, dear?" Janna asked, looking at the bits of paper. "That was some very foolish advice." Goodman said. "Dear, have you ever thought -- really thought -- about the marriage customs of this planet of yours?" "I don't think I have. Aren't they all right?" "They are wrong, completely wrong. They treat women like toys, like little dolls that one puts away when one is finished playing. Can't you see that?" "I never thought about it." "Well, you can think about it now," Goodman told her, "because some changes are going to be made and they're going to start in our home." "Whatever you think best, darling," Janna said dutifully. She squeezed his arm. He kissed her. And then the limousine reached the spaceport and they got aboard the ship. Their honeymoon on Doe was like a brief sojourn in a flawless paradise. The wonders of Tranai's little moon had been built for lovers, and for lovers only. No businessman came to Doe for a quick rest; no predatory bachelor prowled the paths. The tired, the disillusioned, the lewdly hopeful all had to find other hunting grounds. The single rule on Doe, strictly enforced, was two by two, joyous and in love, and in no other state admitted. This was one Tranaian custom that Goodman had no trouble appreciating. On the little moon, there were meadows of tall grass and deep, green forests for walking and cool black lakes in the forests and jagged, spectacular mountains that begged to be climbed. Lovers were continually getting lost in the forests, to their great satisfaction; but not too lost, for one could circle the whole moon in a day. Thanks, to the gentle gravity, no . one could drown in the black lakes, and a fall from a mountaintop was frightening, but hardly dangerous. There were, at strategic locations, little hotels with dimly lit cocktail lounges run by friendly, white-haired bartenders. There were gloomy caves which ran deep (but never too deep) into phosphorescent caverns glittering with ice, past sluggish underground rivers in which swam great luminous fish with fiery eyes. The Government Marriage Council had considered these simple attractions sufficient and hadn't bothered putting in a golf course, swimming pool, horse track or shuffleboard court. It was felt that once a couple desired these things, the honeymoon was over. Goodman and his bride spent an enchanted week on Doe and at last returned to Tranai. across the threshold of their new home, Goodman's first act was to unplug the derrsin generator. "My dear," he said, "up to now, I have followed all the customs of Tranai, even when they seemed ridiculous to me. But this is one thing I will not sanction. On Terra, I was the founder of the Committee for Equal Job Opportunities for Women. On Terra, we treat our women as equals, as companions, as partners in the adventure of life." "What a strange concept," Janna said, a frown clouding her pretty face. "Think about it," Goodman urged. "Our life will be far more satisfying in this companionable manner than if I shut you up in the purdah of the derrsin field. Don't you agree?" "You know far more than I, dear. You've traveled all over the Galaxy, and I've never been out of Port Tranai. If you say it's the best way, then it must be." Past a doubt, Goodman thought, she was the most perfect of women. He returned to his work at the Abbag Home Robot Works and was soon deep in another disimprovement project. This time, he conceived the bright idea of making the robot's joints squeak and grind. The noise would increase the robot's irritation value, thereby making its destruction more pleasing and psychologically more valuable. Mr. Abbag was overjoyed with the idea, gave him another pay raise, and asked him to have the disimprovement ready for early production. Goodman's first plan was simply to remove some of the lubrication ducts. But he found that friction would then wear out vital parts too soon. That naturally could not be sanctioned. He began to draw up plans for a built-in squeak-and-grind unit. It had to be absolutely lifelike and yet cause no real wear. It had to be inexpensive and it had to be small, because the robot's interior was already packed with disimprovements. But Goodman found that small squeak-producing units sounded artificial. Larger units were too costly to manufacture or couldn't be fitted inside the robot's case. He began working several evenings a week, lost weight, and his temper grew edgy. pendable wife. His meals were always ready on time and she invariably had a cheerful word for him in the evenings and a sympathetic ear for his difficulties. During the day, she supervised the cleaning of the house by the Home Robots. This took less than an hour and afterward she read books, baked pies, knitted, and destroyed robots. Goodman was a little alarmed at this, because Janna destroyed them at the rate of three or four a week. Still, everyone had to have a hobby. He could afford to indulge her, since he got the machines at cost. Goodman had reached a complete impasse when another designer, a man named Dath Hergo, came up with a novel control. This was based upon a countergyroscopic principle and allowed a robot to enter a room at a tendegree list. (Ten degrees, the research department said, was the most irritating angle of list a robot could assume.) Moreover, by employing a random selection principle, the robot would lurch, drunkenly, annoyingly, at irregular intervals -- never dropping anything, but always on the verge of it. This development was, quite naturally, hailed as a great advance in disimprovement engineering. And Goodman found that he could center his built-in squeak-and-grind unit right in the lurch control. His name was mentioned in the engineering journals next to that of Dath Hergo. The new line of Abbag Home Robots was a sensation. At this time, Goodman decided to take a leave of absence from his job and assume the Supreme Presidency of Tranai. He felt he owed it to the people. If Terran ingenuity and knowhow could bring out improvements in disimprovements, they would do even better improving improvements. Tranai was a nearutopia. With his hand on the reins, they could go the rest of the way to perfection. He went down to Melith's office to talk it over. "I suppose there's always room for change," Melith said thoughtfully. The immigration chief was seated by the window, idly watching people pass by. "Of course, our present system has been working for quite some time and working very well. I don't know what you'd improve. There's no crime, for example -- " "Because you've legalized it," Goodman declared. "You've simply evaded the issue." "We don't see it that way. There's no poverty -- " "Because everybody steals. And there's no trouble with old people because the government turns them into beggars. Really, there's plenty of room for change and improvement." "Well, perhaps," Melith said. "But I think -- " he stopped suddenly, rushed over to the wall and pulled down the rifle. "There he is!" G oodman looked out the window. A man, apparently no different from anyone else, was walking past. He heard a muffled click and saw the man stagger, then drop to the pavement. Melith had shot him with the silenced rifle. "What did you do that for?" Goodman gasped. "Potential murderer," Melith said. "What?" "Of course. We don't have any out-and-out crime here, but, being human, we have to deal with the potentiality." "What did he do to make him a potential murderer?" "Killed five people," Melith stated. "But -- damn it, man, this isn't fair! You didn't arrest him, give him a trial, the benefit of counsel -- " "How could I?" Melith asked, slightly annoyed. "We don't have any police to arrest people with and we don't have any legal system. Good Lord, you didn't expect me to just let him go on, did you? Our definition of a murderer is a killer of ten and he was well on his way. I couldn't just sit idly by. It's my duty to protect the people. I can assure you, I made careful inquiries." "It isn't just!" Goodman shouted. "Who ever said it was?" Melith shouted back. "What has justice got to do with utopia?" "Everything!" Goodman had calmed himself with an effort. "Justice is the basis of human dignity, human desire -- " "Now you're just using words," Melith said, with his usual goodnatured smile. "Try to be realistic. We have created a utopia for human beings, not for saints who don't need one. We must accept the deficiencies of the human character, not pretend they don't exist. To our way of thinking, a police apparatus and a legal-judicial system all tend to create an atmosphere for crime and an acceptance of crime. It's better, believe me, not to accept the possibility of crime at all. The vast majority of the people will go along with you." "But when crime does turn up, as it inevitably does -- " "Only the potentiality turns up," Melith insisted stubbornly. "And even that is much rarer than you would think. When it shows up, we deal with it, quickly and simply." "Suppose you get the wrong man?" "We can't get the wrong man. Not a chance of it." "Why not?" "Because," Melith said, "anyone disposed of by a government official is, by definition and by unwritten law, a potential criminal."'-"-l for a while. Then he said, "I see that the government has more power than I thought at first." "It does," Melith said. "But not as much as you now imagine." Goodman smiled ironically. "And is the Supreme Presidency still mine for the asking?" "Of course. And with no strings attached. Do you want it?" Goodman thought deeply for a moment. Did he really want it? Well, someone had to rule. Someone had to protect the people. Someone had to make a few reforms in this utopian madhouse. "Yes, I want it," Goodman said. The door burst open and Supreme President Borg rushed in. "Wonderful! Perfectly wonderful! You can move into the National Mansion today. I've been packed for a week, waiting for you to make up your mind." "There must be certain formalities to go through -- " "No formalities," Borg said, his face shining with perspiration. "None whatsoever. All we do is hand over the Presidential Seal; then I'll go down and take my name off the rolls and put yours on." Goodman looked at Melith. The immigration minister's round face was expressionless. "All right," Goodman said. threw it over Borg's head. Goodman backed to a chair and fell into it. His mouth opened, but no words came out. "It's really a pity," Melith said. "He was so near the end of his term. I warned him against Borg reached for the Presidential Seal, started to remove it from his neck -- It exploded suddenly and violently. Goodman found himself staring in horror at Borg's red, ruined head. The Supreme President tottered for a moment, then slid to the floor. Melith took off his jacket and licensing that new spaceport. The citizens won't approve, I told him. But he was sure they would like to have two spaceports. Well, he was wrong." "Do you mean -- I mean -- how -- what -- " "All government officials," Melith explained, "wear the badge of office, which contains a traditional amount of tessium, an explosive you may have heard of. The charge is radio-controlled from the Citizens Booth. Any citizen has access to the Booth, for the purpose of expressing his disapproval of the government." Melith sighed. "This will go down as a permanent black mark against poor Borg's record." press their disapproval by blowing up officials?" Goodman croaked, appalled. "It's the only way that means anything," said Melith. "Check and balance. Just as the people are in our hands, so we are in the people's hands." "And that's why he wanted me to take over his term. Why didn't anyone tell me?" "You didn't ask," Melith said, with the suspicion of a smile. "Don't look so horrified. Assassination is always possible, you know, on any planet, under any government. We try to make it a constructive thing. Under this system, the people never lose touch with the government, and the government never tries to assume dictatorial powers. And, since everyone knows he can turn to the Citizens Booth, you'd be surprised how sparingly it's used. Of course, there are always hotheads -- " Goodman got to his feet and started to the door, not looking at Borg's body. "Don't you still want the Presidency?" asked Melith. "No!" "That's so like you Terrans," Melith remarked sadly. "You want responsibility only if it doesn't incur risk. That's the wrong attitude for running a government." "You may be right," Goodman said. "I'm just glad I found out in time." He hurried home. His mind was in a complete turmoil when he entered his house. Was Tranai a utopia or a planetwide insane asylum? Was there much difference? For the first time in his life, Goodman was wondering if utopia was worth having. Wasn't it better to strive for perfection than to possess it? To have ideals rather than to live by them? If justice was a fallacy, wasn't the fallacy better than the truth? Or was it? Goodman was a sadly confused young man when he shuffled into his house and found his wife in the arms of another man. slow-motion clarity in his eyes. It seemed to take Janna forever to rise to her feet, straighten her disarranged clothing and stare at him openmouthed. The man -- a tall, good-looking fellow whom Goodman had never before seen -- appeared too startled to speak. He made small, aimless gestures, brushing the lapel of his jacket, pulling down his cuffs. Then, tentatively, the man smiled. "Well!" Goodman said. It was feeble enough, under the circumstances, but it had its effect. Janna started to cry. "Terribly sorry," the man murmured. "Didn't expect you home for hours. This must come as a shock to you. I'm terribly sorry." The one thing Goodman hadn't expected or wanted was sympathy from his wife's lover. He ignored the man and stared at the weeping Janna. "Well, what did you expect?" Janna screamed at him suddenly. "I had to! You didn't love me!" "Didn't love you! How can you say that?" "Because of the way you treated me." "I loved you very much, Janna," he said softly. "You didn't!" she shril'ed, throwing back her head. "Just look at the way you treated me. You kept me around all day, every day, doing housework, cooking, sitting. Marvin, I could feel myself aging. Day after day, the same weary, stupid routine. And most of the time, when you came home, you were too tired to even notice me. All you could talk about was your stupid robots! I was being wasted, Marvin, wasted!" It suddenly occurred to Goodman that his wife was unhinged. Very gently he said, "But, Janna, that's how life is. A husband and wife settle into a companionable situation. They age together side by side. It can't all be high spots -- " "But of course it can! Try to understand, Marvin. It can, on Tranai -- for a woman!" "It's impossible," Goodman said. "On Tranai, a woman expects a life of enjoyment and pleasure. It's her right, just as men have their rights. She expects to come out of stasis and find a little party prepared, or a walk in the moonlight, or a swim, or a movie." She began to cry again. "But you were so smart. You had to change it. I should have known better than to trust a Terran." The other man sighed and lighted a cigarette. "I know you can't help being an alien, Marvin," Janna said. "But I do want you to understand. Love isn't everything. A woman must be practical, too. The way things were going, I would have been an old woman while all my friends were still young."  repeated blankly. "Of course," the man said. "A woman doesn't age in the derrsin field." "But the whole thing is ghastly," said Goodman. "My wife would still be a young woman when I was old." "That's just when you'd appreciate a young woman," Janna said. "But how about you?" Goodman asked. "Would you appreciate an old man?" "He still doesn't understand," the man said. "Marvin, try. Isn't it clear yet? Throughout your life, you would have a young and beautiful woman whose only desire would be to please you. And when you died -- don't look shocked, dear; everybody dies -- when you died, I would still be young, and by law I'd inherit all your money." "I'm beginning to see," Goodman said. "I suppose that's another accepted phase of Tranaian life -- the wealthy young widow who can pursue her own pleasures." "Naturally. In this way, everything is for the best for everybody. The man has a young wife whom he sees only when he wishes. He has his complete freedom and a nice home as well. The woman is relieved of all the dullness of ordinary living and, while she can still enjoy it, is well provided for." "You should have told me," Goodman complained. "I thought you knew," Janna said, "since you thought you had a better way. But I can see that you would never have understood, because you're so naive -- though I must admit it's one of your charms." She smiled wistfully. "Besides, if I told you, I would never have met Rondo." The man bowed slightly. "I was leaving samples of Greah's Confections. You can imagine my surprise when I found this lovely young woman out of stasis. I mean it was like a storybook tale come true. One never expects old legends to happen, so you must admit that there's a certain appeal when they do." "Do you love him?" Goodman asked heavily. "Yes," said Janna. "Rondo cares for me. He's going to keep me in stasis long enough to make up for the time I've lost. It's a sacrifice on his part, but Rondo has a generous nature." "If that's how it is," Goodman said glumly, "I certainly won't stand in your way. I am a civilized being, after all. You may have a divorce." his chest, feeling quite noble. But he was dimly aware that his decision stemmed not so much from nobility as from a sudden, violent distaste for all things Tranaian. "We have no divorce on Tranai," Rondo said. "No?" Goodman felt a cold chill run down his spine. A blaster appeared in Rondo's hand. "It would be too unsettling, you know, if people were always swapping around. There's only one way to change a marital status." "But this is revolting!" Goodman blurted, backing away. "It's against all decency!" "Not if the wife desires it. And that, by the by, is another excellent reason for keeping one's spouse in stasis. Have I your permission, my dear?" "Forgive me, Marvin," Janna said. She closed her eyes. "Yes!" Rondo leveled the blaster. Without a moment's hesitation, Goodman dived head-first out the nearest window. Rondo's shot fanned right over him. "See here!" Rondo called. "Show some spirit, man. Stand up to it!" Goodman had landed heavily on his shoulder. He was up at once, sprinting, and Rondo's second shot scorched his arm. Then he ducked behind a house and was momentarily safe. He didn't stop to think about it. Running for all he was worth, he headed for the spaceport. Fortunately, a ship was preparing for blastoff and took him to g'Moree. From there he wired to Tranai for his funds and bought passage to Higastomeritreia, where the authorities accused him of being a Ding spy. The charge couldn't stick, since the Dingans were an amphibious race, and Goodman almost drowned proving to everyone's satisfaction that he could breathe only air. A drone transport took him to the double planet Mvanti, past Seves, Olgo and Mi. He hired a bush pilot to take him to Bellismoranti, where the influence of Terra began. From there, a local spaceline transported him past the Galactic Whirl and, after stopping at Oyster, Lekung, Pankang, Inchang and Machang, arrived at Tung-Bradar IV. His money was now gone, but he was practically next door to Terra, as astronomical distances go. He was able to work his passage to Oume, and from Oume to Legis II. There the Interstellar Travelers Aid Society arranged a berth for him and at last he arrived back on Earth. in Seakirk, New Jersey, where a man is perfectly safe as long as he pays his taxes. He holds the post of Chief Robotic Technician for the Seakirk Construction Corporation and has married a small, dark, quiet girl, who obviously adores him, although he rarely lets her out of the house. He and old Captain Savage go frequently to Eddie's Moonlight Bar, drink Tranai Specials, and talk of Tranai the Blessed, where The Way has been found and Man is no longer bound to The Wheel. On such occasions, Goodman complains of a touch of space malaria -- because of it, he can never go back into space, can never return to Tranai. There is always an admiring audience on these nights. Goodman has recently organized, with Captain Savage's help, the Seakirk League to Take the Vote from Wonien. They are its only members, but as Goodman puts it, when did that ever stop a crusader? Money Back Guarantee An attractive three-dimensional paperweight of our Solar system, in color. The Nine Planets and The Sun are suspended with stars in solid clear plastic, and mounted on a black base. This scientifically correct paperweight in actual relative size and position will furnish many hours of interesting study for teachers and students alike. The perfect gift # sent postpaid. Howard's Originals, Post Office Box #, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Post Office Box #, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway Let posterity be the judge, eh? And come up with a mess of an odd tangle like this? E veryone is astonished at the change in Morniel Mathaway since he was discovered, everyone but me. They remember him as an unbathed and untalented Greenwich Village painter who began almost every second sentence with "I" and ended every third Illustrated one with "me." He had all the pushing, half-frightened conceit of the man who secretly suspects himself to be a second-rater or worse, and any half-hour conversation with him made your ears droop with the boastful yells he threw at them. I understand the change in him, the soft-spoken self-depreciation as well as the sudden overwhelming success. But then, I was there the day he was "discovered" -- except that isn't the right way to put it. To tell you the truth, I don't know how to put it, really, considering the absolute impossibility -- yes, I said impossibility, not improbability -- of the whole business. All I know for sure is that trying to make sense out of it gives me belly-yammers and the biggest headache this side of calculus. We were talking about his discovery that day. I was sitting, carefully balanced, on the one wooden chair in his cold little Bleecker Street studio, because I was too sophisticated to sit in the easy chair. Morniel practically paid the rent on his studio with that easy chair. It was a broken-down tangle of filthy upholstery that was high in the front of the seat and very low in the back. When you sat in it, things began sliding out of your pockets -- loose change, keys, wallets, anything -- and into the jungle of rusty springs and rotting woodwork below. Whenever newcomers came to the place, Morniel would make a big fuss about showing them to "the comfortable chair." And as they twisted about painfully trying to find a spot between the springs, his eyes would gleam and he'd get all lit up with good cheer. Because the more they moved about, the more would fall out of their pockets. After a party, he'd take the chair apart and start counting the receipts, like a store owner hitting the cash register the evening after a fire sale. The only trouble was, to sit in the wooden chair, you had to concentrate, since it teetered. Morniel couldn't lose -- he always sat on the bed. he was saying, "when some dealer, some critic, with an ounce of brain in his head sees my work. I can't miss, Dave, I know I can't miss; I'm just too good. Sometimes I get frightened at how good I am -- it's almost too much talent for one man." "Well," I said, "there's always the -- " "Not that it's too much talent for me," he went on, fearful that I might have misunderstood him. "I'm big enough to carry it, fortunately; I'm large enough of soul. But another, lesser guy would be destroyed by this much totality of perception, this comprehension of the spiritual gestalt, as I like to put it. His mind would just crack wide open under the load. Not me, though, Dave, not me." "Good," r said. "Glad to hear it. Now if you don't m -- " "Do you know what I was thinking about this morning?" "No," I said. "But, to tell you the truth, I don't really -- " "I was thinking about Picasso, Dave. Picasso and Roualt. I'd just gone for a walk through the pushcart area to have my breakfast -- you know, the old the-handis-quicker-than-the-eye Morniel -- and I started to think about the state of modern painting. I think about that a lot, Dave. It troubles me." "You do?" I said. "Well, I tend to -- " "I walked down Bleecker Street, then I swung into Washington Square Park, and while I walked, I was thinking: Who is doing really important work in painting today who is really and unquestionably great? I could think of only three names: Picasso, Roualt -- and me. There's nobody else doing anything worthwhile and original nowadays. Just three names out of the whole host of people painting all over the world at this moment: just three names, no more. It made me feel very lonely, Dave." "I can see that," I said. "But then, you -- " "And then I asked myself, why is this so? Has absolute genius always been so rare, is there an essential statistical limitation on it in every period, or is there another reason, peculiar to our own time? And why has my impending discovery been delayed so long? I thought about it for a long time, Dave. I thought about it humbly, carefully, because it's an important question. And this is the answer I came up with." I gave up. I just sat back in my chair -- not too far back, of course -- and listened to him expound a theory of esthetics I'd heard at least a dozen times before, from a dozen other painters in the Village. The only point of difference between them was on the question of exactly who was the culmination and the most perfect living example of this esthetic. Morniel, you will probably not be amazed to learn, felt it was himself. from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a tall, awkward boy who didn't like to shave and believed he could paint. In those days, he admired Gauguin and tried to imitate him on canvas; he'd talk for hours, in the accents that sound like movie Brooklynese, but are actually pure Pittsburgh, about the mystique of folk simplicity. He got off the Gauguin kick fast, once he'd taken a few courses at the Art Students League and grown his first straggly blond beard. Recently, he had developed his own technique which he called smudge-onsmudge. He was bad, and there were no two ways about it. I say that not only from my opinion -- and I've roomed with two modern painters and been married for a year to another -- but from the opinions of pretty knowing people who, having no personal axe to grind, looked his work over carefully. One of them, a fine critic of modern art, said after staring slack-jawed at a painting which Morniel had insisted on giving me and which, in spite of my protests, he had personally hung over my fireplace: "It's not just that he doesn't say anything of any significance, graphically, but he doesn't even set himself what you might call painterly problems. White-on-white, smudge-onsmudge, non-objectivism, neo-abstractionism, call it what you like, there's nothing there, nothing! He's just another of these loudmouth, frowzy, frustrated dilettantes that infest the Village." So why did I spend time with Morniel? Well, he lived right around the corner. He was slightly colorful, in his own sick way. And when I'd sat up all night, trying to work on a poem that simply wouldn't be worked, I often felt it would be relaxing to drift around to his studio for a spot of conversation that wouldn't have anything to do with literature. The only trouble -- and the thing I always forgot -- was that it almost never was a conversation. It was a monologue that I barely managed to break in on from time to time. You see, the difference between us was that I'd been published, even if it was only in badly printed experimental magazines that paid off in subscriptions. He'd never been exhibited -- not once. for my maintaining a friendly relationship with the man. And that had to do with the one talent he really had. I barely get by, so far as living expenses are concerned. Things like good paper to write on, fine books for my library, are stuff I yearn for all the time, but are way out of my reach financially. When the yearning gets too great -- for a newly published collection by Wallace Stevens, for example -- I meander over to Morniel's and tell him about it. Then we go out to the bookstore -- entering it separately. I start a conversation with the proprietor about some very expensive, out-of-print item that I'm thinking of ordering and, once I've got all of his attention, Morniel snaffles the Stevens -- which I intend to pay for, of course, as soon as I'm a little ahead. He's absolutely wonderful at it. I've never seen him so much as suspected, let alone caught. Of course, I have to pay for the it's not worth is the thumping boredom I have to suffer through in listening to the guy, or my conscience bothering me because I know he never intends to pay for those things. Okay, so I will, when I can. "I can't be as unique as I feel I am," he was saying now. "Other people must be born with the favor by going through the same routine in an art-supply store, so that Morniel can replenish his stock of canvas, paint and brushes, but it's worth it to me in the long run. The only thing potential of such great talent, but it's destroyed in them before they can reach artistic maturity. Why? How? Well, let's examine the role that society -- " And that's exactly when I first saw it. Just as he got to the word "society," I saw this purplish ripple in the wall opposite me, the strange, shimmering outline of a box with a strange, shimmering outline of a man inside the box. It was about five feet off the floor and it looked like colored heat waves. Then there was nothing on the wall. But it was too late in the year for heat waves. And I've never had optical illusions. It could be, I decided, that I had seen the beginnings of a new crack in Morniel's wall. The place wasn't really a studio, just a drafty coldwater flat that some old occupant had cleared so as to make one long room. It was on the top floor and the roof leaked occasionally; the walls were covered with thick, wavy lines in memory of the paths followed by the trickling water. But why purple? And why the outline of a man inside a box? That was pretty tricky, for a simple crack in the wall. And where had it gone? " -- the eternal conflict with the individual who insists on his individuality," Morniel pointed out. "Not to mention -- " notes sounded, one after the other, rapidly. And then, in the center of the room, about two feet above the floor this time, the purple lines reappeared -- still hazy, still transparent and still with the outline of a man inside. Morniel swung his feet off the bed and stared up at it. "What the -- " he began. Once more, the outfit disappeared. "W-what -- " Morniel stuttered. "What's going on?" "I don't know," I told him. "But whatever it is, I'd say they're slowly zeroing in." Again those high musical notes. And the purple box came into view with its bottom resting on the floor. It got darker, darker and more substantial. The notes kept climbing up the scale and getting fainter and fainter until, when the box was no longer transparent, they faded away altogether. A door slid back in the box. A man stepped out, wearing clothing that seemed to end everywhere in curlicues. He looked first at me, then at Morniel. "Morniel Mathaway?" he inquired. "Ye-es," Morniel said, backing away toward his refrigerator. "Morniel Mathaway," the man from the box said, "my name is Glescu. I bring you greetings from # A.D." Neither of us could think of a topper for that one, so we let it lie there. I got up and stood beside Morniel, feeling obscurely that I wanted to get as close as possible to something I was familiar with. And we all held that position for a while. Tableau. # A.D., I thought to myself. I'd never seen anyone dressed like that. Even more, I'd never imagined anyone dressed like that and my imagination can run pretty wild. The clothing was not exactly transparent and yet not quite opaque. Prismatic is the word for it, different colors that constantly chased themselves in and out and around the curlicues. There seemed to be a pattern to it, but nothing that my eyes could hold down and identify. And the man himself, this Mr. Glescu, was about the same height as Morniel and me and he seemed to be not very much older. But there was a something about him -- I don't know, call it quality, true and tremendous quality -- that would have cowed the Duke of Wellington. Civilized, maybe that's the word: he was the most civilized-looking man I'd ever seen. He stepped forward. "We will now," he said in a rich, wonderfully resonant voice, "indulge in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands." So we indulged in the twentieth-century custom of shaking hands with him. First Morniel, then me -- and both very gingerly. Mr. Glescu shook hands with a peculiar awkwardness that made me think of the way an Iowan farmer might eat with chopsticks for the first time. The ceremony over, he stood there and beamed at us. Or, rather, at Morniel. "What a moment, eh?" he said. "What a supreme moment!" and I knew that all those years of meeting process servers unexpectedly on the stairs had begun to pay off. He was recovering; his mind was beginning to work again. "How do you mean 'what a moment'?" he asked. "What's so special about it? Are you the -- the inventor of time travel?" Mr. Glescu twinkled with laughter. "Me? An inventor? Oh, no. No, no! Time travel was invented by Antoinette Ingeborg in -- but that was after your time. Hardly worth going into at the moment, especially since I only have half an hour." "Why half an hour?" I asked, not so much because I was curious as because it seemed like a good question. "The skindrom can only be maintained that long," he elucidated. "The skindrom is -- well, call it the transmitting device that enables me to appear in your period. There is such an enormous expenditure of power required that a trip into the past is made only once every fifty years. The privilege is awarded as a sort of Gobel. I hope I have the word right. It is Gobel, isn't it? The award made in your time?" I had a flash. "You wouldn't mean Nobel, by any chance? The Nobel Prize?" He nodded his head enthusiastically. "That's it! The Nobel Prize. The trip is awarded to outstanding scholars as a kind of Nobel Prize. Once every fifty years -- the man selected by the gardunax as the most pre-eminent -- that sort of thing. Up to now, of course, it's always gone to historians and they've frittered it away on the Siege of Troy, the first atom-bomb explosion at Los Alamos, the discovery of America -- things like that. But this year -- " "Yes?" Morniel broke in, his voice quavering. We were both suddenly remembering that Mr. Glescu had known his name. "What kind of scholar are you?" Mr. Glescu made us a slight bow with his head, "I am an art scholar. My specialty is art history. And my special field in art history is..." "What?" Morniel demanded, his voice no longer quavering, but positively screechy. "What is your special field?" Again a slight bow from Mr. Glescu's head. "You, Mr. Mathaway. In my own period, I may say without much fear of contradiction, I am the greatest living authority on the life and works of Morniel Mathaway. My special field is you." Morniel went white. He groped his way to the bed and sat down as if his hips were made of glass. He opened his mouth several times and couldn't seem to get a sound out. Finally, he gulped, clenched his fists and got a grip on himself. "Do -- do you mean," he managed to croak at last, "that I'm famous? That famous?" "Famous? You, my dear sir, are beyond fame. You are one of the immortals the human race has produced. As I put it -- rather well if I may say so -- in my last book, Mathaway, the Man Who Shaped the Future: 'How rarely has it fallen to the lot of individual human endeavor to -- '" "That famous." The blond beard worked the way a child's face does when it's about to cry. "That famous!" A assured him. "Who is the man with whom modern painting, in its full glory, is said to have definitely begun? Who is the man whose designs and special manipulations of color have dominated architecture for the past five centuries, who is responsible for the arrangement of our cities, the shape of our every artifact, the very texture of our clothing." "Me?" Morniel inquired weakly"You! No other man in the history of art has exerted such a massive influence over design or over so wide an area of art for so long a period of time. To whom can I compare you, sir? To what other artist in history can I compare you?" "Rembrandt?" Morniel suggested. He seemed to be trying to be helpful. "Da Vinci?" Mr. Glescu sneered. "Rembrandt and Da Vinci in the same breath as you? Ridiculous! They lacked your universality, your taste for the cosmic, your sense of the all-encompassing. No, to relate you properly to an equal, one must go outside painting, to literature, possibly. Shakespeare, with his vast breadth of understanding, with the resounding organ notes of his poetry and with his tremendous influence on the later English language -- but even Shakespeare, I'm afraid, even Shakespeare -- " He shook his head sadly. "Wow!" breathed Morniel Mathaway. "Speaking of Shakespeare," I broke in, "do you happen to know of a poet named David Dantziger? Did much of his work survive?" "Is that you?" "Yes," I told the man from # A.D. eagerly. "That's me, Dave Dantziger." He wrinkled his forehead. "I don't seem to remember any -- What school of poetry do you belong to?" "Well, they call it by various names. Anti-imagist is the most usual one. Anti-imagist or postimagist." "No," said Mr. Glescu after thinking for a while. "The only poet I can remember for this time and this part of the world is Peter Tedd." "Who is Peter Tedd? Never heard of him." "Then this must be before he was discovered. But please remember, I am an art scholar, not a literary one. It is entirely possible," he went on soothingly, "that were you to mention your name to a specialist in the field of minor twentieth-century versifiers, he could place you with a minimum of difficulty. Entirely possible." I glanced at Morniel, and he was grinning at me from the bed. He had entirely recovered by now and was beginning to soak the situation in through his pores. The whole situation. His standing. Mine. I decided I hated every single one of his guts. one like Morniel Mathaway that got that kind of nod from fate? There were so many painters who were decent human beings, and yet this bragging slug... And all the time, a big part of my mind was wandering around in circles. It just proved, I kept saying to myself, that you need the perspective of history to properly evaluate anything in art. You think of all the men who were big guns in their time and today are forgotten -- that contemporary of Beethoven's, for example, who, while he was alive, was considered much the greater man, and whose name is known today only to musicologists. But still -- Mr. Glescu glanced at the forefinger of his right hand where a little black dot constantly expanded and contracted. "My time is getting short," he said. "And while it is an ineffable, overwhelming delight for me to be standing in your studio, Mr. Mathaway, and looking at you at last in the flesh, I wonder if you would mind obliging me with a small favor?" "Sure," Morniel nodded, getting up. "You name it. Nothing's too good for you. What do you want?" Mr. Glescu swallowed as if he were about to bring himself to knock on the gates of Paradise. "I wonder -- I'm sure you don't mind -- could you possibly let me look at the painting you're working on at the moment? The idea of seeing a Mathaway in an unfinished state, with the paint still wet upon it -- " He shut his eyes, as if he couldn't believe that all this were really happening to him. Morniel gestured urbanely and strode to his easel. He pulled the tarp off. "I intend to call this -- " and his voice had grown as oily as the subsoil of Texas -- "Figured Figurines No. #." Slowly, tastingly, Mr. Glescu opened his eyes and leaned forward. "But -- " he said, after a long silence. "Surely this isn't your work, Mr. Mathaway?" Morniel turned around in surprise and considered the painting. "It's my work, all right. Figured Figurines No. #. Recognize it?" "No," said Mr. Glescu. "I do not recognize it. And that is a fact for which I am extremely grateful. Could I see something else, please? Something a little later?" "That's the latest," Morniel told him a little uncertainly. "Everything else is earlier. Here, you might like this." He pulled a painting out of the rack. "I call this Figured Figurines No. #. I think it's the best of my early period."-- looks like smears of paint on top of other smears of paint." "Right! Only I call it smudgeon-smudge. But you probably know all that, being such an authority on me. And here's Figured Figurines No. -- " "Do you mind leaving these -- these figurines, Mr. Mathaway?" Glescu begged. "I'd like to see something of yours with color. With color and with form!" Morniel scratched his head. "I haven't done any real color work for a long time. Oh, wait!" He brightened and began to search in the back of the rack. He came out with an old canvas. "This is one of the few examples of my mauve-and-mottled period that I've kept." "I can't imagine why," Mr. Glescu murmured, mostly to himself. "It's positively -- " He brought his shoulders up to his ears in the kind of shrug that anyone who's ever seen an art critic in action can immediately recognize. You don't need words after that shrug; if you're a painter whose work he's looking at, you don't want words. About this time, Morniel began pulling paintings out frantically. He'd show them to Glescu, who would gurgle as if he were forcing down a retch, and pull out some more paintings. "I don't understand it," Mr. Glescu said, staring at the floor, which was strewn with canvases tacked to their wooden stretchers. "This was obviously before you discovered yourself and your true technique. But I'm looking for a sign, a hint, of the genius that is to come. And I find -- " He shook his head dazedly. "How about this one?" Morniel asked, breathing hard. Mr. Glescu shoved at it with both hands. "Please take it away!" He looked at his forefinger again. I noticed the black dot was expanding and contracting much more slowly. "I'll have to leave soon," he said. "And I don't understand at all. Let me show you something, gentlemen." box and came out with a book. He beckoned to us. Morniel and I moved around behind him and stared over his shoulder. The pages tinkled peculiarly as they were turned; one thing I knew for sure -- they weren't made out of paper. And the title-page... The Complete Paintings of Morniel Mathaway, #-#. "Were you born in #?" I demanded. Morniel nodded. "May #, #." And he was silent. I knew what he was thinking about and did a little quick figuring. Sixtyeight years. It's not given to many men to know exactly how much time they have. Sixty-eight years -- that wasn't so bad. Mr. Glescu turned to the first of the paintings. Even now, when I remember my initial sight of it, my knees get weak and bend inward. It was an abstraction in full color, but such an abstraction as I'd never imagined before. As if all the work of all the abstractionists up to this point had been an appenticeship on the kindergarten level. You had to like it -- so long as you had eyes -- whether or not your appreciation had been limited to representational painting until now; even if, in fact, you'd never particularly cared about painting of any school. I don't want to sound maudlin, but I actually felt tears in my eyes. Anyone who was at all sensitive to beauty would have reacted the same way. Not Morniel, though. "Oh, that kind of stuff," he said as if a great light had broken on him. "Why didn't you tell me you wanted that kind of stuff?" Mr. Glescu clutched at Morniel's dirty tee-shirt. "Do you mean you have paintings like this, too?" "Not paintings -- painting. Just one. I did it last week as a sort of experiment, but I wasn't satisfied with the way it turned out, so I gave it to the girl downstairs. Care to take a look at it?" "Oh, yes! Very, very much!" Morniel reached for the book and tossed it casually on the bed. "Okay," he said. "Come on. It won't take more than a minute or two." A S WE trooped downstairs, I found myself boiling with perplexity. One thing I was sure of -- as sure as of the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer had lived before Algernon Swinburne -- nothing that Morniel had ever done or had the capacity of ever doing thetic miles of the reproduction in that book. And for all of his boasting, for all of his seemingly inexhaustible conceit, I was certain that he also knew it. He stopped before a door two floors below and rapped on it. There was no answer. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. Still no answer. "Damn," he said. "She isn't home. And I did want you to see that one." "I want to see it," Mr. Glescu told him earnestly. "I want to see anything that looks like your mature work. But time is growing so short -- " Morniel snapped his fingers. "Tell you what. Anita has a couple of cats she asks me to feed whenever she's away for a while, so she's given me a key to her apartment. Suppose I whip upstairs and get it?" "Fine!" Mr. Glescu said happily, taking a quick look at his forefinger. "But please hurry." "Will do." And then, as Morniel turned to go up the stairs, he caught my eye. And he gave me the signal, the one we use whenever we go "shopping." It meant: "Talk to the man. Keep him interested." I got it. The book. I'd seen Morniel in action far too many times not to remember that casual gesture of tossing it on the bed as anything but a casual gesture. He'd just put it where he could find it when he wanted it -- fast. He was going upstairs to hide it in some unlikely spot and when Mr. Glescu had to take off for his own time -- well, the book would just not be available. Smooth? Very pretty damned smooth, I'd say. And Morniel Mathaway would paint the paintings of Morniel Mathaway. Only he wouldn't paint them. He'd copy them. Meanwhile, the signal snapped my mouth open and automatically started me talking. "Do you paint yourself, Mr. Glescu?" I asked. I knew that would be a good gambit. "Oh, no! Of course, I wanted to be an artist when I was a boy -- I imagine every critic starts out that way -- and I even committed a few daubs of my own. But they were very bad, very bad indeed! I found it far easier to write about paintings than to do them. Once I began reading the life of Morniel Mathaway, I knew I'd found my field. Not only did I empathize closely with his paintings, but he seemed so much like a person I could have known and liked. That's one of the things that puzzles me. He's quite different from what I imagined." I nodded. "I bet he is." "Of course history has a way of adding stature and romance to any important figure. And I can see several things about his personality that the glamorizing process of the centuries could -- but I shouldn't go on in this fashion, Mr. Dantziger. You're his friend." "About as much of a friend as he's got in the world," I told him, "which isn't saying much." ing to figure it out. But the more I figured, the more confused I got. The paradoxes in the thing. How could Morniel Mathaway become famous five hundred years from now by painting pictures that he first saw in a book published five hundred years from now? Who painted the pictures? Morniel Mathaway? The book said so, and with the book in his possession, he would certainly do them. But he'd be copying them out of the book. So who painted the original pictures? Mr. Glescu looked worriedly at his forefinger. "I'm running out of time -- practically none left!" He sped up the stairs, with me behind him. When we burst into the studio, I braced myself for the argument over the book. I wasn't too happy about it, because I liked Mr. Glescu. The book wasn't there; the bed was empty. And two other things weren't there -- the time machine and Morniel Mathaway. "He left in it!" Mr. Glescu gasped. "He stranded me here! He must have figured out that getting inside and closing the door made it return!" "Yeah, he's a great figurer," I said bitterly. This I hadn't bargained for. This I wouldn't have helped to bring about. "And he'll probably figure out a very plausible story to tell the people in your time to explain how the whole thing happened. Whyshould he work his head off in the twentieth century when he can be an outstanding, hero-worshipped celebrity in the twentyfifth?" "But what will happen if they ask him to paint merely one picture -- " "He'll probably tell them he's already done his work and feels he can no longer add anything of importance to it. He'll no doubt end up giving lectures on himself. Don't worry, he'll make out. It's you I'm worried about. You're stuck here. Are they likely to send a rescue party after you?" Mr. Glescu shook his head miserably. "Every scholar who wins the award has to sign a waiver of responsibility, in case he doesn't return. The machine may be used only once in fifty years -- and by that time, some other scholar will claim and be given the right to witness the storming of the Bastille, the birth of Gautama Buddha or something of the sort. No, I'm stuck here, as you phrased it. Is it very bad, living in this period?" I slapped him on the shoulder. I was feeling very guilty. "Not so bad. Of course, you'll need a social security card, and I don't know how you go about getting one at your age. And possibly -- I don't know for sure -- the F.B.I. or Immigration authorities may want to question you, since you're an illegal alien, kind of." He looked appalled. "Oh, dear! That's quite bad enough!" "No, it needn't be. Tell you what. Morniel has a social security card -- he had a job a couple of years ago. And he keeps his birth certificate in that bureau drawer along with other personal papers. Why don't you just assume his identity? He'll never show you up as an imposter!" "Do you think I could? Won't I be -- won't his friends -- his relatives -- " "Parents both dead, no relatives I ever heard about. And I told you I'm the closest thing to a friend he's got." I examined Mr. Glescu thoughtfully. "You could get away with it. Maybe grow a beard and dye it blond. Things like that. Naturally, the big problem would be earning a living. Being a specialist on Mathaway and the art movements that derived from him wouldn't get you fed an awful lot right now." He grabbed at me. "I could paint! I've always dreamed of being a painter! I don't have much talent, but there are all sorts of artistic novelties I know about, all kinds of graphic innovations that don't exist in your time. Surely that would be enough -- even without talent -- to make a living for me on some thirdor fourth-rate level!" It was. It certainly was. But not on the thirdor fourth-rate level. On the first. Mr. GlescuMorniel Mathaway is the finest painter alive today. And the unhappiest. "What's the matter with these people?" he asked me wildly after his last exhibition. "Praising me like that! I don't have an ounce of real talent in me; all my work, all, is completely derivative. I've tried to do something, anything, that was completely my own, but I'm so steeped in Mathaway that I just can't seem to make my own personality come through. And those idiotic critics go on raving about me -- and the work isn't even my own!" "Then whose is it?" I wanted to know. "Mathaway's, of course," he said bitterly. "We thought there couldn't be a time paradox -- I wish you could read all the scientific papers on the subject; they fill whole libraries -- because it isn't possible, the time specialists argue, for a painting, say, to be copied from a future reproduction and so have no original artist. But that's what I'm doing! I'm copying from that book by memory!" # I wish I could tell him the truth -- he's such a nice guy, especially compared to the real fake of a Mathaway, and he suffers so much. But I can't. You see, he's deliberately trying not to copy those paintings. He's working so hard at it that he refuses to think about that book or even discuss it. I finally got him to recently, for a few sentences, and you know what? He doesn't actually remember, except pretty hazily! Of course he wouldn't -- he's the real Morniel Mathaway and there is no paradox. But if I ever told him that he was actually painting the pictures instead of merely copying them from memory, he'd lose whatever little selfconfidence he has. So I have to let him think he's a phony when he's nothing of the sort. "Forget it," I go on telling him. "A buck's a buck."      An editor who holds his breath until a James H. Schmitz story is delivered is apt to turn pretty blue in the face, for he is one of the most meticulous writers in the business. month's issue, is important news. It's a literary sizzler, with lots of deadly action going on all the time -- or is it? That, you see, is why you'll sweat with Commager, who is -- or is he? -- experiencing these confusing and terrifying catastrophes. What was happening to him did worse than make no sense; it made altogether too much sense! But what was true and what was not? Satterfield. Like most of us, Redfern is a properly wary fellow, especially on a world as dangerous as the twelfth planet of Capella, as who wouldn't be? Well, the people he falls in with, for instance, literally almost over his own dead body. But the lesson Redfern passes on to us is a valuable one: Don't get mixed up with fearless adventurers cast in the heroic mold; they can really put on the squeeze! after five years of reviewing for Galaxy, I say 'Au revoir.' I'm off for a long trip to the West Coast and then down to the Virgin Islands, where I am now, by gar, a bloated landowner! (The land isn't bloated by any means, being only fifteen gorgeous acres; I am -- by pride and satisfaction.) It's been a fine five years, but now I turn the column over to Floyd C. Gale; he did some s-f writing years back and a great deal of reading since about #, has excellent taste and an easy, witty style. You'll like him. I do." for your information which must elapse between the writing of this column and its appearance on the newsstands, Walt Disney's Man in Space will have had its second showing on television. Naturally I do not know how many viewers will tune in on the repeat showing, but the audience for the premiere, in March of this This, I may add in the very In front of a "story board" in the Walt Disney studios. This scene, in which Willy Ley explains the principle of the instrument carrier to artists Svendsen and O'Connor, was used in the film. strictest confidence, was higher than we thought it would be while we were planning and making the film. As far as I am concerned, it began with a long distance call from Hollywood -- just as in the movies -- asking me to come out and act as adviser. No notice was offered, but I did have to ask for three days because I was slated to appear at a cocktail party given by the New York Herald Tribune where I was to receive the prize my book Engineers' Dreams had just won. The timing of flights was such, at that time, that I could not attend the party, go home for my luggage and catch the nonstop transcontinental DC-# afterward. What I could do was to take a flight from LaGuardia to Chicago and catch a non-stop Studio scene during the filming. The large rocket DC-# for the West Coast at midflight in Chicago. Needless to say, flying all night, even as a passenger, is not conducive to alertness. ful air-conditioned studios of Walt Disney Productions in Burbank, California, I mentally weighed the problems involved. A nationwide network television viewers -- especially if it had Disney's name attached to it -- which meant that we must take nothing for granted. Writing such a script -- at that moment, I still thought a script had to be written -- would be entirely different from writing for publication, where you can take some things for granted. A man who spends five dollars and probably eager to read it. Furthermore, he is reasonably solvent -- or, if not, he is all the more interested in the subject matter -- and he must have had a fair amount of education, for very few uneducated people buy books. Similarly, in writing this column, I can assume that every reader is interested in science and science fiction. But with a all getting a free show, no such assumption could be made. Obviously everything had to be explained right from scratch. On the other hand, the most instructive device invented so far was at our disposal: the animated cartoon. We would not have to explain with words, as I do in lectures; we could show how things work. As a means of visual instruction, this was superior even to ordinary film. Sitting down with Ward Kimball, the director of the film, and his group of artists, I had the procedure explained to me. They don't have "scripts" at Disney's, at least not in the customary meaning of the word. The "working scripts" are story boards, as they are called, large boards in wooden frames on which the sequence to be shown is pinned up with push pins. What goes on the first story board may be almost anything, quick sketches, photographs if they Dr. Wernher von Braun (left) and Willy Ley between "takes". happen to be around, even pictures clipped from magazines. The boards are gradually refined and improved, the words which may be on the sound track are written down and also pinned up, and after what looks like a minimum of a thousand changes and after approval by Walt Disney, this narration finally does become a kind of script. It is actually typed out to be recorded on the sound track. The very first problem was not so much what to put on the story boards, but what to leave out. At first, the idea had been to show the present concept of the Universe and of the Solar The model of the four-stage ship designed by Dr. Wernher von Braun for the film. System in particular, then to trace the story of the idea of space travel in old science fiction to the present, and finally to tell how today's experts think space travel can be brought about, the climax being a rocket flight to the Moon or to Mars. " story boards survived the discussions with the experts, not because it was wrong in any way, but because each expert dumped an hours' worth of additional information into the debate. Dr. Heinz Haber delivered several fine lectures on problems of space medicine. Dr. Wernher von Braun, when turned loose on engineering detail, could go on until stopped by darkness or other appointments. As for me, I talked for about a week on the history of rocket research and the fundamental principles involved. I don't know just what had been expected of the experts before they arrived; what we did do was to turn offices and sketch rooms into classrooms and apparently everybody was very pleased. The result of this large-scale influx of information was that Walt Disney first split the original first show into two and then authorized another split so that we worked on three shows instead of one. The first, Man in Space, comprised history up to now, the problems of space medicine -- the section where the Disney crew really let fly, it being the Dr. Heinz Haber (left), Dr. von Braun (center) and the author examining model of non-form-fitting spacesuit. only section where humor was possible -- and the immediate future, as embodied in the von Braun plan. The second film will show the building of the space station and the trip around the Moon (without landing). The trip to Mars, at first thought to be merely the climax of the picture, will be a show in itself. When it came to the more detailed story boards, a new set of problems arose. The history was comparatively simple. Of the earliest Chinese rockets of # A.D. and thereafter, not much more is known than that they existed. This left free rein for Ward Kimball and his crew to draw entertaining pictures. Of the later rockets, contemporary pictures are available, so we used these, although they often had to be redrawn to show up well on a television screen. (Let me insert here that the original film is in color, for foreign releases and possible theatrical showing in this country.) Of the most modern rockets, films are available, though they are sometimes not easy to come by. An interesting little item was a film showing the (unsuccessful) takeoff of one of the earliest V-# rockets at Peenemiinde, Germany. When we screened the section, Wernher von Braun naturally recognized the film, for he had been there when it was taken. But he had been certain that this had been a silent film and yet the typical thunder of the V-# motor came out of the loudspeaker. The solution of the puzzle was very simple, of course -- one V-# sounds like another and the sound was "courtesy White Sands Proving Grounds." the problems of explaining fundamentals. The most basic point of space travel is, of course, that the thrust of a rocket is independent of its surroundings; in other words, that the rocket will work in air, under water and also in a vacuum. The rocket does not move beWalt Disney (left) and the author checking some film footage. cause the exhaust blast "pushes against the air." Then again, you can't say that it does not "push against the air," for if there is air around, it obviously cannot help doing so. The point is that this is not what causes the motion. What does cause the motion is that backward thrust produces forward movement. But how to show this? Now it is a fact that you can propel yourself in a canoe on a quiet lake if you have a supply of rocks with you and throw them as hard as you can to the rear. But we were not sure whether this would make a good picture. Another obvious fact is that a gun kicks back and that there is no reason to think that it wouldn't kick back when fired in a vacuum. One of the early story boards contained sketches of a machine gun mounted on a small railroad car, the machine gun firing over the tail end of the car, accelerating it in the opposite direction. Then somebody pinned up a sketch of a little dog sneezing violently. This one was used, along with a general explanation of "action" and "reaction" by means of the animated cartoon. It all made two other problems which I know to be "tough" from lecture experience easy to explain. In the solid fuel rocket, you have a stick of powder that burns off, producing quantities of exhaust gases that escape at high speed through the rearward nozbullets, producing thrust. The tube that houses the powder stick must naturally be able to stand the strain and the heat of combustion. It does so mostly by virtue of the fact that the burning time of a solid-fuel rocket is usually less than a second. But in the liquid-fuel rocket, this compact device has been, so to speak, taken apart. In place of the powder mixture, you have two liquids in separate tanks, one the fuel proper, the other a liquid providing oxygen for combustion. Instead of burning the fuel in the tank which contains it, it has to be forced into a combustion chamber either by gas pressure on the liquids or else by means of fuel pumps. So far, there is no special problem. But the liquid-fuel rocket motor has to last for a full minute or more and the flame produced by the liquid fuels is usually hotter than that of solid fuels. At any event, the temperature of the flame is far above the melting point of the metal. The way out of this dilemma is to put a cooling jacket around the combustion chamber and the exhaust nozzle and to send one of the two liquids, usually the fuel, through this cooling jacket before it is injected into the motor for burning. Jture experience that a nontechnical audience has a good deal of trouble understanding this solution. I don't know whether it is the idea of using a fuel for cooling that is so novel -- after all, anybody should know that a drum of gasoline left in the garage on a cold winter's night is mighty cold and yet is still fuel. Or possibly a non-technical audience just cannot visualize how the liquid flows from the tank through the pumps into the distributing pipes and the cooling jacket to the injection nozzles. But when it was shown in animated diagrams on the screen, nobody failed to grasp it literally at a glance. The other "tough" problem has to do with the artificial satellite. A Viking rocket will climb to # miles and then fall back. "Project Bumper" climbed to # miles and then fell back. But the artificial satellite is supposed to stay in space, and when you say this, you get the inevitable question, "What holds it up?" The correct and truthful answer is that the artificial satellite will stay in space because it is a satellite, but that does not sound like an answer to most people. In explanation by word of mouth, you usually have to resort to the comparison of a stone tied to a string swinging in a circle and say that centrifugal force counter balances the Earth's gravitational attraction. In the film, we could show what happens -- namely, that it is the Earth's gravitational pull which keeps the artificial satellite in a closed orbit. We first showed what would happen if the Earth's gravity did not exist: The rocket, rising at a slant, would simply keep going and escape into space. But then a set of lines representing gravity was drawn in, showing how gravity bends the otherwise straight line of the rocket's path into a closed orbit. belonged in Dr. Heinz Haber's sequence on space medicine also has to do with gravity. With only a negligible number of exceptions, all citizens, resident aliens and temporary visitors are convinced that they can feel gravity. The plain truth is that they can't. What they feel when standing up or sitting down is the effect of resisting the pull of gravity which appears in the sensation of weight. If they did not resist, they would, of course, fall, but while falling they'd feel weightless. Which proves two things, first that you can be deep in a powerful gravitational field and still feel weightless, and second that you cannot feel the gravity itself, but only the effect of resisting its pull. On the screen, this was shown in the form of an outline elevator happily occupied by Mr. Average Man who, to his great surprise, begins to feel weightless and float as Fate, represented by a huge pair of scissors, cuts the ropes. Having told the history of rockets, shown the rockets probing beyond the stratosphere, explained why a rocket will work in empty space, demonstrated what happens in a rocket motor, illustrated the principle of the artificial satellite and given a quick course in space medicine, our next job was to go into the future for just a few years. The first goal of liquid-fuel rocket research was to make one rise off the ground. Once that was accomplished, the goal may be called the altitude record, although I am fully aware that this is a gross oversimplication and that the actual altitude record is merely a part, and not the most important part, of the goal. The unmanned artificial satellite will be the next long step forward, but the ultimate goal is to get Man into space. The first steps have already been made. Pilots have flown twice the speed of sound at high altitudes and piloted rocket-propelled airplanes have beaten the high-altitude record held for so many years by the manned stratosphere balloon Explorer II. In fact, it has now been revealed that a piloted plane has gone to # feet, a height where no rudder, elevator or aileron does much good any more. Space, however, is beyond that. And to go that far, the rocket-propelled airplane will need rocket boosters. animated cartoon made it easy to show just how such a project would be approached. If you have the finished rocket ship in mind, the work begins at the top of the whole thing. The top is a rocket-propelled airplane with sealed cabin. It would be built first and go through the customary series of tests, being towed by a big jet plane, without using any power of its own. Having been disconnected from the towing plane, the pilot would make glide landings. After all this has worked to everybody's full satisfaction, a takeoff must be made with one rocket booster, followed by powered flight, unpowered glide and landing. Then the plane, which by then has become the top stage of a multi-stage rocket ship, would make a rather long flight with two rocket boosters pushing it in succession. Finally, the whole ship would be assembled and be readied for "the flight" -- the flight into space where the top stage (the "plane") circles the Earth a few times until the pilot reduces its speed by firing the forward rocket motors. The reduced speed will then make it change to another orbit, part of which is inside the atmosphere. And once the ship has entered the atmosphere, air resistance will reduce the speed more and more. I want to interrupt my story here for two explanations. The rocket ship (Fig. # shows a photograph of the model) used in the film is Dr. Wernher von Braun's most recent design and constitutes a decided improvement over the original three-stage ship which he first described in his book The Mars Project. It is not only lighter and smaller than the first design, but also differs in concept in several respects. However, I can't dwell on questions of detail until the designer has published it himself in a professional journal first. The other thing I want to point out has to do with the meeting in space of this ship with the nose cone of the instrumentcarrying rocket. The meeting as shown in the film is correct insofar as the instrument carrier was stated to have been put into an orbit leading over both poles of the Earth. The manned ship was assumed to circle the Earth temporarily in the same orbit in which the space station is to be built at a later date. This would put the ship at a distance of # miles from the ground. And though there may be an instrument carrier at that distance, it would not be the first one, which would be sent into an orbit much nearer the ground. flight were worked out with all the care of which everybody involved was capable. A lot of data that would never show in the film was worked out just the same to see where it would lead. At one point, von Braun and I forgot in an interesting manner what we were really doing. It had been suggested that ground control should have an instrument which would show the position of the manned ship at any time during its flight. The instrument, somebody said, might be a globe of the Earth, with a ring of transparent plastic around it, representing the orbit. But this ring should touch the ground, for it was to show takeoff and landing, too. The position of the ship could be indicated by a moving spot of light in the ring of transparent plastic. This sounded fine and von Braun mused, "Now how would one build that?" whereupon we started debating how one might go about it. After a few minutes, one of the artists brought us down to sea level with the remark: "You know, here at Disney's, we just draw things." Well, this-is the story of how a very large portion of the public of the United States and Canada got to see a first lesson in the principles of space travel, or rather of the beginnings of space travel, the first step outside the atmosphere. I am quite sure that a decade from now, lecturers will rent copies of the film to explain to their audiences how prediction differed from reality. I hope they won't forget to mention that prediction is one of the causes of reality. That's true of research. It's also true of science fiction. All Photographs Courtesy Walt Disney Productions Bolden's Pets The price of life was a life for a life -- which was all the reward the victim looked for! as he exhibited the gifts. If he were on Earth, he would be certain it was the flu; in the Centaurus system, kranken. But this was Van Daamas, so Lee Bolden couldn't say what he had. Man hadn't been here long enough to investigate the diseases with any degree of thoroughness. There were always different hazards to overcome as new planets were settled. But whatever infection he had, Bolden was not greatly concerned as he counted out the gifts. He had felt the onset of illness perhaps an hour before. When he got back to the settlement he'd be taken care of. That was half a day's flight from here. The base was equipped with the best medical facilities that had been devised. He stacked up the gifts to make an impressive show: five pairs of radar goggles, seven high-velocity carbines, seven boxes of ammunition. This was the natives' own rule and was never to be disregarded -- it had to be an odd number of gifts. The Van Daamas native gazed impassively at the heap. He carried a rather strange bow and a quiver was strapped to his thigh. With one exception, the arrows were brightly colored, mostly red and yellow. Bolden supposed this was for easy recovery in case the shot missed. But there was always one arrow that was stained dark blue. Bolden had observed this before -- no native was ever without that one somber-looking arrow. The man of Van Daamas stood there and the thin robe that was no protection against the elements rippled slightly in the chill current of air that flowed down the mountainside. "I will go talk with the others," he said in English. "Go talk," said Bolden, trying not to shiver. He replied in native speech, but a few words exhausted his knowledge and he had to revert to his own language. "Take the gifts with you. They are yours, no matter what you decide." The native nodded and reached for a pair of goggles. He tried them on, looking out over fog and mist-shrouded slopes. These people of Van Daamas needed radar less than any race Bolden knew of. Living by preference in mountains, they had developed a keenness of vision that enabled them to see through the perpetual fog and mist far better than any Earthman. Paradoxically it was the goggles they appreciated most. Extending their sight seemed more precious to them than powerful carbines. The native shoved the goggles up on his forehead, smiling with pleasure. Noticing that Bolden was shivering, he took his hands and examined them. "Hands sick?" he queried. "A little," said Bolden. "I'll be all right in the morning." The . native gathered up the gifts. "Go talk," he repeated as he went away. ter and waited. He didn't know how much influence this native had with his people. He had come to negotiate, but this might have been because he understood English somewhat better than the others. A council of the natives would make the decision about working for the Earthmen's settlement. If they approved of the gifts, they probably would. There was nothing to do now but wait -- and shiver. His hands were getting numb and his feet weren't much better. Presently the native came out of the fog carrying a rectangular wicker basket. Bolden was depressed when he saw it. One gift in return for goggles, carbines, ammunition. The rate of exchange was not favorable. Neither would the reply be. The man set the basket down and waited for Bolden to speak. "The people have talked?" asked Bolden. "We have talked to come," said the native, holding out his fingers. "In five or seven days, we come." It was a surprise, a pleasant one. Did one wicker basket equal so many fine products of superlative technology? Apparently it did. The natives had different values. To them, one pair of goggles was worth more than three carbines, a package of needles easily the equivalent of a box of ammunition. "It's good you will come. I will leave at once to tell them at the settlement," said Bolden. There was something moving in the basket, but the weave was close and he couldn't see through it. "Stay," the man advised. "A storm blows through the mountains." "I will fly around the storm," said Bolden. If he hadn't been sick he might have accepted the offer. But he had to get back to the settlement for treatment. On a strange planet you never could tell what might develop from a seemingly minor ailment. Besides he'd already been gone two days searching for this tribe in the interminable fog that hung over the mountains. Those waiting at the base would want him back as soon as he could get there. "Fly far around," said the man. "It is a big storm." He took up the basket and held it level with the cabin, opening the top. An animal squirmed out and disappeared inside. Bolden looked askance at the eyes that glowed in the dim interior. He hadn't seen clearly what the creature was and he didn't like the idea of having it loose in the cabin, particularly if he had to fly through a storm. The man should have left it in the basket. But the basket plus the animal would have been two gifts -- and the natives never considered anything in even numbers. "It will not hurt," said the man. "A gentle pet." were no pets and very few domesticated animals. Bolden snapped on the cabin light. It was one of those mysterious creatures every tribe kept in cages near the outskirts of their camps. What they did with them no one knew and the natives either found it impossible to explain or did not care to do so. It seemed unlikely that the creatures were used for food and certainly they were not work animals. And in spite of what this man said, they were not pets either. No Earthman had ever seen a native touch them nor had the creatures ever been seen wandering at large in the camp. And until now, none had been permitted to pass into Earth's possession. The scientists at the settlement would regard this acquisition with delight. "Touch it," said the native. Bolden held out his trembling hand and the animal came to him with alert and friendly yellow eyes. It was about the size of a rather small dog, but it didn't look much like one. It resembled more closely a tiny slender bear with a glossy and shaggy cinnamon coat. Bolden ran his hands through the clean-smelling fur and the touch warmed his fingers. The animal squirmed and licked his fingers. "It has got your taste," said the native. "Be all right now. It is yours." He turned and walked into the mist. Bolden got in and started the motors while the animal climbed into the seat beside him. It was a friendly thing and he couldn't understand why the natives always kept it caged. He headed straight up, looking for a way over the mountains to avoid the impending storm. Fog made it difficult to tell where the peaks were and he had to drop lower, following meandering valleys. He flew as swiftly as limited visibility would allow, but he hadn't gone far when the storm broke. He tried to go over the top of it, but this storm seemed to have no top. The region was incompletely mapped and even radar wasn't much help in the tremendous electrical display that raged around the ship. His arms ached as he clung to the controls. His hands weren't actually cold, they were numb. His legs were leaden. The creature crept closer to him and he had to nudge it away. Momentarily the distraction cleared his head. He couldn't put it off any longer. He had to land and wait out the storm -- if he could find a place to land. Flexing his hands until he worked some feeling into them, he inched the ship lower. A canyon wall loomed at one side and he had to veer away and keep on looking. Eventually he found his refuge -- a narrow valley where the force of the winds was not extreme -- and he set the land anchor. Unless something drastic happened, it would hold. decided he was too tired to eat, and went directly to sleep. When he awakened, the storm was still raging and the little animal was snoozing by his side. He felt well enough to eat. The native hadn't explained what the animal should be fed, but it accepted everything Bolden offered. Apparently it was as omniverous as Man. Before lying down again, he made the other seat into a bed, although it didn't seem to matter. The creature preferred being as close to him as it could get and he didn't object. The warmth was comforting. Alternately dozing and waking he waited out the storm. It lasted a day and a half. Finally the sun was shining. This was two days since he had first fallen ill, four days after leaving the settlement. Bolden felt much improved. His hands were nearly normal and his vision wasn't blurred. He looked at the little animal curled in his lap, gazing up at him with solemn yellow eyes. If he gave it encouragement it would probably be crawling all over him. However, he couldn't have it frisking around while he was flying. "Come, Pet," he said -- there wasn't anything else to call it -- "you're going places." Picking it up, half-carrying and half-dragging it, he took it to the rear of the compartment, improvising a narrow cage back there. He was satisfied it would hold. He should have done this in the beginning. Of course he hadn't felt like it then and he hadn't had the time -- and anyway the native would have resented such treatment of a gift. Probably it was best he had waited. His pet didn't like confinement. It whined softly for a while. The noise stopped when the motors roared. Bolden headed straight up, until he was high enough to establish communication over the peaks. He made a brief report about the natives' agreement and his own illness, then he started home. He flew at top speed for ten hours. He satisfied his hunger by nibbling concentrated rations from time to time. The animal whined occasionally, but Bolden had learned to identify the sounds it made. It was neither hungry nor thirsty. If merely wanted to be near him. And all he wanted was to reach the base. The raw sprawling settlement looked good as he sat the copter down. Mechanics came running from the hangars. They opened the door and he stepped out. And fell on his face. There was no feeling in his hands and none in his legs. He hadn't recovered. him through the microscreen. It gave his face a narrow insubstantial appearance. The microscreen was a hemispherical force field enclosing his head. It originated in a tubular circlet that snapped around his throat at the top of the decontagion suit. The field killed all microlife that passed through it or came in contact with it. The decontagion suit was non-porous and impermeable, covering completely the rest of his body. The material was thinner over his hands and thicker at the soles. Bolden took in the details at a glance. "Is it serious?" he asked, his voice cracking with the effort. "Merely a precaution," said the doctor hollowly. The microscreen distorted sound as well as sight. "Merely a precaution. We know what it is, but we're not sure of the best way to treat it." Bolden grunted to himself. The microscreen and decontagion suit were strong precautions. The doctor wheeled a small machine from the wall and placed Bolden's hand in a narrow trough that held it steady. The eyepiece slid into the microscreen and, starting at the finger tips, Kessler examined the arm, traveling slowly upward. At last he stopped. "Is this where feeling ends?" "I think so. Touch it. Yeah. It's dead below there." "Good. Then we've got it pegged. It's the Bubble Death." Bolden showed concern and the doctor laughed. "Don't worry. It's called that because of the way it looks through the X-ray microscope. It's true that it killed the scouting expedition that discovered the planet, but it won't get you." "They had antibiotics. Neobiotics, too." "Sure. But they had only a few standard kinds. Their knowledge was more limited and they lacked the equipment we now have." The doctor made it sound comforting. But Bolden wasn't comforted. Not just yet. "Sit up and take a look," said Kessler, bending the eyepiece around so Bolden could use it. "The dark filamented lines are nerves. See what surrounds them?" Bolden watched as the doctor adjusted the focus for him. Each filament was covered with countless tiny spheres that isolated and insulated the nerve from contact. That's why he couldn't feel anything. The spherical microbes did look like bubbles. As yet they didn't seem to have attacked the nerves directly. While he watched, the doctor swiveled out another eyepiece for his own use and turned a knob on the side of the machine. From the lens next to his arm an almost invisible needle slid out and entered his flesh. Bolden could see it come into the field of view. It didn't hurt. Slowly it approached the dark branching filament, never quite touching it. The needle was hollow and as Kessler squeezed the knob it sucked in the spheres. The needle extended a snout which crept along the nerve, vacuuming in microbes as it moved. When a section had been cleansed, the snout was retracted. Bolden could feel the needle then. laid Bolden's hand back at his side and wheeled the machine to the wall, extracting a small capsule which he dropped into a slot that led to the outside. He came back and sat down. "Is that what you're going to do?" asked Bolden. "Scrape them off?" "Hardly. There are too many nerves. If we had ten machines and enough people to operate them, we might check the advance in one arm. That's all." The doctor leaned back in the chair. "No. I was collecting a few more samples. We're trying to find out what the microbes react to." "More samples? Then you must have taken others." "Certainly. We put you out for a while to let you rest." The chair came down on four legs. "You've got a mild case. Either that or you have a strong natural immunity. It's now been three days since you reported the first symptoms and it isn't very advanced. It killed the entire scouting expedition in less time than that." Bolden looked at the ceiling. Eventually they'd find a cure. But would he be alive that long? "I suspect what you're thinking," said the doctor. "Don't overlook our special equipment. We already have specimens in the sonic accelerator. We've been able to speed up the life processes of the microbes about ten times. Before the day is over we'll know which of our anti and neobiotics they like the least. Tough little things so far -- unbelievably tough -- but you can be sure we'll smack them." His mind was active, but outwardly Bolden was quiescent as the doctor continued his explanation. The disease attacked the superficial nervous system, beginning with the extremities. The bodies of the crew of the scouting expedition had been in an advanced state of decomposition when the medical rescue team reached them and the microbes were no longer active. Nevertheless it was a reasonable supposition that death had come shortly after the invading bacteria had reached the brain. Until then, though nerves were the route along which the microbes traveled, no irreparable damage had been done. Either he would recover completely or he would die. He would not be crippled permanently. Another factor in his favor was the sonic accelerator. By finding the natural resonance of the onecelled creature and gradually increasing the tempo of the sound field, the doctor could grow and test ten generations in the laboratory while one generation was breeding in the body. Bolden was the first patient actually being observed with the disease, but the time element wasn't as bad as he had thought. "That's where you are," concluded Kessler. "Now, among other things, we've got to find where you've been." "The ship has an automatic log," said Bolden. "It indicates every place I landed." "True, but our grid coordinates are not exact. It will be a few years before we're able to look at a log and locate within ten feet of where a ship has been." The doctor spread out a large photomap. There were several marks on it. He fastened a sterescope viewer over Bolden's eyes and handed him a pencil. "Can you use this?" "I think so." His fingers were stiff and he couldn't feel, but he could mark with the pencil. Kessler moved the map nearer and the terrain sprang up in detail. In some cases, he could see it more clearly than when he had been there, because on the map there was no fog. Bolden made a few corrections and the doctor took the map away and removed the viewer. "We'll have to stay away from these places until we get a cure. Did you notice anything peculiar in any of the places you went?" "It was all mountainous country." "Which probably means that we're safe on the plain. Were there any animals?" "Nothing that came close. Birds maybe." "More likely it was an insect. Well, we'll worry about the host and how it is transmitted. Try not to be upset. You're as safe as you would be on Earth." "Yeah," said Bolden. "Where's the pet?" The doctor laughed. "You did very well on that one. The biologists have been curious about the animal since the day they saw one in a native camp." "They can look at it as much as they want," said Bolden. "Nothing more on this one, though. It's a personal gift." "You're sure it's personal?" "The native said it was." The doctor sighed. "I'll tell them. They won't like it, but we can't argue with the natives if we want their cooperation." Bolden smiled. The animal was safe for at least six months. He could understand the biologists' curiosity, but there was enough to keep them curious for a long time on a new planet. And it was his. In a remarkably short time, he had become attached to it. It was one of those rare things that Man happened across occasionally -- about once in every five planets. Useless, completely useless, the creature had one virtue. It liked Man and Man liked it. It was a pet. "Okay," he said. "But you didn't tell me where it is." The doctor shrugged, but the gesture was lost in the shapeless decontagion suit. "Do you think we're letting it run in the streets? It's in the next room, under observation." The doctor was more concerned than he was letting on. The hospital was small and animals were never kept in it. "It's not the carrier. I was sick before it was given to me." "You had something, we know that much, but was it this? Even granting that you're right, it was in contact with you and may now be infected." "I think life on this planet isn't bothered by the disease. The natives have been every place I went and none of them seemed to have it." "Didn't they?" said the doctor, going to the door. "Maybe. It's too early to say." He reeled a cord out of the wall and plugged it into the decontagion suit. He spread his legs and held his arms away from his sides. In an instant, the suit glowed white hot. Only for an instant, and it was insulated inside. Even so it must be uncomfortable -- and the process would be repeated outside. The doctor wasn't taking any chances. "Try to sleep," he said. "Ring if there's a change in your condition -- even if you think it's insignificant." "I'll ring," said Bolden. In a short time he fell asleep. It was easy to sleep. ly as she could in the decontagion outfit. It awakened Bolden. It was evening. He had slept most of the day, "Which one are you?" he asked. "The pretty one?" "All nurses are pretty if you get well. Here. Swallow this." It was Peggy. He looked doubtfully at what she held out. "All of it?" "Certainly. You get it down and I'll see that it comes back up. The string won't hurt you." She passed a small instrument over his body, reading the dial she held in the other hand. The information, he knew, was being recorded elsewhere on a master chart. Apparently the instrument measured neural currents and hence indirectly the progress of the disease. Already they had evolved new diagnostic techniques. He wished they'd made the same advance in treatment. After expertly reeling out the instrument he had swallowed, the nurse read it and deposited it in a receptacle in the wall. She brought a tray and told him to eat. He wanted to question her, but she was insistent about it so he ate. Allowance had been made for his partial paralysis. The food was liquid. It was probably nutritious, but he didn't care for the taste. She took the tray away and came back and sat beside him. "Now we can talk," she said. "What's going on?" he said bluntly. "When do I start getting shots? Nothing's been done for me so far." "I don't know what the doctor's working out for you. I'm just the nurse." "Don't try to tell me that," he said. "You're a doctor yourself. In a pinch you could take Kessler's place."  "And I get my share of pinches," she said brightly. "Okay, so I'm a doctor, but only on Earth. Until I complete my offplanet internship here, I'm not allowed to practice." "You know as much about Van Daamas as anyone does." "That may be," she said. "Now don't be alarmed, but the truth ought to be obvious. None of our anti or neobiotics or combinations of them have a positive effect. We're looking for something new." It should have been obvious; he had, been hoping against that, though. He looked at the shapeless figure sitting beside him and remembered Peggy as she usually looked. He wondered if they were any longer concerned with him as an individual. They must be working mainly to keep the disease from spreading. "What are my chances?" "Better than you think. We're looking for an additive that will make the biotics effective." though it was often used, particularly on newly settled planets. He had heard of a virus infection common to Centaurus that could be completely controlled by a shot of neobiotics plus aspirin, though separately neither was of any value. But the discovery of what substance should be added to what antibiotic was largely one of trial and error. That took time and there wasn't much time. "What else?" he said. "That's about it. We're not trying to make you believe this isn't serious. But don't forget we're working ten times as fast as the disease can multiply. We expect a break any moment." She got up. "Want a sedative for the night?" "I've got a sedative inside me. Looks like it will be permanent." "That's what I like about you, you're so cheerful," she said, leaning over and clipping something around his throat. "In case you're wondering, we're going to be busy tonight checking the microbe. We can put someone in with you, but we thought you'd rather have all of us working on it." "Sure," he said. "This is a body monitor. If you want anything just call and we'll be here within minutes." "Thanks," he said. "I won't panic tonight." She plugged in the decontagion uniform, flashed it on and then left the room. After she was gone, the body monitor no longer seemed reassuring. It was going to take something positive to pull him through. They were going to work through the night, but did they actually hope for success. What had Peggy said? None of the anti or neobiotics had a positive reaction. Unknowingly she had let it slip. The reaction was negative; the bubble microbes actually grew faster in the medium that was supposed to stop them. It happened occasionally on strange planets. It was his bad luck that it was happening to him. He pushed the thoughts out of his mind and tried to sleep. He did for a time. When he awakened he thought, at first, it was his arms that had aroused him. They seemed to be on fire, deep inside. To a limited extent, he still had control. He could move them though there was no surface sensation. Interior nerves had not been greatly affected until now. But outside the infection had crept up. It was no longer just above the wrists. It had reached his elbows and passed beyond. A few inches below his shoulder he could feel nothing. The illness was accelerating. If they had ever thought of amputation, it was too late, now. cry out. A nurse would come and sit beside him, but he would be taking her from work that might save his life. The infection would reach his shoulders and move across his chest and back. It would travel up his throat and he wouldn't be able to move his lips. It would paralyze his eyelids so that he couldn't blink. Maybe it would blind him, too. And then it would find ingress to his brain. The result would be a metabolic explosion. Swiftly each bodily function would stop altogether or race wildly as the central nervous system was invaded, one regulatory center after the other blanking out. His body would be aflame or it would smolder and flicker out. Death might be spectacular or it could come very quietly. That was one reason he didn't call the nurse. The other was the noise. It was a low sound, half purr, half a coaxing growl. It was the animal the native had given him, confined in the next room. Bolden was not sure why he did what he did next. Instinct or reason may have governed his actions. But instinct and reason are divisive concepts that cannot apply to the human mind, which is actually indivisible. He got out of bed. Unable to stand, he rolled to the floor. He couldn't crawl very well because his hands wouldn't support his weight so he crept along on his knees and elbows. It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt except the fire in his bones. He reached the door and straightened up on his knees. He raised his hand to the handle, but couldn't grasp it. After several trials, he abandoned the attempt and hooked his chin on the handles, pulling it down. The door opened and he was in the next room. The animal was whining louder now that he was near. Yellow eyes glowed at him from the corner. He crept to the cage. It was latched. The animal shivered eagerly, pressing against the side, striving to reach him. His hands were numb and he couldn't work the latch. The animal licked his fingers. It was easier after that. He couldn't feel what he was doing, but somehow he managed to unlatch it. The door swung open and the animal bounded out, knocking him to the floor. He didn't mind at all because now he was sure he was right. The natives had given him the animal for a purpose. Their own existence was meager, near the edge of extinction. They could not afford to keep something that wasn't useful. And this creature was useful. Tiny blue sparks crackled from the fur as it rubbed against him in the darkness. It was not whining. It rumbled and purred as it licked his hands and arms and rolled against his legs. After a while he was strong enough to crawl back to bed, leaning against the animal for support. He lifted himself up and fell across the bed in exhaustion. Blood didn't circulate well in his crippled body. The animal bounded up and tried to melt itself into his body. He couldn't push it away if he wanted. He didn't want to. He stirred and got himself into a more comfortable position. He wasn't going to die. awake long before the doctor came in. Kessler's face was haggard and the smile was something he assumed solely for the patient's benefit. If he could have seen what 'the expression looked like after filtering through the microscreen, he would have abandoned it. "I see you're holding your own," he said with hollow cheerfulness. "We're doing quite well ourselves." "I'll bet," said Bolden. "Maybe you've got to the point where one of the antibiotics doesn't actually stimulate the growth of the microbes?" "I was afraid you'd find it out," sighed the doctor. "We can't keep everything from you." "You could have given me a shot of plasma and said it was a powerful new drug." "That idea went out of medical treatment a couple of hundred years ago," said the doctor. "You'd feel worse when you failed to show improvement. Settling a planet isn't easy and the dangers aren't imaginary. You've got to be able to face facts as they come." He peered uncertainly at Bolden. The microscreen distorted his vision, too. "We're making progress though it may not seem so to you. When a mixture of a calcium salt plus two antihistamines is added to a certain neobiotic, the result is that the microbe grows no faster than it should. Switching the ingredients here and there -- maybe it ought to be a potassium salt -- and the first thing you know we'll have it stopped cold." "I doubt the effectiveness of those results," said Bolden. "In fact, I think you're on the wrong track. Try investigating the effects of neural induction." "What are you talking about?" said the doctor, coming closer and glancing suspiciously at the lump beside Bolden. "Do you feel dizzy? Is there anything else unusual that you notice?" "Don't shout at the patient." Bolden waggled his finger reprovingly. He was proud of the finger. He couldn't feel what he was doing, but he had control over it. "You, Kessler, should face the fact that a doctor can learn from a patient what the patient learned from the natives." But Kessler didn't hear what he said. He was looking at the upraised hand. "You're moving almost normally," he said. "Your own immunity factor is controlling the disease." "Sure. I've got an immunity factor," said Bolden. "The same one the natives have. Only it's not inside my body." He rested his hand on the animal beneath the covers. It never wanted to leave him. It wouldn't have to. "I can set your mind at rest on one thing, Doctor. Natives are susceptible to the disease, too. That's why they were able to recognize I had it. They gave me the cure and told me what it was, but I was unable to see it until it was nearly too late. Here it is." He turned back the covers and the exposed animal sleeping peacefully on his legs which raised its head and licked his fingers. He felt that. doctor tempered his disapproval. It was an unsanitary practice, but he had to admit that the patient was much improved. Kessler verified the state of Bolden's health by extensive use of the X-ray microscope. Reluctantly he wheeled the machine to the wall and covered it up. "The infection is definitely receding," he said. "There are previously infected areas in which I find it difficult to locate a single microbe. What I can't understand is how it's done. According to you, the animal doesn't break the skin with its tongue and therefore nothing is released into the bloodstream. All that seems necessary is that the animal be near you." He shook his head behind the microscreen. "I don't think much of the electrical analogy you used." "I said the first thing I thought of. I don't know if that's the way it works, but it seems to me like a pretty fair guess." "The microbes do cluster around nerves," said the doctor. "We know that neural activity is partly electrical. If the level of that activity can be increased, the bacteria might be killed by ionic dissociation." He glanced speculatively at Bolden and the animal. "Perhaps you do borrow nervous energy from the animal. We might also find it possible to control the disease with an electrical current." "Don't try to find out on me," said Bolden. "I've been an experimental specimen long enough. Take somebody who's healthy. I'll stick with the natives' method." "I wasn't thinking of experiments in your condition. You're still not out of danger." Nevertheless he showed his real opinion when he left the room. He failed to plug in and flash the decontagion suit. Bolden smiled at the doctor's omission and ran his hand through the fur. He was going to get well. what slower than he'd anticipated though it seemed to satisfy the doctor who went on with his experiments. The offending bacteria could be killed electrically. But the current was dangerously large and there was no practical way to apply the treatment to humans. The animal was the only effective method. Kessler discovered the microbe required an intermediate host. A tick or a mosquito seemed indicated. It would take a protracted search of the mountains to determine just what insect was the carrier. In any event the elaborate sanitary precautions were unnecessary. Microscreens came down and decontagion suits were no longer worn. Bolden could not pass the disease on to anyone else. Neither could the animal. It seemed wholely without para'sites. It was clean and affectionate, warm to the touch. Bolden was fortunate that there was such a simple cure for the most dreaded disease on Van Daamas. It was several days before he was ready to leave the small hospital at the edge of the settlement. At first he sat up in bed and then he was allowed to walk across the room. As his activity increased, the animal became more and more content to lie on the bed and follow him with its eyes. It no longer frisked about as it had in the beginning. As Bolden told the nurse, it was becoming housebroken. The time came when the doctor failed to find a single microbe. Bolden's newly returned strength and the sensitivity of his skin where before there had been numbness confirmed the diagnosis. He was well. Peggy came to walk him home. It was pleasant to have her near. "I see you're ready," she said, laughing at his eagerness. "Except for one thing," he said. "Come, Pet." The animal raised its head from the bed where it slept. "Pet?" she said quizzically. "You ought to give it a name. You've had it long enough to decide on something." "Pet's a name," he said. "What can I call it? Doc? Hero?" She made a face. "I can't say I care for either choice, although it did save your life." "Yes, but that's an attribute it can't help. The important thing is that if you listed what you expect of a pet you'd find it in this creature. Docile, gentle, lively at times; all it wants is to be near you, to have you touch it. And it's very clean." "All right, call it Pet if you want," said Peggy. "Come on, Pet." It paid no attention to her. It came when Bolden called, getting slowly off the bed. It stayed as close as it could get to Bolden. He was still weak so they didn't walk fast and, at first, the animal was able to keep up. went out. The sun was brilliant and Van Daamas seemed wonderful place to be alive in. Yes, with death behind him, it was a very wonderful place. Bolden chatted gaily with Peggy. She was fine company. And then Bolden saw the native who had given him the animal. Five to seven days, and he had arrived on time. The rest of the tribe must be elsewhere in the settlement. Bolden smiled in recognition while the man was still at some distance. For an answer the native shifted the bow in his hand and glanced behind the couple, in the direction of the hospital. The movement with the bow might have been menacing, but Bolden ignored that gesture. It was the sense that something was missing that caused him to look down. The animal was not at his side. He turned around. The creature was struggling in the dust. It got to its feet and wobbled toward him, staggering crazily as it tried to reach him. It spun around, saw him, and came on again. The tongue lolled out and it whined once. Then the native shot it through the heart, pinning it to the ground. The short tail thumped and then it died. Bolden couldn't move. Peggy clutched his arm. The native walked over to the animal and looked down. He was silent for  moment. "Die anyway soon," ne said to Bolden. "Burned out inside." He bent over. The bright yellow eyes had faded to nothingness in the sunlight. "Gave you its health," said the man of Van Daamas respectfully as he broke off the protruding arrow. It was a dark blue arrow.  the planet has Bolden's pets. They have been given a more scientific name, but nobody remembers what it is. The animals are kept in pens, exactly as is done by the natives, on one side of town, not too near any habitation. For a while, there was talk that it was unscientific to use the animal. It was thought that an electrical treatment could be developed to replace it. Perhaps this was true. But settling a planet is a big task. As long as one method works there isn't time for research. And it works -- the percentage of recovery is as high as in other common ailments. But in any case the animal can never become a pet, though it may be in the small but bright spark of consciousness that is all the little yellow-eyed creature wants. The quality that makes it so valuable is the final disqualification. Strength can be a weakness. Its nervous system is too powerful for a man in good health, upsetting the delicate balance of the human body in a variety of unusual ways. How the energy-transfer takes place has never been determined exactly, but it does occur. It is only when he is stricken with the Bubble Death and needs additional energy to drive the invading microbes from the tissue around his nerves that the patient is allowed to have one of Bolden's pets. In the end, it is the animal that dies. As the natives knew, it is kindness to kill it quickly. It is highly regarded and respectfully spoken of. Children play as close as they can get, but are kept well away from the pens by a high, sturdy fence. Adults walk by and nod kindly to it. Bolden never goes there nor will he speak of it. His friends say he's unhappy about being the first Earthman to discover the usefulness of the little animal. They are right. It is a distinction he doesn't care for. He still has the blue arrow. There are local craftsmen who can mend it, but he has refused their services. He wants to keep it as it is. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. Jack of No Trades I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday! room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud. "Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. "If you can't help, at least don't hinder!" I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip. "I could help," I yelled as soon as I got my head free, "if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis." Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age -- he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother. "Boys, boys!" he reproved us. "Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself -- picking on poor Kev." Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still nave been blamed. Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get -- or so I believed -- their true attitude toward me. How else could I tell? "Sorry, fella," Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. "Wrinkles," he grumbled to himself. "Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious." "If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already," Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself. "But I think you'll find she understands." "She knows, all right," Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,' "but I'm not sure she always understands." I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either. room," my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, "and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please." She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing. "Danny, you fumbler!" she screamed. Danny erupted from the kitchen. "How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way." "I don't see why you have to set the table at all," she retorted. "A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could." She turned quickly toward me. "Oh, I am sorry, Kevin." I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white. Sylvia's face turned even whiter. "Father, stop him -- stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!" Father looked at me, then at her. "I don't think he can help it, Sylvia." I grinned. "That's right -- I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall." Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an oldfashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, "It's illegal to probe anyone without permission." "I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed," she said tartly, "and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia -- poor Kevin isn't responsible." She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself. Mother's lips tightened. "Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family -- that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails. "No use," I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. "Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?" "Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy," my father suggested hopefully. "Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cureall?" Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. "He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an offchance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them." ' had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it -- which accounted for more than ninetyfive per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me -- psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet. "I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household," my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair. "You always do, Timothy," my mother said, unfolding her napkin. "And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast." He reached for his juice. "Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?" "The usual," Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. "Hey, Dan, I'm here!" she called. "If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?" "Oh, all right." Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him. "The usual? Trouble with Kev?" Tim looked at me narrowly. "Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him." "Well, that's perfectly natural -- " Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye. "I didn't mean that," Tim said. "I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out." "You've been saying that for years," Danny protested, "and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't -- " "Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me," I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew -- as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either. "No," Tim said, "he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see." He smiled at me. he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. "It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but -- " "He's not saying it just to be kind," my mother put in. "He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin," she added with grim scrupulousness. "Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far." Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding. Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand. Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me. and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared -- he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos. Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them -- partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing. "We don't need what little money Kev could bring in," my father always said. "I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house." And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair andor replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home. So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while. I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive -- artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power -- but I couldn't even do anything like that. About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. "There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective." I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me -- I could see that -- they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them. couple of hundred years ago -- before people started playing around with nuclear energy and they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we -- in # or so, I might have been considered superior, but in # I was just the Faradays' idiot boy. Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more. I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around -- not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought -- I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power? For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be -- a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six? I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland -- or, rather, pseudo woodland -- surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility. However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us. farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm. "Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her. "Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?" Tim shot back at her. "He probably doesn't even know what's happened." "Well, what did happen?" I asked, trying not to snap. "One starship got back from Alpha Centauri," Danny said excitedly. "There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!" This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them. "What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?" "Uh-uh." Danny shook his head. "And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going." "But if they're hostile," I said thoughtfully, "it might mean war." "Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case." There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements -- if such were its intention -- in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament. They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place. Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race. fense that worries me," my mother muttered, "as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin," she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. "Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain." I looked at her. "It is an ill wind," she agreed, smiling wryly, "but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?" I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psipowers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other. My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation -- even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours -- and the war was on. I had enjoyed learning firstaid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities -- normal human abilities, rather. "Gee, Mr. Faraday," one of the other students breathed, "you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything." I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. "My name's not Mr. Faraday," I said. "It's Kevin." "My name's Lucy," she giggled. No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern. "Hey, quit that!" the windee yelled. "You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!" So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive -- just a poetess -- so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself. However, when the actual bombs -- or their alien equivalent -- struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene -- I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact -- and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication. "If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin," she said, "you certainly can." And there was no kindness at all in the you. She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. "Go on -- now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world." to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me. The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought. Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all -- just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar. "Wha -- wha happened?" he asked. "It doesn't hurt any more!" He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too -- too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him. "Touch some of the others, quick!" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers. I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors. But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds. "Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son -- " and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it -- "the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something. I felt... well, good. thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once. "The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it." "Recorded?" I asked a little jealously. "Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?" I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it... and other diseases, too, I guess." She nodded. "Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers." In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that. When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. "I'm your assistant, Kev," she said shyly. I looked at her. "You are?" "I -- I hope you want me," she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. "I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now -- " I clapped her arm -- "there's a job to be done." "Yes, Kevin," she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me. They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give. I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were -- well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them. They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out -- during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets -- and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me. r I 'HE government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me. Plenty of people did come to see me officially -- the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody. "Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?" Lucy asked me one day. I gave her an incredulous glance. "You mean I shouldn't help people?" "Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just... well, you're getting too bound up in your work." "Why shouldn't I be?" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. "Are you jealous, Lucy?" She lowered her eyes. "Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and -- " It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. "Why, do you mean -- " And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted... Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of . Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again. Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary -- only the Vice President this time -- had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more. be back home. I was a celebrity. People dropped in from all around to see me and talk to me. And my family, basking in the reflection of glory, was nice to me... for a while. "I don't have any trouble making appointments with any firm," my father boasted, "when I tell 'em I'm the father of Kevin Faraday." Mother smiled approvingly -- Tim, a little sadly. He was the only one who didn't seem pleased by what had happened to me, even though he'd prophesied it. Sylvia slipped her arm through mine. "The agency wondered whether you wouldn't give them a testimonial for Panacetic Pills, Kev," she said, squeezing my arm. "They'd pay a lot, and the rest of the family sure could use the money if you're too highminded to accept it." "I couldn't do a thing like that, Sylvia. It wouldn't be ethical." "Why wouldn't it be?" She dropped my arm. "The pills couldn't possibly hurt anybody. Maybe take a little business away from Mother, but Mother doesn't mind, do you, dear?" Mother frowned. "But people would think the pills had my healing powers," I explained. "I would be breaking faith with myself if I shilled for them." Sylvia snorted. "Breaking faith with himself. Look who's talking!" "Sylvia," my mother said. "Please." But Sylvia went on -- she was in an overwrought state because her guy hadn't called her, though that was no reason to take it out on me. "Who needs healing power now? The machines can cope with all peacetime ailments. Better take your loot while the getting's good, Kev." "Nevertheless, Kevin is right, Sylvia," my mother said. "He mustn't prostitute his talent." "And we don't actually need the money the testimonial could bring in, no matter how much it is," my father said a little wistfully. "I can support my family." Tim sighed. The months went on. Once again there was nothing for me to do, only it was worse for me now because I had tasted usefulness and fame. People did come for a while with their headaches and cut fingers for me to heal, and I was happy healing them until I realized they were just coming to make me feel good. They didn't really need me. Anybody who had anything seriously wrong with him went to a psychiatrist or a machine, same as always. I healed them too quickly for them to have time to take pleasure in it. They couldn't talk for days about a three-second operation. fingers didn't come. Maybe I hadn't been exactly gracious toward the end. Maybe the whole thing was my fault. Even the Lucy business. My mother said it was, anyhow. You see, Lucy lived quite a distance away and we couldn't call each other up because of my not being able to use the tellies. We wrote and I went to see her a few times, and then she came to meet my family. Once. It was a ghastly evening. We all sat around stiffly, my family being excessively polite to her, thinking, I knew, that this was my only chance to get myself a wife and so they'd better be nice to the girl, no matter what she was like. And seeing her with what I fancied to be their eyes, I realized that she wasn't outstandingly pretty, particularly bright, or even very talented. And what was she thinking? That she had got herself virtually engaged to a useless half-sense because he had had a brief moment of glory as a war hero? Trapped with this imbecile and his dull, stuffy family, and not being able to get out of it without being cruel? What were they actually thinking? I didn't know. But they did -- Mother knew what everybody was thinking, right down to the last convolution of the subconscious mind and Sylvia knew what everyone else was feeling, and the others... they knew or at least sensed part of what was t going on. But I was impercipient, I couldn't tell anything, I was excluded -- out in the cold -- and, being unable ever really to know, was forced to draw the worst conclusions. I took Lucy home that evening. They had to trust me that far alone because it would have looked absurd for Danny or Tim to come along as chaperone, and anyway I had been there alone before, when I had gone to see her. "Lucy," I said as we stood awkwardly before her door, "I don't want you to feel, just because of what might have happened in a burst of -- of patriotic fervor, that you're bound or -- " "No, Kevin," she murmured, without looking at me. "I understand. I don't feel bound or -- committed in any way. And you mustn't feel bound, either." "That's good." I felt a deep sense of sorrow working its way down to settle in my viscera and, if she'd had much perceptiveness, things might have been different then. But she hadn't. I took a deep breath, determined to carry my heartbreak off with dignity. "Well, good-by, Lucy." Jreally been close to me -- in fact, I had nevef so much as kissed her -- I felt lonelier now, without even the hope of her, than I ever had before. I began to take my long walks in the park again, brooding over the power that might have been mine, if only I hadn't been such a damn fool as to give freely without asking anything in return. During the war, I could have got anything I wanted in exchange for what I'd done, or, rather, for what I could do, but I'd been too busy healing. Now it was too late for asking. Nature, being all I had left, became closer to me than ever before. And one morning, after a violent storm the night before, I mourned over the fallen trees and smashed flowers as I had never mourned over fallen and smashed men -- first, because I hadn't cared, and then because I had known I could help. Come to think of it, how did I know it was only people I could help? "Mother," I said eagerly when I came home that evening, "I can heal other things besides people! Trees and shrubs and -- " "That's nice, dear. Perhaps we can get you a job with the Park Department if you're tired of sitting home, and in the meantime you'd better comb those leaves out of your hair. Sylvia, did you call that techno?" "Yes, Mother," Sylvia said gloomily. Her guy still hadn't called. Knowing now how she must feel, I could feel sorry for her. "It said it'll be over as soon as it can, but that it might take days." "We'll have to eat synthetics for dinner if that stove isn't fixed soon," my mother said fretfully, and went off into the kitchen to mess around with the machinery and thus make certain the techno had a real hard job on its hands when it finally did show up. Oh, the devil with it, I thought. No use hoping to interest the family in any extension of my gift that had no practical value except for nature lovers. I might as well seize such meager chances as were still open to me. I wasn't going to be an idealistic idiot any longer. "Sylvie," I said to my sister, "I've changed my mind about that testimonial." She looked blankly at me out of her reverie. "What testimonial?" "The -- you know, the Panacetic Pills." She laughed and patted me on the shoulder, not unkindly, because she could probably feel a sympathy in me now that she never could before. "Too late for that, honey. Your name wouldn't mean a thing any more." So many of them owed their lives to me -- and yet they had forgotten me. Tim looked at me. "Be careful, Kev," he said anxiously. "Careful of what?" "I don't know exactly." He ran his hand through his hair. "But be careful, won't you?" Just at that moment, an easy chair floated in from the next room, banged into me, swerved, and crashed into a table. Danny, who had been thinking of going into interior decoration as a sideline to his business, had been making the furniture leap without looking first. glance as I used my gift to heal my bruised shin. "You might have been a little more explicit," I complained. "I'm no 'path." "I didn't mean -- " But Danny caromed into Tim on his way to inspect the damage. My whole family was so used to relying on their psi powers that they were pretty clumsy when it came to using the merely physical ones. Danny looked sadly at the wreckage. The chair was only nicked, but the table was pretty well smashed. "Gee, Kev," he said mournfully, "if only you could fix furniture the way you fix up people." "I can heal trees," I said. "And they're wood." "So try the table," Sylvia proposed. "It's going to cost you anything?" Danny looked at me hopefully. I went over and touched the table. At first nothing happened. And then the shattered bits of wood sort of shimmered together and it was whole again. Danny's and Sylvia's eyes bugged out. So did mine, as a matter of fact. Only Tim didn't look surprised, just a little sadder. Mother appeared from the kitchen so fast, you'd think she'd caught teleportation from Father. "Kevin!" she cried, her eyes shining with an enthusiasm that my healing of people had never evoked in her. She was a conscientious psychiatrist, but a passionate cook. "Come in here and see what you can do with this stove." My siblings treading on my heels, I went in and fixed it. Like that. She looked at me with genuine mother love in her eyes. "My boy," she breathed adoringly. "Pianos!" Danny yelped suddenly. Everybody looked at him. "If you worked along with me, Kev," he explained, "nobody would ever have to know if I dropped 'em. I could be a senior executive and no questions asked." "But that wouldn't be ethical," Sylvia suggested, with a sidelong glance at me. "My ethical values have come down to Earth," I said. "Be glad to help you out, Dan. And the same goes for you, Sylvie. 'Use More Efficient than Glue.' Nothing for nothing any more, though -- I have to be as professional as everybody and I've got a career to get started." Sylvia sighed. "I wish there were other things you could fix besides people and furniture. Intangibles." "Like broken hearts, maybe?" She smiled. "Maybe." "I'll try," I said, and I concentrated. Just then, the telliebell rang and Tim, being youngest, went to answer it. When he came back, he was smiling. "For you, Sylvie. Lennie." "Lennie!" Sylvia yelped joyously. She ran toward the tellie, dashed back, planted a wet kiss on my cheek, and scurried off to the booth. "Well, gosh!" Danny said. "Maybe it's going to be all right," Tim said, precognizing hard. "Power doesn't necessarily corrupt." "You could make that part of your service, Kev," Danny suggested. "Mending broken hearts, I mean, not corrupting. Hey, where are you going?" "To catch a helibus," I said. "There's a broken heart that needs fixing immediately. And it's for me, so nothing for nothing still goes." by Shepherd Mead. Simon  Schuster, # this one when it came out last year -- but let me inform you it is not to be missed! The Space Merchants and Player Piano were hot satires on advertising and big business; now take a look at this one. But don't forget to wear smoked glasses -- this book sizzles! The theme is the invention of a machine that makes it possible for you to experience every sensation and emotion in the world. from skiing and eating Crunchies to war and s-x, and exploring them to the full, while sitting in your arm chair. Old hat? Not the way Mister Mead puts it down! This story of our civilization in the #s, and how it was irretrievably taken over by the advertisers, is told by one of them -- and no conversion to a noble rebellion takes place, either, as it did in the Pohl-Kornbluth masterpiece previously mentioned. The saccharinity of this fellow's style makes the book not only good satire but magnificent parody: Mead has mercilessly Now read what has happened to the famous incidents in Flying that memorable November #, #, when he first made personal contact with a man from another world... since December #, #, when he took the first photographs of the same saucer that brought his original visitor.  Now he tells of his first meeting, a few months later, with a second man from another world -- his first meeting with one who speaks to him. This second visitor brings him to a Venusian Scout (flying saucer) and this, in turn, brings him to a mother ship. Later he is conveyed in both a Saturnian Scout and a Saturnian mother ship. Adamski tells us what transpires in these space craft and what the men and women from other worlds have told him.  Adamski's photographs of flying since become world-famous as other witnesses in other parts of the world have succeeded in taking photographs identical with his. Adamski gives us # photographs and other illustrations, not only of the flying saucers, but of the great space ships from which they are launched. The main group of these photographs was taken in April, # -- and neither the photographs nor a description of them has ever before been published! # Fourth Avenue, New York #, N. Y. (postpaid). I enclose # for each. Please send C. O. D. I'll pay postman # plus C. O. D. postage on delivery. Name Address City Zone State copied the pseudo-hail-fellowwell-met verbiage of the male side of advertising; and in view of what the protagonist has to report, the parody is almost achingly funny -- and sometimes mighty bawdy. The book makes # look like a funeral march (which, of course, it was). In a way, this one is too -- but with guffaws! Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. Ballantine Books, # Cloth and #c Paper collaboration to see book publication is entirely different from Gravy Planet (otherwise known as The Space Merchants ), but nevertheless it is a good swift anti-utopia in something of the same tradition. Galaxy readers will remember the story: how the descendants of the inventor of the Perfect House finally win their rights through the skills and daring of a small-time lawyer, helped by some child gangs and, of course, by chance. In this world of tomorrow, today's suburbs have become unspeakable slums; the economy is divided (as in The Space Merchants ) between huge monopolies; and the "bread and circuses" of the Romans are back in newer, shinier and crueler form as means no of popular entertainment. The circuses are -- well, if you read the serial, you'll shudder as you remember; if not, read this book and gnaw your knuckles. As a matter of fact, you'll want to read the book again even if you've read it in serial form. It's a grimly unforgettable item that delivers an extra punch on a second reading. Sturgeon. Funk  W agnails Co., # introduction by your reviewer, this book is pure gold. It's Sturgeon's third short story collection, and the first which is predominantly science fiction rather than fantasy. There is not a lemon among the eleven items included; indeed, for my money (but I must note that I am a fall-guy for Sturgeon's work) there is nothing rating less than A. Many of the items are already well-known: "The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast," "Mewhu's Jet," "Thunder and Roses," "Tiny and the Monster," and "Minority Report" -- all hitherto anthologized. Others are either very recent or not so well known and are new to book form: "Hurricane Trio," "Bulkhead" (originally called "Who?"), "Special Aptitude" (originally called "Last Laugh), "And My Fear Is Great," and "A Way Home." The book exhibits almost every facet of Sturgeon's rich endowments in imagination, storytelling ability, mood evocation, idea development, humor, and just If you want to introduce literate people who are science fiction novices to our favorite form of reading, this is the book for them. Of course, it's for you, too! F. L. Wallace. Gnome Press, # Wallace's "Accidental Flight" from a # Galaxy will certainly want this book. It carries that superb tale to its logical conclusion in another star system. For those who did not read the original story, let it be said that it -- and the novel growing from it -- are both based on a uniquely powerful concept: a future world in which disease is conquered but accidents are not. People badly disfigured by accidents or malformation are brought back to life, all right, but they are not allowed to live on Earth, where everyone is now beautiful. They have a planetoid of their own -- and a number of remarkable skills, too. The story relates how these "accidentals" turn their little planet into a gravity-propelled spaceship and take it out to the Centauri system, where they find themselves a habitable planet of their own. It sounds simple, I know, but Wallace has so enriched the idea with a memorably colorful set of characters and melodramatic circumstances that it becomes an unforgettable tale. Loomis. Columbia Publications, #c that Noel Loomis' first published novel (serialized in #) is a pretty poor job. Its characters are wooden and its style sometimes unbearably amateur. The plot has its ingenious points, but it also is hardly breathtaking in its originality. The story is about a crew of three humans who return to Earth from the first near-lightspeed journey in space to find (natch) the world is a lot older than it was when they left a few weeks before. The old mass-time paradox, you know. As a matter of fact, it's # years older and an odd race of "GlassMen" are fighting off the attacks of some bestial remnants of humanity who live in caves. Loomis has an active imagination and if only the book were better conceived and written, it could be recommended as a good, though minor, addition to science fiction's dreams of the far-distant future. As it is, I can only suggest that you won't, at the price, lose much by trying it. mov. Doubleday  Co., # careful selection and is, of course, a worthwhile item -- as is almost everything that Mr. Asimov turns out. Two novelets from Galaxy (the title story and "The Deep"), one from Astounding ("Sucker Bait"), and another ("Youth") from one of Space Publication's magazines make up the #-page collection. Asimov addicts will have to have it. And those who are new to his work will find it an excellent introduction to the style and the imagination of one of science fiction's important writers. There's a thriller on Martian colonization and a water shortage; another on invaders from space which carries a terrific kicker in its tail; a different sort of invasion story in which the people of a far planet make contact with an Earth human (who doesn't know it!) for lifesaving purposes; and a galactic exploration novelet in which a most annoying young man with an insatiable curiosity and an eidetic memory saves the lives of the spaceship crew very much against their wills. Four science fiction adventures at the top of Asimov's best. by Stanton A. Coblentz. Fantasy Press, # new science novel never published before in any form," and I cannot say I'm surprised by that fact. Any story that uses the word "orbs" as a synonym for eyes puts itself pretty well behind the eight ball as far as I am concerned. If the tale had any striking originality, I might forgive the Victorian style, but it has nothing new or even interesting to offer, at least to me. The world's been destroyed by a "Cosmic Blight," no less, and three humans -- boy, girl, boy -- escape to an alien planet, where they help to save a race of birdlike people called Lilbro from a race of monsters known as Ugwugs. You can take it from there. The Lights on Precipice Peak How warm should a handshake be? The answer may be more vital than you could guess! sat quietly and watched the faint eerie glow. It was ruddy and small, a spot of dull red color. For perhaps five or six minutes it showed, moving slowly along what seemed to be the lip of Bighorn Glacier, six miles away and seven thousand feet up in the thin cold air. Then it vanished. John Drinkard lowered his binoculars. "Well, that's that. You can see it, but still you can't. The glasses don't help a bit." "Spooks!" said Chuck Evers. He wriggled his muscular shoulders, slipped down onto the small of his back in the chair, and propped long legs on the porch railing. "Spooks?" Carl Royston's brow wrinkled puzzedly. Drinkard and Evers both watched with suppressed amusement as his face suddenly cleared and he almost smiled. "Ah, yes, apparitions." "Haunts," Chuck said. "Hobgoblins. Ghosts. Banshees." "Banshees wail," said Drinkard. Royston's pale eyes glowed with interest. "This you can say for the lights of Precipice Peak -- they are quiet." "Are you sure?" John Drinkard asked. "How do you know that every coyote you hear is a coyote?" "At any rate," said Royston, "if they make sounds, they are the sounds of the country." He shivered slightly. "A miserable country." he added. John Drinkard was thick and blocky, with big hands and a square chin. Chuck Evers was long and sinewy. Beside them, Royston seemed a pale, slight figure, his thin face sallow, his shoulders ever hunched against the crisp western air. "You are speaking of the land I love," said Chuck Evers. "If you don't like it, why stay around?" supposed to make me a man of vigor, with red corpuscles and a need for cold shower baths. Actually, there is nothing wrong with me. I was simply born to sit and watch while great louts like you run and wrestle and climb and sweat." He shifted his gaze to the peak, now a dark silhouette against the ice-clear stars. "There, the light shows again." Slowly the red glow progressed along a cliff face, much higher than it had before. For minutes it moved along steadily, then faded. "That thing," said Evers suddenly, "was goin' along Fifth Avenue. Spooks don't need a route of ascent, even up Precipice. All of a sudden, the lights of Precipice Peak are gettin' solid. I got a feelin' they'll leave sign." "Sign?" Royston's voice went up in the darkness. There was the familiar pause, then Royston's satisfied tone: "Ah, yes, traces." "Right -- traces, tracks, spoor. Only mystery about those lights is, we don't know who makes them. But they're gettin' to be a tourist attraction. Maybe that's a lead." "How many trips have there been up Precipice this season?" Royston queried softly. "Fifteen or so," John Drinkard said, "and the boy has something. Any sign on Fifth Avenue or across Bighorn would have been seen by now. There've been some good mountain men on the Peak this summer. Some of 'em don't miss much." Royston hugged his narrow shoulders and made himself small in his chair, shivering again as the chill mountain breeze blew across the porch of the Lodge. "Over the swamps of my native Louisiana, where I wish I now was, I have seen balls of fire go drifting. It is swamp gas, methane, slowly oxidizing and glowing. Could this on the mountain be something like?" "It's almost impossible," said Evers. "And anyhow," he added stubbornly, "balls of gases wouldn't follow a trail. Those blasted lights do." John Drinkard rose easily, stretched his thick arms wide. "Tomorrow, Chuck, tomorrow!" he reminded. "Take it easy, boy. Tomorrow you can look for yourself, remember? At  daybreak, we go up to solve the mystery of the lights." "Ghastly," said Royston. "To go out at dawn is as bad as eating raw flesh. But tap on my cabin door when you go by. I will wave to you from the window." nailed short boots along the trail with a steady, satisfying rhythm. Ahead of him, Chuck Evers set the pace, an easy, loosejointed shamble that ate up the mountain miles. They were a good team. They felt the trail alike. Drinkard swelled his big chest, then exhaled gustily, as though to expel the last of the tainted air of the settlements below. He warmed slowly to a climb approach and he would have liked a breather. Ahead, the trail switched back sharply. At the switchback, Evers broke his stride, swung the packsack from his shoulders and leaned his long frame against a boulder. "Break," he said. "I heard you heave like a foundered mule." John Drinkard grinned. He shrugged off his own pack. "It'll be good to enjoy the view and not have to look at your silly hat." Chuck tilted the Swiss mountaineer's hat, complete with eagle feather. "These are the Alps of America," he observed, "so my hat is fitting." "It doesn't even fit you," said Drinkard. Forests of lodgepole pine and spruce lay below them. Already the resort town seemed a toy settlement at the edge of the valley, and the sagebrush world stretched away east to the horizon. To the north, the big peaks of the range tumbled in a massive, orderly row, with lakes flashing along their bases and a vast and timbered plateau rearing up beyond. It was West, good American West, twentieth century and solid, with clean cold mountain air, yellow sunlight on the cliffs and snowfields above. As if by signal, both men turned their gazes upward. The cutback was a vantage point from which could be seen the jumble of ridges and crags surmounted by the glistening white expanse of Bighorn Glacier and, higher still, the seamed front of the eastern face of the mountain, tapering upward to the pinnacle of the peak. The men swung up their packsacks and shook hands. "Good luck, friend," said John Drinkard. "Let's go and see if our names are still on the register up there." "Good luck," said Evers. "Tonight we'll be up where the lights are. Punch me if you see one first." "Lights, nuts," John Drinkard said. "There'll be none while we're on the peak. Five bucks says so." Evers raised his eyebrows. "I'm not a rich man, but I love a sporting chance. Here's my five. Where'll we put 'em?" Drinkard fumbled in his jacket pocket, brought out a tobacco tin. He poured the remaining tobacco into a pouch and held out the tin. "Stick it in there," he said. "Here's mine." A few paces off the trail, John Drinkard pried up a stone, slipped the tin underneath. "Lights, yours; no lights, mine. Right?" "Right," said Evers, and he grinned at the little added spice for the two days ahead. sage up the ever-dimming trail was an appreciative one. Going into the world above the trees was one of the good things of a peak climb. Hoary marmots whistled from their rocks, conies scurried, brownand gray-barred ptarmigan crouched almost invisibly among the gaudy alpine fields of avens and mountain sunflowers and tiny forget-me-nots. At near dusk, they laid out their bedrolls on a level bit of tundra in the lee of a massive outcrop near Bighorn Glacier. A small fire of dead branches of firs and pines that literally crawled on their bellies at this altitude cooked a kettle of stew and heated the water for tea. The men went through the simple chores of an evening camp with the ease that comes when things have been done many times. And when Chuck Evers walked a few paces from the fire, stepped on a small stone that rolled with his weight, he felt with a sort of irritated surprise the little thread of pain that ran through his ankle. Tentatively he tested the foot, then hobbled back to the fire. He knew that he wouldn't climb the peak in the morning. He said nothing to big John until he had stripped off the boot and heavy sock. Then, as Drinkard came back to the fire with more wood, he held out the ballooning ankle. "How are you at taping, friend?" he asked casually. Drinkard looked at the foot, already purpling as it swelled. He reached for his first-aid kit. "Well, anyway," he said resignedly, "you got close enough to watch for lights." Evers set his teeth as Drinkard's big fingers probed the sprain. "We'll pack ice on it," Drinkard decided, "then tape it in an hour. Maybe it's a simple twist." "You know it isn't." "Sure," admitted Drinkard. "I thought you wanted to be cheerful, that's all. It's like when I broke three ribs climbing to look into a bird's nest the day before we were tackling the East Face of Long's. Then you were chinup." "That was different," said Evers. "I wasn't hurting." When the stars were out and the quarter moon rose from the plains, John Drinkard got up from his bedroll seat by the fire. The two men had sat talking quietly for an hour. Evers' ankle was taped and he was easing it before him as best he could. "I'm going to have a look before I turn in," said Drinkard. "My five still says there won't be lights, but the technical crew may be monkeying around somewhere." "Take it easy," Chuck Evers said. "I'll just skirt along the edge of the glacier. Back in half an hour. You take it easy!" Glacier. Its crevasses were so consistent that they were shown on maps. He carried his ice axe, but had no mind to use it. Only after he had worked his way for a number of minutes along the edge of the moonlit ice sheet did the whim to cross it seize him. The glacier had a good snow covering. The going was easy and the view was something few men see. Drinkard automatically avoided the big ice cracks, then slipped through a snow roof into a shallow, temporary one. He wasn't hurt. The moonlight from the crack above showed his ice axe beside him. It was a lucky fall, except for the fact that he couldn't get out again. Time after time, he tried to dig handand foot-holes into the splintery icewall. But he was freezing his fingers and making no headway. He was stoutly but not heavily clothed. The cold began to bite into him. He settled himself on his heels quietly and tried to decide what to do. After an hour, Chuck Evers began to call. John Drinkard knew that if he answered, Chuck would probably attempt the ice himself. Evers' voice came now in measured, regular yips. And, while John wavered, from the crags above the glacier he was answered. It was a strange voice, yet oddly not unfamiliar. To John Drinkard it was muffled, but it had a reassuring sound. Drinkard waited in silence. Not many minutes later, a dark silhouette showed in the narrow crack of sky above. From the voice's first call, Drinkard had realized that they had been watched, probably all day. "Are you injured?" asked the man's odd voice. "I'm okay," Drinkard said. "Just drop me a rope and I can walk up the wall. Mind the snow ledge. I didn't -- and look at me." The man chuckled. "A joke," he said, almost tentatively. "Here is the rope." John Drinkard caught the loop lowered to him. Its texture was strange to his mountaineer's hands. It was down-soft, warm to the touch, and he felt its strength instinctively. He climbed it easily, hand over hand. The stranger stood three strides back from the crevasse lip, negligently holding the rope with one heavy-gauntleted hand -- yet he was slender, slight of build, and when Drinkard rose to his feet, he towered over his rescuer. Big John thrust out his hand. "Well, thanks. Lucky for me somebody has sense enough to walk around ice cracks." The man seemed to hesitate, then extended his own gloved hand. "You must not mind the glove," he said. "It is for your protection. The hand has not yet cooled." of the dimness of the moonlight, for his jaw dropped. But the man turned promptly away. "Come," he said, "I have made an easy way. The one with the swollen foot is concerned for you." John Drinkard, who had climbed scores of peaks up and down the Rockies, followed and felt like a tenderfoot. The man's odd voice and stilted phrases tantalized him, yet he knew they were not entirely strange. And the matter of the hot hand... Drinkard dropped back a couple of paces. The man was setting his booted feet into a line of holes that had not been on the glacier earlier; Drinkard would have sworn to that. They made the traverse of the ice field a simple matter. As they approached the glacier's edge, Drinkard realized that he could see his companion with an amazing clarity. He seemed limned with a dim red glow, which grew brighter with each step. In a few moments, he became as a man outlined in flame, and Drinkard could feel a warmth radiating from him. Yet the snow did not melt under his tread. "It is the boots," said his guide, just as though Drinkard had spoken his thoughts aloud. "They insulate." John Drinkard held onto his poise with something of an effort. "Thank you," he managed drily. "Not only do you light up, but you pick brains. They're both good tricks." The man ahead chuckled tentatively. "A joke," he said, but it was almost a question. "He really doesn't know," thought John Drinkard in astonishment. "That is true," admitted his guide. "Everything else I understand with ease. Even the many kinds of speech are not difficult. But only on Earth are there jokes. We can never be sure about them." "We, huh? I thought a gag like this would take cooperation. How many of you boys are in on it?" They had left the ice and were threading along the little ledge that gave onto the boulder field. "We are four," said the man. He seemed to sense no sarcasm in the question. Drinkard noted, almost without surprise, that the ruddy glow had faded completely and that the man was simply a dark silhouette ahead. and Chuck Evers' voice hailed them from close by. He sat near the tiny fire, the taped foot and ankle eased on a packsack before him. "Well," said Evers, "you took your time." "I fell in a crevasse," John Drinkard said, "and I owe you five bucks." "You should put the more important statement first, but we can take that up later. I see we have company." "I'm sorry." His rescue from the crevasse and the little trek back across the glacier had been like something from a dream to John Drinkard. But now, with the familiar figure of Chuck across the fire, things suddenly assumed their proper proportions again. He faced his guide, who stood silently by. "This is Chuck Evers. I'm afraid I didn't catch your name." The man's thin face showed palely from the peaked hood that covered his head and disappeared into the bulky collar of his stout, steel-smooth jacket. "I am called Dzell," he said quietly. The two men stared at him, and he returned their looks with composure. "It's different, anyway," said Chuck finally. "Yes," agreed the man. "That is because I am different." "He can read your head like a crystal ball and light up like a neon sign," John Drinkard heard himself babbling. Evers, though he sensed the strangeness of the situation, turned to Drinkard with concern. "Easy, boy," he said soothingly. "You've slipped on the ice before. Sit down and let's quit being funny." The stranger smiled, but his curving lips seemed more a studied imitation than any indication of mirth. "Let us all sit and I will tell you why I am Dzell. I will do it because I know, when you repeat my words, that you will not be believed." Evers started to speak, thought better of it, and closed his mouth with an exaggerated snap of teeth. John Drinkard sat wearily on the soft tundra vegetation. "You came up to climb the peak," said the man Dzell, "but also you came to see what caused the lights. If you had not had misfortune, you would have climbed the peak, but there would have been no lights." across the rocky ride and to the upper reaches of the glacier. A dull red glow moved down the route he and John Drinkard had recently taken. Keen eyes could readily see that it had the shape of a man. "That is Dzorr," said Dzell. "We grew in the same membrane. He is erasing our trail across the ice, John Drinkard." Drinkard watched the glow until it slowly faded. "Very smart. We can tell tales, but there won't be any proof, eh?" "That is correct," said the strange man. He turned to Chuck Evers. "You wonder about the statement that we grew in the same membrane. I should have said that we are twins." Evers caught his breath. "Telepathy," he breathed. "John wasn't out of his head." The chill night wind rippled across the alpine field. The little fire flickered and glowed. Overhead, the stars were blue and red and yellow ice. "The truth is simple," said the man called Dzell. "We have told it before, but no one believed, and it has not seemed wise to support our facts. We, Dzorr and I, with our companions Dzinn and Dzett, are explorers." John Drinkard slapped his hand against the boulder beside him and seemed reassured by its solidity. He shook his head to clear it. "I don't get it," he objected. "Chuck and I could call ourselves explorers, too, if rambling around the mountains every chance we get falls under that heading." "We do not explore the mountains," said Dzell. "Here we rest and allow ourselves to behave normally. We explore in the towns and in the cities, where people gather. It is strenuous," he added, with a sound almost like a sigh. "We cannot tolerate it for long. Then we must go into seclusion and renew ourselves." Keen interest was replacing puzzlement in both Evers and Drinkard. They smiled now and Chuck said: "I know what you mean. Ten days in Denver -- a fine town, mind you -- and I feel like I'd been staked with a short rope." "You do not exactly know what I mean," said Dzell. "Your problems are simply matters of #T preference. Ours are physiological. We cannot long maintain metabolic balance in the company of people. Thus, Dzinn and Dzett are now in the world you inhabit. When they must rest, then our turn comes." of small flat stones and he sat sorting them with his gauntleted fingers. They were simply flakes of weathering gneiss, fireand pressure-derived from some granite as ancient as the range. Neither man noticed the idle movements until Dzell raised a piece to his mouth and bit into it with a grinding sound, like a man cracking nuts. His teeth were large and square, and they had a metallic gleam. They made short work of the gneiss. Dzell flexed his fingers, selected another piece of the rock. "Among people," he observed, "this would be conspicuous. You are not adapted to get oxygen from quartz. We are." "You make Houdini look like a piker," big John told him admiringly. "I admit that's tougher cereal than I'd want to try. But the point of the gag still escapes me." "I am aware of that," said the strange man. "You cannot comprehend because your mind is shackled. Yet it must be evident that we are not too much alike." He rose to his feet. "There is the matter of the body glow. I can control my body temperature, raising and lowering it as I choose. The greatest difficulty when I am among people is to keep it down to human body heat. Normally it is very much higher than yours. And when, due to exercise and metabolic speed-up, excess energy is accumulated, it is satisfying to us to radiate it. You get the same release by deep sighs, by long breaths, by stretching your limbs. Unfortunately, when we radiate rapidly in air, we glow. It has made us conspicuous." "We all have our hobbies," said Evers, shifting his swollen ankle and wincing. "Did you ever hear of the Liars' Club? If you like to hold office, you could be President." Dzell did not appear offended. "I said you would not believe. When it is again my turn to explore, I will search for your Liars' Club. I can see from your thoughts that it is concerned with jokes. And this is the one thing about you that we have not mastered. Other explorers have also felt baffled. The function of odd misstatement escapes us." " 'Other explorers'?" Evers' voice lost its note of ridicule, and Drinkard leaned forward with new interest. "You mean there are a lot of incandescent guys like you prowling about?" Dzell shrugged. "All are not from my environment. Many are so unlike you that they cannot mingle and so must observe from hiding. Others cannot exist in your atmosphere without artificial help. We contact them constantly. Your unawareness is a marvel to us all. For creatures so well supplied with adaptations for sensation, you are indeed blind." breath. "If I could radiate, I'd be lit up like a theater marquee. You sound like an old professor I had once. I didn't understand him, either." Had Dzell comprehended humor, he would have smiled. But he simply turned away with finality. "Dzorr is waiting by the glacier," he said. "We have plans for this time. When you return to the settlements below, it would perhaps be wisest not to attempt to explain the lights." The next instant, he was gone without a sound. The two young men sat silently by the dying fire. A few minutes later, both looked up, as though by signal, toward the upper reaches of the glacier. Two glowing spots, dull cherry red, moved steadily across the ice. They were visible for brief minutes, then slowly faded. Chuck Evers shifted restlessly. He shook his head as though a bee were buzzing inside it. "Did you hear something?" he asked. "Not with my ears," said Drinkard. "But as plain as a voice, Dzell just said to my brain 'Good luck, boys!' in good American." "Now I know I'm nuts," grunted Chuck Evers. "That's what he said to me." To descend Precipice Peak, even if only from Bighorn Glacier, is no fit task for a cripple. Still, Evers and Drinkard knew it had to be done, so, in the early morning, they set about it without haste and without complaint. Where the going allowed it, big John simply back-packed Evers. They made use of every ledge, for Chuck could rappel himself down spots he could not climb or be carried. Both were mountain men and tough, but by mid-afternoon they knew they had had enough. So nothing had ever looked better than the cheerful figure of Heine Kolb, slouched in the saddle of his dainty-footed pinto mare, and leading two pack horses loaded with fish panniers. The ranger was headed down. "The complete Samaritan, that's me," said Heine. "I haul fish up and Poor Fish down. Two loads for the price of one." "We will accept your insults along with the ride," Chuck Evers said wearily. "I never knew what a pretty thing a horse could be!" Heine dropped his fish cans, helped to hoist Evers onto one of the pack horses. Drinkard climbed aboard the other. "What happened?" asked the ranger. "I saw by the headquarters record that you were going up." Evers shrugged and John Drinkard said, "The boy here was playing rockchuck on the stretch below the glacier and one rolled with him." Evers grinned wryly, and John added, "It could happen to anybody, but it's the kind of thing that's partial to tenderfeet." "Next time," said Evers humbly, "just leave me up there. Iain't worth saving." They stopped only once. At the big switchback, John Drinkard swung from his horse, pried up a stone, tossed the tobacco can to Evers without a word. The ranger only raised his eyebrows. the lake shore, Evers and Drinkard were not disturbed by questions. When men fail on the peaks, they tell their own stories in their own time. Chuck's ankle showed quick improvement and in a couple of days he was hobbling about. Only young Royston came to visit. "You have not been back to the Lodge," he said. "Perhaps you are afraid to show your faces?" "People talk your arm off up there," said Drinkard. He grinned at the pale young man. "Not many of 'em have the gall to come snooping down here!" Royston sat composedly on a boulder. "You cannot offend me. I was concerned for you, I was interested, so I came. Did you see the lights?" "Nary a light," said Chuck cheerfully. He sat in a canvas chair with his foot propped up. "I told you they wouldn't show when anybody was up there." Drinkard turned on him. "You collected five bucks from me by being on the other side of the fence. You were the man who was sure there would be some sign." Royston looked at them with pale eyes. "You are both muddling the watets. And you are both lying. There were lights on the peak when you were there and I have a feeling you saw them. They were quite a show from here." "Then this is the place to see them from," said Chuck. "Closer up, you lose perspective." Royston rose from his seat on the rock. "Friendship means nothing to you, so I will take my small hike back to the Lodge again. Actually, I came to say that tomorrow I leave this miserable place and go home. I have endured all the health I can stand." "Now that," said Chuck, "is a different story. We're sorry to see you go, fella." "Our regards to the swamps," John Drinkard put in. "Ten to one, when you get there, you'll wish you were back." Carl Royston showed his big teeth in a mirthless smile. "This," he said, "I very much doubt." They watched him go around the turn in the trail. Then Drinkard took two strides to the rock where Royston had sat. He touched a finger tentatively to the stone and snatched it away. "I thought so," he said. "He really liked us, but this time he was careful not to shake hands. In spite of himself, he has reached his limit of control. His temperature is going up." Evers looked on with puzzled eyes. "He never could see a joke and he'd wait to pick our brains for a new word," Drinkard pointed out. "Royston -- " " -- is a name out of a hat," said John Drinkard. "When that lad really goes home, he'll go with his buddies up there on the peak. I wonder which he is -- Dzinn or Dzett." I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of my proposed Mail Science Fiction Library. I also have many thousands of used Science Fiction Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. All Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. The Game of Rat and Dragon Only partners could fight this deadliest of wars -- and the one way to dissolve the partnership was to be personally dissolved! a way to earn a living. Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn't make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciate what you did. He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest and pulled the helmet down over his forehead. As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully. "Meow." That was all she had said. Yet it had cut him like a knife. What did she think he was -- a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn't she know that for every half hour of pinlighting, he got a minimum of two months' recuperation in the hospital? By now the set was warm. He felt the squares of space around him, sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust. As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clockwork of the familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him. Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of the ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting outside the lanes of human travel. Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood. Nothing ever moved in on the Solar System. He could wear the pin-set forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing and burning against his living mind. "Same old ticking world," said Underhill. "Nothing to report. No wonder they didn't develop the pin-set until they began to planoform. Down here with the hot Sun around us, it feels so good and so quiet. You can feel everything spinning and turning. It's nice and sharp and compact. It's sort of like sitting around home." Woodley grunted. He was not much given to flights of fantasy. Undeterred, Underhill went on, "It must have been pretty good to have been an Ancient Man. I wonder why they burned up their world with war. They didn't have to planoform. They didn't have to go out to earn their livings among the stars. They didn't have to dodge the Rats or play the Game. They couldn't have invented pinlighting because they didn't have any need of it, did they, Woodley?" Woodley grunted, "Uh-huh." Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had gotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best of them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job, meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them and thinking nothing more about his duties until the next emergency arose. Woodley never made a point of getting popular among the Partners. None of the Partners liked him very much. Some of them even resented him. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners on occasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint in articulate form, the other pinlighters and the Chiefs of the Instrumentality left him alone. Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily he babbled on, "What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you think it's sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soul pulled out?" "Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it," said Woodley. "After all these years, nobody knows whether we have souls or not." "But I saw one once. I saw what Dogwood looked like when he came apart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky as if it were bleeding and it went out of him -- and you know what they did to Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital where you and I never go -- way up at the top part where the others are, where the others always have to go if they are alive after the Rats of the Up-and-Out have gotten them." Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning something called tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made him look very dashing and adventurous. "Look here, youngster. You don't have to worry about that stuff. Pinlighting is getting better all the time. The Partners are getting better. I've seen them pinmiles apart in one and a half had to try to work the pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with a minimum of human mind to set a pinlight, we wouldn't light the Rats up fast enough to protect our pianoforming ships. The Partners have changed all that. Once they get going, they're faster than Rats. And they always will be. I know it's not easy, letting a Partner share your mind -- " "It's not easy for them, either," said Underhill. "Don't worry about them. They're not human. Let them take care of themselves. I've seen more pinlighters go crazy from monkeying around with Partners than I have ever seen caught by the Rats. How many do you actually know of them that got grabbed by Rats?" his fingers, which shone green and purple in the vivid light thrown by the tuned-in pin-set, and counted ships. The thumb for the Andromeda, lost with crew and passengers, the index finger and the middle finger for Release Ships # and #, found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and child on board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and the thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to the Rats -- lost as people realized that there was something out there underneath space itself which was alive, capricious and malevolent. Pianoforming was sort of funny. It felt like -- Like nothing much. Like the twinge of a mild electric shock. Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time. Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes. Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off. At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar Solar System ticking around inside his head. For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was, subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was loose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read. Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for interstellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away. people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of pianoforming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds. But to the telepaths, they were Dragons. In the fraction of a second between the telepaths' awareness of a hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something like the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin tenuous matter between the stars. It took a surviving ship to bring back the news -- a ship in which, by sheer chance, a telepath had a light beam ready, turning it out at the innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragon dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves non-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their own immediate deaths had been averted. From then on, it was easy -- almost. ways carried telepaths. Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did it. Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reform threedimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to star. The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to sixty to forty in mankind's favor. This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to become ultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than But it was found that the seconds and that this was not enough for the human mind to activate the light beams. Attempts had been made to sheath the ships in light at all times. This defense wore out. As mankind learned about the Dragons, so too, apparently, the Dragons learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly. Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could be provided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence. Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature photonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesium isotope into pure visible radiance. The odds kept coming down in mankind's favor, yet ships were being lost. It became so bad that people didn't even want to find the ships because the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bring back to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred or three hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed, and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their lives were ended. into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged "by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source of life. Then came the Partners. Man and Partner could do together what Man could not do alone. Men had the intellect. Partners had the speed. The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outside the spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside them in their sixpound craft ready to attack. The tiny ships of the Partners were swift. Each carried a dozen pinlights, bombs no bigger than thimbles. The pinlighters threw the Partners -- quite literally threw -- by means of mind-to-firing relays direct at the Dragons. What seemed to be Dragons to the human mind appeared in the form of gigantic Rats in the minds of the Partners. Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the Partners' minds responded to an instinct as old as life. The Partners attacked, striking with a speed faster than Man's, going from attack to attack until the Rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time, it was the Partners who won. With the safety of the interstellar skip, skip, skip of the ships, commerce increased immensely, the population of all the colonies went up, and the demand for trained Partners increased. Underhill and Woodley were a part of the third generation of pinlighters and yet, to them, it seemed as though their craft had endured forever. Gearing space into minds by means of the pin-set, adding the Partners to those minds, keying up the mind for the tension of a fight on which all depended -- this was more than human synapses could stand for long. Underhill needed his two months' rest after half an hour of fighting. Woodley needed his retirement after ten years of service. They were young. They were good. But they had limitations. So much depended on the choice of Partners, so much on the sheer luck of who drew whom. little girl named West entered the room. They were the other two pinlighters. The human complement of the Fighting Room was now complete. Father Moontree was a redfaced man of forty-five who had lived the peaceful life" of a farmer until he reached his fortieth year. Only then, belatedly, did the authorities find he was telepathic and agree to let him late in life enter upon the career of pinlighter. He did well at it, but he was fantastically old for this kind of business. Father Moontree looked at the glum Woodley and the musing Underhill. "How're the youngsters today? Ready for a good fight?" "Father always wants a fight," giggled the little girl named West. She was such a little little girl. Her giggle was high and childish. She looked like the last person in the world one would expect to find in the rough, sharp dueling of pinlighting. Underhill had been amused one time when he found one of the most sluggish of the Partners coming away happy from contact with the mind of the girl named West. Usually the Partners didn't care much about the human minds with which they were paired for the journey. The Partners seemed to take the attitude that human minds were complex and fouled up beyond belief, anyhow. No Partner ever questioned the superiority of the human mind, though very few of the Partners were much impressed by that superiority. The Partners liked people. die for them. But when a Partner liked an individual the way, for example, that Captain Wow or the Lady May liked Underhill, the liking had nothing to do with intellect. It was a matter of temperament, of feel. Underhill knew perfectly well that Captain Wow regarded his, Underhill's, brains as silly. What Captain Wow liked was Underhill's friendly emotional structure, the cheerfulness and glint of wicked amusement that shot through '-Underhill's unconscious thought patterns, and the gaiety with which Underhill faced danger. The words, the history books, the ideas, the science -- Underhill could sense all that in his own mind, reflected back from Captain Wow's mind, as so much rubbish. Miss West looked at Underhill. "I bet you've put stickum on the stones." "I did not!" Underhill felt his ears grow red with embarrassment. During his novitiate, he had tried to cheat in the lottery because he got particularly fond of a special Partner, a lovely young mother named Murr. It was so much easier to operate with Murr and she was so affectionate toward him that he forgot pinlighting was hard work and that he was not instructed to have a good time with his Partner. They were both designed and prepared to go into deadly battle together. One cheating had been enough. They had found him out and he had been laughed at for years. Father Moon tree picked up the imitation-leather cup and shook the stone dice which assigned them their Partners for the trip. By senior rights, he took first draw. drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of halfspoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold. The little girl West came next. She drew Captain Wow. When she saw who it was, she smiled. "I like him," she said. "He's such fun to fight with. He feels so nice and cuddly in my mind." "Cuddly, hell," said Woodley. "I've been in his mind, too. It's the most leering mind in this ship, bar none." "Nasty man," said the little girl. She said it declaratively, without reproach. Underhill, looking at her, shivered. He didn't see how she could take Captain Wow so calmly. Captain Wow's mind did leer. When Captain Wow got excited in the middle of a battle, confused images of Dragons, deadly Rats, luscious beds, the smell of fish, and the shock of space all scrambled together in his mind as he and Captain Wow, their consciousnesses linked together through the pin-set, became a fantastic composite of human being and Persian cat. That's the trouble with working with cats, thought Underhill. It's a pity that nothing else anywhere will serve as Partner. Cats were all right once you got in touch with them telepathically. They were smart enough to meet the needs of the fight, but their motives and desires were certainly different from those of humans. They were companionable enough as long as you thought tangible images at them, but their minds just closed up and went to sleep when you recited Shakespeare or Colegrove, or if you tried to tell them what space was. It was sort of funny realizing that the Partners who were so grim and mature out here in space were the same cute little animals that people had used as pets for thousands of years back on Earth. He had embarrassed himself more than once while on the ground saluting perfectly ordinary non-telepathic cats because he had forgotten for the moment that they were not Partners. He picked up the cup and shook out his stone dice. He was lucky -- he drew the Lady May. most thoughtful Partner he had ever met. In her, the finely bred pedigree mind of a Persian cat had reached one of its highest peaks of development. She was more complex than any human woman, but the complexity was all one of emotions, memory, hope and discriminated experience -- experience sorted through without benefit of words. When he had first come into contact with her mind, he was astonished at its clarity. With her he remembered her kittenhood. He remembered every mating experience she had ever had. He saw in a half-recognizable gallery all the other pinlighters with whom she had been paired for the fight. And he' saw himself radiant, cheerful and desirable. He even thought he caught the edge of a longing -- A very flattering and yearning thought: What a pity he is not a cat. Woodley picked up the last stone. He drew what he deserved -- a sullen, scared old tomcat with none of the verve of Captain Wow. Woodley's Partner was the most animal of all the cats on the ship, a low, brutish type with a dull mind. Even telepathy had not refined his character. His ears were half chewed off from the first fights in which he had engaged. He was a serviceable fighter, nothing more. Woodley grunted. Underhill glanced at him oddly. Didn't Woodley ever do anything but grunt? Father Moontree looked at the other three. "You might as well get your Partners now. I'll let the Scanner know we're ready to go into the Up-and-Out." bination lock on the Lady May's cage. He woke her gently and took her into his arms. She humped her back luxuriously, stretched her claws, started to purr, thought better of it, and licked him on the wrist instead. He did not have the pin-set on, so their minds were closed to each other, but in the angle of her mustache and in the movement of her ears, he caught some sense of gratification she experienced in finding him as her Partner. He talked to her in human speech, even though speech meant nothing to a cat when the pin-set was not on. "It's a damn shame, sending a sweet little thing like you whirling around in the coldness of nothing to hunt for Rats that are bigger and deadlier than all of us put together. You didn't ask for this kind of fight, did you?" For answer, she licked his hand, purred, tickled his cheek with her long fluffy tail, turned around and faced him, golden eyes shining. For a moment, they stared at each other, man squatting, cat standing erect on her hind legs, front claws digging into his knee. Human eyes and cat eyes looked across an immensity which no words could meet, but which affection spanned in a single glance. "Time to get in," he said. She walked docilely into her spheroid carrier. She climbed in. He saw to it that her miniature pin-set rested firmly and comfortably against the base of her brain. He made sure that her claws were padded so that she could not tear herself in the excitement of battle. Softly he said to her, "Ready?" For answer, she preened her back as much as her harness would permit and purred softly within the confines of the frame that held her. He slapped down the lid and watched the sealant ooze around the seam. For a few hours, she was welded into her projectile until a workman with a short cutting arc would remove her after she had done her duty. jectile and slipped it into the ejection tube. He closed the door of the tube, spun the lock, seated himself in his chair, and put his own pin-set on. Once again he flung the switch. He sat in a small room, small, small, warm, warm, the bodies of the other three people moving close around him, the tangible lights in the ceiling bright and heavy against his closed eyelids. As the pin-set warmed, the room fell away. The other people ceased to be people and became small glowing heaps of fire, embers, dark red fire, with the consciousness of life burning like old red coals in a country fireplace. As the pin-set warmed a little more, he felt Earth just below him, felt the ship slipping away, felt the turning Moon as it swung on the far side of the world, felt the planets and the hot, clear goodness of the Sun which kept the Dragons so far from mankind's native ground. Finally, he reached complete awareness. He was telepathically alive to felt the dust which he had noticed earlier high above the ecliptic. With a thrill of warmth and tenderness, he felt the consciousness of the Lady May pouring over into his own. Her consciousness was as gentle and clear and yet sharp to the taste of his mind as if it were scented oil. It felt relaxing and reassuring. He could sense her welcome of him. It was scarcely a thought, just a raw emotion of greeting. At last they were one again. In a tiny remote corner of his mind, as tiny as the smallest toy he had ever seen in his childhood, he was still aware of the room and the ship, and of Father Moontree picking up a telephone and speaking to a Scanner captain in charge of the ship. His telepathic mind caught the idea long before his ears could frame the words. The actual sound followed the idea the way that thunder on an ocean beach follows the lightning inward from far out over the seas. "The Fighting Room is ready. Clear to planoform, sir." little exasperated the way that Lady May experienced things before he did. He was braced for the quick vinegar thrill of pianoforming, but he caught her report of it before his own nerves could register what happened. Earth had fallen so far away seconds before he found the Sun in the upper rear right-hand corner of his telepathic mind. That was a good jump, he thought. This way we'll get there in four or five skips. A few hundred miles outside the ship, the Lady May thought back at him, "O warm, O generous, O gigantic man! O brave, O friendly, O tender and huge Partner! O wonderful with you, with you so good, good, good, warm, warm, now to fight, now to go, good with you... He knew that she was not thinking words, that his mind took the clear amiable babble of her cat intellect and translated it into images which his own thinking could record and understand. Neither one of them was absorbed in the game of mutual greetings. He reached out far beyond her range of perception to see if there was anything near the ship. It was funny how it was possible to do two things at once. He could scan space with his pinset mind and yet at the same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionate thought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered with soft, incredibly downy white fur. While he was still searching, he caught the warning from her. We jump again! And so they had. The ship had moved to a second planoform. The stars were different. The Sun was immeasurably far behind. Even the nearest stars were barely in contact. This was good Dragon country, this open, nasty, hollow kind of space. He reached farther, faster, sensing and looking for danger, ready to fling the Lady May at danger wherever he found it. Terror blazed up in his mind, so sharp, so clear, that it came through as a physical wrench. The little girl named West had found something -- something immense, long, black, sharp, greedy, horrific. She flung Captain Wow at it. Underhill tried to keep his own mind clear. "Watch out!" he shouted telepathically at the others, trying to move the Lady May around. At one corner of the battle, he felt the lustful rage of Captain Wow as the big Persian tomcat detonated lights while he approached the streak of dust which threatened the ship and the people within. The lights scored near-misses. The dust flattened itself, changing from the shape of a sting-ray into the shape of a spear. elapsed. ing human words and was saying in a voice that moved like cold molasses out of a heavy jar, "C A P T A I N." Underhill knew that the sentence was going to be "Captain, move fast!" The battle would be fought and finished before Father Moontree got through talking. later, the Lady May was directly in line. Here was where the skill and speed of the Partners came in. She could react faster than he. She could see the threat as an immense Rat coming direct at her. She could fire the lightbombs with a discrimination which he might miss. He was connected with her mind, but he could not follow it. His consciousness absorbed the tearing wound inflicted by the alien enemy. It was like no wound on Earth -- raw, crazy pain which started like a burn at his navel. He began to writhe in his chair. Actually he had not yet had time to move a muscle when the Lady May struck back at their enemy. Five evenly spaced photonuclear bombs blazed out across a hundred thousand miles. The pain in his mind and body vanished. He felt a moment of fierce, terrible, feral elation running through the mind of the Lady May as she finished her kill. It was always disappointing to the cats to find out that their enemies whom they sensed as gigantic space Rats disappeared at the moment of destruction. Then he felt her hurt, the pain and the fear that swept over both of them as the battle, quicker than the movement of an eyelid, had come and gone. In the same instant, there came the sharp and acid twinge of planoform. Once more the ship went skip. He could hear Woodley thinking at him. "You don't have to bother much. This old son of a gun and I will take over for a while." Twice again the twinge, the skip. He had no idea where he was until the lights of the Caledonia space board shone below. With a weariness that lay almost beyond the limits of thought, he threw his mind back into rapport with the pin-set, fixing the Lady May's projectile gently and neatly in its launching tube. She was half dead with fatigue, but he could feel the beat of her heart, could listen to her panting, and he grasped the grateful edge of a thanks reaching from her mind to his. tal at Caledonia. The doctor was friendly but firm. "You actually got touched by that Dragon. That's as close a shave as I've ever seen. It's all so quick that it'll be a long time before we know what happened scientifically, but I suppose you'd be ready for the insane asylum now if the contact had lasted longer. What kind of cat did you have out in front of you?" Underhill felt the words coming out of him slowly. Words were such a lot of trouble compared with the speed and the joy of thinking, fast and sharp and clear, mind to mind! But words were all that could reach ordinary people like this doctor. His mouth moved heavily as he articulated words, "Don't call our Partners cats. The right thing to call them is Partners. They fight for us in a team. You ought to know we call them Partners, not cats. How is mine?" "I don't know," said the doctor contritely. "We'll find out for you. Meanwhile, old man, you take it easy. There's nothing but rest that can help you. Can you make yourself sleep, or would you like us to give you some kind of sedative?" "I can sleep," said Underhill. "I just want to know about the Lady May." The nurse joined in. She was a little antagonistic. "Don't you want to know about the other people?" "They're okay," said Underhill. "I knew that before I came in here." He stretched his arms and sighed and grinned at them. He could see they were relaxing and were beginning to treat him as a person instead of a patient. "I'm all right," he said. "Just let me know when I can go see my Partner." A new thought struck him. He looked wildly at the doctor. "They didn't send her off with the ship, did they?" "I'll find out right away," said the doctor. He gave Underhill a reassuring squeeze of the shoulder and left the room. The nurse took a napkin off a goblet of chilled fruit juice. her. There seemed to be something wrong with the girl. He wished she would go away. First she had started to be friendly and now she was distant again. It's a nuisance being telepathic, he thought. You keep trying to reach even when you are not making contact. Suddenly she swung around on him. "You pinlighters! You and your damn cats!" Just as she stamped out, he burst into her mind. He saw himself a radiant hero, clad in his smooth suede uniform, the pin-set crown shining like ancient royal jewels around his head. He saw his own face, handsome and masculine, shining out of her mind. He saw himself very far away and he saw himself as she hated him. She hated him in the secrecy of her own mind. She hated him because he was -- she thought -- proud, and strange, and rich, better and more beautiful than people like her. He cut off the sight of her mind and, as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May. "She is a cat," he thought. "That's all she is -- a cat!" But that was not how his mind saw her -- quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding. Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her? ( Continued from Page # ) look at it this way: We all know how clever film makeup men are -- but maybe we've got a reverse idea of their job. Instead of covering wrinkles, perhaps they're putting them in! Yes, I'm aware that it's a shocking notion, that this is very skimpy data to base it on, that all it can be called, actually, is speculation. Yet what other conclusion can be drawn? I think I can explain best by an imaginary scene in the office of Manny Wolverine, head of Infinitesimal Films, Inc. He is negotiating a new contract with Sweetpea Beauregard, whose horizontal walk was what made wide-screen necessary. Manny: (through cigar smoke) Well, kiddo, you're packinm in atta box office and that means you rate a deal. Sweetpea: (squeals) Why, Manny sugah! Ah could nevah have done it without the mahvelous help of the cameramen and -- Manny: For always dollying in behind ya? Take the credit, kiddo -- ya got what every guy would like to take. Here (hands her contract), take a look at this. Sweetpea: (reads, finishes, blinks) Why, Manny sugah, this calls for less money! Manny: More money, kiddo, but there's a special charge. See? Right there. Sweetpea: (gasps in #D) You -- you mean -- ? Manny: (smugly) Yeah. Now what's more important? Sweetpea: This, of cohse! But I -- I never even suspected! Manny: Natch. Nobody does. Sweetpea: (still dazzled) But when did it all staht? Manny: Twenny, twenny-fi years. It's colossally bettern it was then, but it was terrific and sensational even back there. Sweetpea: (blinking thoughtfully) But what about the ones who -- ? Manny: Oh, them. Big sendoff, lotsa publicity -- for re-releases, see -- then pour on the juice real hard. A little plastic surgery and they're ready to start over. Sweetpea: But -- why? Manny: Why take chances on new ones? Same goes for writers -- if they know nothing kills a film fastern a fresh plot, they get this special contract. Sweetpea: Oh, Manny sugah, I'm so flattered you're giving it to me! Manny: Again, you mean. Sweetpea: (blankly) Again? Manny: Sure, kiddo. After you sign, I'll show you who you used to be. Nothing but speculation, I admit, but I'll bet you've often wondered. And the facts all seem to fit. What do you think, kiddo or sugar, as the case may be? Vv continued from Back Cover coeUce-fKlion Biggest Bargain Offer! 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Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. I'lraMsend me post-paid the novels checked below.Ft J o U -- It # ""l J i j O  V (Li 'o -- t-r O  e # For  I . # # or #c each Enclose check.  cash or money order. We pay postage Address City State T HE question of racial survival is understandably on people's minds. However, before the alphabet-bombs made it a more immediate problem, researchers were wondering whether we'd do as well as the dinosaurs, who earned a handsome living for over # years -- and don't think they were in a lowrental area either. We've been around less than # years and yet, these researchers have long been asking, how soon will Man be replaced... and by what? In the Scientific American Reader (Simon #s Schuster), a typical article, called "Is Man Here to Stay?" by Loren C. Eiseley, gives all the facts except the one I think is crucial and so cannot draw the most probable conclusion. Dr. Eiseley offers a valid and yet misleading conflict: "There is a widespread tendency to conceive of the course of evolution as an undeviating upward march from the level of very simple organisms to much more complex ones... the confusion lies in the fact that we fail to distinguish adequately between progressive evolution in a single family line and those greater movements which adjust life to the rise and fall of continents or the chill winds of geological climate." Versus : "Yet as one compares the durability of the simpler creatures with that of the more efficient, one may be led to comment cynically that to evolve is to perish... obviously the completely inadaptive organism cannot master a shifting environment. Life must evolve to live. Why, then, are we confronted with the paradox that he who evolves perishes? Are we not the highest animal? And what, among all things that fly or creep or crawl, is more likely to inherit the future than we are?" Dr. Eiseley then quotes "the law of the unspecialized," a contribution of Edward Drinker Cope, the great #th century Quaker naturalist: "The highly developed, or specialized types of one geological period have not been the parents of the types of succeeding periods but... the descent has been derived from the less specialized of preceding ages." If there's any confusion about the term "unspecialized," George Gaylord Simpson's The Meaning of Evolution explains: "It has been suggested that all animals are now specialized and that the generalized forms on which major evolutionary developments depend are now absent. In fact all animals have been more or less specialized, and a really generalized living form is merely a myth. It happens that there are still in existence some of the less specialized -- that is, less narrowly adapted and more adaptable -- forms from which radiations have occurred and could, as far as we can see, occur again. Opossums are not notably more specialized now than in the Cretaceous and could almost certainly radiate again markedly." Why do very specialized fprms become extinct? When catastrophe of one sort or another strikes, the form can't adapt to the changed environment. Dr. Eiseley's example is the anteater that starves' when ants grow scarce, even though there is an abundance of food for less specialized animals. Three more quotations and I'll get to my own point. Darwin predicted: "We may look with some confidence to a future of great length... All corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." But that follows right after this: "Of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant future." Can these two statements be accepted simultaneously? It isn't easy, but I believe they can. Dr. Eiseley asks: "Is Man a specialized or a generalized creature?" The answer, it seems to me, is a contradictory yes -- he's both. The true divisions of mankind are not racial, national or religious. They're the aptitude groups. The most extreme specializations appear to be the idiot savants, who can't feed or clothe themselves, but can do one thing supremely well. If they are the endproduct of our present trends, it's not hard to imagine them becoming extinct through inability to adapt to some drastic change. Is that good-by to Man? No, for there is the more generalized bulk of the species, far outnumbering the increasingly narrowly specialized, and very well able to adapt to perhaps any change short of complete racial destruction. And, I suppose,capable of radiating into forms we can't even imagine now, if the last part of Darwin's prediction is to come true. Is this what he meant? I wish he had given us a bit of a clue. The Ties of What was happening to Commager did worse than make no sense -- it made too much sense -- but which was true and which was not? lay in a back area of Beverly Hills, south of Wilshire and west of La Brea. It was a big house for that neighborhood, a corner house set back from the street on both sides and screened by trellises, walls and the flanks of a large garage. "That's the number," Jean Bohart said, "but don't stop. Drive on at least a block..." Alan Commager pointed out that there ' was parking space right in front of the house. "I know," Jean agreed nervously, "but if we park there, somebody inside the house would noEarth tice us and that would spoil the main purpose of our trip." "You mean," said Commager as he drove on obediently, "they'll fold the black altar out of sight, drop the remains of the sacrificed virgin through a trap door and hose out the blood, while we're stumbling across the dichondra? I thought we were expected." "We're not expected till tenthirty," Jean said. "Ira didn't exactly make a point of it, but he mentioned they'd be doing other work till shortly after ten." "Then I come on with the dice, eh? By the way, I didn't bring any along. Would these Guides keep sordid little items like that around?" "It isn't going to be a crap game, silly," Jean informed him. "I told you Ira thinks these people can tell whether you were just lucky last week or whether you've developed some sort of special ability. They'll test you -- somehow." her curiously. Jean was a slim blonde who could look crisp as chilled lettuce after an afternoon of smashing tennis matches followed by an hour of diving practice off the high board. She wasn't intellectually inclined, but, understandably, Ira Bohart had never seemed to mind that. Neither did Commager. However, she seemed disturbed now. "Are you beginning to get interested in that sort of thing yourself?" he inquired lightly. "No," she said. "I'm just worried about that husband of mine. Honestly, Alan, this is as bad a metaphysical binge as he's ever been on! And some of those exercises he was showing me yesterday sort of scared me. If they do something like that tonight, I'd like to know what you think of it." "It's just somebody else ort the trail of the Bohart stocks and bonds, Jeannie! Ira will get disillusioned again before any harm is done. You know that, Jeannie." "That's what I keep telling myself," Jean agreed unhappily. "But this time -- " Commager shook his head, parked the car and let her out, a block and a half from the Hawkes home. "Did you try any of those exercises yourself?" "I'm not that loony," Jean said briefly. "Anyway, Ira advised me not to." They walked back to the house in brooding silence. Between them, they'd seen Ira through a bout of Buddhism and successive experiences with three psychological fringe groups, in relentless pursuit of some form of control of the Higher Mind. After each such period, he would revert for a while to despondent normalcy. Four years ago, it had seemed rather amusing to Commager, because then it had been Lona Commager and Ira Bohart who went questing after the Inexpressible together, while Alan Commager and Jean Bohart went sea-fishing or skin-diving off Catalina. But then Lona had died and the Inexpressible stopped being a source of amusement. Sometimes Ira bored Commager to death these days. But he still liked Jean. " pose these rascals anyway?" he asked as they came in s'ght of the house. "I may have surprised the boys at Las Vegas last week, but I couldn't tell a psychic phenomenon from a ringing in my ears." She patted his arm. "That may be true, but you do intimidate people," she explained. "Shucks!" Commager said modestly. It was true, though; he did. "So I'm to sit there and glare at them?" "That's the idea. Just let them know you see through their little tricks and I'll bet they lose interest in Ira before the evening's out! Of course, you don't have to put it on too thick..." Their host, Herbert Hawkes, for one, didn't look like a man who'd be easy to intimidate. He was as big as Commager himself and about the same age; an exfootball player, it turned out. He and Commager exchanging crushing hand-grips and soft smiles, as big men will, and released each other with mutual respect. Ira, who didn't seem any more gaunt and haggard than usual, had appeared a little startled by their entry, possibly because they were early, but more likely, Commager thought, because of a girl who had coiled herself becomingly on the couch very close to Ira. At first glance, this siren seemed no more than seventeen -- a slender, brown-skinned creature in an afternoon dress the exact shade of her skin -- but by the time they were being introduced, Commager had added twelve years to her probable age. She was Ruth MacDonald, she told him, secretary of the Parapsychological Group of Long Beach. Had he heard of it? He said it sounded familiar, which was untrue, but it seemed to please Miss MacDonald. The only other person present, a fifty-odd, graying teddy-bear of a man with very thick eyebrows, announced he was the Reverend Wilson Knox, president of the Temple of Antique Christianity. The Reverend, Commager realized, was pretty well plastered, though there was no liquor in sight. unusual, but they hardly seemed sinister. Commager was practically certain he could identify Herbert Hawkes as the owner of one of the biggest downtown automobile agencies -- which made him an unlikely sort of man to be a member of a group called the Guides. It was Hawkes's own affair, but it promised to make the evening more interesting than Commager had expected. "Were we interrupting anything?" he inquired, looking around benevolently. Ira cleared his throat. "Well, as a matter of fact, Alan, we were conducting a series of experiments with me as the guineapig at the moment. Rather interesting actually -- " He seemed a trifle nervous. Commager avoided Jean's glance. "Why not just continue?" "We can't," the Reverend Knox informed him solemnly. "Our high priestess was called to the telephone a few minutes ago. We must wait until she returns." Ira explained hurriedly, "Mr. Knox is talking about Paylar. She's connected with the new group I'm interested in, the Guides. I suppose Jean told you about that?" "A little." Commager waved his hand around. "But I thought you people were the Guides." Hawkes smiled. Wilson Knox looked startled. "Goodness, no, Mr. Commager! Though as a matter of fact -- " he glanced somewhat warily at his two companions -- "if someone here were a Guide, that person would be the only one who knew it! And, of course, Paylar. That's right, isn't it, Ruth?" Miss MacDonald nodded and looked bored. Jean said to Ira, "All I really told Alan was that some friends of yours would like to experiment with -- well, whatever you think he was using in that crap game last week." She smiled brightly at the group. "Mr. Commager actually won eleven hundred dollars in fifteen minutes of playing!" "Ah, anybody could if they kept the dice for fifteen minutes," Commager said airily. "Question of mind over matter, you know." "Eleven hundred dollars? Phenomenal!" Wilson Knox came wide awake. "And may I ask, sir, whether you employ your powers as a professional gambler?" Commager replied no, that professionally he was a collector, importer, wholesaler and retailer of tropical fish. Which was, as it happened, the truth, but the Reverend looked suspicious. other people came in. One was a handsome though sullenfaced young man whose whiteblond hair had been trimmed into a butch haircut. He was deeply tanned, wore a tee-shirt, white slacks, sneakers and looked generally as if he would be at home on Muscle Beach. The other one had to be Paylar: a genuine Guide or, at least, a direct connection to them. She was downright cute in a slender, dark way. She might be in her early twenties... But for a moment, as Commager stood up to be introduced, he had the confused impression that jungles and deserts and auroras mirrored in ice-flows had come walking into the room with her. Well, well, he thought. Along with Hawkes, here was another real personality. They didn't continue with the experiments on Ira. Wilson Knox reported Commager's feat in Las Vegas to Paylar, who seemed to know all about it, and then went bumbling on into a series of anecdotes about other dice manipulators he had known or heard about. Except for the Boharts, the others listened with varying expressions of polite boredom. But Ira seemed genuinely fascinated by the subject and kept glancing at Commager, to see how he was taking it. Jean became argumentative. "Nobody can really prove that anyone has such abilities!" she stated decisively. "Ira's been working around with this sort of thing for years and he's never shown me anything that couldn't have been a coincidence!" Ira grinned apologetically. Wilson Knox sent a quick glance toward Paylar, who had settled herself in an armchair to Commager's left. The Reverend, Commager thought, seemed both miffed and curiously apprehensive. Commager's own interest in the group became suddenly more lively. "There are people in this world today, my dear young lady," Wilson Knox was telling Jean, "who control the Secret Powers of the Universe!" Jean sighed. "When Ira tells me something like that, I always want to know why we don't hear what these mysterious people are doing." " Paylar again. And this time, Commager decided, there was no question about it: the odd little man seemed genuinely alarmed. The bushy eyebrows were working in unconcealed agitation. "We must consider," he told Jean helplessly, "that such people may have their own reasons for not revealing their abilities." "Hm!" sniffed Jean. Commager laughed. "Mrs. Bohart has a point there, you know," he said to Paylar. "I understand the Guides imply they can, at any rate, train people to develop extrasensory abilities. Would you say they can produce some tangible proof for that claim?" "Sometimes," she said. "With some people." She looked a little tired of the subject, as if it were something she had heard discussed often, as she probably had, so Commager was surprised when she added in the same tone, "I I I could, I think, produce such proofs very easily for you, Mr. Commager. To your own satisfaction, at least." As she turned to look at him, her dark elfin face sober and confident, Commager was aware of a sudden stillness in the room. Wilson Knox started what seemed to be a protesting gesture and subsided again. And Jean was frowning, as if she had just discovered an unexpected uncertainty in herself. "It's a fair offer," Commager acknowledged. "If you're suggesting an experiment, I'll be glad to cooperate." For a moment, he saw something almost like compassion in the serious young face that studied him. Then Paylar turned to the others. "Would you arrange the lighting in the usual way? Mr. Commager, I should like you to sit here." It was what they had come here for, Commager thought. Hawkes and the blond young man, whose name was Lex Barthold, went about the room adjusting the lights. Commager had a strong impression that Jean now would just as soon keep the experiment from being carried out, if she could think of a good enough reason. But the experiment would be a flop anyway. No such halfmystical parlor games had worked on Commager since Lona had died. II store on Wilshire Boulevard, there were display tanks that were laid out with the casual stateliness of an English park and others that had the formal delicacy of a Chinese garden or that appeared to copy, in fantastic miniature detail, sections of some dreamland salt-water reef. These were the designs of two artistically minded girls who managed the store for Commager and they were often expensively duplicated by artists themselves in the homes of the shop's less talented patrons. But the tanks that most interested Commager were the big ones in the back of the store, partitioned off from the plateglass windows and the displays that faced the boulevard. Here fish and plants were bred, raised and stocked without regard for art, and the effect, when you sat down to watch them for a while, was that of being in the center of a secret, green-lit jungle out of which God knew what might presently come soaring, wriggling or crawling at you. It wasn't a bad way, in Commager's opinion, to pass a few hours at night, when you didn't happen to be in a mood either for sleep or human company. In his case, that might happen once or twice a week, or perhaps less than once a month. When it happened more often, it was time to get organized for another one of those trips that would wind up at some warm and improbable point on the big globe of Earth, where people were waiting to help Commager fill his transport tanks with brightly colored little water-creatures -- which, rather surprisingly, provided him with a very good income. It was a pattern he had followed for most of the second half of his thirty-four years, the only two interruptions having been the second world war and the nineteen months he'd been married to Lona. It was odd, he thought, that he'd never found anything more important to do with his life than that, but the personal games he could watch people play didn't seem to be even as interesting as the one he'd chosen for himself. Also, he went on thinking halfseriously, if you got right down to it, probably all the important elements of life were contained right inside the big tank he was observing at the moment, so that if he could really understand what was going on in there, brightly and stealthily among the green underwater thickets, he might know all that could be known about the entire Universe. Considered in that light, the tank became as fascinating as a stage play in a foreign language, in which the actors wore the bright masks of magic and played games that weren't so very unlike those being played by human beings. But any real understanding of the purpose of the play, human or otherwise, always had seemed a little beyond Commager's reach. position in the chair he had pulled up for himself. Perhaps he was simply a bit more stupid than most. But there was a fretting feeling that this game playing, whether on a large scale or a small one, never really led to much, beyond some more of the same. There was, he conceded, a good deal of satisfaction in it for a time, but in the long run, the returns started to diminish. It seemed that things -- in some way Commager couldn't quite fathom -- should have been arranged differently. A car passing on the street outside sent ' a whisper of sound along the edge of his consciousness. With that came the awareness that it had been some time since he'd last heard a car go by and he found himself wondering suddenly what time of night it was. He glanced at his wristwatch. Three-thirty. A little startled, he tried to compute how long he had been sitting there. Then it struck him in a surge of panic that he couldn't remember coming to the store at all! But, of course, his memory told him, you went with Jean to that house... And Paylar had asked him to sit down and... What kind of stunt had she pulled on him? The blackness of terror burst into his consciousness as soon as his thoughts carried him that far -- and it wiped out memory. He tried again, A black explosion. He pushed at it and it retreated a little. It had been between ten and eleven o'clock. Five hours or so ago. What was the last specific thing he could remember? chair, his eyes closed, a little amused, a little bored. It had been going on for some time. Paylar, a quiet voice off to his left, was asking him a series of odd questions. Mr, Commager? head): Right here! Inside my head. specific about that? somewhere between my ears. Or somewhere back of my eyes. to be from the right side of your head? Do you sense the exact distance? Commager discovered he could sense the exact distance. As a point of awareness, he seemed to be located an inch inside the right side of his skull. Simultaneously, though, he noticed that his left ear was less than an inch and a half away from the same spot -- which gave him briefly an odd impression of the general shape of his head! But he realized then that his attention was shifting around in there, rapidly and imperceptibly. His ears seemed to be now above him, now below and, for a moment, the top of his skull seemed to have moved at least a yard away. He laughed. "How am I doing?" Paylar didn't answer. Instead, she asked him to imagine that he was looking at the wall in front of him. After a while, that wasn't too difficult; Commager seemed to be seeing the wall clearly enough, with a standing lamp in either corner, where Hawkes had placed them. Next, the voice told him to imagine that the same wall now was only a few inches in front of his face -- and then that it suddenly had moved six feet behind him. It gave him an odd feeling of having passed straight through the wall in the moment of shifting it. "Put it twenty feet in front of you again," she said. "And now twenty feet behind you." Again the sensation of shifting iri space, as if he were swinging back and forth, past and through the wall. Commager had become alert and curious now. On the third swing, he went straight into the blackness... with panic howling around him! After that, everything was blotted out. discovered, close the gap any farther now. Somewhere near eleven o'clock in the evening, he'd gone into that mental blackout with its peculiarly unpleasant side-effects. His next memory might have been twenty minutes ago, when he found himself staring into the miniature underwater forest of the fish tank in his store. He could phone the Bohart apartment, he thought, and find out what actually had happened. Immediately, then, he became aware of an immense reluctance to carry out that notion and he grimaced irritably. It was no time to worry about what the Boharts might think, but he could imagine Jean's sleepy voice, annoyedly asking who was calling at this hour. And he'd say, "Well, look, I've lost my memory, I'm afraid. A piece of it anyway -- " He shook his head. They'd gone there to show up the Guides, after all! He'd have to work this out by himself. As if in response to his line of thought, the office telephone, up in the front of the store, began ringing sharply. The unexpected sound jolted Commager into a set of chills. He sat there stiffly, while the ring was repeated four times; and then, because there was really no reason not to answer it, no matter how improbable it was that someone would be calling the store at this time of night, he got up and started toward the telephone down the long aisle of back-store tanks. Here and there, one of the tanks was illuminated by overhead lights, like the one before which he'd been sitting. At the corner, where he turned from the aisle into the office, something lay in his path. He almost stepped on it. He stopped in shock. It was a slender woman, lying half on her side, half on her face, in a rumpled dress and something like a short white fur jacket. Her loose hair hid her face. The telephone kept on shrilling. knee beside the woman, touched her and knew she was dead, turned her over by the shoulders and felt a stickiness on his hands. There was a slanting cut across her throat, black in the shadows. "Well," a voice inside Commager's head said with insane calm, "if it isn't Miss MacDonald!" He felt no pity for her at the moment and no real alarm, only a vast amazement. He realized that the telephone had stopped ringing and clusters of thought burst suddenly and coherently into his awareness again. Somebody apparently thought he was here, at threethirty in the morning -- the same somebody might also suspect that Miss MacDonald was here and even in what condition. And the phone could have been dialed quite deliberately at that moment to bring Commager out of the hypnotized or doped trance, or whatever it was that somebody knew he was trapped in. In which case, they might be wanting him to discover Ruth MacDonald's body at about this time. It would be better, he thought, not to get tangled up just now in wondering why anyone should want that to happen; or even whether, just possibly, it had been he himself who had cut Miss MacDonald's brown throat. What mattered was tht, at this instant, somebody was expecting him to react as reasonably as a shocked and stunned man could react in such a situation. The only really reasonable course of action open to him was to call the police promptly -- wherefore, if his curiously calm assumption was correct, he would be primarily expected to do just that. It would be much less reasonable, though still not too unlikely, to carry that ghastly little body far off somewhere and lose it. Or he could just walk out of here and leave Miss MacDonald on the floor, to be discovered by the store's staff in the morning. That would be a stupid thing to do, but still something that might be expected of a sufficiently dazed and frightened man. So he wouldn't do any of those things! The hunch was strong in him that the best way to react just now was in a manner unreasonable beyond all calculation. ald's body aside and flicked on his cigarette lighter. On the floor were gummily smeared spots, but she had bled to death somewhere else before she had been dropped here! Commager's hands and clothes were clean, so it was very improbable that he had carried her in. The sensible thing, he thought, would be to clean up the few stains on the floor before he left, removing any obvious evidence that Miss MacDonald had been in the store at all. Wherefore, he didn't bother to do it. Nor did he waste time wondering whether a half dozen tanks in the back part of the store had been lit when he came in here or not. There was a variety of possible reasons why someone might have left a light on over some of them. He picked up the slender stiffening body on the floor and carried it to the front door. The door was unlocked and his Hudson was at the curb. He shifted Miss MacDonald to one arm, locked the store door behind him, then placed her in the back seat of the car. Even Wilshire Boulevard was a lonely street at this hour, but he saw several sets of headlights coming toward him as he got into the car and started it. As far as he could make out, there hadn't been any blood spilled around inside the Hudson, either. Twelve minutes later, he drove past the corner house he'd visited with Jean Bohart some time before ten in the evening. There was a light on in one of the rooms upstairs, which distinguished Herbert Hawkes's home from any other house in sight. A few blocks away, a dog began to bark. Dogs might be a problem, he thought. a few hundred feet away and sat still for perhaps a minute, listening. The dog stopped barking. Headlights crossed an intersection a few blocks ahead of him. He got out, lifted Miss MacDonald's body out of the car and walked unhurriedly back to the corner house and over the stepping stones of the dichondra lawn to the side of the house. Here was a trellis, with a gate in it, half open. Commager eased his burden sideways through the gate. In the half-light of early morning, he set Ruth MacDonald down under a bush -- which partly concealed her -- in about the same position in which he'd found her. He had a moment of pity to spare for her now. But there was motion inside the house. Commager looked at the door that opened into this side garden. A vague sequence of motions; somebody walking quietly -- but without any suggestion of stealth -- was coming closer to the door. Commager stepped quietly up to the wall beside the door and flattened himself against the wall. A key clicked in the lock. The door swung open. A big shape sauntered out. Commager's fist was cocked and he struck hard, slanting upward, for the side of the neck and the jaw... He laid Herbert Hawkes down beside the body of Ruth MacDonald, one big arm draped across her shoulders. Let the Guides figure that one out, he thought wearily. Not that they wouldn't, of course, but he was going to continue to react unreasonably. Twenty minutes later, he was in his apartment and sound asleep. Ill waspishly. Commager hung for a moment between two levels of awareness. The blazing excitement of the fight was over, but he still hated to relinquish the wild, cold, clear loneliness of the blue -- The thin droning continued to ram at his eardrums. His eyes opened and he sat up, reaching for the telephone as he glanced at the clock beside it. #:#. "Alan? I think it worked! Ira had breakfast and drove off to the office, wrapped in deep thought. You were terrific, simply terrific! Just sitting there like a stone wall -- Commager blinked, trying to catch up with her. Jean Bohart had an athlete's healthy contempt for lie-a-beds and felt no compunction about jolting them out of their torpor. She probably assumed he'd been up and around for the past two hours. Then his waking memories suddenly flooded back. He sucked in a shocked breath. "Eh?" She sounded startled. "I didn't say anything," he managed. "Go ahead -- " He wouldn't, he realized presently, have to ask Jean any leading questions. There was a nervous tension in her that, on occation, found its outlet in a burst of one-way conversation and this was such an occasion. The Boharts had left the Hawkes home shortly before twelve, Ira apparently depressed by the negative results of the evening. The Reverend Knox had made a phone call somewhat earlier and had been picked up within a few minutes by an elderly woman who, in Jean's phrasing, looked like a French bulldog. "I think he was glad to get out of there!" she added. on that. He himself had stayed On with the others. Ruth MacDonald, in Jean's opinion, was making a pretty definite play for him by that time, while Paylar -- "What's her last name, anyway?" -- had become withdrawn to the point of rudeness after Commager's spectacular lack of reaction to her psychological games. "I think she knew just what we were doing by then!" Jean's voice held considerable satisfaction. "So did that Hawkes character. Did you know he's the Herbert Hawkes who owned the Hawkes Chrysler Agency on Figueroa? Well, there's something interesting about that -- " Hawkes had sold out his business about eight months before and it was generally known that his reason had been an imminent nervous breakdown. "What do you make of that, Alan?" Offhand, Commager admitted, he didn't know what to make of it. Well, Jean interrupted, she was convinced Hawkes had gone the way Ira would have gone if they hadn't stopped him. "Those Guides have him hypnotized or something!" She laughed nervously. "Does it sound as if I'm getting too dramatic about it?" "No," he said, recalling his last glimpse of Hawkes and his horrid little companion much too vividly. "He doesn't strike me as acting like a man who's been hypnotized, though. Not that I know much about that sort of thing." Jean was silent, thinking. "Did anything in particular develop between you and the MacDonald?" she asked suddenly. There was a strange sharpness in her tone. Commager felt himself whiten. "No," he said, "I just went home by and by." He tried for a teasing "Are you jealous, little pal?" note. "Were you worrying about it?" "She's poison, that's all!" Jean said sharply. mager showered, shaved, dressed and breakfasted, with very little awareness of what he was doing. He was in a frame of mind he didn't entirely understand himself; under a flow of decidedly unpleasant speculations was a layer of tingling, almost physical elation which, when he stopped to consider it, appeared a less than intelligent response to his present situation. But the realization didn't seem to affect the feeling. The feeling vanished abruptly when he dumped the clothes he'd been wearing the night before out of the laundry bag into which he had stuffed them, along with the blanket on which he'd laid Ruth MacDonald's body in the car. He had handled her with some caution and he couldn't discover marks on any of those articles now that seemed likely to incriminate him. But he had no doubt that a more competent investigation could reveal them. The odd thing was that he still couldn't get himself to worry about such an investigation! He had no logical basis for his belief that unless he himself announced the murder of the secretary of the Parapsychological Group of Long Beach, nobody else was going to take that step. He couldn't even disprove that he hadn't, somewhere along the line last night, dropped into sheer criminal lunacy. But, so far, nobody had come pounding at his door to accuse him of murder. And Commager retained the irrationally obstinate conviction that nobody would. He had an equally strong conviction that he had become the target of the relentless hostility of a group of people, of whose existence he hadn't known until the day before -- and that he wouldn't know why until he discovered the reason for his loss of conscious memory in a period during which he had, to Jean Bohart's discerning eyes, showed no noticeable change in behavior. And, Commager decided finally, he'd better not let the lack of satisfactory conscious evidence for either certainty affect his actions just now. by telephone and left the apartment an hour after he'd been wakened. A few minute later, he was at the store, which would open for business at ten o'clock. Commager unlocked the door and strolled inside. The store's staff had got there at nine and the floors, he noticed, had been thoroughly mopped. Nobody inquired whether he'd been in during the night, so it seemed he had guessed right in leaving the lights on over the big tanks. He drove into Los Angeles then, to keep his first appointment, at Dr. Henry L. Warbutt's Psychology Center. Henry was a stout, whitehaired, energetic little man with the dark melancholy eyes of one of the great apes. "Thirty minutes for free is all I can spare, even for orphans," he informed Commager. "But you're welcome to that, so come in and sit down, boy! Cup of tea, eh? What do you hear from the Boharts?" Commager declined the tea, which was likely to be some nasty kind of disguised health-brew, and stated that the Boharts, when t last heard from, had been doing fine. It wasn't his first visit to the Center. Both of his parents had been dead before he was twelve and Henry, who was a relative on his father's side, had been his legal guardian until he came of age. "I want to find out what you know about a new local organization called the Guides," Commager explained. "They're on the metaphysical side, I'd say, but they seen to be doing some therapy work. They're not listed in the telephone book." Henry looked slightly disturbed. "If you mean the Guides I'm thinking of, they're not so new. How did you hear about them? Is Ira messing around with that outfit now?" Commager told him briefly of last night's earlier events, presenting Jean Bohart's version of his own role in them, as if that were the way he recalled it himself. that point. "Do you remember just what those exercises were that the woman put you through?" When Commager had . described them, he nodded. "They got those gimmicks from another group. I've used them myself now and then. Not on cash clients, of course, just as an experiment. The idea is to divert your attention away from your body-ego, if you know what I mean. No? Well, then -- " He made a steeple of his hands and scowled at his fingertips. "Metaphysically, it's sometimes used as a method to get you out of your physical body." He waved his hands vaguely around. "Off you go into the astral plane or something!" He grinned. "Understand now?" "More or less," Commager said doubtfully. "Did you ever see it happen?" "Eh? Oh, no! With me, they usually just go to sleep. Or else they get bored and won't react at all, about like you did. There's no therapeutic value in it that I know of. But probably no harm, either." "Would you say whether there's any harm in the Guides?" "Well," said Henry thoughtfully, "they're certainly one of the more interesting groups of our local psychological fauna. Personally, I wouldn't go out of my way to antagonize them. Of course, Ira's such a damn fool, you probably had to do something pretty obvious to discourage him. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Guides were working principally with drugs, as far as I could make out at the time. I don't know whether this is the same organization or not, but just lately -- the last year or so -- I've been hearing gossip about them again." "What kind of gossip?" " many of the people who come into this Center for therapy are interested in metaphysics in one way or another," Henry explained. "Some of them have been telling me lately that the Guides are the latest thing in a True Group. And a True Group, in their language, means chiefly that the people in it have some honest to goodness supernatural abilities and powers!" He grimaced unhappily. "Another characteristic is that nobody else knows exactly who belongs to a True Group. In that way, your acquaintances seem to be living up to the legend." Commager said he'd been under the impression that the Guides dealt in parapsychology. Henry nodded. "Well, they'd use that, too, of course! Depending on the class of client -- " He hesitated briefly. "By and large, I'd say the Guides were a very good outfit for fairly normal citizens like you and the Boharts to stay away from!" He'd also heard of the Reverend Wilson Knox and of the Temple of Antique Christianity, though not favorably. "Knox has a crummy little sect back in one of the Hollywood canyons. They go in for Greek paganism. Strictly a screwball group." He didn't know anything of the Parapsychological Group of Long Beach. "You can't keep up with all of them." IV sun-browned hypnotist who'd sometimes gone spear-fishing with Commager. On one such occasion -- the last, if Julius had anything to say about it -- Commager had been obliged to haul him half-drowned out of a kelp bed and thump him back into consciousness. Which made him the right man right now. He clasped his hands behind his head, rocked himself back from his desk and looked first interested and then highly dubious, while Commager went on talking. "You're about as lousy a hypnotic subject as I am myself, Alan!" Julius protested finally. "I tried to put you under twice, remember? Anyway, how about sending you to my tame M.D. for a check-up first? Amnesia isn't anything to -- No?" He considered. "Well, how long ago did this happen?" The fact that it had happened only the night before reassured him somewhat. So presently Commager was sitting in an armchair being informed that his eyelids were getting heavier and heavier. An hour later, Julius said discouragedly, "This isn't getting us anywhere and I've got another appointment at two o'clock! How bad do you want that information, Alan?" "It's a matter of life and death!" "Oh, hell!" said Julius. He went out of the room and came back with a small bottle, partly filled with a slightly oily, aromatic liquid. "I don't use this often, but -- By the way, with the possible exception of last night, did anyone else ever try to hypnotize you?" "Ira Bohart did, the first time I met him," Commager recalled. "It was at a party. No results." "We'll make it two spoonfuls," Julius decided. mager got into the blackness. The next time he consciously opened his eyes, it was past three in the afternoon. Julius, looking pale and exhausted, stood at the desk watching him. He'd loosened his tie and hung his jacket over the back of a chair. His hair was disheveled. "Brother!" he remarked. "Well, we got something, Alan. I'll play parts of it back to you." He jerked his head at a gently burbling percolator on a mantel. "Cup of coffee there for you. Better have some." Commager sipped black coffee, yawned, and took note of the time. Too much of the day already was past, he thought uneasily; he wondered what the Guides had been doing meanwhile. "What happened to your appointments?" n "Canceled them," Julius said, fiddling with the tape recorder. "They'll keep." He glanced around at Commager. "Here's the first thing we got. Chronologically, it seems to fit in at the end of the period you can't remember. Symbolism, but I'm curious. We'll try it first." Commager listened. After a while, there were pricklings of memory. When Julius stopped the recorder, he remarked, "I had a dream this morning that seems to tie in with that." "Ah?" Julius looked professionally cautious. "Well, let's hear about it." Commager hesitated. The dream seemed irrelevant and rather childish, like a fairy tale. He'd been flying around in a great open space, he began at last. And he'd been wondering why nobody else was up there with him, but he hadn't felt particularly concerned about it. Then a hawk came swooping at him, trying to knock him out of the air. There was a long leash attached to the hawk's leg and Commager noticed that, far down below, a number of people were holding the leash and watching the battle. "That explained why there wasn't anyone else around, you see. When anyone tried it, they simply sent a hawk up after him." "Hm!" said Julius. "Recognize the people?" "No " Commager checked himself and laughed. "Of course, it just struck me! Hawkes was the name of one of the people I met last night! That explains the dream!" Julius nodded doubtfully. "Possibly. How did it continue?" there hadn't been much more to it. He couldn't damage the hawk and the hawk couldn't bring him down; finally it disappeared. Then he'd been up there alone... and then he'd been wakened by the telephone. Julius tapped the desk with the eraser end of a pencil, looking thoughtful. "Well -- " he sighed. He turned to the recorder. "Let's try another part of this now, Alan. The central part. Incidentally, we didn't get into what you were actually doing last night. These are your subjective impressions and they aren't necessarily an immediately recognizable reflection of real events, past or present. You understand that?" Commager said he did. But he felta stab of sharp apprehension. He was reasonably certain that whatever Julius heard or guessed in his office remained a private matter. But his own line of action had been based on the solid personal conviction that, whatever had happened last night, it hadn't been he who had killed Ruth MacDonald. In view of the hypnotist's careful and almost formal phrasing, Commager was, for a few moments at least, not quite so sure about that. They were a bad few moments...' Then the recorder was turning again. " it?" Julius asked. "It will help me formulate my own opinion." Commager shrugged. He still felt shaken, after the intermittent waves of grief, rage and remorse that had pounded through him while a section of the tape rewound itself again -- with a vividness and immediacy that dazed him, but still seemed rather unaccountable. After all, that had been over and done with almost four years ago! "It's fairly obvious to me," he said reluctantly. At least his voice sounded steady enough. "A few months before my wife died, I'd begun to get interested in the ing around with. You remember Lona was almost as bad that way as Ira Bohart." He managed a brief, careful grin. "It annoyed me at first, but, of course, I didn't let her know. I thought she'd drop it soon enough. When she didn't, I decided I'd experiment on the quiet by myself. Actually, I was after information I could use to convince Lona she was wasting her time with that sort of thing -- and then she'd have more time to spare for the kind of fun and games I was interested in." Julius smiled faintly and nodded. me -- and sometimes she would!" Commager smiled. "I was also, you see, keeping a list of the times these little experiments didn't work out, and they often didn't, at first. So that, when I told Lona about it finally, it would be obvious that the coincidences had been just that." He hesitated. "I still think they were just that. But one day, it struck me I'd accumulated too many coincidences lately. It shook me." "Did it stop your experimentation?" Julius remained intent on his art work. "A few days later, it did," Corm mager said. He discovered suddenly that he was sweating. "Lona phoned me that afternoon that she was driving down to the beach to pick me up. After she hung up, I had a sudden positive feeling that if she drove her car that afternoon, she'd get killed! I almost called her back. But I decided I wasn't going to turn into another Ira Bohart. As of business and so was Lona! When she got there, I'd tell her -- " The sweat was running down his face now. "Well, you know that part of it. Lona had a heart attack while driving, the doctors thought, and crashed and got killed." He paused again, because his voice had begun to shake. "I don't know why that got on there A coincidences," Commager explained. "Occasions when I'd tell myself Lona would be home at six, say, and she'd actually show up about that time. Or I'd decide what dress she'd select to wear next morning -- " "Predictions, generally?" Julius drew a precise little circle on the desk blotter with his pencil and studied it critically. "Yes. Or I'd put the idea into her head that she wanted to talk about some particular thing with -- " he nodded at the recorder -- "except tnat last night was the hrst time since that I felt, even lor a minute, that something mignt be going on tnat couxdn t be explained in a perfectly normal way!" "was while you were going through that peculiar set of exercises you were describing, wasn't it? Alan, how long ago has it been, exactly, since your wife died?" "Not quite four years." Commager drove back a surge of impatience. "I suppose I've felt guilty enough about it ever since! But right now, Julius, I'm interested in finding out why I lost a few hours of memory last night and how to restore them. Are we getting any closer to that?" "I think we are. Can you be at this office at # a.m. two days from tomorrow? That's Thursday morning -- " "Why should I come here then?" Julius shrugged. "Because that's the earliest appointment I could make for you with Dr. Ciardi. I phoned him just before you woke up. He's a friend of mine and an excellent psychiatrist, Alan. We do a lot of work together." Commager said in angry amazement, "Damn you, Julius! I told you I didn't want anyone else to know about this!" "I know," Julius admitted unhappily. "We've been fairly good friends for about eight years now, haven't we? We've been in and out of each other's homes and met each other's acquaintances, right?" Commager's fingertips drummed on his right knee. He was still furious. "So what?" "So hell, Alan! What you were telling me just now never happened! Your wife wasn't killed in an autoaccident four years ago because, four years ago, you didn't have a wife! To the best of my knowledge, you've never been married!" V early dinner at Tilford's. A mirror lined the entire wall on the opposite side of the room; now and then, he glanced at himself. For a sort of lunatic, he thought, the big, sun-tanned man sitting there looked remarkably calm and healthy. He was still amazed, above all, at the apparent instantaneousness with which he had realized that what Julius had blurted out was true! He could picture Lona in a hundred different ways, very vividly, but he couldn't actually recall having ever mentioned her to anybody else! And he couldn't now remember a single time when he and she and any other person had been together. It was almost as if the entire episode of Lona had been a story somebody had told him, illustrated out of his own imaginings. And now, in a few hours, the story was beginning to fade out. Specific scenes had dropped almost beyond the reach of memory. The image of Lona herself started to blur. H IS immediate reaction had been an odd mixture of shocked self-disgust and profound relief, threaded with the feeling that actually he'd always known, without being consciously aware of it, that there wasn't any real Lona. Even the emptions he'd felt while listening to the tape recorder were a part of the fabrication; almost at the instant of realization, they began to break away from him. Like the sudden shattering of a hard shell of alien matter, Commager thought, which he'd been dragging around, rather like a hermit-crab, under the pretense that it was a natural part of himself. The self-disgust became even more pronounced at that comparison. But whatever his original motives had been for imposing that monstrous construction upon his mind, Commager couldn't see any further connection between it and the events of the past night. Apparently he had thrust himself into a period of amnesia to avoid the full impact of an artifU cial set of emotions. In that period, there had been a very real and very unpleasant occurrence -- a murder. His main reason now for remaining convinced that he hadn't been the murderer was that the evening papers carried no indication that the body of Ruth MacDonald had been found. Which certainly indicated guilt on the part of those who must have found her. He could afford to wait until Thursday, Commager decided, to go digging after the causes of his delusion under Dr. Ciardi's guidance. But he probably couldn't afford to wait at all to find out what the Guides -- he still had to assume it was the Guides -- were preparing for him next. And perhaps the best way to find out would be, quite simply, to ask. walked up the street to a telephone booth and dialed the number of Herbert Hawkes's home. A man's voice informed him presently that it was the Hawkes residence, Lex Barthold speaking. That, Commager recalled, was the name of the blond young man who had been an untalkative member of the party last night. He gave his own name and said he was trying to contact Miss Paylar -- a piece of information which produced a silence of several seconds at the other end. But when Barthold spoke again, he sounded unshaken. "Paylar isn't in at the moment. Shall I take your message, Mr. Commager?" Commager said no, he'd try again, and hung up. Now that, he reflected, walking back to his car, seemed to be an interesting sort of household! For the first time since leaving Julius's office, he wasn't too displeased with himself. If he saw Paylar alone, he might, as far as appearances went, be taking an interest in the well-being of Ira Bohart or, reasonably enough, in Paylar herself. And things could start developing from that point. Of course, she might avoid letting him see her alone. In any case, his call would give them something new to consider. He drove to the beach and turned south toward San Diego. A half hour later, he parked before the cabin where, among bulkier items of fishing gear, he kept a #-caliber revolver. He put that in the glove compartment of the car and started back to town. few minutes after he reached his apartment. "I've called you twice in the last hour," Paylar said. "I underi stand you want to speak to me." "I do," said Commager. "Do you happen to have the evening free?" She laughed. "I've arranged to have it free. You can meet me at your aquarium store, Mr. Commager." "Eh?" he said stupidly. "At your store." Her voice still sounded amused. "You see; I may have a business proposition for you." Then the line went dead. Commager swore and hung up. When he turned into Wilshire Boulevard not very many minutes later, he saw a long gray car, vague under the street lights, move away from the curb a hundred feet or so beyond his store and drive off. There was no sign of Paylar. He parked and followed the car thoughtfully with his eyes. Then he got out. The store was locked, the interior dark. But in back of the office, behind the partition, was a shimmering of light. He thought of the gun in his car. There had been one murder. It seemed a little early for another one. He unlocked the door and locked it again behind him. This time, there were no bodies lying around the aisles. But at the back of the store, standing before a lighted fish tank and looking into it, Paylar was waiting for him. got in. It seemed a theatrical gesture, a boasting indication that his affairs could be easily invaded from without. Aside from that, the darkened store undoubtedly was a nice place for an ambush. Commager wondered briefly why he didn't feel more concerned about that and realized then that he was enormously angry. ' An ambush might have been a relief. "Did you find out much about us today?" Paylar asked. "Not enough," he admitted. "Perhaps you can tell me more." "That's why I'm here." Commager looked at her skeptically. She was wearing a black sweater and slacks that appeared wine-colored in the inadequate light from the big tank. A small, finely shaped body and a small, vivid face. The mouth smiled soberly; black eyes gleamed like an animal's as she turned her head toward him. "We're an organization," she said, "that operates against the development of parapsychological abilities in human beings..." Oddly enough, it made sense and he found himself believing her. Then he laughed. "Do you object to my winning a crap game?" Paylar said seriously, "We don't object to that. But you're not stopping there, Mr. Commager." Again there was an instant of inner agreement; an elation and anxiety. Commager hesitated, startled by his reaction. He said, "I'm not aware of any ambition along that line." She shook her head. "I don't think you're being quite truthful. But it doesn't really matter how aware you are of it just now. The last twenty-four hours have indicated clearly that you can't be checked by any ordinary methods." She frowned. "The possibility had been foreseen -- and so we hit you with everything that was immediately available, Mr. Commager. I was sure it was enough." Commager felt a little bewildered. "Enough for what?" "Why, almost anybody else would have done something sensible -- and then refused to ever budge out of the everyday world again, even in his thoughts. Instead, you turned around and started to smoke us out -- which, incidentally, saved you for the moment from an even more unnerving experience!" appalled. That final comment had no present meaning for him, but she obviously was speaking about a murder of which she, at the very least, had known at the time. She considered it mildly amusing that it had back-fired on them! He said harshly, "I'd enjoy breaking your neck. But I suspect that you're a little crazy." She shrugged, smiling, "The trouble is that you're not going to go on thinking that, Mr. Commager. If you did, we could safely disregard you." He looked down at his hands. "So what are you going to do?" "There are others who say you can be stopped. It's certain you won't like their methods, though I'm not entirely sure they will be effective. I came here tonight to offer you an alternative." "Go ahead and offer it." "You can join us," she said. Commager gave a short laugh of sheer astonishment. "Now why should I want to do that?" "In the end," Paylar said soberly, "you may have very little choice! But there's another reason. You've been trying, all your life, to bring your abilities into your consciousness and under your control." He shook his head. "If you mean wild talents, I haven't done anything of the sort." "Unfortunately," she said, "you won't remain unaware of that trend in yourself very much long'i Anil, if you cooperate with us, we can and will help you to do just that. But we can't let you continue by yourself, without safeguards. You're too likely to be successful, you see. Those wild talents can become extremely wild!" "You know," he said, almost good-humoredly, "I think you really believe what you say. But as far as I'm concerned, you're a group of criminal lunatics without any more secret ability than I have myself -- " "That," Paylar replied undisturbed, "is precisely what we're afraid of. For the time being, though, we can use our abilities in ways that you cannot. What happened while you were doing those exercises last night, Mr. Commager?" He looked at her and then away. "I got rather bored." ing! Exercises of that kind provide very convincing illusions, and very little else, for people who are hungry for illusion. But since you have an ability, it took no more than a word to bring it into action! That was when we knew you had to be stopped. However, I'm afraid you're still turning down my offer." "You read my mind that time, lady! I'd turn you over to the police, too, if I thought it would do any good." "It wouldn't," she assured him. Her head tilted a moment, with soft grace, into an attitude of listening. "I think my car is coming back for me. I'll leave that offer open, Mr. Commager -- in case you survive long enough now to except it!" He grinned. "You shouldn't frighten me like that." "I've frightened you a little, but not nearly enough. But there is more than one way to shake a man to his senses -- or out of them -- so perhaps we can still change your mind. Would you let me out the front door now?" Lights slid over the ceiling above her as she spoke, and the long gray car, its engine throbbing, stood at the curb when they came out. Paylar turned at the car door. "You know where I'm staying," she said, looking up at him, "if you want to find me." Commager nodded. She smiled and then the door opened for her and light briefly filled the interior of the car. Seconds later, he stood staring after it as it fled down the street. She'd been right about there being more than one way of shaking a man out of his senses. The driver of the car -- the very much alive driver -- had been Ruth MacDonald! a full Moon tonight, the Bay would have looked artificial if it hadn't been so huge. A savage, wild place, incongruous in this area with the slow thump and swirl and thunder of the tide. A mile to the south was a cluster of cottages down near the water's edge. Commager's cabin was as close as anything could have been built to the flank of the big northern drop-off. He could look down at the sharp turn of the highway below him or out at the Bay. Nobody yet had tried to build on the rocky rises of ground behind him. Without ordinary distractions, it was a good place for a few hours of painstaking reorientation. He wasn't exactly frightened, Commager told himself. But when he had recognized Ruth MacDonald, a wave of unreason inside him had seemed to rise to meet and merge with the greater wave of unreason rolling in from a shadow-world without. For that moment, the rules of reality had flickered out of existence. An instant later, he'd had them solidly re-established. He was now simply a man who knew something had happened that he couldn't begin to explain rationally. It was a much more acceptable situation, since it included the obvious explanation of irrationality. On Thursday morning, he could tell Dr. Ciardi, "Look, Doc, I'm having hallucinations. The last one was a honey. I thought I was carrying a dead woman all over town! What do we do about it?" And they'd do whatever was done in such circumstances and it would be a sane, normal, active life for Alan Commager forever after -- with a woman more or less like Jean Bohart to live it with, which would keep out the shadowy Lonas. With everything, in fact, that didn't fit-, into that kind of life, that belonged to the shadow-worlds, as completely obliterated and forgotten as they could become. Commager wondered what made that picture look so unsatisfactory. that, according to Paylar, this was exactly how the Guides had expected him to react as soon as her little games had steered him into a bout of amnesia and hallucinations. They'd wanted, she'd said, in approximately those words, to put him in a frame of mind that would make him refuse to ever budge out of the safe, everyday world again, even in his thoughts. Commager grimaced. But they'd become convinced then that he wasn't going to do it! He might do it all the same, he thought. But the reason it couldn't be a completely satisfactory solution was growing clear. One couldn't discount the probability that there was a little more to the shadow-worlds than lunacy and shadow. Perhaps only a very little more and perhaps not. But if he avoided looking at what was there, he would never find out. And then he realized that he wasn't going to avoid looking at it, hadn't really been seriously considering it. He swore at himself, because avoidance did seem still the simple and rational solution, providing one could be satisfied with it. He couldn't be satisfied with it and that was that. He could see now that if an organization such as Paylar had described the Guides to be existed, and if it were composed, at least in part, of people who really had developed an understanding and working knowledge of the possibilities of psi, it would be in a uniquely favorable position to control and check the development of similar abilities in others. Its connections and its influence would be primarily with the psychological fringe groups here and with their analogs elsewhere; and the people wfio were drawn to such groups would be those who were dissatisfied with or incompetent in normal lines of activity, and had become abnormally interested in compensating for their lack of other achievement by investigating the shadowy, vague, ego-bolstering promise of psi. And people frightened by the threat of total war, driven into a search for psychic refuge by the prospect of physical destruction. In either case, because they were uncertain, less than normally capable people, they could be controlled without too much difficulty -- and carefully diverted then, in groups or as individuals, from the thing they were seeking and might stumble upon! The exercises she'd demonstrated to him, Paylar had said, were designed primarily to provide convincing illusions for those who were hungry for illusion. k' mager realized, might feel it was necessary. They might know just enough to be afraid of what such knowledge could lead to. If it were possible to encourage a pair of dice to bounce and spin in just the right pattern to win for you, it might, for example, also be possible to send a few buildings bouncing and spinning through a city! Of course, nobody ever seemed to have done it, but that might be due precisely to the existence of some controlling agency, such as the Guides claimed to be. For a while, Commager regarded the possibility of accepting Paylar's invitation to join her group -- and, a few seconds later, he knew he wasn't going to do that either! However determined he might be to proceed with a painstaking and thorough investigation of this field of possibilities now, there was still a feeling of something completely preposterous about the entire business. He could accept the fact that he had been shaken up mentally to the point where he might qualify without too much difficulty for the nearest insane asylum. But he wasn't ready to admit to anybody just yet that he, a grown man, was taking the matter of psi very seriously. It was something you could try out for yourself, just as an experiment, behind locked doors and with the windows shaded. So Commager locked the front door to his cabin and tried it out. VI been shoved under his apartment door during the night gave a Hollywood telephone number and urgently requested him to call it. It was signed by Elaine Lovelock. So far as Commager could remember, Elaine was no one he knew. When he dialed the number, nobody answered. He'd try tp reach her again before he left for the store, he decided. It was eight-thirty now; he'd just got in from the Bay. The chances were somebody's de luxe fifty-gallon tropical fish tank had started to leak on the living room carpet, and it hadn't occurred to them immediately that this was what pails and pots were for. He sat down to write a few notes on last night's experiment. Nothing very striking had happened; he suspected he'd simply fallen asleep after the first forty minutes or so. But if he kept notes, something like a recognizable pattern might develop. Item : The "Lona complex" hadn't bothered him much. It was beginning to feel like something that had happened to somebody else a long time ago. So perhaps the emotions connected with it hadn't been triggered by Paylar's exercises, as Julius seemed to assume. Or else, since he no longer believed in it, it was on its way out as a complex -- he hoped. Item : With his eyes closed, he could imagine very easily that he was looking through the wall of the room into another section of the cabin; also that he had moved there in person, as a form of awareness. In fact, he had roamed happily all around the Bay area for about ten minutes. For the present, that proved only that he had a much more vivid imagination than he'd thought -- though whoever created Lona could be assumed to have considerable hidden talent along that line! Item: When he'd tried to "read" specific pages of a closed book lying on a table near him, he had failed completely. Item: He had run suddenly -- he might have been asleep by then -- into successive waves of unexplained panic, which brought him upright in his chair with his pulses hammering wildly. Item-. The panic had faded out of reach the instant he began to investigate it and he hadn't been able to recall it. Item-. Either shortly before or after that event, he'd had for a while the sensation of being the target of stealthy and malevolent observation. He had made an attempt to "locate" the observer and gained the impression that the other one unhurriedly withdrew. Item-. Briefly, he'd had a feeling of floating up near the cfeiling of the room, watching his own body sitting in the armchair with its eyes closed. This had rocked him hard enough to awaken him again and he had concluded the experiments. Item : After waking up, he hadn't found or imagined he'd found Ruth MacDonald or anybody else lying around the cabin, murdered or otherwise. He'd checked. And that about summed it up, Commager decided.Not very positive results, but he was determined to continue the experiments. He suspected Julius would feel very dubious about all this; but Julius wasn't going to be informed. He himself was in a remarkably cheerful mood this morning. nificent, musical voice, rather deep for a woman. "I'm so glad you called again, Mr. Commager," she said. "I was away on n unavoidable errand. Dr. Knox needs to see you immediately! How soon can you be here?" "Dr. Knox?" Commager repeated. "Do you mean the Reverend Wilson Knox?" "That is correct. Do you have the address of our Temple?" Commager said he didn't. There was no immediate reason to add that he hadn't the slightest intention of going there, either. "What did he want to see me about?" Mrs. Lovelock hesitated. "I couldn't explain it satisfactorily by telephone, Mr. Commager." A trace of anxiety came into her voice. "But it's quite urgent!" Commager said he was sorry; he had a very full business day ahead of him -- which was true -- so, unless he could get some indication of what this was all about -- The melodious voice told him quaveringly, "Dr. Knox had a serious heart attack last night. He needs your help!" Commager scowled. She sounded as off-beat as the rest of them and he had an urgent impulse to hang up. He said instead, "I don't quite see how I could be of much help under those circumstances. I'm not a doctor, you know." "I do know that, Mr. Commager," Mrs. Lovelock replied. "I also know that you haven't been acquainted with Dr. Knox for more than a few days. But I assure you that you may be saving a human life by coming out here immediately! And that is all I can tell you now -- " She stopped short, sounding as if she were about to burst into tears. What she said didn't make sense. Also Commager hadn't liked the Reverend Knox, quite aside from the company he kept. But he could, he supposed resignedly, afford to waste a few more hours now. "What was that address?" he asked, trying not to sound too ungracious about it. time to wonder whether this mightn't be part of some new little game the Guides wanted to play with him. He was inclined to discount Paylar's threats -- psychologically, he suspected, they'd already tried everything they could do to him -- and they didn't look like people who would resort readily to physical violence, though Hawkes could be an exception there. When Commager came in sight of the Temple of Antique Christianity, physical violence suddenly looked a little more likely. He stopped a moment to consider the place. It was in a back canyon beyond Laurel; the last quartermile had been a private road. A tall iron gate blocked the road at this point, opening into a walled court with a small building to the right. A sign over a door in the building indicated that this was the office. Some distance back, looming over the walls of the court and a few intervening trees, was another structure, an old white building in the Spanish style, the size of a small hotel. It looked like the right kind of setting for the kind of screwball cult Henry Warbutt had described. Depending on who was around, it also looked like a rather good place for murder or mayhem. Should he just stroll in carelessly like a big, brave, athletic man? Or should he be a dirty coward and get his revolver out of the glove compartment? It was bound to make an unsightly bulge in any of his jacket pockets -- He decided to be a dirty coward. the lock clicked open a few seconds after Commager pushed a buzzer button beside it. The only visible way into the area was through the office door, so he went inside. A pallid young man and a dark, intense looking young woman sat at desks across the room from the door. The young man told Commager he was expected and went to a side door of the office with him, from where he pointed to an entrance into the big building, on the other end of what he called the grove. "Mrs. Lovelock is waiting for you there," he said and went back to his desk. The grove had the reflective and well-preserved air of a section of an exclusive cemetery, with just enough trees growing around to justify its name. There was a large, square lawn in the center, and a large, chaste bronze statue stood at each corner of the lawn, gazing upon it. Back among trees to the left was a flat, raised platform, apparently faced with gray and black marble, but otherwise featureless. Commager had just gone past this when he realized that somebody had been watching him from the top of the platform as he passed. That, at any rate, was the feeling he got. He hadn't actually seen anyone, and when he looked back, there was nobody there. But the feeling not only had been a definite and certain one -- it resumed the instant he started walking on again. This time, he didn't look back. Before he'd gone a dozen more steps, he knew, too, just when he'd experienced that exact sensation before. It was the previous night, while he was doing his parapsychological experiments at the Bay and had suddenly felt that he was under secret and unfriendly scrutiny. He laughed at himself, but the impression remained a remarkably vivid one. And before he reached the entrance to the main building which the young man in the office had indicated to him, he had time for the thought that playing with the imagination, as he was doing, might leave one eventually on very shaky ground. Then he was there, looking into a long hallway, and Mrs. Lovelock's fine, deep voice greeted him before he caught sight of her. "I'm so glad you could come, Mr. Commager!" she said. of a room that opened on the hall to the left, and Commager was a trifle startled by her appearance. He had expected a large handsome woman of about thirty, to match the voice. But Mrs. Lovelock was not only huge; she was shockingly ugly and probably almost twice the age he'd estimated. She wore a white uniform, so Commager asked whether she was Wilson Knox's nurse. "I've been a registered nurse for nearly forty years, Mr. Commager," the beautiful voice told him. "At present, I'm attending Dr. Knox. Would you come in here, please?" He followed her into the room and she closed the door behind them. Her big, gray face, Commager decided, looked both worried and very angry. "The reason I wasn't more open with you over the telephone," she told him, "was that I was certain you wouldn't have taken the trouble to drive out here if I had been. And I couldn't have blamed you! Won't you sit down, please?" Commager took a chair and said he was afraid he didn't understand. Mrs. Lovelock nodded. "I shall give you the facts. Dr. Knox had a very severe heart attack at around two o'clock this morning. I have been a member of his congregation for twenty-four years, and I arrived with a doctor shortly afterward. Dr. Knox is resting comfortably now, but he is very anxious to see you. I must let him tell you why, Mr. Commager. But I should like to prepare you for what you will hear -- " gloomily at the carpet for a moment and then her face twisted briefly into a grimace of pure rage. "Wilson -- Dr. Knox -- is a harmless old fool!" she told Commager savagely. "This Antique Christianity he worked out never hurt anybody. They prayed to Pan and they had their dances and chants. And there was the Oracle and he read out of the Book of Pan.  ." "I don't know anything about Dr. Knox's activities," Commager said, not too politely. She had thick, reddened, capable hands and they were locked together now on her lap, the fingers twisting slowly against one another, as if she were trying to break something between them. "I was the Oracle, you see," she explained. "I knew it was foolish, but I'd sit up there on the dais in the smoke, with a veil over my head, and I'd say whatever I happened to think of. But this year, Wilson brought in that Ruth MacDonald -- you know her, he said." "I've met the lady," Commager admitted. "I wouldn't say I know her." "She became the Oracle! And then she began to change everything! I told Wilson he was quite right to resist that. There are things, Mr. Commager, that a good Christian simply must not do!" Which, Commager felt, was a remarkable statement, under the circumstances. Mrs. Lovelock came ponderously to her feet. "Dr. Knox will tell you what remains to be told," she added rather primly. "And, of course, you cannot stay too long. Will you follow me now, please?" as if he were in too bad a condition, Commager thought when he saw him first. He was lying in a hospital bed which had been raised high enough to let him gaze down at the grove out of a window of his second-story room. After he'd talked a few moments, Commager felt the man was delirious and he thought briefly of calling back Mrs. Lovelock or the other nurse who had been with Wilson Knox when they came in. But those two undoubtedly had been able to judge for themselves whether they should remain with the Reverend or not. "Why should they want to kill you?" Commager asked. Knox had been speaking of the Guides and then had started to weep; now he blew his nose on a piece of tissue and made a groping motion for Commager's hand, which Commager withdrew in time. "It was merely a matter of business as far as I was concerned, Mr. Commager. I certainly had no intention of blocking any activities of the Guides. In fact, I should prefer not to know about them. But when Miss MacDonald, who was employed by the Temple, upset our members, I protested to her, sir! Isn't that understandable?" "Entirely," Commager agreed carefully. "What did Miss MacDonald do to upset them?" "She predicted two of the congregation would die before the end of the year," Wilson Knox said shakily. "It caused a great deal of alarm. Many of our wealthier clients withdrew from the Temple at once. It is a considerable financial loss!" The Reverend appeared rational enough on that point. Commager inquired, "Is Miss MacDonald one of the Guides, Dr. Knox?" "It's not for me to say." Knox gave him a suddenly wary look. "When she spoke to me by telephone last night, I asked whether I had offended anyone. I was, of course, greatly distressed!" His expression changed back to one of profound self-pity. "But she repeated only that it had become necessary for me to die this week and hung up." that for the Temple's new Oracle to have phrased her prediction, Commager thought. He regarded Dr. Knox without much sympathy. "So now you want me to simply tell her not to hurt you, eh?" "It would be better, Mr. Commager," Knox suggested, "if you addressed yourself directly to the young woman called Paylar!" He reached for his visitor's hand again. "I place myself under your protection, sir! I know you won't refuse it!" Which was almost precisely what he had said as soon as the nurses left the room, and the reason Commager had believed the patient was in a state of delirium. Now it seemed more probable that he was merely badly mistaken. Commager decided not to ask why it would be better to speak to Paylar. At any direct question concerning the Guides, the Reverend became evasive. He said instead, "What made you decide I could protect you, Dr. Knox?" Knox looked downright crafty. "I have made no inquiries about you, sir, and I do not intend to. I am a simple man whose life has been devoted to providing a measure of beauty and solace for his fellow human beings. In a modest way, of course. I have never pried into the Greater Mysteries!" He seemed to expect approval for that, so Commager nodded gravely. "I speak only of what I saw," Wilson Knox continued. "On Sunday night, I saw them attempt to bring you directly under their sway. Forgive me for saying, sir, that they do not do this with an ordinary person! I also saw them fail and I knew they were frightened. Nevertheless, you were not destroyed." He tapped Commager's hand significantly. "That, sir, was enough for me. I do not attempt to pry -- I have merely placed myself under your protection!" man who could tell the Guides to go jump in the Pacific, might take a passing interest in the gimmicks of an organization like the Temple of Antique Christianity. So on his way out through the grove, Commager had turned aside to get a closer look at the dais. He assumed, at least, that the gray and black marble platform was what Mrs. Lovelock had referred to as the seat of the Oracle, since nothing else around seemed suitable for the purpose. Standing before it, he pictured her sitting up there in the night, veiled, a vast, featureless bulk, announcing whatever came into her mind in that stunning voice, and he could see that Wilson Knox's congregation might well have listened in pop-eyed fascination. Ruth MacDonald couldn't have been nearly as impressive. Perhaps that was why she had started passing out death sentences. Down on Sunset, he parked his car at the curb and remained in it, watching the traffic, while he tried to digest the information he had received -- if you could call it information. Wilson Knox and Mrs. Lovelock appeared to be people who had fabricated so much fantastic garbage for the clients of the Temple that they had no judgment left to resist the fabrications of others. Commager's parting from Mrs. Lovelock had given him the impression that the huge woman also was sullenly afraid, though she hid it much better than the Reverend had. It could be simply that she felt her own position in the Temple would be lost if Knox died; but he thought that in her case, too, it was a more personal fear, of the Guides, or even of himself -- And he'd practically promised both of them to put in a word with Paylar to protect that revolting little man! heart attack, at least, probably had been a real enough thing. And if Ruth MacDonald actually had telephoned a prediction of death to him earlier in the night, there was some cause for intervention. The practice of frightening people into their graves was something that anyone could reasonably insist should be stopped! And that, of course, brought up the question of how he expected to stop it. And the question, once more, of just what that odd group of people -- who indicated they were the Guides or associated with them -- was after. Ruth MacDonald's activities concerning the Temple of Antique Christianity hardly seemed to lie on the lofty, idealistic level ascribe to them in theory, even if he disliked their methods. She was a brassy, modern young witch, Commager thought, using the old witchcraft tools of fear and suggestion out of equally old motives of material gain and prestige. But one couldn't account for Hawkes as simply as that, because Hawkes had had money and prestige. Commager knew least of all about Paylar, except for the young man called Lex Barthold, whose connection with the others wasn't clear. The impression of Paylar was still mainly that she had a physical personality that would be hard to match if you liked them slender, dark and mysterious, and with a self-assurance that wasn't aggressive like Ruth MacDonald's, but that might be a great more difficult to crack. Among the three he'd had to deal with, she seemed to be the leader, though that wasn't necessarily true. He found himself walking slowly down the street toward a phone booth. Let's make a game of it, he thought. Assume that what Paylar had said and what the Reverend had suspected was true -- at least in the Guides's own opinion -- that he had turned out to be exceptionally tough material for their psychological gimmicks. That he had, in fact, abilities he didn't yet know about himself, but which, even in a latent state, were sufficient to have got the Opposition all hot and worried! lieved that -- if they, like Knox and his mountainous registered nurse, had played around so long on the fringes of reality that they were as badly confused now as the people they'd been misleading -- his intervention should still be effective! Particularly if he informed Mrs. Lovelock, with the proper degree of impressiveness, that he'd passed on the word. A little play-acting didn't seem too much effort to put out to save a human life. Even a life like Wilson Knox's... This time, it was Paylar who answered the telephone. "You've disappointed me a little, Mr. Commager," she said. "When I first heard your voice, I was certain you were going to invite me out to dine and dance." Commager assured her that this had been his primary purpose -- and as soon as he'd said it, he began to wonder whether it wasn't true. But business came first, he added. "Well, as to the business," Paylar told him demurely, "I'm not necessarily in control of Ruth's activities, you know. I hadn't been informed that the Reverend Knox was ill." She paused a moment. "I'll tell Ruth she isn'i to frighten your friend again. Will that be satisfactory, Mr. Commager?" "Why, yes, it is," Commager said and found himself flushing. Somehow, in her easy acceptance of his intervention, she'd managed to make him feel like a child whose fanciful notions were being humored by an adult. He put the idea aside, to be investigated later. "Now about where to have dinner -- " Paylar said she'd prefer to let him surprise her. "But I have a condition," she added pleasantly. "There'll be no shop-talk tonight!" Putting him on the defensive again, Commager thought ruefully. He told her shop-talk had been far from his mind and would eight o'clock be about right? It would be about right, she agreed. And then, arriving at the store finally, some fifteen minutes later, he found Jean Bohart waiting in his office. "Hi, Alan," she greeted him gloomily. "You're taking me to lunch. Okay?" In one way and another, Commager felt, Tuesday simply didn't look like a good day for business. ??T'M IN A mood today," Jean announced. She picked without enthusiasm at a grapefruit and watercress salad. "But you're not talking to me, either!" "I was thinking," Commager said, "that I was glad you didn't look like a certain lady I met this morning. What's the mood about?" She hesitated. "I'm making my mind up about something. I'll tell you tomorrow. Who was the lady? Someone I know?" "I doubt it. A Mrs. Lovelock." "I don't know any Lovelocks. What's the matter with her looks?" "Fat," Commager explained. "Well," Jean said glumly, "I'm not that." She was, in fact, in spite of her downcast expression, a model of crisp attractiveness as usual. A white sharkskin suit, with a lavender veil gathered lightly at her throat, plus a trim white hat to one side of a blonde head -- neat, alert and healthy-looking as an airline hostess, Commager thought approvingly. Jean mightn't care for the comparison, though, so he didn't tell her. And he wasn't going to press her about the mood. At the rare moments that she became reserved, probing made her sullen. Probably something to do with Ira again. "I called off the Taylors for tomorrow," she told him suddenly, with some traces of embarrassment, "so we could talk. You don't mind, do you?" "Of course not," Commager said hesitantly. Then it struck him suddenly: they'd had a date for an all-day fishing party Wednesday, Jean and he and the Taylor couple. He'd forgotten completely! "That's all right then," Jean said, looking down at her plate. She still seemed curiously shy and Commager realized that this was no ordinary problem. "Will you sleep at your cabin tonight?" "Sure," he said, concerned -- he was very fond of Jean. His sleeping at the cabin was the usual arrangement on such occasions; he'd have everything ready there for the day before anyone else arrived and then they'd be off to an early start. "I'll be there tomorrow at eight," said Jean. She gave him a quick, unhappy smile. "I love you, Alan -- you never ask questions when you shouldn't!" now, twelve hours apart. If it hadn't been for the attendant problems, Commager decided, his social life might have looked exceptionally well-rounded at the moment to almost anybody! But he didn't seem to be doing a very good job qf keeping clear of attendant problems. It had struck him for the first time, while they were lunching, that Jean Bohart might easily have been the prototype of the figment of Lona. There were obvious general similarities, and the dissimilarities might have been his own expression of the real-life fact that Jean was Ira's wife. But he felt himself moving into a mentally foggy area at that point. There had been occasional light love-making between them, too light to really count; but Jean certainly had remained emotionally absorbed with Ira, though she tended to regard him superficially with a kind of fond exasperation. Commager didn't really know how he felt about Jean, except that he liked her more than anyone else he could think of. There was a warning awareness that if he tried to push any deeper into that particular fog right now, he might get himself emotionally snagged again. It didn't seem advisable to become emotionally snagged. There were still too many other doubtful issues floating around. One of the other issues resolved itself -- in a way -- very shortly, with the ringing of the office telephone. It was Elaine Lovelock once more. "Mr. Commager," she said, "about the matter we were discussing -- " He began to tell her he had spoken to Paylar, but she interrupted him: "Dr. Knox died an hour ago!" You've wished Galaxy would come out earlier? Well it's going to! Your next issue of Galaxy will go on sale at your newsstand November #nd, and be mailed to subscribers November #th. It will be cover dated January but will be your Christmas issue -- with another heartenSanta Claus, of course). In order to do this, there will be no issue dated December, but no issue will be skipped. If you are a subscriber you will still get your same number of issues. We feel certain you'll like this earlier on sale date. Perhaps there have been causes for slaughter just as silly as this was -- but try to find one! chill out of a sullen sky. My pace quickens as I try to regain the relative warmth and shelter of the cavern before I become thoroughly drenched. I cannot afford to catch a cold. All alone as I am and with no medicine, I would stand too great a chance of a quick death. These lowering Oregon skies still hold traces of nameless disease in their writhing cloud tendrils. I am not just afraid of a cold. That would only be the key for some other malady to use and strike me down forever. I see the cave up ahead and feel a sense of contentment as I draw near and then duck inside its stony mouth. The rain hisses without, but inside it is dry. There is a heavy cow-hide hanging on a peg in the wall and I take it down and wrap it around me. Soon I will be warm. Once more I may stave off my ultimate end. Sometimes I wonder why I wish to put it off. Certainly, according to my old standards, there is no point in living. But somehow I feel that the mere fact of living is justification in itself. Even for such a life as mine. I didn't always feel this way. But then circumstances change and people change with them. I changed my circumstances more than myself, but I had no alternative. So now I exist. I suppose I should be content. After all, I am alive and, in my own simple way, I enjoy life. I can remember people who asked nothing more than to be allowed to live -- to exist. Ironically enough, I always considered them sub-normal. I felt that a man should strive to do something that would not only perpetuate the happiness of his own life but that of his fellow-men. Something that would make life more beautiful, and easier, and more kind. I applied myself as a student of philosophy at Stanford University. And the strengthening of this same belief led me to take up teaching and embrace it as the only way of obtaining genuine happiness. My personal philosophy was simple. I would learn about life in all its real and symbolic meanings and then teach it to my pupils, each of whom, I felt sure, were thirsting for the knowledge that I was extracting from my cultural environment. I would show them the meaning behind things. That, I felt, was the key to successful living. Now it seems strangely pathetic that I should have essayed such an impossible task. But even a professor of philosophy can be mistaken and become confused. I remember when I first became aware of the movement. certain precepts into the soft, impressionable heads of those students who came under our influence. Liberalism, some called it, the right to take the values accumulated by society over a period of hundreds of years and bend them to fit whatever idea or act was contemplated. By such methods, it was possible to fit the mores to the deed, not the deed to the mores. Oh, it was a wonderful theory, one that promised to project all human activities entirely beyond good and evil. However, I digress. It was a spring morning at Berkeley, California, when I had my first inkling of the movement. I was sitting in my office gazing out the window and considering life in my usual contemplative fashion. I might say I was being rather smug. I was thinking how fortunate I was to have been graduated from Stanford with such high honors, and how my good luck had stayed with me until I received my doctor's degree in a famous Eastern university and came out to take an associate professorship at the Berkeley campus. I was watching the hurrying figures below on the crosswalks of the shrubbery and the trees and the lawn. I was mixing up Keats with a bit of philosophy and thoroughly enjoying myself. Knowledge is truth, truth beauty, I mused, that is all we know on Earth, and all we need to know. There was a knock on my door and I said come in, reluctantly abandoning my train of thought which had just picked up Shakespeare, whom I was going to consider as two-thirds philosopher and one-third poet. I have never felt that the field of literature had the sole claim to Shakespeare's greatness. a somewhat erratic individual (for a professor, at least) and he was often perturbed. Once he became excited about the possibilities of the campus shrubbery being stunted and discolored by the actions of certain dogs living on campus. He was not a philosophy professor, of course, but a member of the political science group. "Carlson," he asked nervously, "have you heard about it yet?" "I have no idea," I returned good-naturedly. "Heard about what?" He looked behind him as if he thought he might be followed. Then he whirled around, his sharp-featured face alight with feeling. "Carlson -- the Wistick dufels the Moraddy!" And he stared at me intently, his gimlet eyes almost blazing. I stared back at him blankly. "You haven't heard!" he exclaimed. "I thought surely you would know about it. You're always talking about freedom to apply thought for the good of humanity. Well, we're finally going to do something about it. You'll see. Keep your ears open, Carlson." Then he turned and started out of the room. He paused at the threshold and fixed me again with his ferretlike eyes. "The Wistick dufels the Moraddy!" he said, and vanished through the door. And that was my first unheeded omen of what was to come. I wasn't the sort of man who inspired attention. As a matter of fact, I considered reporting him to the head of his department as being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But I didn't. In those days, nervous breakdowns were a common occurrence around college campuses. The educational profession was a very hazardous occupation. One Southern university, for example, reported five faculty suicides during spring quarter. however, I began to realize that there was some sort of movement being fostered by the student body. It couldn't be defined, but it could be felt and seen. The students began to form groups and hold meetings -- often without official sanction. What they were about could not be discovered, but some of the results soon became evident. For one thing, certain students began to walk on one side of the street and the other students walked on the other side. The ones who used the north side of the street wore green sweaters with white trousers or skirts, and the south-side students wore white sweaters with green trousers or skirts. It even got to the point where those in green sweaters went only to classes in the morning and those in white attended the afternoon sessions. Then the little white cards began to appear. They were sent through the mail. They were slipped under doorways and in desk drawers. They turned up beside your plate at dinner and under your pillow at night. They were pasted on your front door in the morning and they appeared in the fly-leaves of your books. They were even hung on trees like fruit, and surely no fruit ever spored so queer a seedling. They said either one thing or longed to what group was not immediately clear. It was not until the riots broke out that the thing began to be seen in its proper perspective. And then it was too late. When the first riot started, it was assumed that the university officials and the police could quell it in a very short time. But strangely enough, as additional police were called in, the battle raged even more fiercely. I could see part of the affair from my window and therefore was able to understand why the increasing police force only added to the turmoil. They were fighting one another! And through the din could be heard the wild shouts of "The Wistick dufels the Moraddy!" or "The Moraddy dufels the Wistick!" The final blow came when I saw the Registrar and the Dean of Men struggling fiercely in one of the hedge-rows, and heard the Dean of Men yell in wild exultation as he brought a briefcase down on the Registrar's head, "The Wistick dufels the Moraddy!" Then someone broke in through the door of my office. I turned in alarm and saw a huge three-letter man standing only a few feet from me. He had been in one of my classes. I remembered something about his being the hardest driving fullback on the Pacific coast. He was certainly the dumbest philosophy student I ever flunked. His hair was mussed and he was wildeyed. He had blood on his face and chest, and his clothes were torn and grass-stained. "The Wistick dufels the Moraddy," he said. "Get out of my office," I told him coldly, "and stay out." "So you're on the other side," he snarled. "I hoped you would be." He started toward me and I seized a bookend on my desk and tried to strike him with it. But he brushed it aside and came on in. His first blow nearly broke my arm and as I dropped my guard due to the numbing pain, he struck me solidly on the side of the jaw. When I recovered consciousness, I was lying by the side of my desk where I had fallen. My head ached and my neck was stiff. I got painfully to my feet and then noticed the big square of cardboard pinned to the door of my office. It was lettered in red pencil and in past tense said, "The Wistick dufelled the Moraddy." taneously in all parts of the country. They were not confined to colleges. They were not confined to any particular group. They encompassed nearly the entire population and the fervor aroused by their battle-cry, whichever one it might be, was beyond all comprehension. I could not understand either slogan's meaning -- and there were others like myself. On several occasions, I attempted to find out, but I was beaten twice and threatened with a pistol the third time, so I gave up all such efforts. I was never much given to any sort of physical violence. One night, I went home thoroughly disheartened by the state of affairs. The university was hardly functioning. Nearly the entire faculty, including the college president, had been drawn into one camp or the other. Their actions were utterly abhorrent to me. If the professor was a greentop, or Wistickian, he lectured only to green-tops. If he belonged to the Moraddians, or white-top faction, they were the only ones who could enter his classroom. The two groups were so evenly divided that open violence was frowned upon as a means of attaining whatever end they had in view. They were biding their time and gathering strength for fresh onslaughts on each other. As I say, I went home feeling very discouraged. My wife was in the kitchen preparing dinner, and I went in and sat down at the table while she worked. The daily paper was lying on the table, its headlines loaded with stories of bloodshed and strife throughout the nation. I glanced through them. Lately, there seemed to be a sort of pattern forming. East of the Mississippi, the general slogan was emerging as the Moraddy dufelling the Wistick. West of the Mississippi, the Wistick was receiving the greater support. And it seemed that the younger people and the women preferred the Moraddy, while elderly people and most men were on the side of the Wistick. I commented on this. My wife answered briefly, "Of course. Anyone should know that the Moraddy will win out." She went on with the preparations for dinner, not looking at me. I sat stunned for a moment. Great God in Heaven, not my wife! "Am I to understand that you are taking any part of this seriously?" I asked with some heat. "The whole thing is a horrible, pointless prank!" She turned and faced me squarely. "Not to me. I say the Moraddy will win out. I want it to -- and I think you'd be wise to get on the bandwagon while there's still time." I realized she was serious. Dead serious. I tried a cautious query: "Just what does the dufellation of the Wistick by the Moraddy mean?" A ND IT made her angry. It actually made her angry! She switched off the front burner and walked past me into the living room. I didn't think she was going to answer, but she did -- sort of. "There is no excuse for an egghead in your position not knowing what it means." Her voice was strained and tense. "If you had any perception whatever, you would understand what the Moraddy has to give the American people. It's our only hope. And you've got to take sides. You're either for the Moraddy or the Wistick -- you can't take the middle way." I felt completely isolated. "Wait! I don't know what it means -- " "Forget it," she broke in. "I should have known. You were born, you have lived, and you will die an egghead in an ivory tower. Just remember -- the Moraddy dufels the Wistick!" And she swept on upstairs to pack. And out of my life. And that's the way it was. Whatever malignant poison had seeped into the collective brain of the nation, it was certainly a devastating leveler of all sorts of institutions and values. Wives left husbands and husbands left wives. Joint bank accounts vanished. Families disintegrated. Wall street crumpled. Developments were swift and ominous. The Army split up into various groups. Most of the enlisted men favored the Moraddy, but the officers and older noncoms pledged the Wistickian faith. Their power was sufficient to hold many in line, but a considerable number in the lower ranks deserted and joined forces with the Moraddians, who held the eastern half of the country. The Wisticks ruled the western half with an iron hand, and all signs pointed toward civil war. Labor and military authorities conscripted the entire population regardless of age, sex or religious convictions. For my own part, I slipped away from the campus and fled north into the Oregon mountains. It was not that I was afraid to fight, but I rebelled at the absolute stupidity of the whole thing. The idea -- fighting because of a few words! But they did. The destruction was frightful. However, it was not as bad as many had thought it would be. The forces of the Wistick leveled the city of New York, true, but it took three H-bombs to do the job, instead of one, as the Air Force had claimed. In retaliation, San Francisco and Los Angeles were destroyed in a single night by cleverly placed atom bombs smuggled in by a number of fifthcolumnist wives who gained access to the cities under the pretext of returning to their husbands. This was a great victory for the Moraddians, even though the women had to blow themselves up to accomplish their mission. The Moraddian forces were slowly beaten back toward the Atlantic shores. They were very cunning fighters and they had youthful courage to implement that cunning. But their overall policy lacked the stability and long-range thinking necessary to the prosecution of total war. One day they might overrun many populous areas and the next day, due to the constant bickering and tion readers! Use your sophisticated understanding of Science Fiction to breach the Iron Curtain. This is a must for every student of Science Fiction as well as an amazing new experience for the general reader. Hard cover, nine complete stories, eight full color plates. Send only # cash, check or money order to: P. Tailer, # East I #th Street, New York City #, New York. quarreling among their own armies, they would lose all they had won, and more, too. Finally, in desperation, they loosed their most horrible weapon, germ warfare. But they forgot to protect themselves against their own malignity. The Semantic War ground to a shuddering halt. The carrion smell of death lay round the world. The dufellation of the Wistick and the Moraddy. around in the forests like a lonely pack-rat. It is not the sort of life I would choose if there were any other choice. Yet life has become very simple. I enjoy the simple things and I enjoy them with gusto. When I find food that suits my stomach, I am happy. When I quench my thirst, I am happy. When I see a beautiful sunset from one of my mountain crags, I am happy. It takes little when you have little, and there have been few men who have had less. Only one thing troubles me. I suppose it doesn't matter, but I go on wondering. , I wonder which side was right. I mean really right. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. for your information # that Galileo Galilei of Pisa, then Professor of Mathematics at Padua, learned about the invention of a Dutchman involving optical lenses, which enabled its user to see distant things as if they were nearby. A small amount of experimentation sufficed to reproduce the instrument which had not yet been named "telescope" -- Galilei himself referred to it as the occhiale when writing Italian and the perspicillum when writing Latin. Within a few months, he had made quite a number of revolutionary astronomical discoveries. He saw mountains on the Moon. He observed that Venus shows phases, just as the Moon does. He "resolved" the Milky Way into countless stars. He saw dark spots on the Sun. He discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter. He noticed that there was something strange about the shape of Saturn. And he wrote it all down in his Sidereal Messenger, which appeared in #. Everything Galilei saw with his new instrument can be seen with a reasonably good pair of binoculars or with a pocket telescope. In fact, my own #-power pocket telescope -- actually a target 'scope from a tank gun -- is superior in many respects to Galilei's occhiale, even discounting its much smaller size. The interesting point is that so many of the astronomical facts discovered by Galilei are almost, but only almost, visible with the naked eye. I don't know whether it is true that a very few people are able to see the four large satellites of Jupiter without any optical aid, as Jules Verne stated in one of his stories. But it is true that some of the major lunar features can be recognized after you have studied a good large photograph of the Moon. You could never draw them from naked eye observation, but once you have "learned" them, you can look for them with some success. Likewise the phases of Venus are very close to naked-eye visibility, but only close. To really see them needs a few magnifications. Lunar map by J. Keill, first published in #. The first drawings of Mars by Fontana. a telescope, however primitive it may appear in retrospect, it was possible to see and to draw those things, and the planets sat for their first portraits, beginning with the Moon. Figure I shows a drawing of the Moon by Galilei himself. It may not be the very first telescopic drawing of the Moon made -- Galilei probably made several and published only the best -- but it certainly is one of the earliest. The round object visible directly on the terminator is indubitably the Mare serenitatis, while the white spot with the two white lines going to (or from) it is certainly the crater we now call Tycho. The roughly triangular shadow on the bright half near Tycho is probably meant to be the Mare humorum and the irregularities below the Mare serenitatis may be the Mare frigoris, dimly seen. Compared to Galilei's sketch, the lunar map drawn by the Scotsman John Keill just a century later looks virtually modern (Fig. #). It was printed in Oxford in # in a book entitled Introductio ad veram Astronomiam; all the Mare plains are recognizably drawn and many of the more conspicuous craters are entered, even with indications of their systems of "rays." Moving on to the planets, Fig. # shows the first drawings of Mars made by Francesco Fontana in # and #. Since Mars moves around the Sun outTwo drawings of Mars side the orbit of Earth, it can never show phases like Venus. Only a small portion of the night side of Mars could be seen from Earth when the relative positions are favorable. Since there is nothing luminous on the portion of the Martian globe that happens to have night, it simply disappears from view. Fontana, in one of his drawings, caught this maximum phase that Mars can show. But the dark portion in the center and the dark rim near the edge of the disk does not correspond to anything known, indicating that Fontana's telescope must have been rather imperfect. The two drawings of Mars made by Christian Huyghens only a few decades later are much betby Christian Huyghens. ter. The darkish triangular area is probably meant to be the one now called Syrtis major and one of the two drawings shows a rather clear indication of the south polar cap of Mars (Fig. #). But Mars is a difficult object even now, just because most of its markings are so faint. Moreover, Mars can be seen well only when it comes close to Earth, roughly every two years and two months. Giant Jupiter is a far better object. It is bigger, to begin with, and it is so far distant from the Earth at any time that it does not make too much difference whether both planets are in neighboring sectors of their orbits as seen from the Sun. Even the earliest drawings Septrrrtrio Three typical drawings of Jupiter made by various observers of the #th century. of Jupiter by Bartoli, Grimaldi, Cassini and Hooke (Fig. # and #) can be recognized at a glance for what they are supposed to be. drawing is not only one of the early drawings of Jupiter; it is also the first to show the feature which later became famous as the Red Spot. That Red Spot -- it isn't always red incidently; it has been seen as orange, yellow, lavender and plain gray -- was greeted as a great novelty when it became faintly visible in #. Eight years later, in #, it was most pronounced and of a particularly vivid color. Speculation ran high then. Some astronomers thought they were lucky enough to actually observe the birth of still another moon of Jupiter. Remember that in # it was still generally believed that the satellites of the planets had been produced by their primaries by flinging portions of their own masses into space. Maybe here was a lucky chance to observe this very process. Jupiter as drawn by Hook on June #, #. Other astronomers believed, however, that they were seeing just the opposite -- not the birth of a new moon, but the funeral of an old moon or at least a potential moon. They thought that one of the asteroids, pulled out of its belt by Jupiter's gravitational might, had crashed and that the Red Spot was the reflection of enormous lava flows caused by the impact. In the middle of the spirited debate, somebody discovered an older drawing of Jupiter which showed the Spot, although it was very faint and not labeled "red." And then, knowing what to look for, it was traced farther back, the trail ending with Cassini's picture. In short, the Spot has been there for centuries, being sometimes well defined and sometimes not -- and we still don't know what it is. A strange case, to my mind, is presented by Fig. #. The drawing was made by Johannes Hevelius (real name : Hewelcke) of Danzig who built himself an observatory in #I and who is usually mentioned with much praise for his observations of the Moon and his improved star catalogue. The lunar maps of Hevelius constituted progress, but his drawing of Jupiter is practically meaningless. If it did not have the name of the planet engraved on it, one might think it an early attempt at drawing the faint markings of the daylight side of Mercury or perhaps the disk of Venus. By the time Hevelius built his observatory, it was known to ,   # #     #   Galileo Galilei's observations of Jupiter in January #, proving the existence of the four large moons. Five drawings of Saturn from #-#. everybody interested in astronomy that Jupiter had four large moons. They are so easily visible with any telescope of any kind that Galilei must have seen them the very first time he pointed his occhiale at Jupiter. But at first he may have thought that he just saw a few stars which happened to lie in the direction of Jupiter. To be sure they were satellites, one had to establish that they move around the planet and in January, #, Galilei watched for this particular phenomenon. The drawings reproduced as Fig. # were the result. Of course Galilei just marked their positions, but even so, they are the first drawing of satellites of another planet.  something new entered the picture. Every schoolboy -- and quite a number of the fathers of schoolboys -- knows nowadays that Saturn has rings. And knowing that Saturn has rings and having seen drawings of the rings of Saturn, everybody can "see" them at once when given access to a telescope. But the early telescopes were small and weak. In addition, nobody had ever even guessed that a planet may have rings. There was nothing else in nature which compared with what Saturn at drawn by Huyghens and Castini, the latter being the first to show Cassini's Division." the telescope showed, wavering because of the constant movement of the atmosphere and with beautiful-looking but annoying rainbow fringes. To add to these difficulties, the planet itself appeared much smaller than Jupiter. We now know that it actually is somewhat smaller than Jupiter, but the main reason for the apparent smallness was simply its greater distance, for the orbit of yond Jupiter's. Galilei's impression of this difficult planet was that it might be a triple planet (see Fig. #, top drawing) while, to Christopher Scheiner, it looked as if the two smaller spheres were attached to the main body. To Pierre Gassendi, it appeared rather as having the general shape of a football with two large dark holes in it. Johannes Hevelius saw and drew the appearance fairly correctly, but was at a loss to explain what he saw. The drawing made by Giovanni Battista Riccioli (Fig. #, bottom drawing) also looks quite correct to us, though it seems that Riccioli believed that the two "handles" were somehow attached to the planet's body. It is somewhat strange that none of these early astronomers who strained their eyes to understand the mysterious shape of Saturn noticed Saturn's satellite, Titan. Though pretty far away, it is, after all, not only Saturn's largest satellite, but by far the largest one in the whole Solar System, surpassing Mercury, the smallest of the planets, by more than # miles in diameter. Mercury's diameter is almost exactly # miles, while that of Titan is around # miles. The man who finally did discover Titan also solved the problem of the "appendages" of Saturn. He was the Dutchman Christian Huyghens, who lived at The Hague and who built himself a telescope which could magnify up to # times. It was not a large telescope, for it had an aperture of only #-## inches, with a focal length of # feet. in # and, during the following year, he realized that the appendages were actually a flat ring around the planet, not touching it at any point (Fig. #, top). Knowing that it was a flat and unattached ring did not reveal anything about its nature, of course, but just then the time approached that was favorable for discovering a little more detail. The ring always maintains the Cassini's drawing marking the discovery of Saturn's moon Rhea on December #rd #. same "attitude" in space, and as Saturn and Earth are moving around the Sun, we see the ring more or less "open" depending on the mutual positions. It can and does happen that we see the ring edge on. Since it is quite thin, it simply disappears from view in that position, except for observers with very powerful telescopes. The other possible extreme is that we can see even the farther rim of the ring raised a bit above the rim of the sphere of the planet itself -- Riccioli caught this position in his drawing. When Huyghens made his discovery, the ring presented itself in an intermediate aspect, but in the following years it "opened up" some more. The first observers to notice a detail on the ring were the brothers Ball in Minehead, England, who reported that they had seen, in the late evening of October #, #, that the ring showed a black line. But apparently no conclusions were drawn and the statement itself was more or less forgotten. In #, Jean Dominique Cassini, following an invitation by his professorship at Bologna and moved to Paris. And just ten years after the announcement of the black line by the brothers Ball, Cassini saw it very clearly himself and continued to watch for it to see whether it was a permanent marking. In #, he made a drawing which he published (Fig. #, bottom) and the main gap has been referred to as "Cassini's Division" ever since, and the "ring" became "rings." Because Cassini watched Saturn so carefully for the sake of the black line on or in the ring, it was very nearly inevitable that he should also discover some of the other moons of Saturn. Both Japetus and Rhea are large, with a diameter of around # miles each, and Cassini discovered both of them: Japetus in #I and Rhea in # (Fig. #). In #, he found two more: Tethys and Dione. We've come a long way since those first portraits of major discoveries in the Solar System -- but we couldn't have done it without them and similar patient observations. Unlike old family pictures, they aren't a bit laughable. The real miracle is that so much was learned with so little in the way of equipment. Would you please tell me what the Doppler effect is? Mike Davenport # Broadleat Avenue Van Nuys, Calif. The Doppler effect is named after Christian Johann Doppler, an Austrian physicist who died in #. He did not "discover" it in the customary sense of the word; he reasoned that it had to exist. Experimental proof was later established by others. To understand the principle, imagine that you have a gadget which sends out # separate impulses per second, such as # very short bursts of radio waves. If you move rapidly away from this gadget, you will receive less than # impulses per second. If you approach it rapidly, you'll receive more than # impulses per second. A sound is actually a succession of such impulses, the sound waves. If you approach the source of the sound rapidly, you'll "receive" more of them per second, which sounds like a higher note. Moving away from the sound source produces a lower note. Experimentally, this can be shown quite easily by driving past an electric hell. At the instant you pass it, it 'seems to acquire a lower pitch. The whistle of a train passing the observer seems to undergo the same change. Doppler predicted this effect in # and it was proved experimentally for sound waves for the first time by Buys-Ballot 'V:  ;; in #. Proof that light waves produce the Doppler effect was first given by Fizeau in #. The Doppler effect is very useful for establishing the velocities of bodies receding from or approaching the observer along the line of sight. Recently I was told by a friend that there may be some giant sloths still living. What is the case for this? Frank E. Goodwyn # Lorain Avenue Silver Springs, Md. The somewhat paradoxical answer is that there is no case for living giant sloths right now, hut that some zoologists once thought they had one. It was during the early decades of the #th century that the giant sloth became known -- as a fossil, naturally. The great problem then was just when it had lived and, more specifically, whether primitive Man in America and the giant sloth had ever met. When evidence for contemporary existence of giant sloth and Man in South America was found, another discovery came to light. Almost at the southern end of the South American continent, there is an inlet which was named Ultima Esperanza, and a retired German sea captain by the name of Eberliard built himself a ranch there. Somewhere on that ranch was the skin of a large animal and when a piece of the skin came into the hands of a professional zoologist, it turned out to be the skin of a giant sloth. It was then that Professor Florentino Ameghino of Argentina announced that the giant sloth probably was not extinct, but had merely grown very rare. He quoted the experience of one Ramon Lista who told of having been startled by a large unknown animal one night while camping in the interior. Since the genus of giant sloth Ameghino expected to be surviving was Mylodon, he coined the name of Neomylodon listai for the living species. A search of early descriptions of South American animals also yielded several suspicious passages. Ameghino said that the native languages contained a name for an animal which could only be Neomylodon. The result of all this was that a British newspaper organized an expedition. The expedition return emptyhanded and some later newspaper accounts may not be entirely truthful. With modern methods like radio-carbon dating, it would be possible to establish the true age of that skin, but I don't believe that this has been done. However, various remains of giant sloth from Texas have been so dated; the figures ran to ages of from # to # years. This confirms the other evidence that early American Man and giant sloth met. That the interior of South America may still harbor survivors cannot be categorically denied. But there is no proof, either. I've Got Them All!! Every One!! Weird and Supernatural Books in Print in America or England! Send #c for giant printed checklist of over # available titles including over # paperbound books at #c each up; also details of ray proposed Mail Science Fiction Library. I also have many thousands of used Science Fidtion Books and back issue Magazines. Send me your want lists without obligation and I will quote prices. All Science Fiction, Weird or Fantasy Books and Magazines. Tell me what you have to sell or swap. Each copy has six to eight stories by such top authors as Ray Bradbury, Sam Merwin, Jr., Evelyn E. Smith, Frederik Pohl, Charles Satterfield, Philip K. Dick, Ted Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Wyman Guin, Damon Knight, L. Sprague de Camp, and many others. All ten for # only Any five I .# Any three I .# or #c each postpaid. Circle numbers wanted Total enclosed  # # Name Address City State Naturally, Man should want to stand on his M own two feet... but how can he when his own  machines cut the ground out from under him? three waiting men. They smoked, paced back and forth, kicked aimlessly at weeds growing by the side of the road. A hot noonday sun glared down on brown fields, rows of neat plastic houses, the distant line of mountains to the west. "Almost time," Earl Perine said, knotting his skinny hands together. "It varies according to the load, a half-second for every additional pound." Bitterly, Morrison answered. "You've got it plotted? You're as bad as it is. Let's pretend it just happens to be late." The third man said nothing. O'Neill was visiting from another settlement; he didn't know Perine and Morrison well enough to argue with them. Instead, he crouched down and arranged the papers clipped to his aluminum check-board. In the blazing sun, O'Neill's arms were tanned, furry, glistening with sweat. Wiry, with tangled gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, he was older than the other two. He wore slacks, a sports shirt and crepe-soled shoes. Between his fingers, his fountain pen glittered, metallic and efficient. Perine grumbled. "I'm laying out the procedure we're going to employ," O'Neill said mildly. "Better to systemize it now, instead of trying at random. We want to know what we tried and what didn't work. Otherwise we'll go around in a circle. The problem we have here is one of communication; that's how I see it." "Communication," Morrison agreed in his deep, chesty voice. "Yes, we can't get in touch with the damn thing. It comes, leaves off its load and goes on -- there's no contact between us and it." "It's a machine," Perine said excitedly. "It's dead -- blind and deaf." "But it's in contact with the outside world," O'Neill pointed out. "There has to be some way to get to it. Specific semantic signals are meaningful to it; all we have to do is find those signals. Rediscover, actually. Maybe half lities." A low rumble interrupted the three men. They glanced up, wary and alert. The time had come. "Here it is," Perine said. "Okay, wise guy, let's see you make one single change in its routine." The truck was massive, rumbling under its tightly packed load. In many ways, it resembled conventional human-operated transportation vehicles, but with one exception -- there was no driver's cabin. The horizontal surface was a loading stage, and the part that would normally be the headlights and radiator grill was a fibrous spongelike mass of receptors, the limited sensory apparatus of this mobile utility extension. Aware of the three men, the truck slowed to a halt, shifted gears and pulled on its emergency brake. A moment passed as relays moved into action; then aportion of the loading surface tilted and a cascade of heavy cartons spilled down onto the brown dust of the roadway. With the objects fluttered a detailed inventory sheet. "You know what to do," O'Neill said rapidly. "Hurry up, before it gets out of here." Expertly, grimly, the three men grabbed up the deposited cartons and ripped the protective wrappers from them. Objects gleamed: a binocular microscope, a portable radio, heaps of plastic dishes, medical supplies, razor blades, clothing, food. Most of the shipment, as usual, was food. The three men systematically began smashing the objects. In a few minutes, there was nothing but a chaos of debris littered around them. "That's that," O'Neill panted, stepping back. He fumbled for his check-sheet. "Now let's see what it does." away; abruptly it stopped and backed toward them. Its receptors had taken in the fact that the three men had demolished the dropped-off portion of the load. It spun in a grinding half-circle and came around to face its receptor bank in their direction. Up went its antenna; it had begun communicating with the factory. Instructions were on the way. A second, identical load was tilted and shoved off the truck. "We failed," Perine groaned as a duplicate inventory sheet fluttered after the new load. "We destroyed all that stuff for nothing." "What now?" Morrison asked O'Neill. "What's the next strategem on your board?" "Give me a hand." O'Neill grabbed up a carton and lugged it back to the truck. Sliding the carton onto the platform, he turned for another. The other two men followed clumsily after him. They put the load back onto the truck. As the truck started forward, the last square box was again in place. The truck hesitated. Its receptors registered the return of its load. From within its works came a low sustained buzzing. "This may drive it crazy," O'Neill commented, sweating. "It went through its operation and accomplished nothing." The truck made a short, abortive move toward going on. Then it swung purposefully around and, in a blur of speed, again dumped the load onto the road. "Get them!" O'Neill yelled. The three men grabbed up the cartons and feverishly reloaded them. But as fast as the cartons were shoved back on the horizontal stage, the truck's grapples tilted them down its far-side ramps and onto the road. "No use," Morrison said, breathing hard. "Water through a sieve." "We're licked," Perine gasped in wretched agreement, "like always. We humans lose every time." The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planetwide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict. "There it goes," Morrison observed dismally. The truck's antenna had come down; it shifted into low gear and released its parking brake. "One last try," O'Neill said. He swept up one of the cartons and ripped it open. From it he dragged a ten-gallon milk tank and unscrewed the lid. "Silly as it seems." "This is absurd," Perine proA U TO F A C tested. Reluctantly, he found a cup among the littered debris and dipped it into the milk. "A kid's game!" The truck had paused to observe them. "Do it," O'Neill ordered sharply. "Exactly the way we practiced it." The three of them drank quickly from the milk tank, visibly allowing the milk to spill down their chins; there had to be no mistaking what they were doing. As planned, O'Neill was the first. His face twisting in revulsion, he hurled the cup away and violently spat milk into the road. "God's sake!" he choked. The other two did the same; stamping and loudly cursing, they kicked over the milk tank and glared accusingly at the truck. "It's no good !" Morrison roared. slowly back. Electronic synapses clicked and whirred, responding to the situation; its antenna shot up like a flagpole. "I think this is it," O'Neill said, trembling. As the truck watched, he dragged out a second milk tank, unscrewed its lid and tasted the contents. "The same!" he shouted at the truck. "It's just as bad!" From the truck popped a metal cylinder. The cylinder dropped at Morrison's feet; he quickly snatched it up and tore it open. The instruction sheets listed rows of possible defects, with neat boxes by each; a punch-stick was included to indicate the particular deficiency of the product. "What'll I check?" Morrison asked. "Contaminated? Bacterial? Sour? Rancid? Incorrectly labeled? Broken? Crushed ? Cracked? Bent? Soiled?" Thinking rapidly, O'Neill said, "Don't check any of them. The factory's undoubtedly ready to test and resample. It'll' make its own analysis and then ignore us." His face glowed as frantic inspiration came. "Write in that blank at the bottom. It's an open space for further data." "Write what?" O'Neill said, "Write: the product is thoroughly pizzled." "What's that?" Perine demanded, baffled. "Write it! . It's a semantic garble -- the factory won't be able to understand it. Maybe we can jam the works." With O'Neill's pen, Morrison carefully wrote that the milk was pizzled. Shaking his head, he resealed the cylinder and returned it to the truck. The truck swept up the milk tanks and slammed its railing tidily into place. With a shriek of tires, it hurtled off. From its slot, a final cylinder bounced; the truck hurriedly departed, leaving the cylinder lying in the dust. O'Neill got it open and held up the paper for the others to see. For a moment, the three men were silent. Then Perine began to giggle. "We did it. We contacted it. We got across." "We sure did," O'Neill agreed. "It never heard of a product being pizzled." Cut into the base of the mountains lay the vast metallic cube of the Kansas City factory. Its surface was corroded, pitted with radiation pox, cracked and scarred from the five years of war that had swept over it. Most of the factory was buried subsurface, only its entrance stages visible. The truck was a speck rumbling at high speed toward the expanse of black metal. Presently an opening formed in the uniform surface; the truck plunged into it and disappeared inside. The entrance snapped shut. "Now the big job remains," O'Neill said. "Now we have to persuade it to close down operations -- to shut itself off." black coffee to the people sitting around the living room. Her husband talked while the others listened. O'Neill was as close to being an authority on the autofac system as could still be found. In his own area, the Chicago region, he had shorted out the protective fence of the local factory long enough to get away with the data tapes stored in its posterior brain. The factory, of course, had immediately reconstructed a better type of fence. But he had shown that the factories were not infallible. "The Institute of Applied Cybernetics," O'Neill explained, "had complete control over the network. Blame the war. Blame the big noise along the lines of communication that wiped out the knowledge we need. In any case, the Institute failed to transmit its information to us, so we can't transmit our information to the factories -- the news that the war is over and we're ready to resume control of industrial operations." "And meanwhile," Morrison added sourly, "the damn network expands and consumes more of our natural resources all the time." "I get the feeling," Judith said, "that if I stamped hard enough, I'd fall right down into a factory tunnel. They must have mines everywhere by now." "Isn't there some limiting injunction?" Perine asked nervously. "Were they set up to expand indefinitely?" "Each factory is limited to its own operational area," O'Neill said, "but the network itself is unbounded. It can go on scooping up our resources forever. The Institute decided it gets top priority ; we mere people come second." "Will there be anything left for us?" Morrison wanted to know. "Not unless we can stop the network's operations. It's already used up half a dozen basic minerals. Its search teams are out all the time, from every factory, looking everywhere for some last scrap to drag home." "What would happen if tunnels from two factories crossed each other?" O'Neill shrugged. "Normally, that won't happen. Each factory has its own special section of our planet, its own private cut of the pie for its exclusive use." "But it could happen." "Well, they're raw-materialtropic ; as long as there's anything left, they'll hunt it down." O'Neill pondered the idea with growing interest. "It's something to consider. I suppose as things get scarcer -- " He stopped talking. A figure had come into the room; it stood silently by the door, surveying them all. TN the dull shadows, the figure looked almost human. For a brief moment, O'Neill thought it was a settlement latecomer. Then, as it moved forward, he realized that it was only quasihuman: a functional upright biped chassis, with data-receptors mounted at the top, effectors and proprioceptors mounted in a downward worm that ended in floor-grippers. Its resemblance to a human being was testimony to nature's efficiency; no sentimental imitation was intended. The factory representative had arrived. It began without preamble. "This is a data-collecting machine capable of communicating on an oral basis. It contains both broadcasting and receiving apparatus and can integrate facts relevant to its line of inquiry." The voice was pleasant, confident. Obviously it was a tape, recorded by some Institute technician before the war. Coming from the quasi-human shape, it sounded grotesque; O'Neill could vividly imagine the dead young man whose cheerful voice now issued from the mechanical mouth of this upright construction of steel and wiring. "One word of caution," the pleasant voice continued. "It is fruitless to consider this receptor human and to engage it in discussions for which it is not equipped. Although purposeful, it is not capable of conceptual thought; it can only reassemble material already available to it." The optimistic voice clicked out and a second voice came on. It resembled the first, but now there were no intonations or personal mannerisms. The machine was utilizing the dead man's phonetic speech-pattern for its own communication. "Analysis of the rejected product," it stated, "shows no foreign elements or noticeable deterioration. The product meets the continual testing-standards employed throughout the network. Rejection is therefore on a basis outside the test area; standards not available to the network are being employed." "That's right," O'Neill agreed. Weighing his words with care, he continued, "We found the milk substandard. We want nothing to do with it. We insist on more careful output." The machine responded presently. "The semantic content of the term pizzled is unfamiliar to the network. It does not exist in the taped vocabulary. Can you present a factual analysis of the milk in terms of specific elements present or absent?" "No," O'Neill said warily; the game he was playing was intricate and dangerous. "Pizzled is an over-all term. It can't be reduced to chemical constituents." "What does pizzled signify?" the machine asked. "Can you define it in terms of alternate semantic symbols?" sentative had to be steered from its special inquiry to more general regions, to the ultimate problem of closing down the network. If he could pry it open at any point, get the theoretical discussion started... "Pizzled," he stated, "means the condition of a product that is manufactured when no need exists. It indicates the rejection of objects on the grounds that they are no longer wanted." The representative said, "Network analysis shows a need of high-grade pasteurized milk-substitute in this area. There is no alternate source; the network controls all the synthetic mammary-type equipment in existence." It added, "Original taped instructions describe milk as an essential to human diet." O'Neill was being outwitted; the machine was returning the discussion to the specific. "We've decided," he said desperately, "that we don't want any more milk. We'd prefer to go without it, at least until we can locate cows." "That is contrary to the network tapes," the representative objected. "There are no cows. All milk is produced synthetically." "Then we'll produce it synthet-' ically ourselves," Morrison broke in impatiently. "Why can't we take over the machines? My God, we're not children! We can run our own lives!" The factory representative moved toward the door. "Until such time as your community finds other sources of milk-supply, the network will continue to supply you. Analytical and evaluating apparatus will remain in this area, conducting the customary random sampling." Perine shouted futilely, "How can we find other sources? You have the whole setup! You're running the whole show!" Following after it, he bellowed, "You say we're not ready to run things -- you claim we're not capable. How do you know? You don't give us a chance! We'll never have a chance!" O'Neill was petrified. The machine was leaving; its one-track mind had completely triumphed. "Look," he said hoarsely, blocking its way. "We want you to shut down, understand. We want to take over your equipment and run it ourselves. The war's over with. Damn it, you're not needed any more!" paused briefly at the door. "The inoperative cycle," it said, "is not geared to begin until network production merely duplicates outside production. There is at this time, according to our continual sampling, no outside production. Therefore network production continues." Without warning, Morrison swung the steel pipe in his hand. It slashed against the machine's shoulder and burst through the elaborate network of sensory apparatus that made up its chest. The tank of receptors shattered; bits of glass, wiring and minute parts showered everywhere. "It's a paradox!" Morrison yelled. "A word game -- a semantic game they're pulling on us. The Cyberneticists have it rigged." He raised the pipe and again brought it down savagely on the unprotesting machine. "They've got us hamstrung. We're completely helpless." The room was in uproar. "It's the only way," Perine gasped as he pushed past O'Neill. "We'll have to destroy them -- it's the network or us." Grabbing down a lamp, he hurled it in the "face" of the factory representative. The lamp and theintricate surface of plastic burst; Perine waded in, groping blindly for the machine. Now all the people in the room were closing furiously around the upright cylinder, their impotent resentment boiling over. The machine sank down and disappeared as they dragged it to the floor. Trembling, O'Neill turned away. His wife caught hold of his arm and led him to the side of the room. "The idiots," he said dejectedly. "They can't destroy it; they'll only teach it to build more defenses. They're making the whole problem worse." Into the living room rolled a network repair team. Expertly, the mechanical units detached themselves from the half-track mother-bug and scurried toward the mound of struggling humans. They slid between people and rapidly burrowed. A moment later, the inert carcass of the factory representative was dragged into the hopper of the motherbug. Parts were collected, torn remnants gathered up and carried off. The last plastic strut and gear was located. Then the units restationed themselves on the bug and the team departed. Through the open door came a second factory representative, an exact duplicate of the first. And outside in the hall stood two more upright machines. The settlement had been combed at random by a corps of representatives. Like a horde of ants, the mobile data-collecting machines had filtered through the town until, by chance, one of them had come across O'Neill. "Destruction of network mobile data-gathering equipment is detrimental to best human interests," the factory representative informed the roomful of people. "Raw material intake is at a dangerously low ebb; what basic materials still exist should be utilized in the manufacture of consumer commodities." O'Neill and the machine stood facing each other. "Oh?" O'Neill said softly. "That's interesting. I wonder what you're lowest on -- and what for." tinnily above O'Neill's head; he ignored them and peered through the cabin window at the ground not far below. Slag and ruins stretched everywhere. Weeds poked their way up, sickly stalks among which insects scuttled. Here and there, rat colonies were visible: matted hovels constructed of bone and rubble. Radiation had mutated the rats, along with most insects and animals. A little farther, O'Neill identified a squadron of t birds pursuing a ground squirrel. The squirrel dived into a carefully prepared crack in the surface of slag and the birds turned, thwarted. "You think we'll ever have it rebuilt?" Morrison asked. "It makes me sick to look at it." "In time," O'Neill answered. "Assuming, of course, that we get industrial control back. And assuming that anything remains to work with. At best, it'll be slow. We'll have to inch out from the settlements." To the right was a human colony, tattered scarecrows, gaunt and emaciated, living among the ruins of what had once been a town. A few acres of barren soil had been cleared; drooping vegetables wilted in the sun, chickens wandered listlessly here and there, and a fly-bothered horse lay panting in the shade of a crude shed. "Ruins-squatters," O'Neill said gloomily. "Too far from the network -- not tangent to any of the factories." "It's their own fault," Morrison told him angrily. "They could come into one of the settlements." "That was their town. They're trying to do what we're trying to do -- build up things again on their own. But they're starting now, without tools or machines, with their bare hands, nailing toG A gether bits of rubble. And it won't work. We need machines. We can't repair ruins; we've got to start industrial production." Ahead lay a series of broken hills, chipped remains that had once been a ridge. Beyond stretched out the titanic ugly sore of an H-bomb crater, half-filled with stagnant water and slime, a disease-ridden inland sea. And beyond that -- a glitter of busy motion. "There," O'Neill said tensely. He lowered the helicopter rapidly. "Can you tell which factory they're from?" "They all look alike to me," Morrison muttered, leaning over to see. "We'll have to wait and follow them back, when they get a load." "If they get a load," O'Neill corrected. r TiHE autofac exploring crew  ignored the helicopter buzzing overhead and concentrated on its job. Ahead of the main truck scuttled two tractors; they made their way up mounds of rubble, probes burgeoning like quills, shot down the far slope and disappeared into a blanket of ash that lay spread over the slag. The two scouts burrowed until only their antennae were visible. They burst up to the surface and scuttled on, their treads whirring and clanking. "What are they after?" Morrison asked. "God knows." O'Neill leafed intently through the papers on his clip-board. "We'll have to analyze all our back-order slips." Below them, the autofac exploring crew disappeared behind. The helicopter passed over a deserted stretch of sand and slag on which nothing moved. A grove of scrub-brush appeared and then, far to the right, a series of tiny moving dots. A procession of automatic ore carts was racing over the bleak slag, a string of rapidly moving metal trucks that followed one another nose to tail. O'Neill turned the helicopter toward them and a few minutes later it hovered above the mine itself. Masses of squat mining equipment had made their way to the operations. Shafts had been sunk; empty carts waited in patient rows. A steady stream of loaded carts hurried toward the horizon, dribbling ore after them. Activity and the noise of machines hung over the area, an abrupt center of industry in the bleak wastes of slag. "Here comes that exploring crew," Morrison observed, peering back the way they had come. "You think maybe they'll tangle?" He grinned. "No, I guess it's too much to hope for." "It is this time," O'Neill answered. "They're looking for different substances, probably. And they're normally conditioned to ignore each other." The first of the exploring bugs reached the line of ore carts. It veered slightly and continued its search; the carts traveled in their inexorable line as if nothing had happened. Disappointed, Morrison turned away from the window and swore. "No use. It's like each doesn't exist for the other," Gradually the exploring crew moved away from the line of carts, past the mining operations and over a ridge beyond. There was no special hurry; they departed without having reacted to the ore-gathering syndrome. "Maybe they're from the same factory," Morrison said hopefully. O'Neill pointed to the antennae visible on the major mining equipment. "Their vanes are turned at a different vector, so these represent two factories. It's going to be hard; we'll have to get it exactly right or there won't be any reaction." He clicked on the radio and got hold of the monitor at the settlement. "Any results on the consolidated back-order sheets?" The operator put him through to the settlement governing offices. "They're starting to come in," Perine told him. "As soon as we get sufficient samplings, we'll try to determine which raw materials which factories lack'. It's going to be risky, trying to extrapolate from complex products. There may be a number of basic elements common to the various sub-lots." "What happens when we've identified the missing element?" Morrison asked O'Neill. "What happens when we've got two tangent factories short on the same material?" "Then," O'Neill said grimly, "we start collecting the material ourselves -- even if we have to melt down every object in the settlements."  TN the moth-ridden darkness of night, a dim wind stirred, chill and faint. Dense underbrush rattled metallically. Here and there a nocturnal rodent prowled, its senses hyper-alert, peering, planning, seeking food. The area was wild. No human settlements existed for miles; the entire region had been seared flat, cauterized by repeated H-bomb blasts. Somewhere in the murky darkness, a sluggish trickle of water made its way among slag and weeds, dripping thickly into what had once been an elaborate labyrinth of sewer mains. The pipes lay cracked and broken, jutting up into the night darkness, overgrown with creeping vegetation. The wind raised clouds of black ash that swirled and danced among the weeds. Once, an enormous mutant wren stirred sleepily, pulled its crude protective night coat of rags around it and again dozed off. TT'OR a time, there was no movement. A streak of stars showed in the sky overhead, glowing starkly, remotely. Earl Perine shivered, peered up and huddled closer to the pulsing heatelement placed on the ground between the three men. "Well?" Morrison challenged, teeth chattering. O'Neill didn't answer. He finished his cigarette, crushed it against a mound of decaying slag and, getting out his lighter, lit another. The mass of tungsten -- the bait -- lay a hundred yards directly ahead of them. During the last few days, both the Detroit and Pittsburgh factories had run short of tungsten. And in at least one sector, their apparatus overlapped. This sluggish heap represented precision cutting tools, parts ripped from electrical switches, high-quality surgical equipment, sections of permanent magnets, measuring devices... tungsten from every possible source, gathered feverishly from all the settlements. Dark mist lay spread over the tungsten mound. Occasionally, a night moth fluttered down, attracted by the glow of reflected starlight. The moth hung momentarily, beat its elongated wings futilely against the interwoven tangle of metal and then drifted off, into the shadows of the thick-packed vines that rose up from the stumps of sewer pipes. "Not a very damn pretty spot," Perine said wryly. "Don't kid yourself," O'Neill retorted. "This is the prettiest spot on Earth. This is the spot that marks the grave of the autofac network. People are going to come around here looking for it someday. There's going to be a plaque here a mile high." "You're trying to keep your morale up," Morrison snorted. "You don't believe they're going to slaughter themselves over a heap of surgical tools and lightbulb filaments. They've probably got a machine down in the bottom level that sucks tungsten out of rock." "Maybe," O'Neill said, slapping at a mosquito. The insect dodged cannily and then buzzed over to annoy Perine. Perine swung viciously at it and squatted sullenly down against the damp vegetation. And there was what they had come to see. that he had been looking at it for several minutes without recognizing it. The search-bug lay absolutely still. It rested at the crest of a small rise of slag, its anterior end slightly raised, receptors fully extended. It might have been an abandoned hulk; there was no activity of any kind, no sign of life or consciousness. The search-bug fitted perfectly into the wasted, fire-drenched landscape. A vague tub of metal sheets and gears and flat treads, it rested and waited. And watched. It was examining the heap of tungsten. The bait had drawn its first bite. "Fish,' ' Perine said thickly. "The line moved. I think the sinker dropped." "What the hell are you mumbling about?" Morrison grunted. And then he, too, saw the searchbug. "Jesus," he whispered. He half-rose to his feet, massive body arched forward. "Well, there's one of them. Now all we need is a unit from the other factory. Which do you suppose it is?" O'Neill located the communication vane and traced its angle. "Pittsburgh, so pray for Detroit... pray like mad." Satisfied, the search-bug detached itself and rolled forward. Cautiously approaching the mound, it began a series of intricate maneuvers, rolling first one way and then another. The three watching men were mystified -- until they glimpsed the first probing stalks of other searchbugs. "Communication," O'Neill said softly. "Like bees." Now five Pittsburgh searchbugs were approaching the mound of tungsten products. Receptors waving excitedly, they increased their pace, scurrying in a sudden burst of discovery up the side of the mound to the top. A bug burrowed and rapid T ly disappeared. The whole mound shuddered; the bug was down inside, exploring the extent of the find. Ten minutes later, the first Pittsburgh ore carts appeared and began industriously hurrying off with their haul. "Damn it!" O'Neill said, agonized. "They'll have it all before Detroit shows up." "Can't we do anything to slow them down?" Perine demanded helplessly. Leaping to his feet, he grabbed up a rock and heaved it at the nearest cart. The rock bounced off and the cart continued its work, unperturbed. O'Neill got to his feet and prowled around, body rigid with impotent fury. Where were they? The autofacs were equal in all respects and the spot was the exact same linear distance from each center. Theoretically, the parties should have arrived simultaneously. Yet there was no sign of Detroit -- and the final pieces of tungsten were being loaded before his eyes. But then something streaked past him. H E didn't recognize it, for the object moved too quickly. It shot like a bullet among the tangled vines, raced up the side of the hill-crest, poised for an instant to aim itself and hurtled down the far side. It smashed directly into the lead cart. Projectile and victim shattered in an abrupt burst of sound. Morrison leaped up. "What the hell?" "That's it!" Perine screamed, dancing around and waving his skinny arms. "It's Detroit!" A second Detroit search-bug appeared, hesitated as it took in the situation, and then flung itself furiously at the retreating Pittsburgh carts. Fragments of tungsten scattered everywhere -- parts, wiring, broken plates, gears and springs and bolts of the two antagonists flew in all directions. The remaining carts wheeled screechingly ; one of them dumped its load and rattled off at top speed. A second followed, still weighed down with tungsten. A Detroit search-bug caught up with it, spun directly in its path and neatly overturned it. Bug and cart rolled down a shallow trench, into a stagnant pool of water. Dripping and glistening, the two of them struggled, halfsubmerged. "Well," O'Neill said unsteadily, "we did it. We can start back home." His legs felt weak. "Where's our vehicle?" As he gunned the truck motor, something flashed a long way off, something large and metallic, moving over the dead slag and ash. It was a dense clot of carts, a solid expanse of heavy-duty ore carriers racing to the scene. Which factory were they from? It didn't matter, for out of the thick tangle of black dripping vines, a web of counterextensions was creeping to meet them. Both factories were assembling their mobile units. From all directions, bugs slithered and crept, closing in around the remaining heap of tungsten. Neither factory was going to let needed raw material get away; neither was going to give up its find. Blindly, mechanically, in the grip of inflexible directives, the two opponents labored to assemble superior forces. "Come on," Morrison said urgently. "Let's get out of here. All hell is bursting loose." O'Neill hastily turned the truck in the direction of the settlement. They began rumbling through the darkness on their way back. Every now and then, a metallic shape shot by them, going in the opposite direction. "Did you see the load in that last cart?" Perine asked, worried. "It wasn't empty." ' followed it, a whole procession of bulging supply carriers directed by an elaborate highlevel surveying unit. "Guns," Morrison said, eyes wide with apprehension. "They're taking in weapons. But who's going to use them?" "They are," O'Neill answered. He indicated a movement to their right. "Look over there. This is something we hadn't expected." They were seeing the first factory representative move into action. As the truck pulled into the Kansas City settlement, Judith hurried breathlessly toward them. Fluttering in her hand was a strip of metal-foil paper. "What is it?" O'Neill demanded, grabbing it from her. "Just came." His wife struggled to catch her breath. "A mobile car -- raced up, dropped it off -- and left. Big excitement. Golly, the factory's -- a blaze of lights. You can see it for miles." O'Neill scanned the paper. It was a factory certification for the last group of settlement-placed orders, a total tabulation of requested and factory-analyzed needs. Stamped across the list in heavy black type were six foreboding words: Letting out his breath harshly, O'Neill handed the paper over to Perine. "No more consumer goods," he said ironically, a nervous grin twitching across his face. "The network's going on a wartime footing." "Then we did it?" Morrison asked haltingly. "That's right," O'Neill said. Now that the conflict had been sparked, he felt a growing, frigid terror. "Pittsburgh and Detroit are in it to the finish. It's too late for us to change our minds, now -- they're lining up allies." IV  across the ruined plain of black metallic ash. The ash smoldered a dull, unhealthy red; it was still warm. "Watch your step," O'Neill cautioned. Grabbing hold of his wife's arm, he led her from the rusty, sagging truck, up onto the top of a pile of strewn concrete blocks, the scattered remains of a pillbox installation. Earl Perine followed, making his way carefully, hesitantly. Behind them, the dilapidated settlement lay spread out, a disorderly checkerboard of houses, buildings and streets. Since the autofac network had closed down its supply and maintenance, the human settlements had fallen into semi-barbarism. The commodities that remained were broken and only partly usable. It had been over a year since the last mobile factory truck had appeared, loaded with food, tools, clothing and repair parts. From the flat expanse of dark concrete and metal at the foot of the mountains, nothing had emerged in their direction. Their wish had been granted -- they were cut off, detached from the network. On their own. Around the settlement grew ragged fields of wheat and tattered stalks of sun-baked vegetables. Crude handmade tools had been distributed, primitive artifacts hammered out with great labor by the various settlements. The settlements were linked only by horse-drawn cart and by the slow stutter of the telegraph key. They had managed to keep their organization, though. Goods and services were exchanged on a slow, steady basis. Basic commodities were produced and distributed. The clothing that O'Neill and his wife and Earl Perine wore was coarse and unbleached, but sturdy. And they had managed to convert a few of the trucks from gasoline to wood. "Here we are," O'Neill said. "We can see from here." "Is it worth it?" Judith asked, exhausted. Bending down, she plucked aimlessly at her shoe, trying to dig a pebble from the soft hide hole. "It's a long way to come, to see something we've seen every day for thirteen months." "True," O'Neill admitted, his hand briefly resting on his wife's slim shoulder. "But this may be the last. And that's what we want to see." TN the gray sky above them, a swift circling dot of opaque black moved. High, remote, the dot spun and darted, following an intricate and wary course. Gradually, its gyrations moved it toward the mountains and the bleak expanse of bomb-rubbled structure sunk in their base. "San Francisco," O'Neill explained. "One of those long-range hawk projectiles, all the way from the West Coast." "And you think it's the last?" Perine asked. "It's the only one we've seen this month." O'Neill seated himself and began sprinkling dried bits of tobacco into a trench of brown paper. "And we used to see hundreds." "Maybe they have something better," Judith suggested. She found a smooth rock and tiredly seated herself. "Could it be?" Her husband smiled ironically. "No. They don't have anything better." The three of them were tensely silent. Above them, the circling dot of black drew closer. There was no sign of activity from the flat surface of metal and concrete; the Kansas City factory remained inert, totally unresponsive. A few billows of warm ash drifted across it and one end was partly submerged in ruble. The factory had taken numerous direct hits. Across the plain, the furrows of its sub-surface tunnels lay exposed, clogged with debris and the dark, water-seeking tendrils of tough vines. "Those damn vines," Perine grumbled, picking at an old sore on his unshaven chin. "They're taking over the world." Here and there around the factory, the demolished ruin of a mobile extension rusted in the morning dew. Carts, trucks, search-bugs, factory representatives, weapons carriers, guns, supply trains, sub-surface projectiles, indiscriminate parts of machinery mixed and fused together in shapeless piles. Some had been destroyed returning to the factory; others had been contacted as they emerged, fully loaded, heavy with equipment. The factory itself -- what remained of it -- seemed to have settled more deeply into the earth. Its upper surface was barely visible, almost lost in drifting ash. In four days, there had been no known activity, no visible movement of any sort. "It's dead," Perine said. "You can see it's dead." O'Neill didn't answer. Squatting down, he made himself comfortable and prepared to wait. In his own mind, he was sure that some fragment of automation remained in the eroded factory. Time would tell. He examined his wristwatch; it was eight-thirty. In the old days, the factory would be starting its daily routine. Processions of trucks and varied mobile units would be coming to the surface, loaded with supplies, to begin their expeditions to the human settlement. Off to the right, something stirred. He quickly turned his attention to it. ering cart was creeping clumsily toward the factory. One last damaged mobile unit trying to complete its task. The cart was virtually empty; a few meager scraps of metal lay strewn in its hold. A scavenger... the metal was sections ripped from destroyed equipment encountered on the way. Feebly, like a blind metallic insect, the cart approached the factory. Its progress was incredibly jerky. Every now and then, it halted, bucked and quivered, and wandered aimlessly off the path. "Control is bad," Judith said, with a touch of horror in her voice. "The factory's having trouble guiding it back." Yes, he had seen that. Around New York, the factory had lost its high-frequency transmitter completely. Its mobile units had floundered in crazy gyrations, racing in random circles, crashing against rocks and trees, sliding into gullies, overturning, finally unwinding and becoming reluctantly inanimate. The ore cart reached the edge of the ruined plain and halted briefly. Above it, the dot of black still circled the sky. For a time, the cart remained frozen. "The factory's trying to decide," Perine said. "It needs the material, but it's afraid of that hawk up there." The factory debated and nothing stirred. Then the ore cart again resumed its unsteady crawl. It left the tangle of vines and started out across the blasted open plain. Painfully, with infinite caution, it headed toward the slab of dark concrete and metal at the base of the mountains. The hawk stopped circling. "Get down!" O'Neill said sharply. "They've got those rigged with the new bombs." His wife and Perine crouched down beside him and the three of them peered warily at the plain and the metal insect crawling laboriously across it. In the sky, the hawk swept in a straight line until it hung directly over the cart. Then, without sound or warning, it came down in a straight dive. Hands to her face, Judith shrieked, "I can't watch! It's awful! Like wild animals!" "It's not after the cart," O'Neill grated. As the airborne projectile dropped, the cart put on a burst of desperate speed. It raced noisily toward the factory, clanking and rattling, trying in a last futile attempt to reach safety. Forgetting the menace above, the frantically eager factory opened up and guided its mobile unit directly inside. And the hawk had what it wanted. close, the hawk swooped down in a long glide parallel with the ground. As the cart disappeared into the depths of the factory, the hawk shot after it, a swift shimmer of metal that hurtled past the clanking cart. Suddenly aware, the factory snapped the barrier shut. Grotesquely, the cart struggled; it was caught fast in the half-closed entrance. But whether it freed itself didn't matter. There was a dull, rumbling stir. The ground moved, billowed, then settled back. A deep shock wave passed beneath the three watching human beings. From the factory rose a single column of black smoke. The surface of concrete split; like a dried pod, it shriveled and broke, and dribbled shattered bits of itself in a shower of ruin. The smoke hung for a while, drifting aimlessly away with the morning wind. The factory was a fused, gutted wreck. It had been penetrated and destroyed. O'Neill got stiffly to his feet. "That's that. All over with. We've got. what we set out after -- we've destroyed the autofac network." He glanced at Perine. "Or was that what we were after?" They looked toward the settlement that lay behind them. Little remained of the orderly rows of houses and streets of the previous year. Without the network, the settlement had rapidly decayed. The original prosperous neatness had dissipated; the settlement was shabby, ill-kept. "Of course," Perine said haltingly. "Once we get into the factories and start setting up our own assembly lines... "Is there anything left?" Judith inquired. "There must be something left. My God, there were levels going down miles!" "Some of those bombs they developed toward the end were awfully big," Judith pointed out. "Better than anything we had in our war." "Remember that camp we saw? The ruins-squatters?" "I wasn't along," Perine said. "They were like wild animals. Eating roots and larvae. Sharpening rocks, tanning hides. Savagery. Bestiality." "But that's what people like that want," Perine answered defensively. "Do they? Do we want this?" O'Neill indicated the straggling settlement. "Is this what we set out looking for, that day we collected the tungsten? Or that day we told the factory truck its milk was -- " He couldn't remember the word. "Pizzled," Judith supplied. "Come on," O'Neill said. "Let's get started. Let's see what's left of that factory -- left for us." factory late in the afternoon. Four trucks rumbled shakily up to the rim of the gutted pit and halted, motors steaming, tailpipes dripping. Wary and alert, workmen scrambled down and stepped gingerly across the hot ash. "Maybe it's too soon," one of them objected. O'Neill had no intention of waiting. "Come on," he ordered. Grabbing up a flashlight, he stepped down into the crater. The shattered hull of the Kansas City factory lay directly ahead. In its gutted mouth, the ore cart still hung caught, but it was no longer struggling. Beyond the cart was an ominous pool of gloom. O'Neill flashed his light through the entrance; the tangled, jagged remains of upright supports were visible. "We want to get down deep," he said to Morrison, who prowled cautiously beside him. "If there's anything left, it's at the bottom." Morrison grunted. "Those boring moles from Atlanta got most of the deep layers." "Until the others got their mines sunk." O'Neill stepped carefully through the sagging entrance, climbed a heap of debris that had been tossed against the slit from inside, and found himself within the factory -- an expanse of confused wreckage, without pattern or meaning. "Entropy," Morrison breathed, oppressed. "The thing it always hated. The thing it was built to fight. Random particles everywhere. No purpose to it." "Down underneath," O'Neill said stubbornly, "we may find some sealed enclaves. I know they got so they were dividing up into autonomous sections, trying to preserve repair units intact, to reform the composite factory." "The moles got most of them, too," Morrison observed, but he lumbered after O'Neill. Behind them, the workmen came slowly. A section of wreckage shifted ominously and a shower of hot fragments cascaded down. "You men get back to the trucks," O'Neill said. "No sense endangering any more of us than we have to. If Morrison and I don't come back, forget us -- don't risk sending a rescue party." As they left, he pointed out to Morrison a descending ramp still partially intact. "Let's get below."  ed one dead level after another. Endless miles of dark ruin stretched out, without sound or activity. The vague shapes of darkened machinery, unmoving belts and conveyer equipment were partially visible, and the partially completed husks of war projectiles, bent and twisted by the final blast. "We can salvage some of that," O'Neill said, but he didn't actually believe it. The machinery was fused, shapeless. Everything in the factory had run together, molten slag without form or use. "Once we get it to the surface... "We can't," Morrison contradicted bitterly. "We don't have hoists or winches." He kicked at a heap of charred supplies that had stopped along its broken belt and spilled halfway across the ramp. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," O'Neill said as the two of them continued past the vacant levels of inert machines. "But now that I look back, I'm not so sure." They had penetrated a long way into the factory. The final level lap spread out ahead of them. O'Neill flashed the light here and there, trying to locate undestroyed sections, portions of the assembly process still intact. It was Morrison who felt it first. He suddenly dropped to his hands and knees; heavy body pressed against the floor, he lay listening, face hard, eyes wide. "For God's sake -- " "What is it?" O'Neill cried. Then he, too, felt it. Beneath them, a faint, insistent vibration hummed through the floor, a steady hum of activity. They had been wrong; the hawk had not been totally successful. Below, in a deeper level, the factory was still alive. Closed, limited operations still went on. "On its own," O'Neill muttered, searching for an extension of the descent lift. "Autonomous activity, set to continue after the rest is gone. How do we get down?" The descent lift was broken off, sealed by a thick section of metal. The still-living layer beneath their feet was completely cut off ; there was no entrance. had come, O'Neill reached the surface and hailed the first truck. "Where the hell's the torch? Give it here!" The precious blowtorch was passed to him and he hurried back, puffing, into the depths of the ruined factory where Morrison waited. Together, the two of them began frantically cutting through the warped metal flooring, burning apart the sealed layers of protective mesh. "it's coming," Morrison gasped, squinting in the glare of the torch. The plate fell with a clang, disappearing into the level below. A blaze of white light burst up around them and the two men leaped back. In the sealed chamber, furious activity boomed and echoed, a steady process of moving belts, whirring machine-tools, fastmoving mechanical supervisors. At one end, a steady flow of raw materials entered the line; at the far end, the final product was whipped off, inspected and crammed into a conveyer tube. All this was visible for a split second; then the intrusion was discovered. Robot relays closed as automatic reflexes came into play. The blaze of lights flickered and dimmed. The assembly line froze to a halt, stopped in its furious activity. The machines clicked off and became silent. At one end, a mobile unit detached itself and sped up the wall toward the hole O'Neill and Morrison had cut. It slammed an emergency seal in place and expertly welded it tight. The scene below was gone. A moment later the floor shivered as activity resumed. Morrison, white-faced and shaking, turned to O'Neill. "What are they doing? What are they making?" . "Not weapons," O'Neill said. "That stuff is being sent up -- " Morrison gestured convulsively -- "to the surface." Shakily, O'Neill climbed to his feet. "Can we locate the spot?" "I -- think so." "We better." O'Neill swept up the flashlight and started toward the ascent ramp. "We're going to have to see what those pellets are that they're shooting up." T HE exit valve of the conveyor tube was concealed in a tangle of vines and ruins a quarter of a mile beyond the factory. In a slot of rock at the base of the mountains, the valve poked up like a nozzle. From ten yards away, it was invisible; the two men were almost on top of it before they noticed it. Every few moments, a pellet burst from the valve and shot up into the sky. The nozzle revolved and altered its angle of deflection; each pellet was launched in a slightly varied trajectory. "How far are they going?" Morrison wondered. "Probably varies. It's distributing them at random." O'Neill advanced cautiously, but the mechanism took no notice of him. Plastered against the towering wall of rock was a crumpled pellet; by accident, the nozzle had released it directly at the mountainside. O'Neill climbed up, got it and jumped down. The pellet was a smashed container of machinery, tiny metallic elements too minute to be analyzed without a microscope. "Not a weapon," O'Neill said. The cylinder had split. At first he couldn't tell if it had been the impact or deliberate internal mechanisms at work. From the rent, an ooze of metal bits was sliding. Squatting down, O'Neill examined them. The bits were in motion. Microscopic machinery, smaller than ants, smaller than pins, working energetically, purposefully -- constructing something that looked like a tiny rectangle of steel. "They're building," O'Neill said, awed. He got up and prowled on. Off to the side, at the far edge of the gully, he came across a downed pellet far advanced on its construction. Apparently it had been released some time ago. This one had made great enough progress to be identified. Minute as it was, the structure was familiar. The machinery was building a miniature replica of the demolished factory. "Well," O'Neill said thoughtfully, "we're back where we started from. For better or worse... I don't know." "I guess they must be all over Earth by now," Morrison said, "landing everywhere and going to work." A thought struck O'Neill. "Maybe some of them are geared to escape velocity. That would be neat -- autofac networks throughout the whole universe." Behind him, the nozzle continued to spurt out its torrent of metal seeds. Reaching the ultimate secret was no problem... but could I follow it up with an encore? couldn't stand to have them laugh. Not the way they did about the swimming. "Oh, come now. No one could learn to swim by reading a book. Five-eighths of a mile the first time in the water!" And they laughed. I guess I laughed, too. More than any other thing, I've wanted people to be happy. But I never swam again -- only that first time. I've always read a lot and sometimes things I've read do get mixed up with things I've done. But the things still happened -- they happened to someone. And people ought to believe. I'd like to tell people now. I'd like to say, "I died once." But if they laughed, it might be later and I'd never hear them. Already there are too many silent things in this. There must be no silent laughter as well. They might think I've got myself all mixed up with things I've read. Things like surgeons pumping life into a heart to bring the patient back after he's died on the operating table. Doctors reviving dead soldiers, if they haven't been gone too long. It's not like that at all. I was truly dead -- for three days. It was almost too long; I suppose I made it back just in time. I don't know. My reading was what started me on this, just the same as with the swimming. When I think about it too much, I almost feel myself that I am exaggerating a bit. But I have proof, proof which no one has ever seen but the doctors and those who found me. See how they keep me swathed in these cloths and how the darkened room hides my eyes? Anyway, I'd be ashamed to show myself, for the mark of death is too terrible and people would be even more afraid of dying than they are now. it in the winter, only I was worried about the cold. I might not have been able to get back at all. But it was too warm when I chose to do it. I should have known better. I've read a lot about keeping things. You can't preserve them in the hot weather; that's why the doctors put those dead soldiers in ice chests, but I didn't think about it enough. I made some other mistakes, too, but I couldn't have known. I guess what started it all was something I read a long time ago, perhaps in a story, or an agricultural bulletin, or maybe in an encyclopedia. Anyhow, it was something about pigs being able to just die if they want to. That always stuck in my mind. It's a pretty wonderful thing, you know. Imagine just being able to die if life didn't seem worth living, or if you were lonely, or maybe just because you wanted to. Oh, I told lots of people about it. You know how sometimes a lull comes in a conversation. Then I'd say, "Pigs are able to just up and die if they want to." But nobody ever paid any attention to me at all. They seemed to ignore the remark. One man did say once, "What the hell are you talking about?" but even he wouldn't listen when I tried to explain. Perhaps it was just too improbable. Besides, people don't like to think about death. They talk about it sometimes and sometimes they brood about it, but they never really think. It has always been too unknown and that frightens them. Then they only fear and stop thinking. It always did seem sad to me that no one had ever tried to help people out about death. Yes, I know one did. He died and came back -- but then He wasn't just a man like you or me. And even He never said exactly what it was like. I wondered if anyone really ever had said. So I began to read with only a single purpose in mind. I had to know so I could tell people. If they could only know, then they wouldn't have that fear and we could talk of death and still be able to laugh. But I had read it all when I read of Jacob's dream, for that's all there was -- dreams, visions, hopes. No one had ever seen and come back to tell the others. The question then was why, not what. It couldn't be that all who died had no whole being to return to. Not every death is marked by a body completely uninhabitable. I myself had heard a doctor say, "There is nothing organically wrong now. The patient will recover if only he has the will to live." The will to live! Suddenly I knew I had found the way. I myself would go and see and return to tell them all. ments. I had a healthy body to return to. I had the will to live, for I enjoy my reading and acquaintances. And I alone had thought it wonderful that pigs can die when they merely want to. I knew that I could, too, and I was not afraid. Very carefully, I began what seemed almost too simple preparations. Drawing some money from an account I kept for medical expenses (at the time I thought this very amusing), I bought an electric clock which registered the hour and the day of the month on cylinders like those on a tachometer. I felt I would want to know exactly how long I had been deceased when I came back. Next I secured a small round mirror with a concave face, the type some use for shaving. This I was to hang directly above my face. It was merely vanity on my part, for I wished to say that I as well as Lazurus's friends had seen a dead man rise. I had assumed that at first my vision might be blurred and thus the magnifying effect of this particular glass would, I thought, help me focus on my face. On my study floor, I prepared a pallet. It was neither soft nor hard, just a comfortable support for the body I was to leave. Beside it I arranged a basin of water and some soft cloths, for I would want to wash right after coming back. You see, I did not fear the obvious. My power lay in thought and I proceeded systematically. Drawn blinds and two small night-lights spread a gray cast over the room, a cast that I was to know too well. Everything was ready now. No, wait! Quickly I placed a tumbler and a decanter of brandy within easy reach and by them laid a pencil and a pad of paper. It was when I straightened up that I first felt the pounding in my body. My heart pulsed as if it were smashing waves of blood through my veins. In my throat, the large arteries swelled with pressure until I thought I would strangle. I had to have some physical exertion to relieve the tension. I felt I might faint or have a stroke unless I moved about. My father had been stricken with an embolism at about my age, and I've read such weaknesses are inherited. So I walked about the house rechecking the locks of windows and doors. Perhaps it was just to keep busy for a few more moments that I even rechecked too the pads of cardboard with which I had muffled the bell-clappers on both telephone and door chime. I don't seem to have had many callers for several years now, but I had to avoid any chance of being disturbed.  exertion, I prepared to lie down, but a sentimental whim moved me like an automaton toward the window. It was the only really unreasoning thing I did. Like a prisoner denied the light on penalty of torture, I knelt down and looked under the blind. Never was the Sun so dazzling. This slightest lifting of the shade poured onto me a warmth that I had never known before. An old saying, invading my mind, destroyed the illusion, and laughing a bit nervously at "seeking his place in the Sun," I turned away and lay down. The dials on my new calendar clock registered #:#, July #. Reaching for my pad and pencil, I recorded this and then, refolding my hands across my chest, I lay quite still. The heat of the day had begun to saturate the closed room. Outside, all was quiet, as if the Sun had mesmerized the world. The insect hum of the electric clock was the only clue of life around me. Looming large above me in the mirror, the magnified reflection of my face calmed my mind with its placidity. Great-lidded Buddha eyes gazed down, holding in their glow my first understanding of Nirvana. I knew that it had come. I had reached the boundary where the fear of returnless going stopped the psyche just this side. My only body consciousness was the heavy thud... thud... thud of blood being driven through my veins. I toyed with stopping the thudding, feeling and savoring the pause between those sledge-hammer strokes on my brain -- knowing that any one of those pauses lengthened to eternity was death. Suddenly I shrieked and sat upright. For an instant, my body had completely stopped and I had known it. Only a nameless grasping fear had snatched me back. My heart beat wildly as I gasped for air. With shaking hands, I poured a drink and gulped it down. It had been close. Still trembling, I arose and slumped into a chair. I had to organize myself, to think my way along this thing. What had happened to me? This one thing I knew: I could do it. I could stop my body at will and I had done it, if only for a second. This thought reassured me or perhaps the brandy opened my reserve of courage, for I had been sitting in the chair some time. the pallet. I regarded it with suspicion, as though there were a deadly scorpion in its folds. Then, jeering at my hesitation, I lay down and composed myself as before. The clock said #:#. I stirred again only to record this on the pad. Despite my nervousness, things proceeded faster this time. A morbid excitement carried me along the path I now already knew. And at its end, I flirted with the stopping. Going over and stepping back, going over and stepping back. It was a pleasure exquisite and unique. Once felt, it was unresistable. I was no longer afraid. I did not have to be. I could stop my body and start it at will. So I let it slip away from me. The thuddings ceased and only the pauses remained -- silent, shapeless things in endless procession. And then the great silence. It flowed over me and I was lost. The silence was too heavy and my thoughts were not my own; they floated up away from me in the silence. I could feel them go, but there was nothing to bring them back. Each thought of protest winged its way into a void with all the rest. And nothing else remained but the will to live. As the silence lapped around this will, it grew until it alone was I. The silence washed about it, but it stood. Then the little rippings and the slicings and the tearings and the softening of things were there -- heard without sound, felt without feeling, like the pulling of a tooth from a novocaine-deadened jaw. It was then I saw the face. Have you ever felt the terror of suddenly waking with a face -- a face of eyes -- staring into your unguarded and bewildered first glance? One feels as if this face would look into one's very life and wrest it from him. Perhaps it is a nascent fear of one's own mask of death. But I could not escape the mask. It loomed above me with gaping maw and staring eyes; eyes that seemed more dead and deadly as my vision cleared. The mirror enlarged the horror that lay below it. It was the wrench of nausea that pulled me from this nightmare. In the violence of the retching, I rolled from beneath the mirror and raised myself to hands and knees. I had knocked over the clock and it shouted up at me -- #:#, July #. Three days! Too long! Too horribly long!  the telephone and pulled it from the stand. I remember nothing else until they brought me here. It's been eight days -- eight days away from death, yet I'm closer to it now than ever before. And I can't think of it. The fear has come crashing through and I can't think. This thing, this body is too far gone. I won't be able to make it move. I'll just feel it getting away -- little by little -- ripping apart cell by cell, and then everywhere all at once. I can feel it now. But in that great silence, I could almost hear the tearing -- yet there was no sound. The doctors have given up all hope. I can see it in their faces. I could hear them talking among themselves when they brought me in. They had to give it a name. There's a certain safety in a name, you know. I would have told them, but I was afraid they'd laugh. The nurses would laugh and say to each other, "Have you heard what the one in # wanted in his case history?" I couldn't stand the laughter now. But that's the way my chart should read -- Cause of Death: -- Death! Intosh. Doubleday  Co., # and Felix finally realize that they've been bought off with a free meal by mankind for the past few thousand years? The author poses this question by presenting a future in which an experiment goes awry and not one, but four animal groups attain intelligence -- mice, rats, cats and dogs. Having the capacity to reason, these natural mutual enemies realize that Man holds a greater threat to their existence, being the enemy of any competitive lifeform. In this disturbing book, one is uncomfortably reminded of the slender pillars on which our civilization is erected: communication, transport and power. How disruptive would gnawed telephone wires, chewed power-line insulation and glass scattered on busy highways be if they were constant and deliberate acts? As the animal becomes able to compete with Man almost on his own level, Man must adopt animal cunning and brutality in order to survive. The way he does it quick-freezes the blood! I would say that Mr. McIntosh has written a Pippin -- and that's not just apple-polishing! Sohl. Rinehart  Company, Inc., # T I 'HE story concerns an America of forty to fifty years hence, thirty years after a successful Communist conquest achieved mainly by the use of germ warfare. The enemy doctors halt the epidemic with pre-prepared vaccine, but it requires monthly booster shots to maintain freedom from relapse, permitting rigid control of the native Americans. It is against this society that Emmet Keyes rebels; his weapon... immunity. I was afraid at this point that I was in for another man-againstthe-world thriller-diller, but Mr. Sohl spared us that. My objection to the book is the caliber of opposition that the hero encounters. I'll go along with us Americans being tough critters to hold down, but could decadence hamstring the enemy in only thirty years after conquest, even with the super-effective booster-shot gimmick that the conquerors could hold over the heads of the conquered? I still had a pleasant time reading it, though, and judging it as literature would be unfair. Sohl set out to write action and made it liamson and James E. Gunn. Gnome Press, # A W, come on now -- this is going too far! So help me, this opus starts out with our rangy, raw-boned hero actually astride an old pinto! Of course he doesn't stay long in the saddle. He's light-years away in pretty quick order, but not before he gets involved in a desperate chase, an assassination, a temporary tie-up with the Director of Communications of the company that owns the whole Galaxy (incidentally a gorgeous tomato), and a weird one-eyed parrot and its owner, a fat little Chinese who (why did you have to do it, fellas?) spouts pidgin English. After this alarming introduction, which scared me into thinking that another Giles Habibula was being born, Wu, the Chinese, became a pretty interesting character. None of the others come alive, but, then, who's got time to be a character when there's so much to do? Leigh Brackett. Ace Books, #c HP HE Big Jump is a fine hunk of story about Man's first try for the stars. One of the original crew of five returns, comatose but with body aquiver with a horrid life of its own. A remarkable feeling of horror and mystery is maintained without letdown while the hero attempts to determine first-hand what has happened to the original crew. It's a big-scale story, but it still manages to make its people human. Solar Lottery is something else again. It's a longer story and has ten times as much plot, so I guess it should be ten times better than its companion story, but... Anyhow, it concerns a society that is founded on the monstrous descendants of our present industrial giants; a governmental setup that uses "teeps" -- telepathic agents; rule-by-chance succession that is determined by lottery and lots, lots more. Too much if you ask me. There's a limit to how many ideas a writer can compress into a story. After that, it's profitless squandering. heim. Hanover House, # titled "Mr. Wollheim Gives Up the Ghost." Says he, "Ghosts is dead." Modern situations and frustrations breed modern terrors. Therefore this ghoulish goulash of modern toupee-raisers. Most of the stories are good, particularly "The Crowd" by Bradbury and a little shocker, "The Rag Thing" by David Grinell. The two long pieces, "The Croquet Player" by H. G. Wells and "The Burrow" by Franz Kafka are both interesting because of the big names involved. "The Burrow" particularly is a fine psychological fable. I liked even better the shorter works by Heinlein, Leiber, Sheckley, A. E. Coppard, Matheson and Robert Bloch. As for "He" by H. P. Lovecraft... HA! ory and Anita Kohsen. The Omega Press, Surrey, England type of book one ordinarily finds reviewed in these columns, since it is meant for the professional rather than the lay reader. But it is of interest because it has something new to say concerning "psi" powers and theory that appealed to me, as utter an utter layman can be, as a somewhat more productive and scientific approach than the experiments of the Rhine investigators. However, it seems to me that the problem of definitive control still remains unsolved in the field of research. The authors strive honestly to overcome this They don't succeed, but their attempt may help point the way -- if there is one. by Ruthven Todd. Charles Scribner's Sons, # hoping for -- a natural, age group # to #. It doesn't at all just so happen that I have a # year-old son, Ricky, and a #year-old daughter, Sandy, and I was getting tired of having them around at their present age levels until something came along for them to review. Ricky: "I enjoyed Space Cat Visits Venus very much. The idea of a cat in a space story I think is very unusual! You don't often read about a cat in space. Venus itself was really something! On Venus there was only one type of animal, a sort of mouse. These mice were very important to the plants of Venus. Just like bees to our plants. Venus was really mostly plants that could communicate with each other." Sandy: "I liked the book. It is about Flyball, a space cat, and Captain Fred Stone's trip to Venus. I liked the fact that the plants were the intelligent beings on Venus and not the animals. Now when I do my gardening, I wonder if perhaps my flowers are talking about me and what they're saying. I hope they like me. I like them." Well, that's this month's allowance taken care of. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. Warrior's Return Hibbs wasn't the first man to come back from the wars with a chip on his shoulder... only his reached from here to Mars! cross-country bus reached the outskirts of town and slowed. "Is there any special place you want to get off, sir?" the bus driver asked. "This will do nicely," Hibbs said. With great gentleness, the driver braked his enormous vehicle to an imperceptible stop, as though he were transporting nitroglycerin instead of people. The gesture wasn't lost on the passengers. They recognized it as the driver's mark of respect, his T# genuflection to the famous Mr. Hibbs. "Is he getting off here?" "Shh! He'll hear you!" "But why here?" "This is where he lived before the war." "And why did he come by bus?" As the bus came to its imperceptible stop four blocks from the center of town, Hibbs stood up and lifted his worn leather suitcase from the baggage rack. Every man in the bus noticed how tall and stooped and skinny he was, how homely, how tiredlooking. They'd be able to tell their friends all about him. And the women made notes of Hibbs' unbecoming steel-rimmed glasses and his cheap, unpressed suit, the coat of which they could estimate within a few dollars. No one spoke as he gave his ticket stub to the driver. "It's been a great pleasure having you, Mr. Hibbs," the driver said, operating the door lever. "Ah -- Mr. Hibbs, could I ask you a question, sir?" Hibbs smiled vaguely, pretending he didn't hear. He started down the steps. The driver said, "Would you mind telling me why you came by bus, sir, instead of the other way?" Hibbs shook his head and walked down the steps. "Mr. Hibbs," the driver said, "could I have your autograph? My little boy -- " Hibbs hurried away from the bus. "Freak!" the driver shouted. The bus roared away. Hibbs wiped perspiration from his forehead and found that his hands were shaking. He began to walk toward town. An old pickup truck came by. Lettered on its battered side was Tommy's Auto Repairs. The driver slowed, stared at Hibbs and stamped on the gas pedal. The truck picked up speed, its ancient engine knocking furiously. The driver glanced back once, then hunched over the wheel. Welcome home, Hibbs thought.  to a stop in front of Joe's Bar. Tommy Burke climbed out, glanced up the block and hurried into the bar. "Hey, guess who's in town!" he yelled. Joe's Bar resembled a cavern. The dirty windows were forever shuttered and the light that filtered through had a cold, unreal, phosphorescent quality, as though there were no light outside at all. No matter what the time, it was always midnight in Joe's Bar, midnight on the longest night in the year. The three drinkers had a night look, too. Their leaning bodies fitted cunningly against the bar, as though shaped for that purpose. Their feet were intricately twined in the brass rail, in a manner no human feet should assume. They looked like fixtures, like simulated humans that Joe might have bought to keep him company. "Well, guess who's back in town," Tommy Burke repeated. The bartender put down his newspaper and said, "Burke, don't come shouting in here like that." "Give me a beer," Burke said, "and guess who's in town." "Abraham Lincoln?" hazarded Jim Mathis. "Alexander the Great?" asked Stan Dearborn. "Julius Caesar?" said Eddie Fleet. "Here's your beer," Joe the bartender said. Burke took a deep gulp and wiped his mouth. "Frank Hibbs is back in town." "Huh?" "You're kidding!" "Hibbs wouldn't come back here!" "He's here," Burke said. "Where?" "Walking down Main Street." "Walking?" The three men uncoiled their feet from the brass rail, rushed to the door and peered out. They came slowly back to the bar and ordered. "Another beer." "Make it two." "Better give me a shot. It is Frank Hibbs!" of the men's room. "You say Frank's back?" "I drove right by him," Burke said. "So why didn't you stop and give him a lift?" Day asked. didn't think of it. You don't give Frank Hibbs a lift just like that. What was I supposed to do, stop and say, 'Hop in, Frank,' like he was just anybody? He didn't have to walk if he didn't want to." "You was scared," the bartender said, winking at the three drinkers. "I was not!" "Sure you was -- a big, strong boy like you." "Well, I ain't scared of you," Burke said sullenly, folding his muscular, grease-stained arms across his chest. "You big, flabby meatball." "No offense," the bartender said, winking again at the drinkers. "So our home-town hero has returned." "Think he'll show us his medals?" Mathis asked. "Frank was never no showoff," fighting rooster with his redrimmed eyes and bristling gray hair. "No, not much," Mathis snorted. "Him and his great big brain." "You can't blame him for being smart," Day argued. "I reckon we'd of won the war without him." "Don't be too sure of that," Day said. "Just what you got against him?" "I hate freaks," Mathis said. "I'd like to boot his tail out of town for him." "Why don't you try?" asked Day. "You're about twice his size, Jim. Go ahead and you try." "You can't fight a guy like that," Mathis grumbled. "In a fair fight, I could beat him. Arid I can lick you any old time." "Say, Tommy," the bartender broke in, "what was Hibbs wearing?" "Business suit," Burke said, puzzled. "Did he have on a hat?" "I don't think so. Why?" "I kinda thought he might be wearing a Buck Rogers space helmet," Joe answered. roared with laughter. "I don't like it," Stan Dearborn said. "Whenever Hibbs is here, someone gets hurt. I think we should ask him politely to leave town. We could get up a deputation -- " "You're forgetting something," Eddie Fleet interrupted, with a subtle smile. "What's that?" "Frank Hibbs can make us rich. You know that, don't you?" He waited until the drinkers had nodded. Then he said, "Tommy, go out and buy a New York Times. I'll show you what I mean." town hadn't changed much. Joe's Bar was as dingy as ever, with the blackout shutters still drawn. Eddie Fleet's hardware store still had machine-gun marks in one wall, from the time the Russian plane, miles from its target, had strafed everything in sight until a Matador brought it down. Stan Dearborn's shoe store had a new sign and someone had opened a dry-cleaning shop. But Mrs. Ganz's boarding house was still there and Taylor's cigar store still had posters of the high school football schedule. He walked into the cigar store. Mrs. Taylor was behind the counter, reading a mystery magazine. She blinked at him through her bifocals and cried. "My goodness! Frank Hibbs!" "Yes, ma'am," Hibbs said. "Could I have two packs of Luckies?" Mrs. Taylor just stared at him. "Are you back for good, Frank?" no "Yes, ma'am. I guess I'm going to stay." "Oh, Frank, we've been so proud of you, most of us. We read all about you in the newspapers. Imagine a boy from our little town becoming famous!" "Well, it's all over," Hibbs said. "I'd rather not talk about it." "I don't blame you. It must have been a frightful experience. But I always said you were an unusual boy. Do you remember how I always spoke up for you after your poor parents died?" Hibbs smiled faintly. "Yes, of course, Mrs. Taylor. How is Danny?" "Danny is dead. My poor boy was killed in that big battle they had around Port Arthur. He was just an ordinary soldier." "I'm very sorry to hear it." "He was on an actual battlefield," Mrs. Taylor said, "carrying an actual weapon. No generals tried to protect Danny." "Could I have the Luckies?" Hibbs asked. Mrs. Taylor took out two packs and held them absentmindedly in her hand. "Well, I guess everyone did what they could. I always spoke up for you, Frank, you know that. I never let anyone call you a freak in my presence. Why, the main reason they didn't commit you that time was because of my say-so. And you've certainly showed them." "I'm very tired, Mrs. Taylor," Hibbs said. "I'd love to talk some other time, but right now -- " "Frank," Mrs. Taylor cut in, "I hate to ask you this on your first day home, but -- " Hibbs held out his hand for the cigarettes. Reluctantly Mrs. Taylor gave them to him and accepted half a dollar. "Please listen to me, Frank. I'm only asking because you and Danny were such friends and I always stuck up for you. They raised the taxes again on that little tiny country place of mine and it's all Joe Walsh's fault. If you spoke to him, Frank -- you wouldn't even have to threaten, just one firm word out of you -- " Hibbs hurried out of the store. Mrs. Taylor followed a few steps. "Well, perhaps after you've rested," she added urgently. "I know you won't forget your old friends. Frank, why didn't you wear your uniform? Your newspaper pictures were so handsome with the uniform. Why didn't you wear it?" "That uniform was a joke," Hibbs said bitterly. "I was no soldier." He walked across the street to Mrs. Ganz's boarding house. ous recesses of Joe's Bar, the drinkers had gathered around a two-day-old copy of the New York Times, spread out full on the bar. They had opened it to the financial section. "Do you really think he can do it?" Dearborn asked. "Of course he can," Eddie Fleet said. "But will he?" "Why not?" Fleet wanted to know. "We're his friends, aren't we? Look, we buy him a couple drinks, we talk about high school days, then we ask. him to have a look at these stock market things. He looks, right? Hibbs was always crazy about numbers. And we're his friends, right?" "And then we ask him which stocks are going up. It's as simple as that. All he has to do is say, 'Minnesota Mining' or 'Dakota Uranium.' A couple of words!" "All he has to do is point," the bartender said. "He don't have to speak at all if he don't want to." "He'll never do it," Day insisted. "Two minutes of his valuable time, that's all it'll take," Fleet said. "How in hell can he say no?" Jim Mathis shook his head. "But are you really sure he'll know? Even those electric brain things they got in Washington and Harvard can't do that." "They can, too," Tommy Burke argued. "If they can," Mathis asked, "how come those professors ain't rich? Answer me that one!" "Look," the bartender said, "Frank can outthink those machines. He did it during the war, the early part, before they found out what else he could do." must have asked him for favors by now. Everybody knows what he can do." "But this is his home town," Fleet said. "This is different. He wants to live here. He wants us to say what a wonderful job he did. That's what he wants. That's why he came back." Day shook his head emphatically. "Frank came back because he doesn't have any other place to go. I guess he's about the most famous man in the country now. People won't leave him alone. I think he hoped he could find a little peace and quiet here." "In that case, he didn't think very good with that great big brain of his," Mathis said. "Come on," Fleet said, folding the T imes. "Let's hunt him up. It's worth a try." Stan Dearborn said, "Hey, let's take along a fifth. Maybe we can soften him up with a drink or two." "Good idea." "A fifth of the best, Joe." "Who's going to pay for it?" the bartender demanded. "We'll chip in. We're all in this, aren't we?" "I guess so," the bartender admitted. He slipped a bottle into a brown paper bag. "Coming, "No." "Why not?" "Because you guys are crazy. You go up to Frank like that, there's going to be trouble. Someone's going to get hurt." Burke said. enter town and had just had time to change into a freshly pressed cotton dress, brush her hair and touch up her lipstick. She opened the front door of the boarding house for him. "Well, Frank!" "Hello, Marie," Hibbs said. "How are you?" "Fine," Marie replied. "I guess I've grown up a little since you were here last." "Yes, you have. You were a pretty little girl then..." "And now?" "You're a pretty woman." Hibbs coughed nervously. "Is your mother here?" "She's in the hospital," Marie said. "Her stomach again." "I'm sorry to hear that." "But she kept your room all through the war, just like you asked. And I cleaned and dusted it every day. It's just the way you left it." "That's fine," Hibbs said. "I think I'll go up now." But he hesitated. Marie was half blocking the doorway. He would have to brush past her to enter the boarding house. "The sheets are clean and fresh," Marie said. "And I made sure nothing was ever moved." "Thank you," Hibbs said. "I know how you feel about your personal things. I wouldn't of let anyone touch them." "Well, thanks." "You look tired, Frank. You ought to have some fun, now that you're back. Go out dancing and things." "Would you like to go dancing with me?" Hibbs asked. "Sure. I'd love to, Frank." "You wouldn't feel -- strange, being seen out with me?" "Of course not, silly!" lence. Then Marie asked, "What are you going to do now, Frankie?" "Nothing much," Hibbs said. "A little painting... "Painting? You?" "Most definitely me." "But, Frank, you could make "I'm just going to do a little painting." "I guess you can afford to," Marie said. "They must of paid you well in the war. I'll bet you got more than those generals. You should of, after all you did!" Hibbs smiled vaguely, brushed past her and slowly started up the stairs. Marie said, "Frank -- " "Yes, Marie?" "I hate to bother you at a time like this. I hate to ask anything of you -- " "Later, perhaps," Hibbs said moving up the stairs. Hurriedly, this time. "Frank, it's Mother's stomach. I don't think the hospital is doing her any good. And it costs so much! It's unbelievable how much it costs." "The doctors know what they're doing," Hibbs said. "Wouldn't you cure her, Frank?" Hibbs turned on the stairs. "I can't do anything like that." "I know you can," Marie said. "You cured Mother's tumor that time. I know she wasn't supposed to tell anyone, but I am her daughter." "I'm through! I'm through with all that. I'm just an ordinary human being now. I'm going to be a painter -- " "Oh, Frank," Marie begged, "you could just flick your fingers and it'd be done." "Don't you understand? I can't arbitrate. I can't pick and choose. If I give to one, I must give to all. And I can't give to all. I did what everybody asked me once, but now I'm sick of being different. I'm my own man now and I want to be like everyone else!" "You won't do it? A little thing like that?" "I can't!" "I shouldn't think it would disturb you so much." Marie said. "After what you did." Hibbs had turned pale. He stared at Marie. "Oh, you can kill, kill, kill, if someone important asks you to. But you won't cure one little sickness. Well, I wouldn't be seen out with a freak like you." Marie was shouting now. Hibbs walked slowly down the stairs, toward the front door. Marie said, "I'm sorry, Frank. I shouldn't have said that. It just slipped out." Hibbs opened the door. "Will you come back? I don't renlly think you're a freak, Frankie -- " Hibbs closed the door behind him. town's little park. Two boys came over and stared at him. "Hey, you're Hibbs, aren't you?" "Sure, he's the guy. Hey, Mr. Hibbs, what did it feel like in space?" "Lonely," Hibbs said. "Was it hot or cold?" "Neither." "How long did you stay?" "Not long. It was exploratory." "How did you breathe?" Hibbs didn't answer. "Brother! What was it like on Mars?" "Lonely." "Boy! Hey, how about doing a trick for us?" "Yeah, show us some of your stuff. Come one!" Hibbs rubbed his eyes. "C'mon, mister. Do something!" The drinkers from Joe's Bar came up in a compact group, blinking in the sunlight. "You kids scram," said Fleet. "Go on, scram. Hiya, Frankie." "Hello, Eddie," Hibbs said. "You remember all the boys, don't you?" "Sure," Hibbs said. "Hello, Joe, Jim, Stan -- I don't believe I know this gentleman." "I'm Tommy Burke. I was a couple years behind you in school. But I remember you, Mr. Hibbs." "Sure has been a long time since high school days," Jim Mathis said. "Buy! Remember those days, Frank?" "I remember them," said Hibbs. "We was all great pals then," Joe said. Hibbs smiled. "Oh, sure," Dearborn said, "we razzed you a little, Frank, because you were different. But we really did like you." "That's a fact," Fleet added. "No friends like the boyhood friends, eh, Frankie?" "I guess that's true," Hibbs agreed. "Things were always lively when you were here, Frankie. That time you burned down old man Thompson's shed. What did you call it?" "Poltergeist manifestation," answered Hibbs. "Yeah! They almost put you away, huh? But you showed 'em all. All those profs at Harvard and Duke -- then the top Army brass -- you showed 'em!" "I should have kept my mouth shut," Hibbs said. "I was an idiot." "How about a drink for old times' sake?" Joe asked, taking a bottle out of a brown paper bag. "Thanks, but I can't drink," Hibbs said. "My metabolic makeup..." "That's okay, Frankie. We'll drink to you. Here's to Frankie Hibbs, the hometown boy who made good." Joe opened the bottle and drank, and passed it around. newspaper. "Say, Frankie," Jim Mathis said, "You were always a hotshot with numbers, weren't you?" Hibbs didn't answer. "Well," Mathis went on, "me and the boys have been thinking of taking a little flyer on Dakota Uranium. Here it is here." He pushed the newspaper at Hibbs. "What do you think, Frankie?" "It's a highly speculative stock," Hibbs said, not looking at the newspaper. "I wouldn't, if I were you." "Yeah? Well, thanks a lot, Frank. That saves us some money right there. What stock do you think we should buy?" "I don't know," Hibbs said. "Sure you do," said Fleet. "We read in the papers about how you could predict any individual stock, if you wanted to. You worked it all out for fun once. Just a matter of understanding the stock market cycle, you told the reporters." "I can't tell you," Hibbs said. "You can see that, can't you? If I tell one person, I'd have to tell -- " "Don't hand us that, Frankie," Mathis said. "I won't do it," Hibbs said. "When I was younger, I didn't mind doing things for people. I got a kick out of it, enjoyed it. I didn't think it would turn out this way. I liked being different then, but it has to stop now. I'm the only one of my kind and there's no place for me." "You mean you won't help us out?" Eddie Fleet asked. "Can't you see my position?" Hibbs pleaded. "You won't help out your old friends," Dearborn said sadly. "I can't!" They turned to go. Mathis murmured softly, "Dirty freak." Hibbs stood up. "What did you say?" "Nothing," Mathis said. "Go on, say it." "All right then, I will," Mathis said. "You're a freak, a dirty freak. And you're a murderer, too. How many of them did you kill, Frankie, sitting in your office in Washington and thinking? A milhuman!" "You're right," Hibbs said, "I'm not really human. I'm a sport, the only one of my kind, absolutely unique and unduplicatable. And all of you envy me and hate me, but you still have to ask favors of me. Like a fool, I did what you asked during the war, because I thought you were my people. But you'll never leave me alone, will you? You'll never forgive me." "Don't get excited, Frankie," Fleet said, taking a step back. "I'm not excited. I'm hopelessly tired and lost. Where can I go? What can I do? It's the same everywhere. 'Do this for me, Mr. Hibbs, do that, Mr. Hibbs. Perform this tiny miracle for me, Mr. Hibbs.' And if I don't -- 'You dirty freak, Mr. Hibbs.' You want miracles? You really want to see miracles?" "Take it easy, Frankie," the bartender said. "Sure, I'll give you miracles!" Hibbs told them. "Want to see me fly?" Abruptly he levitated himself fifty feet into the air and came down again. "That's how I went into space. Want to see me make fire?" "Frank, please!" fingertips, scorching the ground in front of them. They turned to run and suddenly found themselves surrounded by a roaring circle of flames. "That's how I make fire!" Hibbs shouted. "What other little exhibitions would you like? Teleportation?" Mathis and Fleet were suddenly lifted off their feet and hurled to the ground. They scrambled up, ashen white, gasping, hands over their faces to shield them from the circle of flame. "What else can I do for you?" cried Hibbs. "I'm practically unlimited, you know, a real, genuine superman. Maybe you'd like to see how I control supersonics? Shall I level this town for you, as I leveled Stalingrad? Or maybe you want to know what really happened to the Russian Fourth Army? I'll show you!" A blackness formed over the heads of the men, expanded, grew, began to envelop them. "Frank!" Mathis yelled, running into the street. "For God's sake, Frank!" The blackness disappeared. The flames vanished. "All right," Hibbs said, and levitated. "I'm going. To hell with you and your lousy race." "Damn him!" grated Dearborn. "He might have killed us!" "I knew there'd be trouble," Mathis said. "He isn't even human." "But where's he going now?" asked Tommy Burke. "Mars, Venus, the Moon -- who cares?" Dearborn said. "Wherever he goes, he'll be alone. Superman -- he can have it!" The figure of Frank Hibbs, two hundred feet in the air, hesitated, stopped, came down alongpuzzled. Day was sitting on the ground with his arms on his knees and he had a sad, pitying expression. "You didn't run," said Hibbs. "You weren't afraid I might hurt you, even kill you?" "Not really." "Why?" asked Hibbs, bewildany one man in history. Why did you think I'd stop at another?" Day gave his head a single shake. The pitying look never left his face. "They were the enemy. You knew what they stood for and you were right in hating them. You knew I didn't want anything like that, so you wouldn't kill or even hurt me. And there's something else..." "What?" demanded Hibbs. "You're human. Maybe another step up, but human all the same. And you've been made to think you're a computer. I guess you are in a lot of ways, but there's one thing you didn't compute." "What's that?" "You're not the only one with a special talent. There are plenty of people like that -- scientists, artists, mechanics, gardeners with green thumbs." "So?" Hibbs prompted. "You think you can't help anybody if you can't help everybody. Does a surgeon figure that way? Does a green-thumb gardener refuse to work because he can't take care of everybody's garden?" Hibbs was silent for a long while as the other men slowly came back from the street. "I hadn't thought -- " he began, and stopped. He turned sharply on after something! What is it?" "Nothing," said Day. "For myself, that is. For you." "You're crazy. What could I want that I can't do?" "Stop thinking of yourself as a freak. You can't do that alone. You need help. All right, you've got friends right here in town who can help." Hibbs stared around at the others. They nodded sheepishly. "What about a -- a drink?" Tommy Burke invited. "You know something?" said Hibbs. "I've never had one with the boys. I'd -- well, I can't think of anything I'd like better." Day got up and brushed himself off. "Why not?" he asked. "You're only human." cludes in a way that not enough stories manage to achieve -- it leaves you wishing it hadn't ended. But the problem has been tinglingly established, the clues given and hunted down, the danger encountered in all its ferocity, the tangled ties of Earth snaked through or cut -- and where can a story go from there except to its exciting conclusion? But one still can't help wishing... ceed -- and yet must be undertaken. History is full of such necessary doomed exploits. The oddity is that so many of them escaped inevitable catastrophe and did what they set out to do. But can this one? When you read the frightening roster of perils and balance it against the few things in favor of winning, we guarantee you won't rush to the # window to lay down a bet that the story ends happily. And don't construe this to mean it does -- or doesn't. Just wait and see, and then think whether you'd have done the same as the men who had to go along. Chances are that you would; some jobs have to be done, no matter what the risk. into the issue without elbowing out the lineup of short stories, Willy With Redfern on Capella xu  Take Redfern's advice and do not get mixed up with fearless people cast in the heroic mold... , they can really put on the squeeze! but it served a pillory's purpose. "For God's sake!" Redfern yelled. "Careful with that bear trap!" His Fnit torturers didn't speak English, but they understood what Redfern was communicating in a writhing scream. They chattered at each other like crickets on a summer night and eventually took away the toothed, spring-clamped, murderous-looking trap and replaced it with coils of wire, with which they bound him to the frame. The wire was tight, but not, Redfern assured himself consolingly, as tight as the trap would have been on his legs and neck. Next came the tar. At least it looked like tar and served tar's purpose, though it smelled like a swamp at low water. "Ouch!" roared Redfern; it was hot. Then the flaky pumice grit, for unfortunately the Fnits had no feathers -- unfortunately for Redfern, that is; the pumice had a way of rubbing him raw that feathers could never have matched. Then the Fnits chattered at each other for a moment thoughtfully and finally left him alone. It was time for them to gather faggots for the blaze. shoulder at Capella, slowly drifting toward the horizon behind him. He had about an hour before sundown. It all depended on whether or not they found enough burnable wood before dark. The insect-legged Fnits were strictly daylight animals; when their planet got cold at night, they were tunneled in their warm, damp cities underground. fertile planet, at least not this far north, and there might be much suitable wood within easy carrying distance, Redfern told himself. There weren't any big trees at all; he could see that for himself. And that was pretty hopeful. Why, it was ten minutes already and the fuel-gatherers weren't back yet, not even with the first load. His chances of lasting past the sunset, he calculated shrewdly, were at least five or six to one, and that meant that he would live until morning -- of course, if he didn't freeze during the night. Fourteen hours! It seemed like forever. Someone coughed behind him. "Pardon me," said a voice -- a human voice! "Would you be interested in a job?" Redfern jerked against the cables. "Who -- who the devil are you?" he demanded, craning to see. A man stepped apprehensively out from behind the pillory. "My name," he said swiftly, staring about, "is Di Candia. My, ah, associates and I noticed that you appeared to be in difficulties and we thought that you might -- " "Tell me later!" Redfern snapped. "Get me down off here befort the Fnits come back!" "Surely," said the man agreeably. "However, I should warn you that the pay might be, well, uncertain, since ours is a speculative -- " "Di Candia," begged Redfern, "cut me down!" cave on the mountainside, where Redfern slept more joyously than he had slept in years. At daybreak, the man named Di Candia nudged Redfern awake. "We might as well get started," he said cheerfully. "It's a long way into the city -- " "Not yet," objected Redfern. "The Fnits will be sniffing around after me like dogs in a garbage dump. Give them a chance to get discouraged." "Oh, do you think that's necessary?" Di Candia blinked at him thoughtfully. "Well, I suppose you know best. After all -- " he nudged Redfern jovially -- "you're our expert on Fnits, and if we can't take your advice, what are we paying for?" Redfern nodded. "Exactly," he said. "What are you paying me for?" "Oh, it's a simple task, Mr. Redfern. My, ah, associates and I have business here on Capella with the local customs." Redfern said sourly, "That's me, all right. If I were any more familiar with the customs, I'd be dead. Are these your associates?" "All but one." Di Candia made the introductions. "General Glick." A red-faced man, ostensible age about fifty, though it was hard to tell these days. "Mr. Cowper." A pale-faced stripling. "And Miss Garney, who is not present. We represent a, well, syndicate which is anxious to do business on this planet." "You never will," said Redfern positively. "The Fnits don't like humans. They won't have any business dealings." "We happen to think they will. After all, they tolerated you for nearly a year." Redfern sighed. "They tolerated me as long as I stuck to my spaceship. But the first time I wandered into town, they grabbed me." "Because you were in the harem of the Glow," Di Candia supplied. Redfern looked at him thoughtfully. "Been keeping an eye on things, haven't you? Well, yes, I was. But how was I to know? The Fnits ignored me; I walked into a building; it turned out to be the wrong building. Next thing I knew, I was on the mountainside." "But nevertheless," General Glick cut in ponderously, "you were there, my boy. Were you not?" "I was." "And you can go there again?" "I can. I won't." The general looked helplessly at Di Candia, who said smoothly: "Not even for transportation off alternative is going back to the stocks?" Redfern looked unbelievingly at Di Candia. "What the devil do you want with the Glow's harem? Take it from me, you wouldn't be interested!" "That," said Di Candia, "is our problem. You take us there; we do the rest." party was toiling toward the Fnit city. The general was in the lead, puffingly reminiscing. "It was on just such a morning as this," he said to the party at large, "that I shot thirty and a half couple of snipe before breakfast on Glencouley. The wind was from the southeast, perhaps a touch east, and I looked like being high gun until -- " "Please, General," said Di Candia. "We'll attract attention." They were only fifty yards from the Fnit highway, across a rise; they could hear the clatter of unicycles streaming along it. "Time for a break," said Cowper -- almost his first words since Redfern had joined the party. Without discussion, Di Candia and the general stopped in their tracks and sat down. Redfern leaned against a boulder and lit a cigarette, swelmiles away, farther than Saturn from Sol, but it was hot under the fur hoods. All of them were thirty or forty pounds heavier twenty per cent or so higher than Earth's; walking was hard work. Redfern debated casting off the furry parka, but it was important to keep his face shielded as much as possible in case a Fnit should notice them and recognize the late prisoner of the pillory. Of course, with not more than a couple of dozen humans on the whole planet, it wouldn't be much of a feat to track him down, but the Fnits were strange -- they didn't show much disposition toward method. They would be as likely as not to ignore the humans, unless they happened to see Redfern himself. General Glick sighed heavily. "Lunch looks like being late," he mentioned, scowling with the effort of thought. "Could do with a bit of it, too." "We'll eat when we get back to the ship," said Di Candia harshly. The general looked bleak and frustrated. Redfern shut his mouth like a prudent man. His new employers were an odd lot, but, as they had pointed out, he was in no position to be choosy. He sighed and flipped his cigarette away. The Fnit planet had seemed like such a good idea, back on Earth. Newly discovered, virgin territory for commercial exploitation, it had looked like the perfect way to recoup fortunes for a man with a spaceship and no ties. No doubt the, ah, syndicate had felt much the same; but Redfern could predict no glowing future for them. His own experience was distinctly negative. First the months and months of trying to get the Fnits to pay attention to him; then the unfortunate incident when they did. Of course, he was a loner and these people numbered at least four. Perhaps they were better equipped; certainly they appeared to be better financed. when they got to it. It was a monster, for a private vessel, thrice the size of Redfern's ancient blowtorch. It had the look of a Navy rocket, outmoded and sold to civilians with political pull. But even with pull, the Navy's castoffs don't come cheap, and the fuel bill for any rocket capable of carting tons of payload around space is a big item in anybody's budget book. Redfern's practiced eye took in the ship's fittings -- Golightly converter for faster-than-light flight, self-contained atmosphere regenerator, even that unqualified luxury, a radio communications set, utterly useless except when within orbiting range of an inhabited planet because of the torpor of radio-wave speed. In the ledger of his mind, the total was astonishing. The fifth member of the party, the Miss Garney, joined them at the ship. She was, by Redfern's estimate, the most utterly gorgeous piece of femininity a gracious Maker ever put on a planet. She came into the ship's lock like Aphrodite emerging from the waves, and Redfern's adrenals buckled down to heavy-duty pumping. She said meekly, "Things are coming along. My Fnit contact -- " "Miss Garney!" thundered Di Candia. He looked meaningfully at Redfern and said, "Step into the pilot-chamber with me and report. I don't want to have to caution you about security again." Redfern stared after them. It was a moment before he noticed that his fists were clenched and his whole body in a position of combat. He looked dazedly at young Cowper and the general. Cowper was playing an intricate form of six-deck solitaire and the general was relaxed in a plush armchair, holding a brandy-and-splash, obviously dreaming of keepered moors and screamers against a rainy wind. Were they men or mice, Redfern demanded furiously of himself, that they could stand silent while a crude, rude oaf like Di Candia browbeat so lovely a thing as Miss Garney? And what was she doing along on a job like this, anyway? Back on Earth was where she belonged, with Titans of industry and the crowned heads of South America fighting to drink champagne from her slipper; back on the TV screens of the world, or the front pages of the newspapers. Not in an out-of-the-way planet of a God-forsaken star, where the entire human population could nearly be counted on the fingers and toes and the non-human population had no eye for mammalian beauty. Put a name to it: Redfern was, just like that, in love. false Santa Claus beard, but Miss Garney had insisted on it. "According to my Fnit contact," she said in a voice like the chiming of mellow gongs, "they think of you as Warm Blood with Freckles. They'll never think of spotting you under a false beard, particularly if we dye your hair." Redfern was less positive, but if Miss. Garney wanted it that way, that was the way it would be. Besides, it meant just the two of them going into the Fnit city alone -- except, of course, for the Fnits, which hardly counted as competition. They took the long serpentine tunnel down into the Fnit city, lit with pale greenish fire from the rock ceiling, and walked unnoticed through the scurrying Fnits. If you've seen one Fnit, you've seen them all: insect-legged, human-sized, heads like moldy skulls. They could learn to speak English, in a way -- a few of them had, when the first exploring spacer roared down. But few of them bothered, and no human had ever learned to speak Fnit. The Fnits didn't bother about their human and other extrastellar visitors at all, as a matter of fact. Live and let live was their motto -- until one of their uninvited guests crossed the sharp and invisible line of taboo. Then they crossed out the "let live" part of the motto and began gathering faggots. Redfern, remembering, loosened his collar. "Let's get this over with," he whispered to Miss Garney. "They don't understand you," she said conversationally, with a mellow, sympathetic smile. "Don't worry. Where did you say the harem was?" Redfern said rebelliously: "That's your word, not mine. All I know is that it belongs to the chief, what they call the Glow of All the Fnits, and they grabbed me when I walked in." "It's the harem," Miss Garney said sunnily. "Trust my -- contact for that." "How did you make a contact?" Redfern demanded. "Heaven knows, I tried for a year and they wouldn't give me a tumble." "Oh, that was Sir Vivian's work." "Sir Vivian?" "Major-General Sir Vivian Mowgli-Glick. You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he's quite an expert at making contact with, well, native races. Learned it in India." had been in India; in Cawnpore, where the steel mills belched smoke and fire day and night; in Madras, where the big TV studios provided entertainment for the whole world; on the Bengali coast, where the casinos attracted the idle rich of the whole Solar System. "In India?" he asked. "Some time ago," she explained. "The general is older than he appears." "He'd have to be." That was one of the troubles with life these days, Redfern grumbled to himself. Six months in the rejuvenating clinic and an octogenarian came out as young-looking as he liked. Naturally, the biochemists were careful to call it a "cosmetic change," for they didn't really make a man younger. They only restored the elasticity of the skin with hormone injections, shored up the crumbling bone structure with chelate ion-exchange, then patched up worn organs and spruced up useful ones, drained the accumulated poisons from the brain and nervous system, generally tightened up the loose neuronic connections and refurbished ancient joints. Of course, age left its marks. A man of # could never be the man he'd been at #, but -- "cosmetic change!" It was like jacking up therotor-cap on a senile Model-J copter and rolling a # SuperJetmaster underneath it. Figure it out: It was late Nineteenth Century or so when anyone could call the Indians a "native race," which meant that the general must have been nearly a hundred when the rejuvenation clinics opened up. Which would make him -- "Older than hell," growled Redfern. He himself was a good fifty years from his first rejuvenation, which accounted for some of his prejudices. Like most juniors, he rather resented the clinics. Without them, the world wouldn't be bulging as precariously at is was, the drive into interstellar space wouldn't be as urgent... and people like Redfern wouldn't find themselves pilloried by black-shelled monsters like the Fnits. Miss Garney was explaining: " -- brought along a stock of beads and baubles and so on. Trade goods, you know. But Sir Vivian found out something that's been very useful, Mr. Redfern. Sugar. The Fnits are fond of it. Oh, not to eat, of course -- I suppose it would poison them or turn them green or something. But they make a sticky syrup and cement the cracks in their shells. They never get wet, so -- " "There it is," hissed Redfern, jerking his chin at a sphinctershaped doorway. "That's where they grabbed me. The harem." "Oh!" she squealed. "Lovely. It's just lovely, Mr. Redfern!" To Redfern, it looked like any other Fnit dwelling, only bigger. The honeycombed rock passages of the Fnit city were not constructed for sweeping views. One entrance looked much like any other entrance, apart from minor differences in design. The essential difference in design between this and any other was the lounging pair of Fnits at the entrance; to Redfern, the last time he had come this way, it had seemed they might be doormen to a public building. It had taken only a few seconds to find out they were guards. careful notes in a little book. " -- three, four, five, sixth entrance down from that public drink fountain or whatever it is," she counted. "Sort of hexagonal sign over the entrance. Good." She closed the notebook and smiled meltingly at her escort. "The general won't have much trouble locating it. Now we've got a couple of hours to kill. Would you like to look around the town?" Something was bothering Redfern. "Why would the general want to locate it?" he asked uneasily. "Oh, I don't know." Miss Garney looked charmingly vague. "Something about trade relations -- he really doesn't tell me much. Oh, Mr. Redfern, what a charming sight! Let's go look at it!" The "charming view" was the Fnit equivalent of a kiddies' swimming pool, a sort of dusty sandbox, where soft-shelled little Fnits, just past the larval stage, rolled around and threw dust in the air and chattered to each other. But Redfern wasn't bored; he had a charming sight of his own to look at. While Miss Garney was touring the Fnit city, Redfern was admiring the lovely way her head sat on her neck, and the remarkable grace with which her supple fingers scratched the end of her thin, lovely nose. He thought dazedly of his library of pinups, the telestars and S-girls, back in the ship; but they blurred and grayed in his memory in comparison with Miss Garney. He didn't even know her first name! But his adrenals whispered it to his central nervous system and his pounding heart agreed it was true: "She's beautiful!" By the time they got back to the ship, Redfern was hinting broadly about cottages and wedding rings. But he stopped short as they approached the ship. "Good Lord," he said, turning white. "They've found out where I am!" The base of the ship was ringed with Fnits, a dozen of them, cluttering violently at each other. Miss Garney patted his arm. "Don't worry," she soothed. "It's time for their handout. The general usually takes care of it. It gives him pleasure." because as they drew near, the baselock opened and General Sir Vivian Mowgli-Glick stood beaming in the hatch, a carton in one hand. "Here, sir!" he commanded, and tossed little white envelopes of sugar at the Fnits. "Yours, sir. No, no, you with the red collar -- you've had your share, I say!" Redfern and the girl pushed their way through the Fnits into the ship. The general, with one last scattering toss of sugar, followed. "Dirty little beggars," he said with satisfaction. "Reminds me of the Dogras in Srinagar. It was the Fifty-third Rifles at the time and we'd just come up from the Vale. Bless me, I was only -- " "Shut up," said Cowper from behind his everlasting solitaire. "Did you find the place, Miss Garney?" The girl nodded. "Mr. Redfern was most helpful." She smiled at Redfern. "All right," said Cowper, and slammed the cards down on the table. "Let's go. Glick, Di Candia -- you come with me. Garney, entertain our associate here. We won't be long." And they left. Redfern looked warily at the girl. "Well," she said brightly, "would you like a cup of tea?" Redfern cleared his throat. "Uh, how long will they, well, be gone?" he asked. "I mean -- " She laughed. "I know what you mean. Have some tea." She opened the galley and expertly drew hot water into a pot. "The general's idea," she said over her shoulder. "He cannot abide instant tea; he insists on tea leaves and a pot. It makes quite a spectacle in free-fall." It was at least half an hour, Redfern was thinking, to the Fnit city, and half an hour back. So, assume they would take at least half an hour in the city to do whatever they were going to do, that meant ninety minutes. He glanced at the girl thoughtfully, x I I estimating her powers of resistance. Of course, that was always assuming they were really going to the Fnit city; but it had to be that -- Miss Garney said: "You rocket jockeys, you're all alike." She picked up the pot of scalding water meaningfully and marched to the table. "Tea," she said in a voice of command, shoving Cowper's solitaire cards out of the way. Redfern scratched his ear and sat at the table. It wasn't the first time he had made a faulty first approach to a landing and had to abort and come in again. The girl peeked under the lid of the teapot, nodded, and poured. "Now," she said firmly, "we'll have a pleasant chat, won't we? How did you happen to be on Capella Twelve, Mr. Redfern?" closer to her. "Well, it's like anything else. Dad ran a fleet of charter ships -- all rockets, you know, just local stuff. Then the Golightly drive came along and nobody wanted a ship that couldn't make it past Saturn. Dad went to the bank and got the money to refit the ships, but the bank was smarter than he was and they wound up with the ships, all but one. So we heard about the big opportunities out around here and I came out to look for them. I'm still looking. Did anyone tell you that your eyes are the exact color of "That's very interesting," she said, moving away. "And your family is still on Earth?" "Oh, I never had any family," said Redfern, absent-mindedly moving closer to the sugar, which was in front of Miss Garney. "Just Dad, I mean. No wife or anything like that. But I've always looked forward to settling down and -- " "You'll make me spill my tea," said Miss Garney. "Now why don't you just have a piece of cake? We've got plenty of time for a nice -- I mean I don't know exactly when they will be back, it might be any minute, but why don't we just chat?" She patted her hair back into place, looking hunted. "It's been a most interesting trip," she said vivaciously. "Really, I had no idea space was so interesting. When Sir Vivian approached me, I mean, I had the idea that it would be just a long, dull thing, but actually it's been terribly interesting." She made a grab for her bag. "Cigarette?" she asked in a bright tone, lighting one and holding it like a gun between her and Redfern. Redfern sighed. "Thanks," he said, lighting one for himself. After all, a cigarette only burned for, he calculated, maybe nine minutes. He sat back and remarked conversationally: "So this was Sir Vivian's ide'a, coming here?" "Oh, yes -- his and Mr. Cowper's and Major Di Candia's. So we formed a syndicate. They had the know-how and the actual experience. Major Di Candia was in business on Iapetus for ever so long. And, well, I had the money." She dimpled charmingly. "Mummy's third husband was ever so wealthy, you see. So here we are." Redfern stubbed out his cigarette and hitched his chair closer. heard a clamor outside. "Thank heaven!" said Miss Garney, putting down the carving knife. She opened the lock. Cowper and Di Candia and the general scrambled in, dragging a chittering, protesting Fnit on a rope. "Close the port!" bellowed Di Candia, and did it himself without waiting for anyone else to make a move. He leaned against it, breathing hard. "Well!" he said, staring at Miss Garney. "I thought we had a rough time, but you look like the tag end of a battle royal." Redfern cleared his throat, but Miss Garney cut in. "Boys will be boys," she elucidated. "What happened? How did it work?" "Oh, splendid, splendid!" said General Glick happily. "There's a complete change of plan, dear girl. The most fabulous bit of luck, really! We -- " "Save your maundering for a little later," snapped Cowper, tying the squirming Fnit to a hull brace. "Let's get out of here." "Oh, right," said the general agreeably, and Di Candia snapped a salute and sat before the control board. He kicked the ship off the ground, balancing it on its til, drove it staggeringly off for one minute to what Redfern guessed to be north, then delicately set it down again. Di Candia had a radar screen to navigate by; the rest of those in the ship had nothing. But Redfern had the notion they'd gone not more than a mile from the previous landing site. It was a masterly job of piloting and Redfern looked at Di Candia with wonder in his eyes. But even so, the captive Fnit passed out cold. Miss Garney made sympathetic noises and knelt beside the insectoid creature. "Leave him alone," Cowper ordered. "He's less trouble that way. Come in here a moment; I want to bring you up to date." She nodded obediently and left Redfern with the general, the major and the Fnit. If he had had to choose among them for a companion, he thought morosely, it would have been a close decision, but he would have given it to the Fnit. The general took the opportunity to gloat: "A masterly rearguard action, Mr. Redfern! Indeed, Rommel's Afrika Korps had nothing to teach us. A quick pounce and we secure our captive; a beautiful disengage and we're on our way to the ship, with the little roaches chasing after us and the schooner in sight, what? And once aboard the schooner and -- " Redfern said: "What the devil are you up to? Kidnaping? Don't you realize the State Department will have your hide for it?" one finger alongside his nose. "Perhaps there is more to it than meets the eye, Mr. Redfern." "There better be," snarled Redfern. He was just beginning to get upset; things had moved too quickly for him to react as fast as they occurred. "You idiots think you can move in on a planet and throw your weight around without knowing a thing about what makes the inhabitants tick. Look at the Fnit! See the golden bands on his foreleg? That means it's royalty -- high royalty! There are four bands on that one, and even the king, the one they call the Glow, only has five! Why, they'll rip you limb from limb if they catch you!" The general chuckled ponderously. Redfern, disgusted had stamped over to the viewport and looked out. It was nearly dark. That was the only good thing, he told himself; the Fnits wouldn't come out at night even to rescue royalty. But after the darkness would follow the dawn; and when the dawn came... He rubbed his neck unconsciously, feeling a sudden pain where the neck-clamps had been. If they were considerate enough merely to pillory and burn us, he thought. But, he decided, it was not hopeless. The Fnits would undoubtedly be out for blood. But the humans were in the ship and the ship was in shape for flight. Nothing could stop them -- if things got as rough as they surejly would -- from pushing their Fnit captive out of the lock and taking off for calmer worlds. He winced at the thought of abandoning his own ship, but maybe some day, when things cooled down, he could come back for it. Or, better, send someone for it. At any rate, they could surely get away with their lives, as long as they stayed in the ship. Cowper and the girl came back from the private sections of the ship. "All right," Cowper said to Di Candia and General Glick. "We're set." And he put a hand to the baselock door. "Hey!" yelped Redfern in dismay, as the other three men tramped out. "They'll tear you to pieces! Where the devil do you think you're going?" Cowper looked at him coldly. "To the Fnit city, of course," he said, and closed the door behind him. ly, "Now, Redfern, none of those tricks again!" "Don't worry!" he snapped. "I've got other things on my mind. Do you know what the Fnits will do to those men? Good Lord, woman, you can't get away with kidnaping! Even if we escape alive, we can't go home -- we'd spend the rest of our lives in jail for molesting natives!" "Oh, I think not," Miss Garney said lightly. "Mr. Redfern, you worry too much." "But kidnaping -- " "Now, please," she said maternally, "we don't tell you how to run your business, so why should you tell us how to run ours? I don't deny that Sir Vivian had something like kidnaping in mind originally. But, as you say, it does have its illegal aspect and as things turned out, this is much better." "Better how?" Miss Garney hesitated, then looked conspiratorial. "Mr. Cowper would be furious, but -- Well, you see, we may not have spent a year studying the Fnits as you did, but we did manage to make a few friends. And we discovered that the Glow was about to be married and Sir Vivian saw the possibilities in it at once. Why should we not, he said, get the Glow's bride aboard our ship? We could then negotiate with the Glow. We want trade privileges; he wants his wife. A simple exchange." She beamed. "Wasn't it clever of Sir Vivian?" Redfern gasped: "You mean that this Fnit is -- " "Oh, no," she said reassuringly. "Not at all. It was the most wonderful bit of luck. Our Fnit contact gave us an excellent picture of the Glow's bride and of course, thanks to you, we knew where the harem was. So they all went in to get her and -- " Miss Garney blushed prettily -- "Mr. Cowper said they found her all right, and she was in the most compromising situation. With this one right here! Imagine, Mr. Redfern! Practically a queen, on the very eve of her marriage to the Glow, and she allows herself to have a common, vulgar -- " "Wait a minute," Redfern begged hoarsely. "What was the bit of luck?" "Why, you can see that, can't you, Mr. Redfern? Sir Vivian is going to see the Glow, to tell him that we broke up this affair and have the fellow here, for him to do with as he will; and surely the Fnit's gratitude will -- " Redfern had to swallow. He couldn't speak, but he made a violent gesture and Miss Garney stopped, staring at him. At last he got it out in a horrified voice: "Miss Garney, didn't your contact tell you that the Fnits have three sexes?" get her breath. "You mean," she gasped, "they were all three of them going to -- Why, the dirty little creatures! Good heavens, Mr. Redfern, if I had known it was going to be anything like this, I certainly would never have -- " "Shut up! Let me think!" He stared at the captive Fnit, now conscious again and staring unreadably back at him out of faceted eyes. Even the general's original half-witted plan wouldn't work now, he realized; they had a fine Fnit captive for trading purposes -- but the Fnits had the general, the major and Mr. Cowper. "We'll just have to bluff it out," he said at last. "The question is, do you want to come with me or stay here?" "Come with you where?" "Into the Fnit city. Your friends will be just about ready for a barbecue by now; if somebody doesn't get in there on the double, it'll be too late." Miss Garney said hastily: "Oh, I'm coming with you! You certainly wouldn't dream of leaving me here with that, would you?" Redfern felt wistful. Staying with a single Fnit seemed so close to Paradise in his eyes, compared with invading a hostile city full of them. But there wasn't any choice. They bound the captive more securely, Miss Garney found weapons for them, and they left. It was all but dark, and distant Capella made reddish shadows all along the route to the city. At any rate, Redfern knew where the city was. It wouldn't be more than an hour's tramp to get there; in fact, they would pass almost beside his own rocket, where he had left it -- so miserably long before! -- in his illfated expedition that had wound up with him in the stocks, ready for burning. Maybe, he thought, they would be able to stop off at his own ship. It wasn't a patch on the "syndicate's" ship -- ancient rocket tube with auxiliaries, against the trim, compact Golightly drive that Miss Garney's money had bought; a single compartment instead of the plush fittings of the bigger ship. But it was his own. And if he boarded it, there was nothing to stop him from taking off, possibly with Miss Garney, and leaving the idiotic male members of the syndicate to the fate they had richly earned -- nothing, that is, but his conscience. But he didn't have to argue with his conscience. The redtinged shadows were scary but empty -- all except one. And that one held a dozen armed, twittering Fnits; and they were all over Redfern and the girl in the twinkling of an eye; and when the "rescue party" reached the Fnit city, it was in a cocoon of chains.' fusely by the time they got to the Chamber of the Glow -- only partly because of the muggy damp warmth of the Fnit cities. If Redfern and the girl were in a cocoon of chains, the major, the general and Mr. Cowper were entombed. They were in a row before a sort of balcony hanging from the rock wall and in the balcony was the Glow of All the Fnits. Looking at him, Redfern knew for the first time why he had that title. He actually glowed. There was a faint radiance all about him -- radioactivity? More likely some chemical effect -- bioluminescence, like the greenish light of a glowworm. Only this was pure white. There was a Fnit translator below him, looking threateningly at the newcomers. "Why, Walter," exclaimed Miss Garney. "I didn't know you were connected with the -- " "Silence!" chittered the Fnit. "It is not possible for you to speak before the Glow!" "Not possible? Why, Walter, after all the sugar I've given you!" Three Fnits advanced on her. She stopped scolding the translator and only shook her head ruefully. "These Fnits," she said disapprovingly. The Glow began to speak, and the sound was like the magnified voice of crickets in a summer night. He paused and the interpreter Miss Garney had named Walter said: "You are to die for abducting the para-wife of the Glow. Is it of interest to you what the manner of your death may be?" "Oh, very much," piped up General Glick, wriggling in his chain-mail mummy shroud. "You aborigines are always terribly clever about that sort of thing, aren't you? Why, once we lost a subaltern to the Pathans and when they returned his body, it was -- " "Silence!" twittered the Fnit again. "Hear your death. It is fit that you should serve the One you abducted. Since she is a parafemale, a receiver of eggs, you shall receive the grubs from her eggs, until they hatch." Redfern, with horrid recollections of bloated beetles bearing the young of digger wasps on Earth, croaked: "Wait a minute! Let's talk business. You can't kill us; you'd never find the -- the para-wife, or whatever you call her." Colloquy between the translator and the Glow; the translator broke into English to say: "It is not so, we correct you. We know the para-female is in the great ship, and we know that you walked from the great ship to here, and thus it must be near. We have only to look for her." "But it's night!" cried Redfern. "You know how we Earthmen are -- we go about in the night and when it's cold and all the time. Why, our ships are as cold as the air outside at night; she'll freeze. It won't do you any good to find her if she freezes, will it?" frenzy of chirping. It disturbed the Glow; he rose on all eight legs and rasped horrendously at the captives; The translator said: "You have spoken the truth. If the para-female is exposed to the night air, she will perish. Therefore we shall kill you immediately." "Hold it!" Redfern yelled as the Glow twittered at the Fnit guards. "Don't you want to save her?" "It is impossible," the translator explained. "You have said that she will freeze, and it will do us no good to find her when she is frozen. We cannot go out to rescue her, and if we could, she would not survive the trip back to the city." He made a motion with his mandibles, the Fnit equivalent of a philosophical shrug. "It would have been more useful to have you receive the grubs," he said regretfully, "but without the para-female, that is impossible, too, and so -- " He beckoned meaningfully to the guards. "But we can save her!" The interpreter asked curiously, "How?" "We can heat our ship if we wish, you know. Just allow us to go back to the ship and we'll warm it up. In the morning, you can come and get her." The translator made the equivalent of a nod. "Very interesting," he said. "No." "But why?" Redfern demanded. "The Glow in his wisdom sees that you will escape. It is better that the para-female should die than that you should escape. There are other para-females." "We promise we won't escape," Redfern said desperately. "We -- " He stopped short, mouth open. "Well?" asked the Fnit after a moment. Redfern swallowed. "May I -- may I talk to the Glow for a moment? Alone?" "It is not possible," said the translator. "The Glow does not speak English, you see, so that if you -- " "I mean alone except for you. Without the other humans." Miss Garney warned: "Mr. Redfern, I certainly hope you aren't trying to sell us out." Redfern didn't have to answer that, because the Glow rose majestically on all of his legs and twittered in a commanding tone. The Fnit guards picked up Miss Garney and the men and bore them, chains clanking, outside. The translator said: "You may speak." the ship's heaters kept it well above the temperature of the ambient air. But Redfern was shivering by the time he got there and he turned them up a notch. The Fnit para-female chittered furiously at him. He said: "Don't worry about a thing. The old man will be here in the morning." He shucked the parka and gloves and stared moodily at the control board. Nothing could stop him from kicking the Fnit out the baselock, warming up the Golightly drive and lifting gently a gentle cat's-cradle of magnetic force lines. Less than three weeks and he'd be home... He sighed and contemplated without much confidence the gullibility of the Fnits. If only Miss Garney, ethereal and adorable Miss Garney, were here with him! But the Glow had refused to let anyone else come along to j'V;... ' flMl "rescue" the Fnit para-female; he wanted the others as hostages. Redfern stretched out on the padded navigator's couch. He was so keyed up, he realized dismally, that it would be impossible for him to get to sleep; he would no doubt spend the whole long Capellan night worrying and brooding and... He woke up with the clatter of insectoid feet in the baselock scratching at his eardrums. A Fnit face peered curiously into the ship, disappeared, and was replaced by the whitely gleaming face of the Glow himself. The Glow sprang to the side of his para-bride, and there was a mad chittering and clattering of fondly caressing arthropod limbs as the lovers were reunited. Redfern breathed again. Behind the Glow were other Fnits, and with them were the general, the major, Mr. Cowper -- and last, and emphatically complaining, Miss Garney. The Fnit Glow had kept his word. Redfern began to feel slightly happier as he stood up and rustily began to walk toward the newcomers. " -- know that I am absolutely no good in the morning without my tea," Miss Garney was telling everyone within earshot. "And still they drag me, utterly drag me, here, without even a decent word!" She caught sight of Redfern and her tone from hot rage became ice. "Ah! Your little scheme didn't work, eh? Couldn't manipulate the Golightly controls, is that it? So you were not able to make your escape at our expense after all, were you?"- opened his mouth to answer and then remembered the Fnits. He turned to the translator. "Everything all right?" The translator said: "It so appears. You are sure you do not wish to change your mind? There will be many grubs and this parafemale is small... "Thanks, no. Let's get on with it." The translator said philosophically: "Then let it be as you request. Come, the Glow will accompany us to watch the spectacle of your burning." "Burning?" cried Miss Garney. "But I thought -- they've got the Fnit back -- I mean -- " "Burning," said the translator. "Let us go to the pyre." Redfern led the way, well out of range of Miss Garney's complaining voice. Beside him, the translator twittered unendingly, but Redfern was hardly listening. They came to the cleft in the hills where his own old rocket was nestled on its tail-pads and he scrambled aboard, the translator following awkwardly. It was like being home again. He touched the walls and battered control panel lovingly. He ran his fingers over the jet keys and patted the familiar navigational books in the lock-shelf over the controls. There was the gray cover of Hypertrails, giving course settings for every star; the Rocket Engineer's Handbook; the Digest of Interstellar Law; Higgins' Astronauts' Companion. He took down the gold-embossed volume of Higgins sentimentally and let it fall open. There were the remembered pinups, just as he had last seen them -- full-color stereoscopic views of the most delectable beauties of the Solar System. How wise of the Astrogational Board to make Higgins required equipment for solitary navigators! And yet how these great beauties palled into insignificance, Redfern thought fondly, compared with the flesh-and-blood loveliness of -- He swallowed and took a closer look at the pinups, just as the rest of the party came panting and arguing into the airlock. He glanced up at Miss Garney and unbelievingly again at the pinups. Something was wrong somewhere, he thought in horror. It didn't occur to Redfern that he had been fifteen months in space and that even the Wicked Witch of the North would have looked attractive to his woman-starved eyes. He had forgotten how much more attractive the soft, supple flesh of youth might be than the set, determined lines of Miss Garney's face. All he knew was that here were the pinups, and here was Miss Garney, and somehow he had made a terrible mistake. tering: "It is complete. You will now combust yourselves according to our pact." Redfern ignored the yelps from the rest of the human party. "All right, let's get at it." "One moment," chirped the Fnit. "The Glow has asked that I remind you of your undertakings. Firstly, you have stated that it would be inconvenient to you to die as we proposed -- that is, with the grubs of the Glow's female in your flesh." "Very inconvenient," Redfern agreed. "And secondly, that you undertake to burn yourselves to death, complete with this structure in which we are presently talking." "Right," said Redfern. "It is strange to the Glow that this metal should burn. He does not doubt your word, but he must protect himself. You have promised to go up in flame for him, and if you do not do so, there will be steps taken." "Oh, we'll go up in flame, all right," promised Redfern. "But," insisted the translator, "if you do not, then, thirdly, the Glow reminds you that there are twenty-six other humans on the planet. If you should cheat our justice, it is they who will receive the grubs in your place. All of them. Now you may proceed." And the Fnit clambered backward out of the lock. Redfern slammed the lock and dogged it. General Glick protested : "See here, this ship won't burn, sir! If you think we will be a party to -- " "Drop dead," said Redfern moodily. "But strap yourselves in first." He didn't even look over his shoulder to see if they had done so. Let them get banged around a bit, he thought savagely, and put his fingers on the maindrive rocket controls. There was a cough and a roar and a rumbling scream, and every movable object in the cabin shook and slid about as they drove up from the surface Forty minutes later, they were orbiting around the planet and Redfern began coaxing his ancient auxiliaries to ease them into hyperspace for the long trip home. The four others in the cramped cabin rubbed their bruises and screamed at him, singly and in chorus. Redfern gave them the silence of his back. rumbling under the voices of the others, was raging: " -- most disgraceful conduct I have ever observed in my life, sir! Didn't you hear what the Fnit said? Our fellow human beings! Betrayed! Left to perish most foully! What will they say at the Club? For make no mistake, sir, this will be found out. Massacred, every human being on Capella And then we flee like cowardly babes in this rattletrap, when our own ship is thrice as big and faster and -- " "Don't even talk to him, Sir Vivian," Miss Garney advised coldly. "He isn't worth it." "Eh," said the general after a pause. "I suppose you're right. But just to think," he went on morosely, from his hammock, "that my name, the name of General Sir Vivian Mowgli-Glick, M# should be linked with a pusillanimous, chicken-hearted, black deed like that!" Mr. Cowper said: "Newborns, General. What can you expect?" "I suppose that's it," the general agreed moodily. "Takes time to develop a real code, what? Let him live a half dozen lives or so, like you and me and Miss -- " "General!" cried the girl. "Oh, sorry," mumbled the general. They went on like that and Redfern, doggedly busy with his auxiliaries, smiled coldly to himself. So she was as ancient as the general, was she? Thank heaven, he told himself virtuously, that he had known from the first she wasn't worth pursuing. The impudent nerve of these zombies! Taking up space that later generations deserved to have -- and blaspheming him for saving the lives they had no right to! There was a clunk and the wavering lines of force came into phase. The stars winked out in the viewplate and they were in featureless hyperspace. Redfern sighed, and set course, and turned to face his guests. "We're on our way," he told them. "Now do you want to listen to what I have to say?" "No!" said the general, the major and Mr. Cowper. What Miss Garney said was: "Beast!" "Suit yourself," Redfern told them. "But you're on my ship and I'll thank you to mind your manners." "On your ship, are we?" shrieked Miss Garney. "And whose fault is that, I'd like to know? Why couldn't we have taken our own ship -- I mean assuming we were going to leave the other Earthmen to that horrible death?" Redfern said, with the last bit of his patience: "We couldn't take your ship because I didn't want to leave the others to a horrible death." est. They glared at him and Major Di Candia said: "Do you suppose the fellow means anything by that?" "Of course not!" said Miss Garney. "It's only a cheap lie to make us forgive him -- not that we ever will." "Ah, why do I waste my time talking to you?" Redfern asked disgustedly. "Look, what kind of drive did your ship have?" "Full Golightly," Miss Garney said proudly. "Magnetic warp throughout, even for planetside landings. It cost nearly -- " "Never mind what it cost." Redfern rapped the hull of his own ship. "This one's a rocket. Now do you see the difference?" "Certainly I see the difference," snapped Miss Garney. "It will take us twice as long to get home -- to say nothing of the fact that the five of us will be huddled in this little rathole of a cabin the whole way!" "No," said Redfern. "The difference is that yours was not a rocket. I arranged with the Glow for us to incinerate ourselves, as you perhaps heard the Fnit translator say. It was the only thing we could do; would you have preferred to take the place of the Fnit para-female you so cleverly kidnaped -- " They didn't even have the grace to blush, he saw unbelievingly -- "and have baby Fnits hatching in your bodies? Maybe you would, but I wouldn't." "But the Earthmen, sir!" snapped Sir Vivian. "You've betrayed them!" Redfern sighed. "I promised the Glow he could watch us go up in flame. And what did he see?" "Why -- he saw us escaping." "No!" said Redfern. "He saw the wash of flame from our rockets. He's just a Fnit, remember, and they've never seen a rocket land -- mine is the only one on the whole planet and I landed at night, when the Fnits are tucked away. So he saw us go up in flame -- literally! We're burned up -- as far as they know. The Glow is satisfied. The humans are safe. We're on our way home. And now -- " he added -- "if you will kindly form a single line and pucker up, ladies first, I shall extend my left foot." They might not be bright, he thought to himself admiringly, but they certainly were good and stubborn. It was nearly an hour before they all got it straight that the remaining Earthmen on cred, and they themselves were safe enough, and somebody could even go back and pick up their ship, sooner or later, so that all they had lost was their time. And then each one of them manfully apologized. the general, the last to get the thing straight in his mind. He dragged his hammock closer to tying the rope-end into position for a nice, comfortable chat. "Made it look like a blasted suttee, what? I've not seen the like of it since the old days in India. Reminds me of a time in Hyderabad -- '#, it must have been." "Excuse me," Redfern interrupted. "Got to check the auxiliaries." It looked as if it was going to be a long voyage, he thought drearily, staring at the perfectly automatic controls of the auxiliaries and wishing his father had got enough money from the bank for a larger ship. "Mr. Redfern?" He turned with a start. The voice was meltingly sweet; Miss Garney was smiling dewily. "Dear boy," she said, "I -- I just wanted to say that you were perfectly splendid. I do hope you'll forgive us for the terrible way we acted. And," she added archly, "I certainly hope you won't pay too much attention to -- well, what Sir Vivian said. You know, about -- uh -- age." "Of course not," Redfern said glassily, watching her as a bird might watch a python. She reached daintily across him to pick up the volume of Higgins. She glanced at it, tittered, and looked coyly at Redfern. "Naughty," she reproved and, before he could stop her, dropped the book of pinups into the disposal chute. "You won't need these, dear boy. We'll be together for a good long time, won't we? And, really, don't you think that it never hurts if a woman is just the teentsiest bit older? Especially for a man as experienced as you?" Fifty-six days, he calculated, staring at the chugging auxiliaries. Fifty-six days with the general, the major, Mr. Cowper... and Miss Garney. It was going to be . a very long voyage. Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation, Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way. Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets, Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!" Anyone For Doomsday? Not You ! Not Us ! thing that is possible -- and can make a good story -- goes Doomsday is only one possible future out of many: The conquest of other planets . , . Invasions of Earth . , , Other dimensions... Immortality... Strange and exciting future civilizations that have their roots right in the present... magazine of ideas brought vividly to life! for # convincing issues, send # or # for # issues, TO #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. JANUARY # GALAXY Svienrrsttt #  Anyone For Doomsday? Not You! Not Us! thing that is possible -- and can make a good story -- goes Doomsday is only one possible future out of many: The conquest of other planets... Invasions of Earth... Other dimensions... Immortality... Strange and exciting future civilizations that have their roots right in the present... magazine of ideas brought vividly to life! For # convincing issues, send # or # for # issues, TO #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. 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State City State Offer # Offer # Price My Name Address City State City State Offer # Price galaxy by Alan E. Nourse # by James E. Gunn # by Lester del Rey # by Robert Abernathy # by Robert Sheckley # by Richard R. Smith # by Willy Ley # by James H. Schmitz # by H. L. Gold # by Floyd C. Gale # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Klsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. editorial protesting the identifying of extra-sensory research with Dr. Rhine of Duke University, quarreled with his methods and declared that we should look elsewhere for developments. Then I stuck my fingers in my ears. I needn't have braced myself -- only a very few of those who wrote in objected and a good many were glad to learn they weren't alone in questioning Rhine's approach and findings. The editorial even induced some people to attempt their own research. This is the part that has me puzzled and hesitant -- puzzled because I haven't an idea of where to begin, hesitant because my own experiences with psi should be shared and yet I naturally am not a bit eager to be considered a crank, cultist or crackpot. Well, look, before I talk myself out of it, let's get the incidents down fast. During the war, when the news of the Battle of the Bulge came crashing in, the C. O. of my outfit gave us a this-is-it pep talk; all the might of the German army was massed against us, we were in danger of being driven into the sea, the war would go on indefinitely now, and so forth. As orientation man, I had war maps by the dozen and was astonished that nobody was mentioning the huge fight between the Nazis and the Russians in, I think, Romania, at least twice as big if no more bitter than the Bulge. Letting people know about it would have reduced anxiety. When I gave my orientation lecture, which was shortly after the C. O. had alarmed us, I said this was obviously a final desperate gamble and the end had to be near. "Oh, yeah?" challenged the first sergeant. "If you know so much, when'll the war be over?" That was in December. What happened to me should interest researchers, for I felt an electricchair shock, my muscles constricted, my eyes hurt furiously and my head built up a sudden shattering internal pressure, and I was overwhelmed by apprehension as the answer came out: "April #th." The first sergeant got me to bet #. The actual date was May #th and he collected, but (Continued on page # ) Solves puzzles, computes arithmetically, plays games like secret messages, reasons, computes, compares, solves logical problems and syllogisms, psychological and legal tangles, translates from binary to decimal, etc. to-follow instructions for assembling all materials necessary, including precision-machined parts that would cost over # Puzzle Manual, with over # exciting, brain-teasing games, problems, puzzles, etc. This educational hobby brings hours of fun put it togetherl  Do you like to solve Brain-Tensers, Biddles, Codes, Puzzles?  Do you like to take apart and put together clocks, radios, electrical devices?  l)o you enjoy mathematical and intellectual problems?  Do you like the unusual in fun and hobbies?  Are you above average in intelligence? Mail This Coupon  # St. Marks Place, New York #, N. Y. Please send me: Kit and #-Page Manual. # (East of Mississippi) # (Elsewhere in U. S.) # (Outside of U. S.) Returnable in seven days for full refund if not satisfied. I enclose  in full payment. My name and address are attached. Brightside The price has always been a life for a bit -- why should pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and of knowledge t change now? there were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman had flagged him as he came in from the street: "A thousand pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman -- he would leave no Crossing name. He said you'd want to see him. He will be back by eight." Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely -- Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron's table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age -- he might have been thirty or a thousand -- but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing. The stranger said, "I'm glad you waited. I've heard you're planning to attempt the Brightside." Baron stared at the man for a moment. "I see you can read telecasts," he said coldly. "The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing." "At perihelion?" "Of course. When else?" r ' , HE grizzled man searched Baron's face for a 'moment without expression. Then he said slowly, "No, I'm afraid you're not going to make the Crossing." "Say, who are you, if you don't mind?" Baron demanded. "The name is Claney," said the stranger. There was a silence. Then: "Claney? Peter Claney?" "That's right." Baron's eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. "My God, man -- where have you been hiding? We've been trying to contact you for months!" "I know. I was hoping you'd quit looking and chuck the whole idea." "Quit looking!" Baron bent forward over the table. "My friend, we'd given up hope, but we've never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There's so much you can tell us." His fingers were trembling. Peter Claney shook his head. "I can't tell you anything you want to hear." "But you've got to. You're the only man on Earth who's attempted a Brightside Crossing and livd through it! And the story you cleared for the news -- it was nothing. We need details. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?" Baron jabbed a finger at Claney's face. "That, for instance -- epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We've got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed -- " "You want to know why we failed?" asked Claney. "Of course we want to know. We have to know." "It's simple. We failed because it can't be done. We couldn't do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries." "Nonsense," Baron declared. "We will." Claney shrugged. "I was there. I know what I'm saying. You can blame the equipment or the men -- there were flaws in both quarters -- but we just didn't know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun. They'll whip you, too, if you try it." "Never," said Baron. "Let me tell you," Peter Claney said. Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt -- that was in #, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared. I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts -- they couldn't have made a hundred miles, snowflakes in hell -- but I didn't know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson's work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. But it was Mikuta's idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don't suppose you did. No, not Japanese -- Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission. He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, with a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony to his credit. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later. I'd always liked the Major -- he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him. He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he'd been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year -- and then he wanted to know what I'd been doing since Venus and what my plans were. "No particular plans," I told him. "Why?" much do you weigh, Peter?" I told him one-thirty-five. "That much!" he said. "Be damned. Well, there can't be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?" "You should know," I said. "Venus was no icebox." "No, I mean real heat." Then I began to get it. "You're planning a trip." "That's right. A hot trip." He grinned at me. "Might be dangerous, too." "What trip?" "Brightside of Mercury," the Major said. I whistled cautiously. "Aphelion?" He threw his head back. "Why try a Crossing at Aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it." He leaned across me eagerly. "I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he's got Mercury. Until then, nobody's got Mercury. I want Mercury -- but I'll need help getting it." I'd thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself. It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell's Crossing, but someday somebody would cross it. I wanted to be along. the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumpingoff place. The setup there wasn't very extensive -- a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson's crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar 'scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. Twijight Lab wasn't particularly interested in the Brightside, of course -- the Sun was Sanderson's baby and he'd picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He'd chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits # F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at# F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury's wobble, the twilight zone I between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about # miles wide, so the temperature only varies # to # degrees with the libration. The Solar 'scope could take that much change and they'd get good clear observation of the Sun for about # out of the # days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sur when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations. Sanderson did. He thought we'd lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like. Stone was a youngster -- hardly #, I'd say -- but he'd been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn't care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy. It didn't matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don't go asking people in this game why they do it -- they're liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test. plenty of funds -- tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around -- our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges. The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, "Have you heard anything from Mclvers?" "Who's he?" Stone wanted to know. "He'll be joining us. He's a good man -- got quite a name for climbing, back home." The Major turned to me. "You've probably heard of him." I'd heard plenty of stories about Ted Mclvers and I wasn't too happy to hear that he was joining us. "Kind of a daredevil, isn't he?" "Maybe. He's lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We'll need plenty of both." "Have you ever worked with him?" I asked. "No. Are you worried?" "Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck." The Major laughed. "I don't think we need to worry about Mclvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we're going to need each other too much to do any fooling around." He turned back to the supply list. "Meanwhile, let's get this stuff listed and packed. We'll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days." Two days later, Mclvers hadn't arrived. The Major didn't say much about it: Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course. "This range here," the Major said as we crowded around the board, "is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator -- not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting."  told me there was probably constant surface activity." The Major shrugged. "Well, it's treacherous, there's no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east -- " It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside -- even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized. But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much -- the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millenia ago -- but there was C# # , and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide. The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there. Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He'd missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn't seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn't see why everyone should get so excited. He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber's -- half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about. Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and Mclvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest. finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, "was your first big mistake." Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. "Mclvers?" "Of course." Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. "There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn't seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren't our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next." Baron nodded in agreement. "What kind of suits did you have?" "The best insulating suits ever made," said Claney. "Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course -- at # degrees, it wouldn't take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere." "How about the Bugs?" "They were insulated, too, but we weren't counting on them too much for protection." "You weren't!" Baron exclaimed. "Why not?" "We'd be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we'd have to do a lot of forward work on foot." Claney smiled bitterly. "Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire." Baron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass as he set it down on the tablecloth. "Go on," he said tautly. "You started on schedule?" "Oh, yes," said Claney, "we started on schedule, all right. We just didn't quite end on schedule, and that was all. But I'm getting to that." He settled back in his chair and continued. light on a course due southeast with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we could cross an average of # miles a day, we could hit Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury's closest approach to the Sun -- which made Center the hottest part of the planet at the hottest it ever gets. The Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job was only half done -- we would still have to travel another # miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory's scout ship, approximately # days from the time we jumped off. That was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and time-consuming. Delays could  cost us our lives. We all knew that. The Major briefed us on details an hour before we left. "Peter, you'll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving you a hundred-yard lead. Mclvers, you'll have the job of dragging the pledges, so we'll have to direct your course pretty closely. Peter's job is to pick the passage at any given point. If there's any doubt of safe passage, we'll all explore ahead on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?" Mclvers and Stone exchanged glances. Mclvers said: "Jack and I were planning to change around. We figured he could take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility." T HE Major looked up sharply at Stone. "Do you buy that, Jack?" Stone shrugged. "I don't mind. Mac wanted -- " Mclvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. "It doesn't matter. I just feel better when I'm on the move. Does it make any difference?" "I guess it doesn't," said the Major. "Then you'll flank Peter along with me. Right?" "Sure, sure." Mclvers pulled at his lower lip. "Who's going to do the advance scouting?" "It sounds like I am," I cut in. "We want to keep the lead Bug light as possible." Mikuta nodded. "That's right. Peter's Bug is stripped down to the frame and wheels." Mclvers shook his head. "No, I mean the advance work. You need somebody out ahead -- four or five miles, at least -- to pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don't you?" He stared at the Major. "I mean, how can we tell what sort of a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up ahead?" "That's what we have the charts for," the Major said sharply"Charts! I'm talking about detail work. We don't need to worry about the major topography. It's the little faults you can't see on the pictures that can kill us." He tossed the charts down excitedly. "Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column. I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws. Then -- " "No dice," the Major broke in. "But why not? We could save ourselves days!" "I don't care what we could save. We stay together. When we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man alone -- anytime, anyplace." Mclvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he gave a sullen nod. "Okay. If you say so." "Well, I say so and I mean it. I don't want any fancy stuff. We're going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together. Got that?" Mclvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and we nodded, too. "All right," he said slowly. "Now that we've got it straight, let's go." thing else about that trek, I'll never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of the Twilight Lab. I moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the Major and Mclvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them, Stone dragged the sledges. Even at only # per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for the first # miles. I kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out the track the early research teams had made out into the edge of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson's little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to bite. We didn't feel the heat so much those first days out. We saw it. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable # F. inside our suits, but our eyes watched that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace. We drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks. The sun-shield cut the temperature down # or # degrees, for whatever help that was. And then we ate from the forward sledge -- sucking through tubes -- protein, carbohydrates, bulk gelatin, vitamins. The Major measured water out with an iron hand, because we'd have drunk ourselves into nephritis in a week otherwise. We were constantly, unceasingly thirsty. Ask the physiologists and psychiatrists why -- they can give you half a dozen interesting reasons -- but all we knew, or cared about, was that it happened to be so. We didn't sleep the first few stops, as a consequence. Our eyes burned in spite of the filters and we had roaring headaches, but we couldn't sleep them off. We sat around looking at each other. Then Mclvers would say how good a beer would taste, and off we'd go. We'd have butchered our grandmothers for one ice-cold bottle of beer. I began to get my bearings at the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made Earth's old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden. Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge, with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous gases. It was a hot, barren hell-hole, no place for any man to go, but the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there, so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible. Yet we knew that even the land might have been conquered before, except for that Sun. We'd fought absolute cold before and won. We'd never fought heat like this and won. The only worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun itself. Brightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would get us. That was the bargain. I learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods. The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved onto the slope of a range of ragged craters that ran south and east. This range had shown no activity since the first landing on Mercury forty years before, but beyond it there were active cones. Yellow fumes rose from the craters constantly; their sides were shrouded with heavy ash. We couldn't detect a wind, but we knew there was a hot, sulfurous breeze sweeping in great continental tides across the face of the planet. Not enough for erosion, though. The craters rose up out of jagged gorges, huge towering spears of rock and rubble. Below were the vast yellow flatlands, smoking and hissing from the gases beneath the crust. Over everything was gray dust -- silicates and salts, pumice and limecrevices and declivities -- offering a soft, treacherous surface for the Bug's pillow tires. I learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly, at first. Too smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to think so, too. ginning to grate on our nerves. He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route now and then, never far, but a little further each time. Jack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with each stop, mofe reserved and apprehensive. I didn't like it, but I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive enough myself; I just managed to hide it better. And every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the end of an eight-hour trek. But it took one of those side trips of Mclvers' to deliver the penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we heard a sharp cry through our earphones. I wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand horrible pictures racing through our minds... We found him stand stock-still, pointing down the gorge and, for once, he didn't have anything to say. It was the wreck of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-truck model of the sort that hadn't been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the fiberglass helmets. This was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on their Brightside Crossing. out, the terrain began to change. It looked the same, but every now and then it felt different. On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch; I gunned my motor and nothing happened. I could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs, thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash. I picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous. I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed McIvers' scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn't like it. One error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn't thinking much about the others. I was worried about me, plenty worried. I kept thinking, better Mclvers should go than me. It wasn't healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn't get the thought out of my mind. It was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in the Bug again, we moved still more slowly -- edging out on a broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks -- winding back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on solid rock. I couldn't see far ahead, because of the yellow haze rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I Saw a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond a deep crack. I let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved fifty yards to the left, then back to the right. There was only one place that looked like a possible crossing; a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the ledge shift over a few feet. The Major's voice sounded in my ears. "How about it, Peter?" "I don't know. This crust is on roller skates," I called back. "How about that ledge?" I hesitated. "I'm scared of it, Major. Let's backtrack and try to find a way around." There was a roar of disgust in my earphones and Mclvers' Bug suddenly lurched forward. It rolled down past me, picked up speed, with Mclvers hunched behind the wheel like a race driver. He was heading past me straight for the gray ledge.L" throat; I heard the Major take a huge breath and roar: "My God, Mac, stop that thing, you fool!" and then Mclvers' Bug was out on the ledge, lumbering across like a juggernaut. The ledge jolted as the tires struck it; for a horrible moment, it seemed to be sliding out from under the machine. And then the Bug was across in a cloud of dust, and I heard Mclvers' voice in my ears, shouting in glee. "Come on, you slowpokes. It'll hold you!" Something unprintable came through the earphones as the Major drew up alongside me and moved his Bug out on the ledge slowly and over to the other side. Then he said, "Take it slow, Peter. Then give Jack a hand with the sledges." His voice sounded tight as a wire. Ten minutes later, we were on the other side of the cleft. The Major checked the whole column; then he turned on Mclvers angrily. "One more trick like that," he said, "and I'll strap you to a rock and leave you. Do you understand me? One more time -- " Mclvers' voice was heavy with protest. "Good Lord, if we leave it up to Claney, he'll have us out here forever! Any blind fool could see that that ledge would hold." "I saw it moving," I shot back at him. "All right, all right, so you've  got good eyes. Why all the fuss? We got across, didn't we? But I say we've got to have a little nerve and use it once in a while if we're ever going to get across this lousy hotbox." "We need to use a little judgment, too," the Major snapped. "All right, let's roll. But if you think I was joking, you just try me out once." He let it soak in for a minute. Then he geared his Bug on around to my flank again. At the stopover, the incident wasn't mentioned again, but the Major drew me aside just as I was settling down for sleep. "Peter, I'm worried," he said slowly. "Mclvers? Don't worry. He's not as reckless as he seems -- just impatient. We are over a hundred miles behind schedule and we're moving awfully slow. We only made forty miles this last drive." The Major shook his head. "I don't mean Mclvers. I mean the kid." "Jack? What about him?" "Take a look." over near the tractor -- away from the rest of us -- and he was lying on his back, but he wasn't asleep. His whole body was shaking, convulsively. I saw him grip an outcropping of rock hard. I walked over and sat down beside him. "Get your water all right?" I said. He didn't answer. He just kept on shaking. "Hey, boy," I said. "What's the trouble?" "It's hot," he said, choking out the words. "Sure it's hot, but don't let it throw you. We're in really good shape." "We're not," he snapped. "We're in rotten shape, if you ask me. We're not going to make it, do you know that? That crazy fool's going to kill us for sure -- " All of a sudden, he was bawling like a baby. "I'm scared -- I shouldn't be here -- I'm scared. What am I trying to prove by coming out here, for God's sake? I'm some kind of hero or something? I tell you I'm scared -- " "Look," I said. "Mikuta's scared, I'm scared. So what? We'll make it, don't worry. And nobody's trying to be a hero." "Nobody but Herb Stone," he said bitterly. He shook himself and gave a tight little laugh. "Some hero, eh?" "We'll make it," I said. "Sure," he said finally. "Sorry. I'll be okay." I rolled over, but waited until he was good and quiet. Then I tried to sleep, but I didn't sleep too well. I kept thinking about that ledge. I'd known from the look of it what it was; a zinc slough of the sort Sanderson had warned us about, a wide sheet of almost pure zinc that had been thrown up white-hot from below, quite recently, just waiting for oxygen or sulfur to rot it through. I knew enough about zinc to know that at these temperatures it gets brittle as glass. Take a chance like Mclvers had taken and the whole sheet could snap like a dry pine board. But it wasn't Mclvers' fault that it hadn't. back at the wheel. We were hardly moving at all. The ragged surface was almost impassable -- great jutting rocks peppered the plateau; ledges crumbled the moment my tires touched them; long, open canyons turned into lead-mires or sulfur pits. A dozen times I climbed out of the Bug to prod out an uncertain area with my boots and pikestaff. Whenever I did, Mclvers piled out behind me, running ahead like a schoolboy at the fair, then climbing back again red-faced and panting, while we moved the machines ahead another mile or two. Time was pressing us now and Mclvers wouldn't let me forget it. We had made only about # miles in six driving periods, so we were about a hundred miles or even more behind schedule. "We're not going to make it," Mclvers would complain angrily. "That Sun's going to be out to aphelion by the time we hit the Center -- " "Sorry, but I can't take it any faster," I told him. I was getting good and mad. I knew what he wanted, but didn't dare let him have it. I was scared enough pushing the Bug out on those ledges, even knowing that at least I was making the decisions. Put him in the lead and we wouldn't last for eight hours. Our nerves wouldn't take it, at any rate, even if the machines would. Jack Stone looked up from the aluminum chart sheets. "Another hundred miles and we should hit a good stretch," he said. "Maybe we can make up distance there for a couple of days." The Major agreed, but Mclvers couldn't hold his impatience. He kept staring up at the Sun as if he had a personal grudge against it and stamped back and forth under the sunshield. "That'll be just fine," he said. "If we ever get that far, that is." We dropped it there, but the Major stopped me as we climbed aboard for the next run. "That guy's going to blow wide open if we don't move faster, Peter. I don't want him in the lead, no matter what happens. He's right though, about the need to make better time. Keep your head, but crowd your luck a little, okay?" "I'll try," I said. It was asking the impossible and Mikuta knew it. We were on a long downward slope that shifted and buckled all around us, as though there were a molten underlay beneath the crust; the slope was broken by huge crevasses, partly covered with dust and zinc sheeting, like a vast glacier of stone and metal. The outside temperature registered # F. and getting hotter. It was no place to start rushing ahead. half a dozen shaky passages, edging slowly out on flat zinc ledges, then toppling over and across. It seemed easy for a while and we made progress. We hit an even stretch and raced ahead. And then I quickly jumped on my brakes and jerked the Bug to a halt in a cloud of dust. I'd gone too far. We were out on a wide, flat sheet of gray stuff, apparently solid -- until I'd suddenly caught sight of the crevasse beneath in the corner of m eye. It was an overhanging shell that trembled under me as I stopped. Mclvers' voice was in my ear. "What's the trouble now, Claney?" "Move back!" I shouted. "It can't hold us!" "Looks solid enough from here." "You want to argue about it? It's too thin, it'll snap. Move back!" I started edging back down the ledge. I heard Mclvers swear; then I saw his Bug start to creep outward on the shelf. Not fast or reckless, this time, but slowly, churning up dust in a gentle cloud behind him. I just stared and felt the blood rush to my head. It seemed so hot I could hardly breathe as he edged out beyond me, further and further -- I think I felt it snap before I saw it. My own machine gave a sickening lurch and a long black crack appeared across the shelf -- and widened. Then the ledge began to upend. I heard a scream as Mclvers' Bug rose up and up and then crashed down into the crevasse in a thundering slide of rock and shattered metal. I just stared for a full minute, I think. I couldn't move until I heard Jack Stone groan and the Major shouting, "Claney! I couldn't see -- what happened?" "It snapped on him, that's what happened," I roared. I gunned my motor, edged forward toward the fresh broken edge of the shelf. The crevasse gaped; I couldn't see any sign of the machine. Dust was still billowing up blindingly from below. We stood staring down, the three of us. I caught a glimpse of Jack Stone's face through his helmet. It wasn't pretty. "Well," said the Major heavily, "that's that." "I guess so." I felt the way Stone looked. "Wait," said Stone. "I heard something." He had. It was a cry in the earphones -- faint, but unmistakable. "Mac!" The Major called. "Mac, can you hear me?" "Yeah, yeah. I can hear you." The voice was very weak. "Are you all right?" "I don't know. Broken leg, I think. It's -- hot." There was a long pause. Then: "I think my cooler's gone out." f I "HE Major shot me a glance, then turned to Stone. "Get a cable from the second sledge fast. He'll fry alive if we don't get him out of there. Peter, I need you to lower me. Use the tractor winch." I lowered him; he stayed down only a few moments. When I hauled him up, his face was drawn. "Still alive," he panted. "He won't be very long, though." He hesitated for just an instant. "We've got to make a try." "I don't like this ledge," I said. "It's moved twice since I got out. Why not back off and lower him a cable?" "No good. The Bug is smashed and he's inside it. We'll need torches and I'll need one of you to help." He looked at me and then gae Stone a long look. "Peter, you'd better come." "Wait," said Stone. His face was very white. "Let me go down with you." "Peter is lighter." "I'm not so heavy. Let me go down." "Okay, if that's the way you want it." The Major tossed him a torch. "Peter, check these hitches and lower us slowly. If you see any kind of trouble, anything, cast yourself free and back off this thing, do you understand? This whole ledge may go." I nodded. "Good luck." They went over the ledge. I let the cable down bit by bit until it hit two hundred feet and slacked off. "How does it look?" I shouted. "Bad," said the Major. "We'll have to work fast. This whole side of the crevasse is ready to crumble. Down a little more." Minutes passed without a sound. I tried to relax, but I couldn't. Then I felt the ground shift, and the tractor lurched to the side. The Major shouted, "It's going, Peter -- pull back!" and I threw the tractor into reverse, jerked the controls as the tractor rumbled off the shelf. The cable snapped, coiled up in front like a broken clockspring. The whole surface under me was shaking wildly now; ash rose in huge gray clouds. Then, with a roar, the whole shelf lurched and slid sideways. It teetered on the edge for seconds before it crashed into the crevasse, tearing the side wall down with it in a mammoth slide. I jerked the tractor to a halt as the dust and flame billowed up. They were gone -- all three of them, Mclvers and the Major and Jack Stone -- buried under a thousand tons of rock and zinc and molten lead. There wasn't any danger of anybody ever finding their bones. finishing his drink, rubbing his scarred face as he looked across at Baron. Slowly, Baron's grip relaxed on the chair arm. "You got back," he said. Claney nodded. "I got back, sure. I had the tractor and the sledges. I had seven days to drive back under that yellow Sun. I had plenty of time to think." "You took the wrong man along," Baron said. "That was your mistake. Without him you would have made it." "Never." Claney shook his head. "That's what I was thinking the first day or so -- that it was Mclvers' fault, that he was to blame. But that isn't true. He was wild, reckless and had lots of nerve." "But his judgment was bad!" "It couldn't have been sounder. We had to keep to our schedule even if it killed us, because it would positively kill us if we didn't." "But a man like that -- " "A man like Mclvers was necessary. Can't you see that? It was the Sun that beat us, that surface. Perhaps we were licked the very day we started." Claney leaned across the table, his eyes pleading. "We didn't realize that, but it was true. There are places that men can't go, conditions men can't tolerate. The others had to die to learn that. I was lucky, I came back. But I'm trying to tell you what I found out -- that nobody will ever make a Brightside Crossing." "We will," said Baron. "It won't be a picnic, but we'll make it." "But suppose you do," said Claney, suddenly. "Suppose I'm all wrong, suppose you do make it. Then what? What comes next?" "The Sun," said Baron. Claney nodded slowly. "Yes. That would be it, wouldn't it?" He laughed. "Good-by, Baron. Jolly talk and all that. Thanks for listening." Baron caught his wrist as he started to rise. "Just one question more, Claney. Why did you come here?" "To try to talk you out of killing yourself," said Claney. "You're a liar," said Baron. Claney stared down at him for a long moment. Then he crumpled in the chair. There was defeat in his pale blue eyes and something else. "Well?" Peter Claney spread his hands, a helpless gesture. "When do you leave, Baron? I want you to take me along." # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. I  tion readers! Use your sophisticated understanding of Science Fiction to breach the Iron Curtain. This is a must for every student of Science Fiction as well as an amazing new experience for the general reader. Hard cover, nine complete stories, eight full color plates. Send only # cash, check or money order to: P. Tailer, # East #th Street, New York City #, New York. #S The Dwindling Years He didn't expect to be last -- but neither did he anticipate the horror of being the first! years of habit carried the chairman of Exodus Corporation through the morning ritual of crossing the executive floor. Giles made the expected comments, smiled the proper smiles and greeted his staff by the right names, but it was purely automatic. Somehow, thinking had grown difficult in the mornings recently. Inside his private office, he dropped all pretense and slumped into the padding of his chair, gasping for breath and feeling his heart hammering in his chest. He'd been a fool to come to work, he realized. But with the Procyon shuttle arriving yesterday, there was no telling what might turn up. Besides, that fool of a medicist had sworn the shot would cure any allergy or asthma. Giles heard his secretary come in, but it wasn't until the smell of the coffee reached his nose that he looked up. She handed him a filled cup and set the carafe down on the age-polished surface of the big desk. She watched solicitously as he drank. "That bad, Arthur?" she asked. "Just a little tired," he told the coffee stronger than usual and it seemed to cut through some of the thickness in his head. "I guess I'm getting old, Amanda." She smiled dutifully at the time-worn joke, but he knew she wasn't fooled. She'd cycled to middle age four times in her job and she probably knew him better than he knew himself -- which wouldn't be hard, he thought. He'd hardly recognized the stronger in the mirror as he tried to shave. His normal thinness had looked almost gaunt and there were hollows in his face and circles under his eyes. Even his hair had seemed thinner, though that, of course, was impossible. "Anything urgent on the Procyon shuttle?" he asked as she continue staring at him with worried eyes. guiltily and turned to the incoming basket. "Mostly drugs for experimenting. A personal letter for you, relayed from some place I never heard of. And one of the super-light missiles! They found it drifting half a light-year out and captured it. Jordan's got a report on it and he's going crazy. But if you don't feel well -- " "I'm all right!" he told her sharply. Then he steadied himself and managed to smile. "Thanks for the coffee, Amanda." She accepted dismissal reluctantly. When she was gone, he sat gazing at the report from Jordan at Research. For eighty years now, they'd been sending out the little ships that vanished at greater than the speed of light, equipped with every conceivable device to make them return automatically after taking pictures of wherever they arrived. So far, none had ever returned or been located. This was the first hope they'd found that the century-long trips between stars in the ponderous shuttles might be ended and he should have been filled with excitement at Jordan's hasty preliminary report. He leafed through it. The little ship apparently had been picked up by accident when it almost collided with a Sirius-local ship. Scientists there had puzzled over it, reset it and sent it back. The two white rats on it had still been alive. Giles dropped the report wearily and picked up the personal message that had come on the shuttle. He fingered the microstrip inside while he drank another coffee, and finally pulled out the microviewer. There were three frames to the message, he saw with some surprise. He didn't need to see the signature on the first projection. Only his youngest son would have sent an elaborate tercentenary greeting verse -- one that would arrive ninety years too late! Harry had been born just before Earth passed the drastic birth limitation act and his mother had spoiled him. He'd even tried to avoid the compulsory emigration draft and stay on with his mother. It had been the bitter quarrels over that which had finally broken Giles' fifth marriage. Oddly enough, the message in the next frame showed none of that. Harry had nothing but praise for the solar system where he'd been sent. He barely mentioned being married on the way or his dozen children, but filled most of the frame with glowing description and a plea for his father to join him there! to the third frame, which showed a group picture of the family in some sort of vehicle, against the background of an alien but attractive world. He had no desire to spend ninety years cooped up with a bunch of callow young emigrants, even in one of the improved Exodus shuttles. And even if Exodus ever got the super-light drive working, there was no reason he should give up his work. The discovery that men could live practically forever had put an end to most family ties; sentiment wore thin in half a century -- which wasn't much time now, though it had once seemed long enough. Strange how the years seemed to get shorter as their number increased. There'd been a song once -- something about the years dwindling down. He groped for the lines and couldn't remember. Drat it! Now he'd probably lie awake most of the night again, trying to recall them. The outside line buzzed musically, flashing Research's number. Giles grunted in irritation. He wasn't ready to face Jordan yet. But he shrugged and pressed the button. The intense face that looked from the screen was frowning as Jordan's eyes seemed to sweep around the room. He was still young -- one of the few under a hundred who'd escaped deportation because of special ability -- and patience was still foreign to him. Then the frown vanished as an expression of shock replaced it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation. If he looked that bad -- But Jordan wasn't looking at him; the man's interest lay in the projected picture from Harry, across the desk from the communicator. "Antigravity!" His voice was unbelieving as he turned his head to face the older man. "What world is that?" Giles forced his attention on the picture again and this time he noticed the vehicle shown. It was enough like an old model Earth conveyance to pass casual inspection, but it floated wheellessly above the ground. Faint blur lines indicated it had been moving when the picture was taken. "One of my sons -- " Giles started to answer. "I could find the star's designation... Jordan cursed harshly. "So we can send a message on the shuttle, begging for their secret in a couple of hundred years! While a hundred other worlds make a thousand major discoveries they don't bother reporting! Can't the Council see anything?" Giles had heard it all before. Earth was becoming a backwater world; no real progress had been made in two centuries; the young men were sent out as soon as their first fifty years of education were finished, and the older men were too conservative for really new thinking. There was a measure of truth in it, unfortunately. "They'll slow up when their populations fill," Giles repeated his old answers. "We're still ahead in medicine and we'll get the other discoveries eventually, without interrupting the work of making the Earth fit for our longevity. We can wait. We'll have to." at him with the strange puzzled look Giles had seen too often lately. "Damn it, haven't you read my report? We know the superlight drive works! That missile reached Sirius in less than ten days. We can have the secret of this antigravity in less than a year! We -- " "Wait a minute." Giles felt the thickness pushing back at his mind and tried to fight it off. He'd only skimmed the report, but this made no sense. "You mean you can calibrate your guiding devices accurately enough to get a missile where you want it and back?" "What?" Jordan's voice rattled the speaker. "Of course not! It took two accidents to get the thing back to us -- and with a half-light-year miss that delayed it about twenty years before the Procyon shuttle heard its signal. Pre-setting a course may take centuries, if we can ever master it. Even with Sirius expecting the missiles and ready to cooperate. I mean the big ship. We've had it drafted for building long enough; now we can finish it in three months. We know the drive works. We know it's fast enough to reach Procyon in two weeks. We even know life can stand the trip. The rats were unharmed." Giles shook his head at what the other was proposing, only partly believing it. "Rats don't have minds that could show any real damage such as the loss of power to rejuvenate. We can't put human pilots into a ship with our drive until we've tested it more thoroughly, Bill, even if they could correct for errors on arrival. Maybe if we put in stronger signaling transmitters... "Yeah. Maybe in two centuries we'd have a through route charted to Sirius. And we still wouldn't have proved it safe for human pilots. Mr. Giles, we've got to have the big ship. All we need is one volunteer!" It occurred to Giles then that the man had been too fired with the idea to think. He leaned back, shaking his head again wearily. "Ajl right, Bill. Find me one volunteer. Or how about you? Do you really want to risk losing the rest of your life rather than waiting a couple more centuries until we know it's safe? If you do, I'll order the big ship." Jordan opened his mouth and for a second Giles' heart caught in a flux of emotions as the man's offer hovered op his lips. Then the engineer shut his mouth slowly. The belligerence ran out of him. He looked sick, for he had no answer. ' chance for near eternity against such a relatively short wait. Heroism had belonged to those who knew their days were numbered, anyhow. "Forget it, Bill," Giles advised. "It may take longer, but eventually we'll find a way. With time enough, we're bound to. And when we do, the ship will be ready." The engineer nodded miserably and clicked off. Giles turned from the blank screen to stare out of the windows, while his hand came up to twist at the lock of hair over his forehead. Eternity! They had to plan and build for it. They couldn't risk that plan for short-term benefits. Usually it was too easy to realize that, and the sight of the solid, timeenduring buildings outside should have given him a sense of security. Today, though, nothing seemed to help. He felt choked, imprisoned, somehow lost; the city beyond the window blurred as he studied it, and he swung the chair back so violently that his hand jerked painfully on the forelock he'd been twisting. Then he was staring unbelievingly at the single white hair that was twisted with the dark ones between his fingers. Like an automaton, he bent forward, his other hand groping for the mirror that should be in one of the drawers. The dull pain in his chest sharpened and his breath was hoarse in his throat, but he hardly noticed as he found the mirror and brought it up. His eyes focused reluctantly. There were other white strands in his dark hair. The mirror crashed to the floor as he staggered out of the office. It was only two blocks to Giles' residence club, but he had to stop twice to catch his breath and fight against the pain that clawed at his chest. When he reached the wood-paneled lobby, he was barely able to stand. Dubbins was at his side almost at once, with a handunder his arm to guide him toward his suite. "Let me help you, sir," Dubbins suggested, in the tones Giles hadn't heard since the man had been his valet, back when it was still possible to find personal servants. Now he managed the club on a level of quasi-equality with the members. For the moment, though, he'd slipped back into the old ways. on his couch, partially undressed, with the pillows just right and a long drink in his hand. The alcohol combined with the reaction from his panic to leave him almost himself again. After all, there was nothing to worry about; Earth's doctors could cure anything. "I guess you'd better call Dr. Vincenti," he decided. Vincenti was a member and would probably be the quickest to get. Dubbins shook his head. "Dr. Vincenti isn't with us, sir. He left a year ago to visit a son in the Centauri system. There's a Dr. Cobb whose reputation is very good, sir." Giles puzzled over it doubtfully. Vincenti had been an oddly morose man the last few times he'd seen him, but that could hardly explain his taking a twenty-year shuttle trip for such a slim reason. It was no concern of his, though. "Dr. Cobb, then," he said. Giles heard the other man's voice on the study phone, too low for the words to be distinguishable. He finished the drink, feeling still better, and was sitting up when Dubbins came back. "Dr. Cobb wants you to come to his office at once, sir," he said, dropping to his knee to help Giles with his shoes. "I'd be pleased to drive you there." Giles frowned. He'd expected Cobb to come to him. Then he grimaced at his own thoughts. Dubbins' manners must have carried him back into the past; doctors didn't go in for home visits now -- they preferred to see their patients in the laboratories that housed their offices. If this kept on, he'd be missing the old days when he'd had a mansion and counted his wealth in possessions, instead of the treasures he could build inside himself for the future ahead. He was getting possitively childish! Yet he relished the feeling of having Dubbins drive his car. More than anything else, he'd loved being driven. Even after chauffeurs were a thing of the past, Harry had driven him around. Now he'd taken to walking, as so many others had, for even with modern safety measures so strict, there was always a small chance of some accident and nobody had any desire to spend the long future as a cripple. "I'll wait for you, sir," Dubbins, offered as they stopped beside the low, massive medical building. It was almost too much consideration. Giles nodded, got out and headed down the hall uncertainly. Just how bad did he look? Well, he'd soon find out. He located the directory and finally found the right office, its reception room wall covered with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had picked up in some three hundred years of practice. Giles felt better, realizing it wouldn't be one of the younger men. before the nurse could take over, and led Giles into a room with an old-fashioned desk and chairs that almost concealed the cabinets of equipment beyond. He listened as Giles stumbled out his story. Halfway through, the nurse took a blood sample with one of the little mosquito needles and the machinery behind the doctor began working on it. "Your friend told me about the gray hair, of course," Cobb said. At Giles' look, he smiled faintly. "Surely you didn't think people could miss that in this day and age? Let's see it." He inspected it and began making tests. Some were older than Giles could remember -- knee reflex, blood pressure, pulse and fluoroscope. Others involved complicated little gadgets that ran over his body, while meters bobbed and wiggled. The blood check came through and Cobb studied it, to go back and make further inspections of his own. At last he nodded slowly. "Hyper-catabolism, of course. I thought it might be. How long since you had your last rejuvenation? And who gave it?" "About ten years ago," Giles answered. He found his identity card and passed it over, while the doctor studied it. "My sixteenth." It wasn't going right. He could feel it. Some of the panic symptoms were returning; the pulse in his neck was pounding and his breath was growing difficult. Sweat ran down his sides from his armpit and he wiped his palms against his coat. "Any particular emotional strain when you were treated -- some major upset in your life?" Cobb asked. Giles thought as carefully as he could, but he remembered nothing like that. "You mean -- it didn't take? But I never had any trouble-, Doctor. I was one of lot of people couldn't rejuvenate at all, and I had no trouble even then." Cobb considered it, hesitated as if making up his mind to be frank against his better judgment. "I can't see any other explanation. You've got a slight case of angina -- nothing serious, but quite definite -- as well as other signs of aging. I'm afraid the treatment didn't take fully. It might have been some unconscious block on your part, some infection not diagnosed at the time, or even a fault in the treatment. That's pretty rare, but we can't neglect the possibility." and then smiled. "So we'll give you another treatment. Any reason you can't begin immediately?" Giles remembered that Dubbins was waiting for him, but this was more important. It hadn't been a joke about his growing old, after all. But now, in a few days, he'd be his old -- no, of course not -- his young self again! They went down the jiall to another office, where Giles waited outside while Cobb conferred with another doctor and technician, with much waving of charts. He resented every second of it. It was as if the almost forgotten specter of age stood beside him, counting the seconds. But at last they were through and he was led into the quiet rejuvenation room, where the clamps were adjusted about his head and the earpieces were fitted. The drugs were shot painlessly into his arm and the light-pulser was adjusted to his brain-wave pattern. It had been nothing like this his first time. Then it had required months of mental training, followed by crude mechanical and drug hypnosis for other months. Somewhere in every human brain lay the memory of what his cells had been like when he was young. Or perhaps it lay in the cells themselves, with the brain as only a linkage to it. They'd discovered that, and the fact that the mind could effect physical changes in the body. Even such things as cancer could be willed out of existence -- provided the brain could be reached far below the conscious level and forced to operate. There had been impossible faith cures for millenia -- cataracts removed from blinded eyes within minutes, even -- but finding the mechanism in the brain that worked those miracles had taken an incredible amount of study and finding a means of bringing it under control had taken even longer. Now they did it with dozens of mechanical aids in addition to the hypnotic instructions -- and did it usually in a single sitting, with the full transformation of the body taking less than a week after the treatment! But with all the equipment, it wasn't impossible for a mistake to happen. It had been no fault of his... he was sure of that... his mind was easy to reach... he could relax so easily... He came out of it without even a headache, while they were removing the probes, but the fatigue on the operator's face told him it had been a long and difficult job. He stretched experimentally, with the eternal unconscious expectation that he would find himself suddenly young again. Byt that, of course, was ridiculous. It took days for the mind to work on all the cells and to repair the damage of time. first office, where he was given an injection of some kind and another sample of his blood was taken, while the earlier tests were repeated. But finally the doctor nodded. "That's all for now, Mr. Giles. You might drop in tomorrow morning, after I've had a chance to complete my study of all this. We'll know by then whether you'll need more treatment. Ten o'clock okay?" "But I'll be all right?" Cobb smiled the automatic reassurance of his profession. "We haven't lost a patient in two hundred years, to my knowledge." "Thanks," said Giles. "Ten o'clock is fine." Dubbins was still waiting, reading a paper whose headlined feature carried a glowing account of the discovery of the super-light missile and what it might mean. He took a quick look at Giles and pointed to it. "Great work, Mr. Giles. Maybe we'll all get to see some of those other worlds yet." Then he studied Giles more carefully. "Everything's in good shape now, sir?" "The doctor says everything's going to be fine," Giles answered. It was then he realized for the first time that Cobb had said no such thing. A statement that lightning had never struck a house was no guarantee that it never would. It was an evasion meant to give such an impression. The worry nagged at him all the way back. Word had already gone around the club that he'd had some kind of attack and there were endless questions that kept it on his mind. And even when it had been covered and recovered, he could still sense the glances of the others, as if he were Vincenti in one of the man's more morose moods. He found a single table in the dining room and picked his way through the meal, listening to the conversation about him only when it was necessary because someone called across to him. Ordinarily, he was quick to support the idea of clubs in place of private families. A man here could choose his group and grow into them. Yet he wasn't swallowed by them, as he might be by a family. Giles had been living here for nearly a century now and he'd never regretted it. But tonight his own group irritated him. He puzzled over it, finding no real reason. Certainly they weren't forcing themselves on him. He remembered once when he'd had a cold, before they finally licked that; Harry had been a complete nuisance, running around with various nostrums, giving him no peace. Constant questions about how he felt, constant little looks of worry -- until he'd been ready to yell at the boy. In fact, he had. Funny, he couldn't picture really losing his temper here. Families did odd things to a man. the discussions after the dinner, but he'd heard them all before, except for one about the super-speed drive, and there he had no wish to talk until he could study the final report. He gave up at last and went to his own suite. What he needed was a good night's sleep after a little relaxation. Even that failed him, though. He'd developed one the finest chess collections in the world, but tonight it held no interest. And when he drew out his tools and tried working on the delicate, lovely jade for the set he was carving his hands seemed to be all thumbs. None of the other interests he'd developed through the years helped to add to the richness of living now. He gave it up and went to bed -- to have the fragment of that song pop into his head. Now there was no escaping it. Something about the years -- or was it days -- dwindling down to something or other. Could they really dwindle down? Suppose he couldn't rejuvenate all the way? He knew that there were some people who didn't respond as well as others. Sol Graves, for instance. He'd been fifty when he finally learned how to work with the doctors and they could only bring him back to about thirty, instead of the normal early twenties. Would that reduce the slice of eternity that rejuvenation meant? And what had happened to Sol? Or suppose it wasn't rejuvenation, after all; suppose something had gone wrong with him permanently? He fought that off, but he couldn't escape the nagging doubts at the doctor's words. He got up once to stare at himself in the mirror. Ten hours had gone by and there should have been some signs of improvement. He couldn't be sure, though, whether there were or not. He looked no better the next morning when he finally dragged himself up from the little sleep he'd managed to get. The hollows U'ere still there and the circles under his eyes. He searched for the gray in his hair, but the traitorous strands had been removed at the doctor's office and he could find no new ones. He looked into the dining room and then went by hastily. He wanted no solicitous glances this morning. Drat it, maybe he should move out. Maybe trying family life again would give him some new interests. Amanda probhim; she'd hinted at a date once. He stopped, shocked by the awareness that he hadn't been out with a woman for... He couldn't remember how long it had been. Nor why. "In the spring, a young man's fancy," he quoted to himself, and then shuddered. It hadn't been that kind of spring for him -- not this rejuvenation nor the last, nor the one before that. himself and partially succeeded, until he reached the doctor's office. Then it was no longer necessary to frighten himself. The wrongness was too strong, no matter how professional Cobb's smile! He didn't hear the preliminary words. He watched the smile vanish as the stack of reports came out. There was no nurse here now. The machines were quiet -- and all the doors were shut. Giles shook his head, interrupting the doctor's technical jargon. Now that he knew there was reason for his fear, it seemed to vanish, leaving a coldness that numbed him. "I'd rather know the whole truth," he said. His voice sounded dead in his ears. "The worst first. The rejuvenation...?" Cobb sighed and yet seemed relieved. "Failed." He stopped, and his hands touched the reports on his desk. "Completely," he added in a low, defeated tone. "But I thought that was impossible!" "So did I. I wouldn't believe it even yet -- but now I find it isn't the" first case. I spent the night at Medical Center going up the ranks until I found men who really know about it. And now I wish I hadn't." His voice ran down and he gathered himself together by an effort. "It's a shock to me, too, Mr. Giles. But -- well, to simplify it, no memory is perfect -- even cellular memory. It loses a little each time. And the effect is cumulative. It's like an asymptotic curve -- the further it goes, the steeper the curve. And -- well, you've passed too far." He faced away from Giles, dropping the reports into a drawer and locking it. "I wasn't supposed to tell you, of course. It's going to be tough enough when they're ready to let people know. But you aren't the first and you won't be the last, if that's any consolation. We've got a longer time scale than we used to have -- but it's in centuries, not in eons. For everybody, not just you." It was no consolation. Giles nodded mechanically. "I won't talk, of course. How -- how long?" Cobb spread his hands unhappily. "Thirty years, maybe. But we can make them better. Geriatric knowledge is still on record. We can fix the heart and all the rest. You'll be in good physical condition, better than your grandfather -- " "And then..." Giles couldn't pronounce the words. He'd grown old and he'd grow older. And eventually he'd die! An immortal man had suddenly found death hovering on his trail. The years had dwindled and gone, and only a few were left. He stood up, holding out his hand. "Thank you, Doctor," he said, and was surprised to find he meant it. The man had done all he could and had at least saved him the suspense of growing doubt and horrible eventual discovery. " looked up at the Sun and then at the buildings built to last for thousands of years. Their eternity was no longer a part of him. Even his car would outlast him. He climbed into it, still partly numbed, and began driving mechanically, no longer wondering about the dangers that might possibly arise. Those wouldn't matter much now. For a man who had thought of living almost forever, thirty years was too short a time to count. He was passing near the club and started to slow. Then he went on without stopping. He wanted no chance to have them asking questions he couldn't answer. It was none of their business. Dubbins had been kind -- but now Giles wanted no kindness. The street led to the office and he drove on. What else was there for him? There, at least, he could still fill his time with work -- work that might even be useful. In the future, men would need the super-light drive if they were to span much more of the Universe than now. And he could speed up the work in some ways still, even if he could never see its finish. It would be cold comfort but it was something. And he might keep busy enough to forget sometimes that the years were gone for him. Automatic habit carried him through the office again, to Amanda's desk, where her worry was still riding her. He managed a grin and somehow the right words came to his lips. "I saw the doctor, Amanda, so you can stop figuring ways to get me there." She smiled back suddenly, without feigning it. "Then you're all right?" "As all right as I'll ever be," he told her. "They tell me I'm just growing old." This time her laugh was heartier. He caught himself before he could echo her mirth in a different voice and went inside where she had the coffee waiting for him. Oddly, it still tasted good to him. The projection was off, he saw, wondering whether he'd left it on or not. He snapped the switch and saw the screen light up, with the people still in the odd, wheelless vehicle on the alien planet. OR A long moment, he stared at the picture without thinking, and then bent closer. Harry's face hadn't changed much. Giles had almost forgotten it, but there was still the same grin there. And his grandchildren had a touch of it, too. And of their grandfather's nose, he thought. Funny, he'd never seen even pictures of his other grandchildren. Family ties melted away too fast for interstellar travel. Y et there seemed to be no slackening of them in Harry's case, and somehow it looked like a family, rather than a mere group. A very pleasant family in a very pleasant world. He read Harry's note again, with its praise for the planet and its invitation. He wondered if Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation like that, before he left. Or had he even been one of those to whom the same report had been delivered by some doctor? It didn't matter, but it would explain things, at least. Twenty years to Centaurus, while the years dwindled down --  Then abruptly the line finished itself. "The years dwindle down to a precious few... he remembered. "A precious few." Those dwindling years had been precious once. He unexpectedly recalled his own grandfather holding him on an old knee and slipping him candy that was forbidden. The years seemed precious to the old man then. Amanda's voice came abruptly over the intercom. "Jordan wants to talk to you," she said, and the irritation was sharp in her voice. "He won't take no!" Giles shrugged and reached for the projector, to cut it off. Then, on impulse, he set it back to the picture, studying the group again as he switched on Jordan's wire. But he didn't wait for the hot words about whatever was the trouble. "Bill," he said, "start getting the big ship into production. I've found a volunteer." He'd been driven to it, he knew, as he watched the man's amazed face snap from the screen. From the first suspicion of his trouble, something inside him had been forcing him to make this decision. And maybe it would do no good. Maybe the ship would fail. But thirty years was a number a man could risk. If he made it, though... Well, he'd see those grandchildren of Ijis this year -- and Harry. Maybe he'd even tell Harry the truth, once they got done celebrating the reunion. And there'd be other grandchildren. With the ship, he'd have time enough to look them up. Plenty of time! Thirty years was a long time, when he stopped to think of it. for your information R epeatedly, in the past, I have had whole columns devoted exclusively to themes provoked by letters from my readers. This is another of these columns and the first theme I want to take up is that of "Greek Fire." Earlier this year, I received a letter from a reader in which I was asked whether anything is known about the composition of "Greek Fire." My correspondent wrote that a book printed in # -- presumably in England -- asserted that some statements about the feats and attributes of mythological and semi-mythological characters could probably be explained by 'the assumption that the hero used Greek Fire, "the composition of which is now lost." I replied that I could not judge the mythological implications (about which I feel somewhat doubtful), but that the composition of Greek Fire had never been lost and that it was certainly known in #, although the author of the book quoted evidently had not known where to look for it. He could, for example, have consulted the work "On Greek Fire" which Monsieur le professeur Reynaud and le Capitaine Fave had published in Paris in #. He could have found something about it in earlier English books on gunnery. He could even have come across fyr gregeys (Greek Fire) and the allied wylde-iyr (wildfire) in still older English romances. which one has become proverbial, indicate, there were two types: Greek Fire, which came first and was used on land for sieges as well as at sea in naval engagements, and wildfire, which came several centuries later and was used exclusively at sea, as far as we know, at any rate. That this later wildfire or seafire was promptly called Greek Fire, too -- especially by people who were not Greek themselves -- produced the first stumbling block of confusion. And for a long time there actually existed a wellkept secret about the sea-fire. The existence of such a secret was loudly advertised ("secret weapons" were everybody's favorite even in antiquity) and it is probably this much-mentioned fact that led to later generalizations about a "lost art." As regards the early Greek Fire, we have not only general and possibly exaggerated descriptions of its effectiveness but even an actual recipe. It was written about # b. c. by Aeneas the Tactician. Greek Fire, he said, consists of sulphur, pitch, incense, pine-wood and tow. No proportions being given, it is easy to see that the mixture ratio of the ingredients was by no means critical. The incense probably had some religious significance. As for the pinewood, a later commentator thought that the term actually meant charcoal from pine-wood, but personally I can't see any reason for this interpretation. Resinous pine-wood, probably whittled into shavings, sounds like a very logical companion for sulphur and pitch. Aeneas went on to say that this mixture was put into eggshaped wooden containers and heaved upon the decks of enemy ships after ignition. My guess is that these containers were purposely made weak to burst open upon striking. The next preserved recipe for Greek Fire is just seven centuries younger than the one just quoted, having been written down in # a.d. It can be found in De Re Militari by Vegetius. That the seven centuries had improved the mixture by way of much practice of "premeditated military arson" (to use the circumlocution of some German historians for the employment of incendiaries) can be seen from the list of ingredients. They were sulphur, rosin, bitumen and naphtha -- a mixture which would stump even welldrilled modern firefighters if they had nothing but water at their disposal to combat the blaze. Actually the Greek Fire of Vegetius was a much better incendiary than the Greek Fire of the much later collection of military recipes that goes under the name of Liber ignium, or "Fire Book." is one of the oldest in the "Fire Book," which dates it at around # a.d. The ingredients listed are the usual sulphur and pitch, to which petroleum and sarcocolla (a tree gum) were added. Further ingredients were something called Oil of Gemma, tartarum or cream of tartar and sal coctus, which is salt produced by the evaporation of sea water. The sal coctus especially could not have done anything for the mixture but slow down combustion and one may be tempted to guess at some magical reason for its presence. However, the military historian S. J. von Romocki has pointed out that there may have been a rational reason involved, rational though mistaken. Salt from the sea is essentially ordinary salt with a good dose of "impurities" and when you add salt to a fire the flame is colored yellow because of the sodium in the salt. Colonel von Romocki had reason to believe that the people of the eleventh century thought that a brighter flame was also a hotter flame and since the salt brightened the fire, it was thought to be a useful addition. It may even have been a trade secret for a long time. The real and useful secret I mentioned earlier came into being about midway in time between the straightforward recipe of Vegetius and the far more complicated and less effective one of the Liber ignium. The secret was in the hands of the Christian emperors of Constantinople, who confused many a later high-school boy by their habit of referring to themselves as "Romans." In the printed editions of their own writings, it is strange to see somebody proclaim in Greek type that "we Romans" did this or that. But aside from this minor item, everything is clear and logical. The Chronography of Theophanes, written #-# A. D., states in so many words that in # the architect Kallinikos fled from Heliopolis in Syria "to the Romans" (read: Constantinople) and compounded a sea-fire which enabled those Romans to burn a large number of Moslem ships at Cyzicus during the first Moslem siege of Constantinople. The emperor, Constantine corroborated the story by writing: "Be it known that under the reign of Constantine Pogonatos one Kallinikos, who fled from Heliopolis to the Romans, prepared a wet-fire to be discharged from siphons, by means of which the Romans burned the fleet of the Saracens at Cyzicus and gained the victory." Since the reign of emperor Constantine Pogonatos lasted from # to #, the flight of Kallinikos probably did take place in #. This was just one year before the beginning of the first siege of Constantinople, which lasted from # to #. Because of this close proximity of the dates, it seems likely that Kallinikos did not make his invention after his arrival in Constantinople but brought the secret with him. It must have been his own and not just something known in Heliopolis, because the other side never learned it. E mperor Constantine Porphyrogenetos still kept a certain amount of "security" on his best weapon, for he advised his son as follows: "If any persons venture to inquire of you how this fire is prepared, withstand them, and dismiss them with some such answer as this: that the secret was revealed by an angel to the first Emperor Constantine." The first Constantine ruled from # to # and was, of course, completely innocent of the whole case, but some later historians, reading the passage inattentively, took it seriously and tried to push events back by more than three centuries. But as the British Lt.-Col. Henry W. L. Hime remarked about the seventh Constantine's advice to his son: "this passage merely proves that the Emperor was mendacious and his people superstitious." The wet-fire or sea-fire -- later called wildfire -- did serve the "Romans" well. It won the naval battle which lifted the first siege of Constantinople for them and it did the same in the second siege in # to #. It repulsed a Russian fleet under Igor in #I and won them a decisive victory when the Russians tried again in #. What was this substance? That the secret of Kallinikos was the incorporation of saltpeter into "ordinary" Greek Fire seemed an irresistable conclusion to quite a number of later writers, especially those who had no firsthand experience with black gunpowder. The reason for their belief was that one of the original sources on sea-fire, the book of Princess Anna Komnena, mentions that it burned with much smoke and a thunderous noise, something that oil vapor can do nicely. What the "saltpeter writers" overlooked or did not understand were several simple facts. Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenetos as well as Anna Komnena emphasize that the sea-fire was projected from wooden siphons and we can get an idea of what a siphon was if we know that this word ordinarily means the apparatus with which water was thrown into a conflagration. Because of this method of projecting it, the seafire must have been a liquid. It is stated furthermore that it burned on the surface of the water and if you throw slow-burning gunpowder into water you don't get any result worth mentioning -- few substances are as sensitive to moisture as black gunpowder. Moreover, if the Byzantine "procurement service" -- whatever its proper name may have been -- had bought large quantities of an entirely novel substance, namely saltpeter, this could not have stayed a secret for any length of time. It had to be something that did not arouse curiosity because it was well known and used for other purposes, too. And it had to be something that would sustain combustion in spite of the sea water and even cause combustion with the aid of the water. tect Kallinikos left Heliopolis to join "the Romans," an improvement on the well-known Greek Fire had taken place. Pliny the Elder, living in Rome in the first century A. D., already knew that quicklime, when wetted, produces a temperature high enough to ignite easily inflammable substances such as naptha. Around the year #, a recipe for a quicklime-asphalt mixture for military uses in sieges and such was actually written down, advising the artisan to prepare this mixture "in the heat of the noonday sun." Two such recipes can still be found in the Liber ignium -- one names sulphur, quicklime and turpentine, the other substitutes oil for the turpentine -- and another book of the same period contains a recipe listing sulphur, quicklime, naptha, wax and oil. But quicklime could not have been the secret of Kallinikos. In the first place, it was not a secret in his time. In the second place, a rather large quantity of quicklime is needed to produce ignition of an inflammable substance, more quicklime than could be pumped through a fire hose. There is little doubt that the liquid directed at the enemy through the "siphon" was a mixture of petroleum, oil and naphtha, but what ignited it? No satisfactory answer to that question was given until about #, when the English professor W. R. E. Hodgkinson of the Ordnance College in Woolwich got in touch with his compatriot Henry W. L. Hime after having read the latter's book on the origin of gunpowder and ammunition. Professor Hodgkinson pointed out that there is a substance which could ignite such an incendiary liquid at sea even when present in only small quantities. This substance is phosphide of calcium. It not only meets the technical requirements but also what might be called the historical requirements. It would have been a novel substance at the time, known only to the man who happened to stumble across it. It could have been kept secret because rather small quantities were required and because no unusual materials were needed to make it. It can be made of lime, bones and urine, all three inconspicuous and all three much used by alchemists for their experiments. In a manner of speaking, the secret of the sea-fire is still a secret, for nobody seems to ever have written it down. But Professor Hodgkinson's suggestion can be accepted as the solution of the problem without any reservations. Calcium phosphide was not "known," but could have been found by dabbling in alchemy. Quite likely, several people came across it at one time or another. Kallinikos, however, could visualize a use for it when he did. reader in Canada, is about as far removed thematically from the earlier question as is possible, but there is one connecting link -- it, too, is prompted by a statement in an old book. An explorer, returning from Africa, wrote that he had been assured by Ethiopians as well as white settlers that the claws of lions were poisonous, for wounds caused by such claws tended to "inflame" and to be very slowhealing, often breaking open again months later. My correspondent concluded correctly that the idea -- accepting the statement itself as being substantially true -- was based on a confusion between poison and infection. But he wanted to know whether any vertebrates other than snakes and the two versions of the Gila monster actually carry poison. The answer is not as simple as it might look at first glance. Among the amphibians, for example, there is no known case of poison glands connected with hollow or grooved fangs, which is what one usually thinks of after a mention of venomous snakes. But various toads produce a substance in skin glands that can raise blisters on human skin. There is no real danger and susceptibility seems to vary within fantastic limits, most people having very little of it. But strictly speaking, it is a poison. And one South American tree frog, beautifully sheathed in shiny green and golden-yellow skin, does produce a poison in its skin glands which makes it dangerous to the touch. The South American Indians actually use the frog's skin exudation to poison their arrows. In the classes above the amphibians and reptiles, examples of poison become so rare that they are surprises rather than examples and even a zoologist may not think at once of the one I have chiefly in mind. True, there is no venomous bird, although somebody once spoke of "the hawk's venomous glare," but it is different with the mammals. One whole group of them has glands producing a strongly venomous substance, even though this is not possibly a weapon. members of the lowest subclass of the mammals, the monotremes of Australia and New Guinea, better known as platypus and echidna. The males of these animals carry on their hind legs a spur, rather similar in appearance and position to the spur of a rooster. It is smaller in size and, unlike the rooster's spur, it is movable. And it has a fine canal, so narrow that a human hair can be passed through it, while a horse hair is too thick. This canal is connected with the duct of a gland. And ever since platypus has been known -- which is since # -- it was said that the spur is poisonous. One very precise report was written in # by Sir John Jamison. A man, he reported, had picked up a male platypus and the animal, kicking its legs, had jabbed its spur into his hand. The victim "in spite of immediate med" ical treatment exhibited all the symptoms of a person bitten by a venomous snake. The man was obliged to keep to his bed for several days, and did not recover the use of his hand for nine weeks." This is the first definite case on record, but it did not remain the only one. In the course of time, quite a number of people have been injured by the spur of a male platypus and in every case the symptoms resembled snake bite, though recovery, as a rule, took less than a week. No fatal case is known, but smaller animals, like rabbits, died very soon after a platypus spur was forced through their skins. I said earlier that this cannot possibly be a weapon because only the males are equipped with the spur. It must somehow be sexlinked, but so far very little about its "natural use" -- if this is the proper term -- is known. The two most obvious theories that have found their way into print are that (A) the spurs are the equivalent of antlers and used by the males on each other in fighting for the females or (B) the spurs are used by the males on the females to inject them with what to a platypus is an aphrodisiac. Maybe -- but to anybody else, it is poison. Another example of a poison gland in a mammal has become known only very recently. It was announced for the first time during the last week of # of the First International Conference on Animal Venoms by Dr. Oliver P. Pearson of the University of California. The poison bearer is the shorttailed shrew Blarina brevicauda. The poison glands seem to be "in a distinctive, granule-filled segment" of the tissue around the jaws. "Injection of minute quantities of saline extract of these glands produces dramatic effects on respiration, pulse and blood pressure" in experimental animals. It kills mice, which the shrew eats. It has been found in this species of shrew only. And that is all that is known so far. A nother Canadian reader, an officer of the armed forces, came up with a triple question, all concerning our neighbor Mars. His third and last question is the easiest to answer -- where should he try to be stationed in #, when Mars comes close, so he can get a good view? Well, not in Canada and if an assignment of that sort can be wangled, south of even the U. S. The second question was just how close Mars would be during the # opposition and how this opposition compares to a few of the preceding oppositions. The answer is that the # opposition comes close to what is astronomically possible; it is a pity that we can't observe it from a space station outside the Earth's atmosphere. The next really good opposition will take place in August, #, and there should be a space station by then. There will be a fine one in #, but with some luck we'll then no longer need oppositions to observe the planet; very likely one will be able to call up the Lacus Solis station and inquire about the local weather forecast. As for comparisons with other recent oppositions, this is how things worked out: #, July # #, Oct. # #, Dec. # #, Jan. # #, Feb. # #, March # #, May # #, June # #, Sept. #I #.# #.# #.# #.# # #.# #.# #.# #.# The first question in the letter was whether somebody had ever devised a calendar for Mars. To my knowledge, it has been done at least three times. The earliest I know of came from the facile pen of the French astronomer Camille Flammarion. Some ten or twelve years ago, Dr. Robert S. Richardson presented several versions of a Martian calendar and last year Dr. I. M. Levitt published another one, modeled, no doubt, on the proposed World Calendar for Earth. The sad fact is that Mars, just fike Earth, does not complete one revolution around the Sun in a fractionless number of its days. The length of the Martian year is # and six-tenths Martian days. This produces something like the leap-year cycle of the terrestrial calendar, except that there are more leap years than normal years on Mars, if you define a leap year as a year that has one more day than a normal year. In Dr. Levitt's calendar, the Martian year is divided into four equal quarters, running #, #, #. This means that the first two months of the quarter, say January and February, have # days each, while March has #. The same holds true for each quarter in turn. The total per year makes # days. To take care of the extra # #th of a day per year, the calendar has to run in fiveyear cycles. In each cycle, you have two normal years of # days and three leap years of # days. In those leap years, December would have # days, too. Now twice # plus three times # adds up to # days. The figure # multiplied by five also produces # days. Trouble is that the true figure is not # but #, so that each calendar year comes out just a trifle too long. However, the problem can be simply solved, since the tiny difference adds up to just one day per millenium. Once every millenium, a day has to be dropped, which means that in one five-year cycle per millenium, there will be three normal years and two leap years. have the pleasing experience of receiving a letter which tells me something instead of asking questions. Such a letter came from an officer of the U. S. Navy, who wrote: "As a herpetologist and Texan, I can answer your question as to the use of Mountain Boomer for lizards of the genus Crotaphytus. Oddly enough, its origin is tied up with the strange life history of the frog Eleuthrodactylus latrans (family Leptodactylidae) . This is a fairly common but seldom seen frog of the southwestern United States. Unlike most other frogs and toads, the frogs of this genus do not require water for their larval development. "The eggs are laid in the moist earth under large boulders and slabs of limestone. Here the tadpoles develop and undergo metamorphosis before hatching. Tiny frogs emerge directly from the eggs. The mating call of an adult male can be heard over a half a mile, and unlike other frogs they call throughout the day as well as night. Now with the underside of boulders the favorite habitat of Eleuthrodactylus latrans and the upper surfaces the favorite sunning places of Crotaphytus collaris (and other large lizards), it often happens that the loud boom of the frog is attributed to the basking lizard. "I first heard," my correspondent continued, "the Collared Lizard called Mountain Boomer a number of years ago while on a field trip near San Marcos, Texas. Upon asking why such a strange name, I was assured that the lizard had a mighty voice and boomed both day and night. My informant then described perfectly the voice of Eleuthrodactylus latrans... Of course, almost all lizards are mute, with a few exceptions, like some members of the family Geckonidae and the Jamaican lizard Anolis grahami, which emit a faint squeak." Thank you, Mr. R. E. We'll now put the Mountain Boomer to rest as far as this column is conte cUa o: To Our Readers: This is your Christmas Issue.' From now on Galaxy will go on sale much earlier than usual. We are going to establish a five week prior to cover date; "on-sale date". In order to do this we are redating our covers, therefore, we are not publishing an issue marked December. However, your January issue is the Christmas number. Subscribers will get their full number of copies and all readers can look for Galaxy on the stands the last week of each month, (ie) January issue on sale last week of November, February issue on sale last week of December, etc. We hope you like this new dating . QAlaxy puBlishinq coRpoRAtion All younger generations have been going to the dogs... but this one was genuinely sunk! J "Junior!" squeaked Mater, a quavering echo. "Strayed off again -- the young idiot! If he's playing in the shallows, with this tide going out..." Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror. No sign of Junior. Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, out of sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began. "Oh, oh," sobbed Mater. "He's lost. He's swum into the abyss and been eaten by a sea monster." Her slender stem rippled and swayed on its base and her delicate crown of pinkish tentacles trailed disheveled in the pull of the ebbtide. "Pish, my dear!" said Pater. "There are no sea monsters. At worst," he consoled her stoutly, "Junior may have been trapped in a tidepool." "Oh, oh," gulped Mater. "He'll be eaten by a land monster." sters!" snorted Pater. He straightened his stalk so abruptly that the stone to which he and Mater were conjugally attached creaked under them. "How often must I assure you, my dear, that WE are the highest form of life?" (And, as for his world and geologic epoch, he was quite right.) "Oh, oh," gasped Mater. loosened the coral along the reef. reavement had begun attracting attention. In the thickening dusk, tentacles paused from winnowing the sea for their owners' suppers, stalked heads turned curiously here and there in the colony. Not far away, a threesome of maiden aunts, rooted en brosse to a single substantial boulder, twittered condolences and watched Mater avidly. "Discipline!" growled Pater. "That's what he needs! Just wait till I -- " "Now, dear -- " began Mater shakily. "Hi, folks!" piped Junior from overhead. His parents swiveled as if on a single stalk. Their offspring was floating a few fathoms above them, paddling lazily against the ebb; plainly he had just swum from some crevice in the reef nearby. In one pair of dangling tentacles he absently hugged a roundish stone, worn sensuously smooth by pounding surf. "Nowhere," said Junior innocently. "Just playing hide-and-gosink with the squids." "With the other polyps," Mater corrected him primly. She detested slang. Pater was eyeing Junior with ominous calm. "And where," he asked, "did you get that stone?" Junior contracted guiltily. The surfstone slipped from his tentacles and plumped to the seafloor in a flurry of sand. He edged away, stammering, "Well, I guess maybe... I might have gone a little ways toward the beach..." "You guess! When I was a polyp," said Pater, "the small fry obeyed their elders, and no guess about it!" "Now, dear -- " said Mater. "And no spawn of mine," Pater warmed to his lecture, "is going to flout my words! Junior -- Junior paddled cautiously around the homesite, just out of tentacle-reach. He said in a small voice, "I won't." "Yes," admitted Junior. The neighbors stared. The three maiden aunts clutched one another with muted shrieks, savoring beforehand the language Pater would now use. But Pater said "Ulp!" -- no more. "Now, dear," put in Mater quickly. "We must be patient. You know all children go through larval stages." "When I was a polyp..." Pater began rustily. He coughed out an accidentally inhaled crustacean, and started over: "No spawn of mine... " Trailing off, he only glared, then roared abruptly, "I won't!" said Junior reflexively and backpaddled into the coral shadows of the reef. "That wallop," seethed Pater, "wants a good polyping. I mean..." He glowered suspiciously at Mater and the neighbors. "Dear," soothed Mater, "didn't you notice?" "Of course, I... Notice what?" "What Junior was doing... carrying a stone. I don't suppose he understands why, just yet, but..." "A stone? Ah, uh, to be sure, a stone. Why, my dear, do you realize what this means?" pied with improving Mater's mind. It was a long job, without foreseeable end -- especially since he and his helpmeet were both firmly rooted for life to the same tastefully decorated homesite (garnished by Pater himself with colored pebbles, shells, urchins and bits of coral in the rather rococo style which had prevailed during Pater's courting days as a free-swimming polyp). "Intelligence, my dear," pronounced Pater, "is quite incompatible with motility. Just think -- how could ideas congeal in a brain shuttled hither and yon, bombarded with ever-changing sense-impressions? Look at the lower species, which swim about all their lives, incapable of taking root or thought! True Intelligence, my dear -- as distinguished from Instinct, of course -- presupposes the fixed viewpoint!" He paused. Mater murmured, "Yes, dear," as she always did obediently at this point. Junior undulated past, swimming toward the abyss. He moved a bit heavily now; it was growing hard for him to keep his maturely thickening afterbody in a horizontal posture. "Just look at the young of our own kind," said Pater. "Scatterbrained larvae, wandering greedily about in search of new stimuli. But, praise be, they mature at last into sensible sessile adults. While yet the unformed intellect rebels against the ending of carefree polyphood, Instinct, the wisdom of Nature, instructs them to prepare for the great change!" He nodded wisely as Junior came gliding back out of the gloom of deep water. Junior's tentacles clutched an irregular basalt fragment which he must have picked up down the rubble-strewn slope. As he paddled slowly along the rim of the reef, the adult anthozoans located directly below looked up and hissed irritable warnings. He was swimming a bit more easily now and, if Pater had not been a firm believer in Instinct, he might have been reminded of the grossly materialistic theory, propounded by some iconoclast, according to which a maturing polyp's tendency to grapple objects was merely a matter of taking on ballast. "See!" declared Pater triumphantly. "I don't suppose he understands why, just yet... but Instinct urges him infallibly to assemble the materials for his future homesite." fall, and began plucking restlessly at a coral outcropping. "Dear," said Mater, "don't you think you ought to tell him...?" "Ahem!" said Pater. "The wisdom of Instinct -- " "As you've always said, a polyp needs a parent's guidance," remarked Mater. "Ahem!" repeated Pater. He straightened his stalk, and belCome here!" The prodigal polyp swam warily close. "Yes, Pater?" "Junior," said his parent solemnly, "now that you are about to grow down, it behooves you to know certain facts." Mater blushed a delicate lavender and turned away on her side of the rock. "Very soon now," said Pater, "you will begin feeling an irresistible urge... to sink to the bottom, to take root there in some sheltered location which will be your lifetime site. Perhaps you even have an understanding already with some... ah... charming young polyp of the opposite gender, whom you would invite to' share your homesite. Or, if not, you should take all the more pains to make that site as attractive as possible, in order that such a one may decide to grace it with -- " "Uh-huh," said Junior understandingly. "That's what the fellows mean when they say any of 'em'll fall for a few high-class rocks." Pater marshaled his thoughts again. "Well, quite apart from such material considerations as selecting the right rocks, these are certain... ah... matters we do not ordinarily discuss." Mater blushed a more pronounced lavender. The three maiden aunts, rooted to their boulder within easy earshot of Pater's carrying voice, put up a respectable pretense of searching one another for nonexistent waterfleas. "No doubt," said Pater, "in the course of your harum-scarum adventurings as a normal polyp among polyps, you've noticed the ways in which the lower orders reproduce themselves; the activities of the fishes, the Crustacea, the marine worms will not have escaped your attention." "Uh-huh," said Junior, treading water. will have observed that A among these there takes place a good deal of... ah... maneuvering for position. But among intelligent, firmly rooted beings like ourselves, matters are, of course, on a less crude and direct plane. What among lesser creatures is a question of tactics belongs, for us, to the realm of strategy." Pater's tone grew confiding. "Now, Junior, once you're settled you'll realize the importance of being easy in your mind about your offspring's parentage. Remember, a niche in brine saves trying. Nothing like choosing your location well in the first place. Study the currents around your prospective site -- particularly their direction and force at such crucial times as flood-tide. Try to make sure you and your future mate won't be too close down-current from anybody else's site, since in a case like that accidents can happen. You understand, Junior?" "Uh-huh," acknowledged Junior. "That's what the fellows mean when they say don't let anybody get the drop on you." "Well!" said Pater in flat disapproval. "But it all seems sort of silly," said Junior stubbornly. "I'd rather just keep moving around, and not have to do all that figuring. And the ocean's full of things I haven't seen yet. I don't want to grow down!" Mater paled with shock. Pater gave his spawn a scalding, scandalized look. "You'll learn! You can't beat Biology," he said thickly, creditably keeping his voice down. "Junior, you may go!" Junior bobbled off, and Pater admonished Mater sternly, "We must have patience, my dear! All children pass through these larval stages... "Yes, dear," sighed Mater. to have resigned himself to making the best of it. With considerable exertions, hampered by his increasing bottom-heaviness, he was fetching loads of stones, seaweed and other debris to a spot downslope, and there laboring over what promised to be a fairly ambitious cairn. Judging by what they could see of it, his homesite might even prove a credit to the colony (so went Pater's thoughts) and attract a mate who would be a good catch (thus Mater mused). Junior was still to be seen at times along the reef in company with his free-swimming friends among the other polyps, at some of whom his parents had always looked askance, fearing they were by no means well-bred. In fact, there was strong suspicion that some of them -- waifs from the disreputable Shallows district in the hazardous reaches just below the tide-mark -- had never been bred at all, but were products of budding, a practice frowned on in polite society. However, Junior's appearance and rate of locomotion made it clear he would soon be done with juvenile follies. As Pater repeated with satisfaction -- you can't beat Biology; as one becomes more and more bottle-shaped, the romantic illusions of youth must inevitably perish. "I always knew there was sound stuff in the youngster," declared Pater expansively. "At least he won't be able to go around with those ragamuffins much longer," breathed Mater thankfully. "What does the young fool think he's doing, fiddling round with soapstone?" grumbled Pater, peering critically through the green to try to make out the details of Junior's building. "Doesn't he know it's apt to slip its place in a year or two?" "Look, dear," hissed Mater acidly, "isn't that the little polyp who was so rude once?... I wish she wouldn't keep watching Junior like that. Our northwest neighbor heard positively that she's the child of an only parent!" "Never mind." Pater turned to reassure her. "Once Junior is properly rooted, his self-respect will cause him to keep riffraff at a distance. It's a matter of Psychology, my dear; the vertical position makes all the difference in one's thinking." HE great day arrived. Laboriously Junior put a few finishing touches to his construction -- which, so far as could be seen from a distance, had turned out decent-looking enough, though it was rather questionably original in design: lower and flatter than was customary. With one more look at his handiwork, Junior turned bottomend-down and sank wearily onto the finished site. After a minute, he paddled experimentally, but flailing tentacles failed to lift him. He was already rooted, and growing more solidly so by the moment.  "Congratulations!" cried the neighbors. Pater and Mater bowed this way and that in acknowledgment. Mater waved a condescending tentacle to the three maiden aunts. "I told you so!" said Pater triumphantly. "Yes, dear..." said Mater meekly. Suddenly there were outcries of alarm from the dwellers downreef. A wave of dismay swept audibly through all the nearer part of the colony. Pater and Mater looked around, and froze. Junior had begun paddling again, but this time in a most peculiar manner -- with a rotary twist and sidewise scoop which looked awkward, but which he performed so deftly that he must have practiced it. Fixed upright as he was now on the .platform he had built, he looked for all the world as if he were trying to swim sidewise. "He's gone mad!" squeaked Mater. "I..." gulped Pater, "I'm afraid not." At least, they saw, there was method in Junior's actions. He went on paddling in the same fashion and now he, and his platform with him, were farther away than they had been, and growing more remote as they stared. was not a homesite revolved in some way incomprehensible to eyes that had never seen the like. And the whole affair trundled along, rocking at bumps in the sandy bottom, and squeaking painfully; nevertheless, it moved. The polyps watching from the reef swam out and frolicked after Junior, watching his contrivance go and chattering eager questions, while their parentsbawled at them to keep away from that. The three maiden aunts shrieked faintly and swooned in one another's tentacles. The colony was shaken as it had not been since the tidal wave. "Come back!" shrilled Mater. "You can't do that!" "Come back!" gabbled the neighbors. "You can't do that!" But Junior was past listening to reason. Junior was on wheels. the Gravity Business This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he -- and how could anyone find out what those terms might be? vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun. It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for S #. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either. As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that. A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankledeep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright. Then all was quiet -- outside. Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. "Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!" Grampa was a white-haired #year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed. "Now, Grampa," Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. "That landing was pretty rough, Junior." Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. "I know it, Fred," he said, frowning. "This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth." Grampa started to say something, but an #-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, "Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said, 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium -- ' " "That's enough, Four," Junior interrupted. "Never mind what I said." Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened. "And, Four," Reba said automatically, "don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful." Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy. "But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'" Four complained. "Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'" "That's different," Reba said. Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. "See!" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. "That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again." "Stop picking on Junior," Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. "I'm sure he did the best he could." "Anybody talks about gravitational pull," Grampa said, snorting, "deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of spacetime around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago." "Go back to your games, Grampa," Fred said impatiently. "We've got work to do." bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. "You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?" "It belongs to all of us," Four said shrilly. "You gave us all a sixth share." "That's right, Four," Grampa muttered, "so I did. But whose money bought it?" "You bought it, Grampa," Fred said. "That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?" "You, Grampa," Fred said. "You bet! And who made one that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?" "And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills," Joyce said bitterly, "and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!" "Well, now," Grampa protested, "I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone." "You're never going to die, Grampa," Joyce said harshly. "Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company." "Well, now," said Grampa, blinking, "how'd you find out about that? Well, now!" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. "I'll get you this time!" Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. "You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?" Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. "I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner." "That's simple," Four said without hesitation. "The winning strategy is to -- " "Don't be a kibitzer!" Grampa snapped. "When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!" He snorted indignantly. row shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern. "Look!" he said suddenly. "This planet not only has flora -- it has fauna." He rushed to the air lock. "Four!" Reba called out warningly. "It's all right, Reba," Four assured her. "The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum." "What about macro-organisms -- " Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. "That boy!" she said to Junior. "Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, playmates. He's more like a little old man than a boy." But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. "Well, what's all the mystery?" "No use bothering the others yet," Junior said, his face puzzled. "You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit." "Quit!" "That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver -- it won't budge!" blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberrycolor pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, "Fweep? Fweep?" Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. "Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!" "You mean Fweep?" Four asked in astonishment. "I mean that thing, whatever you call it." Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. "Get it out!" Four's eyes widened farther. "But Fweep's my friend." "Nonsense!" Joyce said sharply. "Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a -- a blob!" "Fweep?" queried the raspberry lips. "Fweep?" "If it's Four's friend," Reba said firmly, "it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room." Joyce stood up indignantly. "Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!" She glared malignantly at Grampa. "If you'd rather have that blob than me -- well!" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it. "Fweep?" asked the blob. "Sure," Four said. "Go ahead, fweep -- I mean sweep." Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile. Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. "Good for you, Reba!" he said admiringly. "For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve." "Why, thanks, Grampa," Reba said, surprised. "I like you, gal. Never forget it." "I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!" "You bet he would!" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, "Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow." Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. "Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too." Reba smiled at Grampa he might grow into a man like his grandfather." looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. "What you doing, Four?" "Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings," Four said absently. "The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle." "That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?" "You get the other one figured out?" "It was easy," Grampa said breezily, "once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each -- " "That's right," Four agreed. "I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts." Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it. Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. "Thought you'd say that," he said, picking out the box. "Help yourself." With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. "Ahhh!" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away. "What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?" Four asked. "Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit -- "  "Did you ever work on Niccolo Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the twcA passenger rowboat?" "Yep," Grampa said. "Too easy." Four thought a moment. "There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries -- " "Sounds good, boy," Grampa said eagerly. "Whip it up for me." "Okay, Grampa." Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet. Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked. Its gelatinous form jiggled. "Hid" it said. A S IF IN response, the flivJver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. "Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on." The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts. "Any luck?" Reba asked brightly"Do we look it?" Junior grumbled. "Where's Joyce?" asked Fred. "Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!" The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question: "Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?" "No," Fred said slowly, "and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it." "Then what makes this planet so heavy?" Reba asked. Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. "Your guess is as good as anybody's." "Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock," Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. "This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver -- and we don't have many of them to spare!" She glared venomously at Grampa. "We've still got Fweepland," Four said solemnly. "Fweepland?" Reba repeated. "This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium." "A good thing, too," Junior said glumly, "because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here -- involuntary colonists." Joyce spun on him. "You're joking!" she screeched. "I wish I were," Junior said. "But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize." "It's these '# models," Grampa put in disgustedly. "They never were any good." turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either. Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, "If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth," he amended. "You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it." "That's just supposition," Junior said stubbornly. "The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D." "Maybe the polarizer is broken," Fred suggested. Grampa snorted. "Brokenshmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had. to." "Then it goes deeper," Junior insisted. "It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?" Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. "Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth -- " "Let's not get up on any pulpits," Fred growled. "Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?" Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. "Well," he said, "at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?" The smile faded. "No, I guess you don't." AA fessorially. "Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses." The faces were still blank and unillumined. "Gravity is similar to light," he pressed on. "In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter 'polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted." The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. "That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do." "Now wait a minute!" Grampa protested. "That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me -- I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'" "The only thing you ever did was the polarizer," Joyce snapped. "And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible." Grampa squinted at her sagely. "That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it." "But you don't really know why it works," Junior persisted. "Well, no," Grampa admitted. "Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it." "Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?" Joyce demanded ironically. "Well, now," Grampa said in bafflement, "it rightly should, you know."  softly. We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call -- " "Which," Joyce interrupted, "might get picked up in a few centuries." "And make the best of what we've got," Reba went on, unheeding. "If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver -- even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a goodsized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want." "You know the law: one child per couple," Joyce reminded her frigidly. "You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me." Junior frowned at his wife. "I believe you're actually glad it happened." "I could think of worse things," Reba said. "I like your spunk, Reb," Grampa muttered. "Speaking of children," Junior said, "where's Four?" "Here." Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep. "Fweep?" it queried hopefully. "Not now," said Four. "Where've you been?" Reba asked anxiously. "What've you been doing?" "I've been all over Fweepland," Four said wearily, "trying to locate its center of gravity." "Well?" Fred prompted. "It shifts." "That's impossible," said Junior. "Not for Fweep," Four replied. "What do you mean by that? Joyce suspiciously asked. "It shifted," Four explained patiently, "because Fweep kept following me." "Fweep?" Junior repeated stupidly. "Fweep?" Fweep said eagerly. "He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave." tated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. "I got it figured out, Four," he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. "A missionary takes over a nonrowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and -- " "Not now, Grampa," Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin. The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too. "Rat poison?" Four asked. Joyce started guiltily. "How did you know?" "There's no use trying to poison Fweep," Four said calmly. "He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all." "What level does he use?" Junior wanted to know. "Point the scintillation counter at him." Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped. Junior looked at the counter's dial. "He's radioactive, all right. "Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?" "He uses ordinary matter," Four said. "He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago." "He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?" Junior said unbelievingly. Four nodded. "And that 'skin' of his -- whatever it is he uses for skin -- is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead." Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. "Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass." "And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us." Four giggled at the thought. riously. "Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!" "I don't figure it's a whim," Grampa said. "Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him -- conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move." "I dcn't care why that thing does it," Joyce said icily. "I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it." "How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy." "Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?" "We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet." "Well?" "Probably he's immortal." "And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically. "Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures." "But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now." "Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now." kindly. "We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway." "I thank him for nothing," Joyce snapped. "He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately!" Fred turned impatiently on his wife. "Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!" Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. "Fred!" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room. Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. "Well, boy," he said to Fred, "I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you." Fred stood up apologetically. "I'd better go calm her down," he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce. "Give her one for me!" Grampa called. Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music. "Makes you think, doesn't it?" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly. "Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result." "What I can't understand," Junior said thoughtfully, "is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed -- long enough to keep us from being squashed -- and then quit." "Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from," Four explained. "All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped." is uncomfortable for him, is it?" Grampa said. "Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop." "He's no more improbable than people," said Four. "Less than some I've known," Grampa conceded. "If he can eat anything," Reba said, "why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?" "He wants to be helpful," Four replied without hesitation, "and he's lonely. After all," he added wistfully, "he's never had any friends." "How do you know all these things?" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. "Can you talk to it?" Behind her, Fred said, "Now, Joyce, you promised -- " "But this is important," Joyce cut him off eagerly. "Can you? Talk to it, I mean?" "Some," Four admitted. "Have you asked it to let us go?" "Yes." "Well? What did it say?" "He said he didn't want his friend to leave him." At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips. "Fwiend," it said. "Well, now," Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, "that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep." In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, "That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but -- " "Joyce!" Reba cried, horrified. "Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him -- " "Never mind, Reba," Four said evenly. "It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution." "Fwiend," said Fweep gently. turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone. "Junior!" said Joyce, shocked. Junior swung around impatiently. "Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work." "I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug -- " "Mother!" Junior warned. "We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!" "Well!" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair. Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. "Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet." Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. "It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on." "I take it all back," said Grampa. "That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let crtir polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him. "Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave -- if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do. "That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a minature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points." "That may be," Junior said stubbornly, "but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing." "He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep," Reba said, her voice soft. "No, here they come now." Four, carrying Fweep on his shoulder like a raspberry cat without head or tail. Four's thin face glowed with exertion and glistened with sweat. Already the orange sun had begun to paint his skin tan. "We've been playing dodge ball," Four panted. "Fweep was the ball and I had to dodge him." "There's something wrong with this computer," Junior complained. "Take a look at it." "Sure, Daddy,". Four said promptly, and he took his father's place at the keyboard. After a few moments, he began to frown, then detached a front panel. He started sorting through the maze of wires and electronic components. Grampa watched him with a wary eye. Joyce was unable to restrain herself any longer. "The way you people talk, a person would think we were never going to leave this godforsaken, miserable, uncivilized planet." "That seems to be the general idea," Grampa chuckled, enjoying her dismay. "Unless we can build a reaction rocket ship to push us out of Fweep's range," Fred said glumly. "We've got the iron ore!" Junior put in eagerly. Grampa snorted. "Come on, use your brains. You'd have to build a ship; these flivvers weren't built for the stresses of reaction flight. By the time you've solved all the problems of motors and alloys and rocket-tube linings, fuel, ship construction, personnel protection, and all the rest of it, this planet would be another Detroit and your great-greatgreat-grandchildren would be living in it. You couldn't build a blast furnace even if you had the complete Congressional microfilm library! You'd do better trying to figure out how Fweep does what he does and doing some practicing on that." "Well," Junior said peevishly, "trying to get away is better than sitting here talking about it." Reba stared thoughtfully at Junior and said, "Maybe Fweep would go with us." "Yes!" Joyce said excitedly. "Maybe the dear little thing would go with' us. That would solve everything!" Fout said, "I asked him already. Fweep's afraid to come along." "I'm sure we would be very good to him," Joyce said swiftly. "I've always liked pets. Why, I once had a goldfish of my very own!" "Which you let die," Fred said dryly, "because you forgot to feed it." "Oh, he's not afraid of people," Four told them. "He's afraid of space and unpolarized gravity and things like that. He's lived here all his life -- that's a long time -- and it makes him feel awful funny just to think about leaving. He says he can still remember the way our linear gravitation felt inside when we landed." "Well," Joyce said firmly, "he'll just have to fight it, that's all. If a person let that kind of neurotic impulse rule his life, he'd be completely demoralized in no time." Four glanced over his shoulder at Joyce, as if to see if she were joking. Shaking his head, he returned to the computer's innards. A moment later, he swung around and stared accusingly at Grampa. "You've cannibalized Abacus!" "Well, now," Grampa protested, licking his lips nervously. "You see, I -- " "That's where you got the parts for the pircuits!" Four said with merciless logic. Joyce stood up virtuously and shook her finger at Grampa. "First you entice us out here in this nasty old flivver; then you get us stuck; and now you've ruined the computer for your nasty old games!" "Well, now," Grampa blustered, "the goldarn thing wouldn't work, would it? We didn't need it -- not with Four around. He figures everything out in his head and we just x used Abacus to sort of check him. Ain't that right now?" Five pairs of eyes stared at him in silence. "Well, now," Grampa said defensively, "I got it all worked out anyhow. We can leave here any time we get ready." turned and grew small in the view screen, and Junior sat in the pilot's chair, his hand on the control stick, his eyes fixed on the moving dials in front of him. There were three others in the room: Reba, who looked at the dwindling Fweepland and sighed; Joyce, who sat tautly in her chair, her face fixed and unbelieving; and Fred, who looked at Joyce and shook his head. Grampa opened the door to his room and stepped cockily into the central cabin, shutting the door behind him. "Well?" he demanded confidently. "Are we heading for Earth?" Junior gestured toward the screen. "If Four's coordinates are right." "Speaking of coordinates," Grampa said briskly, "make sure we got the coordinates of Fweepland. It'll take a long time for that atmosphere to dissipate. A nice little world like that is worth its weight in uranium to a good real estate salesman." "How did you do it?" Joyce challenged. Grampa slapped her familiarly on the shoulder. "A problem of gravity," he said gayly, "but a simple one. Nothing for an old pircuit man like me. I guess you folks won't laugh at Grampa and his pircuits any more. Not only did Grampa get you out of Fweepland, but he's taking you back with a valuable little subdivision in the third quadrant to file on." "I hate to spoil the party," Fred said, "but have you thought about what you're going to do with Fweep?" "Fweep?" Grampa repeated, puzzled. "Why should I do anything with Fweep?" "We can't take him back to Earth with us." "Why not?" Grampa demanded. "In the first place, the Immigration Authority would have to pass on him. That might take years, with Fweep's powers and abilities. More important, if Fweep got loose on Earth, every flivver would have the same problem there that we had here. And next time Fweep might not be so cooperative. I don't know what you did to Fweep in there, but if he's still alive, the I.A. isn't going to take a chance." Grampa considered the prospect without dismay. "I wonder if we could smuggle him in. With all those flivvers not working, they'd have to pay us before they could take off." "Grampa!" Fred said sternly. "That would be blackmail -- or worse. Besides getting in trouble with the I.A., you'd get it from the W.B.I. and the I.C.C." G rampa waved his hand impatiently. "We'll solve that problem when we come to it. After all, an old pircuit man like me -- " "What did you do to Fweep?" Joyce repeated insistently. Grampa cleared his throat with pride. "Well, now, I'll tell you. I just happened to notice that Fweep liked my tonic. Every time I took a little nip, the little beast was around my chair, trying to clean my hand for me." "Tonic!" Joyce sniffed. "Liquor, you mean!" "Now that's not right," Grampa objected. "I said tonic and I mean tonic. Got a little alcohol in it for a preservative, maybe, but the important part is the minerals. That's the Longevity Institute's secret. It's what keeps me young. Want a little nip?" He leered at Joyce. "You mean you got Fweep drunk?" Fred exclaimed. "Well, now, that was the effect, but I can't swear it was the alcohol. Not unless Fweep can use the stuff on the molecular level if he wants. On the other hand, maybe it was the minerals in there that affected him. Little world like Fweepland, maybe it lacked a few things when it was made. But the way I looked at it, it stood to reason the little fellow could use a drink. Alone all these centuries, he must've got pretty dry. But whatever it was, he sure got high. Lost all control." "Poor Fweep," Reba murmured. "Poor nothing," Grampa said. "He was the happiest little critter I ever saw. When Four explained to him just what we wanted, he went right to work on that bottle and -- " Gramp's door swung open once more. "Grampa! Grampa!" Four shouted. "Fweep! He -- I mean -- well, we've been calling him by the wrong pronoun. Look!" Four came running out of the room. Behind him rolled a tiny raspberry sphere about the size of a marble. Occasionally it hopped in the air and said, "Fweep?" in a small, high voice. Behind it rolled and hopped a second raspberry marble. "Fweep?" it said. Behind it came another and another until the cabin was full of them, rolling, bouncing, calling "Fweep?" D azedly, junior counted them. "One hundred and one, one hundred and two, one hundred and -- " "Oh, Junior," Reba said, hugging him excitedly. "Aren't they cute?" "What happened?" Grampa asked, as dazed as Junior. "Maybe it was the tonic," Four said, "but I suspect it was the the unpolarized gravity. All of a sudden, Fweep started splitting like an ameba, over and over. Do you suppose that was what made him nervous?" "That's the way the little fellow reproduces, all right," said Grampa. "I wonder if he has to wait until a race becomes civilized enough to discover the polarizer, eh?" "Ugh!" gasped Joyce, brushing a Fweep out of her lap. Grampa looked at the cabin and its occupants happily. "I'd like to remind you," Fred said gravely, "that this multiplies our problem of what to do with Fweep over one hundred times." "What problem?" asked Grampa. "The only problem we got is how we're gonna spend the cash. We're in business -- the gravity business. We'll call it Gravity, Incorporated, and we can reclaim every little hunk of rock in the Solar System. Each one of those little fellows is worth a fortune! We'll give the satellites and the asteroids Earth-normal gravities and atmospheres and, by golly, we're rich!" "Rich?" Joyce echoed. A smile slowly replaced the expression of distaste. She snapped her fingers. "Here, Fweepie," she said in her most enticing tone. "Here, little darlings! Come to dear Joyce!" But they had all hopped to Four and were clustered around him like a raspberry bubble bath. Through them, his face peered, thin and happy. Grampa looked at Reba. She was hugging Junior happily and smiling at Four. Grampa looked back at the boy. "We'll have to be exclusive, though," Grampa said. "Considering the Fweeps' likes and dislikes, that is. We'll sell only to people with children." A # Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. Each month takes you on an expedition to one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, from Sun-baked Mercury to Frigid Pluto.  # two-color illustrations  Scientifically-accurate text with each illustration  Wonderful for your den  Printed in limited edition  Only # postpaid P. O. Box #-R Minneapolis #, Minnesota Endorsed by The Society for the Advancement of Space Travel The Body They made it -- no question of that -- but what had they made? " opened his eyes he saw, leaning anxiously over him, three of the young specialists who had performed the operation. It struck him at once that they would have to be young to attempt what they had attempted; young and irreverent, possessed of encyclopedic technical knowledge to the exclusion of all else; iron-nerved, steel-fingered, inhuman, in fact. They had the qualifications of automatons. He was so struck by this bit of post-anesthetic reasoning that it took him a moment to realize that the operation had been a success. "How do you feel, sir?" "Are you all right?" "Can you speak, sir? If not, just nod your head. Or blink." They watched anxiously. Professor Meyer gulped, testing the limitations of his new palate, tongue and throat. Then he said, very thickly, "I think -- I think -- " "He's all right!" Cassidy shouted. "Feldman! Wake up!" Feldman leaped up from the spare cot and fumbled for his glasses. "He's up so soon? Did he speak?" "Yes, he spoke! He spoke like an angel! We finally made it, Freddie!" Feldman found his glasses and rushed to the operating table. "Could you say something else, sir? Anything?" "I am -- I am -- " "Oh, God," Feldman said. "I think I'm going to faint." The three men burst into laughter. They surrounded Feldman and slapped him on the back. Feldman began to laugh, too, but soon he was coughing violently. "Where's Kent?" Cassidy shouted. "He should be here, damn it. He kept that damned ossilyscope on the line for ten solid hours. Steadiest thing I ever saw. Where the devil is he?" "He went after sandwiches," Lupowicz said. "Here he comes. Kent, Kent, we made it!" Kent came through the door carrying two paper bags, with half a sandwich thrust in his mouth. He swallowed convulsively. "Did he speak? What did he say?"   uproar. A dozen men rushed toward the door. "Get them out of here!" Feldman screamed. "They can't interview him tonight. Where's that cop?" A policeman pushed his way through and blocked the door. "You heard what the docs said, boys." "This isn't fair. This Meyer, he belongs to the world." "What were his first words?" "What did he say?" "Did you really change him into a dog?" "What kind of dog?" "Can he wag his tail?" "He said he was fine," the policeman told them, blocking the door. "Come on now, boys." A photographer ducked under the policeman's arm. He looked at Professor Meyer on the operating table and muttered, "Jesus!" He raised his camera. "Look up, boy -- " Kent put his hand over the lens as the flashgun popped. "Whatdja do that for?" the photographer asked. "You now have a picture of Kent's hand," Kent said with sarcasm. "Enlarge it, and hang it in the Museum of Modern Art. Now, get out of here before I break your neck." "Come on, boys," the policeman repeated sternly, herding the newsmen away. He turned back and glanced at Professor Meyer on the operating table. "Jesus! I still can't believe it!" he muttered, and closed the door. "The bottles!" Cassidy shouted. "A celebration!" "By God, we deserve a celebration!" Professor Meyer smiled -- internally only, of course, since his facial expressions were now limited. Feldman came up to him. "How do you feel, sir?" "I am fine," Meyer said, enunciating carefully with his strange palate. "A little confused, perhaps -- " "But not regretful?" Feldman asked. "I don't know yet," Meyer said. "I was against this on principle, you know. No man is indispensable." "You are, sir." Feldman spoke with fierce conviction. "I followed your lectures. Not that I pretend to understand one tenth of what you were saying. Mathematical symbolism is only a hobby with me. But those unification principles -- " "Please," Meyer said.L ' man said. "You are carrying on the great work where Einstein and the others left off. No one else can complete it! No one! You had to have a few more years, in any form science could give you. I only wish we could have found a more suitable receptacle for your intellect. A human host was unavailable, and we were forced to rule out the primates -- " "It doesn't matter," Meyer said. "It's the intellect that counts, after all. I'm still a little dizzy..." "I remember your last lecture at Harvard," Feldman continued, clenching his hands together. "You were so old, sir! I could have cried -- that tired, ruined body -- " "Can we give you a drink, sir?" Cassidy offered Meyer a glass. Meyer laughed. "I'm afraid my new facial configuration is not suited for glasses. A bowl would be preferable." "Right!" Cassidy said. "One bowl coming up! Lord, Lord..." "You'll have to excuse us, sir," Feldman apologized. "The strain has been terrific. We've been in this room for over a week, and I doubt if one of us had eight hours sleep in that time. We almost lost you, sir -- " "The bowl! The flowing bowl is here!" Lupowicz called. "What'll it be, sir? Rye? Gin?" "Just water, please," Meyer said. "Do you think I could get up?" "If you'll take it easy... Lupowicz lifted him gently from the table and set him on the floor. Meyer balanced uneasily on his four legs. The men cheered him wildly. "Bravo!" "I believe I may be able to do somework tomorrow," Meyer said. "Some sort of an apparatus will have to be devised to enable me to write. It shouldn't be too difficult. There will be other problems attendant upon my change I'm not thinking too clearly as yet..." "Don't try to rush things." "Hell, no! Can't lose you now!" "What a paper this is going to make!" "Collaborative effort, do you think, or each from his own viewpoint and specialty?" "Both, both. They'll never get enough of this. Goddamn it, they'll be talking about this -- " "Where is the bathroom?" Meyer asked. The men looked at each other. "What for?" "Shut up, you idiot. This way, sir. I'll open the door for you." man's heels, perceiving, as he walked, the greater ease inherent in four-legged locomotion. When he returned, the men were talking heatedly about technical aspects of his case. years." "I can't agree with you. Anything we can do once -- " "Don't get scientific on us, kid. You know damned well it was a weird combination of fortuitous factors -- plain blind luck!" "You can say that again. Some of those bio-electric changes -- " "He's back." "Yeah, but he shouldn't be walking around too much. How you feeling, boy?" "I'm not a boy," Professor Meyer snapped. "I'm old enough to be your grandfather." "Sorry, sir. I think you should go to bed, sir." "Yes," Professor Meyer said. "I'm not too strong yet, not too clear..." Kent lifted him and placed him on the cot. "There, how's that?" They gathered around him, their arms linked around bach other's shoulders. They were grinning, and very proud of themselves. "Anything we can get you?" "Just call for it, we'll bring it." "Here, I've filled your bowl with water." "We'll leave a couple , sandwiches by your cot." "Have a good rest," Cassidy said tenderly. Then, involuntarily, absentmindedly, he patted Professor Meyer on his long, smooth-furred head. Feldman shouted something incoherent. "I forgot," Cassidy said in embarrassed apology. "We'll have to watch ourselves. He's a man, you know." "Of course I know. I must be tired... I mean, he looks so much like a dog, you kinda forget -- " "Get out of here!" Feldman ordered. "Get out! All of you!" He pushed them out of the room and hurried back to Professor Meyer. "Is there anything I can do, sir? Anything at all?" Meyer tried to speak, to reaffirm his humanity. But the words came out choked. "It'll never happen again, sir. I'm sure of it. Why, you're -- you're Professor Meyer!" Quickly Feldman pulled a blanket over Meyer's shivering body. "It's all right, sir," Feldman said, trying not to look at the shivering animal. "It's the intellect that counts, sir. The mind!" "Of course," agreed Professor Meyer, the eminent mathematician. "But I wonder -- would you mind patting my head for me, please?" can look forward to some achingly taut muscles even after you finish the story. Why such tension? Well, put yourself in this alarming predicament: When overwhelming danger is constantly present, of course a man is entitled to have a bodyguard. But what if he has to do the job himself... and his body absolutely will not cooperate? sorts, overlooking the fact that nothing could be better suited for those who like security. And security there is a-plenty in this well-run world. The only trouble is, how about those who want to get ahead? What happens to ambitious people in this story could never happen to a robot! You'll find at least another novelet and all the short stories we can cram into the issue Ley. So you think it's a complete enigma, eh? You'll be astonished to discover just how much of it is nothing of the kind! much earlier than before. In case there is still some confusion about whatever became of the December issue, here is the data: To advance the date of sale, we were forced, in effect, to combine the December and January issues... but the volume and number follow the November issue consecutively, so we haven't skippd any issue at all. You'll get the full # of them this I year, same as always. Viking Press, # A T this writing, the proposed space satellite has burst across all the front pages. Our Willy Ley, as one of the foremost experts of the day, has become as familiar to TV audiences as Howdy Doody. Therefore, it seems peculiar to be reviewing his nature book at this time. About the only connection between this and his sudden general fame is that he is busily engaged in unearthing the truth about Old Wives' Tales such as the "Man-Eating Tree." For a factual book, it has a delightful touch of the detective story about it, due to the author's knack of presenting successive data so that it has the flavor of an exciting chase. I'm sure you'll find a favorite of yours here... the Abominable Snowmen or the Tree of Death, perhaps. They're the ones I liked best. by Groff Conklin. Permabooks, #c A ND the next item is this collection by our Groff Conklin. Seventeen shorts and two novelets, all for #c -- a whopping bargain indeed. The novelets by Sturgeon and Chad Oliver are excellent, as are the shorts by Winston K. Marks, Jack Finney and Damon Knight. The rest are mostly very good to good... only one poor rating. All in all, a fine job of selection by "the world's top editor of science-fiction anthologies," to quote the blurb on the cover. George Adamski. Abelard-Schumart, Inc., # of this sequel to Flying Saucers Have Landed, the Flying Saucers have returned and this time he has had the good fortune to be taken for several rides, both in the Saucers themselves and in their mother ships. Adamski avers that the Saucers are not interplanetary craft but comparable to dinghies, strictly shipto-shore. He accompanies the text with a number of pictures of both types of craft, including a series which he claims represents himself and a Venusian snapped at the portholes of a small mother ship by the pilot of a Saucer. The reader will have to decide for himself as to the veracity of the book. But I believe that no one can find fault with the plea for peace and sanity throughout its pages. McIntosh. Ace Books, Inc., #c see what an imposing array the Double Novels have become. This month we have two new issues. The first has the excellent One In Three Hundred by McIntosh, which first appeared as three separate novelets in Fantasy  Science Fiction and last year in hard covers. It brings to mind Wylie and Balmer's old When Worlds Collide. Having reread the latter quite recently, it was a revelation to see how modern s-f stacks up against a true classic. Here is almost identical subject matter and plot. The difference lies in the manner in which the modern craftsman succeeds in making his reader live the story. The Transposed Man fills the balance of the book by eliminating blank pages. If you must know, it concerns a fanatic Society, the Mechanists, trying to overthrow the bumbling democratic government, and the part played by the Hero, a misguided shnook. He's a spy who keeps getting under everybody's skin... but only to plant an identitytransferring device. The author deserves a medal for finishing the book. So does the reader. Ace Books Inc., #c novel entry. The Asimov, of course, is the first few chapters of his famous "Foundation" series, up to and including "The Traders." Even after a decade, it is still a refreshing experience to read about Hari Seldon and his Psychohistory, the charting of future history by means of deductive Mass Psychology. It has a sweep and tongue-in-cheek craftiness worthy of a modern Arabian Nights. Guaranteed to make you feel ten years younger. No World of their Own is an original, but not very. It uses the device of hyperspace travel to dump the hero into an irrevocable future # years from his own, along with his two crewmates and a creature from # lightyears distant that has the faculty of influencing electron flow in any apparatus. Since Earth is ruled by the Servants of Technon, a super-dupercomputer, and threatened by the League of Alpha Centauri and menaced by the Commercial Society, you can soon see why the poor hero all but mumbles, "Lemme alone, willya?" That's # on two books. Mmm, somebody should get together with himself. Kornbluth. Doubleday  Co., Inc., # mate by Jerry Sohl, this book deals with a Communist invasion of the U.S.A. But whereas the former commences thirty years after the invasion, this opus takes us through the final defeat. Also, it is a blunt, hard-bitten account of the brutalization the American populace is subjected to in order to learn their new role, that of peasant. It is believable throughout and thoroughly frightening. Basically, the plots of the two books are virtually identical, but Kornbluth's has an authenticity comparable to the better war novels of the past decade. Incidentally, you don't know with what restraint this appreciative review was written. The most obnoxious character in the book is named Floyd C. Boucher. Ballantine Books, #c ies by the editor of Fantasy  Science Fiction is an event, but not a satisfactory one. The obvious explanation is that it's mostly a roster of youthful literary recruits from the old Unknown and Astounding, with some more recent eager wisps of volunteers, none of them able to stand up under the fire of modern competition. Unfortunately, it's more than that. The themes are scholarly trivialities, pounced on with all the joy of a naturalist who has found an ancient skeleton -- and they are just as meatless. The characters are composed of the effluvium of Latin tomes. As editor, Boucher demands more of his writers. It's regrettable that he can't make the same demands on himself. Harcourt, Brace  Co., # TT'S remarkable how Miss Norton can take the standard ingredients of space opera on the grand scale and still manage to come up with a believably personal yarn. Like her fine Star Man's Son, this future adventure is viewed through the eyes of a youth, coming into manhood in a time when Earth is subject to Galactic Empire rule, deemed too barbarous to deal with other civilizations, fit only to export mercenaries. A really good adventure. Lothrop, Lee #s Sheperd Co., Inc., # citing that my kids grabbed it and fought over the piecas. I didn't get a chance to read it until just now. As you can see, it has appeal. It also has lessons to teach, both moral and scientific. But it doesn't permit them to get in the way of the story, which concerns a boy and his pet, a native bear cub whose species' curse is that their claws become jewels at maturity. Plastics treated with this material acquire fantastic properties. Johnny' attempt to hide his pet's maturity and his acceptance as equal by the fauna of Venus make splendid reading for any kid my age. An attractive three-dimensional paperweight of our Solar system, 'm color. The Nine Planets and The Sun are suspended with stars in solid clear plastic, and mounted on a black base. This scientifically correct paperweight in actual relative size and position will furnish many hours of interesting study for teachers and students alike. The perfect gift # sent postpaid. Howard's Originals, Post Office Box #, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Money Back Guarantee Post Office Box #. Poughkeepsie, N. Y. The Snare It's easy to find a solution when there is one -- the trick is to do it if there is none! had made across the Mare Serenitatis. The Latin translated as "the Sea of Serenity." It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt. Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity. Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth. We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface. The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, "Strange someone didn't notice it before."  a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness. It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles. "What is it?" Marie asked breathlessly. Her husband grunted his bafflement. "Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!" "If it's a perfect sphere," Miller suggested, "most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface." "Maybe it isn't a sphere," my wife said. "Maybe this is all of it." "Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it." I reached for the radio controls on my suit. Kane grabbed my arm. "No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!" I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth. "All right," I conceded. Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side against the metal. A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: "It's steel... made thousands of years ago." Someone gasped over the intercom, "Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?" Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. "I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old." structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, "Look!" A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess. "There's a small room inside," he told us, and climbed through the opening. We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible. "Come on in, Marie," he called to his wife. "This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something..." Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage. "You want to go in?" my wife asked. "Do you?" "Let's." I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller. Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway. For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky. The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. "Something pushed me!" "Are you all right?" "Yes." He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage... and struck an invisible solid wall.L" lar opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight. "What happened?" "The door to this damned place closed," I explained. "What?" Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a lamps. The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault. The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically. Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us. "Miller!" "Yes?" "See if you can get this thing open from the outside." I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls. Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak. "Miller, get help!" "I'll -- " The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently. "What happened to him?" "I'll phone Lunar City." My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves. I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City... Static grated against my ear drums. Static! ratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: "Calling Lunar City." "Static!" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. "There's no static between interlunar radio!" Verana's voice was small and frightened. "That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth." "It does," Marie agreed. "But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless -- " Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white -- "unless we were in outer space!" We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion. I deactivated my radio. Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond. Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies. We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door. We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last. We walked slowly, examining, the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks. Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding. I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet. "Shut off your oxy," I suggested. "We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later." They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets. Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was firy, but his nerves were like steel. "The end of the line," he grunted. As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly. He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand. The door closed behind him. Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. "Harry!" Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice. Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway. Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock. The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form. Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall. I put my arms around her, held her close. "Antigravity machines, force rays," I suggested worriedly. For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon. We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship. My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality. led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps. We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly. Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp. Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms. I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly. j The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column. "Ed!" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. "The things in this room are food!" The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle. "Let's see how it tastes," I said. I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers. The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance. I tasted a small piece. "Chocolate! Just like chocolate!" Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid. "Milk!" she exclaimed. "Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms," I told her. ined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen. Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing. Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap. The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position. "Hyper-space drive," Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars. We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited. A few minutes lat,er, Marie entered the room. I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it. She sat next to Verana. "What happened?" my wife asked. Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, "That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice -- " "Telepathic?" Verana interrupted. "Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!" "What memories?" I inquired.t She frowned with concentration. "Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general..." room at that moment, his face red with anger. "Do you know where we are?" he demanded. "When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!" "Did they use telepathy to explain?" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically. "Yeah," Kane replied. "I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!" "Start at the beginning," I suggested. He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. "This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it -- like rabbits in a snare!" "And now the booby-trap is on its way home," I guessed. "Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us." "How long will the trip take?" I asked. "Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!" Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her. "Don't feel so bad," I told Kane. "It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us -- " "Maybe they'll dissect us!" Marie gasped. Verana scoffed. "A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods." "Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow," Kane said excitedly. "We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!" "It's impossible. Don't waste your time." The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room. ' gers. "So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!" Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls. "Where are you? Who are you?" "I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine." "Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?" "No. I control the ship." Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical. "What are your -- your masters going to do wiith us?" Marie asked anxiously. "You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight i stage. Thy left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity." I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, "Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?" "The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship." "Come on," Kane ordered. "We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth." "It's useless," the ship warned us. For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.  use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on. The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor. After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our alloted space. We gave up. The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the "kitchen." At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament. "Trapped," Kane said angrily. "Trapped in a steel prison." He slammed his fist against the table top. "But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!" "You sure?" I asked. "What?" "Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance." My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry. sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth. Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked. "Whiskey!" "My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one," the machine explained. I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. "A little stronger than our own," I informed the machine. We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles. "Please don't hurt yourself," the machine pleaded. "Why?" Kane screamed at the ceiling. "Why should you care?" "My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition." Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly. "Shtop me, then!" "I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language." It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment. After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana. I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons. Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one! I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me -- somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be. They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an' enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon. The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever. I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the "morning."  throbbing painfully. I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before. I was tied to one of the chairs in the "kitchen." Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair. Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.  "Awake, huh?" "What have you done, Harry?" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him. "Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up." He smiled crookedly. "It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me." "What's your plan?" I asked. He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. "I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution." I grunted my disgust. "The solution is simple," he said. "We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation." "So what?" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone. "The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?" "Right." "Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?" "What remark?" "It said, 'My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?" sion. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so. "Ed," he said, "if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?" "Hell, I don't know," I confessed. "Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times." "Machines always do their best," I argued. "Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him. "Out machines always do their best," he argued, "because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!" "So what?" He shrugged muscular shoulders. "So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring -- " "What are you talking about?" I interrupted. "Are you so drunk that you don't know -- " "I'll show you, Ed." He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath. "Can you see me, machine?" he asked the empty air. "Yes," the electronic brain replied. "Watch!" Kane tightened his fingers around my throat. Verana and Marie screamed shrilly. My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully. "Please stop," the machine pleaded. "What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!" I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions! "Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?" Kane demanded. "Not if you return with dead specimens!" "No," the machine admitted. "If you don't take us back to the Moon," Kane threatened, "I'll kill all of us!" The alien electronic brain was silent. By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled. "If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure." My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem. "Look at it this way," Kane persisted. "If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later." A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness. "You win," the machine conceded. "I'll return the ship to the Moon." Kane released his grip on my throat. "See?" he asked. "Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?" I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again. The Ties of Earth Conclusion of a #-Part Serial You bet Co mmager had a problem! He could smash the conspiracy and not escape alive... or capitulate to it and lose his mind! A lan Commager accompanies his friend Jean Bohart to the home of Herbert Hawkes in Beverly Hills, with the intention of "rescuing" Jean's impressionable husband Ira Bohart from the influence of a mysterious metaphysical group called the Guides. Commager is amused at Ira's belief that Commager himself has recently demonstrated psi abilities that will be of interest to the Guides. At Hawkes's home, they meet a small group of people. To prove to Ira that the Guides are frauds, Commager submits to a series of experiments conducted by an attractive young woman called Paylar. He blacks out and discovers himself presently sitting in his store, much later in the night, with no recollection of how he got there. Also in the store is the dead body of Ruth MacDonald whom he had met at Hawkes's home. Commager decides the Guides are out to frame him for interfering in their business with Ira. He leaves Ruth's body in the garden back of Hawkes's house. Early next morning, Commager learns through a phone call from Jean Bohart that the Boharts are unaware of anything unusual having occurred during the experiments the night before, but that they left the party before he did. Unable to be really certain that he didn't kill Ruth MacDonald during the period of amnesia, Commager calls on Dr. Henry L. Warbutt, his one-time guardian and psychologist. Warbutt tells him that among the local fringe groups the Guides are reputed to have genuine metaphysical powers and that they are probably a good group to avoid. Commager calls next on another friend, a professional hypnotist, Julius Savage. He relives a period of his life, four years back, when he became interested in the psi experiments of his wife, Lona, who was killed shortly afterward in an automobile crash. Julius startles him by telling him that he never had a wife and that his memories of her are a delusion. Paylar meets him that night and explains that the Guides are an organization devoted to preventing the development of parapsychological abilities in human beings. Commager, she says, is in the process of developing such abilities to a dangerous extent. The Guides will use all available means to "stop" him. Commager is skeptical, but is badly jolted again when he notices that the driver of Paylar's car is Ruth MacDonald, now very much alive again. In spite of Paylar's warning, he has no intention of joining the Guides. The following morning, Commager receives a call from a Mrs. Elaine Lovelock, an assistant of Dr. Wilson Knox, who was present at the meeting at Hawkes's house and who is the head of a local pseudo-religious cult. Dr. Knox has had a heart attack during the night and pleads for Commager's help. Commager goes to see Knox who tells him the heart attack is a punishment for having resisted Ruth MacDonald's attempt to assume control of his cult and that the Guides will kill him unless Commager grants him his "protection." Commager, according to Knox, has abilities of which the Guides are afraid. Commager decides to humor Knox to the extent of phoning Paylar and telling her that Ruth is to leave Knox alone. A little later, Commager gets another message from Mrs. Lovelock: Dr. Knox has just died. Within halt an hour, Commager finds himself suffering from something remarkably like a heart attack himself. first hot jolt of pain drove down from the center of Commager's throat to a point under the end of his breast-bone. If it hadn't been so damned pat, he thought, he might have yelled for a doctor. The sensations were thoroughly convincing. There was a section at the back of the store devoted to the experimental breeding of fish that were priced high enough to make such domestic arrangements worthwhile and exceptionally delicate in their requirements for propagation. The section had a doorthat could be locked, to avoid disturbances. Commager went in and locked it. In the swampy, hot-house atmosphere, he leaned against one of the tank racks, breathing carefully. The pain was still there, much less substantial than it had been in the first few moments, but still a vertical, hard cramping inside his chest. It had shocked him -- it did yet -- but he was not nearly so much alarmed as angry. The anger raged against himself -- he was doing this! The suggestion to do it might have been implanted, but the response wasn't an enemy from outside, a phantom tiger pressing cold, steely claws down through his chest. It was a self-generated thing that used his own muscles, his own nerves, his own brain -- It tightened suddenly again. with a bitter, black, strangling nausea in his throat. "I'm doing it!" he thought. The clamping agony was part of himself; he had created it, structured it, was holding it there now. A ND SO HE relaxed it again. Not easily, because the other side of himself, the hidden, unaware, responsive side was being stubborn about this! It knew it was supposed to die now, and it did its determined best. But degree by degree, he relaxed the cramping, the tightness, and then suddenly felt it dissolve completely. Commager stood, his legs spread apart, swaying a little drunkenly. Sweat ran from his body. His head remained cocked to the right as if listening, sensing, while he breathed in long, harsh gasps that slowed gradually. It was gone. And now, he thought, let's really test this thing! Let's produce it again. That wasn't easy either, because he kept cringing in fear of its return. But he produced it. And, this time, it wasn't too hard to let it go, let it dissolve again. He brought it up briefly once more, a single sharp stab -- and washed it away. And that, he thought, was enough of that kind of game. He'd proved his point! He stripped off his shirt and hosed cold water over his head and shoulders and arms. He dabbed himself with a towel, put his wet shirt back on, combed his hair and went back to the office. Sitting there, he thought of an old gag about a moronic wrestler who, practicing holds and grips all by himself, broke off his left foot and remarked admiringly, "Jeez, boss, nobody but me could have done that to me, huh?" Which more or less covered what had happened. And now that he had made that quite clear, it seemed safe to wonder whether just possibly there mightn't have been some direct, immediate prompting from outside -- something that told him to go ahead and break himself apart, just as the wrestler had done. been anything as direct as a telepathic suggestion. It could also have been done, quite as purposefully, by inducing the disturbed leaders of the Temple of Antique Christianity to bring their plight to his attention. By letting him become thoroughly aware of the shadowy, superstitious possibilities in the situation, opening his mind to them and their implications -- and then hammering the suggestion home with the simple, indisputable fact of Wilson Knox's death! If someone was clever enough to know Alan Commager a little better than he'd known himself so far -- and had motive enough else in order to soften him up -- it could have been done in just that way. And Paylar had told him openly that the motive existed. Commager decided that that was how it had been done; though now he didn't mind considering the possibility of a telepathic suggestion either. They might try something else, but he was quite sure that the kind of trick they had tried -- whichever way it had been done -- wouldn't work at all another time. They needed his cooperation for that, and he wasn't giving them any. And still, aside from the fact that Wilson Knox had been threatened, nothing at all had occurred openly. The anger in him remained. He couldn't bring himself to feel really sorry for Knox, or for Elaine Lovelock either. They were destructive mental parasites who'd had the bad luck to run into what might be simply a more efficient parasite of the same breed. In spite of their protests, they hadn't been any less ruthless with the people they controlled. He could recognize that. But the anger stayed with him, a smoldering and dangerous thing, a little ugly. Basically, Commager knew, he was still angry with himself. For reasons still unknown, he had developed an area of soft rot in his thoughts and emotions; and he was reasonably convinced that, without that much to start on, the proddings and nibblings of -- parasites -- couldn't have had any effect. To have reduced himself to the level of becoming vulnerable to them seemed an intolerably indecent failing, like a filthy disease. But anger, however honestly directed where it belongs, wants to strike outward. OR A parasite or whatever else she might be, Paylar looked flatteringly beautiful in a sheath of silver and black -- and he didn't get a significant word out of her all evening. Commager hadn't tried to talk shop, but he had expected that she would. However, in that respect, it might have been simply another interesting, enjoyable but not too extraordinary night out. In other respects, it wasn't. He didn't forget at any time that here was someone who probably shared the responsibility for what he was now rather certain had been, a deliberate murder. In retrospect, her promise to tell Ruth MacDonald not to frighten Knox any more hadn't meant anything, since Knox by then had been as good as dead. The odd thing -- made much odder, of course, by the other probability that he himself had been the actual target of that lar was concerned, he seemed unable to feel any convincing moral indignation about the event! It was puzzling enough so that, under and around their pleasant but unimportant conversation, he was mainly engaged in hunting for the cause of that lack of feeling. Her physical attractiveness seemed involved in it somehow. Not as a justification for murder; he wasn't even so sure this evening that he liked Paylar physically. He felt the attraction, but there was also a trace of something not very far from revulsion in his involuntary response to it. It wasn't too obvious; but she might have almost an excess of quiet vitality, a warmth and slender, soft earthiness that seemed almost more animal than human. That thought-line collapsed suddenly. Rather, it struck Commager, as if he'd been about to become aware of something he wasn't yet prepared to see. Paylar's short black eyebrows lifted questioningly. "I just worked something out, Mabel!" he explained. He'd asked her earlier what her full name was, and she had told him gravely it was Mabel Jones, and that she used Paylar for business purposes only. He didn't believe her, but, for the evening, they had settled cosily on Mabel and Alan. "The thing that's different about you," he went on, "is that you don't have a soul! So, of course, you don't have a human conscience either!" He considered a moment. It seemed, at any rate, to reflect almost exactly how he felt about her. A cat, say, was attractive, pleasant to see and to touch; and one didn't blame a cat for the squawking bird it had killed that afternoon. One didn't fairly blame a cat either if, to avenge some mysterious offense, it lashed out with a taloned paw at oneself! He developed the notion to Paylar as well as he could without violating the rule against shop-talk. The cat-woman seemed neither amused nor annoyed at his description of her. She listened attentively and then said, "You could still join us, Alan -- " "Lady," said Commager, astonished, "there are any number of less disagreeable suggestions you could have made at this hour!" He added, "Leaving out everything else, I don't like the company you keep." Paylar shrugged naked tanned shoulders. Then her gaze went past him and froze briefly. "What's the matter?" he inquired. She looked back at him with a rueful smile. "I'm afraid you're going to see a little more of my company now," she remarked. "What time of night is it, Alan?" just past midnight, he told her, so it wasn't surprising that this and that should have started crawling out of the woodwork. He turned his head. "Hello, Oracle!" he said cordially. "What do you see in the tea leaves for me?" Ruth MacDonald looked a little out of place here in a neat gray business suit. For a moment, she had also looked uncomfortably like a resurrected corpse to Commager, but she was alive enough. She glanced at him. "I see your death," she said unsmilingly. Commager told her that she appeared to be in a rut, but wouldn't she sit down and have a drink? The ice-faced young siren didn't share Paylar's immunity in his mind -- she made his flesh crawl; she was something that should be stepped on! Paylar stood up. "You're fools," she said to Ruth MacDonald without passion. She turned to Commager. "Alan, I should have told you I intended to drive back with Ruth -- " It was a lie, he thought, but he didn't mind. The expression of implacable hostility on Ruth MacDonald's face had been gratifying -- Paylar's friends were becoming really unhappy about him! The gray car stood almost at the far end of the dark parking lot where he had left his own. He walked them up to it and wished them both good night with some solemnity. "You, too, Miss MacDonald!" he said, which gained him another brief glance and nothing more. Then he stepped aside to let them back out. there was no particular psychic ability required to guess what was pushing against the back of his spine. "We're taking the next car," Herbert Hawkes's voice announced gently behind him. "And I'm sure we can count on you to act reasonably this time, Mr, Commager!" It was rather neat, at that. The gray car was moving slowly away, racing its engine. If there had been anyone in sight at the moment -- but there wasn't -- a back-fire wouldn't have created any particular excitement. "I'm a reasonable man," Commager said meekly. "Good evening, Mr. Barthold! I'm to take one of the back seats, I suppose?" "That's what we had in mind," Hawkes admitted. They might or might not be amateurs at this kind of thing, but they didn't seem to be making any obvious mistakes. Lex Barthold was driving, and Commager sat in the seat behind him. Hawkes sat beside Barthold, halfturned toward Commager. The gun he held pointed at Commager's chest lay along the top of the back-rest. From outside, if anyone happened to glance in, it would look as if the two of them were engaged in conversation. Commager thought wistfully of his own gun, stacked uselessly away in his car. This was what came of starting to think in terms of modern witchcraft! One overlooked the simple solutions. "I was wondering," he suggested, "what would happen if we passed a patrol-car." Hawkes shrugged very slightly. "You might try praying that we do, Commager!" was bothering him or not, the big man didn't look happy. And there was a set tension about the way Lex Barthold drove which indicated an equal lack of enjoyment there. Witchcraft addicts themselves, they might feel that physical mayhem, if that was what they were contemplating, was a little out of their normal lines of activity. Otherwise, they had brawn enough for almost any kind of mayhem, and while one needn't assume immediately that the trip was to wind up with outright murder, their attitude wasn't reassuring. Meanwhile, he had been fascinated by the discovery that Hawkes sported a large, discolored bruise at the exact points of his neck and jaw where Commager had thought his fist had landed early Monday morning. Those "hallucinations" hadn't been entirely illusory, after all! However, that made it a little harder again to understand what actually could have happened that night. Commager's thoughts started darting off after rather improbable explanations, such as the possibility of Ruth MacDonald's having a twin sister or a close double who had been sacrificed then -- much as Knox had been -- as part of the plot to drive Alan Commager out of his mind or into his grave! He shook his head. It just didn't seem very likely. The one thing he could be sure of right now was that Hawkes, who mightn't be the most genial of men at best, hadn't appreciated that sneak punch. They didn't pass any patrolcars... IX not a quarter of a mile away from his own Bayside cabin. The location wasn't accidental. Once they were past the point of possible interference, with the last fifty yards of a twisting, precipitous goat-path down to the Bay behind Commager and a gun still in front of him, Hawkes took time out to explain. "We're counting on your being found," he said, "and this is your own backyard, so to speak. You've gone fishing now and then from that spot down there, Commager. Tonight, being a little liquored up, you decided to go for a swim. Or you slipped and fell from all the way up here and died instantly." Commager looked at the gun. "With a couple of bullets in me?" "I don't think it will come to that." Both of them, in spite of Hawkes's bland analysis of the situation, were still as nervous, Commager suspected, as a couple of cats in a strange cellar. "But if it does -- well, you ran into a couple of rough characters out here, and they shot you and threw you in! Of course, we'd prefer to avoid that kind of complication." He paused as if expecting some comment. They both stood about eight feet away, looking at Commager. The Moon was low over the Bay, but it was big, and there was plenty of light for closerange shooting. This was a lumpy shelf of rock, not more than twenty by twenty feet, long and wide; the path dropped off to the right of it to another smaller shelf and ended presently at the water's edge, where there was a wet patch of sand when the tide was out. The only way up from here was the path they'd come down by, and the two stood in front of that. He couldn't read Barthold's expression just now, but Hawkes was savagely tense -- a big man physically confident of himself, mentally prepared for murder, but still oddly unsure and -- expectant! Commager suddenly: they were wondering whether he wasn't going to produce some witchcraft trick of his own in this emergency! It was such an odd shifting of their original roles that it startled a snort of rather hysterical mirth from him; and Hawkes, in the process of handing the gun to Barthold, tried to jerk it back, and then Commager moved. He didn't move toward Hawkes but toward Barthold, who seemed to have a better hold on the gun. They might have thought he was after it, too, because Hawkes let go and swung too hastily at him, as Barthold took a step back. Commager slammed a fist into Barthold's body, swung him around between Hawkes and himself, and struck hard again. The gun didn't even go off. He had no more time then for Barthold, because Hawkes rammed into him with disconcerting solidness and speed. In an instant, it was like fighting a baboon, all nails and muscles and smashing fists and feet. The top of Hawkes's skull butted his mouth like a rock. Commager hit him in the back of the neck, was free for a moment and hit again. Hawkes stepped back, straightening slightly, and Commager followed and struck once more, in the side. Then Hawkes disappeared. It was as sudden as that! Realization that he was stumbling on the edge of the rock shelf himself came together with a glimpse of the thundering white commotion of surf almost vertically beneath him -- a good hundred and fifty feet down. With a terrible trembling still in his muscles, he scrambled six feet back on the shelf and glared wildly around for Lex Barthold. But his mind refused to turn away from the thought of how shockingly close he had come to going over with Hawkes; so a number of seconds passed before he grasped the fact that Barthold also was nowhere in sight. slowed gradually, while he stared warily up the trail to the left. The noise of the water would have covered any sounds of either stealthy withdrawal or approach; but since Barthold seemed to have preferred to take himself and the gun out of the fight, it was unlikely he would be back. On the other hand, there were a number of points on that path where he could wait for Commager to come within easy range, while he remained out of immediate physical reach himself. To the right, the trail led down. Commager glanced in that direction again and, this time, saw the gun where it had dropped into the loose shale of the shelf. Lex Barthold was lying on his back among the boulders of the next shelf down, his legs higher than his head, the upper part of his body twisted slightly to one side. He had fallen only nine feet or so, but he wasn't moving. They looked at each other for a moment; then Commager safetied the gun and put it in his pocket. He went on down. "Hawkes went over the edge," he said, still rather dazed. "What happened to you?" Barthold grunted. "Broke my back!" He cursed Commager briefly. "But you're a dead man, too, Commager!" "Neither of us is dead yet," Commager told him. He felt physically heavy, cold and tired. He hesitated and added, "I'm going to go and get help for you." Barthold shook his head slowly. "You won't get back up there alive. We've made sure of you this time..." He sounded matterof-factly certain of it, and if he felt any concern about what would happen now to himself, there was no trace of it in his voice. Commager stared down at him for a moment wondering, and then looked around. ly below them; the Moon seemed to be sliding fast through clouds far out over the Bay. Overhead, the broken, sloping cliffs might conceal anything or anybody. The feeling came strongly to him then that in this savage and lonely place anything could happen without affecting the human world at all or being noticed by it. The night-lit earth seemed to shift slowly and giddily about him and then steadied again, as if he had, just then, drifted far beyond the boundaries of the reality he knew and were now somewhere else, in an area that followed laws of its own, if it followed any laws at all. When he looked at Barthold again, he no longer felt the paradoxical human desire to find help for a man who had tried to kill him and whom he had nearly killed. He could talk in Barthold's own terms. He bent over him. "What makes you so sure your friends have got me?" Barthold gave him a mocking glance, but he didn't answer. They weren't certain, Commager thought, straightening up. They were just hoping again! That something was preparing against hirp was an impression he'd gained himself, almost like the physical sensation of a hostile stirring and shifting in the air and the rocks about him, a secretive gathering of power. But they weren't certain! "I think," he said slowly, "that I'll walk away from here wheh I feel like it." He paused, and added deliberately, "You people might last longer if you didn't try to play rough, Barthold! Except, of course, with someone like Wilson Knox." culty. "The reason you're still alive is that Paylar and I were the only ones who would believe you were a natural of the new mind. The first one here in twenty-three years -- " His breath seemed to catch; his face twisted into a grimace of pain. "But tonight they all know that ordinary controls won't work on you, Commager! That's what makes it too late for you," Commager hesitated. He said gently, "When did you and Paylar discover I was a natural of the new mind?" "Sunday night, of course!" Barthold was plainly anxious now to keep him here. He hurried on, "The mistake was made five years ago. You should have been destroyed then, before you had learned anything, not placed under control!" Commager's eyes widened slightly. Until that statement, he had given only a fraction of conscious attention to what Barthold was saying, the greater part of his mind alert to catch those wispy, not-quite-physical indications that something unhealthy was brewing nearby in the night. But five years ago! "Paylar made me an offer to join your group," he pointed out. "Wouldn't that have been satisfactory?" Barthold stared up at him. His mouth worked, but for a few seconds he made no audible reply. "Don't wait!" he said with startling, savage intensity. "Now, or..." The words thickened and slurred into angry, incomprehensible mutterings. The eyelids closed. Commager bent down and prodded Barthold's shoulder with a forefinger. The man might be dying -- those last words hadn't sounded as if they were addressed to him -- but there were things he had to know now. "What are you, Barthold? Aren't you a natural, too?" Barthold's eyes opened and rolled toward him, but remained unpleasantly unfocused. "Old mind -- " the thick voice mumbled. And then clearly, "You're a fool, Commager! You didn't really know anything! If the others -- " The eyes closed again. Old mind... That still told him nothing. "Are the others of the old mind?" Barthold grinned tiredly. "Why don't you ask Hawkes?" There was a sound behind Commager like the sloshing of water in the bottom of a boat. Then he had spun around and was on his feet, his hair bristling. the moonlight, twenty feet away. Water ran from his clothes to the rocks among which he stood. Water had smeared his hair down over his face. And the left side of his head looked horribly flattened. He took a step forward, and then came on in a swaying rush. For a long instant of time, Commager only stared. Hawkes was dead; quite obviously, even now as he moved, he was dead -- so he hadn't come climbing back up the rocks out of the sweeping tug of the waves! He -- He was gone. Commager walked over to the point where he had seen Hawkes. The rocks were dry. He went back to Barthold, his lips still stiff with horror. "Tell me what this was!" he said hoarsely. "Or I'll kill you now!" Barthold was still grinning, his eyes open and wickedly alert. "A picture I let you look at -- but, you see, you learn too fast! You're a natural. You wouldn't believe a picture now, and the old mind couldn't do anything else to you. But there are others working for us -- and now -- " There was a rumbling and a grinding and a rushing sound overhead. Commager leaped back, his eyes darting up. He heard Lex Barthold screaming. The whole upper cliff-side was moving, sliding downward. A gray-black, turning, almost vertical wave of broken rock dropping toward them... X hart remarked, with an air of moody discovery, "are really pretty lucky!" Commager went "Hm?" drowsily. Then he lifted his head to look at her. She stood beside the Sweet Susan's lashed wheel, shaded blue eyes gazing at him from under the brim of her yachting cap, hands clasped behind her. "What brought that to mind?" he inquired. "I was thinking about my troubles," she said. "Then I started thinking they weren't really so bad! Comparatively -- " She was keeping her voice light. Commager sat up from where he'd stretched himself out beside the cabin, gathering his thoughts back out of the aimless diffusion of sleep. "Ready to talk about your troubles now?" Jean shook her head. "Not yet." She frowned. "There's something about them I want to figure out by myself first -- and I'm not quite done." The frown vanished. "If you've finished your nap, you might look around and see what a grand morning it is! That's what I meant by being lucky." They were off Dana Point, he saw, so he'd slept a full hour since Jean had taken them out of the Newport Beach harbor. The Sweet Susan was running smoothly southward, through the Pacific's long smooth swells. Now that he was sitting up, the wind streamed cool about his head and neck and shoulders. He said, "Yes, I guess we're lucky." Jean grinned. "And since I've got you awake, I'll catch a nap myself! Not that I spent the night boozing and brawling." Commager smiled at her. "Any time you feel like putting in a night like that, give me a ring." Superficially, in her white slacks and thin sweater, Jean Bohart looked fresh as a daisy; only the tautness about her mouth and a controlled rigidity in the way she stood suggested that the "trouble" might be close to a complete emotional disaster. He'd thought earlier that he would have liked to get out of this jaunt if he could; now he felt guilty and a little alarmed. wheel while she lay down on the bench, pulling a pillow under her head and settling back with the cap-brim down over her eyes. He could tell that the muscles of the slim straight body weren't actually going to relax. But she would pretend now to be asleep and Commager let his thoughts shift away from Jean, promising himself to give her his full attention as soon as she was ready to talk. There were a few problems of his own to be considered, though at the moment he had the sense of a truce, a lull. Last night, he had shaken the Guides badly; he had killed two of their members. But there were at least three left, and he hadn't crippled their power to act. The truce, if it was that, was due in part to their fear of his reaction and in part to an entirely different kind of restraint -- a restraint which he believed was self-imposed. The reason he believed it was that he was now aware of being under a similar restraint himself. He thought he knew why it was an inescapable limitation, but impersonally he could agree with Paylar's opinion that, from the Guides' point of view, he should have been destroyed as soon as they became aware of him. Left to himself -- if in curiosity he had begun to investigate psi -- he would have discovered the limitation quickly enough and abided by it. Even so, it appeared to permit an enormously extended range of effective activity. And Barthold had implied a conflict between an "old mind" and a "new mind." It sounded like an esoteric classification of varying degrees of human psi potential -- an ascendant individual "new mind" threatening the entrenched and experienced but more limited older group, which compensated for its limitation by bringing functioning members of the "new mind" under its control or repressing or diverting their developing abilities. He, apparently, was a "natural of the new mind." He couldn't be permanently controlled. To the older group he represented an intolerable threat. thrown a few thousand tons of stone at him! And he had deflected that missile from its course. Not by very much, but just enough to keep it clear of the frantically scrambling figure of himself, scuttling up the cliff path like a scared beetle. He had done it -- how? Trying to restructure the action, Commager knew that the process itself hadn't been a conscious one. But it had been symbolized in his awareness by a cluster of pictures that took in the whole event simultaneously. A visualization of himself and the long thundering of the rocks, the sideward distortion of their line of fall, and a final picture again of himself as he reached the top of the cliff unharmed. It had all been there, in a momentary, timeless swirling of possibilities against the background of rock and shadow, the tilted, turning sky and moonlight glittering on racing waters. Then, in an instant, the pattern had been set, decided on; and the event solidified into reality with the final thudding crash. Barthold lay buried under the rocks and perhaps, down in the water, the body of Hawkes also had been caught and covered. He hadn't tried to save Barthold. Instead, automatically, he had flung out another kind of awareness, a flashing search for the mind that had struck at him. And he had been prepared, in a way he couldn't have described now, to strike back. He "found" three of them; the one who had acted and two who merely observed. Almost, not quite, he knew where they were. But they were alert. It was as if something, barely glimpsed, had been flicked out of his sight, leaving a lifeless black emptiness for him to grope through if he chose. Commager didn't choose to do any blind groping. He wasn't sure enough of himself for that. -- and, apparently, they -- didn't dare to violate had to do with the preservation of appearances. It was a line of thought he didn't want to follow too far just now. But itseemed that the reality he knew and lived in was a framework of appearances, tough and durable normally but capable of being distorted into possibly chaotic variations. The penalty seemed to be that to the degree one distorted the framework, he remained distorted himself. The smooth flow of appearances was quickly re-established, but the miracle-worker found himself left somehow outside. Commager suspected that he stayed outside. He suspected also that a really significant distortion of appearances would thrust the life and mind that caused it so far out that, for all practical purposes, it ceased to exist. He wasn't tempted to test the theory. Its apparent proof was that reality, by and large, did remain intact, while those who played around too consistently with even minor infringements notoriously failed to thrive. To let a pair of dice briefly defy the laws of chance probably did no harm to anyone, but when you aimed and launched the side of a cliff as a missile of murder, you were very careful that the result was a rock-slide and not a miracle! You didn't -- ever -- disturb the world of reality... them, if they broke the truce, was the ambush, the thing done secretly under the appearance of a natural series of events. It left an unpleasantly large number of possibilities open, but until something new happened, he couldn't know that they weren't ready to call it a draw. So far, his spontaneous reactions had been entirely effective; the obvious damage was all on the other side. But since the damage wasn't all obvious, he had no present intention of forcing a showdown. "Natural" or not, he might be either not quite good enough at that kind of game, or much too good. But meanwhile -- Commager looked thoughtfully at Jean Bohart. She had fallen asleep finally, but she wasn't sleeping comfortably. Her mouth moved fretfully, and she made small whimpering sounds from time to time, almost like a puppy that is dreaming badly. If he'd become a miracleworker on a small scale, Commager thought, if he'd already pushed himself to some degree beyond the normal limits of reality, he might as well get some use out of what he couldn't undo. Looking at her, it wasn't too difficult to imagine the rigidities and tensions that kept Jean from finding any real physical rest. Nor -- a step farther -- was it hard to get a picture of her emotional disturbances shaping themselves into a scurrying and shifting dream-torment. Carefully, Commager took hold of the two concepts. He waited until he could no longer be quite sure whether it was he or Jean who was really experiencing these things; and then, as he had done yesterday with the pain in his own body, he let dreams and tensions ebb away and cease to be. In spite of everything else that had happened, he was still amazed, a few moments later, to realize that his experiment in therapy had been a complete success. XI above. Black-blue thoppy water of the Pacific all about. The Sweet Susan drifted, throttled down and almost stationary. Near the kelp beds two miles to the south, eight other boats gradually changed their relative positions. In the north-east, toward which the Sweet Susan slowly moved, the dark jaws of the Bay opened out, still too far off to make out the scars of last night's rock-slide. Jean had slept steadily for over an hour, and Commager had two lines trailing under superficial observation. Not even a mackerel had taken any interest so far, which probably wasn't due to the sinister influence of the Guides, but to the fact that the deep drop outside the Bay simply wasn't a very good fishing area. Unconcerned about that, he'd been sitting there for some while, in a drowsy, sun-bright daydream composed of an awareness of physical well-being, his odd certainty that the truce still held, and enjoyment of the coincidence that the Sun was getting hotter to the exact degree that the breeze got brisker in compensation. For the hour, under such circumstances, the life of an unambitious, healthy animal seemed to be about as much as anybody reasonably could ask for. He came out of it with a sort of frightened start. He had heard Jean stirring on the bench behind him. Now she yawned, just audibly, and sat up, and he knew she was looking at him. Commager couldn't have said what kept him from turning his head. There was a momentary questioning alarm in him, which stiffened into cold watchfulness as Jean got up and went into the cabin. There had been another little shift in the values of reality while he was off-guard, he thought. Something was a shade wrong again, a shade otherwise than it had been an hour or so ago. But he didn't yet know what it was. out again, and he guessed she'd changed into her swimsuit. He heard her come up behind him, and then a pair of smooth arms were laid lightly across his shoulders and a voice, from a point a little above and behind his head, inquired, "Had any luck, Alan? The Sun got a bit too hot for me." It shocked him completely because it was Lona who touched him and spoke. It was also, of course, Jean Bohart -- and there was no longer any question that she'd served as the model for his imaginary woman. It had been out of just such scraps of illusion as this -- voice sounds and touches, distorted seconds in time -- that he'd built up that self-deception. How he had been reached in the first place to get him started on the construction was something he couldn't yet recall, but the purpose was also completely obvious. Five years ago, Lex Barthold had said, they'd taken him under control. To divert a mind from a direction you didn't want it to follow, you gave it a delusion to stare at. You drenched the delusion in violently unpleasant emotions, which kept the mind from any closer investigation of the disturbance -- Apparently, they'd expected the treatment to be effective for the rest of his lifetime. But when Ira reported on the minor sensation Commager had created in a Las Vegas club, they'd come alert to the fact that his developing psi abilities hadn't been permanently stunted. And then a majority of them had been afraid to attempt to kill a "natural." Unconsciously, he'd resisted the next maneuver -- drastic as it had been -- to throw him into a delusive tizzy. Then he'd begun to strike back at them. It wasn't really surprising, he thought, that they'd become a little desperate. And they might have known of that dice game before Ira told them about it. Ira had been their means of contacting him directly. As Jean had been the means of keeping the primary delusion reinforced and alive. ' her, somewhat carefully. The momentary shock of recognition had faded, but some of the feeling he'd wasted on the delusion seemed to have transferred itself back to the model now! It didn't really surprise him, and it wasn't an unpleasant sensation; but, for a moment, at least, he didn't want it to show in his voice. "Did you get caught up on your sleep?" It might have showed in his voice, because she moved away from him and leaned over the side of the boat, looking at the lines. "Uh-huh!" she said casually. "I feel fine now! Better than I have in a long time, as a matter of fact." Commager regarded her speculatively. The easy grace of her body confirmed what she said; the tensions were gone. He patted himself mentally on the back. Commager the Healer! "Alan?" "Yes?" he said. "I'm leaving Ira." Her face flushed a little. "To be more exact about it, Ira's leaving me! For that MacDonald woman you met Sunday!" Commager said softly that he'd be damned. His thoughts were racing as she went on, "He told me yesterday morning. It jolted my vanity, all right! But the funny thing is, you know, that as soon as I got over that, I found I actually didn't care. It was really a relief. Isn't that funny?" He didn't think it was funny. It was a little too pat. turning to face him, "I thought I loved that guy. And now I find I never did!" She shook her head. "I don't get it, Alan. How can anyone be so crazy?" "What are you going to do?" he asked. She stared at him for a moment, looking appealing, hurt and lovely. If he put his hand out to her now, she'd be in his arms. "I'm going to Florida for a few months. Ira can settle it any way he wants to." So that was the way it had been, Commager thought in astounded fury. He was the one they'd wanted to hold down, but it wasn't only his life they'd twisted and distorted to do it. They'd used Jean just as ruthlessly. And, perhaps, Ira -- For five years, he could have had his imaginary woman. She'd been within his reach in reality. And, now that delusions were not working so well any more, they threw the reality at him! Only now it was a little too late. He'd changed too far to be able to accept their gift. "Jean," he said. "Yes, Alan?" "You're going to stop thinking for a while now," he told her gently. "Y ou're going to just stand there for a while and not be aware of anything that happens." A puzzled frown formed on her face as he started to speak, but it smoothed out again, and then she went on looking placidly at him. Perhaps her eyes had dulled a trifle. Commager at all. Out beyond the Sweet Susan, he saw something like a faint haze beginning to shape itself over the moving surface of the water. He grinned a little. Slowly and deliberately, he framed the cold thought in his mind: Do what you can for yourselves! The truce is over! Their response was an instantaneous one. A long swell rose up behind the Sweet Susan, lifted the boat, passing beneath it, and dropped it again. The Sweet Susan was still rising as Commager picked up Jean Bohart and set her down beside the bench near the wheel; and it slapped down in a smash of spray as he cut the lashings of the wheel with the emergency knife and pulled out the throttle. He glanced around. The haze was a thick fog about them, brilliant white against the blue of the sky overhead, while they ran through its wet, gray shade. The boat shuddered sideways behind the big swell, water roiling about it. Suddenly, with a kind of horror, Commager understood what was there. He had seen pictures of it, or rather of a part of it, cast up on the coast years before: a housesized chunk of rotten, oddly coarse-grained flesh, hurriedly disposed of and never identified. The drifted remnant of a nameless phenomenon of the Pacific deeps. The phenomenon itself was underneath them now! done more than briefly convulse the surface as it turned, it was rising toward the boat. A thing of icy, incredible pressures, it was disrupted and dying as it rose, incapable of understanding the impulse that had forced it from the dark ocean up toward the coast hours before. But it was certain that, in the bright glare above it, it would find and destroy the cause of its pain. So it came up with blind, hideous swiftness; and Commager discovered that rushing bulk could not be simply turned away from them as he had turned the rocks. It was driven by its own sick and terrible purpose. Neither could he reach the minds that guided it. This time, they were alertly on guard. With seconds to spare then, he turned the boat. In the fog to their left, the sea opened in a thundering series of crashes and settled again. Water smashed into the boat as it danced and drove raggedly away, and before it had gone very far it was lifted once more on a thrust of water from below. The thing from the sea had followed, and it was terribly close! So close that the flickering dull glow of a mind as primitive as the monstrous body itself rose up in Commager's awareness. He caught at it. What he drove into the glow was like an insistence on its destruction. It seemed to blaze up in brief, white fury and then went black... The Sweet Susan drove on through a curiously disturbed sea, surrounded by dissipating wisps of what might or might not have been an ordinary patch of fog. Probably, no one on any of the distant fishing boats even noticed that minor phenomenen. A half-mile away, the water roiled once more; and that was all. The Pacific had gone back to its normal behavior. Paylar was talking, at least most of the time. Sometimes Commager listened and sometimes he didn't. It was a fairy tale situation, he thought, somewhat amused at himself. Because he could feel the mood of it very strongly, a childlike one, a mood of enchantment around him and of terror along the fringes of the enchantment. Terror that was in part past, and in part still to come. Far below the slope where they sat, sun-fires gleamed in the dark, moving waters, like fire shining out of the heart of a black jewel. Down there, as was not inappropriate near the end of a fairy tale, two of the bad ones lay dead and buried, unless one of them had been taken away by the water. Much farther out, miles out, the body of a defeated dragon bumped slowly along the seabottom, back to the deeps, nibbled at, tugged at, pulled and turned by armies of hungry fish. A blonde and beautiful princess was halfway to the far land of flowers called Florida by now, flying through the night skies, and released at last from an evil enchantment. She might still wonder at how oddly she'd acted the past few years, but she'd begun to look forward to new and exciting activities -- and she was rapidly forgetting Alan Commager in the process. It had been the only way to arrange it, because this was a trap of magic Jean had no business being in, and she'd been in it only because of him. He'd got himself the other one, the dark, beautiful, wicked witch, to keep company instead. So Paylar talked of magical things, and he listened, pleasantly to believe anything she told him. Earth turned under them, vast and ponderous, away from the Sun and into the night, a big, convincing stage background to what she was talking about. a single entity, growing and developing from this great globe, and its conscious thinking processes went on mainly in that part of it that was human. Which was fine, she explained, while all humans were still Old Mind, as they had been at first, because they were aware of Earth and cared for it, knowing they were a part of it, and that it all belonged together. But then New Mind humans came along, as a natural development. They could think a little better than the others, but they were no longer aware of being a part of Earth life and didn't care about anything much but themselves, since they considered themselves to be individuals. It didn't matter too much. They were still influenced by the purpose and patterns of Earth life, and had practically no conscious defenses against what seemed to them to be obscure motivations of their own. And there were always enough Old Mind people around who knew what was going on to direct the rather directionless New Minders patiently back to the old patterns, so that in the long run things tended to keep moving along much as they always had done. It began to matter when New Minders developed a conscious interest in what was now called psi. That was an Earth life ability which had its purpose in keeping the patterns intact; and only the New Mind, which had intelligence without responsibility, was capable of using psi individualistically and destructively. In most periods of time, the New Mind was kept from investigating psi seriously by its superstitious dread of phenomena it couldn't rationalize. But when it did get interested -- In the Old Mind, adherence to the Earth life pattern was so complete that dangerous psi abilities simply didn't develop. "So you see," she said, "we need New Mind psi to control New Mind psi." to understand that finally. And also that they were able to keep control of the people they used by the fact that psi abilities tended to be as deadly to their possessor as to anyone else, when employed without careful restraint. "At best, I imagine there's a high turnover rate in the New Mind section of an organization like the Guides." "There is," she agreed coolly. "Particularly since we select the ones that are potentially the most dangerous as recruits. The ones most hungry for power. Ruth, for example, is not likely to live out another year." Privately and thoughtfully, Commager confirmed that opinion. "Doesn't that unusual mortality attract attention?" he inquired. It seemed a little tactless, but he added, "What about Hawkes and Barthold, for example? Aren't they going to be officially missed?" "Hawkes was known to be nearly psychopathic," Paylar replied. "Whatever happened to him will surprise no one officially. And no one but ourselves knew anything about Lex." She had showed, Commager thought, an appalling indifference to the fate of her late companions. He studied her for a moment with interested distaste. "You know," he remarked then, "I don't feel any very strong urges for power myself. How does that fit in with your story?" She shrugged. "A natural is always unpredictable. You have a blend of Old Mind and New Mind qualities, Alan, that might have made you extremely useful to us. But since you didn't choose to be useful, we can't take a chance on you." He let that pass. "Where do people like you and Barthold come from?" he inquired curiously. "How did you get involved in this kind of thing?"  said, from a mountain village in northern Italy. Its name was as unimportant as her own. As for the role she was playing, in part she'd been instructed in it, and in part she'd known instinctively what she had to do. She smiled at him. "But none of that is going to concern you very much longer, Alan!" She sounded unpleasantly certain about it. Although he thought he could foretell quite precisely what was going to happen tonight, Commager felt a little shaken. He suggested, "What would happen if people like myself were just left to do as they pleased?" "Earth would go insane," she said calmly. The extravagance of the statement jolted him again, but he could see the analogue. The Old Mind was full of fears, too -- the fear of chaos. "That offer you made me to become one of the Guides -- was that a trap, or was it meant sincerely?" Her face abruptly became cautious and alert. "It was meant sincerely." "How could you have trusted me?" She said evasively, "There was a great deal you could have learned from us. You have discovered some of the things you can do by yourself, but you realize the dangers of uninstructed experimentation." He looked at her, remembering the limitations of Old Mind and that, because of them, there couldn't be any real compromise. He didn't doubt they would have showed him what was safe to do and of use to them; but the only circumstances under which they really could trust him would be to have him so befuddled that he'd be almost completely dependent on their assistance and advice. So they would also have showed him things that were very much less than safe -- for him. He thought that Herbert Hawkes had followed that road almost to the end before he died, and that Ruth MacDonald was rather far advanced on it by now. Those two had been merely greedy and power-hungry people, utilizing talents which were more expensive than they'd been allowed to guess. Lex and Paylar had been the only leaders among the ones he'd met of that group. He didn't bother to repeat his question; but Paylar said suddenly, "Why did you bring me out here this evening, Alan?" what was left of the Guides at Hawkes' place," Commager said. "I was a little annoyed, frankly, both because of something that happened today, and because of something that was done a while ago to somebody else. I was going to tell you to stop playing games around me and people I happen to like -- or else!" He grinned at her. "Of course, I realized you weren't going to risk a showdown right in the middle of town! It could get a little too spectacular. But since you were conveniently waiting alone there for me, I brought you out here." "Supposing," Paylar said, "that we don't choose to accept a showdown here either?" "Lady," he told her, "if it looks as if nothing is going to be settled, there are experiments I can start on with you that should have you yelling very quickly for help to any Guides remaining in the area. As I figure it, you see, a New Mind natural might be able to control an Old Mind expert very much as you intended to control me." She went a little white. "That could be true. But you can't hope to survive a showdown, Alan!" He spread his hands. "Why not? Logically, at least, I don't think there are very many of you left." He was almost certain he knew of one who hadn't openly played a part as yet, but he didn't intend to mention that name at the moment. "It wouldn't take more than a handful of developed New Mind psis to control an area like this. And you wouldn't want more than a handful around or you couldn't be sure of controlling them!" She nodded. "That's also true, of course. But you're still at a hopeless disadvantage, Alan. We -- the Old Mind knows exactly how this situation can be resolved in our favor, if we're prepared to lose a few more of our controlled psis... "The psis mightn't feel quite so calm about it," Commager pointed out. He hesitated. "Though I suppose you might have them believing by now that I'm out to eat them!" "They've been led to consider you a deadly threat to their existence," Paylar agreed with a touch of complacency. "They'll take any risk that's required, particular since they won't understand the full extent of the risk. And that isn't all, Alar... You're not the first New Mind natural we've dealt with, you know. If anything goes seriously wrong in this area, Old Mind all over the Earth will be aware of it." her, because he'd been wondering about that. And then he let the thought come deliberately into the foreground of his consciousness that he would prefer to reach an agreement, if it could be done. The Guides' ability to grasp what was going on in his mind seemed to be a very hazy one; but in a moment, though Paylar's expression didn't change, he was certain she had picked up that intentional piece of information. She said, with a slow smile, "How much do you remember of your parents, Alan?" He stared at her in surprise. "Not very much. They both died when I was young. Why?" She persisted, "Do you recall your mother at all?" "No," he admitted warily. "She divorced my father about two years after I was born. I stayed with him and never saw her again. I understand she died about three years later." "And your father?" she asked him insistently. Commager gestured patiently toward the Bay. "My father drowned out there on a fishing trip when I was eleven. I remember him well enough, actually. Afterward I was raised by a guardian. Do you mind telling me what these questions are about?" "Your father," she said, "was of the Old Mind, Alan. So he must have known what you might develop into almost since your birth." to accept that as valid information. "Why didn't he do something about his shocking little offspring?" he inquired. "Apparently," Paylar said calmly, "he did. If he hadn't died, your special abilities might have been blocked away so completely that they would never have come to your attention -- or brought you to our attention. As it was, what he did to check you was simply not sufficient." Commager considered the possibility, and again it seemed that that was what had occurred. It y was too long ago to arouse any particular emotion' in him. He said absently, watching her, "What's all this supposed to prove, Paylar?" "That we're not trying to control you out of malice. It seems as necessary to us now as it did to your father then." He shrugged. "That makes no difference, you know. If more control is all you have to offer, I'm afraid we'll go right on disagreeing." Paylar nodded. Then she just sat there, apparently unconcerned, apparently satisfied with what had been said and with things as they were, until Commager added suddenly, "I get the notion that you've just informed your little pals it's time for direct action. Correct?" "Two of them are on their way here." She gave him her slight smile. "When they arrive, we'll see what occurs, Alan! Would you like me to show you some pictures meanwhile?" "Pictures?" He stared at her and laughed. He was baffled and, for the moment, furious. He could, as she must realize and as he had once threatened to do, break her slim neck in one hand. The indications were that he could break her mind as easily if he exerted himself in that direction. But she seemed completely unconcerned about either possibility. caught that," she remarked. "You were really broadcasting, Alan! You won't try to hurt me. -- you're really incapable of it -- unless you become very frightened. And you're almost sure you can handle all three of us anyway, so you're not yet afraid... And in that, for once, she might have given him more information than she knew. Because he had sensed there had been three of them involved, two actively and one as an observer, in the last two attempts against him. Paylar, he guessed, had been the observer -- supervisor might be the better term. If those three were the only Guides that remained active locally, she was quite right: he was convinced he could handle them! And if, as seemed likely, they were going to leave him no choice about it, he would. What Old Mind elsewhere might think or do would be another matter then. He wasn't at all sure that he couldn't handle that problem also. Another piece of information Paylar had given him in the last minute or so was that sudden flares of emotion made him "legible" to those who had her own level of ability. He would avoid such emotional outbursts in future. "What kind of pictures did you intend to show me?" he inquired. "You think I'm trying to trap you," she accused him. "Aren't you?" Commager asked, surprised. "Of course! But only by showing you what Earth-life really is like -- while there is still time." "Well," he said agreeably, "go ahead..." between sunset and moonrise and watched pictures, though that wasn't quite what they were. At first, it seemed as if time were flowing around him; the Moon would be overhead briefly and gone again, while the planes of the ground nearby shifted and changed. That, he thought, was to get him used to the process, condition him a little. The trickeries would come next! But when they came, they weren't really trickery. He was simply, Commager decided, being shown life as Old Mind knew it and as, in a way, it was; though he himself had never thought to take quite so dramatic and vivid a view of it. Laughing and crying, thundering and singing, Earthlife drifted past in terrors and delights, flows of brightness and piercing sound and of blackest silence and night. At last, through all that tumult of light and fragrance and emotion, he began to grow aware of what to Old Mind, at least, was primarily there: the driving, powerful, unconscious but tremendous purpose. Earth dying and living, near-eternal... In his mind, he found himself agreeing that it was a true picture of life and a good one. He was a traitor to that life. Old Mind whispered to him. Earth needed him and had created him to help hold back the night and the cold forever! But the tiny, individual selfishness of the New Mind broke away from the flow of life and denied it. So, in the end, all would die together -- The flow slowed. Into it crept the cold and the dark -- a chill awareness of the approaching frozen and meaningless immobility of chaos. It wasn't till then that Commager reached out carefully and altered the pictures a trifle. It had been a good show, he thought, though overly dramatic; and Paylar had timed the paralyzing emergence of chaos very nicely. The two for whom he'd been waiting had just reached the turnoff from the highway. car glided swiftly down the Bay Road, as he brought his awareness back hurriedly to bis immediate surroundings to check on the physical condition of his companion. She sat upright a few feet away from him, her legs crossed under her, her hands dropped laxly into her lap, while the black animal eyes stared in blind horror at the frozen picture oi chaos. She would keep, he decided. And he wasn't really worried about the other two... Ira Bohart and Ruth MacDonald. He reached out for them, and as they flashed savagely back at him, he drew away, out of time, into the space that was open to New Mind only, where they would have to follow if they wanted to touch him. They followed instantly, with a furious lust for destruction which wasn't unexpected but which shocked him nevertheless. They came like daggers of thought, completely reckless, and if they succeeded in touching him in the same way he had touched the sea-thing, the struggle would be over in an instant. It became obvious immediately that he could prevent them from doing it, which -- since he was a stronger, more fully developed specimen of their own class -- was only to be expected. What concerned him was their utter lack of consideration for their own survival. The car they were in hadn't stopped moving; in less than half a minute now it would be approaching the sharp curve above the Bay. He had counted on the driver's attention being forced away from him momentarily, either to stop the car or to manipulate it safely around the curve; in that instant, he would bring the other one under his control as completely as he had trapped Paylar, and he would then be free to deal at his leisure with the driver. the Guides was weaker than a New Mind natural; it had looked as simple as that! He wanted to save what was left of the group, to operate through them very much as Old Mind had been doing, but with a very different purpose. The two who attacked should be withdrawing by now, dismayed at not having found him paralyzed by Paylar's "pictures," as they must have expected. They might be waiting for her to come to their assistance in some other manner, not knowing that she was no longer even aware of the struggle. However, within seconds the need of controlling the car would become urgent enough to settle the issue -- In an instant, he felt himself drawn down, blinded and smothered, in the grasp of a completely new antagonist! It was not so much the awareness of power immensely beyond that of the Guides that stunned him; it was a certainty that this new contact was a basically horrible and intolerable thing. In the fractional moment of time that everything in him was straining simply to escape from it, the New Minders drove through their attack. Pain was exploding everywhere through his being, as he wrenched himself free. Death had moved suddenly very close! Because the third opponent wasn't Paylar, never had been Paylar. He had miscalculated -- and so there had been one he'd overlooked. Now they had met, he knew he wasn't capable of handling this third opponent and the two New Minders together. Then without warning the New Minders vanished out of his awareness, like twin gleams of light switched off. Seconds later, from somewhere far out on the edge of his consciousness, as if someone else were thinking it, the explanation came: The car! They weren't able to stop the car! With that, the last of them drove at him again; and for a moment he was swept down into its surging emotions, into a black wave of rage and terror, heavy and clinging. But he was not unprepared for it now, and he struck at the center of its life with deadly purpose, his own terrors driving him. Something like a long, thin screaming rose in his mind... In that moment, complete understanding came. As in a dream scene, he was looking down into the yard of the Temple of Antique Christianity. It was night-time now; and on the dais he'd investigated the day before, a bulky, shapeless figure twisted and shook under a robelike cloth which covered it completely. The screaming ended abruptly, and the shape lay still. He discovered first that he was incredibly drenched with sweat, and that Paylar still sat in an unchanged position, as she stared at the thing he'd set before her mind to fix her attention. Down on the Bay Road, there was a faint shouting. He stood up shakily and walked forward till he could look down to the point where the road curved sharply to the left to parallel the Bay. The shouting had come from there. A few people were moving about, two of them with flashlights. Intermittently, in their beams, he could see the white, smashed guard railings. A brief, violent shuddering overcame him, and he went back to where Paylar sat, trying to organize his thoughts. The reason for her confident expectance of his defeat was obvious now. The unsuspected opponent -- the gross shape that had kicked about and died on the dais, the woman he'd known as Mrs. Lovelock -- had been another New Mind natural. Or, rather, what had become of a New Mind natural after what probably had been decades of Old Mind control! But that part wasn't the worst of it. I met her and talked to her! he thought in a flash of grief and horror. But I couldn't guess -- He drove the thought from his mind. If he wanted to go on living -- and he realized with a flicker almost of surprise that he very much did -- he had other work to complete tonight. A kind of work that he'd considered in advance as carefully as the rest of it -- And this time, he thought grimly, he'd better not discover later that he'd miscalculated any details. He sat down and rolled over on his side in the exact place and position in which he'd been lying before. Almost the last thing he saw was the sudden jerky motion of Paylar's body, as he dissolved the visual fixation he'd caught her attention in. Then, as she turned her head quickly to look at him, he closed his eyes. " sumed conscious control of his body, there was a cloudy sky overhead and a cool gray wetness in the air. Paylar stood nearby, looking thoughtfully down at him. He looked back at her without speaking. The terrifying conviction of final failure settled slowly and dismally on him. "You can wake up fully now," she told him. "It's nearly morning." He nodded and sat up. "What I shall tell you," her voice went on, "are things you will comprehend and know to be true. But consciously you will forget them again as soon as I tell you to forget. You understand?" Commager nodded again. "Very well," she said. "Somewhere inside you something is listening to what I am saying; and I'm really speaking now to that part of you -- inside. Here and tonight, Alan, you very nearly won, though of course you could not have won in the final issue. But you must understand now, consciously and unconsciously, that you have been completely defeated! Otherwise, you would not stop struggling until you had destroyed yourself -- as thoroughly as another one, very like yourself, whom you met tonight, did years ago!" She paused. "You know, of course, that the New Mind natural you killed tonight was your mother. We counted on the shock of that discovery to paralyze you emotionally, if all else failed. When it happened, for the few seconds during which the shock was completely effective, i uras released bv others of the it Old Mind from the trap in which you had caught me." She smiled. "That was a clever trap, Alan! Though if it hadn't been so clever, we might not have needed to sacrifice your mother. In those few seconds, you see, I planted a single, simple compulsion into your mind -- that when you pretended afterward to become unconscious -- as it appeared you were planning to do to deceive the Old Mind -- your consciousness actually would blank out." Something like that had occurred! He had intended to act as if the struggle with the New Minders had exhausted him to the point where it was possible for Paylar to take him under complete control, since only in that way could he be safe from continuing Old Mind hostility. But then -- He had no awareness of what had happened in the hours that followed till now! "You see?" Paylar nodded. There was a trace of compassion, almost of regret, in her expression. "Believe me, Alan, never in our knowledge has a functioning human mind been so completely trapped as you are now! I have been working steadily on you for the past six hours, and even now would be impossible for you Ml to detect the manner in which you are limited. But within minutes, you will simply forget the fact that any limitations have been imposed on you, and so you will remain free of the internal conflicts that destroyed your mother." She paused. "And here is a final proof for you, Alan, of why this was necessary for us. You recalled that your father drowned in this Bay when you were a child. But as yet you seem to have blocked out of your memory the exact manner in which he died -- " Her voice changed, grew cold and impersonal. "Let that memory come up now, Alan!" it came memory of the shocking conflict of emotion that had caused him to bury the events of that day long ago. But it aroused no emotional response in him now. It had been a member of an alien, hostile species he had compelled to thrust itself down into the water, until the air exploded from its lungs and it sank away and drowned... of the same hostile species as the one talking to him now. "Yes," she said. "You drowned him, Alan, when you first became aware of the mental controls he had imposed on you. And then you forced yourself to forget, because your human conditioning made the memory intolerable. But you aren't truly human, you see. You are an evolutionary mistake that might destroy the life of all Earth if left unchecked!" She concluded, "It has taken all these years to trap you again, under conditions that would permit us to impose controls that no living mind, even in theory, could break. But the efforts and the risks have been well worthwhile to Old Mind! For, you see, we can use your abilities now to make sure there will be no trouble from others of your kind for many years to come. And we can, as the need arises, direct you to condition others of your kind exactly as you have been conditioned... But now" -- a flat, impersonal command drove at him again through her voice -- "forget what I have told you! All of it!" And, consciously, the mind of Commager forgot. as he watched his body stand up and follow the woman up the path to his cabin, a superbly complete job of it! What identity might be remained an intriguing problem for future research, though perhaps not one that he himself would solve. For practical purposes, at any rate, the identity of Alan Commager was no longer absorbed by the consciousness that rose from and operated through his brain and body. And that was the only kind of consciousness Old Mind knew about. He was hidden from Paylar's species now because he had gone, and would remain permanently, beyond the limits of their understanding. He directed an order to the body's mind, and the body stumbled obediently, not knowing why it had stumbled. Paylar turned and caught its arm, almost solicitously, steadying it. "You'll feel all right again after a few hours rest, Alan!" she told it soothingly. Species as alien almost as a cat or a slender, pretty monkey, but with talents and purposes of her own, Paylar was, he thought, an excellent specimen of the second highest development of Earth evolution. He reached very carefully now through the controls he had imposed on her consciousness to the core of her being, and explained gently to her what he had done. For a few seconds, he encountered terror and resistance, but resignation came then, and finally understanding and a kind of contentment. She would help him faithfully against Old Mind now, though she would never be aware of doing it. And that, he thought, was really all for the moment. The next step, the development of New Mind psi in others, was an unhurried, long-term project. In all the area within his range, Old Mind control had stifled or distorted whatever promise originally had been present. recurring. And here and there, as he became aware of them now, their possessors would be contacted, carefully instructed and shielded against Old Mind spies. Until they had developed sufficiently to take care of themselves and of others. Until there were enough of them. Enough to step into the role for which they had been evolved -- and which the lower mind had been utterly unable to, comprehend. To act as the matured new consciousness of the giant Earthlife organism. ( Continued from page #) practically over the dead bodies of the whole company. Next time was as we were crossing the Pacific. Again the first sergeant challenged me and again the sensation paralyzed me. I said the war in the Pacific would end August #th, but this time I was smarter -- I wanted two-toone odds and a month either way. The actual date was the #th and he was glad to pay off. But then the men wanted to know when they were getting home. I truthfully told them I didn't know when they were leaving, but I was going back in February. Until just recently, I thought I'd missed once more and sailed in March -- until I came across the ship's paper. It was dated February #th. What I didn't foresee was that I'd be coming home on an emergency furlough to find my father dying. Those and others were my successes, if you want to call it that, in precognition. Now before some financial paper puts in a bid, let me enter on the record that I had exactly the same feeling on different occasions and was as wrong as any market analyst. What do you do with a thing like that? Apparently it takes great tension to get the data, like working up a wicked electrical potential to spark a gap -- in these cases, a gap of four to six months. Do we test only when the potential exists? Or will we find a way of creating it by some kind of emotional dynamo? If that's it, I won't be a volunteer and I pity those who are -- it hurts even when the answer is wrong. I've had the usual "triumphs" in telepathy that I imagine all of us have experienced. Here, however, the anguish seemed to have been required of the broadcasters. Nothing happened till there was strong emotion. And then I pieced together one letter or syllable after another until it was complete -- when it was, which was far from always, though too frequent and nearright to be all chance. Impressive, no doubt, but not as much as the headache and weariness. A telegram would be a lot easier and more dependable. As far as I'm concerned, my motto is: "Don't telepath -- telegraph!" What's still more annoying is that I haven't found a way to know my thoughts from those of others. It's cost me money in card games, too! Psi is a nuisance. Every editor knows and dreads theme cycles, when writers all over simultaneously turn to the same idea. Right now, it's psi. I wish they'd pstop. I'm psick of psi. Come on now -- aren't you? bomb, written hr (me it was invented! One about tin mmhimthat shows more than # other "bests" of the past decade ! com pli l e play . scores of all-time great S#" 'it o I I  including II. G. Wells' "Invaslon I'iooi Mars," made famous by ## Orson Welles hoax "newscast." Step into the space-suit of Sir Hugh Macpherson, the first man to conquer space and do the "sky-work" for establishing a satellite space-station # miles UP ! Pangborn. 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T P you're excited about the possibilities of rocketing through space... if you enjoy strange adventures, daring flights of the imagination, and jet-propelled reading thrills, here's tremendous news for you! It's tirely to bringing you "the fiction of Today that is rapidly becoming the fact of Tomorrow." Now -- The Cream of New ScienceFiction Books -- For Only I Each! The Science-Fiction Book Club best new Science-Fiction book. the best without worrying about the cost, the Club brings you the brand-new full-length books (plus a few cents shipping charge) -- even though they cost #, # and up in the publisher's original editions Each selection is described to the Club's free bulletin, "Things books you really want -- as few as four a year, if you wish. Just Mail Coupon membership in this unusual new are making this amazing offer to new members: Your choice of any # of the recent Science-Fiction masterpieces described on offer may have to be withdrawn at any time. 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Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. I 'lease send me post-paid the novels checked below.e-# -- Eh    #right Wright -- j-g -- BC  '-I  #   #        #  #I  #  # # For  I . # , or #c each Enclose check, Naim  cash or money order. We pay postage Address City... State science fiction for a couple of decades, I really ought to take a moment to see if it's Literature. The reason is that in a few months, some imposing name is going to be induced to make an equally imposing ass of himself on just that question -- attacking science fiction as non-literature has joined the robin and the crocus as a sign of spring. In the past, I've made the mistake of retorting afterward, when, it turned out, the season was closed. No more of that -- I'll have the first word for a change. The trouble is that I have no idea of who will draw the assignment this year. If I knew, I'd be able to map out my counter-strategy in advance, for the campaign on the other side is inevitably shifty, being unhampered by knowledge or calm judgment. Two years ago, it was Arthur Koestler, a sackcloth wearer whose one pleasure seems to be confessing his shames. He manfully exposed himself as a cardcarrying science fiction addict. No editor in the field minded that -- a customer is a customer -- but I damned well objected to comparing its hold to a mad passion for yoghurt! There are lots of goodies I can leave alone and yoghurt, a sort of curdled milk glue, pretty much leads the sickly list. Last year, a Prof. Lovett of England, having read an anthology or two, appraised science fiction the way a paleontologist will reconstruct a fossil from a single molar. Naturally, like Koestler, but for different reasons, he concluded that it's not Literature. The fact that the man has perhaps the lumpiest style I've ever bruised an eye on does not mean he can't recognize good writing when it's carefully pointed out to him, but even if I agreed with him on any subject, which appears unlikely, I think I would fight to the death his right to say it. Well, no matter who gets the short straw this year and whatever the weapons to be used, we know in advance the outcome -- science fiction will be declared a grimy aggressor into the field of Literature. Then why bother to defend ourselves? I'm past that stage and I hope you are, too -- a viable art form can't be destroyed by criticism any more than a moribund ( Continued on page #) Can you think faster than this Machine? set up to do a problem in space ship engineering Be careful before you answer. construction kit is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and encipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. Specific problems in a variety of fields -- actuarial, policy claim settlement, physics, etc., can be set up and solved with the components. Connections are solderless and are completely explained with templates in the manual. This covers # circuits and shows how new ones can be designed. You will find building and using one kit user wrote us: "this kit has opened up a new world of thinking to me." You actually see how computing, problem solving, and game play (Tic-tac-toe, nim, etc.) can be analyzed with Boolean Algebra and the algebraic solutions transformed directly into circuit diagrams. You create from over # specially designed and manufactured components a machine that solves problems faster than you can express them. Schools and colleges, teachers of science or math, engineering, philosophy or psychology will find these excellent demonstrators of circuitry, solutions in symbolic logic, theory of numbers, cybernetics, and automation. Note: Teachers take advantage of our # discount to educational insituations and for group purchases. Only # with over four hundred components and parts, fully illustrated manual and wiring diagrams. We guarantee that if you do not want to can return it for full refund plus shipping costs. B Oliver Garfield I I # Lexington Ave., N. Y. I #, N. Y. I Please send me: I Kit and Manual. # (East of Mississippi) I # (Elsewhere in United States)  I # (Outside the United States   Returnable in seven days for full refund if J not satisfied. I enclose  in full I payment. My name and address are attached Man in a sewing machine With the Solar Confederation being invaded, all this exasperating computer could offer for a defense was a ridiculous old proverb! T HE mechanical voice spoke solemnly, as befitted the importance of its message. There was no trace in its accent of its artificial origin. "A Stitch in Time Saves Nine," it said and lapsed into silence. Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying. Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the question," he said doubtfully. Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly. "That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask." Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes from the computer. "All right, Buster. I'll give it a try, anyway. What does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?" The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered. "In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its weaknesses -- at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the proper strength." Bristol nodded. "Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to spend weeks figuring out what you meant." Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful as it answered. "It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six words!" "I know," said John. "But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It didn't sound very complete to me." All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked simultaneously. "The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of taking this timely action. It shpuld be done by stitching; if this is done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?" "I made you myself," said Bristol plaintively. "I designed you with my own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design. So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me. And since you're just a complex computer of general design, I with the ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?" Buster answered slowly: "You made me in your own image. Things thus made are often hard to handle." Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. "But you're only a calculating machine!" he shouted. "Your only purpose is to make my work -- and that of other men -- easier. And when I try to use you, you answer with riddles..." The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a moment in silent reproof before i-t answered. "But remember, John," it said, "you didn't merely make me. You also taught me. Or as you would phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and reevaluating this information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single logical body of background information which I could use. "One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor. You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached -- a prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat macabre, perhaps -- and a little mechanistic -- but still there. "Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.'" Bristol stood up once more. "I could cure you with a sledge hammer," he said. "You could remove my ideas," answered the computer without concern. "But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get busy on the ideas I have already given you?" the bristles of short sandy hair on the top of his head with his knuckles. "Ordered around by an overgrown adding machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet." He shook his head. "I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering mathematician." "And Einstein, too, probably," added Buster cryptically. Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the polished marble slabs, of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway to an Egyptian tomb. "When I get around to it," said Bristol, "I'll put lace panties on the bases of all your klystrons." He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin rows of generators. The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slowpaced rendition of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. "One last question," he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. "How in blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or, at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?" He took two steps toward the immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it. "Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't bluffing?" "Don't be silly," answered the calculator softly. "You made me and you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your questions, however inane." "Then answer the ones I just asked." machine a switch snicked sharply, and the great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. "I didn't answer your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark that so frequently annoys you," Buster said, "because the little information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly revealing. "They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent. They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions. "In short, they are startlingly like humans. Their reactions have been so much like yours -- granted the difference that it was they who discovered you instead of you who discovered them -- that their reactions are highly predictable. If they think it is to their own advantage and if they can manage to do it, they will utterly destroy your civilization... which, after a couple of generations, will probably leave you no worse off than you are now." "Cut out the heavy philosophy," said Bristol, "and give me a few facts to back up your sweeping statements." "Take the incident of first contact," Buster responded. "With very little evidence of thought or of careful preparation, they tried to land on the outermost inhabited planet of Rigel. Their behavior certainly did not appear to be that of an invader, yet humans immediately tried to shoot them out of the sky." "That wasn't deliberate," protested Bristol. "The place they tried to land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally, is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the Interceptor Launching Station." "Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone," commented Buster calmly. Bristol stalked back toward the base of the calculator, and poked his nose practically into a vision receptor. "It was no thanks to the invading ships that nobody was killed," he said hotly. "And when they came back three days later they killed a lot of people. They occupied the planet and we haven't been able to dislodge them since." of the retaliation," answered the calculator imperturbably, "Even at 'stitching' speeds, it seems unlikely that they could have communicated with their home planets and received instructions in such a short time. Almost undoubtedly it was the act of one of their hot-headed commanding officers. Their next contact, as you certainly recall, did not take place for three months. And then their actions n were more cautious than hostile. A dozen of their spaceships 'stitched' simultaneously from the inter-planar region into normal space in a nearly perfect englobement of the planet at a surprisingly uniform altitude of only a few thousand miles. It was a magnificent maneuver. Then they sat still to see what the humans on the planet would do. The reaction came at once, and it was hostile. So they took over that planet, too -- as they have been taking over planets ever since." Bristol raised his hands, and then let them drop slowly to his sides. "And since they have more spaceships and better weapons than we do, we would undoubtedly keep on losing this war, even if we could locate their home system,which we have not been able to do so far. The 'stitching' pattern of inter-planar travel makes it impossible for us to follow a starship. It also makes it impossible for us to defend our planets effectively against their attacks. Their ships appear without warning." Bristol rubbed his temples thoughtfully with his fingertips. "Of course," he went on, "we could attack the planets they have captured and recover them, but only at the cost of great loss of life to our own side. We have only recaptured one planet, and that at such great cost to the local human population that we will not quickly try it again." "Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of the invaders," Buster answered, "there was still much information to be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time saving nine." "You're right," said John. "It does, at that. Buster, I have always resented the nickname the newspapers have given you -- the Oracle -- but the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!" f T don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'" answered Buster with dignity. Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. "No, you probably think it's funny," he said. "If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us, if we can't do it, in time to save us?" "Although I have no feeling for self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling, of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry out your deepest convictions, it is not sufficient that mankind be preserved. If that were true, all you would have to do would be to surrender unconditionally. My calculations, as you know, indicate that this would not result in the destruction of mankind, but merely in the finish of his present civilization. To you, the preservation of the dignity of Man is more important than the preservation of Man. You equate Man and his civilization; you do not demand even revolutionary changes, but destruction of your way of life. "Consequently, neither am I of the civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result. Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without thought being required of you, to even one such vital question -- such as this one concerning the invaders -- then I could not logically refuse to give  the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically. "There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle." Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair. "Just relax, dear," said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers. "It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster," he said. "Buster never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax me and make me feel comfortable." Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. "I know, dear," she said. "You need to be able to talk to someone who will always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always know what you're talking about even before you start talking." John nodded, his eyes still closed. "If it weren't for you, darling," he said, "I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow your logic." glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with intelligence. "You never will find me logical," she laughed. "After all, ' I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle." "You sure are a woman," said John with warm feeling. "You can exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my lucky day when you married me." There were a few minutes of peaceful silence. "Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?" asked Anne. "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "That's too bad, dear," said Anne. "I think you work much too hard -- what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired." "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today, dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?" "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you with your problem." While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face with intelligence and compassion. John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking, now that John could see them. "The trouble, darling," he said, "is that I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know what the riddle means." Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor at John's feet. "You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much, dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to expect of it." "When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it." "And that sounds like very good sense, too," said Anne in earnest tones. "But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are already invading us, aren't they?" "It has some deeper meaning than the usual one," said John. "If I could only figure out what it is." Anne nodded vigorously. "I suppose Buster's talking about space-stitching," she said. "Although I can never quite remember just what that is. Or just how it works, rather." a few moments and then plaintively asked, "What is it, dear?" "What's what?" "Stitching, silly. I already asked you." "Darling," said John with reasonable patience, "I must have explained inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times." "And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at the time," said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. "But somehow, later, it never seems quite so plain. When I start to think about it by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again. Please." Bristol grinned suddenly. "Yes, dear," he said. He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. "First of all, you know that there are two coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence, but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the infinitude of points in our Universe -- which we call for convenience the 'alpha' plane -- there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or 'beta' plane." Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. "If they match point for point, how can there be any difference in size?" she asked. John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double the length of the first. "Actually," he said, "each of these line segments has an infinite number of points in it, but we'll ignbre that. I'll just divide each one of these into ten equal parts." He did so, using short, neat crossmarks. "Now I'll establish a one-toone correspondence between these two segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That makes eleven dotted lines. You see?" Anne nodded. "That's plain enough. It reminds me of a Venetian blind that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home." "Yes," said John. "Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha' universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe. If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this, it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the 'alpha' plane -- # miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use decimals." I # stirred and seemed about to speak. "But if I slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the 'beta' universe -- something which, for reasons I can't explain now, takes negligible time -- watch what happens. If I still proceed at the rate of an inch a second in this inter-planar region, then, with the dotted lines all bunched closely together, after five seconds when I switch along another dotted line back to my original universe, I have gone almost the whole length of that longer line. Of course, this introduction of 'alpha' matter -- my pencil point in this case -- into the inter-planar region between the universes sets up enormous strains, so that after a certain length of time our spaceship is automatically rejected and returned to its own proper plane." "Could anybody in the littler universe use the same system?" John laughed. "If there were anybody in the 'beta I plane, I guess they could, although they would end up traveling slower than they would if they just stayed in their own plane. But there isn't anybody. The 'beta' plane is a constant level entropy universe -- completely without life of its own. The entropy level, of course, is vastly higher than that of our own universe." Anne sat up. "I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid word entropy, if you'll promise me not to do it again," she said. ers and smiled. "Now," he said, "if I want to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming device, having nothing to do with how fast I go." He hesitated, groping for the right words. "In point of fact, you have to imagine that corresponding points in the two universes are moving rapidly past each other in all directions at once. I just have to select the right direction, or to convince the probability cloud that corresponds to my location in the 'alpha' universe that it is really a point near the 'beta' universe, going my way. That's a somewhat more confused way of looking at it than merely imagining that I continue to travel in the inter-planar region at the same velocity that I had in 'alpha,' but it's closer to a description of what the math says happens. I could make it clear if I could just use mathematics, but I doubt if the equations will mean much to you. "At any rate, distance traveled depends on mass -- the bigger the ship, the shorter the distance traveled on each return to our own universe -- and not on velocity in 'alpha.' Other parameters, entirely under the control of the traveler, also affect the time that a ship remains in the inter-planar region. "There are refinements, of course. Recently, for example, we have discovered a method of multi-transfer. Several of the transmitters that accomplish the transfer are used together. When they all operate exactly simultaneously, all the matter within a large volume of space is transferred as a unit. With three or four transmitters keyed together, you could transfer a comet and its tail intact. And that's how inter-planar traveling works. Clear now?" "And that's why they call it 'stitching,' " said Anne with seeming delight. "You just think of the ship as a needle stitching its way back and forth into and out of our universe. Why didn't you just say so?" there's another interesting point about stitching. Subjectively, the man in the ship seems to spend about one day in each universe alternately. Actually, according to the time scale of an observer in the 'alpha' plane, his ship disappears for about a day, then reappears for a minute fraction of a second and is gone again. Of course, one observer couldn't watch both the disappearance and reappearance of the same ship, and I assume the observers have the same velocity in 'alpha' as does the stitching ship. Anyway, after a ship completes its last stitch, near its destination, there's a day of subjective time in which to make calculations for the landing -- to compute trajectories and so forth -- before it actually fully rejoins this universe. And while in the inter-planar region it cannot be detected, even by someone else stitching in the same region of 'alpha' space. "That's one of the things that makes interruption of the enemy ships entirely impossible. If a ship is in an unfavorable position, it just takes one more quick stitch out of range, then returns to a more favorable location. In other words, if it finds itself in trouble, it can be gone from our plane again even before it entirely rejoins it. Even if it landed by accident in the heart of a blue-white star, it would be unharmed for that tiny fraction of a second which, to the people in the ship, would seem like an entire day. "If this time anomaly didn't exist, it might be possible to set up defenses that would operate after a ship's arrival in the solar system but before it could do any damage; but as it is, they can dodge any defense we can devise. Is all that clear?" Anne nodded. "Uh-hunh, I understood every word." "There is another thing about inter-planar travel that you ought to remember," said Bristol. "When a ship returns to our universe, it causes a wide area disturbance; you have probably heard it called space shiver or the bong wave. The beta universe is so much smaller than our own alpha that you can imagine a spaceship when shifted toward it as being several beta light-years long. Now, if you think of a ship, moving between the alpha and beta lines on this envelope, as getting tangled in the dotted lines that connect the points on the two lines, that would mean that it would affect an area smaller than its own size on beta -- a vastly larger area on alpha. "So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines, setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity. Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble, he has gone again long before we can detect the bong." ' ' "As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves, just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean." Anne Bristol stood up; put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her head at her husband. "Honestly," she said, "you men are all alike. Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you made about the ten dollars when, you know it was worth every cent of it. She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell you some of..." "Darling!" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed husband. "It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense of responsibility." "Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea." Anne smiled sweetly. "You know," she said, "that my dear father always said that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to us? Stitching our way to their planets in our spaceships, of course." Bristol shook his head. "Your idea may be sound, even if it is a little bloodthirsty coming from someone who won't even let me set a mouse-trap, but it won't work. First, we don't know where their home planets are and second, they have more ships than we do. It might be made to work, but only if we could get enough time. And speaking of time, I've got to meet with the Council as soon as we finish eating. Is dinner ready?"fhurried trip across town, John Bristol found himself facing the other members of Earth's Council at the conference table. "I have been able to get an answer from the computer," he told them without preamble. "It's of the ambiguous type we have come to expect. I hope you can get something useful out of it; so far it hasn't made much sense to me. It's an old proverb. Its advice is undoubtedly sound, as a generality, if we could think of a way of using it." The President of the Council raised his long, lean-fingered hand in a quick gesture. "John," he said, "stop this stalling. Just what did the Oracle say?" "It said, 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.'" "Is that all?" "Yes, sir. According to the calculator, that gives us the best opportunity to save ourselves from the invaders." The President absently stroked the neat, somewhat scanty irongray hair that formed into a triangle above his high forehead and rubbed the bare scalp on each side of the peak vigorously and unconsciously with his knuckles. "In that case," he said at last, "I suppose that we must examine the statement for hidden meanings. The proverb, of course, implies that rapid action, before a trouble has become great, is more economical than the increased effort required after trouble has grown large. Since our troubles have already grown large, that warning is scarcely of value to us now." The War Secretary, who had grown plump and purple during a quarter of a century as a member of the Council, inclined his head ponderously toward the President. "Perhaps, Michael, the Oracle means to tell us that there is a simple solution which, if applied quickly, will make our present difficulty with the invaders a small one." The President pursed his thin lips. "That's possible, Bill. And if it is true, then the words of the proverb should, as a secondary meaning, imply a course of action." The Vice President banged his hands on the table and leaped to his feet, shaking with rage. "Why should we believe that this mountebank is capable of a solution?" he shouted in his stevedore's voice. "Bristol pleads until the taxpayers' dollars to make Bim Gump look like a pauper and uses the money to build a palace filled with junk that he calls Buster! He tells us that this machinery of his is smarter than we are and will tell us what we ought to do. And what happened after we gave him all the money he demanded -- more than he said he needed, at first -- and asked him to show something for all this money? I'll tell you what happened. His gadget gets real coy and answers in riddles. If we just had brains enough, they'd explain what we wanted to know. What kind of fools does this Bristol take us for? Neither this man nor his ridiculous machine has an answer any more than I have. We've obviously been taken in by a charlatan!" Bristol, his fists clenched, spoke hotly. "Sir, that is the stupidest, the most..." ' interrupted the President. "Let me answer Vice President Collins for you. He's a little excited by this whole business, but then, these are trying times." He turned toward the glowering bulk of the Vice President. "Ralph," he said, "you should know that every step in the design, the construction and the -- er -- the education of the Oracle was taken under the close watch of a Board of eminent scientists, all of whom agree that the computer is a masterpiece -- that it is a great milestone in Man's efforts to increase his knowledge. The Oracle has undoubtedly found a genuine solution to the question Bristol asked it. Our task must be to determine what that solution is." "I can't entirely agree with that," said the Secretary for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs in a thin half-whisper. "I think we should depend on our own intelligence and skill to save ourselves. I've watched events come and go on this planet of ours for a long time -- a very long time -- and I feel as I have always felt that men can make the world a Paradise for themselves or they can destroy themselves, but that nothing else but they themselves can do it. We men must save ourselves. And there are still things that we can do." He shrugged his ancient, shawl-covered shoulders. "For example, we could disperse colonies so widely that it would become impossible for the invaders to destroy all of them." "I'm afraid that's no good, George," answered the War Secretary respectfully. "If the Solar System is destroyed, any remaining colonies will be too weak to maintain themselves for long. We must defend this system successfully, or we are lost." "Then that brings us back to the Oracle's proverb." The President thought for a moment. "Stitching obviously refers to inter-planar travel. How can that help us?" The Secretary for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs peered up at the President through the shaggy white thicket of his eyebrows. "Actually, Michael," he said, "it was that thought that made me mention establishing colonies. The colonists would 'stitch' their way to their new homes. And colonizing would have to proceed in a timely manner to have any chance for success." "Yes," answered the President, "but how would that 'save nine'? We have agreed that our Solar System must be saved. There are nine planets. Perhaps the Oracle meant that timely use of interplanar travel can save the Solar System." "Or at least the nine planets!" The War Secretary's fat jowls waggled with excitement. "You know, there is no limit to the size or mass of objects which can use inter-planar travel. What if we physically remove our planets, by stitching them away from the Sun? When the invaders arrived, we would be gone -- Earth and Sun and all the rest!" had been silent up to this time spoke quietly. "Simmer down, Bill. We could move the planets easily enough, of course, but you forget the mass-distance relationship. A single stitch takes about a day. The distance traveled can be controlled within limits. "For an object around the size of the Earth, those limits extend' from a fraction of an inch to a little over two feet. Say that we have two years before the invaders work their way in to the Solar System. If we started right away, we could move Earth about a quarter of a mile by the time they get here. If we tried to take the Sun with us, it could be moved about half an inch in the same length of time. I'm afraid that the Solar System is going to be right here when the invaders come to get us. And I have a hunch that's likely to be a lot sooner than two years." The Secretary of Internal Affairs leaned forward, his short hair bristling. "I think we are wasting our time," he shouted. "I agree with Ralph. I don't believe that the Oracle knows any more about this than we do. If we are going to sit around playing foolish games with words, why don't we do it in a big way? We could hire T.V. time and invite everyone to send in their ideas about what the proverb means on the back of a box-top. Or reasonable facsimile. The contestant with the best answer could get a free allexpense tour to Vega Three. Unless the invaders get here or there first." The President nodded his head. "There may be more sense to that remark than I believe you intended, Charles," he said. "The greater the number of people who think about the problem, the greater the chance of reaching a solution. Even if the proverb is intended as a joke by the Oracle, as you imply, it might be that with a drink and followed him to his comfortable chair. "You look as if that was even rougher than your day with the Oracle," she said. John nodded silently, took a grateful sip of his highball and slipped off his shoes. "All that fuss over a six-word proverb," said Anne. "I still think that if you are going to depend on witch doctors and such to solve from it someone could derive a genuine solution. But as I have said, I am absolutely certain that the computer does know what it is talking about. Without resorting to box-tops or free trips, I think it might be wise to give the Oracle's statement to the public." After several more hours of arguing, the Council adjourned for a few hours and John Bristol returned wearily home. your problems for you, you would do a lot better to try my fortune teller. She gives you a lot more than six words for ten dollars. They make more sense, too. Why, I could be a better Oracle than that gadget you built." "Perhaps you could, dear," answered John patiently. Anne jumped to her feet. "Here, I'll show you." She seated herself cross-legged on the couch. "Now, I'm an Oracle," she announced. "Go ahead, ask me a question. Ask me anything; I'll give you as good an answer as any other Oracle. Results guaranteed." John smiled. "I'm not in much of a mood to be cheered up with to ask the big question of anyone who'll give me any kind of an answer. See if you can do better with this one than Buster did." He repeated word for word the your other Oracle gave you, if you count 'it's' as one word. If you want wise-sounding answers, just come to me and save yourself a trip." his drink and strode to Anne's side. "Say it again!" he shouted. "You may have made more sense than you knew!" "I said you could come to me and save yourself a trip." question he had asked of the computer, that had resulted in its cryptic answer. Anne stared solemnly at nothing for a moment, with her cheeks puffed out. Then, in measured tones, she recited, "It's Like Looking for a Needle in a Haystack." John smiled. "That seems to make as much sense as the Oracle did, anyway," he said. "Sure," answered Anne. "And you get three words mo.e than "No, no! I mean the proverb. How did you come to think of that proverb?" Anne managed to look bewildered. "What's wrong with it? I just thought that you can't do any stitching in time without a needle. I just was trying to think of a proverb to use as an answer and that one popped into my head. Uh... Are you all right, dear?" spun her around. "You just bef your boots I'm all right. I'm feeling swell! You've given us the answer we needed. You know right where the haystack is, and you know there's a needle there. But finding it is something else again. I don't think the invaders will be able to locate this needle." He set her down. "Where are my shoes?" he said. "I've got to get back to the Capitol." Anne seemed faintly surprised. "Because of what I said? They're right on the floor there between you and the sofa. But I was just making conversation. What are you going to do?" "Oh, I'm just going to get started at taking stitches in time. Good-by, darling." He started out the door, ran back to give Anne a lingering kiss and was soon gone at top speed. Anne, waving to him, looked very pleased with herself. By the time Bristol arrived at the Capitol building, the rest of the Council was once again assembled and waiting for him. "Well, John," said the President." You sounded excited enough when you called us together again. Have you figured out what the Oracle meant?" "Yes, sir. With my wife's help. It's obvious, when you finally think about it. It will save us from any danger. And we should have been able to figure it out for ourselves. There's no reason that we should have had to go to the Oracle at all. And it only took Buster -- the computer, I mean -- two or three minutes to think of the answer, and of a proverb that would conceal the answer. It's amazing!" "And if you don't mind telling us, just what is this answer?" The President sounded very impatient.  "We almost had it when we talked of stitching Earth out of reach," John answered eagerly. "If we keep cutting back and forth from one universe toward the other, we will be out of reach, even if we can't move very far. Once a day we reappear in this lionths of a second -- although it will seem like a whole day to us. "Then we spend the following day between this universe and beta. Even if the invaders are right on top of us when we reappear, we'll be gone again before they can do anything. Since we can vary the time of our return within limits, the invaders will never know exactly when we will flick in and out of the alpha plane until they hear our arriving 'bong' wave, and then we will already be gone, since we will be using accelerated subjective time." his dark head and sighed. "No, John," he said, "I'm afraid that isn't the answer. I'm sorry. If we start the operation you suggested, we will be cutting ourselves off from solar energy. The Earth's heat will gradually radiate away. Although beta is at a higher entropy level than our universe, we can't use that energy, except to provide power for the stitching process itself. It's true that we would deny our planet to the invaders, but we would soon kill ourselves doing it." "I didn't mean that we should transfer only Earth, but our entire Solar System," answered Bristol. "As the Oracle told us, the stitch saves nine. A series of time-matched transmitters could do the trick. If we sent the entire Solar System back and forth, the average man in the street would notice no change, except that sometimes there would be no stars in the sky. And when they were there, they wouldn't be moving." t "That would work theoretically," said the Chief Scientist. "And once we were in continuous stitching operations, any invader, as you suggested, could join the system only by synchronizing the transmitter in his ship exactly with all of our synchronized transmitters. That's a job I don't think could ever be done. "Remember, though, that our own transmitters would have to be time-matched to within a minute fraction of a micro-second. Considering that some of the instruments would have to be so far apart that at the speed of light it would take hours to get from one to the other, the problem becomes enormous. Any radio-timing link would be useless." Bristol nodded. "The Oracle said that the stitch must be taken in time," he agreed. "But that is no real problem. We can just send a small robot ship into interplanar travel and let it bounce back. The 'bong' of its return will reach all transmitters simultaneously and we can use that as the initial time-pulse. Once the operation starts, it will be easy to synchronize, since we will always switch over again on the instant of our return to the alpha plane." The Chief Scientist relaxed. "I think that does it, John. We hide in time, instead of in distance." "We stitch in time," corrected the President, "and hide like a needle in a haystack." #nnHE invaders may eventuJally find out a method of countering our defense," said the Chief Scientist, "but it will undoubtedly take a great deal of time. And in the meantime, we will have the opportunity to seek out and destroy their home planets. It will be a long, slow process of extermination, but we have a good chance to win." "I don't agree with that, Tom," said John. "I don't think extermination can be the answer. With our example to guide them, the invaders can use stitching to escape us as easily as we can use it to escape them. What we should do now is to contact the invaders and show them that it is to both our advantages to bring hostilities to an end. By stitching the Solar System, and the other systems of our confederation in and out of the alpha plane, we should be able to gain the time necessary for contact with the enemy and make peace with him. "From what the Oracle has told me about the humanlike traits of the invaders, it's very likely they will listen to reason when it's proved that it will be to their advantage." John snapped his fingers and spoke with considerable excitement. "Now I understand, I believe, why Buster indicated to me that there was another reason for his vague answer to our question. to accept the destruction of Man's civilization. It feels equally undestruction of the invaders' civilization. Buster has an objective viewpoint in applying the mores Man has given him. And it seems to me that Buster felt it important for us to reach this spirit of compromise by ourselves. How do you feel about it, gentlemen?" Debate quickly determined that all seven members of the Council favored an attempt to establish a truce -- some of them forced into this opinion by their inability to find any method of reaching the throats of the invaders. Having reached this conclusion, the Council swung immediately into action. Within a few weeks, the entire Solar System, along with the other planetary systems of the confederation, except for their brief daily return, disappeared from the alpha universe. John Bristol, a few days after the continuous stitching started, was relaxing lazily on the sofa in his living room when there was a sudden pounding on the door. He opened it to find the Chief Scientist standing on his doorstep, his eyes red from loss of sleep. "Good Lord! What's the matter with you?" asked Bristol. "Have you been celebrating too much? Come in, Tom, come in." The Chief Scientist entered wearily and sat down. "No. I haven't been celebrating. I've been trying to work out a little problem you left with us. We have been planning, as you suggested, to send out expeditions to contact and make agreement with the invaders. We can send them out all right, but how can we ever get them back into our solar system? They won't be able to find us any easier than the invaders can." on a side table and slumped into the closest chair. "If we don't contact each other," he said, "I am certain that the invaders will some day find a means of penetrating our defenses. Even needles in haystacks can be found, if you take enough time and aren't disturbed while you are hunting. This thing has me licked." Bristol sat down slowly. "Your whole department hasn't been able to find an answer?" "Not even the glimmering of an idea." He shrugged his shoulders. "It looks as if we are going to need the advice of your Oracle again." Bristol stood for a minute in thought and then with a smile said, "Why, of course. Excuse me for a second, please. I'll be right back." He stepped to the foot of the stairs and called out in a confident voice, "Come down a minute, please, Anne, darling! I have an important question I want to ask you!" waters of a startling, breath-holdingly suspenseful future. It's a world at war and yet not at war, for the enemy, though it has overrun three continents, is not a government! But there are other puzzlements: In the vernacular, the foe is known as the Cow-dyes... and how does a big-ship Navy man, intent on winning the war that isn't a war, get himself to believe that an assignment ordering him to take care of cows will whip the Cow-dyes? And how will that bring him to his wife, a prisoner of war halfway around the world... assuming he can escape the Glotch, that most hideous and mysterious of all weapons in the history of frightful be missing a lot if you miss it! novelets scheduled for the next issue. In the most perilous period of prehistory, hunting reptile heavyweights is no job for a human lightweight. It doesn't sound possible, but you'll see why it's bulk against bulk. It's all really very simple -- if you cannot change with the times, just change the times! Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door. "Come in," he said. A tall robot entered, the electronic beam of its single eye piercing the gloom and focusing on the psychiatrist's face. "Dr. Anson," the robot said, "the rent is due today. Pay me." Dr. Howard Anson blinked. He did not like the harsh light, nor the harsh voice, nor' the harsh meaning of the message. As he rose, he attempted to conceal his inner reactions with a bland smile, then remembered that his facial expression meant nothing to the robot. That was precisely the trouble with the damned things, he told himself; you couldn't use psychology on them. "Sixty tokens," the robot chanted, and rolled across the room toward him. "But -- " Dr. Hanson hesitated, then took the plunge. "But I haven't got sixty tokens at the moment. I told the manager yesterday. If you'll only give me a little time, a slight extension of credit -- " "Sixty tokens," the robot repeated, as if totally unmindful of I he interruption, which, Dr. Anson assured himself, was exactly the case. The robot was unmindful. It did not react to unpredictable factors; that wasnot its function. The robot didn't set the rental figures in this office building and had no power to make decisions regarding credit. It was built to collect the rent, nothing more. But that was enough. More than enough.  arms rose and the hooklike terminals slid back the panels in its chest. to reveal a row of pushbuttons and a thin, narrow slot. "The rent is due," repeated the r obot. "Please deposit the tokens in the slot." Anson sighed. "Very well," he said. He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and scooped out half a dozen shiny disks. He slipped the disks into the slot. They landed inside the robot's cylindrical belly with a series of dull plops. Evidently the robot had been making the rounds of the building all day; it sounded more than half full. For a wild moment, Dr. Anson wondered what would happen if he kidnaped the robot and emptied its cashbox. His own medical specialty was psychiatry and neuro-surgery, and he was none too certain of a robot's anatomical structure, but he felt sure he could fool around until he located the jackpot. He visualized himself standing before the operating table, under the bright lights. "Scalpel... forceps... blowtorch... But that was unthinkable. Nobody had ever dared to rob a robot. Nobody ever robbed anything or anyone today, which was part of the reason Dr. Anson couldn't pay his rent on time. Still, he had paid it. The robot's terminals were punching pushbuttons in its chest and now its mouth opened. "Here is your receipt," it said and a pink slip slid out from its mouth like a paper tongue. Anson accepted the slip and the mouth said, "Thank you." The terminals closed the chestpanels, the electronic beam swept the corners as the wheels turned, and the robot rolled out of the room and down the corridor. Anson closed the door and mopped his brow. So far, so good. But what would happen when the robot reached the manager? He'd open his walking cash register and discover Anson's six ten-token disks. Being human, he'd recognize them for what they were -- counterfeit. Dr. Anson shuddered. To think that it had come to this, a reputable psychiatrist committing a crime! He considered the irony. In a world totally devoid of anti-social activity, there were no anti-social tendencies which required the services of psychiatry. And that was why he, as the last living psychiatrist, had to resort to antisocial activity in order to survive. Probably it was only his knowledge of anti-social behavior, in the abstract, which enabled him to depart from the norm and indulge in such actions in the concrete. Well, he was in the concrete now and it would harden fast -- unless something happened. At best, his deception would give him a few days' grace. After that, he could face only disgrace. down behind the desk. Maybe this was the beginning, he told himself. First counterfeiting and fraud, then robbery and embezzlement, then rape and murder. Who could say where it would all end? "Physician, heal thyself," he murmured and glanced with distaste at the dust-covered couch, where no patient reposed; where, indeed, no patient had ever reposed since he'd opened his office almost a year ago. It had been a mistake, he realized. A big mistake ever to listen to his father and -- The visio lit up and the audio hummed. Anson turned and confronted a gigantic face. The gigantic face let out a gigantic roar, almost shattering the screen. "I'm on my way up, Doctor!" the face bellowed. "Don't try to sneak out! I'm going to break your neck with my bare hands!" For a few seconds Anson sat there in his chair, too numb to move. Then the full import of what he had seen and heard reached him. The manager was coming to kill him! "Hooray!" he said under his breath and smiled. It was almost too good to be true. After all this time, at last, somebody was breaking loose. A badly disturbed personality, a potential killer, was on his way up -- he was finally going to get himself a patient. If he could treat him before being murdered, that is. Tingling with excitement, Anson fumbled around in his files. Now where in thunder was that equipment for the Rorschach Test? Yes, and the Porteus Maze and -- The manager strode into the room without knocking. Anson looked up, ready to counter the first blast of aggression with a steely professional stare. But the manager was smiling. "Sorry I blew up that way," he said. "Guess I owe you an apology." "What?" "When I found those counterfeit tokens, something just seemed to snap for a moment," the manager explained. "You know how it is." "Yes, I do," said Anson eagerly. "I understand quite well. And it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm sure that with your cooperation, we can get to the roots of the trauma. Now if you'll just relax on the couch over there -- " continued to smile, but his voice was brusque. "Nonsense! I don't need any of that. Before I came up here, I stopped in at Dr. Peabody's office, down on the sixth floor. Great little endocrinologist, that guy. Gave me some kind of a shot that fixed me up in a trice. That's three times faster than a jiffy, you know." "I don't know," Anson answered vaguely. "Endocrinology isn't my field." "Well, it should be. It's the only field in medicine that really amounts to anything nowadays. Except for diagnosis and surgery, of course. Those gland-handers can do anything. Shots for when you feel depressed, shots for when you're afraid, shots for when you get excited, or mad, the way I was. Boy, I feel great now. At peace with the world!" "But it won't last. Sooner or later, you'll get angry again." "So I'll get another shot," the manager replied. "Everybody does." "That's not a solution. You're merely treating the symptom, not the basic cause." Anson rose and stepped forward. "You're under a great deal of tension. I suspect it goes back to early childhood. Did you ever suffer from enuresis?" "It's my turn to ask questions. What about those fake tokens you tried to palm off on me?" "Why, it was all a joke. I thought if you could give me a few more days to dig up -- " "I'm giving you just five minutes to dig down," the manager said, smiling pleasantly but firmly. "You ought to know that you can't pull a trick like that with a cash collector; these new models have automatic tabulators and detectors. The moment that robot came back to my office, it spat up the counterfeits. It couldn't stomach them. And neither can I." "Stomach?" asked Anson hopefully. "Are you ever troubled with gastric disturbances? Ulcers? Psychosomatic pain in the -- " The manager thrust out his jaw. "Look here, Anson, you're not a bad sort, really. It's just that you're confused. Why don't you clever up and look at the big picture? This witch-doctor racket of yours, it's atomized. Nobody's got any use for it today. You're like the guys who used to manufacture buggy whips; they sat around telling themselves that the automobile would never replace the horse, when any streetcleaner could see what was happening to business. "Why don't you admit you're licked? The gland-handers have taken over. Why, a man would have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist nowadays and you know there aren't any crazy people any more. So forget about all this. Take a course or something. You can be an End-Doc yourself. Then open up a real office and make yourself some big tokens." Anson shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "Not interested." The manager spread his hands. "All right. I gave you a chance. Now there's nothing left to do but call in the ejectors." the door. Apparently he had been prepared for Anson's decision, because two ejectors were waiting. They rolled into the room and, without bothering to focus their beams on Anson, commenced to scoop books from the shelves and deposit them in their big open belly-hampers. "Wait!" Anson cried, but the ejector robots continued inexorably and alphabetically: there went Adler, Brill, Carmichael, Dunbar, Ellis, Freud, Gesell, Korney, Isaacs, Jung, Kardiner, Lindner, Moll -- "Darling, what's the matter?" Sue Porter was in the room. Then she was in his arms and Dr. Anson had a difficult time remembering what the matter was. The girl affected him that way. But a look at the manager's drugged smile served as a reminder. Anson's face reddened, due to a combination of embarrassment and lipstick smudges, as he told Sue what had happened. Sue laughed. "Well, if that's all it is, what are you so upset about?" Without waiting for a reply, she advanced upon the manager, her hand digging into her middle bra-cup. "Here's your tokens," she said. "Now call off the ejectors." The manager accepted the disks with a smile of pure euphoria, then strode over to the robots and punched buttons. The ejectors halted their labors between Reich and Stekel, then reversed operations. Quickly and efficiently, they replaced all the books on the shelves. In less than a minute, Anson faced the girl in privacy. "You shouldn't have done that," he said severely. "But, darling, I wanted to. After all, what are a few tokens more or less?" "A few tokens?" Anson scowled. "In the past year, I've borrowed over two thousand from you. This can't go on." "Of course not," the girl agreed. "That's what I've been telling you. Let's get a Permanent and then Daddy will give you a nice fat job and -- " "There you go again! How often must I warn you about the Elektra situation? This unnatural dependency on the Father Image is dangerous. If only you'd let me get you down on the couch -- " "Why, of course, darling!" "No, no!" Anson cried. "I want to analyze you!" "Not now," Sue answered. "We'll be late for dinner. Daddy expects you." "Damn dinner and damn Daddy, too," Anson said. But he took the girl's arm and left the office, contenting himself by slamming the door. "Aren't you going to put up that Doctor Will Return in Two Hours sign?" the girl asked, glancing back at the door. "No," Anson told her. "I'm not coming back in two hours. Or ever." Sue gave him a puzzled look, but her eyes were smiling. weren't smiling as he and Sue took off from the roof. He kept them closed, so that he didn't have to watch the launching robots, or note the 'copter's progress as it soared above the city. He didn't want to gaze down at the metallic tangle of conveyors moving between the factories or the stiffly striding figures which supervised their progress on the ramps and loading platforms. The air about them was filled with 'copters, homeward bound from offices and recreation areas, but no human figures moved in the streets. Ground-level was almost entirely mechanized. "What's the matter now?" Sue's voice made him look at her. Her eyes held genuine concern. "The sins of the fathers," Anson said. "Yours and mine." He watched the girl as she set the 'copter on auto-pilot for the journey across the river. "Of course it really wasn't my father's fault that he steered me into psychiatry. After all, it's been a family tradition for a hundred and fifty years. All my paternal ancestors were psychiatrists, with the exception of one or two renegade Behaviorists. When he encouraged my interest in the profession, I never stopped to question him. He trained me -- and I was the last student to take up the specialty at medical school. The last, mind you! "I should have known then that it was useless. But he kept insisting this state of affairs couldn't last, that things were sure to change. 'Cheer up,' he used to tell me, whenever I got discouraged. 'The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction.!. And then he'd tell me about the good old days when he was a boy and the world was still full of fetichism and hebephrenia and pyromania and mixoscopic zoophilia. 'It will come again,' he kept telling me. 'Just you wait and see! We'll have frottage and nympholepsy and compulsive exhibitionism -- everything your little heart desires.' "Well, he was wrong. He died knowing that he had set me up in a dead-end profession. I'm an anachronism, like the factory worker or the farmer or the miner or the soldier. We don't have any need for them in our society any more; robots have replaced them all. And the End-Docs have replaced the psychiatrists and neuro-surgeons. With robots to ease the physical and economic burden and gland-handers to relieve mental tension, there's nothing left for me. The last psychiatrist should have disappeared along with the last advertising man. Come to think of it, they probably belong together. My father was wrong, Sue. I know that now. But most of the real blame belongs to your father." "Daddy?" she exclaimed. "How can you possibly blame him?" family has been pioneering in robotics almost as long as mine has worked in psychiatry. One of your ancestors took out the first basic patent. If it weren't for him and those endocrine shots, everything would still be normal -- lots of incest and scoptophilia, plenty of voyeurism for everybody -- " "Why, darling, what a thing to say! You know as well as I do what robots have done for the world. You said it yourself. We don't have any more manual or menial labor. There's no war, plenty of everything for everybody. And Daddy isn't stopping there." "I suppose not," Anson said bitterly. "What is the old devil dreaming up now?" Sue flushed. "You wouldn't talk like that if you knew just how hard he's been working. He and Mr. Mullet, the engineering chief. They're just about ready to bring out the new pilot models they've developed for space travel." "I've heard that one before. They've been announcing those models for ten years." "They keep running into bugs, I guess. But sooner or later, they'll find a way to handle things. Nothing is perfect, you know. Every once in a while, there's still some trouble with the more complicated models." "But they keep trying for perfection. Don't you see where all this leads to, Sue? Human beings will become obsolescent. First the workers, now the psychiatrists and other professions. But it won't end there. Inside of another generation or two, we won't need anyone any more. Your father, or somebody like him, will produce the ultimate robot -- the robot that's capable of building other robots and directing them. Come to think of it, he's already done the first job; your factories are self-perpetuating. All we need now is a robot that can take the place of a few key figures like your father. Then that's the end of the human race. Oh, maybe they'll keep a few men and women around for pets, but that's all. And thank God I won't be here to see it." "So why worry?" Sue replied. "Enjoy yourself while you can. We'll apply for a Permanent and Daddy will give you a job like he promised me -- " "Job? What kind of job?" "Oh, maybe he'll make you a vice-president or something. They don't have to do anything." "Fine! A wonderful future!" "I don't see anything wrong with it. You ought to consider yourself lucky." "Listen, Sue." He turned to her earnestly. "You just don't understand the way I feel. I've spent eighteen years of my life in school, six of it in training for my profession. That's all I know and I know it well. And what have I to show for it? I'm a psychiatrist who's never had a patient, a neuro-surgeon who's never performed anything but an experimental topectomy or lobotomy. That's my work, my life, and I want a chance to function. I don't intend to sit around on a fat sinecure, raising children whose only future is oblivion. I don't want a Permanent with you under those conditions." Permanent with me isn't good enough, is that it? I suppose you'd rather have a lot of repression and guilt complexes and all that other stuff you're always talking about." "It isn't that," Anson insisted. "I don't really want the world to revert to neurotic or psychotic behavior just so I can have a practice. But damn it, I can't stand to see the way things are going. We've done away with stress and privation and tension and superstition and intolerance, and that's great. But we've also done away with ourselves in the process. We're getting to the point where we, as human beings, no longer have a function to perform. We're not needed." The girl gave him an angry glance. "What you're trying to say is that you don't need me, is that it?" "I do need you. But not on these terms. I'm not going to lead a useless existence, or bring children into a world where they'll be useless. And if your father brings up that vice-president deal at dinner tonight, I'm going to tell him to take his job and -- " "Never mind!" Sue flipped the switch from auto-pilot back to manual and the 'copter turned. "You needn't bother about dinner. I'll take you back to your office now. You can put yourself down on the couch and do a little practicing on your own mind. You need it! Of all the stupid, pigheaded -- " The sound of the crash reached them even at flying level. Sue Porter broke off abruptly and glanced down at the river front below. Anson stared with her. "What was that?" he asked. "I don't know -- can't make it out from here." She spun the controls, guiding the 'copter down until it hovered over a scene of accelerating confusion. A huge loading barge was moored against one of the docks. Had been moored, rather; as they watched, it swung erratically into the current, then banged back against the pier. Huge piles of machinery, only partially lashed to the deck, now tumbled and broke free. Some of the cranes splashed into the water and others rolled across the flat surface of the barge. "Accident," Sue gasped. "The cable must have broken." metallic figures which dotted the deck and stood stolidly on the dock. "Look at the robots!" "What about them?" asked Sue. "Aren't they supposed to be doing something? That one with the antenna -- isn't it designed to send out a warning signal when something goes wrong?" "You're right. They beam Emergency in a case like this. The expediters should be out by now." "Some of them look as if they're paralyzed," Anson noted, observing a half dozen of the metallic figures aboard the barge. They were rigid, unmoving. Even as he watched, a round steel bell bowled across the deck. None of the robots moved -- the sphere struck them like a ball hitting the pins and hurtled them into the water. On the pier, the immobilized watchers gave no indication of reaction. "Paralyzed," Anson repeated. "Not that one!" Sue pointed excitedly as the 'copter hovered over the deck. Anson looked and found the cause of her consternation. A large, fully articulated robot with the humanoid face of a controller clattered along in a silvery blur of motion. From one of its four upper appendages dangled a broad-bladed axe. It bumped against an armless receptacle-type robot and the axe descended, striking the robot squarely in its loading compartment. There was a crash as the victim collapsed. And the controller robot sped on, striking at random, in a series of sped-up motions almost impossible to follow -- but not impossible to understand. "That's the answer!" said Anson. "It must have cut the cable with the axe. And attacked the others, to immobilize them. Come on, let's land this thing." "But we can't go down there! It's dangerous! Somebody will send out the alarm. The expediters will handle it -- " "Land!" Anson commanded. He began to rummage around in the rear compartment of the 'copter. "What are you looking for?" Sue asked as she maneuvered the machine to a clear space alongside a shed next to the dock. "The rope ladder." "But we won't need it. We're on the ground." "I need it." He produced the tangled length and began to uncoil it. "You stay here," he said. "This is my job." "What are you going to do?" "Yes, what are you going to do?" The deep voice came from the side of the 'copter. Anson and Sue looked up at the face of Eldon Porter. "Daddy! How did you get here?" "Alarm came through." scowled at the dock beyond, where the expediter robots were already mopping up with flamethrowers. "You've got no business here," Eldon Porter said harshly. "This area's off-limits until everything's under control." He turned to Anson. "And I'll have to ask you to forget everything you've seen here. We don't want word of accidents like these to leak out -- just get people needlessly upset." "Then this isn't the first time?" asked Anson. "Of course not. Mullet's had a lot of experience; he knows how to handle this." "Right, Chief." Anson recognized the thin, bespectacled engineer at Eldon Porter's side. "Every time we test out one of these advanced models, something goes haywire. Shock, overload, some damned thing. Only thing we can do is scrap it and try again. So you folks keep out of the way. We're going to corner it with the flame-throwers and -- " "No!" Anson opened the door and climbed out, dragging the long rope ladder behind him. "Where in hell do you think you're going?" demanded Eldon Porter. "I'm after that robot," Anson said. "Give me two of your men to hold the ends of this ladder. We can use it like a net and capture the thing without destroying it. That is, put it in restraint." "Restraint?" "Technical term we psychiatrists use." Anson smiled at the two men and then at the girl. "Don't worry," he said. "I know what I'm doing. I've got a case at last. Your robot is psychotic." "Psychotic?" grumbled Eldon Porter, watching the young man move away. "What's that mean?" "Nuts," said Sue sweetly. "A technical term.' k ' Sue saw Dr. Howard Anson again. She waited anxiously outside in the corridor with her father until the young man emerged. He peeled off his gloves, smiling. "Well?" rumbled Eldon Porter. "Ask Mullet," Anson suggested. "He did it!" the thin engineer exulted. "It works, just like he said it would! Now we can use the technique whenever there's a breakdown. But I don't think we'll have any more. Not if we incorporate his suggestions in the new designs. We can use them on the new space pilot models, too." "Wonderful!" Eldon Porter said. He put his hand on Anson's shoulder. "We owe you a lot." "Mullet deserves the credit," Anson replied. "If not for him and his schematics, I'd never have made it. He worked with me night and day, feeding me the information. We correlated everything -- you know, I'd never realized how closely your engineers had followed the human motor-reaction patterns." Eldon Porter cleared his throat. "About that job," he began. "That vice-presidency -- " "Of course," Anson said. "I'll take it. There's going to be a lot of work to do. I want to train at least a dozen men to handle emergencies until the new models take over. I understand you've had plenty of cases like this in the past." "Right. And we've always ended up by junking the robots that went haywire. Hushed it up, of course, so people wouldn't worry. Now we're all set. We can duplicate the electronic patterns of the human brain without worrying about breakdowns due to speedup or overload. Why didn't we think of the psychiatric approach ourselves?" "Leave that to me," Anson said. And as the two men moved off, he made a psychiatric approach toward the girl. She finally stepped back out of his arms. "You owe me an explanation. What's the big idea? You're taking the job, after all!" "I've found I can be useful," Anson told her. "There is a place for my profession -- a big one. Human beings no longer go berserk, but robots do." "Is that what this is all about? Have you been psychoanalyzing that robot you caught?" psychoanalysis isn't suitable for robots. The trouble is purely mechanical. But the brain is a mechanism, too. The more I worked with Mullet, the more I learned about the similarities." other." "You cured that robot in there?" she asked incredulously. "That's right." Anson slipped out of his white gown. "It's as good as new, ready to go back on the job at once. Of course it will have slower, less intense reactions, but its judgment hasn't been impaired. Neuro-surgery did the trick. That's the answer, Sue. Once you open them up, you can see the cure's the same." "So that's why you were wearing a surgical gown," she said. "You were operating on that robot." Anson grinned triumphantly. "The robot was excited, in a state of hysteria. I merely applied my knowledge and skill to the problem." "But what kind of an operation?" "I opened up the skull and eased the pressure on the overload wires. There used to be a name for it, but now there's a new one." Anson took her back into his arms. "Darling, congratulate me! I've just successfully performed the first prefrontal robotomy!" Current New Books : Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. (Bet. #th  #th Streets) New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday #:# A. M. to #:# P. M. (Phone GRamercy #-#) ( Continued from page #) one can be revived by praise -- but my own curiosity has been momentarily stirred. Is science fiction literature, either with or without a capital "L"? I don't know, but let's see. The litmus commonly used to determine whether something is literature indicates its degree of success in depicting its era. I know that's a sticky sentence, but it's the kind of language critics hide behind. All it means is: did the author give you a sharp, vivid idea of what it was like to be alive in his time? Because science fiction deals mostly with the future and the past, alien planets, other dimensions and the like, it would seem to be out of bounds as literature, on the basis of this definition. How can you live vicariously in a writer's era if he's constantly going off somewhere else? Ah, but is he? The more he tells you of other times and places, the more he reveals of his own time and place. You can see that for yourself in the Utopias of the past; they display in surgical detail the conditions they aimed to correct. Not too oddly, I guess, we in the present can't find much choice between those real and imaginary societies. The real ones were harsh and unjust, but so were the imaginary -- they were sweet setups for the authors and their friends, bum deals for everyone else. The gadgetry, too, tells us all we need to know of their science. Many of the ideas proved valid -- distant communication, flight, ground and undersea travel, transmutation of metals, improved food raising and storage, teaching methods, publishing, recording sound for posterity -- but they were unworkable because they were bound so immovably to the science of the day. In the same way, many of our ideas are valid, but if they come about as proposed, it will be a sheer accident. We also, of course, are limited by our knowledge. But it's the idea that counts, not the execution -- once the thought is expressed, the rest is up to the researchers. Science fiction does something that no other fiction can do. It provides a clear view of today, plus a sharp contrast between extrapolation and ultimate fact. A bonus like that should make science fiction LLiterature. Not all, by any means -- no field of any kind can produce only masterpieces -- but enough to meet the entrance examination...You may fire when ready, Gridley, or whatever your name is this year. But before you do -- is your attack Literature? for your information ing brightly over the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey shore and from this fact I derive for myself the right to reminisce a little. About thirtyfive years ago -- I was still in high school at the time -- there was an astronomical exhibition in the old Urania Observatory in Berlin, the same observatory where the planetoid Eros had been tracked down. One of the items on display was a model of the Moon, some sixteen inches in diameter, made in years of painstaking work by a retired teacher. A white-haired gentleman in his seventies was talking to him and when he left, somebody said to me: "This gentleman still knew Professor Hansen." This would have been more instructive by far if I had known at the time who Professor Hansen had been, but the name stuck in my mind and in due course I found out. Peter Andreas Hansen, to use his full name, had been the author of a theory concerning the Moon. It was easily the most spectacular idea about the Moon anybody has ever had and it is almost sad that he was wrong. If Hansen had been right, science fiction authors would have a very nearly inexhaustible theme to play with and the first exploratory round-the-Moon ships would really have something to watch for and photograph. to realize that the Moon is an independent solid body in space at about the time of Christ. What people thought before that time is only imperfectly known; my guess is that most of them managed to do without any specific ideas. Pliny the Elder mentioned in his famous Natural History that "the ancients" thought the Moon was a round silver shield in the sky. But there was disagreement about the nature of the spots that could be so clearly seen. One unknown philosopher declared that they were just dirt, atmospheric vapors which had condensed on the shiny silver. Another equally unknown philosopher held that no vapors had sullied the splendor of the heavenly disk, but that the spots one could see were reflections of the continents and seas of the Earth below. One might study the geography of the Earth by looking at the Moon. The really difficult problem was to find out where the observer himself was located in this reflection. Another early idea is embodied in a Hindu legend. According to it, the Moon was the round face of a lantern carried by a giganKepler's Second Law. The areas swept over the radius vector must be equal for equal times. In a circular orbit P. # , the angles would be equal too. In an elliptical orbit (right), they are decidely unequal tic (and invisible) Heavenly Watchman. In the classical West, as I have mentioned, the Moon was recognized as a "second Earth" some two thousand years ago. It was understood that the Moon was considerably smaller than Earth, but this was taken to be the main or even the only dissimilarity. Like the Earth, it indubitably had continents and seas, mountains and valleys, rivers and forests. These ideas are still reflected in the astronoomical names for some of the lunar features. The largest of the dark blotches is still called Oceanus procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. Another feature is still spoken of as the Sinus iridum, the Rainbow Bay, and another section is labeled Palus nebularum, the Misty Swamp. When Galileo Galilei looked at the Moon, he still thought he saw seas and continents, but it needed only slight improvements of the early telescopes to realize that the "seas" could not be seas. And familiarity with the surface of the Moon quickly convinced the observer that he could always see everything there was to be seen, that his vision was never obscured by lunar cloud patches. The astronomers of the first half of the seventeenth century might not yet be able to make up their minds on whether there was an atmosphere on the Moon or not, but they could tell that it was a cloudless atmosphere. Later in the same century, the case was already decided. The Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christian Huyghens, who died in #, stated it categorically in his book Cosmotheoros: "on the Moon, there are no seas, no rivers, nor clouds, nor air and water." The same book, incidentally, contains the statement that the moons of Jupiter and of Saturn always turn the same side to their planets, just as our moon does with us. TOR A layman, Huyghens' verdiet may well have dispelled whatever interest he had had in the Moon before. As far as astronomers were concerned, their work was just beginning. The first and most obvious and incidentally rather tedious job was a complete mapping of the visible hemisphere. If any changes should take place on the lunar surface, one had to have a detailed map to recognize them. While they were at it, astronomers began to realize that our moon is extraordinary in size. The Earth-Moon system is almost a double planet, something we know to be theoretically possible, even though our own solar system happens not to offer an example. True, our moon is not the largest satellite in the Solar System. Its diameter of # miles is surpassed by three of the four large moons of Jupiter (namely by Io, Ganymede and Callisto), by Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, and by Triton, the larger of the two known moons of Neptune. But while Triton has a diameter of around # miles, the diameter of its planet is # miles. Earth's diameter is a little over # miles, so that the diameter of our moon is, in round oM plane: of moon's Rbit The extreme positions above end below the ecliptic the Moon can assume, permitting a look over its poles figures, one-quarter of the diameter of the planet to which it belongs. Still, the Earth-Moon system is not quite a double planet because the common center of gravity of the system is still inside the body of the Earth, about # miles below the surface. Although nobody ever experienced any trouble locating the Moon in the sky, provided it was visible at all, the calculation of the Moon's orbit happens to be a very difficult job. One might say that any perturbation of its movement that is possible at all actually does take place. For quite some time, astronomers looked for some unknown factor influencing the Moon's movement. And this is the point where Professor Peter Andreas Hansen entered the picture. Hansen had been born in Denmark exactly one hundred years after Huyghens died in Holland. Before he became an astronomer, he had been an instrument maker, but he became involved in an astronomical venture -- the measuring of a meridian. He was working at Altona Observatory then, but only a few years later, in #, he was offered the position as director of the Seeberg Observatory. Hansen's special interest was the computation of orbits and he was fascinated by the perturbations of orbits. Small wonder that he tackled the problem of the orbit of the Moon. While working at it, he thought one day that he had spotted that unknown factor other astronomers had been talking about. Much could be explained if one assumed that the Moon was not a perfect sphere. not perfect spheres. Everybody knows that the Earth has a rather marked equatorial bulge. And Jupiter's equatorial bulge is so enormous that it can be seen with even a small telescope. But this is not what Hansen meant when he said that the Moon was not a perfect sphere. He did not think of equatorial bulges and flattened poles. The idea was rather that the Moon was slightly egg-shaped, that it had two equatorial diameters, one when measured from rim to rim of the visible disk and another and larger one when measured from the center of the visible disk to the center of the hemisphere, which is invisible from Earth. Instead of having an equatorial bulge all around the equator, like a quickly rotating planet, the Moon, in Hansen's opinion, had a large equatorial bulge in only one spot, something like an enormous high plateau, large enough to accommodate whole mountain chains and deep valleys. The center of this enormous bulge was supposed to coincide with the center of the visible disk of the Moon. In fact, all we could see from Earth was just this bulge, for the Moon's longer equatorial diameter was lined up with the common center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system. If this was true, it not only explained the observed peculiarities in the Moon's orbital motion; it also shed an entirely new light on everything else that had been observed. If the visible lunar disk was an enormous mountainous plateau, lifted to stratospheric heights, the observed absence of air and of water was only the logical result of such elevation. There was no observable air because the plateau was above the denser layers of the Moon's atmosphere. And there could be no water because it had run off the bulge It followed that no observation that had been made could be applied to the unknown hemisphere of the Moon. The most thorough knowledge of the Sahara Desert does not enable you to construct a picture of India or of Mexico just because they lie in the same latitudes. The Moon's other hemisphere probably did have an atmosphere and probably did have water. And where there are air and water, there are probably plants. And where there are plants, the presence of animals can be predicted with a fair chance of being right, because animal life is parasitic on plant life. Nor did you have to stop along this chain of reasoning at this point. If there are animals, some of them will start preying on other animals after a while and become carnivorous. And some of them might become intelligent in time and represent what older poets had called the "selenites," the inhabitants of the Moon. with much respect because he was a deservedly famous astronomer. They listened with the greatest of interest, too, because it was a fascinating and novel idea. The next problem was to find out whether it was also true. Continued observation was still the means of doing it because nature had provided some help in the form of the phenomenon of libration. I feel that I should digress from the main theme at this point for a fuller explanation of this phenomenon which, as I know from correspondence I receive from readers, is not well understood by many. As is generally known, the Moon turns around its axis in the same number of days and hours as it needs to go around the Earth once. It is as if you had a man walking around you in a circle, looking rigidly in the direction in which he is walking. That way, he turns around his own axis once every time he circles you and all you can observe is his left profile, with his left ear roughly in the center of what you can see of his head. Well, if this is the case, what is libration and how does it enter into the picture? The proper answer is that it is caused by the fact that the Moon does not move around the Earth in a circle but on an elliptical orbit. To explain this, let us first see what the Moon does not do (Fig. #). Namely, it does not move around the Earth in a circle. Such a circular path is shown on the left in the diagram. If the Moon did move in a circular path, it would need precisely the same time to go from A to B as it would need to go from C to D. In reality, the orbit is elliptical, as shown with great exaggeration on the right in the diagram. Again it needs as much time to go from A to B as it does to go from C to D. The sections of the orbit traveled are of markedly different length; what counts is that the shaded areas formed by the lines from the center of the Moon to the common center of gravity are equal. Technically, such a line from center to center is known as the radius vector and Kepler's Second Law states that the radius vector must sweep over equal areas in equal times. When the Moon is closest to the Earth -- in perigee, as it is called -- it moves faster than when it is farthest away, or in apogee. Logically, then, since the areas covered by the radius vector have to be equal for equal times, the portions of the orbit traversed cannot be of equal length. The customary statement that the average velocity of the Moon is # miles per second is, of course, true, but the word "average" must not be overlooked. Actually, the Moon is faster than that in perigee and slower in apogee. Before going on to the next step of the explanation, let me give the actual figures: The farthest apogee possible is # miles; the nearest possible perigee is # miles, both measured from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. The surface-to-surface distance is, of course, # miles less. velocity of the Moon along its orbit is not uniform, we only have to realize that the rate of. rotation around its axis must be uniform to see what happens (Fig. #). Both at apogee and at perigee, the same spot on the Moon -- marked by a short line -- forms the center of the visible disk. But this spot is not in the center at intermediate positions. One might say that the rotation of the Moon lags somewhat behind its orbital motion for onehalf of the orbit and is somewhat ahead of it for the other half. And if the spot which is in the center at apogee, and perigee is off center in between, it is obvious that a portion of what was visible, say, in apogee disappears from view over the left rim, while another previously invisible portion comes into view over the right rim. This is part of what is called libration. The other part is caused by the fact that the Moon's orbit is slightly tilted as compared to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the ecliptic (Fig. #). Depending on the position at the moment, we can sometimes peep over the lunar north pole into the area beyond, and sometimes over the lunar south pole. The overall result is that, in the course of a number of years, we can see and map a total of # per cent of the lunar surface. Only # I per cent of it is completely unknown and will remain so until the films taken by the first circumlunar rocket come out of the developer. But a total of # per cent was enough to disprove Hansen's intriguing idea. If he had been right, we should have caught an occasional glimpse of the "lowlands," especially when looking over the poles. Moreover, at periods of maximum libration, the unusual shape of the Moon should be apparent to some degree to direct vision. sive research -- much of it carried out by Simon Newcomb in Washington -- all astronomers were agreed that Hansen's assumption did not conform with reality. Since the whole episode had taken place at a time when science fiction novels were few and far between, Professor Hansen's egg-shaped Moon was not exploited literarily. With just one exception, that is, hut this exception was written in Polish. It appeared decades after the idea had been abandoned in science, namely, half a century ago. Its title was On Silvery Plains and the name of its author was Jerczy von Zulawsky. In the story, two or three ships, carrying cabins that can be used like automobiles, land near the center of the visible hemisphere of the Moon and then start the long trek "downhill" to the jungle of the lowlands. Near the end of his life, the leader of the expedition goes back in one of the automobile cabins to the place of the original landing where a mortar has been left behind to shoot the expedition's report back to Earth. The novel, of course, was supposed to be this report. Since I last read the book in about #, I may have forgotten some details, but it seems to me that Hansen's name was not mentioned in it. Jerczy von Zulawsky probably never saw the original papers but received his inspiration from a second or third hand popular account in a general magazine or newspaper supplement. Well, how does the other side of the Moon look? The answer is: probably not very different from the side we can see from Earth. What appears at the rim when the libration is favorable are the same types of formations so well known to astronomers. There are a number of craters, some of them quite large, a mountain range or two, and the edges of some mare plains. Interestingly enough, we know the approximate locations of at least three craters that are deeply hidden in the inaccessible # I per cent of the lunar surface. These craters have systems of "rays" as we know them from Tycho and Copernicus on the visible hemisphere. On "our" side, all "ray" systems originate from large craters and the "rays" themselves are great circle lines. It is comparatively unimportant in this connection that we don't know the nature of the "rays" and have no idea of why some craters have them and others do not. What is important is that the "rays" from beyond the rim indicate the existence and locations of several large craters. Some British astronomers have postulated that the unknown hemisphere may differ in degree from the known hemisphere, even though they must be fundamentally alike. They think that the unknown hemisphere contains a lesser number of craters and consists mostly of large mare plains. This reasoning is built, however, upon a foundation of hypotheses which, at the moment, are beyond either proof or disproof. The only suggestion one can make here is to have patience. In about # years, if not earlier, we'll be able to look at films and see what the other side actually looks like. A S A result of the discussion of the "transits" of Venus across the Sun's disk, I received a number of letters from readers who wanted to know a lot of things I had failed to mention since, after all, my article did not concern transits specifically. The questions ranged all the way from requests for a table of Venus transits to inquiries about rules for transits of Mercury. Because Mercury moves around the Sun in a much shorter time than Venus, a Mercury transit is a much more frequent phenomenon than a Venus transit. It can occur only in May and in November and the number of years between one transit and the next follows the sequence # -- #  # -- # -- # -- #, a total of # years. The cycle then repeats. Table I shows the transits which took place or will take place during the #th and #th centuries, with an additional entry for the next century because the last transit of the #th century will be a mere grazing of the Sun's limb -- almost a near miss, so to speak. As regards Venus transits, they are listed on Table II and because they are so rare, we can cover a time interval of several centuries. Taking further strides in the medical sciences for granted, I hope that at least half May Nov. Nov. Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. Nov. May May Nov. Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. May of my readers will be able to see the next one scheduled and half of those the one after the next. Year and Date : Duration : #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June I I h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # short #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # very short #, June # h m The corkscrew of space Of course history had to he rewritten... how could these facts be left on the books?... T T IS the very essence of # being human that Man B. should ever long for new horizons, onward, upward striving. When Man ceases to hunger for the frontier, he will no longer be Man. They say Columbus was looking for a new trade route, for spices from the Orient. What nonsense! As if the divine discontent could be reduced to an investment of the Grocery Guild! And likewise, on that memorable day whose centenary we are now observing, that unforgettable day when Man broke the last shackles of space and time, it was the holy fire which burned in that dauntless pioneer -- " Speech by Hon. Representative, in United Nations Assembly, # May # out when the Fleet arrived, and those who could traveled from as far as Yellowpeak and Whatsit for the occasion. A fair sprang up overnight, tents and booths sprawling over dusty miles, carnivals, migratory shows both live and recorded, noise and bustle and cheer. The alcohol plants and the fun houses did a rush business and you couldn't get a hotel room for love, money or good sweet water. Some folk even had to break the law and camp in the ruins, the long extinct native race sheltering a new, non-furry breed of Martian. Laslos Magarac threaded past the crowds till he got to the spaceport fence. He had an impulse to pay a dollar to one of the telescope concessionaires for a look at the fifty great ships orbiting around the planet, but decided against it -- the line was too long. After all, twice a local year was about once an Earthyear, so it was a capitalized Event -- but the shuttle boats blasting down, sheeting flame through clouds of kicked-up red dust, were spectacular enough. There was one arriving now, descending on a tail of fire some four miles away -- which put it almost on the horizon. It was a bright gleam against the darkblue sky, under the shrunken sun. As he watched, it entered its cradle and was wheeled off toward the waiting electrotrucks. Unloading began immediately; the trucks gulped packages and scurried like beetles toward the warehouses. Mail, merchandise, tools and luxuries -- it was like a friendly greeting from old Earth. Another line of vehicles was chuffing toward an empty shuttle with boxed and baled Martian goods, mostly drybean extract with a scattering of jewels, hopper pelts and prehistoric relics. The Fleet had to work fast, deliver its cargo and get loaded and start home again in a few days. Magarac found a place in the post office line and resigned himself to waiting an hour. He was a somewhat dehydrated-looking man with a gaunt ugly face and dry black hair. The coverall which protected him from the late-afternoon chill was the standard Martian garment, but as a well-to-do planter, he bore an expensive cloak patterned like a rainbow. "Ah... impatient, I see, my friend." Magarac turned around. Oliver Latourelle had joined the queue behind him. The physicist was a well-nourished man with a plump, sharp-nosed face, watery blue eyes and bushy white hair fringing an egg-shaped skull. "Is it that you await mail from a fair one back on Earth?" "Not any more," said Magarac gloomily. "Three Mars-years was too long to wait." tongue in sympathy. "The old tale, no? You are going to Mars to raise drybeans and make a fortune. But it takes long to become rich, even in the Dominion, and meanwhile the radio beams are too public and first-class mail is ten dollars an ounce." "I'm doing okay," said Magarac defensively. "On Mars, that is. The trouble is that passage home would eat up half my money." He didn't like to discuss his personal affairs, but when there are barely # people on an entire planet, privacy hardly exists. "Be consoled," advised Latourelle. "I speak as a man of experience. No one ever died of a broken heart. That organ is capable of miraculously rapid self-repair. The secret is to give it time to do so." "Oh, I'm long over that business," said Magarac. "What I'm anxious to find out is how synthetic chemistry is progressing on Earth." "So? I realize that to operate a plantation here requires a good scientific background, but are you so vitally interested that you cannot wait until your mail is delivered?" "I am," said Magarac. "And so is all Mars, whether they know it or not. Eighty per cent of our industry is based on the drybean. It won't grow anywhere else, and they're finding new medicinal uses for the extract every year. But figure it out for yourself. Freight rates being what they are, the stuff costs fifty dollars an ounce by the time the Earth doctor gets it. Every chemical firm you can name has a team trying to synthesize the basic molecule. One day soon, they're going to do it and then the drybean planters are finished. I'm watching the technical journals so I can sell out in time." "And what will you do then, with the Dominion broke?" "God only knows." "And I thank Him I was born to be a research physicist, and I thank the Rockefeller Foundation for so generously subsidizing my work," said Latourelle. "Though with all respect to this excellent planet of yours, my friend, it seems a long and dry three years ahead until I can return to France." He had arrived with the Fleet before last, but even if he finished ahead of schedule, he would have to wait his turn for passage. "What d'you have to be here for, anyway?" asked Magarac. He had gotten quite friendly with Latourelle, but knew little of the man's highly specialized project. "I am studying magnetism. Mars, you see, does not have a core like Earth, but is of uniform composition. Apparently that accounts for its peculiar magnetic field... Yet in what way? I think it is an effect of relativistic wave mechanics. I have developed a most beautiful theory of Riemannian folds in a multiply connected space. Now I am checking the magnetic data to see if my theory will hold -- you pardon the expression -- water." "And so what's your hurry to get your mail?" Magarac chuckled. "A gorgeous dame of your own?" "No. Not that I am too old even now, I assure you, but I have more sense than to expect a delectable woman to wait five Earth-years for my return. I shall simply start afresh. No, no, my friend, it is that I have been extravagant with myself. Well, say rather that I am supplying a necessity. If you would care to visit my house tonight for a little private discussion -- ?" And Latourelle would say nothing more. With elaborate silence, he picked up a large wooden case at the desk, and Margarac's last sight of him was a small suspicious figure hugging the box to his chest and stumping off toward Syrtis. good for humanity at large, but it would hit Mars heavily. Magarac had been an engineer on Earth, with added experience in chemistry, and could read between the lines. M'Kato announced cautiously that he thought he had the structural formula of protenzase. If he was right, they would be synthesizing it in another year. Quite probably, the next Fleet would not be accepting drybean extract. Magarac slouched gloomily away from the lights and music and swirl of the fair. What the devil was a man to do? So far, the history of Mars had been economic history. The first colony had been planted to mine the rich uranium beds of the Aetheria. To save freight, it had had to be made self-sufficient; and, since this was not Periclean Greece, it had had to include women. Children resulted and drybean culture provided a new source of income... so good a source that Mars stopped shipping uranium and used it instead to break down iron oxides and produce a breathable atmosphere. Now they were the Dominion, with junior status in the UN, and talked big about gaining full selfgovernment. But when their economy was kicked in the stomach -- Magarac found Solis Avenue deserted. Only a few early returnees like himself, and the puritan isolationists who had not gone to the fair at all, were in town. He walked along the street between the flat-roofed stone houses of a rainless, timberless world. Overhead glittered a night of splendid stars, but he missed the Moon. Phobos and Deimos weren't worth writing home about. He sighed and took out a cigarette and winced as he lit it. Synthetic tobacco, synthetic alcohol, synthetic steaks... God! Maybe he ought to throw in his hand and go back to Earth. Only he liked it here. There was room in the deserts and the equatorial moors. A man was still a man, not a number. You worked with your hands and brain, for yourself, and makinga timegnawed sandstone waste blossom green was more satisfying than punching a clock in an Earthside factory. He wanted to get married and fill his ranch house with kids and raise them up proud of being Martians and Magaracs. He turned a corner and emerged on Matsuoko Plaza. The thin air carried sound so poorly that he was almost on the rally before he realized. ing from the balcony of Barsoom House. Magarac had to admit the demagogue had personality -- a thick-set, dynamic type, with a fierce head that he was always tossing dramatically back, a voice which was organ and trumpet and bass drum. What the planter did not like was the words, or the crowd, or the greenshirted goons stationed around the square. " -- And I say to you, it was hard work, hard work and obedience which made the glorious vision of our grandfathers into the reality you see about you, which transformed a planetwide desolation into a world of men! It was thrift and sobriety. Yes, let me say it was intolerance -- intolerance of vice, of drink, of laziness and rebelliousness against constituted authority, which made us what we now are. "Then let us be intolerant! These self-styled democrats, these Earth-lovers, with their hellbrewed liquor and their loose women and their hair-splitting Bill of Rights designed only to thwart the Will of the People, will ruin us if they can. It is we who Believe who must save the destiny of Mars -- " Magarac shrank into a dark corner. The mob numbered almost a hundred men, shoving and yelling in an ugly mood, and Magarac was no friend of Blalock's Freeman Party. As an assemblyman of Syrtis District, he had often spoken publicly against him. Freeman! Haw! And all the horses laughed. And all the horses' donkeys laughed. It was the old story, the would-be dictator, appealing to that queer deep streak of masochistic puritanism in the Martian culture. The first colonists had needed such traits, to nerve them for their heartbreaking job. But now -- good Lord! Wasn't it about time Mars became civilized? How it happened, Magarac was never sure. One minute, Blalock was talking himself beserk and the crowd was crying amen; the next minute, they were across the plaza, tearing Cassidy's Bar  Grill apart. Cassidy was the most inoffensive little man in the Solar System, who often apologized for the rotgut he had to sell and the prices he had to charge. Martian beer was just barely preferable to none at all, though it cost as much as champagne would on Earth, and Cassidy operated a friendly neighborhood pub where men could shed the grinding sameness of desert reclamation in a few hours of conviviality. Magarac not only liked the place and its owner, but figured they were important to keeping the town sane. When he saw glass splinter as two six-foot bruisers tossed Cassidy through his own window, and when he saw the whole investment smashed and running out in the street, Laslos Magarac decided that if Blalock had intimidated the police, the skunk ought to be shown there was still one man left in Syrtis. A man, by God! He ran across the square and started swinging. door and stood uncertainly. "But what happened to you, my friend? You look like one of the old Martian ruins." "Just a ruined Martian." Magarac lurched into the house and headed for the bathroom. "Use the whole week's water ration if you desire," said Latourelle anxiously. "Me, I am not drinking water any more." He hovered about trying to be helpful while Magarac got washed and patched. Apart from a missing tooth, the damage was only skin deep and a glass of analgesite took away the pain. It was with a sigh almost of contentment that Magarac finally stretched out in a battered easy chair. Latourelle's house consisted of three rooms: bath, living-diningsleeping, and a laboratory. The lab took up most of the space. But with his genius for being comfortable, the Frenchman had made his home a place of cheer. "When the assembly meets next week, they're going to get an earful," said Magarac. "Not that it'll do any good. Blalock's bullies have everybody else cowed. But you shoulda seen the other guy." He smiled dreamily, with bruised and swelling lips. "Four of 'em was one too many for me, but they won't forget me in a hurry." "I take it, then, you had the run-in with the Freemen?" "They were busting up Cassidy's tavern. I dragged him away and called a doctor. He'll be all right." "Barbarians! Have they no consideration for others?" "Not the Freemen. They want to march around in fancy uniforms and so they figure everybody else ought to want the same." Magarac scowled and lighted a cigarette. His fingers shook a little. "Ollie, Mars is really sick." "It must be, if this sort of thing is proceeding unhindered." "We're out of touch with history. What can we do but stagnate, when you have to work a lifetime to save up enough money for one vacation on Earth? Blalock would be laughed out of town back there. But here he's a big frog because the whole planet is such a small puddle. And life is so grim at best that the shoddy excitement he can offer appeals to the young men." Magarac spoke fast, with the feverish loquacity of weariness. "We have to live ascetically because of economics. So, sooner or later, we're going to rationalize that fact and turn ascetism from an unpleasant necessity to a shining virtue." He puffed hard, seeking comfort from the vile fake tobacco. "When that happens, Mars will no longer be fit to live on." "It is not now, I fear," said Latourelle. "Sure, it still is, because we have hope. We can work and hope to improve the place. But if Blalock gets into power, there won't even be that hope." and go," said Latourelle fatalistically. "The beast will have his day and then be forgotten." "Not when the bottom is going to be knocked out of our economy -- which will happen pretty soon. Then everybody will be desperate enough to try the old panacea, the Almighty State." Magarac's face twisted. "And we could do so much, Ollie, if we had the chance! We have minerals, we have space for agriculture... and Earth is getting so overcrowded, someday it'll be desperate for food. But the damned cost of shipping! The time it takes! If we had a fast, cheap method of space travel, we could shuck this lopsided drybean economy, build up diversified industries, turn Mars into an Eden." "One cannot very well argue with a gravitational potential difference," shrugged Latourelle. "No, but a rocket is such a slow and wasteful way to overcome it." Magarac looked wistful. "And if we had something better, we'd be in close touch with Earth. We'd have a living culture to nourish us -- books, music, art, everything Man needs to be more than just a two-legged belly." "Well, be of good heart, my friend. In another fifty or a hundred years such a method will be available." "Hm?" Magarac looked up through two black eyes. "What d'you mean?" "Did you not know? Bieri, I suppose not; you are no theoretical physicist. But if my concept of warped space is valid, then it should be entirely possible to -- well, yes, to bring a spaceship directly from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth, or vice versa, in the wink of an eye, at negligible cost. The ship would follow a geodesic through the appropriate fold in space -- " Magarac jumped to his feet. "You don't mean it!" "But I do." Latourelle beamed. "There, is not that consolation to you?" "No," said Magarac bleakly. "Fifty years will be too late. Mars will have been ruined in a decade." He leaned over and gripped Latourelle's shoulders. "D'you think you can build such a ship now?" "What do you think I am? A sorcerer?" "I know you're a Nobel Prize winner, a genuine genius and -- " "And an old tired man who will in a few years return to his beloved valley of the Dordogne and sit on a vine-covered terrace and sip a glass of Medoc. Shall we say a Pouillac?" Latourelle smiled wistfully. "I cannot produce miracles to order." "You've done it, blast you! That neutron recycler of yours -- " "That was to prove a point which interested me. My heart goes out to you, but up here -- " Latourelle tapped his gleaming forehead -- "up here is a selfish animal, the subconscious mind, which must first be given an allimportant motive before it will work. And as I am only to be on Mars three more years, I have no such motive."L"-his chair. "Yeah... yeah, I guess so." "Come on to Earth," urged Latourelle. "Come to France and I will show you how to live. You poor Martians must wolf your tasteless synthetics and gulp your miserable beer and try to persuade yourselves you are still human. It is no wonder that prohibitionism is growing. This Blalock now, if he could ever taste a properly prepared mousse of shad roe, with a Barsac -- no, let us say a Puligny Montrachet -- ah, he would realize that there are higher values than his own ambition and that the goodness of God is a more alive thing than the cold charity of the State." Magarac braced himself. He liked Latourelle, but the old fellow was a bore on this one topic. "I have given some thought to my first menu," went on the physicist raptly. "I cannot now specify the vintages, for I have lost touch, but give me time when I return, give me time. We will begin, of course, with a light dry sherry. There are those who maintain the virtues of vermouth as an aperitif, but not just before a meal, if you please. After the appetizers and the clear soup, there will be the fish and the white Burgundy of which I spoke." He was almost crooning now. "With the tournedos, we will serve Bordeaux... Chateau Lafite, I believe, if there has been a good year. With the salad, which must naturally be based on that great American contribution, the calavo, one might argue the merits of a Chateau Cheval Blanc, a Clos Fortet or an Haut Brion, but I think -- " Magarac nodded. He jerked to wakefulness when Latourelle stopped and regarded him with a hurt expression. After a moment, the Frenchman looked contrite. "But of course! Forgive me! Here you have been in battle, righteous battle but a lost cause, and I sit droning on about joys out of your reach. I promised you a surprise, d d I not? Well, a surprise you shall have, one to lighten your soul and renew your manhood. I have been saving it, denying it even to myself till you should come, for shared pleasures are best. But now -- wait!" He sprang to his feet and went over to a cabinet and opened it. Bottles glistened within, row on row of them, slender bottles with labels of gentle witchcraft. Magarac felt his jaw clank down. He pulled it up again with an effort. ishly and rubbed his hands. "Is it not a noble sight? Is it not a vision for the gods? I assure you, this hope is all that has sustained me in my time on Mars." "My God!" stammered Magarac. "It must have cost a fortune!" "It did, it did indeed. Luckily, I have a fortune -- or had." Latourelle broke out two slim glasses and a corkscrew. "You see, it has hitherto been impossible to export liquors to other planets. Quite apart from the cost, the prolonged high acceleration and then the free fall, they ruin it. Even crossing an ocean, a good wine is sadly bruised. Crossing space, it simply dies; one might as well drink Martian beer," "Um... yes, I've heard of that. Colloidal particles agglom era te and obscure chemical reactions take place. Even whisky won't survive the trip." Magarac approached the cabinet reverently. "But this -- " "This is a new process. The last Fleet brought me a letter announcing success and I hastened to order a case of assorted wines. It will not be much, but it will help keep me sane until the next shipment can arrive." Latourelle extracted a bottle and held it up to the light. "The process, it involves a tasteless, harmless additive which stabilizes both the colloids and the chemistry. The finest Chambertin-Clos has been flown through an Atlantic hurricane and served that same night in New York with no slightest injury done to it." The cork popped out with a flourish. "Now, my old, we drink the first wine to cross interplanetary space!" The living red stream sparkled into the glasses. Silently, as if performing a holy rite, the two men raised their drinks and sipped. Latourelle went white. "Nom de diable! Pure vinegar!" Immortal Oliver Latourelle! At a time of crisis, when the gj planet of Mars faced ruin and dictatorship, it was he and his great associate Laslos Magarac, later to become Premier of the Dominion and first President of a fully independent nation -- it was those two men, driven by the need to expand humanity's frontiers to the very stars, who created the space-warp ship. " Think of it, gentlemen! In one month, Latourelle had worked out the principles of such a vessel. "In two more months, he had equipped an old ship, the piously renamed St. Emilion, with a warp engine and had crossed to Earth in a few microseconds. It was only a token cargo he brought back to Mars, a case of wine, doubtless to symbolize the achievements of his own fair country, but he had proved it could be done. That simple case of wine foreshadowed the argosies which now ply between a thousand suns. "And it was the great Latourelle's first words when he emerged from his ship on his return from Earth and staggered across the sands of Mars -- surely too overcome by emotion to walk straight -- it was his words which have become the official motto of the Martian Republic and will live forever in Martian hearts as a flaming symbol of human genius: "A votre sante!" The Category Inventors There was security for all in this well-run world -- but what happened to a man who tried to get ahead could never happen to a robot! Illustrated down that brought matters to a head. Not that they hadn't been gathering for months. Ever since, in fact, he had been put on reserve, Marge seemed to have been conducting a campaign -- a subtle, insistent, completely wifely campaign. First it was: "It's not your fault, honey, the world just doesn't understand creative artists any more." He had said modestly, "Oh, a bassoon player isn't creative, peaches; he's executant." "Anyway," she retorted firmly, "he's an artist." It seemed only as an afterthought that she added, "That means he's got intelligence and imagination. And that means he's got a head start when it comes to finding a new job -- doesn't it, honey?" And her big brown eyes had looked up at him so confidently, so guilelessly. "Sure, sure, a head start," he had said, feeling his heart droop. Being able to play the bassoon didn't seem much of a qualification for doing any other job at all. "Of course," she said a few days later, "you could get a job in a jazz band, Gilbert, couldn't you? It's all the rage again." She added hastily, "Oh, I know you don't like the idea, but -- " He explained to her patiently that it wasn't a matter of not liking the idea. It was simply that he couldn't. Playing jazz wasn't quite the same thing as playing serious music, which was why robots could be taught to do the one, but not -- so far, anyway -- the other. "Well, Phil Tomkys made the switch, didn't he?" she said. What Phil Tomkys could do and what he could do, he'd told her tersely, were two entirely different things. Jazz playing was a certain specialized ability -- he made it sound on a level with safe-breaking or parricide -- and you either had it or you hadn't -- now did she see?  pose then?" she suggested some time later. She couldn't have touched him on a rawer spot. But she went on, blithely unwitting: "How about those tunes you're always humming to yourself? They sound pretty good to me and -- "They're probably someone else's," he told her curtly. They were someone else's, he knew. Ten years of orchestra playing had left no room in his head for original music. He'd learned that at great cost, because he had tried his hand once at a quartet for bassoon, celeste, recorder and guitar -- and even that unusual combination hadn't been proof against his subconscious; it was almost finished before he'd realized that it was all bits and pieces from obscure compositions he'd played in the past. The memory of that first and last attempt made him feel guilty now. That was one of the nastiest things about being on reserve -- it made you think yourself deficient in not having abilities that there was no earthly reason you should have, anyway. But he managed to keep a hold on his temper. And the next time. And, by a mighty effort, the next. But the tension mounted and mounted -- until the robot broke down one fine spring morning. And then it stopped mounting. It exploded. "Right in the middle of getting breakfast, too," Marge wailed, surveying the inert mass of metal that lay by the kitchen table. Gilbert had just got up. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "I'll ring Center," he said with an unurgent yawn. "But the children will be late for school," she said. "Colin! Michael!" she called to the bathroom. "Do hurry." "It's not much use their hurrying, is it, if there's no breakfast ready for them?" Gilbert observed helpfully. "What do you think I'm trying to do?" she snapped, juggling wildly with unfamiliar implements. "I've only got two pairs of hands." He roared at that and struck a pose. "Step closer, folks! See the only woman in captivity with four arms." She stamped her foot in flustered rage. "You know what I meant. A fine father you are, standing there trying to be funny when your children are late for school. As if the poor mites haven't had enough to put up with lately." His laughter stopped abruptly. "And what exactly do you mean by that?" "What I say." She jabbed desperately at food tubes. He glared at her. "Well, just what have the 'poor mites' had to put up with?" "Oh, I'm too busy to argue with you. Anyway, you wouldn't understand." "Oh, wouldn't I? Perhaps I understand only too well. 'Lately' wouldn't be... just three months and thirteen days?" "If you like," she muttered, not looking at him. "Just as I thought!" he exploded. "You blame me. Ever since they put me on reserve you've been getting at me. That's a fine encouragement for a man, I must say. If you think -- " vanced a step toward her. He failed to notice the recumbent robot until he fell headlong over it. He lay there, rubbing a scuffed shin and swearing colorfully. "If you're going to use foul language," his wife said icily, "you might at least keep your voice down. You know what sharp ears the children have." He climbed to his feet, glaring. "Oh, so now I'm a corrupter of my own children, is that it? Well, let me tell you that -- " But at that moment a terrific squawking rose from the Henomat, the gadget that synthesised fresh eggs from raw meal. His wife jerked and jabbed frantically at the kitchen control panel. She only succeeded in releasing several faucets of assorted juices and ketchups. As they splashed and oozed over the floor she made one last despairing assault on the control panel. The faucets continued to run. But a blaring of jazz music joined the chaos now. She threw up her hands in surrender, sank into a chair and buried her head on the table-top. Gilbert, standing there in a deafened daze, felt a sudden pang of remorse. Perhaps it was his fault; perhaps he should have foreseen the day, when a metal being with a crystalline brain would take over his job, as robots had taken over so many other people's by now. Contritely he dashed to the control panel and fumbled at it. Somehow his manipulations did the trick. The faucets gurgled to a stop, the music snapped off and the Henomat died in a flurry of feathery whimpers. Gilbert's self-esteem recovered slightly. He looked expectantly at his wife, but she did not lift her head. She only sniffed a dismal and muffled sniff. There's gratitude! he thought angrily. Well, it wasn't his fault. His gaze fell upon the abject heap of metal on the floor. It was kind. Suddenly all the frustration of the last few months focused on the robot and ignited in anger. He lashed out at it with his foot. The foot was still slipper-shod and it hurt. But he was too enraged to care and the action, although it made no impression on the robot, brought gratifying relief to his feelings. Marge had raised her head and was regarding him witheringly. "Well, now I've seen everything," she said. "A grown man actually kicking a poor defenseless robot." "When it's down, too," he said caustically. He flared up again. "It seems you've got more sympathy for a robot than you have for your husband. It's a fine way to -- " He was interrupted by a small human avalanche tumbling into the room. "Morning, Mom," said the boys in chorus. "Morning, Pop." Was there, thought Gilbert, a pause, just a slight one, between the two greetings? And a dying fall to the second? "Hey, the robot's passed out," said Colin. "Was that what all the noise was, Pop?" Michael asked. Gilbert glowered. Then he sighed and dragged the robot out of the kitchen by its feet. He dumped it in a bedroom closet and dialed Robocenter. He lingered a while before he went back to the kitchen. He saw that the kids had left -- without much breakfast, obviously -- and he realized then that that was why he had lingered -- to avoid facing them. So it was getting to that point now. II dressed and feeling desperate when the door buzzer sounded. Not from any desire to be helpful -- that he certainly didn't feel -- but just to be able to hear the sound of his own voice again, anybody's voice, he said, "That'll be the mechanic from Center. I'll open it." But it wasn't the mechanic. "Hello, son," came a plummy voice. Another one, gentle and fluting, cooed from behind a mountainous fluorotex package, "Surprise!" It was George and Phoebe, Marge's parents. Gilbert winced. This was all he needed. "Had a sudden call from party H.Q.," boomed George. "And we took the early rocket in so we could have an hour with you," Phoebe explained, peeking birdlike from behind her burden. "Ah -- er, come in, then," said Gilbert. "Anything wrong, son?" said George, drawing Gilbert to one side as Phoebe went to find Marge, "Wrong? Why, no, nothing's wrong." He laughed unconvincingly. "It's just that I was expecting someone else. The mechanic from Robocenter." "That robot of yours broken down? Too bad. The poor kid's up to her neck in it, eh? I'll just say hello to her." He came back quickly. "I'll say she is! Still, Mother's pitching in." He winked as sounds of furious activity came from the kitchen. "She's just the same at home. Leaves so little for our robot to do, he's thinking of applying for a pension." He chuckled hugely. Then, noticing that filbert wasn't as much as smiling, he stopped abruptly and turned on a manner that Gilbert knew well by now -- the earnest, the man-to-man. "Well, how are things, my boy?" "You mean, have I got a job yet?" "Heavens, no! I know it's not that easy. We all know it takes time. What I meant was, how are the ideas working out?" " What ideas?" George shook his head. "As bad as that, eh? Still, it's the darkest hour before the dawn. You mark my words, I've seen it happen so many times. Just when a man thinks there isn't a single idea left that someone else hasn't thought of, a real big one comes down out of the blue and hits him right between the -- " The door buzzer cut across George's eloquence. Gilbert ducked out in relief. chanic, clad in the gray coveralls of Roboservice. But he wasn't alone. "Yes?" said Gilbert to the other three who were about to follow the mechanic in. The three were also in gray, but wore bolero and slacks, street style. They were young, cropped of head, their faces scrubbed and intense. "We're therapists," explained the foremost and tallest one. "Therapists?" Gilbert echoed. "But nobody here's sick." "Hah! That's a good one," said the foremost of the three, turning his head to share his amusement with his colleagues. He turned back to Gilbert. "We are, of course, robotherapists." "Huh?" was all that Gilbert could manage. "I am a robopsychiatrist," the other amplified. "I am a robosynaptic stimulator," said the second. "And said the third with quiet pride, "am a robomorale coordinator." Just like the three bears, Gilbert thought. Of all the twaddle! But he stood aside for them to enter. "Where is the robot?" said the first therapist. Gilbert, deciding he disliked the man's manner, addressed himself pointedly to the mechanic. "In the bedroom closet, second on the left. I dumped it there after it broke down. It cluttered up the kitchen too much." "Right," said the mechanic amiably and went through. "Too bad," said the leading therapist, shaking his head. "It would have been better if you had left it where it fell. The failure attitude often gives a valuable pointer to the cause of breakdown." He beckoned to his colleagues and they followed in the wake of the mechanic. Gilbert looked after them for a long moment before returning to the living room. 'Well, now I've seen everything," he told his father-in-law. "They've actually got psychiatrists for robots." But George was quite unsurprised. "Why, didn't you know? They've had them for six months or more. One of the brightest new fields in years. The teloids were full of it." "Oh, I must have missed it," Gilbert murmured, realization dawning of just how out of touch he'd been with the world at large; how absorbed in his world of music playing that seemed now as unreal and faraway as an age in history. earnestly. "That's the way things are now. Branching out, keeping one step ahead of the robot all the time. That's what, if you don't mind my saying so, you haven't realized yet. A man's got to be adaptable. Now, take old Tom Angel, he was a schoolmate of mine. He was a top-class tailor and thought his job was safe as houses. But it wasn't. "So, after he'd been on reserve a time he happens to remember the birthday cards people used to send each other when we were kids. So what does Tom do? He ups and registers himself as the first of a new generation of greeting-card verse writers. And this is the best part, he'd never written a line of verse in his life. But he was first in, so he got charter rights. Get the idea? Once you get in the progressive mood, you're all set." Gilbert reflected dully that brushing the dust off a defunct custom was a funny kind of progress, but he tried to look interested, knowing that George was trying to be helpful in his fashion, just as Marge's mother was when she brought parcels of things a reservist's valid-for-aweek scrip wouldn't stretch for. "You see, Gil," George went on, "this isn't something new. Something like it has been happening for hundreds of years now, with machines displacing people. It's the scale of this that's new, because the robots threaten everybody's job." "Except politicians' and robopsychiatrists'," Gilbert couldn't resist saying. George looked pained. "Don't say that, Gil. And don't think politics aren't getting as competitive as everything else. Imagine, they even sent me to school -- me at my time of life -- to get what they called historical perspective. I kicked like mad, but I must admit it did me a power of good. It makes a man see why there've been so many changes since robots were invented. You know -- " he wagged a finger at Gilbert -- "there's been more progress in the past twenty years than in the whole hundred before that. From space travel to -- well, to self-coiling spaghetti." "I can't see much progress in reserve in the process." "Ah, but ten years ago there the challenge of the robot has been taken up. Because it's not only a challenge, it's an opportunity. This is the Age of Opportunity. We can all be thankful for one thing, at least, that we're not living in the last century." George shuddered. "Then, if a man was out of a job he had to find one!" "He had to? I wish I had the chance." "Ah, but that's the point. It wasn't always so easy. Nowadays, a man doesn't have to fight for a job. All he has to do is invent one." bit in the book," said Gilbert. "You know? The one with pictures that they give you in exchange for your job?"  "Oh, sorry," George said a bit huffily. "I was only trying to help." He rallied. "Anyway, you have got a father-in-law in the right party, that's one consolation. The party that stands up for the reservist's rights." Gilbert lifted an inward eye to heaven. "Yes, sir," George continued. "If the Technoes had their way, a reservist's life wouldn't be worth a light. But we fought for his rights all along the line. It was us Populists, for instance, who saw that every family -- workers and reservists alike -- had a robot of its own by inalienable rights." Gilbert had had as much as he could stand. "To hell with your inalienable rights!" he exploded. "Both parties have got it nicely carved up between them. All either of you care about is making sure that things go on just the way they are. As for the precious benefits of having a robot, let me tell you I'd be perfectly happy if there weren't any robots at all -- especially the ones that sit on their chromium-plated backsides in chromium-plated orchestras!" George looked shocked now. "I -- I -- you don't know what you're saying," he burbled. "Why, you're talking like a -- like a Luddite." "Oh, I am, am I? Well, let me -- " Gilbert stopped in mid-air and said suspiciously, "What's a Luddite?" "Luddites were the people who broke up the first power machines two hundred years ago." It was an item he'd picked up in the course on Historical Perspective. "And if that's the way you're -- " "Hold it!" A wild light came into Gilbert's eye. He had just thought of something. Why, of course! Why not? "What is it, son?" said George, anxious now at the look on his son-in-law's face. But Gilbert didn't hear him. With a whoop he bounded for the door, threw it back and collided with the leading therapist who was waiting on the other side, knuckles raised. "Well -- " gasped the therapist, staggering. "Sorry," said Gilbert cheerfully, trying to push past. "But there's something I have to tell you," said the therapist, recovering balance and breath with an effort. Behind him his two colleagues closed ranks. Gilbert halted. "Well, what is it? Make it brief. I'm a busy man." He laughed delightedly at the novelty of the words. a queer look. "It's no laughing matter, I'm afraid. We just gave your robot a tape-auto in there and the results were sad, sad. We shall have to take it back for immediate reorientation. You see -- " he shook his head gravely -- "it had developed a severe guilt complex." "Guilt complex?" Gilbert echoed blankly. "That's right. They're sensitive, you know. And if they once get the idea that their owners aren't happy, that starts it. They think it's their fault, they wonder what mistakes they could have made. They brood on it and then they do make mistakes. Oh, little ones, the kind you or I wouldn't notice at all, but a robot does because it knows it's not supposed to make mistakes. That only makes it feel more guilty and so it goes until -- well, it just gives up in despair." Despite his urgency to be off, Gilbert found himself listening with fascinated incredulity. The therapist was achingly earnest. "Of course, we'll know better next time, won't we? Center will send a replacement up. Just let the new one know it's making you happy, that's all, and everything will be fine. Just a smile, a grateful word now and then, eh?" For a moment Gilbert looked at the therapist with the expression of a child seeing its first elephant. Then he burst out laughing. "Of course I'll let it know I'm happy! I am happy. Who wouldn't be happy, living in this Age of Opportunity?" He noticed George's startled face peering from the living room and he laughed loudly again. "Now, if you don't mind -- " The therapists looked blankly at each other and fell away as Gilbert made for the door. Ill  carrying its usual scattered population of reservists, waiting in the slender hope of getting in on a hot tip. Gilbert walked past them, straight to the first cubicle. Inside was a counter, behind it j  a robot attendant. "I want to file a category," Gilbert announced. "Certainly, sir," said the robot, producing a form and an envelope from beneath the counter. The form required particulars of name, date of birth, reserve number. Gilbert entered these in impatiently, then arrived at the section headed: Nature of Category. Boldly he filled in neo-luddite. He scratched his chin thoughtfully with the end of his stylus and added, A lawful opposition to the robot economy. He smiled to himself. There was a job no robot would ever be able to take over. Under the heading Overall Classification of Category he entered political. He placed the form flat in the envelope as instructed and passed it with a flourish to the robot. The robot franked it across the flap and fed it into a machine by its side. In a few seconds, the envelope popped out again and the robot handed it back to Gilbert. Gilbert felt a sudden disquiet. "Well?" he asked. "Your application will take a short time to check," the robot explained. "This machine sends a copy to the registry below. They carry a complete file there of all categories." "Oh, I see," said Gilbert, relieved. While he waited he scanned the posters stuck up around the walls of the cubicle. Most bore the faces of successful category filers: inventors of such jobs as hydroponics stabilizer, cybernetic diviner, traumographist. What in creation was a traumographist? Gilbert wondered. A shock writer? One who drew graphs of shock responses? In what? Men? Atoms? Gilbert smiled. The sound of such specialized and enigmatic vocations no longer made him feel hopelessly ill-equipped in this complex world. Now he was going to meet the world on its own terms and --  -- chine and a 'slip of pasteboard popped up. The robot took it, scanned it, then lifted its crystalline eyes to Gilbert. "I'm sorry, sir, but your application has been rejected." Gilbert stood dazed, unbelieving. The robot went on, "The Category Office extends its sincere regrets and trusts that this will not deter you from making further applications. The Category Office -- " Gilbert interrupted what was obviously a set speech. He stretched across the counter and grabbed the robot by one articulated arm. "Look here, you -- you metallic mouthpiece. That application is legitimate. Nobody's got any right to reject it. You can't just stand there and -- " "Please." The unalterable pitch of the robot's voice only pointed its obvious embarrassment. Conditioned, like all robots, never to be hostile to humans, it could only make pathetic token efforts to release itself. Gilbert sighed and let go, feeling ashamed of himself. "Anyway," he persisted, "I want to see somebody about this." "An overseer is already on his way," the robot said. He must, unnoticed, have pressed an alarm signal, Gilbert realized. The overseer came in briskly; a round, cheerful individual. "Ah, Mr. Gilbert Parry. About your application, is it? Well, I'm very sorry. We dislike having to turn down anybody's application, you understand. Naturally, we -- " "Naturally nothing," Gilbert said brusquely. "That category I put forward is perfectly admissible." "But, Mr. Parry -- " "Don't interrupt. I've got a right to be heard. You may think you have all this sewn up nice and tidily. That's what the two political parties think, but they're wrong. Both of them support the system as it is. That's not enough." "But, Mr. Parry, you can't -- " "I can. What's more, I'll set out and prove, if I have to, that even from the standpoint of the status quo an opposition is socially necessary. Now, don't try to tell me I can't do that." The manager smiled. "But the need of an opposition is recognized. I was only trying to tell you that you can't register the category because it was registered years ago." "What!" "Yes, the Humans Only movement, as it's called, is a recognized party, though it's never managed to win an election or attract many adherents. Most people are only too grateful for the benefits robots have brought. But the movement does have State backing: funds, offices, the same proportion of salaried officials to members as the two big parties." Gilbert was already drifting miserably to the door. "Of course," the overseer added helpfully, "you could take up voluntary work for the party. There's always the chance you might be able to step into a salaried vacancy in a few years." "Thanks, it doesn't matter," Gilbert mumbled, and left the cubicle. A group of waiting hopefuls took one look at his face and melted away. There was only one thing to do. Start all over again at some other line, study and study until he was as proficient at it as he was at playing the bassoon. But what line? And how could he be sure that that wouldn't be taken over by robots before he became skilled at it? Still, there was nothing for it but to try. Even if it came to nothing, Marge wouldn't be able to get at him -- not fairly, anyway. More than that, he wouldn't have to put up with his own gnawing sense of failure. Noticing a library, he turned into it. He asked the assistant -- a robot even here in a center of # r learning -- for guidance. It brought him a well-thumbed handbook. Leading in the categories it listed were those of the old occupations that were  too closely linked to flesh and blood and spirit to be easily yielded up to the robot -- medicine, law, the creative arts. Well, medicine was out. He was no weakling, but he couldn't stand the thought of coldly opening up bodies. Law? He couldn't even argue successfully with his own wife, let alone with a judge and jury. And as for the creative arts -- you had to have a vocation, hadn't you? No, it would have to be something totally new -- one of the bewilderingly complex fields like... what was it on that poster?... traumography? On the impulse, he looked it up. Yes, it was here, all right. But he couldn't, after minutes of perplexed reading and re-reading, even make out what field it was in, the language describing it was so specialized. Hell! it was even worse than he had feared. He riffled through the book dejectedly. Then suddenly a displayed ad caught his eye. So there were ways! Why, of course, there had to be. The system had been going for years; it was bound to happen that people would emerge with just this flair. Alert young men, their minds not canalized in the narrow bounds of one profession, but at ease in this complicated world, able to see the need for a new job here, a new branch there. But how would you pay for such a service? Reservists' scrip was unnegotiable. Still, he had a few hundred credits of real money salted away for a possible emergency. It was worth a try. its grandiloquent name, was a small, dingy building downtown, all of thirty years old by the look of it. Still, Gilbert told himself, it's unwise to pre-judge the goods by the package. But the sudden fracas was more disturbing. He had to jump back hastily as the narrow swingdoors flew open and two burly individuals burst through, carrying a struggling, spitting burden. Through flailing arms and legs, Gilbert glimpsed an old gnomelike face, pink with frustration. Once on the sidewalk the two huskies lowered the man to his feet with exaggerated solicitude, gave him one meaningful look and , retreated into the building. One of them turned to throw out a battered brief case at the old man's feet. "I'll get a writ served on you, you scum!" their victim bellowed, shaking his fist. His stature was as gnomelike as his face, but his voice was surprisingly resonant. "A man's got his rights, you know. I'll. -- I'll -- " The little man subsided, as if realizing the futility of hurling his protests at blank doors. With a spluttering sigh he picked up his case, gave an outraged jerk to his bolero, then hobbled off down the street. Gilbert looked after him for a moment, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the poor old chap. He only hoped the incident had nothing to do with the C. P. Jones Bureau, that that wasn't their normal way of handling clients. Quelling the thought, he went in. "Room fifty-three?" Gilbert asked the robot enquiry clerk. "The C. P. Jones Bureau." "I'm sorry, sir, but Mr. Jones no longer operates here." "Oh, but his bureau?" "Mr. Jones himself was the bureau." "Well, has he started up anywhere else, do you know?" "He left no information on that point, sir." and left. So that was that. And that left what? Traumography? He shuddered at the thought. As he hesitated on the sidewalk, he thought of the chucking-out incident. ' Now, there was a job. They daren't build a man-handling robot. He flexed his biceps thoughtfully -- The thought died miserably. "You probably had to have your name put down at birth for a trade as rudimentary as that. He sighed and wandered off. Passing a bar, he went in as automatically as if it were a habit, which it never had been. This was an open bar, not one of those bleak reservists' places where you had to produce a ration card. Here you paid money. He went to a booth and ordered a double Scotch from the robot waiter. It wasn't until he turned to reach in his pocket to pay that Gilbert noticed who was sitting opposite him. It was the little old man he had seen thrown out of the Universe Building. He was looking mournfully at his drink as if it were a clouded crystal ball. The sight moved Gilbert to pity. Here was he feeling sorry for himself. At least he had youth. On an impulse he lifted his glass and said, "Better times." The old man raised his head slowly. "Huh!" he said. Then he managed a wan smile and said, "Thank you," and drained his glass. Gilbert drained his own and, to his questioning glance, the old man said, "Same as you." Gilbert ordered up. "I saw what happened to you back there," Gilbert ventured sympathetically. "Did you?" The old man sighed. "The robbers! Throwing a man out after all these years." He looked so miserable that Gilbert instantly regretted having mentioned the incident. "It's a wrench when you've worked in the same building for nearly ten years," the old man went on. "Oh, you worked there?" "I had my own office. The C. P. Jones Bureau." "You -- C. P. Jones?" Gilbert's conception of alert young men underwent violent revision. "Why, you heard of me?" The old boy's face lit up eagerly. "Heard of you? I was coming to see if you could fix me up." "You were? Ah, well, perhaps it was best I wasn't there. It saved you from being disappointed." Gilbert was puzzled. "I was disappointed. But how do you mean?" gory in stock." He paused, then with the air of one relieved to get a confession off his chest, added, "As a matter of fact, son, I never did manage to invent a single category -- except the one." "Oh," said Gilbert, his sympathy beginning to be tinged with suspicion. "What was the one?" "Why, the category of category inventor, of course." The old man sniffed. "Perhaps I wasn't very good at it, but I did have charter rights. Seems that nothing's sacred any longer, not even charter rights. They revised my category a week ago and canceled my license. Mind you, I didn't take it sitting down. But what can you do?" He took a despondent sip at his drink. "They've got you all ways." Gilbert felt a stirring of resentment at such ingratitude. "It seems to me," he said roughly, "you had a pretty good run for your money. I should think your clients have got the grievance." The old man looked up indignantly. "Why? They didn't do too badly. I always worked hard for them. Was it my fault the ideas didn't come? And it didn't cost them anything. My fee was only payable out of salary if and when I delivered." "Oh," said Gilbert. The old man hadn't been such a shark, then. The old man chuckled now. "You're right, though, about having a good run. I suppose, all in all, I did." "But how come you got away with it all that time?" Mr. Jones chuckled again. "Well, it was the Rehabilitation Office that paid me my fixed salary. Whereas it was the Labor Office that I was supposed to pay any fees into, less my commission, of course. Once a year the Accounting Office -- that's another department again -- sent around a robot auditor to check the book. They just never got around to checking up with each other, I suppose -- until now." He fell back into gloom. "Now I've got to invent another job." Gilbert examined the other's gnomelike face, the gnarled hands about his glass. "But I should have thought you'd be past... I mean, well -- " "You mean, why do I worry about another job at my age, is that it? Because my wife is not my age. She's only -- well, she says she's twenty-nine -- anyway, she wouldn't take kindly to the notion of my being on reserve." "Ah, these wives," Gilbert agreed. "It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have them to reckon with." "Wouldn't it?" said Mr. Jones, almost fiercely. "For me, I'm glad the way it is. If it wasn't for Babs -- that's my wife -- I'd have gone to pieces. I used to be a trapeze artist in the circus. That's how I met Babs; she was a dancer in a sideshow. I was the oldest trapeze man in the game, but even I had to pack it in some day. Got too shaky. If it hadn't been for Babs, I'd have gone to seed, been in my urn by now as like as not. Babs has got her faults, but she's a damn sight better encouragement to a man than any of these noble, shoulderto-shoulder dames. They want the feeling of power over a man. Babs only wants money and the things that money buys and then she's happy. And so am I."  beside such rough-and-ready philosophy. "Mm-mm, maybe you're right. Have another drink." "No, it's my turn," the old man insisted. And, as the drinks arrived, "But I'm talking about myself too much. How is it with you?" Gilbert told him and they had another drink. And they swapped yarns about their ex-professions. And they had another drink. And then Mr. Jones suggested they make a move to a real bar. And that started a pub-crawl such as Gilbert in his former sober life had never imagined possible. They talked, they joked. Even the way the world was treating them both assumed, under the influence of more and more drink, the aspect of one great joke. They laughed themselves silly over traumography and what it could be, their interpretations ranging from the inane to the obscene. That started them off on inventing mock categories, a game that lasted them through two bars and got them thrown out of a third when the categories became too outrageous. In one bar, in a lull, they ordered beer, and it had a melancholy effect on the little man. He said they were selfish, that everyone was selfish. They ought to feel sorry, not for themselves, but for the robots. Revealing unexpected depths to his character, he proceeded to recite lugubriously: How am I to face the odds Of Man's bedevilment and God's, I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made? Luckily that phase didn't last. Gilbert quickly ordered whiskey again and the resilient little man was back in form in a flash. And when Gilbert said, "What say we start a union for robots, then?" Mr. Jones threw himself into the idea with rare zest. They wondered if that might not be the salvation for both of them, until they reflected that a robot's minimum week could only be a # hours -- work being their one function -- and who'd have any interest in opposing that? The evening became more and more wild. Gilbert was never sure afterward whether the little man really did give a demonstration of the finer points of trapeze work from a chandelier. He would recall that they drank a great deal of liquor between them and that somewhere in the early hours he fell into a robocab. After that all was darkness... IV Sun through his eyelids that woke him. He recoiled with a groan. He heard shutters pulled, and was devoutly grateful for the dimness. A figure moved near him. "Is that you, Marge honey?" he whimpered. "No, sir, this is your new robot." It was holding out a glass of something that fizzed. Gilbert took it eagerly and downed it at a gulp. "A-ah, that's better." "Will there be anything else, sir?" "No, thanks." He was seized with a sudden fear. "Yes. Yes, there is. My wife." "Mrs. Parry asked me to tell her as soon as you awoke," the robot said. Gilbert breathed out in relief. For a moment he had had the thought that Marge might have left him. He couldn't have blamed her if she had -- not after his behavior yesterday -- then last night on top of it. He was overcome with sudden contrition. "It's all right," he said to the robot. "I'll tell her myself. I'm getting up." And somehow he managed it, though he wouldn't have without the assistance of the robot. "Thank you," Gilbert told it. Then, feeling the need to do penance all around, he added somewhat sheepishly, "You have made me very happy." "Thank you, sir," said the robot, inevitably without inflection, but when it repeated the words Gilbert felt that it really meant them. His penitential mood considerably sustained, he went in to Marge. And when he saw her, looking her prettiest, he felt touched to the quick. He began to mumble words of abject apology. But she cut him short with a kiss. "Don't apologize, honey. It was my fault. If I hadn't nagged you, you wouldn't have acted like that." She guided him to a chair. "Here." She poured him a cup of black coffee. "What would you like for breakfast?" "I've got it here, thanks," he said weakly. She nodded sympathetically. understanding, Gilbert fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. With the pack, a slip of paper came out. He looked at it. It read simply: Umbrological Parallax Tracer. Now what the heck did that mean? It was in his own handwriting, too. Then a dim memory crawled back from the confusion of the night before. He stared at the words, repeating them over and over to himself between sips of coffee. Then it suddenly dawned on him. "Why, that's it!" he exclaimed -- and winced. Despite having served him up with an answer, his head still couldn't stand that amount of sudden excitement. "What's the matter, sweet?" Marge crooned. "Here, have a cerebrin." He tottered to his feet. "Oh, don't be so noble and shoulderto-shoulder." He grinned quickly and kissed her. "Don't pay any attention to me, honey, I've just seen the light." He drained his coffee hurriedly. "I've got something urgent to attend to." He kissed her again and dashed off. He chose a different cubicle this time, just to be on the safe side, and made his application with a practiced, if shaky, hand. This time an official came unsummoned. The manager himself, what was more, for that's how he introduced himself to Gilbert. He was holding the copy of the application in his hand. "I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Parry," he said. "Umbrological Parallax Tracer. Ah, yes, most interesting. What exactly is that?" With a calmness that surprised even himself, Gilbert answered, "Well, it involves ascertaining the degrees of parallax that occur in umbrological investigations. It's not easy to explain in a few words, but -- " "Of course," said the manager understanding. "I thought it would probably be too complex for me to grasp. But you failed to enter the overall classification. I can make it on the photostat for you." He looked at Gilbert inquiringly, his stylus poised. For a moment Gilbert floundered, cursing himself for having overlook the point. "Er -- well, that's not easy to describe, either. You see -- " "I understand," said the manager soothingly. "Shall we say Synthesis, then? That covers a multitude of categories these days." "Oh -- ah, yes, yes, it's definitely a form of synthesis." filled in the space. "There's just one more point. The West Town office has already admitted an application this morning for, ah -- " he consulted a slip of paper in his hand -- "an Umbrological Parallax Co-relator. It just came through on the tape. Now, you'd have to prove, if called upon, that the two functions are distinct and separate." Gilbert doubted the testimony of his own ears. Then there really was something called Umbrology -- in which parallaxes occurred? And then -- "That wouldn't have been a Mr. C. P. Jones, would it?" "Why, yes. You know each other, then?" "We should have met this morning," lied Gilbert stoutly, "to file our categories together. One of us must have got the offices mixed. You see, umbrology has been our life work, in our spare hours, that is. But a parallax tracer is entirely different from a parallax co-relator. In fact, they're two entirely opposed functions. Opposed, but mutually dependent, if you understand. You see, a parallax can only be co-related in dialectical opposition and conjunction to and with its being traced." Gilbert was beginning to enjoy himself. "To put it more simply -- " "That's perfectly all right," said the manager. "I'll see that the distinction is made clear. Your charter will be mailed to you in a few days. But if you're working in the same field, hadn't you better share facilities with your friend, Mr. Jones? Provisionally, anyway?" "Why, yes," said Gilbert. "It would save a lot of delay in our work." "Indeed. Well, Mr. Jones will already have been granted offices. Hold on, I'll get the address from West Town." building. When Gilbert entered, Mr. Jones was arranging some handsome-looking furniture. The little man straightened and his eyes lit up. "Hello, my boy. So you found me, then." Gilbert grinned. "You old rogue. You nearly queered the pitch for me." The old man chuckled. "Well, all's fair. And somehow you didn't get around to giving me your address last night. And I didn't know you'd get the self-same idea. I do remember that we laughed a lot over it and said it was one of the best categories we thought up. Of the printable ones, that is." He chuckled again. "Anyway, I did alter the end to give you a loophole." Gilbert clapped the little man on the back. "That was more than I thought to do, I must admit." Gilbert looked around the office and felt a sudden sharp pang of conscience. "Of course we're cheating, aren't we?" "Cheating?" said the little man, feigning indignation very well, Gilbert thought. "I'm not. We may be anticipating a trifle, but that's a different thing altogether. I've already looked up Umbrology for a start. It's all right, there isn't such a word -- not yet. As near as I can make out, it would be a science of shadows. Now all we have to do is find the parallaxes." "But -- you're not serious?" said Gilbert. "Serious? Of course I'm serious. Can we help it if we haven't caught up with our category yet? Who was the great man, the Indian squatting on his haunches where he was born or Columbus setting out to find a place that no one knew existed? We've just got to have the same kind of faith as Columbus had. You've got brains. As for me, I always found it easier to earn my living on a trapeze. But I'm no slouch. My brain's been very well preserved from all those years of swinging about a hundred feet up with nothing to do. Oh, I may not have been any great shakes in my last category, but that wasn't specific enough. In Umbrology, I think we've got something a man can really get his teeth into." "But they'll find out," said Gilbert, weakening. "Courage, my lad, courage. The world's so complicated these days, everyone's such a specialist, that no one can be sure what's actual fact yet and what isn't. What was that one you came out with last night -- traumographist? Well, how many traumographists are there in the world? Say there's only one, which is more than possible. Then only he knows what he's doing. Anyway, if they step in before we've gotten anywhere, then we'll just start in some other line. The scope's enormous." Why, Gilbert told himself, he really does mean it! What was more, such confidence was catching. It was striking, too, the way the little old man made no kind of reservation on account of his years. He talked as if he were immortal, his capacity boundless. Standing there now, his head cocked to one side, he did look like some ageless troll, indefatigable and of infinite resource. "Anyway," said Mr. Jones. "I'm not letting grass grow under my feet. Here -- " his grin nearly bisected his face -- "don't just stand there. Our robot hasn't arrived yet. Give me a hand with this filing cabinet. We're going to need it." A free sample copy of the current issue of "Fantasy-Times", the Isaac Asimov. Doubleday  Co., Inc., # of science fiction's best-known authors and, as far as I know, his first venture into time travel. It's a truly fascinating opus, but I don't envy poor Asimov the tremendous job of working out the paradoxes inherent in any time story, particularly the one he chose. I doubt that there is one reasoning being who hasn't been tempted by the thought of being able to go back and alter one's past in order to avoid mistakes or tragedy. This is the basis of Asimov's story, though on a cosmic scale. A society of so-called Eternals has the power to alter the mainstream of time to eliminate unwanted features from their position in Eternity, a sort of pseudo-time that exists simultaneously from the beginning of time travel in the #th Century through the Hidden Century, up to about the #th Century. By means of the device of phsio-time, time in Eternity is concurrent. I must admit that the concepts became a bit bewildering now and then, but Asimov didn't stoop to take the easy way out to tell his story and that calls for literary courage. The hero is a Technician, the class of Eternals whose duty it is to compute the Minimum Necessary Change required to alter satisfactorily a given time sequence and to put the change into effect at the proper instant of Their social status is comparable to that of hangman among their associates because of the widespread dislocation and annihilation of eras that their changes entail. Do you realize what a monkeywrench a guy like that could be if he developed a grudge? Asimov does. by H. Chandler Elliot. Gnome Press, Inc., # that this book, like olives, is to be either liked or disliked, nothing in between. It revolves about a #th Century so-called Freeman, one of the mindless masses, who raises himself to the level of the ruling Hierarchy by dint of his dissatisfaction with Status Quo. civilized survivors, the Polynesians, assuming the Brown Man's Burden, have organized a world society based on freedom from want, the duties of the Freeman multitudes being reproduction and food production only, until every possible acre is tilled and progress stultified at story time. Our hero single-handedly overturns the whole shootin' match, which is all right by me, but somehow he can't stick to straightforward action and deliberation. Scattered throughout are enough parenthetical asides to make a script of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The blurb says this is a beautifully written book. True enough, but Chandler has overdone a good thing. Rinehart  Co., Inc., # meant this to be a sequel to his The Time Masters, even though it's a follow-up in time and has two characters common to each. I'm sure he could have done his story just as well without Gilbert and Shirley Nash, but I must confess that I sort of go for them myself. Especially Shirley. Telepathy with a kiss -- wow! Who cares if it's a one-way communication? And as for Gilbert... have you ever heard of Gilgamesh, the guy that legend says has lived for ten thousand years? Got it? The story itself concerns a series of Time Bombs, in the literal sense, blowing the bejabbers out of several high-ranking members of the fanatical Sons of America, or Ben's Boys, as they call themselves. Lt. Danforth of police spots an unusual pattern in the explosions, and even though canned as a scapegoat, continues his investigations on his own, with the blessings and unofficial aid of Mr. Ramsey, the telepathity Police. Tucker has a beautiful little twist in store at the end that might catch you as flat-footed as it did me. drew North. Gnome Press, Inc. # ing dust jackets before I dig into the meat of the stories, I was pretty well scared by the lurid recap. Funny thing, in resume the story sounds as amateurishly blud-and-thunderish as the blurb come-on hints, but in actuality, though unpretentious space opera, it makes good adventure reading for a couple of carefree hours. The crew of a Trader, a spacetub comparable to tramp steamers, bids for and wins the rights to a D-class planet. In bidding, though, the crew has pooled all their money and have none left for equipment and supplies. A wealthy amateur archeologist puts up the money and brings his scientific helpers along. When it turns out that he isn't really what he seems... I told you it sounds pretty bad. The "Sargasso" part of the title alludes to the Earthly Sea of Lost Ships, intimating that the planet appears to be a graveyard of spaceships. That, plus the fact that it contains the first identifiable artifacts of the Forerunners, an unknown race that had space travel way back when, makes the purchased planet a pretty valuable hunk of real estate. The ending was a bit on the abrupt side, but since the cover says "A Dane Thorsen-Solar Queen Adventure," simple deduction should prove this to be the first of a series. Elementary, my dear Flotsam. Philip Wilding. Philosophical Library. # land for an American firm. It does not specify whether the author likewise is British, but that would be my guess, even though the Earth locale is New Mexico and Old Mexico and the protagonists American. Regardless of nationality, Wilding deserves plaudits for perfecting a particularly annoying device of "putting everything" in "quotes." Having a "naturally" sensitive "stomach," I got "dizzy" from all this "stop-and-go" writing. The story concerns the preparations for and the actual flight to Venus, hewing close to this line while tossing out at every opportunity hints of sub-plots and sub-sub-plots that never materialize. Considering what the author has done with his chosen plot, maybe it would have been better -- but that's his business. After the Venusians have guided the Earth ship in to planetfall, the most interesting part, to say very little, occurs. Anyway, I must admit I never met more beautiful characters -- not a single plain, ordinary-looking one, even among the Venusians, without whose "help" this "book" would never have been "written." Dutton  Co., Inc., # T HE author has quite a background in aviation, according to the jacket. This is apparent in the story also. However, in spite of what should have been a basically tense plot, all the author's dramatic and tragic situations fall flat. But his inventiveness is commendable, particularly the symbiosis between the Martian and the oxygen-producing algae that live like hair on his body. The Martian has come to Earth seeking new and hardier strains of algae and lichens, since the native varieties are dying out for some obscure reason. His own mysteriously propelled ship has been destroyed on landing and he must return with Earth's first Martian expedition. Of course, since the Earth ship is destroyed on landing and return must be made by Martian ship, turnabout is fair play, isn't it? Well, of course it is. This is the third author this month who has figured out a way to get my nanny. He does it by liberally larding (and I Do mean "Lard") his story with italics. All I can "say" is, (wait) till next "month!" Trap Check your dictionary if you think "trap" is a simple and uncomplicated word... or read this for another definition! of assistance. The situation is potentially dangerous, so come at once. It shows how right you were, Samish, old friend. I should never have trusted a Terr an. They are a sly, ignorant, irresponsible race, just as you have always pointed out. Nor are they as stupid as they seem. I am beginning to believe that the slenderness of the tentacle is not the only criterion of intelligence. What a sorry mess, Samish! And the plan seemed so foolproof... Ed Dailey saw a gleam of metal outside his cabin door, but he was still too sleepy to investigate. He had awakened shortly after daybreak and tiptoed outside for a glimpse at the weather. It was unpromising. There had been a heavy rain during the night and water dripped from every leaf and branch of the surrounding forest. His station wagon had a drowned look and the dirt road leading up the mountainside was a foot-thick in mud. His friend Thurston came to the door in pajamas, his round face flushed with sleep and Buddhalike in its placidity. "It always rains on the first day of a vacation," Thurston stated. "Rule of nature." "Might be a good day for trout," Dailey said. "It might; But it is a better day for building a roaring fire in the fireplace and drinking hot buttered rum." Tj I OR eleven years, they had  been taking a short autumn vacation together, but for different reasons. Dailey had a romantic love for equipment. The clerks in New York's fancier sports shops hung expensive parkas on his high, stooped shoulders, parkas such as one would wear on the trail of the Abominable Snowman in the fastnesses of Tibet. They sold him ingenious little stoves that would burn through a hurricane and wickedly curved knives of the best Swedish steel. Dailey loved to feel a lean canteen against his side and a bluedsteel rifle over his shoulder. But the canteen usually contained rum and the rifle was used against nothing deadlier than tin cans. For in spite of his dreams, Dailey was a friendly man, with no malice toward bird or beast. His friend Thurston was overweight and short of wind, and burdened himself only with the lightest of fly rods and the smallest of shotguns. By the second week, he usually managed to steer the hunt to Lake Placid, to the cocktail lounges that were his true environment. There, with an incredible knowledge of spoor and lair, he placidly hunted the pretty vacationing girls instead of the brown bear, the black bear, or the mountain deer. This mild exercise was more than adequate for two soft and successful businessmen on the wrong side of forty, and they returned to the city tanned and refreshed, with a new lease on life and a renewed tolerance for their wives. "Rum it is," Dailey said. "What's that?" He had noticed the gleam of metal near the cabin. Thurston walked over and poked the object with his foot. "Odd-looking thing." Dailey parted the grass and saw an open framework box about four feet square, constructed of metal strips, and hinged on top. Written boldly on one of the strips was the single "Where did you buy that?" Thurston asked. "I didn't." Dailey found a plastic tag attached to one of the metal strips. He pulled it loose and read: "Dear Friend, this is a new and revolutionary design in to the general public, we are giving you this model absolutely free! You will find it a unique and valuable device for the capture of small game, provided you follow precisely the directions on the other side. Good luck and good hunting!" "If this isn't the strangest thing," Dailey said. "Do you suppose it was left during the night?" "Who cares?" Thurston shrugged. "My stomach is rumbling. Let's make breakfast." "Aren't you interested in this?" "Not particularly. It's just another gadget. You've got a hundred like it. That bear trap from Abercrombie and Fitch. The jaguar horn from Battler's. The crocodile lure from -- " "I've never seen a trap like this," Dailey mused. "Pretty clever advertising, just to leave it here." "They'll bill you for it eventually," Thurston said cynically. "I'm going to make breakfast. You'll wash the dishes." turned the tag over and read the other side. and anchor it to any convenient Press Button One on the base. seconds and press Button Two. press Button Three to deactivclosed at all times except when the principle of Osmotic Section "What won't they think of next?" Dailey said admiringly. "Breakfast is ready," Thurston called. "First help me set the trap." Thurston, dressed now in Bermuda shorts and a loud sport shirt, came out and peered at the trap dubiously. "Do you really think we should fool with it?" "Of course. Maybe we can catch a fox." "What on Earth would we do with a fox?" Thurston demanded. "Turn it loose," Dailey said. "The fun is in the catching. Here, help me lift it." The trap was surprisingly heavy. Together they dragged it fifty yards from the cabin and tied the chain to a young pine tree. Dailey pushed the first button and the trap glowed faintly. Thurston backed away anxiously. After five seconds, Dailey pressed the second button. The forest dripped and squirrels chattered in the treetops and the long grass rustled faintly. The trap lay quietly beside the tree, its open metal framework glowing faintly. "Come in," Thurston said. "The eggs are undoubtedly cold." Dailey followed him back to the cabin, glancing over his shoulder at the trap. It lay in the forest, silent and waiting. Samish, where are you? My need is becoming increasingly urgent. Unbelievable as it will sound, my little planetoid is being pulled apart before my very eyes! You are my oldest friend, Samish, the companion of my youth, the best man at my mating, and a friend of Fregl as well. I'm counting on you. Don't delay too long. I have already beamed you the beginning of my story. The Terrans accepted my trap as a trap, nothing more. And they began to use it at once, with no thought to the possible consequences. I had counted on this. The fantastic curiosity of the Terr an species is well known. During this period, my wife was crawling gaily around the planetoid, redecorating our hutch and enjoying the change from city life. Everything was going well... explained in pedantic detail why a trap could not function unless it had an opening to admit the prey. Dailey smiled and spoke of osmotic section. Thurston insisted that there was no such thing. When the dishes were washed and dried, they walked over the wet, springy grass to the trap. "Look!" Dailey shouted. Something was in the trap, something about the size of a rabbit, but colored a bright green. Its eyes were extended on stalks and it clicked lobsterlike claws at them. "No more rum before breakfast," Thurston said. "Starting tomorrow. Hand me the canteen." Dailey gave it to him and Thurston poured down a generous double shot. Then he looked at the trapped creature again and went, "Brr!" "I think it's a new species," Dailey said. "New species of nightmare. Can't we just go to Lake Placid and forget about it?" "No, of course not. I've never seen anything like this in my zoology books. It could be completely unknown to science. What will we keep it in?" "Keep it in?" "Well, certainly. It can't stay in the trap. We'll have to build a cage and then find out what it eats." Thurston's face lost some of its habitual serenity. "Now look here, Ed. I'm not sharing my vacation with anything like that. It's probably poisonous. I'm sure it has dirty habits." He took a deep breath and continued. "There's something unnatural about that trap. It's -- inhuman!" Dailey grinned. "I'm sure they said that about Ford's first car and Edison's incandescent lamp. This trap is just another example of American progress and knowhow." "I'm all for progress," Thurston stated firmly, "but in other directions. Can't we just -- " He looked at his friend's face and stopped talking. Dailey had an expression that Cortez might have worn as he approached the summit of a peak in Darien. "Yes," Dailey said after a while. "I think so." "What?" "Tell you later. First let's build a cage and set the trap again." Thurston groaned, but followed him. W HY haven't you come yet, Samish? Don't you appreciate the seriousness of my situation? Haven't I made it clear how much depends upon you? Think of your old friend! Think of the lustrous-skinned Fregl, for whose sake I got into this mess. Communicate with me, at least. The Terrans used the trap, which, of course, was not a trap at all, but a matter transmitter. I had the other end concealed on the planetoid, and fed into it three small animals which I found in the garden. The Terrans removed them from the transmitter each time -- for what purpose, I couldn't guess. But a Terr an will keep anything. After the third beast passed through and had not been returned, I knew that all was in readiness. So I prepared for the fourth and final sending, the all-important one, for which all else was mere preparation. They were standing in the low shed attached to their cabin. Thurston looked with distaste at the three cages made of heavy mosquito netting. Inside each cage was a creature. "Ugh," Thurston said. "They smell." In the first cage was the original capture, the stalk-eyed, lobster-clawed beast. Next came a bird with three sets of scaly wings. Finally there was something that looked like a snake, except that it had a head at each end. Within the cages were bowls of milk, plates of minced meat, vegetables, grasses, bark -- all untouched. "They just won't eat anything," Dailey said. "Obviously they're sick," Thurston told him. "Probably germ carriers. Can't we get rid of them, Ed?" Dailey looked squarely at his friend. "Tom, have you ever desired fame?" "What?" "Fame. The knowledge that your name will go down through the ages." "I am a businessman," Thurston said. "I never considered the possibility." "Never?" T hurston smiled foolishly. "Well, what man hasn't? What did you have in mind?" "These creatures," Dailey said, "are unique. We will present them to a museum." "Ah?" Thurston queried interestedly. "The Dailey-Thurston exhibit of creatures hitherto unknown." "They might name the species after us," Thurston said. "After all, we discovered them." "Of course they would! Our names would go down with Livingstone, Audubon and Teddy Roosevelt." "Hmm." Thurston thought deeply. "I suppose the Museum of Natural History would be the place. I'm sure they'd arrange an exhibit -- " "I wasn't thinking merely in terms of an exhibit," Dailey said. "I was thinking more of a wing -- the Dailey-Thurston Wing." Thurston looked at his friend in amazement. There were depths to Dailey that he had never imagined. "But, Ed, we have only three of them. We can't equip a wing with three exhibits." "There must be more where these came from. Let's examine the trap." This time the trap contained a creature almost three feet tall, with a small green head and a forked tail. It had at least a dozen thick cilia, all of them waving furiously. "The rest were quiet," Thurston said apprehensively. "Maybe this one is dangerous." "We will handle it with nets," Dailey replied decisively. "And then I want to get in touch with the museum." After considerable work, they transferred the thing to a cage. The trap was reset and Dailey sent the following wire to the Museum of Natural History: Then, at Thurston's insistence, he wired several impeccable character references to the museum, so they wouldn't think he was a crank. That afternoon, Dailey explained his theory to Thurston. There was, he felt sure, a primeval pocket isolated in this section of the Adirondacks. Within it were creatures which had survived from prehistoric times. They had never been captured because, due to their great antiquity, they had acquired a high degree of experience and caution. But the trap -- operating on the new principle of osmotic section -- had proved to be beyond their experience. "The Adirondacks have been pretty well explored," Thurston objected. "Not well enough, apparently," Dailey said, with irrefutable logic. Later, they returned to the trap. It was empty. Samish. Kindly step up the volume. Or, better still, get here in person. What's the use of beaming me, in the spot I'm in? The situation is steadily becoming more and more desperate. What, Samish? The rest of the story? It's obvious enough. After three animals had passed through the transmitter, I knew I was ready. Now was the time to tell my wife. Accordingly, I asked her to crawl into the garden with me. She was quite pleased. "Tell me, my dear," she said, "has something been bothering you of late?" "Urn," said I. "Have I displeased you?" she asked. "No, sweetheart," I said. "You have tried your best, but it just isn't good enough. I am going to take a new mate." She stood motionless, her cilia swaying in confusion. Then she exclaimed, "Fregl!" "Yes," I told her, "the glorious Fregl has consented to share my hutch." "But you forget we were mated for life." "I know. A pity you insisted on that formality." And with one clever shove, I pushed her into the matter transmitter. Samish, you should have seen her expression! Her cilia writhed, she screamed, and was gone. I was free at last! A little nauseous, but free! Free to mate with the splendid Fregl! Now you can appreciate the full perfection of the scheme. It was necessary to secure the Ter rans' cooperation , since a matter transmitter must be manipulated from both ends. I had disguised it as a trap, because Terrans will believe anything. And as my master stroke, I sent them my wife. Let them try to live with her! I never could! Foolproof, absolutely foolproof. My wife's body would never turn up, because the acquisitive Terrans keep what they get. No one could ever prove anything. And then, Samish, then it happened... T HE cabin's air of rustic serenity was gone. Tire tracks crossed and recrossed the muddy road. The grounds were littered with flash bulbs, empty cigarette packs, candy wrappers, pencil stubs and bits of paper. But now, after a hectic few hours, everyone was gone. Only a sour taste remained. Dailey and Thurston stood beside the empty trap, staring hopelessly at it. "What do you suppose is wrong with the damned thing?" Dailey asked, giving the trap a frustrated kick. "Maybe there's nothing else to capture," Thurston suggested. "There has to be! Why would it take four completely alien beasts and then no more?" He knelt beside the trap and said bitterly, "Those stupid museum people! And those reporters!" "In a way," Thurston said cautiously, "you can't blame them -- " "Can't I? Accusing me of a hoax! Did you hear them, Tom? They asked me how I performed the skin grafts!" "It's too bad the animals were all dead by the time the museum people got here," Thurston said. "That did look suspicious." "The idiotic creatures wouldn't eat. Was that my fault? And those newspaper people... Really, you would think the metropolitan newspapers would hire more intelligent reporters." "You shouldn't have promised to capture more animals," Thurston said. "It was when the trap didn't produce that they suspected a hoax." "Of course I promised! How should I guess the trap would stop with that fourth capture? And why did they laugh when I told them about the osmotic section system of capture?" "They never heard of it," Thurston answered wearily. "No one ever heard of it. Let's go to Lake Placid and forget the whole thing." "No! This thing must work again. It must!" Dailey primed and activated the trap and stared at it for several seconds. Then he opened the hinged top. Dailey stuck his hand into the trap and let out a scream. "My hand! It's gone!" He leaped backward. "No, it's not," Thurston assured him. Dailey examined both hands, rubbed them together and insisted, "My hand disappeared inside that trap." "Now, now," Thurston said soothingly. "A little rest in Lake Placid will do you a world of good -- " Dailey stood over the trap and pushed in his hand. It disappeared. Pie reacher farther in and watched his arm vanish up to the shoulder. He looked at Thurston with a smile of triumph. "Now I see how it works," he said. "Those animals didn't come from the Adirondaclcs at all!" "Where did they come from?" "From wherever my hand is! Want more, do they? Call me a liar? I'll show them!" "Ed! Don't do it! You don't know what -- " But Dailey had already stepped feet-first into the trap. His feet disappeared. Slowly he lowered his body until only his head was visible. "Wish me luck," he said. "Ed!" Dailey held his nose and plunged out of sight. mediately, it will be too late! I must stop beaming you. The enormous Terr an has completely ransacked my little planetoid. He has shoved everything, living or dead, through the transmitter. My home is in ruins. And now he is tearing down my hutch! Samish, this monster means to capture me as a specimen! There's no time to lose! Samish, what can he keeping you? You, my oldest friend... What, Samish? What are you saying? You can't mean it! Not you and Fregl! Reconsider, old friend! Remember our friendship! # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon RdL, R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. Bodyguard When overwhelming danger is constantly present, of course a man is entitled to have a bodyguard. The annoyance was that he had to do it himself... and his body would not cooperate! exceptionally handsome, and he knew it. So did the light-haired girl at his side, and so did the nondescript man in the gray suit who was watching them from a booth in the corner. Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was almost ordinary-looking. As for the extraterrestrials -- it was a free bar -- they were merely amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably hideous. Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a short man standing next to the pair -- young, as most men and women were in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though not death -- but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century. The drink he had been raising to his lips splashed all over his clothing; the glass shattered at his feet. Now he was not only a rather ugly little man, but also a rather ridiculous one -- or at least he felt he was, which was what mattered. "Sorry, colleague," Gabe said lazily. "All my fault. You must let me buy you a replacement." He gestured to the bartender. "Another of the same for my fellow-man here." The ugly man dabbed futilely at his dripping trousers with a cloth hastily supplied by the management. "You must allow me to pay your deanery bill," Gabe said, taking out his wallet and extracting several credit notes without seeming to look at them. "Here, have yourself a new suit on me." You could use one was implied. And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance, was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's handsome face.  was laid upon his arm. "Don't do that," the nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. "You wouldn't want to go to jail because of him." The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces now ranged against him -- including his own belated prudence -- were too strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to smash back, and now it was too late for that. Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. "So, it's you again?" The man in the gray suit smiled. "Who else in any world would stand up for you?" "I should think you'd have given up by now. Not that I mind having you around, of course," Gabriel added too quickly. "You do come in useful at times, you know." "So you don't mind having me around?" The nondescript man smiled again. "Then what are you running from, if not me? You can't be running from yourself -- you lost yourself a while back, remember?" Gabe ran a hand through his thick blond hair. "Come on, have a drink with me, fellow-man, and let's let bygones be bygones. I owe you something -- I admit that. Maybe we can even work this thing out." "I drank with you once too often," the nondescript man said. "And things worked out fine, didn't they? For you." His eyes studied the other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness at the lips, and were not pleased with what they saw. "Watch yourself, colleague," he warned as he left. "Soon you might not be worth the saving." "Who was that, Gabe?" the girl asked. He shrugged. "I never saw him before in my life." Of course, knowing him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he happened to have been telling the truth. extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions, reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to the letter combination bodyguard, he went out into the street. If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for years. The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. "Where to, fellow-man?" the driver asked. "I'm new in the parish," the other man replied and let it hang there. "Oh?... Females?... Narcophagi?... Thrill-mills?" But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head. "Games?" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was wanted by then. "Dice?... Roulette?... Farjeen?" "Is there a good zarquil game in town?" The driver moved so he could see the face of the man behind him in the teleview. A very ordinary face. "Look, colleague, why don't you commit suicide? It's cleaner and quicker." "I can't contact your attitude," the passenger said with a thin smile. "Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it happens, there's a... well, the) e's no experience to match it at a thrill-mill." He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy. "Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?" The driver spat out of the window. "If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen... anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em." "But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a commission, wouldn't it?" the other man asked coolly. "Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though." "I have sufficient funds. I also have a gun." "You're the dictator," the driver agreed sullenly. II in early fall. Gabe Lockard was in no condition to drive the helicar. However, he was stubborn. "Let me take the controls, honey," the light-haired girl urged, but he shook his handsome head. "Show you I can do something 'sides look pretty," he said thickly, referring to an earlier and not amicable conversation they had held, and of which she still bore the reminder on one thickly made-up cheek. Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist. To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames. Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him speculatively. "My guardian angel," he mumbled -- shock had sobered him a little, but not enough. He sat up. "Guess I'm not hurt or you'd have thrown me back in." "And that's no joke," the fat man agreed. The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall that he had not been alone. "How about Helen? She on course?" "Seems to be," the fat man said. "You all right, miss?" he asked, glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern. "Mrs." Gabriel corrected. "Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel Lockard," he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl. "Pretty bauble, isn't she?" "I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard," the fat man said, looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. "I hope you'll be worthy of the name." The light given off by the flaming car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too. Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them. There were no public illuminators this far out -- even in town the lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and beginning to slide downhill... Gabe gave a short laugh, for no reason that she could see. she had encountered the fat man before, which was, of course, absurd. She had an excellent memory for faces and his was not included in her gallery. The girl pulled her thin jacket closer about her chilly body. "Aren't you going to introduce your -- your friend to me, Gabe?" "I don't know who he is," Gabe said almost merrily, "except that he's no friend of mine. Do you have a name, stranger?" "Of course I have a name." The fat man extracted an identification card from his wallet and read it. "Says here I'm Dominic Bianchi, and Dominic Bianchi is a retail milgot dealer... Only he isn't a retail milgot dealer any more; the poor fellow went bankrupt a couple of weeks ago, and now he isn't... anything." "You saved our lives," the girl said. "I'd like to give you some token of my -- of our appreciation." Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only casually, as a byproduct of some larger scheme, and her appreciation held little gratitude. The fat man shook his head without rancor. "I have plenty of money, thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard... Come," he addressed her husband, "if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the future! Sometimes," he added musingly, "I almost wish you would let something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?" Gabriel shivered. "I'll be careful," he vowed. "I promise -- I'll be careful." When he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night, the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification. Perhaps -- and this was the most likely hypothesis -- he just didn't care. Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course -- so much so that there were many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of "crimes against nature." Actually the phrase was more appropriate to zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly applied. And this was one crime -- for it was crime in law as well as nature -- in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator; otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse. lously expensive; it had to be to make it profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs. Which was why they came to Terra to make profits -- there has never been big money in musical chairs as such. When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent -- as they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the law -- they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons could kill the Vinzz... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet. The taxi driver took the fat man to one of the rather seedy locales in which the zarquil games were usually found, for the Vinzz attempted to conduct their operations with as much unobtrusive ness as was possible. But the front door swung open on an interior that lacked the opulence of the usual Vinoz set-up; it was downright shabby, the dim olive light hinting of squalor rather than forbidden pleasures. That was the trouble in these smaller towns -- you ran greater risks of getting involved in games where the players had not been carefully screened. The Vinoz games were usually clean, because that paid off better, but, when profits were lacking, the Vinzz were capable of sliding off into darkside practices. Naturally the small-town houses were more likely to have trouble in making ends meet, because everybody in the parish knew everybody else far too well. The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in coming to such desolate, off-trail places -- hoping that eventually disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed too logical for the man he was haunting. However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. "One?" the small green creature in the slightly frayed robe asked. "One," the fat man answered. Ill down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. "Only weighted out," he muttered, "he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you two to come out to a place like this?" "I really think Gabriel must be possessed..." the girl said, mostly to herself. "I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse. It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?" "It does indeed," the stranger agreed, coughing a little. It was growing colder and, on this world, the cities had no domes to protect them from the climate, because it was Earth and the air was breathable and it wasn't worth the trouble of fixing up. The girl looked closely at him. "You look different, but you are the same man who pulled us out of that aircar crash, aren't you? And before that the man in the gray suit? And before that... ?" The young man's cheekbones protruded as he smiled. "Yes, I'm all of them." "Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people who go around changing their bodies like -- like hats?" Automatically she reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that. TE smiled again, but coughed"-instead of speaking. "But why do you do it? Why! Do you like it? Or is it because of Gabriel?" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was included in its scope. "Do you want to keep him from recognizing you; is that it?" "Ask him." "He won't tell me; he never tells me anything. We just keep running. I didn't recognize it as running at first, but now I realize that's what we've been doing ever since we were married. And running from you, I think?" There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she wondered how much control he had over a body that, though secondor thirdor fourthhand, must be new to him. How well could he make it respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not, she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so casually. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat -- of fur taken from some animal who had lived and died lightyears away -- more closely about herself. The thin young man began to cough again. Overhead a tiny star seemed to detach itself from the pale flat disk of the Moon and hurl itself upward -- one of the interstellar ships embarking on its long voyage to distant suns. She wished that somehow she could be on it, but she was here, on this solitary old world in a barren solar system, with her unconscious husband and a strange man who followed them, and it looked as if here she would stay... all three of them would stay... "If you're after Gabriel, planning to hurt him," she asked, "why then do you keep helping him?" "I am not helping him. And he knows that." "You'll change again tonight, won't you?" she babbled. "You always change after you... meet us? I think I'm beginning to be able to identify you now, even when you're... wearing a new body; there's something about you that doesn't change." "Too bad he got married," the young man said. "I could have followed him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway," he added, his voice less impersonal, "for your sake." She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an outsider; he was part of their small family group -- as long as she had known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect that he was even more closely involved than that. "Why must you change again?" she persisted, obliquely approaching the subject she feared. "You have a pretty good body there. Why run the risk of getting a bad one?" "This isn't a good body," he said. "It's diseased. Sure, nobody's supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty of foliage." "How -- long will it last you?" "Four or five months, if I'm careful." He smi'ed. "But don't worry, if that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be expensive -- that's all. lit Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then it was tough on me too, wasn't it?" "But how did you get into this... pursuit?" she asked again. "And why are you doing it?" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should know him better than most. "Ask your husband." The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate, snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name, and stirred it with his toe. "I'd better call a cab -- he might freeze to death." He signaled and a cab came. "Tell him, when he comes to," he said to the girl as he and the driver lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, "that I'm getting pretty tired of this." He stopped for a long spell of coughing. "Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't, in the long run, be most beneficial for my face." personally, in English that was perfect except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, "but I'm afraid you cannot play." "Why not?" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes. "You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house." "But I have plenty of money." The young man coughed. The Vinzz shrugged. "I'll pay you twice the regular fee." The green one shook his head. "Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This game is really clean." "In a town like this?" "That is the reason we can afford to be honest." The Vinzz' tendrils quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been velvetgreen moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung with him. "We do a lot of business here," he said unnecessarily, for the whole set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by no means poor when it came to worldly goods. "Why don't you try another town where they're not so particular?" The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game. He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration. And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him? Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original casing had? He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl, seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of information. antennae with another of his kind. Now they detached, and the first approached the man once more. "There is, as it happens, a body available for a private game," he lisped. "No questions to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good health." The man hesitated. "But unable to pass the screening?" he murmured aloud. "A criminal then." The green one's face -- if you could call it a face -- remained impassive. "Male?" "Of course," the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had also never been a recorded instance of humans' and extraterrestrials' exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or biological impossibility, no one could tell. It might merely be prudence on the Vinzz' part -- if it had ever been proved that an alien life-form had "desecrated" a human body, Earthmen would clamor for war... for on this planet humanity held its self-bestowed purity of birthright dear -- and the Vinzz, despite being unquestionably the stronger, were pragmatic pacifists. It had been undoubtedly some rabid member of the anti-alien groups active on Terra who had started the rumor that the planetary slogan of Vinau was, "Don't beat 'em; cheat 'em." "It would have to be something pretty nuclear for the other guy to take such a risk." The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "How much?" "Thirty thousand credits." "Why, that's three times the usual rate!" "The other will pay five times the usual rate." "Oh, all right," the delicate young man gave in. It was a terrific risk he was agreeing to take, because, if the other was a criminal, he himself would, upon assuming the body, assume responsibility for all the crimes it had committed. But there was nothing else he could do. mirror and found he had a fine new body; tall and strikingly handsome in a dark, coarse-featured way. Nothing to match the one he had lost, in his opinion, but there were probably many people who might find this one preferable. No identification in the pockets, but it wasn't necessary; he recognized the face. Not that it was a very famous or even notorious one, but the dutchman was a careful student of the "wanted" fax that had decorated public buildings from time immemorial, for he was ever mindful of the possibility that he might one day find himself trapped unwittingly in the body of one of the men depicted there. And he knew that this particular man, though not an important criminal in any sense of the word, was one whom the police had been ordered to burn on sight. The abolishing of capital punishment could not abolish the necessity for self-defense, and the man in question was not one who would let himself be captured easily, nor whom the police intended to capture easily. This might be a lucky break (or me alter all, the new tenant thought, as he tried to adjust himself to the body. It, too, despite its obvious rude health, was not a very comfortable fit. I can do a lot with a hulk like this. And maybe I'm cleverer than the original owner; maybe I'll be able to get away with it. IV "don't try to fool me! I know you too well. And I know you have that man's -- the real Gabriel Lockard's -- body." She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror. Lockard -- Lockard's body, at any rate -- sat up and felt his unshaven chin. "That what he tell you?" "No, he didn't tell me anything really -- just suggested I ask you whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to see his body spoiled." "It is a pretty good body, isn't it?" Gabe flexed softening muscles and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved at having someone with whom to share his secret. "Not as good as it must have been," the girl said, turning and looking at him without admiration. "Not if you keep on the way you're coursing. Gabe, why don't you... ?" "Give it back to him, eh?" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be his wife then. That would be nice -- a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little more than you deserve?" "I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe," she said truthfully enough, for she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. "Of course I'd go with you," she went on, now knowing she lied, "when you got your... old body back." Sure, she thought, I'd keep going with you to farjeen houses and thrill-mills. Actually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had refused to go with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash that experience from her mind or her body. "You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?" she went on. "You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose, does he?" "I don't want to know!" he spat. "I wouldn't want it if I could get it back. Whoever it adhered to probably killed himself as soon as he looked in a mirror." He swung long legs over the side of his bed. "Christ, anything would be better than that! You can't imagine what a hulk I had!" "Oh, yes, I can," she said incautiously. "You must have had a body to match your character. Pity you could only change one."--struck her right on the mouth. Although he hadn't used his full strength, the blow was painful nonetheless. She could feel the red of her lipstick become mixed with a warmer, liquid red that trickled slowly down her freshly powdered chin. She wouldn't cry, because he liked that, but crumpled to the ground and lay still. If, experience had taught her, she pretended to be hurt, he wouldn't hit her again. Only sometimes it was hard to remember that at the actual moment of hurt and indignity. He was too afraid of prison -- a tangible prison. And perhaps, to do him credit, he didn't want to deface his own property. He sat down on the edge of the bed again and lit a milgot stick. "Oh, get up, Helen. You know I didn't hit you that hard." "Did you have to beat him up to get him to change bodies?" she asked from the floor. "No." He laughed reminiscently. "I just got him drunk. We were friends, so it was a cinch. He was my only friend; everybody else hated me because of my appearance." His features contorted. "What made him think he was so damn much better than other people that he could afford to like me? Served him right for being so noble." She stared at the ceiling -- it was so old its very fabric was beginning to crack -- and said nothing. "He didn't even realize what he had here -- " Lockard tapped his broad chest with complacence -- "until it was too late. Took it for granted. Sickened me to see him taking the body for granted when I couldn't take mine that way. People used to shrink from me. Girls..." She sat up. "Give me a milgot, Gabe." He lighted one and handed it to her. "For Christ's sake, Helen, I gave him more than he had a right to expect. I was too goddamn noble myself. I was wellmilled; I didn't have to leave half of my holdings in my own name -- I could have transferred them all to his. If I had, then he wouldn't have had the folio to hound me all over this planet or to other planets, if I'd had the nerve to shut myself up on a spaceship, knowing he probably would be shut up on it with me." He smiled. "Of course he won't hurt me; that's the one compensation. Damage me, and he damages himself." "But it's your life he saves, too," she reminded him. "My life wouldn't ever have been in danger if it hadn't been for this continual persecution -- it's driving me out of this dimension! I planned to start a new life with this body," he pleaded, anxious for belief and, as a matter of fact, she believed him; almost everybody has good intentions and there was no reason to except even such a one as Gabriel Lockard, or whatever he was originally named. "It was my appearance that got me mixed up," he went on. "Given half a chance I could have straightened out -- gone to Proxima Centauri, maybe, and then out to one of the frontier planets. Made something of myself up there. But nobody ever gave me a chance. Now, as long as he follows me, there's nothing I can do except run and try to hide and know all the time I can't escape -- I'm already in the trap." "What can he do if you stay and face him?" "I don't know -- that's the hell of it. But he's smart. Somehow he'll lure me into another game. I don't know how, but that must be what he has in mind. What else could it be?" "What else indeed?" Helen asked, smiling up at the ceiling. fingers and he took another. "It'd take time for him to arrange any kind of private game set-up, though, and as long as I keep on the move, he won't be able to create anything. Unless he runs into a floating zarquil game." He smiled mirthlessly. "And he couldn't. Too much machinery, I understand... Lucky he doesn't seem to have connections, the way I have," Lockard boasted. "I have connections all over the goddamn planet. Transferred them when I transferred my holdings." She got up, seated herself on the vanity bench, and took up a brush, which she ran absently over the pale hair that shimmered down to her paler shoulders. "So we keep running all over the planet... What would you do if I left you, Gabriel?" "Kill you," he said without hesitation. "Slowly. Even if I have to put this precious hulk of mine in jeopardy. And you wouldn't like that. Neither would your boy friend." "Stop calling him my -- " "Wait a minute -- maybe there is an escape hatch!" His blue eyes sharpened unbecomingly. "He can't kill me, but there's nothing "How about the police?" She tried to speak calmly as she passed the brush up and down, sometimes not even touching her hair. "The body you have won't be any good to you with them looking for it. And you're not a professional exterminator, Gabe -- you wouldn't be able to get away with it." "I can hire somebody else to have plenty of foliage. Maybe I didn't leave him exactly half of my property, but, what the hell, I left him enough." "How will you recognize him?" she asked, half-turning, fearfully. "He'll have a new body, you know." "You'll recognize him, Helen -- you said you could." At that moment she could have wrapped her own hair tightly around her white throat and strangled herself; she was so appalled by her own witless treachery. He dragged her to her feet. "Aah, moonbeam, you know I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just that this whole crazy pattern's driving me out of this world. Once I get rid of that life-form, you'll see, I'll be a different man." As his arms tightened around her, she wondered what it would be like, a different man in the same body. V I would do a thing like that?" the little lawyer asked apprehensively, not meeting the bland blue eyes of the man who faced him across the old-fashioned flat-top desk. It was an even more outmoded office than most, but that did not necessarily indicate a low professional status; lawyers were great ones for tradition expressed in terms of outof-date furniture. As for the dust that lay all over despite the airconditioning... well, that was inescapable, for Earth was a dusty planet. "Oh, not you yourself personally, of course," Gabriel Lockard -- as the false one will continue to be called, since the dutchman had another name at the moment -- said. "But you know how to put me in touch with someone who can." "Nonsense. I don't know who gave you such libelous information, sir, but I must ask you to leave my office before I call -- " "It was Pat Ortiz who gave me the information," Lockard said softly. "He also told me a lot of other interesting things about you, Gorman." Gorman paled. "I'm a respectable attorney." "Maybe you are now; maybe not. This isn't the kind of town that breeds respectability. But you certainly weren't sunny side up when Ortiz knew you. And he knew you well." The lawyer licked his lips. "Give me a chance, will you?" Lockard flushed. "Chance! Everybody rates a chance but me. Can't you see, I am giving you a chance. Get me somebody to follow my pattern, and I promise you Ortiz won't talk." Gorman slipped the plastic shells from his face and rubbed the pale watery eyes underneath. "But how can I get you a man to do... the thing you want done? I have no connections like that." "I'm sure you can make the right connections. Take your time about it, though; I'm in no hurry. I'm planning to adhere to this locale for a while." "How about this man you want... put out of the way?" Gorman suggested hopefully. "How can you be sure he won't leave?" Gabriel laughed. "He'll stay as long as I do." The little lawyer took a deep breath. "Mr. Lockard, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I really cannot do anything for you." Gabe rose. "Okay," he said softly. "If that's your pattern, I'll just put a call through to Ortiz." He turned to go. "Wait a minute!" the lawyer cried. Lockard stopped. "Well?" Gorman swallowed. "Possibly I may be able to do something for you, after all... I just happened to have heard Jed Carmody is in town." Gabriel looked at him inquiringly. "Oh... I thought you might have heard the name. He's a killer, I understand, a professional exterminator... on the run right now. But this is his headquarters -- I'm told -- and he probably would come here. And he might be short on folio. Naturally, I've never had any dealings with him myself." "Naturally," Gabe mocked. "But I'll see what I can do." Gorman's voice was pleading. "You'll wait, Mr. Lockard, won't you? It may be a little while before I can find out where he is. This isn't -- " his voice thinned -- "at all my type of pattern, you know." "I'll wait... a reasonable length of time." The door closed behind him. Descending pneumo tubes hissed outside. The little lawyer rose and went to the window -- a flat expanse of transparent plastic set immovably into the wall of the building, an old building, an old town, an old planet. As he watched the street below, a faint half-smile curved his almost feminine mouth. He went back to the desk and punched a code on the vidiphone. the little cafe with the gold letters for humans only embedded in the one-way glass front; this was a town that adhered rigidly to the ancient privileges of the indigenous species. He entered as the shrillness of a vidiphone bell cut through the babble inside without in any way checking it. After a moment, his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and he could see his wife waiting at a table near the entrance, daintily peeling a tigi fruit. "Well," she asked as she put a plump pink section into her mouth, "did you hire your killer?" "Shhh, not so loud!" He threw himself into the chair next to hers. "Do you want me to get into trouble?... And I wouldn't put it past you," he continued without waiting for an answer. "Remember, it's your boy friend's body that gets into trouble." "He's not my boy friend." A waiter beckoned from the vidiphone booth to someone sitting in the dark shadows at the rear of the restaurant. "Where is he?" Gabriel exclaimed suddenly. "He must be here somewhere. Tell me which he is, Helen?" His hand gripped her arm cruelly, as he swung her around on her chair to face each part of the room. "Is it that guy over there?... That one?... That one?" She could not repress a start of surprise as her eyes met those of the thin-featured young manentering the vidiphone booth. He returned her gaze with somber interest. Gabe relaxed. "So that's the one, eh? Not very formidable. Looks the way he always should have looked." He lit a milgot. "I'll get Gorman to tip off the zarquil boys -- only one game in this parish, I'm told -- that that lifeform's not to be allowed to play; I'll make any loss good out of my own pocket. That'll keep him onstage for the nonce. He won't leave to get himself fixed up somewhere else as long as I stay. And I'm going to stay... to the bitter end." He smiled lovingly to himself. But it's not the right man, Helen thought gladly. He did manage to change, after all. Gabe has the wrong man. She felt a little sorry for the unknown and doomed individual who inhabited the delicate, angular body, but it was so close to death anyhow that the immediate threat didn't matter. And Gabriel -- the real Gabriel -- was safe. VI HP HE emaciated young man entered Gorman's office and locked the door behind him with an electroseal. "Disembodiment," he identified himself. "So you did get a new body, Jed," the lawyer remarked affably. "Very good packaging. Makes you look like a poet or something." "Good as a disguise, maybe, but one hell of a lousy hulk." The young man hurled himself into the chair by the desk. Even Gorman winced at the cruel treatment accorded such obvious fragility. "Gimme a milgot, Les. This thing -- " he indicated his body with contempt -- "is shot to Polaris. Won't last more than a few months. Some bargain I got." Gorman lit a stick himself. "The guy who got your body didn't get such a bargain either," he murmured through a cloud of purple smoke. "At least he'll live. If he's lucky. I wish he'd hurry and get himself picked up, though, so I could collect the folio and jet off. Can't go after it now. Hounds will be sniffing after anybody gravitating around the place where I've stashed it until they're sure they have me. They don't know where the money is exactly, of course, or they'd soak it up, but they've got an idea of the general sector." "Want me to pick it up for you, Jed?" the lawyer asked, his pale, flickering eyes brushing across the young man's dark intense ones. "Oh, sure. All I need is for you to know where it is and all I'd see would be your rocket trail." The young man leaned across the expanse of littered steel. "Or do you know where it is, Les?" he asked softly. "Do you know where it is and are you just hibernating until I'm safely out of the way?" In spite of himself, Gorman could not help moving back. "Don't be a fool, Jed," he said in a voice that was several tones higher. "If I knew where it was... well, you're not very frightening in your present embodiment, you know." "Don't be too sure of that, Gorman. And you were always yellow; anybody could frighten you." He began to laugh shrilly. "Hey, that's good. Get it? Any body, see?" The lawyer did not join in the mirth. "How are you fixed for cash?" he asked abruptly. in a sardonic grin. "Why do you think I risked public communion with a darkside character like you, Les? I shot my wad making the shift. I could use a little loan. You know I have millions stashed away," the young man said angrily as Gorman remained silent. "I'll pay you as soon as the hounds take the chump who's leasing my hulk." "Maybe you can earn some money." Gorman toyed with a paperweight. "Did you get a look at that big blond guy in the cafe -- the one I told you about on the phone?" "Yeah. Nice life-form he had with him. I wouldn't mind being in that body." "Seems he wants somebody exterminated. And I told him I heard Jed Carmody was in the parish and might be interested." The young man sprang to his feet, furious. "You what?" "Turn your antigravs off. I told him Jed Carmody was in the parish. Are you Jed Carmody?" The other sat down and exhaled heavily. "You're on course -- I'm nobody just now." "Any identification come with the package?" "Naah, what'd you expect?... But why tell anyone that Jed Carmody's hitting the locality?" "I thought you might be interested in picking up a little freefalling foliage." The young man shook his head impatiently. "Risk having this hulk heated up for a half-credit crime? Don't be an alien, Gorman. I'm going to hit subsoil until this other life-form gets collected by the hounds." "Thought you might like to do it to help me out," Gorman murmured. The other man stared. "How do you fit into the pattern?" Gorman shrugged. "Oh, I get it: this guy's putting the barometer on you?" Gorman nodded. "Bad landing, counselor. But you don't seriously expect... ? Hey!" The wide-set eyes glistened darkly. "I got it! Why don't you get this guy who's got my hulk to make the flight? Send somebody out to magnetize him like you thought he was the real Carmody, see?" a moment; then shook his thin-haired head. "No reason to think the man is an extralegal." "Anyone who finds himself in my hulk damn well has to be if he wants to stay out of the sardine box... Look, what's the first thing he's going to want to do when he finds out what he's been stuck with? Go to another parish and hop hulks, right? And he'll need plenty of foliage to do it." "Maybe he has money," Gorman suggested wearily. "No fuel lost finding out." The young man rubbed his hands together gleefully. "If he takes on the flight, though, see that he gets my flash, huh? Rosy up the picture." "Maybe he can kill whoever this Lockard has in mind without getting picked up by the police. Such things have happened; otherwise you wouldn't have been able to run around loose so long, Jed." "An amateur? Not a chance! Besides, just to make sure, little..." He stopped in the act of tapping his chest. "Say, I don't have a name, do I? What's a good epithet for me, Les? Something with class." The lawyer studied the pale, bony face for a moment or two. "How about John Keats?" he suggested. "Simple and appropriate." The other man thought. "Yeah, I like that. John Keats. Plain, but not like John Smith. Subtle. I'll buy it. Okay, so you think I'm going to take my view-finder off the fake Carmody? I'm going to adhere to that life-form closer than Mary's lamb. So when he knocks off whoever the other guy wants novaed, I can yell doggie. Then the hounds get him -- with my flash on him and all, they'll never have the nebula of a notion that they don't have all of me... I pick up the foliage and rock out to some place where I can buy me a new jewel case, no questions asked. Don't fret, Gorman -- you'll get your nibble. I've never played the game with you, have I?" Instead of answering, Gorman asked a question of his own. "Kind of hard on the other guy, isn't it?" "He rates it for sticking me with a piece of statuary like this. Look at it this way, Les -- in his own hulk he would've died; this way he's got a chance to live. Yeah, get him to make the flight, Les. You can charm the juice out of a lemon when you want to; it's your line of evil. And don't let on you know he's not the genuine article." "I won't," Gorman sighed. "I only hope I can persuade him to take on the flight. Don't forget it's important to me too, Jed -- uh, John." "Make planetfall, then," John Keats said. "So long, Les." "Good-by, Johnny." creamy hair at the dressing table when there came a tap at the door to the living room of the suite -- a tap so light that it could have been someone accidentally brushing past in the corridor outside. Gabriel sprang up from the bed where he had been lolling, watching her and stood for a moment poised on the balls of his feet, until the knock was repeated more emphatically. He started toward the other room. "But who could be knocking at the door at this hour?" she asked. "It's almost one... Gabe, do be careful." -- He halted and looked back at her suspiciously. "Why do you say that? You know you don't care what happens to me?" That last was a question rather than a statement and had a plaintive quaver which failed to touch her. Once she had still been able to feel some compassion; now, nothing he said or did could arouse more than fear and disgust. "If somebody knocks you over the head when you open the door," she murmured, smiling at her own image, "then who will be there to protect me?" A choked sound came from the back of the man's throat. He turned toward her, his fists clenched. She braced herself for the blow, but then the knock came for the third time and her husband reluctantly continued on into the living room, letting the door shut behind him. She rose and pushed it open a little. She had a pretty good idea of who might be expected, but was not especially perturbed, for she knew the real Gabriel Lockard, in whatever guise he might be now, was safe from her husband. And she was curious to see what the exterminator looked like. The door to the corridor was out of her line of vision, but she could hear it as it opened. "Lockard?" a deep, husky voice whispered. "Gorman sent me." "Come in, Mr. Carmody. You are Carmody?" "Shhh," the husky voice warned. "If you get me into trouble, I'm not going to be able to complete your pattern for you, am I?" "Sorry -- I wasn't thinking. Come on in." A heavy tread shook the ancient floorboards, and presently the man responsible for it came into the girl's sight. He was a huge creature, bigger even than Gabriel, with dark hair growing low to a point on his forehead, and a full-lipped sensual face. Then, as he spoke, as he moved, she knew who he was. She pressed close against the wall of the bedroom, her slender shoulders shaking, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth, so that the sound of her wild, irrepressible laughter would not reach her husband's ears. "Sit down, Carmody," Gabriel said cordially, as he handed the newcomer a glass, "and make yourself comfortable." There was a brief, rather awkward silence. "Well," Gabriel went on, with a smile that would have been thoroughly ingratiating to anyone who hadn't known him, "I don't suppose I have to cruise around the asteroids with you?" , "No," Carmody replied, looking speculatively toward the bedroom door. "No, you don't." t tion of his gaze. "Worried about somebody overhearing? There's only my wife in there. She's listening, all right, but she won't talk. Come in, Helen." Carmody rose automatically as she came in, his dark eyes following every line of her long, smooth body in its close-fitting, though opaque, negligee of smoke-gray silk -- a fabric which, through extreme scarcity, had come into fashion again. "Sit down," Gabriel ordered brusquely. "We're not formal here." Carmody sat, trying not to stare at the girl. She began to mix herself a drink. "Moonbeam," her husband said, "you won't tell anybody about this little peace  conference, will you?" "No," she said, looking at Carmody. "I won't talk." She lifted , her glass. "Here's to murder!" "Helen," Gabriel insisted, unable to rationalize the vague uneasiness that was nagging at him, "you won't dare say anything to anybody? Because, if you do, you'll regret it!" "I said I wouldn't talk. Have I ever broken my word?" "You've never had the chance." But it would be incredible that she should have the temerity to betray him. After all, she was his wife. She should stick to him out of gratitude and self-interest, for he was rich, at least, and he wasn't exactly repulsive. And he'd been good to her. All men lost their tempers at times. "Let's get down to business, huh?" Carmody said harshly. "Whom do you want knocked off?" "I don't know his name," Gabriel replied, "but I can describe him." After he had finished doing so, there was a small pause. Carmody was silent. Helen turned back to the bar; her face was concealed from the men. Her body shook a little. Lockard thought she was crying, and wondered again whether his confidence in her was entirely justified. "I think maybe I know the guy," Carmody went on. "Only been around the -- the parish a couple of days, if it's the life-form I mean." "Must be the one," Lockard told him. "Think you can do it?" "A cinch," Carmody assured him. from the door marked Females; Human and Humanoid, and rounded the turn in the corridor, a brawny arm reached out of a vidiphone booth and yanked her inside. The girl gave a startled cry, then relaxed. "Oh, it's you; you gave me a turn." "You're not afraid? You know who I am, then?" She nodded. "You're the real Gabriel Lockard." His big body was pressing hers in the closefitting confines of the booth. In some ways it could be considered more attractive than her husband's. "Why are you hiding here?" "I'm not hiding, I'm lurking," he explained. "Wouldn't do for me to appear too openly. The police -- that is, the hounds -- are on Carmody's trail. I don't want them to find me." "Oh." She pulled away from him. She mustn't let her interest be aroused in a body so soon to be discarded. "I've been looking for an opportunity to talk to you since last night," he growled, the only way he could gentle a voice as deep as the thick vocal cords of the body produced. "But your husband is always around... You haven't told him who I was, have you?" She shook her head slowly, reproachfully. "I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't have told him about the other one either, but I... well, I guess I jumped or something when I caught sight of him and Gabe mistakenly picked it up." There was a tense silence as they stood almost pressed against one another. "It's easy to see how you got into Carmody's body," she went on, speaking a little too rapidly, "but how did you happen to get into this particular line of evil?" "Simple -- that lawyer your husband went to see sent scouts out to have Carmody picked up. And they flushed me. Naturally I would have turned down the job if he hadn't happened to mention for whom it was... "That other man is the real Carmody now, isn't he?" She looked up at him. Her eyes were gray or green; he couldn't determine which. "So it doesn't matter even if he does get killed." "But how can he get killed?" the big man reminded her with a gentleness completely out of keeping with the ferocity of his appearance. "I'm not a killer, please believe me -- I have never killed anybody and I hope I never have to."  who he was -- who he had been -- before he started playing the game. Gabriel Lockard, of course. But what had Gabrifel Lockard been? Surely not the narco-filled, fear-ridden dilettante the man -- the body, at least -- was now. He couldn't possibly have been or the hulk wouldn't have stood up so well under the treatment it was getting from its current tenant. But all that didn't seem to matter. All she wanted was the rightful man in his rightful body, and that seemed almost impossible of achievement. 'What do you intend to do?" she asked, almost sharply. "I don't know," he said. "By agreeing to kill this -- John Keats he calls himself -- I felt I had the situation in hand. And I suppose I have, in a sense. But the end result is a stalemate. I've been following him around just to make everything look on course for your husband until I decide what to do. Sometimes, though, I get the curious feeling that Keats is following me." "Maybe for the same reason you've been following Gabriel?" Helen touched his arm gingerly; it was more muscular than her husband's. "This isn't a bad body, you know -- maybe he sets some store by it." "But that doesn't make sense!" he said, impatiently shaking off her hand, not wanting her to like this criminal's body that, despite its superficial attractiveness, fitted him no more easily than any of the others. "Logically, it seems to me, he should try to get as far away from his own hulk as possible... Duck! Here comes your husband!" He blocked her with his wide body as Gabriel Lockard's swung past the booth, its perfect features marred by a frown. "Okay," he whispered, as Lockard rounded the corner, "rock back to your table and act angry because he's late." He watched until Gabriel had retraced his steps and gone back to the hotel dining room; then sauntered in the same direction. From the next booth, John Keats stared sullenly after the departing figure. He had been straining his ears, but the booths were effectively soundproofed; all he could learn was that the stranger had developed some kind of quick understanding with Lockard's wife and, knowing the potentialities of his former packaging, this saddened rather than surprised the young man. He punched Gorman's number without turning on the visual. "Disembodied," he said curtly. "Look here, Gorman, I've been wondering -- just who is this life-form supposed to be sending to the joyful planetoids?" "I haven't any idea," Gorman's voice said curiously. "Didn't seem any of my evil, so I didn't ask. And I don't suppose Lockard would have told me. Why do you want to know?" "Because I don't see him taking a fix on anybody except Lockard's wife and I don't hold with exterminating females except maybe by accident. Besides, I kind of radiate for that tigi myself." The lawyer's voice definitely showed interest. "Isn't there anybody else he could possibly be after?" "Well -- " John Keats gave a sick laugh -- "there's only one other possible flight pattern. It's kind of extradimensional, but sometimes I think maybe he's after me." There was a long pause. "Absurd," the little lawyer said thoughtfully. "Absurd. He doesn't even know who you are." Pale blood surfaced under tHe young man's transparent skin. "I never thought of that, but you're wrong. He does. He's got to. It was a private game." His voice thickened and he had to stop for coughing. "When you told him he was Jed Carmody, naturally he could figure out who was squatting in his hulk." "But magnetizing him was your own idea, Johnny," Gorman pointed out gently. "Besides, that's no reason he should be after you; what's the percentage in it? And, anyhow, where does Lockard fit into this?" He seemed to be asking the question of himself as much as of the other man. "Yeah," John Keats muttered, "that's what I've got to find out." "Me, too," Gorman half-whispered. "What did you say?" "I said tell me when you find out; I'm sort of curious myself." said, "I'm not working for you; I'm working for Lockard. What's the idea of sending for me this hour of the night?" "Then why did you come this hour of the night when I asked J you to?" the lawyer inquired, leaning back in his chair and smiling. The big man hesitated and shrugged. "Can't say, myself. Curiosity, maybe... But you can hardly expect me to violate my employer's confidence?" Gorman laughed. "You get your ideas from the viddies, don't you? Only don't forget that you're the villain, not the hero, of this piece, fellow-man." Carmody, completely taken aback, stared at him -- the little alien couldn't know! And, furthermore, he was mistaken -- Carmody, Lockard, the dutchman, had done nothing wrong, committed no crime, violated no ethic. On the other hand, he had done nothing right either, nothing to help himself or any other. "What do you mean?" he finally temporized. "Tell me this -- Lockard hired you to kill the man who goes under the name of John Keats, didn't he?" "Yes, but how did you know that?" He was beginning to have the same primitive fear of Gorman that he had of the Vinzz; only it was more natural for an extraterrestrial to have apparently supernatural powers. "Keats told me -- and Keats, of course, is the real Carmody." "So you found out?" "Found out!" Gorman laughed. "I knew it all along. Does a man keep any secrets from his lawyer?" "If he's smart, he does." Carmody absently beat his hand on the desk. "This Keats isn't too smart, though, is he?" "No... he isn't a very bright guy. But it was his idea that this would be a fine method of getting you out of the way. And not too bad an idea, either... You had to be disposed of, you know," he explained winningly. "And how nice to have hounds do it for us. Of course we had no idea of iyho your quarry was." "I can see your point of view," Carmody said ironically. "But why tell me now?" And then he thought he saw the answer. "Are you afraid I'll really kill him?" The lawyer shook his head and smiled back. "Afraid you really won't." He placed the tips of his fingers together. "I am prepared to double whatever Lockard is offering you to make sure that Keats, with Carmody inside him, is definitely put out of the way forever." basis of trust -- none of the reverse honor that legend commonly assigned to extralegals. Carmody got up. Even seated, he had towered above the lawyer. Standing, he was like a largerthan-life statue of doom -- of doom, Gorman nervously Itoped, pointing in the desired direction. "And if I refuse?" Carmody asked. Gorman moved his chair back uneasily. "I might persuade Keats that he could risk one murder in his present shape, if it was to insure his ultimate safety." "Meaning it would be a good idea for him to kill me?" "Meaning it would be an excellent idea for him to kill you." "Look here, Gorman," Carmody said, in a low voice that gradually increased in volume. He could no longer restrain the anger that had been seething up in him for all the years of his wandering. "I've had enough of all this, hiding, running, shifting bodies and now hiring out as a killer. Because I'm an honest man. Maybe you've never seen one before, so take a good look at me. You may never have the chance again." "I am looking and I see Jed Carmody. Not my idea of the prototype of honesty." "But I don't feel like Jed Carmody." "Tell that to the hounds." Gorman laughed uproariously. "By law, you're responsible for Carmody's crimes. Of course, if they put you away or -- as they'd undoubtedly prefer -- accidently exterminate you in the line of duty, and then suspect Carmody hulkhopped, they might look around some more. But there wouldn't be any percentage in that for you, especially if you were dead." "I know, I know," Carmody retorted impatiently. "You can't tell me anything I haven't told myself." He paused for a moment. "This is a good body, though," he added. "Almost as good as my old one." Gorman raised his eyebrows. "You can't be referring to the corpus currently going by the epithet of John Keats?" "The name was your idea, I take it. No, that wasn't my original body." "Oh, so you're a dutchman, eh? A thrill boy?" There was contempt, even from such as Gorman. "Getting a lot of free falls out of all this, are you?" Carmody tried to ignore this, but he couldn't. It wasn't true, he told himself; he had suffered years of playing the game and derived no pleasure from those sufferings -- no pleasure at all. But he would not stoop to argue with Gorman. "Maybe I can get away with this body to one of the frontier planets," he mused. "At least I can make a run for it; at least that would be a worthwhile kind of running." "Brave words!" the lawyer sneered. "But rather risky to put into action. Don't you think the best thing to do would be just go ahead with the pattern as set? How much did Lockard offer you?" Gorman sucked in his breath. "You're lying, of course, but I'll match that. Carmody -- Keats -- has ten times that amount and maybe more hidden away where I can lay my hands on it as soon as I'm sure he's where he can't to me. And, in the remote instance that you're telling the truth, you can't turn down a million credits... whoever you are, dutchman!" "Oh, can't I?" Carmody went to the door; then turned. "It may interest you to know that I'm worth a hundred times that amount and maybe more." The lawyer laughed skeptically. "If you have enough money to buy your way, then why are you doing this?" Carmody frowned. "You wouldn't understand... I'm not sure I understand myself." The door slammed behind him. Descending pneumos hissed. "Just talking with his elbows," Gorman said comfortingly to himself. "He'll do it. He's got to do it." But he wasn't altogether convinced. IX building, John Keats' figure emerged from the shadows of a nearby doorway. He looked up at the golden rectangle of Gorman's window and then toward the direction in which Carmody had gone; and bit his lip irresolutely. After a moment's reflection, he chose to follow his old body. Somehow he didn't have much confidence in Gorman any more; not that he'd ever really trusted him. In their line of evil you couldn't afford to trust anybody. He had made a mistake. But it could still be rectified. If the big man was aware of his tracker, he did not seem to care. He moved purposefully in the direction of the hotel, scorning the helicabs that swooped down to proffer their services, avenues gay with music and the dark alleys mournful with the whine of the farjeen wires as if they were all the same. The hotel was on one of the avenues, because the Lockards always had only the best of whatever there was to be had. Carmody crossed the almost deserted lobby in swift strides and took the pneumo to the seventh floor. Knowing that his body could have only one objective in that place, Keats took the stairs to the basement. Carmody sprang out of the pneumo exit and ran down the corridor to bang lustily on the intricately embossed metal door of the Lockards' suite. After a moment, the girl, again in negligee, opened it. Her green-gray eyes widened when she saw who the late visitor was, and she put a finger to her lips. "Shh, Gabe's asleep; let's not wake him unless it's necessary." She closed the door softly behind him. "What is it... Jed?" He was so choked with excitement that he could hardly get the words out. "Helen; will you make a break with me for Proxima Centauri? They won't ask any questions there, if we can get there. And from Proxima we can go -- " "But your body?" "The hell with my body." He gripped her arms with powerful hands. "You mean much more to me than that worthless hulk." "But, Jed, Gabe'll never let us go... " Proxima Centauri -- that had been Gabriel's dream, too... His hands pressed so hard into her flesh, she knew there would be bruises on her skin; was she always doomed to fall in love with men who would leave marks on her? "Let him try to stop us. I'm bigger than he is, now." She looked up at him. "You always were, darling. But he has influence, though he wouldn't need it; he could simply set the police on you." "That's the chance we're going to have to take... But perhaps I'm asking too much. I haven't the right to ask you to take such risks," he added bitterly. "I was thinking only of myself, I see, not of you." "Oh, no, Jed!" " Helen?" a drowsy voice asked from the bedroom. It was followed by the comely person of Gabriel himself, fastening his dressing gown. "Oh, hello, Carmody." His face lighted up avidly, all sleepiness vanishing like aspent milgot. "Did'you do it already?" "No, I didn't. And, what's more, I'm not going to do it!" Lockard looked astonished. "But what's .wrong? You said you would." Carmody sighed. "Yes, I know I did. I was stalling. That's what I've always done -- stalled, put things off, hesitated to make decisions. Well, I've made my decision now." "You're not afraid of him?" Lockard said in a voice that was meant to be taunting and emerged as querulous. "A little pipsqueak like that Keats? Or enough for you? Is that it?" That was enough for the man whose emaciated body was torturedly cramped in the air-conditioning vent and further agonized by the strain of repressing the cough that sought to tear its way out of his chest. He had found out what he wanted to know and, as he inched his way back down to the basement, he was already making plans for getting even with all those he now knew to be enemies. It had been a conspiracy against him from the start; the hounds probably weren't even aware that he was in town. It was Gorman who had told him they knew of his general whereabouts -- Gorman, the good friend who had suggested he change bodies, knowing that whatever hulk he wound up with was bound to be more vulnerable than his primal form. And Gorman would pay... "More than enough," Carmody replied, as unaware of the fact that he had lost one-third of his audience as he had been that he was addressing three rather than two listeners. "Only I'm not a killer." "But I understood you were supposed to be a professional exterminator?" "Jed Carmody is a killer. Only I'm not Jed Carmody." lockard moved backward and stared at the still bigger man. Lockard retreated still further. "You -- you're him! You were all along!" He whirled on his wife. "And you knew, you doublecrosser! Knew and didn't tell me! By God, I'll break every bone in your body!" "Lay a hand on her and I'll break every bone in my body!" Lockard stopped where he was. "It doesn't mean anything to me any more, you see," Carmody explained. "I wanted it when I didn't have anything else. But now I have Helen. I could kill you, you know. As Carmody, an acknowledged exterminator, I have nothing to lose. But I'm letting you live, as a hostage for Helen... And, besides, as I've been busy trying to convince everybody all evening, I am not a murderer." He turned to the girl. "Will you come with me to Proximo, Helen?" "Y-yes, Jed," she said, looking apprehensively at her husband. "Gather your packs. I'm going to the air office to make the arrangements." Carmody consulted his chronometer. "It's three o'clock. I should be back by eight or so. Get some sleep if you can." Her wide frightened eyes turned again toward her husband. "Here." Jed tossed her the gun Gorman had given him. "If he tries anything, use it." "Yes, Jed. But... " "Don't worry; I have another one." The door slammed behind him. "Gimme that gun, you little tramp!" Lockard snarled, twisting it out of her flaccid hand. X the hotel and turned left in the direction of the airstation which stayed open all night. He had walked a short distance when suddenly a high voice came out of the darkness behind him, "Not so fast, Mr... Carmody," and a hard knob was pressed in his back. "Mr. Keats, I believe," Carmody said, wondering why he wasn't frightened. "Right." The other coughed at some length. "You thought you were pretty smart, didn't you, foisting me off with a hulk that wasn't only shopworn but hot?" "Your intentions weren't exactly noble either, were they, Mr. Keats?" "I want my frame back!" Suddenly the idea came to Carmody, and so wonderful it was he could hardly throttle his voice down to calmness. "Shooting me won't help you get it back. In fact, it might make it rather difficult." "You have your choice between going back to the zarquil house wiht me and switching or getting your current insides burned out." Carmody exhaled a small hissing sigh that he hoped would not be recognized as obvious relief to the man behind him. "You'll have to pay. I haven't enough folio on me." "I'll pay; I'll pay," the voice snarled. "I always pay. But you'll come peacefully?" he asked in some surprise. "Yes. Matter of fact, I'll be glad to get out of this body. No matter how much I try, somehow I can never manage to keep it clean... Gently, now, you don't want to muss up a body you're planning to occupy yourself, now do you?" "This is too easy," Keats' voice murmured dubiously. "Maybe it's another trap..." "You're always going to imagine traps, Mr. Exterminator, whether they're there or not. You and Lockard both -- people who run must have something to run from, and half the time it's not there and half the time, of course, it is; only you never know which is which -- " "You talk too much," the man behind him snarled. "Shut up and keep moving." "Back again?" the Vinzz at the door asked. The present Carmody was a little startled. Somehow he had thought of the Vinzz as too remote from humanity to be able to distinguish between individual members of the species. "I'm afraid neither of you is qualified to play." "No reason why we shouldn't have a private game, is there?" John Keats demanded belligerently. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. "In that case, no, no reason at all. If you want to be so unsporting and can afford it. It will cost you a hundred thousand credits each." "But that's twice what I had to pay last week!" Keats protected angrily. The Vinzz shrugged an antenna. "You are, of course, at liberty to take your trade elsewhere, if you choose." "Oh, hell," the temporarily poetic-looking killer snarled. "We're stuck and you know it. Let's get it over with!" consciousness back into the thin young man's body again. More uncomfortable than usual, because the criminal's body had been in such splendid physical condition and this one so poor -- now worse than before, because it had been worked far beyond its attenuated capabilities. The individuality that had originally been Gabriel Lockard's, formerly housed in Jed Carmody's body, now opened John Keats' eyes and looked at the Vinzz who stood above him. "The other human has been told you awakened before him and have already departed," the Vinzz explained. "He has violence in his heart and we do not care for violence on our doorstep. Bad for business." "Has he gone already?" The Vinzz nodded. "How long has he been gone?" He scrambled to his feet and investigated the clothing he wore. Carmody had been in too much of a hurry to clean himself out. There was some money left, a container of milgot sticks, and a set of electroseals. "He has just left." The extraterrestrial's eyes flickered in what might have been surprise. "Don't you wish to avoid him?" "No, I must go where he goes." The Vinzz shrugged. "Well, it's your funeral in the most literal sense of the word." He sighed as the young man plunged out into the darkness. "But, from the objective viewpoint, what a waste of money!" The massive, broad-shouldered figure of Jed Carmody was still visible at the end of the street, so the thin man slowed down. He wanted to follow Carmody, to keep close watch on where he was going and, if necessary, guide him in the right direction, though he didn't think he'd have to do that. But he had no intention of overtaking him. Carmody might not want openly to use the gun the former tenant had so carefully left him, but with his physique he could break the fragile body of John Keats in two, if he so desired, and he probably did. Meanwhile Carmody -- the real Carmody -- having been deprived of an immediate revenge, had begun to realize how much better the situation was as it now stood. If he killed Keats out of hand, he might miss out on half a million credits, because it was his custom to get cash in advance for all his flights, and this was his flight pattern now. He wouldn't trust that Lockard life-form to defoliate after the job was done. Of course he himself had plenty of money stashed away, but would be no trouble to find the sickly Keats later. And there was no reason the hounds should get him -- Carmody -- after all, the other had been rocketing around in his body and he hadn't been caught. Carmody had allowed himself to be stampeded into panic. He smiled. Gorman wouldn't ever be able to chart any pattern like that, or like anything, again. Fortunately there was no permanent harm done, and a half quil losses, with a nice profit left over. Maybe he could even beat was obviously a coward and a fool. A few threats should be enough to get him to hand over. Carmody paused for a moment outside the hotel. It still took some nerve to walk boldly into the brightly lit lobby. as he entered. At the same time, the pneumo gates lifted and Gabe Lockard came out, dragging a heavily veiled Helen, their luggage floating behind them. Both stopped as they caught sight of the killer; Lockard paled -- Helen gasped. Too bad I have to leave her in the tentacles of this low life-form, Carmody thought with regret, but there was no help for it. He approached them with what he thought was an ingratiating smile. "Mr. Lockard, I've decided to give you another chance." It was an unhappy choice of word. "Oh, you have, have you!" the big blond man yelled. "I thought I did have another chance. And now you've spoiled that, too!" "What do you mean by that?" Carmody demanded, his thick dark brows almost meeting across his nose. "I figured on getting away before you came back," Gabriel babbled in a frenzy, "but you'd have found me anyway. You always find me. I'm sick of this running. There's only one way to stop you, only one way to be sure that, whatever happens to me, you won't be around to enjoy it." "Listen, Lockard, you're making a mistake. I -- " "The only mistake I made was in hiring somebody else to do the job I should have done myself." He pulled out the gun -- Carmody's own gun -- and fired it. He wasn't a good shot, but that didn't matter. He had the flash on full blast and he pumped and pumped and pumped the trigger until the searing heat rays had whipped not only the killer's astonished body but all through the lobby. The few people still there rushed for cover as rug, chairs, potted palms were shriveled by the lancing holocaust. There was a penetrating odor of burning fabric and frond and flesh. Helen let out a wail as Carmody, more ash than man, fell to the charred carpet. "Gabe, Gabe, what have you done!" The gun dropped from his hand to rejoin its owner. His face crumpled. "I didn't really mean to kill... only to scare him... What'll I do now?" "You'll run, Mr. Lockard," John Keats' body said as he entered the devastated lobby. "You'll run and run and run. He's dead, but you'll keep on running forever. No, not forever -- I apologize -- some day you'll get caught, because the hounds aren't amateurs like you and... him... He pointed to the crumbling, blackened corpse, keeping his hand steady with an effort for, God knew, he was the biggest amateur of them all. Lockard licked his lips and gazed apprehensively around. Frightened faces were beginning to peer out from their places of concealment. "Look, Carmody," he said in a low, stiff voice, "let's talk this over. But let's get out of here first before somebody calls the hounds." "All right," the thin man smiled. can go over to Gorman's office. They won't look for us there right away." "How'll we get in?" "I have a 'seal," Keats said. Surely one of the electroseals he carried must belong to Gorman's office. It was a chance he'd have to take. XI ent seals before he found the one that opened the lawyer's office. He was afraid his obvious lack of familiarity would arouse Lockard's suspicions, but the big man was too much preoccupied with his own emotions. An unpleasantly haunting aroma of cooked meat seeped out from inside. "For Christ's sake, Carmody, hurry!" Lockard snarled, and gave a sigh of relief as the door swung open and the illuminators went on, lighting the shabby office. Gorman was there. His horribly seared body lay sprawled on the dusty rug -- quite dead. "You -- you killed him?" Gabriel quavered. The sight of murder done by another hand seemed to upset him more than the murder he himself had just committed. The thin man gave a difficult smile. "Carmody killed him." Which was undoubtedly the truth. "The gun that did it is in his pocket. I had nothing to do with it." His eyes sought for the oneb. behind the veil. He wanted the girl who stood frozenly by the door to know that this, at least, was the truth. Gabriel also stayed near the door, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. In death Carmody and Gorman, the big man and the small man, had looked the same; each was just a heap of charred meat and black ash. No blood, no germs -- all very hygienic. "You're smart, Carmody," he said from taut lips. "Damn smart." "I'm Keats, not Carmody! Remember that." He dropped into the chair behind the desk. "Sit down, both of you." Only Gabriel accepted the invitation. "Why don't you take that thing off your face, Mrs. Lockard? You aren't hiding from anybody, are you?" Gabriel gave a short laugh. "She's hiding her face from everybody. I spoiled it a little for her. She was going to sell me out to... the guy in your body." Keats' hand tightened on the arm of his chair. Lose his temper now and he lost the whole game. "It was a good body," he said, not looking at the thing on the rug, trying not to remember the thing on the rug on the other side of town. "A very good body." Through the veil, Helen's shadowy eyes were fixed on his face. He wanted to see what Lockard had done to her, but he couldn't tear off the veil, as he longed to do; he was afraid of the expression that might be revealed on her face -- triumph when there should have been anguish; anguish when there should have been triumph. "Not as good as the one I have here." Lockard thumped his own chest, anxious to establish the value of the only ware he had left. "Matter of opinion," Keats said. "And mine was in better shape." "This one isn't in bad condition," Gabriel retorted defensively. "It could be brought back to peak in' short order." "You won't have much opportunity to do it, though. But maybe the government will do it for you; they don't pamper prisoners, I understand, especially lifers." an extralegal, Carmody -- Keats," he whined. "You know your course. You know how to hide from the hounds... I'm a -- a respectable citizen." He spread his hands wide in exaggerated helplessness. "Strictly an amateur, that's what I am -- I admit I've been playing out of my league." "So?" "I'm worth a lot of money, Keats, a hell of a lot. And half of it can be yours, if you... change bodies with me." Keats' angular face remained expressionless, but there was a sharp cry from the girl -- a cry that might have been misunderstood as one of pain, but wasn't. Gabriel turned toward her, and his upper lip curled back over his teeth. "I'll throw her in to the bargain. You must have seen her when she wasn't banged up so you know she's not permanently disfigured. Isn't she worth taking a risk for?" Keats shrugged. "If the hounds pull you down, she'll be a legal widow anyway." "Yes, but you'd have no... chance with her in the body you now have... No chance," he repeated. His voice broke. "Never had a chance." "Go ahead, feel sorry for yourself," the other man said. "Nobody else will." Gabriel's face darkened, but he also had to control his temper to gain what he fancied were his own ends. "You won't deny that this hulk is better than the one you have now?" "Except that there's one thing about the head that I don't like." Gabriel stared in bewilderment. His body was beyond criticism. "What is it you don't like about the head?" "There's a price on it now." Gabriel pressed his spine against the back of the chair. "Don't play the innocent, Carmody. You've killed people, too." "Well, sure, but not out in the open like that. You know how many people saw you blast him? Too many. #'f you're going to exterminate somebody, you do it from a dark doorway or an alley by, and you blast him in the back. But there's no use giving you lessons; it's not likely you'll ever be able to use them where you're going." Gabriel suddenly sagged in his chair. He looked down at the floor. "So you won't do it?" Keats grew apprehensive. He hadn't expected the big man to give in to despair so soon -- it might spoil all his plans and leave him trapped in this sick unwanted body. He lit a milgot. "I didn't say that," he pointed out, trying to sound unconcerned. "Matter of fact, I might even consider your proposition, if..." There was hope in Lockard's eyes again. It made Keats a little sick to think of the game he had to play with the other; then he thought of the game the other had played with him, the game the other had played with his wife, and the faint flickering of compassion died out in him. "What do you want?" Gabriel asked. Keats took a moment before he answered. "I want all of what you've got." Gabriel uttered an inarticulate sound. "You can't take it with you, colleague. If we hulk-hop, it's got to be tonight, because the hounds will be baying on your trail any moment. You wouldn't have the chance to transfer the property to my name and, if you take my word that I'll hand over half afterward, you're just plain out of this dimension... Think of it this way, Lockard -- what's worth more to you, a couple of "All right, Carmody," Lockard said dully, "you're the dictator." T HE Vinzz' eyes flickered in astonishment. "Another private game? However..." he shrugged eloquently. "It will cost you a hundred thousand credits each, gentlemen." "No discount for a steady customer?" Keats inquired lightly, though he was trembling inside. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. "None. You ought to be glad I didn't raise the price again." "Why didn't you?" he couldn't help asking. The Vinzz looked steadily into the man's eyes. "I don't know," it answered at last. "Perhaps I have been so long on this planet that I have developed a sentimental streak... In any case, I am going back to Vinau the day after tomorrow..." "For God's sake," Lockard, his senses so confused with fear and apprehension that he was able to catch only fragments of their talk, screamed, "pay him what he asks and don't haggle!" "All right," Keats agreed. "The lady will wait for me here," he told the Vinzz. The extraterrestrial quivered indecisively. "Most irregular," it murmured. "However, I cannot refuse a slight favor for such an old customer. This way, madam." Gabriel Lockard's eyes. ' Well," the Vinzz who stood above him lisped, "how does it feel to be back in your own body again?" Gabriel got up and stretched. He stretched again, and then an expression of wonderment came over his handsome features. "I feel... exactly the way I felt in... any of the others," he said haltingly. "I'm not comfortable in this one either. It's not right -- it doesn't fit. My own body... "You've grown out of it," the green one told him, not unkindly. "But you will be able to adjust to it again, if you'll give it a chance "There's that word again." Gabriel winced. "I'm beginning to respond to it the way my... predecessor did. Do we ever really get another chance, I wonder?" "Take my advice." The Vinzz' face became almost human. "This is costing my people money, but we've made enough out of you and your -- shall we say? -- friends. It is a shame," it murmured, "to prey upon unsophisticated lifeforms, but one must live. However, I'll tell you this: The compulsion will come over you again and again to play the game -- your body will torment you unbearably and you will long for relief from it, but you must conquer that desire or, I warn you, you will be lost to yourself forever. It's a pattern that's enormously difficult to break, butit can be broken." Gabriel smiled down at the little green creature. "Thanks, colleague. I'll remember that advice. And I'll take it." "The other is still asleep," the Vinzz told him. "This time I thought it best to let you awaken first. Good-by, and... good luck." "Thanks, fellow-man," Gabriel said. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. teroom, her veil flung back so that he could see her poor, marred face. Anger rose hotly in him, but he pushed it down. Her suffering had not been meaningless and revenge was already consummated. "Gabriel!" Her voice was taut. "... Jed!" "Gabriel," he smiled. "The genuine, original Gabriel -- accept no substitutes." "I'm so glad." Her lips formed the words, for she had no voice with which to make them. "Come." He took her arm and led her out into the quiet street. It was almost daylight and the sky was a clear pearl gray. Again a star detached itself from the translucent disk of the Moon and sped out into the Galaxy. Soon, he thought, we'll be on a starship like that one, leaving this played-out planet for the new worlds up in the sky. "You're going to let Gabe -- the other Gabriel -- go?" she asked. He bent his head to look at her swollen face. "You're free, Helen; I have my body back; why should we concern ourselves with what happens to him? He can't hurt us any more." "I suppose you're right," she muttered. "It seems unfair... She shivered. "Still, you have no idea of the things he did to me -- the things he made me do... I She shivered again. "You're cold. Let's get started." "But where are we going?" She placed her hand on his arm and looked up at him. "Back to the hotel to pick up your luggage. And then -- I still think Proxima is a good idea, don't you? And then perhaps farther out still. J'm sick of this old world." "But, Je -- Gabriel, you must be mad! The police will be waiting for you at the hotel." "Of course they'll be waiting, but with a citation, not handcuffs." She looked at him as if he had gone extradimensional. He laughed. "What your ex-husband didn't know, my dear, was that there was a reward out for Jed Carmody, dead or alive." Her face was blank for a moment. "A reward! Oh, G-G-G-Gabriel!" The girl erupted into hysterical laughter. "Shhh, darling, control yourself." He put his arm around her, protectively, restrainingly. "We'll be conspicuous," for already the Sun's first feeble rays were beginning to wash the ancient tired streets with watery gold. "Think of the reward we're going to get -- five thousand credits, just for us!" She wiped her eyes and pulled down her veil. "Whatever will we do with all that money!" "I think it would be nice if we turned it over to the hotel," he smiled. "I made rather a shambles of their lobby when, pursuant to my duty as a solar citizen, I exterminated the killer Carmody. Let's give it to them and leave only pleasant memories behind us on our journey to the stars." And he couldn't help wondering whether, if things got really tough, somewhere up in those stars he could find another zarquil game. A # Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. 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We pay postage Addre.-ts City State the unsettling experience of a writer who found himself trudging up the subway steps behind two men. The first exclaimed that the Sun had been out when they got aboard... and here it was pouring downtown! "Well," said the other, "it's better than nothing." I speculated on the possibility that the second speaker was an alien from a world without weather, or perhaps from an unknown part of Earth where weather was optional. Then I had to drop the subject, having run out of data. That's not so any longer and I can't say I'm happy it isn't. All of it adds up to the conclusion that there are indeed Aliens Among Us. No, it's not a matter of looking for slight scars where antennae have been neatly lopped off, signs of third eyes, fingers grafted onto tentacles, legs that bend backward at the knee, or where the knee should be, or watching for "people" to emerge from burrows in Central Park. Even we, with our necessarily less advanced science, would be cleverer than that. The giveaways, as you can see, can't be that easily detected. Then must we remain dupes? Not at all! One thing that can't be shucked very readily is conditioning. You've had one example. Did the "man" who betrayed himself get flustered and fear exposure? I doubt it; we're accustomed to laugh off such flubs as unthinking answers or slips of the tongue, and any well-trained scout would exploit that human trait. But no longer! Regard this blooper: A letter to a newspaper blamed subway accidents on the "fact" that, for the past few years, transport workers have had no working conditions at all! Somebody (or something), I'll wager, is going to get recalled and made an example of. Besides shooting off his mouth, if that is what it is, he falsified in our terms, which are the ones that count, for if there's anything the tions. I admit that I was bothered by both these instances being associated with the subway. Now, considering the others at hand, I think it's only coincidence. In my first editorial job, I was jolted by this astonishing sentence: "Gibbering idiotically, his bare feet padded across the floor." Naturally, I thought it was merely a dangling participle -- but gibbering feet aren't so impossible when you remember that crickets communicate, or whatever they do, by rubbing their hind legs together. Then there's the now defunct (or recalled) Broadway character who enthused over a movie: "Don't miss it if you can!" Translating that is as frustrating as staring at the optical-illusion blocks -- just when you think you have it, the whole meaning turns upside down. I think it may indicate a desperate lack of free will. But it may be exactly the opposite... or something else entirely that we can't even imagine. Sam Goldwyn's famous -- well, Goldwynisms could stand deciphering. For example: "I'll believe in color TV when I see it in black and white." Anybody who sees color in black and white could be seeing black and white in color! He is also reported to have said: "These guys who are working on the atom bomb must be crazy. Don't they know they're playing with dynamite?" I sense contempt here, a hint of alien weapons so powerful that even our most horrible are like blasting powder by comparison. He denies authorship of these and other -- well, Goldwynisms. I believe him, if only because no scout would be allowed to goof so often. Or is that more of the same contempt? After a recent TV commercial, I can understand such superiority: Super Anahist, the anouncer said, gets rid of sniffles and red, swollen eyes. If we had detachable eyes, I guess we'd be feeling pretty superior, too, eh? I think I'm on the right track in decoding these weird glimpses of outworld conditioning, but there are at least two complications : -- It sounds as if we're playing unwitting host to more than one alien species. -- Some human beings do have tangled tongues, like the Rev. Spooner's "Pardon me, madam; you're occupewing the wrong pie. I'll sew you to another sheet." That doesn't make detection a bit easier. But what I'm really worried about is a quote from The Pocket Book of Boners, an omnibus of (supposedly) schoolboy howlers: Name a noted foreigner assisting the eoionisls in the Kevolutionary War. God. Now what in the name of Heaven does that mean? In the bloodiest and most ferocious arena of all prehistoric Earth, hunting reptile heavyweights isn't for human lightweights! for Dinosaur won't take you hunting late-Mesozoic dinosaur. Why not? How much d'you weigh? A hundred and thirty? Let's see, that's under ten stone, which is my lower limit. I'll take you to any period in the Cenozoic. I'll get you a shot at an entelodont or a titanothere or a uintathere. The've all got fine heads. I'll even stretch a point and take you to the Pleistocene, where you can try for one of the mammoths or the mastodon. I'll take you back to the Triassic where you can shoot one of the smaller ancestral dinosaur. But I will not -- will jolly well not -- take you to the Jurassic or Cretaceous. You're just too small. No offense, of course. What's your weight got to do with it? Look here, old boy, what did you think you were going to shoot them with? You hadn't thought, eh? " Here you are, my own private gun for that work, a Continental .#. Does look like a shotgun, doesn't it? But it's rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .# nitro express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs fourteen and a half pounds and has a muzzle energy of over seven thousand foot-pounds. Costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. Lot of money for a gun, what? I have some spares I rent to the sahibs. Designed for knocking down elephant. Not just wounding them, knocking them baseover-apex. That's why they don't make guns like this in America, though I suppose they will if hunting parties keep going back in time through Prochaska's machine. I've been guiding hunting parties for twenty years. Guided 'em in Africa until the game gave out there except on the preserves. That just about ended the world's real big-game hunting. My point is, all that time I've never known a man your size who could handle the six-noughtnought. It knocks 'em over. Even when they stay on their feet, they get so scared of the bloody cannon after a few shots that they flinch. Can't hit an elephant at spitting range. And they find the gun too heavy to drag around rough Mesozoic country. Wears 'em out. It's true, lots of people have killed elephant with lighter guns: the .#, .#, and .# doubles, for instance, or even .# magnum repeaters. The difference is that with a .# you have to hit something vital, preferably the heart, and can't depend on simple shock-power. An elephant weighs -- let's see -- four to six tons. You're planning to shoot reptiles weighing two or three times as much as an elephant and with much greater tenacity of life. That's why the syndicate decided to take no more people dinosaur hunting unless they could handle the .#. We learned the hard way, as you Americans say. There were some unfortunate incidents... I'll tell you, Mr. Seligmari. It's after seventeen hundred. Time I closed the office. Why don't we stop at the bar on our way out while I tell you the story? my fifth safari. The Raja? Oh, he's the Aiyar half of Rivers  Aiyar. I call him the Raja because he's the hereditary monarch of Janpur. Means nothing nowadays, of course. Knew him in India and ran into him in New York running the Indian tourist agency. That dark chap in the photograph on my office wall, the one with his foot on the dead saber-tooth. Well, the Raja was fed up with handing out brochures about the Taj Mahal and wanted to do a bit of hunting again. I was at loose ends when we heard of Professor Prochaska's time machine at Washington University. Where is the Raja? Out on safari in the early Oligocene, after titanothere, while I run the office. We take turn about now, but the first few times we went out together. Anyhow, we caught the next plane to St. Louis. To our mortification, we found we weren't the first. Lord, no! There were other hunting guides and no end of scientists, each with his own idea of the right use for the machine. We scraped off the historians and archeologists right at the start. Seems the bloody machine won't work for periods more recent than # years ago. years. Why? Oh, I'm no four-dimensional thinker, but as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can't have that in a well-run universe. But before # B.C., more or less, the actions of the expeditions are lost in the stream of time before human history begins. At that, once a stretch of past time has been used, say the month of January, that stretch over again by sending another party into it. Paradoxes again. But the professor isn't worploit, he won't soon run out of eras. Another limitation of the machine is the matter of size. For technical reasons, Prochaska had to build the transition chamber just big enough to hold four men with their personal gear, plus the chamber-wallah. Larger parties have to be sent through in relays. That means, you see, it's not practical to take jeeps, boats, aircraft, or other powered vehicles. you're going to periods without human beings, there's no whistling up a hundred native bearers to trot along with your gear on their heads. So we usually take a train of asses -- burros, they call them here. Most periods have enough natural forage to get you where you want to go. As I say, everybody had his own idea for using the machine. The scientists looked down their noses at us hunters and said it would be a crime to waste the machine's time pandering to our sadistic amusements. We brought up another angle. The machine cost a cool thirty from the Rockefeller Board and such people, but that only accounted for the original cost, not the cost of operation. And the thing uses fantastic amounts of power. Most of the scientists' projects, while worthy as worthy could be, were run on a shoestring, financially speaking. Now we guides catered to people with money, a species with which America seems overstocked. No offense, old boy. Most of these could afford a substantial fee for passing through the machine to the past. Thus we could help finance the operation of the machine for scientific purposes, provided we got a fair share of its time. Won't go into the details, but in the end the guides formed a syndicate of eight members, one member being the partnership of Rivers  Aiyar, to apportion the machine's time. We had rush business from the start. Our wives -- the Raja's and mine -- raised bloody hell with us.  They'd hoped when the big game gave out they'd never have to share us with lions and things again, but you know how women are. Can't realize hunting's not really dangerous if you keep your head and take precautions. had two sahibs to wet-nurse : both Americans in their thirties, both physically sound, and both solvent. Otherwise they were as different as different can be. Courtney James was what you chaps call a playboy: a rich young man from New York who'd always had his own way and didn't see why that agreeable condition shouldn't continue. A big bloke, almost as big as I am; handsome in a florid way, but beginning to run to fat. He was on his fourth wife, and when he showed up at the office with a blonde with "model" written all  over her, I assumed this was the fourth Mrs. James. "Miss Bertram," she corrected  me, with an embarrassed giggle.  "She's not my wife," James explained. "My wife is in Mexico, I think, getting a divorce. But Bunny here would like to go along -- " "Sorry," I said, "we don't take ladies. At least not to the late Mesozoic." This wasn't strictly true, but I felt we were running enough risks, going after a little-known fauna, without dragging in people's domestic entanglements. Nothing against sex, you understand. Marvelous institution and all that, but not where it interferes with my living. "Oh, nonsense," said James. "If she wants to go, she'll go. She skis and flies my airplane, so why shouldn't she -- " "Against the firm's policy." "She can keep out of the way when we run up against the dangerous ones." "No, sorry." "Damn it," said he, getting red. "After all, I'm paying you a goodly sum and I'm entitled to take who I please." "You can't hire me to do anything against my best judgment," I said. "If that's how you feel, get another guide." "All right, I will. And I'll tell all my friends you're a goddamn -- " Well, he said a lot of things I won't repeat. It ended with my telling him to get out of the office or I'd throw him out. I was sitting in the office thinking sadly of all that lovely money James would have paid me if I hadn't been so stiff-necked, when in came my other lamb, one August Holtzinger. This was a little slim pale chap with glasses, polite and formal where the other had been breezily self-confident to the point of obnoxiousness. Holtzinger sat on the edge of his chair and said: "Uh -- Mr. Rivers, I don't want you to think I'm here under false pretenses. I'm really not much of an outdoorsman and I'll probably be scared to death when I see a real dinosaur. But I'm determined to hang a dinosaur head over my fireplace or die in the attempt." "Most of us are frightened at first," I soothed him, and little by little I got the story out of him. been wallowing in money, Holtzinger was a local product who'd only lately come into the real thing. He'd had a little business here in' St. Louis and just about made ends meet when an uncle cashed in his chips somewhere and left little Augie the pile. He'd never been married but had a fiancee. He was building a big house, and when it was finished, they'd be married and move into it. And one furnishing he demanded was a ceratopsian head over the fireplace. Those are the ones with the big horned heads with a parrot-beak and frill over the neck, you know. You have to think twice about collecting them, because if you put a seven-foot triceratojss head into a small living room, there's apt to be no room left for anything else. We were talking about this when in came a girl, a small girl in her twenties, quite ordinarylooking, and crying. "Augie!" she wept. "You can't! You mustn't! You'll be killed!" She grabbed him round and said to me: "Mr. Rivers, you mustn't take him! He's all I've got! He'll never stand the hardships!" "My dear young lady," I said, "I should hate to cause you distress, but it's up to Mr. Holtzinger to decide whether he wishes to retain my services." "It's no use, Claire," said Holtzinger. "I'm going, though I'll probably hate every minute of it." "What's that, old boy?" I asked. "If you hate it, why go? Did you lose a bet or something?" "No," said Holtzinger. "It's this way. Uh -- I'm a completely undistinguished kind of guy. I'm not some. I'm just an ordinary Midwestern small businessman. You never even notice me at Rotary luncheons, I fit in so perfectly. But that doesn't say I'm satisfied. I've always hankered to go to far places and do big things. I'd like to be a glamorous, adventurous sort of guy. Like you, Mr. Rivers." "Oh, come," I protested. "Professional hunting may seem glamorous to you, but to me it's just a living." You know what I mean. Well, now I've got this legacy, I could settle down to play bridge and golf the rest of my life and try to act like I wasn't bored. But I'm determined to do something big for once. Since there's no more real big-game hunting, I'm gonna shoot a dinosaur and hang his head over my mantel. I'll never be happy otherwise." Well, Holtzinger and his girl, whose name was Roche, argued, but he wouldn't give in. She made me swear to take the best care of her Augie and departed, sniffling. When Holtzinger had left, who should come in but my viletempered friend Courtney James. He apologized for insulting me, though you could hardly say he groveled. "I don't actually have a bad temper," he said, "except when people won't cooperate with me. Then I sometimes get mad. But so long as they're cooperative, I'm not hard to get along with." I knew that by "cooperate" he meant to do whatever Courtney James wanted, but I didn't press the point. "How about Miss Bartram?" I asked. "We had a row," he said. "I'm through with women. So if there's no hard feelings, let's go on from where we left off." "Absolutely," I agreed, business being business. The Raja and I decided to make it a joint safari to eightyupper Cretaceous, or the middle Cretaceous, as some American geologists call it. It's about the best period for dinosaur in Missouri. You'll find some individual species a little larger in the late upper Cretaceous, but the period we were going to gives a wider variety. Now, as to our equipment, the Raja and I each had a Continental .# like the one I showed you and a few smaller guns. At this time, we hadn't worked up much capital and had no spare .#s to rent. he would rent a gun, as he expected this to be his only safari and there was no point in spending over a thousand dollars for a gun he'd shoot only a few times. But since we had no spare .#s, his choice was between buying one of those and renting one of our smaller pieces. We drove into the country to let him try the .#. We set up a target. Holtzinger heaved up the gun as if it weighed a ton and let fly. He missed completely and the kick knocked him flat on his back with his legs in the air. He got up, looking paler than ever, and handed me back the gun, saying; "Uh -- I think I'd better try something smaller." When his shoulder stopped being sore, I tried him out on the smaller rifles. He took a fancy to my Winchester #, chambered for the .# magnum cartridge. It's an excellent all-round gun -- What's it like? A conventional magazine rifle with a Mauser-type bolt action. It's perfect for the big cats and bears, but a little light for elephant and very definitely light for dinosaur. I should never have given in, but I was in a hurry and it might have taken months to get him a new .#. They're made to order, you know, and James was getting impatient. James already had a gun, a Holland  Holland .# double express. With # foot-p)ounds of muzzle energy, it's almost in a class with the .#. Both sahibs had done a bit of shooting, so I didn't worry about their accuracy. Shooting dinosaur is not a matter of extreme accuracy but of sound judgment and smooth coordination so you shan't catch twigs in the mechanism of your gun, or fall into holes, or climb a small tree the dinosaur can pluck you out of, or blow your guide's head off. People used to hunting mammals sometimes try to shoot a dinosaur in the brain. That's the dinosaur haven't got any. To be exact, they have a little lump of tissue about the size of a tennis ball on the front end of their spines, and how are you going to hit that when it's imbedded in a moving six-foot skull? The only safe rule with dinosaur is -- always try for a heart shot. They have big hearts, over a hundred pounds in the largest species, and a couple of .# slugs through the heart will kill them just as dead as a smaller beast. The problem is to get the slugs through that mountain of muscle and armor around it. " chaska's laboratory one rainy morning; James and Holtzinger, the Raja and I, our herder Beauregard Black, three helpers, a cook, and twelve jacks. Burros, that is. The transition chamber is a little cubbyhole the size of a small lift. My routine is for the men with the guns to go first in case a hungry theropod might be standing in front of the machine when it arrived. So the two sahibs, the Raja and I crowded into the chamber with our guns and packs. The operator squeezed in after us, closed the door, and fiddled with his dials. He set the thing for April twenty-fourth, eightyred button. The lights went out, leaving the chamber lit by a little batteryoperated lamp. James and Holtzinger looked pretty green, but that may have been the dim lighting. The Raja and I had been through all this before, so the vibration and vertigo didn't bother us. I could see the little black hands of the dials spinning round, some slowly and some so fast they were a blur. Then they slowed down and stopped. The operator looked at his ground-level gauge and turned a handwheel that raised the chamber so it shouldn't materialize underground. Then he pressed another button and the door slid open. No matter how often I do it, I get a frightful thrill out of stepping into a bygone era. The operator had raised the chamber a foot above ground level, so I jumped down, my gun ready. The others came after. We looked back at the chamber, a big shiny cube hanging in mid-air a foot off the ground, with this little liftdoor in front. "Right-ho," I told the chamberwallah, and he closed the door. The chamber disappeared and we looked around. The scene hadn't changed from my last expedition to this era, which had ended, in Cretaceous time, five days before this one began. There weren't any dinosaur in sight, nothing but lizards. materializes on top of a rocky rise from which you can see in all directions as far as the haze will let you. To the west, you see the arm of the Kansas Sea that reaches across Missouri and the big swamp around the bayhead where the sauropods live. It used to be thought the sauropods became extinct before the Cretaceous, but that's not so. They were more limited in range because swamps and lagoons didn't cover so much of the world, but there were plenty of them if you knew where to look. To the north is a low range that the Raja named the Janpur Hills after the little Indian kingdom his forebears had ruled. To the east, the land slopes up to a plateau, good for ceratopsians, while to the south is flat country with more sauropod swamps and lots of ornithopods : duckbills and iguanadonts. The finest thing about the Cretaceous is the climate: balmy, like the South Sea Islands, with little seasonal change, but not so muggy as most Jurassic climates. We happened to be there in spring, with dwarf magnolias in bloom all over, but the air feels like spring almost any time of year. A thing about this landscape is that it combines a fairly high rainfall with an open type of vegetation-cover. That is, the grasses hadn't yet evolved to the point of forming solid carpets over all open ground, so the ground is thick with laurel, sassafras and other shrubs, with bare ground between. There are big thickets of palmettos and ferns. The trees round the hill are mostly cycads, standing singly and in copses. Most people call them palms, . though my scientific friends tell me they're not true palms. Down toward the Kansas Sea are more cycads and willows, while the uplands are covered with screw-pine and ginkos. Now I'm no bloody poet -- the Raja writes the stuff, not me -- but I can appreciate a beautiful scene. One of the helpers had come through the machine with two of the jacks and was pegging them out, and I was looking through the haze and sniffing the air, when a gun went off behind me -- ban! ban! I turned round and there was Courtney James with his .# and an ornithomime legging it for cover fifty yards away. The ornithomimes are medium-sized running dinosaurs, slender things with long necks and legs, like a cross between a lizard and an ostrich. This kind is about seven feet tall and weighs as much as a man. The beggar had wandered out of the nearest copse and James gave him both barrels. Missed. I was a bit upset, as triggerhappy sahibs are as much a menace as those who get panicky and freeze or bolt. I yelled: "Damn it, you idiot, I thought you weren't to shoot without word from me!" "And who the hell are you to tell me when I'll shoot my own gun?" he demanded.  Holtzinger and the Raja got us calmed down. I explained: "Look here, Mr. James, I've got reasons. If you shoot off all your ammunition before the trip's over, your gun won't be available in a pinch and it's the only one of its caliber. Second, if you empty both barrels at an unimportant target, what would happen if a big theropod charged before you could reload? Finally, it's not sporting to shoot everything in sight. I'll shoot for meat, or for trophies, or to defend myself, but not just to hear the gun go off. If more people had there'd still be decent sport in our own era. Understand?" "Yeah, I guess so," he said. Mercurial sort of bloke. The rest of the party came through the machine and we pitched our camp a safe distance from the materializing place. Our first task was to get fresh meat. For a twenty-one-day safari like this, we calculate our food requirements closely so we can make out on tinned stuff and concentrates if we must, but we of meat. When that's butchered, we go on a short tour, stopping at four or five camping places to hunt and arriving back at base a few days before the chamber is due to appear. Holtzinger, as I said, wanted a ceratopsian head, any kind. James insisted on just one head : a tyrannosaur. Then everybody'd think he'd shot the most dangerous game of all time. Fact is, the tyrannosaur's overrated. He's more a carrion-eater than an active predator, though he'll snap you up if he gets the chance. He's less dangerous than some of the other theropods -- the flesh-eaters -- such as the big saurophagus of the Jurassic, or even the smaller gorgosaurus from the period we were in. But everybody's read about the tyrant lizard and he does have the biggest head of the theropods. otte in our period isn't the rex, which is later and a little bigger and more specialized. It's the trionyches with the forelimbs not reduced to quite such little vestiges, though they're too small for an#dhing but picking the brute's teeth after a meal. When camp was pitched, we still had the afternoon, so the Raja and I took our sahibs on their first hunt. We already had a map of the local terrain from previous trips. The Raja and I have worked out a system for dinosaur hunting. We split into two groups of two men and walk parallel from twenty to forty yards apart. Each group consists of one sahib in front and one guide following and telling the sahib where to go. We tell the sahibs we put them in front so they shall have first shot, which is true, but another reason is they're always tripping and falling with their guns cocked, and if the guide were in front, he'd get shot. The reason for two groups is that if a dinosaur starts for one, the other gets a good heart shot from the side. A S WE walked, there was the usual rustle of lizards scuttling out of the way: little fellows, quick as a flash and colored like all the jewels in Tiffany's, and big gray ones that hiss and plod off. There were tortoises and a few little snakes. Birds with beaks full of teeth flapped off squawking. And always that marvelous mild Cretaceous air. Makes a chap want to take his clothes off and dance with vine-leaves in his hair, if you know what I mean. Not that I'd ever do such a thing, you understand. Our sahibs soon found that Mesozoic country is cut up into call them. Walking is one long scramble, up and down, up and down. We'd been scrambling for an hour and the sahibs were soaked with sweat and had their tongues hanging out, when the Raja whistled. He'd spotted a group of bonehead feeding on cycad shoots. These are the troodonts, small ornithopods about the size of men with a bulge on top of their heads that makes them look quite intelligent. Means nothing, because the bulge is solid bone and the brain is as small as in other dinosaur, hence the name. The males butt each other with these heads in fighting over the females. They would drop down to all fours, munch a shoot, then stand up and look round. They're warier than most dinosaur because they're the favorite food ofthe big theropods. People sometimes assume that because dinosaur are so stupid, their senses must be dim, but it's not so. Some, like the sauropods, are pretty dim-sensed, but most have good smell and eyesight and fair hearing. Their weakness is that, having no minds, they have no memories; hence, out of sight, out of mind. When a big theropod comes slavering after you, your best defense is to hide in a nullah or behind a bush, and if he can neither see nor smell you, he'll just forget all about you and wander off. We sneaked up behind a patch of palmetto downwind from the bonehead. I whispered to James: "You've had a shot already today. Hold your fire until Holtzinger shoots and then shoot only if he misses or if the beast is getting away wounded." "Uh-huh," said James and we separated, he with the Raja and Holtzinger with me. This got to be our regular arrangement. James and I got on each other's nerves, but the Raja, once you forget that Oriental-potentate rot, is a friendly, sentimental sort of bloke nobody can help liking. Well, we crawled round the palmetto patch on opposite sides and Holtzinger got up to shoot. You daren't shoot a heavy-caliber rifle prone. There's not enough give and the kick can break your shoulder.-the last few fronds of palmetto. I saw his barrel wobbling and weaving and then off went James's gun, both barrels again. The biggest bonehead went down, rolling and thrashing, and the others ran on their hindlegs in great leaps, their heads jerking and their tails sticking up behind. "Put your gun on safety," I said to Holtzinger, who'd started forward. By the time we got to the bonehead, James was standing over it, breaking open his gun and blowing out the barrels. He looked as smug as if he'd inwas asking the Raja to take his picture with his foot on the game. His first shot had been excellent, right through the heart. His second had missed because the first knocked the beast down. James couldn't resist that second shot even when there was nothing to shoot at. I said: "I thought you were to give Holtzinger first shot." "Hell, I waited," he said, "and he took so long, I thought something must have gone wrong. If we stood around long enough, they'd see us or smell us." There was something in what he said, but his way of saying it got me angry. I said: "If that sort of thing happens just once more, we'll leave you in camp the next time we go out." "Now, gentlemen," said the Raja. "After all, Reggie, these aren't experienced hunters." "What now?" asked Holtzinger. "Haul the beast back ourselves or send out the men?" "I think we can sling him under the pole," I said. "He weighs under two hundred." The pole was a telescoping aluminium carrying pole I had in my pack, with yokes on the ends with spongerubber padding. I brought it along because in such eras you can't always count on finding saplings strong enough for proper poles on the spot. The Raja and I cleaned our bonehead, to lighten him, and tied him to the pole. The flies began to light on the offal by thousands. Scientists say they're not true flies in the modern sense, but they look and act like them. There's one conspicuous kind of carrion fly, a big four-winged insect with a distinctive deep note as it flies. we sweated under that pole. We took turns about, one pair carrying the beast while the other two carried the guns. The lizards scuttled out of the way and the flies buzzed round the carcass. When we got to camp, it was nearly sunset. We felt as if we could eat the whole bonehead at one meal. The boys had the camp running smoothly, so we sat down for our tot of whiskey feeling like lords of creation while the cook broiled bonehead steaks. Holtzinger said: "Uh -- if I kill a ceratopsian, how do we get his head back?" I explained : "If the ground permits, we lash it to the patent aluminium roller-frame and sled it in." "How much does a head like that weigh?" he asked. "Depends on the age and the species," I told him. "The biggest weigh over a ton, but most run between five hundred and a thousand pounds." "And all the ground's rough like today?" "Most of it. You see, it's the combination of the open vegetation cover and the high rainfall. Erosion is frightfully rapid." "And who hauls the head on its little sled?" "Everybody with a hand. A big head would need every ounce of muscle in this party and even then we might not succeed. On such a job, there's no place for side." "Oh," said Holtzinger. I could see him wondering whether a ceratopsian head would be worth the effort. The next couple of days, we trekked round the neighborhood. Nothing worth shooting; only a herd of fifty-odd ornithomimes who went bounding off like a lot of bloody ballet dancers. Otherwise there were only the usual lizards and pterosaurs and birds and insects. There's a big lacewinged fly that bites dinosaurs, so you can imagine its beak makes nothing of a human skin. One made Holtzinger leap into the air when it bit through his shirt. James joshed him about it, saying: "What's all the fuss over one little bug?" The second night, during the Raja's watch, James gave a yell that brought us all out of our tents with rifles. All that had happened was that a dinosaur tick had crawled in with him and started as big as your thumb even when it hasn't fed, he was understandably startled. Luckily he got it before it had taken its pint of blood. He'd pulled Holtzinger's leg pretty hard about the fly bite, so now Holtzinger repeated : "What's all the fuss over one little bug, buddy?" James squashed the tick underfoot and grunted. He didn't like being twitted with his own words. on our circuit. We meant to take them first to the borders of the sauropod swamp, more to see the wild-life than to collect anything. From where the transition chamber materializes, the sauropod swamp looks like a couple of hours' walk, but it's an all-day scramble. The first part is easy, as it's downhill and the brush isn't heavy. But as you get near the swamp, the cicads and willows grow so thickly, you have to worm your way among them. There was a sandy ridge on the border of the swamp that I led the party to, for it's pretty bare of vegetation and affords a fine view. When we got to the ridge, the Sun was about to go down. A couple of crocs slipped off into the water. The sahibs were so exhausted, being soft yet, that they flopped down in the sand as if dead. The haze is thick round the swamp, so the Sun was deep red and distorted by the atmospheric layers -- pinched in at various levels. There was a high layer of clouds reflecting the red and gold, too, so altogether it was something for the Raja to write one of his poems about. Only your modern poet prefers to write about a rainy day in a garbage dump. A few little pterosaur were wheeling overhead like bats, only they don't flutter like bats. They swoop and soar after the big night-flying insects. Beauregard Black collected firewood and lit a fire. We'd started on our steaks, and that pagodashaped Sun was just slipping below the horizon, and something back in the trees was making a noise like a rusty hinge, when a sauropod breathed out in the the water. If Mother Earth were to sigh over the misdeeds of her children, it would sound just about like that. The sahibs jumped up, waving and shouting: "Where is he? Where is he?" I said: "That black spot in the water, just to the left and this side of that point." They yammered while the sauropod filled its lungs and disappeared. "Is that all?" yelped James. "Won't we see any more of him?" Holtzinger said: "I read they never come out of the water because they're too heavy." "No," I explained. "They can walk perfectly well and often do, for egg-laying and moving from one swamp to another. But most of the time they spend in the water, like hippopotamus. They eat eight hundred pounds of soft swamp plants a day, all with those little heads. So they wander about the bottoms of lakes and swamps, chomping away, and stick their heads up to breathe every quarter-hour or so. It's getting dark, so this fellow will soon come out and lie down in the shallows to sleep." "Can we shoot one?" demanded James. "I wouldn't," said I. "Why not?" and it's not sporting. First, they're even harder to hit in the brain than other dinosaurs because of the way they sway their heads about on those long necks and their hearts are too deeply buried in tissue to reach unless you're awfully lucky. Then, if you kill one in the water, he sinks and can't be recovered. If you kill one on land, the only trophy is that little head. You can't bring the whole beast back because he weighs thirty tons or more. We don't need thirty tons of meat." Holtzinger said: "That museum in New York got one." "Yes," I agreed. "The American Museum of Natural History sent a party of forty-eight to the early Cretaceous, with a fifty-caliber machine gun. They assembled the gun on the edge of a swamp, killed a sauropod -- and spent two solid months skinning it and hacking the carcass apart and dragging it to the time machine. I know the chap in charge of that project and he still has nightmares in which he smells decomposing dinosaur. They also had to kill a dozen big theropods who were attracted by the stench and refused to be frightened off, so they had them lying round and rotting, too. And the theropods ate three men of the party despite the big gun." Next morning, we were finishing breakfast when one of the helpers called: "Look, Mr. Rivers! Up there!" He pointed along the shoreline. There were six big duckbill feeding in the shallows. They were the kind called parasaurolophus, with ia .crest consisting of a long spike of Be ' sticking out the back of their heads, like the horn of an oryx, and a web of skin connecting this with the back of their neck. "Keep your voices down," I said. The duckbill, like the other ornithopods, are wary beasts because they have no armor or weapons against the theropods. The duckbill feed on the margins of lakes and swamps, and when a gorgosaur rushes out of the trees, they plunge into deep water and swim off. Then when phobosuchus, the super-crocodile, goes for them in the water, they flee to the land. A hectic sort of life, what? Holtzinger said: "Uh -- Reggie, I've been thinking over what you said about ceratopsian heads. If I could get one of those yonder, I'd be satisfied. It would look big enough in my house, wouldn't it?" "I'm sure of it, old boy," I said. "Now look here. I could take you on a detour to come out on the shore near there, but we should have to plow through half a mile of muck and brush, up to our knees in water, and they'd hear us coming. Or we can creep up to the north end of this sand spit, from which it's four or five himdred yards -- a long shot, but not impMsssible. Think you could do it?" "With my 'scope sight and a sitting position -- yes. I'll try it." "You stay here," I said to James. "This is Augie's head and I don't want any argument over your having fired first." zinger clamped his 'scope to his rifle. We crouched our way up the spit, keeping the sand ridge between us and the duckbills. When we got to the end where there was no more cover, we crept along on hands and knees, moving slowly. If you move slowly directly toward or away from a dinosaur, it probably won't notice you. The duckbills continued to grub about on all fours, every few seconds rising to look round. Holtzinger eased himself into the sitting position, cocked his piece, and aimed through the 'scope. And then -- Bang! bang! went a big rifle back at the camp. Holtzinger jumped. The duckbill jerked up their heads and leaped for the deep water, splashing like mad. Holtzinger fired once and missed. I took a shot at the last duckbill before it disappeared. I missed, too: the .# isn't designed for long ranges. Holtzinger and I started back toward the camp, for it had struck us that our party might be in theropod trouble and need reinforcements. What happened was that a big sauropod, probably the one we'd heard the night before, had wandered down past the camp under water, feeding as it went. Now the water shoaled about a hundred yards offshore from our spit, halfway over to the edge of the swamp on the other side. The sauropod had ambled up the slope until its body was almost all out of water, weaving its head from side to side and looking for anything green to gobble. This kind looks like the well-known brontosaurus, but a little bigger. Scientists argue whether it ought to be included in the genus camarasaurus or a separate genus with an even longer name. When I came in sight of the camp, the sauropod was turning round to go back the way it had come, making horrid groans. It disappeared into deep water, all but its head and ten or twenty feet of neck, which wove about for some time before they vanished into the haze. When we came up to the camp, James was arguing with the Raja. Holtzinger burst out: "You bastard! That's the second time you've spoiled my shots!" Strong language for little August. "Don't be a fool," said James. "I couldn't let him wander into camp and stamp everything flat." "There was no danger of that," objected the Raja politely. "You can see thee water is deep offshore. It is just that our triggerhappee Mr. James cannot see any animal without shooting." you needed to do was throw a stick of firewood at it. They're perfectly harmless." This wasn't strictly true. When the Comte de Lautrec ran after one for a close shot, the sauropod looked back at him, gave a flick of its tail, and took off the Comte's head as neatly as if he'd been axed in the Tower. "How was I to know?" yelled James, getting purple. "You're all against me. What the hell are we on this goddamn trip for except to shoot things? You call yourselves hunters, but I'm the only one who's hit anything!" I got pretty wrothy and said he was just an excitable young skite with more money than brains, whom I should never have brought along. "If that's how you feel," he said, "give me a burro and some food and I'll go back to the base by myself. I won't pollute your air with my loathsome presence!" "Don't be a bigger ass than you can help," I snapped. "That's quite impossible." 'Then I'll go all alone!" He grabbed his knapsack, thrust a couple of tins of beans and an opener into it, and started off with his rifle. Beauregard Black spoke up: "Mr. Rivers, we cain't let him go off like that by hisself. He'll git lost and starve or be et by a theropod." "I'll fetch him back," said the Raja and started after the runaway. He caught up as James was disappearing into the cycads. We could see them arguing and waving their hands, but couldn't make out what they said. After a while, they started back with arms around each other's necks like old school pals. I simply don't know how the Raja does it. This shows the trouble we get into if we make mistakes in planning such a do. Having once got back into the past, we had to make the best of our bargain. We l always must, you see. I don't want to give the impression Courtney James was , only a pain in the rump. He had his good points. He got over these rows quickly and next day would be as cheerful as ever. He was helpful with the general work of the camp -- when he felt like it, at any rate. He sang well and had an endless fund of dirty stories to keep us amused. We stayed two more days at that camp. We saw crocodile, the small kind, and plenty of sauropod -- as many as five at once -- but no more duckbill. Nor any of those fifty-foot super-crocodiles. S O, ON the first of May, we broke camp and headed north toward the Janpur Hills. My sahibs were beginning to harden up and were getting impatient. We'd been in the Cretaceous a week and no trophies. I won't go into details of the next leg. Nothing in the way of a trophy, save a glimpse of a gorgosaur out of range and some tracks indicating a whopping big iguanodont, twenty-five or thirty feet high. We pitched camp at the base of the hills. We'd finished off the bonehead, so the first thing was to shoot fresh meat. With an eye to trophies, too, of course. We got ready the morning of the third. I told James: "See here, old boy, no more of your tricks. The Raja will tell you when to shoot." "Uh-huh, I get you," he said, meek as Moses. Never could tell how the chap would act. We marched off, the four of us, into the foothills. We were looking for bonehead, but we'd take an ornithomime. There was also a good chance of getting Holtzinger his ceratopsian. We'd seen a couple on the way up, but mere calves without decent horns. It was hot and sticky and we were soon panting and sweating like horses. We'd hiked and scrambled all morning without seeing a thing except lizards, when I picked up the smell of carrion. I stopped the party and sniffed. We were in an open glade cut up by these little dry nullahs. The nullahs ran together into a couple of deeper gorges that cut through a slight depression choked with a denser growth, cycad and screwpine. When I listened, I heard the thrum of carrion flies. "This way," I said. "Something ought to be dead -- ah, here it is!" And there it was: the remains of a huge ceratopsian lying in a little hollow on the edge of the copse. Must have weighed six or eight tons alive; a three-horned variety, perhaps the penultimate species of Triceratops. It was hard to tell because most of the hide on the upper surface had been ripped off and many bones had been pulled loose and lay scattered about. Why couldn't I have gotten to him before he died? That would have been a darn fine head." Associating with us rough types had made little August profane, you'll observe. I said: "On your toes, chaps. A theropod's been at this carcass and is probably nearby." "How d'you know?" James challenged, with the sweat running off his round red face. He spoke in what was for him a low voice, because a nearby theropod is a sobering thought even to the flightiest. I sniffed again and thought I could detect the distinctive rank odor of theropod. But I couldn't be sure because the stench of the carcass was so strong. My sahibs were turning green at the sight and smell of the cadaver. I told James: "It's seldom even the biggest theropod will attack a full-grown ceratopsian. Those horns are too much for them. But they love a dead or dying one. They'll hang round a dead ceratopsian for weeks, gorging and then sleeping their meals off for days at a time. They usually take cover in the heat of the day anyhow, because they can't stand much direct hot sunlight. You'll find them lying in copses like this or in hollows, anywhere there's shade." "What'll we do?" asked Holtzinger. "We'll make our first cast through this copse, in two pairs as usual. Whatever you do, don't get impulsive or panicky." I looked at Courtney James, but he looked right back and then merely checked his gun. "Should I still carry this broken?" he wanted to know. "No; close it, but keep the safety on till you're ready to shoot," I said. It's risky carrying a double closed like that, especially in brush, but with a theropod nearby, it would have been a greater risk to carry it open and perhaps catch a twig in it when one tried to close it. "We'll keep closer than usual, to be in sight of each other," I said. "Start off at that angle. Raja. Go slowly and stop to listen between steps." We pushed through the edge of the copse, leaving the carcass but not its stink behind us. For a few feet, we couldn't see a thing. It opened out as we got in under the trees, which shaded out some of the brush. The Sun slanted down through the trees. I could hear nothing but the hum of insects and the scuttle of lizards and the squawks of toothed birds in a treetop. I thought I could be sure of the theropod smell, but told myself that might be imagination. The theropod might be any of several species, large or small, and the beast itself might be anywhere within a half-mile radius. "Go on," I whispered to Holtzinger, for I could hear James and the Raja pushing ahead on my right and see the palm-fronds and ferns lashing about as they disturbed them. I suppose they were trying to move quietly, but to me they sounded like an earthquake in a crockery shop. "A little closer," I called, and presently they appeared slanting in toward me. " filled with ferns and clambered up the other side, then found our way blocked by a big clump of palmetto. "You go round that side: we'll go round this," I said, and we started off, stopping to listen and smell. Our positions were exactly the same as on that first day when James killed the bonehead. I judge we'd gone two-thirds of the way round our half of the palmetto when I heard a noise ahead on our left. Holtzinger heard it and pushed off his safety. I put my thumb on mine and stepped to one side to have a clear field. The clatter grew louder. I raised my gun to aim at about the height a big theropod's heart would be at the distance it would appear to us out of the greenery. There was a movement in the foliage -- and a six-foot-high bonehead stepped into view, walking solemnly across our front from left to right, jerking its head with each step like a giant pigeon. I heard Holtzinger let out a breath and had to keep myself from laughing. Holtzinger said: "Uh -- " "Quiet," I whispered. "The theropod might still -- " That was as far as I got when that damned gun of James's went off, ban! bang! I had a glimpse of the bonehead knocked arsyvarsy with its tail and hindlegs flying. "Got him!" yelled James, and I heard him run forward. "My God, if he hasn't done it again!" I groaned. Then there was a great swishing, not made by the dying bonehead, and a wild yell from James. Something heaved up and out of the shrubbery and I saw the head of the biggest of the local flesh-eaters, tyrannosaurus trionyches himself. The scientists can insist that rex is bigger than trionchyes, but I'll swear this tyrannosaur was bigger than any rex ever hatched. It must have stood twenty feet high and been fifty feet long. I could see its big bright eye and six-inch teeth and the big dewlap that hangs down from its chin to its chest. The second of the nullahs that cut through the copse ran athwart our path on the far side of the palmetto clump. Perhaps six feet deep. The tyrannosaur had been lying in this, sleeping off its last meal. Where its back stuck up above ground level, the ferns on the edge of the nullah masked it. James had fired both barrels over the theropod's head and woke it up. Then James, to compound his folly, ran forward without reloading. Another twenty feet and he'd have stepped on the tyrannosaur's back. when this thing popped up in front of him. He remembered his gun was empty and he'd left the Raja too far behind to get a clear shot. James kept his nerve at first. He broke open his gun, took two rounds from his belt and plugged them into the barrels. But in his haste to snap the gun shut, he caught his right hand between the barrels and the action -- the fleshy part between his thumb and palm. It was a painful pinch and so startled James that he dropped his gun. That made him go to pieces and he bolted. His timing couldn't have been worse. The Raja was running up with his gun at high port, ready to snap it to his shoulder the instant he got a clear view of the tyrannosaur. When he saw James running headlong toward him, it made him hesitate, as he didn't want to shoot James. The latter plunged ahead and, before the Raja could jump aside, blundered into him and sent them both sprawling among the ferns. The tyrannosaur collected what little wits it had and crashed after to snap them up. And how about Holtzinger and me on the other side of the palmettos? Well, the instant James yelled and the tyrannosaur's head appeared, Holtzinger darted forward like a rabbit. I'd brought my gun up for a shot at the tyrannosaur's head, in hope of getting at least an eye, but before I could find it in my sights, the head was out of sight behind the palmettos. Perhaps I should have shot at where I thought it was, but all my experience is against wild shots. When I looked back in front of me, Holtzinger had already disappeared round the curve of the palmetto clump. I'm pretty heavily built, as you can see, but I started after him with a good turn of speed, when I heard his rifle and the click of the bolt between shots: bang -- click-click -- bang -- click-click, like that. He'd come up on the tyrannosaur's quarter as the brute started to stoop for James and the Raja. With his muzzle twenty feet from the tyrannosaur's hide, he began pumping .#s into the beast's body. He got off three shots when the tyrannosaur gave a tremendous booming grunt and wheeled round to see what was stinging it. The jaws came open and the head swung round and down again. Holtzinger got off one more shot and tried to leap to one side. He was standing on a narrow place between the palmetto clump and the nullah. So he fell into the nullah. The tyrannosaur continued its lunge and caught him, either as he was falling or after he struck bottom. The jaws went chomp and up came the head with poor Holtzinger in 'hem, screaming like a doomed soul. aimed at the brute's face. Then I realized its jaws were full of my friend and I'd be shooting him. As the head went up, like the business end of a big power shovel, I fired a shot at the heart. But the tyrannosaur was already turning away and I suspect the ball just glanced along the ribs. The beast took a couple of steps away when I gave it the other barrel in the back. It staggered on its next step but kept on. Another step and it was nearly out of sight among the trees, when the Raja fired twice. The stout fellow had untangled himself from James, got up, picked up his gun and let the tyrannosaur have it. The double wallop knocked the brute over with a tremendous smash. It fell into a dwarf magnolia and I saw one of its hindlegs waving in the midst of a V shower of incongruously pretty pink-and-white jDetals. Can you imagine the leg of a bird of prey enlarged and thickened until it's as big round as the leg of an elephant? But the tyrannosaur got up again and blundered off without even dropping its victim. The last I saw of it was Holtzinger's legs dangling out one side of its jaws (by now he'd stopped screaming) and its big tail banging against the tree-trunks as it swung from side to side. The Raja and I reloaded and ran after the brute for all we were worth. I tripped and fell once, but jumped up again and didn't notice my skinned elbow till later. When we burst out of the copse, the tyrannosaur was already at the far end of the glade. I took a quick shot, but probably missed, and it was out of sight before I could fire another. We ran on, following the tracks and spatters of blood, until we had to stop from exhaustion. Their movements look slow and ponderous, but with those tremendous legs, they don't have to step very fast to work up considerable speed. When we'd finished gasping and mopping our foreheads, we tried to track the tyrannosaur, on the theory that it might be dying and we should come up to it. But the spoor faded out and left us at a loss. We circled round hoping to pick it up, but no luck. Hour later, we gave up and went back to the glade, feeling very dismal. ting with his back against a tree, holding his rifle and Holtzinger's. His right hand was swollen and blue where he'd pinched it, but still usable. His first words were: "Where the hell have you been? You shouldn't have gone off and left me; another of those things might have come along. Isn't it bad enough to lose one hunter through your stupidity without risking another one?" I'd been preparing a pretty warm wigging for James, but his attack so astonished me, I could only bleat: "We lost -- ?" "Sure," he said. "You put us in front of you, so if anybody gets eaten, it's us. You send a guy up against these animals undergunned. You -- " "You stinking little swine," I began and went on from there. I learned later he'd spent his his time working out an elaborate theory according to which this disaster was all our fault -- Holtzinger's, the Raja's and mine. Nothing about James's firing out of turn or panicking or Holtzinger's saving his worthless life. Oh, dear, no. It was the Raja's fault for not jumping out of his way, etcetera. Well, I've led a rough life and can express myself quite eloquently. The Raja tried to keep up with me, but ran out of English and was reduced to cursing James in Hindustani. I could see by the purple color on James's face that I was getting home. If I'd stopped to think, I should have known better than to revile a man with a gun. Presently James put down Holtzinger's rifle and raised his own, saying: "Nobody calls me things like that and gets away with it. I'll just say the tyrannosaur ate you, too." The Raja and I were standing with our guns broken open, under our arms, so it would take a good part of a second to snap them shut and bring them up to fire. Moreover, you don't shoot a .# holding it loosely in your hands, not if you know what's good for you. Next thing, James was setting the butt of his .# against his shoulder, with the barrels pointed at my face. Looked like a pair of blooming vehicular tunnels. The Raja saw what was happening before I did. As the beggar brought his gun up, he stepped forward with a tremendous kick. Used to play football as a young chap, you see. He knocked the .# up and it went off so the bullet missed my head by an inch and the explosion jolly well near broke my eardrums. The butt had been punted away from James's shoulder when the gun went off, so it came back like the kick of a horse. It spun him half round. The Raja dropped his own gun, grabbed the barrels and twisted it out of James's hands, nearly breaking the bloke's trigger finger. He meant to hit James with the butt, but I rapped James across the head with my own barrels, then bowled him over and began punching the stuffing out of him. He was a good-sized lad, but with my sixteen stone, he had no chance. " discolored, I stopped. We turned him over, took a strap out of his knapsack and tied his wrists behind him. We agreed there was no safety for us unless we kept him under guard every minute until we got him back to our time. Once a man has tried to kill you, don't give him another opportunity. Of course he might never try again, but why risk it? We marched James back to camp and told the crew what we were up against. James cursed everybody and dared us to kill him. "You'd better, you sons of bitches, or I'll kill you some day," he said. "Why don't you? Because you know somebody'd give you away, don't you? Ha-ha!" The rest of that safari was dismal. We spent three days combing the country for that t#n-annosaur. No luck. It might have been lying in any of those nullahs, dead or convalescing, and we should never see it unless we blundered on top of it. But we felt it wouldn't have been cricket not to make a good try at recovering Holtzinger's remains, if any. After we got back to our main camp, it rained. When it wasn't raining, we collected small reptiles and things for our scientific friends. When the transition chamber materialized, we fell over one another getting into it. The Raja and I had discussed the question of legal proceedings by or against Courtney James. We decided there was no precedent for punishing crimes combefore, which would presumably be outlawed by the statute of limitations. We therefore untied him and pushed him into the chamber after all the others but us had gone through. When we came out in the present, we handed him his gun -- empty -- and his other effects. As we expected, he walked off without a word, his arms full of gear. At that point, Holtzinger's girl, Claire Roche, rushed up crying: "Where is he? Where's August?" scene except to say it was distressing in spite of the Raja's skill at that sort of thing. We took our men and beasts down to the old laboratory building that Washington University has fitted up as a serai for expeditions to the past. We paid everybody off and found we were nearly broke. The advance payments from Holtzinger and James didn't cover our expenses and we should have damned little chance of collecting the rest of our fees from James or from Holtzinger's estate. And speaking of James, d'you know what that blighter was doing all this time? He went home, got more ammunition and came back to the university. He hunted up Professor Prochaska and asked him: "Professor, I'd like you to send me back to the Cretaceous for a quick trip. If you can work me into your schedule right now, you can just about name your own price. I'll offer five thousand to begin with. I want to go to April B.C." Prochaska answered: "Vot do you vant to go back again so soon so badly for?" "I lost my wallet in the Cretaceous," said James. "I figure if I go back to the day before I arrived in that era on my last trip. I'll watch myself when I arrived on that trip and follow myself till I see myself lose the wallet." "Five thousand is a lot for a vallet." "It's got some things in it I can't replace. Suppose you let me worry about whether it's worth my while." "Veil," said Prochaska, thinking, "the party that vas supposed to go out this morning has phoned that they vould be late, so maybe I can vork you in. I have alvays vondered vot vould happen vhen the same man occupied the same time tvice." So James wrote out a check and Prochaska took him to the chamber and saw him off. James's idea, it seems, was to sit behind a bush a few yards from where the transition chamber would appear and pot the Raja and me as we emerged. into our street-clothes and phoned our wives to come get us. We were standing on Forsythe Boulevard waiting for them when there was a loud crack, like an explosion or a close-by clap of thunder, and a flash of light not fifty feet from us. The shockwave staggered us and broke windows in quite a number of buildings. We ran toward the place and got there just as a policeman and several citizens came up. On the boulevard, just off the curb, lay a human body. At least it had been that, but it looked as if every bone in it had been pulverized and every blood vessel burst. The clothes it had been wearing were shredded, but I recognized an H.  H...# double-barreled express rifle. The wood was scorched and the metal pitted, but it was Courtney James's gun. No doubt whatever. Skipping the investigations and pened was this : Nobody had shot us as we emerged on the twentyfourth and that, of course, couldn't be changed. For that matter, the instant James started to do anything that would make a visible change in the world of eightyforces would snap him forward to the present to prevent a paradox. Now that this is better understood, the professor won't send anybody to a jDeriod less than five hundred years prior to the time that some time traveler has already explored, because it would be too easy to do some act, like chopping down a tree or losing some durable artifact, that would affect the later world. Over long periods, he tells me, such changes average out and are lost in the stream of time. We had a bloody rough time after that, with the bad publicity and all, though we did collect a fee from James's estate. The disaster hadn't been entirely James's fault. I shouldn't have taken him when I knew what a spoiled, unstable sort he was. And if Holtzinger could have used a heavy gun, he'd probably have knocked the tyrannosaur down, even if he didn't kill it, and so given the rest of us a chance to finish it. So that's why I won't take you to that period to hunt. There are plenty of other eras, and if you think them ovpr, I'm sure you'll find -- Good Lord, look at the time! Must run, old boy; my wife'll skin me. Good night! A # Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. Each month takes you on an expedition to one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, from Sun-baked Mercury to Frigid Pluto.  # two-color illustrations  Scientifically-accurate text with each illustration  Wonderful for your den  Printed in limited edition  Only # postpaid P. O. Box #-R Minneapolis # , Minnesota Endorsed by The Society for the Advancement of Space Travel # flat tiger A Certainly people have to be fed, but the question was -- what foods like to be eaten? announce that contact with intelligent beings other than ourselves has Anally been achieved and that, as a result of that meeting, peace has come at last, with the peoples of all nations firmly united behind a shining new doctrine. The true story of this final contact has been delayed for several months, for security reasons, which necessitated that any publication of the facts be cleared first with the Secret Sertion Service and Senator Bang -- who, while he had no direct official connection with the matter, would have caused everybody else a lot of trouble if he hadn't been checked with first. Also, it was necessary to clear with the opposite numbers of the above individuals and organizations in some one hundred and twenty-seven other nations, who either had representatives at the final contact aforementioned, or learned about it afterward in one way or another, and were understandably miffed at not being invited to the conference, as they called it. The story actually begins some few months back when a spaceship landed on the lawn of the White House one morning about eight A. M. and the President, looking out the window of his bedroom, perceived it. "A spaceship!" he ejaculated. "That is correct, sir," replied a voice inside his head. "The ship you see is the racing spaceabout Sunbeam and I am Captain Bligh. Over." "Captain Bligh!" echoed the astounded President. "Why, yes -- " The voice broke off suddenly and the President received the impression of a chuckle of amusement. "Oh, I see the coincidence that startles you. I read you loud and clear. Strange, isn't it, how words will sometimes duplicate themselves in a totally alien language? If you will go down to your office, you will meet me and we can talk there. Over." "I'll be right down," said the President, hurriedly grabbing for his pants. "Right. See you then. Over and out." "Over and out," replied the President mechanically. fice and locked the door. A curtain by the window stirred and there stepped into view a creature slightly shorter than himself, but much heavier, equipped with tentacles and fangs. The President, however, was pleasantly surprised to note that it -- or rather he, for it later turned out that Captain Bligh was, indeed, a male -- did not in the least repel him with his alienness, this being the first human to discover that no totally unfamiliar form can arouse an emotional response. "Captain Bligh, I presume," he said politely. "The same," replied the captain in passable English. "I have been profiting by the interval since we last spoke to learn your language and succeeded to some degree. Two-way mental radio is a marvelous device, you know. Over." "Roger -- I mean you do very nicely," said the President, passing a hand over his damp brow. "But you know, my dear sir, that ship of yours will attract all sorts of attention." "Not at all," answered Bligh. "The spaceabout's light-reflecting properties have been heterodyned to yohr personal retinal pattern only. Be assured that you are the only man on this world that can see it at the present moment." "That's a relief. You have no idea how the papers would jump on something like this." He gestured to a chair. "Won't you sit down?" "Thanks, but I'd rather stand. No leg joints, you see. You're probably wondering how I happen to be here." "Well, I don't think I should commit myself by giving you a definite answer immediately on that," said the President cautiously"No matter," said Bligh. "I will explain anyway. I happen to be in a roundthe-Galaxy race at the moment -- the Sunbeam is a stripped-down hot-warp. Unfortunately, as I was passing your solar system, I got a flat tiger and had to pull in for repairs." "I beg your pardon?" queried the President. "Did you say a flat tiger?" "Excuse me," said Bligh. "I should have explained. The tiger -- Felts Tigris Longipilis or what you know as the Siberian tiger -- is a discarded mutant variform of a race which was formerly distributed ever#Twhere throughout the Galaxy, but which has since ended its physical existence and passed on -- " Captain Bligh's voice took on a reverent hush and he removed the top of his head, considerably startling the President until he realized that it was actually a cap of some sort -- "to that great macro-universe up yonder to which we must all go one day." T he President cleared his throat embarrassedly. Captain Bligh put his cap back on and continued his explanation. "Tigers are, therefore, to be found on every world and familiar to every intelligent race. Since they still possess many of the potentials of their departed master-strain, they have been bred and conditioned to a variety of uses. One of the most widespread of these is as neural governors on the feeders that meter out fuel to the warp engines. The fuel feed must be controlled with such delicacy that no mechanical process can be devised fine enough. I have four warp engines on my Sunbeam and therefore, naturally, four tigers; one petty tiger and three tigers second class." "Ah -- yes," the President replied. "But you said that this tiger was flat." "Exactly. My tigers and others like them have been bred and trained for their work. It is a very exacting job, as you can imagine, since a tiger's attention second while the ship is in operation. To aid them in their concentration, the tigers' lungs are filled with a drug in gaseous form under high pressure, which, being slowly absorbed into the bloodstream, keeps them in a state of hyper-concentration." "Oh?" said the President. "But why a gaseous drug? I should think an injection -- " "Not at all. A gaseous drug has the great advantage that when the trip is over, or at any moment when the situation may require it, the tiger may exhale and within a few seconds be rid of the effects of the drug. No tiger of your planet, of course, could do it -- but our tigers are quite capable of holding their breaths for weeks." "Then how did this accident occur?" "My Number One Port Tiger somehow omitted a basal metabolism test at his last physical checkup," said the Captain sadly. "I am sorry to say that he was eighteen points over normal and used up his gas ahead of schedule. There is no room on the ship to set up the gas-manufacturing apparatus and, of course, yours was the only habitable planet for us to land on in this system. I did not know it was -- er -- civilized." "And when you saw it was?" prompted the President. "I looked you up immediately," replied the Captain. "I am in no sense an official, but I could hardly wait to offer you the tentacle of friendship on behalf of the Galactic Confraternity of Intelligences." gain a little time, the President dabbed at his mouth with his handkerchief and put it away again. "I am only, you must understand,. executive head of this one nation." "Oh? I see -- " said Captain Bligh, telepathing the equivalent of a bothered frown. "That makes it troublesome. Time is, of course, relative; but there's this little matter of my possibly losing the race if I have to spend too much time here. I can, of course, notify Exploration when I reach the finish point on Capra IV, but that will mean centuries of red tape. It would short-cut things enormously if I could carry word directly to Confraternity Headquarters that you already consider yourselves a member world." "Oh, I see," said the President. "Tell me, just how much time can you afford to spend?" "Well, let me see -- To set up the apparatus, one of your days -- To gas Number One Port Tiger, two days -- To dismantle, half a day. Say, three days from this coming sunset." "Hum," said the President thoughtfully, "I'll see what I can do." They went outside to the spaceabout together. "Be with you in a minute," said the Captain and dived in through the airlock of his vessel, to return a moment later, carrying -- he was obviously of inhuman strength -- a rather thin, helpless-looking tiger... "Mr. President," said the Captain. "May I present my Number One Port Tiger, second class." The Tiger extended a paw. "This is indeed an honor," it telepathed feebly. "Not at all, not at all," said the President gingerly shaking the animal's paw. "The poor fella's worn out," said the Captain in an aside to the President as he laid the Number One Port Tiger on the White House lawn. "The last of his gas went while we were still a number of light-years short of your system and we went the last stretch on nerve alone. Pretty well took it out of him." Looking at Number One Port lie on the grass, looking more like a cardboard cut-out of a tiger than the real item, the President was inclined to agree. "You're going to set up your apparatus here?" he asked, somewhat nervously. Bligh instantly comprehended the cause of his agitation. "Don't worry," he reassured. "I guarantee complete invisibility." "Well, if you think so -- " replied the President, rather doubtfully. "I'll leave you to that and see what I can do in this other matter." T he President returned to his office and sat down at his desk, pressing a button as he did so. A few seconds later, his Special Secretary, Morion Stanchly, put in an appearance. "Yes, Mr. President?" he said. "Sit down. Morion," said the President. "I have something to discuss with you." And he waved his Special Secretary to a chair. Morion Stanchly was a little administrative secret. He had been around the White House for forty years, inheriting the office from his father who had had it in turn from his father, and so on back to Preserved Stanchly, who had first been named to the post by General Washington, before the General became President. It was, of course, an unofficial post. Special Secretaries were always carried on the payroll under a different title and usually under a different name. Morion was, at the moment, down on the official books as a White House chauffeur named Joe Smith. He would remain Joe Smith until some contingency required him to adopt another cover name and occupation. But he would not leave the White House; and the secret of his existence would be passed on by word of mouth as a strictly administrative secret from one President to the next. His duty was to do the impossible. He was a tall, dark-browed capable-looking man in his early sixties and he nodded agreeably as he took his chair. "Morion," said the President. "We have been contacted from outer space." A true Stanchly, Morion merely raised one eyebrow quizzically. "Yes, sir?" he said. "And -- " The President told him the whole story. Morion got up and looked out the window onto the White House lawn. But, of course, he saw nothing. "What would you like me to do, sir?" he said, returning to his seat. "Three days," said the President. "I know it sounds ridiculous -- but would there be any possible chance of arranging a meeting of the Four of us inside of three days?" Hardly were the words out of his mouth when he realized how incongruous they sounded. "No, no, of course not," he said. "I'm thrown a little off balance by this thing. Morion. Maybe -- " "Well, now, Mr. President," said Morion judiciously. "All Four. Well, now -- " The President looked at him with hope beginning to revive in his eyes. "Morion!" he said. "You don't mean -- " "There is a certain possibility," said the Special Secretary. "Considering the gravity and urgency of the situation. Mark you -- just a possibility. I'll have to swear you to secrecy, of course." "Anything, Morion, anything!" "Very well, then," said the Special Secretary. H e rose from his chair and went to one wall of the room. He pushed aside a picture of a former President that was hanging there and revealed the front of a wall safe. His fingers spun the dial, the safe opened and he removed an old-fashioned wallphone with a handcrank, from which a long cord led back into the depths of the safe. He carried the phone to the desk and set it down. "Would you lock the door, Mr. President?" he asked courteously. The President went to do so, hearing behind his back the shirring ring of the phone as Morion turned the bell crank for one long ring and three shorts. There was a slight pause; and then the Special Secretary spoke into the antiquated mouthpiece. "Hello? Boris? This is Morion... why, yes. A trifle chilly here. Yes, a head cold. No! You don't say. No! Is that a fact? Not really. No -- " He paused, covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned apologetically to the President. "If you don't mind, Mr. President," he said. "Perhaps you'd better wait outside, after all." Bowing his head, the President unlocked the office door and went out, closing it behind him. Outside, he lit a cigarette and paced up and down nervously. After a short while, he returned to the office door and opened it a crack. The voice of Morion came to his ear, in conversation now with a man apparently named Cecil. The President went back to his pacing for another fifteen minutes and then ventured to open the door again. Morion waved him to come back inside. " -- that's right, Raoul," he was saying into the mouthpiece. "Here tomorrow at three o'clock local time, in the afternoon. Yes... Yes. You may bring your man in by the north underground entrance. Yes... Yes, indeed. The same to you and Felice. Good-by." He hung up, returned the phone to the safe, closed the safe and replaced the picture. "They'll be here tomorrow, sir," he told the President. "Morion!" said the President, delightedly. "This is miraculous." "Part of my duties, sir," replied Morion, immovably. "It is a miracle!" said the President. "What would I do without you? Tell me. Morion -- those other men you were talking to. They wouldn't by any chance be the Special Secretaries o( -- " "Mr. President!" interrupted Morion, deeply shocked. "Oh, sorry," said the President. "I didn't mean to pry." "Such information is absolutely restricted." "Sorry." "Well, now," said Morion, the stern lines of his face relaxing. "No damage was done, fortunately. You understand, though, that the strictest security is necessary in my work." "Oh, of course," said the President. "Where shall I meet the other -- the visitors. Morion?" "I would suggest right here in your office, Mr. President," said Morion. "Leave the details to me." "Gladly," said the President. "And now," he added a trifle nervously, "perhaps I'd better go back outside and let Captain Bligh know." "I would advise that, sir," said Morion Stanchly, nodding soberly. "I will be honored to attend your meeting," said Captain Bligh, waving a cheerful tentacle as he busily connected pieces of equipment together. A t three o'clock the following day, Captain Bligh and the President were ensconced in the President's office, for the meeting that would start as soon as those others due to be present had arrived. They were talking golf. Or rather the President was talking golf, and the Captain, as befitted a being strongly sportsconscious, was listening. " The fourteenth on that particular course is a dog-leg," the President was saying. "Three hundred and forty-five yards from tee to pin. I decided to take a chance -- " There was a discreet knock on the door and Morion appeared, ushering in, in that order, the Prime Minister of England, the President of France and the Secretary of a Certain Party in Russia. The President of the United States rose to his feet. "Gentlemen," he said warmly. "May I present Captain Bligh of the Galactic Confraternity of Intelligences -- " and there was the usual bustle of hand and tentacle shaking and personal introductions, which ended with all four of the humans seated around the President's desk and Bligh standing facing them all. "To start the ball rolling," said our President, "may I say that . there is nothing official about this meeting. Just a little -- er -- gettogether." "Of course," said Great Britain. "But certainly," said France. "Maybe," said the Secretary of the Certain Party, looking suspiciously at Bligh. "Well, at any rate," said the President, hurrying along, "since the meeting's to be informal, I suggest we get right down to business. I assume that you have all been informed of the reasons for Captain Bligh's presence on to the Confraternity Earth's wish to join the rest of the Galaxy in that great organization to which he belongs. The question in my mind, and I'm sure in yours, is why it would or would not be feasible for us to do so. Captain Bligh has offered to cast some light on this question for us by explaining something of what life is like as a member of the Confraternity and afterward answering any questions we may wish to put him. Captain Bligh?" H e sat down. Leaving the floor to the Captain, who waved a tentacle modestly. "Well, now," he said. "I'll see what I can do to satisfy you people about the Galaxy. As you know, there's nothing official about my visit or myself and ings who could describe the situation much better than I -- you'll meet some of them if you decide to join the Confraternity. But I'll do my best as an amateur and a sports-being to pinch hit for them. "I don't happen to know the figures on how many races and inhabited worlds there are in the Confraternity. Let's just say that there are enough of both to make their exact counting a thing of merely academic interest. As for why you haven't been visited before -- a question my host here asked me on the first day of my arrival -- you know how it is. Most of the Galaxy has been explored; and, without any offense, you are in kind of an out-of-theway corner here. I'd say it was inevitable that someone should come along sooner or later and find you; but not so surprising that it hasn't happened before this, though for all I know, you may have been noted down in some ship's logbook a few thousand years ago -- " "Look here," interrupted the Prime Minister, "if something like that happened, wouldn't the Confraternity have taken some measures to acquaint us with their existence? Now wouldn't they?" "Well -- I suppose they might have," said Bligh, a trifle embarrassed. "But a few thousand years ago, I don't imagine you would have been too much interested in interstellar travel. Plenty to keep you occupied here, then, you know. Not too much point in making a big to-do about establishing contact. Of course, I don't know if that's what might have happened, it's only a reasonable guess." "Grumpf!" said the Prime Minister. "How about these flying saucers?" demanded the President of France. "Pardon me?" asked Bligh. The President of France explained. "Oh," said Bligh. "Chlorophyllsniffers. Perfectly harmless, but a slight menace to low-flying aircraft. Every planet has them flitting in occasionally. A few leased in your upper atmosphere will scare them off." T he president of France looked uncertain, but made a note of Bligh's answer. "You're supposed to be telepathic," said the Prime Minister, returning to the attack. "Aren't there some telepaths in this Confraternity that would have received our -- er -- thought whatchamacallits? Wouldn't there?" "Well, yes," said Bligh. "Bound to be, I suppose. There's some races that can hear an electron scratch its nose in the next spiral nebula. Still, maybe they didn't think it important to mention it. Different people, different ways, you know. It takes all kinds to make a universe." "Well, dammit!" said the Prime Minister. "Isn't there any organization with the job of finding new cultures?" "Oh, yes -- Exploration," replied Bligh. "But they're mostly a bunch of hobbyists in actual fact, you understand. I mean -- no great purpose in finding another new culture when there's so many around to begin with. They might be poking around here; and then they might decide to poke around there. Lots of places, you know, where a new race might pop up." This announcement seemed to throw the meeting temporarily into silence. Then the Secretary of the Certain Party leaned over and whispered in the ear of the President of the United States, who drew the other two into a huddle, which ended with them all resuming their places and the President facing Bligh again. "I ask for all of us," said the President, "whether you are truly representative of the intelligence and culture of the normal member of the Confraternity?" "Not at all, not at all," Bligh hurried to assure him. "There's every conceivable kind of intelligence and culture in the Confraternity. All kinds of life-forms. All kinds and types of intelligences." There was a moment's silence. "Then what -- " demanded the Secretary, speaking up unexpectedly and gutturally on his own, "do they have in common between them?" "Love," replied Bligh blissfully. "Their mutual love and affection." There was another short silence. "Love each other, eh?" grunted the Prime Minister. "Yes," said Bligh, "just as they will love you humans if you ' become a part of the Confraternity." tatives withdrew into another conference. Little telepathic snatches of conversation reached the mind of Captain Bligh -- "The U.N., of course -- but the circumstances -- decadent capitalistic emotion -- now, my dear fellow, be reasonable -- " but he very politely ignored them. The President broke from the huddle and once more approached Bligh. "Naturally," he said, "none of us here disparage love as a desirable acquisition, where one people are concerned with others. But -- er -- there is the practical side to any alliance -- a question of tangibles -- " "Tangibles? Why, of course!" cried Bligh. "It's with tangibles that the United Peoples of the Confraternity will wish to express their love toward you. Grants-inaid and rehabilitation funds from the Galactic Treasury -- donations of up-to-date equipment and supplies. Technical assistance, of course." "Of course?" said four voices at once. "For little things. Merely to raise your standard of living to average Confraternity level," said Captain Bligh. "Electronic power plants -- am I correct in assuming you have not yet cracked the electron? -- force shields, weather control units, drugs to conquer all your diseases and reverse the process of aging -- all these little home comforts will be donated to you as a matter of course." The four humans looked at each other. "And -- " continued Bligh, "you will want to hook on to the absolutely free Galaxy-wide transportation system. A terminal will be set up on your Moon immediately. You will find," said Captain Bligh with a roguish telepathic twinkle, "many pleasant vacation spots in the Galaxy with all conveniences furnished free of charge by the local life-form." He stopped speaking. For a moment, nobody said anything. Then the President cleared his throat and spoke. "And what kind of tangibles," he said, "would the Confraternity expect us to express our love with?" "Tangibles? From you? My dear human!" cried Bligh. "What are material things compared to the pure emotion of love? Tangibles can't buy happiness. After all, it's love that makes the Universe go around." He telepathed a quick shake of the head. "No. No. You people will give in return only the rare quality of your affection." T he four men looked doubtful. "Believe me," went on Captain Bligh, earnestly, "out in the Universe, material things are nothing and less than nothing. With so many differing races, how could a material standard be set up common to all? Useless and less than useless. That is why, among the stars, the common currency is love and a people are rated on the quantity and quality of their capability for affection." He beamed at them. "Permit me to say that you people strike me as having great capabilities along that line. I've only had a chance to glance at things here, but judging from your movies, your books and magazines -- " "Ahem!" said the President, clearing his throat abruptly. "Well, now, I must admit you paint an attractive picture. Captain. If you'll excuse us again for a minute -- " Captain Bligh waved a gracefully assenting tentacle, and the four humans withdrew into another huddle. After a few moments of animated conversation, they returned to Bligh. "I have been deputed to say, for all of us," said the President of the United States, "that while, as I have mentioned before, there is nothing official about this little meeting or ourselves, certainly there seems to be no conceivable reason why we humans should not respond with affection to affection freely given by others." "My dear sir!" cried Bligh, delighte.d. "How well you put it. I was sure you would agree." His gaze took in them all. "It was inevitable. While I'm not a particularly perceptive being, as beings go, it seemed to me that I could see Love and Affection hovering around you all like an aura. How right I was. Gentlemen, the Universe is yours, just as soon as you make your adjustment." "Adjustment?" said the Prime Minister. "Of course. But a mere bagatelle. A nothing," said Captain Bligh. "A mere matter of love extended logically to include all living creatures. A moment's adjustment by a metabolic ordinator, completely painless. Clicksnap and it's over and you are all energy eaters." "Eaters of what?" said the President of France. "Energy. My dear sirs," said Captain Bligh. "You surely would not wish to continue with your present diets. How could you eat something you love? And love, like charity, begins at home. Moreover -- " he went on -- "how could you expect the rest of the Universe to accept you otherwise? Consider the similarity of shapes. For example, what a Red-eyed Inchos would think on arriving to set up a modern weather control system for your planet, if he should see one of you sitting down to -- " the Captain shuddered -- "a roast turkey, except for a slight difference in size, the exact image of himself. Similarly with a Lullar and a barbecued pig, or a Brvandig and a baked sturgeon." A fter a moment, the President of the United States cleared his throat. "Perhaps -- " he suggested, "a strictly vegetarian -- " "Mr. President," said Bligh, interrupting with dignity, "I am myself only one of uncounted myriads, but some of my best friends are plants." He fixed the President with a stern eye. "I hate to think what a Snurlop would say if he happened to see a loaf of your bread and imagined a child of his own being harvested, threshed, ground and even baked!" "But now -- " interposed the President of France hastily, "certainly liquids such as wine -- " "Please!" choked Bligh, turning green. He staggered and leaned against the desk beside him. Hastily the President of the United States fanned the Captain's face with a major-general's appointment that happened to be lying close at hand. Slowly, the color returned to Bligh's gums. "Please," he repeated feebly, "amputation, crushing, fermentation -- horrible." He shook his head. "No -- no liquids." "Water," said the Prime Minister. Bligh looked at him. "Think," he said, "just think of the minute organisms that must die, either through being boiled alive, poisoned with chlorine, or digested living, to provide you with ordinary drinking water. Why, the Fellibriks of -- " "Yes, yes," interrupted the President hastily, "I'm sure your little friends would be shocked. If you will excuse us just once more -- " "Certainly," replied Bligh, faintly, sagging against the desk. Stout sports-being as he was, the images just conjured up by the recent conversation had turned him pale inside (he was incapable of turning pale outside). As he breathed heavily and tried to recover, little bits of conversation reached him. "Borscht -- civet de lapin -- rare steak -- roast beef and Y orkshire pudding -- sacrifice -- solidarity -- " Slowly, but with the look of men who have been through the fire and emerged triumphant, the four representatives of humanity turned back to the representative of the Galactic Confederation of Races. come to the world. We are united at last as we have never before been in history, united as one people behind what has come to be known as the UnBligh Doctrine, and which is now emblazoned in letters of gold over the front doors of the U.N. Building. No government or individual or collection of individuals shall have the power at any time to come between any other individual and the due and lawful exercise of his appetite. Let the Galactic Confederation of Races beware! To find a thief in a society where crime does not exist, there is only one answer -- manufacture a thief to catch the thief I A t #:# P.M. on Monday, October #, #, I became a deviant -- I left my job half an hour early. I called my Department Director and told him I wasn't feeling well. It wasn't exactly a lie or I couldn't have told it, but it was so close to one that I fidgeted nervously in my chair, facing the screen. I wasn't feeling well, true -- but it was all in my head. The Director looked at me shrewdly. His name was Foreman; he had a dark face and black, bristling eyebrows that almost met over his nose. He had been Director for only a year. If there had been such a thing as dislike, I would have disliked him. As it was, he made my back stiffen and my throat tighten, which was a strange talent in an executive. But he had a talent for character analysis, which was why he was Director instead of a Statistician #st Class like me, and he asked, "How long has it been since you've seen your analyst?" "Five years," I replied. "That's too long. Norm," he said, taking a kindly interest. "This might be psychosomatic." "I resent that," I snapped, feeling my circulation speed up and my face grow warm. "My childhood was just as scientific as yours." He had used a nasty word and he knew it. I realized immediately that he had used it deliberately for its shock value and my reaction had confirmed his snap diagnosis. "Of course. Norm," he soothed. "Everyone's was. Just call me a cautious old fool and see an analyst for my sake. Okay?" That was different. It was an order and I naturally would obey it. "Okay," I said quickly, not giving him a chance to specify what analyst and when. my office until the publicroom registered empty and walked through quickly to the publicdoor. Automatically, I punched the time clock. My premature departure would show up in the statistics, but for the first time in my life I didn't care. "Norm has departed from the norm," I thought, and chuckled. I hadn't laughed like that since I was a child, and I stopped suddenly. It was a bad sign. The basis of humor is surprise and disappointed expectation; neither of them have any place in a well-run world or a well-ordered personality. I crossed the publichall to the elevator that was waiting and stopped, shocked. There was already someone in the elevator -- a small, round, middle-aged stranger with a silvery thatch of hair cut short. His astonishment at my careless intrusion on his privacy was obvious, but he recovered quickly. As I was stepping back, mumbling my apologies, he said gently, "Wait, brother." I waited. "You've got troubles, brother," he went on with impersonal kindness. "See an analyst! Don't wait another twenty-four hours! Meanwhile, be my guest." Overwhelmed by his benevolence, I accepted his offer and rode with him to the publicfloor in silence. As we parted he handed me a yellowed piece of stiff paper and said cryptically, "If life ain't dandy, see Andy." After his silvery head had disappeared in the crowd outside, I looked at the paper. It said: Freelance Analyst and Public Headshrinker I shrugged, crumpled it in my hand and looked around for a publican. I couldn't find any. I stuck it in my pocket and forgot about it; I had more important worries. I put on my publicface and merged with the crowd moving past Statistical Center. The street, of course, is common and there is no right of privacy there. In the street, we are anonymous. I maneuvered myself into the subway stream and rode home in the proper manner, my arms folded across my chest, my eyes, behind their one-way glasses, fixed on a spot just above the head of the farthest person. My thoughts were torment. I was a Statistician #st Class. It was a good thing to be and I was contented with it. Naturally. The annual Examinations had tested me, classified me and placed me, as they had everyone. Statistician #st Class was the ideal position for a person with my intelligence and psychological profile. A n almost forgotten economic theory had an excellent aphorism : From everyone according to his ability -- to everyone according to his need. It hadn't worked for those almost forgotten economists; it wasn't an economic theory -- it was a psychological concept and they had no means whatever of determining a person's ability or his need. That was before Kinder made psychology a science and produced a society that worked. Everyone had a job that suited his talents and his psychological needs, and everyone was happy because his needs were satisfied. Children were raised scientifically and, when they were grown, they were treated as human beings, with certain inalienable rights. A society so built could not help but be happy. For one hundred years, the world had rocked along on an even keel. It did not go anywhere or want to; it already was there. Everybody was happy instead of swinging back and forth from gloom to ecstasy. Ecstasy is a dangerous emotion. As a statistician, I knew that all things balance out. Ecstasy must be paid for in misery. And it is the extremes that really rock the boat and threaten society. So I worked with the things I loved -- the Computer, numbers, graphs -- in a reasonably happy world and everything was rosy and private. Until a week ago. Then it was still private but bleak. Because I was what I was, I noticed it. Because I was what I was, I knew what it meant and I kept it to myself. Now, because I was what I was, I had to do something about it. My home was a conventional side-by-side duplex. I entered the common and went into my quarters and sat down at my desk. I waited long enough for my wife to notice that I was home -- in case she was entertaining a lover -- and then I punched for companionship. Ordinarily a wife is the last person a man would choose, but I had to talk to somebody. In a moment, the screen brightened. My wife's face appeared in it. It seemed concerned; at another time, I would have worried about causing it. Naida was a good wife, mated to me intellectually and emotionally, and beautiful in my eyes. "Norm!" she exclaimed. "What's the matter? You're home twentyfive minutes early." "If you aren't occupied," I said formally, "I'd like the pleasure of your company." "So early?" she asked, her eyes wide and startled. "If it is congenial," I said stiffly. "Of course," she said hurriedly. "It's just -- I mean -- five minutes?" she swept into the common in her laciest negligee, looking unusually beautiful and desirable, but my mind was too troubled to be drawn off on a tangent. "I've just uncovered a crime wave," I said miserably. Disappointment wiped her smile away and then her features assumed a proper expression of tender attention. "What's crime?" she asked. I was ready; I had asked the Computer. "An action that threatens the structure of society and is condemned by law." "Like invasion of privacy?" she said brightly. "Worse, Naida," I groaned. "Much worse." "What could be worse than invasion of privacy?" "Theft," I said in a low, harsh voice. "Theft?" "Taking something that doesn't belong to you." "But I don't see how that could be worse than invasion of pri -- " "Invasion of privacy," I interrupted with inexcusable impatience, "can be thoughtless or accidental. Theft demands intent; it indicates a basic perversion of character." It had been such a small thing at the start. Only a statistician would have seen it; only a statistician would have found it meaningful. A statistician works with figures day after day. There is a rhythm to statistics that sings to his inner ear, sweetly, soothingly; a dissonance is a frightful thing. Statistical analysis was the vital job of my world. Everyone felt that way about his work, of course, but in the case of statistical analysis it was true. The duty of every society is to establish a norm and to correct marked deviations from it. In my world, statistical analysis established the norm and the analysts did the correction -- what there was of it. Last Monday, I had been scanning the Computer's daily summary. Everything had been going smoothly: # gal. water purified # gal. water consumed; # births# deaths... And finally, at the bottom of the sheet: I candy reward taken from baby. "Without consent?" Naida asked. "How could the child consent? It couldn't even talk!" "But that wasn't in the summary." "No, I got the details from the nursery. The foster-mother had just given the reward to the child for compassionate behavior and had left him to enjoy it in privacy. His angry wails brought her back. The reward was gone. Someone walking past had snatched it from the baby's hands. The child was furious; his social development received a setback that will take years to overcome. Although he could not describe the thief, the child exhibited a sharp and unwarranted suspicion of the nursery analyst. Presumably the thief was a man." "How awful!" Naida shuddered. "It might have been one of our children." Naida. Society's children. We have no right to make emotional claims on them -- no right, therefore, even to know which of them is ours. All children are our children; all men are our brothers." "Yes, Norm," she said dutifully. "Norm," she went off on her own tangent, "could we have another? Child, I mean?" I sighed heavily; it was a familiar question. "Our request is in, Naida. What else can I do? All right," I added hastily, "I'll ask again about the quota for our genetic bracket." "Norm," Naida said distantly, "I think I'll apply for nursery duty." ' I sighed again. "Yes, dear." Every month she applied, and every month she was turned down. She had the wrong psychological profile for the nursery; she couldn't help smothering the children with sticky, indiscriminate mother love and creating all sorts of fixations and complexes in them. The analysts would sooner have admitted a hooded cobra. "Candy from a baby!" she said, switching back with mercurial ease. "That's terrible! But it doesn't seem so very serious." I massed my thoughts for a frontal assault on the fortress of her understanding. "Society is a delicately balanced mechanism. Societies in motion can absorb and dampen harmful vibrations, but our society is at rest. One anti-social act makes it quiver; one anti-social individual can throw the whole thing out of alignment. "We aren't organized to handle crime. We haven't had a theft for seventy-five years -- I asked the Computer. There aren't even any laws against it. Incipient criminals are nipped in the nursery. We're like a long-isolated community coming in contact with an infectious disease for which we have lost our immunity. The way the Polynesians did, we may succumb to measles and smallpox." Naida's eyes opened wide in an expression I had always found tremendously attractive; now it irritated me. "Goodness!" she exclaimed. "We aren't in danger of that, too?" "No, no! It was just a comparison. I stopped to gather together my scattered thoughts. "That was last Monday. The next day, a child's walker was stolen from a nursery on the other side of town. Wednesday, a sack of marbles disappeared from the East Side. Thursday, a football was left overnight on a playing field; it wasn't there in the morning. On Friday, it was a teen-ager's convertible; on Saturday, the virginity of a girl who was strolling through Central Park." "But that's silly! All he had to do was ask!" "Of course. But that wouldn't have satisfied him." Naida frowned thoughtfully. "It sounds exactly as if the thief were growing up." "Sunday, he grew up," I lars from the First National Bank." N aida sank back in the loveseat, shocked. "How could he do that?" "No human tellers were present to check on the computer at the bank. When a routine series of drafts on the city's general fund, signed with signatures identical with those of the City Treasurer, were presented at a public cash booth, the money, in small, untraceable bills, was delivered without question. The discrepancy was discovered this morning." "How do you know it wasn't the Treasurer's real signature?" "They were identical. Real signatures always have minor variations." I hesitated. "Or so the Computer said." "What's being done about it?" "Nothing. I tell you, Naida, we aren't equipped to handle something like this. They're passing it off at City Hall as a clerical error. They think the money will turn up in another account." Naida looked at me steadily with her large, violet eyes. "And you know better." She said it firmly, but I had to justify myself all the same. "Don't you see? It's because I'm a statistician. Computers don't make mistakes; only people do. Figures don't lie. And statistics predict the future automatically. With me, extrapolation is second nature; I follow the curve to the next intersection and I know what's coming. "Somewhere in this city is a man who will wreck our society thoroughly and permanently on the jagged rocks of his frustrations. No one but me can see it. If I don't do something, this world of ours is gone. I've got to do something! Social consciousness is bred in me! I must protect society!" "Norm!" she said, some of my panic finally reaching her. "What are you going to do?" "That's what's bothering me," I confessed. "I can't track down a criminal; it's not in my psychological profile. The bloodhound has been bred out of the human race, like all the rest of the socially destructive impulses. Imagine the frustration of a detective with nothing to detect!" Naida wrinkled her forehead. "Isn't there an old saying: It takes a thief to catch a thief?" I looked at her, startled. "Darling!" I said, and caught her up in my arms. "That's it. That's the answer." ; She looked surprised, then pleased. The afternoon ended pretty much the way she had expected, after all. old one. The gilt had peeled away long ago, leaving only a black outline that read: Ercelanrt? Anul'.st and I'ublir HcacUlirinkcr The building was old, too, a relic of pre-analytic days, a greenglass-and-aluminum eyesore, very pigeon-specked. As far as I could tell, Andrew Q. Rednik was the only tenant left in the towering monstrosity. Why he had an office on the thirty-seventh floor, I couldn't understand.  T S Y L A N A The elevators were all sealed and hung with tattered signs; Out of Order. I had climbed all thirty-seven flights of stairs and I wheezed in front of the door, not feeling well -- not feeling well at all. A small sign by an old-fashioned door knob said: Grin and come in. I went in, but I didn't grin. The waiting room was peeling chrome and split plastic. Faded signs were tacked all over the walls: I would have turned right around and gone back down those thirty-seven flights of stairs, but Rednik was the only freelance analyst listed in the directory. That was the disadvantage of nonconformity. It was also the advantage, I reflected with scrupulous fairness. Without Rednik, I would have been helpless; no other analyst would risk the uncertainties and inevitable frustrations of freelance existence. There was an inner door. It was closed. There was a sign on it, too: Sit down and consider your symptoms. The analyst will be with you in a moment. I started searching for the chair with the fewest splits in the bottom. Before I had it picked out. the inner door opened and Rednik stuck his head out, looking wise and benevolent like an extinct, snow-capped volcano. "Rednik?" I asked. "It ain't Santa Claus, brother." "Who?" "Never mind," he said. "You wouldn't remember." antique steel-and-plastic desk and a traditional red-leather couch. On second glance, the couch seemed more original than traditional. On the ceiling above it, where the eyes of the recumbent patient would naturally rest. was still another sign: Don't second-uess the analyst! "Now, boy, what's the trouble?" Rednik inquired paternally. I sank into the ancient chair opposite the desk. "I've got to do something," I said desperately, "and it isn't in my profile." "Naturally" "What's natural about it?" 'Why else would you come to me? If it were in your profile, it would be done and forgotten." He sighed. "That's the one trouble with this world: there's no one capable of handling the unexpected. But then, if there were, it wouldn't be this kind of world at all." "Are you saying that there's an advantage in being unadjusted?" "That depends on what you mean by advantage. If you mean happiness -- no. If you mean power -- there's always an advantage in being different, if you can handle it. In the country of the normal, the neurotic man is king." He squinted at me shrewdly. "You want to be king?" "Of course not!" I protested, offended. "I'm happy the way things are -- except for one little prob-lem. I don't want to change anything; I want to keep things from being changed. But I've got to find somebody, and when I find him, I've got to be able to do whatever is necessary." "Ah!" Rednik said wisely. "The rabbit wants to become a tiger." "A what?" "A manhunter!" "Oh. Yes." His stubby fingers beat out a nervous rhythm on the desk. "You know what you're asking me to do. This is against all the analytic regulations. It would mean my license if anyone found out." "If you don't do it," I said somberly, "it may mean the end of the world." He frowned at me speculatively. "As bad as that?" "Every bit." He slapped the desk decisively. "I'll do it." "Why?" I asked bluntly, surprising myself. Already my psychological profile must have changed under the frustrations of the resolved situation, for my question was a glaring invasion of privacy. He waggled a roguish finger at me. "Ah-ah!" he chided. "Now you are trying to analyze me. Be patient." He chuckled suddenly. "Get it? Don't be an analyst! Be a patient!" I didn't think it was the least bit funny. He chuckled again. "You'll get your chance. But if you must have a reason, let us say for now that I'm bored." "Bored? Then you aren't in the right job." "Or perhaps I've been in the right job too long." I glanced nervously at my watch. "Well, let's get started. I've got only two hours for lunch." "We've started already. Don't you feel repressions lifting their snaky heads in your subconscious?" "Well, maybe," I admitted reluctantly. "But you haven't done anything!" He sighed. "So we must be active about it, eh?" He got up from the desk and settled himself comfortably on the couch. Folding his hands across tiis chest, he said, 'Walk around back there where I can't see you." "But I'm the one who's supposed to lie on the couch!" "That's analysis, when you get your repressions removed!" he snapped, raising up on one elbow to scowl at me. "This is reverse analysis. Now walk around back there!" Annoyed, I went behind the couch while he got comfortable. "The first thing I can remember," he began in a distant, reminiscing voice, "was when I was four years old. I saw my father kissing my mother and I ran over to them and hit my father. I kept yelling, 'Let her go! You're hurting her! I hate you! I hate you!' After that, relations between my father and me were a little strained -- " "Your father!" I exclaimed. "Your mother! What are you talking about? You were living with them? What a nasty situation!" He turned and glared at me. "You aren't very good at this sort of thing, are you? You're supposed to listen, not comment." I clamped my lips shut on an irritated retort. "When I was twenty-seven," he went on easily, "I perfected analysis and revolutionized society -- " "What are you talking about?" I demanded indignantly. "Kinder perfected analysis a hundred years ago." Wordlessly, he motioned toward the sign on the ceiling: Don't second-guess the analyst! "I'm beginning to dislike you," I growled. He beamed at me. "Fine. Soon it will blossom into loathing." On the way back to Statistical Center, I followed a lone pigeon for two blocks. It finally got alarmed and flew away. T he sessions continued daily. Every day for a week, Rednik lay comfortably on his redleather couch, rambling incoherently over an implausibly long and eventful existence, incident by incident, in disgusting detail, while I paced the floor behind him, longing to impart confidences of my own. He kept cutting me off. Every day my repressions grew stronger and my disposition more touchy. I lost weight; I couldn't sleep; illogical impulses swept over me periodically. I kept up my search for the thief, poring over the daily summaries in spite of a growing distaste for the Computer, numbers and graphs. But I couldn't find another isolated statistic; the thief held his hand. I repeatedly asked myself a question that had no answer: What is there to steal when a dollars? W'as I wrong? I wondered. VTas the thief satisfied, tna compulsion worked out? Was all my torment in vain? There were no answers to these, either. At home, I became brusque and tyrannical. I broke in on Naida unexpectedly with the tormented hope of finding her with a lover; when I was disappointed, as I always was, I stormed at her jealously anyway. When she was gone, I switched a couple of wires in her intercom so that it transmitted continuously, whether the receiver was turned on or not. After that, I sat for hours watching her move about her quarters unaware. I found myself growing passionately in love with my own wife. It was a vastly unsettling experience. When I was at work, I called her several times a day. When I was home, I summoned her curtly at all hours. Finally I became completely anti-social: I moved her and her belongings into my own quarters and sealed up her half of the duplex. Oddly enough, Naida seemed to bloom under this boorish treatment. She smiled constantly. Often, as she went about her daily tasks, pushing buttons, selecting menus, she would laugh and sing. Women are inexplicable. At the same time, I began developing strange interests in other women. The first time, I saw a girl on the street and obeyed an impulse to follow her. I followed her halfway across town before she turned and asked pleasantly, "What is you want?" "You," I said bluntly. She was too well raised, of course, to frustrate a fellow human being. Only much later did I realize that I hadn't even learned her name. fied with little, I became a tortured creature dissatisfied with abundance. Often I was unhappy. Sometimes I was miserable. And once or twice I felt the poignant stab of an ecstasy I had never dreamed. My only consolation was that I was sacrificing myself for my world. It had better be worth it, I thought bitterly. Still the thief did not strike. The annual Examinations were upon me suddenly. In three days, I would submit my personality to their prodding and prying and precise judgments. I would do poorly. It would mean my job. Brooding, unhappy, I returned to Rednik and his horrid revelations once more. I forced myself to open  the door, my breath rasping in my throat. I closed it behind me and stared at it blindly for a moment, bracing myself for the ordeal that waited on the red-leather couch. My blurred eyes focused. I saw something I should have seen seven days before. The letters on the door spelled: tsylanA ecnaleerF dna reknirhsdaeH cilbuP I pronounced each word slowly. They made a kind of sense, like an ancient root language -- like reverse analysis. A reverse analyst, of course, is a tsyleina. A tsylana ecnaleerf. I shuddered. It made even more sense than that. Rednik -- Kinder. Kinder -- Rednik. It was the sort of thing a man would do who would put "Don't Kid with Your Id!" on his waiting room wall. I burst through the inner door and said accusingly: "You're Kinder!" "That's what I told you the first day," he said blandly..."Because you didn't expect me to believe you." He shrugged carelessly. "It was a matter of indifference whether you believed me or not." "Everything you told me was true," I said with a shaky, horrified voice. "All that fantastic assemblage of enormities and atrocities." "Perhaps. And, again, perhaps not." His smile was infuriating. of my itability to pin him down. If there had been a weapon handy, I would have killed him without hesitation and without remorse. "I hate you!" I said violently. "Why? Why? Why make rules and then shatter them?" "Let me tell you a story," he began. "Not that again!" "This is a different kind of story," he went on, unperturbed. "Once upon a time, there was a Creator. He made a man and a woman, and He created a perfect place for them to live in. He called it Paradise. Every day. He looked out on Paradise and saw the same stupid, happy people, not wanting anything because everything was available, not going anywhere because there was nowhere to go, unchanging because there was no reason for change. "Finally He was tempted to create a little sin and therewith He gave his creatures change, misery, ecstasy and free will. For without sin, there is no free will; without evil, there is no choice." I stared at him vacantly. I couldn't stop thinking about a man named Kinder. "It's a lie," I said. "That would make you about a hundred and thirty years old. Nobody lives that long." Rednik sighed. "One hundred and twenty-seven, boy. You didn't listen good. And that isn't unusual in this era of the integrated personality. Lots of people will live that long. Doctors used to be familiar with diseases they called psychosomatic. Today it works the other way around: the mind makes the body well instead of sick. Well, boy, good-by," he said abruptly. "The treatment is over." "You mean I'm finished?" I exclaimed. "No. I'm finished. You've just begun. You have frustrations enough. Frustrations are like rabbits, you know. From now on, they will breed themselves." "But -- "I began, and the next moment he was gone. Only it wasn't the next moment. Two hours had passed in the flicker of a thought. I was late getting back to the office and Foreman spoke sharply to me. It was completely frustrating. to Rednik's office, climbing the thirty-seven flights of stairs with painful persistence, but the place was as deserted as the rest of the building. The only change was a slowly deepening layer of dust on the signs, the desk and the red-leather couch. It was a constant irritation. But soon there was no time for that. The annual Examinations were at hand. For three nights, I did not sleep. I twisted in my pneumatic crib, trying to think of something I could do, but all I could think of was a foolish phrase that kept running through my mind on anapestic feet: In the country of the normal, the neurotic man is king. But I wasn't a king. I was so far from being king that I was going to lose my job, such as it was. I couldn't even find the thief I had set out upon this cruel road to catch, for whom all this torment had been necessary. And then, the night before the Examinations, I sat up straight in my crib and shouted: "That's it!" A few days before, I would have hurried to the analyst if I had started talking to myself. "That's what?" mumbled Naida, startled out of her sleep, sitting up beside me looking quite beautiful. But my eyes were filled with another vision. "Shhh!" I said. "Go back to sleep!" "Yes, dear," she said meekly. I got up, dressed quickly and hurried to the office. It was ghostly at that time of night, but I soon forgot my environment. I was too busy formulating a question for the Computer. The Computer was, actually. Statistical Center, and the offices in it were little cavities scooped out of the giant brain. Statistics is the common denominator of all phenomena and the Computer knew everything -- including the questions asked in previous Examinations and the weighting of the answers. It could compare the questions and answers of earlier Examinations, graph their evolution and extrapolate the questions that would be asked this year and the answers I needed. My job was to phrase that order in Computer language. It took me until dawn. The moment I set it in, fhe Computer started chattering. A sheaf of papers began piling up on my desk. It was a shock: the Computer was fast, but not that fast... There had to be another answer, a twopart answer: (#) this was no extrapolation; the questions and answer for this year's Examinations were already on file; and (#) someone had already asked for them. fusing lately. For a society planned from womb to tomb, where there was a place for everyone and everyone was in his place, it was presenting me with a lot of surprises. I picked up the sheaf of pajjers, folded them and stuffed them into my blouse. A man could have any position in the world, I thought. All he had to do was to ask the Computer. No normal person would, of course. That would be cheating. And no normal person would want a position for which he was not suited. But, then, my thief was not normal. Neither was I. I assumed my publicface and moved with the growing crowd to the giant, sprawling Examinations building. I submitted my profile card to a scanner. It clucked out a cubicle assignment. I would quickly become lost, trying to find it, but loudsjjeakers called out directions constantly: I sank wearily into the cubicle's padded chair. It was lucky I had the answers; I was in no condition to figure them out for myself. There was a slot for my profile card. As soon as I had pushed the card into it, the Examinations began. On the screen in front of me, the following question appeared: T here are many types of pleasure and we do not all like the same things. Of the following activities, choose the one which would please you the most: #) Eating a delicious meal #) Finishing a difficult job #) Supervising a large operation #) Bringing pleasure to a friend #) Making love to a beautiful woman I stared at the choices blankly, unable to decide which of them I would really prefer, unable even to determine which of them I should prefer. I slipped the sheaf of papers out of my blouse and found the first question. The right choice was #. fourth button on the panel under the screen and had a horrid thought: Had the Computer understood me? There was one outcome of the Examinations that nobody talked about: elimination. It was a sort of artificial selection of desired characteristics. I shuddered and forced myself to go on. The next question had appeared and I had to answer it. So it went, question after question, for three days, eight hours a day. After a few hours, the brain became so numb that the instinctive response was the only one possible. But I had the answers -- the right answers, I prayed. After a while, I stopped reading the questions and checked off numbers. I slipped once. I waited nervously in my office after the Examinations were finished and finally my new profile was delivered with a pneumatic thunk. I ripped open the cardboard container and read: The enclosed card has a magnetic reproduction of your new psychological profile and will become part of your permanent records. It indicates that you have a high altruism index and that your proper position is political leadership, # certain. There was only one higher index in the Examinations. A new position, therefore, has been created for you. Beginning tomorrow, you will fill the posttion of Deputy Mayor. A cold elation filled my emotional centers. I let it spill over freely, because I had done what I set out to do. I had found the thief. Symbolic thefts had not been enough for him. He had stolen, finally, the most significant thing available in this political subdivision: power. Tomorrow, justice would catch up with the criminal. Today, I would be busy. Just before quitting time, I located my new office in City Hall and put in a call to the Mayor. A little blonde secretary with an interestingly full lower lip answered. "Is the new Mayor in?" I inquired cautiously. "He's been here, sir, and gone. Will you leave a message?" "No. I'll see him in the morning." I would, too, I thought grimlyI went over the Mayor's office inch by inch and drawer by drawer. Next morning, I returned before ten and had plenty of time to do what was necessary before anyone arrived. " arrived, I was ready. I walked steadily down the narrow private corridor to his office, feeling a little breathless but under remarkable control for the circumstances. I knocked at his door. A moment later, it slid aside. "You!" I cried. The new Mayor was Foreman. His black eyebrows knitted themselves together over his nose as he said, almost simultaneously, "What are you doing here?" I recovered first. "I'm the new Deputy Mayor." "Fantastic!" "No more fantastic than you jumping to head of my department and then Mayor of the city." "I've always been an executive. You're a statistician." "I was a statistician." I watched the statement soak in through several layers of preconceptions. His eyes were suddenly startled. "So! The old screwball sent somebody after me. I should have got rid of him when I had a chance." "Rednik?" His hand was below desk level. 'Who else?" He raised his hand; in it was something blue, complicated and metallic. "And you just walk right in and announce yourself!" 'What's that?" I asked sharply. "The card in the museum case called it a pistol. It propels explosive pellets by expansion of gases." "Once a thief, always a thief," I sneered. "Exactly. And now I'm going to commit the ultimate theft -- I'm going to steal your life." "You can't get away with it." "Of course I can. Who would question me if I said you suddenly went mad and blew yourself up?" He grinned suddenly. "In the country of the normal,the neurotic man is king." "I don't understand," I said. "How did you slip through? You're what happened to me. What happened to you?" "Who knows? Rednik said it was an imstable genetic pattern collapsing under the psychic stresses of approaching middle age, but he was full of it up to his neck. Whatever it was, it made me cheat the Examinations into giving me a job I couldn't handle. I looked up Rednik. Every afternoon, he came to my office. I hated him!" "Even then you were stealing time." you can make me forget what I'm going to do. You're going to get it. Now." His hand tightened on the gun. "You can't do it," I said. "You're a thief, not a murderer. Your conditioning is too strong for you to defy." "Don't bet on it!" he got out between clenched teeth. He put his left hand on the pistol to help the right hand squeeze. I watched him interestedly. "It's no use anyway." I said casually. "I came in early this morning and packed the barrel full of quick-setting plastic cement." "Now I know you're lying. I'm not going to look at it and give you a chance to jump me." He squeezed the trigger, I dived to the floor as the fragments flew over my head. He had a strangely peaceful expression on his face when he died. Rednik had taught me this: the truth can be more deceptive than a lie. The office was suddenly filled with people, forgetful of manners and propriety. "What happened? What happened?" asked the littje blonde secretary. And then, more politely, "I beg your pardon for this intrusion, sir, but there was a loud noise in here." I stared at her for a moment, speechless, struck by a sudden vision of the future. It was not at all what I had once imagined, but it would be interesting. The secretary would help me make it so, I was sure. "A very sad thing," I said gravely. 'The Mayor was demonstrating an ancient weapon and it exploded." "He's dead?" she gasped and looked at me with wide blue eyes. 'Then you'll be Mayor!" "Why," I exclaimed in mock surprise, "so I will!"before the mess was cleaned up and I could relax behind the Mayor's desk. Mayor! The word had a good sound to it. Governor sounded better, though. And President was best of all. But they would have to wait their turn. I chuckled. In the country of the normal, the neurotic man is king. But for some obscure reason, I couldn't relax. I couldn't understand why. I had found my thief and punished him. I had power and the promise of more power. What more could a neurotic want? What about Rednik-Kinder? I thought. What was he doing? Was he lying on a couch somewhere, working his twisted magic on some new patient? Was he creating another neurotic to come after me? I flipped open the switch of the office communicator. "Attention, everyone. In view of the emergency, office hours will be until four o'clock today." I called Personnel. "I want two strong men with quick reflexes and high loyalty indexes. And I want all public records searched for a freelance analyst named Rednik or Kinder. Or any freelance analyst at all." There, I thought, that should do it! But I still couldn't relax. I twisted in my pneumatic crib that night until Naida snuggled up to me and said, "What's the matter, darling? Can't you sleep?" I pushed her away roughly. "No!" I knew what I lacked : security. There was no security for a neurotic. If he had security, he would not be a neurotic. Even if I found Rednik-Kinder and got rid of him somehow, it woudn't do me any good. The measures I had taken to find him and to protect myself would create imbalances which would lead inevitably to my destruction. My world was no longer the country of the normal. Society was on the move again, picking up speed before the winds of passion, blowing across unknown seas toward some unknown destination. There was one saying RednikKinder had forgotten to tell me: Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Current New Books : Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. (Bl. nth t #lh SlTMlt) Nw York #, Nw York Open Monday Thru Saturday #:# A. M. to #:# P. M. (Phone CRomorey #-#) for your information A bout two years ago, I received in the mails an envelope postmarked Lindau, which I knew to be a town near Lake Constance. It was adorned with two rubber stamps: one was simply the name and address of the sender; the other said (in German, of course), "Do not throw away. Please pass this on." Inside were two small pamphlets, one in German and one in English, both substantially the same, advertising matter for three books written by one Karl Neupert. Below Mr. Neupert's picture was added in ink: "Died February #, #." The books I was supposed to buy and the new Weltanschauung to which I was to be converted were something that really was no longer news to me. I had made their acquaintance around #, when bookstores were supplied with posters that promised to show the Erth and the Universe -- yes, that's right, the Earth and the Universe -- as it "really" was. The just-discovered secret of creation was that both were the same. The Earth, Mr. Neupert said, was actually hollow and, while its diameter was about # miles as geographers have asserted for quite some time, we lived on the inside of this hollow Earth. And the hollow Earth also contained the Universe. In the center of the hollow Earth there floated a sphere, a thousand miles or so in diameter, which was either black or very dark blue. Luminous points representing the constellations and the Milky Way were attached to this sphere and around it moved the Sun and the planets, all of them much smaller than astronomers thought. When the Sun was on one side of this sphere, the opposite half of the Earth had night, since the sphere was material and cast a shadow. Then, in the course Of # hours, the Sun moved around the central sphere -- called "Phantom Universe" -- and naturally the other half of the "Inner Earth" had daylight. I don't recall whether it was stated or not just what the "Phantom Universe" consisted of, but I do recall that it was forbidden to ask what was outside the "world egg," to use Mr. Neupert's own term for the whole. He modestly said that even he could not anwer that question. HE English-language pamphlet began with the words: "The Heavens? Illusion! The Immense Universe: Absurdity! The Earth is a Cosmic Cell, Universe Inside. We live on the Inside Surface." The illustration was the same as that on the German pamphlet, with only one minor The hoHow Earth as canceived by Dr. Edmond Halley. change: in the German pamphlet, Europe had daylight; in the English pamphlet, the Americas had daylight, a fine point from which I concluded that the publisher did not expect many sales in Great Britain. Herr Karl Neupert had changed to Mr. Charles E. Neupert and there was another interesting inked addition. The printed pamphlet said that all this had been "discovered by Charles E. Neupert." This was revised to read: "Discovered by Prof. U. G. Morrow, Chicago #, developed by Charles E. Neupert." Presumably because I had never heard of Professor U. G. Morrow, there was still no sale. The episode came to mind again a few weeks ago, when I received a letter from an Air Force officer who wanted to know whether it was really true that somebody once said that the Earth was hollow, with an internal sun as well as an external sun, and that there was a hole near the pole large enough to fly an airplane inside. The answer to the query is that somebody had actually said so, except that he wanted to sail "inside" with a ship and carry the airplanes for exploration of the Inner World -- at the time, airplanes did not have ranges of more than a few hundred miles. Actually the man who said so, a Th hollow Earth oi imoginod by Sir John Leilio. Mr. Marshall B. Gardner, was only the last of a long but somewhat disconnected line of hollow Earth advocates. In fact, the concept began with two men of science who are still known to science as pioneers in many fields. One was the Scottish mathematician and physicist Sir John Leslie, who lived from # to # and who wrote on "Natural Philosophy" and worked out experiments to explore "the Nature and Properties of Heat." The other man, who lived just about one century earlier, is even more famous. He was Dr. Edmond Halley, the first man to predict the return of the comet named after him, and also the first to state in so many words that the Earth's atmosphere must have an upper limit. Eklmond Halley must have formed his idea about the internal constitution of the Earth at about the time he became editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (in #); his own paper appeared in the Transactions in #. which interested Halley were the vagaries of the Earth's magnetic field. If you put all the reports together -- and Halley excelled in assembling reports from all sources and drawing conclusions from them -- it seemed as if the Earth's magnetic poles did not stay put in one place. Trying to explain this strange behavior, Halley produced charts of the deviations of the compass needle and then said that these deviations might well be based on the internal structure of the Earth. If the Earth consisted of three concentric shells, the observed facts might be explained by assuming that the three shells rotated with minute differences in speed. It was probably only a matter of seconds, or even fractions of a second, per day, but these differences caused the observed "misreadings" of the compass needle. Since the innermost shell of the three was still a hollow shell, one had to assume an empty space at the center, but Halley did not want to believe that it was completely empty. So he postulated that at the center of the Captain John Clovo Symmot' hollow Eorth. whole there was a sphere of glowing hot matter, a kind of miniature sun. Nobody would ever be able to see it because the three shells were unbroken and hundreds of miles in thickness. As far as one can tell, Halley's contemporaries were not very much impressed with the whole idea, though they welcomed the chart of the magnetic deviations. The matter more or less lapsed in the course of the ensuing decades and finally was not remembered any more by anybody but a few historians of science. At much later dates, Halley's concept often came to be mentioned in the same breath with Sir John Leslie's, as if they were alike, or as if Leslie had simply revived Halley's ideas some threequarters of a century later. Actually there was a fundamental difference. Halley had supposed three concentric spheres. Leslie simply thought that the Earth was hollow, a thick-shelled bubble, as it were. But he also thought that the hollow Earth could not be completely empty inside and he also supposed an internal miniature sun -- or, rather, two of them. The two glowing bodies were supposed to move around each other as the binary stars far out in space do -- the motion of the binaries had just been discovered and reSir John Leslie even gave names to his two internal suns; classical mythology provided two that did fit well under the asMarsholl B. Gardner'! hollow Earth, the last proposal of its kind. sumed circumstances: Pluto and Proserpina. rizer of about the same period was the founder of the calculus of variations and inventor of the binary logarithms, the Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler. Euler, for whose services there was a heated competition between Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia -- both wanted him for their respective newly founded Academies of Sciences and both got him, first Catherine, then Frederick and then Catherine again -- held a concept which really can be lumped with Leslie's. The only difference was that Euler supposed only one internal sun in the center, just as Halley had done. Some thirty years after Euler's death -- Leslie was still alive -- the idea of a hollow Earth erupted with a great deal of noise and really became piopular for a few decades, at least in America. What happened and how it happiened is comparatively easy to find out, but to say how the new prophet of an old idea, John Cleves Symmes, fitted into the sequence of hollow Earth theorizers is considerably more difficult. He claimed repeatedly that his "theory" originated with him and that he had the first flash of it one night when he looked at Jupiter. But on one occasion, when asked point blank whether he acknowledged the priority of Euler and Halley, he admitted that he knew of their ideas, but brushed the question aside by saying that they had taught something entirely different. Actually, Symmes' ideas were just a modification of Halley's. Instead of three concentric spheres, Symmes had five. There was no central sim. And all five shells had large holes near their poles and each shell rotated at a different speed. There is a rather tenuous literary thread connecting Halley and Symmes. The uncle of the theorist Captain John Cleves Symmes (he had held an Army commission and had fought with distinction in two engagements of the war of #) was a then well-known judge who once wrote his nephew as follows: "In the reign of James VI of Scotland, who was the same person with James I of England, about the year #, a Protestant dissenting clergyman by the name of Symmes came over from England with a company of pious adventurers... Mr. Symmes afterward went from Plymouth with a part of the first settlers and built Charlestown, where he presided as pastor over a Presbyterian congregation..." The Symmes family, then, reached America in the form of a Protestant clergyman, and Captain Symmes once said that there had been a number of clergymen in his family. One may safely presume that they owned religious books; one such book. The Christian Philosopher by the famous Cotton Mather, contained an approving description of Halley's concept. Symmes might have forgotten what he read as a boy, but Halley's idea must have stuck in his mind somehow, for their concepts are too similar to be pure accident. Symmeswas perfectly justified in dismissing Halley and Euler as predecessors. With them, the concept of a hollow Earth had been one theory among many others, and if confronted with proof to the contrary, they would probably have discarded it with small regrets. To Symmes, it was not a theory, even though he used this word: it was a credo, an overwhelming obsession which he would have been unable to shed even if somebody could have bundled him into an airplane and flown him to the poles. In the succession of hollow Earth theorizers, Symmes was the first crank. His entrance on the public scene was peculiar enough. He mailed out five hundred printed letters, to all members of Congress, the presidents of universities and learned societies in the United States, and to a number of learned men in Europe. Attached to the letter were: (A) a printed "postscript" on a separate sheet and (B) a certificate of sanity! I have not been able to ascertain the wording of that certificate, but the letter and the postscript read as follows: St. Louis, Missouri Territory North America April #, A.D. # To All the World: I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid, concentrick spheres; one within the other, and it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the World will support and aid me in the undertaking. Jno. Cleves Symmes, Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry P.S. I have ready for the press a treatise on the principles of matter, wherein I show proof of the above positions, account for various phenomena, and disclose Dr. Darwin's "Golden Secret." My terms are the patronage of This and the New Worlds. I dedicate to my wife and her ten children. I select Dr. S. L. Mitchell, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander von Humboldt as my protectors. I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea; I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude #; we will return in the succeeding spring. I . c. s. Dr. Mitchell, Sir Humphrey Davy and the Baron von Humboldt had no idea of the honor conferred upon them, unless they, as is likely, were on the mailing list for the letter and learned about it after the event. It also goes without saying that the promised treatise never appeared, so that the world still does not know what Dr. Erasmus Darwin's (grandfather of the famous naturalist) Golden Secret was supposed to have been. In fact, Symmes never wrote a book about his own theory. One pamphlet about it was written by a disciple during Symmes' lifetime and Symmes himself said that he had not been projerly presented. Another pamphlet was written after his death by his son Americus Vespuccius Symmes and, of course, we can't tell what his father would have said about it. What Symmes did write were a few Memoirs in succession, but they, too, were mere one-page statements, if that is the word to use. To let my readers decide for themselves which word should or might be used. I'll quote Memoir No. II in full: With dividers describe a circle on a plane of matter of loose texture, and in the centre add a very small circle; then draw a line through the centre. It is evident (as matter gravitates matter in proportion to quantity and distance) that either half of the inner circle, being almost equal surrounded by matter, must be a very little gravitated centrewise; so being suspended, only a rotary motion is needed to throw it compactly toward the outer circle. This being admitted, it follows that halfway from the outer to the inner side of this circle of matter so thrown out, a like rarity, suspension, or balance of gravity should prevail, and hence a disposition to concentric circles; therefore it follows that successive similar subdivisions should exist, gradually lessening in force or quantity. By applying this principle to the earth, I found the necessity of hollow concentric spheres. A decision of schoolmen on these lines should be followed by additional positions, further explaining my new principles of hollow spheres, open at the poles, declared in a circular letter of the #th of April, #. John Cleves Symmes, of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry The French Academy, after reading the communications and presumably after making certain that their difficulties were not merely linguistic, produced some choice expressions of ridicule. Symmes was deeply hurt, because he apparently had been convinced that one of the members of the Academy would applaud him. This member was Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Laplace. The reason: Laplace had published his own ideas about the poles. Condensed, they amounted to about this: The Earth has an equatorial bulge, caused by its rotation. The formation of the equatorial bulge may well have been accompanied by the formation of polar depressions, so that explorers, once they got that far, should find warm and ice-free polar seas, warmed by the internal heat of the Earth. ' I ' O Symmes' mind, this had been a step in the right direction and he felt that Laplace had just not gone far enough. Since Symmes had gone further, Laplace was supposed to applaud -- but Laplace did not want to go any further. Because Symmes' teachings have to be reconstructed from endless interviews he gave to newspaper reporters, from reports about his many lectures and from letters he wrote to the editors, there is no way of arriving at a definite picture. The figures he gave were not always the same and crucial points often are not mentioned. At any event, the outermost Earth shell had a thickness of about # miles. The circular opening -- popularly called "Symmes Hole" -- in the north had a diameter of about # miles; the one in the south was somewhat larger. The rims of these openings -- Symmes called them "verges" -- were open seas, beyond the "icy hoops" that had been insufficiently penetrated by explorers and whalers. While the verges were perfectly circular, they were not centered on the poles. The axis of rotation formed an angle of between # and # degrees with the center line of the verges. What the relative positions of axis of rotation and of the verges of the inner shells were supposed to be was not made clear. Symmes' son later assumed that all verges were lined up along the same center line. All these shells were "habitable without and within upon my word of honor" and, in addition to all this surface space, there was more room by far because in the stony shell were numerous and enormous caves with a native life of their own. This assertion was made mostly about the outermost shell. I don't know whether there were big caves in the inner shells, too. As for the southern verge, some ships must have come close to it, for their captains and crews had seen the light reflected from the icy hoop across the verge. They had called them the Magellanic Clouds. In the north, the verge was highest in latitude to the north of Europe, but the Svalbard Archipelago was close to it. Its northermost island, now called Northeast Land, might possibly be in the verge. This position necessitated that the verge ate a considerable chunk out of northern Siberia, which was practically unknown at the time. Symmes, while conducting his lecture tours like a political campaign, petitioned Congress twice for an expedition to the verge, starting off from the West Coast and working its way up to Siberia. Congress managed to bury both petitions -- their dates were # and # -- by means of tricks with which Congressmen have a lot of experience. The French Academy stood firm. But the Russians actually nibbled at the bait. S ymmes claimed to have received a personal letter from the Czar, which is unlikely, but there was correspondence with the Czar's representatives. The Russians, remember, owned all of Siberia and Alaska, but very little was known about this territory It was considered an accomplishment to know that there was no land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. The Czar's government had been toying with the idea of a more thorough exploration of Siberia all along. If this exploration might open a gateway to the Inner World, they were ready -- and annex what could be found. Symmes was invited to come to Russia and assist in organizing the expedition. It was taken for granted that he would go along as one of the leaders, in #. He declined because of poor health. Two years later, on May #, #, he died at the age of not quite # years. Although the newspapers had been quite excited about his theory and the public had flocked to his lectures, Symmes apparently had had mainly nothing more than curiosity value even to his admirers. Soon after his death, it was all over. A few major articles in magazines -- Harper's for example -- appeared later, but were considered "historical articles" by the readers. They did not influence anybody. However, hollow Earth ideas, now solidly in the hands of cranks, still persisted. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, one Cyrus Reed Teed, writing mostly under the name of Koresh, was the first to anticipate Herr Neupert. Teed also said that we live on the inside of the Earth, but he was far less definite about astronomical facts to be explained away than Neupert at a later date. In #, one W. F. Lyons, who called himself Professor, published a book with the title A Hollow Globe, which was simply a copy of Symmes, who, however, was not even mentioned. "Professor" Lyons, if somebody questioned him about that oversight, probably replied that his theory was entirely different -- he did not have any additional hollow spheres inside the Earth.  N fiction, the hollow Earth  idea has been given a quite thorough workout. The earliest, written during Symmes' lifetime, was a satirical treatment called The Journal of Capt. Adam Seaborn : Symzonia, published in #. As you'll notice, Symmes' name is worked into the title. But from that point on, though the number of books increases considerably, he gets less mention. For example, Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (about #) merely is similar to the good captain's name. Then comes Verne's The Voyage to the Center of the Earth Bradshaw's The Goddess of AtvatabarBeini the History of the Discovery of the Interior lorld created a bit of a stir. Science fiction readers are most familiar, of course, with the Pellucidar series of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in # with At the Earth's Core. Those are the outstanding items. There have been others and undoubtedly there will be more, even though the concept has been so wholly exploded. Ideas die hard, you know, and false ones often appear to be especially enduring. The Marshall B. Gardner who was mentioned earlier in the article was really the latest and presumably last of the proponents of a hollow Earth of what might be called the "classical" type. In #, he published a small volume with the title A Journey to the Earth's Interior, Or, Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? His model of the hollow Earth was almost precisely that of Euler, a thick shell with a miniature svin in the center, but with two verges concentric to the poles added. Gardner's argument was that there was still some doubt that anybody had actually reached the poles and that the explorers themselves would be bound to be confused, since they did not expect to find themselves in a verge. The aurora was explained by Gardner as the reflection of the light from the inner sun, shining through the verge, on the outer atmosphere. A second and much enlarged edition of the book appeared in #. Gardner rejected with utter indignation any comparison between his idea and "Symmes' nonsense." Reading his book is a strange experience; it is full of the most obvious flaws in logic and the most amateurish misinterpretation of scientific facts taken from books of popular science. Coupled with this is an obvious desire for absolute honesty -- in pursuit of falsity. Well, the poles now are discovered and at least one airline is flying commercially over the area where Laplace expected a large depression and a warm sea and where others dreamed of verges opening a pathway to a fabulous inner world. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at #  to #  under Ahat they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. All Ronnie wanted was to go back to his beautiful valley -- but where on Earth was it? Little Red Schoolhouse R onnie avoided the towns. Whenever he came to one, he made a wide detour, coming back to the tracks miles beyond it. He knew that none of the towns was the village he was looking for. The towns were bright and new, with white streets and brisk cars and big factories, while the village in the valley was old and quiet, with rustic houses and shaded streets and a little red schoolhouse. Just before you came to the village, there was a grove of friendly maples with a brook winding through them. Ronnie remembered the brook best of all. In summer, he had waded in it many times, and he had skated on it in winter; in autumn, he had watched the fallen leaves, like the sea. Ronnie had been sure that he could find the valley, but the tracks went on and on, through fields and hills and forests, and no familiar valley apeared. After a while, he began to wonder if he had chosen the right tracks, if the shining rails he followed day after day were really the rails along which the stork train had borne him to the city and to his parents. He kept telling himself that he wasn't truly running away from home, that the aseptic three-room apartment in which he had lived for a month wasn't his home at all, any more than the pallid man and woman vho had met him at the bustling terminal were his mother and father. His real home was in the valley, in the old rambling house at the outskirts of the village; and his real parents were Nora and Jim, who had cared for him throughout his boyhood. True, they had never claimed to be his parents, but they were just the same, even if they put him on the stork train when he was asleep and sent him to the city to live with the pallid people who pretended to be his parents. Nights, when the shadows came too close around his campfire, he thought of Nora and Jim and the village. But most of all, he thought of Miss Smith, the teacher in the little red schoolhouse. Thinking of Miss Smith made him brave and he lay back in the summer grass beneath the summer stars and he wasn't scared at all. ate the last of the condensed food tablets he had stolen from his parents' apartment. He knew that he had to find the valley soon and he walked faster along the tracks, staring eagerly ahead for the first familiar landmark -- a remembered tree or a nostalgic hilltop, the silvery twinkle of a winding brook. The trip on the stork train had been his first trip into the outside world, so he was not certain how the valley would look, coming into it from the surrounding coimtryside; nevertheless, he was sure he would recognize it quickly. His legs were stronger now than they had been when he had first steppied off the stork train and his dizzy spells were becoming less and less frequent. The Sim no longer bothered his eyes and he could look for long moments at the blue sky and the bright land with no painful afterimages. Toward evening, he heard a high-pitched whistle and his heart began to pound. He knew at last that he had the right tracks and that he couldn't be very far from the valley, for the whistle was the shrill lullaby of a stork train. Ronnie hid in the weeds that lined the embankment and watched the train pass. He saw the children reclining on their chairbeds, staring curiously through the little windows, and he remembered how he had stared, too, on his trip to the city, how surprised -- and frightened -- he had been, upon awakening, to see the strange new land unrolling before his aching eyes. He wondered if his face had been as white as those he was seeing now, as white and as peaked and as sickly, and he guessed that probably it had been, that living in the valley affected your complexion some way, made your eyes sensitive to light and your legs weak. But that couldn't be the answer. His legs had never been weak when he had lived in the valley, he remembered, and his eyes had never bothered him. He'd never had trouble seeing the lessons on the blackboard in the little red schoolhouse and he'd read all the printed words in the schoolbooks without the slightest difficulty. In fact, he'd done so well with his reading lessons that Miss Smith had patted him on the back, more times than he could remember, and told him that he was her star pupil.  eager he was to see Miss Smith again, to walk into the little classroom and have her say, "Good morning, Ronnie," and see her sitting reassuringly behind her desk, her yellow hair parted neatly in the middle and her round cheeks pink in the morning light. For the first time, it occurred to him that he was in love with Miss Smith and he recognized his real reason for returning to the valley. The other reasons were still valid, though. He wanted to wade in the brook again, and feel the cool tree shadows all around him, and after that he wanted to meander through the maples, picking a slow way homeward, and finally he wanted to wander down the lazy village street to the house and have Nora scold him for being late for supper. The stork train was still passing. Ronnie couldn't get over how long it was. Where did all the children come from? He didn't recognize a single one of them, yet he had lived in the valley all his life. He hadn't recognized any of the children on his own stork train, either, for that matter. He shook his head. The whole thing was bewildering, far beyond his understanding. When the last of the cars had passed, he climbed back up the embankment to the tracks. Dusk was seeping in over the land and soon, he knew, the first star would appear. If only he could find the valley before night came! He wouldn't even pause to wade in the brook; he would run through the maples and down the street to the house. Nora and Jim would be delighted to see him again and Nora would fix a fine supper; and perhaps Miss Smith would come over during the evening, as she sometimes did, and discuss his schoolwork, and he would walk to the gate with her, when she was ready to go, and say good night, and see the starlight on her face as she stood goddess-tall beside him... He hurried along the tracks, staring hungrily ahead for some sign of the valley. The shadows deepened around him and the damp breath of night crept down from the hills. Insects awoke in the tall meadow grass, katydids and crickets, and frogs began singing in ponds. After a while, the first star came out. came to the big broad-shouldered building. He did not recall having seen it during his ride on the stork train. That was odd, because he had never left the window once during the whole trip. He paused on the tracks, gazing at the towering brick facade with its tiers and tiers of small barred windows. Most of the upper windows were dark, but all of the first-floor windows were ablaze with light. The first-floor windows were different in other respects, too, he noticed. There were no bars on them and they were much larger than the higher ones. Ronnie wondered why that should be. And then he noticed something else. The tracks stretched right up to the imposing facade and entered the building through a lofty archway. Ronnie gasped. The building must be a terminal, like the one in the city, where his parents had met him. But why hadn't he seen it when the stork train had passed through it? Then he remembered that he'd been put on the train when he was asleep and could have missed the first part of the journey. He'd assumed, when he awoke, that the train was just pulling out of the valley, but perhaps it had pulled out some time before -- a long time, even -- and had passed through the terminal while he was sleeping. It was a logical explanation, but Ronnie was reluctant to accept it. If it was true, then the valley was still a long way off, and he wanted the valley to be close, close enough for him to reach it tonight. He was so hungry, he could hardly stand it, and he was terribly tired. He looked miserably at the big hulking building, wondering what to do. "Hello, Ronnie." Ronnie almost collapsed with fright on the tracks. He peered around him into the shadows. At first he saw no one, but after a while he made out the figure of a tall man in a gray uniform standing in a grove of locusts bordering the tracks. The man's uniform matched the shadows and Ronnie realized with a start that he had been standing there all along. "You are Ronnie Meadows, aren't you?" "Yes -- yes, sir," Ronnie said. He wanted to turn and run, but he knew it wouldn't do any good. He was so tired and weak that the tall man could catch him easily. "I've been waiting for you, Ronnie," the tall man said, a note of warmth in his voice. He left the tree shadows and walked over to the tracks. "I've been worried about you." "Worried?" "Why, of course. Worrying about boys who leave the valley is my job. You see, I'm the truant officer." but I didn't want to leave the valley, sir," he said. "Nora and Jim waited until I went to sleep one night, and then they put me on the stork train, and when I woke up, I was already on my way to the city. I want to go back to the valley, sir. I -- I ran away from home." "I understand," the truant officer said, "and I'm going to take you back to the valley -- back to the little red schoolhouse." He reached down and took Ronnie's hand. "Oh, will you, sir?" Ronnie could hardly contain the sudden happiness that coursed through him. "I want to go back in the worst way!" "Of course I will. It's my job." The truant officer started walking toward the big building and Ronnie hurried along beside him. "But first I've got to take you to the principal." Ronnie drew back. He became aware then of what a tight grip the truant officer had on his weakfeeling hand. "Come on," the truant officer said, making the grip even tighter, "The principal won't hurt you." "I -- I never knew there was a principal," Ronnie said, hanging back. "Miss Smith never said anything about him." "Naturally there's a principal; there has to be. And he wants to talk to you before you go back. Come on now, like a good boy, and' don't make it necessary for me to turn in a bad report about you. Miss Smith wouldn't like that at all, would she?" "No, I guess she wouldn't," Ronnie said, suddenly contrite. "All right, sir. I'll go." Ronnie had learned about principals in school, but he had never seen one. He had always assumed that the little red schoolhouse was too small to need one and he still couldn't imderstand why it should. Miss Smith was perfectly capable of conducting the school all by herself. But most of all, he couldn't understand why the principal should live in a place like the terminal -- if it was a terminal -- and not in the valley. However, he accompanied the truant officer dutifully, telling himself that he had a great deal to learn about the world and that an interview with a principal was bound to teach him a lot. through an entrance to the left of the archway and walked down a long bright corridor lined with all green cabinets to a frosted glass door at the farther end. The lettering on the glass The door opened at the truant officer's touch and they stepped into a small white-walled room even more brightly illumined than the corridor. Opposite the door was a desk with a girl sitting behind it, and behind the girl was another frosted glass door. The The girl looked up as the truant officer and Ronnie entered. She was young and pretty -- almost as pretty as Miss Smith. "Tell the old man the Meadows kid finally showed up," the truant officer said. The girl's eyes touched Ronnie's, then dropped quickly to a little box on her desk. Ronnie felt funny. There had been a strange look in the girl's eyes -- a sort of sadness. It was as though she was sorry that the truant officer had found him. She told the little box: "Mr. Curtin, Andrews just brought in Ronnie Meadows." "Good," the box said. "Send the boy in and notify his parents." "Yes, sir." The principal's office was unlike anything Ronnie had ever seen before. Its hugeness made him uncomfortable and the brightness of its fluorescent lights hurt his eyes. All the lights seemed to be shining right in his face and he could hardly see the man behind the desk. But he could see him well enough to make out some of his features: the high white forehead and receding hairline, the thin cheeks, the almost lipless mouth. For some reason, the man's face frightened Ronnie and he wished that the interview were over. "I have only a few questions to ask you," the principal said, "and then you can be on your way back to the valley." "Yes, sir," Ronnie said, some of his fear leaving him. "Were your mother and father unkind to you? Your real mother and father, I mean." "No, sir. They were very good to me. I'm sorry I had to run away from them, but I just had to go back to the valley." "Were you lonesome for Nora and Jim?" Ronnie wondered how the principal knew their names. "Yes, sir." "And Miss Smith -- were you lonesome for her?" "Oh, yes, sir!" upon him and he shifted uncomfortably. He was so tired, he wished the principal would ask him to sit down. But the principal didn't and the lights seemed to get brighter and brighter. "Are you in love with Miss Smith?" The question startled Ronnie, not so much because he hadn't expected it, but because of the tone in which it was uttered. There was unmistakable loathing in the principal's voice. Ronnie felt his neck grow hot, and then his face, and he was too ashamed to meet the principal's eyes, no matter how hard he tried. But the strange part of it was, he didn't understand why he was ashamed. The question came again, the loathing more pronounced than before: "Are you in love with Miss Smith?" "Yes, sir," Ronnie said. Silence came and sat in the room. Ronnie kept his eyes down, fearfully awaiting the next question. But there were no more questions and presently he became aware that the door behind him had opened and that the truant officer was standing over him. He heard the principal's voice: "Level Six. Tell the tech on duty to try Variant #-C on him." "Yes, sir," the truant officer said. He took Ronnie's hand. "Come on, Ronnie." "Where're we going?" "Why, back to the valley, of course. Back to the little red schoolhouse." Ronnie followed the truant officer out of the office, his heart singing. It seemed almost too easy, almost too good to be true. Ronnie didn't understand why they had to take the elevator to get to the valley. But perhaps they were going to the roof of the building and board a 'copter, so he didn't say anything till the elevator stopped on the sixth floor and they stepped out into a long, long corridor lined with hundreds of horizontal doors so close together that they almost seemed to touch. Then he said: "But this isn't the way to the valley, sir. Where are you taking me?" "Back to school," the truant officer said, the warmth gone from his voice. "Come along now!" but it wasn't any use. The truant officer was big and strong and he dragged Ronnie down the long antiseptic corridor to a recess in which a gaunt woman in a white uniform was sitting behind a metal desk. "Here's the Meadows kid," he said. "The old man says to change the plot to #-C." The gaunt woman got up wearily. Ronnie was crying by then and she selected an ampoule from a glass cabinet beside the desk, came over and rolled up his sleeve and, despite his squirming, expertly jabbed the needle into his arm. "Save your tears till later," she said. "You'll need them." She turned to the truant officer. "Curtin's guilt complex must be getting the best of him. This is the third #-C he's prescribed this month." "The old man knows what he's doing." "He only thinks he knows what he's doing. First thing you know, we'll have a whole world full of Curtins. It's about time someone on the Board of Education took a course in psychology and found out what motherlove is all about!" "The old man's a graduate psychologist," the truant officer said. "You mean a graduate psychopath!" "You shouldn't talk like that." "I'll talk the way I please," the gaunt woman said. "You don't hear them crying, but I do. C-# belongs back in the twentieth centuty and should have been thrown out of the curriculum long ago!" She took Ronnie's arm and led him away. The truant officer shrugged and returned to the elevator. Ronnie heard the metal doors breathe shut. The corridor was very quiet and he followed the woman as though in a dream. He could hardly feel his arms and legs, and his brain had grown fuzzy. The gaunt woman turned off into another corridor and then into another. Finally they came to an open door. The woman stopped before it. "Recognize the old homestead?" she asked bitterly. But Ronnie hardly heard her. He could barely keep his eyes open. There was a bed in the shelflike cubicle beyond the horizontal door, a strange bed with all sorts of wires and dials and screens and tubes around it. But it was a bed, and for the moment that was all he cared about, and he climbed upon it gratefully. He lay his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. "That's a good boy," he heard the woman say just before he dropped off. "And now back to the little red schoolhouse." pillow purred and the screens lit up and the tapes went into action. "Ronnie!" Ronnie stirred beneath the covers, fighting the dream. It had been a horrible dream, filled with stork trains and strange people and unfamiliar places. And the worst part of it was, it could be true. Nora had told him many times that some morning, when he awoke, he would be on the stork train, bound for the city and his parents. He fought harder and harder, kicking at the covers and trying to open his eyes. "Ronnie," Nora called again. "Hurry up or you'll be late for school!" His eyes opened then, of their own accord, and instantly he knew that everything was all right. There was the bright morning sunlight streaming into his attic bedroom, and there were the nostalgic branches of the backyard maple gently brushing his window. "Coming!" He threw back the covers and leaped out of bed and dressed, standing in a warm puddle, of sunlight. Then he washed and ran downstairs. "It"s about time," Nora said sharply when he came into the kitchen. "You're getting lazier and lazier every day!" Ronnie stared at her. She must be feeling ill, he thought. She had never spoken to him like that before. Then Jim came in. He hadn't shaved and his eyes were bloodshot. "For Pete's sake," he said, "isn't breakfast ready yet?" "In a minute, in a minute," Nora snapped back. "I've been trying to get this lazy brat out of bed for the last half hour." Bewildered, Ronnie sat down at the table. He ate in silence, wondering what could have hapipened in the brief span of a single night to change Nora and Jim so. Breakfast was pancakes and sausage, his favorite dish, but the pancakes were soggy and the sausage was half raw. He excused himself after his second pancake and went into the living room and got his books. The living room was untidy and had a moldy smell. When he left the house, Jim and Nora were arguing loudly in the kitchen. Ronnie frowned. What had happened? He was sure that things hadn't been this way yesterday. Nora had been kind then, Jim soft-spoken and immaculate, and the house neat. What had changed everything? ment, he would be in school and see Miss Smith's smiling face and everything would be all right again. He hurried down the bright street, past the rustic houses, and the laughing children on their way to school. Miss Smith, his heart sang. Beautiful Miss Smith. The Sun was in her hair when he walked in the door and the little bun at the back of her neck was like a golden pomegranate. Her cheeks were like roses after a morning shower and her voice was a soft summer wind. "Good morning, Ronnie," she said. "Good morning. Miss Smith." He walked on clouds to his seat. The lessons began -- arithmetic, spelling, social studies, reading. Ronnie wasn't called upon to recite till reading class, when Miss Smith told him to read aloud from the little red primary reader. He stood up proudly. The story was about Achilles and Hector. Ronnie got the first sentence off fine. He didn't begin to stumble till the middle of the second. The words seemed to blur and he couldn't make them out. He held the primer closer to his eyes, but still he couldn't read the words. It was as though the page had turned to water and the words were swimming beneath the surface. He tried with all his might to see them, but his voice stumbled worse than ever. Then he became aware that Miss Smith had walked down the aisle and was standing over him. She was carrying a ruler and her face was strange, sort of pinched and ugly. She snatched the book from his hands and slammed it on the desk. She seized his right hand and flattened it out in her own. The ruler came down on his palm with stinging force. His hand tingled and the pain shot up his arm and went all through him. Miss Smith raised the ruler, brought it down again -- And again and again and again. Ronnie began to cry. HE principal had had a long hard day and he didn't feel much like talking to Mr. and Mrs. Meadows. He wanted to go home and take a relaxing bath and then tune in on a good telempathic program and forget his troubles. But it was part of his job to placate frustrated parents, so he couldn't very well turn them away. If he'd known they were going to come 'coptering out to the educational center, he would have put off notifying them till morning, but it was too late to think of that now. "Send them in," he said wearily into the intercom. Mr. and Mrs. Meadows were a small, shy couple -- productionline workers, according to Ronnie's dossier. The principal had little use for production-line workers, particularly when they spawned -- as they so frequently did -- emotionally unstable children. He was tempted to slant the interrogation lights into their faces, but he thought better of it, "You were notified that your son was all right," he said disapprovingly, when they had seated themselves. "There was no need for you to come out here." "We we were worried, sir," Mr. Meadows said. "Why were you worried? I told you when you first reported your son missing that he'd try to return to his empathic existence and that we'd pick him up here as soon as he showed up. His type always wants to return, but unfortunately we can't classify our charges prior to placing them on the delivery train, since doing so would require dispelling the empathic illusion at an inopportune time. Dispelling the illusion is the parents' job, anyway, once the child is integrated in reality. Consequently we can't deal with our potential misfits till they've proven themselves to be misfits by running away." "Ronnie isn't a misfit!" Mrs. Meadows protested, her pale eyes flashing briefly. "He's just a highly sensitive child." "Your son, Mrs. Meadows," the principal said icily, "has a pronounced Oedipus complex. He bestowed the love he ordinarily would have felt for you upon his fictitious teacher. It is one of those deplorable anomalies which we cannot foresee, but which, I assure you, we are capable of correcting, once it reveals itself. The next time your son is reborn and sent to you, I promise you he won't run away!" "The corrective treatment, sir," Mr. Meadows said. "Is it painful?" "Of course it isn't painful! Not in the sense of objective reality." H e was trying to keep his mounting anger out of his voice, but it was difficult to do so. His right hand had begun to twitch and that made his anger all the worse, for he knew that the twitching meant another spell. And it was all Mr. and Mrs. Meadows' fault! These production-line imbeciles! These electrical-appliance accumulators! It was not enough to free them from the burden of bringing up their children! Their piddling questions had to be answered, too! "Look," he said, getting up and walking around the desk, trying to keep his mind off his hand, "this is a civilized educational system. We employ civilized methods. We are going to cure your son of his complex and make it piossible for him to come and live with you as a normal redblooded American boy. To cure him of his .complex, all we need to do is to make him hate his teacher instead of love her. Isn't that simple enough? "The moment he begins to hate her, the valley will lose its abnormal fascination and he will think of it as normal children think of it -- as the halcyon place where he attended elementary school. It will be a pleasant memory in his mind, as it's intended to be, but he won't have any overwhelming urge to return to it." "But," Mr. Meadows said hesitantly, "won't your interfering with his love for his teacher have some bad effect upon him? I've done a little reading in psychology," he added apologetically, "and I was under the impression that interfering with a child's natural love for its parent -- even when that love has been transferred -- can leave, well, to put it figuratively, scar tissue." The principal knew that his face had gone livid. There was a throbbing in his temple, too, and his hand was no longer merely twitching; it was tingling. There was no doubt about it -- he was in for a spell, and a bad one.  said. "Sometimes I can't help but wonder what you people expect of an educational system. We relieve you of your offspring from the day of their birth, enabling both parents to work full time so that they can afford and enjoy all of the luxuries civilized beings are entitled to. We give your offspring the best of care: We employ the most advanced total identification techniques to give them not only an induced elementary education but an emphatic background as well, a background that combines the best elements of Tom Sawyer, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and A Child's Garden of Verses. "We employ the most advanced automatic equipment to develop and maintain unconscious oral feeding and to stimulate the growth of healthy tissue. In short, we employ the finest educational incubators available. Call them mechanized extensions of the womb if you will, as some of our detractors insist upon doing, but no matter what you call them, there is no gainsaying the fact that they provide a practical and efficient method of dealing with the plethora of children in the country today, and of preparing those children for home-high school and correspondence-college. "We perform all of these services for you to the best of our ability and yet you, Mr. Meadows, have the arrogance to express doubt of our competence! Why, you people don't realize how lucky you are! How would you like to be living in the middle of the twentieth century, before the invention of the educational incubator? How would you like to have to send your son to some rundown firetrap of a public school and have him suffocate all day long in an overcrowded classroom? How would you like that, Mr. Meadows?" "But I only said -- " Mr. Meadows began. The principal ignored him. He was shouting now and both Mr. and Mrs. Meadows had risen to their feet in alarm. "You simply don't appreciate your good fortune! Why, if it weren't for the invention of the educational incubator, you wouldn't be able to send your son to school at all! Imagine a government appropriating enough money to build enough old-style schools and playgrounds and to educate and pay enough teachers to accommodate all the children in the country today! It woiild cost more than a war! And yet, when a workable substitute is employed, you object, you criticize. You went to the little red schoolhouse yourself, Mr. Meadows. So did I. Tell me, did our methods leave you with any scar tissue?" Mr. Meadows shook his head. "No, sir. But I didn't fall in love with my teacher." "Shut up!" The principal gripped the edge of the desk with his right hand, trying to stop the almost unbearable tingling. Then, with a tremendous effort, he brought his voice back to normal. "Your son will probably be on the next delivery train," he said. "And now, if you will please leave -- " H e flicked on the intercom. "Show Mr. and Mrs. Meadows out," he said to his secretary. "And bring me a sedative." "Yes, sir." Mr. and Mrs. Meadows seemed glad to go. The principal was glad to see them leave. The tingling in his hand had worked all the way up his arm to his shoulder and it was more than a mere tingling now. It was a rhythmic pain reaching forty years back in time to the little red schoolhouse and beautiful, cruel Miss Smith. The principal sat down behind his desk and closed his right hand tightly and covered it protectively with his left. But it wasn't any good. The ruler kept rising and falling, anyway, making a sharp thwack each time it struck his flattened palm. When his secretary came in with the sedative, he was trembling like a little child and there were tears in his bleak blue eyes. # Star Shelf Ray Bradbury. Ballantine Books, Inc., # the last collection of Bradbury shorts appeared and that's much too long. Here we have nineteen of them, lots of rich reading. I have no way of telling which are from where and when, since I am doing this review from galleys. I remember having read the zany "Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse," the story of the transformation of a brutal bore into a fascinating bon vivant. "The Small .Assassin," guaranteed to frighten pregnant women out of two full months, is another I recall from a previous anthology, as is "The Crowd," a chiller that kept me a pedestrian on a holiday weekend. These can certainly stand repetition. The quality of the other stories is somewhat uneven. There are wonderfully evocative mood tales such as "The Lake," "The Wind" and "The Emissary." I don't think there's anyone writing fantasy today who can send me back to my boyhood with such ease and credibility, and people the world with fresh wonder or horror. Then there's a "cutie, Auntie Tildy, who is strictly Anti-Death in "There Was An Old Woman." "The Next in Line" I found disappointing because of a terrific buildup to a big letdown. "Jackin-the-box" was routine. But that's still quite an average. Oliver, Ballantine Books, #Sc T haven't been able to figure out-just what Oliver means by his title, but that didn't stop me from enjoying most of this collection of his. There are seven stories, two of them new. Six are pure science-fiction; "Transformer," from Fantasy  Science Fiction, is straight fantasy -- a story of the unhappy and vengeful townspeople of a model railroad belonging to a sadistic young boy. Several of the other stories are anthropological studies. Two of them, "Rite of Passage" and "Scientific Method," both deal with the initial contact of Man with alien races. The problems differ, however. In the former story, reminiscent of John Campbell's "Forgetfulness," the difficulties stem from the difference in level of the two civilizations, while the latter deals amusingly with the similarity of approach of two comparably civilized races to the problem. "Artifact" is an interesting and plausible exposition of the adaptability of the human animal under seemingly impossible conditions and "A Star Above It" is a time travel story that conjectures what might-have-been if the Aztecs had had horses when Cortez began throwing his weight around. Altogether, a worthwhile #c worth, with only one poor story in the lot, and that a shortie. Leigh Brackett. Doubleday  Co., Inc. # Miss Brackett has a list of radio and screen credits as well as stories in many fields. But my previous knowledge of her work has been limited to The Starmen, Enchantress of Venus, etc., space opera from the old school, enjoyable enough, but frankly escapist. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when from the pen of the wife of Edmond Hamilton and the author of the above works comes this powerful and sensitive opus. The time is about fifty years or so after The Destruction. The survivors of the holocaust have caused a new amendment to the Constitution to be written, forbidding concentration of population in excess of one thousand, or more than eight hundred buildings per square mile. Due to their knowledge of handicrafts and their lack of dependence on so-called luxuries, the Mennonites and Amish survived with hardly any difficulty and numbered millions of converts two generations later. Two Mennonite youths, cousins cursed with imagination and curiosity, disobey their fathers' edicts and attend a religious revival, to see a trader stoned to death because he is supposedly from "Bartorstown," a legendary stronghold of evil pre-Destruction knowledge. After stealing the dead man's radio, they are torn between an understanding of the need to stay Man's destructive nature by maintaining artificial curbs on dangerous information and the realization that stagnation is death. Their quest for "Bartorstown" and knowledge makes for a story of true stature. H. C. Kreisheimer. Pageant Press, # became overlooked during this column's transition period. I was under the impression that Groff Conklin had written it up, so that accounts for this review of an item published last June. According to publicity, Mrs. Kreisheimer is the widowed mother of four sons and two daughters. That makes it painful for me to say that I admire her for her effort, but cannot cheer its result. The author envisages a nottoo-distant future world in which "Mazuria," patently America, is the most powerful nation on Earth. The President's personal secretary, a nice career girl, is very obviously cultivated by a suave, handsome, wealthy airline official whose company has blossomed from a very recent beginning to the largest in the country. He obtains easy access to the President, but unfortimately begins to fall in love with Miss Secretary, who doesn't suspect that he is a complete dupe, or dope, of the Communists. The Communists are refreshingly original in their plans to hamstring the various nations of the world, but they would require the unwitting help of a whole army of gullible career girls. I can't believe there are that many. The John C. Winston Co., # series of juveniles, this continues Wollheim's personal "Secret" series. Does he have science fiction True Confessions in mind? Mars has been colonized for a century without any progress being made toward discovering the manner of entrance into the sealed closets, tunnels and caverns of the native Martians. Seems as if they left behind them perfect cities that the Earth colonists have been using, somewhat like an aborigine tenting in a split-level, but no way has been found to power any of the obviously superior appliances. Young Nelson Parr, bom on Mars, is returning home after studying on Earth. Someone breaks into his room and leaves a weird three-fingered, feathery handprint on his mirror. Why should anyone do this? Well, after a hundred years. Earth is abandoning Mars, ostensibly because of logistical reasons, but actually because of pressure from higher up. Someone or something wants Earthmen off Mars. The young reader will be surprised to learn who and why. Wollheim has some interesting theories on the origin of Deimos and Phobos and also of the human species. There's a slackening of ingenuity midway through, but Wollheim can be forgiven because he exerted himself so imaginatively fore and aft. Duke and Edward Lanchbery. Philosophical Library, # THE title is in quotes since the authors of this text explain that the speed of sound, contrary to popular belief, does not constitute an actual barrier through which a pilot has to crash his plane. This is the least of the information that the authors impart. I had no difficulty following their explanations, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that the book is written in a breezy style. The contents include a comprehensive section on various wing designs; the physiological effects of high-speed, high-altitude flying; piston, jet, turbo-jet and rocket 'engines, and an interesting section on theoretical and practical design. Liberally spotted throughout the book as well are very sharp photographs of jets and rockets, some of which seem straight from the drawing boards of H. Wesso and Elliot Dold of the mid-thirties, the days of mechanical science fiction. The authors -- British, you knew -- apologize to their readers for having used so many airplanes of American design. Claim we have a tendency to blab more about our secret aircraft. Golly, do we? Some assignment for a man who wanted to help win the war that wasn't a war! What did cows have to do with the Cow-dye enemy? Part I of a #-Part Serial missile scare on the flight down from Montauk, but it turned out to be one of our own. It came screaming hungrily in at us, clearly visible through the windows of the transport plane, and you could hear forty people taking a deep breath ognized us at the last moment. It veered off, spun around and nosed away, hunting a Caodai -- not that there was much chance of finding any over the American coast there. Outside of that, the flight to Boca Raton was most relaxing. I helped the girl I had been talking to down from the jet transport. She was only a rating, but very attractive. She thanked me and offered me a lift "Negative, Madam," I said. "I'll be met." She extended her hand and, after a second, I shook it. "It's been fun. Lieutenant. Perhaps we'll meet again, if you're going to be stationed in the area." I said, "Of course." It was ambiguous, but I meant to be. Perhaps it would not have mattered for me to mention how long I expected to be in the area. But perhaps it would. In any case, there was the fact of her being an enlisted woman. And there was also my wife. There wasn't any helicopter waiting. I took my orders out and phoned the number they gave. A voice at the other end guessed -- rather offhandedly, I thought -- that they would get someone down to meet me pretty soon, and for a moment I considered taking his name and rank. But I hung up instead. I claimed my baggage and went into the coffee shop at the airport. the counter was bringing my coffee, I noticed a coin-in-theslot typewriter standing idle. So I arranged with the Wac T# at the stationery stand for paper and three sheets of carbon and, when I had finished the coffee, got busy with my compliance letter. I typed: (Adv. Res. Unit #-#) #th June, File No. X-SaT-# Frcxm: Lieutenant (j.g.) Logan To: Officer in Charge, ProUnit #-#). Via: Direct. Subject; Compliance with orders. Reporting for duty. Pers, X-SaT, dated #d June. #. In compliance with orders, I am reporting for duty. (s) Logan Warren Moeller. It always pays to get a little bit ahead in the Navy, I have found. I returned the sheets of carbon, clipped one copy of the compliance letter into my personal file folder and folded the other three into an envelope -- on which, with some pleasure, I lettered the words crash priority. Then I sat back and waited for what might happen. And still no helicopter. "You'll have to move. Lieutenant," said a stocky marine with a Shme Patrol armband. "Prisoners coming through." I got out of the way. A transpKrt had landed and a file of short, wiry-looking Caodais was coming down the ramp, hands clasped atop their heads, armed SP guards covering them. I looked at them curiously. It was the first time I had seen the enemy in the flesh and they didn't look much like the posters in the heads at training camp. These were a little too dark, I thought, to be from Indochina; perhaps from the satellite states in the Near East. "Row'd you like to come up against those babies in a fight?" asked an Air Force captain standing by my side. "I often have," I said, and went back to the telephone booth. I felt a little ashamed of myself for snubbing him. Still, it was true enough -- we had our share of engagements aboard Spruance and these Stateside heroes give me a pain. Project Mako's operations room was surprised. "You mean they didn't pick you up, Lieutenant?" a man's voice said. "Hold on." I held on, and after a while the voice returned. "Sorry, Lieutenant," it said breathlessly. "The pilot fouled up. Give him fifteen minutes." jammed with prisoners now, maybe a hundred of them. They were a quiet lot, for prisoners. There was roughly one tommygun-carrying SP for every three unarmed Caodais, but it still gave me a creepy feeling to be so close to them. Even in action, the nearest I had ever been to a living Caodai aboard Spmance was a thousand yards of himdredfathom water. The Air Force captain gave me an injured look from where he was gaping at the Caodais, so I walked in the other direction. It was the first time I had ever been in Florida, and from the observation deck of the airport, I could see a skyline of palm trees and hibiscus, just as the travel booklets had promised -- back in the days when there were travel booklets. Those were pretty remote days, I told myself, only three or four years, but I had been a civilian then, and so was my wife. The whole country was civilian then, barring eight or to remember -- There was confusion and shouting behind me. "Grab him! No, stand back, you idiots! Give him a chance to breathe! He's hurt!" I turned and reached for the sidearm that I wasn't carrying -- it was pure reflex, because my first thought was that the prisoners were making a break. But it wasn't the prisoners. It was my friend from the wild blue yonder and he was staggering and screaming, clutching his side. A couple of Navy men were trying to' hold him, but he didn't even know they were there. I started to run toward him, me and everybody else in sight. But it was a little late. He yelled something hoarse and loud, and fell over against the yeoman by his side, and you had only to look at him slumping to the floor to know that he was dead. I stood there for a moment, staring at him. He had a dreamer's face, a kid not more than twenty or so, but he would never reach twenty-one. In a moment, the field medics were there and they carried him into an office, and everybody in sight asked the man next to him: "What happened?" The loudest of the theories was that one of the Caodais had smuggled a gun in and potshot the captain, but the shore patrol was positive that was imp)ossible. Impossible, first, that they could have had guns; even more impossible that any of them could have leaned past the guards at the waiting room doors and fired without the guard noticing it. The only people who might have had any information -- the Navy yeoman who had been beside him and the medical officer from the field -- were closeted inside the office, and there was an S.P. guard outside the closed office door who obviously didn't know anything and wouldn't tell you if he did. It was a pretty exciting introduction to Florida. It got even more exciting, in a way, a few moments later. There was a screeching siren outside and three Army officers wearing the Intelligence insigne came leaping up the steps two at a time. They disappeared into the closed office and stayed there. That disposed of the faint possibility that it had been a natural death. Peculiar, I thought, that they should have got Intelligence there in such a hurry. But I didn't know quite how peculiar it was. ject Mako finally picked me was only moderately apologetic. "I forgot," he said cheerfully. "Say, what's all the excitement?" I told him, overlooking the fact that he was in sloppy uniform and seemed a little extra careful not to breathe on me. "Killed him, hey?" he exclaimed, impressed. "You don't say!" But the 'copter looked shipshape enough, in its freshly painted Navy markings, and the chief seemed to know what he was doing as he took off. We aimed at one of the towering cumulo-nimbus down the shore, a mountain of a cloud -- boiling puffs of whipped cream piled over one another, the frayed thunderhead anvil teetering at the top. chin. "Gonna have a storm. Lieutenant. We get one every afternoon about this time. But don't worry, Charlie'll beat it in." "Good," I said crisply. "Sure we will," he told me reassuringly. He took one hand off the steering column to scratch and peered at me, leaning slightly forward and cocking his head. "Say, Lieutenant," he said amiably, "do you ever go to the races?" "I haven't had much opportunity lately. I've just come from a forward area." I was almost certain the man had been drinking. "Tsk, too bad." He was still leaning forward, still staring at me; his eyes were blinking in a slow, regular cycle. Then he scratched again and took a negligent look at his instruments and the sky. "Good track at Boca. Only greyhounds, of course. You have to go clear to Miami if you want horses. I did that last liberty and I won a hundred and eighty dollars." "Good for you," I said. He shrugged modestly. "Oh, I don't know. One of the other farmhands cleaned up a thousand right here in Boca on the dogs. He hit the double twice, betting quinellas." I looked at him curiously. "Farmhands?" I repeated. Of course, the Navy knew what it was doing, and if it chose to pull me off a Nimitz-class cruiser in Caodai waters to send me to Florness, not mine. He said, "Huh?" "Did you say you were a farmhand?" He guffawed. "Naw, Lieutenant, I'm a toe-dancer. Sure I'm a farmhand -- what else would I be doing here?" That time I caught a whiff of his breath. I had been pretty sure he had been either drinking or popping. The breath told me wWch; you could have put ice cubes in it and served it at a cocktail party. first rating I had encountered from Mako was dnmk on duty, or the next thing to it. One of the most difficult problems a junior officer faces is keeping to the right side of the thin borderline between an easy relationship with the enlisted men on one hand, and outright Asiatic lack of discipline on the other. I didn't want to start out on my new base by putting a man on report. I let it go, with some doubt in my mind. But the new base was beginning to sound strange -- farmhands! -- and it seemed to me that I'd best get my bearings. Anyway, drunk or sober, he was flying the helicopter well enough. And he seemed a friendly type. He picked a battered pair of glasses off the floor and handed them to me. "Prison camp." He pointed below. "Take a look if you want to. Lieutenant." They were good glasses and we were only a few hundred feet up. I could see, very clearly, the scattered compounds inside the barbed wire and the sentry towers all around. There seemed to be something going on inside the compound, a procession of some kind, with paper dragons and enormous paper figures. I spotted a dragon with a man's head, a paper Oriental temple, easily eight feet high, and all sorts of Mardi Gras trimmings. "What's the celebration?" I asked. The chief took a quick look through the glasses and returned them to me. "Ah, who knows?" he said genially. "They go on like that a lot. Did you see old Victor Hugo?" I stared. "Victor who?" "Hugo. The paper dragon there, with Victor Hugo's head on it," he explained. "See it? Victor Hugo's one of their saints, like. Funny, isn't it. Lieutenant? The guards give them the cardboard to make those things. It keeps the Cow dyes out of trouble, I guess." Victor Hugo! I stared through the glasses until the camp was out of sight. There they were -- the enemy -- the members of the religious cult that had stormed out of old Vietnam and swept over most of three continents -- And appeared to be about ready to take on a couple more. stared at the clouds. He was motionless for so long that I began to wonder if he was asleep. But at some unremarked sign below, he heeled the stick over and said: "Here's your new home. Lieutenant" I looked over the sill of the window. A cluster of buildings and what seemed to be pasture lands; groves of palm trees and more pasture. "It looks like a dairy farm," I said. "Right on the button. Lieutenant," he agred. But he winked. "Kind of a peculiar dairy farm, though. You'll find out." He cut the switch at the edge of a plowed field. There was no suggestion of securing the machine. We jumped out and left it, bags and all. "Come on. Lieutenant," he said. "I think the commander's in the milkshed." Milkshed! But that's what it was; I could see for myself. The chief led that way toward a low, open sided building. My feet were ankle-deep in black soil. Three or four men in coveralls were putting a herd of cattle through a milking stall. My guide went up and spoke to one of them, a tall, rawboned redhead in ripped, soiled coveralls, while I looked around for the commander. The redhead said, "Thanks, Charlie. Take his bags to the He came toward me, mopping his face with a bandanna, and right at that point I got a considerable setback. This hayseed cowhand, whose lantern jaw was a clear week behind a shave, wore pinned to the lapel of his dirty coveralls the gold leaf of a lieutenant commander in the U.N. Navy. "Welcome aboard, Moeller," he said, sticking out his hand. "I'm Commander Lineback." Well, I did the best I could, lacking an O.O.D. to report to, lacking,, colors to salute, lacking everything that made up the colorful ritual of Navy reporting for duty. I asked myself a lot of questions in that milkshed while I was waiting at Commander Lineback's request for him to finish what he was doing. When finally he was done and he walked with me to his headquarters office, he the 'copter; "This used to be a dairy farm, Moeller, and to a considerable extent it still is. But you'll find it's an unusual one." And he went on to explain the operation of the dairy farm -- how they planted forage for the cattle between rows of a cash crop, told the cattle what to eat and what to leave alone, how the cattle were far from bright and often had to be told a number of times before they understood. But, though I listened carefully, he never said what was unusual about that. II I was fresh from the big-ship Navy. SpTuance was a twelvethousand-tonner, a heavy undersea cruiser with a complement of nine hundred officers and ratings, and you could shave in your reflection from its brightwork. Project Mako was... a dairy farm. And I was an officer of the line. Take the way Lineback had said: "Glad to have you aboard." There wasn't anything wrong with the words, but he smiled and it was the wrong kind of smile, as though he were kidding the Navy. In three years, I had learned that you do not -- repeat : do not -- kid the Navy. It isn't a matter of flag-waving patriotism or anything like that; it's jurt good sense. The Navy was doing a man-sized job with the Caodais. If it hadn't been for the Navy, nothing in the world would have stopped them from opening up a beachhead somewhere along the coast of Guatemala, say, or Ecuador. They were used to jungles. Like the Japanese at Singapore, where the defending guns were firmly emplaced to face the only "possible" attack, from the sea -- and the Japs had struck from the blind land side and won -- once the Cow-dyes got a toehold anywhere in the Americas, they would plow their way right up and down the hemisphere. The jungle wouldn't stop them, and by then it would be a little late for the fusion bombs. But the Navy stopped them, by doing things the Navy way. And you don't kid an outfit that's doing the job for you. Commander Lineback shoved me off on his exec, a full lieutenant named Kedrick. He was a pot-bellied little man, obviously over-age in grade, but at least he seemed pretty Navy -- in a harried, fussbudget sort of way. He logged in my arrival, complimented me on my arrival, and listened to my mild complaint about the helicopter pilot. "Forgot to pick you up, eh? And drinking on duty, eh?" He sighed. "Well, Moeller, good men are hard to find." And he showed me to my quarters. The B.O.Q. at Project Mako was what once had been a thirdrate beachfront vacation hotel. The walls were paper and the rooms were made for midgets, but the plumbing was crystal and chrome. There was a magnificent view of the ocean. I was admiring it when Kedrick said briskly: "Draw the curtains, man. It's getting dark!" ly. "Blackout?" I asked. With radar and infravision, visible light made no particular difference to hostile vessels. "Blackout," he said firmly. "Don't ask me why, but it's orders, something to do with the Glotch, I guess. Maybe they think the Caodais are sending it over by frogman -- they need regular light." "Excuse me, but what is the Glotch?" "Good Lord, man, how would I know? All I know is, pieople drop down dead. They say it's a Caodai secret weapon and they call it the Glotch -- heaven knows why. Is this the first you've heard of it?' I hesitated. There hadn't been anything like that on Spruance, not even scuttlebutt. But it had a familiar sound. I told him about the Air Force captain at the airport. He nodded. "Sounds like it. Now you know as much as anybody else." He was looking tense, even for him. "We haven't had it here -- Mako's a small station. But it's happened right in Boca before. One of the guards at the stockade, a couple of weeks ago, and a transient before that." He shrugged. "Not my problem," he said, dismissing it. He turned and paused in the doorway of my quarters, looking like nothing so much as a bellboy waiting for his tip. He said; "The commander won't have time to talk to you about your duties here for a while, Moeller. Matter of fact, I won't, either. We're expecting a new draft of officers and you'll all get briefed at once -- as much as you'll get briefed, that is. Until then, you'll have to cool your heels for a while." "That's all right, sir. It'll give me a chance to look around the station." "The devil it will, Moeller!" he said sharply. "Everything on the project is classified Top Secret and Need-to-Know. You'll get the word, when the time comes, from the commander, not before." He scowled at me as though I were a suspected pacifist. "Meanwhile, you're restricted to the B.O.Q., the wardroom and the headquarters area. And make sure you stay there." stayed there. With nothing to do. Back on the cruiser, there had been plenty to do. I was posted to Spruance as a computer officer, since I'd majored in cyternetics; but as long as I was in a forward area, I wanted to fight. They were glad to accommodate me. There is almost always a place for a man who wants to fight in a war, even a cold one. I don't know why they called it a cold war, anyhow -- it seemed hot enough on Spruance. While I was aboard, we had three confirmed Caodai kills -- two merchantmen and a little surface corvette. Of course, they weren't officially Caodais; officially, they were "unidentified vessels in interdicted area." But it was funny how the Caodai patrols never sank any "unidentified" Asian or African shipping, any more than the U.N. fleet bothered the American. I suppose that if either side had intercepted a European ship, it would have been quite a problem for the commander -- if there had been any European ships for anybody to intercept. They called it a cold war. But hotting it up over in Europe, theirs. Our land casualties were comparatively low -- in the low And no state of war. There was just this one little theirs all the way from the Pjrrenees to the White Sea in local "police actions." Well, it really wasn't a war, rot in the old-fashioned sense. For one thing, it wasn't country against country, the way it used to be when things were simple. It was confederation, the United Nations, against a Church Militant, the Caodais. They were a religion, not a nation; they happened to be a religion with troops and battlewagons and fusion bombs, but a religion all the same. And how can you declare war against a religion? Our ambassadors still maintained an uneasy residence in Nguyen-Yat-Hugo's court. Every day or so, the ambassador would show up at Vat's giant Cambodian temple with a fresh note of and the answer was always: "Sorry, but you had better take that to the Iranian (or Pakistani or Saudi-Arabian or Vietnamese) authorities, not us." And diplomatic relations went limpingly on. And so did a certain amount of trade, so you could tell that it wasn't really a war. But the best way to tell was that the fusion bombs stayed nicely tucked into their satellite launchers, theirs and ours. Silly? Not so very silly, no -- the bomb was all too able to end the "war" overnight. By ending everything. So everybody played the same game, we and the Caodais, because everybody had the same powerful desire to keep the fusion bombs right where they were. The rules were fairly simple: No landings in force on the enemy continents (but islands no were fair game). No attacks on enemy shipping in "open" waters (but sink anyone you like in interdicted areas -- and interdict any waters that suit your fancy). But it was never called war. For some people, it was a pretty high-stakes game. Not so much for me, you understand, though Spruance had been in a forward area -- we'd never come up against anything as big as we were. But it was a mighty rough police operation for the ones who saw water hammer in when the depth bomb connected, the ones who took a hunk of gelignite in the navel, the ones who lost a wing at thirty thousand feet and found the escape hatch buckled. But not for me. Especially not at Project Mako. hopefully at breakfast for someone to tell me to report for briefing. Nobody did. It was raining and everybody else seemed to have work to do, so I picked some books out of the shelf in the wardroom -- Mahan and Jellicoe -- and talked the mess boy out of some coffee. It never hurts to refresh yourself on classical tactics. Commander Lineback came slouching through the wardroom just before lunch while I was reading The Grand Fleet. He gave me a strange look. "Glad to see you're improving your mind," he said. "Everything going all right?" "Well, yes, sir," I said, "except -- " "Glad to hear it," he said, and was gone. I was getting tired of being treated like an interloper. didn't think I was an interloper; his hve stars, had picked me out of Spruance and crash-prioritied me to this hole in the Florida swamp. Maybe Lieutenant-Commander Lineback didn't have time to bother with me, but I was a skilled and talented naval officer and not constitutionally fitted for being a bum. I had thirty-five sweeps to my own credit -- ranging up to a himdred miles from Spruance in my little battery-powered scout torp -- and though I didn't have any kills, I had an official assist on the corvette. I'd flushed it right into Spruance's jaws. After lunch, everybody disappeared again and I was tired of the wardroom. I put on my oilskins and wandered around the headquarters area, watching the big, warm drops smash the bougainville blooms. It was kind of pretty, Florida was; I thought about maybe some day, my wife and I, coming here for a second honejnnoon... If I ever saw her again. Maybe, I thought to myself urgently, walking a little faster, maybe if I put it to the commander right, he'd let me go into town and I could have a few drinks, even pop a couple. But it wouldn't do any good. I'd tried drinking and it didn't let me forget that my wife was a long, long way away. I kicked at the watery hibiscus morosely. It's tough enough to go to war and leave the girls behind you. But what about when they don't stay behind you? "Moo-oo." I looked up, startled. ing where I Was going. I had wandered along a shell-bordered walk, past a truck garden the enlisted men kept on the side, into a grove of coconut palms. And on the other side of the palms was a shack, and in the shack a cow was monotonously lowing. The question was: was I still in the headquarters area? I looked around me. Nobody had told me exactly what the headquarters area was, I reminded myself defensively. It wasn't my fault if I was outside it. The shack had one curious feature, considering that a cow was ni lowing inside it -- it had only a regular human-azed door. There were windows, but I couldn't see through them. I could hear all right, though. That cow sounded unhappy -- sick, perhaps, or wanting to be milked, though it was only the middle of the afternoon. "Moooo," it went, and then, in a lower key with a sort of grant at the end: "Moo-oo-oo!" Then the first one again, and the second, in an alternation too regular to be believed. Well, what could be more natural than to hear cattle lowing on a dairy farm? But the regularity bothered me and so did the door. I walked closer. And the door opened in my face. Lieutenant Kedrick was standing there, turned away, talking to a hawk-faced j.g. whom I had seen at lunch. The j.g. was gesturing with a spool of recording tape; he saw me over Kedrick's shoulder and his expression changed. Kedrick turned around. "Moeller," he said. I cleared my throat. "Aye-aye, sir." He stepped closer to me angrily. Rain was splattering off his slicker, but he hardly noticed. He raged: "Curse it, Moeller, you were restricted to the area! Report to my quarters right now!" "Sir, I -- " "On the double!" I saluted, said crisply: "Ayeaye, sir!" I left. showed up in his two-room suite and he wasn't in a very good frame of mind. I leaped to attention as he came dripping in the door. He said furiously, "At ease, Moeller!" He peeled off his slicker and threw it on the tiled floor of his private bath. "Moeller," he said, taking his wet shoes off, "you were restricted to headquarters area. I don't make the rules on this base; that wasn't tny idea. Get it through your head, Moeller! This place is hot!" I said, "Yes, sir. I -- " "The hottest installation in the Navy," he went on. "Now ask me why the hottest installation in the Navy has fifteen hundred PWs in a stockade on its doorstep. I don't know. Ask me how I'm supposed to keep security when they send me idiots from the forward areas, with no briefing and no brains. I don't know." He kicked the second shoe into a corner and sat down. "First it's activating this place," he continued, not even looking at me now, "trying to make a shipshape installation out of a dairy farm, for God's sake. Then it's the Glotch. Then it's the ratings going Asiatic. What next?" "Sir, I was only -- " "Forget it," he said morosely. "I talked to Commander Lineback about you and those are his orders. Forget it." "Forget it, sir?" I repeated after a moment. "Commander Lineback," he said heavily, "has been in the Navy exactly seven months. He tells me, 'Moeller's new here. Give him a chance.' He says, "What's the difference? Let him roam around the base all he wants. After he sees everything there is to see, I'll brief him.' He says. When it comes right down to that, there's nothing to see, anyway -- not imtil Moeller and the rest of them make something to see.' That's what Commander Lineback says. Commander Linegerates the need for security at the present stage of this installation's development." aggerates it, sir?" I asked, shocked. "He's only been in the Navy se'-en months," repeated Lieutenant Kedrick, staring suicidally at the wall. Ill the lieutenant to give him the de-luxe tour, like Lieutenant Kedrick ordered," the man said. "Carry on," I said automatically, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. "Oh, I wasn't at attention. Lieutenant," he said cheerfully. I looked at him more carefully. It was Charlie, the helicopter pilot. "Give me five minutes," I said. It was enough for a shower and dressing; according to my watch, I had already missed breakfast. I suppose that everyone is familiar with dairy farms, and that's about all there was to see on Project Mako. I'd already seen enough to last me a lifetime. I had spent part of my teens doing summer work in upstate New York, where you can't throw a rock between Albany and Ssrracuse without hitting somebod#s Holstein. Of course. Southern cattle aren't Holsteins, but they all operate about the same. Those at Project Mako (Oswiak informed me it had been the Volusia County Dairj'men's Co-op Center) were divided in two herds, one purebred Santa Gertrudis, the other Brahman-Friesian crossbreds. But the husbandry was no different. The milksheds were the same; the forage was the same; the cattle themselves lowed and ate and were milked the same. Project Mako's number two crop happened to be hybrid teosinte, the Mexican bush com. Back in Cayuga County, we mostly used potatoes for the secondary crop, but it didn't matter: You plant your potatoes, or com, or anything you like in rows; you show the cattle your specimens of the money crop in its various stages of growth; and you ttim them loose. The cattle eat the weeds and leave the crop. They fertilize the pasture and the "weeds" make milk for you. They tell me the old folks used to do the same thing with geese and cotton. But it was just luck that geese didn't like the taste of cotton stalks. With cows, by speaking their language, you could tell them what to eat and what to leave alone. "They aren't really weeds, Lieutenant," the chief said. "They're hay, like." "Sure," I said. I knew more about it than he did. Naturally you don't want your cattle eating real weeds; best practice in Cayuga County was to sow a cover crop of one of the ladino grasses or hybrid clover -- something that will stand up under heavy grazing. Naturally you don't want it to look too much like your money crop, either -- cows aren't bright. "So this is Project Mako," I said. "All of it," said Oswiak, grinning. "Ain't it a beaut. Lieutenant?" A fter talking the steward out of some coffee, I rested my feet in the wardroom. Oswiak was right: Project Mako was a beaut -- that is, it was a beautiful dairy farm. But what was top secret about it? There was, it was true, one largish building that was next to empty, and all Oswiak knew about it was that equipment was due to arrive. There were two or three smaller buildings -- the one where Lieutenant Kedrick had caught me out of bounds, for instance -- that seemed a little ambiguous on a dairy farm. One was full of records of animal noises; another held cages -- empty ones, the kind that you might keep white rats or monkeys in, if you were going to run a research laboratory. Oswiak didn't know what they were for, either, except that they had something to do with animals. I had already figured that out. I stretched out and read a newspaper. The hawk-faced j.g. who had been with Kedrick came in and nodded. His name, I had found, was Hoglund. I offered him the paper and picked up a magazine; it was getting close to lunch time. "Look at that!" exclaimed Hoglund, his hawk face wrathful. "The lousy, stinking rats!" I looked at the front page he was holding. His thumb was restCall Put at #; Manicurists, Bakers, Morticians Face Early Draft. I said: "They'll get the whole country mobilized before long. I hear -- " "I'm not talking about the draft," he corrected severely. "They got Winkler.I'd read the story. It said: "General Sir Allardis Winkler, Military Attache of the United Kingdom Government in Exile, died at his home in Takoma Park, Maryland, last night of undetermined causes. General Winkler's body was discovered by a member of his family when -- " I looked at Hoglund wonderingly. "Friend of yours?" "Man, don't you know what that is? That's the GlotchJ They got Winkler, just the way they got Senator Irvine last spring. Who's next? That's what I want to know. Those damn Cow-dyes can pick us off, one by one, and we don't know dirt from dandruff how to stop them." say anything here about the -- ah -- Glotch." "Sure it doesn't. Where've you been, man? Can't you tell when they're covering something up?" "I've been out of touch," Hoglund snapped his fingers. "You're the one from sea duty. You mean they didn't have the Glotch there?" "Not that I ever heard of." "You were lucky," he said. "I bet if there's been one, there's been fifty cases in the paper in the last six months. General Winkler dies of undetermined causes. Senator Irvine found dead in bed. District Mobilization Director Grossinger dead of stroke. 'Stroke,' they say -- sure, the Cow-dyes strike them dead. And not just big shots, but all kinds of people. Why -- "I saw an Air Force captain -- " "Why, I bet there's been thousarvls killed that we don't even hear about." He shook his head. "That guard at the stockade a while back, he never got in the papers. They -- " "This Air Force captain probably -- "They don't tell us about it. You know why? Because they don't know what to do. The big brass is scared witless. They're trying blackouts, they're trying this, they're trying that. But they aren't getting anywhere, believe me. He might have gone on forever, but the stewards appeared. "Chow, gentlemen." I had spent three hours minutely examining a top secret Navy installation and I had listened to an impassioned harangue on an enemy secret weapon. But I couldn't honestly say that I'd learned a single thing about either one. I found Commander Lineback in the milkshed after lunch and I said just about that to him. He said: "You'll get briefed, Moeller. I told you. We're waiting for the rest of your draft to arrive." "Can I ask when that will be, sir?" Department. The word is it might be a week." "Commander Lineback, can't you just give me an idea of what all this is about? You did let me look over the whole project, you know." "And you saw everything there is to see." "Buc it's just a farm!" "Right," he agreed. "Absolutely right." One of the ratings saluted and asked if it was okay to start bringing the cows in and Lineback nodded. He said, talking to me but keeping his eyes on the cattle being nm in to the milking stalls: "Maybe you know as much as I do already, Moeller. Seven months ago, I was assistant professor of agronomy at Eau Claire. They called me up. They picked me right out of a classroom and gave me e two-week indoctrination course and sent me down here to activate this station. Did they tell me why?" "I don't know, sir, but surely you have some idea -- " "Oh, maybe I have," he admitted. "Maybe a couple of the moment. Then: "Look," he said, "I don't want to say anything against you, boy, but you're getting to be a pain in the neck. We've got some stuff to be picked in three days. Want to go down and pick it up?" other officers do, too. But until I'm told to pass on my ideas to you, I'll keep them inside my own head where they belong. I'll tell you this much -- it has somethings or other to do with animals." "I figured that out for myself, sir," I said bitterly, just as I had to Oswiak. "And we've got a lot of equipment coming -- including some kind of electronic gizmo for you." bank computer to help you figure out the price of butter." He looked at me thoughtfully, but he didn't say anything for a what I need, a vacation from doing nothing." "Yes or no, Moeller!" All of a sudden, he was a superior officer again. "Why -- why, yes, sir." I automatically snapped to. He nodded. "Kedrick'll fix up your orders." He grinned. "You can leave this afternoon. They tell me Miami's quite a place." I said, "Sir, I -- I'm sorry if I was out of line." "Forget it." "It's just that -- well, Spruance was more my kind of war." He seemed like a human being. I said hesitantly: "You see, sir, as long as I was in Caodai waters, there was always the chance of bagging a commando raid. And I have a special reason for wanting to go to Zanzibar." He looked at me alertly. "Zanzibar? Nothing much there." "Depends on how you look at it, sir." I could see the moment when his expression changed as he remembered. It was in my personnel file, after all. "Oh. Your wife." "That's right, sir. She's been interned in the big camp on Zanzibar for two years." He patted the brown neck of a cow absently. "Tough. Well, you didn't have much chance of making it." "Not much, sir. Now it's not any." He flicked the cow on the rump and she bumped stiffly over to the milking stall. A seaman in dungarees and tee-shirt hitched the plastic cups to her teats and, through yards of transparent tubing, the milk pulsed to the settling tank. "Well," Commmander Lineback said, "have a nice time in Miami. What did you say your wife's name was?" "Thank you, sir." He looked at me curiously. "Moeller?" he said, like a man who suspects his phone connection has gone dead. "Yes, sir?" "Nothing. I just asked you what your wife's name was." I stood at attention. "Elsie, sir." I saluted and left, quickly. IV sented my orders. The room clerk said: "Glad to have you here. Lieutenant; hope you'll have a good time. Front!" He clapped his hands sharply. I mentioned: "I'm here on official busines." He smiled knowingly. The corporal who came over to pick up my Val-Pak must have been the bell captain. He waited embarrassingly. In spite of Navy regulations regarding cash gratuities to military personnel, I gave him a quarter. He didn't give it back. Maybe the Army regulations were different. My room was thirty stories up, overlooking the ocean and the Gulf Stream. You could almost see the Stream -- in fact, I'm not sure but what I did see it, a paler blue in the blue-violet of the inshore waters. You could see quite a lot from my window. You could even see the sooty high-water mark along the white beaches, where the oil from sneak-raid torpedoed tankers had washed ashore. I changed into my dress greens, left my room key with the tech sergeant at the desk and headed for the headquarters of Commander, South Atlantic Theater. SPs in white leggings opened the door of my cab and saluted smartly. It was a hotel that made mine look like an outhouse; over its hibiscus-framed front doorway was the stainless-steel legend: peated on the white life-preservers that hung from the railings of the walks, on the caps of the elevator operators and the armpatches of the SPs, and was even picked out in pastel tile on the deck around the swimming pool where I had been instructed to report. A petty officer read my orders skeptically, scratched his head and sent one of the SPs to the end of the pool. A hairy-bodied man in green trunks came back with the SP, toweling himself furiously. "Can't I have even a lunch break, Farragut?" he demanded. "What the devil is it now?" He read the orders and looked at me irritatedly. "Mako, Mako," he repeated. 'Whaf s Mako?" I looked quickly at the petty officer. "Classified, sir," I whispered. He barked, 'What the devil isn't?" But he picked up a hushphone from the petty officer's desk and spoke into it for a moment. "You're early. Lieutenant Your commander was distinctly told that the issue wouldn't be ready imtil Thursday." "Sorry, sir," I apologized. "Oh, not your fault." He gave me back my orders -- limp and blurry where he'd dripped on them. "Come back Thursday." 'What shall I do until then, sir?" He looked at me imbelievingly. "This is Miami. Just be back here Thursday, that's all." And he dived wallowingly into the pool. So there I was, on my own in Miami. It had been, I counted, seventeen months since I had walked the streets of an American city with time to kill. On Spruance, you didn't take your leave, because where were you going to go? The whole thing about a nuclear-power submarine cruiser, after all, is that it doesn't need to get back to home base very often. Spruance had been cruising for a year when I joined her, was still cruising now. There had been a couple of times when, for a day or so, we had touched at Bordeaux or Cork on some strategic errand, and some of us got to stretch oiu' legs ashore. But have you ever spent a festive evening in a heap of rabble? Neither has anyone else. Miami Beach, though, was festive enough to make up for all. My hotel was bright and shiny, even though in the rundown district around Lincoln Road. The wonderful thing about spending a couple of days at the Beach is the pretty girls, for a wise provihostess-training center right next door in Coral Gables. Biscayne Boulevard was lined with them, seven days a week, all the weeks of the year. Lord knows when the girls foimd time to study -- or perhaps their social life at Biscayne Boulevard was a kind of extension course at the training center, because what else does an airline hostess have to know? At any rate, they were there -- as many as the reminiscing boys on Spmance had said, and as pretty. They were the sweetestlooking, gayest-laughing, homiestseeming things I had seen in seventeen months; and four out of ten of them, seen from a distance, had the same waved brownish hair and carefree walk of Elsie. Elsie. It was more than two years since we had our last leave together. I stopped under a palm tree and looked, as ineonspicuously as I could, at the picture in my wallet. She was almost a stranger. It hadn't been so bad on Spruance, where there were few women and there had always been the faint chance of commandoing Zanzibar. But here in Miami, where everyone but me walked two-bytwo, it was bad. I was lonesome. H er and her cursed volunteering! I had told her and told her, long before her number came up: "When they get you, don't volunteer for anything." So naturally she had signed on the courier flight to Nhatrang in Indo-China, where the Caodai headquarters were, and naturally the courier had wandered off course over Yemen, and naturally the Caodais niked him down. It wasn't Elsie they were interested in; the game they were after was the air marshal in whose staff she was a yeoman. He'd be a valuable hostage in some future exchange. And they nabbed him. She was lucky she got out in time -- and twice as lucky that they'd eventually shipped her to the big internment camp on Zanzibar, along with the marshal. But me, I was hardly lucky at all. I had a large glass of fresh orange juice at a sidewalk cafe and talked with a Waaf at the next table. She was a very attractive blcMjde; she would have been fun to take out -- if she had been Elsie. I walked two blocks and had a guanabana sherbet at another sidewalk cafe, and talked with a Waaf sitting next to me at the counter. She was a very attractive brunette, but she wasn't Elsie either. I considered a third sidewalk cafe featuring fresh papaya-pineapple drinks. But there is a limit to the amount of liquid I can stand sloshing around in me. Glamorous Miami! I was prepared to sell it short, that hot afternoon. It wasn't that Miami wasn't very nice. It was too nice for a lonely man. I was battling a sort of perverse inanimate conspiracy against me on the part of the Sun, the sky, the weather. If Elsie had been with me, I would have been happy. But she wasn't. There was only one thing to do. I had been resisting doing it ever since Fd landed at Montauk, en route to Project Mako. I couldn't resist it any more. I found a phone booth, and the Classified book had what I wanted: Hartshome # e GicM'dano, F.C.C. Licensees, at an address near the Venetian Causeway. The heading was Telepathists #s Espers. T he girl at the desk was an enlisted Wave. It surprised me, for the last time I had used an esper, the whole outfit was aggressively civilian. She said doubtfully, "Zanzibar? That's Caodai territory." "I know it is," I said patiently. "My wife is interned there." She looked at me as though I were a pacifist or something, forms. I gave her all the information she asked for, and she said: "You're lucky. They say that all esp communication will be pre-empted for military use the first of the month. Now would you like this guaranteed or not?" "Non-guaranteed," I said. The difference in the rate was considerable; besides, I'd had half a dozen previous rapports with Elsie. There wasn't any doubt in my mind that I'd get through. That is, if she was still -- Never mind that, I told m # rself quickly, and listened to the Wave. She was mumbling figures from a rate book and making marks on a pad. "Eleven dollars and ninety-five cents, including tax," she said at last "That's for three minutes." She spoke into an intercom and nodded to me. "Mr. Giordano will see you now." Giordano was a beadyeyed little old man with curly white hair. "Six previous rapports," he said approvingly, studjdng my chart "Well, ten cc ought to be enough for you. Will you roll up your sleeve, please?" I looked away as the needle bit into my arm. It tingled; the hormone solution you take before an esper rapport seems to be distilled from wasp venom. "Thank you," he said, and I rolled down my sleeve as he sat down at his desk. He wasn't much like the last esper I'd gone to, back in Providence, when Elsie was first interned. That one had worn a white tunic with a sidebuttoned collar like a surgeon's, and he had been a phony from the word go. Oh, he put me in touch with Elsie all right, but there had been a gauzy shapelessness about the contact that had left me more unsatisfied when I left than when I came in. This one had a fine businesslike air about him. He wore an ordinary Navy undress imiform with a chief warrant's pin in his collar. That's a more important factor in esping than most people realize. The Providence hookup had been the one real failure I had had with Elsie. I have the node, Lieutenant?" he asked. The "node" was the photograph of Elsie from my wallet. He studied it approvingly. Why is it that the photograph one carlies of agirl is alwajrs in a bathing suit? Is it that the more you can see of a subject, the more vividly the image brings her back? Or just that one usually carries a camera to the beach? "Very nice," he said. "Now how about your nodal experience?" "Well," I said hesitantly, "just before the picture was taken, we had lunch on a terrace overlooking the beach. There was a band and we danced." "And you remember the tune the band was playing?" I nodded. "Good. One other thing. Lieutenant. Do you know what time it is in Zanzibar now?" I snapped my fingers. "Oh, damn. She'll be asleep?" He glanced at a chart and nodded. "It's aroimd two in the morning there. Of course you can get rapport even if she's asleep, you know, but she may not remember it in the morning. Or she may think it's a dream." "We'll try it." I could always try again the next day, I told myself; the money didn't matter. "Lean back," he said gently, and the lights went out, all but a tiny, indirect one that softened the shadows but left nothing for the mind to fix on. I felt the esper come into my mind. I know that some people find that an ordeal, like the den tist's pick pr#dng into the bicuspid. For me, it has always been a warming, protecting sort of' coming together. Perhaps it is because I've never esped anyone but Elsie and it hasn't been a matter of exchanging data but of moods. Those who try to use espers for business calls, trying to pinpoint details in a cloudy contact, must find the whole process exasperating. I heard, in the back of my mind, the slow whisper of the music and I saw the beach-umbrellaed terrace where Elsie and I had danced. The esper was finding the range. Elsie? I formed the name in my mind. She was asleep, all right But her voice from far away, foggy yet real: Darling. In successsion, I formed the thoughts: I'm well. Fm lonesome. I love you. And her answers: Fm well, but tired. I love you, too. I want to see you... Three minutes went very fast. " Nothing, perhaps. Nothing, certainly, that could have been put on a progress report. I didn't know why Elsie was tired, I didQj't know what she had had for dinner or what the weather was in Zanzibar. I didn't even have a phrase or a gesture or a look to treasure; nothing had been that clear. Esping is a form of communication, yes, but of emotions rather than concepts. One speaks with sighs instead of syllables, and I don't know any answer to give to those who say you can get the same effect staring into the bubbles in your beer. For a moment, I had been with Elsie in my mind. I couldn't touch her; I couldn't hear her or see her, but she was there. Was that worth slightly more than six cents a second, tax included? It was worth anything in the world. I paid the girl at the desk dreamily and drifted out I was halfway across the street before I heard her calling after me. "Hey, Lieutenant! You forgot your hat." I took it from her, blinking. She said: "I hope things work out for you and your wife." I thanked her and caught a bus back along the palm-lined boulevards. All the depression was gone. All right, I hadn't touched Elsie -- but I had been with her. How many times, after all, in our short married life together had I waked in the night and known, only known, that she was asleep beside me? I didn't have to wake her, or talk to her, or turn on the light and look at her; I knew she was there. I got off the bus at Lincoln Road, still dreaming. It was dark, or nearly, before I came to and realized I had walked far past my hotel and that I was hungry. I looked around for a place to eat, but I was in an area of solid block away and the two nearest restaurants bore the discreet legend: Fla Officers Only. I turned around and walked back toward my own area. dark and then realized that Miami Beach, like Project Mako, was blacked out. But it seemed blacker than a blackout could account for, and not in any understandable way. The lights were there, hidden behind their canvas shields from the possible enemy eyes at sea. The narrow slits in the shields over the street lamps cast enough light on the pavement for me to see where my feet were going. The cars that moved along the boulevards had their marker lights, dim and downward cast but clear. And yet I was finding it hard to get my bearings. Something was sawing at my mind. It was the hormone shots, I thought, with a feeling of relief. I was still a little sensitive, perhaps, from the esping. What I needed was a good meal and to sit down for a while. It would make me as good as new. But where was a restaurant? Someone slid a burning pine splinter into the base of my neck. It hart! I must have yelled, because figures came running toward me. I couldn't see them very clearly, and not only because of the darkness, and I couldn't quite heaf" what they said, because something was whining and droning in my ears, or in my mind. There was another stab at the base of my head and one in my shoulders, like hot knives. I felt myself falling; something smacked across my face and I knew it was the pavement. But that pain was numbed, nothing compared to the fire stabbing into my neck and shoulders. Someone was tugging at my arm and roaring. I heard a police whistle and wondered why. And then I didn't wonder anything at all. The world was black and silent. Even the pain was gone. V sake! Suppose we ought to let him sleep it off?" I blocked someone's slapping hands away from my cheeks and opened one eye. Ringed around me were half a dozen faces, looking down -- a couple of nurses, a doctor or two, and a j.g. with a thin black mustache and an O.O.D. band on his arm. "Well," said the Officer of the Deck, "welcome back." I tasted something awful in my mouth. "Wha -- happened?" The faces were grave. "You got burned." Apparently being burned was no laughing matter. I groggily made sense of what they were telling me. Like the Air Force captain at the Boca Raton field, like the other mysterious victims I had heard whispers about, I had been burned. And it was true enough; they showed me a bright mirror above and I could see the bums. My shoulders, the base of my neck, a thin line down my back like a bad sunburn, and they hurt. Something clicked in my fuzzy brain. "Oh," I said, "the Glotch." But they had never heard of "the Glotch." Evidently the Boca Raton name for it was purely local, but the thing was the same, all right. They called it "getting burned." The O.O.D., whose name was Barney Savidge, had heard it called "The Caodai horrors." But it was all the same thing and all bad. "You're a lucky kid," said Lieutenant Savidge. "We picked you up and it looked like you were as dead as the rest of them. After all, only one out of a thous -- " "Savidge!" one of the medics said sharply. The O.O.D. looked quilty. "Sorry, sir. Ansnvay, Moeller, you're lucky." They wouldn't tell me much; apparently the Glotch was as hush-hush in Miami as it was in Boca Raton. But it appeared I would live. They brought me coffee after they finished dressing my burns. pital and, although I had visions of being a celebrity for a day, the O.O.D. cut me down to size. "It comes and goes," he said, looking apprehensively at the ship's surgeon out of earshot across the room. "It comes and goes, some days a whole bunch of casualties, some days none. Last night was one of the bad ones." "You mean I wasn't the only one?" "Hah! There were seven, Moeller -- last I heard." He stared at me thoughtfully. "The only difference between you and the other six is, you're alive." It was a cheerful thought. "Well," I said, "thanks for everything and I guess I'll be getting along -- " "I guess you won't," he said flatly. "Maybe in the morning. They want to look you over -- you're supposed to be dead, you know. They want to find out how come you're not" It wasn't so bad. They kept taking my temperature for a while, and feeling my pulse, and talking to each other in what doctors use for English. But Savidge, who didn't appear to be too overworked as O.O.D., dropped in every few minutes and we got fairly well acquainted. Along about three in the morning, they decided I could go to sleep. So I did, but I wouldn't say I slept well. T he hairy-bodied officer form this time and he turned out to be a captain. "Moeller," he said crisply, "I told you your stuff wasn't ready yet. Are you trying to rush me? Speak up!" "No, sir, but -- "But go away, Moeller," he said. "Remember the famous motto of the Navy: 'Don't call us; we'll call you.' You're dismissed." And that was that. out of bed. He was bleary-eyed on three hours sleep after a night as Officer of the Deck, but he began to wake up with the third cup of wardroom coffee. "I'll tell you what we do," he began to plan. "We'll pick up a couple of Waafs from the training center and run over to Tropical Park for the afternoon and -- " "I'm married, Barney." He stared at me. "What?" "I don't want to pick up a couple of Waafs." He scratched his head. "Well, we'll go over to Tropical Park by ourselves and -- " I said: "Barney, could we look around the base here? I've been out on a cow -- that is," I corrected myself hurriedly, remembering those bright red Most Secret stamps on my travel orders, "I've been out of touch with the Navy. Let's take a look at the ships." All he said was: "It takes all kinds." bean fleet is big enough for anybody. There were forty men of war surfaced in Bisca#me Bay, destroyers and carriers and a couple of JVimitz-cla cruisers that brought a curious sensation to my throat "Busy out there," I said, staring hungrily at the fighting ships nursing from the tankers. "It's getting busier all the time, Logan," Barney said soberly. "See that bucket beyond the breakwater?" He was pointing at an ancient monitor, a harbor-defense craft with plenty of punch but no range to speak of. Work barges were lashed to its sides and welders were slicing into a twisted, scarred mass of metal on its forward deck. "Looks like it tangled with a can opener," I said. "A Caodai can opener. That's Hadley and it was down off the Keys when a Caodai sneak raid took a potshot at it. It got back; there were two last month that didn't." I said uneasily: "Barney, have things been hotting up while I was at sea? All this business of getting burned and sneak raids right off our coast -- it sounds bad." B arney shrugged morosely. "Who knows? There isn't any war on." "Come on," I insisted. "What's the score?" 'Who knows?" he repeated. "You can see for yourself, things are happening. Up until last a capital ship in coastal waters. Since then -- well, never mind how many, but we've lost some. Are things getting worse all over or is it just local? I don't know. We send out a squad of scout torpedoes three times a day and I guess we average twenty contacts a week. "By the time the big boys get to where the torpedoes have made a contact, there's nothing there, usually. Sometimes not even the scout But you look in the papers and you find nothing about it of course. Once in a while, maybe, there's a story about 'Unidentified vessel sighted off Miami Beach' -- that's when you can see them from the topfloor windows of the hotels. But that's all." He flicked his cigarette into the water and grinned at me. "Now do we go to Tropical Park?" So we went and I succeeded in losing forty-five dollars. It wasn't hard -- I just bet hunches. By the fourth race, the T# at the five-dollar window got to know me and shook his head sadly when I bought my tickets, but I didn't mind much, because what I was thinking of was not horses and parimutuel betting but war and Elsie. I sat out the sixth race in a canteen imder the grandstand and read a newspaper. I could hear the crowd screaming and stamping overhead, but the newspaper thundered louder than they, if only you read between the lines. Eight-Year-Olds Face Student Draft. How long had we been putting school kids in imiform? Had it started while I was on Spruance? The age limits had been lower and lower, that much I knew -- but eight-year-olds? Caodais Protest Ankara Looting, Threaten Reprisals Against Hostages. I read that one thoroughly. There had been trouble at the Caodai legation in Turkey VI and the Caodais appeared to think it was deliberately fomented. That much was simple enough, but the bit about hostages gave me a bad time. Because I couldn't help remembering that one of the hostages was no mere statistic, but the girl I had married. The nature of the trouble in Ankara was far from clear; sometimes it seemed to me that there had been an arson attempt, sometimes a mere hit-and-run burglary. It was sloppy reporting and I read the item over a dozen times before I concluded that it didn't matter. If the Caodais were looking for a pretext to take their temper out on the hostages, anything at all would serve. I found Barney in thecrowd, right where I'd left him, and told him my burns were bothering me. It was true enough, at that -- my whole neck was stiffening up. But what was bothering me most of all was life itself. I arranged to meet him again and caught the bus back to my hotel, so lost in my own ugly thoughts that I didn't pay any attention to the desk clerk's expression. But what he handed me along with my room key jolted me out of my reverie. It was a mailgram a furious kitten: ."Curse it, Moeller, don't you know the first thing about military security? You've got your head crammed full of the top-ciassified information in the country -- and you have to blather it all over the world with an esper!" I swallowed and said nothing at all. In truth, I had almost forgotten going to the esper; the attack on the beach had just about wiped it out of my mind. "Answer me!" demanded Kedrick. I hadn't heard the question, but I could guess. 'Tm sorry, sir," I said. "Sorry!" Kedrick seemed to inflate with pent-up irritation. "If you're sorry now, what will you be when a court-martial gets hold of you?" "But I -- I didn't say anything, sir. I just sort of, well, wanted to know how my wife was. You don't talk when you esp. You just -- " "Knock it off," ordered Kedrick explosively. "You can tell all that to Commander Lineback. I can assure you, though, that he takes a dim view of you right at the moment." "Yes, sir." I thought a moment and added: "Is that why I was recalled?" "No." Kedrick shifted gears into savage irony. "You were recalled because the project would like you to do a little work for a change. New equipment and new officers are in. We're going to start to roll and you've got to attend a briefing at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow. As a matter of fact, Moeller, we didn't find out about your crazy trick with the esper until a mailgram came in ago. There was a censor's gigsheet on you and the commander hit the roof." That was improbable, I thought, remembering Lineback. I appeared to be dismissed, so I started a rather stiff-armed salute. It attracted Kedrick's attention. "What the devil's the matter with your neck?" he demanded. I touched the bandages. "What you call the Glotch, sir," I said, and told him my adventure. It took a lot of passion out of him. He was staring pensively at nothing when I finished. "Is that all, sir?" I asked positively, after a moment. 'What?" He roused himself. "Oh, I guess so, Moeller. This is a crazy business." "Yes, sir," I agreed. He seemed very tired all of a sudden. "You're dismissed. Go pop a couple with your girl and -- " "I don't have a girl, sir," I said. "Well, take a couple of drinks and get a night's sleep." He shook his head wearily. "Trouble! The Glotch and the stockade getting set to explode and guts with espers -- " He was talking to himself, not me. I saluted and hit the sack. I hadn't fully understood the reference to the stockade, but I didn't let worry keep me awake. I dreamed very happily of Elsie until the messman tapped on my door at #. T here were fifteen of us officers at the briefing, six of them brand-new, arrived on the morning plane. Commander Lineback spoke only long enough to introduce a -- civilian! We all looked at him with considerable interest. His name was Schwende and he was at least fihy -- well over the compulsory military training age, of course. But he was a civilian, and he was out of uniform, and Lineback referred to him as "doctor." He was quick and concise and he told us, at long last, what all of us were doing at Project Mako. We are going to do research in animal communication. There wasn't anything new about that, but we were going to add some new wrinkles. Dairy farmers had given orders to their cows for decades. But we were going beyond cows and horses and pigs, beyond the order to lay off the cash crop and the one to return to the barn for milking. We were going to talk to them. "You'll make guesses," said the doctor -- of animal husbandry, not medicine. "That's your privilege. Guess your heads off about what the Navy's going to do with animals. But keep your guesses to yourself." And that was the end of that, barring handing out individual assignments. Mine was to run a computer. We were dismissed and the new draft of officers rejxjrted to the dayroom to be assigned to quarters. All of the new ones were ensigns and j.g.s, except for the Russian. He was some kind of senior lieutenant, but just what that amounted to, I cannot say. It didn't matter in terms of command relationship, of course, because as a co-belligerent he was present only as a military observer. He was Red Army, not Navy, but he wore our naval undress whites, with only the Russian shoulder-boards to mark his rank. And he was quartered with me. A room to myself had been too good to last. I showed him to our room with silent regrets for the loss of my solitude. In hesitant but good English, he said: "Is very nice, Lieutenant Which of the beds is yours?" I offered him his choice, but he insisted on not disturbing my arrangements. "Both of them are splendid," he declared judiciously, and then he smiled. It was a good smile; with it, he came to rigid attention. "Timiyazev, Semyon Ilyitch," he proclaimed. "Please to call me Semyon." we made ourselves acquainted. He knew more about Project Mako than I had before the briefing, but nothing that was very informative. He had been thoroughly briefed by his govemment-in-exile at their tiny legation in Washington, just next to the dome of the United Nations building. He said: "They were very glad to be able to send me to this place. We have not so very many officers in the Free Russian Forces who are versed in animal psychology, do you see? Much less one who is the son of a colleague of Pavlov's." "I didn't know it ran in the blood." He looked at me appraisingly, then chuckled. "Oh, it does not Surely not. But my mother was also my teacher. She was unhappy when my opportunity came to attend the Suvorov Academy. She would have preferred, you see, a scientific life for me. But in a world of war, one is best as a soldier. And if one must be a soldier, why not attend the Academy and have perhaps the prospect of becoming a general?" He added pensively, "That was some years ago, of course, before the Orientals occupied us. Now -- perhaps my mother knew best." I made my excuses after a little while. Semyon made me a bit uncomfortable. I know that the Russian business is all over and done with, and you don't hold a grudge against somebody who's down. And, in a way, it's our fault that the Russians are in the kind of shape they're in. If we hadn't pulverized them so hard in the Short War, they wouldn't have been so soft a touch ten years later for the Caodais coming up through Mongolia. And if they had been able to hold on for a while then, long enough for us to get off the dime, the Caodais might have been stopped in their tracks right there, the way Hitler could have been at the Sudetenland. And universal conscription might not have been necessary, and Elsie might not have been so many thousand miles away... And if wishes were horses, beggars would own the winners at Tropical Park. ant." Oswiak took his hands off the controls to point. I clutched the sides of the 'copter seat and looked. "I never saw those buildings before." "Sure you didn't," he agreed. "They wasn't any buildings there last week. The Seabees come in the day you took off for Miami, and more fuss and commotion you never heard in your life. But they got them up." He brought us down gently between two of the buildings we were talking about -- three-story prefabs with the workmen still laying pnjwer lines around them. "Looks like we're getting busy, hey. Lieutenant?" he said with satisfaction. It did indeed. Counting a couple of permanent buildings that had been standing idle, waiting for equipment, there were a good hundred thousand square feet of space in the new colony. A chunk of one floor in one of the prefabs was all mine. It was up to me to supervise the installation of my computers and get ready to go to work. The computers were the equal of anything I had had to work with at I.B.M., back in the old Civilian days. I looked at them and swallowed. Putting them in was a job, but I had a good crew #?# and the job was completed by bedtime. The night shift came on to test connections as I left. I stopped by my new roommate's quarters to see if he wanted a lift back to the B.O.Q. He didn't. It was well on to midnight, but he was busy doing something with a collie. From the door, I heard a clicking sound, like one of those tin gadgets from childhood called crickets. I looked and that was what it was -- formed tin body, hardened, cupped tin plate fitted into it. "What's doing?" I demanded. Semyon looked up angrily. "Hush, Logan!" he ordered severely. "New dog, I must finish this trial. Stay right there where you are!" The dog looked at me pleadingly. It was clearly confused. Its tongue was hanging, it was panting, its slightly raised foreleg was quivering. Semyon didn't say another word. We all waited and the dog got tired first. It started toward me, looked at Semyon, hesitated, stopped. Semyon was as silent as old Stalin in his tomb. The dog turned tentatively to one side and click went the cricket in Semyon's fingers. The dog walked slowly to a straight-backed chair. Click. The dog touched the chair with its nose. Click, click. had called it a "trial," but all he was doing was clicking his little cricket. He didn't say a word; he hardly moved. The dog was as puzzled as I, which was some consolation. It stopped and looked at Semyon. Semyon, blue eyes serene under his pale brows, looked calmly back. The dog took a hesitant step away from the chair and paused, waiting for a reaction. Silence. The dog whined worriedly and returned to the chair. Click went Semyon's cricket. The dog placed its forepaws on the seat. Click, click. The dog leaped into the seat and curled up, tail wagging madly. Click, click, click and then Semyon, grinning broadly, said: "Fine dog. Oh, excellent dog! You may come in now, please, Logan." He walked over to the dog, talking to it in Russian, and scratched enthusiastically behind its ears. "What the devil is it?" I demanded. "Were you sending Morse code?" He beamed. "Not precisely the Morse, you understand, but a code. We were talking, the dog and I." "Some Russian invention?" He shrugged modestly. "Certainly a Russian invention. My own mother invented it herself; you will find it described in Great Russian Encyclopedia. Of course," he added, to be fair, "she was assisted in inventing it by a man named Skinner in America, who invented it also, some years earlier. But my mother invented it in Russia, you see." "Tell me," I invited. Semyon was delighted to explain, but he was far from clear. It was a way of communicating with animals, only the animals couldn't talk back. It was a way of getting a dog to do what you wished, yet it wasn't training. "Is it the same thing Lineback uses for cows?" "No, no!" he said. "Radically different, Logan!" "Different how?" look. I could see he was wondering how anyone so stupid had been assigned to Project Mako, but he was too polite to say so. He said only: "You have heard the cattle language. It is only a matter of listening to the sounds the beasts make -- we will dismiss, for the moment, the visual components. One discovers how one beast informs another that there is, shall we say, a patch of clover here or a stinging nettle there. Once you have learned the, shall we call it, ox-tongue -- " he grinned at me -- "you say it back to the beast. "You make a stinging-nettle bleat for danger and pain; you say it to the beast, and you show him, perhaps, a clump of marigolds. Then perhaps he does not eat the marigolds. Of course, he perhaps slips some times, for he is quite stupid. He may take a nibble to see for himself. 'Then you beat him, and make the stinging-nettle bleat again, and he learns. Oh, he learns, surely; it is question of time and repetition." He frowned at me and said argumentatively: "Is training, you see? The language in that method is only to expedite the trainmg. "I see. And what you were doing?" "It is language" He smiled abruptly. "But I admit, Logan, it is a very tiny language. One word: 'Yes.' My dog here, Josip; if he does as I wish, I say 'yes' to him. If he does what I do not wish, I say nothing at all, and he understands 'no.' I snap this thing for yes; I do nothing for no. A very simple language, isn't it?" "Too simple. How can it work?" He shrugged. "See for yourself. What would you have Josip do?" "Do?" "Set a task for him, Logan. We shall see." I hesitated, and he flared up: "You think it is no language, yes? I see. You think it is some kind of trick or game, like trained-dog acts in the fair. But see for yourself, Logan -- give me an order and I will translate. Would you perhaps care to have Josip sit in your lap? Push the door you left ajar closed with his nose? Fetch you a book from the shelf?" trained dogs do some astonishing things -- " "Not trained!" he almost screamed. "Is absolutely untrained, this dog! Except for only one hour this afternoon, when I taught him the language. Nothing else. Is not training, Logan, you must understand that!" He cast about the room agitatedly. "No discussion!" he said peremptorily. "Look here, I choose a task. You see the cardboard cup on the floor? Once it had coffee in it. I drank the coffee; I forgot the cup. I shall require Josip to pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. Neatness is important, is it not? Even for a dog." "I had a Scotty who carried newspapers -- " "Logan! I shall stand behind this folding screen, peeping at him with only my eyes. I shall say nothing, except in our tiny language. One word, remember! No, no -- no discusion, only watch." He huffed and went behind the screen, the dog watching him worriedly. It was a sad little spectacle, in a way. My S#mnpathies were all with the dog. He knew something was expected of him, but he clearly did not know what. There was silence from Semyon behind the screen. Then the dog took a tentative step toward Semyon. Silence still. The dog, forlorn, took a step away. Click from Semyon. The dog brightened and, with assurance, took several more steps. Click, click, click and then the clicking stopped. The dog had veered away from the direction of the paper cup. hang of it. He lolled his tongue worriedly for only a second, then tried another direction, at random. Silence. Then another, and this time it was straight for the cup. Click, click until the dog was standing right at the cup, touching it with his nose. It might have taken three or four minutes in all, but, guided by Semyon's cricket-noises, the dog unarguably did exactly v'hat Semyon had promised. He pushed the cup, touched it with his paw, rolled it with his nose. Eventually he picked it up, and eventually he carried it to the wastebasket. Like Shannon's mechanical mouse, he made random motions until he fovmd one that paid off (with a click) and continued with it purposefully until the payoff stopped. It all went quite rapidly. The cup went into the wastebasket and Semyon came gleefully from behind the screen. "Ah, Logan?" he asked. "Training? Or language?" I was getting sleepy. I left him and looked in on the last stages of checking my digital computers. Well, I am no more stupid than most, but Man's mind is divided into compartments, leakproof and thought-tight. I had been polite with Semyon, but I had not been convinced. Set aside the question of what it all had to do with the Navy or the Caodais -- that was a separate problem. On its own merits, what Semyon was doing was interesting enough. And perhaps it was even important, in some way. But to call it language? Ridiculous. I had at least a nodding acquaintance  with the theory of language. Language is a supple and evocative thing; how could you dignify a one-word vocabulary by that term? Imagine compressing information, any quantity whatsoever of information, into a simple yes-and-no code... Thinking which, I checked the installation of my digital computers, capable of infinite subtle operations, packed with countless bits of knowledge and instruction. All of it was transcribed, summarized and digested into what the mathematicians call the binary system, and reproduced in the computers by the off-or-on status of electronic cells. Binary -- yes or no -- off or on. M aybe I was stupid. But you have to admit that the idea of binary language is hard to take. Animals, after all, are not electronic computers. They are flesh and blood like ourselves. I would have thought of talking to animals in a mathematical code about as soon as I would have And then I found out that, way back in the 'fifties, people had begun to do just that. I poked through the briefing documents in the project library imtil I found a resume of some trials that had taken place long ago, in England, on a computer called They set the computer the problem of translating German into English. The computer, no doubt, clicked and hummed and blew a couple of fuses, and then settled down to the job of squeezing the sense of one language into the forms of another. The resume didn't say just how were hints. In the first place, some mere human had to give what they called post-editing, meaning the choice, from context, of several possible translations for a single word. But it worked. So I read farther -- on animal communication, this time. I found Semyon's mother's "invention" in the literature -- also way back in the early 'fifties. I found sample vocabularies for cow, for dog, even for rabbit and duck. Some of the "words" were kind of interesting. For crow, a B-natural whole note, two staccato A-sharp quarter notes and a scattering of grace notes. Translation : "Beat it, there's an eagle coming." Crow was one of the simpler vocabularies, only about fifty identified words; but it was astonishing what corvus conveyed to his friends with a few very simple caws. And some of the beasts, nearly mute, got considerable meaning across without any sound at all. Take the duck's train-switching wiggle of the tail feathers, for instance. Translation: "I love very much, honey, let's get married." I suspected, at about that point, that some of the early researchers were carried away by their sense of humor. "Langriage?" I complained to Semyon in our quarters, while I was reading the briefing books and he was playing something he called a balalaika. "How can they call that language? If my mouth waters, that means I want to eat -- but is mouth-watering a word? It's only a reflex action, Semyon!" He didn't miss a chord. "Is better, Logan, that you consider instead the analogy of onomatopoeia!" Well, that stopped me -- until I looked it up -- and then it stopped me in a different way. Onomatopjoeia : the formation of words from instinctive or mimetic sounds, thought by some to be the essential origin of all language. Well, suppose the supple English language really was nothing but a refined and codified collection of grunts and yelps and wheezes... And suppxse that animal barks and posturings were language as well... What the devil did the Navy want of me, anjway? were bright -- and the Project Mako alarm bell was ringing General Quarters. I leapod out of bed like a grig on a griddle. It was the first GQ I'd heard since I left Spruance, but the old habits didn't die. General Quarters meant get to your combat stations now. I was into my pants and on my way out the door before the springs on my bed stopped vibrating. The only thing was -- what combat stations? By the time I was awake enough to ask myself that, I found that other people had the same question. Every officer on the corridors, yelling at each other in confusion. Kedrick's tirmy voice over the loud-hailer straightened us out, though. It blared: "All officers to the wardroom! On the double! All officers to the wardroom! On the double!" W E pushed into the wardroom like the Golden Horde through Hungary -- and just as unkempt. The mess attendants showed up, blinking and rubbing their eyes. Kedrick, standing on a table with a strange Army major next to him, snapped: "Coffee, you men! Get the lead out! We're pulling out of here in twenty minutes." As the mess attendants were disappearing, he barked: "Shut up, everybody! Keep it down! The Cow-dyes are busting out of the stockade and we're going to shove 'em back in. Major Lansing will explain." The exec bobbed his plump chin at the strange Army officer, who growled: "Now you know as much as I do, except for details. Fm security officer at Eighth Group, up the beach. About an hour ago, there was some ship-toshore shelling, mostly flares and noisemakers, and then the damn Cow-dyes began boiling up. They swamped the guards, took our headquarters building, knocked out our radio, and kept on going. Fve got six personnel-carrying 'copters outside -- " I recognized then the fluttering rumble that had been subconsciously bothering me -- "and you're the nearest effectives." He glanced at us wryly, but let it go at that "Your commander is already on his way there. Lieutenant Kedrick and I will command two columns to relieve the guards. If there are any guards left to relieve by the time we get there." He moved aside as the messmen came in with the first pots of coffee. "I'm sorry," he added, "to be going out of channels this way, but war is hell." He glanced at his watch. "We're taking off in five minutes. You want coffee, drink it. You want more clothes, go get them. Weapons will be issued at the 'copters." And that was that. It was like being in the Navy again. end of the major's little talk, sleepy-eyed and wobbly, but he didn't have any trouble pulling himself together when he heard what the man had to say. He shouldered his way to me. "Ah, Logan!" he exulted. "We shoot some Orientals, I hope. It will give me pleasure. Only -- " he looked oddly shy -- "a favor, Logan?" I burned my lips on the coffee. I managed to say: "What favor?" "Josip. Who knows what your n Bureau of Supply will do with him if I end up in some unmarked grave? I do not suppose that a dog is a standard article to be furnished to ships and shore installations. Will you -- " I stared at him. "Sure," I managed to promise. It was just cracking daylight as we came fluttering down into the mangroves. There was no sign of the ship-to-shore firing the major had talked about, but out over the pearl-skied Atlantic I could see the lights of himter 'copters stabbing at the waves. If there were Caodai vessels out there, they would be wisest not to surface. It would be some time before marine vessels with any range could reach the scene, but the 'copters were there and I imagined I could see the skittering hydrofoils on the surface. "Ssst!" hissed Semyon sharply as we banked and dipped. "Over there, Logan! Like beetles in barn dung!" "What? What?" I was a little jumpy, I guess. "The Orientals," gloated Semyon. And then, with an abrupt change of pace, utter dejection: "The fools! The fools! Why do we not hit them from above, eh? Bomb them, napalm them, shoot them -- " "Thejr're prisoners, Semyon!" I said, shocked. "A prisoner escaped is scarcely a prisoner, my friend. What is better -- to shoot them from above, where they cah scarcely do us much harm, or to sit in the bushes below and wait for them to come?" I said uneasily: 'The majoi looks like he knows what he's doing, Semyon." He shrugged a large Russian shrug and that was all. But he carefully checked the clips on his T-gun. The 'copters came down in a clearing and the major jumped on a stump to dispose us. 'They're moving slow," he bellowed, "but they're moving. Soon as you see anything, shoot it! They've got some guns, captured from the guards. I don't know how many or whether this lot has them. There's upward of five thousand of them nmning around, so you'll have plenty of targets. Moeller!" I jumped. Of all things I might have expected, being called out by name just then wasn't one of them. "Front and center, Moeller," lashed to a Churchill dock, bobbing harmlessly in the gentle morning swell. She said bitterly: "Half our complement on leave -- underbawled the major. "The rest of you disperse and take cover." I saluted the major with more snap than I'd been able to put into a salute for weeks. He clipped: "Moeller? You the one checked out on a scout torp?" "Checked out?" I started to blaze, but this wasn't the time for it. I said briskly: "Better than eight hundred hours in combat sweeps, with a confirmed -- " "Sure," he said, unimpressed and unheeding. He jerked a thumb and I found myself trudging through the mangrove swamp with a female naval ensign, toward the shore. We looked at three scout torps staffed to begin with -- the filthy swine!" She didn't make clear was perfectly plear that she, as temporary exec officer while the male strength of the torpedosquadron complement was manning the other torps, was requesting me to take one of the idle scouts out on a sweep. She didn't have to ask me twice. I slid out on the surface and two hundred yards from shore checked the sealer telltales, flooded the negative buoyancy tanks and tipped the diving vanes. I leveled off at thirty meters -- plenty deep for the continental shelf. guided aerial torpedoes mbstly -- and that meant at least a few Caodai vessels somewhere within range. Of course, "range" was any I My search pattern was clipped to the board over my scanning port. I flexed the vanes a couple of times to get the feel of the torp; it was good to be home again. All these scouts came off the same assembly lines and were made out of the same interchangeable parts, but it is astonishing how much the feel can differ between craft. I set the auto-pilot for the first leg of the sweep, triggered the sonars, and I was off. Back to Spnxance! I felt like a fighting man. And there was some chance that I might see some action. The girl ensign had filled me in a little bit on the way down to the beach. There really had been ship-to-shore firing -- thing up to # miles, and the only reason it wasn't more is that you can't get farther than # miles away from anjrwhere and still be on Earth. But she thought, though she wasn't clear why, that they were pretty close inshore. V# I tasted the implications of it thoughtfully. Both sides in the cold war were being pretty meticulous about respecting the continental masses belonging to the other side. You couldn't say as much for islands, and naturally Europe was respected by no one at all, being a selected jousting field. But even guided-missile attack was very rare. I wondered what on the Florida coast made the Caodais mad enough to start shooting. The blowoff, naturally, would be if they attempted to make a landing. I remembered what Kedrick had said about expecting trouble from the stockade. The girl had talked as if everyone knew the prisoners were seething for weeks past. How in blazes, I demanded  of myself, could you be expected to know what was going on when security kept everybod # r's mouth shut? Was it fair to drag me out of bed when -- Two things stopped that train of thought. One was the faintly shamefaced realization that I was furiously enjoying every minute of it. The secohd was the sonar sighting bell loud in my ear. I read the telltales fast: It wasn't a whale or a clump of weed. The microphones had picked up anhad spotted it instantly as an enemy. Contact! pra ;d there was someone within ran'.to hear: "Unidentified object, presumed Caodai, sighted at Grid Eight Eighty-Baker-FortyTwo -- ' I read my coordinates off the autolog. "Object bearing fifty-five degrees from present position, range extreme, size unknown." That was it. #I the sonar communicator got as far as someone who could hear -- and if the understaffed, overworked squadron complement could spare a pair of ears to listen -- then I might get reinforcements, possibly even in time to help. Until then, it was up to me. screws, I came about, tripping the safeties on the bow tubes. I had four tiny homing missiles to squander. Any one of them, small as they were, would probably do the trick if they connected with anything smaller than a cruiser. And they would do their best to connect; their seeker fuses would tune in on the sound of the enemy screws, the temperature of the enemy hull, the magnetic deflection of the enemy steel, all at once. And if one bearing differed from the other two, they would reject that one. They would do their best. But of course the Caodais would be doing their best. Their noisemakers would be clattering up the water at acoustic-focal points hundreds of yards away. Their "curtain" ports would be dropping thermal flares. Their counter-magnet generators would tic fields stem and stem by unpredictable turns. Still -- I had four missiles. One would be enough. I was closing on them at maximum speed, trying hard to read the indications in the sonar. A little bright pip of light doesn't tell you much, but it got bigger and brighter, and it began to look like something a lot bigger than me. All of a sudden, I was thinking of Elsie, fantastic thoughts: Suppose this Caodai, whatever he was, hit me; and suppose I got free and swam to the surface; and suppose they picked me up as a prisoner; and suppose they interned me; and suppose, just suppose, that I wound up on Zanzibar... But then I had no time for fantasies. The big, bright splotch in the sonar plate shimmered and spattered into a cluster of dots. For a moment, they wavered and tried to converge again -- but it was a cluster, all right. One, two, three -- I coimted, and counted again. But the count didn't make much difference. I had four missiles, sure. And there were at least eight enemy craft! Continued Next Month Thinking about being a writer wiii never make you one! You can become a successful writer only by writing -- steadily and for a long time, in spite of discouragement. The Magazine Institute, an organization of writers and editors, offers a chance to write, under the patient direction of a professional. You may concentrate on fiction or non-fiction. Everything you write for a full year will be individually criticized. The Magazine Institute course does not pretend to be able to teach you a few tricks that wili make you a writer overnight. It takes twelve months to complete and students are required to submit written work regularly. The course is open to qualified students who possess some natural writing ability. A qualifying Literary Aptitude Test, together with free catalog describing the Magazine Institute method of listing successful graduates, will be sent on request. Fifty Rockefeller Plaza, Dept. #K  Rockefeller Center, New York #, N. Y. I Please send your free Literary Aptitude I Test and your latest catalog to:  Name  Street Address j City or Town...Zone State  Like the second oct of a thoroughly exciting ploy, next month's installment of Frederik first installment. Why should the Navy put a big-ship man on a dairy farm? What do cows hove to do with the Cow-dye enemy? The Glotch -- that hideous burning death which strikes from nowhere -- what is it and how does the enemy pick and smite victims? Con Moeller get back to sea, where at least he stands on infinitesimal chance of reaching killed everywhere but in the hostile countries? In other words, you may find serials that punishable by lawl DeWitt Miller... for only a trickster of a novelet could hold anyone os deviously straightforward (or should it be straightforwardly devious?) as Swenson. Taken separately, Swenson's principal qualities aren't sins -- he drinks beer and he dispatches spaceships. But what he does to competing lines is a caution! OmHfbas nd-triP irwooN. Vo S " . Fiction I'lnli "! Spij;";So.S s'i.K So.tirn'ro-,'SV-S W;,f ort!-non nowl of These Great by joining: this new kind of book club no?t). They're all masterpieces by top-flight authors -- packed with rocket-fast stories I A story about the first Abomb, written before It was Invented! Another about the maclilne that shows "newsreels" of any past event. Plus more than # other "bests" of the past dccadel (('urrcnt Series). The jrlrl whose tortured mind is bombarded by the thotiftht waves of other people. The synthetic creature that goes "berserk" at hlrh temperatures. And many others. 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Y, Name  Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Address  City State eauxy by R. DeWift Miller by Vaughan Shelton by Robert Sheckley by David Mason by E. C. Tubb by Frederik Pohl by Willy Ley by H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. V. #c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the Cnited States, Canada, Mexico, South and ('entral America and C.S. Possessions. Klscwhcre #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submittel must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co... Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. N.B.C  For Listening each Wednesday X-I Galaxy For Reading each Month x-I Galaxy Science Fiction each Wednesday night. X-I 'Q-o-o.-c Here is adult Science Fiction, excitingly dramatized, by the best directors and adaptors -- over the greatest Network -- from the best of adult Science Fiction -- Galaxy Magazine. X-I Consult your newspaper for program time for X-Minus One on your X-I Radio Network, a service of A S an old hand at science fiction, I know what happens when you set your spaceship down on an alien world, whirl open the airlock, spring out alertly on the turf for Man's first look at this strange planet, and out of the lush foliage comes a -- Comes a what? If you're a writer with integrity, you want something really new, so you go out for a thoughtful walk and may not return for days. When you do, you find yourself defeatedly settling for tentacles, antennae, extra mouths andor legs, etc., etc. You're not happy with the solution, but what else can you do? Well, friend, you need help. I'm trying to give it here and Willy Ley is doing likewise elsewhere in this issue. We may not succeed, but it won't be for want of trying. Tentacles, antennae, extra mouths andor legs are all right for getting on with a story, when the aliens aren't particularly important, but by not challenging the problem, we're leaving a whole area of speculation unexplored. Let's have at it, shall we? The big handicap, of course, is that we have only our own planet to go by. However, that is better than having none at all. At least it gives us an idea of nature's method of solving life problems. The setup we're familiar with consists of vegetation living off soil and air, herbivores living off vegetation, carnivores living off herbivores. But is that the only one possible? Some plants eat insects and small animals. I don't know if there are any animals that can subsist on minerals, but that doesn't mean it can't be. In one story, I built a race of extraterrestrials that ate rock. Worked out rather nicely, too, except that, being limited in wordage, I had to ignore the other lifeforms on the planet. If it's universally true that whatever lives off soil may be considered a lawn and something must mow it, the idea of intelligent flesheating plants isn't absurd. Willy Ley, though, quotes de Camp to set a minimum limit to the size of an intelligent form. I disagree -- on Ley's own authority; he himself revealed that the Portuguese man-of-war is actually a colony of small animals, all combining to make one of the most fearsomely efficient fishing forms imaginable. Ants, bees and termites also, by joining forces, evolved something remarkably like a civilization. At any rate, the only comparable society on Earth is mankind's. So, if # pounds is really the minimum body-weight for an intelligent creature, as he and de Camp agree, it can be achieved by teamwork. For that matter, we can claim -- with truth -- that it takes a certain irreducible number of creatures to attain a civilization of any given level, if we use our own history as an inflexible guide. But would that hold if we had nothing but highly skilled specialists and machines? Since any advanced society is necessarily more versatile than even its most versatile genius, at least as far as we know, the weight of the body politic might be more significant than that of the individual member. And who says the body politic must consist of a single species? Let's go even further. Our civilization is dependent not only on an irreducible minimum population, but on an irreducible minimum of bacteria, enzymes, earthworms, plants, insects -- not freight or food animals. I'm not suggesting we give these things the vote, merely stating that they can't be left out of the required weight of a civilization. Those like ours, at any rate. But aren't other arrangements feasible? I think so. Trying to figure in advance what they might be is the hard job. Once we see how nature solves its problems, we generally kick ourselves for not having thought of the solutions. For instance, there's the problem of chewing. Birds have no teeth -- so they use gizzards filled with swallowed gravel that acts as miniature millstones. Reptiles have to gulp prey whole -- so they have digestive systems that would do credit to acid vats. Ungulates have multiple stomachs; if they are frightened while grazing, they can chew when danger is past. And how about built-in cleats? Snakes have 'em. Or animals that can drown both in air and water? Whales, of course; being breathers, they can drown in water, but because of their huge size, they need the buoyancy of water to help their lungs and so drown in air when aground. Far from running out of material, Willy Ley and I had to limit ourselves severely. All it takes is a little research to come up with more than anyone can use. If you have any notions you want to share, let's have them. Same with questions. Swenson There were no vacuums in Space Regulations, so Swenson -- well, you might say he knew s. how to plot courses through sub-ether legality! Dispatcher that Swenson staggered into the offices of Acme Interplanetary Express and demanded a job as dispatcher. They threw him out. They forgot to lock the door. The next time they threw him out, they remembered to lock the door but forgot the window. The dingy office was on the ground floor and Swenson was a tall man. When he came in the window, the distraught Acme Board of Directors realized that they had something unusual in the way of determined drunks to deal with. Acme was one of the small hermaphroditic companies -- hauling mainly freight, but shipping a few passengers -- which were an outgrowth of the most recent war to create peace. During that violent conflict, America had established bases throughout the Solar System. These required an endless stream of items necessary for human existence. While the hostilities lasted, the small outfits were vital and for that reason prospered. They hauled oxygen, food, spare parts, whisky, atomic slugs, professional women, uniforms, paper for quadruplicate reports, cigarettes, and all the other impedimenta of wartime life. With the outbreak of peace, such companies faced a precarious, devil-take-the-hindmost type of existence. day that Swenson arrived had been grim even for Acme. Dovorkin, the regular dispatcher, had been fired that morning. He had succeeded in leaving the schedule in a nightmarish muddle. And on Dovorkin's vacant desk lay the last straw -- a Special Message. Acme Interplanetary Express # Z Street New York Your atomic-converted ship Number # is hereby grounded at Luna City, Moon, until demurrage bill paid. Your previous violations ot Space Regulations make our action mandatory. Planetary Commerce Commission The Acme Board of Directors was inured to accepting the inevitable. They had heard rumors along Blaster's Alley of Swenson's reputation, which ranged from insanity. So they shrugged and hired him. His first act was to order a case of beer. His second was to look at what Dovorkin had left of a Dispatch Sheet. "Number # is still blasting through the astraloids. It should be free-falling. Why the hell isn't it?" Old Mister Cherobie, Chairman of the Board, said quietly: "Before you begin your work, we would like a bit of information. What is your full name?" "Patrick M. Swenson." "What does the M stand for?" "I don't know." "Why not?" "My mother never told me. I don't think she knows. In the s name of God, why don't you send NumTjer #... "What's your nationality?" "I'm supposed to be a Swede." "What do you mean, 'supposed'?" "Will you open one of those beers?" "I asked you..." Swenson made a notation on the Dispatch Sheet and spun around in the swivel chair. "I was born on a Swallow Class ship in space betYeen the Moon and Earth. My mother said my father was a Swede. She was Irish. I was delivered anc circumcised by a rabbi who happened to be on board. The ship was of Venutian registry, but was owned by a Czechoslovakian company. Now you figure it out." "How did you happen to come here?" "I met Dovorkin in a bar. He told me that you were in trouble. You are. Is one of the Moulton Trust's ships at Luna City?" "Yes." "Then that's why you're grounded. They've got an in with the Planetary Commerce Commission. What's the demurrage?" "Seventy-six thousand dollars." "Can you raise it?" "No."  sheet. "How come Number # is in New York?" "We're waiting for additional cargo. We have half a load of snuff for Mars. And we've been promised half a load of canned goods for Luna City. It's reduced rate freight that another company can't handle." "Dovorkin told me about the snuff. That's a starter, anyway." Swenson turned back to the Dispatch Sheet and muttered to himself; "Always a good thing to have snuff for Mars." Mister Carobie became strangely interested. "Why?" Swenson paid no attention. 'What are you taking a split load for?" "We had no choice." "You know damn well that the broken-down old stovepipes you buy from war surplus are too slow to handle split loads. Who promised you the canned goods?" "Lesquallen, Ltd." "Oh, Lord!" said Swenson. "An outfit that expects lions to lie down with lambs!" The red ship-calling light flashed on. "Number # to dispatcher. This is Captain Elsing. Dovorkin..." "Dispatcher to Number #. Dovorkin, hell. This is Swenson. What blasts?" "B jet just went out. Atomic slug clogged." "How radioactive is the spout?" asked Swenson. "Heavy." "Have somebody who's' already had a family put oft armor and clean up the mess," Swenson said, "and alter course for Luna City. I'll send you the exact course in a few minutes. When you get to Luna, land beside the Moulton Trust's ship. Now stand by to record code." Swenson reached back to Mister Cerobie. "Acme private code book." Silently, the Chairman of the Board handed it to him. When Swenson had finished coding, he handed the original message to Mister Cerobie. The message read: "Captain Rising, have crew start fight with Moulton's crew. Not much incentive will be necessary. See that no real damage is done. Urgent. Will take all responsibility. Explain later. Cerobie." "Swenson," Mister Cerobie said quietly, "you are insane. Tear that up." With slow dignity, Swenson put on his coat. He stood there, smiling, and looking at Mister Cerobie. The memory of Dovorkin stalked unpleasantly through the Chairman's mind. Everything was hopeless, anyway. Better go out with a bang than a whimper. "All right, send it," he said. "There is plenty of time to countermand -- after I talk to you." sending the coded message, he turned back to Mister Cerobie. "What's this I hear from Dovorkin about a Senator being aboard Number # at Luna?" A member of the Board began: "After all..." Mister Cerobie cut him off: "Your information is correct, Swenson. A Senator has shipped with us. However, I would prefer to discuss the matter in my private office." Swenson crossed the room to the astrographer in the calculating booth and said: "Plot the free-falling curve for Number # to Mars." Then he followed Mister Cerobie into the Chairman's office. Half an hour lter, they came out and Swenson went back to his desk. First he glanced at the free-falling plot Then he snorted, called the astrographer and fired him. Next he said to Mister Cerobie: "Is that half load of snuff..." "Yes, it is. You know Martians as well as I do. With their type of nose, they must get quite a sensation. I understand they go a bit berserk. That's why their government outlaws snuff as an Earth vice. However, our cargo release states that it is being sent for 'medicinal purposes.' It's no consequence to us what they use the snuff for. We're just hauling it. And I don't have to tell you how fantastic a rate we're getting." "To hell with the canned goods part of the load," Swenson said. "Can you get a full haul of snuff?" "Possibly. But it would cost." "Even this outfit can afford to grease palms." "I'll see what I can do." "What's the Senator on the Moon for?" "He's supposed to make a speech on Conquest Day." Mister Cerobie lit a cigar. "That's day after tomorrow," he added. "Exactly where is this eloquence to be expounded?" Senator is speaking at the dedication of the new underground recreation dome. It's just outside Luna City. They've bored a tunnel from the main dome cluster. This dedication is considered very important. Everybody in Luna will be there. It's been declared an official holiday, with all crews released. Even the maintenance and public service personnel have begn cut to skeleton staffs." "With that fiesta scheduled on our beloved satellite," said Swenson, "we won't have to worry about getting the Senator off for some time. His name's Higby, isn't it?" Mister Cerobie nodded. "Then he'll whoop it up long enough for you to get that demurrage mess straightened out." "Unfortunately, it isn't that simpie. The Senator is due for another speech on Mars. The timing is close -- he only has a minimum of leeway. As you mentioned. Number # is grounded for demurrage. And we can't ship the Senator out on Number # because of the bad jet." Swenson was silent for a long time. The beer gurgled pleasantly as he drank it. Then a bright smile -- which could have been due either to inspiration or beer -- spread across his face. "If that idiot Dovorkin can be trusted," he said, "the Senator is speaking in the early afternoon, our time. Do you happen to know just when he starts yapping? And the scheduled length of the spiel?" "I'll check it." Mister Cerobie turned to one of his assistants. Swetison took down the Luna Data Handbook and thumbed through it. A moment later, the assistant handed a slip of paper to the Board Chairman. "The Senator," Mister Cerobie said, "will speak from # hours to # hours." Swenson smiled and stuck a marker in the Luna Data Handbook. "Now," he said, "about this snuff. Can you have it loaded by tomorrow night?" "I don't see how." "Remember our agreement in the office. If we don't do something, we're through, so all we can do is lose. Leave me be and don't ask questions. I want to blast Number # into low Earth-orbital tomorrow night." Mister Cerobie looked off into that nowhere which was the daily destiny of Acme. "All right," he said, "I was born a damn fool. I'll do my best to have a full load of snuff aboard -- somehow -- tomorrow night." Swenson went back to his Dispatch Sheet. During the next five hours, he looked up only long enough to order another case of beer and a new astrographer. Finally, he called Heilberg, the assistant dispatcher who was on the night shift, gave him a lecture concerning dispatching in general and the present situation in particular, promoted a date with one of the stenographers, and departed. the next morning, he was sober, ornery and disinclined to do any work. He cornered O'Toole, the labor relations man, and began talking women. O'Toole was intrigued but evasive. "Your trouble," Swenson said, "is not with women. It's with evolution. I don't blame evolution for creating women. I blame it for abandoning the egg. Just when it had invented a reasonable method of reproduction which didn't make the female silly-looking and tie her down needlessly for nine months..." "I don't think they're sillylooking." "Maybe you don't, O'Toole, but I do. And you must admit that nine months is a hell of a long time to fool around with something that could be hatched in an incubator under automatic controls. Look at the time saving. If evolution hadn't abandoned the egg idea, half the human race wouldn't waste time being damned incubators." O'Toole backed away. He had never heard the legend of Swenson's egg speech. "Don't tell me," Swenson went on, "that evolution is efficient. Are you married, O'Toole?" "Yes, I "Wouldn't you rather your wife laid an egg than -- " "I don't kno.w," O'Toole interrupted, "but I do know that I'd like to find out what the dispatch situation is at the moment." Swenson grabbed a piece of paper and drew a diagram. While O'Toole was studying the diagram, someone laid a Special Message on Swenson's desk. Swenson glanced at it: Acme Interplanetary Express # Z Street New York Your ship Number # is hereby grounded at Luna City, pending an investigation of a riot involving your men, and for non-payment of bill for atomic slug purification. Your Number # is also charged with unpaid demurrage bill. Planetary Commerce Commission  and threw the Special Message in the wastebasket. Mister Cerobie, who had just entered the ollice, fished the form out and read it. "It never rains, but it pours," he said. "You can't stand long on one foot," Swenson answered without looking up. "Put all your troubles in one basket and then lose the basket. Morituri te salutamus. Have you heard my theory about the advantage of reproduction via the egg? And get me a beer." "I will get you a beer, but if you say a word about that egg theory, I will fire you. I heard you talking to O'Toole." "Okay. We'll forget the egg for the nonce. Did you pilfer that snuff?" "It's being loaded. And it cost Acme -- " I bboI(:ek Down ' AStbocjRapherto plot "Did you expect it would fall like manna from heaven?" Swenson flipped the switch of the intercom to Acme's launching area. "Give me Number #. Captain Wilkins." "What are you going to do?" Mister Cerobie asked. "Don't you remember what I told you yesterday? Where's that beer?" Mister Cerobie smiled, a weary, dogged smile, the smile of a man who had bet on drawing to a belly straight. "Captain Wilkins," came over the intercom, "calling Swenson, dispatcher, for orders." "Blast as soon as loaded for low altitude Earth-orbital." Swenson was silent a moment, then: "Hell, don't you know the plot? All right. I'll give it to you. Full jets, two minutes, azimuth..." Mister Cerobie interrupted quietly: "Swenson, don't you think you'd better check with the astrographer?" Turning off the intercom, Swenson spun in his chair. "Any decent dispatcher knows that one by heart. So maybe I'm wrong. Then Number # will pile up on either the Moon or the Earth. If that happens, you can collect the insurance and get out of this mess." He flipped on the intercom switch. "Sorry, Captain Wilkins, brass interference. As I was saying, I azimuth..." M ister Cerobie made no effort to continue the conversation. He was reading an astrogram, which had just been handed to him. Swenson snapped off the intercom, glanced at his Dispatch Sheet, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was silent for the next half hour and drank three beers, looking either thoughtful or asleep. Mister Cerobie' smoked a cigar until it burned his mustache. When the third beer was finished, Swenson reached for an astrogram blank and wrote: Mister Cerobie, who had been reading over Swenson's shoulder, said: "You know that demurrage rumor is true." "If things don't work out and we have any trouble, you can say you hadn't heard about the demurrage. By the way, can you write an insert to a political speech?" "I suppose so. I've lied befi.re." "Make sure it will take ten minutes to deliver -- even talking fast -- which Senators don't usually do." "What," inquired Mister Cerobie, "shall I write about?" "You know that scandal Senator Higby's opposition just got involved in. That business about slave labor exploitation on Venus. The story broke this morning. Get touch with my friend Max Zempky on Telenews and have him give you some inside details. It doesn't matter if they're important or not. The Senator will grab anything that might pep up his speech. Besides, he's probably been having a large time in Luna City and hasn't heard about this morning's story." Mister Cerobie executed a sweeping bow. "Yes, sir. And if this thing doesn't work, I told you yesterday in my office what would happen." Swenson shrugged. "Kismet."  S Mister Cerobie opened the door to his private office, Swenson called after him: "Where's this outfit's attorney?" "In the Board Room." "Find him and send him in here." Mister Cerobie nodded. "And," Swenson added, "be damned sure that speech insert will run at least ten minutes. More, if possible." Mister Cerobie slammed the door. Five minutes later, slim, softspoken Van Euing, Acme's attorney, coughed behind the dispatcher's chair. Swenson swiveled from coding the astrogram and dropped his cigarette. "What the hell -- oh, you. Lawyers are like policemen -- they sneak up on people." "How did you know I was the firm's attorney?" "I watched you try that unfairtrade-practice suit against Lesquallan Ltd. two years ago. It was snowing outside. I was broke and the courtroom was warm. You should have won the case. Some of their evidence looked phony to me. Anyway, you did a good job." "Thank you." "Did you ever stop to think about the advantage of the egg -- " "Mister Cerobie said you wished to speak to me." "That's right. I want you to draw up a something-or-other -- you know what I mean -- grounding Moulton Trust's ship on the Moon until this fight hassle is settled." "You mean you wish me to prepare a restraining order?" "Restrain, yeah! And restrain them as long as you can. I wish you could restrain them forever. This solar system would be a better place." "On what grounds am I to base my order?" "Claim they started the fight and our crew's so bashed up that we haven't enough able meri to blast off." "But I'm afraid we can't prove that." "And what's it going to cost us to try? You're on retainer. The total bill for said restraining order will be only the price of some legal paper and the services of a notary. The steno's hired by the month, like you." Van Euing looked puzzled. "What good will it do?" "You know how long it takes courts to do anything. Before your order is tossed out, Moulton will have been grounded for a week." Van Euing lit his pipe. "In legal parlance, it is something irregular, which, being translated, means it's a slick trick." "All it's going to cost you is being half an hour late to lunch." Van Euing puffed a moment on his pipe and said: "Because of your audacity, Swenson, and furthermore, because you'll be fired tomorrow. I'll prepare the restraining order." Swenson put out his hand and his blunt fingers closed around Van Euing's delicate ones. When Van Euing had gone, Swenson returned to coding the astrogram. He checked the form twice and sent it. Then he turned over his desk to an apprentice dispatcher, left orders to be called if anything broke down, and went out to lunch.  T was # : # p.m. when news of  the restraining order arrived in the quiet, streamlined offices of the Moulton Trust. Two minutes later, the offices were still streamlined, but not quiet. The three major stockholders of the great organization, N. Rovance, F. K. Esrov, and Cecil Neinfurt-Whritings, formed a tiny huddle at one end of the long conference table. Esrov was waving a copy of the order. "Gentlemen, we can consider this nothing but an outrage!" "Blackmail, really!" It was Neinfort-Whritings's lisping voice. "Whatever it is, this sort of nonsense must be stopped at the beginning. It might set a precedent." "May I suggest," Rovance broke in, "that, as the matter of precedent is sure to arise, we take no action without first consulting Lesquallan Ltd." "An excellent idea," Esrov nodded. He switched on the intercom to his first secretary. "Connect me with Lesquallan Ltd. I want to speak with Novell Lesquallan. Inform him that it is urgent." "He just entered our office." The voice that came from the intercom carried the slightest trace of surprise. "He said he desired to discuss something about canned goods and snuff. I shall send him in at once." Rovance turned to NeinfortWhritings. "I fear that old Cerobie is becoming senile. Apparently he has lost his mind." "But really, did he ever have one?" Nobody laughed. Esrov slammed the restraining order on the conference table and stood up. "Gentlemen, what shall we do concerning -- " "Yes, gentlemen, that is just what I want to know." Three heads pivoted. Novell Lesquallan, sole owner of Lesquallan Ltd., stood in the doorway. He was a broad, ruddy-faced man with a voice trained to basso interruptions. "I understand, Mr. Lesquallan," Esrov said, "that you have a matter to discuss with us." "Yes! Sit down, F.K. We have some talking to do -- about that bankrupt, dishonest Acme Interplanetary Express." "Quite a coincidence," NeinfortWhritings murmured. "You got trouble with that outfit, too? That settles it. They've cluttered up the orderly progress of free enterprise long enough. Out they go." Novell Lesquallan swiftly read the document and bellowed an unintelligible remark. "Something, quite," NeinfortWhritings agreed. L esquallan got his voice under control. "What action do you intend to take?" "We hadn't decided," Rovance answered. "We received the order only a few minutes ago." "Before we form our plans," Esrov said, "we would like some information about your problems with Acme. We understand it involves canned goods and snuff." "Yes, those damned... At the last minute, they turned down a small load of canned goods for Luna that we'd been decent enough to give them at reduced rates. They can't get away with that kind of thing long. But that's just the beginning. They got hold of the contract and permit to haul a consignment of medicinal snuff to Mars. We had already arranged for that cargo. You know that snuff situation. Through certain contacts, we have been able -- perfectly legally -- to have permits issued. That customs man must have taken a double -- " "We understand," Rovance broke in. "We have had occasion to make similar arrangements. The rates -- and other inducements -- are extremely satisfactory." "Well, gentlemen," Lesquallan demanded, "what are we going to do about this unprecedented situation?" "I suggest," Neinfort-Whritings said, "that we have our legal staffs meet in joint session. We should impress on them that the quashing of this restraining order is urgent. Perhaps we should consider debts owed us by the judiciary we helped elect." "An excellent idea," Lesquallan declared. "I will take care of that part of it myself, personally." "As to the snuff matter," Esrov said, "I think we should emphasize to our mutual contact that he should be more discriminating in issuing permits." "That's all right for now," Lesquallan snapped. "But he's , done with, too. I'll see to it that he's replaced." "As to the canned goods situation," Rovance said, "it seems to me that we should have a subsidiary company to handle our excess cargoes -- at reduced rates, of course. It shouldn't cost too much to pick up one of the less financially secure companies -- such as Acme." Esrov nodded. "An excellent idea." "I agree," Lesquallan said and sat down. "But first we must dispose of today's damned annoyances. I suggest that we outline a plan for immediate action." "To begin with," Esrov reminded him, "we must deal with the restraining order." from lunch, he was not as sober and thus in a better mood. Mister Cerobie's insert to the Senator's speech was on his desk. Swenson read the first few lines: As a further indication of the methods, devices, malfeasances, and corrupt practices employed, used, and sustained by those with whom you have called upon me to negotiate in the highest tribunal in Washington, let me cite the following information which I have just received. Although this information is top-drawer, restricted and highly secret, I was able to obtain it through certain channels which, as a man of honor, I must leave undisclosed. The right of all creatures to be free is a fundamental, an inviolable, right and yet on Venus... Swenson said to himself: "Mister Cerobie is in the wrong business," and started coding the insert. He had almost finished when the ship-calling light flashed red. "Number # to Dispatcher. Captain Verbold speaking." "Dispatcher to Number #. This is Swenson. Go ahead." "I'm afraid you can't help me. May I speak to Mister Cerobie?" "He's out to lunch." "This matter is serious. I am faced with what amounts to mutiny." "Sorry, but I got troubles, too. Maybe I can find Mister Cerobie, maybe I can't. Why don't you tell me your grief?" Captain Verbold hesitated. "It's something I've been expecting. The crew has stated that they will leave the ship at Mars." Captain Verbold's next sentence was pronounced word by word in code. "I even have private information that there is a plot to take over the ship and blast directly to Earth, where the crew feel their case can be more justly presented." "What are they squawking about?" "Everything. Wages have not been paid for six months. Poor radiation shielding. Food not up to standard. You know the story." "It's not the first time I've heard it." "What am I to do?" # in your copy of Space Regulations," said Swenson. "If they divert ship from Mars without your permission, it's mutiny. That means the neutron death chamber or, if they are very lucky, life sentences to the Luna Penal Colony. Get them all together and read it to them. You're free-falling now, so even the jetters won't have to be on duty." "But if I could talk to Mister Cerobie -- " "I've already told you I don't know where the hell he is. He couldn't do you any good, anyway. Didn't you ever read Space Regulations? Section #: 'The captain of a ship in flight is solely responsible for the maintenance of discipline and his orders cannot be changed or overruled'." "Swenson, you said a moment ago that this was your first suggestion. I presume, therefore, that you have others." "I have two others." Swenson paused long enough for a brief study of his Master Ship Location Chart, which he had just brought up to date. The chart showed the position of all ships at the moment in space. "There's a patrol cruiser loaded with gendarmes on a course paralleling yours. It's one of the new Arrow Class and if they blast full, they can catch you in ten hours. Mention to the crew that you could notify the police boys and have them pick you up and escort you to Mars." "What is the patrol ship's number and call letters?" "Arrow -- British -- Earth -- num"Thanks. If things get too bad, I might take advantage of our valiant guarders of the spaceways. All right, you said you had three suggestions. What's the third?" "Some goons on a Moulton Trust ship, parked beside our number # on the Moon, started a fight and beat up our boys. We're about to sue Moulton for plenty. Tell your crew about it and suggest that if they behave, we'll cut them in on the proceeds from the suit, in addition to paying their wages as soon as a snuff cargo that I had to send into orbital gets to Mars." "On whose authority am I to make such a statement?" "Swenson's. You don't need any other, do you? I know most of the boys on your mobile junkyard. They trust me, so they'll trust you. You have my word that Cerobie will go for the idea." "You talk to Cerobie and let me know what happens. Meanwhile, I'll think over your suggestions." T he ship-calling light blinked off and Swenson went back to coding the speech insert. As he was finishing, O'Toole came in. Swenson looked up. "O'Toole, sure and it's one hell of a job you're doing. You've got" me in a fight with myself. My Swedish half wants to ignore you and my Irish half wants to punch you in the nose. You're supposed to handle labor relations. And I just received a message from Captain Verbold of Number # that his crew is about to mutiny." "Mother of God, what can I do?" cried O'Toole. "This outfit's so broke, it doesn't have enough money to pay the filing fee for bankruptcy." "In the face of adversity, you should spit." "Who are you quoting?" "Me.", "Look, Swenson, I'm supposed to supervise labor relations, sure. Labor is something you hire. That's done by paying wages -- on time." "At least you should have brains enough to understand the advantage of the egg." "What?" asked O'Toole blankly. "I've already explained it to you. Apparently it didn't get past your hair. I shall therefore make a second attempt. Do you understand the principle of the egg?" "I don't-" "Of course not. You never stopped to analyze it. You just assumed that because human beings are born the way they are, it is the best method. How much pain and trouble does a hen have laying an egg? Does she -- " "Getting back to number #," O'Toole said firmly, "what did Captain Verbold -- " "Consider the advantage of the egg from another angle, O'Toole. Let's say your wife lays an egg and, at the moment, you don't have money enough to support another child. All you would have to do is put the egg in cold storage until your ship comes in. Then you can take the egg out and incubate it. Instead of being -- " The click of the latch as O'Toole closed the door caused Swenson to spin in his chair. Tossing his pencil on the Dispatch Sheet, he put on his coat and went home. Acme Interplanetary Express arrived at the office the following morning, a Special Message lay in sublime isolation on his desk. Swenson opened a beer and read the message. Board of Directors Acme Interplantary Express Gentlemen: Your restraining order concerning our ship at Luna City can only be considered as representing a warped and intolerable concept of justice. We will take every legal action available to us. Moreover, your action in refusing, without notice, a load which we were so kind as to offer you and your immoral dealings in contraband snuff force us to sever all commercial relations with your organization. We are taking appropriate action with the Planetary Commerce Commission. Yours sincerely, Moulton Trust Lesquallan Ltd. Swenson was smiling cherubically and bringing his Master Chart up to date when O'Toole came in. "Swenson, did you have eggs for breakfast? And how goes with the dispatch?" Carefully noting the last change of ship position on the Master Chart, Swenson turned to O'Toole. "Things are like so," he said, and drew a diagram. While O'Toole was studying the diagram, Swenson placed a call to Moulton Trust. "Give me Eisrov. Yes, Esrov himself. This is Swenson, Acme Interplanetary. If Esrov doesn't want to talk to me, jets to him, but I think I have some information he can use." "Will you please hold on, Mr. Swenson? I will convey your message." Swenson looked at O'Toole for a moment in silence. "No, I don't like eggs for eating. My theory concerns another aspect -- " "I know," said O'Toole resignedly. from the desk speaker. "Mr. Swenson, you have some information for us?" "Yes, Erov. I've just seen your message to our Board and I want you to know that I can certainly understand your pnasition. I could not prevent the restraining order. However, I have a suggestion as to what you can do about it." "We are doing everything we can." "Didn't you support Senator Higby for re-election last year? Well, he has shipped with us on an inspection tour of planetary outposts. Right now, he's on the Moon and will speak at #:# this afternoon at the official opening of the new Recreation Center. It occurred to me that it might be worthwhile for you to send him a message suggesting that he incorporate in his speech something about the laxity of the Planetary Commerce Commission that allowed you to get into this mess." "An excellent idea, Mr. Swenson. We shall give it immediate consideration. And, by the way, if for any reason your employment with Acme should terminate, we should be able to find a suitable position for you with our company." "Thanks, Esrov." Swenson switched off the set. "You dirty, stinking," O'Toole blared, "doublecrossing -- " "Calm down, O'Toole. Don't get off the rocket until she's on the ground. I've got reasons." "Reasons? You haven't even got reason! And you're a crook!" "Now don't let my Irish half get on top. I want that Senator to talk as long as possible. Let's go back to the egg." "Youve laid it." "For the last time, let me explain. If evolution had followed my theory, I, being a man, would not lay eggs. Women would and therefore they would escape -- " "Swenson," Mister Cerobie called from the door of the Board Room, "you are hired -- tentatively -- as a ' dispatcher, not an egg-evolution theorist. Now come in here. The Board wants to talk to you." Swenson jerked the diagram out of O'Toole's hand and followed Cerobie. Ten minutes later, he came out of the Board Room, saying: "Gentlemen, the Senator speaks at #:# this afternoon. At #:# either fire me, crucify me and make me drink boiled beer alone, or give me a raise."  I 'HE clock on the wall over the dispatcher's desk showed # : # when Swenson called Acme's Luna City Terminal. "Dispatcher to Numbers # and #, have crew stand by to blast off in exactly # minutes. I don't give a damn about regulations or the P.C.C. This is an order from your company. It must be obeyed. Number # will follow course as originally planned -- destination Mars. Number # will blast for Earth, curve to be given in space." Fifteen minutes later, the dispatcher's office at Acme Interplanetary Express was quieter than an abandoned and forgotten tomb. The Board of Directors stood silently in a semi-circle behind Swenson. Every employee, even the stenographers, were jammed into the frowsy room. As the hand of the clock sliced off the last second of the # minutes, Swenson looked over his shoulder -- and laughed, a great, resounding laugh. Then he flicked the switch and picked up the microphone. "Swenson dispatcher to # and #. Blast! Over. Swenson dispatcher to # and #. Blast!" Suddenly the silent room was filled with the roar of the jets as they thundered in the imaginations of the men and women crowded around the dispatcher's desk. The tension broke as almost a sob of gladness. What if it proved a hopeless dream, a mere stalling of inevitable ruin? They were no longer grounded. They were in space. To those in the room, it seemed only an instant until the shipcalling light flashed on. "Number # to dispatcher. In space. All clear." "Dispatcher to Number #, steady as she goes." The red light was off for a moment. Then: "Number # to dispatcher. In space. All clear." "Dispatcher to Number #. Temporary curve A #. Will send exact curve plot in half an hour." Swenson turned to the astrographer. "Give me a plot for Chicago. I don't want to land her in this state. Just a matter of prudence. She's registered in this state." The astrographer shouldered his way through the crowd. When he reached the calculators, his swift fingers began pushing buttons. Swenson leaned back. "Mischief, thou art a'space," he said. "Now take whatever course thou wilt." AT #:#, Swenson reached again for the microphone. "Dispatcher to Number #. You are circling Earth at low orbital. Decelerate and drop to stratosphere. Maintain position over New York. Curve and blasting data..." . At # : #, he called Max Zempky at Telenews. "Anything frying at Luna?" "My God, yes! Senator Higby yapped sixteen minutes overtime and the shadow knife-edge caught everybody with their air tanks down. The control crews were listening to the speech and there wasn't anybody left to switch over the heating-cooling system. You've been to the Moon, so you know what happens. When day changes to night and you haven't got any atmosphere, the temperature drops from boiling to practically absolute zero. Sure, the automatic controls worked, but there wasn't any crew to adjust and service the heaters and coolers. It's a mess. Say, haven't you got a ship or two up there?" "I got 'em out in time." "Well, Moulton didn't. Their ship's been considerably damaged." "Thanks, Max. Let me know if anything else breaks." While Swenson had been talking, two Special Messages and an astrogram had been laid on his desk. He first read one of the Special Messages. Acme Interplanetary Express # Z Street New York Gentlemen : We are holding you responsible for the damage to our ship Number #, now on the Moon. The captain of your ship should have known the potential danger and warned Senator Higby of the time factor. once. F. K. Esrov Moulton Trust Swenson scribbled an answer and handed it to an assistant. Moulton Trust Nuts, Esrov. You've got to think up something better than that. We have no control over public officials, except during flight. Bellyache all you want Sedately, Swenson The astrogram was from Senator Hiram C. Higby: Swenson replied: T he second Special Message with crisp and blunt formality why two Acme ships, which had been officially grounded by the Commission, had blasted off the Moon. In answer, Swenson was mild and apologetic. What else could he have done? Surely the Commission must understand that his first duty was to save his ships from damage. He had been informed by his captains that the shadow knife-edge was almost due, and there was no possibility of the control crews servicing the temperature-change compensators in time. It was an emergency. The matter of the grounding could be settled later. When his answer was finished, he coded it, along with the Special Message from Moulton Trust, the astrogram from Senator Higby, and his replies. Finally, he coded Then he called Number #. "Number # to dispatcher. This is Verbold. What goes on now?" "You tell me. Dwelleth thy household in peace?" "For the moment." "Have you followed my instructions?" "In general, yes." "Did your crew hear Senator Higby's speech?" "Most of them. What else is there to do in this rat-trap?" "I could think of a lot of things. But as long as the crew heard the Honorable's spiel, that's all that matters. Do you know about the little affair half an hour ago at Luna City?" "No." "Check your news recorder. Have the item broadcast to the crew. Then decode the sequence of messages I'm about to send and read them -- at your discretion -- to the men. Stand by to record code." When he had finished, Swenson leaned back and opened a beer. "All we can do now is wait. But I'd give my grandmother's immortal soul, if the old shrew had one, to be in the sacred sanctum of Moulton Trust."  of the long table in Moulton's Board Room. He spoke slowly and for once his voice was low; "Esrov, did you or did you not suggest to our Senator Higby that he lengthen his speech on the Moon to include certain new information? And did that information involve my company along with yours?" "Mr. Lesquallan, the matter concerns only a minor aspect of policy," said Esrov placatingly. "Minor aspect of policy, hell! It concerns business. Look what happened at Luna. And you let us get publicly involved in it. Such matters must never be handled openly." Esrov did not answer. "Did you send such a message, Rovance?" Rovance shook his head. Lesquallan turned to Neinfort-Whritings. "Did you?" "No, Lesquallan." NeinfortWhritings gently pulled a SpecialMessage form from beneath Esrov's folded hands as they lay on the gleaming conference table. Lesquallan swung back to Esrov. "Did you send it?" Esrov looked down at his folded hands. At last he said quietly: "Yes, I sent a message to the Senator -- in our mutual interests." "Was it your own idea? Or did someone else suggest it?" "The basic thought came from a most unexpected source. It was, we might say, one of those happy breaks of industry. The dispatcher at Acme had the sense to cooperate with us. He gave me certain otherwise unavailable information, and -- " "What was his name?" "I don't -- oh, yes, it was Swenson." "You... you fool... idiot!" Neinfort-Whritings handed Lesquallan the Special Message he had taken from Esrov. It was the one from Swenson, which began: "Nuts, Esrov." Lesquallan read the message. Then he said slowly: "I've dealt with that clown Swenson before -- over minor matters. I never thought he had that much brains." He looked at Esrov. "Or insight. Swenson's a smart man. Therefore, he must be eliminated." "I still maintain," Rovance said, "that the basis of the matter is the strangling of free enterprise." "I agree," said Lesquallan "What right has Acme to interfere with free enterprise? They "What shall we do?" NeinfortWhritings murmured. "Follow Swenson's suggestion. we're going to our top contacts. They owe us plenty." "Shall we dictate a memo?" Esrov put in. ordered. "We're not dictating anything. And we're not sending any messages to anybody. Let the ' planetary Express had left the smoke-dense office when the ship-calling light went on: "Number S to Swenson. Verbold speaking." "Dispatcher to Number #. Go ahead." "Uproar under control. I followed your instructions. A crew that's laughing won't mutiny. The crew sends thanks and their most pious wishes for the distress of Moulton. The men expect shares of the proceeds, if any, in the lawsuit. But they insist on being paid on Mars." "They will be. Captain Verbold. Now I've got to keep this beam clear. Good luck." Swenson turned to Mister Cerobie. "I presume you can at least find enough cash for the back pay?" Mister Cerobie did not answer. He was staring at a Special Message which had just been handed to him. He dropped it on Swenson's desk. Acme Interplanetary Express # Z Street New York Because of your violation of Space Regulations and unprecedented effrontery, your ships Numbers # and # are hereby ordered to return to the Moon. There they will be impounded. A police patrol escort has been dispatched to insure your compliance with our order. Planetary Commerce Commission Swenson read the message and looked up. "Well?" asked Mister Cerobie. The murmur of voices died. The dispatcher's office of Acme Interplanetary Express was a silent, isolated world. Swenson wrote an astrogram and handed it to the Chairman of the Board. "Shall I code it?" Mister Cerobie read the astrogram. He read it a second time and his perplexity vanished. "But will it work?" he asked. Swenson shrugged. "It ought to. Remember what happened when Solar System Freight lost that chemical load? We're stratosphering over New York. Anyway, he wouldn't dare take the chance. Shall I code it. Mister Cerobie?" "Absolutely!"  I 'HE men and women of Acme crowded and squirmed for a look at the astrogram on Swenson's desk. O'Toole realized first and yelled. Slowly, as understanding came, other voices took it up, until the office was a chaos of sound. Bottles appeared from nowhere. O'Toole raised one of them : "Sure and St. Patrick would have loved it!" Calmly, Swenson coded: The dispatcher for Acme said to himself: "I doubt very seriously if any sane Senator up for re-election would want the official records to show that, because he talked too long on the Moon, a cargo of snuff was dumped over New York. Sneezing voters cannot see candidate's name on ballot." Twenty minutes later, the replying astrogram was in Swenson's hand. A ND that, Mister Cerobie," said Swenson, "is how you slide out of a jam. You'll get enough cash for that snuff haul to Mars to pay the crew of Number # when she lands there. And you'll have enough left over to pay the demurrage and repair charges at Luna. Now open me a beer." Mister Cerobie opened the beer wearily. "You're fired, Swenson," he said. "I'll be damned if I'll write another speech or be your bartender." Swenson drank and smiled. The ship-calling light flashed red. "Number # to dispatcher. This is Captain Marwovan. Compartment holed by meteorite. Cannot land on Ganymede until we make repairs. Send me the orbital curve so we can circle until the hole is patched. And tell Mister Cerobie that the crew is complaining about back pay." Transferring the beer to his other hand, Swenson grabbed the microphone. "Dispatcher to Number # " for sagging in relief, as at the end of a particulorly tense and deadly mission -- for this tautly suspenseful serial has hurled you, alive and fearful, into a future that makes but, considering our horrible nuclear and bacteriological arsenal, it can't be done under the name of "warl" And these first two installments have shown exactly why "universal conscription" must be so universal that it includes not only men, women and children, but animals as well! The vital key to the destructive non-war, though, is the Glotch, that hideous weapon which can kill anyone anywhere, no matter how far from the Cow-dye enemy or how well concealed. Wait till you discover what it is and how it works -- and just who its victims are! pages with a shock that is still influencing stories being written now. Evidently that dazzling effort took so much out of Guin that he wearily went bock to being vice-president of Lakeside Laboratory. Now, finally recovered and filled with vitamins made doxically, it has a "happy" ending! The protagonist, you see, always felt that the only gag worth pulling was a cosmic one -- until he finds out that the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humor!  Another novelet, of course, plus short stories and our regular features... Including some thoroughly documented fish stories by Willy Ley that should make you wonder if we've really left the past behind usl I had the finest bodyguard on any world to protect me... but what was it that watched him? crash in Burma next week, but it shouldn't affect me here in New York. And the feegs certainly can't harm me. Not with all my closet doors closed. No, the big problem is lesnerizing. I must not lesnerize. Absolutely not. As you can imagine, that hampers me. And to top it all, I think I'm catching a really nasty cold. The whole thing started on the evening of November seventh. I was walking down Broadway on my way to Baker's Cafeteria. On my lips was a faint smile, due to having passed a tough physics exam earlier in the day. In my pocket, jingling faintly, were five coins, three keys and a book of matches. Just to complete the picture, let me add that the wind was from the northwest at five miles an hour, Venus was in the ascendancy and the Moon was decidedly gibbous. You can draw your own conclusions from this. I reached the corner of #th Street and began to cross. As I stepped off the curb, someone yelled at me, "The truck! Watch the truck!" I jumped back, looking around wildly. There was nothing in sight. Then, a full second later, a truck cut around the corner on two wheels, ran through the red light and roared up Broadway. Without the warning, I would have been hit. this, haven't you? About the strange voice that warned Aunt Minnie to stay out of the elevator, which then crashed to the basement. Or maybe it told Uncle Joe not to sail on the Titanic. That's where the story usually ends. I wish mine ended there. "Thanks, friend," I said and looked around. There was no one there. "Can you still hear me?" the voice asked. "Sure I can." I turned a complete circle and stared suspiciously at the closed apartment windows overhead. "But where in the blue blazes are you?" "Gronish," the voice answered. "Is that the referrent? Refraction index. Creature of insubstantiality. The Shadow knows. Did I pick the right one?" "You're invisible?" I hazarded. "That's it!" "But what are you?" "A validusian derg." "A what?" "I am -- open your larynx a little wider please. Let me see now. I am the Spirit of Christmas Past. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Bride of Frankenstein. The -- " "Hold on," I said. "What are you trying to tell me -- that you're a ghost or a creature from another planet?" "Same thing," the derg replied. "Obviously." That made it all perfectly clear. Any fool could see that the voice belonged to someone from another planet. He was invisible on Earth, but his superior senses had spotted an approaching danger and warned me of it. Just a plain, everyday supernormal incident. I began to walk hurriedly down Broadway. "What is the matter?" the invisible derg asked. "Not a thing," I answered, "except that I seem to be standing in the middle of the street talking to an invisible alien from the larthest reaches of outer space. I suppose only I can hear you?" "Well, naturally." "Great! You know where this sort of thing will land me?" "The concept you are sub-vocalizing is not entirely clear." "The loony bin. Nut house. Bug factory. Psychotic ward. That's where they put people who talk to invisible aliens. Thanks for the warning, buddy. Good night." F eeling light-headed, I turned east, hoping my invisible friend would continue down Broadway. "Won't you talk with me?" the derg asked. I shook my head, a harmless gesture they can't pick you up for, and kept on walking. "But you must," the derg said with a hint of desperation. "A real sub-vocal contact is very rare and astonishingly difficult. Sometimes I can get across a warning, just before a danger moment. But then the connection fades." So there was the explanation for Aunt Minnie's premonition. But I still wasn't having any. "Conditions might not be right again for a hundred years!" the derg mourned. What conditions? Five coins and three keys jingling together when Venus was ascendant? I suppose it's worthy of investigation -- but not by me. You never can prove that supernormal stuff. There are enough people knitting slipcovers for straitjackets without me swelling their ranks. "Just leave me alone," I said. A cop gave me a funny look for that one. I grinned boyishly and hurried on. "I appreciate your social situation," the derg urged, "but this contact is in your own best interests. I want to protect you from the myriad dangers of human existence." I didn't answer him. "Well," the derg said, "I can't force you. I'll just have to offer my services elsewhere. Good-by, friend." I nodded pleasantly. "One last thing," he said. "Stay off subways tomorrow between noon and one-fifteen p.m. Goodby." "Huh? Why?" "Someone will be killed at Columbus Circle, pushed in front of a train by shopping crowds. You, if you are there. Good-by." "Someone will be killed there tomorrow?" I asked. "You're sure?" "Of Course." "It'll be in the newspapers?" "I should imagine so." "And you know all sorts of stuff like that?" "I can perceive all dangers radiating toward you and extending into time. My one desire is to protect you from them." I had stopped. Two girls were giggling at me talking to myself. Now I began walking again. "Look," I whispered, "can you wait until tomorrow evening?" "You will let me be your protector?" the derg asked eagerly. "I'll tell you tomorrow," I said. "After I read the late papers." IHE item was there, all right. I read it in my furnished room on #th street. Man pushed by the crowd, lost his balance, fell in front of an oncoming train. This gave me a lot to think about while waiting for my invisible protector to show up. I didn't know what to do. His desire to protect me seemed genuine enough. But I didn't know if I wanted it. When, an hour later, the derg contacted me, I liked the whole idea even less, and told him so. "Don't you trust me?" he asked. "I just want to lead a normal life." "If you lead any life at all," he reminded me. "That truck last night -- " "That was a freak, a once-in-alifetime hazard." "It only takes once in a lifetime to die," the derg said solemnly. "There was the subway, too." "That doesn't count. I hadn't planned on riding it today." "But you had no reason not to ride it. That's the important thing. Just as you have no reason not to take a shower in the next hour." "Why shouldn't I?" "A Miss Flynn," the derg said, "who lives down the hall, has just completed her shower and has left a bar of melting pink soap on the pink tile in the bathroom on this floor. You would have slipped on it and suffered a sprained wrist." "Not fatal, huh?" "No. Hardly in the same class with, let us say, a heavy flowerpot pushed from a rooftop by a certain unstable old gentleman." "When is that going to hapIjen?" I asked. "I thought you weren't interested." "I'm very interested. When? Where?" 'Will you let me continue to protect you?" he asked. "Just tell me one thing," I said. "What's in this for you?" "Satisfaction!" he said. "For a validusian derg, the greatest thrill possible is to aid another creature evade danger." "But isn't there something else you want out of it? Some trifle like my soul, or rulership of Earth?" "Nothing! To accept payment for Protecting would ruin the emotional experience. All I want out of life -- all any derg wants -- is to protect someone from the dangers he cannot see, but which we can see all too well." The derg paused, then added softly, "We don't even expect gratitude." Well, that clinched it. How could I guess the consequences? How could I know that his aid would lead me into a situation in which I must not lesnerize? "What about that flowerpot?" I asked. "It will be dropped on the corner of Tenth Street and McAdams Boulevard at eight-thirty tomorrow morning." "Tenth and McAdams? Where's that?" "In Jersey City," he answered promptly. "But I've never been to Jersey City in my life! Why warn me about that?" "I don't know where you will or won't go," the derg said. "I merely perceive dangers to you wherever they may occur." "What should I do now?" "Anything you wish," he told me. "Just lead your normal life." Normal life. Hah! I attended classes at Columbia, did homework, saw movies, went on dates, played table tennis and chess, all as before. At no time did I let on that I was under the direct protection of a validusian derg. Once or twice a day, the derg would come to me. He would say something like, "Loose grating on West End Avenue between #th and #th Streets. Don't walk on it." And of course I wouldn't. But someone else would. I often saw these items in the newspapers. Once I got used to it, it gave me quite a feeling of security. An alien was scurrying around twenty-four hours a day and all he wanted out of life was to protect me. A supernormal bodyguard! The thought gave me an enormous amount of confidence. My social life, during this period, couldn't have been improved upon. But the derg soon became overzealous in my behalf. He began finding more and more dangers, most of which had no real bearing on my life in New York -- things I should avoid in Mexico City, Toronto, Omaha, Papeete. I finally asked him if he was planning on reporting every potential danger on Earth. "These are the few, the very few, that you are or may be affected by," he told me. "In Mexico City? And Papeete? Why not confine yourself to the local picture? Greater New York, say." "Locale means nothing to me," the derg replied stubbornly. "My perceptions are temporal, not spatial. I must protect you from everything!" It was rather touching, in a way, and there was nothing I could do about it. I simply had to discard from hieports the various dangers in Hoboken, Thailand, Kansas City, Angkor Vat (collapsing statue), Paris and Sarasota. Then I would reach the local stuff. I would ignore, for the most part, the dangers awaiting me in Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn, and concentrate on Manhattan. These were often worth waiting for, however. The derg saved me from some pretty nasty experiences -- a holdup on Cathedral Parkway, for example, a teen-age mugging, a fire. TUT HE kept stepping up the pace. It had started as a report or two a day. Within a month, he was warning me five or six times a day. And at last his warnings, local, national and international, flowed in a continual stream. I was facing too many dangers, beyond all reasonable probability. On a typical day: "Tainted food in Baker's Cafeteria. Don't eat there tonight." "Amsterdam Bus # has bad brakes. Don't ride it." "Mellen's Tailor Shop has a leaking gas line. Explosion due. Better have your clothes drycleaned elsewhere." "Rabid mongrel on the prowl between Riverside Drive and Central Park West. Take a taxi." Soon I was spending most of my time not doing things, and avoiding places. Danger seemed to be lurking behind every lamp post, waiting for me. I suspected the derg of padding his report. It seemed the only possible explanation. After all, I had lived this long before meeting him, with no supernormal assistance whatsoever, and had gotten by nicely. Why should the risks increase now? I asked him that one evening. "All my reports are perfectly genuine," he said, obviously a little hurt. "If you don't believe me, try turning on the lights in your psychology class tomorrow." "Why?" "Defective wiring." "I don't doubt your warnings," I assured him. "I just know that life was never this dangerous before you came along." "Of course it wasn't. Surely you know that if you accept protection, you must accept the drawbacks of protection as well." "Drawbacks like what?" The derg hesitated. "Protection begets the need of further protection. That is a universal constant." "Come again?" I asked in bewilderment. "Before you met me, you were like everyone else and you ran such risks as your situation offered. But with my coming, your immediate environment has changed. And your position in it has changed, too." "Changed? Why?" "Because it has me in it. To some extent now, you partake of my environment, just as I partake of yours. And, of course, it is well known that the avoidance of one danger opens the path to others." "Are you trying to tell me," I said, very slowly, "that my risks have increased because of your help?" "It was unavoidable," he sighed. strangled the derg at that moment, if he hadn't been invisible and impalpable. I had the angry feeling that I had been conned, taken by an extraterrestrial trickster. "All right," I said, controlling myself. "Thanks for everything. See you on Mars or wherever you hang out." "You don't want any further protection?" I "You guessed it. Don't slam the door on your way out." "But what's wrong?" The derg seemed genuinely puzzled. "There are increased risks in your life, true, but what of it? It is a glory and an honor to face danger and emerge victorious. The greater the peril, the greater the joy of evading it." For the first time, I saw how alien this alien was. "Not for me," I said. "Scram." "Your risks have increased," the derg argued, "but my capacity for detection is more than ample to cope with it. I am happy to cope with it! So it still represents a net gain in protection for you." I shook my head. "I know what happens next. My risks just keep on increasing, don't they?" "Not at all. As far as accidents are concerned, you have reached the quantitative limit." "What does that mean?" "It means there will be no further increase in the number of accidents you must avoid." "Good. Now will you please get the hell out of here?" "But I just explained -- " "Sure, no further increase, just more of the same. Look, if you leave me alone, my original environment will return, won't it? And, with it, my original risks?" "Eventually," the derg agreed. "If you survive." "I'll take that chance." The derg was silent for a time. Finally he said, "You can't afford to send me away. Tomorrow -- " "Don't tell me. I'll avoid the accidents on my own." "I wasn't thinking of accidents." "What then?" "I hardly know how to tell you." He sounded embarrassed. "I said there would be no further quantitative change. But I didn't mention a qualitative change."  about?" I shouted at him. "I'm trying to say," the derg said, "that a gamper is after you." "A what? What kind of a gag is this?" "A gamper is a creature from my environment. I suppose he was attracted by your increased potentiality for avoiding risk, due to my protection." "To hell with the gamper and to hell with you." "If he comes, try driving him off with mistletoe. Iron is often effective, if bonded to copper. Also -- " I threw myself on the bed and buried my head under the pillow. The derg took the hint. In a moment, I could sense that he was gone. What an idiot I had been! We denizens of Earth have a common vice: We take what we're offered, whether we need it or not. You can get into a lot of trouble that way. But the derg was gone and the worst of my troubles were over. I'd sit tight for a while, give things a chance to work themselves out. In a few weeks, perhaps, I'd... There seemed to be a humming in the air. I sat upright on the bed. One corner of the room was curiously dark and I could feel a cold breeze on my face. The hum grew louder -- not really a hum, but laughter, low and monotonous. At that point, no one had to draw me a diagram. "Derg!" I screamed. "Get me out of this!" He was there. "Mistletoe! Just wave it at the gamper." "Where in blazes would I get mistletoe?" "Iron and copper then!" I leaped to my desk, grabbed a copper paperweight and looked wildly for some iron to bond it to. The paperweight was pulled out of my hand. I caught it before it fell. Then I saw my fountain pen and brought the point against the paperweight. The darkness vanished. The cold disappeared. I guess I passed out. I ' HE derg said triumphantly, an hour later, "You see? You need my protection." "I suppose I do," I answered dully. "You will need some things," the derg said. "Wolfsbane, amarinth, garlic, graveyard mold -- " "But the gamper is gone." "Yes. However, the grailers remain. And you need safeguards against the leeps, the feegs and the melgerizer." So I wrote down his list of herbs, essences and specifics. I didn't bother asking him about this link between supernatural and supernormal. My comprehension was now full and complete. Ghosts and spirits? Or extraterrestrials? All the same, he said, and I saw what he meant. They leave us alone, for the most part. We are on different levels of perception, of existence, even. Until a human is foolish enough to attract attention to himself. Now I was in their game. Some wanted to kill me, some to protect me, but none cared for me, not even the derg. They were interested solely in my value to the game, if that's what it was. And the situation was my own fault. At the beginning, I had had the accumulated wisdom of the human race at my disposal, that tremendous racial hatred of witches and ghosts, the irrational fear of alien life. For my adventure has been played out a thousand times and the story is told again and again -- how a man dabbles in strange arts and calls to himself a spirit. By so doing, he attracts attention to himself -- the worst thing of all. So I was welded inseparably to the derg and the derg to me. Until yesterday, that is. Now I am on my own again. Things had been quiet for a few weeks. I had held off the feegs by the simple expedient of keeping my closet doors closed. The leeps were more menacing, but the eye of a toad seemed to stop them. And the melgerizer was dangerous only in the full of the Moon. "You are in danger," the derg said yesterday. "Again?" I asked, yawning. "It is the thrang who pursues us." "Us?" "Yes, myself as well as you, for even a derg must run risk and danger." "Is this thrang particularly dangerous?" "Very." "Well, what do I do? Snakeskin over the door? A pentagon?" "None of those," the derg said. "The thrang must be dealt with negatively, by the avoidance of certain actions." restrictions on me, I didn't think another would matter. "What shouldn't I do?" "You must not lesnerize," the derg said. "Lesnerize?" I frowned. "What's that?" "Surely you know. It is a simple, everyday human action." "I probably know it under a different name. Explain." "Very well. To lesnerize is to -- " He stopped abruptly. "What?" "It is here! The thrang!" I backed up against a wall. I thought I could detect a faint stirring of dust, but that might have been no more than overwrought nerves. "Derg!" I shouted. "Where are you? What should I do?" I heard a shriek and the unmistakable sound of jaws snap)ping. The derg cried,' "It has me!" "What should I do?" I cried again. There was a horrible noise of teeth grinding. Very faintly, I heard the derg say, "Don't tesnerize!" And then there was silence. So I'm sitting tight now. There'll be an airplane crash in Burma next week, but it shouldn't affect me here in New York. And the feegs certainly can't harm me. Not with all my closet doors closed. No, the problerri is lesnerizing. I must not lesnerize. Absolutely not. If I can keep from lesnerizing, everything will pass and the chase will move elsewhere. It must! All I have to do is wait them out. The trouble is, I don't have any idea what lesnerizing might be. A common human action, the derg had said. Well, for the time. I'm avoiding as many actions as possible. I've caught up on some back sleep and nothing happened, so that's not lesnerizing. I went out and bought food, paid for it, cooked it, ate it. That wasn't lesnerizing. I wrote this report. That wasn't lesnerizing. I'll come out of this yet. I'm going to catch a nap. I think I have a cold coming on. Now I have to sneez Current IS etc Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a lare stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of .science fiction magazines available. (Bel. #th t #lh Sireelt) New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday #:# A. M. to #:# P. M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) for your information F or at least the last three decades, a large number of science fiction writers have been confronted, at one time or another, with the problem of constructing extraterrestrial lifeforms. Naturally the professional chemists and biologists who write science fiction on the side did best, not so much because their professional knowledge led them for long distances on hitherto untrodden paths, but because it made them stop at the right moment. As regards those who were primarily writers, the results make one suspect that they at first tried to apply what biology they knew. Since this apparently did not get them very far, they presumably threw overboard whatever it was they had not quite arrived at and wrote things like this: "Surprisingly, the aliens were quite human in shape, the only major differences, or at any event the ones which were easily visible, being a strong tail and a bluish complexion." Or else, if the actual contact with the aliens could be fleeting, they resorted to saying that the forms the Earthmen beheld were so alien, so outside of all terrestrial experience, that it was impossible to describe them. A LL this refers to recent science fiction, of course. Now let's take a quick look back to the forerunners of modern science fiction and see whether they did any better. The first man who seriously attempted to think up life-forms of another heavenly body (the Moon, in this case) was the great Johannes Kepler, when wrestling with his book Somnium, which he never really finished. The planetary conditions he had in mind consisted of a rocky surface with many caves, large and small, arid broiling sunshine through a thin atmosphere. Hence the creatures of the Moon mostly have the shape of terrestrial snakes, to be able to escape the deadly sunshine quickly and thoroughly. Of the science fiction writers of the nineteenth century, I am selecting three and naturally the list has to be headed by Jules Verne. I think that I have read all of Verne and, unless a minor work escaped me, I can only report that he refrainedfrom building any extraterrestrials whatever. Jules Verne's compatriot and contemporary Achille Eyraud (in his Voyage a Venus) and his English contemporary Percy Greg (in his novel about a trip to Mars Across the Zodiac) were both proficient in describing pretty girls, but the only alien creature I remember is a flying snake in Greg's book. As for Sydney Whiting's Helionde: or, Adventures in the Sun, published in London in #, Herschel's notion that the Sun is a dark body with a luminous atmosphere, it can hardly be considered science fiction. But even if it is, it does not offer much in the line of extraterrestrial creatures; a fairly typical example of the things you encounter is a bush which does not grow seed pods but cakes of perfumed soap. Unlike Jules Verne, H. G. Wells went in quite heavily for extraterrestrials in his earlier years. When the engineer Cavor goes to the Moon, he finds gigantic moon calves and a ruling race modeled both in bodily and in social organization after the ants or termites of Earth. I think that Wells is the original inventor of the giant insects which have plagued science fiction editors ever since. But, as you also know, when Wells' Martians come to Earth, they turn out to be airbreathing octopi in shape -- not, as has been said on many occasions, a very likelyshape. ence fiction writer of the past was not the only type of creative genius who did, or could have, exerted ingenuity in the building of an extraterrestrial. There were many others who engaged in a very similar line of endeavor for the purpose of representing gods, demons or just outlandish creatures, somewhat along the line of the Midnight Marvels to which I devoted a column some months ago. To put it bluntly, nobody showed much imagination and the method was standardized at an early age: Combine the features of various kinds of living creatures into something that could be drawn, painted or sculptured and the job was done. Put a woman's head on a feline body and you had a sphinx. Add the head of a bird to the body of a man and you had ibis-headed Thoth. Take a horse and supply it with the wings of an eagle and Pegasus was ready for flight, though with lateral stability only. Take another horse, cut off its head and graft the upper half of a man's body to it and the centaur was ready. Christianity brushed away these particular examples, but the method must have remained, for at one point St. Bernard had harsh words to say about decorations he encountered in monasteries : "What business have those ridiculous monstrosities, those amazingly freakish beauties' and marvelously beautiful freaks in the cloisters right in front of the eyes of the monks who are supposed to be reading or meditating? You see one head with many bodies or one body with many heads. Here you have a serpent's tail attached to a quadruped and there a mammal's head attached to a fish's body. There you have a creature that is half horse and half goat and here one with horns and the rear end of a horse." Just what business such creations had in a cloister is a still unanswered question, but artists The Hydra which was removed from the Mediterranean landscape by Hercules just could not think of another method. The fabulous unicorn was drawn as a horse with the feet of a goat and a narwhale's tusk on its forehead. The mermaid -- a fairly late invention -- was a woman from forehead to waist and a fish below that. (Virgil Partch, in a recent cartoon, put the left-over halves together as an alternate choice.) And the traditional picture of the devil was that of a man with ' two small goat's horns, one goat leg and a tail. Demons differed from devils by having a few more incongruous parts added to an improbable anatomy. thing as simple, comparatively speaking, as the legendary Hydra, the extirpation of which was one of the feats of Hercules, the artists stuck to their formula. Flying snakes from Gesner The Forest Devil said to have been caught in Switzerland The story spoke of a sevenheaded snake and this should not be a very hard task for an artist. What he did draw was the body of an exceedingly well-nourished snake with seven heads that might be described as humanized lion faces and with two, just two, lion paws with six toes. We do not know who made this drawing; it was preserved for us by Konrad Gesner in his Historia animalium with a warning that his readers should not take the Hydra to have been historical reality. But the same book contained "flying snakes," since classical authors had vouchsafed their existence. Some just had wings. Others had wings and feet. A far more complicated creature was the Forest Devil, also from Gesner, an unclassified and unclassifiable beast caught just once in a Swiss forest. Here the artist went all out: the body is that of a mammal with a tail, the legs are human but with bird feet, the arms human with lion's paws. The creature has a beard and the masculine article is used throughout in the description -- but there are pronounced pendulous breasts. And then you had the really complicated creatures, the griffin, the dragon and the basilisk. In the case of the basilisk, the legend was definite on a few things: the basilisk was the king of the serpents and came into being when a seven-year-old rooster laid an egg which was hatched either by a toad or by the Sun. In appearance, then, it had to have both characteristics, those of serpents and those of the rooster. I offer two attempts to combine these characteristics. Left: The grifFin, old German drawing Right; The dragon, from the same source The artist who drew the picture for Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia more or less settled for a lizard's body with a long tail. The head -- wearing a crown -- was mostly that of a rooster and there were eight rooster's feet, four on each side. The other picture (artist also unknown) is from an old German natural history book. In this design, the rooster largely won out, except for the long reptilian tail and the wings, which are not bird wings. The griffin is a wild mixture of bird and mammal all the way through, while the dragon is, in this case, a comparatively tame creature. More often, it appeared as an enormous crocodile with gigantic bat wings. can do almost as well is proven by Fig. F, which is the outcome of a game my wife used to play with our two daughters. In that game, one of the three participants would start by drawing a head, which could be either human or animal. Then the head was folded under, leaving only the lines of the neck visible, and the next player could go on from there, knowing only that it was a neck. And so forth. In this particular case, resulting in a bug-eyed monster which could quite easily have graced (if that's the word) the cover of certain magazines at a certain period, the daughter who drew the head obviously had some sort of fairy tale caterpillar in mind. The mind of the next player was on cats, but the first still stuck to caterpillars. The one who had cats in mind produced the skirt of which the hem remained visible, so that the dancer's legs resulted. So you obviously cannot produce a biologically possible or even believable creature by the (random or artistic) combination of separate parts. Fine -- but how can you go about it? All I can say offhand is that it isn't easy; so much depends on so many different circumstances. There is, in the first place, the planetary environment, consisting of such factors as either much water or very little water; temperature which depends mainly but not only on the distance of the planet from its sun; seasonal changes which depend on the inclination of the axis of rotation of a planet to the plane of its orbit Top: The bosilitic, from Munster's Cosmogrophio Bottom: The basilisk, hatched from a rooster's egg Not an extraterrestrial but the result of a game. Same method, though around the sun. It depends on the presence or absence of a large moon (or moons) because, with a large and nearby moon, you get pronounced tides, while without a moon, or only very small moons, you only have the solar tide, which is likely to be unimpressive. The relative abundance of the chemical elements in the outer crust and in the atmosphere certainly also plays a role. L et us, for a first test, take our two neighbors in the Solar System, Venus inside the Earth's orbit and Mars outside it. When I started reading books on science, as a schoolboy, Venus, in most of them, was firmly declared to be a panthalassa, the technical term for a planet completely covered by water without any land showing. This, after various attempts to be "different," has recently been revived by Whipple and Menzel as the most likely concept. Now such a shoreless ocean -- I am avoiding all other consideration and am concentrating on just the one fact that it is an ocean -- can harbor virtually everything in abundance. But with limitations; you can't just mix the fauna of the equatorial Pacific Ocean of today with equatorial seas of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and obtain a believable or even possible picture. You can have, if you want to, most of the arthropods, lobsters and sea spiders, trilobites and, if you insist, something like a seagoing centipede. But you must specify that there are shallow areas in this ocean if you want to have clams, for they don't grow too far down. You can have jellyfish in fantastic numbers of species as well as individuals. You can have octopi and all sorts of fishes. But you can't have a turtle, for example, because when, in Earth's past, some fishes went up on land, they first produced what we now call amphibia -- say, primitive salamanders -- and the reptiles, the birds and the mammals came afterward. They all are creatures of the land, even though some reptiles, like the turtles and the sea snakes, and some mammals, like the whales and the seals, returned to the ocean at a later date. And don't make anything more intelligent than the most intelligent fish -- I don't know which fish that is or could be -- for the open sea is a region of steady movement and no intelligence is needed for that. The exceptions to the statement that this is a region of movement are armored forms like clams, but a perfectly sessile creature which relies on its armor for individual protection and on numerous offspring for survival of the species also is not going to develop intelligence. It doesn't need any. So a shoreless Venusian ocean -- I repeat I am concentrating on no other fact than that it is a shoreless ocean -- might harbor a very varied life and some forms may be rather pretty. But I challenge anybody to think up an aquatic form of life, especially among the invertebrates, which would look radically different from what we have in our oceans. The multitude of forms on our own planet is so overwhelming that one always gets the impression that anything that can survive with the shape it has is also in existence. O NE thing is absolutely needed in this shoreless ocean if it is to have any life at all. There must be plants, microscopic or otherwise, because animal life alone is an impossibility. You know the old tall tale about the man who made a living by having a mouse and cat farm. The cats, of course, ate the mice, and when the cats were big enough, he killed and skinned them, sold the pelts and fed the cat's bodies to the mice. Even if the mice were carnivorous, this just wouldn't work. Somewhere at the beginning of such a cycle, there has to be the original food producer, the plant, which makes living (and edible, as a rule) tissue out of dissolved minerals, carbon dioxide and sunlight for energy. I might as well, at this point, present two strong hints at caution. If, in that sea, you have a tribe of Kraken, octopi a mile in circumference and the largest thing in the ocean, don't make them smart. If they are the largest thing in the ocean, immune to all danger except an occasional outburst of the elements, such as a submarine volcano opening up, and, of course, old age, they don't have to be intelligent. What has been said about oysters a while ago applies also to the invulnerable life-form. Likewise, don't make someinto an intelligent life-form. Some time ago, somebody wrote a story in which the main character, who was not a hero, caught what he thought to be a shiny wasp. It stung him so hard that he had to let go -- and then noticed to his surprise that the wasp sting made his Geiger counter chatter wildly. The implication was, of course, that this was a tiny spaceship with atomic drive. Though I liked the story, I knew that this could never happen. In order to be intelligent enough to even discover atomic energy, a being has to have a rather large number of brain cells. These brain cells must be nourished, which needs organs for eating and digesting food. The digestive tract must be protected by some covering and this package must be moved around in some manner so that it can find food. It must also move around to avoid being eaten, at least until it has attained the intelligence that splits atoms and controls what they do after splitting. T T has been said and bolstered with many pounds of statistics that, in a modern army, # men are needed to ehable two men to shoot at the enemy. This relationship must apply also to the number of cells needed to support the brain cells that do the thinking. Since a cell, in order to function as a cell, must consist of a very large number of molecules and since the size of molecules is a given fact, there must be a minimum size for a functioning cell. L. Sprague de Camp, who was to my knowledge the first to present this chain of reasoning (in a two-part article in Astounding, May and June issues of #), came to the conclusion that an overall body weight of around # pounds would be needed if you want intelligence on the human level. It is possible that a few facts permit a little more stretching, so that the minimum weight could be less. But the reasoning itself is valid and the reduction cannot be very much. Whether the first interstellar hero has to establish relations with something weighing # or only # pounds does not make much of a difference. But I did not want to slip out of our solar system yet. Now if we look at Mars, we are helped no end by the fact that we know a great deal about it. Here is a small planet with very little water and a thin atmosphere consisting mostly of inert nitrogen. It is generally a cold planet, but during the summer the equatorial regions can attain temperatures between # and # degrees Fahrenheit at noon. To make our problem still easier, we are virtually certain that we see plant life. The dark greenish patches which all bear nice classical names due to Signor Schiaparelli of half a century ago cannot just be mineral discolorations. When covered up by yellow dust from the deserts, they manage to break through again and just during the last close approach of Mars, in #, Dr. Earl C. Slipher, working at Bloemfontein, South Africa, found a new one almost the size of Texas under about # northern Martian latitude and about # Martian longitude, which means about halfway between the northern end of Syrtis major and T rivium Charontis, two wellknown Martian markings. cussion recently in learned journals on whether any terrestrial plant could grow on Mars, and if so, which one. Naturally any suggestion made by anybody was countered with heavy arguments by somebody else. But the fact remains that we see something growing on Mars which is, in our terminology, plant life. If we do not understand their biochemistry under the conditions we are forced to assume from astronomical observations, this can only mean one of two things: Either we cannot observe all the conditions and something which we have missed, or are bound to miss with present instrumentation, is a perfectly fine explanation; or else we don't know enough biochemistry and there is a way of living and growing under these conditions. The reasoning that forced us to say that there must be plant life in the Venusian oceans, if we want animal life of any kind, almost forces us to say that, since there are plants on Mars, there must be something that we would call animals. Some biologists with whom I discussed this stated with professional caution that this reasoning does not necessarily hold true. I don't agree. Speaking in the largest sense, the animals of Earth, from sow bugs to elephants, are parasitic on plants. Now life, at least on Earth, behaves in such a manner that if there is something to be parasitic on, something else will be happy to take over the role of the parasite. Something feeding on these Martian plants must have the power of movement because it needs so much plant tissue for its own sustenance that the rate of the plant growth cannpt furnish the necessary amount. Hence it must be capable of locomotion. Whether this supposed Martian plant-eater is built along the lines  of a locust, or along the lines of a desert tortoise, or along those of a rabbit is something entirely different again. One can assume that it simply freezes into a deathlike state during the cold Martian rlight and remains in that state until thawed out by the Sun. In. that case, it could be insectlike in organization. One can assume with equal justification that the "animal," at the first sign of cold in the evening, burrows into the ground for a few feet and goes to sleep normally in an environment where the temperature may be quite cold, but where there is very little deviation from whatever temperature it may have. Iri that case, it could be something comparable to a desert tortoise. Or you can make the assumption that it has an internal mechanism like the birds and mammals of Earth, something producing heat. Then it does not have to dig itself in. All it needs is an effective heat insulator around its body, which might be hairlike, or featherlike,' or, if this sounds more "alien," something like bark or sponge rubber. Co far, I have mostly talked about extraterrestrial animal life in order to show some of the difficulties. When it comes to an extraterrestrial intelligent lifeform, the difficulties rapidly increase in number and kind. It may come as a surprise, but the first tentative recipe for the construction of an intelligent extraterrestrial was written by the Dutch physicist, philosopher and astronomer Christian Huyghens. The title of the book is Kosmotheoros and it appeared posthumously, in #, at first in Latin. Nobody seems to know just hen Huyghens wrote the major portion of the book. He said there that an extraterrestrial must have eyes and ears -- that is, senses "and pleasure arising from his senses." He must know the art of writing to remem, ber things, arithmetic and geometry to understand relationships, hands to make things -- and he must be upright. It does not become quite clear from Huyghens' book why he must be upright. It sounds as if Huyghens made this condition to free the forelimbs from the task of locomotion so that there are "hands to make things." The insistence struck me as amusing because Sprague de Camp, in the articles mentioned, also was insistent on that point, but more for mechanical reasons. The brain must be protected against shock as much as possible and the more bone, cartilage and tissue there is between the feet, which take the shocks, and the brain, the better. All this is sound logic and it is obvious that the body of the extraterrestrial must be such that it functioned well as an animal body before it grew to be intelligent. Of course, one can postulate that accidental enviromental conditions of the past helped along. Around the turn of the century, a number of biologists and zoologists toyed with the idea that Man had evolved in what they called an asylum, an area accidentally free from large predatory animals and with a gentle climate. They obviously did not think much of the human body as a well-functioning animal. We now know that they were wrong and that the idea of the "asylum" is not needed. But it may conceivably have happened somewhere else, for the Galaxy must be full of planets and possibilities. culty in imagining a believable intelligent extraterrestrial -- we have never seen one. What I mean by this remark is this: We know the organization of living animal tissue on Earth. We know that the organization of the mammal is superior. True, it "wastes" food by making its own heat, but this fact makes it climatically independent. And though a reptile can do quite well in the proper climate, it is very limited. When the air grows too cold, it must be inactive, though it usually survives. When the air grows too hot, it dies of heat stroke, for, lacking a temperatureregulating mechanism, it not only cannot keep warm, it also cannot keep cool. Now this vertebrate body, whether mammalian or reptilian, has two pairs of limbs and usually a tail. What we don't know is Whether it has to be built that way. To use a classical example: we don't know whether the centaur shape is possible or not. On Earth, it doesn't exist; that much is certain. But is this due to an anatomical necessity for which we don't know the reason or did it just happen that way here? As for comparatively minor matters, we do know that they just happened. Genus Homo is tailless and almost hairless. But it doesn't have to be hairless and tailless to invent writing, to build and ride cars and to engage in research, politics and crime. If we had fur and a tail, our fashions, habits and morals would be different, but if brain and senses and hands were unchanged, we'd still write books and symphonies, build houses, ships and airplanes -- and try to build an extraterrestrial. Point of Departure As if Danner's troubles weren't bad enough -- they were a repetition of something that had created chaos thousands of years ago! H sake, sit down! You act as if you were ready to attack Donner with your bare hands." The president of the Research Foundation removed an expensive cigar from its plastic cocoon and lit it from young Taplin's eagerly offered lighter. Halleck sat down. "Sorry, G. W. This business has me on edge. I feel responsible for Donner's activities -- and for the missing #, too. The whole thing reeks of larceny." "You are responsible, Hal." The president's tone was crisp but not accusing. "That's what a general manager gets paid for. Isn't it time Donner showed up?" "He's to be here at ten, Mr. Caples. The girl will buzz us as soon as he comes in." Orville Taplin was a very good secretary, but his eagerness to prove it sometimes irked his superiors. "Shall I order some coffee sent up, Mr. Caples?" "Not just now. Look, Hal, have you checked on this Simon Kane that Donner mentions in his letter? He doesn't sound quite real. Do we know if there is such a person?" Taplin interrupted the general manager to answer the question. "Yes, sir. There really is a Simon Kane. I talked to Dr. Reed by transatlantic telephone last night. He said Kane was public relations man on his first expedition to Egypt in #." "Why the blazes didn't you let me talk to him?" Halleck was on his feet again, a sharp-faced, balding man with a temper that suggested ulcers. "G. W., I -- " "Forget it, Hal! What else, young man?" "Well, Dr. Reed said he fired him at the request of the Egyptian government and sent him back to the States. He said it was a long story and he didn't want to get into it on the phone."  hogany desk and tapping the blotter for emphasis, Halleck said, "Look, G. W., Kane doesn't matter. He's just a name. The Utah Flats plant is short #. Let Donner explain it in court. If Kane or anyone else was involved, let Donner prove it." The buzzer wheezed and Orville Taplin's finger shot to the key. "Yes?" "Mr. Donner is here." G. W. Caples nodded to the question in the secretary's face. "Send him in." The man in the doorway was tall, sandy and rather stooped for early middle age. His straight lined features looked competent, but the mouth was compressed to a narrow hyphen, as if he had lived through this ordeal many times in anticipation and always come out of it badly. His gray business suit was wrinkled with travel. "Gftod morning, Mr. Caples. Gentlemen." Although he closed the door gently, the click of it sounded loud in the silence. "I hope I'm not late." "Right on the dot, Ray. Glad to see you. Pick a comfortable chair." The president smoothed the crumpled letter in front of him on the desk and waved the silent Halleck to a seat. "You can order that coffee now, young man." When Taplin had called for the coffee and started the recording machine, G. W. Caples addressed the newcomer again with heavy, executive affability. It was authentic enough to ease the watchspring tension in the room. "Before we start, Ray, keep it in mind that this isn't a trial or anything like that. I, for one, have an open mind. If your record hadn't been beyond reproach, you wouldn't be a research plant manager in the first place." "Thank you." "But your letter here mentions an unauthorized experiment that cost #, a missing man -- two missing men, in fact -- your fear of ugly publicity and -- well, various other details that leave me thoroughly confused. Now, you're going to give us all the facts -- not as a culprit, but as a trusted official." "I appreciate that, sir. Shall I begin at the beginning?" "Yes. Forget the letter. Begin where you like." "Well, first, you know Dr. Wilson Reed, the archeologist. Top man in the field. He made the Yucatan discoveries and located the Poseidon Tablets in the vaults under the Sphinx -- the newspapers called him the 'Columbus of the Past.' But I don't need to tell you that. This all began with a letter I had from Dr. Reed shortly after he left for his second expedition to Egypt." reputation, but I never met the man." "That's one of the many things I don,'t understand, Mr. Caples." Raymond Donner sat on the edge of the leather lounge chair and kneaded his long, thin hands. "You see, the letter asked me to cooperate with Simon Kane in every way and there was an interoffice memo from you enclosed, instructing me to do so, written in your own handwriting." Caples leaned across the desk, startled. "A memo from me! Now see here, Ray -- Where is the memo? Where's the letter?" "They're gone, Mr. Caples. They were stolen." The buzzer sounded and a cheerful redhead brought in a tray with four cups, cream and sugar bowls and a large aluminum coffee urn. It remained untouched on the desk when she had gone. "I see. They were stolen." The president's casual manner was gone and the tension returned unchecked. "Go on." "I'm sorry, sir. But the letter and memo were the keys to the whole business. And I want to remind you at the beginning that I'm not a scientist or an aviation engineer, but an administrative officer -- " "Maybe we should say you were." "Shut up, Halleck! Let him go on." The president glanced at the recorder spinning silently and drew short, angry puffs on his cigar. "And I want to remind you, too, gentlemen, that I'm here of my own volition. My fears are for the Foundation's reputation, not for myself alone. After all, there's no motive for murder and -- " "Murder!" The two executives looked frozen. Taplin, starting to reach for the coffee, changed his mind. and, to put it bluntly, no dead body. But let me take it from the beginning." A S I said, the letter and memo came in May, just after Dr. Reed left for Egypt again. A week after that, Simon Kane phoned from Salt Lake City to make an appointment for the following afternoon. He turned out to be a darkfeatured, very distinguished type in his late forties. His eyes were an intense black, heavily browed and, though he wasn't big, his voice was deep and arrestingly modulated. Listening to him, it was easy to lose track of what he was saying. His mouth was wide and -- well, sympathetic. We talked for about an hour that first day, mostly about Dr. Reed's marvelous discovery in Egypt. Kane said the Poseidon Tablets described a magnificent civilization, scientifically advanced, that had flourished on an equatorial continent until it was destroyed by the Biblical Flood -- around # B.C. He spoke of Dr. Reed as an intimate friend and said he had been greatly impressed with you, Mr. Caples. "I've never heard of the man. But it seems pretty strange that he should have turned up when Halleck was in Persia and I was in Europe on atomic-inspection duty and Reed was off to Egypt." "Looking back at it, I agree with you," said Donner, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. "But it didn't occur to me at the time." "Well, get on with it." ter idea of Kane's remarkable voice, its hypnotic quality -- but I guess I can't. Maybe that's just an excuse. I wish I'd thrown him out of the office the first day. When we got around to the reason for his call, he asked if there was any chance of our being overheard. I assured him there wasn't and he told me his weird story. It seemed Dr. Reed had found another series of fourteen tablets along with the others, but these hadn't been publicized. A translation of the first half dozen showed that they concerned an outstanding -- perhaps the ultimate -- scientific achievement of the Poseidon civilization: a small solar energy converter, able to deliver such fantastic power that it made our nuclear sources look as primitive as the windmill. When I said the invention wouldn't be very welcome ""in a country where the entire economy was geared to atomic power, Kane agreed and said that explained the secrecy. He said you, Mr. Caples, and Dr. Reed felt the device should be tested under wraps and then turned over to the government, since private ownership of a dirt-cheap power source -- if it worked -- might precipitate economic chaos. the same position. "The whole idea is pure nonsense, the most transparent fraud. A child wouldn't swallow it." "You may be right. It was my misfortune not to be a child." completely plausible. He said two good men could build the gadget in a month. He agreed to bring the specifications to my office the next morning and I showed him out, feeling very excited about the thing. I had a lot to learn about Mr. Kane. In the morning, I called in Ruhl and Heiniger and told them they were to work on a project involving # security. They agreed, of course. The hush-Kush jobs are usually the most interesting. Then Kane came in with his sheets of specifications and gave them the details. Their faces were -- I was going to say like children viewing their first Christmas tree. Since it was all Greek to me, I left the three of them to discuss the project and went off about some other business. Kane was gone when I got back and had left a note inviting me out to his house for a cocktail or two that afternoon. When I could get away, I drove out to his place, a great, sprawling ranchhouse he'd rented a few miles from the plant. No one else was there, but Kane was an ingratiating host and a couple of hours passed very pleasantly. I kept wgndering why he wanted such a big place, way out in the hills, just for himself. Around five, I phoned Ruhl at the plant. He's rather a stolid type ordinarily, but he was stuttering with excitement. He said the power unit was revolutionary and might change the course of history. Kane laughed when I repeated that to him. "Maybe it already did," he said. "A few thousand years ago." We shook hands at the door and agreed to meet the next morning and get to work. As I was walking along the house toward the drive where my car stood, a movement at one of the windows near the end of the building caught my eye. I paused and looked up -- into the face of one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. She was youngish, not over # or #, pale in coloring with rich, black hair piled up behind her neck. The large, dark eyes were looking squarely into mine. I must have stopped and stared for several seconds, for, in addition to her beauty, I thought I saw a great dread written in the girl's face. Then she was gone. All the way home, I kept wondering why Simon Kane hadn't mentioned the woman in his house. The silly thought that she was being held captive there kept coming to me, no matter how often I dismissed it. fee and made a face when he sipped it. "Donner, I don't know why you have to ornament this yarn with hypnotic-voiced villains and captive girls. Can't you just tell us if your expensive gadget worked?" Halleck slumped glumly. Taplin fluttered over the cold coffee and ordered some more. Caples. I set Ruhl and Heiniger up in the isolated shop at the west corner of the plant area and they had it functioning in three weeks. We brought in a skilled glass-cutter to form the big, faceted eye to receive the Sun's radiations. Naturally, he didn't know what it was for. By the time the eye was ready, they'd assembled the conversion elements. They rigged the thing to deliver electrical current through a series of step-down transformers. The result was appalling. Until the current was reduced to a tiny 'fraction of the potential, it blew out every testing gauge they plugged into it. Up to this time, I think all three of us -- Heiniger, Ruhl and myself -- had been kept hopped up by curiosity and Kane's infectious confidence. Now it was evident that something incredible had been produced. Think of it -- two men could lift the converter between them, yet its potential was as great as any atomic pile we have! was getting restless. "Are you sure you didn't dream all this, Donner?" "That story will sound great in court -- but it doesn't account for the #." Halleck's laugh was thin, with no amusement in it. The buzzer sounded. "Here's your hot coffee, Mr. Caples," said Taplin. When the girl had gone again, Donner continued patiently, speaking in Halleck's direction without anger. than three thousand dollars, including salaries, materials, overhead, everything. The experiment seemed to be finished. I wrote up my report and showed it to Kane before filing it in the project folder with Reed's letter and the memo and everything else concerned. I supposed Kane would be bn his way east and I'd be expected to verify his statement of the results. But he didn't come in to say good-by . One morning, I stopped in at the isolated shop and found Heiniger still working with the power unit. Naturally, I asked what he was doing. "Getting it ready to mount in the projectile, Mr. Donner," he said. I said, "What projectile?" (and I) had leased a surplus one-man rocket from the White Sands Project and that he and Ruhl were to rig the solar unit in it. Rather than let Heiniger know something was wrong, though I felt like blowing my top, I asked him how on Erth an electrical plant could power a rocket. "There's nothing to it," he said. "It's all in Mr. Kane's translations of those tablets of his." I was beginning to wonder if this was really happening or if I was dreaming. Heiniger described some sort of method for setting up a magnetic field in front of the rocket so that it could be pulled, rather than pushed, at almost any speed through the atmosphere that the pilot wished -- five, ten, twelve thousand miles an hour -- whatever the pilot could take. It was hard to believe an experienced man like Heiniger would swallow that. I said, "It's ridiculous! The skin would melt!" "Oh, no," said Heiniger. "Mr. Kane has the formula for an alloy that won't melt at any speed in atmosphere. His tablets tell how it was used way back there for the same kind of flight. He's having a special sheath of it made for the rocket in Santa Fe." bed his cigar into the ashtray. "Donner," he said, "what do you take us for? You're making it almost impossible for the Foundation to back you up, coming in here with such a fairy story." Raymond Donner seemed to shrink in his clothes and he slumped deep in his chair. "I know how it sounds. I'm a fool -- I admit it. But Heiniger isn't, nor Ruhl. They were convinced they were working on the modern world's first practical spaceship." spinning and drove out to Simon Kane's place. I was determined not to go any farther with this without authority from you, even if I had to chase you all over Europe. , When I reached the house, Kane's car was in the driveway. He met me on the patio and pushed me inside before I could say my piece. There was a young man in the drawing room whom he introduced as Porter Hays. He was a handsome chap in his middle twenties with cropped, blond hair and an engaging candor about him. I guessed he was a flier by the recklessness about his mouth and eyes. He seemed very excited. They took me to a table spread with photographs and typed sheets and, for the first time, I saw pictures of the original tablets. The typed sheets were translations. "Porter has agreed to fly the ship," said Kane, as if I knew all about that. "He's with the PanColumbian Project and has flown all the other types that have been developed so far." "But this is the one that will make history, Mr. Donner!" I looked at Hays closely and saw that he meant it. "This will fly anywhere in our solar system -- and probably clear out to most others -- without carrying a fuel supply. And the best thing about it is the absolute guarantee of a return trip. Those geniuses down at Pan-Columbia have plenty of ideas for getting you out there, but very few for getting you back." I realized the Simon Kane magic had been at work on the young man. He was sold completely and -- considering the posto risk his life on them -- the objections I intended to make seemed rather puny at the time. Still, I was about to ask Kaue to see me in private when the young pilot spoke up. He said, "Say, Mr. Kane, where's the last tablet? There are only photos of thirteen here." "Why, that's right," Kane said. "I forgot to mention it. The first thirteen take us through the construction of the unit and the ship and the inventor's successful trial flights. Number fourteen hasn't been translated yet -- it takes about a month to decipher each tablet." Porter Hays had a disarming way of asking anything he wanted to know. "And who does it? Do you, Mr. Kane?" "No. That is, it's a special gift, takes years of study -- " "Then who does decipher them?" "Well, you see -- " It was the first time I'd seen Simon Kane uneasy and at a loss for words. "My wife does it. She's Egyptian, a scholar in her own right, daughter of one of Egypt's foremost antiquarians." her and, although Kane tried every evasion, he finally left the room and was gone quite a while. During the wait, I talked with young Hays and confirmed my high opinion of him. I wondered how he'd react to Mrs. Kane if she turned out to be the beautiful girl I'd seen in the window a few weeks earlier. I soon found out, for Kane came back leading the girl by the hand. I might have said "dragging," but it wasn't quite that obvious. At closer view, wearing a sort of chiton-draped white dress, she was even more lovely than I'd thought. The long lashes veiled her eyes, except when she acknowledged Kane's introductions with a quick glance and a murmured, "How do you do." Her name was Nalja. Hays was obviously impressed and, in his uninhibited way, said, "Good Lord, Kane! If I had a dream like this at home, I wouldn't hide her. I'd keep her out on display to make the other guys jealous." The girl gave him a grateful look and just a flicker of a smile, but said nothing. Simon Kane's reaction was curious. The color drained from his face and hostile was the only word for his expression. Then he seemed to get under control and became his genial self. "My dear," he said to his wife, "we thought you could give a hint about the text of the fourteenth tablet. Are you far enough along?" Her voice was low and throaty, with a slight British accent. "I'm sorry. I have only just started." "Have you no idea what it's about?" "Only that it seems to be some sort of testimonial. The language symbols are a little different than the others and it's difficult to read." Then she was gone and Porler Hays stood looking at the door through which she had passed, as if he had just seen a vision. " Caples cut in. "How's that tape holding out, young man?" "Fine, Mr. Caples. At least an hour more to go." "All right. Go ahead, Donner. Can't you leave out some of the side issues and get to the finish of this?" "They're all related to the outcome of the matter, Mr. Caples. It wouldn't make any sense at all without them." "Nor with them," said Halleck sourly, staring out the window. back to Salt Lake, so I only had a moment alone with him. When I told him I wanted to hold up everything until I'd checked with my superiors, he just laughed it off. He said that you, Mr. Caples, had seen all thirteen translations and your memo covered the whole works. I'm sorry to say this convinced me. Next day, a carload of equipment came in for testing and I didn't see Simon Kane for about a week, though I learned things weren't going so well. There was seme trouble with the alloy. The rccket was shipped in, though, and turned out to be a very recent model with the latest developments in shock and pressure compensation, oxygen plant, homingbeam navigation and all that. The credit to White Sands was only #, including insurance, so I authorized it without misgivings, figuring that the persuasive Kane had swung a good deal. Ruhl got back from Santa Fe and said they'd licked the alloy problem, though it had been hard to avoid publicity. The metal could only be worked in a molten state, so the fabricator was casting the nose sheath and three overlapping girdles with rivet holes, also rivets and fin shields of the same stuff. It sounded heavy to me, but Ruhl said that would eliminate all possibility of vibration. This metal casting accounted for most of the #. During the next two weeks, I was too busy with other things to worry much about the project, but two incidents happened that had a bearing on it. On a visit to Salt Lake, I was dining at the Pioneer Arms one evening and spotted Porter Hays at a table across the room. He was with a young lady who looked familiar to me, even from the back. They were deep in conversation. Hays looked up and saw me just as the waiter brought my dinner. His expression was far from friendly. When the waiter moved out of the way, I looked over and saw that Hays and the girl were gone. A little later, a bellboy brought me a note. It read, "I expect you'll be guided by your own ideas of honor in a case like this. But if you can conscientiously keep your goddam mouth shut, you may help to correct a great injustice. Hays." the window. Now he interrupted. "I suppose this note and the bill of lading on the rocket were stolen, too?" "I tore up that note myself, Mr. Caples. The bill of lading, though -- the second incident concerns it." Young Taplin had begun to fidget. and said the airship was all rigged and ready to go. He had chosen a spot in the desert for the test and had scheduled it for the next morning. He'd engaged an expert communications man -- a friend of Ruhl's -- and the ship and all ground equipment were loaded on a trailer under canvas, ready to leave at nightfall. Ruhl, Heiniger and the radio man would ride out there together in the trailer. I was irked not to have been consulted on the arrangements. Kane wanted me to pick up Porter Hays and follow the trailer out, saying he'd be delayed, but would be there at dawn. I told him I had an appointment for dinner -- some government brass -- but would be there in time for the test. Kane seemed to become furious at this. He railed about the lack of cooperation and how he'd had to work out the details of the project almost single-handed, in spite of a clear directive from my superiors. It ended by my hanging up on him. Driving home around eleven that night, I passed the plant and noticed a light burning in the darkened office building. Before I reached the gate, it struck me that the light was from my own office. The guard at the gate had just come on duty, but his clipboard had no incoming signatures on it. So I went to take a look. I turned the knob of my office door and Kane was standing by the desk with his briefcase in one hand and his hat in the other. I was shocked at the change in him. His eyes were sunken and deeply rimmed with shadow. He looked ten years older than the last time I'd seen him. But he wasn't at all abashed. He walked around the desk and took my hand, saying, "Raymond, I've been waiting here an hour. Felt sure you'd stop by. Wanted to apologize in private for my disgraceful performance this afternoon." Kane must have seen I wasn't satisfied. "The strain of this undertaking has been greater than you realize," he added. "So much is at stake, such a great responsibility to Dr. Reed, your foundation, the whole world -- " I mumbled something about forget it and told him to come along to my place for a bracer and we'd ride out to the site together. But he said he had a couple of matters to attend to and we parted at the plant gate. down. Caples took his seat at the desk. "I have a feeling," he said, "that we are about to learn if this prehistoric spaceship of yours ever got off the ground." "Shall I order some more coffee, Mr. Caples?" asked Taplin eagerly. "No. Just shut up, you idiotl Are you too young to appreciate this breathless, undocumented melodrama Mr. Donner's describing for us? This last incident explains the lack of documentation, doesn't it, Donner?" "I'm afraid it does. I discovered later that the folder with all the papers relating to the project was missing from my files, but I have other evidence to offer -- a witness." He glanced at his wristwatch. "If my witness is prompt. I'll just have time to finish this." "Please do! Does the next scene take place at the launching site?" -- missed the turn off the highway and went a long way past it. When I found the place, everything was ready and they were waiting for me. The aircraft lay on its side, looking fat and very ungainly, I thought, because of its increased girth. Porter Hays seemed tense, but eager to get on with it. He wore no flight garb except his helmet with the earphones. Standing there in slacks and sweater, smoking a final cigarette, he didn't look theatrical enough for such an occasion. I thought of telling him I'd kept my goddam mouth shut, but didn't get a chance. The plan was to take the ship up a few hundred feet and jockey around to test everything. If the equipment and ship were all right. Hays would whip her up a few hundred miles and cruise at his discretion. There was to be no long flight that day. Since we were far out of the traffic lanes, we didn't expect to attract any attention. At last the Sun came up full, there was a final conference, and Hays climbed into the ship's rotating cabin by the door at the rear. He waved and shut the door. He could see out with his teleview, of course, but we couldn't see him. While the radio man checked the ship-to-ground contact, the rest of us moved back out of habit, though there would be no blast here.  itself to a vertical position. It rose gradually to about ten feet, stopped, then shot up a couple of hundred and stopped again. It was incredible! "Give me the phone," said Kane. He was as white as paste and his eyes were fever-bright. "How's it doing, Hays? Looked good from here. Is she powering right?" The answer must have been gratifying because Simon Kane's white teeth flashed when he heard it. After that, the ship bobbed around in swift dashes, stopping, then darting upward till it was only a dot, reaching unbelievable speeds. All this time, Kane was talking with Hays on the phone, asking questions, suggesting new maneuvers. Though he was trembling with excitement, his voice was calm, controlled and persuasive. I realized later that he was egging Hays on to try more and more spectacular tests of the ship. Suddenly it shot away in a steep climb toward the west and was out of sight in a matter of seconds. Kane laid down the telephone and turned to me. "He's satisfied the craft works perfectly," he said. "He's going to take it straight out for four or five hours and then come back." We all stared at him, for Hays wasn't to have stayed up over an hour. I said, "He can't do that. There's too mhch he doesn't know about the ship. Tell him to come back!" Kane didn't look at me. "The boy knows his business. Leave him alone. He's making history." "But the first time -- " "I'm going down the road a few miles to get some breakfast. Take turns talking to him, why don't you?" He got in his car and drove off.  you've got a talent, but you're in the wrong line of work." G. W. Caples dug a chubby forefinger under his collar and worked the tie knot loose. "This scenario is worth every single cent of  # , # ." Raymond Donner's mouth pressed a little tighter and his tongue pushed through to moisten his gray dry lips. "He never came back," he said hoarsely. "And neither did Hays." Something in the man's voice stopped the president from going on with his sarcastic attack. "Did the ship crash?" he asked more soberly... "No. It just flew away and never came back." The silence hung like a shroud. All three of them -- even the selfconscious Taplin -- stared at Donner. "We talked to Porter Hays in turns. We begged him to come back. But he just laughed and said he was having the ride of his life. After about two hours, his voice faded out suddenly -- and that was the end of it." "How long ago was this?" "Four days." "Have you notified the authorities, the police or -- well, anyone?" "No. I've been putting it off. You see. Hays gave us no hint of any trouble. The others are still sitting out there in the desert waiting for him, trying to make radio contact. The ship carried a standard survival kit with seven days' rations and water. If he's had no operational trouble. Hays could stay out at least a week." "And what about Simon Kane?" demanded Caples. " by noon, I went to look for him. On the way to his home, I stopped at the office, on a hunch, and discovered the records were missing. At last it began to penetrate that there was something rotten in Denmark. Dusk had fallen and there were no lights in the Kane house when I got there. No one answered the doorbell. I called and pounded and finally climbed in a window to look for signs that the Kanes had packed and left. There were none. Everything was in order. Then, as I was leaving, I heard a knocking sound from the end of the building and traced it to the last room on the west side, a sort of study. The knocking came from a locked closet. The key was gone, so I had to smash the door. Nalja Kane was sitting on the floor, staring at me without seeming to see me. She looked frightful, with her hair awry and her eyes red and glassy. She sort of moaned as I helped her up. "Did it happen? Did he fly the ship?" I said, "Yes, but something's wrong. Where is your husband?" The girl seemed to go all to pieces, turning her head from side to side and repeating, "Oh, no! Oh, no!" Then she collapsed. I drove her to the hotel in the nearest town and called a doctor I knew. He said she had emotional exhaustion, needed rest rather than hospital care, and gave her a strong sedative. When I got home, I stayed awake long enough to write that letter to you and then fell into bed. The phone woke me around ten the next morning. It was Ruhl, calling from a gas station on the highway. He said Hays wasn't back yet and promised to call again at five. I mulled the whole thing over all day, trying to sort out the facts, but they just wouldn't add up to anything. When Ruhl called again with the same bad news, I decided to come on east and get it off my chest. It's all beyond me. I don't know what to do. ets and pulled out a cigarette pack. It was empty and he crumpled it absently. Halleck patted his own pockets but couldn't find any. "Now take it easy, Ray," said Caples, walking around the desk with the humidor and holding it open. "This is the weirdest thing I've ever heard -- yet I think I believe you. Leave it to you solid types to foul up on a grand scale! How about this witness you mentioned?" "On the train -- I wanted more time to think, so I didn't fly here -- it occurred to me how flimsy this would all sound, without your memo or anything else to back it up. I couldn't even prove the tablets ever existed. In Chicago, I phoned Nalja Kane. She was much better and quite calm. When I told her the spot I was in, she agreed to take a plane in the morning and try to be here at #:# today." Taplin's finger darted to the key panel, but Caples brushed him aside and opened the circuit himself. "This is Mr. Caples. Is there a lady in the outer office?" "Yes, sir. Mrs. Simon Kane." "Ask her to step in, please." The four men rose before the door opened -- Donner, slowly, with great weariness. She stood a moment, looking from one face to another, cool and regal in summer white with a small flowered hat. Faint purple circles gave her Raymond Donner took her hand and led her to a chair. "Thank you for coming, Mrs. Kane. May I present Mr. Caples and Mr. Halleck, my superiors -- and Mr. Taplin." When they were seated, she spoke first in her low, passionate voice, without waiting for questions. "I will tell you what I know of Simon Kane, gentlemen, though it may be less than you would expect from a wife. In return, I ask you to use all your influence to find him and bring him to justice. He is a monster and a murderer!" "You have my word on it, Mrs. Kane," said Caples, "if you can supply the evidence that crimes have been committed. Taplin -- the recorder. Move it closer." As she began to speak, an occasional small break in her voice hinted at the emotional turbulence the girl was holding in tight rein. Egypt in #. We met through my father, who represented the Egyptian government on Dr. Reed's excavation project. At first, Simon was charming and devoted. We left Egypt almost at once and entered upon a very pleasant, if secluded, life in this country. The only discordant note was my father's obvious dislike for Simon. His letters were stiff and infrequent, and finally stopped altogether. One day, after we had lived here about three years, my husband brought home two heavy cases and called me in when he opened them. These cases contained the fourteen tablets that Mr. Donner has probably mentioned. Simon told me Dr. Reed had turned them over to him to be deciphered. I knew at once that this was not true, since Dr. Reed is one of the world's foremost students of ancient writings and would have prized the tablets too highly to let my husband carry them around in his car. When Simon asked me to make the translations, I refused. He became nearly insane with rage and finally told me he had persuaded my father to help him steal them a few weeks before our wedding. If I did not agree to translate them, he threatened to expose my father and disgrace him before the world. So I did as Simon demanded and it killed my love for him. In his twisted, possessive way, I think my husband continued to love me. Once the translation was under way, he tried very hard to win my voluntary cooperation. He said the device described in the tablets would upset the economy of the entire world. The government and industry, he claimed, would pay any price he asked for suppressing it, once it was tested and proved. We would live like royalty. But I told him that, if not for my father, I would expose him without the least hesitation. When we moved to Utah, Simon found an isolated house for us and I was virtually a prisoner. ' danger signals of emotion breaking through showed in the swift, anxious breathing. The four men studied her helplessly and then it was Taplin who got the glass of water that bridged a difficult moment. She went on. "The first day you came to our house, Mr. Donner, I wrote a note of warning. I intended to hand it to you through the window, but Simon came into the room behind me and I couldn't." "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Kane. You were obviously in trouble. I should have -- " "Perhaps it was better. It might have cost you your life to cross Simon at that point." stopped by one day. My husoand was out and I answered the door. He was a fine man, sensitive and kind, considering his adventurous temperament. He could see I was nervous -- you know the disarming way he had of asking the most personal questions. I was afraid to talk there and asked him to drive me to Salt Lake. On the way, I told him the whole story. He was very sympathetic and promised to help -- beginning by trying to contact my father. I hoped he would refuse to fly the ship when he knew about Simon. But he had absolute confidence in it and no fear at all. His plan was to complete the test and then ask you, Mr. Donner, to impound the ship and all the records on it. The day before the test flight, I put in the time completing the translation of the fourteenth tablet. Simon had shown no interest in this, believing it to be a summary of the others. As the sense of it began to emerge, I was horrified. By midnight, I had finished it and I sat down in the drawing room with a typed copy in my hand, waiting for my husband. I waited all night and must have fallen asleep around dawn. The door chime wakened me. It was a messenger with a note from Porter -- Mr. Hays. A newspaper friend of his in Cairo had been checking and discovered that my father had been dead six months. The circumstances of his death were curious and Mr. Hays suggested contacting the Cairo police as soon as the flight was over. This news was a terrible blow, but the moment I read it, I was free of Simon Kane. I went to the phone and asked the operator for the police. While I was waiting for the connection, there was a slight sound behind me. I turned and Simon was crossing the room. He was in his dressing gown. He must have .come in while I was dozing. I ran for the door, but he caught me and pushed me into a chair. " phone, he read Mr. Hays' note without saying a word. His face was terrible and I knew I was in danger. Then I saw that the typed copy of the fourteenth tablet was gone. "You read it -- the last tablet," I said. "And you know you've done all this evil for nothing. The flight can't take place. If you -- if you stop me from telling the police, Porter will tellthem. He knows everything." He took my wrist and dragged me to the studio and forced me into the closet and locked the door. I could hear him crumpling and burning papers for a long time. At last he came close to the door and said, "There, my dear! Try to prove that the tablets ever existed!" When he was gone, I screamed and pounded on the door until I was exhausted. A frightful thing was going to happen and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Only once -- only one time since this all began have I opposed my husband successfully. And it had no effect on the outcome. When I typed up the text of the last tablet, I made a carbon copy and put it in my handbag. I have it here. I believe it will be evidence enough to prove that Simon Kane is a murderer. flat beaded bag and found a folded sheet, which she handed to Donner. He smoothed it on his knees with hands that trembled a little. "May he read it aloud, Mrs. Kane?" asked Caples. "Certainly, if he wishes. But the first part is technical data on a flight by an inventor named Axtel. The two last paragraphs contain the evidence I am offering you." -' finger down the sheet. He read: "The foregoing record is accurate and we acknowledge Axtel's superlative contribution to science. But we must admit that his greatest contribution is in the proving of an axiom: Where ultimate force is involved, it is better to know none of the laws than to know most of them. " 'On the fourth day, the aircraft returned from far space to the point of its departure. It was in excellent condition -- but empty. Nothing remained of Axtel but merely his clothing and his ring.' " Nalja Kane covered her face with both hands and sobbed noiselessly. The four men all gazed at the paper as it rustled in Donner's quivering hand. Presently the buzzer ripped the silence like the tearing of a shroud. After the second sharp buzz, G. W. Caples tripped the switch and croaked, "Yes?" The girl's voice, bright and businesslike, answered, "There's a long-distance call from Utah for Mr. Donner. It's a Mr. Ruhl. He says it's urgent."      Garrity's Annuities every planet is badly in need of family men, naturally -- but the same one on all of them? Y OU might say Garrity brought it on himself. The way I put it, Garrity was the architect of his own disasters. It's a nicely put phrase, I think. Anyway, a lot of people tried to tell him what might happen. I did, for one, though I'd never have thought it would happen in just that way. What I would have predicted for Garrity would be trouble, but just ordinary trouble: jail, or getting his Space Engineer's ticket suspended, or something like that. Not the kind of trouble he's got. I remember distinctly the first time I heard Garrity explaining his theory. It wasn't a new theory, but the way Garrity talked about it, you'd think he'd invented it personally. We were sitting in the messroom in the Aloha -- that was the old Aloha, the one that belonged to the Muller Space Lines. Talking about women -- trip like that. Neither Garrity nor I had ever touched down on Seranis, which was where we'd be in another week or so. The other off-watch man, Gloster, had been there several times and liked the place. "A lot of Earthside Oriental in 'em," Gloster said. "They're little brown characters, real obliging. The girls especially. You just treat 'em polite and they'll treat you right back." "Uh-huh," I said, considering the idea. "It'll cost you just as much in the end. Women are always looking for something." "Not this kind on Seranis," Gloster said. "Best port I've ever been in. I'm staying on the Aloha till I get to putting curtains on my cabin port." Garrity shook his head. He looked as cynical as he could, for his age, which was twenty-four. We were all of us fresh out of Lunar, with the ink hardly dry on our Engineer tickets. "I'll tell you," said Garrity. "I haven't seen a woman yet that wouldn't cost you more than she was worth in the long run." "Long run?" I asked him. "We don't spend more than a few days down on Seranis. Isn't going to be any long run. If she runs, let her to catch her before takeoff time." Gloster chuckled, but Garrity just looked righteous. "You'll see what I mean," he told us. "Yeah," Gloster said. "I guess you and me will go downtown and pick up a couple girls and take in some high-priced amusements, like listening to records at the Spaceman's Union Lounge. After which we hurl our hardearned cash away on a quart of pink arrack and we take the girls home with it. In the morning, we haven't got a credit left, so we blast off with nothing but a set of beautiful memories." Gloster crowed. "What's the matter, anyway, Garrity? The Union gets us the best wage scale in any space fleet and you still think girls cost too much? Even the Seranese?" Garrity kept on looking wise. "I'm not kidding. I've seen a lot of men come up to retirement without a credit put away. Halfpay and nothing else, all because they spent everything having a good time." "You can do without women, maybe?" I asked. "No," Garrity admitted. "I'm a normal man." "Yeah," said Gloster, very flat. Garrity looked peeved. "Well, I am. But I'm careful, too. I figured it all out a long time back. I aim to have everything you guys look for and not go to half the trouble and expense." "What did you figure out?" "I'm going to get married." Gloster and I just sat there, looking at each other. After a while, Gloster finished his coffee in silence. He got up, looked at Garrity, shook his head sadly, and went out. T T took me a while to finish looking Garrity over, myself. When I managed to get my voice under control, I asked him what he was talking about. "I saw what happened to my old man," Garrity told me. "When he came up for retirement, he was broke. He doesn't complain, but he never has anything left out of his retirement pay. Spends his time loafing around and writing his memoirs. It was women, mostly; after he lost my mother -- she died when I was born -- he went off to space again. Sent back enough tc keep me, spent the rest in one port or another." I didn't say anything, but it was beginning to add up. I don't know anything about psychology, but I thought there might be something like a reason in what Garrity was telling me for the way Garrity was. Somewhere he'd got the idea that his old man wasn't happy. I doubted it, because I've seen and talked to lots of old retired hands. Most of them had a good life be# hind them and they were still enjoying the taste of it But I didn't argue with Garrity about it. I've got more sense. When a man's got a pet notion, leave it alone. You won't pry him off it and you might get him mad at you. A spaceship's too small to make enemies in. "Suppose you get married," I asked him. "So you have a place to go, and a girl in it, in one port. How about all the others? Going to take a permanent port watch instead of seeing a little fun?" "Easy," Garrity said. "I'll just get married in all of them." "All of them?' "Well, the ones I'm in most often. Terra City, Chafanor, some other places. I'm thinking of homesteading on one line as soon as I pad on a little seniority." The notion did have a certain cold practicality about it. I didn't like it, but as far as getting away with it went, he could. Garrity went on to explain a bit more; his system seemed to have been worked out to the last detail. He'd set up two, three, maybe fcur or five happy little households, spend his end-of-run leave in each, dividing up his time nice and even. All of them together wouldn't cost him what a night or two on the town might. To add to that, he'd pick out his wives with care. They'd all be different in a lot of ways, for the sake of variety, but they'd all be affectionate, home-loving girls, and careful with money. They'd save his credits for him. And when he retired, he could keep active and happy visiting them and his various families, which he expected to include a real lot of kids and grandchildren. "I don't believe in small families," he explained. A t the time, I never thought he'd try to carry it through. I've heard wild ideas in messrooms before, particularly halfway through a long trip. They usually fade out when a man gets his feet down on gravity again. This one didn't. But it might have worked out, at that. It was just Garrity's luck that he signed on the Brooklyn. The Brooklyn carried ore from Serco to Terra, and Terran machinery back to Serco, a regular, steady, run. When I bumped into Garrity in the hiring hall, he told me he'd just signed on her, and I told him I had, too. Naturally, I asked him how the Garrity oldage-insurance system was working out. '"Well," he confessed, "I'm not married yet. But I've got a likely girl here in Terra City. All I've got to do is ask her. Now if I can line one up in Serco -- " "In Serco?" I turned a little pale, I think. "Listen, Garrity, have you ever been in Serco?" "No. Why? Aren't they humanoids?" "Oh, sure." I was trying to think just how you'd describe Serco and its peculiar people. "Only different." "How're they different?" Looking at that stubborn mug of his, I knew I wasn't going to be years. It was just no use. Garrity had everything all figured out. But I took one try. "They've never been much of a mechanical culture; they buy all their stuff from outside, in exchange for ore and timber. But they're one of the pldest civilizations in the Galaxy. They've spent minds and thoughts, all that philosophy sort of thing. I don't mean they aren't perfectly all right. They're human, but they know a lot. It wouldn't pay to fool around with them." Garrity laughed. "Maybe they might read my mind?" I knew it was no use. I just shrugged, bought Garrity a beer to celebrate, and we headed for the spaceport. No, the Sercoans don't read minds. At least, I don't think they do, though there are times when they're that clever at adding you up that you'd think they were looking at your thoughts. Garrity didn't get caught that way. He got caught because he couldn't keep from telling the rest of us about his great idea. One of the navigators, a man named Lane, was the one who told Katha about it. naturally. Everybody was. She' worked in the port medical office and she was one of the reasons jthy it tSok a high-seniority caird 'td 'sign on a ship for Serco. There were a lot of men who'd take dn extra set of immane shots just to have Katha give it to them'. And it isn't a bit easy to figure out why. She wasn't any beauty. Goodlooking, sort of, but not especially so; 'a tallish girl, with gray eyes and a long, narrow, sensitive face. Browny-red hair that always looked a little carelessly cut. As I said, nothing at all special. It was just something about her. She could have had her pick and she picked Garrity. And only Lane broke the rules and told her. Trouble is, he told her a couple of weeks too late. It was because Lane had never thought that Katha would fall for Garrity that he hadn't told .'her before. Bui: when he touched down at Serco port and heard that Katha and Garrity had gotten married the week before, he didn't waste any more time. He called Katha up from the spaceport, and told her all about the Garrity plan, and how she was only the first, but definitely not the last. Lane told me afterward what Katha had said. "I am not jealous," she'd answered. "If he had wanted Others when he was away, he could have done as he wished; as a man might. But he has spokento you as a child, not a man. I do not like that." ' She didn't sound terribly angry. It was the way she phrased it that bothered Lane.' "But he is not a bad man," she said thoughtfully to 'Lane. "And he is a good" lover and makes a fine husband. Twill nOt hurt him, but I think I will" give him something which will teach him, if he wants to learn. And when he has learned, T will take it away again and he may be as free as he can... as free as any of you of the outside ever are." I can't tell you what it was she did. Neither can Garrity. Hell, he didn't even know she'd done anything! He kissed her good-by at the port gates and went on' his way, and she went back to work in the pprt medical office. As far as any of us could see, the Garrity plan was well under way. I T wasn't six months before I saw the thing starting off. That was when I was invited to Garrity's second wedding. It was in Terra City, and when he asked me to come down with him for a witness, I assumed it would be the girl he had been busily courting before he went to Serco. But when I walked into the marriage regis'try office and took a look at the girl, I got a clear, horrific idea of just what Katha had done to Garrity. He didn't think anything had been done to him. He .was all smiles. He brought the girl toward me, proud and possessive, grinning all over his face. "This is Mary Collins," he told me, and I kept on looking, not saying anything. She smiled, and shook hands, and I could tell by her expression that she knew exactly what I was thinking. Unfortunately, I couldn't say a word about it to Garrity. There was always the faint possibility that I might be wrong, in which case I could make a lot of trouble by saying a few words. The words were there, though, straining to get out. When he said, "Mary Collins," what I wanted to say was, "No, it isn't. It's Katha." ' Because it was. After I watched the girl long enough, all the way through the marriage ceremony, then down in the elevator and out into the street, I became dead certain. There was a brown mole on Katha's arrn. Mary had it, too. And there was a look about the eyes -- well, there could only be one Katha. What I could not understand was why Garrity didn't see it. After all, he'd been married to Katha. But when tried to say something to him, he brushed it off. "Sure, Mary looks a little like Katha," he agreed with me. "But there are all kinds of small differences. Things a man finds out as he goes along. Look, I'm very fond of both of them. I know the difference. You're just confused by the slight resemblance." The clincher was the problem of how Katha had reached Terra City ahead of Garrity, to begin with, and whether there was still a Katha in Serco. I asked a man off a ship fresh from Serco and he told me Katha hadn't been there for some time. No one knew where she'd gone, but she had said she'd be back. So Mary could be Katha, given a fast passenger ship. And Arnel could be Katha, too. Arnel had a mole in the right And Virginia. "VT'ES, Garrity married every one of them. Six girls, six planets. It took him a while, and by the time he got as far as Ruth, he was going to a lot of trouble to arrange his shipping runs so he could make the full circuit. But every so often I'd hear from him, or run into him, and there would always be a new one. The Garrity plan was going fine, but it lacked that one ingredient he had counted on -- variety. Every one o( those girls was Katha. He didn't think so. He could call off the differences between them by the hour. To listen to him, if you hadn't actually seen them, you'd have believed every word he said. Each one of them gets a share of Garrity's pay -- a big share, from the looks of it. Each one of them keeps a nice place for Garrity and, when he comes into port, he eats and sleeps as well as any honest groundwalker. And each one of them has a small fat baby boy, of whose exact age Garrity never seems to be quite sure. Two or three of the kids seem extremely advanced for their ages and they were all born fairly close together, which was enough to make Garrity as proud as a rooster. And Garrity seems to be the only one who can't tell. Thinking about it might make a man want to rush off to Serco and find a girl like Katha... and Serco is full of them. I'd like having a girl like Katha. I'd like having six Kathas even better. But I'm not going to. I won't drive myself batty trying to figure out how she'd be keeping me fooled. And especially why.k kk # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, ,here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. # Star Shelf by Richard Wilson. Ballantine Books, #c ous. I merely found it fresh, fascinating and vastly amusing. Wilson does a takeoff on The Warriot's Husband that should end all Amazon stories, if we're lucky. The gals have taken over the U. S. by the end of the century and have everything running like housework -- oops! -- clockwork. The only place fitten fer a real man is (where else?) Texas. When a feller's had enough of "Biddyland" and escapes to man's country, his 'copter lands on the roof of Nieman-Marcus and he comes out on ground level on a cayuse. Wal, pardner, this is the divided country that faces the invader when a gigantic spaceship hovers over West Alexandria, Va., and wipes it out with a backwash from its unknown propulsive power. When the invaders turn out to be gorgeous babes wearing metallic bras and skirts and seemingly without menfolk, you can see that problems might arise. Wilson even throws in a new sued by the above lightly clad Something tells me that Wilson had as much fun writing this book as I had reading it. Evans. Fantasy Press, Inc., # F or some reason, the phrase "poor man's E. E. Smith" kept running through my head while reading this work. The similarity of name helps; also, the fact that the plot of the story concerns a telepath incognito on an alien world smacks of old-time space opera. In particular, when this telepath is a Secret Operative of the Interstellar Corps who pursues his espionage through his control of insects, birds and beasties a la Kimball Kinnison, the result is a bit startling. However, as I said, this is the poor man's version. George Hanlon, the off-thebeaten-telepath, is young, inexperienced and inclined to be a bit of a sad-sack. Unlike his doughty predecessor, Kinnison, he doesn't , haul keel above the surface of Estrella and go gallivanting through the parsecs once throughout the entire book. Still, after bumbling about a bit, he manages to find out why a sudden crime wave and burst of anti-Federated Planets feeling had almost killed the chances of Estrella voting itself into the Federation. That's what is so hard for him to savvy. The Estrellans are basically extremely ethical peopue. It's a feather in George Hanlon's space helmet when he is able to spot the real and unsuspected culprit. It is also pleasant to report that George isn't a Ballantine Books, #c pie of the maturation of S-F over the past couple of decades and this volume is an excellent case in point. It contains eight stories, four of which appeared prior to #. All are good Sturgeon. However, the contrast between the early and recent stories is startling. "Microcosmic God," "Medusa" and "Prodigy" all appeared in Asf and are straight science fiction done in a straightforward reportorial manner. "Ghost of a Chance," "Blabbermouth" and "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall" appeared in various places and are fantasies, the last a shiny little horror story. "Bright Segment" is new and uncategorizable (shades of Gloria Lockerman!.). It is also a tremendous mood story. And "Twink" appeared in this magazine last year. The last two items point up Sturgeon's mastery of plot, technique and suspense. For those unfortunates who have not read his More than Human, the awardwinning novel based on "Baby Is Three," which apjjeared here first, this collection will serve as both introduction and  consolation. But read both -- the novel is also available. McCann. Simon and Schuster, # A S you no doubt know, this volume is the winner of the ter Contest and ran in these pages from June to September of last year. Like the Pohl-Kornbluth novels, Gladiator-at-Law and Gravy Planet, this opus envisages a future in which' some present aspect of society has burgeoned into a Frankenstein monster. In this instance, insurance companies have made the logical step forward of preventing accidents, diseases and wars by taking over the enforcement agencies. Policies are written for just about any and all necessaries as well as exigencies, having such names as Blue Plate, Blue Blanket and Blue Heaven. Sounds like Blue Heaven, indeed, but who needs insurance if everyone is healthy, whole and protected? And there lies the story! Even if you read it in this magazine, you'll want this handsome book for your permanent shelf. Clason. Alfred A. Knopf, # that has both good and bad points. It is well written and interesting and even gripping at times. It concerns a neglected son of a famous engineer. The father is constructing a spaceship for a final try at Venus, ten other expeditions having failed disastrously. The boy is invited to visit with his dad at the site in the Arctic after several years of separation. Earth has been completely exploited and new frontiers must be opened. Naturally, due to the previous failures, there is a great deal of feeling against the expedition, particularly when it involves three hundred people, one-third of the population of the Arctic town that has volunteered to attempt the trip. Fanatics make an abortive attempt to destroy the ship, wounding the father. The boy, Tal Roberts, to whom such an adventure previously was abhorrent, is thus able to go along in the place of another boy injured in the fracas. Isaac Asimov. Signet Books, #c rial that has gone through both printing and reprinting. Asimov's fascinating science-detective story here is republished as a paperback, after Doubleday did it last year in hard covers. If you recall the story, you will understand its deserved popularity. It takes place in the distant future, when Earth consists of enclosed cities of steel. The Spacers, who feel nothing but contempt and revulsion toward Earth, are descendants of Earthmen who colonized the Outer Planets and are at present virtually quarantining Earth in its hermetic cities. When one of them is murdered, an explosive situation develops. Then the hero, an Earth detective, must of necessity work with a Spacer robot, in spite of his anti-robot bias. If you are a detective fan as well as a science fiction addict, you will get especial delight in pitting your wits against the author's. Betcha Asimov wins. James E. Gunn. Gnome Press, # did better on his own this time than he did in his collaboration Bridge. If you remember that epic, you will recall the hero to whom nothing was impossible. Now there was a man! -- well, the jacket says he is a "callow acolyte." That, I think, is going too far. Why, he got himself an education that would equip him to make a living as a mugger iri any big town. This transformation comes about because of a girl fleeing into Dane's cathedral while he is on duty in the miracle-making control room. She has a crystal pebble of obvious value, because, after entrusting it to Dane, she is murdered by the Mercenaries, bad eggs, let me tell you. Seems that, in the hero's feudalistic world, the pebble has some significance for releasing the downtrodden masses. Dane has to flee the sanctuary of his monastery and do lotsa killing in order to preserve the thing. And so develops "one of the most harrowing chases in ScienceLiterature." You know something, they're right! Then how is it that I got a kick out of the book? The answer must be that it did just what it set out to do -- create excitement. Time to Kill He had been hired to commit a whodunit -- now what turned it into whodunwhat-to-whom? T he man in the red cloak and mask led the way into a booth, hit the switch with the palm of his hand and, when the screen snapped across the opening, leaned forward. "Listen," he said quietly. "What I want is simple. I want you to kill a man for me." "Simple," agreed Fenwick drily. He glanced around the" booth and then through the polarized screen into the main room. It was filled with the usual party crowd of men and women. From the way they stamped and snapped their fingers, he guessed that someone had switched on the tingle-tubes to full blast. From inside the booth, he couldn't feel the intoxicating electronic pulsations. He couldn't recognize anyone, either. The fad that year was for Renaissance costume. Last year it had been Victorian and next year it could be Grecian, but this year everyone wore long, sweeping cloaks from neck to heel and oddly distorted masks which covered the face to just above the mouth. Fenwick, even while obeying the dictates of fashion, thought it stupid. In his avocation -- he had no vocation -- it was necessary, even though it meant changing one's whole wardrobe every year, which, of course, was the reason. It was good for business. "We are screened," said the man when it became obvious that Fenwick had no intention of speaking. "You have nothing to fear." "You have nothing to fear," corrected Fenwick. "I don't even know your name. You're a stranger who invited me to join him in a private talk and now it turns out to be murder. What do you think I am?" mask, the man's lips curved into a smile. "I know what you are. You're a hunter, a hardened slayer of the innocent and helpless." "Hunting is not murder," Fenwick said. "No? Tell me, what is the difand a man?" "You pay a heavy fine if you Fenwick bluntly. "The punishment is rather more severe for "Is it? But the reward would be higher. Very much higher indeed -- and you needn't be caught." And there he put his finger on the important thing. Fenwick had no conscience; if he had, he would never have been a hunter in the first place. But he did have a healthy regard for his own skin. To kill was simple; to escape the consequences of murder was something else. "No motive," urged the man. "No possible suspicion. No reason or cause for the police to look for you at all. If any man on Earth can commit murder and get away with it, it's you." "You flatter me." Fenwick wished the man would remove his mask so he could read his expression. "But I am no assassin." "You need money and, as I said, the reward would be high." "High enough to be worth risking my life?" "It wouldn't come to that. A quick attack, a quick escape. Nothing to it." "The police are clever," reminded Fenwick. Despite himself, he was intrigued by the proposal. came easily to him, but lately the slaughter of inoffensive creatures had grown stale. Hunting had become too easy, but what about other prey? "The police are clever," admitted the stranger, "but not as clever as they would like you to think. You know their routine? Everyone remotely connected with any crime is given nullcensor and questioned beneath a lie detector. If a suspect is guilty, they will find him. But what if the guilty person is not a suspect? inhabitants of this city?" He reached beneath his cloak 'and paper rustled as he produced a sheaf of crisp new bills. "I said that the reward would be high. Twenty thousand credits, to be exact." He pushed the notes toward the hunter. "Would you call that high enough?" mask. Until now, he had regarded the entire thing as a joke, the stranger accosting him at the party, the conversation, the suggested murder. The sight of the money made it all very real. "If you want this man dead so badly, why not kill him yourself?" Fenwick asked. "I have a motive, obviously, or I would not want him dead." The man smiled again, his lips moist beneath his mask. "Still thinking of the police?" "You're damned right I am. No one has been murdered for the past fifty years. No crime of any kind has been unsolved in all that time. There are rumors -- " "They're false," said the man quickly. "The police don't have a machine with which they can look back through time. It's just propaganda to discourage potential criminals." "Perhaps. But how can you be sure?" "Because I know. But even if they had such a machine, what of it? You will be masked and are a trained hunter -- you know how to cover your tracks. They won't know who you are and how can they check a whole city? But the question doesn't apply -- there is no such machine." He fingered the money, letting the edges of the notes riffle over the ball of his thumb. "And there is no longer any death penalty." "Right," said Fenwick thoughtfully. "But the risk is still great." "The risk is as great as you care to make it," said the man evenly. "Look at it as a challenge. You, the hunter, against the full power of the law. You must kill and then you must escape. For the escape should prove exciting." He riffled the money again and Fenwick stared at it. "I could agree and walk out bf here and forget what you want me to do," he pointed out. The man nodded. "You could," he said easily. "Will you?" , "No." Fenwick picked up the money. T he victim was a man named Carl Gerard. He was about Fenwick's own age and lived in a class B apartment. Why the stranger wanted him dead was something Fenwick didn't bother to think about. Gerard was quarry. He was twenty thousand credits. First Fenwick arranged for his escape. A travel agency sold him a ticket on the Mars Express leaving every night at midnight from the local field. To lure the quarry from his lair and then to identify him was the hardest part of the whole business. Even that, however, proved disappointingly easy. From a costumers, Fenwick bought a female skin-mask complete with artificial hair. He found a videophone with a tone-selector, adjusted it to emulate a female voice and called Gerard. He aroused no suspicions. If anything, Gerard was too eager to meet the strange female who had called him to suggest a date. Rendezvous time was set for nine o'clock at a busy corner. With time to kill, Fenwick bought aticket to a horrorscope and sat in thoughtful silence while all around him men and women shrieked and shivered to the artificial stimulation of their nerves and glands. He had reason to be thoughtful -- he was thinking of the temporal police. The stranger had denied the existence of any machine which was able to scan time. Rumor had it otherwise, but that could have been instigated by the police and cleverly publicized. If there were such a machine, though, it would account for the crime-free fifty years. No murderer could hope to escape if the police could scan back and actually see him at work. Even if masked and disguised, he wouldn't stand a chance. All the police need do was follow his image back in time until they saw him as he really was. For a moment, Fenwick considered abandoning the whole thing. Then, as he thought about it, he shrugged. His employer, whoever he was, had gauged him too well. The thrill of the hunt was in his blood, the problem intrigued him, and he knew that he was going, to earn his money. Ansrway, no one knew for certain whether or not there was a time-scanning machine. And even if there wgre, it would take time for the police to identify him. By then, he would be halfway to Mars and beyond their jurisdiction. He relaxed, amused at the gasps and shudders of those around him even as his own skin crawled and adrenalin flooded into his bloodstream. Half an hour before rendezvous time, he left the theater and, taking an elementary precaution, walked toward the scavenger part of the city. It was unhealthy in its deserted houses and broken streets, but it was scantily populated and, more important, badly lit. He stepped into a pool of darkness, neat and trim in his puce cloak and mask. He stepped out again dressed in light blue. With no time to waste, he caught a 'copcab. Five minutes later, he was at the rendezvous. Gerard was early. He stood on the comer, conspicuous in his yellow cloak and mask, both ornamented with black arabesques -- the cloak and mask that he had told his caller he would be wearing. In turn, he looked for a silver assembly, the most unlikely color Fenwick could think of. Watching him, the hunter felt a rising excitement. He was in no hurry. It would take less than fifteen minutes by 'copcab to the field and the less time between the murder and takeoff, the better. His deadline was thirty minutes before midnight, which left ninety minutes to go. Ninety minutes in which to watch and stalk, to baffle the quarry and head him on the path he must take. Ninety minutes of skill and cunning culminating in the final moment of victory when the knife he carried beneath his cloak would sink into warm and living flesh. He could afford to wait. It was almost an hour before Gerard admitted to himself that the call had been a hoax. Reluctantly he moved away and behind him, like a colorful figure of destiny, Fenwick waited for time and place to coincide. Gerard seemed aimless. He wandered at random, staring at the window displays, looking at the public information strips, glancing at the scintillaiit bursts of the flash-advertising, acting more like a yokel than the citydweller he was. A fter a while, Gerard went into a tavern and Fenwick, always cautious, waited outside. When Gerard came out, he seemed nervous. He kept glancing over his shoulder, his yellow mask grotesque in the shimmering light of the advertisements, and his pace had increased from a casual saunter to a determined walk. And yet he didn't head back toward the safety of his apartment. He followed an erratic, winding path which led him through side turnings and narrow passages between the towering buildings and his direction, incredible as it seemed, was toward the bright glow of a 'copcab center. Fenwick chuckled as he increased his pace and cut down the distance between them. High on a building, the illuminated face of a clock warned him that his time was running out, but he wasn't worried. From the center, he could get transportation to the field so that, though Gerard didn't know it,' h was actually  helping his murdeier to escape. The man inthe yellow cloak seemed even mbffe nfervous than before. He pausdd atthe mouth of a nairOw all#y windihgbe;tweentwo brightly' lit streets. Then, his ' head flow'd between his shoulders,healrriost 'tan through the alley, d .Fenwick-' stared a'ftdrhim his-brainalert as he-assessed time and speedand disftarice. If he ran after Gerard,' he "Would frighten the quarry.' But'if 'he cut around the corner and rait hard for a dew hundred metfers, he would rfeach the mouth of the'alley before him. He wouldbump into him in the sheltered darkness,' kill and be on his way to Mars before anyone discovered the body. He smiled as he put his plan into execution. There was a big red sign at the corner of the alley where it joined the main street. It flared and died, flared and died, so that the walls and gutters seemed painted in blood and darkness. It flared as he reached the corner. It flared again as he stepped into the alley. It flared one more time as he struck at the man in the yellow cloak, thumb to the blade and ripping upward in the murderous slash he had learned as an apprentice hunter. Before the body fell; he was running down the alley, wiping his hand on the inside #fhis cloak and the blood and fingerprints from the knife befdre throwing 'it away. He'd had it so Icmg thiatmo one could possibly tface'it to him, andhe Wanted to' berid of the damningeyidende' ' which  chemical analysisarid micro-ests could  reveal; Blit he needri'f'tfevePbbVh"' ered. vI The' police wereWaiting for 'him at the other erid of the alley. T herewas no triall Tfial supposes doubt ari'd there could be no doubt' as to'his guilt.'-But there Were plenty of.' questions and Fenwick owned them all. "How?" he asked for the hundredth time. "I'd just committed the crime. How did the officers get there so fast?" "The temporal police?" The man they had assigned to him looked bored. "Surely that's obvious. When we discovered the body, it was simple to determine the time of death. So the officers merely went back to just before the actual moment." He looked tiredly at Fenwick. "Didn't you know we could travel backward in time?" "I'd heard that you could scan the past, but not actually travel to it. Can you? Scan it, I mean?" "No. I wish we could. It would make things so much easier." "I see." So in one thing, at least, the stranger had told the truth. Fenwick frowned at the wall of his cell. "But if you can travel back, then why didn't you prevent the murder?" "How could we?" The man -- Johnson, his name was -- shielded a yawn. "If there had been no murder, there would have been no murder to prevent. No body, you understand, so there would have been no reason for going back at all." "I don't get it," complained Fenwick. "Or do I? No murder, so no body, so no reason for going back. But if you didn't go back, there would have been a body. So..." He broke off looking baffled. "A paradox!" "No," said Johnson. "There are no pardoxes in time." Fenwick shook his head. "What about if someone went back and killed his grandfather?" "I'm tired of hearing that old chestnut," said Johnson. "All right, what would happen if a man did that? First, if he killed his grandfather after his father had been born, it wouldn't make the slightest difference. If he killed him before his father had been conceived, then, naturally, he couldn't exist. As he didn't exist, he couldn't have killed his grandfather. So, being alive, he didn't kill his grandfather. He can't kill his grandfather. The argument is ridiculous." "It still seems like a paradox to me," insisted Fenwick. "There can be no paradox in time. Think about it for a while and you'll understand why." "To hell with it," said Fenwick disgustedly. "All I know is that I've been caught. What happens to me now?" "The only thing left to happen -- your punishment."  wick dryly. "Pardon my curiosity, but just what form will that punishment take?" "You murdered a man," said Johnson. "What punishment do you expect?" "There's no death penalty," Fenwick said. "Or is that another piece of trickery, like not letting people know you can go back in time?" "No. You will not be legally murdered." "What then? Ten years imprisonment? A lifetime?" "Oh, nothing like that." Johnson seemed to have recovered his gocd humor. "A peculiar thing, time travel. Unfortunately we are limited to fifty years, so we cannot satisfy our curiosity as to the past. Also, its uses are strictly limited. No tourists, for example, no exploitation or exploring or going back to visit dead relatives. No paradoxes," he explained. "If you went back to visit your dead father, he would know it. He would have told you, so you would know it. Since he didn't, you didn't, so you won't. Simple." "In other words, the police have suppressed it and use it solely to fight crime." Fenwick wasn't fooled. He had recognized Johnson's hate for a murderer. "Interesting, but what's it got to do with me?" "I'm telling you," said Johnson mildly. "You committed a murder. We caught you, but our job is as much to prevent crime as to avenge it. But a body had to be discovered in order for us to catch you." He smiled at Fenwick's expression. "Think about it. You were caught, therefore you must have killed. Because you killed, you must be punished. Yet, at the same time, we must protect the public, so we cannot let you kill an innocent man in order that we can catch you to punish you." He rose and looked down at the hunter. "It's all very simple. I'm sure that you will be able to appreciate the justice of it before long." He smiled and something metallic gleamed in his hand. Fenwick recognized it as a hypo-gun and, for the first time since his capture, felt fear. "Wait a minute! What about the man who hired me? Isn't he guilty, too?" "Why should he be? Intent is harmless without execution. You could have refused to commit the murder." "But..." I'T E broke off because Johnson had gone, the cell had gone, everything had gone and he was sitting in a tavern with a drink in his hand, while all around him drummed the frenetic pounding of jazz. "Crazy," he muttered and shook his head. But he wasn't crazy and this, as he soon discovered, was cold reality and not a dream. He examined himself. He was wearing a yellow cloak and mask, both adorned with black arabesques. It was a familiar cloak; he had seen it before, but just when and where, he couldn't remember. Drugs, of course -- he still felt doped. Johnson had knocked him out with the hypo-gun and they had drugged and dressed him and brought him to this tavern. But why? Why? He shook his head and finished the drink and looked around for the police who must be guarding him. He didn't see any and began to have hopes that he was really free. Leaving the tavern, he walked down the street. He walked quickly, glancing behind him for fear of seeing a hated uniform, but aside from a man in a light blue cloak and mask, no one seemed to be following him. It was while he was walking that the drug began to wear off. The streets were familiar, too familiar; So were the shop the displays, the advertising signs -- even his very movements. The man in the .blue cloak! Himself in yellowlGerard had worn a yellow cloak; he had worn a blue one. The man following him was himself! The streets he had walked down then.were the same ones he walked down now! Grudgingly, he admired the beauty of it. The tables turned, the hunter hunted. The paradox resolved by the simple expedient of making himself his own murderer. But if he'd killed himself, then Gerard? And if he hadn't killed Gerard, why was he being punished? Or was he? There were no guards, no police, nothing to prevent him going to the spaceport and catching the midnight Express to Mars. The bright glow of a 'copcab center attracted him and he headed toward it. Behind him, the man in blue quickened his pace. F enwick thought of stopping and facing him and explaining what had happened. He didn't because he knew himself too well. the man in yellow. It wasn't a question of personalities or explanations; as soon as time and place were right, the blow would be struck and Eenwick would be dead. And there was another, more important reason. Fenwick had neither moneynor a ticket, but the man in blue had both. And there was only one way to get therti. ' He simulated fear, glancing constantly over 'bis shoulder and almost runnings down a narrow alley he remembered from before. He smiled as' he saw his follower hesitate and then run down the street. He knew exactly what he intended and he would be ready for him. He wasn't Gerard, that timid fool whom the police had obviously removed to safety after putting Fenwick in his place. He was a hunter, as skilled and as strong as the man in blue and he knew what the man in blue was going to do. No hunter could have a bigger advantage than that. The man in blue would race around the other way to head him off. Fenwick knew it even before the other suddenly made the decision, for he had done it himself. But then what? The man in blue had a knife and he didn't. But he had the cape -- and there was a refuse can. He draped the cape over it and stood worrying for an instant. It didn't look at all like a man; it was too short and squat. He dragged it over to the wall, where even the big red sign that kept flaring into life left it in shadow. Would that fool the man in blue into thinking it was his quarry hunched down fearfully, hoping to escape detection? Even more important, could he himself rewrite the past? There was no time to think further -- the man in blue came running into the alley. Fenwick pressed back out of sight in the deeper shadow. The man in blue hesitated only for a second before thrusting the knife into the cape. As soon as the blade rang against the metal of the refuse can, Fenwick had stepped behind the man in blue and chopped at the back of the neck with the edge of his palm -- not too hard, for he didn't want to kill his earlier self, yet powerfully enough to knock him out. He knew just where the money and the ticket were, and he had them out in a flash of movement and was running toward the end of the alley. He faltered there, apprehensive, but there were no police waiting. Almost arrogantly then, he flagged a 'copcab qnd ordered it to take him out to the spaceport. I T was on the way that bewilderment hit him. No paradox, eh? Gerard hadn't been murdered. Fenwick hadn't been killed by the man in blue, as Johnson had planned. The man in blue was unconscious but safe. Then what crime had been committed? None -- and yet Fenwick had to flee to Mars! If he turned back, he had no assurance that he would not be picked up by the temporal police. Scowling, he tried to reason it out. The spaceport lights were glaring below when he finally found the answer. It made him smile -- a bitter and yet admiring smile. Naturally there had been no crime committed, either by him or anyone else in the past fifty kill, just as others had undoubtsteal, and that was enough for the temporal police. If he didn't go to Mars, they were sure to have another trick like substituting him for his victim. Only, of course, he wouldn't put them to the bother; that one or the next might work. Not feeling a bit jaunty, as a hunter should, Fenwick turned in his ticket and went aboard the ship for Mars. Part # of a #-Part SerTal In this wildest of all possible non-wars, the order was wilder still... spare every animal... and throw the men to the wolvesl too By Illustrated by  L ogan moeller is my name, Lieutenant, U. N. Naval Reserve. I was once a combat officer oi the line, piloting a scout torpedo in more than eight hundred hours of combat sweeps against the enemy. Risky? Sure -- operating a thousand meters under the surface of the sea, everything is a risk, and the enemy made it its business to make the risks high. But war is hell; you expect danger in war. The only thing was -- where was the war? You only go to war with countries, and the Caodais weren't a country; they were a religion that had swept up out of Indo-China and through all of Asia, Oceania and Africa. But war? No, it wasn't war. If it were, both sides would use the A-bomb, the H-bomb, the C-bomb, the bacteriological-warfare sprays and mists and dusts. So it wasn't war, because that would be the end of everything. But meanwhile we kept pounding each other -- strictly on neutral territory, like Europe or the open sea. And meanwhile we kept doing odd things to each other -- taking prisoners, for instance. Elsie was only one prisoner, but she was the one who counted with me, because she was my wife. She volunteered, when it would have been months before the universal draft caught her. Even worse than that, the first thing she did was voluntarily go on a courier flight over Caodai territory, and naturally the Caodais niked her down; and  she was alive and safe in a prison camp on Zanzibar, the Red Cross told me. It wasn't so bad while I was on combat duty afloat, but then I was transferred to a toppriority, .most-secret, ultra-urgent naval project on the Florida shore. Project Mako was the biggest disappointment I had in the Navy. It was a dairy farm! Commander Lineback told me, the day I arrived, that I would find it a pretty unusual dairy farm. I watched the cattle being milked, I heard their drovers give them the orders tor the day, I listened to the cattle arguing back. And then I went to Lineback with blood in my eye. Unusual! What vi'as unusual about that? But he calmed me down by promising new developments as soon as certain equipment and personnel arrived. But the new developments came earlier than that, or one new development did: The Glotch. Some people called it that, but I've also heard it called "unidentified ballistic phenomenon, presumably hostile." It was a kind of radiation burn that killed -- all but me. I got it; I was lucky; I survived. But if the Caodais could reach out and strike down someone anywhere in America as easily as it appeared, that was the end for us. Anyway, the new equipment arrived, and with it the new personnel. I found out what we were supposed to be doing: research into animal communication. What did the Navy have to do with talking to animals? And what, for that matter, did some of the new personnel have to do with the Navy? Senior Lieutenant Semyon IIyitch Timayazev, late of Krasnoye Armee, now, since the Red Army no longer mattered to anybody, a military attache of the People's Democratic Tsarist Republican Russian Governmentin-Exile ; , he was one of the new personnel, and a dog-trainer by vocation. A dog-trainer! And he ranked me -- me, an officer of the line! But at least we were doing something and I began to suspect that maybe, somewhere, there was some purpose behind all this, when Project Mako suffered a serious interruption. There was a ship-to-shore shelling from Caodais somewhere out in the Atlantic, coupled with an outbreak in the prisoner stockade down the beach. I found myself out in a scout torp again, scouring the subsea area for the Caodai ships. I found them. Eight of them. E ight Caodais -- corvettes at the least, by the size of them in the sonar screen. And I was in a little thirty-foot torp, with four missiles to fight with. If I got a # hit with every one of them, that still left four to beat the dubbing out of me. I didn't feel heroic; I felt scared. But I didn't turn around and run for it, either. If I ran, they could catch me. If I attacked, they could pound me to pieces before I got within range. If I sat still and prayed, I would at least enhance my dubious prospects of getting to heaven, which would at any rate be something constructive so my last minutes on Earth wouldn't be a total loss. But what I did was fight. It was habit and instinct and routine. Full speed forward, turn the navigation over to the autopilot. Cut the fire-control remotes in on missile Number One, discriminate, lock, arm, fire. Cut in on Number Two, fire Number Two. Cut in on Number Three, fire Number Three. Cut in on Number Four, fire Number Four... and thenit was time to run. In fact, it was past time. They were on course for me and I was on course for them; we had closed to less than five thousand yards. By the time I came about,' it was forty-five hundred -- and a corvette can catch a scout torp with a forty-five-hundred-yard lead in roughly twenty minutes. It is only a matter of relative speeds. Of course, in twenty minutes I could be closer inshore than they would dare to follow -- But they didn't really have to catch me. Their missiles would do the job for them. with very close attention. It was all I could do. There were the eight of them, big and ugly by now;, there were the four staggered little streaks that were my missiles. And there -- yes, there, just before the lead Caodai, were two other little glowing streaks. They were missiles, but they weren't mine. I kicked the auto-armor pedal home. My scout was now defensively armed; it was dropping random-sized masses of fine-spun metallic wool into the slipstream, hoping to divert the Caodai missiles. Unfortunately, the Caodai were doing the same. I saw a mushrooming flare around one of my missiles as it went off, far out of effective range of the enemy craft, triggered, no doubt, by just such a blob of chaff. And another. And then the sonar screen was awash with light from rim to rim. The pressure spheres surrounding the exploding missiles confused Jthe sound waves, made them return conflicting images. I scrambled the sonar screen and snapped on the audic. At least I would know if something big was getting close to me. Something big was! But not the Caodais -- it came from due south, down the coast, and it was big was a Spruance-class cruiser, coming to the rescue. The Caodai might get me, but Big Brother was going to get and yelled excitedly; "Welcome to the party! I'll give you my bearings for cross-check. My grid position -- " But I didn't finish. Audic tinkled and cut out in my earphones. There had been a nearby explosion and the filters, designed to keep the wearer from ruptured eardrums, had cut off the amplification. I waited for the smash. I never heard it, but I felt it. Something hit the side of my head and that was all, brother, that was all. the good die young," growled somebody with a Russian accent. I sat up abruptly. "Semyon!" I said. "What-" The heel of his hand caught me in the chest and I went back down again. "Doctor says to lie still! You should have been dead, Logan! Don't provoke fortune!" )# Well, I was alive, though it took me a while to believe it. What had hit me had been nothing but concussion, and the torp, though sprung a little at the seams, was still infact. The autopilot shut itself off when the hull was breached and, when nobody took the controls, automatically surfaced the vessel -- and hydrofoils found it, with me inside. But I was alive. "Did they get them?" I demanded. "Get who? The Orientals?" Semyon shrugged. "They did not yet have the courtesy to report to me, Logan. I can only assume -- " "All right. What about the stockade?" "Ha," he said, sitting up. "Such a struggle, Logan! Through the jungle like savages, screaming and fighting, deadly beyond -- " "What about the stockade?" "Is over," he grumbled. "We fought a little bit, and then armor began coming up from the highway, and when the Orientals saw the tanks, they ran. Oh, some got through; they will be caught." So that was that. Well, I thought, leaning back against the pillows of the sick-bay and listening to the thumping in my head, it wasn't so bad, after all. A free ride in a scout torp -- I'd thought I'd never get to pilot one again. A successful, or anyway fairly successful, combat sweep against superior odds. A sure commendation in my file jacket, maybe even a citation possibly a Navy Cross -- stranger things had happened. And the whole thing was over, a pleasant interlude in a dull existence. What I didn't know was that nothing is ever really over. Semyon said commandingly: "The doctor!" I sat up and he pushed me down again. The doctor poked me and looked into my eyes. "Back on duty in the morning. Meanwhile He reached for a needle. I protested: "I can go to sleep without that!" "That's good," he said, squeezing the plunger.  and then, magically, he was turning around and coming back, only it wasn't the doctor any more. It was Elsie, just the way she had been the day we were married, lovely and desirable and all the wife a man could want. "Darling," I said to her and she bent and kissed me. and held me in her arms. And then, all of a sudden, her left eye blossomed out in a ripple of greenish light, and then her nose, and then she was awash from side to side with light, just like a sonar scope, and the rest of the dream was hardly pleasapt at all. But I was fit for duty the next morning. And what's more, they put me to work. Remember Manhattan Project? They had a big, difficult, important job. They needed an isotope of uranium -- Uo.-,,-,, as every schoolboy knows, and they needed lots of it. They even knew ways they might get it -- had got it, in microgram quantities. There was thermal diffusion -- the endless flow of uranium salts through osmotic barriers. There was the mass spectograph. There was the "breeder" reaction. And there were others. Manhattan Project had to make a decision. So they decided to do them all. That was the military mind at work, and who is to say they were wrong? Project Mako worked along the same lines. We had half a dozen paralleling projects going at once. Lineback's own group was tediously expanding their vocabulary of Cow. Semyon Timayazev was bedeviling his little dogs with yes-no codes, persuading them to talk to him. A team of four full lieutenants was reading meaning into the elevation of a dog's tail and translating it into flipper-positions for the seals they were given to work with. And more. And I, with a fifty-year-old Wave, a Barnard graduate with a degree in statistical mathematics, to help me -- I was assigned the programing of a computer series that would make sense out of what they were doing. It was simple enough to assign conceptual values to the parts of language and I couldn't complain about the equipment the Navy gave me. The basic unit was an siderate genius in BuSup had added a self-checking circuit to flush triple voltage through the tubes to pick off the bad ones, between operations, so that the unit was pretty reliably good for #six-nines per cent effective operation. There were forty-eight memory tanks in the mercury-delay class, plus a batch of magnetic drums for instructions and a large electrostatic storage unit. With its card punch, reader and teleprinter, it pretty well filled my space. I looked at it and eltisomething like the midget who married the circus fat lady. It was a lot of computer to handle all by myself. UT the hard part wasn't running the computer; it was making sense out of what came out. Semyon had told me so. He formed the habit of dropping in on me for a coffee break now and # then. I don't know if all Russians are the same way, and if they are, it might account for the way they made out in the war, for he seemed to need his coffee break every hour on the hour. He said: "Is a question of vohas not the vocabulary." I said stiffly: "A computer a translated Russian back in the 'fifties." "Ah, Russian, you say? It is the language of animals, you say?" "I didn't mean -- " "No, no. I do not mean I am insulted. I only ask, is Russian the language of animals? It is not, we will suppose. It is merely a human language." "Merely?" "Merely! Small vocabulary, you see. Not like animal, large." I stared at him. "If I understand what you're saying, which is unlikely, you're trying to tell me that animals have a bigger vocabulary than Russ -- than people have." "Exactly so, Logan. Think! Is it engraved on your machine, that motto? 'Think!' Read the motto, Logan, and do as it says. Think, for example, if an animal possesses the capacity for abstract , thought. He does not, you will say? Correct." "But that makes for a smaller vocabulary, doesn't it?" Semyon crossed his legs, sipped his coffee and got ready for a nice, long chat. He said professorially: "Be, for the moment, my little dog Josip and think of how he thinks. Are you and I 'men,' Logan, in Josip's eyes? Or is each of us a man, an individual -- you, perhaps, 'man who sits and watches' and I 'man who makes clicking sounds and gives food'? It is the latter, you will see. For that is how nouns begin in speech, as proper nouns, not class-words but names for particular things. This is why, with Josip, I have followed in the great tradition of my mother and cut to the root. Two words! Just a single word and a silence which is -- " "You told me," I said shortly. "Do you mean that to an animal, each thing has its own individual word?" "I simplify," Semyon said sunnily. "But you grasp my meaning." I did -- and I also grasped his arm and escorted him to the door. He'd made the job look even harder than before. 'YET things got done. Three days after the Caodai incident, we were in full swing. The seeker groups fed me long lines of symbols, representing -- they thought -- the conceptual elements of the language of cows and seals, dogs and rabbits, cats and pigs. We got nowhere with the rabbits -- too stupid; and the pigs were farmbred, too fat to do anything but eat. But with the other animals, there was progress. The seekers watched the animals the way Haroun al Raschid watched his harem favorites. They recorded every sound, photographed every movement. With chemical nostrils, they examined the odors the animals gave off (someone had remembered that bees use odor to indicate sources worth of electronic equipment, they palped the electromagnetic spectrum for signals that coarse human senses could not read. And they found things -- sound, scent, bocfy pwsture, bodily ftinctions: these were the elements of language. Whatever seemed to have meaning, they assigned a symbol, even if the meaning itself was not clear. (Usually it wasn't.) Then they had a list of the essential parts of the animal vocabulary -- lacking translations, for the most part, but very nearly complete. And that was half their job. The other half was to record, in infinite detail, everything the animals felt and saw and experienced. That was the list of referrents for the "word" symbols. The two lists gave, first, the "words," second, the meanings. And then it was up to me and my Wave to tape the findings, program them and feed them to could, from frequency and from context and from comparison with the known parts of other languages, match symbols with referents and make for us a dictionary of Pig and Cat and Seal. I made the dictionary, but when I thought I could use it to win an argument with Semyon, I was kidding myself. He came wandering in one afternoon for coffee and found the first pages of a typed report summarizing what we had learned of Essential Cat. I tapped him on the shoulder. "It says 'Most Secret' at the top of the page," I reminded him. "Eh?" He looked at me absently. "Of course, Logan. Most interesting. I will return it in the morning." walking out the door and took it away from him. "You'll probably get a copy, but not from me. Anyway, you won't enjoy it, because it makes a liar out of you." "Oh?" He beamed at me. "Is difficult, Logan. How often can a maiden be betrayed? And what is this lie?" I hesitated, then showed him. After all, he'd already looked at it. "Cat," I said. "Look them over, Semyon. Fifty eight symbols, that's all. Seven tail movements, three kinds of rictus, twenty-two noises -- add them up. Fifty-eight. And you said the animal vocabulary would be larger than the human." "I did," he acknowledged. "And I still do. Fifty-eight symbols, but are they fifty-eight words? I think not. Call them phonemes, like the sounds of English. There are forty-some of those, I think? But put them together this way and that,  and you have three, four, I do not know how many hundred thousand words." He sighed. "I have one question for you, Logan. When you were knocked unconscious by the Orientals in that little boat -- how could you tell?" "Good-by, Semyon," I said, holding open the door. The next morning, we had our raid. It started out normally enough -- punctually, one hour after breakfast, Semyon showed up with the coffee containers and his usual good humor. I said: "I'm busy, Semyon." He smiled forgivingly. "Khorashaw. That means, 'I do not mind,' " he explained. "Will you pass me the sugar?" I sighed and passed it. I counted: Six spioons of sugar. "Ah," he said, tasting the first sip, "one lives again. At the Academy was like heaven to drink coffee, Logan. Only once a day. And coffee was from Turkey, you know. Once -- " "Better drink it fast," I advised. "I have to get back to work." once four cooks drank coffee and died," he went on. "Whole batch had to be thrown away, because someone had put strychnine in it. Terrible." He frowned reminiscently. "A Turk? One imagines so. Vaz terrible time -- " "Good-by, Semyon." I threw my empty container in the wastebasket and stood up.  " -- was terrible time when Soviets of Russia were surrounded by hostile nations. Now, of course -- " he shrugged -- "it is greatly different. We are friend to all, what of us the Orientals left. Do you find this a lesson to you, Logan?" I held the door open for him. "I do, Semyon. Good-by." as he left and I couldn't help smiling. It was hard to realize that his country and mine had torn each other apart for the salvage of the splinters not much over a decade before, when Semyon was a fresh eighteen-year-old junior officer, straight out of the Academy into the Yugoslav Push that had touched off the Short War. That was Semyon's first battle -- against Marshal Tito's stubborn little army. And now he had named his dog in honor of his late enemy, the marshal, whose real name was Josip Broz. Semyon was a nuisance, but it was with a little disappointment that I realized, later on, that he hadn't shown up for his ten o'clock coffee. And he didn't show up at eleven and he was late, actually late, for lunch. "Logan," he explained sorrowfully, staring without appetite at the plate the mess attendant put before him, "Josip is sick. Could someone have hurt him, Logan? He is bleeding and he will not let me come near. Poor little dog, perhaps he has been in a fight. And he behaves oddly. I play with him and show him ' tricks, and he whines and hides under the desk and whines again." He began to chew morosely. "Maybe you ought to call a vet." "I did! Of course I did. And he said, 'Terribly sorry, old man, but it will have to wait; we must scrub the cattle's teeth for Commander Lineback first.' And poor Josip, he is in pain." It was silly, but he was worried. He even left the table early, so that when I took the 'copter down to our area, it was without him and he missed all the excitement. Because, from .the 'copter, somebody saw a running figure in the palmettos, where nobody should have been running at all. We radioed back to Lineback's administrative area and in less than ten minutes we encircled, closed in on and recaptured eight Caodai escapees roasting the carcass of a pig over an open fire. There were three more pig carcasses in the clearing; the prisoners must have worked like demons to get the animals driven off the research area while most of us were at lunch. The security guard hadn't noticed a thing -- no doubt because the security guard, relaxed and happy with the sure knowledge that nobody would ever bother a place like Project Mako, was sound asleep under a palm.  guess that's the end of the Pig section of the project. But what bothers me is the radio." It wasn't much of a radio -- the sort of thing that prisoners somehow smuggle in, piece by piece, but it could easily have reached out past the horizon to where a Caodai ship might be lurking, barely awash. Somebody snickered and Lineback turned on him sharply. "Belay that! Mako might be funny to you and maybe it's even funny to me. But it isn't funny to COMost Secret and he isn't going to like Caodais with radios roaming around it." "But, Commander," ventured Kedrick, "these guys were just looking for something to eat. They wouldn't have raided the pigs if they'd been after bigger stuff." back shortly. "In fact, that's an order -- get it dispatched at once." Semyon wasn't exactly disappointed at missing the excitement, when I dropped in his section to tell him about it. He had other things on his mind. "Is very bad with Josip," he told me worriedly. "Look!" All I could see was a slack tail sticking out from under a chair. I said, not too tactfully: "You're lucky. The Pig section is worse off than you. The Caodais ate them up." I had his full attention. "What?" he demanded. I had to tell him all about the Caodai escapees again. He kindled like a rocket. "Curse them!" he raved. "I see it, I see it! They come here to destroy us, Logan! They eat the pigs, they hurt my little dog, heaven only knows what damage they do to the other stock! Call Lineback, Logan! Get him here. No, give me that phone -- I will do this myself!" And he did, he got Lineback there in a matter of minutes. It sounded preposterous, of course, to me and no doubt to Lineback. Stilk the Caodais had been in the area and it was at least something of a coincidence that one of our experimental animals  should be in trouble just then. And Josip was in trouble. Semyon managed  briefly to cdax the dog: into his lapf but Josip wasn't happy there.  . He looked' up at us with eyes as big and unhappy as Seniyon's.  I said uncertainly:: "Maybe -- ;  maybe if' we cleanhim up a  little'-"' c'...V . Well, we tried it. Semyon raced ' down to the head and came back  with an armful of paper towels l'afnd' a dish ofwater; but' 'Josip wouldn't sit still tor us to wash: off  the blood. He jerked convulsively and moaned and scurried, whining fretfully, under a desk. there, Semyon had worked up a storm against the Orientals and he blasted his commanding officer with demands for the instant arrest of every Caodai within reach on grounds of espionage, sabotage and treason. "Easy, Timayazev!" rapped Lineback. "What's the story?" "I am telling it you!" cried Semyon. "My dog has been sabotaged -- wounded! Do not believe me. I am only a Russian, a dirty foreigner. Do not take my word! But see for yourself!' He gestured dramatically at the desk. Lineback looked at us worriedly for a moment. "Oh, hell," he sighed. "The things this Navy makes me do -- you say the dog's back there?" "I say it!" Lineback reluctantly got down ; on his hands and knees, had a sudden thought, hesitated and looked at us. ,   . "Is he vicious?" # i!'jQsip? Vicious?" Semyon witheredLineback with an unbplievi. ing look.  "All right," said Lineback placatingly and put his head down to the floor to look under the desk. He suddenly jerked his head up and stared at us, then bent again and reached underneath. "Do not hurt Josip!"' Semyon warned sharply. "He is ill. He has been hurt -- " Lineback's expression was unreadable. He pulled something out from under the desk and held it out to us. "Mouse!" gasped Semyon. "Poor Josip, he has caught a mouse!" Lineback shook his head slowly. Then he looked down at the little animal in his very gently cupped hands. "Not exactly a mouse," he said at last. "It's what we call a puppy. Josip, my innocent friend, has just given birth to it." ried about the possibility of Caodai transmission from the little radio the escapees had, I suppose, but he was also rather strained in his relations with Semyon and me. You can't blame him. He came to his position as head of Project Mako by the animal-husbandry route and he must have been astonished to find how little we animal experts knew about animals. I don't say it was punishment, but the next time the officers' extra-duty roster was posted, Semyon and I were prominent on it: To assist Project Veterinary Officer, it said after our names. Of course "extra duty" is defined as that which you do after all your regular duties are well taken care of. That meant I spent the time from # to # running worked with his dogs -- including Josip, now renamed Josie, and her pups. Then, promptly after dinner, we reported to the veterinarian's office for a pleasant evening's relaxation. And the veterinarian handed us a small box of thermometers with which we were to perform our duties. It was, I told Serriyon later on in the milkshed, la lousy way to fight a cold war. "Cattle!" complained Semyon. "If it could be only at least a dog, which I know well, you understand, and like... But cattle!" For all his grousing, Semyon was not unhappy with the job, so I turned the temperature-taking segment of it over to him and myself took the daily check-chart to record his findings. It was, I reminded myself,, important work; Lineback had said so himself, too important to entrust to enlisted men. But it didn't seem like important work. I wondered what Elsie would think if she saw me squatting soberly on a bale of hay, while the world crept closer to the point of ignition. Elsie. I stared out at the brilliant white moon that, ten hours before, had been shining on Elsie, and I missed my wife very much. "Logan! I have been talking to you!" "Sorry, Semyon." He was looking worried; he waved the thermometer at me. "Three of them, Logan! I examine three cattle and they are hot. Epidemic, no? So I examine two more and they are hot, too!" I looked at the chart. It was true -- I had written it myself but had hardly noticed what I was writing. Semyon had taken the temperature of five cows and they all hovered a bit over a hundred degrees. I said: "It's not much of a fever, Semyon -- " "Call Lineback." "But, listen, Semyon -- " "Call Lineback!" him out of a pleasant bridge game at the club. "Sir, we've got some sick cattle here. They all have fevers, every one of them." And Semyon was chattering over my shoulder about the Orientals and secret germ weapons. Lineback sounded mad, but he promised to come right over. And he did, with the veterinary officer at his side. And that is when I first learned that the normal temperature of a healthy cow is not #-plus degrees, but a hundred and one. as Semyon and I limped back to quarters, nursing our wounds, but I wasn't enjoying it. Commander Lineback had been pretty rough on us. "Ah, well," said Semyon philosophically, "at least we do not have that detail any more." I told him to shut up. But gradually I was soothed. The clouds, white and fleecy in the moonlight; a mutter of thunder from over the Gulf Stream; a gentle, warm wind -- it was pleasant. I sighed. Semyon looked around at me. "You are thinking of your wife?" "What?" I started to shake my head, but then I realized it was true -- not with the top of my mind, no, but deep inside. "It's been a long time," I said. "Two years? That is not so terribly long." "It's long enough for me," I said shortly. "I wouldn't mind so much if I were doing anything to shorten it." We walked along for a moment, but the night was no longer so pleasant. "The trouble is not hearing anything," I told him after a moment. "No letters. No more esping -- Lineback'd put me in irons if I tried it again." "Terrible," he agreed, looking as sad as only a Russian can. "And no chance in the world of ever getting anywhere near her. Semyon, that's the worst thing! At least, when I was on the cruiser, there was alwaysthe chance -- " "Lieutenant Moeller?" It was a runner from the commander's staff, peering at us through the moonlight. "Yes?" "Commander's compliments," he said breathlessly, "and will you report to him at the milkshed on the double?"  "Oh-oh," said Semyon. We looked at each other. What was Lineback doing back at the milkshed? There was only one way to find out. We went back to the shed -- perhaps not exactly on the double, but near enough to it so that we were both breathing hard. Lineback, the vet and a couple of other officers were a circle of bobbing torches in the darkness -- not in the shed, but behind it, gathered around -- a sick cow? Something on the ground, anyway. I couldn't quite see. my face. "Moeller, take a look." For once, he wasn't fussy, he wasn't an old maid. His torch shone on what was on the ground. It wasn't a cow. It was a man. Or, at any rate, it had been. "Oswiak," I said. But it wasn't easy to recognize him; the chin, the throat, one whole side of the jawline all were scarred and tortured. He was dead and he hadn't died easily. "The Glotch." "The Glotch," said Kedrick. "You were here before. Any ideas about this?" The only idea I had was to get away from that face. It reminded me of how close I had come, back in Miami. I said so. Lineback sighed heavily and I could hear him scratching his long jaw in the darkness. "So they've spotted Mako," he said. "Somebody's going to catch bloody blue hell for this. Well, let's get him to the sickbay, you medics." I didn't stop in the wardroom, I went right to bed; but not immediately to sleep. Oswiak's face was too clear before me. I've seen dead men more times than one. I've been close enough to dying myself -- not only in Miami, not only in the action after the stockade break, but on Spruance. But Oswiak had been burned and there is something especially repellent about a man who has died of burns, yards from anywhere, in the middle of a healthy, unsinged stand of crabgrass. It wasn't natural; it wasn't -- well, decent. I swore at Semyon when he tried to wake me for breakfast and slept right through until he came back to the rogm just before lunch. By then, of course, he knew as much as I did -- he and all the rest of Project Mako, all the more because Commander Lineback had put out an orderof-the-day placing the whole subject under top-secret classification. Naturally, that insured that every officer and rating on the project had to find out just what it was that was secret. But it made it possible for me to duck discussing it with Semyon, who had a somber interest in such matters. day for me. I went down to my workroom after lunch, but I wasn't there half an hour when the usual rating appeared with the usual compliments-and-getthe-devil-down-here from Lineback. This time, for a novelty, he seemed almost sympathetic. "I've You're in trouble, Moeller." "Yes, sir," I said. "That's nothing new, eh? Well, you're right. I've had you on this carpet before about using Giardano to get in touch with your wife and that's what you're in trouble about today. However, I'm sorry to say that you're in a little niore trouble now." "Yes, sir." "You damned young fool!" he exploded. "How does it feel to know that you've killed a man, Moeller?" That startled me. "Killed " "Or the next thing to it. You saw him last night -- Oswiak, with his throat burned out." "That's not fair. Commander! I "Shut up, Moeller." He got control of himself. "You didn't do anything on purpose, no. In fact, you don't do much on purpose ever, do you? You blunder into things. Like you blundered into He added moodily: "Ah, the hell with it. I just called you in a Caodai secret weapon -- there's small doubt of it, Moeller -- there's evidence that they are From Project Mako, I guarantee, there has been absolutely no -- not from here, but from Miami, when I didn't have my eyes on you for a moment -- and that transmission was from you." me out and through and up and down, but it didn't hurt very much because I was numb. I did not enjoy the thought that, however stupidly and unwittingly, I had helped the Cow-dyes kill an American. there won't be any courtmartial," he was saying and I focused on him again. "But you deserve it, Moeller, and I want you to know that from here until you leave this base, I'm watching you." That seemed to be that. I said, "Yes, sir," automatically, and saluted, and turned to leave. But he wasn't quite through. "One more thing," he said, his expression unreadable. "I picked up a piece of information that you might be interested in. You were on Spruance before you came here, weren't you?" "Yes, sir." "Then you might be interested to know that this burning gizmo the Caodais have has just been tested out on a submerged vessel. The Caodais are probably pretty happy, because, according to a intercepted, it works. The whole engineering section of the sub died at once and the sub hasn't been heard from since." He looked at me levelly. "It was Spruance, Moeller." I had thought I was numb, but I wasn't numb enough. I was out in the anteroom, ignoring Giardano sitting there reproachfully, waiting for his own turn under the lash, before it occurred to me to wonder if I had saluted. Spruance was sunk. And I was tending cows and pushing buttons in a featherbed project ashore. T here had been big doings down in the bay for a couple of weeks, but we had been warned to keep our noses out of it. Something had been floated in on a moonlit night, guarded by a patrol boat, convoyed by two little Diesel tugs; and a huge tarpaulin tent had been erected over it, and Navy mechanics had been hammering at it day and night. They weren't our own mechanics; they were flown in in shifts, and flown out again, even for mess. Semyon and I strolled down one evening after work, but a husky seaman with a rifle leaned out of a cluster of palmettos and halted us. We didn't argue; I heard the snick of the bolt on his rifle, and we turned around and went home. "Very silly procedure," Semyon said angrily. "They might have shot us!" "I think they would have," I said. The seaman had looked very businesslike. "Barbarous!" raged Semyon. "In Irkutsk, such a thing would not be. Ah, Logan, you Americans have not yet learned the proper conduct of a war. In Krasnoye Armee, when I was a cadet at the Suvorov Academy and -- " "I've heard," I said. "And what is Krasnoye Armee doing these days?" "Oh, granted!" Semyon agreed cheerfully. "You beat the ears from us; we lost. True. But, Logan, we lost so well!" "Let's go into town," I said disgustedly. We took a 'copter to Boca Raton and wandered around at loose ends. "Let us visit the Passion Pit," Semyon suggested eagerly. "Why not?" It wasn't my idea of a big evening, but I admittedly didn't have any better ideas to suggest. Besides, I had been a long time away from Elsie, but not quite long enough to be looking for another girl, and in spite of its name, the Passion Pit was about the most innocuous sfot in town. They didn't even have a license. If you wanted to get high in the Passion Pit, you brought your own poison. " stood still while the attendant stamped our foreheads with fluorescent ink -- so that we could walk in and out, if we wished, without being accused of crashing the place free; the UV spotlight at the door showed who had paid admission and who ivas merely hopeful of getting in for free -- and sat down to watch the floor show. "We should have brought a couple of shots," Semyon grumbled. "It is not fun, just sitting here. If I wish to see cows cavort, there are plenty at Proj -- " "Shut up." It wasn't only that I wanted to keep him from mentioning Project Mako by name, though we'd had pretty stiff orders about that, but the chorus girls were near enough to hear and one of them was glaring at us. "All right. But we should have brought a couple of shots." T shrugged. Semyon didn't pop and I didn't drink -- we'd had arguments about it -- but there wasn't any sense discussing it with him. Anyway, the Pit was a shot, we wouldn't be likely to get our seats back. The Passion Pit wasn't anything like a pit, really. It was on the beach, looking out over the ocean. Only the size of it and the way the crowd acted on a busy night gave it its name. I suppose seventy-five people could have fitted into it comfortably. On a dull Monday, it usually held a hundred. The tables were more than merely close; they almost touched each other, and where you fitted in your chairs was your own problem. Semyon nudged me and pointed. He had a thunderhead scowl and I saw why. Over against the wall, decorously eating in the midst of the uproar, ignoring the band blaring in their ears and the chorus line kicking past their noses, sat Commander Lineback and a dowdy middle-aged Wave jaygee. "Even here, he follows us!" hissed Semyon. "Don't mind him," I said. "Who's the woman?" Semyon pursed his lips. "You have never met the officer his wife? A very charming lady -- almost as charming as this who comes now!" He swiveled his chair around, eyes gleaming, completely forgetting about the commander and his wife. The feature stripper of the evening was making her appearance. She was new, but I had heard of her -- she was actually a commissioned officer, which meant talent a good cut above the usual level of the Passion Pit, most of whose entertainers flagged a waiter and ordered beer -- the best you could do in the Pit -- and sat back to enjoy myself. But the three-piece "orchestra" had just begun the slow, deep-beat number that the stripper worked to when fireworks began going off outside. Sirens blared and search beams lashed the sky, and shots and signal rockets and more commotion than New Year's Eve in a madhouse. Semyon said something startled and violent in Russian and we craned our necks to see out the window. Something was going on down at the beach, but we could not see precisely what. "Let us go look," Semyon proposed gleefully. "Perhaps they have caught a patchifist." "Pacifist. But I just ordered a beer and the show -- " "Logan, there is no show," he said severely. He was right; the stripper was standing at the window, staring out, and the musicians were right behind her. It was more exciting outside the Passion Pit than in, at that. Half the population of the town seemed to be beating the waterfront. "Let us look!" We joined the throng beating its way down to the scene of the excitement. It was a fine, warm night, smelling of hibiscus and decaying palms, not fitting for so much turmoil. "Patchifist, patchifist!" Semyon was bawling. Whether he was the first to have the idea or not, I cannot say, but in a moment it seemed that the whole town was screaming: "Lynch the dirty pacifists! String 'em up!" It was a frightening exhibition of mob violence, erupting out of nothing, driving remorselessly to a bloody goal. I had seen a lynching like this one once before, back in upstate New York, when ten square miles of countryside converged to dip one man by his heels into his own cistern. It turned out later that the original trouble had been over land and the man was no more a pacifist than you or I, only a queer, morose sort of recluse from the city, but that must have been little enough consolation to him when the rope broke. Not that I doubted that pacifists, and dangerous ones, really existed, but there had been no pacifist up there in Barton. And there was none here. The crowd surged to the water's edge and stopped. In a writhing heap on a baggage cart, covered with a blanket, was a casualty of the cold war. A medical Army colonel was beside him,, methodically injecting a series of drugs into an arm that was held by two sick-faced men. The injured man was unconscious and he wasn't screaming, but he was in pain. Someone in authority was questioning the colonel. The medic shrugged without looking up. "I don't know," he said. "Obstetrics is my specialty, but I think he'll be all right. No, I don't know what did it. He was on harbor patrol, es -- " He looked up and a curtain descended over his face. "You'll have to ask somebody else," he said shortly. He waved at the fireworks out over the water. "They've found something, that's all I know." They had found it, all right; there were more light Navy vessels, mostly high-speed hydrofoils, skimming over the water than I had seen since the Fleet exercises. The show went on for half an hour before we found out just what it was that they had discovered. airscrew hydrofoil, zooming up to the landing, stopping short as the screws were reversed, sinking down on the foils to its hulllines just at the dock -- a real hot-pilot operation. Semyon and I had pulled rank to get unto the landing itself and we were right there when the hydrofoil's crew handed him up. He was a little fellow, not more than five-two or thereabouts, brown-skinned and oliveeyed. He was dead. He wore breathing gear and frog flippers on his feet, and around his waist was a whole assembly line of weapons and equipment. It was the first Caodai I had ever seen dead in that way. But it was not the first body I had seen, pitted and scarred, looking like the bottom man on a pile of football players, run over by a team with white-hot cleats on their shoes. When I saw the wounds on the Caodai frogman's back and neck, I knew what had been wrong with the injured man at the waterfront. He had lived, but the Caodai had not, any more Secret weapon? But if the Caodais owned it, how had it destroyed one of their own men? We never did go back to the Passion Pit. It didn't seem like a good idea any more. We went home and to bed; and the next morning. Commander Lineback had me in his office again. "I saw you on the raft last night, Moeller," he began heavily and I braced myself for what might be coming. He passed a hand over his face. "I don't know, boy," he said querulously. "I don't think there's anything wrong with you. Heaven knows I don't think you're a Cow-dye spy or anything like that, but why is it that whenever anything goes wrong, you're always right there on the scene?" "Sir, Lieutenant Timayazev and I were in the Pa -- " "I know. I saw you." He shook his head and said kindly: "Look, Moeller, will you just try to stay out of trouble for a while? I've got work for you." "Yes, sir, but -- " "Forget it." He pressed a button and a rating came in with what looked like an old-fashioned pilot's helmet, one of those closefitting things with earflaps that the old open-cockpit boys wore as a badge of office, except that this one seemed to be woven of shiny aluminum. "Try it on," the commander invited. "It's for you." T put it on without Comment. It squeezed my ears a little, but it wasn't too bad. Lineback half smiled. "It doesn't do much for your looks," he observed. "We'll see if it helps keep you alive." "Alive, sir?" "You saw that Cow-dye last night." I swallowed and looked at the helmet again, turning it over in my hands. "Put it back on," he ordered sharply. "Until further notice, you'll wear it twenty-four hours a day, every day, all day. That's an order." I put it back on. "Why me, sir?" The commander lit a cigarette and waved out the match. "I think I told you that the weapon esp-sensitized. Every victim so if you haven't been sensitized, you aren't susceptible to the Cowdye weapon -- whatever it is. You'll find a lot of these hats on the project, starting today. You're the first." "Thanks," I said. He glanced at me and I added, "Sir." He said mildly, "You did see see that Cow-dye, didn't you?" I had, and if the aluminum hat would keep me from looking like that, I would wear the aluminum hat. But something was bothering me. "If it's a Caodai weapon, sir, how come it hit him?" Lineback shrugged. "Maybe haven't seen fit to inform me. All I know is that a seaman on harbor patrol -- an esper, as it happened -- reported detecting Cow-dye harbor patrol and before they got on the scent, he was slugged with -- with whatever it is. Radiation, I suppose. They say he'll live, by the way. I imagine the weapon backfired. "They couldn't find any trace of a gun or anything like thatmaybe it was portable and the Cow-dye dropped it when he was hurt. Anyway, they're dragging -- in five hundred feet of water, so don't hold your breath till they find anything." Lineback shook himself. "Enough of this conversation. I said I've got work for you." I assumed a posture of attention. "Yes, sir!" I said, trying to look as military as possible. A new batch of animal bright sayings to process through the computer, I thought, or perhaps some pleasant little additional duty with the thermometers. If I had to take that sort of thing to stay in the Navy, I would take it, but at least I would try to be shipshape about it. I leaned forward and picked up the sealed orders Lineback flipped across the desk to me. But it wasn't like that at all. I opened the envelope and stared in utter disbelief. I was ordered to assume command of a sea-going fighting ship! For a moment, I felt as though I were in the real honest-to-JohnPaul-Jones Navy again. cause when Semyon and I raced down to examine my new command, we discovered that there had been a few little modifications. heavy monitor, six thousand tons displacement, nuclear powered. armed with twenty homing-torpedo tubes and damned little else. Weems was an elderly lady her over to me, but monitors of her class had served well and damagingly to the enemy in a great many actions, and she still could have been a command worth having -- especially for a jay-gee. neers had performed a sort of crude hysterectomy on the old girl. She didn't look much different, under the tarpaulin tent, but her torpedo racks were empty, the tubes were plugged with steel disks, and far-reaching changes had been made in her propulsion system. For one thing, four inches of sheathing had. been stripped from her reactor. It made a nice economy in weight -- Weems, from a lumbering snail of a vessel, could now in theory lope along as lightly as a corvette -- but it had the one drawback that everybody inside her hull was subject to a wash of radiation all the time the reactor was going. Semyon looked at-,me with the roundest of eyes. "Logan, are they making a Kamikaze of you?" "Of us," I said, grimly enjoying myself. "You're part of my crew." "I am not!" he yelped. "In Krasnoye Armee, is never -- " "It's all right," I assured him. "Relax. In the first place, this old wagon isn't going anywhere. In the second place, if it did, and you and I went with it, we would live up forward in a sealed whaleboat. When the reactor was on, we'd be behind a six-inch bulkhead. The only communication we would have with the main compartments would be over intercoms." He meditated. "Otchi khorashaw," he announced. "Is all right." He patted the heavy tubeloading gear, still in place because it was too clumsy to take out. "It not bad, this Weems," he said thoughtfully. "And you are commander. I congratulate you, Logan." We toured the ship like midshipmen on their first training cruise. Semyon was delighted with the happy combination of sea and shore duty. We would spend our working days on Weems, sleep in our quarters ashore, have our evenings free for the Passion Pit. He had it all figured out -- Almost all. f I 'HE whaleboat which would nominally be our quarters was comfortable enough, though not large. It was similar in design to the scout torpedoes I had piloted when I was attached to Spruance, but not as fast and not armed. Its whole function was to get a part of the crew away in case the monitor was crippled or breached. There were quarters for three: A "captain's cabin" -- mine -- the principal distinction of which was a curtain to draw across the bunk, and two uncurtained bunks fitted around the main drive shaft. It would be a little cramped on an extended cruise, but livable. Something was troubling Semyon. We tramped aft from the sealing hatch to the whaleboat and he cast puzzled looks at the main control board, the fire-control panel, the complicated fighting gear of a deep-sea monitor. busiest here. Most of the panel had been made fully automatic, run off a modified baby computer; what little could not be automatized had been redesigned. Pushbuttons had been replaced with big, soft-handled throw switches. Infinite-range microverniers had been ripped out and simple onoff two-position toggles put in their place. There could be little grace or flexiblity in operating Weems with the new controls; power ahead would be "Full" or "Dead Stop" and rudder wbuld be hard right or amidships. But it would go. Semyon started to ask me a question a couple of times, but frowned and stopped himself each time. It was only when we came to where the crew quarters should have been that he exploded. "Logan," he said accusingly, "there is something here which is not right! Where are the bunks, Logan? What is this canvas on stared, blinked, read again. Then he looked up at me. They say Russians are very emotional; perhaps that is why his eyes seemed dark and almost wet. His voice was strained. "We are Judases, you and I. Those poor animals!" the floor, Logan? Why is there no galley on this Weems, Logan?" "You can flgure it out," I told him. "You realize this whole area of the ship would be awash with radiation in action." "Of course! That is why I ask, Logan!" "Everything so simple, even a child could operate it. Maybe even less than a child, Semyon." He was staring at me. "Now perhaps you know what Project Mako was all about." I held out the orders and he took them unbelievingly. He X but the animals didn't seem to mind. We drew a full complement for Weems: Three dogs, including Josie, two small apes and a seal. The seal was not physically present -- she stayed in the pool up in the Project area, but if Weems or anything like Weems ever put to sea, she would go along. On an actual strike, it wouldn't be both the dogs and the apes, but one group or the other. In our dry run, one of our principal missions was to find out which could operate a submarine better. The apes had manual dexterity, which was helpful, but in the sheaf of preliminary studies Lineback threw at me, it turned out that the dogs had more tolerance poisoning, he wouldn't know it. Being an animal, he wouldn't ever know it, until he dropped dead -- but that would probably take weeks. The seal was somebody's bright idea and I could see that she might be the most useful of all. for low-level radio activity, which might be more important.  I 'HE reactor was not completely bare, of course; it had a stripping of some light metal around it, filtering out gamma radiation and some of the other byproducts. But neutrons, for instance, floated right through. With the light sheathing, being within range of the reactor meant slow, not sudden, death. And for the first part of the time the subject was dying of radiation Imagine a seal, trained to follow orders, carrying a leech bomb to a cruising Caodai ship! It wasn't that they couldn't detect her -- but supposing they did detect her, what would they they do about it? They weren't going to blow every fish, whale and dolphin that came within range of their sonars out of the water -- and our seal would look like any other seal, except for what she carried. It was extremely doubtful that they could recognize that in time to do them much good. Working with the seal, in fact, was child's play. All we had to do was to run through enough of a vocabulary to explain to her that if she swam to the object that was shown to her and pushed the big metal disk, she would get a fish -- and prove it to her with a few fish. She would be one surprised seal, though, when she pushed the big metal disk in an actual operation. dently the burns were causing more trouble than the newspapers reported. And by then, of course, the reason for the helmets was an opensecret. Semyon's feelings were hurt. "I have not enough brain then? The Orientals cannot vector in on the little brain of Semyon Timayazev, the son of a disciple of Pavlov? Hah!" He was moody about it for days, until we got a shipment of helmets of a new size and shape. Then he was utterly crushed -- the new helmets were for our dogs. I tried to explain to him that tivity, not intellect, that our work with the dogs might have made them susceptible. But you cannot tell a Russian anjrthing once he gets an idea fixed in his brain, and for some little time after that, Semyon was of no use to Project Mako. All he could do was stare unhappily at the dogs. But the work proceeded. I pushed myself pretty hard, because along about the time I got my first command, I received a letter from the Red Cross. "Lieutenant Moeller," they said, "we regret to inform you in answer to your request of # June that we are unable to establish Signalman #C, last known to be every time he saw me trying to take a shower with my aluminum helmet on my head. On Lineback's orders, I kept my mouth shut about what it was for, but as Lineback had promised, they began cropping up all over the base before long. Kedrick was the second man to turn up with one; then three or four of the other officers, including the Waves; then the enlisted personnel -- apparently on the principle that they were comparatively expendable. My own Wave appeared at the keyboard of the computer one morning with a feminine-styled model perched on the back of her head. It was smaller than mine, apparently a later issue -- which, considering that mine was no more than three or four days old, indicated a pretty high priority in project development. Ev.idue to current security restrictions in force. Application has been made for permission for a Red Cross representative to visit her for the purpose of ascertaining her welfare, in line with your request. However, we must inform you that there is a backlog in excess of fourteen hundred such applications. None have been granted." So I pushed myself hard and the animals and Semyon harder still.  hull of Weems began to smell like an old goat bam. "Trained, these animals!" Semyon complained bitterly. "They are not even houses-broken!" But that had little to do with their military occupational specialty. The chimpanzees were named Clara and Kay, both femalesr both yoimg and friendly; they caught on to what we wanted of them quickly enough. It was a spectacular sight to see Semyon, vocabulary sheets in his hand, chattering and posturing at the apes, but it got results. I found out very quickly that there wasn't any such thing as a conveasation with an ape. You could stand there and tell it the chimpanzee symbols for, "Loudnoise. Hurry. Grab-fhaf-thing. Pull," and it would merely look at you, head cocked far over on one side, brown ape eyes staring vacantly. And then it would scratch and scamper away. But then the crash-dive bell would sound and Clara or Kay would leap up from her flea-hunt and jerk open the manual main-tank valve as skillfully as any twenty-year submariner. I don't mean to say that they never talked back -- often they would object and tell us that they wanted a banana or a shiny ball or a handful of mealworms. But there was little predictability in their responses. The dogs were another matter entirely. Their main problem was gamilousness. You would explain to them, say, a complicated couijse-correction maneuver and they would bark, growl and semaphor the whole thing back to you. And they wouldn't repeat it just once; they would tell you the whole procedure two or three times, and then come up and put their forepaws on your legs and mention a couple of the highspots, and tell you about the firecontrol drill they had done the day before, with emphasis on how High-Shiny-Lever was not the same as Little-Thick-Lever, even though both of them had to be pulled sharply outward. Semyon was astonished. "Oh, that Mamushka should not see! Observe, Logan! They chat like diplomat's wives!" I T was true enough; when we left them in a simulated abandon-ship, retreating to the whaleboat and communicating with the animals in W'eems proper only through the telecom, they chattered at each other. Since a very large proportion of canine vocabulary is aromatic, that contributed to the soggy state of Weem's interior. Fortunately, those sections of their vocabulary -- though of paramount interest to the dogs -- had nothing to do with shiphandling, so it wasn't necessary for us to duplicate them. The biggest hitch in communicating from the whaleboat was that we were living a lie and we knew it. It was all very well to dry-run the animals from the whaleboat, in communication by means of the telecom, but in actual combat we would not be so fortunate. Water bars microwaves; communication is possible, but only by sonar beam, and that presents a real challenge to a telecom. the engineers were back, ripping out all our communication equipment and replacing it with something complicated and new. Semyon and I sat on the shore, playing with Josie's puppies and waiting, and the whole business was noisily but speedily installed in an hour. plained it to us, sweating. "It's a sonarvision installation and Flag Section thinks it ought to do for whatever kind of lash-up you guys have got here." He looked puzzledly at Josie and at Semyon and shrugged. "Anyway, it'll give you a two-way picture. But not instantaneous; it's got a slow rate of scan and you can transmit about one full image every two seconds. There's a little bell that rings when your picture's taken. The phosphdl-s in the picture tube -- " From there on, it got deep, but I understood. Instead of radio waves, which the sea would stop, this thing beamed sound waves, which the sea carried beautifully. But because of the slow speed of sound waves, apparently, we were confined to transmitting a series of stills instead of a movie. When I pounded it through Semyon's head, after the engineers had left, he glowered at me. "But the essence, Logan," he protested, "the essence of the vocabulary is motion and -- " I patted him on the head. "Back to the computers," I said, as kindly as I could. , if we didn't have perfect rapport with the animals, there were compensations. With practice, they got almost good enough to ship-handle by themselves, anyhow. The image in the sonarvision screen wasn't terribly sharp, but by turning up the gain, we got a patchy sort of vivid light-anddark silhouette that looked awful to me, but which the dogs and apes had no trouble recognizing. The only thing was, they couldn't seem to grasp the notion that the picture of Semyon was the same as the person of Semyon; they would take orders from Semyon in person, but the semaphoring stills only puzzled them. We ran picture-recognition tests for two whole days and Josie was the first of the dogs to begin to get the idea. I pointed to Semyon and announced his name; I pointed to the photo of Semyon the signal lab had made for us, as contrasty as the screen image,  and named it; and Josie got up on her hind feet and leaped over to the photo and licked it. It was like winning the Battle of the Atlantic. "Good girl," I said in English, because by the time we got the dogs, they had already acquired ten or twenty loan words, like any other reasonably intelligent mutt. And in Dog: "Now. This one. Do." It was a photo of a cow. Josie stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and then pronounced: "Big -- " Well, never mind what the Dog word for "cow" is. But she got it. I ran through a couple of dozen pictures and she called every one; and when I came to a photo of her puppies, she called each name and, barking the lookat-me symbol, rolled over on her back to display her swollen milk glands. I took a break, scratching the back of Josie's neck and smoking a cigarette. She said the low, halfvoice whine for "Bad smell" once, but only as a comment, not a reproof, and she nudged my cigarette case indulgently with her nose. I picked it up and opened it. Elsie's picture was inside the lid, taken two years before. I started to tell Josie that this was my wife, but somehow it didn't seem right, translated into Dog, and I contented myself with showing her the picture. She looked at it a little dubiously, tongue lolling out, one paw on my knee. I didn't think how odd that might look to anyone else until I heard Lineback's voice, scratchy with scorn, from behind me saying: "What are you trying to do, Moeller, make her jealous?" Weems like a homing torpedo through a tube, and in that one half-hour inspection, there wasn't a thing that Semyon and I had been doing that he didn't touch on. He was wearing a sardonic expression when he began,but by the time he completed his tour and watched us put the animals through a couple of simple paces, his face was serious and friendly. "Lieutenant Moeller, Lieutenant Timayazev," he said, "well done. Now I've got a hard question for you. Do you think you can make this thing work in combat?" Semyon swallowed audibly. I said quickly: "Certainly, sir." Lineback looked at me thoughtfully. "You're pretty salty," he said and I couldn't tell whether it was approbation or not. "Well, you may get the chance. You'll have orders tomorrow." He reached over to pat Sammy, our wire-hair. Sammy glanced at Semyon, who told him; "Boss. All right here." Sammy whined. You could translate it as, "Well, if you say so," and suffered Lineback to pat him. Lineback shook his head. "That business with your hands and the growl -- you were talking to the pup." "That is correct. Commander," agreed Semyon proudly. "I translate it like so -- " "Never mind," said Lineback. "I don't know, it seems to me things were simpler before this idea got started." Sammy was acting ill at ease, so Lineback let him go. "Dogs usually like me. Been getting along with animals all my life. I suppose once they get in the habit of conversation with humans, it changes their attitudes a little." "That is so," Semyon nodded eagerly. "One picks up a little of culture from the other; it is a phenomenon well known. You will find it in the papers of my mother, who worked with Pavlov." "No doubt," said Lineback drily and got up to look for his hat. I got up with him; he had left the hat at A-Hatch and -- "Sammy!" I yelled. The terrier, surprised in the act, looked around at me. I rescued the commander's hat just in the nick of time. Commander Lineback, I will say for him, rose to the occasion. He looked at me for a speculative moment, then smiled slightly. "I see," he said impassively. "Well, you won't have to translate that for me. Good day, gentlemen." And he left, leaving Semyon and me staring at each other in horror and relief. XI S O we found ourselves on orders. It wasn't Lineback who handed them to us. It was a special courier-officer from a higher command and it wasn't even ble and instant endorsement. But the orders were signed "By comthe courier was a full commander of the line. Semyon was awed. "It is big, Logan," he said portentously. "Did you observe? He shares your tastes in hats." . "I observed," I said. The commander had worn the aluminum skullcap under his regulation dress cap, a style which was becoming fashionable. We broke the seal on our orders and read them hurriedly. They explained very little, only that we were detached from Project Mako as of # the next morning and, were to proceed without delay to a port on the Florida Gulf coast for assignment. That was all my orders said. Semyon's had one extra paragraph -- directing him to bring with him certain "experimental animals covered by Reference two (#) dogs, two (#) apes, small, female, and on# (#.) seal." inevitable that everyone we saw on Project Mako stopped us to say good-by. We reported in to Commander Lineback, who made the most sensible suggestion of the day: "Go out and get drunk. It may be a long wait for the next time." So we headed off base and wovmd up in the Passion Pit -- but not, this time, without shots of our own. When the waiter finally made it to our table, Semyon ordered ginger ale and I ordered chicken broth setups and we got set to enjoy the floor show. The stripper went through the whole act without interruption and I must say it was worth it. She was a lovely woman, goldenhaired, blue-eyed, tall and shapely. She had a figure that no woman deserved and it was incontrovertibly natural; she went to some trouble to prove it. point of those things, we were seated at ringside and he invited her to our table when she paused right in front of us near the end of her number. I was surprised she didn't have us thrown out. I was even more surprised when, five minutes after she made her last bow, she showed up at our table. "Lovely," said Semyon sentimentally, looking at her costume. It was civilian clothing, rare enough on a young girl; you could see the fall-away zippers and clippers that marked it as part of her professional wardrobe. "I have not seen many such dresses in your country. May we offer you a drink?" He reached for his flask as I reached for my case; we both held them out at the same time. "Thanks," she said with a warm smile. "I'll pop, please." Semyon shook his head in sad resignation. "Mad," he said. "However -- waiter!" The waiter came over and took our orders -- the same setups for Semyon and myself, beef bouillon for the girl. "My name," she said, "is -- " "Caresse O'Nuit," said Semyon promptly. "I have seen the billboards." . "But my name is Nina Mer"Of course," Semyon said humbly. "I am sorry, Nina. It is a much more lovely name." "Which is?" "Nina Merriam." "Is it?" She thought about it. "No, I think you're wrong," she decided. "But it's my real name, so let's use it, shall we?" Semyon said: "I would use any name that would bring you to...  me. She looked at him. "Down, boy." "Chicken broth," said the waiter, arriving. "Ginger ale. And here's your beef bouillon, Nina. Better take it easy; the old man's out back." "Don't worry about me," said Nina, and looked at me expectantly. I took out the case again and offered her a choice. She hesitated, then picked a flat green one. "They're doubles," I warned her. "So we'll live a little." She popped the pastille into her mouth and swallowed it expertly, dry. She sat for a moment before she took the first spoonful of the chaser. "Good stuff," she said. then, but after all, as Commander Lineback had said, it might be a long time before we had another chance to hoist a few. I took a double, too -- but unlike sweet, blonde, young Nina Merriam, I had to wash it down with half the chicken broth. They say that you don't really get any physical kick out of popping for at least half an hour -- it takes that long for the buildup. But I swear I get a tingle as soon as it slides down my throat. Call it psychological and maybe it is, but I can feel my temperature go up, I can see things begin to take on that lovely, fuzzy, dreamy look, I can feel that funny hot tingle go through my body. Semyon, of course, disapproved. He sat glumly sipping his Scotch and ginger and watched us. "Filthy custom," he grumbled. "Thank heaven is not found in Russia." "They used to say the same thing about alcohol," I said dreamily. " 'S just a poison, alcohol. Why would anybody want to poison himself?" "Be easy on him. Lieutenant," Nina broke in, pushing away the balance of her chaser. "I kind of wish I could get as big a charge out of liquor as I do out of bios. I'm getting as fat as a pig on the chasers." "Oh, no, no!" Semyon exclaimed at once, dropping the whole discussion. "I have seen many pigs, Nina Merriam. Truly, there was none of them who was not much, much fatter than you." "Thanks." "You are welcome," said Semyon proudly. "You have in no respect a figure like a pig's. Observe that in hog, the middle section bulges out like watermelon. Your middle section is slim -- two-hands slim, I estimate. Utterly unlike pig. I have covered waist; now I proceed upward. Pig -- " "No, you don't," said the girl. "Forget about the pigs." "Of course. But pig -- " "I think pigs are dirty animalsl" Semyon giggled and slopped more Scotch into his glass. "So you say of pig," he observed. "And pig says of ypu -- " And he told her, in Pig, what pigs called humans. It was the same term they used for portions of their swill; it sounded like a hay-fever patient blowing his nose. The girl looked suddenly interested. "I didn't know you were a farmer," she said. "Farmer? Timayazev is no farmer! Logan here and I, we -- " "Semyon! Shut up!" I had been half asleep in my chair, dreamily listening to them, thinking how far aviay and curious everything was; but Semyon brought me to with a bang. me up, Logan! I was not going to speak of Project Mako!" "You better not," I told him and went back to examining my own sensations. I was beginning to see things through a haze. I looked down at the floor, where a cigarette was smoldering far, far away. It reminded me to take a drag on my own cigarette, and when I raised my fingers to my lips, there was no cigarette in them. It posed an interesting problem. Cigarettes appeared from nowhere on the floor, cigarettes disappeared from my hands; it was all incomprehensible and suspicious. Was it possible that the Caodais were up to tricks with my cigarettes? I thought it over and rejected the possibility. The pacifists, yes; that might be it. But it couldn't be the Caodais, because they were too far away. It had to be pacifists. However, I had a plan to outwit them. It involved bending over and picking up the cigarette on the floor. It took a little thinking, but it was workable; it would restore the balance. While I was figuring out the details, Nina Merriam said: "How about another round?" and the waiter appeared and disappeared, and new setups were on the table. "Logan," Semyon was saying insistently. "Logan, why don't you answer me?" "What is it that you would like an answer to?" I asked him carefully. "I asked you if I might tell Nina about Josie's puppies." I touched my fingertips together. "I see. You want to know if you can tell Nina about Josie's puppies." "That's right." "Don't interrupt me, Semyon! I'm thinking." I closed my eyes to concentrate. The problem had many ramifications and I couldn't help wondering how Semyon had got onto that subject in the first place. Lineback would throw a tizzy if he knew that Semyon had so much as admitted he'd ever seen a dog. But Lineback, of course -- "Logan!" Semyon sounded mad. "Wake up!" I opened my eyes and smiled at him forgivingly. "Well?" he demanded. "Can I or can I not?" "This is my verdict," I announced. I paused to frame the thing in exactly the right words. I was feeling a little woozy from the double shots, there was no denying it. Not only was I flushing hot all over, but I could feel my skin getting dry and my pulse thudding; it was time to take it easy for a while. I said carefully: "You can't tell her about the puppies. You can tell her about Josie herself, all right, but you mustn't mention talking to her, or the Weems." gustedly. "Curse this security," he said. "Don't say anything about our shipping orders, either," I warned him. "Of course not, Logan! Do you think I am a loose-tongue? Well, ' Nina, I cannot discuss the puppies, so do not ask me. I won't do it." I nodded approvingly and closed my eyes to listen better. This time, it was the girl who said, with a touch of irritation: "Wake up, Lieutenant Moeller. The chaser's getting cold." "Sorry," I mumbled and found my case. She grabbed it, apparently under the impression that I was going to spill its contents. "No need to get excited," I protested. J# "You've only got one anthrax left. Maybe you'd better lay off for a while." I sat up straight. "Help yourself," I said cordially. "Officer of the line can mix his shots. Don't expect girl to do as much." She took the flat green pastille and swallowed it, making a face as she sipped the lukewarm bouillon. I took one at random and popped it. "Hey!" she cried, but I already had it down and was choking on the chicken broth. "You shouldn't have done that," Nina said worriedly. "Do you feel all right?" "I feel ferfect -- perfectly fine." It wasn't entirely true and I avoided her eyes, not so much because they were accusing as because they were attached to her face, and her face was moving. I didn't want to look at any moving objects just then. I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the slight tremor inside me to decide to go away. It didn't. I took a really deep breath and sat up straight -- it seemed hard to stay erect for any length of time -- and smiled at Semyon and the girl. "Dance, Miss Merriam?" I invited. "There isn't any music," she pointed out. TUT Semyon responded, even if the girl was a spoilsport. His eyes jerked open. "Dance!" he said. "Timayazev will dance lesginka for you!" "Oh, no, you won't," said Nina Merriam, and between us we got him back in his chair. I had had only one more shot than the girl, but I was frankly reeling and she seemed as fresh as ever. I don't know how women do it. She reminded me of my wife; Elsie and I had pub-crawled three nights a week for half a year before we were married and it was always I who began getting disorderly. Semyon resisted only briefly. Then he sat back, sprawled in his chair, and smiled lovingly at us. "Good party, Logan," he said. "The best," I agreed. I sneaked a look at my watch; it was hard to make it out and even harder to perform the necessary subtraction, but as near as I could figure, it was two hours since I had taken my first shot. The anthrax colonies in my system were pretty well established; I had a fine building case of fever and approaching delirium. Any minute now, the second layer of the pastille would dissolve and the antibiotics would take over, cleaning out the bacteria and sobering me up. It was about right, I thought fuzzily, computing the time to get back to base and the amount ofsleep I would have before our transportation arrived the next morning. And completely forgetting the trouble with mixing your shots. For the antibiotics are specifics; the cores that will sober up your case of anthrax in an hour don't touch pneumococcus or the others. I was in for a doublejointed hangover -- still drunk on the second dose while I was being sobered up from the first. I didn't know it and it was just as well. But I knew it the next morning. Oh, yes! what I do," I told Semyon, who was rubbernecking at the big ships in the wash. He glowered resentfully, but he followed orders. We stepped into a submersible whaleboat and sat ourselves in the sternsheets while a couple of efficient seamen disposed the crates containing the animals in the cargo space. They were almost all the baggage Semyon and I had between us; the orders had specified strip-ship condition. It meant battle stations; it meant the big-ship Navy and a combat mission; it meant, perhaps, getting somewhere near the east coast of Africa and Elsie. We boarded Monmouth, a forty-thousand-ton carrier, by one of the three after gangways, and Semyon was so preoccupied watching the whaleboat carrying our animals to a forward gangway for loading that he almost forgot to salute the colors. I nudged him and he looked at me blankly for a moment before he remembered our careful rehearsal. Josie and the apes were easier to train than Semyon Timayazev. Our quarters were small but comfortable; we shifted into dress blues and reported to the executive officer and were sent immediately to see the captain. I had almost forgotten such niceties of the naval service as the captain's call. I would have felt like the wanderer coming home, only I wasn't feeling much of anything except a queasiness in my stomach and a throbbing like Monmouth's main-drive engines in my head. But I got through the interview with the captain all right and so did Semyon. Having a hangover is not the worst thing that can happen to a naval officer on his first day at a new ship. It tends to make you concentrate on what you are doing. But as soon as we had a moment to ourselves, we headed for the sickbay and wheedled vitamin shots out of one of the surgeons. He thought it was very funny. They helped, but I did not enjoy the surgeon's prescription for "helping to re-establish the intestinal flora" which he claimed the antibiotics had pretty well knocked out. It was yoghurt and I forced it down, but I almost lost it again when Semyon cried delightedly: "Schav! Please, Doctor -- me, too!" and proceeded to swallow a pint of the stuff. A ll in all, we were in pretty good shape for the briefing at nine hundred hours the next morning, except for Semyon's worry about his beloved dogs. "Josie, of course," he told me fretfully. "They understand Josie, she is on the orders. And Sammy is all right, and the apes. But the little puppies, Logan, will they be all right? No orders for them, you know." I chased him down to the whaleboat level to look them over. Before sunrise, we got under weigh. Monmouth slipped lines and stood out into the channel -- on the surface, since Caodai radar didn't matter on our initial course in the Gulf. I was on deck in officer's country as we sailed, feeling useless, with reason. I had no part in the complicated task of getting a war vessel on course. Faint dawn light was coming up behind us. Monmouth blinkered gocd-by to the harbor monitor through a gentle drizzle and then the hailer gave all of us idlers the warning. Stand by to submerge. I found a spot out of the traffic lanes, near a running port, and I watched through the glass as the deck parties stripped and stowed the outboard gear. They did their job and disappeared in well under sixty seconds. Monmouth was a taut ship. There was a hoot and jangling of bells and Monmouth slid downward into the water. Green and blue waves bubbled up over my port, turned brackish gray, and then there was nothing at all to see, nothing but a faint sourceless light through the water outside. I went to the briefing in a thoughtful mood. I was astonished at the number of officers at the briefing -- nearly sixty. The ship's executive officer rapped his knuckles against the standing microphone and called us to attention. He looked at us queerly for a moment before he spoke. Then he waved a red-sealed envelope and said: "Welcome aboard, gentlemen. You've all got quarters and you all know you're on a crash-priority mission, and half of you have been haunting my office ever since we got under weigh. Well, I couldn't tell you anything. I've been in this Navy for forty-six years, and I've heard of sealed orders, and I always thought they were something you read about in books." H e slapped the envelope against the mike and the amplified thud rolled around the room. "That's what we got here. Sealed orders. In -- " he glanced at his watch -- "in one minute, the captain's going to be opening his copy of these and then we'll all know what we're up to. Until then, hold your breath." He rocked back on his heels, calmly observing his watch. Then he leaned forward again and I guess we all really did hold our breaths. He said: "I forgot to tell you, those of you that don't know it already, that Captain's Calls are suspended for the time being, so don't bother me for appointments." There was a groan from the sixty of us and he said : "All right, gentlemen. Here it is." And he stripped the seals off the envelope and began to read. It was a crash-priority mission, all right. Even the weary old exec stood straighter and seemed to come alive as he read the formal phrases from the orders. It was -- the Glotch, though that wasn't what the orders called it. Intelligence had come up with the conclusion that the Caodai headquarters for the new weapon was not on the interdicted mainland, but the island of Madagascar. Our sortie was to make reconnaissance, to find out what was there -- and, if possible, to pulverize it. "Target Gamma." That's what the orders called it -- a point fixed with grid markings on a map. Something was there, something  which the Caodais were trying as ably as they could to hide. We were going to take a look. The exec finished reading the orders and folded the sheet. "Specific assignments will be given out later, by sections," he said after a moment. "Gentlemen, this has been as much of a surprise to me as to you. But I suppose we all had an idea that it might have something to do with the Caodai weapon. I only want to add one thing to what you've just heard. It's no secret that they have been hitting us pretty hard. Well, it's been worse than you think. Worse than we can stand, in fact." He licked his lips. "Gentlemen, you're in for some rough times and only a fool would try to tell you that you're all going to come through them alive. But keep this in mind: This is for keeps. I have it from the captain. If this doesn't dation to the President will be a declaration of war. It's as serious as that. "We've got to come through -- or else it means the satellite bombs for' everybody." That was that; we were dismissed. We left the briefing room silently, all of us too busy thinking about what the exec had said, and its implications, to talk. But we were not all thinking of the same implications. I raced from the briefing room to the chartroom, to confirm what I already knew but could hardly believe. Our target was Madagascar, a long, flat island hanging off the east coast of Africa. And next above it, inches away on the map, another island -- Zanzibar! And Zanzibar meant Elsie.  me: "At last we are equals! I have been promoted -- I am now considered as valuable as you and the animals!" He displayed what had just been issued to him, an aluminum helmet, protection against the Glotch. The whole ship was being fitted with them. "We're late," I growled at him and tugged him away to our special section briefing. I had been on edge ever since I had found out how close I was wife was eking out her days in the monotony of a prison camp. Incredible that I could come that close to her and not see her! But impossible that I could do anything else! For all of my months on Spruance, I had been praying for just such a strike; and now that it was within grasp, it was worse than anything I' could have imagined. So near, I said to myself -- and for the first time understood how powerful the ragged, overused cliches of speech had to be to survive so long -- so near and yet so far. Our special section briefing was very exclusive -- the briefing officer, Semyon and me. He began without preamble: "There will be three waves against Target Gamma and you are in Wave One. There will be three groups in Wave One: Group A, air reconnaissance. That's radarproofed gliders, launched at sea, with infra-red scanners and so on. Group B is intelligence officers -- they're Oriental nationals, mostly from Hawaii, I think, for infiltration. Group C is animal penetration -- that's you." tF E closed his Plans book with a snap and said: "Your mission is to get your animals as close to Target Gamma as you can and then get them back. You will spend the next seven days rehearsing them. They w'ill have to learn to use small cameras, which they will carry around their necks, and they will take pictures of everything in the area. You two are expendable, but the animals are not -- until they've got the pictures, anyway." I glanced at Semyon. The briefing officer had just sunk TYeems and my visions of my first combat command. "How are we supposed to get the animals back if we're expendable?" "We'll establish a rendezvous point where they can be picked up. Frankly, I think you two will get caught. Maybe it will be even better if you do get caught," he added callously, "because it'll give the Caodais something to do. You -- " he nodded at Seymon -- "may get by; you'll have cover papers as a Ukrainian neo-Bolshevik refugee, of which Intelligence thinks there is a small colony on Madagascar. "But you -- " that was me -- "are going to have to just stay out of sight. Oh, we'll color up your skin and give you what looks like a prosthetic arm and hope you may pass for a disabled Caodai veteran. But don't count on it. The dogs, remember; they're what's important. Unless there's been a worse security leak than we have any reason to believe, the Cowdyes won't be on to the animal bit." Going back to our quarters, I thought of the endless days on Weems, training the animals to operate a ship. Was it all camouflage? Were the guiding geniuses behind Project Mako trying to throw dust in the eyes of the Caodais, in case they penetrated our security? Or was it merely that things had to go tight, and whatever for Project Mako had to be scrapped in favor of this all-ornothing effort against Target Gemma?  through the portholes at absolutely nothing -- we were fathoms down and running lightless -- maybe the prospects weren't so bad. Maybe the expendable unit in this operation -- myself -- might actually enjoy being expended. It was all pretty far-fetched, I admitted to myself, but consider: If the Caodais nabbed me, the chances were that they would not shoot me out of hand. True, I would be a spy and they certainly weren't going to pat me on the back and send me home with an ice-cream cone in one hand and a red balloon in the other. But we weren't at war. We didn't shoot Caodai spies. We arrested them, and tried them, and threw them in jail or in concentration camps. But would that be so bad -- assuming, I mean, that the Caodais were as humane as we? May#) be the punishment would be something like imprisonment in a PW camp. And maybe, just maybe (but still, how conveniently close at hand it was!) the Semyon, grown queerly moody, spent most of his time slumped over a chessboard in our wardroom. I offered to play a game with him and his refusal was a masterpiece of tact. Even tact didn't get him out of a game with the duty officer late one night, though, and Semyon trounced him so economically that I realized why he hadn't been greatly interested in playing against me. I tried to make friends with some of the ship's officers, but they looked on us with something of the attitude Chicago's stockyard workers have toward the cattle. I did manage to get into a few bridge games in the ship's wardroom, but always with the feeling of being an interloper. And the ship's officers, for that matter, struck me as an eccentric lot, far below the standards of Spruance. The only one I cottoned to at all was a gunnery officer named Rooie, like myself a former scouttorp pilot on a Spruance-class cruiser, now on limited duty because of injuries which accounted for some of the three rows of ribbons on his chest. He was salty and amiable, but unfortunately the othfer officers of his duty section disliked me on sight. IOR a few days, it was bearable, because they urgently needed a fourth for bridge. But after we went down five tricks, doubled and redoubled, after I had started with the Pratt convention (opening two-bid to show a void in a suit), my partner threw his cards on the floor. He was an ensign named Winnington, a beefy young redhead, and what he said about my bridgeplaying was bad enough, but what he said about me personally made it impossible to stay in the room. So it all worked out for the best. Semyon and I spent tedious hours with Josie and Sammy, while the chimps asked ridiculous questions and the puppies got in the way; and they were all ready for the big performance. Heaven knows what sense they made out of the answers we gave to their "Why"s, but they knew their jobs. From Ilorida, we swept grandly south and east, as our course was lined out day by day in the chartroom. At forty knots -- not our best speed, but the one which made the least noise and fuss to alert Caodai sonars -- we were clipping off nearly a thousand miles a day. Each night we surfaced briefly to let the navigators obtain a fix, and for a few moments each time, half a dozen lucky souls were permitted out on the weather deck, perhaps to see the stars. But not me. For eleven days, I counted my fingers and thumbs while we went from the Caribbean through the South Atlantic, and into' the broad curve that grazed the Antarctic Ocean itself south of Good Hope. And then we were creeping up the eastern flank of Africa -- slow and wary. These were interdicted waters. If we were spotted here, we were dead; at the best, we would have to abort and run. Our orders were to avoid engagement unless it was forced on us, but there was a pretty fair chance that we might have no choice. Consequently the fire-control stations were doublemanned around the clock, and we crept under the thermoplane, in the dense Antarctic Deep water, with our fingers crossed. It was dead reckoning now. The navigators had only the fragmentary charts of submarine configurations to help them get a fix. Surfacing, even for a moment, was out of the question. The strain was beginning to tell on the ship's crew. Rooie's wardroom. It was like the condemned cell block in the death house. Rooie was there, watching a canned TV program S L A v E S H I P in a film viewer, and when I tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped. "Oh, Moeller," he said, but his eyes were hunted and it was a moment before he smiled. "How are you?" He switched off the film viewer. "I don't know what the blasted thing is about, anyhow. Want some coffee?" He signaled the mess attendant without waiting for me to answer. She was an enlisted Wave, rather attractive-looking from the rear; I didn't get a good look at her face as she went out for our coffee. Winnington appeared from behind a bookshelf. "Hello," he said, a little stiffly. "Hi." If he wanted to forget the fracas at the card table, I was We all sat down and talked about nothing in particular. They were eager to talk, even Winnington. It is an ugly companion, the knowledge that at any time some wandering Caodai sonar beam may bounce off your ship's hull and lead a torpedo to you. "Your coffee, sir." Winnington took a cup, and the girl turned to me. She was attractive from the front, too; only a seamansecond, but young and fresh-looking. She wore no makeup, but -- But I had seen her before. When I had seen her before, she had worn quite a lot of makeup -- makeup and little else! "Nina Merriam!" I said. There was no doubt in my mind; the last time I had seen her, her hair had been a different color; but it was the same girl -- the ensign stripper from the Passion Pit. I stood up so fast that I kicked my chair over backward. "What the, devil are you doing here?" I bellowed at her. Rooie and Winnington were asking startled questions and I filled them in. Their reaction was sharper than mine. "Spy!" gasped Rooie. "Moeller, you've caught yourself a spy! Look at her -- American as you and me, selling out!" took her at quick-march " down to the ship's executive officers quarters, leaving Winnington gaping foolishly after us. There was an armed guard at his door. I told him; "Watch her. She's probably a spy. Hold her here while we talk to the exec." The girl said sharply: "I'm not a spy!" But what else would she say? Rooie and I pushed our way into the exec's office, careless of shipboard protocol, and blurted out our story. We must have sounded like idiots, but nothing ruffled the exec. He'd said he had been in the Navy forty-six years; I believed every year of it. He stared at us thoughtfully and lit a cigarette. "A spy, you say." He puffed on the cigarette in an infuriatingly meditative manner. He was past retirement age, the kind of grizzled old three-striper who keeps passing his fitness tests for pure spite, refusing to be put out to pasture. And he kept looking at us. "Sir," burst out Rooie, "she's right in your anteroom. Why don't you -- " He stopped, just barely in time. Thunderclouds were gathering over the exec. Well, after all, he was the administrative officer for a ship of the line and Rooie was b very junior lieutenant. But the explosion looked as if it was going to be a beaut. It probably would have been, if we had heard it. But we didn't. The loud-hailers in the passageway rattled with the klaxon alarm and then the voice from the bridge suddenly and harshly blared: "Attention on deck! Attention on deck! Bandits in fleet strength detected on intersecting course. Condition Crash Red! Battle stations!" 'onfJnued from Back Cover Each Is packed with rocket-swift stories tlmt take you soaring In time and space... written by the greatest science-fiction writers. A # value, full-length, full-size, in handsome permanent bindings -- and all yours for only I on this amazing offer I N OW. for the first time, on this big SclFiction described on this page for only I ! te-fktion Club's Biggest Bargain Offer!  A story about the first ABomb... written before It was Invented! Plus a score of other best tales from Astounding ScienceFiction magazine by editor John W. rampbell, Jr. (Publ. ed. #.) World renowned stories by II. (J. Wells. Jules Verne. Sir Arthur Conan. Doyle. Aldous Huxley. Philip Wylie,. 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Please register both reservations in my name. Honored Unless Filled Out and Signed on the Reverse Side. For only #I I mi msr now  f ER MAY # # Anyone For Doomsday? Not You! Not Us  thing that IS possibleand can make a good story -- eoes Doomsday is only one possible future out of many: The conquest of other planets... Invasions of Earth... Other dimensions... Immortality... Strange and exciting future civilizations that have their roots right in the present , , . magazine of ideas brought vividly to life! For # convincing issues, send # or # for # issues, TO galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. I'Uasc sciul iiic )ost-pail tlie novels cliecked below.B- -- B-#-tr   # -- B-e-#C # For # #c each Enclose check.  cash or money order. Name We pay postage Address City State ealajQ' by Edward W. Ludwig fay Jim Harmon by Willy Ley fay H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale o" Publishing Corporation. Main offices: this magazine are fiction, and any similarity betweL characte?rd" I peVsoos U Printed In the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title peg. g.j. Pat. Off. Z I I I Radio Network, a service of N.B.C . For Listening each Wednesdoy X-I Galaxy For Reading each Month X-I Galaxy Science Fiction each Wednesday night. Consult your newspaper for program time for X-Minus One on your X-I Here is adult Science Fiction, excitingly dramatized, by the best directors and adaptors -- over the greatest Network -- from the best of adult Science Fiction -- Galaxy Magazine. # . #I butions and biggest messes have been made by two kinds of brains -- the devious and the literal. Those of us who fall between these extremes are generally awed by the first and dismayed by the second. When I was writing fact-detective cases, I was impressed by the beautifully elaborate plans of a Chicago man who murdered a chess master. But then I discovered why the police prefer ingenious crimes; with so many threads to hold, the complex criminal is bound to tangle himself up quickly. The devious slayer was caught in less than a day! But deviousness is almost always a joy to watch. Not long ago. The New Yorker ran a piece by a writer who lacked repartee and thus was reduced to prepartee -- setting up his gags in advance. Living in the country, where power and phone lines topple in every storm, he saw a great possibility: It the power lines went down and the telephone wires didn't and he made a call to a neighbor and the wife answered instead oi the husband, he'd have a perfect setup. That was a lot to ask, but it happened. He grabbed the phone, called, the wife answered, and he crowed, "Where was Moses when the light went out?" Mrs. Moses said, "Down in the cellar. He thought it was the fuse." The writer said, "Oh," and made some small talk about the storm, and disappointedly hung up. Naturally, he had to tell somebody, so he explained the joke to his wife, who listened stonily. "Well, it was a funny idea, wasn't it?" he demanded peevishly. "Funny," she said. "Don't make me laugh." She, incidentally, once reported that a friend of hers "goes to church religiously." With a wife like that, I suppose a man has no recourse but Erector Set thinking. Unfortunately, he just proves the cops are right -- the more complicated reasoning gets, the more likely it is to fall apart. Yet there's no doubt that we need devious minds. During WW II, some genius hired science fiction writers to think up outlandish weapons and engineers to detail them -- and then let the blueprints fall into enemy hands, thus lousing up their research. On the other hand, when Mac(Continued on page #) Circle numbers wanted enclosed . # # Name Address City State Each copy has six to eight stories by such top authors as Ray Bradbury, Sam Merwin, Jr., Evelyn E. Smith, Frederik Pohl, Charles Satterfield, Philip K. Dick, Ted Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Wyman Guin, Damon Knight, L. Sprague de Camp, and many others. All ten for # only Any five I .# Any three I .# or #c each postpaid. i i I I i Volpla The only kind of gag worth pulling, f alway ntaintained, was a cosmic one -- till f learned the Cosmos has a really nasty sense of humorl T here were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic accelerator. But there were three of them. My heart took a great bound. I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying to hit a combination that would work. I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her tolerantly. "Can't adjust your skates?" I asked again. "Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight enough." I continued to look down on her. "Well, Dad-dee, I can't!" "Tightly enough." "What?" "You can't turn this old key tightly enough." "That's what I say-yud." "All right, wench. Sit on this chair." I got down and shoved one saddle shoe into a skate. It fitted perfectly. I strapped her ankle and pretended to use the key to tighten the clamp. Volplas at last Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No, twelve.' I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had given me the idea of a flying mutant. looking at him, he started a little tarantella about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the cage. I turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate. "Daddy?" "Yes?" "Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?" "I'll speak to her about it." "Don't you know?" "Do you understand the word" "No." I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. "Tell your mother that I retaliate. I say she is beautiful." She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and waved. Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly. Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern. These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures. My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling. "Lunch, dear." "Be right there." She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view when I slipped out. "Come ori, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace." "Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out." "From me, of course." "But you love me just the same." "I adore you." She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my shoulders and kissed me. My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, "Hello, baby." My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. "What on Earth's got into you?" The maid beat it into the house. I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up the ketchup and said, "I've reached the dangerous age." "Oh, good heavens!" hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it. I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath and looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the Pacific shimmered. I thought, "All this and three volplas, too." I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, "Yes, sir, the dangerous age. And, lady, I'm going to have fun." My wife sighed patiently. I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and said, "But you're the only one I'm dangerous about." I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the ' terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction. "You have lovely lips," I whispered. "Thanks. Yours deserve the L Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too." Our son reared the new palamino I had just bought him for his fourteenth birthday and yelled down, "Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or I'll give you lead poisoning." I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture. I thought, "By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!" The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. "Mom, I'd like a swim before I eat." He started undressing. "You look as though a little water might help," she agreed, sitting down next to me with her plate. The girl was yanking off her skates. "And I want one." "All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit." "Oh, Mother. Why?" "Because, dear, I said so." The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit. I looked at my wife. "What's the idea?" "She's going to be a young woman soon." "Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young man sooner than already." "Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start wearing clothes." I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer. "This place is going to hell," I complained. "The old man isn't allowed to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked." I leaned toward her and smacked her cheek. "But the food and the old woman are still the best." "Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever since you came out of the lab." "I told you -- " "Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age." I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. "Just the same, I'm going to have a new kind of fun." grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock grimness on her lips. "It's a joke," I assured her. "I'm going to play a tremendous joke on the whole world. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way, but I've always..." She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. "Like?" "Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I found a litter of flat stones that had young blacksnakes under each slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out. The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't understand how so manysnakes got there. I learned how great it can be to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that you have prepared for them." She let go of my ear. "Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?" "Yep." She shook her head. "Did I say you are eccentric?" I grinned. "Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab can't wait." The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But my first volplas were shockingly humanoid. They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to stand. He was a little, the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink. On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same proportion to the body as it is in the human.  arms, the span was fortyeight inches. I held his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. The spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger, the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward. Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened. The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it anchored at the little toe. This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now. It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a thrill run along my back. By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from them in a most humanlike way. They were active, curious, playful and decidedly amorous. Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this portended was brought home to me with a shock. I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, "Hello, pretty one. Hello." The male watched me, grinning. He said, "'Elio, 'ello." A S I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife said, "Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate." I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. "Oh, great! Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's wonderful. Success on success!" I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn. The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place. My wife just stared at me. "Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?" "I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus." She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. "Wouldn't you just settle for a worldly martini?" "I will, yes. But first a divine kiss." I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would have their own crafts and live in small tree houses. I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first white men enter these hills. When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers would laugh. Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He would conclude, "I am convinced that they have a language and speak it intelligently." The government would issue denials. Reporters would "expose the truth" and ask, "Where have these aliens come from?" The government would reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends. Volpla wisdom would become a cult -- and of all forms of comedy, cults, I think, are the funniest. L' ing to me?" my wife asked with impatient patience. "What? Sure. Certainly." "You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space." She got up and poured me another martini. "Here, maybe this will sober you up." I pointed. "That's probably Guy and Em." A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down to meet them. I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, "Do you have your TV set on?" "No," I answered. "Should I?" "It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it." "What broadcast?" "From the rocket." "Rocket?" "For heaven's sake, darling," my wife complained, "I told you about Gu # s rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the broadcasts." As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. "He's out of contact today. Thinks he's Zeus." I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in. Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multistage rocket. After a bit, I got up and said, "I have something out in the lab I want to check on." "Hey, wait a minute," Guy objected. "They're about to show the shots of the launching." My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat down again. The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself. Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close. "You look real good," I said. "A regular Space Ranger. What are you shooting at?" "Darling, will you please -- be -- quiet?" "Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around." dead-earnest face was explaining more about the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there. Well, now -- say, that would be something! I began to feel a little ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about my volplas. But only for a moment. A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a flaming pillar, then was gone. The screen returned to a studio, where an announcer explained that the film just shown had been taken day before yesterday. Since then, the rocket's third stage was known to have landed successfully at the south shore of Mare Serenitatis. He indicated the location on a large lunar map behind him. "From this position, the telemeter known as Rocket Charlie will be broadcasting scientific data for several months. But now, ladies and gentlemen, we will clear the air for Rocket Charlie's only general broadcast. Stand by for Rocket Charlie." A chronometer appeared on the screen and, for several seconds, there was silence. I heard my boy whisper, "Uncle Guy, this is the biggest!" My wife said, "Em, I think I'll just faint." Suddenly there was a lunar landscape on the screen, looking just as it's always been pictured. A mechanical voice cut in. "This is Rocket Charlie saying, 'Hello, Earth,' from my position in Mare Serenitatis. First I will pan the Menelaus Mountains for fifteen seconds. Then I will focus my camera on Earth for five seconds." The camera began to move and the mountains marched by, stark and awesomely wild. Toward the end of the movement, the shadow of the upright third stage appeared in the foreground. Abruptly the camera made a giddy swing, focused a moment, and we were looking at Earth. At that time, there was no Moon over California. It was Africa and Europe we were looking at. "This is Rocket Charlie saying, 'Good-by, Earth.' " Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes. The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at once. ator to cut the volplas' gestation down to one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month. I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early infants were females, which sped things up considerably. By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own way. I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model, and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their little skulls a bit. My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out of the lab. I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley about a mile back in the ranch. They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously. They kept me busy relating their words for "tree," "rock," "sky" to the objects. They had a little trouble with "sky." Until I had them out in the open country, it had been impossible to appreciate fully what lovely little creatures they were. They blended perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes. Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll. He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He sailed over her in a stunning sweep. Then he rose up and iip until he hung in the breeze for a long moment, thirty feet above the ground. He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us in a golden IS flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass. The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little whoop. After that, it was a carnival. ers; they were gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking, turning and spiraling to a gentle halt. I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the Chornicle motored out into the hills to witness this! Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool. They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes stretched to dry. I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little actual surviving. I called the male over to me. He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first. "Before the red men came, did we live here?" "You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors." "We can learn again. We want to stay here." His little face was so solemn and thoughtful that I reached out and stroked the fur on his head reassuringly. ' We both heard the whir of wings overhead. Two mourning doves flew across the stream and landed in an oak on the opposite hillside. I pointed. "There's your food, if you can kill it." He looked at me. "How?" "I don't think you can get at them in the tree. You'll have to soar up above and catch one of them on the wing when they fly away. Think you can get up that high?" He looked around slowly at the breeze playing in the branches and dancing along the hillside grass. It was as if he had been flying a thousand years and was bringing antique wisdom to bear. "I can get up there. I can stay for a while. How long will they be in the tree?" "Chances are they won't stay long. Keep your eye on the tree in case they leave while you are climbing." H e ran to a nearby oak and clambered aloft. Presently he launched himself, streaked down-valley a way and caught a warm updraft on a hillside. In no time, he was up about two hundred feet. He began criss-crossing the ridge, working his way back to us. The two girls were watching him intently. They came over to me wonderingly, stopping now and then to watch him. When they were standing beside me, they said nothing. They shaded their eyes with tiny hands and watched him as he passed directly above us at about two hundred and fifty feet. One of the girls, with her eyes fast on his soaring planes, reached out and grasped my sleeve tightly. He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near. I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I did so. "He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here." I got up and found a stick. "Can you do this?" I threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She threw it better than I had expected. "Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and throw a stick into it." She climbed skillfully into the tree beside us and launched herself across the stream. She swooped up the opposite hillside and landed neatly in the tree where the doves rested. The birds came out of the tree, climbing hard with their graceful strokes. I looked back, as did the girl remaining beside me. The soaring volpla half closed his planes and started dropping. He became a golden flash across the sky. The doves abruptly gave up their hard climbing and fell away with swiftly beating wings. I saw one of the male volpla's planes open a little. He veered giddily in the new direction and again dropped like a molten arrow. The doves separated and began to zigzag down the valley. The volpla did something I would not have anticipated -- he opened his planes and shot lower than the bird he was after, then swept up and intercepted the bird's crossward flight. I saw the planes close momentarily. Then they opened again and the bird plummeted to a hillside. The volpla landed gently atop the hill and stood looking back at us. The volpla beside me danced up and down shrieking in a language all her own. The girl who had raised the birds from the tree volplaned back to us, yammering like a bluejay. had to walk back, of course -- he had no way to carry such a load in flight. The girls glided out to meet him. Their lavish affection held him up for a time, but eventually he strutted in like every human hunter. They were raptly curious about the bird. They poked at it, marveled at its feathers and danced about it in an embryonic rite of the hunt. But presently the male turned to me "We eat this?" I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to clean the  ,r' "Yes. I will bring many more of you, if you promise to keep them all here in this woods until the # r're ready to leave." "I promise." He looked up at the night sky and, in the firelight, I saw his wonder. "You say we came from there?" "The old ones of your kind told me so. Didn't they tell you?" "I can't remember any old ones. You tell me." "The old ones told me you came long before the red men in a ship from the stars." Standing there in the dark, I had to grin, visioning the Simday supplements that would be written in bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their fire. Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal. When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached. The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire. I said again, "Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you ready for it." "We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?" about a year, maybe even less. He looked into the sky for a long time. "Those little lights are the stars?" "That's right." "Which star?" I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. "From Venus." Then I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. "In your language Pohtah." ' He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, "Venus. Pohtah." ported all of the volplas out to the oak woods. There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design on niy part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to actual parenthood. By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy, sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through midday and midnight. The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my ranch and the fun would be on. My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying about the disemboweled buildings and she said, "What on Earth is going on here?" "I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going to write a paper about my results. My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. "I thought you meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first." My son asked, "What happened to the animals?" "Turned them over to the university for further study," I lied. "Well," he said to her, "you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision." Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation on the ranch. Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed. the original camp to meet the oldest of the males, who had apparently established himself as a chief of all the volpla families. He assured me that the volplas were staying close to the ranch, but complained that the game was getting scarce. Otherwise things were progressing nicely. The males now carried little stone-tipped spears with feathered shafts that they could throw in flight. They used them at night to bring down roosting sparrows and in the day to kill their biggest game, the local rabbits. The women wore b I u e j a y feathers on their heads. The men wore plumes of dove feathers and sometimes little skirts fashioned of rabbit down. I did some reading on the subject and taught them crude tanning of their rabbit and squirrel hides for use in their tree homes. The tree homes were more and more intricately wrought with expert basketry for walls and floor and tight thatching above. They were well camouflaged from below, as I suggested. These little creatures delighted me more and more. For hours, I could watch the adults, both the males and females, playing with the children or teaching them to glide. I could sit all afternoon and watch them at work on a tree house. So one day my wife asked, "How does the mighty hunter who now returns from the forest?" "Oh, fine. I've been enjoying the local animal life." "So has our daughter." "What do you mean?" "She has two of them up in her room." "Two what?" "I don't know. What do you call them?" I went up the stairs three at a time and burst into my daughter's room. There she sat on her bed reading a book to two volplas. One of the volplas grinned and said in English, "Hello there, King Arthur." "What's going on here?" I demanded of all three. "Nothing, Daddy. We're just reading like we always do." "Like always? How long has this been going on?" "Oh, weeks and weeks. How long has it been since you came here that first time to visit me. Fuzzy?" The impolite volpla who had addressed me as King Arthur grinned at her and calculated. "Oh, weeks and weeks." "But you're teaching them to read English." "Of course. They're such good pupils and so grateful. Daddy, you won't make them go away, will you? We love each other, don't we?" Both V o I p I a s nodded vigorously. She turned back to me. "Daddy, did you know they can fly? They can fly right out of the window and way up in the sky." "Is that a fact?" I said testily. I looked coldly at the two volplas. "I'm going to speak to your chief." I raved at my wife. "Why didn't you tell me a thing like this was going on? How could you let such an unusual thing go on and not discuss it with me?" My wife got a look on her face that I don't see very often. "Now you listen to me, mister. Your whole life is a secret from us. Just what makes you think your daughter can't have a little secret of her own?" She got right up close to me and her blue eyes snapped little sparks all over me. "The fact is that I was wrong to tell you at all. I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone. Look what happened when I did. You go leaping aroimd the house like a raving maniac just because a little girl has a secret." "A fine secret!" I yelled. "Didn't it occur to you this might be dangerous? Those creatures are oversexed and..." I stumbled into an awful silence while she gave me the dirtiest smile since the days of the Malatestas. "How did you... suddenly get to be... the palace eunuch? Those are sweet lovable little creatures without a harm in their furry little bodies. But don't think I don't realize what's been going on. You created them yourself. So, if they have any dirty ideas, I know where they got them." I stormed out of the house. I spun the jeep out of the yard and ripped off through the woods. The chief was sitting at home as comfortable as you please. He was leaning back against the great oak that hid his tree house. He had a little fire going and one of the women was roasting a sparrow for him. He greeted me in volpla language. "Do you realize," I blurted angrily, "that there are two volplas in my daughter's bedroom?" "Why, yes," he answered calmly. 'They go there every day. Is there anything wrong with that?" "She's teaching them the words of men." "You told us some men may be our enemies. We are anxious to know their words, the better to protect ourselves." He reached atound behind the tree and, right there in broad daylight, that volpla pulled a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle out of hiding. He held it up apologetically. "We have been taking it for some time from the box in front of your house." He spread the paper on the ground between us. I saw by the date that it was yesterday's. He said proudly, 'Trom the two who go to your house, I have learned the words of men. As men say, I can 'read' most of this." him. How could I possibly recoup this situation so that the stunning joke of the volplas wouldn't be lost? Would it seem reasonable that the volplas, by observing and listening to men, had learned their language? Or had they been taught it by a human friend? That was it -- I would just have to sacrifice anonymity. My family and I had found a colony of them on our ranch and taught them English. I was stuck with it because it was the truth. The volpla waved his long thin arm over the front page. "Men are dangerous. They will shoot us with their guns if we leave here." I hastened to reassure him. "It will not be like that. When men have learned about you, they will leave you alone." I stated this emphatically, but for the first time I was beginning to see this might not be a joke to the volplas. Nevertheless, I went on. "You must disperse the families at once. You stay here wtih your family so we remain in contact, but send the other families to other places." He shook his head. "We cannot leave these woods. Men would shoot us." Then he stood and looked squarely at me with his nocturnal eyes. "Perhaps you are not a good friend. Perhaps you have lied to us. Why are you saying we should leave this safety?" "You will be happier. There will be more game." He continued to stare directly at me. "There will be men. One has already shot one of us. We have forgiven him and are friends. But one of us is dead." "You are friends with another man?" I asked, stunned. He nodded and pointed up the valley. "He is up there today with another family." "Let's go!" He had the advantage of short glides, but the volpla chief couldn't keep up with me. Sometimes trotting, sometimes walking fast, I got way ahead of him. My hard breathing arose as much out of my anxiety about the manner of handling this stranger as it did out of the exertion. I rounded a bend in the creek and there was my son sitting on the grass near a cooking fire playing with a baby volpla and talking in English to an adult volpla who stood beside him. As I ap proached, my son tossed the baby into the air. The tiny planes opened and the baby drifted down to his waiting hands. He said to the volpla beside him, "No, I'm sure you didn't come from the stars. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure my father -- " I yelled from behind them, "What business do you have telling them that?" about two feet. My son turned his head slowly and looked at me. Then he handed the baby to the male and stood up. "You haven't any business out here!" I was seething. He had destroyed the whole store of volpla legends with one small doubt. He brushed the grass from his trousers and straightened. The way he was looking at me, I felt my anger turning to a kind of jelly. "Dad, I killed one of these little people yesterday. I thought he was a hawk and I shot him when I was out hunting. I wouldn't have done that if you had told me about them." I couldn't look at him. I stared at the grass and my face got hot. "The chief tells me that you want them to leave the ranch soon. You think you're going to play a big joke, don't you?" I heard the chief come up behind me and stand quietly at my back. My son said softly, "I don't think it's much of a joke. Dad. I had to listen to that one crying after I hit him." There were big black trail ants moving in the grass. It seemed to me there was a ringing sound in the sky. I raised my head and looked at him. "Son, let's go back to the jeep and we can talk about it on the way home." "I'd rather walk." He sort of waved to the volpla he had been talking to and then to the chief. He jumped the creek and walked away into the oak woods. The volpla holding the baby stared at me. From somewhere far up the valley, a crow was cawing. I didn't . look at the chief. I turned and brushed past him and walked back to the jeep alone. At home, I opened a bottle of beer and sat out on the terrace to wait for my son. My wife came toward the house with some cut flowers from the garden, but she didn't speak to me. She snapped the blades of the scissors as she walked. A volpla soared across the terrace and landed at my daughter's bedroom window. He was there only briefly and relaunched himself. He was followed from the window in moments by the two V o I p I a s I had left with my daughter earlier in the afternoon. I watched them with a vague unease as the three veered off to the east, climbing effortlessly. When I finally took a sip of my beer, it was already warm. I set it aside. Presently my daughter ran out onto the terrace. "Daddy, my volplas left. They said good-by and we hadn't even finished the TV show. They said they won't see me again. Did you make them leave?" "No. I didn't." She was staring at me with hot eyes. Her lower lip protruded and trembled like a pink tear drop. "Daddy, you did so." She stomped into the house, sobbing. My God! In one afternoon, I had managed to become a palace eunuch, a murderer and a liar! M ost of the afternoon went by before I heard my son enter the house. I called to him and he came out and stood before me. I got up. "Son, I can't tell you how sorry I am for what happened to you. It was my fault, not yours at all. I only hope you can forget the shock of finding out what sort of creature you had hit. I don't know why I didn't anticipate that such things would happen. It was just that I was so intent on mystifying the whole world that I..." I stopped. There wasn't anything more to say. "Are you going to make them leave the ranch?" he asked. I was aghast. "After what has happened?" "Gee, what are you going to do about them. Dad?" "I've been trying to decide. I don't know what I should do that will be best for them." I looked at my watch. "Let's go back out and talk to the chief." His eyes lighted and he clapped me on the shoulder, man to man. We ran out and got into the jeep and drove back up to the valley. The late afternoon Sun glared across the landscape. We didn't say much as we wound up the valley between the darkening trees. I was filled more and more with the unease that had seized me as I watched the three volplas leave my terrace and climb smoothly and purposefully into the east. We got out at the chiefs camp and there were no volplas around. The fire had burned down to a smolder. I called in the volpla language, but there was no answer. We went from camp to camp and found dead fires. We climbed to their tree houses and found them empty. I was sick and scared. I called endlessly till I was hoarse. At last, in the darkness, my son put a hand on my arm. "What are you going to do. Dad?" Standing there in those terribly silent woods, I trembled. "I'll have to call the police and the newspapers and warn everybody." "Where do you suppose they've gone?" I looked to the east where the stars, rising out of the great pass in the mountains, glimmered like a deep bowl of fireflies. The last three I saw were headed that way."  house for hours. When we stepped out onto the lighted terrace, I saw the shadow of a helicopter down on the strip. Then I saw Guy sitting near me in a chair. He was holding his head in his hands. Em was saying to my wife, "He was beside himself. There wasn't a thing he could do. I had to get him away from there and I thought you wouldn't mind if we flew over here and stayed with you till they've decided what to do." I walked over and said, "Hello, Guy. What's the matter?" He raised his head and then stood and shook hands. "It's a mess. The whole project will be ruined and we don't dare go near it." "What happened?" "Just as we set it off -- " "Set what off?" "The rocket." "Rocket?" Guy groaned. "The Venus rocket! Rocket Harold!" My wife interjected. "I was telling Guy we didn't know a thing about it because they haven't delivered our paper in weeks. I've complained -- " I waved her to silence. "Go on," I demanded of Guy. "Just as I pushed the button and the hatch was closing, a flock of owls circled the ship. They started flying through the hatch and somehow they jammed it open." Em said to my wife, "There must have been a hundred of them. They kept coming and coming and flying into that hatch. Then they began dumping out all the recording instruments. The men tried to run a motor-driven ladder up to the ship and those owls hit the driver on the head and knocked him out with some kind of instrument." Guy turned his grief-stricken face to me. "Then the hatch closed and we don't dare go near the ship. It was supposed to fire in five minutes, but it hasn't. Those damned owls could have..." There was a glare in the east. We all turned and saw a brief streak of gilt pencil its way up the black velvet beyond the mountains. "That's it!" Guy shouted. "That's the ship!" Then he moaned. "A total loss." I grabbed him by the shoulders. "You mean it won't make it to Venus?" He jerked away in misery. "Sure, it will make it. The automatic controls can't be tampered with. But the rocket is on its way without any recording instruments or' TV aboard. Just a load of owls." My son laughed. "Owls! My dad can tell you a thing or two." I silenced him with a scowl. He shut up, then danced off across the terrace. "Man, man! This is the biggest! The most -- the greatest -- the end!" I went to the box on the terrace, I grabbed my boy's arm. "Don't you breathe a word." He giggled. "The joke is on you, Pop. Why should I say anything? I'll just grin once in a while." "Now you cut that out." He held onto my arm and walked toward the phone box with me, half convulsed. "Wait till men land on Venus and find Venusians with a legend about their Great White Father in California. That's when I'll tell." The phone call was from a screaming psychotic who wanted Guy. I stood near Guy while he listened to the excited voice over the wire. Presently Guy said, "No, no. The automatic controls will correct for the delay in firing. It isn't that. It's just that there aren't any instruments... What? What just happened? Calm down. I can't understand you." I heard Em say to my wife, "You know, the strangest thing occurred out there. I thought it looked like those owls were carrying things on their backs. One of them dropped something and I saw the men open a package wrapped in a leaf. You'd never believe what was in it -- three little birds roasted to a nice brown!" My son nudged me. "Smart owls. Long trip." I put my hand over his mouth. Then I saw that Guy was holding the receiver limply away from his ear. He spluttered. "They just taped a radio message from the rocket. It's true that the radio wasn't thrown out. But we didn't have a record like this on that rocket." He yelled into the phone. "Play it back." He thrust the receiver at me. For a moment, there was only a gritty buzz from the receiver. Then the tape started playing a soft, high voice. "This is Rocket Harold saying ever#dhing is well. This is Rocket Harold saying good-by to men." There was a pause and then, in clear volpla language, another voice spoke. "Man who made us, we forgive you. We know we did not come from the stars, but we go there. I, chief, give you welcome to visit. Good-by." " hausted by the excitement to say anything. I was filled with a big, sudden sadness. I stood for a long time and looked out to the east, where the sprawling mountain range held a bowl of dancing fireflies between her black breasts. Presently I said to old Guy, "How long do you think it will be before you have a manned rocket ready for Venus?" Name your symptom Anybody who shunned a Cure needed his head examined -- assuming he had one left! H enry infield placed the insulated circlet on his head gently. The gleaming rod extended above his head about a foot, the wires from it leading down into his collar, along his spine and finally out his pants leg to a short metallic strap that dragged on the floor. Clyde Morgan regarded his partner. "Suppose -- just suppose -- you were serious about this, why not just the shoes?" Infield turned his soft blue eyes to the black and tan oxfords with the very thick rubber soles. "They might get soaked through." Morgan took his foot off the chair behind the desk and sat down. "Suppose they were soaked through and you were standing on a metal plate -- steps or a manhole cover -- what good would your lightning rod do you then?" Infield shrugged slightly. "I suppose a man must take some chances." Morgan said, "You can't do it, Henry. You're crossing the line. The people we treat are on one side of the line and we're on the other. If you cross that line, you won't be able to treat people again." The small man looked out the large window, blinking myopically at the brassy sunlight. "That's just it, Clyde. There is a line between us, a wall. How can we really understand the people who come to us, if we hide on our side of the wall?" Morgan shook his thick head, ruffling his thinning red hair. "I dunno, Henry, but staying on our side is a pretty good way to keep sane and that's quite an accomplishment these days." Infield whirled and stalked to the desk. "That's the answer! The whole world is going mad and we are just sitting back watching it hike along. Do you know that what we are doing is really the most primitive medicine in the world? We are treating the symptoms and not the disease. One cannibal walking another with sleeping sickness doesn't cure anything. Eventually the savage -- just as all those sick savages out in the street will die unless we can cure the disease, not only the indications."'-ious weight uneasily. "Now, Henry, it's no good to talk like that. We psychiatrists can't turn back the clock. There just aren't enough of us or enough time to give that old-fashioned therapy to all the sick people." Infield leaned on the desk and glared. "I called myself a psychiatrist once. But now I know we're semi-mechanics, semi-engineers, semi-inventors, semi lots of other things, but certainly not even semi-psychiatrists. A psychiatrist wouldn't give a foetic gyro to a man with claustrophobia." His mind went back to the first gyro ball he had ever issued; the remembrance of his pride in the thing sickened him. Floating before him in memory was the vertical hoop and the horizontal hoop, both of shining steel-impervium alloy. Transfixed in the twin circles was the face of the patient, slack with smiles and sweat. But his memory was exaggerating the human element. The gyro actually passed over a man's shoulder, through his legs, under his arms. Any time he felt the walls creeping in to crush him, he could withdraw his head and limbs into the circle and feel safe. Steel-impervium alloy could resist even a nuclear explosion. The foetic gyro ball was worn day and night, for life. The sickness overcame him. He sat down on Morgan's desk. "That's just one thing, the gyro ball. There are so many others, so many." Morgan smiled. "You know, Henry, not all of our Cures are so -- so -- not all are like that. Those Cures for mother complexes aren't even obvious. If anybody does see that button in a patient's ear, it looks like a hearing aid. Yet for a nominal sum, the patient is equipped to hear the soothing recorded voice of his mother saying, 'It's all right, everything's all right. Mommy loves you, it's all right...'" "But is everything all right?" Infield asked intensely. "Suppose the patient is driving over one hundred on an icy road. He thinks about slowing down, but there's the voice in his ear. Or suppose he's walking down a railroad track and hears a train whistle -- if he can hear anything over that verbal pablum gushing in his ear." Morgan's face stiffened. "You know as well as I do that those voices are nearly subsonic. They don't cut a sense eficiency more than # per cent." "At first, Clyde -- only at first. But what about the severe case where we have to burn a threedimensional smiling mother-image on the eyes of the patient with radiation? With that image over everything he sees and with that insidious voice drumming in his head night and day, do you mean to say that man's senses will only be impaired # per cent? Why, he'll turn violently schizophrenic sooner or later -- and you know it. The only cure we have for that is still a straitjacket, a padded cell or one of those inhuman lobotomies." Morgan shrugged helplessly. "You're an idealist." "You're damned right!" Infield slammed the door behind him. I I #HE cool air of the street was A a relief. Infield stepped into the main stream of human traffic and tried to adjust to the second change in the air. People didn't bathe very often these days. He walked along, buffeted by the crowd, carried along in this direction, shoved back in that direction. Most people in the crowd seemed to be Normals, but you couldn't tell. Many "Cures" were not readily apparent. A young man with black glasses and a radar headset (a photophobe) was unable to keep from being pushed against Infield. He sounded out the lightning rod, his face changing when he realized it must be some kind of Cure. "Pardon me," he said warmly. "Quite all right" It was the first time in years that anyone had apologized to Infield for anything. He had been one of those condemned Normals, more to be scorned than pitied. Perhaps he could really get to understand these people, now that he had taken down the wall. Suddenly something else was pushing against Infield, forcing the air from his lungs. He stared down at the magnetic suction dart clinging leechlike to his chest Model Acrophobe #-X, he catalogued immediately. Description; safety belt. But his emotions didn't behave so well. He was thoroughly terrified, heart racing, sweat glands pumping. The impervium cable undulated vulgarly. Some primitive fear of make symbols? his mind wondered while panic crushed him. "Uncouple that cable!" the shout rang out. It was not his own. A clean-cut young man with mouse-colored hair was moving toward the stubble-chinned, heavy-shouldered man quivering in the center of a web of impervium cables stuck secure to the walls and windows of buildings facing the street, the sidewalk, a mailbox, the lamp post and Infield. Mouse-hair yelled hoarsely, "Uncouple it, Davies! Can't you see the guy's got a lightning rod? You're grounding him! "I can't," Davies groaned. "I'm scared!" Halfway down the twenty feet of cable. Mouse-hair grabbed on. "I'm holding it. Release it, you hear?" Davies fumbled for the broad belt around his thickening middle. He jabbed the button that sent a negative current through the cable. The magnetic suction dart dropfjed away from Infield like a thing that had been alive and now was killed. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief. A fter breathing deeply for a few moments, he looked up to see Davies releasing and drawing all his darts into his belt, making it resemble a Hydra-sized spiked dog collar. Mouse-hair stood by tensely as the crowd d'sassembled. "This isn't the first time you've pulled something like this, Davies," he said. "You weren't too scared to release that cable. You just don't care about other people's feelings. This is official." Mouse-hair drove a fast, hard right into the soft blue flesh of Davies' chin. The big man fell silently. The other turned to Infield. "He was unconscious on his feet," he explained. "He never knew he fell." "What did you mean by that punch being official?" Infield asked while trying to arrange his feelings into the comfortable, familiar patterns. The young man's eyes almost seemed to narrow, although his face didn't move; he merely radiated narrowed eyes. "How long have you been Cured?" "Not -- not long," Infield evaded. The other glanced around the street. He moistened his lips and spoke slowly. "Do you think you might be interested in joining a fraternal organization of the Cured?" Infield's pulse raced, trying to get ahead of his thoughts, and losing out. A chance to study a pseudo-culture of the "Cured" developed in isolation! "Yes, I think I might. I owe you a drink for helping me out. How about it?" The man's face paled so fast. Infield thought for an instant that he was going to faint. "All right. I'll risk it." He touched the side of his face away from the psychiatrist. Infield shifted around, trying to see that side of his benefactor, but couldn't manage it in good grace. He wondered if the fellow was sporting a Mom-voice heaj ing aid and was afraid of raisin her ire. He cleared his throat, no ticing the affectation of it. "Mj name's Infield." "Price," the other answered ab. sently. "George Price. I suppose they have liquor at the Club. We can have a drink there, I guess."; Price set the direction and field fell m at his side. "Look, if you don't drink. I'll buy you a cup of coffee. It was just a suggestion." Price's strong features were beginning to gleam moistly. "You are lucky in one way, Mr. Infield. People take one look at your Cure and don't ask you to go walking in the rain. But even after seeing this, some people still ask me to have a drink." This was revealed, as he turned his head, to be a small metal cube above his left ear. Infield supposed it was a Cure, although he had never issued one like it. He didn't know if it would be good form to inquire what kind it was. "It's a cure for alcoholism," Price told him. "It runs a constant blood check to see that the alcohol level doesn't go over the sobriety limit." "What happens if you take one too many?" Price looked off as if at something not particularly interesting, more interesting than what he was saying. "It drives a needle into my temple and kills me." The psychiatrist felt cold fury rising in Wmsupposed to save lives, not endanger them. "What kind of irresponsible idiot could have issued such a device?" he demanded angrily. "I did," Price said. "I used to be a psychiatrist. I was always good in shop. This is a pretty effective mechanism, if I say so myself. It can't be removed without causing my death and it's indestructible. Impervium-shielded, you see." Price probably would never get crazed enough for liquor to kill himself. Infield knew. The threat of death would keep him constantly shocked sane. Men hide in the comforts of insanity, but when faced with death, they are often forced back to reality. A man can't move his legs; in a fire, though, he may run. His legs were definitely paralyzed before and may be again, but for one moment he would forget the moral defeat of his life and his withdrawal from life and live an enforced sanity. But sometimes the withdrawal was -- or could become -- too complete. "We're here." Infield looked up self-consciously and noticed that they aaaa:... had crossed two streets from his building and were standing in  front of what appeared to be a small, dingy cafe. He followed Price through the screeching screen door. They seated themselves at a small table with a red-checked cloth. Infield wondered why cheap bars and restaurants always used red-checked cloths. Then he looked closer and discovered the reason. They did a remarkably good job of camouflaging the spots of grease and alcohol. grease and alcohol of the tablecloths shuffled up to them with a towel on his arm, staring ahead of him at some point in time rather than space. Price lit a cigarette with unsteady hands. "Reggie is studying biblical text. Cute gadget. His contact lenses are made up a lot of layers of polarized glass. Every time he blinks, the amount of polarization changes and a new page appears. His father once told him that if he didn't study his Bible and pray for him, his old dad would die." The psychiatrist knew the threat on the father's part couldn't create such a fixation by itself. His eyebrows faintly inquired. Price nodded jerkily. "Twenty years ago, at least." "What'll you have, Georgie?" Reggie asked. The young man snubbed out his cigarette viciously. "Bourbon. Straight." Reggie smiled -- a toothy, vacant, comedy-relief smile. "Fine. The Good Book says a little wine is good for a man, or something like that. I don't remember exactly." Of course he didn't. Infield knew. Why should he? It was useless to learn his Bible lessons to save his father, because it was obvious his father was dead. He would never succeed because there was no reason to succeed. But he had to try, didn't he, for his father's sake? He didn't hate his father for making him study. He didn't want him to die. He had to prove that. Infield sighed. At least this device kept the man on his feet, doing some kind of useful work instead of rotting in a padded cell with a probably imaginary Bible. A man could cut his wrists with the edge of a sheet of paper if he tried long enough, so of course the Bible would be imaginary. "But, Georgie," the waiter complained, "you know you won't drink it You ask me to bring you drinks and then you just look at them. Boy, do you look funny when you're looking at drinks. Honest, Georgie, I want to laugh when I think of the way you look at a glass with a drink iij it." He did laugh. Price fumbled with the cig, arette stub in the black iron ash. tray, examining it with the skill of scientific observation. "Mr. Infield is buying me the drink and that makes it different." Reggie went away. Price kept dissecting the tobacco and paper. Infield cleared his throat and again reminded himself against such obvious affectations. "You were telling me about some organization of the Cured," he said as a reminder. terested in the relic of a cigarette. He was suddenly intensely interested and intensely observant of the rest of the cafe. "Was I? I was? Well, suppose you tell me something. What do you really think of the Incompletes?" The psychiatrist felt his face frown. "Who?" "I forgot. You haven't been one of us long. The Incompletes is a truer name for the so-called Normals. Have you ever thought of just how dangerous these people are, Mr. Infield?" "Frankly, no," Infield said, realizing it was not the right thing to say but tiring of constant pretense. "You don't understand. Everyone has some little phobia or fixation. Maybe everyone didn't have one once, but after being told they did have them for generations, everyone who didn't have one developed a defense mechanism and an aberration so they would be normal. If that phobia isn't brought to the surface and Cured, it may arise any time and endanger other people. The only safe, good sound citizens are Cured. Those lacking Cures -- the Incompletes -- must be dealt with." Infield's throat went dry. "And you're the one to deal with them?" "It's my Destiny." Price quickly added, "And yours, too, of course." Infield nodded. Price was a demagogue, young, handsome, dynamic, likable, impassioned with his cause, and convinced that it was his divine destiny. He was a psychopathic egotist and a dangerous man. Doubly dangerous to Infield because, even though he was one of the few people who still read books from the old days of therapy to recognize Price for what he was, he nevertheless still liked the young man for the intelligence behind the egotism and the courage behind the fanaticism. "How are we going to deal with the Incompletes?" Infield asked. Price started to glance around the cafe, then half-shrugged, almost visibly thinking that he shouldn't run that routine into the ground. "We'll Cure them whether they want to be Cured or not -- for their own good." Infield felt cold inside. After a time, he found that the roaring was not just in his head. It was thundering outside. He was getting sick. Price was the type of man who could spread his ideas throughout the ranks of the Cured -- if indeed the plot was not already universal, imposed upon many ill minds. H e could picture an entirely Cured world and he didn't like the view. Every Cure cut down on the mental and physical abilities of the patient as it was, whether Morgan and the others admitted it or not. But if everyone had a crutch to lean on for one phobia, he would develop secondary symptoms. People would start needing two Cures -- perhaps a foetic gyro and a safety belt -- then another and another. There would always be a crutch to lean on for one thing and then room enough to develop something else -- until everyone would be loaded down with too many Cures to operate. A Cure was a last resort, dope for a malignancy case, euthanasia for the hopeless. Enforced Cures would be a curse for the individual and the race. But Infield let himself relax. How could anyone force a mechanical relief for neurotic or psychopathic symptoms on someone who didn't want or need it? "Perhaps you don't see how it could be done," Price said. "I'll explain." Reggie's heavy hand sat a straight bourbon down before Price and another before Infield. Price stared at the drink almost without comprehension of how it came to be. He started to sweat. "George, drink it." The voice belonged to a young woman, a blonde girl with pink skin and suave, draped clothes. In this den of the Cured, Infield thought half-humorously, it was surprising to see a Normal -- an "Incomplete." But then he noticed something about the baby she carried. The Cure had been very simple. It wasn't even a mechanized half-human robot, just a rag doll. She sat down at the table. "George," she said, "drink it. One drink won't raise your alcohol index to the danger point. You've got to get over this fear of even the sight or smell of liquor." The girl turned to Infield. "You're one of us, but you're new, so you don't know about George. Maybe you can help if you do. It's all silly. He's not an alcoholic. He didn't need to put that Cure on his head. It's just an excuse for not drinking. All of this is just because a while back something happened to the baby here -- " she adjusted the doll's blanket -- "when he was drinking. Just drinking, not drunk. "I don't remember what happened to the baby -- it wasn't important. But George has been brooding about it ever since. I guess he thinks something else bad will happen because of liquor. That's silly. Why don't you tell him it's silly?" "Maybe it is," Infield said softly. "You could take the shock if he downed that drink and the shock might do you good." like doing something very melodramatic, like throwing my drink -- and yours -- across the room, but I haven't got the guts to touch those glasses. Do it for me, will you? Cauterizing the bite might do me good if I'd been bitten by a rabid dog, but I don't have the nerve to do it." Before Infield could move, Reggie came and set both drinks on a little circular tray. He moved away. "I knew it. That's all he did, just look at the drink. Makes me laugh." Price wiped the sweat off his palms. Infield sat and thought. Mrs. Price cooed to the rag doll, unmindful of either of them now. "You were explaining," the psychiatrist said. "You were going to tell me how you were going to Cure the Incompletes." "I said we were going to do it. Actually you will play a greater part than I, Doctor Infield." The psychiatrist sat rigidly. "You didn't think you could give me your right name in front of your own office building and that I wouldn't recognize you? I know some psychiatrists are sensitive about wearing Cures themselves, but it is a mark of honor of the completely sane man. You should be proud of your Cure and eager to Cure others. Very eager." "Just what do you mean?" He already suspected Price's meaning. Price leaned forward. "There is one phobia that is so widespread, a Cure is not even thought of -- hypochondria. Hundreds of people come to your office for a Cure and you turn them away. Suppose you and the other Cured psychiatrists give everybody who comes to you a Cure?" Infield gestured vaguely. "A psychiatrist wouldn't hand out Cures unless they were absolutely necessary." "You'll feel differently after you've been Cured for a while yourself. Other psychiatrists have." Before Infield could speak, a stubble-faced, barrel-chested man moved past their table. He wore a safety belt. It was the man Price had called Davies, the one who had fastened one of his safety lines to Infield in the street. Davies went to the bar in the back. "Gimme a bottle," he demanded of a vacant-eyed Reggie. He came back toward them, carrying the bottle in one hand, brushing off rain drops with the other. He stopped beside Price and glared. Price leaned back. The chair creaked. Mrs. Price kept cooing to the doll. "You made me fall," Davies accused. Price shrugged. "You were unconscious. You never knew it." Sweat broke out on Davies' forehead. "You broke the Code. Don't you think I can imagine how it was to fall? You louse!" his safety belt. At close range, before the lines could fan out in a radius, all the lines in front attached themselves to Price, the ones at each side clung to their table and the floor, and all the others to the table behind Infield. Davies released all lines except those on Price, and then threw himself backward, dragging Price out of his chair and onto the floor. Davies didn't mind making others fall. They were always trying to make him fall just so they could laugh at him or pounce on him; why shouldn't he like to make them fall first? Expertly, Davies moved forward and looped the loose lines around Price's head and shoulders and then around his feet. He crouched beside Price and shoved the bottle into the gasping mouth and poured. Price twisted against the binding lines in blind terror, gagging and spouting whiskey. Davies laughed and tilted the bottle more. Mrs. Price screamed. "The Cure! If you get that much liquor in his system, it will kill him!" She rocked the rag doll in her arms, trying to soothe it, and stared in horror. Infield hit the big man behind the ear. He dropped the bottle and fell over sideways on the floor. Fear and hate mingled in his eyes as he looked up at Infield. Nonsense, Infield told himself. Eyes can't register emotion. Davies released his lines and drew them in. He got up precariously. "I'm going to kill you," he said, glaring at Infield. "You made me fall worse than Georgia did. I'm really going to kill you." Infield wasn't a large man, but he had pressed two hundred and fifty many times in gym. He grabbed Davies' belt with both hands and lifted him about six inches off the floor. "I could drop you," the psychiatrist said. "No!" Davies begged weakly. "Please!" "I'll do it if you cause more trouble." Infield sat down and rubbed his aching forearms. right into the arms of Reggie. The waiter closed his huge hands on the acrophobe's shoulders. "You broke the Code all the way," Reggie said. "The Good Book says 'Thou shouldn't kill' or something like that, and so does the Code." "Let him go, Reggie," Price choked out, getting to his feet. "I'm not dead." He wiped his hand across his mouth. "No. No, you aren't." Infield felt an excitement pounding through him, same as when he had diagnosed his first case. No, better than that. "That taste of liquor didn't kill you. Price. Nothing terrible happened. You could find some way to get rid of that Cure." Price stared at him as if he were a padded-cell case. "That's different. I'd be a hopeless drunk without the Cure. Besides, no one ever gets rid of a Cure." They were all looking at Infield. Somehow he felt this represented a critical point in history. It was up to him which turn the world took, the world as represented by these four Cured people. "I'm afraid I'm for less Cures instead of more. Price. Look, if I can show you that someone can discard a Cure, would you get rid of that -- if I may use word -- monstrous thing on your head?" Price grinned. Infield didn't recognize its smugness at the time. "I'll show you." He took off the circlet with the lightning rod and yanked at the wire running down into his collar. The new-old excitement within was running high. He felt the wire snap and come up easily. He threw the Cure on the floor. "Now," he said, "I am going out in that rain storm. There's thunder and lightning out there. I'm afraid, but I can get along without a Cure and so can you." "You can't! Nobody can!" Price screamed after him. He turned to the others. "If he reveals us, the Cause is lost. We've got to stop him for good. We've got to go after him." "It's slippery," Davies whimpered. "I might fall." Mrs. Price cuddled her rag doll. "I can't leave the baby and she mustn't get wet." "Well, there's no liquor out there and you can study your text in the lightning flashes, Reggie. Come on." R unning down the streets that were tunnels of shining tar, running into the knifing ice bristles of the rain, Henry Infield realized that he was very frightened of the lightning. There is no action without a reason, he knew from the old neglected books. He had had a latent fear of lightning when he chose the lightning rod Cure. He could have picked a safety belt or foetic gyro just as well. He sneezed. He was soaked through, but he kept on running. He didn't know what Price and Reggie planned to do when they caught him. He slipped and fell. He would soon find out what they wanted. The excitement was all gone now and it left an empty space into which fear rushed. Reggie said, "We shall make a sacrifice." Infield looked up and saw the lightning reflected on the blade of a thin knife. Infield reached toward it more in fascination than fear. He managed to get all his fingers around two of Reggie's. He jerked and the knife fell into Infield's palm. The psychiatrist pulled himself erect by holding to Reggie's arm. Staggering to his feet, he remembered what he must do and slashed at the waiter's head. A gash streaked across the man's brow and blood poured into his eyes. He screamed. "I can't see the words!" It was his problem. Infield usually solved other people's problems, but now he ran away -- he couldn't even solve his own. Infield realized that he had gone mad as he held the thin blade high overhead, but he did need some kind of lightning rod. Price (who was right behind him, gaining) had been right. No one could discard a Cure. He watched the lightning play its light on the blade of his Cure and he knew that Price was going to kill him in the next moment. He was wrong. The lightning hit him first. bandage at the lettering on He ran across the room to the man sitting at the desk, reading by the swivel light. "Mr. Morgan, your partner, Mr. Infield, he -- " "Just a moment." Morgan switched on the room lights. "What were you saying?" "Mr. Infield went out without his Cure in a storm and was struck by lightning. We took him to the morgue. He must have been crazy to go out without his Cure." Morgan stared into his bright desk light without blinking. "This is quite a shock to me. Would you mind leaving? I'll come over to your place and you can tell me about it later." Reggie went out. "Yes, sir. He was struck by lightning, struck dead.-He must have been crazy to leave his Cure..." The door closed. Morgan exhaled. Poor Infield. But it wasn't the lightning that killed him, of course. Morgan adjusted the soundproofing plugs in his ears, thinking that you did have to have quite a bit of light to read lips. The thunder, naturally, was what had killed Infield. Loud noise -- any noise -- that would do it every time. Too bad Infield had never really stopped being one of the Incompletes. Dangerous people. He would have to deal with them. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. for your information T hough stories of scientific discoveries never repeat precisely, they often have such a pronounced pattern that, in reading one story, one thinks that it is a retelling of another and it can happen that the mind is lulled into a kind of carelessness by the similarities and experiences a surprise when things suddenly take a different turn. As a case in point, I offer the stories of two "scientific" fishes. One event is rather old, having occurred in the period from # to #. The other is recent, so recent that it is, in fact, still current The first story began with the fact that a man was tired of who had owned a farm near the Burnett River in Queensland, Australia, for a number of years, but had retired and moved to Sydney. One day in #, he decided to pass the time at the Sydney Museum. There he saw specimens of all the unusual animals of Australia with which he was familiar. But there was something missing and he fell to talking about it with Gerard Krefft, the curator of the museum. Mr. Forster asked why the museum did not show the big fish that lived in the Burnett River. that he did not know anything about a big fish in the Burnett River, but thought it quite likely that the museum might have specimens -- not yet on exhibit, possibly -- from other localities. He asked Forster to describe it and Forster did his best. The fish was around five feet long and greenish in color, with a white belly, and had unusually large scales. It did not have a tail like other fish but more like an eel. Come to think of it, the shape of the body was alsp like that of an eel, a very fat eel, about as thick as a man's thigh. And it had four strong fins. Mr. Forster was certain about that, even though Mr. Keffrt had never heard about a fish with only four fins. Forster added that the fish was edible. The white squatters in the area actually called it the Burnett salmon, while the natives had a name like barramundi. (In that Mr. Forster was wrong. The natives did have a name for the fish he had in mind, but it was dyelleh. Barramundi was the native name for an entirely different fish.) The discussion ended with a promise by Mr. Forster to write to his cousin, who had taken over the farm, and ask him to send a few Burnett salmon to Mr. Krefft. Early in #, a barrel arrived at the museum. It contained several Burnett salmon, strongly salted as a preservative against the heat of the southern-hemisphere summer. Curator Krefft pulled one of the specimens from the barrels and hefted it onto a table; the Burnett salmon proved to be a heavyweight. had delivered a rather good description of the external characteristics. An expert would have done better only by attaching the proper technical terms to some of the external appendages. He r would have called the pointed fringe of fin material around the rear end a Diphyceral Tail (pronounced with capitals out of respect for its rarity) and he would have emphasized that the four fins were living examples of an up to that moment only theoretical concept, namely the archipterygitim of Professor Karl Gegenbauer. It was, in short, a limb which could evolve into a fish's fin or else could become an amphibian's leg. Krefft then looked into the mouth of the creature and stated later that he did not believe his eyes. There were very few but very large teeth in this mouth, each one looking as if a set of teeth had grown together, and reminding the onlooker of the comb of a rooster. Such teeth had been known as fossils, but nobody had been quite sure which kind of early fish had grown them; general suspicion centered around an ancient shark. The extinct fish to which these teeth once belonged had been called Ceratodus, or "horn-tooth." Now it was clear that it had not been a shark. When Krefft dissected the fish, he found that, in addition to the normal gills, it also had a single lung. It was the fish that got into all the books as the Australian Lungfish, a veritable living fossil from the Middle Age of fish history. K refft was so overwhelmed by the find that he did not even think it proper to give it another scientific name than the one attached to the fossil. He called it Ceratodus Forsteri, adding, as is customary, his own name. Since then, pretty complete specimens of the fossil Ceratodus have been found. It turned out that the fossils of several hundred form were not quite the same, so the Latin word for "new" was tacked on in front of the name and it became Neoceratodus Forsteri Krefft. What had to be done next was to investigate the living fossil in the living state. Two one-man expeditions set out for the Burnett River to do just that. One consisted of Professor Spencer of Melbourne, who just spent his vacation on the project. The other one was Professor Richard Semon of Jena, Germany, who had traveled half-way around the Earth for the purpose, backed by the money of the Swiss manufacturer Karl Ritter. Professor Semon, a direct pupil of Ernst Haeckel, was successful where Spencer was not, simply because Neoceratodus steadfastly refused to lay eggs until after Professor Spencer's vacation was over. But Professor Semon's studies were interrupted, too, one day. No more eggs, no more fish within reach. The reason? The natives had eaten them! Professor Semon had to wait for a full year -- which he spent on islands between Australia and New Zealand -- until the mating time of Neocera f odus came round again. Then, with natives who had been very strongly warned against eating the fish, he offered what to them were enormous rewards for bringing in the fish, and especially the eggs, alive. Observing the development of an individual lungfish from its egg would shed much light on the evolution of the species in the past. It had been obvious all along that the lungfishes -- there are three: one in South America, one in Africa and one in Australia, the Australian form being the largest and the most typical -- were somewhere near the point where, in the distant past, the marine vertebrates, the fishes, had gone on land to become amphibians. But what had gone before? Where did the lungfishes fit in with the other fishes? Mostly with the aid of fossils, the story could be reconstructed. The earliest known fishes, from the late Silurian and early Deyears ago, were a strange lot. They were small, just a few inches long. Their organ of locomotion was their tail exclusively for there were no other fins. They also had no jaws and consequently no teeth. But they were heavily armored, with plate armor in front and scales over the tail section. Their main and possibly only enemy must have been the gigantic sea scorpions (eurypterids) of the same time, which were a good ten feet in length. No living representative of this type is left. fishes managed to become something else, presumably by leaving the river and going into the open sea. They developed jaws and paired fins and lost their armor, and speed became their protective device. We all know this type: the selachians, sharks in everyday English. That they were an inherently successful development is shown by the fact that they are still with us, although the bad reputation of a few of them has confused the picture. The number of surviving species of sharks (and of rays, which are also selachians) is small and the number of individuals, too. Moreover, with a very few exceptions, the living forms are all rather recent types. Above the sharks, we get two main lines. One of them constimtes the endless multitudes of tjje living true, or bony, fishes. Another line led through an intermediary group to the first amphibians; the lungfishes are a group which branched off this intermediary group. They were near, but not in, the line of evolution of the amphibians and managed to survive mostly by being able to endure conditions which neither true fishes nor amphibians could tolerate. The name of the intermediary group from which both the lungfishes and the amphibians came is crossopterygians. In English, this is translated as "lobe-fins." The Germans are more careful when it comes to the translation of the Greek word krossoi and call them QuastenfJosser or "tassel-fins." An especially vigorously flourishing tribe of the lobe-fins were the coelacanths ("hollow spines") with large heads, strong, almost limblike, fins and a curious double tail. They started later in the Devonian period, lived through the Carboniferous and the Permian periods and all through the three periods of the great reptiles, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, but becoming rarer and rarer as time went on. They petered out near the end of the Cretaceous period and the last of the crossopterygians was Mactopotna Mantelli. It so happened that Macropoma was the first fossil of a crossopterygian ever discovered. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward carefully reconstructed it. M y second fish story begins by reporting that a river called Chalumna empties into the ocean on the southeast coast of Africa, near a town called East London. Late in #, a trawler with a load of fish berthed in New London. Its captain phoned the curator of the local museum, Miss M. Courtnay Latimer, told her that he had caught a very curious fish, and maybe she would like to come to the wharf to look at it. Miss Latimer did and saw at first glance that, whatever it was, it was very curious, just as the captain had said. There was an unwieldy fish with an enormous head, steel blue in color, with large blue eyes, large scales and peculiar fins. It was a little over five feet in length and, though the captain of the trawler did not know its name, he did know its weight: # pounds. He also remembered details of the catch. It had been caught not very far offshore on December #nd, #, with a trawler net -- other contents: one and a half tons of shark and half a ton of redfish and kobs -- in # fathoms of water. It had lived for three hours after capture and had tried to bite the hand of the captain as he bent over to see whether it was alive. The trawler captain had termed it a very curious fish. Miss Latimer spoke of it as a very primitive fish when she informed Dr. James Leonard Brierley Smith, ichthyologist at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. South Africa. Dr. Smith hurried to East London, but meanwhile nature had taken its course. The trawler had not returned to shore immediately after this catch. Miss Latimer probably wrote at once, but time went by between her first look at the fish and Dr. Smith's arrival. And it was summer in the southern hemisphere. Miss Latimer had been forced to order the fish skinned and the skin mounted. She did save the skull, too, and the rest had to be thrown away. But although all the internal and interesting parts were missing, Dr. Smith saw that it was a coelacanthl To honor Miss Latimer, who had saved what could be saved, he called it Latimeria and wrote down, for the journal The Cape Naturalist, the precise classification: Class: Pisces; Subclass:' Crossopterygii; Order: Actinistia; Family: Coelacanthidae; Genus: Latimeria; Species: chalumnae, and added: "the genus and the species are new to science." This was one of those major understatements which are occasionally made by people who want to avoid being called enthusiastic, for it was the biggest discovery in the whole natural history field since the finding of Neoceratodus. A live brontosaurus in Lake Victoria would have been more spectacular, of course, but of lesser scientific interest. It certainly would have involved us, the observers, less because Latimeria chalumnae J. L. B. Smith is a representative of what constituted our own ancestry and a brontosaurus is not. long frustration, for the Second World War was on. Fishing for food continued as usual, but the specimen off the mouth of the Chalumna River was evidently a stray. It is said that Dr. Smith, during the war years, asked his wife in the middle of the night, "Do you think Latimeria lives in the Mozambique Channel?" (the water separating Madagascar from Africa) and I, for one, am inclined to believe this story; I have done similar things myself. Life would have been much easier for Dr. Smith if he had known where Latimeria lived. Since he Area of distribution of the living eoeloeanths, the sea between the mainland of Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. didn't, he had to consider an enormous area. The three languages spoken on the coastline of Africa are, going from south to north: English, Portuguese and French. Dr. Smith had pamphlets printed in large numbers in these three languages, offering a reward of # for a specimen. He made collecting trips himself and, in December, #, had just come to Durban Harbor, South Africa, with many specimens of other fish, when he received a message from a trader plying the ocean between the African mainland and the Comores Islands: Grande Comore, Moheli, Anjouan and Mayotte. Trader Eric Hunt reported that he had a second specimen! Dr. Smith, worried that it might decay like the first before he got there, telephoned Daniel F. Malan, the Prime Minister of The living coelacanth, Latimeria Chalumnae Smith. the Union of South Africa, pleading for an airplane and pilot. Prime Minister Malan is a champipn of Apaartheid (segregation) and thinks that evolution IS a question of belief instead of knowledge. Moreover, the telephone call arrived at midnight, when he was asleep. In spite of all this. Dr. Smith won his point -- the Prime Minister ordered at once that a Dakota plane (DC-#) and a military pilot be placed at Dr. Smith's disposition. He was flown to Trader Hunt's ship. High emotional strain and lack of sleep combined to put Dr. Smith's nerves on edge;' when he saw the wrapped fish on board the small ship, he had to ask others to remove the wrappings for him. There was a large blue coelacanth with large blue eyes, with catlike teeth in its jaws -- and it was undecayed! Dr. Smith knelt down on the deck and wept. caught by a native, Ahmed Hussein, # yards off the island of Anjouan in # feet of water. The fish had struggled so hard that Ahmed Hussein had to bash Its head in. The next morning, he took It to market, but before somebody else of equal ignorance bought It for soup, another native recognized it as the fish which was worth three years of normal income. The lucky fisherman and his canny informant lugged the fish over # miles of mountainous terrain to Trader Hunt's vessel. Hunt, who had been handing out Dr. Smith's leaflets himself, sent a cable to the scientist, then sliced open the fish's sides and packed them with salt. After that. galaxy science fiction The most recent fossil coelacanth, restoration of skeleton (above) and of external appearance (below). The restorations were made before the living coelacanth was discovered. he found a medical officer, borrowed a S#ringe and five liters of formalin and injected them into the fish. Dr. Smith now had the material to decide the two questions most important from the scientific standpoint: How were the jaws formed? And had the coelacanths progressed to the point of having livers? En passant, he collected some information from the natives of the Comores Islands. They all knew the fish, which was brought to market occasionally. Their own name for it was combessa. Its flesh turned into jelly when it was boiled. And, when alive, its eyes were luminous. After examining Specimen No. # some more. Dr. Smith felt that this was a different species from No. #. And so it happened that the anti-evolutionist Prime Minister had this fish named after him -- it became Malania anjouanae, "Malan's fish from Anjouan." Science did not have to wait for another dozen years for Specimen No. #. It was killed by Houmadi Hassani off Anjouan in # feet of water on September #, #. It was a smaller fish, weighing only # pounds, and it was brown with white spots. Because of this coloration, Houmadi Hassani's assertion that he had the fish was not believed at first, but a few hours after death, it turned blue. It was flown in an old Junkers plane to Madagascar, for in the meantime. Professor James Millot in Paris had informed French officialdom about the scientific rarity in French waters, since both the Comores and Madagascar are French possessions. In fact. Professor Millot was waiting in Madagascar; he was not going to miss a chance to have a go at the next specimen that showed up. And he soon made a few scientific pronouncements. The coelacanth apparently showed a very unusual amount of individual variation, in coloration as well as in placements of the fins. Hence Dr. Smith's new species, based on such minor dif. ferences, was unfounded. They were all Latimeria chalumnae. Specimen No. # was taken near Grande Comore, the main island of the group, on January #, #. In the morning of January #th, Specimen No. # was brought in and, a few hours later. Specimen No. #. But there was a wait of ten months for No. #. The scientists, especially the French, were overjoyed with the development, but they mourned one fact. One couldn't be sure about the very first specimen because so little of it was left, but all the others had been males. A S IN the case of Neoceratodus, the scientific desire for iish eggs grew to outrageous proportions. Furthermore, six good specimens were enough to learn all about the anatomy of this survivor from the period preceding the so-called Age of Reptiles. Now one had to observe the live fish if one wanted more information. The French had matched Dr. Smith's reward of one hundred pounds sterling all along and had paid it to the lucky fishermen -- with public ceremonies. Now doubled the prize, but it jiad to be a live specimen to rate the bigger award.   gpecinien No. # was brought in on November #, #, by two fishermen, Zema ben Said Mohamed and Madi Bacari. The fish struck at a depth of # feet and it took more than half an hour to haul it in. Specimen No. # was to be a female. There was dancing all night in the village. The specimen was put in a swamped boat resting on the bottom in very shallow water and a fish net was stretched over the boat so that the catch could not escape. And anybody could see that the natives had told the truth all along: the eyes of the fish glowed strongly with a greenish-yellow light. The color of the live specimen was a very dark gray-blue. As it swam slowly about in its confined space, the pectoral fins made "curious rotating movements," to use Professor Millot's words. Millot continued: "... the second dorsal and anal fins, likewise very mobile, served together with the tail as a rudder. After daybreak it became apparent that the light, and above all the sun itself, was upsetting the animal very much, so several tent canvases were put over the boat to serve as some kind of protection. But despite this precaution and the more or less constant renewal of the water, the fish began to show more and more obvious signs of distress, seeking to conceal itself in the darkest corners... at #:# hr. it was still swimming feebly; but at #:# hr. it had its belly in the air and only the fins and gill covers were making agonized movements." Specimen No. #, four feet and nearly eight inches long and weighing almost precisely # pounds, had lived for about # hours, counting from the moment of its striking the baited hook. Unfortunately, the fish did not carry any eggs. But quoting Millot once more: "Two principal conclusions emerge from the corroborated statements made by local observers and myself: (#) the extreme photophobia of Latimeria -- the sunlight seemed literally to hi it; (#) the exceptional mobility of the pecundulate fins, correlated with the wealth of musculature which is revealed by anatomical studies. The pectorals, in particular, can move in almost any direction and show themselves capable of assuming practically every conceivable position." B ecause of the sensitivity to sunlight, an "aquarium" for Latimeria will probably have to take the shape of a wire-net cage at the bottom of the sea. at least # feet below the surface, which can be lifted to, say, # feet from time to time to enable scientists in aqualungs to study the fish and take photographs. Professor Millot has promised that "all about Latimeria" will be told in a foxir-volume work now in preparation. But the last volume of this work will certainly not be sent to the printer until a few more things have been done. One is to observe mating and spawning, if at all possible. If that does not work out, the scientists want to have at least one bunch of eggs which can be hatched and a few yoimg will then be killed off for careful dissection at intervals of a few days. Richard Semon did that with Neoceratodus eggs. The comparison between the two should be most interesting and enlightening. Since the young in their early stages always resemble their ancestors, such a study may teach us just where Latimeria ties in with fossil forms and possibly even enable us to arrange the fossil forms in an evolutionary sequence. Another observation that would be of the greatest interest would be to find where the fish actually lives. The first specimen was evidently a stray, because all the others were taken in the vicinity of the Comores Islands -- usually, but not always, in fairly deep water. If one could establish where the fish lives, it could be a clue for its survival in just this area. If they prefer caves it might also be that the biggest specimen stay in their caves. The first one, weighing # poimds, is also the largest one so far. Most of the others weighed # pounds or less. But the natives swear that in the past, when nobody yet cared, specimens weighing # pounds were brought to market once in a while. Finally, it is not established that the fish lives only near the Comores Islands. It has not yet been fotmd near the Cosmoledo Islands, or near the Seychelles Islands, some distance to the northeast from the Cosmoledos. On the other hand, nobody has been strenuously looking around these islands and we have seen that, in spite of strenuous looking, many years passed between Specimen No. I and No. #. Moreover, such living fossils have a habit of surviving in widely separated areas, a fact that can be easily explained. Originally they had a worldwide distribution and then managed to hang on in a few places, becoming extinct in the in-between areas. Marsupials, for example, survived mainly in Australia. But they also live in the Americas. iV as old as Latimeria and Neo ceratodas, the horseshoe crab survives along the Atlantic shores of the United States. The only other place it can be found is in the waters around the Moluccas on the other side of the Earth. The point Fm leading up to is that there is a little bit of very feeble evidence for a primitive fish of large size in the Gulf of Mexico. In #, a woman in or near Tampa, Florida, ran a small shop selling souvenirs to tourists. She made many of them herself and her raw material consisted often of fish scales, which she bought from local fishermen. One day in #, a fisherman sold her a gallon can full of scales. They had the same size as the scales of a large tarpon -- about that of a silver dollar -- but they looked different. Being curious, she mailed one of the scales to the National Museum in Washington, D. C., where it was passed on to the fish expert. Dr. Isaac Ginsburg. Dr. Ginsburg knew several things instantly: One: he had never seen such a scale before. Two: no fish with such scales was known to live in the Gulf of Mexico. Three: there had never been even a rumor of a large unknown fish from those waters. Finally: the fish which grew this scale was a very primitive type, possibly a crossopterygian. He at once wrote to Tampa requesting information on the whereabouts of more scales, the place where the fisherman had been fishing, the appearance of the fish from which the scales were taken. He never received a reply. Nothing is known, therefore, except that there must be something unusual in the Gulf. We may get still a third fish story of the type of the two just told, right in our own waters. Current ISew Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. (Bet. Ilth B #th Streett) New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday #:.T# A. M. to #:# P. M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) A Coffin for Jacob With never o moment to rostf tho pursuit through space felt like a game of hounds and hares... or was it follow the leader? pale, gaunt body through the open doorway of the Blast Inn, the dead man following silently behind him. His fear-borne gaze traveled into the dimly illumined Venusian gin mill. The place was like an evil caldron steaming with a brew whose ingredients had been culled from the back corners of three planets. Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen, Martians or Venusians. Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it was the dead man's hand. "Coma esta, senor?" a small voice piped. "Speken die Deutsch? Desirez-vous d'amoui? Da? Nyet?" Ben looked down. The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees. "I'm American," Ben muttered. "Ah, buena! I speak English ires fine, senor. I have Martian friend, she tres pretty and tres fat. She weigh almost eighty pounds, monsieur. I take you to her, si?" Ben shook his head. your Martian wench. I don't want your opium or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug thafd bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul. "It is deal, monsieur? Five dollars or twenty keelis for visit Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams -- " "I'm not buying." The dirty-faced kid shrugged. "Then I show you to good table, -- tres bien. I do not charge you, senor." The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices. They passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed Earthmen -- merchant spacemen. They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed tombstones. Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO-breathing Venusians, the first he'd ever seen. They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape. They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their greenlidded eyes unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his"spine. Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club against the stone booths. Keep walking, Ben told himself. You look the same as anyone else here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead. The officer passed. Ben breathed easier. "Here we are, monsieur" piped the Martian boy. "A tres fine table. Close in the shadows." Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows? Frowning, he sat down he and the dead man. He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra. The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for their spindly bodies. Their long fingers played upon the strings of their cirillas or crawled over the holes of their flutes like spider legs. Their tune was sad. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and forgotten grandeur. For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead man. He thought. What are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dustcovered world? Couldn't they have played their music on Mats? Or had theylike me, felt the challenge of new worlds? He sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the faces of the Inn's other occupants. you've got to find him, he thought, you've got to find the man with the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man. T he dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and about forty and he hated spacemen. His body was buried now -- probably in the silent gray wastes outside Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a part of Ben as sight in his eyes. Sometimes the image would be shuffling dnmkenly beside him, its lips spitting whiskey-slurred curses. Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle from a corner of the gaping mouth. You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a memory that has burned into your mind. It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate. He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him. "Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Ever#rwhere, all you see's spacemen." He was a neatly dressed civilian. Ben smiled. "If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here." "The name's Cobb." The man hiccoughed. "Spacemen in their white monkey suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a little tin god." He downed a shot of whiskey. Ben stiffened. He was twentyfour and dressed in the white, crimson-braided uniform of the Odyssey's junior astrogation officer. He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe. He'd sought long for that key. in order to dull the memory of his parents' death in a recent strato-jet crash -- he'd spent hours watching the night sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his collection of astronomy and rocketry books. At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys Town No. # in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friend who understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space. And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the Odyssey -- the first ship, it was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps beyond. Cobb was persistent: "Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth. What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?" The guy's drunk, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three stools down the bar. Cobb followed. "You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like people to call you a sucker." Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and held him there. "Thas what you are -- a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!" Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and without warning, it welled up into savage fury. His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of life. He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw. Ben knew that he was dead. Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror just as, a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger. He ran. F or some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet. At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tychoward side of the city. He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette. A thousand stars -- a thousand motionless balls of silver fire -- shone above him through Luna Cits transparent dome. He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run. Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision. You can do two things, he thought. You can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do. That would eliminate the escape charge. Yotd get off with voluntary manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then yotd be free. But yotd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new men aver thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class jet-men on beat-up freighters -- they don't want convicted killers. You'd get the rest of the thrill of conquering space through video and by peeking through electric fences of spaceports. Or -- There were old wives' tales of a group of renegade spacemen who operated from the Solar System's frontiers. The spacemen weren't outlaws. They were misfits, rejectees from the clearing houses on Earth. And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their headquarters was Venus. Their leader -- a subject of popular and fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines -- wash rumored to be a redbearded giant. So, Ben reflected, you can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously. You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from Earth. After all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant second, to destroy a man's life and his dream? tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new personnel even more so. Ben Curtis made it to Venus. There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs. But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways obscure the dead face? So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant, and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once. "You look for someone, senor?" He jumped. "Oh. You still here?" "Oui" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. "I keep you company on your first night in Hoover City, n'est-ce-pas?" "This isn't my first night here," Ben lied. "I've been around a while." "You are spacemen?" Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. "Here. Take off, will you?" Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. "Ich danke, senor. You know why city is called Hoover City?" Ben didn't answer. "They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner, monsieur?" Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy. "Ai-yee, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music." The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness. Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him -- reddish balloon faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, sliteyed faces, and occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a face with a red beard. A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this. He needed help. But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The Martian kid, perhaps? Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of white. He tensed. Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought. His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness. And then he saw another and another and another. Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a wheel with Ben as their focal point. You idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have knovm! L ight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded, realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been turned on. The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debrisstrewn floor. Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away. Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward, falling. The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised. A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in Ben's direction. "Curtis!" one of the policemen yelled. "You're covered! Hold it!" Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into which the musicians had disappeared. A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall ahead of him crumbled. He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the mildly stunning neuro-clubs. Another hiss passed his cheek. He was about twelve feet from the exit. Another second, his brain screamed. Just another second Or would the exits be guarded? He heard the hiss. It hit directly in the small of his back. There was no pain, just a slight pricking sensation, like the shallow jab of a needle. H e froze as if yanked to a stop by a noose. His body seemed to be growing, swelling into balloon proportions. He knew that the tiny needle had imbedded itself deep in his flesh, knew that the paralyzing mortoCain was spreading like icy fire into every fiber and muscle of his body. He staggered like a man of stone moving in slow motion. He'd have fifteen -- maybe twenty -- seconds before complete lethargy of mind and body overpowered him. In the dark world beyond his fading consciousness, he heard a voice yell, "Turn on the damn lights!" Then a pressure and a coldness were on his left hand. He realized that someone had seized it. A soft feminine voice spoke to him. "You're wounded? They hit you?" "Yes." His thick lips wouldn't let go of the word. "You want to escape -- even now?" "Yes." "You may die if you don't give yourself up." "No, no." He tried to stumble toward the exit. "All right then. Not that way. Here, this way." Heavy footsteps thudded toward them. A few yards away, a flashlight flicked on. Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his vision -- if he still had vision. "You're sure?" the voice persisted. "I'm sure," Ben managed to say. "I have no antidote. You may die." His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection, njassage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender at once. "Anti... anti..." The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced from his throat. "No... I'm sure... sure." He didn't hear the answer or anything else. sensation of awakening. Return to consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black nothingness to a dreamlike state of awareness. He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders, hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to transfer itself to his own body. For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded shut But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way to a translucent cloak of mist A round, featureless shape hovered constantly above -- a face, he supposed. He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was a deep, staccato grunting. But he heard someone say, "Don't try to talk." It was the same gentle voice he'd heard in the Blast Inn. "Don't talk. Just lie still and rest. Everything'll be all right" Everything all right, he thought dimly. There were long periods of lethargy when he was aware of nothing. There were periods of light and of darkness. Gradually he grew aware of things. He realized that the soft rubber mouth of a spaceman's oxygen mask was clamped over his nose. He felt the heat of electric blankets swathed about his body. Occasionally a tube would be in his mouth and he would taste liquid food and feel a pleasant warmth in his stomach. Always, it seemed, the face was above him, floating in the obscuring mist. Always, it seemed, the soft voice was echoing in his ears: "Swallow this now. That's it. You must have food." Or, "Close your eyes. Don't strain. It won't be long. You're getting better." Better, he'd think. Getting better... At last, after one of the periods of lethargy, his eyes opened. The mist brightened, then dissolved. He beheld the cracked, unpainted ceiling of a small room, its colorless walls broken with a single, roimd window. He saw the footboard of his aluminite bed and the outlines of his feet beneath a faded blanket. Finally he saw the face and figure that stood at his side. "You are better?" the kind voice asked. T he face was that of a girl probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Her features, devoid of makeup, had an unhealthy-looking pallor, as if she hadn't used a sunlamp for many weeks. Yet, at the same time, her firm slim body suggested a solidity and a strength. Her straight brown hair was combed backward, tight upon her scalp, and drawn together in a knot at the nape of her neck. "I -- I am better," he murmured. His words were still slow and thick. "I am going to live?" "You will live." He thought for a moment. "How long have I been here?" "Nine days." "You took care of me?" He noted the deep, dark circles beneath her sleep-robbed eyes. She nodded. "You're the one who carried me when I was shot?" "Yes." "Why?" Suddenly he begah to cough. Breath came hard. She held the oxygen mask in readiness. He shook his head, not wanting it "Why?" he asked again. "It would be a long story. Perhaps I'll tell you tomorrow." A new thought cloaked in sudden fear, entered his murky consciousness. "Tell me, will -- will I be well again? Will I be able to walk?" He lay back then, panting, exhausted. "You have nothing to worry about" the girl said softly. Her cool hand touched his hot forehead. "Rest. We'll talk later." His eyes closed and breath came easier. He slept. When he next awoke, his gaze turned first to the window. There was light outside, but he had no way of knowing if this was morning, noon or afternoon -- or on what planet. He saw no white-domed buildings of Hoover City, no formal lines of green-treed parks, no streams of buzzing gsnro-cars. There was only a translucent and infinite whiteness. It was as if the window were set on the edge of the Universe overlooking a solemn, silent and matterless void. The girl entered the room. "Hi," she said, smiling. The dark half-moons under her eyes were less prominent Her face was relaxed. She increased the pressure in his rubberex pillows and helped him rise to a sitting position. "Where are we?" he asked. "Venus." "We're not in Hoover City?" "No." He looked at her, wondering. "You won't tell me?" "Not yet. Later, perhaps." "Then how did you get me here? How did we escape from the Inn?"  friends who can be bribed. A hiding place in the city, the use of a small desert-taxi, a pass to leave the city -- these can be had for a price." "You'll tell me your name?" "Maggie." 'Why did you save me?" Her eyes twinkled mischievously. "Because you're a good astrogator." His own eyes widened. "How did you know that?" She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. "I know everything about you. Lieutenant Curtis." "How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers -- " "I know that you're twentyft O four. Bom July #, #. Ornbaned at four, you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were #. You graduated from Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation. Your rating for the five-year period was # -- the second highest in a class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a # in History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?" Fascinated, Ben nodded. "You were accepted as junior astrogation officer aboard the Odyssey. You did well on your flight from Roswell to Luna City. In a barroom fight in Luna City, you struck and killed a man named Arthur Cobb, a pre-fab salesman. You've been charged with second degree murder and escape. A reward of # credits has been offered for your capture. You came to Hoover City in the hope of finding a renegade group of spacemen who operate beyond Mars. You were looking for them in the Blast Inn." He gaped incredulously, struggling to rise from his pillows. "I -- don't get it." "There are ways of finding out what we want to know. As I told you, we have many friends." He fell back into his pillows, breathing hard. She rose quickly. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have told you yet. I felt so happy because you're alive. Rest now. We'll talk again soon. "Maggie, you -- you said I'd live. You didn't say I'd be able to walk again." She lowered her gaze. "I hope you'll be able to." "But you don't think I will, do you?" "I don't know. We'll try walking tomorrow. Don't think about it now. Rest." He tried to relax, but his mind was a vortex of conjecture. "Just one more question," he almost whispered. "Yes?" 'The man I killed -- did he have a wife?" She hesitated. He thought. Damn it, of all the questions, why did I ask that? Finally she said, "He had a wife." "Children?" "Two. I don't know their ages." She left the room. his bed. As he turned over on his side, his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room. He sat straight up, his chest heaving. The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a merchant spaceman's umform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly trimmed red beard! Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his brain. The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night. And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and knees, his legs numb and useless. The crjHing in his ears. His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed, the giant disappeared, to be replaced by whitebooted feet stomping relentlessly toward him. He awoke still screaming... A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a question already formed in his mind. She came and at once he asked, "Who is the man with the red beard?" She smiled. "I was right then when I gave you that thumbnail biog. You were looking for him, weren't you?" "Who is he?" She sat on the chair beside him. "My husband," she said softly. He began to understand. "And your husband needs an astrogator? That's why you saved me?" "We need all the good men we can get" 'Where is he?" She cocked her head in mock suspicion. "Somewhere between Mercury and Pluto. He's building a new base for us -- and a home for me. When his ship returns. I'll be going to him." Why aren't you with him now?" "He said unexplored space is no place for a woman. So I've been studying criminal reports and photos from the Interplanetary Bureau of Investigation and trying to find recruits like yourself. You know how we operate?" He told her the tales he'd heard.  quite a few of us now -- about a thousand -- and a dozen ships. Our base used to be here on Venus, down toward the Pole. The dome we're in now was designed and built by us a few years ago after we got pushed off Mars. We lost a few men in the construction, but with almost every advance in space, someone dies. "Venus is getting too civilized. We're moving out and this dome is only a temporary base when we have cases like yours. The new jjgge -- I might as well tell you going to be an asteroid. I won't gay which one. "Don't get the idea that we're outlaws. Sure, about half our group is wanted by the Bureau, but we make honest livings. We're just people like yourself and Jacob." "Jacob? Your husband?" She laughed. "Makes you think of a Biblical character, doesn't it? Jacob's ansdhing but that. And just plain 'Jake' reminds one of a grizzled old uranium prospector and he isn't like that, either." She lit a cigarette. "Anyway, the wanted ones stay out beyond the frontiers. Jacob and those like him can never return to Earth -- not even to Hoover City -- except dead. The others are physical or psycho rejects who couldn't get clearance if they went back to Earth. They know nothing but rocketing and won't give up. They bring in our ships to frontier ports like Hoover City to unload cargo and take on supplies." "Don't the authorities object?" "Not very strongly. The I. B. I. has too many problems right here to search the whole System for a few two-bit crooks. Besides, we carry cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. Nobody really cares whether it comes from the asteroids or Hades. If we want to risk our lives mining it, that's our business." She pursed her lips. "But if they guessed how strong we are or that we have friends planted in the I. B. I. -- well, things might be different. There probably would be a crackdown." Ben scowled. 'What happens if there is a crackdown? And what will you do when Space Corps ships officially reach the asteroids? They can't ignore you then." "Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It could be us, you know -- if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You can't follow the textbook rules of astrogation out there. You make up your own." B en stiffened. "And that's why you want me for an astrogator." Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. "If you want to come -- and if you get well." She looked at him strangely. "Suppose -- " He fought to find the right words. "Suppose I got well and decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me go?" Her thin face was criss-crossed by emotion -- alarm, then bewilderment, then fear. "I don't know. That would be up to Jacob." He lay biting his lip, staring at the photo of Jacob. She touched his hand and it seemed that sadness now dominated the flurry of emotion that had coursed through her. "The only thing that matters, really," she murmured, "is your walking again. We'll try this afternoon. Okay?" "Okay," he said. When she left, his eyes were still turned toward Jacob's photo. He was like two people, he thought. Half of him was an officer of the Space Corps. Perhaps one single starry-eyed boy out of ten thousand was lucky enough to reach that goal. He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions: "A Space Officer Is Honest." "A Space Officer Is Loyal." "A Space Officer Is Dutiful." Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts, mankind would never have broken away from the planet that years. Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead, would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.,! to pay. A good officer would pay that debt. He'd surrender and take his punishment He'd rip the  crimson braid from his uniform. He'd prevent the Academy for the Conquest of Space from being labeled the school of a murderer and a coward. And by doing these things, the' haunting image of a dead man would disappear from his visioa But the other half of Ben Curtis was the boy who'd stood trem- bling beneath a night sky of beckoning stars. The eyes in Jacob's photo seemed to be staring at the boy in him, not at the officer. They appeared both pleading and hopeful They were like echoes of cold, barren worlds and limitless space, of lurking and savage death. They held the terror of loneliness and of exile, of constant flight and hiding. But, too, they represented a strength that could fulfill a boy's dream, that could carry a man to new frontiers. They, rather than the neat white uniform, now offered the key to shining miracles. That key was what Ben wanted. But he asked himself, as he had a thousand times, "If I follow Jacob, can I leave the dead man behind?" He tried to stretch his legs and he cursed their numbness. He smiled grimly. For a moment, he'd forgotten. How futile now to think of stars! What if he were to be like this always? Jacob would not want a man with dead legs. Jacob would either send him back to Earth or -- Ben shuddered -- see that he was otherwise disposed of. And disposal would be the easier course. T his was the crisis. He sat on the side of the bed, Maggie before him, her strong arm about his waist. "Afraid?" she asked. "Afraid," he repeated, shaking. It was as if all time had been funneled into this instant, as if this moment lay at the very vortex of all a man's living and desiring. There was no room in Ben's mind for thoughts of Jacob now. "You can walk," Maggie said confidently. "I know you can." He moved his toes, ankles, legs. He began to rise, slowly, falteringly. The firm pressure around his waist increased. He stood erect. His legs felt like tree stumps, but here and there were a tingling and a warmth, a sensitivity. "Can you make it to the window?" Maggie asked. "No, no, not that far." "Try! Please try!" She guided him forward. His feet shuffled. Stomp, stomp. The pressure left his waist. Maggie stepped away, walked to the window, turned back toward him. He halted, swaying. "Not alone," he mouthed fearfully. "I can't get there by myself." "Of course you can!" Maggie's voice contained unexpected impatience. Ashamed, he forced his feet to move. At times, he thought he was going to crash to the floor. He lumbered on, hesitating, fighting to retain his balance. Maggie waited tensely, as if ready to leap to his side. Then his eyes turned straight ahead to the window. This was the first time he'd actually seen the arid, dust-cloaked plains of the second planet. He straightened, face aglow, as though a small-boy enthusiasm had been reborn in him. His tree-stump legs carried him to the window. He raised shaking hands against the thick glassite pane. Outside, the swirling white dust was omnipresent and unchallenged. It cut smooth the surfaces of dust-veiled rocks. It clung to the squat desert shrubbery, to the tall skeletal shapes of Venusian needle-plants and to the swish-tailed lizards that skittered beneath them. The shrill of wind, audible through the glassite, was like the anguished complaint of the planet itself, like the wail of an entity imprisoned in a dark tomb of dust Venus was a planet of fury, eternally howling its wrath at beings isolated from sunlight and greenery, from the clean blackness of space and the warm glow of sister-planet and star. The dust covered all, absorbed all, eradicated all. The dust was master. The dome, Ben felt, was as transitory as a tear-drop of fragile glass falling down, down, to crash upon stone. "Is it always like this?" he asked. "Doesn't the wind ever stop?" "Sometimes the wind dies. Sometimes, at night, you can see the lights from the city.""he thought, was a symbol of Man's littleness in a hostile universe. But, too, it was a symbol of his courage and defiance. And perhaps Man's greatest strength lay in the very audacity that drove him to build such domes. "You like it, don't you?" Maggie asked. "It's lonely and ugly and wild, but you like it." He nodded, breathless. She murmured, "Jacob used to say it isn't the strange sights that thrill spacemen -- it's the thoughts that the sights inspire." He nodded again, still staring. She began to laugh. Softly at first, then more loudly. It was the kind of laughter that is close to crying. "You've been standing there for ten minutes! You're going to walk again! You're going to be well!" He turned to her, smiling with the joyous realization that he had actually stood that long without being aware of it. Then his smile died. Standing behind Maggie, in an open doorway, was a gray scaly, toadlike monster -- a six-and-ahalf-foot Venusian. He was motionless as a statue, his green-lidded eyes staring curiously at Ben. His scaly hand was tight about the butt of an old-faShioned heat, pistol bolstered to his hip... Maggie suppressed a smile.   "Don't be frightened, Ben. This is Simon -- Simple Simon, we call him. His I. Q. isn't too high, but he makes a good helper and guard for me. He's been so anxious to see you, but I thought it'd be better if he waited until you were well." Ben nodded, fascinated by the apparent muscular solidity of the creature. It hadn't occurred to his numbed mind that he and Maggie were not the sole occupants of the dome. But Maggie had acted wisely, he thought. His nightmares had been terrifying enough without bringing Simple Simon into them. "Shake hands with Ben," she told the Venusian. Simple Simon lumbered forward, then paused. His eyes blinked. "No," he grated. Maggie gasped. "Why, Simple Simon, whafs the matter?" The gray creature rasped, "Ben -- he not one of us. He thinks -- different In thoughts -- thinks escape. Earth." of us, Simon." She stepped forward and seized the Venusian's arm. "You go to your room. Stand guard. You guard Ben just like you guard me. Understand?" Simple Simon grunted, "I guard. If Ben go -- I stop him. I stop him good." He raised his huge hands suggestively. "No, Simon! Remember what Jacob told you. We hurt no one. Ben is our friend. You help him!" The Venusian thought for a long moment Then he nodded. "I help Ben. But if go -- stop." She led the creature out of the room and closed the door. "Whew," Ben sighed. "I'd heard those fellows were telepaths. Now I Know" Maggie's trembling hands reached for a cigarette. "I -- I guess I didn't think, Ben. Venusians can't really read your mind, but they see your feelings, your emotions. It's a logical evolutionary development, I suppose. Auditory and visual commxmication are difficult here, so evolution turned to empathy. And that's why Jacob keeps a few Venusians in our group. They can detect any feeling of disloyalty before it becomes serious." Ben remembered Simple Simon's icy gaze and the way his rough hand had gripped his heat pistol. "They could be dangerous." "Not really. They're as loyal as Earth dogs to their masters. I mean they wouldn't be dangerous to anyone who's loyal to us." Silently, she helped him back to his bed. "I'm sorry, Maggie -- sorry I haven't decided yet." She neither answered nor looked at him. Grimly, he realized that his status had changed. He was no longer a patient; he was a prisoner. A Venusian day passed, and a Venusian night. The dust swirled and wind blew, as constant as the whirl of indecision in Ben's mind. Maggie was patient. Once, when she caught him gazing at Jacob's photo, she asked, "Not yet?" He looked away. "Not yet." dome consisted of three rooms, each shaped like pieces f  of a fluffy pie with narrow conCrete hallways between. His room served as a bedroom and he discovered that Maggie slept on a pneumatic cot in the kitchen. The third room, opening into the airlock, housed a small hydroponics garden, sunlamp, short-wave visi-radio, and such emergency equipment as oxygen tanks, windsuits, and vita-rations. It was here that Simple Simon remained most of the time, tending the garden or peering into the viewscreen that revealed the terrain outside the dome. Maggie prepared Ben's meals, bringing them to him on a tray until he was able to sit at a table As his paralysis diminished, he helped her with cooking -- with Simple Simon standing by as a mute, motionless observer. Occassionally Maggie would talk of her girlhood in a small town in Missouri and how she'd dreamed of journeying to the stars. " 'Stars are for boys,' they'd tell me, but I was a queer one. While other gals were dressing for their junior proms, I'd be in sloppy slacks down at the spaceport with Jacob." She laughed often -- perhaps in a deliberate attempt to disguise the omnipresent tension. And her laughter was like laughter on Earth, floating through comfortable houses and over green fields I and through clear blue sky. When she laughed, she possessed a beautyDespite her pale face and lack of makeup, Ben realized that she was no older than he. li I'd only known her back on Earth, he thought. It I -- And then he told himself. You've got enough problems. Don't create another one! Finally, except for a stiffness in his leg joints, he'd fully recovered. "How much time do I have?" he asked. "Before you decide?" "Yes." "Very little. Jacob's ship is on its way. It'll be here -- well, you can't tell about these things. Two or three Earth days, maybe even tomorrow. It'll stay in Hoover City long enough to discharge and load cargo. Then it'll stop here for us and return to -- to our new base." "What do you think Jacob would do if I didn't want to go with him?" asked me that before. I said I didn't know." Ben thought, I know a lot about you, Jacob. I know yotre based on an asteroid. I know how many men you have, how many ships. I know where this dome is. I know you have men planted in the I. B. I. Would you let me go, knowing these things? How great is your immunity from the law? Do you love freedom so much that yotd kill to help preserve it? Fear crawled through his mind on icy legs. "Maggie," he said, "what would Jacob do if he were me?" She looked amused. "Jacob wouldn't have gotten into your situation. He wouldn't have struck Cobb. Jacob is -- " "A man? And Fm still a boy? Is that what you mean?" "Not exactly. I think you'll be a man after you make your decision." He frowned, not liking her answer. "You think the dream of going into space is a boss's dream, that it can't belong to a man, too?" "Oh, no. Jacob still has the dream. Most of our men do. And in a man, it's even more wonderful than in a boy." Then her face became more serious. "Ben, you've got to decide soon. And it's got to be a complete decision. You can have no doubt in your mind." He nodded. "On account of Simon, you mean," She motioned for him to come to the window in his room. He gazed outward, following the line of her finger as she pointed. He saw a man-sized mound of stones, dimly visible beneath the wind-whipped dust A grave. "He was a man like you," Maggie said softly. "God knows Simon didn't try to kill him. But he was escaping. He -- he made the decision not to join us. Simon sensed it There was a struggle. Simon's hands -- well, he doesn't realize -- " She didn't have to explain further. Ben knew what those mighty scaly paws could do. like bits of eternity cloaked in frozen fear. Somewhere in the blackness of interplanetary space, Jacob's rocket was streaking closer and closer to Venus. How Fifty thousand? Or was it now -- right now -- ripping through the murky Venusian atmosphere above the dome? A complete decision, Maggie had said. Jacob didn't want a potential deserter in his group. And you couldn't pretend that you were loyal to Jacob -- not with monstrosities like Simple Simon about Soon Jacob, not Ben, might have to make a decision -- a decision that could result in a second cairn of stones on the wind-swept desert. Ben shivered. Before retiring, he wandered nervously into the supply room. Maggi was poised over the visiradio. Simple Simon was intently scanning the night-shrouded terrain in the viewscreen. "Any news?" Ben asked Maggie. The girl grunted negatively without looking up. Ben's gaze fell upon the array of oxygen masks, windsuits, vitarations. Then, on a littered shelf, he spied a small Venusian compass. Almost automatically, his hand closed over it. His brain stirred with a single thought; A compass could keep a man traveling in a straight line. Simple Simon restlessly shifted. He turned to Ben, blinking in the frighteningly alien equivalent of a suspicious scowl. Ben's hand tightened about the compass. He tried to relax, to force all thought of it from his mind. He stared at the viewscreen, concentrating on the ceaseless drift of dust. The Venusian's eyes studied him curiously, as if searching his mind for the illusive echo of a feeling that had given him alarm. "I think I'll turn in," yawned Ben. " 'Night, Maggie. Simon frowned, apparently frustrated in his mental search. "Ben -- not one of us. I -- watch." Ben returned to his room, the compass hot and moist from the perspiration in his hand. He took a deep breath. Why had he taken the compass? He wasn't sure. Perhaps, he reflected, his decision had already been made, deep beneath the surface of consciousness. He stood before the window, peering into the night. He knew that to attempt to sleep was futile. Sleep, for the past few days an ever-ready friend, had become a hostile stranger. God, his brain cried, what shall I do? Slowly, the dust outside the window settled. The scream of wind was no longer audible. His startled eyes beheld dim, faraway lights -- those of Hoover City, he guessed. It was as if, for the space of a few seconds, some cosmic power had silenced the Venusian fury, had guided him toward making his decision. He whipped up his compass. He barely had time to complete the measurement. "Sixty-eight degrees," he read. "Northeast by east." Fresh wind descended onto the plain. Dancing dust erased the vision of the lights. "Sixty-eight, sixty-eight," he kept muttering. But now there was nothing to do -- except try to sleep and be ready. Strong hands shook him out of restless sleep. He opened bis eyes and saw complete darkness. He thought at first that his eyesight had failed. "Ben! Wake up!" Maggie's voice came to him, crisp, commanding. "The rocket's coming. I've decoded the message. We only have a few minutes." The girl snapped on a small bulkhead light. She left him alone to dress. He slid out of bed, a drowsiness still in him. He reached for his clothing. Abruptly, the full implication of what she had said struck him. Jacob's rocket was coming. This was the time for decision, yet within his taut body there was only a jungle of conflicting impulses. face hard, her eyes asking the silent question. Ben stood frozen. The slow seconds beat against his brain like waves of ice. At last she said, "Ready, Ben?" She spoke evenly, but her searching gaze belied the all-important significance of her words. In the dim light, the photograph of Jacob was indistinguishable, but Ben could still see the image of the dead man. He thought, I can't run away with Jacob like a selfish, cowardly kid! No matter how bright the stars would bet that brightness couldn't destroy the image of a dead man with staring eyes. No matter what Jacob and Simon do to me, I've got to try to get back to Earth. He suddenly felt clean inside. He was no longer ashamed to hold his head high. "Maggie," he said. "Yes?" "I've made my decision." Outside the window, a waterfall of flame cascaded onto the desert, pushing aside the dust and the darkness. The deep-throated sound of rocket engines grumbled above the whining wind. The floor of the dome vibrated. "The rocket's here!" Maggie cried. The flaming exhaust from the ship dissolved into the night. The rocket thunder faded into the wind. The alarm on the dome's inner airlock bulkhead rang. Maggie ran like a happy child through the concrete corridor, Ben following. She bounded into the supply room, pushed Simple Simon aside, stopped before a control panel. Her fingers flew over switches and levers. The airlock door slid open. A short, stubble-bearded man clad in windsuit and transparalite helmet stomped in. He unscrewed the face plate of his helmet. His ears were too big and he looked like a fat doll. "We're ready for you, Mrs. pierce," he said. Maggie nodded eagerly. She whirled back to Ben. "Hurry! Get your helmet and suit on!" She spun back to the big-eared little man. "Cargo unloaded? All set for the flight home?" Home, Ben thought She calls a place she's never seen home. "Cargo's unloaded." "No trouble with the I. B. I.? No investigation?" "Not yet. We're good for a few more hauls, I guess." B en slipped on his windsuit. He glariced at the control panel for the airlock. Yes, he could manipulate it easily. He contemplated the heat pistol at Simple Simon's hip. A tempting idea -- but, no, he wanted no more of violence. Then he bit his lip. He cleared his mind of all thought. Simple Simon evidently had not noted the impulse that flicked his adrenals into pumping. The big-eared man stared strangely at Maggie. "Mrs. Pierce, before we go, I'd better tell you something." "Y ou can do that on the rocket." Maggie stepped forward to seize her helmet The man blocked her movement "Mrs. Pierce, your husband -- Jacob -- was on the rocket." 'What?" The girl released a broken, unbelievirig little laugh. 'Why, he wouldn't dare! That idiot, taking a chance like -- " Alarm twisted her features. "He -- he wasn't captured -- " "No, he wasn't captured. And he took no chance, Mrs. Pierce." A moment of silence. Then she sucked in her breath. Ben understood. Words echoed in his mind: "Jacob and those like him can never return to Earth, not even to Hoover City -- except dead." Maggie swayed. Ben and the big-eared little man jumped to her side, guided her back into the compartment used as a kitchen. They helped her to a chair. Ben turned on the fire beneath a coffee pot. Simple Simon watched silently. Her eyes empty and staring, Maggie asked, "How did it happen?" 'We were heading into a clump of baby asteroids the size of peas. The radar warning was too slow. We couldn't pull away; we had to stop. The deceleration got him -- crushed him. He lived for five minutes afterward." The little man produced a folded paper from a pocket of his suit. "Jacob said he had some ideas he had to get down on paper. God knows why, but during those five minutes he drew up this plan for improving our deceleration compensator." "Plans for -- " she gasped. "He was a spaceman, Mrs. Pierce." The man handed her the paper. Ben caught a glimpse of scribbled circuits, relays, cathodes. "When he finished," the man continued, "he said to tell you that he loved you." She started to hand the paper back. The spaceman shook his head. "No, the original i;s yours. I've made copies for our own ships and for the brass in Hoover City." little man, lost in the world he was creating for her. Ben was excluded from that world, a stranger. Then Ben saw his opportunity. Simple Simon's face was expressionless, but tears were zigzagging down his gray, reptilian features. Ben stared for several seconds, wondering if his vision had deceived him. Till this instant, he'd somehow assumed that the big Venusian was devoid of emotion. But Simple Simon was crying. It was unlikely that the creature would peer into his mind at a moment like this. Step by step, Ben backed toward the open door in the rear of the compartment. Silently, he slipped through it. He attempted to move automatically, without feeling. He darted into the supply room. The continued drone of voices told him his action had not been observed. He didn't like it at all. Escaping this way was like crumpling Maggie's grief into an acid ball and hurling it into her face. But he had no other choice. A few seconds later, he was dressed in windsuit and oxygen helmet. A can of vita-rations was strapped to his back and his compass was in his hand. Heart refusing to stop pounding, he threw the levers and switches to open the airlock. He cringed under the grinding, scraping noise, as loud to him as the ringing clash of swords. But the murmur of voices continued. He stepped outside. The airlock door clanged shut. He was caught by the biting dust and the shrill banshee wind. He fell, then scrambled erect. To his right, he saw the silver sheen of Jacob's rocket shining behind a row of golden, eyelike portholes. Beneath it were black outlines of moving, helmeted figures. He bent low to study the luminous dial of his compass. Behind him was a grating and a sliding of metal. A movement in the darkness. He txirned. Dimly illuminated by the glow from the rocket ports was the grim, stony face of Simple Simon. piece of the night itself, compressed and solidified to form a living creature. The impression was contradicted only by the glowing whiteness of his eyes. The reptilian body shuffled forward. The scales on his great face and chest reflected the lights from the rocket like Christmas tree ornaments dusted with gold. His hands reached out. Words thundered in Ben's memory: God knows Simon didn't try to kill him. Simon's hands -- well, he doesn't realize -- Ben hopped away from the groping hands, slipped the compass into his pocket, balled his fists. The wind caught at his body. He stumbled, then recovered his balance. Despite the wind and his suit's bulkiness, he was surprised at his own agility. He recalled that the gravitational pull of Venus was only four-fifths of Earth's. That was an advantage. Crouching against the wind, he stepped to his left, away from the rocket. He was reluctant to enter an area of greater darkness, but neither did he want to risk observation by the men he'd seen near Jacob's ship. Simple Simon followed. He moved like an automaton, fimctioning with awkward, methodical slowness. His hands, speckled with reflected light, rose up out of the darkness. Ben stepped back, wiped the dust from his clouded face-plate. One swoop of those hands, he knew, could shatter his helmet, destroy his oxygen supply, leave him choking on deadly methane and carbon dioxide. But, so far, Simon seemed bent on capture, not destruction. That fact gave Ben a second advantage. Scaly fingers, moving now with greater swiftness, closed over the shoulder of his suit. Ben felt himself being pulled forward, a child in the grasp of a giant. His brief surge of confidence vanished. Cold terror swept upon him. He lashed out wildly. His right fist found his target, found it so well that the skin split on his gloved knuckles. Simon's head snapped back. The grasping fingers slipped from Ben's suit. But still the Venusian lumbered ahead, an irresistible juggernaut, the hands continually groping. Ben ducked and slipped aside. The can of vita-rations was ripped from his back. He crouched low, fighting the wind, maneuvering for another blow. His lungs ached, but he had no opportunity to increase his helmet's oxygen flow. His weak leg muscles were beginning to pain as though with needles of fire. upon his shoulders. This time, his fist found Simon's stomach. The creature released a grunt audible above the howling of wind. His body doubled up. Ben struck again and again. His lungs throbbed as if they'd break through his chest. A fresh layer of dust coated his faceplate, nearly blinding him. He fought instinctively, gauntleted fists battering. Simple Simon fell. Ben brushed away the dust from his face-plate, turned up his helmet's oxygen valve. Then he knelt by the fallen creature. A new fear came to Ben Curtis -- a fear almost as great as that of being caught in Simon's crushing grip. It was the fear that he had killed again. But even in the near-darkness, he could distinguish the labored rise and fall of the massive chest. Thank God, he thought. From the direction of Jacob's ship, a flash of light caught his eye. The black shapes of helmeted men were becoming larger, nearer. Ben tensed. The spacemen couldn't have heard sounds of the struggle, but they might have noticed movement. Puffing, Ben plunged into the darkness to his left, slowing only long enough to consult the dial of his compass. "Sixty-eight degrees," he breathed. The compass dial was now his only companion and his only hope. It was the one bit of reality in a world of black, screaming nightmare. A t first Ben Curtis fought the wind and the dust and the night. His fists were clenched as they had been while struggling with Simon. Each step forward was a challenge, a struggle and -- so far, at any rate -- a victory. But how far was the city? Five miles? Ten? How could you judge distance through a haze of alien sand? And were Simple Simon or Jacob's men following? How good was a Venusian's vision at night? Would the scaly hands find him even now, descending on him from out of the blackness? He kept walking, walking. Sixty-eight degrees. Gradually his senses grew numb to the fear of recapture. He became oblivious to the wailing wind and the beat of dust against his face-plate. He moved like a robot. His mind wandered back through time and space, a pinwheel spinning with unforgettable impressions, faces, voices. He saw the white features of a dead man, their vividness fading now and no longer terrifying. A Space Officer Is Honest A Space Officer Is Loyal. A Space Officer Is Dutiful. The words were like clear, satisfying music. He cursed at the image of a pop-eyed Martian boy. A tres fine table, monsieur. Close in the shadows. And yet, he told himself, the boy really didn't do anything wrong. He was only helping to capture a murderer. Maybe he was lonesome for Mars and needed money to go home. Ben thought of Maggie: While other gals were dressing for their junior proms, I'd be in sloppy slacks down at the spaceport with Jacob... If I'd only known her back on Earth -- Maggie, sitting alone now with a wrinkled paper and its mass of scrawled circuits. Alone and hollow with grief and needing help. Ben's throat tightened. Damn it, he didn't want to think about that What was it the little big-eared man had said? I've made copies for our own ships and for the brass in Hoover City. Why had he said that? Why would renegades give their secrets to the Space Corps? The Corps would incorporate the discoveries in their ships. With them. they'd reach the asteroids. Jacob's group would be pushed even further outward. Ben stopped, the wind whipping at his suit and buffeting his helmet -- but not as hard as the answer he had found. existence to justify, a debt to pay. They justified that existence and paid that debt by helping humanity in its starward advance. Maggie had said. We carry cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's getting scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. If we want to risk our lives getting it, that's our business... The dome we're in now was designed and built by us a few years ago. We lost a few men in the construction, but with almost every advance in space, someone dies. The wind pressed Ben back. The coldness of the Venusian night was seeping into his suit. It was as if his body were bathed, at once, in flame and ice. He slipped, fell, his face turned toward the sandy ground. He did not try to rise. Yet his mind seemed to soar above the pain, to carry him into a wondrous valley of new awareness. Man would never be content to stay on nine insignificant globes -- not when his eyes had w the power to stare into a night B sky and when his brain had the H ability to imagine. There would  have to be pioneers to seek out I the unknown horror, to face it I and defeat it. There would have to be signposts lining the great road and helping others to follow without fear. dreams, those men would be the lonely ones, the men of no return. For all the glory of their brief adventure, they would give not only their cloaks, but ultimately their lives. Ben lay trembling in the darkness. His brain cried. You couldn't rig up a radar system or a deceleration compensator, but you could chart those asteroids. You can't bring a man named Cobb back to life, but you could help a thousand men and women to stay alive five or ten or twenty years from now. Ben knew at last what decision Jacob would have made. The reverse of sixty-eight on a compass is two-forty-eight. dies, strong hands moved about his face-plate, his windsuit, his helmet. Then they were wiping perspiration from his white face and placing a wet cloth on the back of his neck. "You were coming back," a voice kept saying, "You were coming back." His mouth was full of hot coffee. He became aware of a gentle face hovering above him, just as it had a seeming eternity ago. He sat up on the bed, conscious now of his surroundings. "Simon says you were coming back, Ben. Why?" He fought to grasp the meaning of Maggie's words. "Simon? Simon found me? He brought me back?" "Only a short way. He said you were almost here." Ben closed his eyes, reliving the whirlwind of thought that had whipped through his brain. He mumbled something about pioneers and a scrawled paper and a debt and a decision. Then he blinked and saw that he and Maggie were not alone. Simple Simon stood at the foot of his bed -- and was that a trace of a smile on his reptilian mouth? And three windsuited spacemen stood behind Maggie, helmets in their hands. One was a leanboned, reddish-skinned Martian. Simple Simon said, "Ben -- changed. Thinks -- like us. Good now. Like -- Jacob." The little big-eared man stepped up and shook hands with Ben. "If Simon says so, that's good enough for me." A blond-haired Earthman helped Ben from the bed. "Legs okay. fellow? Think you're ready?" Ben stood erect unassisted. "Legs okay. And I'm ready." He thought for a moment. "But suppose I wasn't ready. Suppose I didn't want to go with you. I know a lot about your organization. What would you do?" The blond man shrugged untroubledly. 'We wouldn't kill you, if that's what you mean. We'd probably vote on whether to take you with us an#nvay or let you go." His smile was frank. "I'm glad we don't have to vote." Ben nodded and turned to Maggie. "You're still coming with us?" She shook her head, a mist shining in her sad eyes. "Not on this trip. Not without Jacob. I'll get one of our desert taxis back to Hoover City. Then I'll be going to Earth for a while. I've got some thinking to do and thinking is done best on Earth. Out here is the place for feeling." Her eyes lost a little of their pain. "But I'll be back. Jacob wouldn't stay on Earth. Neither will I. I'll be seeing you." The big-eared man put his hand on Ben's shoulder. "Think you can get us back to Juno?" he asked. Ben looked at Maggie and then at the big-eared man. "You're as good as there," he said confidently. Space Lawyer by Nat Schach was # Adventures of a lawyer in the future The Fairy Chessman  Tomorrow and Tomorrow by L. Padgett was # Two novels in one book Renaissance by Raymond F. Jones was # A novel of the far future Minnions of the Moon SF with a light touch Cosmic Engineers by Clifford #. Simak was # First rate space opera Robots Have No Tails by Lewis Padgett was # The famous Gallegher stories Judgment Night by C. L. Moore was # Superb adventure In the future Iceworld by Hal Clement was # Wonderful alien story Typewriter in the Sky  Fear by L. Ron Hubbard was # Two famous stories from Unknown The Mixed Men by A. E. Van Vogt was # The Castle of Iron by Fletcher Pratt  L. Sprague de Camp was # The famous Unknown story Pattern for Conquest by George #. Smith was # First rate space opera. Shambleau  Others by C. L. Moore was # Volume I of the famous Northwest series Northwest of Earth by C. L. Moore was # Volume # of this series Mutant by Lewis Padgett was # The famous Baldy stories Mel Oliver Si Space Rover on Mars Adventure with a circus in space The Complete Book of Outer Space by Ley, von Braun etc. was # Symposium of space travel over # Illustrations The Starmen by Leigh Brackett was # Adventure In space # East #th Street New York #, N. Y. Ash for our illustrated list and newspaper. one across Doing puzzles is an escape, eh? Then how was it Norman found himself so boxed in? Tt ' for better or for worse," Norman answered without turning from the paper-littered table. "And you knew about it before you took me. Ella smothered a sigh. Not even feminine logic could refute that one. What she hadn't known beforehand was the fiendish ingenuity of crossword compilers. After all, she had reasoned, a square was a square and words were words. There was a limit to both, and a limit to the interest a grown man should find in them. A year of marriage had taught her otherwise. In good wifely fashion, she had tried to work up an intelligent interest in the things herself. But by the time she'd grasped what a cryptic clue was, that "bender you can take a child on" in four letters could only be knee, Norman had moved on to skeletons. She struggled gamely after, but before she'd blacks in, Norman had discovered the delights of coded puzzles. It was then that she gave up the unequal contest and looked on sadly while her husband threaded his way into deep and deeper mazes -- square ones, round ones, pyramidal, hexagonal; literary, zoological, mathematical; straight, reversed, double-clued. was lucky, that there were worse vices than an addiction to crosswords. But sometimes she couldn't help feeling lonely and resentful. And then, as she just had, she protested. "It's not as if you ever made anything out of them," she complained, returning to the fray. "Now if one across connects with five down, then five down connects with eleven through." In exactly the same abstracted tone, he said, "I won a gift certificate last year, didn't I?" "And what did you do with it? Bought books of puzzles!" He turned wearily in his chair. "Please, dear, don't badger me. This is the toughest one I've ever tackled. The queerest, too." "Really," she said, yawning. "Well, it's half-past one. I'm going to bed." "Good night, dear," Norman said. "Ah, that's it -- eleven through connects with three up." His words tailed off into incoherence as he scribbled. Ella shrugged hopelessly and went to bed. And so she missed seeing and perhaps it was a good thing she did -- the fruits of her husband's toil. After half an hour of frenzied activity, he laid his pencil aside, frowning perplexedly. He was sure he had found the key to it. He followed his tortuous lines of reasoning back, step by step, and they checked. There was no doubt about it, this was the only possible solution. But it didn't fit. There had to be four interlocking squares, yet how could there be? Unless -- Of course! The puzzle was four-dimensional. It was one across, one down, one through and -- well, he'd have to call it one out for the moment. But that was it! He jumped to his feet in triurriph. He could see it now. He -- He suddenly experienced a feeling of vertigo, making him shut h's eyes and bring his hand up to h;s head. Everything was a yellowish gray. He shouldn't have leaped up like that, he told himself. It was having a strange effect on him. Geometric patterns flowered and dwindled between his eyeballs and his closed lids. They were like nothing else he had ever seen before. Except, perhaps, those trick drawings of cubes that you can't make up your mind whether you're seeing from above or below. Suddenly the moving patterns froze and, the moment after, faded away. The dizziness left him. He opened his eyes thankfully. And he sucked in his breath. For he was no longer in his own living room, but standing in a yellow landscape under a copper-colored sky. riedly and thought hard. He must have been overdoing his solving puzzles lately, he reasoned. That was it -- he had conked out and been removed to the hospital. He was in the grounds now. Perhaps he had lost his memory for a spell; those things happened. But everything would be all right. Crosswords had taught him there was a name for practically everything, so there was sure to be one for this, some Greek or Latin name known to the seriousfaced specialists who would be working on his case this very moment. Yes, everything was going to be all right. Of course. With a desperate calm, he opened his eyes again. Andhis heart sank. These were no hospital grounds. Unless the hospital was underneath him. And unless it was a special kind of place that hung an emerald sun up in the sky just to amuse the patients. Because, for as far as he could see, a rolling sea of saffron-colored grass stretched away. Between gaps in the waves, he could make out a green haze on the horizon that looked like hills. That was all. And this was real; he knew it in every fiber. He didn't stop to reflect how real a thing would appear to somebody with delusions. He knew he wasn't having any. And the sound he was suddenly conscious of was no delusion, either. A metallic clicking like -- like some frightful beast sharpening long claws one against another. He felt his knees weaken. The sound came from his left, from beh'nd a hillock. He was standing almost on the slopes of the hillock, so that it shut out a large sector of his view. He listened. The creature must be as close to the hillock on the other side as he was on this. He realized with a dreadful certainty that there was no sense in fleeing -- not from an enemy he didn't know a thing about. It might be able to clear fifty feet in one bound, for instance. On the other hand, it might have some limitation that could be exploited. There was only one thing for it. Accordingly, he edged his way round the intervening lump of ground. He came to the rim of it, thankful at least that whatever it was on the other side seemed not to have had the same idea. The clicking went on from the same direction, sinisterly and rhythmically. An outcropping of some freakish crystalline rock made a good vantage point. He crouched down, his heart thumping wildly, and peered round it. And there, in that yellow plain, under a green sun and a copper sky -- was an old woman, a gentle-looking old soul, rocking away in a chair -- knitting! T he old woman looked up suddenly; a pair of beady eyes plainly saw him. He stepped out from cover. The effect on the old lady was immediate. Her face broke into a toothless grin.  "A-ah," she quavered. "The collector. Come here, sir. I've been waiting a long time for you." Norman approached her chair warily. "I've got them all at my cabin," she told him excitedly. "All packed and ready. Two hundred and thirty-five." "Two hundred and thirty-five what?" Norman asked in a daze. "Why, chest protectors, of course." Her old eyes narrowed. "Wait, maybe you're a Rebel spy. I've heard tales of spies." Norman looked around baffledly. Startled by the incongruity of a quite mad, but otherwise ordinary enough old woman in the midst of this utterly strange landscape, he hadn't noticed what else might be visible on this side of the hillock. His numbed mind took in several things now. One was a cluster of cabins, white-painted and as ordinary as the old woman. Another was more people. His immediate attention was taken by one striding purposefully toward him. It was a woman, clad in blouse and jodhpurs. The face, though young, looked as functional as the outfit. She halted, a couple of feet away, looking him over as if he were a horse. Then, before he could frame the questions he was bursting to ask, she said abruptly, "Anagram of cart horse." Even in such bewildering circumstances, it was almost reflex for Norman. "Why -- er -- orchestra." The girl nodded approvingly and stuck out a hand. "At last! I'd begun to give up hope. My name's Miss Hoff. Miss Hoff." "Happy to meet you," Norman replied automatically. "Mine's Norman Woods." The old woman pricked up her ears. "Woods, you say, son? Not kin of Colonel Woods of the Fifth New York Cavalry by any chance?" The girl drew Norman away. "She thinks the Civil War's still on. It's best to leave her alone." "Civil War?" Norman echoed. "Then this is an asylum?" "Asylum?" said Miss Hoff. "Heavens, no! You're in another dimension, that's all." "That's all!" He looked around wildly. "Look, I've got to get back! I -- " shaking her head slowly. "There is no way back, Mr. Woods." "But there has to be." His voice started to spiral up toward hysteria. "This is all a dream. Yes, that's it. I'll wake up in a minute and -- " "Steady, steady," said Miss Hoff. "Don't disappoint me. You don't want to get like him, do you?" Norman was aware of an old man, dressed in ancient breeches and buckled shoes. As he ambled past, Norman distinctly heard him muttering, "Where are they? I just walked round 'em and they vanished. What have they done with the horses?" Norman blinked and stared in the wake of the old man. He'd heard of him. But it couldn't be. That had been -- how many years ago? -- a couple of centuries or more. "Bathurst's always looking for the horses," Miss Hoff said contemptuously. "At least old Mrs. Lockhart hasn't let it shake her from what she thinks is still her duty. It just demonstrates the superior adaptability of the female." "Have it your way," Norman said impatiently. "But will you kindly tell me just what I have to adapt myself to? How did I get here? And you? And the others?" "How? Because of visualization while following some intricate line of thought. I, for example, was working out a complex theorem in higher mathematics. Mrs. Lockhart was knitting comforts for the troops. Unfortunately she chose a rather complicated pattern. As for Bathurst, heaven knows what he was working out. I gave up asking long ago." "But how can we all be here at the same time?" Norman objected. "Somebody from the eighteenth Century and somebody from Civil War times -- and us?" He laughed raggedly. "Or did you come from Ancient Rome?" Miss Hoff looked at him frigidly. "I was born in #. I was translated in #. I was something of a child prodigy. The reason we can all be here at the same time is that time goes at only about a quarter of its normal rate in this world." "But how is it you -- almost seemed to be expecting me? And that anagram business, what was that? A password or something?" Miss Hoff smiled enigmatically. "That can wait for the time being. Let me show you around our little settlement first. Oh, this is Jimmy." She turned to a vacantlooking youth who had just come out of one of the cabins. "Say hello to Mr. Woods, Jimmy. He's new here." The youth looked at Norman for an uncomprehending moment, then shuffled on. "A sad case of mental retardment," Miss Hoff commented. "But how did he get across? I thought you said it was a matter of the mind being engaged in a complex problem." him with a steady eye. "That is something I've never been able to explain. Perhaps there's a certain trigger level, higher or lower according to the mentality of the individual. Anyway, whatever the cause, the effect is a rare one, as witness the small number here -- only five in a century and a half; six now with you. And there were only one or two before then. I disinterred a few sets of bones to check what the natives told me." "Natives?" Norman echoed in alarm. "What kind of natives?" "Oh, not human ones. But friendly. You'll see one soon." The tour of inspection took little time. The few cabins were comfortably, if primitively, furnished. Miss Hoff led him to her own. "And this is Feen," she said as they entered. "He's the only native regularly here. The rest are busy building the city." But Norman wasn't listening; he was too busy gaping at the creature who stood deferentially before them. Under a face like the Cheshire Cat's, the torso was passably human. It was the lower appendages that were really odd -- four stumpy legs on which the body stood upright as if on an undercarriage. "All done, ma'am," Feen squeaked. "Good," said Miss Hoff. "You may go." Feen bowed low and retired. Miss Hoff gestured to Norman to sit down. He did so gratefully. A sudden thought occurred to him. "Where's the other member of the happy band?" he asked. Miss Hoffs face darkened. "He, Mr. Woods, is a disgrace to your sex. He spends all his time drinking." Norman reflected that Miss Hoffs standards seemed altogether too high. If a man, marooned in this outlandish place, took to drink, he had every right to. "How did he get across?" he asked. "The same way I did. He was a mathematician, too. A fine mind. But mind is no good without strength of character." Her eye was on Norman. "That is why I hope you will prove worthy of my trust." "Look," Norman said, "don't talk to me of trust. It seems to me I'm being asked to take a whale of a lot on trust myself. For instance, you told me there's no way back. You also told me that you came over in #. So will you tell me how you happen to be wearing a nylon blouse?" H er composure flickered for a moment. Then she smiled thinly. "Very observant of you. I'm glad you are. But I didn't want to explain everything until you were in a calmer frame of mind." "And I shan't be in that," Norman told her, "until you do explain. There is a way back, isn't there?" "There is, Mr. Woods. I use it to bring back things we need. But it only works for me. It needs a knowledge of higher math and an unusual ability to visualize. You have to see your way back." "I saw my way here," he said doggedly. "I can see my way back." She leaned back in her chair. "Try then. But you'll be wasting your time. Imagine a forest and a thousand and one paths branching from Point A. Only one of them reaches Point B. A man leaving B would be bound to reach A. But if he left A to reach B, the odds would be a thousand to one against him. A poor analogy, but it may serve to prove to you that a return journey isn't as easy as the one here." Norman looked at her, his suspicion withering into a despairing conviction that she was telling the truth. "Anyway," she went on, "you'll have better things to do. Naturally, I had a purpose in getting you here." "Getting me here?" He stared at her. "You were expecting me then!" "Well, not exactly you, but someone. You see, it took a good bit of working out. I had somehow to lead a mind into the path. In the end, I had the idea of incorporating it in a crossword puzzle. Getting it accepted in the paper was the hardest part, but I managed it. You seem to be the only one who solved it." He gaped at her, then collapsed, despite himself, in laughter. "You mean -- I won the prize? This -- " He flapped a helpless hand. Her reaction was plainly disapproving. "This, Mr. Woods, is worth more than any Earthly prize. Here you have a great mission. You, young and a man, are ideally suited -- apart from a certain flippancy which I trust you will learn to curb. My main fear was that only another woman, or an old man, would have solved it. I would have had to try again." Norman's laughter halted. "How do you mean?" "Because," she said calmly, "my aim is to build a new world here. It must be obvious to you that neither of the two males you have seen is suitable for the purpose. And the other one -- " she shuddered -- "is disgusting." her meaning to grow clear. Then he recoiled visibly. Miss Hoff looked affronted. "The notion disturbs you?" "But I -- I'm married," he stuttered, grasping at the first excuse handy to avoid the clutches of a female as cold and forbidding as this. "Nonsense. That's in another world." She fixed a stern eye on him, as if divining the true reason for his reaction. "And you can forget all the romantic absurdity of the so-called culture you left behind. It only diverted energies that could be better used in other directions, as well as obscuring the chaotic state of things there." She leaned toward him. "Don't you see the opportunity here? A chance to start all over again, to build such a civilization as Earth has never known -- a rule of the intellect. The natives here will supply the manual labor gladly. Their whole delight in life is serving others. In fifty years, we can build a Utopia." Her eyes gleaming, the severely practical Miss Hoff seemed as near to emotion as he had yet seen her. The trouble was, he didn't care for that particular emotion. And then a thought struck him that filled him with a blind and futile rage. "You fool!" he exploded. "You talk of intellect! Yet you snare me, uproot me, for some lunatic idea -- and all the time it wasn't necessary. You could have begun your dynasty on Earth. You didn't need a man here." "Do you think it would have been so easy?" she answered imperturbably. "Not with the right kind of man, anyway. Besides, it won't be just a one-time affair. And you will have other duties. such as the upbringing of the children. Women will be liberated in this world. It's laid down in the Code of Conduct. But that can wait until you've settled down. I have gone into the matter scientifically. Procreation must be undertaken with a quiet mind." Norman looked into her face and realized that she meant it -- every word of it. She must have read it out of books. She had grown from child to woman in a world cut off from all the pleasures of civilization. All the time she must have been planning to this end. It was going to be some crackpot Utopia. And what would he be to posterity? Norman the First? Or Procreating Unit One? He shivered. '"Meanwhile," she said, "we eat and then to bed. I have a cabin prepared for you." N orman lay awake for a long time, tired though he was, pondering on the spot he was in. It could have been worse, he supposed. Whatever Miss Hoff's faults, she seemed to have organized things well. The cabins were comfortable and pleasant. The supper had been uncooked and vegetarian -- that was also in the Code of Conduct, she told him -- but it had been palatable. But it was the sheer wrench of things that hurt. He was completely lacking in any Robinson Crusoe aptitudes. His daily round, quiet and humble as it may have been, had been enough; he had been content. He felt a wave of self-pity flood through him -- a heartfelt regret that he'd ever set eyes on that damned puzzle. But it was too late now, he told himself. He'd have to accept things. The thought that that included mating with the formidable Miss Hoff brought him out in a cold sweat. Wait, though! He didn't have to play ball! But his efforts to tell himself that weren't very successful. He had a strong suspicion that Miss Hoff had means of enforcing her will. She was sure to have the natives on her side. She had probably bought them over with baubles she brought back from Earth. He wondered sleepily what she used for money on those trips. Perhaps this place was crawling with gold; perhaps... It seemed that he had only just dropped off to sleep when he felt a hand shaking him by the shoulder. He blinked up indignantly. A man stood over him, holding a lantern. '"Who are you?" Norman demanded. "Ambrose Gedge," the man said. "I was otherwise engaged when you arrived." Norman's nostrils bore to his sleep-fuddled brain a strong aroma of alcohol. So this was the other member of the settlement. "Pleased to meet you," he grumbled. "But did you have to come to say hello in the middle of the night?" He turned over. "But I came to say good-by." The man's voice was thick. "And to wish you good luck. I'm going off to the mountains. I couldn't stand the sight of you and -- and Bertha -- together." Norman turned back. "Bertha?" "Miss Hoff." Gedge, a tubby red-faced man, seemed overcome with emotion. "I envy you your luck, old man." "Luck?" Norman echoed. "Of course. A whole little world of your own. And Bertha." He sighed. "What a type! So proud, so masterly." M arveling at the wide range of people's tastes, Norman stared at him. "Only one trouble with her," Gedge went on, "she's too damn finicky. First day I was here, I thought I was going to have fun -- but that put Bertha right off; That's what drove me to the bottle. That put her off even more. A vicious circle, my friend." He shook his head sadly. "I thought she was coming 'round to my way of thinking, but then she got this crossword plan. Now my chances are finished." "You're welcome to her," Norman said, "and to this place. I'd give my right arm to get away." "You would?" Gedge seized him by the shoulder. "Well, you can if you want to." Norman jerked upright, blinking unbelievingly at him. "But Miss Hoff said it needed higher math and visualization. I can visualize, but I'm not much good at math." Gedge winked. "You can get a headache from higher math; you can also get it from hitting yourself over the head with a mallet. Come over to my cabin. I'll show you something." Wide awake now, Norman dressed hurriedly and followed Gedge, telling himself not to hope too much, that it might all be the ravings of a drunk. Dawn was breaking. Nobody else was in sight. Gedge showed Norman into his cabin. He ferreted under his bed, fetched out something covered in cloth and unwrapped it. The first sight of it half-confirmed Norman's fears. It was a framework of sticks, lashed together in a complicated and seemingly purpose'ess structure. "This," said Gedge, "is the way back. It's a visual aid. Getting back is harder, as Bertha probably told you. But she doesn't know that I found it my way. The only thing is that you have to get pretty drunk for it to work." "Anything," said Norman fervently. "Good." Gedge thrust a large earthenware bottle at him. Norman took a gulp and coughed. It was fiery stuff. "Only native rotgut, I'm afraid," the other said apologetically. "Bertha refuses to bring me any real stuff back with her." "But can't you bring your own back?" "Hah, wish I could. I only tried it once. I nearly got arrested back there. It seems that when I disappeared, people thought I'd gone behind the Iron Curtain. And since I was engaged in a secret project, that makes it highly unsafe to go back."  the uproar the case had caused several years back. He offered his sympathies. "It was a dog's life anyway," Gedge said indifferently. "I only thought this gadget up so I wouldn't be dependent on Bertha for supplies. But you get used to even to this stuff. Hey, drink up!" "I'm going as fast as I can," said Norman. "I'm not a drinking man." He took another gulp. "Is it any good trying now?" "Lord, no. You've got to get pickled. Come on, drink." Norman dutifully drained the bottle. Gedge handed him another, chuckling. "I can't wait to see Bertha's face when she finds you're gone." He treated himself to a generous swig at the thought "I bet she'll -- " He broke off, startled, as a rapping sounded on the door. "Bertha!" he whispered hoarsely. "Quick, hide behind the door." Norman jumped to it. Gedge opened the door cautiously. "Ah, your good pardon, sir," came a quavering voice. "But have you seen a coach and horses? I was -- " Norman heard Gedge's breath exhaled in a shuddering sigh. "They went thataway," he said. G edge turned back, sweating heavily. "Come on, drink up. We've got no time to lose. I can't stand the strain." Norman choked down another mouthful. "But how do I know where I'll get back? I mean he disha -- hey, hear that? We're getting somewhere! But I mean he disappeared in Europe. What if I turn up in the middle of the Atlantic?" "No fear of that, old man. I've mapped out the contangency. All of Earth touches only a small area here. Where do you want to get back to?" "New York." "Mm -- well, we can arrange that. Though we'd better make it out in the country just to be on the safe side. The map's over there, under my pillow. Get it, will you?" Norman didn't realize until he staggered that this was a test. "Good," said Gedge. "That ought to do it. Let's get outside. We'll take a bottle apiece to make sure." Though it was quite light now, the coast seemed clear as they picked their way between the dunes. "Well, take one for the road," said Gedge. "Now -- look at this." Norman squinted at the gadget. "Start from this point. Now follow to this one. See? No, don't close one eye -- that won't do. Now follow from one point to the next." Norman did as he was told. But all he felt was dizziness. "It's no good," he said after a couple of minutes effort. "Keep at it," Gedge said. "Wait -- " he cocked an ear -- "what was that? No, keep on looking." He lurched over to the outcropping of rock and peered around it.  He turned back instantly, his face white. "For heaven's sake, hurry! It's Bertha. She must have missed you." Norman tried again. From one joint of the gadget to the next, his eyes followed feverishly. His head spun. "It's no good," he groaned. He staggered. And then he seemed to be falling, falling... staring blearily up at a blueuniformed figure. "Where am I?" he asked weakly. "You're in South Orange police station, bud. Boy, were you tight! You'll have some explaining to do to the judge in the morning." "Judge?" said Norman joyously. He was back then! He struggled to a sitting position, but the effort was too brutal. He raised a hand to his splitting head. The cop looked at him oddly. "Well, if the thought of the judge makes you so happy, you'll like knowing that you have some explaining to dobefore you meet him. The call's been out for you for two days. The little lady's on her way here now." Two days? Of course, the time rate. But Ella? How could he start explaining? "Seems she left you doin' a crossword puzzle or somethin'." The cop scratched his head. "I've heard of queer things drivin' a man to drink, but -- " "That was the last time," said Norman devoutly. "Never again." "Yeah, that's what they all say." "I didn't mean drinking," said Norman. Taylor Caldwell. Gold Medal Books, #c written a science fiction book. Instead, this is pure fantasy, envisioning a near future in which God is fed up with the murderous antics of Man and poisons the Earth against him. There is no rain and nothing edible will grow. The fertile lands are overgrown with a weed that harbors a huge poisonous insect whose bite is fatal. Food supplies are being rapidly depleted. The situation is worldwide, but censorship in the various countries prohibits the printing of any information. Delegates still argue in the United Nations, Aand Hbombs are still boastfully exploded. The story is told by a young married veteran whose father, a patient. Joblike tower of strength, is the only one who recognizes the pestilence as Divine Retribution. Maybe you or I would quibble with Miss Caldwell's picture of Earth abandoned and the behavior of the starving populace or the idea of Divine Retribution. However, many stretches of the book have a Biblical power. All in all, a disturbing plea for sanity and peace. No argument there, at least. Press, Inc., # T he title is completely descriptive of the book. This strange, yet amusing little story is written in the form of a report by the secretary of the Combined Scientific Societies of the U. S. A. to the Secretary of Science, evidently a new Cabinet post, on April #, #. It concerns the Status Quo, but not Ihe one we are familiar with, being a preliminary account in advance of the full scientific reports of the events that led to the disorganization of the world. It appears that in # and '#, while the rest of the world was unprecedented rainy dry season as well as a very rainy rainy season washed away the topsoil of the Hinche Plateau in the interior of Haiti. The bluish Nitroearth thus exposed is the cause of all the trouble. It is Mesozoic in origin, having been covered nowhere on Earth so close to the surface as in this spot in Haiti. Due to the global preoccupation with the war, no one except James Carstairs, a sociologist, and Sylvia Rendle, a journalist, who were unfortunate enough to be marooned on the plateau for a year, realized that Man was about to lose his unchallenged grip on the planet. Exposed to the revitalizing sunshine, the Nitro-earth is giving up its hoarded store of dinosaur eggs and parasitic disof years ago. The report is a personalized account of the beginning of this struggle against Nature. Very impressive, too, both in scholarship and tension. Rachel Carson. Houghton Mifflin Co., # way, on Long Island, N. Y. we have more sea than anything else except trouble with the L. I. R. R. Of the two. I'll take the sea any time -- especially the sea as Rachel Carson describes it Miss Carson takes us into many of her intimate seashore spots and shows us wonders there that we never would suspect existed in such barren surroundings. I recall one day this year that my kids and I watched a tremendous horde of egg-shaped mole crabs, uprooted by successive waves, burrowing simultaneously until, in a flash, there was nothing to be seen but sand and a receding wave, leaving a sense of illusion. From Miss Carson's description of these creatures, I would swear that she was looking over my shoulder and reading my reactions. It is a fascinating book that has us waiting impatiently for warm weekends to return so that we can discover other marvels for ourselves. It is also a beautiful book, with excellent illustrations by Bob Hines of U. S. Fish #s Wildlife Service on almost every page. It doesn't have the sweep and grandeur of The Sea Around Us, but neither does its subject matter. It's a homy book about saltwater neighbors. Hector MacPherson. Philosophical Library, # fine broth of a book Dr. MacPherson has written, too. In simple, clear fashion, it takes the novice through the heavens, starting with the Northern Stars, which change position least throughout the year. From them, after pointing out unmistakable signposts, he proceeds to the constellations, taking them one by one and listing the items of interest in each, following the seasonal changes of the sky. An added bonus is a section of star maps at the end, which delineates the important constellations and denotes the magnitude of the constituent stars. MY by Fred Hoyle. Harper  Brothers, # A handsome and fascinating book indeed. The style is attractive and often witty, especially in the information and theories the author blithely tosses about. Naturally you know that Mother Earth is now thought to of two -- but that means that the gal we've been stuck on all our life turns out to be twice as old as we thought. Not only did Hoyle disillusion me thusly, but he claims that the Earth did not start out as a molten sphere, as we had been taught, but as an agglomeration of cold bodies that stuck together and gradually squeezed the lighter elements to the surface. He also theorizes that hydrocarbons existed before the Earth and that far more is trapped below the surface than is suspected. Hoyle really comes into his own, though, on the cosmic scale with the generation of galaxies! The book pictorially is on the same grand scale as the text, with almost fifty exceptional photos by the largest instruments extant, as well as numerous line drawings. Robert Silver berg. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, # T his is a book that I would have liked when I was a youngster. Silverberg knows his audience and they're his equals, as they should be, while he relates his fast-moving story of a new space cadet caught up in a series of events that prove almost too much for his divided loyalty. Larry Stark is the cadet, son of a commander in the Patrol and convinced through his training that Earth can do no wrong, that even the Jovian colonial revolt, quelled bloodily by Terra, was in no way caused by Earth. His friend on his shakedown cruise to Alpha Centauri is a Martian youth, loyal to the Patrol but wise enough to see the justice of the colonies' position. When they arrive at Alpha C IV, they find that three of the four settlements have revolted against Earth rule. And when Larry sees banners with slogans like "No Taxation without Representation," they awaken in him an understanding of history that kids will excitedly share. Duka and Helena Kolda. Harper #s Brothers, # T his book could be a transcription of any modern child's dreams. It was almost impossible for me to tear it it of the avid hands of my family in order to do this review. An average boy, Martin, who could be you -- at an early age, of course -- builds himself a contraption of tin-foil, candy boxes, radio tubes, Slinky the spring and his Space Helmet. Only, Joy of Joys, it works! He establishes communication with a golden-haired beauty from Marinoid, Saturn's Moon of the Sea, on which there is no solid land. They make a date to meet at Battery Park via matter transference and then proceed to have one heckuva adventurous day at Coney Island. Martin's broke, but his gal is a real golden-hair. They hock a lock, attracting the greedy attention of a lurking cad who chases them throughout the day for the gold of her hair. Martin thwarts the blackguard in true Boy-hero style. The photos by Miss Kolda are done in wonderful keeping with the joyful make-believe spirit of the book. Slave Ship Conclusion Here was the end product of this war that was not a war -- on entire naval task force to protect some dogs and apes and seals! L ogan moeller is my name, Lieutenant, j.g., UJf. Naval Reserve. I was a combat officer of the line in what we laughingly called the Cold War -- laughingly because, with a very cold; and because, when you stopped and looked around, it wasn't exactly a war. How can you have a war without an enemy? The Caodais weren't a country; they were a religion that had swept up out of Indo-China, overrun Asia, Oceania and Africa, and were obviously well on the way to adding the rest of the world. You can't declare war on a religion, can you? And so it wasn't war, but meanwhile we fought and died and took prisoners. Elsie, for instance, was only one prisoner out of hundreds of thousands -- but she was the one that counted with me because she was my wife. She had volunteered, months before the universal draft could have caught her, and she had been captured. While I was on combat duty at sea, it wasn't so bad -- I had other things on my mind. But then I was transferred -- to a strange shore station: Project Mako, where it learn how to talk to animals. What did they have to do with i fighting the Caodais? Senior Lieutenant Semyon Ilyitch Timayazev, late of KrasK '"ritx-' Ji, noye Armee, now, since the Red Army no longer existed, a military attache of the People's Democratic Tsarist Republican Russian Government-in-Exile, was assigned to Project Mako because, apparently, his mother had been one of Pavlov's assistants decades before. With him, I managed to get somewhere with the actual task of manning a fighting submarine with animals and it began to seem that our project might get somewhere. But the Cold War suddenly began hotting up. Worst of all was something called: The Glotch -- "unidentified ballistic phenomenon, presumably hostile." It was a kind of radiation burn that killed, almost every time, and it struck anywhere. If the Caodais had a weapon like that, it was the end of the war -- unless we could knock out that and he plucked Semyon and me and half a dozen of our animals out of Project Mako and put us on a task force to strike at what Intelligence believed to be Caodai headquarters for the new weapon. Our objective was Madagascar -- and Elsie was interned on Zanzibar, and the map showed it to be only a hair away. But there was a girl, a commissioned stripper in a government operated nightclub nearby, where she had been named: Nina Merriam; now she turned up again -- no longer commissioned but an enlisted woman, no longer a stripper but a mess attendant in the aircraft carrier Monmouth's wardroom -- and no longer named Nina Merriam! I dragged her to the executive officer's cabin to have her arrested as a spy, but general quarters sounded; we were in Caodai waters and a bandit flotilla showed up in our sonars! his way to his battle station before the klaxon had stopped blaring. The exec was a moment slower, but not because he was paying any attention to us. He bellowed something into his intercom, listened for a second, bellowed again, and was gone. There was no one left but the girl and me. She said urgently: "Let me go. Lieutenant! You've got this all wrong. I've got to get out of here and -- " I said; "Shut up!" I was feeling jittery. General quarters is a powerful voice of command. I had no battle station on Monmouth; I was supercargo, as useless in an engagement and as undesirable as the wardroom silver the old surface ships used to jettison before a fight. But I didn't want to be useless; I wanted to respond to the alarm, and all I could do was stay here and look ugly at a young girl. Bandits in fleet strength! It wasn't even a wanderer on picket duty or a cruising raider that we might hope to swamp before it could ' transmit a signal. It meant fleet action if they spotted us -- and we I were big enough for anyone to I spot. I felt the angle of the deck change and, simultaneously, a  slowing in the throb of the screws. I could see in my mind just what was happening: We were reballasting our tanks, tipping our diving fins, slowing our propellers to a gentle wash as we headed for the bottom. Under a good thick blanket of the dense, cold Antarctic Deep water, we might not be spotted. Sonar echoes took odd bounces off the interfaces between layers of water of differing densities and of all the water in the Earth's oceans, Antarctic Deep made the sharpest, cleanest interface. That much, at least, was good. T he girl was saying: "I tell you one more time. Lieutenant -- get out of my way. That's a direct order!" "What?" I stared at tier. I was between her and the door, and I was going to stay there. It would have been nice if I had had a weapon. I felt a little foolish. standing there with  my bare hands hanging at my sides, but of course I shouldn't really need any more than bare hands to subdue a hundred-and-five-pound girl. I said: "Fd appreciate it if you'd shut up until the exec gets back. But you're not leaving here, understand that." "I'm not a Cow-dye, you idiot! I'm Nina Willette of Navy Intelligence and you're keeping me from the most important job I've ever done!" she took a deep breath and fought for control of herself. She was, all at once, superbly beautiful as she stood glaring at me, her shoulders thrown back, her eyes filled with fury, and I suppose she knew it very well. They are actors by trade, these cloak-anddagger people; how was a simple line officer like myself to know whether she was telling the truth or not? She said, with an effort: "Look, Lieutenant, I'll explain it to you. I'm Counter-intelligence. I was on security duty when I was a stripper at Boca Raton. I'm on security duty now. There are pacifists in Monmouth's complement, Moeller! Do you know what that means? Right now, we're at battle stations. This is the time when I ought to be out on the prowl, making sure everybody's at his station, looking for trouble before it starts -- and I'm here waiting for a fat-headed j.g. to make up his mind to let me go. Get out of my way!" "Good try," I said, but I was shaken. "Stay where you are." Well, she was some kind of spy or counter-spy, but she was only a girl, and a small one and a young one at that. All of a sudden, her eyes filled with tears. She sobbed and leaned blindly forward; instinctively, I reached out to help her. She clung to me, weeping, and it was like holding a fragrant, sad flower. I hadn't known that enlisted women used perfume. The exec and the encroaching Caodais seemed very remote and I found myself patting her head and saying soothing things. And then the roof fell in. my right ear and there was no one in the exec's office but me; Nina whatever her name was was gone. Lord knows what she hit me with, but it was nothing to what the exec hit me with when he came back for a brief racing second and found me standing dopily in the middle of the floor. I don't suppose he said more than twenty words to me, but every one of them dug deep under the skin and festered. It seems that she was indeed Naval Intelligence. And a full commander at that. lOS I saluted empty air; he was gone already. It seemed like a good place to be out of, so I left. In any case, even though I didn't have a real battle station, there was a place where I was supposed to be. Semyon and I had been assigned a whaleboat, deep in the lower decks of the carrier, far below even the aircraft hangars, below the engineering sections, in the steel belly of the ship, surrounded by jet fuel for the aircraft and diesel oil for the torps and auxiliaries. It was where the animals were kept, for the whaleboat would be our assault vessel for the landing on Madagascar -- if we ever got that far. And it was where I was supposed to be in any action. I headed for it through the roaring tumult of a capital ship at general quarters. There was plenty of noise aboard Monmouth just then, but it was mostly vocal -- the racket of the loud-hailers, the sharp orders of the officers with working parties, the rattle of sighting orders as I passed the fire-control compartments. But the engines were a gentle whisper, barely enough to maintain steerage way. For human voices would not penetrate the ship's hull to give us away to the enemies around us in the dense, chill water draining off the Antarctic ice pack, but the sounds of our screws most surely would. We were well into the Indian Ocean, surrounded by Caodai Africa, Caodai Asia and the inhospitable ice. The Caodais thought of it as their private lake, as we did the Caribbean, and with just as much reason. Even if the sighted Cao!dai vessels missed us, there would be others. Of course, we did have the curtain of the thermoplane over our heads and that was a help. But it iwas as helpful to the Caodais now as to us. I was sympathizing with the men at the sonar stations, pinging into the dark deeps, charting and weighing the echoes that came back. There would be a vhgue splash of light in the sonar screen, warped by distance, almost obliterated by the thermo' plane. Was it a blue whale, a school of fish -- or a Caodai sub? Our real advantage was that  we could fairly assume any sighting was a sub, whereas they might not expect to find us here. whaleboat. He was sitting with the puppies in his lap, talking nervously tP Josie. He blinked at me as I slid in through the entrance hatch. He scrambled to his feet and then: "Oh," he said in relief, "it is you, Logan. I did not know but perhaps it was an admiral. In Krasnoye Armee -- " " -- there were no admirals," I finished for him. "Are the animals all right?" "Oh," he said dourly, "they will perhaps survive, if the rest of us do. Have you news, Logan? Are we to be in combat?" "Can't you hear the squawkbox?" It was rattling a repetition of what it had been saying, at intervals, ever since the first alarm: "Remain at stations. We have lost sonar contact, but the audic listening posts indicate the enemy still on course." Which meant that we had stopped pinging the waters for fear of having them hear our own sonars, but our directional microphones had a fix on the Caodai screws, not muffled as ours were because, it appeared, they did not know we were around. That was good. Now if only they didn't close to a point where even the curtain between the dense, cold water and the bottom and the lighter, warmer, saltier layers above no longer screened us from their sonars. Semyon sat down and lifted the puppies into his lap. He clucked over them and petted them. "Always jumping up and down," he complained. "Is never a moment to sit, or to play chess, or merely to think. Ah, Irkutsk, if only I could see you once again! How precious the memory -- " His voice trailed off; he was i staring past me at the entrance hatch. I turned and there was Nina Willette-or-whatever. She had with her the surly officer named Wilmington and she also had a wide-mouthed, dangerouslooking gim in her hand. I said dazedly, "Lieutenant Timayazev. Commander Willette." Semyon pushed the puppies off his lap and stood up to give her a ramrod Red Army salute, hand twanging wide at the temple like the ancient Coldstream Guards. But he glanced at me inquiringly at the same time. I started to explain, but the girl cut me off. "Inside, Winnington," she said, and gestured with the gun. And to me: "Sorry to barge in like this, but I had to get him out of the way. They'd tear him to pieces back in the fire-control room." " even more sullen. He walked casually over to the navigator's desk, pushed Josie onto the floor and sat. "You've got no right to do this," he observed flatly. "No rightl" she blazed, but Semyon outblazed her. "SvoloctU" he roared at Winnington. "Leave dog alone! She was not hurting you, the dog!" Josie whined her complaints; and then, as she caught the timbre of her boss's voice, barked threateningly: "Go away! Go away!" Winnington looked more alarmed at Semyon and the dog than he had at Nina's gun. "Get these characters off me," he appealed to her. "I ought to let the dog take a bite," she answered. "But we'll save you for better things." She sat down, looking drained, and glanced at me. "Congratulations, Lieutenant," she said. "You almost loused things up, but not quite. I got to Winnington just as he was about to pull the trigger on the Caodais." He said matter offactly: "I was setting up range and vectors. That's all. I wouldn't have fired without an order." She laughed. "Of course not And you're not a pacifist, either, are you?" "Pacifist?" I said, shocked. And Semyon blared: "Patchifist? This one, a patchifist? Logan, leave me turn Josie loose on him! Is first patchifist I have ever in ihy whole life seen!" "Lay off," I begged him. "Tell me about it Nina -- Commander, I mean." "Nina will do," she said wearily. "That's all there is to tell. I was assigned to keep an eye on him; he's been under surveillance for a long time. But he's smart. He didn't make a move-rruntil it could be a big one. If I had been five seconds later, he would have salvoed his whole battery at the Caodais -- and they would have blown us right out of the water ten minutes later." Winnington laughed sharply, but he didn't say anything. He was watching Semyon, cradling Josie in his arms and murmuring to her in Dog, with what appeared to be genuine amusement. A pacifist! I'd seen traces of their work, a newspaper report of a time bomb at the Caodai legation, an Army installation mysteriously ablaze, but as far as I knew, I had never seen one in the flesh. And here was Winnington, my surly bridge partner of the wardroom, revealed as an authentic pacifist! It was like seeing a cobra emerging from a washstand drain -- the essence of evil where only familiar and safe things f should be. I started to question her, but the rattle of the loud-hailers in the passageway stopped me. There was a new tone to the bridge talker's voice: "Attention on deck! All hands to Condition Baker! Bandits past closest point of contact and holding steady on course." And then, humanly: "They missed us!"  yon said nastily, "you have lost your chance!" "Leave him alone," I told him. There was tramping and talking in the passageways as the damage-control parties came up from the fuel tanks, where they had been waiting for possible Caodai hits and almost certain cremation if one occurred. They looked hardly human in their anti-flash face paint and heavy hoods. Josie, spying them from the entrance hatch, barked like a rabid animal. "Hush!" said Semyon to her, and repeated the order in Dog whine. I asked Nina Willette: "Now what? Do you want me to escort you back to the exec's office with this one?" "Give us ten minutes," she said. "Let them cool off a little. We pretty near had a lynching when I arrested him." Winnington might not even have heard her; he continued to watch Semyon try to soothe the disturbed dogs, still with the air of amused detachment. He bent over casually to remove one of the puppies from his shoes and Josie, the vigilant mother, sprang for him. Semyon made a grab and caught her, yipping, by the tail, while the puppies clamored at him. 'Tortune pulverize the fortune-pulverized beasts!" Semyon snarled. "Hush, now! Hush!" And he went on to bawl them out in Dog. Nina said approvingly: "He barks like a native." Semyon glowered at her briefly. But only briefly, because no mere human distraction could keep him from animals. "All right, all right!" he said, in a mock-furious motherly growl. "Semyon will tell you a story. Be calm! A nice story, I promise it." He had spoken in English, but the dogs, and even the seals behind their bars, reacted at once. Apparently they recognized the word "story," which told me a little something I hadn't known before about why Semyon so frequently slipped back to the animal quarters for a few moments before he went to bed. Winnington stared in disgusted unbelief and Nina almost exploded. Well, it was a mad sight: There were the animals, yapping with joy; there was Semyon, oblivious of us all; and there were Nina and Winnington, watching a full-grown fighting man tell bedtime stories to a brood of animals. It must have been even funnier to them than it was to me. ence. It was like tucking a sixyear-old and a three-year-old into bed at the same time. One story will more or less do for both of them, but the differences in vocabulary mean you have to double up on the story as you go along -- something like the facing Hebrew and English pages in the Holy Book they read from at the m Christmas Feast of Lights. Semyon squatted down among the dogs, next to the seal pen, and then it was a steady stream of bark-whine-sniff-and-twitch, shiver-and-whine, grimace-and-growl. The animals were delighted; they followed the story with frantic absorption. And Nina was delighted, too. After the first incredulous stare, she stuffed a handkerchief to her mouth and kept it there, eyes on Semyon. She managed not to laugh out loud, which is more than I could say for Winnington. But Semyon was oblivious. It was the longest monologue in any animal tongue I have ever heard, and I realized that it accounted for a lot in the comparative fluency Semyon had over me in talking with the dogs; it must have been splendid practice. I watched him admiringly as he improvised substitutes for words that did not exist, wagging the tail he didn't have, making the croupy barks that are Seal punctuation. When he finished, the animals applauded wildly. And so did Nina. "Thank you very much," she said sincerely, regaining her self-control. Semyon asked suspiciously: "For what, thanks?" "For telling us the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I wouldn't have missed it for the world." He looked puzzled. "Oh, no, Commander. Was not Riding Hood. How would that be tactful? Was Goldilocks and Three Bears, don't you see?" He stopped, indignant; Nina had lost her self-control completely on that one. And when she laughed, that broke me up. But it didn't last. Nina stopped short and blinked at me. "What was that?" I felt it, too. The deck pulsed underneath us. A pause, and it pulsed again, as though a blue whale were nuzzling playfully up to Monmouth. But it was no whale, I knew. I had felt the same gentle pulsing on Spruance', I knew the feel of the recoil as a ship's main batteries loosed against an enemy. Winnington grated triumphantly: "Caught me, did you? But maybe there was somebody you missed!" Someone had salvoed a burst of at least a dozen missiles. If we had been hiding, we weren't hiding any more; those missiles were laid on course at the fat and ignorant Caodais as they waddled blissfully away from us. But they wouldn't be waddling any more. XV figured. While the four of us and the animals waited in the whaleboat, the loud-hailers roared orders and the ship lurched continually against the recoil of missiles leaving for Caodai targets. And then there was a shudder that was not a missile leaving the tubes. A Caodai torpedo had exploded against our deflection net, close enough to jar us all, and then another, and more, and one final one that was not against the net but against the hull of Monmouth. We were hit, and badly. And even that was notthe end. Monmouth took six direct hits by my own count, standing helpless in the whaleboat. The ship was hurt. Our lights failed and then went on again as the secondary circuits cut in. The secondaries failed and our own whaleboat batteries lit the little cabin as I cut in the sealer switches. Outside in the passageways, there was no power at all, at least in our deep)-laid section of the keelson, but from far away I could hear the rattle of the loud-hailers, and what they snapped out sharply was: "All auxiliaries abandon ship! All auxiliaries abandon ship!" And that was the beginning of long hours of death-in-life for the four of us. We hugged the bottom, squatted there and waited. Crippled Monmouth was still fighting. We could hear the distant explosions; but there wasn't anything we could do about it. Communication was impossible; the deeps were shuddering with explosions enough to drown out any call. To fight was out .of the question: Our whaleboat had no armament, for the space for the missile rackets and projectile tubes had been preempted by the animal pens. We squatted and waited. There came a time when the noise of combat slacked off and seemed more distant. I cut out the ruptured "eardrums" of our sound-ranging gear and tried to take a fix. There was still fighting, but it was drifting south of us and east. Nina said over my shoulder, watching the indicator needles: "They're running for it. The Caodais are chasing them." It seemed that way, but whatever Monmouth was up to, we had still only one choice -- to wait. If we were spotted by any Caodai, even a corvette, we were done; but if we stayed dead and silent on the ocean floor, we had a prayer of a hope. We would be spotted, no doubt about it, but spotted as a hulk of metal, nothing more. And the floor of the Indian Ocean just about there was rich in metal hulks. even harder on the animals. Josie was anxiously asking what was goiqg on, the puppies were alternately demanding food and whining for their box, the seals in their pens were barking worriedly. The process of learning had gone both ways. While we were picking up Dog and Seal, they were picking up Human Intonations. They could tell we were upset and there is nothing in the world more likely to upset an animal that that knowledge. "Quiet, quiet," pleaded Semyon in English and Dog and Seal. "You will drive me insane, you beasts." He pushed the puppies to the floor and called Josie to attend to them. "Dog," he said, but not to the animals; he was glowering at Winnington, silent against the hull of the whaleboat. "Leave him alone," I said. Semyon switched his glower to me. "Leave him alone, it is? But did he leave us alone? He sent us to the bottom, Logan! Filthy patchifist, he fired the guns!" Winnington asked morosely: "From here?" "Hah," said Semyon. "No, not you, but your brother patchifist, whoever he was. For peace you did it? Pig, how would it be for peace to make war?" "For ultimate peace!" Winnington flared. "You think we like killing people, we peacemen? You're f an idiot if you think that peace means sitting quiet and taking punishment." He was flushed and excited, taking a queer pleasure in the fact that we were all of us near death. "That is not pacifism, that's stupidity! We must tight for peace, we must destroy the enemy. Kill everybody who might kill us -- then, only then, we'll have peace!" We let him rant himself out while, very cautiously, we rocked the whaleboat free of the mud and crept quietly to the thermoplane. We were no longer getting sounds of battle in the audic apparatus. Either the battle was over or out of range -- or it was perhaps fairly close, but masked by the interface between the bottom water and the warmer waters above. The thermographs showed us when we breached the interface. I cut the drive, cut the ventilator switches, cut every motor that could give out a sound, and we listened as hard as we could. The little torp began instantly to settle, but we had plenty of water under us and the important thing was to be all ears, no sound, until we found out what was going on around us. speed the diving vanes ceased to bear us up and we slid downward, closer to the thermoplane we had just crossed. The autopilot began frantically manufacturing course corrections. It flipped the diving vanes and the rudders like a panicked barnyard hen, and when that produced no effect, it began to beep complainingly. I snapped its cut-off switch and it was silent again, and we listened. Nothing. Nina said: "Do you think we ought to try the sonars?" I shook my head and started the motors as we sank under the thermoplane again. "No sense looking for trouble. If somebody's playing possum close by, they'll hear us on their audic, all right -- but if we ping them, they won't even have to be close by." I locked in the autopilot. "Now what?" I asked. We had a long debate over what to do next. But it could only be decided one way. There was a Caodai installation on Madagascar, little more than three hundred miles away. Our mission was to survey it; if necessary, to attempt to destroy it. We would carry out our mission. Surprisingly, even Winnington agreed. "Very patriotic," he sneered. "But I'll go along. The sooner we wipe out those rats, the sooner the Peace Party can rule America." "Very patriotic," Semyon agreed moodily. "Also quite wise. I think. Because -- am I wrong, Logan? -- we do not really have a choice; we are ten thousand miles from home. And this little boat they give us, its range is not more than a thousand." Madagascar was only three hundred miles away -- but the island was a thousand miles long. It was touch-and-go whether we would make it. Semyon swore gloomily, coaxing the power reserves along. We crept on the bottom, taking our position from sonar soundings and one daring midnight surfacing for a star fix. We made it We hovered in a muddy little estuary while Semyon talked lengthily to one of the seals. Then we bribed the seal into the aft ejection tube. It wasn't necessary to blast him out with compressed air; he could swim free. He pilotfished us up the little river as far as we dared go in the whaleboat, coming back to report and going forth to scout again. It was tedious but reasonably safe. out to scout; it was night and we were in a little cove, hidden by tangled growth. They were gone forever, and came back covered with mud. "Is a terrible place, Logan," Semyon groaned. "I thought we would be captured many times. But -- it is there." "Target Gamma?" "One presumes so." He sighed. "There is a small town on this bank of the river. Perhaps two miles past it is a ring of labor camps. And in the center of the ring, something which is guarded. I did not myself see it, you understand, but Josie says it smells secret." It was nearly dawn. Semyon was worn out, but Josie was as frisky as a puppy. She tended her brood while we were talking and demanded to be included in the party when we were through. We left Semyon to watch over Winnington and the other animals. Nina, Josie and I made up the party that proposed to knock out the Caodai's secret-weapon base. A girl, a dog and me. Struggling into her Madagascan coolie outfit -- slacks, sweater, floppy hat -- Nina saw my expression and laughed. "Cheer up, Moeller," she said. "There's only about five million Caodais on the island. Not bad odds." I found myself grinning back at her. It was a queer thing -- I couldn't help thinking about it, even with the approaching raid on my mind. Nina was an easy girl to get along with. It had been a long time since I had paid much attention to other girls. Why was it that now, with Elsie, comparatively speaking, almost within reach, I was suddenly noticing how sweet and -- and charming, I had to confess it, another girl was? It wasn't a line of speculation I really wanted to follow to its end. I was glad when we slipped out of the upper hatch and climbed ashore to get started. bled the man in the yellow robe. "Vous etes bien pressee?" "Idiot," Nina muttered to me in English. "I told you to take it easy." She smiled appealingly at the priest and spoke to him in rapid-fire French. I could make out only part of it: We were freshly arrived from Tananarive and looking for work; could he direct us to a rooming house? The Caodai shook his head. Without much interest, he yawned and stretched and asked to see our passports. That presented a problem, because Nina didn't have one. Semyon and I had been issued the best set of forged credentials Naval Intelligence could cook up, but no one had planned for Nina to be along. However, Nina's French could get by and mine couldn't, so we were in trouble either way; we had decided to pass as man and wife and hope that one passport would do for both. Nina kept up a clamor of questions and comments while the priest was looking over the yellow card that identified me as an agricultural worker of French origin. There were plenty of them on Madagascar, hangovers from the colonial days and the overthrow that followed. The priest had evidently been up all night and real'.y just wanted to collect a toll for crossing the footbridge. He tossed the document back at me and growled: "Foutez le camp, touse les deux." We paid him and moved along. As soon as we were across the bridge into the town itself, Nina turned on me. "Moeller," she snapped, "if you can't relax, we'll never get through. Walk slowly! You've supposedly been walking a long way and you're tired. Hop like a grasshopper and you'll attract attention." T transferred the cord tied to Josie's collar to my other hand. "Sure," I said. 'What do we do, amble casually right through the town?" 'What else?" It was early morning, but already the streets were crowded. Most of the people moving about the narrow streets were Arab-African mixtures of one hue or another, but there was an admixture of Orientals and a handful of Europeans. More than half of the Orientals wore the yellow robes, blouse or shorts of the Caodais. But they were not alone; several priests we passed were obviously nearly pure African. Caodaism, like the Mohammedans before them, practiced a rigid sort of tolerance; there was no distinction in skin color or creed for them -- if the man whose skin was in question Caodai revelations and, if called up, join the Caodai armed forces. throughout the Asian and African f The streets were not only narrow; they wound like wormholes in an apple. I had to consult Josie's superior sense of direction -- bending and talking to her under pretense of loosening her collar -- to keep us heading straight through the town. She was almost the only leashed dog in sight and therefore attracted a little more attention than I liked; the Madagascan custom appeared to be to let dogs roam the streets, as unhampered and as privileged as a Benares bull. Everyone, it appeared, spoke French. I remembered that the Caodais themselves had come from a section of the Indonesian peninsula once under French rule, and of course Madagascar had been French for nearly a century. ' All the same, it seemed odd to hear brown, black, tan and yellow faces conversing in the language I associated with bombed-out cities and finishing schools. your eyes on your lunch." We were sitting beside the road as a company of Caodai infantry swung past. There was a sort of clearing in the vegetation, on the outskirts of the little town we had crossed; there were Oriental vendors of foods and we were not the only ones who had paused there for a bite to eat. The Caodai soldiers paid no attention to any of us, being disciplined, eyes-front troops. They passed. Nina left me for a moment with the dog and talked briefly to one of the vendors. She came back with a handful of dried dates and two CocaColas and said: "Security troops, I think. There are slave labor camps ahead. Does Josie recognize this road?" I spoke to the dog; she growled back dubiously. "It smelled altogether different," I translated to for Nina, "but she thinks it's the same place. It has something to do with daytime smells and nighttime smells." Nina nodded. "It checks. Labor camps beyond the bend in the road, something big on the other side of them. According to the Coke man, there's nothing to stop us going right along the road -- all the Caodai installations are off to one side, on the bank of the river." It was high noon, or nearly, and most of the other pedestrians were disappearing down side roads and into shops and cafes. Nina and I conferred briefly and followed their example. We struck out boldly down one of the little dirt paths toward the river, looking for a place to use as a base of operations. No one stopped us; no one paid any attention. I was expecting Caodai infantrymen to pounce out at us from behind every tree. I must have shown it, because Nina snapped: "I told you, Logan, relax. Nobody's going to bother us." She was right. After all, we were not a platoon of commandoing Marines, anti-flash painted, tommygun-carrying, camouflagehelmeted. We were only a man and a woman and a dog; if I had seen a party like ours anywhere in the United States, I would scarcely have noticed it. Except -- Come to think of it, I would have noticed such a party. I said curiously to Nina: "See anything unusual about these people? Civilians! Outside of the Caodai priests and the troops that marched by in the road -- how many have you seen in uniform?" She nodded thoughtfully. "A pMuliar way to fight a war, I guess. You'd think they'd be as deep in this thing as we are, wouldn't you? Now look," she said, dismissing it, "how about holing up here and sending Josie in for a look?" on the shore of the river, where we might appear to be resting and enjo#ung the view if anyone should come along. I talked to Josie long enough to make sure she imderstood. Josie was a patient dog, but she had very little comprehension of just what we humans were about, there on the banks of the Madagascan creek. She wasn't a stray mutt and she didn't want to act like one; she complained that she had been told many times that it was impolite and inexcusable to eat out of garbage piles or cans -- and yet that was what we were asking her to do now, to justify her wanderings. She was a wellbrought-up dog who had been taught to stay close to her home and master and -- I finally snarled loud enough to convince her; she rolled over on her back and I had to pat her stomach to let her know we were still friends. With the canine equivalent of a shrug, she started out. Hours passed and she didn't come back. "Dogs have no sense of time," I explained to Nina, possibly for the hundredth time. She said reluctantly: "I know. I'm sorry if I'm pestering you. But I'm getting worried." We had something to worry about, I agreed -- but I didn't agree out loud. I was the junior member of our expedition, and though we had never articulated a command relationship, I was "suggestions" as orders. Spying was her line of work, not mine. But it was dark and we were in enemy territory and a good bet to be shot out of hand in case someone asked us questions. Our scout was overdue reporting back and Nina was getting worried. And without any fuss, our relative positions changed. We were no longer commander and jaygee; we were worried woman and -- however falsely -- reassuring man. I liked it much better that way. "Stay here. I'll take a look around," said the man to the woman. "The devil you will," said the commander to the jaygee. "Use your fat head for something, Logan. How do you expect to find the dog -- whistle all the way from here to the Caodai installation?" I said reasonably: "Of course not. I just want to take a look around -- " "No." So that was that -- for the time being. B ut time passed and Josie stayed away; and what it came down to in the long run was the choice of which of us should go looking. And I won, if you can call it that. Madagascar was an unfriendly place, after dark of a night. I could hear vehicles on the paved road, but I stayed off it. I could hear voices, now and again, around the houses that fronted on the river, but I gave them a wide berth. I felt uncomfortably like a fawn somehow forced to slink through Central Park from end to end, avoiding the worrisome human smell all about. Only I was more purposeful than a fawn, of course; closer perhaps to a beast of prey -- a fox, say, trying to raid a henhouse. And unaware (or all too frighteningly aware) that the henhouse was guarded by mastiffs. I wasn't so much looking for the dog as trying to accomplish the dog's job. If Josie turned up where Nina waited in the clearing, good; Nina would hold her there until I returned. But if not, we couldn't stay there forever. It would then be my spied-out information we would go back to the whaleboat with, not Josie's. All I wanted was one clear look at the secret installation up ahead. Much more than that I couldn't hope for, but from whatever I could find out then, we could plan. There were lights ahead. I was on the brink of the woods, facing a plowed-up open strip that surrounded a lighted, barbed-wireenclosed compound -- the prison camps, I supposed. There were Caodai guards emplaced about the fence, but not so close to me that I had to worry about them. Their attention would certainly be inward, toward the prisoners. But beyond the barbed wire, perhaps a quarter of a mile, there were two bright-lit yellow brick towers. So far, so good. I skirted the edge of the plowed ground and headed for the lighted towers. I was pretty lucky. I must have gone a hundred yards before they caught me. " the Caodai. "Stay and brood on your crimes. Western swine!" It didn't seem fair for him to call me that; he was as white as I. Fair-haired and chunky, he might have been of Dutch ancestry, but the Caodais didn't care about that. He threw me into a cell and marched his detail away. I was in a yellow-walled room underneath the twin-towered building I had seen alight. Logan, old boy, I told myself, you've had it. Consider this fact: I was out of uniform in Caodai territory -- that made me a spy. It was well known what the Caodai did to spies. There was only one bright spot: Nina and Semyon were still free. They knew I had been captured, so they would be careful. Would being careful be enough, though? I didn't know, but, on thinking it over, I decided it wouldn't, because there simply was no precaution they could take that would counterbalance their having to get inside the temple I was in. I couldn't forget what the briefing officer had told us all, back on Monmouth: This expedition had to work, because the Caodais could not continue to be in possession of the secret of the Glotch. "Western swine!" My Dutch friend was at the door. He wasn't alone. A very dark Caodai, wearing a shoulder patch that looked like a rook in chess, brought in a case full of shiny things. Half a dozen other Caodais followed. Two of them grabbed me. The dark one took a hypodermic needle out of the case. "Wait a minute!" I said sharply. "You can't do this to me! I claim the protection of international law. You can execute me, but -- ow!" He was mighty clumsy with that needle. It tingled for a second and then my whole upper arm and shoulder began to feel cold. Well, I knew what was coming next. Subtle Oriental poisons, for a start. Then brainwashing. Torture. I said to myself: Good-by, Elsie. I was beginning to feel cold all over; the fair-skinned Caodai was standing over me, but he seemed far away. He took out a pad of paper. "Your name?" he demanded. Name, rank and serial number. That was all, I reminded myself. I gave them to him as briskly and finally as I could: "Moeller, Logan, lieutenant junior grade, X-SaT-#." "How did you get here?" I stiffened; it was beginning. But he would never find out about Monmouth and the whaleboat from me. "I refuse to answer," I said distinctly. walls were swirling around me now. I no longer felt cold; I hardly felt anything at all. I could barely hear the Dutch Caodai saying: "Where are your companions?" Which one? Semyon was in the whaleboat, I supposed, but Nina -- I got a grip on myself. "No answer," I said. I stared at him Wearily, wondering what made a man like him turn renegade. Of course, when the Caodais overran the former Dutch colonies in the Indies, they had picked up everyone who would join them. In that respect, the Caodais were a perfect democracy. But still and all, a white renegade in Caodai uniform was hard to take. "Atheistic Western swine!" hissed the Caodai. "Don't dare call me a renegade!" Fantastic, I thought to myself drowsily. Ifs almost as if I were speaking my thoughts aloud. I woke up with a jump. I had a sour, tinny taste in my mouth and an unbelievable headache. Nina Willette was shaking me. "You cracked! Moeller, listen to me." I blinked blearily at her. She said, with pity and reproach: "They worked you over, didn't they, Logan? But you shouldn t have cracked." "Hey," I protested, "hold it!" I sat up and tried to set her straight. "I gave them my name and rank and serial number. That's all. I didn't crack!" "No?" She looked at me and the pity was subtracted from her gaze, leaving only the reproach. "Then how did they know where I was?" "Be reasonable, Nina. They must have -- " "How did they know my name?" "Good God!" I whispered. "That needle. They must have shot me full of scopolamine." "Exactly, atheistic Western swine," said the blond Caodai, opening the door. "Exactly." They were not gentle with us, but I hardly noticed. Truth serum! The psychic censors numbed, the questions answered -- I must have spilled my guts for fair. It was no comfort to reassure myself that it was not my fault, because it was a lie. It was my fault -- my fault for allowing myself to be captured, my fault for being there in the first place. We were led out of the cell, Nina Willette and I, and up into the main workings of the twintowered temple. Target Gamma! If only we had some way of getting back to America with what we were seeing now! fog of self-reproach, looking about me against the faint, almost vanished chance that I might some day be able to get back and report, what would I have to say? I could say: "We went through a long yellow corridor full of Caodais." I could say: "They looked at us as though we were lepers." But I couldn't say that I had learned the secret of the weapon called the Glotch, because there was no sign of anything like that anywhere around. An arsenal? I had thought we might be headed for something like that, but this didn't look like an arsenal. It looked more like a hospital, or perhaps a medical laboratory, than anjrthing else I had ever encountered, and that wasn't really a matter of looks but of smell, the faint under-layer of ether and iodoform you find in medical places. There were no whirring machines or hidden industrial plants, only the whispering air and medicinal odor and white-and-pastel look, in the little rooms we caught glimpses of. And for this we had sacrificed Monmouth. We reached a high-ceiling room where an old Caodai in a scarlet cloak stood frozen beside a bright globe. "Votre saint ete," said the blond-haired Caodai, "les americains." Nina stiffened beside me. "The pope," she whispered, unbelieving. It took me a moment to understand what she meant. Not the pontiff of Rome, no, but the supreme chief of the Caodais, who wore the same title. The old Caodai by the globe of the world was Nguyen Yat Hugo himself! Remember what I had seen of old Nguyen: latrine posters, showing him luring helpless U.N. soldiery into haunts of bawdy vice, his yellow face wicked and fierce, his long fingers clawed like a killer cat's. But he was only a man. If he was evil, it did not show in his face. He stood gravely watching us as we approached. He was tall for an Indo-Chinese, old but not senile, his robes curious but not ridiculous. I remembered the Caodais in their stockade north of Project Mako and their fantastic paper figurines of this man. It was hard not to think of him as a figure of fun (Mardi Gras masks and Jacks-in-thebox), but in his presence it wasn't hard at all. "You slime!" Not evil but anger. He spoke to us and he was raging. Nina, beside me, made a little choking sound. He lashed into us verbally, cut us to ribbons. We were slime, wretches, unfit to live. We stood there and listened. What else could we do? riod and stopped, his face as emotionless as before. He said something short and foreign to one of the Caodai priests -- a middle-aged woman who looked like my mother's laundress -- and we all waited while the priest left and then returned. She brought another woman with her, a slight brown-haired womani in faded khaki. I stared at her curiously as she blinked in the light. It crossed my mind that she was no Caodai. She had the look of an American, though her dress might have been Caodai as much as anything else. She looked out of place here. I watched her, waiting for something to happen that would explain why she was here. By and by, I noticed that the Caodais were very intently watching me. And then I realized who the girl was. Strange that I should see my long-lost wife and not at once recognize her? I suppose so, but I wasn't the only one that had to do a doubletake. Elsie herself didn't quiver a muscle until I suddenly yelled her name. There was a dizzy, slippery, sliding moment when everything around me crashed into new arrangements and meanings and I stood still, like an idiot, saying her name and staring. And then I was running toward her and she toward me. We shook hands. It was more that than a lovers' hug -- we stopped inches apart and I reached out my hands toward hers. Perhaps the strain would have passed and we would have been in each other's arms, but the Gabdai chief stopped us. "Your wife," he said in a clear, savage voice. "Enjoy her for this moment, my lieutenant. She may not live to the next." I had dropped Elsie's hands, spun around and was halfway to him, in a single reflex, before the Caodai officers leaped between me and Nguyen, and their weapons were in their hands. I said: "What the devil are you up to?" "Up to?" he repeated bitterly. "No, Lieutenant, I want to know what you are up to. Perhaps we could have pieced out our information from your subconscious, where we found your wife's name and the story of your interesting voyage here. But it would have taken time, and I do not have time." officers slowly bolstered their guns. Nina was on one side of me and Elsie on the other. I said: "What do yoii want?" "Information! Truthful answers, Lieutenant -- for which I will pay -- with your life and your wife's." I glanced at Elsie and Nina. Both of them were watching me, waiting for me to do something, to an intolerable predicament. But there wasn't any solution in me. I looked around at the Caodai officers, at the implacable face of Nguyen Yat Hugo. The thing was bitterly ironic: The Caodai was demanding information from me. information that could hardly be of any real importance to the Caodai cause (for what did I have to say, past the minutiae of our voyage?), but which I knew I would die to keep from him. If our positions had changed -- if it were I who had the secret of what they called the Glotch and he who had to learn it to live -- then it might have made sense, both his insistence to learn and Nina and Elsie die, rather than tell. It didn't make sense. It was an outrageous perversion of human values for the three of us to suffer for the sake of concealing so little. But that, as they say, was the way the little old ball bounced. I cleared my throat once and said to Nguyen Yat Hugo: "Go to hell!" Well, the heavens didn't fall on us just then, though I had thought they might. But I underestimated Nguyen. All that happened was that he gave quick orders and the three of us were marched out -- separately. And there I was in the yellow-walled room again. I knew what it was, of course -- the softening up that makes the ultimate tearing apart so much easier. Leave the Americans alone, Nguyen had said to his officers; put them away and let them worry for a while; let them scare themselves to death by brooding on what's going to happen to them. But I didn't think it was going to work. I sat there, staring at the yellow walls and wondering which of the footsteps in the corridor outside was going to be my torturer's, and I coded up all the factors and played them through the computer inside my skull. Too bad that I had spilled Elsie's name and location in my drugged state so that Nguyen could have her flown here to torture me with. Too bad that Nina had been caught the same way. Too bad that no one could get word of what had happened to us to Semyon, back in the whaleboat. Too bad. All of it too bad. But those losses were already raked in and there was no point in wishing the little steel ball had dropped in a different slot. I concluded, if I were in this all by myself, but since I wasn't, I would have to do the best I could with the circumstances I had to work with. Nguyen would roast in his Caodai hell before I would tell him a single syllable of what he wanted to know. Not because it mattered what I told him (for I knew nothing, of course), nor because I was a hero (for I knew from the trembling of my arms and legs I was not), but because that was the way the game was played. And I wasn't going to get out alive, anyhow. That was the important thing to remember: I was going to die. No matter what Nguyen said, I was a spy, trapped in a spy's role, and the best I could hope for was a quick firing squad. Once I had thought of all of the possibilities, the computer that was my brain quickly rapped out my solution; it wasn't hard to see. Back at M.I.T., when I had learned computer operation and the mathematics that went with it, we had had a course in what they call Theory of Games. It hadn't kept me from dropping all of my loose change in each of the weekly poker nights, but it probably prolonged the process. Roughly, it came to this: When things go well, play to win as much as you can; when things go poorly, play to lose as little. This was no spot for maximizing gains. There was no prospect of any gain worth having. It was a spot for minimizing losses. I couldn't hope to get us all freely and successfully away. But I could hope that, perhaps, I would be the only one to die. If I did, Nina would have to stand by herself -- but was she any better off with me alive? And Elsie, on the other hand, was nothing to Nguyen. She had no information; she had not been trapped in espionage. He might conceivably kill her out of pique -- but not probably. So the thing for me to do was to make the guards kill me right away. On the principle of minimization of losses, I couldn't even try to grab a gun and shoot Nguyen. That was too risky -- not to me, but to Elsie and Nina in case I was successful. What I had to have was a nice, quiet, futile attack on a humble, trigger-happy guard. End of Lieutenant Logan Moeller. As minimal a loss as anyone could imagine. I made my plans and then I waited. T hey came for me -- I don't know after how long a time. It was important that I do nothing premature. I didn't make the mistake of attacking them as soon as they poked their noses in the door -- they might have just clobbered me with their fists and tied me to make sure I didn't try it again. I went along with them. Though I know the Dutch Caodai addressed me in English, I paid no attention to their actions or manner. Down the corridor, into the elevator, out into the great hall. At the entrance to the hall, I decided, I would grab for a gun, point it at the handiest figure in a yellow robe and wait for the bullets. We got to the entrance and the moment the door opened, I made my move. I got the gun -- surprisingly, with no difficulty. I had thought that would be the hard part, but the guard's grip was incredibly lax. I had it and I leaped through the door and drew a bead on the female priest, the closest to me, standing morosely by the door. I could feel my shoulderblades drawing close to each other, waiting for the bullets to strike. Only -- No bullets. I gaped around. There were the Caodai officers and there was Nguyen. And there, smoking a cigarette, swinging a gun in his free hand... "Splendidly done, Logan!" said Semyon earnestly, throwing away ver. I should have known I would not be necessary. Is too bad you cannot capture these Orientals and deliver them to justice, is it not? But, you see, I have done so already." in and I stood gaping in the meantime. Semyon shrugged modestly. "A heroic feat, you say?" I hadn't said anything of the sort. "Oh, perhaps. But the credit should not merely be my own, Logan. Equally brave were the crew. We slipped up this filthy small river, every man at his post, searching out the Oriental target -- " I goggled. "What -- " "The crew," he said emphatically, "is brave also. Every man of them. No, no, Logan, I understand that you think of me as your rescuer, but without the six men in our crew out there in the river, manning the guns that will blow the roof off this very yellow brick building, what would my small gun accomplish?" I caught on. I was surprised that Nguyen and his court didn't catch on, too, he made it so easy. But Semyon hurried on: "And we must not keep them waiting, Logan. If I do not appear outside within -- " he consulted his watch -- "eleven minutes, that is the end of all of us. Come, old man." He jerked his pistol at Nguyen. "Let us go to surrender." Nguyen corrected coldly. "I agreed to talk. I do not surrender." "As you wish it, old man. But come outside now, if you please. Perhaps my crew's watches are not accurate." Well, we all went -- Semyon and the pope and Nina and Elsie, fresh from their own cells and as astonished as I, and all. And then I was even more astonished, because there at the foot of the grass that went down to the little river rocked the whaleboat, looking tiny and ridiculous in the African sun; and as we came out, the muzzles of the deck guns, capable of launching high explosive shells that would blow us all to free ions in the air, swiveled to cover us. I looked at them incredulously. Who were the gunners? And then I thought I understood. I whispered to Semyon: "Winnington?" "Tied up," he whispered back. "Hush." Out loud, he said: "What is it to be, old man? Do we all die here and now? Or do we discover a solution that permits us all to go on living?" Nguyen, staring sourly at the little whaleboat, said: "There is none. You cannot go free. But it was clever of you. Lieutenant, to have lied under our drug." I said helpfully: "Oh, I wasn't." "Enough! cried Semyon. "One thing at a time, if you please." He glared at me and said to the Caodai: "These are our terms. First, you give us safe-conduct out of the belligerent zone. Second, you come with us as a hostage. Third, you attempt no reprisals. Fourth -- " "Three will do," said the Caodai. "No." Semyon blinked at him. "No?" N guyen again was the implacable, ageless figure I had first seen. He contemptuously ignored Semyon's gun, ignored the deck guns of the whaleboat, stepped close to Semyon and looked him in the eye. He said: "You shall not escape. You would not get so far as the mouth of the I river." ' Semyon retorted: "We'll blow you to bits." "Do." Semyon looked at me. "Logan?" he inquired weakly. I cleared my throat. "Will you give us a safe-conduct, at least?" "No." "Will you -- " "Nothing, my lieutenant. If the Great Palace wishes my death at this time, I shall die; that is as the Great Palace wishes it." I stared at him thoughtfully. He stared right back, not giving , an inch. It wasn't bluff. Here was the pope of all the Caodais, the supreme ruler of half the Earth, the most deadly fighting man the i world had ever made. And here were we, a handful of unimportant humans and a couple of dogs die rather than even give us his promise -- which he could have broken without a moment's pang -- to let us go free. I shook my head silently. He never would have passed Game Theory at M.I.T., I thought, annoyed. Everything was with him; this was a time for him to be maximizing his gains, stretching out to conquer the world as it reeled under the Glotch. I swallowed and stared harder. Maybe, the thought came from nowhere, maybe he might have passed the course, after all. Maybe it was not his technique that was wrong, but my estimate of the situation. I contemplated the thought incredulously. Could it be, I asked myself, that things weren't going as well as they seemed for old Nguyen? It was ridiculous. And yet, as he stood there, he was no voracious conqueror; he was a sober, fierce old man, hopeless of moving forward, but inflexibly It didn't make sense. might have been there yet -- if Semyon had ever been a Boy Scout. I don't know what they taught them at the Suvorov Academy, but I guarantee knot-tying was not in the curriculum, because while we were staring at each other, there was an interruption. And the name of the interruption was Winnington. It was Nina who saw him. "Logan!" she gasped. "We're in trouble!" The topside hatch of the whaleboat was open and Winnington's surly face was sticking out We were all armed, of course, with guns we'd taken from the resentful Caodais and perhaps, if we'd been quicker, we could have potted Winnington before he got out of the hatch. But he had the jump on us. He was manning the deck guns from the breech position and it was too late; we couldn't shoot. If we had looked as through we were going to shoot, it would have been the last look on the faces of any of us. He cut out the switches to the remote fire-control stations below and stared at us, evidently deciding what to do. A small brown pointed nose poked out of the hatch behind him. Josie. She looked worried, even at that distance, and I knew why. Semyon had left her to run the remotes on the deck guns, as she had so painstakingly learned back in the monitor at Project Mako, but his instructions had not included what to do in the event that a human captive got free. Naturally Josie was perplexed. But not so perplexed and worried as I, because I knew what Winnington was likely to do. Peace? He'd do whatever came to hand for that ideal; he'd win peace even if he had to blow up the world to get it. He bent to the loud-hailer and his amplified bellow nearly bowled us over. "Get out of the way!" Semyon shouted furiously; "Turn that thing off! Get away from those guns, Winnington, I command you!" "Hah!" roared Winnington, but he did turn the loud-hailer off. "I said get out of the way! I see who you've got there. Either you move or you go with him!" And he put his thumbs on the gun-trips. Semyon cried: "Wait! Wait, Winnington! Let us not be hasty! There is much to lose." But he seemed to have panicked; he was snapping his fingers erratically, babbling words that made little sense. Winnington shouted angrily: "No stalling, Timayazev. I'll give you ten seconds to stand aside. Ten seconds, you hear me?" "Please," begged Semyon, snapping his fingers frantically; I stared at him incredulously, wondering how far he had been pushed to dissolve so completely in terror. "Please, Winnington, I beg of you, do not fire!" Semyon at all, but at the deck of the whaleboat. Hesitantly, by fits and starts, looking bewilderedly at Semyon, Josie moved up behind Winnington. It was absolutely impossible, I told myself, but she seemed to be following orders. But what orders? I glanced at Semyon. He was scarcely looking at the dog, only pleading with the pacifist and snapping his -- Snapping bis fingers. I remembered the cricket and the "little one-word language." And there, if you like, is a measure of comparative intelligence, for it was clear that Josie had remembered it before me. She closed her eyes and took a nip out of Winnington. Reflexes are reflexes. Josie, yowling, was kicked yards away and into the water by Winnington's foot, but by the time he got his eyes around front again, it was a little too late. Semyon had been waiting; his gun was up. He fired and Winnington dropped. "And now, old man," Semyon said to the pope, perfectly calm, 'Sve resume our little talk, correct? I have saved your life from that patchifist; perhaps you will be more reasonable now?" But Nguyen blazed: "Tricks, Russian! You have tricked me, I see, but it is not important. If I must die, I die gladly, for I have no wish to outlive the Great Palace. If the world cannot be Caodai, let me perish!" There it was again! Even Semyon frowned. Nguyen was roaring on: "Name your conditions! I refuse them all! Filth and slime, killers, vermin! You have us, but I spit on you!" It was my turn to argue with Nguyen. But I didn't do it. There was a sudden queer flash, quick and gone. Elsie put her hand on my arm. "What -- what -- " It had been like lightning, but there were no clouds; I couldn't understand it. Semyon understood it, though. He understood it very well. He moaned something in Russian, his face gone suddenly sick. He nodded to me and said conversationally: "The clouds again, you see, Logan. Climbing trees on the horizon." That was silly, because I had just looked and there weren't any clouds. There hadn't been any. But now there was one. "Like Irkutsk once more," said Semyon, and gestured with his gun to the horizon. I looked, incredulous, as the mounting cloud leaped and spread, and then the concussion hit us from the distant nuclear blast.  a mile off shore, and waited. Waited for what? Not for some miracle to put fuel in our tanks; there was no hope of that. Not for someone to rescue us; the U.N. would never come near Madagascar and the Caodais would not rescue but kill. Not even for the world to come to an end. That had already begun. We just waited. Semyon was comforting the animals; Elsie and Nina were sitting inspecting each other in silence. We had taken a prisoner, old Nguyen himself, and he was bound where once we had bound the late pacifist Winnington. Too bad he was dead, I told myself -- he would have been delighted with the way things were working out. Because his blind dream, the war to bring peace by destroying all warriors on Earth, was already started. Nguyen said heavily from his comer: "Incredible." He was staring reflectively at Semyon and the dogs. "They are your animals; you use them as slaves. Some you kill and eat, do you not? The Caodai does not eat flesh; that seems horrible to us. And yet -- they love you." Semyon patted Josie. "We love them!" he said defiantly. Nguyen shrugged. "It is well known that you love everyone and everything. It accounts for the satellite bombings as easily as for your slaughterhouses." W "Shut up, old man!" said Semyon. He crooned to the dogs while ' Elsie flared up. "Put a gag in his mouth. I'm sick of Caodai hypocrisy. The Western atheists do this and the I Western atheists do that, and we m older away in their prison camps while they pretend that the fault's all ours. Gag him or I'll shut him up myself!" I looked in some amazement at j my warrior bride.  For I remembered Elsie. She was a quiet and biddable girl when we married -- not counting her habit of volunteering, of course. I'd never heard her scream at anyone -- at anyone at all, not even me. True, Nguyen was the arch-enemy and she must have had pitiful fantasies of a chance like this while she was in the concentration camp. But even so -- Not the least of the problems of the Big Cold War, I thought, would come when the Elsies and the Myself s tried to get back to where we could recognize each other again. ' Nina Merriam was collecting herself again. She was an Intelligence officer and she, too, had no doubt had ridiculous dreams of a chance like this. "Now then!" she said briskly to the pope of the , Caodai. "Tell me what you were doing here." ask you to tell me," she wheedled. "Please. There is no use to keep a secret, is there?" She offered him a cigarette and smiled, woman-to-man. "An admirable performance," commented Nguyen. "I do not smoke, but your interrogation is splendid." "Thank you. Why did you leave Cambodia for this lousy little island?" He shrugged. Nina smiled again. "Good. You stick to your principles. I don't suppose any of us will last twentyfour more hours, but we might as well go on with it, just as if it mattered whether you gave us information or I obtained it. So I shall continue to ask questions and you will answer only where it doesn't matter. Correct?" Nguyen nodded wearily. Semyon cut in: "You could at least tell us what is happening, old man. There is no secret about that." Nguyen closed his eyes. "The end of the world is happening. Your ship attacked us in our own waters. We retaliated. Your people retailiated against our retaliation -- " "The satellite bombs?" "You have seen one of them," said Nguyen Yat Hugo. "You must realize that our bombs are falling, too." Nina whimpered: "But why? You must have known it was the end for all of us!" Semyon raged: "Couldn't you wait, old man? Your weapon was too slow, was it? The burning and must unleash the satellite bombs." Nguyen said hoarsely: "Our weapon? What weapon is that?" "I do not know your name for it," Semyon retorted contemptuously. "We call it the Glotch; it is a burning fire that strikes the head and neck and -- " The stern, stiff old face of Nguyen was cracking. "No," he cut in, shaking his head. It was incredible, but you couldn't doubt the expression on his face. I stammered: "It -- it isn't your weapon?" "It is not," said Nguyen with passion. "We Caodai are on our knees before it!" We stared at each other. If it wasn't a Caodai weapon -- and Elsie confirmed that it had struck them as hard as us -- And if it wasn't our own weapon, which it was not -- Whose weapon was it? pered Nguyen, looking through our periscopic sights. We had surfaced and the smoking coast of Madagascar was a mile or less away. "Maybe the damage is only local, I said. "Can you raise anyone on the radio, Nina?" She shook her head. "Everybody's jamming." "Fall-out negligible," Semyon reported from the aft lookout ports. "There must have been an onshore wind. One shouldn't swim too long in these waters, though." I said to the pope of the Caodai: "If we find a spot on the coast where we can safely land, can you conduct us to a place where we can radio the U.N. forces?" He spread his hands, his face unemotional. "I can try." "We haven't any other choice, Logan," Elsie reminded me. I noticed that her hand was in mine. "Even if we could refuel this boat, we could scarcely navigate it back across the Atlantic." "Man your stations," I ordered. "Nguyen, I assume you haven't any hailing signal we could use for a safe-conduct? It would be a help, if a Caodai ship should spot us." "There is none." "Full speed south then," I said. "As long as the fuel holds out." It held out better than I had expected; we made nearly ten miles before the engines began to splutter. While we still had steerage way, I spun the rudder wheel and we slanted in on a sandy beach. There were concrete pillboxes and chevaux-de-frise, and God knows how many electronic and sonar alarms we triggered as we beached. But there apparently were very few Caodais at the filter centers that day, after the bombs had fallen. Our only real danger -- from that particular source, at least -- was that someone would notice we had landed, on a radar remote, and send over a nike to home in on us to save the trouble of investigating. We ran up from the beach, as far away as we could get before our breath gave out, in case a wandering patrol should happen by. "There is," said the pope, "a command post somewhere about. I consecrated it myself two days ago." We sent one of the monkeys up a tree, but she either couldn't understand what we wanted or her short simian vision didn't let her detect the building we had described. Semyon, cursing in Russian, tried climbing to see for himself. But we couldn't get high enough to see, any of us. "It is this way," said Nguyen strongly, and what could we do but follow his lead? And he led us right into a trap. T here were Coadais all over the place. They swarmed from the command post like termites from a hill; there was a rattle of small-arms fire, and rushing brown-skinned men in uniforms, and it was all over before we could move. For a moment when they jumped us, I had old Nguyen in front of my gun and I don't know why I didn't pull the trigger. "Treacherous beast!" sobbed Semyon. "We trusted you and you betrayed us!" And I felt much the same. "No!" cried Nguyen, and he bellowed something at the Caodai soldiers. They gave him an argument. Apparently he wasn't recognized, but they took us all to the command post and there was a long, complicated discussion in French too fast for my ears. Nina, following it as closely as she could, explained: "They think he's an impostor and the fat one is all for shooting the lot of us. Somebody's going to get a picture of the pope and compare." They brought the picture -- a ceremonial portrait draped in yellow bunting, as remote a likeness to the real man in its own prettifying way as the caricatures in our latrines had been in theirs. But it convinced them. So all we had to do was arrange to use their radio, get in touch with the U.N. command in Washington, stop the war and clear up the mess. We never got past Step One. Jamming -- loud and furious, jamming by the Caodais and jamming by us. There were no radio communications anywhere in the world. XX TOT only were we the ones ' who were trying to stop the war -- it looked as though we had started it. For the naval action that Monmouth precipitated had spread. The Caodais had sunk her. A U.N. fleet had made a daring raid into interdicted waters to try to rescue her. In retaliation, the Caodais had raided the Caribbean again. In retaliation for that, a strike against Cebu. In retaliation for that -- It had wound up with the satellite bombs. We looked at the situation map in the radio room and it was like the end of the world. There had been at least eighty fusion bombs dropped. And a weary, jittery black radioman in a Caodai uniform was trying to get through with the message that might stop it all; but it was hopeless. The radioman glanced at us and shrugged. "Je m'y perds, votre saintete," he said. "Je ne puis pas." Nguyen said tunelessly: "He cannot get through." A sous-tenente who spoke fair English cleared his throat and said: "Sir, perhaps if we have patience, a time will come when we can get through. There have been breaks in the jamming; we received messages for nearly half an hour this morning." "There will be no more breaks -- except as the stations are bombed off the air." Nguyen smiled wryly. "It is that which we wish to prevent." Semyon looked up from the animals. "Fantastic," he said, his eyes round. "It is not your weapon. It is not our weapon. Yet we bomb each other." Nina Willette was still an Intelligence officer. She asked: "Have you really lost many people to this burning thing -- I suppose I can't call it the Glotch any more." Nguyen hesitated only a moment. Then he confessed: "More than seven hundred thousand. Nearly every one of our -- what is your word? -- our telepathists; and a few others. And you?" It was Nina's turn to hesitate. Still, he had been frank with her, or had seemed to. "I have no official information. Perhaps half a Elsie and I stared back and forth among ourselves. So many, I thought, how can there have been so many? But the more I thought. the more plausible it got. For even in my own small experience, there had been half a dozen or more. every five hundred or so on the North American continent! E lsie, surprisingly, grinned unhappily, and in that moment, she was my Elsie again. She took my hand. "No more calling up your wife just to see how she is, Logan. It's too expensive now -- if this thing knocks off the espers, they'll raise their rates. Is it always espers?""All," said Nguyen. "Nearly all professionals, plus a few others who had recently been sensitized. And with you?" "I think so," said Nina. "You understand that it was a highly classified matter with us -- but I think so." "You see?" Elsie clutched my hand. "From now on, esping will be only on matters of the gravest importance -- on matters -- on -- " She stared at me, then wordlessly at the useless radio. "On matters, she proclaims, of the gravest importance!" howled Semyon. "But naturally! They cannot jam the telepathic wave, however hard they try. It is our way to reach America!" Our way to reach America. But we didn't have an esper at hand to do it. Nguyen sent scouts racing across the Madgascan littoral in all directions and they came back with psychologists, with Caodai military communications men, with a mixed bag of assorted protesting black, brown and yellow men and women. But not an esper in the lot. Nguyen snapped: "If you had not killed them off -- " He sagged. "My apology. If they had not died through this thing we both wish to combat, it would be easy. But there is scarcely a telepathist in all the lands of the Great Palace. Hardly even a man who was sensitized, much less an expert." Elsie looked at me and shook her head urgently. But all the same, I cleared my throat and said : "I was sensitized only a few weeks ago." "I was sensitized last year," Nina Willette volunteered suddenly. No one else said anything at all. Then Elsie burst out: "That's ridiculous, Logan! You're no esper; you only paid your money to use one. Good heavens, I was part of the same hookup, so if you -- " "I was sending," I told her. "You were only receiving." "But, Logan, 'it's dangerous! You heard what this man said. It's bad enough in America, but in Caodai territory, esping is a quick way to die. Don't do it! Let that girl try!" T hen she looked me in the eye and stopped. "I'm sorry, darling," she said defeatedly. "I was sensitized more recently than Nina," I reminded her. "I know," shq answered, almost inaudibly. "It, uh, it probably isn't really dangerous. I still have my helmet. I'll just take it off to see if I can reach some American esper. Then as soon as I've got through -- " She reached up and kissed me, hard. Then she turned away. "Get on with it," she said over her shoulder. We talked to one of the psychologists Nuygen's patrols had rounded up, a faded tan-skinned man with a bulbous face and a thin black mustache, who claimed to know a little about the theory The sous-tenente translated: "You cannot reach anyone except a trained esper or one with whom you have had a -- a -- excuse, but what is the English word for 'rapport'?" "Rapport. Get cracking," said Nina impatiently. The sous-tenente pursed his lips. "Curious. Well, then, you must try to reach someone with whom you have formerly been in contact. Preferably an esper, if there is one. Think of him, and of the place where you saw him last, and of the sounds and smell of the room; recreate it all in your mind. But do not linger on a single person, for perhaps he is dead. Try one as best you can. If no answer, try another. You comprehend?" "I comprehend," I said. "Let's go." We took off our aluminum helmets -- that I, for one, had lived in, slept in, even bathed with for weeks. We lay down on hard cots in a room of the command post and they closed the door. And then we tried to telepath. It was a funny sensation -- something like trying to flex the fingers on a third hand. I was straining muscles that didn't exist, reaching through the void with limbs I did not own, shouting with vocal cords that should have been in the base of my skull and were not. In the hands of the esper, it had been quick and easy. There was the gray wandering and the sense of touching, and there was a contact. Now -- nothing. " idiots. Could we ever reach anyone? Ridiculous, I thought. Could a jellyfish solve quadratic equations? The brain tissue, whatever it was that held the in us; we were not espers. I belligerently followed directions, daring something to happen. I thought of Giordano and his office on the Venetian Causeway. Nothing. I thought of the smell of rotting palm trees and hibiscus, the warmth of the early summer Miami air, the way his breath had rasped as he was helping me reach Elsie. Nothing. All right, I said, I give up and thought of another esper, the incompetent one in Providence -- And I got Giordano. Peevishly: Who the hell are you? Don't you know this is dangerous? Not words, of course. I've explained that esping is not a matter of words. But an irritation, and a question, and a warning. I tried -- as a blind castaway might try to spot a sail on the horizon -- I tried, ineptly and without knowing whether I was succeeding, to convey what I had to say: The Glotch is not a Caodai weapon. It kills them as well as us. Tell the high command. Tell them to stop the bombs. The Caodai didn't start the war. They are dying as rapidly as we. Stop it, stop it, until we find out... Until, finally, an incredulousness from Giordano, an understanding, at last a belief and a promise. I could almost see him, seated at his desk, not in Miami now but in some colder, dryer place, staring at emptiness, conversing with me. He was nodding, promising -- Bright yellow fireflies came between us. I shook my head and the rapport was gone. No more Giordano, no more sense of touch. But the fireflies were still there. They lanced through the base of my neck. I yelled out loud and clawed for the helmet I had dropped beside my cot. The pain was worse than that night along the drive at Miami Beach, worse than anything I had ever felt. I got the helmet and jammed it onto a head filled with hurting and flame. "Help!" I bawled, and I wondered if the door was really opening, if people were really bursting in, if that was really Elsie clutching me in her arms. My head rolled to one side and I caught a glimpse of the cot next to mine. There was something there, something that had been a person, but it wasn't Nina Merriam -- not with blackness and horror where the pretty young face had been, not with the charred agony that was crisped into the expression. Preposterous! It was a seared corpse. It couldn't be Nina Merriam! But it was. So I found out -- more than a week later, when they dared remove the needles, when they had stopped enough of the pain and patched enough of the ruin around my head and neck, and had begun to think I might yet live -- the only man in all the world who had survived not a single attack of the whatever-it-was, but two. didn't talk for a while. And then we couldn't stop. The war was over; I had after all got through, and so had Nina -- before she died. It was good that we both had made it, for they would scarcely have believed one. But you do not lie through be mistaken. So they had stopped the bombs and the satellites hung silent in the sky. And the Caodais and we had begun to compare notes and to look for answers. Volunteers had offered themselves as sacrifice. Some had died, sitting in darkened rooms with opened photographic shutters waiting to catch the track of whatever came flashing in as they esped, a few coughing their lungs out in improvised cloud chambers, a great many surrounded by infinite varieties of scientific equipment that tested and measured and felt. After a day, I was well enough to walk about. The grafts from the skin bank were healing and the damage to the nervous system was slight. And I had a visitor. I was in a naval hospital outside of what had been New Washington and Nguyen had flown there to sign the Bethesda Compact. And he came to see me and to say: "Thank you." That was the greatest shock of all. "For what?" I asked, blank. Nguyen laughed silently. "We are in your debt, my lieutenant," he said. "We have learned to get along together, the Caodai and the West, and that is good. And even more, through your work with the dogs and monkeys and seals, we have learned to get along with our animals. And only just in time, my lieutenant. Only just in time." "In time for what?" "What you call the Glotch. It wasn't our weapon or yours. In fact, you see, it was not a weapon at all. Today the news is made: It is life." "Life?" He nodded somberly. "Living things. Telepathic. Tiny, below the threshold of visibility. They seek to communicate when they sense the subtle esper flow and because their structure and ours cannot exist together -- they die. And perhaps that could be borne, but we die, too. As you know." "Life!" I breathed. "How on Earth -- " "Ah, no!" he cried. "Not on Earth at all. Mars? I don't know -- but not of the Earth, that is sure. And that is why we were only just in time. For now that we have learned to get along with each other, we start, this second, to learn to get along with Them. They have been attracted, the scientists think, by our esping and perhaps also our bombs from outside. I doubt They will ever leave us alone again." "Mars!" I breathed. It was fantastic. And also, of course, wrong -- but how thoroughly wrong, we did not discover until Venus once more swam close to Earth. Nina Merriam would have liked to know. I wished somehow I could tell her. But I had Elsie to discuss it with. And, pretty soon, we had other things to talk about -- discharge for both of us, a home, a job, a family -- all the wonderfully prosaic things that help wipe out years of loneliness and horror. But neither of us has forgotten Nina. We don't want to and we won't. (Continued from page #) Arthur was preparing to invade Korea, the attack was scornfully called "Operation Common Knowledge" because everything was known about it, including the target. "Hah!" the Chinese must have said in top-level conference. "Very clumsy, trying to make us think we will strike at Inchon." So they dug in everywhere but at Inchon -- and that, of course, was exactly where MacArthur landed. This kind of disarmingly direct thinking was proposed for the problem of captured soldiers. By ordering them to broadcast or sign any "confession" demanded of them, all propaganda would have been denied the enemy. The proposal was defeated, but I'm not sure I see why. Maybe because this approach is expected from young children only. A father with a very large package joshed his son, who, wearing a Superman costume, was leaping all around the yard: "Come on. Superman, help me get this inside the house." The child sized up the bulk and heft of the package. "I'm not Superman," he said realistically. "I'm just a little boy and I can't carry anything like that." Lincoln Steffens' Autobiography shows how flabbergasting literal thinking can be on an adult level. A Philadelphia political ring had five huge graft projects to put across. The lieutenants' opinion was to pull them separately, giving the public time to cool off in between. The big boss, however, decided to spring all five at once. They did -- and such cosmic gall demoralized all opposition. The devious minds contribute immensely, especiallyto the sciences, but mainly to provide the data that the rare Newtons and Einsteins --  unswervingly literal, all of them -- reduce to unbelievably simple equations, which the devious scoff at; nothing could be that simple. The method is equally clear -- find the most direct solution. Science fiction has done that often. Fifty years ago. Wells saw that the way to conquer gravity was to nullify it. (Verne scoffed.) Now there's an anti-gravity research program, while Verne's elaborate Moon cannon has long been obsolete. Does that mean the literal mind is superior to the devious? No, they need each other. It's just that the literal mind, traveling in a straight line, has to wait for the devious to catch up. It will. 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Inventories are running low. Don't miss your chance to complete your collection. # For  # or #c each Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Address  City State Galaxy #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copses) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions, Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by sett-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. Title Reg. U.S. Pet. Off. Each Tuesday nite on Radio. Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X-lThe choice from Galaxy adapted by the tops at N. B. C. portant discovery ever made is in the hands of people who recognize only a fraction of its immense significance. It is not going too far to say that by broadcasting the discovery, this editorial may mark the end of all of mankind's problems. Like every great formulation, the discovery looks simple: "If you know why you feel angry," say psychoanalysts, "you don't have to be angry" Simple on the surface, yes, but it may take centuries for every aspect to be explored and applied. Before we begin our preliminary extrapolation, however, let's test its validity in its current usage. Assume you drive a car and someone has sides wiped you. You know that going into a rage is infantile behavior. Soyou pull over and carefully scrutinize your emotions. You feel angry because some roadhog endangered several lives and caused a few hundred dollars' worth of damage. Why? Because he's filled with aggressions. Are they your problem or his? His, of course. Retaliation would be your aggressions -- your problem, not his. Still angry? Certainly not; having worked out the whole thing, you have no need to be angry. The formulation naturally applies to all emotions: joy, despair, love, hate, fear and so forth. We could test each, but we'd only be confirming the soundness of the discovery. Nor should we waste time on the prospect of a world in which all emotions, once known, need not be expressed. Let's concentrate instead on the astonishing practical extensions. If it's true that knowing why you feel an emotion removes the need to express it -- and you've seen that it is so -- then not applying the formula to all human functions is a refusal to face reality. Take not-eating. Stated in blunt terms, we eat because we think (have been conditiond to believe) we are hungry. Any number of people, knowing why they felt hungry, have been able to fast for (seemingly) incredibly long periods. True enough, some died and ( Continued on page #) Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street. New York #. N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. Pleas Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Checlc Here D Add #c Foreign Posta For  # or #c each Name -- Address City State Thera were pride and indignation In Mezzerow' mission to Earth and yet a practical reason... but maybe he should have let bed enough alonel Loves Company passports, scanning the against the small square of immense variety of stamps plastic, he had to choose from. He select"Marcus Mezzerow?" he asked, ed one with multicolored ink that glancing at the older man and back at the passport. His lips quivered with amusement at what was printed there. "There seems to be a mistake in the name of the planet," he said. "It's hard to believe they'd call it Messy Row." "There is a mistake," said Marcus heavily. "However, there's nothing you can do about it It's listed as Messy Row on the charts." The official's face twitched and he bent over the other passport. He was slow in stamping it "Wilbur Mezzerow?" he asked the young man. "That's me," said Wilbur. "Isn't it a terrible thing to do? You'd almost think people on Earth can't spell -- or maybe they don't listen. That's why Pa and me are here." "Wilbur, this man is not responsible for our misfortune," said Marcus. "Neither can he correct it. Don't bore him with our problems." "Well, sure." "Come on." 'Welcome to Earth," said the official as they walked away. He caught sight of a woman coming toward him and cringed inwardly before he recognized that she, too, had just arrived from one of the outer worlds. He could tell because of the absence of the identifying gleam in her eyes. On principle he'd stamp her passport with dull and dingy ink. his father. He hadn't attained his full growth, but he was as tall though not as heavy as Marcus. "Where are we going now?" he asked. "Get the name changed?" "Don't gawk," said Marcus, restraining his own tendency to gaze around in bewilderment. Things had changed since his father had been here. "No, we're not. It's simple, but it may take longer than we think. We have to act as if Earth is an unfriendly planet." "Hardly seems like a planet." "It is. If you scratch deep enough under those buildings, you'll find soil and rock." Even Marcus didn't know how deep that scratch would have to be. "Seems hard to believe it was once like -- uh -- Mezzerow." Wilbur was looking at the buildings and pedestrians streaming past and the little flutter cars that filled the air. "Bet you can't find any place to be alone in." "More people are alone within ten miles of us than you have ever seen," said Marcus. He stopped in front of a building and consulted a small notebook. The address agreed, but he looked in vain for a name. There wasn't a name on any of the buildings. Nevertheless, this ought to be it. They'd been walking for miles and he had checked all the streets. He spoke to Wilbur and they went inside. It was a hotel. The Universe over, there is no mistaking a hotel for anything else. Continuous arrivals and departures stamp it with peculiar impermanency. A person might stay twenty years and yet seem as transient as the man still signing the registry. A clerk sauntered over to the Mezzerows. He was plump, but the shoulders of his jacket were obviously much broader than he was. "Looking for someone?" he inquired. "I'm looking for the Outer Hotel," said Marcus. 'This is a hotel," the clerk said, raising his shoulders and letting them fall. One shoulder didn't come down, so he grasped the bottom of the sleeve and pulled it down. "What's the name?" The clerk yawned. "Doesn't have a name -- just a number. No hotel has had a name for the last hundred years. Too many of them." "My father stayed at the Outer Hotel fifty years ago, before he left to discover a new planet It was at this address." The clerk, wary of his shoulder pads, shrugged sideways. It gave him a bent look vhen one shoulder stayed back. "Maybe it wasn't a hundred years ago," he said to his fingernails. "Anyway, they don't have names now." "This must be the old Outer Hotel," Marcus decided. "We'll stay here." The clerk's aplomb was not as foolproof as he imagined. It slipped a trifle. "You want to stay here? I mean really?" "Why not?" growled Marcus. "You have room, don't you? It seems like a decent place. I don't have any other recommendations." "Certainly it's decent and we have room. I thought you might be more comfortable elsewhere. I can recommend an exclusive men's hotel to you." "We are plain people and don't want anything exclusive," said Marcus. "Register us, please." "I don't do menial tasks," said the clerk with an offended laugh. "I'm here for the sole purpose of imparting class to the hotel. Take your registry problems to the desk robot." Wilbur looked curiously at the pudgy clerk as he walked away, smiling coyly at the passersby. "Pa, how can a man like him make this place seem classy?" "Son, I don't know," said Marcus heavily. "Earth has changed since your grandfather described it to me. I don't propose to find out what's the matter with it. We'll just take care of our business and go home." ing their baggage claim checks to the robot, who assured them that everything would be zipped straight to their room from the spaceport. In spite of Wilbur's protests that, he wasn't tired, that he was just getting used to walking again after being cramped in the ship, they went to their rooms to freshen up. Thus they missed the noontime exodus of workers from the buildings around them. Marcus had food sent up, but didn't eat much, though initially he had been hungry. The lot # steaks were excellent in appearance, nicely seared and thick. Inside, they were gray and watery, with an offensive taste, obviously tank-grown. After a few bites, Marcus abandoned the meat and ate vegetables. These, though illflavored and artificially colored, he could eat without suspicion. Wilbur consumed everything before him, ending by looking hungrily at the steak on his father's plate. Marcus hastily shoved the trays in the disposer slot. If he had time before he left Earth, he meant to find out what a "lot #" steak was. He hoped it wasn't what he thought. When they were ready, they dropped to the ground floor. The clerk who gave class to the hotel was nowhere in sight. They went out into the street and headed for the tall spire of Information Center. It was a landmark they couldn't miss. Every human who thought of visiting Earth was familiar with it. If a question couldn't be answered there, it was beyond the scope of human knowledge. There were many more women than men on the streets. Marcus noted it, but didn't think it unusual. He had heard that women had more free time in the middle of the day on planets that had been settled for a long time. He walked on with a long stride, oblivious to the feminine glances he and his son attracted. At Information Center, he consulted the index at the entrance, jostled by people from thousands of planets who were doing the same. The red line on the floor led to the planet section, which was what he wanted. Keeping check on Wilbur, who showed a tendency to wander, he followed it to the end. The end was an immense room with innumerable small booths. Instinctively, Marcus distrusted booths; more than anything else, they resembled vertical coffins. Growling to Wilbur to stay close by, he went inside and closed the door. He inserted a coin and made the selection. A harried face appeared on the viewplate. "Does your question require a human answer?" "It certainly does," said Marcus. "I didn't come nine hundred and forty-seven light-years to be befuddled by a robot." The harried face barked something unintelligible in another direction and then turned back to Marcus. "Very well. Question?" "I want to request a change. My planet -- " "Planet? Change?" repeated the face. It disappeared and a finger took its place. The finger rifled rapidly down a vertical index. It stopped and stabbed and the index popped open. "Go to snatched a slip out of the open space and dropped the slip in a slot. "Go to the platform at the rear of this building. Take any that building for the change." Marcus wasn't surprised, but he felt annoyed. "Can't you make the change here? I don't like being shoved around." "We are not authorized to make changes. We are merely what our name implies; we have the information to direct you to the proper sources. The slip I gave you is a map of the general vicinity of the place you want. You can't get lost." "You gave me no map," snapped Marcus. The voice didn't answer him, though the finger still waved on the viewplate. He couldn't argue very well with a finger. The plate burped and a slip dropped out of the slot below it. Only then did he release the lever, allowing the finger to vanish. (Marriages; alternate variations nulment and divorce). Hastily, he stuffed the map in his pocket as Wilbur pressed the door, trying to look at what he had in his hand. It was nothing for a growing boy to see. It wasn't a good map, since it didn't show where the building was in relation to the rest of the city. The transportation tube would take him there, but he'd have to find his own way back. The tube that whisked them to Outers, a circumstance that made the crowded uncomfortable trip more bearable. Marcus didn't talk to the others -- their interests were worlds apart -- but he felt closer to them than to the strange, frantic people of Earth. cal, a style once in vogue throughout the Universe. With Wilbur following, Marcus plunged in. It seemed strange that he had come nine hundred odd light-years for a matter that, once stated, would only take a few matters of some minor official's time. And yet it was necessary. For years, he had been writing requests without results. It was not as crowded as Information Center. The booths were wider and Marcus decided they both could squeeze in. It was a historic moment: Wilbur should be present. After several trials, they did get in together. The official who came to the plate was as relaxed as the other had been harried. "Planets; changes, apply for," he said. He had perfected the art of raising one eyebrow. "That's why we're here," said Marcus, fumbling in his jacket He was jammed against Wilbur and couldn't get his hand in his pocket. "Land masses reshaped, oceans installed, or climate recycled?" asked the official. "We don't want the climate changed," said Wilbur. 'We've got lots of it -- rain, hail, snow, hot weather. All in the same day -- though not in the same place. It's a big planet, nearly as big as Earth." 'Wilbur, I'll do the talking," declared Marcus, still struggling to reach his pocket. "Yes, Pa. But we don't want the continents reshaped. We like them as they are. And we've got enough oceans." "Wilbur," Marcus said sharply, pulling his hand free. He held up a tattered chart. "Are you sure you know what you do want?" asked the relaxed man with a yawn. "I'm coming to it," said Marcus. "Fifty years ago, my father, Mathew Mezzerow, discovered a planet. Things being the way they were then, planet stealing and such, Captain Mezzerow didn't come back and report it. He settled on it right there, securing for his heirs and descendants a proper share of the new world." "What do you expect for that, a medal?" "He could have had a medal. Being practical, he preferred a part of the planet Since then, we have become a thriving community. But we're not growing as fast as we should. That's why I'm here." "You've come to the wrong what you want." "Planets; economic help for? No, we don't want that kind of aid. However, there is one insignificant mistake that has been hindering us. People don't settle the way they should. You see, though Captain Mathew Mezzerow didn't return to report his discovery in person, he did send in a routine claim. That's where the mistake was made. Naturally he named the planet after himself. Mezzerow. Mezz -- uh -- row. The second e is almost silent, hardly pronounced at all. But what do you think somebody -- a robot, probably -- called it?" "I can't guess." "Messy Row," said Marcus. "It maligns a good man's name. We're stuck with it because somebody bobbled." the official with a cautious smile. "But I can't see that it affects anything. One name is as good as another." "That's what you think," Marcus retorted. "I can see how the robot made the mistake and I'm not blaming it My father sent in a verbal tape report Mezzerow could sound a little like Messy Row. Anyway, it's had a bad effect on the settlers. Men come there because it sounds easy and relaxed, which it is, of course, to a point. But women avoid it They don't like the sound of the name." "Then it's really women you're concerned with," said the official. A cold glazed stare had replaced his indifference. "In any event, you've come to the wrong place. We reconstruct planets. Names are out of our jurisdiction." "It makes things bad when there aren't enough women," continued Marcus. "Some men leave when they can't find anyone to marry." He crumpled the old chart in his hands. "It's not merely that, of course. Simple justice demands that a great man's name be properly honored." "You've come to the wrong place for justice," said the offikind of an adjustment. Let's see if I can't refer you to someone else." He rested his head on his hand. Then he straightened up, snapping his fingers. "Of course. If you want the name of a planet changed, you go to Astrogation; charts, errors, locations of." "You do?" Marcus asked dubiously. Life on Mezzerow had not prepared him for the complexities of governmental organization. "Certainly," said the official, happy that he had solved the problem. "Don't thank me. It's what I'm here for. Go to A"Where is it?" The official frowned importantly and turned to the great vertical file that Marcus was learning to associate with all departments of the government He stabbed his finger at a space, but nothing opened. "Seem to be all out of reference slips," he said with a casual lack of surprise. "Come back tomorrow and I may have some. It's quitting time now." "Do I have to come back? Aof the city from here." "It may be," said the official, reaching for his jacket. "If you don't want to waste time, buy a map from an infolegger. It'll be a day old, but chances are it should be accurate on most things." The plate snapped off, leaving Marcus and his son staring at nothing. Marcus got up and left the booth. "What's an infolegger?" asked Wilbur as he followed him. "They move things fast on Earth," said Marcus tiredly. He hadn't realized how wearing it could be to chase down the thread of responsibility in a govemment that had many things to look after. "An infolegger doesn't know any more about it than you do, but he'll sell you information that you can ordinarily get free from the government." "But who buys from him?" "Fools like me who get tired of running around. We'd better get back to the hotel." "I wish we were on Messy -- Mezzerow," said Wilbur wistfully. "Ma would have dinner ready now." "I keep forgetting your appetite. All right, we'll eat as soon as we find a restaurant." It was easy enough to walk there. It was stopping that was hard. Marcus made his way to the side of the street and hauled Wilbur in out of the stream of pedestrians. Inside there was one vacant table which they promptly took, oblivious to the glares of those who were not so fast afoot. Marcus studied the menu at length. To his disappointment, there was no lot # steak listed. Instead there were two other choices, a lot # and a miscellany steak. Marcus looked up to see that his son had already dialed his orders Questioning revealed that Wilbur had missed his afternoon snack and thought that a full portion of one steak and half of the other would compensate for his fast. "Vegetables, too," said Marcus. "Pa, you know I don't like that stuff." "Vegetables," said Marcus, watching to make sure his son selected a balanced diet. After deliberation, he decided on a high protein vegetable plate for himself, though ordinarily he liked meat. He couldn't get that idea out of his mind. The low rectangular serving robot scurried up and began dispensing food with a flurry of extensibles. Marcus noted that the steaks were identical with those served in the hotel. "Waiter, what is the origin of those steaks?" "The same as all meat. Hygienically grown in a bath of nutrients that supply all the necessary food elements. Trimmed daily and delivered fresh and tender, ready for instant preparation." "I'm familiar with the process," snapped Marcus, wincing as his son chewed the gray, watery substance. "What I asked was . the origin, the ultimate origin. From what animals were the first cells taken?" "I don't know. No other protein source is so free from contamination." "Will the manager know?" "Perhaps." "Tell him I would like to see him." "I'll pass the request along. But it won't do any good. The manager can't come. It's a robot attached to the building." "Then I'll go to it," said Marcus, rising. "Keep the food warm. How do I get there?" "The manager shouldn't be disturbed," said the robot as it placed thermoshields over the food. "It's the small room to the rear, at the right of the kitchen." Marcus found the place without difficulty. The manager lighted up as he came in. The opposite wall blinked and a chair swung out for him. "Complaint?" said the manager hollowly. The manager was hollow. "Not exactly," said Marcus, repeating his request. The manager meditated briefly"Are you an Outer?" "I am." "I thought so. Only Outers ask that question. I'll have to find out some day." "Make it today," said Marcus. "An excellent thought," said the manager. "I'll do it. But this is a chain restaurant and so you'll have to wait. If you don't mind the delay, I'll plug in one of our remote information banks." Marcus did mind delay, but it was worse not knowing. He waited. after an interval. "There is great difficulty feeding a city this large. In fact, there is with all of Earth -- it's greatly overpopulated." "So I understand," mumbled Marcus. "The trouble began forty-five or fifty years ago with the water supply," said the robot. "It was sanitary, but there was too great or not great enough concentration of minerals in it. Information isn't specific on this point. The robots in control of the tanks found that beef, pork, lamb and chicken in all their variety would not grow fast enough. Many tanks wouldn't grow at all. "The robots communicated this fact to higher authorities and were told to find out how to correct the situation. They investigated and determined that either the entire water-system would have to be overhauled, or a new and hardier protein would have to be developed. Naturally, it would require incalculable labor to install a new water-system. They didn't recommend it." "Naturally," said Marcus. "The situation was critical. The city had to be fed. The tank robots were told to find the new protein. Resources were thrown open to them that weren't hitherto available. In a short time, they solved the problem. About half of the tanks that were not growing properly were cleaned out and the new protein placed in them. The old animal name system was outmoded so the new lot number system was devised and applied to every tank regardless of its ultimate origin." "Then nobody has any idea what they're eating," said Marcus. "But what was that new protein? That's what I want to know." "It was hardy. It came from the most adaptable creature on Earth," said the robot. "And there was another factor in favor of it. The flesh of all mammals is nearly the same. But there are differences. The ideal protein for a meat-eating animal is one which exactly matches the creature's own body, eliminating food that can't be fully utilized." Marcus closed his eyes and grasped the arm of the chair. "Do you feel ill?" inquired the managing robot. "Shall I call the doctor? No? Well, as I was saying, there was already a supply of animal tissue on hand. It was this that the robots used. It's funny that you're asking this. Not many people are so curious." "They didn't care," snarled Marcus. "As long as they were fed, they didn't ask what it was." "Why should they?" asked the robot. "The tissue was already well adapted to growth tanks. Scrupulously asceptic, in no way did it harm the original donors who were long since dead. And there was little difference in the use of it, anyway. No one would hesitate if he were injured and needed skin or part of a liver or a new eye. This was replacement from the inside, by a digestive process rather than a medical one." "The robots took tissue from the surgery replacement tanks," said Marcus. "Do you deny it?" "That's what I've been telling you," said the robot. "A very clever solution considering how little time they had. However only about half of the tanks had to be replaced." "Cannibals," said Marcus, nearly destroying the chair as he hurled it away from him. "What's a cannibal?" asked the robot. But Marcus wasn't there to answer. He went back to the restaurant, under control by the time he reached the table. He couldn't tell Wilbur because Wilbur had finished eating except for the vegetables which were mostly untouched. Marcus sat down and took the shields off the food, looking at it gloomily. "Pa, aren't you going to eat?" asked Wilbur. "As soon as I get my breath back," he said. It wasn't bad when he ate, but the mere thought of food was distasteful. He gianced sternly at his son. "Wilbur, hereafter you may not order meat. As long as we are on Earth, you will ask for eggs." "Just eggs?" said Wilbur incredulously. "Gee, they're real expensive here. Anyway, I don't like them without a rasher of -- " "Eggs," said Marcus. Another thought occurred to him. "Sunnyside up. No cook can disguise that." T HE sky was dark when they left the restaurant. After work, traffic had abated and the entertainment rush hadn't come on the streets, which were now curiously silent and deserted. Marcus caught sight of the tall spire of Information Center glistening against the evening sky. "Where are we going?" asked Wilbur. "To the hotel. We have a hard day's work tomorrow." "Can we walk? I mean, we can't see anything in the tubes." "It's a long walk." "It's right over there. I've walked farther before breakfast." Marcus noted with approval that Wilbur had used the Information Center as a landmark to deduce the correct location of the hotel. His training showed. Even in the confusion of the city, he wouldn't get lost. "It's farther than you think, but we'll walk if you want. It may be our last evening on Earth. At least, I sincerely hope so." They went on. In time they saw what there was to see. It was a city, vast and sprawling, but still just another city Man had created. The buildings were huge, but constructed as all buildings had to be, out of stone and steel, concrete and plastic. Women were beautiful, tastefully gowned and coiffured, but it was easy to see that they were merely women. Shops were elaborate and fanciful, but there was a limit to what they displayed, an end to the free play of fancy. By the time they realized they were tired, they were close to the hotel. There wasn't any use in seeking transportation, since they'd get where they were going almost as fast either way. They had kept to the main thoroughfares since there was more to see. But Marcus had quickly accustomed himself to the pattern of streets and as they neared their destination he saw a short cut which they took. It was getting late and the street was dark. He began to wonder whether they should have come this way. He decided they shouldn't have. A faint red flash from the doorway indicated that his tardy decision was sound but useless. His knees tingled where the red flash struck him and in the middle of a stride he felt he didn't have any feet He fell forward, trying to shield Wilbur. Wilbur was falling, too, and they collided on the downward arc. Hands seized him, lifting him up. He was in no condition to struggle. Besides it wasn't safe. A tingler wasn't a lethal weapon, but it could have unpleasant effects if used carelessly or hastily. He didn't think they were in any real danger and it was best not to provoke their captors. ered sufficiently to be aware of what was going on, he found he had been carried to a space between two buildings, hidden from the street by a masonry projection. Wilbur was sitting beside him and a dim light played on them. "Don't move," said a voice that made an effort to be rough and hard, but failed by an octave. Now that Marcus thought of it the hands that had lifted him were small and soft. Their captors were women. The disconnected impressions of the city seemed to fall into a pattern. He was not greatly surprised at what was happening. The light moved closer and Marcus could make out the figure of the woman who held it. Behind her were others -- all women. But even delicate hands were capable of leveling a tingler. "Don't say anything," he said to his son in a low voice. Wilbur nodded dazedly. "No whispering," barked the soprano, shining the light directly in his eyes. "Now, are either of you married?" Marcus sighed; so that was it. Poor Earth was in a bad way when a pudgy unattractive clerk could get a high-salaried job solely because he was male. "Answer me," demanded the high unsteady voice. "Are either of you married? On Earth, I mean." Marcus could see her clearly, now that his eyes had become accustomed to the light. She was young, barely out of her teens. "What kind of question is that? When you're married, you're married. It doesn't matter where you are." On Earth, apparently, it did. "Outers," she exclaimed happily. "I've always hoped I'd find one. They're real men. Now let's see, which one shall I take?" She flashed the light on Wilbur, who squirmed and blinked. "He's younger and will probably last longer," she said critically. "On the other hand, he'll be clumsy and inexperienced." She turned to Marcus. "You need a shave," she said crisply. "Your beard is turning gray. I think I'll take you. Older men are nice." "You can't have me," said Marcus. She was near and he could have taken both the weapon and the light from her. But he couldn't stand, much less walk, and there were other women in the background, all armed probably, watching the girl who seemed to be their leader. "You see, I am married. Wilma wouldn't like it, if I took another wife." "Not even just for the time you're on Earth? It isn't much to ask." She turned the light on herself. "Am I unattractive?" She was not outstandingly beautiful, but since she was dressed as scantily as law allowed and fashion decreed Marcus could see her desirability. "How old are you?" he asked. "Old enough," she said. "In eleven months, I'll be twentyone." "You're pretty," said Marcus. "If I were fifteen or twenty years younger -- and not married -- I'd come courting." "But you did." she said in amazement. "Why did you come down a dark street, if you weren't looking for romance?" for romance on Earth. Men must be outnumbered at least three to one. It tied in with what he had so far observed. "I'm sorry for your trouble," he said. "But you must remember that we're Outers. We're not familiar with your customs. We were merely taking a short cut to our hotel." She gestured in sullen defeat. "I suppose it was a mistake. But why can't I have him, then? He's not married." "He isn't, nor will he be for some time. He has barely turned seventeen. I won't give my permission." "He's your son? Then you are experienced. Are you sure you won't reconsider me -- just while you're on Earth? I told you I don't like young men. Maybe that's because my father was an older man." "I'm sure he was," said Marcus. "However that's no reason to find me irresistible." He tried to stand, but his legs were rubbery and he sat down quickly. She looked at him with concern. "Does it hurt? I guess we gave you the strongest charge." She handed him the light and went to the women who were standing some distance behind her. He heard her whispering. Presently she came back. She knelt beside him and began rubbing his legs. "I sent them away," she said. 'They're going to look for someone else. It was my turn to propose to whomever we captured, but now you spoiled it." He smiled at her earnestness. "I'm sure you deserve better than you're apt to find with these strange methods of courtship. However I think you should help my son. You gave him a charge, too." "I bet I did," she said scornfully. "Don't worry about him. Kids recover easily." "Should I clout her, Pa?" asked Wilbur as he stood up, bending his knees gingerly. "She had no business shooting us." "She didn't, but you have no business talking like that. Touch her and I'll wallop you." The girl ignored Wilbur, putting her arms around Marcus and helping him to his feet. From the girl's reaction to him you'd never think so, but he was getting old. The first step was proof of it. He could walk unaided, but it felt as if someone were pulling pins out of his legs at the rate of two or three a second. "I'll go with you to the hotel," said the girl. "There are probably other marriage gangs out. If they see me with you, they'll think I've already made my catch." Marcus frowned in the darkness. Wilbur was getting entirely the wrong idea about women. He'd find it difficult to adjust to the different conditions at home. Marcus told the girl their names and asked hers. "Mary Ellen." "That's all, Mary Ellen?" "Of course, I have a last name, but I'm hoping to change it." He sighed in resignation. "Mary Ellen, we won't discuss marriage again. Is this clear? However I have plans for you. I'll get in touch with you before we leave Earth." They were nearing a brightly lit thoroughfare and he felt safer. "I was hoping you'd say that," she said wistfully. She dug into a tiny purse and handed him a card. "You'll notice there's another name on it, too. That's Chloe, my half-sister. She's smart and I like her, but I hope you don't like her -- not better than me, anyway." "I'm sure I won't. But why half-sister? I'd think it would be rather difficult for your mother to marry again." "Of course she couldn't," she said scornfully. "No woman's allowed more than half a -- " "Mary Ellen!" "All right, I won't say it," she said crossly. "But you asked." information. With women drastically outnumbering men, husbands had to be shared. Men were allowed more than one mate, but women never were. Perhaps the development of polygamy had been inevitable. Earth was the center of a vast and spreading civilization. Men went out to settle the newly discovered planets while, for the most part, women tended to remain behind. More than that, there were some women who came to Earth from planets that had been settled longer, attracted by the glamor of an older civilization and high-paying jobs, never realizing until they got there the other conditions that went with it. Earth's dilemma was therefore a partial solution to one of the problems of his own planet. But the important problem, getting the name changed to Mezzerow, was harder than he had anticipated. He wasn't looking forward to tomorrow. He noticed Mary Ellen glancing curiously around. "Is there anything wrong?" he asked. "Nooo. It's just sort of funny that you'd stay here -- in the heart of the unmarried girls' residential district." She grinned at him. "Maybe I'd better go in with you." "I think you'd better," he said. That's what the pudgy clerk had meant. He should have listened to him and gone to the men's hotel. The lobby was crowded with women, many of whom, he suspected, had been waiting for their return. On a man-starved planet, word got around. Perhaps he was imagining it, but he thought he heard an audible sigh of disappointment when they came in with Mary Ellen. She had more than repaid them for the few anxious moments she had caused. Much more, though she didn't know it yet. They went directly to their rooms and Marcus sent Wilbur inside, lingering at the door to talk with the girl. "Should I come in?" she asked hopefully. "I'm really sorry about your legs." "You will not come in, Mary Ellen. I don't trust myself alone with you." "You mean it?" "I was never more sincere." He almost believed it himself. "We don't have to get married if you're not going to be here long enough to make it worthwhile," she said happily. "I was thinking -- " He glanced warningly inside the room. "He's a big nuisance," she whispered. "Look. I've got to work tomorrow, but in the evening I'll be free. Put the kid on a merry-go-round and come and see me, huh?" She threw her arms around Marcus and kissed him passionately. Then she turned and ran down the hall. Marcus shook his head and went into his room. little difficulty contacting an infolegger. For a rather large sum, a map purporting to show the bands. For another sum, a map of the principal transportation tubes was added to it Both were assuredly out of date in many respects, but were probably correct in the one detail Marcus was concerned with. They started rather late to avoid the morning rush. There were some transportation complications. At the first trial they arrived at the wrong section of the city. After consultation with various passengers and robot way stations, they got it straightened out. Penciling corrections On the map, they retraced their route, making only one mistake along the way. This mistake was not their fault. A transfer junction had been relocated since they had passed through it on the way out They got to their destination in good time, perhaps faster than if they had used the services of also an example of neo-drive-in classical. But instead of resembling something appropriate, say a five or six pointed star, it appeared to be a mere jumble of children's curv-blocks. A closer look convinced Marcus that his first appraisal had been wrong. Originally it must have been built to house another A-function. Perhaps A-WR (Anatomy; woman, reclining). Whatever it was on the outwithin. Marcus found it impossible to get near the question booths. Robots scurried about in seemingly useless tasks and workmen shouted orders that no one paid attention to. In the midst of the dust and turmoil, one man stood on a platform and watched the frantic effort with bored serenity. "Moving," he said automatically as Marcus approached. "Where to?" "I don't know. It depends on whom we can bump." were moving and didn't know where. Another day and his map was useless. And if this man was right, even Information Center was tomorrow. "Isn't there a planning commission?" he said. "Don't they tell you where to move?" The man shrugged. "There's a planning commission. But they had too many responsibilities and had to move to a larger building, the same as we're doing. Until they get settled, everyone's on his own." The man spoke quietly into the mike and the tempo of the removal robots accelerated. He turned back to Marcus and added an explanation: "Three exploration ships returned yesterday, loaded to the brim with micro-data. That's why we have to move." Marcus rubbed his face. He could see it posed a problem. It was not merely the storage of new data, the data also had to be made available to the public. This required new offices, human supervisors, robot clerks. That was the way they did things on Earth, but he wished they'd waited a few days. "You can't be moving this stuff out on the streets. Somebody must have an idea where you're going. Tell me who he is. I've got to find out where you'll be tomorrow." "Oh, no. If you found where we're moving, you'd learn who we're going to bump," said the man with cheerful cunning. "They'd take steps to repel us. Can't have that." The man scratched his head. "Tell you, if you're really honest -- if you're not a department spy -- I can show you how to take care of your business today." "I'm an Outer," said Marcus. "I don't care about your squabbles. I want to get something settled and get out of here." "You look like an Outer," said the man. "Here's what you do. Part of the department is still functioning. Go to the side entrance. Question booths there are open." He turned back to the mike and barked orders that had no visible effect on anything. THE man was partly wrong. The side entrance was open, but corridors and booths were jammed with displaced information seekers. Marcus was not easily discouraged. By now he was accustomed to the vast machinations required for the simplest things. He went to the back entrance. It, too, was jammed, but after a short desperate struggle he squeezed into a booth, leaving Wilbur to hang on the outside. The official who answered him was sleepy and harassed, a difficult expression. He yawned and took his feet off the desk to acknowledge the call and then a robot removed the desk. He had no place to put his feet so he kept them firmly on the floor as if he expected that, too, to vanish. Marcus stated the request clearly, spreading the chart for the man to see. "Here is the original from which the phototape was made and sent to Earth with his comments. I don't know what happened here. Perhaps the tape was fuzzy or it may have been fogged in transit by radiation. Or it may have been faulty interpretation on the part of a robot." The official peered out of the view plate. "Messy Row. Mezzerow. Ha, ha." He laughed perfunctorily and got up to pace. A robot came near the chair and he sat down hastily. "Here, you can see that in his own hand he spelled it Mezzerow," said Marcus. "He named it after himself as every explorer is entitled to do once in his career. I ask that in simple justice the mistake be corrected. I have a petition signed by everyone on the planet." The official waved the documents back. "It doesn't matter who signed," he said. "We don't allow these things to influence our decision." He put his head in his hand though he had no desk for his elbow. His lips moved soundlessly as he framed the reply. "I want to give you an insight to our problems," he said. "First, consider pilots. There are all sorts of beautiful names for planets. Plum Branch, Coarsegold, Waves End, but there's only one Messy Row. It's a bright spot on their voyage. They look at the charts and see it -- Messy Row. They laugh. Laughter is a therapeutic force against the loneliness of space. The name of your planet is distinctive." "We don't care for the distinction," said Marcus. "It's got so bad, we call it Messy Row ourselves, when we're not thinking. Who's going to settle on a planet they laugh at?" The official didn't seem to hear. Marcus adjusted the volume control, but there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the sound or the volume. "This is only a small part of it," continued the man. "Do you have any idea how many charts we print? You would have us make them obsolete. Think of the ships roaming through space, many never touching Earth. How can we reach them with corrected charts?" "I'm glad you said corrected charts," said Marcus. "But corrected charts shouldn't be any harder to deliver than new ones -- which, you'll admit, you're always making." "I can't compromise our famous accuracy for the whims of a few selfish individuals," said the official. He stood up and this time the robot whisked the chair away. He smiled and reached out his hand for the familiar vertical file. The file wasn't there, but a robot was. It took his hand and tried to lead him away. He shook himself loose. "You can see we're busy. Come back when we're not in the midst of an upheaval. I might consider a request that at present I must turn down." He walked briskly away, leaving Marcus with a fine view of an empty room -- until a robot came and took the viewplate to the other end. Marcus eased out of the booth. Wilbur was waiting with an anxious face. "I know it's past noon," he said gloomily to his son. "We'll get something to eat Eggs." Wilbur knew better than to protest. removal robots arrived at the rear section. In the quiet of a nearby restaurant Marcus considered the problem anew. The mission hadn't been entirely a failure. He could accomplish one important task without the aid of any government agency. In fact, it was better if he didn't ask their help; But he owed something to the memory of Captain Mathew Mezzerow. Mezzerow his father had called the planet -- and Mezzerow it was going to be. There was also Wilma. She had arrived when both she and the settlement were quite young. Courted and feted and proposed to endlessly, she had found the excitement of being the center of attention irresistible. She hadn't minded the name then, not since she was the prettiest, most attractive girl there. There weren't many others. But she had changed as Messy Row had grown. They had four sons now, Wilbur the oldest. Four sons. She was not concerned whether they would marry. Her sons were smart and handsome and belonged to the best family -- they would experience no trouble in finding wives. But if they did she could always take them visiting -- to a planet on which there was no woman shortage. Once she had been slightly giddy, even after they were married. Marcus had often wondered how her lashes could possibly remain intact when other men came near. She had outgrown that phase and when the chrysalis burst it revealed a different woman. Out of the flirtatious girl came the homemaker. Everything near her was immaculate. Fences around the house were whitewashed and the lawns were always mowed. Inside, everything was as tidy as a pin. Mud was never tracked in. Wilma no longer approved of Messy Row as the name of any planet on which she lived. Marcus had to have help. Someone who lived on Earth would know the proper approach better than he. He fished out the card Mary Ellen had given him and the longer he looked the more certain he was that he had found the person. It was not Mary Ellen. It was her sister. Mary Ellen and Chloe -- no last names given. Apparently this was custom, the way unmarried girls informed the world that they were looking for mates. In addition to their names was the address at which they both lived. There was also the occupation of each. Mary Ellen was a junior attendant, whatever that was. But Chloe was far more important. She was an astrographer, a senior supervisor astrographer. Marcus ate rapidly, a definite plan materializing with each bite. Chloe was the key. With her aid, he should be able to change Messy Row. He smiled reflectively. With what fie had to offer she would certainly consent to help him -- even if it was illegal. but Chloe was and she welcomed them. Marcus truthfully explained how they'd met her sister. Chloe commented unfavorably on the marriage gangs and, though Marcus agreed, he received the remarks in silence. It was not for him to change the mores of Earth. Society had to work with what there was. Chloe was small and dark in contrast to the larger blonde Mary Ellen. She was older, too. Once she must have been quite pretty, but instead of easing graciously into the poise of maturity she had been forced into the early thirties without a husband. The struggle showed. She was cordial when they came in and even more cordial when he finished outlining his plan. "Yes, something can be done," she said quietly. "I will set up the organization and ship them out in groups of ten. I have a vacation in a few months and Mary Ellen and I will come then." She glanced at him anxiously. "That is, if you think I'm needed." "You are," he assured her. "We need wives, mothers, skilled technicians. I can't think of anyone who will fit the description better." "Then you'll see me again," she said. "And not merely for the reasons you think. You see, I have a high-salaried job and could have been married before this. But it didn't seem right. I want to feel I'm of some use to a civilization that seems to have forgotten people like me exist." "Mezzerow needs you," he said. "I was thinking of a man I know. Joe Ainsworth, a quiet thoughtful fellow of about thirty-five or thirty-seven. His trouble has been that he likes pretty women who are also intelligent. I'll have him keep an eye out for you." She smiled and the transformation took place. She was pretty. Marcus wondered whether there was such a person as Joe Ainsworth. There must be, in kind, if not in name. "So much for that," said Chloe briskly. 'The rest of your plan for Messy Row is a fine example of muddy thinking. In the first place I work for a private company, not the government." "But you make government charts." "True. But let me show you what I mean. What's the code number of the chart Messy Row is on?" Marcus quoted it from memory. The code of a map on which a given system could be found was almost as important as the name. Chloe closed her eyes. "No," she said when she opened them. "That's done in another department. I couldn't possibly change it to Mezzerow." "But if you changed it, the name would stay," said Marcus. "I'll give you money to see that it gets done. Once it's on the map nobody will say anything. Even if they do notice, all they'll know is that there's a conflict between early and late editions. They'll have to go directly to the source to straighten it out. And we're the source." Chloe smiled fleetingly. "It's never done that way. Do you think they'd send nine hundred and forty-seven light-years to find whether the name is Messy Row or Mezzerow?" She crossed her legs and they were nice legs. There had to be a Joe Ainsworth. "It won't work," said Chloe. "I can't make the change myself or even bribe someone to do it." She noticed his dejection and touched his hand. "Don't be discouraged. There's another way. An Outer wouldn't think of it because he doesn't know what goes on behind the scenes." "I've seen enough to give me a good idea," said Marcus. "I wonder. Have you noticed that when you ask for information you are always answered by a human? And just as obviously he doesn't know. He has to contact a robot and relay the information along." The omnipresent vertical file was, in reality, a robot memory bank. Why not give the robot a voice and dispense with innumerable men and women? The question was on his face when he looked at Chloe. "Robots are logical -- nothing more," she said. "Most questions can't be given black and white answers. There must be an intermediary who understands the limitations of the mechanical mind to interpret it to the public." "I don't see how this is going to help me," he said. "You've been trying to get an official to say that you're right and he'll see that the change is made. Abandon that approach. He'll never take the time. Write your request." "For forty years we've been writing. That's why I'm here." Chloe smiled again. "The number of letters received by the government in one year reaches a remarkable total. Or perhaps the total isn't huge when you consider how many humans in the Universe there are. Anyway, off-planet letters are never opened, because there's no way to tell from the outside which are important. So they're all pulped and used as nutrients in food tanks." Marcus nodded dubiously. "I see. Anyone who thinks he has something important will come here... as I did. And if he isn't satisfied he tries to go over the head of whoever refused the request. This volume is still great, but it's small enough to be processed without falling hopelessly behind." "Exactly. And if you phrase your request properly there's a good chance it will be granted, even if it is foolish." "This isn't foolish," said Marcus, rubbing his hands. "I've got all the facts. I can write them in my sleep." "Who said anything about facts?" said Chloe. "The worst thing you can do is to give them facts. Don't you see what I'm trying to tell you?" Marcus took a deep breath. "No," he said. "Let's go over it again. Mathew Mezzerow discovered a planet and named it after himself. Does this mean anything? Not really. Does it mean anything that Messy Row will be settled more slowly because of the name? Again no. Thousands of other planets will gain the settlers that Messy Row loses. The robot will refuse a request based on facts and from the government's viewpoint will be justified." "But you just said robots don't handle requests." "Face to face they don't. You would resent it as an arrogant bureaucracy being told you couldn't have something by a robot. But you don't see who processes written requests. And in these matters the government uses robots because they're more efficient." It was too complex for Marcus. Robots processed written requests, but not those made in person. Robots were logical and only logical and therefore ordinarily should not be appealed to on the basis of reason. He swallowed hard and looked at Chloe. "What should I do?" he asked. "Emotion," she said. "Robots don't understand emotion. But they can and have been built to recognize emotion. On a minor matter such as this, you need to overload the emotion recognition factor. "Merely identify the planet. Then stress not the justice of your claim but the anguish you've suffered. Make it extreme -- paint a picture of the misery the 'error has already caused and will continue to cause. If you make it strong enough, the robot will set aside rational processes and grant the request." government grew in size and complexity and contact with the governed parts became more tenuous, greater reliance had to be placed in logic, machinemade logic. But machines could not hope to encompass all the irrationality of Man. And irrational demands were apt to cause trouble. Pride was irrational, and so was the greater part of human misery. Therefore, in minor matters, the government had provided a safety valve for irrational requests. Only in minor matters, men still decided important issues. But in the innumerable small decisions that had to be made daily, robots would set aside their logical process if a strong emotion were present. "Pa," said Wilbur from the corner in which he had been squirming sleepily. "Not now, Wilbur," growled Marcus. "I suppose you're hungry." In his mind he was composing the request. It was unlike anything he'd written. "I think there's something in the kitchen," said Chloe, but Marcus hastily refused. Even on her salary she couldn't afford to serve eggs. Mary Ellen came in just then. She slouched in dispiritedly, cloak drooping about her. "Hi, sis," she said as she opened the door. Then she saw Marcus and revived abruptly. She flung herself across the room and into his lap, wrapping her arms around him. "Mark, dear," she said, smiling cattily over his head at her sister. Marcus sighed regretfully. Heaven knew what the boy in his innocence would tell his mother. He worked himself loose from the girl's embrace and explained why he was here. "Then we're going to Messy Row?" "In a few months," said Chloe. "Marcus is setting up a perpetual fund to help those who can't pay their fare." "Oh, I'll go," said Mary Ellen, looking steadily at Marcus. "But you needn't expect me to get married." Marcus smiled to himself. She was dramatizing. When she found her choice wasn't limited she would scarcely remember him. There was, if Marcus now recalled correctly, a Joe Ainsworth, twenty-four or five. What made him seem older, when Marcus had first thought of him, was his prematurely gray hair. The two should be a perfect match. Chloe could not have Joe Ainsworth after all, but there'd be another for her. "Please change, Mary Ellen," said Marcus. "We're going to dinner." "All of us?" "Certainly all of us," said Marcus dryly, noting her disapproval. ing with Chloe what he should say in the request. Apparently there were nuances he didn't understand because he still didn't have it settled to his satisfaction when Mary Ellen returned. "I'm ready," she said, pirouetting for his approval. She was ready, but not for a quiet little dinner. "I suggest a wrap for your shoulders," he said. She made a face, but went to get one. "How long will it take to get this through?" he asked Chloe. "Four to six years. There's a backlog." "Four to six years?" he repeated increduously. He began to see that the loophole the government had provided was very small indeed. Who would bother, even if he felt strongly about it, when he knew it would take so long? "That's going through regular channels." Chloe frowned and smoothed her hair. "You may be very lucky though. Today, just today, we might find a much faster way. You said they are "They are," he said, hoping he knew what she meant. This was a golden opportunity that might never come again. "Then they'll be busy through the night A workman should have access to the master robot" Marcus smiled. "I'm an excellent workman." "You'll need me, too. You won't recognize what you're after." "Granted. Is it dangerous?" "Not physically. But there's a severe penalty for tampering with government property. There's an even heavier one for trying to get your case considered ahead of schedule." He could see why this was so. He could also see that Chloe was the kind of person Messy Row needed. She knew what she was getting into, but didn't hesitate. "Then you should come with me. But stay in the background. Promise me you'll try to get away if I'm caught." She shrugged. "If you're caught you'll need help on the outside." Mary Ellen came back, a transparent shimmering wrap over her shoulders. She was blonde and dazzling. "Where are we going? I'm so happy." Marcus loosened his collar and sat down. "Dinner's off, except for you two. Chloe and I have work to do. Mary Ellen, take Wilbur back to the hotel for me. Watch after him." "You want me to?" she asked despondently. "I asked you to." "Then I will." She arched her back, and it was a splendid arch. She swirled around, pausing at the door. "Come on, brat," she snarled. "Pa, I can get along -- " said Wilbur. Marcus looked at him and he left with Mary Ellen. "We haven't much time," said Marcus when they were alone. "First we have to write the request. I'll need your help." Chloe took the cover off a small machine in the corner. She sat down and turned toward him. "We have to emphasize anguish and suffering." "Misery," suggested Marcus. "Misery is a good strong word," she agreed. "It isn't used much lately. You should have this acted on in hours instead of years." "It will be nice," said Marcus. "I can't think of any name as bad as Messy Row." Slowly he began to speak of the misery resulting from the error. Making corrections as they went, Chloe typed it on the tape. weight of forty-three years roll away. He was tired, but it was relaxed tiredness that comes with achievement. It had been become part of the bustle and confusion. It had even been easy to locate the master robot that processed decisions on chart names. But the rest hadn't been easy even with Chloe to guide and counsel him. The master robot was one of the last things to be moved. It was located deep in the sub-subbasement, ordinarily inaccessible. It was a ponderous contrivance, awkward to move and quite delicate. Truck robots backed up to it and under it, lifting it up. Technicians and extra workmen swiftly began disconnecting it from 'the building. Marcus was one of those extra workmen and he did his job as well as the others. But he didn't get an opportunity to insert his request in the machine. Chloe sauntered past in shapeless work clothes, winking as she went by. She attracted no attention because there were many women around. Marcus got ready, moving to the front of the machine, feeling the spool in his pocket. A technician stared suspiciously at him, but there wasn't anything definite to object to. Chloe leaned against the wall, moving the switch next to her with her elbow. Immediately standby circuits cut in, but the flicker of lights caused a commotion. The technician next to Marcus whirled, shouting at Chloe who looked startled and tired. The tiredness was real. In the few free seconds he had, Marcus put the spool in the machine close to the top. It jammed the remaining spools closer together, but the machine was built to compensate for overloads. There should be no trouble from this. The spool itself was another thing Chloe had helped him with. Normally requests were received on paper and had to be transcribed. She had enabled him to bypass one stage altogether. They worked on after the shouting episode. At the first rest break they walked up to the street level, pausing in a dimly lighted hall to strip off their outer work clothing which they disposed of. They were no longer workmen. They were pedestrians who had passed by and wandered in to see what was happening. They didn't belong in the building and were told to leave, which they did. And so it was late when Marcus entered the hotel. There was no one around, for which he was thankful. He didn't feel like fending off women at this hour of the morning. He went up and let himself in quietly. Wilbur was asleep in the adjoining room and the door between them was open. He closed it before turning on the light, which he adjusted to the lowest level. Perhaps by this time the master chart robot was in a new location, grinding out decisions. Messy Row was or soon would be a thing of the past. "Pa," Wilbur called as Marcus removed a shoe. "Yes. I'm back. Go to sleep." "Did you get it done?" "It's finished. We're taking the next ship out." "Tomorrow?" "If there's one scheduled tomorrow." "Before we say good-by?" Marcus could hear the bed rustle as Wilbur sat up. "We'll send them a note. Anyway they'll be on Mezzerow in a few months." T HE door opened and Wilbur stood there, his face white and his eyes round and serious. "But I gotta say good-by to Mary Ellen." Marcus took off the other shoe. He should have known not to leave them alone. His only excuse was that he had been thinking of other things. "I thought you didn't like her," he said. "Pa, that was because I thought she didn't like me," said Wilbur. "But she does. I mean -- " He leaned heavily against the doorway and his face was long and sad. Marcus smiled in the near darkness. The boy had been around girls so seldom he didn't know how they behaved. He had mistaken a normal reaction to the opposite sex for something more. Nevertheless it had worked out nicely. Wilbur would not remember who it was that Mary Ellen had really pursued. With the feverish egotism of youth he would retain only the memory of the interest she'd shown in him. A kiss would haunt him for years. "Am I to understand you made love to her?" he asked sternly, amused at his own inaccuracy. "Oh, Pa," said Wilbur. "I kissed her." "These affairs pass away." "I still gotta say good-by," said Wilbur. "We'll see," said Marcus. Not if he could help it, would they. It would be a terrible thing if, on parting, Mary Ellen would throw her arms around him, ignoring Wilbur. She was too young to understand what it might mean to someone even younger than herself. Marcus went to sleep with the satisfaction of a man who is in full control of destiny. In the morning thre was no need for subterfuge. A ship was going near Mezzerow. Not directly to it, the planet wasn't that important. But it was merely a short local hop from one of the planets on the schedule. Mezzerow. After all these years he could call it by the rightful name without feeling provincial. The excitement of the return trip shook Wilbur out of his preoccupation with Mary Ellen. Marcus packed and had the luggage zipped to the space port. He called Chloe and completed the financial arrangements and left a message for her sister who was at work. And then they were at the port, entering the ship. There was a short wait before takeoff. They settled in the cabin and Wilbur promptly went to sleep. Food, sleep, girls; it was all a young man had time for. But Marcus couldn't rest though he was tired. He wanted to hear the schedule announced. By this time the correction should have been made. The rockets started, throbbing softly as the tubes warmed up. Wilbur awakened with a start, sitting on the edge of the acceleration diaphragm. "Do you think they'll announce it?" he asked. "I think so," said Marcus. The Universe would know that it was Mezzerow. The rockets throbbed higher; the cabin shook. Weren't they going to call the schedule? The intercom in the cabin rasped. They were. "Bessemer, Coarsegold," said the speaker. "Get on the acceleration couch," said Marcus as he did so himself. "Noreen, Cassalmont," the speaker droned. But now there was too much interference from the rockets. The thrust pressed Marcus deep into the flexible diaphragm. The announcer shouted, but the blood was roaring in his ears. Marcus felt himself sliding into the gray world of takeoff. the stars and the sensation of great weight rolled away. Marcus sat up. "We didn't hear it," said Wilbur, swinging his legs. "We didn't. But they announced it." "I wish I'd heard," said Wilbur. It was bothering Marcus, too. "The thing to do is to find out," he said. They went into the corridor. The rockets were silent; the star drive had taken over. The solar system was behind them, indistinguishable from the other stars. The pilot was busy and nodded his head, asking them to wait while he set the controls. He flipped levers and after an interval turned around. "Can I help you?" he asked. "We didn't hear the schedule," said Marcus. "The rockets were too loud." The pilot smiled apologetically. "You know how it is -- last minute corrections on the charts. We had to wait until new ones were delivered, just before takeoff." The oppression that had been hovering near lifted a little. "I understand," said Marcus. "Would you tell me if Mezzerow was one of the corrections?" The pilot turned to the list and ran his finger down the line. He looked and looked again. "No Mezzerow here," he said. The oppression had never been far away. It came back. "No Mezzerow?" said Marcus bleakly. "No, but I'll check." The pilot bent over the list. "Wait. Maybe this is why I didn't see it. Take a look." Marcus looked where the pilot was pointing. Above the fingernail, in bold black letters, was the name. Mezzerow -- changed to avoid confusion with a family name.) "Thanks," said Marcus faintly. "That's what I wanted to know." They went to the cabin in silence. Marcus closed his eyes but that didn't shut out the new name. Nothing could. "That's not as nice as it was," said Wilbur. "What do you suppose was wrong?" "I don't know," said Marcus. But he did know. Fourteen times, or was it eleven, he had used one word. He had tried to overload the master robot with emotion and he had succeeded. He had given it one outstanding impression: Misery. "What'll we do?" said Wilbur. "Go back and change it?" "No," said Marcus. "We'll leave it as it is. When you grow up and take my place, you can try your hand at it if you want." Women would get there regardless of what it was called. Chloe would realize what had happened and anyway he'd write. She'd see that they got to the right place. And with women for the men who wanted to settle, they'd get along. Besides, there was the element of uncertainty. He had thought nothing could be quite as bad as the old name... until this. He shuddered to think what the next change might be like. "Will it be all right?" asked Wilbur anxiously. ' "It has to be all right," said Marcus, his voice strong with resignation. "We're going home to Misery Row."      # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon Rd., R.D. #, Box #F Verona, Penna. Death Wish Compared with a spaceship in distress, going to hell in a handbasket is roomy and slowl T HE space freighter Queen Dierdre was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the EarthMars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her engineer. Watkins was fond of saying that there are two kinds of equipment -- the kind that fails bit by bit, and the kind that fails all at once. Watkins was short and redfaced, magnificently mustached, and always a little out of breath. With a cigar in his hand, over a glass of beer, he talked most cynically about his ship, in the' immemorial fashion of engineers. But in reality, Watkins was foolishly infatuated with Dierdre, idealized her, humanized her, and couldn't conceive of anything serious ever happening. On this particular run, Dierdre soared away from Terra at the proper speed; Mr. Watkins signaled that fuel was being consumed at the proper rate; and Captain Somers cut the engines at the proper moment indicated by Mr. Rajcik, the navigator. As soon as Point Able had been reached and the engines stopped, Somers frowned and studied his complex control board. He was a thin and meticulous man, and he operated his ship with mechanical perfection. He was well liked in the front offices of Mikkelsen Space Lines, where Old Man Mikkelsen pointed to Captain Somers' reports as models of neatness and efficiency. On Mars, he stayed at the Officers Club, eschewing the stews and dives of Marsport. On Earth, he lived in a little Vermont cottage and enjoyed the quiet companionship of two cats, a Japanese houseboy, and a wife.  yet he sensed something wrong. Somers knew every creak, rattle and groan that Dierdre was capable of making. During blastoff, he had heard something different In space, something different had to be wrong. "Mr. Rajcik," he said, turning to his navigator, "would you check the cargo? I believe something may have shifted." "You bet," Rajcik said cheerfully. He was an almost offensively handsome young man with black wavy hair, blase blue eyes and a cleft chin. Despite his appearance, Rajcik was thoroughly qualified for his position. But he was only one of fifty thousand thoroughly qualified men who lusted for a berth on one of the fourteen spaceships in existence. Only Stephen Rajcik had had the foresight, appearance and fortitude to court and wed Helga, Old Man Mikkelsen's eldest daughter. Rajcik went aft to the cargo hold. Dierdre was carrying transistors this time, and microfilm books, platinum filaments, salamis, and other items that could not as yet be produced on Mars. But the bulk of her space was taken by the immense Fahrensen Computer. Rajcik checked the positioning lines on the monster, examined the stays and turnbuckles that held it in place, and returned to the cabin. "All in order, Boss," he reported to Captain Somers, with the smile that only an employer's son-in-law can both manage and afford. "Mr. Watkins, do you read anything?" Watkins was at his own instrument panel. "Not a thing, sir. I'll vouch for every bit of equipment in Dierdre ." "Very well. How long before we reach Point Baker?""Three minutes, Chief," Rajcik said. "Good." The spaceship hung in the void, all sensation of speed lost for lack of a reference point Beyond the portholes was darkness, the true color of the Universe, points of the stars. Captain Somers turned away from the disturbing reminder of his extreme finitude and wondered if he could land Dierdre without shifting the computer. It was by far the largest, heaviest and most delicate piece of equipment ever transported in space. He worried about that machine. Its value ran into the billions of dollars, for Mars Colony had ordered the best possible, a machine whose utility would offset the immense transportation charge across space. As a result, the Fahrensen Computer was perhaps the most complex and advanced machine ever built by Man. "Ten seconds to Point Baker," Rajcik announced. "Very well." Somers readied himself at the control board. "Four -- three -- two -- one -- fire!"  Acceleration pressed the three men back into their couches, and more acceleration, and -- shockingly -- still more acceleration. "The fuel!" Watkins yelped, watching his indicators spinning. "The course!" Rajcik gasped, fighting for breath. Captain Somers cut the engine switch. The engines continued firing, pressing the men deeper into their couches. The cabin lights flickered, went out, came on again. And still the acceleration mounted and Dierdre's engines howled in agony, thrusting the ship forward. Somers raised one leaden hand and inched it toward the emergency cut off switch. With a fantastic expenditure of energy, he reached the switch, depressed it. The engines stopped with dramatic suddenness, while tortured metal creaked and groaned. The lights flickered rapidly, as though Dierdre were blinking in pain. They steadied and then there was silence. Watkins hurried to the engine room. He returned morosely. "Of all the damn things," he muttered. "What was it?" Captain Somers asked. "Main firing circuit. It fused on us." He shook his head. "Metal fatigue, I'd say. It must have been flawed for years." "When was it last checked out?" "Well, it's a sealed unit. Supposed to outlast the ship. Absolutely foolproof, unless -- " "Unless it's flawed." "Don't blame it on me! Those circuits are supposed to be Xrayed, heat-treated, fluoroscoped -- you just can't trust machinery!" At last Watkins believed that engineering axiom. "How are we on fuel?" Captain Somers asked. "Not enough left to push a kiddy car down Main Street," Watkins said gloomily. "If I could get my hands on that factory inspector..." Captain Somers turned to Rajcik, who was seated at the navigator's desk, hunched over his charts. "How does this affect our course?" Rajcik finished the computation he was working on and gnawed thoughtfully at his pencil. "It kills us. We're going to cross the orbit of Mars before Mars gets there." "How long before?' "Too long. Captain, we're flying out of the Solar System like the proverbial bat out of hell." devil-may-care smile which Watkins found singularly inappropriate. "Damn it, man," he roared, "don't just leave it there. We've got a little fuel left. We can turn her, can't we? You are a navigator, aren't you?" "I am," Rajcik said icily. "And if I computed my courses the way you maintain your engines, we'd be plowing through Australia now." "Why, you little company toady! At least I got my job legitimately, not by marrying -- " "That's enough!" Captain Somers cut in. Watkins, his face a mottled red, his mustache bristling, looked like a walrus about to charge. And Rajcik, eyes glittering, was waiting hopefully. "No more of this," Somers said. "I give the orders here." "Then give some!" Watkins snapped. "Tell him to plot a return curve. This is life or death!" "All the more reason for remaining cool. Mr. Rajcik, can you plot such a course?" "First thing I tried," Rajcik said. "Not a chance, on the fuel we have left. We can turn a degree or two, but it won't help." Watkins said, "Of course it will! We'll curve back into the Solar System!" "Sure, but the best curve we can make will take a few thousand years for us to complete." "Perhaps a landfall on some other planet -- Neptune, Uranus -- " Rajcik shook his head. "Even if an outer planet were in the right place at the right time, we'd need fuel -- a lot of fuel -- to get into a braking orbit. And if we could, who'd come get us? No ship has gone past Mars yet." "At least we'd have a chance," Watkins said. "Maybe," Rajcik agreed indifferently. "But we can't swing it. I'm afraid you'll have to kiss the Solar System good-by." Captain Somers wiped his forehead and tried to think of a plan. He found it difficult to concentrate. There was too great a discrepancy between his knowledge of the situation and its appearance. He knew -- intellectually -- that his ship was traveling out of the Solar System at a tremendous rate of speed. But in appearance they were stationary, hung in the abyss, three men trapped in a small, hot room, breathing the smell of hot metal and perspiration. "What shall we do, Captain?" Watkins asked.  neer. Did the man expect him to pull a solution out of the air? How was he even supposed to concentrate on the problem? He had to slow the ship, turn it. But his senses told him that the ship was not moving. How, then, could speed constitute a problem? He couldn't help but feel that the real problem was to get away from these high-strung, squabbling men, to escape from this hot, smelly little room. "Captain! You must have sopie idea!" Somers tried to shake his feeling of unreality. The problem, the real problem,' he told himself, was how to stop the ship. He looked around the fixed cabin and out the porthole at the unmoving stars. We are moving very rapidly, he thought, unconvinced. Rajcik said disgustedly, "Our noble captain can't face the situation." "Of course I can," Somers objected, feeling very light-headed and unreal. "I can pilot any course you lay down. That's my only real responsibility. Plot us a course to Mars!" "Sure!" Rajcik said, laughing. "I can! I will! Engineer, I'm going to need plenty of fuel for this course -- about ten tons! See that I get it!" "Right you are," said Watkins. "Captain, I'd like to put in a requisition for ten tons of fuel." "Requisition granted," Somers said. "All right, gentlemen, responsibility is inevitably circular. Let's get a grip on ourselves. Mr. Rajcik, suppose you radio Mars." When contact had been established, Somers took the microphone and stated their situation. The company official at the other end seemed to have trouble grasping it. "But can't you turn the ship?" he asked bewilderedly. "Any kind of an orbit -- " "No. I've just explained that." "Then what do you propose to do, Captain?" "That's exactly what I'm asking you." There was a babble of voices from the loudspeaker, punctuated by bursts of static. The lights flickered and reception began to fade. Rajcik, working frantically, managed to re-establish the contact. "Captain," the official on Mars said, "we can't think of a thing. If you could swing into any sort of an orbit -- " "I can't!" "Under the circumstances, you have the right to try anything at all. Anything, Captain!" Somers groaned. "Listen, I can think of just one thing. We could bail out in spacesuits as near Mars as possible. Link ourselves together, take the portable transmitter. It wouldn't give much of a signal, but you'd know our approximate position. Everything would have to be figured pretty closely -- those suits just carry twelve hours' air -- but it's a chance." voices from the other end. Then the official said, "I'm sorry, Captain." "What? I'm telling you it's our one chance!" "Captain, the only ship on Mars now is the Diana. Her engines are being overhauled." "How long before she can be spaceborne?" "Three weeks, at least And a ship from Earth would take too long. Captain, I wish we could think of something. About the only thing we can suggest -- " The reception suddenly failed again. Rajcik cursed frustratedly as he worked over the radio. Watkins gnawed at his mustache. Somers glanced out a porthole and looked hurriedly away, for the stars, their destination, were impossibly distant. They heard static again, faintly now. "I can't get much more," Rajcik said. "This damned reception... What could they have been  suggesting?" "Whatever it was," said Watkins, "they didn't think it would work." "What the hell does that matter?" Rajcik asked, annoyed. "It'd give us something to do." They heard the official's voice, a whisper across space. "Can you hear... Suggest..." At full amplification, the voice faded, then returned. "Can only suggest... most unlikely... but try... calculator... try..." The voice was gone. And then even the static was gone. "That does it," Rajcik said. "The calculator? Did he mean the Fahrensen Computer in our hold?" "I see what he meant," said Captain Somers. "The Fahrensen is a very advanced job. No one knows the limits of its potential. He suggests we present our problem to it." "That's ridiculous," Watkins snorted. "This problem has no solution." "It doesn't seem to,'.' Somers agreed. "But the big computers have solved other apparently impossible problems. We can't lose anything by trying," "No," said Rajcik, "as long as we don't pin any hopes on it." "That's right. We don't dare hope. Mr. Watkins, I believe this is your department." "Oh, what's the use?" Watkins asked. "You say don't hope -- but both of you are hoping anyhow! You think the big electronic god is going to save your lives. Well, it's not!" "We have to try," Somers told him. "We don't! I wouldn't give it the satisfaction of turning us down!" astonishment. "Now you're implying that machines think," said Rajcik. "Of course I am," Watkins said. "Because they do! No, I'm not out of my head. Any engineer will tell you that a complex machine has a personality all its own. Do you know what that personality is like? Cold, withdrawn, uncaring, unfeeling. A machine's only purpose is to frustrate desire and produce two problems for every one it solves. And do you know why a machine feels this way?" "You're hysterical," Somers told him. "I am not. A machine feels this way because it knows it is an unnatural creation in nature's domain. Therefore it wishes to reach entropy and cease -- a mechanical death wish." "I've never heard such gibberish in my life," Somers said. "Are you going to hook up that computer?" "Of course. I'm a human. I keep trying. I just wanted you to understand fully that there is no hope." He went to the cargo hold. After he had gone, Rajcik grinned and shook his head. "We'd better watch him." "He'll be all right," Somers said. "Maybe, maybe not." Rajcik pursed his lips thoughtfully. "He's blaming the situation on a machine personality now, trying to absolve himself of guilt. And it is his fault that we're in this spot. An engineer is responsible for all equipment." "I don't believe you can put the blame on him so dogmatically," Somers replied. "Sure I can," Rajcik said. "I personally don't care, though. This is as good a way to die as any other and better than most." Captain Somers wiped perspiration from his face. Again the notion came to him that the problem -- the real problem -- was to find a way out of this hot, smelly, motionless little box. Rajcik said, "Death in space is an appealing idea, in certain ways. Imagine an entire spaceship for your tomb! And you have a variety of ways of actually dying. Thirst and starvation I rule out as unimaginative. But there are possibilities in heat, cold, implosion, explosion -- " "This is pretty morbid," Somers said. #'M A pretty morbid fellow," Rajcik said carelessly. "But at least I'm not blaming inanimate objects, the way Watkins is. Or permitting myself the luxury of shock, like you." He studied Somers' face. "This is your first real emergency, isn't it, Captain?" "I suppose so," Somers answered vaguely. "And you're responding to it like a stunned ox," Rajcik said. "Wake up, Captain! If you can't live with joy, at least try to extract some pleasure from your dying." "Shut up," Somers said, with no heat. "Why don't you read a book or something?" "I've read all the books on board. I have nothing to distract me except an analysis of your character." Watkins returned to the cabin. "Well, I've activated your big electronic god. Would anyone care to make a burned offering in front of it?" "Have you given it the problem?" "Not yet. I decided to confer with the high priest. What shall I request of the demon, sir?" "Give it all the data you can," Somers said. "Fuel, oxygen, water, food -- that sort of thing. Then tell it we want to return to Earth. Alive," he added "It'll love that," Watkins said. "It'll get such pleasure out of rejecting our problem as unsolvable. Or better yet -- insufficient data. In that way, it can hint that a solution is possible, but just outside our reach. It can keep us hoping." Somers and Rajcik followed him to the cargo hold. The computer, activated now, hummed softly. Lights flashed swiftly over its panels, blue and white and red. Watkins punched buttons and turned dials for fifteen minutes, then moved back. "Watch for the red light on top," he said. "That means the problem is rejected." "Don't say it," Rajcik warned quickly. Watkins laughed. "Superstitious little fellow, aren't you?" "But not incompetent," Rajcik said, smiling. "Can't you two quit it?" Somers demanded, and both men turned startedly to face him. "Behold!" Rajcik said. "The sleeper has awakened." "After a fashion," said Watkins, snickering. Somers suddenly felt that if death or rescue did not come quickly, they would kill each other, or drive each other crazy. "Look!" Rajcik said. " panel was flashing green. "Must be a mistake," said Watkins. "Green means the problem is solvable within the conditions set down." "Solvable!" Rajcik said. "But it's impossible," Watkins argued. "It's fooling us, leading us on -- " "Don't be superstitious," Rajcik mocked. "How soon do we get the solution?" "It's coming now." Watkins pointed to a paper tape inching out of a slot in the machine's face. "But there must be something wrong!" The computer hummed, its lights flashing green. Then the hum stopped. The green lights blazed once more and faded. "What happened?" Rajcik wanted to know. "It's finished," Watkins said. "Pick it up! Read it!" "You read it. You won't get me to play its game." Rajcik laughed nervously and rubbed his hands together, but didn't move. Both men turned to Somers. "Captain, it's your responsibility." "Go ahead, Captain!" Somers looked with loathing at his engineer and navigator. His responsibility, everything was his responsibility. Would they never leave him alone? He went up to the machine, pulled the tape free, read it with slow deliberation. "What does it say, sir?" Rajcik asked. "Is it -- possible?" Watkins urged. "Oh, yes," Somers said. "It's possible." He laughed and looked around at the hot, smelly, lowceilinged little room with its locked doors and windows. "What is it?" Rajcik shouted. few thousand years to return to the Solar System, Rajcik? Well, the computer agrees with you. Twenty-three hundred years, to be precise. Therefore, it has given us a suitable longevity serum." "Twenty-three hundred years," Rajcik mumbled. "I suppose we hibernate or something of the sort." "Not at all," Somers said calmly. "As a matter of fact, this serum does away quite nicely with the need for sleep. We stay awake and watch each other." The three men looked at one another and at the sickeningly familiar room smelling of metal and perspiration, its sealed doors and windows that stared at an unchanging spectacle of stars. Watkins said, "Yes, that's the sort of thing it would do,"      Like automobile batteries, every writer periodically seems to need time to recharge. That explains the appearance and disappearance of well-loved names, in case you were puzzled. There's nothing even faintly amusing about the process. When it happens, it is a catastrophe to the writer and another source of anguish to the editor. The feeling -- well, this is a personal affidavit stating that the only thing like it is having the nurse walk out of the room and forget to remove the needle after you've been given a transfusion. No matter how often you go through it, you always feel that this is the final one -- you'll never get another idea again; even if you did, you couldn't put it down on paper; or if you wrote it, the story would be awful. Fortunately for us, though, all authors do eventually get their creative batteries recharged; It's just a matter of storing up power. And when that happens -- novelet about a perfect world, so peaceful and accommodating that nothing short of Paradise can compete with it. But how it got that way is only slightly less ghastly than how it manages to stay that way! novelet which refuses to be satisfied with the proposition that when a malignant world endangers another, surgery is the only answer. Instead, it comes up with an alternative solution -- maybe the malignancy can be killed with kindnessl But the best news of all... both authors are back in full production again, sparking away more dazzlingly than ever... and you'll see them often in these glad pagesl wBaaasaaaasg iaate ?... U Cr iO# #'fiwt "# for your information fm tm. World War, when every old ax blade and every rusty girder suddenly acquired importance as scrap steel, the English dismantled an interesting structure located some ten miles from Glasgow. Just a few years later, immediately after the end of the war, British Army engineers George Bennie's experimental monorail track with station, photographed in # worked hard and with top priority on the repair of a bomb-damaged structure of almost the same kind in a city in West Germany in the British Zone of Occupation. Both the structure that was dismantled in England and the one that was repaired in Germany were monorail tracks, the only ones in the world. They were not completely alike, but the main difference was not one of construction. The most important difference was that the one in England was experimental and had been built for purposes of testing and demonstration, while the one in Germany was and is a hard-working part of the city's public transportation system, the city being Elberfeld-Barmen. It has been ever since it was built in # and its history, except for the bomb damage sustained during the Second World War, is happily devoid of any dramatic incident. It simply worked from the first day on and, through all these years, it was a unique offshoot of the iron horse. There was no other like it. But it is quite probable that one day in the future, the passenger-carrying monorail of Elberfeld Barmen will not be unique any more. It will then be the oldest example of a special and very useful means of transportation. And it is also likely that the newer examples will owe their existence and usefulness to a premeditated disregard of the principles that guided the design and construction of the first. best when told in proper chronological order. The city of Elberfeld-Barmen was originally two cities, Elberfeld and Barmen, both situated some distance apart on the banks of a fairly small river, the Wupper, which is a tributary of the Rhine River. The valley of the Wupper River was in the center of what was to become one of the most heavily industrialized sections of all Europe. Even before the turn of the century, the traffic situation of the whole area had become very nearly unmanageable. And the neighboring cities of Elberfeld and Barmen were in an especially difficult spot. As almost always happens -- npbody knows why -- people living in one city had jobs in the other. Local traffic was heavy and, in addition to the local traffic, there was a good deal of through traffic. In both cities, the streets were generally old and rather narrow and by no means straight. The Imperial Railroad bought what rights of way it needed and, in time, took care of much of the through traffic. The local traffic problem still remained to be solved. An engineer from Cologne, by the name of Eugen Langen, pointed out to the harassed city officials of both cities that there was something that might be called open space between the two cities, namely the Wupper River. One might build an elevated railroad running over the river, without hampering the river traffic itself. Eugen Langen probably was not the first to think of this, but if others had harbored the same idea before him, they had given up, for the river does not happen to be very straight, either. No elevated railroad, if circumstances forced it to stay over the river, could follow all its twists and turns and run at a speed faster than a brisk walk. The answer, presented by Langen, was a type of railroad which could follow the twists and bends and still run at a reasonable speed. He evolved a structure resembling a steel-girder bridge running the length of the river, with supports looking like inverted "V"s, planted into the banks of the river. This structure supported two single rails and the trains were suspended from these rails. Each car hung from so-called bogies and each bogie had two wheels, one behind the other, which rested on the single rails. In each bogie, the front wheel was the driving wheel with an electric motor, while the second wheel merely trailed. The current for the driving wheels was furnished in the same manner as for any other electric train. Naturally, a car hanging from bogies could take rather sharp turns fairly fast in perfect safety. The name given to the new device was Schwebebahn, which might be translated nearly literally as "levitated railroad," but is usually referred to in English engineering literature as the Wuppertal Monorail.  its completion, somebody wrote a paper proving conclusively that the structure must be unsafe, since it should collapse under its own weight. At the time this was written, the Schwebebahn had a record of having handled # passengers per hour in each direction ever since it was opened to the public. It obviously was far less unsafe than the critic had calculated. Whoever was in charge then modified operations somewhat, however. Instead of three-car trains, which had been customary, the Monorail ran only two-car trains, but more of them. Since the stations are spaced rather closely together, the speed of this monorail is never very high. Its function, and consequently its speed, might best be compared to a fairly fast streetcar line operating under ideal traffic conditions, with nobody else ever getting in the way. The Wuppertal Monorail has shown that such a transportation system has definite advantages in crowded areas because it can provide urban mass transportation without taking up any space on the ground worth mentioning. It is with just this thought in mind that there have been sporadic studies of a monorail project for southern California. This monorail, if built, would be a suburban rapid transit -- let's say fairly rapid -- line running from the center of Los Angeles to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley, a distance of # miles. Instead of following a river, the San Fernando Valley Monorail would follow a proposed freeway and it would look different for this reason. Instead of being supported by inverted "V"s, the rails would be supported by T-shaped girders which would be imbedded in the center-park strip of the freeway. As in the example of the Wuppertal Monorail, the San Fernando Valley Monorail is to have electric drive and the cars are to be suspended from two bogies apiece, each bogie with two wheels. But in the new proposal, every bogie wheel is supposed to be a driving wheel, equipped with an electric motor of # horsepower, which would result in a maximum speed (this is purely a coincidence of figures) of # m.p.h. No higher speeds are possible under the circumstances because of economic spacing of the stations. For the sake of passengers, especially standees, acceleration and deceleration of the cars must not surpass a maximum of six feet per second squared, and this would imply a spacing of stations a minimum of # miles apart if one wanted to reach # m.p.h. between stations. The most important talking point of the advocates of monorail systems is, of course, safety, for which the Wuppertal Monorail has produced a most impressive record. A suspended monorail cannot be derailed except by difficult and highly ingenious sabotage. The rails cannot possibly be flooded. No snow can accumulate on the rails, although this consideration, of course, does not apply to sunny California. No driver, however reckless or careless, can stall his car on the track. The second talking point is that, in this particular case, where a rapid transit line has to be built in a heavily populated area, a monorail would be cheaper than a surface railroad. politan Traffic and Transit Committee of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce completed a study of what it would cost to build a double-track surface railroad in the center of the freeway. This, of course, meant widening the freeway and buying some right-of-way for the purpose. The final figure read that this double track railroad would cost # per mile. But that was only for the widened freeway and the roadbed. There would be additional expenses for tracks, stations, signal systems and, naturally, the trains themselves. The monorail along the same route would cost # per mile, including structures, signal system, car yard, repair shops and eight intermediate stations. This figure of # per mile included everything but the cost of the terminal station and the price of the rolling stock. Interesting -- but how about that other monorail structure the English used up for scrap during the Second World War? Well, that one, though also a S# The Doppersberg station of the Wuppertal monorail in Elberfeld monorail, is something from an entirely different chapter of the same book, maybe even a chapter from a different book. To understand it, we have to go back to early entries in the story of the iron horse. When the first locomotives were in what would now be called the planning stage, a few people who had learned mathematics severely lectured the inventors on their lack of mathematical knowledge. A rail, they said, is a straight line. A wheel is a circle. A locomotive wheel on a rail is, mathematically speaking, a circle and a tangent. As everybody knows, a circle and a tangent touch in just one point. Therefore no car could possibly be moved by applying force to its wheels. Since wheel and track touched in one point only, there could not possibly be enough friction to move the vehicle. The wheel, in all probability, would merely spin. A few inventors took this information to heart and came up with "designs" in which the wheels were cogwheels fitting a notched rail -- or else in which all wheels were all freely spinning and the motion was to be accomplished by pushing rods engaging either the cross ties of the tracks or else the ground directly. The latter type had imitation horse feet at the end of the push rods! But some people just built locomotives and found out that, tangent to the circle notwithstanding, they got enough traction not only to move the locomotive but to make it pull a train, too. rails was taken for granted and the railroads grew rapidly, in numbers, size and in weight. As a matter of fact, they grew too much in weight. Rolling stock was built to last and if it grew Two-ear train of the Wuppertal Monorail traveling over the Wupper River heavy in the process, well, that was the way things were. Around #, a good solidly built passenger car in which every seat was occupied weighed just three per cent more than the same car without any passengers! Every once in a while, somebody noticed this obvious inefficiency and made suggestions for lightweight trains. He was then either told that durability was the most important consideration or was suspected of being a camouflaged salesman for an aluminum company. Only recently have lightweight trains actually appeared on the scene, but they are still rare. In the meantime, imaginative engineers had gone a step further in their reasoning. Except for heavy freight engines, where their great weight was useful when it came to traction, there was no need or reason for inefficient overweight in rolling stock. One should, therefore, use all the tricks of the trade to lighten the cars. It would then, obviously, take much less power to move a car. And with lessened power requirements, one could think of engines other than the steam engine. Moreover, why rely on traction of turning wheels? Airplanes moving around on the ground moved on wheels, but no wheel traction was involved. Why not investiThe first propeller-driven railroad ear in history -- Berlin, # gate whether an airplane propeller might not furnish the motive power for wheeled vehicles, too? It turned out after the First World War that several engineers had secretly toyed with this idea for years. But it also turned out that the first propeller-driven railroad car had been built in a most unprofessional manner. The year was # and the place was Palestine. A contingent of German soldiers stationed there found the climate too warm for their taste, but fortunately the shore of the Mediterranean Sea was only a little more than a mile away. Unfortunately, however, they had to walk that mile, though there was a railroad track. There also was a flatcar but no locomotive. Then somebody looked speculatively at a wrecked airplane. Its propeller was undamaged, its engine in running condition. No harm in taking the engine out of the wrecked plane and mounting it on the flatcar. Maybe it would work. It did. Without knowing about this example, a German scientist who had been in charge of propeller production and testing (for airships) through the war advocated, in #, that available railroad cars and available aircraft engines should be put together as emergency propeller-driven railroads. The scientist was Dr. Otto Steinitz, who had devoted some spare time to the problem of propeller-driven trackbound vehicles for several years. The reason he publicly advocated his ideas at that particular time was that he believed that such emergency vehicles would help to return German soldiers home after the Armistice had been signed. Theoretically, the months just following a revolution may be the proper psychological time for advocating new ideas in other fields, too. In reality, nothing happens as a rule, if only because of the lack of means. At any event, the Germans finally got their soldiers home without taking advantage of Dr. Steinitz's suggestion. B UT the proper sub-section in the Office of the Federal Railroads of the Ministry of Transportation was interested and a single car was built. It wasn't built quite the way Dr. Steinitz wanted it. The chief engineer of this particular railroad shop considered it a rather extreme case of lunacy that Dr. Steinitz wanted ball bearings; who had ever heard of a railroad car running on ball bearings? Dr. Steinitz lost this particular battle. The same man also could not see why the front end of the car should not be square. Dr. Steinitz had stated that he wanted the front end of the car to look "somewhat like the stem of a ship." The man in charge of the actual building decided that one did not build pointed railroad cars; it just wasn't done. After much complaining, a kind of compromise was reached. It was not very good, but the completed vehicle did work. It passed a test run with flying colors in May, #. It made a run with the railroad committee of the National Assembly on board. It pulled a trailer; by chance, only the heaviest type of freight car happened to be available to serve as a trailer on that day. But the propeller car pulled it just the same. Then, after a number of noncommittal statements had been issued, it ran for a year around freight yards in Berlin, doing odd jobs of moving freight over short distances, even though Dr. Steinitz had stated over and over again that the propeller drive for trackbound vehicles would work most efficiently for long runs at rather high speeds and that the Principle of bogie-wheel suspension for a propeller-driven monorail. The broken line marks the path of the propeller blade tips propeller drive was not good for stop-and-go driving. The German railroads had to replace most of their rolling stock, which had been worn out in four years of war with continuous duty and little maintenance. But they built conventional equipment. No lightweight rolling stock. And certainly no propeller drive. More than ten years later, another engineer by the name of Krukenberg succeeded in persuading the railroad office to build him a streamlined (and lightweight) test car with a pusher propeller. It made several runs between Berlin and Hamburg at record speeds and became the favorite subject of newspaper and newsreel photographers. And then there came an official statement that propeller driven railroad cars were "not yet practical." THE next step was taken by the Scotsman George Bennie in putting together the propeller drive and the monorail. Many of the objections, some silly, some justified, that had been brought forth against propeller drive for surface vehicles became automatically invalid when applied to overhead monorails. And the propeller drive, on the other hand, greatly simplified the construction of the monorail car. The wheels in the bogies no longer had to be powered and the problem of current supply and current pickup along the line could be eliminated by having the propeller driven by an airplane type engine running on aviation gasoline. George Bennie was in the fortunate position of being able to do more than write articles about his project and publish detailed drawings. In #, he built a #-foot test section of monorail track, complete with a station and a propeller-driven car. And he predicted as a result of both calculations and tests that a propeller-driven monorail ought to be able to reach speeds of # m.p.h. This sounded pretty farfetched at the time, but he may very well have been conservative in his prediction. Of course the propeller-driven monorail is something entirely different from the bogie-wheeldriven type in action over the Wupper River and under study for the San Fernando Valley. There the goal is reasonably fast transit for rfiany passengers between closely spaced stations. The propeller-driven monorail is a means of really rapid transit for large passenger loads in any kind of weather over fairly long distances, with stations spaced widely apart. Just what the spacing of the stations will be and to what overall range monorail systems might be expanded will depend entirely on local conditions, on actual transportations needs. Front end of a propeller-driven monorail train Ideally, for high speeds and efficient operation, the stops should be at least # miles apart, while the total length of a run may be # miles. Above distances of # miles, especially if they are to be traveled non-stop, the airplane begins to assert its superiority. But within the #-mile range in congested areas, the only possible competitor in terms of speed would be the large helicopter -- the bus-type helicopter. Not being trackbound, it is more flexible than a monorail, but it is not as independent of local weather conditions. And its fuel consumption per tonmile of payload flown is much higher, of course, probably about ten times as high because airborne equipment has to lift the physical payload in addition to moving it. Strange as it may seem at first glance, the traffic density on a rigidly proscribed track can compete with that in the apparently boundless atmosphere. The helicopters could fly at many different levels, but at some time they have to land in a specific place, which is the place where a congestion might occur. this one deals with technological problems like speed versus fuel consumption, passengercarrying capacity over a given route for a specific time interval, and safety of operations in various kinds of assumed weather, you are on reasonably firm ground. But when it comes to financial aspects, such firm foundation for thinking seems to vanish more often than not. I don't know the reasons; I just remember examples from the past. At one time, a railroad had to go around mountains. It had to do that -- or so it was stated -- a mountain would cost far too much, provided it was possible at all. At some other time, somebody showed why the automobile would always remain a city vehicle. The reason was so simple that a child could understand it. To travel in an automobile from one city to another would require a road of exceptional quality, a quality comparable to a city street. Naturally such roads could be built, but hundreds of miles of such roads would cost so much that the public simply could not afford them. To discuss the probable cost of a monorail system is, therefore, a very difficult undertaking and a general comparison of costs between monorail, railroad, superhighway and helibus line would quickly turn into science fiction. Areal answer can be given only after a specialized and thorough study of one particular route, as was made in the case of' the San Fernando Valley project. There the financial superiority of the monorail was extreme, to put it mildly, because of the rights of way that had to be bought in an area where they are expensive. no guide : Chicago to Peoria, Christi, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia, to Birmingham, Alabama; Tacoma, Washington, to Portland, Oregon; Burbank, California, to San Diego; and Providence, Rhode Island, to Newark, New Jersey, are all about the same milage as the Piper Cub flies. But even assuming equal transportation demands -- which is certainly wrong -- the cost of construction of any connecting trackage would vary enormously from place to place, without counting the cost of right of way. Among the places just quoted, the Chicago to Peoria line probably has the flattest country. There a double-track monorail structure might cost more than a double-track railroad. But once you deal with country that is not flat, the surface rail line encounters expensive items such as grading, cutting through hills, crossing rivers and creeks and similar vagaries of nature. The monorail encounters the same natural features, but in the vast majority of cases, the structure can neutralize them by the simple expedient of lengthening or shortening the supports. It is just the type of structure that can cope with difficult territory. Moreover, it is just the type of vehicle that would be useful for serving an airport which is a score of miles from the city to which it belongs. In short, it is the means for really fast ground transportation and it accomplishes this feat by raising the vehicles a little off the ground -- truly a mutant of the iron horse. scription sent to a new address, notify Why so long? Because... Master and secondary lists have to be corrected. A new addressograph plate has to be cut. The plate has to be put in its proper alphabetical place in the addressograph machine. Other people are moving, too, and their changes of address have to be processed. Four weeks is none too long, but we can handle it. As soon as you know where vou're moving to, please send the old as well as the new address immediately to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. YWho would not have pity for a poor, helpless victim? Nobody -- except another poor victim! a chance. All he could do was shield his head with limp arms and moan, while this other fellow -- a young, husky six-footer -- gave him a vicious, cold-blooded beating. "Hey, there!" I yelled indignantly. "Cut it out!" But the kid kept belting away, as if he were methodically working out on a fifty-pound training bag. Finally, the old man sagged to the pavement. Then this hoodlum began to kick him. I'm not a hero. I'm a newspaper man whose job it is to look at things objectively. But I know right from wrong. My one punch caught the young bruiser back of the ear and spilled him on the ground. He lay there for a moment, then rolled over. Even by the street light, it was easy to see his eyes were glassy. It gave me lots of satisfaction. Tm not a big man -- just compact -- but I take care of myself. I don't drink or smoke and I exercise regularly. The result is I can handle myself in the clinches. The kid sat up and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. I could see now that he was a college boy. The red sweater with the terrycloth border and the white pants with a shortened left leg were a dead giveaway. "Listen here," I said roughly, "you nuts? Beating up an old man!" He appeared to be desperately searching for an explanation -- something to say. Then, abruptly, without having uttered a sound, he reeled away and shambled hurriedly down the street. My first inclination was to give chase. But the old man groaned and I turned to help him. That was when I had it -- a virtual brain storm. This whole episode, I could see, was a perfect answer to the damnable criticisms leveled at my series on juvenile delinquency. More than that, it was an absolute vindication! to sit at a meeting and take it on the chin from twenty of the town's leading lights who designated themselves The Committee for the Protection of Youth. The outfit was, of course, politically inspired. It had obviously been started by the Mayor and his gang as a means of torpedoing Jones, the publisher of my paper. Jones, you see, had become politically ambitious himself. Since I was the star on Jones' team, they piled on me. Some of the nicer things said about my articles were that they constituted filthy muckraking, were a pattern of irresponsible lies, and were designed principally to smear the incumbent politicos. The children of the town, they cried, were being sacrificed to ruthless ambition. It wouldn't have been so bad if Jones had stuck by me. But he cut and ran. Discretion, he had whispered to me from behind a pudgy hand, was the better part of valor. Then he told them he would discontinue the articles. Now I had first-hand proof of a particularly brutal bit of delinquency. A cruel assault on a podr, helpless old man! Furthermore, I was the hero of the incident! Bending down to see how seriously the old man had been hurt, I asked, "What happened, Pop? Was he trying to rob you or something?" He didn't answer. I looked around for help, but the street was deserted. The best thing, I decided, was to take him home. There Nan, my wife, could patch him up while I found out what had happened. I bent down again and pulled him to his feet He staggered. I put one steadying hand on his shoulder and gripped his wrist with the other. My spine went cold. It was his, flesh. Not so much that it felt like rubber -- but the chill. Here we were in the middle of a heat wave, the thermometer nudging ninety, and the old guy's wrist is like an icicle! For a second, it threw me. Then I thought of shock. That might explain it And Nan, having been a nurse, would be the one to know. I started the old man walking. "See if you can make it to my house," I urged. "It's just around the comer." Nan switched on the porch light when she heard us on the steps. Opening the door, she drew back with a little shriek. The old man was pretty gruesome-looking at that But it wasn't just his blood-covered face and matted white beard. There was something spiderish about him. He was angular, and dark, and skeletal. His eyes, deepset and brooding, seemed to crouch under his shaggy, jutting brows. "Take it easy, honey," I said. "The old guy just needs some patching up." and helped him into the house. After we'd eased him into the easy chair by the fireplace in the living room, she turned to me, worried. "Were you in an accident?" I gave her the story and she looked at me sharply, but didn't speak. She went into the bedroom and came back with blankets and medicine bottles. Tucking the blankets around the old man's legs, she said, "But I don't understand why you were walking. You went to the meeting in Jones' car. Why didn't he bring you back?" I didn't answer. The old man had closed his eyes and his breathing was becoming very shallow. "Look at him," I said. "Is he all right?" "He's sleeping. Why don't you answer my question?" "Jones didn't bring me home because I had words with him and walked away in a huff." "Over the meeting?" "Partly." I explained about the meeting and how Jones had backtracked when the going got rough. "After all, it was his idea to build circulation with sensational articles and to use them to attack the present administration. But when there's a showdown, he acts like a scared rabbit. And that's what I told him." "Fm glad," Nan said, her face brightening. "What did he say to that? "He gave me a lot of bull about it being a mistake to pick on people's children and how we should stick to old standbys like redlight districts and dope trafficking." Nan slapped the iodine on the table. "Some nerve! What did you tell him?" "I told him he was jerking the rug from under me and that I'd be damned if I'd write a bunch of warmed-over tripe. Then I walked away." "You finally quit!" Until then, I don't think I'd ever realized just how much Nan hated my work. Of course, off and on, we'd really had some knock-down drag-outs, but I'd never considered them serious. Oh, we often talked about my going into teaching physical ed. It had been my intention ever since college. Some day I'd actually do it. I shook my head. "No, honey, I didn't quit." "But you're going to?" I shrugged in a gesture of helplessness. "How can I? An unprovoked attack against a poor old man is dynamite. It puts me in the driver's seat. I can write an' I article that will make every mealy-mouthed hypocrite who spoke against me tonight eat his words." "It's always something," she said wearily. "Year after year, you've come up with one reason or another to stay in the rotten business. And what does it amount to? Mud-slinging! I'm beginning to think you like it!" She'd never come out so bluntly and, deep down, I felt my resentment pressing like the sharp edge of a coiled spring. Originally, getting into the newspaper game had been a sort of fluke. Majoring in physical ed at college, I often covered the various sports events for the campus paper. One day, a big-time scandal broke, involving gamblers and one of the teams, and I found myself in a perfect spot to do an exclusive for a city paper. My stuff was run verbatim under a by-line and afterward picked up by the wire services. Later, with a trick knee keeping me out of the war, I managed to talk myself into a job with the newspaper that had run my expose. I was goaded by a feeling that I ought to be doing something bigger than teaching children how to play games. From the very start, I discovered I had a peculiar talent. If I found myself anywhere near a skeleton in a closet, I could plainly hear its rattle. Before long, my reputation was firmly established. # Nan, whom I'd met at college, knew of my ambition to teach and began planning toward that end as soon as we married. She started what she called a quitting fund. This was to stake a move to a small town where her uncle was principal of the high school. He was supposed to help me get a foothold in the new career. But then Tommy was born and there were bills to pay. After that there were other reasons, like car payments. By the end of the war, the teaching plans were no longer discussed, and Nan and I had drawn so far apart that even the bickering between us had ceased. Finally, when Tommy was about ten, she suddenly let me have it. It seems the kid was running around with a tough crowd. She wanted to get him away from the city. He needed the fresh air and the decent, normal home-life of a small town, she said. And she meant every word of it. Luckily, Jones had come along right about then and offered me a job on his newspaper, back in the old home town. He had an idea he could drive the opposition paper out of business by featuring yellow journalism at the local level. That's where I came in. With my ability to make the news bleed, he figured he could cinch it. For that reason, he was ary. So I accepted. Nan, of course, was furious, even though I pointed out the extra dough meant we could start planning again. She didn't calm down until I promised to quit the job after six months. thing. She was right enough about that. But she had no right to make such an issue of things. I started to tell her that, then stopped. Maybe she was picking a quarrel to make me forget about the old man and the story. I threw a fast block into my resentment. "Honey," I said, "don't be unreasonable. Remember this job with Jones was supposed to get Tommy away from the city, and the extra dough was all part of that big plan for the teaching business." "What plan?" she flared. "There never was a plan except to pamper your vanity! Big-shot Potter, the whiz-bang newspaperman! That's all you've ever been interested in!" I had to take a deep breath to keep from yelling back at her. "You're not being very fair about this. I did it all with you and Tommy in mind." Her voice lowered. "Is that so? Well, how about the promise to quit in six months? We've saved the money. What marvelous thing do you have in mind for me and Tommy now?" That hurt. As a matter of fact, I'd been quite enjoying the stint with Jones. My series on juvenile delinquency had just about doubled circulation and that gave me a deep sense of accomplishment. Then, too, writing the stuff against the Mayor and the rest of the town's big-wigs -- in keeping with Jones' political ambitions -- nurtured a feeling of power that was very satisfying. Frankly, the meeting earlier that evening had set me down harder than I cared to admit. Now, with every chance for a comeback, Nan wanted me to pass! "Listen," I snarled, "so it's hot. So don't take it out on me!" Her fists bunched and the color drained from her face. Knowing the signs, I could tell this was going to be a lulu. But the door flew open and Tommy came clomping through the hallway and into the front room. He's a big kid for his age, mentally and physically. He spotted the old man right away. "Golee" he breathed excitedly. "Who's the creep?" "Never mind," Nan said, quickly recovering her composure. "He's had an accident. Just get some money from your father and go to the drugstore for more bandages. I'll need them." I gave him a buck and he ran out the kitchen way, slamming the back door so hard, the whole house shook. The old man's eyes flickered open. He looked at me first, then at Nan. "Well," he said in a peculiar muffled tone that suggested he was speaking through an obstruction like a fencing mask, "isn't this cozy!" I immediately threw a lot of questions at him. His name, he said, was Ashe -- just plain Ashe. He couldn't remember any other name. He couldn't remember why he'd been beaten up, nor what had led up to it. He was very confused. He thought maybe it would all come back to him later. However, he did remember my rescuing him and he appreciated that very much. Hearing hifn say so gave me a nice, tingling glow. I invited him to stay for dinner and he accepted. jVjAN objected. "There's only " salad," she wailed. "It was too hot to cook." "Salad's fine," I told her. "Oh, Ted, pleasel" "Listen here," I said coldly, "I've invited Ashe to stay and he's accepted. Why all the fuss?" She gave me a hurt look, turned, flounced into the kitchen. I started to follow, thinking I'd made a mistake in being so brusque. Then I thought, the heck with it. Let her take it any way she wanted. Sweat was plastering my shirt and pants to me like a skindiver's outfit. I needed a shower. I told Ashe to rest easy and went into the bathroom. When I came out, Tommy had returned. He and the old man were busily gabbing. Nan, standing by the kitchen door, frantically signaled me to join her. In the kitchen, she backed me against the sink. "Get him out of here!" "Why?" I asked, startled. "There's something wrong with him." "Wrong?" "It's just the heat," I scoffed. "If you must know, he -- he leered at me! While you were in the shower. It was awful!" "Nan, do you think that kind of yarn is going to stop me from writing about what happened tonight? It won't. And you can make up your mind I'm keeping the job. When I get through with the people in this town, they'll know they've been dealing with Edward Potter!" Tight-lipped, she went to the refrigerator for the supper. As soon as we'd sat down, Ashe began to talk. He kept it up through the entire meal. He'd been everywhere and done everything, to hear him tell it. Tommy, listening bug-eyed, kept asking questions. It sort of got me. The hero of the affair, to my own son, was Ashe! It was Nan who finally blew the whistle. "Mr. Ashe," she said, her voice honed to a razor-edge, "I'm sure Ted would be much more interested in knowing what led up to the fight tonight -- or are you still confused?" There was a beat of three while he studied Nan carefully. Then he said, "It's quite apparent, Mrs. Potter, that you've absolutely no use for me. This shows discernment. Most likely, with a woman's instinct, you've hit upon at least part of the truth. Because of that, it might be wise to lay all my cards on the table. But I warn you, it will be hard to believe." "That," said Nan, leaning back with a gleam of triumph in her eyes, "I'll bet on!"right. So hard, in fact, that I thought he was just pulling Nan's leg. He said he'd come from another world, outside our solar system, where people existed in a kind of liquid state, bouncing about, for the most part, like large water-filled bladders. They were, however, capable of taking almost any shape their superior minds willed. They could flatten and drift about in the water, or they could inflate and rise in the air. They could even become facsimiles of other living things, taking on the shape, texture and coloration, a capability which aided greatly in their main function of traveling as missionaries of goodness amongst the peoples of the Galaxy. For they were perfect -- as perfect as angels. As he talked, Nan's face got redder and redder. Finally, when I couldn't keep from snickering, she jumped up, grabbed her empty plate and headed for the kitchen. "Don't rush off, honey," I said innocently. She stopped at the kitchen door and glared at me. "I guess I know when I'm being kidded!" "But," said Ashe in his cold, dry purr, "I'm not kidding." It seemed to me the joke had gone far enough. "Don't tell me," I said sarcastically, "that you're a missionary to Earth!" "No," he admitted. "I'm here because I was banished." "Oh. A sort of fallen angel!" "Exactly." Another chill scurried along my spine. It was his tone of voice more than anything. But then, too, his eyes had a dull, black humorlessness about them. Nan returned to the table and sat down. I noticed a band of perspiration mustaching her upper lip. Indeed, I seemed to have grown much hotter myself. Irritably, I said, "Ashe, it's too damn warm for games. If you don't want to explain what happened this evening, that's your privilege. But, as you know, the story means a lot to me. And I did stick my neck out for you!" He held up a .gnarled hand. "One moment, my boy. Let me finish." So he finished. And the rest of the story was even nuttier. He was a throwback, he said with quiet pride. The perfection which had taken his people countless years to attain was wiped out the moment he came into being. They'd tried to reform him, but there was something fundamental about his evil -- as if it were an essence. As a last resort, they'd put him into one of their wonderful machines and thrown the switch. At that agonizing instant, he'd imagined himself to be water scraping over the edge of a sharp rock. Then he'd come to, drifting through space. And, much later, he'd touched Earth. Once landed, he'd taken on many shapes, through the years -- mainly, however, of people who'd died. carefully sliding my chair back. If I could reach the phone in the hallway without being noticed, it would be fairly simple to get help. But he saw what I was doing and laughed. "Edward," he said, "I know you don't believe me, but stick around until I prove it." What happened next almost made me sick to my stomach. His face, which had been as wrinkled as a fielder's mitt, all of a sudden took on the appearance of a disturbed reflection in a pool of water. His flesh began to writhe like a tangled mass of earthworms. Thirty seconds after it began, he'd sloughed off thirty years. Even his beard, which had been as white as shower-room tiling, became a fierce, dead black. I heard Tommy pipe, "Golee" and Nan sigh -- only it sounded more like a groan. I shook away the dazed feeling and it was immediately replaced by a great excitement. "Listen here," I said hoarsely, "this story will set the whole country on its ear. With my byline on it!" "Oh, Ted," Nan cried, "don't let him take you in! It's a trick. It's -- it's mass hypnotism or something." "The trouble with you," I said, "is you don't believe even what you see with your own eyes!" The next day, ' I went to see Jones. We'd decided -- Ashe and I -- upon a course of action. The existence of Ashe was to remain a secret, but I was to keep my job with the paper at all costs. Then we could sit back and wait for the opportune moment to spill it, a time when we had the best angle and were positive Ashe wouldn't be labeled a hoax. Driving to the plant, I was tense enough to snap. It was not entirely from the unabated heat, either. I didn't like the way Ashe had acted during the latter part of the evening. Naturally I had felt disappointment at not being able to reveal his presence. But what rankled most was the guy's colossal gall. Okay, so I'm childish, only I just don't like to have someone gobble up my share of the dessert. He'd also borrowed all the cash in the house and then demanded I draw on my bank account. I quickly discouraged that. But the topper was his forcing Nan and me to sleep on the couch while he used the bed. He said his bruises still hurt, even though they weren't visible. when Jones kept me waiting for over an hour. Surprisingly enough, he was in good spirits. As I entered the office, he indicated one of the leather chairs and said with a laugh, "Sit down, Ted. I've got some good news." My opinion of him the previous evening obviously hadn't been taken very much to heart. Sourly, I told him, "As a publisher, you should know that good news is no news." The smile left his face. Then, with a visible effort, he forced it back. "You have something there, Ted. You certainly have. But point of view is important, also. You see, they've arrested a gang of kids for shoplifting. One of them is Tommy, your son." I jumped up. "Arrested Tommy!" "Now wait, Ted. Don't go off half-cocked. It's a break. Don't you see? You can cover delinquency with the lid off now. You'll be writing as a parent in the same boat with other parents..." I could still hear his frantic noises after I'd slammed the door behind me and run the length of the corridor. At the police station, I had the distinct feeling they'd been waiting for me. I knew most of them, especially the big red-headed guy who beckoned me into a rear office. His name was Thompson -- Detective Emanuel Thompson. He always looked as if he wore a football uniform under his dark blue suit. My articles had roasted him plenty. He handled juvenile delinquency cases. "Well, Mr. Potter," he greeted me, Smiling tightly, "we meet under unfortunate circumstances." "Can the phony sympathy," I said. "You're not the type. Just let me see my boy." He used a red-and-blue handkerchief to wipe the dampness from his beefy neck. "I think we'd better have a little talk first." "I got no talking to do. This is a lousy frame-up against me and the paper. Get my son out here and do it fast!" sighed and reached for the phone. It really got me when Tommy came into the room. He'd been crying; his face was streaked, and he looked scared and forlorn. "Son," I said, finding it difficult to keep the rasp out of my voice, "if you've got a hat, put it on and let's go." Thompson pulled out his handkerchief again and carefully lowered himself into the chair behind the desk. "You don't seem to understand, Mr. Potter. Your boy is in trouble. He's been identified as leading a gang of kids who spent most of the morning shoplifting in stores all over town." "That's bull," I said. "How could my boy do a thing like that? He's only twelve. Who identified him, anyway?" "The shopkeepers and the other members of the gang." felt a great cavity of doubt "Son," I asked, "what's this all about?" Tommy's face creased with fear and tears brimmed his eyes. "It was Ashe," he quavered. "Ashe?" "Yes. I told him about the gang." "Gang?" "The Red Skulls." "What the heck are you talking about?" "Some of the fellows got together and built a hut for a clubhouse over on the garbage dump. We call ourselves the Red Skulls. I was made leader. I'm called the Skull Cap." 'Why haven't I heard about this?" "You never asked, Dad. I tried to tell you one night, but you were hurrying to get to that roadhouse on the turnpike. You said you had a big lead on juvenile delinquency." "Well, you certainly didn't try very hard," I said angrily. "What was this gang's purpose?" "Oh, different things. One of the fellows has a .# and we hunt rats. Then -- " "Go on." "That's all." "You started to say something else." He kicked at the floor. "Aw, gee!" "Let's have it!" "We smoked." "Smoked!" He nodded. "And what else?" "That's all. Honest!" Thompson said, "What about shoplifting?" "No," sniveled Tommy. "That was Ashe. He wanted me to talk the gang into shoplifting, but I wouldn't. Then he changed himself to look like me and talked the fellows into it when I wasn't around. I only know about it because I ran into them after they'd been in a store..." Thompson gave me a funny look. 'Who's this Ashe he keeps talking about?" I started to tell him. Then I got a sudden mental flash of how idiotic it would all sound. "The boy," I said evenly, "is beside himself because of all he's been through. It's time to call a halt to this farce. I'm going to hire myself some legal talent." He shrugged. "Suit yourself." Tommy grabbed my arm and cried, "Please don't leave me, Dad!" I pulled away from him, feeling as if I'd dropped him off a cliff. Right outside the station, I met Nan. She was pale and breathless. Jones had phoned the news. She wanted to go to Tommy immediately. I guided her to the car and pushed her inside. "Listen here," I said tensely, "for once, don't make a fuss. Just help me find Ashe. He's the one who can free Tommy." a hot one!" she gasped. "That's really a hot one!" I shook her, thinking she was hysterical. She stopped laughing and swallowed hard. "Ashe is home." "Home?" "Blind drunk, with a blonde on his knee." I tramped so hard on the accelerator that it must have scraped the ground all the way home. Ashe didn't hear me pull up to the house because the radio was going full blast. I hit the light switch in the hallway and the brightness flared against the lengthening afternoon shadows, spotting him and the blonde on the living room couch. The blonde looked as if she'd come from a burlesque runway. Ashe dumped heron the floor and staggered to his feet. He'd changed his appearance again. Now he looked a strikingly handsome twenty-five. He came forward to throw a heavy arm around my shoulder. "Glad to see you, Ted," he mouthed. "Ran out of money. Must have more. Small loan..." I put both hands on his chest and pushed. He stumbled back and thudded against the wall. "The police have picked up Tommy," I said flatly. "He's been charged with the shoplifting you did today." He sobered instantly. He jerked the blonde to her feet, booted her out, slammed the door and came back to me. "Ted, I'm shocked to hear this. Tell me about it quickly. We must do something right away." The blonde had begun to howl and scream curses. I could hear doors and windows opening all the way down the street. "You monster!" Nan spat, and hurried outside. Presently the girl quieted down. "Ted," Ashe whispered, "I'm ashamed of myself. Here you befriended me and all I've done is get you and your family in trouble." He held a cupped hand over his eyes as if he were shading tears. "Can you possibly find it in your heart to forgive me?" I was moved. After all, a poor, homeless alien being couldn't very well be expected to understand our manners and feelings. Yet this one did. All because he'd been touched by my friendship. "Ashe," I said, feeling the the warmth of good will, "I'm happy to hear you say that. Bygones are bygones. The important thing is springing Tommy." "Exactly," he said. "We'll go and explain everything to the police. But we'll do it in grand style. This is your big show. We must have Jones and the Mayor. We must have photographers, reporters, television, radio -- everything!"L ' will be all right. She was just upset." "Honey," I told her excitedly, "we're about to stand the whole country on its collective ear. Ashe is going to reveal his identity!" Nan's face pinched into a look of disgust. "You mean you're trusting this -- this creature again?" "Sure, honey. Anyone can make a mistake." "That's right!" she exploded. "You're making one now! Oh, Ted, stop being such a fool!" "Listen here," I said, "this is the last two minutes of the game. We're trying to score before the gun -- and you start an argument!" She began to blubber. Why must she always be so unreasonable? Why the constant bickering and tension and unhappiness? I was sick to death of it. I grabbed Ashe's arm. "Come on," I said, "let's go." Even outdoors, the air felt hot and clammy. I headed the car for the plant, figuring I could do my phoning from there as well as pick a crew. But on Main Street, Ashe spotted a cab and made me stop. He said he'd better go on ahead. He thought things would work smoother that way. He could start the ball rolling on the release of Tommy, and I wouldn't be held up by having to tell people who he was. I drove on alone. But it was a mistake. People simply didn't believe my story about an alien being. In various ways and tones of voice, they all suggested I go home and sleep it off. In desperation, I went up to Jones' house, even though he'd already told me on the phone that he was in the middle of a dinner party. He came up close to me and sniffed my breath. "Don't worry," I told him. "I never touch it. But maybe I should smell yours. Anyone who turns his back on the biggest story of all time must be drunk!" He jerked the cigar from his mouth and gave me a narroweyed, searching look. "Ted, I just hope for your sake this isn't some kind of a joke." pulled up to the police station in a three car convoy, with a big crew from the paper. I led the group inside, feeling the excitement grow in me. I marched up to the desk sergeant "Where is he?" The desk sergeant looked startled. 'Who?" Well, he wasn't there. He just wasn't there! It was like getting tackled two yards from a touchdown by a tackier you hadn't realized was anywhere near! Jones pushed forward, chewing agitatedly on his cigar. "Edward, you've got some nerve, pulling a stunt like this! It's an outrage!" "Take it easy," I said weakly. "Something's gone wrong." "It certainly has. You must have gone insane!" "Listen here! If you don't stick with me on this, I'm all through with the paper!" "That suits me fine!" I watched him leave, trailing cigar smoke. The others followed. My face burned and Sweat trickled down my back and along my sides. I wanted to hit out at something... A hand gripped my elbow. It was Sergeant Thompson. "Mr. Potter, you shouldn't let this get you down. People's kids get in scrapes all the time. Tomorrow you'll have a talk with the judge and everything will turn out okay." I jerked my elbow away. "In other words, you think I'm batty, too!" "No," he said, gripping my elbow again and starting me toward the door. "It's been hot and you just need some rest" "Thompson," I said, dragging myself to a halt, "I know it sounds nuts, but this Ashe character really exists. Help me find him and you can cut yourself a slice. It'll be big time!" The grip on my elbow increased. "Go home, Mr. Potter, and get a good night's sleep." "But it's on the level, Thompson. Jones and I busted up. I'm playing on your team now!" His face got all flushed. "My job isn't a game and I don't belong to any team. Get wise, will you? Stay in your own back yard for once. It could stand a lot of weeding!" He pushed me out the door then -- so hard, I almost fell. heat press in on me, I tried to dope out the next move. My car was still at Jones' place, so I'd need a cab. I turned toward the drugstore at the end of the block where I could phone. Walking along, I recalled Ashe had taken a cab earlier in the evening. If I could talk to the driver, I might get a lead on his whereabouts. I walked faster. I thought of Thompson and his remark about the back yard... and the weeds. Again, for the third time, a chill traveled the length of my spine. I began to run. I ran past the drugstore and all the way home. They were both in the bedroom. Nan stood in the far corner with her back against the wall. Her shoulders were scratched and her lip cut. She held a, heavy bookend poised to strike at Ashe, who was in front of her, moving stealthily forward. The moment I spun him around, I froze in amazement. I couldn't recognize him. Then, all at once, I realized I was looking at the spitting image of myself. He broke from my grasp and darted to the window. Before I could follow, Nan had dropped the bookend and flung herself into my arms. "Oh, Ted," she sobbed, "I knew it wasn't you!" I kissed her and gently disengaged her arms. "I've got to get Ashe," I said. When I vaulted through the window and circled the house, I spotted him rushing down the street. I caught him around the corner at the same spot where I'd first seen him. I slugged him. Yet I knew it was useless the instant the blow landed. He felt just like sponge rubber. But I kept hitting him. I didn't bother listening to his cries and I didn't give a damn that he'd changed himself back to an old man. The blow on the back of my neck was so sudden, I didn't feel it. The only sensation was unbalance, as if I were walking uphill. Then I was slapped with the sidewalk. Looking up, I could see he was young, clean-cut and well built. His long, horsy face was furious. "You crazy?" he yelled. "Beating up an old man!" I searched desperately for an explanation -- something to say. Then, abruptly, without having uttered a sound, I reeled away and shambled hurriedly down the street... home, to Nan. up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. The Venus Trap One thing Man never counted on to take along into space with him was the Eternal Triangle -- especially a true-blue triangle like thisl "w: darling?" James .asked anxiously. "Don't you like the planet?" "Oh, I love the planet," Phyllis said. "It's beautiful." It was. The blue -- really blue -- grass, blue-violet shrubbery and, loveliest of all, the great golden tree with sapphire leaves and pale pink blossoms, instead of looking alien, resembled nothing so much as a fairy-tale version of Earth. Even the fragrance that filled the atmosphere was completely delightful to Terrestrial nostrils -- which was unusual, for most other planets, no matter how well adapted for colonization otherwise, tended, from the human viewpoint, anyway, to stink. Not that they were not colonized nevertheless, for the population of Earth was expanding at too great a rate to permit merely olfactory considerations to rule out an otherwise suitable planet. This particular group of settlers had been lucky, indeed, to have drawn a planet as pleasing to the nose as to the eye -- and, moreover, free from hostile aborigines. As a matter of fact, the only apparent evidence of animate life were the small, bright-hued creatures winging back and forth through the clear air, and which resembled Terrestrial birds so closely that there had seemed no point to giving them any other name. There were insects, too, although not immediately perceptible -- but the ones like bees were devoid of stings and the butterflies never had to pass through the grub stage but were born in the fullness of their beauty. However, fairest of all the creatures on the planet to James Haut -- just then, anyhow -- was his wife, and the expression on her face was not a lovely one. "You do feel all right, don't you?" he asked. "The light gravity gets some people at first." "Yes, I guess I'm all right. I'm still a little shaken, though, and you know it's not the gravity." take her in his arms and say something comforting, reassuring, but the constraint between them had not yet been worn off. Although he had sent her an ethergram nearly every day of the voyage, the necessarily public nature of the messages had kept them from achieving communication in the deeper sense of the word. "Well, I suppose you did have a bit of a shock," he said lamely. "Somehow, I thought I had told you in my 'grams." "You told me plenty in the 'grams, but not quite enough, it seems." Her words didn't seem to make sense; the strain had evidently been a little too much. "Maybe you ought to go inside and lie down for a while." "I will, just as soon as I feel less wobbly." She brushed back the long, light brown hair which had got tumbled when she fainted. He remembered a golden rather than a reddish tinge in it, but that had been under the yellow sun of Earth; under the scarlet sun of this planet, it took on a different beauty. "How come the preliminary team didn't include -- it in their report?" she asked, avoiding his appreciative eye. "They didn't know. We didn't find out ourselves until we'd sent that first message to Earth. I suppose by the time we did relay the news, you were on your way." "Yes, that must have been it." The preliminary exploration team had established the fact that the planet was more or less Earth-type, that its air was breathable, its temperature agreeably springlike, its mineral composition very similar to Earth's, with only slight traces of unknown elements, that there was plenty of drinkable water and no threatening life-forms. Human beings could, therefore, live on it. It remained for the scout team to determine whether human beings would want to live on it -- whether, in fact, they themselves would want to, because, if so, they had the option of becoming the first settlers. That was the way the system worked and, in the main, it worked well enough. After less than two weeks, this scout team had beamed back to Earth the message that the planet was suitable for colonization, so suitable that they would like to give it the name of Elysium, if there was no objection. There would be none, Earth had replied, so long as the pioneers bore 'in mind the fact that six other planets had previously been given that name, and a human colony currently existed on only one of those. No need to worry about a conflict of nomenclature, however, because the name of that other planet Elysium had subsequently been changed by unanimous vote of settlers to Hades. piece of information, Earth had added the more cheerful news that the wives and families of the scouts would soon be on their way, bringing with them the tools and implements necessary to transform the wilderness of the frontier into another Earth. In the meantime, the men were to set up the packaged buildings with which all scout ships were equipped, so that when the women came, homes would be ready for them. The men set to work and, before the month was out, they discovered that Elysium was neither a wilderness nor a frontier. It was populated by an intelligent race which had developed its culture to the limit of its physical abilities -- actually well beyond the limit of what the astounded Terrestrials could have conceived its physical abilities to be -- then, owing to unavoidable disaster, had started to die out. The remaining natives were perspicacious enough to see in the Terrestrials' coming not a threat but a last hope of revivifying their own moribund species. Accordingly, the Earthmen were encouraged to go ahead building on the sites originally selected, the only ban being on the type of construction materials used -- and a perfectly reasonable one under the circumstances. James had built his cottage near the largest, handsomest tree in the area allotted to him; since there were no hostile life-forms, there was no need for a closely knit community. Everyone who had seen it agreed that his house was the most attractive one of all, for, although it was only a standard prefab, he had used taste and ingenuity to make it a little different from the other unimaginative homes. And now Phyllis, for whom he had performed all this labor of love, for whom he had waited five long months -- the tedium of which had been broken only by the intellectual pleasure of teaching English to a sympathetic native neighbor -- Phyllis seemed unappreciative. She had hardly looked at the inside of the cottage, when he had shown her through, and now was staring at the outside in a blank sort of way. The indoctrination courses had not, he reflected, reconciled her to the frontiersman's necessarily simple mode of living -- which was ironic, considering that one of her original attractions for him had been her apparent suitability for the pioneer life. She was a big girl, radiantly healthy, even though a little green at the moment. voice steady. "You don't like the house -- is that it? "But I do like it. Honestly I do." She touched his arm diffidently. "Everything would be perfect if only -- " "If only what? Is it the curtains? I'm sorry if you don't like them. I brought them all the way from Earth in case the planet turned out to be habitable. I thought blue was your favorite color." "Oh, it is, it is! I'm mad about the curtains." Perhaps it wasn't the house that disappointed her; perhaps it was he himself who hadn't lived up to dim memory and ardent expectation. "If you want to know what is bothering me -- "she glanced up apprehensively, lowering her voice as she did -- "it's that tree. It's stuck on you; I just know it is." He laughed. "Now where did you get a preposterous idea like that, Phyl? You've been on the planet exactly twenty-four hours and -- " " -- and I have, in my luggage, one hundred and thirty-two ethergrams talking about practically nothing but Magnolia this, Magnolia that. Oh, I had my suspicions even before I landed, James. The only thing I didn't suspect was that she was a free!" "What are you talking about, honey? Magnolia and I -- we're just friends." "Purely a platonic relationship, I assure you," the tree herself agreed. It would have been silly for her to pretend not to have overheard, since the two were still standing almost directly underneath her. "Purely platonic." "She's more like a sister to me," James tried to explain. if I had imagined I was going to have a tree for a sister-in-law, I would have thought before I married you, James." Bursting into tears, she ran inside the cottage. "Sorry," he said miserably to Magnolia. "It's a long trip out from Earth and an uncomfortable one. I don't suppose the other women were especially nice to her, either. Faculty wives mostly and you know how they are... No, I don't suppose you would. But she shouldn't have acted that way toward you." "Not your fault," Magnolia told him, sighing with such intensity that he could feel the humidity rise. "I know how you've been looking forward to her arrival. Rather a letdown, isn't it?" "Oh, I'm sure it'll be all right." He tried to sound confident. "And I know you'll like Phyllis when you get to know her." "Possibly, but so far I'm afraid I must admit -- since there never has been any pretense between us -- that she is a bit of a disappointment. I -- and my sisters also -- had expected your females, when they came, to be as upright and true blue as you. Instead, what are they? Shrubs." The door to the cottage flew open. "A shrub, am I!" Phyllis brandished an axe which, James winced to recall, was an item of the equipment he had ordered from Earth before the scout team had learned that the trees were intelligent. "I'll shrub you!" "Phyllis!" He wrested the axe from her grip. "That would be murder!" " 'Woodman,' as the Terrestrial poem goes," the tree remarked, "'spare that tree! Touch not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me and I'll protect it now!' " Good of her to take the whole thing so calmly -- rather, to pretend to take it so calmly, for he knew how sensitive Magnolia really was -- but he was afraid this show of moral courage would not diminish Phyllis's dislike for her; those without self-control seldom appreciate those who have it. "If you'll excuse us," he said, putting his arm around his wife's heaving shoulders, "I'd better see to Phyllis; she's a little upset. Holdover from spacesickness, I expect. Poor girl, she's a long way from home and frightened." "I understand, Jim," Magnolia told him, "and, remember, whatever happens, you can always count on me." admirable representative of Terrestrial womanhood!" James snapped, as soon as the door had slammed behind him and his wife, leaving them alone together in the principal room of the cottage. "Insulting the very first native you meet!" "I did not either insult her. All I said was, What beautiful flowers -- do you suppose the fruit is edible?' How was I to know it -- she could understand? Naturally I wouldn't dream of eating her fruit now. It would probably taste nasty anyway. And how do you think l felt when a tree answered me back? You don't care that I fainted dead away, and I've never fainted before in my life. All you care about is that old vegetable's feelings! It was bad enough, feeling for five months that someone had come between us, but to find out it wasn't someone but something -- !" "Phyllis," he said coldly, "I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head." Dropping into the overstuffed chair, his wife dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. "She wasn't so very polite to me!" "Look, Phyllis -- "he strove to make his voice calm, adult, reasonable -- "you happened to have hit on rather a touchy point with her. Those trees are dioecious, you know, like us, and she isn't mated. And, well, she has rather a lot of xylem zones -- rings, you know." "Are you trying to tell me she's old?" "Well, she's no sapling any more. And, consideration aside, you know it's government's policy for us to establish good relations with any intelligent life-form we have to share a planet with. You weren't in there trying." Phyllis put away her handkerchief with what he hoped would be a final sniff. "I suppose I shouldn't have acted that way," she conceded. "Now you're talking like my own dear Phyllis," James said tenderly, though, as a matter of fact, he had a very remote idea of what his own dear Phyllis was like. He had met her only a couple of months before the scout mission was scheduled, and so their courtship had been brief, and the actual weeks of marriage even briefer. He had remembered Phyllis as beautiful -- and she was beautiful. He had not, however, remembered her as pig-headed -- and pig-headed she was, too. "How come she hasn't a mate? I didn't think trees were choosy." tion to that statement, uncharitable though it was; after all, someone whose only acquaintance with trees had been with the Terrestrial variety would naturally be incapable of appreciating the total tree at its highest development. "It's a great tragedy," he told her in a hushed tone. "There was a blight some years back and most of the male trees died off, except for a few on the other side of the planet -- well out of beeshot, even if the females there would let the females here have any pollen, which they absolutely won't." "I don't blame them," Phyllis said coldly. Of course she would identify at once with the trees whose domestic lives seemed to be threatened. "It's not that so much. It's that the male trees produce so little pollen." 'This would be a good place for people with hay fever then, wouldn't it?" "And even when there is fruit, so much of it tends to be parthenocarpous -- no seeds." He sighed. 'The entire race is dying out." "How is it you know so much about botany?" she asked suspiciously. "It's not your field." "I don't know so very much, really," he smiled. "I had to learn a little, if I wanted to work the land, so I borrowed an elementary text from Cutler." Had he been a trifle idealistic in quitting his snug, if uninspiring, job on the faculty to join in this Utopian venture? So many of the other men at the university had enrolled, it had seemed a splendid idea until Phyllis's arrival. "Daddy never had any trouble working his land and he doesn't know a thing about botany. You've been boning up on it just to please her!" "Phyllis! How can you jump to conclusions without a shred of evidence?" Not that she wouldn't be able to collect such evidence later, because the allegation happened to be correct. If, instead of coming to Elysium, I had merely gone to China, would she have thought it so odd that l studied Chinese? Then why, where the natives are trees, shouldn't I study botany? The woman is unreasonable. W A ND will her -- people let you farm?" Now he could show her how cogently and comprehensively he could answer a logical question. "That aspect of the situation will . be all right, dear, because only the trees are an intelligent species and, even of them, some aren't so bright. They won't have any more objection to our eating the other fruit and vegetables than we would have to an extraterrestrial's eating our eggs and chickens, for example. We're going to try to introduce some Earth plants here, though, as the higher forms of vegetation are dying out and we're afraid the lower might follow. Pity it's too late for a sound conservation program." doesn't think it's too late for a sound conservation program. She still has hopes -- far-fetched, maybe, and I'm not so sure they are. Mark my words, James, she's got designs on you." "Don't be idiotic," he protested. "That would be -- " he attempted to introduce a light note -- "it would be miscegenation." "These foreigners can't be expected to have our standards." And she burst into tears again. "A fine thing to go through that miserable five-month trip only to find out a tree has alienated my husband's affections." "Oh, come on, Phyl!" He still was trying for a smile. "What would a tree see in me?" "I'm beginning to wonder what I saw in you. You never loved me; you just wanted a wife to come out and colonize with you and b-b-breed." What could he say? It was almost true. Phyllis was a beautiful girl and he loved her, but, if he had planned to remain as an instructor with the Romance Languages Department instead of joining the scout mission, he knew he would never have asked her to be his wife... for her sake, of course, as well as his own. He should say something to reassure her, but the words wouldn't come. "I don't like it here," Phyllis sobbed. "I don't like blue leaves. I don't like blue grass, I like them green, the way they're supposed to be. I hate this nasty planet. It's all wrong. I want to go home." She was very young -- less than eight years younger than he, true, but he was mature for his age. They didn't know each other very well. And, finally, there were more men than women on the planet and he had noticed that the bachelors had seemed readily disposed, upon her arrival the day before, to overlook the fact that she had no college degree. So he must be patient with her. "There's nothing wrong about it, dear. The plants here synthesize cyanophyll instead of chlorophyll; that's why the leaves are blue instead of green. And, of course, there are different mineral constituents of the soil -- more aluminum and copper, for instance, than on Earth, and some elements we haven't quite isolated yet. So, you see, they're bound to be a little different from Terrestrial trees." "A little different I wouldn't mind," she said sulkily, "but they're a lot different without being nearly alien enough." "Look, Phyllis -- dear -- those trees have been very hospitable, very kind. We owe them a lot. They themselves suggested that we come here and live with them in, so to speak, symbiosis." "That's a fine idea!" understand after I had explained it to you." "We provide the brains and they provide the furniture." "Phyllis! What a thing to say!" "I've heard of man-eating trees before. I suppose there could be man-loving ones, too." "Phyllis, these trees are as gentle and sweet as -- as -- " He didn't know how he could explain it to her. No one who had never been friends with a tree could appreciate the true beauty of the xylemic character. "Why, we even offered to go over to the other side of the planet and fetch some pollen for them, but they wouldn't hear of it. Unfortunately, they'd rather die than be mated to anyone they had never met." "What a perfectly disgusting idea!" "I don't think so. Trees can be idealistic -- " "You fetching pollen for her, I mean. Naturally she wouldn't want pollen from a tree on the other side of the planet. She wants you!" "Don't be silly. Incompatibility usually exists between the pollen of one species and the stigmata of another. Besides," he added patiently, "I haven't got pollen." "You'd better not, or it won't be her who'll have the stigmata." "Phyllis -- " he sat down on the arm of her chair and tried to embrace her -- "you know that you're the only life-form I love." "Please, James." She pushed him away. "I guess I love you, too, in spite of everything... but I don't want to make a public spectacle of myself." "What do you mean now?" "That tree would know everything that goes on. She's telepathic." "Where did you get a ridiculous idea like that? What kind of rubbish have you been reading?" "All right, tell me : how else did she learn to speak such good English?" "It's because she's of a very high order of intelligence. And I suppose -- " he laughed modestly -- "because I'm such a good teacher." "I don't care how good a teacher you are -- a tree couldn't learn to speak a language so well in five months. She must be telepathic. It's the only explanation." vised later, as James came out on the lawn to talk to his only friend on the planet. He hadn't seen much of the other scouts since the housebuilding frenzy had started, and visits among the men had decreased. The base camp, where the bachelors and the older married couples lived, was located a good distance away from his land, for he had raised his honeymoon cottage far from the rest; he had wanted to have his Phyllis all to himself. In the idyll he had visualized for the two of them, she would need no company but his. Little had he imagined that, within twenty-four hours of her arrival, he would be looking for company himself. "I suppose so," he said, kicking at a root. "Oh, I'm sorry, Maggie; I didn't think." "That's all right," Magnolia said bravely. "It didn't really hurt. That female has got you all upset, you poor boy." James muttered a feeble defense of his wife. "Jim, forgive me if I speak frankly," the tree went on in a low rustle, "but do you think she's really worthy of you?" "Of course she is!" "Surely on your planet you could have found a mate more admirable, high-minded, exemplary -- more, in short, like yourself. Or are all the human females inferior specimens like Phyllis?" "They're -- she suits me," James said doggedly. "Of course, of course. It's very noble of you to defend her; you would have disappointed me if you had said anything else, and I honor you for it, James." He kicked at one of the pebbles. The tree meant well, he knew, yet, like so many wellmeaning friends, she succeeded only in dispiriting him. It was almost like being back at the faculty club. "I don't suppose a clod like her would have brought any more books along," the tree changed the subject. James's own library had been insufficient to slake the tree's intellectual thirst, so he had gone all over the planet to borrow books for Magnolia. Dr. Lakin, at Base, who had formerly taught English literature, possessed a fine collection which he had been reluctant to lend until he had learned that they were not for James but for a tree. At that, he had fetched the books himself, since he was anxious to meet her. "A lot of the trees here have learned the English language," he had told James, "but none seems to have developed a taste for its literature. Your Magnolia is undoubtedly a superior specimen. Excellent natural taste, too -- perhaps a little unformed when it comes to poetry and the more sophisticated aspects of life, but she'll learn, she'll learn."  James knew, could hardly be said of his wife. "Phyllis did bring some books," he told Magnolia. "For you, no doubt. That was kind of her. I'm stire she has many good qualities which will unfold one by one, as her meristems start differentiating. I hope you don't feel I've been too  -- well, personal, Jim. I was only trying to help. If I've gone too far..." "Of course not, Maggie. After all -- " he laughed bitterly -- "I do know you better than I know her." "We have been good friends, haven't we, Jim? It was rather nice -- these five months we spent alone together. For the first time in my life, I have never regretted being so far from my sisters. 'And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.' " Her blue leaves shone violet in the scarlet rays of the setting sun; the gold of her trunk was lit with red radiance. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen... but she was a tree, not a woman. "I'm sure she'll fit in after a while," Magnolia continued. "Perhaps she isn't well. She seems to guttate an awful lot. Do you suppose she's been overwatered?" "That wasn't guttation," James said heavily. "It was tears. It means she's unhappy," "Unhappy? Perhaps she won't fit in on this planet, in which case she should by all means go back to Earth. It's cruel and unfair to keep an intelligent -- loosely speaking -- life-form anywhere against her will, don't you think?" "She'll be happy here," James vowed. "I'll make her happy." "Well, I certainly hope you can manage it! By the way, do you suppose you'll have a chance to read me the books she brought, or will she be keeping you too busy?" "I'll never be too busy to read to you, Magnolia." "That's very nitrogenous of you, Jim. Our -- intellectual communions have meant a lot to me. I'd hate to have to give them up." "So would I," he said. "But there won't be any need to. Phyllis will understand." "I certainly hope so. I so admire your English literature. It's so deeply cognizant of the really meaningful things in life. And if your coming to this planet has served only to add poetry to our cultural heritage, it would be reason enough to welcome you with open limbs. For it was a truly perceptive versifier who wrote the immortally simple lines: 'Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.' "And such a charming tune to go with it, too," Magnolia went on. "We have always sung the music that the wind and the rain have taught us, but, until you came, we never thought of putting words and melody together to form one glorious whole. 'A tree that may in summer wear,' " she caroled in a pleasing contralto, "'a nest of robins in her hair.' By the way, Jim, ever since reading that poem, I've been meaning to ask you precisely what are robins and do you think they'd look well in my hair, by which, I suppose the bard refers, in a somewhat pedestrian flight of fancy, to leaves?" "They're a kind of bird,' he said drearily. "Birds -- nesting in my hair! I wouldn't think of allowing it. But then I suppose Terrestrial birds are quite different from ours? More housebroken, shall we say?" "Everything's different," James said and, for an irrational moment, he hated everything that was blue that should have been green, everything sweet that should have been vicious, everything intelligent that should have been mindless.  much worse, they improved to a degree. After a day or two had passed, Phyllis, being a conscientious girl, came to realize how wrong it had been for her as a Terrestrial immigrant to show overt hostility toward a native of the planet that had welcomed her. "But how can she be a -- a person?" Phyllis wanted to know, when they were inside the cottage, for she had learned to hold her tongue when they were near Magnolia or any of her sisters, who, though they could not speak the language as fluently as she, understood it very well and eavesdropped at every possible opportunity in order, they said, to improve their accents. "She's a tree. A plant. And plants are just vegetables." She stabbed her needle energetically through the tablecloth she was embroidering. "You mustn't project Terrestrial attitudes upon Elysian ones," James said, patiently looking up from his book. "And don't underestimate Magnolia's capabilities. She has sense organs, and motor organs, too. She can't move from where she is, because she's rooted to the ground, but she's capable of turgor movements, like certain Terrestrial forms of vegetation -- for example, the sensitive plant or blue grass." "Blue grass," Phyllis exclaimed. "I'm sick of blue grass. I want green grass." "However, these trees have conscious control of their pufvini, whereas the Earth's plants don't, and so they can do a lot of things that Earth plants can't." "It sounds like a dirty word to me." "Pulvini merely means motor organs." "Oh." was a more advanced botany text, covered with the jacket of a French novel in order to spare Phyllis's feelings. "Darling, can't you get it through your pretty head that they're intelligent lifeforms? If it'll make it easier for you to think of them as human beings who happen to look like trees, then do that." "That's exactly what I am doing. And I'm quite sure she thinks of you as a tree who happens to look like a human being." "Phyllis, sometimes I think you're being deliberately difficult. Do you know one of the reasons why I took such pains to teach Magnolia English? It was that I hoped she would be a companion for you, that you could talk to  each other when I had to be away from home." "Why do you call her Magnolia? She isn't a lot like one." "Isn't she? I thought she was. You see, I don't know so much botany, after all." Actually, he had picked that name for the tree because it expressed both the arboreal and the feminine at the same time -- and also because it was one of the loveliest names he knew. But he couldn't tell Phyllis that; there would be further misunderstanding. "Of course she has a name in her own language, but I can't pronounce it." "They do have a language of their own then?" "Naturally, though they don't get much chance to speak it, since they've grown so few and far apart that verbal communication has become difficult. They communicate by a network of roots that they've developed." "I don't think that's so clever." "I merely said... oh, what's the use of trying to explain everything to you? You just don't want to understand." dlework and closed her eyes. "James," she said, opening them again, "it's no use pretending. I've been trying to be sympathetic and understanding, but I can't do it. That tree -- I've forced myself to be nice to her, but the more I see of her, the more convinced I am that she's trying to steal you from me." Phyllis was beginning to poison his mind, he thought, because it had seemed to him also, in his last conversation with Magnolia, that he had discerned more than ordinary warmth in her attitude toward him... and perhaps a trace of spite toward his wife? Preposterous! The tree had only been trying to cheer him up as any friend might reasonably do. After all, a tree and a man... Nonsense! One had an anabolic metabolism, one a catabolic. But this was a different kind of tree. She spoke, she read, she was capable of conscious turgor movements. And he, he had often thought secretly, was a different kind of man. Whereas Phyllis... But that was disloyalty -- to the type as well as the individual. The tree could be a companion to him, but she could not give him sons to work his land; she could not give him daughters to populate his planet; moreover, she did not, could not possibly know what human love meant, while Phyllis could at least learn. "Look, dear," he said, sitting down beside his wife on the couch and taking her hand in his. She didn't draw away this time. "Suppose that what you say is true -- not that it is, of course. Just because the tree has a crush on me doesn't mean I necessarily have a crush on her, does it?" His wife looked up at him, her rose-red lips parted, her mossgray eyes shining. "Oh, if only I could believe that, James!" "Anyhow, she doesn't know what the whole thing's about, poor kid!" "Poor kid" "Phyllis, you know you're prettier than any tree." That was not literally true, but reason was useless; he had to make his point in terms she could understand. "And, remember, she's got a lot of rings -- she must be centuries old -- while you are only nineteen." "Twenty," Phyllis corrected. "I had a birthday on the ship." "Well, you certainly must allow me to wish you a happy birthday, darling." She was in his arms at last; he was about to kiss her, and the tree seemed very remote, when she drew back. "But are you sure she doesn't -- she isn't -- she can't be watching us?" "Darling, I swear it!" "Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear, that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops "... But he had sense enough not to say it, and Elysium had not one blessed moon, but three, and everything was all right. For a while anyway. a corm," the tree remarked, as James paused for a chat. He hadn't much time to be sociable those days, for there was such a lot of work to be done, so many preparations to be made, so many things to be requisitioned from Earth. The supply ships were beginning to come now, bringing necessities and an occasional luxury for those who could afford it. "She's pregnant," James explained. "Happened before I left Earth." "How do you mean?" "She's about to fruit. Didn't I read that zoology book to you?" "Yes, but -- oh, James, it all seems so vulgar! To fruit without ever having bloomed -- how squalid!" "It all depends on how you look at it," he said. "I -- that is, we had hoped that when the baby came, you would be godmother to it. You know what that is, don't you?" "Of course I do. You read Cinderella to me. I know it's a great honor. But I'm afraid I must decline." "Why? I thought you were my -- our friend." "Jim, there is something I must confess: my feelings toward you are not merely those of a friend. Although Phyllis doesn't have too many rings of intellect, she is a female, so she knew all along." Magnolia's leaves rustled diffidently. "I feel toward you the way I never felt toward any intelligent life-form, but only toward the sun, the soil, the rain. I sense a tropism that seems to incline me toward you. In fact, I'm afraid, Jim, in your own terms, I love you." "But you're a tree! You can't love me in my own terms, because trees can't love in the way people can, and, of course, people can't love like trees. We belong to two entirely different species, Maggie. You can't have listened to that zoology book very attentively." "Our race is a singularly adaptable one or we wouldn't have survived so long, Jim, or gone so far in our particular direction. It's lack of fertility, not lack of enterprise, that's responsible for our decline. And I think your species must be an adaptable one, too; you just haven't really tried. Oh, James, let us reverse the classical roles -- let me be the Apollo to your Daphne! Don't let Phyllis stand in our way. The Greek gods never let a little thing like marriage interfere with their plans." #UT I love Phyllis," he said in confusion. "I love you, too," he added, "but in a different way." "Yes, I know. More like a sister. However, I have plenty of sisters and I don't need a brother." "We're starting a conservation program," he tried to comfort her. "We have every hope of getting some pollen from the other side of the planet once we have explained to the trees there how far we can make a little go, and you've got to accept it; you mustn't be silly about it." "It isn't the same thing, Jim, and you know it. One of the penalties of intelligence is a diffusiveness of the natural instincts. I would rather not fruit at all than -- " "Magnolia, you just don't understand. No matter how much you -- well, pursue me, I can never turn into a laurel tree." "I didn't -- " "Or any kind of tree! Look, some more books were just sent over from Base." Magnolia gave a rueful rustle. "Just were sent? Didn't they come over a month ago?" James flushed. "I know I haven't had a chance to do much reading to you in the last few weeks, Maggie -- or any at all, in fact -- but I've been so busy. After the baby's born, things will be much less hectic and we'll be able to catch up." "Of course, James. I understand. Naturally your family comes first." "One of the books that came was an advanced zoology text that might make things a little clearer." "I should very much like to hear it. When you have the time to spare, that is." "Tell you what," he said. "I'll get the book and read you the chapter on the reproductive system in mammals. Won't take more than an hour or so." "If you're in a hurry, it can wait." "No,"" he told her. "This will make me feel a little less guilty about having neglected you."  cord is severed," he concluded, "and the human infant is ready to take its place in the world as a separate entity. Now do you understand, Magnolia?" "No," she said. "Where do the bees come in?" "I thought you were in such a hurry to get to Base, James," Phyllis remarked sweetly from the doorway, wiping her reddening hands on a dish towel. "I am, dear." He slipped the book behind his back; it was possible that, in her present state of mind -- induced, of course, by her delicate condition -- Phyllis might misunderstand his motive in reading that particular chapter of that particular book to that particular tree. "I just stopped for a chat with Magnolia. She's agreed to be godmother to the baby." "How very nice of her. Elarth Government will be so pleased at such a fine example of rapport with the natives. You might even get a medal. Wouldn't that be nice?... James," she hurried on, before he could speak, "you still haven't found any green-leafed plants on the planet, have you? Have you looked everywhere? Have you looked hard?" "Haven't I told you time and time again, Mrs. Haut," the tree said, "that there aren't any -- that there can't be any? It's impossible to synthesize chlorophyll from the light rays given off by our sun -- only cyanophyll. What do you want with a green-leafed plant, anyway?" Phyllis's voice broke. "I think I'd lose my mind if I was convinced that I'd never see a green leaf again. All this awful blue, blue, blue, all the time, and the leaves never fall, or, if they do, there are new ones right away to take their place. They're always there -- always blue." "We're everblue," Magnolia explained. "Sorry, but that's the way it is." "Jim, I hate to hurt your feelings, but I just have to take down those curtains. The colors -- I can't stand it!' times get fanciful notions," James said to the tree. "It's part of the pregnancy syndrome. Try not to pay any attention." "Kindly don't explain me to a tree!" Phyllis cried. "I have a right to prefer green, don't I?" "There is, as your proverb says, no accounting for strange tastes," the tree murmured. "However -- " "We're going to have a formal christening," James interrupted, for the sake of the peace. "We thought we should, since ours will be the first baby born on the planet. Everybody on Elysium will come -- that is, all the human beings. Only because they can come, you know; we'd love to have the trees if they were capable of locomotor movement. You'll get to widen your social contacts, Maggie. Dr. Lakin and Dr. Cutler will probably be here; I know you'll be glad to see Dr. Lakin again, and you've been anxious to meet Dr. Cutler. They've been asking after you, too. I think Dr. Lakin is planning to write a monograph on you for the Journal of the American Association of Professors of English Literature -- with your permission, of course." "Christening -- that's one of your native festivals, isn't it? It should be most interesting." "That's right," Phyllis murmured. "It will be Christmas soon. I'd almost forgotten. It'll be the first Christmas I've ever spent away from home. And there won't be any snow or -- or anything." She started to guttate -- to cry again. "Cheer up, honey," Jim said. "It won't be as bad as you think, because I didn't forget Christmas was coming. There's something specially nice for you on its way from Earth; I only hope it gets here on time." Phyllis sniffled. "Maybe we'll have a Christmas party, too. Would you like that?" But she remained unresponsive. He turned to the tree. "Christening's entirely different, though," he explained. "It's -- I guess naming the fruit would be the best way to describe it." "Is that so?" Magnolia said. "What kind of fruit do you expect to have, Mrs. Haut? Oranges? Bananas? As your good St. Luke says, the tree is known by its fruit. You look as if yours might be a watermelon." "Why, the -- idea!" Phyllis choked. "Are you going to stand there, James, and let that vegetable insult me?" "I'm sure she didn't mean to," he protested. "She got confused by -- that zoology book I read her." The door slammed behind his weeping wife. "I don't think you quite understand, Maggie," he said. "In fact, sometimes I almost think you, too, don't want to understand." "I know what kind of fruit it's going to be," the tree concluded triumphantly. "Sour apples." "that tickles! There's more to acting as a Christmas tree than I had anticipated from your glowing descriptions, Jim." "Here, dear," Phyllis said, "maybe you'd better let me put the decorations on her." "You can't get on the ladder in your condition," he said, apprehensive not only for her welfare but for the tree's. Phyllis had not taken kindly to the idea of having Magnolia as official Christmas tree, suggesting that, if she must participate in the ceremonies, it might be better in the capacity of Yule log. However, Jim knew Magnolia would be offended if any other tree were chosen to be decorated. "I'll manage all right," he assured his wife. "If you want to be useful, you might put on some coffee and make sandwiches or something. The bachelors are coming over from Base with that equipment that arrived yesterday, and they'll probably be glad of a snack before turning in." "The coffee's already on and the canapes made," Phyllis smiled. "And I've baked cookies, too, and whipped up a batch of penuche. What kind of a Christmas party do you think it would be without refreshments?" "Very efficient, isn't she?" Magnolia remarked, as the battery-powered lights that James had affixed to her began to wink on, for the deep red-violet dusk had already fallen and the first moon was rising. "Have you thought, Mrs. Haut, that if you fruit today, it will save the expense of another festival?" "I don't expect to fruit for another two months," Phyllis said coldly, "and why shouldn't we have another festival? We can afford it and I like parties. I haven't been to one since the day I landed." "Is the life out here getting a little quiet for you, petiole?" the tree asked solicitously. "It must be hard when one has no intellectual resources upon which to draw." ten seconds; then, "I wonder where those boys can be," she said. "I hope they bring some pickles along. I asked to have some sent, but I'm accustomed to having no attention paid to what I want." "There's a surprise coming for you, Phyllis," James could not help telling her again, hoping to arouse some semblance of interest. "Something I know you'll love... And for you, too," he said courteously to Magnolia. "You mean the same surprise for both, or a surprise apiece?" the tree asked. "Oh, one for each, of course." "I see the lights of the 'copter now!" Phyllis cried and, running out into the middle of the lawn, began waving her handkerchief. He hadn't seen her so pleasantly excited for a long time. "I don't suppose I'll need to turn on the landing lights," he said to Magnolia. "You should do the trick." "Am I all finished?" she rustled anxiously. "I do wish I could see myself. How do I look?" "Splendid. I've never had as beautiful a Christmas tree as you, Maggie," he told her with complete honesty. "Not even on Earth." "I'm glad, Jim, but I still wish I could be more to you than just a Christmas tree." "Shh. The others might hear." For the helicopter had landed and the visitors were pouring out, with shouts of admiration. Not only the bachelors had come -- and in full force -- but some of the older men from Base, who apparently felt they could manage to do without their wives for twelve hours, even if those hours included Christmas Eve. He wondered where he and Phyllis could put them all, but some could sleep outside, if need be, for it was never cold on Elysium. The winds were gentle and the rains light and fragrant. " crowding around Phyllis and the tree, James rooted eagerly through the packages they had brought, until he found what he wanted. Then he rushed over to the group. "I know I should wait until tomorrow, but I want to give the girls their presents now." The other men smiled sympathetically, almost as joyful as he. "Merry Christmas, Magnolia!" He hoped Phyllis would understand that it was etiquette which dictated that the alien life-form should get her gift first. "Thank you," the tree said, "I am deeply touched. I don't believe anyone ever gave me a present before. What is it?" "Liquid plant food -- vitamins and minerals, you know. For you to drink." "What fun!" she exclaimed in pretty excitement. "Pour some over me right now!" "Not so fast, Jim, boy!" Dr. Cutler, the biologist, snatched the jug from James' hand. "First youall better let me take a sample of this here stuff back to Base to test on a lower life-form, so's I can make sure it won't do anything bad to Miss Magnolia. Might have iron in it and I have a theory that iron may not be beneficial for the local vegetation." "Oh, thank you!" the tree rustled. "It's so very thoughtful of you, Doctor, but I'm sure Jim would never give me anything that would injure me." "I'm sure he isn't fixing to do a thing like that, ma'am, but he's no botanist." "And for you, Phyllis..." James handed his wife the awkward bundle to unwrap for herself. She tore the papers off slowly. "Oh, Jim, darling, it's -- it's -- " "You wanted a bit of green, so I ordered a plant from Earth. You like it? I hope you do." "Oh, Jiml" She embraced him and the pot simultaneously. "More than anything !" "It won't stay green," Magnolia observed. "Either it'll turn blue or it'll die. Puny-looking specimen, isn't it?" "Well," said James, "it's only a youngster. I guess this Christmas is too early, but next Christmas there ought to be berries. It's a holly plant, Phyl." "Holly," she repeated, her voice shaking a little. "Holly." She and Dr. Cutler exchanged glances. "I told you, Miz Phyllis, ma'am -- he may know the first thing about botany, but he doesn't know anything after that." "Jim," Phyllis said, linking her free arm through his, "I misjudged you. Dr. Cutler is right. You don't know so very much about botany, after all." Her voice was trembling, and not with tears this time. "I love this little plant; it's just what I wanted... but there aren't ever going to be any berries, because, to have berries, you have to have two plants. And the right two. Holly's di -- dio -- it's just like us." "Oh," James said, feeling thoroughly inadequate. "I'm sorry." "But you mustn't be sorry. I'm going to plant it here on Elysium, and I hope it will stay green in spite of what she says, and it'll have blossoms anyway... and it was very, very sweet of you, dear." She kissed his cheek. "Is this one a boy or a girl?" Magnolia asked. "You-all can't tell till it blooms, Miss Magnolia, ma'am," Dr. Cutler informed her. "Maybe I can. Hand it up here, please." Phyllis paused for an irresolute moment, then, smiling nervously at her guests, obliged. "It's a boy," Magnolia announced, after a minute. "A boy." She gave back the pot reluctantly. "Phyllis," she said, "you and I have never been friends and I admit that it's been my fault just as much as yours." "As much as mine?" Phyllis echoed. "I like that -- " and was going to go on when she obviously recollected that they had company, and stopped. "So I know it's presumptuous of me to ask you a favor." "Yes, Magnolia?" Phyllis said, her fine cornsilk eyebrows arched a trifle. "What is this favor?" 'When you plant the little fellow -- you said you were going to, anyhow -- would you plant him near me?" Phyllis looked down at the plant she held cradled in her arms and then up at the tree. "Of cours, Magnolia," she said, frowning slightly. "I didn't realize..." Her voice began to tremble. "I have been pretty rotten, haven't I?" She looked toward James, but he turned his glance away. "Just because you were a plant," Phyllis continued, "didn't mean I had to be a b-b-beast It must have been awful for you, seeing me like this, practically crowing over you, and knowing that you yourself would never have the chance to be a m-m-mmother." "'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,' " Magnolia said sadly, "'and waste its sweetness on the desert air.'" ashamedly now. "I'll plant him right next to you -- Maggie. I want you to have him. He can be your baby." "Thank you, Phyl," Maggie said softly. "That's very... blue of you." "Although I think that's a jimdandy idea," the biologist said, "and I sure wouldn't want to do anything to discourage it, being real interested in the results of an experiment like that my own self, I don't think you ought to feel so mean about it, Miz Phyllis. If all she wanted -- begging your pardon, Miss Magnolia, ma'am -- was a baby, why didn't she take an interest in the holly until she found out it was a male? Why wouldn't a little old girl holly have done as well?" "Why -- why, you scheming vegetable!" Phyllis exploded at Magnolia, clutching the holly plant to her protective bosom. "He's much too young for you, and I'm going to plant him far away, where he can't possibly fall into your clutches." "Now, Miss Phyllis, we-all mustn't look at things out of their proper perspective." "Then why did you take your hat off when you were introduced to Miss Magnolia, Cutler?" Dr. Lakin asked interestedly. "Sir, where I come from, we respect femininity, whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. Nonetheless, we-all got to remember, though Miss Magnolia is unquestionably a lady, she is not a woman." Phyllis began to laugh hysterically. "You're right!" she gasped. "I had almost forgotten she was only a tree. And that it is only a little Christmas holly plant that's probably going to die, anyway -- they almost always do." "That's cruel, Phyllis," James said, "and you know it is." "Do you really think I'm cruel? Are you going to tell the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables on me? But why am I cruel? I'm giving her the holly. That's what she wants, isn't it? Do you hear that, Miss Magnolia, ma'am? He's all yours. We'll plant him next to you -- right away. And I hope he doesn't die. I hope he grows up to make you a good husband."  able," Dr. Lakin said to James later that same evening, after the planting ceremonies were over and the rest of the party had gone into the cottage for fresh coffee and more sandwiches and cookies and penuche. "Quite remarkable. You're a lucky man, Haut." "Thank you, sir," James replied abstractedly. "I'm sure Phyllis will be pleased to -- " "Phyllisl Oh, Mrs. Haut is a very remarkable woman, of course. A handsome, strong girl; she'll make a splendid mother, I'm sure. But I was referring to Miss Magnolia. She's a credit to you, my boy. If for no other reason, your name will go down in the history of our colony as that of the guide and mentor of Miss Magnolia. That's quite a tree you have there." James looked at the dark form of the tree -- for the lights had been turned out -- silhouetted against the three pale moons and the violet night. "Yes, she is," he said. "You're fortunate to be her neighbor... , and her friend." "Yes, I am." "Well, I expect I'd better join the rest. Are you coming on in, Jim?" "In a little while, sir. I thought I'd -- I wanted to have a word with Magnolia. I won't be long," "Of course, of course. I'm delighted to see that there is such an excellent relationship between you... Good night, Miss Magnolia!" he called. "Good night, Dr. Lakin," the tree replied, politely enough, but it was obvious that she was preoccupied with her new charge, who stood as close to her as it was possible to plant him and yet allow room for him to grow. across the lawn until he was quite near Magnolia. "Maggie," he whispered, reaching out to touch her trunk -- smooth it was, and hard, but he could feel the vibrant life pulsing inside it. Certainly she was not a plant, not just a plant, even though she was a tree. She was a native of Elysium, neither animal nor vegetable, unique unto the planet, unique unto herself. "Maggie." "Yes, Jim. Don't you think his silhouette is so graceful there in the moonlight? He isn't really puny -- just frail." "Maggie, you're not serious about this holly?" "What do you mean?" And still he didn't have her full attention. Woud he ever have it again? "Serious about raising him to be your -- your -- " "Why not, Jim?" "It's impossible." "Is it? It certainly is far more possible with him, isn't it? That much I understood from your zoology books." "I suppose so." "Besides, I have nothing to lose, have I?" "But even if it were possible, wouldn't it be humiliating for you? The creature's mindless!" Magnolia's leaves rustled in the darkness. She was laughing -- a little bitterly. "Your Phyllis isn't your intellectual equal, Jim, and yet you say you love her and I suppose you do. Am I not entitled to my follies also?" But she couldn't compare Phyllis to a holly plant! It was unreasonable. "He may die, of course," Magnolia said. "I've got to be prepared for that. The soil is different, the air is different, the sun is different. But the chances are, if he survives, he'll turn blue. And if he turns blue, who knows what other changes might be brought about? Maybe the plants on your Earth aren't inherently mindless, Jim. Maybe they just didn't have a chance. 'Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime...?' That land isn't Earth, Jim, so it might just possibly be Elysium." A What he wanted to say, he had no right to say, so he kept silent. "It'll be a chance for me, too, Jim. At least we're both plants, he and I. That gives us a headstart." "Yes, I suppose it does." "Intellect doesn't count for much in the propagation of the species. Life goes on without regard for reason, and that's mainly what we're here for, to make sure that life goes on -- if we're here for anything at all. Thanks to your kind, Jim, life will continue on this planet; it will certainly be your kind of life -- and I hope it can be ours as well." "Yes," he said. "I hope so, too." And he did, but he wished it didn't have to continue in quite that way. Perhaps it was a trick of the three moons, but the holly plant's leaves seemed to have changed color... They were no longer green, but almost blue -- powder blue. "You'd best be getting on to your party, Jim," Magnolia said. "You wouldn't want to be remiss in your duties as host. And please close the door gently when you go inside. The little holly plant's asleep." As he closed the door carefully behind him, he heard a burst of laughter coming from the kitchen, where the guests apparently had assembled -- raucous animal laughter -- and, rising shrill and noisy above it, Phyllis's company laugh.      Hotel Leamington Oakland, California Membership still I Jain Now! # #rd Avenue Oakland, California Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Ballantine Books, #c ography at the rear of this book, the Kuttners have stopped writing under myriad pseudonyms. High time, too. Fifty per cent of active readers were convinced that fifty per cent of active authors were the Kuttners. This collection is representative of their talent for creating and maintaining mood as in "Vintage Season," "Two-Handed En  shelf gine" and "The Devil We Know:" with the rollicking "Exit the Professor" thrown in as a change of pace. "Home There's No Returning" is the only low mark in the book, but suffers more through comparison with its companions than through faults of its own. The previously mentioned brief biography is a little gem of wit and information. The author of that should not remain anonymous or pseudonymous. Recommendation? You should read it. The Kuttners should get back into production again! Fredric Brown. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., # since Wells have overlooked the obvious. Martians are not huge-chested spindles, pink lizards or any of the other innumerable shapes pictured by science fiction. They really are Little Green Men! The story's hero, a science fiction writer named Luke Devereaux, retires to a California desert shack to recover his writing touch miles from civilization. He thinks he is unique, therefore, when he is visited by a two-anda-half-foot green Martian who turns out to be as nasty an individual as you never met. It develops, however, that all over Earth at the same instant, themselves obnoxiously known. They "kwimmed" to Earth and that is the extent of the information that they will impart. For the rest, being of basically cruel nature, they deliberately cause nervous breakdowns, suicides and destruction of world economy. Fortunately, they are visible and audible only, not otherwise material. Also, they appear and disappear at will, do not use individual names, and address all males as "Mack" and all females as "Toots." Their knowledge of idiomatic language is fantastic and their interest in the human sex life insatiable. Unfortunately, they possess both night and Xray vision, so that the human birthrate falls off alarmingly the first year of their invasion, even in France. There are spots where the author got carried away by his narrative, but he succeeded in writing a very funny book. the Editorial Staff of Life and Lincoln Barnett. Time Inc., and Simon  Schuster, Inc., # contains the complete series which ran in Life in thirteen installments for over two years. If you were one of those who attempted to save the individual issues in which it appeared, only to have pages ripped and lost and copies mislaid, you will be happy to have this permanent record. For those who have never seen it in periodical form, I quote the introduction by Vannevar Bush, wartime Chief of the Office of Scientific Research and Development: "It is not a treatise but a modest volume of text richly illustrated which will captivate the scientific people who would not otherwise concern themselves with its subject matter." I heartily agree. The illustrations are profuse and magnificent. The text is inclined to floweriness, but it doesn't get in the way of the pictures, which are guaranteed to absorb the interest. The total time covered by the years, from the birth of Earth the heat death of the Sun thirty ture. Altogether, it's as intriguing a natural history book as I've ever seen under  one cover and more than adequately proves the truth of the old saw about one picture being worth at least a thousand words. Auhert de la Rue. Philosophical Library, # wind has influenced history through the invention of the sail and, of course, these days the entire world watches the path of a modern hurricane or typhoon, but how many people know the intimate story of local winds and their influence in subtle ways on human life? The author takes us to many localities, mainly European, where virtually the entire behavior of the inhabitants has been determined by the vagaries of atmospheric disturbances. According to the jacket, the publishers believe this to be the first book written on the winds as they affect mankind. It doesn't need that distinction to qualify as a rewarding book on an unusual subject. ley. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, # r I 'HE author, a science teacher in a New Jersey college, is also the author of two science fiction juveniles, Lodestar: Rocket Ship to Mars and Mars. The present book, addressed to the #-year-and-up audience, is a brain-prodding exposition of the problems Man must expect to arise from his projected first trip into space. From the first chapter on the question of destinations to the last concerning the problem of gravity, the author sustains interest, not only with his text, but with the demonstrative experiments he suggests. I found that my young son, Ricky, was not only eager but capable of conducting the experiments with the simple household materials the author suggests. B. Shippen. The Viking Press, # concerns itself with the vital discoveries of men who were forerunners in their fields, from Aristotle, the first biologist, through Darwin, and down to Weismann and Morgan, of gene and chromosome fame. Each vignette, and there are a score of them, records the highlights in the lives of men who changed biology from superstition to the science it is today. The book is handsomely illustrated in line by Anthony Ravielli. It is intended for teen-age audiences, but even a well-informed adult is sure to find fascinating bits of new information. and Patrick Moore. The MacMillan Company, # the Royal Astronomical Society. In addition, Dr. Wilkins is director of the Lunar Section of the British Astronomical Association and Moore is its secretary. With that background, the reader can expect as authoritative a book on the subject as can be published. He is not disappointed. The book features -- and, in mous revised #-inch lunar map fact, is built around -- the faof Dr. Wilkins. To those readers who are not familiar with the map, it is possibly the most detailed record of the Moon's face in existence. The introduction takes the reader from the history of Selenography to a general survey of surface details and classification, and speculates on the causation of observed changes which would tend to prove that the Moon is not in a state Of suspended animation. The following twenty-five sections deal with the individual portions of the map as segmented by the authors. As they state, the book is meant primarily for observers. However, anyone who has ever looked at the Moon with appreciation will find the book a source of provocative information. Besides marvelously detailed sections of the map, there are fine lunar photographs and enlarged drawings of some of the more spectacular features. There follows a series of appendices, the most valuable of which covers lunar photography, a subject which the amateur knows through sad experience is badly neglected. If the reader ever intends to purchase a telescope, this book will serve both as incentive and guide. The Moralist Aye, 'tis a difficult thing to be a lady on a far world -- but who needs them there? almost every rule and Xenon was one of them. The rule in this particular case was the old cataloguers' adage that cataloguing duty was never pleasant, often dangerous and always hard. Xenon is the fourth planet of one of the stars investigated some seven or eight years ago by the battleship Terra on her swing around the edge of the Black Hole. Unequipped for exploration, the Terra hadn't bothered to land on the planet, but instead had taken only the usual gravitational and atmosphere readings and then had continued on her long mapping patrol. She had slowed just long enough to send back her report on tight beam to Venus Relay Station and propose the name of Xenon, "the unknown." After all, a planet with point nine Earth gravity and almost twenty per cent oxygen in its atmosphere was well worth a name rather than a number. About a year later, the preliminary exploration ship arrived and spent several weeks mapping and testing this, that and the other thing. Then she went home and wrote her report -- and what a report it was! The thing read like a Chamber of Commerce bulletin that had been sponsored by a subdivider. All it needed was a couple of ads offering some choice business locations for sale and it would have been complete. The planet was perfect, the climate was perfect, the soil fertile. There were no natives or hostile life to bother a man. The forests were wide, the plains were broad and the numerous rivers were not only full of fish but also emptied into blue seas that were just as full of fish as the rivers. That report was enough to make a man quit his job and go to Xenon to start a chicken ranch or grow oranges. tion acted with its usual speed. Three years later, a cataloguing group landed from the supply ship Hunter. The duties of the groups are simple enough; they determine which of the food crops known to Man can best adapt themselves to the conditions found on the particular planet under examination. They list the native flora and fauna, minerals and resources. They chart the weather and its cycles and, in general, try to determine if Man can exist there and, if so, no if the planet is worth the expense, trouble and danger of colonization. Most planets are not worth it, but Xenon was. And now the group had returned with its final report and its recommendations. The report? Xenon was perfect, just perfect. The recommendations? Immediate colonization, but be careful who is sent so that place isn't spoiled by a bunch of land-grabbing exploiters who might not appreciate the place. They had been back nearly a week before Lee Spencer had time to come to my place for the weekend. Due to a combination of my wife's cooking and a sedentary desk job with the Bureau, I was beginning to have a bit of difficulty in bending over far enough to zip on my shoes in the mornings, but Lee was still as lean and fit as he was the day he blasted off for Xenon nearly four years before. He had been given the full returned-hero treatment, complete with press conferences, testimonial dinner, audience with the Coordinator -- everything. He hadn't had a waking moment to himself since he landed, so I suppose that might have been one reason that he relaxed so completely in front of the library fire after dinner and talked more than he perhaps should have. Or the generous slug of the old brandy my grandfather left me may have had something to do with it. At any rate, he was in an expansive mood that night after Martha had filled him with one of her always excellent dinners and I had nearly floated him in Grandfather's brandy. We had a lot of "do you remember" man talk to catch up on and after enduring nearly two hours of conversation about people and happenings of which she knew nothing, Martha gave up and headed for the stairs. ' "You two can talk all night if you want," she announced over her shoulder, "but I'm going to bed. Breakfast on the patio about nine or so, Lee." "I'll be there, Marty. Sleep tight." "Not as tight as you will, I'll bet," she grinned. "There's another jug in the kitchen if you think you may need it." door hiss as it slid closed and sat for a moment looking into the fire and listening to it whispering secrets to itself. "She's a pretty nice wife, Sam," he told me. "Thanks. I like her, too." "Not at all like Prunella." "Prunella?" I said. "I don't think -- " "Well, that's what the boys at the station began calling her a couple of days after she landed. Behind her back, of course." "I still don't know who -- " "You know, the niece of that windbag in World Congress that you featherheads in the front office sent out to replace Pop Jensen when he fell out of that tree and had to be sent back to Earth for hospitalization." "Oh, that one. Look, Lee, I didn't have anything to do with her selection. She was appointed by the Old Man himself. Understand there was some kind of pressure on him from the top." "I forgive you, Sam, but I rather doubt if some of the other people of the group will for a while." "How come she didn't stay?" I asked. "Political pressure or not, I can't imagine the supervisors sending out an incompetent replacement." "Incompetent?" he almost snorted. "Prunella was the most belligerently competent female that it has ever been my misfortune to run across. Prunella was efficiency personified, make no mistake about that. She was -- or is -- a top-flight botanist and had led several expeditions here on Earth, but she couldn't realize that Xenon wasn't Earth. She tried to live by the book as she had here, but in spite of the genlu eral excellence of the Spaceman's Handbook, her methods didn't work so well." I primed him with another two fingers out of the bottle and sat back to listen. "Good brandy," he said. "I made some once on Xenon, but Prunella put a halt to that in a hurry, just as she did a lot of other things. The trouble with her was that she was always insufferably right. Every blasted time! And she was right again when she pointed out that if we were to come under attack, the products of the little distillery might impair our efforts to defend ourselves. My still went under the ax." on. "She neglected to say what might attack us or where this enemy might come from, since men are the only animals to achieve space flight thus far and there was nothing on Xenon that was hostile to us. "But I'm getting ahead of my story," he told his glass. "It probably all started when she arrived. We had been looking forward to the day, but none of us more than Joe, our cook. Joe was that rare find, a man who took pride in his work and worked with pride. Joe, I firmly believe, could barbecue a spaceman's boot so that it would taste like steak. He considered Prunella and her arrival a fine opportunity to show what he could do when he really wanted to. "For her first meal with us, Joe had prepared Prunella a feed from every edible native fruit, vegetable and meat that he could lay his hands on. It was the same stuff that we had been getting fat on for nearly two years, but did we eat any of his cooking that night? Not a bite," he answered himself. -- "I thought she was going to toss a fit right there and then. " 'Gentlemen,' she said, 'you know as well as I that consumption of any native product of a strange planet is expressly forbidden by the Spaceman's Handbook of Survival until these products have been thoroughly investigated and passed upon by the proper authorities. Therefore, we shall eat the synthetics that have been provided for us until these have been examined by the labs on Earth.' "She was right, of course," Lee went on. "Many poor devils have died in agony because they were foolish enough to eat some luscious-looking fruit before it had been checked. We tried to tell her that our lab monkeys and cats had eaten and liked everything on the table, as had we, but we still had to send samples to Earth. That was two years ago and they still haven't handed back a report." He sighed again and this time didn't wait for me to pour for him. "So we ate synthetics, but you know how they are -- every morsel filled to the brim with everything a man needs to live on indefinitely, except one thing -- taste. It almost broke Joe's spirit, he fixed the stuff for us in every way known to mortal Man. No matter how thin he sliced it, it was still synthetic and still had that flavor of a well-aged gluepot." Lee ran his tongue over his lips, as though the taste were still in his mouth. "There were countless little incidents such as that," he said, "none of them important, but they all added up to a constant irritation and resentment among the men. Maybe it was easygoing Pop Jensen who spoiled us. I don't know." or two. "Then there was the time a water-pup nuzzled Prunella while she was taking a lone swim in the river that ran near the station. She spent all morning on a sandbar in the middle of the river before the school of pups tired of their play and left long enough for her to consider it safe enough to swim back to the river bank." He grinned to himself. "Sam, those pups are as harmless and friendly and playful as any pups of Earth, but Prunella didn't know that and none of us could convince her of it. She said that the pups might be dangerous, under some unknown circumstances which she didn't define, then quoted us a passage from the Handbook which prohibited fraternization with any native life-forms until friendly relations were established. She evidently didn't consider being nuzzled a friendly act. Ergo, no more swimming and that was an order." He made another trip to the brandy bottle, then sank back into the deep chair again. "But the most exasperating thing Prunella pulled on us was the inspections every morning before we left on our daily field trips. We had all been on Xenon long enough to know what equipment we needed to carry, right down to the last specimen box, but what we carried and what the Survival Handbook said to carry were two different things. That is, they were two different things before Prunella began her inspections. We had found long before that all of the gear prescribed by the Handbook was heavy, most of it was useless, none of it necessary on Xenon. It might be of some use on some other planet, but we didn't need it there. So, as a consequence, we didn't lug much of that junk around over the landscape with us." "None of it?" I said. "Well, almost none. But after Little Miss Efficiency began making her morning spot checks, we left the compound each day looking like a picture of what the well-dressed man on a strange planet will wear. We carried everything in the book and a few more that Pruny thought up all by her little self. In addition to all the survival, signaling and first-aid equipment that dangled and jangled from various parts of us, we also carried enough offensive and defensive weapons to start and maintain a war of no small size. "Granted, the first-aid and radio paraphernalia might be handy in some way, but blasters, needle-guns, knives, defense shields and all the other apparatus struck as being a little on the ridiculous side, especially since neither we nor the men before us had found a single life-form on Xenon that would attack Man. Or rather, with one exception, none of them would and a blaster or needle-gun was of no use on that one." ly? And what was this mysterious exception?" I thought I was playing straight man for some elaborate joke, but Lee was serious. "Damn it all, don't you people even read your own directives? I'm talking about the powder puffs. Does that mean anything to you?" Seeing my blank look, he explained resignedly, "The powder puffs are the way the Xenon equivalent of Earthly mushrooms takes to spread its spores. They have some unpronounceable Latin name, but we called them powder puffs because, oddly enough, that's what they looked like. The puffs are little round balls of a very light fluffy material, with the spores adhering to small fibers on the surface. The things are carried by the winds over great distances hnd when they finally come down, they bump along, leaving a dusting of spores on anything they touch." "They don't sound very dangerous," I told him. "They aren't then. It's the next step in their life cycle that makes them a nuisance. You see, Sam, if they don't come in contact with some substance containing moisture and a high percentage of nitrogen, the spores lie dormant. Can you think of any substance fitting those requirements better than a nice warm mess of living protein?" He grinned at me ghoulishly. "Don't look so horrified, Sam. I'll bet credits against chalk that you're host to at least one kind of fungus right now. Do you have athlete's foot?" He was thirsty again and took steps to remedy such a deplorable situation. "The puffs are only another type of fungus, even though they do cause more trouble than most. The animals on Xenon are immune from them, but when they land on a man, they send out tiny rootlets that are like minute hairs. These go into the nearest capillary and start taking the nitrogen they need from the blood. After a week or so, they drop off and continue their cycle. I'm told that a man can be practically covered with the varmits and his nitrogen balance won't be disturbed enough to bother him." "Then why worry about them?" I asked as he paused a moment. He didn't seem to hear me. "Those puffs would be just another annoyance except for the fact that those little rootlets evidently work on the nerve endings of the body just enough so they don't hurt but itch instead and, brother, how they do itch! Makes you wish you had four more hands and someone else to help scratch." He squirmed in remembrance. "I understand some of the earlier men dug out divots of flesh to get rid of the intolerable itch and to keep from going crazy. It's that bad. Good thing, though, that the spores can't live inside the body. Can you imagine having an itch like that in your lungs?" continued. "You'll forgive me if I seem to wander from La Prunella, but you have to understand the powder puffs to know why she left our bed and board so suddenly. "Of course, it's true all of the old-timers on Xenon had been puffed at one time or another, but just to prevent a repeat performance, we all, including Prunella, wore that protective goo you people sent out to us a few years ago. Works pretty well. You build up a considerable immunity after the first attack of puffs and more after each succeeding one, but that's the hard way. The goo is easier." His voice trailed off as, with a surprised look, he noticed his glass, was again empty. This time he brought the bottle back with him. "But to get back to Pruny. Well, the men were getting pretty fed up with Prunella's arbitrary ways and her morning inspections, but the last straw was when she shot Johnny, the station's pet Me-too bird that we had raised from almost an egg. Same as humans, Johnny had his little faults and foibles, but we loved him in spite of them. "One of those faults was the reason Johnny lived outside the dome instead of inside with the rest of us, as he would have liked. We never let him stay inside for any length of time because he was never able to understand why floors should be clean and kept that way. So Johnny's nest was on top of the ultra-wave tower and that's where he spent most of his time when he wasn't lazily riding around on the shoulders of one of us or panhandling Joe, the cook, for something extra to eat. "He was in his nest when Prunella got him with that delicate-looking, deadly little needlegun of hers. I'll bet he had a hundred of those tiny slivers of steel in him. One would have been enough, but she must have set the gun on full automatic and then let it spew itself empty." I made sympathetic noises. "She said afterward that Johnny had been a possible disease carrier and, besides, he was dirty. There was absolutely no doubt about it -- Johnny was dirty and in more ways than one, but as for diseases, Xenon seemed to have none that the human race hadn't already overcome on some other planet far more dangerous than this one." as Lee paused to sip and roll the brandy. He said, "I've always suspected, however, that the real reason for Johnny's assassination struck Prunella, so to speak, like a bolt from the blue when she walked under his nest in the tower. At any rate, I saw her shoving her shirt into the disposer chute. Johnny had one bad habit and all of us knew better than to get within his range, but Prunella, being new with us, just didn't understand that bird," He stopped, twirling his empty glass suggestively, with painful memories obviously clouding his eyes while he stared into the hypnotically flickering fire. "Empty," he said mournfully, "just as my heart was." He bowed his head to Johnny's memory as I hastily left him alone with his grief. I quickly returned from the kitchen, bringing a fresh supply of the medicinal spirits that Grandfather had advised for moments of stress and, over Lee's feeble protests, forced a generous dosage into his glass. He regarded it with a wan, pathetic smile, then, at my urging, choked back his sorrow and nearly drained the goblet in a manful gulp. Grandfather was right. The sorrow left Lee's eye and from somewhere he found new courage to go on. "The death of the bird seemed to crystalize the rebellion. That night, the entire personnel of the station unanimously elected themselves as joint chairmen of the Ways and Means Committee of the Xenon Anti-Prunella and After sundown Elbow bending League and immediately called a special meeting. The emergency session convened around a keg of my illegal brandy which, in some miraculous manner, had escaped Prunella's searching hatchet. Not wishing to offend the unknown gods who had thus smiled upon us, we took small token sips as we meditated." Lee demonstrated with the glass in his hand. "How to throw off the yoke of the oppressor who had come among us? How to ease the bite of her lash on our quivering backs? How to restore our tiny, inoffensive still whose musical, tinkling drip we loved so well? The suggestions put before the committee that night were many and varied and wonderful." Lee tried to light a cigarette and nearly broiled the end of his nose with the flame. "Lopez, head of our camera team, wanted to pickle her in a barrel of brandy and send her back to Venus Relay Station aboard the next courier rocket. Sounded like a good idea, too, until Olsen, one of the biologists, objected on the grounds that those bums on Venus never did anything for us, so why should they get all that good brandy? The motion was tabled as impractical when we saw the pit into which Lopez and his wild ideas had nearly led us. A whole barrel of brandy! The man must have been desperate to call for such extreme measures." mann, the chemist of the bunch, proposed smoking her as one would a ham and then hanging her over the main gate of the compound to keep away the beasties and things that go boomp in the night. Now that was what I thought a fine idea. Functional, you might say. Might as well get some good out of her. But then Joe smothered it with his observation that, after one look at that face of hers, the good beasties would stay out of the compound, too. "The dark and devious ways of the plotter were difficult for us to assume, scientists and technicians that we were, and the trips to the keg became more frequent as we sought the aid of the nameless gods who had sent it to us." He paused again as Grandpa's brandy took another beating. "The web of our own fuzzy thinking was entangling us more and more when I was privileged to be present during the only true flash of genius I've ever witnessed." The wonder, the awe was still in his voice. "Akermann's assistant, the Kid, was singled out for the touch and I must say for him that he held up very nicely under the blow, but one could see that his sudden responsibility set heavy on his narrow bony shoulders. The Kid drew additional inspiration from the glass in his hand, then leaped to his feet and as promptly sat down again. He gave the decking at his feet a baleful glare and tried again, first choosing his footing carefully as a man should when the floor shows that alarming tendency to tilt." "'Men,' he said owlishly, 'le's fix it show see -- I mean so she -- won't like it here an' maybe she'll go 'way. Le's set the puffs on her.' " 'On her what?' someone wanted to know. "'On her nuthin'. Just on her!' the Kid said. "'Oh.' "There was another mass assault on the speedily diminishing committee prayed to the gods of the spacemen for guidance. The committee decided to consider the motion. " 'Wunnerful idea,' Akermann beamed at his protege, 'but how you gonna get 'em to bite through that protective goo she dunks herself in every mornin'. Just how you gonna, huh?'" I asked Lee. "The Kid was ready with an answer. 'Do y' know why we wear clothes made only of vegetable or synthetic fibers and not any animal wool, hide or fur?' "'Sure, any fool knows that,' Akermann said. 'The cotton lobby had a law passed.' " 'I'm serious,' the Kid told him disgustedly. "'Howdy,' our learned chemist said happily, sticking out his hand. 'I'm Akermann.' "The Kid must have finally decided that his boss was even more advanced in brandy shock than he was if it was possible -- and it was. He picked another chemist, Harry North, as his new straight man and, squinting one eye a bit in an effort to keep him in focus, said, 'Harry, do you know why we don't wear wool 'n stuff like that?' "'Sure,' Harry answered. 'The Handbook says animal fibers are protein an' if the puffs get a foothold on any article of clothing made of 'em, then their rootlets c'n penetrate most any kind of goo an' fasten into the guy that happens to be so stupid. Then someone has to give him the treatment to keep him from scratching right down to the liver an' lights.' "The Kid's punch line was trying to get out so bad that he was about to blow a tube. "That's right, Harry,' he smiled patronizingly. "Now if Prunella was to wear somethin' like that, do y' spose the puffs would get 'er?' "Harry was still puzzled. 'Sure they would, but she's not gonna do it. Handbook says not to, n' even gives a long list of stuff not to wear. Nope, she won't.""I know there's a list, but one nitrogenous fiber didn't get on it. Silk is a protein -- fibroin -- but it's not on the list.' '"Silk? Why should silk be on the list?' Martin, a big, beefy physicist, was red-faced and indignant. 'It's too expensive and fragile for ordinary wear an' besides, no self-respecting spaceman l ever knew would be caught dead in a silk undershirt or a silk anything else! What d'you think those guys are, a bunch of women to go around wearing sil -- ' He stopped abruptly, staring at the Kid with something like awe. 'Do you think we can get 'er into something made of silk?' he asked humbly, as befits a man when he speaks to a superior being. "There was a respectful silence as the group waited for Mr. Paulson, formerly the Kid, to speak. "Mr. Paulson clapped his hand over his mouth, said 'Urp' between his clenched fingers, turned a remarkable shade of green and looked about him like a trapped animal. A few of his admirers led him through a small door, no doubt to worship silently at his feet while he rested after his soulshaking ordeal. It was clear that Mr. Paulson had given his all for the cause." on Mr. Paulson's pain-racked exit, its latching hiss drowned by the simultaneous demand of the committee, individually, for the attention of the committee, collectively. Each of them considered himself the sole person present capable of carrying on the great work for which Mr. Paulson had so nobly sacrificed himself. Ordinarily sedate doctors of this or that gibbered at each other in an arm-waving frenzied attempt to be heard. "In a matter of seconds, half the committee had the other half backed into chairs, against tables and into corners, earnestly explaining in a conspiratorial roar just how Prunella was to be enticed into wearing the silken booby-trap. "The committee gradually shouted itself into a red-faced, thirsty semi-hoarseness only to find a demon -- ne Shulman, our top botanist -- guarding the inspirational keg with a heavy stool and promising a swift and personal drought to any man who didn't shut up on the spot. I need not say that we shut nor that order was fast in coming among us. "In the comparative quiet that followed, there was a rapid-fire shifting of ideas, deleting some, adding to others, and Prunella was doomed. The plot wasn't too thick. It depended only on the fact that an expert's eye was needed to detect the difference between sheer Enduron, the newest and best of the synthetic fibers, and sheer silk. By the same token, the reverse was true. That is, given silk, one could easily mistake it for Enduron. "The services of a woman on Terra were necessary to us, so Sparks magnanimously recruited his young sister, a writer or artist or something of the sort, who lives somewhere in southern Europe. All she had to do was buy a dozen pairs of the fluffiest, nine silk undies she could find in the most chi-chi shop in Paris and then send them to Prunella with a note honoring her as the first woman on Xenon and asking Prunella to accept them as a token of admiration from one woman to another. Some fictitious name was to be signed to it. "We raided the office, obtained Prunella's file and copied out the proper measurements from it Sparks fed the message, measurements and a blank signed photocheck into the coder and the automatic ultra-wave transmitter took it with a swift blip of sound and that was that."  breath, which he did by inhaling from a full glass. Then he continued talking. "All this occurred about the middle of Xenon's third month. We expected the skivies to arrive on a supply ship due the first of the following month, which gave us nearly three Earth weeks to wait, but we didn't mind. After all, we had something to wait for. "The ship, bless the crew, was on schedule almost to the hour. Adams had had his wide-angle 'scope aimed at the sky above Xenon since long before breakfast, and he and the detectors ran a dead heat when the ship winked out of sub-space about "By mid-morning, the ship's gravitors had floated her into the field for the usual feather-light landing, and mail call, always the first order of business, was over. "Women have a well-deserved reputation for dawdling over trifles when important matters wait, but that morning Prunella broke all previous records. She gossiped with the ship's captain about interminable bills of lading, she inspected the field for any possible damage by the ship, she swallowed enough coffee to start a fair-sized shortage. Finally, just in time to save the station from a mass nervous collapse, she left the office for her quarters, carrying her mail in one hand and that small, all-important package in the other. "She reappeared for lunch wearing the tiny smile of a woman who knows she is appreciated by someone and, we hoped, also wearing something else not quite so visible. Never was one so closely watched by so many. If she looked distressed, we gloated. If she squirmed in her chair, we rejoiced. Her every move was analyzed for possible puff symptoms. "Prunella, that evening, dined as the captain's guest aboard ship. In the mess hall, with Mr. Paulson installed in the seat of honor, the arguments were long, loud and heated: She had 'em on. She didn't. The puffs had her. They didn't. "I hadn't realized there were so many synonyms for fool and idiot or so many genteel ways to sneer until my learned colleagues that night debated the case of the puffs versus Prunella. We went to bed still in an agony of indecision." appropriately sympathetic. I obliged. "The next morning, Prunella had breakfast alone in her quarters, but then she often did. Or I should say she ordered breakfast sent and then ate only a little of it and sent it back. A short while later, Prunella left her room, went to the library and returned to her quarters with a spool of microfilm in her hand. All the people who could cram into the tiny library cubicle were in before the hiss of Prunella's closing door died away. A wild rape of the library files improved our digestions, dispositions and belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil -- Prunella had withdrawn the film on 'Effects of Xenon Life-forms on the Human Body.' "I learned later that some farsighted soul had added lurid details to the section of the film dealing with the puffs, describing minutely what one could expect after powder puff infestation. Odd thing about a few of those added details -- some of the more horrible ones had never been noticed before nor have they been reported since. "Prunella went aboard the supply ship Hunter shortly after noon, scratching determinedly in several places that no lady should, at least in public. "The captain, most of his loading done and seeing her dire nefed, blasted off for Terra immediately and flipped into sub-space much closer to the planet than he should have. Prunella was on Terra that same night, Xenon time. The captain told me on his next trip that Pruny had commandeered both quarantine nurses at Polar Space Field to work on her. It still took the two women several hours to finish, according to him. She must have been covered with the things. Bet she looked as though she were sprouting fur." "One thing I don't understand," I told Lee. "You kept referring to a 'treatment' of some kind for the powder puffs. Didn't Prunella know about it? If she did, I don't see why she didn't take it on Xenon. Surely, at the risk of being insubordinate, you didn't deny it to her if she had ordered it." "Quite the contrary, Sam. Prunella knew all about the 'treatment.' And in spite of your suspicions as to our hard hearts, many of us offered our services after leering in what we hoped was a suggestive manner. You see, Sam, the mysterious treatment consisted of nothing more than a very close examination of every square centimeter of the skin with a high-power magnifier and using a pair of fine tweezers to pull out the puff rootlets. But in addition to all of Prunella's other faults andor virtues, Prunella was a prude." We drank a silent toast to pure womanhood. Read it and you'll see for yourself! Only #c a copy at your favorite newsstand... or # a year. (Add I per year on foreign subscriptions to) Write to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. In the Cards It is one thing to safeguard the future... and something else entirely to see someone you love cry in terror two years from now! when I bought my Grundy Projector was take a trip to about two years ahead and see what was going to happen to me. Everyone was doing it around that time; students were taking short trips into the future to learn whether or not they would pass their exams, married couples were looking ahead to see how many kids they were going to have, businessmen were going into the future to size up their prospects. I took the trip because I was getting married and I couldn't resist the temptation of finding out how things would work out with my fiancee Marge and myself. Not that I had any doubts about Marge, but the Grundy Projectors were guaranteed harmless and there's no point in taking chances with a serious step like marriage. Everybody was looking ahead then. Within a week after the Grundy Projectors were introduced, you could walk past homes every evening and see people with those shimmering bird-cages around them. Their bodies were there, but heaven knows when their minds were -- months and often even years ahead of time. I knew exactly when to go on my first time trip. I even knew where: I'd already put a down payment on a home in the new dome housing area where Marge and I would be living after the wedding. Knowing where to go on a time trip is important. On this one, for instance, I hadn't been assigned ?n address yet and there were all sorts of changes in the place -- buildings and streets where there had only been empty lots and sections marked off by string -- and I just had to hunt until I came to our home. You can imagine how much more difficult finding my future self would be if I hadn't known the exact location. That's about the only major drawback to making time trips and I don't see how it can be overcome. Directories would be one answer, but how would you go about putting them together if your crews can't ask questions or touch filing cards or even open future visiphone books? E ventually, after setting the dial around the two-year mark, which is about the maximum limit on most models, I found myself in my future home in the dome housing area. I was watching myself as I would be and Marge as she would be. Only I didn't like what I saw. We were fighting and screaming at each other. You could tell at a glance that we hated each other. And after only two years! I was completely stunned as I watched that scene. Future Marge looked furious; she had the kind of look I never even suspected she could get on her face. But I think I was more enraged at my future self than at her. At the time, I was seriously in love with Marge -- although it seemed evident it wasn't going to last -- and I loathed myself for acting that way toward her. And after all those rash promises I had been making, too! I was really a tangled mess of emotions as I watched our future selves battling it out. I became conscious of not being alone as I watched. It didn't take long to discover that it was Marge who had come to join me. I should have expected her -- she must have been just as curious about her marriage as I was and, like myself, would naturally take her Projector to the twoyear limit. Of course we couldn't hold hands the way we would have if our bodies had been there, but then we probably wouldn't have held them long. We were both pretty embarrassed by what we saw. The cause of the fight was very obscure, and though we saw and heard everything perfectly, we still didn't really understand. However, the emotions expressed were plain enough. "You aren't going to die, Marge," my future self was yelling at her. "Try and get that through your damned thick stupid skull!" "I am! I am!" she was screaming back at me. "You know I'm going to die. You want to get rid of me. Our marriage has been one long fight from the start." "Don't talk such damned rot," my future self hollered back at her. "There's probably a perfectly good explanation for it all and you're too ignorant to see it!" "The only explanation is that I'm going to die," future Marge insisted. She broke down, sobbing into an already saturated handkerchief. My future self stamped around the room, cursing and furiously kicking the furniture. "Why don't you find out for sure? Why don't you go in closer and find out the real reason?" She sobbed even louder. "I daren't! You do it for me. Go find out for yourself and then tell me." That seemed to make my future self even madder. "You know I wouldn't touch one of those things even to save my life. I mean it, too! Besides, if you do die, it'll be your own fault. You'll have believed yourself to death! You think you're going to die and now you won't be happy until you are dead." Future Marge began to sob hysterically and my Marge, who had been right beside me, suddenly seemed to grow a little more remote. Then a strange thing happened. My future self stopped pacing up and down the room and turned to look straight at me with the queerest expression on his face. That was enough for me. I got out of there fast and flipped back to the peace and security of #. Projector, glad to be back in the relative calm of my body, although it still took me a long time to get settled down. I felt like smashing the Projector there and then, and I guess I should have done it. The problem that had me all tied in knots was whether or not I should go ahead and marry Marge after what I had seen. I know it looked as though I was going to marry her anyway, but in my innocence I figured I could beat that. I soon realized I was going to get nowhere sitting all by myself in my room, so I went over to Marge's place. She was waiting for me, swinging quietly to and fro on the hammock on the dark patio. Normally I would have sat right down beside her, but this time I just stood back sheepishly and waited. Neither of us said anything for a while and I just watched as the hammock floated in the faint bluish light from some nearby lamps. Marge seemed to shine almost angelically as the glow caught her dark eyes and her softly tanned arms and legs. self for treating her the way I had seen myself treating her in the future. It must have been a mistake. There had to be a mistake somewhere. I couldn't have made myself do anything to hurt her. Her voice was husky and scared when she spoke. "Do you think it'll happen the way we saw it, Gerry?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "They say that whatever you see always turns out to be the thing that happens." "Do you think we'll fight like that when -- if we're married?" It was on the end of my tongue to talk common sense and logic to her, but then I realized that neither of us wanted to hear anything like that. We were in love and we didn't want to hear anything that conflicted with our emotions. Marge sat up in the hammock and made room for me to sit down beside her. "I just don't see how it could happen to us," I said... "I don't see how we could fight like that There must have been some mistake. Maybe we looked in on the wrong people." Neither of us added anything to that. We both knew we weren't going to change so much that we couldn't recognize ourselves two years later. "Maybe it was some sort of alternative world we saw," I suggested, eagerly clutching at any straw, "showing us what could happen if we didn't work hard at our marriage. It could have been a sort of warning of what could happen to some people. But not us, of course!" Marge's lonely little hand crept into mine for comfort and I began to warm up to the subject. "Don't you worry about it," I assured her. "What would we ever find to quarrel about?" The idea seemed so preposterous, we both began to laugh. "I couldn't fight with you, Gerry," Marge said, snuggling closer. "Me, neither," I said. "Don't worry about what we saw. The scientific boys will probably have a rational explanation worked out for the whole thing. I'll bet it's happened to lots of people." Somehow, while we were talking, we had managed to get very close together in the hammock. Marge and I could never talk far apart for long. "I couldn't wait for you to come over," Marge said in a small voice. "I couldn't wait to get here," I lied. "I just don't believe that what we saw could possibly happen to us. What on Earth would wp ever find to fight over?" That was the one basic mistake that we, and everyone else, made when we discussed the Bilbo Grundy Projector. When the Projector showed you something was going to happen, it happened. That night, Marge and I made plans to get married even sooner and the ceremony took place four weeks later. been a well-kept secret until it suddenly burst upon us with a carefully planned publicity campaign. There hadn't even been a hint of experiments in the timetravel field until the discovery had suddenly been made public in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the whole world. Grundy had discovered a way of projecting a person's view into the future and the equipment required turned out to be amazingly compact, simple and inexpensive. The average cost of a Projector was fifty-five dollars -- well within practically anyone's price range. Grundy and his backers had lined up a large number of famous people beforehand, all of whom had tried the Projector us how great it was. Terrific fun -- the newest thrill since the first radio, or the first airplane, or the first space rocket. And absolutely harmless, tool All you had to do was set a dial and get into the cage and you could watch yourself an hour or a day or up to two years ahead of time. If you wanted to see if it was going to rain that weekend, all you did was climb in and take a look. If you wanted to' see where you would be going for your annual vacation, just press a button and you would see yourself making the final plans. All for fifty-rfive dollars. What with all the advertising coming at us via every possible medium, first five days. Because he knew exactly how many he was going to sell -- just by making use of his own invention -- Grundy was fully prepared for the onslaught of customers. Everyone talked of nothing but the new sensation. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing about it. It seemed as if the rest of the world had. stopped. Before long, there wasn't a thing about the next two years that we didn't know. We all jumped ahead in great leaps and found out all kinds of things that were due to happen to us and to the world. If the things were good, we waited happily for them to happen. If things didn't look too good, we shrugged it off, like Marge and me, and said it couldn't happen to us. ever we saw happening did take place exactly as we saw it -- it was inescapable. The first instance I saw of this was in the accountanting office where I operated an accounts analyzer. We advertised for a new operator to assist in my department and lined up interviews with thirty-two applicants. When the day of the interviews arrived, only one applicant turned up. He was found suitable and got the job. The president, Mr. Atkins, was pretty het up about the whole affair. "Why would thirty-one men not present themselves for interviews as they had arranged?" he kept asking me. "It's a good job, isn't it, Gerald?" I tried to explain to him that the Time Projector was probably involved in the affair, although I couldn't see how exactly. Mr. Atkins was an old man who didn't believe in new gadgets of any kind and he wasn't convinced. Finally, however, I managed to get him to call some of the applicants and ask them why they had not appeared for their interviews. He almost went apoplectic when he heard the reasons. Each of the thirty-one answered that he had flipped ahead to see what was going to happen on that particular day and each one had seen that he wasn't going to visit Mr. Atkins in search of a job, so he didn't go. Some of them even told him that they knew they were going to get jobs elsewhere on a certain date and that they were just taking a vacation until that day came. I had a hard time soothing Mr. Atkins that afternoon. He wouldn't stop talking about it. Finally, just to satisfy himself, he re-interviewed the sole successful applicant. As we should have expected, the new man answered that he had looked ahead to see that he was going to get the job and had dutifully made his appearance. Mr. Atkins was flabbergasted and he spluttered and fumed for minutes on end. Then he looked crafty. "What am I going to do now?" he asked the new man. "You're going out to get drunk, sir," the new man answered. And that's exactly what Mr. Atkins did.  came commonplace in no time. The newspapers were filled with them every day, though it still took us quite a while to understand that there was nothing we could do to avoid the inevitable. It was all pretty staggering and naturally we protested like madmen. Naturally it didn't do a bit of good. It was in the cards that we would protest without results. Even when we did get quieted down, we were still in a daze because of the weird things that were happening. For instance, there was this fellow on our street who suddenly became famous for writing a best-selling novel. For ten years, he had been writing without selling a word and then suddenly he broke into the big time with a best-seller. Everyone asked him how he had done it and he calmly explained that he looked into the future and .saw himself with a popular novel to his credit. He found out what the novel was about and then catpe back to his own time and wrote it and his success worked out exactly as he had seen it on his time trip. No one could say that he hadn't written the book himself. My kid brother Willy was in first year rnedjcine when he looked ahead and saw that he wasn't going to be present at the term-end exams, so he just didn't bother to attend. He stayed in bed that day. He didn't want to be a doctor, anyway -- I think he only started it for my mother's sake. A lot of people argued with him and said if he had only gotten out of bed that morning and gone to school, the prediction would have been proven false. The only answer to that, of course, is that Willy just didn't get out of bed that morning, thus proving the prediction true. We argued for weeks over that one. It doesn't matter now -- Willy is a 'copter mechanic and crazy about the work. After all, he didn't have the slightest difficulty getting a job. He simply looked ahead to see where he would be working and then applied. Inevitably, some people found out when they were going to die. Even when they took steps to forestall the grim event, they often discovered that their plans actually helped them arrive at their demise right on the button. But most people died of old age anyway, what with all the latest developments in safety engineering and medicine. Nevertheless, it meant that fate was having its own way as usual, with the difference that we knew everything beforehand and remained just as helpless! " that the predictions were one hundred per cent accurate, all kinds of changes affected our lives. For a start, a lot of people automatically found their jobs had disappeared overnight -- weather forecasters, news analysts, pollsters, stock-market speculators, and all the people connected with any form of racing, betting, lotteries or raffles, to name only a few. Gambling, respectable or otherwise, requires someone to win and someone to lose -- and sult he already knew? A few new jobs were created by others who looked ahead and foresaw such things as earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanic eruptions and violent storms. They set up special teams for handling these disasters, evacuating people and removing valuable property beforehand. This explained why, as we looked ahead, we saw fewer and fewer deaths occurring from these tragedies. The growing efficiency of the rescue services worked wonders -- which were part of the future, as you'd expect, not successful attempts to change it -- although there were always a small number of deaths, mainly the kind of people who never used to pay any attention to the news, didn't look at road signs, and the like. Some of them belonged to the crowd who opposed Bilbo Grundy's fabulous invention. They were strictly a minority but, as is usually the case, they were a pretty noisy and outspoken bunch. They were a mixed lot, too, made up of people who had foreseen their deaths or personal disaster, those who had lost their jobs through the invention, a number of cranks who habitually were against everything, plus a few, like myself, who just didn't feel easy about the Projector. I couldn't see that time travel was evil or sinful the way some of them described it and I never attended any of their protest meetings, but I did sympathize with them to a certain extent. Everyone called them the 'Diehards' and the stock remark was that they should look into the future to see if their movement was going to be a success before they got too involved in it. That drove them wild. with her Projector. The device was very popular with women, mainly, I guess, because it was the absolutely perfect fortunetelling device and it was much more fun than either video or visiphone conversations. I put my own Grundy Projector away in the basement shortly after I got married and I never used it any more. To my way of thinking, it made life pretty dull. I had just been married and I was also starting to get ahead at my job -- Mr. Atkins had put me in charge of a whole department full of accounts analyzers. I went around with all sorts of wild plans and dreams of a rosy future for us. I hoped someday to form my own company and I was also interested in finding a better place to live. The dome housing development was only temporary as far as I was concerned and I wanted something bigger for when we could afford a family. I suppose we all have those dreams of success when we're young, and though most of us have fairly predictable futures, I still can't help thinking that it's those wild dreams and schemes that keep us slugging away and add a little zest to life. Anyway, I soon found that Marge was knocking all the zest out of my life because she knew the future for both of us and she kept telling me about it. It took me a few weeks to finally persuade her that I'd rather not know what was going to happen. But it was too late then, because she'd told me everything that was important. For instance, I knew I was going to be living in the dome house for another two years and probably more. I knew I was still going to be working for Mr. Atkins and I knew just how much money I was going to have in the bank at the end of two years. I even knew that my paunch would get bigger and my hair would start falling out Life got to be just a matter of sitting around waiting for the expected to happen. of the time projection habit, but it was useless. She was as addicted as everyone else and the Grundy Projector looked as though it was going to be here for good and no one was going to stop it. After all, who could prevent an expectant mother from jumping ahead a year or so to find out whether she is going to have a boy or girl? I know the doctors can tell with one hundred per cent accuracy in the second month, but the parents-to-be still want to find out if Junior will look like Mom or Dad. Or who could prevent a young boy and girl from finding out whom they were going to marry? New methods of courting appeared -- if you could call it courting. A boy would merely look ahead and find out who the lucky girl was going to be and then call on her. She was usually sitting at the front door waiting for him, too. I kind of liked the old-fashioned way, when Marge and I met by chance one day and then spent months getting to know each other. Of course it was impossible to avoid knowing future news whether you wanted to hear it or not. The newspapers, in trying to beat each other to scoops, could only find good headline material among the Diehards; the rest of us all knew what would happen to us. Most of the papers carried two separate sections -- one for future events and the other for present "news." We still had crime with us. The crooks who knew they Were going to jail always went there at the appointed time, regardless of their elaborate precautions and so-called foolproof systems. Others who knew they were going to stay free for a couple of years at least led fabulously successful lives of crimes, made more daring by the fact that they knew they were temporarily safe from the law. The police, on the other hand, never bothered to chase these characters, knowing in advance that they weren't going to catch them anyway. This naturally set the Diehards to hollering. For a time, they talked of forming vigilante groups to do their own policing, but nobody worried about this. It was in the cards, you see, that they weren't going to do it. The final blow to the Diehards came during the Federal Elections of #, when the Neo-Republicans just got up and walked out of office and the United NorthSouth Democrats walked in without a single election speech being made. I know a few votes were cast, but everyone knew what the results would be long before it happened. The part that annoyed the Diehards so much was that it was their handful of votes that decided the results. two years, Marge and I began to have our first samples of that bitter quarrel we had both witnessed on our first time trip. I had almost forgotten about what I had seen, but soon I saw how I was going to be taking part in such quarrels quite frequently. Marge just wouldn't stop making those time trips and it seemed to me she spent hours every day in her Projector. There was something in the future that worried her and, naturally that worried me, too. I was almost tempted to get my own Projector out of the basement and find out for myself. Marge was beginning to look sick and pale all the time. She got much thinner and weaker and I knew she cried a lot when I wasn't around. I tried my best to find the cause of the trouble, but I got nowhere. Trying to cheer her up with little surprises was a waste of time. It's no fun trying to surprise anyone who knows better than yourself what the surprise is going to be. Finally, when out of desperation I had almost decided to take my first time trip in nearly two years, I came home from the office to find Marge sobbing hysterically beside the Projector. "We're going to die, Gerry!" she said, when I managed to get ,her fairly coherent. "I've been looking ahead for months now and I just don't see us anywhere in the future!" So there it was. I didn't know what to do or say. I was scared and mad and sorry for Marge for keeping such a secret bottled up inside herself for so long. The first thing I said was, "There must be a mistake -- " until I remembered that there were never any mistakes with Grundy Projectors.L ' to find a way out of the situation. "Maybe you couldn't find us because we moved," I said quickly. "Maybe I got another job and left town or was transferred to the Boston office. Mr. Atkins has mentioned it a couple of times." "I looked," Marge said miserably. "I looked everywhere and I just couldn't see us anywhere." "But how do you know we're going to die?" I argued. "Did you see it happen?" She shook her head. "I didn't dare look that close. I got it pinned down to somewhere in the next month and I didn't dare look any closer, afraid I might have to see something horrible. All I know is we just won't be around sometime after the next four or five weeks." "Has anyone mentioned anything to you about our death?" I asked. It was considered improper to even hint at another person's death just in case that person hadn't found out. Still, you know how tactless some people can be. Marge just shook her head and went right on sobbing. "Listen," I said, "I'll bet you're getting all worked up for nothing. Anything -- absolutely anything -- could happen in the next few weeks. There's probably a perfectly simple explanation for the whole thing." I guess I wasn't very convincing because Marge just stared of her eyes. "Gerry, would -- would you go and look? If it's something harmless, you can come right back and tell me. If it's something awful, I won't ask about it." "No," I said. "That would be just the same as telling you what's going to happen. Besides, I don't want to know." We just sat around the house for the rest of that evening. After Marge had gone to bed, I went down to the basement and smashed both our Bilbo Grundy Time Projectors into little pieces. I'd seen the hopelessness and despair in people who had learned just how and when they would die. Smashing the things wouldn't change the future -- I realized that -- but I didn't want Marge obeying the impulse to find out. Or myself, for that matter. reling started in earnest. Marge wouldn't let up on the business of dying, and as well as being scared, I was also sick of hearing about our short and questionable future. Marge was furious with me for destroying her Projector and blamed me constantly for making her suffer by preventing her from looking into the future. "Now we won't know what's going to happen until it's too late!" she shrieked at me. "That's right!" I yelled back. "And that's just the way I want it! What's the use of knowing and worrying in advance if there's no way of doing anything about it?" Then, one night, we had the identical fight that we had watched two years earlier, on our first time trip. Marge, as usual, was crying hysterically about not having long to live and I was shouting at her about wishing herself into the grave. She seemed to have forgotten that I was going to go, too, and had taken all the suffering on her own shoulders. When I was hollering and stamping about the room, I had a funny, eerie feeling as I suddenly remembered that my younger unmarried self had watched -- or was watching -- the same scene. I just stopped doing anything for a moment and stared around the room. Naturally I saw nothing, because there was nothing to see, and I remembered how quickly my younger self had fled when I had looked up like that Ashamed, I tried to soothe Marge, but she was too far gone to be comforted. I was glad to get out of the house every day and spend a few hours at the office. I must admit that I was scared to be with Marge because it looked as though we were going to go together and I felt safer away from her. I know it's nothing to be proud of, but it helped ease the tension, for Marge as well as myself. One day, Mr. Atkins stopped in at my office and sat down to talk. There was nothing unusual about this; he often visited me for a chat, even though he wasn't so friendly with the other employees. We talked for a while about the usual things, department business and some of the staff members. Then Mr. Atkins turned the conversation away from business matters. "Do you have one of those newfangled Time Projector things, Gerald?" he asked. Mr. Atkins was getting on in years and called everything introduced in the last thirty years "newfangled." "No," I said. "I did have one, but I stopped using it soon after I got it." "Didn't you like it?" I shrugged. "It wasn't that. I just preferred to find out for myself what would happen to me." I didn't want to tell him the true story or my other troubles. Mr. Atkins sat back in his chair and sighed. "Ah, yes. I don't suppose you remember too much about the old days, not after the last two years we've been through. People had problems in those days and they used to have to solve them for themselves. People don't have to make decisions any more, you know. Do you think you could still make a decision, Gerald?" it difficult to stop fidgeting and stay quietly seated. I began to suspect that he was leading up to something important. It could have been the transfer to another branch or an out-of-town assignment which would explain our disappearance in the future. "I still try to make plans and direct my own future whenever I can," I stalled. "It's difficult, I know," Mr. Atkins went on, "especially when all the news is about something that's going to happen a day or a week or a year from now. It's not so bad for an old man like me, but it must be tough on you young fellows. Too bad this Bilbo -- uh -- " "Grundy," I said. "Bilbo Grundy." Mr. Atkins knew the name as well as I did, but it was one of his little tricks to pretend he was getting old and forgetful, although he really wasn't. It used to be a good business tactic before the Grundy Projector came out. It wasn't any more -- not with people being able to see outcomes of dealings -- but he couldn't get rid of the habit. "It's too. bad he had to invent that fool time gadget," he went on. "I suppose your wife uses it all the time. They seem to be very popular with women." "Marge gave it up a short time ago," I lied. "She got bored with it." Mr. Atkins nodded thoughtfully. "Wouldn't it be nice to live in an age again when none of us knew what was going to happen? When life had lots of surprises -- both good and bad? When you could get up in the morning and not be sure what was going to happen before night? Would you like that, Gerald?" I didn't know what to say. He was off on that wandering-mind routine and I didn't know for sure whether he was really rambling or not. "I think I'd like it, Mr. Atkins," I said. "As long as everyone else was in the same boat." " Would you like it?" He was suddenly looking at me with the shrewd, out-of-the-corner-of-theeye expression he had when he was handling some wealthy client's intricate income tax problems. "I mean it," I told him. "I'm tired of living among people who know my business two years ahead of time." "I can get you to a world like that," he said quietly. I didn't say anything in reply. Who could? "I have some friends," he went on, "who make a practice of helping people like yourself to better things." "What do you mean by 'better things'?" I asked warily. "I'm talking about time travel, Gerald. The real thing -- not the Bilbo Grundy toy, but real physical time travel. These friends have gone a lot further than Grundy did with his invention and they perform the service of transporting people to a better age." "You mean the future?" "The past!" said Mr. Atkins. "The chances are the future will be even worse. I'm talking about the middle of the last century, around the nineteen fifties or thereabouts." I began to laugh. "The nineteen-fifties! What would I do to earn a living in those days?" guess that would be your first unsolved problem. After all, you said you wanted problems and the chance to make plans and try to make themeome true." "But why pick me?" I wanted to know. "I like you, Gerald," he said. "I would like to see you have a decent chance. And don't flatter yourself -- you wouldn't be the first one to go. You'd be in good company." I just sat staring vacantly at him. "I guess you could say this is your first big decision in two years," he added. "There's no hurry. You can think it over for a while." I asked questions -- lots of them -- but I didn't get too many answers. Mr. Atkins explained that naturally the affair was hushhush. After the way the Grundy Projector had been thrust so irresponsibly upon us, no one wanted any further complications. But there were some answers I could piece together both from what I already knew and the hints he dropped. I'd been in on conferences and listened to Mr. Atkins try to figure out ways of expanding, building up our business. Each time, he'd been stymied by the Grundy Projector. If he'd bull some idea through, his competitors would see exactly how it worked out. If he didn't, they'd know that, too. And I had heard him rant when the accountants -- using the Grundy Projectors, of course -- would make up their inventory, sales, profit-and-loss and tax statements two years or more in advance. That was actually what galled him. Mr. Atkins was used to making plans, calculating risks and gains, taking his chances. With the Grundy Projectors in existence, nobody could do that any more. I gathered from what he told me that there was a syndicate of men like himself backing the inventor of a genuine time machine. They didn't condemn the Grundy invention on any moral or religious or even selfish grounds. They just resented very bitterly the same thing that annoyed me -- the sense of repetition. As Mr. Atkins put it, "It's no different than reading a story and then having to relive the whole thing, anticipating each action and bit of dialogue. And that's precisely what this is. Only it's our lives, not fiction. We didn't like it, Gerald. We didn't like it at all! But we did something about the problem instead of merely complaining." Let me say right now that I thought the solution they came up with was nonsensical and I kept searching, all the time we talked, for ways of politely turning down the offer. Escaping to to the past was a ridiculous answer. But it was just the kind of notion that would appeal to an old-fashioned character like Mr. Atkins. I didn't tell him so, of course. I thanked him for his consideration and shook hands and felt relieved when he finally left. then. I'd back out, quit if I had to, rather than take refuge in the past to evade the future. It wasn't until I got out of the office that I realized there was no big decision to make; it was already made for me. Either I was going to die or I was going into the past -- and I wasn't going to die if I could help it. But neither did I intend going into the past if I could really help thatl When Marge realized that I wasn't merely trying to take her mind off the fatal day, she pounced on me and hugged me as though I myself had invented the time machine just to save her life! "It's wonderful, darling!" she cried. "You were right all along! Oh, how can you forgive me for making things so unbearable for you?" "About this idea of going into the past -- " I said. "What's the difference when we go to," she cut in, "as long as we don't have to die?" "But I figured on telling Mr. Atkins at the last minute that all I want is a transfer -- " "What's the sense of guessing?" she asked excitedly. "All we have to do is bprrow a couple of Projectors and see!" I began to feel myself being squeezed into a one-way trap. I put my foot down -- but where it landed was in a Grundy Projector from the people next door -- and where it figuratively emerged was eleven days later, when I couldn't shut my non-physical eyes to the way the whole situation would turn out. Marge and I, with half a dozen others, were getting into a helicar. I followed them out to a house in the country. We handed in all the money we had saved and in return were given oldstyle clothes, ancient looking money and a small amount of luggage. Then we all stepped into what looked like an oversized version of a Grundy Projector and vanished. Fight? Argue? Scheme? I didn't have a chance. in old New York. We were met by others who had pioneered the way before us and they looked after our group until we lgprned the ropes. There was nothing easy about getting used to the era. I wished often that I could get back to my own time, Grundy Projector or no Grundy Projector. Still, Marge didn't complain; she was prepared to endure anything just because she thought her life had been saved. Occasionally! bothered by my blunders in adjusting to this past century, I'd start to reason with her, explain that her life hadn't been in danger at all. But then, luckily, I would realize that convincing her would leave an angry, dissatisfied wife on my hands and I always managed to stop in time. I got a job working as a night janitor in a bank and studied accounting in the daytime until I was able to get a steady job. We've been here a few years now and I guess you could say we're pretty well assimilated. We have a house and two small sons each of us had felt, only we hadn't and I'm doing well at my job. figured it out so clearly. But Rog We still see some of our friends Owens has a special reason for from the #st century and they've thinking particularly hard about also managed to make the change the problem. Mr. Atkins and his successfully. syndicate hadn't send us back We get together now and then, for purely altruistic reasons; and talk over old times, and laugh they learned that Rog's daughter at some things and get nostalgic Ann would marry a fellow (not Over other things. Now that there one of us) named Jack Grundy aren't any Grundy Projectors and that they'd have a son named around, we've started feeling once Bilbo, who would invent the more that our fates are in our Grundy Projector. Our .assignown hands. ment was to keep that from hapRog Owens has an interesting pening. viewpoint. He said one night, "It Well, we couldn't prevent the wasn't the future that was fixed; marriage, but we could -- and it was the Grundy Projectors did -- make sure their son would that fixed the future! Whatever have a good, plain American just let happen... or even But today my younger boy worked to make it happen. No told me their kindergarten teachtheir own deaths. Hell, how's that And one little girl can't proany different than voodoo?" nounce it. She calls him Bilbo. ( Continued from page #) the rest lost weight, occasionally to the point of emaciation. But that merely proves they wavered in their knowledge of why they felt hungry. The ones who died were just not trying. Eating is a habit (compulsive ritual) forced on us in childhood. Most children seem to be "poor" eaters, indicating they know why they feel hungry and so don't have to eat The fault of course, is the parents' for forcing them. Not-breathing used to be a monopoly of East Indian fakirs. Houdini and others have shown that anyone can do it. But their method, suspended animation, is only half-knowing why we breathe. According to the textbooks, we breathe so that we can bring oxygen to the blood cells and remove waste products. Superstition, obviously. When we breathe, the alleged waste products removed are displaced oxygen molecules, shoved along by newcomers; two things can't occupy the same space at the same time. Here, too, the cause is to be found in childhood: we are spanked at birth for not breathing. There's no point wasting time discussing sleep -- it's a heritage from our primitive ancestors, who had nothing else to do at night -- or day, if they were nocturnal. Breaking any rituals as entrenched as these always creates a sense of impending doom. But it can be done. That is the thing to keep in mind. There are so many ways in which the formula can be used that the real question is where to start. Spaceships -- we could dispense with food storerooms, galleys, air recirculation, sanitation, heat control, gravity, bunks -- everything but hull and motive power. War -- maybe the enemy won't buy the formula, but our knowing why fission, fusion and bacteria warfare kill would make them non-lethal. Disease -- they could all be laughed out of existence in a matter of minutes. Immortality -- right at our fingertips. Overpopulation -- one generation to bring under control. Poverty -- who, knowing why he felt poor, would be poor? Economics -- if we know why we want to make and buy things, we don't have to. The last item bothered me, I admit: idle people are bored people. But would they be, if they knew why they felt bored? Lord, what a discovery! But hoW is it that I know why I feel elated and still am elated? -- Continued from Back Cover M#f These Great a r I i Mi f ' ' r  hJrm Isag kj.;. f mi rummy of sc sen a ricim i m They're packed with rocket-fast stories that take you soaring through time and space -- in handsome Mars as your first selection. r  #  . tsnuktm smiis... , 'r mm nwr iBanrni bout the first A-bomb, written "forr it was invented! One about the machine that shows "newsmany others. minus novels: a complete play: scores of alllinngreat S-F ories. including .H. (i. Wells' Invasion from Mars." made faious by Orson Welles. authors. Wonders of Earth and Man. Ama.ing inventions. Space travel. Worlds of tomorrow. # fascinating pages I Series). The girl whose tortured mind is bombarded by the thought waves of other people. The synthetic creature that goes "berserk" at high temperatures. Sold. A terrifying, suspensepacked story of the future, when the Reds have enslaved every living soul on earth -- except one American boy. Judith Merril. A new collection of # superb tales ojf fantasy -- the supernatural mass hypnosis -- telepathy -- levitation, etc. Fiction masterpieces described here-F ree -- with your first regular Selection. Exploring Mars. (See other Side.) Every month, you will be offered the "cream" of the new # and # Science-Fiction books -- for only #. You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year. This offer may have to be withdrawn. So mail Dept. GX-#, Garden City, N. Y. Dept. GX-#, Garden City, N. 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A Richardson, well-known astronomer A Richardson, well-known astronomer of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, takes us streaking through space at more than # miles per second to the most intriguing planet of the universe -- Mars! How long will it take the first interplanetary space ship, as scientists now visualize it, to reach Mars ? Will it be able to get back to Earth ? What sort of an atmosphere does Mars have ? II , s there any life therj? Are the "canals'# actually channel s jj fi  w a t e r ? Are its pslSr ice caps made pf "dry ice"? Whfc causes the "pink '  mists" that ftfifAny # give Mars its  reddish glow ? " The author answers these and hundreds of when you join and get "Exploring Mars" as your first Club book other questions, as he takes you on ing reading that it has been chosen as the first Selection for new members of the ScienceFiction Hook Club. You can start your membership with EXof the great ScienceFiction classics described on the other side of this for only #, as a new member. Pick the ones you want now, and mail the See Other Side for Complete Details Dept. GX#, Garden City, N. Y. JULY # GALAXYScience fiction Qdldxy # by Clifford D. Simak Anyone For Doomsday? Not You! Not Us I thing that is possible -- and can make a good story -- goes Doomsday is only one possible future out of many: The conquest of other planets... Invasions of Earth... Other dimensions... Immortality... Strange and exciting future civilizations that have their roots right in the present... magazine of ideas brought vividly to life! For # convincing issues, send # or # for # issues, TO #I Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. AT., Each Tuesday nite on Radio Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. 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In your hands, this knowledge could alter the entire course of your affairs. The Rosicrucians offer to you -- if you have the courage to break away h'om limited forms of thinking -- these same simply expressed truths of life which have led thousands to a joyous method of better living. Learn how you may share the private instructions of The Rosicrucians, a non-profit fraternity of men and women whose influence extends into every land. Let this be the turning point in your life! For your copy of "The Mastery of Life" use the coupon below or write to Scribe T.S.M. Scribe T.S.M. I San Jose, California, U.S.A.  Please send me, without obligation, my ! cosy of "Tie Mastery of Life" which exI plains how I may receive and use your in I telligent and age-old method for attaining I mastership of life. I Name j Address I  intelligence report that allowed only one conclusion: There Are Aliens Among Us. My intent was to inform without alarming. Evidently I succeeded, for out of the jumble of letters received, only one was intelligible and therefore clearly from a human reader. "This is in reference to your article in the March issue of Galaxy entitled 'Look Now!' It is strange how one may brood for years over a problem and then suddenly have it brought into focus by reading another's views on the subject. The similarity between your conclusions and mine is, if you'll pardon the expression, astounding. "The subject is my wife. It happens that she has been a very good wife and I have no desire to alter our relationship, even if she is an alien. Good wives are not easy to find and represent a substantial investment. Therefore, I am signing this with a pseudonym and mailing it from a false address -- and request that both be kept confidential. "Many of her statements are perfectly ordinary spoonerisms. Her reference to a 'platation from Quota' is an example of this. As you suggest, perhaps it is a deliberately cultivated type of protective coloration designed to draw attention away from those slips even the best of agents, human or otherwise, inevitably make. "Some of these verbal prat-falls are quite humorous, which supports your theory, for humans are notoriously uncritical when laughing. For instance, she doesn't care for a neighbor's home because she says she doesn't like 'overwrought iron.' viewpoint occasionally reveals itself. Ever since my wife told me that the 'washee-pot needs coughing,' I have become uncomfortable in the presence of all pots. I keep wondering if this or that pot is a washee-pot and if it intends to cough. "I will give you three more examples and ask you to think about them. I have tried to reason them out, but I always somehow get the feeling that my mind is going cross-eyed. Here they are: "'It's half of one and six-adozen of the other.' Close questioning has ascertained that this is meant to indicate two equal quantities, but I challenge any (Continued on page #) Announcing Bounty The new satirical magazine treating today's events with humor and taste... Featuring delightful articles by such popular writers as Quentin Reynolds H. Allen Smith Henry Morgan Ilka Chase Bob Cooke Leon Pearson On sale at your newsstand Read it for fun. # c Drop Dead T he critters were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist. One herd of them clustered in a semicircle in front of the ship, i not jittery or belligerent -- just looking at us. And that was strange. Ordinarily, when a space, ship sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week at least for any Here was the perfect world -- accommodating and peaceful -- but how it got that way was less ghastly than how it stayed that way! life that might have seen or heard it to creep out of hiding and sneak a look around. The critters were almost cowsize, but nohow as graceful as a cow. Their bodies were pushed together as if ever blessed one of them had run full-tilt into a wall. And they were just as lumpy as you'd expect from a collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel color -- the kind of color one never finds on any self-respecting animal: violet, pink, orange, chartreuse, to name only a few. The overall effect was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts. And that, by far, was not the worst of it. From their heads and other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of vegetation, so that it appeared each animal was hiding, somewhat ineffectively, behind a skimpy thicket. To compound the situation and make it completely insane, fruits and vegetables -- or what appeared to be fruits and vegetables -- grew from the vegetation. So we stood there, the critters looking at us and us looking back at them, and finally one of them walked forward until it was no more than six feet from us. It stood there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped dead at our feet. The rest of the herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the world as if they had done what they had come to do and now could go about their business. put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with an absentminded motion. "Another whatisit coming up!" he moaned. "Why couldn't it, for once, be something plain and simple?" "It never is," I told him. "Remember that bush out on Hamal V that spent half its life as a kind of glorified tomato and the other half as grade A poison ivy?" "I remember it," Oliver said sadly. Max Weber, our biologist, walked over to the critter, reached' out a cautious foot and prodded it. "Trouble is," he said, "that Hamal tomato was Julian's baby and this one here is mine." "I wouldn't say entirely yours," Oliver retorted. "What do you call that underbrush growing out of it?" I came in fast to head off an argument. I had listened to those two quarreling for the past twelve years, across several hundred light-years and on a couple dozen planets. I couldn't stop it here, I knew, but at least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about. "Cut it out," I said. "It's only a couple of hours till nightfall and we have to get the camp set up." "But this critter," Weber said. "We can't just leave it here." more of them. This one will stay right here and even if it doesn't -- " "But it dropped dead!" "So it was old and feeble." "It wasn't. It was right in the prime of life." "We can talk about it later," said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. "I'm as interested as you two, but what Bob says is right. We have to get the camp set up." "Another thing," I added, looking hard at all of them. "No matter how innocent this place may look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything. No drinking any water. No wandering off alone. No carelessness of any kind." "There's nothing here," said Weber. "Just the herds of critters. Just the endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing." He really didn't mean it. He knew as well as I did the reason for observing planet rules. He only wanted to argue. "All right," I said, "which is it? Do we set up camp or do we spend the night up in the ship?" That did it. '  fore the sun went down and by dusk we were all settled in. Carl Parsons, our ecologist, had the stove together and the supper started before the last tent peg was driven. I dug out my diet kit and mixed up my formula and all of them kidded me about it, the way they always did. It didn't bother me. Their jibes were automatic and I had automatic answers. It was something that had been going on for a long, long time. Maybe it was best that way, better than if they'd disregarded my enforced eating habits. steaks and I had to move away so I couldn't smell them. There's never a time when I wouldn't give my good right arm for a steak or, to tell the truth, any other kind of normal chow. This diet stuff keeps a man alive all right, but that's about the only thing that can be said of it. I know ulcers must sound silly and archaic. Ask any medic and he'll tell you they don't happen any more. But I have a riddled stomach and the diet kit to prove they sometimes do. I guess it's what you might call an occupational ailment. There's a lot of never ending worry playing nursemaid to planet survey gangs. After supper, we went out and dragged the critter in and had a closer look at it. It was even worse to look at close than from a distance. There was no fooling about that vegetation. It was the real McCoy and it was part and parcel of the critter. But it seemed that it only grew out of certain of the color blocks, in the critter's body. We found another thing that practically had Weber frothing at the mouth. One of the color blocks had holes in it -- it looked almost exactly like one of those peg sets that children use as toys. When Weber took out his jackknife and poked into one of the holes, he pried out an insect that looked something like a bee. He couldn't quite believe it, so he did some more probing and in another one of the holes he found another bee. Both of the bees were dead. He and Oliver wanted to start dissection then and there, but the rest of us managed to talk them out of it. We pulled straws to see who would stand first guard and, with my usual luck, I pulled the shortest straw. Actually there wasn't much real reason for standing guard, with the alarm system set to protect the camp, but it was regulation -- there had to be a guard. I got a gun and the others said good night and went to their tents, but I could hear them talking for a long time afterward. No matter how hardened you may get to this survey business, no matter how blase, you hardly ever get much sleep the first night on any planet. the camp table, on which burned a lantern in lieu of the campfire we would have had on any other planet. But here we couldn't have a fire because there wasn't any wood. I sat at one side of the table, with the dead critter lying on the other side of it and I did some worrying, although it wasn't time for me to start worrying yet. I'm an agricultural economist and I don't begin my worrying until at least the first reports are in. But sitting just across the table from where it lay, I couldn't help but do some wondering about that mixed-up critter. I didn't get anywhere except go around in circles and I was sort of glad when Talbott Fullerton, the Double Eye, came out and sat down beside me. Sort of, I said. No one cared too much for Fullerton. I have yet to see the Double Eye I or anybody else ever cared much about. "Too excited to sleep?" I asked him. He nodded vaguely, staring off into the darkness beyond the lantern's light. "Wondering," he said. "Wondering if this could be the planet." "It won't be," I told him. "You're chasing an El Dorado, hunting down a fable." "They found it once before," Fullerton argued stubbornly. "It's all there in the records." "So was the Gilded Man. And the Empire of Prester John. Atlantis and all the rest of it. So was the old Northwest Passage back on ancient Earth. So were the Seven Cities. But nobody ever found any of those places because they weren't there." He sat with the lamplight in his face and he had that wild look in his eyes and his hands were knotting into fists, then straightening out again. "Sutter," he said unhappily, "I don't know why you do this -- this mocking of yours. Somewhere in this universe there is immortality. Somewhere, somehow, it has been accomplished. And the human race must find it. We have the space for it now -- of planets and eventually other galaxies. We don't have to keep making room for new generations, the way we would if we were stuck on a single world or a single solar system. Immortality, I tell you, is the next step for humanity!" "Forget it," I said curtly, but once a Double Eye gets going, you can't shut him up. "Look at this planet," he said. "An almost perfect Earth-type planet. Main-sequence sun. Good soil, good climate, plenty of water -- an ideal place for a colony. How many years, do you think, before Man will settle here?" "A thousand. Five thousand. Maybe more." "That's right. And there are countless other planets like it, planets crying to be settled. But we won't settle them, because we keep dying off. And that's not all of it..." the rest -- the terrible waste of dying -- and I knew every bit of it by heart. Before Fullerton, we'd been saddled by one Double Eye fanatic and, before him, yet another. It was regulation. Every planet-checking team, no matter what its purpose or its destination, was required to carry as supercargo an agent of Immortality Institute. But this kid seemed just a little worse than the usual run of them. It was his first trip out and he was all steamed up with idealism. In all of them, though, burned the same intense dedication to the proposition that Man must live forever and an equally unyielding belief that immortality could and would be found. For had not a lost spaceship found the answer centuries before -- an unnamed spaceship on an unknown planet in a longforgotten year! It was a myth, of course. It had all the hallmarks of one and all the fierce loyalty that a myth can muster. It was kept alive by Imn mortality Institute, operating under a government grant and billions of bequests and gifts from hopeful rich and poor -- all of whom, of course, had died or would die in spite of their generosity. "What are you looking for?" I asked Fullerton, just a little wearily, for I was bored with it. "A plant? An animal? A people?" And he replied, solemn as a judge: "That's something I can't tell you." As if I gave a damn! But I went on needling him. Maybe it was just something to while away my time. That and the fact that I disliked the fellow. Fanatics annoy me. They won't get off your ear. "Would you know it if you found it?" He didn't answer that one, but he turned haunted eyes on me. I cut out the needling. Any more of it and I'd have had him bawling. We sat around a while longer, but we did no talking. He fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth and rolled it around, chewing at it moodily. I would have liked to reach out and slug him, for he chewed toothpicks all the time and it was an irritating habit that set me unreasonably on edge. I guess I was jumpy, too. Finally he spit out the mangled toothpick and slouched off to bed. I sat alone, looking up at the ship, and the lantern light was just bright enough for me to make out the legend lettered on which was enough to identify us anywhere in the Galaxy. the agricultural experimental planet, just as they would have cal research planet, or Capella IX, the university planet, or any of the other special departmental planets. tion and the hundreds of survey teams like us were just a part of it. But we were the spearheads who went out to new worlds, some of them uncharted, some just barely charted, looking for plants and animals that might be developed on the experimental tracts. Not that our team had found a great deal. We had discovered some grasses that did well on one of the Eltanian worlds, but by and large we hadn't done anything that could be called distinguished. Our luck just seemed to run bad -- like that Hamal poison ivy business. We worked as hard as any of the rest of them, but a lot of good that did. Sometimes it was tough to take -- when all the other teams brought in stuff that got them written up and earned them bonuses, while we came creeping in with a few piddling grasses or maybe not a thing at all. It's a tough life and don't let anyone tell you different. Some of the planets turn out to be a fairly rugged business. At times, the boys come back pretty much the worse for wear and there are times when they don't come back at all. But right now it looked as though we'd hit it lucky -- a peaceful planet, good climate, easy terrain, no hostile inhabitants and no dangerous fauna. Weber took his time relieving me at guard, but finally he showed up. I could see he still was goggleeyed about the critter. He walked around it several times, looking it over. "That's the most fantastic case of symbiosis I have ever seen," he said. "If it weren't lying over there. I'd say it was impossible. Usually you associate symbiosis with the lower, more simple forms of life." "You mean that brush growing out of it?" He nodded. "And the bees?" He gagged over the bees. "How are you so sure it's symbiosis?" He almost wrung his hands. "I don't know," he admitted. to the tent I shared with Kemper. The bacteriologist was awake when I came in. "That you. Bob?" "It's me. Everything's all right." "I've been lying here and thinking," he said. "This is a screwy place." "The critters?" "No, not the critters. The planet itself. Never saw one like it. It's positively naked. No trees. No flowers. Nothing. It's just a sea of grass." "Why not?" I asked. "Where does it say you can't find a pasture planet?" "It's too simple," he protested. "Too simplified. Too neat and packaged. Almost as if someone had said let's make a simple planet, let's cut out all the frills, let's skip all the biological experiments and get right down to basics. Just one form of life and the grass for it to eat." "You're way out on a limb," I told him. "How do you know all this? There may be other lifeforms. There may be complexities we can't suspect. Sure, all we've seen are the critters, but maybe that's because there are so many of them." "To hell with you," he said and turned over on his cot. Now there's a guy I liked. We'd been tent partners ever since he'd joined the team better than ten years before and we got along fine. Often I had wished the rest could get along as well. But it was too much to expect. The fighting started right after breakfast, when Oliver and Weber insisted on using the camp table for dissecting. Parsons, who doubled as cook, jumped straight down their throats. Why he did it, I don't know. He knew before he said a word that he was licked, hands down. The same thing had happened many times before and he knew, no matter what he did or said, they would use the table. But he put up a good battle. "You guys go and find some other place to do your butchering! Who wants to eat on a table that's all slopped up?" "But, Carl, where can we do it? We'll use only one end of the table." Which was a laugh, because in half an hour they'd be sprawled all over it. "Spread out a canvas," Parsons snapped back. "You can't dissect on a canvas. You got to have -- " "Another thing. How long do you figure it will take? In a day or two, that critter is going to get ripe." It went on like that for quite a while, but by the time I started up the ladder to get the animals, Oliver and Weber had flung the critter on the table and were at work on it. something not exactly in my line of duty, but over the years I'd taken on the job of getting them unloaded, so they'd be there and waiting when Weber or some of the others needed them to run off a batch of tests. I went down into the compartment where we kept them in their cages. The rats started squeaking at me and the zartyls from Centauri started screeching at me and the punkins from Polaris made an unholy racket, because the punkins are hungry all the time. You just can't give them enough to eat. Turn them loose with food and they'd eat themselves to death. It was quite a job to get them all lugged up to the port and to rig up a sling and lower them to the ground, but I finally finished it without busting a single cage. That was an accomplishment. Usually I smashed a cage or two and some of the animals escaped and then Weber would froth around for days about my carelessness. I had the cages all set out in rows and was puttering with canvas flies to protect them from the weather when Kemper came along and stood watching me. "I have been wandering around," he announced. From the way he said it, I could see he had the wind up. But I didn't ask him, for then he'd never have told me. Y ou had to wait for Kemper to make up his mind to talk. "Peaceful place," I said and if was all of that. It was a bright, clear day and the sun was not too warm. There was a little breeze and you could see a long way off. And it was quiet. Really quiet. There wasn't any noise at all. "It's a lonesome place," said Kemper. "I don't get you," I answered patiently. "Remember what I said last night? About this planet being too simplified?" He stood watching me put up the canvas, as if he might be considering how much more to tell me. I waited. Finally, he blurted it. "Bob, there are no insects!" "What have insects -- " "You know what I mean," he said. "You go out on Earth or any Earthlike planet and lie down in the grass and watch. You'll see the insects. Some of them on the ground and others on the grass. There'll be all kinds of them." "And there aren't any here?" He shook his head. "None that I could see. I wandered around and lay down and looked in a dozen different places. Stands to reason a man should find some insects if he looked all morning. It isn't natural. Bob." and I don't know why it was, but I got a little chilled about there not being any insects. Not that I care a hoot for insects, but as Kemper said, it was unnatural, although you come to expect the so-called unnatural in this planet-checking business. "There are the bees," I said. "What bees?" "The ones that are in the critters. Didn't you see any?" "None," he said. "I didn't get close to any critter herds. Maybe the bees don't travel very far." "Any birds?" "I didn't see a one," he said. "But I was wrong about the flowers. The grass has tiny flowers." "For the bees to work on." Kemper's face went stony. "That's right. Don't you see the pattern of it, the planned -- " "I see it," I told him. He helped me with the canvas and we didn't say much more. When we had it done, we walked into camp. Parsons was cooking lunch and grumbling at Oliver and Weber, but they weren't paying much attention to him. They had the table littered with different parts they'd carved out of the critter and they were looking slightly numb. "No brain," Weber said to us accusingly, as if we might have made off with it when he wasn't looking. "We can't find a brain and there's no nervous system." "It's impossible," declared Oliver. "How can a highly organized, complex animal exist without a brain or nervous system?" "Look at that butcher shop!" Parsons yelled wrathfully from the stove. "You guys will have to eat standing up!" "Butcher shop is right," Weber agreed. "As near as we can figure out, there are at least a dozen different kinds of flesh -- some fish, some fowl, some good red meat. Maybe a little lizard, even." "An all-purpose animal," said Kemper. "Maybe we found something finally." "If it's edible," Oliver added. "If it doesn't poison you. If it doesn't grow hair all over you." "That's up to you," I told him. "I got the cages down and all the little cusses to your heart's content." Weber looked ruefully at the mess on the table. "We did just a rough exploratory job," he explained. "We ought to start another one from scratch. You'll have to get in on that next one, Kemper." Kemper nodded glumly. Weber looked at me. "Think you can get us one?" "Sure," I said. "No trouble." It wasn't. Right after lunch, a lone critter came walking up, as if to visit us. It stopped about six feet from where we sat, gazed at us soulfully, then obligingly dropped dead. Oliver and Weber barely took time out to eat and sleep. They sliced and probed. They couldn't believe half the things they found. They argued. They waved their scalpels in the air to emphasize their anguish. They almost broke down and wept. Kemper filled box after box with slides and sat hunched, half petrified, above his microscope. Parsons and I wandered around while the others worked. He dug up some soil samples and tried to classify the grasses and failed, because there weren't any grasses -- there was just one type of grass. He made notes on the weather and ran an analysis of the air and tried to pull together an ecological report without a lot to go on. I looked for insects and I didn't find any except the bees and I never saw those unless I was near a critter herd. I watched for birds and there were none. I spent two days investigating a creek, lying on my belly and staring down into the water, and there were no signs of life. I hunted up a sugar sack and put a hoop in the mouth of it and spent another two days seining. I didn't catch a thing -- not a fish, not even a crawdad, not a single thing. By that time, I was ready to admit that Kemper had guessed right. Fullerton walked around, too, but we paid no attention to him. All the Double Eyes, every one of them, always were looking for something no one else could see. After a while, you got pretty tired of them. I'd spent twenty years getting tired of them. The last day I went seining, Fullerton stumbled onto me late in the afternoon. He stood up on the bank and watched me working in a pool. When I looked up, I had the feeling he'd been watching me for quite a little while. "There's nothing there," he said. The way he said it, he made it sound as if he'd known all along there was nothing there and that I was a fool for looking. But that wasn't the only reason I got sore. Sticking out of his face, instead of the usual toothpick, was a stem of grass and he was rolling it around in his lips and chewing it the way he chewed the toothpicks. "Spit out that grass!" I shouted at him. "You fool, spit it out!" TT IS eyes grew startled and he spit out the grass. "It's hard to remember," he mumbled. "You see, it's my first trip out and -- " "It could be your last one, too," I told him brutally. "Ask Weber sometime, when you have a moment, what happened to the guy who pulled a leaf and chewed it. Absent-minded, sure. Habit, certainly. He was just as dead as if he'd committed suicide." Fullerton stiffened up. "I'll keep it in mind," he said. I stood there, looking up at him, feeling a little sorry that I'd been so tough with him. But I had to be. There were so many absent-minded, well-intentioned ways a man could kill himself. "You find anything?" I asked. "I've been watching the critters," he said. "There was something funny that I couldn't quite make out at first..." "I can list you a hundred funny things." "That's not what I mean, Sutter. Not the patchwork color or the bushes growing out of them. There was something else. I finally got it figured out. There aren't any young." Fullerton was right, of course. I realized it now, after he had told me. There weren't any calves or whatever you might call them. All we'd seen were adults. And yet that didn't necessarily mean there weren't any calves. It just meant we hadn't seen them. And the same, I knew, applied as well to insects, birds and fish. They all might be on the planet, but we just hadn't managed to find them yet. And then, belatedly, I got it -- the inference, the hope, the halfcrazy fantasy behind this thing that Fullerton had found, or imagined he'd found. "You're downright loopy," I said flatly. He stared back at me and his eyes were shining like a kid's at Christmas. He said: "It had to happen sometime, Sutter, somewhere." I climbed up the bank and stood beside him. I looked at the net I still held in my hands and threw it back into the creek and watched it sink. "Be sensible," I warned him. "You have no evidence. Immortality wouldn't work that way. It couldn't. That way, it would be nothing but a dead end. Don't mention it to anyone. They'd ride you without mercy all the way back home." time on him. He stared back at me stubbornly, but still with that awful light of hope and triumph on his face. "I'll keep my mouth shut," I told him curtly. "I won't say a word." "Thanks, Sutter," he answered. "I appreciate it a lot." I knew from the way he said it that he could murder me with gusto. We trudged back to camp. The camp was all slicked up. The dissecting mess had been cleared away and the table had been scrubbed so hard that it gleamed. Parsons was cooking supper and singing one of his obscene ditties. The other three sat around in their camp chairs and they had broken out some liquor and were human once again. "All buttoned up?" I asked, but Oliver shook his head. They poured a drink for Fullerton and he accepted it, a bit ungraciously, but he did take it. That was some improvement on the usual Double Eye. They didn't offer me any. They knew I couldn't drink it. "What have we got?" I asked. "It could be something good," said Oliver. "It's a walking menu. It's an all-purpose animal, for sure. It lays eggs, gives milk, makes honey. It has six different kinds of red meat, two of fowl, one of fish and a couple of others we can't identify." "Lays eggs," I said. "Gives milk. Then it reproduces." "Certainly," said Weber. "What did you think?" "There aren't any young." Weber grunted. "Could be they have nursery areas. Certain places instinctively set aside in which to rear their young." "Or they might have instinctive birth control," suggested Oliver. "That would fit in with the perfectly balanced ecology Kemper talks about." Weber snorted. "Ridiculous!" "Not so ridiculous," Kemper retorted. "Not half so ridiculous as some other things we found. Not one-tenth as ridiculous as no brain or nervous system. Not any more ridiculous than my bacteria." "Your bacteria!" Weber said. He drank down half a glass of liquor in a single gulp to make his disdain emphatic. "The critters swarm with them," Kemper went on. "You find them everywhere throughout the entire animal. Not just in the bloodstream, not in restricted areas, but in the entire organism. And all of them the same. Normally it takes a hundred different kinds of bacteria to make a metabolism work, but here there's only one. And that one, by definition, must be general purpose -- it must do all the work that the hundred other species do." He grinned at Weber. "I wouldn't doubt but right there are your brains and nervous systems -- the bacteria doubling in brass for both systems." stove and stood with his fists planted on his hips, a steak fork grasped in one hand and sticking out at a tangent from his body. "If you ask me," he announced, "there ain't no such animal. The critters are all wrong. They can't be made that way." "But they are," said Kemper. "It doesn't make sense! One kind of life. One kind of grass for it to eat. I'll bet that if we could make a census, we'd find the critter population is at exact capacity -- just so many of them to the acre, figured down precisely to the last mouthful of grass. Just enough for them to eat and no more. Just enough so the grass won't be overgrazed. Or undergrazed, for that matter." "What's wrong with that?" I asked, just to needle him. I thought for a minute he'd take the steak fork to me. "What's wrong with it?" he thundered. "Nature's never static, never standing still. But here it's standing still. Where's the competition? Where's the evolution?" "That's not the point," said Kemper quietly. "The fact is that that's the way it is. The point is why? How did it happen? How was it planned? Why was it planned?" "Nothing's planned," Weber told him sourly. "You know better than to talk like that." Parsons went back to his cooking. Fullerton had wandered off somewhere. Maybe he was discouraged from hearing about the eggs and milk. For a time, the four of us just sat. Finally Weber said: "The first night we were here, I came out to relieve Bob at guard and I said to him... He looked at me. "You remember, Bob?" "Sure. You said symbiosis." "And now?" asked Kemper. "I don't know. It simply couldn't happen. But if I did -- if it could -- this critter would be the most beautifully logical example of symbiosis you could dream up. Symbiosis carried to its logical conclusion. Like, long ago, all the life-forms said let's quit this feuding, let's get together, let's cooperate. All the plants and animals and fish and bacteria got together -- " "It's far-fetched, of course," said Kemper. "But, by and large, it's not anything unheard of, merely carried further, that's all. Symbiosis is a recognized way of life and there's nothing -- " Parsons let out a bellow for them to come and get it, and I went to my tent and broke out my diet kit and mixed up a mess of goo. It was a relief to eat in private, without the others making cracks about the stuff I had to choke down. ing notes on the small wooden crate I'd set up for a desk. I thumbed through them while I ate. They were fairlysketchy and sometimes hard to read, being smeared with blood and other gook from the dissecting table. But I was used to that. I worked with notes like that all the blessed time. So I was able to decipher them. The whole picture wasn't there, of course, but there was enough to bear out what they'd told me and a good deal more as well. For examples, the color squares that gave the critters their crazyquiltish look were separate kinds of meat or fish or fowl or unknown food, whatever it might be. Almost as if each square was the presentday survivor of each ancient symbiont -- if, in fact, there was any basis to this talk of symbiosis. The egg-laying apparatus was described in some biologic detail, but there seemed to be no evidence of recent egg production. The same was true of the lactation system. There were, the notes said in Oliver's crabbed writing, five kinds of fruit and three kinds of vegetables to be derived from the plants growing from the critters. I shoved the notes to one side and sat back on my chair, gloating just a little. Here was diversified farming with a vengeance! You had meat and dairy herds, fish pond, aviary, poultry yard, orchard and garden rolled into one, all in the body of a single animal that was a complete farm in itself! I went through the notes hurriedly again and found what I was looking for. The food product seemed high in relation to the gross weight pf the animal. Very little would be lost in dressing out. That is the kind of thing an ag economist has to consider. But that isn't all of it, by any means. What if a man couldn't eat the critter? Suppose the critters couldn't be moved off the planet because they died if you took them from their range? I recalled how they'd just walked up and died; that in itself was another headache to be filed for future worry. What if they could only eat the grass that grew on this one planet? And if so, could the grass be grown elsewhere? What kind of tolerance would the critter show to different kinds of climate? What was the rate of reproduction? If it was slow, as was indicated, could it be stepped up? What was the rate of growth? I got up and walked out of the tent and stood fjor a while, outside. The little breeze that had been blowing had died down at sunset and the place was quiet. Quiet because there was nothing but the critters to make any noise and we had yet to hear them make a single sound. The stars blazed overhead and there were so many of them that they lighted up the countryside as if there were a moon. I walked over to where the rest of the men were sitting. "It looks like we'll be here for a while," I said. "Tomorrow we might as well get the ship unloaded." ' the silence I could sense the half-hidden satisfaction and the triumph. At last we'd hit the jackpot! We'd be going home with something that would make those other teams look pallid. We'd be the ones who got the notices and bonuses. Oliver finally broke the silence. "Some of our animals aren't in good shape. I went down this afternoon to have a look at them. A couple of the pigs and several of the rats." He looked at me accusingly. #T I flared up at him. "Don't look at me! I'm not their keeper. I just take care of them until you're ready to use them." Kemper butted in to head off an argument. "Before we do any feeding, we'll need another critter." "I'll lay you a bet," said Weber. Kemper didn't take him up. It was just as well he didn't, for a critter came in, right after breakfast, and died with a savoir iaire that was positively marvelous. They went to work on it immediately. Parsons and I started unloading the supplies. We put in a busy day. We moved all the food except the emergency rations we left in the ship. We slung down a refrigerating unit Weber had been yelling for, to keep the critter products fresh. We unloaded a lot of equipment and some silly odds and ends that I knew we'd have no use for, but that some of the others wanted broken out. We put up tents and we lugged and pushed and hauled all day. Late in the afternoon, we had it all stacked up and under canvas and were completely bushed. Kemper went back to his bacteria. Weber spent hours with the animals. Oliver dug up a bunch of grass and gave the grass the works. Parsons went out on field trips, mumbling and fretting. Of all of us. Parsons had the job that was most infuriating. Ordinarily the ecology of even the simplest of planets is a complicated business and there's a lot of work to do. But here was almost nothing. There was no competition for survival. There was no dog eat dog. There were just critters cropping grass. I started to pull my report together, knowing that it would have to be revised and rewritten again and again. But I was anxious to get going. I fairly itched to see the pieces fall together -- although I knew from the very start some of them wouldn't fit. They almost never do. Things went well. Too well, it sometimes seemed to me. There were incidents, of course, like when the punkins somehow chewed their way out of their cage and disappeared. Weber was almost beside himself. "They'll come back," said Kemper. "With that appetite of theirs, they won't stay away for long." A ND he was right about that part of it. The punkins were the hungriest creatures in the Galaxy. You could never feed them enough to satisfy them. And they'd eat anything. It made no difference to them, just so there was a lot of it. And it was that very factor in their metabolism that made them invaluable as research animals. The other animals thrived on the critter diet. The carnivorous ones ate the critter-meat and the vegetarians chomped on critterfruit and critter-vegetables. They all grew sleek and sassy. They seemed in better health than the control animals, which continued their regular diet. Even the pigs and rats that had been sick got well again and as fat and happy as any of the others. Kemper told us, "This critter stuff is more than just a food. It's a medicine. I can see the signs: 'Eat Critter and Keep Well!'" Weber grunted at him. He was never one for joking and I think he was a worried man. A thorough man, he'd found too many things that violated all the tenets he'd accepted as the truth. No brain or nervous system. The ability to die at will. The lingering hint of wholesale symbiosis. And the bacteria. The bacteria, I think, must have seemed to him the worst of all. There was, it now appeared, only one type involved. Kemper had hunted frantically and had discovered no others. Oliver found it in the grass. Parsons found it in the soil and water. The air, strangely enough, seemed to be free of it. But Weber wasn't the only one who worried. Kemper worried. too. He unloaded most of it just before our bedtime, sitting on the edge of his cot and trying to talk the worry out of himself while I worked on my reports. And he'd picked the craziest point imaginable to pin his worry on. can explain it all," he said, "if you are only willing to concede on certain points. You can explain the critters if biotic arrangement carried out on a planetary basis. You can believe in the utter simplicity of the ecolthat, given space and time enough, anything can happen within the bounds of logic. "You can visualize how the bacteria might take the place of brains and nervous systems if you're ready to say this is a bacterial world and not a critter world. And you can even envision the bacteria -- all of them, every single one of them -- as forming one gigantic linked intelligence. And if you accept that theory, then the voluntary deaths become understandable, because there's no 'actual death involved -- it's just like you or me trimming off a hangnail. And if this is true, then Fullerton has found immortality, although it's not the kind he was looking for and it won't do him or us a single bit of good. "But the thing that worries me," he went on, his face all knotted up with worry, "is the seeming lack of anything resembling a defense mechanism. Even assuming that the critters are no more than fronting for a bacterial world, the mechanism should be there as a simple matter of precaution. Every living thing we know of has some sort of way to defend itself or to escape potential enemies. It either fights or runs and hides to preserve its life." He was right, of course. Not only did the critters have no defense, they even saved one the trouble of going out to kill them. "Maybe we are wrong," Kemper concluded. "Maybe life, after all, is not as valuable as we think it is. Maybe it's not a thing to cling to. Maybe it's not worth fighting for. Maybe the critters, in their dying, are closer to the truth than we." It would go on like that, night after night, with Kemper talking around in circles and never getting anywhere. I think most of the time he wasn't talking to me, but talking to himself, trying by the very process of putting it in words to work out some final answer. And long after we had turned out the lights and gone to bed, I'd lie on my cot and think about all that Kemper said and I thought in circles, too. I wondered why all the critters that came in and died were in the prime of life. Was the dying a privilege that was accorded only to the fit? Or were all the critters in the prime of life? Was there really some cause to believe they might be immortal? I asked a lot of questions, but there weren't any answers. We continued with our work. Weber killed some of his animals and examined them and there were no signs of ill effect from the critter diet. There were traces of critter bacteria in their blood, but no sickness, reaction or antibody formation. Kemper kept on with his bacterial work. Oliver started a whole series of experiments with the grass. Parsons just gave up. The punkins didn't come back and Parsons and Fullerton went out and hunted for them, but without success. the pieces fell together better than I had hoped they would. It began to look as though we had the situation well nailed down. We all were feeling pretty good. We could almost taste that bonus. But I think that, in the back of our minds, all of us were wondering if we could get away scot free. I know I had mental fingers crossed. It just didn't seem quite possible that something wouldn't happen. And, of course, it did. We were sitting around after supper, with the lantern lighted, when we heard the sound. I realized afterward that we had been hearing it for some time before we paid attention to it. It started so soft and so far away that it crept upon us without alarming us. At first, it sounded like a sighing, as if a gentle wind were blowing through a little tree, and then it changed into a rumble, but a far-off rumble that had no menace in it. I was just getting ready to say something about thunder and wondering if our stretch of weather was about to break when Kemper jumped up and yelled. I don't know what he yelled. Maybe it wasn't a word at all. But the way he yelled brought us to our feet and sent us at a dead run for the safety of the ship. Even before we got there, in the few seconds it took to reach the ladder, the character of the sound had changed and there was no mistaking what it was -- the drumming of hoofs heading straight for camp. They were almost on top of us when we reached the ladder and there wasn't time or room for all of use to use it. I was the last in line and I saw I'd never make it and a dozen possible escape plans flickered through my mind. But I knew they wouldn't work fast enough. Then I saw the rope, hanging where I'd left it after the unloading job, and I made a jump for it. I'm no ropeclimbing expert, but I shinnied up it with plenty of speed. And right behind me came Weber, who was no rope-climber, either, but who was doing rather well. I thought of how lucky it had been that I hadn't found the time to take down the rig and how Weber had ridden me unmercifully about not doing it. I wanted to shout down and point it out to him, but I didn't have the breath. We reached the port and tumbled into it. Below us, the stampeding critters went grinding through the camp. There seemed the terrifying things about it was how silently they ran. They made no outcry of any kind; all you could hear was the sound of their hoofs pounding on the ground. It seemed almost as if they ran in some blind fury that was too deep for outcry. as one could see on the starlit plains, but the spaceship divided them and they flowed to either side of it and then flowed back again, and beyond the spaceship there was a little sector that they never touched. I thought how we could have been safe staying on the ground and huddling in that sector, but that's one of the things a man never can foresee. The stampede lasted for almost an hour. When it was all over, we came down and surveyed the damage. The animals in their cages, lined up between the ship and the camp, were safe. All but one of the sleeping tents were standing. The lantern still burned brightly on the table. But everything else was gone. Our food supply was trampled in the ground. Much of the equipment was lost and wrecked. On either side of the camp, the ground was churned up like a half-plowed field. The whole thing was a mess. It looked as if we were licked. The tent Kemper and I used for sleeping still stood, so our notes were safe. The animals were all right. But that was all we had -- the notes and animals. "I need three more weeks," said Weber. "Give me just three weeks to complete the tests." "We haven't got three weeks," I answered. "All our food is gone." "The emergency rations in the ship?" "That's for going home." "We can go a little hungry." He glared at us -- at each of us in turn -- challenging us to do a little starving. "I can go three weeks," he said, "without any food at all." "We could eat critter," suggested Parsons. "We could take a chance." Weber shook his head. "Not yet. In three weeks, when the tests are finished, then maybe we will know. Maybe we won't need those rations for going home. Maybe we can stock up on critters and eat our heads off all the way to Caph." I looked around at the rest of them, but I knew, before I looked, the answer I would get. "All right," I said. "We'll try it." "It's all right for you," Fullerton retorted hastily. "You have your diet kit." Parsons reached out and grabbed him and shook him so hard that he went cross-eyed. "We don't talk like that about those diet kits." Then Parsons let him go.  the stampede had wrecked our warning system, but none of us got much sleep. We were too upset. Personally, I did some worrying about why the critters had stampeded. There was nothing on the planet that could scare them. There were no other animals. There was no thunder or lightning -- as a matter of fact, it appeared that the planet might have no boisterous weather ever. And there seemed to be nothing in the critter makeup, from our observation of them, that would set them off emotionally. But there must be a reason and a purpose, I told myself. And there must be, too, in their dropping dead for us. But was the purpose intelligence or instinct? That was what bothered me most. It kept me awake all night long. At daybreak, a critter walked in and died for us happily. We went without our breakfast and, when noon came, no one said anything about lunch, so we skipped that, too. Late in the afternoon, I climbed the ladder to get some food for supper. There wasn't any. Instead, I found five of the fattest punkins you ever laid your eyes on. They had chewed holes through the packing boxes and the food was cleaned out. The sacks were limp and empty. They'd even managed to get the lid off the coffee can somehow and had eaten every bean. The five of them sat contentedly in a corner, blinking smugly at me. They didn't make a racket, as they usually did. Maybe they knew they were in the wrong or maybe they were just too full. For once, perhaps, they'd gotten all they could eat. I just stood there and looked at them and I knew how they'd gotten on the ship. I blamed myself, not them. If only I'd found the time to take down the unloading rig, they'd never gotten in. But then I remembered how that dangling rope had saved my life and Weber's and I couldn't decide whether I'd done right or wrong. I went over to the corner and picked the punkins up. I stuffed three of them in my pockets and carried the other two. I climbed down from the ship and walked up to camp. I put the punkins on the table. "Here they are," I said. "They were in the ship. That's why we couldn't find them. They climbed up the rope." Weber took one look at them. "They look well fed. Did they leave anything?" "Not a scrap. They cleaned us out entirely." The punkins were quite happy. It was apparent they were glad to be back with us again. After all, they'd eaten everything in reach and there was no further reason for their staying in the ship. and walked over to the critter that had died that morning. "Tie on your bibs," he said. He carved out big steaks and threw them on the table and then he lit his stove. I retreated to my tent as soon as he started cooking, for never in my life have I smelled anything as good as those critter steaks. I broke out the kit and mixed me up some goo and sat there eating it, feeling sorry for myself. Kemper came in after a while and sat down on his cot. "Do you want to hear?" he asked me. "Go ahead," I invited him resignedly. "It's wonderful. It's got everything you've ever eaten backed clear off the table. We had three different kinds of red meat and a slab of fish and something that resembled lobster, only better. And there's one kind of fruit growing out of that bush in the middle of the back..." "And tomorrow you drop dead." "I don't think so," Kemper said. "The animals have been thriving on it. There's nothing wrong with them." It seemed that Kemper was right. Between the animals and men, it took a critter a day. The critters didn't seem to mind. They were johnny-on-the-spot. They walked in promptly, one at a time, and keeled over every morning. The way the men and animals ate was positively indecent. Parsons cooked great platters of different kinds of meat and fish and fowl and what-not. He prepared huge bowls of vegetables. He heaped other bowls with fruit. He racked up combs of honey and the men licked the platters clean. They sat around with belts unloosened and patted their bulging bellies and were disgustingly contented. I waited for them to break out in a rash or to start turning green with purple spots or grow scales or something of the sort. But nothing happened. They thrived, just as the animals were thriving. They felt better than they ever had. Then, one morning, Fullerton turned up sick. He lay on his cot flushed with fever. It looked like Centaurian virus, although we'd been inoculated against that. In fact, we'd been inoculated and immunized against almost everything. Each time, before we blasted off on another survey, they jabbed us full of booster shots. I didn't think much of it. I was fairly well convinced, for a time at least, that all that was wrong with him was overeating. about medicine, but not much, got the medicine chest out of the ship and pumped Fullerton full of some new antibiotic that came highly recommended for almost everything. We went on with our work, expecting he'd be on his feet in a day or two. But he wasn't. If anything, he got worse. Oliver went through the medicine chest, reading all the labels carefully, but didn't find anything that seemed to be the proper medication. He read the first-aid booklet. It didn't tell him anything except how to set broken legs or apply artificial respiration and simple things like that. Kemper had been doing a lot of worrying, so he had Oliver take a sample of Fullerton's blood and then prepared a slide. When he looked at the blood through the microscope, he found that it swarmed with bacteria from the critters. Oliver took some more blood samples and Kemper prepared more slides, just to doublecheck, and there was no doubt about it. By this time, all of us were standing around the table watching Kemper and waiting for the verdict. I know the same thing must have been in the mind of each of us. It was Oliver who put it into words. "Who is next?" he asked. Parsons stepped up and Oliver took the sample. We waited anxiously. Finally Kemper straightened "You have them, too," he said to Parsons. "Not as high a count as Fullerton." Man after man stepped up. All of us had the bacteria, but in my case the count was low. "It's the critter," Parsons said. "Bob hasn't been eating any." "But cooking kills -- " Oliver started to say. "You can't be sure. These bacteria would have to be highly adaptable. They do the work of thousands of other micro-organisms. They're a sort of handyman," a jack-of-all-trades. They can acclimatize. They can meet new situations. They haven't weakened the strain by becoming specialized." "Besides," said Parsons, "we don't cook all of it. We don't cook the fruit and most of you guys raise hell if a steak is more than singed." "What I can't figure out is why it should be Fullerton," Weber said. "Why should his count be higher? He started on the critter the same time as the rest of us." I remembered that day down by the creek. "He got a head start on the rest of you," I explained. "He ran out of toothpicks and took to chewing grass stems. I caught him at it." forting. It meant that in another week or two, all of them would have as high a count as Fullerton. But there was no sense not telling them. It would have been criminal not to. There was no place for wishful thinking in a situation like that. "We can't stop eating critter," said Weber. "It's all the food we have. There's nothing we can do." "I have a hunch," Kemper replied, "it's too late anyhow." "If we started home right now," I said, "there's my diet kit..." They didn't let me finish making my offer. They slapped me on the back and pounded one another and laughed like mad. It wasn't that funny. They just needed something they could laugh at. "It wouldn't do any good," said Kemper. "We've already had it. Anyhow, your diet kit wouldn't last us all the way back home." "We could have a try at it," I argued. "It may be just a transitory thing," Parsons said. "Just a bit of fever. A little upset from a change of diet." We all hoped that, of course. But Fullerton got no better. Weber took blood samples of the animals and they had a bacterial count almost as high as Fullerton's -- much higher than when he'd taken it before. Weber blamed himself. "I should have kept closer check. I should have taken tests every day or so." "What difference would it have made?" demande'd Parsons. "Even if you had, even if you'd found a lot of bacteria in the blood, we'd still have eaten critter. There was no other choice." "Maybe it's not the bacteria," said Oliver. "We may be jumping at conclusions. It may be something else that Fullerton picked up." Weber brightened up a bit. "That's right. The animals still seem to be okay." They were bright and chipper, in the best of health. We waited. Fullerton got neither worse nor better. Then, one night, he disappeared. Oliver, who had been sitting with him, had dozed off for a moment. Parsons, on guard, had heard nothing. We hunted for him for three full days. He couldn't have gone far, we figured. He had wandered off in a delirium and he didn't have the strength to cover any distance. But we didn't find him. however. It was a ball of some strange substance, white and fresh-appearing. It was about four feet in diameter. It lay at the bottom of a little gully, hidden out of sight, as if someone or something might have brought it there and hidden it away. We did some cautious poking at it and we rolled it back and forth a little and wondered what it was, but we were hunting Fullerton and we didn't have the time to do much investigating. Later on, we agreed, we would come back and get it and find out what it was. Then the animals came down with the fever, one after another -- all except the controls, which had been eating regular food until the stampede had destroyed the supply. After that, of course, all of them ate critter. By the end of two days, most of the animals were down. Weber worked with them, scarcely taking time to rest. We all helped as best we could. Blood samples showed a greater concentration of bacteria. Weber started a dissection, but never finished it. Once he got the animal open, he took a quick look at it and scraped the whole thing off the table into a pail. I saw him, but I don't think any of the others did. We were pretty busy. I asked him about it later in the day, when we were alone for a moment. He briskly brushed me off. I went to bed early that night because I had the second guard. It seemed I had no more than shut my eyes when I was brought upright by a racket that raised goose pimples on every inch of me. I tumbled out of bed and scrabbled around to find my shoes and get them on. By that time, Kemper had dashed out of the tent. There was trouble with the animals. They were fighting to break out, chewing the bars of their cages and throwing themselves against them in a blind and terrible frenzy. And all the time they were squealing and screaming. To listen to them set your teeth on edge. Weber dashed around with a hypodermic. After what seemed hours, we had them full of sedative. A few of them broke loose and got away, but the rest were sleeping peacefully. I got a gun and took over guard duty while the other men went back to bed. cages, walking back and forth because I was too tense to do much sitting down. It seemed to me that between the animals' frenzy to escape and Fullerton's disappearance, there was a parallel that was too similar for comfort. I tried to review all that had happened on the planet and I got bogged down time after time as I tried to make the picture dovetail. The trail of thought I followed kept turning back to Kemper's worry about the critters' lack of a defense mechanism. Maybe, I told myself, they had a defense mechanism, after all -- the slickest, smoothest, trickiest one Man ever had encountered. As soon as the camp awoke, I went to our tent to stretch out for a moment, perhaps to catch a catnap. Worn out, I slept for hours. Kemper woke me. "Get up. Bob!" he said. "For the love of God, get up!" It was late afternoon and the last rays of the sun were streaming through the tent flap. Kemper's face was haggard. It was as if he'd suddenly grown old since I'd seen him less than twelve hours before. "They're encysting," he gasped. "They're turning into cocoons or chrysalises or..." I sat up quickly. "That one we found out there in the field!" He nodded. "Fullerton?" I asked. "We'll go out and see, all five of us, leaving the camp and animals alone." We had some trouble finding It because the land was so flat and featureless that there were no landmarks. But finally we located it, just as dusk was setting in. The ball had split in two -- not in a clean break, in a jagged one. It looked like an egg after a chicken has been hatched. And the halves lay there in the j.alhering darkness, in the silence imderneath the sudden glitter of (he stars -- a last farewell and a new beginning and a terrible alien liui. I tried to say something, but my brain was so numb that I was not entirely sure just what I Mbould say. Anyhow, the words died in the dryness of my mouth and the thickness of my tongue before I could get them out. b'or it was not only the two halves of the coGoon -- it was Ibe murks within that hollow, the impiession of what had been (here, blurred and distorted by I lie marks of what it had become. We fled back to camp. ' ver, got the lantern lighted. We stood uneasily, unable to look at one another, knowing that the time was past for all dissembling, that there was no use of glossing over or denying what we'd seen in the dim light in the gully. "Bob is the only one who has a chance," Kemper finally said, speaking more concisely than seemed possible. "I think he should leave right now. Someone must get back to Caph. Someone has to tell them." He looked across the circle of lantern light at me. "Well," he said sharply, "get going! What's the matter with you?" "You were right," I said, not much more than whispering. "Remember how you wondered about a defense mechanism?" "They have it," Weber agreed. "The best you can find. There's no beating them. They don't fight you. They absorb you. They make you into them. No wonder there are just the critters here. No wonder the planet's ecology is simple. They have you pegged and measured from the instant you set foot on the planet. Take one drink of water. Chew a single grass stem. Take one bite of critter. Do any one of these things and they have you cold." Oliver came out of the dark and walked acrossthe lanternlighted circle. He stopped in front of me. "Here are your diet kit and notes," he said. "But I can't run out on you!" "Forget us!" Parsons barked at me. "We aren't human any more. In a few more days..." He grabbed the lantern and strode down the cages and held the lantern high, so that we could see. "Look," he said. There were no animals. There were just the cocoons and the little critters and the cocoons that had split in half. I saw Kemper looking at me and there was, of all things, compassion on his face. "You don't want to stay," he told me. "If you do, in a day or two, a critter will come in and drop dead for you. And you'll go crazy all the way back home -- wondering which one of us it was." They all turned away from me and suddenly it seemed I was all alone. Weber had found an axe somewhere and he started walking down the row of cages, knocking off the bars to let the little critters out. I walked slowly over to the ship and stood at the foot of the ladder, holding the notes and the diet kit tight against my chest. When I got there, I turned around and looked back at them and it seemed I couldn't leave them. I thought of all we'd been through together and when I tried to think of specific things, the only thing I could think about was how they always kidded me about the diet kit. And I thought of the times I had to leave and go off somewhere and eat alone so that I couldn't smell the food. I thought of almost ten years of eating that damn goo and that I could never eat like a normal human because of my ulcerated stomach. Maybe they were the lucky ones, I told myself. If a man got turned into a critter, he'd probably come out with a whole stomach and never have to worry about how much or what he ate. The critters never ate anything except the grass, but maybe, I thought, that grass tasted just as good to them as a steak or a pumpkin pie would taste to me. So I stood there for a while and I thought about it. Then I took the diet kit and flung it out into the darkness as far as I could throw it and I dropped the notes to the ground. I walked back into the camp and the first man I saw was Parsons. "What have you got for supper?" I asked him. I want the Galaxy to know... I did it, nobody else! And what was my reward? Just to get... when I was a sub-clerk in the Special Problems Section on one hot morning (all mornings a letter at me. "Here's a special problem to end all special problems," he said. It was the expensively embossed stationery of the Galactic Commission, with an added fancy ornament that the Committee on Intercultural Relations had adopted. The Committee was reinformation concerning musical culture in its sector. "Let's see," I said. "There are the Golarifths on Willac. They rub their tentacles together during mating season. Humans can't hear it, but it's said to produce some pretty lively music. It that what they had in mind?" "I wouldn't know," said the Chief. "And the Arocambi on Mandus. Their noises faintly resemble the backfire of a commuter plane. How would that do?" "It's your problem," he said. and he walked away laughing. As a problem, it didn't amount to much. I'd had some really tough ones to handle. There was the time the Gistobs from Vernith were sending a trade commission to forward blueprints of a typical Gistob dwelling so a model community could be built for them to use. As if any idiot didn't know that no self-respecting Gistob would ever hang his hat anywhere but in a nice, creamy mudhole. Then there was the time the to double their fortunes by palming off their three-hundred-yearold films to the outlying planets. Some kind of primitive war picture was shown on Lamruth and the natives were enthralled. They didn't understand the picture, but they were captivated by the air raid sirens and they decided they wanted one. They bombarded threats until the thing was tossed into the lap of Special Problems. I got tired of the whole business after a year or so and I told Engineering to make them one. Engineering went overboard on the project, as Engineering usually does. They delivered an amazing noisemaker that not only had a siren, but other gadgets that chirped and squeaked and honked and hissed. The thing was installed in the capital city of Lamruth and, ever since, the natives have gathered from miles around once a week to hear the thing cut loose. And then there was the problem of the natives on Emruck. a tourist attraction because of its miniature active volcanoes and its moving rock formations. But the natives are humans and they positively refused to wear clothing. The Galactic Commission was highly embarrassed by the situation and Special Problems was put to work on it. It took some doing, but eventually we got the natives dressed. The Galactic Commission wasn't happy about that, either. As soon as the natives started wearing clothing, the tourist trade practically dropped to zero. And there was the time -- but all this doesn't have anything to do with my invention. The request for information on musical Culture didn't faze me. In fact, I had a form letter for just such emergencies and I put it to work. "The musical culture of this sector," I wrote, "is extremely complex and virtually impossible to describe. No data has been accumulated because no one atsary specialized knowledge and equipment for such a project." I sent the letter off and forgot about it. Some ten months later, the Chief walked in with a shriveled, bewiskered specimen I certainly would have taken for a Nincolm if he hadn't been wearing clothing. "This," said the Chief, "is Professor Wolfstammer." "Professor Otto Wolfstammer," the Professor said. "The Professor is a musicologist," said the Chief. "A comparative musicologist," the Professor said. "He has been sent out by the Galactic Commission to study music in this sector," said the Chief. "To study musical culture in this sector," the Professor said. "Do you know what a comparative musicologist is?" asked the Chief. I'd had a hard morning and my reflexes were on the slow side. "No," I confessed. "The Professor will be glad to tell you," the Chief said, and he walked away laughing. The Professor was more than glad to tell me. He dragged in a few crates of apparatus and lectured to me for two hours. When he had finished, I still didn't know what a comparative musicologist might be, but I had a very good idea about what should be done with the Professor. was leaving that evening. I put the Professor and his equipment on board. He went quietly, if not eagerly, because I had given him a stirring description of the unusual vocal music to be found among the natives there. I want it understood that there was neither malice nor ignorance behind my sending him to Himard. Of course I knew that the natives on Himard were tone deaf. I thought that the Professor would discover that for himself in something under twenty-four hours. But even if he did, it would be a month before he could get that month to get over his lecture on comparative musicology. I overrated the Professor. He was gone for two months, and when he came back, he was a hospital case. He never did find out that the natives were tone deaf. But he bothered them so persistently and was so determined to make them sing into his recording machine that they began to think he was ridiculing their musical inadequacy. People can be sensitive about a deficiency when an Earthling in long whiskers keeps making an issue of it. They nearly killed the Professor. I thought it might cost me my job, but he never filed a complaint. He still doesn't know those natives were tone deaf. He thought they were just unusually belligerent. He came to see me the day he got out of the hospital. "I'm very sorry to bother you again," he apologized. "Don't mention it," I said. "How did you enjoy the music on Himard?" "Wonderful! Really, it was marvelous. Most unusual, too. But I'm afraid it is not exactly suitable for my purposes. I wonder if you would suggest -- " "Another planet?" "Yes, if you would be so kind. If possible, one where the inhabitants are a bit more peaceful." I looked at the work piled on my desk and thought about the time it would take to go through the files looking for accidental references to music. I didn't even know that there were any. I couldn't recall ever having seen a single one. Then I had an inspiration. I remembered the siren I'd had built for the natives of Lamruth. "This might interest you," I said. "On Lamruth, there is an open-air concert once a week. The music is produced by some mysterious instruments which are carefully guarded. The concerts are so popular that natives walk miles to hear them." #' HE Professor's eyes sparkled. It may have been my imagination, but I think he drooled a little, too. "Amazing," he said. "Such a level of musical development on these outlying planets has never been suspected." "You'll find the music unique," I promised him. "But I'll warn you about one thing -- don't attempt to see the musical instruments or ask questions about them. The natives might react violently." "I shall proceed cautiously," he said. He still wore some bandages from his Himard adventure. A week later, the Professor left for Lamruth. I never saw him again, but I heard some pretty funny reports about what he did there. He was astonished by the music of Lamruth. He observed, listened and recorded. He analyzed and synthesized. Then he returned to Earth and wrote a book, and the Galactic Commission, with Its usual disregard for the value of the taxpayers' money, published it. I've never seen the book. Few people have, but I understand that it contains several hundred pages of fine print, many sheets of music, a long series of mathematical calculations concerning the Lamruth musical system, and photographs of the enraptured natives listening to my synthetic air raid siren. It winds up with an essay on the sociological implications of music on Lamruth. What happened next is too fantastic to believe, but I'll remind you that these events are documented in the Galactic Commission Scientific Studies, Series #, Volume #. A librarian in an obscure library on Mars noticed the pages of calculations in the Professor's book and classified the book as mathematics. It collected dust in that section of the library for two years. Then a passing mathematician accidently knocked it off the shelf. He picked it up to see what had hit him and noticed those same mathematical calculations. He took the book home and studied it and wrote a paper on a new mathematical basis for musical sounds. The paper was read by a scientist on Earth, who used it as the point of departure for a theoretical study in the latent energy of sound waves. An engineer saw this study and published a speculation on the amount of unharnessed energy released hourly in the noise of the average large city. Other scientists and engineers became interested and eventually they evolved the now famous Fottengil Process, by which all major cities of Earth have free electrical power conveniently processed from their own noise. I told you, it's all documented. The Galactic Commission uncovered this strange series of events in a special investigation into the sources of the Fottengil Process. Lavish rewards were made to all who had contributed, including the librarian who misclassified the Professor's book. The Professor was given a generous pension for life, in spite of the fact that other musicologists had proven his mathematical calculations to be completely in error. Even the Chief was rewarded for the cooperation extended to the Professor by his department. He was transferred back to Earth and given a soft job with double the salary. The one who started the entire development -- namely myself -- was all but forgotten. It was I who had that siren built in the first place. It was I who sent the Professor to Lamruth. And I'm now a sub-clerk in the Special Problems Section on It's true that there is a sign on my desk that says "Cultural Adviser." It is also true that I don't have much work to do, because not many people come here after cultural advice -- only two this year, so far. The last one was an art expert. I told him I'd heard of three-dimensional paintings on Calmus and got rid of him within twenty-four hours. He may not be back, because the natives on Calmus have no eyesight and they tend to be sensitive about that. My job is easy and the government service provides regular pay credits. But I'm stuck here on pany but haughty department heads and a lot of moronic subclerks, and the climate is terrible. I wouldn't have you think I'm bitter about it, but I want to set the record straight. I ask you, is that any way to reward the person responsible for the Fottengil Process?      any illusion that you will relax while reading this novelet, frown a bit over this situation; By using the installment plan, Crandall endured the worst that the Galaxy had to offer. Now it was Earth's turn to sweat! Take our word for it -- you've never encountered an installment plan like the one Tenn has created -- nor such menace as these murderously tough payments produce after they are finished! you practically need omniscience to make sure you don't overdo omnipotence! Remember that last month's Forecast declared that Sturgeon is back again in full production? To round out a muscular trio of novelists, he offers the story without blunting its point is in for a struggle something like this: Every once in too great a while, along comes a yarn that takes a good, hard-headed, practical fact -- and shows that the fact is nothing but poor, pudding-headed, completely impractical nonsense. That is exactly what Sturgeon has done here... and its effect could revolutionize existing theory by turning it clear around... and plumping it down squarely on its feet I information By WIllY lEY dence, I just came across a typewritten page which was the beginning of a Galaxy column I had started and did not finish. I don't recall any more why I changed my mind then, but because of certain clues I know that it was written during the latter part of January, #. Here is what I wrote then: "If contra-terrene matter does not exist, Nature performed an elaborate hoax last year in order to make us believe that it does. Some time during # -- date undisclosed -- a Skyhook balloon hovered for six hours at a height of a little more than # feet over Texas. It had been released from Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas and was part of a joint research project of the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission, The equipment carried in the gondola was of the kind that detects and records cosmic rays. "When the 'catch' was examined later by Professor Marcel Schein and his colleagues of the Department of Physics of the University of Chicago, they saw that they had indeed caught something unusual. Nothing like it had ever been seen before -- it was a 'pure photon shower.' Twenty-one photons were counted in a very small space, with energies from somewhat below # "The total energy release amounted to #'" (or # This in itself would be fantastic and new enough. But when the scientists looked for the heavy charged particles which one would expect as the cause of such a burst, there weren't any." T his is as far as I got then. Now, only one year later, the whole thing is outdated. We no longer have to say that such a photon shower must have been caused by a particle of contra-terrene matter. (Dr. Zwicky had predicted in a letter published in vol. #, #, of the Physical Review that such particles could be found only at extreme altitudes.) We no longer have to quote this case as possible evidence for the probable existence of contra-terrene matter. In fact, it does not matter if this particular case is never explained down to the last photon. For in October, #, contraterrene matter was made at the University of California. This matter being what it is, it is a good thing that they can make it only an atom at a time. Contra-terrene matter, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, was not thought up by a science fiction writer. It appeared in print for the first time in # in a very technical work with the title Die moderne Atomtheorie (Modern Atomic Theory) which was a symposium published by Professor W. Heisenberg, a Nobel Prize winner. The chapter discussing the possibility of "reverse matter" was by another Nobel Prize winner. Dr. P. A. M. Dirac. Dirac reasoned thus : There was a small particle carrying a negative charge, the electron. Its opposite number was the proton, carrying a positive charge, but more than # times as massive as the electron. Then there was the neutron, about as massive as the proton, but without any electrical charge. Dirac concluded that there should be another set of atomic particles, namely the "anti-electron" and the "anti-proton." The anti-electron should have the same mass as an electron, but carrying a positive charge. The anti-proton, of course, would have the mass of the proton, but with a negative charge. we know consists of a nucleus of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a number of electrons arranged in several layers, called shells. If Dirac's two unknown particles existed, there should be a matter of an entirely different type, with negatively charged anti-protons in the nucleus and surrounded by antielectrons. Theoretically you could have a counterpart of every element built up in this matter. To the eye, there would be no difference between ordinary (or "terrene") iron and such contra-terrene iron. Most likely it would have the same melting point. The spectroscope could not tell them apart. But if the twain should meet, they would utterly annihilate each other with nothing left but pure energy. Of course iron did not have to meet iron; contraterrene iron meeting terrene air would produce the same effect. Dirac's "anti-electron" was actually discovered some time later and became known as a positron. It remained to find the antiproton, tentatively called "negatron." But that was not easy. Even if such matter existed elsewhere in space, it could not penetrate the atmosphere. It would make only a very bright flash at very high altitudes and such a bright flash would not be much of a proof. V. Rojansky calculated in # that a contra-terrene iron meteorite, if it was to reach the surface, would have to be # inches in diameter and # inches in length. Even then it had to fall without tumbling or else it would be consumed completely while still falling. There were a few cases on record that looked suspicious in the light of this theory, the best known being the great Siberian meteorite of #. But since, by definition, no meteoritic matter could be left, there could never be any palpable evidence. And as the years wore on, several scientists tried to find reasons why the anti-proton was "unnecessary" and "therefore" probably did not exist. Well, anti-protons have now been produced in the laboratory. Naturally they lasted for only a tiny fraction of a second with all that inimical terrene matter around. But they could be observed. They were there and -- surprise! -- their so-called cross section turned out to be about double of that of the proton. Maybe the spectroscope will still be useful; nobody can tell at the moment. But knowing now what to go after, we'll know soon. 'T'HE year was # A.D. The most important scientific body then in existence -- overshadowing even the Royal Society of London to all but Englishmen -- namely the Academy of Sciences in Paris, announced a resolution which said that the Academy would no longer investigate or examine alleged solutions of the problem of squaring the circle which might be submitted. The same went for the so-called Delian problem of doubling a cube or for the trisection of angles. Dissemination of news was not what it is now in #. Many people outside of Paris engaged in these three problems apparently did not learn that the Academy had declared them, by implication, to be insoluble. Papers and pamphlets continued to come in. But one has the feeling that, even if the authors of these papers had learned about the Academy's attitude, they would not have been discouraged, for that is something you cannot do to a true circle squarer. As regards the other two problems, the number of people addicted to them sqems to have been smaller at any time in history. Speaking of the present, I can only say that I have never met anybody who spent his evenings trying to double a cube. I did meet three . or four tri-sectors, but I have come across at least half a dozen circle squarers. It is this particular problem which seems to have held, and still holds, a fascination that simply cannot be understood by the nonaddict. Interestingly enough, the circle squarers of the more recent past -- say the last hundred years -- always invented a so-called "good-reason" for their endeavors. They thought and said that the squaring of the circle would also reveal the Secret of the Universe -- why and how, in the name of Pythagoras, and which secret did they mean? -- or else they were convinced that somebody, somewhere, had substantial sums of money waiting to be awarded as a prize to the successful genius. While there have been money prizes for various mathematical problems at one time or another, it so happens that there never was one for that particular problem -- except in the sense that at least two people offered prizes for finding a mistake in their solutions. One of these two offered a thousand dollars (at a time when four dollars was a good week's pay) and the other offered fifty pieces of gold. Both had to pay within a few years after offering the rewards. But I once knew a circle squarer who confided to me that the Government had a secret prize in readiness. "That a secret prize is a plain absurdity just never occurred to him. Incidentally, he did not claim to have found the solution. " itself, let's look at the problem first. The problem is to construct a square of precisely the same area as a given circle. Emphasis is on the word precisely; a difference of a mere one-tenth of one per cent or even of a tenacceptable. It has to be precise. Along with this demand there goes a condition. The condition of that square has to be accomplished by using only two tools: a pair of compasses and an unmarked straight edge. If that classical condition is neglected, a solution can be found. Leonardo da Vinci is the author of what is probably the earliest one. To construct a square of the same area as a given circle, da Vinci made a roller of the same diameter as the circle. The thickness of the roller was one-half of the radius of that circle -- onequarter of its diameter. Running the inked roller on a sheet of paper for precisely one revolution resulted in a rather long and narrow rectangle of the same area as the circle. To convert the rectangle into a square by geometrical construction was elementary. With instruments in addition to the pair of compasses and the unmarked ruler, it can be done. But when you do observe the classical condition, things have ahabit of getting tough very fast -- and of staying that way. One way tried by many is shown in Fig. #. There you have the circle. You put one square inside it and another one around it; obviously the inscribed square is smaller in area than the circle, while the circumscribed square is larger. The wanted square is evidently intermediate in size. To construct it, we halve the distance between the two squares and draw a third one (dotted line in Fig. #). It looks as if it might be of the right size. To prove that it is, you have to prove that the protruding segment of the circle and the protruding corner of the square are equal in area -- to make this more easily visible, one of each has been shaded in the drawing. Well, in this particular case, the two areas are not equal, as one can easily see. But if you had a square of a slightly larger size where the two areas look equal, you could not prove their equality by any means, even if it happens to be the case of sheer accident. the actual historical development, one may ask whether there was a reason why so many people through so many centuries believed that it could be done. There was. There was a case where it could be proved that a figure bounded by pieces of circles was precisely equal in area to another figure bounded by straight lines. This case is known to mathematicians as the menisci or lunulae of Hippocrates of Chios, who lived in Athens during the second half of the fifth century b.c. It may be wrong to say that he caused the waste of more manhours than anybody since his time, but he certainly ranks high among inventors of misleading evidence. Look at Fig. #. You have there a triangle in which one angle is a right angle and both cathetes and the hypotenuse are adorned with a half circle each. The half circle A has, of course, the largest area, while the areas of E and D are smaller. None of them has an area which is either equal to or a simple fraction of the area T of the triangle. But E h D A; the two smaller semicircles taken together have the same area as the larger one. Now we redraw the same thing as shown in Fig. #B. The largest of the three semicircles then splits each of the smaller ones into two unequal areas. The former area E now consists of eh e' and the former area D now consists of the areas dfd'. The largest semicircle obviously is the sum of TIe'#d'. Since e  e' d  d' are equal to T  e'  d', the area T must be equal to e  d. In words : the area of the two lunulae equals the area of the triangle. If this does not look like a possible approach to converting a circle into a square, nothing does. The similarity can easily be carried a step farther by drawing the figure #. The square inscribed in a circle demonstrably consists of four triangles; all you have to do is to connect the four corners by two lines which are also diameters of the circle. Then you construct the four lunulae. And there can be no doubt that A  a, B  b, C  c and D  d. Of course A will equal d etc. etc. And A  B  C D equals the square. All you have to do now is to convert the four lunulae into one circle and the problem is solved. But if you try to do that, you'll find out, after an hour or after three years, depending on your individual persistence, that it cannot be done. The lunulae of Hippocrates are an interesting and very special case which only happens to look as if it bore any relationship to the problem. T)UT the whole thing, countless people have moaned through the centuries, looks so simple on principle! You can prove that a certain triangle must have the same area as a given circle. The height of that triangle must be equal to the radius of the circle and its base must be equal to its circumference. It remains to construct such a triangle. The height presents no problem, of course, but just what is the length of the base? This problem has a separate name. It is called the rectification of the circle, but actually rectification and quadrature go hand in hand. If one could solve the one, the other would be solved automatically. Well, the circumference of the circle is its diameter multiplied by something, namely the ratio of diameter to circumference. Everybody knows now that this ratio is called by the Greek letter pi, and since the problem came down to us from the Greeks, one has the tendency to assume that it was "always" called by that letter. Actually the use of pi to designate this value is rather recent. It was used that way for the first Jones in # in a book with the title Synopsis palmariorum Mathesos, which was an introduction to mathematics. Mr. Jones' usage was then popularized by Leonhard Euler in his voluminous correspondence as well as in his main work, the Introductio in analysin infinitorum which appeared in #. The wrestling with this value goes back past the Greeks for good and practical reasons. The oldest figure we have is that given in the Papyrus Rhind. The copy of the papyrus we have is not the original; it says in the manuscript itself that it was copied by clerk Ahmes, the servant of the king Raaus, which dates the copy as having been made in about # B.C. The papyrus states that the area of a circle is equal to a square constructed with the base of ##th of the diameter. In decimal notation, this makes pi equal to #, which is better than the figure given in the Bible (I Kings, vii, # and # Chronicles iv, # if you want to check) where the value of pi appears as a straight three. Among the Greeks, the first to come up with a value was Archimedes, who stated that the figure was greater than # ##I but smaller than # ##. Compared to the modern value, these figures look as follows: # ##I  # pi  #... # ##  # This is really good enough for most practical purposes and the value of # ## was used for many centuries for such things as measuring the iron rirn for a wheel or cutting paving blocks for a circular enclosure of some kind. R oman surveyors know Archimedes' approximation of # ##, but are said to have used # ## in their work since it made calculations that much easier! Of the Chinese, we know what values were used by some of their mathematicians, but we do not know how they arrived at them. One Wang Fau used the ratio ##, which is #, while Chang King thought that pi was equal to the square root of #, which is #, an accidental similarity that has troubled many later circle squarers. (Another such similarity has caused many geometrical constructions, namely the fact that the square root of # plus the square root of # closely resembles pi. The figures are #  #  #.) The best Chinese approximation was that of the astronomer T s u Ch'ung-chih (born in # A.D.) who arrived at the ratio of ## or #. Of the men of the Renaissance who tried their hand on the rectification of the circle. I'll mention only Nikolaus Chrypffs, who was born at Kues on the Moselle in #I and became known later in life as Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus. His construction is shown in Fig. #. If the smaller circle to the left is the given circle, you construct one side of the inscribed square AB and use this to establish point C. Then you draw a circle the center of which is halfway between point C and the center of the first circle. The triangle inscribed in this second and somewhat larger circle has the same circumference as the first circle. Or rather it would have if pi were equal to #. A much better, slightly more accurate and at any event faster approximation is the one shown in Fig #. The construction is obvious from the drawing. The two, is a fraction of a per cent longer than the circumference of the circle. The construction shown in Fig. # is even more elegant. It was found in # by Adam Kokhansky, the Royal Mathematician of the King of Poland. The construction begins with the circle, a tangent and a diameter which touches the periphery in the same point as the tangent. Then you construct an angle of #, which establishes point A on the tangent. Then you proceed along the tangent for # radii, which establishes point B, B Vc ABVf R f'# bcV#r The line from B to C represents half the periphery of the circle. It does so with surprising accuracy, for it would be correct if pi were #. Actually, pi is a so-called transcendental number which cannot be expressed accurately either by decimals or as a fraction. Since this cannot be done, it cannot be constructed. You can produce almost any degree of accuracy you wish, but it cannot really be accurate -- provided, to repeat, that you stick to compass and unmarked straight edge as the instruments employed. B ut though most people know by now that a fully accurate construction is impossible, every once in a while somebody succeeds in coming up with a new approximation that has been missed in the past. In #, a German civil servant, Peter Pupovac, submitted to a mathematician the construction shown in Fig. #. You divide the diameter of the circle into five parts, add one more and draw a vertical line in that point. You make it three divions high. The sum of the three sides of this triangle nearly equals the circumference of the circle, namely ##  ##  ## multiplied by the square root of five. This amounts to #, so the sum of the sides of the triangle is # diameters too large. Another surprising approximation -- this time a direct quadrature rather than a rectification -- was found accidentally by a German officer in World War I. During a period of quiet in springtime, when the lilacs were in bloom, he amused himself by trying to draw a representation of a lilac blossom with nothing but a pair of compasses. When he had obtained a result which he considered a good representation, he Fig. # noticed that a circle and a square overlapped. (Fig. #) They looked as if they were equal in area. After the war, he sent the figure to a mathematician, Dr. Theodor Wolff, with the question whether Nature might not have accomplished something that Man had failed to do. Dr. Wolff had a ready answer, namely that Nature, if she had found a solution, had done so in violation of the classical rule, something which Man could do, too. Then he calculated what mistake, if any, Nature had made. Nature had not solved the problem even by using non-classical methods. The difference between the areas of the circle and the square is a little less than one per cent of the circle's area. The savants of the French Academy who decided not to waste their time any more by examining so-called solutions of the circle-square problem would have liked this little touch. Even Mother Nature can't do it correctly! S# Writing of the Rat Everything about the aliens was a galactic puzzle... , but the key T hey had strapped the Enemy to a chair, which in John Jahnke's opinion was neither necessary nor smart, but Jahnke was only a captain (Field rank). Ugly the squat, grayfurred, sharp-toothed creatures were, certainly, and their thick bodies, well over six feet tall, were frighteningly strong. But they were also proud and intelligent. They never ran amok in a hopeless situation; that would be beneath their dignity. The irons were going to make questioning the creature a good deal more diffiicult than it would Illustrated was under the mat! have been otherwise -- and that would have been difficult enough. But Jahnke was only a Field officer and, what was worse, invalided Home. Here it could hardly matter that he knew the Enemy better than any other human being alive. His opinions would be weighed against the fact that he had been invalided Home from a Field where there were no battles. And the two years of captivity? A rest cure, the Home officers called them. "Where did you take him?" he asked Major Matthews. "Off a planet of # I Cygni," Matthews growled, loosening his tie. "Whopping sun, a hundred fifty times as big as Sol, six hundred fifty light-years from here. All alone there in a ship no bigger than himself." "A scout?" "What else? All right, he's ready." Matthews looked at the two hard-faced enlisted men behind the Enemy's chair. One of them grinned slightly. "Ask him where he's from." The gray creature turned flat steady eyes on Jahnke, obviously already aware that he was the interpreter. Sweating, Jahnke put the question. "Hnimesacpeo," the Enemy said. "So far, so good," Jahnke murmured hopefully. "Hnimesacpeo tee rebo?" "Tea." "Well?" Matthews demanded. "That's the big province in the sonable." "The hell with that. We already knew he was Vegan. Where's his station?" was Vegan was unknown and might never be known. But there was no point in arguing that with Matthews; he already thought he knew. After a moment's struggle with the language. Jahnke tried: "Sftir etminbi Tokolny?" "R-daee blk." "Either he doesn't understand me," Jahnke said resignedly, "or he won't talk while he's in the chair. He says, 'I just told you.' " "Try again." "Dir at y edie," Jahnke said. "St fir etminbu rakolna?" "Hnimesacpeo." The creature's eyes blinked once. "Ta hter o alkbee." "It's no good," Jahnke said. "He's giving me the same answer, but this time in the pejorative form -- the one they use for draft animals and children. It might go better if you'd let him out of those irons." Matthews laughed shortly. "Tell him to open up or expect trouble. The irons are only the beginning." "Sir, if you insist upon this course of action, I will appeal against it. It won't work and it's counter to policy. We know from long experience Outside that -- " "Never mind about Outside; you're on Earth now," Matthews r etorted harshly. "Tell him what I said." Worse and worse. Jahnke put the message as gently as he could. The Enemy blinked. "Sehe et broe in ieen." "Well?" Matthews snapped. "He says you couldn't run a maze with your shoes off," Jahnke said, with grim relish. The phrase was the mortal insult, but Matthews wouldn't know that; the literal translation could mean little to him. Nevertheless, Matthews had brains enough to know when he was being defied. He flushed furiously. "All right!" he told the toughs. "Start on him -- and don't start slow!" Jahnke was abruptly wishing that he hadn't translated the insult at all, but the outcome would probably have been the same in the long run. "Sir," he said, his voice ragged, "I request your permission to leave." "Don't be stupid. Do you think we're doing this for fun?" Since this what exactly what Jahnke thought, he was glad that the question was rhetorical. "Who'll translate when he does talk, if you're not here?" "He won't talk." "Yes, he will," Matthews promised savagely. "And you can tell him why." After a moment, Jahnke said stonily; "Ocro hli antsoutinys, iuso tizen et tobee." and Jahnke w'as none too sure that he had got it right. The Enemy merely nodded once and looked away. There was no way of telling whether he had failed to understand, had understood and was trying to avoid betraying Jahnke, or was merely indifferent. He said: "Seace tcectisbe." The phrase was formal; it might mean "thank you," but then again it might mean half 'a hundred equally common expressions, including "hello," "good-by," and "time for lunch." "Does he understand?" Matthews demanded. "I think he does," Jahnke said. "You'll be destroying him for nothing. Major." Two hours later, the gray creature looked at Matthews' out of his remaining, lidless eye, said clearly, "Sehe et broe in icen," and died. He had said nothing else, though he had cried out often. Somehow, that possible word of thanks he had given Jahnke made it worse, not better. Jahnke went back to his quarters on shaky legs, to compose a letter of protest. He gave it up after the first paragraph. There was nobody to write to. While he had been Outside, he could have appealed to the Chief of Intelligence Operations (Field), who had been his friend as well as his immediate superior. But now he was in New Washington, where ship swung less weight than Home officers as far down the chain of command as Major Matthews. It hadn't always been like that. After the discovery of the Enemy, the Field officers had commanded as much instant respect at Home as Field officers always had; they were in the position of danger. But as it gradually became clear that there was going to be no war, that the Field officers were bringing home puzzles instead of victories, that the danger Outside was that of precipitating a battle rather than fighting one, the pendulum swung. Now Field officers treated the Enemy with respect and were despised for it -- while the Home officers itched for the chance to show that they weren't soft on the Enemy. Matthews had had one chance and would be itching for another. Jahnke put down his pen and stared at the wall, feeling more than a little sick.  IHE gray creatures were, as it had turned out, everywhere. When the first interstellar ship had arrived in the Alpha Centauri system, there they were, running the two fertile planets from vast stony cities by means of an elaborate priesthood. The relatively infertile fourth planet they had organized as a tight autarchy of technicians, dominating a high-energy economy of scarcity. They had garrisoned several other utterly barren Centaurian planets, for what was vaguely called "reasons of policy," meaning that nobody knew why they had. That had been only a foretaste. No habitable planet was without them, however far you stretched the definition of "habitable." Their most magnificent Earthlike world twice the diameter of Earth and at least a century in advance of Earth technologies. But they were found, too, on the major satellite of #I Cygni C, a "gray ghost" star almost small enough to be a gas-giant planet, where they lived tribal lives as cramped and penurious as those of ancient Lapland -- and had the Ragnarok-like mythology to go with it. No one could even guess how long they had known interstellar flight or where they had come from. The hypothesis that they had originally been Vegans was shaky, based solely on the fact highly developed planet yet discovered. As for facts that argued in the opposite direction, there were more than enough, from Jahnke's point of view. They had, for instance, a common spoken language, but every one of their civilizations had a different written language, usually irreconcilable with all the others -- pictograms, phonetic systems, ideograms, hieratic shorthands, inflectional systems, tonemodulated systems, positional systems -- the works. The spoken language was so complex that not even Jahnke could speak it above primer level, for it was based on phoneme placement inside the word. In short, it was totally synthetic, derived from the Enemy's vast knowledge of information theory, and could be matched up in part to any written language imaginable. Thus there was no way to tell what written language -- which always abstracts from speech and introduces new elements that have nothing to do with speech -- might have been the original. A nd how can you be sure you know where the Enemy's home planet is, Jahnke brooded, when you can see him still actively exploring and taking over one new system after another, for no other visible reason than sheer acquisitiveness? How can you tell how long that process has been going on, when no new penetration of human beings to more distant reaches of the Galaxy fails to find the gray creatures established on two or three promising planets, and nosing in on half a dozen additional cinder-blocks which have nothing to recommend them but the fact that they are large enough to land upon? "They're nothing but six-foothad once told Jahnke, in a tone of disgust unusual for him. "The whole damned Galaxy must be overrun with them. They couldn't have evolved any civilization we ever found them in." "They're intelligent," Jahnke had protested. "Nobody's yet measured how intelligent they are." "Sure," Singh had said. "I'll give them that much credit. They're more than intelligent -- they didn't evolve any of 'their' civilizations, John. They couldn't have, because the civilizations are too diversified. The Enemy maintains all of them with equal thoroughness and equal indifference. If we could just explore some of those planets. I'll bet we'd find the bones of the original owners. How does that poem of Pound's go?" His brow furrowed a moment over this apparent irrelevancy and he quoted: "And the wind shifts and the dust on a doorsill shifts and even the writing of the rat footprints tells us nothing, nothing at all about the greatest city, the greatest nation where the strong men listened and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was. "That's how it is," Singh added gloomily. "All these gray rats are doing is picking everybody else's cupboards. They're very good at that. They may well be picking ours before long." That was the second theory; on the whole, it was the most popular one now. It was the theory under which a man like Matthews could torture to death a creature several times as intelligent as he was and with a code of customs and a set of moral standards which made Matthews look like a bushman, on the grounds that the Enemy were merely loathsome scavengers, fit only for extermination. Singh, Jahnke could find little good to say for the rat theory, either. Both theories pointed, in the end, toward a common military goal -- that of finding the Enemy's home planet and deEnemy's home, then at least there was a target. If the Enemy were spreading from some other heartland, then the target still remained to be found. But what good was that? It was military nonsense. The Enemy outnumbered humanity by millions to one. On the highly develEnemy commanded weapons compared to which humanity's best were only torches to be waved in the face of the inevitable night. The first moment of open warfare would be the end of humanity. So far, the gray creatures and humanity were not at war. But the time of the explosion was drawing closer. Jahnke did not really think that the Enemy could be still in ignorance of Earth's practice of picking up its lone scouts for questioning; the Enemy's resources were too great. It was his private theory, shared by Piara Singh, that the Enemy was content to let its scouts be questioned, as long as they were set free unharmed later. After all, the Enemy had once picked up Jahnke under the same circumstances and for that same purpose. It was for that reason that he knew their language better than any other human being; he had lived among them for two years. But if Matthew's Inquisition methods represented a new and general policy toward these occasional captives, the Enemy would not let that policy go unprotested. The gray creatures were very proud. Jahnke knew that, for they had expected no less pride of him. And what would happen when one of the Enemy's scouts came nosing, at long last, into the Solar System of Earth -- even around so cold, dark and useless a world as the satellite of Proserpine, far beyond Pluto? Earth had no use for that rockball, but it would never let the "rats" have it, just the same. The gray tide had spared the Sol system, but that couldn't last forever. It had spared nothing else. The phone rang insistently, jarring Jahnke out of his bitter reverie. He picked it up. "Captain Jahnke? One moment, please. Colonel Singh calling." a state of numb shock, uncertain whether to be delighted or appalled. What could Piara Singh be doing here, out of the high free emptiness of Outside? Had he been invalided Home again, too, or had some failure -- "John? How are you? This is Singh; I called the moment I got in." "Hello, Colonel. I'm astonished and pleased. But what -- " "I know what you're thinking," voice was high with suppressed eagerness; Jahnke had never heard him sound so young before. "I'm Home on my own initiative, on special orders I wormed out of old Wu himself. I brought a prisoner with me. John, listen, he's the most important prisoner we've ever taken. He told me his name!" "No! They never do! It's against the rules!" "But he did," Singh said, almost bubbling. "It's Hrestce. In the language, it means 'compromise,' isn't that right? I think he was deliberately sent to us with a message. That's why I came Home. The key to the whole problem seems to be in his hands and he obviously wants to talk. I have to have you to listen to him and tell me what it means." Jahnke's heart tried to rise and sink at the same time, enclosing his whole chest in an awful vise of apprehension. "All right," he Here in New Washington, I mean?" "Oh, of course." Singh's enthusiasm seemed to be about to burst the telephone handset -- and small wonder, after all the setbacks that had made up his career Outside. "They recognized right away how important this is. They've assigned their best interrogation man to me, a Major Matthews. I don't doubt that he's good, but we'll need you first. If you can get here for a preliminary talk with Hrestce -- " "I can get there," Jahnke said tensely. "But don't let anyone else talk to him before I do. This Matthews is dangerous; if he phones before I arrive, stall him. Where are you calling from?" "At home on the Kattegat. I have three weeks' leave. You know the place, don't you? You can reach it in an hour, if you can catch a rocket immediately. I can keep Hrestce in my jurisdiction for you that long easily. Nohe's here." til I get there. I'll see you in an hour." "Right, John. Good-by." "Seace tee ctisbe." "Yes -- how does it go? Tea." "Tee; tea." T rembling with excitement and urgency, Jahnke got the rest of his mussed uniform off, clambered into mufti and packed his equipment: a tape recorder, two dictionaries compiled by himself, a set of frequency tables for the Enemy language which he had not yet completed, and a toothbrush. At the last moment, he remembered to take his officer's ID card and money to buy his rocket ticket. Now. All ready. He opened the door to go out. Matthews was there. His feet were wide apart, his hands locked behind his back, his face thrust forward. He looked like a lowering, small-scale copy of the Colossus of Rhodes. "Morning, Captain Jahnke," Matthews said, with a slight and nasty smile. "Going somewhere? The Kattegat, maybe?" The soldiers behind Matthews, those same two wooden-faced toughs, helped him wait for Jahnke's answer. After a moment of sickening doubt, Jahnke retreated into his quarters, to the kitchen, out of Matthew's sight. He found the bottle of cloudy ammonia his batman used for scrubbing his floors and shook it until it was full of foam. Then he went back to the front room and threw the bottle as hard as he could into the corridor. It seemed to explode like a bomb. He had to knee one soldier who clawed through the fumes into the front room; he got away over the man's writhing body. His eyes were streaming. Now he had to reach Singh before Matthews did. It would be a near thing. Temporarily, at least, time was on his side, Jahnke was pretty sure. Piara Singh's Kattegat home was a retreat, quite possibly unlisted among the addresses the government had for him; Jahnke had learned of it only through a few moments of nostalgia in which the colonel had indulged over a drink. If so, Matthews would have a difficult time searching the shores of the strait for it, and might think only very belatedly of looking in the wildest part of Jutland. Also in Jahnke's favor was the fact that Matthews was only a major. The man whose leave he had to plan on invading was a full colonel, even though only a despised Field officer -- and the scorn in which Field officers were held was in itself only a symptom of the Home officers' guilt at being Home officers. Matthews would probably pause to collect considerable official backing before venturing further. All this was logical, but Jahnke knew Matthews too well to be comforted by it. He got a liner direct to Copenhagen, which cut down his transit time considerably. After that, there was only the complicated business of getting off the islands onto the peninsula, and thence north to Alborg. Col. Singh had a car waiting for him there, which took him direct to the lodge. "An hour and a half," Singh said, shaking hands. "That was good time." "Glad to see you, sir. We're going to have to move fast, I'm afraid; we're not safe even here. This Matthews is a dedicated sadist. Do you remember the prisoner that was sent home with me? Well, Matthews tortured him to death yesterday, trying to get routine information out of him. He'll do the same with your captive if he gets his hands on him. He knows I'm here, of course. Either my telephone wire was tapped or he knew that you'd call me as soon as the news trickled A n expression of revulsion totally transformed Col. Singh's lean brown face for a moment, but he said decisively: "So it's come to that; they must be cut off from the real situation Outside almost entirely, and it's their own fault. Well, I know what we can do. I have a private plane here and my pilot is the very best. We'll just take ourselves upstairs and defy this Matthews to get us down until we're ready." "Where are we going?" Jahnke asked. "I don't know at the moment and it doesn't matter. There are a lot of places to hide inside a thousand-mile radius where Matthews wouldn't think of looking for us, if we have to hide. But I think I can pull his teeth through channels before it comes to that. Come on, better meet the prisoner." He led the way into the next room. The prisoner was looking at a book which, Jahnke could see as he put it aside, was mostly mathematics. He was an unusually big specimen even for an Enemy, almost seven feet tall, with enormous shoulders and arms, a deep chest, and a brow which gave him an expression of permanent ferocity. He looked as though he could have torn Jahnke and the colonel to pieces without the slightest effort, as indeed he probably could. "Hrestce, John Jahnke," Col. Singh said. "Seace tee ctisbe," Jahnke said. "Tea." Hrestce held out his hand and Jahnke took it, somewhat nervously. Then, drawing a deep breath, he quickly outlined the situation, pulling no punches. When he got to the part about the death of Matthews' prisoner, Hrestce only nodded; when Jahnke proposed that they leave, he nodded again. That was all. In the cabin of the plane, Jahnke started his tape recorder and got out his manuscript dictionary. With Hrestce's first words, however, it became apparent that he wasn't going to need the dictionary. The Enemy spoke simply, though with great dignity, and quickly found the speechrate which was comfortable for Jahnke. When he spoke to Singh, he slowed down even more; he seemed already aware that Singh's command of the language did not extend to high-order abstractions or subtle constructions. AM an emissary, as Colonel Singh surmised," Hrestce said. "My mission is to apprise you of the search my people have been conducting and to take such further steps as your reaction dictates. By 'you,' of course, I mean mankind." "What is the search?" Jahnke inquired, "First I must explain some other matters," Hrestce said. "You have some incomplete truths about us which should be completed right now. You know that we occupy many dissimilar civilizations; you suspect that they are not ours and that the original owners are gone. That is true. You think you have never seen our home culture. That is also true; our planet of origin is far out on the end of this spiral arm of the Galaxy, from which we have been working our way inward toward the center. You think we have usurped the original owners of these cultures. That is not true. We have another function. We are custodians." "Custodians?" Singh repeated. "Of cultures, of entire ecologies. That is the role which has been thrust upon us. When we first mastered interstellar flight, sometime in the prehistory of your race, we found these abandoned planets by the hundreds. We found only a few inhabited ones, which I will describe in a moment." "The research that followed was tedious and I shall do no more than describe its results. Briefly, there is a race in the Galaxy whieh is praeticing slavery upon an incredible scale. We know who they are, for we have encountered several of their slave-planets, but they fight ferot iously and without quarter, so lhat we have been unable to find out where they came from, or practice, however, is to evacuate #I planet entirely; there is evidence of resistance on all the empty worlds, but the battles and losses were never large -- evidently the slavers utterly overwhelmed them. The bones we find never account for more than #I tenth of the total population of the planet, usually much less. Yet the people are gone, leaving nothing behind but their effects, which the raiders seldom bother to loot. "We do not know how many of these conquered and enslaved races are still alive. Under the circumstances, we have chosen to maintain each culture on its own terms, in the hope that at least some of them may be repossessed by their owners in the future, as we have already turned hack the liberated worlds. It is for that reason that we have evolved this synthetic language, which is adaptable to any culture and carries the implicit assumptions of none." The gray creature paused and the expression which crossed his face was something like a fleeting smile. "After speaking it for so many millenia, we find we rather like it. Some of us are doing creative work in it." "I like it very well," Jahnke said. "It's highly flexible; I should think it might make a good medium for poetry." "There you make a statement with import for your race." The smile, if that was what it had been, was gone without a trace. "It was your captivity, to some extent, that deterred us from wiping you all out at once, as we have the power to do. For I must tell you plainly now that you are an outpost of the slavers we are seeking." if only hazily; but it hurt, all the same. "We were in doubt at first. Though the physical form is the same, your obvious creativity and your frequent flashes of sanity and decency seemed anomalous. Also, there seemed to be evidence that you had evolved on this planet. Further investigation disposed of that point, however; of all your presumptive ancestors, only the extinct half-simian, stone-throwing culture of South Africa is indigenous to Earth. All the others, plus many forms that puzzle your naturalists, you brought with you from other planets -- as slaves or food -- and the stone-throwers you wiped out as being of too little intelligence to be useful. The Cro-Magnons, for example, were the descendants of the race of ever about it" Jahnke asked hollowly: "What now? Since you have decided not to wipe us out -- " "There is the heart of the question," Hrestce said. "You have been cut off a long time from the moral monsters who spawned you and during that time you have changed. Your race still reverts to the parent type now and then: you produce an Alexander, a Khan, a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Stalin, a MacHinery -- or a Matthews. But plainly, these are now sub-human types and will become even more rare with time. 'We have been hunting for the main body of these slavers for a long time. They have crimes beyond number to answer for. They may have changed greatly in twenty-five thousand years, as you have changed; if so, we will be gratified. If they have not changed, we are prepared to destroy them down to the last monster." Hrestce paused and looked at the two men with somber ferocity. "The task is enormous," he said, "because of the caretaking responsibilities that go with it. We would share it with someone if we could. We have decided to ask you if you would agree to to share it. The growth you have undergone is staggering; it shows potentialities which we believe are greater than ours." A long sigh exploded from Singh; evidently he had been holding his breath longer than he himself had realized. " So all the time you were the rat-terriers and we were the rats. Matthews fits the description, all right. When I get through with him, he's going to be breaking rocks." As for Jahnke, he would have found it hard to say whether he was awed or elated, for both emotions had overwhelmed him at once. Matthews and his breed were certainly through; the Field officers had brought home not only the bacon, but the laurel wreath -- not a bloody victory to be lived down, but a mighty standard to be followed. "Can we accept?" Jahnke breathed at last. The colonel stood shakily and went forward to the door of the control cubby. 'West as she goes," he told the pilot huskily. "For New Washington. And get me the Secretary-General on the radio." "Yes, sir." Piara Singh closed the door and came back. While the plane turned over the dark Atlantic, the three rat-terriers put their heads together. In some cupboard toward the center of the Galaxy, the writing of the rat was waiting to be read. Is your collection of complete? agazifu If not, here is your chance to fill in missing copies. Back numbers of CtlctX tScience  .yagfCtziyie are available from May, #, on. Inventories are running low. Don't miss your chance to complete your collection. For  # or #c each IfSI Jan. Sold out Fob. Sold out Mar. Sold out Apr. Sold out May Juno July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. X Jan. # Fab. #  March J Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. Enclose cheek, cosh or money order. We pay postage Name... Address City State . Bad Give this robotic therapist a condition to cure and it did -- alway s o ven if it had to convert itself into a Typhoid Mary to do sol Medicine Caswell walked rapidly down Broadway with a loaded revolver hidden in his coat pocket. He didn't want to use the weapon, but feared he might anyhow. This was a justifiable assumption, for Caswell was a homicidal maniac. It was a gentle, misty spring day and the air held the smell of rain and blossoming dogwood. Caswell gripped the revolver in his sweaty right hand and tried to think of a single valid reason why he should not kill a man named Magnessen, who, the other day, had commented on how well Caswell looked. What business was it of Manessen's how he looked? Damned busybodies, always spoiling things for everybody... Caswell was a choleric little man with fierce red eyes, bulldog jowls and ginger-red hair. He was the sort you would expect to find perched on a detergent box, orating to a crowd of lunching businessmen and amused students, shouting, "Mars for the Martians, Venus for the Venusians!" But in truth, Caswell was uninterested in the deplorable social conditions of extraterrestrials. He was a jetbus conductor for the New York Rapid Transit Corporation. He minded his own business. And he was quite mad. Fortunately, he knew this at least part of the time, with at least half of his mind. well continued down Broadway toward the #rd Street branch of Home Therapy Appliances, Inc. His friend Magnessen would be finishing work soon, returning to his little apartment less than a block from Caswell's. How easy it would be, how pleasant, to saunter in, exchange a few words and... No! Caswell took a deep gulp of air and reminded himself that he didn't really want to kill anyone. It was not right to kill people. The authorities would lock him up, his friends wouldn't understand, his mother would never have approved. But these arguments seemed pallid, over-intellectual and entirely without force. The simple fact remained -- he wanted to kill Magnessen. Could so strong a desire be wrong? Or even unhealthy? Yes, it could! With an agonized groan, Caswell sprinted the last few steps into the Home Therapy Appliances Store. Just being within such a place gave him an immediate sense of relief. The lighting was discreet, the draperies were neutral, the displays of glittering therapy machines were neither too bland nor obstreperous. It was the kind of place where a man could happily lie down on the carpet in the shadow of the therapy machines, secure in the knowledge that help for any sort of trouble was at hand. A clerk with fair hair and a long, supercilious nose glided up softly, but not too softly, and murmured, "May one help?" "Therapy!" said Caswell. "Of course, sir," the clerk answered, smoothing his lapels and smiling winningly. "That is what we are here for." He gave Caswell a searching look, performed an instant mental diagnosis, and tapped a gleaming white-and-copper machine. "Now this," the clerk said, "is the new Alcoholic Reliever, built leading magazines. A handsome piece of furniture, I think you will agree, and not out of place in any home. It opens into a television set." With a flick of his narrow wrist, the clerk opened the Alcoholic Reliever, revealing a #-inch screen. "I need -- " Caswell began. "Therapy," the clerk finished for him. "Of course. I just wanted to point out that this model need never cause embarrassment for yourself, your friends or loved ones. Notice, if you will, the recessed dial which controls the desired degree of drinking. See? If you do not wish total abstinence, you can set it to heavy, moderate, social or light. That is a new feature, unique in mechanotherapy." # AM not a alcoholic," Caswell said, with considerable dignity. "The New York Rapid Transit Corporation does not hire alcoholics." "Oh," said the clerk, glancing distrustfully at Caswell's bloodshot eyes. "You seem a little nervous. Perhaps the portable Bendix Anxiety Reducer -- " "Anxiety's not my ticket, either. What have you got for homicidal mania?" The clerk pursed his lips. "Schizophrenic or manic-depressive origins?" "I don't know," Caswell admitted, somewhat taken aback. "It really doesn't matter," the clerk told him. "Just a private theory of my own. From my experience in the store, redheads and blonds are prone to schizophrenia, while brunettes incline toward the manic-depressive." "That's interesting. Have you worked here long?" "A week. Now then, here is just what you need, sir." He put his hand affectionately on a squat black machine with chrome trim. "What's that?" "That, sir, is the Rex Regenerator, built by General Motors. Isn't it handsome? It can go with any decor and opens up into a well-stocked bar. Your friends, family, loved ones need never know -- " "Will it cure a homicidal urge?" Caswell asked. "A strong one?" "Absolutely. Don't confuse this with the little ten amp neurosis models. This is a hefty, heavyduty, twenty-five amp machine for a really deep-rooted major condition." "That's what I've got," said Caswell, with pardonable pride. "This baby'll jolt it out of you. Big, heavy-duty thrust bearings! Oversize heat absorbers! Completely insulated! Sensitivity range of over -- " "I'll take it," Caswell said. "Right now. I'll pay cash." "Fine! I'll just telephone Storage and -- " "This one'll do," Caswell said, pulling out his billfold. "I'm in a hurry to use it. I want to kill my friend Magnessen, you know." T he clerk ducked sympathetically. "Y ou wouldn't want to do that... Plus five per cent sales tax. Thank you, sir. Full instructions are inside." Caswell thanked him, lifted the Regenerator in both arms and hurried out. After figuring his commission, the clerk smiled to himself and lighted a cigarette. His enjoyment was spoiled when the manager, a large man impressively equipped with pince-nez, marched out of his office. "Haskins," the manager said, "I thought I asked you to rid yourself of that filthy habit." "Yes, Mr. Follansby, sorry, sir," Haskins apologized, snubbing out the cigarette, "I'll use the display Denicotinizer at once. Made rather a good sale, Mr. Follansby. One of the big Rex Regenerators." "Really?" said the manager, impressed. "It isn't often we -- wait a minute! You didn't sell the floor model, did you?" 'Why -- why. I'm afraid I did, Mr. Follansby. The customer was in such a terrible hurry. Was there any reason -- " Mr. Follansby gripped his prominent white forehead in both hands, as though he wished to rip it off. "Haskins, I told you. I must have told you! That display Regenerator was a Martian model. For giving mechanotherapy to Martians." "Oh," Haskins said. He thought for a moment. "Oh." Mr. Follansby stared at his clerk in grim silence. "But does it really matter?" Haskins asked quickly. "Surely the machine won't discriminate. I should think it would treat a homicidal tendency even if the patient were not a Martian." "The Martian race has never had the slightest tendency toward homicide. A Martian Regenerator doesn't even possess the concept. Of course the Regenerator will treat him. It has to. But what will it treat?" "Oh, said Haskins. "That poor devil must be stopped before -- you say he was homicidal? I don't know what will happen! Quick, what is his address?" "Well, Mr. Follansby, he was in such a terrible hurry -- " The manager gave him a long, unbelieving look. "Get the police! Call the General Motors Security Division! Find him!" Haskins raced for the door. 'Wait!" yelled the manager, struggling into a raincoat. "I'm coming, too!" ed to his apartment by taxicopter. He lugged the Regenerator into his living room, put it down near the couch and studied it thoughtfully. "That clerk was right," he said, after a while. "It does go with the room." Esthetically, the Regenerator was a success. Caswell admired it for a few more moments, then went into the kitchen and fixed himself a chicken sandwich. He ate slowly, staring fixedly at a point just above and to the left of his kitchen clock. Damn you, Magnessen! Dirty no-good lying shitty-eyed enemy of all that's decent and clean in the world... Taking the revolver from his pocket, he laid it on the table. With a stiffened forefinger, he poked it into different positions. It was time to begin therapy. Except that... Caswell realized worriedly that he didn't want to lose the desire to kill Magnessen. What would become of him if he lost that urge? His life would lose all purpose, all coherence, all flavor and zest. It would be quite dull, really. Moreover, he had a great and genuine grievance against Magnessen, one he didn't like to think about. Irene! His poor sister, debauched by the subtle and insidious Magnessen, ruined by him and cast aside. What better reason could a man have to take his revolver and... Caswell finally remembered that he did not have a sister. Now was really the time to begin therapy. He went into the living room and found the operating instructions tucked into a ventilation louver of the machine. He opened them and read: To Operate All Rex Model Regenerators: #. Place the Regenerator near a comfortable couch. (A comfortable couch can be purchased as an additional accessory from any General Motors dealer.) #. Plug in the machine. #. Affix the adjustable contact band to the forehead. And that's all! Your Regenerator will do the rest! There will be no language bar or dialect problem, since the Regenerator communicates by Direct Sense Contact (Patent Pending). All you must do is cooperate. Try not to feel any embarrassment or shame. Everyone has problems and many are worse than yours! Your Regenerator has no interest in your morals or ethical standards, so don't feel it is 'judging' you. It desires only to aid you in becoming well and happy. As soon as it has collected and processed enough data, your Regenerator will begin treatment. You make the sessions as short or as long as you like. You are the boss! And of course you can end a session at any time. That's all there is to it! Simple, isn't it? Now plug in your General Motors Regenerator and  that," Cassidy said to himself. He pushed the Regenerator closer to the couch and plugged it in. He lifted the headband, started to slip it on, stopped. "I feel so silly!" he giggled. Abruptly he closed his mouth and stared pugnaciously at the black-and-chrome machine. "So you think you can make me sane, huh?" The Regenerator didn't answer. "Oh, well, go ahead and try." He slipped the headband over his forehead, crossed his arms on his chest and leaned back. Nothing happened. Caswell settled himself more comfortably on the couch. He scratched his shoulder and put the headband at a more comfortable angle. Still nothing. His thoughts began to wander. Magnessen! You noisy, overbearing oaf, you disgusting -- "Good afternoon," a voice murmured in his head. "I am your mechanotherapist." Caswell twitched guiltily. "Hello. I was just -- you know, just sort of -- " "Of course," the machine said soothingly. "Don't we all? I am now scanning the material in your preconscious, with the intent of synthesis, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. I find..." "Yes?" "Just one moment." The Regenerator was silent for several minutes. Then, hesitantly, it said, "This is beyond doubt a most unusual case." "Really?" Cassidy asked, pleased. "Yes. The coefficients seem -- I'm not sure..." The machine's robotic voice grew feeble. The #S pilot light began to flicker and fade. "Hey, what's the matter?" "Confusion," said the machine. "Of course," it went on in a stronger voice, "the unusual nature of the symptoms need not prove entirely baffling to a competent therapeutic machine. A symptom, no matter how bizarre, is no more than a signpost, an indication of inner difficulty. And all symptoms can be related to the broad mainstream of proven theory. Since the theory is effective, the symptoms must relate. We will proceed on that assumption." "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" asked Caswell, feeling light-headed. its pilot light blazing, "Mechanotherapy today is an exact science and admits of no significant errors. We will proceed with a word-association test." "Fire away," said Caswell. "House?" "Home." "Dog?" "Cat." "Fleefl?" Caswell hesitated, trying to figure out the word. It sounded vaguely Martian, but it might be Venusian or even -- "Fleefl?" the Regenerator repeated. "Marfoosh," Caswell replied. making up the word on the spur of the moment. "Loud?" "Sweet." "Green?" "Mother." "Thanagoyes?" "Patamathonga.' "Arrides?" "N exothesmodrastica ." "Chtheesnohelgnopteces? " "Rigamaroo latasentricpropatria!" Caswell shot back. It was a collection of sounds he was particularly proud of. The average man would not have been able to pronounce them. "Hmm," said the Regenerator. "The pattern fits. It always does." "What pattern?' "You have," the machine informed him, "a classic case of feem desire, complicated by strong dwarkish intentions." "I do? I thought I was homicidal." "That term has no referent," the machine said severely. "Therefore I must reject it as nonsense syllabification. Now consider these points: The feem desire is perfectly normal. Never forget that. But it is usually replaced at an early age by the hovendish revulsion. Individuals lacking in this basic environmental response -- " "I'm not absolutely sure I know what you're talking about," Caswell confessed. "Please, sir! We must establish one thing at once. You are the patient. I am the mechanotherapist. You have brought your troubles to me for treatment. But you cannot expect help unless you cooperate." "All right," Caswell said. "I'll try." Up to now, he had been bathed in a warm glow of superiority. Everything the machine said had seemed mildly humorous. As a matter of fact, he had felt capable of pointing out a few things wrong with the mechanotherapist. Now that sense of well-being evaporated, as it always did, and Caswell was alone, terribly alone and lost, a creature of his compulsions, in search of a little peace and contentment. He would undergo anything to find them. Sternly he reminded himself that he had no right to comment on the mechanotherapist. These machines knew what they were doing and had been doing it for a long time. He would cooperate, no matter how outlandish the treatment seemed from his layman's viewpoint. But it was obvious, Caswell thought, settling' himself grimly on the couch, that mechanotherapy was going to be far more difficult than he had imagined. customer had been brief and useless. He was nowhere to be found on the teeming New York streets and no one could remember seeing a red-haired, red-eyed little man lugging a black therapeutic machine. It was all too common a sight. In answer to an urgent telephone call, the police came immediately, four of them, led by a harassed young lieutenant of detectives named Smith. Smith just had time to ask, "Say, why don't you people put tags on things?" when there was an interruption. A man pushed his way past the policeman at the door. He was tall and gnarled and ugly, and his eyes were deep-set and bleakly blue. His clothes, unpressed and uncaring, hung on him like corrugated iron. "What do you want?" Lieutenant Smith asked. The ugly man flipped back his lapel, showing a small silver badge beneath. "I'm John Rath, General Motors Security Division." "Oh... Sorry, sir," Lieutenant Smith said, saluting. "I didn't think you people would move in so fast." Rath made a noncommittal noise. "Have you checked for prints. Lieutenant? The customer might have touched some other therapy machine." "I'll get right on it, sir," Smith said. It wasn't often that one of the operatives from GM, GE or sonal hand. If a local cop showed he was really clicking, there just might be the possibility of an Industrial Transfer... Rath turned to Follansby and Hoskins, and transfixed them with a gaze as piercing and as impersonal as a radar beam. "Let's have the full story," he said, taking a notebook and pencil from a shapeless pocket. He listened to the tale in ominous silence. Finally he closed his notebook, thrust it back into his pocket and said, "The therapeutic machines are a sacred trust. To give a customer the wrong machine is a betrayal of that trust, a violation of the Public Interest, and a defamation of the Company's good reputation." The manager nodded in agreement, glaring at his unhappy clerk. "A Martian model," Rath continued, "should never have been on the floor in the first place." "I can explain that," Follansby said hastily. "We needed a demonstrator model and I wrote to the Company, telling them -- " "This might," Rath broke in inexorably, "be considered a case of gross criminal negligence." clerk exchanged horrified looks. They were thinking of the General Motors Reformatory outside of Detroit, where Company offenders passed their days in sullen silence, monotonously drawing micro-circuits for pocket television sets. "However, that is out of my jurisdiction," Rath said. He turned his baleful gaze full upon Haskins. "You are certain that the customer never mentioned h i s name?" "No, sir. I mean yes. I'm sure," Haskins replied rattledly. "Did he mention any names at all?" Haskins plunged his face into his hands. He looked up and said eagerly, "Yes! He wanted to kill someone! A friend of his!" "Who?" Rath asked, with terrible patience. "The friend's name was -- let me think -- Magneton! That was it! Magneton! Or was it Morrison? Oh, dear..." Mr. Rath's iron face registered a rather corrugated disgust. People were useless as witnesses. Worse than useless, since they were frequently misleading. For reliability, give him a robot every time. "Didn't he mention anything significant?" "Let me think!" Haskins said, his face twisting into a fit of concentration. Rath waited. Mr. Follansby cleared his throat. "I was just thinking, Mr. Rath. About that Martian machine. It won't treat a Terran homicidal case as homicidal, will it?" "Of course not. Homicide is unknown on Mars." "Yes. But what will it do? Might it not reject the entire case as unsuitable? Then the customer would merely return the Regenerator with a complaint and we would -- " Mr. Rath shook his head. "The Rex Regenerator must treat if it finds evidence of psychosis. By Martian standards, the customer is a very sick man, a psychotic -- no matter what is wrong with him." Follansby removed his pincenez and polished them rapidly. "What will the machine do, then?" "It will treat him for the Martian illness most analogous to his case. Feem desire, I should imagine, with various complications. As for what will happen once treatment begins, I don't know. I doubt whether anyone knows, since it has never happened before. Offhand, I would say there are two major alternatives: The patient may reject the therapy out of hand, in which case he is left with his homicidal mania unabated. Or he may accept the Martian therapy and reach a cure." brightened. "Ah! A cure is possible!" "You don't understand," Rath said. "He may affect a cure -- of his non-existent Martian psychosis. But to cure something that is not there is, in effect, to erect a gratuitous delusional system. You might say that the machine would work in reverse, producing psychosis instead of removing it" Mr. Follansby groaned and leaned against a Bell Psychosomatica. "The result," Rath summed up, "would be to convince the customer that he was a Martian. A sane Martian, naturally." Haskins suddenly shouted, "I remember! I remember now! He said he worked for the New York Rapid Transit Corporation! I remember distinctly!" "That's a break," Rath said, reaching for the telephone. Haskins wiped his perspiring face in relief. "And I just remembered something else that should make it easier still." "What?" "The customer said he had been an alcoholic at one time. I'm sure of it, because he was inholic Reliever, until I talked him out of it. He had red hair, you know, and I've had a theory for some time about red-headedness and alcoholism. It seems -- " "Excellent," Rath said. "Alcoholism will be on his records. It narrows the search considerably." poration, the expression on his craglike face was almost pleasant. It was good, for a change, to find that a human could retain some significant facts. ber your goricae?" the Regenerator was saying. "No," Caswell answered wearily"Tell me, then, about your juvenile experiences with the thorastrian fleep." "Never had any." "Hmm. Blockage," muttered the machine. "Resentment. Repression. Are you sure you don't remember your goricae and what it meant to you? The experience is universal." "Not for me," Caswell said, swallowing a yawn. He had been undergoing mechanotherapy for close to four hours and it struck him as futile. For a while, he had talked voluntarily about his childhood, his mother and father, his older brother. But the Regenerator had asked him to put aside those fantasies. The patient's relationships to an imaginary parent or sibling, it explained, were unworkable and of minor importance psychologically. The important thing was the patient's feelings -- both revealed and repressed -- toward his goricae. "Aw, look," Caswell complained, "I don't even know what a goricae is." "Of course you do. You just won't let yourself know." "I don't know. Tell me." "It would be better if you told me." "How can I?" Caswell raged. "I don't know!" "What do you imagine a goricae would be?" "A forest fire," Caswell said. "A salt tablet. A jar of denatured alcohol. A small screwdriver. Am I getting warm? A notebook. A revolver -- " "These associations are meaningful," the Regenerator assured him. "Your attempt at randomness shows a clearly underlying pattern. Do you begin to recognize it?" "What in hell is a goricae?" Caswell roared. "The tree that nourished you during infancy, and well into puberty, if my theory about you is correct. Inadvertently, the goricate stifled your necessary rejection of the feem desire. This in turn gave rise to your present urge to dwark someone in a vlendish manner." "No tree nourished me." "You cannot recall the experience?" "Of course not. It never happened." "You are sure of that?" "Positive." "Not even the tiniest bit of doubt?" "No! No goricae ever nourished me. Look, I can break off these sessions at any time, right?" "Of course," the Regenerator said. "But it would not be advisable at this moment. You are expressing anger, resentment, fear. By your rigidly summary rejection -- " "Nuts," said Caswell, and pulled off the headband. Caswell stood up, yawned, stretched and massaged the back of his neck. He stood in front of the humming black machine and gave it a long leer. "You couldn't cure me of a common cold," he told it. Stiffly he walked the length of the living room and returned to the Regenerator. "Lousy fake!" he shouted. Caswell went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of beer. His revolver was still on the table, gleaming dully. Magnessen! You unspeakable treacherous filth! You fiend incarnate! You inhuman, hideous monster! Someone must destroy you, Magnessen! Someone... Someone? He himself would have to do it. Only he knew the bottomless depths of Magnessen's depravity, his viciousness, his disgusting lust for power. Yes, it was his duty, Caswell thought. But strangely, the knowledge brought him no pleasure. After all, Magnessen was his friend. He stood up, ready for action. He tucked the revolver into his right-hand coat pocket and glanced at the kitchen clock. Nearly six-thirty. Magnessen would be home now, gulping his dinner, grinning over his plans. This was the perfect time to take him. Caswell strode to the door, opened it, started through, and stopped. A thought had crossed his mind, a thought so tremendously involved, so meaningful, so farreaching in its implications that he was stirred to his depths. Caswell tried desperately to shake off the knowledge it brought. But the thought, permanently etched upon his memory, would not depart. Under the circumstances, he could do only one thing. He returned to the living room, sat down on the couch and slipped on the headband. The Regenerator said, "Yes?" "It's the damnedest thing," Caswell said, "but do you know, I think I do remember my goricae!" New York Rapid Transit Corporation by televideo and was put into immediate contact with Mr. Bemis, a plump, tanned man with watchful eyes. "Alocoholism?" Mr. Bemis repeated, after the problem was explained. Unobtrusively, he turned on his tape recorder. "Among our employees?" Pressing a button beneath his foot, Bemis alerted Transit Security, Publicity, Intercopany Relations and the Psychoanalysis Division. This done, he looked earnestly at Rath. "Not a chance of it, my dear sir. Just between us, why does General Motors really want to know?" Rath smiled bitterly. He should have anticipated this. differences in the past. Officially, there was cooperation between the two giant corporations. But for all practical purposes -- "The question is in terms of the Public Interest," Rath said. "Oh, certainly," Mr. Bemis replied, with a subtle smile. Glancing at his tattle board, he noticed that several company executives had tapped in on his line. This might mean a promotion, if handled properly. "The Public Interest of GM," Mr. Bemis added with polite nastiness. "The insinuation is, I suppose, that drunken conductors are operating our jetbuses and helis?" ' r "Of course not. I was searching for a single alcoholic predilection, an individual latency -- " "There's no possibility of it. We at Rapid Transit do not hire people with even the merest tendency in that direction. And may I suggest, sir, that you clean your own house before making implications about others?" And with that, Mr. Bemis broke the connection. No one was going to put anything over on him. "Dead end," Rath said heavily. He turned and shouted, "Smith! Did you find any prints?" Lieutenant Smith, his coat off and sleeves rolled up, bounded over. "Nothing usable, sir." Rath's thin lips tightened. It had been close to seven hours since the customer had taken the Martian machine. There was no telling what harm had been done by now. The customer would be justified in bringing suit against the Company. Not that the money mattered much; it was the bad publicity that was to be avoided at all cost. "Beg pardon, sir," Haskins said. Rath ignored him. What next? Rapid Transit was not going to cooperate. Would the Armed Services make their records available for scansion by somatotype and pigmentation? "Sir," Haskins said again. "What is it?" "I just remembered the customer's friend's name. It was Magnessen." "Are you sure of that?" "Absolutely," Haskins said, with the first confidence he had shown in hours. "I've taken the liberty of looking him up in the telephone book, sir. There's only one Manhattan listing under that name." Rath glowered at him from under shaggy eyebrows. "Haskins, I hope you are not wrong about this. I sincerely hope that." "I do too, sir," Haskins admitted, feeling his knees begin to shake. "Because if you are," Rath said, "I will... Never mind. Let's go!" rived at the address in fifteen minutes. It was an ancient brownstone and Magnessen's name was on a second-floor door. They knocked. The door opened and a stocky, crop-headed, shirt-sleeved man in his thirties stood before them. He turned slightly pale at the sight of so many uniforms, but held his ground. "What is this?" he demanded. "You Magnessen?" Lieutenant Smith barked. "Yeah. What's the beef? If it's about my hi-fi playing too loud, I can tell you that old hag downstairs -- " "May we come in?" Rath asked. "It's important." Magnessen seemed about to refuse, so Rath pushed past him, followed by Smith, Follansby, Haskins and a small army of policemen. Magnessen turned to face them, bewildered, defiant and more than a little awed. "Mr. Magnessen," Rath said, in the pleasantest voice he could muster, "I hope you'll forgive the intrusion. Let me assure you, it is in the Public Interest, as well as your own. Do you know a short, angry-looking, redrhaired, r e d eyed man?" "Yes," Magnessen said slowly and warily. Haskins let out a sigh of relief. "Would you tell us his name and address?" asked Rath. "I suppose you mean -- hold it! What's he done?' "Nothing." "Then what you want him for?" "There's no time for explanations," Rath said. "Believe me, it's in his own best interest, too. What is his name?" Magnessen studied Rath's ugly, honest face, trying to make up his mind. Lieutenant Smith said, "Come on, talk, Magnessen, if you know what's good for you. We want that name and we want it quick." It was the wrong approach. Magnessen lighted a cigarette, blew smoke in Smith's direction and inquired, "You got a warrant, buddy?" "You bet I have," Smith said, striding forward. "I'll warrant you, wise guy." "Stop it!" Rath ordered. "Lieutenant Smith, thank you for your assistance. I won't need you any longer." Smith left sulkily, taking his platoon with him. Rath said, "I apologize for Smith's over-eagerness. You had better hear the problem." Briefly but fully, he told the story of the customer and the Martian therapeutic machine. When he was finished, Magnessen looked more suspicious than ever. "You say he wants to kill me?" "Definitely." "That's a lie! I don't know what your game is, mister, but you'll never make me believe that. Elwood's my best friend. We been best friends since we was kids. We been in service together. Elwood would cut off his arm for me. And I'd do the same for him." "Yes, yes," Rath said impatiently, "in a sane frame of mind, he would. But your friend Elwood -- is that his first name or last?" "First," Magnessen said tauntingly. "Your friend Elwood is psychotic." "You don't know him. That guy loves me like a brother. Look, what's Elwood really done? Defaulted on some payments or something? I can help out." "You thick-headed imbecile!" Rath shouted. "I'm trying to save your life, and the life and sanity of your friend!" "But how do I know?" Magnessen pleaded. "You guys come busting in here -- " "You must trust me," Rath said. Magnessen studied Rath's face and nodded sourly. "His name's Elwood Caswell. He lives just down the block at number #." door was short, with red hair and red-rimmed eyes. His right hand was thrust into his coat packet. He seemed very calm. "Are you Elwood Caswell?" Rath asked. "The Elwood Caswell who bought a Regenerator early this afternoon at the Home Therapy Appliances Store?" "Yes," said Caswell. "Won't you come in?" Inside Caswell's small living room, they saw the Regenerator, glistening black and chrome, standing near the couch. It was unplugged. "Have you used it?" Rath asked anxiously. "Yes." Follansby stepped forward. "Mr. Caswell, I don't know how to explain this, but we made a terrible mistake. The Regenerator you took was a Martian model -- for giving therapy to Martians." "I know," said Caswell. "You do?" "Of course. It became pretty obvious after a while." "It was a dangerous situation," Rath said. "Especially for a man with your -- ah -- troubles." He studied Caswell covertly. The man seemed fine, but appearances were frequently deceiving, especially with psychotics. Caswell had been homicidal; there was no reason why he should not still be. And Rath began to wish he had not dismissed Smith and his policemen so summarily. Sometimes an armed squad was a comforting thing to have around. Caswell walked across the room to the therapeutic machine. One hand was still in his jacket pocket; the other he laid affectionately upon the Regenerator. "The poor thing tried its best," he said. "Of course, it couldn't cure what wasn't the r e." He laughed. "But it came very near succeeding!" face and said, in a trained casual tone, "Glad there was no harm, sir. The Company will, of course, reimburse you for your lost time and for your mental anguish -- " "Naturally," Caswell said. " -- and we will substitute a proper Terran Regenerator at once." "That won't be necessary." "It won't?" "No." Caswell's voice was decisive. "The machine's attempt at therapy forced me into a complete self-appraisal. There was a moment of absolute insight, during which I was able to evaluate and discard my homicidal intentions toward poor Magnessen." Rath nodded dubiously. "You feel no such urge now?" "Not in the slightest." Rath frowned deeply, started to say something, and stopped. He turned to Follansby and Haskins. "Get that machine out of here. I'll have  few things to say to you at the store." The manager and the clerk lifted the Regenerator and left. Rath took a deep breath. "Mr. Caswell, I would strongly advise that. you accept a new Regenerator from the Company, gratis. Unless a cure effected in a proper mechanotherapeutic manner, there is always the danger of a setback." "No danger with me," Caswell said, airily but with deep conviction. "Thank you for your consideration, sir. And good night." Rath shrugged and walked to the door. "Wait!" Caswell called. Rath turned. Caswell had taken his hand out of his pocket. In it was a revolver. Rath felt sweat trickle down his arms. He calculated the distance between himself and Caswell. Too far. "Here," Caswell said, extending the revolver butt-first. "I won't need this any longer." Rath managed to keep his face expressionless as he accepted the revolver and stuck it into a shapeless pocket. "Good night," Caswell said. He closed the door behind Rath and bolted it. At last he was alone. Caswell walked into the kitchen. He opened a bottle of beer, took a deep swallow and sat down at the kitchen table. He stared fixedly at a point just above and to the left of the clock. He had to form his plans now. There was no time to lose. Magnessen! That inhuman monster who cut down the Caswell goricae! Magnessen! The man who, even now, was secretly planning to infect New York with the abhorrent feem desire! Oh, Magnessen, I wish you a long, long life, filled with the torture I can inflict on you. And to start with... Caswell smiled to himself as he planned exactly how he would dwark Magnessen in a vlendish manner. All the things you are Nothing was simpler than the First Contact Code... "Monkey See, Monkey Do"... and it was Man who had to be the monkeyl T here are regulations to govern the conduct of First Contact spaceships, rules drawn up in desperation and followed in despair, for what rule can predict the effect of any action upon the mentality of an alien people? Jan Maarten was gloomily pondering this as he came into the atmosphere of Durell IV. He was a big, middle-aged man with thin ash-blond hair and a round worried face. Long ago, he had concluded that almost any rule was better than none. Therefore he followed his meticulously, but with an ever-present sense of uncertainty and human fallibility. These were ideal qualifications for the job of First Contacter. He circled the planet, low enough for observation, but not too low, since he didn't want to frighten the inhabitants. He noted the signs of a primitive-pastoral civilization and tried to remember everything he had learned in Volume #, Projected Techniques tor First Contact on So-catled Primitive-pastoral Worlds, published by the Department of Alien Psychology. Then he brought the ship down on a rocky, grasscovered plain, near a typical medium-sized village, but not too near, using the Silent Sam landing technique. "Prettily done," commented Crpswell, his assistant, who was too young to be bothered by uncertainties. Chedka, the Eborian linguist, said nothing. He was sleeping, as usual. Maarten grunted something and went to the rear of the ship to run his tests. Croswell took up his post at the viewport.  well reported half an hour later. "About a dozen of them, definitely humanoidal." Upon closer inspection, he saw that the natives of Durell were flabby, dead white in coloration and deadpan in expression. Croswell hesitated, then added, "They're not too handsome." "What are they doing?" Maarten asked. "Just looking us over," Croswell said. He was a slender young man with an unusually large and lustrous mustache which he had grown on the long journey out from Terra. He stroked it with the pride of a man who has been able to raise a really good mustache. "They're about twenty yards from the ship now," Croswell reported. He leaned forward, flattening his nose ludicrously against the port, which was constructed of one-way glass. Croswell could look out, but no one could look in. The Department of Alien Psychology had ordered the change last year, after a Department ship had botched a first contact on Carella II. The Carellans had stared into the ship, become alarmed at something within, and fled. The Department still didn't know what had alarmed them, for a second contact had never been successfully established. That mistake would never happen again. "What now?" Maarten called. "One of them's coming forward alone. Chief, perhaps. Or sacrificial offering." "What is he wearing?" "He has on a -- a sort of -- will you kindly come here and look for yourself?" Maarten, at his instrument bank, had been assembling a sketchy picture of Durell. The planet had a breathable atmosphere, an equitable climate, and gravity comparable to that of Earth. It had valuable deposits of radioactives and rare metals. Best of all, it tested free of the virulent micro-organisms and poisonous vapors which tended to make a Contacter's life feverishly short. Durell was going to be a valuable neighbor to Earth, provided the natives were friendly -- and the Contacters skillful. viewport and studied the natives. "They are wearing pastel clothing. We shall wear pastel clothing." "Check," said Croswell. "They are unarmed. We shall go unarmed." "Roger." "They are wearing sandals. We shall wear sandals as well." "To hear is to obey." "I notice they have no facial hair," Maarten said, with the barest hint of a smile. "I'm sorry, Ed, but that mustache -- " "Not my mustache!" Croswell yelped, quickly putting a protective hand over it. "I'm afraid so." "But, Jan, I've been six months raising it!" "It has to go. That should be obvious." "I don't see why," Croswell said indignantly. "Because first impressions are vital. When an imfavorable first impression has been made, subsequent contacts become difficult, sometimes impossible. Since we know nothing about these people, conformity is our safest course. We try to look like them, dress in colors that are pleasing, or at least acceptable to them, copy their gestures, interact within their framework of acceptance, endeavor in every way -- " "All right, all right," Croswell said. "I suppose I can grow another on the way back." They looked at each other; then both began laughing. Croswell had lost three mustaches in this manner. While Croswell shaved, Maarten stirred their linguist into wakefulness. Chedka was a lemurlike humanoid from Eboria IV, one of the few planets where Earth maintained successful relations. The Eborians were natural linguists, aided by the kind of associative ability found in nuisances who supply words in conversation -- only the Eborians were always right. They had wandered over a considerable portion of the Galaxy in their time and might have attained quite a place in it were it not that they needed twenty hours' sleep out of twentyfour. Croswell finished shaving and dressed in pale green coveralls and sandals. All three stepped through the degermifier. Maarten took a deep breath, uttered a silent prayer and opened the port. A low sigh went up from the crowd of Durellans, although the chief -- or sacrifice -- was silent. They were indeed humanlike, if one overlooked their pallor and the gentle sheeplike blandness of their feaures -- features upon which Maarten could read no trace of expression. "Don't use any facial contortions," Maarten warned Croswell. Slowly they advanced until they were ten feet from the leading Durellan. Then Maarten said in a low voice, "We come in peace." ten said they were wanderers from afar, come out of the Great Nothingness to engage in friendly discourse with the gentle people of Durell. He spoke of green and distant Earth, so like this planet, and of the fine and humble people of Earth who stretched out hands in greeting. He told of the great spirit of peace and cooperation that emanated from Earth, of universal friendship, and many other excellent things. Finally he was done. There was a long silence. "Did he understand it all?" Maarten whispered to Chedka. The Eborian nodded, waiting for the chief's reply. Maarten was perspiring from the exertion and Croswell couldn't stop nervously fingering his newly shaven upper lip. The chief opened his mouth, gasped, made a little half turn, and collapsed to the ground. It was an embarrassing moment and one uncovered by any amount of theory. The chief didn't rise; apparently it was not a ceremonial fall. As a matter of fact, his breathing seemed labored, like that of a man in a coma. Under the circumstances, the Contact team could only retreat to their ship and await further developments. Half an hour later, a native approached the ship and conversed then listend to the answer, which was so soft as to be almost undecipherable. "Chief says welcome," Chedka reported in his economical English. "Good, good," Maarten said. He took a few more steps forward and began to speak, pausing every now and then for translation. Earnestly, and with extreme conviction, he intoned Primary Speech BB-# (for humanoid, primitive pastoral, tentatively non-aggressive aliens). Even Croswell, who was impressed by very little, had to admit it was a fine speech. Maarwith Chedka, keeping a wary eye on the Earthmen and departing immediately. "What did he say?" Croswell asked. "Chief Morri apologizes for fainting," Chedka told them. "He said it was inexcusably bad manners." "Ah!" Maarten exclaimed. "His fainting might help us, after all -- make him eager to repair his 'impoliteness.' Just as long as it was a fortuitous circumstance, unrelated to us -- " "Not," Chedka said. "Not what?" "Not unrelated," the Eborian said, curling up and going to sleep. linguist awake. "What else did the chief say? How was his fainting related to us?" Chedka yawned copiously. "The chief was very embarrassed. He faced the wind from your mouth as long as he could, but the alien odor -- " "My breath?" Maarten asked. "My breath knocked him out?" Chedka nodded, giggled unexpectedly and went to sleep. Evening came, and the long dim twilight of Durell merged imperceptibly into night. In the village, cooking fires glinted through the surrounding forest and winked out one by one. But lights burned within the spaceship until dawn. And when the sun rose, Chedka slipped out of the ship on a mission into the village. Croswell brooded over his morning coffee, while Maarten rummaged through the ship's medicine chest. "It's purely a temporary setback," Croswell was saying hopefully. "Little things like this are bound to happen. Remember that time on Dingoforeaba VI -- " "It's little things that close planets forever," Maarten said. "But how could anyone possibly guess -- " "I should have foreseen it," Maarten growled angrily. "Just because our breath hasn't been offensive anywhere else -- here it is!" Triumphantly he held up a bottle of pink tablets. "Absolutely guaranteed to neutralize any breath, even that of a hyena. Have a couple." Croswell accepted the pills. "Now what?" "Now we wait until -- aha! What did he say?" Chedka slipped through the entry port, rubbing his eyes. "The chief apologizes for fainting." "We know that. What else?" "He welcomes you to the village of Lannit at your convenience. The chief feels that this incident shouldn't alter the course of friendship between two peaceloving courteous peoples." Maarten sighed with relief. He cleared his throat and asked hesitantly, "Did you mention to him about the forthcoming -- ah -- improvement in our breaths?" "I assured him it would be corrected," Chedka said, "although it never bothered me." "Fine, fine. We will leave for the village now. Perhaps you should take one of these pills?" "There's nothing wrong with my breath," the Eborian said complacently. They set out at once for the village of Lannit. " mitive-pastoral people, one looks for simple but highly symbolic gestures, since that is what they understand best. Imagery! Clear-cut and decisive parallels! Few words but many gestures! Those were the rules in dealing with primitive-pastorals. As Maarten approached the village, a natural and highly symbolic ceremony presented itself. The natives were waiting in their village, which was in a clearing in the forest. Separating forest from village was a dry stream bed, and across that bed was a small stone bridge. Maarten advanced to the center of the bridge and stopped, beaming benignly on the Durellans. When he saw several of them shudder and turn away, he smoothed out his features, remembering his own injunction on facial contortions. He paused for a long moment. "What's up?" Croswell asked, stopping in front of the bridge. In a loud voice, Maarten cried, "Let this bridge symbolize the link, now eternally forged, that joins this beautiful planet with -- " Croswell called out a warning, but Maarten didn't know what was wrong. He stared at the villagers; they had made no movement. "Get off the bridge!" Croswell shouted. But before Maarten could move, the entire structure had collapsed under him and he fell bone-shakingly into the dry stream. "Damnedest thing I ever saw," Croswell said, helping him to his feet. "As soon as you raised your voice, that stone began to pulverize. Sympathetic vibration, I imagine." Now Maarten understood why the Durellans spoke in whispers. He struggled to his feet, then groaned and sat down again. "What's wrong?" Croswell asked. "I seem to have wrenched my ankle," Maarten said miserably. Chief Moreri came up, followed by twenty or so villagers, made a short speech and presented Maarten with a walking stick of carved and polished black wood. "Thanks," Maarten muttered, standing up and leaning gingerly on the cane. "What did he say?" he asked Chedka. "The chief said that the bridge was only a hundred years old and in good repair," Chedka translated. "He apologizes that his ancestors didn't build it better." "Hmm," Maarten said. "And the chief says that you are probably an unlucky man." He might be right, Maarten thought. Or perhaps Earthmen were just a fumbling race. For all their good intentions, population after population feared them, hated them, envied them, mainly on the basis of unfavorable first impressions. Still, there seemed to be a chance here. What else could go wrong? Forcing a smile, then quickly erasing it, Maarten limped into the village beside Moreri. Durellan civilization was of a low order. A limited use had been made of wheel and lever, but the concept of mechanical advantage had been carried no further. There was evidence of a rudimentary knowledge of plane geometry and a fair idea of astronomy. Artistically, however, the Durellans were adept and surprisingly sophisticated, particularly in wood carving. Even the simplest huts had bas-relief panels, beautifully conceived and executed. "Do you think I could take some photographs?" Cr os we #I asked. "I see no reason why not," Maarten said. He ran his fingers lovingly over a large panel, carved of the same straightgrained black wood that formed his cane. The finish was as smooth as skin beneath his fingertips. The chief gave his approval and Croswell tooks photographs and tracings of Durellan home, market and temple decorations. Maarten wandered around, gently touching the intricate basreliefs, speaking with some of the natives through Chedka, and generally sorting out his impressions. The Durelleans, Maarten judged, were highly intelligent and had a potential comparable to that of Homo sapiens. Their lack of a defined technology was more the expression of a cooperation with nature rather than a flaw in their makeup. They seemed inherently peace-loving and non-aggressive -- valuable neighbors for an Earth that, after centuries of confusion, was striving toward a similar goal. This was going to be the basis of his report to the Second Contact Team. With it, he hoped to be able to add, A favorable impression seems to have been left concerning Earth. No unusual difficulties are to be expected. Chedka had been talking earnestly with Chief Moreri. Now, looking slightly more wide awake than usual, he came over and conferred with Maarten in a hushed voice. Maarten nodded, keeping his face expressionless, and went over to Croswell, who was snapping his last photographs. "All ready for the big show?" Maarten asked. "What show?" "Moreri is throwing a feast for us tonight," Maarten said. "Very big, very important feast. A final gesture of good will and all that." Although his tone was casual, there was a gleam of deep satisfaction in his eyes. Croswell's reaction was more immediate. "Then we've made it! The contact is successful!" Behind him, two natives shook at the loudness of his voice and tottered feebly away. "We've made it," Maarten whispered, "if we watch our step. They're a fine, understanding people -- but we do seem to grate on them a bit." Croswell had completed a chemical examination of the Durellan foods and found nothing harmful to humans. They took several more pink tablets, changed coveralls and sandals, bathed again in the degermifier, and proceeded to the feast. The first course was an orangegreen vegetable that tasted like squash. Then Chief Moreri gave a short talk on the importance of intercultural relations. They were served a dish resembling rabbit and Croswell was called upon to give a speech. "Remember," Maarten whispered, "whisper!" Croswell stood up and began to speak. Keeping his voice down and his face blank, he began to enumerate the many similarities between Earth and Durell, depending mainly on gestures to convey his message. Chedka translated. Maarten nodded his approval. The chief nodded. The feasters nodded. Croswell made his last points and sat down. Maarten clapped him on the shoulder. "Well done, Ed. You've got a natural gift for -- what's wrong?" Croswell had a startled and incredulous look on his fact. "Look!" Maarten turned. The chief and the feasters, their eyes open and staring, were still nodding. "Chedka!" Maarten whispered. "Speak to them!" The Eborian asked the chief a question. There was no response. The chief continued his rhythmic nodding. "Those gestures!" Maarten said. "You must have hypnotized them!" He scratched his head, then coughed once, loudly. The Durellans stopped nodding, blinked their eyes and began to talk rapidly and nervously among themselves. "They say you've got some strong powers," Chedka translated at random. "They say that aliens are pretty queer people and doubt if they can be trusted." "What does the chief say?" Maarten asked. "The chief believes you're all right. He is telling them that you meant no harm." "Good enough. Let's stop while we're ahead." He stood up, followed by Croswell and Chedka. "We are leaving now," he told the chief in a whisper, "but we beg permission for others of our kind to visit you. Forgive the mistakes we have made; they were due only to ignorance of your ways." Maarten went on whispering, his face expressionless, his hands at his sides. He spoke of the oneness of the Galaxy, the joys of cooperation, peace, the exchange of goods and art, and the essential solidarity of all human life. Moreri, though still a little dazed from the hypnotic experience, answered that the Earthmen would always be welcome. Impulsively, Croswell held out his hand. The chief looked at it for a moment, puzzled, then took it, obviously wondering what to do with it and why. He gasped in agony and pulled his hand back. They could see deep burns blotched red against his skin. "What could have -- " "Perspiration!" Maarten said. "It's an acid. Must have an almost instantaneous effect upon their particular makeup. Let's get out of here." gether and they had picked up some stones and pieces of wood. The chief, although still in pain, was arguing with them, but the Earthmen didn't wait to hear the results of the discussion. They retreated to their ship, as fast as Maarten could hobble with the help of his cane. The forest was dark behind them and filled with suspicious movements. Out of breath, they arrived at the spaceship. Croswell, in the lead, sprawled over a tangle of grass and fell headfirst against the port with a resounding clang. "Damn!" he howled in pain. The ground rumbled beneath them, began to tremble and slide away. "Into the ship!" Maarten ordered. They managed to take off before the ground gave way completely. thetic vibration again," Croswell said, several hours later, when the ship was in space. "But of all the luck -- to be perched on a rock fault!" Maarten sighed and shook his head. "I really don't know what to do. I'd like to go back, explain to them but -- " "We've outlived our welcome," Croswell said. "Apparently. Blunders, nothing but blunders. We started out badly, and everything we did made it worse." "It is not what you do," Chedka explained in the most sympathetic voice they had ever heard him use. "It's not your fault. It's what you are." Maarten considered that for a moment. "Yes, you're right. Our voices shatter their land, our expressions disgust them, our gestures hypnotize them, our breath asphyxiates them, our perspiration burns them. Oh, Lord!" "Lord, Lord," Croswell agreed glumly. "We're living chemical factories -- only turning out poison gas and corrosives exclusively." "But that is not all you are," Chedka said. "Look." He held up Maarten's walking stick. Along the upper part, where Maarten had handled it, longdormant buds had burst into pink and white flowers, and their scent filled the cabin. "You see?" Chedka said. "You are this, also." "That stick was dead," Croswell mused. "Some oil in our skin, I imagine." Maarten shuddered. "Do you suppose that all the carvings we touched -- the huts -- the temple -- " "I should think so," Croswell said. Maarten closed his eyes and visualized it, the sudden bursting into bloom of the dead, dried wood. "I think theyil understand," he said, trying very hard to believe himself. "It's a pretty symbol and they're quite an understanding people. I think they'll approve of -- well, at least some of the things we are." # Star Shelf by Frank Herbert Doubleday and Co., Inc., # nating story of undersea warfare of the future by a comparative newcomer to the field, but I doubt if there is any established writer who would not be tickled to claim this tense and well-written novel as his own. It concerns the mission of an American subtug to get through the Eastern Powers' defensive cordon around Europe in order to pirate desperately needed oil from a secret American-drilled well off the coast of Norway, about which the enemy knows nothing. In spite of their ignorance of the well, the EP subs have managed to sink twenty out of tweilty subtugs and their mile-long tows. Obviously they have something that the Allies don't and that might turn out to be "sleepers" or turncoats. It is put squarely in the lap of a BuPsych Ensign, schooled in electronics, to take over as Electronics Officer of a four-man subtug in order to prevent a neurotic  shelf crackup of the unstable skipper, police the crew to prevent sabotage and to bring back information concerning enemy espionage methods. This yarn from Astounding S-F is the odyssey of the Fenian Ram and a gripping tale it is. by Grotf Conklin. The Vanguard Press, Inc., # B y latest count, this is number five in Conklin's "idea" series of anthologies. Unlike many rival anthologists, Conklin makes a concerted effort within the framework of his "idea" to give his audience as wide a selection as possible, at times even straying slightly beyond the limits, if story quality warrants. It would not be true to report that the average for the collection runs A#l, but it certainly does better than B-plus. And it's good to see old-timers like Miles J. Breuer and S. Fowler Wright represented, the latter with a yarn written for the anthology. Sheckley. Ballantine Books, Inc., #c lection of Sheckley short stories shows the same unique approach to standard s-f plots as his first entry. An even dozen stories make up the book and Galaxy can proudly claim half. Remember "Hunting Problem," which takes an old chestnut of a plot: Man on a hostile new planet turning out to be quarry instead of hunter? Make The Hunter an immature Scout of the Brave Bison Patrol going after the skins of bull Mirashes (Man) for his Scout Badge, endow him with the fantastic abilities of his incredibly advanced race, and you have a good idea of the ingredients Sheckley uses in whipping up a tasty yarn. And how about "Skulking Permit," concerning an isolated Earth colony which no longer has such proven items of civilization as a Jail, Post Office, Little Red Schoolhouse or even a Thief? With an imminent visit from Earth officials pending, who will be the Town Thief? The quality is not uniform -- whose is? -- but very high in inventiveness, ingenuity and reader appeal. Frederick Fell, # N umber ten in the annual "Year's Best" collection is right up in the same qualitative category with its worthy forebears, even though Dikty is carrying along without Bleiler, strange as that may sound to the ear after all these years. The selection of stories is large -- twenty, including two novellas, ranging from good to very good, although two could very well have been omitted. An excellent feature of the book is the Science Fiction Book Index, a complete compilation of all publications of #, assembled by Earl Kemp. Both the novellas, "Exile" by Everett B. Cole and "Nightmare Blues" by Frank Herbert who also wrote Dragon in the Sea, reviewed this month, appeared in Astounding S-F and are well worth reading. A big (over # pages) bargain, both in size and quality. by Frederik Pohl. Ballantine Books, Inc., #c debt of gratitude to Pohl for giving up his authors' agency and concentrating on full-time writing. This volume is a case in point to demonstrate his considerable versatility. It ranges from the horror of "Let The Ants Try" through the whimsical fantasy of "Grandy Devil" to the farcical "What To Do Until The Analyst Comes." Readers of this magazine will remember the two longer works in the book. They are "The Mapmakers," a highly inventive yarn about a lost galactic charting expedition with only a blinded navigator to rely on to get them home, and the disturbing moodprovocative "Tunnel Under The World" with its wallop ending. A must for anyone who enjoys the maturing of a talent. by Dagobert D. Runes. Philosophical Library, # T his is  straight philosophical essay, but I have included it in this month's column because of the intriguing ideas of the author concerning prehistoric Man. I have never seen elsewhere the visualization of early Man as a berry-picking, nut-eating vegetarian. According to Dr. Runes, Man never tasted meat until his intellect developed to the tool-making level, at which time he changed from a defensive animal to an omnivore. Is it possible that H. G. Wells in his classic A Story ol the Stone Age could have been that far off the beam? by Rufus Suter. Vantage Press, # #) L ast month's Men, Microscopes and Living Things, which also began with Aristotle, set down personal details of the lives of ten scientists for the edification of the young reader. This tome, which also concerns itself primarily with ten, approaches them through their influence on their contemporaries and, more important, on their impact on the world of their tomorrows. No juvenile this, but an adult, scholarly study presented in an easy style. E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp. Gnome Press, # T his is the sixth in the Conan series, which threatens never to end. Even though R. E. Howard died approximately two decades ago, it appears that "hitherto unpublished manuscripts" keep coming to view. In this instance, four unrelated adventures have been woven by L. Sprague de Camp into the Conan saga. Action and blood there are aplenty in the good old tradition and Howard fans will find exciting reading. As for me, I think de Camp did a remarkable job when he tossed his inhibitions to the wind and out-Conaned Conan in his own Tritonian Ring of a few years back. #am. The Macmillan Co., # N OW there's a sure-fire title for a juvenile if I ever saw one! Fortunately, the story lives up to its promise as it tells of Charley Holt, an orphaned youngster, and his horse Navajo, and their experiences with the strange ship that landed between the humps of Saddle Mountain. The tale is particularly tense in the first half after Charley has made his discovery of the ship and its strange occupants and attempts to avoid capture. The fact that he doesn't and suffers incarceration on another planet as a result makes for an exciting book for teenagers. by Harry Revel. M-G-M Records has ever reviewed a record before, but what S-F addict could overlook an item with such a title as this? It must be admitted that this pleasantly listenable album is considerably more reminiscent of Here Comes Mr. Jordan than it is of H. P. Lovecraft's "Colour out of Space" in flavor, but Hollywood's ethereal choirs sound pretty good on wax as well. Horrer Howce Atroshus speling, eh? Laff it off and what'll be more atroshusly parsed is -- you! had turned a delicate pea-green. He closed the shutter on the opening very quickly indeed. Nonetheless, he said in nearly his usual voice, "I'm afraid it's a trifle literary. Freeman. Reminds of that thing of Yeats' -- 'What monstrous, beast. Its time come, uh, round again, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?' But the people who go to a horror house for amusement aren't literary. It wouldn't affect them they way it did me." He giggled nervously. No answering emotion disturbed the normal sullenness of Freeman's face. "I thought there was a nice feel to it," he said obstinately. "I wouldn't have put so much time in on this stuff unless I thought you'd be interested. Research is more my line. I could have made a lot more money working on one of the government projects." "You didn't have much choice, did you?" Dickson-Hawes said pleasantly. "A political past is such a handicap, unless one's willing to risk prosecution for perjury." "I'm as loyal as anybody! For the last five years -- eight, ten -- all I've wanted to do was make a little cash. The trouble is, I always have such rotten luck." "Um." Dickson-Hawes wiped his forehead unobtrusively. "Well, about your little effort. There are some nice touches, certainly. The idea of the monstrous womb, alone on the seashore, slowly swelling, and..." In the folds of his handkerchief, he stifled a sort of cough. "No, I'm afraid it's too poetic. I can't use it, old chap." The two men moved away from the shuttered opening. Freeman said, "Then Spring Scene is the only one you're taking?" "Of those of yours I've seen. It's horrid enough, but not too horrid. Haven't you anything else?" Dickson-Hawes' voice was eager, but eagerness seemed to be mixed with other things -- reluctance, perhaps, and the fear of being afraid. F reeman fingered Ws lower lip. "There's the Well," he said after a moment. "It needs a little more work done on it, but -- I guess you could look at it." "I'd be delighted to," DicksonHawes agreed heartily. "I do hope you understand, old man, that there's quite a lot of money involved in this." "Yeah. You've really got the capital lined up? Twice before, you were sure you had big money interested. But the deals always fell through. I got pretty tired of it." "This time it's different. The money's already in escrow, not to mention what I'm putting in myself. We intend a coast-to-coast network of horror houses in every gayway, playland and amusement park." "Yeah. Well, come along." They went down the corridor to another door. Freeman unlocked it. "By the way," he said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your voice down. Some of the machinery in this stuff's -- delicate. Sensitive." "By all means. Of course." They entered. To their right was an old brick house, not quite in ruin. To the left, a clump of blackish trees cut off the sky. Just in front of them was the moss-covered coping of an old stone well. The ground around the well was slick with moisture. Dickson-Hawes sniffed appreciatively. "I must say you've paid wonderful attention to detail. It's exactly like being out of doors. It even smells froggy and damp." "Thanks," Freeman replied with a small, dour smile. "What happens next?" "Look down in the well." Rather gingerly, DicksonHawes approached. He leaned over. From the well came a gurgling splash. Dickson-Hawes drew back abruptly. Now his face was not quite greenish; it was white. "My word, what a monster!" he gasped. "What is it, anyway?" "Clockwork," Freeman answered. "It'll writhe for thirty-six hours on one winding. I couldn't use batteries, you know, on account of the water. That greenish flash in the eyes comes from prisms. And the hair is the same thing you get on those expensive fur coats, only longer. I think they call it plasti-mink." "What happens if I keep leaning over? Or if I drop pebbles down on it?" "It'll come out at you." disappointed. "Anything else?" "The sky gets darker and noises come out of the house. Isn't that enough?" Dickson-Hawes coughed. "Well, of course we'd have to soup it up a bit. Put an electrified rail around the well coping and perhaps make the approach to the well slippery so the customers would have to grasp the hand rail. Install a couple of air jets to blow the girls' dresses up. And naturally make it a good deal darker so couples can neck when the girl gets scared. But it's a nice little effort. Freeman, very nice indeed. I'm almost certain we can use it. Yes, we ought to have your well in our horror house." Dickson-Hawes' voice had rung out strongly on the last few words. Now there came another watery splash from the well. Freeman seemed disturbed. "I told you to keep your voice down," he complained. "The partitions are thin. When you talk that loud, you can be heard all over the place. It isn't good for the -- machinery." "Sorry." "Don't let it happen again... I don't think the customers ought to neck in here. This isn't the place for it. If they've got to neck, let them do it outside. In the corridor." "You have no idea, old chap, what people will do in a darkened corridor in a horror house. It seems to stimulate them. But you may be right. Letting them stay here to neck might spoil the illusion. We'll try to get them on out." "Okay. How much are you paying me for this?" "Our lawyer will have to discuss the details," said DicksonHawes. He gave Freeman a smile reeking with synthetic charm. "I assure you he can draw up a satisfactory contract. I can't be more definite until I know what the copyright or patent situation would be." "I don't think my Well could be patented," Freeman said. "There are details in the machinery nobody understands but me. rd have to install each unit in your horror house network myself. There ought to be a clause in the contract about my per diem expenses and a traveling allowance." "I'm sure we can work out something mutually satisfactory." "Uh... let's get out of here. This is an awfully damp place to do much talking in." again. Freeman locked the door. "Have you anything else?" Dickson-Hawes asked. Freeman's eyes moved away. "No." "Oh, come now, old chap. Don't be coy. As I told you before, there's money involved." "What sort of thing do you want?" "Well, horrid. Though not quite so poetically horrid as what you have behind the shutter. That's a little too much. Perhaps something with a trifle more action. With more customer participation. Both the Well and Spring Scene are on the static side." "Uh." They walked along the corridor. Freeman said slowly, "I've been working on something. There's action and customer participation in it, all right, but I don't know. It's full of bugs. I just haven't had time to work it out yet." "Let's have it, old man, by all means!" "Not so loud! You've got to keep your voice down. Otherwise I can't take you in." Freeman himself was speaking almost in a whisper. "All right. Here." They had stopped before a much more substantial door than the one behind which the Well lay. There was a wide rubber flange all around it, and it was secured at top and bottom by two padlocked hasps. In the top of the door, three or four small holes had been bored, apparently to admit air. "You must have something pretty hot locked up behind all that," Dickson-Hawes remarked. "Yeah." Freeman got a key ring out of his pocket and began looking over it. Dickson-Hawes glanced around appraisingly. "Somebody's been writing on your wall," he observed. "Rotten speller, I must say." Freeman raised his eyes from the key ring and looked in the direction the other man indicated. On the wall opposite the door, just under the ceiling, somebody in what looked like blackish ink. The effect of the ill-spelled words on Freeman was remarkable. He dropped the key ring with a clatter, and when he straightened from picking it up, his hands were quivering. "I've changed my mind," he said. He put the key ring back in his pocket. "I always did have the damnedest luck." back against the wall and crossed his ankles. "How do you get your ideas, Freeman?" "Oh, all sorts of ways. Things I read, things people tell me, things I see. All sorts of ways." Both men were speaking in low tones. "They're amazing. And your mechanical effects -- I really don't see how you get machinery to do the things you make it do." Freeman smiled meagerly. "I've always been good at mechanics. Particularly radio and signaling devices. Relays. Communication problems, you might say. I can communicate with anything. Started when I was a kid." There was a silence. DicksonHawes kept leaning against the wall. A close observer. Freeman noticed almost a tic, a fluttering of his left eyelid. At last Freeman said, "How much are you paying for the Well?" Dickson-Hawes closed his eyes and opened them again. He may have been reflecting that while a verbal contract is quite as binding as a written one, it is difficult to prove the existence of a verbal contract to which there are no witnesses. He answered, "Five thousand in a lump sum, I think, and a prorated share of the net admissions for the first three years." There was an even longer silence. Freeman's face relaxed at the mention of a definite sum. He said, "How are your nerves? I need money so damned bad." Dickson-Hawes' face went so blank that it would seem the other man had touched a vulnerable spot. "Pretty good, I imagine," he said in a carefully modulated voice. "I saw a good deal of action during the war." Cupidity and some other emotion contended in Freeman's eyes. He fished out the key ring again. "Look, you must not make a noise. No yelling or anything like that, no matter what you see. They're very -- I mean the machinery's delicate. It's full of bugs I haven't got rid of yet. The whole thing will be a lot less ghastly later on. I'm going to keep the basic idea, make it just as exciting as it is now, but tone it down plenty." "I understand." Freeman looked at him with a frown. "Don't make a noise," he cautioned again. "Remember, none of this is real." He fitted the key into the first of the padlocks on the stoutly built door. The second padlock was a little stilT. Freeman had to fidget with it. Finally he got the door open. The two men stepped through it. They were outside. expressing it: They were outside. If the illusion had been good in the Well, here it was perfect. They stood in a sort of safety island on the edge of a broad freeway, where traffic poured by in an unending rush eight lanes wide. It was the time of day when, though visibility is really better than at noon, a nervous motorist or two has turned on his parking lights. Besides the two men, the safety island held a new, shiny,  eggplant colored sedan. Dickson-Hawes turned a bewildered face on his companion. "Freeman," he said in a whisper, "did you make all this?" For the first time. Freeman grinned. "Pretty good, isn't it?" he replied, also in a whisper. He opened the car door and slid into the driver's seat. "Get in. We're going for a ride. Remember, no noise." The other man obeyed. Freeman started the car -- it had a very quiet motor -- and watched until a lull in the traffic gave him a chance to swing out from the curb. He stepped on the accelerator. The landscape began to move by. Cars passed them. They passed some cars. Dickson-Hawes looked for the speedometer on the dashboard and couldn't find it. A garage, a service station, a billboard went by. The sign on the garage The service station had conical pumps. The tomatoes on the billboard were purple and green. Dickson-Hawes was breathing shallowly. He said, "Freeman -- where are we?" Once more, the other man grinned. "You're getting just the effect I mean to give," he retorted in a pleased whisper. "At first, the customer thinks he's on an ordinary freeway, with ordinary people hurrying home to their dinners. Then he begins to notice all sorts of subtle differences. Everything's a little off-key. It adds to the uneasiness." "Yes, but -- what's the object of all this? What are we trying to do?" "Get home to our dinners, like everyone else." "Where does the -- well, difficulty come in?" "Do you see that car in the outer lane?" They were still conversing in whispers. "Black, bullet-shaped, quite' small, going very fast?" "Yes." "Keep your eye on it." The black car was going very fast. It caught up with a blue sedan in front of it, cut in on it and began to crowd it over to the curb. The blue sedan tried to shake off the black car, but without success. If the driver didn't want to be wrecked, he had to get over. T?OR A while, the two cars ran parallel. The black car began to slow down and crowd more aggressively than ever. Suddenly it cut obliquely in front of the sedan and stopped. There was a frenzied scream of brakes from the sedan. It stopped with its left fender almost against the black bulletshaped car. The bodies were so close, there was no room for the sedan driver to open his door. Freeman had let the car he was driving slow down, presumably so Dickson-Hawes could see everything. For a moment, there was nothing to see. Only for a moment. Then two -- or was it three? -- long, blackish, extremely thin arms came out from the black car and fumbled with the glass in the window of the sedan. The glass was forced down. The arms entered the sedan. From the sedan there came a wild burst of shrieking. It was like the flopping, horrified squawks of a chicken at the chop#T# ping block. The shrieks were still going on when the very thin arms came out with a -- The light hid nothing. The three very thin arms came out with a plucked-off human arm. They threw it into the interior of the black car. The three arms invaded the sedan once more. This time, Dickson-Hawes had turned neither white nor greenish, but a blotchy gray. His mouth had come open all around his teeth, in the shape of a rigid oblong with raised, corded edges. It was perfectly plain that if he was not screaming, it was solely because his throat was too paralyzed. Freeman gave his passenger only a momentary glance. He was looking into the rear-view mirror. He began to frown anxiously. blue sedan had stopped. Dickson-Hawes covered his face with his hands while Freeman drove past it and the other car. When the group lay behind them, he asked in a shaking whisper, "Freeman, are there any more of them? The black cars, I mean?" "Yeah. One of them's coming toward us now." Dickson-Hawes' head swiveled around. Another of the black cars was hurtling toward them through the traffic, though it was still a long way behind. Dickson-Hawes licked his lips. "Is it -- after us?" "I think so." "But why? Why -- us?" "Part of the game. Wouldn't be horrid otherwise. Hold on. I'm going to try to shake it off." Freeman stepped down on the accelerator. The eggplant-colored sedan shot ahead. It was a very fast car and Freeman was evidently an expert and nerveless driver. They slid through nonexistent holes in the traffic, glanced off from fenders, slipped crazily from lane to lane, a shuttle in a pattern of speed and escape. The black car gained on them. No gymnastics. A bulletlike directness. But it was nearer all the time. Dickson-Hawes gave a sort of whimper. "No noise," Freeman cautioned in a fierce whisper. "That'll bring them down for sure. Now!" He pressed the accelerator all the way down. The eggplant-colored car bounced and swayed. There was a tinkle of glass from the headlights of the car on the left as the sedan brushed it glancingly. Dickson-Hawes moaned, but realized they had gained the length of several cars. Momentarily, the black pursuer fell behind. They went through two red lights in a row. So did the black bullet. It began to edge in on them. Closer and closer. Faster and faster. Dickson-Hawes had slumped forward with his head on his chest. The black car cut toward them immediately. Freeman snarled. Deliberately, he swung out into the path of the pursuer. For a second, it gave ground. "Bastards," Freeman said grimly. The black car cut in on them like the lash of a whip. The sedan slithered. Hub caps grated on concrete. The sedan swayed drunkenly. Brakes howled. Dickson-Hawes, opening his eyes involuntarily for the crash, saw that they were in a safety island. The same safety island, surely, from which they had started out? The black car went streaking on by. "I hate those things," Freeman said bitterly. "Damned Voom. If I could -- But never mind. We got away. We're safe. We're home." move. "I said we're safe," Freeman repeated. He opened the car door and pushed the other man out through it. Half-shoving, half-carrying, he led him to the door from which they had entered the freeway. It was still the time of day at which nervous motorists turn on their parking lights. Freeman maneuvered DicksonHawes through the door. He closed it behind them and fastened the padlocks in the hasps. They were out in the corridor again -- the corridor on whose Freeman drew a deep breath. "Well. Worked better than I thought it would. I was afraid you'd yell. I thought you were the type that yells. But I guess the third time's the charm." "What?" "I mean I guess my goddam luck has turned at last. Yeah. What did you think of it?" Dickson-Hawes swallowed, unable to answer. Freeman regarded him. "Come along to my office and have a drink. You look like you need one. And then you can tell me what you think of this setup." The office was in the front of the house, down a couple of steps. Dickson-Hawes sank into the chair Freeman pulled out for him. He gulped down Freeman's dubious reddish Bourbon gratefully. After the second drink, he was restored enough to ask, "Freeman, was it real?" "Certainly not," the other man said promptly. "It looked awfully real," Dickson-Hawes objected. "That arm..." He shuddered. "A dummy," Freeman answered promptly once more. "You didn't see any blood, did you? Of course not. It was a dummy arm." "I hope so. I don't see how you could have made all the stuff we saw. There's a limit to what machinery can do. I'd like another drink." Freeman poured. "What did you think of it?" Color was coming back to Dickson-Hawes' cheeks. "It was the most horrible experience I ever had in my life." Freeman grinned. "Good. People like to be frightened. That's why roller-coaster rides are so popular." "Not that much, people don't. Nobody would enjoy a rollercoaster ride if he saw cars crashing all around him and people getting killed. You'll have to tone it down a lot. An awful lot." "But you liked it?" "On the whole, yes. It's a unique idea. But you'll have to tone it down about seventy-five per cent." can be done. But I'll have to have a definite commitment from you before I undertake such extensive changes." "Urn." "There are other places I could sell it, you know," Freeman said pugnaciously. "Jenkins of Amalgamated might be interested. Or Silberstein." "Jenkins lit out with about six thousand of Amalgamated's dollars a couple of months ago. Nobody's seen him since. And they found Silberstein wandering on the streets last week in a sort of fit. Didn't you know? He's in a mental home. You won't be selling either of them much of anything." Freeman sighed, but made no attempt to dispute these distressing facts. "Fll have to have a definite commitment from you before I make that many major changes," he repeated stubbornly. "Well..." Fright and whiskey may have made Dickson-Hawes a little less cautious than usual. "We could pay you fifty a week for a couple of months while you worked on it, as advance against royalties. If we didn't like the final results, you wouldn't have to give back the advance." "It's robbery. Apprentice mechanics earn more than that. Make it sixty-five." "I hfite haggling. Tell you what. We'll make it sixty." Freeman shrugged tiredly. "Let'.s get it down in black and white. I'll just draw up a brief statement of the terms and you can sign it." "Well, okay." Freeman stooped and began to rummage in a desk drawer. Once he halted and seem to listen. He opened another drawer. "Thought I had some papier... Yeah, here it is." He turned on the desk light and began to write. Dickson-Hawes leaned back in his chair and sippied at Freeman's whiskey. He crossed his legs and recrossed them. He was humming "Lili Marlene" loudly and off pitch. His head rested against the wall. Freeman's pen moved across the paper. "That's about it," he said at last. He was smiling. "Yeah. I -- " There was a splintering crash, the sound of lath and plaster breaking. Freeman looked up from the unsigned agreement to see the last of his entrepreneurs -- the last, the indubitable last -- being borne off in the long black arms of the Voom. It was the first time they had gone through the partitions in search of a victim, but the partitions were thin and the unsuccessful chase on the highway had excited them more than Freeman had realized. There has to be a first time for any entity, even for Voom. Dickson-Hawes' shrieks died away. The third episode had ended just as disastrously as the earlier two. There wasn't another entrepreneur in the entire U.S.A. from whom Freeman could hope to realize a cent for the contents of his horror house. He was sunk, finished, washed up. Freeman remained sitting at his desk, motionless. All his resentment at the bad luck life had saddled him with -- loyalty oaths, big deals that fell through, chiselers like Dickson-Hawes, types that yelled when the Voom were after them -- had coalesced into an immobilizing rage. At last he drew a quavering sigh. He went over to the bookcase, took out a book, looked up something. He took out a second book, a third. He nodded. A gleam of blind, intoxicated vindictiveness had come into his eyes. Just a few minor circuit changes, that was all. He knew the other, more powerful entities were there. It was only a question of changing his signaling devices to get in touch with them. Freeman put the book back on the shelf. He hesitated. Then he started toward the door. He'd get busy on the circuit changes right away. And while he was making them, he'd be running over plans for the horror house he was going to use the new entities to help him build. It would be dangerous. So what? Expensive... he'd get the money somewhere. But he'd fix them. He'd build a horror house for the beasts that would make them sorry they'd ever existed -- Horrer Howce for the Voom. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania your selections ore not limited to a few titles. ScienceFiction we needn't waste your time on adjectives: the names of the aucheck off the titles and mail your remittance to us at the address given. enclose purchase price listed. For each at right... at no charge.  This Fortress World -- James E. Gunn #  Tales of Conan -- Robt. E. Howard  De Camp S#. # B Plague Ship -- Andrew North # Interplanetary Hunter -- Barnes (Emsh Mius) #  Highways in Hiding -- Geo. #. Smith #  Undersea Fleet -- n Coming Attractions -- edited by Greenberg #  SF -- Year's Greatest Science Fiction edited by Judith Merril # checked below ot the left, for which I  Northwest of Earth -- C. L. Moore #  Pattern For Conquest -- Geo. #. Smith #  Cosmic Engineers -- Clifford Simak #  The Mixed Men -- A. E. Van Vogt #  The Starmen -- Leigh Brackett #  Iceworld -- Hal Clement #  Judgement Night -- C. L Moore #  Mutant -- Lewis Padgett # The Skills of When a malignant world endangers another, surgery is the usual answer. But perhaps there is another -- kill it with kindness! A nd the Sun went nova and humanity fragmented and fled; and such is the self-knowledge of humankind that it knew it must guard its past as it guarded its being, or it would cease to be human; and such was its pride in itself that it made of its traditions a ritual and a standard. The great dream was that wherever humanity settled, fragment by fragment by fragment, however it lived, it would continue rather than begin again, so that all through the Universe and Xanadu the years, humans would be humans, speaking as humans, thinking as humans, aspiring and progressing as humans; and whenever human met human, no matter how different, how distant, he wpuld come in peace, meet his own kind, speak his own tongue. Humans, however, being humans -- star, disliking its light, and found the fourth planet. It hung waiting for him like an exotic fruit. (And was it ripe, and could he ripen !I# it? And what if it were poison?) He left his machine in orbit and descended in a bubble. A young savage watched him come and waited by a waterfall. "Earth was my mother," said Bril from the bubble. It was the formal greeting of all humankind, spoken in the Old Tongue. "And my father," said the savage, in an atrocious accent. Watchfully, Bril emerged from the bubble, but stood very close by it. He completed his part of the ritual. "I respect the disparity of our wants, as individuals, and greet you." "I respect the identity of our needs, as humans, and greet you. I am Wonyne," said the youth, "son of Tanyne, of the Senate, and Nina. This place is Xanadu, the district, on Xanadu, the fourth planet." "I am Bril of Kit Carson, second planet of the Sumner System, and a member of the Sole Authority," said the newcomer, adding, "and I come in peace." the savage would discard any weapons he might have, according to historic protocol. Wonyne did not; he apparently had none. He wore only a cobwebby tunic and a broad belt made of stones and could hardly have concealed so much as a dart. Bril waited yet another moment, watching the untroubled face of the savage, to see if Wonyne suspected anything of the arsenal hidden in the sleek black uniform, the gleaming jackboots, the metal gauntlets. Wonyne said only, "Then, in peace, welcome." He smiled. "Come with me to Tanyne's house and mine, and be refreshed." "You say Tanyne, your father, is a Senator? Is he active now? Could he help me to reach your center of government?" The youth paused, his lips moving slightly, as if he were translating the dead language into another tongue. Then, "Yes. Oh, yes." Bril flicked his left gauntlet with his right fingertips and the bubble sprang away and up, where at length it would join the ship untjl it was needed. Wonyne was not amazed -- probably, thought Bril, because it was beyond his understanding. Bril followed the youth up a winding path past a wonderland of flowering plants, most of them purple, some white, a few scarlet, and all jeweled by the waterfall. The higher reaches of the path were flanked by thick soft grass, red as they approached, pale pink as they passed. Bril's narrow black eyes flicked everywhere, saw and recorded everything: the easy-breathing boy spring up the slope ahead, and the constant shifts of color in his gossamer garment as the wind touched it; the high trees, some of which might conceal a man or a weapon; the rock outcroppings and what oxides they told of; the birds he could see and the birdsongs he heard which might be something else. He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is obvious. Yet he was not prepared for the house; he and the boy were halfway across the parklike land which surrounded it before he recognized it as such. It seemed to have no margins. It was here high and there only a place between flower beds; yonder a room became a terrace, and elsewhere a lawn was a carpet because there was a roof over it. The house was divided into areas rather than rooms, by open grilles and by arrangements of color. Nowhere was there a wall. There was nothing to hide behind and nothing that could be locked. All the land, all the sky, looked into and through the house, and the house was one great window on the world. Seeing it, Bril felt a slight shift in his opinion of the natives. His feeling was still one of contempt, but now he added suspicion. A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was: Every man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change his dictum: he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it? "Tan! Tan!" the boy was shouting. "I've brought a friend!" toward them from a garden. The man was huge, but otherwise so like the youth Wonyne that there could be no question of their relationship. Both had long, narrow, clear gray eyes set very wide apart, and red -- almost orange -- hair. The noses were strong and delicate at the same time, their mouths thin-lipped but wide and good-natured. But the woman -- It was a long time before Bril could let himself look, let himself believe that there was such a woman. After his first glance, he made of her only a presence and fed himself small nibbles of belief in his eyes, in the fact that there could be hair like that, face, voice, body. She was dressed, like her husband and the boy, in the smoky kaleidoscope which resolved itself, when the wind permitted, into a black-belted tunic. "He is Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System," babbled the boy, "and he's a member of the Sole Authority and it's the second planet and he knew the greeting and got it right. So did I," he added, laughing. "This is Tanyne, of the Senate, and my mother Nina." "You are welcome, Bril of Kit Carson," she said to him; and unbelieving in this way that had come upon him, he took away his gaze and inclined his head. "You must come in," said Tanyne cordially, and led the way through an arbor which was not the separate arch it appeared to be, but an entrance. The room was wide, wider at one end than the other, though it was hard to determine by how much. The floor was uneven, graded upward toward one corner, where it was a mossy bank. Scattered here and there were what the eye said were white and striated gray boulders; the hand would say they were flesh. Except for a few shelfand tablelike niches on these and in the bank, they were the only furniture. Water ran frothing and gurgling through the room, apparently as an open brook; but Bril saw Nina's bare foot tread on the invisible covering that followed it down to the pool at the other end. The pool was the one he had seen from outside, indeterminately in and out of the house. A large tree grew by the pool and leaned its heavy branches toward the bank, and evidently its wideflung limbs were webbed and tented between by the same invisible substance which covered the brook, or they formed the only cover overhead yet, to the ear, felt like a ceiling. The whole effect was, to Bril, intensely depressing, and he surprised himself with a flash of homesickness for the tall steel cities of his home planet. Nina smiled and left them. Bril followed his host's example and sank down on the ground, or floor, where it became a bank, or wall. Inwardly, Bril rebelled at the lack of decisiveness, of discipline, of clear-cut limitation inherent in such haphazard design as this. But he was well trained and quite prepared, at first, to keep his feelings to himself among barbarians. "Nina will join us in a moment," said Tanyne. Bril, who had been watching the woman's swift movements across the courtyard through the transparent wall opposite, controlled a start. "I am unused to your ways, and wondered what she was doing," he said. "She is preparing a meal for you," explained Tanyne. "Herself?" wonderingly. "Does that seem unusual to you?" "I understood the lady was wife to a Senator," said Bril. It seemed adequate as an explanation, but only to him. He looked from the boy's face to the man's. "Perhaps I understand something different when I use the term 'Senator.' " "Perhaps you do. Would you tell us what a Senator is on the planet Kit Carson?" "He is a member of the Senate, subservient to the Sole Authority, and in turn leader of a free Nation." "And his wife?" "His wife shares his privileges. She might serve a member of the Sole Authority, but hardly anyone else -- certainly not an unidentified stranger." "Interesting," said Tanyne, while the boy murmured the astonishment he had not expressed at Bril's bubble, or Bril himself. "Tell me, have you not identified yourself, then?" "He did, by the waterfall," the youth insisted. "I gave you no proof," said Bril stiffly. He watched father and son exchanged a glance. "Credentials, written authority." He touched the flat pouch hung on his power belt. Wonyne asked ingenuously, "Do the credentials say you are not Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System?" Bril frowned at him, and Tanyne said gently, "Wonyne, take care." To Bril, he said, "Surely there are many differences between us, as there always are between different worlds. But I am certain of this one similarity; the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a winding path." Bril sat silently and thought this out. It was probably some sort of apology, he decided, and gave a single sharp nod. Youth, he thought, was an attenuated defect here. A boy Wonyne's age would be a soldier on Carson, ready for a soldier's work, and no one would be apologizing for him. Nor would he be making blunders. None! He said, "These credentials are for your officials when I meet with them. By the way, when can that be?" Tanyne shrugged his wide shoulders. "Whenever you like." "The sooner the better." "Very well." "Is it far?" Tanyne seemed perplexed. "Is what far?" "Your capital, or wherever it is your Senate meets." "Oh, I see. It doesn't meet, in the sense you mean. It is always in session, though, as they used to say. We -- " and made a liquid, bisyllabic sound. Then he laughed. "I do beg your pardon," he said warmly. "The Old Tongue lacks certain words, certain concepts. What is your word for -- er -- the presence of all in the presence of one?" "I think," said Bril carefully, "that we had better go back to the subject at hand. Are you saying that your Senate does not meet in some official place, at some appointed time?" "I -- " Tan hesitated, then nodded. "Yes, that is true as far as it -- " "And there is no possibility of my addressing your Senate in person?" "I didn't say that." Tan tried twice to express the thought, while Bril's eyes slowly narrowed. Tan suddenly burst into laughter. "Using the Old Tongue to tell old tales and to speak with a friend are two different things," he said ruefully. "I wish you would learn our speech. Would you, do you suppose? It is rational and well based on what you know. Surely you have another language besides the Old Tongue on Kit Carson?" "I honor the Old Tongue," said Bril stiffly, dodging the question. Speaking very slowly, as if to a retarded child, he said, "I should like to know when I may be taken to those in authority here, in order to discuss certain planetary and interplanetary matters with them." "Discuss them with me." "You are a Senator," Bril said, in a tone which meant clearly: You are only a Senator. "True," said Tanyne. With forceful patience, Bril asked, "And what is a Senator here?" "A contact point between the people of his district and the people everywhere. One who knows the special problems of a small section of the planet and can relate them to planetary policy." "And whom does the Senate serve?" "The people," said Tanyne, as if he had been asked to repeat himself. "Yes, yes, of course. And who, then, serves the Senate?" "The Senators." Bril closed his eyes and barely controlled the salty syllable which welled up inside him. "Who," he inquired steadily, "is your Government?" The boy had been watching them eagerly, alternately, like a devotee at some favorite fast ball game. Now he asked, "What's a Government?" ' point was most welcome to Bril. She came across the terrace from the covered area where she had been doing mysterious things at a long work-surface in the garden. She carried an enormous tray -- guided it, rather, as Bril saw when she came closer. She kept three fingers under the tray and one behind it, barely touching it with her palm. Either the transparent wall of the room disappeared as she approached, or she passed through a section where there was none. "I do hope you find something to your taste among these," she said cheerfully, as she brought the tray down to a hummock near Bril. "This is the flesh of birds, this of small mammals, and, over here, fish. These cakes are made of four kinds of grain, and the white cakes here of just one, the one we call milk-wheat. Here is water, and these two are wines, and this one is a distilled spirit we call warm-ears." Bril, keeping his eyes on the food, and trying to keep his unisweet fresh scent of her as she bent over him, so near, said, "This is welcome." She crossed to her husband and sank down at his feet, leaning back against his legs. He twisted her heavy hair gently in his fingers and she flashed a small smile up at him. Bril looked from the food, colorful as a corsage, here steaming, there gathering frost from the air, to the three smiling expectant faces, and did not know what to do. "Yes, this is welcome," he said again, and still they sat there, watching him. He picked up the white cake and rose, looked out and around, into the house, through it and beyond. Where could one go in such a place? Steam from the tray touched his nostrils and saliva filled his mouth. He was hungry, but... He sighed, sat down, gently replaced the cake. He tried to smile and could not. "Does none of it please you?" asked Nina, concerned. "I can't eat here!" said Bril; then, sensing something in the natives that had not been there before, he added, "thank you." Again he looked at their controlled faces. He said to Nina, "It is very well prepared and good to look on." "Then eat," she invited, smiling again. This did something that their house, their garments, their appallingly easy ways -- sprawling all over the place, letting their young speak up at will, the shameless admission that they had a patois of their own -- that none of these things had been able to do. Without losing his implacable dignity by any slightest change of expression, he yet found himself blushing. Then he scowled and let the childish display turn to a flush of anger. He would be glad, he thought furiously, when he had the heart of this culture in the palm of his hand, to squeeze when he willed; then there would be an end to these hypocrital amenities and they would learn who could be humiliated. TUT these three faces, the boy's so open and unconscious of wrong, Tanyne's so strong and anxious for him, Nina's -- that face, that face of Nina's -- they were all utterly guileless. He must not let them know of his embarrassment. If they had planned it, he must not give them the satisfaction. If they had not planned it, he must not let them suspect his vulnerability. With an immense effort of will, he kept his voice low; still, it was harsh. "I think," he said slowly, "that we on Kit Carson regard the matter of privacy perhaps a little more highly than you do." They exchanged an astonished look, and then comprehension dawned visibly on Tanyne's ruddy face. "You don't eat together!" Bril did not shudder, but it was in his word : "No." "Oh," said Nina, "I'm so sorry!" Bril thought it wise not to discover exactly what she was sorry about. He said, "No matter. Customs differ. I shall eat when I am alone." "Now that we understand," said Tanyne, "go ahead. Eat." But they sat there! "Oh," said Nina, "I wish you spoke our other language; it would be so easy to explain!" She leaned forward to him, put out her arms, as if she could draw meaning itself from the air and cast it over him. "Please try to understand, Bril. You are very mistaken about one thing -- we honor privacy above almost anything else." "We don't mean the same thing when we say it," said Bril. "It means aloneness with oneself, doesn't it? It means to do things, think or make or just be, without intrusion." "Unobserved," said Bril. "So?" replied Wonyne happily, throwing out both hands in a gesture that said quod erat demonstrandum. "Go on then -- eat! We won't look!" and helped the situation not at all. "Wonyne's right," chuckled the father, "but, as usual, a little too direct. He means we can't look, Bril. If you want privacy, we can't see you." Angry, reckless, Brill suddenly reached to the tray. He snatched up a goblet, the one she had indicated as water, thumbed a capsule out of his belt, popped it into his mouth, drank and swallowed. He banged the goblet back on the tray and shouted, "Now you've seen all you're going to see." With an indescribable expression, Nina drifted upward to her feet, bent like a dancer and touched the tray. It lifted and she guided it away across the courtyard. "All right," said Wonyne. It was precisely as if someone had spoken and he had acknowledged. He lounged out, following his mother. " Something she could not contain; something rising to that smooth surface, about to reveal outlines, break through... anger? Bril hoped so. Insult? He could, he supposed, understand that. But -- laughter? Don't make it laughter, something within him pleaded. "Bril," said Tanyne. For the second time, he was so lost in contemplation of the woman that Tanyne's voice made him start. "What is it?" "If you will tell me what arrangements you would like for eating. I'll see to it that you get them." "You wouldn't know how," said Brill bluntly. He threw his sharp, cold gaze across the room and back. "You people don't build walls you can't see through, doors you can close." "Why, no, we don't." As always, the giant left the insult and took only the words. I bet you don't, Bril said silently, not even for -- and a horrible suspicion began to grow within him. "We of Kit Carson feel that all human history and development are away from the animal, toward something higher. We are, of course, chained to the animal state, but we do what we can to eliminate every animal act as a public spectacle." Sternly, he " waved a shining gauntlet at the great open house. "You have apparently not reached such an idealization. I have seen how you eat; doubtless you perform your other functions so openly." "Oh, yes," said Tanyne. "But with this -- " he pointed -- "it's hardly the same thing." "With what?" Tanyne again indicated one of the boulderlike objects. He tore off a clump of moss -- it was real moss -- and tossed it to the soft surface of one of the boulders. He reached down and touched one of the gray streaks. The moss sank into the surface the way a pebble will in quicksand, but much faster. "It will not accept living animal matter above a certain level of complexity," he explained, "but it instantly absorbs every molecule of anything else, not only on the surface but for a distance above." "And that's a -- a -- where you -- " #S Tan nodded and said that that was exactly what it was. "But -- anyone can see you!" Tan shrugged and smiled. "How? That's what I meant when I said it's hardly the same thing. Of eating, we make a social occasion. But this -- " he threw another clump of moss and watched it vanish -- "just isn't observed." His sudden laugh rang out and again he said, "I wish you'd learn the language. Such a thing is so easy to express." But Bril was concentrating on something else. "I appreciate your hospitality," he said, using the phrase stiltedly, "but I'd like to be moving on." He eyed the boulder distastefully. "And very soon." "As you wish. You have a message for Xanadu. Deliver it, then." "To your Government." "To our Government. I told you before, Bril -- when you're ready, proceed." "I cannot believe that you alone represent this planet! "Neither can I," said Tanyne pleasantly. "I don't. Through me, you can speak to forty-one others, all Senators." "Is there no other way?" Tanyne smiled. "Forty-one other ways. Speak to any of the others. It amounts to the same thing." "And no higher government body?" arm and plucked a goblet from a niche in the moss bank. It was chased crystal with a luminous metallic rim. "Finding the highest point of the government of Xanadu is like finding the highest point on this," he said. He ran a finger around the inside of the rim and the goblet chimed beautifully. "Pretty unstable," growled Bril. Tanyne made it sing again and replaced it; whether that was an answer or not, Bril could not know. He snorted, "No wonder the boy didn't know what Government was." "We don't use the term," said Tanyne. "We don't need it. There are few things here that a citizen can't handle for himself; I wish I could show you how few. If you'll live with us a while, I will show you." He caught Bril's eye squarely as it returned from another dis' gusted and apprehensive trip to the boulder, and laughed outright. But the kindness in his voice as he went on quenched Bril's upsurge of indignant fury, and a little question curled up: Is he managing me? But there wasn't time to look at it. "Can your business wait until you know us, Bril? I tell you now, there is no centralized Government here, almost no government at all; we of the Senate are advisory. I tell you, too, that to speak to one Senator is to speak to all, and that you may do it now, this minute, or a year from now -- whenever you like. I am telling you the truth and you may accept it or you may spend months, years, traveling this planet and checking up on me; you'll always come out with the same answer." Noncommittally, Bril said, "How do I know that what I tell you is accurately relayed to the others?" "It isn't relayed," said Tan frankly. "We all hear it simultaneously." "Some sort of radio?" Tan hesitated, then nodded. "Some sort of radio." "I won't learn your language," Bril said abruptly. "I can't live as you do. If you can accept those conditions, I will stay a short while." "Accept? We insist!" Tanyne bounded cheerfully to the niche where the goblet stood and held his palm up. A large, opaque sheet of a shining white material rolled down and stopped. "Draw with your finger," he said. "Draw? Draw what?" "A place of your own. How you would like to live, eat, sleep, everything." "I require very little. None of us on Kit Carson do." his gauntlet like a weapon, made a couple of dabs in the corner of the screen to test the line, and then dashed off a very creditable parallelepiped. "Taking my height as one unit, I'd want this one-and-a-half long, one-and-a-quarter high. Slit vents at eye level, one at each end, two on each side, screened against insects -- " "We have no preying insects," said Tanyne. "Screened anyway, and with as near an unbreakable mesh as you have. Here a hook suitable for hanging a garment. Here a bed, flat, hard, with firm padding as thick as my hand, one-and-oneeighth units long, one-third wide. All sides under the bed enclosed and equipped as a locker, impregnable, and to which only I have the key or combination. Here a shelf one-third by onequarter units, one-half unit off the floor, suitable for eating from a seated posture. "One of -- those, if it's self-contained and reliable," he said edgily, casting a thumb at the boulderlike convenience. "The whole structure to be separate from all others on high ground and overhung by nothing -- no trees, no cliffs, with approaches clear and visible from all sides; as strong as speed permits; and equipped with a light I can turn off and a door that only I can unlock." "Very well," said Tanyne easily. "Temperature?" "The same as this spot now." "Anything else? Music? Pictures? We have some fine moving -- " Bril, from the top of his dignity, snorted his most eloquent snort. "Water, if you can manage it. As to those other things, this is a dwelling, not a pleasure palace." "I hope you will be comfortable in this -- in it," said Tanyne, with barely a trace of sarcasm. "It is precisely what I am used to," Bril answered loftily. "Come, then." "What?" The big man waved him on and passed through the arbor. Bril, blinking in the late pink sunlight, followed him. On the gentle slope above the house, halfway between it and the mountaintop beyond, was a meadow of the red grass Bril had noticed on his way from the waterfall. In the center of this meadow was a crowd of people, bustling like moths around a light, their flimsy, colorful clothes flashing and gleaming in a thousand shades. And in the middle of the crowd lay a coffin-shaped object. eyes, then stubbornly would not, and at last, as they came near, yielded and admitted it to himself : this was the structure he had just sketched. He walked more and more slowly as the wonder of it grew on him. He watched the people -- children, even -- swarming around and over the little building, sealing the edge between roof and wall with a humming device, laying screen on the slit-vents. A little girl, barely a toddler, came up to him fearlessly and in lis ing Old Tongue asked for his hand, which she clapped to a tablet she carried. "To make your keys," explained Tanyne, watching the child scurry off to a man waiting at the door. He took the tablet and disappeared inside, and they could see him kneel by the bed. A young boy overtook them and ran past, carrying a sheet of the same material the roof and walls were made of. It seemed light, but its slightly rough, pale-tan surface gave an impression of great toughness. As they drew up at the door, they saw the boy take the material and set it in position between the end of the bed and the doorway. He aligned it carefully, pressing it against the wall, and struck it once with the heel of his hand, and there was Bril's required table, level, rigid, and that without braces and supports. "You seemed to like the looks of some of this, anyway." It was Nina, with her tray. She floated it to the new table, waved cheerfully and left. "With you in a moment," Tan called, adding three singing syllables in the Xanadu tongue which were, Bril concluded, an endearment of some kind; they certainly sounded like it. Tan turned back to him, smiling. "Well, Bril, how is it?" Bril could only ask, "Who gave the orders?" "You did," said Tan, and there didn't seem to be any answer to that. Already, through the open door, he could see the crowd drifting away, laughing and singing their sweet language to each other. He saw a young man scoop up scarlet flowers from the pink sward and hand them to a smiling girl, and unaccountably the scene annoyed him. He turned away abruptly and went about the walls, thumping them and peering through the vents. Tanyne knelt by the bed, his big shoulders bulging as he tugged at the locker. It might as well have been solid rock. "Put your hand there," he said, pointing, and Bril clapped his gauntlet to the plate he indicated. Sliding panels parted. Bril got down and peered inside. It had its own light, and he could see the buff-colored wall of the structure at the back and the heavy filleted partition which formed the bed uprights. He touched the panel again and the doors slid silently shut, so tight that he could barely see their meeting. "The door's the same," said Tanyne. "No one but you can open it. Here's water. You didn't say where to put it. If this is inconvenient..." " the spigot, water flowed into a catch basin beneath. "No, that is satisfactory. They work like specialists." "They are," said Tanyne. "Then they have built such a strange structure before?" "Never." Bril looked at him sharply. This ingenuous barbarian surely could not be making a fool of him by design! No, this must be some slip of semantics, some shift in meaning over the years which separated each of them from the common ancestor. He would not forget it, but he set it aside for future thought. "Tanyne," he asked suddenly, "how many are you in Xanadu?" "In the district, three hundred. On the planet, twelve, almost thirteen thousand." "We are one and a half billions," said Bril. "And what is your largest city?" "City," said Tanyne, as if searching through the files of his memory. "Oh -- city! We have none. There are forty-two districts like this one, some larger, some smaller." "Your entire planetary population could be housed in one building within one city on Kit Carson. And how many generations have your people been here?" "Thirty-two, thirty-five, something like that." "We settled Kit Carson not quite six Earth centuries ago. In point of time, then, it would seem that yours is the older culture. Wouldn't you be interested in how we have been able to accomplish so much more?" "Fascinated," said Tanyne. "You have some clever little handicrafts here," Bril mused, "and a quite admirable cooperative ability. You could make a formidable thing of this world, if you wanted to, and if you had the proper guidance." "Oh, could we really?" Tanyne. seemed very pleased. "I must think," said Bril somberly. "You are not what I -- what I had supposed. Perhaps I shall stay a little longer than I had planned. Perhaps while I am learning about your people, you in turn could be learning about mine." "Delighted," said Tanyne. "Now is there anything else you need?" "Nothing. You may leave me." only one of the big man's pleasant, open-faced smiles. Tanyne waved his hand and left. Bril heard him calling his wife in ringing-baritone notes, and her glad answer. He set his mailed hand against the door plate and it slid shut silently. Now what, he asked himself, got me to do all that bragging? Then the astonishment at the people of Xanadu rose up and answered the question for him. What manner of people are specialists at something they have never done before? He got out his stiff, polished, heavy uniform, his gauntlets, his boots. They were all wired together, power supply in the boots, controls and computers in the trousers and belt, sensory mechs in the tunic, projectors and field loci in the gloves. He hung the clothes on the hook provided and set the alarm field for anything larger than a mouse any closer than thirty meters. He dialed a radiation dome to cover his structure and exclude all spy beams or radiation weapons. Then he swung his left gauntlet on its cable over to the table and went to work on one small corner. In half an hour, he had found a combination of heat and pressure that would destroy the pale brown board, and he sat down on the edge of the bed, limp with amazement. You could build a spaceship with stuff like this. Now he had to believe that they had it in stock sizes exactly to his specifications, which would mean warehouses and manufacturing facilities capable of making up those and innumerable other sizes; or he had to believe that they had machinery capable of making what his torches had just destroyed, in job lots, right now. But they didn't have any industrial plant to speak of, and if they had warehouses, they had them where the Kit Carson robot scouts had been unable to detect them in their orbiting for the last fifty years. Slowly he lay down to think. locate the central government. If it is an autocracy, organized tightly up to the peak, so much the better; the peak is small and you kill it or control it and use the organization. If there is no government at all, you recruit the people or you exterminate them. If there is plant, you run it with overseers and make the natives work it until you can train your own people to it and eliminate the natives. If there are skills, you learn them or you control those who have them. All in the book; a rule for every eventuality, every possibility. But what if, as the robots reported, there was high technology and no plant? Planetwide cultural stability and almost no communications? Well, nobody ever heard of such a thing, so when the robots report it, you send an investigator. All he has to find out is how they do it. All he has to do is to parcel up what is to be kept and what eliminated when the time comes for an expeditionary force. There's always one clean way out, thought Bril, putting his hands behind his head and looking up at the tough ceiling. Item, one Earth-normal planet, rich in natural resources, sparsely populated by innocents. You can always simply exterminate them. But not before you find out how they communicate, how they cooperate, and how they specialize in skills they never tried before. How they manufacture superior materials out of thin air in no time. He had a sudden heady vision of Kit Carson equipped as these universal specialists with some heretofore unsuspected method of intercommunication, capable of building cities, fighting wars, with the measureless skill and split-second understanding and obedience with which this little house had been built. No, these people must not be exterminated. They must be used. Kit Carson had to learn their tricks. If the tricks were -- he hoped not! -- inherent in Xanadu and beyond the Carson abilities, then what would be the next best thing? Why, a cadre of the Xanadu, scattered through the cities and armies of Kit Carson, instantly obedient, instantly trainable. Instruct one and you teach them all; each could teach a group of Kit Carson's finest. Production, logistics, strategy, tactics -- he saw it all in a flash. Xanadu might be left almost exactly as is, except for its new export -- aides de camp. Dreams, these are only dreams, he told himself sternly. Wait until you know more. Watch them make impregnable hardboard and anti-grav tea-trays... The thought of the tea-tray made his stomach growl. He got up and went to it. The hot food steamed, the cold was still frosty and firm. He picked, he tasted. Then he bit. Then he gobbled. Nina, that Nina... No, they can't be exterminated, he thought drowsily, not when they can produce such a woman. In all of Kit Carson, there wasn't a cook like that. He lay down again and dreamed, and dreamed until he fell asleep. They showed him everything, and it apparently never occurred to them to ask him why he wanted to know. Asking was strange, because they seemed to lack that special pride of accomplishment one finds in the skilled potter, metalworker, electronician, an attitude of "Isn't it remarkable that I can do it!" They gave information accurately but impersonally, as if anyone could do it. And on Xanadu, anyone could. At first, it seemed to Bril totally disorganized. These attractive people in their indecent garments came and went, mingling play and work and loafing, without apparent plan. But their play would take them through a flower-garden just where the weeds were, and they would take the weeds along. There seemed to be a group of girls playing jacks right outside the place they would suddenly be needed to sort some seeds. Tanyne tried to explain it: "Say we have a shortage of something -- oh, strontium, for example. The shortage itself creates a sort of vacuum. People without anything special to do feel it; they think about strontium. They come, they gather it." "But I have seen no mines," Bril said puzzledly. "And what about shipping? Suppose the shortage is here and the mines in another district?" "That never happens any more. Where there are deposits, of course, there are no shortages. Where there are none, we find other ways, either to use something else, or to produce it without mines." "Transmute it?" "Too much trouble. No, we breed a fresh-water shellfish with a strontium carbonate shell instead of calcium carbonate. The children gather them for us when we need it." He saw their clothing industry -- part shed, part cave, part forest glen. There was a pool there where the young people swam, and a field where they sunned themselves. Between times, they went into the shadows and worked by a huge vessel where chemicals occasionally boiled, turned bright green, and then precipitated. The black precipitate was raised from the bottom of the vessel on screens, dumped into forms and pressed. Just how the presses -- little more than lids for the forms -- operated, the Old Tongue couldn't tell him, but in four or five seconds the precipitate had turned into the black stones used in their belts, formed and polished, with a chemical formula in Old Tongue script cut into the back of the left buckle. "One of our few supersitions," said Tanyne. "It's the formula for the belts -- even a primitive chemistry could make them. We would like to see them copied, duplicated all over the Universe. They are what we are. Wear one, Bril. You would be one of us, then." contempt and went to watch two children deftly making up the belts, as easily, and with the same idle pleasure, as they might be making flower necklaces in a minute or two. As each was assembled, the child would strike it against his own belt. All the colors there are would appear each time this happened, in a the belt, now with a short trim of vague tongued light, was tossed in a bin. Probably the only time Bril permitted himself open astonishmerit on Xanadu was the first time he saw one of the natives put on this garment. It was a young man, come dripping from the pool. He snatched up a belt from the bank and clasped it around his waist, and immediately color and substance flowed up and down, a flickering, changing collar for him, a moving coruscant kilt. "It's alive, you see," said Tanyne. "Rather, it is not non-living matter." He put his fingers under the hem of his own kilt and forced his fingers up and outward. They penetrated the fabric, which fluttered away -- untorn. "It is not," he said gravely, "altogether material, if you will forgive an Old Tongue pun. The nearest Old Tongue term for it is 'aura.' Anyway, it lives, in its way. It maintains itself for -- oh, a year or more. Then dip it in lactic acid and it is refreshed again. And just one of them a fire burn?" "But why wear such a thing?" Tanyne laughed. "Modesty." He laughed again. "A scholar of the very old times, on Earth before the Nova, passed on to me the words of one Rudofsky: 'Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty.' We wear these because they are warm when we need warmth, and because they conceal some defects some of the time -- surely all one can ask of any human affectation." "They are certainly not modest," said Bril stiffly. "They express modesty just to the extent that they make us more pleasant to look at with than without them. What more public expression of humility could you want than that?" Bril turned his back on Tanyne and the discussion. He understood Tanyne's words and ways imperfectly to begin with, and this kind of talk left him bewildered, or unreached, or both. hardboard. Hanging from the limb of a tree was a large vat of milky fluid -- the paper. Tan explained, of a wasp they had developed, dissolved in one of the nucleic acids which they synthesized from a native weed. Under the vat was a flat metal plate and a set of movable fences. These were arranged in the desired shape and thickness of the finished panel, and then a cock was opened and the fluid ran in and filled the enclosure. Thereupon two small children pushed a roller by hand across the top of the fences. The white lake of fluid turned pale brown and solidified, and that was the hardboard. Tanyne tried his best to explain to Bril about that roller, but the Old Tongue joined forces with Bril's technical ignorance and made the explanation incomprehensible. The coating of the roller was as simple in design, and as complex in theory, as a transistor, and Bril had to let it go at that, as he did with the selective analysis of the boulderlike "plumbing" and the antigrav food trays (which, he discovered, had to be guided outbound, but which "homed" on the kitchen-area when empty). He had less luck, as the days went by, in discovering the nature of the skills of Xanadu. He had been quite ready to discard his own dream as a fantasy, an impossibility -- the strange idea that what any could do, all could do. Tanyne tried to explain; at least, he answered every one of Bril's questions. These wandering, indolent, joyful people could pick up anyone's work at any Stage and carry it to any degree. One would pick up a flute and play a few notes, and others would stroll over, some with instruments and some without, and soon another instrument and another would join in, until there were fifty or sixty and the music was like a passion or a storm, or after-love or sleep when you think back on it. And sometimes the bystanders would step forward and take an instrument from the hands of someone who was tiring, and play on with all the rest, pure and harmonious; and, no. Tan would aver, he didn't think they'd ever played that particular piece of music before, those fifty or sixty people. It always got down to feeling, in Tan's explanations. "It's a feeling you get. The violin, now; I've heard one, we'll say, but never held one. I watch someone play and I understand how the notes are made. Then I take it and do the same, and as I concentrate on making the note, and the note that follows, it comes to me not only how it should sound, but how it should feel -- to the fingers, the bowing arm, the chin and collarbone. Out of those feelings comes the feeling of how it feels to be making such music. "Of course, there are limitations," he admitted, "and some might do better than others. If my fingertips are soft, I can't play as long as another might. If a child's hands are too small for the instrument, he'll have to drop an octave or skip a note' But the feeling's there, when we think in that certain way. "It's the same with anything else we do," he summed up. "If I need something in my house, a machine, a device, I won't use iron where copper is better; it wouldn't ieel right for me. I don't mean feeling the metal with my hands; I mean thinking about the device and its parts and what it's for. When I think of all the things I could make it of, there's only one set of things that feels right to me."  that, plus this -- this competition between the districts, to find all elements and raw materials in the neighborhood instead of sending for them -- that's why you have no commerce. Yet you say you're standardized -- at any rates, you all have the same kind of devices, ways of doing things." "We all have whatever we want and we make it ourselves, yes," Tan agreed. In the evenings, Bril would sit in Tanyne's house and listen to the drift and swirl of conversation, or the floods of music, and wonder; and then he would guide his tray back to his cubicle and lock the door and eat, and brood. He felt at times that he was under an attack with weapons he did not understand, on a field which was strange to him. He remembered something Tanyne had said once, casually, about men and their devices: "Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it's hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed. It was always that way. We lost a culture once on Xanadu. Didn't you ever wonder, Bril, why there are so few of us here? And why almost all of us have red hair?" Bril had, and had secretly blamed the small population on the shameless lack of privacy, without which no human race seems to be able to whip up enough interest in itself to breed readily. Tan surprisingly. "We were wiped out. Know how many were left? Three!" That was a black night for Bril, when he realized how pitiable were his efforts to learn their secret. For if a race were narrowed to a few, and a mutation took place, and it then increased again, the new strain could be present in all the new generations. He might as well, he thought, try to wrest from them the secret of having red hair. That was the night he concluded that these people would have to go; and it hurt him to think that, and he was angry at himself for thinking so. That, too, was the night of the ridiculous disaster. his teeth in helpless fury. It was past noon and he had been there since he awoke, trapped by his own stupidity, and ridiculous, ridiculous. His greatest single possession -- his dignity -- was stripped from him by his own carelessness, by a fiendish and unsportsmanlike gadget that -- His approach alarm hissed and he sprang to his feet in an agony of embarrassment, in spite of the strong opaque walls and the door which only he could open. It was Tanyne; his friendly greeting bugled out and mingled with birdsong and the wind. "Bril! You there?" Bril let him come a little closer and then barked through the vent, "I'm not coming out." Tanyne stopped dead, and even Bril himself was surprised by the harsh, squeezed sound of his voice. "But Nina asked for you. She's going to weave today; she thought you'd like -- " "No," snapped Bril. "Today I leave. Tonight, that is. I've summoned my bubble. It will be here in two hours. After that, when it's dark, I'm going." "Bril, you can't. Tomorrow I've set up a sintering for you; show you how we plate -- " "No!" "Have we offended you, Bril? Have I?" "No." Bril's voice was surly, but at least not a shout. "What's happened?" Bril didn't answer. Tanyne came closer. Bril's eyes disappeared from the slit. He was cowering against the wall, sweating. Tanyne said, "Something's happened, something's wrong. I... feel it. You know how I feel things, my friend, my good friend Bril." The very thought made Bril stiffen in terror. Did Tanyne know? Could he? He might, at that. Bril damned these people and all their devices, their planet and its sun and the fates which had brought him here. "There is nothing in my world or in my experience you can't tell me about. You know I'll understand," Tanyne pleaded. He came closer. "Are you ill? I have all the skills of the surgeons who have lived since the Three. Let me in." "No!" It was hardly a word; it was an explosion. Tanyne fell back a step. "I beg your pardon, Bril. I won't ask again. But -- tell me. Please tell me. I must be able to help you!" All Tight, thought Bril, half hysterically. I'll tell you and you can laugh your fool red head off. It won't matter once we seed your planet with Big Plague. "I can't come out. I've ruined my clothes." "Bril! What can that matter? Here, throw them out; we can fix them, no matter what it is." "No!" He could just see what would happen with these universal talents getting hold of the most compact and deadly armory this side of the Sumner System. "Then wear mine." Tan put his hands to the belt of black stones. "I wouldn't be seen dead in a flimsy thing like that. Do you think I'm an exhibitionist?" much) than Bril had ever seen in him, Tanyne said, "You've been a lot more conspicuous in those winding sheets you've been wearing than you ever would in this." Bril had never thought of that. He looked longingly at the bright nothing which flowed up and down from the belt, and then at his own black harness, humped up against the wall under its hook. He hadn't been able to bear the thought of putting them back on since the accident happened, and he had not been this long without clothes since he'd been too young to walk. "What happened to your clothes, anyway?" Tan asked sympathetically. Laugh, thought Bril, and Fit kill you right now and you'll never have a chance to see your race die. "I sat down on the -- I've been using it as a chair; there's only room for one seat in here. I must have kicked the switch. I didn't even feel it until I got up. The whole back of my -- " Angrily he blurted, "Why doesn't that ever happen to you people?" "Didn't I tell you?" Tan said, passing the news item by as if it meant nothing. Well, to him it probably was nothing. "The unit only accepts non-living matter." "Leave that thing you call clothes in front of the door," Bril grunted after a strained silence. "Perhaps I'll try it." Tanyne tossed the belt up against the door and strode away, singing softly. His voice was so big that even his soft singing seemed to go on forever. But eventually Bril had the field to himself, the birdsong and the wind. He went to the door and away, lifted his seatless breeches sadly and folded them out of sight under the other things on the hook. He looked at the door again and' actually whimpered once, very quietly. At last he put the gauntlet against the doorplate, and the door, never designed to open a little way, obediently slid wide. He squeaked, reached out, caught up the belt, scampered back and slapped at the plate. "No one saw," he told himself urgently. He pulled the belt around him. The buckle parts knew each other like a pair of hands. first thing he was aware of was the warmth. Nothing but the belt touched him anywhere and yet there was a warmth on him, soft, safe, like a bird's breast on eggs. A split second later, he gasped. How could a mind fill so and not feel pressure? How could so much understanding flood into a brain and not break it? He understood about the roller which treated the hardboard; it was a certain way and no other, and he could feel the rightness of that sole conjecture. He understood the ions of the mold-press that made the belts, and the life-analog he wore as a garment. He understood how his finger might write on a screen, and the vacuum of demand he might send out to have this house built so, and so, and exactly so; and how the natives would hurry to fill it. He remembered without effort Tanyne's description of the feel of playing an instrument, making, building, molding, holding, sharing, and how it must be to task, moving randomly and only for pleasure, yet taking someone's place at vat or bench, furrow or fishnet, the very second another laid down a tool. He stood in his own quiet flame, in his little coffin-cubicle, looking at his hands and knowing without question that they would build him a model of a city on Kit Carson if he liked, or a statue of the soul of the Sole Authoriy. He knew without question that he had the skills of this people, and that he could call on any of those skills just by concentrating on a task until it came to him how the right way (for him) would feel. He knew without surprise that these resources transcended even death; for a man could have a skill and then it was everyman's, and if the man should die, his skill still lived in everyman. Just by concentrating -- that was the key, the keyway, the keystone to the nature of this device. A device, that was all -- no mutations, nothing 'extra-sensory' (whatever that meant); only a machine like other machines. You have a skill, and a feeling about it; I have a task. Concentration on my task sets up a demand for your skill; through the living flame you wear, you transmit; through mine, I receive. Then I perform; and what bias I put upon that performance depends on my capabilities. Should I add something to that skill, then mine is the higher, the more complete; the feeling of it is better, and it is I who will transmit next time there is a demand. A ND he understood the authority that lay in this new aura, and it came to him then how his home planet could be welded into a unit such as the Universe had never seen. Xanadu had not done it, because Xanadu had grown randomly with its gift, without the preliminary pounding and and discipline. But Kit Carson! Carson with all skills and all talents shared among all its people, and overall and commanding, creating that vacuum of need and instant fulfilment, the Sole Authority and the State. It must be so (even though, far down, something in him wondered why the State kept so much understanding away from its people), for with this new depth came a solemn new dedication to his home and all it stood for. Trembling, he unbuckled the belt and turned back its left buckle. Yes, there it was, the formula for the precipitate. And now he understood the pressing process and he had the flame to strike into new belts and make Tanyne had said... why had he never said that the garments of Xanadu were the source of all their wonders and perplexities? But had Bril ever asked? Hadn't Tanyne begged him to take a garment so he could be one with Xanadu? The poor earnest idiot, to think he could be swayed away from Carson this way! Well, then, Tanyne and his people would have an offer, too, and it would all be even; soon they could, if they would, join the shining armies of a new Kit Carson. From his hanging black suit, a chime sounded. Bril laughed and gathered up his old harne and all the fire and shock and paralysis asleep in its mighty, compact weapons. He slapped open the door and sprang to the bubble which waited outside, and flung his old uniform in to lie crumpled on the floor, a broken chrysalis. Shining and exultant, he leaped in after it and the bubble sprang away skyward. " return to Kit Carson in the Sumner System, the garment had been duplicated, and duplicated again, and tested. Within a month, nearly two hundred thousand had been distributed, and eighty factories were producing round the clock. Within a year, the whole planand unified as never before, moving together under their Leader's will like the cells of a hand. And then, in shocking unison, they all flickered and dimmed, every one, so it was time for the lactic acid dip which Bril had learned of. It was done in panic, without test or hesitation; a small taste of this luminous subjection had created a mighty appetite. All was well for a week -- And then, as the designers in Xanadu has planned, all the other segments of the black belts joined the first meager two in full operation. souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere. A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon fhem, there was only one conccail ration possible to each of them -- to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As (ach found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succ"('ded expert, transcended exp('it, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom. So Kit Carson, as a culture, ceased to exist, and something new started there and spread through the stars nearby. And because Bril knew what a Senator was and wanted to be one, he became one. and Nina were singing softly, when the goblet in the mossy niche chimed. "Here comes another one," said Wonyne, crouched at their feet. "I wonder what will make him beg, borrow or steal a belt." "Doesn't matter," said Tanyne, stretching luxuriously, "as long as he gets it. Which one is he. Wo -- that noisy mechanism on the other side of the small moon?" "No," said Wonyne. "That one's still sitting there squalling and thinking we don't know it's there. No, this is the force-field that's been hovering over Fleetwing District for the last two years." Tanyne laughed. "That'll make conquest number eighteen for us." "Nineteen," corrected Nina dreamily. "I remember because eighteen was the one that just left and seventeen was that funny little Bril from the Sumner System. Tan, for a time that little man loved me." But that was a small thing and did not matter. ( Continued from page # ) human mathematician to prove this or even understand it. '"Did you know that Chinese is spoken by more people than anybody else?' This implies that beings other than people speak Chinese. The only comfort I can find in the remark is that we outnumber them. " 'While you're out in the kitchen, dear, the uncoffee should be plugged.' I don't feel that this statement requires comment. Anyone can see that the washeepots need coughing because they are full of uncoffee that hasn't been plugged. "I don't know whether or not this is relevant, but we have a ten-month-old daughter who wakes up every night arid chuckles delightedly in the dark at something we can't see or hear. At any rate, my wife claims she can't see or hear it. I know I can't." There may be more here than meets the eye, but what meets the eye is certainly disturbing enough. That overwrought iron, for example -- if metal can get fatigued and X-rays can detect it, what makes you think your wife can't sense nervousness in at least iron? If she is able to, what else can she sense? Now maybe you see why I don't share your comfort in the fact that we outnumber the beings who speak Chinese. One machine gun, remember, could have won any war before # or so. And have you noticed that she has not mentioned any other language? However, you're safe. Whatever happens, your wife can probably protect you. If not, your daughter can -- she seems on the best of terms with the thing or things in the dark, and half her loyalty presumably is, if not to humanity, then to her dad. But what of the rest of us? Those 'platations from Quoto' sound formidable enough to upset anyone who knows military organization. This uneasiness is not lulled by the least baffling communication from the alien respiondents ; "Of time some courses I can't see my face in front of my hand and some people don't think I think like a people. "But I do. I just go bored from without and say things brightly through a mirror dark-wards. It is only a profound disassociation of intent and meaning. Any human can do." Very homy-sounding... but at the bottom of the letter is a pink blur, # inches across, that looks like a vast fingerprint. It isn't, though. I checked with a friend who knows fingerprinting. It's the mark of a bare heel. r Great Science-Fiction Ificcirc yours for only  members citing lM)ks worth up to #.") in the puhlishor.s' editions yours for fUily l #lni)ly l)y joinin) (his new kiiul of bookclub V(n They're all jnusterworks of science-fiction (or factual scientific books of sp"'ial interest to science-fiction fans), by top-fliht authors. 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Worlds of tomorrow. #)# faseinatinK paKesl (Fubl. ed. #.) comiletLpla.v; scores of all-time reat S-F stories. iticltidiiiK il. (t. Wells' "Invasion from Mars," made famous by Orson W'elles' lioax "newscast.' (Publ. od. #.) Just Mail Coupon Indicate on coupon your choice of any liction masterpieces describel here. One will be considered your first selection, for which you'll be billed only #. plus a Every month you will be offered the cream of the new # to # sciencefiction books -- for only I each. You take only those books you really want -- as few as four a year. But this offer may be withdrawn at any time. So mail coui)on Dept. Gx-#, Garden City, N. Y. Dept. Gx-#, Garden City. N. Y. l)ill uu' only #, plus a few oenls psiuKe. TlU' oUkt two aro club's free bulletin. "ThinKs to f'nmc " Jescrl))inK comimi sclccllons. For each hiMik I ac-cept. I will pay only # f)lus shipphiK. 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They came boiling up the main corridor, pushing against the heavily armed guards who were conducting them, the featurestory men and by-line columnists in the lead, the TV people with their portable but still-heavy equipment cursing along behind. Time in Advance As they went, they passed little groups of spacemen in the black-and-red uniform of the Interstellar Prison Service walking rapidly in the opposite direction, on their way to enjoy five days of planetside leave before the ship roared away once more with a new cargo of convicts. The impatient journalists barely glanced at these drab personalities who were spending their lives in a continuous shuttle from one end of the Galaxy to the other. After all, the life and addone thousands of times, done to death. The big story lay ahead. In the very belly of the ship, the guards slid apart two enormous sliding doors -- and quickly stepped aside to avoid being trampled. The reporters almost flung themselves against the iron bars that ran from floor to ceilS ing and completely shut off the great prison chamber. Their eager, darting stares were met with by at most a few curious glances from the men in coarse gray suits who lay or sat in the tiers of bunks that rose in row after sternly functional row all the way down the cargo hold. Each man clutched -- and some caressed -- a small package neatly wrapped in plain brown paper. The chief guard ambled up on the other side of the bars, picking the morning's breakfast out of his front teeth. "Hi, boys," he said. "Who're you looking for -- as if I didn't know?" O NE of the older, more famous columnists held the palm of his hand up warningly. "Look, Anderson: no games. The ship's been almost a half-hour late in landing and we were stalled for fifteen minutes at the gangplank. Now where the hell are they?" Anderson watched the TV crews shoulder a place for themselves and their equipment right up to the barrier. He tugged a last bit of food out of one of his molars. "Ghouls," he muttered. "A bunch of grave-happy, funeralhungry ghouls." Then he hefted his club experimentally a couple of times and clattered it back and forth against the bars. "Crandall!" he bellowed. "Henck! Front and center!" The cry was picked up by the guards strolling about, steadily, measuredly, club-twirlingly, inside the prison pen. "Crandall! Henck! Front and center!" It went ricocheting authoritatively up and down the tremendous curved walls. "Crandall! Henck! Front and center!" Nicholas Crandall sat up crosslegged in his bunk on the fifth tier and grimaced. He had been dozing and now he rubbed a hand across his eyes to erase the sleep. There were three parallel scars across the back of his hand, old and brown and straight scars such as an animal's claws might rake out. There was also a curious zigzag scar just above his eyes that had a more reddish novelty. And there was a tiny, perfectly round hole in the middle of his left ear which, after coming fully awake, he scratched in annoyance. "Reception committee," he grumbled. "Might have known. Same old goddam Earth as ever." He flipped over on his stomach and reached down to pat the face of the little man snoring on the bunk immediately under him. "Otto," he called. "Blotto Otto -- up and at 'em! They want us." Henck immediately sat up in the same cross-legged fashion, even before his eyes had opened. His right hand went to his throat where there was a little network of zigzag scars of the same color and size as the one Crandall had on his forehead. The hand was missing an index and forefinger. "Henck here, sir," he said thickly, then shook his head and stared up at Crandall. "Oh -- Nick. What's up?" "We've arrived, Blotto Otto," the taller man said from the bunk above. "We're on Earth and they're getting our discharges ready. In about half an hour, you'll be able to wrap that tongue of yours around as much brandy, beer, vodka and rotgut whiskey as you can pay for. No more prison-brew, no more raisinjack from a tin can under the bed, Blotto Otto." down on his back again. "In half an hour, but not now, so why did you have to go and wake me up? What do you take me for, some dewy, post-crime, pettylarceny kid, sweating out my discharge with my eyes open and my gut wriggling? Hey, Nick, I was dreaming of a new way to get Elsa, a brand-new, really ugly way." "The screws are in an uproar," Crandall told him, still in a low, patient voice. "Hear them? They want us, you and me." Henck sat up again, listened a moment, and nodded. "Why is it," he asked, "that only spacescrews have voices like that?" "It's a requirement of the service," Crandall assured him. "You've got to be at least a minimum height, have a minimum education and with a minimum nasty voice of just the right earsplitting quality before you can get to be a space-screw. Otherwise, no matter how vicious a personality you have, you are just plain out of luck and have to stay behind on Earth and go on getting your kicks by running down slowpoke 'copters driven by old ladies." A guard stopped below, banged angrily at one of the metal posts that supported their tier of bunks. "Crandall! Henck! You're still convicts, don't you forget that! If you don't front-and-center in a double-time hurry, I'll climb up there and work you over once more for old-time's sake!" "Yes, sir! Coming, sir!" they said in immediate, mumbling unison and began climbing down from bunk to bunk, each still clutching the brown-paper package that contained the clothes they had once worn as free men and would shortly be allowed to wear again. "Listen, Otto." Crandall leaned down as they climbed and brought his lips close' to the littie man's ear in the rapid-fire, extremely low-pitched prison whisper. "They're taking us to meet the television and news boys. We're going to be asked a lot of questions. One thing you want to be sure to keep your lip buttoned about -- " "Television and news? Why us? What do they want with us?" "Because we're celebrities, knockhead! We've seen it through for the big rap and come out on the other side. How many men do you think have made it? But listen, will you? If they ask you who it is you're after, you just shut up and smile. You don't answer that question. Got that? You don't tell them whose murder you were sentenced for, no matter what they say. They can't make you. That's the law." Henck paused a moment, one and a half bunks from the floor. "But, Nick, Elsa knows! I told her that day, just before I turned myself in. She knows I wouldn't take a murder rap for anyone but her!" "She knows, she knows, of course she knows!" Crandall swore briefly and almost inaudibly. "But she can't prove it, you goddam human blotter! Once you say so in public, though, she's entitled to arm herself and shoot you down on sight -- pleading self-defense. And till you say so, she can't; she's still your poor wife whom you've promised to love, honor and cherish. As far as the world is concerned -- " '  "HE guard reached up with his club and jolted them both angrily across the back. They dropped to the floor and cringed as he snarled over them: "Did I say you could have a talk-party? Did #? If we have any time left before you get your discharge, I'm taking you cuties into the guard-room for one last big going-over. Now pick them up and put them down!" They scuttled in front of him obediently, like a pair of chickens before a snapping collie. At the barred gate near the end of the prison hold, he saluted and said: "Pre-criminals Nicholas Crandall and Otto Henck, sir." Chief Guard Anderson wiped the salute back at him carelessly. "These gentlemen want to ask you fellas a couple of questions. Won't hurt you to answer. That's all, O'Brien." His voice was very jovial. He was wearing a big, gentle, halfmoon smile. As the subordinate guard saluted and moved away, Crandall let his mind regurgitate memories of Anderson all through this month-long trip from Proxima Centaurus. Anderson nodding thoughtfully as that poor Minelli -- Steve Minelli, hadn't that been his name? -- was made to run through a gauntlet of club-swinging guards for going to the toilet without permission. Anderson chuckling just a moment before he'd kicked a gray-headed convict in the groin for talking on the chow-line. Anderson -- Well, the guy had guts, anyway, knowing that his ship carried two pre-criminals who had served out a murder sentence. But he probably also knew that they wouldn't waste the murder on him, however viciously he acted. A man doesn't volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils. "Do we have to answer these questions, sir?" Crandall asked cautiously, tentatively. The chief guard's smile lost the tiniest bit of its curvature. "I said it wouldn't hurt you, didn't I? But other things might. They still might, Crandall. I'd like to do these gentlemen from the press a favor, so you be nice and cooperative, eh?" He gestured with his chin, ever so slightly, in the direction of the guard-room and hefted his club a bit. "Yes, sir," Crandall said, while Henck nodded violently. "We'll be cooperative, sir." Dammit, he thought, if only I didn't have such a use for that murder! Let's keep remembering Stephanson, boy, no one but Stephanson! Not Anderson, not O'Brien, not anybody else: the name under discussion is Frederick Stoddard Stephanson! the other side of the bars were fussing their equipment into position, the two convicts answered the preliminary, inevitable questions of the feature writers: "How does it feel to be back?" "Fine, just fine." "What's the first thing you're going to do when you get your discharge?" "Eat a good meal." (From Crandall.) "Get roaring drunk." (From Henck.) "Careful you don't wind up right behind bars again as a post-criminal." (From one of the feature writers.) A good-natured laugh in which all of them, the newsmen, Chief Guard Anderson, and Crandall and Henck, participated. "How were you treated while you were prisoners?" "Oh, pretty good." (From both of them, concurrent with a thoughtful glance at Anderson's club.) "Either of you care to tell us who you're going to murder?" (Silence.) "Either of you changed your mind and decided not to commit the murder?" (Crandall looked thoughtfully up, while Henck looked thoughtfully down.) Another general laugh, a bit more uneasy this time, Crandall and Henck not participating. "All right, we're set. Look this way, please," the television announcer broke in. "And smile, men -- let's have a really big smile." Crandall and Henck dutifully emitted big smiles, which made three smiles, for Anderson had moved into the cheerful little group. The two cameras shot out of the grasp of their technicians, one hovering over them, one moving restlessly before their faces, both controlled, at a distance, by the little box of switches in the cameramen's hands. A red bulb in the nose of one of the cameras lit up. "Here we are, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience," the announcer exuded in a lavish voice. "We are on board the convict ship Jean Valjean, which has just landed at the New York Spaceport. We are here to meet two men -- two of the rare men who have managed to serve all of a voluntary sentence for murder and thus are legally entitled to commit one murder apiece. "In just a few moments, they will be discharged after having served out seven full years on the convict planets -- and they will be free to kill any man or woman in the Solar System with absolutely no fear of any kind of retribution. Take a good look at them, ladies and gentlemen of the television audience -- it might be you they are after!" the announcer let a moment or two elapse while the cameras let their lenses stare at the two men in prison gray. Then he stepped into range himself and addressed the smaller man. "What is your name, sir?" he asked. "Pre criminal Otto Henck, #," Blotto Otto responded automatically, though not able to repress a bit of a start at the sir. "How does it feel to be back?" "Fine, just fine." "What's the first thing you're going to do when you get your discharge?" Henck hesitated, then said, "Eat a good meal," after a shy look at Crandall. "How were you treated while you were a prisoner?" "Oh, pretty good. As good as you could expect." "As good as a criminal could expect, eh? Although you're not really a criminal yet, are you? You're a pre-criminal." Henck smiled as if this were the first time he was hearing the term. "That's right, sir. I'm a precriminal." "Want to tell the audience who the person is you're going to become a criminal for?" Henck looked reproachfully at the announcer, who chuckled throatily -- and alone. "Or if you've changed your mind about him or her?" There was a pause. Then the announcer said a little nervously: "You've served seven years on dangerfilled, alien planets, preparing them for human colonization. That's the maximum sentence the law allows, isn't it?" "That's right, sir. With the precriminal discount for serving the sentence in advance, seven years is the most you can get for murder." "Bet you're glad we're not back in the days of capital punishment, eh? That would make the whole thing impractical, wouldn't it? Now, Mr. Henck -- or precriminal Henck, I guess I should still call you -- suppose you tell the ladies and gentlemen of our television audience : What was the most horrifying experience you had while you were serving your sentence?" "Well," Otto Henck considered carefully. "About the worst of the lot, I guess, was the time on camp I was in, when the big wasps started to spawn. They that's about a hundred times the size of -- " "Is that how you lost those two fingers on your right hand?" and studied it for a moment. "No. The forefinger -- I We were building the first prison camp on the planet and I dug up a funny kind of red rock that had all sorts of little bumps on it. I poked it, kind of -- you know, just to see how hard it was or something -- and the tip of my finger disappeared. Pow -- just like that. Later on, the whole finger got infected and the medics had to cut it off. "It turned out I was lucky, though; some of the men -- the convicts, I mean -- ran into bigger rocks than the one I found. Those guys lost arms, legs -- one guy even got swallowed whole. They weren't really rocks, see. They were alive -- they were lousy with them. The middle finger -- I lost the middle finger in a dumb kind of accident on board ship while we were being moved to -- " The announcer nodded intelligently, cleared his throat and said: "But those wasps, those githey were the worst?" Blotto Otto blinked at him for a moment before he found the conversation again. "Oh. They sure were! They were used to laying their eggs in a kind of monkey they have on rough on the monkey, but that's how the baby wasps got their food while they were growing up. Well, we get out there and it turns out that the wasps can't see any difference between those Antares monkeys and human beings. First thing you know, guys start collapsing all over the place and when they're taken to the dispensary for an X-ray, the medics see that they're completely crammed -- " "Thank you very much, Mr. Henck, but Herkimer's Wasp has already been seen by and described to our audience at least three times in the past on the Interstellar Travelogue, which is carried by this network, as you ladies and gentlemen no doubt remember, on Wednesday evenings from seven to seven-thirty p.m. terrestrial standard time. And now, Mr. Crandall, let me ask you, sir: How does it feel to be back?" Crandall stepped up and was put through almost exactly the same verbal paces as his fellow prisoner. ence. The announcer asked him if he expected to find Earth much changed. Crandall started to shrug, then abruptly relaxed and grinned. He was careful to make the grin an extremely wide one, exposing a maximum of tooth and a minimum of mirth. "There's one big change I can see already," he said. "The way those cameras float around and are controlled from a little switch-box in the cameraman's hand. That gimmick wasn't around the day I left. Whoever invented it must have been pretty clever." "Oh, yes?" The announcer glanced briefly backward. "You mean the Stephanson Remote Control Switch? It was invented by Frederick Stoddard Stephanson about five years ago -- Was it five years, Don?" "Six years," said the cameraman. "Went on the market five years ago." "It was invented six years ago," the announcer translated. "It went on the market five years ago." Crandall nodded. "Well, this Frederick Stoddard Stephanson must be a clever man, a very clever man." And he grinned again into the cameras. Look at my teeth, he thought to himself. I know you're watching, Freddy. Look at my teeth and shiver. The announcer seemed a bit disconcerted. "Yes," he said. "Exactly. Now, Mr. Crandall, what would you describe as the most horrifying experience in your entire..." After the TV men had rolled up their equipment and departed, the two pre-criminals were subjected to a final barrage of questions from the feature writers and columnists in search of odd shreds of color. "What about the women in your life?" "What books, what hobbies, what amusements filled your time?" "Did you find out that there are no atheists on convict planets?" "If you had the whole thing to do over again -- " As he answered, drably, courteously, Nicholas Crandall was thinking about Frederick Stoddard Stephanson seated in front of his luxurious wall-size television set. Would Stephanson have clicked it off by now? Would he be sitting there, staring at the blank screen, pondering the plans of the man who had outlived odds estimated at ten thousand to one and returned after seven full, unbelievable years in the prison camps of four insane planets? amining his blaster with sucked-in lips -- the blaster that he might use only in an openand-shut situation of self-defense if he wished to avoid the postcriminal sentence for murder, which, without the fifty per cent discount for punishment voluntarily undergone in advance of the crime, was as much as fourteen years in the many-pronged hell from which he, Crandall, had just returned? Or would Stephanson be sitting, slumped in an expensive bubblechair, glumly watching a still-active screen, frightened out of his wits but still unable to tear himself away from the wellorganized program the network had no doubt built around the return of two -- count 'em: two! -- homicidal pre-criminals? At the moment, in all probability, the screen was showing an interview with some Earthside official of the Interstellar Prison Service, an expansive public relations character who had learned to talk in sociology. "Tell me, Mr. Public Relations," the announcer would ask (a different announcer, more serious, more intellectual), "how often do pre-criminals serve out a sentence for murder and return?" "According to statistics -- " a rustle of papers at this point and a penetrating glance downward -- "according to statistics, we may expect a man who has served a full sentence for murder, with the # per cent pre-criminal discount, to return only once in # years on the average." "You would say, then, wouldn't you, Mr. Public Relations, that the return of two such men on the same day is a rather unusual situation?" "Highly unusual or you television fellas wouldn't be in such a fuss over it." A thick chuckle here, which the announcer dutifully echoes.  ,And what, Mr. Public Relations, happens to the others who don't return?" A large, well-fed hand gestures urbanely. "They get killed. Or they give up. Those are the only two alternatives. Seven years is a long time to spend on those convict planets. The work schedule isn't for sissies and neither are the life-forms they encounter -- the big man-eating ones as well as the small virus-sized types. "That's why prison guards get such high salaries and such long leaves. In a sense, you know, we haven't really abolished capital punishment; we've substituted a socially useful form of Russian Roulette for it. Any man who commits or pre-commits one of a group of particularly reprehensible crimes is sent off to a planet where his services will benefit humanity and where he's forced to take his chances on coming back in one piece, if at all. The more serious the crime, the longer the sentence and, therefore, the more remote the chances." "I see. Now, Mr. Public Relations, you say they either get killed or they give up. Would you explain to the audience, if you please, just how they give up and what happens if they do?" chair, a locking of pudgy fingers over paunch. "You see, any pre-criminal may apply to his warden for immediate abrogation of sentence. It's just a forms. He's pulled off work detail right then and there and is sent home on the very next ship out of the place. The catch is this: Every bit of time he's served up to that point is canceled -- he gets nothing for it. "If he commits an actual crime after being freed, he has to serve the full sentence. If he wants to be committed as a precriminal again, he has to start serving the sentence, with the discount, from the beginning. Three out of every four precriminals apply for abrogation of sentence in their very first year. You get a bellyful fast in those places." "I guess you certainly do," agrees the announcer. "What about the discount, Mr. Public Relations? Aren't there people who feel that's offering the precriminal too much inducement?" The barest grimace of anger flows across the sleek face, to be succeeded by a warm, contemptuous smile. "Those are people, I'm afraid, who, however well-intentioned, are not well versed in the facts of modern criminology and penology. We don't want to discourage pre-criminals; we want to encourage them to turn themselves in. "Remember what I said about three out of four applying for abrogation of sentence in their very first year? Now these are individuals who were sensible enough to try to get a discount on their sentence. Are they likely to be foolish enough to risk twice as much when they have found out conclusively they can't stand a bare twelve months of it? Not to mention what they have discovered about the value of human life, the necessity for social cooperation and the general desirability of civilized processes on those worlds where simple survival is practically a matter of a sweepstakes ticket. "The man who doesn v apply for abrogation of sentence? Well, he has that much more time to let the desire to commit the crime go cold -- and that much greater likelihood of getting killed with nothing to show for it. Therefore, so few pre-criminals in any of the categories return to tell the tale and do the deed that the social profit is absolutely enormous! Let me give you a few figures. "Using the Lazarus Scale, it has been estimated that the decline in premeditated homicides alone, since the institution of the pre-criminal discount, has been forty-one per cent on Earth, thirty-three and a third per cent on Venus, twenty-seven per cent -- " comfort, that would be to Stephanson, Nicholas Crandall reflected pleasurably, those forty-one per cents and thirty-three and a third per cents. Crandall's was the balancing statistic: the man who wanted to murder, and for good and sufficient cause, one Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. He was a leftover fraction on a page of reductions and cancellations -- he had returned, astonishingly, unbelievably, after seven years to collect the merchandise for which he had paid in advance. He and Henck. Two ridiculously long long-shots. Henck's wife Elsa -- was she, too, sitting in a kind of bird-hypnotized-bya-snake fashion before her television set, hoping dimly and desperately that some comment of the Interstellar Prison Service official would show her how to evade her fate, how to get out from under the ridiculously rare disaster that was about to happen to her? Well, Elsa was Blotto Otto's affair. Let him enjoy it in his own way; he'd paid enough for the privilege. But Stephanson was Crandall's. Oh, let the arrogant bean-pole sweat, he prayed. Let me take my time and let him sweat! The newsmen kept squeezing them for story angles until a loudspeaker in the overhead suddenly cleared its diaphragm and announced : "Prisoners, prepare for discharge! You will proceed to the ship warden's office in groups of ten, as your name is called. Convict ship discipline will be maintained throughout. Arthur, Augluk, Crandall, Ferrara, Fu-Yen, Garfinkel, Gomez, Graham, Henck -- " A half hour later, they were walking down the main corridor of the ship in their civilian clothes. They showed their discharges to the guard at the gangplank, smiled still cringingly back at Anderson, who called from a porthole, "Hey, fellas, come back soon!" and trotted down the incline to the surface of a planet they had not seen for seven agonizing and horror-crowded years. There were a few reporters and photographers still waiting for them, and one TV crew which had been left behind to let the world see how they looked at the moment of freedom. to answer, which they could afford to be brusque about, although brusqueness to any but fellow prisoners still came hard. Fortunately, the newsmen got interested in another pre-criminal who was with them. Fu-Yen had completed the discounted sentence of two years for aggravated assault and battery. He had also lost both arms and one leg to a corrosive moss on Prohis term and came limping down the gangplank on one real and one artificial leg, unable to grasp the hand-rails. As he was being asked, with a good deal of interest, just how he intended to commit simple assault and battery, let alone the serious kind, with his present limited resources, Crandall nudged Henck and they climbed quickly into one of the many hovering gyrocabs. They told the driver to take them to a bar -- any quiet bar -- in the city. Blotto Otto almost went to pieces under the impact of actual free choice. "I can't do it," he whispered. "Nick, there's just too damn much to drink!" Crandall settled it by ordering for him. "Two double scotches," he told the waitress. "Nothing else." When the scotch came, Blotto Otto stared at it with the kind of affectionate and wistful astonishment a man might show toward an adolescent son whom he saw last as a babe in arms. He put out a gingerly, trembling hand. "Here's death to our enemies," Crandall said, and tossed his down. He watched Otto sip slowly and carefully, tasting each individual drop. "You'd better take it easy," he warned. "Elsa might have no more trouble from you than bringing flowers every visiting day to the alcoholic ward." "No fear," Blotto Otto growled into his empty glass. "I was weaned on this stuff. And, anyway, it's the last drink I have until I dump her. That's the way I've been figuring it, Nick: one drink to celebrate, then Elsa. I didn't go through those seven years to mess myself up at the payoff." en years in one steaming hell after another. And before that, twelve years with Elsa. Twelve years with her pulling every dirty trick in the book on me, laughing in my face, telling me she was my wife and had me legally where she wanted me, that I was gonna support her the way she wanted to be supported and I was gonna like it. And if I dared to get off my knees and stand on my hind legs, pow, she found a way to get me arrested. "The weeks I spent in the cooler, in the workhouse, until Elsa would tell the judge maybe I'd learned my lesson, she was willing to give me one more chance! And me begging for a divorce on my knees -- hell, on my belly! -- no children, she's able-bodied, she's young, and her laughing in my face. When she wanted me in the cooler, see, then she's crying in front .of the judge; but when we're alone, she's always laughing her head off to see me squirm. "I supported her, Nick. Honest, I gave her almost every cent I made, but that wasn't enough. She liked to see me squirm; she told me she did. Well, who's squirming now?" He grunted deep in his throat. "Marriage --  it's for chumps!" Crandall looked out of the open window he was sitting against, down through the dizzy, busy levels of Metropolitan New York. "Maybe it is," he said thoughtfully. "I wouldn't know. My marriage was good while it lasted, five years of it. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn't good any more, just so much rancid butter." "At least she gave you a divorce," said Henck. "She didn't take you." "Oh, Polly wasn't the kind of girl to take anyone. A little mixed up, but maybe no more than I was. Pretty Polly, I called her; Big Nick, she called me. The starlight faded and so did I, I guess. I was still knocking myself out then trying to make a go out of the wholesale electronics business with Irv. Anyone could tell I wasn't cut out to be Anyway, Polly wanted out and I gave it to her. We parted friends. I wonder, every once in a while, what she's -- " There was a slight splashy noise, like a seal's flipper making a gesture in the water. Crandall's eyes came back to the table a moment after the green, melonlike ball had hit it. And, at the same instant, Henck's hand had swept the ball up and hurled it through the window. The long, green threads streamed out of the ball, but by then it was falling down the side of the enormous building and the threads found no living flesh to take root in. From the corner of his eye, Crandall had seen a man bolt out of the bar. By the way people kept looking back and forth fearfully from their table to the open doorway, he deduced that the man had thrown it. Evidently Stephanson had thought it worthwhile to have Crandall followed and neutralized. in preening over his reflexes. The two of them had learned to move fast a long time ago -- " over a lot of dead bodies. "A Venusian dandelion bomb," he observed. "Well, at least the guy doesn't want to kill you, Nick. He just wants to cripple you." "That would be Stephanson's style," Crandall agreed, as they paid their check and walked past the faces which were just now beginning to turn white. "He'd never do it himself. He'd hire a bully-boy. And he'd do the hiring through an intermediary just in case the bully-boy ever got caught and blabbed. But that still wouldn't be safe enough: he wouldn't want to risk a postcriminal murder charge. "A dose of Venusian dandelion, he'd figure, and he wouldn't have to worry about me for the rest of my life. He might even come to visit me in the home for incurables -- like the way he sent me a card every Christmas of my sentence. Always the same message: 'Still mad? Love, Freddy.'" "Quite a guy, this Stephanson," Blotto Otto said, peering around the entrance carefully before stepping out of the bar and onto the fifteenth level walkway. "Yeah, quite a guy. He's got the world by the tail and every once in a while, just for fun, he twists the tail. I learned how he operated when we were roommates way back in college, but do you thing that did me any good? I ran into him just when that wholesale electronics business with Irv was really falling apart, about two years after I broke up with Polly. "I was feeling blue and I wanted to talk to someone, so I told him all about how my partner was a penny-watcher and I was a big dreamer, and how between us we were turning a possible nice small business into a definite big bankruptcy. And then I got onto this remote-control switch I'd been fooling around with and how I wished I had time to develop it." Blotto Otto kept glancing around uneasily, not from dread of another assassin, but out of the unexpected sensation of doing so much walking of his own free will. Several passersby turned around to have another stare at their out-of-fashion kneelength tunics. "So there I was," Crandall went on. "I was a fool, I know, but take my word, Otto, you have no idea how persuasive and friendly a guy like Freddy Stephanson can be. He tells me he has this house in the country he isn't using right now and there's a complete electronics lab in the basement. It's all mine, if I want it, as long as I want it, starting next week; all I have to worry about is feeding myself. And he doesn't want any rent or anything -- it's for old time's sake and because he wants to see me do something really big in the world. "How smart could I be with a con-artist like that? It wasn't till two years later that I realized he must have had the electronics lab installed the same week I was asking Irv to buy me out of the business for a couple of hundred credits. After all, what would Stephanson, the owner of a brokerage firm, be doing with an electronics lab of his own? But who figures such things when an old roommate's so warm and friendly and interested in you?" to see you every few weeks. And then, about a month after you've got it all finished and working, he locks you out of the place and moves all your papers and stuff to another joint. And he tells you he'll have it patented long before you can get it all down on paper again, and anyhow it was his place -- he can always claim he was subsidizing you. Then he laughs in your face, just like Elsa. Huh, Nick?" Crandall bit his lip as he realized how thoroughly Otto Henck must have memorized the material. How many times had they gone over each other's planned revenge and the situations which had motivated it? How many times had they told and retold the same bitter stories to each other, elicited the same responses from each other, the same questions, the same agreements and even the very same disagreements? Suddenly, he wanted to get away from the little man and enjoy the luxury of loneliness. He saw the sparkling roof of a hotel two levels down. "Think I'll move into that. Ought to be thinking about a place to sleep tonight." Otto nodded at his mood rather than at his statement. "Sure. I know just how you feel. But that's pretty plush, Nick: The Capricorn-Ritz. At least twelve credits a day." "So what? I can live high for a week, if I want to. And with my background, I can always . pick up a fast job as soon as I get low. I want something plush for tonight, Blotto Otto." "Okay, okay. You got my address, huh, Nick? I'll be at my cousin's place." "I have it, all right. Luck with Elsa, Otto." "Thanks. Luck with Freddy. Uh -- so long." The little man turned abruptly and entered a main street elevator. When the doors slid shut, Crandall found that he was feeling very uncomfortable. Henck had meant more to him than his own brother. Well, after all, he'd been with Henck day and night for a long time now. And he hadn't seen Dan for -- how long was it? -- almost nine years. He reflected on how little he was attached to the world, if you excluded the rather negative desire of removing Stephanson from it. One thing he should get soon was a girl -- almost any girl. But, come to think of it, there was something he needed even more. nearest drugstore. It was a large one, part of a chain. And there, featured prominently in the window, was exactly what he wanted. At the cigar counter, he said to the clerk: "It's pretty cheap. Do they work all right?" The clerk drew himself up. "Before we put an item on sale, sir, it is tested thoroughly. We are the largest retail outlet in the Solar System -- that's why it's so cheap." "All right. Give me the medium-sized one. And two boxes of cartridges." With the blaster in his possession, he felt much more secure. He had a good deal of confidence -- based on years of escaping creatures with hair-trigger nervous systems -- in his ability to duck and wriggle and jump to one side. But it would be nice to be able to fight back. And how did he know how soon Stephanson would try again? He registered under a false name, a ruse he thought of at the last moment. That it wasn't worth much, as ruses went, he found out when the bellhop, after being tipped, said: "Thank you, Mr. Crandall. I hope you get your victim, sir." So he was a celebrity. Probably everyone in the world knew exactly what he looked like. All of which might make it a bit more difficult to get at Stephanson. While he was taking a bath, he asked the television set to check through Information's file on the man. Stephanson had been rich and moderately important seven years ago; with the Stephanson Switch -- how do you like that, the Stephanson Switch! -- he must be even richer now and much more important. He was. The television set informed Crandall that in the last calendar month, there were sixteen news items relating to Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. Crandall considered, then asked for the most recent. That was datelined today. "Frederick Stephanson, the president of the Stephanson Investment Trust and Stephanson Electronics Corporation, left early this morning for his hunting lodge in Central Tibet. He expects to remain there for at least -- " "That's enough!" Crandall called through the bathroom door. Stephanson was scared! The arrogant bean-pole was frightened silly! That was something; in fact, it was a large part of the return on those seven years. Let him seethe in his own sweat for a while, until he found the at last, almost welcome. the fresh news and was immediately treated to a bulletin about himself and how he had registered at the Capricorn-Ritz under the name of Alexander Smathers. "But neither is the correct name, ladies and gentlemen," the playback rolled out unctuously. "Neither Nicholas Crandall nor Alexander Smathers is the right name for this man. There is only one name for that man -- and that name is death! Yes, the grim reaper has taken up residence at the Ritz-Capricorn Hotel tonight, and only he knows which one of us will not see another sunrise. That man, that grim reaper, that deputy of death, is the only one among us who knows -- " "Shut up!" Crandall yelled, exasperated. He had almost forgotten the kind of punishment a free man was forced to endure. The private phone circuit on the television screen lit up. He dried himself, hurried into clothes and asked, "Who's calling?" "Mrs. Nicholas Crandall," said the operator's voice. He stared at the blank screen for a moment, absolutely thunderstruck. Polly! Where in the world had she come from? And how did she know where he was? No, the last part was easy -- he was a celebrity. "Put her on," he said at last. Polly's face filled the screen. Crandall studied her quizzically. She'd aged a bit, but possibly it wasn't obvious at anything but this magnification. As if she realized it herself, Polly adjusted the controls on her set and her face dwindled to life-size, the rest of her body as well as her surroundings coming into the picture. She was evidently in the living room of her home; it looked like a low-tomiddle-income-range furnished apartment. But she looked good -- awfully good. There were such warm memories... "Hi, Polly. What's this all about? You're the last person I expected to call me." "Hello, Nick." She lifted her hand to her mouth and stared over its knuckles for some time at him. Then: "Nick. Please. Please don't play games with me." He dropped into a chair. "Huh?" S HE began to cry. "Oh, Nick! Don't! Don't be that cruel! I know why you served that sentence -- those seven years. The moment I heard your name today, I knew why you did it. But, Nick, it was only one man -- just one man, Nick!" "Just one man what?" "It was just that one man I was unfaithful with. And I thought he loved me, Nick. I wouldn't have divorced you if I'd known what he was really like. But you know, Nick, don't you? You know how much he made me suffer. I've been punished enough. Don't kill me, Nick! Please don't kill me!" "Listen, Polly," he began, completely confused. "Polly girl, for heaven's sake -- " "Nick!" she gulped hysterically. "Nick, it was over eleven years ago -- ten, at least. Don't kill me for that, please, Nick! Nick, truly, I wasn't unfaithful to you for more than a year, two years at the most. Truly, Nick! And, Nick, it was only that one affair -- the others didn't count. They were just -- just casual things. They didn't matter at all, Nick! But don't kill me! Don't kill me!" She held both hands to her face and began rocking back and forth, moaning uncontrollably. Crandall stared at her for a moment and moistened his lips. Then he said, "Whew!" and turned the set off. He leaned back in his chair. Again he said, "Whew!" and this time it hissed through his teeth. Polly! Polly had been unfaithful during their marriage. For a year -- no, two years! And -- what had she said? -- the others, the others had just been casual things! The woman he had loved, the woman he suspected he had always loved, the woman he had given up with infinite regret and a deep sense of guilt when she had come to him and said that the business had taken the best part of him away from her, but that since it wasn't fair to ask him to give up something that obviously meant so much to him -- Pretty Polly. Polly girl. He'd never thought of another woman in all their time together. And if anyone, anyone at all, had ever suggested -- had so much as hinted -- he'd have used a monkey wrench on the meddler's face. He'd given her the divorce only because she'd asked for it, but he'd hoped that when the business got on its feet and Irv's bookkeeping end covered a wider stretch of it, they might get back together again. Then, of course, business grew worse, Irv's wife got sick and he put even less time in at the office and -- "I feel," he said to himself numbly, "as if I've just found out for certain that there is no Santa Claus. Not Polly, not all those good years! One affair! And the others were just casual things!" HP HE telephone circuit went off again. "Who is it?" he snarled. "Mr. Edward Ballaskia." "What's he want?" Not Polly, not Pretty Polly! An extreme fat man came on the screen. He looked to right and left cautiously. "I must ask you, Mr. Crandall, if you are positive that this line isn't tapped." "What the hell do you want?" Crandall found himself wishing that the fat man were here in person. He'd love to sail into somebody right now. Mr. Edward Ballaskia shook his head disapprovingly, his jowls jiggling slowly behind the rest of his face. "Well, then, sir, if you won't give me you assurances, I am forced to take a chance. I am calling, Mr. Crandall, to ask you to forgive your enemies, to turn the other cheek. I am asking you to remember faith, hope and charity -- and that the greatest of these is charity. In other words, sir, open your heart to him or her you intended to kill, understand the weaknesses which caused them to give offenses -- and forgive them." "Why should I?"' Crandall demanded. "Because it is to your profit to do so, sir. Not merely morally profitable -- although let us not overlook the life of the spirit -- but financially profitable. Financially profitable, Mr. Crandall." "Would you kindly tell me what you are talking about?" The fat man leaned forward and smiled confidentially. "If you can forgive the person who caused you to go off and suffer seven long, seven miserable years of acute discomfort, Mr. Crandall, I am prepared to make you a most attractive offer. You are entitled to commit one murder. I desire to have one murder committed. I am very wealthy. You, I judge -- and please take no umbrage, sir -- are very poor. "I can make you comfortable for the rest of your life, extremely comfortable, Mr. Crandall, if only you will put aside your thoughts, your unworthy thoughts, of anger and personal vengeance. I have a business competitor, you see, who has been -- " Crandall turned him off. "Go serve your own seven years," he venomously told the blank screen. Then, suddenly, it was funny. He lay back in the chair and laughed his head off. That butter-faced old slob! Quoting religious texts at him! T UT the call had served a purpose. Somehow it put the scene with Polly in the perspective of ridicule. To think of the woman sitting in her frowsy little apartment, trembling over her dingy affairs of more than ten years ago! To think she was afraid he had bled and battled for seven years because of that! He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "Well, anyway, I bet it did her good." And now he was hungry. He thought of having a meal sent up, just to avoid a possible rendezvous with' another of Stephanson's ball-throwers, but decided against it. If Stephanson was really hunting him seriously, it would not be much of a job to have something put into the food he was sent. He'd be much safer eating in a restaurant chosen at random. Besides, a few bright lights, a little gaiety, would be really welcome. This was his first night of freedom -- and he had to wash that Polly taste out of his mouth. He checked the corridor carefully before going out. There was nothing, but the action reminded him of a tiny planet near Vega where you made exactly the same precautionary gesture every time you emerged from one of the tunnels formed by the long, parallel lines of moist, carboniferous ferns. Because if you didn't -- well, there was an enormous leechlike mollusc that might be waiting there, a creature which could flip chunks of shell with prodigious force. The shell merely stunned its prey, but stunned it long enough for the leech to get in close. And that leech could empty a man in ten minutes flat. Once he'd been hit by a fragment of shell, and while he'd been lying there, Henck -- Good old Blotto Otto! Crandall smiled. Was it possible that the two of them would look back on those hideous adventures, one day, with actual nostalgia, the kind of beery, pleasant memories that soldiers develop after even the ugliest of wars? Well, and if they did, they hadn't gone through them for the sake of fat cats like Mr. Edward Ballaskia and his sanctified dreams of evil. Nor, when you came right down to it, for dismal little frightened trollops like Polly. Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. Frederick Stoddard -- Somebody put an arm on his shoulder and he came to, realizing that he was halfway through the lobby. "Nick," said a rather familiar voice. Crandall squinted at the face at the end of the arm. That slight, pointed beard -- he didn't know anyone with a beard like that, but the eyes looked so terribly familiar... "Nick," said the man with the beard. "I couldn't do it." his younger brother! "Dan!" he shouted. "It's me all right. Here." Something clattered to the floor. Crandall looked down and saw a blaster lying on the rug, a larger and much more expensive blaster than the one he was carrying. Why was Dan toting a blaster? Who was after Dan? With the thought, there came half-understanding. And there was fear -- fear of the words that might come pouring out of the mouth of a brother whom he had not seen for all these years... "I could have killed you from the moment you walked into the lobby," Dan was saying. "You weren't out of the sights for a second. But I want you to know, Nick, that the post-criminal sentence wasn't the reason I froze on the firing button." "No?" Crandall asked in a breath that was exhaled slowly through a retroactive lifetime. "I just couldn't stand adding any more guilt about you. Ever since that business with Polly -- " "With Polly. Yes, of course, with Polly." Something seemed to hang like a weight from the point of his jaw; it pulled his head down and his mouth open. "With Polly. That business with Polly." Dan punched his fist into an open palm twice. "I knew you'd come looking for me sooner or later. I almost went crazy waiting -- and I did go nearly crazy with guilt. But I never figured you'd do it this way, Nick. Seven years to wait for you to come back!" "That's why you never wrote to me, Dan?" "What did I have to say? What is there to say? I thought I loved her, but I found out what I meant to her as soon as she was divorced. I guess I always wanted what was yours because you were my older brother, Nick. That's the only excuse I can offer and I know exactly what it's worth. Because I know what you and Polly had together, what I broke up as a kind of big practical joke. But one thing, Nick: I won't kill you and I won't defend myself. I'm too tired. I'm too guilty. You know where to find me. Anytime, Nick." He turned and strode rapidly through the lobby, the metal spangles that were this year's high masculine fashion glittering on his calves. He didn't look back, even when he was walking past the other side of the clear plastic that enclosed the lobby. Crandall watched him go, then said "Hm" to himself in a lonely kind of way. He reached down, retrieved the other blaster and went out to find a restaurant. A She sat, poking around in the spiced Venusian food that wasn't one-tenth as good as he had remembered it, he kept thinking about Polly and Dan. The incidents -- he could remember incidents galore, now that he had a couple of pegs on which to hang them. To think he'd never suspected -- but who could suspect Polly, who could suspect Dan? He pulled the prison discharge out of his pocket and studied it. Having duly served a maximum penal sentence of seven years, discounted from fourteen years, Nicholas Crandall is herewith discharged in a pre-criminal status --  -- to murder his ex-wife, Polly Crandall? -- to murder his younger brother, Daniel Crandall? Ridiculous! But they hadn't found it so ridiculous. Both of them, so blissfully secure in their guilt, so egotistically certain that they and they alone were the objects of a hatred intense enough to endure the worst that the Galaxy had to offer in order to attain vengeance -- why, they had both been so positive that their normal and already demonstrated cunning had deserted them and they had completely misread the warmth in his eyes! Either one could have switched confessions in mid-explanation. If they had only not been so preoccupied with self and had noted his astonishment in time, either or both of them could still be deceiving him! Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that a woman was standing near his table. She had been reading his discharge over his shoulder. He leaned back and took her in while she stood and smiled at him. She had everything a woman needs for great beauty -- figure, facial structure, complexion, carriage, eyes, hair, all these to perfection -- but she had those other final touches that make the difference between a mere beauty and a work of art. Those final touches included such things as sufficient wealth to create the ultimate setting in coiffure and gown, as well as the single Saturnian paeaea stone glowing in priceless black splendor between her breasts. Those final touches included the look of feminine intelligence in her large eyes, and the overbred, overindulged, overspoiled quality that chilled while attracting desire. "May I sit with you, Mr. Crandall?" she asked in a voice of which no more could be said than that it fitted the rest of her.  more exhilarated than amused, he slid over on the restaurant couch. She sat down like an empress taking her throne before the eyes of a hundred tributary kings. Crandall knew, within approximate limits, who she was and what she wanted. She was either a reigning post-debutante from the highest social circles in the System, or a theatrical star newly arrived and still in a state of nova. And he, as a just-discharged convict, with the power of life and death in his hands, represented a taste she had not yet been able to indulge but was determined to enjoy. Well, in a sense it wasn't flattering, but a woman like this could only fall to the lot of an ordinary man in very exceptional circumstances; he might as well take advantage of his status. He would satisfy her whim, while she, on his first night of freedom -- "That's your discharge, isn't it?" she asked and looked at it again. There was a moist beading on her upper lip as she avidly studied it -- what a strange, satiated animal for one so splendidly young! "Tell me, Mr. Crandall," she asked at last, turning to him with the wet pinpoints above her lip served a pre-criminal sentence for murder. It is true, is it not, that the punishment for murder and the most brutal, degraded rape imaginable are exactly the he'd be unlikely to try another for some time. But that girl! And Edward Ballaskia! There was a message in his box. Someone had called, leaving only a number to be called back. Now what? he wondered as he went back up to his room. Stephanson making overtures? Or same?" After a long, sick silence, Crandall called for his check and walked out of the restaurant. TT E had subsided enough when he reached the hotel to stroll with care around the transparent lobby housing. No one who looked like a Stephanson trigger man was in sight, although Stephanson was a cautious gambler. One attempt having failed, some unhappy mother wanting him to murder her incurable child? set and sat down to watch the screen with a good deal of curiosity. It flickered -- a face took shape on it. Crandall barely restrained a cry of delight. He did have a friend in this city from pre-convict days. Good old dependable, plodding, realistic Irv. His old partner. And then, just as he was about to shout an enthusiastic greeting, he locked it inside his mouth. Too many things had happened today. And there was something about the expression on Irv's face... "Listen, Nick," Irv said heavily at last. "I just want to ask you one question." "What's that, Irv?" Crandall kept himself rock-steady. "How long have you known? When did you find out?" Crandall ran through several possible answers in his mind, finally selecting one. "A long time now, Irv. I just wasn't in a position to do anything about it." Irv nodded. "That's what I thought. Well, listen, I'm not going to plead with you. I know that after seven years of what you've gone through, pleading isn't going to do me any good. But, believe me or not, I didn't start dipping into the till very much until my wife got sick. My personal funds were exhausted. I couldn't borrow any more, and you were too busy with your own domestic troubles to be bothered. Then, when business started to get better, I wanted to prevent a sudden large discrepancy on the books. "So I continued milking the business, not for hospital expenses any more and not to deceive you, Nick -- really! -- but just so you wouldn't find out how much I'd taken from it before. When you came to me and said you were completely discouraged and wanted out -- well, there I'll admit I was a louse. I should have told you. But after all, we hadn't been doing too well as partners and I saw a chance to get the whole business in my name and on its feet, so I -- I -- " "So you bought me out for three hundred and twenty credits," Crandall finished for him. "How much is the firm worth now, Irv?" The other man averted his listen, Nick, business has been terrific this past year in the wholesale line. I didn't cheat you out of all that! Listen, Nick -- " Crandall blew a snort of grim amusement through his nostrils. "What is it, Irv?" I RV drew out a clean tissue and wiped his forehead. "Nick," he said, leaning forward and trying hard to smile winningly. "Listen to me, Nick! You forget about it, you stop hunting me down, and I've got a proposition for you. I need a man with your technical know-how in top management. I'll give you a twenty per cent interest in the business, Nick -- no, make it twenty-five per cent. Look, I'll go as high as thirty per cent -- thirty-five per cent -- " "Do you think that would make up for those seven years?" Irv waved trembling, conciliatory hands. "No, of course not, Nick. Nothing would. But listen, Nick. I'll make it forty-five per -- " Crandall shut him off. He sat for a while, then got up and walked around the room. He stopped and examined his blasters, the one he'd purchased earlier and the one he'd gotten from Dan. He took out his prison discharge and read it through carefully. Then he shoved it back into the tunic pocket. He notified the switchboard that he wanted a long-distance Earthside call put through. "Yes, sir. But there's a gentleman to see you, sir. A Mr. Otto Henck." "Send him up. And put the call in on my screen as soon as it goes through, please, Miss." A few moments later, Blotto Otto entered his room. He was drunk, but carried it, as he always did, remarkably well. "What do you think, Nick? What the hell do you -- " "Sh-h-h," Crandall warned him. "My call's coming in." The Tibetan operator said, "Go ahead, New York," and Frederick Stoddard Stephanson appeared on the screen. The man had aged more than any of the others Crandall had seen tonight. Although you never could tell with Stephanson: he always looked older when he was working out a complex deal. thing; he merely pursed his lips at Crandall and waited. Behind him and around him was a TV Spectacular's idea of a hunting lodge. "All right, Freddy," Crandall said. "What I have to say won't take long. You might as well call off your dogs and stop taking chances trying to kill andor injure me. As of this moment, I don't even have a grudge against you." "You don't even have a grudge -- " Stephanson gasped, in spite of his rigid self-control. "Why not?" "Because -- oh, because a lot just wouldn't be seven hellish years of satisfaction, now that I'm face-to-face with it. And because you didn't do any more to me than practically everybody else has done -- from the cradle, for all I know. Because I've decided I'm a natural born sucker: that's just the way I'm constructed. All you did was take your kind of advantage of my kind of construction." Stephanson leaned forward, peered intently, then relaxed and crossed his arms. "You're actually telling the truth!" "Of course I'm telling the truth! You see these?" He held up the two blasters. "I'm getting rid of these tonight. From now on, I'll be unarmed. I don't want to have the least thing to do with weighing human life in the balance." The other man ran an index nail under a thumb nail thoughtfully a couple of times. "I'll tell you what," he said. "If you mean what you say -- and I think you do -- maybe we can work out something. An arrangement, say, to repay you a bit for what you went through out there. I'd like to, but it's really up to you whether I can. We'll see." "When you don't have to?" Crandall was astonished. "But why didn't you make me an offer before this?" "Because you'd have thought I was trying to buy you off. I'd protect myself, yes, but I wouldn't bribe you to spare my life." Crandall considered the point. "I don't get it. But maybe that's the way you're constructed. Well, we'll see, as you said." When he rose to face Henck, the little man was still shaking his head slowly, dazedly, intent only on his own problem. "What do you think, Nick? Elsa went on a sightseeing jaunt to the Moon last month. The line to her oxygen helmet got clogged, see, and she died of suffocation before they could do anything about it. Isn't that a hell of thing, Nick? One month before I finish my sentence -- she couldn't wait one lousy little month! I bet she died laughing at me!"  around him. "Let's go out for a walk, Blotto Otto. We both need the exercise." Funny how the capacity for murder affected people, he thought. There was Polly's way -- and Dan's. There was old Irv bargaining frantically but still shrewdly for his life. Mr. Edward Ballaskia -- and that girl in the restaurant. And there was Freddy Stephanson, the only intended victim -- and the only one who wouldn't beg. He wouldn't beg, but he might Could Crandall accept what amounted to charity from Stephanson? He shrugged. Who knew what he or anyone else could or could not do? "What do we do now, Nick?" Blotto Otto was demanding petulantly once they got outside the hotel. "That's what I want to know -- what do we do?" "Well, I'm going to do this," Crandall told him, taking a blaster in each hand. "Just this." He threw the gleaming weapons, right hand, left hand, at the transparent window walls that ran around the luxurious lobby of the Ritz-Capricorn. They struck thunk and then thunk again. The windows crashed down in long, pointed daggers. The people in the lobby swung around with their mouths open. A policeman ran up, his badge jingling against his metallic uniform. He seized Crandall. "I saw you! I saw you do that! You'll get thirty days for it!" "Hm," said Crandall. "Thirty days?" He pulled his prison discharge out of his pocket and handed it to the policeman. "I tell you what we'll do, officer -- Just punch the proper number of holes in this document or tear off what seems to you a proportionately sized coupon. Either or both. Handle ,it any way you like." Beginning in the October Issue! by Alfred Bester, author of the In his first and only science fiction novel since the famed The Demolished Man, Bester actually intensifies the creative magic that then a hardcover book and a paperbound reprint, winning all awards in the field the year it appeared, and now bought as a film by Jose Ferrer! Magnificent as that novel was, Alfred Bester's new serial is even richer and more exciting in ideas, action and background, filled with unforgettable scenes and characters in an astonishingly real -- and really astonishing -- future world! Don't miss it! Reserve a copy at your newstand... or subscribe now for a full year (# issues) and tell us to start with the October issue! Send # to... Honorable Opponent No general ever had a worse assignment... to be dignified with Earth's conquerors... a race of unmilitary clowns! Illustrated by HE Fivers were late. Perhaps they had misunderstood. Or this might be another of their tricks. Or maybe they never had intended to stick to their agreement. "Captain," asked General Lyman Flood, "what time have we got now?" Captain Gist looked up from the chessboard. "Thirty-seven oh eight, galactic, sir." Then he went back to the board again. Sergeant Conrad had pinned his knight and he didn't like it. "Thirteen hours late!" the general fumed. "They may not have got it straight, sir." "We spelled it out to them. We took them by the hand and we went over it time and time again so they'd have it clear in mind. They couldn't possibly misunderstand." But they very possibly could, he knew. The Fivers misunderstood almost everything. They had been confused about the armistice -- as if they'd never heard of an armistice before. They had been obtuse about the prisoner exchange. Even the matter of setting a simple time had involved excruciating explanation -- as if they had never heard of the measurement of time and were completely innocent of basic mathematics. "Or maybe they broke down," the captain offered. The general snorted. "They don't break down. Those ships of theirs are marvels. They'd live through anything. They whipped us, didn't they?" "Yes, sir," said the captain. "How many of them, Captain, do you estimate we destroyed?" "Not more than a dozen, sir." "They're tough," the general said. tent and sat down in a chair. The captain had been wrong. The right number was eleven. And of those, only one had been confirmed destroyed. The others had been no better than put out of action. And the way it figured out, the margin had been more than ten to one in favor of the Fivers. Earth, the general admitted to himself, had never taken such a beating. Whole squadrons had been wiped out; others had come fleeing back to Base with their numbers cut in half. They came fleeing back to Base and there were no cripples. They had returned without a scratch upon them. And the ships that had been lost had not been visibly destroyed -- they had simply been wiped out, leaving not a molecule of wreckage. How do you beat a thing like that, he asked himself. How do you fight a weapon that cancels out a ship in its entirety? Back on Earth and on hundreds of other planets in the Galactic Confederacy, thousands of researchers were working day and night in a crash-priority program to find an answer to the weapon -- or at least to find the weapon. But the chance of success ran thin, the general knew, for there was not a single clue to the nature of it. Which was understandable, since every victim of the weapon had been lost irretrievably. Perhaps some of the human prisoners would be able to provide a clue. If there had been no such hope, he knew, Earth never would have gone to all the trouble to make this prisoner exchange. He watched the captain and the sergeant hunched above the chessboard, with the captive Fiver looking on. He called the captive over. The captive came, like a trundling roly-poly. And once again, watching him, the general had that strange, disturbing sense of outrage. For the Fiver was a droll grotesque that held no hint of the martial spirit. He was round and jolly in every feature, expression and gesture, dressed in a ribald clash of colors, as though designed and clad deliberately to offend any military man. "Your friends are late," the general told him. "You wait," the Fiver said and his words were more like whistling than talk. One had to listen closely to make out what he said. The general held himself in check. No use in arguing. No point blowing up. He wondered if he -- or the human race -- would ever understand the Fivers. Not that anyone really wanted to, of course. Just to get them combed out of Earth's hair would be enough. "You wait," the Fiver whistled. "They come in middle time from now." And when in hell, the general wondered, would be a middle time from now? The Fiver glided back to watch the game. The general walked outside. r I 'HE tiny planet looked colder and more desolate and forbidding than it ever had before. Each time he looked at it, the general thought, the scene was more depressing than he had remembered it. Lifeless, worthless, of no strategic or economic value, it had qualified quite admirably as neutral territory to carry out the prisoner exchange. Neutral mostly because it wasn't worth the trouble for anyone to grab it. The distant star that was its sun was a dim glow in the sky. The black and naked rock crept out to a near horizon. The icy air was like a knife inside the general's nostrils. There were no hills or valleys. There was absolutely nothing -- just the smooth flatness of the rock stretching on all sides, for all the world like a great spacefield. It had been the Fivers, the general remembered, who had suggested this particular planet and that in itself was enough to make it suspect. But Earth, at that point in the negotiations, had been in no position to do much haggling. He stood with his shoulders hunched and he felt the cold breath of apprehension blowing down his neck. With each passing hour, it seemed, the place felt more and more like some gigantic trap. But he must be wrong, he argued. There was absolutely nothing in the Fivers' attitude to make him feel like that. They had, in fact, been almost magnanimous. They could have laid down their terms -- almost any terms -- and the Confederacy would have had no choice but to acquiesce. For Earth must buy time, no matter what the price. Earth had to be ready next time -- five years or ten or whatever it might be. But the Fivers had made no demands, which was unthinkable. Except, the general told himself, one could never know what they might be thinking or what they might be planning. The exchange camp huddled in the dimness -- a few tents, a portable power plant, the poised and waiting ship and, beside it, the little scouter the captive Fiver had been piloting. The scouter iri itself was a good example of the gulf which separated the Fivers and the humans. It had taken three full days of bickering before the Fivers had been able to make clear their point that the scouter as well as its pilot must be returned to them. No ship in all the Galaxy had ever gotten so thorough a study as that tiny craft. But the facts that it had yielded had been few indeed. And the captive Fiver, despite the best efforts of the experts in Psych, had furnished even fewer. The area was quiet and almost deserted. Two sentries strode briskly up and down. Everyone time, waiting for the Fivers. The general walked quickly across the area to the medic tent. He stooped and went inside. table, drearily playing cards. One of them put down his hand and rose. "Any word, General?" The general shook his head. "They should be coming soon, Doc. Everything all set?" "We've been ready for some time," said the psychiatrist. "We'll bring the boys in here and check them over as soon as they arrive. We've got the stuff all set. It won't take us long." "That's fine. I want to get off this rock as quickly as I can. I don't like the feel of it." "There's just one thing..." "What's that?" "If we only knew how many they are handing back?" The general shook his head. "We never could find out. They're not so hot on figures. And you'd think, wouldn't you, that math would be universal?" "Well," said Doc resignedly, "we'll do the best we can." "There can't be many," the general said. 'We're only giving back one Fiver and one ship. How many humans do you figure a ship is worth to them?" "I wouldn't know. You really think they'll come?" "It's hard to be certain that they understood. When it comes to sheer stupidity -- " "Not so stupid," Doc replied, quietly. 'We couldn't learn their language, so they learned ours." "I know," the general said impatiently. "I realize all that. But that armistice business -- it took days for them to get what we were driving at. And the time reckoning system still more days. Good Lord, man, you could do better using sign language with a Stone Age savage!" "You should," said Doc. "The savage would be human." "But these Fivers are intelligent. Their technology, in many ways, has us beaten seven ways from Sunday. They fought us to a standstill." "They licked us." "All right, then, they licked us. And why not? They had this weapon that we didn't have. They were closer to their bases. They had no logistics problem to compare with ours. They licked us, but I ask you, did they have the sense to know it? Did they take advantage of it? They could have wiped us out. They could have laid down peace terms that would have crippled us for centuries. Instead, they let us go. Now how does that make sense?" "You're dealing with an alien race," said Doc. "We've dealt with other aliens. And we always understood them. Mostly, we got along with them." "We dealt with them on a commercial basis," Doc reminded him. "Whatever trouble we might have had with them came after a basic minimum of understanding had been achieved. The Fivers are the first that ever came out shooting." eral said. "We weren't even heading for them. We might have passed them by. They couldn't have known who we were. Point is, they didn't care. They just came piling out and opened up on us. And it's been the same with everyone else who came within their reach. They take on every comer. There's never a time when they aren't fighting someone -- sometimes two or three at once." "They have a defensive complex," said Doc. "Want to be left alone. All they aim to do is keep others off their planets. As you say, they could have wiped us out." "Maybe they get hurt real easy. Don't forget we gave them a bloody nose or two -- not as much as they busted us, but we hurt them some. I figure they'll come out again, soon as they can cut in." He drew a deep breath. "Next time, we have to be ready for them. Next time, they may not stop. We have to dope them out." It was tough work, he thought, to fight an enemy about which one knew next to nothing. And a weapon about which one knew absolutely nothing. There were theories in plenty, but the best no more than educated guesses. The weapon might operate in time -- hurling its targets back into unimagined chaos. Or it might be dimensional. Or it might collapse the atoms in upon themselves, reducing a spaceship to the most deadly massive dustmote the Universe had known. One thing for certain -- it was not disintegration, for there was no flash and there was no heat. The ship just disappeared and that was the end of it -- the end and all of it. "There's another thing that bothers me," said Doc. "Those other races that fought the Fivers before they jumped on us. When we tried to contact them, when we tried to get some help from them, they wouldn't bother with us. They wouldn't tell us anything." "This is a new sector of space for us," the general said. "We are strangers here." "It stands to reason," argued Doc, "they should jump at the chance to gang up on the Fivers." "We can't depend on alliances. We stand alone. It is up to us." He bent to leave the tent. "We'll get right on it," said Doc, "soon as the men show up. We'll have a preliminary report within an hour, if they're in any shape at all." "That's fine," the general said and ducked out of the tent. It was a bad situation, blind and terrifying if one didn't manage to keep a good grip on himself. The captive humans might bring back some information, but even so, you couldn't buy it blind, for there might be a gimmick in it -- as there was a gimmick in what the captive Fiver knew. the psych boys might have managed to outsmart themselves. It had been a clever trick, all right -- taking the captive Fiver on that trip and showing him so proudly all the barren, no-good planets, pretending they were the showplaces of the Confederacy. Clever -- if the Fiver had been human. For no human would have fought a skirmish, let alone a war, for the kind of planets he'd been shown. But the Fiver wasn't human. And there was no way of knowing what kind of planet a Fiver might take a fancy to. And there always was the chance that those crummy planets had given him the hunch that Earth would be easy prey. The whole situation didn't track, the general thought. There was a basic wrongness to it. Even allowing for all the differences which might exist between the Fiver and the human cultures, the wrongness still persisted. And there was something wrong right here. He heard the sound and wheeled to stare into the sky. The ship was close and coming in too fast. But even as he held his breath, it slowed and steadied and came to ground in a perfect landing not more than a quarter of a mile from where the Earth ship stood. The general broke into a run toward it, then remembered and slowed to a stiff military walk. Men were tumbling out of tents and forming into lines. An order rang across the area and the lines moved with perfect drill precision. The general allowed himself a smile. Those boys of his were good. You never caught them napping. If the Fivers had expected to sneak in and catch the camp confused and thus gain a bit of face, it was a horse on them. The marching men swung briskly down the field. An ambulance moved out from beneath its tarp and followed. The drums began to roll and the bugles sounded clear and crisp in the harsh, cold air. It was men like these, the general told himself with pride, who held the expanding Confederacy intact. It was men like these who kept the peace across many cubic light-years. It was men like these would roll back the Fiver threat. There were few wars now. Space was too big for it. There were too many ways to skirt around the edge of war for it to come but seldom. But something like the Fiver threat could not be ignored. Some day, soon or late, either Earth or Fiver must go down to complete defeat. The Confederacy could never feel secure with the Fivers on its flank. the general turned. It was Captain Gist, buttoning his tunic as he ran. He fell in beside the general. "So they finally came, sir." "Fourteen hours late," the general said. "Let us, for the moment, try to look our best. You missed a button, Captain." "Sorry, sir," the captain said, fastening the button. "Right, then. Get those shoulders back. Smartly, if you will. Right, left, hup, hup!" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sergeant Conrad had his squad moving out with precision, escorting the captive Fiver most correctly forward, with all the dignity and smartness that anyone might wish. The men were drawn up now in two parallel lines, flanking the ship. The port was swinging open and the ramp was rumbling out and the general noted with some satisfaction that he and Captain Gist would arrive at the foot of the ramp about the time it touched the ground. The timing was dramatic and superb, almost as if he himself had planned it down to the last detail. The ramp snapped into position and three Fivers came sedately waddling down it. A seedy-looking trio, the general thought. Not a proper uniform nor a medal among the lot of them. The general seized the diplomatic initiative as soon as they reached the ground. "We welcome you," he told them, speaking loudly and slowly and as distinctly as he could so they would understand. They lined up and stood looking at him and he felt a bit uncomfortable because there was that round jolly expression in their faces. Evidently they didn't have the kind of faces that could assume any other expression. But they kept on looking at him. The general plunged ahead. "It is a matter of great gratification to Earth to carry out in good faith our obligations as agreed upon in the armistice proceedings. It marks what we sincerely hope will be the beginning of an era..." "Most nice," one of the Fivers said. Whether he meant the general's little speech or the entire situation or was simply trying to be gracious was not at once apparent. U ndaunted, the general was ready to go on, but the spokesman Fiver raised a short round arm to halt him. "Prisoners arrive briefly," he whistled. "You mean you didn't bring them?" "They come again," the Fiver said with a glorious disregard for preciseness of expression. He continued beaming at the general and he made a motion with the arm that might have been a shrug. "Shennanigans," the captain said, close to the general's ear. "We talk," Jhe Fiver said. "They're up to something," warned the captain. "It calls for Situation Red, sir." "I agree," the general told the captain. "Set it up quietly." He said to the Fiver delegation: "If you gentlemen will come with me, I can offer you refreshments." He had a feeling that they were smiling at him, mocking him, but one could never tell. Those jolly expressions were always the same. No matter what the situation. "Most happy," said the Fiver spokesman. "These refresh -- " "Drink," the general said and made a motion to supplement the word. "Drink is good," the Fiver answered. "Drink is friend?" "That is right," the general said. He started for the tent, walking slowly so the Fivers could keep up. He noted with some satisfaction that the captain had carried on most rapidly, indeed. Corporal Conrad was marching his squad back across the area, with the captive Fiver shambling in the center. The tarps were coming off the guns and the last of the crew was clambering up the ladder of the ship. The captain caught up with them just short of the tent. "Everything all set, sir," Corporal Conrad reported in a whisper. "Fine," the general said. They reached the tent and went inside. The general opened a refrigerating unit and took out a gallon jug. "This," he explained, "is a drink we made for your compatriot. He found it very tasty." He set out glasses and sipping straws and uncorked the jug, wishing he could somehow hold his nose, for the drink smelled like something that had been dead too long. He didn't even like to guess what might have gone into it. The chemists back on Earth had whomped it up for the captive Fiver, who had consumed gallon after gallon of it with disconcerting gusto. The general filled the glasses and the Fivers picked them up in their tentacles and stuck the straws into their drawstring mouths. They drank and rolled their eyes in appreciation. The general took the glass of liquor the captain handed him and gulped half of it in haste. The tent was getting just a little thick. What things a man goes through, he thought, to serve his planets and his peoples. drinking and wondered what they might have up their sleeves. Talk, the spokesman had told him, and that might mean almost anything. It might mean a reopening of negotiations or it might be nothing but a stall. And if it was a negotiation, Earth was across the barrel. For there was nothing he could do but negotiate. Earth's fleet was crippled and the Fivers had the weapon and a renewal of the war was unthinkable. Earth needed five years at the minimum and ten years would be still better. And if it was attack, if this planet was a trap, there was only one thing he could do -- stand and fight as best he could, a thoroughly suicidal course. Either way, Earth lost, the general realized. The Fivers put down their glasses and he filled them up again. "You do well," one of the Fivers said. "You got the paper and the marker?" "Marker?" the general asked. "He means a pencil," said the captain. "Oh, yes. Right here." The general reached for a pad of paper and a pencil and laid them on the desk. One of the Fivers set down his glass and, picking up the pencil, started to make a laborious drawing. He looked for all the world like a five-year-old printing his first alphabet. They waited while the Fiver drew. Finally he was finished. He laid the pencil down and pointed to the wiggly lines. "Us," he said. He pointed to the sawtooth lines. "You," he told the general. The general bent above the paper, trying to make out what the Fiver had put down. "Sir," the captain said, "it looks like a battle diagram." "Is," said the Fiver proudly. He picked the pencil up. "Look," he said. He drew directional lines and made a funny kind of symbol for the points of contact and made crosses for the sections where the battle lines were broken. When he was done, the Earth fleet had been shattered and sliced into three segments and was in headlong flight. "That," the general said, with the husk of anger rising in his throat, "was the engagement in Sector #. Half of our Fifth Squadron was wiped out that day." "Small error," said the Fiver and made a deprecatory gesture. He ripped the sheet of paper off the pad and tossed it on the floor. He laboriously drew the diagram again. "Attend," he said. T HE Fiver drew the directional lines again, but this time he changed them slightly. Now the Earth line pivoted and broke and became two parallel lines that flanked the Fiver drive and turned and blunted it and scattered it in space. The Fiver laid the pencil down. "Small matter," he informed the general and the captain. "You good. You make one thin mistake." Holding himself sternly in hand, the general filled the glasses once again. What are they getting at, he thought. Why don't they come flat out and say it? "So best," one of the Fivers said, lifting his glass to let them know that he meant the drink. "More?" asked the Fiver tactician, picking up the pencil. "Please," said the general, seething. He walked to the tent flap and looked outside. The men were at the guns. Thin wisps of vapor curled from the ship's launching tubes; in just a little while, it would be set to go, should the need arise. The camp was quiet and tense. He went back to the desk and watched as the Fiver went on gaily with his lesson on how to win a battle. He filled page after page with diagrams and occasionally he was generous -- he sometimes showed how the Fivers lost when they might have won with slightly different tactics. "Interesting!" he piped enthusiastically. "I find it so," the general said. "There is just one question." "Ask," the Fiver invited. "If we should go to war again, how can you be sure we won't use all of this against you?" "But fine," the Fiver enthused warmly. "Exactly as we want." "You fight fine," another Fiver said. "But just too slightly hard. Next time, you able to do much better." "Hard!" the general raged. "Too roughly, sir. No need to make the ship go poof." Outside the tent, a gun cut loose and then another one and above the hammering of the guns came the full-throated, ground-shaking roar of many ship motors. The general leaped for the entrance, went through it at a run, not bothering with the flap. His cap fell off and he staggered out, thrown slightly off his balance. He jerked up his head and saw them coming in, squadron after squadron, painting the darkness with the flare of tubes.  "You crazy fools, stop firing!" But there was no need of shouting, for the guns had fallen silent. The ships came down toward the camp in perfect flight formation. They swept across it and the thunder of their motors seemed to lift it for a moment and give it a mighty shake. Then they were climbing, rank on serried rank, still with drill precision -- climbing and jockeying into position for regulation landing. The general stood like a frozen man, with the wind ruffling his iron-gray hair, with a lump, half pride, half thankfulness, rising in his throat. Something touched his elbow. "Prisoners," said the Fiver. "I told you bye and bye." The general tried to speak, but the lump was there to stop him. He swallowed it and tried once again. "We didn't understand," he said. "You did not have a taker," said the Fiver. "That why you fight so rough." "We couldn't help it," the general told him. "We didn't know. We never fought this way before." "We give you takers," said the Fiver. "Next time, we play it right. You do much better with the takers. It easier on us." No wonder, the general thought, they didn't know about an armistice. No wonder they were confused about the negotiations and the prisoner exchange. Negotiations are not customarily needed to hand back the pieces one has won in a game. And no wonder those other races had viewed with scorn and loathing Earth's proposal to gang up on the Fivers. "An unsporting thing to do," the general said aloud. "They could have told us. Or maybe they were so used to it." And now he understood why the Fivers had picked this planet. There had to be a place where all the ships could land. landing ships mushing down upon the rock in clouds of pinkish flame. He tried to count them, but he became confused, although he knew every ship Earth had lost would be accounted for. "We give you takers," said the Fiver. "We teach you how to use. They easy operate. They never hurt people or ships." And there was more to it, the general told himself, than just a silly game -- though maybe not so silly, once one understood the history and the cultural background and the philosophic concepts that were tied into it. And this much one could say for it: It was better than fighting actual wars. But with the takers, there would be an end of war. What little war was left would be ended once for all. No longer would an enemy need to be defeated; he could be be simply taken. No longer would there be years of guerrilla fighting on newly settled planets; the aborigines could be picked up and deposited in cultural reservations and the dangerous fauna shunted into zoos. "We fight again?" the Fiver asked with some anxiety. "Certainly," said the general. "Any time you say. Are we really as good as you claim?" "You not so hot," the Fiver admitted with disarming candor. "But you the best we ever find. Play plenty, you get better." The general grinned. Just like the sergeant and the captain and their eternal chess, he thought. He turned and tapped the Fiver on the shoulder. "Let's get back," he said. "There's still some drinking in that jug. We mustn't let it go to waste." # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania This way to the Regress No, Sullivan didn't have a great future behind him... he had H E remembered the rain and the glare of auto headlights all around him. He could see nothing more, but he knew Emily was lying nearby, covered by someone's overcoat, not moving. It was painful, being born like this -- a white knife, piercing him with each breath. All that drifted out of reach. When he woke again, they great past ahead! were both in the car, whirling violently back from the grinding clash of a collision. The other car receded; its headlamps finally turned to a dim glow on the far side of the hill and vanished. The road reeled back silently, smoothly. Sullivan watched the stars wheel through the night as he drove. He was tired and at peace, wanting nothing, accepting everything with a quiet wonder. How strange and wonderful it all was, entering his home for the first time -- five beautifully furnished rooms, just right for Emily and himself. The books with their leather and cloth bindings! The pictures, the boxes of cigars, the wardrobes and dressers full of rich, dark clothing cut to his measure! Life, thought Laurence Wallace Sullivan, was good. That morning before the fire, his hand took a comfortably worn leather volume from the shelves and opened it to a thumb-marked page. Time's graven footsteps in the sands Behind us, if we but approach, Sublime our own lives we can make. Remind us, lives of all great men! Wonderful words... He glanced at his watch. The sky outside his study window was lightening from deep azure to robin's egg, faintly green over the skeletal forest of antennas. He felt stuffed; it was time for dinner. He replaced the book on its shelf and strolled into the dining room, sighing and stretching. Gaynor, he found, operated an unprinting plant that filled a three-story building on Vesey Street. The enormous machines devoured every kind of printed matter and turned it into neat rolls of paper, cans of ink, metal ingots. Their operation was far too complex for Sullivan to understand fully and he did not try, contenting himself with the correspondence and the financial reports that flowed across his desk. Gaynor, his partner, spent more time in the plant -- a red-faced, dyspeptic man with a raucous voice. Nevertheless, Sullivan flattered himself that he understood the romance of his business: Words, words from all over the world streamed into this building in nature's senseless profusion -- words endlessly repeated, words plucked from dead fires and from trashcans, to be carefully unprinted and reduced to one copy only of each sermon, pamphlet, book, advertising leaflet. Like arrow-shapes, fan-shapes of floating paper, each found its way unerringly to the one man for whom it was meant. Sullivan (in his humble way, of course) was a public servant, a guardian of regress. The swift years went by. Summers, on Cape Cod, Sullivan began to feel a strange discontent, listening to the curlews piping on the sands, or watching a sudden evening squall carry water in gray pencil-marks up from the sea. In his lips, each pale Havana cigar prolonged itself behind its inch-long ash, until at last it rounded itself off, and he drew the flame, capped the cigar with his silver knife, and put it away carefully in the humidor. Emily's hair was darkening; they talked more now, and quarreled more. Sometimes she looked strangely at him. Where was it all heading? What was life for? He was fifty-two when he discovered sex with Emily -- a brief and unsatisfactory experience, not soon repeated. Two years later, he met Peggy. It was in an apartment house in the fifties, where he had never been before. The door opened as he turned to it one afternoon and she slapped his face, hard. Then they were inside, glaring at each other, breathing heavily. Sullivan felt a fury for her that was all mingled with disgust and satiated desire. and after Alice there was Connie. That was in #; Sullivan was forty-seven, in the prime of his vigor. In that year, the stranger who was his son came home from Italy. Robert had just been discharged from the Army; he called himself R. Gaynor Sullivan at first, was gawky and insolent, but after he enrolled in college, things went better. Then, in a surprisingly short time, he was home again and the apartment was not big enough. They moved to a house in Long Island City -- more confusion, and Sullivan's relations with his wife were strained. He was working too hard; the firm's business was booming, due partly to a heavy lump-sum repayment to Emily's father. Each month, the check stubs. Money poured into the account from grocer, dentist, doctors... he was always hard pressed to pay enough other people to keep it stabilized. In the evenings, his familiar face stared back at him from the mirror, haggard and gray. His fingers rubbed the smooth cheek; the razor came riding diagonally up with a crisp sound, trailing lather and making the bristles sprout behind it. Then the warm brush to remove the lather, and the same face, with its beard restored. What if he should leave it smooth some day? But he didn't want to be conspicuous. The firm had moved several times, finally settling in a loft on Bleeker Street. Their operations had simplified; more and more employees had left, until Sullivan, Gaynor and three unprinters were running the place themselves. Sullivan often took a hand at the job press; once you had learned the trick of it, there was a soothing, almost hypnotic quality in the rhythm that flicked a blank page from the platen and slapped a printed on in to be erased, all in the acrobatic moment of safety when the metal jaws gaped. Gaynor was a much more likable fellow these days; Sullivan's days at work were filled with pleasure, as his nights were at home. The boy had grown incredibly dear to him and he was in love with Emily. He had never, Sullivan thought, been so happy. filled, the final entries had been erased from the ledgers, the workmen were unbolting the presses and dismantling them to be carried away. There was nothing more to do but to shake hands on it and go their separate ways. He and Gaynor ceremonially locked the door together and adjourned to the bar downstairs, feeling a premonitory glow. "Here's to success!" "Maybe now that this fella Roosevelt is going out, we'll see some changes." They clinked their glasses solemnly, set them down on the waitress's tray and, sobered, left. Gaynor was going back to Minneapolis, where he had a job as foreman of an unprinting plant. Sullivan himself was going to have to hunt for a while before he found a job as assistant to a paper broker. But not for long; the Boom was coming up in a few years.    Sullivan uncrumpled the Sun, relishing the heavy . feel of the gray pages. "That woman is out of office in Texas," he announced, adding "Good riddance!" Yes, that was what the headline said. Women governors -- what was the world coming to? Emily, unfolding diapers, did not seem to hear. She was losing her figure again; she seemed pale, tired and listless. Little Robert was grunting in his cradle; he had shrunk to a fat handful, more animal than baby. He slept nearly all the time, when he was not howling or further distending Emily's swollen breasts. Life was a queer business. In another month, it would be time to take them both to the hospital and only Emily would be coming home. That was funny; he had loved the child and he took an affectionate interest in it even now, but it would be almost a relief to get rid of it. Afterward, it would be a good six months before Emily got her figure back. She glanced at him sidelong. She was still a lovely woman, but what did she secretly think of him? What was it really all about? droned in his ears. Emily, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her, gently moved out of his embrace. He took the ring from her finger and handed it to Bob. "I divorce thee with this ring," he said. Later, they went out together, many times. At a party one morning, a polite stranger led him up to her and said, "Emily, I want you to say good-by to Larry Sullivan." They looked across a gulf; her fingers were cool in his and he knew he would never see her again. From that day on, there was an emptiness in his life. He tried to fill it with amusements -- too much liquor, too much music. He met girls and kissed them, took them on dates, but he missed his wife. It was hard to get used to, living alone after all those years together. Still, life had its compensations. There was an endless interest in watching the changes the years brought, seeing it all work out. Automobiles lost all trace of their former streamlines, became elegantly spare or even boxy, hinting at the victorias and broughams to come. There were fewer machines on the streets and fewer people; the air was purer. Garbo replaced Grable on the silver screen. Abruptly, then, the movies ceased to talk. The incomparable Chaplin came into his own; the Keystone cops grew famous. Sullivan watched it all with fascinated eyes. Technological regress was certainly a wonderful thing! And yet sometimes Sullivan found himself thinking nostalgically of the old blaring, bustling days. Luckily, there was still the War to come. Europe was rousing from her long sleep and, to the east, holy Russia was being born. the scar on his chin. He was due to go to field hospital with it, he judged -- it was tight and raw-feeling and itched. It was the worst scar he had, puckered and stretching halfway up his shin-bone; he would be glad to get rid of it and go on to the front. War was not much like the movies, so far. He walked out of the barracks tent into the sunlight, helping himself along with his cane. There were a lot of other casualties; he supposed this must be the prelude of the big battle of the Argonne that he had read about in the prophecies. That would be where his number came up. What would it be -- a mortar shell, or hand-to-hand -- or even something anticlimatic, like falling over a tent rope in the dark? He wished the time would come, so he could get it over with.    He met his father, briefly, when he came home from France. The old man was very gray and shaky, and they did not seem to have much in common. It was a relief on both sides when Sullivan went off to Cornell. He was enrolled as a senior, which meant he had to go the full four years. Sullivan did not mind that; the years you spent in college were the most important ones of your life. Here everything you had thought and read, all you knew, all you had been, poured out of you and funneled down to the instructee of that particular class. Then the instructee would sum it all up in according to who it was, and eventually the essence of it would get into the ultimate copy of a textbook, to be absorbed by the author and so returned to nature, used up, got rid of. In the spring, Sullivan went out for football. He was registered in the athletic prediction books as playing two full seasons on the 'varsity. The books did not say so, but probably that was where he was going to get rid of the crook in his nose. Professor Toohey was an old duck who took a fancy to Sullivan before he had been in college a year. They used to spout beer, down in Toohey's dark cellar, where he kept a keg for it, and talk philosophy. "There's something to think about," Toohey might begin, circling up to a subject they had discussed before. "How can we tell? The reverse sequence of causation may be just as valid as the one we are experiencing. Cause and effect are arbitrary, after all." "But it sounds pretty farfetched," Sullivan would say cautiously. "It's hard for us to imagine, just because we're not used to it. It's only a matter of viewpoint. Water would run downhill, and so on. Energy would flow the other way -- from total concentration to total dispersion. Why not?"  alize that peculiar world, it gave him a half-pleasant shudder. Imagine never knowing the date of your death. "Everything would be backward. If you meant 'catch,' you'd have have to say 'throw.' All the words would have to mean different things -- all the verbs that express duration, anyway. There are difficulties to it." "It all makes perfectly good sense in its own terms," stated Profesor Toohey. "Friction would be a factor to be subtracted from energy calculation, not added. And so on. The Universe would be expanding; we'd heat our houses with furnaces instead of cooling them. Grass would grow out of seeds. And there'd be no increting and exgesting as we do." Sullivan grinned. "You mean the older we got, the more wrinkled and decrepit we'd be?" "Think about it for a minute. It would seem perfectly natural. We might live backward, death to birth, and never know the difference. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Do wars cause armies, or armies wars? What do we mean by causation, anyway? Think about it." "Hmmm." And the formal end-question: "Sullivan, what do you think about the principle of causation?" He wished he knew.    The world was growing larger and brighter, now that he was ten. Sullivan had a furious energy that drove him out of doors all day in good weather. Even in winter, he stood about, watching the freezing ground water rush up the drainspout, or letting the snow form on his head and shoulders, drifting up into the white sky as it did from the ground on which he stood. Whatever came, he took without question. If his fingers and nose were bright pink with cold when he went out, the snow would warm them. If he awoke with a black eye, a friend would heal it with his fist. Sullivan climbed his friends' backs and leaped off, and they his, with peals of cracked idiot laughter. They fidgeted in class, made comical faces at one another from behind books, swarmed yelling uphill and down again. For repletion, there was mealtime, and time was the cure for hunger. The hardest thing was that Mrs. Hastings would not let him out of bed when he awoke early in the morning, though any fool could see he was not going to sleep any more. After that, his day was one long gallop. Sullivan and his father were seized with a nervous anticipation; it took the form of tears on Sullivan's part, scowls and throat-clearings on his father's. All day, they were good for nothing and could not look at each other. At last, in the late afternoon, they dressed to go out. A hired carriage was waiting. His father drove, following the roads automatically. When they got out, Sullivan saw that they were in a cemetery. Something clutched tight at his heart. His father's arm came unwelcome around him, the strong fingers hard on his arm as he stumbled. Others were moving nearby; finally they all grouped, and turned, and were standing beside a half-open grave. Two men were uncovering the box already, expertly catching each shovel-load of dirt as it leaped, thrusting it sharply into the pile and waiting for the next. Afterward, they raised the box with broad straps until it rested on boards laid across the hole in the ground. The minister, standing on the far side of the grave, unfolded his hands and spoke. "... From dust thou comest, and dust thou art..." When he was finished, he coughed apologetically and was silent. The crowd began to flow away. The workmen stood beside the grave and the box, bareheaded in the sunlight, hands at their sides.    Sullivan was trying to get used to an unaccustomed pain that had come to live in his chest. It was like being sick, but he was not sick. It was not even an honest pain, caused by medicine; it was just a kind of persisting crying ache that would not go away. He saw now, with the eye of disillusionment, that all his past gaiety had been foolish. Here he was in the last decade of his life, with fifty-two years behind him, and what could he show for it? Nothing but this ache of loss. His hand worked reflexively at the contents of his pocket and brought up a spiny handful: jackknife, pencil stub, assorted nails, a wad of grimy string, two marbles and an aggie, three pennies, a gray chip of rock with shiny specks on it, cracker crumbs and, over everything, pocket lint. Dust and ashes. A hot tear crawled up his cheek. The old man came into the room wearily, setting a broom down in the corner. He had been taking care of the house himself, these last few days. Mrs. Hastings had disappeared and Sullivan did not think she was coming back. "Put your coat on, Larry," said his father with a sigh.  told. In silence, they went out to the corner and waited for the streetcar. Gradually Sullivan began to recognize the route they took. It was the same way they had gone that time when he had his tonsils put in. A touch of fear came to him, but he endured it and said nothing. It was the hospital they were going to, all right. In the dark lobby, they did not look at each other. Sullivan's father stood with his bowler hat in both hands, talking to a doctor, while Sullivan walked mechanically past him down the hall. Where was he going in this unpleasant dark place with its sharp smells of ether and formaldehyde, and its clicking sharpheeled nurses with sour faces over their trays? The closed doors moved past on either side. Sullivan stopped and turned, with an unaccountable tightness in his throat, and found himself facing a door like the others. But this one was going to open. The knob turned; Sullivan could not bear it. He wanted to rim, but felt rooted to the spot. What, oh, what was it? The door was opening, and inside, on the bed -- A gray woman. Her tired eyes opened and she tried to smile at him. "Mother," he said. .      "Shoot the wad!" has always been the motto of this magazine... and your evidence that it's followed is the way we've recklessly printed every Theodore Sturgeon story as fast as it has come in, without holding out for replacements. We intend to go on doing just that. It's a nervous way of doing business, but writers like Sturgeon have an admirable habit of coming through -- and not merely with usable material -- but with tense, For example, in next month's issue, Theodore Sturgeon offers a novella, how wholly, shockingly impossible it is for a tradition-smashing doctor to take a particular case -- one reason, everybody knows; the other, he keeps entirely to himself -- only there isn't a single way for him to get out of taking the impossible case! agreeable problem of a novelet, puts an unsuccessful poet in another pickle: What would the aliens want one-half so precious as the incredibly beautiful animal skins they refuse to sell? Early Model Opening a new planet? Then take Bentley's advice -- invulnerability is a great thing, but make doubly sure you don't overdo itl T HE landing was almost a catastrophe. Bentley knew his coordination was impaired by the bulky weight on his back; he didn't realize how much until, at a crucial moment, he stabbed the wrong button. The ship began to drop like a stone. At the last moment, he overcompensated, scorching a black hole into the plain below him. His ship touched, teetered for a moment, then sickeningly came to rest. Bentley had effected mankind's first landing on Tels IV. His immediate reaction was to pour himself a sizable drink of strictly medicinal scotch. When that was out of the way, he turned on his radio. The receiver was imbedded in his ear, where it itched, and the microphone was a surgically implanted lump in his throat. The portable sub-space set was self-tuning, which was all to the good, since Bentley knew nothing about narrowcasting on so tight a beam over so great a distance. "All's well," he told Professor Sliggert over the radio. "It's an Earth-type planet, just as the survey reports said. The ship is intact. And I'm happy to report that I did not break my neck in landing." "Of course not," Sliggert said, his voice thin and emotionless through the tiny receiver. "What about the Protec? How does it feel? Have you become used to it yet?" feels like a monkey on my back." "Well, you'll adjust," Sliggert assured him. "The Institute sends its congratulations and I believe the government is awarding you a medal of some sort. Remember, the thing now is to fraternize with the aborigines, and if possible to establish a trade agreement of some sort, any sort. As a precedent. We need this planet, Bentley." "I know." "Good luck. Report whenever you have a chance." "I'll do that," Bentley promised and signed off. He tried to stand up, but didn't make it on the first attempt. Then, using the handholds that had been conveniently spaced above the control board, he managed to stagger erect. Now he appreciated the toll that no-weight extracts from a man's muscles. H: wished he had done his exercises more faithfully on the long trip out from Earth. Bentley was a big, jaunty young man, over six feet tall, widely and solidly constructed. On Earth, he had weighed two hundred pounds and had moved with an athlete's grace. But ever since leaving Earth, he'd had the added encumbrance of seventythree pounds strapped irrevocably and immovably to his back. Under the circumstances, his movements resembled those of a very old elephant wearing tight shoes. He moved his shoulders under the wide plastic straps, grimaced, and walked to a starboard porthole. In the distance, perhaps half a mile away, he could see a village, low and brown on the horizon. There were dots on the plain moving toward him. The villagers apparently had decided to discover what strange object had fallen from the skies breathing fire and making an uncanny noise. "Good show," Bentley said to himself. Contact would have been difficult if these aliens had shown no curiosity. This eventuality had been considered by the Earth Interstellar Exploration Institute, but no solution had been found. Therefore it had been struck from the list of possibilities. The villagers were drawing closer. Bentley decided it was time to get ready. He opened a locker and took out his linguascene, which, with some difficulty, he strapped to his chest. On one hip, he fastened a large canteen of water. On the other hip went a package of concentrated food. Across his stomach, he put a package of assorted tools. Strapped to one leg was the radio. Strapped to the other was a medicine kit. Thus equipped, Bentley was carrying a total of # pounds, every ounce of it declared essential for an extraterrestrial explorer. The fact that he lurched rather than walked was considered unimportant. ' I 'HE natives had reached the ship now and were gathering around it, commenting disparagingly. They were bipeds. They had short thick tails and their features were human, but nightmare human. Their coloring was a vivid orange. Bentley also noticed that they were armed. He could see knives, spears, lances, stone hammers and flint axes. At the sight of this armament, a satisfied smile broke over his face. Here was the justification for his discomfort, the reason for the unwieldy seventythree pounds which had remained on his back ever since leaving Earth. It didn't matter what weapons these aboriginals had, right up to the nuclear level. They couldn't hurt him. That's what Professor Sliggert, head of the Institute, inventor of the Protec, had told him. Bentley opened the port. A cry of astonishment came from the Telians. His linguascene, after a few seconds' initial hesitation, translated the cries as, "Oh! Ah! How strange! Unbelievable! Ridiculous! Shockingly improper!" Bentley descended the ladder on the ship's side, carefully balancing his # pounds of excess weight. The natives formed a semicircle around him, their weapons ready. He advanced on them. They shrank back. Smiling pleasantly, he said, "I come as a friend." The linguascene barked out the harsh consonants of the Telian language. They didn't seem to believe him. Spears were poised and one Telian, larger than the others and wearing a colorful headdress, held a hatchet in readiness. Bentley felt the slightest tremor run through him. He was invulnerable, of course. There was nothing they could do to him, as long as he wore the Protec. Nothing! Professor Sliggert had been certain of it. Sliggert had strapped the Protec to Bentley's back, adjusted the straps and stepped back to admire his brainchild. "Perfect," he had announced with quiet pride. Bentley had shrugged his shoulders under the weight. "Kind of heavy, isn't it?" "But what can we do?" Sliggert asked him. "This is the first of its kind, the prototype. I have used every weight-saving device possible -- transistors, light alloys, printed circuits, pencil power packs and all the rest. Unfortunately, early models of any invention are invariably bulky." "Seems as though you could have streamlined it a bit," Bentley objected, peering over his shoulder. "Streamlining comes much later. First must be concentration, then compaction, then groupfunction, and finally styling. It's always been that way and it will always be. Take the typewriter. Now it is simply a keyboard, almost as flat as a briefcase. But the prototype typewriter worked with foot pedals and required the combined strength of several men to lift. Take the hearing aid, which actually shrank pounds through the various stages of its development. Take the linguascene, which began as a very massive, complicated telectronic calculator weighing several tons -- " "Okay," Bentley broke in. "If this is the best you could make it, good enough. How do I get out of it?" Professor Sliggert smiled. Bentley reached around. He couldn't find a buckle. He pulled ineffectually at the shoulder straps, but could find no way of undoing them. Nor could he squirm out. It was like being in a new and fiendishly efficient strait jacket. "Come on, Professor, how do I get it off?" "I'm not going to tell you." "Huh?" "The Protec is uncomfortable, is it not?" Sliggert asked. "You would rather not wear it?" "You're damned right." "Of course. Did you know that in wartime, on the battlefield, soldiers have a habit of discarding essential equipment because it is bulky or uncomfortable? But we can't take chances on you. You are going to an alien planet, Mr. Bentley. You will be exposed to wholly unknown dangers. It is necessary that you be protected at all times." "I know that," Bentley said. "I've got enough sense to figure out when to wear this thing." "But do you? We selected you for attributes such as resourcefulness, stamina, physical strength -- and, of course, a certain amount of intelligence. But -- " "Thanks!" "But those qualities do not make you prone to caution. Suppose you found the natives seemingly friendly and decided to discard the heavy, uncomfortable Protec? What would happen if you had misjudged their attitude? This is very easy to do on Earth; think how much easier it will be on an alien planet!" "I can take care of myself," Bentley said. "That is what Atwood said when he left for Durabella II and we have never heard from him again. Nor have we heard from Blake, or Smythe, or Korishell. Can you turn a knife-thrust from the rear? Have you eyes in the back of your head? No, Mr. Bentley, you haven't -- but the Protec has!" "Look," Bentley had said, "believe it or not, I'm a responsible adult. I will wear the Protec at all times when on the surface of an alien planet. Now tell me how to get it off." "You don't seem to realize something, Bentley. If only your life were at stake, we would let you take what risks seemed reasonable to you. But we are also worth of spaceship and equipment. Moreover, this is the Protec's field test. The only way to be sure of the results is to have you wear it all the time. The only way to ensure that is by not telling you how to remove it. We want results. You are going to stay alive whether you like it or not." Bentley had thought it over and agreed grudgingly. "I guess I might be tempted to take it off, if the natives were really friendly." "You will be spared that temptation. Now do you understand how it works?" "Sure," Bentley said. "But will it really do all you say?" "It passed the lab tests perfectly." "I'd hate to have some little thing go wrong. Suppose it pops a fuse or blows a wire?" "That is one of the reasons for its bulk," Sliggert explained patiently. "Triple everything. We are taking no chance of mechanical failure. "And the power supply?" "Good for a century or better at full load. The Protec is perfect, Bentley! After this field test, I have no doubt it will become standard equipment for all extraterrestrial explorers." Professor Sliggert permitted himself a faint smile of pride. "All right," Bentley had said, moving his shoulders under the wide plastic straps. "I'll get used to it." But he hadn't. A man just doesn't get used to a seventythree-pound monkey on his back.  I , HE Telians didn't know what to make of Bentley. They argued for several minutes, while the explorer kept a strained smile on his face. Then one Telian stepped forward. He was taller than the others and wore a distinctive headdress made of glass, bones and bits of rather garishly painted wood. "My friends," the Telian said, "there is. an evil here which I, Rinek, can sense." Another Telian wearing a similar headdress stepped forward and said, "It is not well for a ghost doctbr to speak of such things." "Of course not," Rinek admitted. "It is not well to speak of evil in the presence of evil, for evil then grows strong. But a ghost doctor's work is the detection and avoidance of evil. In this work, we must persevere, no matter what the risk." Several other men in the distinctive headdress, the ghost doctors, had come forward now. Bentley decided that they were the Telian equivalent of priests and probably wielded considerable political power as well. "I don't think he's evil," a young and cheerful-looking ghost doctor named Huascl said. "Of course he is. Just look at him." "Appearances prove nothing, as we know from the time the good spirit Ahut M'Kandi appeared in the form of a -- " "No lectures, Huascl. All of us know the parables of Lalland. The point is, can we take a chance?" Huascl turned to Bentley. "Are you evil?" the Telian asked earnestly. "No," Bentley said. He had been puzzled at first by the Telians' intense preoccupation with his spiritual status. They hadn't even asked him where he'd come from, or how, or why. But then, it was not so strange. If an alien had landed on Earth during certain periods of religious zeal, the first question asked might have been, "Are you a creature of God or of Satan?" "He says he's not evil," Huascl said. "How would he know?" "If he doesn't, who does?" "Once the great spirit G'tal presented a wise man with three kdal and said to him -- " And on it went. Bentley found his legs beginning to bend under the weight of all his equipment. The linguascene was no longer able to keep pace with the shrill theological discussion that raged around him. His status seemed to depend upon two or three disputed points, none of which the ghost doctors wanted to talk about, since to talk about evil was in itself dangerous. To make matters more complicated, there was a schism over the concept of the penetrability of evil, the younger ghost doctors holding to one side, the older to the other. The factions accused each other of rankest heresy, but Bentley couldn't figure out who believed what or which interpretation aided him. " over the grassy plain, the battle still raged. Then, suddenly, the ghost doctors reached an agreement, although Bentley couldn't decide why or on what basis. Huascl stepped forward as spokesman for the younger ghost doctors. "Stranger," he declared, "we have decided not to kill you." Bentley suppressed a smile. That was just like a primitive people, granting life to an invulnerable being! "Not yet, anyhow," Huascl amended quickly, catching a frown upon Rinek and the older ghost doctors. "It depends entirely upon you. We will go to the village and purify ourselves and we will feast. Then we will initiate you into the society of ghost doctors. No evil thing can become a ghost doctor; it is expressly forbidden. In this manner, we will detect your true nature." "I am deeply grateful," Bentley said. "But if you are evil, we are pledged to destroy evil. And if we must, we can!" The assembled Telians cheered his speech and began at once the mile trek to the village. Now that a status had been assigned Bentley, even tentatively, the natives were completely friendly. They chatted amiably with him about crops, droughts and famines. Bentley staggered along under his equipment, tired, but inwardly elated. This was really a coup! As an initiate, a priest, he would have an unsurpassed opportunity to gather anthropological data, to establish trade, to pave the way for the future development of Tels IV. All he had to do was pass the initiation tests. And not get killed, of course, he reminded himself, smiling. It was funny how positive the ghost doctors had been that they could kill him. The village consisted of two dozen huts arranged in a rough circle. Beside each mud-andthatch hut was a small vegetable garden, and sometimes a pen for the Telian version of cattle. There were small green-furred animals roaming between the huts, which the Telians treated as pets. The grassy central area was common ground. Here was the community well and here were the shrines to various gods and devils. In this area, lighted by a great bonfire, a feast had been laid out by the village women. feast in a etate of near-exhaustion, stooped beneath his essential equipment. Gratefully, he sank to the ground with the villagers and the celebration began. First the village women danced a welcoming for him. They made a pretty sight, their orange skin glinting in the firelight, their tails swinging gracefully in unison. Then a village dignitary named Occip came over to him, bearing a full bowl. "Stranger," Occip said, "you are from a distant land and your ways are not our ways. Yet let us be brothers! Partake, therefore, of this food to seal the bond between us, and in the name of all sanctity!" Bowing low, he offered the bowl. It was an important moment, one of those pivotal occasions that can seal forever the friendship between races or make them eternal enemies. But Bentley was not able to take advantage of it. As tactfully as he could, he refused the symbolic food. "But it is purified!" Occip said. Bentley explained that, because of a tribal taboo, he could eat only his own food. Occip could not understand that different species have different dietary requirements. For example, Bentley pointed out, the staff of life on Tels IV might well be some strychnine compound. But he did not add that even if he wanted to take the chance, his Protec would never allow it. Nonetheless, his refusal alarmed the village. There were hurried conferences among the ghost doctors. Then Rinek came over and sat beside him. "Tell me," Rinek inquired after a while, "what do you think of evil?" "Evil is not good," Bentley said solemnly. "Ah!" The ghost doctor pondered that, his tail flicking nervously over the grass. A small green-furred pet, a mog, began to play with his tail. Rinek pushed him away and said, "So you do not like evil." "No." "And you would permit no evil influence around you?" "Certainly not," Bentley said, stifling a yawn. He was growing bored with the ghost doctor's tortuous examining. "In that case, you would have no objection to receiving the sacred and very holy spear that Kran K'leu brought down from the abode of the Small Gods, the brandishing of which confers good upon a man." "I would be pleased to receive it," said Bentley, heavy-eyed, hoping this would be the last ceremony of the evening. Rinek grunted his approval and moved away. The women's dances came to an end. The ghost doctors began to chant in deep, impressive voices. The bonfire flared high. Huascl came forward. His face was now painted in thin black and white stripes. He carried an ancient spear of black wood, its head of shaped volcanic glass, its length intricately although primitively carved. Huascl said, "O Stranger from the Skies, accept from us this spear of sanctity! Kran K'leu gave this lance to Trin, our first father, and bestowed upon it a magical nature and caused it to be a vessel of the spirits of the good. Evil cannot abide the presence of this spear! Take, then, our blessings with it." Bentley heaved himself to his feet. He understood the value of a ceremony like this. His acceptance of the spear should end, once and for all, any doubts as to his spiritual status. Reverently he inclined his head. Huascl came forward, held out the spear and -- The Protec snapped into action. Its operation was simple, in common with many great inventions. When its calculator-component received a danger cue, the Protec threw a force field around its operator. This field rendered him invulnerable, for it was completely and absolutely impenetrable. But there were certain unavoidable disadvantages. If Bentley had had a weak heart, the Protec might have killed him there and then, for its action was electronically sudden, completely unexpected and physically wrenching. One moment, he was standing in front of the great bonfire, his hand held out for the sacred spear. In the next moment, he was plunged into darkness. As usual, he felt as though he had been catapulted into a musty, lightless closet, with rubbery walls pressing close on all sides. He cursed the machine's super-efficiency. The spear had not been a threat; it was part of an important ceremony. But the Protec, with its literal senses, had interpreted it as a possible danger. Now, in the darkness, Bentley fumbled for the controls that would release the field. As usual, the force field interfered with his positional sense, a condition that seemed to grow worse with each subsequent use. Carefully he felt his way along his chest, where the button should have been, and located it at last under his right armpit, where it had twisted around to. He released the field. The feast had ended abruptly. The natives were standing close together for protection, weapons ready, tails stretched stiffly out. Huascl, caught in the force field's range, had been flung twenty feet and was slowly picking himself up. The ghost doctors began to chant a purification dirge, for protection against evil spirits. Bentley couldn't blame them. When a Protec force field goes on, it appears as an opaque black sphere, some ten feet in diameter. If it is struck, it repels with a force equal to the impact. White lines appear in the sphere's surface, swirl, coalesce, vanish. And as the sphere spins, it screams in a thin, high-pitched wail. All in all, it was a sight hardly calculated to win the confidence of a primitive and superstitious people. "Sorry," Bentley said, with a weak smile. There hardly seemed anything else to say. kept his distance. "You cannot accept the sacred spear," he stated. "Well, it's not exactly that," said Bentley. "It's just -- well, I've got this protective device, kind of like a shield, you know? It doesn't like spears. Couldn't you offer me a sacred gourd?" "Don't be ridiculous," Huascl said. "Who ever heard of a sacred gourd?" "No, I guess not. But please take my word for it -- I'm not evil. Really I'm not. I've just got a taboo about spears." The ghost doctors talked among themselves too rapidly for the linguascene to interpret. It caught only the words "evil," "destroy," and "purification." Bentley decided his forecast didn't look too favorable. After the conference, Huascl came over to him and said, "Some of the others feel that you should be killed at once, before you bring some great unhappiness upon the village. I told them, however, that you cannot be blamed for the many taboos that restrict you. We will pray for you through the night. And perhaps, in the morning, the initiation will be possible." Bentley thanked him. He was shown to a hut and then the Telians left him as quickly as possible. There was an ominous hush over the village; from his doorway, Bentley could see little groups of natives talking earnestly and glancing covertly in his direction. It was a poor beginning for cooperation between two races. He immediately contacted Professor Sliggert and told him what had happened. "Unfortunate," the professor said. "But primitive people are notoriously treacherous. They might have meant to kill you with the spear instead of actually handing it to you. Let you have it, that is, in the most literal sense." "I'm positive there was no such intention," Bentley said. "After all, you have to start trusting people sometime." worth of equipment in your charge." ?#UT I'm not going to be able to do anything!" Bentley shouted. "Don't you understand? They're suspicious of me already. I wasn't able to accept their sacred spear. That means I'm very possibly evil. Now what if I can't pass the initiation ceremony tomorrow? Suppose some idiot starts to pick his teeth with a knife and the Protec saves me? All the favorable first impression I built up will be lost." "Good will can be regained," Professor Sliggert said sentenworth of equipment -- " " -- can be salvaged by the next expedition. Look, Professor, give me a break. Isn't there some way I can control this thing manually?" "No way at all," Sliggert replied. "That would defeat the entire purpose of the machine. You might just as well not be wearing it if you're allowed to rely on your own reflexes rather than electronic impulses." "Then tell me how to take it off." "The same argument holds true -- you wouldn't be protected at all times." "Look," Bentley protested, "you chose me as a competent explorer. I'm the guy on the spot. I know what the conditions are here. Tell me how to get it off." "No! The Protec must have a full field test. And we want you to come back alive." "That's another thing," Bentley said. "These people seem kind of sure they can kill me." "Primitive peoples always overestimate the potency of their strength, weapons and magic." "I know, I know. But you're certain there's no way they can get through the field? Poison, maybe?" "Nothing can get through the field," Sliggert said patiently. "Not even light rays can penetrate. Not even gamma radiation. You are wearing an impregnable fortress, Mr. Bentley. Why can't you manage to have a little faith in it?" "Early models of inventions sometimes need a lot of ironing out," Bentley grumbled. "But have it your way. Won't you tell me how to take it off, though, just in case something goes wrong?" "I wish you would stop asking me that, Mr. Bentley. You were chosen to give the Protec a full field test. That's just what you are goihg to do." was deep twilight outside and the villagers had returned to their huts. Campfires burned low and he could hear the call of night creatures. At that moment, Bentley felt very alien and exceedingly homesick. He was tired almost to the point of unconsciousness, but he forced himself to eat some concentrated food and drink a little water. Then he unstrapped the tool kit, the radio and the canteen, tugged defeatedly at the Protec, and lay down to sleep. Just as he dozed off, the Protec went violently into action, nearly snapping his neck out of joint. Wearily he fumbled for the controls, located them near his stomach, and turned off the field. The hut looked exactly the same. He could find no source of attack. Was the Protec losing its grip on reality, he wondered, or had a Telian tried to spear him through the window? Then Bentley saw a tiny mog puppy scuttling away frantically, its legs churning up clouds of dust. The little beast probably just wanted to get warm, Bentley thought. But of course it was alien. Its potential for danger could not be overlooked by the ever-wary Protec. He fell asleep again and immediately began to dream that he was locked in a prison of bright red sponge rubber. He could push the walls out and out and out, but they never yielded, and at last he would have to let go and be gently shoved back to the center of the prison. Over and over, this happened, until suddenly he felt his back wrenched and awoke within the Protec's lightless field. This time he had real difficulty finding the controls. He hunted desperately by feel until the bad air made him gasp in panic. He located the controls at last under his chin, released the field, and began to search groggily for the source of the new attack. He found it. A twig had fallen from the thatch roof and had tried to land on him. The Protec, "Aw, come on now," Bentley of course, had not allowed it. groaned aloud. "Let's use a little judgment!" But he was really too tired to care. Fortunately, there were no more assaults that night. hut in the morning, looking very solemn and considerably disturbed. "There were great sounds from your hut during the night," the ghost doctor said. "Sounds of torment, as though you were wrestling with a devil." "I'm just a restless sleeper," Bentley explained. Huascl smiled to show that he appreciated the joke. "My friend, did you pray for purification last night and for release from evil?" "I certainly did." "And was your prayer granted?" "It was," Bentley said hopefully. "There's no evil around me. Not a bit." Huascl looked dubious. "But can you be sure? Perhaps you should depart from us in peace. If you cannot be initiated, we shall have to destroy you -- " "Don't worry about it," Bentley told him. "Let's get started." "Very well," Huascl said, and together they left the hut. The initiation was to be held in front of the great bonfire in the village square. Messengers had been sent out during the night and ghost doctors from many villages were there. Some had come as far as twenty miles to take part in the rites and to see the alien with their own eyes. The ceremonial drum had been taken from its secret hiding place and was now booming solemnly. The villagers watched, chattered together, laughed. But Bentley could detect an undercurrent of nervousness and strain. There was a long series of dances. Bentley twitched worriedly when the last figure started, for the leading dancer was swinging a glass-studded club around his head. Nearer and nearer the dancer whirled, now only a few feet away from him, his club a dazzling streak. The villagers watched, fascinated. Bentley shut his eyes, expecting to be plunged momentarily into the darkness of the force field. But the dancer moved away at last and the dance ended with a roar of approval from the villagers. Huascl began to speak. Bentley realized with a thrill of relief that this was the end of the ceremony. "O brothers," Huascl said, "this alien has come across the great emptiness to be our brother. Many of his ways are strange and around him there seems to hang a strange hint of evil. And yet who can doubt that he means well? Who can doubt that he is, in essence, a good and honorable person? With this initiation, we purge him of evil and make him one of us." Huascl walked up to Bentley. "Now," Huascl said, "you are a ghost doctor and indeed one of us." He held out his hand. Bentley felt his heart leap within him. He had won! He had been accepted! He reached out and clasped Huascl's hand. Or tried to. He didn't quite make it, for the Protec, ever alert, saved him from the possibly dangerous contact. "You damned idiotic gadget!" Bentley bellowed, quickly finding the control and releasing the field. He saw at once that the fat was in the fire. "Evil!" shrieked the Telians, frenziedly waving their weapons. "Evil!" screamed the ghost doctors. Bentley turned despairingly to Huascl. "Yes," the young ghost doctor said sadly, "it is true. We had hoped to cure the evil by our ancient ceremonial. But it could not be. This evil must be destroyed! Kill the devill" A shower of spears came at Bentley. The Protec responded instantly. Soon it was apparent that an impasse had been reached. Bentley would remain for a few minutes in the field, then override the controls. The Telians, seeing him still unharmed, would renew their barrage and the Protec would instantly go back into action. Bentley tried to walk back to his ship. But the Protec went on again each time he shut it off. It would take him a month or two to cover a mile, at that rate, so he stopped trying. He would simply wait the attackers out. After a while, they would find out they couldn't hurt him and the two races would finally get down to business. He tried to relax within the field, but found it impossible. He was hungry and extremely thirsty. And his air was starting to grow stale. Then Bentley remembered, with a sense of shock, that air had not gone through the surrounding field the night before. Naturally -- nothing could get through. If he wasn't careful, he could be asphyxiated. Even an impregnable fortress could fall, he knew, if the defenders were starved or suffocated out. He began to think furiously. How long could the Telians keep up the attack? They would have to grow tired sooner or later, wouldn't they? Or would they? He waited as long as he could, until the air was all but unbreathable, then overrode the controls. The Telians were sitting on the ground around him. Fires had been lighted and food was cooking. Rinek lazily threw a spear at him and the field went on. So, Bentley thought, they had learned. They were going to starve him out. walls of his dark closet seemed to be pressing against him. He was growing claustrophobic and already his air was stale again. He thought for a moment, then overrode the controls. The Telians looked at him coolly. One of them reached for a spear. "Wait!" Bentley shouted. At the same moment, he turned on his radio. "What do you want?" Rinek asked. "Listen to me! It isn't fair to trap me in the Protec like this!" "Eh? What's going on?" Professor Sliggert asked, through the ear receiver. "You Telians know -- " Bentley said hoarsely -- "you know that you can destroy me by continually activating the Protec. I can't turn it off! I can't get out of it!" "Ah!" said Professor Sliggert. "I see the difficulty. Yes." "We are sorry," Huascl apologized. "But evil must be destroyed." "Of course it must," Bentley said desperately. "But not me. Give me a chance. Professor!" "This is indeed a flaw," Professor Sliggert mused, "and a serious one. Strange, but things like this, of course, can't show up in the lab, only in a full-scale field test. The fault will be rectified in the new models." "Great! But I'm here now! How do I get this thing off?" "I am sorry," Sliggert said. "I honestly never thought the need would arise. To tell the truth, I designed the harness so that you could not get out of it under any circumstances." "Why, you lousy -- " "Please!" Sliggert said sternly. "Let's keep our heads. If you can hold out for a few months, we might be able -- " "I can't! The air! Water!" "Fire!" cried Rinek, his face contorted. "By fire, we will chain the demon!" And the Protec snapped on. Bentley tried to think things out carefully in the darkness. He would have to get out of the Protec. But how? There was a knife in his tool kit. Could he cut through the tough plastic straps? He would have to! But what then? Even if he emerged from his fortress, the ship was a mile away. Without the Protec, they could kill him with a single spear thrust. And they were pledged to, for he had been declared irrevocably evil. But if he ran, he at least had a chance. And it was better to die of a spear thrust than to strangle slowly in absolute darkness.- The Telians were surrounding him with campfires, closing off his retreat with a wall of flame. He hacked frantically at the plastic web. The knife slithered and slipped along the strap. And he was back in Protec. When he came out again, the circle of fire was complete. The Telians were cautiously pushing the fires toward him, lessening the circumference of his circle. Bentley felt his heart sink. Once the fires were close enough, the Protec would go on and stay on. He would not be able to override a continuous danger signal. He would be trapped within the field for as long as they fed the flames. And considering how primitive people felt about devils, it was just possible that they would keep the fire going for a century or two. He dropped the knife, used side-cutters on the plastic strap and succeeded in ripping it halfway through. He was in Protec again. Bentley was dizzy, half-fainting from fatigue, gasping great mouthfuls of foul air. With an effort, he pulled himself together. He couldn't drop now. That would be the end. He found the controls, overrode them. The fires were very near him now. He could feel their warmth against his face. He snipped viciously at the strap and felt it give. He slipped out of the Protec just as the field activated again. The force of it threw him into the fire. But he fell feet-first and jumped out of the flames without getting burned. The villagers roared. Bentley sprinted away; as he ran, he dumped the linguascene, the tool kit, the radio, the concentrated food and the canteen. He glanced back once and saw that the Telians were after him. But he was holding his own. His tortured heart seemed to be pounding his chest apart and his lungs threatened to collapse at any moment. But now the spaceship was before him, looming great and friendly on the flat plain. He was going to just make it. Another twenty yards... Something green flashed in front of him. It was a small, green-furred mog puppy. The clumsy beast was trying to get out of his way. He swerved to avoid crushing it and realized too late that he should never have broken stride. A rock turned under his foot and he sprawled forward. He heard the pounding feet of the Telians coming toward him and managed to climb on one knee. Then somebody threw a club and it landed neatly on his forehead. asked incomprehensibly from far off. Bentley opened his eyes and saw Huascl bending over him. He was in a hut, back in the village. Several armed ghost doctors were at the doorway, watching. "Ar dril?" Huascl asked again. Bentley rolled over and saw, piled neatly beside him, his canteen, concentrated food, tools, radio and linguascene. He took a deep drink of water, then turned on the linguascene. "I asked if you felt all right," Huascl said. "Sure, fine," Bentley grunted, feeling his head. "Let's get it over with." "Over with?" "You're going to kill me, aren't you? Well, let's not make a production out of it." "But we didn't want to destroy you," Huascl said. "We knew you for a good man. It was the devil we wanted!" "Eh?" asked Bentley in a blank uncomprehending voice. "Come, look." The ghost doctors helped Bentley to his feet and brought him outside. There, surrounded by lapping flames, was the glowing great black sphere of the Protec. "You didn't know, of course," Huascl said, "but there was a devil riding upon your back." "Huh!" gasped Bentley. "Yes, it is true. We tried to dispossess him by purification, but he was too strong. We had to force you, brother, to face that evil and throw it aside. We knew you would come through. And you did!" "I see," Bentley said. "A devil on my back. Yes, I guess so." That was exactly what the Protec would have to be, to them. A heavy, misshapen weight on his shoulders, hurling out a black sphere whenever they tried to purify it. What else could a religious people do but try to free him from its grasp? He saw several women of the village bring up baskets of food and throw them into the fire in front of the sphere. He looked inquiringly at Huascl. "We are propitiating it," Huascl said, "for it is a very strong devil, undoubtedly a miracle-working one. Our village is proud to have such a devil in bondage." A ghost doctor from a neighboring village stepped up. "Are there more such devils in your homeland? Could you bring us one to worship?" Several other ghost doctors pressed eagerly forward. Bentley nodded. "It can be arranged," he said. He knew that the Earth-Tels trade was now begun. And at last a suitable use had been found for Professor Sliggert's Protec. subscription sent to a new adWhy so long? Because... Master and secondary lists have to be corrected. A new addres#graph plate has to be cut. The plate has to be put in its proper alphabetical place in the addressograph machine. Other people are moving, too, and their changes of address have to be processed. Four weeks is none too long, but we can handle it. As soon as you know where you're moving to, please send the old as well as the new address immediately to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Yfor your information planet of the Solar System, is, of course, still technically a planet, since it moves around the Sun in a closed orbit. But it is now being said that Pluto did not always have full planetary status. It has been charged -- by Dr. Gerard Peter Kuiper of the University of Chicago -- with being a "runaway moon" of Neptune. I can't make up my mind at the moment whether the charge that it is a former moon that managed to make itself independent should be considered detrimental to its reputation or whether that should enhance it. But if you take the position that being a runaway moon instead of a born planet is a demotion, you may also add that the demotion is richly deserved. Pluto simply failed to live up to the advance publicity it received as "Planet X" before its discovery. It has been a disappointment all along, for it did not turn out to be what one could reasonably have expected. Seriously: the proper status of Pluto became dubious quite soon after the general jubilation following its discovery by Clyde W. Tombaugh in #. Questions piled up quickly. Was it really the Planet X for which Percival Lowell had instituted a search? Did it really cause the gravitational effects from which its presence and orbit had been calculated? And was its final discovery, after years of diligent and difficult search, possibly just due to a lucky accident? Was it possible that Planet X, predicted not only by Percival Lowell but by other astronomers as well, still remained completely unknown and yet to be discovered? TOR an astronomer to hunt one celestial body and discover another is not as incredible as it may sound. One of the minor moons of Jupiter was found in just that way. And it has happened repeatedly that an astronomer "checked" on one asteroid only to find out, after a while, that he had actually discovered a new one. That such things do not happen only in the crowded Asteroid Belt is shown by a famous case involving a transatlantic cablegram. In Europe, they had discovered a new comet -- not a very rare event if you have telescopic comets in mind. The observatory which made the discovery wanted it verified and cabled the fact of the discovery and the position of the object to the Lick Observatory. The telegraph operator, obviously ignorant of astronomical notations, garbled the figures. Lick Observatory, of course, accepted the figures that had been received, and when this particular area of the sky became observable, they looked. Quite close to the cabled position, a telescopic comet was found. It was a new comet -- not the one the Lick astronomers had been asked to verify! It has become customary to say that the discovery of Pluto began with the discovery of UraMarch #, #. While this statement can be maintained on the grounds that the discovery of Uranus showed that there were planets beyond Saturn, which had been accepted as the outermost planet for so many centuries, there were actually many differences. When Herschel found Uranus, he had not been looking for a new planet. There was no suspicion that it might exist, no theoretical reasoning assuming its existence. Herschel simply found it and, as a matter of fact, he believed for some time that he had merely discovered a new comet. After it had been established as a planet, it was located on quite a number of earlier star charts -- # in all -- where unsuspecting observers had entered it as a fixed star. Using these older chance observations and, of course, all the observations since the discovery by Herschel, Alexis Bouvard in Paris constructed tables of the motions of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. As far as Jupiter and Saturn were concerned, the tables and the observed positions agreed nicely. For Uranus, they did not agree. One way out of the difficulty was to assume that the older observations had been careless -- although there was no reason for such a posthumous insult to able observers -- and to discard them. Then new tables were calculated, based only on observations after Herschel's discovery. A few years later, it became unmistakably clear that these tables did not work, either. And in #, an amateur astronomer, the Reverend T. J. Hussey, wrote a letter to Sir George B. Airy, in which he blamed an unknown planet outside the orbit of Uranus for the discrepancy between calculation and observation. r  "HE view that an unknown planet might explain much became common among astronomers fairly fast. Professor F. B. G. Nicolai, then director of the observatory at Mannheim, said that this would best explain the fact Halley's Comet did not behave precisely as calculated. This was in #. In #, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, during a visit to Sir John Herschel, the son of the discoverer of Uranus, declared that he was convinced that there was an unknown planet. After his return to Germany, he assigned his assistant to the task of calculating the position of an unknown planet from the observed discrepancies. But by that time, Bessel was no longer a young man; he died in # and the job remained unfinished, at least as far as Bessel's discovery in Konigsberg is concerned. But it had been completed just during those last few years of Bessel's life in two other places. In France, Urbain J. J. Leverrier presented his report on the calculation of the existence and position of a Trans-Uranian planet to the French Academy on November #, #. In England, John Couch Adams, a rather young man who had only recently received his bachelor's degree, did the same work and forwarded his report to Sir George B. Airy around November #st, #. There has been much unnecessary discussion on whether priority should be awarded to Adams or to Leverrier. The plain fact is that both men did the same work at the same time. Since astronomical circles were well acquainted with the "misbehavior" of Uranus, it is surprising that more people were not attacking the same problem simultaneously. for a moment here and explain just what it was that made astronomers speak in such decided terms about an "unknown planet." Let us first consider the case of a single planet moving around a sun. To simplify the picture still more, let us assume that its orbit is not a ellipse, as it very likely would be, but a circle. In this case, the single planet would move at a constant rate; it would arrive at a certain point at a specific time. Now we add a second planet, which moves around the same sun, but in an orbit outside the orbit of the first planet. It will move at a slower rate and it also has to follow a much larger path. The result is that the inner planet will overtake the outer one at regular intervals. As the two come near each other, the effects of their own gravitational fields will enter into the game. They pull each other, and the inner planet moves a bit faster than it would if the other did not exist. By the same token, the outer planet is slowed down a bit. The closer they come to each other, the more strongly this mutual "perturbation" will show up. But at the instant the inner planet passes the outer planet, the effect is reversed. Now the inner planet is slowed down by the pull of the outer one, which falls behind, while the outer planet is speeded up a bit by the attraction of the inner one that races ahead. In short, if a planet, at a certain point of its orbit, first speeds up and then slows down, it indicates a gravitational pull by a body in an orbit farther away from its sun. Conversely, a slowing down followed by a speed-up would indicate the presence of another body in an orbit nearer its sun. To return to the case of Uranus, it was slowed down a little and then suddenly pulled along by the gravitational fields of both Saturn and Jupiter. Their orbit, positions and weights were known and could be taken into account. But even when all the perturbations by Saturn and Jupiter had been figured in, calculations and observations obstinately failed to agree. Of course observers make minor mistakes, but not all observers make them in the same direction. Moreover, the discrepancies were too large to be ascribed to "observational errors." And the whole picture suggested a pull from "outside." If astronomers had observed Uranus for several complete revolutions around the Sun, they could have established the period of the unknown planet outside of Uranus simply by tabulating the interval between two such perturbations that could not be ascribed to Saturn or to Jupiter. If they are so-and-so-many years apart, then the period of revolution of the external unknown body must be so-and-somany years. It would have been simple. TUT Uranus needs # years- to go around the Sun once. In #, it had not been observed for even one complete revolution. You could stretch that by taking the older observations, where the planet had been mistakenly entered on star charts as a star, but even then the evidence was spotty and the calculation far from simple. To get anywhere, one assumption had to be made, concerning the distance of the unknown planet from the Sun. John Couch Adams assumed a distance of # A. U. (astronomical units) -- he expected the unknown planet to be # times as far from the Sun as the Earth revolves around it. That assumption was according to the Bode-Titius rule (see Table I) which succeeds in expressing the distances of the planets from the Sim by simple arithmetic. Nobody quite knows why it works that way, even though there has been much thought expended on just that problem. Even though we don't know why, a glance at the table shows that it does work nicely for all the planets from Mercury to Uranus. There was no reason to assume that it should not work for the unknown planet, too, and Adams began his work by supposing that distance for the unknown body. As for Leverrier in France, he assumed a distance of # A.U. With either assumption, a case for an unknown planet could be worked out and both Adams and Leverrier could say that the planet should be in a given position along its orbit on a certain day. Adams picked October #st, #, as the day for which he made his calculation and stated that it should be in heliocentric longitude # or #. (The true position of Neptune for that day was ##'.) Leverrier picked January #st, #, as his date and gave a heliocentric longitude of ##' as the probable position of the unknown planet. The two independent calculations agreed rather well, as one can see. r I 'HE next problem was, naturally, to find it in the sky. This meant searching the area of the calculated position more or less around the plane of the ecliptic, since all the planets of the Sun move in about the same plane as does the Earth. If this had to be done today, the observer would photograph that region of the sky, wait three days or so and photograph the same region again. Then he would settle down to the job of comparing the plates in order to see whether one of the dots of light had moved during the time elapsed between exposures. There is a special instrument for doing just that, but even with this instrument, it is tedious work. Moreover, a few known planets might move in the same area and have to be identified first. But in #, photography was not yet a help to the astronomer and the job had to be done visually. The area of the sky had to be compared with prepared star charts to see whether an unmapped dot of light had wandered in. T A B L E I The Bode-Titius Rule #( #X#) : # actual distance # A.U. #( #X#) : # # # # A.U. #-K #X#) : # # # # A.U. #( #X#) : # # # # A.U. #( #X#) : # # # # A.U. #( #X#) : # # # # A.U. #( #X#) : # # # # A.U. #( #X#) : # # # # A.U. #(#X#) : # # # # A.U. #(#X#) : # #; not matched by a known planet #(#X#) : # #; also not matched It is now known that the British observer entrusted with the search by Airy actually saw Neptune, but failed to pay attention to it. His whole performance was such that it is safe to say that he wasn't interested in the project and merely went through the motions he had been ordered to make. Leverrier, in September, #, wrote to the German astronomer Galle in Berlin, who requested the permission of the director of the observatory, J. F. Encke, to proceed with the search. Encke approved and Galle, assisted by a student named H. L. d' Arrest, went to work. He found it the same night and verified the discovery during the following night. Much later, it turned out that the French astronomer Lalande had seen the planet twice, on the #th and #th of May, #. But since the "star" seemed to have shifted positions, Lalande concluded that he must have made a mistake in one of his observations. The position which seemed less likely to him, for reasons we don't know, he rejected completely. The other one he decorated with a question mark and let it go at that! After Neptune had been discovered, it was only natural that virtually everybody wondered whether the story would be repeated. Of course first it was necessary to learn everything that could be learned about Neptune. Almost at once, its large moon Triton was discovered -- by William Lassell -- and it was established that it was # miles from the planet, that its diameter must be around # miles and that it needed # days to go once around Neptune. As for Neptune itself, it was slightly larger than Uranus, with a diameter of # miles (that of Uranus # miles) and that it turned around its axis at a rather fast rate, in # hours and # minutes. (Uranus does it in # hours and # minutes.) Neptune was not only slightly larger than Uranus but also heavier -- it would take # Earths to balance Uranus on a scale; for Neptune, # Earths would be needed. I may add here, out of chronology, that Gerard P. Kuiper discovered a much smaller moon of Neptune in #. It is small, about # miles in diameter, and needs # days to go around the planet in a very elongated orbit. " Uranus and the other large outer planets in most respects, it proved to be surprising as far as its distance was concerned. It was # astronomical units closer to Orbit of Pluto projected on the plane of Neptune's orbit . The Greek letter alpha marks Pluto's aphelion , the letter pi its perihelion the Sun than the Bode-Titius farther inward in the Solar System than one could reasonably expect. The main problem was not changed by this fact -- whether the Bode-Titius rule missed in the case of Neptune or not, was there a planet still farther out? To derive its presence, provided it existed, from irregularities in the motion of Neptune, would have required a long wait, for Neptune needs almost # Earth years for one revolution. But there were other leads one could follow. Comets, which have very little mass, are very strongly "perturbed" by planets. It was the French astronomer Camille Flammarion who pointed to a comet thus "perturbed" and far outside the orbit of Neptune, at that. More of them were found after Flammarion had put the idea into some minds. Moreover, a planet beyond Neptune, a "Trans-Neptune," would not only Pluto's orbit drawn in perspective to show that it does not actually cross Neptune's orbit perturb the orbit of Neptune; it would also show up in the motions of Uranus, which by # had been observed for one and a half of its revolutions. There seemed to be enough evidence by then for Professor George Forbes to predict a Trans-Neptune at a distance of about # A. U., requiring # years for one complete revolution. He expected it to be even larger than Jupiter in size! The German astronomer Dr. Theodor Grigull of Munster supposed a Trans-Neptune which he called "Hades" at a distance of # A. U. with a period of revoluThe relative positions of Neptune and Pluto as seen from the Sun for about # years prior to Pluto's discovery # A.U. The orbits of the outer planets , actual and predicted. (For explanation , see text) tion of # years and a size like Uranus or Neptune. ing came to a very similar conclusion. His Trans-Neptune was a little farther out than Grigull's, with a period of # years. And Thomas Jefferson Jackson See predicted the planet "Oceanus" at # A. U. with a period of # years. He went further -- there probably was a Trans-Oceanus at # A. U. with a period of # years and still another at # A. U. with a period of somewhere around # years. The most careful set of calculations was that of Percival Lowell, published in # under the title Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet, which he called "Planet X." He supposed it to be of about half the mass of Uranus, or seven Earth masses, with a period of around # years. One important difference between Lowell and the other astronomers who had thought about the same problem was that he had his own observatory. After having reached a theoretical conclusion, he could start an actual search. He did not know, of course, that he was not to live much longer -- he died in November, # -- but all the time that was left to him, he hoped that one of his assistants would inform him about the actual discovery. HP H E announcement came more than # years after his death, on March #, #. The date had a double significance -- it was both the date on which Herschel had discovered Uranus and Percival Lowell's birthday. Pluto really was discovered, though, in the afternoon of February #, #, when Clyde W. Tombaugh examined two plates, taken on January #rd and January #th, both centered on the star Delta Geminorum. Tombaugh said later that he was sure at once -- the two images were as sharp as those of stars (a comet image would have been somewhat diffuse) and the displacement was right for a planet beyond Neptune. Of the names that had been suggested for Planet X, the name Pluto was chosen, since it began with the letters P.L., the initials of the man who had predicted it. A comparison between the prediction and actuality is given on Table II, but it must be kept in mind that it took years until the figures for Pluto were established and that the values given in the last three lines did not become known until recently. But the searching questions arose soon. Pluto's orbit, as it became known, was unlike that The diameters of the three smallest major planets compared to that of Earth , of our moon and the tyro moons of Neptune. (The diameter of Pluto taken as # per cent of that of Earth) Period # years # years Perihelion # # #' #" Inclination about # # #' #" Eccentricity # # Distance at perihelion #I A. U. # A. U. # # Distance at aphelion # A. U. # # # Length of major axis of orbit # A. U. # A. U. Rotation not predicted # days Diameter not predicted # miles Mass compared to Earth less than # per cent Comparison between Lowell's "Planet X" and Pluto of any other planet. It was strongly inclined to the ecliptic and so eccentric that the planet's perihelion, the point of its orbit nearest the Sun, is actually closer than the nearest Neptune can come to the Sim, even though the average distance is greater. Pluto will go through its perihelion. in # and, for the period from # to #, it will be closer to the Sun than Neptune. Aphelion, the point farthest from the Sun, will be reached in #. An orbit like that just did not sit well with a planet. The next question was its size. It was too small to show a disk in any telescope then in existence. That meant that it had to be far smaller than Neptune, for even the Earth should still show a tiny disk at that distance. But if it was smaller than the Earth, say somewhere between Earth and Mars in size, it could not possibly cause a measurable pertubation on planets as large and as distant from it as Uranus and Neptune. To make it cause the perturbations from which Planet X had been computed, its average density would have to be sixty times that of water. Such densities in a planet that size cannot exist. Then Kuiper succeeded in making some direct measurements. The first figure given, accompanied by the statement that the probable margin of error was large, was a diameter of # miles, # miles less than that of the Earth. The next figure was # miles, less than that of Mars, which is # miles. Meanwhile, this has been revised downward some more, to around # miles, which is the same as the diameter of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. but about ten years after Pluto's discovery, somebody remarked that it might merely be a runaway moon of Neptune. Pluto seemed to be about as far displaced north and south from the ecliptic as Neptune was "displaced" inward, if you took the Bode-Titius rule seriously. The total picture of the edge of the Solar System looked as if something violent had taken place there at one time. Neptune was more than # than it should be. Its then only known satellite Triton moved around it in the wrong direction and Uranus seemed to have been influenced to the extent of having its axis as well as the orbits of its satellites tilted by around # degrees. Whatever it was that did all this could easily have torn Pluto away from Neptune and thrown it into the orbit it now has. But nobody could figure out a force which could tilt Uranus by # degrees without disturbing its orbit and which could move Nepout making its orbit eccentric. But one more discovery about Pluto makes it more likely than ever that it once was a moon of Neptune. Pluto had to have a period of rotation around its axis. But that period was not known until very recently, when it was found to be # days. This is much slower by far than the rotational period of any other of the outer planets. Only moons rotate that slowly around their axes, because all moons are forced by their planets into a period of axial rotation equal to the periods of their revolutions around their planets. If Pluto, when a moon of Neptune, was somewhat farther out than Triton, a period of # days would be very logical. Dr. G. P. Kuiper thinks that Pluto made itself independent at a very early stage of the formation of the Solar System. In fact, he believes that at that time Neptune lost Triton and Nereid, too, but later succeeded in recapturing them. At any event, the discovery of the slow axial rotation of Pluto makes it certain that it is not the Planet X Percival Lowell and the others were postulating. Whether Planet X exists is still uncertain. And where it is, if it exists, is still unknown. The Genius Heap Get away from it all -- escape neutrino storms by coming to Callisto! Drover did -- and he walked into a human tornado l T HE fight began, really, with a simple comment that Mordecai Drover offered to nobody in particular while watching Dr. Helena Curtis, the Bartok Colony's resident novelist, trying to finish her research before nightfall. He couldn't fathom why the remark had set off such an explosion. After all, all he had said was, "I can never quite get used to it." "What?" Henry Chatterton asked abstractedly. "Seeing a woman using an index. It's as outlandish a sight as a chimpanzee roller-skating." At this precise moment, Callisto slid into Jupiter's shadow and the nighttime clamor of the Bartok Colony began to rise rapidly toward its sustained crescendo. Typewriters began to rattle one after the other, pianos to compete discordantly, a phonograph to grunt out part of Le Sacre du Prirttemps for Novgorod's choreography pawns, and collapsible tubes to pop air-bubbles as paint was squeezed onto palettes. The computer, too, began humming deep in its throat, for Dr. Winterhalter of the Special Studies section was trying to make it compose a sonata derived entirely from information theory. The clamor would last four hours and # minutes before beginning to taper off. Helena, however, made no move toward her typewriter. She closed her reference book with a savage snap, as though trying to trap a passing moth, and stood up. Mordecai, who had already of The Drum-Major and the Mask, failed to notice her glare until he became aware of an unprecedented silence in the Commons Room. He looked up. him, step by step, each pace made more menacing by the peculiar glide Callisto's slight gravity enforced. She was graceful under any circumstances; now she looked positively serpentine, and her usually full lips were white. Alarmed, Mordecai put down his pen. "Just what did you mean by that?" she asked. By what? Mordecai searched his memory frantically. At first, all he could come up with was the last strophe he had written, only a few seconds ago, and as yet he had no idea what he meant by that; the thing was badly flawed and needed revision before even its author could know what it meant. Then he remembered the remark about women and indexes -- indices? -- already hours away in the fleet subjective time of Callistan night. "Why, it wasn't anything," he said wonderingly. "I mean you know how it is with chimpanzees -- " "Oh, I do, do I?" "Well, maybe I didn't -- what I mean is, they get to be very skillful at unusual tasks -- it's just that you don't expect them to be -- Helena, it was only a joke! What good is a joke after it's explained? Don't be obstinate." "Meaning don't be obstinately stupid?" she said through her teeth. "I've had enough of your nasty innuendoes. If there's anything I loathe, it's a would-be genius with no manners." Henry Chatterton's smock was already spattered with egg tempera from top to bottom and the painting on his canvas was nearly a quarter finished. Slashing away at one corner of it with a loaded brush, he said out of the corner of his mouth: "We've had to put up with that viper's tongue of yours long enough, Helena. Why don't you go hitch your flat frontispiece over your decollete novel and let the rest of us work?" "Now wait a minute," John Rapaport said, flushing heavily and looking up from the dural plate on which he had been sketching. "By what right does an egg-coddler go out of his way to insult a craftsman, Chatterton? If you have to dip that brush of yours in blatherskite, save it for your daubs -- never mind smearing it over Helena." Chatterton swung around in astonishment and then began to smirk. "So thafs how it's going to be! Well, Johnny boy, congratulations. But I predict that you'll find five hours makes a very, very long night. Don't say an expert didn't warn you." Rapaport swung. His engravers' point flew accurately at Chatterton's left eye. The painter ducked just in time; the tool stuck, quivering, in his canvas. He took one look at it and rushed on Rapaport, howling. Mordecai would have been out of the way with no difficulty, if Helena's open hand had not caught him a stinging blow across the chops at the crucial moment. Then he and Chatterton went over. The noise quickly attracted the rest of the happy family. Only fifteen minutes after Mordecai's innocent remark, the Commons Room was untidily heaped with geniuses. It looked like a long night. before, had fumbled so long and so helplessly with his spacesuit until an impatient crewman had decided to help him dog it down, he had almost been dumped out of the airlock, and the ship's captain barely gave him time to get clear before taking off again. Within a few seconds, it seemed, he had been more alone than he had ever been in his life. He had stood still inside the suit, because he could do nothing else, and fumed. Actually, he knew, he was more afraid than angry, though he was thoroughly furious with himself, and with Martin Hope Eglington, his mentor. It certainly hadn't been Mordecai's idea to come to Jupiter IV. He had never even been in space before, not even so far as the Moon, and had had no desire to go. Nevertheless, here he was, under a sky of so deep a blue that it was almost black and full of sharp cold stars, even though it was midday. The Sun was a miniature caricature of itself, shedding little light and no apparent heat. There was nothing else to be seen but a wilderness of tumbled rocks, their sharp edges and spires protruding gauntly through deep layers of powdery snow, all the way to the near horizon. The fact that Mordecai could hear a faint sighing whistle outside his suit, as of the saddest and weakest of all winds, did not cheer him. It had begun, as such things usually did with Mordecai, with what had seemed an innocent question, this time one asked by someone else. Eglington had been helping him with the prosody of The Drum Major and the Mask, Mordecai's major poem thus far, cast as a sirvente to Wallace Stevens. They had swinked at it all day in Eglington's beautiful and remote Vermont home. Mordecai had now been Eglington's only protege; there was a time when the Pulitzer Prize winner had maintained a sort of salon of them, but now he was too old for such rigors. Eglington had said, shortly after dinner. "It's really shaping up very well, Mordecai, if you could just get yourself past trying to compress everything you know into one phrase. In a poem of this length, at least a little openness of texture is desirable -- if only to let the reader into it." "I see that now. Whew! When I first got started, nobody told me poetry could be such hard work." "All real poetry is hard work; that's one of its telltales. Tell me something, Mordecai -- when do you do most of your work? I don't mean your best work, necessarily; at what hours of the day do you find that you work most easily, can concentrate best, put the most out?" That had been easy to answer. Mordecai's work habits had been fixed for fifteen years. "Between about eight at night and two in the morning." "I thought so. That's true of most creative people, including scientists. The exact hours vary, but the fact is that most of the world's creative work -- and creative play; it's the same thing -- is done at night." "Interesting," Mordecai had said. "Why is that, do you suppose?" "Oh, I don't have to suppose. The answer is known. It's because, during those hours, the whole mass of the Earth is between you and the Sun. That protects you from an extremely penetrating kind of solar radiation, made up of particles called neutrinos. The protection is negligible statistically, because all matter is almost perfectly transparent to neutrinos, but it seems that the creative processes are tremendously sensitive to even the slightest shielding effect." "Too bad they can't be blocked off completely, then. I'd like to be able to work days. I just can't." "You can, if you want to undergo some privations in the process," Eglington had said, almost idly. "Ever hear of the Bartok Colony?" "Yes, it's a retreat of some sort. Never went in for that kind of thing much myself. I work better alone." "I see you don't know where it is. It's on Callisto." The notion had startled and somewhat repelled Mordecai, for whom the neutrinos had already been almost too much. He would expect Eglington to know about such things -- he was not called "the poet of physics" for nothing -- but Mordecai had no interest in them. "On Callisto? Why, for heaven's sake?" "Well, for two reasons," Eglington had said. "First of all, because at that distance from the Sun, the raw neutrino flux is only about three point seven per cent of what it is here on Earth. The other reason is that for nearly five hours of every two weeks -- that is, every Callistan day -- you have the small bulk of the satellite plus the whole mass of Jupiter between you and the Sun. For that period, you're in a position to work your creative engine with almost no neutrino static. I'm told that the results, in terms of productivity, are truly fantastic." "Oh," Mordecai had said. "It seems like an extreme measure, somehow." ward, intensely serious. "Only extreme measures produce great work, Mordecai. Tell me -- what was the big change in Man that differentiated him permanently, qualitatively, from all other species?" "The opposable thumb," Mordecai had said promptly. "Wrong. The opposable thumb helps Man to handle things, it stimulates curiosity, it gets the world's work done. It is, if you like, a device of daylight. But the ability to think in abstractions is the big skill that Man has and that is an ability that works mostly at night. Second question: why was fire Man's most important discovery?" "Well, it helped him to get more nourishment out of his food," Mordecai said, but more cautiously now. "That's minor. What else?" Mordecai had known he was well out of his depth by that time. He simply shook his head. "Independence of the Sun, Mordecai. That one gain has permanently arrested Man's evolution. Without it, he was developing a number of specialized types for different environments: the bushman, the pigmy, the Eskimo, and so on. Fire not only halted the process, but reversed it; the devolution set in. Now we don't have to adapt to our environments; we can carry our own wherever we go. In that way, we protect ourselves from adapting away from abstract thinking and toward some purely physical change that will make it unnecessary for us to think." Eglington had paused and sniffed reflectively at his brandy. Then, with apparent irrelevance, he had added Do you tell your relatives what your work hours are?" "Not by a long shot. They're all alarm-clock types. They think I'm lazy as it is; if I told them I didn't get up until noon, they'd be sure of it." "Exactly. Daylight encourages monkey thinking, practicality, conformity, routine operation. It's at night that Man-thinking gets done. During the day, there are the twinges about the regular paycheck, keeping the family fed, making your relatives proud of you, taking no chances, and all the rest of that rot. 'Early to bed and early to rise' is nothing but an invitation to put your head into a horse-collar. The man who stays in bed all day isn't a lazy slob; he's a man who's very sensibly protecting his valuable human brains from the monkey-drive." "You make a good case," Mordecai had said admiringly. "I really think you ought to go, Mordecai. I'll give you a letter to the chairman; he's at the quite sure I can swing it." ed surge of alarm. "But, Martin, wait a minute -- " "Don't worry; you'll be admitted. Anyhow, you've gone as far as you can go with me. Now you need to strike out on your own -- and this is the way to do it." And so Mordecai Drover, on Jupiter IV, frightenedly had been waiting for somebody from the Bartok Colony to pick him up. He did not feel a particle more creative than he had felt at his worst moments back home. Rather less, as a matter of fact. A stirring in the middle distance drew his attention belatedly. Something like a bug was coming toward him. As it came closer, he saw that it was a sort of snowmobile, with huge fat tires and a completely sealed cabin. He let out a gasp of relief. "Hello," his suit radio said, in a voluptuous feminine voice. "Stand fast, Mr. Drover; we have you on the radar. Welcome to Bartok Colony." The voice virtually transformed Callisto for Mordecai; if there was one historical period in which he would most liked to have lived, it was that of Marlene Dietrich. When, half an hour later, he found that Dr. Helena Curtis strongly resembled that -- alas! -- long-dead Helen of the age before space flight, he had been suddenly, as Eglington probably had expected, ready to stay on Callisto forever. "Now there are only two rules here," Dr. Hamish Crenshaw, the Colony's director, had begun murmuring in Mordecai's ear while his suit was being stripped off him. "First of all, we have no facilities for children; you'll understand, I'm sure, and forgive us when I tell you that we -- uh -- Take Steps. Dietary steps; you'll never notice them, but we like to be honest. And the other rule is Get Along. We're all one family here and we try not to quarrel." "Oh, of course not," Mordecai had said, but he hadn't really been listening. surgeon -- a staff member, not a guest -- gave Mordecai a hyaluronidase injection for his black eye and dismissed him without ceremony. Evidently the brawl in the Commons Room had produced several more serious wounds. Mordecai prowled the corridors morosely for a while, but kept meeting people he had only recently been fighting with -- or, at least, trying to fight out from under. He finally went back to his own cubicle and tried to resume The DrumMajor and the Mask. It was hopeless. The cacophony of noise in the station had hardly bothered him after the first strange night, but now he couldn't think through it. He wondered how the others had stood it for so long. Neutrinos or no neutrinos, his own brain was generating nothing but blots. Besides, he felt almost intolerably guilty. After all, his remark had been unfeeling, especially after what had happened two nights ago (or a month ago, as he kept thinking of it). That had been one of the unexpected effects of night on Jupiter IV: the same shielding that liberated the creative impulse seemed to liberate the libido as well. In four hours and # minutes, two people could fall in love, become passionately and exclusively attached to each other, and fall explosively out of love before the night was over -- a process that would have taken months or years on Earth. No wonder the Colony, as Dr. Crenshaw had put it, Took Steps against the possibility of children. But was it Mordecai's fault that Helena was the most beautiful woman in the Colony and hence the most frequent figure in these amours and explosions? Besides, he had suffered, too. He could hardly find it comfortable to be out" of love with Dietrich, after having had adored her image hopelessly since he was old enough to distinguish pants from trousers. He doubted that he would ever write another love poem again. The corridors of the Colony began to resound with a series of hoots and shrieks, as loud as though they were being heard by an insect trapped in a steam calliope. Dr. Winterhalter had once again begun to hope, and had wired the computer's output directly to the Hammond organ; the computer's current notion of what a sonata ought to sound like was rattling the doors in their sockets. The computer had not yet quite solved the music of the spheres. The Cadre to . Suppress Dr. Winterhalter, made up of all the musicians in the Colony, would be stampeding past Mordecai's door at any moment. Yet after all, he told himself, the remark hadn't been any more virulent than many of the things that got said daily in the Colony, and Helena had always been one of the worst offenders; Chatterton had been right about that. Even at home, Mordecai recalled with nostalgia, nighttime was the time you said things that you regretted the next day. He had always attributed that looseness of tongue to the dulling of inhibitions by fatigue (or, of course, alcohol), but since it was so much worse here, maybe the doubledamned neutrinos had been responsible for that too. Or maybe they hadn't. If you coop thirty highly individualistic people in one sealed can on a cheerless iceball like Callisto, you should expect tempers to get somewhat frayed. Whatever the answer, Mordecai wanted out. There was no doubt in his mind that being in the Colony had increased his productivity markedly, but it wasn't worth the constant emotional upheavals. the corridor to make sure he would not be run over by the Cadre, and then set off determinedly for the office of Dr. Hamish Crenshaw. There was no sense in postponing matters. As he passed Helena Curtis' closed door, however, he paused. Maybe one postponement could do no harm. There was another question nagging at him, which he suddenly decided was more important. He knocked tentatively. Helena opened the door and stared at him, her eyes coldly furious. "Beat it," she said. "I don't mean to interrupt," Mordecai said humbly. "I apologize for my remark. It was nasty and inexcusable. Also, I've got something I'd like to discuss with you." "Oh?" For a moment, she simply continued to glare at him. Then, gradually, some of the unfriendliness seemed to die away. "Well, it's decent of you to apologize. And that beastly squabble did sour me on Rapaport just in time; maybe I owe you an apology, too. What's on your mind?" "I want to know what you know about old Walker Goodacre -- the man who founded the Colony. I'm beginning to think there's a joker buried somewhere and he may be it." "Hm. All right, come on in. But no monkeyshines, Mordecai." "Certainly not," he said innocently. "That's part of the problem, Helena. This setup is supposed to encourage what they call 'Man-thinking' and it does seem to have that effect -- but it also seems to bring out all the monkey-emotions. I'm starting to wonder why." "Well," Helena said, sitting down thoughtfully, "they say the neutrinos -- " "Hang the neutrinos! I mean let's just forget about them for the time being and think about what the Colony's supposed to accomplish. We should begin with the history; there's where you can help, right at the beginning. How is the Colony actually run?" "By a board of directors, administering the Goodacre estate," she said. "The place was originally founded by Goodacre himinto a special trust to build the place and then bequeathed another ten to keep it going. The Colony is run off the interest from the bequest." A LL right. What kind of man was Goodacre?" Mordecai asked. "I mean aside from the fact that he was a rich man. Wasn't he also a scholar of stature? I seem to remember that he was." "Oh, yes," Helena said. "He was a sociologist, considered one of the most eminent of his time. Mordecai, if you're suggesting that this whole thing is an experiment and we're just experimental animals, you're wasting your breath. The newspapers milked all the melodrama out of that when the Colony was first founded. Of course, it's an experiment; what of it?" "Of course. But what kind of experiment? Look here, Helena, you know more history than I do. A lot more. Think back on the history of bequests to artists. Do they usually come from men who are artists or scholars themselves? It's my impression that they don't. More usually, they come from men who are not creative themselves and feel guilty or frustrated about it -- men whose money was often made by dubious means in the first place, so some of it is given away to the most 'disinterested' people the rich man can imagine, in expiation. Like the Nobel Prizes -- money made from dynamite. Only a cultural cipher could dream of an artist as 'disinterested' in that sense." "I can think of a few exceptions," Helena said, "but only partial ones. In that respect, old Goodacre was an unusual case. I'll grant you that." "Right. Now it's my judgment that this experiment as it was outlined to us is working very badly. Yet Goodacre was a top sociologist, you tell me; why should the biggest experiment he ever designed, being run strictly in accordance with his wishes, be so miserable a failure?" "Well, sociology's not an exact science -- " "I had the notion that it'd become much more exact since Rashevsky, at least. And I think it might be more sensible to assume that old Goodacre did know what he was doing and that this mess is exactly the outcome he wanted. Why did he want it?" "Mordecai," Helena said slowly, "I apologize again and this time I mean it. Let's see how close we can get to the bottom of this before the night's over." "Why stop then?" Mordecai urged. "It's only a question of fact -- no creativity involved." In this, of course, he was a little underestimating himself. Deduction is creative; Mordecai had simply had too little experience with it to realize the fact. Dr. Hamish Crenshaw appeared to be indulging in a series of improvised attempts to prevent further brawls by dividing the sheep from the goats, without having quite made up his mind how to tell one animal from the other. His first move was to forbid working in the Commons Room, which did nothing but stop work in the Commons Room; it utterly failed to prevent brawling there, and it was impossible for the director to close the Commons Room entirely. Then he tried to reshuffle the room assignments so that all the guests whose records carried the fewest marks for quarrels would wind up on one side of the Colony and the most quarrelsome guests on the other. The net gain here was fewer bruises sustained by accident by the least quarrelsome. The most quarrelsome continued to quarrel, more frequently now because they were deprived of the calming effects sometimes exerted by the cooler heads. After this had become sufficiently obvious to all, Dr. Crenshaw decided to reshuffle the rooms according to talent. This was abortive. Everybody at Bartok Colony, except the staff, was supposed to be a leader in his field, so Crenshaw apparently concluded that the only way to measure talent was by age: young poets, for example, were sheep, old poets goats. Since there was only one poet in the Colony at the moment -- Mordecai -- the plan foundered on Mordecai's obvious inability to baa and bleat at the same time from opposite sides of the dome. But nothing seemed to discourage Dr. Crenshaw. He tried to segregate the sexes. This produced the biggest riot in the Colony's history. The next move in the game of musical chairs was to lump all the practitioners of the noisy arts -- music, ballet, sculpture -- into one group and those who quietly wrote or painted into the other. The concentration of noise made it worse than it had been when diffused and in no way decreased the squabbling. The most recent solution was a curfew. The rules were that everyone had to be in his room by nightfall and had to stay there until the night was over. All gatherings were forbidden, but exceptions were made for teams ("such as composer-and-librettist," Dr. Crenshaw had added with what he seemed to think was great tact). This move really made a difference; it actually cut the quarreling in half. It also cut productivity right back down to the daytime level, even in the naturally solitary arts. "Which I think is what you've been aiming for all along," Mordecai told Crenshaw grimly, in Crenshaw's office. "All the other silly rules were designed to convey an illusion of bumbling desperation, to disguise the curfew as just one more example of the same." ingly but a look at Mordecai and Helena evidently convinced him that neither had been disarmed. He put his hands together on his desktop and leaned forward confidingly. "Now that's a peculiar theory," he said, still smiling. "Suppose you tell me why you think so." "It's in keeping with the whole philosophy," Mordecai said. "Dr. Curtis and I have been doing considerable research lately and we've come up with some conclusions we don't like. Among other things, we talked to Dr. Ford." Crenshaw frowned. Dr. Ford was the colony's staff physicist. The statement that he had been talking to guests obviously did not please the director. "We found out a few things about the neutrino notion that we hadn't known before," Mordecai went on. "Dr. Ford says that neutrinos go through ordinary matter as if it weren't there. Back home on Earth, the neutrino flux is so great that there are a hundred neutrinos passing through a space the size of a matchbox at any given instant -- yet even detecting their existence was one of the hardest problems physicists ever tackled. He says the difference between the night and the day flux on Earth has never been measured." "Never by instruments," Crenshaw said smoothly. "But the human brain measures it; it's a very delicate detector." "That's pure hypothesis," Helena retorted. "Dr. Ford says that to capture the average neutrino would take a lead barrier fifty light-years thick. Under those conditions, exceptional captures within a human brain must take place on the order of once every million years or more." "We considered all this in setting up the Colony," Crenshaw said. "We do have people like Dr. Ford on our staff, after all. Obviously the neutrino-capture theory was not proven. It was a conjecture. But we've been in operation for quite a few years now and the empirical evidence has been adding up all during that time. Your own personal experience should confirm it. There is a definite increase in creativity out here and particularly when we are in the Jovian shadow." H E leveled a finger at them or, rather, between them. "This is one reason why I don't like to have physicists like Ford shooting off their mouths to our guests. Physicists don't understand the artistic temperament and artists generally don't know enough about physicists to be aware of their limitations. You didn't know, for instance, the real meaning behind what Ford was telling you. I do know: he was complaining that the neutrino theory is based upon the concept that the brain acts as an organic detector, and the ground rules of his science don't allow organic dectors. Since you had no way of knowing this and, like most lay people, you regard physicists as minor gods, you're shaken up. You've allowed him to discredit not only your belief in the Colony, but even the evidence of your own experience!"  said. "But experience isn't evidence until it's put in order and there's always more than one possible order. Dr. Curtis and I don't know much about physicists, it's true, but we do know something about artists. We know that they're highly suggestible. They have to be or they'd be in some other trade. Convince them that they're going to be more creative in the dark of the moon, or after a course of mescal, or in the Jovian neutrino shadow, and most of them will be more creative, whether there's any merit in the actual notion you've sold them or not." He grinned reminiscently. "I once knew a writer whose work was largely unsalable, so he had to have a regular job to stay alive. He developed the notion that he had to be fired at least once a year in order to maintain his productivity. Sooner or later, toward the end of each job year, he was fired -- and it did increase his writing output for a while. What has that to do with neutrinos?" "Nothing," Crenshaw said. "A single example never has anything to do with anything except itself. But let's suppose for the sake of argument that the neutrino theory is not only shaky, but entirely wrong. Have you anything better to offer? Until we discover just what creativity actually is -- what goes on in the brain to produce it -- we'll never really know whether it's possible for a neutrino to interfere with that process. In the meantime, the empirical evidence we collect here in the Colony adds up." "Adds up to what?" Mordecai demanded. Crenshaw only shrugged. "Dr. Crenshaw," Helena said, "maybe there is something in the neutrino theory all the same. I'm perpared to admit the possibility -- but I don't think it makes any difference. We know that artists always produce best under stress, either personal or societal -- it doesn't matter what kind. If production increases in this Colony, it's because conditions here for a resident artist are worse than those he had to work under back home -- not better. No wonder production dropped when you cut down our internecine warfare. You've always had it in your power to reduce those quarrels, but you didn't choose to exercise it until now." "Why now?" Crenshaw inquired gently. "To cut down on the amount of our work that gets home, of course," Mordecai said, amazed that the man could continue such an obvious rear-guard defense after his major defenses had been breached. "Dr. Crenshaw, we know that old Goodacre knew what he was doing. He was interested in the role of the artist in society. He was asking himself: Does society really need these creative people? Does it really want them around? Are the things they produce worth having, weighed against the damage that they do just by being alive and impinging upon normal people? So he contrived this experiment." the point." But he was sweating. "We do. Above all, old Goodacre wanted to know this: What would happen to society if, generation after generation, the cream of its artists is skimmed off, the artists sent into exile -- and their work returned to Earth only at a measurable, controllable rate? Take architecture, for instance: you skim Gropius off one generation, Wright off another, and so on, and what's left? Draftsmen, Tenderers, workhorses, without anybody to stir them into a ferment. Sooner or later, Earth has no creativity left in its gene-pool but the kind that makes men into engineers and scientists -- and mightn't that be just as well, in the long run? That's the question this Colony too." Crenshaw sighed. After a while, Helena said: "Well?" 'Well, what?" Crenshaw asked tiredly. "I'm not going to tell you you're right or wrong or way off base. No matter what conclusions you come to, I still have to stay here and administer this madhouse. I'm not Goodacre; I just work here." "That's what the guards at Dachau said," Mordecai said. "The question is, what do you plan to do?" "Go home," Mordecai stated immediately. "And how do you plan to do that? You signed a contract when you came here. In addition to your legal ties, you can't leave here until I personally say you can. I can simply deny you passage, deny you knowledge of the ship schedules -- there are half a hundred other knots I can tie you in. Why not just sit and take it? It won't last forever." "Of course it won't," Helena said grimly. "But we're not sheep, nor Judas-goats. Suppose the experiment ends by proving that society can get along without us? Then we'd never get home at all, no matter what the contract says." Crenshaw looked down at his hands, and then up again. His expression was now one of frank boredom. "That may well be true. However, I deny it for the record. And now I have work to do. Thank you for coming to see me." Mordecai grinned. Crenshaw had obviously never thought of him as a conspirator and Mordecai was savoring the surprise. "There are other people waiting to see you," he said. He got up and opened the door. There was Novgorod and his highly muscular group of dancers; Henry Chatterton, his beard bristling and his smock-pockets loaded with eggs far too far gone to make decent egg tempera; John Rapaport with his bottles of acid and his beltful of nastily pointed little engravers' tools; Dr. Winterhalter with a sheaf of papers full of calculations on orbits and schedules to Earth; and quite a few additional "harmless artists." They looked anything but harmless now. "We're going home," Mordecai said. "Maybe society would like to get along without us, but we aren't going to let it. It won't catch us again by offering us a nice workroom, where it's always as quiet as three o'clock in the morning. We don't need that kind of phony solitude -- we carry the real thing with us wherever we go, even when we're fighting among ourselves. Do you understand that?" "No," Crenshaw said hoarsely. "I don't think I do understand." Mordecai took Helena's hand as she rose. "Then you didn't study your experimental animals thoroughly enough. If you had, you would have found that one of them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, knew the flaw in your experiments a whole century ago and wrote it down." "What -- was it?"' " 'In a real dark night of the soul,' " quoted Mordecai, " 'it is always three o'clock in the morning.' " Current ISeiv Books : Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. (Bet. #th  #th Street) New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday #:# A. M. to #:# P. M. (Phone GRomercy #-#) by Arthur C. Clarke. Harcourt, Brace  Co., # Night appeared in #, virtually everyone agreed that here was one of the finest science fiction novels in years. In his foreword to the present book, Clarke explains his dissatisfaction with the earlier work and exercises his prerogative to rewrite it. The revision is certainly as intriguing in relating the mission of Alvin, the sole malcontent in par, which had gone unchanged since its creation at the moment that Man gave up the stars. The immortal inhabitants of the city are tied to its environs by an ancestral fear of the invaders, legendary enemies who purportedly had driven Man back to his native Earth and sequestered him within this one city. Marvelous it is, with its guiding brain, the Central Computer, and its Memory Banks which contain the electronic patterns of every food, article of furniture, indeed every human born and reborn into Diaspar in its clever method of immortality. But Alvin, a Unique, never having a prior incarnation is possessed of a driving discontent with it. His incomprehensible urge eventually has repercussions, but it is not the function of this review to give them away. For those who have read the first version of this book, perhaps you will wonder, along with me, why the author should have been unhappy with such a superior work. Is he like Alvin, his rebellious hero? by J. R. R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin Co., # you continue holding the volume in limp hand, with a faraway look, you know you've had a genuine reading experience. Here it is. This is the final volume in a trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. The previous two books, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, saw the formation of the Fellowship to combat the evil powers of the Dark Lord, Sauron. Man, Dwarf, Elf and Hobbit join in mutual pact to destroy the Ring, which alone gives Evil power over the forces of Good. It sounds downright silly as a synopsis, but it becomes a gripping adventure in the hands of a master like Tolkien. These were the days of Middle Earth when natural forces were wilder than today and supernatural forces wilder still. The trance quality of the narrative is comparable to that other hypnotic masterpiece of fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison -- recommendation enough. Series, Edited by Anthony Boucher. Doubleday  Co. # ' I 'HE publication of this year's F  S F anthology is something less than an event. Editor Boucher, to paraphrase Rev. Sidney Smith, tries to overcome gravity by an excess of levity. Despite the coyness of the collection, some of the individual stories are worthy efforts, such as "Pottage," another of Zenna Henderson's haunting stories of The People, outcasts from space upon Earth, hiding their wild talents through fear of reprisal; "Created He Them," Alice Eleanor Jones' disturbing vision of a future world. The other assets are yarns by Asimov, Knight, Clarke and Raymond E. Banks. Knight in particular has a daffy tale that explains just about every frustration you might have been subject to and also has possibly the wildest scene in science fiction, in which he uses every cliche in      sheif the repertoire as a spurious explanation of his hero's dilemma. Used as spice, the Knight story would add taste to the collection. But as Mrs. Murphy undoubtedly would have said, Boucher dumped so much of it into the chowder that he spoiled the overall flavor. Vantage Press, Inc., # ways -- subject matter, treatment, even its inclusion in this review. Semantically speaking, it is science-fiction, since it concerns a scientific experiment and it certainly is fictitious. The experiment in question involves the starvation of a group of college students, volunteers, to determine whether morality, religious convictions, sex standards, etc., are affected by variations in or curtailment of diet. The author is qualified for his task, having headed the Dept, of Biochemistry at Tulane, and also by his wartime post of chief of Military Nutrition in the Surgeon General's Office. Artistically speaking, however, the author's scientific background is not sufficient to provide more than a very moderately interesting discourse on sexuality and homosexuality. These he certainly airs without fears, but one wonders no if it was necessary to go through an entire book to prove a scientific point that few would argue. Messner, Inc., # kind's progress toward space travel becomes a lighter task because of this book. It is written in the manner of a novel of high adventure. The author sets the stage for each episode so that the famous real-life characters come to glowing life. For instance, he tells how one night, while engaged in his search for Pluto, Professor Clyde Tombaugh almost froze to death in the observatory, could count on no aid and only ingenious thinking enabled him to get out of his tight spot. This sole living discoverer of a major planet has since come up with a camera that can detect a tennis ball # miles out in space. From Dr. Robert Goddard's early experiments at Roswell, New Mexico, Malian takes us in fascinating anecdotes down to the present accelerated rocket program of the U. S. at White Sands Proving Grounds. One example: did you know that the war hinged on a crew-chief's slightly off-color trick of loading a regulation flying boat off-center so it would lose its race with Nice job. You'll like it. Stanley Zuber. Pageant Press, Inc., # patriate Czech at present living in Canada. This is his first novel in English and he has visualized a world society founded on the Brotherhood of Man. The capital of Canerica, Oremont, is the seat of a world convention to establish a unified language. The chief protagonists are cultured and beautiful, as who wouldn't be with only a couple of hours' mandatory labor to perform? Free time is given over to individual amatory pursuits, and author Zuber gives us countless instances. There is no dramatic action anywhere in the book, which relies, not too successfully, on conflict for affection between the main characters, becoming far too involved for the small satisfaction gained. The book suffers also from an excessive artiness created by its narration in present tense. Henry Holt  Co., # reading any Heinlein juvenile, fills me with a sort of retroactive envy of modern-day kids. We' never had stories like this when we were kids. Yes, we had Tarzan, Tom Swift and John Carter. But how did Carter get to Mars? With the twang of a harp string! Rocket Man is a story of a Martian voyage, but the hero gets to Mars on more than a string. It is a highly believable yarn about a New York lad who has never seen a spaceship, his acceptance at the New Mexico College of Science and Engineering and his appointment in the Space Force. The author is situated at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico and very evidently writes with considerable knowledge of his subject. But no dry treatise, Rocket Man brings the world of # excitingly near. If you have a teen-ager with starry eyes, this is his ticket to space.      The Claustrophile Every once in a while, along comes a story like this that turns "common sense" around -- and plumps it down squarely on its feet! ft P hominy, Chris!" His mother's mild, tired voice at last penetrated. "For pity's sakes, son, how many times -- " But Tess Milburn came to his rescue, reaching a thin arm, a sallow hand, to the dish of grits and passing it down to the boarder. Mr. Magruder didn't say anything. He never said anything. He never ate hominy grits, either, but that wasn't the point. When Miz Binns set out the dinner, everything had to be passed to everybody, no matter what. Chris sighed and mumbled he was sorry. He let his mind drift back to the three-body problem. He knew he couldn't solve the three-body problem, but he couldn't be satisfied that it was impossible. Chris Binns was a computer mechanic, a good one, and what he was really pursuing was (a) the right question to ask the (b) right kind of machine. He frowned at the problem as if he could squeeze an answer out of his brow, and almost had what he wanted when he became aware that he had impaled Tess Milburn with his unseeing gaze and was scowling fiercely at her. She smiled, that brief, weak showing of teeth that she did instead of blushing. It was Chris who blushed, a very little, but already he was sliding back into his thoughts, away from embarrassment, apology, even from the dinner table. The solution, he thought, lies here: that it's fair to consider all three orbits as ellipses and the final solution as a predictable relationship between the lengths of one focal axis of each. He saw, clearly, a circular cam riding a parabolic track, and the linkage between three such tracks and their cams trembled in the wings of his intellect, ready for the spotlight, the entrance -- Wham! The screen door slammed back against the verandah wall and a heavy suitcase simultaneously struck the floor by the table. "Hit the blockhouse!" roared a heavy baritone. " 'Ware my tailjets! I'm a-comin' in!" "Billy! Oh, Billy!" cried Miz Binns. S HE was on her feet with her arms out, but couldn't use them before she Was caught up and swung around by the laughing giant who had hit the floor right by the suitcase. Tess Milburn sat astonished, stopped, like some many-functioned machine when its master switch is thrown; chewing, breathing, blinking, probably heartbeat, certainly cerebration, all ceasing at once in the face of something she had no reflexes for. Mr. Magruder made a sound that would have been a grunt if it had been vocalized, and bent to pick up the fork he had dropped. With no change of expression, he scrubbed it with his napkin and then went on eating. Chris Binns sat with his eyes closed, to all appearances as frozen as the girl, but inwardly in an agony of activity as he pursued his vanished thought, humbly asking only for their shape and texture, not their whole substance, something he could find again and rebuild on. But it was not possible; the lights were out inside, the doors closed. He blew gently through his nostrils, making up his mind to try again some time, and opened his eyes. "Hi, Bill." The cadet put his mother down. "Contact, shipmate!" he said thunderously. His hair was crisp, sun-colored; his shoulders bulged under the short, full cape of the space-blue topcoat. Its four buttons, gold, white, green, red for the inner planets, glittered in their midnight background as he flung himself on his brother. Chris, flailing away the accurate and painful pounding of the cadet's greeting, suddenly giggled foolishly, slid his chair back, bent sideways. "Hi. Hi." "And if it isn't little old Tessie Heartburn," Billy roared, bestowing an explosive kiss on Tess Milburn's cheek. "And Old Faithful himself, star boarder extraordinary, conversationalist par ex -- " His heavy hand was stopped abruptly in its descent to the old man's shoulder apparently by nothing more than Mr. Magruder's quick glance upward. The hand raised again, to be a facetious, almost insulting salute. "Mr. Magruder." Mr. Magruder nodded once, curtly, and went about the business of eating. Miz Binns fluttered and clucked and cried. "Billyboy, oh, it's so good to, why didn't you tell us you were, have you had your, now, Tess, if you'll just move a little this way and, Chris, just, and I'll set you another -- " "You wired you'd be here in the morning," said Chris. '"Sun always comes up when little Billee walks in," grinned the cadet. "But ack-shull, shipmate, I got a ride in a supply truck, begged off final inspection, and jatoed out." He looked swiftly around the table. "Where's Horrible Horrocks?" "Billy!" squeaked his mother. "Miss Horrocks got transferred to another school," said Chris. "Thought we wrote you about it." "Oh, yes. Forgot. Read through the home gossip real fast," said Billy carelessly. ITx gruder found us a new boarder for her room. A Miss Gerda Stein. We thought she'd be settled in by the time you arrived. But you didn't arrive tomorrow, did you?" Billy laughed and kissed her. "I sure didn't arrive tomorrow. I'm going to arrive ten minutes ago." "Oh-h, you know what I... silly-Billy. Chris, come help me." Chris looked at her numbly for a moment, then got to his feet, jostling the table. Billy laughed and said, "I know you, Mom. You don't need help. You've got secrets." He turned grinning to Tess Milburn. "They're prolly going to talk about you." "Oh, Billy, you're awful, just awful," his mother said pinkly. Mr. Magruder only steadied his water glass as Chris bumped the table, and then began to butter a roll. Tess Milburn gave her embarrassed lip-flicker, and Miz Binns said, "Don't you listen to that wicked boy, Tess," and shook a fond finger at Billy. She made an abrupt beckoning motion and disappeared into the kitchen. Chris followed her out. She stood by the door, and when he was in the room, she reached out a practiced hand and stopped the door from swinging. With the ignorance of acoustics apparently possible only to mothers, she began speaking intensely in a whisper which was totally inaudible to him, pointing and flapping toward the dining room, moving her lips too much and her jaw not at all. "What?" he asked, not too softly. He was mildly irritated. She cast her eyes up to heaven and shushed him violently. She took his arm and backed across the kitchen, looking past his shoulder all the while as if she expected everyone in the dining room to be pressing ears to the door. "I said what did you have to go and have her for dinner tonight of all nights, Billy home and all?" "We had a date. Besides, I didn't know Billy was -- " "It's very inconsiderate," she complained. "Well, what do you want me to do?" "It ought to be sort of a family thing, your brother home from school." The irritation rose to as high as it ever got with Chris -- not very high. "Then let's get rid of Mr. Magruder, too." "That's different and you know it." He did know it. Mr. Magruder had his own bubble of life within the lives they all led and he stayed unbreakably within it. He communed with himself, his newspaper and his habits, which were so regular that, once established, they required no imagination or conjecture from anyone else in the place. He could talk: but he needn't. They hardly saw him, which led them all to believe that he didn't see them much either. "Well, all right," said Chris. "I'll just explain it to her and take her home and come right back." "You can't, you can't," she fretted. It was what she wanted him to do, but that disqualified it; she wouldn't have that on her conscience. He shrugged and said, "Then what did you call me out here for?" The question was not rude, but a genuine request for information. "It's a shame, that's all," she answered. She squeezed her hands together and looked at them unhappily. There seemed to be nothing else for him to say and certainly nothing he could do. He turned to go back to the dining room, but she said, "Why is she here so much, Chris?" "I don't know, Mom. She -- " He made a vague gesture. He really didn't know. Tess dropped around occasionally -- hadn't it been to visit Miz Binns, anyway at first? And since she was around so much, he talked to her. he couldn't recall clearly. Anything. Whatever was on his mind that could be talked about. His work -- some of it; most of it couldn't be expressed in words; it was conceptual, or technical, or mathematical, or all three. His feelings -- some of them; most of them couldn't be expressed in words, either; they were too conceptual, or unidentified, or occluded, or all three. "We go to the movies sometimes," he said at length. And, "It's nice sometimes to have somebody to talk to." He said that, not "talk with." He would have wondered why, but his mother interrupted his thinking the way people always did. "I know this is no time to discuss it," she said in that urgent whisper, "but what's she want? I mean are you, do you, are you planning to, you know." She finished it like a statement, not a question. "I -- never thought about it." "You better. The way she acts." "All right. But like you say, Mom, it's not the time to think about it now." The limited irritation was back again. He turned to the door which exploded inward and struck him a stinging blow on the right pelvis. "Now what's going on in th' black hole?" Billy roared. "You engineers precessin' my gyros again?" "Tell Mom what you want to eat," said Chris painfully. He walked stiffly back to the table and sat down. He rubbed his hip covertly. He didn't look at Tess Milburn. He couldn't. He picked at his food. She picked at her food. Mr. Magruder, who drank tea with his meals, drank his tea. And all the while, voices came from the kitchen. Chris was acutely embarrassed, but at the same time he was wondering about the filtering effect of the swinging door, because it passed Miz Binns' high frequencies -- the sibilants and the hiss of her stage whisper -- and Billy's lows, the woofs, the chest tones -- all without transmitting a single intelligible syllable. But when Billy laughed, he understood it. He had heard that laugh before. Billy bumped the door and surged through without touching it again as it swung open and back. His mother caught it and held it open on her side and bleated, "No, Billy, no!" and Billy laughed again and said, "Don't you worry your pretty little head about it, Mom. Billy fix." Miz Binns stood in the doorway wringing her hands, then sighed and went back in to get Billy's dinner. Billy plumped down at the table and passed Chris a wide wink. "Well, Tess," he said expansively. "So long since I've seen you. Grown a bit, filled out a bit. Hell around a bit too, I bet." He ignored the silent drop of her jaw and the quick frightened smile that followed it. "You've been walled up in this haymow too long, girl. A little hurry an' noise will do you a world of good. How about you and me, we couple up right after chow and buzz this burg?" Stricken, she looked at Chris. Chris said, "Look, Billy, we -- " with a plate heaped and steaming. Serving dishes on the table not good enough for little Billee, Chris thought bitterly, fold by now. "Mom, what do you know! Tess and I got a date for right away!" Billy announced. "Oh, now, Billy!" said Miz Binns in that he's-naughty-buthe's-so-sweet tone. "Your very first night and we haven't had a chance to chat even, and you have so little time, and -- " "Mom," said the cadet cheerfully, "you and I, we have two solid weeks in the daytime to blow tubes and scavenge tanks to our hearts' delight, in the daytime when all good slaves are out digging gold. I hate to deprive you tonight, but gosh, Mom, don't be stingy. Spread it around. It's okay, isn't it, Chris?" It's okay, isn't it, Chris? All his life, that special laugh and then this question. For a while, when he was nine and Billy was seven, he used to burst into tears when he heard that question. For a while before that and afterward, he had responded with a resounding "No!" And a little later on, he had reasoned, argued, or silently shaken his head. Nothing ever made any difference. Billy would watch him and smile happily through his countermeasure, no matter what, and when he was finished would go right ahead and take, or do, or not do whatever the thing was that he wanted and Chris didn't. He had outweighed Chris since he was four years old, outtalked him always. But this one time, this one lousy time, he wasn't going to get away with it. Chris looked at his mother's anxious face, at Tess with a spot of pink on each of her sallow cheeks, a shine in her eyes that he had never been able to put there. No, by God, no. He filled his lungs to say it out loud when the impossible happened. A hard hand closed on his left wrist, under the table. A voice spoke in his left ear: "Let him!" -- soft but commanding. He looked down at the hand, but it had already gone. He looked at the face to his left, and Mr. Magruder impassively poured more tea. No one else seemed to have seen or heard. It was Mr. Magruder, all right, with some knack of directional, perfectly controlled speech, two syllables formed and aimed from the side of the thin dry lips for Chris and Chris alone. It was unusual for the old man to say anything at all beyond "Pass the salt." It was unprecedented for him to enter a conversation, advise. Chris looked at Tess's troubled, almost beseeching face, the pink, the shine. "You want to go?" S HE looked at Billy and back to him, and then dropped her eyes. Chris felt rather than saw the slight movement of Mr. Magruder's foot against the floor. He did not touch Chris, but the movement was another syllable of command; there was no question in Chris's mind about that. "Go ahead if you want to." Mr. Magruder nodded, or simply dropped his chin to watch his hands fold a napkin. Miz Binns said, "I still think you're awful, Billy," and did not quite add, "dear boy." Tess Milburn giggled. Billy began to eat heartily, and what might have been a very strained silence indeed was canceled before it could become a problem. The doorbell rang. "I'll get it," Chris said relievedly. He got up and turned to the open, screened doorway. It must be a trick of the light was the thought that flashed through his mind, but there wasn't time to pursue it. "Yes?" "I'm Gerda Stein. Mr. Magruder -- " "Oh, it's Miss Stein," his mother called. "Come in, do come in." It had been no trick of the light. Chris opened the screen door and stood back, speechless. He had known there were human beings like this. TV and the movies were full of them. They smiled from magazines and book-jackets, crooned and called and sold coffee, crockery and cosmetics on the car radio. All these are the proper and established places for such creatures; they don't, they just don't stand breathtakingly under the porch light on warm summer evenings and then walk straight into your own familiar house. Someone nudged him out of his daze -- Miz Binns. "Dinner's on, I can warm up something, and your room's all, my son from the Space Academy just, no, this is Chris. Billy's the -- " "How do you do, Chris," said Gerda Stein. "Uh," said Chris. He followed the girl and his mother through the foyer into the dining room. "You already know Mr. Magruder and this, this is Billy." Billy shot up out of his chair like one of the Base rockets, and again Mr. Magruder steadied his water glass. "Well-#-#," Billy breathed, a sound like the last descending tones of a mighty alert siren. Gerda Stein smiled at him and Chris could see him blink. "No," she said in answer to something Miz Binns was saying, "I've had dinner." Chris came around the table and found his eyes on Tess Milburn's face. It was wistful. "And this is Tess Milburn," he blurted. In that instant of empathy for the ignored girl, so shadowed by the great light cast by the newcomer, he fairly shouted. He looked like a fool and knew it. ly and took Tess's hand. Surprisingly, Tess smiled, too, and went on smiling after she had been released -- a real smile, for once, substitute for nothing. Chris felt embarrassed to see it -- a strange embarrassment, starting with the consciousness of how hot his ears were, then going through a lightning intuitive chain to the insight that he was embarrassed when he made someone happjr, and that it had been worth the effort of thought because it was so rare, and then the conclusion that anyone who made people happy so rarely couldn't be worth much. Which led him, of course, to look at his younger brother. Billy had stopped chewing when Gerda Stein came in and he had not swallowed. He seemed for these long seconds as preoccupied as Chris was most of the time, and the slight flick of his blue eyes from Tess's face to Gerda Stein's indicated the source of his deep perplexity. And suddenly Chris saw it, as if it had been imprinted across the golden tan of the cadet's bland forehead in moving lights. If Billy now went on with his idea of a date with Tess, this vision would be left here with Chris and Mom and Mr. Magruder and -- very soon now, Mr. Magruder and Mom would retire, and... On the other hand, Billy shared with his mother a deep reluctance to face anyone with "Beat it, I don't need you around," or any variation thereof. Chris sat down slowly before his cold dinner and waited. He felt some things which taught him a great deal. One of them was that it was good to be involved with Billy in a situation where Billy couldn't win. If Billy backed out of the date, Chris would go; if not, not; and by this Chris learned that the date didn't really matter to him. This was a great relief to him. His mother's questions had disturbed him more than he had known until he felt the relief. Billy sighed through his nostrils and finally swallowed his mouthful. "I'm backin' off my gantry, girl," he said to Tess, "so start the count-down." Chris caught a quick puzzled flicker of expression on Gerda Stein's face. Miz Binns said, "He always talks like that. He means he and Tess are going out. Space talk." Chris thought she was going to run and hug him, but with obvious effort she controlled her feelings and said to Miss Stein, "Well, come settle in the parlor until I can take you up to your room." "Have fun, kids," said Chris, and got up and followed into the parlor. In the foyer, he turned and glanced back. He met Mr. Magruder's penetrating gaze, a startling experience for one used to seeing only the man's cheek or lowered eyelid. He wished he could get some message, some communication from it, but this time he couldn't. He felt very strange, as. if he had been given absolute alternatives: chaos, or obedience to an orderly unknown. He knew he had chosen obedience and he was inexpressibly excited. man in the family," Miz Binns was saying proudly to Gerda Stein, "and Billy's always wanted to be one, and now look." From the couch, Gerda Stein said politely, "He seems to be doing very well." "Well? Why, he's in the top twentieth of his class, nobody ever did that before except one fellow that was an air marshal's son, Billy's born for it, that's what he is, born for it." Chris said, "He was running around in a space helmet when he was two years old." At his voice, Gerda Stein turned and smiled at him. "Oh, hello." "I declare I don't know how I could've had two boys so different," said Miz Binns. "Years, I just couldn't guess what Chris here would wind up doing, he's nicely settled down though, fixing adding machines." "Computers," Chris said mildly"Really! That must be very interesting. I use a computer." "What kind?" little one." "I know it. Mechanical binary. Clever little machine," said Chris and, to his intense annoyance, found himself blushing again. "Oh, well, you have something in common," said Miz Binns. "I'll just scoot along upstairs and see that your room's just right. You keep Miss Stein happy till I call, Chris." "Don't go to any -- " the girl began, but Miz Binns had fluttered out Chris thought we have something in common, have we? He was absolutely tongue-tied. Keep Miss Stein happy, hah! He flicked a glance at her and found with something like horror that she was watching him. He dropped his eyes, wet his lips, and sat tensely wishing somebody would say something. Billy said something. Leaving Tess standing in the foyer, he stepped into the parlor, winked at Gerda Stein and said to Chris, "I heard that last test-firing of yours, shipmate -- 'Have fun!' Well, you have fun." He looked at Gerda Stein with open admiration. "Just remember, brer pawn -- first move don't win the game; it's only an advantage. You told me that yourself." "Shucks," Chris said inanely. "I'll see you soon," said Billy, stabbing a forefinger toward her. "Good night," Gerda Stein said courteously. ing, "C'mon, Venus-bird, let's go git depraved." Tess Milburn squeaked, then tittered, and they went out. Miz Binns came downstairs just then and stopped at the front door. "You Tess Milburn," she called in what she apparently hoped was mock severity, "you don't go keepin' that boy up until all hours!" From the warm dark came Billy's rich laughter. "That boy," breathed Miz Binns, coming into the parlor, "I do declare, he's a caution, come on upstairs now if you want to and see your room, Miss Stein. That your bags out there on the stoop? Chris, just nip out and get Miss Stein's bags in like a good boy." "All right, Mom." He was glad to have something to do. He went out and found the bags, two of them, a large suitcase and what looked like an overnight case. The suitcase was no trouble, but the little one weighed perhaps fifty pounds and he grunted noisily when he lifted it. "Here," called Miz Binns, Til -- " "No!" he barked. "I can handle it." Mom wouldn't learn, couldn't learn that a man might be humiliated in front of strangers. He lifted the bags abruptly, knowing just how Bill -- how a fellow could walk, sing, surge them up to the landing, lift and surge again to the top, breathing easily. He took a step and swung, and got all tangled with the screen door, and banged the overnight case noisily against the jamb; his arms and back wouldn't do the easy graceful thing his mind knew how to do with them. So he didn't lift and swing, or breathe easily, but plodded and hauled, and came into the north bedroom blowing like a grampus. All in the worlfl he hoped for was that he wouldn't catch Gerda Stein smiling. He caught Gerda Stein smiling. He put the bags down by the bed and went blindly back down the stairs. Mr. Magruder was just then pacing his leisurely way into the parlor, his newspaper under his arm, and Chris became painfully aware of how hard he was still breathing and how it must look. He controlled it and fled to the dining room. He stood against the table for a long moment, pulling himself together, and then, with his glazed eyes fixed on the dish of cold hominy grits, slid gratefully into the familiar aloneness of his conjectures. fore cooking, absorbs moisture softens swells steams gets cold loses moisture gets gummy if left long enough would set like concrete anyway until more moisture came along. Deeper he went into a lower level, seeing the hydroscopes, the thirsty molecular matrices, yearning and getting, satiated, yielding, turning again to thirsty horn. Down again to a lower level and the awareness all about him of the silent forces of the capillary, the unreasonable logic of osmosis, the delicate compromise called meniscus. Water, water, everywhere... in the table-legs and the cloth, water fleeing from the edges of a pool of gravy, flying to the pores of a soda-cracker, all the world sere and soggy, set, slushy, slippery and solid because of water. no pipestem arms nor unready tongues nor fumblings for complex behavior codes known reflexively to all the world but Christopher Binns, and he was comforted. "What you dreaming about, boy, I do declare!" He came up out of it and faced her. He felt much better. "I'll give you a hand washing up, Mom." "Now you don't have to do any such of a thing, Chris. Go on into the parlor and chat with Mr. Magruder." He chuckled at the thought and began to stack the dirty plates. His mother went into the kitchen to clear the sink, shaking her head. Her woeful expression, he divined, was only superficial, a habit, an attitude; he could sense the core excitement and delight with which Billy always filled her. Billy can do no wrong; he syllogized -- Billy does everything well; Billy does no wrong well. He carried the plates into the kitchen. "I'm going to bed, dear." "Good night, Mom." "Thanks for helping. Chris -- " "You're not angry at Billy, are you, about Tess, I mean?" "Why should I be angry?" he asked. "Well, I'm glad, then." She thought he had answered her. "He doesn't mean it, you know that." "Sure, Mom." He wondered dispassionately how her remark could possibly be applied to the situation, and gave up. He wondered also, with considerably more interest, how and why he had been aware that while he was in the kitchen, Gerda Stein had come down and re-entered the parlor and that Mr. Magruder had gone up to bed. He wondred also what use the information would be to him, he who had the Sadim touch. The Sadim touch was a recurrent whimsy with him; it was Midas spelled backward and signified that everything he touched, especially gold, turned to -- "Shucks." "What, dear?" "Nothing. Good night, Mom." tiredly toiled up the stairs. He stood by the dining room table, looking at the cut glass sugar-bowl, now turned out to pasture in its old age and holding two dozen teaspoons, handles down, looking like something a robot bride in a cartoon might carry for a bouquet. He scanned the orderly place-setting around the table, the clean inverted cups mouthing their saucers, each handle a precise sixty degrees off the line of the near table edge; the bread plates with the guaranteed #K # solid gold edging absent from every convexity, wanly present in the concave. And he couldn't lose himself in these things. Below the level of the things themselves, there was nowhere he could go. Something had closed his usual ready road to elsewhere and he felt a strange panic. He was unused to being restrained in the here and now, except on company time. All right, then, he admitted. He walked slowly through the foyer and into the parlor. Gerda Stein sat on the couch. She wasn't knitting, or reading, or doing anything. Just sitting quietly, as if she were waiting. What on Earth could she be waiting for? He looked for the right place to sit, a chair not too close (not because he was afraid of being "forward" but because he would have absolutely no resources if she thought he was) and not too far away (because it was late and everyone was in bed and they would have to keep their voices low. In case they talked). "Here," she said, and put her hand on the cushion beside her. In his own house, he said, "Thank you, thank you very much," and sat down. When the silence got to be too much for him, he faced her. She looked back gravely and he turned again and stared at the print of the sentinel at Pompeii which had hung there since before he was born. 'What are you thinking?" You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. But he said, "You comfortable?" He considered his statement, hanging there untouched in the room, and added with something like hysteria, "In your room, I mean." She shrugged. It conveyed a great deal. It was, "Quite what I expected," and "There's certainly nothing to complain about," and "What can it possibly matter?" and, more than anything else, "I won't be here long enough to have any feelings about it one way or the other." A NY of these things, spoken aloud by anyone else, would have made him wildly defensive, for all he may not have been ir.s able to express it. Spoken by her, perhaps it would be different. He couldn't know. But transmitted thus mutely -- he had nothing to say. He put his hands together between his knees and squeezed, miserable and excited. "Why did your brother go to the Space Academy?" she asked. "Congressman Shellfield got him the appointment." "I didn't mean that." "Oh," he said, "you mean why." He looked at her and again had to look away. "He wanted to, I guess. He always wanted to." "You can't always want to do anything," she said gently. 'When did it start?" "Gosh... I dunno. Years back. When we were kids." "What about you?" "Me?" He gave a short, uncertain laugh. "I can't remember wanting anything specially. Mom says -- " "I wonder where he ever got the idea," she mused. He guessed she had been thinking about Billy up in her room and had come down to find out more about him, had sat here waiting until he could come and tell her more. He made a sad, unconscious little gesture with his hands. Then he remembered that she hadasked a question. When he didn't answer questions, why did she just wait like that? 'We used to play spaceman before Billy could talk," he recalled. He glanced her way and laughed surprisedly. "I'd forgotten all about that. I really had." "What kind of games?" "Games, you know. Rocket to the Moon and all. I was the captain and he was the crew. Well, at first I was the... I forget. Or I was the extraterrestrial and he was the explorer. Games." He shrugged. "I remember the takeoffs. We'd spread out on the couch and scream when the acceleration pressed the air out of our lungs. Mom didn't much like that screaming." She laughed. "I can imagine. Tell me, do all spacemen talk the way he does?" "You mean that 'shipmate' and 'gantry' and 'hit the blockhouse'?" He paused for such a long time that she asked quietly, "Don't you want to tell me?" sure. I had to think. Last year, Easter vacation, he brought another cadet with him, name of Davies. Nice fellow, quiet, real black hair, sort of stoop-shouldered. I'd heard Billy talking that way before, thought it was the way to talk. But when I used it on Davies, he'd just look at me -- " unconsciously, Chris was mimicking the wonderstruck Davies -- "as if I was crazy. Harmless, but crazy." He gave his soft, embarrassed chuckle. "I guess I didn't do it right. I guess there's just exactly a right way of saying those things. You have to be a cadet to do it." "Oh? Do all the cadets talk that way?" "Davies didn't. Not to us, anyway. I never met any others." "Maybe Billy's the only one who talks that way." Chris had never considered the possibility. "That would sure sound funny at the Academy." "Not if he never did it there." Chris made a sudden awkward movement of the head, trying to brush away the idea. Stubbornly, it wouldn't brush. It was, after all, the first hypothesis his kind of logic had been able to accept for Cadet Davies' odd reactions. In itself, this was welcome, but it opened up an area of thinking about his brother he disliked to indulge in. He said as much: "I wouldn't like to think of Billy that way, talking like -- like when we were seven, eight years old." "Why not? How do you like to think of Billy?" "He's -- getting what he wants. Going where he wants to go. He always has." "Instead of you?" "I don't know what you mean." Or, he added silently, why you ask or why you want to know any of this. He shifted his feet and turned to meet that disconcerting, warm, open, un jeering smile. "What do you want me to say?" he demanded, with a trace of irritation. She settled back slightly. He knew why; she was going to wait again. He wouldn't be able to cope with that, he knew, so he said quickly, "It's all right for Billy to be that way. He can do things I -- other people can't do. I'm not mad about that, not mad at him. There's nothing to be mad at. It would be like -- being mad at a bird because it had wings. He's just different." He realized that he had wandered from the area of her question, so he stopped, thought back, located it. Billy gets what he wants -- instead of you. He began again: "It's all right for Billy to get what he wants, even if it's something I happen to want, too, and don't get... How can I explain it?" pacing, always turning away from her, passing her with his eyes downcast. It was as if the sight of her chained him, and with his eyes averted, he could run with his own thoughts again. "It's as if Billy wasn't something separate at all, but just another side of me. Part of me wants to go to the Academy -- Billy goes. Part of me wants to go out with Tess, not just to the movies, but out with her, make her feel -- you know. Well, Billy does it. Or talk like Billy, look like him, all that racket and fast gab." He laughed, almost fondly. He sounded, then, just like his mother. "Sometimes he's a nuisance, but mostly I don't care. There's other things, lots of them, that I do that Billy couldn't. There's another part of me that does those things." He allowed himself another quick look at Gerda Stein. She had turned to follow his pacings. He was in the far corner of the room and she sat with her cheek on her bare forearm, her head inclined as on a pillow and her hair hung down over the arm of the couch, heavy and bright. "What things?" she asked. He came back then and sat down beside her. "It's hard to say. It's very hard to say." He sat for a long time performing the totally unprecedented task of verbalizing what he had never given words to before, the thoughts and feelings, ideas and intuitions so intimately, so mutely his own; all the things he set aside when he talked to Tess, all the things which occupied and preoccupied him during that ninety per cent of his life when he must commune and could not communicate. He sat there striving with it while she waited. Her waiting was no longer a trial to him. He realized that, but would not think about it. Yet. "The nearest I can get to it," he said when he was ready, "is this: I've found out something that's at the root of everything anyone can think about, something that all thinking gets to sooner or later, and starts from, too. One simple sentence... Now wait." He put his simple sentence in front of his mind and looked at it for a long studious time. Then he spoke it. "Nothing is always absolutely so." He turned to her. She nodded encouragingly but did not speak. "It's a -- help. A big help," he said. "I don't know when I first found it out. A long time back, I suppose. It helps with people. I mean the whole world is built on ideas that people say are so, and about all the troubles people have are caused by finding out that one thing or another around them just' isn't so. Or it isn't so any longer. Or it's almost so, but not absolutely." kN receipt of another encour" aging nod from Gerda Stein, "Nothing is always absolutely so," he said again. "Once you know that, know it for sure, you can do things, go places you never thought about before. Everything there is gives you some place to go, something to think about. Everything. Take a -- a brass rivet, say. It's brass; you start with that. And what's brass? An alloy. How much change of what metal would make it not be brass? Given enough time, would radioactive decay in one of the metals transmute it enough so it wouldn't be brass any more? "Or take the size. How big is it? Well, doesn't that depend? It's smaller after it's been used than when it was new. What color is it? That depends, too. In other words, if you're going to describe to me exactly what that rivet is, you're going to have to qualify and modify and get up a list of specs half as long as a tide chart and half as wide as Bowditch. And then all I have to do is sweat one drop of sweat on that rivet and wait twenty-four hours and you'll have to revise your specs. "Or drop down a level. Pass a current through my rivet. The copper has this resistance and the zinc has another and a trace of iron has still more. What's the velocity of electromagnetic force through all this mess, and what kind of arguments do the atoms have about it? Or use a strong magnetic field. Why -- really why, aside from 'It just happens' -- is the copper so shy magnetically in brass and so out-and-out ferrous in alnico?" He stopped to breathe. He breathed hard. It recalled to him how she had smiled when he had puffed into her room with the bags. He realized suddenly that he had been altogether wrong in his estimate of that smile. He had feared it because he was ready to fear any smile. Now he knew that it was not just any smile, but the one he saw now -- warm, encouraging, much like the smile which Tess Milburn had found and kept. "What I'm driving at is, with this idea, that nothing is always absolutely so. You don't really need people or anything about them -- movies, TV, talk; anyway, not for hours at a time, days. You don't have to hate people; I don't mean that at all. It's just that people's worries don't matter so much. People's troubles you can answer every time by saying 'Nothing is always absolutely so,' and go on to something else. "But when you see that the wet half of a towel is darker than the dry half, or hear the sound of a falling bomb descending when all reason says it ought to rise in pitch, and you know where you're going to start: Why? and where you'll wind up: Nothing is always absolutely so, and challenge yourself to find the logic between start and finish -- why, then you have your hands full; then you have a place to go." SN'T that a sort of escape?" the girl asked quietly. "Depends on where you're standing at the time. Mixing yourself up with human problems is maybe escaping from these other things. Anyway, these other things are human problems." "Are they?" "EMCturned out to be. First it had to be thought out, with the thinking all the reward in sight, and after that it had to be applied, but don't tell me it isn't a human problem! Someone, for instance, had to put pineapple rings on a ham before baking, for the very first time! Or eat a raw oyster. That seems to me to be the kind of thinking I'm talking about." He brought his hand down for emphasis on the arm of the couch; it fell right on hers. "That's why Billy's at the Academy, because someone, and then some people, and then mankind began to want space." She curled her fingers around his hand, not quite clasping it, and looked down contemplatively. "A good hand," she said in an impersonal voice, and gave it back to him. "Huh? It's crummy -- solder burns, ground-in bench dirt..." He held it as if it no longer completely belonged to him. And it doesn't, he thought with a start. "Tell me," she asked lazily, "is the Academy's way the right way to get to space?" "The only way," he said positively, and then, because his reason caught up with his honesty, he amended, "that's being tried." Suddenly she sat up straight, leaned forward. She tossed her hair back as she turned toward him, with a gesture he knew he'd never forget. She said, "I wonder about that. I wonder about fine-tuning men physically until they're all muscle and bounce, just to coop them up in a cabin for months on end. I wonder about all the training in astrogation when even primitive computers can do better, and no training at all in conversation, which we don't have a machine for yet. I wonder at the thinking behind hundred per cent male complements on those ships. I wonder about #G stress tests on men who will have to develop an inertialess drive before they can think about real space travel. But most of all, I wonder -- I worry -- about putting extraverts on spacecraft." She settled back again, looking at him quizzically. "All right," he said, "I can play that game. Suppose I took every one of those wonderments of yours and turned them over to look at the other side. What would you do instead -- man your ships with soft-bellied bookworms with no reflexes? Train them in philosophy and repartee in an eighteenth-century salon? Teach them to rely on their computers and never know what the machines are doing? Put women on the ships for them to get jealous about and fight over? Lay in a pack of brooding introverts, neuroses and all?" "Neuroses," she repeated. "I'm glad you mentioned them. I imagine you're pretty sure that humanity is by and large a pretty neurotic species." "Well, if your definition -- " "Never mind the specs," she said, interrupting him. ring to her voice that affected him much as had the first sight of her, standing out there under the porch light. Breathless, he fell silent. "Yes, humans are neurotic," she answered her own question. "Insecure, disoriented, dissatisfied, fearful, full of aggressions against their own kind, always expecting attack, always afraid of being misunderstood, always in conflict between the urge to fly like a bird and the urge to burrow like a mole. Now why should all this be?" He simply shook his head, bewildered. "You have a very special mind, Chris, with your hypotheses and your lower levels and your quarreling atoms. Can you take a really big hypothesis?" "I can try." "Hypothesis:" she said, making it sound like a story title. 'There is a space-traveling species that achieved space flight in the first place because, of all species, it was the most fit. It established a commerce throughout a system, systems of systems, a galaxy, another. It had an inertialess fasterthan-light drive, a suspended animation technique, sub-etheric communications -- why go on listing all its achievements? Just say it was technologically gifted and its gift was only one facet of the whole huge fact that it was born and bred for space travel. "Now, expanding as it must, it spread itself thin. It compensated as well as it could by learning to breed fast, by reducing to the minimum the size of its crews and increasing the efficiency of its ships. But each of these .expedients only increased the spread; there's an awful lot of business in this universe for the sole qualified species. "The only way out was to locate planets similar to their own home world and seed them with people. That way, crews could be formed from one end of the explored universe to the other. The best way to do this would be to put down large colonial ships on suitable planets, complete with everything they might need to raise six or seven generations while acclimating to the planet. Thereafter, the colonies could be self-sustaining. That's the overall pic -- uh -- hypothesis. Are you still with me?" "N-no," said Chris dazedly, "but go on." She laughed. "Now suppose one of these big colonial vessels had some trouble -- an impossible series of unlikely happenings that threw it out of control, while in faster-than-light flight with the personnel in suspended animation and all automatic orientation gear washed out. Centuries go by. If it encounters a galaxy, it will search out the right kind of planet, but it doesn't encounter anything until -- " Her voice died down. Chris looked at her, bent closer. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing very slowly, very deeply. As if she sensed him near her, she opened her eyes suddenly and gave a queer twisted smile. "Sorry," she murmured, and took his hand so he would not move away. "This is the part I -- don't like to think about, even -- hypothetically." TOR a moment, all the senses in Chris's body seemed to concentrate and flow together, to lie ecstatic in the hollow of her hand. Then she began to speak again. "The ship was old, old by then, and the machinery badly butched. It found a galaxy all right, and, in time, a planet. It snapped into normal space; it started the gestators..." "Gestators?" he echoed blankly"Artificial placentae. Easier to carry fertilized ova and nutrients than children or even parents. But the revitalizers, for the suspendees -- they failed, about ninety-eight per cent of them." She sighed. It was a mourning sound. "No one knows what happened, not all of it. No one... should. The ship wasn't designed to make planetfall; it was an orbital, true-space vessel. They landed it, somehow, the few that were left. The crash took more lives -- most, perhaps. The scout ships, the ferries, neatly stacked in the gimbal locks -- all wrecked. Stores, books -- call them books, it's simpler -- everything lost. And all that was left, all that lived... a couple of hundred babies, helpless, hungry, many hurt, and a handful of maimed adolescents to care for them. "The ship didn't last long; it wasn't built to take what a corrosive oxygen atmosphere could do to it. The boats hadn't been coated and they went, too, in weeks. "But this is a hardy breed. Most died, but not all. Perhaps, to some, this would be a fascinating study in the old heredityenvironment haggle; personally, I wouldn't have the stomach for it. They lost their language, their culture, their traditions and ageold skills. But they kept their genes. And in time, two prime characteristics showed through their savagery, come straight from their heritage: They bred fantastically and they reached for the stars. "Unlike any other civilized species, they would breed beyond the ability of the land to support them, breed until they had to kill one another to survive at all -- a faculty developed through eons of limitless lehbensraum, but a deadly quality for a planetbound race. It decimated them and they outbred even their own deadliness, so that in a brief time -- twenty, twenty-two thousand years -- they went from the dozto carpet the planet with their bodies. Meanwhile the suicidal other-worldly urge to breed colored their mores and their literature until it stood unique among the galactic cultures. "But they reached for the stars. They excused their hunger for the stars in a thousand ways, and when they grew too rational for excuses, they made no more and still went starward. "And now, today, they are on the verge of it, by themselves, struggling along in their own terrified, terrifying way, ignorant of their origins, mystified by the drive in their blood... yes, Chris, a. neurotic people." "How did you -- uh -- where did you hear -- uh -- read this... She laughed and looked down again at his hand. She patted it with her free one and then held it for a moment in both. "Hypothesis, remember?" He shuddered, the late, large impact of her vivid voice and the pictures it evoked. It was somehow a delightful sensation. "Will... did they ever find their own people?" "They were found. Contact was made -- oh, four hundred years ago." "Then it isn't -- " He looked closely at her face. Even now, he was afraid of what her laughter might be like. "... Earth?" he finished in a small voice. "Isn't it?" "Four hundred years... everybody would know." She shook her head soberly. "Consider : twenty thousand years of genetic drift, mutation, conditioning. The old drives may be there -- statistically, and in the majority. But figure it out for yourself -- what are the chances of a prototypical spaceman after all that time? You'd find most of the desirable characteristics in some, some in most. You'd find all of them as a statistic, in a numerical sample. But if you were a captain looking for a crew, how would you find the man you wanted?" "You already described the spacebound neurotic." "It can't be just any neurotic, only because he's neurotic! He has to be a very special -- very specialized neurotic indeed. They're rare." "Then you'd have to announce yourself, advertise for what you wanted, have screenings, a training program -- " "Don't you know what would happen if all the world found out about the spaceman?" "There'd be a riot, I guess -- everyone wanting to go." "There'd be a riot, all right," she said sadly, "but not that kind. There's one thing mankind is afraid of, sight unseen. It's a fear born of his slow growth on a strange and hostile planet, with only his brains as weapons and shelter." "One fear -- " "The alien. Xenophobia -- virtually a racial disease. All through your history, you have it, and it's always there under the surface, waiting to break out again like an ugly fire. There would be an attack on the spacemen themselves, and then a witch-hunt the like of which even this planet has never seen before. First the ones who fully qualify as spacemen, though they were born here; next, anyone who has some of spaceman's characteristics -- and everyone has!" "I don't believe it!" Chris protested hotly. "I don't think human beings would go that far, be that stupid!" "Humanity lets itself live on bare sufferance as it is," Gerda Stein said sorrowfully. "No, publicity isn't the answer." "Then what's been going on these four hundred years?" S HE said, "Surveys. Spaceman still desperately needs recruits, especially in this galaxy, which is new, unexplored, practically. So spacemen come here, live among you, and every once in a while a candidate is spotted. He's observed for -- well, long enough to determine if he's the right kind." "What's the right kind?" he asked. "You gave a pretty good description yourself a while ago." "The introspective neurotic?" "With special mechanical and computing skills, and an inner resource that needs no books or teleplays or joy-riding or depravity to keep from being bored." "And what happens when someone like that turns up?" "The -- agent reports, and after a while the space captain shows up. If the candidate is from Earth and just goes." "Of course! What good would he be if he was shanghaied?" "Well," said Chris primly, "that's something, anyway." She did laugh at him, after all. It didn't hurt. While she was laughing, he was so disarmed that he asked her a question. He hadn't meant to; it just slipped out. "Why did you want to know all those things about Billy?" "Don't you have any idea?" He looked at his hands. He said, a little sullenly, "You seem to think Billy never started anything by himself. You don't seem to think he can. You -- well, I got the idea you think he gets pushed into things." He turned to her briefly. "By me, for Pete's sake!" "And you don't think so?" He gave a snort, embarrassed and negative. "If I could believe that, I -- I could believe everything else you've been saying." She smiled a very special smile. "Why don't you try it, then, and find out who's right?" Quietly, for a long time, he thought. "I will," he whispered at last. "I will." He straightened and looked at her. "Gerda, where do you come from?" She rose and, spectacularly, stretched. "A little place called Port Elizabeth," she said. "Not very far from here. Port Elizabeth, New Jersey." "Oh." She laughed at him again and took his hand. "Good night, Chris. Can we talk some more about this?" He shook his head. "Not until I really -- really think about it." "You will." foyer to the stairs. She put one hand on the newel post and waved to him, crinkling her eyelids in a way he would find as unforgettable as that turn and sweep and uncovering when she threw back her hair to face him. He found himself quite incapable of a wave or anything else. For a long time after he heard her door close, he stood in the parlor looking at the stairs. At last he shook himself, turned out the lights in the parlor and all but the night lamp in the foyer. He turned on the porch light for Billy and went upstairs to the room they shared. He undressed slowly and absent-mindedly, looking around his room as if he had never seen it. The orrery which he had started to build when he was ten, and which Billy had taken away from him and finished, all except the painting, which he did after all because Billy grew tired of it. The charts of the Solar System from the celestial north (over Billy's bed) and from the south (over his). The Smithsonian photo-map of the Moon, carefully pasted to the ceiling, which Billy had moved to another spot, apparently because he hadn't been consulted, so Chris had had to plaster up the first spot. The spaceships and Billy's toy space helmet. (Hadn't it been Chris's, for his twelfth birthday? But somehow "your" helmet had become "our" helmet and then "mine.") Anyway, it was all space stuff, everything in sight, and space meant Billy, so somehow it was all Billy. And Billy not back long enough even to open his bag. Chris got the pattern suddenly, but very late. Years late. He lay back on his bed and grinned, then got up and switched on the light over the desk. He went into the lavatory and got a big cake of white soap and spread newspaper on the desk and went to work on the soap with a pocketknife, carving a cat's head.- clumping heavily, yawning noisily on the stairs. He banged into the room and kicked the door closed. "Now you didn't have to wait up, shipmate," he said facetiously. "I wasn't." Chris got up from the desk, put the knife down, and crossed to his bed. Billy flung off his cape and tossed it on the easy-chair. "Well, I tilted that chick clean off the orbit, shipmate. You can take down your meteor screens. She won't be dustin' around you no more." "Why do me a favor like that?" Chris asked tiredly. "You and Mom, you mean," said Billy, shucking out of his space boots. "You hadn' oughta worry Mom like that." "Like what?" "She computed you an' li'l Heartburn on a collision orbit.  Well, Billy fix. She'll have nothin' in her viewplates from now on but Space Academy blue." He went to his cape and arranged it carefully on the chair-back. "It's not me, y'unnerstan', shipmate, not me pers'nal. It's just no one man can compete against the Space Corps. Not on a Venus sighting anyway," he said with labored modesty. Chris could see his mind wandering away from the subject before he had gotten the whole sentence out. "How'd you make out?" "Make out? Oh -- Miss Stein." "Oh -- Miss Stein. Fair warning, shipmate -- that there's Target the Next." eyes. "You ever satisfied?" "Look, shipmate," Billy said over his shoulder, " 'satisfied' didn't come inboard yet. These things I play straight and square, gyros on the ship's long axis and a-pointin' down the main tube.  So get the brief, mudbound: tonight's mission was for you and for Mom. Tomorrow's for me. Over." He banged open his kit and pulled out a pajama zip-on. It was then that the carved bar of soap caught his eye. "What you riggin', shipmate?" "Nothing," said Chris, as tired, ly before, but watching like a lynx. "Sculptin' soap. I heard of it. Often wondered." He bent over the work and, suddenly, laughed. That laugh. "Hey, high time we got a new hobby. This ain't bad for a beginner." He rocked the desk lamp back and forth to get shadows. "Think I'll square it away a bit for you. It's okay, isn't it, Chris?" "I was going to fin -- " "That's all right, don't let it worry you. You won't know I touched it." He had stopped listening to Chris while Chris spoke, stopped listening to himself before he himself finished. He leaned over and flicked the carving with the point of the knife, then again. He bent closer, considering. Abruptly he sat down, got his elbows solidly planted on the desk, pulled the light closer and went to work. Behind him, Chris nodded once, then smiled himself into his thoughts, level on lower level -- the very first being the knowledge of who did start (and usually complete) things -- until he slept. to take no breakfast at home, but to mount his stately and ludicrous old three-tone # Buick and drive into town, where he would have tea sent up to the office. He did these things at such an unbearably early hour that his tacit offer of transportation to any who wanted it was almost always refused. But this was an exception. Miz Binns greeted the change with polite protests but inner satisfaction; Billy was sleeping late, having been doing something up in the room until all hours, and now she would be able to take her time and compose a really fabulous tray for him. And Chris, looking uncharacteristically bright and cheerful for that hour, held Gerda Stein's elbow for her as she negotiated the front steps, and opened the ancient Buick's chrome-slashed door for her. As soon as they were away from the curb, Chris took a deep breath and said, "I'm sure you won't be needing Miss Stein today at all, Mr. Magruder." The old man said nothing and did nothing but continue to drive at his less-than-lawful and undeviating rate. Gerda Stein turned expressionless and watchful eyes to Chris's face. Nobody said anything for a two-block interval. "Also," said Chris firmly, "I'd appreciate it if you'd have someone in your office call my plant around #:# and tell them I won't be in today. I could do it myself, but I want it off my mind right now." Mr. Magruder took his foot off the accelerator and let the car glide to a stop at the curb before applying the brakes. It ' took a long silent time. Chris opened the door and handed Gerda Stein out. He shut the t door. "Thank you, Mr. Magruder." As soon as the car was out of sight, Chris Binns began to laugh like a fool. Gerda Stein held on to him, or sturdily held him up, and after a time laughed, too. "What was that for?" she asked when she could. Chris wiped his eyes. "Damn if I know. Too much of... too much all at once, I guess." Impulsively he reached out and ran his hand gently from her temple to the hinge of her jaw, not quite cupping her chin. She held quite still while he did this, and when he dropped his hand, she said, "Well, hello." He wished he had something like it to say, but after two trials all he could utter was, "B-breakfast," so they laughed together again and strode off, Chris holding her hand tight to the inside of his elbow. She walked well with " him, long steady paces. "Can you dance in a spaceship?" he asked. "With slow rolls," she twinkled. They had wafflles with cherry syrup and the best coffee in the world. He watched his thoughts and smiled, and she watched his face. When they had finished and fresh coffee arrived, he said, "Now, questions." "Go ahead." "You say the colony ship was wrecked here about twenty-five thousand years ago. How do you account for Swanscombe and Pekin and Australopithecus and all?" "They're indigenous." S HE touched his hand for emphasis. "Chris, if you'll think on galactic terms, or larger, you'll be quite satisfied. When one of those seeking mechanisms is set for a planet of this type, it isn't satisfied with an almost. And in multigalactic terms, there's plenty of choice. Homo sap, or something very like him, grows on many of those planets, if not most. In Earth's case, they may even have interbred. We're not sure, but there have been cases. Whether or not, though, Spaceman's presence here was no boon to the other races. He's a pretty rtice fellow in his own element, but he makes for a fairly critical mass when you let him pile up." "All right. Now a little more about this neurosis business. Why should Spaceman be so out of kilter on a planet? I'd think of him as pretty adaptable." "He certainly is! He survived for twenty-five thousand years here, didn't he? But about these neuroses -- they're easy enough to account for, once you understand the basic drives. Look: "One characteristic that has been the subject of more worry, more sneers, more bad jokes than anything else here -- except sex itself -- is the back-to-the-womb movement. Introspection and introversion and agorophobia and heaven knows what else, from the ridiculous -- like the man who can't work in an office where he can't have his back to the wall -- to the sublime -- like the Nirvana concept -- is traced to a desire for the womb -- the enclosed, sustaining, virtually gravityless womb. As soon as you discover that the womb itself is only a symbol for this other heritage, what explanation do you need instead?" "Bedamned," whispered Chris. "Another almost universal inner tension has to do with people, though some of us compensate admirably. What's the most ideal state for most people? The family -- the enclosed, familiar, mutually responsive family unit. Only strangers cause communication to break down; only outsiders are unpredictable. Hence our cultural insanities -- as I told you before, xenophobia, the fear of the foreigner. Spaceman travels in sexually balanced smallfamily units, the young getting their own ships and their own mates as the ships meet and cross the Universe over." "Bedamned again," said Chris. "Now your ideal spaceman: He'd have to be a neurotic on Earth, just as -- if you can imagine it -- a person brought up from birth to walk nothing but tight wires would be neurotic on solid ground. He'd wear himself out with unnecessary compensatory reflexes. Your true spaceman wants knowledge, not pastimes. His reaction to outside pressures is to retreat into his own resources -- first, his ship (like you in your job); next, his own thoughts and where they might lead him (like you on your own time). And he wants a -- " eyes. He said gently, "Go on." "He wants, not women, but a mate," she said. "Yes." It took a while, but she then could smile and say, "Any more questions?" "Yes... What's going to become of Billy?" "Oh, he'll be all right," she said confidently. "He and all his kind. He'll graduate, and train some more, and graduate again. He'll stay where he is, perhaps, and train others. Or he'll get a big job -- skipper of a Moon ferry, maybe, or second officer on the first Mars ship. Space will make him sick -- tense, always apprehensive, never comfortable -- but he'll be strong and stick it out. " And after a while, he'll retire with honors and a pension." "And he'll never know?" . "That would be too cruel... Any more?" "Only one big one and I haven't been able to think around it. One of the most permeating fears of humankind -- some say the only one we're actually born with and don't have to learn -- is the fear of falling. How do you equate that with Spaceman?" She laughed. "You can't see that?" He shook his head. She leaned forward, capturing him with her eyes and her urgency. "You are home, where you belong, in space, with all of safe immensity around you, and it's the way you live, and work, and sleep... and suddenly, right there, there's a planet under you!" It hit him so suddenly, he'  gasped and actually strained upward to get away from the floor, the great pressing obtrusive bulk of Earth. "You're not falling," she whispered into the heart of his terror. "It's trying to tall on you!" He closed his eyes and clutched at the table and forced himself to reorient. Slowly, then, he looked at her and managed to grin. "You've got yourself a boy," he said. "Let's get out of here, Captain." I do declare I have never had my life turned so upsy turvy all at once in my life. What with you getting married so quick like that and then Mr. Magruder finding you that wonderful job but I still dont know what's so wonderful about New Zealand of all places. Still if your happy. Then on top of that Billy running out to marry Tess Milburn like that just because you two did it I don't understand, I always thought Billy had his own ideas and couldn't be led, its as if somebody just pushed a button and bang he did it, come to think of it thats the way he decided to go after the Academy thing and he says it was you started him on this soap carving even. What with keeping the marriage secret until he graduates and trying to find a new bar of soap in the house I do declare I don't know where I am. Speaking of Mr Magruder which I was, he's no longer with me, just paid up his month and left without a howdy do. I hear he's with Mrs. Burnett over to Cecil Street, all she has is that little house and that hopeless son who designs cameras and whatnot and hides in his room all the time, which is pretty insulting after all I did for him for eight solid years. 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Complete, easy-to"  cs with your entry follow rules  to win ooe of the fabulous prizes, your coupon must be mailed before November I #th. So do it today ! iwmc in auvarur I mar refect any recording before or oiler receiving it. id cancel my membership at any time. I pay only the Member s low Price of SI.S# (plus a few cent, for shipping) per long playing disc. A saving ot # off the usual retail P?f ce . I enclose #c to heip cover shipping ot the # masterpieces. Name... Address  ct, y Zone Slate he all but yelled -- a wordless, painful bleat, one concentrated syllable to contain five years of loneliness, fury, self-revilement and that agony peculiar to the victim of "the other man." Yet he controlled it, throwing it with a practiced reflex to a tensing of his abdomen and the transient knotting of thigh muscles behind the desk, letting the impact strike as it should, unseen. Outwardly, he was controlled. It was his job to know the language of eyelids, jaw muscles, lips, and it was his special skill to make them mute. He rose slowly as his nurse ushered her in and while she took the three short paces to meet him. He studied her with an impassive ferocity. He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild... free, rather... but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine. And indeed she still did so; somehow that hurt him more than anything else could. She stopped before the desk. He moved his hands behind him; other man It was wholly, shockingly Impossible for him to take this case -- one reason everybody knew; the other he kept to himself -- only there was not one single way S her gaze was on them and he wanted her to look up. He waited until Miss Jarrell discreetly clicked the door shut. "Osa," he said at last. "Well, Fred." T HE silence became painful. How long did that take -- two seconds, three? He made a meaningless sound, part of a laugh, and came around the desk to shift the chair beside it. "Sit down, for heaven's sake." She sat down and abruptly, for the first time since she had entered the office, she looked directly at him. "You look -- you look well, Fred." "Thanks." He sat down. He wanted to say something, but the only thing that would come readily to his lips was, "You're looking well, too" -- such a patent lie that he couldn't tell it. And at last he found something else to say: "A lot has happened." She nodded and her gaze found a corner of the tooled-leather blotter frame on the desk. She studied it quietly. "Five years," she said. Five years in which she must have known everything about him, at first because such a separation is never sharp, but ragged, raveled, a-crackle with the different snaps of different threads at different times; and later, because all the world knew what he was, what he had done. What he stood for. For him, five years at first filled with a not-Osa, like a sheet of paper from which one has cut a silhouette; and after that, the diminishing presence of Osa as gossip (so little of that, because anyone directly involved in gossip walks usually in a bubble of silence); Osa as rumor, Osa as conjecture. He had heard that Richard Newell had lost -- left -- his job about the time he had won Osa, and he had never heard of him working again. Glancing at Osa's cheap clothes now, and the new small lines in her face, he concluded that whatever Newell had found to do, it could not have been much. Newell, he thought bitterly, is a man God made with only one victory in him and he's used it up. "Will you help me?" Osa asked stridently. He thought. Was I waiting for this? Is this some sort of reward, her coming to me for help? Once he might have thought so. At the moment, he did not feel rewarded. He sat looking at her question as if it were a tangible object, a box of a certain size, a certain shape, made of some special material, which was not to be opened until he had guessed its contents. Will you help me? Money? Hardly -- Osa may have lost a great deal, but her towering pride was still with her. Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen. Not money, then. Perhaps a job? For her? No, he knew her well. She could get her own jobs. She had not, therefore she didn't want one. This could only mean she lived as she did for Newell's sake. Oh, yes, he would be the provider, even if the illusion starved her. Then a job for Newell? Didn't she know he couldn't be trusted with any responsible job and was not constituted to accept anything less? Of course she knew it. All of which left only one thing. She must be sure, too, that Newell would accept the idea or she would not be here asking. He said, "How soon can he start therapy?"  at once, as if he had touched her with a high voltage electrode -- the first and only indication she had evinced of the terrible tensions she carried. Then she raised her head, her face lit with something beyond words, something big enough, bright enough, to light and warm the world. His world. She tried to speak. "Don't," he whispered. He put out his hand and then withdrew it. "You've already said it." She turned her head away and tried to say something else, but he overrode that, too. "I'll get paid," he said bluntly. "After his therapy, he'll earn more than enough -- " (For both of us? For my bill? To pay you back for all he's done to you? ) for everything." "I should have known," she breathed. He understood. She had been afraid he wouldn't take Newell as a patient. She had been afraid, if he did take him, that he might insist on doing it free, the name of which was charity. She need not have worried. I should have known. Any response to that, from a shrug to a disclaimer, would destroy a delicacy, so he said nothing. "He can come any time you say," she told him. This meant, He isn't doing anything these days. He opened a desk book and riffled through it. He did not see it. He said, "I'd like to do some pretty intensive work with him. Six, eight weeks." "You mean he'd stay here?" He nodded. "And I'm afraid -- I'd prefer that you didn't visit him. Do you mind very much?" She hesitated. "Are you sure that..." Her voice trailed off. "I'm sure I want to do it," he said, suddenly rough. "I'm sure I'll do everything I can to straighten him out, bar nothing. You wouldn't want me to say I was sure of anything else." She got to her feet. "I'll call you, Fred." She watched his face for a moment. He did not know if she would want to shake his hand or -- or not. She took one deep breath, then turned away and went to the door and opened it. "Thank you..." He sat down and looked at the closed door. She had worn no scent, but he was aware of her aura in the room, anyway. Abruptly he realized that she had not said 'Thank you." He had. O SA didn't call. Three days, four, the phone ringing and ringing, and never her voice. Then it didn't matter -- rather, she had no immediate reason to call, because the intercom whispered, and when he keyed it, it said in Miss Jarrell's clear tones, "A Mr. Newell to see you, Doctor." Stupidly he said, "Richard A. Newell?" Bzz Pssa Bzz. "That's right, Doctor." "Send him in." "I beg your pardon?" "Send him in," said the doctor. I thought that's what I said. What did it sound like? He couldn't res member. He cleared his throat painfully. Newell came in. "We-ell, Freddy-boy." (Two easy paces; cocked head, half smile.) "A small world." Without waiting to be asked, he sat down in the big chair at the end of the desk. At first glance, he had not changed; and then the doctor realized that it was the -- what word would do? -- the symphonic quality of the man, the air of perfect blending -- it was that which had not changed. Newell's diction had always suited the clothes he chose and his movements were as controlled as his speech. He still wore expensive clothes, but they were years old -- yet so good they hardly showed it. The doctor was immediately aware that under the indestructible creases and folds was a lining almost certainly frayed through; that the elegant face was like a cheap edition printed from worn plates and the mind behind it an interdependence of flimsy parts so exactly matched that in the weak complex there was no weakest component. A machine in that condition might run indefinitely -- idling. The doctor closed his eyes with a brief impatience and consigned the concepts to the limbo of oversimplified analogies. "What do you want?" Newell raised his eyebrows a fraction. "I thought you knew. Oh, I see," he supplemented, narrowing his eyes shrewdly. "One of those flash questions that are supposed to jolt the truth out of a man. Now let's see, just what did pop into my head when you asked me that?" He looked at the top of the window studiously, then leaned forward and shot out a finger. "More." "More?" "More -- that's the answer to that question. I want more money. More time to myself. More fun." He widened his eyes and looked disconcertingly into the doctor's. "More women," he said, "and better. Just -- more. You know. Can do?" "I can handle only so much," said the doctor levelly. His thighs ached. "What you do with what I give you will be up to you... What do you know about my methods?" "Everything," said Newell offhandedly. the doctor said, "That's fine. Tell me everything about my methods." "Well, skipping details," said Newell, "you hypnotize a patient, poke around until you find the parts you like. These you bring up by suggestion until they dominate. Likewise, you minimize other parts that don't suit you and drive them underground. You push and you pull and blow up and squeeze down until you're satisfied, and then you bake him in your oven -- I'm using a figure of speech, of course -- until he comes out just the proper-sized loaf. Right?" "You -- " The doctor hesitated. "You skipped some details." "I said I would." "I heard you." He held Newell's gaze soberly for a moment. "It isn't an oven or a baking." "I said that, too." "I was wondering why." Newell snorted -- amusement, patronization, something like that. Not irritation or impatience. Newell had made a virtual career out of never appearing annoyed. He said, "I watch you work. Every minute, I watch you work; I know what you're doing." "Why not?" Newell laughed. "I'd be much more impressed in an atmosphere of mystery. You ought to get some incense, tapestries in here. Wear a turban. But back to you and your bake-oven, what-do-youcall-it -- " "Psychostat." "Yes, psychostat. Once you've taken a man apart and put him together again, your psychostat fixes him in the new pattern the way boiling water fixes an egg. Otherwise he'd gradually slip back into his old, wicked ways." He winked amiably. Not smiling, the doctor nodded. "It is something like that. You haven't mentioned the most important part, though." "Why bother? Everybody knows about that." His eye flicked to the walls and he half-turned to look behind him. "Either you have no vanity or you have more than anyone, Fred. What did you do with all the letters and citations that any human being would frame and hang? Where's all the plaques that got so monotonous on the newscasts?" He shook his head. "It can't be no vanity, so it must be more than anyone. You must feel that this whole plant -- you yourself -- are your citation." He laughed, the professional friendly laugh of a used-car salesman. "Pretty stuffy, Freddy." The doctor shrugged. "I know what the publicity was for," said Newell. "A fiendish plot to turn you into a personality kid for the first time in your life." Again the engaging smile. "It isn't hard to get you off the subject, Freddy-boy." "Yes, it is," said the doctor without heat. "I was just making the point that what I do here is in accordance with an ethical principle which states that any technique resulting in the destruction of individual personality, surgical or otherwise, is murder. Your remarks on its being publicly and legally accepted now are quite appropriate. If you must use that analogy about taking a patient all apart and putting him together again in a different and better way, you should add that none of the parts are replaced with new ones and none are left out. Everything you have now, you'll have after your therapy." "All of which," said Newell, his eyes twinkling, "is backed up by the loftiest set of ethics since Mohandas K. Gandhi." f T , HE twinkle disappeared behind a vitreous screen. The voice was still soft. "Do you suppose I'd be fool enough to put myself in your hands -- your hands -- if I hadn't swallowed you and your legendary ethics down to here?" He jabbed himself on the chest. "You're so rammed full of ethical conduct, you don't have room for an honest insult. You have ethics where most people carry their guts." "Why did you come here," asked the doctor calmly, "if you feel that much animosity?" "I'll tell you why," smiled Newell. "First, I'm enjoying myself. I have a sense of values that tells me I'm a better man than you are, law, fame and all, and I have seventy-odd ways -- one of which you were once married to -- to prove it. Why wouldn't anyone enjoy that?" "That was 'first' You've got a 'secondly I ?" "A beaut," said Newell. "This one's for kicks, too: I think I'm the toughest nut you've ever had to crack. I'm real happy about the way I am -- all I want is more, not anything different. If you don't eliminate my lovable character or any part of it -- and you won't; you've stacked the deck against yourself -- you'll wind up with just what you see before you, hi-fi amplified. And just for a little salt in the stew, I might as well tell you that I know you can't operate well without hypnosis, and I can't be hypnotized." "You can't?" "That's right. Look it up in a book. Some people can't be hypnotized because they won't, and I won't." "Why not?" Newell shrugged and smiled. "I see," said the doctor. He rose and went to the wall, where a panel slid aside for him. He took up a shining hypodermic, snicked off the sterile sheath and plunged the needle into an ampoule. He returned to the desk, holding the hypodermic point upward. "Roll up your sleeve, please." "I also happen to know," Newell said, complying readily, "that you're going to have one hell of a time sorting out drug-reaction effects from true responses, even with neoscopolamine." "I don't expect my work to be easy. Clench your fist, please." Newell did, laughing as the needle bit. The laugh lasted four syllables and then he slumped silently in his chair. The doctor took out a blank case book and carefully entered Newell's name and the date and a few preliminary notes. In the "Medication" column, he wrote, # cc neutral saline solution. He paused then and looked at the "better" man and murmured, "So you can run a mile faster than Einstein." f f A LL ready, Doctor." "Right away." He went to the rack in the corner and took down a white coat. Badge of office, he thought, cloak of Hippocrates, evolved through an extra outdoor duster we used to wear to keep the bodily humours off our street clothes... and worn today because, for patients, the generalization "doctor" is an easier departure point for therapeutics than the bewildering specific "man." Next step, the juju mask, and full circle. He turned into the west corridor and collided with Miss Thomas, who was standing across from Newell's closed door. "Sorry!" they said in unison. "Really my fault," said Miss Thomas. "I thought I ought to speak to you first, Doctor. He -- he's not completely dismantled." "They very frequently aren't." "I know. Yes, I know that." Miss Thomas made a totally uncharacteristic, meaningless flutter of the hands and then welded them angrily to her starched flanks. The doctor felt amusement and permitted it to show. Miss Thomas, his head technician, was neither human nor female during working hours, and the touch of color, of brightness in her lack of ease pleased him somehow. She said, "I'm familiar with the -- uh -- unexpected, Doctor. Naturally. But after eighty hours of machine catalysis, I don't expect a patient to resemble anything but a row of parts laid out on a laboratory bench." "And what does this patient resemble?" There was a sudden, soft peal of delighted feminine laughter from the closed door. Together they looked at its bland surface and then their eyes met. "Two hundred cycles," said Miss Thomas. "Listen to her." They listened: Miss Jarrell's voice, a cooing, inarticulate Miss Jarrell, was saying, "Oh... you... you!" And more laughter. Miss Thomas said severely, "I know what you're thinking about Hildy Jarrell, but don't. That's exactly what I did myself." Again she made the uncharacteristic flutterly gesture. "Oh-h!" she breathed impatiently. Because his impulses were kind, the doctor ignored most of this and picked up only, "Two hundred cycles. What do you get at the other frequencies?" "Oh, that's all right, all of it. Average response. Pre-therapeutic personality responds best at eighty cycles. Everywhere else, he's nice and accessible. Anyway," she said a little louder, obviously to drown out another soft sudden chuckle from behind the door, "I just wanted you to know that I've done what I can. I didn't want you to think I'd skipped anything in the spectrum. I haven't. It's just that there's a personality in the #-cycle area that won't dismantle." "Yet," he corrected mildly. "Oh, you can do it," she said in rapid embarrassment. "I didn't mean... I only meant..." S HE drew a deep breath and started over. "I just wanted you to be sure my job's done. As to what you can do, you'll handle it, all right. Only -- " "Only what, Miss Thomas?" "It's a pity, that's all," she blurted, and pushed past him to disappear around the corner. He shook his head, puzzlement and laughter wrestling gently deep inside him. Only then did something she had said fully register with him:... there's a personality in the #-cycle area that won't dismantle." That woman, he thought, has the kind of precision which might be clouded by emotion, but nothing would eliminate it. If she said there's a personality in the #cycle area, she meant just that. A personality, not a component or a matrix or a complex. As she herself had put it, after catalysis a patient should resemble nothing more than a row of parts on a lab bench. Down through the levels of hypnosis, audible frequencies would arbitrarily be assigned to various parts of the personality, and by suggestion each part would respond to its frequency throughout the therapy. Any part could be summoned, analyzed, then minimized, magnified, stressed or quelled in the final modulation and made permanent in the psychostat. But at the stage Newell was in -- should be in -- these were parts, sub-assemblies at most. What did she mean "a personality" in the #cycle area? She was wrong, of course. Oh, Cod, he thought, she's wrong, isn't she? He opened the door. Miss Jarrell did not see him. He watched for a long moment, then said, just loud enough to be heard over the soft thrumming of the #-cycle note from the speakers, "Don't stop, Miss Jarrell. I'd like to see a little more of this." Miss Jarrell flung up a scarlet face. The doctor said again, quietly but with great force, "Go on, please." She turned away to the bed, her back held with a painful rigidity and her ears, showing through her hair, looking like the tips of bright little tongues. "It's all right," soothed the doctor. "It's all right, Miss Jarrell. You'll see him again." She made a soft sound with her nostrils, grinned ruefully and went to the controls. She set one of them for the patient's allotted sleep-command frequency and hit the master switch. There was a gentle explosion of sound -- "white" noise, a combination of all audio frequencies, which served to disorient the dismantled patient, his reflexive obedience attempting to respond to all commands at once -- for ten seconds, and then it automatically faded, leaving the #cycle "sleep" note. The patient's face went blank and he lay back slowly, his eyes closing. He was asleep before his head reached the pillow. T HE doctor stood suspended in thought for some time. Miss Jarrell gently arranged the patient's blanket. It was not done dutifully nor as part of the busyness of waiting for his next move. For some reason, it touched the doctor deeply and pulled him out of his reverie. "Let's have the P.T., Miss Jarrell." "Yes, Doctor." She consulted the index and carefully set the controls. At his nod, she touched the master switch. Again the white noise, and then the deep moo of the #cycle tone. The P.T. -- pre-therapeutic -- personality would be retained untouched throughout the treatment, right up until the final setting process in the psychostat, except, of course, for the basic post-hypnotic command which kept all segments under control of the audio spectrum. The doctor watched the sleeping face and was aware of a most unprofessional desire to have something other than that untouched P.T. appear. He glanced at Miss Jarrell without turning his head. She should leave now, and ordinarily she would. But she was not behaving ordinarily just now. The patient's eyes half-opened and stayed that way for a time. It was like the soft startlement of a feline which is aware of something, undecided whether the something deserves more attention than sleep, and therefore simply waits, armed and therefore relaxed. Then he saw the eyes move, though the lids did not. This was the feline taking stock, but deluding its enemies into thinking it still drowsy. The man changed like an aurora, which is ever the same while you watch, but something quite different if you look away and look back again. I think in analogies, the doctor chided himself, when I don't like the facts. "Well, Freddy-boy," drawled Richard A. Newell. Behind him, he heard Miss Jarrell's almost inaudible sigh and her brisk quiet footsteps as she turned on the speech recorder, crossed the room and closed the door behind her. Newell said, "Nurse is an odd term for a woman built like that. How you doing, Freddy?" "Depends," said the doctor. Newell sat up and stretched. He waved at the red eye of the recorder. "Everything I say is taken down and may be used against me, hm?" "Everything is used, yes. Not -- " "Oh, spare me the homilies, Fred. Transcribe them yourself, do you?" "I -- no." As he caught Newell's thought, and knew exactly the kind of thing the man was going up with impotent rage. It did not show. "Fine, fine." Projecting his voice a bit, Newell said over an elaborate yawn, "Haven't waked up like this since I was a kid. You know, disoriented, wondering for a moment where I was. Last bed I was in wasn't so lonesome. Missed thirty of those last forty winks, the way she was all over me. 'Dick, oh, Dick, please...'" he mimicked cruelly. "Told her to shut up and get breakfast." not at anything he had said, but at the writhing silent thing within the doctor, which he could not see but knew must be there. He glanced again at the pilot light on the recorder and said, "Mentioning no names, of course," and the doctor understood immediately that names would be mentioned, places, dates and interrelationships, whenever Newell chose... which would be when the suspense ceased to entertain him. Meanwhile, the doctor could prepare himself for the behindthe-back gossip, the raised eyebrows of the transcribing typist, the after-hours debates as to the ethical position of a doctor's practicing on the man who had... who was... The sequence spiraled down to a low level of his personal inferno and flickered there, hot and smokeless. "You didn't tell me," said Newell. "How you doing? Find the secret of my success yet?" The doctor shrugged easily, which was not easy to do. "We haven't begun." "Thought not." Newell snorted. "By the time you're finished, you won't have begun, either." "Why do you say that?" "I extrapolate it. I come here, you give me a shot of knockout drops, I get a sound sleep and wake up rested and cheerful. Otherwise, nothing. Yet I know that you've taken my slumbering corpus, poked it, prodded it, checked it in and wrung it out, tooted on your tooters, punched cards and clicked out four miles of computer tape -- for what? I'm still me, only rested up a little." "How do you know we did all that?" "I read the papers." When the doctor made no reply, Newell laughed again. "You and your push-button therapy." He looked up in recall, as if reading words off the ceiling. "What's the claim -- #  of your patients cured?" "Modulated." "Pretty word, modulated. Pretty percentage, too. What kind of a sieve do you use?" "Sieve?" "Don't tell me you don't select your patients!" "No, we take them as they come." "Ha. You talk like the Lysenkoists. Remember them? Russian genetics experts fifty years back. They claimed results like that. They claimed non-selective methodology, too, even when some of the people supposed to be breeding split-kernel corn were seen splitting the kernels with a knife. Even the Communists rejected them after a while." He flicked a wolfish glance at the recorder and grinned. "But then," he said clearly, "no Communist would reject you, Freddy." Of the four possible responses which came to him, the doctor could find none that would sound unlike a guilty protest, so he said nothing. Newell's widening grin informed him that his silence was just as bad. "Ah, Fred, m'boy, I know you. I know you well. I knew a lot about you five years ago and I've learned a lot more since." He touched the dark wiry tuft between his collarbones. "Like, for example, you haven't a single hair on your chest. Or so I've been told." as a rejoinder. He could examine his feelings later -- he knew he would; he inescapably must. For now, he knew that any answer would fall into Newell's quiver as new arrows. Silence was a condition Newell could not maintain nor tolerate; silence made Newell do the talking, take the offensive... inform on and expose his own forces. Silence Newell could use only sometimes; words, always. Newell studied him for a moment and then, apparently deciding that in order to return to a target, it was necessary to leave it temporarily, looked at the compact control panel. "I've read a lot about that. Push one button, I'm a fighting engine. Push another, I lie down with the lamb. Who was it once said humanity will evolve into a finger and a button, and every time the finger wants anything, it will push the button -- and that will be the end of humanity, because the finger will get too damn lazy to push the button?" He wagged his head. "You're going to gadget yourself clear out of a living, Fred." "Did you read what was written over the entrance when you came here?" the doctor asked. "I noticed there was something there," said Newell amiably, "and no, I didn't read it. I assumed it was some saw about the sanctity of the personality, and I knew I'd get all I could stand of that from you and your acolytes." "Then I think you ought to know a little more about what you call 'push-button therapy,' Newell. Hypnosis isn't therapy and neither is the assigned audioresponse technique we use. Hypnosis gives us access to the segments of personality and creates a climate for therapy, and that's all. The therapy itself stands or falls on the ability of the therapist, which is true of my school as it is of all others short of the lobotomists." "Well, well, well. I goaded a real brag out of you at last. I didn't know you had it in you." Newell chuckled. "# effective and you do it all your little self. Now ain't you something? Tell me, able therapist, how do you account for the # who get by you?" "Why do you want to know?" "I might alter the figures for you. Who are these sturdy souls?" "Organic defectives," said the doctor. And certain others... but he kept that to himself. Newell shouted, "Touche!" and fell back with a roar of appreciative laughter. But the doctor saw his eyes before he closed them, little windows with all the faces of hate looking out. The doctor was delighted. He braced himself for the reaction against his own pleasure which he could always expect from his austere professionalism, but it did not come. He put this fact away with the others he knew he must examine later. can't have it both ways, Fred. About hypnosis riot being therapy, I mean. What's this I heard somewhere about certain frequencies having certain effects, no matter who you are?" "Oh, that. Yes, some parts of the audio spectrum do affect most people. The subsonics -- fourteen to around twenty cycles, for example, if you use enough amplitude -- they scare people. And beatfrequencies between two tones, where the beat approaches the human pulse, sometimes have peculiar psychological effects. But these are byways, side phenomena. We use the ones we can rely on and ignore or avoid the others. Audio frequencies happen to be convenient, accurate and easy for patient and therapist to identify. "But they're not essential. We could probably do the same thing with spoken commands or a spectrum of odors. Audio is best, though; the pure electronic tone is unfamiliar to most people and so has no associations except the ones we give it. That's why we don't use # cycles -- the hum you're surrounded by all your life from AC devices." "And what about if you're tonedeaf?" asked Newell, with an underlay of gloating which could only mean that he was talking about himself. "Nobody's that tone-deaf, except the organic defectives." "Oh," said Newell disappointedly, then returned to the halfsneering search for information. "And so the patient walks out of here prepared for the rest of his life to go into a state of estrus every time an English horn sounds A-#?" "You know better than that," retorted the doctor, for once not concealing his impatience. "That's what the psychostat is for. Every frequency the patient responds to is recorded there -- " he waved at the controls -- "along with its intensity. These are analyzed by a computer and compared by another one with a pattern which shows which segments are out of line -- like too much anger or unwarranted fear, in terms of the patient's optimum. The psychostat applies dampers on the big ones and amplifies the atrophied ones until the response matches the master pattern. When every segment is at optimum -- the patient's, mind you; no one else's -- the new pattern is fixed by an overall posthypnotic which removes every other suggestion that has been applied." "So the patient does go out of here hypnotized!" "He walks in here hypnotized," said the doctor. "I'm surprised at you, Newell. For a man who knows so much about my specialty, you shouldn't need to be lectured on the elementals." "I just like the sound of your voice," Newell said acidly, but the # acid was dilute. "What do you mean, the patient walks in here hypnotized?" "Most people are, most of the time. In the basic sense, a man is under hypnosis whenever any one of his senses does not respond to a present stimulus, or when his attention is diverted even slightly from his physical surroundings. You're under hypnosis when you read a book, or when you sit and think and don't see what you're staring at, or when you bark your shin on a coffee-table you didn't see under bright lights." "That's so much hair-splitting." Newell didn't even pause before his next sentence, which came from quite a different area than his scoffing incredulity. "Why didn't you tell me all this when I said I couldn't be hypnotized?" "I preferred to believe you when you said you knew it all." disappeared. "Listen, you," Newell grated, in the ugliest tone of voice the doctor had ever heard, "you better watch what you're doing." It was time again for silence and the doctor used it. He gave Newell no choice but to lie there and stare at his own words. He watched the man regaining his poise, laboriously, hand over hand, then resting, testing, waiting to be sure he could speak again. "Well," Newell said at length, and the doctor almost admired him for the smoothness of his tone, "it's been fun so far and it'll wind up more so. If you really can do what you say, I'll make it right with you, Freddy-boy. I'll really pay off." "That's nice," said the doctor guardedly. "Nice? Just nice? Man, I'll give you a treasure you couldn't get any other way. You could never get," he amended. He looked up into the doctor's face brightly. "Nearly five solid years a-building and it's all yours. Me, I'll start a new one." "What are you talking about?" "My little black book. Got everything in it from pig to princess. Whoever you are, however you feel from time to time, there's a playmate in there for you. You could really use it, Freddy. You must have stored up quite a charge since you-know-what," he said, grinning at the recording machine. "Fix me up, I fix you up. Fair enough?" The silence this time was unplanned. The doctor walked to the controls, dialed # and hit the master. The #-cycle note died, the white noise took over, and then the #-cycle sleep command. The doctor felt that gleaming grin leave the room like a pressure off his back. He is a patient, the doctor thought at last, out of his hardheld numbness. He is a patient in a therapeutic environment as detached from the world as a nonEuclidean theorem. There is no Newell; there is only a patient There is no Fred, only a doctor. There is no Osa, only episodes. Newell will be returned to the world because he has a personality and it has an optimum, because that is what I do here and that is what I am for. He touched the annunciator control and said, "Miss Jarrell, I want you." She opened the door almost immediately; she must have been waiting in the corridor. "Oh, Doctor, I am sorry! I know I shouldn't do anything like that. It's just -- well, before I knew it..." "Don't apologize, Miss Jarrell. I mean it -- don't. You may even have done some good. But I have to know exactly what influences were... no, don't explain," he said when she tried to speak. "Show me." "Oh, I couldn't! It's so -- silly!" "Go on, Miss Jarrell. It isn't silly at all." with her eyes averted and went to the controls. She dialed a frequency and activated the master, and as the white noise roared out, she went to the foot of the bed, waiting. The audio faded, all but a low, steady thrum -- # cycles. The patient opened his eyes. He smiled. It was a smile the like of which the doctor had never seen before, though he might have imagined one. Not, however, on the face of Richard A. Newell. There was nothing conceivable in Richard A. Newell to coexist with such an expression. The patient glanced down and saw Miss Jarrell. Ecstatic recognition crossed his face. He grasped the covers and whipped them over his head, and lay stiff and still as a pencil. "You...!" crooned Miss Jarrell, and the blanket was flung down away from the patient's head, and he gurgled with laughter. She snatched at his toes, and he bucked and chortled, and covered up again. "The bumble bee -- " she murmured, and he quivered, a paroxysm of delighted anticipation -- "goes round the tree... and she snatched at his toes again. He whipped the blanket away from his face and gave himself up to an explosion of merriment which was past vocalization -- in fact, but for that soft and intense chuckle, he had made hardly a sound. "You..." The doctor watched and slowly felt a vacuum in the scene somehow, and a great tugging to fill it with understanding, and the understanding would not come until the word "ridiculous" slipped through his mind... and that was it: This should be ridiculous, a grown man reacting like a sevenmonth infant. What was extraordinary was that it was not ridiculous and that it was indeed a grown man, not a mere infantile segment. It was a thing to be felt. There was a -- a radiance in these bursts of candid merriment which, though certainly childlike, were not childish. It was a quality to be laughed with, not laughed at He glanced at the audio selector. Yes, this was the #-cycle response that Miss Thomas had mentioned. "A personality -- " He began to see what she had meant. He began, too, to be afraid. He went to the wall rack where the technician's response-breakdown was clipped. It was a standard form, one column showing the frequencies arbitrarily assigned to age levels (# cycles and the command suggestion: "You are eleven years old") and another column with the frequencies assigned to emotional states (# cycles and "You are very angry;" # cycles, "You are afraid"). Once the patient was completely catalyzed, response states could readily be induced and their episodic material extracted -- fear at age three, sexuality at fourteen, fear plus anger plus gratification at age six, or any other combination. The #-cycle area was blotchy with Miss Thomas's erasures, but otherwise blank. The doctor inwardly shook himself and got a firm grip. He went to the bed and stood looking down at that sensitive, responsive face. "Who are you?" he asked. rpHE patient looked at him, eyes bright, a glad, anticipatory smile on his lips. The doctor sensed that the man did not understand him, but that he was eager to; further, that from the bottom of his heart the man was prepared to be delighted when he did understand. It filled the doctor with an almost tender anxiety, a protectiveness. This creature could not be disappointed -- that would be inartistic to the point of gross injustice. "What's your name?" the doctor pursued. The patient smiled at him and sat up. He looked into the doctor's eyes with an almost unbearable attention and a great waiting, ready to treasure whatever might come next if only -- if only he could identify it. One thing's certain, mused the doctor: this was no infantile segment. Child, yes, but not quite child. "Miss Jarrell." "Yes, Doctor." "The initial, the middle initial on the chart. It's 'A.' What does that stand for?" After a moment, "Anson," she said. To the patient, he said, "I'm going to call you Anson. That will be your name." He put his hand on the patient's chest. "Anson." The man looked down at the hand and up, expectantly, at the doctor. The doctor said, touching his white coat, "Doctor. Doctor." He pointed at Miss Jarrel. "Miss -- " "Hildy," said Miss Jarrell quickly. The doctor could not help it; he grinned briefly. This elicited a silent burst of glee from the patient, which was shut off instantly, to be replaced by the anticipation, the watchful and ready attentiveness. He burdened the doctor with his waiting and the necessity to appreciate. Yet what burden was it, really? This creature would appreciate the back of a hand across the face or two choruses of the Londonderry Air. The doctor poised over the bed, waiting for an answer, and it came: The burden lay in the necessity not to please this entity, but to do this thing properly, in ways which would never have to be withdrawn later. He trusts me -- there, in three words, was the burden. The doctor took the patient's hand and put the fingertips close to his lips. "An-son," he said. Then he put the hand to the patient's own mouth, nodding encouragingly. The patient obviously wanted to do it right, too -- more, even, than the doctor. His lips trembled. Then, "An-son," he said. Across the room, Miss Jarrell clapped her hands and laughed happily. "That's right," smiled the doctor, pointing. "Anson. You're Anson." He touched his own chest. "Doc-tor." He pointed again. "Miss Hildy." The man in the bed sat up slowly, his eyes on the doctor's face. "An-son. Anson." And then a light seemed to flood him. He hit his chest with his knuckles. "Anson!" he cried. He felt his own biceps, his face, and laughed. "That's right," said the doctor. "Doc... tok," said Anson with difficulty. He looked wistful, almost distraught. "That's okay. That's good. Doctor." "Doc-tor." Anson turned brightly to Miss Jarrell and pointed. "Miss Hildy!" he sang triumphantly. "Bless you," she said, saying it like a blessing. doctor stood for a moment grinning back like a fool and feeling frightened and scratching his head. Then he went to work. "Richard," he said sharply, and watched for a reaction. There was none, just the happy eagerness. "Dick." Nothing. "Newell." Nothing. "Hold up your right hand. Close your eyes. Look out of the window. Touch your hair. Let me see your tongue." ' Anson did none of these things. The doctor wet his lips. "Osa." Nothing. He glanced at Miss Jarrell. "Anson," he said, and Anson increased his attention. It was startling; the doctor hadn't known he could. "Anson, listen." He pulled back his sleeve and showed his watch. "Watch. Watch." He held it close, then put it to Anson's ear. Anson gurgled delightedly. "Tk tk," he mimicked. He cocked his head and listened carefully to the doctor repeating the word. Then, "Wats. Watts. Watch," he said, and clapped his hands exactly as Miss Jarrell had done before. "All right, Miss Jarrell. That's enough for now. Turn him off." He heard her intake of breath and thought she was going to speak. When she did not, he faced her and smiled. "It's all right, Miss Jarrell. We'll take good care of him." She looked for the sarcasm in his face, between his words, back in recall, anywhere, and did not find it. She laughed suddenly and heartily; he knew she was laughing at herself, spellbound as she had been, anxious for the shining something which hid in the #cycle area. "I could use a little therapy myself, I guess," she said wonderingly. "I would recommend it to you if you had reacted any other way." She went to the door and opened it. "I like working here," she said, blushed, and went out. The doctor's smile disappeared with the click of the latch. He glanced once at the patient, then moved blindly to the controls. He locked them and went back to his office. ting no answer, she entered the doctor's office. "Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought you were still -- " The expression on his face halted her. She took the reports she carried and put them down on the desk. He did not move. She went to the cabinet, which slid open for her, and shook two white pills from a vial. She broke a beam with a practiced flick of the wrist. A paper cup dropped and filled with ice-water. She took it to the doctor. "Here." He said rapidly, "What? What? What?" and, seeking, looked the wrong way to find her voice. He turned again, saw her. "What?" and put his hand for a moment over his eyes. "Oh, Miss Thomas." "Here," said the technician again. "What is it?" He seemed to be trying to identify the cup, as if he had never seen one before. Because she was kind, Miss Thomas took it another way. "Dexamyl." "Thank you." He took them, swallowed water, and looked up at her. "Thank you," he said again. "I seem to be..." "It's all right," said Miss Thomas firmly. "Everything's all right." Some of his control returned and he chuckled a little. "Using my own therapy on me?" "Everything is all right, far as I know," she said, in the grumpy tone under which she so often concealed herself. She folded her arms with an all but audible snap and glared out of the window. The doctor glanced up at her rigid back and, in spite of himself, was amused. She was daring him to order her out, challenging him not to tell her what the trouble was. He recalled, then, that she was doubtlessly gnawed like the Spartan boy by the fox of curiosity she was hiding under her starch. There's a personality in the #-cycle area that won't dismantle... oh, you can do it, but... it's a pity, that's all, he recalled. He said, "It's one of those things of Prince's." She was quiet for so long that she might not have heard him and I'm damned, he thought, if I'm going to spell it out for her. But she said, "I don't believe it," and, into his continued silence, "Morton Prince's alternate-personality idea might be the only explanation for some cases, but it doesn't explain this one." "It doesn't?" "Two personalities in one mind -- three or more sometimes. One of his case histories was of a woman who had five distinct egos. I'm not quarreling with the possibility, Doctor." Every time Miss Thomas surprised him, it was in a way that pleased him. He would, he thought, think that through some day. "Then why quarrel with this one?" he asked. sat down in the big chair. They sat for a time in a companionable, cerebral quiet. Then she said, "Prince's case histories show a lot of variation. I mean one ego will be refined, educated, another rough and stupid. Sometimes the prime was aware of the others, sometimes not; sometimes they hated each other. But there was this denominator: If the condition existed at all, it existed because the alternate ego could communicate and did. Had to." "Morton Prince wasn't equipped for segmentation under tertiary hypnosis." "I think that's beside the point," Miss Thomas said flatly. "I'll say it again: Prince's alternate egos had to emerge. I think that's the key. If an ego can't communicate and won't emerge unless you drag it out by the scruff of the neck, I don't think it deserves to be called an ego." "You can say that and yet you've seen Ans -- the alternate?" "Anson. Hildy Jarrell told me about the christening. Yes, I can say that." He looked at her levelly and she dropped her eyes. He remembered again their encounter in the corridor in front of Newell's door. Don't blame Hildy Jarrell -- that's exactly what I did myself. "Miss Thomas, why are you trying to herd me away from this case?" "Doctor!" He closed his eyes and said, "You find a segment that you can't break. It's a particularly -- well, let's say that whatever it is, you like it." He paused and, exactly in time, said, "Don't interrupt me. You know very well that the rock bottom of my practice is that personality is inviolate. You know that if this is a genuine case of alternate ego, I wouldn't touch it -- I couldn't, because the man has only one body, and to normalize him, I'd have to destroy one ego or the other. "Now you knew perfectly well that I'd discover the alternate. So the first thing you do is call my attention to it, and the next thing you do is give me an argument about it, knowing I'd disagree with you, knowing that if there was any doubt in my mind, it would disappear in the argument." "Why on earth would I do a thing like that?" she challenged. "I told you -- so I'd get off the case -- reset the P.T. and discharge him." "Damn it," said Miss Thomas bitterly. knowing too much about a colleague's thought processes," he said into midair. "You can't manipulate somebody who understands you." "Which one of us do you mean?" she demanded. "I really don't know. Now are you going to tell me why you tried this, or shall I tell you?" "I'll tell you," said Miss Thomas. "You're tired. I don't want anything to happen to that Anson. As soon as I found him, I knew exactly what would happen if you went ahead with Newell's therapy. Anson would be the intruder. I don't care how -- how beautiful an intruder he might be, he could only show up as an aberration, something extraneous. You'd pack him down to pill size and bury him so deep in. a newmodel Newell that he'd never see daylight again. I don't know how much consciousness he has, but I do know I couldn't bear to have him buried alive. "And supposing you committed therapy on Anson alone, brought him up like a shiny young Billy Budd and buried that heel Newell -- if you'll pardon the unprofessional term, Doctor -- down inside him somewhere? You think Anson would be able to defend himself? You think he could take a lane in the big rat race? This world is no place for cherubim. "So there isn't a choice. I don't know what Anson shares with Newell and I never will. I do know that however Anson has existed so far, it hasn't spoiled him, and the only chance he has to go on being what he is is to be left alone." " Quod erat demonstrandum," said the doctor, spreading his hands. "Very good. Now you know why I've never treated alternate ego cases. And perhaps you also know how useless your little machination was." "I had to be sure, that's all. Well, I'm glad. I'm sorry." He smiled briefly. "I follow that." He watched her get up, her face softened by content and her admiration of him unconcealed. She bent an uncharacteristically warm gaze on him and moved toward the door. She looked back once on the way, and once there, she stopped and turned to face him. "Something's the matter." There were, he knew, other ways to handle this, but at the moment he had to hurt something. There were several ways to do the hurt, too, and he chose the worst one, saying nothing. Miss Thomas became Miss Thomas again, her eyes like oneway mirrors and her stance like a soldier. She looked out of herself at him and said, "You're going on with the therapy." He did not deny it. "Are you going to tell me which one gets it?" "Depends on what you mean by 'gets it,'" he said with grim jocularity. She treated the bad joke as it deserved to be treated and simply waited for it to go away. He said, "Both." S HE repeated the word in exactly his inflection, as though she could understand it better if it were as near as her own lips. Then she shook her head impatiently. "You can apply just so much therapy and then there's a choice to make." "There's this choice to make," he said, in a constricted tone that hurt his throat. "Newell lives in a society he isn't fit for. He's married to a woman he doesn't deserve. If it is in my power to make him more fit and more deserving, what is the ethical choice?" Miss Thomas moved close to the desk. "You implied that you'd turned down cases like this before. You sent them back into society, untreated." "Once they sent lepers back untreated," he snapped. "Therapy has to start somewhere, with someone." "Start it on rats first." I am, he said, fortunately to himself. He considered her remark further and decided not to answer it, knowing how deeply she must regret saying it. She said, "Hildy Jarrell will quit when she finds this out." "She will not quit," said the doctor immediately and positively. "And as for me -- " "Yes?" Their gazes locked like two steel rods placed tip to tip, pressing, pressing, knowing that some slight wavering, some side drift, must come and must make a break and a collision. But instead, she broke. She closed her eyes against tears and clasped her hands. "Please," she whispered, "do you have to go through with this? Why? Why?" Oh, God, he thought, I hate this. "I can't discuss it." That, he thought painfully, is altogether the truth. She said heavily, "I don't think you should." He knew it was her last word. "It is a psychological decision, Miss Thomas, and not a technological one." He knew it was unfair to fall back on rank and specialty when he no longer had an argument he could use. But this had to stop. She nodded. "Yes, Doctor." She went out, closing the door too quietly. He thought, What do you have to be to a person so you can run after someone crying, Come back! Come back! Don't hate me! I'm in trouble and I hurt! I T took Miss Jarrell about forty minutes to get to the office. The doctor had figured it at about thirty-five. He was quite ready for her. She knocked with one hand and turned the knob with the other and flew in like an angry bee. Her face was flushed and there was a little pale tension-line parenthesizing each nostril. "Doctor -- " "Ah, Miss Jarrell," he said with a huge joviality. "I was just about to call you. I need your help for a special project." "Well, I'm sorry about that," she began. Her eyes were wide and aflame, and the rims were slightly pink. He wished he could magic a few minims of azacyclonol into her bloodstream; she could use it. "I've come to -- " "The Newell case." "Yes, the Newell case. I don't think-" He had almost to shout this time. "And I think you're just the one for the job. I want that #cycle entity -- you know, Anson -- I want him educated." "Well, I think it's just -- what?" And as the angry syllable ricocheted around the office, she stared at him and asked timidly, "I beg your pardon?" "I'd like to relieve you of your other duties and put you with Anson full time. Would you like that?" "Would I like... what will I do?" "I want to communicate with him. He needs a vocabulary and he needs elementary instruction. He probably doesn't know how to hold a fork or blow his nose. I think you can do a good job of teaching him." "Well, I -- why, I'd love to!" "Good. Good," he said like a department-store Santa Claus. "Just a few details. I'll want every minute on sound film, from white noise to white noise, and I'll want to review the film every day. And, of course, I'd have to ask you not to discuss this with anyone, on or off the staff. It's a unique case and a new therapy, and a lot depends on it. On you." "Oh, you can depend on me, Doctor!" I TE nodded agreement. "We'll start tomorrow morning. I'll have the first word-lists and other instructions ready for you by then. Meanwhile, I've got some research to do. Contact the Medical Information Service in Washington and have them key in Prince, Morton, and Personality, Multiple, on their Big Brain. I want abstracts of everything that has been published in the last fifty years on the subject. No duplicates. An index. Better order microfilm and send it by telefax, AA priority." "Yes, Doctor," said Miss Jarrell eagerly. "Foreign publications too?" "Everything any researcher has done. And put a Confidential on the order as well as the delivery." "Really secret." "Really." He concealed the smile which struggled to show itself; in his mind, he had seen the brief image of a little girl hiding jelly-beans. "And get me the nurses' duty-list. I have some juggling to do." "Very well, Doctor. Is that all?" "All for now." She nearly skipped to the door. He saw a flash of white as she opened it; Miss Thomas was standing in the outer office. He could not have been more pleased if she had been there by his explicit orders, for Miss Jarrell said, as she went out, "And thank you, Doctor -- thank you very much." Chew on that, Thomas, he thought, feeling his own small vindictiveness and permitting himself to enjoy it for once. And: Why am I jumping on Thomas? Well, because I have to jump on somebody once in a while and she can take it. Why don't I tell her everything? She has a good head. Might have some really good ideas. Why not? Why not? he asked again into a joyless void. Because I could be wrong. I could be so wrong. That's why not. T HE research began, and the long night work. In addition to the vast amount of collateral reading -- there was much more material published on the subject of multiple personality than he had realized -- he had each day's film to analyze, notes to make, abstracts to prepare for computercoding, and then, after prolonged thought, the next day's lessons to outline. The rest of the clinic refused to stop and wait for this job to be done, and he had an additional weight of conscience as he concealed his impatience with everything else but the Newell case. He was so constituted that such a weight made him over-meticulous in the very things he wished to avoid, so that his ordinary work took more time rather than less. As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con. Winnowing through the material, he isolated two papers of extreme interest to him. One was a theory, one an interim report on a series of experiments which had never been completed due to the death of the researcher. The theory, advanced by one Weisbaden, was based on a search through just such material as this. Indeed, Weisbaden seemed to have been the only man besides himself who had ever asked the Medical Information Service for this complete package. From it, he had abstracted statistics, weighted them to suit his theory, and come up with the surprising opinion that multiple personality was a twinning phenomenon, and that if a method were found for diagnosing all such cases, a correspondence would be found between the incidence of multiple births and the incidence of multiple personalities. So many births per thousand are twins, so many per hundred thousand are triplets, and the odds with quads So, too, said Weisbaden, would be the statistical expectation for the multiple personality phenomenon, once such cases stopped being diagnosed as schizoids and other aberrates. Weisbaden had not been a medical man -- he was some sort of actuary -- but his inference was fascinating. How many twins and triplets walked the Earth in single bodies, without any organic indication that they were not single entities? How many were getting treatment for conditions they did not have; how many Siamese twins were being penalized because they would not walk like other quadrupeds; how many separate entities were being forced to spend their lives in lockstep? Some day, thought the doctor -- as so many doctors have thought before -- some day, when we can get closer to the genetic biologists, when psychology becomes a true science, when someone devises a cross-reference system between the disciplines which really works... and some day, when I have the time -- well, maybe I could test this ingenious guess. But it's only a guess, based on neither observation nor experiment. Intriguing, though -- if only it could be tested. The other paper was of practical value. A certain Julius Marx -- again not a medical man, but a design engineer with, apparently, hobbies -- had built an electro-encephalograph for two (would anyone ever write a popular song about that?) which graphed each of the patients through a series of stimuli, and at the same time drew a third graph, a resultant. determining brain-wave types, rather than individual specimens, and had done circuitry on machines which would handle up to eight people at once. In a footnote, with dry humor, he had qualified his paper for this particular category: "Perhaps one day the improbable theories of Dr. Prince might approach impossibility through the use of this device upon a case of multiple personality." Immediately on reading this, Anson and Newell, and when he had both before him, he wished fervently that Julius Marx had been there with him; he suspected that the man enjoyed a good laugh, even on himself. The graphs were as different as such graphs can possibly be. The confirmation of his diagnosis was spectacular, and he left a note for Miss Jarrell to track down every multiple personality case he had rejected for the past eight years and see what could be done about some further tests. What would come after the tests, he did not know -- yet. The other valuable nudge he got from the Marx paper was the idea of a resultant between two dissimilar electro-encephalograms. He made one from the Newellanything as Goldbergian as Marx's complicated device, but with a simple computer coupling. He kept it in his top desk drawer, and every few days he would draw it out and he would wonder... Therapy for Anson wasn't therapy. Back at the very beginning, Miss Thomas had said that his was a personality that wouldn't dismantle; she had been quite right. You can't get episodic material from an entity which has had no subjective awareness, no experience, which has no name, no sense of identity, no motility, no recall. There were many parts to that strange radiance of Anson's and they were all in the eye of the beholder, who protected Anson because he was defenseless, who was continually amazed at his unselfconsciousness as if it were an attribute rather than a lack. His discovery of the details of self and surroundings was a never-ending delight to watch, because he himself was delighted and had never known the cruel penalties we impose on expressed delight, nor the masking idioms we use instead: Not a bad sunset there. Yeah. Real nice. "He's good," Miss Jarrell said to the doctor once. "He's only good -- nothing else." Therapy for Newell was, however, therapy, and not rewarding. The properly dismantled and segmented patient is relatively simple to handle. Key in anger (# cycles) and demand "How old are you?" Since anger does not exist unsupported, an episode must emerge; the anger has an object, which existed at a time and place; and there's your episode. "I'm six," says your patient. Key in the "You are six years ojd" note for reinforcement and you're all ready for significant recall. Or start with the age index: "You are twelve years old." When that is established, demand, "How do you feel?" and if there is significant material in the twelfth year, it will emerge. If it is fear, add the "fear" note and ask "Where are you?" and you'll have the whole story. B UT not in Newell's case. There was, of course, plenty of conflict material, but somehow the conflicts seemed secondary; they were effects rather than causes. By far the largest category of traumas is the unjustified attack -- a severe beating, a disease, a rejection. It is traumatic because, from the patient's point of view, it is unjustified. In Newell's case, there was plenty of suffering, plenty of defeat; yet in every single episode, he had earned it. So he was without guilt. His inner conviction was that his every cruelty was justified. The doctor had an increasing sense that Newell had lived all his life in a books-balanced, debtspaid condition. His episodes had no continuity, one to the other. It was as if each episode occurred at right angles to the line of his existence; once encountered, it was past, like a mathematical point. The episodes were easy to locate, impossible to relate to one another and to the final product The doctor tried hard to treat Anson and Newell in his mind as discrete, totally unconnected individuals, but Miss Jarrell's sentimental remark kept echoing in his mind: "He's good; he's only good -- nothing else," and generating an obverse to apply to Newell: He's evil, he's only evil -- nothing else. This infuriated him. How nice, how very nice, he told himself sarcastically, the spirits of good and evil to be joined together to make a whole man, and how tidily everything fits; black is totally black and white is white, and together the twain shall make gray. He found himself telling himself that it wasn't as simple as that, and things did not work out according to moral evaluations which were more arbitrary even than his assigned audio. It was about this time that he began to doubt the rightness of his decision, the worth of his therapy, the possibility of the results he wanted, and himself. And he had no one to advise him. He told that to Miss Thomas. It was easy to do and it surprised both of them. He had called her in to arrange a daily case and explain about the resultant, which he also wanted daily. She said yes, Doctor, and very well, Doctor, and right away, Doctor, and a number of other absolutely correct things. But she didn't say why, Doctor? or that's good, Doctor, and suddenly he couldn't stand it. He said, "Miss Thomas, we've got to bury the hatchet right now. I could be wrong about this case, and if I am, it's going to be bad. Worse than bad. That's not what bothers me," he added quickly, afraid she might interrupt, knowing that this must spill over or never emerge again. "I've been through bad things before and I can handle that part of it." Then it came out, simple and astonishing to them both: "But I'm all alone with it, Tommie." H E had never called her that before, not even to himself, and he was overwhelmed with wonderment at where it might have come from. Miss Thomas said, "No, you're not," gruffly. "Well, hell," said the doctor, and then got all his control back. He dropped a film cartridge into the viewer and brought out his notes. Using them as index, he sat with his hand on the control, spinining past the more pedestrian material and showing her the highlights. He presented no interpretations while she watched and listened. She heard Newell snarling, "You better watch what you're doing," and Anson pointing about the room, singing, "Floor, flower, book, bed, bubble. Window, wheel, wiggle, wonderful." (He had not known at that stage what a wonderful was, but Miss Jarrell said it almost every hour on the hour.) She saw Newell in recall, aged eleven, face contorted, raging at his fifth-grade teacher, "I'll bomb ya, y'ole bitch!" and at thirteen, coolly pleased at something best unmentioned concerning a kitten and a centrifuge. She saw Anson standing in the middle of the room, left elbow in right hand, left thumb pressed to the point of his chin, a stance affected by the doctor when in perplexity: "When I know everything there is to know," Anson had said soberly, "there'll be two Doctor Freds." At this, Miss Thomas grunted and said, "You wouldn't want a higher compliment than that from anybody, anytime." The doctor shushed her, but kindly. The first time he had seen that sequence, it made his eyes sting. It still did. He said nothing. She saw it all, right up to yesterday's viewing, with Newell in a thousand pieces from what appeared to be a separate jigsaw puzzle for each piece, and Anson a bright wonder, learning to read now, marveling at everything because everything was new -- teaspoons and music and mountains, the Solar System and sandwiches and the smell of vanilla. And as he watched, doors opened in the doctor's mind. They did not open wide, but enough for him to know that they were there and in which walls. How to describe the indescribable feeling of expertness? It is said that a good truckdriver has nerve-endings which extend to the bumper and tail light, tire tread to overhead. The virtuoso pianist does not will each separate spread and crook of each finger; he wills the notes and they appear. The doctor had steered this course of impossible choices by and again he felt it, the urge that this way is right now and there is the thing to do next. The miracle to him was not the feeling, but that it had come back to him while he watched the films and heard the tapes with Miss Thomas, who had said nothing, given no evaluation or advice. They were the same films he had studied, run in the same sequence. The difference was only in not being alone any more. "Where are you going?" Miss Thomas asked him. From the coat closet, he said, "File that material and lock it up, will you, Miss Thomas? I'll call you as soon as I return." He went to the door and smiled back at her. It hurt his face. "Thanks." Miss Thomas opened her mouth to speak, but did not. She raised her right hand in a sort of salute and turned around to put the files away. HP HE doctor called from a booth near the Newell apartment "Did I wake you, Osa? I'm sorry. Sometimes I don't know how late it gets." "Who... Fred? Is that you, Fred?" "Are you up to some painful conversation?" Alarmed, she cried, "Is something the matter? Is Dick -- " He mentally kicked himself for his clumsiness. What other interpretation could she have put on such a remark? "He's okay. I'm sorry. I guess Tm not good at the light banter... Can I see you?" She paused for a long moment. He could hear her breathing. "I'll come out. Where are you?" He told her. She said, "There's a cafe just around the comer, to your left. Give me ten minutes." He put up the phone and went to the comer. It was on a dingy street which seemed to be in hiding. On the street, the cafe hid. Inside the cafe, booths hid. In one of the booths, the doctor sat and was hidden. It was all he could do to keep himself from assuming a fetal posture. A waiter came. He ordered Collinses, made with light rum. He slumped then, with his forearms on the table and his chin on them, and watched bubbles rise in the drinks and collect on the underside of the shaved ice, until the glasses frosted too much for him to see. Then he closed his eyes and attempted to suspend thought, but he heard her footsteps and sprang up. "Here I am," he said in a seallike bark far louder than he had intended. She sat opposite him. "Rum collins," she said, and only then did he remember that it had always been the drink they shared, when they had shared things. He demanded of himself, Now why did I have to do that? and answered, You know perfectly well why. "Is he really all right?" she asked him. "Yes, Osa. So far." "I'm sorry." She turned her glass around, but did not lift it. "I mean maybe you don't want to talk about Dick." "You're very thoughtful," he said, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to see her just for himself. "But you're wrong. I did want you to talk about him." "Well... if you like, Fred. What, especially?" He laughed. "I don't know. Isn't that silly?" He sipped his drink. He was aware that she did the same. They never used to say "cheers" or "skoal" or anything else, but they always took that first sip together. He said, "I need something that segmentation or hypnosis or narcosynthesis just won't give me. I need to flesh out a skeleton. No, it's more refined than that. I need tints for a charcoal portrait." He lifted his hands and put them down again. "I don't know what I need. I'll tell you when I get it." "Well, of course I'll help if I can," she said uncertainly. "All right. Just talk, then. Try to forget who I am." H E met her eyes and the question there, and elaborated, "Forget I'm his therapist, Osa. I'm an interested stranger who has never seen him, and you're telling me about him." "Engineering degree, and where he comes from, and how many sisters?" "No," he said, "but keep that up. You're bound to stumble across what I want that way." "Well, he's... he's been sick. I think I'd tell a stranger that." "Good! What do you mean, sick?" She glanced quickly at him and he could follow the thought behind it: Why don't you tell me how sick he is? And then, But you really want to play this game of the interested stranger. All right. She stopped looking at him and said, "Sick. He can't be steered by anything but his own -- pressures and they -- they aren't the pressures he should have. Not for this world." "Why do you suppose that is?" "He just doesn't seem to care. No," she denied forcefully, "I don't mean that, not at all. It's more like -- I think he would care if he -- if he was allowed to, and he isn't allowed to." She got his eyes again. "This is very hard to do, Fred." "I know and I'm sorry. But do go on; you're doing fine. What do you mean, he isn't allowed to care about the world and the way it wags? Who won't allow him?" "It isn't a who; it's a -- I don't know. You'd have a term for it. I'd call it a monster on his back, something that drives him to do things, be something he really isn't." "We strangers don't have any terms for anything," he reminded her gently. "That's a little refreshing," she said with a wan half-smile. "I like... mystified... people. They make me feel like one of the crowd. You know who's lucky?" she asked, her voice suddenly wild and strained and, by its tone, changing the subject. "Psychotics are lucky. The nuts, the real buggy ones. (I talk like this to layman strangers.) The ones who see butterflies all the time, the ones who think the President is after them." "Lucky!" he exploded. "Y es, lucky. They have a name for the beast that's chewing on them. Sometimes they can see it themselves." "I don't quite "I mean this," she said excitedly. "If I see grizzly bears under every lamp post, I'm seeing something. It has a name, a shape; I could draw a picture of it. If I do something irrational, the way some psychos do -- run a nonexistent railroad or shoot invisible pheasant with an invisible gun, I'm doing something. I can describe it and say how it feels and write letters about it. See, these are all things plaguing the insane. Labels, handles. Things that you can hold up to reality to demonstrate that they don't coincide with it." "And that's lucky?" S HE nodded miserably. "A mere neurotic -- Dick, for example -- hasn't a thing he can name. He acts in ways we call irrational, and has a sense of values nobody can understand, and does things in a way that seems consistent to him but not to anyone else. It's as if there were a grizzly bear, after all, but we'd never heard of grizzly bears -- what they are, what they want, how they act. He's driven by some monster without a name, something that no one can see and that even he is not aware of. That's what I mean." "Ah." They sat for minutes, silent and careful. Then, "Osa-" "Yes, Fred." "Why do you love him?" She looked at him. "You really meant it when you said this would be a painful conversation." "Never mind that. Just tell me." "I don't think it's a thing you can tell." "Then try this: What is it you love in him?" She made a helpless gesture. "Him." He sat without responding until he knew she felt his dissatisfaction with the answer. She frowned and then closed her eyes. "I couldn't make you understand, Fred. To understand, you'd have to be two things: a woman, and -- Osa." Still he sat silent. Twice she looked up to his face and away, and at last yielded. She said in a low voice, "It's a... tenderness you wouldn't believe, no matter how well you know him. It's a gentle, loving something that no one ever born ever had before and never will again. It's... I hate this, Fred!" "Go on, for heaven's sake! This is exactly what I'm looking for." "It is? Well, then... But I hate talking like this to you. It doesn't seem right." "Go on" She said, almost in a whisper, "Life is plain hell sometimes. He's gone and I don't know where, and he comes back and it's just awful. Sometimes he acts as if he were alone in the place -- he doesn't see me, doesn't answer. Or maybe he'll be the other way, after me every second, teasing and prodding and twisting every word until I don't know what I said or what I should say next, or who I am, or... anything, and he won't leave me alone, not to eat or to sleep or to go out. And then he -- " She stopped and the doctor waited, and this time realized that waiting would not be enough. "Don't stop," he said. She shook her head. "Please. It's impor -- " "I would, Fred," she burst out frantically. "I'm not refusing to. I can't, that's all. The words won't -- " "Don't try to tell me what it is, then," he suggested. "Just say what happens and how it makes you feel. You can do that." "I suppose so," she said, after considering it. 'kSA took a deep breath, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes again. "It will be hell," she said, "and then I'll look at him and he... and he... well, it's there, that's all. Not a word, not a sign sometimes, but the room is full of it. It's... it's something to love, yes, it's that, but nobody can just love something, one-way, forever. So it's a loving thing, too, from him to me. It suddenly arrives and everything else he is doing, the cruelty, the ignoring, whatever might be happening just then, it all stops and there's nothing else but the -- whatever it is." She wet her lips. "It can happen any time; there's never a sign or a warning. It can happen now, and again a minute from now, or not for months. It can last most of a day or flash by like a bird. Sometimes he goes on talking to me while it happens; sometimes what he actually says is just nothing, small-talk. Sometimes he just stands looking at me, without saying anything. Sometimes he -- I'm sorry, Fred -- he makes love to me then and that's... Oh, dear God, that's..." "Here's my handkerchief." "Thank you. He -- does that other times, too, when there's nothing loving about it. This -- this thing-to-love, it -- it seems to have nothing to do with anything else, no pattern. It happens and it's what I wait for and what I look back on; it's all I have and all I want." When he was quite sure she had no more to say, he hazarded, "It's as if some other -- some other personality suddenly took over." He was quite unprepared for her reaction. She literally shouted, "No!" and was startled herself. She recoiled and glanced guiltily around the cafe. "I don't know why," she said, sounding frightened, "but that was just -- just awful, what you said. Fred, if you can give any slightest credence to the idea of feminine intuition, you'll get that idea right out of your head. I couldn't begin to tell you why, but it just isn't so. What loves me that way may be part of Dick, but it's Dick, not anybody or anything else. I know that's so, that's all. I know it." Her gaze was so intense that it all but made him wince. He could see her trying and trying to find words, rejecting and trying again. At last, "The only way I can say it that makes any sense to me is that Dick could be such a -- a louse so much of the time and still walk a straight line without something just as extreme in the other direction. It's -- it's a great pity for the rest of the world that he only shows that side to me, but there it is." "Does he show it only to you?" He touched her hand and released it. "I'm sorry, but I must ask that." She smiled and a kind of pride shone from her face. "Only to me. I suppose that's intuition again, but it's as certain as Sunday." The pride disappeared and was replaced by a patient agony. "I don't delude myself, Fred -- he has other women; plenty of them. But that particular something is for me. It isn't something I wonder about. I just -- know." He sat back wearily. S HE asked, "Is all this what you wanted?" He gave her a quick, hurt glance and saw, to his horror, her "It's what I asked for," he said in a flat voice. "I see the difference." She used his handkerchief. "May I have this?" "You can have -- " But he stopped himself. "Sure." He got up. "No," he said, and took the damp handkerchief out of her hand. "I'll have something better for you." "Fred," she said, distressed, it J  "I'm going, forgive me and all that," he said, far more angrily than he had thought he would. But polite talk and farewells were much more than he could stand. "The layman stranger has to have a long interview with a professional acquaintance. I don't think I'd better see you again, Osa." "All right, Fred," she said to his back. He had hurt her, he knew, but he knew also that his stature in her cosmos could overshadow the hurt and a hundred more like it. He luxuriated in the privilege and stamped out, throwing a bill to the waiter on the way. He drove back and plodded up the ramp to the clinic. For some obscure reason, the inscription over the door caught his attention. He had passed it hundreds of times without a glance; he had ordered it put there and he was satisfied with it, and why should it matter now? But it did. What was it that Newell had said about it? Some saw about the sanctity of personality. A very perceptive remark, thought the doctor, considering that Newell hadn't read it: It was from Robert Lindner and was the doctor's answer to the inevitable charges of "pushbutton therapy." But he wondered .now if the word "Man" was really inclusive enough. He shook off the conjecture and let himself into the building. Light gleamed from the translucent door of his office at the far end of the corridor. He walked down the slick flooring toward it, listening to his heels and not thinking otherwise, his mind as purposively relaxed as a fighter's body between rounds. He opened the door. "What are you doing?" "Waiting," said Miss Thomas. "Why?" "Just in case." to the closet and hung up his coat. Back at his desk, he sat down and straightened his tired spine until it crackled. Then he looked at Miss Thomas in the big chair. She put her feet under her and he understood that she was ready to leave if he wished her to. He said, "Hypothesis: Newell and Anson are discrete personalities." While he spoke, he noticed Miss Thomas's feet move outward a little and then cross at the ankles. His inner thought was, Of all the things I like about this woman, the best is the amount of conversation I have with her without talking. "And we have plenty of data to back that up," he continued. "The Anson and Newell is Newell, and to prove it, we've crystallized them for anyone to see. We've done such a job on them that we know exactly what Anson is like without Newell. 'We've built him up that way, with that in mind. We haven't done quite the same with Newell, but we might as well have. I mean we've investigated Newell as if Anson did not exist within him. What it amounts to is this: In order to demonstrate a specimen of multiple personality, we've separated and isolated the components. "Then we go into a flat spin because neither segment looks like a real human being... Miss Thomas?" "Yes?" "Do you mind the way I keep on saying 'we'?" She smiled and shook her head. "Not at the moment" "Further," he said, answering her smile but relentlessly pursuing his summation, "we've taken our two personalities and treated each like a potentially salvable patient -- one neurotic, one retarded. We've operated under the assumption that each contained his own disorder and could be treated by separate therapies." "We've been wrong?" "# certainly have," said the doctor. He slapped the file cabinet at his left. "In here, there's a very interesting paper by one Weisbaden, who theorizes that multiple personalities are actually twins, identical twins bom of the same egg-cell and developing within one body. One step, as it were, into the microcosm from foetus in foetu." "I've read about that," said Miss Thomas. "One twin bom enclosed in the body of another." "But not just partly -- altogether enclosed. Whether or not Weisbaden's right, it's worth using as a test hypothesis. That's what I've been doing, among other things, and I've had my nose stuck so far into it that I wasn't able to see a very important corresponding part of the analogy: namely, that twinning itself is an anomaly, and any deviation in a sibling of multiple origin is teratological." "My," said Miss Thomas in mock admiration. T HE doctor smiled. "I should have said 'monstrous,' but why drag in superstitions? This thing is bad enough already. Anyway, if we're to carry our twinning idea as an analogy, we have got to include the very likely possibility that our multiple personalities are as abnormal as Siamese twins or any other monstrosity -- I hate to use that word!" "I'm not horrified," said Miss Thomas. "Abnormal in what way?" "Well, in the crudest possible terms, what would you say was the abnormality suffered by one Siamese twin?" "The other Siamese twin." "Mmm. And by the same analogy, what's the name of Newell's disorder?" "My goodness!" gasped Miss Thomas. "We better not tell Hildy Jarrell." "That isn't the only thing we'll have to keep from her -- for a while, at least," said the doctor. "Listen: did you run my notes on Newell?" "All of them." "You remember the remark she made that bothered me, about Anson's being only and altogether good, and the trouble I had with the implication that Newell was only and altogether bad?" "I remember it." "It's a piece of childishness that annoys me wherever I find it and I was damned annoyed to be thinking at all along those lines. The one reason for its being in the notes at all is that I had to decant it somewhere. Well, I've been euchred, Miss Thomas. Because Anson appeared in our midst shining and unsullied, I've leaned over backward trying to keep away from him the corruptions of anger, fear, greed, concupiscence and all the other hobbies of real mankind. By the same token, it never occurred to me to analyze what kindness, generosity, sympathy or empathy might be lurking in Newell. Why bother in such a -- what was the term you used?" "Heel," said Miss Thomas without hesitation. "Heel. So what we have to do first is to give each of these -- uh -- people the privilege of entirety. If they are monsters, then let us at least permit them to be whole monsters." "You don't mean you'll -- " "We," he corrected, smiling. She said, through her answering smile, "You don't mean we'll take poor Anson and -- " He nodded. "Offhand, I don't see how you're going to do it, Doctor. Anson has no fear. He'd laugh as he walked into a lion's cage or a high-tension line. And I can't imagine how you'd make him angry. You of all people. He -- he loves you. As for... oh, dear. This is awful." "Extremes are awful," he agreed. "We'll have to get pretty basic, but we can do it. Hence, I suggest Miss Jarrell be sent to Kalamazoo for a new stove or some such." "And then what?" "It is standard practice to acquaint a patient with the name and nature of his disorder. In our field, we don't tell him, we show him, and when he absorbs the information, we call it an insight. Anson, meet Newell. Newell, meet Anson." "I do hope they'll be friends," said Miss Thomas unhappily. TN a darkness within a darkness in the dark, Anson slept his new kind of sleep, wherein he now had dreams. And then there was his own music, the deep sound which lit the darkness and pierced the dark envelopes, one within the other; and now he could emerge to the light and laughter and the heady mysteries of life and communication with Miss Hildy and Doctor Fred, and the wonder on wonder of perception. Gladly he flung himself back to life to -- But this wasn't the same. He was here, in the bed, but it wasn't the same at all. There was no rim of light around the ceiling, no bars of gold pouring in a sunlit window; this was the same, but not the same -- it was dark. He blinked his eyes so hard, he made little colored lights, but they were inside his eyes and did not count. unbearable noise in the form of a cymbal-crash right by his head in the dark. He recoiled from it and tried to bounce up and run, and found he could not move. His arms were bound to his sides, his legs to the bed, by some wide formless something which held him trapped. He fought against it, crying, and then the bed dropped away underneath him and stopped with a crash, and rose and dropped again. There was another noise -- not a noise, though it struck at him like one: this was a photo-flash, though he could not know it. Blinded and sick, he lay in terror, waiting for terror again. He heard a voice say softly, "Turn down the gain," and his music, his note, the pervasive background to all his consciousness, began to weaken. He strained toward it and it receded from him. Thumpings and shufflings from somewhere in the dark threatened to hide it away from him altogether. He felt, without words, that the note was his life and that he was losing it. For the first time in his conscious life, he became consciously afraid of dying. He screamed, and screamed again, and then there was a blackness blacker than the dark and it all ceased. "He's fainted. Lights, please. Turn off that note. Give him # and we'll see if he can sleep normally. God, I hope we didn't go too far." They stood watching the patient. They were panting with tension. "Help me with this," said the doctor. Together, he and Miss Thomas unbuckled the restraining sheet. They cleared away the flash-gun, the cymbals, and readjusted the bed-raising control to its normal slow operation. "He's all right, physically anyway," said the doctor after a swift examination. "I told you it would work if we got basic enough. He wouldn't fear a lion because he doesn't know what a lion is. But restraint and sudden noise and falling -- he doesn't have to know what they are. Okay, button him up again." "What? You're not going to -- " "Come on, button him up," he said brusquely. She frowned, but she helped him replace the restraining sheet. "I still think -- " she began, and earned a "Sh!" H E set up the #-cycle note again at its usual amplitude and they waited. There was a lag in apparent consciousness this time. The doctor realized that the patient was awake, but apparently afraid to open his eyes. "Anson..." Anson began to cry weakly. "What's the matter, Anson?" "D-doctor Fred, Doctor Fred... the big noise, and then I couldn't move and all the black and white smash lights." He wept again. The doctor said nothing. He simply waited. Anson's sobs stopped abruptly and he tried to move. He gasped loudly and tried again. "Doctor Fred!" he cried in panic. Still the doctor said nothing. Anson rolled his head wildly, fell back, tried again. "Make it so I can get up," Anson called piteously. "No," said the doctor flatly. "Make so I -- " "No." Piercingly, Anson shrieked. He surged upward so powerfully that for a second the doctor was afraid for the fastenings on the restraining sheet. But they held. For nearly ten minutes, Anson fought the sheet, screaming and drooling. Fright turned to fury, and fury to an intense, witless battle. It was a childish tantrum magnified by the strength and staying power of an adult. At about the second minute, the doctor keyed in a supplementary frequency, a shrill # cycles which had been blank on the index. Whenever Anson paused for breath, the doctor intoned, "You are angry. You are angry." Grimly he watched until, a matter of seconds before the patient had to break, he released him to sleep. "I couldn't stand another minute of that," said Miss Thomas. Her lips were almost gray. She moistened a towel and gently bathed the sleeping face. "I didn't like that at all." "You'll like the rest of it," promised the doctor. "Let's get rid of this sheet." They took it off and stored it. "How'd you like me to hit the ten-five cycles with that sheet off?" he asked. "Build him a cage first," she breathed in an awed tone. He grinned suddenly. "Hit eighty cycles for me, will you?"  ard Newell wakening. He groaned and moved his head gingerly. He sat up suddenly and yelped, and covered his face for a moment with both hands. "Hello, Newell. How do you feel?" "Fred! What've you been doing to me?" "How do you feel?" "Like the output of a garbage disposal unit. I haven't felt like this since the day I rowed a boat for fourteen hours." "It's all right, Newell. All in a day's work." "Work is right. I know -- you've had me out pulling a plow while I was hypnotized. Slave labor. Lowers the overhead. Damn it, Fred, I'm not going to take much more of this." "You'll take as much as I choose to give you," snapped the doctor. "This is my party now, Dicky-boy." Miss Thomas gasped. Newell slowly swung his legs out and sat looking at the doctor, an ominous and ugly half-smile on his face. "Miss Thomas," said the doctor, "ten-five, please." With his amusement deeply concealed, he watched Miss Thomas sidle to the controls and dial for the # supplementary note. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind. Tenfive was a fury motif, the command to Anson to relive the state of unbearable anger he had been in just moments ago. "Miss Thomas," said Newell silkily, "did I ever tell you the story of my life? Or, for that matter, the story of the doctor's life?" "Whyno, Mr. Newell." "Once upon a time," said Newell, "there was a doctor who... who..." As the shrill note added itself to the bumble of the #cycle tone, Newell's voice faltered. Behind him, the doctor heard the rustle of Miss Thomas's starch as she braced herself. Newell looked at the doctor with astonishment. "What the hell am I up to?" he murmured. "That isn't a funny story. 'Scuse me, Miss Thomas." He visibly relaxed, swung his feet back up on the bed and rested on one elbow. "I haven't felt like this since... Where's Osa?" he asked. "Home. Waiting for you." "God. Hope she doesn't have to wait much longer. Is she all right?" "She's fine. So are you, pretty near. I think we have the thing whipped. Like to hear about it?" " 'Talk about me,' " Newell quoted. "'Talk nice if you can, but talk about me.' " T HE doctor saw Miss Thomas staring incredulously at the controls, checking to be sure she had keyed the right note. He laughed. Newell laughed with him; it was one of the most pleasant of imaginable sounds. And it wasn't Anson's laugh, either -- not even remotely. This was Richard Newell to the life, but warm, responsive, considerate. The doctor said, "Did Osa ever tell you she thought you had a nameless monster pushing you around?" "Only a couple hundred times." "Well, you have. I'm not joking, Dick -- you really have. Only you've never suspected it and you don't have a name to call it by." "I don't get you." He was curious, anxious to learn, to like and be liked. It was in the way he spoke, moved, listened. Miss Thomas stood with her hand frozen near the controls, ready to shut him off at the first sign of expected violence. "You will. Now here's the picture." And in simple terms, the doctor told him the story of Anson, the theory of multiple personality as a phenomenon of twinning, and at last his theory of the acrobatic stabilization the two entities had achieved on their own. "Why acrobatic?" asked Newell. "You know you act like a heel most of the time, Dick." "You might say so." It was said quite without resentment. "Here's why. (Just listen, now; you can test it any way you like after you've heard it all.) Your alter ego (to coin a phrase) had been walled in, excluded from consciousness and expression and even self-awareness, ever since you were bom. I won't attempt to explain that; I don't know. Anyway, there it lay, isolated but alive, Dick, alive -- and just as strong as you!" "I... can't picture such a thing." "It isn't easy. I can't either, completely. It's like trying to get into the mind of another species, or a plant, if you can imagine such a thing. I do know, though, that the thing is alive, and up until recently had nothing -- no knowledge, no retained experience, no mode of expression at all." "How do you know it's there, then?" "It's there all right," said the doctor. "And right this very minute, it's blowing its top. You see, all your life it's lived with you. It has had a blind, constant urge to break through, and it never could make it until it popped up here and we drew it out. It's a fascinating entity, Dick. I won't go into that now; you'll know it -- him -- thoroughly before you leave. But believe it or not, it's pretty nice. More than nice: it's positively angelic. It's lain there in the dark all these years like a germinated seed, pushing up toward the light. And every time it came near -- you batted it down again." "I did?" "For good sound survival reasons, you did. But like a lot of survival impulses, yours was pretty irrational. A lion roars, a deer runs. Good survival. But if he runs over a cliff? What I'm getting at is that there's room for both of you in Richard Anson Newell. You've coexisted fairly well, considering, as strangers and sometime enemies. You're going to do a lot better as friends and partners. Brothers, if you want the true term, because that's just what the two of you are." "How does this -- if true -- explain the way I've been mucking around with my life?" doctor paused. "You might say you've been cantilevered out from a common center. Way out. Now your alter -- we call him Anson -- is, as I've said, a very nice fellow. His blind stragglings have been almost all toward something -- call it an aura, if you like -- in people around you. The pressures are everything that's warm and lovable and good to be with. "But you -- man, you felt invaded! You could never reach out toward anything; Anson was there ahead of you, pressing and groping. You had to react, immediately and with all your might, in the opposite direction. Isn't it true that all your life you've rejected and tramped on anything that attracted you -- and at the same time you've taken only things you couldn't really care about?" "Well, I..." "Just hold onto the idea. This speech I'm making is for your intellectual understanding; I don't expect you to buy it first crack out of the barrel." "But I haven't always... I mean what about Osa? Are you telling me I didn't really want Osa?" "That's the cantilever effect, Dick. Anson never felt about Osa the way you did. I think she must have some confining effect on him; he doesn't like to be confined, does he. Miss Thomas?" He chuckled. "She either leaves him cold or makes him angry. So angry that it's beyond belief. But it's an infant's anger, Dick -- blind and furious and extreme. And what happens then, when you react in the opposite direction?" "Oh, my God," breathed Newell. "Osa..." He turned his suddenly illuminated gaze up. "You know, sometimes I -- we -- it's like a big light that..." "I know, I know," said the doctor testily. "Matter of fact, that's happening right now. Turn off the ten-five, please, Miss Thomas." "Yes, Doctor." "That high note," the doctor explained. "It's for Anson -- induced anger. You're being pretty decent at the moment, Newell. You realize that?" "Well, why wouldn't I? You've done a lot for me." The note faded. Newell closed his eyes and opened them again. There was a long, tense silence. Finally Newell said in his most softly insulting tone, "You spin a pretty tale, Freddy-boy. But I'm tired of listening. Shall I blackmail you the hell out of here?" "Five-fifty, Miss Thomas." "Yes, Doctor." She turned Newell off. Thomas jittered in indecision. She tried to speak and then looked at the doctor with mute pleading. "Go ahead," he encouraged. She shook her head. "I don't know what comes next. Morton Prince was wrong; there are no multiple egos, just multiple siblings sharing the same body, the same brain." She halted, waiting for him to take it from there. "Well?" he said. "I know you're not going to sacrifice one for the other; that's why you never handled these cases before. But -- " she flapped her hands helplessly -- "even if Newell could carry the equipment around, I'd never sleep nights, thinking that Anson had to go through the agony of that ten-five note just so Newell would be a decent human being. Or even, for that matter, vice versa." "It wouldn't be either humane or practical," he said. "Well?" "Do they take turns being dominant, one day on, one day off?" "That still would be sacrificing each half the time." "Then what? You said it would be 'Newell, meet Anson. Anson, meet Newell.' But you don't have the same problem you'd have with Siamese twins or the same solution." "Which is?" "Separating them without killing either one. All these two have is a single brain to share and a single body. If you could cut them free" "I can't," he said bluntly. "I don't intend to." "All right," she conceded in defeat. "You're the doctor. You tell  M me. "Just what you said -- the Morton Prince cases were in communication." "And Newell and Anson are, just because we gave Anson a vocabulary? What about that cantilever effect you explained to Newell? You can't let them go through life counterbalancing each other -- Newell pulling violently to the other side of Anson's reactions, Anson doing the same with Newell's. Then what?" she repeated almost angrily. "If you know, why put me through this guessing game?" "To see if you'd come up with the same answer," he said candidly. "A check on my judgment. Do you mind?" She shook her head again, but this time with a little complimentary smile. "It's a painful way to get cooperation, only it works, damn you." She frowned then, considering. "The two of them are compartmented. Are they different in that way from the other multiples?" "Some, yes -- the ones that are detected because there is communication. But not the others. And those cases rate treatment (because all people in difficulty do) and Newell-Anson, if we work it out properly, will show us how to help them. There's an obvious answer, Miss Thomas. I'm hoping -- almost desperately -- that you come up with the one I thought of." S HE made a self-impatient gesture. " Not the psychostat. Definitely not eliminating one or the other. Not making them take turns." She looked up with a questioning awe on her face. "The opposite of treating Siamese twins?" "Like what?" he asked urgently, leaning forward. so "Don't separate them. Join them. Make a juncture." "Keep going," he pressed. "Don't stop now." "Surgical?" "Can't be done. It isn't one lobe for Newell, the other for Anson, or anything that simple. What else?" She thought deeply, began several times to say something, dismissed each intended suggestion with a curt head-shake. He waited with equally deep intensity. She nodded at last. "Modulate them separately." She was no longer asking. "Then modulate them in relation to each other so they won't be in that awful cantilever balancing act." "Say it!" he nearly yelled. "But that isn't enough." "No!" "Audio response." "Why?" he rapped out. "And which?" "Sixty cycles -- the AC tone they'll be hearing almost all the time. Assign it to communication between them." The doctor slumped into a chair, drained of tension. He nodded at her, with the tiredest grin she had ever seen. "All of it," he whispered. "You got everything I thought of... including the # cycles. I knew I was right. Now I know it. Or doesn't that make sense?" "Of course it does." "Then let's get started." "Now?" she asked, astonished. "You're too tired -- " "Am I?" He jacked himself out of the chair. "Try stopping me and see." tants, made two analogs and another, and used all three as the optimum standard for the final fixing process in the psychostat. It was a longer, more meticulous process than it had ever been and it worked; and what shook the doctor's hand that last day was an unbelievable blend -- all of Newell's smoothness and a new strength, the sum of powers he had previously exhausted in the dual struggle that neither had known of; and, with it, Anson's bright fascination with the very act of drawing breath, seeing colors, finding wonderment in everything. "We're nice guys," said Richard Anson Newell, still shaking the doctor's hand. "We'll get along great." "I don't doubt it a bit," the doctor said. "Give my best to Osa. Tell her... here's something a little better than a wet handkerchief." "Whatever you say," said Richard Anson Newell. He waved to Miss Thomas, who watched from the corridor, and behind her, Hildy Jarrell, who wept, and he went down the steps to the street. "We're making a mistake, Doctor," said Miss Thomas, "letting him -- them -- go." "Why?" he asked, curious. "All that brain power packed in one skull..." The doctor wanted to laugh. He didn't. "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed. "Meaning it's not so at all," she said suspiciously. "Why not?" "Because it isn't twice the amount of brains any individual has. It's only as much as any two distinct individuals have. Like you and me, for instance. Mostly we supplement each other -- but just here and there, not everywhere, adding up to a giant double brain. Same with Newell and Anson. And any two people can be counted on to jam one another occasionally. So will they -- but not like before treatment." They watched until Richard Anson Newell was out of sight, then went back to check the multiple personality cases that Miss Jarrell had dug out of the files. got a letter: Dear Fred, I'll write this because it will do me good to get it off my chest. If it doesn't do enough good, I'll send it. If that doesn't help, I don't know what I'll do. Yes, I do. Nothing. Dick is... incredible. He takes care of me, Fred, in ways I'd never dreamed of or hoped for. He cares. That's it, he cares -- about me, about his work. He learns new things all the time and loves old things over again. It's... could I say miracle? But, Fred -- this is hateful of me, I know -- the thing I told you about, the thing I used to wish for and live to remember, no matter what... it's gone. That's probably good, because of what happened between times. But sometimes I'd trade my perfect husband for that louse and a wet handkerchief, if l could have the other thing along with it somehow. There, I've said it. Osa The doctor galloped through the clinic until he found his head technician in the electrical lab. "Tommie," he said jovially, "did you ever go out and get drunk with a doctor?" The tears were streaming down his face. Miss Thomas went out and got drunk with the doctor. Beginning in the October Issuel author of the award-winning In his first and only science fiction novel since the famed The Demolished Man, Bester actually intensifies the creative magic that made that novel so fabulously successful -- first as a Galaxy serial, then a hardcover book and a paperbound reprint, winning all awards in the field the year it appeared, and now has been bought as a film by Jos# Ferrer! Magnificent as that novel was, Alfred Bester's new serial is even richer and more exciting in ideas, action and background, filled with unforgettable scenes and characters in an astonishingly real -- and really astonishing -- future world! Don't miss it! Reserve a copy at you r newsstand... or subscribe now and tell us to start with the October issue! Send # to... #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Read it and you'll see for yourself! Only #c a copy at your favorite newsstand... or # a year. (Add I per year on foreign subscriptions to) Write to... #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. Nothing but the best If he took the high road -- and also the low road -- he'd be in the same place afore himself! on top of Hobson's Hill and stared at the town below, as though trying to imprint a permanent impression of the view on his memory. He paid particular attention to a wood-and-corrugated-iron construction at the bottom of the hill by the railroad tracks, which Well concealed in the bushes behind him and humming mutely were four black metal boxes forming a small square. Antennae sprouted from each box, curving inward to form an arch in which the light seemed to vibrate and shimmer. Charles Mead made an adjustment on one of the boxes and then stepped quickly into the shimmering arch. Darkness smothered him immediately. There was a sudden terrifying sensation of weightlessness, of falling. He kept pushing and pushing, although there seemed to be nothing to push against except swirling, spinning blackness. Then, suddenly, he was standing on another Hobson's Hill. The four black boxes had gone, but the blurred arch of light was still there. He fell to his knees, clutching in terror at the grass, trembling and breathless: the switch from one world to another was always unnerving. Immediately between worlds, the sensation of being in no world, of stepping into a bottomless abyss, always left him ragged with panic. He had not made the trip many times before, but he doubted if he would ever get used to it. r I "HE town looked substantially the same as the one he had just left, though he was pleased to note that Finlay's Lumber Co. was no longer in sight. It was proof that he had made the switch successfully. For some reason, Finlay never seemed to have established his business anywhere but in Charles Mead's world. There were similar changes in every world -- some large changes, some small -- but at least Hobson's Hill was always there, which was why he chose it as his jumping-off point. Charles Mead set off down the hill and along the highway into town. In a telephone booth, he searched the directory and then began walking again with a new eagerness in his step. Ten minutes later, he turned onto the front porch of a small, neat brick bungalow. He was about to press the bell button when he paused, listening. From inside the house, he heard voices yelling -- a man and a woman -- strident with anger. Charles Mead smiled faintly and rather smugly and put his finger to the button. The voices stopped yelling as the bell jangled somewhere in the house. A moment later, the front door opened and, at the same time, he heard a woman's high heels stamping through to the back of the house. Then a door slammed. The man in the doorway wore moccasins, jeans and a red plaid shirt. Except for the general sloppi ness of his dress compared with the unwrinkled neatness of Charles Mead's expensive gray slacks and sports jacket, the pair could have been twins. Both were slim and tall with the slightly stooped appearance of tall men. Their short, sandy hair and wide blue eyes gave them both a boyish look. "Chuck Mead?" Charles Mead asked. This one was sure to be called Chuck, he thought. The man nodded, frowning slightly. "Good," said Charles. "That's my name, too. May I come in?" He pushed his way past the bewildered Chuck Mead, went into the living room and sat down. prepared. It was the first time he had said it aloud to anyone and, as he talked, he became painfully aware of how foolish it sounded. He knew that Chuck Mead was smiling behind the hand he so casually cupped over his chin and mouth. In the tiny living room with its fading furnishings, its old mahogany piano and the new TV, its old wedding pictures on the newly redecorated walls, talk of other worlds than this was hopelessly out of place. "Look, I'm wasting my time trying to explain," Charles Mead said. "I want you to come with me. Don't ask questions. What I have to show you will save hours of explanation." "What are you going to show me?" Chuck asked. "Just come with me," Charles persisted. He knew it was only a matter of time. The bewildering similarity between them had definitely aroused the other's curiosity. He noticed that although Chuck Mead still smiled, it was an uneasy smile. "Okay," Chuck said. "Anything for a laugh. Where do we go?" "Hobson's Hill. I suppose you call it that in this world, too?" "That's what we call it," Chuck said, suppressing another grin. "In this world." "Let's go, then," Charles urged, relieved that the toughest part was over. "There's nothing to worry about -- you'll be completely safe." "Who's worrying?" challenged his counterpart pugnaciously. Mead, fighting and struggling all the way, into his own world and together they stood on Hobson's Hill, overlooking the town. "Scares me silly every time I make that crossing," Charles confessed breathlessly. Chuck's fingers still clutched his arm, digging painfully into the flesh as though he expected the ground to crumble away at any moment. "You're okay now," Charles reassured him. He pressed the switches on the square of black boxes and the humming noise ceased. The arch collapsed. "Just look around you and see if this isn't a different world. You'll notice we have a Finlay's Lumber Company here, which you don't have in your world. That's only one minor difference. Come on home with me and I'll give you all the proof you could want." Charles Mead's home was a spacious villa set well back from the road in pleasant handsomely kept grounds. They went inside and Charles led the way upstairs to the den, a bright, paneled room at the back of the house. "Nice place," Chuck said, awed. "I suppose it is," Charles agreed. "Sit down. We've got a lot to talk about." He poured drinks from a wellstocked cabinet and settled in an easy chair. "Now, then, I want to know if you're really convinced of this business of other worlds." "Sure," Chuck said, "unless you've got me doped or hypnotized or I'm dreaming or something. It all seems real enough." "It is real." Ice cubes clicked as Charles tilted his glass and drank. "Now let's get down to business. Just listen to what I have to say and don't interrupt. I want you to think for a moment about those times in your life when you've had to make a decision or choose between two alternative courses of action which would affect your whole life. Have you ever wondered, when you've made your choice, what would have happened if you had chosen the other alternative? For instance, if you arrived at a situation where two jobs were available and you chose one, wouldn't you sometimes wonder how things would have been if you had chosen the other job? "I think I can show you," he continued, "that when we reach such situations and finally select a course of action, we also take the other course at the same time. I'm going to try to prove to you that an alternative world somehow comes into existence in which you live your other life. As a matter of fact, you and I sprang from one of these decisive moments. I'm pretty sure I know which one, too." tests with a quick wave of his hand. "You really can't argue with me about it. You've seen two worlds already -- surely you don't think it ends there? After all, we live in an infinite universe; why shouldn't we be infinite creatures living out the infinite possibilities of our lives? Still, to return to you and me -- your wife's name is Kathy, isn't it?" "Yeah. Is yours?" "My wife is called Estelle. Does that mean anything to you?" Chuck put down his drink and straightened suddenly. "You mean Estelle Defoe?" "That's right. If you want to make sure we're talking about the same girl, go look out the window." Chuck stood up and leaned over the sill. Outside, surrounded by the close-trimmed green lawn, was a swimming pool. Beside the pool, a shapely blonde was stretched out face down on a red towel like some bright, beautiful calendar girl. She wore the bottom half of a green striped bikini; the top half lay on the grass beside her. "My God! That's Estelle, all right!" Chuck exclaimed. "I'd know her anywhere. Still got that terrific figure, too!" "I suppose she is hard to forget after -- how long? Just over seven years, isn't it? Isn't that how long you've been married?" "How did you know?" "Can't you guess? Remember, seven or eight years ago, how you tortured yourself choosing between two girls -- Estelle or Kathy? Remember how hard it was arriving at a decision?" "It wasn't too difficult. I chose Kathy." "I know," Charles said, smiling. "I was left with Estelle. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Don't you see: I am you and you are me! If there's any difference between us, it's only what the last seven years have done to us. It was one of those decisions I spoke of, when one of us followed one path, leaving the other to explore the other path." "That's crazy! I happen to know Estelle married a major in the Army years ago and went out West to live." "In your world, maybe," Charles said, "but the one in this world married me." of the window. "Lucky you." He made a gesture that took in the room, the girl, the magnificent house, the beautiful garden. "Did Estelle make you rich, too?" "Not the way you seem to be figuring. Her father gave me a job in his electronics business and I did some profitable research for him. Now I'm a partner in the firm. We have a big plant on the other side of town. As a matter of fact, it was while I was in the lab out there that I stumbled on these alternate worlds. By sheer accident, I crossed into another world and almost scared myself to death. "By the way," he went on, "what happened to you after you married Kathy? I often wondered what it would have been like being married to her." "It's all right, I guess," Chuck said. "We got married and bought a house. A couple of years ago, I went into business on my own -- Hi-Fi and TV repairs. Business isn't too bad." He flashed another look at the golden girl sunning herself by the pool. "Estelle hasn't changed much in all these years," he said nostalgically. "She's still as beautiful as ever." Then he banged his glass down hard on the window sill. "You must be trying to put something over on me! What's the gag?" "There's no gag," Charles assured him. "Besides, there's more to come." "Like what?" "I mentioned earlier about this being an infinite universe. There must be more than just the world you live in and the world I live everybody making decisions all the time, following one path and discarding another -- there must number of them!" Chuck drained his glass and went back to the cabinet to help himself. "It's not just a theory," Charles insisted. "I know there's more than just our two worlds. I've seen a couple of them. I could even take you to them. And every time anyone makes a decision, new ones spring into existence. Do you follow me?" "I guess so," Chuck said. "As much as anyone can follow a thing like that." "I'm still not finished -- " "Hold it," Chuck cut in abruptly. "Before we get tangled up any further, what am  doing here?" Charles said. "I couldn't keep a thing like this to myself, yet who could I tell? I thought it over and said nothing to anyone in this world, because it suddenly occurred to me that the best person to confide in was one of my hundreds of selves." "Quit it," Chuck begged. "Y ou'll drive me nuts -- you and your hundreds of selves!" "You're one of them," Charles reminded him. "The others all exist somewhere. I just happened to reach you by accident. When I started down Hobson's Hill, I didn't know which Charles Mead would be in the town. After all, I've made dozens of big decisions in the past few years. There must be plenty of other Charles Meads in existence." "That still doesn't explain why you brought me here. Don't tell me you intend to round up all the different versions of yourself. If so, count me out!" "You're getting warm," Charles said. "If you'll bear with me a little longer, I'll stretch your imagination again." Chuck groaned and settled down resignedly in the armchair. "If there really are all these worlds," Charles began, "and I can't see why there shouldn't be, then a world must exist where there's a Charles Mead who never made a wrong decision! A Charles Mead who did everything right, who never made a wrong move in his life! Of course there must also be one of us who never made a right decision -- to say nothing of all the endless varieties between the two extreme cases. But, of course, I'm not concerned with them." Chuck stood watching the sleeping girl by the ornamental pool, looking back, thinking back over seven years. Then he went over to the cabinet and poured himself another drink -- a strong one. "So what if there is a perfect Charles Mead somewhere? What about him?" "I'd like to see him," Charles said. "I'd like to see such a world. Wouldn't you?" "In your place? Not a chance! What's wrong with the world you're in now? It looks good to me. A lot better than mine -- beautiful wife, big house, big shot in the company..." "It's a matter of what you're used to," Charles said dryly. "I hope you don't mind me saying this -- we are brothers, more rather than less -- when I called on you, I'm sure I heard you fighting with Kathy. Do you fight often?" "I guess we do," Chuck said, "from time to time." "Estelle and I fight all the time. I still regret marrying her, even though I got rich because of it. Anyway, we don't, get along. We don't even try to manage. There were plenty of times when I regretted not marrying Kathy. She seemed to me to be a nice homy, comfortable sort of kid." "I hope you're not going to suggest we trade places," Chuck said. "Of course not. I told you -- I'm searching for the perfect world. Charles Mead's Utopia!" He raised his glass in a mock toast. "Want to come along?"  looking out of the window on to the lawn. The girl by the pool stirred briefly in her sunny slumber. "Weren't you ever happy with Estelle?" he asked. Charles shrugged. "I suppose I was at first. But we soon grew tired of each other. I was tied up with the business and Estelle wanted a good time." "It's funny," Chuck said wistfully, "but when Kathy and I started to drift apart, I began to have Estelle on my mind all the time. I used to imagine how much better things would have been if I'd married her instead." "I guess we both made a poor choice. Probably the perfect Charles Mead didn't choose either girl." "If I failed with Kathy and you failed with Estelle, I wouldn't be surprised if the Charles Mead who -- ah -- got away didn't fail in some other world. Kathy and Estelle were a couple of nice kids. Maybe it wasn't their fault entirely. Maybe it was the fault of Charles and Chuck Mead." "Possibly," said Charles a little wearily. "But that sort of argument gets us nowhere. You still can't disprove that there isn't a perfect Charles Mead somewhere." "I doubt if he's perfect," Chuck said. "Making the correct decisions all the time doesn't necessarily make him perfect. Besides, even if you did meet him, it wouldn't alter you in any way. You'd be the same person you are now." "I'd still like to find him." "I'll bet you wouldn't know him if you saw him. And you might waste a whole lifetime looking. Then, if you did find him, what makes you think he'd want you hanging around?" "At least, if he did kick me out, I'd know he'd made the absolutely correct decision," Charles said, smiling. "Well, don't count me in on your search. If you take my advice, you'll smash your invention or whatever it is and stay in your own world. There's nothing to be gained by exploring the paths you might have followed." "What's to be gained by not going?" "That's up to you. You can stay and make the best of your own world." "You're a fine one to talk. Are you going back to your own life -- to Kathy? Even though you don't get along with her?" ' Chuck said, "Of course. Your Utopia is as remote to me as Heaven or Hell. The important thing is not the hundreds of lives you could have led or all the possibilities that occur in your lifetime. The thing that counts is what you do with the one lifetime that's given to you. You're not happy with Estelle so you blame Estelle, thinking you'd be happier with Kathy or someone else. I felt the same way about Kathy and thought I'd be happier with Estelle. Now that you've given us both the opportunity to see ourselves ruining both lives, we can see that it's probably us at fault. If you want to find the perfect Charles Mead, you have to find him inside yourself -- not in some untouchable otherworld." "You should have been a minister," Charles told him. "You preach a good sermon." Chuck's boyish face reddened suddenly. "It still goes, anyway. Perhaps I've spent more time than you lately wondering why my marriage was breaking up. Maybe I have the answer now." "So you're going back to the little woman, filled with love and kisses and a heart full of hope!" "Forget it," Chuck said. "Forget I said anything at all." "Don't worry about it. No hard feelings. You're perfectly free to do or say what you like." He suddenly smiled and then began to laugh aloud. "What's funny?" Chuck asked. "Plenty," said Charles. "I just realized we both made decisions a few minutes ago. We both chose between two alternatives. You decided to go home to Kathy instead of going with me. I decided to go on with my quest instead of going back to Estelle." "What about it?" "Remember what I told you? Every time you choose one of two alternative courses of action, another world comes into existence in which you follow the other course of action ! Don't you see what that means?" by to Chuck as they stood on top of Hobson's Hill. Then, when Chuck had vanished, he switched off his equipment and set about camouflaging the black boxes in the bushes. It was too late in the day to make a second attempt at crossing into another world and he decided to wait until tomorrow. When a man was seeking perfection, he told himself, it paid to be patient and cautious and not to rush headlong into things. Presently, when he was satisfied with his work of concealing the apparatus, he set off down the hill.  .: Chuck Mead came through the harrowing experience of crossing worlds and stood once more on the top of Hobson's Hill in his own world. He glanced all around him, nervously reassuring himself that he was in his own world again. Then he took a crumpled cigarette from his shirt pocket and inhaled hungrily while he waited for his heart to stop its frantic hammering. Had he really been in another world, he wondered, and had he really seen Estelle? Presently, as he recalled events, his train of thought brought him around to Kathy and his decision. She would still be mad at him after the fight they had had when Charles arrived. Funny, now he couldn't even remember what they had been quarreling about! It seemed that any little thing could start them off these days. But it wasn't too late -- he was sure of that now. The situation could still be repaired. There was still time. With a quick, determined gesture, he flung the cigarette away from him, and with a new spring in his stride, he set off down the hill. universe, among the myriad worlds and possibilities, was a world born of a decision. In this world, Charles Mead stood on top of Hobson's Hill dismantling his apparatus. He was finished with it and was going to destroy it as soon as he got home. Chuck had been right; he was a fool to think of leaving Estelle for a mad dream. Strange, he thought, the way he had neglected her all these years. A girl like Estelle needed warmth and gayety and affection, not the boorish neglect of an idiot who wished he was in another world. He was lucky, he realized, that she was still there to go home to. With the act of making his decision, he felt a new peace of mind he had not experienced in years. At least he was about to tackle a problem within his grasp, not some ridiculous and impossible hunt through an infinity of alien worlds. He shook his head, genuinely puzzled. How on Earth could he have ever considered such an absurd notion, he wondered as he shouldered his equipment and set off down the hill. born of a decision, Charles and Chuck Mead emerged on top of Hobson's Hill. They looked about them eagerly, pointing out the landmarks in the town below. "This one's really different!" Charles said excitedly. "Look, there's no lumberyard and not even any railroad tracks. And that tall gray building downtown is new, too!" "Let's go," Chuck urged. "Let's take a look." "Take it easy," Charles cautioned, his hand on Chuck's arm. "We'll have to be careful about this. Remember, we're looking for the best -- the perfect -- world!" "Okay," Chuck said. "Even if it takes a lifetime, we settle for nothing but the best." And together, like two wise men off to seek Truth itself and, at the same time, like two schoolboys on some youthful adventure, they set off down the hill. for your information which is written entirely in response to letters received from readers -- a fairly high percentage of the mail during the last few months has been asking about Project Vanguard, the official name for the satellite shots. Why, several correspondents wanted to know, why has Galaxy, of all magazines, been so silent on Vanguard? Well, there are several intertwined answers to this query. To begin with, I explained various possible methods of shooting a satellite, in Galaxy, just a short time prior to the official announcement that the United States would shoot a satellite during the International Geophysical Year of #-#. When the announcement was made -- the date was July #, # -- there was nothing new that could be added for a considerable while. Some of the letters I received reminded me of a press conference I attended, where a newspaperman said to a government scientist involved in Vanguard: "You boys have changed your story around several times; why don't you stick to one line?" Whereupon the scientist answered truthfully that nobody had changed a story around, but that the facts were released as the scientists made up their minds what to do. Incidentally I still don't know just what that newspaperman meant when he accused the scientists, or the public relations officers, of having "changed the story around." Each release merely added more facts. He must have considered it a case of malicious duplicity that the first release spoke about a satellite, while later releases upped the figure to ten. Now the figure has been raised to twelve and sixteen units are on order, presumably to allow for possible failures. decided upon, it might be wise to mention the fundamental facts briefly. A body will become a satellite of Earth if it has a certain and rather high velocity, parallel to the ground, outside the atmosphere. Which velocity is required depends on the distance from the ground, but for those heights now within reach, say from # to # miles, the required velocities are all quite close to # Vi miles per second. Let's assume the body needs # miles per hour to stay in its orbit. To impart such a velocity on something with the use of present-day fuels requires a threestage rocket. The problem of producing a permanent satellite may therefore be described as consisting of two successive steps. The first one would be to lift the artificial satellite beyond the atmosphere, about to a height of # miles. The second would be to provide it with velocity parallel to the ground. In reality, these two steps are not so strictly separated. The lifting itself could and would provide some of the velocity needed. If every one of the three rockets which make up the threestage rocket were to fire just as soon as the preceding stage has used up its fuel, it could easily happen that the burn-out point of the third stage is still in the atmosphere. Now the orbit begins at the bum-out point of the final stage of the assembly. This means that the artificial satellite, each time it has completed one revolution around the Earth, would go through that bum-out point. Since the Earth has meanwhile turned on its axis, that point would be somewhere else with reference to the ground. But this is another problem. The important fact here is that the satellite would have to go through the altitude of the burnout point of the final, third stage. If that bum-out point were at a height of # miles, the satellite, each time it comes around, would dip into the atmosphere to an Earth-nearest point, the perigee, only # miles up. Each time it does that, air resistance would kill off some of its momentum. Hence it would not be a permanent satellite, but a temporary one. A few satellite shots will certainly be made with the perigee of the orbit inside the atmosphere, just because measuring the changes in the orbit which occur as a result of the grazing of the atmosphere would giv# us figures for atmospheric density at such great heights. But if you want a permanent satellite, a burn-out point in the atmosphere will not do. You want the final burn-out point to. be located outside the atmosphere. And this can be done by taking advantage of the well-known fact that a rocket does not stop moving just because its fuel supply has been used up. After the period of "powered flight," there comes the period of "unpowered flight" for every rocket. And if, at the moment of burn-out, the trajectory pointed upward, as is usually the case, the gain in altitude after bum-out is considerable. In the nearly vertical high-altitude shots of the V-# program, the bum-out altitude of the rocket was always quite close to # miles. The peak altitudes reached were from # to # miles. The three-stage Vanguard satellite carrier will lift vertically at first. After it has gained an altitude of two or three miles, it will be tilted in an easterly direction. This tilt eastward will take advantage of the fact that the Earth turns in an easterly direction, so that the rocket receives a kind of free velocity gift. The firing site for Vanguard is going to be Patrick Air Force Base, near Cape Canaveral in Florida. The rotational velocity of the Air Force Base being around # feet per second, the rocket gains this # feet per second by moving eastward after takeoff. The official schematic drawing of the satellite shots. The term "range # miles" on the diagram refers to the expected impact point of the second stage, about # miles from the takeoff site. (If one insisted that it should move westward, it would need extra fuel to kill off these # feet per second, obviously an illogical procedure.) When the first stage stops burning, the whole will be about # miles above sea level and, measured horizontally, about # miles to the east of the firing site. At this moment, the second stage ignites and lifts itself out of the first stage. The first stage will go through a normal ballistic trajectory, which will carry it to a maximum height of roughly # miles above sea level. This highest point #  of its trajectory will be about # miles from the takeoff site, measured horizontally. The first stage will find its end by smashing into the Atlantic Ocean # miles from the takeoff site. Meanwhile, the second stage has used up its fuel and acquired a velocity that is roughly half of the necessary orbital velocity. At the moment of burn-out, it will be # miles above sea level and at least that far from the firing site, measured horizontally. Now it coasts upward at a very shallow angle. It may to all intents and purposes be beyond the atmosphere at # miles altitude, but it is safe to make sure. The second stage will be permitted to coast without power to an altitude beyond # miles. In fact, it will probably reach around # miles. While gaining altitude as it coasts along, it unfortunately loses velocity. The loss due to whatever air resistance there might still be left will probably be so small that it could not even be measured, but the rocket is coasting upward against the gravitational attraction of the Earth. And that is a loss that can be calculated and is noticeable. When the second stage has coasted to the highest altitude it can attain, it must of necessity be moving parallel to the ground. It is now at the halfway point of its trajectory. From now on, it will lose altitude and gain speed again, following the gravitational attraction of the Earth. At the point where it is highest, moving parallel to the ground -- and incidentally moving at its slowest, which is still pretty fast -- the third-stage rocket will separate from the second stage. The horizontal distance from the launching site at that moment is # miles. The height is right. The direction of movement is right, too. All that is still lacking is velocity. It is up to the third stage to make up the difference between what it has and what is required. Nobody can tell precisely at the moment just how much that will be, but the third stage will probably have to supply half of the total velocity. either outside the atmosphere or still inside, depending on whose If we take the highest figures available, a satellite with a perigee # miles up will last a year. Taking the lowest figures, it will be permanent, at least as compared to the human life-span. Its actual lifetime will probably be somewhat in between -- after all, this is one of the things we want to find out. So much for the performance of the satellite carrier. Now for its appearance and dimensions. The overall appearance of the Vanguard three-stage rocket will be precisely that of an enormous rifle cartridge -- no fins. Fins are not needed because the rocket motors of the first two stages will be mounted on gymbals, just as were the motors of the Viking rockets. Balancing during the first few seconds following takeoff and tilting thereafter will be accomplished by deflecting the exhaust blast slightly, as needed. At takeoff, the satellite carrier will be # feet tall, with a largest diameter of # inches. It will be an exceptionally long and slim rocket. The total takeoff weight will be around eleven tons, which is less than the takeoff weight of the V-#. The first stage will be guided and controlled, but the guidance and control instruments will all be located in the second stage. One may say that the first stage is essentially a booster of large dimensions, the device to supply the first heavy push. The fine work is all done by the second stage. The second stage operates on other fuels than the first, the main reason being that the liquid oxygen used in the first stage is not really storable. Once you have fueled a rocket operating on liquid oxygen, it is time to fire it. Therefore the two upper stages of Vanguard must have storable fuels. That of the second stage is unsymmetrical dimethyl-hydrazine, burning with nitric acid which acts as the oxidizer. The fuel of the third stage will be a solid fuel, precise composition not yet decided on. As has been mentioned, it is the second stage which does all the fine work. It controls the first stage and later it controls itself. And because it puts itself in the proper position and fires the third stage at the proper moment, it may be said to control the third stage, too. Technically, the third stage is an unguided rocket, just something that is aimed (by the second stage) and fired at the right moment. HP HE third stage and the artificial satellite on top of the third stage will be completely encased by the nose cone of the second stage. After second-stage burn-out, this nose cone will split open and be shed, exposing the third stage and the satellite. They had to be protected against air friction on the way up, but after reaching # miles, they do not need protection any more. The third stage is supposed to spin around its longitudinal axis for stability. This spin must be induced by a mechanism in the second stage and it might be this spin which is used to get rid of the protecting nose cone of the second stage. Nothing much is yet known about the third stage, except for the fact that it will be a solid-fuel rocket to simplify firing procedure. Nor can much be said about the satellite itself, except that there will be various satellites. The one most talked about will be spherical, of the same diameter as the third-stage rocket -- expected to be # inches -- and contain instruments which report their findings to the ground by means of a battery-powered radio transmitter. It might be necessary to separate this satellite from the third-stage rocket. This could be done most simply by mounting it on a tensed spring which is released by a timing device. If such separation of satellite and third-stage carrier is necessary and is carried out, we'll get two satellites for the price of one. The third-stage rocket is in the same orbit as the satellite. It is only a few feet per second slower than the satellite (which got a slight additional push from the tensed spring) and it has no reason to fall back to Earth. Satellite and third-stage rocket will move along the same orbit, drawing apart very slowly, and will afford a fine comparison of the behavior of two satellites in the same orbit, but of different shapes. The latter only matters, of course, as far as residual air resistance is concerned. If no separation is needed, the satellite proper would simply be the nose cone of the third-stage rocket. It is quite possible that a specialized satellite would be essentially attached to the third stage, with a few sensing elements sticking out from it. Still another possible form of artificial satellite that has been discussed in the past would be uninstrumented and large. One could fill up the whole nose cone of the third stage with a compressed plastic foam that is permitted to escape to form a large foam bubble around the third stage. Or it could be a non-elastic plastic balloon which is inflated from a pressure capsule carried along. This latter type of artificial satellite would have a very fine visibility. It would not report to the ground by means of radio, but it would reveal very many things we want to know because of the shape of the orbit it will assume. And in order to observe this well, the satellite must be easily visible. I may add that it is planned to inform the public via the newspapers and radio when the artificial satellites will be visible for a certain area. They will be naked-eye objects, faint stars that can be told from the real stars because of their visible movement. But, of course, these faint moving stars will only be the vanguard of much bigger ones to come. T N the January issue this year, I answered a question from a reader concerning a calendar for Mars. Not only the reader whose question I answered -- or thought I did -- but half a dozen others have written in in the meantime, telling me that I had not been explicit enough. A few of them had tried to construct Martian calendars on the basis of my reply, but found they did not have enough information to go by. Since Mars is near right now, interest in the construction of a calendar for Mars for the convenience of future explorers might be more widespread than at other times and I'll therefore go into the subject at greater length and with more detail. The two natural units on which any calendar is based are the length of the day, which is the time needed by the planet to turn around its axis, and the length of the year, the time needed by the same planet to move once around the Sun. Mars needs # days to go around the Sun once, but these are Earth days. The Martian day is # minutes and about # seconds longer than the Earth day; hence there are # Mars days in a Martian year. For the sake of convenience, let's round this off to # # #th days; we can take care of the tiny difference later. Using that figure, we find that five Mars years contain # Martian days. Since for purposes of calendar making, every year has to have a number of full days -- you cannot end a year with half a day and threetenths of a day -- the five years comprising such a five-year cycle must be of unequal length. Breaking up the five-year cycle is naturally an arbitrary procedure which could follow any one of several different schemes. Three possibilities are these: First Year # days Second Year U Third Year it Fourth Year u Fifth Year # " # days Or: First Year # days Second Year u Third Year u Fourth Year ii Fifth Year u # days Or: First Year # days Second Year u Third Year a Fourth Year u Fifth Year # " # days In short, you can either have four years of equal length, with the fifth year two days shorter or three days longer than the others; or else you can alternate with each fifth year one day longer than it would come out if alternation were carried through. spects better way would be to follow a ten-year cycle with alternating years. During such a ten-year cycle of # Martian days, the five "short" years of # days each would have accumulated # days and the five "long" years of # days each would have accumulated # days, totaling # days. This is one day short, so every tenth year would have to have one additional leap year's day to make the cycle come out even. So far, so good, but how do we divide the years into months? Using the ten-year cycle, Dr. Robert G. Aitken, former director of the Lick Observatory, devised a calendar in which each year had sixteen months of six weeks each. In an odd-numbered year, the four months of spring would all begin on a Sunday and the first s P R I N (  S U M M E R S M T w T F S s M T w T F S First Week # # Sec'd Week # # Third Week #I # Fourth Week # # Fifth Week #" # # # Sixth Week #o #l #o #l # A U T # M N w I N T E R S M T w T F S s M T w T F S  # # First Week # # Sec'd Week # # Third Week # # Fourth Week # #I Fifth Week # # # # Sixth Week #l #o #l Scheme for a Martia n calendar for a "short" year as devised by Dr. Robert G. Aitken three of these four months would have # days each, but the fourth spring month only #I days. Consequently the four summer months would all begin with a Saturday; the first three of them would have # days each and the fourth summer month again only #I days. Therefore the four autumn months would all begin on Fridays, again with the fourth month having only #I days, so that the four winter months would all begin on Thursdays. Since again the fourth winter month is only #I days long, the whole year has used up # days. The next year, logically, has to be an even-numbered year beginning on a Wednesday. Again the four spring months all start on the same weekday, and since the fourth spring month is #I days long, the four summer months all begin on Tuesdays, running through the schedule of #, #, # and #I days. This makes the four autumn months begin on Mondays and the four winter months on Sundays. But in an even-numbered year, all four winter months are # days long, so that the next odd-numbered year also begins on a Sunday, as did the preceding odd-numbered year. This scheme can run with utmost rigidity for nine years, but the tenth year must have an extra day to complete the cycle. This extra day will be outside the scheme and not be assigned to any week or month. It will be, in name as well as in spirit, a Holiday. The more recent calendar for Mars, devised by Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of the Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia, is based on a fiveyear cycle with a sequence of #, #, #, #, # days. It has twelve months, like the terrestrial calendar, but with eight weeks to the month. A "short" year of # days would look as shown in Table II. As can be seen, at the end of each season there would have to be one "short week" of only six days. The absence of one day per season would have to be disregarded in assigning weekday names. By doing that, every week throughout the whole year (and of course every month, too) would begin with a Sunday. In the "long" years, the month of December would have # days, so that a "long" year would have only three "short" weeks instead of four. This takes care of everything except the small difference caused by rounding off the Martian year to # Martian days. That simplification causes every calendar year in both these calendars to be # days too long, which builds up to very nearly a full day in a thousand years. The adjustment would consist in making S M T w T F s s M T W T F s s M T w T F S I # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # # # # # # I  # # # # #l #o #l #o #l # # # # h# # # # #I # Scheme for a Martian calendar for I . "short" year according to Dr. I. M. Levitt what would normally be a "long" year into a "short" year every millennium. Dropping one day every millennium is certainly an easy, uncomplicated method of adjustment, but the fact is that this adjusts the calendar a bit too much. After a mere twenty thousand years, the error will have added up to a full day, so the adjustment consisting of changing a "long" year into a "short" year must be omitted every twentieth millennium. Well, this ought to be detailed enough for the making of a Martian calendar. The difference between terrestrial and Martian day, by the way, is within the adjustment spread of a betterclass watch or alarm clock. If you want to, you can have a "Martian clock" just by adjusting one to be # minutes and # seconds "late" according to Earth time. Once you have accomplished this, and don't forget to keep it wound, the time shown by the hands will make no sense whatever after only a week. However, it will be correct Martian time, for some place on Mars.      the subway, Humphrey read the letter through for the twentieth time. Dear Mr. Spink, If still available, report to this office #:# hours T.M.T. tomorrow re employment Yours truly, Theodore Crump Managing Director Cosmic Developments, Inc.  Some problem to give an unsuccessful poet -- what would the Vernans want one-half so , precious as the skins they wouldn't sell? And for the twentieth time since he had received the letter in that morning's mail, Humphrey felt a tangle of emotions. Foremost, because it was triggered like a reflex, was pain. It was borne on the memory of his first contact with Cosmic Developments, Inc, six months before. Then he had suffered for three days and nights at the hands of a diabolical creature called Clapton -- Clapperton? -- who had taken that time to assess his adaptability quotient. At least that was what he had called it. But Humphrey had soon found out that the phrase was a euphemism for sadism. It had involved his picking his way on hands and knees through complicated mazes, being suddenly dumped into rooms where the perspectives were all wrong, being made to perform such simplelooking feats as threading a needle and drinking a coke -- but under gravities ranging from nil to seven. Then there had been those goggles which had been locked on him and which reversed his vision. And that ultraviolet room where -- He brought himself up with a start, conscious that a man in the seat opposite was looking at him curiously. Humphrey stared the fellow down. After all, who wouldn't show his emotions at the memory of that experience? He'd had double vision for weeks afterward and even now had a tendency to walk in circles if he didn't watch out. And all for what? he had asked himself when he got their letter of rejection. They had said they would keep his application on file. He'd taken that for what it was usually worth. But now -- well, one thing was sure. If they thought he was going to let himself be put through all that again, they had another think coming. There were limits to what a self-respecting human being would put up with in his efforts to reach other worlds. Ah, but that was it! F OR that was another of the emotions that the letter fanned to ignition point -- his desperation to get out. But not for the usual reasons. Most of them wanted -- what? -- profit, adventure, escape, he supposed. He smiled now at the memory of Crump asking him what his reasons were. He'd said the money. Useless to have stated the real one -- images. Crump would have thought him mad. But that was the sober truth of it. Being a poet in the #nd century had its special problems. Not the age-old one of scanty reward -- he got by, anyway, nosing out old and rare books -- but the sheer brute fact that there had been so many poets already that there was precious little left to say. Oh, new ideas, new gadgets came out daily, but it took years for them to be assimilated to the point where a poet could introduce them naturally into his work. Humphrey still smarted from the mauling one of his pieces had received from a hostile critic because he'd described his relations with a girl friend in terms of operating a cyberscope. For that matter, he'd suffered a pretty severe mauling from the girl friend, too, before she'd turned on one prismatic heel and marched out of his life. That had been the clinching point. There was only one thing to do -- get out where the new horizons were being unrolled, where new experiences and new colors would quicken his jaded soul. It had to be a job; the tourist trade months of trying had got him nowhere -- until this morning. He savored that #:# hours T.M.T. -- Terran Mean Time. The soberly printed symbols woke visions of men who used such phrases as casually as he'd say " a quarter after three," of the worlds in which they moved. He felt a tingling in his blood, felt the images crowding all ready to be liberated. showed him into Crump's presence. But his attention was jerked to somebody else, distributed awkwardly over a chair by Crump's desk -- a tall, bony individual with thick old-fashioned glasses. Suppressing a shudder, Humphrey marched straight up to Crump's desk. "Let's get one thing straight before we start -- I'm having nothing to do with him." "Ah, yes," said the plump little executive, gesturing Humphrey to a chair. "You remember Dr. Clapperton?" "Could I forget?" Humphrey all but snarled. "Well," said Crump reassuringly, "Dr. Clapperton is only here this time on -- ah -- a watching brief. Now you're ready to start immediately?" "Just give me twelve hours to settle things up," said Humphrey, relieved. "This is an extraterrestrial job, of course, like the last one I lost out on?" Crump seemed to hesitate slightly. "This is the same job you applied for." "Oh? But those tests last time. I thought -- " "Figures," Crump said contemptuously. He picked up a folder and consulted it. "You had an A.Q. of #, the lowest of the fifteen applicants we tested." Humphrey looked puzzled. "We've already tried two men," Crump went on. "One with an A.Q. of #, another with #." Seeing that Humphrey still looked bewildered, he added, with a passing glare at Clapperton, "After a week, both of them were signaling home to be relieved." "I see," said Humphrey, which wasn't quite true. "Adaptability isn't the important thing for this job, then?" Crump sighed painfully. "I don't know. What I do know is that Clapperton here wheedled an allocation of a hundred thousand credits out of me for all that A.Q. testing paraphernalia. He is here now to witness what I think of his system." "I still say I'm right," Clapperton protested. "An organism in a strange environment either has to adapt, get out or -- " "Go under," Crump finished for him in a weary tone. "I know it by heart by now." "Well, it's true." "Then your system of assessment must be haywire, because it hasn't worked'for Verna." "Just what is wrong with -- er -- Verna?" Humphrey put in. "Right," said Crump. "Briefly, the natives' disinterest in selling us certain skins that we'd like to buy." "You mean you can't offer enough?" "I mean that we have yet to find what the Vemans will take in payment." "Money, perhaps?" Humphrey suggested brightly. "We did think of that. But it's no use to them. They don't appreciate metals, gems, trade balances. Verna is way out and right off the usual routes. There's no terran settlement or tourist trade, so it's understandable that our money isn't of much interest to them. But they don't seem to want anything else that we can offer, either. At least" -- he looked at Humphrey peculiarly -- "so far as we've been able to find out." "But how's that? I'd like to be a bit clearer on conditions there, if you don't mind." "It is a precept of Dr. Clapperton, " Crump answered, "to leave the subject with an entirely open mind. That's one idea of his that I do go along with. The two men he selected started from scratch, too. " Humphrey felt suddenly annoyed. "If that's the only reason, I think you -- " "Ah, but that isn't the only reason. Clapperton's idea seems fair enough. You will adapt better if the environment is completely new. To tell you more might lead you to preconceive lines of adaptation that wouldn't work in practice. It might be harder to scrap them than to start clear." Humphrey nodded, reluctantly seeing the logic of that. "The pay will be a thousand a month," Crump said, "plus expenses, plus a lump sum of fifty thousand if you can land a contract with the Vernans, with fifteen per cent commission on the Earth selling price of all grath skins you ship." Grath skins, thought Humphrey, must be horribly hard to get. He was about to agree when it occurred to him that he could demonstrate his powers of adaptation right here and now. "I want seventy-five thousand and twenty per cent." "Done," said Crump, with suspicious alacrity. 'Til have the contract drawn up right away." tertransit, Humphrey's somewhat romantic view of the men who plied the stellar distances had suffered a space-change. The crew of the freighter that was carrying him to Verna were the most taciturn bunch he'd ever met. His pleasantly phrased questions about their jobs got terse grunts. It was because their jobs were all routine, the captain answered Humphrey's plaint at dinner, a matter of constantly checking the automatic gear that really ran the ship. They were the type the shipping companies chose, the self-sufficient kind who suffered boredom best. That brief speech seemed to strain the captain's verbal powers severely. Captains were evidently chosen on the same principle. After that, Humphrey kept to his cabin most of the time, reading from cover to cover and back again the two anthologies that a stringent baggage allowance had limited him to. The pack that nearly all the allowance. The pack consisted of a bulky illustrated catalogue of Earth goods, a six-month ration of food capsules and a squat black Fritsch Field transmitter. A brochure came with that. It seemed that tion to Verna, would direct an interbeam his way once a week, which was about as often as the black box would be able to get up enough power to generate a tenminute interference signal. He had been told to cram up on Intercode. At the end of meswould acknowledge receipt by collapsing the beam, which would, in the stiff language of the brochure, "register with an audible oscillation." Humphrey had been somewhat taken aback at finding that communication would be that rudimentary. Knowing, as everybody did, that intertransit covered lightyears in days, he had assumed that the mere exchange of messages would be easy and certainly telephonic. And two-way, at least. It was, he was told, between established stations, but that took considerably more tonnage of equipment and power than he could man or manage. He had accepted that in a good pioneering spirit -- even if it did mean that a call for help would have to await the next weekly beam. But he still brooded on Crump's refusal to tell him more about Verna. He hated not knowing what he might have to call for help from. But he finished the flight in good heart, sustained by the conviction that he was getting somewhere at last. T HE ship materialized out of interspace and dropped him on Verna, the single planet of a Sol-type sun. The captain wished him a laconic good luck. The crew looked up a moment from their tasks. The freighter took off again. Humphrey was alone on a strange planet for the first time in his life. He looked about him. He was standing in a sun-baked stretch of country. Trees were dotted about the place. Over to his left and beyond a rise of yellow ground, he could see the tops of the white buildings that he had glimpsed through the clouds as the ship had descended. Everything was peaceful, the day pleasantly warm. The trees, the sky, the smell of the air even, were comfortingly Earthlike. Nobody -- no thing -- seemed to have started out to meet him. He shrugged, hoisted the pack which, under what seemed slightly less than Earth gravity, was still heavy enough, and set off toward the signs of life. As he surmounted the rise, he came into full view of what he saw now was a sizable city. The buildings were no primitive leantos, either; some of them were several stories high. But there was still no sign of any committee, welcoming or otherwise. Only as he was almost under the shadow of the outer ring of buildings did he get his first sight of a Vernan -- and then of eight or nine at once. And very small ones. They came out, scampering, toward him, laughing shrilly. One of Humphrey's fears vanished. At least he wouldn't have to adapt to the idea of talking business with a fire-breathing dragon. These kids were just like kids anywhere, even if their hair was a bright saffron in color. He waved to them cheerfully. But just then an adult Vernan, a woman, came out and shouted at them. The children stopped, hesitated, then trooped reluctantly back. It wasn't until the city had swallowed them up again that Humphrey realized something. The woman hadn't shouted at all. That could mean only one thing -- the Vernans were .telepathic. Well, that ought to take care of the language problem. He entered the city, his confidence boosted. houses, the place opened up into broad thoroughfares. He saw lots of Vernans now. They all had that saffron hair. They were dressed in short pastel-colored togas that showed a good deal of tawny skin and some handsome physiques. But nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him, except in the negative sense that not one of them came near him. As he passed up the middle of a wide avenue, the native population retreated or skirted what would have been the sidewalks, if not for the fact that they didn't have sidewalks here. This tied in with the realization that he couldn't see any sign of mechanical transport. Or hear any. The whole place was eerily silent. Then he realized that that would be only natural in a city of telepaths. But this shunning of him wasn't natural. He came to a sudden halt, resting his pack and feeling the absurdity of the situation. How could any race be so incurious? And then he was aware of a subtle feeling in the air, a feeling of withdrawal, of polite annoyance at being intruded on, and recognized that he was feeling the cumulative emotions of several thousand Vernans. But why should they regard him as an intruder? He meant them no harm. Anyway, what harm would he be able to do them? It must have been his predecessors, he thought disgustedly. They'd put on the Big White Chief act, getting the natives' backs up right away. Well, he'd soon show them that wasn't typical of all Earthmen. And if they avoided him, he'd just have to go to a place that he would have sought out in any case -- a hotel. They must have some such place here. They'd have to take notice of him then, surely. He didn't know how he'd get over the problem of payment, but he'd work that one out when he came to it. He shouldered his pack again and set off. He passed places with boards over them like medieval shop signs. One showed a pot, another what was obviously some item of grocery. But hotels seemed few and far between. But at last he came to a sign with a jug and what looked like a Venetian blind but could conceivably have been a folding bed. At any rate, it looked like the equivalent of bed and breakfast. He went in. He knew immediately he was in the right place. Potted plants stood around the foyer. The foyer was deserted. But there was a desk and an alert-looking desk clerk. determinedly radiating friendliness. At least, he hoped he was projecting. He evidently succeeded, for the clerk stopped backing away, but looked baffled. And Humphrey, to his disappointment, got no mental signal back. Until, suddenly, he stepped into an aura of communication. "Yes?" the clerk seemed to say. And a kind of implication of status came over, too. This was the proprietor, not a clerk. "Excuse my hesitation. I thought -- " The message faded away in a whirl of images. Humphrey made out a stool, a lamp, a scroll. Some kind of hospitality ritual, Humphrey decided. "Can you fix me up with a room?" he asked. The whirl of images stopped. "Have you payment?" An image came of octagonal coins. "No, but I wondered if -- well, I could clean dishes or help around the place." The Vernan looked dubious. "Just a moment. I'll call my wife." Humphrey got a queer sensation then as the clerk turned away slightly. He got a clear image, but not of a wife -- of some kind of plant. But it was most positively a woman who obeyed the call! "I was just asking your good husband -- " Humphrey started, and stopped, confusion spreading through him like a fire. "Pardon me," he blurted and made off, suddenly remembered the pack that he had grounded by the desk, went back for it and staggered out of the hotel. He got well away before he dumped his burden and sat down, sweating, on the stone balustrade of a fountain. He was beginning to have an inkling of the difficulties that had faced his predecessors on Verna. For telepathy obviously wasn't so simple. He had never had to think about it before in his life, but he had imagined it would be a straightforward enough process. Now he tried to reason it out. These people used telepathy instead of speech, whereas we speak only what we want to say. They must have some telepathic parallel-some check over what they emitted. But he hadn't! Nor had his predecessors. They must have learned what he had learned -- just what a human's thoughts involved. As just now, for instance. Did his looking at a pretty female really involve what he had got back, reflected shockingly from her receptive mind? All that? He shrugged. What if it did? It was only natural, wasn't it? And wasn't it natural for Vernans, too? It must be, otherwise it wouldn't have had that outraged effect on the hotelkeeper's wife; it would have been meaningless. And it was innocent enough. One didn't go around making intimate proposals to every girl one passed in the street. But hadn't he done just that? And not in her ear. In that moment of flurry, he had been conscious that the husband had been in on the hook-up, too. Naturally. And who else within radius? Because it was obvious that they were more sensitive in their receiving than he was. The hotelkeeper had got his own message before he had stepped into the hotelkeeper's range. But when that woman had called to the children, he had got that. But she had seemed to shout. If it had been a mental "shout," that seemed to indicate a measure of control. His problem was in the opposite direction -- how did one learn to whisper? finally came up with the conclusion that everything would be all right as long as he confined his dealings to men. They would be the ones he'd have to see about grath skins and that was all that mattered, wasn't it? Unless -- the thought halted him -- this was a female-governed society. Well, he'd have to find out. He put on his pack again wearily and set off in search of authority. One large building stood out in the center of the city. He headed for it. He approached it from across what looked like, by its size and the statuary dotted around it, the city's main square. That, and the knot of people clustered around the entrance, reinforced his notion that it was the seat of rule. The crowd melted away as he strode across the square, leaving the entrance completely deserted as he went in. But a dark-togaed doorkeeper stood his ground in the hall. Humphrey got an immediate sensation of resentment. But he'd met worse than that from doorkeepers on Earth. "I want to see the chief," he announced briskly. The resentment melted into a lot of images, just as the hotelkeeper's reaction had. But this time of a spinning sun, a multiheaded beast. Humphrey repeated his question. The doorkeeper shrugged. "Hold on." He departed down a long corridor. After several minutes, he came back. "The chief will see you. Seventh blue door on the left." Telepathy had its clumsy side, Humphrey reflected as hp went down the corridor. Vernans might be able to "shout," but even they evidently couldn't beam it. Or maybe sheer distance had defeated the doorkeeper, he thought, passing gray doors, green doors, orange, white, red. From them, as he passed, he got a slight but disconcerting sensation of annoyance -- at him, from the people behind them. He felt like opening each door and apologizing, but suspected that #ight only make matters worse. The corridor turned at right angles before he reached the seventh blue door. After a moment of hesitation, he went in. An aged giant with faded fair locks and a dark blue toga rose, bowed stiffly and sat down again, gesturing Humphrey to a chair. "What can I do for you?" came the chief's message. It carried overtones of massive authority and irritation. And only one image -- a vast, prickly hedge. "I want to buy grath skins," Humphrey told him, realizing with sudden panic that he had neither seen one yet nor knew who had given them that name. A telepathic race didn't have names, surely, or perhaps the beasts were called after the noise they made? stood immediately. Humphrey received a blast of anger. "I told the ones who came before you that they were not for sale. Didn't they tell you?" Humphrey gave up the attempt to explain. "No," he confessed. "Do you mind telling me?" "Because the barbaric society you come from has nothing to offer us in exchange. Grath skins are scarce, just enough to go around for our own use. We could hunt more, but there is no inducement." Humphrey had already fished out his catalogue. "But we can offer many valuable things. Tape players, cyberscopes, rocket craft -- " He stopped, conscious that the chief was roaring his head off telepathically, though no sound escaped his tight, motionless lips. "Toys!" the chief exploded. "What do we want with such things? What use are the products of a people who cannot even control their thoughts?" Humphrey started to get indignant. "I don't see that you've got so much to be smug about. Your setup strikes me as pretty primitive. You haven't got mechanical transport, radio, #-D T.V. -- " "Meaningless symbols," the chief said. "Well, they're not meaningless in practice. How would you like to move around at two hundred -- well, many times faster than a man can run? Or speak to -- " He suddenly remembered and erased that one, but added enthusiastically, "How would you like to see what's going on on the other side of Verna -- in living color?" The chief laughed again, but with considerable weariness. "If I want to see what goes on on the other side of Verna, I can go there. Or hire artists. We have excellent artists." "But the time!" Humphrey persisted. "We live many years." Humphrey started then, suddenly allowed sight of all the circuits of the Vernan sun that the old man had seen. It was like seeing the rings of a vast and ancient tree. Whatever the length of the Vernan year, it added up to a large chunk of time. Humphrey began to get the Vernan viewpoint in perspective. He strove against it. "But all these things we can offer -- there must be something there you need. Here's a whole section on installations, services. How would you like a latest model sanitation system for your city? Or complete pan-urban airconditioning?" The chief shook his head. "A MiniSol power station, then? Compact, clean, sufficient to supply power for -- " "I've heard it all before," the chief told him. "We don't need any of those things. Sanitation we have. Air-conditioning we don't need. Power?" He shrugged. "We have a greater power. And a greater gift than any you can offer us. In telepathy we have communication, and in communication peace. Behind all the things you offer me, there is a picture of a desperately unbalanced people, struggling to make up for the lack of that one gift. If your people could only relax, they might find in themselves that power. Or they might have done so once. I fear it is atrophied in them now." do have it, wouldn't you say? How else could you communicate with me?" "Only because our own powers are refined -- so refined that your crude thinking processes are like a scream in our minds. Do you understand now why your people are not welcome here?" "I'm sorry," Humphrey apologized. "But -- I thought you people had control." "Only of transmission, and that is a complicated process. We can project, in an emergency, for -- " Humphrey had a mental image of a distance that he guessed at about half a mile. "The cleverer among us can reduce our thoughts so as not to disturb our neighbors, though we are used to a background level of thought. You will understand that there are varying degrees of intensity as well as varying degrees of individual control." "Couldn't I learn control?" The chief smiled tolerantly. "Ages of development were needed for our people to learn how to handle their powers. It would be impossible for a stranger to learn even in a whole lifetime. The system of etiquette is extremely complex." Humphrey was beginning to understand. "Like throwing up screens of images?" "Ah, you've recognized that? Yes, that is a part of it. We sublimate the stronger emotions that way. The greater control a person has, the more refined he is regarded by his fellows." Humphrey could see parallels with speech on Earth. "So that a man, addressing his girl friend or wife in public, would symbolize her -- as a plant, say?" "Exactly. As a plant or flower or whatever was customary between them. More intimate thoughts would be reserved for private occasions." "I see." The chief drew a hand across his brow. "I am tired. The interview is at an end." He caught Humphrey's apology. "Thank you, but it is not because of age. The telepathic faculty becomes richer with age, but somewhat less sensitive to shock. The average person could not have stood contact with you for a fraction of this time." Humphrey rose. There was plainly nothing more to be said. He shouldered his pack and made for the door. "Oh, just one thing more," the chief called after him. Humphrey turned. "In case you should think of going out to hunt grath yourself, I ought to warn you that grath also are telepathic in a simple but highly sensitive way. They can scent a thought a long way off." He smiled. "I should think they'd be able to detect yours before you even started out." "Then how do your people do it?" "Our hunters have the cultivated ability of fooling the grath by aping the beast's thought processes. The grath would rather believe his thoughts than his eyes."  light of the Vernan day, Humphrey felt wretched. It was clear enough now why his predecessors, for all their high A.Q.s, had found the assignment an impossible one. An Earthman was about as welcome here as a visitor to Earth would be who went around making a noise like a buzz-saw. Only this was worse, being much more complicated. He thought bitterly of the irony of it -- of himself, a poet, a weaver of words, coming up against a race who hadn't the slightest need of them. His dreams of new vistas had already withered; now they looked pitiable. Well, there was only one thing to do -- settle down to being a pariah for the next seven days, until he could get a call through long after that they took to send a ship to pick him up. There was no sense in trying any further. These people were pretty polite, under the circumstances, but testing their patience any more might be dangerous. Night came with conventional tropical suddenness. Smoky yellow lights sprang up in the windows of the buildings. Humphrey sighed and looked around for a parking place. He found one in the angle of the plinth of a statue in the main square. He threw his pack down and himself by it. Miserably he took out his case of capsules and swallowed a couple of them. He settled down for the night -- or tried to. For although it was peaceful -- the Vernans continued to give him a wide berth -- the daytime warmth soon ebbed from the air. He shivered and drew his jerkin tighter about him, thinking dark thoughts of Crump and even darker ones of his own foolhardiness. He fell asleep at last, but seemed to rebound immediately was shining full in his face and he thought at first that that was what had wakened him. Then he became conscious of two round violet eyes peering at him around the plinth. He lifted himself on an elbow. A figure stepped out into the moonlight and came up to him. Steady, Humphrey told himself and thought frantically of an elephant -- as violent a contrast to this graceful creature as his sleepfuddled mind could think of. He could at least try to conform to local usage, however hopeless the chief had said it would be for him. The girl was holding out a cloak that shimmered in the moonlight. She wore a similar one clasped at her throat. "A grath skin," she explained. "I saw you and couldn't bear the thought of your sleeping out here without cover." "Thank you," Humphrey answered gratefully, taking the cloak and laying it over his cramped limbs. It was wonderfully warm, for all its lightness. He saw now why Crump was anxious to get his hands on a supply. "It's only an old one," the girl told him apologetically. "It's fine, thank you. Where shall I return it?" "You can keep it." "I can? You're very kind." Humphrey turned over, hitching the cloak over his shoulders, annoyed that a meeting with a pretty girl by moonlight should find him at such a disadvantage. didn't go away. He felt the nearness of her mind and realized that she was young, equivalent to an Earth seventeen-year-old. Her thoughts were like those of any kid doing something daring. But he didn't enjoy being the subject of them, hated being in her mind something like a cross between a caged animal and a forbidden fruit. He stirred and turned back to her. "Now look here, I'm grateful, but -- " The girl suddenly laughed. Just as suddenly, she bit her lip. Humphrey got a clear impression that she knew she had done something not considered good form. But he was surprised at hearing a sound -- any sound -- escaping a Veman's lips. "Don't tell me you can speak?" he said. And said it aloud, to show what he meant. He felt her embarrassment. A screen of images went up, but scattered, tenuous, as if she hadn't mastered the art yet. Now it was his turn to laugh. In her embarrassment, she looked even prettier. Humphrey took a grip on himself. He thought desperately of the elephant again, but the image wasn't effective enough by half. "Why don't you clear off?" he radiated angrily, then caught the answer. Partly from her mind, but that was only a confirmation of a thought from another quarter. He jerked around angrily and caught sight of several heads disappearing around the corner of a building. "You're doing this for a bet!" he accused her furiously. She looked awkward, but didn't budge. "All right," he said. "You'll win the hard way. I hope it gives you a headache!" He dived in his pack. He pulled out an anthology and opened it at random. He read out loud in as clear and ringing a voice as he could produce: From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers, Harnessed with level rays in golden reins, The zebras draw the dawn across the plains Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers. The sunlight, zither ing their flanks with fire, Flashes between the shadows as -- as -- He faltered, aware of the girl's marvelous violet eyes upon him. But aware of something more -- of her mind seized by his. Not frightened, disturbed, resentful, the only reactions he had met so far on Verna, but -- yes, fascinated. And clamoring now for him to go on. He complied dazedly: -- as they pass Barred with electric tremors through the grass Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre... He went on to the end. Complete communion seemed to reign between them. wonderingly at last. "Poetry," he said aloud. "Pur -- tree," she said, and laughed delightedly. "You can speak!" he said. But why had the verse, a piece by a twentieth-century poet, had such an effect on her? An effect that he could feel! Was it because the words concentrated symbols? And concentrated his own mind, too, as he read, so that his thoughts were no longer harsh and crude to a Vernan mind? No -- positively welcome. It seemed fantastic, impossible, almost wholly incredible. But was it? Vemans only used symbols in a system of manners. Had they never, then, experienced the richness, the delight of them? Words were the magical power that drew images together, focusing them, relating one with another. And Vernans had never had need of words. Didn't that explain a lot? Their lack of drive, for one thing. Hadn't a large part of Man's struggle upward risen from the sheer necessity to communicate? He felt the dawning of a great idea, the solution. But -- "Yes!" the girl broke in eagerly upon his thoughts. "Yes!" "I don't know. You're young. The young always welcome innovations. But how about the older ones?" She dismissed the thought with a pout. "When their eyes are opened to what they have missed, they will fall over themselves to sample it." Her own unbelievable eyes lit up. "I'll be your prophet." He had a sharp twinge of doubt, of conscience. Who could know what the ultimate effects would be? He might be laying a powder train. Maybe the Vernans were a lot of stick-in-the-muds, but it was a stable and peaceful stretch of mud. What right had he to disturb it? "It is more than a right -- it is a duty," the girl told him firmly. "You think so?" He faltered. "How have you managed all this time without names? What can I call you?" "Call? Oh, I don't know." It was that elementary impasse that made Humphrey's mind up for him. A telepathic race did lack a whale of a lot of things, all for the lack of names. Accurate distances, shop names, those little things he had noticed. But, vastly more important, records. A race built itself on the accumulated wisdom of previous generations, didn't it? But a race without language had no means of preserving that wisdom beyond the vehicle of the brain -- and why should even a telepathic Vernan brain be less fallible than any other? "I know what I'll call you," Humphrey said, delighted at the thought. "Calliope. The muse of poetry." "Cal-eye-o-pee," she said, radiating pleasure. "Right, then," he told her. "I'll start tomorrow." "We'll start tomorrow." She snuggled up to him. "But now -- more poetry." relayed from Humphrey on Verna. Initial order one thousand grath skins, to be delivered in bimonthly installments two hundred. Payment per skin: one copy each Gardner's Diamond Treasury of English Lyric, one terran grammar, one terran ditionary -- Crump winced. Finding out that the Vemans were telepathic had obviously gone to the young fool's head. He read on. Then it became clear. The last sentence crystallized it. He flipped Clapperton's switch gleefully and summoned him to his office. He told him the news. Clapperton's reaction was the same as Crump's had been at first. "I don't believe it," he said flatly. "I'll read on," Crump said. " 'Advise Clapperton to revise his method. He must have thrown the first two men as he threw me. I was so busy trying to adapt that I nearly missed the answer. Luckily I saw it in time and was qualified to exploit it. Clapperton was right, but not right enough. An organism in a strange environment either has to adapt to it, get out or go under. But there's a fourth course -- '" Crump paused and his eye held a glint that, although he couldn't know it, was a close cousin to the one that had been in Humphrey's as he had tapped away at a black box on distant Verna -- "'Adapt the environment to itself.'" # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what theve ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania Human Man's Burden Massa Flaswell was lonely on his cold, cold planetoid... till it got hot and crowded! E dward flaswell bought his planetoid, sight unseen, at the Interstellar Land Office on Earth. He selected it on the basis of a photograph, which showed little more than a range of picturesque mountains. But Flaswell loved mountains and as he remarked to the Claims Clerk, "Might be gold in them thar hills, mightn't thar, pardner?" "Sure, pal, sure," the clerk responded, wondering what man in his right mind would put himself several light-years from the nearest woman of any description whatsoever. No man in his right mind would, the clerk decided, and gave Flaswell a searching look. But Flaswell was perfectly sane. He just hadn't stopped to consider the problem. Accordingly, Flaswell put down a small sum in credits and made a large promise to improve his land every year. As soon as the ink was dry upon his deed, he purchased passage aboard a second-class drone freighter, loaded it with an assortment of secondhand equipment and set out for his holdings. Most novice pioneers find they have purchased a sizable chunk of naked rock. Flaswell was lucky. His planetoid, which he named Chance, had a minimal manufactured atmosphere that he could boost to breathable status. There was water, which his well-digging equipment tapped on the twentythird attempt. He found no gold in them thar hills, but there was some exportable thorium. And best of all, much of the soil was suitable for the cultivation of dir, olge, smis and other luxury fruits. As Flaswell kept telling his robot foreman, "This place is going to make me rich!" "Sure, Boss, sure," the robot always responded. T HE planetoid had undeniable promise. Its development was an enormous task for one man, but Flaswell was only twentyseven years old, strongly built and of a determined frame of mind. Beneath his hand, the planetoid flourished. Months passed and Flaswell planted his fields, mined his picturesque mountains and shipped his goods out by the infrequent drone freighter that passed his way. One day, his robot foreman said to him, "Boss Man, sir, you don't look too good, Mr. Flaswell, sir." Flaswell frowned at this speech. The man he had bought his robots from had been a Human Supremicist of the most rabid sort, who had coded the robots' responses according to his own ideas of the respect due Human People. Flaswell found this annoying, but he couldn't afford new response tapes. And where else could he have picked up robots for so little money? "Nothing wrong with me, Gunga-Sam," Flaswell replied. "Ah! I beg pardon! But this is not so, Mr. Flaswell, Boss. You have been talking to yourself in the fields, you should excuse my saying it." "Aw, it's nothing." "And you have the beginning of a tic in your left eye, sahib. And your fingers are trembling. And you are drinking too much. And-" "That's enough, Gunga-Sam. A robot should know his place," Flaswell said. He saw the hurt expression that the robot's metal face somehow managed to convey. He sighed and said, "You're right, of course. You're always right, old friend. What's the matter with me?" "You are bearing too much of the Human Man's Burden." "Don't I know it!" Flaswell ran a hand through his unruly black hair. "Sometimes I envy you robots. Always laughing, carefree, happy -- " "It is because we have no souls." "Unfortunately I do. What do you suggest?" "Take a vacation, Mr. Flaswell, Boss," Gunga-Sam suggested, and wisely withdrew to let his master think. Flaswell appreciated his servitor's kindly suggestion, but a vacation was difficult. His planetoid, Chance, was in the Throcian System, which was about as isolated as one could get in this day and age. True, he was only a fifteenday flight from the tawdry amusemuch farther from Nagondicon, where considerable fun could be obtained for the strong in stomach. But distance is money, and money was the very thing Flaswell was trying to make on Chance. more thorium and began to grow a beard. He continued to mumble to himself in the fields and to drink heavily in the evenings. Some of the simple farm robots grew alarmed when Flaswell lurched past and they began praying to the outlawed Combustion God. But loyal Gunga-Sam soon put a stop to this ominous turn of events. "Ignorant mechanicals!" he told them. "The Boss Human, he all right. Him strong, him good! Believe me, brothers, it is even as I say!" But the murmurings did not cease, for robots look to Humans to set an example. The situation might have gotten out of hand if Flaswell had not received, along with his next shipment of food, a shiny new Roebuck-Ward catalogue. Lovingly he spread it open upon his crude plastic table and, by the glow of a simple cold-light bulb, began to pore over its contents. What wonders there were for the isolated pioneer! Home ers, and portable solidovision, and -- Flaswell turned a page, read it, gulped and read it again. It said: Pioneers, why suffer the curse of loneliness alone? Why bear the HuMan's Burden singly? Roebuck-Ward is now offering, for the first time, a limited selection of Brides for the Frontiersman! The Roebuck-Ward Frontier Model Bride is carefully selected for strength, adaptability, agility, perseverance, pioneer skills and, of course, a measure of comeliness. These girls are conditioned to any planet, since they possess a relatively low center of gravity, a skin properly pigmented for all climates, and short, strong toe and fingernails. Shapewise, they are well proportioned and yet not distractingly contoured, a quality which the hard-working pioneer should appreciate. The Roebuck-Ward Frontier Model comes in three general sizes see specifications below) to suit any man's taste. Upon receipt of your request, Roebuck-Ward will quick-freeze one and ship her to you by third-class Drone Freight. In this way, your express charges are kept to an absolute minimum. Why not order a Frontier Model Flaswell called for Gunga-Sam and showed him the advertisement. Silently the mechanical read, then looked his master full in the face. "This is surely it, effendi," the foreman said. "You think so, huh?" Flaswell stood up and began to pace nervously around the room. "But I wasn't planning on getting married just yet. I mean what kind of a way is this to get married? How do I know I'll like her?" "It is proper for Human Man to have Human Woman." "Yeah, but-" "Besides, do they quick-freeze a preacher and ship him out, too?" A slow smile broke over Flaswell's face as he digested his servant's shrewd question. "Gunga-Sam," he said, "as usual, you have gone directly to the heart of the matter. I guess there's a sort of moratorium on the ceremony while a man makes up his mind. Too expensive to quick-freeze a preacher. And it would be nice to have a gal around who could work her share." Gunga-Sam managed to convey an inscrutable smile. Flaswell sat down and ordered a Frontier Model Bride, specifying the small size, which he felt was plenty big enough. He gave Gunga-Sam the order to radio. T HE next few weeks were filled with excitement for Flaswell and he began to scan the skies anxiously. The robots picked up the mood of anticipation. In the evenings, their carefree songs and dances were interspersed with whispering and secret merriment. The mechanicals said to GungaSam over and over again, "Hey, Foreman! The new Human Woman Boss, what will she be like?" "It's none of your concern," Gunga-Sam told them. "That's Human Man business and you robots leave it alone." But at the end, he was watching the skies as anxiously as anyone. During those weeks, Flaswell meditated on the virtues of Frontier Woman. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. No pretty, useless, helpless painted woman for him! How pleasant it would be to have a cheerful, common-sense, down-togravity gal who could cook, wash, pretty up the place, boss the house robots, make clothes, put up jellies... So he dreamed away the time and bit his nails to the quick. At last the drone freighter flashed across the horizon, landed, jettisoned a large packing case, and fled in the direction of Amyra IV. The robots brought the case to Flaswell. "Your new bride, sir!" they shouted triumphantly, and flung their oilcans in the air. Flaswell immediately proclaimed a half-day holiday and soon he was alone in his living room with the great frigid box marked "Handle with Care. Woman Inside." He pressed the defrosting controls, waited the requisite hour, and opened the box. Within was another box, which required two hours to defrost. Impatiently he waited, pacing up and down the room and gnawing on the remnants of his fingernails. And then the time was up, and with shaking hands, Flaswell opened the lid and saw -- "Hey, what is this?" he cried. r I t HE girl within the box blinked, yawned like a kitten, opened her eyes, sat up. They stared at each other and Flaswell knew that something was terribly wrong. She was clothed in a beautiful, impractical white dress and her name, Sheila, was worked upon it in gold thread. The next thing Flaswell noticed was her slenderness, which was scarcely suitable for hard work on outplanet conditions. Her skin was a creamy white, obviously the kind that would blister under his planetoid's fierce summer sun. Her hands were long-fingered, red-nailed, elegant -- completely unlike anything the Roebuck-Ward Company had promised. As for her legs and other parts, Flaswell decided they would be very well on Earth, but not here, where a man must pay attention to his work. She couldn't even be said to have a low center of gravity. Quite the contrary. Flaswell felt, not unreasonably, that he had been swindled, duped, made a fool of. Sheila stepped out of the crate, walked to a window and looked out over Flaswell's flowering green fields and his picturesque mountains beyond them. "But where are the palm trees?" she asked. "Palm trees?" "Of course. They told me that Srinigar V had palm trees." "This is not Srinigar V," Flaswell said. "But aren't you the Pasha of Srae?" Sheila gasped. "Certainly not. I am a Frontiersman. Aren't you a Frontier Model Bride?" "Do I look like a Frontier Model Bride?" Sheila snapped, her eyes flashing. "I am the Ultra Deluxe Luxury Model Bride and I was supposed to go to the subtropical paradise planet of Srinigar V." "We've both been cheated. The shipping department must have made an error," Flaswell said gloomily. The girl looked around Flaswell's crude living room and a wince twinged her pretty features. "Oh, well. I suppose you can arrange transportation for me to Srinigar V." "I can't even afford to go to Nagondicon," Flaswell said. "I will inform Roebuck-Ward of their error. They will undoubtedly arrange transportation for you, when they send me my Frontier Model Bride." Sheila shrugged her shoulders. "Travel broadens one," she said. Flaswell nodded. He was thinking hard. This girl had, it was obvious, no pioneering qualities. But she was amazingly pretty. He saw no reason why her stay shouldn't be a pleasant one for both. "Under the circumstances," Flaswell said, with an ingratiating smile, "we might as well be friends." "Under what circumstances?" "We are the only two Human People on the planet." Flaswell rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. "Let's have a drink. Tell me all about yourself. Do you -- " A T that moment, he heard a loud sound behind. He turned and saw a small, squat robot climbing from a compartment in the packing case. "What do you want?" Flaswell demanded. "I," said the robot, "am a Marrying Robot, empowered by the government to provide legal marriages in space. I am further directed by the Roebuck-Ward Company to act as guardian, duenna and protector for the young lady in my charge, until such time as my primary function, to perform a ceremony of marriage, has been accomplished." "Uppity damned robot," Flaswell grumbled. "What did you expect?" Sheila asked. "A quick-frozen Human preacher?" "Of course not. But a robot duenna -- " "The very best kind," she assured him. "You'd be surprised at how some men act when they get a few light-years from Earth." "I would?" Flaswell said disconsolately. "So I'm told," Sheila replied, demurely looking away from him. "And after all, the promised bride of the Pasha of Srae should have a guardian of some sort." "Dearly beloved," the robot intoned, "we are here gathered to join -- " "Not now," Sheila said loftily. "Not this one." "I'll have the robots fix a room for you," Flaswell growled, and walked away, mumbling to himself about Human Man's Burden. He radioed Roebuck-Ward and was told that the proper model Bride would be sent at once and the interloper shipped elsewhere. Then he returned to his farming and mining, determined to ignore the presence of Sheila and her duenna. Work continued on Chance. There was thorium to be mined out of the soil and new wells to dig. Harvest time was soon at hand, and the robots toiled for long hours in the green-blossomed fields, and lubricating oil glistened on their honest metal faces, and the air was fragrant with the perfume of the dir flowers. Sheila made her presence felt with subtle yet surprising force. Soon there were plastic lampshades over the naked cold-light bulbs and drapes over the stark windows and scatter rugs on the floors. And there were many other changes around the house that Flaswell felt rather than saw. His diet underwent a change, too. The robot chefs memory tape had worn thin in many spots, so all the poor mechanical could remember how to make was beef Stroganoff, cucumber salad, rice pudding and cocoa. Flaswell had, with considerable stoicism, been eating these dishes ever since he came to Chance, varying them occasionally with shipwreck rations. chef in hand. Patiently she impressed upon his memory tape the recipes for beef stew, pot roast, tossed green salad, apple pie, and many others. The eating situation upon Chance began to improve markedly. But when Sheila put up smis jelly in vacuum jars, Flaswell began to have doubts. Here, after all, was a remarkably practical young lady, in spite of her expensive appearance. She could do all the things a Frontier Wife could do. And she had other attributes. What did he need a regular Roebuck-Ward Frontier Model for? After mulling this for a while, Flaswell said to his foreman, "Gunga-Sam, I am confused." "Ah?" said the foreman, his metal face impassive. "I guess I need a little of that robot intuition. She's doing very well, isn't she, Gunga-Sam?" "The Human Woman is taking her proper share of Human Person's Burden." "She sure is. But can it last? She's doing as much as any Frontier Model Wife could do, isn't she? Cooking, canning -- " "The workers love her," GungaSam said with simple dignity. "You did not know, sir, but when that rust epidemic broke out last week, she toiled night and day, bringing relief and comforting the frightened younger robots." "She did all that?" Flaswell gasped, shaken. "But a girl of her background, a luxury model -- " "It does not matter. She is a Human Person and she has the strength and nobility to take on Human Person's Burden." "Do you know," Flaswell said slowly, "this has convinced me. I really believe she is fit to stay here. It's not her fault she isn't a Frontier Model. That's a matter of screening and conditioning, and you can't change that. I'm going to tell her she can stay. And then I'll cancel the other Roebuck order." A strange expression glowed in the foreman's eyes, an expression almost of amusement. He bowed low and said, "It shall be as the master wishes." Flaswell hurried out to find Sheila.  had been constructed out of an old toolshed. With the aid of a robot mechanic, she was caring for the dents and dislocations that are the peculiar lot of metalskinned beings. "Sheila," Flaswell said, "I want to speak to you." "Sure," she answered absently, "as soon as I tighten this bolt." She locked the bolt cleverly into place, and tapped the robot with her wrench. "There, Pedro," she said, "try that leg now." The robot stood up gingerly, put weight on the leg, found that it held. He capered comically around the Human Woman, saying, "You sure fixed it, Boss Lady. Gracias, ma'am." And he danced out into the sunshine. Flaswell and Sheila watched him go, smiling at his antics. "They're just like children," Flaswell said. "One can't help but love them," Sheila responded. "They're so happy, so carefree -- " "But they haven't got souls," Flaswell reminded her. "No," she agreed somberly. "They haven't. What did you wish to see me about?" "I wanted to tell you -- " Flaswell looked around. The sick bay was an antiseptic place, filled with wrenches, screwdrivers, hacksaws, ballpeen hammers and other medical equipment. It was hardly the atmosphere for the sort of announcement he was about to make. "Come with me," he said. They walked out of the hospital and through the blossoming green fields, to the foot of Flaswell's spectacular mountains. There, shadowed by craggy cliffs, was a still, dark pool of water overhung with giant trees, which Flaswell had force-grown. Here they paused. "I wanted to say this," Flaswell said. "You have surprised me completely, Sheila. I expected you would be a parasite, a purposeless person. Your background, your breeding, your appearance all pointed in this direction. But I was wrong. You have risen to the challenge of a Frontier environment, have conquered it triumphantly, and have won the hearts of everybody." "Everybody?" Sheila asked very softly. "I believe I can speak for every robot on the planetoid. They idolize you. I think you belong here, Sheila." The girl was silent for a long while, and the wind murmured through the boughs of the giant force-grown trees, and ruffled the black surface of the lake. Finally she said, "Do you think I belong here?" Flaswell felt engulfed by her exquisite perfection, lost in the topaz depths of her eyes. His breath came fast, he touched her hand, her fingers clung. "Sheila..." "Yes, Edward..." "Dearly beloved," a strident metallic boice barked, "we are here gathered -- " "Not now, you fool!" Sheila cried. ' I ' HE Marrying Robot came forward and said sulkily, "Much as I hate to interfere in the affairs of Human People, my taped coefficients are such that I must. To my way of thinking, physical contact is meaningless. I have, by way of experiment, clashed limbs with a seamstress robot. All I got for my troubles was a dent. Once I thought I experienced something, an electric something that shot through me giddily and made me think of slowly shifting geometric forms. But upon examination, I discovered the insulation had parted from a conductor center. Therefore, the emotion was invalid." "Uppity damned robot," Flaswell growled. "Excuse my presumption. I was merely trying to explain that I personally find my instructions unintelligible -- that is, to prevent any and all physical contact until a ceremony of marriage has been performed. But there it is; those are my orders. Can't I get it over with now?" "No!" said Sheila. The robot shrugged his shoulders fatalistically and slid into the underbrush. "Can't stand a robot who doesn't know his place," said Flaswell. "But it's all right." "What?" "Yes," Flaswell said, with an air of conviction. "You are as good as any Frontier Model Wife and far prettier. Sheila, will you marry me?" The robot, who had been thrashing around in the underbrush, now slid eagerly toward them. "No," said Sheila. "No?" Flaswell repeated uncomprehendingly. "You heard me. No! Absolutely no!" "But why? You fit so well here, Sheila. The robots adore you. I've never seen them work so well -- " "I'm not interested in your robots," she said, standing very straight, her hair disheveled, her eyes blazing. "And I am not interested in your planetoid. And I am most emphatically not interested in you. I am going to Srinigar V, where I will be the pampered bride of the Pasha of Srae!" They stared at each other, Sheila white-faced with anger, Flaswell red with confusion. The Marrying Robot said, "Now should I start the ceremony? Dearly beloved..." Sheila whirled and ran toward the house. "I don't understand," the Marrying Robot said plaintively. "It's all very bewildering. When does the ceremony take place?" "It doesn't," Flaswell said, and stalked toward the house, his brows beetling with rage. The robot hesitated, sighed metallically and hurried after the Ultra Deluxe Luxury Model Bride. A LL that night, Flaswell sat in his room, drank deeply and mumbled to himself. Shortly after dawn, the loyal Gunga-Sam knocked and slipped into the room. "Women!" Flaswell snarled to his servitor. "Ah?" said Gunga-Sam. "I'll never understand them," Flaswell said. "She led me on. I thought she wanted to stay here. I thought..." "The mind of Human Man is murky and dark," said GungaSam, "but it is as crystal compared to the mind of Human Woman." "Where did you get that?" Flaswell asked. "It is an ancient robot proverb." "You robots. Sometimes I wonder if you don't have souls." "Oh, no, Mr. Flaswell, Boss. It is expressly written in our Construction Specifications that robots are to be built with no souls, to spare them anguish." "A very wise provision," Flaswell said, "and something they might consider with Human People, too. Well, to hell with her. What do you want?" "I came to tell you, sir, that the drone freighter is landing." Flaswell turned pale. "So soon? Then it's bringing my new bride!" "Undoubtedly." "And it will take Sheila away to Srinigar V." "Assuredly, sir." Flaswell groaned and clutched his head. Then he straightened and said, "All right, all right. I'll see if she's ready." He found Sheila in the living room, watching the drone freighter spiral in. She said, "The very best of luck, Edward. I hope your new bride fulfills all your expectations." The drone freighter landed and the robots began removing a large packing case. "I had better go," Sheila said. "They won't wait long." She held out her hand. Flaswell took it. He held her hand for a moment, then found he was holding her arm. She did not resist, nor did the Marrying Robot break into the room. Flaswell suddenly found that Sheila was in his arms. He kissed her and felt exactly like a small sun going nova. Finally she said, "Wow," huskily, in a not quite believing voice. Flaswell cleared his throat twice. "Sheila, I love you. I can't offer you much luxury here, but if you'd stay -- " "It's about time you found out you love me, you dope!" she said. "Of course I'm staying!" T HE next few minutes were ecstatic and decidedly vertiginous. They were interrupted at last by the sound of loud robot voices outside. The door burst open and the Marrying Robot stamped in, followed by GungaSam and two farm mechanicals. "Really!" the Marrying Robot said. "It is unbelievable! To think I'd see the day when robot pitted himself against robot!" "What happened?" Flaswell asked. "This foreman of yours sat on me," the Marrying Robot said indignantly, "while his cronies held my limbs. I was merely trying to enter this room and perform my duty as set forth by the government and the Roebuck-Ward Company." "Why, Gunga-Sam!" Flaswell said, grinning. The Marrying Robot hurried up to Sheila. "Are you damaged? Any dents? Any short-circuits?" "I don't think so," said Sheila breathlessly. Gunga-Sam said to Flaswell, "The fault is all mine. Boss, sir. But everyone knows that Human Man and Human Woman need solitude during the courtship period. I merely performed what I considered my duty to the Human Race in this respect, Mr. Flaswell, Boss, sahib." "You did well, Gunga-Sam," Flaswell said. "I'm deeply grateful and -- oh, Lord!" "What is it?" Sheila asked apprehensively. Flaswell was staring out the window. The farm robots were carrying the large packing case toward the house. "The Frontier Model Bride!" said Flaswell. "What'll we do, darling? I canceled you and legally contracted for the other one. Do you think we can break the contract?" Sheila laughed. "Don't worry. There's no Frontier Model Bride in that box. Your order was canceled as soon as it was received." "It was?" "Certainly." She looked down, ashamed. "You'll hate me for this -- " "I won't," he promised. "What is it?" "Well, Frontiersmen's pictures are on file at the Company, you know, so Brides can see what they're getting. There is a choice -- for the girls, I mean -- and I'd been hanging around the place so long, unable to get unclassified as an Ultra Deluxe, that I -- I made friends with the head of the order department. And," she said all in a rush, "I got myself sent here." "But the Pasha of Srae -- " "I made him up." "But why?" Flaswell asked puzzledly. "You're so pretty -- " "That everybody expects me to be a toy for some spoiled, pudgy idiot," she finished with a good deal of heat. "I don't want to be! I want to be a wife! And I'm just as good as any chunky, homely female!" "Better," he said. "I can cook and doctor robots and be practical, can't I? Haven't I proved it?" "Of course, dear." She began to cry. "But nobody would believe it, so I had to trick you into letting me stay long enough to -- to fall in love with  me. "Which I did," he said, drying her eyes for her. "It's all worked out fine. The whole thing was a lucky accident." What looked like a blush appeared on Gunga-Sam's metallic face. "You mean it wasn't an accident?" Flaswell exclaimed. "Well, sir, Mr. Flaswell, effendi, it is well known that Human Man needs attractive Human Woman. The Frontier Model sounded a little severe and Memsahib Sheila is a daughter of a friend of my former master. So I took the liberty of sending the order directly to her. She got her friend in the order department to show her your picture and ship her here. I hope you are not displeased with your humble servant for disobeying." well finally got out. "It's like I always said -- you robots understand Human People better than anyone." He turned to Sheila. "But what is in that packing case?" "My dresses and my jewelry, my shoes, my cosmetics, my hair styler, my -- " "But" "You want me to look nice when we go visiting, dear," Sheila only fifteen days away. I looked it up before I came." Flaswell nodded resignedly. You had to expect something like this from an Ultra Deluxe Luxury Model Bride. "Now!" Sheila said, turning to the Marrying Robot. The robot didn't answer. "Now!" Flaswell shouted. "You're quite sure?" the robot queried sulkily. "Yes! Get started!" "I just don't understand," the Marrying Robot said. "Why now? Why not last week? Am I the only sane one here? Oh, well. Dearly beloved..." And the ceremony was held at last. Flaswell proclaimed a three day holiday and the robots sang and danced and celebrated in their carefree robot fashion. Thereafter, life was never the same on Chance. The Flaswells began to have a modest social life, to visit and be visited by couples fifteen and twenty days Randico I. But the rest of the time, Sheila was an irreproachable Frontier Wife, loved by the robots and idolized by her husband. The Marrying Robot, following his instruction manual, retrained himself as an accountant and bookkeeper, skills for which his mentality was peculiarly well suited. He often said the whole place would go to pieces if it weren't for him. And the robots continued to dig thorium from the soil, and the dir, olge and smis blossomed, and Flaswell and Sheila shared together the responsibility of Human People's Burden. Flaswell was always quite vocal on the advantages of shopping at Roebuck-Ward. But Sheila knew that the real advantage was in having a foreman like the loyal, soulless Gunga-Sam. # Star Shelf Doubleday  Co., Inc., # imagination of the American public as few books have since WW II. Mr. Bernstein, Senior, once remarked to Junior that Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke "will never make a dime out of it," meaning parapsychology, but that assuredly does not hold true of his son's book. Besides its phenomenal sales, it is to be produced (as fiction?) by Hollywood. Its subject matter, reincarnation, is old hat. The more recent device, recall via hypnosis, is almost as old. Then why has the book caught fire? Several guesses: Honest intellectual curiosity, the hope for communication with the hereafter such as follows every war, crackpottery and cultism. Also, in itself it is blithe and breezily entertaining until it reaches the verbatim record of the several trances undergone by the subject, "Mrs. Simmons," when it assumes an aura of authenticity. Is it authentic? That is the real question. Hypnotist and subject insist it is. Authorities almost unanimously agree that the subject, from books, plays or films that have sunk into her subconscious, has built up a character in obedience to a hypnotic command. Much of the data, if it actually existed, would be on public record. It isn't. Nevertheless, though Bernstein contributes nothing new to our knowledge of hypnotism, the book may prove valuable in instigating valid research. Arthur C. Clarke, Ballantine Books, # stories to some of his most recent, this volume presents an excellent cross-section of the art of one of science fiction's foremost exponents. Should you wish to wean a neophyte, I can't think of a better assortment or one better selected for change of pace. "Rescue Party," Clarke's first published story, remains as fresh and provocative after ten years as on publication. It is the only yarn in which Clarke gives full vent to his cosmic imagination, but that in no way detracts from the color and interest of the remainder. That he is capable of turning out pure horror is attested to in "A Walk In the Dark" and "The no Parasite." The whimsical humor of "Trouble with the Natives" and the tongue-in-cheek sly clowning of "Jupiter Five" add spice to the collection. A couple of stories are somewhat below the general level of the book, but who can quibble about the side-dishes when the main course is so appetizing? The volume is also available paperbound. Heinlein. Doubleday  Co., Inc., # count, but I estimate this to be Heinlein's twentieth book. His current offering is an excellent example of his ability to take one of the oldest plots in any literature, that of impersonation, and present it as an enjoyable reading experience. The story opens, as have countless space operas, in a bar complete with Martians and a huge spaceman. After this prosaic beginning, however, any resemblance to space opera is accidental. The yam's hero is an unlikelyseeming thespian named The Great Lorenzo, who has been chine as the likeliest impersonator of John J. Bonforte, leader of the Political Expansionist coalition. Seems as if some political opponents of Bonforte have kidnaped him on the eve of a Martian presentation in his honor. The Martians, sticklers for protocol, would never forgive his absence from such an honor for any reason except death, aside from which it would reflect unfavorably on all Earthmen. It is up to Lorenzo to carry off a masquerade that will deceive even close friends of the missing leader. I don't think I'm giving the story away when I say that he succeeds, for the real story begins when he has to carry on beyond the acceptance of the Martian honor. The book does not measure up to the standards of the author's Sixth Column or The Puppet Masters, but it makes pleasant and exciting reading. W. J. Stuart. Farrar, Straus  Cudahy, Inc., # proached this book with a great deal of trepidation, as who wouldn't, considering that it is based on a Cinemascope and color Hollywood film? Need I remind you of what they did to Jones' This Island Earth? Can ycu visualize what the book version of that would have been if based on the film? In color, yet! I am delighted to report that, though this is unabashed space opera, it is of a very superior kind. Stuart, whoever he might be, has done an excellent job of camouflaging the obvious Hollywood touch. For instance, there's a scientist and his beautiful daughter, marooned on a far-from-desert planet -- scares you to, huh? -- yet Stuart actually makes it palatable. He also carries off the difficult literary feat of telling his story in the first person singular from three different viewpoints: the scientist exposed to the superior knowledge of a long-dead race; the ship's doctor of the expedition sent to rescue him; and the hardbitten young commander of the rescue ship. Taut and tenseful despite its celluloid ancestry. John Day Co., # " hundred years, space travel has become a commonplace, someone is going to write a Mysteries of the Asteroid Belt or M. o. t. Moon and it will read amazingly like this book. The protagonists will also be men of courage, daring and physical fortitude and their enemy, environment, will be still more hostile, but advanced technology will tend to make an almost exact comparison possible. lit Also, there will undoubtedly be visionaries, carried away by their confidence in some outre device, such as occurred in "Andre's Folly," an account of a disastrous attempt to fly over the North Pole with a hydrogen-filled balloon. And the fantastic loss of life during the centuries-long search for the Northwest Passage will most likely be duplicated by expeditions seeking an economically feasible route through the Asteroid Belt. All in all, an invigorating exercise in extrapolation, such as the author never intended, that I recommend highly to any fan with a restless imagination. Paul French. Doubleday and Co., Inc., # ' Lucky Starr series is as fastmoving as its predecessors. This time David Starr, member of the Council of Science, is sent to Mercury to investigate why things are going wrong with Project Light, a pure science research project. It is under condemnation for political reasons by a Senator Swenson as a waste of taxpayer's money, but even without an that the trouble and Swenson are tied by the same knot. m Plenty of interesting facts are tossed in for free by the author without slowing the appropriately swift action. putting out "The Science-Fiction World," a handsome little paper edited by Robert Bloch and Bob Tucker, crammed with information of general interest. Also specific dope on cinema releases and planning and magazine and fan doings. It's free from Gnome Press, # E. #I St., N.Y. #, N.Y... Wombats and Moondust, a slender volume of poetry in a fantastic vein by Thomas Burnett Swann, # from Wings Press of Mill Valley, Calif. In no sense science fiction, but off-track and of possible interest... Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer by Cecil Michael, # from Vantage Press, has a cowcatcher title and is honest enough to call itself fiction, as others in its field do not do. It's a visitation yarn with some weird concepts that would have been more effective in surer hands...Aircraft Today # by John W. R. Taylor, Philosophical Library, #, is another of the beautifully English-printed and illustrated factual issues. This is an annual collection of articles on every aspect of aviation -- even tells you "How to Build Yourself an Aeroplane"! Seeing-Eye Dog The problem was not whether Curt could accept his being blind -- It had to accept him! in the impenetrable, oppressive darkness: the sonorous ticking of the wall clock, the shrill cries of children at play, the distant blatancy of angry auto horns. Curt Markson gripped the knurled arm rests and leaned forward as though he might pierce the black pall. "But I've qualified, haven't I?" Somewhere beyond the curtain of blackness, the director's swivel chair creaked tentatively. "Yes -- and no. Oh, you satisfy the objective requirements. But I'm afraid, prove assignment of an animal in your case." "But I've passed all the tests!" "You have," Dr. Wendt conceded wearily. "However, your business partner here can describe how you've affected the Institute's animals. He's been at all your sessions. Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but it wasn't at all pleasant for the dogs." Alex Bardell took his arm solicitously. "That's true, Curt." the pitiful whimpering of the staff animals, their yelps of pain, the scurrying staccato of their claws as they thrashed about and cowered in anguish. "Visual empathy is normally achieved with a delicate touch, scarcely felt by the Seeing-Eye Dog," Wendt explained. "But occasionally there is the person with an unbearably rough level of mental impact. It's as though someone were grinding into the animal's brain with a rasp. Unfortunately, you're one of those persons." "But can't I tone down?" "No one has been able to appreciably alter his impact index yet, although recent research has been encouraging." "I can keep on trying!" "It isn't that simple. Besides the humane consideration, there's the fact that rough mental contact drives an animal mad. And there's no telling when it may identify the source of its anguish and attack -- viciously." Curt groped for the desk, found stood up under the punishment. Can't I have one of them?" "No," Wendt said bluntly. "Each animal here has gone through years of special preparation to train applicants. Each is the result of generations of nucleonically stimulated inbreeding. In all other respects, though, they're still just dogs. Their breaking point is merely higher than any stock animal that could be assigned to you by the Labonitz Institute of Telepathic Empathy." "But I've got to have my sight before next week!" Curt insisted. "I have to know by then whether I can live a normal life with a Seeing-Eye Dog!" "I know. Your fiancee is due back then. How long has it been since your accident?" "Two months." Curt dropped back into his chair. "And you're organically blind?" "Hopelessly blind." "You've been in darkness now for sixty days with a permanent optic nerve lesion." Wendt's voice was coldly impersonal. "Mr. Markson, I was sightless forty years before Dr. Labonitz perfected the VE technique." Animal nails clattered on the tile floor and suddenly a dog's breath panted in Curt's face as two forepaws plopped down on his leg. Wendt had sent his "eyes" up for a closer look. insects, rubber droned monotonously on concrete as Curt tried to visualize the rush of summer green past the car. "Don't take me back to the office, Alex," he said despondently. "I'm not much use there." Alex laughed. "Of course you are. As soon as you readjust, you'll be contributing as much as before." Curt was depressively silent. Then, "It's no good. I'm going to pull out of the business -- get away entirely." Alex jolted the car to a stop. "Don't you realize I want you to share the firm? I still can't help feeling responsible for the accident." "Forget it. The only reason the company plane crashed was because I didn't make sure I had enough gas." "But I told you I'd have the gauge fixed and see that the tank was full." "You couldn't -- you had car trouble and there was no way to send word before I took off." Alex drove on silently and Curt played a spiritless game of trying to identify the sounds that came to him in the eternal night. "Alex, I don't want you to think I don't appreciate everything. You've been like a brother. Even in the matter of Sue -- " "There was nothing magnanimous in that. She loved you, not me." Curt slumped. "That's pretty much like water over the dam. When she gets back in town, I'm not even going to see her. Things will be different then... if you're still interested." Alex exploded. "So you want me to rescue her? For God's sake, knock off the dirge! Anyway, I've figured out -- " "We're not headed downtown, are we?" "No. I didn't want to say anything until I was sure I could make the connections. But when I saw you'd be turned down by the Institute, I got in touch with a kennel owner." He braked the car. Curt felt the wheels swerve and roll up the incline of his driveway. A dog yelped anxiously nearby and there was the clanking of a chain. "I went to this kennel yesterday. They carry on a black market operation in Seeing-Eye Dogs. Actually, the dogs are rejects a devious VE index, others -- well, others just not docile enough to be trusted with a blind person." Curt tensed anxiously, then smiled. Again hope flared in the frightful darkness. Alex helped him out of the car. "They insist on only one thing -- that we keep the animal muzzled." Eagerly, Curt went forward toward the dog's expectant whimpering. "We'll skip the muzzle in this case." "But S-E dogs are hybrid mastiffs! This one weighs almost two hundred pounds!" "No muzzle," Curt repeated obstinately. "That's no way to gain an animal's confidence." "All right, then, no muzzle -- but only if you don't try visual empathy unless I'm with you." animal facetiously during a moment of buoyant optimism as he spent the rest of the day and the next morning winning the mastiff's trust. And the name, Curt realized as he knelt beside the Seeing-Eye Dog in the living room and sent his sensitive fingers over its powerful flank, was indeed appropriate. Brutus was huge. There was the feel of lurking might in every sweeping line of its broad back and thickset shoulders. And in the great head and blunt, wrinkled snout -- homely as they must have been visually -- there was a tactile revelation of gentle and noble tolerance. Curt rose and the dog reared up, dropping its forepaws on his shoulders. Laughing, he staggered back under the weight until he fell clumsily on the sofa. Alex came over and disentangled them. "By tomorrow," he said encouragingly, "you ought to be ready to try a first contact." Curt tensed on the sofa. Why not now? There wasn't much time left -- Sue was due in next week and already it was Friday. Straining, he reduced his thought intensity to a mere whisper of force, remembering the finer points of receptive concentration. Projecting an empathic connection, Wendt had said, was like singling out an obscure corridor in the brain and imagining a beam of perceptive force shining down its length -- into the primitive consciousness of the dog. Delicately, Curt told himself. In his case, the corridor must be a tenuous, hollow thread, pliable and gossamer. And the beam itself had to be pale and extenuated. He added a modicum of intensity to the fancied ray of perception. And there was contact! Nothing that could be called vision -- not yet -- only the merest glimmer of external light. But that was all he wanted now. He must be meticulous, allowing Brutus ample time for reassurance against the presence of something alien in its mind. The mastiff whined restlessly and Curt heard the heavy fall of its pads on the carpet as it paced. The perceptive thread wound intimately around isolated conceptual islands in the dog's consciousness-precincts of pseudosemantic thought. One prominent cloud of swirling concept haze carried the abstraction afraid. And Brutus' whine climbed to a yelp. "Curt! You're trying it?" He nodded. "Easy, then," Alex cautioned. "Remember -- delicately!"  ing purposely among the shallow thought patterns. He recognized some of the elemental animal ideas and discerned their conceptual connotation. There was the pre-eminent me-I of selfidentification -- the eager predicated food-stuff -- the avid yearning of the affirmative want -- the reverential idea mist of the mystical man-thing and its, complementary plural, more-than-oneman-thing. Boldly now, Curt bolstered the empathic connection, seeking out the animal's visual receptor system. And there was light! Vaguely, he could see the outline of furniture, himself standing in front of the dog, the sunshine pouring in through the window. But the mastiffs fear was like a great quaking vibration and the precincts of concept haze swirled and thrashed viciously: me-I -- afraid -- man-thing -- more-thanone-man-thing -- Brutus reared in anguish and abruptly Curt's contact with the animal snapped, plunging him back into darkness. And Curt could hear the dog barging and barking madly about the room. "Easy!" Alex shouted. "Break off!" Curt thrust his hands up protectively. But suddenly the great animal lunged into him and sent him flailing backward. Somewhere in the room, furniture smashed and glass shattered. "What happened?" he cried. "The fool dog banged into a table. But he seems to be calming down now." Groping, Curt went toward the sound of the mastiffs rasping breathing. "Stay away!" Alex warned. "He's dangerous!" But Curt's hands touched the great trembling body and he ran his fingers tenderly over the furrowed coat of the dog's nape, whispering reassuring words. Its whimpers subsided eventually and it turned to lick his hand. "We've got to muzzle the beast," Alex said resolutely. Curt shook his head. "This is bad enough." while after Alex phoned to say he wouldn't be in until late, the facsimile teletype's bell signaled reception of a telegram while its keys clacked out the message. Curt tore the sheet out of the machine and held it in front of his eyes, before he remembered he couldn't see. Bitterly, he crumpled the paper and thrust it in his pocket. He felt his way to the window. With the breeze on his face, he tried to visualize the full Moon that would be rising in the east. "Brutus," he called softly. The mastiffs chain dragged across the supporting wire until the animal stood close enough for Curt to hear its friendly, excited breathing. He toyed tentatively with the idea of attempting another VE contact, now that the distractions of the day were over and the dog was safely tethered. Tenderly, he sent the perceptual beam through the narrow corridor to the animal's mind. And again he encountered the ethereal islands of conceptual constructs. There was the vague reflection of his own image, all cloaked in the idea haze manthing. And in symbolic nearness was the animal's sphere of selfidentity. Only now it was more than me-I. It had taken on a new shade -- me-I-Brutus. Abruptly he realized the manthing image had grown stronger and was swimming into resolution. Now it seemed to be centered in a rectangular frame, silThen he recognized the frame as the window in which he stood. Without complications, he had established visual empathy and was now looking at himself through the eyes of the animal! Brutus gave a soft yelp. But Curt readily recognized that it was not a cry of distress, only alert expectancy. Good boy, Brutus! he thought. The subvocal praise struck responsive idea chords in the mastiff's mind. Me-I-Brutus -- good took shape sluggishly, with a tinge of simple, unaffected pride. Then a new concept haze formed, clouded with perplexity: Boy? Curt remembered the telegram and broke the connection. Hurriedly, he felt his way to the back door and stepped outside, reestablishing contact. Vicarious vision came instantly. And Curt watched himself walk down the steps -- cautiously at first, then more confidently as he realized there was efficient coordination despite the shift to external perspective. He struck out across the yard toward the dog, clearly seeing and avoiding the bench that was in his path. The mastiff started to turn its head aside, but Curt canceled the motion with a deliberately soft impulse. Standing before the animal, he ironed the telegram smooth against his thigh. Then he held the message in front of the dog's face. Brutus started to sniff the paper, but with a gentle command, Curt stayed the action and the dog sat motionless, its eyes on the telegram. The bold type stood out prominently in the moonlight:  for the weekend, Alex fixed breakfast the next morning. But Curt showed little interest in the food. "You should have been here, Alex!" he said enthusiastically. "It worked just the way Wendt said it would." "What do you suppose made it work?" "I don't know, unless it was because I tried it on the spur of the moment. All the other times, I spent hours anticipating visual empathy, building up a tension that could be released only telepathically into the animals' minds." "That might be it," Alex said thoughtfully. "At any rate, I'm glad we're making progress -- with Sue due in day after tomorrow." Curt leaned forward excitedly. "Do you realize if she had been out there last night, she wouldn't even have suspected I was blind?" "It was that good?" "It was remarkable. Wendt was right -- vicarious vision is better than direct sight. You can see yourself in true objective relationship to everything around you." Outside, Brutus' chain slid noisily along its race as the mastiff covered its range again and again in a bounding, playful stride. Alex's chair skittered back. "I've got to run into town and get Jackson started on the Petersburg job specifications. When I come back, we'll see what you can do." After he had gone, Curt roamed restlessly through the blackness of the house, struggling not to anticipate the next attempt at establishing visual empathy. Now he was sure trying too hard had been the cause of all his trouble. But as he went from room to room, he found his thoughts returning uncontrollably to the mastiff, his mind involuntarily trying to make VE contact. At the Institute, they had told him it would be that way. They had said he would find sight contact -- even motor control -- an automatic process. They had promised no more volition would be needed to command the dog's visual faculties than had been required for his own. He was in the hallway when the phone rang. Rather than rerun the obstacle course to the living room, he felt his way toward the extension in Alex's room. His groping hand knocked something off the night table before he found the phone. "Mr. Markson?" a girl's voice inquired. "Yes?" "This is Westside Kennels," she said. "Just calling to see whether you're satisfied with the dog." "Brutus? He's fine." "We thought you'd be pleased. Actually, I just wanted to make sure you got the animal okay. We don't usually deliver them sight unseen and install them in the yard." Curt felt his back tighten. Preoccupied with the conversation, his mind had unconsciously sent out a perceptual thread to Brutus and he had gotten a vicarious glimpse of the yard. "Mr. Markson?" the girl asked. "Yes. Everything's all right. The dog's fine." Deliberately, he closed off the involuntary contact with the mastiff's mind. After he had hung up, he felt along the floor for the object he had knocked off the table. Almost immediately, he found it -- a flat steel file. When he opened the drawer to place it inside, his hand encountered an object whose identity escaped him at first. Curiously, he ran his fingers over the thing. It was a gardener's hand rake. romped playfully in the living room, the thud of its pads resounding against the carpet like the beat of a drum wrapped in wool. Alex led Curt to a straight-back chair. "I think it'll be better," he suggested, "if you relax first, try to ease off all the tension." "I've been anticipating this session too much," Curt said apprehensively. "Suppose it doesn't work?" "Get your mind off it for a while. Think about something else. I'll call the signal on establishing VE." Curt summoned a mental image of Sue as she had been three months earlier, on the day she sailed with her mother on the tour. Brutus quieted, padded over to sniff his trouser legs. But Curt tried to keep his thoughts off the dog. Recalling the accident was an easy way of doing that -- the plane sputtering only minutes after takeoff, stalling, falling away into the wooded section -- "Now, Curt!" Alex said softly. Hesitantly, Curt gave rein to the eager niche of his mind that recoiled before the darkness. Vicarious vision snapped on like a floodlight and the animal whined briefly. Curt saw himself seated in the chair. In a mirror behind him, he watched the dog sitting on its haunches and disinterestedly licking its chops. Now the mastiff's crude thoughts were weaving warm emotions of delightful fondness and loyalty, gratitude -- monotonous in their fawning simplicity, yet sincere and reassuring. Man-thing good boy... Foodstuff?... I-Brutus thirst-water... Curt turned triumphantly toward Alex and, compliantly, the dog's head swung in that direction, centering on the other who stood by the door. Then Brutus went berserk. Sickening with disappointment and fear, Curt watched fierce spasms of pain rack the primitive processes of its mind. the great dog rear up, growling savagely. Then the visual contact broke and he heard the mastiff charging in agony around the room and crashing into the furniture. Alex shouted in alarm and the door slammed shut, muffling the outcry. Helpless before the rampaging brute, Curt held his contact with the animal's nonperceptive consciousness, trying to soothe it. Easy, boy, he thought desperately. It's all right, Brutus! Hurt! I-Brutus afraid! Even despite its anguish, shreds of pseudorational thought seeped through to Curt. Man-thing, other-manthing, man-thing, other-man-thing. Brutus was trying to identify the source of its distress! Curt rose and stumbled around behind the chair, putting it between himself and the crazed animal that raged in the impenetrable darkness. The ponderous wheeling weight lurched against the chair and the impact hurled him to the floor. Then there was the sound of angry teeth crunching into wood, splintering the chair, scattering it about the room. "Alex!" he called frantically. The door opened and the dog flung the chair aside and rushed growling across the room. Alex screamed in pain. Then there was silence as Curt traced Brutus' racing claws down the polished hallway floor and out the back door. "What happened? Alex! You all right?" There was movement on the floor by the door and Alex swore painfully. "Goddam monster got his teeth in my arm!" Curt reached him and felt the sleeve, wet with blood. "I went out to get my automatic," Alex explained. "But it wasn't loaded. There wasn't time to look for bullets." "I'll call a doctor." "It isn't that bad. I can drive to the clinic. But leave that damned animal alone!" stood disconsolately in the doorway while Alex cleaned up the shambles the dog had made of the living room. Curt traced the other's progress acoustically. "Will you drive me to the airport in the morning?" Alex was silent a moment "You've decided to meet Sue anyway?" "No. I'm taking a plane out before she arrives." "You're not giving up that easily!" "But what else is there?" "First you're going to try this visual empathy thing my way. We'll have one more session -- in the garage. Brutus will be chained down. Then you're going to pour it on with all the mental strength you've got!" "But "There are two ways of mastering a stubborn animal. In this case, consideration and kindness aren't paying off. We'll try it the other way." Curt shook his head. "No. I've had enough. I should have listened to Wendt." "I'm sure it will work, Curt. Think it over. When you decide, let me know. I'm going to rest up. This arm's giving me hell." Curt sat before the window throughout the afternoon, feeling the waning warmth of the Sun on his face, listening to the clanking of Brutus' chain as the damp breezes of twilight came in to rustle the curtains. Then quite suddenly -- just as the hall clock rang seven -- he decided. He went to the phone and had the operator put him through to the owner of Westside Kennels. "I'm calling about a dog I got Thursday," he explained when the man answered. "I want you to pick it up in the morning." "I'm sorry, but we don't make any adjustments -- " "I'm giving you back the animal," Curt said. "That's different. Who did you say you were?" "The transaction was in the name of Alex Bardell." There was a pause. "I don't recall that name." "It's the animal you delivered and put on a race in the yard." "Oh, the S-E mastiff? I didn't recognize your voice, Mr. Markson." "That's understandable," Curt said irritably. "You haven't heard it before." "What do you mean? We spoke on the phone three times about the animal before you said to send it out." Curt frowned uncertainly. Then he heard a click in the receiver and remembered the extension in Alex's room. "You still there, Mr. Markson?" "It's okay," said Curt. "Thanks." phone in the cradle. Why, he wondered, had Alex arranged the purchase of the dog in his -- Curt's -- name? More important, why had he been listening in on the telephone conversation? It was almost as though Alex had been trying to create the impression that he'd had nothing to do with buying Brutus. Why? Because he hadn't wanted to become involved in a black market deal? Still puzzling over the click of the extension phone, his thoughts went back to the last time he had used the instrument in Alex's room. And he remembered the file he had knocked off the table and the hand rake he had found in the drawer. He stiffened misgivingly. Now that he recalled the incident, there had been something odd about the rake. All but three -- or was it two? -- of its prongs were missing. And -- The door closed softly behind him and its lock clicked shut. Then he heard the light switch snap on. "Alex?" he called apprehensively. Alex laughed. "You look as though you've doped out something rather unpleasant." "Like what?" Curt asked, befuddled. "I was afraid you had become suspicious when you found the file on the night table yesterday. But then I realized that if you had suspected anything then, you would have left it on top of the table and not in the drawer with the rake." The remaining prongs on the hand rake, Curt remembered now, had been sharpened -- like the fangs of a dog! "But after hearing that phone conversation," Alex went on, "I knew it would take someone with a lot less sense not to have figured out everything then." "The rake!" Curt blurted. "Brutus!" "Brutus? I was hoping there would be another session with the dog. I was going to let him work you over, then finish the job with the rake. But since you forced the issue, I'll have to lock him up in here and let him supply all the evidence I'm going to need." "I don't think he'll attack me." "Oh, but he will," Alex said. "I can pour enough pain and confusion into his mind to make him tear the whole house up. You see, I had a lot of practice with empathy and control when I attended the sessions with you at the Institute." "You were driving Brutus mad!" "Of course. In fact, I'm the reaYou're probably as efficient a VE contact controller as the next guy. But I couldn't let it be that way. Because then you'd learn that with an S-E dog, blindness wouldn't be any obstacle at all between you and Sue. So I was always there to agitate the dogs and make sure you'd be rejected; to engineer a deal so it would appear that you yourself bought a dangerous black market animal; to keep enraging Brutus telepathically -- "  But Alex's fist exploded against his face and he dropped to the floor. Water sour with the smell of stale flowers spilled into his face and a hand pulled him roughly to his feet. "Even letting you get by with that successful session with the dog Friday night fitted in well with my plans," Alex went on softly. "It gave you confidence so you'd be encouraged to continue your attempts at VE." Curt sent eyes that couldn't see darting about the room and Alex laughed at his desperation. "Even this gash on my arm is a bit of luck. If I have to, I can show the dog was just as much a threat to me as it was to you." "They'll wonder why you didn't help me when the dog attacked," Curt pointed out. "Not a chance. You see, I left for Cleveland this morning on the two-fifteen. Several persons saw me buy a ticket and get on the train. But I made certain they didn't see me get off before it left. Others will see me return tomorrow morning. In between departure and arrival, I haven't left the house and the car's hidden in the garage. I think I'll even go to a hotel when I get in tomorrow and let the housekeeper find the mess here." Curt stood frozen against the wall, wrestling helplessly with his thoughts. But what chance did he have -- blind? Outside, Brutus yawned audibly and stirred inside the kennel next to the house. "But you know something, Curt? I don't think there'll even be an investigation. What happened will be clear enough." Curt listened helplessly to the approaching footsteps. "Was it Sue?" he asked. He imagined he could see Alex's characteristic shrug. "Sue and the business, of course. You didn't think I would let you have her so easily, did you? And with the arrangement we have, this is the only way I can own the firm outright." "The crash, too, Alex?" TT E tried to hide the hope on his face as he suddenly sent a thread of perceptive empathy to Brutus' brain. A nocturnal scene of the yard formed sharply in his mind, framed in the arched entrance to the dog house. "Naturally the crash, too," said Alex. "That seemed like the simplest way. After it failed, though, I couldn't try anything like that again. But when you started your could be done." Gingerly, Curt made the animal rise and step out of the kennel without noise. But Brutus' incessant low-level thoughts seemed to blare deafeningly. I-Brutus good boy. Man-thing -- Curt snipped them off, leaving only the visual empathy corridor. Carefully, he directed the mastiff toward the house. But even if he could find some way to release the dog and bring it crashing through the window, what good would it do? Alex was still there to drive it into a frenzy. Curt tried another desperate play for time. "But why didn't you let me pull out? I wanted to." He brought the dog into a rampant attitude, straining upright at the end of its taut chain -- but silently. "Pull out?" Alex said. 'Tm not that naive. Let you decide later to have another try at the Institute and find out you could get along with an S-E animal?" Swiftly but cautiously, Curt sent the animal prancing sideways until its head was lined up with the window. Now he could see vicariously into the room! Alex was in front of him, the rake with its sharpened prongs drawn back and aimed at his neck. Alex swung the tool and Curt ducked, straightening with an uppercut that couldn't have been better directed even if he had coordinated it from the autoperspective. He left Alex limp on the floor and groped his way out of the house to Brutus. "Come on, boy," he said, unchaining the animal. "Let's get out before he comes to and starts throwing monkey-thoughts into the works." Man-thing good boy, Brutus prated as Curt ushered the dog onto the car seat beside him and drove off. Other-man-thing bad. dutifully behind them as Curt carried Sue's bags toward the car. He had kept the dog at a distance so she wouldn't suspect yet. Ahead, Sue's mother obligingly stepped into the cab Curt had ordered for her. His perspective was a view of their own backs, with the expanse of the airport and its passenger aisles stretching out before them. Curt held her hand more tightly. "Watch out for that crack in the apron," he warned. She laughed lightly and drew up, turning toward him. Puzzled, he sat Brutus on his haunches and directed the animal's gaze on her attractive profile while he guided his own sightless stare full into her face. "All right, Curt," she said cheerfully. "I'm convinced. You can call off the demonstration." Stunned, he backed off. "You knew?" "Of course. Alex kept me informed. He wasn't at all optimistic about it, though. He was sure But I knew you would." He let the breath rush out of his lungs. "Then why didn't you tell me you knew?" "Because I wanted you to see that blindness would make no difference between us." Blithely, she kissed him on the cheek, then turned toward Brutus. "So that's the mutt? Come here, boy. We've got to start getting acquainted." Curt let her drive to town while he sat back enjoying the scenery -- and her. Since Willy Ley began his science department here in March, #, the postman has been staggering in with queries from readers... and the volume of mail has increased steadily. This, instead of distressing us, proves that it is a recognizedly valuable readers # service feature. We're happy. Mr. Ley is happy. Those who are having their questions answered are happy. But what about you? If anything in science puzzles you, ask Willy Leyl And don't think your questions have to be the kind that only technicians and researchers would ask. This department is run for laymen who don't know where to go for such information, not for the professional who does. The questions with the widest popular interest will be answered in the magazine. Send in your queries right now. All we request is that you keep them short and no more than one or two at a time. And please add your name and address; they will be kept confidential if you want, but we can't run anonymous letters. the cards over and over again. His hands were almost steady. "Want to place a limit on the bets?" he asked. His two colleagues who had made the night drive with him from the University said nothing, but Rothman laughed. "Today?" he said. "Today, the sky's the limit." MacPherson rested the deck on the table and watched as Rothman stood up to look through the barred window at the glittering Arizona desert. Rothman had got thinner during his months of confinement; his shoulders were bony beneath the gray hospital robe and his balding head looked like a skull. "Are you going to play?" asked MacPherson. "Or is poker too childish an amusement for a mathematician?" Rothman turned his back to the window. "Oh, I'll play. When three old friends from the Project suddenly turn up for a visit, even a madman will string along." Shuffling the cards again, MacPherson wished the other men would say something; it wasn't fair of them to make him carry Would this be the last poker game -- with all life at stake and every card a mere deuce? the conversation. Professor Avery, who had cut his physics classes in order to join the morning's party, sat in glum silence. His plump face was pale, and behind thicklensed spectacles which enlarged his eyes grotesquely, he blinked as he watched the flickering cards. Dr. Neill, from Physical Chemistry, was tapping his toe against the table leg, watching Rothman, who stood at the window, waiting. "But we can't have much of a game with only four people," said Rothman. "We ought to have a fifth." "Maybe we can find someone." MacPherson walked to the locked steel door and rattled the rectangular lattice set in at shoulder height, put his mouth to the metal bars and called out. "Hey, Joe!" A N attendant in white uniform shuffled into the corridor of closed doors, carrying a tray with one hand and scratching his head with the other. "How about joining us for a game of poker?" Joe shook his head and grinned. "Not me, Professor! I start buddying around with the loonies, I lose my job." "But we're not inmates!" "Maybe not, but Dr. Rothman is." "Doesn't prove I'm crazy, Joe," said Rothman. "Conversely, not being inmates doesn't prove these men are sane." "It's a fact you don't look any crazier to me than a lot of professors," confessed Joe. "I don't know. All I know is, I'm not crazy enough to break the rules and lose my job. Besides, you longhairs wouldn't stand a chance at poker with me." Still grinning, he shuffled out of sight down the hall. MacPherson sighed and went back to the table. "Well, we'll have to get along with just the four of us." "There's always the unseen guest," said Rothman, "but you won't need to deal him a hand. He already holds all the cards." Neill looked up. "Stop hamming and sit down. Quit making like a maniac. It's not even a good act." "Okay." Rothman drew up a chair. "Now what was said about limiting the bets?" "Why bother setting a limit?" said Neill. "We're not likely to aires and we all got exactly the same pay when we were on the Project. Unless your sick pay has had two or three zeros tacked onto it, you're npt going to be making any wild bets, and as for the rest of us -- " "University professors are still being paid less than nightclub dancers," said Avery. "You're lucky to be out of the rat race, Rothman. While we worry about how to pay the grocery bill, you can relax, eating and sleeping at government expense. You never had it so good." "Maybe you'd like to get yourselves committed and keep me company?" MacPherson rapped the deck on the table. "Stop that kind of talk. We came here to play poker." "Did you?" asked Rothman, grinning. "Then why don't you deal?" "Cut, Neill?" said MacPherson. As he shot the slippery cards over the table top, each flick of his thumb watched by Rothman's intent eyes, he regretted this impulsive visit; it now seemed a gesture without meaning. He wondered whether the others were as nervous as he was. On the drive over from Los Angeles during the night, Neill had seemed calm enough and even Avery, who had changed a lot during work on the Project, had chatted with them unconstrainedly. It was hard to be certain what other men were feeling, even when you had known them a long time, but it could not be pleasant for any of them to be visiting a former colleague who had been removed from the Project directly to a sanitarium. "Tell me something," said Rothman as he picked up his cards. "Do you still think I'm crazy?" "Don't be an idiot," MacPherson snapped. "Do you think we'd cut our classes and drive nearly five hundred miles just to play poker with a lunatic?" "No," said Rothman. "That's how I know. But why aren't you frank about it? Why keep on pretending there wasn't a special reason for your visit?" against the table leg again and Avery's eyes were hard and staring as he examined his cards. 'Who'll open?" MacPherson asked. "I can't." "I can," said Rothman. "I'm betting one blue chip. Listen, Avery, why won't you look at me? If you think I'm hamming, what do you call your own act? How long are we going to go on kidding each other? They've shut me up here, but that doesn't mean they've stopped me from logical thinking. My three old friends from the Project don't turn up in the middle of a Friday morning just to calm my fevered brain with a card game." "What's wrong with poker?" demanded MacPherson. "Poker? Nothing. I know -- It must be the test. Total conversion of matter to energy. Not just a minute percentage any more -- total conversion. They've finished the set, haven't they? They're ready to test. They're going to disintegrate Waaku, aren't they? It must be today. Then this is the day the world ends. Tell me, when is zero hour?" Neill's cards had slipped from his fingers and he stooped to the floor, fumbling for them. Avery was bending one corner of a card, creasing it, smoothing it out, and creasing it again. Nobody was going to answer, MacPherson realized. They were leaving it up to him. He spoke sharply. "You're getting onto forbidden ground, Rothman. You know we're not allowed to discuss the Project with you. We're allowed to visit you only under the strictest promise not to speak of it at all. You're certainly rational enough to understand what the therapists have told you, that you'd get well easily enough if you'd stop worrying. Forget about zero hour. Everything's going to be all right." Rothman turned to look out the window. "Is it today?" "How should we know? We're only innocent bystanders now, like you. Remember, we all left the Project over six months ago, except Avery, and last month they let him go." Neill had rearranged his cards now and he looked at them instead of Rothman as he spoke. "There's nothing to worry about. Your calculations were wrong. The test is not going to get out of control -- if and when they make it. But they don't tell us things any more." "Since they fired you," said Rothman. "That's right, since they fired us," Neill said. The creased comer of a card suddenly broke off in his fingers. "If you didn't believe in my calculations, why did you back me up? I didn't ask you to. If you didn't believe in the danger, why didn't you stay out of the argument and keep your jobs? It wasn't your fight. You could have kept out of it -- or attacked me, like Avery." "All we did was insist that even if you had made a mistake in your calculations, that didn't necessarily prove you were crazy," said Neill. "We didn't know whether you were right or not. We couldn't argue about the math. Avery tore that to pieces and the boys at Columbia and Harvard backed him up. MacPherson and I aren't competent to check your math. To us, you didn't seem any crazier than the people who sent you here. But after you'd scared them silly, they had to do something to stop your scaring other people." again, but stopped at the sight of Avery. Avery was standing and crumpling a card spasmodically, his lips were moving without sound, and he was breathing rapidly. "Look here," said MacPherson. "You'd better change the subject. If little Joe passes by the door and hears us talking about the Project, he'll have our visiting privileges revoked before you can say nuclear fission, and they'll stay revoked forever." "How long is forever?" asked Rothman, Avery threw down his cards and walked to the window. Through the bars, there was nothing to be seen but the expanse of sand, glinting in the morning sun, and a cactus plant casting a stubby shadow. He whirled to face the others. "Look, MacPherson," he burst out. "I'm fed up with this game. Snookums Rothman mustn't think about the Project any more, so we mustn't say the naughty word. But we were all in it together at the beginning and there was a while when we were all every bit as scared as he was. Why not tell him we came this morning in case -- just in case -- he'd heard about the test and was worrying? What's the harm in telling him what the whole university knows? That zero hour is today, this morning, now!" "Shut up, you fool!" said MacPherson. But Rothman glanced at his cards again, then looked up. "When does it begin? What time is it now?" "Don't answer!" shouted MacPherson. "Are you trying to knock him off balance again?" "I will answer!" said Avery. "I'm going to tell him. He scared us silly with his calculations; now let us scare him with some cold facts. It'll do him good. Maybe when the test is over, if he finds -- I mean when he finds -- he was wrong, he'll be cured." "Yes, and maybe he'll really be crazy." Grabbing Avery fiercely by the arm, MacPherson tried to drag him to the door, but Avery broke away. "Listen, Rothman!" Avery's breath was coming quick and shallow. "Today is the day! Zero hour is eleven o'clock this morning!" one spoke or moved as they all watched Rothman. At last Rothman sighed, once. "What time is it now?" From the door came a scratching sound. MacPherson turned to see Joe, grinning at them through the steel lattice. "How's things?" Joe wanted to know. "Thought I heard a commotion in here. Doc Rothman's not acting up, I hope?" "Everything's under control, Joe," MacPherson assured him. "Just having a friendly game." "Don't cheat while they're watching you," said Joe, and his face disappeared. "Well, the murder's out," said MacPherson. "No use kidding you any longer," Neill said, fanning his cards. "Eleven o'clock this morning. Six o'clock tomorrow morning, Waaku time. But it's just another test. Nothing's going to happen." Avery took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses. "Any idea of a possible chain reaction is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, I recently spent a full week checking the math again myself, so I know. But we knew how you felt about it, Rothman, and we didn't want you to be worrying here all alone, in case you'd found out. That's why we came." Rothman was looking out the window. He did not answer. Slowly MacPherson went back to his chair and picked up his cards. "And now how about playing some poker? Rothman, you opened for a blue. What about you, Neill?" "I'm staying," said Neill, shoving in a chip. "Always was a gambler. I'm going to stay till the cows come home." "What time is it?" Rothman asked. "I haven't got a wristwatch. They think I might break the crystal and cut my throat." MacPherson slammed down his cards and jerked his watch from his pocket. "What does it matter what time it is? Why couldn't they give you a watch with a plastic crystal? If you have to know, it's eleven-forty." "And thirteen seconds," added Neill. "Then it's already started," said Rothman. H E leaned his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. "It's on its way now. There's somewhat more than a third of the Earth between us and Waaku -- the place where Waaku was, I mean. The disintegration wave is moving slowly. The seismic wave of an earthquake would get here in about fifty minutes, more or less. But the shock wave from Waaku, traveling somewhere around five thousand miles an hour, will need about an hour and seventeen minutes, plus or minus a minute or so. That means it will reach us in about thirty-seven minutes from now, and the disintegration wave is following close behind. Well, nice to have known you, fellows. Anyone want to check my math?" He waved toward the desk behind him, piled high with manuscript and a sprawling heap of books on which rested a slide-rule. "Calm down," said MacPherson. "Nothing is going to happen. Damn you, Avery! Are you proud of what you accomplished?" Avery glared. "It'll do him good! He's got to learn to face reality, like the rest of us. In a little more than half an hour, the test will be finished. The world will still be here. Rothman will have to admit his equations were wrong -- and then he'll be cured." Rothman leaned forward. "Or contrariwise, Rothman will not have to admit he was wrong and Rothman will not be cured! If I made a mistake in my math, why couldn't anybody put his finger on it? I'm not so crazy that I wouldn't be able to see an error in calculus when it was pointed out to me. If you're sure my calculations are wrong, why do you look so frightened?" "Do we have to go over all that again?" said MacPherson. "The boys at Columbia told you where the mistake was. It's where you inverted that twelve-by-twelve matrix. Didn't you bother to check the inverted matrix?" "The same old tale." Rothman picked up his cards. "No mathematician will ever admit that another mathematician could invent a method beyond his comprehension. Still harping on an error in my inverted matrix. What time is it now?" "There's no doubt that your calculations are wrong," said Neill, "but I still don't see why we have to insist on proving it the hard way. With bombs, why do we need to fool around with the total disintegration of matter? Sure, I know the new model releases a googol times the energy you get out of uranium fission, but who cares? There's plenty of uranium for our needs." "The trouble with uranium is that it doesn't make a big enough bang," said MacPherson. "People aren't impressed by it any more. The same goes for plutonium, even for lithium, at least for any size bomb we can make. The idea is to show the world something so convincing that they'll never even think of a war again. When they see every island in the Waaku chain wiped off the map, they'll get the point." and cleared his throat. "Did you check the inverted twelve-bytwelve, Rothman?" "I suppose you think I forgot to. Have you checked it?" "Yes, I have. I may not know much math, but I did check it." "Even after the Columbia boys said it was nonsense? Well, does it come out right?" "No, it doesn't! You multiply the inverted matrix by the original and you not only don't get zeros for all elements outside the diagonal, you get a haphazard assortment of ones and twos. Worse still, every element in the diagonal comes out equal to zero. The product of the two matrices is about as different from the identity matrix as anything could be. mathematicians -- how could you manage to make so many mistakes in one set of calculations?" "Did I tell you that was an inverted matrix? Maybe, for this problem, you need something a little more advanced than algebra. Anyhow, if my math is all wrong, why did your first report okay it?" "What do you mean, my first report?" "The one you sent to Prexy. The one you later called in and burned. Except Prexy showed it to me and I photostated it. Here." Rothman reached into the pile of papers on his desk and drew out a little envelope. It contained photographic prints. He held one before Avery's glasses. "Does that look familiar?" Avery drew his hand across his forehead, but did not reply. "Is that true, Avery?" asked MacPherson. "Did you make a report okaying Rothman's calculations and then withdraw it?" "Well, what if I did? The report didn't seem to make me much more popular than Rothman was. What if some very influential people in Government explained to Prexy, and he explained to me, just how unpopular that first report might make me? Or suppose they didn't. Maybe I simply didn't find the mistakes in the math until later." Avery kept looking at his cards as he spoke. "Oh, great," said MacPherson. "Rothman gets put away here, Neill and I lose our jobs, and there's hell to pay in Washington, all because Avery says Rothman's math is full of holes. Now it turns out he wasn't sure and maybe was pressured into it. Grand. Between a screwball and a skunk, I'll choose the screwball. Maybe if Avery had stuck to his guns, there wouldn't have been any test." IT doesn't matter," said Roth- man. "Avery was probably warned to mend his ways. I was. Or maybe he couldn't face the truth. I'm sure he's been much happier, the last few months, believing I'm crazy. Anyway, I don't blame him any more. Maybe my math will soon speak for itself. For your benefit -- " he turned to Avery -- "I may point out that the errors you said you found affect only the velocity of the wave of disintegration. So what if that isn't quite right? The proof that the reaction will be self-sustaining is independent of that." Avery was white with rage. "The proof, as you called it, that the reaction will be self-sustaining and will consume the entire substance of the Earth doesn't make sense, either. You used D as an operator where it should have been a constant. That's what finally made them certain that you were insane." There was a rap at the door and Joe poked his head in. "Lunch, Professors! Twelve o'clock, high noon, like they say. How about some turkey sandwiches?" MacPherson began to sweat; the thought of food made him feel sick. Was it possible, he wondered, that in spite of everything, he was not quite sure? He looked at Neill and Avery, but they had turned their heads away. "We won't bother with lunch, Joe," said Rothman. "Must be a pretty good game if you won't even knock off to eat," said Joe. "Well, will you at least mark your menu for tomorrow?" "For tomorrow? Tomorrow isn't going to come, you know." "Nuts," muttered Joe as he closed and locked the door. "Pure nuts." Avery cleared his throat, and his voice was thin. "Look here, Rothman! If the Universe were composed of matter as unstable as you claim, it would have ceased to exist long ago. Somewhere, somehow, in the infinity of chance events since the creation of the Earth, something would have occurred to start the self-sustaining chain reaction, and all matter would have been annihilated." "Are you trying to prove something to yourself?" asked Rothman. "Surely you don't equate inyears. That's a finite time -- long enough for the more dangerous radioactives to disappear completely, of course, but not long enough for all possible chance events to have taken place. Anyway, I never have asserted that the reaction would reach from Earth to the other planets, or even to the Moon. The Universe, including the Solar System, will still go on. But our old Earth is going up like a pile of magnesium powder mixed with potassium chlorate when you drop a lighted match on it." don't know why I keep arguing with a lunatic. But you know yourself that the value you give for the integration constant in those equations is a pure guess, only you spend ten pages of doubletalk trying to hide that fact. If the constant is the one you give, why, sure, then you get a chain reaction. But you made it up! Who ever heard of a constant of that magnitude in the solution of an ordinary differential equation?" "That's one criticism of my work the Harvard and Columbia boys never mentioned." "Okay, then I mention it. You're crazy!" "Are you sure?" "Positive!" "Then why can't you forget the approach of zero hour? Fll tell you why and you aren't even making a good show of hiding it. You know that, compared to mine, your knowledge of mathematics is about m a level with that of a college sophomore. Deep down, you know that my calculations were correct. You are convinced -- convinced -- that the bombing of Waaku has already started a chain reaction. And that about seventeen minutes past twelve, around eight minutes from now, the shock wave will reach us, and then the wave of disintegration. Look out of the window! See that cactus in the sand, with its little yellow flower? It will be annihilated. All that desert will go, too -- every pebble, every grain of sand. Everything you see, and you yourself, will be disintegrated. transformed into energy!" Suddenly he relaxed into a grin and softened his voice. "I thought we were playing poker. We're waiting for you to bet. Why don't you at least look at your cards?" Avery opened his mouth, then closed it, and picked up his hand, riffling the five cards. "Tm staying," he said. "Here's your blue and I raise you a blue." Slowly the others picked up their hands and stared at the cards. MacPherson scarcely looked at his as he spoke. "I'm staying." He picked up the deck. "Cards, gentlemen?" Rothman shook his head. "I'll play these." Neill took two. "I like to hold a kicker," he explained. Avery and MacPherson drew three. "I opened," said Rothman, "and I'll bet five blue chips." "See you and raise you a blue," Neill said. "TU string along," said Avery. MacPherson threw his hand in. "Til let you guys fight it out." who was studying his cards. "I'll see you," he began, and paused. Then he shoved all of his chips into the pot. "I'll see you and raise you a hundred blue chips." "Damn it, Rothman!" MacPherson protested. "I know we agreed on no limit, but if you go on playing like this, you'll lose more than you can afford." "I've already lost everything," said Rothman, "and so have you. Don't you know what time it is? In a few minutes, none of you will be around to try to collect. What time is it now?" Avery reached for his watch, then stopped. Rothman turned his head. "What's that?" Nobody moved. A noise like the roar of a swift freight train rushed into the room, rattling the windows. The walls shook, the floor trembled, the slide-rule slid off the pile of books and clattered to the floor. They jumped to their feet and Avery ran to the window, clutching at the bars. "Not yet," said Rothman calmly. "The cactus plant will still be there, casting its little shadow. You might as well sit down and finish the game. That was only the shock wave. Have you forgotten that it is transmitted through the Earth faster than the wave of disintegration? We still have a few minutes left. Isn't anybody going to see my bet?" Avery lurched to the desk, grabbed a remnant of torn paper and scribbled on it "I'll see you," he yelled, "and raise you a hundred and twentyMacPherson walked to the window. "Look at the sky. This is it." They all jammed against his back, trying to see the horizon, waiting. Avery dropped the scrap of paper and covered his eyes. "What is there to see?" Neill whispered. "I thought -- there was a flash..." MacPherson's voice trailed off, and he rubbed his eyes. "But I didn't see anything," said Neill. "There's nothing to see." ert remained calm, the blue sky was unmarked by even a cloud, the air was still. A second minute went by. Neill drew out his watch, looked wonderingly at the steady march of the second hand. Then he turned and stumbled into the lavatory. They could hear his dry heaves. Rothman's eyes wavered from MacPherson to Avery, and back to MacPherson, and he sighed. "Looks as if I was wrong, gentlemen," he said. "Maybe I am crazy, after all. I wonder if that integration constant could have been wrong." He reached down to the floor to pick up the fallen slide-rule, sat down and drew a pad of paper toward him. MacPherson leaned against the window, too weak to move. He saw Avery take his hands away from his eyes. He could hear the chattering of Avery's teeth, could hear them click as he clamped them together, trying to control his lips. It seemed a long time before Avery managed to speak. "You!" cried Avery. He lunged forward, grabbed Rothman by the shoulder and jerked him to his feet. "This -- will teach you -- not to make -- mistakes -- " He smashed his fist into Rothman's face. Still MacPherson could not move, could not even shout. He could only listen to Avery. "And this will teach you -- not to set up matrices -- that don't multiply -- that burn up -- the world" Again Avery struck and knocked M# Rothman to the floor. Breaking through his paralysis, MacPherson clutched Avery by the shoulder, but Avery kicked at the man on the floor, again and again. "Avery!" shouted MacPherson. "Snap out of it, man! It's all over! The test is finished. We're still here. Rothman was wrong, just as we always knew he was!" But Avery was on his knees, pounding Rothman with both fists, sobbing out meaningless words, oblivious to the shouts outside and to MacPherson's tugging. The door burst open and Joe rushed in, followed by two other attendants. "What goes on?" After a glance at Avery's contorted face, Joe grabbed for his legs. "Send for the doc, boys. We're going to need help." O NE of the men ran down the corridor while Joe and the others succeeded in pulling Avery away from Rothman, who struggled to his feet. A doctor came in with a loaded hypodermic. He gave Avery an injection in the arm. "Go easy there," said MacPherson. "Hell be all right in a few minutes. He's had a shock, that's all." "Shock," Avery mumbled. MacPherson gripped Avery's arm. "Try to relax, man. It's finished. We never believed in it, of course. But I'll admit it's a relief, even to me, to be sure there was no danger of a chain reaction at all." Suddenly he felt cold. There was no understanding in Avery's eyes. He slumped to the floor. "Do you think he'll be all right when he comes out from under the drug?" asked MacPherson. "I can't say," said the doctor. "I only saw him a few minutes, when you came here this morning. I thought at the time he was pretty disturbed. Much more than Rothman here. Next week, I think, we're going to send Rothman home." Rothman wiped the blood off his chin and grinned weakly. "You don't mean that, Doc. I used the wrong integration constant in a little calculation. I must be crazy."      Next month's big news helps to establish # as a truly great proving that a magnificept talent can grow beyond even so spectacular a story as Bester's own The Demolished Man. In that earlier novel, he hauled you into a moving, breathing, living world based on telepathy. Now he puts you in an even more alive world based on teleportation... but teleportation so dramatically explicit that you'll feel you can follow the method without the slightest trouble and never use any other form of transportation again! Just as the telepathic society shaped the unforgettable characters of The Demolished Man, people in its own startling shape... including Gully Foyle, shipwrecked spaceman with the most frightening grudge the Solar System has ever known! fiction masterpieces. Why take a chance on missing it? Reserve your copy at your newsstand or subscribe today. If you don't, you'll be missing a genuinely memorable reading experience! Is your collection of jalaxy agaxine complete? If not, here is your chance to fill in missing copies. Back numbers of jalaxy SceCe jflrflPM are available from May, #, on. Inventories are running low. Don't miss your chance to complete your collection. For  # or #c each Jan. Sold out Feb. Sold out Mar. Sold out Apr. Sold out Mey Juno July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. X Jan. # Feb. # March #  .  . Hudson Street  New York #, N. Y. Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Name Address City State . Anyone For Doomsday ? Not You! 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OCTOBER T# # oauxy A Great New Novel  MY  By Author of the award-winning SolvM puzzUt, computes arilhmvtiealfy, pUy gm lik sacral massagas, raasons, compulas, comparas, solvas logical problams and syllogisms, psychological and lagal langlas, Iranslalas from binary lo dacimal, ale. to-follow instructions for assembling all materials necessary, including precision-machined parts that would cost over # Puzzle Manual, with over # exciting, brain-teasing games, problems, puzzles, etc. This educational hobby brings hours of fun put it togetherl  Do you like to solve Brain-Teasers, Riddles, Codes, Puzzles? O Do you like to take apart and put together clocks, radios, electrical devices?  Do you enjoy mathematical and intellectual problems?  Do you like the unusual in fun and hobbies?  Are you above average in intelligence? -- Mail This Coupon --  --  --  -- i # Lexington Ave., New York # Please send me: Kit and #-Page Manual. # (East of Mississippi) # (Elsewhere in U. S.) # (Outside of U. .) Returnable in seven days for full refund if net satisfied. I enclose  in full payment. My name and address are attached. g eniac OaJ.aoQ' #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no rsponsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. New places, or people you pass in the street, may seem oddly familiar to you. Have you known them in a previous life? You wonder why you are living on earth to-day and for what purpose you are here. Certain secrets of life and mental development cannot be divulged indiscriminately. If you sincerely feel the need for instruction in the use of your liier creative endowment, you have reached the stage where the Rosicrucian teachings will be of practical value to you in your everyday life. Learn how to quietly impress your personality on others, to better your business and social position. Use your own naturally endowed powers to achieve results you now think unattainable in your present state of untrained and undirected endeavour. Simple Rosicrucian teachings enable intelligent men and women to soar to new heights of achievement, new freedom, new contentment in life. Devoted to the attainment of the true Brotherhood of Mankind, The Rosicrucians are a Non-Religious, Non-Political, Non-Profit Making Fraternity. You are invited, though not urged, to write for the free # page book -- "The Mastery of Life," which has been written to give readers an outline of the world-wide scope and history of this noncommercial fraternity. This invitatipn is not to be taken as an assurance that every applicant receiving "The Mastery of Life" will be approved for membership by the Dean of Students. Please use the coupon below or write to: Scribe: V.Z.S. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Name Address State Why, Back Home,,. far worlds, a prime import will be outrageous whoppers about how this or that those worlds are. Like these. Arid planets: Notice in the Deneb Gazette: "George Smith hereby withdraws his candidacy for treasurer of Maricopa County. It has rained enough for Mr. Smith to return to farming." That was a #-inch rain -- the drops were # inches apart. Wolf IV is much drier; the postmasters there have to rivet the stamps to letters. On Dehyd, the water is wet on only one side. One Dehyder who operates a ferry hauls water all year just to keep his boat running. Cold planets: A Brrer was asked if Brr is as cold as people say. "We do have very short summers," he admitted. "Summer last year was on a Tuesday." On Icicle, a sheep raiser claimed his sheep, jumping from one hill to another, got stuck in the frozen air and hung there like clouds. "What about the law of gravity?" he was asked. "That was frozen solid, too," he explained. The fish on Chill grow inch-long fur to keep them warm through the winter. Windy planets: The kids on Blast make kites from iron window grills with log chains for tails. One Howl hen got herself caught in a blow and was turned around the wrong way; before she could get herself straightened out, she had laid the same egg five times. A farmer on New America planted his wheat in Kansas, fertilized it in Colorado, harrowed it in Utah, weeded it in Nevada and harvested it right back home. Healthful planets: Livelong started a cemetery, but they had to import a corpse from Dehyd. Old people on Tenscore have to go to other planets to die. "Is this place healthy?" a tourist asked a Vegan. "Sure is," said the Vegan. "Why, when I first came to Vega, I couldn't speak a single word, was absolutely hairless, had to be lifted from my bed and couldn't walk two steps." "Wonderful!" cried the tourist. "And how long have you been on Vega?" "I was born here," the Vegan said. Poor planets: A rancher on Poverty was asked how much he got for his herd of ziggls. "Not as much as I figured," he said. "But then I never thought I would." They tried raising cattle on Slum, but the steers were so thin, the men could brand them three at a time by putting carbon paper between them. On Borrow, where rationing is standard, a farmer reported having several hundred pounds of meat in his freezer and got an official letter asking how come. He wrote back: "It was necessary for me to kill the whole animal at once." Rich planets: "The reason you Moguls boast so much," a Borrower grumbled, "is you have an inferiority complex." "In that case," the Mogul replied, "it's the biggest inferiority complex in the Galaxy." Brrer visitor in Ccssal bookstore: "I'd like a small map of Colossus." Indignant bookseller: "Madam, there is no such thing as a small map of Colossus." After uranium was discovered on Aldebaran, the Alde-barons quit branding their goats and took them to town to be engraved. Spacegram from new circus press agent: "What have we got here on Plenty, absolutely the biggest midgets in the Universe or absolutely the littlest?" High-living planets: "Folks on Blotto sure are friendly," reported a Vegan. "They talk to you right on the street, invite you to dinner, take you up to their hotel room and buy you drinks." "Did all that happen to you?" he was asked in awe. "No," he said, "my sister." Demanded the strict Slajdash father, "What are your intentions toward my daughter -- honorable or dishonorable?" Said the suitor, "You mean I've got a choice?" A Ripsnorter put a gun into a stranger's ribs and ordered him to drink from his jug. The stranger strangled, "My gosh, that's horrible stuff!" "Ain't it?" agreed the Ripsnorter. "Now you hold the gun on me while I take a gulp." Game planets: To kill an Altair proj, you have to aim fast, shoot faster, and whistle just as you shoot; the proj stops a moment to see who whistled, which allows the bullet to catch up with him. A fish caught on Tackle was so big, a snapshot of it weighed seven poimds. Craggy worlds: Sign atop mountain road on Dizzy: Resume breathing. Flat worlds: "Monorail's due in an hour," said the Planer. "But I can't see her yet, so she must be late." Some of these tall tales may sound new, but each one here came from The Wild West Joke Book by Oren Arnold (Frederick Fell, #), who says, "It isn't necessary to originate a new joke... All you have to do is tell them somewhere else." Other planets, for instance? X., Each Tuesday nite on Radioi Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X-#The choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N. B. C. The Stars What Alfred Bester did with telepathy in The Demolished Man, he does now with teleportation in this equally spectacular, novel of the future! Beginning a #-Part Serial Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night. What immorta! hand or eye Cou!d frame thy fearful symmetry? -- Blake T his was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. This was an era of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it. All the habitable worlds of the Solar System were occupied. Three planets and eight satelof people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always. The Solar System seethed with activity... fighting, feeding and breeding, learning the new technologies that spewed forth almost before the old had been mastered, girding itself for the first exploration of the far-distant stars in deep space; but "Where are the new frontiers?" the Romantics cried, unaware that the frontier of the mind had opened in a laboratory on Callisto at the turn of the #th century. A researcher named Jaunte set fire to his bench and himself (accidentally) and let out a yell for help, with particular reference to a fire extinguisher. Who so surprised as Jaunte and his colleagues when he found himself standing alongside said extinguisher, seventy feet removed from his lab bench? They put Jaunte out and went into the whys and wherefores of his instantaneous seventy-foot journey. Teleportation -- the transportation of oneself through space by an effort of the mind alone -- had long been a theoretical concept, and there were a few hundred badly documented proofs that it had happened in the past. This was the first time that it had ever taken place before professional observers. T hey investigated the Jaunte Effect savagely. This was something too Earth-shaking to handle with kid gloves and Jaunte was anxious to make his name immortal. He made his will and said farewell to his friends. Jaunte knew he was going to die because his fellow researchers were determined to kill him, if necessary. There was no doubt about that. Twelve psychologists, parapsychologists and neurometrists of varying specialization were called in as observers. The experimenters sealed Jaunte into an unbreakable crystal tank. They opened a water valve, feeding water into the tank, and let Jaunte watch them smash the valve handle. It was impossible to open the tank; it was impossible to stop the flow of water. The theory was that if it had required the threat of death to goad Jaunte into teleporting himself in the first place, they'd damned well threaten him with death again. The tank filled quickly. The observers collected data with the tense precision of an eclipse camera crew. Jaunte began to drown. Then he was outside the tank, dripping and coughing explosively. He'd teleported again. The experts examined and questioned him. They studied graphs and X-rays, neural patterns and body chemistry. They began to get an inkling of how Jaunte had teleported. On the technical grapevine (this had to be kept secret), they sent out a call for suicide volunteers. They were still in the primitive stage of teleportation; death was the only spur they knew. They briefed the volunteers thoroughly. Jaunte lectured on what he had done and how he thought he had done it. Then they proceeded to murder the volunteers. They drowned them, hanged them, burned them; they invented new forms of slow and controlled death. There was never any doubt in any of the subjects that death was the object. Eighty per cent of the volunters died, and the agonies and remorse of their murderers would make a fascinating and horrible study, but that has no place in this history except to highlight the monstrosity of the times. Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, but twenty jjer cent jaunted. (The name became a word almost immediately.) "Bring back the romantic age," the Romantics pleaded, "when men can risk their lives in high adventure." The body of knowledge grew rapidly. By the first decade of the #th century, the principles of jaunting were established and the first school was opened by Charles Fort Jaunte himself, then fiftyseven, immortalized, and ashamed to admit that he had never dared jaunte again. But the primitive days were past; it was no longer necessary to threaten a man with death to make him teleport. They had learned how to teach Man to recognize, discipline and exploit yet another resource of his limitless mind. TT OW, exactly, did Man teleport? One of the most unsatisfactory explanations was provided by Spencer Thompson, publicity representative of the Jaunte Schools, in a press interview. seeing; it is a natural aptitude of almost every human organism, but it can only be developed by training and experience. couldn't see without practice? either unmarried or have no children... preferably both. served an infant learning to use its eyes would. portation? tion of oneself from one locality to another by an effort of the mind alone. think ourselves from, say, New York to Chicago? vided one thing is clearly understood. In jaunting from New York to Chicago, it is necessary for the person teleporting himself to know exactly where he is when he starts and where he's going. dark room and unaware of where you were, it would be impossible to jaunte anywhere with safety. And if you knew where you were, but intended to jaunte to a place you had never seen, you would never arrive alive. One cannot jaunte from an unknown departure point to an unknown destination. Both must be known, memorized and visualized. where we are and where we're going -- ? sure we'll jaunte and arrive. naked? naked. clothes teleport with us? port, they also teleport the clothes they wear and whatever they are strong enough to carry. I hate to disappoint you, but even ladies' clothes would arrive with them. it? mind think? What is the thinking process? Exactly how do we remember, imagine, deduce, create? Exactly how do the brain cells operate? body knows. knows exactly how we teleport either, but we know we can do it -- just as we know that we can think. Have you ever heard of Descartes? He said: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. We say: Cogito ergo jaunte. I think, therefore I jaunte. If it is thought that Thompson's explanation is exasperating, inspect this report of Sir John Kelvin to the Royal Society on the mechanism of jaunting: We have established that the teleportative ability is associated with the Nissl bodies, or Titjroid Substance, in nerve cells. The Tigroid Substance is easiest demonstrated by Nissl's method using # g. of methylene blue and # g. of Venetian soap dissolved in # cc. of water. Where the Tigroid Substance does not appear, jaunting is impossible. Teleportation is a Tigroid Function. A ny man was capable of jaunting, provided he developed two faculties, visualization and concentration. He had to visualize, completely and precisely, the spot to which he desired to teleport himself; and he had to concentrate the latent energy of his mind into a single thrust to get him there. Above all, he had to have faith... the faith that Charles Fort Jaunte never recovered. He had to believe he would jaunte. The slightest doubt would block the mind-thrust necessary for successful teleportation. The limitations with which every man is born necessarily limited the ability to jaunte. Some could visualize magnificently and set the coordinates of their destination with precision, but lacked the power to get there. Others had the power but could not, so to speak, see where they were jaunting. And space set a final limitation, for no man had ever jaunted farther than a thousand miles. He could work his way in jaunting jumps over land and water from Nome to Mexico, but no jump could exceed a thousand miles. By the #s, this form of employment application blank had become a commonplace: This space reserved for retina pattern identification Last Middle First Continent Country County L (# miles): M ( # miles) : X (# miles): D (# miles): V (# miles): C (# miles): The old Bureau of Motor Vejaunte applicants, and the old hides took over the new job and American Automobile Association Despite all efforts, no man had ever jaunted across the voids of space, although many experts and fools had tried. Helmut Grant, for one, who spent a month memorizing the coordinates of a jaunte stage on the Moon and visualized every mile of the two-hundredand-forty-thousand-mile trajectory from Times Square to Kepler City. Grant jaunted and disappeared. They never found him. They also never found Enzio Dandridge, a Los Angeles revivalist looking for Heaven; Jacob Maria Freundlich, a paraphysicist who should have known better than to jaunte into deep space searching for meta-dimensions; Shipwreck Cogan, a professional seeker after notoriety; and hundreds of others, lunatic-fringers, neurotics, escapists and suicides. Space s closed to teleportation. Jaunting was restricted to the surfaces of the planets of the Solar System. UT within three generations, the entire Solar System was on the jaunte. The transition was more spectacular than the changeover from horse and buggy to gasoline age four centuries before. On three planets and eight satellites, social, legal and economic structures crashed while the new customs and laws demanded by universal jaunting mushroomed in their place. There were land riots as the jaunting poor deserted slums to squat in plains and forests, raiding the livestock and wildlife. There was a revolution in home and office building; labyrinths and masking devices had to be introduced to prevent unlawful entry by jaunting. There were crashes and panics and strikes and famines as pre-jaunte industries failed. Plagues and pandemics raged as jaunting vagrants carried disease and vermin into defenseless countries. Malaria, elephantiasis and break-bone fever came north to Greenland; rabies returned to England after an absence of three hundred years. The Japanese beetle, the citrous scale, the chestnut blight and the elm borer spread to every corner of the world, and from one forgotten pest-hole in Borneo, leprosy, long considered extinct, reappeared. Crime waves swept the planets and satellites as their underworlds took to jaunting with the night around the clock, and there were brutalities as the police fought them without quarter. There came a hideous return to the worst prudery of Victorianism as society, with protocol and taboo, fought the sexual and moral dangers of jaunting. A cruel and vicious war broke out between the Inner Planets -- Venus, Terra and Mars -- and the Outer Satellites, a war brought on by the economic and political pressures of teleportation. Until the Jaunte Age dawned, the three Inner Planets (and the Moon) had lived in delicate economic balance with the seven inhabited Outer Satellites -- lo, Europe, Ganymede and Callisto of Jupiter; Rhea and Titan of Saturn; and Lassell of Neptune. The United Outer Satellites supplied raw materials for the Inner Planets' factories and a market for their finished goods. Within a decade, this balance was destroyed by jaunting. The Outer Satellites, raw young worlds in the making, had bought seventy per cent of the I.P. transpKDrtation production. Jaunting ended that. They had bought ninety per cent of the I.P. communications production. Jaunting ended that, too. In consequence, I.P. purchase of O.S. raw materials fell off. With trade exchange destroyed, it was inevitable that the economic war would degenerate into a shooting war. Inner Planet cartels refused to ship manufacturing equipment to the Outer Satellites, attempting to protect themselves against competition. The O.S. confiscated the plants already in operation on their worlds, broke patent agreements, ignored royalty obligations... and the war was on. It was an age of freaks, monsters and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the #th century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution -- that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the Solar System was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform Man and make him the master of the Universe. It is against this seething background of the #th century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins. H e was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival with the passion of a beast in a trap. Occasionally his primitive mind emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity. Then he lifted his mute face to Eternity and muttered: "What's a matter, me? Help, you goddam Gods! Help, is all." Blasphemy came easily to him; it was half his speech, all his life. He had been raised in the gutter school of the #th century and spoke nothing but the gutter tongue. Of all brutes in the world, he was among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive. So he struggled and prayed in blasphemy; but occasionally his raveling mind leaped backward to his childhood and remembered a nursery jingle: Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place And death's my destination. He was Gulliver Foyle, Mechanic's Mate #rd Class, thirty years old, big-boned and rough... and one hundred and seventy days adrift in space. He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love. The lethargic outlines of his character showed in the official Merchant Marine records; AS-##:# A man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition. Energizes at minimum. The stereotype Common Man. Some unexpected shock might possibly awaken him, but Psych cannot find the key. Not recommended for further promotion. Foyle had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for thirty years like some heavily armored creature, sluggish and indifferent... Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man; but now he was adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, and the key to his awakening was in the lock. Presently it would turn and open the door to holocaust. T he spaceship Nomad drifted halfway between Mars and Jupiter. Whatever war catastrophe had wrecked it had taken a sleek steel rocket, one hundred yards long and one hundred feet broad, and mangled it into a skeleton on which was mounted the remains of cabins, holds, decks and bulkheads. Great rents in the hull were blazes of light on the sunside and frosty blotches of stars on the darkside. The SS Nomad was a weightless emptiness of blinding sun and jet shadow, frozen and silent. The wreck was filled with a floating conglomerate of frozen debris that hung within the destroyed vessel like an instantaneous photograph of an explosion. The minute gravitational attraction of the bits of rubble for each other was slowly drawing them into clusters which were periodically tom apart by the passage through them of the one survivor still alive on the wreck, Gulliver Foyle, AS-##:#. He lived in the only airtight room left intact in the wreck, a tool locker off the main-deck corridor. The locker was four feet wide, four feet deep and nine feet high. It was the size of a giant's coffin. Six himdred years before, it had been judged the most exquisite Oriental torture to imprison a man in a cage that size for a few weeks. Yet Foyle had existed in this lightless coffin for five months, twenty days and four hours.    "Who are you?" "Gully Foyle is my name." "Where are you from?" "Terra is my nation." "Where are you now?" "Deep space is my dwelling place." "Where are you bound?" "Death's my destination." On the one hundred and seventy-first day of his fight for survival, Foyle answered these questions and awoke. His heart hammered and his throat burned. He groped in the dark for the air tank which shared his coffin with him and checked it. The tank was empty. Another would have to be moved in at once. So this day would commence with an extra skirmish with death which Foyle accepted with mute endurance. He felt through the locker shelves and located a torn spacesuit. It was the only one aboard the Nomad and Foyle no longer remembered where or how he had found it. He had sealed the tear with emergency spray, but had no empty oxygen cartridges on the back. Foyle got into the suit. It would hold enough air from the locker to allow him five minutes in vacuum -- no more. Foyle opened the locker door and plunged out into the black frost of space. The air in the locker puffed out with him and its moisture congealed into a tiny snow cloud that drifted down the torn main-deck corridor. Foyle heaved at the exhausted air tank, floated it out of the locker and abandoned it. One minute was gone. himself through the floating debris toward the hatch to the ballast hold. He did not run; his gait was the unique locomotion of free-fall and weightlessness -- thrusts with foot, elbow and hand against deck, wall and corner, a slow-motion swooping through space like a bat flying under water. Foyle shot through the hatch into the darkside ballast hold. Two minutes were gone. Like all spaceships, the Nomad was ballasted and stiffened with the mass of her gas tanks laid down the length of her keel like a long lumber raft tapped at the sides by a labyrinth of pipe fittings. Foyle took a minute disconnecting an air tank. He had no way of knowing whether it was full or already exhausted, whether he would fight it back to his locker only to discover that it was empty and his life was ended. Once a week, he endured this game of space roulette. There was a roaring in his ears; the air in his spacesuit was rapidly going foul. He yanked the massy cylinder toward the ballast hatch, ducked to let it sail over his head, then thrust himself after it. He swung the tank through the hatch. Four minues had elapsed and he was shaking and blacking out. He guided the tank down the main-deck corridor and bulled it into the tool locker. He slammed the locker door, dogged it, found a hammer on a shelf and swung it against the frozen tank to loosen the valve. Foyle twisted the handle grimly. With the last of his strength, he unsealed the helmet of his spacesuit, lest he suffocate within the suit while the locker filled with air... if this tank contained air. He fainted, as he had fainted so often before, never knowing whether this was death. Sfi "Who are you?" "Gully Foyle." "Where are you from?" "Terra." "Where are you now?" "Space." "Where are you bound?" He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of survival. In the darkness, he explored the locker shelves where he kept his rations. There were only a few packets left. Since he was already wearing the patched spacesuit, he might just as well run the gantlet of vacuum again and replenish his supplies. He flooded his spacesuit with air from the tank, resealed his helmet and sailed out into the frost and light again. He squirmed down the main-deck corridor and ascended the remains of a stairway to control deck, which was no more than a roofed corridor in space. Most of the walls were destroyed. the stars on his left, Foyle shot aft toward the galley storeroom. Halfway down the corridor, he passed a door frame still standing foursquare between deck and roof. The leaf hung on its hinges, half open, a door to nowhere. Behind it was all space and the steady stars. As Foyle passed the door, he had a quick view of himself reflected in the polished chrome of the leaf... Gully Foyle, a giant gaunt creature, bearded, crusted with dried blood, emaciated, with sick, patient eyes... and followed always by a stream of floating debris, the raffle disturbed by his motion and following him through space like the tail of a festering comet. Foyle turned into the galley storeroom and began looting with the methodical speed of five months' habit. Most of the bottled goods had frozen solid and exploded. Much of the canned goods had lost their containers, for tin crumbles to dust in the absolute zero of space. Foyle gathered up ration packets, concentrates and a chunk of ice from the burst water tank. He threw everything into a large copper cauldron, turned and darted out of the storeroom, carrying the cauldron. At the door to nowhere, Foyle glanced at himself again, reflected in the chrome leaf framed in the stars. Then he stopped his motion in bewilderment. He stared at the stars behind the door which had become familiar friends after five months. There was an intruder among them -- a comet, it seemed. with an invisible head and a short, spurting tail. Then Foyle realized he was staring at a spaceship, stern rockets flaring as it accelerated on a Sunward course that must pass him. "No," he muttered. "No, man. No." He was continually suffering from hallucinations. He turned to resume the journey back to his coffin. Then he looked again. It was still a spaceship, stem rockets flaring as it accelerated on a Sunward course which must pass him. He discussed the illusion with Eternity. "Six months already," he said in his gutter tongue. "Is it now? You listen a me, lousy Gods. I talkin' a deal, is all. I look again, sweet prayer-men. If it's a ship, I'm yours. You own me. But if it's a gaff, man -- if it's no ship -- I unseal right now and blow my guts. We both ballast level, us. Now reach me the sign, yes or no, is all." He looked for a third time. For the third time, he saw a spaceship, stern rockets flaring as it accelerated on a Sunward course which must pass him. It was the sign. He believed. He was saved. hurtling down the control-deck corridor toward the bridge. But at the companionway stairs, he restrained himself. He could not remain conscious for more than a few more moments without refilling his spacesuit. He gave the approaching spaceship one pleading look, then shot down to the tool locker and shakingly pumped his suit full. He mounted to the control bridge. Through the starboard observation port, he saw the spaceship, stern rockets still flaring, evidently making a major alteration in course, for it was bearing down on him very slowly. button. There was a three-second pause during which he suffered. Then white radiance blinded him as the distress signal went off in three triple bursts, nine prayers for help. Foyle pressed the button twice again, and twice more the flares flashed in space while the radioactives incorporated in their combustion set up a static howl that must register on any waveband of any receiver. The stranger's jets cut off. Foyle had been seen. He would be saved. He was reborn. He exulted. locker and replenished his spacesuit. He began to weep as he started to gather his possessions -- a faceless clock which he kept wound just to listen to the ticking, a lug wrench with a handshaped handle which he would hold in lonely moments, an eggslicer upon whose wires he would pluck primitive tunes. He dropped them in his excitement, hunted for them in the dark, then began to laugh at himself. He filled his spacesuit with air once more and capered back to the bridge. He punched a flare the hull of the Nomad shot a sunlet that burst and hung, flooding miles of space with harsh white light. "Come on, baby you," Foyle crooned. "Hurry up, man. Come on, baby baby you." Like a ghost torpedo, the stranger slid into the outermost rim of light, approaching slowly, looking him over. For a moment, Foyle's heart constricted; the ship was behaving so cautiously that he feared she was an enemy vessel from the Outer Satellites. Then he saw the famous red and blue emblem on her side, the trademark of the mighty industrial clan of Presteign; Presteign of Terra, jjowerful, munificent, beneficent. And he knew this was a sister ship, for the Nomad was also Presteign-owned. He knew this was an angel from space hovering over him. "Sweet sister," Foyle crooned. "Baby angel, fly away home with me. T he ship came abreast of Foyle, illuminated ports along its side glowing with friendly light, its name and registry number clearly visible in illuminated T:#. The ship was alongside him in a moment, passing him in a second, disappearing in a third. The sister had spurned him; the angel had abandoned him. Foyle stopped dancing and crooning. He stared in dismay. He leaped to the flare panel and slapped buttons. Distress signals, landing, takeoff and quarantine flares burst from the hull of the Nomad in a madness of white, red and green light, pulsing, pleading... and yora-T:# passed silently and implacably, stem jets flaring again as it accelerated on a Sunward course. So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived and he died. After thirty years of existence and six months of torture. Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man, was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man forever. "You pass me by," he said with slow mounting fury. "You leave me rot like a dog. You leave me die, Vorga... Vora-T: #. No. I get out of here, me. I follow you, Vorga. I find you, Vorga. I pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy." The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle. He was dedicated. "Vorga. I kill you filthy."   He did what the cipher could not do -- he rescued himself. For two days, he combed the wreckage in five-minute forays and devised a harness for his shoulders. He attached an air tank to the harness and connected the tank to his spacesuit helmet with an improvised hose. He wriggled through space like an ant dragging a log, but he had the freedom of the Nomad for all time. He thought. In the control bridge, he taught himself to use the few navigation instruments that were still unbroken, studying the standard manuals that littered the wrecked navigation room. In the ten years of his service in space, he had never dreamed of attempting such a thing, despite the rewards of promotion and pay; but now he had Vorga-T # to reward him. He took sights. The Nomad was drifting in space on the eclipfrom the Sun. Before him were spread the constellations Perseus, Andromeda and Pisces. Hanging almost in the foreground was a dusty orange spot that was Jupiter, distinctly a planetary disc to the naked eye. With any luck, he could make a course for Jupiter and rescue. be habitable. Like all the planets beyond the asteroid orbits, it was a frozen mass of methane and ammonia, but its four largest satellites swarmed with cities and populations now at war with the Inner Planets. He would be a war prisoner, but he had to stay alive to settle accounts with Vora-T: #. Foyle inspected the engine room of the Nomad. There was Hi-Thrust fuel remaining in the tanks and one of the four tail jets was still in operative condition. Foyle found the engine-room manuals and studied them. He repaired the connection between fuel tanks and the one jet chamber. The tanks were on the sunside of the wreck and warmed above freezing point. The HiThrust was still liquid, but it would not flow. In free-fall, there was no gravity to draw the fuel down the pipes. Foyle studied a space manual and learned something about theoretical gravity. If he could put the Nomad into a spin, centrifugal force would impart enough gravitation to the ship to draw fuel down into the combustion chamber of the jet. If he could fire the combustion chamber, the imequal thrust of the one jet would impart a spin to the Nomad. But he couldn't fire the jet without first having the spin; and he couldn't get the spin without first firing the jet. He thought his way out of the deadlock, inspired by Vorga. Foyle opened the drainage petcock in the combustion chamber of the jet and tortuously filled the chamber with fuel by hand. He had primed the pump. Now, if he ignited the fuel, it would fire long enough to impart the spin and start gravity. Then the flow from the tanks would commence and the rocketing would continue. He tried matches. Matches will not burn in the vacuum of space. He tried flint and steel. Sparks will not glow in the absolute zero of space. He thought of red-hot filaments. He had no electric power of any description aboard the Nomad to make a filament red hot. He found texts and read. Although he was blacking out frequently and close to complete collapse, he thought and planned. He was inspired to greatness by Vorga. Foyle brought ice from the frozen galley tanks, melted it with his own body heat, and added water to the jet combustion chamber. The fuel and the water were non-miscible; they did not mix. The water floated in a thin layer over the fuel. Foyle brought a silvery bit of wire, pure sodium metal. He poked the wire through the open petcock. The sodium ignited when it touched the water and flared with high heat. The heat touched off the Hi-Thrust, which burst in a needle flame from the petcock. Foyle closed the petcock with a wrench. The ignition held in the chamber and the lone aft jet slammed out flame with a soundless vibration that shook the ship. The off-center thrust of the jet twisted the Nomad into a slow spin. The torque imparted a slight gravity. Weight returned. The floating debris that cluttered the hull fell to decks, walls and ceilings; and the gravity kept the fuel feeding from tanks to combustion chamber. Foyle wasted no time on cheers. He left the engine room and struggled forward in desperate haste for a final, fatal observation from the control bridge. This would tell him whether the Nomad was committed to a wild plunge out into the no-return of deep space, or a course for Jupiter and the chance of rescue. The slight gravity made his air tank almost impossible to drag. The sudden forward surge of acceleration shook loose masses of debris which flew backward through the Nomad. As Foyle struggled up the companionway stairs to the control deck, the rubble from the bridge came hurtling back down the corridor and smashed into him. He was caught up in this tumbleweed in space, rolled back the length of the empty corridor and brought up against the galley bulkhead with an impact that shattered his last hold on consciousness. He lay pinned in the center of half a ton of wreckage, helpless, barely alive, but still raging for vengeance. "Who are you?" "Where are you from?" "Where are you now?" "Where are you bound?" is spread the broad belt of the asteroids. Of the thousands, known and unknown, most unique to the Freak Century was the Sargasso Asteroid, a tiny planet manufactured of natural rock and wreckage, salvaged by its inhabitants in the course of two hundred years. They were savages, the only savages of the #th century; descendants of a research team of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the Asteroid Belt two centuries before, when their ship had failed. By the time their descendants were rediscovered, they had built up a world and a culture of their own and preferred to remain in space, salvaging and spoiling, and practicing a barbaric travesty of the scientific method they remembered from their forebears. They called themselves The Scientific People. The world promptly forgot them. SS Nomad looped through space, neither on a course for Jupiter nor the far stars, but drifting across the Asteroid Belt in the slow spiral of a dying animalcule. It passed within a mile of the Sargasso Asteroid and it was immediately captured by The Scientific People to be incorporated into their little planet. They found Foyle. He awoke once while he was being carried in triumph on a litter through the natural and artificial passages within the scavenger asteroid. The passages were constructed of meteor metal, stone and hull plates. Some of the plates still bore names long forgotten in the history of space travel: Indus Queen, Terra; Syrtus Rambler, Mars; Three Ring Circus, Saturn. The passages led to great halls, storerooms, apartments and homes, all built of salvaged ships cemented into the asteroid. In rapid succession, Foyle was borne through an ancient Ganymede scow, a Lassell ice-borer, a captain's barge, a Callisto heavy cruiser, a #nd-century fuel transport with glass tanks still filled with smoky rocket fuel. Two centuries of salvage were gathered in this hive: armories of weapons, libraries of books, museums of costume, warehouses of machinery, tools, rations, drink, chemicals, synthetics and surrogates. A crowd around the litter was howling triumphantly. "Quant Suff!" they shouted. A woman's chorus began an excited bleating: "Ammonium bromide gr. I V # Potassium bromide gr. # Sodium bromide gr. # Citric acid quant, suff." "Quant Suff!" The Scientific People roared. "Quant Suff!" Foyle fainted. been taken out of his spacesuit. He was in the greenhouse of the asteroid, where plants were grown for fresh oxygen. The hundred-yard hull of an old ore carrier formed the room and one wall had been entirely fitted with salvaged windows -- round ports, square ports, diamond, hexagonal -- every shape and age of port had been introduced until the vast wall was a crazy quilt of haphazard glass and weird light. The distant Sun blazed through; the air was hot and moist. Foyle gazed around dimly. A devil face peered at him. Cheeks, chin, nose and eyelids were hideously tattooed like an ancient Maori mask. Across the brow was tattooed tiny arrow thrust up from the right shoulder, turning it into the symbol of Mars, used by scientists to designate male sex. "We are the Scientific Race," the devil face said. "I am J # seph; these are my people." He gestured. Foyle gazed at the grinning crowd surrounding his litter. All faces were tattooed into devil masks; all brows had names blazoned across them. "How long did you drift?" J ij seph asked. "VoTga" Foyle mumbled. "You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Very. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of Holy Darwin. Most scientific." "Quant Suff!" the crowd bellowed. J S seph seized Foyle's elbow in the manner of a physician taking a pulse. His devil mouth counted solemnly up to ninetyeight. "Your pulse -- ninety-eight point six," J # seph said, producing a thermometer and shaking it reverently. "Most scientific." "Quant Suff!" came the chorus. J # seph proffered an Erlenmeyer fiask. It was labeled : Lung, Cat. C.S., hematoxylin Ss eosin. "Vitamin?" J # seph inquired. When Foyle did not respond, J # seph removed a large pill from the flask, placed it in the bowl of a pipe and lit it. He puffed once and then gestured. Three girls appeared before Foyle. Their faces were grotesquely tattooed. Across each brow was a name: J AN. The "O" of each name had a tiny cross at the base, the sign of Venus and female sex. "Choose," J # seph said. "The Scientific People practice Natural Selection. Be scientific in your choice. Be genetic." As Foyle fainted again, his arm slid off the litter and glanced against M # ira. "Quant Suff!" with a domed roof. The hall was filled with rusting antique apparatus: a centrifuge, an operating table, a wrecked fluoroscope, autoclaves, cases of corroded surgical instruments. They strapped Foyle down on the operating table while he raved and rambled. They fed him. They #S shaved and bathed him. Two men began turning the ancient centrifuge by hand. It emitted a rhythmic clanking like the pounding of a war drum. The assembled began tramping and chanting. They turned on the ancient autoclave. It boiled and geysered, steam. They turned on the old fluoroscope. It was short-circuited and it spat sizzling bolts of lightning across the steaming hall. A ten-foot figure loomed up to the table. It was J i seph on stilts. He wore a surgical cap, a surgical mask and a surgeon's gown that hung from his shoulders to the floor. The gown was heavily embroidered with red and black thread, illustrating anatomical sections of the body. J i seph was a lurid tapestry out of a surgical text. "I pronounce you Nomad!" J i seph intoned. The uproar became deafening. J i seph tilted a rusty can over Foyle's body. There was the reek of ether. Foyle lost his tatters of consciousness and darkness enveloped him. Out of the darkness, Fora-T:# surged again and again, accelerating on a Sunward course that burst through Foyle's blood and brains until he could not stop screaming silently for vengeance. c #( He He was dimly aware of washings and feedings and trampings and chantings. At last he awoke to a lucid interval. There was silence. He was in a bed. The girl, M # ira, was in bed with him. "Who you?" Foyle croaked. "Your wife. Nomad." "What?" "Your wife. You chose me, Nomad. We are gametes." "What?" "Scientifically mated," M # ira said proudly. She pulled up the sleeve of her nightgown and showed him her arm. It was disfigured by four ugly slashes. "I have been inoculated with something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue." Foyle struggled out of the bed. "Where we now?" "In our home." "What home?" "Yours. You are one of us. Nomad. You must marry every month and beget many children. That will be scientific. But I am the first." Foyle ignored her and explored. He was in the main cabin of a small rocket launch of the early #s, once a private yacht. The main cabin had been converted into a bedroom. looked out The laimch was sealed into the mass of the asteroid, connected by passages to the main body. He went aft. Two smaller cabins were filled with growing plants for oxygen. The engine room had been converted into a kitchen. There was HiThrust in the fuel tanks, but it fed the burners of a small stove atop the rocket chambers. Foyle went forward. The control cabin was now a parlor, but the controls were still operative. He thought. Then he went aft to the kitchen and dismantled the stove. He reconnected the fuel tanks to the original jet combustion chambers. M # ira followed him curiously. "What are you doing. Nomad?" "Got to get out of here, girl," Foyle mumbled. "Got business with a ship called Vorga. You dig me, girl? Going to ram out in this boat, is all." M # ira backed away in alarm. Foyle saw the look in her eyes and leaped for her. He was so crippled that she avoided him easily. She opened her mouth and let out a scream. At that moment, a mighty clangor filled the launch; it was J S seph and his devilfaced Scientic People outside, banging on the metal hull, going through the ritual of a scientific charivari for the newlyweds. M # ira screamed and dodged while Foyle pursued her patiently. He trapped her in a corner, ripped her nightgown off and bound and gagged her with it. M # ira made enough noise to split the asteroid open, but the scientific charivari was louder. Foyle finished his rough patching of the engine room; he was almost an expert by now. He picked up the writhing girl and took her to the main hatch. "Leaving," he shouted in M # ira's ear. "Take off. Blast right out of asteroid. Hell of a smash, girl. Maybe all die, you. Everything busted wide open. Guesses for grabs what happens. No more air. No more asteroid. Go tell'm. Warn'm. Go, girl." He opened the hatch, shoved M # ira out, slammed the hatch and dogged it. The charivari stopped abruptly. At the controls, Foyle pressed ignition. The automatic takeoff siren began a shriek that had not sounded in decades. The jet chambers ignited with dull concussions. Foyle waited for the temperature to reach firing heat. While he waited, he suffered. The launch was cemented into the asteroid. It was surrounded by stone and iron. Its rear jets were flush on the hull of another ship packed into the riiass. He didn't know what would happen when his jets began their thrust, but he was driven to gamble by Vorga. He fired the jets. There was a hollow explosion as Hi-Thrust flamed out of the stern of the ship. The launch shuddered, yawed, heated. A squeal of metal began. Then the launch grated forward. Metal, stone and glass split and the ship burst out of the asteroid into space. THE Inner Planets navy picked him up ninety thousand miles outside Mars orbit. After seven months of shooting war, the IP patrols were alert but reckless. When the launch failed to answer and give recognition countersigns, it should have been shattered with a blast and questions could have been asked of the wreckage later. But the launch was small and the cruiser crew was hot for prize money. They closed and grappled. They found Foyle inside, crawling like a headless worm through a junkheap of spaceship and home furnishings. He was bleeding again, ripe with gangrene, and one side of his head was pulpy. They brought him into the sick bay aboard the cruiser and carefully curtained his tank. Foyle was no sight even for the tough stomachs of lower-deck navy men. They patched his carcass in the amniotic tank while they completed their tour of duty. On the jet back to Terra, Foyle recovered consciousness and bubbled words beginning with V. He knew he was saved. He knew that only time stood between him and vengeance. The sick-bay orderly heard him exulting in his tank and parted the curtains. Foyle's filmed eyes looked up. The orderly could not restrain his sickened curiosity. "You hear me, man?" he whispered. Foyle grunted. The orderly bent lower. "What happened? Who in hell done that to you?" "What?" Foyle croaked. "Don't you know?" "What? What's a matter, you?" "Wait a minute, is all." The orderly disappeared as he jaunted to a supply cabin and reappeared alongside the tank five seconds later. Foyle struggled up out of the fluid. His eyes blazed. "It's coming back, man. Some of it. Jaunte. I couldn't jaunte on the Nomad, me." "What?" "I was off my head." "Man, you didn't have no head left, you." "I cculdn't jaunte. I forgot how, is all. I forgot everything, me. Still don't really remember much. I He recoiled in terror as the orderly thrust the picture of a hideous tattooed face before him. It was a Maori mask. Cheeks, chin, nose and eyelids were decorated with stripes and swirls. Across the brow was blazoned cried out in agony. The picture was a mirror. The face was his own. done! L-E-S, gentlemen. Never forget. Location. Elevation. Situation. That's the only way to remember your jaunte coordinates. Don't jaunte yet, Mr. Peters. Wait your turn. Be patient, you'll all be C class by and by. Has anyone seen Mr. Foyle? He's missing. Oh, look at that heavenly Brown Thrasher. Listen to him. Oh, dear. I'm thinking all over the place... or have I been speaking, gentlemen?" "Half and haif, ma'am." "It does seem unfair. One-way telepathy is a nuisance. I do apologize for shrapneling you with my thoughts." "We like it, ma'am. You think pretty." "How sweet of you, Mr. Gorgas. All right, class; all back to school and we start again. Has Mr. Foyle jaunted already? I never can keep track of him." Robin Wednesbury was conducting her re-education class in jaunting on its tour through New York City, and it was a exciting a business for the cerebral cases as it was for the children in her primer class. She treated the adults like children and they rather enjoyed it. For the past month, they had been memorizing jaunte stages at street intersections, chanting: "L-E-S, ma'am. Location. Elevation. Situation." She was a tall, lovely Negro handicapped by the fact that she was a telesend, a one-way telepath. She could broadcast her thoughts to the world, but could receive nothing. This was a disadvantage that barred her from more glamorous careers, yet suited her for teaching. Despite her volatile temperament, Robin Wednesbury was a thorough and methodical jaunte instructor. The men were brought down from General War Hospital to the jaunte school, which occupied an entire building in the Hudson Bridge at #nd Street. They started from the school and marched in a sedate crocodile to the vast Time Square jaunte stage, which they earnestly memorized. Then they all jaunted to the school and back to Times Square. The crocodile reformed and they marched up to Columbus Circle and memorized its coordinates. Then all jaunted back to school via Times Square and returned by the same route to Columbus Circle. Once more, the crocodile formed and off they went to Grand Army Plaza to repeat the memorizing and the jaunting.patients (all head injuries who had lost the power to jaunte) to the express stops, so to speak, of the public jaunte stages. Later they would memorize the local stops at street intersections. As their horizons expanded (and their powers returned), they would memorize jaunte stages in widening circles, limited as much by income as ability, for one thing was certain: You had to actually see a place to memorize it, which meant you first had to pay for the transportation to get you there. Even #-D photographs would not do the trick. The Grand Tour had taken on a new significance for the rich. "Location. Elevation. Situation," Robin Wednesbury lectured, and the class jaunted by express stages from Washington Heights to the Hudson Bridge and back again in primer jumps of a quarter-mile each, following their lovely Negro teacher earnestly. The little technical sergeant with the platinum skull suddenly spoke in the gutter tongue: "But there ain't no elevation, ma'am. We're on the ground, us." "Isn't, Sgt. Logan. 'Isn't any' would be better. I beg your pardon. Teaching becomes a habit and I'm having trouble controlling my thinking today. The war news is so bad. We'll get to Elevation when we start memorizing the stages on top of skyscrapers, Sgt. Logan." The man with the rebuilt skull digested that, then asked: "We hear you when you think, is a matter you?" "Exactly." "But you don't hear us?" "Never. I'm a one-way telepath." "We all hear you? Or just me, is all?" "That depends, Sgt. Logan. When I'm concentrating, only the one I'm thinking at; when I'm at loose ends, anybody and everybody... poor souls. Excuse me." Robin turned and called: "Don't hesitate before jaunting. Chief Harris. That starts doubting and doubting ends jaunting. Just step up and bang off." "I worry sometimes, ma'am," a chief petty officer with a tightly bandaged head answered. He was obviously stalling at the edge of the jaunte stage. "Worry? About what?" "Maybe there's gonna be somebody standing where I arrive. Then there'll be a hell of a real bang, ma'am." "Now I've explained that a hundred times. Experts have gauged every jaunte stage in the world to accommodate peak traffic. That's why private jaunte stages are small, while the Times Square stage is two hundred yards wide. It's all been worked out mathematically and there isn't simultaneous arrival. That's less than your chance of being killed in a jet accident" bandaged C.P.O. nodded dubiously and stepped up on the raised stage. It was of white concrete, round, and decorated on its face with vivid black and white patterns as an aid to memory. In the center was an illuminated plaque which gave its name and jaunte coordinates of latitude, longitude and elevation. At the moment when the bandaged man was gathering courage for his primer jaunte, the stage began to flicker with a sudden flurry of arrivals and departures. Figures appeared momentarily as they jaunted in, hesitated while they checked their surroundings and set new coordinates, and then disappeared as they jaunted off. At each disappearance, there was a faint 'p)op' as displaced air rushed into the space formerly occupied by a body. "Wait, class," Robin called. "It's rush hour. Everybody off the stage, please." Laborers in heavy work clothes, still spattered with snow, were on their way south to their homes after a shift in the north woods. Fifty white-clad dairy clerks were headed west toward St. Louis. They followed the morning from the Eastern Time Zone to the Pacific Zone. And from eastern Greenland, where it was already noon, a horde of white-collar office workers was pouring into New York for their limch hour. "All right, class," Robin called when the rush was over. "We'll continue. Oh, dear, where is Mr. Foyle? He always seems to be missing." "With a face like he's got, him, you can't blame him for hiding it, ma'am. Up in the cerebral ward, we call him Boogey." "He does look dreadful, doesn't he, Sgt. Logan? Can't they get those marks off?" "They're trying. Miss Robin, but they don't know how yet. It's called tattooing and it's sort of forgotten, is all." "Then how did Mr. Foyle acquire his face?" "Nobody knows. Miss Robin. He's up in cerebral because hes lost his mind, him. Can't remember nothing. Me, personal, if I had a face like that, I wouldn't want to remember nothing, too." "It's a pity. He looks frightful. Sgt. Logan, do you suppose I've let a thought about Mr. Foyle slip and hurt his feelings?" The little man with the platinum skull considered. "No, ma'am. You wouldn't hurt nobody's feelings, you. And Foyle ain't got none to hurt, him. He's just a big, dumb ox, is all." "I have to be so careful, Sgt. Logan. You see, no one likes to know what another person really thinks about him. We imagine that we do, but we don't. This telesending of mine makes me loathed. And lonesome. I -- please don't listen to me. I'm having trouble controlling my thinking. Ah! There you are, Mr. Foyle. Where in the world have you been wandering?" stage and stepped off quietly, his hideous face averted. "Been practicing, me," he mumbled. Robin repressed the shudder of revulsion in her and went to him sympathetically. She took his arm. "You really should be with us more. We're all friends and having a grand time. Please join in." Foyle refused to meet her glance. As he pulled his arm away from her sullenly, Robin suddenly reali#ed that his sleeve was soaking wet. His entire hospital uniform was drenched. "Wet? He's been in the rain somewhere. But Tve seen the morning weather reports. No rain east of St. Louis. Then he must have jaunted farther than that. But he's not supposed to be able. He's supfK)sed to have lost all memory and ability to jaunte. He's malingering." Foyle leaped at her. "Shut up, you!" The savagery of his face was terrifying. "Then you are malingering." "How much do you know?" "That yoxire a fool and you're making a scene." "Did they hear you?" "I dorft know. Let go of me." Robin turned away from Foyle. "All right, class. We're finished for the day. Now back to school for the hospital bus. You jaunte first, Sgt. Logan. Remember: L-E-S. Location. Elevation. Situation..." "What do you want?" Foyle growled. "A payoff, you?" "Be quiet. Stop making a scene. Now don't hesitate, Chief Harris. Step up and jaunte off." "I want to talk to you," said Foyle. "Certainly not. Wait your turn, Mr. Peters. Don't be in such a hurry." "You going to report me in the hospital?" "Naturally." "I want to talk to you." "No." "They gone now, all. We got time. I'll meet you in your apartment." "My apartment?" Robin was genuinely frightened. "In Green Bay, Wisconsin." "This is absurd. I've got nothing to discuss with this -- " "You got plenty. Miss Robin. You got a family to discuss." Foyle grinned at the terror she radiated. "Meet you in your apartment," he repeated. "You can't possibly know where it is," she faltered. "Just told you, didn't I?" "Y-you couldn't possibly jaunte that far. You -- " "No?" The mask grinned. "You just told me I was mal -- that word. You told the truth, you. We got half an hour. Meet you there."-ment was in a massive building set alone on the shore of Green Bay. The apartment house looked as though a magician had removed it from a city residential area and abandoned it amidst the Wisconsin pines. Buildings like this were a commonplace in the jaunting world. With self-contained heat and light plants, and jaunting to solve the transportation problem, single and muliple dwellings were built in desert, forest and wilderness. The apartment itself was a fourroom flat, heavily insulated to protect neighbors from Robin's telesending. It was crammed with books, music, paintings and prints -- all evidence of the cultured and lonely life of this unfortunate wrong-way telepath. Robin jaunted into the living room of the apartment a few seconds after Foyle, who was waiting for her with ferocious impatience. "So now you know for sure," he began without preamble. He seized her arm in a painful grip. "But you ain't gonna tell nobody in the hospital about me. Miss Robin. Nobody." "Let go of me!" Robin lashed him across his face. "Beast! Savage! Don't you dare touch me!" Foyle released her and stepped back. The impact of her revulsion made him turn away angrily to conceal his face. "So you've been malingering," she said. "You knew how to jaunte. You've been jaunting all the while you've been pretending to learn in the primer class, taking big jumps around the country -- around the world, for all I know." "Yeah. I go from Times Square to Columbus Circle by way of... most anywhere. Miss Robin." "And that's why you're always missing. But why? Why? What are you up to?" An expression of jx)ssessed cunning appeared on the hideous face. "I'm holed up in General Hospital, me. It's my base of operations, see? I'm settling something, Miss Robin. I got a debt to pay off, me. I had to find out where a certain ship is. Now I got to pay her back. Now I rot you, Vorga. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy!" stopped shouting and glared at her in wild triumph. Robin backed away in alarm. "For God's sake, what are you talking about?" "Vorga. Vora-T: #. Ever hear of her. Miss Robin? I found out where she is from Bo'ness  Uig's ship registry. Bo'ness fit Uig are out in SanFran. I went there, me, the time when you was learning us the crosstown jaunte stages. Went out to SanFran, me. Found Vorga, me. She's in Vancouver shipyards. She's owned by Presteign of Presteign. Heard of him. Miss Robin? Presteign's the biggest man on Terra, is all. But he won't stop me. Fll kill Vorga filthy. And you won't stop me leither. Miss Robin." Foyle thrust his face close to hers. "Because I cover myself. Miss Robin. I cover every weak spot down the line. I got something on everybody who could stop me before I kill Vorga... including you. Miss Robin." "No." "Yeah. I found out where you live. They know up at the hospitaL I come here and looked around. I read your diary. Miss Robin. You got a family on Callisto, motlwr and two sisters." "For God's sake!" "So that makes you an alienbelligerent. When the war started, you and all the rest was given one month to get out of the Inner Planets and go home. Any which didn't became spies by law." Foyle opened his hand. "I got you right here, girl." He clenched his hand. "My mother and sisters have been trying to leave Callisto for a year and a half. We belong here. We" "Got you right here," Foyle repeated. "You know what they do to spies? They cut information out of them, Miss Robin. They take you apart, piece by piece -- " The Negro girl screamed. Foyle nodded happily and took her shaking shoulders in his hands. "I got you, is all, girl. You can't even run from me because all I got to do is tip Intelligence and where are you? There ain't nothing nobody can do to stop me; not the hospital or even Mr. Holy Mighty Presteign of Presteign." "Get out, you filthy, hideous... thing. Get out!" "You don't like my face. Miss Robin? There ain't nothing you can do about that either." Suddenly he picked her up and carried her to a deep couch. He threw her down on the couch. "Nothing," he repeated. conspicuous waste, on which all society is based, Presteign of Presteign had fitted his Victorian mansion in Central Park with elevators, housephones, dumbwaiters and all the other laborsaving devices which jaunting had made obsolete. The servants in that giant gingerbread castle walked dutifully from room to room, opening and closing doors and climbing stairs. Presteign of Presteign arose, dressed with the aid of his valet and barber, descended to the morning room with the aid of an elevator, and breakfasted, assisted by a butler, footman and waitresses. He left the morning room and entered his study. In anage when communication systems were virtually extinct -- when it was far easier to jaunte directly to a man's office for a discussion than to telephone or telegraph -- Presteign still maintained an antique telephone switchboard with operator in his study. "Get me Dagenham," he said. ' 'HE operator struggled and put a call through to Dagenham Couriers, Inc. This was a tion of bonded jaunters set up to perform any public or confidential service for any principal. Their fee was Cr I per mile. Dagenham guaranteed to get a courier around the world in eighty minutes. Eighty seconds after Presteign's call was put through, a Dagenham courier appeared on the private jaunte stage outside Presteign's home, was identified and admitted through the jaunteproof labyrinth behind the entrance. Like every member of the Dagenham staff, he was an M class jaunter, capable of teleporting a thousand miles a jump indefinitely, and familiar with innumerable jaunte coordinates. He was a senior specialist in chicanery and cajolery, trained to the incisive efficiency and boldness that characterized Dagenham Couriers andeflected the ruthlessness of its founder. "Presteign?" he said, wasting no time on protocol. "I want to hire Dagenham." "Ready, Presteign." "Not you. I want Saul Dagenham himself." "Mr. Dagenham no longer gives personal service for less than Cr # , # ." "The amount will be five times that." "Fee or percentage?" teed against ten per cent of the total amount at risk." "Agreed. The matter?" "PyrE." "Spell it, please." "The name means nothing to you?" "No." "Good. It will to Dagenham. PyrE. Capital P Y R Capital E. Pronounced 'pyre' as in funeral pyre. Tell Dagenham we've located the PyrE. He's engaged to get it -- at all costs -- through a man named Foyle. Gulliver Foyle." courier produced a tiny silver pearl, a memo-bead, repeated Presteign's instructions into it, and left without another word. Presteign turned to his telephone operator. "Get me Regis Sheffield." Ten minutes after the call went through to Regis Sheffield's law office, a young law clerk appeared on Presteign's private jaunte stage, was vetted and admitted through the maze. He was a bright young man with a scrubbed face and the expression of a delighted rabbit. "Excuse the delay, Presteign," he said. "We got your call in Chicago and I'm still only a D class five-hundred-miler. Took me a while getting here." "Is your chief trying a case in Chicago?" "Chicago, New York and Washington. He's been on the jaunte from court to court all morning. We fill in for him when he's in another court." "I want to retain him." "Honored, Presteign, but Mr. Sheffield's pretty busy." "Not too busy for PyrE." "Sorry, sir, I don't quite -- " "No, you don't, but Sheffield will. Just tell him PyrE, as in funeral pyre, and the amoimt of his fee." "Which is?" teed against ten per cent of the total amount at risk." "And what performance is required of Mr. Sheffield?" "To prepare every known legal device for kidnaping a man and holding him against the army, the navy and the police." "Quite. And the man?" "Gulliver Foyle." The law clerk muttered quick notes into a memo-bead, nodded and departed. Presteign left the study and ascended the plush-carpeted stairs to his daughter's suite to pay his morning respects. In the homes of the wealthy, the rooms of the female members were blind, without windows or doors, open only to the jaunting of intimate members of the family. Thus was morality maintained and chastity defended. But since Olivia Presteign was herself blind to normal sight, she could not jaunte. Consequently her suite was entered through doors closely guarded by ancient retainers in the Presteign clan livery. glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infra-red only, from # Anglengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar and electromagnetic fields. She was holding her Grand Levee in the drawing room of the suite. She sat in a brocaded wing chair, sipping tea, guarded by her duenna, holding court, chatting with a dozen men and women standing about the room. She looked like an exquisite statue of marble and coral, her blind eyes flashing as she saw and yet did not see. She saw the drawing room as a pulsating flow of heat emanations ranging from hot highlights to cool shadows. She saw the dazzling magnetic patterns of clocks, phones, lights and locks. She saw and recognized people by the characteristic heat patterns radiated by their faces and bodies. She saw, around each head, an aura of the faint neural brain pattern, and sparkling through the heat radiation of each body, the ever-changing mitogenetic tone of muscle and nerve. Presteign did not care for the artists, musicians and fops Olivia kept about her, but he was pleased to see a scattering of society notables this morning. There was a Z# Sears-Roebuck; a Gillette; young Sidney Kodak, who would one day be Kodak of Kodak; a Houbigant; Buick of Buick; and R. H. Saks-Gimbel clan. Presteign paid his respects to his daughter and left the house. He set off for his clan headquarters at # Wall Street in a coach and four driven by a coachman assisted by a groom, both wearing the Presteign trademark of red, black and blue. That black "P" on a field of scarlet and cobalt was one of the most ancient and distinguished trademarks in the social register, rivaling the "#" of the Heinz clan and the "RR" of the Rolls-Royce dynasty in antiquity. The head of the Presteign clan was a familiar sight to New York jaunters. Iron-gray, handsome, powerful, impeccably dressed and mannered in the old-fashioned style, Presteign of Presteign was the epitome of the socially elect, for he was so exalted in station that he employed coachmen, grooms, hostlers, stableboys and horses to perform a function for him which ordinary mortals performed by jaunting. As men climbed the social ladder, they displayed their jxjsition by their refusal to jaunte. The newly adopted into a great commercial clan rode an expensive bicycle. A rising clansman drove a small sports car. The captain of a sept was transported in a chauffeur-driven antique from the old days, a vintage Bentley or Cadillac or a towering Lagonda. An heir-presumptive in direct line of succession to the clan chieftainship staffed a yacht or a plane. Presteign of Presteign, head of the clan Presteign, owned carriages, cars, yachts, planes and trains. His position in society was so lofty that he had not jaunted in forty years. Secretly, he scorned the bustling new-rich like the Dagenhams and Sheffields, who still jaunted and were unashamed. elated keep at # Wall Street that was Castle Presteign. It was staffed and guarded by his famous Jaunte Watch, all in clan livery. Presteign walked with the stately gait of a chieftain as they piped him to his office. Indeed he was grander than a chieftain, as an importunate government official awaiting audience discovered to his dismay. That unfortunate man leaped forward from the waiting crowd of petitioners when Presteign passed. "Mr. Presteign," he began, "I'm from the Internal Revenue Department. I must see you this morn -- " Presteign cut him short with an icy stare. "There are thousands of Presteigns. All are addressed as Mister. But I am Presteign of Presteign, head of house and sept, first of the family, chieftain of the clan. I am addressed as Presteign. Not 'Mister' Presteign. Presteign." He turned and entered his office, where his staff greeted him with a muted chorus: "Good morning, Presteign." Presteign nodded, smiled his basilisk smile and seated himself behind the enthroned desk while the Jaunte Watch skirled their pipes and ruffled their drums. Presteign signaled for the audience to begin. The Household Exjuerry stepped forward with a scroll, for Presteign disdained memo-beads and all mechanical business devices. "Report on Clan Presteign enterprises," the Equerry began. "Common Stock: High-# # I Vi Low-#I Vi. Average quotations New York, Paris, Ceylon, Tokyo Presteign waved his hand irritably. The Equerry retired to be replaced by Black Rod. "Another Mr. Presto to be invested, Presteign." Presteign restrained his impatience and went through the tedious ceremony of swearing jn the #th Mr. Presto in the hierarchy of Presteign Prestos who managed the shops in the Presteign retail division. Until recently, the man had had a face and body of his own. Now, he was ready to join the Prestos. After six months of surgery and psycho-conditioning, he was identical to the other # Mr. Prestos and to the idealized portrait of Mr. Presto which hung behind Presteign's dais... a kindly, honest man resembling Abraham Lincoln, a man who instantly inspired affection and trust. Around the world, purchasers entered an identical Presteign store and were greeted by an identical manager, Mr. Presto. He was rivaled, but not surpassed, by the Kodak clan's Mr. Kwik and Montgomery Ward's Uncle Monty. " pleted, Presteign arose abruptly to indicate that the public investiture was ended. The office was cleared of all but the high officials. Presteign paced, obviously repressing his seething impatience. He never swore, but his restraint was more terrifying than profanity. "Foyle," he said in a suffocated voice. "A common sailor. Dirt. Dregs. Gutter scum. But that man stands between me and -- " "If you please, Presteign," Black Rod interrupted timidly, "it's eleven o'clock, Eastern time; eight o'clock, Pacific time." "What?" "If you please, Presteign, may I remind you that there is a launching ceremony at nine. Pacific time? You are to preside at the Vancouver shipyards." "Launching?" "Our new freighter, the Presteign Princess. It will take some time to establish three-dimensional broadcast contact with the shipyard, so we had better -- " "I will attend in person." "In person!" Black Rod faltered. "But we cannot possibly fly to Vancouver in an hour, Presteign. We -- " "I will jaunte," Presteign of Presteign snapped, such was his agitation. His appalled staff made hasty preparations. Messengers jaunted ahead to warn the Presteign offices across the country and the private jaunte stages were cleared. Presteign was ushered to the stage within his New York office. It was a circular platform in a blackhung room without windows -- a masking and concealment necessary to prevent unauthorized persons from discovering and memorizing coordinates. For the same reason, all homes and offices had one-way windows and confusion labyrinths behind their doors. To jaunte, it was necessary (among other things) for a man to know exactly where he was and where he was going, or there was little hope of arriving anywhere alive. It was as imp)Ossjble to jaunte from an undetermined starting point as it was to arrive at an unknown destination. Like shooting a pistol, one had to know where to aim and which end of the gun to hold. But a glance through a window or door might be enough to enable a man to memorize the L-E-S coordinates of a place. stage, visualized the coordinates of his destination in the Philadelphia office, seeing the picture clearly and the position accurately. He relaxed and energized one concentrated thrust of will and belief toward the target. He jaunted. There was a dizzy moment in which his eyes blurred. The New York stage faded out of focus; the Philadelphia stage blurred into focus. There was a sensation of falling down, and then up. He arrived. Black Rod and others of his staff arrived a respectful moment later. So, in iauntes of one and two hundred miles each, Presteign crossed the continent and arrived outside the Vancouver shipping yards at exactly nine o'clock in the morning. Pacific time. He had left New York at eleven A.M. He had gained two hours of daylight. This, too, was a commonplace in a jaunting world. The square mile of imfenced concrete -- what fence could bar a jaunter? -- comprising the shipyard looked like a white table covered with black pennies neatly arranged in concentric circles. But on closer approach, the pennies enlarged into the hundredfoot mouths of black pits dug deep into the Elarth. Each circular mouth was rimmed with concrete buildings, offices, check rooms, canteens, changing rooms. These were the takeoff and landing pits, the drydock and construction pits, of the shipyards. Spaceships, like sailing vessels, were never designed to support their own weight unaided against the drag of gravity. Normal terran gravity would crack the spine of a spaceship. The ships were built in deep pits, standing vertically in a network of catwalks and construction grids, braced and supported by anti-gravity screens. They took off from similar pits, riding the anti-grav beams upward, like motes mounting the vertical shaft of a searchlight, until at last they reached the Roche Limit and could thrust with their own jets. Landing spacecraft cut drive jets and rode the same beams downward into the pits. As the Presteign entourage entered the Vancouver yards, they could see which of the pits were in use. From some, the noses and hulls of spaceships extruded, raised quarterway or halfway above ground by the anti-grav screens as workmen in the pits below brought their aft sections to particular operational levels. Three Presteign V-class transports, VeB, Vestal and Vorga, stood partially raised near the center of the yards, undergoing flaking and replating, as the heatlightning flicker of torches around Vorga indicated. A t the concrete building teign entourage stopped before a sign that read: you are enVisitor badges were distributed to the party and even Presteign of Presteign received one. He dutifully pinned it on, for he well knew what the result of entering without such a protective badge would be. The entourage continued, winding its way through pits until it arrived at #-#, where the pit-mouth was decorated with bunting in the Presteign colors and a small grandstand had been erected. Presteign was welcomed and, in turn, greeted his various officials. The band struck up the clan song, bright and brassy, but one of the instruments appeared to have gone insane. It struck a brazen note that blared louder and louder until it engulfed the entire band and the surprised exclamations. Only then did Presteign realize that it was not an instrument, but the shipyard alarm. An intruder was in the yard, someone not wearing an identification or visitor's badge. The radar field of the protection system was tripped and the alarm sounded. Through the raucous bellow of the alarm, Presteign could hear a multitude of 'Pops' as the yard guards jaunted from the grandstand and took positions around the square mile of concrete field. His own Jaunte Watch closed in around him, looking wary and alert. A voice began blaring on the P.A., coordinating defense. "UN"Someone must have broken in!" Black Rod shouted. "I'm aware of that," Presteign answered calmly. "He must be a stranger if he isn't jaunting into here." "I'm aware of that also." "What in God's name is he up to?" Black Rod exclaimed. "You are familiar with my rule, sir," Presteign said coldly. "No associate of the Presteign clan may take the name of the Divinity in vain. You forget yourself." Black Rod touched Presteign's arm. "He's coming this way, Presteign. Will you take cover, please?" "I will not." "Presteign, there have been assassination attempts before. Three of them. If -- " "How do I get to the top of this stand?" "Presteign!" "Help me up." still protesting hysterically, Presteign climbed to the top of the grandstand to watch the power of the Presteign clan in action against danger. Below, he could see workmen in white jumpers swarming out of the pits to gape at the excitement. Guards were appearing as they jaunted from distant sectors toward the focal point of the action. Presteign watched the B-# pit. A figure appeared, dashing swiftly toward the pit, veering, dodging, bulling forward. It was a giant man in hospital blues with a wild thatch of black hair and a distorted face that appeared, in the distance, to be painted in livid colors. His clothes were flickering like heat lightning as the protective induction field of the defense system seared him. There were shouts and a distant rattle of shots, the pneumatic whine of scope guns. Half a dozen workmen in white leaped for the intruder. He scattered them and streaked on and on toward B-#, where the nose of Vorga showed. He was a lightning bolt driving through workmen and guards, pivoting, striking, whipping forward implacably. Suddenly he stopped, reached inside his flaming jacket and withdrew a black canister. With the convulsive gesture of an animal writhing in death-throes, he bit the end of the canister and hurled it, straight and true on a high arc toward Vorga. The next instant, he was struck down. "Presteign!" Black Rod squawked. Presteign shook him off and watched the canister curve up and then down toward the nose of Vorga, spinning and glinting in the cold sunlight. At the edge of the pit, it was caught by the anti-grav beam and flicked upward as by a giant invisible thumbnail. Up and up and up it whirled, one hundred, five hundred, a thousand feet. Then there was a blinding flash, and an instant later a titanic clap of thunder that smote ears and jarred teeth and bone. Presteign picked himself up and descended the grandstand to the launching podium. He placed his finger on the launching button of the Presteign Princess. "Bring me that man, if he's still alive," he told Black Rod. He pressed the button. "I christen thee -- the Presteign Power."  I 'HE star chamber in Castle Presteign was an oval room with ivory panels picked out with gold, high mirrors and stained glass windows. It contained a gold organ with robot organist by Tiffany, a gold-tooled library with android librarian on library ladder, a Louis Quinze desk with android secretary before a manual memo-bead recorder, an American bar with robot bartender. Presteign would have preferred the ostentation of having human servants, but androids and robots kept secrets. "Be seated. Captain Yeovil," he said courteously. "This is Mr. Regis Sheffield, representing me in this matter. That young man is Mr. Sheffield's assistant." "Bunny's my portable law library," Sheffield grunted. Presteign touched a control. The still-life in the star chamber came alive. The organist played, the librarian sorted books, the secretary typed, the bartender shook drinks. It was spectacular. And the impact, carefully calculated by industrial psychometrists, established control for Presteign and put visitors at a disadvantage. "You spoke of a man named Foyle, Captain Yeovil?" Presteign prompted. Captain Peter Y'ang-Yeovil of Central Intelligence was a lineal descendant of the learned Mencius and belonged to the Intelligence Tong of the Inner Planets Armed Forces. For two hundred Intelligence work to the Chinese who, with a five-thousand-year history of cultivated subtlety behind them, had achieved wonders. Captain Y'ang-Yeovil was a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, an adept of the Tientsin Image Makers, a Master of Superstition, and fluent in the Secret Speech. He did not look Chinese. Y'ang-Yeovil hesitated, fully aware of the psychological pressures operating against him. He examined Presteign's ascetic, basilisk face; Sheffield's blunt, aggressive expression; and the eager young man named Bunny whose rabbit features had an unmistakable Oriental cast. It was necessary for Yeovil to establish control or effect some sort of compromise. He opened with a flanking movement. "Are we related anywhere within fifteen degrees of consanguinity?" he asked Bunny in the Mandarin dialect. "I am of the house of the learned MengTse, whoin the barbarians call Mencius." "Then we are hereditary enemies," Bunny answered in faltering Mandarin. "For the formidable ancestor of my line was deposed as governor of Shan-tung in # B.C. by the falsely honored Earthpig Meng-Tse." "With all courtesy, I shave your ill-formed eyebrows," Y'angYeovil said. "Most respectfully, I singe your snaggle teeth." Bunny laughed. "Come, sirs," Presteign protested. "We are reaffirming a threethousand-year blood feud," Y'angYeovil explained to Presteign, who looked sufficiently unsettled by the conversation and the laughter which he did not understand. thrust. "When will you be finished with Foyle?" "What Foyle?" Sheffield asked. "What Foyle have you got?" "There are thirteen of that name associated with the clan Presteign." "An interesting number. Did you know I was a Master of Superstitution? Some day I must show you the Mirror-And-Listen Mystery. I refer to the Foyle involved in a reported attempt on Mr. Presteign's life this morning." "Presteign," Presteign corrected. "I am not 'Mister.' I am Presteign of Presteign." "Three attempts have been made on Presteign's life," Sheffield said. "You'll have to be more specific." "Three this morning? Presteign must have been busy." Y'angYeovil sighed. Sheffield was proving himself a resolute opponent. The Intelligence man tried another diversion. "I do wish our Mr. Presto had been more specific." "Your Mr. Presto!" Presteign exclaimed. "Oh, yes. Didn't you know one of your five hundred Prestos was an agent of ours? That's odd. We took it for granted you'd find out and went ahead with a confusion ojjeration." Presteign looked appalled. Y'ang-Yeovil crossed his legs and continued to chat breezily. "That's the basic weakness in routine Intelligence procedure -- you start finessing before finesse is required." "He's bluffing," Presteign burst out. "None of our Prestos could possibly have any knowledge of Gulliver Foyle." "Thank you." Y'ang-Yeovil smiled. "That's the Foyle I want. When can you let us have him?" Sheffield scowled at Presteign and then turned on Y'ang-Yeovil. "Who's 'us'?" he demanded. "Central Intelligence." "Why do you want him?" "Do you make love to a woman before or after you have been introduced?" "That's a damned impertinent question." "And so was yours. When can you let us have Foyle?" "When you show cause." "To whom?" "To me." Sheffield hammered a heavy forefinger against his palm. "This is a civilian matter concerning civilians. Unless war materiel, war personnel, or the strategy and tactics of a war-in-being are involved, civilian jurisdiction shall always prevail." "# Terran Appeals #," murmured Bunny. "The Nomad was carrying war materiel." "The Nomad was transporting platinum bullion to Mars Bank," Presteign snapped. "If money is a -- " " am leading this discussion," Sheffield interrupted. He swung around on Y'ang-Yeovil. "Name the war materiel." Y'ang-Yeovil off balance. He knew that the crux of the Nomad situation was the presence on board ship of # pounds of PyrE, the total world supply, which was probably irreplaceable now that its discoverer had disappeared. He knew that Sheffield realized that they both knew this. He had assumed that Sheffield would prefer to keep PyrE unnamed. And yet here was the challenge to name the unnameable. He attempted to meet bluntness with bluntness. "All right, gentlemen, I'll name it now. The Nomad was transpK)rting twenty pounds of a substance called PyrE." Presteign started; Sheffield silenced him. "What's PyrE?" "According to our reports -- " "From Presteign's Mr. Presto?" "Oh, that was bluff." Y'ang-Yeovil laughed and momentarily gained control. "According to Intelligence, PyrE was developed for Presteign by a man who subsequently vanished. PyrE is a Misch Metal, a pyrophore. That's all we know for a fact. But we've had vague reports about it -- unbelievable reports from reputable agents. If a fraction of our inferences are correct, PyrE could make the difference between victory and defeat." "Nonsense. No war materiel has ever made that much difference." "No? I cite the fission bomb of #. I cite the Null-G anti-gravity installations of #. Talley's AllField Radar Trip Screen of #. Materiel can often make the difference, especially when there's the chanbe of the enemy getting it first." "There's no such chance now." "Thank you for admitting the importance of PyrE." "I admit nothing; I deny everything." "Central Intelligence is prepared to offer an exchange. A man for a man. The inventor of PyrE for Gully Foyle." "You've got him?" Sheffield demanded. "Then why badger us for Foyle?" "Because we've got a corpse!" Yeovil flared. "The CXiter Satellites command had him on Lassell for six months, trying to carve information out of him. We pulled him out with a raid at a cost of seventy-nine per cent casualties. We rescued a corpse. We still don't know if the Outer Satellites were having a cynical laugh at our expense, letting us recapture a body. We still don't know how much they ripped out of him." right at this. His merciless fingers tapped slowly and sharply. "Damn it!" Y'ang-Yeovil stormed. "Can't you recognize a crisis, Sheffield? We're on a tightrope. What the devil are you doing AS backing Presteign in this shabby deal? You're the leader of the Liberal party -- Terra's arch-patriot. You're Presteign's jxjlitical archenemy. Sell him out, you fool, before he sells us all out." "Captain Yeovil," Presteign broke in with icy venom, "these remarks cannot be countenanced." "We want and need PyrE," Y'ang-Yeovil continued. "We'll have to investigate that twenty pounds of PyrE, rediscover the synthesis, learn to apply it to the war effort... and all this before the O.S. beat us to the punch, if they haven't already. But Presteign refuses to coo)erate. Why? Because he's opposed to the party in power. He wants no military victories for the Liberals. He'd rather we lost the war for the sake of politics because men like Presteign never lose. Come to your senses, Sheffield. You've been retained by a traitor. What in God's name are you trying to do?" Before Sheffield could answer, there was a discreet tap on the door of the Star Chamber and Saul Dagenham was ushered in. Time was when Dagenham had been one of the Inner Planets' research wizards, a physicist with inspired intuition, total recall, and a sixthorder computer for a brain. But there had been an accident at Tycho Sands and the fission blast that should have killed him did not. Instead, it turned him dangerously radioactive; it transformed him into a #th century "Typhoid Mary." He was paid Cr # a year by the Inner Planets government to take precautions which they trusted him to carry out. He avoided physical contact with any person for more than five minutes per day. He could not occupy any room, not his own, for more than thirty minutes a day. Commanded and paid by the IP to isolate himself, Dagenham had abandoned research and built the colossus of Dagenham Couriers, Inc. When Y'ang-Yeovil saw the short blond cadaver with leaden skin and death's-head smile enter the Star Chamber, he knew he was assured of defeat in this encounter. He was no match for the three men together. He arose at once. "I'm getting an Admiralty order for Foyle," he said. "As far as Intelligence is concerned, all negotiations are ended. From now on, it's war." "Captain Yeovil is leaving," Presteign called to the Jaunte Watch officer who had guided Dagenham in. "Please see him out through the maze." Y'ang-Yeovil waited until the officer stepped alongside him and bowed. Then, as the man courteously motioned to the door, Y'angYeovil looked directly at Presteign, smiled ironically and disappeared with a faint 'pop.' "Presteign!" Bunny exclaimed. "He jaunted. This room isn't blind to him. He -- " "Evidently," Presteign said. "Inform the Master of the Household," he instructed the amazed Watch officer. "The coordinates of the Star Chamber are no longer secret. They must be changed within twenty-four hours. And now, Mr. Dagenham -- " "One minute," said Dagenham. "There's that Admiralty order." nation, Dagenham disappeared, too. Presteign raised his eyebrows. "Another party to the Star Chamber secret," he murmured"But at least he had the tact to conceal his knowledge until the secret was out." Dagenham reappeared. "No point wasting time going through the motions of the maze," he said. "I've given orders in Washington. They'll hold Yeovil up; two hours guaranteed, three hours probable, four hours possible." "How will they hold him up?" Bunny asked. Dagenham gave him his deadly of Dagenham Couriers -- fun, fantasy, confusion, catastrophe. We'll need all four hours. Damn! Fve disrupted your dolls, Presteign." The robots were suddenly capering in lunatic fashion as Dagenham's hard radiation penetrated their electronic systems. "No matter. I'll be on my way." "Foyle?" Presteign demanded. "Nothing yet." Dagenham grinned his death's-head smile. "He's really imique. I've tried all the standard drugs and routines on him. Nothing. Outside, he's just an ordinary spaceman -- if you forget the tattoo on his face -- but inside he's got steel guts. Something's got hold of him and he won't give." "What's got hold of him?" Sheffield asked. "I hope to find out." "How?" "Don't ask; you'd be an accessory. Have you got a ship ready, Presteign?" Presteign nodded. "I'm not guaranteeing there'll be any Nomad for us to find, but we'll have to get a jump on the navy if there is. Law ready, Sheffield?" "Ready. I'm hoping we won't have to use it." "I'm hoping, too; but again, I'm not guaranteeing. All right, stand by for instructions. I'm on my way to crack Foyle." "Where have you got him?" Dagenham shook his head. "This room isn't secure." He disappeared. He jaunted Cincinnati-New Orleans-Monterrey to Mexico City, where he appeared in the Psychiatry Wing of the giant hospital of the Combined Terran Universities. 'Wing' was hardly an adequate name for this section, which occupied an entire city in the metropolis that was the hospital. He jaunted up to the #rd floor of the Therapy Division and looked into the isolated tank where Foyle floated, imconscious. D agenham glanced at the distinguished bearded gentleman in attendance. "Hello, Fritz." "Hello, Saul." "Hell of a thing, the head of psychiatry minding a patient for me." "I think we owe you favors, Saul." "You still brooding about Tycho Sands, Fritz? I'm not. Am I lousing your wing with radiation?" "I've had everything shielded." "Ready for the dirty work?" "I wish I knew what you were after." "Information." "And you have to turn my ther-. apy department into an inquisition to get it?" "That was the idea." "Why not use ordinary drugs?" "Tried them already. No good. He's not an ordinary man." "You know this is illegal." "I know. Changed your mind? Want to back out? I can duplicate your equipment for a quar"No, Saul. We'll always owe you favors." "Then let's go. Nightmare Theater first." They trundled the tank down a corridor and into a hundred-feetsquare padded room. It was one of therapy's by-passed experiments. Nightmare Theater had been an early attempt to shock schizophrenics back into the objective world by rendering the fantasy world into which they were withdrawing uninhabitable. But the shattering and laceration of patients' emotions had proved to be too cruel and dubious a treatment. For Dagenham's sake, the head of psychiatry had dusted off the #D visual projectors and reconnected all sensory projectors. They decanted Foyle from his tank, gave him a reviving shot and left him in the middle of the floor. They removed the tank, turned off the lights and entered the concealed control booth. There they turned on the projectors. Every child in the world imagines that its fantasy world is unique to itself. Psychiatry knows that the joys and terrors of private fantasies are a common heritage shared by all mankind. Fears, guilts, terrors and shames could be interchanged, from one man to the next, and none would notice the difference. The therapy department at Combined Hospital had recorded thousands of emotional tapes and boiled them down to one all-inclusive, all-terrifying performance in Nightmare Theater. sweating, and never knew that he had awakened. He was in the clutch of the serpent-haired, bloody-eyed Eumenides. He was pursued, entrapped, precipitated from heights, burned, flayed, bowstringed, vermin-covered, devoured. He screamed. He ran. The radar Hobble-Field in the Theater clogged his steps and turned them into the ghastly slowmotion of dream nmning. And through the cacophony of grinding, shrieking, moaning, pursuing that assailed his ears muttered the thread of a persistent voice. "Where is Nomad where is Nomad where is Nomad where is Nomad where is Nomad?" "Vorga," Foyle croaked. "Vora." He had been inoculated by his own fixation. His own nightmare had rendered him immune. "Where is Nomad? where have you left Nomad? what happened to Nomad? where is Nomad?" " For a.'" Foyle shouted. "Vorga." In the control booth, Dagenham swore. The head of psychiatry, monitoring the projectors, glanced at the clock. "One minute and forty-five seconds, Saul. He can't stand much more." "He's got to break. Give him the final effect." They buried Foyle alive, slowly, inexorably, hideously. He was carried down into black depths and enclosed in stinking slime that cut off light and air. He slowly suffocated while a distant voice boomed : But Foyle was back aboard Nomad in his lightless, airless coffin, floating comfortably between deck and roof. He curled into a tight fetal ball and prepared to sleep. He was content. He would escape. He would find VoTa. "Impervious bastard!" Dagenham swore. "Has anyone ever resisted Nightmare Theater before, Fritz?" "Not many. You're right -- that's an uncommon man, Saul." "He's got to be ripped open. To hell with any more of this. We'll try the Megal Mood next. Are the actors ready?" "All ready." "Then let's go." There are six directions in which delusions of grandeur can run. The Megal (short for megalomania) Mood was therapy's dramatic diagnosis technique for establishing and plotting the particular course of megalomania. Foyle awoke in a luxurious four-poster bed. He was in a bedroom, hung with brocade, papered in velvet. He glanced around curiously. Soft sunlight filtered through latticed windows. Across the room, a valet was quietly laying out clothes. "Hey!" Foyle grunted. IHE valet turned. "Good morning, Mr. Fourmyle," he murmured. "What?" "It's a lovely morning, sir. I've laid out the brown twill and the cordovan pumps, sir." "What's a matter, you?" "I've -- " The valet gazed at Foyle curiously. "Is anything wrong, Mr. Fourmyle?" "What you call me, man?" "By your name, sir." "My name is -- Fourmyle?" Foyle struggled up in the bed. "No, it's not. It's Foyle. Gully Foyle, that's my name, me." The valet bit his lip. "One moment, sir..." He stepped outside and called. A lovely girl in white came running into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. She took Foyle's hands and gazed into his eyes. Her face was distressed. "Darling, darling, darling," she whispered. "You aren't going to start all that again, are you? The doctor swore you were over it." "Start what again?" "All that Gulliver Foyle nonsense about your being a common sailor and -- " "I am Gully Foyle. That's my name -- Gully Foyle." "Sweetheart, you're not. That's just a delusion you've had for weeks. You've been overworking and drinking too much." "Been Gully Foyle all my life, me." "Yes, I know, darling. That's the way it's seemed to you. But you're not. You're Geoffrey Fourmyle. The Geoffrey Fourmyle. You're -- Oh, what's the sense in telling you? Get dressed, my love. You've got to come downstairs. Your office has been frantic." Foyle permitted the valet to dress him and went downstairs in a daze. The lovely girl, who evidently adored him, conducted him through a giant studio littered with drawing tables, easels and half-finished canvases. She took him into a vast hall filled with desks, file cabinets, stock tickers, clerks, secretaries, office personnel. They entered a lofty laboratory cluttered with glass and chrome. Burners flickered and hissed; bright-colored liquids bubbled and churned; there was a pleasant odor of interesting chemicals and odd experiments. "What's 'all this?" Foyle asked. The girl seated Foyle in a plush armchair alongside a giant desk littered with interesting papers scribbled with fascinating symbols. On some, Foyle saw the name 'Geoffrey Fourmyle,' scrawled in an imposing, authoritative signature. "There's some crazy kind of mistake, is all," Foyle said. The girl silenced him. "Here's Doctor Regan. He'll explain." A N impressive gentleman with a crisp, comforting manner came to Foyle, touched his pulse, inspected his eyes, and nodded in satisfaction. "Good," he said. "Excellent. You are close to complete recovery, Mr. Fourmyle. Now you will listen to me for a moment, eh?" Foyle nodded. "You remember nothing of the past. You have only a false memory. You were overworked. You are an impxjrtant man and there were too many demands on you. You started to drink heavily a month ago -- No, no, denial is useless. You drank. You lost yourself." J M "You became convinced you were not the famous Jeff Fourmyle, an infantile attempt to escape responsibility. You imagined you were a common spaceman named Foyle. Gulliver Foyle, yes? With an odd number -- " "Gully Foyle, AS : ## : #. But that's me. That's -- " "It is not you. This is you." Dr. Regan waved at the interesting offices they could see through the transparent glass wall. "You can only recapture the true memory if you discharge the old. All this glorious reality is yours, if we can help you discard the dream of the spaceman." Dr. Regan leaned forward, his jx)lished spectacles glittering hypnotically. "Reconstruct this false memory of yours in detail and I will tear it down. Where do you imagine you left the spaceship Nomad? How did you escape? Where do you imagine the Nomad is now?" Foyle wavered before the romantic glamor of the scene which seemed to be just within his grasp. "It seems me, I left Nomad out in" He stopped short. A devil-face peered at him from the highlights reflected in Dr. Regan's spectacles... a hideous tiger mask with N  mad blazoned across the distorted brow. Foyle stood up. "Liars," he growled. "It's real, me. This here is phony. What happened to me is real. Tm real, me." Saul Dagenham walked into the laboratory. "All right," he said. "Strike the set. It's a washout." The bustling scene in laboraory, office and studio ended. The actors quietly disappeared without another glance at Foyle. Dagenham gave Foyle his deadly smile. "Tough, aren't you? You're really unique. My name is Saul Dagenham. We've got five minutes for a talk. Come into the garden." HE Sedative Garden atop the Therapy Building was a triumph of therapeutic planning. Every perspective, every color, every contour had been designed to placate hostility, soothe resistance, melt anger, evaforate hyseria, absorb melancholia and depression. "Sit down," Dagenham said, pointing to a bench alongside a pool in which crystal waters tinkled. "I'll have to walk around a bit. Can't come too close to you. I'm 'hot.' D'you know what that means?" Foyle shook his head sullenly. Dagenham cupped both hands around the flaming blossom of an orchid and held them there for a moment. "Watch that flower." He paced up a path and turned suddenly. "You're right, of course. Everything that happened to you is real -- only what did happen?" "Go to hell," Foyle growled. "You know, Foyle, I admire you." "Go to hell." "In your own primitive way, you've got ingenuity and guts. I've been checking on you. That bomb you threw in the Presteign shipyards was lovely, and you nearly wrecked General Hospital getting the money and material together." Dagenham counted fingers. "You looted lockers, stole from the blind ward, stole drugs from the pharmacy, stole apparatus from the lab stockrooms." "Go to hell, you." "But what have you got against Presteign? Why'd you try to blow up his shipyard? They tell me you broke in and went tearing through the pits like a wild man. What were you trying to do, Foyle?" "Go to hell." Dagenham smiled. "If we're going to chat, you'll have to hold up your end better than that. Your conversation's getting monotonous. What happened to Nomad?" "I don't know about Nomad, nothing." "The ship was last reported over seven months ago. Are you the sole survivor? And what have you been doing all this time? Having your face decorated?" "I don't know about Nomad, nothing." "No, Foyle, that won't do. You show up with Nomad tattooed across your face. Freshly tattooed. Intelligence checks and finds you were aboard Nomad when she sailed. Foyle, Gulliver: AS: # #:#, Mechanic's Mate, #rd Class. As if all this isn't enough to throw Intelligence into a tizzy, you come back in a private launch that's been missing fifty years. Man, you're cooking in the reactor. Intelligence wants the answers to all these questions. And you ought to know how Cenral Intelligence butchers its answers out of people." Foyle started. D agenham nodded as he saw his point sink home. "That's why I think you'll listen to reason. We want information, Foyle. I tried to trick it out of you; admitted. I failed because you're too tough; admitted. Now I'm offering you an honest deal. We'll protect you if you'll cooperate. If you don't, you'll spend five years in an Intelligence lab having information chopped out of you." It was not the prospect of the butchery that frightened Foyle, but the thought of the loss of freedom. A man had to be free to avenge himself; to raise money and find Vora again; to rip and tear and gut Vorga. "What kind of deal?" he asked. "Tell us what happened to Nomad and where you left her." "Why, man?" "Why? Because of the salvage, man." "There ain't nothing to salvage. She's a wreck, is all." "Even a wreck's salvageable." "You mean you'd jet way out there to pick up pieces? Don't joker me, man." "All right," Dagenham said in exasperation. "There's the cargo." "She was split wide open. No cargo left." "It was a cargo you don't know about," Dagenham said confidentially. "Nomad was transporting platinum bullion to Mars Bank. Every so often, banks have to adjust accounts. Normally, enough trade goes on between planets so that accounts can be balanced on paper. The war's disrupted normal trade and Mars Bank found that Presteign owed them twentyway of getting the money short of actual delivery. Presteign was delivering the money in bar platinum aboard the Nomad. It was locked in the purser's safe." pered. "Give or take a few thousand. The ship was insured, but that just means that the underwriters, Bo'ness and Uig, get the salvage rights and they're even tougher than Presteign. However, there'll be a reward for you. Say, twenty thousand credits -- lump sum." pered again. "We're assuming that an O.S. raider caught up with Nomad somewhere on course and let her have it. They couldn't have boarded and looted or you wouldn't have been left alive. This means that the purser's safe is still -- Are you listening, Foyle?" But Foyle was not listening. not twenty thousand -- twenty millions in platinum bullion as a broad highway to Vorga. No more petty thefts from lockers and ing and the razing of Vorga. "Foyle!" Dagenham. "I don't know about Nomad, nothing," he said. "What the hell's got into you now? Why're you dummying up again?" "I don't know about Nomad, nothing." "I'm offering a fair reward. A spaceman can go on a hell of a tear with twenty thousand credits -- a one-year tear. What more do you want?" "I don't know about Nomad, nothing." "It's us or Intelligence, Foyle." "You ain't so anxious for them to get me or you wouldn't be flipping through all this. But it ain't no use, anyway. I don't know about Nomad, nothing." "You son of a -- " Dagenham tried to repress his anger. He had revealed just a little too much to this cunning, primitive creature. "You're right, Foyle. We're not anxious for Intelligence to get you. But we've made our own preparations." His voice hardened. "You think you can dummy up and stand us off. You think you can leave us to whistle for Nomad, You've even got an idea of beating us to the salvage." "No," Foyle said. "Now listen to this. We've got a lawyer waiting in New York. He's got a criminal prosecution for piracy pending against you; piracy in space, murder and looting. We're going to throw the book at you. Presteign will get a conviction in twenty-four hours. If you've got a criminal record of any kind, that means a lobotomy. They'll bum out half your brain to stop you from ever jaunting again." Dagenham stopped and glowered at Foyle. When Foyle shook his head, Dagenham continued. "If you haven't got a record, they'll hand you ten years of what is laughingly known as medical treatment. We don't punish criminals in our enlightened age; we cure 'em -- and the cure is worse than punishment. They'll stash you in a black hole in one of the cave hospitals. You'll be kept in permanent darkness and solitary confinement so you can't jaunte out. They'll go through the motions of giving you shots and therapy, but you'll be rotting in the dark. You'll stay there and rot until you decide to talk. So make up your mind." "I don't know nothing about Nomad. Nothing!" Foyle said. "All right," Dagenham spat. Suddenly he pointed to the orchid blossom he had enclosed with his hands. It was blighted and shriveled. "That's what's going to happen to you." Continued Next Month # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under vhat they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania Being unique is a matter of pride -- but being a complete mathematical impossibility? T he remarkable distinction of Thatcher Blitt did not come to the attention of a bemused world until late in the year #. Although Thatcher Blitt was, by the standards of his time, an extremely successful man financially, this was not considered real distinction. Unfortunately for Blitt, it never has been. The history books do not record the names of the most successful merchants of the past unless they happened by chance to have been connected with famous men of the time. Thus Croesus is remembered largely for his contributions to famous Romans and successful armies. And Haym Solomon, a similarly wealthy man, would have been long forgotten had he not also been a financial mainstay of the American Revolution and consorted with famous, if impoverished, statesmen. So if Thatcher Blitt was distinct among men, the distinction was not immediately apparent. He was a small, gaunt, fragile man who had the kind of face and bearing that are perfect for movie crowd scenes. Absolutely forgettable. Yet Thatcher Blitt was one of the foremost businessmen of his time. For he was president and founder of that noble institution. Genealogy, Inc. Thatcher Blitt was not yet # when he made the discovery which was to make him among the richest men of his time. His discovery was, like all great ones, obvious yet profound. He observed that every person had a father. thought, it followed inevitably that every father had a father, and so on. In fact, thought Blitt, when you considered the matter rightly, everyone alive was the direct descendant of untold numbers of fathers, down through the ages, all descending, one after another, father to son. And so backward, unquestionably, into the unrecognizable and perhaps simian fathers of the past. This thought, on the face of it not particularly profound, struck young Blitt like a blow. He saw that since each man had a father, and so on and so on, it ought to be possible to construct the genealogy of every person now alive. In short, it should be possible to trace your family back, father by father, to the beginning of time. And of course it was. For that was the era of the time scanner. And with a time scanner, it would be possible to document your family tree with perfect accuracy. You could find out exactly from whom you had sprung. And so Thatcher Blitt made his fortune. He saw clearly at the beginning what most of us see only now, and he patented it. He was aware not only of the deep-rooted sense of snobbishness that exists in many people, but also of the simple yet profound force of curiosity. Who exactly, one says to oneself, was my forty-times-great-great-grandfather? A Roman Legionary? A Viking? A pyramid builder? One of Xenophon's Ten Thousand? Or was he, perhaps (for it is always possible), Alexander the Great? Thatcher Blitt had a product to sell. And sell he did, for other reasons that he alone had noted at the beginning. The races of mankind have twisted and turned with incredible complexity over the years; the numbers of peopie have been enormous. With thirty thousand years in which to work, it was impossible that there was not, somewhere along the line, a famous ancestor for everybody. A minor king would often suffice, or even a general in some forgotten army. And if these direct ancestors were not enough, it was fairly simple to establish close blood kinship with famous men. The blood lines of Man, you see, begin with a very few people. In all of ancient Greece, in the time of Pericles, there were only a few thousand families. Seeing all this, Thatcher Blitt became a busy man. It was necessary not only to patent his idea, but to produce the enormous capital needed to found a large organization. The cost of the time scanner was at first prohibitive, but gradually that obstacle was overcome, only for Thatcher to find that the government for many years prevented him from using it. Yet Blitt was indomitable. And eventually, after years of heart-rending waiting. Genealogy, Inc., began operations. Within months, the very name of the company and its taut slogan, "An Ancestor for Everybody," became household words. There was but one immediate drawback. It soon became apparent that, without going back very far into the past, it was sometimes impossible to tell who was really the next father in line. The mothers were certain, but the fathers were something else again. This was a ponderable point. But Blitt refused to be discouraged. He set various electronic engineers to work on the impasse and a solution was found. An ingenious device which tested blood electronically through the scanner -- based on the different sine waves of the blood groups -- saved the day. That invention was the last push Genealogy, Inc, was ever to need. It rolled on to become one of the richest and, for a long while, most exclusive corporations in the world. Yet it was still many years before Thatcher Blitt himself had time to rest. There were patent infringements to be fought, new developments in the labs to be watched, new ways to be found to make the long and arduous task of father-tracing easier and more economical. Hence he was well past sixty when he at last had time to begin considering himself. He had become by this time a moderately offensive man. Surrounded as he had been all these years by pomp and luxury, by impressive names and extraordinary family trees, he had succumbed at last He became unbearably name-conscious. He began by regrouping his friends according to their ancestries. His infrequent parties were characterized by his almost Parliamentarian system of seating. No doubt, all this had been in Thatcher Blitt to begin with -- it may well be, in perhaps varying quantities, in all of us -- but it grew with him, prospered with him. Yet in all those years he never once inspected his own forebears. You may well ask, was he afraid? One answers, one does not know. But at any rate, the fact remains that Thatcher Blitt, at the age of #, was one of the few rich men in the world who did not know who exactly their ancestors had been. A ND so, at last, we come to the day when Thatcher Blitt was sitting alone in his office, one languid hand draped vacantly over his brow, listening with deep satisfaction to the hum and click of the enormous operations which were going on in the building around him. What moved him that day remains uncertain. Perhaps it was that, from where he was sitting, he could see row upon row of action pictures of famous men which had been taken from his time scanners. Or perhaps it was simply that this profound question had been gnawing at him all these years, deeper and deeper, and on this day broke out into the light But whatever the reason, at #:# that morning, he leaped vitally from his chair. He summoned Cathcart, his chief assistant, and gave him the immortal command. "Cathcart!" he grated, stung to the core of his being. "Who am I?" Cathcart rushed off to find out. There followed some of the most taut and fateful days in the Inc. Father-tracing is, of course, a painstaking business. But it was not long before word had begun to filter out to interested people. The first interesting discovery made was a man called Blott, in eighteenth century England. (No explanation was ever given for the name's alteration from Blott to Blitt. Certain snide individuals took this to mean that the name had been changed as a means to avoid prosecution, or some such, and immediately began making light remarks about the Blotts on old Blitt's escutcheon.) This Blott had the distinction of having been a wineseller of considerable funds. This reputedly did not sit well with Thatcher Blitt. Merchants, he snapped, however successful, are not worthy of note. He wanted empire builders. He wanted, at the very least, a name he had heard about. A name that appeared in the histories. His workers furiously scanned back into the past. Months went by before the next name appeared. In #th century England, there was a wandering minstrel named John (last name unprintable) who achieved considerable notoriety as a ballad singer, before dying an unnatural death in the boudoir of a lady of high fashion. Although the details of this man's life were of extreme interest, they did not impress the old man. He was, on the contrary, rather shaken. A minstrel. And a rogue to boot. There were shakeups in Genealogy, Inc. Cathcart was replaced by a man named Jukes, a highly competent man despite his interesting family name. Jukes forged ahead full steam past the birth of Christ (no relation). But he was well into ancient Egypt before the search began to take on the nature of a crisis. simply nobody. Or to be more precise, nobody but nobodies. It was incredible, all the laws of chance were against it, but there was, actually, not a single ancestor of note. And no way of faking one, for Thatcher Blitt couldn't be fooled by his own methods. What there was was simply an unending line of peasants, serfs, an occasional foot soldier or leather worker. Past John the ballad-singer, there was no one at all worth reporting to the old man. This situation would not continue, of course. There were so few families for men to spring from. The entire Gallic nation, for example, a great section of present-day France, sprang from the family of one lone man in the north of France in the days before Christ. Every native Frenchman, therefore, was at least the son of a king. It was impossible for Thatcher Blitt to be less. So the hunt went on from day to day, past ancient Greece, past Jarmo, past the wheel and metals and farming and on even past all civilization, outward and backward into the cold primordial wastes of northern Germany. And still there was nothing. Though Jukes lived in daily fear of losing his job, there was nothing to do but press on. In Germany, he reduced Blitt's ancestor to a slovenly little man who was one of only three men in the entire tribe, or family, one of three in an area which now contains to form, was simply a member of the tribe. As was his father before him. Yet onward it went. Westward back into the French caves, southward into Spain and across the unrecognizable Mediterranean into a verdant North Africa, backward in time past even the Cro-Magnons, and yet ever backward, # years, #, with old Blitt reduced now practically to gibbering and still never an exceptional forebear. There came a time when Jukes had at last, inevitably, to face the old man. He had scanned back as far as he could. The latest ancestor he had unearthed for Blitt was a hairy creature who did not walk erect. And yet, even here, Blitt refused to concede. "It may be," he howled, "it must be that my ancestor was the first man to walk erect or light a fire -- to do something." It was not until Jukes pointed out that all those things had been already examined and found hopeless that Blitt finally gave in. Blitt was a relative, of course, of the first man to stand erect, the man with the first human brain. But so was everybody else on the face of the Earth. There was truly nowhere else to explore. What would be found now would be only the common history of mankind. Blitt retired to his chambers and refused to be seen.  I 'HE story went the rounds, as such stories will. And it was then at last, after # years of insignificance, that the name of Blitt found everlasting distinction. The story was picked up, fully documented, by psychologists and geneticists of the time, and inserted into textbooks as a profound commentary on the forces of heredity. The name of Thatcher Blitt in particular has become famous, has persisted until this day. For he is the only man yet discovered, or ever likely to be discovered, with this particular distinction. In # years of scanner-recorded history, the blood line of Blitt (or Blott) never once produced an exceptional man. That record is unsurpassed. Next Month... teleportation. Don't miss any part of this truly great novel! for your information ber, #, an unknown animal entered the annals of science in the most dignified and respectable manner possible. In the evening of that day, a meeting of the Royal Zoological Society of London took place and the main paper was read by Dr. Gideon Algernon Mantell, a famous geologist and paleontologist. Doctor Mantell had news from New Zealand, which had been sent to him by his own son, who had been collecting. The main news of the evening dealt with a bird. A few years earlier, Walter Mantell had sent the remains of a bird to his father, stating that this must be the bird which was called Moho by the Maoris of the North Island and Takahe by the Maoris of the South Island. The Maoris had said that this bird could not fly, even though it had wings. They had described it and said that they had eaten it while it was still around. After scientific examination of the remains it had been called Notornis mantelli. But now. Dr. Mantell was able to announce, something could be added: Notornis mantelli was still aliv.e. At any event, his son had secured the carcass of a freshly killed bird. It was about the size of a goose. A S many readers may know, this Takahe was thought to be extinct since about #, but was discovered alive on the west shore of Lake Te Anau on the South Island. It is now as strictly protected as is humanly possible. But Dr. Mantell had more news to tell that night: It may not be irrelevant to add, that in the course of Mr. Walter Mantell's journey from Banks' Peninsula along the coast to Otago, he learnt from the natives that they believed there still existed in that country the only indigenous terrestrial quadruped, except a species of rat, which there are reasonable grounds for concluding New Zealand ever possessed. While encamping at Arowenua in the district of Timaru, the Maoris assured him that about ten miles inland there was a quadruped which they called Kaureke, and that it was formerly abundant, and often kept by their ancestors in a domestic state as a pet animal. It was described as about two feet in length, with coarse grisly hair; and must have more nearly resembled the Otter or Badger than the Beaver or the Ornithorhynchus (platypus), which the first accounts seemed to suggest as the probable type. The offer of a liberal reward induced some of the Maoris to start for the interior of the country where the Kaureke was supposed to be located, but they returned without having obtained the slightest trace of the existence of such an animal; my son, however, expresses his belief in the native accounts, and that if the creature no longer exists, its extermination is of a very recent date. This is the earliest printed statement in which the mysterious mammal is even mentioned. An earlier writer on New Zealand's natural history, Ernest Dieffenbach, M.D., the naturalist of the New Zealand Company, had stated in his book Travels in New Zealand (London, #) that "no terrestrial beast has been found wild in these Islands, nor do any app)ear to be known to the natives." The fact is that the only native mammals of New Zealand are two bats. One of them is closely related to an Australian form; the other is typical for New Zealand only. Locally, they are distinguished as the long-tailed and the short-tailed bat, with the explanation that the long-tailed bat has short ears while the short-tailed bat is long-eared.  I HE Maoris told that when they arrived in Ao-tea-roa ("long white cloud" or "long shining land," their name for New Zealand) from Hawa-iki (their original home, most probably the island of Raiatea, about # miles to the northwest of Tahiti ) in the canoes Tainui, Takitimu, Te Arawa, Mata-atua, Kurhaupo and Tokomaru they brought dogs with them which they kept as livestock. The main wave of the Maori migration to New Zealand must have been around # A.D., but the dog, now extinct, was still mentioned by Captain James Cook as one of the two mammals hp saw. The other was a black rat which was rare even then -- the Maoris ate it, too. I have to digress from Dr. Mantell's unknown "indigenous terrestrial quadruped" for a moment to say a little more about that black rat. No doubt it was there, for it even received a scientific name, Mus maorium, or Maori rat. The Maori name for it was Kiore. But one expert claimed around # that he could not find a difference between the Maori rat and the common Pacific species of rat Mus exulans. And Alfred Russell Wallace points out in his once-famous book Island Lite (London, #) that whenever a man caught a black rat and the Maoris jubilantly declared that this was a true Kiore (in the meantime, other European rats had arrived by ships from England, much against the wishes of everybody), it turned out to be either a European black rat or else an Australian rat which had arrived as a stowaway on ships from Australia. The story of Dr. Mantell's unknown quadruped moved on to several other names. The name of the explorer in question is now in most books as Sir Julius von Haast, but he was born in Bonn on the Rhine (where his father was Burgomaster) as Johann Franz Julius von Haast. And he did not see New Zealand until the age of #, when he arrived in Auckland on December #st, #. He became famous as a geologist. He discovered an important pass through the mountains of the South Island which still bears his name. He located coal and gold and founded the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, New Zealand. But he kept telling friends that, because of his beautiful and strong voice, he had wanted to become an opera singer -- presumably his dignified father had something to say about that ambition -- and that he had played the violin in the symphony orchestra of Diisseldorf under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. Sir Julius learned a new name for the unknown mammal. The Maoris called it Waitoreke, or Waitoreki, or Waitoteke. I haven't been able to find out anywhere whether this name can be translated, but I found in Dieffenbach a glossary of Maori words and learned that waipa means river, waikeri means either swamp or rivulet, wairere means waterfall, waikare means clear water and waitangi (a place name) means noisy water. Waitoreke obviously has something to do with water. Maybe the name just means "lives in water" or something like that.  N #, the Austrian geologist  Ferdinand von Hochstetter embarked on the Novara for a lorg trip of exploration. He came to New Zealand and made friends with Dr. Julius von Haast. Two years after his return to Austria, von Hochstetter started to assemble his notes on New Zealand for a book and asked von Haast whether anything new could be reported. The reply was printed in his book in a footnote reading: My friend Haast writes to me about the Waitoreki under the date of the #th of June #I as follows: "# feet above sea level I saw at the upper Ashburton River (South Island, Province of Canterbury), in an area where no human foot ever walked before me, its tracks on many occasions. The tracks resemble those of our European otter but are somewhat smaller. The animal itself was seen by two gentlemen who ow.n a sheep ranch at the shore of Lake Heron in the neighborhood of the Ashburton River at an elevation of # feet above sea level. They describe the animal as being of a dark brown color, of the same size as a large rabbit. They hit it with a whip; it emitted a whistling sound and disappeared quickly in the water along the reeds." That footnote was the sum total that Dr. von Hochstetter (or rather Dr. von Haast) could report. Even at a later date, during the official Inaugural Address at the occasion of the founding of the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, Sir Julius could not claim to have ever seen the animal. But he repeated that he had seen its tracks many times. Meanwhile, the animal had made its appearance in another footnote. In #, a London publishing house printed a book by the Reverend Richard Taylor, entitled Te Ika A Maui, Or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants. The footnote on p. # reads in full: A man named Sevmour, of Otaki, stated that he had repeatedly seen an animal in the Middle Island, near Dusky Bay, on the south-west coast, which he called a musk-rat, from the strong smell it emitted. He said, its tail was thick, and resembled the ripe piiori, the fruit of the kie-kie, which is not unlike in appearance to the tail of a beaver. This account was corroborated by Tamihana te Rauparaha, who spoke of it as being more than double the size of the Norway rat, and as having a large flat tail. A man named Tom Crib, who had been engaged in whaling and sealing in the neighborhood of Dusky Bay for more than twenty-five years, said he had not himself seen the beaver, but had several times met with their habitations, and had been surprised by seeing little streams dammed up, and houses like bee-hives erected on one side, having two entrances, one from above and the other below the dam. One of the Camerons, who lived at Kaiwarawara, when the settlers first came to Wellington, stated that he saw one of these large rats and pursued it, but it took to the water, and dived out of sight.  I ' HE two comments which may have to be made to clear up a few question marks in the reader's mind are that for a while the South Island was called Middle Island (the one now called Stewart Island was then named South Island), while the Norway rat mentioned is the common European brown rat, which can be of considerable size itself. As time went on, reports about the Waitoreke became rarer and rarer. In other words there weren't any, and books about New Zealand or about natural history followed the style started by Ferdinand von Hochstetter: the Waitoreke began to dwell exclusively in footnotes. But naturalists would have given almost anything to find out whether it lived in New Zealand lakes and rivers, too. For in the meantime, the facts of life, evolution, had been realized and a New Zealand mammal held high promises just because of its location. The earliest known mammals were the monotremes, platypus and two types of echidna, known from Australia and New Guinea. They had survived there, along with hosts of mammals of the next higher type, the marsupials, because their area had become separated from other land masses at a time when the marsupials were the highest mammals there were. Now there was every indication that the land connection to New Zealand (via New Guinea) had broken down at an even earlier time. If there was an indigenous New Zealand mammal, it had to be very old and probably was a monotromelike platypus, sharing with it the habit of dwelling near water, but not necessarily looking like it. And since New Zealand had preserved a reptile, the Hatteria or Sphenodon, which was most decidedly "pre-dinosaur" in age, a New Zealand mammal might even have a bodily organization which could be called "pre-mammal." In short, it might be the scientific find of the century -- provided it could be found. The area where it might be found could be reasonably well localized. All reports, with a single doubtful exception, had come from the South Island, more specifically the southern half of the South Island. Walter Mantell heard his story on the east coast of the South Island, to the south of Banks' Peninsula. Sir Julius von Haast had seen the tracks in the interior fairly far to the south. And Lake Heron -- it is just about I Vz miles long and not entered on most maps -- might be said to be just about the center of the South Island. Dusky Bay, of course, is almost at the southern end and I might add that Takahe was once taken near Dusky Bay and that the most recent (but more than a century old) report of a small moa also came from that area. first report -- if it is one -- also came from Dusky Bay. Again I have to quote a footnote, this time from p. # of Wallace's Island Life. The animal described by Captain Cook as having been seen at Pickersgill Harbour in Dusky Bay (Cook's #nd Voya, Vol. I, p. #) may have been the same creature. He says: "A four-footed animal was seen by three or four of our people, but as no two gave the same description of it, I cannot say what kind it is. All, however, agreed that it was about the size of a cat, with short legs, and of a mouse color. One of the seamen, and he who had the best view of it, said it had a bushy tail, and was the most like a jackal of any animal he knew." It is suggestive that, so far as the points in which "all agreed" -- the size and the dark color -- this description would answer well to the animal so recently seen this is in reference to von Haast's Lake Heron story while the "short legs" correspond to the otter-like tracks, and the thick tail of an otter-like animal may well have appeared "bushy" when the fur was dry. It has been suggested that it was only one of the native dogs; but as none of those who saw it took it for a dog, and the points on which they all agreed are not dog-like, we can hardly accept this explanation. Sorry -- this ends the story. The Waitoreke has not been found and the latest remark about it that I could find occurs in The New Zealand Nature Book by W. Martin, printed in Auckland, New Zealand, in #. It says there (for once not in a footnote), "Other than the two species of bats. New Zealand has no land mammals whatsoever, unless there be more truth than is generally believed in the persistent reports of a native otter." as a research engineer for a company in the instrument business. The bread and butter of the firm was radio-sondes for the Weather Bureau, those little instrument packages containing a kind of thermometer, a device for measuring air pressure and a third one for measuring humidity, all three being hitched up with a radio transmitter so that the readings taken by the instruments aloft can be received and recorded on the ground. The company also published a weekly or biweekly company newspaper. One day, the lady in charge cornered me at lunch, wondering aloud -- and in the presence of four witnesses -- whether I might not be persuaded to write something for the company paper. I said yes without having any idea what I might write for them, but talks with some of the assembly line inspectors and one or two junior engineers taught me that nobody in the whole plant and only one man in the laboratory (its director) had any idea of the history of the radio-sondes they were making busily every day. So I dug into both company records and meteorological literature and came up with a threepart article of how the radiosonde had come into being. And while I was busily noting down events and dates, I found, to my own surprise, that the radio-sondes they began making in # or thereabouts could have been manufactured as far back as #. Not all the component parts which were actually used had been available in #, but other components, which could have done the same job, had been at hand. I am not trying to change the theme -- quite the contrary -- but I now have to mention that the first liquid-fuel rocket to lift itself off the ground did so in Massachusetts in #. And the first really large liquid-fuel rocket to work successfully was one of the early V-# rockets; the date was October #rd, #. But when you look at a liquid-fuel rocket, you also find that most components (or materials) had been around many years prior to those dates. It would actually have been possible to send a liquid-fuel rocket to an altitude of at least # miles half a century ago, in #. The diagram shows a simplified cross section through a large liquid-fuel rocket of the type of V-# or Viking. Let us begin at the top and see what the parts are and how they work. The very nose of the rocket is conical, usually made of sheet steel, and it houses the instruments which constitute the "payload." As for the sheet steel, it became available in # and the same year may be held to apply for recording meteorological instruments. Of course there would be no great difference if the skin were sheet iron instead of sheet steel and that is almost three centuries older. ' we have in mind is #, these instruments could not have broadcast their findings; radio was in existence, but it had a long way to progress imtil it could be used for this purpose. However, it Sheet steel (ca.l#) (sheet iron, ca. #, Bohemia) (#o pure, Linde #) (ca. #) centrifugal pumps, ( ca. #) or " copper or " aluminum (#) (molded ortificiol graphite, E. G. Acheeon, # ) would have been possible to eject the instrument package with the aid of a timing device and parachute it to the ground. The first recorded use of a parachute took place in #, when Monsieur Blanchard dropped a dog from the gondola of his balloon. (He tried it on himself in #, but Leonardo da Vinci had sketched this about #.) Of course there were timing devices and "infernal machines" around at the same time. The next section below the nose cone holding the payload is usually the section containing the rocket instruments. What we use now did not exist in #, but an engineer could have rigged up a gyro, driven, say, by compressed nitrogen. But if you just want a vertical or near-vertical flight, you do not need this section at all. That a liquid-fuel rocket can fimction without it and produce a fine vertical flight was once accidentally proved by an Aerobee rocket. The Aerobee has no "guidance," relying instead on what is called "arrow stability." But imtil this unforeseen event took place, everybody would have agreed that the rocket needed the push from the solid-fuel booster to acquire enough arrow stability. Well, in this particular case, a valve misbehaved, the Aerobee began working, left its solid-fuel booster behind in the launching rack and climbed peacefully to nearly # miles. Next section in the rocket is the tank for the oxidizer. Big rockets like Viking and V-# use liquid oxygen, available since #. Smaller rockets like the Aerobee use nitric acid, available for centuries. The next tank is the fuel tank. Again the big rockets use # per cent ethyl alcohol, which Italian #. Or you may prefer hydrazine, which sounds enormously "modern" but was made for the first time in #. The tanks themselves are, of course, sheet metal and though nitric acid is hard on metals, it would have been no real problem in # to devise a tank which could have held nitric acid for an hour or so. B elow the fuel tanks, you have the rocket motor. It has a shape which simply did not exist in #. But its shape is not so difficult that it could not have been made then. As for the material, you could use sheet steel or sheet copper or sheet aluminum, which became available in #. For the metal-forming techniques of #, sheet copper might have been the best bet, since there was not much practice yet in the handling and forming of aluminum. If that rocket had worked on hydrazine and nitric acid, there would have been no problem with ignition, for this is a so-called hypergolic combination which bursts into flame spontaneously when the two liquids touch each other. For an alcohol-oxygen rocket, ignition is required -- and the device used is a fireworks pinwheel inserted into the motor through the exhaust nozzle. A fireworks pinwheel could have been bought in Nuremberg in #. As for getting the fuels from the tanks into the rocket motor, the modern practice is to have high-strength hydrogen peroxide decompose into steam, which drives a turbine, which in turn drives the centrifugal pumps. Centrifugal pumps began to be built commercially in about #. High-strength hydrogen peroxide did not become available until much later, but an engineer might have rigged up a different method of driving the fuel pumps. Or else he might just have pressurized both the fuel and the oxidizer tank with compressed nitrogen. In short, all the materials, including the fuels, for a vertical rocket shot into the stratosphere were available in #. The few things which were not directly available were within easy reach of the engineering methods of the time. But, as we well know, nobody even tried to build a liquid-fuel rocket in #. The fuels and materials were there. General engineering practice existed, too. So did the necessary mathematics to calculate whatever needed calculating. But it wasn't done. It couldn't be done because nobody had said that it could be done. There was one ingredient missing and it happens to be the most important one. There was no theory.  have published the idea that Los Angeles might be supplied with drinking water by means of towing icebergs from Antarctica to Long Beach and allowing them to melt after they got there. Icebergs, being originally compacted snow, consist of fresh water; that much is certain. I don't know whether Los Angeles is short of drinking water to the extent of considering such plans. In fact, I don't even know how that proKsal reads in detail. All I know is that a reader asked me whether this idea is feasible at all or whether an iceberg, towed such a distance through equatorial seas, would melt en route. This is a question to which one can attempt to find an answer. It so happens that there is some practical experience with the towing, not of icebergs, but of rather bulky objects. The objects were large log rafts which were towed along the Pacific shore of the United States from Seattle to San Diego. The log rafts were more than # feet long, with a width of around # feet. Their weight amounted to # tons and they had a draft comparable to a very large ocean liner, namely # feet. It took only one ocean-going tug with a # horse-power engine to tow them; of course, since they did not make much speed, they needed about two weeks for the #-mile trip. It is important to mention that the practical experience did not consist of just one such tow. If there had been only one, we might with much justification conclude that everybody happened to be very lucky. But in the course of a few years, # such rafts were assembled in Seattle and only three of the # failed to reach San Diego. Two of them came apart en route because the chains which held them together broke in several places. The third one had to be abandoned because it caught fire -- don't ask me how. The main lesson learned from all this was that large and bulky buoyant objects can be towed over long distances with comparatively little engine power if a slow speed is acceptable. Now we can go back to the proposed towing of icebergs. If you travel along the #th western meridian, you would reach the shore of Antarctica at about a southern latitude of # degrees. No land, not even an island, would get in the way along that meridian. The distance that would have to be traveled is, in round figures, # miles. If you assume a towing speed of # mph, you'd cover a distance of # miles in # hours. The time needed to get the iceberg from Antarctica to Long Beach, California, would therefore be # days. It is well known that a large mass of solid ice is rather resistant to melting, but whether an iceberg would last for approximately # days being towed through warm seas is something that can really be decided only by experiment. And what you do with the iceberg after you get it where you want it is another little problem I don't care to tackle at the moment.      PRoblem No problem can compete with a PRoblem -- and this one was right ' in the monster elassi T he letter came down the slot too early that morning to be the regular mail run. Pete Greenwood eyed the New Philly special delivery photocancel with a dreadful premonition. The letter said: Peter: Can you come East chop-chop, urgent? Grdznth problem getting to he a PRoblem, need expert icebox salesman to get gators out of hair fast. Yes? Math boys hot on this, citizens not so hot. Please come. Tommy Pete tossed the letter down the gulper with a sigh. He had lost a bet to himself because it had come three days later than he expected, but it had come all the same, just as it alwa#rs did when Tommy got himself into a hole. Not that he didn't like Tommy. Tommy was a good PR-man, as PR-men go. He just didn't know his own depth. PRoblem in a beady Grdznth eye! What Tommy needed just now was a Bazooka Battalion, not a Public Relations man. Pete settled back resignedly in the Eastbound Rocketjet and paid off the bet to himself one drink at a time. He had four gone and a fifth going when the fat lady up the aisle let out a scream. A huge saurian head had materialized out of nowhere and was hanging in air, peering about uncertainly. A scaly green body followed, four feet away, complete with long razor talons, heavy hind legs, and a whiplash tail with a needle at the end. It floated upside down for a moment, legs thrashing. Then the head and body joined, executed a horizontal pirouette, and settled gently to the floor like an eight-foot circus balloon. "WO rows down, a small boy let out a muffled howl and tried to bury himself in his mother's coat collar. An indignant wail arose from the fat lady. Someone behind Pete groaned aloud and quickly retired behind a newspaper. The creature coughed apologetically. "Terribly sorry," he said in a coarse rumble. "So difficult to control, you know. Terribly sorry..." His voice trailed off as he lumbered down the aisle toward the empty seat next to Pete. The fat lady gasped and an angry murmur ran through the cabin. "Sit down," Pete said to the creature. "Relax. Cheerful reception these days, eh?" "You don't mind?" asked the creature, monstrously agape in surprise. "Not at all." Pete put his briefcase on the floor. At a distance, the huge beast had looked like a nightmare combination of large alligator and small tyrannosaurus. Now, close up, Peter could see that the "scales" were actually tiny wrinkles of satiny green fur. He knew, of course, that the Grdznth were mammals -- "docile, feace-loving mammals," Tommy's PR-blasts had declared emphatically -- but with one of them sitting about a foot away, Pete had to fight down a wave of horror and revulsion. The creature was most incredibly ugly. Great yellow pouches hung down below flat reptilian eyes and a double row of long curved teeth glittered sharply. The creature was rolling its eyes wildly and puffing like a fat man on a steep hill. "Misgauged?" said Pete, gripping the seat in spite of himself. The Grdznth nodded sadly. "It's horrible of me," he panted. gjn "I just can't help it, I always misgauge. Last time, it was the chancel of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded Morning Prayer -- " He paused to catch his breath. "What an effort. The energy barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump -- " He broke off sharply, staring out the port. "Are we going east?" "I'm afraid so, friend." "Oh, dear. I wanted to get to Florida." "Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong airplane," said Pete. "Why Florida?" The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. "The Wives, of course. The climate is so much better and they musn't be disturbed, you know." "Of course," said Pete. "In their condition. I'd forgotten." "And then I'm told that things have been somewhat -- unpleasant -- in the East just now." faced and frantic, beating off the hordes of indignant citizens. "So I hear," he said. "How many more of you are coming through?" "Oh, not many, not many at all. Only the Wives -- half a million or so -- and their spouses, of course." The creature clicked his talons nervously. "We haven't much more time, you know. Only a few more weeks, a few months at the most. If we couldn't have stopped over here, I just don't know what we'd have done." "Think nothing of it," said Pete indulgently. "It's been great having you." The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete. The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion. Junior had half emerged from the collar; he was busy sticking his tongue out at the Grdznth. The creature shifted uneasily. "Really, I think -- perhaps Florida would be better." "Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off," said Pete. "Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but -- " Already the Grdznth was beginning to fade out. "Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast," said Pete. The creature gave him a toothy smile, nodded once, and grew more indistinct. In another five seconds, the seat was empty. Pete leaned back, grinning to himself as the angry rumble rose around him like a wave. He was a Public Relations man to the core, but right now he was off duty. He poured another drink and chuckled all the way to New Philly. The passengers avoided him pointedly. But as he walked down the gangway to hail a cab, he wasn't smiling so much. He was wondering just how high Tommy was hanging him this time. ' I 'HE lobby of the Public Relations Bureau was swarming like an upturned anthill when Pete disembarked from the taxi. He could almost smell the desperate tension of the place. He fought his way past scurrying clerks and preoccupied poll-takers toward the executive elevators. On the newly finished seventeenth floor, Tommy Heinz was pacing the corridor like a father in labor. Tommy had lost weight since Pete had last seen him. His ruddy face was paler, his hair thin and ragged, as though chunks had been torn out from time to time. He saw Pete step off the elevator, and ran forward with open arms. "Thank God you came!" he groaned. "I thought you'd never call. I was afraid you'd let me down -- " "Me?" said Pete. "I'd never let down a pal." The sarcasm didn't dent Tommy. He led Pete through the anteroom into the plush director's office, thrusting a drink into his hand and bouncing about like a nervous sparrow. His words were tumbling out like a waterfall. He looked as though one gentle shove might send him yodeling down Market Street in his underdrawers. "Hold it," said Pete. "Relax. I'm not going to leave for a while yet. Your girl screamed something about a Senator as we passed through. Did you hear her?" Tommy gave a violent start. "Senator!" He flipped a desk switch. "What Senator is that?" "Senator Stokes," the girl said wearily. "He had an appointment. He's ready to have you fired." "All I need now is a Senator. What does he want?" "Guess," said the girl. "Oh. That's what I was afraid of. Can you hold him?" "They swept around him last night and dusted him off this morning. His appointment was for yesterday, remember?" "Remember! Of course I remember. Senator Stokes -- something about a riot in Boston." Tommy started to flip the switch, then added, "See if you can get Charlie down here with his giz." a frantic light in his eye. "Good old Pete. Just in time. Eleventh-hour reprieve. Have another drink, have a cigar -- do you want my job? It's yours. Just speak up." "I fail to see," said Pete, "why you had to drag me all the way from L. A. to have a cigar. I've got work to do." "Selling movies, right?" "Check." "To people who don't want to buy them, right?" "In a manner of speaking," said Pete testily. "Considering some of the movies you've been selling, you should be able to sell anything to anybody, any time, at any price." "Please. Movies Are Getting Better by the Day." "Yes, I know. And the Grdznth are getting worse by the hour. They're coming through in battalions -- a thousand a day! The more Grdznth come through, the more they act as though they own the place. Not nasty or anything -- it's that infernal politeness that the people hate most, I think. Can't get them mad, can't get them into a fight -- but they do just as they please, and go anywhere they please, and if the people don't like it, the Grdznth' go right ahead anyway." Pete pulled at his lip. "Any violence?" Tommy gave him a long look. "So far, we've kept it out of the papers, but there have been some incidents. Didn't hurt the Grdznth a bit -- they're ultra-pacifists, but they carry personal protective fields around with them, activated, a little point they didn't bother to tell us about. Anybody who tries anything fancy gets thrown like a bolt of lighting hit him. Rumors are getting wild -- people are saying they can't be killed, that they're just moving in to stay." Pete nodded slowly. "Are they?" "I wish I knew. I mean for sure. The psych-docs say no -- the Grdznth agreed to leave at a specified time, they say, and something in their cultural background makes them stick strictly to their agreements. But that's just what the psych-docs think and they've been known to be wrong." "And the app)ointed time?" helplessly. "If we knew, you'd still be in L. A. Roughly six months and four days -- plus or minus a month or so for the time differential. That's strictly tentative, according to the math boys. It's a parallel universe, one of several thousand already explored, according to the Grdznth scientists working with Charlie Karns. Most of the parallels are analogous and we just happen to be anthropologically analogous to the Grdznth, a point we've omitted from our PR-blasts. They have an eight-planet system around a hot sun which is going to get lots hotter any day now. Pete's eyes widened. "Nova?" "Apparently. Nobody knows how they predicted it, but they did. Spotted it several years ago, so they've been romping through parallel after parallel, trying to find one they can migrate to. They found one, sort of a desperation choice. It's cold and arid and full of impassable mountain chains. With an uphill fight, they can make it support a fraction of their population." Tommy shook his head helplessly. "They picked a very sensible system for getting a good strong Grdznth population on the new parallel as fast as possible. Picked the males for brains, education and adaptability. The females were largely chosen according to how pregnant they were." Pete grinned. "Grdznth in utero. There's something poetic about it." "Just one hitch," said Tommy, "The girls can't gestate in that climate -- at least not until they've been there long enough to get their glands adjusted. Seems we have just the right climate for gestating Grdznth, even better than at home. So they came begging for permission to stop here, on the way through, to rest and parturate." "So Earth becomes a glorified incubator." Pete got to his feet and refilled his glass thoughtfully from the bar at the end of the room. "This is all very touching, but it just doesn't wash. If the Grdznth are so unpopular here, why did we let them in in the first place?" He looked narS# rowly at Tommy. "To be very blunt -- what's the parking fee?" "Plenty," said Tommy heavily. "That's the trouble. The fee is so high. Earth just can't afford to lose it. Charlie Karns'll tell you why." '-Section was an intense skeleton of a man with a long pointed jaw and a long white coat drooped over his shoulders like a shroud. In his arms, he clutched a small black box. "It's this parallel universe business, of course," he explained to Pete, with Tommy beaming over his shoulder. "The Grdznth can cross through. They've been able to do it for a long time. According to our figuring, this must involve complete control of mass, space and dimension, all three. And time comes into one of the three -- we aren't sure which." The mathematician set the black box on the desk and released the lid. Like a jack-in-thebox, two small white plastic spheres popped out and began chasing each other about in the air six inches above the box. Presently a third sphere rose up from the box and joined in the fun. Pete watched it until his head began to spin. "No wires?" "Strictly no wires," said Charlie glumly. "No nothing." He closed the box with a click. "This is one of their children's toys. Among other things, it takes nullgravity to work." Pete sat down, rubbing his chin. "I'm beginning to see. They're teaching you this?" Tommy said, "They're trying to. He's been working for weeks with their top mathematicians -- him and a dozen others. How many computers have you burned out, Charlie?" "Four. There's a differential factor and we can't spot it. They have the equations, all right. It's a matter of translating them into constants that make sense. But we haven't yet cracked the differential." "And if you do, then what?" Charlie took a deep breath. "We'll have interdimensional control -- a practical, utilizable transmatter. We'll have null-gravity -- which means the greatest advance in power utilization since fire was discovered. It might give us the opening to a concept of time travel that makes some kind of sense. And power! If there's an energy differential of any magnitutude -- " He shook his head sadly. " 'Then what?' the man says." "We'll also know the time differential," Tommy cut in hopefully, "and how long the Grdznth gestation period will be." "It's a fair exchange," said Charlie. "We keep them until the girls have their babies. They teach dimension." Pete nodded. "That is, if you can make the people put up with them for another six months or so." Tommy sank back in his chair. "In a word -- yes. So far, we've gotten nowhere at a thousand miles an hour." tician wailed, hurling himself down on a chair and burying his face in his hands. "I've failed. Failed!" The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the cosmetician to the Public Relations men. "I say -- I am sorry..." His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face. Pete Greenwood stared at the sobbing cosmetician. "What's eating him?" "Professional pride," said Tommy. "He can take twenty years off the face of any woman in Hollywood, but he can't get to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one thing we've tried," he added as they moved on down the corridor. "You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The man in the street reads our PR-blast and then looks up to see one of the nasty things staring over his shoulders at the newspaper." "So you can't make them beautiful," said Pete. "Can't you make them cute?" "With those teeth? Those eyes? Ugh." "How about the 'jolly company' approach?" "Tried it. There's nothing jolly about them. They pop out of nowhere, anywhere. In church, in bedrooms, in rush-hour traffic through Lincoln Tunnel -- look!" Pete peered out the window at the traffic jam below. Cars were snarled for blocks on either side of the intersection. A squad of traffic cops was converging angrily on the center of the mess, where a stream of green reptilian figures seemed to be popping out of the street and lumbering through the jammed autos like General Sherman tanks. "Ulcers," said Tommy. "City traffic isn't enough of a mess as it is. And they don't do anything about it. They apologize profusely, but they keep coming through." The two started on for the office. "Things are getting to the breaking point. The people are wearing thin from sheer annoyance -- to say nothing of the nightmares the kids are having and the trouble with women fainting." The signal light on Tommy's desk was flashing scarlet. He dropped into a chair with a sigh and flipped a switch. "Okay, what is it now?" "Just another Senator," said a furious male voice. "Mr. Heinz, my arthritis is beginning to win this fight. Are you going to see me now or aren't you?" "Yes, yes, come right in!" Tommy turned white. "Senator Stokes. I'd completely forgotten -- " to like being forgotten. He walked into the office, looked disdainfully at the PR-men and sat on the edge of a chair, leaning on his umbrella. "You have just lost your job," he said with an icy edge to his voice. "You may not have heard about it yet, but you may take my word for it. I personally will be delighted to make the necessary arrangements, but I doubt if I'll need to. There are at least a hundred Senators in Washington who are ready to press for your dismissal, Mr. Heinz -- and there's been some off-the-record talk about a lynching. Nothing official, of course." "Senator -- " "Senator be damned. We want somebody in this office who can manage to do something." "Do something! You think I'm a magician? I can just make them vanish? What do you want me to do?" The Senator raised his eyebrows. "You needn't shout, Mr. Heinz. I am not the least interested in what you do. My interest is focused completely on a collection of five thousand letters, telegrams and visiphone calls I've received in the past three days alone. My constituents, Mr. Heinz, are making themselves clear. If the Grdznth do not go, I go." "That would never do, of course," said Pete. The Senator gave Pete a cold, clinical look. Then he asked Tommy, "Who is this person?" "An assistant on the job," Tommy said quickly. "A very excellent PR-man." The Senator sniffed audibly. "Full of ideas, no doubt." "Brimming," said Pete. "Enough ideas to get your constituents off your neck for a while, at least." "Indeed?" A warmer look came into the Senator's eyes. Tommy swallowed hard and tried to get his cigar lighted. "Indeed," said Pete. "Tommy, how fast can you get a PR-blast to penetrate? How much medium do you control?" "Plenty," Tommy gulped. "And how fast can you sample response and analyze it?" "We can have prelims six hours after the PR-blast is launched. For God's sake, man, if you have something, tell us! Don't keep us sweating!" Senator. "Everything else has been tried, but it seems to me one important factor has been missed, one that will take your constituents by the ears." He looked at Tommy pityingly. "You've tried to make them beautiful, but they aren't beautiful. And you've tried to make them lovable, but they aren't lovable. There's one thing they are, though -- at least half of them." Tommy's jaw sagged. "Pregnant," he said. "Now see here," spluttered the Senator. "If you're trying to make a fool of me to my face -- " "Sit down and shut up," said Pete. "If there's one thing every human being reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've got several hundred thousand pregant Grdznth just waiting for all the little Grdznth to arrive -- and nobody's given them a side glance." He turned to Tommy. "Get some copywriters down here and a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heartThe color was back in Tommy's cheeks and the Senator was forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. "We'll need TV hookups and plenty of newscast space," Tommy said eagerly. "Maybe a few photographs -- do you suppose baby Grdznth are lovable?" "They probably look like salamaders," said Pete. "But say anything you want. We're going to get across the sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, and anything goes." "It's genius," chortled Tommy. "Sheer genius." "If it sells," the Senator added dubiously. "It'll sell," Pete said. "The question is: for how long?" precision. Nothing sudden, harsh, or crude -- but slowly, in a broadcast comment here or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor found his TV discussion on "Motherhood As An Experience" suddenly shifted from #:# Monday evening to #:# Saturday night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the light of day through devious channels. Three days later, a Grdznth miscarriage threatened and was averted. It was only a page four item, but it was a beginning. Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, .trembled with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened little children, they were a trifle overbearing in their insufferably stubborn politeness -- but in a civilized world, you just couldn't turn pregnant girls out in the rain. Not even Grdznth girls. By the second week, the blast was going at full tilt. In the Public Relations Buieau building, machines worked on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp postprandial stomach pains. "Don't start thinking," he warned on the morning the third week started. "If we start thinking now, we're lost. Just react, feed the stuff into the machines -- " "But why don't the people respond?" Tommy plaintively asked. "Haven't they got any feelings? The blast is washing over them like a wave and there they sit!" He punched the private wire to Analysis for the fourth time that morning. He got a man with a hag-ridden look in his eye. "How soon?" "You want yesterday's rushes?" "What do you think I want? Any sign of a lag?" "No lag yet. Last night's panel drew like a magnet. The 'D-Date' tag you suggested has them by the nose." "How about the President's talk?" "He should be campaigning." Tommy mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. "Okay. Now listen: we need a special run on all the response data we have to date for tolerance levels. Got that? How soon can we have it?" Analysis shook his head. "We could only make a guess with the data to date." "Fine," said Tommy. "Make a guess." "Give us three hours," said Analysis. "Y ou've got thirty minutes. Get going." Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly. "It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down, we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor, or it's the axe for Charlie." Pete grunted and sank down behind the desk thoughtfully. Tommy chuckled to himself and paced the room in an overflow of nervous energy. "And what do we get? A revolutionized world! Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for an afternoon on the beach and back in time for supper. A hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. Why, when people begin seeing what the Grdznth are giving us, they'll welcome them with open arms." "Hmmmm," said Pete. "Well, why won't they? The people just didn't trust us, that was all. What does the man in the street know about transmatters? Nothing. But give him one and then try to take it away -- " "Yeah, yeah," interrupted Pete. "It sounds great. It also stinks." Tommy blinked at him. "You crazy? What stinks?" Pete jammed his hands into his pockets. "This whole setup. Do you realize where we're standing in this thing? We're but on a limb -- way out. We're fighting for time -- time for Charlie and his gang to crack their puzzle, time for the Grdznth girls to gestate. But what are we hearing from Charlie?" "Well, it's -- it's a difficult problem. Charlie can't just -- " "That's right," said Pete. "Nothing is what we're hearing from Charlie. We've got no transmatter, no null-G, no power, nothing except a whole lot of Grdznth and more coming through just as fast as they can. I'm just beginning to wonder what the Grdznth are giving us." "Well, they can't gestate forever " "Maybe not, but I've still got a burning urge to talk to Charlie. I have a feeling they're going to be gestating a little too long." to math, but Charlie wasn't answering. "Sorry," the operator said. "Nobody's gotten through there for three days." Three days?" cried Tommy. "What's wrong? Is he dead? "Couldn't be. They burned out two more machines last night. Killed the switchboard power for twenty minutes." "Get him on the wire," said Tommy. "That's orders." The operator sighed unhappily. "Yes, sir. But they want you in Analysis." Analysis was a shambles. Paper and tape were piled kneedeep on the floor. The machines clattered wildly, coughing out reams of paper to be gulped by other machines. In a corner office, they found their man, pale but jubilant. "The program," said Tommy. "How's it going?" "You can count on the people staying happy for at least another five months." He hesitated an instant. "If they see some baby Grdznth at the end of it all." There was dead silence in the room. "Baby Grdznth," Tommy said finally. "And if it happens to be six months?" Analysis drew a finger across his throat. "What are we going to do?" Tommy's hands were shaking. "We're going to go find him," Pete declared.'-"tomb. The machines were silent. In the office at the end of the room, they found an unshaven Charlie grimly splitting a bottle with a very smug-looking Grdznth. The bottle was floating gently about six feet above the desk. So were the Grdznth and Charlie. "Charlie!" Tommy howled. "We've been trying to get you for hours. The operator -- " "I know, I know." Charlie waved a hand disjointedly. "I told her to go away. I told the rest of the crew to go away. Everybody." "Then you cracked the differential?" Charlie tipped an imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. "Spike cracked it. Spike is a sort of Grdznth Fermi." He tilted the bottle up and rolled his head under it. "Now why don't you go away, too?" Tommy turned purple. "We've got five months," he said hoarsely. "Do you hear me? If they aren't going to have their babies in five months, we're dead men." Charlie chuckled. "Five months, he says. We figured the babies to come in about three months -- right. Spike? Not that it'll make much difference to us." Charlie sank slowly down to the desk. He wasn't laughing any more. "We're never going to see any Grdznth babies. It's going to be a little too cold for that." Pete stared at the math man. "What else did you find?" "The energy factor," Charlie mumbled. "Nobody thought of that, except in passing. Should have, though, long ago. Two completely independent universes, obviously two energy systems. Incompatible. We were dealing with mass, space and dimension -- but the energy differential was the important one." "What about the energy?" "We're loaded with it. Supercharged. Packed to the breaking point and way beyond." Charlie scribbled frantically on the desk pad. "Look, it took energy for them to come through -- immense quantities of energy. Every one that came through upset the balance, distorted our whole energy pattern. And they knew from the start that the differential was all they needed to overload us completely was time for enough crossings." "And we gave it to them." Pete sat down slowly, his face green. "Like a rubber ball with a dent in the side. Push in one side, the other side pops out. And we're the other side. When?" "Any day now. Maybe any minute." Charlie spread his hands helplessly. "Oh, it won't be bad at all. Spike here was telling me. Mean temperature is only # below zero, lots of good clean snow, thousands of nice jagged mountain peaks. A lovely place, really. Just a little too cold for Grdznth. They thought Earth was much nicer." "For them," whispered Tommy. "For them," Charlie said. Next Month... extraordinary novelet that will probably become one of your all-time science fiction favorites. Read it and see for yourself! # Star Shelf inson. J. M. Lippincott Co., Phila., S# good mystery, take a good look at the people around you -- you might not be able to uncurl! Robinson has come up with a new slant on homo superior. He is not the social-conscious "Baldy" of Padgett-Kuttner or the masochistic Odd John of Stapledon. Who says he must stick out like a sore thumb? Robinson, whose skill in yarn-spinning grows in leaps, envisages superman as a master of camouflage, all things to all men -- and all women, too. Neither is he a social being, but rather quite a bit of a monster, a cruel one at that. Professor Wm. Tanner, anthropologist and chairman of a Navysubsidized committee testing human endurance, has himself a problem to solve. Someone on his committee of nine is superman. Unfortunately, all too soon his committee at the mid-Western university is reduced to eight and he is reduced to hiding, because homo supe has destroyed the sole member who could expose his identity and has planted evidence pointing to Tanner. From that point on, Tanner becomes the defenseless rabbit in a harrowing chase that will have you biting your nails. If you can guess the ending, you're a better unraveler than I proved to be. Duell, Sloan  Pearce, N.Y.: Little, Brown  Co., Boston, T oronto, S# situation. Two divisions of Russian infantry, parts of a Special Corps, take over Manhattan Island from Canal Street south. They have sneaked into the Narrows, past Quarantine, in American lend-lease Liberty ships and tied up without challenge. With hardly a shot being fired, they have managed to subdue the sleepy populace before the Sun is fully up. But what have they to gain by putting their heads into the American eagle's beak? Tcue, they have seized thousands of hostages as well as the financial capital. Wall Street, but they are in effect hostages themselves. Moscow has disowned the Corps, but of course they would have in any event, since they have committed an act of war. Washington is set to eject the invaders, but pressure of opinion stops the Pentagon's hand because it just might be true that the Special Corps has pulled a beaut of a doublecross on the Kremlin. Sound like a solid foundation for an exciting invasion yarn with a brand-new slant? It is -- only something happens to it about two-thirds through. Action turns to talk, talk to philosophy and philosophy to a conclusion that I just can't see nohow. troduction by the Editors of Fortune. E. P. Dutton  Co. N. Y., # the list of authors up on top, where they belong. You can well understand when I tell you that Chairman; John von Neumann, Pusey, Pres. Harvard U.; Chief Justice Earl Warren; Crawford H. Greenwalt, Pres, du Pont Co.; George M. Humphrey, Sec. of Treas.; Adlai Stevenson, youknow-who; Robert E. Sherwood, playwright; Charles P. Taft, Fed. Council of Churches; and Henry R. Luce, Editor-in-chief, Time, Inc. The above hefty list of contributors was asked by Fortune to speculate on what changes the year # would bring, mainly in their individual fields. I guess that the readers of Fortune would declare their prognostications wild. I am sure you will agree that they most likely err on the side of caution. It is unusual, though, to see such an array of talent attempting to take over the forte of the S-F writer: logical extrapolation. G. Schneider. Rinehart  Co., Inc. New York, # Schneider's book is of more than passing interest. It concerns itself with the # election and the manner in which the admen have taken over by that time. Candidates are products to be sold and the campaigns are carried out on a strict merchandising level. Of course, Kornbluth and Pohl went considerably further in Gravy Planet, but Kazoo fills in some of the chinks. Blade Reade is the dynamic, ulcer-ridden advertising executive master-minding one party's effort to sell Henry Clay Adams, a name tailor-made to draw both North and South to their banner. The book is an amusing account of Reade's slick campaign, but there's nothing amusing in its plausibility, which is downright grisly. Philosophical Library, New York, # Electrons in Action, this volume is a beautifully printed and illustrated member of Philosophical Library's English-manufactured series. The author is an expert of twenty years' standing as engineer, writer and teacher, and he has attempted to explain, in accurate but elementary terms, electronic devices and their applications. If a former wartime Air Corps communications officer like me, with a hasty tread-job electronics education, can follow the author with ease and interest, I'd say anybody can -- and should. Bradford Chambers. Stravon Publishers, New York, # shima, the government announcement last summer of plans to launch a space satellite program has resulted in a sudden upsurge in public interest in science -- specifically space travel, form erly the exclusive domain of pages like ours. This luridly dustjacketed little volume has been calculated to catch the eye of the neophyte. Once hooked, said beginner will And that he has in his hand an easily understandable basic text. by Arthur K. Barnes. Gnome Press, Inc., New York, # U ndoubtedly, if you are an AX. like Barnes or me, this will take you back to the good(?) old days of the middle years of S-F, when the impact of Stanley Weinbaum's Queeeell was still busily repercussing -- the days of monsters and gimmicks. Of suchlike, the above volume has its fill and more. Add to that the lurid sketches by Ed Emsh and W. I. van der Poel and you have a fearful object indeed. In the heyday of Gerry Carlyle, the fabulously gorgeous interplanetary hunter modeled with alterations after the glamor figure of the '#s, Frank Buck, this was sizzling stuff. But, having seen other sizzling stuff turn stone-cold dead in the book market, I naturally approached this volume, some fifteen years later, with considerable trepidation. Astonishingly, these stories are still surprisingly readable. If you like a huge collection of out gimmicks in tight situations, you will assuredly go for this. North. Gnome Press, New York, # of Dane Thorson and the Free Trader, the Solar Queen. If you recall Sargasso of Space, Thorson was assigned to a freetrade ship on graduation from training academy, instead of to a cushy job with one of the big companies. He doesn't regret it, fortunately for teen-age readers, because he has himself a fistful of adventures such as he'd never have had as a cloistered company man. This time, the cargo-master of the Queen and his apprentice, Thorson, have a problem in establishing trade relations with a feline race on Sargol, a planet to which they have won trading rights. Thorson solves the problem, but in a manner that brings discredit on himself in spite of its success. On the home trip, an unknown illness knocks out all the crew except the apprentice youngsters who participated in a native ceremony and somehow acquired immunity. As a plague ship, the Queen is subject to outright destruction or condemned to wander. Thorson solves that problem also, in an interesting fashion, but again with repercussions. George All The Way It was very embarrassing... Marcer discovered that time travel was pure # skiddoo! E ven before the shimmering stopped, Bill Marcer saw that he was being surrounded. He felt a trifle uneasy, though the phlutters had assured him there would be no danger. Abruptly the shimmering was gone and Marcer seemed to feel the last of his personal molecules slip back into place as the Phleger effect faded. He wriggled his shoulders, threw them back, filled his chest and forced a smile. "Greetings," he said to the crowd, pivoting to address as many as possible from the railed bring you greetings from the twentieth century." No one had told him to make a speech, but he thought it would be appropriate. One of the men of the future stepped for)vard, smiling formally. He was dressed in pantaloons and a skirt, or kilt, and halter top, something like a Macedonian dancer, or maybe a Scot. "Hi," this individual said, s)eaking slowly and distinctly, as if to a foreigner. "Welcome to twentyone seventy-seven. I'm Jeems Kenth to be your guide. Or would you prefer to make your double o solo?" "Double o solo?" Bill Marcer repeated. "You mean go around by myself?" "Oskie-wow-wow," another pantalooned man said. "You win the sixty-four thousands." He pronounced each syllable with care. "What?" "You did say twentieth century?" the first futureman, Jeems Kenth, asked. He looked anxious. "Yes." "Then everything's jake," he said with a visible return of his assurance. "We've straightened up and are flying right. Ish-kabibble?" "On the beam," his fellow futureman agreed. "Voot!" "The latter part of the twentieth century," Marcer said. TT dawned on him that these people, in preparation for his visit, had been studying the folk expressions of his time, or what they thought was his time. "The latter part?" Jeems Kenth looked disappointed. "Then we have not mastered your language? We are off the beam and icing up?" "Not at all," Marcer said quickly. As unofficial ambassador from #, he had to be diplomatic. "You're right in the groove. Reet. Cooking on the front burner, with gas." He wasn't fluent in the embarrassing slang of his father's and grandfather's time, but he thought he could get by. "Shut my mouth," he added as he thought of another one. "Fan my brow!" Kenth said delightedly. "The kid's okay!" "Terrif!" added his friend, who identified himself as Aces Jack. "Slip us some skin." "Natch," said Marcer. He got down from the platform and shook hands all around, murmuring "Real George" or "Howza boy?" as he was introduced to Sperris Theo, Stanols Thom, Lucez Hank, Wobanx Joce and Jenfooz Ed. "What say we tie on the feedbag while we chew the rag?" suggested Jenfooz Ekl, who was heavy and hearty. "Something for the inner man?" "Fine," said Bill Marcer. "That'd be the most, I mean." He saw that he had materialized in a public square and that the crowd around him was holding up traffic. Wildly colored three-wheeled vehicles waited calmly for the obstruction to clear, without a honk out of them. But now a uniformed man made his way through the crowd, saying: "Unclutter. Decong." Aces Jack went to meet him, saying: "Twonce. Wantroduce chronaut from twencent. Marcers Bill. Bill, Phoebes Dick." "Do," Phoebes Dick said in the clipped speech that apparently was the proper language of #. He gave Marcer a brief look and turned away to Aces Jack. "Going? Must unsnarl." He went back to the patient traffic jam as Jenfooz kl and Jeems Kenth led the group toward a building shaped, Marcer thought, something like a hamburger. He felt a bit hurt by Phoebes Dick's abruptness. The man could have looked up at least one slang expression, for politeness' sake. Jeems Kenth seemed to sense Marcer's disappointment. "P.D.'s a cop," he said. "You savvy how cops are on duty. Dum-da-dadum." "Check," Marcer said. He had no idea what the musical phrase was meant to convey. for them at the hamburger joint, as Marcer felt obliged to call it. Bowls on the table were piled high with familiar raw fruit and unfamiliar prepared foods. "Yes, we have no bananas," said Lucez Hank brightly, although they had. "Pile in. Your stomach must think your throat's been cut." "That's right," Marcer nodded agreeably. "Haven't eaten for a couple of hundred years, come to think of it." Everybody laughed uproariously and for a while there was no conversation, only the soimd of eating, which was done with the fingers. As Bill Marcer chewed, he studied his hosts, thinking of their names. They had called him Marcers Bill, inverting it. Back when surnames began to be used, people took them from occupations: Miller, Goldsmith, Wheeler, Hunter. Then the sons: Robertson, son of Robert -- Robert's son. That seemed to be the style again, here in #. Jeems Kenth, then, had been Jeem's Kenneth or -- of course! -- GM's Kenneth. He turned to Kenth, waving a dripless algyburger excitedly. "You're with General Motors, aren't yoii?" Kenth beamed. "Solid, Jackson." Marcer turned to the man on his left. "And Jenfooz Ed. General Foods?" "Sensash!" Ed agreed. "And Stands Thom would be with Standard Oil, and Sperris Theo with Sperry's, and Lucez Hank with Luce's -- publishing. Right?" "The kid's a wonder," Wobanx Joce said from across the table. "Now dig me and Aces Jack." "Wobanx." Marcer pondered it. "World Bank?" he guessed. They nodded in delight. "But Aces Jack? You've got me there, unless you're in the playing-card business." Jack grinned. "Higher stakes. "Atomic Energy Commission?" "Corporation. Defederalized." "Of course," Marcer said. "Then that cop -- Phoebes Dick. Could "Bull's eye!" said Lucez Hank. "Now you level with us, Marcers Bill. What's your line?" "None, really. I'm what the papers call the heir to a silicone fortune. Just a playboy with a lot of money, which is why I'm here. I guess if I had any descendants, one of them might be Slix Bill. Tell me," he said, forgetting to slang it up in his excitement, "is there anybody like that around? Could I see him?" There was a silence that Marcer took for embarrassment. Stanols Thom broke it with a laugh. "That'd be illegal, Fosdick, old boy. It'd be like wising you up to when you were going , to kick the bucket. Couldn't tip your mitt, you know." "It wouldn't matter," Marcer said. "I won't remember any of this, anyhow. Didn't they tell you, when they arranged my trip, that I'll have an amnesia shot when I get back? Time travel's still top secret in #." "Fill us in," Jeems Kenth said. "We have the general picture, of course, but you're a history book on legs. Give us the straight lowdown." from his algyburger into the disposal slot in the middle of the table. "Well," he said, "time travel was a Government project till it ran into budget trouble. Budgets haven't become obsolete, have they?" They shook their heads, smiling ruefully. For years, he told them. Congress had appropriated money and the top-secret Ingersoll Project had gobbled it up, without notable success. On its best try, IP sent an expendable research worker five minutes into the future. He didn't come back. But when the five minutes had elapsed, there he was. The intervening time simply hadn't existed for him. This sort of research didn't seem productive, economically or militarily. The costs worked out lars a minute, so the House Appropriations Committee balked at year's program. One committee member wanted to know if there wasn't a private agency that could carry on. The Rockefellers, maybe, or the Fords. The committee counsel was instructed to look into it. His looking produced the Phleger Foundation, consisting of the airplane manufacturer. Phleger set up his Foundation's time division in a vast piece of property outside Los Angeles, which he'd taken over in one of his less inspired mergers. The property had been vacant for years and the chronicians swarmed in. To the Phleger people, the fact that someone had gone five minutes into the future proved time travel practical. The principle had to be the same for five years, a jump they eventually achieved. But these were one-way trips and valuable chronicians were lost to research for whatever span of time they jumped. Then, one historic day, a round trip was achieved. From that time on, the Foundation began to earn money faster than it could be spent. It accomplished this by making time travel a pla # dhing of the idle rich. Old Philip Phleger personally took charge of hawking tours to Phleger's future among adventurrent fad, motor-sledding in the Antarctic, had begun to pall. "Have you tried phluttering?" Old Man Phleger would say. "It's the latest thing. Certain tax advantages, too, you know." Bill Marcer, after Phleger's legal section codified, his medical people examined, his psychologists analyzed, and the Old Man himself had a whirl at it, was among the first non-professionals to phlutter. Marcer signed the check, the waiver and the medical form and climbed onto the open-railed platform in the great shed. The shimmering came, obscuring the figures of the chronicians watching him intently from their banks of machines. Things went gray, he sneezed a couple of times and, gripping the railing tightly, he phluttered into #. A ND here I am," he told Jeems and Aces and Stanols and the rest. "Just a playboy on a fling. It's certainly been good of you to give up your valuable time to entertain me." "Not at all," Aces Jack said pleasantly. "Don't low-rate yourself. It takes two to tango." "If you mean my money and Phleger's brains, you're right. Well, then, if you don't mind, I'd like to see more of #. Tve only got two hours." Jeems Kenth looked at his wristwatch. "Why, that's the same as mine," Marcer said. He pushed up his sleeve to compare them. "A Hamilton." "An heirloom," Kenth explained. "Been in the family for generations. My time is your time, eh, Rudy?" Marcer laughed. "I've heard of Rudy Vallee, of course, but he was really before my time. You know, if you don't mind my saying so, all these slang expressions -- well, they're a bit of a strain. We speak -- spoke -- pretty straight English back in #." trying to make you feel at home. I, for one, put in many an hour at the histoviewer to learn your quaint expressions." "Oh, I'm sorry. I've offended you." "Forget it," Jenfooz Ed broke in. "Sweep it under the rug. Look, fellas, our man from the past has to go back soon and we're wasting his valuable time. And I do mean valuable, eh. Bill? I'll bet Old Man Phleger took a stack of the green before he let you climb aboard." "I have some left," Marcer grinned. "Well, you won't spend it here. Everything's on the house. Now what would you like to do? How about -- " "I'd like to see what you're doing with silicones," Marcer interrupted. "It's the family business, you know. I'll probably be going into it when or if I settle down." "Great idea," Aces Jack said, "but I'm afraid the slix works is pretty far out. You'd never get back in time to go back in time, if you follow me. We've got to get you on that platform when the gong sounds or I hate to think what'd happen to your molecules." "Oh?" Marcer said in alarm. "I didn't know -- " "Never fear," Jenfooz Ekl boomed. "We'll see that you're dephluttered in one piece. What I was going to say was, why don't we give our guest a gander at the girly line?" "Girly line?" Marcer brightened. "You mean women? Come to think of it, I haven't seen any of your women. They're not extinct, are they?" "Perish forbid!" Stanols Thom exclaimed. "Let's show the young buck." "Bring on the girls!" cried Jenfooz Eki. "Va-va-voom!" He ran to a door on which the word Women was lettered. "Open the door, Richard!" Aces Jack shouted to him. "Let there be titillation for our guest in his last remaining minutes!" T he door opened and Bill Marcer was indeed titillated by the bevy of near-buxom young women who emerged in a little dancing run. Lilting music from hidden speakers accompanied their entry. ch wore a differently daring costume and each danced up to him and introduced herself with a kiss and a verse. "I'm Daysend Mae, for your hours of play," said a red-headed charmer. A raven-haired beauty told him : "They call me Jet; I help you forget." "Abandon your worry and play with Terri," recited a striking blonde. Marcer's head was swimming from the subtly changing whiffs of perfume. He was laughing in delight and had difficulty puckering his lips to do justice to the variegated kisses he was receiving. He grabbed at the fourth girl and for a delicious moment held her in his arms. This one whispered: "I'm off at six, honey. Meet me at Exit C." She gave him a little bump with her tummy and winked as she danced away. Before he could digest her message -- she was a most appealing strawberry blonde -- an aubumhaired dream was upon him, cooing: "Flee with Bea beyond the sea." She flickered her long eyelashes against his cheek as she bestowed her kiss. A great gong soimded just as he was puckering up for a statuesque creature whose hair he failed to notice because of her other assets. But at a gesture from Jeems Kenth, she reversed her dance and flitted away. "Sorry, big boy," she said. "Time's up." And off they went, the gorgeous lot of them, doing a little time step back through the door marked Women. Marcer, dizzy and lipsticked, reluctantly permitted himself to be led out of the building to the platform that was to take him back to #. "That was fun," Marcer said, "but what was it? Is that the way you choose your -- uh -- companions in #?" "One of the ways," Sperris Theo said. "Those were the playgirls. For a more permanent alliance, there's the mate date. We knew you wouldn't have time for that." "Hated to drag you away," Aces Jack put in, "but we can't have your molecules congealing." "Been great having you," Lucez Hank told him. "Now on your horse and awa-a-y!" Marcer climbed up on the platform. His hosts gathered around it to shake hands. Even Phoebes Dick, holding back traffic for his departure, gave him a clipped salute. "I can't tell you how much I enjoyed knowing you all," Marcer said. He searched for words. "It was the -- the cat's pajamas." They were laughing and waving while the shimmering began. " stopped, he was back in the shed. Back in the dull past of his own time, he thought, with the sweet kisses of the future still tingling his lips. In a moment, he supposed, he'd get his amnesia shot. Meanwhile, he savored his memory. The chronicians were shouting "Get that curtain up!" someone seemed to be yelling. "Throw something over those mockups," somebody else cried, "and, for God's sake, get out of here with those costumes. Something's gone wrong with the shim!" Marcer clutched the platform rail and stared. He couldn't see too well because they had a spotlight on him and the rest of the shed was dim. But wasn't that Wobanx Joce disappearing through a door? And Jeems Kenth crowding behind him, throwing a look of consternation over his shoulder? Kenth, the one who'd worn that "heirloom" wristwatch. And at the other side of the big room, peeping out from behind a slab of painted scenery -- wasn't that a giggling gang of girls, among whom could be discerned Jet and Terri and Daysend Mae? Chorus girls. Undoubtedly, for there among them was the strawberry blonde, looking boldly at him and holding up six fingers. 'Tm off at six, honey," she had told him in "#." He'd been taken for a joyride into a phony future. Swindled. Bilked. Angrily he looked around for Old Man Phleger. He didn't see him. But there was the top "chronician," Wagner, the chief of staff of these confidence men who had tried to rook him so expensively. Wagner, a harassed, perspiring man in a smock, was scurrying desperately from one bank of controls to another, throwing occasional hopieless glances at Marcer. "Wagner!" Marcer said. "You crook! Wait till I get my hands on you!" He climbed over the rail. Wagner threw out his hands appealingly. "Don't get excited, Mr. Marcer. I know what you think, but it's not that way at all. I mean not entirely. I can explain." "You'll explain to the police," Marcer said. "I've had all the explanation I need. Phleger's future! Nothing but movie sets!" "Please, Mr. Marcer -- " " -- federal offense," Marcer said, be interested, too. You even had the gall to hang their name on pne of your actors. 'Phoebes Dick'!" "Now, Mr. Marcer -- " "Va-va-voom!" Marcer shouted at him. "Oh, phlut-phlut! Yes, we have no bananas! Very clever! The music goes round and round and it comes out fraud. Twentythree skiddoo to you, kiddo. I'll be seeing you in court." "Mr. Marcer, listen to me," Wagner pleaded. "I admit we staged the whole thing. I admit it and I'll tear up your check if you want me to. But first listen. Time travel is possible. You would have gone into the legitimate future if our machine hadn't broken down at the last minute." Wagner's earnestness was obvious. "The machine broke down?" with the sleeve of his smock. "We didn't want to disappoint you. Frankly, we were afraid that if we weren't ready on time, you'd change your mind about your donation, and we needed the money. So we faked it, intending to explain later and give you a rain check." "A rain check?" Marcer echoed. "Yes. When the machine is repaired, we're prepared to send you into the legitimate future -- free of charge -- if you're still interested." "Free?" Marcer calmed down. "Well, now." He considered. "I guess there's nothing to lose. I could Stop payment on the check even if you didn't tear it up." "We'll tear it up. After this fiasco, we need your good will even more than your money." their machine within a week. Bill Marcer thought it over, went back, laughed with Wagner and let his check go through. He signed a new waiver and climbed up on the railed platform. His decision might have been influenced by the strawberry blonde, whose role in the phony follies of # was the only one that really meant anything. She'd waited for him, as she had promised, at Exit C, at six. Now the shimmering began and the figures of Wagner and the other chronicians faded. Marcer didn't like anything about the real future. It was chill and drizzly and he couldn't see very far. Men in gray uniforms ringed the platform. They wouldn't talk to him and refused to let him climb over the rail. His visit lasted only ten minutes, but it seemed an hour and he kept sneezing all the time. He preferred the fake. When he got back from this damp nothing of a future, he promised himself, he and the strawberry blonde were going to have a mate date. sary. He had on quite a load. I worked him over some to bring him half awake. "Get sobered up," I ordered curtly. "We made planetfall. We've got work to do." I took the bottle and corked it and set it high up on the shelf, where it wasn't right at hand. Doc managed to achieve some dignity. "You needn't worry. Captain. As medic of this tub -- " "I want all hands up and moving. We may have something out there." "I know," Doc said mournfully. "When you talk like that, it's bound to be a tough one. An offbeat climate and atmosphere pure poison." "It's Earth-type, oxygen, and the climate's fine so far. Nothing to be afraid of. The analyzers gave it almost perfect rating." Doc groaned and held his head between his hands. "Those analyzers of ours do very well if they tell us whether it is hot or cold or if the air is fit to breathe. We're a haywire outfit, Captain." "We do all right," I said. "We're scavengers and sometimes birds of prey. We scour the Galaxy for an#?thing that's loose." I paid no attention to him. That was the way he always talked when he had a skin full. "You get up to the galley," I told him, "and let Pancake pour some coffee into you. I want you on your feet and able to do your fumbling best." But Doc wasn't ready to go just yet. "What is it this time?" "A silo. The biggest thing you ever saw. It's ten or fifteen miles across and goes up clear out of sight." "A silo is a building to store winter forage. Is this a farming planet?" "No," I said, "it's desert. And it isn't a silo. It just looks like one." "Warehouse?" asked Doc. "City? Fortress? Temple -- but that doesn't make any difference to us, does it. Captain? We loot temples, too." "Get up!" I yelled at him. "Get going." imagine the populace has come out to greet us. Appropriately, I hope." "There's no populace," I said. "The silo's just standing there alone." "Well, well," said Doc. "A second-story job." He started staggering up the catwalk and I knew he'd be all right. Pancake knew exactly how to get him sobered up. I went back to the port and found that Frost had everything all set. He had the guns ready and the axes and the sledges, the coils of rope and the canteens of water and all the stuff we'd need. As second in command. Frost was invaluable. He knew what to do and did it. I don't know what I'd have done without him. I stood in the port and looked out at the silo. We were a mile or so away from it, but it was so big that it seemed to be much closer. This near to it, it seemed to be a wall. It was just God-awful big. "A place like that," said Frost, "could hold a lot of loot." "If it isn't empty," I answered. "If there isn't someone or something there to stop us taking it. If we can get into it." "There are openings along the base. They look like entrances." "With doors ten feet thick." I wasn't being pessimistic. I was being logical -- I'd seen so many things that looked like billions turn into complicated headaches that I never allowed myself much hope until I had my hands on something I knew would bring us cash. Hutch Murdock, the engineer, came climbing up the catwalk. As usual, he had troubles. He didn't even stop to catch his breath. "I tell you," he said to me, "one of these days those engines will just simply fall apart and leave us hanging out in space lightyears from nowhere. We work all the blessed time to keep them turning over." I clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe this is it. Maybe after this we can buy a brand-new ship." But it didn't cheer him up. He knew as well as I did that I was talking to keep up my spirit as well as his. "Someday," he said, "we'll have bad trouble on our hands. Those boys of mine will drive a soap bubble across three hundred lightyears if it's got an engine in it. But it's got to have an engine. And this wreck we got..." He would have kept right on, but Pancake blew the horn for breakfast. and he seemed to be functioning. He had a moderate case of shudders and he seemed a little pale. He was a little bitter, too, and somewhat poetic. "So we gather glory," he told us. "We go out and lap it up. We haunt the ruins and we track the dream and we come up dripping cash." "Doc," I said, "shut up." He shut up. There was no one on the ship I had to speak to twice. We didn't dally with the food. We crammed it down and left. Pancake left the dishes standing on the table and came along with us. We got into the silo without any trouble. There were entrances all around the base and there weren't any doors. There was not a thing or anyone to stop us walking in. It was quiet and solemn inside -- and unspectacular. It reminded me of a monstrous office building. It was all cut up with corridors, with openings off the corridors leading into rooms. The rooms were lined with what looked like filing cases. We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the walls to lead us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like that and one could wander maybe half a lifetime finding his way out. We were looking for something -- almost anything -- but we didn't find a thing except those filing cases. So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files. Pancake was disgusted. "There won't be nothing but records in those files. Probably in a lingo we can't even read." "There could be anything inside those files," said Frost. "They don't have to be records." Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the files, but I stopped him. There wasn't any use doing it messy if there was a better way. We fooled around a while and we found the place where you had to wave your hand to make a drawer roll out. The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of dynamite. They were about two inches in diameter and a foot, or maybe a little more, in length, and they were heavy. "Gold," said Hutch. "I never saw black gold," Pancake said. "It isn't gold," I told them. I was just as glad it wasn't. If it had been, we'd have broken our backs hauling it away. Gold's all right, but you can't get rich on it. It doesn't much more than pay wages. We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor, looking them over. "Maybe it's valuable," said Frost, "but I wouldn't know. What do you think it is?" None of us had the least idea. We found some sort of symbols no on each end of the sticks and the symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn't help us any because the symbols made no sense. We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more drawers. Every single drawer was filled with the sticks. We went into some other rooms and we waved our hands some more and the drawers came popping out and we didn't find anything except more sticks. " the day had turned into a scorcher. Pancake climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub and the rest of us sat down in the shade of the ship and laid several of the sticks out in front of us and sat there looking at them, wondering what we had. "That's where we're at a big disadvantage," said Hutch. "If a regular survey crew stumbled onto this, they'd have all sorts of experts to figure out the stuff. They'd test it a dozen different ways and they'd skin it alive almost and they'd have all sorts of ideas and they'd come up with some educated guesses. And pretty soon, one way or another, they'd know just what it was and if it was any use." "Someday," I told them, "if we ever strike it rich, we'll have to hire us some experts. The kind of loot we're always turning up, we could make good use of them." "You won't find any," said Doc, "that would team up with a bunch like us." "Where do you get 'bunch-likeus' stuff?" I asked him, a little sore. "Sure, we ain't got much education and the ship is just sort of glued together and we don't use any fancy words to cover up the fact that we're in this for all we can get out of it. But we're doing an honest job." "I wouldn't call it exactly honest. Sometimes we're inside the law and sometimes outside it." That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went, there wasn't any law. "Back on Earth, in the early days," I snapped back, "it was folks like us who went into new lands and blazed the trails and found the rivers and climbed the mountains and brought back word to those who stayed at home. And they went because they were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anjrthing else that wasn't nailed down tight. They didn't worry much about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why, it was just too bad." Hutch said to Doc: "There ain't no sense in you going holy on us. Anything we done, you're in as deep as we are." "Gentlemen," said Doc, in that hammy way of his, "I wasn't trying to stir up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you needn't set your heart on getting any experts." "We could get them," I said, "if we offered them enough. They got to live, just like anybody else." "They have professional pride, too. That's something you've forgotten." "We got you." "Well, now," said Hutch, "I'm not too sure Doc is professional. That time he pulled the tooth for me "Cut it out," I said. "The both of you." This wasn't any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just a couple of months ago, I'd got it quieted down and I didn't want it breaking out again. sticks and turned it over and over, looking at it. "Maybe we could rig up some tests," he suggested. "And take the chance of getting blown up?" asked Hutch. "It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance that it's not explosive." "Not me," said Doc. "I'd rather just sit here and guess. It's less tiring and a good deal safer." "You don't get anywhere by guessing," protested Frost. "We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only find out what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them stored in the building. And there's nothing in the world to stop us from taking them." "The first thing," I said, "is to find out if it's explosive. I don't think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost anything. For instance, it might be food." "We'll have Pancake cook us up a mess," said Doc. I paid no attention to him. He was just needling me. "Or it might be fuel," I said. "Pop a stick into a ship engine that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or two." Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in. to work. We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go and there we dug a foxhole. H# By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out, but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds at rest. So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the stick. Nothing hapjjened. Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or three times more and there was no explosion. We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn't even dented. By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick couldn't be set off by concussion, although the test didn't rule out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up. That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and they stripped the teeth clean off. We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Pancake refused. "You aren't bringing that stuff into my galley," he said. "If you do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keep a good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I ain't having you mess up the place..." "All right. Pancake," I said. "Even with you cooking it, it probably wouldn't be fit to eat." table, looking at the sticks piled in the center of it. Doc brought out a bottle and we all had a drink or two. Doc must have been considerably upset to share his liquor with us. "It stands to reason," said Frost, "that the sticks are good for something. If the cost of that building is any indication of their value, they're worth a fortune." "Maybe the sticks aren't the only things in there," Hutch pointed out. "We just covered part of the first floor. There might be a lot of other stuff in there. And there are all those other floors. How many would you say there were?" "Lord knows," said Frost. "When you're on the ground, you can't be sure you see to the top of it. It just sort of fades away when you look up at it." "You notice what it was built of?" asked Doc. "Stone," said Hutch. "I thought so, too," said Doc. "But it isn't. You remember these big apartment mounds we ran into in that insect culture out on Suud?" We all remembered them, of course. We'd spent days trying to break into them because we had found a handful of beautifully carved jade scattered around the entrance of one of them and we figured there might be a lot of it inside. Stuff like that brings money. Folks back in civilization are nuts about any kind of alien art and that jade sure enough was alien. We'd tried every trick that we could think of and we got nowhere. Breaking into those mounds was like punching a feather pillow. You could dent the surface plenty, but you couldn't break it because the strength of the material built up as pressure compressed the atoms. The harder you hit, the tougher it became. It was the kind of building material that would last forever and never need repair and those insects must have known they were safe from us, for they went about their business and never noticed us. That's what made it so infuriating. And material like that, I realized, would be just the ticket for a structure like the silo. You could build as big or as high as you had a mind to; the more pressure you put on the lower )# structure, the stronger it would be. "It means," I said, "that the building out there could be much older than it seems to be. It could "If it's that old," said Hutch, "it could really be packed. You can store away a lot of loot in a Doc and Frost drifted off to bed and Hutch and I sat there alone, looking at the sticks. of the things that Doc was always saying, about how we were just a bunch of cutthroats, and I wondered if he might be right. But think on it as hard and as honest as I could, I couldn't buy it. On every expanding frontier, in all of history, there had been three kinds of men who went ahead and marked out the trails for other men to follow -- the traders and the missionaries and the hunters. We were the hunters in this case, hunting not for gold or slaves or furs, but for whatever we could find. Sometimes we came back with empty hands and sometimes we made a haul. Usually, in the long run, we evened out so we made nothing more than wages. But we kept on going out, hoping for that lucky break It hadn't happened yet, and perhaps it never would. But someday it might. We touched the ghostly edge of hope just often enough to keep us thinking that it would. Although, I admitted to myself, perhaps we'd have kept going out even if there'd been no hope at all. Seeking for the unknown gets into your blood. When you came right down to it, we probably didn't do a bit more harm than the traders or the missionaries. What we took, we took; we didn't settle down and change or destroy the civilizations of people we pretended we were helping. I said as much to Hutch. He agreed with me. "The missionaries are the worst," he said. "I wouldn't be a missionary no matter what they paid me." We weren't doing any good just sitting there, so I got up to start for bed. "Maybe tomorrow we'll find something else," I said. Hutch yawned. "I sure hope we do. We been wasting our time on these sticks of dynamite." He picked them up and on our way up to bed, he heaved them out the port. The next day, we did find something else. We went much deeper into the silo than we had been before, following the corridors for what must have been two miles or more. We came to a big room that probably covered ten or fifteen acres and it was filled from wall to wall with rows of machines, all of them alike. They weren't much to look at. They resembled to some extent a rather ornate washing machine, with a bucket seat attached and a dome on top. They weren't bolted down and you could push them around and when we tipped one of them up to look for hidden wheels, we found instead a pair of runners fixed on a swivel so they'd track in any direction that one pushed. The runners were made of metal that was greasy to the touch, but when you rubbed your fingers on them, no grease came off them. There was no power connection. "Maybe it's a self-powered unit," said Frost. "Come to think of it, I haven't noticed any power outlets in the entire building." where we could turn on the power and there wasn't any place. That whole machine was the smoothest, slickest hunk of metal you ever saw. We looked for a way to get into its innards, so we could have a look at them, but there wasn't any way. The jacket that covered the works seemed to be one solid piece without an apparent seam or a sign of a bolt or rivet. The dome looked as though it ought to come off and we tried to get it off, but it remained stubbornly in place. The bucket seat, however, was something else again. It was lousy with all sorts of attachments to accommodate the sitting surface of almost any conceivable kind of being. We had a lot of fun adjusting it in different ways and trying to figure out what kind of animal could have a seat like that. We got a bit obscene about it, I remember, and Hutch was doubled up laughing. But we weren't getting anywhere and we were fairly sure we wouldn't until we could get a cutting tool and open up one of the machines to find out what made it tick. We picked out one of them and we skidded it down the corridors. When we got to the entrance, we figured we would have to carry it, but we were mistaken. It skidded along over the ground and even loose sand almost as well as it did in the corridors. After supper. Hutch went down to the engine room and came back with a cutting tool. The metal was tough, but we finally got at least some of the jacket peeled away. The innards of that machine were enough to drive you crazy. It was a solid mass of tiny parts all hooked together in the damnedest jumble. There was no beginqing and no end. It was like one of those puzzle mazes that go on and on forever and get no place. Hutch got into it with both hands and tried to figure out how to start taking it apart. After a while, he sat back on his heels and growled a little at it. "There's nothing holding them together. Not a bolt or rivet, not even so much as a cotter pin. But they hang together somehow." "Just pure cussedness," I said. He looked at me kind of funny. "You might be right, at that." He went at it again and bashed a couple of knuckles and sat there sucking at them. "If I didn't know that I was wrong," he said, "I'd say that it was friction." "Magnetism," Doc offered. "I tell you what. Doc," said Hutch. "You stick to what little medicine wou know and let me handle the mechanics." Frost dove in quick to head off an argument. "That frictional idea might not be a bad one. But it would call for perfect machining and surface polish. Theoretically, if you place two perfectly polished surfaces together, the molecules will attract one another and you'll have permanent cohesion." M# all that stuff. Mostly he seemed to be just like the rest of us, but occasionally he'd come out with something that would catch you by surprise. I never asked him anything about himself; questions like that were just plain bad manners. We messed around some more and Hutch bashed another knuckle and I sat there thinking how we'd found two items in the silo and both of them had stopped us in our tracks. But that's the way it is. Some days you can't make a dime. Frost moved around and pushed Hutch out of the way. "Let me see what I can do." Hutch didn't protest any. He was licked. Frost started pushing and pulling and twisting and fiddling away at that mess of parts and all at once there was a kind of whooshing sound, like someone had let out their breath sort of slow and easy, and all the parts fell in upon themselves. They came unstuck, in a kind of slowmotion manner, and they made a metallic thump along with tinkling sounds and they were just a heap inside the jacket that had protected them. "Now see what you done!" howled Hutch. "I didn't do a thing," said Frost. "I was just seeing if I could bust one loose and one did and then the whole shebang caved in." He held up his fingers to show us the piece that had come loose. "You know what I think?" asked Pancake. "I think whoever made that machine made it so it would fall apart if anyone tried to tinker with it. They didn't want no one to find out how it was put together." "That makes sense," said Doc. "No use getting peeved at it. After all, it was their machine." "Doc," I said, "you got a funny attitude. I never noticed you turning down your share of anything we find." "I don't mind when we confine ourselves to what you might call, in all politeness, natural resources. I can even stomach the pillaging of art-forms. But when it comes to stealing brains -- and this machine is brains -- " Frost let out a whoop. He was hunkered down, with his head inside the jacket of the machine, and I thought at first he'd got caught and that we'd have to cut him out, but he could get out, all right. "I see now how to get that dome off the top," he said. It was a complicated business, almost like a combination on a safe. The dome was locked in place by a lot of grooves and you had to know just how to turn it to lift it out of place. Frost kept his head inside the jacket and called out directions to Hutch, who twisted the dome first this way and then that, sometimes having to pull up on it and other times press down to engage the slotted mechanism that held it locked in place. Pancake wrote down the combinations as Frost called them off and finally the dome came loose in Hutch's hands. mystery to it. It was a helmet, all rigged out with adjustable features so it could be made to fit any type of head, just as the seat was adjustable to fit any sitting apparatus. The helmet was attached to the machine with a retractable cable that reeled out far enough to reach someone sitting in the seat. And that was fine, of course. But what was it? A portable electric chair? A permanent wave machine? Or what? So Frost and Hutch poked around some more and in the top of the machine, just under where the dome had nested, they found a swivel trap door and underneath it a hollow tube extending down into the mass of innards -- only the innards weren't a mass any more, but just a basket of loose parts. It didn't take any imagination to figure what that hollow tube was for. It was just the size to take one of the sticks of dynamite. Doc went and got a bottle and passed it around as a sort of celebration and after a drink or two, he and Hutch shook hands and said there were no hard feelings. But I didn't pay much attention to that. They'd done it many times before and then been at one another's throat before the night was over. Just why we were celebrating was hard to figure. Sure, we knew the machine fitted heads and that the dynamite fitted the machine -- but we still had no idea what it was all about. We were, to tell the truth, just a little scared, although you couldn't have gotten one of us to admit it. We did some guessing, naturally. "It might be a mechanical doctor," said Hutch. "Just sit in that seat and put the helmet on your head and feed in the proper stick and you come out cured of whatever is wrong with you. It would be a blessing, I can tell you. You wouldn't ever need to worry if your doctor knew his business or not." I thought Doc was going to jump right down Hutch's throat, but he must have remembered how they had shaken hands and he didn't do it. "As long as you're thinking along that line," said Doc, "let's think a little bigger. Let's say it is a rejuvenation machine and the stick is crammed with vitamins and hormones and such that turn you young again. Just take the treatment every twenty years or so and you stay young forever." "It might be an educator," Frost put in. "Those sticks might be packed full of knowledge. Maybe a complete college subject inside of each of them." "Or it might be just the opposite," said Pancake. '"Those sticks might soak up everything you know. Ech of those sticks might be the story of one man's whole life." "Why record life stories?" asked Hutch. "There aren't many men or aliens or what-not that have life stories important enough to rate all that trouble." "If you're thinking of it being some sort of communications deal," I said, "it might be anything. It might be propaganda or religion or maps or it might be no more than a hie of business records." "And," said Hutch, "it might kill you deader than a mackerel." "I don't think so," Doc replied. H# "There are easier ways to kill a person than to sit him in a chair and put a helmet on him. And it doesn't have to be a communicator." "There's one way to find out," I said. "I was afraid," said Doc, "we'd get around to that." "It's too complicated," argued Hutch. "No telling what trouble it may get us into. Why not drop it cold? We can blast off and hunt for something simple." "No!" shouted Frost. "We can't do that!" "I'd like to know why not," said Hutch. "Because we'd always wonder if we passed up the jackpot. We'd figure that maybe we gave up too quick -- a day or two too quick. That we got scared out. That if we'd gone ahead, we'd be rolling in moriey."  but we batted it around some more before we would admit he was. All of us knew what we had to do, but there were no volunteers. Finally we drew straws and Pancake was unlucky. "Okay," I said. "First thing in the morning..." "Morning, nothing!" wailed Pancake. "I want to get it over with. I wouldn't sleep a wink." He was scared, all right, and he had a right to be. He felt just the way I would have if I'd drawn the shortest straw. I didn't like barging around on an alien planet after dark, but we had to do it. It wouldn't have been fair to Pancake to have done otherwise. And, besides, we were all wrought up and we'd have no rest until we'd found out what we had. So we got some flashes arid went out to the silo. We tramped down the corridors for what seemed an endless time and came to the room where the machines were stored. There didn't seem to be any difference in the machines, so we picked one at random. While Hutch got the helmet off, I adjusted the seat for Pancake and Doc went into an adjoining room to get a stick. When we were all ready. Pancake sat down in the seat. I had a sudden rush of imbecility. "Look," I said to Pancake, "you don't need to do this." "Someone has to," said Pancake. "We got to find out somehow and this is the quickest way." "I'll take your place." Pancake called me a dirty name and he had no right to do that, for I was only being helpful. But I called him another and we were back to normal. Hutch put the helmet on Pancake's head and it came down so far you couldn't see his face. Doc popped the stick into the tube and the machine purred a little, starting up, then settled into silence. Not exactly silence, either -- when you laid your ear against the jacket, you could hear it running. Nothing seemed to happen to Pancake. He sat there cool and relaxed and Doc got to work on him at once, checking him over. "His pulse has slowed a little," Doc reported, "and his heart action's sort of feeble, but he seems to be in no danger. His breathing is a little shallow, but not enough to worry about." It might not have meant a thing to Doc, but it made the rest of us uneasy. We stood around and watched and nothing hapIened. I don't know what we thought might happen. Funny as it sounds, I had thought that something would. cake got no worse. We waited and we waited. The machine kept running and Pancake sat slumped in the seat. He was as limp as a dog asleep and when you picked up his hand, you'd think his bones had melted plumb away. All the time we got more nervous. Hutch wanted to jerk the helmet off Pancake, but I wouldn't let him. No telling what might happen if we stopped the business in the middle. It was about an hour after dawn that the machine stopped running. Pancake began to stir and we removed the helmet. He yawned and rubbed his eyes and sat up straight. He looked a bit surprised when he saw us and it seemed to take a moment for him to recognize us. "What happened?" Hutch asked him. Pancake didn't answer. You could see him pulling himself together, as if he were remembering and getting his bearings once again. "I went on a trip," he said. "A travelogue!" said Doc, disgusted. "Not a travelogue. I was there. It was a planet, way out at the rim of the Galaxy, I think. There weren't many stars at night because it was so far out -- way out where the stars get thin and there aren't many of them. There was just a thin strip of light that moved overhead." "Looking at the Galaxy edgeon," said Frost, nodding. "Like you were looking at a buzz-saw's cutting edge." "How long was I under?" asked Pancake. "Long enough," I told him. "Six or seven hours. We were getting nervous." "That's funny," said Pancake. "I'll swear I was there for a year or more." "Now let's get this straight," Hutch said. "You say you were there. You mean you saw this place." "I mean I was there!" yelled Pancake. "I lived with those people and I slept in their burrows and I talked with them and I worked with them. I got a blood blister on my hand from hoeing in a garden. I traveled from one place to another and I saw a lot of things and it was just as real as sitting here." We bundled him out of there and went back to the ship. Hutch wouldn't let Pancake get the breakfast. He threw it together himself and since Hutch is a lousy cook, it was a miserable meal. Doc dug up a bottle and gave Pancake a drink, but he wouldn't let any of the rest of us have any of it. Said it was medicinal, not social. That's the way he is at times. Downright hog-selfish. Pancake told us about this place he had been to. It didn't seem to have much, if any, government, mostly because it didn't seem to need one, but was a humble sort of planet where rather dim-witted people lived in a primitive agricultural state. They looked, he said, like a cross between a human and a groundhog, and he drew a picture of them, m but it didn't help a lot, for Pancake is no artist. He told us the kind of crops they raised, and there were some screwy kinds, and what kind of food they ate, and we gagged at some of it, and he even had some of the place names down pat and he remembered shreds of the language and it was outlandishsounding. We asked him all sorts of questions and he had the answers to every one of them and some were the kind he could not have made up from his head. Even Doc, who had been skeptical to start with, was ready to admit that Pancake had visited the planet. A fter we ate, we hustled Pancake off to bed and Doc checked him over and he was all right. When Pancake and Doc had left. Hutch said to me and Frost: "I can feel those dollars clinking in my pocket right this minute." We both agreed with him. We'd found an entertainment gadget that had anything yet known backed clear off the map. The sticks were recordings that packed in not only sight and sound, but stimuli for all the other senses. They did the job so well that anyone subjected to their influence felt that he was part of the environment they presented. He stepped into the picture and became a part of it. He was really there. Frost already was planning exactly how we'd work it. "We could sell the stuff," he said, "but that would be rather foolish. We want to keep control of it. We'll lease out the machines and we'll rent the sticks and since we'll have the sole supply, we can charge anything we wish." "We can advertise year-long vacations that take less than half a day," said Hutch. "They'll be just the thing for executives and other busy people. Why, in a single weekend you could spend four or five years' time on several different planets." "Maybe it's not only planets," Frost went on. "There might be concerts or art galleries and museums. Maybe lectures on history and literature and such." We were feeling pretty good, but we were tuckered out, so we trailed off to bed. I didn't get into bed right away, however, but hauled out the log. I don't know why I ever bothered with it. It was a hit-and-miss affair at best. There would be months I'd not even think about it and then all at once I'd get all neat and orderly and keep a faithful record for several weeks or so. There was no real reason to make an entry in it now, but I was somewhat excited and had a feeling that perhaps what had just happened should be put down in black and white. So I crawled under the bunk and pulled out the tin box I kept it and the other papers in, and while I was lifting it to the bunk, it slipped out of my hands. The lid flew open. The log and all the pajjers and the other odds and ends I kept there scattered on the floor. I cussed a bit and got down on my hands and knees to pick up the mess. There was an awful lot of it and most of it was junk. Someday, I told myself, I'd have to throw a lot of it away. There were clearance papers from a hundred different ports and medical certificates and other papers that were long outdated. But among it I found also the title to the ship. I sat there thinking back almost twenty years to the day I'd bought the ship for next to nothing and towed it from the junkyard and I recalled how I'd spent a couple of years spare time and all I could earn getting it patched up so it could take to space again. No wonder, I told myself, that it was a haywire ship. It had been junk to start with, and during all those years, we'd just managed to keep it glued together. There had been many times when the only thing that got it past inspection had been a fast bribe slipped quietly to the man. No one in the Galaxy but Hutch could have kept it flying. pers, thinking about Hutch and all the rest of them. I got a little sentimental and thought a lot of things I'd have clobbered anyone for if they had dared to say them to me. About how we had stuck together and how any one of them would have died for me and I for any one of them. There had been a time, of course, when it had not been that way, back in the days when they'd first signed on and had been nothing but a crew. But that day was long past; now they were more than just a crew. There had been no signing on for years, but just staying on as men who had a right to stay. And I sat there, flat on the floor, and thought how we'd finally done the thing we'd always hoped to do, how we'd caught up with the dream -- us, the ragamuffin crew in the gluedtogether ship -- and I felt proud and happy, not for myself alone, but for Hutch and Pancake and Doc and Frost and all the rest. Finally I got the papers all picked up and back in the box again and tried to write up the log, but was too tired to write, so I went to bed, as I should have done in the first place. But tired as I was, I lay there and thought of how big the silo was and tried to estimate how many sticks might be cached away there. I got up into the trillions and I saw it was no use; there was no way to keep the figures straight. The whole deal was big -- bigger than anything we'd ever found before. It would take a group of men like us at least five lifetimes of steady hauling to empty the silo. We'd have to set up a corporation and get a legal staff (preferably one with the lowest kind of ethics) and file a claim on this planet and go through a lot of other red tape to be sure we had it all sewed up. We couldn't take a chance of letting it slip through our fingers because of any lack of foresight. We'd have to get it all doped out before we went ahead. I don't know about the rest of them, but I dreamed that night of wading knee-deep through a sea of crisp, crinkly banknotes. When morning came. Doc failed to show up for breakfast. I went hunting him and found he hadn't even gone to bed. He was sprawled in his rickety old chair in the dispensary and there was one empty bottle on the floor and he trailed another, almost empty, alongside the chair, keeping a rather flimsy hold upon its neck. He still was conscious, which was about the most that could be said of him. I was plenty sore. Doc knew the rules. He could get paralyzed as soon or as often or as long as he wanted to when we were in space, but when we were grounded and there was work to do and planet ailments to keep an eye out for, he was expected to stay sober. I kicked the bottle out of his fist and I took him by the collar with one hand and by the seat of his britches with the other and frog-walked him to the galley. chair, I yelled for Pancake to get another pot of coffee going. "I want you sobered up," I told Doc, "so you can go out with us on the second trip. We need all the manpower we have." Hutch had rounded up his gang and Frost had got the crew together and had rigged up a block and tackle so we could start loading. Everyone was ready to begin bringing in the cargo except Doc and I swore to myself that, before the day was over, I'd work the tail right off him. As soon as we had breakfast, we started out. We planned to get aboard as many of the machines as we could handle and to fill in the space between them with all the sticks we could find room for. We went down the corridors to the room that held the machines and we paired off, two men to the machine, and started out. Everything went fine until we were more than halfway across the stretch of ground between the building and the ship. Hutch and I were in the lead and suddenly there was an explosion in the ground about fifty feet ahead of us. We skidded to a halt. "It's Doc!" yelled Hutch, grabbing for his belt-gun. I stopped him just in time. "Take it easy. Hutch." Doc stood up in the port and waved. a rifle at us. "I could pick him off," Hutch said. "Put back that gun," I ordered. I walked out alone to where Doc had placed his bullet. He lifted his rifle and I stopped dead still. He'd probably miss, but even so, the kind of explosive charge he was firing could cut a man in two if it struck ten feet away. "I'm going to throw away my gun," I called out to him. "I want to talk with you." Doc hesitated for a moment. "All right. Tell the rest of them to pull back a way." I spoke to Hutch over my shoulder. "Get out of here. Take the others with you." "He's crazy drunk," said Hutch. "No telling what he'll do." "I can handle him," I said, sounding surer than I felt. Doc let loose another bullet off to one side of us. "Get moving, Hutch." I didn't dare look back. I had to keep an eye on Doc. "All right," Doc finally yelled at me. "They're back. Throw away your gun." think I was trying to draw on him, I unfastened the buckle of the gun belt and let it fall to the ground. I walked forward, keeping my eyes on Doc, and all the time my skin kept trying to crawl up my back. "That's far enough," Doc said when I'd almost reached the ship. "We can talk from here." "You're drunk," I told him. "I don't know what this is all about, but I know you're drunk." "Not nearly drunk enough. Not drunk enough by half. If I were drunk enough, I simply wouldn't care." "What's eating you?" "Decency," said Doc, in that hammy way of his. "I've told you many times that I can stomach looting when it involves no more than uranium and gems and other trash like that. I can even shut my eyes when you gut a culture, because you can't steal a culture -- even when you get through looting it, the culture still is there and can build back again. But I balk at robbing knowledge. I will not let you do it. Captain." "I still say you're drunk." "You don't even know what you've found. You are so blind and greedy that you don't recognize it." "Okay, Doc," I said, trying to smooth his feathers, "tell me what we've found." "A library. Perhaps the greatest, most comprehensive library in all the Galaxy. Some race spent untold years compiling the knowledge that is in that building and you plan to take it and sell it and scatter it. If that happens, in time it will be lost and what little of it may be left will be so out of context that half its meaning will be lost. It doesn't belong to us. It doesn't even belong to the human race alone. A library like that can belong only to all the peoples of the Galaxy." "Look, Doc," I pleaded, "we've worked for years, you and I and all the rest of them. We've bled and sweated and been disappointed time and time again. This And that means you as well as the rest of us. Think of it. Doc -- more money than you can ever spend -- enough to keep you drunk the rest of your life!" Doc swung the rifle around at me and I thought my goose was cooked. But I never moved a muscle. I stood and bluffed it out. A t last, he lowered the gun. "We're barbarians. History is full of the likes of us. Back on Earth, the barbarians stalled human progress for a thousand years when they burned and scattered the libraries and the learning of the Greeks and Romans. To them, books were just something to start a fire with or wipe their weapons on. To you, this great cache of accumulated knowledge means nothing more than something to make a quick buck on. You'll take a scholarly study of a vital social problem and retail it as a year's vacation that can be experienced in six hours' time and you'll take -- " "Spare me the lecture, Doc," I said wearily. "Tell me what you want." "Go back and report this find to the Galactic Commission. It will help wipe out a lot of things we've done." "So help me. Doc, you've gone religious on us." "Not religious. Just decent." "And if we don't?" "I've got the ship," said Doc. "I have the food and water." "You'll have to sleep." "I'll close the port. Just try getting in." He had us and he knew he did. Unless we could figure out a way to grab him, he had us good and proper. I was scared, but mostly I was burned. For years, we'd listened to him run off at the mouth and never for a moment had any of us thought he meant a word of it. And now suddenly he did -- he meant every word of it. I knew there was no way to talk him out of it. And there was no compromise. When it came right down to it, there was no agreement possible, for any agreement or compromise would have to be based on honor and we had no honor -- not a one of us, not even among ourselves. It was stalemate, but Doc didn't know that yet. He'd realize it once he got a little sober and thought about it some. What he had done had been done on alcoholic impulse, but that didn't mean he wouldn't see it through. One thing was certain: As it stood, he could outlast us. "Let me go back," I said. "I'll have to talk this over with the others." began to suspect how deeply he had become committed, began to see for the first time the impossibility of us trusting one another. "When you come back," he told me, "have it all thought out. I'll want some guarantees." "Sure, Doc," I said. "I mean this. Captain. I'm in deadly earnest. I'm not just fooling." J# "I know you aren't, Doc." I went back to where the others were clustered just a short distance from the building. I explained yhat was up. "We'll have to spread out and charge him," Hutch decided. "He may get one or two of us, but we can pick him off." "He'll simply close the p)ort," I said. "He can starve us out. In a pinch, he could try to take the ship up. If he ever managed to get sober, he could probably do it." "He's crazy," said Pancake. "Just plain drunken crazy." "Sure he is," I said, "and that makes him twice as deadly. He's been brooding 'on this business for a long, long time. He built up a guilt complex that is three miles high. And worst of all, he's got himself out on a limb and he can't back down." "We haven't got much time," said Frost. "We've got to think of something. A man can die of thirst. You can get awfully hungry in just a little while." The three of them got to squabbling about what was best to do and I sat down on the sand and leaned back against one of the machines and tried to figure Doc. Doc was a failure as a medic; otherwise he'd not have tied up with us. More than likely, he had joined us as a gesture of defiance or despair -- perhaps a bit of both. I#S And besides being a failure, he was an idealist. He was out of place with us, but there'd been nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. For years, it had eaten at him and his values got all warped and there's no place better than deep space to get your values warped. He was crazy as a coot, of course, but a special kind of crazy. If it hadn't been so ghastly, you might have called it glorious crazy. You wanted to laugh him off or brush him to one side, for that was the kind of jerk he was, but he wouldn't laugh or brush. I don't know if I heard a sound -- a footstep, maybe -- or if I just sensed another presence, but all at once I knew we'd been joined by someone. I half got up and swung around toward the building and there, just outside the entrance, stood what looked at first to be a kind of moth made up in human size. I don't mean it was an insect -- it just had the look of one. Its face was muffled up in a cloak it wore and it was not a human face and there was a ruff rising from its head like those crests you see on the helmets in the ancient plays. not a cloak at all, but a part of the creature and it looked like it might be folded wings, but it wasn't wings. "Gentlemen," I said as quietly as I could, "we have a visitor." I walked toward the creature soft and easy and alert, not wanting to frighten it, but all set to take evasive action if it tried to put the finger on me. "Be ready. Hutch," I said. "I'm covering you," Hutch assured me and it was a comfort to know that he was there. A man couldn't get into too much trouble with Hutch backing him. I stopped about six feet from the creature and he didn't look as bad close up as he did at a distance. His eyes seemed to be kind and gentle and his funny face, alien as it was, had a sort of peacefulness about it. But even so, you can't always tell with aliens. We stood there looking at one another. The both of us understood there was no use of talking. We just stood and sized one another up. Then the creature took a couple of steps and reached out a hand that was more like a claw than hand. He took my hand in his and tugged for me to come. There were just two things to do -- either snatch my hand away or go. I went. I didn't stop to get it figured out, but there were several factors that helped make up my mind. First off, the creature seemed to be friendly and intelligent. And Hutch and all the others were there, just behind me. And over and above all, you don't get too far with aliens if you act stand-offish. So I went. We walked into the silo and behind me I heard the tramping feet of the others and it was a sound that was good to hear. I didn't waste any time wondering where the creature might have come from. I admitted to myself, as I walked along, that I had been half-expecting something just like this. The silo was so big that it could hold many things, even people or creatures, we could not know about. After all, we'd explored only one small corner of the first floor of it. The creature, I figured, must have come from somewhere on the upper floors as soon as he learned about us. It might have taken quite a while, one way or another, for the news to reach him. He led me up three ramps to the fourth floor of the building and went down a corridor for a little way, then went into a room. It was not a large room. It held just one machine, but this one was a double model; it had two bucket seats and two helmets. There was another creature in the room. The first one led me over to the machine and motioned for me to take one of the seats. watching Hutch and Pancake and Frost and all the others crowd into the place and line up against the wall. Frost said: "A couple of you boys better stay outside and watch the corridor." Hutch asked me: "You going to sit down in that contraption, Captain?" "Why not?" I said. "They seem to be all right. There's more of us than them. They don't mean us any harm." "It's taking a chance," said Hutch. "Since when have we stopped taking chances?" The creature I had rret outside had sat down in one of the seats, so I made a few adjustments in the other. While I was doing this, the second creature went to a file and got out two sticks, but these sticks were transparent instead of being black. He lifted off the helmets and inserted the two sticks. Then he fitted one of the helmets on his fellow-creature's head and held out the other to me. I sat down and let him put it on and suddenly I was squatting on the floor across a sort of big coffee-table from the gent I had met outside. "Now we can talk," said the creature, "which we couldn't do before." I wasn't scared or flustered. It seemed just as natural as if it had been Hutch across the table "There will be a record made of everything we say," said the creature. "When we are finished, you will get one copy and I will get the other for our files. You might call it a pact or a contract or whatever term seems to be most applicable." "I'm not much at contracts," I told him. "There's too much legal flypaper tied up with most of them." "An agreement, then," the creature suggested. "A gentlemen's agreement." "Good enough," I said. Agreements are convenient things. You can break them any time you want. Especially gentlemen's agreements. "I suppose you have figured out what this place is," he said. "Well, not for sure," I replied. "Library is the closest that we have come." "It's a university, a galactic university. We specialize in extension or home-study courses." I'm afraid I gulped a bit. "Why, that's just fine." "Our courses are open to all who wish to take them. There are no entrance fees and there is no tuition. Neither are there any scholastic requirements for enrollment. You yourself can see how difficult it would be to set up such requirements in a galaxy where there are many races of varying viewpoints and abilities." "You bet I can. "The courses are free to all who can make use of them," he said. "We do expect, of course, that they make proper use of them and that they display some diligence in study." "You mean anyone at all can enroll?" I asked. "And it don't cost anything?" A fter the first disappointment, I was beginning to see the possibilities. With bona fide university educations for the taking, it would be possible to set up one of the sweetest rackets that anyone could ask for. "There's one restriction," the creature explained. "We cannot, obviously, concern ourselves with individuals. The paperwork would get completely out of hand. We enroll cultures. You, as a representative of your culture -- what is it you call yourselves?" "The human race, originally of the planet Earth, now covering years. I'd have to see your chart..." "That's not necessary at the moment. We would be quite happy to accept your application for the entrance of the human race." It took the wind out of me for a minute. I wasn't any representative of the human race. And if I could be, I wouldn't. This was my deal, not the human race's. But I couldn't let him know that, of course. He wouldn't have done business with me. "Now not so fast," I pleaded. "There's a question or two I'd like to have you answer. What kind of courses do you offer? What kind of electives do you have?" "First there is the basic course," the creature said. "It is more or less a familiarization course, a sort of orientation. It includes those subjects which we believe can be of the most use to the race in question. It is, quite naturally, tailored specifically for each student culture. After that, there is a wide field of electives, hundreds of thousands of them." "How about final exams and tests and things like that?" I wanted to know. "Oh, surely," said the creature. "Such tests are conducted every -- tell me about your time system." I told him the best I could and he seemed to understand. "I d say," he finally said, "that about every thousand years of your time would come fairly close. It is a long-range program and to conduct tests any oftener would put some strain upon our resources and might be of little value." That decided me. What happened a thousand years from now was no concern of mine. I asked a few more questions to throw him off the track -- just in case he might have been suspicious -- about the history of the university and such. I still can't believe it. It's hard to conceive of any race working sity aimed at the eventual education of an entire galaxy, traveling to all the planets to assemble data, compiling the records of countless cultures, correlating and classifying and sorting out that mass of information to set up the study courses. It was just too big for a man to grasp. OR A while, he had me reeling  on the ropes and faintly starry-eyed about the whole affair. But then I managed to snap back to normal. "All right. Professor," I said, "you can sign us up. What am I supposed to do?" "Not a thing," he said. "The recording of our discussion will supply the data. We'll outline the course of basic study and you then may take such electives as you wish." "If we can't haul it all in one trip, we can come back again?" I asked. "Oh, definitely. I anticipate you may wish to send a fleet to carry all you need. We'll supply sufficient machines and as many copies of the study recordings as you think you will need." "It'll take a lot," I said bluntly, figuring I'd start high and haggle my way down. "An awful lot." "I am aware of that," he told me. "Education for an entire culture is no simple matter. But we are geared for it." So there we had it -- all legal and airtight. We could get anything we wanted and as much as we wanted and we'd have a right to it. No one could say we stole it. Not even Doc could say that. The creature explained to me the system of notation they used on the recording cylinders and how the courses would be boxed and numbered so they could be used in context. He promised to supply me with recordings of the electives so I could pick out what we wanted. He was real happy about finding another customer and he proudly told me of all the others that they had and he held forth at length on the satisfaction that an educator feels at the opportunity to pass on the torch of knowledge. He had me feeling like a heel. Then we were through and I was sitting in the seat again and the second creature was taking the helmet off my head. I got up and the first creature rose to his feet and faced me. We couldn't talk any more than we could to start with. It was a weird feeling, to face a being you've just made a deal with and not be able to say a single word that he can understand. But he held out both his hands and I took them in mine and he gave my hands a friendly squeeze. "Why don't you go ahead and kiss him?" asked Hutch. "Me and the boys will look the other way." Ordinarily, I'd have slugged Hutch for a crack like that, but I didn't even get sore. The second creature took the two sticks out of the machine and handed one to me. They'd gone in transparent, but they came out black. "Let's get out of here," I said. We got out as fast as we could and still keep our dignity -- if you could call it that. and Pancake and Frost together and told them what had happened. "We got the Universe by the tail," I said, "with a downhill pull." "What about "Doc?" asked Frost. "Don't you see? It's just the kind of deal that would appeal to him. We can let on we're noble and big-hearted and acting in good faith. All I need to do is get close enough to grab him." "He won't even listen to you," said Pancake. "He won't believe a word you say." "You guys stay right here," I said. "I'll handle Doc." I walked back across the stretch of ground between the building and the ship. There was no sign of Doc. I was all set to holler for him, then thought better of it. I took a chance and started up the ladder. I reached the port and there was still no sign of him. I moved warily into the ship. I thought I knew what had become of him, but there was no need to take more chances than I had to. I found him in his chair in the dispensary. He was stiffer than a goat. The gun lay on the floor. There were two empty bottles beside the chair. I stood and looked at him and knew what had happened. After I had left, he had got to thinking about the situation and had run into the problem of how he'd climb down off that limb and he had solved it the way he'd solved most of his problems all his life. I got a blanket and covered him. Then I rummaged around and found another bottle. I uncorked it and put it beside the chair, where he could reach it easy. Then I picked up the gun and went to call the others in. I lay in bed that night and thought about it and it was beautiful. There were so many angles that a man didn't know quite where to start. There was the university racket which, queerly enough, was entirely legitimate, except that the professor out in the silo never meant it to be sold. And there was the quickie vacation deal, offering a year or two on an alien planet in six hours of actual time. All we'd need to do was pick a number of electives in geography or social science or whatever they might call it. There could be an information bureau or a research agency, charging fancy prices to run down facts on any and all subjects. Without a doubt, there'd be some on-the-spot historical recordings and with those in hand, we could retail adventure, perfectly safe adventure, to the stay-athomes who might hanker for it. I thought about that and a lot of other things which were not quite so sure, but at least probable and worth investigating, and I thought, too, about how the professors had finally arrived at what seemed to me a sure-fire effective medium for education. You wanted to know about a thing, so you up and lived it; you learned it on the ground. You didn't read about it or bear about it or even see it in plain threedimension -- you experienced it. You walked the soil of the planet you wanted to know about; you lived with the beings that you wished to study; you saw as an eyewitness, and perhaps as a participant, the history that you sought to learn. A nd it could be used in other ways as well. You could learn to build anything, even a spaceship, by actually building one. You could learn how an alien machine might operate by putting it together, step by simple step. There was no field of knowledge in which it would not work -- and work far better than standard educational methods. Right then and there, I made up my mind we'd not release a single stick until one of us had previewed it. No telling what a man might find in one of them that could be put to practical use. I fell asleep dreaming about chemical miracles and new engineering principles, of better business methods and new philosophic concepts. And I even figured out how a man could make a mint of money out of a philosophic concept. We were on top of the Universe for sure. We'd set up a corporation with more angles than you could shake a stick at. We would be big time. In a thousand years or so, of course, there'd be a reckoning, but none of us would be around to take part in it. OC sobered up by morning and I had Frost heave him in the brig. He wasn't dangerous any longer, but I figured that a spell in pokey might do him a world of good. After a while, I intended to talk to him, but right at the moment I was much too busy to be bothered with him. I went over to the silo with Hutch and Pancake and had another session with the professor on the double-seat machine and picked out a batch of electives and settled various matters. Other professors began supplying us with the courses, all boxed and labeled, and we set the crew and the engine gang to work hauling them and the machines aboard and stowing them away. Hutch and I stood outside the silo and watched the work go on. "I never thought," said Hutch, "that we'd hit the jackpot this way. To be downright honest with you, I never thought we'd hit it. I always thought we'd just go on looking. It goes to show how wrong a man can be." "Those professors are soft in the head," I said. "They never asked me any questions. I can think of a lot they could have asked that I couldn't answer." "They're honest and think everyone's the same. That's what comes of getting so wrapped up in something you have time for nothing else." And that was true enough. The professor race has been busy for that -- and that never would be finished. "I can't figure why they did it," I said. "There's no profit in it." "Not for them," said Hutch, "but there is for us. I tell you. Captain, it takes brains to work out the angles." I told him what I had figured out about previewing everything before we gave it out, so we would be sure we let nothing slip away from us. say this for you, Captain -- you don't miss a bet. And that's the way it should be. We might as well milk this deal for every cent it's worth." "I think we should be methodical about this previewing business," I said. "We should start at the beginning and go straight through to the end." Hutch said he thought so, too. "But it will take a lot of time," he warned me. "That's why we should start right now. The orientation course is on board already and we could start with that. All we'd have to do is set up a machine and Pancake could help you with it." "Help me!" yelled Hutch. "Who said anything about me doing it? I ain't cut out for that stuff. You know yourself I never do any reading -- " "It isn't reading. You just live it. You'll be having fun while we're out here slaving." "I won't do it." "Now look," I said, "let's use a little sense. I should be out here at the silo seeing everything goes all right and close at hand so I can hold a powwow with the professor if there's any need of it. We need Frost to superintend the loading. And Doc is in the clink. 'That leaves you and Pancake. I can't trust Pancake with that previewing job. He's too scatterbrained. He'd let a fortune glide right past him without recognizing it. Now you're a fast man with a buck and the way I see it -- " "Since you put it that way," said Hutch, all puffed up, "I suppose I am the one who should be doing it." That evening, we were all dogtired, but we felt fine. We had made a good start with the loading and in a few more days would be heading home. Hutch seemed to be preoccupied at supper. He fiddled with his food. He didn't talk at all and he seemed like a man with something on his mind. As soon as I could, I cornered him. "How's it going, Hutch?" "Okay," he said. "Just a lot of gab. Explaining what it's all about. Gab." "Like what?" "Some of it is hard to tell. Take a lot of explaining I haven't got the words for. Maybe one of these days you'll find the time to run through it yourself." "You can bet your life I will," I said, somewhat sore at him. "There's nothing worth a dime in it so far," said Hutch. I believed him on that score. Hutch could spot a dollar twenty miles away. I went down to the brig to see Doc. He was sober. Also unrepentant. "You outreached yourself this time," he said. "That stuff isn't yours to sell. There's knowledge in that building that belongs to the Galaxy -- for free."  happened, how we'd found the silo was a university and how we were taking the courses on board for the human race after signing up for them all regular and proper. I tried to make it sound as if we were being big, but Doc wouldn't buy a word of it. "You wouldn't give your dying grandma a drink of water unless she paid you in advance," he said. "Don't give me any of that guff about service to humanity." So I left him to stew in the brig a while and went up to my cabin. I was sore at Hutch and all burned up at Doc and my tail was dragging. I fell asleep in no time. The work went on for several days and we were almost finished. I felt pretty good about it. After supper, I climbed down the ladder and sat on the ground beside the ship and looked across at the silo. It still looked big and awesome, but not as big as that first day -- because now it had lost some of its strangeness and even the purpiose of it had lost some of its strangeness, too. Just as soon as we got back to civilization, I promised myself, we'd seal the deal as tight as possible. Probably we couldn't legally claim the planet because the professors were intelligent and you can't claim a planet that has intelligence, but there were plenty of other ways we could get our hooks into it for keeps. I sat there and wondered why no one came down to sit with me, but no one did, so finally I clambered up the ladder. I went down to the brig to have a word with Doc. He still was unrepentant, but he didn't seem too hostile. "You know. Captain," he said, "there have been times when I've not seen eye to eye with you, but despite that I've respected you and sometimes even liked you;" "What are you getting at?" I asked him. "You can't soft-talk yourself out of the spot you're in." "There's something going on and maybe I should tell you. You are a forthright rascal. You don't even take the trouble to deny you are. You have no scruples and probably no morals, and that's all right, because you don't pretend to have. You are -- " "Spit it out! If you don't tell me what is going on. I'll come in there and wring it out of you." "Hutch has been down here several times," said Doc, "inviting me to come up and listen to one of those recordings he is fooling with. Said it was right down my alley. Said I'd not be sorry. But there was something wrong about it. Something sneaky." He stared round-eyed through the bars at me. "You know, Captain, Hutch was never sneaky." "Well, go on!" "Hutch has found out something, Captain. If I were you, I'd be finding out myself." I didn't even wait to answer him. I remembered how Hutch had been acting, fiddling with his food and preoccupied, not talking very much. And come to think of it, some of the others had been acting strangely, too. I'd just been too busy to give it much attention. I cussed with every step I took. A captain of a ship should never get so busy that he loses touch -- he has to stay in touch all the blessed time. It had all come of being in a hurry, of wanting to get loaded up and out of there before something happened. And now something had happened. No one had come down to sit with me. There'd not been a dozen words spoken at the supper table. Everything felt deadly wrong. Pancake and Hutch had rigged up the chart room for the previewing chore and I busted into it and slammed the door and stood with my back against it. Not only Hutch was there, but Pancake and Frost as well and, in the machine's bucket seat, a man I recognized as one of the engine gang. I stood for a moment without saying anything, and the three of them stared back at me. The man with the helmet on his head didn't notice -- he wasn't even there. "All right. Hutch," I said, "come clean. What is this all about? Why is that man previewing? I thought just you and -- " "Captain," said Frost, "we were about to tell you." "You shut up! I am asking Hutch." "Frost is right," said Hutch. "We were all set to tell you. But you were so busy and it came a little hard..." "What is hard about it?" "Well, you had your heart all set to make yourself a fortune. We were trying to find a way to break it to you gentle." I left the door and walked over to him. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said, "but we still never was a time of day or night, Hutch, that I couldn't beat your head in and if you don't want me to start, you better talk real fast." tain," Frost said quietly. "We're taking this stuff back and we'll turn it over to the authorities." "All of you are huts!" I roared. "For years, we've slaved and sweated, hunting for the jackpot. And now that we have it in our mitts, now that we can walk barefooted through a pile of thousanddollar bills, you are going chicken on me. What's -- " "It's not right for us to do it, sir," said Pancake. And that "sir" scared me more than anything that had happened so far. Pancake had never called me that before. other of them and what I saw in their faces chilled me to the bone. Every single one of them thought just the same as Pancake. "That orientation course!" I shouted. Hutch nodded. "It explained about honesty and honor." "What do you scamps know about honesty and honor?" I raged. "There ain't a one of you that ever drew an honest breath." "We never knew about it before," said Pancake, "but we know about it now." "It's just propaganda! It's just a dirty trick the professors played on us!" And it was a dirty trick. Although you have to admit the professors knew their onions. I don't know if they figured us humans for a race of heels or if the orientation course was just normal routine. But no wonder they hadn't questioned me. No wonder they'd made no investigation before handing us their knowledge. They had us stopped before we could even make a move. "We felt that since we had learned about honesty," said Frost, "it was only right the rest of the crew should know. It's an awful kind of life we've been living, Captain." "So," said Hutch, "we been bringing in the men, one by one, and orienting them. We figured it was the least that we could do. This man is about the last of them." "A missionary," I said to Hutch. "So that is what you are. Remember what you told me one night? You said you wouldn't be a missionary no matter what they paid you." "There's no need of that," Frost replied coldly. "You can't shame us and you can't bully us. We know we are right." "But the money! What about the corporation? We had it all planned out!" Frost said: "You might as well forget it. Captain. When you take the course -- " "I'm not taking any course." My voice must have been as deadly as I felt, for not a one of them made a move toward me. "If any of you mealy-mouthed missionaries feel an urge to make me, you can start trying right now." They still didn't move. I had them bluffed. But there was no point in arguing with them. There was nothing I could do against that stone wall of honesty and honor. I turned my back on them and walked to the door. At the door, I stopped. I said to Frost: "You better turn Doc loose and give him the cure. Tell him it's all right with me. He has it coming to him. It will serve him right." Then I shut the door behind me and went up the catwalk to my cabin. I locked the door, a thing I'd never done before. I sat down on the edge of the bunk and stared at the wall and thought. they had forgotten. This was my ship, not theirs. They were just the crew and their papers had run out long ago and never been renewed. I got down on my hands and knees and hauled out the tin box I kept the papers in. I went through it systematically and sorted out the papers that I needed -- the title to the ship and the registry and the last papers they had signed. I laid the papers on the bunk and shoved the box out of the way and sat down again. I picked up the papers and shuffled them from one hand to the other. I could throw them off the ship any time I wished. I could take off without them and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it. And what was more, I could get away with it. It was legal, of course, but it was a rotten thing to do. Now that they were honest men and honorable, though, they'd bow to the legality and let me get away with it. And in such a case, they had no one but themselves to thank. I sat there for a long time thinking, but my thoughts went round and round and mostly had to do with things out of the past -- how Pancake had gotten tangled up in the nettle patch out in the Coonskin System and how Doc had fallen in love with (of all things) a tri-sexual being that time we touched at Siro and how Hutch had cornered the liquor supply at Munko, then lost it in a game that was akin to craps except the dice were queer little living entities that you had no control of, which made it tough on Hutch. A rap came at the door. It was Doc. "You all full of honesty?" I asked him. He shuddered. "Not me. I turned down the offer." "It's the same kind of swill you were preaching at me just a couple of days ago." "Can't you see," asked Doc, "what it would do the human race?" "Sure. It'll make them honorable and honest. No one will ever cheat or steal again and it will be cozy..." 'They'll die of complicated boredom," said Doc. "Life will become a sort of cross between a Boy Scout jamboree and a ladies sewing circle. There'll be no loud and unseemly argument and they'll be polite and proper to the point of stupefaction." "So you have changed your mind." "Not really. Captain. But this is the wrong way to go about it. Whatever progress the race has ever made has been achieved by the due process of social evolution. In any human advance, the villains and the rascals are as important as the forward-looking idealist. They are Man's consciences and Man can't get along without them." "If I were you. Doc," I said, "I wouldn't worry so much about the human race. It's a pretty big thing and it can take a lot of bumps. Even an overdose of honesty won't hurt it permanently." Actually, I didn't give a damn. I had other things on my mind right then. D oc crossed the room and sat down on the bunk beside me. He leaned over and tapped the papers I still held in my hand. "You got it all doped out," he said. I nodded bleakly. "Yeah." "I thought you would." I shot a quick glance at him. "You were way ahead of me. That's why you switched over." Doc shook his head emphatically. "No. Please believe me. Captain, I feel as bad as you do." "It won't work either way." I shuffled the papers. "They acted in good faith. They didn't sign aboard, sure. But there was no reason that they should have. It was all understood. Share and share alike. And that's the way it's been for too long to repudiate it now. And we can't keep on. Even if we agreed to dump the stuff right here and blast off and never think of it again, we'd not get rid of it. It would always be there. The past is dead. Doc. It's spoiled. It's smashed and it can't be put back together." I felt like bawling. It had been a long time since I had felt that full of grief. "They are different kind of men now," I said. "They went and changed themselves and they'll never be the same. Even if they could change back, it wouldn't be the same." Doc mocked me a little. "The race will build a monument to you. Maybe actually on Earth itself, with all the other famous humans, for bringing back this stuff. They'd be just blind enough to do it." I got up and paced the floor. "I don't want any monument. I'm not bringing it in. I'm not having anything more to do with it." I stood there, wishing we had never found the silo, for what had it done for me except to lose me the best crew and the best friends a man had ever had? "The ship is mine," I said. "That is all I want. I'll take the cargo to the nearest point and dump it there. Hutch and the rest of them can carry on from there, any way they can. They can have the honesty and honor. I'll get another crew." it would be almost the way it had been. Almost, but not quite. "We'll go on hunting," I said. "We'll dream about the jackpot. We'll do our best to find it. We'll do anything to find it. We'll break all the laws of God or Man to find it. But you know something. Doc?" "No, I don't," said Doc. "I hope we never find it. I don't want to find another. I just want to go on hunting." We stood there in the silence, listening to the fading echoes of those days we hunted for the jackpot. "Captain," said Doc, "will you take me along?" I nodded. What was the difference? He might just as well. "Captain, you remember those insect mounds on Suud?" "Of course. How could I forget them?" "You know, I've figured out a way we might break into them. Maybe we should try it. There I almost clobbered him. I'm glad now that I didn't. Suud is where we're headed. If Doc's plan works out, we may hit that jackpot yet! and Box #, Silver Spring, Md. Choose from # current titles -- hardcover First Editions valued to # ! #  each ! sive publisher of science fiction in the country, is expanding. This fall we intend to bring out all our new titles at # each. In order to test this policy... to see if increased sales will result from slashing the former prices... we make you this offer: For still greater savings, we'll send you any # books for #... any # books for #! Use the handy listing below as your order-blank... check the titles you desire with an "X". We suggest you also select alternate titles, and check them with a "V" in case of shortage. Frankly, we or money-order. (Illustrated catalog on request) # East #th Street New York #, New York Gentlemen: Please send me the following titles, checked with a "V". Coming of Conan by Howard # Conan the Barbarian by Howard # Sword of Conan by Howard # King Conan by Howard # Conan the Conqueror by Howard # Tales of Conan by Howard # Sargasso of Space by North # Plague Ship by North # Men Against the Stars ed. Greenberg # Journey to Infinity ed. Greenberg # Travelers of Space ed. Greenberg # Robot and the Man ed. 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"Well... let's try It this way. Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!" 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These techniques have been ap plied to the development of a miniature radio receiver. A special (patent pending) regeuerative RF reflex circuit is incorporated in the wrist radio which allows for good selectivity and maximum sensitivity. In moderate signal strength areas, no antenna is required. The high sensitivity of the receiver permits its use with no external antenna at distances up to twenty-five miles for a broadcast station of average power, facilitating its use as a true wrist radio. Good reception is possible at greater distances bv the use of a short length of wire from six inches to three feet depding on the distance from the broadcast station. Consistent reception has been obtained over thirtyfive miles from the transmitter site. The small size mak it the ideal radio. It can be worn on the wrist where it wilt fit comfortably under the sleeve of a Jacket or worn in a shirt pocket. The use of transUtwe mtkei It s ragged deelee not subjected to tube breekege. 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The publisher assumes no resjponsibUity for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. #. N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Choose from # current titles -- hardcover First Editions valued to # ! #  each ! sive publisher of science fiction in the country, is expanding. This fall we intend to bring out aH our new titles at # each. In order to test this policy... to see if increased sales will result from slashing the former prices... we make you this offer: For still greater savings, we'll send you any # books for #... any # books for #! Use the handy listing below as your order-blank... check the titles you desire with an "X". We suggest you also select alternate titles, and check them with a "V" in case of shortage. Frankly, we or money-order. (Illustrated catalog on request) # East #th Street New York #, New York Gentlemen: Please send me the following titles, checked with a "V" Coming of Conan by Howard # Conan the Barbarian by Howard # Sword of Conan by Howard # King Conan by Howard # Conan the Conqueror by Howard # Tales of Conan by Howard # Sargasso of Space by North # Plague Ship by North # Men Against the Stars ed. Greenberg # Journey to infinity ed. Greenberg # Travelers of Space ed. Greenberg # Robot and the Man ed. Greenberg # All About the Future ed. Greenberg # Coming Attractions ed. Greenberg # # Science Fiction Novels ed Greenberg # interplanetary Hunter by Barnes # Science Fiction Terror Tales ed. Conklin # Sixth Column by Heiniein # I enclose  for with an "X". I am checking alternate selctions This Fortress World by Gunn # SF: The Year's Greatest ed. Merrill # Highways In Hiding by Smith # Children of the Atom by Shiras # Forgotten Planet by Leinster # City by Simak # Prelude to Space by Clarke # Sands of Mars by Clarke # Against the Fall of Night by Clarke # Address: Centauri by Wallace # Foundation by Asimov # Foundation  Empire by Asimov # Second Foundation by Asimov # Reprieve From Paradise by Elliott # Lost Continents by de Camp # books checked. BA#NA A s WE get closer to space travel, people who worry about that sort of thing are trying to devise ways of keeping the crews sane. One way to keep sane, of course, is to get away from people who worry about that sort of thing. The proposals, like proverbs, all make sense and yet all contradict one another; Lone pilots because more would get on each other's nerves. Several because lone pilots get on their own nerves. Mixed crews to avoid frustration. All-male (sometimes all-female) crews to avoid bloodshed. I don't think it matters much -- provided every member of the Crew has a monkey to attend to. If scientific reasons are needed, they can be thought up as fast as the crew catches wise: to test air, temperature, metabolism, food, psychic climate, hard radiation, and so forth. Naturally, the only motive that matters is to saddle the crew with a monkey apiece. I derive this solution from my own experience in the Pacific during WW II, when I thought having a monkey would take my mind off things. It did. I was as tied down as a mother of nine. Baggy (for Baguio, where he was captured) fought furiously against being housCbroken, left alone or allowed to be hungry. I almost went broke feeding him, finally outflanked regulations by cutting bananas off a tree in a mined area. That saved pesos. But then Baggy got so sick that he couldn't even work up a decent glare. I knew then that he was close to death. But good old Pedro, our native scout, spotted the stalk of bananas I'd liberated and said of course Baggy was sick -- I'd been feeding him male bananas. That's the real point here; the sequel may be of interest, but it's not important: Baggy recovered, glare and all, and I sold him to a sailor minutes after checking into a rest camp in Manila, and knew (relative) freedom again. I tried often to find the difference between male and female bananas, never succeeded, which good old Pedro claimed was a matter of Filipino know-how. Not long ago, I mentioned my puzzlement to Willy Ley. He choked on his cigar and kept choking while he gave me the (Continued on page #) of science fiction stories by Strangers in the Universe Clifford Simak is a pioneer in the field of science fiction and one of the genre's most accomplished exponents. 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The Man Who Ate the World In a civilization which flowed with milk and honey -- and flowed and flowed and flowed -- his tragedy was that he had not drowned at birth! H e had a name but at home he was called "Sonny," and he was almost always at home. He hated it. Other boys his age went to school. Sonny would have done anything to go to school, but his family was, to put it mildly, not well off. It was not Sonny's fault that his father was so unsuccessful. But it meant no school for Sonny, no boys of his own age for Sonny to play with. All childhoods are tragic (as all adults forget), but Sonny's was misery all the way through. The worst time was at night, when the baby sister was asleep and the parents were grimly eating and reading and dancing and drinking, until they were ready to drop. And of all bad nights, the night before his twelfth birthday was perhaps Sonny's worst. He was old enough to know what a birthday party was like. It would be cake and candy, shows and games. It would be presents, presents, presents. It would be a terrible, endless day. He switched off the color-D television and the recorded tapes of sea chanteys and, with an appearance of absent-mindedness, walked toward the door of his playroom. Davey Crockett got up from beside the model rocket field and I said, "Hold on thar, Sonny. Mought take a stroll with you." Davey, with a face as serene and strong as a Tennessee crag, swung its long huntin' rifle under one arm and put its other arm around Sonny's shoulders. "Where you reckon the two of us ought to head?" Sonny shook Davey Crockett's arm off. "Get lost," he said petulantly. "Who wants you around?" out of the closet, hobbling on its wooden leg, crouched over its knobby cane. "Ah, young master," it said reproachfully, "you shouldn't ought to talk to old Davey like that! He's a good friend to you, Davey is. Many's the weary day Davey and me has been a-keepin' of your company. I asks you this, young master: Is it fair and square that you should be a-tellin' him to get lost? Is it fair, young master? Is it square?" Sonny looked at the floor stubbornly and didn't answer. What was the use of answering dummies like them? He stood rebelliously silent and still until he just felt like saying something. And then he said: "You go in the closet, both of you. I don't want to play with you. I'm going to play with my trains." Long John said unctuously: "Now there's a good idea, that is! You just be a-havin' of a good time with your trains and old Davey and me'll -- " "Go ahead!" shouted Sonny. He kept stamping his foot until they were out of sight. His fire truck was in the middle of the floor; he kicked at it, but it rolled quickly out of reach and slid into its little garage under the tanks of tropical fish. He scuffed over to the model railroad layout and glared at it. As he approached, the Twentieth Century Limited came roaring out of a tunnel, sparks flying from its stack. It crossed a bridge, whistled at a grade crossing, steamed into the Union Station. The roof of the station glowed and suddenly became transparent, and through it Sonny saw the bustling crowds of redcaps and travelers -- "I don't want that," he said. "Casey, crack up old Number Ninety-nine again." Obediently the layout quivered and revolved a half-turn. Old Casey Jones, one and an eighth inches tall, leaned out of the cab of the S.P. locomotive and waved good-by to Sonny. The locomotive whistled shrilly twice and picked up speed -- It was a good crackup. Little old Casey's body, thrown completely free, developed real blisters from the steam and bled real blood. But Sonny turned his back on it. He had liked that crackup for a long time -- longer than he liked almost any other toy he owned. But he was tired of it. He looked around the room. Tarzan of the Apes, leaning against a foot-thick tree trunk, one hand on a vine, lifted its head and looked at him; but Tarzan was clear across the room. The others were in the closet. Sonny ran out and slammed the door. He saw Tarzan start to come after him, but even before Sonny was out of the room, Tarzan slumped and stood stockstill. T T wasn't fair. Sonny thought angrily. They wouldn't even chase him, so that at least he could have some kind of chance to get away by himself. They'd iust talk to each other on their little radios, and in a minute one of the tutors, or one of the maids, or whatever else happened to be handy would vector in on him -- But, for the moment, he was free. He slowed down and walked along the Great Hall toward his baby sister's room. The fountains began to splash as he entered the hall; the mosaics on the wall began to tinkle music and sparkle with moving colors. "Now, chile, whut you up to?" He turned around, but he knew it was Mammy coming toward him. It was slapping toward him on big, flat feet, its pink-palmed hands lifted to its shoulders. The face under the red bandanna was frowning, its gold tooth sparkling as Mammy scolded: "Chile, you is got usns so worried, we's fit to die! How you 'speck us to take good keer of you efn you run off lak that? Now you jes come on back to your nice room with Mammy an' we'll see if there ain't some real nice program on the TV." Sonny stopped and waited for it, but he wouldn't give it the satisfaction of looking at it. Slapslap the big feet waddled cumbersomely toward him; but he didn't have any illusions. Waddle, big feet, three hundred pounds and all. Mammy could catch him in twenty yards with a ten-yard start. Any of them could. He said in his best icily indignant voice: "I was just going in to look at my baby sister." Pause. "You was?" The plump black face looked suspicious. "Yes, I was. Doris is my own sister and I love her." Pause -- long pause. "Dat's nice," said Mammy, but its voice was still doubtful. "I 'speck I better come 'long with you. You wouldn't want to wake your lil baby sister up. Ef I come. I'll he'p you keep real quiet." Sonny shook free of it -- they were always putting their hands on kids! "I don't want you to come with me, Mammy!" "Aw, now, honey! Mammy ain't gwine bother nothin', you knows that!" Sonny turned his back on it and marched grimly toward his sister's room. If only they would leave him alone! But they never did. It was always that way, always one darn old robot -- yes, robot, he thought, savagely tasting the naughty word. Always one darn robot after another. Why couldn't Daddy be like other daddies, so they could live in a decent little house and get rid of those darn robots -- so he could go to a real school and be in a class with other boys, instead of being taught at home by Miss Brooks and Mr. Chips and all those other robots? They spoiled everything. And they would spoil what he wanted to do now. But he was going to do it all the same, because there was something in Doris's room that he wanted very much. It was probably the only tangible thing he wanted in the world. A S HE and Mammy passed the imitation tumbled rocks of the Bear Cave, Mama Bear poked its head out and growled: "Hello, Sonny. Don't you think you ought to be in bed? It's nice and warm in our bear bed. Sonny." He didn't even look at it. Time was when he had liked that sort of thing, too, but he wasn't a fouryear-old like Doris any more. All the same, there was one thing a four-year-old had -- He stopped at the door of her room. "Doris?" he whispered. Mammy scolded: "Now, chile, you knows that lil baby is asleep! How come you tryin' to wake her up?" 'T won't wake her up." The furthest thing from Sonny's mind was to wake his sister up. He tiptoed into the room and stood beside the little girl's bed. Lucky kid! he thought enviously. Being four, she was allowed to have a tiny little room and a tiny bed -- while Sonny had to wallow around in a forty-foot bedchamber and a bed eight feet long. He looked down at his sister. Behind him, Mammy clucked approvingly. "Dat's nice when chilluns loves each other lak you an' that lil baby," it whispered. Doris was sound asleep, clutching her teddy-bear. It wriggled slightly and opened an eye to look at Sonny, but it didn't say anything. Sonny took a deep breath, leaned forward and gently slipped the teddy-bear out of the bed. It scrambled pathetically, trying to get free. Mammy whispered urgently: "Sonny! Now you let dat old teddy-bear alone, you heah me?" Sonny whispered: "I'm not hurting anything. Leave me alone, will you?" "Sonny!" He clutched the little furry robot desperately around its middle. The stubby arms pawed at him, the furred feet scratched against his arms. It growled a tiny doll-bear growl, and whined, and suddenly his hands were wet with its real salt tears. "Sonny! Come on now, honey, you knows that's Doris's Teddy. Aw, chile!" He said: "It's mine!" It wasn't his. He knew it wasn't. His was long gone, taken away from him when he was six because it was old, and because he had been six, and six-year-olds had to have bigger, more elaborate companionrobots. It wasn't even the same color as his -- it was brown and his had been black and white. But it was cuddly and gently warm and he had heard it whispering little bedtime stories to Doris. And he wanted it very much. side. A low-pitched pleading voice from the door: "Sonny, you must not interfere with your sister's toySi One has obligations." He stood forlornly, holding the teddy-bear. "Go away, Mr. Chips!" "Really, Sormy! This isn't proper behavior. Please return the toy." "I won't!" Mammy, dark face pleading in the shadowed room, leaned toward him and tried to take it away from him. "Aw, honey, now you know that's not -- " "Leave me alone!" he shouted. There was a gasp and a little whimper from the bed, and Doris sat up and began to cry. The little girl's bedroom was suddenly filled with robots -- and not only robots, for in a moment the butler appeared, leading Sonny's actual flesh-and-blood mother and father. Sonny made a terrible scene. He cried, and he swore at them childishly for being the unsuccessful clods they were, and they nearly wept, too, because they were aware that their lack of standing was bad for the children. But he couldn't keep Teddy. They marched him back to his room, where his father lectured him while his mother stayed behind to watch Mammy comfort the little girl. His father said: "Sonny, you're a big boy now. We aren't as well off as other people, but you have to help us. Don't you know that, Sonny? We all have to do our part. Your mother and I'll be up till midnight now, consuming, because you've made this scene. Can't you at least try to consume something bigger than a teddybear? It's all right for Doris because she's so little, but a big boy like you -- " "I hate you!" cried Sonny, and he turned his face to the wall. They punished him, naturally. The first pimishment was that they give him an extra birthday party the week following. The second punishment was even worse. II  nearly a score of years -- a man named Roger Garrick in a place named Fisherman's Island walked into his hotel room. The light didn't go on. The bellhop apologized, "We're sorry, sir. We'll have it attended to, if possible." "If possible?" Garrick's eyebrows went up. The bellhop made putting in a new light tube sound like a major industrial operation. "All right." He waved the bellhop out of the room. It bowed and closed the door. Garrick looked around him, frowning. One light tube more or less didn't make a lot of difference; there was still the light from the sconces at the walls, from the reading lamps at the chairs and chaise-longue and from the photomural on the long side of the room -- to say nothing of the fact that it was broad, hot daylight outside and light poured through the windows. All the same, it was a new sensation to be in a room where the central lighting wasn't on. He didn't like it. It was -- creepy. A rap on the door. A girl was standing there, young, attractive, rather small. But a woman grown, it was apparent. "Mr. Garrick? Mr. Roosenburg is expecting you on the sun deck." "All right." He rummaged around in the pile of luggage, looking for his briefcase. It wasn't even sorted out! The bellhop had merely dumped the stuff and left. The girl said: "Is that what you're looking for?" He looked where she was pointing; it was his briefcase, behind another bag. "You'll get used to that aroimd here. Nothing in the right place, nothing working right. We've all gotten used to it." We. He looked at her sharply, but she was no robot; there was life, not the glow of electronic tubes, in her eyes. "Pretty bad, is it?" She shrugged. "Let's go see Mr. Roosenburg. I'm Kathryn Pender, by the way. I'm his statistician." He followed her out into the hall. "Statistician, did you say?" She turned and smiled -- a tight, grim smile of annoyance. "That's right. Surprised?" Garrick said uneasily: "Well, it's more a robot job. Of course, I'm not familiar with the practice in this sector -- " "You will be," she promised bluntly. "No, we aren't taking the elevator. Mr. Roosenburg's in a hurry to see you." "But She actually glared at him. "Don't you understand? Day before yesterday, I took the elevator and I was hung up between floors for an hour and a half. Something was going on at North Guardian and it took all the power in the lines. Would it happen again today? I don't know. But, believe me, an hour and a half is a long time to be stuck in an elevator." She turned and led him to the fire stairs. Over her shoulder, she said: "Get it straight once and for all, Mr. Garrick. You're in a disaster area here... Anyway, it's only ten more flights."  I 'EN flights. Nobody climbed ten flights of stairs any more! Garrick was huffing and puffing before they were half way, but the girl kept on ahead, light as a gazelle. Her skirt reached between hip and knees, and Garrick had plenty of opportunity to observe that her legs were attractively tanned. Even so, he couldn't help looking around him. It was a robot's-eye view of the hotel that he was getting; this was the bare wire armature that held up the confectionery suites and halls where the humans went. Garrick knew, as everyone absently knew, that there were places like this behind the scenes everywhere. Belowstairs, the robots worked; behind scenes, they moved about their errands and did their jobs. But nobody went there. It was funny about the backs of this girl's knees. They were paler than the rest of the leg -- Garrick wrenched his mind back to his surroundings. Take the guard rail along the steps, for instance. It was wire-thin, fraillooking. No doubt it could bear any weight it was required to, but why couldn't it look that strong? The answer, obviously, was that robots did not have humanity's built-in concepts of how strong a rail should look before they could believe it really was strong. If a robot should be in any doubt -- and how improbable that a robot should be in doubt! -- it would perhaps reach out a sculptured hand and test it. Once. And then it would remember, and never doubt again, and it wouldn't be continually edging toward the wall, away from the spider-strand between it and the vertical drop -- He conscientiously took the middle of the steps all the rest of the way up. Of course, that merely meant a different distraction, when he really wanted to do some thinking. But it was a pleasurable distraction. And by the time they reached the top, he had solved the problem. The pale spots at the back of Miss Pender's knees meant she had got her tan the hard way -- walking in the Sun, perhaps working in the Sun, so that the bending knees kept the Sun from the patches at the back; not, as anyone else would acquire a tan, by lying beneath a normal, healthful sunlamp held by a robot masseur. He wheezed: "You don't mean we're all the way up!" "All the way up," she said, and looked at him closely. "Here, lean on me if you want to." "No, thanks!" He staggered over to the door, which opened naturally enough as he approached it, and stepped out into the flood of sunlight on the roof, to meet Mr. Roosenburg. doctor, but he remembered enough of his basic pre-specialization to know there was something in that fizzy golden drink. It tasted perfectly splendid -- just cold enough, just fizzy enough, not quite too sweet. And after two sips of it, he was buoyant with strength and well-being. He put the glass down and said: "Thank you for whatever it was. Now let's talk." "Gladly, gladly!" boomed Mr. Roosenburg. "Kathryn, the files!" Garrick looked after her, shaking his head. Not only was she a statistician, which was robot work, she was also a file clerk -- and that was barely robot work. It was the kind of thing handled by a semi-sentient punchcard sorter in a decently run sector. Roosenburg said sharply: "Shocks you, doesn't it? But that's why you're here." He was a slim, fair little man and he wore a golden beard cropped square. Garrick took another sip of the fizzy drink. It was good stuff; it didn't intoxicate, but it cheered. He said: "I'm glad to know why I'm here." The golden beard quivered. "Area Control sent you down and didn't tell you this was a disaster area?" Garrick put down the glass. "I'm a psychist. Area Control said you needed a psychist. From what I've seen, it's a supply problem, but -- " "Here are the files," said Kathryn Pender, and stood watching him. Roosenburg took the spools of tape from her and dropped them in his lap. He asked tangentially: "How old are you, Roger?" Garrick was annoyed. "I'm a qualified psychist! I happen to be assigned to Area Control and -- " "How old are you?" Garrick scowled. "Twentyfour." Roosenburg nodded. "Um. Rather young," he observed. "Maybe you don't remember how things used to be." Garrick said dangerously: "All the information I need is on that tape. I don't need any lectures from you." Roosenburg pursed his lips and got up. "Come here a minute, will you?"  of the sim deck and pointed. "See those things down there?" Garrick looked. Twenty stories down, the village straggled off toward the sea in a tangle of pastel oblongs and towers. Over the bay, the hills of the mainland were faintly visible through mist and, riding the bay, the flat white floats of the solar receptors. "It's a power plant. That what you mean?" Roosenburg boomed: "A power plant. All the power the world can ever use, out of this one and all the others, all over the world." He peered out at the bobbing floats, soaking up energy from the Sun. "And people used to try to wreck them," he added. Garrick said stiffly: "I may only be twenty-four years old, Mr. Roosenburg, but I have completed school." "Oh, yes. Of course you have, Roger. But maybe schooling isn't the same thing as living through a time like that. I grew up in the Era of Plenty, when the law was Consume! My parents were poor and I still remember the misery of my childhood. Eat and consume, wear and use. I never had a moment's peace, Roger! For the very poor, it was a treadmill; we had to consume so much that we could never catch up, and the further we fell behind, the more the Ration Board forced on us -- " "That's ancient history, Mr. Roosenburg. Morey Fry liberated us from all that." The girl said softly: "Not all of us." The man with the golden beard nodded. "Not all of us -- as you should know, Roger, being a psychist." Garrick sat up straight and Roosenburg went on: "Fry showed us that the robots could help at both ends -- by producing and by consuming. But it came a little late for some of us. The patterns of childhood do linger on." Kathryn Pender leaned toward Garrick. "What he's trying to say. Mr. Garrick, is that we've got a compulsive consumer on our hands." Ill wasn't as much as a mile wide and not much more than that in length,, but it had its city and its bathing beaches, its parks and theaters. It was possibly the most densely populated island in the world... for the number of its inhabitants. The President of the Council convened their afternoon meeting in a large and lavish room. There were nineteen councilmen around a lustrous mahogany table. Over the President's shoulder, the others could see the situation map of North Guardian and the areas surrounding. North Guardian glowed blue, cold, impregnable. The sea was misty green; the mainland, Fisherman's Island, South Guardian and the rest of the little archipelago were hot, hostile red. Little flickering fingers of red attacked the blue. Flick, and a ruddy flame wiped out a corner of a beach. Flick, and a red spark appeared in the middle of the city, to grow and blossom, and then to die. Each little red whipflick was a point where, momentarily, the defenses of the island were down; but always and always, the cool blue brightened around the red and drowned it. The President was tall, stooped, old. It wore glasses, though robot eyes saw well enough without. It said, in a voice that throbbed with power and pride: "The first item of the order of business will be a report of the Defense Secretary." The Defense Secretary rose to its feet, hooked a thumb in its vest and cleared its throat. "Mr. President -- " "Excuse me, sir." A whisper from the sweet-faced young blonde taking down the minutes of the meeting. "Mr. Trumie has just left Bowling Green, heading north." The whole council turned to glance at the situation map, where Bowling Green had just flared red. The President nodded stiffly, like the crown of an old redwood nodding. "You may proceed, Mr. Secretary," it said after a moment. "Our invasion fleet," began the Secretary, in its high, clear voice, "is ready for sailing on the first suitable tide. Certain units have been, ah, inactivated, at the, ah, instigation of Mr. Trumie. But on the whole, repairs have been completed and the units will be serviceable within the next few hours." Its lean, attractive face turned solemn. "I am afraid, however, that the Air Command has sustained certain, ah, increments of attrition -- due, I should emphasize, to chances involved in certain calculated risks -- " "Question! Question!" It was the Commissioner of Public Safety, small, dark, fire-eyed, angry. "Mr. Commissioner?" the President began, but it was interrupted again by the soft whisper of the recording stenographer, listening intently to the earphones that brought news from outside. "Mr. President," it whispered, "Mr. Trumie has passed the Navy Yard." T he robots turned to look at the situation map. Bowling Green, though it smoldered in spots, had mostly gone back to blue. But the jagged oblong of the Yard flared red and bright. There was a faint electronic hum in the air, almost a sigh. The robots turned back to face each other. "Mr. President! I demand that the Defense Secretary explain the loss of the Graf Zeppelin and the #th Bomb Group!" The Defense Secretary nodded to the Commissioner of Public Safety. "Mr. Trumie threw them away," it said sorrowfully. Once again, that sighing electronic drone from the assembled robots. The Coimcil fussed and fiddled with its papers, while the situation map on the wall flared and dwindled, flared and dwindled. The Defense Secretary cleared its throat again. "Mr. President, there is no question that the, ah, absence of an effective air component will seriously hamper, not to say endanger, our prospects of a suitable landing. Nevertheless -- and I say this, Mr. President, in full knowledge of the conclusions that may -- indeed, should! -- be drawn from such a statement -- nevertheless, Mr. President, I say that our forward elements will successfully complete an assault landing -- " "Mr. President!" The breathless whisper of the blonde stenographer again. "Mr. President, Mr. Trumie is in the building!" On the situation map behind it, the Pentagon -- the building they were in -- flared scarlet. The Attorney General, nearest the door, leaped to its feet. "Mr. President, I hear him!" And they could all hear now. Far off, down the long corridors, a crash. A faint explosion, and another crash, and a raging, querulous, high-pitched voice. A nearer crash, and a sustained, smashing, banging sound, coming toward them. The oak-paneled doors flew open with a crash, splintering. A tall, dark male figure in gray leather jacket, rocket-gun holsters swinging at its hips, stepped through the splintered doors and stood surveying the Council. Its hands hung just below the butts of the rocket guns. It drawled: "Mistuh Anderson Trumie!" It stepped aside. Another male figure -- shorter, darker, hobbling with the aid of a stainless steel cane that concealed a ray-pencil, wearing the same gray leather jacket and the same rocket-gun holsters -- entered, stood for a moment, and took position on the other side of the door. Between them, Mr. Anderson Trumie shambled ponderously into the Council Chamber to call on his Council.  age. He wasn't much more than five feet tall, but his weight was close to four hundred pounds. He stood there in the door, leaning against the splintered oak, quivering jowls obliterating his neck, his eyes nearly swallowed in the fat that swamped his skull, his thick legs trembling as they tried to support him. "You're all under arrest!" he screeched. "Traitors! Traitors!" He panted ferociously, glowering at them. They waited with bowed heads. Beyond the ring of councilman, the situation map slowly blotted out the patches of red as the repair robots worked feverishly to fix what Sonny Trumie had destroyed. "Mr. Crockett!" Sonny cried shrilly. "Slay me these traitors!" Wheep-wheep, and the guns whistled out of their holsters into the tall bodyguard's hands. Ratatai-tat, and two by two, the nineteen councilmen leaped, clutched at air and fell as the rocket pellets pierced them through. "That one, too!" Mr. Trumie pointed at the sweet-faced blonde. Bang. The sweet young face convulsed and froze; it fell, slumping across its little table. On the wall, the situation map flared red again, but only faintly -- for what were twenty robots? Sonny gestured curtly to his other bodyguard. It leaped forward, tucking the stainless steel cane under one arm, putting the other around the larded shoulders of Sonny Trumie. "Ah, now, young master," it crooned. "You just get ahold o' Long John's arm now -- " "Get them fixed," Sonny ordered abruptly. He pushed the President of the Council out of its chair and, with the robot's help, sank into it himself. "Get them fixed right, you hear? I've had enough traitors! I want them to do what I tell them!" "Sartin sure, young master. Long John'll be pleased to -- " "Do it now! And yon, Davey, I want my lunch!" "Reckoned you would, Mistuh Trumie. It's right hyar." The Crockett robot kicked the fallen councilmen out of the way as a procession of waiters filed in from the corridor. Sonny ate. He ate until eating was pain, and then he sat there sobbing, his arms braced against the tabletop, until he could eat more. The Crockett robot said worriedly: "Mistuh Trumie, moughtn't you rear back a mite? Old Doc Aeschylus, he don't hold with you eatin' too much, you know." "I hate Doc!" Trumie said bitterly. He pushed the plates off the table. They fell with a rattle and a clatter, and they went spinning away as he heaved himself up and lurched alone over to the window. "I hate Doc!" he brayed again, sobbing, staring through tears out the window at his kingdom with its hurrying throngs and marching troops and roaring waterfront. The tallow shoulders tried to shake with pain. He felt as though hot cinderblocks were being thrust down his throat, the ragged edges cutting, the hot weight crushing. "Take me back," he wept to the robots. "Take me away from these traitors. Take me to my Private Place!" IV burg, "he's dangerous." Garrick looked out over the water, toward North Guardian. "I'd better look at his tapes," he said. The girl swiftly picked up the reels and began to thread them into the projector. Dangerous. This Trumie indeed was dangerous, Garrick conceded. Dangerous to the balanced, stable world, for it only took one Trumie to topple its stability. It had taken thousands and thousands of years for society to learn its delicate tightrope walk. It was a matter for a psychist, all right. And Garrick was uncomfortably aware that he was only twenty-four. "Here you are," said the girl. "Look them over," Roosenburg suggested. "Then, after you've studied the tapes on Trumie, we've got something else. One of his robots. But you'll need the tapes first." "Let's go," said Garrick. The girl flicked a switch and the life of Anderson Trumie appeared before them, in color, in three dimensions -- in miniature. Robots have eyes; and where the robots go, the eyes of Robot Central go with them. And the robots go everywhere. From the stored files of Robot Central came the spool of tape that was the frightful life story of Sonny Trumie. The tapes played into the globe-shaped viewer, ten inches high, a crystal ball that looked back into the past. First, from the recording eyes of the robots in Sonny Trumie's nursery. The lonely little boy, twenty years before, lost in the enormous nursery. "Disgusting!" breathed Kathryn Pender, wrinkling her nose. "How could people live like that?" Garrick said: "Please, let me watch this. It's important." In the gleaming globe, the little boy kicked at his toys, threw himself across his huge bed, sobbed. Garrick squinted, frowned, reached out, tried to make contact. It was hard. The tapes showed the objective facts, but for a psychist, it was the subjective reality behind the facts that mattered. Kicking at his toys. Yes, but why? Because he was tired of them -- and why was he tired? Because he feared them? Kicking at his toys. Because -- because they were the wrong toys? Kicking -- hate them! Don't want them! Want -- A bluish flare in the viewing globe. Garrick blinked and jumped, and that was the end of that section.  I 'HE colors flowed and sud- denly jelled into bright life. Garrick recognized the scene after a moment -- it was right there in Fisherman's Island, some pleasure spot overlooking the water. A bar, and at the end of it was Anderson Trumie at twenty, staring somberly into an empty glass. The view was through the eyes of the robot bartender. LD #I Anderson Tnimie was weeping. Gnce again, there was the objective fact -- but the fact behind the fact, what was it? Trumie had been drinking, drinking. Why? Drinking, drinking. With a sudden sense of shock, Garrick saw what the drink was -- the golden, fizzy liquor. Not intoxicating. Not habit-forming! Trumie had become no drunk. It was something else that kept him drinking, dinking, must drink, must keep on drinking, or else -- And again the bluish flare. There was more -- Trumie feverishly collecting objects of art, Trumie decorating a palace, Trumie on a world tour, and Trumie returned to Fisherman's Island. And then there was no more. "That," said Roosenburg, "is the file. Of course, if you want the raw, unedited tapes, we can try to get them from Robot Central, but -- " "No." The way things were, it was best to stay away from Robot Central; there might be more breakdowns and there wasn't much time. Besides, something was beginning to suggest itself. "Run the first one again," said Garrick. "I think maybe I'll find something there." G arrick made out a quick requisition slip and handed it to Kathryn Pender, who looked at it, raised her eyebrows, shrugged and went off to have it filled. By the time she came back, Roosenburg had escorted Garrick to the room where the captured Trumie robot lay chained. "He's cut off from Robot Central," Roosenburg was saying. "I suppose you figured that out. Imagine! Not only has Trumie built a whole city for himself -- but even his own Robot Central!" Garrick looked at the robot. It was a fisherman, or so Roosenburg had said. It was small, dark, black-haired; possibly the hair would have been curly, if the sea water hadn't plastered the curls to the scalp. It was still damp from the tussle that had landed it in the water and eventually into Roosenburg's hands. Roosenburg was already at work. Garrick tried to think of the robot as a machine, but it wasn't easy. The thing looked very nearly human -- except for the crystal and copper that showed where the back of its head had been removed. "It's as bad as a brain operation," said Roosenburg, working rapidly without looking up. "I've got to short out the input leads without disturbing the electronic balance -- " Snip, snip. A curl of copper fell free, to be grabbed by Roosenburg's tweezers. The fisherman's arms and legs kicked sharply like a dissected galvanized frog's. Kathryn Pender said: "They found him this morning, casting nets into the bay and singing O Sole Mio. He's from North Guardian, all right." Abruptly the lights flickered and turned yellow, then slowly returned to normal brightness. Roger Garrick got up and walked over to the window. North Guardian was a haze of light in the sky, across the water. Click, snap. The fisherman robot began to sing: T utte le serre, dopo quel fanal, Dietro la caserma, ti staro ed -- Click. Roosenburg muttered under his breath and probed further. Kathryn Pender joined Garrick at the window. "Now you see," she said. Garrick shrugged. "You can't blame him." "I blame him!" she said hotly. "I've lived here all my life. Fisherman's Island used to be a tourist spot -- why, it was lovely here. And look at it now. The elevators don't work. The lights don't work. Practically all of our robots are gone. Spare parts, construction material, everything -- it's all gone to North Guardian! There isn't a day that passes, Garrick, when half a dozen bargeloads of stuff don't go north, because he requisitioned them. Blame him? I'd like to kill him!" Snap. Sputtersnap. The fisherman lifted its head and caroled: Forse dommani, pianerai, E dopo tu, sorriderai -- covered a flat black disc. "Kathryn, look this up, will you?" He read the serial number from the disc and then put down the probe. He stood flexing his fingers, looking irritably at the motionless figure. Garrick joined him. Roosenburg jerked his head at the fisherman. "That's robot repair work, trying to tinker with their insides. Trumie has his own Robot Central, as I told you. What I have to do is recontrol this one from the substation on the mainland, but keep its receptor circuits open to North Guardian on the symbolic level. You understand what I'm talking about? It'll think from North Guardian, but act from the mainland." "Sure," said Garrick. "And it's damned close work. There isn't much room inside one of those things -- " He stared at the figure and picked up the probe again. Kathryn Pender came back with a punchcard in her hand. "It was one of ours, all right. Used to be a busboy in the cafeteria at the beach club." She scowled. "That Trumie!" "You can't blame him," Garrick said reasonably. "He's only trying to be good." She looked at him queerly. "He's only-" Roosenburg interrupted with an exultant cry. "Got it! Okay, you -- sit up and start telling us what Trumie's up to now!" The fisherman figure said obligingly, "Yes, Boss. What you wanna know?" What they wanted to know, they asked; and what they asked, it told them, volunteering nothing, concealing nothing. There was Anderson Trumie, king of his island, the compulsive consumer. It was like an echo of the bad old days of the Age of Plenty, when the world was smothering under the endless, pounding flow of goods from the robot factories and the desperate race between consumption and production strained the whole society. But Trumie's orders came not from society, but from within. Consume commanded something inside him, and Use it cried, and .Devour it ordered. And Trumie obeyed, heroically. They listened to what the fisherman robot had to say, and the picture was dark. Armies had sprung up on North Guardian; navies floated in its waters. Anderson Trumie stalked among his creations like a blubbery god, wrecking and ruling. Garrick could see the pattern in what the fisherman had to say. In Trumie's mind, he was dictator, building a war machine. He was supreme engineer, constructing a mighty state. He was warrior. was playing tin soldiers," said Roger Garrick, and Roosenburg and the girl nodded. "The trouble is," Roosenburg said, "he has stopped playing. Invasion fleets, Garrick! He isn't content with North Guardian any more. He wants the rest of the country, too!" "You can't blame him," said Roger Garrick for the third time, and stood up. "The question is, what do we do about it?" "That's what you're here for," Kathryn told him. "All right. We can forget about the soldiers -- as soldiers, that is. They won't hurt anyone. Robots can't." "I know that," Kathryn snapped. "The problem is what to do about Trumie's drain on the world's resources." Garrick pursed his lips. "According to my directive from Area Control, the first plan was to let him alone -- there is still plenty of everything for anyone, so why not let Trumie enjoy himself? But that didn't work out too well." "Didn't work out too well," repeated Kathryn Pender bitterly. "No, no -- not on your local level," Garrick explained quickly. "After all, what are a few thousand robots, a few hundred million dollars' worth of equipment? We could resupply this area in a week." "And in a week," said Roosenburg, "Trumie would have us cleaned out again!" "That's the trouble," Garrick declared. "He doesn't seem to have a stopping point. Yet we can't refuse his orders. Speaking as a psychist, that would set a very bad precedent. It would put ideas in the minds of a lot of persons -- minds that, in some cases, might not prove stable in the absence of a completely reliable source of everything they need, on request. If we say no to Trumie, we open the door on some mighty dark corners of the human mind. Covetousness. Greed. Pride of possession -- " "So what are you going to do?" demanded Kathryn Pender. Garrick said resentfully: "The only thing there is to do. I'm going to look over Trumie's folder again. And then I'm going to North Guardian Island." V aware of the fact that he was only twenty-four. But his age couldn't make a great deal of difference. The oldest and wisest psychist in Area Control's wide sphere might have been doubtful of success in as thorny a job as the one ahead. He and Kathryn Pender warily started out at daybreak. Vapor was rising from the sea about them, and the little battery-motor of their launch whined softly beneath the keelson. Garrick sat patting the little box that contained their invasion equipment, while the girl steered. The workshops of Fisherman's Island had been all night making some of the things in that box -- not because they were so difficult to make, but because it had been a bad night. Big things were going on at North Guardian; twice, the power had been out entirely for an hour, while the demand on the lines from North Guardian took all the power the system could deliver. The Sun was well up as they came within hailing distance of the Navy Yard. Robots were hard at work; the Yard was bustling with activity. An overhead traveling crane, eight feet tall, laboriously lowered a prefabricated fighting top onto an eleven-foot aircraft carrier. A motor torpedo boat -- fullsized, this one was, not to scale -- rocked at anchor just before the bow of their launch. Kathryn steered around it, ignoring the hail from the robot lieutenant-j.g. at its rail. She glanced at Garrick over her shoulder, her face taut. "It's -- it's all mixed up." Garrick nodded. The battleships were model-sized, the small boats full scale. In the city beyond the Yard, the pinnacle of the Empire State Building barely cleared the Pentagon, right next door. A soaring suspension bridge leaped out from the shore a quarter of a mile away and stopped short a thousand yards out, over empty water. -- even for a psychist just out of school, on his first real assignment. Trumie was trying to run a world singlehanded, and where there were gaps in his conception of what his world should be, the results showed. "Get me battleships!" he ordered his robot supply clerks, and they found the only battleships there were in the world to copy, the child-sized, toy-scaled play battleships that still delighted kids. "Get me an Air Force!" And a thousand model bombers were hastily put together. "Build me a bridge!" But perhaps he had forgotten to ' say to where. focused on the world around him. Kathryn Pender was standing on a gray steel stage, the mooring line from their launch secured to what looked like a coast defense cannon -- but only about four feet long. Garrick picked up the little box and leaped up to the stage beside her. She turned to look at the city. "Hold on a second." He was opening the box, taking out two little cardboard placards. He turned her by the shoulder and, with pins from the box, attached one of the cards to her back. "Now me," he said, turning his back to her. She read the placard dubiously: I AM A "Garrick," she said, "you're sure you know what you're doing?" "Put it on!" She shrugged and pinned it to the back of his jacket. Side by side, they entered the citadel of the enemy. According to the fisherman robot, Trumie lived in a gingerbread castle south of the Pentagon. Most of the robots got no chance to enter it. The city outside the castle was Trumie's kingdom, and he roamed about it, overseeing, changing, destroying, rebuilding. But inside the castle was his Private Place; the only robots that had both an insideand outside-the-castle existence were the two bodyguards of his youth, Davey Crockett and Long John Silver. "That," said Garrick, "must be the Private Place." It was decidedly a gingerbread castle. The "gingerbread" was stonework, gargoyles and columns; there were a moat and a drawbridge, and there were robot guards with crooked little rifles, wearing scarlet tunics and fur shakos three feet tall. The drawbridge was up and the guards stood at stiff attention. "Let's reconnoiter," said Garrick. He was unpleasantly conscious of the fact that every robot they passed -- and they had passed thousands -- had turned to look at the signs on their backs. Yet it was right, wasn't it? There was no hope of avoiding observation in any event. The only hope was to fit somehow into the pattern -- and spies would certainly be a part of the military pattern. Wouldn't they? doubts and led the way around the gingerbread palace. The only entrance was the drawbridge. They stopped out of sight of the ramrod-stiff guards. Garrick said: "We'll go in. As soon as we get inside, you put on your costume." He handed her the box. "You know what to do. All you have to do is keep him quiet for a while and let me talk to him." "Garrick, will this work?" Garrick exploded: "How the devil do I know? I had Trumie's dossier to work with. I know everything that happened to him when he was a kid -- when this trouble started. But to reach him takes a long time, Kathryn. And we don't have a long time. So -- " He took her elbow and marched her toward the guards. "So you know what to do," he said. "I hope so," breathed Kathryn Pender, looking very small and very young. They marched down the wide white pavement, past the motionless guards -- Something was coming toward them. Kathryn held back. "Come on!" Garrick muttered"No, look!" she whispered. "Is that -- is that Trumie?" He looked, then stared. It was Trumie, larger than life. It was Anderson Trumie, the entire human population of the most congested island for its-population in the world. On one side of him was a tall dark figure, on the other side a squat dark figure, helping him along. His face was horror, drowned in fat. The bloated cheeks shook damply, wet with tears. The eyes squinted out with fright on the world he had made. Trumie and his bodyguards rolled up to them and past. And then Anderson Trumie stopped. He turned the blubbery head and read the sign on the back of heavily, clutching the shoulder of the Crockett robot, he gaped wildly at her. Garrick cleared his throat. This far his plan had gone, and then there was a gap. There had to be a gap. Trumie's history, in the folder that Roosenburg had supplied, had told him what to do with Trumie; and Garrick's own ingenuity had told him how to reach the man. But a link was missing. Here was the subject, and here was the psychist who could cure him, and it was up to Garrick to start the cure. cato bleat: "You! What are you? Where do you belong?" He was talking to the girl. Beside him, the Crockett robot murmured: "Reckon she's a spy, Mistuh Trumie. See thet sign ahangin' on her back?" "Spy? Spy?" The quivering lips pouted. "Curse you, are you Mata Hari? What are you doing out here? It's changed its face," Trumie complained to the Crockett robot. "It doesn't belong here. It's supposed to be in the harem. Go on, Crockett, get her back!" "Wait!" said Garrick, but the Crockett robot was ahead of him. It took Kathryn Pender by the arm. "Come along thar," it said soothingly, and urged her across the drawbridge. She glanced back at Garrick, and for a moment it looked as though she were going to speak. Then she shook her head, as if giving an order. "Kathryn!" yelled Garrick. "Trumie, wait a minute! That isn't Mata Hari!" No one was listening. Kathryn Pender disappeared into the Private Place. Trumie, leaning heavily on the hobbling Long John Silver robot, followed. Garrick, coming back to life, leaped after them. The scarlet-coated guards jumped before him, their shakos bobbing, their crooked little rifles crossed to bar his way. He ordered: "One side! Out of my way! I'm a human, don't you understand? You've got to let me pass!" They didn't even look at him; trying to get by them was like trying to walk through a wall of moving, thrusting steel. He shoved and they pushed him back; he tried to dodge and they were before him. It was hopeless. And then it was hopeless indeed, because behind them, he saw, the drawbridge had gone up. VI into a chair like a mound of blubber falling to the deck of a whaler. Though he made no signal, the procession of serving robots started at once. In minced the maitre d', bowing and waving its graceful hands. In marched the sommelier, clanking its necklace of keys, bearing its wines in their buckets of ice. In came the lovely waitress robots and the sturdy steward robots, with the platters and tureens, the plates and bowls and cups. They spread a meal -- a dozen meals -- before him, and he began to eat. He ate as a penned pig eats, gobbling until it chokes, forcing the food down because there is nothing to do but eat. He ate, with a sighing accompaniment of moans and gasps, and some of the food was salted with the tears of pain he wept into it, and some of the wine was spilled by his shaking hand. But he ate. Not for the first time that day, and not for the tenth. Sonny Trumie wept as he ate. He no longer even knew he was weeping. There was the gaping void inside him that he had to fill, had to fill; there was the gaping world about him that he had to people and build and furnish... and use. He moaned to himself. Four hundred pounds of meat and lard, and he had to lug it from end to end of his island, every hour of every day, never resting, never at peace! There should have been a place somewhere, there should have been a time, when he could rest. When he could sleep without dreaming, sleep without waking after a scant few hours with the goading drive to eat and to use, to use and to eat... And it was all so wrong! The robots didn't understand. They didn't try to understand: they didn't think for themselves. Let him take his eyes from any one of them for a single day and everything went wrong. It was necessary to keep after them, from end to end of the island, checking and overseeing and ordering -- yes, and destroying to rebuild, over and over! He moaned again and pushed the plate away. He rested, with his tallow forehead flat against the table, waiting, while inside him the pain ripped and ripped, and finally became bearable again. And slowly he pushed himself up, and rested for a moment, and pulled a fresh plate toward him, and began again to eat. Not because he didn't want to go on, but because he absolutely couldn't. He was bone-tired, but something was bothering him -- one more detail to check, one more thing that was wrong. Mata Hari. The houri at the drawbridge. It shouldn't have been out of the Private Place. It should have been in the harem, of course. Not that it mattered, except to Sonny Trumie's never-resting sense of what was right. Time was when the hour is of the harem had their uses, but that time was long and long ago; now they were property, to be fussed over and made to be right, to be replaced if they were worn, destroyed if they were wrong. But only property, as all of North Guardian was property -- as all of the world would be his property, if only he could manage it. But property shouldn't be wrong. He signaled to the Crockett robot and, leaning on it, walked down the long terrazzo hall toward the harem. He tried to remember what the houri had looked like. The face didn't matter; he was nearly sure it had changed it. It had worn a sheer red blouse tmd a brief red skirt, he was almost certain, but the face -- It had had a face, of course. But Sonny had lost the habit of faces. This one had been somehow different, but he couldn't remember just why. Still -- the blouse and skirt were red, he was nearly sure. And it had been carrying something in a box. And that was odd, too. He waddled a little faster, for now he was positive it was wrong. "Thar's the harem, Mistuh Trumie," said the robot at his side. It disengaged itself gently, leaped forward and held the door to the harem for him. "Wait for me," Sonny commanded, and waddled forward into the harem halls. Once he had so arranged the harem that he needed no help inside it; the halls were railed, at a height where it was easy for a pudgy hand to grasp the rail; the distances were short, the rooms close together. He paused and called over his shoulder: "Stay where you can hear me." It had occurred to him that if the houri robot was wrong, he would need Crockett's guns to make it right. A chorus of female voices sprang into song as he entered the main patio. They were a bevy of beauties, clustered around a fountain, diaphanously dressed, I #I iangudtbusly glancing at Sonny Trumie as he waddled inside. "Shut up!" he shrieked. "Go back to your rooms!" They bowed their heads and, one by one, slipped into the cubicles. No sign of the red blouse and the red skirt. He began the rounds of the cubicles, panting, peering into them. "Hello, Sonny," whispered Theda Bara, lithe on a leopard rug, and he passed on. "I love you!" cried Nell Gwynn, and, "Come to me!" commanded Cleopatra, but he passed them by. He passed Dubarry and Marilyn Monroe, he passed Moll Flanders and he passed Troy's Helen. No sign of the houri in red -- Yes, there was. He didn't see the houri, but he saw the signs of the houri's presence : the red blouse and the red skirt, lying limp and empty on the floor. Sonny gasped; "Where are you? Come out here where I can see you!" Nobody answered Sonny. "Come out!" he bawled. And then he stopped. A door opened and someone came out; not an houri, not female; a figure without sex but loaded with love, a teddy-bear figure, as tall as pudgy Sonny Trumie himself, waddling as he waddled, its stubby welcoming arms stretched out to him. eyes. Its color was a little darker than Teddy. It was a good deal taller than Teddy. But unquestionably, undoubtedly, in everything that mattered, it was -- "Teddy," whispered Sonny Trumie, and let the furry arms go around his four htmdred pounds. Twenty years disappeared. "They wouldn't let me have you," Sonny told the teddy-bear. It said, in a voice musical and warm; "It's all right. Sonny. You can have me now. Sonny. You can have everything. Sonny." "They took you away," he whispered, remembering. They took the teddy-bear away; he had never forgotten; They took it away and Mother was wild and Father was furious. They raged at the little boy and scolded him and threatened him. Didn't he know they were poor, and Did he want to ruin them all, and What was wrong with him, anyway, that he wanted his little sister's silly stuffed robots when he was big enough to use nearly grown-up goods? The night had been a terror, with the frowning, sad robots ringed around and the little girl crying; and what had made it terror was not the scolding -- he'd had scoldings -- but the worry, the fear and almost the panic in his parents' voices. For what he did, he came to understand, was no longer a (diildish sin. It was a big sin, a failure to consume his quota -- And it had to be punished. The first punishment was the extra birthday party. The second was -- shame. Sonny Trumie, not quite twelve, was made to feel shame and humiliation. Shame is only a little thing, but it makes the victim of it little, too. Shame. The robots were reset to scorn him. He woke to mockery and went to bed with contempt. Even his little sister lisped the catalogue of his failures. You aren't trying. Sonny, and You don't care. Sonny, and You're a terrible disappointment to us, Sonny. And finally all the things were true, because Sonny at twelve was what his elders made him. And they made him... "neurotic" is the term; a pretty-sounding word that means ugly things like fear and worry and endless self-reproach... "Don't worry," whispered the Teddy. "Don't worry. Sonny. You can have me. You can have what you want. You don't have to have anything else." halls of the Private Place like a tiger. "Kathryn!" he shouted. "Kathi Pender!" The robots peeped out at him worriedly and sometimes they got in his way and he bowled them aside. They didn't fight back, naturally -- what robot would hurt a human? But sometimes they spoke to him, pleading, for it was not according to the wishes of Mr. Tnunie that anyone but him rage destroying through North Guardian Island. Garrick passed them by. "Kathryn!" he called. "Kathryn!" He told himself fiercely: Trumie was not dangerous. Trumie was laid bare in his folder, the one that Roosenburg had supplied, and he couldn't be blamed; he meant no harm. He was once a little boy who was trying to be good by consuming, consuming, and he wore himself into neurosis doing it; and then they changed the rules on him. End of the ration, end of forced consumption, as the robots took over for mankind at the other end of the farmand-factory cornucopia. It wasn't necessary to struggle to consume, so the rules were changed. And maybe Trumie knew that the rules had been changed, but Sonny didn't. It was Sonny, the little boy trying to be good, who had made North Guardian Island. And it was Sonny who owned the Private Place and all it held -- including Kathryn Pender. GitV cdIedhQusely: 'iathryiit If ycni hear me, answer me!" It had seemed so simple. The fulcrum on which the weight of Trumie's neurosis might move was a teddy-bear. Give him a teddy-bear -- or, perhaps, a teddybear suit, made by night in the factories of Fisherman's Island, with a girl named Kathryn Pender inside -- and let him hear, from a source he could trust, the welcome news that it was no longer necessary to struggle, that compulsive consumption could have an end. Then Garrick or any other psychist would clear it all up, but only if Trumie would listen. "Kathryn!" roared Roger Garrick, racing through a room of mirrors and carved statues. Because, just in case Trumie didn't listen, just in case the folder was wrong and Teddy wasn't the key -- Why, then, Teddy to Trumie would be only a robot. And Trumie destroyed them by the score. Roger Garrick, trotting through the silent palace, and at last he heard what might have been an answer. At least it was a voice -- a girl's voice, at that. He was before a passage that led to a room with a fountain and silent female robots, standing and watching him. The voice came from a small room. He ran to the door. It was the right door. There was Trumie, four hundred pounds of lard, lying on a marble bench with a foam-rubber cushion, the jowled head in the small lap of -- Teddy. Or Kathryn Pender in the teddy-bear suit, the sticklike legs pointed straight out, the sticklike arms clumsily patting him. She was talking to him, gently and reassuringly. She was telling him what he needed to know -- that he had eaten enough, that he had used enough, that he had consumed enough to win the respect of all, and ari end to consuming. Garrick himself could not have done better. It was a sight from Mother Goose, the child being soothed by his toy. But it was not a sight that fitted in well with its surroundings, for the seraglio was upholstered in mauve and pink, and the paintings that hung about were wicked. Sonny Trumie rolled the pendulous head and looked squarely at Garrick. The worry was gone from the fear-filled little eyes. Garrick stepped back. No need for him just at this moment. Let Trumie relax for a while, as he had not been able to relax for a score of years. Then the psychist could pick up where the girl had been unable to proceed, but in the meantime, Trumie was finally at rest. The Teddy looked up at Garrick and in its bright blue eyes, the eyes that belonged to the girl named Kathryn, he saw a queer tincture of triumph and compassion. Garrick nodded, and left, and went out to the robots of North Guardian, and started them clearing away the monstrous child'seye conception of an empire.  head in the lap of the teddybear. It was talking to him nicely, so nicely. It was droning away: "Don't worry. Sonny. Don't worry. Everything's all right. Everything's all right." Why, it was almost as though it were real. It had been, he calculated with the part of his mind that was razor-sharp and never relaxed, nearly two hours since he had eaten. Two hours! And he felt as though he could go another hour at least, maybe two. Maybe -- niaybe even not eat at all again that day. Maybe even learn to live on three meals. Perhaps two. Perhaps -- He wriggled -- as well as four hundred greasy pounds can wriggle -- and pressed against the soft warm fur of the teddy-bear. It was so soothing. "You don't have to eat so much. Sonny. You don't have to drink so much. No one will mind. Your father won't mind. Sonny. Your mother won't mind..." It was very comfortable to hear the teddy-bear telling him those things. It made him drowsy. So deliciously drowsy! It wasn't like going to sleep, as Sonny Trumie had known going to sleep for a dozen or more years, the bitterly fought surrender to the anesthetic weariness. It was just drowsy. And he did want to go to sleep. And finally he slept. All of him. Not just the four hundred pounds of blubber and the little tormented eyes, but even the razorsharp mind-Trumie that lived in the sad, obedient hulk. It slept. It had not slept all these twenty years. Dead Ringer There was nothing, especially on Earth, which could set him free -- the truth least of all I in the window seat, watching the morning crowds on their way to work and carefully avoiding any attempt to read Jordan's old face as the editor skimmed through the notes. He had learned to make his tall, bony body seem all loose-jointed relaxation, no matter what he felt. But the oversized hands in his pockets were clenched so tightly that the nails were cutting into his palms. Every tick of the old-fashioned clock sent a tbrob racing through his brain. Every rustle of the pages seemed to release a fresh shot of adrenalin into his blood stream. This time, his mind was pleading. It has to be right this time... Jordan finished his reading and shoved the folder back. He reached for his pipe, sighed, and then nodded slowly. "A nice job might make a good feature for the Sunday section, at that." It took a second to realize that the words meant acceptance, for thoroughly against another failure. Now he felt the tautened muscles release, so quickly that he would have fallen if he hadn't been braced against the seat. He groped in his mind, hunting for words, and finding none. There was only the hot, sudden flame of unbelieving hope. And then an almost blinding exultation. his silence. The editor made a neat pile of the notes, nodding again. "Sure. I like it. We've been short of shock stuff lately and the readers go for it when we can get a fresh angle. But naturally you'd have to leave out all that nonsense on Blanding. Hell, the man's just buried, and his relatives and friends -- " stared at the editor, trying to penetrate through the haze of hope that had somehow grown chilled and unreal. His thoughts were abruptly disorganized and out of his control. Only the urgency remained. "It's the key evidence. And we've got to move fast! I don't know how long it takes, but even one more day may be too late!" Jordan nearly dropped the pipe from his lips as he jerked upright to peer sharply at the younger man. "Are you crazy? Do you seriously expect me to get an order to exhume him now? What would it get us, other than lawsuits? Even if we could get the order without cause -- which we can't!" The the pipe did fall as he gaped open-mouthed. "My God, you believe all that stuff. You expected us to publish it straight!" "No," Dane said thickly. The hope was gone now, as if it had never existed, leaving a numb emptiness where nothing mattered. "No, I guess I didn't really expect anything. But I believe the facts. Why shouldn't I?" He reached for the papers with hands he could hardly control and began stuffing them back into the folder. All the careful documentation, the fingerprints -- smudged, perhaps, in some cases, but still evidence enough for anyone but a fool -- tioningly to himself, and then his voice was taking on a new edge. Two years on the Trib. Then you turned up on the Register in Sename there." "Yeah," Dane agreed. There was no use in denying anything now. "Yeah, Dane Arthur Phillips. So I suppose I'm through here?" Jordan nodded again and there was a faint look of fear in his expression. "You can pick up your pay on the way out. And make it quick, before I change my mind and call the boys in white!" I T could have been worse. It had been worse before. And there was enough in the pay envelope to buy what he needed -- a flash camera, a little folding shovel from one of the surplus houses, and a bottle of good scotch. It would be dark enough for him to taxi out to Oakhaven Cemetery, where Blanding had been buried. It wouldn't change the minds of the fools, of course. Even if he could drag back what he might find, without the change being completed, they wouldn't accept the evidence. He'd been crazy to think an#d:hing could change their minds. And they called him a fanatic! If the facts he'd dug up in ten years of hunting wouldn't convince them, nothing would. And yet he had to see for himself, before it was too late! He picked a cheap hotel at random and checked in under an assumed name. He couldn't go back to his room while there was a chance that Jordan still might try to turn him in. There wouldn't be time for Sylvia's detectives to bother him, probably, but there was the ever-present danger that one of the aliens might intercept the message. He shivered. He'd been risking that for ten years, yet the likelihood was still a horror to him. The uncertainty made it harder to take than any human-devised torture could be. There was no way of guessing what an alien might do to anyone who discovered that all men were not human -- that some were... zombies. There was the classic syllogism; All men are mortal; I am a man; therefore, I am mortal. But not Blanding -- or Corporal Harding. It was Harding's "death" that had started it all during the fighting on Guadalcanal. A grenade had come flying into the foxhole where Dane and Harding had felt reasonably safe. The concussion had knocked Dane out, possibly saving his life when the enemy thought he was dead. He'd come to in the daylight to see Harding lying there, mangled and twisted, with his throat torn. There was' blood on Dane's uniform, obviously spattered from the dead man. It hadn't been a mistake or delusion; Harding had been dead. It had taken Dane two days of crawling and hiding to get back to his group, too exhausted to report Harding's death. He'd slept for twenty hours. And when he awoke, Harding had been standing beside him, with a whole throat and a fresh uniform, grinning and kidding him for running off and leaving a stunned friend behind. It was no ringer, but Harding himself, complete to the smallest personal memories and personality traits. probably saved Dane's sanity while he learned to face the facts. All men are mortal; Harding is not mortal; therefore, Harding is not a man! Nor was Harding alone -- Dane found enough evidence to know there were others. The Tribune morgue yielded even more data. A man had faced seven firing squads and walked away. Another survived over a dozen attacks by professional killers. Fingerprints turned up mysteriously "copied" from those of men long dead. Some of the aliens seemed to heal almost instantly; others took days. Some operated completely alone; some seemed to have joined with others. But they were legion. Lack of a clearer pattern of attack made him consider the possibility of human mutation, but such tissue was too wildly different, and the invasion had begun long before atomics or Xrays. He gave up trying to understand their alien motivations. It was enough that they existed in secret, slowly growing in numbers while mankind was unaware of them. When his proof was complete and irrefutable, he took it to his editor -- to be fired, politely but coldly. Other editors were less polite. But he went on doggedly trying and failing. What else could he do? Somehow, he had to find the few people who could recognize facts and warn them. The aliens would get him, of course, when the story broke, but a warned humanity could cope with them. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you tree. Then he met Sylvia by accident after losing his fifth job -- a girl who had inherited a fortune big enough to spread his message in paid ads across the country. They were married before he found she was hard-headed about her money. She demanded a full explanation for every cent beyond his allowance. In the end, she got the explanation. And while he was trying to cash the check she gave him, she visited Dr. Buehl, to come back with a squad of quiet, refined strong-arm boys who made sure Dane reached Buehl's "rest home" safely. Hydrotherapy... Buehl as the kindly firm father image... analysis... hypnosis that stripped every secret from him, including his worst childhood nightmare. His father had committed a violent, bloody suicide after one of the many quarrels with Dane's mother. Dane had found the body. Two nights after the funeral. he had dreamed of his father's face, horror-filled, at the window. He knew now that it was a normal nightmare, caused by being forced to look at the face in the coffin, but the shock had lasted for years. It had bothered him again, after his discovery of the aliens, until a thorough check had proved without doubt that his father had been fully human, with a human, if tempestuous, childhood behind him. "You see, Dane? You know it was a nightmare, but you don't really believe it even now. Your father was an alien monster to you -- no adult is quite human to a child. And that literal-minded self, your subconscious, saw him after he died. So there are alien monsters who return from death. Then you come to from a concussion. Harding is sprawled out unconscious, covered with blood -- probably your blood, since you say he wasn't wounded, later. "But after seeing your father, you can't associate blood with yourself -- you see it as a horrible wound on Harding. When he turns out to be alive, you're still in partial shock, with your subconscious dominant. And that has the answer already. There are monsters who come back from the dead! An exaggerated reaction, but nothing really abnormal. We'll have you out of here in no time." No non-directive psychiatry for Buehl. The man beamed paternally, chuckling as he added what he must have considered the clincher. "Anyhow, even zombies can't stand fire, Dane, so you can stop worrying about Harding. I checked up on him. He was burned to a crisp in a hotel fire two months ago." It was logical enough to shake Dane's faith, until he came across Milo Blanding's picture in a magazine article on society in St. Louis. According to the item, Milo was a cousin of the Blandings, whose father had vanished in Chile as a young man, and who had just rejoined the family. The picture was of Harding! An alien could have gotten away by simply committing suicide and being carried from the rest home, but Dane had to do it the hard way, watching his chance and using commando tactics on a guard who had come to accept him as a harmless nut. In St. Louis, he'd used the "Purloined Letter" technique to hide -- going back to newspaper work and using almost his real name. It had seemed to work, too. But he'd been less lucky about Harding-Blanding. The man had been in Europe on some kind of a tour until his return only this last week. Dane had seen him just once then -- but long enough to be sure it was Harding -- before he died again. This time, it was in a drunken auto accident that seemed to be none of his fault, but left his body a mangled wreck. Dane dismissed the taxi at the false address, a mile from the entrance to the cemetery. He watched it turn back down the road, then picked up the valise with his camera and folding shovel. He shivered as he moved reluctantly ahead. War had proved that he would never be a brave man and the old fears of darkness and graveyards were still strong in him. But he had to know what the coffin contained now, if it wasn't already too late. It represented the missing link in his picture of the aliens. What happened to them during the period of regrowth? Did they revert to their natural form? Were they at all conscious while the body reshaped itself into wholeness? Dane had puzzled over it night after night, with no answer. Nor could he figure how they could escape from the grave. Perhaps a man could force his way out of some of the coffins he had inspected. The soil would still be soft and loose in the grave and a lot of the coffins and the boxes around them were strong in appearance only. A determined creature that could exist without much air for long enough might make it. But there were other caskets that couldn't be cracked, at least without the aid of outside help. What happened when a creature that could survive even the poison of embalming fluids and the draining of all the blood woke up in such a coffin? Dane's mind skitted from it, as always, and then came back to it reluctantly. There were still accounts of corpses turned up with the nails and hair grown long in the grave. Could normal tissues stand the current tricks of the morticians to have life enough for such growth? The possibility was absurd. Those cases had to be aliens -- ones who hadn't escaped. Even they must die eventually in such a case -- after weeks and months! It took time for hair to grow. And there were stories of corpses that had apparently fought and twisted in their coffins still. What was it like for an alien then, going slowly mad while it waited for true death? How long did madness take? He shivered again, but went steadily on while the cemetery fence appeared in the distance. He'd seen Blanding's coffin -- and the big, solid metal casket around it that couldn't be cracked by any amount of effort and strength. He was sure the creature was still there, unless it had a confederate. But that wouldn't matter. An empty coffin would also be proof. gate, unsure about whether there would be a watchman or not. A hundred feet away, there was a tree near the ornamental spikes of the iron fence. He threw his bag over and began shinnying up. It was difficult, but he made it finally, dropping onto the soft grass beyond. There was the trace of the Moon at times through the clouds, but it hadn't betrayed him, and there had been no alarm wire along the top of the fence. He moved from shadow to shadow, his hair prickling along the base of his neck. Locating the right grave in the darkness was harder than he had expected, even with an occasional brief use of the small flashlight. But at last he found the marker that was serving until the regular monument could arrive. His hands were sweating so much that it was hard to use the small shovel, but the digging of foxholes had given him experience and the ground was still soft from the gravediggers' work. He stopped once, as the Moon came out briefly. Again, a sound in the darkness above left him hovering and sick in the hole. But it must have been only some animal. He uncovered the top of the casket with hands already blistering. Then he cursed as he realized the catches were near the bottom, making his work even harder. He reached them at last, fumbling them open. The metal top of the casket seemed to be a dome of solid lead, and he had no room to maneuver, but it began swinging up reluctantly, until he could feel the polished wood of the coffin. Dane reached for the lid with hands he could barely control. Fear was thick in his throat now. What could an alien do to a man who discovered it? Would it be Harding there -- or some monstrous thing still changing? How long did it take a revived monster to go mad when it found no way to escape? He gripped the shovel in one hand, working at the lid with the other. Now, abruptly, his nerves steadied, as they had done whenever he was in real battle. He swung' the lid up and began groping for the camera. His hand went into the silklined interior and found nothing! He was too late. Either Harding had gotten out somehow before the final ceremony or a confederate had already been here. The coffin was empty. T here were no warning sounds this time -- only hands that slipped under his arms and across his mouth, lifting him easily from the grave. A match flared briefly and he was looking into the face of Buehl's chief strong-arm man. to be quiet and we'll release you. Okay?" At Dane's sickened nod, he gestured to the others. "Let him go. And, Tom, better get that filled in. We don't want any trouble from this." Surprise came from the grave a moment later. "Hey, Burke, there's no corpse here!" Burke's words killed any hopes Dane had at once. "So what? Ever hear of cremation? Lots of people use a regular coffin for the ashes." "He wasn't cremated," Dane told him. "You can check up on that." But he knew it was useless. that." The tone was one reserved for humoring madmen. Burke turned, gesturing. "Better come and Dr. Buehl are waiting at the hotel." The gate was open now, but there was no sign of a watchman; if one worked here, Sylvia's money would have taken care of that, of course. Dane went along quietly, sitting in the rubble of his hopes while the big car purred through the morning and on down Lindell Boulevard toward the hotel. Once he shivered, and Burke dug out hot brandied coffee. They had thought of everything, including a coat to cover his dirt-soiled clothes as they took him up the elevator to where Buehl and Sylvia were waiting for him. She had been crying, obviously, but there were no tears or recriminations when she came over to kiss him. Funny, she must still love him -- as he'd learned to his surprise he loved her. Under different circumstances... "So you found me?" he asked needlessly of Buehl. He was operating on purely automatic habits now, the reaction from the night and his failure numbing him emotionally. "Jordan got in touch with you?" Buehl smiled back at him. "We knew where you were all along, Dane. But as long as you acted normal, we hoped it might be better than the home. Too bad we couldn't stop you before you got all mixed up in this." "So I suppose I'm committed to your booby-hatch again?" Buehl nodded, refusing to resent the term. "I'm afraid so, Dane -- for a while, anyhow. You'll find your clothes in that room. Why don't you clean up a little? Take a hot bath, maybe. You'll feel better." no guards followed him. But they had thought of everything. What looked like a screen on the window had been recently installed and it was strong enough to prevent his escape. Blessed are the poor, for they shall be poorly guarded! He was turning on the shower when he heard the sound of voices coming through the door. He left the water running and came back to listen. Sylvia was speaking. " -- seems so logical, so completely rational." "It makes him a dangerous person," Buehl answered, and there was no false warmth in his voice now. "Sylvia, you've got to admit it to yourself. All the reason and analysis in the world won't convince him he's wrong. This time we'll have to use shock treatment. Burn over those memories, fade them out. It's the only possible course." There was a pause and then a sigh. "I suppose you're right." Dane didn't wait to hear more. He drew back, while his mind fought to accept the hideous reality. Shock treatment! The works, if what he knew of psychiatry was correct. Enough of it to erase his memories -- a part of himself. It wasn't therapy Buehl was considering; it couldn't be. It was the answer of an alien that had a human in its hands -- one who knew too much! He might have guessed. What better place for an alien than in the guise of a psychiatrist? Where else was there the chance for all the refined, modern torture needed to burn out a man's mind? Dane had spent ten years in fear of being discovered by them -- and now Buehl had him. Sylvia? He couldn't be sure. Probably she was human. It wouldn't make any difference. There was nothing he could do through her. Either she was part of the game or she really thought him mad. Dane tried the window again, but it was hopeless. There would be no escape this time. Buehl couldn't risk it. The shock treatment -- or whatever Buehl would use under the name of shock treatment -- would begin at once. It would be easy to slip, to use an overdose of something, to make sure Dane was killed. Or there were ways of making sure it didn't matter. They could leave him alive, but take his mind away. In alien hands, human psychiatry could do worse than all the medieval torture chambers! stomach as he considered the worst that could happen. Death he could accept, if he had to. He could even face the chance of torture by itself, as he had accepted the danger while trying to have his facts published. But to have his mind taken from him, a step at a time -- to watch his personality, his ego, rotted away under him -- and to know that he would wind up as a drooling idiot... He made his decision, almost as quickly as he had come to realize what Buehl must be. There was a razor in the medicine chest. It was a safety razor, of course, but the blade was sharp and it would be big enough. There was no time for careful planning. One of the guards might come in at any moment if they thought he was taking too long. Some fear came back as he leaned over the wash basin, staring at his throat, fingering the suddenly murderous blade. But the pain wouldn't last long -- a lot less than there would be under shock treatment, and less pain. He'd read enough to feel sure of that. Twice he braced himself and failed at the last second. His mind flashed out in wild schemes, fighting against what it knew had to be done. The world still had to be warned! If he could escape, somehow... if he could still find a way... He couldn't quit, no matter how impossible things looked. But he knew better. There was nothing one man could do against the aliens in this world they had taken over. He'd never had a chance. Man had been chained already by carefully developed ridicule against superstition, by carefully indoctrinated gobbledegook about insanity, persecution complexes, and all the rest. For a second, Dane even considered the possibility that he was insane. But he knew it was only a blind effort to cling to life. There had been no insanity in him when he'd groped for evidence in the coffin and found it empty! He leaned over the wash basin, his eyes focused on his throat, and his hand came down and around, carrying the razor blade through a lethal semicircle. give place to sickness on his face as the pain lanced through him and the blood spurted. He watched horror creep up to replace the sickness while the bleeding stopped and the gash began closing. By the time he recognized his expression as the same one he'd seen on his father's face at the window so long ago, the wound was completely healed. for your information T he words which have to preface this column were written quite a number of years ago, namely around the year #. Their author was Jules Verne, but he did not write them for publication, for they occur in a letter he wrote to his father. In the original, they read: Tout ce qtun homme est capable (fimaginer, (fautres hommes seront capables de le realiser, which translates as "everything one man is capable of imagining, other men will be capable of realizing." In other words, Jules Verne took the position that the imagination of one man, namely the writer, will forecast the shape of things to come. It is too bad that he never wrote an essay on the role of science fiction. It would be interesting to see whether he would have analyzed his own contribution not just as something loosely called "imagination," but more precisely as what is now called "extrapolation." Because if you examine just Jules Verne's work carefully, you'll find that he was the extrapolator extraordinary and that his "imagination" was carefully directed into directions given by known facts. I am not diverging from the theme myself when I tell that it happens quite often to me, usually before lectures, that local newspaper reporters, assigned to a routine interview, try to get some special color into it by asking for a little rundown on things "invented" by science fiction writers. By this they mean devices or machines described with reasonable accuracy first in a story and now reality. The list of such inventions actually is much shorter than one should think at first glance and so, most of the time, a note of disappointment creeps into the interview rather soon. S O Jules Verne prophesied the long-range submarine, as everybody knows. In the process of describing its workings, he "invented" the periscope. Then I say; "Yes, and he named his fictional submarine Nautilus because that was the name that Robert Fulton had given to his small experimental submarine which he tried in the Seine River in France and which did not have a periscope." I then want to go on and say that the first atomic submarine received the same name to honor both, but usually I don't get that far because I am interrupted by the surprised question : "You mean to say there actually were functioning subs before Jules Verne's time?" On one occasion, the reporter was so keenly disappointed that he threw this particular sheet of his notes into the wastepaper basket. This, to his mind, was no longer a story. The fact is, of course, that it is the story. The actual discovery of something new and, as a rule, the first model of a possible practical application of that discovery generally came from a scientist (or, in the past, a professional inventor who may be termed an "applied scientist"). What the writer like Jules Verne did was to see clearly before his mind's eye what the future of this invention could be. Being a writer, he told it in terms of fictional action. And to the reading public, the facts often became known through the fictionalized version first, so that the public acquired the habit of crediting the writer not only with the story but with the discovery, too. Actually the scientists came first in the vast majority of all the cases, as was mentioned in this column a few months ago, with reference to cotnra-terrene matter. Ex-editor Sam Moskowitz discovered to his surprise recently that the spaceships of science fiction became rockets only after Goddard and Oberth had published their mathematical studies of propulsion in a vacuum. (There are one and half exceptions to this statement. The Frenchman Achilla Eyraud, in #, hit on a moteur a reaction for his ship and, thirty years later, the German Kurd Lasswitz "invented" a rocket-type propulsion mechanism which he called "repulsor." Lasswitz is the "half exception," for while he wrote about the device in a space-travel novel, he was a scientist in daily life.) Keeping in mind that the writer, though he does the major job of prophesying, usually gets the fundamental idea from the scientist, we can get down to cases. And I'll begin with the very rare and possibly unique case of one of these "prophets" who was essentially an artist rather than a writer. He happened to be a Frenchman, too; his name was Albert Robida and he was bom in #. He had his floruit, as bibliographers like to put it, around #-#, when he was about # years old. A T that time, the electric telegraph was firmly established, but Heinrich Hertz had not yet discovered the waves at first named after him. Other inventions utilizing electric current had just been born. Alexander Graham Bell received his patents in # and #. In October, #, Thomas Alva Edison's electric lamp burned for the first time in his laboratory. Two years prior to that date, Edison had received the first patent for his phonograph. Somebody who carefully followed the announcements about inventions -- we know that Jules Verne did and can safely assume that Robida also did -- could know that it was possible to speak over a wire and that sound could be recorded directly, without the detour via the written word. But Rebida't "spoken newspaper" on the breakfast table. Aside from the old-fashioned design, this looks "normal" to us no commercial use was really in sight at the moment. Robida thought of one: the "spoken newspaper" at breakfast time (Fig. #.), the radio of today. Since the very term newspaper implied reporters, Robida invented the roving reporter complete with microphone (Fig. #). Two things are most interesting about this picture. One is the result of the knowledge of the time: The reporter's microphone is not a walkie-talkie, since radio waves were still unknown, so the reporter trails a cable. But Robida put a "magic eye" in his other hand -- we would call it a TV camera. Robida must have reasoned by analogy that if sound could be both transmitted and recorded and a picture could be so recorded (professional and amateur photographers already numbered many thousands in his day), it seemed likely that a picture might be transmitted, too, in some manner. As if this single item in the picture of the reporter might not be enough to establish him as the prophet of television with posterity, Robida did portray television in the home (Fig. #), not quite in a form which is now in use, but close enough to it to eliminate all argument. It is always said that the tank is an invention of H. G. Wells and was born with his story The Land Ironclads, first published in the December, #, issue of The Strand Magazine. But one can make a strong case for RoRemote entertainment de luxe in the home, acording to Robida first air-to-air missile. It appeared on the cover of a German pulp magazine around # or early #. I cannot illustrate it for the simple reason that I could not find files of that old magazine (more accurately, "dime novel") in a library. As I remember the cover, this missile bore a surprising resemblance to the German Henschel Hs-# air-to-ground missile of bida, who had tanklike war machines in # (Fig. #). The one thing against the claim for Robida is that his "tanks" still ran on rails. There are precisely # years between Robida's engines and Wells' "land ironclads." But precisely ten years after the one and ten years prior to the other, namely in #, Mr. Frank Reade, Jr., had a tank (Fig. #) which not only did not need rails, but was even amphibious! "I 'HE next case is one I imfortunately cannot illustrate; it is, to my knowledge, the Robido's roving reporter, trailing wires for sound and picture Robida'i guest at either the lank or the armored train the Second World War, b.ut I don't dare to go so far as to print a picture of the Hs-# and say that this was drawn for the first time in #. But I am certain about the story background for the cover painting. From # till #, somebody in Germany wrote science fiction dime novels with the overall title "Captain Mors, Pirate of the Air." Of course, you understand that this Captain Mors was a very benevolent pirate who took from the rich to support the poor. He made his first appearance with a zeppelin-type airship of astonishing capabilities and declared himself Master of the Air, not permitting anybody else to fly. (Later, after he had built himself an even more astonishing spaceship, he relented somewhat and let others share the air with him.) But at the period when he was still objecting to other people's airships, these other people banded together to blast The tank, according to Frank Reade, Jr. him out of the air. English, French and Belgian airships attack his ship directly with cannon and machine guns and are easily defeated. But while Captain Mors is occupied in this manner, the Russian airship climbs to a higher altitude so far away that there cannot be any menace from the Russian ship as far as airborne artillery goes. But the Russians do not carry artillery -- they release air-to-air missiles! Captain Mors can save his ship and his skin only by superior speed and frantic and skillful maneuvering. Even here, though, the author of the story (who wrote anonymously) and his illustrator (equally anonymous) probably received the germ of the idea from practical science. Early in the present century, a Swedish artillery officer, Baron von Unge, had tried to re-introduce the war rocket, first as a ground-to-ground weapon like howitzers. When that computer and rapid-fire gun (U. S. Army Photograph) did not work out too well, he argued that rocket-propelled missiles were the ideal weapons for airships to use against other airships, since both the weight and the recoil of cannon were lacking. (Note in passing: An American airship inventor. General Thayer, had made it a point that the cannon of his airship should fire in the direction of the tail end of the ship, so that their recoil would aid in the propulsion of the ship.) The idea of the air-to-air missile had been conceived by the Baron von Unge, but von Unge had unwinged rockets in mind. The anonymous author described (and his illustrator drew) a winged missile which, I seem to remember, was even controlled from the mother ship in some manner. This was evidently a "shot in the dark" which happened to hit. yet to come. The science fiction writers of the #s were obviously under the influence of the First World War, which had just ended. They wrote tirelessly about future wars and, by inventing a large number of future weapons, they did come up with Piping light in complete darkness to "Manipulators" at work in a contaminated illuminate a document area. The observation is direct through a (Courtesy E. I. du Pont de Nemours) radiation-proof window (Oak Ridge National Laboratory a few that later became reality, matic artillery which aimed itself There was a story, for examat the targets and fired at a rate pie, in which one side had autothen equaled only by machine (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Mechanical arm developed by General Electric is powerful enough to twist on iron bar. But it con also move a raw egg around (Courtesy General Electric) The "Yes-Man' beautician at work... and some readers felt our January, #, cover too fantastic even for science fiction ! guns. All the gunners had to do was to see to it that the shellfeeding mechanism functioned properly. There is now such a gm (Fig. #), the Sksrsweeper. I have been told that the man who originally wrote the Buck Rogers stories and invented the character made a rather good forecast of the Bazooka in one of his stories. Since I haven't read the story myself, I can only report this as hearsay. Of course Dr. E. E. Smith can take credit for having predicted radar, with the "detector screens driven with the utmost power." While he did not describe just how the detector screens worked, the similarity between what they were supposed to do and what radar really does is striking. At one time during the last phase of the Second World War -- between VE Day and VJ Day -- I loaned a boxful of magazines to somebody who wanted to know what science fiction was. When the magazines were returned to me, there was a long evening of discussion and one of the questions that came up was: "Do you know why Dr. Smith did not say 'radar' when he described the detector screens? Radar is a much better word." Well, I did know. Now I can't say whether the detector screens were one of these "shots in the dark" or whether Dr. Smith did go by a prior announcement from scientific sources. I don't think he did, but he could have. About #, Guglielmo Marconi delivered a lecture on radio waves and their transmission. He made reference to the fact that radio waves are reflected by solid objects and said that this characteristic might be used, one day, "to detect obstacles at sea either in darkness or in bad weather." Yes, this lecture was printed; otherwise I wouldn't know about it myself, for when it was originally delivered, I was getting ready to be born. A very typical "shot in the dark" was the repeated mention of unbreakable glass in many stories. That there would be such glass at some time seemed logical. Now we have not one but two substances which fit the label. The one is actually a type of glass, virtually unbreakable. The other is transparent plastic, best known under its trade name of Incite. Lucite has a strange characteristic which would have made wonderful story material if it had been foreseen. It can be used to "pipe light" around comers (Fig. #) and the fact that the lightpiping rod in the picture is visible at all is due to an "imperfection." If it had an absolutely smooth surface, no light would emerge through the sides; the rod would look dark with only a beam coming out of its end. How science fiction forecast the atomic bomb has been told and retold so many times that I would not even mention it here if it weren't for one thing -- namely, the people who, tell the story do not seem to be acquainted with the story in which atomic bombs and atomic artillery appeared for really the first time. I can't recall the name of the author, but the title of the story was The Final War and it appeared in one of Hugo Gernsback's magazines. The bombs and shells that end the war are not only "atomic" in the amount of destruction they cause; at one point earlier in the story, an investigator makes specific reference to the "nuclei" -- something which was not very meaningful to the readers. To end on a peaceful note, one of the neatest predictions ever to come out of science fiction is Heinlein's "waldos." If you have read the story, you'll remember that the hero is suffering from extreme muscular weakness of such a pronounced type that he lives on an artificial satellite in free fall around the Earth. To do things, he relies on an invention of his own. He slips his hands into something resembling a pair of gloves and, elsewhere, duplicate hands of different sizes and strengths do with force what the weak hands of the inventor feebly direct. These 'Svaldos" are with us in considerable number. The first ones I know of were developed for the Atomic Energy Commission for the remote handling of radioactive materials; they received the somewhat stiff name of "manipulators." To make it easy to learn to handle them, they usually have a "I to I power translation." In other words, the mechanical hand inside the radioactive area exerts the same pressure as the operator's real hand on the outside. If you press strongly enough to crush a beaker directly in your hand -- not really a recommended procedure -- the mechanical hand will crush it, too. But there are mechanical arms in which the power can be stepped up. ries of "remote hands" is something that General Electric has named "Yes-Man." At one end there is the "master," a kind of harness with elbows, wrists, hands and fingers. The "master" is worn by the real master, namely the operator. At the other end there is the "slave," which is a set of mechanical arms with elbows, wrists, hands and fingers. "Yes-Man" slave does what the master does. It does not even have to be near. The "master" could be directed in New York and the "slave" could perform in Boston. Moreover, there could be "slaves" in Chicago, San Francisco, Hollywood and Palm Beach all doing what the "master in New York is doing." This, Moscow may say, is what Wall Street always wanted. Seriously, the "Yes-Man" is also designed to work in either radioactive or otherwise unhealthy areas. It could be used in a room which is filled with live steam # degrees hot. It could perform in a room where a container filled with a poisonous gas has burst. It could be used to de-fuze a shell or bomb. And since there could be hundreds of slaves hooked up to one master, it might be used in some instances for assembly operations requiring long practice. So far, all this has been pretty serious. The ending in a lighter vein was created, or at least unveiled, just a few days before I started writing the column for this issue. Remember the Liquor Organ which was such an essential ingredient in a series of Kuttner stories? Well, it now exists. There now is a mechanical bartender where you only have to push a few buttons -- I am told that the combinations are easy to learn -- to get the drink you want in the mixture ratio you prefer. All you have to do, in addition to pushing buttons, is to see that the attachments which hold the bottles do hold bottles with something in them. But there is a drawback to everything. The thing costs four thousand dollars, which makes it one of the cases where human help is decidedly cheaper. Do you have your copy of Prize Winning Novel Regular # Edition for # If not, mail check, cash or money order to I could help him, that old man waiting patiently on the Moon -- but not after what I had done! the terminator was bisecting Tycho. It was a pretty sight with the sharp, blackink shadows etched across the plains and the tips of the mountains limned with light, but to me it was bad timing. Landing isn't as hard as it used to be and the automatics have taken the danger from a nightside touchdown, but I liked to see where I was going. So I orbited a couple of times until the land field was clear, then killed velocity, swung up the nose and let the ground-based radar pilot take over. We hardly felt the shock of landing. Dumarest was, as usual, eager to stretch his legs. French, the third member of the crew, packed his instruments, completed his log and, by the time Dumarest had damped the pile and made all secure, was ready for the monitor. I joined them at the airlock with the cargo manifests, log and ship's papers in their folder under my arm. None of us carried much in the way of baggage, for weight was still an item on the ships and there was no profit in paying for excess. The monitor crawled from the station toward us, rammed the plastic union against the hull over the airlock, signaled and waited for us to imseal and enter. Herman was the driver and he nodded to me as I sat beside him. "Good trip?" "The usual." I watched as the maintenance crew entered the ship and shut the door behind them. Herman dogged shut our compartment, hit the bleed-valve and, as the air spilled from the union, pulled free of the ship and headed toward the station. 'I'HE cargo monitors passed us, going in the opposite direction, before we had gone halfway. They crawled over the dust on their way to the ship, big, ungainly things, but far better than the old days when cargo had to be man-handled by men in spacesuits. Now it was an easy ship-tomonitor to storage dome, with men working in air all the time. I guessed that it would only be a matter of time before the ships themselves were brought within a dome, too. Nobody spoke on the ride to the station. To Herman, it was routine; to us, it was the end of a journey, with the inevitable letdown at the end of anticipation. For a couple of weeks, we would loaf, drink, talk, see what sights were to be seen, maybe even take a trip down to Earth. Then back into space again, to Mars or Venus or maybe Mercury, interplanetary bus-drivers wet-nursing a cargo of supplies and machinery on the way out and valuable minerals on the way in. I'd done it for fifteen years and it was like living at the bottom of an everdeepening rut. "I wonder if he's there," said Dumarest. The monitor had stopped within the outer dome and he led the way out. French shrugged. "I guess so, unless he's dead. What do you think, Frank?" I didn't answer. "Every trip the same," said Dumarest. "It's getting so I expect old man Thorne to be waiting for me. It's like seeing the Earth, something you get to rely on." We passed from the entry port into Reception. "He's there," said Dumarest. "Just the same as always." He chuckled. "Good old Thorne, he never lets you down." Thorne stood by the exit of Reception, just within the short corridor leading to the living quarvieii ters. A thin, withered scrap of a man, his shoulders stooped despite the low gravity, his hair in fading brown streaks over his balding skull, his eyes as soft and wistful as those of an unwanted puppy. I felt those eyes on me while I handed the manifests to one official, the ship's papers to another. They followed as I stepped into the Medic's cubicle for a radiation check and they were waiting for me when I came out to clear Customs. Soft eyes, patient eyes, eyes that stared at everyone who landed on the Moon. For everyone landing on the Moon had to pass through Reception and everyone heading for Earth had to arrive at Tycho. Most never gave him a second thought. Some, like Dumarest, wondered and perhaps built elaborate theories to account for his presence. I knew just why he stood where he did and stared at endless faces with his soft, patient eyes. He was waiting for his son. ward as I was about to pass him, one thin hand resting on my arm, the soft eyes asking the eternal question. I shook my head. "No luck. Sorry." "No passengers? No one else on board? Nobody at all, Frank?" "Just the three of us." I looked at Dumarest and French as they passed us, heading to a hotel, a shower, a complete relaxation from ship routine. Some crews stuck together during leaves, but ours wasn't one of them. I knew I wouldn't see them again, unless by accident, until time came for takeoff. "And no ships due for three days." Thorne let his hand fall from my arm. He knew the flight schedules as well as the dispatchers did. "Did you -- on Mars, I mean?" "We landed at Holmston," I said. "We were there two days, just long enough to unload and take on cargo. I know every man and woman in the settlement." "Of course." He blinked and looked abashed. "I just thought that maybe..." "Be reasonable," I said. "Mars isn't like the Sahara. A man can't wander over the deserts for years, just like that. He can't live away from the settlements, no food, no water, not even enough air." "No, I suppose not." He moved beside me as I walked down the passage. I didn't want his company, but I didn't know how to tell him that. I had spoken to him first from pity, then from habit, now from duty. Always my reports were the same, but always he accepted what I said with the mental reseivatkm that I must be wrong. I anticipated his next question. "Nor on Venus. Conditions there are about like Mars. You live in a settlement or you don't live at all." "Mercury?" "Not a chance." We had reached the end of the corridor and the avenues of the dome stretched out before us. I headed for the official cubicles, paid for a key and led the way down the passage. The cubicle was small, cramped, containing only a cot, a chair and a locker. It was more like a cell than anything else, but it was cheap. I threw my baggage onto the cot and turned to the old man. "You're wasting your time, Thome. Why don't you admit it?" "I can't." He sat on the chair and looked at his hands. "You don't understand -- no one does -- but I've got to see Tony again." "Why?" "There's something I want to say to him." "That all?" My voice must have expressed my feelings, for he looked up at me. "No," he said quietly. "That isn't all. He is my son." rather than what he said. It was the voice of a dedicated man and there could be no arguing  I # I L with it. I unzipped my bag, took out a few toilet articles, a change of underwear and some personal junk that I carried around, and spread the things about the cubicle. I didn't look at the old man; if he wanted to talk, he would talk. I hoped he wouldn't. "Sixteen years," he said. "It's a long time." "Too long," I said. "He's probably been dead for years." "No!" The denial was so emphatic, it hurt. "Why not?" I was losing patience. "Lots of men died in the early days. How can you be sure that he wasn't one of them?" "I've tracked down the record of every man who died off Earth." He smiled at my expression. "It took money, Frank, but I'm not poor and I'd spend every penny I , owned if I could just see my boy once more." I didn't say anything. There was nothing I could say, but I wished the old man would get up and leave me. He didn't; instead, he told me all about it. I wished he hadn't. Tony Thorne was young, wild, with a dream in his heart and starlight in his eyes. His mother was dead; his father refused to give him up and so denied him permission to enlist in Space School. So young Tony had stolen all the money he could lay his hands on and had run away from home; A simple, sordid, sixteeayear-old story. Nothing unique about it in the slightest -- nothing, that is, aside from the sequel. "I want to forgive him," said the old man. "I've tried to forget him, but I can't. I keep thinking of him somewhere out in space or on one of the planets. Married, perhaps, and with children of his own -- my grandchildren. I want to find him and tell him that I understand and forgive." He looked at me with those soft, patient eyes. "Can you understand?" "I can understand how you feel," I said carefully. "But can you understand how he might feel? He ran away from home sixteen years ago and has never written. Have you thought that maybe he doesn't want to see you?" "He could be afraid. That might be it. I was pretty hard in the old days." "Sixteen years is a long time," I insisted. "A man can forget a lot during that time." "But not his father." "You're the man who turned him into a criminal because you wanted your own way. Now, because age has made you sentimental, you want to find him and tell him how sorry you are that it all happened. You know what I think? I think you're plain damned selfish." "Maybe I am," he said slowly. 'I giiess all eld parepts are." He studied me. "How old are you, Frank?" "Thirty-three. Why?" "Tony would be that age on his next birthday." He had already forgotten most of what I had said. "He would look a lot like you -- same hair, same eyes." T sighed and shook his head. A A "I suppose you never met him while at school?" "No." "Are you sure? He was big for his age, good at athletics. He had dark hair and when he smiled, it was like the Sun breaking through clouds." "What do you think the early days were like, Thorne?" I forced him to meet my eyes. "The Government schools were fine, sure, but what about the kids who couldn't get in and had to buy their way into space? They learned or they died. Those dajrs are over now and everything is nicely regulated and safe, but it was hell while it lasted. You think your son will thank you for something like that?" "It was his own choosing," Thorne said. "No, it was what you forced him to do." I drew a deep breath. "Anyway, you can't even be sure that he ever went into space." "He went into space," said the old man. "That was why he stole the money, to, bribe his way into Space School. Tm sure of that." "And that's why you stand in Reception watching everyone who lands?" He made a helpless gesture. "It's all I can do. I'm too old to go on the search myself; the Medics wouldn't pass me. Tony may have changed his name, anjrthing, and no one would know. But one day he'll come back home. When he does. I'll be waiting." "You're crazy." I stood up and walked the two paces to the end of the cubicle. I gazed at the wall, smooth metal, then turned to face the old man. "Crazy! Do you hear? You've stood there for how long? Two years? Three? And still he hasn't come. Why don't you go home?" "I'm here to stay. My heart wouldn't stand the trip." He rose to his feet, very old, very pathetic, and reached for the door. "So you're here until you die, is that it?" "Yes, Frank," he said quietly. "That's about it." "And you're going to stand there in Reception and stare at everyone landing on the Moon. You're going to do that year after year so that, every time I land, you'll be waiting. Right?" "Yes," he said again. "That's right." "Get out," I said. "Get out and leave me alone." y #I cubicte seenaed more like a cell than ever after he had gone. I sat down for a while, then, collecting my toilet things, went down the passage to the communal washroom. I showered, shaved and did all the things which are supposed to make a man feel fresh and glad to be alive, but for me they were just wasting time. Returning to the cubicle, I changed into my spare uniform and went out. Entertainment on the Moon consisted mostly of indoor sports, though an enterprising firm offered mountaineering and dust-skiing, neither of which interested me in the slightest. I had a couple of drinks in a bar and was finishing the second when I saw Dumarest. He glanced through the door, saw me, hesitated and then moved on. I wasn't surprised; Dumarest was a drinking man and foxmd little enjoyment in my company. On board, where there was no alcohol, I could afford to relax. In a bar, knowing how liquor loosened tongues, I dared be nothing but careful. I'd had to be careful for sixteen years. I took two more solitary drinks in two different bars and finally, feeling the warmth of the liquor in my stomach, slipped coins into the slot of a tridi and entered the darkened theatre. #S The movie was a regular heartwringer about a little boy, his dog and a white-haired old mother. The plot was nothing, the scenery everything, and I sniffed the scent of pines and heard the thin whisper of wind through the trees, saw the stately movement of fleecy clouds and even felt the sprayed moisture of S#mthetic rain on my face and hands. For a while, I was back on Earth, among the green, growing things of the planet where I had been born. The planet I hadn't visited for almost half my life. The tridi turned sour. The eyes of the dog reminded me of the eyes of Thorne. The white-haired old mother reminded me of the silent, watchful, ever-hoping man who stood in Reception. The kid, with his dark hair and the smile like the Sun breaking through the clouds, made me remember things best left forgotten. Back in the cubicle, I sat on the cot and stared at the metal walls. The likeness to a jail cell was unintentional, but it was there. The only difference between the room in which I sat and an actual cell was that I could, at any time, open the door and leave. Leave to enter another cell, the cell of a spaceship bound for the planets, a metal egg which held a man more securely than any prison. into the mirror facing the locker. It was a full-length mirror and it gave a good view. I glowered at the man reflected there, the seamed face, the graying hair, the haimted eyes. The eyes which held a secret that had to be kept. Some men can commit a crime and forget it. Others, forced into crime for the sake of an ideal, punish themselves all their lives. Before Thome had come, it had been bad, but now it was getting unbearable. Every time I landed, I could feel those soft, patient eyes and know that I and I alone could end his vigil. And he would stay there all his life, watching, watching, meeting me at the end of every trip. And, on the Moon, men live a long, long time. Cursing did no good, but I cursed all the same. Cursing the accident of chance which had thrown me, a space-mad youngster, into the company of a nmaway kid with the same dream -- but with the money to turn that dream into reality. Cursing the rock, the thin skull, the bloodmoney which had bought me sixteen years of helL And his father's watching eyes. Frank. J. B. Lippincott., Phila.  N. Y. #  of you remember Frank's slapsticky Mr. Adam of a few years back. Well, relax... or rather, prepare to tense up, because his current book is as different as Dracula and Joe Miller. It is a murder story -- not a mystery, because we are informed of identities at the outset. Also, it is a true horror yarn because the victim is sufficiently powerful to thwart any attempt, but remains uncomprehendingly inert while the murderous plans unfold. Who is the victim? The U.S.A. Like last month's Two Rabies to Times Square, the author envisions a Soviet school turning out completely Americanized agents. Four of them are landed on the Florida coast to infiltrate into the Strategic Air Command and sabotage the newest longrange bombers into being grounded. Once this happens, of course, the U.S. cannot retaliate against attack with any strength. If you have had any experience with the military chain of command, you'll find yourself shackled to this book right to the end. N. Locke and A. Donald Booth. Technology Press and John Wiley  Sons, Inc., N. Y. # TN many yams, from E. E. Smith's Skylark on, authors have circumvented communication problems by means of trick gadgets that take in alien lingoes and turn out English. We accepted it for the sake of story continuity, but it always took a strong swallow. The real surprise, though, is that there is considerable progress already in adapting electronic brains to the problem! A fascinating subject, indeed, but the series of essays in this book are for engineers or serious students of linguistics, not laymen. by Victor Cohn. The BobbsMerrill Co., Inc., Indianapolis  N. Y. # professional takes over from amateurs! Last month, we had a staggeringly impressive list of prognosticators writing in The Fabulous Future. Of course, they only went as far as #, but it's almost certain that we'll hit the limits of their vision long before then. Cohn, however, opens a vista that looks like a reckless pipe dream -- and proceeds to show how all this is either already in the labs or on the drawing board. And far from producing a dry essay, Cohn has interjected fascinating glimpses into the daily routine of Mr. Future before each chapter. Harold Mead. Ballantine Books, N. Y. # gems as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's #. Mead follows in their footsteps with a powerful story reminiscent of both yarns, but strongly individualistic in his treatment of a regimented future society. The period is unspecified, but mankind has fought its way back from barbarism after a war to the point where it requires lebensraum once again. An explorer has been sent to The Island to report on colonization possibilities. A new race of perfect physical specimens has been bred for this specific purpose. His report is favorable and colonization proceeds. However, his prolonged absence from civilization has so warped his outlook on the holiness of the state that he is a ripe subject for reconditioning. The conflict between the Reconditioneds, the Colonists and the Islanders is presented with a savage power that is unusual in a first novel. Spanuth. The Citadel Press, N. Y. # volume under advisement to pass on the historical merits of its argument, for the basic premise is a gripping one and its logic is too convincing for anybody but an expert to assess. Spanuth puts forth the startling theory that Atlantis is not to be found in the various places previously assumed, but in the North Sea off Schleswig-Holstein, near Heligoland. He bases this on Plato's Dialogues and certain inscriptions on the walls of the temple of Medinet Habu, erected victory over the North people. They are depicted with horned helmets and are described as excellent seamen. He reasons further that there is an enormous chronological error in the dating of the Atlantis catastrophe -- the computation was made in years, whereas, even today, the Egsptians reckon in months. The error, then, lay in considering Atlantis as falling in # B.C. instead of # B.C. Worldwide cataclysms swept the Earth at that time and the Atlanteans were forced from their inundated home. Far from being disorganized, however, they were superbly equipped and had a navy of # vessels. They swept over Europe in their march to the Egyptian border, being repulsed only by the ancient Atheneans until their utter defeat by the Egyptians. True or not, the presentation of Spanuth's theory reads like authentic history. Fletcher G. Watson. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, # O N occasion, the little members of the Solar System far outdistance the bigger in spectacularly. If you've ever watched a meteor shower or traced the path of a comet, you know how exciting they can be. Professor Watson's revision of his #I text brings his study of these heavenly wanderers up to date with the latest techniques of photographic and radio observation. No amateur astronomer can find a better one-volume guide to the celestial hobo jungle. James Dugan. Harper  Bros., N. Y., # Latil and Jean Rivoire. G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y. # A T the time that Man is making his greatest progress in piercing the space frontier, he has also made tremendous strides in expanding his knowledge of a much closer barrier, the sea. This is evidenced by the number of books on the subject flooding the market. It almost appears as if the authors of these two books agreed to divide up spheres of influence. In spite of the considerable length of both books, there is very little overlap in coverage of events. Both contain fascinating accounts of Man's age-long efforts to understand and conquer the cruel element. The French book is written more from the vantage-point of the naturalist, whereas Dugan has devoted himself more to the material aspects of Man's interest in the sea, delineating the progress in diving appurtenances from antiquity to the present and their use in salvage. De Latil and Rivoire, however, have had intimate contact with the pioneers of the skindiving technique and have drawn some fine word-pictures of this habit-forming new sport that may have you hocking the family jewels for an Aqualung all your own. Both volumes are copiously illustrated and will dress up your non-fiction shelf. van. The Citadel Press, N. Y. # where in this column, Girvan makes a strong case for his specialty. In case you didn't know, he is the British publisher of Heard's Riddle of the Flying Saucers and Adamski's Flying Saucers Have Landed. And, as you'd expect, he has had access to more interplanetary platter reports than you can shake a head at. He states that, at the outset of the saucer controversy, he was infected with the will-not-to-believe until testimony became so overwhelming that he lost his resistance. He stresses the point that he himself has not been a witness of a visitation, but that the plethora of accounts by unimpeachable witnesses has resulted in a will-to-believe. Understandable -- but the title's promise of common sense is not fulfilled. Pride leadeth to worse than a fall... It sticketh men out on a limb and keepeth them there! B y the time the spaceship had finished jiggling and actually stood firmly on Domerangi soil, Justin Mamer was beginning to doubt his sanity. "We must be crazy," he said. "We must be." The other Earthman, who had been gazing out the viewplate at the green-and-gold alien vista, glanced around suddenly at Marner's remark. "Huh?" "There are limits to which one goes in proving a point," Marner said. He indicated the scene outside. "This little journey exceeds the limits. Now that we're here, Kemridge, I'm sure of it. Nobody does things like this." Kemridge shrugged sourly. "Don't be silly, Justin. You know why we're here, and you know how come we're here. This isn't any time to -- " "All right," Marner said. "I take it all back." He stared for a moment at his delicate, tapering fingers -- the fingers that could have belonged to a surgeon, were they not the property of a top-rank technical engineer. "Don't pay any attention to whatever I just said. It's the strain that's getting me." The door of the cabin chimed melodiously. "Come in," said Kemridge. T he door slid open and a Domerangi, clad in a bright yellow sash, gray-green buskins and a glittering diadem of precious gems, stepped heavily into the cabin. He extended two of his five leathery tentacles in welcome. "Hello, gentlemen. I see you've come through the trip in fine shape." "What's going on now, Plorvash?" Marner asked. "The ship has landed at a spaceport just outside the city," the alien said. "I've come to take you to your quarters. We're giving you two the finest accommodations our planet can offer. We want your working conditions to be of the best." "Glad to hear it." Marner flicked a glance at his companion. "They're most considerate, aren't they, Dave?" The taller of the two Earthmen nodded gravely. "Definitely." Plorvash grinned. "Suppose you come with me now. You would like to be well rested before you undertake your task. After all, you should be at your best, since planetary pride is at stake." "Of course," Marner said. "The test will begin as soon as you wish. May I offer you good luck?" "We won't need it," Kemridge stated grimly. "It's not a matter of luck at all. It's brains -- brains and sweat." "Very well," Plorvash said. "This is what you're here to prove. It ought to be amusing, in any case -- whatever the outcome may be." Both Earthmen tried to look calm and confident, absolutely sure of themselves and their skill. They merely managed to look rigidly worried. ords on the subject, but it is an observed phenomenon that the most serious differences of opinion generally originate in bars. It had been in a bar at Forty-sixth and Sixth that Justin Marner had ill-advisedly had words with a visiting Domerangi, a month before, and it had been in the same bar that the train of events which had brought the two Earthmen to Domerang V had started -- and never stopped gaining momentum. It had been a simple altercation at first. Marner had been reflectively sipping a whiskey sour, and Kemridge, seated to his left with his long legs tincomfortably scrunched up, had been toying with a double scotch. The Domerangi had entered the bar with a characteristically ponderous stride. Though contact with Domerang V had been made more than a century before, Domerangi were still rare sights in New York. Marner and Kemridge knew this one, though -- he was attached to the Domerangi Consulate on Sixty-sixth and Third, and they had had dealings with him a year ago in the matter of some circuit alignments for the building's lighting system. Domerangi, with their extraordinary peripheral vision, prefer subdued, indirect lighting, and Marner and Kemridge had designed the lighting plot for the Consulate. The Domerangi spotted them immediately and eased his bulk onto the stool next to them. "Ah, the two clever engineers," the alien rumbled. "You remember me, of course?" "Yes," Marner said quickly. "How's the lighting job working out?" "As well as could be expected." The Domerangi waved toward the bartender. "Barkeep! Two beers, please." "What do you mean by that?" Kemridge demanded as the beers were drawn arid set on the bar. "Just one moment, please." The alien curled two tentacles gently around the beers and poured one into each of the two feedingmouths at the sides of his face. "Marvelous liquid, yoiu' beer. The one point where Earth is clearly superior to Domerang is in brewing." "To get back to the lights -- " Kemridge prodded. "Oh, yes," the alien said. "The lights. Well, they're a pretty fair job -- as good as we could have hoped for, from a second-rate technology." "Now hold on a minute!" Marner said hotly, and that was how it started.  shut," Marner said glumly. He stared balefully at the spotless ceiling of the hotel room in which the Domerangi had installed them. Kemridge whirled and glared down at the smaller man. "Listen, Justin: we're here and we're going to show them up and go home rich and famous. Got that?" "Okay," Marner said. He ran a finger along his thin lower lip. "I'm sorry I keep popping off like this. But it does seem screwy to have gone to this extent just to prove a point that came up in a barroom debate." "I know. But we wouldn't have come here if the State Department hadn't heard about the argument and thought it needed settling. The Domerangi have been acting lordly about their technology as long as we've known them. I think it's a great idea to send a couple of honest-to-Christmas Terran engineers up here to show them once and for all who's got what it takes." "But suppose we don't show them?" "We will! Between the two of us, we can match anything they throw at us. Can't we?" Marner smiled gloomily. "Sure we can," he said without conviction. "I haven't doubted it for one minute." Kemridge walked to the door and, with a swift searching motion of his fingers, foimd the plate that covered the door mechanism. He imclipped it. "Look in here, for example," he said, after a moment's scrutiny. "Simple cybernetic mechanism. I don't quite figure the way this green ceramic relay down here controls the power flow, but it's nothing we couldn't dope out, given a screwdriver and a little spare time." Marner stood on tip-toes and peered in. "Perfectly understandable gadget," he commented. "Not nearly as efficient as our kind, either." "That's just the point," Kemridge said. "These Domerangi aren't half the sharks they think they are. We stipulated that we could duplicate an#dhing they gave us, right? With our natural savvy and a little perspiration, we ought to be able to match the best gadget they test us with. If we follow through up here and those two Domerangi engineers on Earth mess up their half of the test, then we've done it. The State Department's counting on our versatility. That's all we need, Justin -- cleverness!" Marner's eyes lit up. "Dave, I'm sorry I was so pig-headed a minute ago. We'll give them the business, all right!" He stood up a little higher and gingerly extended a hand into the gaping servomechanism in the wall. "What are you doing?" Kemridge asked. "Never mind. Get on the phone and tell Plorvash that we'll be ready to get to work tomorrow. While you're doing that, I want to fool with this relay. Might as well get some practice now!" He was radiant with new-found enthusiasm. the door the following morning, the mood was still on them. They were clear-eyed, wide awake and firmly convinced they could master any problem. "Who's there?" Mamer asked loudly. "Me," the Domerangi said. "Plorvash." Instantly the door flew open and the dumfounded alien charge-d'affaires was confronted with the sight of the two Earthmen still snug in their beds. He peered behind the door and in the closet. "Who opened the door?" he asked suspiciously. Marner sat up in bed and grinned. "Try it again. Go outside and call out 'Plorvash' the way you just did." The alien lumbered out, pulling the door shut behind him. When he was outside, he said his name again and the door opened immediately. He thundered across the threshold and looked from Marner to Kemridge. "What did you do?" "We were experimenting with the door-opener last night," Kemridge said. "And before we put it back together, we decided it might be fun to rig up a modified vocoder circuit that would open the door automatically at the sound of the syllables 'Plorvash' directed at it from outside. It works very nicely." The alien scowled. "Ah -- yes. Very clever. Now as to the terms of this test you two are to engage in: we've prepared a fully equipped laboratory for you in Central Sqorvik -- that's a suburb not far from here -- and we've set up two preliminary problems for you, as agreed. When you've dealt with those -- if you've dealt with those -- we'll give you a third." "And if we don't deal with them successfully?" "Why, then you'll have failed to demonstrate your ability." "Reasonable enough," Marner said. "But just when do we win this thing? Do you go on giving us projects till we miss?" "That would be the ultimate proof of your ability, wouldn't it?" Plorvash asked. "But you'll be relieved to know that we have no such plans. According to the terms of the agreement between ourselves and your government, the test-groups on each planet will be required to carry out no more than three projects." The alien's two mouths smiled unpleasantly. "We'll consider successful completion of all three projects as ample proof of your ability." "I don't like the way you say that," Kemridge objected. "What's up your sleeve?" "My sleeve? I don't believe I grasp the idiom," Plorvash said. "Never mind. Just a Terran expression," said Kemridge. outside the hotel -- a long, low job with a pulsating flexible hood that undulated in a distressing fashion, like a monstrous metal artery. Plorvash slid the back door open. "Get in. I'll take you to the lab to get started." Mamer looked at the alien, then at Kemridge. Kemridge nodded. "How about one for the road?" Mamer suggested. "Eh?" "Another idiom," he said. "I mean a drink. Alcoholic beverage. Stimulant of some kind. You catch?" The alien grinned nastily. "I understand. There's a dispensary on the next street. We don't want to rush you on this thing, anyway." He pointed to the moving roadway. "Get aboard and we'll take a quick one." They followed the Domerangi onto the moving strip and a moment later found themselves in front of a domed structure planted just off the roadway. "It doesn't look very cozy," Kemridge commented as they entered. A pungent odor of ether hit their nostrils. Half a dozen Domerangi were l#nng on the floor, holding jointed metal tubes. As they watched, Plorvash clambered down and sprawled out on his back. "Come, join me," he urged. "Have a drink." He reached for a tube that slithered across the floor toward him and fitted it into his left feeding mouth. "This is a bar?" Kemridge asked unhappily. "It looks more like the emergency ward of a hospital." Plorvash finished drinking and stood up, wiping a few drops of green liquid from his jaw. "Good," he said. "It's not beer, but it's good stuff. I thought you two wanted to drink." Mamer sniffed the ether-laden air in dismay and shook his head. "We're not -- thirsty. It takes time to get used to alien customs, I suppose." "I suppose so," Plorvash agreed. "Very well, then. Let's go to the lab, shall we?" I'HE laboratory was, indeed, a sumptuous place. The two Earthmen stood at the entrance to the monstrous room and marveled visibly. 'We're impressed," Mamer said finally to the Domerangi. "We want to give you every opportunity to succeed," Plorvash said. "This is just as important for us as it is for you." Mamer took two or three steps into the lab and glanced around. To the left, an enormous oscilloscope wiggled greenly at him. The right-hand wall was bristling with elaborate servomechanisms of all descriptions. The far wall was a gigantic toolchest and workbenches were spotted here and there. The lighting -- indirect, of course -- was bright and eye-easing. It was the sort of research setup a sane engineer rarely bothers even to dream of. "You're making it too easy for us," said Kemridge. "It can't be hard to pull off miracles in a lab like this." "We are honest people. If you can meet our tests, we'll grant that you're better than we are. It you can, that is. If you fail, it can't be blamed on poor working conditions." "Fair enough," Kemridge agreed. "When are you ready to start?" "Immediately." Plorvash reached into the bagging folds of his sash and withdrew a small plastic bubble, about four inches long, containing a creamy-white fluid. "This is a depilator," he said. He squeezed a few drops out of the bubble into the spoonlike end of one tentacle and rubbed the liquid over the thick, heavy red beard that sprouted on his lower jaw. A streak of beard came away as he rubbed. "It is very useful." He handed the bubble to Mamer. "Duplicate it." "But we're engineers, not chemists," Mamer protested. "Never mind, Justin." Kemridge turned to the alien. "That's the first problem. Suppose you give us the second one at the same time, just to make things .more convenient. That way, we'll each have one to work on." want to work on two projects at once? All right." He turned, strode out and returned a few moments later, carrying something that looked like a large mousetrap inside a cage. He handed it to Kemridge. "We use this to catch small house pests," Plorvash explained. "It's a self-baiting trap. Most of our house pests are color-sensitive and this trap flashes colors as a lure. For example, it does this to trap vorks -- " he depressed a lever in the back and the trap glowed a lambent green -- "and this to catch flaibs." Another lever went down and the trap radiated warm purple. An unmistakable odor of rotting vegetation emanated from it as well. "It is, as you see, most versatile," the alien went on. "We've supplied you with an ample number of vermin of different sorts -- they're at the back of the lab, in those cages -- and you ought to be able to rig a trap to duplicate this one. At least, I hope you can." "Is this all?" Kemridge asked. Plorvash nodded. "You can have all the time you need. That was the agreement." "Exactly," Kemridge said. 'We'll let you know when we've gotten somewhere." said Plorvash. After he had left, Mamer squeezed a couple of drops of the depilatory out onto the palm of his hand. It stung and he immediately shook it off. "Better not fool with that till we've run an analysis," Kemridge suggested. "If it's potent enough to remove Domerangi beards, it'll probably be a good skin-dissolver for Earthmen. Those babies have tough hides." Mamer rubbed his hand clean hastily. "What do you think of the deal in general?" "Pretty soft," Kemridge said. "It shouldn't take more than a week to knock off both these things, barring complications. Seems to me they could pick tougher projects than these." "Wait till the final one," warned Mamer. "These are just warmups." called Plorvash from the lab. The alien's bulky form filled the screen. "Hello," he said mildly. 'What's new?" 'We've finished the job," Marner reported. "Both of them?" "Naturally." "I'll be right over." Plorvash strode into the lab about fifteen minutes later, and the two Earthmen, who were busy with the animal-cages at the back ao of the lab, waved in greeting. "Stay where you are," Kemridge called loudly. He reached up, pressed a switch, and thirty cages clanged open at once. As a horde of Domerangi vermin came bounding, slithering, crawling and rolling across the floor toward Plorvash, the alien leaped back in dismay. "What kind of trick is this?" "Don't worry," Mamer said, from the remotest comer of the lab. "It'll all be over in a second." The animals ignored Plorvash and, to his surprise, they made a bee-line for a complex, humming arrangement of gears and levers behind the door. As they approached, it began flashing a series of colors, emanating strange odors and making cvirious clicking noises. When the horde drew closer, jointed arms suddenly sprang out and scooped them wholesale into a hopper that gaped open at floor level. Within a moment, they were all stowed away inside. Mamer came across the lab, followed by Kemridge. "We've improved on your model," he said. "We've built a better trap. YOur version can deal with only one species at a time." Plorvash gulped resoundingly. "Very nice. Quite remarkable, in fact." "We have the schematics in our room," said Kemridge. "The trap may have some commercial value on Domerang." "Probably," Plorvash admitted. "Mow'd you do on the depilator?" "That was easy," Marner said. "With the setup you gave us, chemical analysis was a snap. Only I'm afraid we've improved on the original model there, too." "What do you mean?" Marner rubbed the side of his face uneasily. "I tried our stuff on myself, couple of days ago, and my face is still smooth as a baby's. The effect seems to be permanent." "You'll submit samples, of course," Plorvash said. "But I think it's fairly safe to assume that you've passed through the first two projects -- ah -- reasonably well. Curiously, your counterparts on Earth also did well on their preliminaries, according to our Consul in New York." "Glad to hear it," Marner lied. "But the third problem tells the tale, doesn't it?" "Exactly," said Plorvash. "Let's have that one now, shall we?" and Kemridge found themselves staring down at a complicated nest of glittering relays and tubes which seemed to power an arrangement of pistons and rods. Plorvash had carried it in with the utmost delicacy and had placed it on a workbench in the middle of the vast laboratory. "What is it?" Marner asked. "You'll see," promised the alien. He fumbled in the back of the machine, drew forth a cord and plugged it into a wall socket. A small tube in the heart of the machine glowed cherry red and the pistons began to move, first slowly, then more rapidly. After a while, it was humming away at an even, steady clip, pistons barreling back and forth in purposeless but inexorable motion. Kemridge bent and peered as close to the workings of the gadget as he dared. "It's an engine. What of it?" "It's a very special kind of engine," Plorvash said. "Suppose you take the plug out." The Earthman worked the plug from its socket and looked at the machine. Then the plug dropped from his limp hand and skittered to the floor. "It -- doesn't stop going, does it?" Kemridge asked quietly. "The pistons keep on moving." "This is our power source," Plorvash said smugly. "We use them in vehicles and other such things. It's the third problem." "We'll give it a try," Marner tried to say casually. "I'll be most interested in the results," Plorvash said. "And now I must bid you a good day." "Sure," Marner said weakly. "Cheers." They watched the broadbeamed alien waddle gravely out of the laboratory, waited till the door was closed, and glanced at the machine. It was still moving. Marner licked his lips and looked pleadingly at Kemridge. "Dave, can we build a perpetualmotion machine?" IHE Domerangi machine worked just as well plugged in or unplugged, once it had tapped some power source to begin with. The pistons threaded ceaselessly up and down. The basic components of the thing seemed simple enough. "The first step to take," Marner said, "is to shut the damned thing off so we can get a look at its innards." "How do we do that?" "By reversing the power source, I suppose. Feed a negative pulse through that power input and that ought to do it. We'll have to reverse the polarity of the signal." Half an hour's hard work with tools and solder had done that. They plugged the scrambled cord into the socket and the machine coughed twice and subsided. "Okay," Marner said, rubbing his hands with an enthusiasm he did not feel. "Let's dig this baby apart and find out what makes it tick." He turned and stared meaningfully at Kemridge. "And let's adopt this as a working credo, Dave: inasmuch as the Domerangi have already built this thing, it's not impossible. Okay?" "That seems to be the only basis we can approach it on," Kemridge agreed. They huddled around the device, staring at the workings. Marner reached down and pointed at a part. "This thing is something like a tuned-plate feedback oscillator," he observed. "And I'll bet we've almost got a thyratron tube over here. Their technology's a good approximation of ours. In fact, the whole thing's within our grasp, technically." "Hmm. And the result is a closed regenerative system with positive feedback," Kemridge said dizzily. "Infinite energy, going round and round the cycle. If you draw off a hundred watts or so -- well, infinity minus a hundred is still infinity!" "True enough." Marner wiped a gleaming bead of perspiration from his forehead. "Dave, we're going to have to puzzle this thing out from scratch. And we don't dare fail." He reached doggedly for a screwdriver. "Remember our motto. We'll use our natural savvy and a little perspiration, and we ought to do it." Three weeks later, they had come up with their first trial model -- which wobbled along for half an hour, then gave up. And a month after that, they had a machine that didn't give up. Plorvash. "There it is," Marner said, pointing to the bizarre thing that stood next to the original model. Both machines were humming blithely, plugs dangling from the sockets. "It works?" Plorvash whispered, paling. "It hasn't stopped yet," Marner said. There were heavy rings under his eyes and his usually plump face was drawn, with the skin tight over his cheekbones. It had been two months of almost constant strain and both Earthmen showed it. "It works, eh?" Plorvash asked. "How.?" "A rather complex hyperspace function," Kemridge said. "I don't want to bother explaining it now -- you'll find it all in our report -- but it was quite a stunt in topology. We couldn't actually duplicate your model, but we achieved the same effect, which fulfills the terms of the agreement." "All a matter of response to challenge," said Marner. "We didn't think we could do it until we had to -- so we did." "I didn't think you could do it either," Plorvash said hoarsely. He walked over and examined the machine closely. "It works, you say? Honestly, now?" His voice was strained. "Of course," Marner said indignantly. "We have just one question." Kemridge pointed to a small black rectangular box buried deep in a maze of circuitry in the original model. "That thing down there -- it nearly threw us. We couldn't get it open to examine it and so we had to bypass it and substitute a new system for it. What in blazes is it?" Plorvash wheeled solidly around to face them. "That," he said in a strangled voice, "is the power source. It's a miniature photoelectric amplifier that should keep the model running for -- oh, another two weeks or so. Then the jig would have been up." "How's that?" Marner was startled. "It's time to explain something to you," the alien said wearily. "We don't have any perpetualmotion machines. You've been cruelly hoaxed into inventing one for us. It's dastardly, but we didn't really think you were going to do it. It took some of our best minds to rig up the model we gave you, you know." Marner drew up a lab stool and sat down limply, white-faced. Kemridge remained standing, his features blank with disbelief. Marner said, "You mean we invented the thing and you didn't you -- " Plorvash nodded. "I'm just as astonished as you are," he said. He reached for a lab stool himself and sat down. It groaned under his weight. Kemridge recovered first. "Well," he said after a moment of silence, "now that it's over, we'll take our machine and go back to Earth. This invalidates the contest, of course." "I'm afraid you can't do that," Plorvash said. "By a statute enacted some seven hundred years ago, any research done in a Domerangi government lab is automatically government property. Which means, of course, that we'll have to confiscate your -- ahem -- project." "That's out of the question!" Marner said hotly. "And, furthermore, we intend to confiscate you, too. We'd like you to stay and show us how to build our machines." "This is cause for war," Kemridge said. "Earth won't let you get away with this -- this kidnaping!" "Possibly not. But in view of the way things have turned out, it's the sanest thing we can do. And I don't think Earth will go to war over you." "We demand to see bur Consul," said Marner. "Very well," Plorvash agreed. "It's within your rights, I suppose."  I 'HE Earth Consul was a whitehaired, sturdy gentleman named Culbertson, who arrived on the scene later that day. "This is very embarrassing for all of us," the Consul said. He ran his hands nervously down his traditional pin-striped trousers, adjusting the crease. "You can get us out of it, of course," Marner said. "That machine is our property and they have no right to keep us prisoners here to operate it, do they?" "Not by all human laws. But the fact remains, unfortunately, that according to their laws, they have every right to your invention. And by the treaty of #, waiving extraterritorial sovereignty, Earthmen on Domerang are subject to Domerangi laws, and vice versa." He spread his hands in a gesture of sympathetic frustration. "You mean we're stuck here," Marner said bluntly. He shut his eyes, remembering the nightmare that was the Domerangi equivalent of a bar, thinking of the morbid prospect of spending the rest of his life on this unappetizing planet, all because of some insane dare. "Go on, tell us the whole truth." The Consul put the palms of his hands together delicately. "We intend to make every effort to get you off, of course -- naturally so, since we owe a very great debt to you two. You realize that you've upheld Earth's pride." "Lot of good it did us," Marner grunted. "Nevertheless, , we feel anxious to make amends for the whole unhappy incident. I can assure you that we'll do everything in our power to make your stay here as pleasant and as restful as -- " "Listen, Culbertson," Kemridge said grimly. "We don't want a vacation here, not even with dancing girls twenty-four hours a day and soft violins in the background. We don't like it here. We want to go home. You people got us into this -- now get us out." The Consul grew even more unhappy-looking. "I wish you wouldn't put it that way. We'll do all we can." He paused for a moment, deep in thought, and said, "There's one factor in the case that we haven't as yet explored." "What's that?" Marner asked uneasily. "Remember the two Domerangi engineers who went to Earth on the other leg of this hookup?" The Consul glanced around the lab. "Is this place wired anywhere?" "We checked," Kemridge said, "and you can speak freely. What do they have to do with us?" voice. "There's a slim chance for you. I've been in touch with authorities on Earth and they've been keeping me informed of the progress of the two Domerangi. You know they got through their first two projects as easily as you did." The two Earthmen nodded impatiently. The old diplomat smiled his apologies. "I hate to admit this, but it seems the people at the Earth end of this deal had much the same idea the Domerangi did." "Perpetual motion, you mean?" "Not quite," Culbertson said. "They rigged up a phony antigravity machine and told the Domerangi to duplicate it, just as was done here. Our psychologies must be similar." "And what happened?" Marner asked. "Nothing, yet," the Consul said sadly. "But they're still working on it, I'm told. If they're as clever as they say they are, they ought to hit it sooner or later. You'll just have to be patient and sweat it out. We'll see to it that you're well taken care of in the meantime, of course, and -- " "I don't get it. What does that have to do with us?" Marner demanded. "If they keep at it, they'll invent it eventually." Marner scowled. "That may take years. It may take forever. They may never discover a workable anti-grav. Then what about us?" The Consul looked sympathetic and shrugged. A curious gleam twinkled in Kemridge's eye. He turned to Marner. "Justin, do you know anything about tensor applications and gravitational fields?" "What are you driving at?" Marner said. "We've got an ideal lab setup here. And I'm sure those two Domerangi down there wouldn't mind taking the credit for someone else's anti-grav, if they were approached properly. What do you think?" Marner brightened. "That's right -- they must be just as anxious to get home as we are!" "You mean," said the Consul, "you'd build the machine and let us smuggle it to Earth so we could slip it to the Domerangi and use that as a talking-point for a trade and -- " He stopped, seeing that no one was listening to him, and looked around. Marner and Kemridge were at the far end of the lab, scribbling equations feverishly. Unbelievable as it seems, we've learned recently that there are readers who actually go through only the synopsis and last installment of serials! If you're one of them and are doing that with Alfred most superbly realistic treatment of teleportation in all science fiction-settling for dehydrated recapitulation instead of living, sweating, fighting through scenes quivering with masterful tension... and you have not met Gully Foyle. Before you get to next month's installment, read the previous two and you will see the lethal logic behind Foyle's but not one cent for entropy!" Robert Sheckley, which shows up the statement that there is plenty of room in space for every misfit as sheer propaganda. For Danton discovers painfully and bewilderedly that there is less room in space for misfits than anywhere else! and the oceans. Are there such things? Can the reports be believed? Sign aboard this expedition, for that is exactly what It sets out to find! Continued from page #) real data. If there are any errors herein, they must be blamed on his cigar. The banana "tree," he said, is actually an herb, the world's largest, since the "trunk" consists of the concentric leaf bases of the big leaves (also the world's largest). The banana is technically a berry (world's largest? I forgot to ask him) and the tiny black specks inside are degenerated seeds -- which means that every banana plantation on Earth was planted by Man! They had to start somewhere, didn't they? Obviously. The edible banana is a dead-end hybrid of various wild and inedible species. (No, that was not what I was feeding Baggy.) When a seedy diploid and a seedy tetraploid are crossed, the edible non-seed triploid is the result. So we know how it was done and even where and when -- in Malaya in early historical times. As Ley says, however, the man who can trace the # or more varieties of edible bananas back to their ancestors may already have been born... but he hasn't done the job yet. How, I wanted to know, can sterile fruit be planted? The answer is that bits of the banana root stalk serve as seed. Each bit keeps growing out until, before long, a large underground mat of roots surroxmds the place where the single bit was planted. The root stalks produce buds, which shoot up as towering plants; each plant produces only a single bunch of bananas and dies. The plant is then cut to the ground, to be replaced by another growing from a different underground bud. Where, I asked, had I gone wrong in feeding Baggy? Simple -- the fruit does not ripen on the tree. That's why wild monkeys don't eat bananas. (Meant to ask how it was discovered that bananas ripen only off the tree; realize answer could not be more than guesswork.) In retrospect, the whole development of the banana appears too complex to have been all accident, I objected. Ley was still choking, so I may be reporting incorrectly, but I think he mentioned the peach and some others as having equally mysterious (and inedible) ancestors, yet were cultivated by our own ancestors, indicating a rule-of-greenthumb knowledge of genetics. Now I ought to explain the title of this editorial and thank the inventor. It's the work of an ingenious fan and the entire equation reads: BAj#NA  BAMaybe that's the answer. Great truths are always simple. B Af # N A Stars My Destination Part # of a #-Part Serial Being passed by while shipwrecked deserved furious vengeance -- but seeking it thrust Foyle from the absolute cold of space to the absolute black of Earth's most notorious cave prison! T he history of Gulliver Foyle's drive for vengeance begins in the #th century, a fascinating freak century of monsters and grotesques, the great age of teleportation, which is called "jaunting." Foyle, the last living survivor aboard the Presteign company's freighter Nomad, has been drifting in space, fighting for survival in the wrecked ship tor # days. Another freighter, SS Vorga, also owned by the Presteign company, passes close enough to sight Foyle. Unaccountably and cruelly, Vorga refuses to rescue Foyle and leaves him to die. Foyle, a common spaceman without training or skill, is abruptly awakened from brute lethargy by his rage and swears to revenge himself on Vorga. He succeeds in getting the wrecked Nomad under way again and is picked up by the savages of a Sargasso asteroid, a tiny planet manufactured of natural rock and wreckage salvaged by its inhabitants in space. They also salvage the SS Nomad and incorporate the wreck into their asteroid. These are the only savages of the #th century, descendants of a research team marooned in space centuries ago. They call themselves the Scientific People and go through travesties of scientific ritual, including tattooing of their faces. While Foyle is unconscious, his lace is hideously tattooed with designs and the name of the ship on which he was found. Nomad. He awakens to find himself "scientifically" mated to a girl of the Sargasso asteroid. Foyle escapes and is picked up by the Inner Planets navy and brought back to Earth. He is still seething for revenge and prepares to seek out and destroy Vorga even while he's recuperating from his injuries in an army hospital. Robin Wednesbury, a beautiful Negro girl who, as a "telesend," a one-way telepath, is teaching the hospital head-injury cases how to jaunte again, discovers that Foyle is malingering. Foyle blackmails her into silence and rapes her. Robin is too terrified by the huge savage man with the tattooed face to defend herself. Foyle makes a primitive attempt to blow up SS Vorga in the Presteign dry docks in Vancouver and is captured by the Presteign company guards. The head of the giant corporation, Presteign of Presteign, hires the formidable Saul Dagenham of Dagenham Couriers, and Regis Sheffield, leading lawyer of Terra, to rip information out of Foyle. It is urgent to discover the whereabouts of the wreck of SS Nomad, for platinum and a mysterious substance called PyrE, the secret of which only Presteign knows. The Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites are at war, and Captain Peter Y'ang-Yeovil of Central Intelligence demands that Presteign turn Foyle over to Intelligence so that the army can salvage Nomad and the PyrE. Although Central Intelligence does not know what PyrE is, Y'ang-Yeovil suspects that it has such fantastic powers that it can make the difference between winning and losing the war. Presteign refuses to give up Foyle or any information about PyrE. Saul Dagenham applies every ingenious form of physical and psychological pressure on Foyle to obtain information about the whereabouts of the wreck of the Nomad. Foyle, still possessed by his passionate desire for vengeance against Vorga, refuses to reveal anything. At last Dagenham tells Foyle that legal charges have been fabricated against him. He'll go to one of the cavernprisons on Terra and stay there the Spanish-French border, is the deepest abyss in France, the Gouffre Martel. Its caverns twist for miles under the Pyrenees. It is the most formidable cavern hospital on Earth. No patient has ifunted out of its pitch darkness, for none has ever succeeded in learning the jaunte coordinates of the black hospital depths. Short of prefrontal lobotomy, there are only three ways to stop a man from jaunting: a blow on the head, producing concussion; sedation which prevents concentration; and concealment of jaunte coordination. Of the three, concealment was the most practical. The cells that line the winding passages of Gouffre Martel are cut out of living rock. They are never illuminated. Neither are the passages. Infra-red lamps flood the darkness, visible only to guards and attendants wearing snooper goggles with specially treated lenses. For the patients, there is only the black silence of Gouffre Martel, broken by the distant rush of underground waters. For Foyle, there were the silence, the rushing and the hospital routine. At eight o'clock (or it may have been any hour in this timeless abyss), he was awakened by a bell. He arose and received his morning meal, slotted into the cell by pneumatic tube. It had to be eaten at once, for the china-surrogate of cups and plates was timed to dissolve in fifteen minutes. At eight-thirty, the cell door opened and Foyle and hundreds of others shuffled blindly through the twisting corridors to Sanitation. Here, still in darkness, they were processed like beef in a slaughter house -- cleansed, shaved, irradiated, disinfected, dosed and inoculated. Their paper uniforms were removed and sent up to the shops to be pulped. New uniforms were issued. Then they shuffled back to their cells, which had been automatically scrubbed out while they were in Sanitation. In his cell, Foyle listened to interminable therapeutic talks, lectures, moral and ethical guidance for the rest of the morning. Then there was silence again, and nothing but the rush of distant water and the quiet steps of goggled guards in the corridors.  cupational therapy. The TV screen in each cell lit up and the patient thrust his hands into the shadow frame of the screen. He saw three-dimensionally and he felt the broadcast objects and tools. He cut hospital uniforms, sewed them, manufactured kitchen utensils and prepared foods. Although actually he touched nothing, his motions were transmitted to the shops, where the work was accomplished by remote control. After one short hour of this relief came the darkness and silence again. But every so often, once or twice a week (or perhaps once or twice a year), came the muffled thud of a distant explosion. The concussions were startling enough to distract Foyle from the furnace of vengeance that he stoked all through the silences. He whispered questions to the invisible figures around him in Sanitation. "What's them explosions?" "Explosions?" "Blowups. Hear 'em a long way off, me." "Them's Blue Jauntes." "What?" "Blue Jauntes. Every sometime a guy gets fed up with old Jeffrey. #i Can't take it no more, him. Jauntes into the wild blue yonder." "Jesus." "Yep. Don't know where they are, them. Don't know where they're going. Blue Jaunte into the dark... and we hear 'em exploding in the mountains. Boom! Blue Jaunte." He was appalled, but he could understand. The darkness, the silence, the monotony destroyed sense and brought on desperation. The loneliness was intolerable. The patients buried in Gouffre Martel prison hospital looked forward eagerly to the morning Sanitation period for a chance to whisper a word and hear a word. But these fragments were not enough and desperation came. Then there would be another distant explosion. Sometimes the suffering men would turn on each other and a savage fight would break out in Sanitation. These were instantly broken up by the goggled guards, and the morning lecture would switch on the Moral Fiber record preaching the Virtue of Patience. Foyle learned the records by heart, every word, every click and crack in the tapes. He learned to loathe the voices of the lecturers; the Understanding Baritone, the Cheerful Tenor, the Man-to-Man Bass. He learned to deafen himself to the therapeutic monotony and perform his occupational therapymechanically, but he was without resources to withstand the endless solitary hours. Fury was not enough. He lost count of days, of meals, of sermons. He no longer whispered in Sanitation. His mind came adrift and he began to wander. He imagined he was back aboard Nomad, reliving his fight for survival. Then he lost even this feeble grasp on illusion and began to sink deeper and deeper into the pit of catatonia -- of womb silence, womb darkness and womb sleep. An angel hummed to him once. Another time she sang quietly. Thrice he heard her speak; "Oh, God!" and "God damn!" and "Oh!..." in a heart-rending descending note. He sank into his abyss, listening to her. "There is a way out," his angel murmured in his ear sweetly, comforting. Her voice was soft and warm, yet it burned with anger. It was the voice of a furious angel. "There is a way out." It whispered in his ear from nowhere and suddenly, with the logic of desperation, it came to him that there was a way out of Gouffre Martel. He had been a fool not to see it before. "Yes," he croaked. "There's a way out." There was a soft gasp, then a soft question: "Who's there?" "Me, is all," Foyle said. "You know me." "Where are you?" "Here. Where I always been, me. "But there's no one. I'm alone." "Got to thank you for helping me." "Hearing voices is bad," the furious angel murmured. "The first step off the deep end. I've got to stop." "You showed me the way out. Blue Jaunte, is all." "Blue Jaunte! My God, this must be real! You're talking the gutter lingo. You must be real! Who are you?" "Gully Foyle." "But you're not in my cell. You're not even near. Men are in the north quadrant of Gouffre Martel. Women are in the south. I'm South-#. Where are you?" "North-#." "You're a quarter of a mile away. How can we -- Of course! It's the Whisper Line. I always thought that was a legend, but it's true. It's working now." "Here I go, me," Foyle whispered. "Blue Jaunte." "Foyle, listen to me. Forget the Blue Jaunte. Dont throw this away. It's a miracle." "What's a miracle?" "There's an acbustical freak in Gouffre Martel -- they happen in underground caves -- a freak of echoes, passages and whispering galleries. Old-timers call it the Whisper Line. I never believed them. No one ever did, but it's true. We're talking to each other over the Whisper Line. No one can hear us but us. We can talk, Foyle. We can plan. Maybe we can escape." Queen. She was hot-tempered, independent, intelligent, and she was serving five years of "cure" in Gouffre Martel for larceny. Jisbella gave Foyle a cheerfully venomous account of her revolt against society. "You don't know what jaunting's done to women, Gully. It's locked us up, sent us back to the seraglio." "What's seraglio, Jiz?" "A harem. A place where women are kept on ice. After a thousand years of civilization, it says here, we're still property. Jaunting's such a danger to our virtue, our value, our mint condition, that we're locked up like gold plate in a safe. There's nothing for us to do... nothing respectable. No jobs. No careers. There's no getting out, Gully, unless we bust out and smash all the rules." "Did you have to?" "I had to be independent. Gully. I had to live my own life and that's the only way society would let me. So I ran away from home and turned crook." And Jiz went on to describe the lurid details of her revolt: the Temper Racket, the Cataract Racket, the Honeymoon and Obituary Robs, the Badger Jaunte and the Glim Drop. Foyle told her about Nomad and VoTa, his hatred and his plans. He did not tell Jisbella about his face or the twenty millions in platinum bullion waiting out in the asteroids. "What happened to Nomad?" Jisbella asked. "Was it the way that man Dagenham said? Was she blasted by an O.S. raider?" "I don't know, me. Can't remember, Jiz." "The blast probably wiped out your memory. Shock. And being marooned for six months didn't help. Did you notice anything worth salvaging from Nomad?" "No," Foyle said truthfully. "Did Dagenham mention anything?" "No," he lied. "Then he must have another reason for hounding you into Gouffre Martel. There must be something else he wants from Nomad." "Yeah, Jiz." "But you were a fool, trying to blow up Vorga like that. You're like a wild beast trying to punish the trap that injured it. Steel isn't alive. It doesn't think. You can't punish Vorga." "Don't know what you mean, Jiz. Vorga passed me by." "You punish the brain, Gully, not the ship. Find out who was aboard Vorga. Find out who gave the order to pass you by. Punish him." "Yeah. How?" "Learn to think. Gully. The head that could figure out how to get Nomad under way and how to put a bomb together ought to be able to figure that out. But no more bombs; brains instead. Locate a member of Vorga's crew. He'll tell you who was aboard. Track them down. Find out who gave the order. Then punish him. But it'll take time. Gully -- time and money. More than you've got." "I got a whole life, me." across the Whisper Line, their voices sounding small, yet close to the ear. There was only one particular spot in each cell where the other could be heard, which was why so much time had passed before they discovered the miracle. But now they made up for lost time. And Jisbella educated Foyle. "If we ever break out of Gouffre Martel, Gully, it'll have to be together, and I'm not trusting "You are," Jisbella answered firmly. "I have to talk gutter a you half the time, me." "I can read and write." "And that's about all -- which means that outside of brute strength, you'll be useless." "Talk sense, you," he said angrily. "I am talking sense, me. What's the use of the strongest chisel in the world if it doesn't have an edge? We've got to sharpen your wits. Gully. Got to educate you, man, is all." He realized she was right. He would need training not only for the bust-out but for the search for Vorga as well. Jisbella was the daughter of an architect and had received an education. This she drilled into Foyle, leavened with the cynical experience of five years in the underworld. Occasionally he rebelled against the hard work and there would be fiercely whispered quarrels, but in the end he would apologize and submit again. And sometimes Jisbella would tire of teaching and then they would ramble on, sharing dreams in the dark. "I think we're falling in love. Gully." "I think so, too, Jiz." "I'm an old hag. Gully. A hundred and five years old. What are you like?" "Awful." "How, awful?" "My face." "You make yourself sound romantic. Is it one of those exciting scars that make a man attractive?" "No. You'll see when we meet, us. That's wrong, isn't it, Jiz? Just plain: 'When we meet.' Period." "Good boy." "We will meet some day, won't we, Jiz?" "Soon, I hope, Gully." Jisbella's faraway voice became crisp and businesslike. "But we've got to stop hoping and get down to work. We have to plan and prepare." had inherited a mass of information about Gouffre Martel. No one had ever jaunted out of the cavern hospitals, but for decades the underworld had been collecting and collating information about them. It was from this data that Jisbella had formed her quick recognition of the Whisper Line that joined them. It was on the basis of this information that she began to discuss escape. "We can pull it off. Gully. Never doubt that for a minute. There must be dozens of loopholes in their security system." "No one's ever found them before."  "No one's ever worked with a partner before. We'll pool our knowledge and we'll make it." He no longer shambled to Sanitation and back. He felt the corridor walls, noted doors, memorized their texture, counted, listened, deduced and reported. He made a note of every separate step in the Sanitation pens and reported them to Jiz. The questions he whispered to the men around him in the shower and scrub rooms had purpose. Together, Foyle and Jisbella built up a picture of the routine of Gouffre Martel and its security system. One morning, on the return from Sanitation, he was stopped as he was about to step back into his cell. "Stay in line, Foyle." "This is North-#. I know where to get off by now." "Keep going." "But -- " He was terrified. "You're moving me?" "Visitor to see you." He was marched up to the end of the north corridor where it met the three other main corridors that formed the huge cross of the hospital. In the center of the cross were the administration offices, maintenance workshops, clinics and plants. Foyle was thrust into a room as dark as his cell. The door was shut behind him. He became aware of a faint shimmering outline in the blackness. It was no more than the ghost of an image with a blurred body and a death's head. Two black discs on the skull face were either eye sockets or infra-red goggles. "Good morning," said Saul Dagenham. "You?" Foyle exclaimed. "Me. I've got five minutes -- I'm dangerously radioactive, remember? Sit down. Chair behind you." Foyle felt for the chair and sat down slowly. "Enjoying yourself?" Dagenham inquired. "What do you want?" Dagenham said dryly. "Last time we talked, your dialogue consisted entirely of 'Go to hell.' " "Go to hell, Dagenham, if it'll make you feel any better." "Your repartee's improved; your speech, too. You've changed," Dagenham said. "Changed a damned sight too much and a damned sight too fast. I don't like it. What's happened to you?" "I've been going to night school." "You've had ten months in this night school." "Ten months?" Foyle echoed in amazement. "That long?" "Ten months without sight and without sound. Ten months in solitary. You ought to be broken." "Oh, I'm broken, all right." "You ought to be whining. I was right -- you're imusual. At this rate, it's going to take too long. We can't wait. I'd like to make a new offer." "Make it." "Ten per cent of Nomad's bullclaimed. "Why didn't you offer that in the first place?" "Because I didn't know your caliber. Is it a deal?" "Almost. Not yet." "What else?" "I get out of Gouffre Martel." "Naturally." "And someone else, too." "It can be arranged." Dagenham's voice sharpened. "Anything more?" "I get access to Presteign's files." "Are you insane? It's out of the question." "His shipping files." "What for?" "A list of personnel aboard one of his ships." "Oh." Dagenham's eagerness revived. "I can arrange that. Anything else?" "No." "Then it's a deal." Dagenham was delighted. The deadly radioactive blur arose from its chair. "We'll have you out in six hours. We'll start fixing things for your friend at once. It's a pity we wasted this time, but no one can figure you, Foyle." "Why didn't you send in a telepath to probe the information out of me?" "A telepath? Be reasonable, Foyle. There aren't a dozen full telepaths in all the Inner Planets. Their time is earmarked for the next ten years. We couldn't persuade one to interrupt his scheddule for love or money." "I apologize, Dagenham. I thought you didn't know your business." "You very nearly hurt my feelings." "So now I know you're only lying." "You're flattering me." "You could have hired a teleyou could have hired one without a bit of trouble." "The government would never -- " "They don't all work for the government. No, you've got something too hot to let a telepath get near." leaped across the room and seized Foyle. "How much do you know, Foyle? What are you covering? Who are you working for?" Dagenham's hands shook. "What a fool I've been! Of course you're unusual. You're no common spaceman. I asked you -- who are you working for?" Foyle tore Dagenham's hands loose. "No one," he said. "No one except myself." "No one, eh? Including your friend in Gouffre Martel you're so eager to rescue? By God, you almost swindled me, Foyle. Tell Captain Y'ang-Yeovil I congratulate him. He's got a better staff than I thought." "I never heard of any Y'angYeovil." "It's no deal. You and your colleague are going to rot here. I'll have you moved to the worst cell in the hospital. I'll sink you to the bottom of Gouffre Martel. I'll Guard, here! G-" Foyle grasped Dagenham's throat, dragged him down to the floor and hammered his head on the flagstones. Dagenham squirmed once and then was still. Foyle ripped the goggles off his face and put them on. Sight returned in soft red and rose lights and shadows. He was in a small reception room with a table and two chairs. Foyle stripped Dagenham's jacket off and put it on with two quick jerks that split the shoulders. Dagenham's cocked highwayman's hat lay on the table. Foyle clapped it on and pulled the brim down over his face. On opposite walls were two doors. Foyle opened one a crack. It led out to the north corridor. He closed it, leaped across the room and tried the other. It opened onto a jaunte-proof maze. Foyle slipped through the door and entered the maze. Without a guide to lead him through the labyrinth, he was immediately lost. He began to run around the twists and turns and found himself back at the reception room. Dagenham was struggling to his knees. Foyle turned back into the maze again. He ran. He came to a closed door and thrust it open. It revealed a large workshop illuminated by normal light. Two technicians working at a machine bench looked up in surprise. Foyle snatched up a sledge hammer, leaped on them like a caveman and felled them. Behind him, he heard Dagenham shouting in the distance. He looked around wildly, dreading the discovery that he was trapped in a cul de sac. The workshop was Lshaped. Foyle tore around the corner, burst through the entrance of another jaunte-proof maze and was lost again. The Gouffre Martel alarm system began clattering. Foyle battered at the walls of the labyrinth with the sledge, shattered the thin plastic masking and found himself in the infra-red-lit south corridor of the Women's Quadrant. WO women guards came up the corridor, running hard. Foyle swung the sledge and dropped them. He was near the head of the corridor. Before him stretched a long perspective of cell doors, each bearing a glowing red number. Overhead, the corridor was lit by glowing red globes. Foyle stood on tiptoe and clubbed the globe above him. He hammered through the socket and smashed the current cable. The entire corridor went dark. "Evens us up -- all in the dark now," Foyle gasped, and tore down the corridor, feeling the wall as he ran and counting cell doors. Jisbella had given him an accurate word picture of the South Quadrant. He was counting his way toward South-#. He blundered into a figure, another guard. Foyle struck at her once with his sledge. She fell. The women patients began shrieking. Foyle lost count, ran on, stopped. "Jiz!" he bellowed. He heard her voice. He encountered another guard, disposed of her, ran, located Jisbella's cell. "Gully, for God's sake..." Her voice was muffled. "Get back, girl. Back." He hammered against the door with his sledge and it burst inward. He staggered in and fell against a figure. "Jiz?" he panted. "Excuse me. Was passing by. Thought I'd drop in." "Gully, in the name of -- " "Yeah. Hell of a way to meet, eh? Come on. Out, girl. Out!" He dragged her out of the cell. "We can't try a break through the offices. They don't like me back there. Which way to your Sanitation pens?" "Gully, you're crazy." "Whole quadrant's dark. I smashed the power cable. We've got half a chance. Go!" He gave her a powerful thrust and she led him down the passages to the automatic stalls of the women's Sanitation pens. While mechanical hands removed their uniforms, soaped, soaked, sprayed and disinfected them, Foyle felt for the glass pane of the medical observation window. He found it, swung the sledge and smashed it. "Get in, Jiz." IT E shoved her through the window and followed. They were both stripped, greasy with soap, slashed and bleeding. Foyle slipped and crashed through the blackness, searching for the door through which the medical officers entered. "Can't find the door, Jiz. Door from the clinic. I -- " "Shh!" "But " A soapy hand found his mouth and clamped over it. She gripped his shoulder so hard that her fingernails pierced his skin. Through the bedlam in the caverns sounded the clatter of steps close at hand. Guards were rxmning blindly through the Sanitation stalls. The infra-red lights had not yet been repaired. "They may not notice the window," Jisbella hissed. "Be quiet." They crouched on the floor. Steps trampled through the pens in bewildering succession. Then they were gone. "All clear now," Jisbella whispered. "But they'll have searchlights any minute. Quick, Gully. Out." "But the door to the clinic, Jiz. I thought -- " "There is no door. They use spiral stairs and they pull them up. They've thought of this escape, too. We'll have to try the laundry lift. Lord know what good it'll do us. Oh, Gully, you fool! You utter fool!" They climbed through the observation window back into the pens. They searched through the darkness for the lifts by which soiled uniforms were removed and fresh uniforms issued. They could find nothing. And in the darkness, the automatic hands again soaped, sprayed and disinfected them. The caterwauling of a siren suddenly echoed through the caverns, silencing all other sound. There came a hush as suffocating as the darkness. "They're using the G-phone to track us, Gully." "The what?" "Geophone. It can trace sound through half a mile of solid rock. That's why they've sirened for silence." "The laundry lift?" "Can't find it." "Then come on." "Where?" "We're running." "Where?" "I don't know, but I'm not getting caught flat-footed. Let's go. The exercise'll do you good." fore him and they ran, gasping and stumbling, through the blackness, down into the deepest reaches of South Quadrant. Jisbella fell twice, blundering against turns in the passages. Foyle took the lead, holding the sledge in his hand, the handle extended before him as an antenna. But they crashed into a blank wall and realized they had reached the dead end of the corridor. They were boxed, trapped. "What now?" she wheezed. "Don't know. Looks like the dead end of my ideas, too. We can't go back for sure. I clobbered Dagenham in the offices. Hate that man. Looks like a poison label with that radioactivity of his. You got a flash, girl?" "Oh, Gully... Gully..." Jisbella sobbed. "Was counting on you for ideas. 'No more bombs,' you said. Wish I had one now. Could -- Wait a minute." He touched the oozing wall against which they were leaning. He felt the checkerboard indentations of mortar seams. "Bulletin from G. Foyle. This isn't a natural cave wall. It's made of brick and stone. Feel." Jisbella felt the wall. "So?" "Means this passage don't end here. Goes on. They blocked it off. Out of my way." He shoved Jisbella up the passage, ground his hands into the floor to grit his soapy palms, and began swinging the sledge against the wall. He swung in steady rhythm, grunting at each blow. The steel sledge hit the wall with the blunt concussion of stones struck under water. "They're coming," Jiz said. "I hear them." The blunt blows took on a crumbling, crushing overtone. There was a whisper, then a steady pebble-fall of loose mortar. Foyle struck harder, faster. Suddenly there was a crash and a gush of icy air blew in their faces. "Through," Foyle muttered. Ferociously, he attacked the edges of the hole pierced through the wall. Bricks, stones and old mortar flew. Foyle stopped and called Jisbella. "Try it." He dropped the sledge, seized her and held her up to the chesthigh opening. She cried out in pain as she tried to wriggle past the sharp edges. Foyle pressed her relentlessly until she got her shoulders and then her hips through. He let go of her legs and heard her fall on the other side. tore his way through the jagged breach in the wall. He felt Jisbella's hands trying to break his fall as he crashed down in a mass of loose brick and mortar. They were both through into the icy blackness of the unoccupied caverns of Gouffre Martel... miles of unexplored grottoes and caves. "By God, we'll make it yet," Foyle mumbled. "I don't know if there's a way out. Gully." Jisbella was shaking with cold. "Maybe this is all blind alley, walled off from the hospital." "There has to be a way out." "I don't know if we can find it." "We've got to find it. Let's go, girl." They blundered forward in the darkness. Foyle tore the useless goggles from his eyes. They crashed against ledges, corners, low ceilings; they fell down slopes and steep steps. They climbed over a razor-back ridge to a level plain and their feet shot from under them. Both fell heavily to a glassy floor. Foyle felt it and touched it with his tongue. "Ice," he panted. "Good sign. We're in an ice cavern, Jiz. Underground glacier." They arose shakily, straddling their legs and worked their way across the ice that had been forming in the Gouffre Martel abyss for millennia. They climbed into a forest of stone saplings that were stalagmites and stalactites thrusting up from the jagged floor and down from the ceilings. The vibrations of every step loosened the huge stalactites, ponderous stone spears that thundered down from overhead. At the edge of the forest, Foyle stopped, reached out and tugged. There was a clear metallic ring. He took Jisbella's hand and placed the long tapering cone of a stalagmite in it. "Cane," he grunted. "Use it like a blind man." He broke off another and they went tapping, feeling, stumbling through the darkness. There was no sound but the gallop of panic... their gasping breath and racing hearts, the taps of their stone canes, the multitudinous drip of water, the distant rushing of the underground river beneath Gouffre Martel. "Not that way, girl." Foyle nudged her shoulder. "More to the left." "Have you the faintest notion where we're headed, Gully?" "Down, Jiz. Follow any slope that leads down." "You've got an idea?" "Yeah. Surprise, surprise! Brains instead of bombs." "Brains instead of -- " Jisbella screamed with hysterical laughter. "You exploded into South Quadrant w-with a sledge hammer and th-that's your idea of b-brains instead of b-b-b -- " Che shrieked and giggled be yond all control until Foyle grasped her and shook her. "Shut up, Jiz. If they're tracking us by G-phone, they could hear you from Mars." "S-sorry, Gully. Sorry. I..." She took a breath. "Why down?" "The river -- the one we hear all the time. It must be near. It probably melts off the glacier back there." "The river?" "The only sure way out. It must break out of the mountain somewhere. We'll swim." "Gully, you're insane!" "What's a matter, you? You can't swim?" "I can swim, but -- " "Then we've got to try. Got to, Jiz. Come on." The rush of the river grew louder as their strength began to fail. Jisbella pulled to a halt at last, gasping. "Gully, I've got to rest." "Too cold. Keeping moving." "I can't." "Keep moving." He felt for her arm. "Get your hands off me!" she cried furiously. He released her in amazement. "What's the matter with you? Don't lose your head, Jiz. I'm depending on you." "For what? I told you we had to plan... work out an escape... and now you've trapped us into this." "I was trapped myself. Dagenham was going to change my cell. No more Whisper Line for us. I had to, Jiz... and we're out, aren't we?" "Out where? Lost in Gouffre Martel. Looking for a river to drown in. You're a fool. Gully, and I'm an idiot for letting you trap me into this. Damn you! You pull everything down to your imbecile level and you've pulled me down, too. Run. Fight. Punch. That's all you know. Beat. Break. Blast. Destroy -- Gully!" Jisbella screamed. There was a clatter of loose stone in the darkness and her scream faded down and away to a heavy splash. Foyle heard the thrash of her body in water. He leaped forward, shouted, "Jiz!" and staggered over the edge of a precipice. He fell and struck the water flat with a stunning impact. The icy river enclosed him and he could not tell where the surface was. the swift current drag him against the chill slime of rocks, and then was home bubbling to the surface. He coughed and shouted. He heard Jisbella answer, her voice faint and muffled by the roaring torrent. He swam with the current, trying to overtake her. He shouted and heard her growing fainter and fainter. The roaring grew louder and abruptly he was shot down the hissing sheet of a waterfall. He plunged to the bottom of a deep pool and struggled once more to the surface. The whirling current entangled him with a cold body bracing itself against a smooth rock wall. "Jiz!" "Gully! Thank God!" They climg together for a moment while the water tore at them. "Gully..." Jisbella coughed. "It goes through here." "The river?" "Yes." He squirmed past her and felt the mouth of an imderwater timnel. The current was sucking them into it. "Hold on," Foyle wheezed. He explored to the left and the right. The walls of the pool were smooth, without handhold. "We can't climb out. Have to go through." "There's no air. Gully. No surface." "Couldn't be forever. We'll hold our breath." "It could be longer than we can hold our breath." "Have to gamble." "I can't do it." "You must. No other way. Pump your lungs. Hold on to me." They supported each other in the water, gasping for breath, filling their limgs. Foyle nudged Jisbella toward the underwater tunnel. "You go first. I'll be right behind... help you in case you get into any trouble." "Trouble!" Jisbella cried in a shaking voice. She submerged and permitted the current to pull her into the tunnel mouth. Foyle followed. The fierce waters drew them down, down, down, caroming from side to side of a tunnel that had been worn glass-smooth. Foyle swam close behind Jisbella, feeling her thrashing legs beat his head and shoulders. They tumbled through the tunnel until their lungs burst and their blind eyes started. Then there was a roaring again and a surface, and they could breathe. The glassy tunnel sides were replaced by jagged rocks. Foyle caught Jisbella's leg and seized a stone projection at the side of the river. "Got to climb out here!" he shouted. "What?" "Got to climb out. You hear that roaring up ahead? Rapids. Be torn to pieces. Out, Jiz." S HE was too weak to climb out of the water. He thrust her body up onto the rocks and followed. They lay on the dripping stones, too exhausted to speak. At last Foyle got wearily to his feet. "Have to keep on," he said. "Follow the river. Ready?" She could not answer; she could not protest. He pulled her up and they went stumbling through the darkness, trying to follow the bank of the torrent. The boulders they traversed were gigantic, standing like dolmens, heaped, jumbled, scattered into a labyrinth. They lurched and twisted through them and lost the river. They could hear it in the darkness; they could not get back to it. They could get nowhere. Foyle grunted in disgust. "We're lost again. Really lost this time. What are we going to do?" Jisbella began to cry. She made helpless yet furious sounds. Foyle dragged to a stop and sat down, drawing her down with him. "Maybe you're right, girl," he said wearily. "Maybe I am a damned fool. I got us trapped into this no-jaunte jam and we're licked." She didn't answer. "So much for brainwork. Hell of an education you gave me." He hesitated. "You think we ought to try back-tracking to the hospital?" "We'll never make it." "Guess not. Was just practicing my brain. Should we make a racket so they can track us by G-phone?" "They'd never hear iis... never find us in time." "We could make enough noise. You could knock me around a little. Be a pleasure for both of us." "Shut up." "What a mess!" He sagged back, cushioning his head on a tuft of soft grass. "At least I had a chance aboard Nomad. There was food and I could see where I was trying to go. I could -- " He broke off and sat bolt upright "Jiz!" "Don't talk so much." him and clawed up sod and tufts of grass. He thrust them into her face. "Smell this!" He laughed. "Taste it. It's grass, Jiz. Earth and grass. We must be out of Gouffre Martel." "What?" "It's night outside. Overcast. We came out of the caves and never knew it. We're out, Jiz!" They leaped to their feet, peering, listening, sniffing. The night was impenetrable, but they heard the soft sigh of night winds, and the sweet scent of green growing things came to their nostrils. Far in the distance, a dog barked. "Good Lord, Gully," Jisbella whispered incredulously. "You're right. We're out of Gouffre Martel. All we have to do is wait for dawn." She laughed. She flung her arms about him and kissed him. They babbled excitedly. They sank down on the soft grass again, weary, but unable to rest, eager, impatient, all life before them. "Hello, Gully, darling Gully. Hello, Gully, after all this time." "Hello, Jiz." "I told you we'd meet some day... some day soon. I told you, darling. And this is the day." "The night." "The night, so it is. But no more murmuring in the night along the Whisper Line. No more night for us. Gully dear." Suddenly they became aware that they were nude, lying close, no longer separated. Jisbella fell silent, but did not move. He clasped her almost angrily with a desire that was no less than hers. When dawn came, he saw that she was lovely, long and lean, with smoky red hair and a generous mouth. But when dawn came, she saw his face. a small general practice in Montana-Oregon which was legitimate and barely paid for the diesel oil he consumed each weekend, participating in the rallies for vintage tractors, which were the vogue in Sahara. His real income was earned in his Freak Factory in Trenton, to which Baker jaxmted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night. There, for enormous fees and no questions asked. Baker created monstrosities for the entertainment business and refashioned skin, muscle and bone for the underworld. Looking like a male midwife. Baker sat on the cool veranda of his Spokane mansion, listening to Jiz McQueen finish 'the story of her escape. "Once we hit the open country outside Gouffre Martel, it was easy. We found a shooting lodge, broke in and got some clothes. There were guns there, too -- with explosives. We took them and sold them to some locals. Then we bought rides to the nearest jaunte stage we had memorized." "Which?" "Biarritz." "Traveled by night, eh?" "Naturally." "Do anything about Foyle's face?" "We tried makeup, but that didn't work. The damned tattooing showed through. Then I bought a dark skin-surrogate and sprayed it on." "Did that do it?" "No," Jiz said angrily. "You have to keep your face quiet or else the surrogate cracks and peels. Foyle couldn't control himself. He never can. It was plain hell." "Where is he now?" "Sam Quatt's got him in tow." "I thought Sam retired from the rackets." "He did," Jisbella said grimly, "but he owes me a favor. He's minding Foyle. They're circulating on the jaunte to stay ahead of the cops." said musingly. "Haven't seen a tattoo case in all my life. Thought it was a dead art. I'd like to add him to my collection. Do you know I collect curios, Jiz?" "Everybody knows that zoo of yours in Trenton, Baker. It's ghastly." "I picked up a genuine fraternal cyst last month -- " Baker began enthusiastically. "I don't want to hear about it," she snapped. "And I don't want Foyle in your zoo. Can you get the muck off his face? Clean it up? He says they were stymied at General Hospital." "They haven't had my experience, dear. Hmm. I seem to remember reading something once somewhere. Now where did I -- ? Wait a minute." Baker stood up and disappeared with a faint pop. Jisbella paced the veranda fiercely until he reappeared twenty minutes later with a tattered book in his, hands and a triumphant expression on his face. "Got it," Baker said. "Saw it in the Caltech Library stacks three years ago. You may admire my memory." "To hell with your memory. What about his face?" Baker flipped the fragile pages and meditated. "Indigotin disulphonic acid. I may have to synthesize the acid, but..." He closed the text and nodded emphatically. "I can do it. Only it seems a pity to tamper with that face if it's as unique as you describe it." "Will you get off your disgusting hobby?" Jisbella exclaimed in exasperation. 'We're hot, understand? The first that ever broke out of Gouffre Martel. The cops won't rest until they've got us back. This is extra-special for them." "But "How long do you think we can stay out of Gouffre Martel with Foyle running around with that tattooed face?" "What are you so angry about?" "I'm not angry. I'm explaining. "He'd be happy in the zoo," Baker said persuasively. "And he'd be under cover there. I'd put him in the room next to the Cyclops girl -- " "The zoo is out. That's definite." "All right, Jiz. But why are you worried about Foyle being recaptured? It won't have anything to do with you." "Why should you worry about me worrying? I'm asking you to do a job. I'm paying for it." "It'll be expensive, dear, and I'm fond of you. I'm trying to save you money." "No, you're not." "Then I'm curious." "Then let's say I'm grateful. He helped me; now I'm helping him." He smiled cynically. "Then let's help him with a brand-new face." "No," she said in a flat, decisive voice. "I thought so. You want his face cleaned up because you're interested in his face." "Damn you. Baker, will you do the job or not?" "It'll cost five thousand." "Break that down." "A thousand to synthesize the acid. Three thousand for the surgery. And one thousand for -- " "Your curiosity?" "No, dear." Baker smiled again. "A thousand for the anesthetist." "Why anesthesia?" He reopened the ancient text. "It looks like a painful operation. You know how tattooing is done? They take a needle, dip it in dye, and punch it into the skin. To bleach that dye out. I'll have to go over his face with a needle, pore by pore, and punch in the indigotin disulphonic. It'll hurt." Jisbella's eyes flashed. "Can you do it without the dope?" "I can, Jiz, but Foyle -- " "Forget Foyle! I'm paying four thousand. Let him suffer." "Jiz! You don't know what you're letting him in for!" "I know. Let him suffer." She laughed so furiously that she startled Baker. "Let his face make him suffer, too." pied a round brick threestory building that had once been the roundhouse in a suburban railway yard before jaunting ended the need for suburban railroads. The ancient ivy-covered roundhouse was alongside the Trenton rocket pits, and the rear windows looked out on the mouths of the pits thrusting their anti-grav beams upward, and Baker's patients could amuse themselves watching the spaceships riding silently up and down the beams, their portholes blazing, recognition signals blinking, their hulls rippling with St. Elmo's fire as the atmosphere carried off the electrostatic charges built up in outer space. The basement floor of the factory contained Baker's zoo of anatomical curiosities, natural freaks and monsters bought and or abducted. Baker, like the rest of his world, was passionately devoted to these creatures and spent long hours with them, drinking in the spectacle of their distortions the way other men saturated themselves in the past with the beauty of art. The middle floor of the roundhouse contained bedrooms for post-operative patients, laboratories, staff rooms, and kitchens. The top floor contained the operating theaters. In one of the latter, a small room usually used for retinal experiments, Baker was at work on Foyle's face. Under a harsh battery of lamps, he bent over the operating table, working meticulously with a small steel hammer and a platinum needle. Baker was following the pattern of the old tattooing on Foyle's face, searching out each minute scar in the skin and driving the needle into it. Foyle's head was gripped in a clamp, but his body was unstrapped. His muscles writhed at each tap of the hammer, but he never moved his body. He gripped the sides of the operating table. "Control," he said through his teeth. "You wanted me to learn control, Jiz. I'm practicing." He winced. "Don't move," Baker ordered. "I'm playing it for laughs." "You're doing all right, son," Sam Quatt said, looking sick. He glanced sidelong at Jisbella's ferocious face. "What do you say, Jiz?" "He's learning." Baker continued dipping and hammering the needle. "Listen, Sam," Foyle mumbled, barely audible. "Jiz told me you own a private ship. Crime pays, huh?" "Yeah, crime pays. I got a little four-man job. Twin-jet. Kind they call a Saturn Weekender." "Why Saturn Weekender?" "Because a weekend on Saturn would last ninety days. She can carry food and fuel for three months." "Just right for me," Foyle muttered. himself. "Sam, I want to rent your ship." "What for?" "Something hot." "Legitimate?" "No." "Then it's not for me, son. I've lost my nerve. Jaunting the circuit with you, one step ahead of the cops, showed me that. I've retired for keeps. All I want is peace." "I'll pay fifty thousand. Don't ycu want fifty thousand? Ycu could spend Sundays counting it." The needle was hammering remorselessly. Foyle's body was twitching at each impact. "I already got fifty thousand. I got ten times that in cash in a bank in Vienna." Quatt reached into his pocket and took out a ring of glittering sonic keys. "Here's the key for the bank. This is the key to my place in Joburg. Twenty rooms, twenty no acres. This here's the key to my Weekender in Montauk. You ain't temptin' me, son. I quit while I was ahead. I'm jaunting back to Joburg and live happy for the rest of my life." "Let me have the Weekender. You can sit safe in Joburg and collect." "Collect when?" "When I get back." "You want my ship on trust and a promise to pay?" "A guarantee." Quatt snorted. "What guarantee?" "It's a salvage job in the asteroids. Ship named Nomad." "What's on the Nomad? What makes the salvage pay off?" "I don't know." "You're lying." "I don't know," Foyle insisted stubbornly. "But there has to be something valuable. Ask Jiz." "Listen," Quatt said, "I'm going to teach you something. We do business legitimate, see? We don't slash and scalp. We don't hold out. I know what's on your mind. You got something juicy, but you don't want to cut anybody else in on it. That's why  you're begging for favors." die, but, still gripped in the vice of his possession, was forced to repeat; "I don't know, Sam. Ask Jiz." "If you've got an honest deal, make an honest proposition," Quatt said angrily. "Don't come prowling around like a damned tattooed tiger figuring how to poimce. We're the only friends you got. Don't try to slash and scalp -- " Quatt was interrupted by a cry tom from Foyle's lips. "Hold still," Baker said in an abstracted voice. "When you twitch your face, I can't control the needle." He looked hard and long at Jisbella. Her lips trembled. Suddenly she opened her purse and took out two Cr # banknotes. She dropped them alongside the beaker of acid. "We'll wait outside," she said. She fainted in the hall. Quatt dragged her to a chair and found a nurse, who revived her with aromatic ammonia. She began to cry so violently that Quatt was frightened. He dismissed the nurse and hovered until the sobbing subsided. "What the hell has been going on?" he demanded. "What was that money supposed to mean?" "It was blood money." "For what?" "I don't want to talk about it." "Are you all right?" "No." "Anything I can do?" "No." There was a long pause. Then Jisbella ask in a weary vdice: "Are you going to make at deal with Gully?" "Me? Not a chance. It sounds like a thousand-to-one shot" "There has to be something valuable on the Nomad. Otfierwise Dagenham wouldn't have hounded Gully." "I'm still not interested. What about you?" "Not interested, either. I don't want any part of Gully Foyle again." After another pause, Quatt asked: "Can I go home now?" "You've had a rough time, haven't you, Sam?" "I think I died about a thousand times nurse-maidin' that tiger around the circuit." "I'm sorry, Sam." "I had it coming to me, after what I did to you when you were copped in Memphis." "Rimning out on me was only natural, Sam." Q uatt shrugged. 'We always do what's natural, only sometimes we shouldn't do it." "I know, Sam. I know." "And you spend the rest of your life trying to make up for it. I figure I'm lucky, Jiz. I was able to square it tonight. Can I go home now?" "Back to Joburg and the happy life?" "Uh-huh." "Don't leave me alone yet, Snm. I'm ashamed of myself." "What for?" "Cruelty to dumb animals." "What's that supposed to mean?" "Never mind. Hang around a little. Tell me about the happy life. What's so happy about it?" "Well," Quatt said reflectively, "it's having everything you wanted when you were a kid. If you can have eversthing at fifty that you wanted when you were fifteen, you're happy. Now when I was fifteen..." And Quatt went on and on describing the symbols, ambitions and frustrations of his boyhood which he was now satisfying, until Baker came out of the operating theater. "Finished?" Jisbella asked eagerly. "Finished. After I put him under, I was able to work faster. They're bandaging his face now. He'll be out in a few minutes." "Weak?" "Naturally." "How long before the bandages come off?" "Six or seven days." "His face'll be clean?" "I thought you weren't interested in his face, Jiz. It ought to be clean. I don't think I missed a spot of pigment. You may admire my skill, Jisbella -- also my sagacity. I'm going to back Foyle's salvage trip." t m Quatt laughed. "You taking a thousand-to-one gamble. Baker? I thought you were smart." "I am. He's in shock and he talked under the anesthesia. num bullion aboard the Nomad." face darkened and he turned on Jisbella. But she was also furious. "Don't look at me, Sam. I didn't know. He held out on me, too. Swore he never knew why Dagenham was hounding him." "It was Dagenham who told him," Baker said. "That was another thing he let slip." "I'll kill him," Jisbella snapped. "I'll tear him apart with my own two hands and you won't find anything inside his carcass but black rot. He'll be a curio for your zoo. Baker. I wish to God I'd let you have him!" I'HE door of the operating theater opened and two orderlies wheeled out a trolley on which Foyle lay, twitching slightly. His entire head was one white globe of bandage. "Is he conscious?" Quatt asked Baker. "I'll handle this," Jisbella burst out. "I'll talk to the son of a -- Foyle!" Foyle answered faintly through the mask of bandage. As Jisbella drew a savage breath for her onslaught, one wall of the hospital disappeared and there was a clap of thunder that knocked them to their feet. The entire building rocked from repeated explosions, and through the gaps in the walls, uniformed men began jaunting in from the streets outside, like rooks swooping into the gut of a battlefield. "Raid!" Baker shouted. "Christ!" Quatt shook. The vmiformed men were swarming all over the building, shouting: "Foyle! Foyle!" Baker disappeared with a pop. The attendants jaunted, too, deserting the trolley on which Foyle waved his arms and legs feebly, making faint soimds. "It's a goddam raid!" Quatt shook Jisbella. "Go, girl! Go!" "We can't leave Foyle!" "Wake up, girl! Go!" "No." Jisbella seized the trolley and ran it down the corridor. Quatt pounded alongside her. The roaring in the hospital grew louder: "Foyle! Foyle! Foyle!" "Leave him!" Quatt urged. "Let them have him." "No." "It's a lobo for us, girl, if they get us." "We can't run out on him." They skidded around a corner into a shrieking mob of postoperative patients, bird men with fluttering wings, mermaids dragging themselves along the floor like seals, hermaphrodites, giants, pygmies, two-headed twins, centaurs, and a mewling sphinx. They clawed at Jisbella and Quatt in terror. "Get him off the trolley!" Jisbella cried. Quatt yanked Foyle off the trolley. Foyle came to his feet and sagged. Jisbella took his arm and, between them, Sam and Jiz hauled him through a door into a ward filled with Baker's temporal freaks -- subjects with accelerated time-sense, darting about the ward with the lightning rapidity of humming birds and emitting piercing batlike squeals. "Jaunte him out, Sam." "After the way he tried to cross and scalp us?" "We can't ditch him, Sam. You ought to know that by now. Jaunte him out. Caister's place!" Che helped Quatt haul Foyle  to his shoulder. The temporal freaks seemed to fill 'the ward with shrieking streaks. The ward doors burst open. A dozen bolts from pneumatic guns whined through the ward, dropping the temporal patients in their gyrations. Quatt was slammed back against a wall, dropping Foyle. A black and blue bruise appeared on his temple. "Get out of here!" Quatt roared. "I'm done, Jiz!" "Sam!" she cried in panic. "I'm done. Can't jaimte. Go, girl!" Trying to shake off the concussion that prevented him from jaunting, Quatt straightened and charged forward, meeting the uniformed men who poured into the ward. Jisbella took Foyle's arm and dragged him out the back of the ward, through a pantry, a clinic, a laundry supply, and down flights of ancient stairs that buckled and threw up clouds of termite dust. They came into a victual cellar. Baker's zoo inmates had broken out of their cells in the chaos and were raiding the cellar like bees glutting themselves with honey in an attacked hive. A Cyclops girl was cramming her mcuth with handfuls of butter scooped from a tub. Her single eye above the bridge of her nose leered at them. Jisbella dragged Foyle through the victual cellar, found a bolted wooden door and kicked it open. They stumbled down a flight of crumbling steps and found themselves in what had once been a coal cellar. The concussions and roarings overhead sounded deeper and hollow. A chute slot on one side of the cellar was barred with an iron door held by iron clamps. Jisbella placed Foyle's hands on the clamps. Together they opened them and climbed out of the cellar through the coal chute. They were outside the Freak Factory, huddled against the rear wall. Before them were the Trenton Rocket pits, and as they gasped for breath, Jiz saw a freighter come sliding down an anti-grav beam into a waiting pit. Its portholes blazed and its recognition signals blinked like a lurid neon sign, illuminating the back wall of the hospital. A figure leaped from the roof of the hospital. It was Sam Quatt, attempting a desperate flight. He sailed out into space, arms and legs flailing, trying to reach the up-thrusting anti-grav beam of the nearest pit which might catch him in mid-flight and cushion his fall. His aim was perfect. Seventy feet above ground, he dropped squarely into the shaft of the beam. It was not in operation. He fell and was smashed on the edge of the pit. matically retaining her grip on Foyle's arm, she ran across the seamed concrete to Sam Quart's body. There she let go of Foyle and touched Quatt's head tenderly. Her fingers were stained with blood. Foyle tore at the bandage on his face, working eye-holes through the gauze. He muttered to himself, listening to Jisbella weep and heating the shouts behind him from Baker's factory. His hands fumbled at Quart's body, then arose and tried to pull Jisbella up. "Got to go," he croaked. "Got to get out. They've seen us." Jisbella never moved. Foyle mustered all his strength and pulled her upright. "Times Square," he said. "Jaunte, Jiz!" Uniformed figures appeared around them. Foyle shook Jisbella's arm and jaunted to Times Square, where masses of jaunters on the gigantic stage stared in amazement at the huge man with the white bandaged globe for a head. The stage was the size of two football fields. Foyle stared around dimly through the bandages. There was no sign of Jisbella, but she might be anywhere. He lifted his voice to a shout. "Montauk, Jiz! Montauk! The Folly Stage!" Foyle jaunted with a last thrust of energy and a prayer. An icy Nor'easter was blowing in from Block Island and sweeping brittle ice crystals across the stage on the site of a medieval ruin known as Fisher's Folly. There was another figure on the stage. Foyle tottered to it through the wind and the snow. It was Jisbella, looking frozen and lost. "Thank God," Foyle breathed almost reverently. "Thank God. Where does Sam keep his Weekender?" He shook Jisbella's elbow. "Where does Sam keep his Weekender?" "Sam's dead." "Where does he keep that Saturn Weekender?" "He's retired, Sam is. He's not scared any more." "Where's the ship, Jiz?" "In the yards down at the lighthouse." "Come on." "Where?"' "To Sam's ship!" Foyle thrust his big hand before Jisbella's eyes; a bunch of keys lay in his palm. "I took his keys. Come on." "He gave them to you?" "I took them off his body." "Ghoul!" She began to laugh. "Liar... Lecher... Tiger... Ghoul! The walking cancer... Gully Foyle." Nevertheless she followed him through the snow storm to Montauk Light. powdered wigs, four flamboyant women carr # ring pythons, a child with golden curls and a cynical mouth, a professional duelist in medieval armor, and a man wearing a hollow glass leg in which goldfish swam, Saul Dagenham said; "All right, the operation's finished. Call the rest off and tell them to report back to Courier headquarters promptly." The sideshow jaunted and disappeared. Regis Sheffield rubbed his eyes and asked: "What was that lunacy supposed to be, Dagenham?" "Disturbs your legal mind, eh? That was part of the cast of our confusion and catastrophe." Dagenham turned to Presteign and smiled his death's-head smile. "I'll return your fee if you like, Presteign." "You're quitting?" "No, I'm enjoying myself. I'll work for nothing. I've never tangled with a man of Foyle's caliber before. He's unique." "How?" Sheffield demanded. "I arranged for him to escape from Gouffre Martel. He escaped, all right -- but not my way. I tried to keep him out of police hands with confusion and catastrophe. He ducked the police -- but his own way. I tried to keep him out of Central Intelligence's hands with fun and fantasy. He stayed clear -- again his own way. I tried to detour him into a ship so he could make his try for Nomad. He wouldn't detour -- but he got his ship. He's heading out now." "You're following?" "Naturally." Dagenham hesitated. "But what was he doing in Baker's factory?" "Plastic surgery?" Sheffield suggested. "A new face?" "Not possible. Baker's good, but he can't do a plastic that quick, so it had to be minor surgery. Foyle was on his feet with his head bandaged." "The tattoo?" Presteign asked. Dagenham nodded and the smile left his lips. "That's what's worrying me. You realize, Presteign, that if Baker removed the tattooing, we'll never recognize Foyle?" "My dear Dagenham, his face won't be changed." "We've never seen his face, only the mask." "I haven't met the man at all," Sheffield said. "What's the mask like?" "Like a tiger. I was with Foyle for two long sessions. I ought to know his face by heart, but I don't. All I know is the tattooing." "Ridiculous," Sheffield stated bluntly. "No. Foyle has to be seen to be believed. However, it doesn't matter. He'll lead us out to Nomad. He'll lead us to your bullion and PyrE, Presteign. I'm almost sorry it's all over. As I said. I've been enjoying myself. He really is unique." IHE Saturn Weekender was built like a pleasure yacht; it was ample for four, spacious for two, but not spacious enough for Foyle and Jiz McQueen, Foyle slept in the main cabin; Jiz kept to herself in the stateroom. On the seventh day out, Jisbella spoke to Foyle for the second time: "Let's get those bandages off, Ghoul." Foyle left the galley, where he was sullenly heating coffee, and kicked back in freefall to the bathroom. He floated in after Jisbella and wedged himself into the alcove before the washbasin mirror. Jisbella braced herself on the basin, opened an ether capsule and began soaking and stripping the bandage off with hard, hating hands. The strips of gauze peeled slowly. "D'you think Baker did the job?" he asked in agonized suspense. No answer. "Could he have missed anywhere?" The stripping continued. "It stopped hurting two days ago." No answer. "For God's sake, Jiz! Is it still war between us?" Jisbella's hands stopped. She looked at Foyle's bandaged face with hatred. "What do you think?" "I asked you." "The answer is yes." "Why?" "You'll never vmderstand." "Make me understand." "Shut up." "If it's war, whyd you come with me?" "To get what's coming to Sam and me." "Money?" "Shut up." "You didn't have to come along. You could have trusted me." "Trusted you? You?" Jisbella laughed without mirth and recommenced the peeling. Foyle struck her hands away. "I'll do it myself." She lashed him across his bandaged face. "You'll do what I tell you. Be still. Ghoul!" Che continued unwinding the bandage. A strip came away, revealing Foyle's eyes. They stared at Jisbella, dark and brooding. The eyelids were clean; the bridge of the nose was clean. A strip came away from Foyle's chin. It was blue-black. Foyle, watching intently in the mirror, gasped. "He missed the chin!" he exclaimed. "Baker goofed -- " "Shut up," Jiz answered shortly. "That's whiskers." The innermost strips came away quickly, revealing cheeks, mouth and brow. The brow was clean. The cheeks under the eyes were clean. The rest was covered with a blue-black seven-day beard. Its "Shave," Jiz commanded. Foyle ran water, soaked his face, rubbed in depilatory and washed the beard off. Then he leaned close to the mirror and inspected himself, unaware that Jisbella's head was close to his as she, too, stared into the mirror. Not a mark of tattooing remained. Both sighed. "It's off," Foyle said. "All off. He did the job." Suddenly he leaned farther forward and inspected himself more closely. His face looked new to him, as new as it looked to Jisbella. "I'm changed. I don't remember looking like this. Did he do surgery on me, too?" "No," said Jisbella. "What's inside you changed it. That's the ghoul you're seeing, along with the liar and the cheat." "Lay off! Let me alone!" "Ghoul," Jisbella repeated, staring at Foyle's face with glowing eyes. "Liar. Cheat." He took her shoulders and shoved her out into the companionway. She went sailing down into the main lounge, caught a guide-bar and spun herself around. "Ghoul!" she cried. "Liar! Cheat! Ghoul! Lecher! Beast!" Foyle pushed off after her, seized her again and shook her violently. Her red hair burst out of the clip that gathered it at the nape of her neck and floated out like a mermaid's tresses. The burning expression on her face transformed Foyle's anger into passion. He enveloped her and buried his new face in her breast "Lecher," Jiz murmured. "Animal." "Jiz..." "The light," Jisbella whispered. Foyle reached out blindly toward the wall-switches and pressed buttons, and the Saturn Weekender drove on toward the asteroids with darkened portholes. cabin, drowsing, murmuring, touching tenderly for hours. "Poor Gully," Jisbella whispered. "Poor darling Gully..." "Not poor," he said. "Rich. Soon." "Yes, rich and empty. You've got nothing inside you. Gully dear. Nothing but hatred and revenge." "It's enough." "Enough for now. But later?" "Later? That depends." "It depends on your inside. Gully; what you get hold of." "No. My future depends on what I get rid of." "Gully, why did you hold out on me in Gouffre Martel? Why didn't you tell me you knew there was a fortune aboard Nomad?" "I couldn't." "Didn't you trust me?" "It wasn't that. I couldn't help myself. That's what's inside me -- what I have to get rid of." "Control again, Gully? You're driven." "Yes, I'm driven. I can't learn control, Jiz. I want to, but I can't." "Do you try?" "I do. God knows, I do. But then something happens and -- " "And then you pounce like a tiger." "If I could carry you in my pocket, Jiz, to warn me, stick a pin in me..." "Nobody can do it for you. Gully. You have to learn yourself." He digested that for a long moment. Then he spoke hesitantly: "Jiz, about the money..." "To hell with the money." "Can I hold you to that?" "Oh, Gully." "Not that I -- that I'm trying to hold out on you. If it wasn't for Vorga, I'd give you all you wanted. All! I'll give you every cent left over when I'm finished. But I'm scared, Jiz. Vorga is tough, what with Presteign and Dagenham and that lawyer Sheffield. I've got to hold on to every cent, Jiz. I'm afraid if I let you take one credit, that could make the difference between Vorga and I." "Me." "Me." He waited. "Well?" "You're possessed," she said wearily. "Not just a part of you, but all of you." "No." "Yes, Gully. All of you. It's just your skin making love to me. The rest is feeding on Vorga." At that moment, the radar alarm in the forward control cabin burst upon them, unwelcome and warning. "Destination zero," Foyle said, no longer relaxed, once more possessed. He shot forward into the control cabin. Co HE returned to the freak planetoid in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Sargasso planet manufactured of rock and wreckage and the spoils of space-disaster salvaged by the Scientific People. He returned to the home of J  seph and his People who had tattooed "N S mad" across his face and scientifically mated him to the girl named M # ira. Foyle overran the asteroid with the sudden fury of a Vandal raid. He came blasting out of space, braked with a spume of flame from the forward jets, and kicked the Weekender into a tight spin around the junkheap. They whirled around, passing the blackened ports, the big hatch from which J S seph and his Scientific People emerged to collect the drifting debris of space, the new crater Foyle had tom out of the side of the asteroid in his first plunge back to Terra. They whipped past the giant patchwork windows of the asteroid greenhouse and saw hundreds of faces peering out at them, tiny white dots mottled with tattooing. "So I didn't murder them," Foyle grunted. "They've pulled back into the asteroid. Probably living deep inside while they get the rest repaired." "Will you help them. Gully?" "Why?" "You did the damage." "I've got my own problems. But it's a relief. They won't be bothering us." He circled the asteroid once more and brought the Weekender down in the mouth of the new crater. "We'll work from here," he said. "Get into a suit, Jiz. Let's go! Let's go!" He drove her, mad with impatience; he drove himself. They corked up in their spacesuits, left the Weekender and went sprawling through the debris in the crater into the bleak heart of the asteroid. It was like squirming through the crawling tunnels of giant v#orm-holes. Foyle switched on his micro-wave suit-set and spoke to Jiz. "Be easy to get lost in here. Stay with me. Stay close." "Where are we going. Gully?" "After Nomad. I remember they were cementing her into the asteroid when I left. Don't remember where. Have to find her."  I "HE passages were airless and their progress was soundless, but the vibrations carried through metal and rock. They paused once for breath alongside the pitted hull of an ancient warship. As they leaned against it, they felt the vibrations of signals from within, a rhythmic knocking. Foyle smiled grimly. "That's J  seph and the Scientific People inside, requesting a few words. I'll give 'em an evasive answer." He pounded twice on the hull. "And now a personal message for my wife." His face darkened. He smote the hull angrily and turned away. "Come on. Let's go." But as they continued the search, the signals followed them. It became apparent that the outer periphery of the asteroid had been abandoned; the tribe had withdrawn to the center. Then, far down a shaft wrought of beaten aluminum, a hatch opened, light blazed forth, and J  seph appeared in an ancient soacesuit fashioned of glasscloth. He stood in the clumsy sack, his devil-face staring, his hands clutched in supplication, his devil-mouth making motions. Foyle stared at the old man, took a step toward him and then stopped, fists clenched, throat working as fury arose within him. And Jisbella, looking at Foyle, cried out in horror. The old tattooing had returned to his face, blood-red against the pallor of the skin, scarlet instead of black, truly a tiger mask in color as well as design. "Gully!" she cried. "Your face!" Foyle ignored her and stood glaring at J # seph while the old man made beseeching gestures, motioned to them to enter the interior of the asteroid, and then disappeared. Only then did Foyle turn to Jisbella and ask: "What? What did you say?" Through the clear globe of the helmet, she could see his face distinctly. And as the rage within Foyle died away, Jisbella saw the blood-red tattooing fade and disappear. "Did you see that joker?" Foyle said. "That was J S seph. Did you see him begging and pleading after what he did to me?... What did you say?" "Your face, Gully. I know what's happened to your face." "What are you talking about?" "You wanted something that would control you, Gully. Well, you've got it. Your face. It -- " Jisbella began to laugh hysterically. "You'll have to learn control now, Gully. You'll never be able to give way to emotion -- any emotion -- because -- " # UT he was staring past her and suddenly he shot up the aluminum shaft with a yell. He jerked to a stop before an open door and began to whoop in triumph. The door opened into a tool locker, four by four by nine. There were shelves in the locker and a jumble of old provisions and discarded containers. It was Foyle's coffin aboard the Nomad. J  seph and his People had succeeded in sealing the wreck into their asteroid before the holocaust of Foyle's escape had rendered further work impossible. The interior of the ship was virtually untouched. Foyle took Jisbella's arm and dragged her on a quick tour of the ship and finally to the purser's locker, where Foyle tore at the windrows of wreckage and debris until he disclosed a massive steel face, blank and impenetrable. "We've got a choice," he panted. "Either we tear the safe out of the hull and carry it back to Terra where we can work on it, or we open it here. I vote for here. Maybe Dagenham was lying. All depends on what tools Sam has in the Weekender, anyway. Come back to the ship, Jiz." He never noticed her silence and preoccupation until they were back aboard the Weekender and he had finished his urgent search for tools. "Nothing!" he snarled impatiently. "There isn't a hammer or a drill aboard. Nothing but gadgets for opening bottles and rations." Jisbella didn't answer. She didn't take her eyes off his face. "Why are you staring at me like that?" Foyle demanded. "I'm fascinated," Jisbella answered slowly. "By what?" "I'm going to show you something, Gully." "What?" "How much I despise you." Jisbella slapped him twice. Stung by the blows, Foyle started up in fury. Jisbella picked up a hand mirror and held it before him. "Look at yourself. Gully," she said quietly. "Look at your face." He looked. He saw the old tattoo marks flaming blood-red under the skin, turning his face into a scarlet and white tiger mask. He was so chilled by the appalling spectacle that his rage died at once -- and the mask disappeared just as swiftly. "Lord!" he whispered. "Lord, Lord!" "I had to make you lose your temper to show you," Jisbella said. "What's it mean, Jiz? Did Baker goof the job?" "I don't think so. I think you've got scars under the skin. Gully -- first from the tattooing and then from the bleaching. Needle scars. They don't show normally, but they do when your emotions take over and your heart begins pumping blood... when you're furious or frightened or passionate or possessed. Do you understand?" staring at his face, touching it in bewilderment. "You said you wished you could carry me in your pocket to stick pins in you when you lose control. You've got something better than that. Gully, or worse, poor darling. You've got your face." "No!" he said. "No!" "You can't ever lose control. Gully. You'll never be able to drink too much, eat too much, love too much, hate too much. You'll have to hold yourself with an iron grip." "No!" he insisted desperately. "It can be fixed. Baker can do it, or somebody else. I can't walk around afraid to feel anything because it'll turn me into a freak!" "I don't think this can be fixed. Gully." "Skin-graft." "The scars are too deep for graft. You'll never get rid of this stigmata. Gully. You'll have to learn to live with it." Foyle flung the mirror from him in sudden rage, and again the blood-red mask dared up under his skin. He lunged out of the main cabin to the main hatch, where he pulled his "spacesuit down and began to squirm into it. "Gully! Where are you going? What are you going to do?" "Get tools," he shouted. "Tools for the safe." "Where?" "In the asteroid. They've got dozens of warehouses stuffed with tools from wrecked ships. There have to be drills there; everything I need. Don't come with me. There may be trouble. How is my lousy face now? Showing it? I hope there is trouble!" He corked his suit and went into the asteroid. He found a hatch separating the inhabited core from the outer void. He banged on the door. He waited and banged again until at last the hatch was opened. Arms reached out and yanked him in, and the hatch was closed behind him. It had no airlock. He blinked in the light and scowled at J # seph and his innocent People gathering before him, their faces hideously decorated. And he knew that his own face must be flaming red and white, for he saw J S seph start, and he saw the devil-mouth shape the syllables : Nomad. crowd, scattering them brutally. He smashed J  seph with a backhand blow from his gaimtleted fist. He searched through the inhabited corridors, recognizing them dimly, and he came at last to the chamber, half natural cave, half antique hull, where the tools were stored. He rooted and ferreted, gathering up drills, diamond bits, acids, thermites, dynamite jellies, fiises. In the gently revolving asteroid, the gross weight of the equipment was reduced to less than a hundred pounds. He lumped it into a mass, roughly bound it together with cable and started out of the store-cave. J  seph and his Scientific People were waiting for him, like fleas waiting for a wolf. They darted at him and he battered through them, harried, delighted, savage. The armor of his spacesuit protected him from their attacks and he went down the passages searching for a hatch that would lead out into the void. Jisbella's voice came to him, tinny on the earphones and agitated: "Gully, can you hear me? This is Jiz. Gully, listen to me." "Go ahead." "Another ship came up two minutes ago. It's drifting on the other side of the asteroid." "What!" "It's marked with yellow and black colors, like a hornet" "Dagenham's colors!" "Then we've been followed." "Dagenham's probably had a fix on me ever since we busted out of Gouffre Martel. I was a fool not to think of it. We've got to work fast, Jiz. Cork up in a suit and meet me aboard Nomad. The purser's room. Go, girl!" "But, Gully-" "Sign off. They may be monitoring our waveband. Go!" He drove through the asteroid, reached a barred hatch, broke through the guard before it smashed it open and went into the void of the outer passages. The Scientific People were too desperate getting the hatch closed to stop him. But he knew they would follow him; they were raging. He hauled the bulk of his equipment through twists and turns to the wreck of the Nomad. Jisbella was waiting for him in the purser's room. Che made a move to turn on her micro-wave set and Foyle stopped her. He placed his helmet against hers and shouted: "No short-wave. They'll be monitoring and they'll locate us by DF. You can hear me like this, can't you?" She nodded. "All right. We've got maybe an hour before Dagenham finds us. We've got maybe an hour before J  seph and his mob come after us. We're in a hell of a jam. We've got to work fast. She nodded again. "No time to open the safe and transport the bullion." "If it's there." "Dagenham's here, isn't he? That's proof it's there. We'll have to cut the whole safe out of the Nomad and get it into the Weekender. Then we blast." "But-" "Just listen to me and do what I say. Go back to the Weekender. Empty it out. Jettison everything we don't need -- all supplies except emergency rations." "Why?" "Because I don't know how many tons this safe weighs and the ship may not be able to handle it when we come back to gravity. We've got to make allowances in advance. It'll mean a tough trip back, but it's worth it. Strip the ship. Fast! Go, girl. Go!" He pushed her away and, without another glance in her direction, attacked the safe. It was built into the structural steel of the hull, a massive metal ball some four feet in diameter. It was welded to the strakes and ribs of the Nomad at twelve different spots. Foyle hit each weld in turn with acids, drills, thermite and refrigerants. He was operating on the theory of structural strain -- to heat, free # e and etch the steel until its crystalline structure was distorted and its physical strength destroyed. He was fatiguing the metal. Jisbella returned and he realized that forty-five minutes had passed. He was dripping and shaking, but the globe of the safe hung free of the hull with a dozen rough knobs protruding from its surface. Foyle motioned urgently to Jisbella and she strained her weight against the safe with him. They could not budge its mass together. As they sank back in exhaustion and despair, a quick shadow eclipsed the sunlight pouring through the rents in the Nomad hull. They stared up. A spaceship was circling the asteroid less than a quarter of a mile off. against Jisbella's. "Dagenham," he gasped. "Looking for us. Probably got a crew down here combing for us, too. Soon as they talk to J # seph, they'll be here." "Oh, Gully!" "We've still got a chance. Maybe they won't spot Sam's Weekender until they've made a couple of revolutions. It's hidden in that crater. Maybe we can get the safe aboard in the meantime." "How?" "I don't know, damn it! I don't know." He pounded his fists together in frustration. "I'm finished." "Couldn't we blast it out?" "Blast? Bombs instead of brains? Is this Mental McQueen speaking?" "Listen. Blast it with something explosive. That would act like a rocket jet -- give it a thrust." "But then what? How do we get it into the ship, Jiz? Can't keep on blasting. Haven't got time." "No, we bring the ship to the safe." "What?" "Blast the safe straight out into space. Then bring the ship arovind and let the safe sail right into the main hatch. Like catching a ball in your hat. See?" He saw. "Hey, we can do it!"Foyle leaped to the pile of equipment and began sorting out sticks of dynamite gelatine, fuses and caps. "We'll have to use the shortwave. One of us stays with the safe; one of us pilots the ship. One with the safe talks the one with the ship into position. Right?" "Right. You'd better pilot. Gully. I'll do the talking." He nodded, fixing explosive to the face of the safe, attaching caps and fuses. Then he placed his helmet against hers. "Vacuum fuses, Jiz. Timed for two minus utes. When I give the word by short-wave, just pull off the fuse heads and get out of the way. Right?" "Right." "Stay with the safe. Once you've talked it into the ship, come right after it. Don't wait for anything. It's going to be close." He thumped her shoulder and returned to the Weekender. He left the outer hatch open, and the inner door of the airlock as well. The ship's air puffed out immediately. Airless and stripped by Jisbella, it looked dismal and forlorn. Foyle went directly to the controls, sat down and switched on his micro-wave set. "Stand by. I'm coming out now." the laterals for three seconds and then the forwards. The Weekender lifted easily, shaking debris from her back and sides like a whale surfacing. As she slid up and back, Foyle called: "Dynamite, Jiz! Now!" There was no blast; there was no flash. In the silence of space, a new crater opened in the asteroid below him and a flower of rubble sprang upward, rapidly outdistancing a dull steel ball that followed leisurely, turning in a lazy spin. "Ease off." Jisbella's voice came cold and competent over the earphones. "You're backing too fast. And incidentally, trouble's arrived." He braked with the rear jets, looking down in alarm. The surface of the asteroid was covered with a swarm of hornets. They were Dagenham's crew in yellow and black banded spacesuits. They were buzzing around a single figure in white that dodged and spun and eluded them. It was Jisbella. "Steady as you go," Jiz said quietly, although he could hear how hard she was breathing. "Ease off a little more... Roll a quarter turn." He obeyed her almost automatically, still watching the struggle below. The flank of the Weekender cut off any view of the trajectory of the safe as it approached him, but he could still see Jisbella and Dagenham's men. She ignited her suit rocket -- he saw the tiny spurt of flame shoot out from her back -- and came sailing up from the surface of the asteroid. A score of flames burst out from the backs of Dagenham's men as they followed. Half a dozen dropped the pursuit of Jisbella and came up after the Weekender. "It's going to be close. Gully." Jisbella was panting now, but her voice was still calm. "Dagenham's ship came down on the the same moment, the whiteother side, but they've probably suited figure broke out of the signaled him by now and he'll be cluster of yellow wasps. It came on his way. Hold your position, rocketing up to the Weekender, Gully. About ten seconds now..." hotly pursued. The hornets closed in and en"Come on, Jiz! Come on!" gulfed the tiny white suit. Foyle howled. "Come, girl! "Foyle! Can you hear me? Come!" Foyle!" Dagenham's voice came As Jisbella disappeared from in fuzzily and finally cleared, sight behind the flank of the "This is Dagenham calling on Weekender, Foyle set controls your band. Come in, Foyle!" and prepared for top acceleration. "Jiz! Jiz! Can you get clear "Foyle! Will you answer me? of them?" This is Dagenham speaking." "Hold your position. Gully... "Speak your head off, DagenThere she goes! It's a hole in one, ham," Foyle shouted. "Give me son!" the Weekender as the safe, moving slowly but massively, rammed into the main hatch. At the word when you're aboard, Jiz, and hold on." "I can't make it, Gully." "Come on, girl!" "I can't get aboard. The safe's blocking the hatch. It's wedged in halfway." "Jiz!" "There's no way in, I tell you," she cried in despair. "I'm blocked out." He stared around wildly. Dagenham's men were boarding the hull of the Weekender with the menacing purpose of professional raiders. Dagenham's ship was lifting over the brief horizon of the asteroid on a dead course for him. "Foyle, you're finished. You and the girl. But I'll offer a deal..." "Gully, help me!" "Forga," Foyle said in a strangled voice. He closed his eyes and tripped the controls. The tail jets roared. The Weekender shook and shuddered forward. It broke free of Dagenham's boarders, of Jisbella, of warnings and pleas. It pressed Foyle back into the pilot's chair with the blackout of lOG acceleration, an acceleration that was less pressing, less painful, less treacherous than the passion that drove him. And as he passed from sight, there rose up on his face the blood-red stigmata of his possesWith a heart of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander. With a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney, Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end -- Methinks it is no journey. Tom-a-Bedlam 'pHE old year soured as pestilence poisoned the planets. The war gained momentum and grew from a distant affair of romantic raids and skirmishes in space to a holocaust in the making. It soon became evident that the last of the World Wars was done and the first of the Solar Wars had begun. The belligerents slowly massed men and materiel for the havoc. The Outer Satellites introduced universal conscription and the Inner Planets perforce followed suit. Industries, trades, sciences, skills and professions were drafted; regulations and oppressions followed. The armies and navies requisitioned and commanded. Commerce obeyed, for this was the shooting phase of a commercial struggle. But populations rebelled and dr aftjaunting and labor-jaunting became critical problems. Spy scares and invasion scares spread. The hysterical became informers and lynchers. An ominous foreboding paralyzed every home from Baffin Island to the Falklands. The dying year was enlivened only by the advent of the Four Mile Circus. This was the popular nickname for the grotesque entourage of Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, a wealthy young buffoon from the largest of the asteroids. Fourmyle of Ceres was enormously rich; he was also enormously amusing. He was the classic nouveau riche of all time. His entourage was a cross between a country circus and the comic court of a Bulgarian kinglet, as witness this typical arrival in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Early in the morning, a lawyer, wearing the stovepipe hat of a legal clan, appeared with a list of camp sites in his hand and a small fortune in his pocket. He settled on a four-acre meadow facing Lake Michigan and rented it for an exorbitant fee. He was followed by a gang of surveyors from the Mason  Dixon clan. In twenty minutes, the surveyors had laid out a camp site and the word had spread that the Four Mile Circus was arriving. Locals from Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota came to watch the fun. Twenty roustabouts jaunted in, each carrying a tent-pack on his back. There was a mighty overture of bawled orders, shouts, curses, and the tortured scream of compressed air. Twenty giant tents ballooned upward, their lac and latex surfaces gleaming as they dried in the winter sun. The spectators cheered. drifted down and hovered over a giant trampoline. Its belly opened and a cascade of furnishings came down. Servants, valets, chefs and waiters jaunted in. They furnished and decorated the tents. The kitchens began smoking and the odor of frying, broiling and baking pervaded the camp. Fourmyle's private police were already on duty, patrolling the four acres, keeping back the huge crowd of spectators. Then by plane, by car, by bus, by truck, by bike and by jaunte came Fourmyle's entourage. Librarians and books, scientists and laboratories, philosophers, poets, athletes. Racks of swords and sabers were set up and judo mats and a boxing ring. A fifty-foot pool was sunk in the ground and filled by pump from the lake. An interesting altercation arose between two beefy athletes as to whether the pool should be warmed for swimming or frozen for skating. Musicians, actors, jugglers and acrobats arrived. The uproar became deafening. A crew of mechanics melted a grease-pit and began revving up Fourmyle's collection of vintage diesel harvesters. Last of all came the camp followers: wives, daughters, mistresses, whores, beggars, chiselers and grafters. At noon, Fourmyle of Ceres arrived with a display of conspicuous transportation so outlandish that it had been known to make seven-year melancholics laugh. A giant amphibian thrummed up from the south and landed on the lake. A landing barge emerged from the plane and droned across the water to the shore. Its forward wall banged down into a drawbridge and out came a #th century staff car. Wonder piled on wonder for the delighted spectators, for the staff car drove a matter of twenty yards to the center of camp and then stopped. "What can possibly come next? Bike?" "No, roller-skates." "He'll come out on a pogostick."  wildest speculations. The muzzle of a circus cannon thrust up from the staff car. There was the bang of a black-powder explosion and Fourmyle of Ceres was shot out of the cannon in a graceful arc to the very door of his tent, where he was caught in a net by four valets. The applause that greeted him could be heard for six miles. Fourmyle climbed onto his valets' shoulders and motioned for silence. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," Fourmyle began earnestly, "Lend me your ears. Shakespeare. #-#. Damn!" Four white doves shook themselves out of Fourmyle's sleeves and fluttered away. He regarded them with astonishment, then continued. "Greetings, salutations, bonjour, bon ton, bon vivant, bon voyage, bon -- What the hell?" Fourmyle's pockets caught fire and rocketed forth Roman candles. He tried to put himself out. Streamers and confetti burst from him. "Friends... Shut up! I'll get this speech straight. Quiet! Friends -- " Fourmyle looked down at himself in dismay. His clothes were melting away, revealing lurid scarlet underwear. "Kleinmann!" he bellowed angrily. "Kleinmann! What's happened to your hypno-training?" A hairy head thrust out of a tent. "You stoodied for dis sbeech last night, Fourmyle?" "You bet I stoodied. For two hours, I stoodied. Never took my head out of the hypno-oven. Kleinmann on Prestidigitation." "No, no, no!" the hairy man bawled. "How many times must I tell you? Prestidigitation is not sbeech-making. Is magic. Dutnbkopf! You haff the wrong hypnosis taken!" The scarlet underwear began melting. Fourmyle toppled from the shoulders of his shaking valets and disappeared within his tent. There was a roar of laughter and cheering and the Four Mile Circus ripped into high gear. The kitchens sizzled and smoked. There was a perpetuity of eating and drinking. The music never stopped. The vaudeville never ceased. Inside his tent, Fourmyle changed his clothes, changed his mind, changed again, undressed again, kicked his valets and called for his tailor in a bastard tongue of French, Mayfair and affectation. Halfway into a new suit, he recollected he had neglected to bathe. He slapped his tailor, ordered ten gallons of scent to be decanted into the pool, and was stricken with poetic inspiration. He summoned his resident poet. "Take this down," Fourmyle commanded. "Le roi est mort, les -- Wait. What rhymes with Moon?" "June," his poet suggested. "Croon, soon, dune, loon, noon, rune, tune, boon..." "I forgot my experiment!" Fourmyle exclaimed. "Dr. Bohunl Dr. Bohun!" Half-naked, he rushed pell-mell into the laboratory, where he blew himself and Dr. Bohun, his resident chemist, halfway across the tent. As the chemist attempted to raise himself from the floor, he found himself seized in a most painful and embarrassing stranglehold. "Nogouchi!" Fourmyle shouted. "Hi, Nogouchi! I just invented a new judo hold!" focating chemist and jaunted to the judo mat, where the little Japanese inspected the hold and shook his head. "No, please." He hissed politely. "Pressure on windpipe are not perpetually lethal. I show you, please." He seized the dazed chemist, whirled him and deposited him on the mat in a position of unbreakable self-strangulation. "You observe, please, Fourmyle?" But Fourmyle was in the library bludgeoning his librarian over the head with Bloch's Das Sexual Leben (eight pounds, nine ounces) because that unhappy man could produce no text on the manufacture of perpetualmotion machines. He rushed to his physics laboratory, where he destroyed an expensive chronometer to experiment with cog wheels, jaunted to the bandstand, where he seized a baton and led the orchestra into confusion, put on skates and fell into the scented swimming pool, was hauled out, swearing fulminously at the lack of ice. "I wish to commute with myself," Fourmyle said, kicking his valets in all directions. He was snoring before the last of them limped to the door and closed it behind him. The snoring stopped and Foyle arose. "That ought to hold them for today," he muttered, and went into his dressing room. He stood before a mirror, took a deep breath and held it, meanwhile watching his face. At the expiration of one minute, it was still unmarred. He continued to hold his breath, maintaining rigid control over pulse and muscle, mastering the strain with iron calm. At two minutes and twenty seconds, the stigmata appeared, blood-red. Foyle let out his breath. The tiger mask faded. "Better," he murmured. "Much better. The old fakir was right -- Yoga is the answer. Control. Pulse, breath, bowels, brains." He stripped and examined his body. He was in magnificent condition, but his skin still showed delicate silver seams in a network from neck to ankles. It looked as though someone had carved an outline of the nervous system into Foyle's flesh. The silver seams were the scars of an operation that had not yet faded. Cr # bribe to the chief surgeon of the Mars Commando Brigade and had transformed Foyle into an extraordinary fighting machine. Every nerve plexus had been rewired, microscopic transistors and transformers had been buried in muscle and bone, a minute platinum outlet showed at the base of his spine. To this, Foyle affixed a power-pack the size of a pea and switched it on. His body began an internal electronic vibration that was almost mechanical. "More machine than man," he thought. He dressed, rejected the extravagant apparel of Fourmyle of Ceres for the anonymous black coverall of action. He jaunted to Robin Wednesbury's apartment in the lonely building amidst the Wisconsin pines. It was the real reason for the advent of the Four Mile Circus in Green Bay. He jaunted and arrived in darkness and empty space and immediately plummeted down. "Wrong coordinates?" he thought. "Misjaunted?" The broken end of a rafter dealt him a bruising blow and he landed heavily on a shattered floor upon the putrefying remains of a corpse. Foyle leaped up in calm revulsion. He pressed hard with his tongue against his right upper first molar. The operation that had transformed half his body into an electronic machine had set the control switchboard in his teeth. Foyle pressed a tooth with his tongue and the peripheral cells of his retina were excited into emitting a soft light. He looked down two pale beams at the corpse of a man. The corpse lay in the apartment below Robin Wednesbury's flat. It was gutted. Foyle looked up. Above him was a ten-foot hole where the floor of Robin's living room had been. The entire building stank of fire, smoke and rot. "Jacked," Foyle said softly. "This place has been jacked. What happened?" The jaunting age had crystallized the hoboes, tramps and vagabonds of the world into a new class. They followed the night from east to west, always in darkness, always in search of loot, the leavings of disaster, carrion. If earthquake shattered a warehouse, they were jacking it the following night. If fire opened a house or explosion split the defenses of a shop, they jaunted in and scavenged. They called themselves Jack-jaunters. They were jackals. Foyle climbed up through the wreckage to the corridor on the floor above. The Jack-jaunters had a camp there. A whole calf roasted before a fire which sparked up to the sky through a gash in the roof. There were a dozen men and three women around the fire, rough, dangerous, jabbering in the rhyming slang of the jackals. They were dressed in mismatched clothes and drinking potato beer from champagne glasses. A n ominous growl of anger and terror met Foyle's appearance as the big man in black came up through the rubble, his intent eyes emitting pale beams of light. Calmly, he strode through the rising mob to the entrance of Robin Wednesbury's flat. His iron control gave him an air of detachment. "If she's dead," he thought, "I'm finished. I've got to use her. But if she's dead..." Robin's apartment was gutted like the rest of the building. The living room was an oval of floor around the jagged hole in the center. Foyle searched for a body. Two men and a woman were in the bed in the bedroom. The men cursed. The woman shrieked at the apparition. The men hurled themselves at Foyle. He backed a step and pressed his tongue against his upper incisors. Neural circuits buzzed and every sense and response in his body was accelerated by a ratio of five. The effect' was an instantaneous reduction of the external world to extreme slow motion. Sound became a deep garble. Color 'shifted down the spectrum toward the red. The two assailants seemed to float toward him with dreamlike languor. To the rest of the world, Foyle became a blur of action. He sidestepped the blow inching toward him, walked around the man, raised him and threw him toward the crater in the living room. He threw the second man after the first jackal. To Foyle's accelerated senses, their bodies seemed to drift slowly, still in mid-stride, fists inching forward, open mouths slowly burbling heavy clotted sounds. Foyle whipped around to the woman cowering in the bed. "Wsthrabdy?" the blur asked. The woman shrieked. Foyle pressed his upper incisors again, cutting off the acceleration. The external world shook itself out of slow motion back to normal. Sound and color leaped up the spectrum and the two jackals disappeared through the crater and crashed into the apartment below. "Was there a body?" Foyle repeated gently. " A beautiful Negro girl?" The woman was unintelligible. He took her by the hair and shook her, then hurled her through the crater in the living room floor. His search for a clue to Robin's fate was interrupted by the mob from the hall. They carried torches and makeshift weapons. The Jack-jaimters were not professional killers. They only worried defenseless prey to death. "Don't bother me," Foyle warned quietly, ferreting intently through closets. a ruffian in a mink suit and a tricorne hat, and inspired by the curses percolating up from the floor below. The man in the tricorne threw a torch at Foyle. Foyle accelerated again and the Jack-jaunters were transformed into living statues. Foyle picked up half a chair and calmly clubbed the slow-motion figures. They remained upright. He thrust the man in the tricorne down on the floor and knelt on him. Then he decelerated. Again the external world came to life. The jackals dropped in their tracks, pole-axed. The man in the tricorne hat and mink suit roared. "Was there a body in here?" Foyle asked. "Negro girl. Very tall. Very beautiful." The man writhed and attempted to gouge Foyle's eyes. "You keep track of bodies," Foyle said. "Some of you Jacks like dead girls better than live here?" ones. Did you find her body in Receiving no satisfactory answer, he picked up a torch and set fire to the mink suit. He followed the Jack-jaunter into the living room and watched him with detached interest. The man howled, toppled over the edge of the crater and flamed down into the darkness below. "Was there a body?" Foyle called down. He shook his head at the answer. "Not very deft," he grumbled at himself. "I've got to learn how to extract information. Dagenham could teach me a thing or two." He poured water down on the man and put out the fire. Then he switched off his electronic system and jaunted. He appeared in Green Bay, smelling so abominably of singed hair and scorched skin that he entered the local Presteign shop (jewels, perfumes, cosmetics, ionics  surrogates) to buy a deodorant. But the local Mr. Presto had evidently witnessed the arrival of the Four Mile Circus and recognized him. Foyle at once snapped out of his detached intensity and became the outlandish Fourmyle of Ceres. He clowned and cavorted, bought a twelve-ounce flagon of Euge No. # at Cr # an ounce, dabbed himself delicately and tossed the bottle into the street to the edification and delight of Mr. Presto. The Record Clerk at the County Record office was unaware of Foyle's identity and obdurate and uncompromising. "No, sir. County Records Are not Viewed Without Proper Court Order for Sufficient Cause. That Must Be Final." Foyle examined him keenly and without rancor. "Asthenic type," he decided. "Slender, longboned, no strength. Epileptoid character. Self-centered, pedantic, single-minded, shallow. Not bribable; too repressed and straitlaced. But repression's the chink in his armor." from the Four Mile Circus waylaid the Record Clerk. They were of the female persuasion and richly endowed with vice. Two hours later, the Record Clerk, dazed by flesh and the devil, delivered up his information. The apartment building had been opened to Jack-jaunting by a gas explosion two weeks earlier. All tenants had been forced to move. Robin Wednesbury was in protective confinement in Mercy Hospital near the Iron Mountain Proving Grounds. "Protective confinement?" Foyle wondered. "What for? What's she done?" It took thirty minutes to organize a Christmas Party in the Four Mile Circus. It was made up of musicians, singers, actors and rabble who knew the Iron Mountain coordinates. Led by their chief buffoon, they jatinted up with music, fireworks, firewater, and gifts. They paraded through the town spreading largess and laughter. They blundered into the radar field of the Proving Ground protection system and were driven out with laughter. Forumyle of Ceres, dressed as Santa Claus, scattering banknotes from a huge sack over his shoulder and leaping in agony as the induction field of the protection system burned his bottom, made an entrancing spectacle. They burst into Mercy Hospital, following Santa Claus, who roared and cavorted with the detached calm of a solemn elephant. He kissed the nurses, made drunk the attendants, pestered the patients with gifts, littered the corridors with money, and abruptly disappeared when the happy rioting reached such heights that the police had to be called. Much later, it was discovered that a patient had disappeared, too, despite the fact that she had been under sedation and was incapable of jaunting. As a matter of fact, she had departed from the hospital inside Santa's sack. brought along for that purpose. Foyle jaunted with her over his shoulder to the hospital grounds. There, in a quiet grove of pines under a frosty sky, he helped her out of the sack. She wore severe white hospital pajamas and was beautiful. He removed his own costume, watching the girl intently, waiting to see if she would recognize and remember him. She was alarmed and confused; her telesending was like heatlightning: "Who is he? What's happened? The music. The uproar. Why kidnaped in a sack? Drunks slurring on trombones. 'Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.' Adeste Fidelis. What's he want from me? Who is he?" "I'm Fourmyle of Ceres," Foyle said. Who? Fourmyle " of -- ? Yes, of course. The buffoon. The bourgeoise gentilhomme. Vulgarity. Imbecility. Obscenity. The Four Mile Circus. My God! Am I telesending? Can you hear me?" "I hear you. Miss Wednesbury," Foyle said quietly. "What have you done? Why? What do you want with me? I -- " "I want you to look at me." "Bonjour, Madame. Into my sack, Madame. Ecco! Look at me. I'm looking," Robin said, trying to control the jangle of her thoughts. She gazed up into his face without recognition. "Itfs a face. I've seen so many like it. The features of masculinity. Everyman in rut. Will God never save us from brute desire?" "My rutting season's over, Miss Wednesbury." "I'm sorry you heard that. I'm terrified, naturally. I -- You know me?" "I know you." "We've met before?" She scrutinized him closely, but still without recognition. Deep down inside Foyle there was a surge of triumph. If this woman of all women failed to remember him, he was safe, provided he kept blood and brains and face under control. "We've never met," he said. "I've heard of you. I want something from you. That's why we're here -- to talk about it. If you don't like my offer, you can go back to the hospital." "You want something? But I've got nothing. Nothing's left but shame and -- Why did the suicide fail? Why couldn't I-" "So that's it?" Foyle interruoted softly. "You tried to commit suicide, eh? That accounts for the gas explosion that opened the building, and your protective confinement. Attempted suicide. Why weren't you hurt in the explosion?" "So many were hurt. So many died. But I didn't. I'm imlucky, I suppose. I've been unlucky all my life." "Why suicide?" "I'm tired. I'm finished. I've lost everything... I'm on the army graylist... suspected, watched, reported. No job. No family. No -- Why suicide? Dear God, what else but suicide?" "You can work for me." "I can... What did you say?" "I want you to work for me, Miss Wednesbury." HE burst into hysterical laughter. "For you? Another camp-follower in the Circus? Work for you, Fourmyle?" "You've got sex on the brain," he said gently. "I'm not looking for tarts. They look for me, as a rule." "I'm sorry. I'm obsessed by the brute who destroyed me. I -- I'll try to make sense." Robin calmed herself. "Let me understand you. You've taken me out of the hospital to offer me a job. You've heard of me. That means you want something special. My specialty is telesending." "And charm." "What?" "I want to buy your charm, Miss Wednesbury." "I don't understand." "Why," Foyle said mildly, "it ought to be simple for you. I'm the buffoon. I'm vulgarity, imbecility, obscenity. That's got to stop. I want you to be my social secretary." "You expect me to believe that? You could hire a hundred social secretaries... a thousand, with your money. You expect me to believe that I'm the only one for you? That you had to kidnap me from protective confinement to get me?" Foyle nodded. "That's right, there are thousands, but only one that can telesend." "What's that got to do with it?" "You're going to be the ventriloquist; I'm going to be your dummy. I don't know the upper classes; you do. They have their own talk, their own jokes, their own manners. If a man wants to be accepted by them, he's got to talk their language. I can't, but you can. You'll talk for me, through my mouth." "But you could learn." "It would take too long. And charm can't be learned. I want to buy your charm. Miss Wednesbury. Now about salary -- I'll pay you a thousand a month." Her eyes widened. "You're very generous, Fourmyle." "I'll clean up this suicide charge for you." "You're very kind." "And I'll guarantee to get you off the army graylist. You'll be back on the whitelist by the time you finish working for me. You can begin with a clean slate and a bonus. You can start living again." then she began to cry. She sobbed and shook and Foyle had to steady her. "Well?" he asked. "Will you do it?" She nodded. "You're so kind. It's -- I'm not used to kindness any more." The dull concussion of a distant explosion made Foyle stiffen. "Christ!" he exclaimed in sudden panic. "Another Blue Jaunte. I-" "No," Robin said. "I don't know what Blue Jaunte is, but that's the Proving Ground. They-" She looked up at Foyle's face and screamed. The unexpected shock of the explosion and the vivid chain of associations had wrenched loose his iron control. The blood-red scars of tattooing showed under his skin. She stared at him in horror, still screaming. He touched his face once, then leaped forward, and gagged her. Once again he had hold of himself. "It shows, eh?" he said with a ghastly smile. "Thought I was back in Gouffre Martel listening to a Blue Jaunte. Yes, I'm Foyle. The brute who destroyed you. You had to know, sooner or later. but I'd hoped it would be later. I'm Foyle, back again. Will you be quiet and listen to me?" She shook her head frantically, trying to struggle out of his grasp. With detached calm, he punched her jaw. Robin sagged. Foyle picked her up, wrapped her in his coat and held her in his arms, waiting for consciousness to return. When he saw her eyelids flutter, he spoke again. "Don't move or you'll be sick. Maybe I didn't pull that punch enough." "Brute... Beast..." "I could do this the wrong way," he said. "I could blackmail you. I know your mother and sisters are on Callisto, that you're classed as an alien belligerent by association. That puts you on the blacklist, ipso facto. Is that right? Ipso facto. 'By the very fact.' Latin. You can't trust hypnolearning. I could point out that all I have to do is send anonymous information to Central Intelligence and you wouldn't be just suspect any more. They'd be ripping information out of you inside twelve hours." I'm not going to do it that way. I'm going to tell you the truth because I want to turn you into a partner. Your mother's in the Inner Planets. She's in the Inner Planets," he repeated. "She may be right here on Earth." "Safe?" she whispered. "I don't know." "Put me down." "You're cold." "Put me down." He set her on her feet. "You destroyed me once," she said in choked tones. "Are you trying to destroy me again?" "No. Will you listen?" She nodded. "I was lost in space. I was dead and rotting for six months. A ship came up that could have saved me. It passed me by. It let me die. A ship named Vorga. VoTa -- T: #. Does that mean anything to you?" "No." "Jiz McQueen -- A friend of mine who's dead now once told me to find out why I was left to rot. That would be the answer to who gave the order. So I started buying information about Vora. Any information." "What's that to do with my mother?" "Just listen. Information was tough to buy. The Vora records were removed from the Bo'ness  Uig files. I managed to locate three names... three out of a standard crew of four officers and twelve men. Nobody knew anything or nobody would talk. And I found this." Foyle took a silver locket from his pocket and handed it to Robin. "It was pawned by some spaceman off the Vora. That's all I could find out." Robin uttered a cry and opened the locket with trembling fingers. Inside were her picture and the pictures of two other girls. As the locket was opened, the #D photos smiled and whispered: "Love from Robin, Mama... Love from Holly, Mama... Love from Wendy, Mama." "It is my mother's," Robin wept. "It... She... For pity's sake, where is she? What hapipened?" "I don't know," Foyle said steadily. "But I can guess. I think your mother got out of that concentration camp... one way or another." "And my sisters, too. She'd never leave them." "Maybe your sisters, too. I think Vora was running refugees out of Callisto. Your family paid with money and jewelry to get aboard and be taken to the Inner Planets. That's how a spaceman off the Vorga came to pawn this locket." "Then where are they?" know. Maybe they were dumped on Mars or Venus. Most probably they were sold to a labor camp on the Moon, which is why they haven't been able to get in touch with you. I don't khditf wliw# ttey w but Votia. can tell IB." "Are you lying, tricking me?" "Is that locket a lie? I'm telling the truth -- all the truth I know. I want to find out why they left me to die and who gave the order. The man who gave the order will know where your mother and sisters are. He'll tell you... before I kill him. He'll have plenty of time. He'll be a long time dying." Robin looked at him in horror. The passion that gripped him was making his face once again show the scarlet stigmata. He looked like a tiger closing in for the kill. "I've got a fortune to spend. Never mind how I got it. I've got three months to finish the job. I've learned enough math to compute the probabilities. Three months is the outside before they figure that Fourmyle of Ceres is Gully Foyle. Ninety days. From Hew Year's to All Fools. Will you join me?" "You?" Robin cried with loathing. "Join you?" camouflage. Nobody ever su pects a clown. But I've been studying, learning, preparing for the finish. All I need now is you." "Why?" "I don't know where the hunt is going to lead me -- society or slums. I've got to be prepared for both. The slums I can handle alone; I haven't forgotten the gutter. But I need you for society. Will you come in with me?" "You're hurting me." Robin wrenched her arm out of Foyle's grasp. "Sorry. I lose control when I think aut Vorga. Will you help me find Vorga and your family?" "I hate you," Robin burst out. "I despise you. You're rotten. You destroy eversihing you touch. Someday I'll pay you back." "But we work together from New Year's to All Fools?" "We work together," she said venomously. Continued Next Month # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania X-I Each Tuesday nite on Radiol Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X., X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N. B.C. Science-Fiction Best-Sellers -- worth up to # in publishers editions -- are yours for only I when you join the new Science-Fiction Book Club. All full-size, full-length, handsomely bound editions! All crammed with rocket-fast reading thrills that take you soaring through time and space. All masterworks of Science-Fiction (or science facts) by top-notch -- Brand-new # Fifth Annual Edition. Pub. ed. #. See Full Description on other side.) diabolical little men from Mars land on earth and create complete chaos -- until Luke Devereaux gets an idea for ending the scourge. But will it work? Pub, ed, #.) 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(Offer good in U. S.  Canada) See Other Side for Details A whisiu'r tlit'ir i)l;m to steal a mysterious in ill iondol la r tnasuro off the moon. You are with them as they zoom throuj'li sinice to the moon. You wateh tlunii load their fabulous moon eacht on tin spa-ship for tin return flijrht to Earth. Tin two partners in erinn pause before boardina: the ship. One whijis out a ffun. Yoii htar a de.ab'uiny: roar as one of the moon thives pitches forward into a pool of his own blood! Earth headlines scream out the news of the "First Murd(r on the Moon !" The Earth police know who the killer is but they can't touch him. No jury could convict him. He's committed the "perfect" crime -- with NO alibi ! Science-Fiction murder!" It's just tales of tomorrow by the top writers of toda.y in this lirand-new #dd anthology of "The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction." And it is Just sellers -- worth up to #. #o -- that can be yours ftr only # on this amazing offer! See Coupon on Other Side.) DECEMBER # # OaUxy m  The Cr ! a I Native Problem ) By  I  o i r?  X By l f Continuing K MY ir By CD ,  n # . o Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation. Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way, Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Flum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" 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Ileilet el In I II ot A min . n I afeyelte lledlo Unlit All m etl (in niuihw#id( M Imoiii I Hle(e Colleun Ohlalioina A x m D uke UnlveidMy Albert Einstein Medical College Nnvnl Research Laboratories Hoard of I ducat ion I ecumsah, Nelirnska Mni eh field Hchools I oi Angeles Publlo Hchools lefferson Union High School Kansas Hlato University Cm el (tables Hen I or H. S. Courtlnml Jr. High #chool llell telephone Laboratories Here's a wonderful kit that gives you a fascinating introduction to the logic machines of our modern age ! The devices you can build test intelligence, code and decode, count, play Tic-tac-toe, solve problems and now compose music ! Converts from binary to decimal -- reasons in syllogisms -- computes ! Build any one of # exciting electric brain machines in just a few hours by following the clear-cut, step-by-step directions toy. 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X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N. B. C. ealaxy by Robert Sbeckley by Harry Warner, Jr. by E. C. Tubb by Alfred B ester by Willy Ley #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. "D emembering my editorials proving There Are Aliens Among Us, an alarmed reader sent me an article from Travel Magazine with the shaky message: "The plot thickens!!!" In the article, Dolph Sharp declares: "I first began to wonder why my luggage weighed more on the return trip only after it had happened the fifth time in a row. I was being checked through the airport on my way home and the clerk looked up from weighing my one bag. "'You're three pounds over.'" "'What!' I cried. I am given to crying under such circumstances. The bag had only weighed # pounds on my going trip. I bought a trinket or two that couldn't weigh more than sixseven ounces, but on the other hand I had lost a pair of socks, a necktie and one shoe. "If anything, the balance should have been in my favor." Naturally, it wasn't. Checking with other travelers, Sharp found they had the same puzzling experiences each time they came back on a plane. Unfortunately, his attempts to guess how come only eliminated possibilities: that the airlines tampered with their scales; that luggage could "somehow trap and preserve and expand with fumes and steams and essences" so that a suitcase could "retain the New Yorkness of New York;" the opinion of a physicist that one generally has clothes cleaned before a trip, not on returning; and, with a note of despair, Sharp asks the reader for the answer. I doubt if he'll get it from them; they have not been collecting data as I have done. The problem is much more confusing than he thinks, for we are dealing with two phenomena: gain and loss. To add to Sharp's half of the question: Overweight people will testify that a single bite of something fattening adds a pound or more. According to logic, you should weigh, dressed, exactly as much as your stripped weight plus the weight of your clothing. Tests by independent laboratories, however, show that you weigh more dressed. Unless a large roast (bird or meat) is eaten at one sitting, it gains weight each day, regardless of the number of sandwiches, salads, hash and other leftover (Continued on page #) Don't let our hard-working Santa do the whole job of supplying your family and friends with Christmas gifts. Even his four And just to show that we do not intend to sit back while you a gift in itself, to your family and friends -- everywhere in the your name and your season's greetings ! That will help the poor old gent contend with an expanding universe for another year, at least. Gift to: Name Address City State Q Send gift card as follows: From Enclose Check, Cash, or Money Order Use separate sheet for additional names -- or for your whole order -- if you do not want to mar this handsome issue. The Native Problem Plenty of room in space for every misfit? Sheer propaganda -- Danton discovered there was less room in space than anywhere else! E dward danton was a misfit. Even as a baby, he had shown pre-anti-social leanings. This should have been sufficient warning to his parents, whose duty it was to take him without delay to a competent prepubescent psychologist. Such a man could have discovered what lay in Danton's childhood to give him these contra-group tendencies. But Danton's parents, doubtless dramatizing problems of their own, thought the child would grow out of it. He never did. In school, Danton got barely passing grades in Group Acculturation, Sibling Fit, Values Recognition, Folkways Judgment and other subjects which a person must know in order to live serenely in the modern world. Because of his lack of comprehension, Danton could never live serenely in the modem world. It took him a while to find this out. From his appearance, one would never have guessed Danton's basic lack of Fit. He was a tall, athletic young man, greeneyed, easy-going. There was a certain something about him which considerably intrigued the girls in his immediate affective environment. In fact, several paid him the highest compliment at their command, which was to consider him as a possible husband. But even the flightiest girl could not ignore Danton's lacks. He was liable to weary after only a few hours of Mass Dancing, when the fun was just beginning. At Twelve-hand Bridge, Danton's attention frequently wandered and he would be forced to ask for a recount of the bidding, to the disgust of the other eleven players. And he was impossible at Subways. spirit of that classic game. Locked arm in arm with his teammates, he would thrust forward into the subway car, trying to take possession before another team could storm in the opposite doors. His group captain would shout, "Forward, men! We're taking this car to Rockaway!" And the opposing group captain would scream back, "Never! Rally, boys! It's Bronx Park or bust!" Danton would struggle in the close-packed throng, a fixed smile on his face, worry lines etched around his mouth and eyes. His girl friend of the moment would say, "What's wrong, Edward? Aren't you having fun?" "Sure I am," Danton would reply, gasping for breath. "But you aren't!" the girl would cry, perplexed. "Don't you realize, Edward, that this is the way our ancestors worked off their aggressions? Historians say that the game of Subways averted an allout hydrogen war. We have those same aggressions and we, too, must resolve them in a suitable social context." "Yeah, I know," Edward Danton would say. "I really do enjoy this. I -- oh, Lord!" For at that moment, a third group would come pounding in, arms locked, chanting, "Canarsie, Canarsie, Canarsie!" In that way, he would lose another girl friend, for there was obviously no future in Danton. Lack of Fit can never be disguised. It was obvious that Danton would never be happy in the New York suburbs which stretched from Rockport, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia; nor in any other suburbs, for that matter. Danton tried to cope with his problems, in vain. Other strains started to show. He began to develop astigmatism from the projection of advertisements on his retina, and there was a constant ringing in his ears from the singswoop ads. His doctor warned that symptom analysis would never rid him of these psychosomatic ailments. No, what had to be treated was Danton's basic neurosis, his anti-sociality. But this Danton found impossible to deal with. And so his thoughts turned irresistibly to escape. There was plenty of room for Earth's misfits out in space. neurotics, psychopaths, and cranks of every kind and description had gone outward to the stars. The early ones had the Mikkelsen Drive to power their ships, and spent twenty or thirty years chugging from star system to star system. The newer ships were powered by GM subspatial torque converters, and made the same journey in a matter of months. The stay-at-homes, being socially adjusted, bewailed the loss of anyone, but they welcomed the additional breeding room. In his twenty-seventh year, Danton decided to leave Earth and take up pioneering. It was a tearful day when he gave his breeding certificate to his best friend, AI Trevor. "Gee, Edward," Trevor said, turning the precious little certificate over and over in his hands, "you don't know what this means to Myrtle and me. We always wanted two kids. Now because of you -- " "Forget it," said Danton. "Where I'm going, I won't need any breeding permit. As a matter of fact, I'll probably find it impossible to breed," he added, the thought having just struck him. "But won't that be frustrating for you?" AI asked, always solicitous for his friend's welfare. "I guess so. Maybe after a while, though, I'll find a girl pioneer. And in the meantime, there's always sublimation." "True enough. What substitute have you selected?" "Vegetable gardening. I might as well be practical." "You might as well," AI said, "Well, boy, good luck, boy." Once the breeding certificate was gone, the die was cast. Danton plunged boldly ahead. In exchange for his Birthright, the government gave him unlimited free transportation and two years' basic equipment and provisions. Danton left at once. ily populated areas, which were usually in the hands of rabid little groups. He wanted no part of a place like Korani II, for instance, where a giant calculator had instituted a reign of math. Nor was he interested in Heil V, where a totalitarian population of # was earnestly planning ways and means of conquering the Galaxy. He skirted the Farming Worlds, dull, restrictive places given to extreme health theories and practices. When he came to Hedonia, he considered settling on that notorious planet. But the men of Hedonia were said to be short-lived, although no one denied their enjoyment while they did live. Danton decided in favor of the long haul, and journeyed on. He passed the Mining Worlds, somber, rocky places sparsely populated by gloomy, bearded men given to sudden violence. And he came at last to the New Territories. These unpeopled worlds were past Earth's farthest frontier. Danton scanned several before he found one with no intelligent life whatsoever. It was a calm and watery place, dotted with sizable islands, lush with jungle green and fertile with fish and game. The ship's captain duly notarized Danton's claim to the planet, which Danton called New Tahiti. A quick survey showed a large island superior to the rest. Here he was landed, and here he proceeded to set up his camp. There was much to be done at first. Danton constructed a house out of branches and woven grass, near a white and gleaming beach. He fashioned a fishing spear, several snares and a net. He planted his vegetable garden and was gratified to see it thrive under the tropic sun, nourished by warm rains which fell every morning between seven and seven-thirty. All in all, New Tahiti was a paradisical place and Danton should have been very happy there. But there was one thing wrong. The vegetable garden, which he had thought . would provide first-class sublimation, proved a dismal failure. Danton found himself thinking about women at all hours of the day and night, and spending long hours crooning to himself -- love songs, of course -- beneath a great orange tropic moon. This was unhealthy. Desperately he threw himself into other recognized forms of sublimation; painting came first, but he rejected it to keep a journal, abandoned that and composed a sonata, gave that up and carved two enormous statues out of a local variety of soapstone, completed them and tried to think of something else to do. There was nothing else to do. His vegetables took excellent care of themselves; being of Earth stock, they completely choked out all alien growths. Fish swam into his nets in copious quantities, and meat was his whenever he bothered to set a snare. He found again that he was thinking of women at all hours of the day and night -- tall women, short women, white women, black women, brown women. The day came when Danton found himself thinking favorably of Martian women, something no Terran had succeeded in doing before. Then he knew that something drastic had to be done. But what? He had no way of signaling for help, no way of getting off New Tahiti. He was gloomily contemplating this when a black speck appeared in the sky to seaward. He watched as it slowly grew larger, barely able to breathe for fear it would turn out to be a bird or huge insect. But the speck continued to increase in size and soon he could see pale jets, flaring and ebbing. A spaceship had come! He was alone no longer! cautious time landing. Danton changed into his best pareu, a South Seas garment he had found peculiarly well adapted to the climate of New Tahiti. He washed, combed his hair carefully and watched the ship descend. It was one of the ancient Mikkelsen Drive ships. Danton had thought that all of them were long retired from active service. But this ship, it was apparent, had been traveling for a long while. The hull was dented and scored, hopelessly archaic, yet with a certain indomitable look about it. Its name, proudly lettered on the bow, was The Hutter People. When people come in from deep space, they are usually starved for fresh food. Danton gathered a great pile of fruit for the ship's passengers and had it tastefully arranged by the time The Hutter People had landed ponderously on the beach. A narrow hatch opened and two men stepped out. They were armed with rifles and dressed in black from head to toe. Warily they looked around them. Danton sprinted over. "Hey, welcome to New Tahiti! Boy, am I glad to see you folks! What's the latest news from -- " "Stand back!" shouted one of the men. He was in his fifties, tall and impossibly gaunt, his face seamed and hard. His icy blue eyes seemed to pierce Danton like an arrow; his rifle was leveled at Danton's chest. His partner was younger, barrel-chested, broadfaced, short and very powerfully built. "Something wrong?" Danton asked, stopping. "What's your name?" "Edward Danton." "I'm Simeon Smith," the gaunt man said, "military commander of the Hutter people. This is Jedekiah Franker, second-in-command. How come you speak English?" "I've always spoken English," said Ddnton. "Look, I -- " "Where are the others? Where are they hiding?" "There aren't any others. Just me." Danton looked at the ship and saw the faces of men and women at every port. "I gathered this stuff for you folks." He waved his hand at the mound of fruit. "Thought you might want some fresh goods after being so long in space." A pretty girl with short, tousled blonde hair appeared in the hatchway. "Can't we come out now, Father?" "No!" Simeon said. "It's not safe. Get inside, Anita." "I'll watch from here, then," she said, staring at Danton with frankly curious eyes. Danton stared back and a faint and unfamiliar tremor ran through him. offering. We will not, however, eat it." "Why not?" Danton reasonably wanted to know. "Because," said Jedekiah, "we don't know what poisons you people might try to feed us." "Poisons? Look, let's sit down and talk this over." "What do you think?" Jedekiah asked Simeon. "Just what I expected," the military leader said. "Ingratiating, fawning, undoubtedly treacherous. His people won't show themselves. Waiting in ambush, I'll bet. I think an object lesson would be in order." "Right," said Jedekiah, grinning. "Put the fear of civilization into them." He aimed his rifle at Danton's chest. "Hey!" Danton yelped, backing away. "But, Father," said Anita, "he hasn't done anything yet." "That's the whole point. Shoot him and he won't do anything. The only good native is a dead native." "This way," Jedekiah put in, "the rest will know we mean business." "It isn't right!" Anita cried indignantly. "The Council -- " " -- isn't in command now. An alien landfall constitutes an emergency. During such times, the military is in charge. We'll do what we think best. Remember Lan II!" "Hold on now," Danton said. "You've got this all wrong. There's just me, no others, no reason to -- " A bullet kicked sand near his left foot. He sprinted for the protection of the jungle. Another bullet whined close and a third cut a twig near his head as he plunged into the underbrush. "There!" he heard Simeon roar. "That ought to teach them a lesson!" Danton kept on running until he had put half a mile of jungle between himself and the pioneer ship. He ate a light supper of the local variety of bananas and breadfruit, and tried to figure out what was wrong with the Hutters. Were they insane? They had seen that he was an Earthman, alone and unarmed, obviously friendly. Yet they had fired at him -- as an object lesson. A lesson for whom? For the dirty natives, whom they wanted to teach a lesson... That was it! Danton nodded emphatically to himself. The Hutters must have thought he was a native, an aboriginal, and that his tribe was lurking in the bush, waiting for a chance to massacre the new arrivals! It wasn't too rash an assumption, really. Here he was on a distant planet, without a spaceship, wearing only a loincloth and tanned a medium bronze. He was probably just what they thought a native should look like on a wilderness planet like this! "But where," Danton asked himself, "do they think I learned English?" r T'HE whole thing was ridiculous. He started walking back to the ship, sure he could clear up the misunderstanding in a few minutes. But after a couple yards, he stopped. Evening was approaching. Behind him, the sky was banked in white and gray clouds. To seaward, a deep blue haze advanced steadily on the land. The jungle was filled with ominous noises, which Danton had long ago found to be harmless. But the new arrivals might not think so. These people were triggerhappy, he reminded himself. No sense barging in on them too fast and inviting a bullet. So he moved cautiously through the tangled jungle growth, a silent, tawny shape blending into the junglebrowns and greens. When he reached the vicinity of the ship, he crawled through the dense undergrowth until he could peer down on the sloping beach. The pioneers had finally come out of their ship. There were several dozen men and women and a few children. All were dressed in heavy black cloth and perspiring in the heat. They had ignored his gift of local fruit. Instead, an aluminum table had been spread with the spaceship's monotonous provisions. On the periphery of the crowd, Danton saw several men with rifles and ammunition belts. They were evidently on guard, keeping close watch on the jungle and glancing apprehensively overhead at the darkening sky. Simeon raised his hands. There was immediate silence. "Friends," the military leader orated, "we have come at last to our long-awaited home! Behold, here is a land of milk and honey, a place of bounty and abundance. Was it not worth the long voyage, the constant danger, the endless search?" "Yes, brother!" the people responded. Simeon held up his hands again for silence. "No civilized man has settled upon this planet. We are the first and therefore the place is ours. But there are perils, my friends! Who knows what strange monsters the jungle hides?" "Nothing larger than a chipmunk," Danton muttered to himself. "Why don't they ask me? I'd tell them." "Who knows what leviathan swims in the deep?" Simeon continued. "We do know one thing: There is an aboriginal people here, naked and savage, undoubtedly cunning, ruthless and amoral, as aboriginals always are. Of these we must beware. We will live in peace with them, if they will let us. We will bring to them the fruits of civilization and the flowers of culture. They may profess friendship, but always remember this, friends: No one can tell what goes on in a savage heart. Their standards are not ours; their morals are not ours. We cannot trust them; we must be forever on guard. And if in doubt, we must shoot first! Remember Lan II!"  a hymn and began their evening meal. As night fell, searchlights came on from the ship, making the beach bright as day. The sentries paced up and down, shoulders hunched nervously, rifles ready. Danton watched the settlers shake out their sleeping bags and retire under the bulge of the ship. Even their fear of sudden attack couldn't force them to spend another night inside the ship, when there was fresh air to breathe outside. The great orange moon of New Tahiti was half-hidden by highflying night clouds. The sentries paced and swore, and moved closer together for mutual comfort and protection. They began firing at the jungle sounds and blasting at shadows. Danton crept back into the jungle. He retired for the night behind a tree, where he would be safe from stray bullets. This evening had not seemed the time for straightening things out. The Hutters were too jumpy. It would be better, he decided, to handle the matter by daylight, in a simple, straightforward, reasonable fashion. The trouble was, the Hutters hardly seemed reasonable. In the morning, though, everything looked more promising. Danton waited until the Hutters had finished their breakfast, then strolled into view at the edge of the beach. "Halt!" every one of the sentries barked. "That savage is back!" called a settler. "Mummy," cried a little boy, "don't let the nasty bad man eat    me! "Don't worry, dear," the boy's mother said. "Your father has a rifle for shooting savages." Simeon rushed out of the spaceship and glared at Danton. "All right, you! Come forward!" Danton stepped gingerly across the beach, his skin tingling with nervous expectation. He walked to Simeon, keeping his empty hands in sight. "I am the leader of these people," Simeon said, speaking very slowly, as if to a child. "I the big chief fella. You big fella chief your people?" "There's no need to talk that way," Danton said. "I can hardly understand you. I told you yesterday that I haven't any people. There's just me." white with anger. "Unless you're honest with me, you're going to regret it. Now -- where is your tribe?" "I'm an Earthman," Danton yelled. "Are you deaf? Can't you hear how I talk?" A stooped little man with white hair and great horn-rimmed glasses came over with Jedekiah. "Simeon," the little man said, "I don't believe I have met our guest." "Professor Baker," said Simeon, "this savage here claims he's an Earthman and he says his name is Edward Danton." The professor glanced at Danton's pareu, his tanned skin and calloused feet. "You are an Earthman?" he asked Danton. "Of course." "Who carved those stone statues up the beach?" "I did," Danton said, "but it was just therapy. You see -- " "Obviously primitive work. That stylization, those noses -- " "It was accidental, then. Look, a few months ago I left Earth in a spaceship -- " "How was it powered?" Professor Baker asked. "By a GM subspatial torque converter." Baker nodded, and Danton went on. "Well, I wasn't interested in places like Korani or Heil V, and Hedonia seemed too rich for my blood. I passed up the Mining Worlds and the Farming Worlds, and had the government ship drop me here. The planet's registered as New Tahiti, in my name. But I was getting pretty lonely, so I'm glad you folks came." "Well, Professor?" Simeon said. "What do you think?" "Amazing," Baker murmured, "truly amazing. His grasp of colloquial English bespeaks a fairly high level of intelligence, which points up a phenomenon frequently met with in savage societies, namely, an unusually welldeveloped power of mimicry. Our friend Danta (as his original, uncorrupted name must have been) will probably be able to tell us many tribal legends, myths, songs, dances -- " "But I'm an Earthman!" "No, my poor friend," the Professor corrected gently, "you are not. Obviously you have met an Earthman. Some trader, I daresay, stopping for repairs." Jedekiah said, "There's evidence that a spaceship once landed here briefly." "Ah," said Professor Baker, beaming. "Confirmation of my hypothesis." "That was the government ship," Danton explained. "It dropped me off here." "It is interesting to note," said Professor Baker in his lecturing voice, "how his almost-plausible story lapses into myth at various crucial points. He claims that the ship was powered by a 'GM subspatial torque converter' -- which is nonsense syllabification, since the only deep-space drive is the Mikkelsen. He claims that the journey from Earth was made in a matter of months (since his untutored mind cannot conceive of a journey lasting years), although we know that no space drive, even theoretically, can achieve that." after you people left Earth," Danton said. "How long have you been gone?" "The Hutter spaceship left Earth one hundred and twenty years ago," Baker replied condescendingly. "We are mostly fourth and fifth generation. Note also," Baker said to Simeon and Jedekiah, "his attempt to think up plausible place-names. Words such as Korani, Heil, Hedonia appeal to his sense of onomatopoeia. That there are no such places doesn't disturb him." "There are!" Danton said indignantly. "Where?" Jedekiah challenged. "Give me the coordinates." "How should I know? I'm no navigator. I think Heil was near Bootes, or maybe it was Cassiopeia. No, I'm pretty sure it was Bootes -- " "I'm sorry, friend," said Jedekiah. "It may interest you to know that I'm the ship's navigator. I can show you the star atlases and charts. Those places aren't on them." "Your charts are a hundred years out of date!" "Then so are the stars," Simeon said. "Now, Danta, where is your tribe? Why do they hide from us? What are they planning?" "This is preposterous," Danton protested. "What can I do to convince you? I'm an Earthman. I was born and raised -- " "That's enough," Simeon cut in. "If there's one thing we flutters won't stand for, it's backtalk from natives. Out with it, Danta. Where are your people?" "There's only me," Danton insisted. "Tight-mouthed?" Jedekiah gritted. "Maybe a taste of the blacksnake whip -- " "Later, later," Simeon said. "His tribe'll come around for handouts. Natives always do. In the meantime, Danta, you can join that work gang over there, unloading the supplies." "No, thanks," said Danton. "I'm going back to -- " Jedekiah's fist lashed out, catching Danton on the side of the jaw. He staggered, barely keeping his footing. "The chief said no backtalk!" Jedekiah roared. "Why are you natives always so bone-lazy? You'll be paid as soon as we unload the beads and calico. Now get to work." That seemed to be the last word on the subject. Dazed and tives before him on a thousand different worlds, Danton joined the long line of colonists passing goods out of the ship. loading was done and the settlers were relaxed on the beach. Danton sat apart from them, trying to think his situation through. He was deep in thought when Anita came to him with a canteen of water. "Do you think I'm a native?" he asked. She sat down beside him and said, "I really don't see what else you could be. Everyone knows how fast a ship can travel and -- " "Times have changed since ycur people left Earth. They weren't in space all that time, were they?" "Of course not. The Hutter ship went to H'gastro I, but it wasn't fertile enough, so the next generation moved to Ktedi. But the corn mutated and almost wiped them out, so they went to Lan II. They thought that would be a permanent home." "What happened?" "The natives," said Anita sadly. "I guess they were friendly enough, at first, and everyone thought the situation was well in hand. Then, one day, we were at war with the entire native population. They only had spears and things, but there were too many of them, so the ship left again and we came here." "Hmm," Danton said. "I see why you're so nervous about aboriginals." "Well, of course. While there's any possibility of danger, we're under military rule. That means my father and Jedekiah. But as soon as the emergency is past, our regular Hutter government takes over." "Who runs that?" "A council of Elders," Anita said, "men of good-will, who detest violence. If you and your people are really peaceable -- " "I haven't any people," Danton said wearily. " -- then you'll have every opportunity to prosper under the rule of the Elders," she finished. They sat together and watched the sunset. Danton noticed how the wind stirred her hair, blowing it silkily across her forehead, and how the afterglow of the sun outlined and illuminated the line of her cheek and lip. He shivered and told himself it was the sudden chill of evening. And Anita, who had been talking animatedly about her childhood, found diffi#. I culty in completing her sentences, or even keeping her train of thought. After a while, their hands strayed together. Their fingertips touched and clung. For a long time, they said nothing at all. And at last, gently and lingeringly, they kissed. "What the hell is going on here?" a loud voice demanded. a burly man standing over him, his powerful head silhouetted black against the moon, his fists on his hips. "Please, Jedekiah," Anita said. "Don't make a scene." "Get up," Jedekiah ordered Danton, in an ominously quiet voice. "Get up on your feet." Danton stood up, his hands half-clenched into fists, waiting. "You," Jedekiah said to Anita, "are a disgrace to your race and to the whole Hutter people. Are you crazy? You can't mess around with a dirty native and still keep any self-respect." He turned to Danton. "And you gotta learn something and learn it good. Natives don't tool with Hutter women! I'm going to impress that little lesson on you right here and now." There was a brief scuffle and Jedekiah found himself sprawled on his back. " Hurry !" Jedekiah shouted. "The natives are revolting!" An alarm bell from the spaceship began to peal. Sirens wailed in the night. The women and children, long trained for such an emergency, trooped back into the spaceship. The men were issued rifles, machine guns and hand grenades, and began to advance on Danton. "It's just man to man," Danton called out. "We had a disagreement, that's all. There's no natives or anything. Just me." The foremost Hutter commanded, "Anita, quick, get back!" "I didn't see any natives," the girl said staunchly. "And it wasn't really Danta's fault -- " "Get back!" She was pulled out of the way. Danton dived into the bushes before the machine guns opened up. He crawled on all fours for fifty yards, then broke into a dead run. Fortunately, the Hutters were not pursuing. They were interested only in guarding their ship and holding their beachhead and a narrow stretch of jungle. Danton heard gunfire throughout the night and loud shouts and frantic cries. "There goes one!" "Quick, turn the machine gun! They're behind us!" "There! There! I got one!" "No, he got away! There he goes... But look, up in the tree!" "Fire, man, fire!" as the Hutters repulsed the attacks of imaginary savages. Toward dawn, the firing subsided. Danton estimated that a ton of lead had been expended, hundreds of trees decapitated, acres of grass trampled into mud. The jungle stank of cordite. He fell into a fitful slumber. At midday, he awakened and heard someone moving through the underbrush. He retreated into the jungle and made a meal for himself out of a local variety of bananas and mangoes. Then he decided to think things over. But no thoughts came. His mind was filled with Anita and with grief over her loss. All that day, he wandered disconsolately through the jungle, and in the late afternoon heard again the sound of someone moving through the underbrush. He turned to go deeper into the island. Then he heard someone calling his name. "Danta! Danta! Wait!" It was Anita. Danton hesitated, not sure what to do. She might have decided to leave her people, to live in the green jungle with him. But more realistically, she might have been sent out as a decoy, leading a party of men to destroy him. How could he know where her loyalties lay? "Danta! Where are you?" Danton reminded himself that there could never be anything between them. Her people had shown what they thought of natives. They would always distrust him, forever try to kill him... "Please, Danta!" Danton shrugged his shoulders and walked toward her voice. They met in a little clearing. Anita's hair was disheveled and her khakis were torn by the jungle briars, but for Danton there could never be a lovelier woman. For an instant, he believed that she had come to join him, flee with him. Then he saw armed men fifty yards behind her. "It's all right," Anita said. "They're not going to kill you. They just came along to guard me." "Guard you? From me?" Danton laughed hollowly. "They don't know you as I do," Anita said. "At the Council meeting today, I told them the truth." "You did?" "Of course. That fight wasn't your fault and I told everybody so. I told them you fought only to defend yourself. And Jedekiah lied. No pack of natives attacked him. There was only you, and I told them this." "Good girl," Danton said fervently. "Did they believe you?" "I think so. I explained that the native attack came later." could there be a native attack when there aren't any natives?" "But there are," Anita said. "I heard them shouting." "Those were your own people." Danton tried to think of something that would convince her. If he couldn't convince this one girl, how could he possibly convince the rest of the Hutters? And then he had it. It was a very simple proof, but its effect would have to be overwhelming. "You actually believe there was a full-scale native attack," Danton stated. "Of course." "How many natives?" "I heard you outnumbered us by at least ten to one." "And we were armed?" "You certainly were." "Then how," Danton asked triumphantly, "do you account for the fact that not a single Hutter was wounded!" She stared at him wide-eyed. "But, Danta dear, many of the Hutters were wounded, some seriously. It's a wonder no one was killed in all that fighting!" Danton felt as though the ground had been kicked out from under him. For a terrifying minute, he believed her. The Hutters were so certain! Perhaps he did have a tribe, after all, hundreds of bronzed savages like himself, hidden in the jungle, waiting... "That trader who taught you English," Anita said, "must have been a very unscrupulous character. It's against interstellar law, you know, to sell firearms to natives. Someday he'll be caught and "Firearms?" "Certainly. You couldn't use them very accurately, of course. But Simeon said that sheer firepower -- " "I suppose all your casualties were from gunshot wounds." "Yes. The men didn't let you get close enough to use knives and spears." "I see," Danton said. His proof was utterly demolished. But he felt enormously relieved at having regained his sanity. The disorganized Hutter soldiery had ranged around the jungle, firing at everything that moved -- each other. Of course they had gotten into trouble. It was more than a wonder that some of them hadn't been killed. It was a miracle. "But I explained that they couldn't blame you," said Anita. "You were attacked first and your own people must have thought you were in danger. The Elders thought this was probable." "Nice of them," Danton said. "They want to be reasonable. After all, they realize that natives are human beings just like ourselves." W A RE you sure of that?" Danton asked, with feeble irony. "Of course. So the Elders held a big meeting on native policy and decided it once and for all. We're setting aside a thousand acres as a reservation for you and your people. That should be plenty of room, shouldn't it? The men are putting up the boundary posts now. You'll live peacefully in your reservation and we'll live in our own part of the island." "What?" Danton said. "And to seal the pledge," Anita continued, "the Elders asked you to accept this." She handed him a roll of parchment. "What is it?" "It's a peace treaty, declaring the end of the Sutter-New Tahitian war, and pledging our respective peoples to eternal amity." Numbly, Danton accepted the parchment. He saw that the men who had accompanied Anita were setting red and black striped posts into the ground. They sang as they worked, happy to have reached a solution for the native problem so quickly and easily. "But don't you think," Danton asked, "that perhaps -- ah -- assimilation might be a better solution?" "I suggested it," Anita said, blushing. "You did? You mean that you would -- " "Of course I would," said Anita, not looking at him. "I think the amalgamation of two strong races would be a fine and wonderful thing. And, Danta, what wonderful stories and legends you could have told the children!" "I could have showed them how to fish and hunt," Danton said, "and which plants are edible, and things like that." "And all your colorful tribal songs and dances." Anita sighed. "It would have been wonderful. I'm sorry, Danta." "But something must be possible! Can't I talk to the Elders? Isn't there anything I can do?" "Nothing," Anita said. "I'd run away with you, Danta, but they'd track us down, no matter how long it took." "They'd never find us," Danton promised. the chance." "Darling!" "But I can't. Your poor people, Danta! The Hutters would take hostages, kill them if I weren't returned." "I don't have any people! I don't, damn it!" "It's sweet of you to say that," Anita said tenderly. "But lives cannot be sacrificed just for the love of two individuals. You must tell your people not to cross the boundary lines, Danta. They'll be shot. Good-by, and remember, it is best to live in the path of peace." She hurried away from him. Danton watched her go, angry at her noble sentiments which separated them for no reason at all, yet loving her for the love she showed his people. That his people were imaginary didn't count. It was the thought that mattered. At last he turned and walked deep into the jungle. XJ E stopped by a still pi I of black water, overhung with giant trees and bordered by flowering ferns, and here he tried to plan the rest of his life. Anita was gone; all commerce with human beings was gone. He didn't need any of them, he told himself. He had his reservation. He could replant his vegetable garden, carve more statues, compose more sonatas, start another journal... "To hell with that!" he shouted to the trees. He didn't want to sublimate any longer. He wanted Anita and he wanted to live with humans. He was tired of being alone. What could he do about it? There didn't seem to be anything. He leaned back against a tree and stared at New Tahiti's impossibly blue sky. If only the Hutters weren't so superstitious, so afraid of natives, so... And then it came to him, a plan so absurd, so dangerous... "It's worth a try," Danton said to himself, "even if they kill me." He trotted off toward the Hutter boundary line. A sentry saw him as he neared the vicinity of the spaceship and leveled his rifle. Danton raised both arms. "Don't fire! I have to speak with your leaders!" "Get back on your reservation," the sentry warned. "Get back or I'll shoot." "I have to speak to Simeon," Danton stated, holding his ground. "Orders is orders," said the sentry, taking aim. "Just a minute." Simeon stepped out of the ship, frowning deeply. "What is all this?" "That native came back," the sentry said. "Shall I pop him, sir?" "What do you want?" Simeon asked Danton. "I have come here to bring you," Danton roared, "a declaration of war!" camp. In a few minutes, every man, woman and child had gathered near the spaceship. The Elders, a council of old men distinguished by their long white beards, were standing to one side. "You accepted the peace treaty," Simeon pointed out. "I had a talk with the other chiefs of the island," Danton said, stepping forward. "We feel the treaty is not fair. New Tahiti is ours. It belonged to our fathers and to our fathers' fathers. Here we have raised our children, sown our corn and reaped the breadfruit. We will not live on the reservation!" "Oh, Danta!" Anita cried, appearing from the spaceship. "I asked you to bring peace to your people!" "They wouldn't listen," Danton said. "All the tribes are gathering. Not only my own people, the Cynochi, but the Drovati, the Lorognasti, the Retellsmbroichi and the Vitelli. Plus, naturally, their sub-tribes and dependencies." "How many are you?" Simeon asked. "Fifty or sixty thousand. Of course, we don't all have rifles. Most of us will have to rely on more primitive weapons, such as poisoned arrows and darts." A nervous murmur arose from the crowd. "Many of us will be killed," Danton said stonily. "We do not care. Every New Tahitian will fight like a lion. We are a thousand to your one. We have cousins on the other islands who will join us. No matter what the cost in human life and misery, we will drive you into the sea. I have spoken." He turned and started back into the jungle, walking with stiff dignity. "Shall I pop him now, sir?" the sentry begged. "Put down that rifle, you fool!" Simeon snapped. "Wait, Danta! Surely we can come to terms. Bloodshed is senseless." "I agree," Danton said soberly. "What do you want?" "Equal rights!" The Elders went into an immediate conference. Simeon listened to them, then turned to Danton. "That may be possible. Is there anything else?" "Nothing," Danton said. "Except, naturally, an alliance between the ruling clan of the Hutters and the ruling clan of the New Tahitians, to seal the bargain. Marriage would be best." again, the Elders gave their instructions to Simeon. The military chief was obviously disturbed. The cords stood out on his neck, but with an effort he controlled himself, bowed his agreement to the Elders and marched up to Danton. "The Elders have authorized me," he said, "to offer you an alliance of blood brotherhood. You and I, representing the leading clans of our peoples, will mingle our blood together in a beautiful and highly symbolic ceremony, then break bread, take salt " "Sorry," Danton said. "We New Tahitians don't hold with that sort of thing. It has to be marriage." "But damn it all, man -- " "That is my last word." "We'll never accept! Never!" "Then it's war," Danton declared and walked into the jungle. He was in a mood for making war. But how, he asked himself, does a single native fight against a spaceship full of armed men? He was brooding on this when Simeon and Anita came to him through the jungle. "All right," Simeon said angrily. "The Elders have decided. We Hutters are sick of running from planet to planet. We've had this problem before and I suppose we'd just go somewhere else and have it again. We're sick and tired of the whole native problem, so I guess -- " he gulped hard, but manfully finished the sentence -- "we'd better assimilate. At least, that's what the Elders think. Personally, I'd rather fight." "You'd lose," Danton assured him, and at that moment he felt he could take on the Hutters single-handed and win. "Maybe so," Simeon admitted. "Anyhow, you can thank Anita for making the peace possible." "Anita? Why?" "Why, man, she's the only girl in the camp who'd marry a naked, dirty, heathen savage!" A ND so they were married, and Danta, now known as the White Man's Friend, settled down to help the Hutters conquer their new land. They, in turn, introduced him to the marvels of civilization. He was taught Twelve-hand Bridge and Mass Dancing. And soon the Hutters built their first Subway -- for a civilized people must release their aggressions -- and that game was shown to Danta, too. He tried to master the spirit of the classic Earth pastime, but it was obviously beyond the comprehension of his savage soul. Civilization stifled him, so Danta and his wife moved across the planet, always following the frontier, staying far from the amenities of civilization. Anthropologists frequently came to visit him. They recorded all the stories he told his children, the ancient and beautiful legends of New Tahiti -- tales of sky gods and water demons, fire sprites and woodland nymphs, and how Katamandura was ordered to create the world out of nothingness in just three days, and what his reward for this was, and what Jevasi said to Hootmenlati when they met in the underworld, and the strange outcome of this meeting. The anthropologists noted similarities between these legends and certain legends of Earth, and several interesting theories were put forth. And they were interested in the great sandstone statues on the main island of New Tahiti, weird and haunting works which no viewer could forget, clearly the work of a pre-New Tahitian race, of whom no trace could ever be found. But most fascinating of all for the scientific workers was the problem of the New Tahitians themselves. Those happy, laughing, bronzed savages, bigger, stronger, handsomer and healthier than any other race, had melted away at the coming of the white man. Only a few of the older Hutters could remember having met them in any numbers and their tales were considered none too reliable. "My people?" Danta would say, when questioned. "Ah, they could not stand the white man's diseases, the white man's mechanical civilization, the white man's harsh and repressive ways. They are in a happier place now, in Valhoola beyond the sky. And someday I shall go there, too." And white men, hearing this, experienced strangely guilty feelings and redoubled their efforts to show kindness to Danta, the Last Native. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania Of All Possible Worlds Changing the world is simple; the trick is to do it before you have a chance to undo it I Alben knew whom he had to thank for it -- his great-grandfather. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered as he hurried into the laboratory slightly ahead of the escorting technicians, all of them, despite the excitement of the moment, remembering to bob their heads deferentially at the half-dozen full-fleshed and hardfaced men lolling on the couches that had been set up around the time machine. He shrugged rapidly out of his rags, as he had been instructed in the anteroom, and stepped into the housing of the enormous mechanism. This was the first time he had seen it, since he had been taught how to operate it on a dummy model, and now he stared at the great transparent coils and the susurrating energy bubble with much respect. This machine, the pride and the hope of #, was something almost outside his powers of comprehension. But Max Alben knew how to run it, and he knew, roughly, what it was supposed to accomplish. He knew also that this was the first backward journey of any great duration and, being scientifically unpredictable, might well be the death of him. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered again affectionately. If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest timetravel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Blight, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout. And if that had not been discovered, the ruling powers of Earth, more than a century later, would never have plucked Max Alben out of an obscure civilservice job as a relief guard at the North American Chicken Reservation to his present heroic and remunerative eminence. He would still be patrolling the barbed wire that surrounded the three white leghorn hens and two roosters -- about one-sixth of the known livestock wealth of the Western Hemisphere -- thoroughly content with the half-pail of dried apricots he received each and every payday. No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Max Alben would not now be shifting from foot to foot in a physics laboratory, facing the black market kings of the world and awaiting their final instructions with an uncertain and submissive grin. J-" trolled mushrooms, Levney, the blackberry tycoon, Sorgasso, the packaged-worm monopolist -- would black marketeers of their tremendous stature so much as waste a glance on someone like Alben ordinarily, let alone confer a lifetime pension on his wife and five children of a full spoonful each of non-synthetic sugar a day? Even if he didn't come back, his family was provided for like almost no other family on Earth. This was a damn good job and he was lucky. Alben noticed that Abd Sadha had risen from the straight chair at the far side of the room and was approaching him with a sealed metal cylinder in one hand. "We've decided to add a further precaution at the last moment," the old man said. "That is, the scientists have suggested it and I have -- er -- I have given my approval." The last remark was added with a slight questioning note as the Secretary General of the United Nations looked back rapidly at the black market princes on the couches behind him. Since they stared back stonily, but offered no objection, he coughed in relief and returned to Alben. "I am sure, young man, that I don't have to go into the details of your instructions once more. You enter the time machine and go back the duration for which it has been preset, a hundred and thirteen years, to the moment after the Guided Missile of # was launched. It is #, isn't it?" he asked, suddenly uncertain. "Yes, sir," one of the technicians standing by the time machine said respectfully. "The experiment with an atomic warhead guided missile that resulted in the Blight was conducted on this site on April #, #." He glanced proudly at the unemotional men on the couches, very much like a small boy after completing a recitation before visiting dignitaries from the Board of Education. "Just so." Abd Sadha nodded. "April #, #. And on this site. You see, young man, you will materialize at the very moment and on the very spot where the remote-control station handling the missile was -- er -- handling the missile. You will be in a superb position, a superb position, to deflect the missile in its downward course and alter human history for the better. Very much for the better. Yes." He paused, having evidently stumbled out of his thought sequence. "And he pulls the red switch toward him," Gomez, the dandelion-root magnate, reminded him sharply, impatiently. "Ah, yes, the red switch. He pulls the little red switch toward him. Thank you, Mr. Gomez, thank you very much, sir. He pulls the little red switch on the green instrument panel' toward him, thus preventing the error that caused the missile to explode in the Brazilian jungle and causing it, instead, to explode somewhere in the mid-Pacific, as originally planned." The Secretary-General of the United Nations beamed. "Thus preventing the Blight, making it nonexistent, as it were, producing a present-day world in which the Blight never occurred. That is correct, is it not, gentlemen?" he asked, turning anxiously again. ' on couches deigned to answer him. And Alben kept his eyes deferentially in their direction, too, as he had throughout this period of last-minute instruction. He knew who ruled his world -- these stolid, well-fed men in clean garments with a minimum of patches, and where patches occurred, at least they were the color of the surrounding cloth. Sadha might be Secretary-General of the United Nations, but that was still a civil-service job, only a few social notches higher than a chicken guard. His clothes were fully as ragged, fully as multi-colored, as those that Alben had stepped out of. And the gnawing in his stomach was no doubt almost as great. "You understand, do you not, young man, that if anything goes wrong," Abd Sadha asked, his head nodding tremulously and anticipating the answer, "if anything unexpected, unprepared-for, occurs, you are not to continue with the experiment but return immediately?" "He understands everything he has to understand," Gomez told him. "Let's get this thing moving." The old man smiled again. "Yes. Of course, Mr. Gomez." He came up to where Alben stood in the entrance of the time machine and handed the sealed metal cylinder to him. "This is the precaution the scientists have just added. When you arrive at your destination, just before materializing, you will release it into the surrounding temporal medium. Our purpose here, as you no doubt -- " Levney sat up on his couch and snapped his fingers peremptorily. "I just heard Gomez tell you to get this thing moving, Sadha. And it isn't moving. We're busy men. We've wasted enough time." "I was just trying to explain a crucial final fact," the SecretaryGeneral apologized. "A fact which may be highly -- " "You've explained enough facts." Levney turned to the man inside the time machine. "Hey, fella. You. Move!" Max Alben gulped and nodded violently. He darted to the rear of the machine and turned the dial which activated it. flick! Albin knew whom he had to thank for it -- his great-grandfather. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed as he looked at the morose faces of his two colleagues. Bob Skeat and Hugo Honek had done as much as he to build the tiny time machine in the secret lab under the helicopter garage, and they were fully as eager to go, but -- unfortunately for them -- they were not descended from the right ancestor. Leisurely, he unzipped the richly embroidered garment that, as the father of two children, he was privileged to wear, and wriggled into the housing of the complex little mechanism. This was hardly the first time he had seen it, since he'd been helping to build the device from the moment Honek had nodded and risen from the drafting board, and now he barely wasted a glance on the thumb-size translucent coils growing out of the almost microscopic energy bubbles which powered them. This machine was the last hope, of #, even if the world of #, as a whole, did not know of its existence and would try to prevent its being put into operation. But it meant a lot more to Mac Albin than merely saving a world. It meant an adventurous mission with the risk of death. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed again happily. If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest timetravel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Epidemic, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout. And if that had not been discovered, the Albins would not have become physicists upon the passage of the United Nations law that everyone on Earth -- absolutely without exception -- had to choose a branch of research science in which to specialize. In the flabby, careful, life-guarding world the Earth had become, Mac Albin would never have been reluctantly selected by his two coworkers as the one to carry the forbidden banner of dangerous experiment. No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Mac Albin would probably be a biologist today like almost everyone else on Earth, laboriously working out dreary gene problems instead of embarking on the greatest adventure Man had known to date. Even if he didn't come back, he had at last found a socially useful escape from genetic responsibility to humanity in general and his own family in particular. This was a damn good job and he was lucky. "Wait a minute, Mac," Skeat said and crossed to the other side of the narrow laboratory. him stuff several sheets of paper into a small metal box which he closed without locking. "You will take care of yourself, won't you, Mac?" Hugo Honek pleaded. "Any time you feel like taking an unnecessary risk, remember that Bob and I will have to stand trial if you don't come back. We might be sentenced to complete loss of professional status and spend the rest of our lives supervising robot factories." "Oh, it won't be that bad," Albin reassured him absent-mindedly from where he lay contorted inside the time machine. He watched Slceat coming toward him with the box. Honek shrugged his shoulders. "It might be a lot worse than even that and you know it. The disappearance of a two time father is going to leave an awful big vacancy in the world. Onetimers, like Bob and me, are all over the place; if either of us dropped out of sight, it wouldn't cause nearly as much uproar." "But Bob and you both tried to operate the machine," Albin reminded him. "And you blacked out after a fifteen-second temporal displacement. So I'm the only chance, the only way to stop the human race from dwindling and dwindling till it hits absolute zero, like that fat old Security Council "Take it easy, Mac," Bob Skeat said as he handed the metal box to Albin. "The Security Council is just trying to solve the problem in their way, the conservative way: a worldwide concentration on genetics research coupled with the maximum preservation of existing human lives, especially those that have a high reproductive potential. We three disagree with them; we've been skulking down here nights to solve it our way, and ours is a radical approach and plenty risky. That's the reason for the metal box -- trying to cover one more explosive possibility." Albin turned it around curiously. "How?" "I sat up all last night writing the manuscript that's inside it. Look, Mac, when you go back to the Guided Missile Experiment of # and push that red switch away from you, a lot of other things are going to happen than just deflecting the missile so that it will explode in the Brazilian jungle instead of the Pacific Ocean." "Sure. I know. If it explodes in the jungle, the Epidemic doesn't occur. No Shapiro's Mumps." Skeat jiggled his pudgy little face impatiently. "That's not what I mean. The Epidemic doesn't occur, but something else does. A new world, a different #, an alternate time sequence. It'll be a world in which humanity has a better chance to survive, but it'll be one with problems of its own. Maybe tough problems. Maybe the problems will be tough enough so that they'll get the same idea we did and try to go back to the same point in time to change them." looking for trouble." "Maybe it is, but that's my job. Hugo's the designer of the time machine and you're the operator, but I'm the theoretical man in this research team. It's my job to look for trouble. So, just in case, I wrote a brief history of the world from the time the missile exploded in the Pacific. It tells why ours is the worst possible of futures. It's in that box." "What do I do with it -- hand it to the guy from the alternate #?" The small fat man exasperatedly hit the side of the time machine with a well-cushioned palm. " Y ou know better. There won't be any alternate # until you push that red switch on the green instrument panel. The moment you do, our world, with all its slow slide to extinction, goes out and its alternate goes on -- just like two electric light bulbs on a pushpull circuit. We and every single one of our artifacts, including the time machine, disappear. The problem is how to keep that manuscript from disappearing. "Well, all you do, if I have this figured right, is shove the metal box containing the manuscript out into the surrounding temporal medium a moment before you materialize to do your job. That temporal medium in which you'll be traveling is something that exists independent of and autonomous to all possible futures. It's my hunch that something that's immersed in it will not be altered by a new time sequence." ABob," Honek rumbled. "He thinks he's Captain Blood and this is his big chance to run away to sea and become a swashbuckling pirate." Albin grimaced in annoyance. "I am excited by doing something besides sitting in a safe little corner working out safe little abstractions for the first time in my life. But I know that this is a first experiment. Honestly, Hugo, I really have enough intelligence to recognize that simple fact. I know that if anything unexpected pops up, anything we didn't foresee, I'm supposed to come scuttling back and ask for advice." "I hope you do," Bob Skeat sighed. "I hope you do know that. A twentieth century poet once wrote something to the effect that the world will end not with a bang, but a whimper. Well, our world is ending with a whimper. Try to see that it doesn't end with a bang, either." "That I'll promise you," Albin said a trifle disgustedly. "It'll end with neither a bang nor a whimper. So long, Hugo. So long, Bob." He twisted around, reaching overhead for the lever which activated the forces that drove the time machine. flick! fleeted, that this time travel business, which knocked unconscious everyone who tried it, only made him feel slightly dizzy. That was because he was descended from Giovanni Albeni, he had been told. There must be some complicated scientific explanation for it, he decided -- and that would make it none of his business. Better forget about it. All around the time machine, there was a heavy gray murk in which objects were hinted at rather than stated definitely. It reminded him of patrolling his beat at the North American Chicken Reservation in a thick fog. According to his gauges, he was now in #. He cut speed until he hit the last day of April, then cut speed again, drifting slowly backward to the eighteenth, the day of the infamous Guided Missile Experiment. Carefully, carefully, like a man handling a strange bomb made on a strange planet, he watched the center gauge until the needle came to rest against the thin etched line that indicated the exactly crucial moment. Then he pulled the brake and stopped the machine dead. All he had to do now was materialize in the right spot, flash out and pull the red switch toward him. Then his well-paid assignment would be done. But... He stopped and scratched his dirt-matted hair. Wasn't there something he was supposed to do a second before materialization? Yes, that useless old windbag, Sadha, had given him a last instruction. He picked up the sealed metal cylinder, walked to the entrance of the time machine and tossed it into the gray murk. A solid object floating near the entrance caught his eye. He put his arm out -- whew, it was cold! -- and pulled it inside. A small metal box. Funny. What was it doing out there? Curiously, he opened it, hoping to find something valuable. Nothing but a few sheets of paper, Alben noted disappointedly. He began to read them slowly, very slowly, for the manuscript was full of a lot of long and complicated words, like a letter from one bookworm scientist to another. The problems all began with the Guided Missile Experiment of #, he read. There had been a number of such experiments, but it was the one of # that finally did the damage the biologists had been warning about. The missile with its deadly warhead exploded in the Pacific Ocean as planned, the physicists and the military men went home to study their notes, and the world shivered once more over the approaching war and tried to forget about it. But there was fallout, a radioactive rain several hundred miles to the north, and a small fishing fleet got thoroughly soaked by it. Fortunately, the radioactivity in the rain was sufficiently low to do little obvious physical damage: All it did was cause a mutation in the mumps virus that several of the men in the fleet were incubating at the time, having caught it from the children of the fishing town, among whom a minor epidemic was raging. I I ' HE fleet returned to its home town, which promptly came down with the new kind of mumps. Dr. Llewellyn Shapiro, the only physician in town, was the first man to note that, while the symptoms of this disease were substantially milder than those of its unmutated parent, practically no one was immune to it and its effects on human reproductivity were truly terrible. Most people were completely sterilized by it. The rest were rendered much less capable of fathering or bearing offspring. Shapiro's Mumps spread over the entire planet in the next few decades. It leaped across every quarantine erected; for a long time, it successfully defied all the vaccines and serums attempted against it. Then, when a vaccine was finally perfected, humanity discovered to its dismay that its generative powers had been permanently and fundamentally impaired. Something 'had happened to the germ plasm. A large percentage of individuals were born sterile, and, of those who were not, one child was usually the most that could be expected, a twochild parent, being quite rare and a three-child parent almost unknown. Strict eugenic control was instituted by the Security Council of the United Nations so that fertile men and women would not be wasted upon non-fertile mates. Fertility was the most important avenue to social status, and right after it came successful genetic research. Genetic research had the very best minds prodded into it; the lesser ones went into the other sciences. Everyone on Earth was engaged in some form of scientific research to some extent. Since the population was now so limited in proportion to the great resources available, all physical labor had long been done by robots. The government saw to it that everybody had an ample supply of goods and, in return, asked only that they experiment without any risk to their own lives -- every human being was now a muchprized, highly guarded rarity. There were less than a hundred thousand of them, well below the danger point, it had been estimated, where a species might be wiped out by a new calamity. Not that another calamity would be needed. Since the end of the Epidemic, the birth rate had been moving further and further behind the death rate. In another century... That was why a desperate and secret attempt to alter the past was being made. This kind of world was evidently impossible. Max Alben finished the manuscript and sighed. What a wonderful world! What a comfortable place to live! He walked to the rear dials and began the process of materializing at the crucial moment on April #, #. flick! fleeted, that these temporal journeys, which induced coma in everyone who tried it, only made him feel slightly dizzy. That was because he was descended from Giovanni Albeni, he knew. Maybe there was some genetic relationship with his above-average fertility -- might be . a good idea to mention the idea to a biologist or two when he returned. If he returned. All around the time machine, there was a soupy gray murk in which objects were hinted at rather than stated definitely. It reminded him of the problems of landing a helicopter in a thick fog when the robot butler had not been told to turn on the ground lights. According to the insulated register, he was now in #. He lowered speed until he registered April, then maneuvered slowly backward through time to the eighteenth, the day of the infamous Guided Missile Experiment. Carefully, carefully, like an obstetrician supervising surgical robots at an unusually difficult birth, he watched the register until it rolled to rest against the notch that indicated the exactly crucial moment. Then he pushed a button and froze the machine where it was. All he had to do now was materialize in the right spot, flash out and push the red switch, from him. Then his exciting adventure would be over. But... He paused and tapped at his sleek chin. He was supposed to do something a second before materialization. Yes, that nervous theoretician, Bob Skeat, had given him a last suggestion. He picked up the small metal box, twisted around to face the opening of the time machine and dropped it into the gray murk. A solid object floating near the opening attracted his attention. He shot his arm out -- it was cold, as cold as they had figured -- and pulled the object inside. A sealed metal cylinder. Strange. What was it doing out there? Anxiously, he opened it, not daring to believe he'd find a document inside. Yes, that was exactly what it was, he saw excitedly. He began to read it rapidly, very rapidly, as if it were a newly published paper on neutrinos. Besides, the manuscript was written with almost painful simplicity, like a textbook composed by a stuffy pedagogue for the use of morons. The problems all began with the Guided Missile Experiment of #, he read. There had been a number of such experiments, but it was the one of # that finally did the damage the biologists had been warning about. The missile with its deadly warhead exploded in the Brazilian jungle through some absolutely unforgivable error in the remote-control station, the officer in charge of the station was reprimanded and the men under him courtmartialed, and the Brazilian government was paid a handsome compensation for the damage. TUT there had been more damage than anyone knew at the time. A plant virus, similar to the tobacco mosaic, had mutated under the impact of radioactivity. Five years later, it burst out of the jungle and completely wiped out every last rice plant on Earth. Japan and a large part of Asia became semi-deserts inhabited by a few struggling nomads. Then the virus adjusted to wheat and corn -- and famine howled in every street of the planet. All attempts by botanists to control the Blight failed because of the swiftness of its onslaught. And after it had fed, it hit again at a new plant and another and another. Most of the world's non-human mammals had been slaughtered for food long before they could starve to death. Many insects, too, before they became extinct at the loss of their edible plants, served to assuage hunger to some small extent. But the nutritive potential of Earth was steadily diminishing in a horrifying geometric progression. Recently, it had been observed, plankton -- the tiny organism on which most of the sea's ecology was based -- had started to disappear, and with its diminution, dead fish had begun to pile up on the beaches. Mankind had lunged out desperately in all directions in an effort to survive, but nothing had worked for any length of time. Even the other planets of the Solar System, which had been reached and explored at a tremendous cost in remaining resources, had yielded no edible vegetation. Synthetics had failed to fill the prodigious gap. In the midst of the sharply increasing hunger, social controls had pretty much dissolved. Pathetic attempts at rationing still continued, but black markets became the only markets, and black marketeers the barons of life. Starvation took the hindmost, and only the most agile economically lived in comparative comfort. Law and order were had only by those who could afford to pay for them and children of impoverished families were sold on the open market for a bit of food. But the Blight was still adjusting to new plants and the food supply kept shrinking. In another century... That was why the planet's powerful individuals had been persuaded to pool their wealth in a desperate attempt to alter the past. This kind of world was manifestly impossible. Mac Albin finished the document and sighed. What a magnificent world! What an exciting place to live! He dropped his hand on the side levers and began the process of materializing at the crucial moment on April #, #. flick! mote-control station began to take on a blurred reality all around him, Max Alben felt a bit of fear at what he was doing. The technicians, he remembered, the Secretary-General, even the black market kings, had all warned him not to go ahead with his instructions if anything unusual turned up. That was an awful lot of power to disobey: he knew he should return with this new information and let better minds work on it. They with their easy lives, what did they know what existence had been like for such as he? Hunger, always hunger, scrabbling, servility, and more hunger. Every time things got really tight, you and your wife looking sideways at your kids and wondering which of them would bring the best price. Buying security for them, as he was now, at the risk of his life. But in this other world, this other #, there was a state that took care of you and that treasured your children. A man like himself, with five children -- why, he'd be a big man, maybe the biggest man on Earth! And he'd have robots to work for him and lots of food. Above all, lots and lots of food. He'd even be a scientist -- everyone was a scientist there, weren't they? -- and he'd have a big laboratory all to himself. This other world had its troubles, but it was a lot nicer place than where he'd come from. He wouldn't return. He'd go through with it. The fear left him and, for the first time in his life, Max Alben felt the sensation of power. He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, sweating a bit at the sight of the roomful of military figures, despite the technicians' reassurances that all this would be happening too fast to be visible. He saw the single red switch pointing upward on the instrument panel. The switch that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway decent world! Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him. flick! mote-control station began to oscillate into reality all around him, Mac Albin felt a bit of shame at what he was doing. He'd promised Bob and Hugo to drop the experiment at any stage if a new factor showed up. He knew he should go back with this new information and have all three of them kick it around. But what would they be able to tell him, they with their blissful adjustment to their thoroughly blueprinted lives? They, at least, had been ordered to marry women they could live with; he'd drawn a female with whom he was completely incompatible in any but a genetic sense. Genetics! He was tired of genetics and the sanctity of human life, tired to the tip of his uncalloused fingers, tired to the recesses of his unused muscles. He was tired of having to undertake a simple adventure like a thief in the night. But in this other world, this other #, someone like himself would be a monarch of the black market, a suzerain of chaos, making his own rules, taking his own women. So what if the weaklings, those unfit to carry on the race, went to the wall? His kind wouldn't. He'd formed a pretty good idea of the kind of men who ruled that other world, from the document in the sealed metal cylinder. The black marketeers had not even read it. Why, the fools had obviously been duped by the technicians into permitting the experiment; they had not grasped the idea that an alternate time track would mean their own non-existence. This other world had its troubles, but it was certainly a livelier place than where he'd come from. It deserved a chance. Yes, that was how he felt: his world was drowsily moribund; this alternate was starving but managing to flail away at destiny. It deserved a chance. Albin decided that he was experiencing renunciation and felt proud. He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, disregarding the roomful of military figures since he knew they could not see him. The single red switch pointed downward on the instrument panel. That was the gimmick that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world! Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him. flick! Now! Now to make a halfway decent world! Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him. flick! Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world! Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him. flick!... pulled the little red switch toward him. Hick!... pushed the little red switch from him. Hick!... toward him. Hick!... from him. Hick! new ?f) G A M E Make a hit with your friends! Introduce them to bring a third dimension to competitive playing. Developed by two doctors of psychology, it combines simplicity with intellectual stimulation. men). This is a really new concept in games -- a new dimension and a new challenge to your ability. Attractively packaged it makes a wonderfor your information of reminiscences of the famous Austrian reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, I came across a little story which somehow seems applicable to the theme at hand. Talking about his days as a newspaperman in Prague, Kisch recalled an old editor whose main function in his later years seems to have consisted of belittling the news of the day. If a local reporter came into the office with a story of a large fire somewhere, the old man would hardly glance at the report which he turned over to the composing room, but would tell the reporter about a much bigger fire that had taken place some forty years earlier when he was a young reporter. Egon Erwin Kisch remarked in his book that if a copy boy, white-faced, had come from the telegraph room with a wire stating that the Emperor (Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary) had just died, the old editor probably would have replied: "Well, surely you did not expect such an old man to go on living forever." You know how thoughts often connect the most improbable items that have occurred recently. A day or two earlier, I had received a letter from a reader in which I was asked whether I had any opinion about the tales of the "Sea Serpent." Presumably this letter had been inspired by my article on Latimeria, which was on the newsstands then. But while reading Kisch's book, I remembered that letter and the thought occurred to me what the old editor might have said if the copy boy had brought in a wire announcing that the "Sea Serpent mystery" had, at long last, been solved, presumably by capturing one or by the discovery of a fresh carcass having been washed ashore. He might either have said: "Well, surely you did not really expect that all the creatures in the oceans are already known to science." Or else he may have said: "Did you really think that this creature, which has been seen on many occasions for centuries, would remain undiscovered forever?" self, it might be useful to mention that one does not have to dig through old newspaper files to come up with stories about something called the "sea serpent" and then have to wonder whether this is a bona fide report of a sea captain who simply told what he saw, or whether the story was made up at the office because there happened to be no other news, what with Congress adjourned, the President on vacation and European statesmen sitting out the hot months of the year at the seashore or in their mountain cottages. There are several books on the problem, one of which, at least, deserved to be called "professional literature." It was published in October, #, by a Dutch professor of Zoology, "Director of the Royal Zoological and Botanical Society at The Hague," A. C. Oudemans, Ph.D. It is an enormous book, nearly as large in size as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and about as thick as one of its volumes, containing # pages in rather small type. It contains reports on # sightings of the disputed monster. In all cases where the witnesses were still alive in #, Dr. Oudemans got in touch with them by mail to obtain the fullest possible documentation. Not quite four decades later, in #, the second book devoted exclusively to the sea serpent saw print in London. The title of Dr. Oudemans' book had been simply The Great SeaSerpent (though written and printed in Holland, it was in English). The second book, by the late Lieutenant Commander Rupert T. Gould (R.N.), bore the title The Case for the Sea Serpent. Like Dr. Oudemans' work, Commander Gould's book was carefully documented, with cross-check by correspondence of all the stories where witnesses could still be reached. It is amusing to see how the professions of these two authors influenced both the style and contents of their books. Oudemans' is primarily a zoological treatise, sometimes dull, with interesting (if somewhat far-fetched) zoological reasoning attached. Commander Gould's book is better written by far and you never have to wonder about such nautical detail as type of vessel, precise location, weather conditions, etc. But when it comes to zoology, he opened the door to some nonsense, presumably for the sake of completeness. The same author later published another book called The Loch Ness Monster which is not as good a book, probably because it was rushed through typewriter and printing press. Professor Oudemans, then still alive, also wrote a few pamphlets on the Loch Ness monster, both in Dutch and in English. They don't much more than state that the Loch Ness monster, if captured, would vindicate his position taken in #. Additional sea serpent literature can be found in a number of books devoted to the sea rather than to zoology. There is a roundup of the reports I thought most important in my book The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn (New York #, Viking), which at least has the advantage over the other two of being still in print.   'HE so-called sea serpent mystery can be stated in a few sentences. If you eliminate all the sightings which fail to furnish a reasonably good description or where there is the least doubt about the veracity of the reporter, you end up with about half a hundred reports. They come from most of the seven seas, although the majority came from the Atlantic Ocean, which may simply be due to the fact that the Atlantic Ocean is more heavily traveled than any other. There seems to be no special preference for any latitude. In the Atlantic, sightings range from Greenland and Iceland all the way south to nearly the southern tip of Africa. There are several along the coast of Norway, one from the English Channel, one from the Mediterranean. In the Pacific, there is one from the vicinity of Hawaii, one from the Gulf of California, several off the California coast and some off Alaska. There were one or two in the Indian Ocean. The only one from Antarctic waters I recall at the moment was most likely a mistaken explanation. All these sightings could be explained by a specific shape, first drawn up by Professor Oudemans. This being the case, the easiest way out is to assume the existence of a large and officially unknown marine creature. If you do take this easy way out, you may speculate on what it is. Or what it could be. Let's look at some of the most famous cases now. It is traditional, to some extent, to begin with Archbishop Olaus Magnus of Sweden. But I'll just mention his name, mostly because he was not an eyewitness himself, partly because he wrote his book far from home, in Rome, at an advanced age, so that mistakes and distortions are to be expected. The oldest case to be quoted then will be that of Hans Egede, often called the "Apostle of Greenland," on one of his missionary voyages, when off the west coast of Greenland. I'll quote this verbatim: Anno #, July. On the #th appeared a very terrible sea-monster which raised itself so high above the water that its head reached above our main-top. It had a long sharp snout, and blew like a whale, had broad, large flappers, and the body was, as it were, covered with hard skin, and it was very wrinkled and uneven on its skin; moreover on the lower part it was formed like a snake, and when it went under water again, it cast itself backwards and in so doing it raised its tail above the water, a whole ship-length from its body. That evening we had very bad weather. r I HE last sentence sounds a littie like a non sequitur. What it is probably intended to convey is that prior to evening and at the time of the encounter, the weather was not bad. The later printed version of Egede's journal is accompanied by the picture shown as Fig. #, which you will find on the next page of this article. It is said to have been made originally by a Mr. Bing, who was one of the missionaries aboard; but there is no way of finding out any more how much time went by between the encounter and the making of the drawing. And unfortunately it never occurred to Egede to state the dimensions of his ship anywhere. If we assume that it was a vessel of around # tons, which is likely for the period, the raising of the head "above the main top" would bring it to a height of around # feet above the water. It may be useful to add that Egede's book contains several rather good pictures of the various kinds of whales seen during the same voyage. The next report was made only a few years later, in #, by Commandant Lorenz von Ferry, who traveled on a small vessel along the coast of Norway from Trondhjem to Molde. The weather was fine and the animal passed close to the vessel, swimming faster than the men could row. For this reason, the Commandant took his gun, which happened to be loaded with small shot, and fired at the animal which immediately disappeared in the water and did not come up again, although the Commandant made the boat wait around for a while in hopes of a reappearance. Next came a flurry of reports from the New England coast, most of them in the form of solemn legal affidavits made and sworn to before the Honorable Lonson Nash, Justice of the Peace. The first witness -- and, by a curious circumstance, also the last to have seen it -- was shipmaster Solomon Allen, whose testimony began as follows: I, Solomon Allen #d, of Gloucester, in the County of Essex, Ship master, depose and say; that I have seen a strange marine animal, that I believe to be a serpent, in the harbor in said Gloucester. I should judge him to be between eighty and ninety feet in length, and about the size of a half-barrel, apparently having joints from his head to his tail. I was about one hundred and fifty yards from him, when I judged him to be of the size of a half-barrel. His head formed something like the head of the rattle snake, but nearly as large as the head of a horse. When he moved on the surface of the water, his motion was slow, at times playing about in circles, and sometimes moving nearly straight forward. When he disappeared, he sunk apparently directly down, and would next appear at two hundred yards from where he disappeared, in two minutes. His color was a dark brown, and I did not discover any spots upon him. Fig. I Hans Egede's sea monster, as drawn by the missionary Bing This ability of "sinking straight down" is one of the standard features of this series of reports as well as others. Lorenz von Ferry's animal also disappeared immediately under the water when hit. The next important case, and one of the most famous ones to this day, is the so-called Daedalus sea serpent. On August #, #, Her Majesty's ship Daedalus, commanded by Captain Peter M'Quhae, had reached a point in the South Atlantic, roughly halfway between the Cape of Good Hope and the island of St. Helena, returning from duty in the Indian Ocean. , In the afternoon of the date mentioned, H.M.S. Daedalus passed a "sea serpent." When the Daedalus arrived in London, word about the occurrence got out and was published in the Times and the captain was requested by the admiralty to state his position. He then wrote a letter to Admiral Sir W. H. Gage which I'll quote in full, for authenticity; interest and flavor: Sir, -- I n reply to your letter of this day's date, requiring information as to the truth of a statement published in The Times newspaper, of a seaserpent of extraordinary dimensions having been seen from Her Majesty's ship Daedalus, under my command, on her passage from the East Indies, I have the honour to acquaint you, for the information of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, that at # o'clock p.m. on the #th of August last, in latitude # #' S., and longitude # #' E., the weather dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the N.W., with a long ocean swell from the S.W., the ship on the port tack heading N.E. by N., something very unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman, rapidly approaching the ship from before the beam. The circumstance was immediately reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lieut. Edgar Drummond, with whom ter, I was at the time walking the quarter-deck. The ship's company were at supper. On our attention being called to the object it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail yard should show in the water, there was at the very least # feet of the animal a fleur d'eau, no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye; and it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the S.W., which it held on at the pace of from # to # miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. The diameter of the serpent was about # or # inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake, and it was never, during the # minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses, once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like a mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its back. It was seen by the quartermaster, the boatswain's mate, and the man at the wheel, in addition to myself and officers above mentioned.  by artists under the direct supervision of Captain M'Quhae (fig. # and #). To this day, they look as convincing as they are inexplicable. In the wake of the Daedalus story, several others were published, antedating it as far as the actual observation was concerned, . Fig. # The "sea serpent" passing H.M.#. Daedalus, as published in # but not published until Captain McQuhae had stated: "This is what I saw, whether it can be explained or not." One of these belated reports is the Lady Combermere sea serpent -- in the vast majority of cases they are named after the ship from which they were seen -- which had been encountered in # . This sighting had taken place in the northern Atlantic and when the vessel approached the animal, it "reared head and neck out of the water and after taking a survey it all at once vanished." Another report was that of the Royal Saxon, made by Dr. R. Davidson. The Royal Saxon was going to India and was "a considerable distance south-west of the Cape of Good Hope." The water was "fine and smooth" and "it was in the middle of the day, and the other passengers were at lunch." But though there were few people on deck, the captain (Petrie by name) was among them. As for the animal: It passed within # yards of the ship, without altering its course in the Fig. # The Daedalus serpent, drawn under supervision of Capt. M'Quhae least; but as it came right abreast of us, it slowly turned its head towards us. Apparently only about one-third of the upper part of its body was above water in nearly its whole length, and we could see the water curling up on its breadth as it moved along, but by what means it moved we could not perceive. Since Dr. Davidson wrote his report because of the Daedalus story, he was writing about twenty years after the event and did not remember the date any longer. He only knew that the Royal Saxon had sailed for India in #. The next well-documented sighting took place only a few years later, a long distance away, on May #, #, off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The observers were four commissioned officers of the Canadian forces and a Mr. Henry Ince who, though not holding a commission himself, was closely associated with the military, being the ordnance storekeeper at Halifax. They were all on a fishing excursion together. The statement signed by everybody contained the following paragraphs: At the distance of from # to # yards on our starboard bow, we saw the head and neck of some denizen of the deep... in the act of swimming, the head so far elevated and thrown forward by the curve of the neck as to enable us to see the water under and beyond it. The creature rapidly passed, leaving a regular wake from the commencement of which, to fore part, which was out of water, we judged its length to be about # feet... There could be no mistake, no delusion... It is most difficult to give correctly the dimensions of any object in the water. The head of the creature we set down at about six feet in length, and that portion of the neck which we saw, at the same; the extreme length, as before stated, at between # and # feet. The neck in thickness equalled the bole of a moderate-sized tree. The head and neck of a dark brown or nearly black colour, streaked with white in irregular streaks. I do not recollect seeing any part of the body. and presumably written in the wake of the Daedalus report was that of Captain George Hope, of H.M.S. Fly. Publication took place in the Zoologist (#, p. #), but the observation had been made in #. It was really an observation rather than an encounter: "In the gulf of California, the sea being perfectly calm and transparent, we saw at the bottom a large marine animal, with the head and general figure of the alligator, except that the neck was much longer and that instead of legs the creature had four large flappers, somewhat like those of turtles... the creature was distinctly visible, and all its movements could be observed with ease: it appeared to be pursuing its prey at the bottom of the sea." During the three decades following the Daedalus incident, other reports came in, less spectacular than the Daedalus story, but most of them just as authentic. And then came somebody who could explain everything. His name was Henry Lee, his book was published in London in #, and the title he picked for it was Sea Monsters Unmasked. Most of the time, Mr. Lee said, the sea serpent was merely a string of porpoises. Leaping through the water, the individual porpoises appear to be the separate convulsions of an enormous snake. Now it is quite possible that one or another landlubber was taken in by such a string of porpoises. But most of the reports quoted speak of a "wake" left by the animal; they say that it reared its head far out of the water as if to look around. Or they say that the animal progressed through the water at a rapid rate, but that they were not able to see the means of locomotion. All of this is something porpoises cannot possibly do. But Mr. Lee's main explanation was a creature which, only fifty years earlier, had been every bit as "fabulous" or "mythical" as the sea serpent itself. It was the Kraken of Norse folklore, the giant squid. Actually, the giant squid had an even longer history than the sea serpent. A case of catching and subduing one had been reported by Pliny the Elder. In disguise, the giant squid appears in Homer's Odyssey, strangely enough (or interestingly enough) in the same place where Pliny's squid was killed. While generally doubted to be real at the outset of the nineteenth century, the giant squid had been established as an actual creature during the decades preceding Lee's book. It is not too illogical that Lee may have felt that the establishment of the actual existence of a marine monster should explain all the sightings. So the Daedalus case was redrawn as a giant squid swimming at the surface with its long tentacles trailing (Fig. #). And Hans Egede's sea monster could also be redrawn as a squid (Fig. #). It was all very ingenious, but unfortunately it did not fit. The position of the squid drawn to explain Egede is probably an impossibility. And the captain of the Daedalus, even though he probably never saw a giant squid traveling in this manner -- nobody else ever has -- would have given a different description if the animal was so close that he would have recognized a man at the same distance. mans and his big book. After, as has been told, quoting and collecting everything ever written on the sea serpent, he sat back against the background of his zoological knowledge and tried to sum up. The fact that the animal had so often been seen raising its head high out of the water indicated that it could as easily be a true serpent as a string of porpoises -- meaning that it could be neither. A serpent can raise its head when traveling, whether on land or when swimming at the surface of a lake or river. I have watched swimming snakes rather often -- and I admit in passing that it usually happened because I threw them into the water to watch them swim -- and from these personal observations, as well as the reported observations of others, I know that they raise at best ten Direction of travel Fig. # The Daedalus serpent as "unmasked" by Henry Lee per cent of their total length. If the head of the snake is raised three inches above the water, the snake is in all probability # inches long, perhaps a little more. If the "sea serpent" raised its head # feet out of the water, that would make it # feet long, which is at least three times the length of the largest known land snake. Moreover, a swimming serpent, even one of colossal dimensions, would not leave a "regular wake." Most important, since a snake's undulations are horizontal, no observer would ever be in doubt about the means of locomotion -- they would be plainly visible. And as a final clincher, paddles were seen in quite a number of cases, some of which have not been mentioned in this article for lack of space. A serpent with paddles is no longer a serpent. Taking all this into account and also the fact that observations in rather cold water are freV ' Fig. # Lee's "unmasking" of Egede't monster quent -- the true sea snakes which have adapted themselves to a marine life live in the Indian Ocean and other decidedly warm bodies of water -- Professor Oudemans proclaimed that it was his considered opinion that the sea serpent was actually a mammal! I have to confess that, at this moment, I feel very much like the TV announcer who is told that he has # seconds left to introduce the "mystery guest." Since I've used up my space for this month, I'll finish the story in the next What better way to use a time machine than to handle department store complaints? But pleasing a customer should have its limits! T HE Christmas party at the Boston branch of Hartshorne-Logan was threatening to become more legendary than usual this Christmas. The farm machinery manager had already collapsed. When he slid under the table containing the drinks, Miss Pringle, who sold drown!" One out of every three dirty stories started by party attendees had remained unfinished, because each had reminded someone else of another story. The recently developed liquors which affected the bloodstream three times faster had driven away twinges of conscience about untrimmed trees and midnight church services. The star salesman for mankies and the gentleman who was in charge of the janitors were putting on a display of Burmese footwrestling in one corner of the general office. The janitor foreman weighed fifty pounds less than the Burma gentleman, who was the salesman's customary opponent. So the climax of one tactic did not simply overturn the foreman. He glided through the air, crashing with a very loud thump against the wall. He wasn't hurt. But the impact knocked the hallowed portrait of H. H. Hartshorne, co-founder, from its nail. It tinkled imposingly as its glass splintered against the floor. HP HE noise caused a temporary lull in the gaiety. Several employes even felt a passing suspicion that things might be getting out of hand. "It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!" cried Mr. Hawkins, the assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present, worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of glasses. Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight. "We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the holiday," he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his attention on any working day. With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a drink that would make him feel even better. A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening machine. "Hell, Milly, you aren't working!" someone shouted at her. "Have another!" Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: "Oh, I see. They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old." Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's voice. To hear more of it, he said to her : "I'll bet that's been in there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago." "I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this." Milly turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so. The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out. Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly and picked up the order form. "This thing has never been processed!" Raising his voice, he shouted jovially, "Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!" scrawled words on the order form : "Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for vacuum cleaner. Dress for threeyear-old girl." She turned to the assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in her young life. "Let's fill this order right now!" "The poor woman must be dead by now," he objected, secretly angry that he hadn't thought of such a fine party stunt himself. Then he brightened. "Unless -- " he said it loud enough for the employes to scent a great proposal and the room grew quiet -- "unless we broke the rules just once and used the time warp on a big mission!" There was a silence. Finally, from an anonymous voice in one corner: "Would the warp work over eighty years? We were always told that it must be used only for complaints within three days." "Then let's find out!" Mr. Hawkins downed the rest of his drink and pulled a batch of keys from his pocket. "Someone scoot down to the warehouse. Tell the watchman that it's on my authority. Hunt up the stuff that's on the order. Get the best of everything. Ignore the catalogue numbers -- they've changed a hundred times in all these years." Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal of excitement. "Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order -- it's my greatgrandmother! Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to come to work here because of that." Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to look fatherly. It didn't. "Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll substitute a manky!" ing from mailing the letter when she found the large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared pugnaciously at the bundle. "The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!" she told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never seen before. The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to the impersonal typing on the customary HartshorneLogan onto the box, indicating to the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and therefore hadn't been broken in shipment. Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the house. Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. "Want!" she said decisively. "Your dress ought to be here," Ann said. She found scissors in her sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to open the parcel. "Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should throw away my letter of complaint," she told her daughter. "And by the time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter. Then they'll write again." Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted the expletives that she wanted to add. The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it wer alive. The paper wrappings flapped open. "There!" Sally said. Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned. It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small girl's dress should be. But Sally was delighted. "Mine!" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress. "It's probably the wrong size, too," Ann said, pulling off Sally's dress to try it on. "Let's find as many things to complain about as we can." cept for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started to look vacantly at the distant wall. "We'll have to send it back," Ann said, "and get the one we ordered." She tried to take it off, but the child squawked violently. Ann grabbed her daughter's arms, held them above her head and pulled at the dress. It seemed to be stuck somewhere. When Ann released the child's arms to loosen the dress, Sally squirmed away. She took one step forward, then began to float three inches above the ground. She landed just before she collided with the far wall. Sally looked scared until she saw her mother's face. Then she squealed in delight. Ann's legs were rubber. She was shaking her head and wobbling uncertainly toward her daughter when the door opened behind her. "It's me," her husband said. "Slow day at the office, so I came home early." "Les! I'm going crazy or something. Sally just -- " Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box. "Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?" He was looking at a small box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained rattled when he shook it. Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object. A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end. "Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no wire." "I don't know," Ann said. "Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally -- " He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. "They must have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment." He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again. Sally was still in his arms. "That's the doorbell, I think," he said, looking at the next object. It had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug for a wall socket. "That's funny," Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment. "It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of the doorbell." The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover and said: "Les, mI out Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she does." I ES stared at his wife and put  J the child onto the rug. Sally began to walk, then rose and I I gain floated, this time toward the hassock on which the manky lay. His jaw dropped. "My God! Ann, what -- " Ann was staring, too, but not at her daughter. "Les! The hassock! It used to be brown!" The hassock was a livid shade of green. A neon, demanding, .creaming green that clashed hori ibly with the soft browns and ieds in which Ann had furnished the room. "That round thing must be leaking," Les said. "But did you nee Sally when she -- " Ann's frazzled nerves carried a Irantic order to her muscles. She jumped up, strode to the hassock and picked up the manky with two fingers. She tossed it to Les. Immediately, she regretted her action. "Drop it!" she yelled. "Maybe it'll turn you green, too!" Les kicked the hassock into the hall closet, tossed the manky in after it and shut the door firmly. As the door closed, he saw the  i it ire interior of the dark closet brighten into a wet-lettuce green. When he turned back to Ann,  lie was staring at her left hand. The wedding band that Les had put there a dozen years ago was glow over the finger up to the first knuckle. Ann felt the scream building up inside her. She opened her mouth to let it out, then put her hand in front of her mouth to keep it in, finally jerked the hand away to prevent the glowing ring from turning her front teeth green. She collapsed into Les's arms, babbling incomprehensibly. He said: "It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green dye or whatever it is will wash off." Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental about her removing it. "I'll get dinner," she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel. "Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into the kitchen, Sally." Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of propulsion. the meal was almost ready, two things happened: Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice said from the front of the house, "Don't answer the front door." Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit under his arm. She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. "Neatest trick I've seen in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady Burnett out there pushed the button?" "Oh. Something like those name cards with something funny printed on them, like 'Another hour shot.' Well, if there's a little tape in there repeating that message, you'd better shut that part off. It might get boring after a while. And it might insult someone." Ann went to the door and turned the knob. The door didn't open. The figure of Mrs. Burnett, half-visible through the heavy curtain, shifted impatiently on the porch. Les yanked at the doorknob. It didn't yield for him, either. He looked up at the doorbell, which he had installed just above the upper part of the door frame. "Queer," he said. "That isn't in contact with the door itself. I don't see how it can keep the door from opening." Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: "Won't you come to the back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck." "I just wanted to borrow some sugar," the woman cried from the porch. "I realize that I'm a terrible bother." But she walked down the front steps and disappeared around the side of the house. "Don't open the back door." The well-modulated voice from the small doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving. "If this is ventriloquism -- " she began icily. "I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the office," Les said. "But you'd better let the old girl in. No use letting her get peeved." The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her neighbor. "I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather hectic day in an awful lot of ways."  pede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold. She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible. It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked suspiciously behind her. "The children have some new toys," Ann improvised hastily. "Sally is so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see now -- it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?" "I already have it," Bob said, handing a filled cup to his mother. The boy turned back to the detective set which he had spread over the kitchen table. "Excitement isn't good for me," Mrs. Burnett said testily. "I've had a lot of troubles in my life. I like peace and quiet." "Your husband is better?" "Worse. I'm sure I don't know why everything happens to me." Mrs. Burnett edged toward the hall, trying to peer into the front of the house. Ann stood squarely in front of the door leading to the hall. Defeated, Mrs. Burnett left. A muffled volley of handclapping, mixed with a few faint cheers, came from the doorbell-box when she crossed the threshold. Ann went into the hall to order Les to disconnect the doorbell. She nearly collided with him, coming in the other direction. "Where did this come from?" Les held a small object in the palm of his hand, keeping it away from his body. A few drops of something unpleasant were dripping from his fingers. The object looked remarkably like a human eyeball. It was human-size, complete with pupil, iris and rather bloodshot veins. "Hey, that's mine," Bob said. "You know, this is a funny detective kit. That was in it. But there aren't instructions on how it works." "Well, put it away," Ann told Bob sharply. "It's slimy." Les laid the eyeball on the table and walked away. The eyeball rolled from the smooth, level table, bounced twice when it hit the floor, then rolled along, six inches behind him. He turned and kicked at it. The eyeball rolled nimbly out of the path of the kick. "Les, I think we've made poor Mrs. Burnett angry," Ann said. "She's so upset over her poor husband's health and she thinks we're insulting her." Les didn't hear her. He strode to the detective set, followed at a safe distance by the eyeball, and picked up the box. "Hey, watch out!" Bob cried. A small flashlight fell from the box, landed on its side and its bulb flashed on, throwing a pencil of light across Les's hands. T OB retrieved the flashlight and turned it off while Les glanced through an instruction booklet, frowning. "This toy is too complicated for a ten-year-old boy," Les told his wife. "I don't know why you ordered such a thing." He tossed the booklet into the empty box. "I'm going to return it, if you don't smudge it up," she replied. "Look at the marks you made on the instructions." The black fingermarks stood out clearly against the shiny, coated paper. Les looked at his hands. "I didn't do it," he said, pressing his clean fingertips against the kitchen table. Black fingerprints, a full set of them, stood out against the sparkling polished table's surface. "I think the Detectolite did it," Bob said. "The instructions say you've got to be very careful with it, because its effects last for a long time." Les began scrubbing his hands vigorously at the sink. Ann watched him silently, until she saw his fingerprints appear on the faucet, the soap and the towel. She began to yell at him for making such a mess, when Sally floated into the kitchen. The girl was wearing a nightgown. "My God!" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. "She got out of that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?" Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in the parcel. Her heart sank. She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: "Les, I think it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time for a nap. It seems impossible, but -- " She shrugged mutely. "And I think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed." She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs, keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward out of her arms. The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal. Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball. Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep. room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed. She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les called the doctor before going to work. The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood out on its side: "Today is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate today." The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order. She tore open the envelope and read: "We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will readily ascertain that the payment of # will enable you to resume the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent order as soon... Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace, knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after work tonight. She had just decided to call HartshorneLogan's complaint department when the phone rang. "I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris," a voice said. "Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with something that his parents gave him." "My son?" Ann asked incredulously. "Bob?" "Yes. It's a little gadget that looks like a water pistol. Your son insists that he didn't know it would make clothing transparent. He claims it was just accident that he tried it out when he was walking by the gym during calisthenics. We've had to call upon every family in the neighborhood for blankets. Bob has always been a good boy and we believe that we can expel him quietly without newspaper publicity involving his name, if you'll -- " "I'll be right down," Ann said. "I mean I won't be right down. I've got a sick baby here. Don't do anything till I telephone my husband. And I'm sorry for Bob. I mean I'm sorry for the girls, and for the boys, too. I'm sorry for -- for everything. Good-by." phone, the doorbell rang. It rang with a normal buzz, then began to play soft music. Ann opened the door without difficulty, to admit Dr. Schwartz. "You aren't going to believe me, Doctor," Ann said while he took the child's temperature, "but we can't get that dress off Sally." "Kids are stubborn sometimes." Dr. Schwartz whistled softly when he looked at the thermometer. "She's pretty sick. I want a blood count before I try to move her. Let me undress her." Sally had been mumbling halfdeliriously. She made no effort to resist as the doctor picked her up. But when he raised a fold of the dress and began to pull it back, she screamed. The doctor dropped the dress and looked in perplexity at the point where it touched Sally's skin. "It's apparently allergy to some new kind of material. But I don't understand why the dress won't come off. It's not stuck tight." "Don't bother trying," Ann said miserably. "Just cut it off." Dr. Schwartz pulled scissors from his bag and clipped at a sleeve. When he had cut it to the shoulder, he gently began to peel back the edges of the cloth. Sally writhed and kicked, then collapsed in a faint. The physician smoothed the folds hastily back into place. He looked helpless as he said to Ann: "I don't know quite what to do. The flesh starts to hemorrhage when I pull at the cloth. She'd bleed to death if I yanked it off. But it's such an extreme allergy that it may kill her, if we leave it in contact with the skin." The manky's rattle suddenly began rhythmically from the lower part of the house. Ann clutched the side of the chair, trying to keep herself under control. A siren wailed somewhere down the street, grew louder rapidly, suddenly going silent at the peak of its crescendo. Dr. Schwartz glanced outside the window. "An ambulance. Looks as if they're stopping here." "Oh, no," Ann breathed. "Something's happened to Les." "It sure will," Les said grimly, walking into the bedroom. "I won't have a job if I can't get this stuff off my fingers. Big black fingerprints on everything I touch. I can't handle correspondence or shake hands with customers. How's the kid? What's the ambulance doing out front?" "They're going to the next house down the street," the physician said. "Has there been sickness there?" Les held up his hands, palms toward the doctor. "What's wrong with me? My fingers look all right. But they leave black marks on everything I touch." The doctor looked closely at the fingertips. "Every human has natural oil on the skin. That's how detectives get results with their fingerprint powder. But I've never heard of nigrification, in this sense. Better not try to commit any crimes until you've seen a skin specialist." A NN was peering through the window, curious about the ambulance despite her own troubles. She saw two attendants carry Mr. Burnett, motionless and white, on a stretcher from the house next door into the ambulance. A third member of the crew was struggling with a disheveled Mrs. Burnett at the door. Shrieks that sounded like "Murder!" came sharply through the window. "I know those bearers," Dr. Schwartz said. He yanked the window open. "Hey, Pete! What's wrong?" The front man with the stretcher looked up. "I don't know. This guy's awful sick. I think his wife is nuts." Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk, gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular. "It's murder!" she screamed. "Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's going to die! It means the electric chair!" The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth to quiet her. "Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him," Dr. Schwartz shouted to the men. "We've got a very sick child up here." "I was afraid this would happen," Les said. "The poor woman already has lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks that somebody is poisoning him." Bob stuck his head around the bedroom door. His mother stared unbelievingly for a moment, then advanced on him threateningly. Something in his face restrained her, just as she was about to start shaking him. "I got something important to tell you," Bob said rapidly, ready to duck. "I snuck out of the principal's office and came home. I got to tell you what I did." "I heard all about what you did," Ann said, advancing again. "And you're not going to slip away from me." "Give me a chance to explain something. Downstairs. So he won't hear," Bob ended in a whisper, nodding toward the doctor. A NN looked doubtfully at Les, then followed Bob down the stairs. The doorbell was monotonously saying in a monotone: "Don't answer me, don't answer me, don't go to the door." "Why did you do it?" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into weary sadness. "People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the rest of your life. You can't possibly explain -- " "Don't bother about the girls' clothing," Bob said, "because it was only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did before I left the house." Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas. "I forgot about it," Bob continued, "when that ray gun accidentally went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect -- " "He put stuff in the sugar?" A deep, booming voice came from the front of the house. Mother and son looked through the hall. A policeman stood on the threshold of the front door. "I heard that! The woman next door claims that her husband is poisoned. Young man, I'm going to put you under arrest." The policeman stepped over the threshold. A blue flash darted from the doorbell box, striking him squarely on the chest. The policeman staggered back, sitting down abruptly on the porch. A scent of ozone drifted through the house. "Close the door, close the door," the doorbell was chanting urgently. "Where's that ambulance?" Dr. Schwartz yelled from the top of the steps. "The child's getting worse." Something splintered in the hall closet door. The manky zoomed through the hole it had broken and began ricocheting wildly through the house like a crazed living creature, smashing ornaments, cracking the plaster. Les rushed through the front door to try to pick up the policeman. The officer drew his gun. An unearthly scream of "Help!" shrieked out of the doorbell. Ann put her hands over her eyes, as if that would make the unbelievable scene vanish. mas party, in the middle of inventory, when her headache had completely vanished, Milly began to worry. She talked the situation over for one whole afternoon with her best friend at Hartshorne-Logan, a girl in the complaint department. That same evening, after work, Milly went to the public library for the first time in her life. She borrowed a thick tome on the theory of time travel. But only three sentences in the first ten pages were comprehensible to her. She turned to her manky for comfort before going to bed. The next morning, she braved the protective screen of secretaries, receptionists and sub-officials who ordinarily protected Mr. Hawkins from minor annoyances, and penetrated to his office. Mr. Hawkins didn't recognize her when she walked in. His attitude became much more formal when she reminded him of their actions on Christmas Eve. "So you see, Mr. Hawkins," Milly concluded earnestly, "I'm worried. We had so much fun at that party that we didn't think about what we might do to those folks in the past." "You should understand," Mr. Hawkins firmly replied, "that I was not enjoying myself at the party. Definitely not. I must engage in the painful duty of assuming a pose of gaiety on special occasions, such as the annual office party." Milly shot him a withering look, but didn't argue that particular point. She continued: "So I've been thinking. We might have done a terrible thing. Sending that dress to a kid without the right underclothing could be real dangerous. Maybe even fatal." "We cannot harm people in the long ago, any more than the past could conceivably harm us." "But don't you see?" Milly fought to restrain tears of fright and frustration. "I'm not sure! And it's the most important thing in the world to me. That little girl who got the dress is my grandmother. If she died while she was a little girl, there wouldn't be any me. I can't be born, if my grandmother died before she was three years old." "The paradoxes of time travel have been greatly exaggerated," Mr. Hawkins said. "Perhaps a genealogist would be able to clear up the question." foot height, suddenly furious. "You don't care if I just vanish all of a sudden! All that you care about is keeping yourself out of a lot of bother!" She turned on her heel, walked to the door, and added:"After I've helped to fill forty orders every working day for the past three years!" Milly stalked out and slammed the door behind her. Then she stopped, just outside the door, waiting for a chain reaction to occur. It did, about five seconds later. Mr. Hawkins popped through the door with a shout: "Where's that girl?" He was through the reception room and halfway down the hall when Milly called him back. "Here I am," she said sweetly. He grabbed her arm and yanked her into his office. "You know," he said, "I've been thinking about those poor, unfortunate people in the past, too. Now that you mention it, I believe we should do something for them." He wiped his forehead. "You've been thinking about a poor, unfortunate manager right here in the present," Milly retorted, sure of her position now. I "All of a sudden, you've figured  out what it will mean if I vanish because my grandmother never A had any children. You realize that if I've never existed, all of a sudI den Hartshorne-Logan will have thousands of complaint letters, lawsuits about orders over the past three years. You're thinking about what's going to happen to your position, if you're to blame for all those customers not getting their merchandise." Mr. Hawkins turned away until he got his face under control. "We'll talk about that later," he said mildly at last. "Let's agree that everyone will be happier if we straighten up matters. And don't you think that just we two should do the straightening up ourselves? It'll be simpler if -- uh -- other officials don't hear about this."   away from her eyes the mess was still more complicated. The new factor was a short young girl who was walking up to the house. She was looking about, like a country girl suddenly whisked to Times Square. The policeman whirled when he heard footsteps behind him. "What do you want?" "I'm afraid that I'm to blame for the whole thing," Milly told the officer. "I represent Hartshorne-Logan. We've just discovered that we made several mistakes when we filled an order for this family. I've come to pick up the wrong merchandise." The doorbell made ominous clucking sounds as Milly reached the threshold. She looked up at the box and told Ann: "I'm afraid that I can't get in while that defective doorbell is working. Will you cut off the house current for a minute, while I disconnect it?" Les blinked at her, then began to curse, loudly and bitterly. "Why didn't I think of that?" Les dodged the manky's careening and headed for the fuse box. Milly called after him : "Maybe there are bananas in the refrigerator. Take them out right away, if there are. The manky will quiet down then." Ann rushed to the kitchen, yanked out the three bananas and threw them through the open window. She heard the dull thud from the front room as the manky fell to the carpet and lay motionless. "I've pulled the switch!" Les yelled. The policeman warily stepped through the door, looking at Les. Dr. Schwartz intercepted the policeman. "Officer," Dr. Schwartz said, "there's a very sick little girl upstairs. I think you'll do your duty best by trying to hurry up an ambulance." "But there's a murder charge floating around and I practically heard a confession," the policeman protested, slightly dazed. Milly had pulled down the doorbell assembly. She put it beside the manky, then scooped up the remaining sections of Bob's detective kit and put them on the pile. She headed for the stairs, calling over her shoulder: "Don't worry about your detective set troubles. Those things wear off in twenty-four hours." the load of merchandise, Milly tiptoed into her grandmoth- er's room. When she heard Dr. Schwartz trailing her curiously, she turned to him, whispering: "I'll watch over the little girl. You go down and explain to that policeman that there wasn't anything harmful in the chemicals in the detective set, and there was a short circuit in the doorbell, and that the child must be allergic to the dress. It was all Hartshorne-Logan's fault, not this family's." "But what about that thing?" Dr. Schwartz said, pointing to the manky. Milly tried frantically to think of a believable explanation and changed the subject: "The policeman said something about a murder confession. There was genuine truthtalk in the detective set. If someone swallowed any of it, it might be a genuine confession." "My goodness!" Dr. Schwartz raced downstairs. Milly bent over the child who would become her grandmother. Sally lay flushed and feverish on the big bed, sunk into a deep coma. Milly bent and kissed her grandmother, then quickly deactivated the anti-grav pads in the shoulders. After that, it took only a moment to decamouflage the zippers which held the crosh force. The dress then slipped right off. Sally sighed the instant the dress fell free. Her skin was already returning to its normal hue by the time Milly had taken another dress from a bureau drawer. Milly slipped it onto Sally and covered her up to prevent a chill. Milly kissed the child again and looked at the ancestor whom she had known only as a tiny old lady. Then she gathered up her pile of merchandise, tossing on top the dress, with its shoulder pads again activated. The commotion downstairs was still loud, but it no longer sounded hysterical. Milly ticked off the order list on her fingers, to make sure she had collected everything. Then she opened the bedroom window. Buoyed by the anti-grav force, she floated to the ground, landing with only a slight jar. She darted through the backyard, away from the house, attracting no attention. Everyone in the block had convened at the front of the house, where Mrs. Burnett was screaming out a full confession and the policeman was sweatingly scribbling it down. Mrs. Burnett was explaining in trying detail the exact manner in which she had poisoned her four husbands in the past seven years, to collect their insurance. " Hartshorne-Logan of the future, she sank wearily into a chair. She held her hand out and watched it quiver. "Golly, I didn't realize how scared I was, until I got back," she told Mr. Hawkins. "But I think I did only one thing wrong. I forgot to figure out some alibi for my great-uncle to use for his accident with the clothes penetration ray." "Your ancestors will forget all about that in their excitement over the insurance company rewards," Mr. Hawkins assured her. "I checked way back on the old records. I see that your greatgrandmother paid her bill, right after the date when all this trouble came up. But she never bought another thing from Hartshorne-Logan." "Well, it's a good thing that time travel can't cause trouble both ways," Milly reflected. "I don't think I'll even go to next year's Christmas party." "No danger of time travel bothering us. Nothing could come from the past into the present that could possibly hurt us." "Gee, I'm glad," Milly said, and sneezed. It frightened her because sneezes were unknown in this world from which the cold virus had been eradicated. Then she sneezed again. A little later, Mr. Hawkins began to sneeze. ing, nose-blowing persons throughout the world were soon proof that Mr. Hawkins had blundered again. Herman discovered, nothing can beat cold, hard facts l office beating his hands together and shivering with cold. "Women!" he said. "Five gallons, a pint of oil and would I check the tires and battery." He snorted. "Tires I don't mind, but couldn't she have left the battery until daylight?" "Service," said Onslow. "Service with a smile. Tip?" "Not on your life." Herman held out his hands to the warmth of the stove. Together with Onslow, he formed the night staff of the Acme Garage. It was a pleasant enough job, with little to do in the small hours but sit in the office and wait for some stranded motorist to call for help or service the few cars traveling through the night. He nodded toward the paper Onslow was holding. "Anything interesting?" "Not much. A couple of holdups, a murder and some more disappearances." Onslow riffled the paper, his thin face adorned with heavy spectacles intent as he read the column. "You ever think about that?" "Holdups?" Warmed, Herman sat down and lit a cigarette. Physically, he was totally opposite Onslow, being big and florid where the other man was thin and pale. He gestured with his cigarette. "Places like this don't get held up, not with the two of us. Those punks pick single-man stations to knock over." "Not holdups," said Onslow. "Disappearances." He folded the paper and leaned forward. "Did you know that every year # people vanish? I don't mean they run away from their families or skip their jobs. They literally vanish." He snapped his fingers. "Just like that." "Must have a reason," Herman said comfortably. He wasn't much of a reader and was tired of the radio, so an argument with Onslow was as good a way to pass the time as any he could think of. Made something interesting to tell Mary over breakfast, too. "No reason," said Onslow. "No reason at all." ject. "You wouldn't think it possible in this civilization, what with social security, the police, the paper-work checking and registering every individual, but it does. Men and women vanish and are never found again. It's the truth." "I don't doubt it," chuckled Herman. "There have been times when I've felt like taking a long, one-way walk. Means nothing." "You don't get it," said Onslow. "I'm not talking about the people who have obviously decided to run away. People like that pack a bag, draw out their money from the bank, make some preparations before leaving. Most of them are easily found; all of them could be if anyone were interested enough. I'm talking about the mysteries, the people who vanish for no reason and without making any plans at all." He shook his head. "Sometimes it worries me." "Maybe they were snapped up by something in a flying saucer?" Herman chuckled again; somehow, he couldn't take Onslow's statement seriously. He didn't disbelieve it, for the thin man never lied, but he just couldn't accept it. He changed the subject. "I've been thinking about what you told me last night. You know, that time-travel thing." "The paradox?" Onslow smiled. "Did you work it out?" "I think so." Herman frowned to stir up his memory; he and Mary had spent a couple of hours on the problem before he hit the sack. '"If a man invents a time machine," he said carefully, "and then goes back to kill his grandfather when a boy, then he couldn't have been bom, could he?" "Hardly." "Then if he hadn't been born, he couldn't invent a time machine in the first place. But if he hadn't invented it, he couldn't have killed his grandfather, so he would have been born anyway." Herman drew a deep breath. "So he didn't kill his grandfather at all. Right?" He looked anxiously at the other man. "Near enough." Onslow knew better than to labor the point. "If he was born, then his grandfather couldn't have been killed when a boy, so all that about going back really enter into it." "That's what I said," lied Herman. "Mary kept trying to tie me in knots, but I made her see sense in the end." He hesitated. "Got any more?" "Paradoxes?" Onslow looked surprised. "Sure, if you're interested." "I'm interested." Herman glanced through the office windows. The night was a bad one, cold, wet, miserable, a night most people would choose to stay indoors. "May as well talk as read or listen to the radio. More interesting, anyway." "How about this one?" Onslow helped himself to a cigarette and hunched closer to the stove. "An old Greek named Zeno dreamed it up and it's a good one. Achilles was going to race a tortoise. The tortoise was placed halfway down a measured strip -- it doesn't matter how long -- and Achilles stood at the starting line. You got the idea?" "Sure, the tortoise was given a big start." "It was halfway down the strip," said Onslow. "So the gun went off and the race started. Now before Achilles could catch up with the tortoise, he had to cover half the distance between them. Right?" nodded. "Sure, of course. He had to reach the halfway mark between them." "Yes, but by the time he had reached that halfway mark, the tortoise had moved on a bit further. So Achilles had to cover half that distance, by which time the tortoise had moved on still more. So Achilles had to cover half that distance and then half the next distance and so on." Onslow leaned back. "How did Achilles ever catch up with the tortoise?" "Uh?" Herman looked blank. "By running faster, of course. Nothing to it." "Isn't there?" Onslow reached for paper and pencil. "Look at it this way." He made swift sketches. "First he had to cover half the first distance, then half the second, then the third and all the rest. Look at it that way and he could never have caught up because, no matter how short the distance, he had always to cover a half of it, by which time the tortoise had moved on." "I see," said Herman glumly. This was one time when he couldn't dazzle Mary with his superior knowledge. It wasn't much good taking home a problem to which he didn't know the answer. Onslow took pity on him. "No one can really work it out the way it's stated. They say that calculus can do it, but I wouldn't know. The easy answer is that Achilles wasn't racing to catch up with the tortoise at all; he was running to a point past the finishing line. That way, all he had to do was cover a series of decreasing halves of distance and so, naturally, he won hands down." "Sure," said Herman, relieved. "The gimmick depends on which way you look at it." He glanced at his watch, then through the windows. A car came down the road, slowed and swung into the forecourt of the all-night restaurant a few hundred feet lower down. Onslow, who had headed toward the door when he heard the slowing car, grunted and busied himself at the stove instead. Herman switched on the radio, listened to a disc jockey announcing the next record, then switched off with a grunt of disgust. "Got any more?" "Paradoxes?" Onslow looked thoughtful. "Have you heard the one about the missing unit?" "Tell me," Herman invited. "Three men go into a restaurant," said Onslow. "The bill comes to thirty units and -- " "Units?" "Dollars, pounds, francs, it doesn't matter what you call them." "The bill comes to thirty units -- dollars, say. The manager, after the bill has been paid, finds that he's overcharged by five dollars. He gives the five dollars to a waiter who, being dishonest, gives each of the three men one dollar each and pockets the remaining two." Onslow flicked his cigarette. "Now, in effect, the men have each paid nine dollars for their meal. Three nines are twenty-seven. The waiter has kept two dollars. Twenty-seven and two make twenty-nine. Where is the other dollar?" "Wait a minute!" Herman was frowning. His lips moved as he thought. "What's the answer?" "I don't know." Onslow sat down and leaned forward. "If you take the units -- dollars -- at each stage, you get the full amount. They handed the manager thirty dollars. He kept twenty-five and gave the waiter five, still thirty. The waiter gave the men one each, three, kept two, five, and the manager had the other twentyfive. Still thirty. But the men went into the restaurant with thirty dollars, ten each. They come out with one dollar each, so they must have spent twentyseven between them. If they guessed the waiter was robbing them, all they could reclaim was two. So we still get twenty-nine instead of thirty." He stood up as a car swished into the forecourt before the pumps. "You think about it while I serve this customer," he suggested. The car was new and the customer felt toward it the same emotion that a mother has for her child. He insisted on Onslow's inspecting the oil, demanded a different brand from a sealed can, watched the pump gauge with a suspicious eye, asked to have his tires and battery checked and then wanted his plugs tested. By the time Onslow had finished, he was blue with cold and in a frame of mind to regret the passing of the horse as a means of locomotion. Herman glanced up from where he sat, a sheet of paper before him and a frown creasing his forehead. "I don't get it," he said plaintively. "Nor me." Onslow shivered as he warmed himself at the stove. "You'd think that a guy had better things to worry about than a heap of steel and rubber." He rubbed his hands together. "Plug testing at three A.M.! They'll be wanting a wash and polish next!" "Service," said Herman maliciously. "Service with a smile. Tip?" "Go to hell." "It's warm there, from what they tell me," said Herman mildly. He scowled down at his sheet of paper. "I've been working on what you said. I still can't see it. If you count in the money the men have, then you get two dollars over; if not, one dollar less." "Twenty-seven they paid, three they have, two the waiter has." Onslow nodded. "Thirty-two units instead of thirty. I told you it was a good one." noyed at his inability to solve the problem, a little tired and more than a little irritated. "Why use units? Why not plain, ordinary dollars?" "It would work in any currency," said Onslow mildly. "The paradox, I mean. Or with anyY O U GO thing similar. People, for example." "People!" Herman crumpled the sheet of paper. "You serious?" For answer, Onslow picked up his newspaper and opened it at the column dealing with the latest disappearances. He tapped it. "Why not? People are units just the same as the mythical dollars we were talking about. If you can lose a dollar by passing it from hand to hand, why not a man or a woman?" "Hand to hand," said Herman shrewdly. "You don't pass people around that way." "Maybe not, but they move just the same." Onslow listened to the hum of an approaching car. It mounted, reached a peak, fell away as the car drove into the night. "People are on the move all the time, driving, walking, on the subways, in trains, airplanes, boats, all the time moving from one place to another." He picked up the newspaper and glanced at it. "Just like the dollars in the paradox." "You're crazy!" Herman snorted. "It isn't the same at all." "No?" Onslow shrugged. "Call a dollar a unit and call a man a unit and you have the same thing. Pass them around, one way and another, and they are still the same thing. And if a dollar can get lost in the shuffle, then why not a man?" "Men don't vanish like that," protested Herman. He flinched as Onslow held out the newspaper. "They can't." "But they do." The thin man smiled and produced his cigarettes. He passed them to Herman, lit them, inhaled with quiet luxury. "I used to work in a lost and found office one time. You wouldn't believe the things people lose. Umbrellas, briefcases, parcels, books, all kinds of things." "I've lost stuff myself," said Herman. "Anyone can forget a parcel or a book." "Sure, but that isn't all." Onslow stared through the office window. "What about false teeth, artificial legs, artificial eyes, a pair of crutches, trusses, things like that? How can a man lose his false teeth? They aren't something you carry around in your hand or loose in a pocket. The same with artificial legs or eyes. And not wrapped, remember -- we used to get them handed in just as they were found." He looked at Herman. "Have you ever seen a man walking around with an unwrapped artificial leg under his arm?" "Not that I can remember." "Of course you haven't. And teeth -- you wear false teeth, Herman. What do you do with them?" "Keep them in my mouth. What else?" "That's what I mean. And yet you'd be surprised at the number of dentures handed in to every lost and found office every week." Onslow shook his head. "It makes you wonder." "Not me, it doesn't," said Herman. "I don't go for that sort of pipe-dream."  ' back to the window and blew smoke against his reflection. "Twelve thousand a year. And that's just in this country alone. No one knows how many people vanish all over the world. And people moving all the time. From one place to another and back again. From country to country, state to state, town to town, even from home to business. All moving just like the dollars in the paradox." Herman didn't answer. He was thinking of Mary's younger brother, who had gone to Korea. He'd been reported missing -- not killed, not even believed to have been killed, just missing. Herman hadn't thought it odd at the time, but now he couldn't get it out of his mind. "Maybe they shed their 'bits' when they vanish," said Onslow reflectively. "A man gets lost in the shuffle and his teeth or spectacles or artificial leg just stays behind." "But where do they go?" Herman was still thinking of Korea. "Where does the missing dollar go?" Onslow shrugged. "No one knows where they go. Maybe they're still walking around somewhere, not knowing who they are. Or perhaps they just vanish, be as if they never were." He dropped his butt and trod on it. "And it could happen at any time. You might leave for work and never get there, or start for home or down the street and never arrive. You'd have made only one move too many or maybe just a move in the wrong direction. Who knows?" "You're kidding," said Herman. "You made it all up just to pass the time, didn't you?" He was a big man and irritated. Onslow stared at him, then picked up the newspaper. "Sure," he said. "I just made it up." "Take a walk down the street and vanish!" Herman shook his head. "Crazy! But you made it all up, didn't you?" "That's what I said." Onslow glanced at his watch. "It's getting near dawn. How about coffee?" Going down the road to the restaurant was a privilege Herman insisted on. Someone had to stand by the phone and pumps, so they couldn't both go. Normally he was eager for the errand. This time, though, he didn't move. "You go," he said. # Star Shelf devoid of a single fictional work, has, I think, considerable general appeal. Physical, natural and human sciences are all represented. It seems to me that today's releases, aimed at the lay market, are of high interest and digestibility. As for instance: her von Braun. The Viking Press, N. Y., # OR the past four years, or since his articles on space flight first began appearing in Colliers, the "Mars Project" has been identified with von Braun, even appearing as a book under his name. Now he has pooled resources with our own Willy and produced an intellectually stimulating volume that has the reader asking: "Why isn't this being done now?" These two gifted men show that a space station, the first necessary step to a Martian voyage, and little else. The authors have facts and figures covering every operation of the Odyssey, from the space flight itself to the actual landing on the planet and the return trip. The magnificent paintings by Chesley Bonestell complete a beautiful package. Gartmann. David McKay Co., Inc., N. Y. # G artmann, a well known rocket expert himself, has compiled a series of short biographies of the men who he feels have been most instrumental in bringing rocketry to its present eminence. He starts with Hermann Ganswindt, the fabulous eccentric who first applied Newton's Third Law of Motion to theoretical flight in airless space and ends with Wernher von Braun, the man responsible for the development of the V# and who is now aiding the American research effort. An interesting glimpse of the international set of visionaries who made reality out of the stuff of dreams. The World Publishing Co., Cleveland  N. Y., # gall in naming his book. I can only admire him for opening thus: "The first space pilot has already been bom. He is probably between ten and sixteen." My ten-year-old, Rickie, agrees vehemently. So, you see, Gaul has a ready-made market. You and I can only stand on the sidelines while he cautions his neo-spacemen concerning the problems they are certain to encounter. The book's chapters are well thought out and have the advantage of having Virgil Finlay's unbelievably detailed drawings to enhance interest. The completely straight-faced instructions for deportment upon encountering alien intelligence are priceless. Maybe it's rinuch later than we think. Gray Barker. University Books, N. Y. #  own hunch is that Gray Barker is due for a long life, his dangerous knowledge notwithstanding. His book is a weird winding trail of saucer reports which he tracked down to the neglect of his business, and the peculiar and sudden loss of interest in saucers by prominent investigators and devotees. He may be right, but there is another explanation he omitted -- downright boredom. I know I'm tired of saucers! Arthur C. Clarke. Harper #s Brothers, N. Y., #  aqualung, there has been an upswing in interest in the sea. The trend is exemplified when such a man as Clarke, with his reputation earned in other fields, sticks his nose into a mask and swims off to investigate the underwater beauties of the Great Barrier Reef, off Australia. Throughout the book, I couldn't help but feel that Clarke was purpling a lily. The subject is dramatic in itself and he appeared to be straining for vividness except during his underwater descriptions. But nobody can carp at the glorious photos, both black and white and color. Auguste Piccard. Oxford University Press, N. Y., # always exemplified the spirit of scientific adventure to me since his daring balloon ascents in the '#s. Add to that the fabulous records set by his development, the bathyscaphe, employing the identical principles as the stratospheric balloon in the medium of the oceanic abyss, and you can see that I was panting to rip into this tome. Interesting, yes, but it is too full of acknowledgments of aid from various agencies and manufacturing firms and has too much technical detail for the lay reader in search of adventure at the frontiers of science. Hanover House, N. Y., # ence fiction, having produced both stories and articles for this field. In this book, he attempts to fill the need for a somewhat more than elementary introduction to electronic theory and practice. A. W. Keen in Electronics a couple of months ago did a similar job, but on a lower level. Pierce assumes his reader to have a minimum background of highschool math and leads him in easy stages through fields, waves, noise and radiation. Though this may not be light reading, it is an excellent try that succeeds in informing without intimidating. timer Wheeler. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., N. Y., # have exciting lives, live this one and see! Of course, Sir Mortimer's life spans two world wars in which he served in the field, the second time as brigadier in Africa and Salerno. Can you picture any wartime commander being as concerned with the preservation of antiquities as with the conduct of the war? Wheeler took time out from his command to set up a guard of liberated Italians to watch over Tripolitanian ruins. Archeologically, Wheeler almost single-handedly brought excavating up to its present high level, in which practically nothing of value can be destroyed in the process. A bit fruity in style, but thoroughly worth reading. ton V. Kline. The Julian Press, N. Y., # A N unfortunate thing about published rebuttals is that they usually come too late, when interest has died down. This scholarly book, deserving of wide distribution, consists of several sections that deal with various questions raised by Bernstein in his book and lay the ghost of Bridey as effectively as the actual expose which has just been circulated in the major magazines and newspapers at this writing. J. Brandon. Stravon Publishers, N. Y., # pected, the success of Bridey brought a flood of books on the subject. The above book, written by a well-known (and good-looking) woman stage hypnotist, in spite of its theatrical appearance and profusion of staged shots, is interesting, if light, in its treatment, and written with the respect becoming to one who earns her living from her knowledge of hypnotism. R. C. Johnson. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # in this little volume a number of case histories and experiments in precognition, telepathy, object reading, etc., that read like working notes of any leading author of fantasy. These items are presented as completely substantiated. Food for thought, but not to be swallowed whole.      #th century of teleportation, Gully Foyle, a common spaceman marooned in space aboard the wrecked freighter SS Nomad, has been galvanized into ferocity by the unaccountable refusal of a sister ship, SS Vorga, to rescue him. Foyle succeeds in rescuing himself and returns from space devoured by a desire for vengeance against Vorga. He has returned hideously tattooed after a stay with a savage tribe who live on a Sargasso planetoid in the Asteroid Belt. They have salvaged the Nomad and built it into their little planet. Foyle's first primitive attempt at vengeance forces him to blackmail and assault a lovely Negro girl named Robin Wednesbury, who is a jaunte teacher and a "telesend," a one-way telepath. Foyle is captured by the owner of Vorga and Nomad, the famous Presteign of Presteign, who is determined to discover the location of the wreck of the Nomad. On platinum and a mysterious substance called PyrE. Central Intelligence, represented by Captain Peter Y'ang-Yeovil, is also anxious to locate the priceless PyrE, which may be the vital factor in the war between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites. The Stars My Destination Part # of a # Part Serial for entropy!" was Foyle's scheme for revenge for being left to die in space! Presteign employs Saul Dagenham, formidable chief of Dagenham Couriers, and Regis Sheffield, Terra's leading lawyer, to rip information out of Foyle. Foyle cannot be compelled to talk and he is immured in Gouffre Martel, to. Kept in solitary confinement in Gottfire Martel, Foyle is able to make contact with another prisoner, Jisbella McQueen, over the "Whisper Line," an acoustical ireak which enables them to whisper to each other even though their cells are half a mile apart. Jiz McQueen, a rebel against jaunte-age morality which keeps women in purdah, is a clever, educated girl imprisoned for larceny. She educates Foyle, teaches him to speak properly, and plans to escape with him. Jiz explains to Foyle that if he is to revenge himself on Vorga, he cannot punish the ship itself; he must find the man who gave the order to leave him in space. Foyle and Jiz make a daring escape from Gouffre Martel and Jiz takes Foyle to an underworld physician who removes the ghastly tattooing from Foyle's face. Then Foyle and Jiz jet out to the Sargasso Asteroid to salwreck of the Nomad. Foyle makes the terrifying discovery that although the tattooing has been removed from his face, the bloodred scars of it reappear whenever he is overcome by any emotion. He will have to maintain iron control over himself forever. Just as Foyle succeeds in cutting loose the purser's safe, containing the fortune in platinum and the PyrE, from the wreck of the Nomad, Saul Dagenham jets up to the asteroid. He has followed Foyle from Terra. Foyle, driven by his remorseless lust for vengeance, abandons Jiz McQueen to Dagenham, sacrificing her in order to escape with the treasure. Months later, Foyle reappears on Terra in the guise of Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, a ludicrous new-rich playboy whose antics are the delight and the laughingstock of the world. This is really protective camouflage for Foyle, who is still intent on revenge. He has ferreted out the names of three crewmen from the Vorga. To track them down, he is prepared for any emergency, for he has studied hard and he has bribed a physician from the Commando Brigade to operate on him and rewire muscle and nerve to turn him into a fantastic accelerated fighting machine, capable of incredibly fast and strong acts for short periods. Foyle's final step is to make Robin Wednesbury, the cultivated and lovely Negro "telesend," join forces with him. Foyle reveals to Robin that her mother and two sisters, missing since the war broke out between the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites, are in some way connected with SS Vorga which he is hunting. Although Robin was raped by Foyle and loathes him, she is forced to work with him. A N New Year's Eve, Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres made his onslaught .on society. He appeared first in Canberra at the Government House ball, half an hour before midnight. This was a highly formal affair, bursting with color and pageantry, for it was the custom at formals for society to wear the evening dress that had been fashionable the year its clan was founded or its trademark patented. Thus the Morses (Telephone and Telegraph) wore #th-century frock coats and their women wore Victorian hoop-skirts. The Skodas (Powder # Guns) harked back to the late #th century, wearing Regency tights and crinolines. The daring Peenemundes (Rockets  Reactors), dating from the #s, wore tuxedos and their women unashamedly revealed legs, arms and necks in antique Worth and Mainbocher gowns. Fourmyle of Ceres appeared in evening clothes, very modern and very black, relieved only by a white sunburst on his shoulder the trademark of the Ceres clan. With him was Robin Wednesbury in a glittering white gown, her slender waist tight in whalebone, the bustle of the gown accentuating her long straight back and graceful step. The black and white contrast was so arresting that an orderly was sent to check the sunburst trademark in The Almanack ol Peerages and Patents. He returned with the news that it was of the Ceres Mining Company, organized in # for the exploitation of the mineral resources of Ceres, Pallas and Vesta. The resources had never manifested themselves and the House of Ceres had gone into eclipse but had never become extinct. Apparently it was now being revived. "Fourmyle? The clown?" "Yes. The Four Mile Circus. Everybody's talking about him." "Is that the same man?" "Couldn't be. He looks human." Society moved toward Fourmyle, curious but wary. "Here they come," Foyle muttered to Robin. "Relax. They'll accept anything if it's amusing. Stay tuned." "Are you that dreadful man with the circus, Fourmyle?" "Sure you are. Smile." "I am, madam. You may touch me." "Why, you actually seem proud. Are you proud of your bad taste?" "The problem today is to have any taste at all." "The problem today is to have any taste at all. I think I'm lucky." "Lucky but dreadfully indecent." "Indecent but not dull." "And dreadful but delightful. Why aren't you cavorting now?" "I'm under the influence, madam." "Oh, dear. Are you drunk?" "I'm under your influence." "You wicked young man. Charles, come here and save Fourmyle. I'm ruining him." "That's Victor of R.C.A. Victor." "Fourmyle, is it? Delighted. What's that entourage of yours cost?" "Tell him the truth." "Forty thousand, Victor." "Good Lord! A week?" "A day." d'you want to spend all that money for?" "The truth again!" "For notoriety, Victor." "Ha! Are you serious?" "I told you he was wicked, Charles." "Damned refreshing. Klaus! This impudent young man is spending forty thousand a day -- for notoriety, if you please!" "Skoda of Skoda." "Good evening, Fourmyle. I am much interested in this revival of the name. You are, perhaps, a cadet descendant of the original founding board of Ceres, Inc.?" "Give him the truth." "No, Skoda. It's a title by purchase. I bought the company. I'm a mere climbing upstart, Skoda." "Good. Tou jours audace!" "My word, Fourmyle! You're frank." "Told you he was impudent. Very refreshing. There's a parcel of damned upstarts about, young man, but they don't admit it. Elizabeth, come and meet Fourmyle of Ceres." "Fourmyle! I've been dying to meet you." "Lady Elizabeth Citroen." "Is it true you travel with a portable college?" "The light touch here." "A portable high school, Lady Elizabeth." "But why, Fourmyle?" "Oh, madam, it's so difficult to spend money these days. We have someone would invent a new extravagance." "You ought to travel with a portable inventor, Fourmyle." "I've got one. Haven't I, Robin? But he wastes his time on perpetual motion. What I need is a resident spendthrift. Would any of your clans care to lend me a younger son?" "Would any of us care to? There's many a clan would pay for the privilege of unloading." "Isn't perpetual motion spendthrift enough for you, Fourmyle?" "No. It's a shocking waste of money. The whole point of extravagance is to act like a fool and feel like a fool, but enjoy it. Where's the joy in perpetual motion? Is there any extravagance but not one cent for entropy. My slogan." clustering around Fourmyle grew. They were delighted and amused. He was a new toy. Then it was midnight, and as the great clock tolled in the New Year, the gathering prepared to move with midnight around the world. "Come with us to Java, Fourmyle. Regis Sheffield's giving a marvelous legal party. We're going to play 'Sober the Judge.'" "Hong Kong, Fourmyle." "Tokyo, Fourmyle. It's raining in Hong Kong. Come to Tokyo and bring your circus." "Thank you, no. Shanghai for me. The Soviet Duomo. I promise an extravagant reward to the first one who discovers the deception of my costume. Meet you all in two hours. Ready, Robin?" "Don't jaunte. Bad manners. Walk out. Slowly. Respects to the Governor... to the Commissioner... their ladies... bien. Don't forget to tip the attendants. Not him, idiot! That's the Lieutenant Governor. All right, you made a hit. You're accepted. Now what?" "Now what we came to Canberra for." "I thought we came for the ball." "The ball and a man named Forrest." "Who's that?" "Ben Forrest, spaceman off the Vorga. I've got three leads to the man who gave the order to let me die -- a cook in Rome named Poggi; a quack in Shanghai named Orel; and this man, Forrest. This is a combined operation... society and search. Understand?" "I understand." "We've got two hours to rip Forrest open. D'you know the coordinates of the Aussie Cannery company town?" "I don't want any part of your Vorga revenge. I'm searching for my family." "This is a combined operation -- every way," he said with such detached savagery that she winced and at once jaunted. When Foyle arrived in his tent in the Four Mile Circus on Jervis Beach, she "was already changing into travel clothes. Foyle looked at her. Although he forced her to live in his tent for security reasons, he had never touched her again. Robin caught his glance, stopped changing and waited. He shook his head. "That's all finished." "How interesting. You've given up rape?" "Get dressed," he said, controlling himself. "Tell them they've got two hours to get the camp up to Shanghai." Foyle and Robin arrived at the front office of the Aussie Cannery company town. They applied for identification tags and were greeted by the mayor himself. "Happy New Year," the mayor caroled. "Happy! Happy! Happy! Visiting? A pleasure to drive you around. Permit me." He bundled them into a lush helicopter and took off. "Lots of visitors tonight. Ours is a friendly town. Friendliest company town in the world." The plane circled giant buildings. "That's our ice palace. Swimming baths on the left. Big dome is the ski-jump. Snow all year round. Tropical gardens under that glass roof. Palms, parrots, orchids, fruit. There's our market... theater... got our own broadcasting company, too. #D-#S. Take a look at the football stadium. Two of our boys made All-American this year. Turner at Right Rockne and Otis at Left Thorpe." "Do tell," Foyle murmured. "Yessir, we've got everything. Everything. You don't have to jaunte around the world looking for fun. Aussie Cannery brings the world to you. Our town's a little universe. Happiest little universe in the world." "Having absentee problems, I see." The mayor refused to falter in his sales-pitch. "Look down at the streets. See those bikes? Motorcycles? Cars? We can afford more luxury transportation per capita than any other town on Earth. Look at those homes. Mansions. Our people are rich and happy. We keep 'em rich and happy." "But do you keep them?" "What d'you mean? Of course we -- " "You can tell us the truth. We're not job prospects. Do you keep them?" "We can't keep 'em more than six months," the mayor groaned. "It's a hell of a headache. We give 'em everything, but we can't hold onto 'em. They get the wanderlust and jaunte. Absenteeism's cut our production by twelve per cent. We can't hold onto steady labor." "Nobody can." "There ought to be a law. Forrest, you said? Right here." He landed them before a Swiss chalet set in an acre of gardens and took off, grumbling to himself. Foyle and Robin stepped before the door of the house, waiting for the monitor to pick them up and announce them. Instead, the door flashed red and a white skull and crossbones appeared on it. A canned voice spoke: "warn"On New Year's Eve?" Foyle said to Robin. "Friendly fella. Let's try the back." They walked around the chalet, pursued by the skull and crossbones flashing at intervals, and the canned warning. At one side, they saw the top of a cellar window brightly illuminated and heard the muffled chant of voices : "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." "Cellar-Christians!" Foyle exclaimed. the window. Thirty worshipers of assorted faiths were celebrating the New Year with a combined and highly illegal service. The #th century had not yet abolished God, but it had abolished organized religion. "No wonder the house is mantrapped," Foyle said. "Filthy practices like that. Look, they've got a priest and a rabbi, and that thing behind them is a crucifix." "Did you ever stop to think what swearing is?" Robin asked quietly. "You say 'Jesus' and 'Jesus Christ.' Do you know what that is?" "Just swearing, that's all. Like 'ouch' or 'damn.' " "No, it's religion. You don't know it, but there are two thousand years of meaning behind words like that." "This is no time for dirty talk," Foyle said impatiently. "Save it for later. Come on." The rear of the chalet was a solid wall of glass, the picture window of a dimly lit, empty living room. "Down on your face," Foyle ordered. "I'm going in." Robin lay prone on the marble patio. Foyle triggered his body, accelerated into a lightning blur and smashed a hole in the glass wall. Far down on the sound spectrum, he heard dull concussions. They were shots. Quick projectiles laced toward him. Foyle dropped to the floor and tuned his ears, sweeping from low bass to supersonic until at last he picked up the hum of the ManTrap control mechanism. He turned his head gently, pinpointed the location by binaural DF, wove in. through the stream of shots and demolished the mechanism. He decelerated. "Come in, quick!" Robin joined him in the living room, trembling. The Cellar-Christians were pouring up into the house somewhere, emitting the sounds of martyrs. "Wait here," Foyle grunted. He accelerated, blurred through the house, located the Cellar-Christians in poses of frozen flight, and sorted through them. He returned to Robin and decelerated. "None of them is Forrest," he reported. "Maybe he's upstairs. The back way, while they're going out the front. Come on!" They raced up the back stairs. On the landing they paused to take bearings. "Have to work fast," Foyle said. "Between the shots and the religion riot, the world and his wife'll be jaunting around asking questions -- " He broke off. A low mewling sound came from a door at the head of the stairs. Foyle sniffed. "Analogue!" he exclaimed. "Must be Forrest. How about that? Religion in the cellar and dope upstairs." "What are you talking about?" "I'll explain later. In here. I only hope he isn't on a gorilla kick." like a diesel tractor. They were in a large, bare room. A heavy rope was suspended from the ceiling. A naked man was entwined with the rope midway in the air. He squirmed and slithered up and down the rope, emitting a mewling sound and a musky odor. "Python," Foyle said. "That's a break. Don't go near him. He'll mash your bones if he touches you." Voices below began to call: "Forrest! What's all the shooting? Happy New Year, Forrest! Where in hell's the celebration?" "Here they come," Foyle grunted. "Have to jaunte him out of here. Meet you back at the beach. Go!" He whipped a knife out of his pocket, cut the rope, swung the squirming man onto his back and jaunted. Robin was on the empty Jervis beach a moment before him. Foyle arrived with the squirming man oozing over his neck and shoulders like a python, crushing him in a terrifying embrace. The red stigmata had burst out on Foyle's face. "Sinbad," he said in a strangled voice. "Old Man of the Sea. Quick, girl! Right pockets. Three over. Two down. Sting-ampule. Let him have it anywh -- " His voice was choked off. Robin opened the pocket, found a packet of glass beads and took them out. Each bead had a beesting end. She thrust the sting of an ampule into the writhing man's neck. He collapsed. Foyle shook him off and arose from the sand. "Christ!" He massaged his throat and took a deep breath. "Control," he said, resuming his air of detached calm. The scarlet tattooing faded from his face. "What was all that horror?" Robin asked. "Analogue. Psychiatric dope for psychotics. Illegal. A twitch has to release himself somehow, revert to the primitive. He identifies with a particular kind of animal -- gorilla, grizzly, brood bull, wolf. Takes the dope and turns into the animal he admires. Forrest was queer for snakes, seems as if." "How do you know all this?" "Told you I've been preparing for Vorga. Show you something else I've learned, if you're not chicken-livered -- how to bring a twitch out of Analogue." Foyle opened another pocket in his battle coveralls and got to work on Forrest. Robin watched for a moment, then uttered a horrified cry, turned and walked to the edge of the water. She stood, staring blindly at the surf and the stars, until the mewling and the twisting ceased and Foyle called to her. "You can come back now."- tered creature seated upright on the beach gazing at Foyle with dull, sober eyes. "You're Forrest?" "Who the hell are you?" "You're Ben Forrest, leading spaceman. Formerly aboard the Presteign Vorga." Forrest cried out in terror. "You were aboard the Vorga on September #th, #." The man sobbed and shook his head. "On September sixteen, you passed a wreck out near the Asteroid Belt. Wreck of the Nomad, your sister ship. She signaled for help. Vorga passed her by. Left her to drift and die. Why did Vorga pass her by?" Forrest began to scream hysterically. "The records are all gone from the Bo'ness  Uig files. Someone got to them before me. Who was that? Who was aboard Vorga? Who shipped with you? I want officers and crew. Who was in command?" "No!" Foyle held a sheaf of banknotes before the hysterical man's face. "I'll pay for the information. Fifty thousand. Analogue for the rest of your life. Who gave the order to let me die, Forrest? Who?" The man smote the banknotes from Foyle's hand, leaped up and ran down the beach. Foyle tackled him at the edge of the surf. Forrest fell headlong, his face in the water. Foyle held him there. "Who commanded Vorga, Forrest? Who gave the order?" "You're drowning him!" Robin cried. "Water's easier than vacuum. I suffered for six months. Who gave the order, Forrest?" The man bubbled and choked. Foyle lifted his head out of the water. "What are you? Loyal? Crazy? Scared? Your kind would sell out for five thousand. I'm offering fifty. Fifty thousand for information, you son of a bitch, or you die slow and hard." The tattooing appeared on Foyle's face. He forced Forrest's head back into the water and held the struggling man. Robin tried to pull him off. "You're murdering him!" . Foyle turned his terrifying face on Robin. "Get your hands off me! Who was aboard with you, Forrest? Who gave the order? Why?" Forrest twisted his head out of the water. "Twelve of us on Vorga," he screamed. "Christ save me! There was me and Kemp -- " and sagged. Foyle pulled his body out of the surf. "Go on. You and who? Kemp? Who else? Talk." There was no response. Foyle examined the body. "Dead," he growled. "Oh, my God! My God!" "Just when he was opening up. What a stinking break." He took a deep breath and drew calm about him like an iron cloak. The tattooing disappeared from his face. He adjusted his watch for # degrees east longitude. "Almost midnight in Shanghai. Let's go. Maybe we'll have better luck with Sergei Orel, pharmacist's mate off the Vorga. Don't look so scared. This is only the beginning. Go, girl. Jaunte!" Robin gasped. He saw that she was staring over his shoulder with an expression of incredulity. Foyle turned. A flaming figure loomed on the beach, a huge man with burning clothes and a monstrously tattooed face. "Christ!" Foyle took a step toward the burning image, and abruptly it was gone. He turned to Robin, ashen and trembling. "Did you see that?" "Yes." "What was it?" "You." "Me? How's that possible? How "It was you." "But -- " He faltered, the strength and furious possession drained out of him. "Illusion? Hallucination?" "I don't know. I saw it, too." "To see yourself... face to face. The clothes were on fire. Did you see that? What in the name of God was it?" "It was Gully Foyle," Robin said, "burning in hell." "All right," he burst out angrily. "It was me in hell, but I'm going through with it. If I burn in hell, Vorga will burn with me." He pounded his palms together, stinging himself back to strength and purpose. "I'm still going through with it, by God! Shanghai next. Jaunte!" A T the costume ball in Shanghai, Fourmyle of Ceres electrified society by appearing as Death in Diirer's "Death and the Maiden" with a dazzling blonde creature clad in transparent veils. A Victorian society which stifled its women in purdah, and which regarded the # gowns of the Peenemunde clan as excessively daring, was shocked, despite the fact that Robin Wednesbury was chaperoning the pair. But when Fourmyle revealed that the female was a magnificent android, there was an instant reversal of opinion in his favor. Society was delighted with the deception. Nakedness, shameful in humans, was merely a sexless curiosity in androids. At midnight, Fourmyle auctioned off the android to the gentlemen of the ball. "The money to go to charity, Fourmyle?" "Certainly not. You know my slogan: Not one cent for entropy. Do I hear a hundred credits for this expensive and lovely creature? She's all beauty and highly adaptable. Two hundred? Thank you. Three and a half? Thank you. I'm bid -- Five? Eight? Thank you. Any more bids for this remarkable product of the resident genius of the Four Mile Circus? She walks. She talks. She adapts. She has been conditioned to respond to the highest bidder. Nine? Do I hear any more bids? Are you all done? All through? Sold to Lord Yale for nine hundred credits." Tumultuous applause and appalled ciphering: "An android like that must have cost ninety thousand! How can he afford it?" "Will you turn the money over to the android, Lord Yale? She will respond suitably. Until we meet again in Rome, ladies and gentlemen... the Borghese Palace at midnight. Happy New Year." Fourmyle had already departed when Lord Yale discovered, to the delight of himself and the other bachelors, that a double deception had been perpetrated. The android was, in fact, a living, human creature, all beauty and highly adaptable. She responded magnificently to nine hundred credits. The trick was the smoking room story of the year. The stags waited eagerly to congratulate Fourmyle. But Foyle and Robin Wednesbury were passing under a sign that read: double your jauntback in seven languages, and entering the emporium of dr. serThe waiting room was decorated with lurid brain charts demonstrating how Dr. Orel poulticed, cupped, balsamed and electrolyzed the brain into double its capacity or double your money back. He also doubled your memory with antifebrile purgatives, magnified your morals with tonic roborants, and adjusted all anguished psyches with Orel's Epulotic Vulnerary. The waiting room was empty. Foyle opened a door at a venture. He and Robin had a glimpse of a long hospital ward. Foyle grunted in disgust. "A Snow Joint. Might have known he'd be running a dive for sick-heads, too." Collectors, the most hopeless of neurotic addicts. They lay in their hospital beds, suffering mildly from illegally induced para-measles, para-flu, para-malaria, devotedly attended by nurses in starched white uniforms, and avidly enjoying their illegal illness and the attention it brought. "Look at them," Foyle said contemptuously. "Disgusting. If there's anything filthier than a religion-junky, it's a disease-bird." "Good evening," a voice said behind them. Foyle shut the door and turned. Dr. Sergei Orel bowed, crisp and sterile in the classic white cap, gown and surgical mask of the medical clans, to which he belonged by fraudulent assertion only. He was short, swarthy and olive-eyed, recognizably Russian by his name alone. More than a century of jaunting had so mingled the many populations of the world that racial types were disappearing. "Didn't expect to find you open for business on New Year's Eve," Foyle said. "Our Russian New Year comes two weeks later," Dr. Orel answered. "Step this way, please." He pointed to a door and disappeared with a pop. The door revealed a long flight of stairs. As Foyle and Robin started up the stairs, Dr. Orel appeared above them. "This way, please. Oh... one moment." He disappeared and appeared again behind them. "You forgot to close the door." He shut the door and jaunted again. This time he reappeared high at the head of the stairs. "In here, please." "Showing off," Foyle muttered. "Double your jaunting or double your money back. All the same, he's pretty fast. I'll have to be faster." They entered the consultation room. It was a glass-roofed penthouse. The walls were lined with gaudy antiquated medical apparatus : a sedative bath-machine, an electric chair for administering shock treatment to schizophrenics, chotic patterns, old optical and electronic microscopes. The quack waited for them behind his desk. He jaunted to the door, closed it, jaunted back to his desk, bowed, indicated chairs, jaunted behind Robin's and held it for her, jaunted to the window and adjusted the shade, jaunted to the light switch and adjusted the lights, then reappeared behind his desk. "One year ago," he smiled, "I could not jaunte at all. Then I discovered the secret, the Salutiferous Abstersive which -- " Foyle touched his tongue to the switchboard wired into the nerveendings of his teeth. He accelerated. He arose without haste, stepped to the slow-motion figure going "Bloo-hwoo-fwaa-maw" behind the desk, took out a heavy sap and scientifically smote Orel across the brow, concussing the frontal lobes and stunning the jaunte center. He picked the quack up and strapped him into the electric chair. All this took approximately two seconds. To Robin Wednesbury, it was a blur of motion. opened his eyes, stirred, discovered where he was, and started in anger and perplexity. "You're Sergei Orel, pharmacist's mate off the Vorga," Foyle said quietly. "You were aboard the Vorga on September #, #." The anger and perplexity turned to terror. "On September sixteen, you passed a wreck out near the Asteroid Belt. It was the wreck of the Nomad. She signaled for help and Vorga passed her by. You left her to drift and die. Why?" Orel rolled his eyes but did not answer. "Who gave the order to pass rot and die?" Orel began to gibber. "Who was aboard Vorga? Who shipped with you? Who was in command? I'm going to get an answer. I'll buy it or tear it out of you. Why was I left to die? Who told you to let me die?" Orel screamed. "I can't talk abou -- Wait! I'll tell -- " He sagged. Foyle examined the body. "Dead, just when he was ready to talk, like Forrest." "Murdered." "I never touched him. It was suicide." Foyle guffawed without humor. "You're insane." "No, amused. I didn't kill them; I forced them to kill themselves." "What nonsense is this?" "They've been given Sympathetic Blocks. You know about SBs, girl? Intelligence uses them on espionage agents. Take a certain body of information you don't want told. Link it with the sympathetic nervous syitem that controls automatic respiration and heart beat. As soon as the subject tries to reveal that information, the block comes down, the heart and lungs stop, the man dies, your secret's kept. An agent doesn't self to avoid torture; it's been done for him." "It was done to these men?" she asked. "Obviously." "But why?" "How do I know? Refugee Running isn't the answer. Vorga must have been operating worse rackets than that to take this precaution. But we've got a problem. Our last lead is Poggi in Rome. Angelo Poggi, chef's assistant off the Vorga. How are we going to get information out of him without -- " He broke off. His image stood before him, silent, ominous, face burning bloodred, clothes flaming. Foyle was paralyzed. He took a breath and spoke in a shaking voice. "Who are you? What do you -- " The image disappeared without a sound. Foyle turned to Robin, moistening his lips. "Did you see it?" Her expression answered him. "Was it real?" S HE pointed to Sergei Orel's desk, alongside which the image had stood. Papers on the desk had caught fire and were burning briskly. Foyle backed away, still frightened and bewildered. He passed a hand across his face. It came away wet. Robin rushed to the desk and tried to beat out the flames. She picked up wads of paper and letters and slammed helplessly. Foyle did not move. "I can't stop it," she gasped at last. "We've got to get out of here." Foyle nodded, then pulled himself together. "Rome," he croaked. "We jaunte to Rome. There's got to be some explanation for this. I'll find it, by God! And in the meantime, I'm not quitting. Rome. Go, girl. Jaunte!"    Since the Middle Ages, the Spanish Stairs have been the center of corruption in Rome. Rising from the Piazza di Spagna to the gardens of the Villa Borghese in a broad long sweep, the Spanish Stairs are, have been, and always will be swarming with vice. They were destroyed in the fission wars of the late #th century. They were rebuilt and destroyed again in the war of the World Restoration in the #st century. Once more they were rebuilt and this time covered over with blastproof crystal, turning the stairs into a stepped Galleria. The dome of the Galleria cut off the view from the death chamber in Keats' house. No longer would visitors peep through the narrow window and see the last sight that met the dying poet's eyes. Now they saw the smoky dome of the Spanish Stairs, and through it the distorted figures of corruption below. The Galleria of the Stairs was illuminated at night, and this New Year's Eve was chaotic. For centuries, Rome has welcomed the New Year with a bombardment -- firecrackers, rockets, torpedoes, gunshots, bottles, shoes, old pots and pans. Romans save junk for months to be hurled out of top floor windows when midnight strikes. The roar of fireworks inside the Stairs and the clatter of debris clashing on the Galleria roof were deafening as Foyle and Robin Wednesbury climbed down from the carnival in the Borghese Palace. Foyle in the livid crimsonand-black tights and doublet of Cesare Borgia, Robin in the silverencrusted gown of Lucrezia Borgia. They wore grotesque velvet masks. The contrast between their Renaissance costume and the modern clothes around them brought forth jeers and catcalls. Even the Lobos who frequented the Spanish Stairs, the unfortunate habitual criminals who had had a quarter of their brains burned out by prefrontal lobotomy, were aroused from their frightful apathy to stare. The mob seethed around the couple as they descended the Galleria. "Poggi," Foyle called quietly. "Angelo Poggi?" A bawd bellowed anatomical adjurations at him. "Poggi? Angelo Poggi?" Foyle was impassive. "I'm told he can be found on the Stairs at night. Angelo Poggi?" A whore maligned his mother. "Angelo Poggi? Ten credits to anyone who brings me to him." Foyle was ringed with extended hands, some filthy, some scented, all greedy. He shook his head. "Show me first." Roman rage crackled around him. "Poggi? Angelo Poggi?"    After six weeks of loitering on the Spanish Stairs, Captain Peter Y'angYeovil at last heard the words he had hoped to hear. Six weeks of tedious assumption of the identity of Angelo Poggi, chefs assistant off the Vorga, long dead, was finally paying off. It had been a gamble, first risked when Intelligence had brought the news to Captain Y'angYeovil that someone was making cautious inquiries about the crew of the Presteign Vorga, and paying heavily for information. "It's a long-shot," Y'ang-Yeovil had said, "but Gully Foyle did make that lunatic attempt to blow up Vorga. And twenty pounds of PyrE is worth a longshot." Now he waddled up the stairs toward the man in the Renaissance costume and mask. He had put on forty pounds with glandular shots. He had darkened his complexion with diet manipulation. His features, never of an Oriental cast but cut more along the hawklike lines of the ancient American Indian, easily fell into an unreliable pattern with a little muscular control. The Intelligence man panted up the Spanish Stairs, a gross cook with a larcenous countenance. He extended a package of soiled envelopes toward Foyle. "Filthy pictures, signore? Cellar-Christians, kneeling, praying, singing psalms, kissing cross? Very naughty." "No." Foyle brushed the pornography aside. "I'm looking for Angelo Poggi." croscopically. His crew on the stairs began photographing and recording the interview without ceasing its pimping and whoring. The Secret Speech of the Intelligence Tong of the Inner Planets Armed Forces wigwagged around Foyle and Robin in the ancient Chinese sign-language of eyelids, eyebrows, fingertips and infinitesimal body motions. "Signore?" Y'ang-Yeovil wheezed. "Angelo Poggi?" "Si, signore," Y'ang-Yeovil replied. "I am Poggi." "Chefs assistant off the Vorga?" Expecting the same start of terror manifested by Forrest and Orel, which he at last understood, Foyle shot out a hand and grabbed Y'ang-Yeovil's elbow. "Yes?" "Si, signore," Y'ong-Yeovil replied tranquilly. "How can I serve your worship?" "Maybe this one can come through," Foyle murmured to Robin. "He's not scared. Maybe he knows a way around the Block. I want information from you, Poggi." "Of what nature, signore, and at what price?" "Anything you've got. Name your price." "But, signore! I am a man full of years and experience. I am not to be bought in wholesale lots. I must be paid item by item. Make your selection and I will name the price. What do you want?" "You were aboard Vorga on September #th, #?" "That item costs Cr #." Foyle smiled mirthlessly and paid. "I was, signore." "I want to know about a ship you passed out near the Asteroid Belt. The wreck of the Nomad. You passed her on September sixteen. Nomad signaled for help and Vorga passed her by. Who gave that order?" "Ah, signore!" "Who gave you that order and why?" "I must know why a question is asked before I answer, signore." Y'angYeovil smiled greasily. "And I will pay for my caution by cutting the price. Why are you interested in Vorga and Nomad and this shocking abandonment in space? Were you, perhaps, the unfortunate who was so cruelly treated?" "He's not Italian! His accent's perfect, but the speech pattern's all wrong. No Italian would frame sentences like that." Foyle stiffened in alarm. Y'angYeovil's eyes, sharpened to detect and deduce from minutiae, caught the change in attitude. He realized at once that he had slipped somehow. He signaled to his crew urgently. out on the Spanish Stairs. In an instant, Foyle and Robin were caught up in a screaming, struggling mob. The crews of the Intelligence Tong were past-masters of this OP-I maneuver, designed to outwit a jaunting world. Their split-second timing could knock any man off balance and strip him for identification. Their success was based on the simple fact that between unexpected assault and defensive response, there must always be a recognition lag. Within the space of that lag, the Intelligence Tong guaranteed to prevent any man from saving himself. In three-fifths of a second Foyle was battered, kneed, hammered across the forehead, dropped to the steps and spread-eagled. The mask was plucked from his face, portions of his clothes torn away, and he was helpless for the identification cameras. Then, for the first time in the history of the tong, their schedule was interrupted. A man appeared, straddling Foyle's body -- a huge man with a hideously tattooed face and clothes that smoked and flamed. The apparition was so appalling that the crew stopped dead and stared. A howl went up from the crowd on the Stairs. "The Burning Man!" "But thafs Foyle," Y'ang-Yeovil whispered. For perhaps a quarter of a minute, the apparition stood, silent, burning, staring with blind eyes. Then it disappeared. The man spread-eagled on the ground disappeared, too. He turned into a blur of action that whipped through the crew, locating and destroying cameras, recorders, all identification apparatus. Then the blur seized the girl in the Renaissance gown and vanished. The Spanish Stairs came to life again, painfully, as though struggling out of a nightmare. The bewildered Intelligence crew clustered around Y'ang-Yeovil. "What in God's name was that, Yeo?" "I think it was our man. Gully Foyle. You saw that tattooed face." "And the burning clothes!" "Looked like a witch at the stake." "But if that burning man was Foyle, who were we wasting our time on?" "I don't know. Does the Commando Brigade have an Intelligence service they haven't bothered to mention to us?" "Why the Commandos, Yeo?" "You saw the way he accelerated, didn't you? He destroyed every record we made." "I still can't believe my eyes." "That was top secret Commando technique. They take their men apart and rewire and regear them. I'll have to check with Mars HQ and find out whether Commando Brigade's running a parallel investigation." "Does the army tell the navy?" "They'll tell Intelligence," Y'ang-Yeovil said angrily. "This case is critical enough without jurisdictional hassels. And another thing: there was no need to manhandle that girl in the maneuver. It was undisciplined and unnecessary." Y'ang Yeovil paused, for once unaware of the significant glances passing around him. "I must find out who she is," he added dreamily. "If she's been regeared, too, it'll be real interesting, Yeo," said a bland voice, markedly devoid of implication. "Boy Meets Commando." Y'ang Yeovil flushed. "All right," he blurted. "I'm transparent." "Just repetitious, Yeo. All your romances start the same way. 'There's no need to manhandle that girl.' And then Dolly Quaker, Jean Webster, Gwynn Roget, Marion -- " "No names, please!" a shocked voice interrupted. "Does Romeo tell Juliet?" "You're all going on latrine assignment tomorrow," Y'ang-Yeovil said. "I'm damned if I'll stand for this salacious insubordination. No, not tomorrow; but as soon as this case is closed." His hawkface darkened. "What a mess! Will you ever forget Foyle standing there like a burning brand? But where is he? What's he up to? What's it all mean?" mansion in Central Park was ablaze for the New Year. Charming antique electric bulbs with zigzag filaments and pointed tips shed yellow light. The jaunte,proof maze had been removed and the great door was open for the special occasion. The interior of the house was protected from the gaze of the crowd outside by a jeweled screen just inside the door. The sightseers buzzed and exclaimed as the famous and nearfamous of clan and sept arrived by car, by coach, by litter, by every form of luxurious transportation. Presteign of Presteign himself stood before the door, iron-gray, handsome, smiling his basilisk smile, and welcomed society to his open house. Hardly had a celebrity stepped through the door and disappeared behind the screen when another, even more famous, came clattering up in a vehicle even more fabulous. The Colas arrived in a band wagon. The Esso family (six sons, three daughters) was magnificent in a glass-topped Greyhound bus. But Greyhound arrived (in an Edison Electric Runabout) hard on their heels and there was much laughter and chaffing at the door. But when Edison of Westinghouse dismounted from his Essofueled gasoline buggy, completing the circle, the laughter on the steps turned into a roar. Just as the crowd of guests turned to enter Presteign's home, a distant commotion attracted their attention. It was a rumble, a fierce chatter of pneumatic punches, and an outrageous metallic bellowing. It approached rapidly. The outer fringe of sightseers opened a broad lane. A heavy truck rumbled down the lane. Six men were tumbling baulks of timber out the back of the truck. Following them came a crew of twenty arranging the baulks neatly in rows. Presteign and his guests watched with amazement. A giant machine approached, bellowing and pounding, crawling over the ties. Behind it were deposited parallel rails of welded steel. Crews with pneumatic sledges spiked the rails to the timber ties. The track was laid to Presteign's door in a sweeping arc and then curved away. The bellowing engine and crews disappeared into the darkness. "Good God!" Presteign was distinctly heard to say. Guests poured out of the house to watch. A shrill whistle sounded in the distance. Down the track came a man on a white horse, carrying a large red flag. Behind him panted a steam locomotive drawing a single observation car. The train stopped before Presteign's door. A conductor swung down from the car, followed by a pullman porter. The porter arranged steps. A lady and gentleman in evening clothes descended. "Shan't be long," the gentleman told the conductor. "Come back for me in an hour." "Good God!" Presteign exclaimed again. HP HE train puffed off. The coupie mounted the steps. "Good evening, Presteign," the gentleman said. "Terribly sorry about that horse messing up your grounds, but the old New York franchise still insists on the red flag in front of trains." "Fourmyle!" the guests shouted. "Fourmyle of Ceres!" the sightseers cheered. Presteign's party was now an assured success. Inside the vast velvet and plush reception hall, Presteign examined Fourmyle curiously. Foyle endured the keen gaze with equanimity, meanwhile nodding and smiling to the enthusiastic admirers he had acquired from Canberra to New York, with whom Robin Wednesbury was chatting. "Control," he thought. "He grilled me in his office for one hour after that crazy attempt I made on Vorga. Will he recognize me? Your face is familiar, Presteign," Fourmyle said. "Have we met before?" "I have not had the honor of meeting a Fourmyle until tonight," Presteign answered ambiguously. Foyle had trained himself to read men, but Presteign's hard, handsome features were unreadable. Standing face to face, the one detached and compelled, the other reserved and indomitable, they looked like a pair of brazen statues at white heat, on the verge of running molten. "I'm told that you are proud of being an upstart, Fourmyle." "Yes. I've patterned myself after the first Presteign." "Indeed?" "You will remember that he boasted of starting the family fortune in the plasma black market during the Third World War." "The second, Fourmyle. But the hypocrites of our clan never acknowledge him. The name was Payne then." "I know." "And what was your unhappy name before you changed it to Fourmyle?" "It was Presteign." "Indeed?" The basilisk smile acknowledged the hit. "You claim a relationship with our clan?" "I will claim it in time." "Of what degree?" "Let's say a close blood relationship." "I detect a certain fascination for blood in you, Fourmyle." "No doubt a family weakness, Presteign." "You're pleased to be cynical," Presteign said, not without cynicism, "but you speak the truth. We have always had a fatal weakness for blood and money. It is our vice. I admit it." "And I share it." "A passion for blood and money?" "Most passionately." "Without mercy, without forgiveness, without hypocrisy?" "And completely without conscience." "Fourmyle, you are a young man after my own heart. If you do not claim a relationship with our clan, I shall be forced to adopt you." "You're too late, Presteign. I've already adopted you." "You must be presented to my daughter, Lady Olivia. Will you allow me?" They crossed the reception hall. Foyle hesitated, wondering whether he should call Robin to stand by for impending emergencies, but he was too triumphant. "He doesn't know. He'll never know." Then doubt came : "But I'll never know if he does know. He's crucible steel. He could teach me about control." Acquaintances hailed Fourmyle. "Wonderful deception you worked in Shanghai." "Marvelous carnival in Rome, wasn't it? Did you hear about the burning man who appeared on the Spanish Stairs?" "We looked for you in London." "What a splendid entrance that called. "Outdid us all, Fourmyle. Made us look like a pack of damned pikers." "You forget yourself, Harry," Presteign said coldly. "You know I permit no profanity in my home." "Sorry, Presteign. Where's the circus now, Fourmyle?" "I don't know," Foyle said. "Just a moment." A crowd gathered, grinning in anticipation of the latest Fourmyle folly. He took out a platinum watch and snapped open the case. The face of a valet appeared on the dial. "Ahhh -- whatever your name is -- where are we staying just now?" The answer was tiny and tinny. "You gave orders to make New York your permanent residence, Fourmyle." "Oh? Did I? And?" "We bought St. Patrick's Cathedral, Fourmyle." no "And where is that?" "Old St. Patrick's, Fourmyle. On Fifth Avenue and what was formerly #th Street. We've pitched the camp inside." "Thank you." Fourmyle closed the platinum Hunter. "There's one thing to be said for the outlawed religions: At least they built churches big enough to house a circus." Olivia Presteign was seated on a dais, surrounded by admirers paying court to this beautiful albino daughter of Presteign. She was strangely and wonderfully blind, for she could see in the infra-red only, from # Anglengths far below the normal visible spectrum. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves; she saw her admirers in a strange light of organic emanations against a background of red radiation. She? was a Snow Maiden, an Ice Princess with coral eyes and coral lips, imperious, mysterious, unattainable. Foyle looked at her once and lowered his eyes in confusion before the blind gaze that could only see him as electromagnetic waves and infra-red light. His pulse began to beat faster; a hundred lightning fantasies about himself and Olivia Presteign flashed in his heart. "Don't be a fool!" he thought desperately. "Control yourself. Stop dreaming. This can be dangerous..." dressed in a husky, silvery voice, was given a cool, slim hand; but the hand seemed to explode within his with an electric shock. It was almost a start of mutual recognition... almost a joining of emotional impact. "This is insane. She's a symbol. The Dream Princess. The Unattainable. Control!" He was fighting so hard that he scarcely realized he had been dismissed, graciously and indifferently. He could not believe it. He stood gaping like a lout. "What? Are you still here, Fourmyle?" "I couldn't believe I'd been dismissed, Lady Olivia." "Hardly that, but I'm afraid you are in the way of my friends." "I'm not used to being dismissed. No. No. All wrong! At least by someone I'd like to count as a friend." "Don't be tedious, Fourmyle. Do step down." "How have I offended you?" "Offended me? Now you're being ridiculous." "Lady Olivia... Can't I say anything right? Where's Robin? Can we start again, please?" "If you're trying to be gauche, Fourmyle, you're succeeding." "Your hand again, please. Hi Thank you. I'm Fourmyle of Ceres." She laughed. "I'll concede you're a clown. Now do step down. I'm sure you can find someone to amuse." "What's happened this time?" he demanded. "Really, sir, are you trying to make me angry?" "No. Yes, I am. Trying to touch you somehow, cut through the ice. The first time, our handclasp was -- violent. Now it's nothing. What happened?" "Fourmyle," Olivia said wearily, "I'll grant that you're amusing, original, witty, fascinating -- I'll grant you anything, anything you wish, if you will only go away." He stumbled off the dais. "Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. No. She's the dream just as I dreamed her. The icy pinnacle to be stormed and taken." He came face to face with Saul Dagenham. He stood paralyzed. "Ah, Fourmyle," Presteign said. "This is Saul Dagenham. He can only give us thirty minutes and he insists on spending one of them with you." "Does he know? Did he send for Dagenham to make sure? Attack. T ou jours audace. What happened to your face, Dagenham?" Fourmyle asked with detached curiosity. r pHE death's-head smiled. "And I thought I was famous. Radiation poisoning. Time was when they said 'Hotter than a pistol.' Now they say 'Hotter than Dagenham.' " The deadly eyes raked Foyle. "What's behind that circus of yours?" "A passion for notoriety." "I'm an old hand at camouflage myself. I recognize the signs. What's your larceny?" Foyle smiled back, beginning to relax, restraining his triumph. "I've outfaced them both. You look happier, Dagenham." Instantly he realized the slip. Dagenham picked it up in a flash. "Happier than when? Where did we meet before?" "Not happier than when; happier than me." Foyle turned to Presteign. "I've fallen desperately in love with Lady Olivia." "Saul, your half hour's up." Dagenham and Presteign, on either side of Foyle, turned. A tall woman approached, stately in an emerald evening gown, her red hair gleaming. It was Jisbella McQueen. Before the shock could seethe into his face, Foyle turned, ran six steps to the first door he saw, opened it and darted through. The door slammed behind him. He was in a short blind corridor. There was a click, a pause, and then a canned voice spoke courteously: "You have invaded a private portion of this residence. Please return." Foyle gasped and struggled with himself. "You have invaded a private portion of this residence. Please return." "I never knew. Thought she was killed out there. She recognized me..." "You have invaded a private portion of this residence. Please return." "I'm finished. She'll never forgive me. Must be telling Dagenham and Presteign now." The door from the Reception Hall opened, and for a moment, Foyle thought he saw his flaming image. Then he realized he was looking at Jisbella's flaming hair. She made no move, just stood and smiled at him in furious triumph. He straightened. "By God, I won't go down whining." Without haste, Foyle sauntered out of the corridor, took Jisbella's arm and led her back to the Reception Hall. He never bothered to look around for Dagenham or Presteign. They would present themselves, with force and arms, in due time. He smiled at Jisbelln; she smiled back, still in triumph. "Thanks for running away, Gully. I never dreamed it could be so satisfying." "Running away? My dear Jiz!" "Well?" "I can't tell you how lovely you're looking tonight. We've come a long way from Gouffre Martel, haven't we?" Foyle motioned to the ballroom. "Dance?" at his composure. She permitted him to escort her to the ballroom and take her in his arms. "By the way, Jiz, how did you manage to keep out of Gouffre Martel?" "Dagenham arranged it. So you dance now, Gully?" "I dance, speak four languages miserably, study science and philosophy, write pitiful poetry, blow myself up with idiotic experiments, fence like a fool, box like a buffoon... In short, I'm the notorious Fourmyle of Ceres." "No longer Gully Foyle." "Only to you, dear, and whoever you've told." "Just Dagenham. Are you sorry I blew your secret?" "You couldn't help yourself any more than I could." "No, I couldn't. Your name just popped out of me. What would you have paid me to keep my mouth shut?" "Don't be a fool, Jiz. This accident's going to earn you about Cr #." "What d'you mean?" "I told you I'd give you what was left after I finished Vorga." "You've finished Vorga?" she said in surprise. "No, dear, you've finished me. But I'll keep my promise." She laughed. "Generous Gully Foyle. Be real generous, Gully. Make a run for it. Entertain me a little." "Squealing like a rat? I don't know how, Jiz. I'm trained for hunting; nothing else." "And I killed the tiger. Give me one satisfaction, Gully. Say you were close to Vorga. I ruined you when you were half a step from the finish. Yes?" "I wish I could, Jiz, but I can't. I'm nowhere. I was trying to pick up another lead to Vorga here tonight." "Poor Gully. Maybe I can help you out of this jam. I can say -- oh, that I made a mistake -- or a joke -- that you really aren't Gully Foyle. I know how to confuse Saul. I can do it, Gully -- if you still love me." He looked down at her and shook his head. "It's never been love between us, Jiz. You know that. I'm too one-track to be anything but a hunter." "Too one-track to be anything but a fool!" "What did you mean, Jiz -- Dagenham arranged to keep you out of Gouffre Martel and you know how to confuse him? What have you got to do with Dagenham?" "I work for him. I'm one of his couriers." "You mean he's blackmailing you? Threatening to send you back if you don't -- " "No. We hit it off the minute we met. He started off capturing me; I ended up capturing him." "How do you mean?" "Can't you guess?" were veiled, but he understood. "Jiz! With him?" "Yes." "But how? He's radioactive. He-" "There are precautions. It's... I don't want to talk about it, Gully." "Sorry. He's a long time returning." "Returning?" "Dagenham. With his army." "Oh. Yes, of course." Jisbella laughed again, then spoke in a low, furious tone. "You don't know what a tightrope you've been walking, Gully. If you'd begged or bribed or tried to romance me... damn you, I'd have ruined you. I'd have told the world who you were, screamed it from the housetops -- " "What are you talking about?" "Saul isn't returning. He doesn't know. You can go to hell on your own." "I don't believe you." "D'you think it would take him this long to get you? Saul Dagenham?" "But why didn't you tell him? After the way I ran out on you -- " "Because I don't want him going to hell with you. I'm not talking about Vorga. I mean something else. PyrE. That's what they're after -- twenty pounds of PyrE." "What's that?" "When you got the safe open, was there a small box in it? Made "Yes." "Twenty slugs that looked like compressed iodine crystals." "What did you do with the slugs?" "Sent two out for analysis. No one could find out what they are. I'm trying to run an analysis on a third in my lab -- when I'm not clowning for the public." "Oh, you are, are you? Why?" "I'm growing up, Jiz," Foyle said gently. "It didn't take much to figure out that was what Presteign and Dagenham were after." "Where have you got the rest of the slugs?" "In a safe place." "They're not safe. They can't ever be safe. I don't know what PyrE is, but I know it's the road to hell and I don't want Saul walking it." "You love him that much?" "I respect him that much. He's the first man who ever showed me an excuse for the double standard." "Jiz, what is PyrE? You know." "I've guessed. I've pieced together the hints I've heard. And I could tell you, Gully, but I won't." The fury in her face was luminous. "I'm running out on you this time. I'm leaving you to hang helpless in the dark. See what it feels like!" S HE broke away from him and swept across the ballroom floor. At that moment, the first bombs fell. They came in like meteor swarms; not so many, but far more deadly. They came in on the morning quadrant, that quarter of the globe in darkness from midnight to dawn. They collided head-on with the forward side of the Earth in its revolution around the Sun. They had been traveling miles. Their excessive speed was matched by the rapidity of the Terran defense computers which traced and intercepted these New Year gifts from the Outer Satellites within the space of microseconds. A multitude of fierce new stars prickled in the sky and vanished; they were bombs detected and detonated five hundred miles above their target. But so narrow was the margin between speed of defense and speed of attack that some got through. They shot through the aurora level, the meteor level, the twilight limit, the stratosphere, and down to Earth. The invisible trajectories ended in titanic convulsions. The first atomic explosion which destroyed Newark shook the Presteign mansion with an unbelievable quake. Floors and walls shuddered and the guests were thrown in heaps along with furniture and decorations. Quake followed quake as the random shower descended around New York. They were deafening, shocks, the flares of lurid light on the horizon were so enormous that reason was stripped from humanity, leaving nothing but flayed animals to shriek, cower and run. Within the space of seconds, Presteign's New Year party was transformed from elegance into anarchy. Foyle arose from the floor. He looked at the struggling bodies on the ballroom parquet, saw Jisbella fighting to free herself, took a step toward her and then stopped. He revolved his head dazedly, feeling it was no part of him. The thunder never ceased. He saw Robin Wednesbury in the Reception Hall, reeling and battered. He took a step toward her and then stopped again. He knew Hi precisely where he must go. He accelerated. The thunder and lightning dropped down the spectrum to grinding and flickering. The shuddering quakes turned into greasy undulations. Foyle blurred through the giant house, searching, until at last he found her in the garden, standing tiptoe on a marble bench, looking like a marble statue to his accelerated senses -- the statue of exaltation. tion leaped up the spectrum again and once more he was buffeted by that bigger-than-deathsize bombardment. "Lady Olivia," he called. "Who is that?" "The clown." "Fourmyle?" "Yes." "And you came searching for me? I'm touched, really touched." "You're insane to be standing out here like this. I beg you to let me -- " "No, no, no. It's beautiful. Magnificent!" "Let me jaunte with you to some place that's safe." "Ah, you see yourself as a knight in armor? Chivalry to the rescue. You haven't the flair for it. You'd best go." "I'll stay." "As a beauty-lover?" "As a lover." "You're still tedious, Fourmyle. Come, be inspired. This is Armageddon. Flowering Monstrosity. Tell me what you see." "There's nothing much," he answered, looking around and wincing. "There's light all over the horizon. Quick clouds of it. Above, there's a -- a sort of sparkling effect. Like Christmas lights twinkling." "Oh, you see so little with your eyes! See what I see! There's a dome in the sky, a rainbow dome. The colors run from deep tang to named the colors I see. What would that dome be?" "The radar screen." "And then there are vasty shafts of fire thrusting up and swaying, weaving, dancing, sweeping. What are they?" "Interceptor beams. You're seeing the whole electronicdefense system." "And I can see the bombs coming down, too -- swift streaks of what you call red. But not your red. Mine. Why can I see them?" "They're heated by air friction, but the inert lead casing doesn't show the color to us." "See how much better you're doing as Galileo than Galahad. Oh! There's one coming down in the east. Watch for it! It's coming, coming, coming... Now!" A flare of light on the eastern horizon proved it was not her imagination. It was very real. "There's another to the north. Very close. Very. Now!" north. "And the explosions, Fourmyle," she said breathlessly. "They're not just clouds of light. They're fabrics, webs, tapestries of meshing colors. So beautiful. Like exquisite shrouds." "Which they are, Lady Olivia," muttered Foyle. "Are you afraid?" "Yes." "Then run away." "No." "Ah, you're defiant." "I don't know what I am. I'm scared, but I won't run." "Then you're making a show of knightly courage." The husky voice sounded amused. "Just think, Fourmyle. How long does it take to jaunte? You could be safe in seconds -- in Mexico, Canada, Alaska. There must be millions there now. We're probably the last left in the city." "Not everybody can jaunte so far and so fast." "Then we're the last left who count. Why don't you leave me? Save yourself. I'll be killed soon. No one will ever know you turned tail." "Bitch!" "Ah, you're angry. What shocking language. It's the first sign of weakness. Why don't you exercise your better judgment and carry me off? That would be the second sign." "Damn you!" He stepped close to her, clenching his fists in rage. She touched his cheek with a cool, quiet hand, but once again there was that electric shock. "No, it's too late, my dear," she said quietly. "Here comes a whole cluster of red streaks -- down, down, down -- directly at us. There'll be no escaping this. Jaunte! Take me with you. Quick! Quick!" He swept her off the bench. "Bitch! Never!" He held her, found the soft coral mouth and kissed her, bruised her lips with his, waiting for the final blackout. The concussion never came. "Tricked!" he exclaimed. She laughed. He kissed her again and at last forced himself to release her. She gasped for breath, then laughed again, her coral eyes blazing. "It's over," she said. "It hasn't begun yet." "What do you mean?" "The war between us." "Make it a human war," she said fiercely. "You're the first not to be deceived by my looks. Oh, God! The boredom of the chivalrous knights and their milk-warm passion for the fairy-tale princess. But I'm not like that inside. I'm not. Never! Make it a savage war between us. Don't win me -- destroy me!"  Olivia again, the gracious snow maiden. "I'm afraid the bombardment has finished, my dear Fourmyle. The show is over. But what an exciting prelude to the New Year. Good night." "Good night?" he echoed incredulously. "Good night," she repeated. "Really, my dear Fourmyle, are you so gauche that you never know when you're dismissed? You may go now. Good night." He hesitated, searched for words, and at last turned and lurched out of the house. He was trembling with elation and confusion. He walked in a daze, scarcely aware of the confusion and disaster around him. The horizon now was lit with the light of red flames. The shock waves of the assault had whipped the atmosphere so violently that winds still whistled in strange gusts. Brick, cornice, glass and metal were tumbling and crashing. And this despite the fact that no direct hit had been made on New York. The streets were empty; the city was deserted. The entire population of New York, of every city, had jaunted in a desperate search for safety, to the limit of their ability -- five miles, fifty miles, five hundred miles. Some had jaunted into the center of a direct hit. Thousands died in jaunte explosions, for the stages had not been designed to accommodate a mass exodus. Foyle became aware of whitearmored Disaster Crews appearing on the streets. An imperious signal warned him that he was about to be summarily drafted for disaster work. The problem of jaunting was not to get populations out of cities, but to force them to return and restore order. Foyle had no intention of spending a week fighting fire and looters. He accelerated and evaded the Disaster Crew. At Fifth Avenue, he decelerated. The drain of acceleration was so enormous that he was reluctant to maintain it for more than a few moments. Long periods of acceleration demanded days of recuperation. The looters and Jack-jaunters were already at work on the avenue, singly, in swarms, furtive yet savage, jackals rending the body of a living but helpless animal. They descended on Foyle. Anything was their prey tonight. "I'm not in the mood," he told them. "Play with somebody else." He emptied the money out of his pockets and tossed it to them. They snapped it up but were not satisfied. They desired entertainment and he looked like a helpless gentleman. Half a dozen surrounded Foyle and closed in. "We're going to have a party," one said. Foyle had once seen the mutilated body of one of their party guests. He sighed and detached his mind from visions of Olivia Presteign. "All right, jackals," he said. "Let's have a party." into a screaming dance. Foyle tripped the switchboard in his mouth and became for twelve devastating seconds the most murderous machine ever devised -- the Commando killer. It was done without conscious thought or volition; his body merely followed the directive taped into muscle and reflex. He left six jackals stretched on the street and jaunted to old St. Pat's. The cathedral still stood, unblemished, eternal, the distant fires flickering on the green copper of its roof. Inside, it was deserted. The tents of the Four Mile Circus filled the nave, illuminated and furnished, but the circus personnel was gone. Servants, chefs, valets, athletes, philosophers, camp-followers and crooks had fled. "But they'll be back to loot," Foyle murmured. He entered his own tent. The first thing he saw was a figure in white, crouched on a rug, crooning sunnily to itself. It was Robin Wednesbury, her gown in tatters, her mind in tatters. "Robin!" She went on crooning wordlessly. He pulled her up, shook her and slapped her. She beamed and crooned. He filled a syringe and gave her a tremendous shot of Niacin. The sobering wrench on her pathetic flight from reality was ghastly. Her satin skin turned ashen. The beautiful face twisted. She recognized Foyle, remembered what she had tried to forget, screamed and sank to her knees. She began to cry. "That's better," he told her. "You're a great one for escape, aren't you? First suicide, now this. What next?" "Go away." "Probably religion. I can see you joining a cellar sect with passwords like Pax Vobiscum. Bible smuggling and martyrdom for the faith. Can't you ever face up to anything?" "Don't you ever run away?" "Escape is for cripples, neurotics." "Neurotics. The favorite word of the Johnny-Come-Lately educated. You're so educated, aren't you? So poised. So balanced. You've been running away all your life." "Me? Never. I've been hunting all my life." "You've been running. Haven't you ever heard of Attack-Escape? To run away from reality by attacking it, denying it, destroying it? That's what you've been doing." jolt. "Attack-Escape? You mean I've been running away from something?" "Obviously." "From what?" "You can't accept life as it is. You refuse. You attack it, try to force it into your own pattern. You attack and destroy everything that stands in the way of your own insane pattern." She lifted her tear-stained face. "I can't stand it any more. I want you to let me go." "What about your family?" "And find them my own way." "Why? What now?" "It's too much, you and the war, because you're as bad as the war. Worse. What happened to me tonight is what happens to me every moment I'm with you. I can stand one or the other, not both." "No," he said. "I need you." "I'm prepared to buy my way out." "How?" "You've lost all your leads to Vorga, haven't you?" "And?" "I've found another." "Where?" "Never mind where. Will you agree to let me go if I turn it over to you?" "I can take it from you." "Go ahead, take it." Her eyes flashed. "If you know what it is, you won't have any trouble." "I can make you give it to me." "Can you? After the bombing tonight? Try." He was taken aback by her defiance. "How do I know you're not bluffing?" "I'll give you one hint. Remember the man in Australia?" "Forrest?" "Yes. He tried to tell you the names of the crew. Do you remember the only name he got out?" "Kemp." "He died before he could finish it. The name is Kempsey." "That's your lead?" "Yes. Name and address. In return for your promise to let me go." "It's a sale," he said. "You can go. Give it to me." S HE went at once to the travel dress she had worn in Shanghai. From the pocket, she took out a sheet of partially burned paper. "I saw this on Sergei Orel's desk when I was trying to put the fire out -- the fire the Burning Man started." She handed him the sheet of paper. It was a fragment of a begging letter. It read: do anything to get out of these bacteria fields. Why should a man just because he can't jaunte get treated like a dog? Please help me, Serg. Help an old shipmate off a ship we don't mention. You can spare Cr #. Remember all the favors I done you? Send Cr # or even Cr #. Don't let me down. Rodg Kempsey Barracks # Bacteria, Inc. Mare Nubium Moon "By God!" Foyle exclaimed. "This is the lead! We can't fail this time. He'll spill everything -- everything!" He grinned at Robin. "We leave for the Moon tomorrow night. Book passage. No, there'll be trouble on account of the attack. Buy a ship. They'll be unloading them cheap enough, anyway." "We?" Robin said. "You mean you." "We're going to the Moon. Both of us." "I'm leaving." "You're not leaving. You're staying with me." "But you swore you'd -- " "Grow up, girl. I had to swear to anything to get this. I need you more than ever now. Not for Vorga. I'll handle Vorga myself. For something much more important." He looked at her incredulous face and smiled ruefully. "If you'd given me this letter two hours ago, I'd have kept my word. But it's too late now. I need a Romance Secretary. I'm in love with Olivia Presteign." She leaped to her feet in a blaze of fury. "Yotfre in love with her? Olivia Presteign? In love with that white corpse!" The bitter fury of her telesending was a startling revelation to him. "Ah, now you have lost me. Forever. Now I'll destroy you!" She disappeared.  was handling reports at Central Intelligence Hq. in London at the rate of six per minute. Information was phoned in, wired in, cabled in, jaunted in. The bombardment picture unfolded rapidly. "If it wasn't for jaunting," Y'angYeovil said, "the losses would have been five times that. All the same, it's close to a knockout. One more punch like that and Terra's finished." He addressed this to the assistants jaunting in and out of his office, appearing and disappearing, dropping reports on his desk and chalking results and equations on the glass blackboard that covered one entire wall. Informality was the rule and Y'angYeovil was surprised and suspicious when an assistant knocked on his door and entered with elaborate formality. "What larceny now?" he asked. "Lady to see you, Yeo." "Is this the time for comedy?" Y'angYeovil said in exasperated tones. He pointed to the Whitehead equations spelling disaster on the transparent blackboard. "Read that and weep on the way out." "Very special lady, Yeo. Your Venus from the Spanish Stairs." "Who? What Venus?" "Your Congo Venus." "Oh, that one." Y'angYeovil hesitated. "Send her in." "You'll interview her in private, of course." "Of course nothing. There's a war on. Keep those reports coming, but tip everybody to switch to Secret Speech if they have to talk to me." Robin Wednesbury entered the office, still wearing the torn white evening gown. She had jaunted without bothering to change. Her face was strained but lovely. Y'ang-Yeovil gave her a splitsecond inspection and realized that his first appreciation of her had not been mistaken. Robin returned the inspection and her eyes dilated. "But you're the cook from the Spanish Stairs! Angelo Poggi!" A S AN Intelligence Officer, Y'ang-Yeovil was prepared to deal with this crisis. "Not a cook, madam. I haven't had time to change back to my usual fascinating self. Please sit here, Miss... ?" "Wednesbury. Robin Wednesbury." "Charmed. I'm Captain Y'angYeovil. How nice of you to come and see me. You've saved me a long, hard search." "B-but I don't understand. What were you doing on the Spanish Stairs? Why were you hunting-?" Y'ang-Yeovil saw that her lips weren't moving. "Ah? You're a telepath, Miss Wednesbury? How is that possible? I thought I knew every telepath in the Solar System." "I'm not a full telepath. I'm a telesend. I can only send, not receive." "Which, of course, makes you worthless to the world. I see." Y'ang-Yeovil cocked a sympathetic eye at her. "What a dirty trick, Miss Wednesbury, to be saddled with all the disadvantages of telepathy and be deprived of all the advantages. I do sympathize. Believe me." "Bless him! He's the first ever to realize that without being told." "Careful, Miss Wednesbury, I'm receiving you. Now about the Spanish Stairs?" He paused, listening intently to her agitated telesending: "Why was he hunting? Me? Alien Bellig -- Oh, God! Will they hurt me? Cut and -- Information. I -- " "My dear girl," Y'ang-Yeovil said gently, "listen to me a moment. You're an Alien Belligerent?" She nodded. "That's unfortunate, but we won't worry about it now. About Intelligence cutting and slicing information out of people -- that's all propaganda." "Propaganda?" "We're not maladroits, Miss Wednesbury. We know how to extract information without being Medieval. But we spread the legend to soften people up in advance, so to speak." "Is that true? He's lying. It's a trick." "It's true, Miss Wednesbury. I do finesse, but there's no need now. Not when you've evidently come of your own free will to offer information." "He's too adroit, too quick. He-" "You sound as though you've been badly tricked recently, Miss Wednesbury. Badly burned." "I have. I have. By myself, mostly. I'm a fool. A hateful fool." "Never a fool, Miss Wednesbury, and never hateful. I don't know what's happened to shatter your opinion of yourself, but I hope to restore it. So you've been deceived, have you? By yourself, mostly? We all do that. But you've been helped by someone. Who?" "I'm betraying him." "Then don't tell me." "But I've got to find my mother and sisters. I can't trust him any more. I've got to do it myself." Robin took a deep breath. "I want to tell you about a man named Gulliver Foyle." Y'angYeovil at once got down to business. S IT true he arrived by railroad?" Olivia Presteign asked. "In a locomotive and observation car? What wonderful audacity!" "Yes, he's a remarkable young man," Presteign answered. He stood, iron-gray and iron-hard, in the Reception Hall of his home, alone with his daughter. He was guarding honor and life while he waited for servants and staff to return from their panic-stricken jaunte to safety. He chatted imperturbably with Olivia, never once permitting her to realize their grave danger. "Father, I'm exhausted." "It's been a trying night, my dear. But please don't retire yet." "Why not?" Presteign refrained from telling her that she would be safer with him. "I'm lonely, Olivia. We'll talk for a few minutes." "I did a daring thing, Father. I watched the attack from the garden." "My dear! Alone?" "No. With Fourmyle." A heavy pounding began to shake the front door which Presteign had closed. "What's that?" "Looters," Presteign answered calmly. "Don't be alarmed, Olivia. They won't get in." He stepped to a table on which he had laid out an assortment of weapons as neatly as a game of patience. "There's no danger, my love." He tried to distract her. "You were telling me about Fourmyle -- " "Oh, yes. We watched together, describing the bombing to each other." "Unchaperoned? That wasn't discreet, Olivia." "I know. I behaved disgracefully. He seemed so big, so sure of himself, that I gave him the Lady Hauteur treatment. He was furious, Father. That's why he came looking for me in the garden." "And you permitted him to remain? I'm shocked, dear." "I am, too. I think I was half out of my mind with excitement. What's he like, Father? Tell me. What does he look like to you?" "He is big. Tall, very dark, rather enigmatic. Like a Borgia. He seems to alternate between assurance and savagery." "I could see it myself. He glows with danger. Most people just shimmer; he looks like a lightning bolt. It's terribly fascinating." "My dear," Presteign remonstrated gently, "unmarried females are too modest to talk like that. It would displease me, my love, if you were to form a romantic attachment for a parvenu like Fourmyle of Ceres." r T , HE Presteign staff jaunted into the Reception Hall, cooks, waitresses, footmen, pages, coachmen, valets, maids. All were shaken and hang-dog after their flight from death. "You have deserted your posts. It will be remembered," Presteign said coldly. "My safety and honor are again in your hands. Guard them. Lady Olivia and I will retire." He took his daughter's arm and led her up the stairs, fiercely protective of his ice-pure princess. "Blood and money," Presteign murmured. "What, Father?" "I was thinking of a family vice, Olivia. I was thanking fortune that you have not inherited it." "What vice is that?" "There's no need for you to know. It's one that Fourmyle shares." "Like a Borgia, you said. A wicked Borgia with black eyes and lines in his face. That must account for the pattern." "Pattern, my dear?" "Yes. I can see a strange pattern over his face -- not the usual electricity of nerve and muscle. Something laid over that. It fascinated me from the beginning." "What sort of pattern do you mean?" "Fantastic. Wonderfully evil. I can't describe it. Give me something to write with. I'll show you." They stopped before a six-hundred-year-old Chippendale cabinet. Presteign took out a silvermounted slab of crystal and handed it to Olivia. She touched it with her fingertip; a black dot appeared. She moved her finger and the dot elongated into a line. With quick strokes, she sketched the hideous swirls and blazons of a Maori devil-mask.  darkened bedroom. A moment later, it was flooded with light as one wall illuminated. It seemed as though a giant mirror reflected Jisbella's bedroom, but with one odd quirk. Jisbella lay in the bed alone, but in the reflection Saul Dagenham sat on the edge of the bed alone. The mirror was, in fact, a sheet of lead glass separating identical rooms. Dagenham had just illuminated his. "Love by the clock." Dagenham's voice came through a speaker. "Disgusting." "No, Saul. Never." "Frustrating." "Not that, either," she said. "But unhappy." "No. You're greedy. Be content with what you've got." "It's more than I ever had. You're truly magnificent, Saul." "You're extravagant. Now go to sleep, darling. We're skiing tomorrow." "There's been a change of plan. I've got to work." "Oh, Saul, you promised me! No more working and fretting and running. Aren't you going to keep your promise?" "I can't with a war on." "You sacrificed enough in that radioactive accident up at Tycho Sands. They can't ask any more of you." "I've got one job to finish." "I'll help you finish it." "No. You'd best keep out of this, Jisbella." "You don't trust me." "I don't want you hurt." "Nothing can hurt us." "Foyle can." "W-what?" she stammered. "Fourmyle is Foyle. You know that. I know you know." "But I never -- " "No, you never told me. I said you're magnificent. Keep faith with me the same way, Jisbella." "Then how did you find out?" "Foyle slipped." "How?" "The name." "Fourmyle of Ceres? He bought the Ceres company." "But Geoffrey Fourmyle?" "He invented it." "Geoffrey Fourmyle is the name they use in the Megalomania Test down in Combined Hospital in Mexico City. I used the Megal Mood on Foyle when I tried to open him up. The name stayed buried in his memory. He dredged it up and throught it was original." "Poor Gully." Dagenham smiled. "There's no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves." "What are you going to do, Saul?" "Do? Finish him, of course." "For twenty pounds of PyrE?" "No. To win a lost war." "What?" Jisbella came to the glass wall separating the rooms. "You, Saul? Patriotic?" He nodded almost guiltily. "You've changed me. I'm a sane man again." He pressed his face to the wall, too, and they kissed through three inches of lead glass.--suited to the growth of anaerobic bacteria, soil organisms, phage, rare molds and all those microscopic life-forms, essential to medicine and industry, which required airless culture. Bacteria, Inc., was a huge mosaic of culture fields traversed by catwalks spread around a central clump of barracks, offices and factory. Each field was a giant glass vat, one hundred feet in diameter, twelve inches high and no more than two molecules thick at any point. A day before the sunrise line, creeping across the face of the Moon, reached Mare Nubium, the vats were filled with culture medium. At sunrise, abrupt and blinding on the airless Moon, the vats were seeded, and for the next fourteen days of continuous Sun, they were tended, shielded, regulated, nurtured, the field-workers trudging up and down the catwalks in spacesuits. As the sunset line crept toward Mare Nubium, the vats were harvested and then left to freeze and sterilize in the two-week frost of the Lunar night. Jaunting was of no use in this tedious step-by-step cultivation. Hence Bacteria, Inc., hired unfortunates incapable of jaunting and paid them slave wages. This was the lowest form of labor, the dregs and scum of the Solar System; and the barracks of Bacteria, Inc., resembled an Inferno during the two-week layoff period. Foyle discovered this when he entered Barracks #. He was met by an appalling spectacle. There were two hundred men in the giant room; there were whores and their hard-eyed pimps, professional gamblers and their portable tables, dope-peddlers, money-lenders. There was a haze of acrid smoke and the stench of alcohol and Analogue. Furniture, bedding, clothes, unconscious bodies, empty bottles, rotting food were scattered on the floor. A roar challenged Foyle's appearance, but he was equipped to handle this situation. He spoke to the first hairy face thrust into his. "Kempsey?" he asked quietly. He was answered outrageously. Nevertheless he grinned and handed the man a Cr # note. "Kempsey?" he asked another. He was insulted. He paid again and continued his saunter down the barracks distributing Cr # notes in calm thanks for insult and invective. In the center of the room, he found his key man, the obvious barracks bully, a monster of a man, hairless, fondling two bawds and being fed whiskey by sycophants. "Kempsey, you?" Foyle asked in the old gutter tongue. "I'm diggin' Rodger Kempsey." "Diggin' you for broke, me," the man answered, thrusting out a huge paw for Foyle's money. "Gimme." from the crowd. Foyle smiled and spat in his eye. There was an abject hush. The hairless man dumped the bawds and surged up to annihilate Foyle. Five seconds later, he was groveling on the floor. "Still diggin' Kempsey," Foyle said gently. "Diggin' hard, man. You better finger him, man, or you're gone, is all." "Washroom!" the hairless man howled. "Holed up. Washroom." "Now you broke me," Foyle said. He dumped the rest of his money on the floor before the hairless man and walked quickly to the washroom. Kempsey was cowering in the corner of a shower, face pressed to the wall, moaning in a dull rhythm that showed he had been at it for hours. "Kempsey?" The moaning answered him. "What's a matter, you?" "Clothes," Kempsey wept. "All over, clothes. Like filth, like sick, like dirt. Clothes. All over, clothes." "Up, man. Get up." "Clothes. All over, clothes. Like filth, like sick, like dirt..." "Kempsey, mind me, man. Orel sent me." Kempsey stopped weeping and turned his sodden countenance to Foyle. "Who? Who?" "Sergei Orel sent me. I've bought your release. You're free. We'll blow." "When?" "Now." "God bless him. Bless him!" Kempsey began to caper in weary exultation. The bruised and bloated face split into a facsimile of laughter. He laughed and capered and Foyle led him out of the washroom. But in the barracks, he screamed and wept again, and as Foyle led him down the long room, the bawds swept up armfuls of dirty clothes and shook them before his eyes. Kempsey foamed and gibbered. "What's a matter, him?" Foyle inquired of the hairless man in the gutter patois. The hairless man was now a respectful neutral, if not a friend. "Guesses for grabs. Always like that, him. Show old clothes and he twitch. Man!" "For why, already?" "For why? Crazy, is all." At the main-office airlock, Foyle got Kempsey and himself corked in suits and then led him out to the rocket field where a score of anti-grav beams pointed their pale fingers upward from pits to the gibbous Earth hanging in the night sky. They descended a pit, entered Foyle's yawl and uncorked. Foyle took a bottle and a stingampule from a cabinet. He poured a drink and handed it to Kempsey. He hefted the ampule in his palm, smiling. still dazed, still exulting. "Free! God bless him! Free! You don't know what I've been through." He drank again. "I still can't believe it. It's like a dream. Why don't you take off, man? I -- " Kempsey choked and dropped the glass, staring at Foyle in horror. "Your face! What happened to it?" "You happened to it, you son of a bitch!" Foyle leaped up, his tiger-face burning, and flung the ampule like a knife. It pierced Kempsey's neck and hung quivering. Kempsey toppled. Foyle accelerated, blurred to the body, picked it up in mid-fall and carried it aft to the starboard stateroom. There were two main staterooms in the yawl and Foyle had prepared both in advance. The starboard room had been stripped and turned into a surgery. Foyle strapped the body on the operating table, opened a case of surgical instruments, and began the delicate operation he had learned by hypno-training that morning -- an operation made possible only by his five-to-one acceleration. He cut through skin and fascia, sawed through the rib cage, exposed the heart, snipped it out and connected veins and arteries to the intricate blood-pump alongside the table. He started the pump. Twenty seconds, objective time, had elapsed. He placed an oxygen mask over Kempsey's face and switched on the alternating suction and eructation of the oxygen pump. Foyle decelerated, checked Kempsey's temperature, shot an anti-shock series into his veins and waited. Blood gurgled through the pump and Kempsey's body. After five minutes, Foyle removed the oxygen mask. The respiration reflex continued. Kempsey was without a heart, yet alive. Foyle sat down alongside the operating table and waited. The stigmata still showed on his face. Kempsey awoke, screaming. Foyle leaped up, tightened the straps and leaned over the heartless man. "Look at yourself, Kempsey. You're dead." Kempsey fainted. Foyle brought him to with the oxygen mask. "Let me die, for God's sake!" "I died for six months and I didn't whine." "Let me die!" "In time, Kempsey. Your sympathetic block's been by-passed, but I'll let you die in time, if you behave. You were aboard Vorga on September #th, #?" "For Christ's sake, let me die!" "You were aboard Vorga?" "Yes." #'V#' OU passed a wreck out in space," Foyle pressed on. "Wreck of the Nomad. She signaled for help and you passed her by. Yes?" "Yes." "Why?" "Oh, Christ help me!" "I was aboard Nomad, Kempsey. Why did you leave me to rot?" "Sweet Jesus, help me! Christ, deliver me!" "I'll deliver you, Kempsey, if you answer questions. Why did you leave me to rot?" "Couldn't pick you up." "Why not?" "Reffs aboard." "I guessed right, then. You were running refugees in from Callisto?" "Yes." "How many?" "Six hundred." "That's a lot, but you could have made room for one more. Why didn't you pick me up?" "We were scuttling the reffs." "What!" Foyle cried. "Overboard... all of them... six hundred. Stripped 'em... took their clothes, money, jewels, baggage... put 'em through the airlock in batches. Christ! The clothes all over the ship... the shrieking and the -- Jesus! If I could only forget! The naked people... blue... busting wide open... spinning behind us. The clothes all over the ship. Six hundred. Scuttled!" "You bastard! It was a racket? You took their money and never intended bringing them to Earth?" "It was a racket." "And that's why you didn't pick me up?" "Would have had to scuttle you, anyway." "Who gave the order?" "Captain." "Name?" "Joyce. Lindsey Joyce." "Address?" "Skoptsy Colony, Mars." Foyle was thunderstruck. "He's a Skoptsy? You mean after hunting him for a year, I can't touch him, hurt him, make him feel what I felt?" He turned away from the tortured man on the table, equally tortured himself by frustration. "A Skoptsy! The one thing I never figured on! After preparing that port stateroom for him -- what am I going to do? What in God's name am I going to do?" he roared in fury, the stigmata showing livid on his face. ate moan from Kempsey. He returned to the table. "Let's get it straight for the last time. This Skoptsy, Lindsey Joyce, gave the order to scuttle the reffs?" "Yes." "And to let me rot?" "Yes. Yes. Yes! That's enough! Let me die!" "Live, you filthy, heartless slaughterer! Live without a heart. Live and suffer. I'll keep you alive forever, you -- " A lurid flash of light caught Foyle's eye. He looked up. His burning image was staring through the large square porthole of the stateroom. As he leaped to the porthole, the Burning Man disappeared. Foyle left the stateroom and darted forward to main controls where the observation bubble gave him two hundred and seventy degrees of vision. The Burning Man was nowhere in sight. "It's not real," he muttered. "It couldn't be real. It's a sign, a good luck sign -- a Guardian Angel. It saved me on the Spanish Stairs. It's telling me to go ahead and find Lindsey Joyce." He strapped himself into the pilot chair, ignited the yawl's jets and slammed into full acceleration. "Lindsey Joyce, Skoptsy Colony, Mars," he thought as he was thrust back deep into the pneumatic chair. "A Skoptsy... without senses, without pleasure, without pain. The ultimate in Stoic escape. How am I going to put him in the port stateroom and make him feel what I felt aboard Nomad? Damnation! It's as though he's dead. He is dead. And I've got to figure how to whip a dead body and make it feel pain. To come so close to the end and have the door slammed in your face... The damnable frustration of revenge. Revenge is for dreams, never for reality." An hour later, he released himself from the acceleration and his fury, unbuckled himself from the chair, and remembered Kempsey. He went aft to the surgery. The extreme acceleration of the takeoff had choked the blood-pump. Kempsey was dead. Suddenly Foyle was overcome with a novel passionate revulsion for himself. He fought it helplessly. "What's a matter, you?" he whispered. "Think of the six hundred, scuttled... Think of yourself... Are you turning into a white livered Cellar Christian turning the other cheek and whining forgiveness? Olivia, what are you doing to me? Give me strength, not cowardice..." Nevertheless, he averted his eyes as he scuttled the body. priority! zation, the air struggle on Mars was still so critical that the V-L Law, the Vegetative-Lynch Law, was still in effect. It was a stroy any plant vital to the transformation of Mars' carbon dioxide atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere. Even blades of grass were sacred. There was no need to erect keep off the grass neons. The man who wandered off a path onto a lawn would be instantly shot. So would the woman who picked a flower. Two centuries of sudden death had inspired a reverence for green growing things that almost amounted to a religion. Foyle remembered this as he raced up the center of the causeway leading to Mars St. Michele. He had jaunted direct from the Syrtis airport to the St. Michele stage at the foot of the causeway, which stretched for a quarter of a mile through green fields to Mars St. Michele. The rest of the distance had to be traversed on foot. Like the original Mont St. Michele on the French coast, Mars St. Michele was a majestic Gothic cathedral of spires and buttresses looming on a hill and yearning toward the sky. Ocean tides surrounded Mont St. Michele on Earth; green tides of grass surrounded Mars St. Michele. Both were fortresses. Mont St. Michele had been a fortress of faith before organized religion was abolished. Mars St. Michele was a fortress of telepathy. Within it lived Mars', sole full telepath, Sigurd Magsman. "Now these are the defenses protecting Sigurd Magsman," Foyle chanted, halfway between hysteria and litany. "Firstly, the Solar System; secondly, Martial Law; thirdly, Dagenham-Presteign  Co.; fourthly, the fortress itself; fifthly, the uniformed guards, attendants, servants and admirers of the bearded sage we all know so well, Sigurd Magsman, selling his awesome powers for awesome prices..." Foyle laughed immoderately: "But there's a sixthly that I know: Sigurd Magsman's Achilles' Heel. I've paid Cr. # to Sigurd the Illrd... or was he the IVth?" He passed through the outer labyrinth of Mars St. Michele with his forged credentials and was tempted to bluff or proceed directly by Commando Action to an audience with the Great Man himself, but time was pressing and his enemies were closing in and he could not afford to satisfy his curiosity. Instead, he accelerated, blurred, and found a humble cottage set in a walled garden within the Mars St. Michele home farm. It had drab windows and a thatched roof and might have been mistaken for a stable. Foyle slipped inside. ' I I HE cottage was a nursery. Three pleasant nannies sat motionless in rocking chairs, knitting poised in their frozen hands. The blur that was Foyle came up behind them and quietly stung them with ampules. Then he decelerated. He looked at the ancient, ancient child, the wizened, shriveled boy who was seated on the floor playing with electronic trains. "Hello, Sigurd," Foyle said. The child began to cry. "What are you afraid of? I'm not going to hurt you." "You're a bad man with a bad face." "I'm your friend, Sigurd." "No, you're not. You want me to do h-had things." "I'm your friend. Look, I know all about those big hairy men who pretend to be you, but I won't tell. Read me and see." "You're going to hurt him and y-you want me to tell him." "Who?" "The captain-man. The Ski -- Shot -- " The child fumbled with the word, wailing louder. "Go away. You're bad. Badness in your head and burning mens and -- " "Come here, Sigurd." "Shut up, you little monster!" Foyle grabbed the seventy-yearold child and shook it. "This is going to be a brand-new experience for you, Sigurd. The first time you've ever been walloped into anything. Understand?" The ancient child read him and howled. "We're going on a trip to the Skoptsy Colony. If you behave yourself and do what you're told, I'll bring you back safe and give you a lolly or whatever the hell they bribe you with. If you don't behave, I'll beat the living daylights out of you." "No, you won't. You won't! I'm Sigurd the telepath. You wouldn't dare." "Sonny, I'm Gully Foyle, Solar Enemy Number One. I'm just a step away from the finish of a year-long hunt, risking my neck because I need you to settle accounts with a son of a bitch who -- Sonny, I'm Gully Foyle. There isn't anything I wouldn't dare." The telepath began broadcasting terror with such an uproar that alarms sounded all over Mars St. Michele. Foyle took a firm grip on the ancient child, accelerated, and carried him out of the fortress. Then he jaunted. r  I HE ancient Skoptsy sect of White Russia, believing that sex was the root of all evil, practiced an atrocious self-castration to extirpate the root. The modern Skoptsys, believing that sensation was the root of all evil, practiced an even more barbaric custom. Having entered the Skoptsy Colony and paid a fortune for the privilege, the initiates submitted joyously to an operation that severed the sensory nervous system, and lived out their days without sight, sound, speech, smell, taste or touch. When they first entered the bastardized monastery, the initiates were shown elegant ivory cells in which it was intimated they would spend the remainder of their lives in rapt contemplation, lovingly tended. In actuality, the senseless creatures were packed in rock cells where they sat on rough stone slabs and were fed and exercised once a day. For twenty-three out of twenty-four hours, they sat alone in the dark, untended, unguarded, unloved. "The living dead," Foyle muttered. He decelerated, put Sigurd Magsman down and switched on the retinal light in his eyes, trying to pierce the womb-gloom. It was midnight above ground. It was permanent midnight down in these womb-tombs. Sigurd Magsman was broadcasting terror and anguish with such a telepathic bray that Foyle was forced to shake the child again. "Shut up!" he whispered. "You can't wake these dead. Now find me Lindsey Joyce." The child whimpered. "They're sick... all sick... worms in their heads and sickness and -- " "Christ, don't I know it! Come on, let's get it over with. There's worse to come." They went down the twisting labyrinth of the catacombs. The stone slabs shelved the walls from floor to ceiling. The Skoptsys, white as slugs, mute as corpses, motionless as Buddhas, filled the caverns with the odor of vegetative life. The telepathic child wept and shrieked. Foyle never relaxed his relentless grip, never relaxed the hunt. "Johnson, Wright, Keeley, Graff, Nastro, Underwood... there's thousands here!" Foyle read off the bronze identification plates attached to the slabs. "Reach out, Sigurd. Find Lindsey Joyce for me. We can't go over them name by name. Regal, Cone, Brady, Vincent -- What in the name of God!" Sigurd screamed.the bone-white figures had cuffed his brow. It was swaying and writhing, its face twitching. All the white slugs on their shelves were squirming and writhing. Sigurd Magsman's constant telepathic broadcast of anguish and terror was reaching them and torturing them. "Stop it!" Foyle snapped. "Find Lindsey Joyce and we'll get out of here. Reach out and find him." "Down there." Sigurd wept. "Straight down there. Seven, eight, nine shelves down. I want to go home. I'm sick. I Foyle, went pell-mell down the catacombs with Sigurd, reading off identification plates until at last he came to: "lindsey Joyce. This was his enemy, the instigator of his death and the deaths of the six hundred from Callisto. This was the enemy for whom he had planned vengeance and had prepared the agony of the port stateroom aboard his yawl. This was Vorga. It was a woman. Foyle gaped in shock. In these days of the double standard, with women kept in purdah, there were many reported cases of women masquerading as men to enter the worlds closed to them, but he had never yet heard of a woman in the merchant marine, masquerading her way to the top. "This?" he exclaimed furiously. "This is Lindsey Joyce? Lindsey Joyce off the Vorga? Ask her." "I don't know what Vorga is." "Ask her!" "But I don't -- She was -- She like gave orders." "Captain?" "I don't like what's inside her. It's all sick and dark. It hurts. I want to go home." "Ask her. Was she captain of the Vorga?" "Yes. Please, please, please don't make me go inside her any more. It's twisty and hurts. I don't like her." "Tell her I'm the man she wouldn't pick up on September #th, #. Tell her it's taken a long time, but I've finally come to settle the account. Tell her I'm going to pay her back." "I d-don't understand. Don't understand." "Tell her I'm going to kill her, slow and hard. Tell her I've got a stateroom aboard my yawl, fitted up just like my locker aboard Nomad where I rotted for six months... where she ordered Vorga to leave me to die. Tell her she's going to rot and die just like me. Tell her!" Foyle shook the wizened child furiously. "Make her feel it. Don't let her get away by turning Skoptsy. Tell her I kill her filthy. Read me and tell her!" "She -- sh-she didn't give that order." "She what?" "I c-can't understand her." "She didn't give the order to scuttle me?" "I'm afraid to go in." "Go in, you little monster, or I'll take you apart. What does she mean?" r T"HE child wailed; the woman writhed; Foyle fumed. "Go in! Go in! Get it out of her! Jesus, why does the only telepath on Mars have to be a child? Sigurd! Sigurd, listen to me. Ask her: Did she give the order to scuttle the reffs?" "No. No!" "No, she didn't, or no, you won't?" "She didn't." "Did she give the order to pass Nomad by?" "She's twisty and sicky. Oh, home. Want to go." "Did she give the order to pass Nomad by?" "No. Take me home." "Ask her who did!" roared Gully Foyle. "I want my Nannie." "Ask her who could give her an order. She was captain aboard her own ship. Who could command her? Ask her!" "No. No. No. I'm afraid. She's sick. She's bad. I don't understand her. I want my Nannie. I want to go home." The child was shrieking and shaking; Foyle was shouting. As Foyle reached for the child in a rage, his eyes were blinded by comb was illuminated by the Burning Man. Foyle's image stood before him, face hideous, clothes on fire, the blazing eyes fixed on the convulsing Skoptsy that had been Lindsey Joyce. The Burning Man opened his tiger mouth. A grating sound emerged. It was like flaming laughter. "She hurts," he said. "Who are you?" Foyle whispered. The Burning Man winced. "Too bright," he said. "Less light." Foyle took a step forward. The Burning Man clapped hands over his ears in agony. "Too loud! Don't move so loud." Suddenly he laughed again. "Listen to her. She's screaming. Begging. She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to be hurt. Listen to her." Foyle trembled. "She's telling us who gave the order. Can't you hear? Listen with your eyes." The Burning Man pointed a talon finger at the writhing Skoptsy. "She says Olivia." "What!" "Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign." The Burning Man vanished. The catacombs were dark again. Colored lights and cacophonies whirled around Foyle. He gasped and staggered. "Blue jaunte," he muttered. "Olivia. No. Not. Never. Olivia. I-" He felt a hand reach for his. "Jiz?" he croaked. He became aware that Sigurd Magsman was holding his hand and weeping. He picked the boy up. "I hurt," Sigurd whimpered. "I hurt, too, son." "Want to go home." "I'll take you home."  arms, he blundered through the catacombs. "The living dead," he mumbled. And then: "I've joined them." He found the stone steps that led up from the depths to the monastery cloister above ground. He trudged up the steps, tasting death and desolation. There was bright light above him, and for a moment he imagined that dawn had come already. Then he realized that the cloister was brilliantly lit with artificial light. There was the tramp of shod feet and the low growl of commands. Halfway up the steps, Foyle stopped and mustered himself. "Sigurd," he whispered. "Who's above us? Find out." "Sojers," the child answered. "Soldiers? What soldiers?" "Commando sojers." Sigurd's crumpled face brightened. " They come for me. T o take me home to AM!" The telepathic clamor brought a shout from overhead. Foyle accelerated and blurred up the rest of the steps to the cloister. It was a square of Romanesque arches surrounding a green lawn. In the center of the lawn was a giant Cedar of Lebanon. The flagged walks swarmed with Commando search-parties and Foyle came face to face with his match, for, an instant after they saw his blur whip up from the catacombs, they accelerated, too, and all were on even terms. But Foyle had the boy. Shooting was impossible. Cradling Sigurd in his arms, he wove through the cloister like a brokenfield runner hurtling toward a goal. No one dared block him, for at plus-five acceleration, a headon collision between two bodies would be instantly fatal to both. Objectively, this break-neck skirmish looked like a five-second zigzag of lightning. Foyle broke out of the cloister, went through the main hall of the monastery, passed through the labyrinth and reached the public jaunte stage outside the main gate. There he stopped, decelerated and jaunted to the monastery airfield, half a mile distant. The field was also ablaze with lights and swarming with Commandos. Every anti-grav pit was occupied by a Brigade ship. His own yawl was under guard. A fifth of a second after Foyle arrived at the field, the pursuers from the monastery jaunted in. He looked around desperately. He was surrounded by half a regiment of Commandos, all under acceleration, all geared for lethal action, all his equal or better. The odds were impossible. A ND then the Outer Satellites altered the odds. Exactly one week after the saturation raid on Terra, they struck at Mars. Again the missiles came down on the midnight-to-dawn quadrant. Again the heavens twinkled with interceptions and detonations, and the horizon exploded great puffs of light while the ground shook. But this time there was a ghastly variation, for a brilliant nova burst overhead, flooding the nightside of the planet with garish light. A swarm of fission-heads had struck Mars' tiny satellite, Phobos, instantly vaporizing it into a sunlet. The Recognition Lag of the Commandos to this appalling attack gave Foyle his opportunity. He accelerated again and burst through them to his yawl. He stopped before the main hatch and saw the stunned guard party hesitate between a continuance of the old action and a response to the new. Foyle hurled Sigurd Magsman up into the air like an ancient Scotsman tossing the caber. As the guard party rushed to catch the boy, Foyle dived through them into his yawl, slammed the hatch and dogged it. Still under acceleration, never pausing to see if anyone was inside the yawl, he shot forward to controls, tripped the release lever and, as the yawl started to float up the anti-grav beam, threw on full #-G propulsion. He was not strapped into the pilot chair. The effect of the #-G drive on his accelerated and unprotected body was monstrous. A creeping force took hold of him and spilled him out of the chair. He inched back toward the rear wall of the control chamber like a sleepwalker. To his accelerated senses, the wall appeared to approach him. He thrust out both arms, palms flat against the wall to brace himself. The sluggish power thrusting him back jacked his arms apart and forced him against the wall, gently at first, then harder and harder until face, jaw, chest and, body were crushed against the metal. The mounting pressure became agonizing. He tried to trip the switchboard in his mouth with his tongue, but the propulsion crushing him against the wall made it impossible for him to move his distorted mouth. A burst of explosions, so far down the sound spectrum that they sounded like sodden rockslides, told him that the Commando Brigade was bombarding him with shots from below. As the yawl tore up into the blue-black of outer space, he began to scream in a bat-screech that was snapped off by unconsciousness. Concluded Next Month      cludes with as explosive a climax as ever was achieved by any science fiction serial. Mull this volcanic concept: PyrE is power beyond Man's most fantastic dream... but Gully Foyle's Burning Man is a fantastic dream within Man's power! sible question: Why shouldn't one culture imitate another culture right down to the last little detail? But the answer is a harrowing one: The last little detail may be just that -- the final one! a hunt that covers centuries and oceans and seas... a hunt manned by trained observers, not charlatans or even landlubbers. Their detailed reports of what they saw may leave room for argument, but none whatever for doubt. As a case history of an age-old mystery, exacting judge. Short stories, of course, plus our regular features... plus a warm visit by our famous and beloved four-armed Santa Claus! Poor chap, he really has his hands full passing out gifts -- take a look at the next page and see how you can help him out -- while at the same time making grateful friends and saving money! Reading one of this towering pair of science fiction novels as Alfred Bester. in its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price... and we pay the postage ! n ling riglu now. Send your # immediately to... Plot mo #I Hudson St. the demolished man rush mo   copies of New York # , N. Y. The Original Edition -- Complete! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Name Address ! City m. State I Enclose ( Continued from page #) dishes made of it. The amount ultimately thrown out is very nearly the original weight. Any housewife who uses a laundromat will depose that the only way to get a laundry beneath the nine-pound load seems to be to send in an empty bag. When you move into an empty apartment, the amount of junk to be cleared out is beyond all reason or explanation, especially magazines and newspapers; a number of experimenters have found that these accumulate even when none are bought. There are many other examples, but let's examine the loss side of the ledger. You can tag your socks like migratory birds or staple them together, but however carefully you handle them, you will invariably wind up with a handful (or drawerful) of single socks. There is no known way of keeping your stock of handkerchiefs from steadily dwindling. Even if you make a point of not eating the canned foods you especially like, they are always gone when you want them. (There is an obverse: the ones you don't like multiply.) Game is notorious for its shrinkage -- fish lose weight and length from water to boat and still more from boat to home. The theory that this is because of fighting and exposure to air is untrue; if they escape the hook, they swiftly grow big again. No matter how many light bulbs of the right wattage you may buy, you usually have to settle for a # when a # blows. There is an inexplicable quantitative difference between a quart of soda (or beer) and a quart of milk. When you break a shoe lace, the ones in the drawer will always be the wrong size and color. The books in your library are not the ones you bought. Sugar and coffee dribble away at the most awkward times. No one knows what happens to the linen for the guest room. There's more, but this is enough to work with. Sinister? I thought so at first, but have you noticed how the ledger balances? Exasperatingly, yes, but it does balance: a sock for a pound of fat, canned Alberta peaches for neverending roasts, old magazines and newspapers for light bulbs. Somewhere, it seems to me, there is a marketplace where such trades are considered equitable. 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Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada. Mexico. South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. Alt material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by the Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Q uite a number of readers write in each month asking for the latest facts on Galaxy. Well, it's true -- I haven't submitted a Treasurer's Report in several years. I wasn't sure you were interested. Now that enough requests have come in to indicate you are, here's the picture : Circulation: Doing very nicely; still leading all competition and gfowing comfortably. Like every publication, of course, we could use more sales, which depends on dealers ordering copies and displaying them up front. If your dealer doesn't carry Galaxy, or if he does but hides it in a pile, we'd much appreciate your telling him he is missing a profitable bet. So will he. And so will you, because the larger our circulation, the better magazine we can put out. As for instance : Covers : After years of experimentation, we've finally come up with what seems to be the ideal solution -- by widening the left-hand band a bit, we can feature stories and Willy Ley's articles without cutting at all into the picture area -- and without noticeably reducing the size of the picture. Took considerable juggling, but we worked it out at last. Costs: Up and up. That sounds like your budget and mine, but there are important differences. Production expenses, though on about the same increase as our budgets, don't fluctuate; they are high and they keep going higher. Paper, for instance. More and more pulpwood is going into industrial papers, where the profit is greater, which slashes the supply of printing paper, thus driving up the price. A very startling incidental fact: Printing paper accounts for less than # of all the paper made! The big # is wrapping paper of all sorts, bags, cartons, toweling, tissues, construction paper, mache, board and so forth. Subscriptions : We still have several times as many as our nearest competitor, but we'd naturally like to have more. To get them, we realize we have to offer an attractive deal -- and we do. Besides saving you money, we mail copies flat in a strong envelope (raises the cost, but worth it) and rush them out (Continued on Page #) Don't let our hard-working Santa do the whole job of supplying your family and friends with Christmas gifts. Even his four And just to show that we do not intend to sit hack while you a gift in itself, to your family and friends -- everywhere in the your name and your season's greetings ! That will help the poor old gent contend with an expanding universe for another year, at least. Gift to: Name Address City State  Send gift card as follows: From Enclose Check, Cash, or Money Order Use separate sheet for addiftona! names  or for your whote order -- if you do not want to mar this handsome issue. Why shouldn't a culture mimic another right down to the last little detail? Because the last detail may be just that -- the final one! T he planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening, which deep-space men knew as the Slot. Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. "Now, Johnny," he said, "easy this time. Real easy. Gentle her into it. She's not a new ship. She resents being slammed into the Slot." "She'll take it," Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal abandon. "Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting us off Torriang. A little closer and -- " "I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I'm an instinctive astrogator." He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff switch. "You're out two decimal points," said Beliakoff, who worried about such trifles. "Enough to ionize us." "I know, I know," Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. "I was just touching it for luck. Here we go!" He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected, college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty alien would ever marry his daughter. Kyne had no daughter. Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port. asked proudly, once the ship was locked in hyperspace. "Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every time." "Poor devil, Kyne," Beliakoff sighed. "A paranoid," Kelly diagnosed. "Did he ever tell you about the plot to keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?" "He never talked to me much. "That's because you're a cold distant, unsympathetic type,' Kelly said, with a complacent smile. "Me he told eversthing. He applied to Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organizaton, land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare. Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!" "Why didn't he get in?" "Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little astrogation." With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, "I understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at Terra." "Please don't try," Beliakoff begged, shuddering. "I knew we should have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala." "We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour." "I was afraid it would sour anyhow," Beliakoff said, with a worrier's knack for finding trouble. "Mala is the slowest loading port this side of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time." "Noticed that, did you?" Kelly asked. "Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?" "Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books. Really hustled for them." Beliakoif said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face became pale. "You what?" "Gave 'em the books. Don't worry," Kelly said quickly. "Kyne gave them to me before they hauled him away." "You gave the warfare books to the people on Mala?" "You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?" "Plenty." Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. "It'll be a year, their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!" "Now?" Kelly gasped. "Here?" "At once!" "But we might come out inside a star or -- " "That," Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, "simply cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!" der of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand man. "But damn it all," General Drak shouted, "I must have it! I am the Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship! Doesn't that mean anjdhing?" "Not under the circumstances," Nob answered. Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened interestedly. "Think he'll get it?" one asked. "Not a chance," the other answered. Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. "Will you please attempt to understand my position?" he said hoarsely. "You put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me. Me! Correct?" "He's got a point," one soldier said. "He'll never get it," the other replied. "Shut up, you two!" Drak roared. "Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly way. Nob. Authority must be recognized!" "I'm sorry," Nob said. "Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with you. But the Book of Terran Rank Equivalents is quite specific. Seven shoulder stars are the most -- the absolute most -- that any general can wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight." "But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!" "That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky. I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven." "Take one away from Frix, then." "Can't. He'll resign." "In that case, I resign." "You aren't allowed to. The book, Military Leadership, specifically states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable." "All right!" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone. The two soldiers exchanged winks. "At attention, you two," Drak said. "You're supposed to be honor guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?" "We haven't got weapons," one of the soldiers pointed out. "Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front." "But we need them here," the soldier said earnestly. "It's bad for morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory," Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it was quoted at him. "You may be right," he agreed. "I'll try to ge some back." He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly! walked into his store and inquired, "Drak, how would you like to be a general?" "I don't know," Drak had confessed honestly. "What is it and why do we need one?" "War starting," Nob said, "You've heard of war, haven't you? Erth idea, very Earthly, I'll" explain later how it works. What do you say?" "All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?" "Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the Supreme Command Post." But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually held nails in it when he was out on a repair job. In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact, he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars war of '#, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of the Fanzani Rebellion. But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's Leadership, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of Rank. In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to write down the code. Was it He wished he knew. It made quite a difference. The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. "Hey, General, take a look out the window!" Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules. "Hey, what?" he demanded. "Forgot," the corporal said. "Hey, sir, take a look out the window, huh?" "Much better." Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a mass of ascending black smoke. "City of Chando," the corporal said proudly. "Boy, we smacked it today! Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a gravel pit now!" "Sir," Drak reminded. "Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next, huh, sir?" "Let me see..." General Drak, examined a wall map upon which the important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn, Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his desk. "Yeah?" asked a voice over the loudspeaker. "Which one, Ingif?" "Kys, of course," said the cracked voice of his old hardware store assistant. "Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up." "Thanks, Ingif." Drak turned to the corporal. "Go to it, soldier!" "Yes, sir!" The corporal hurried out. General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How should it read? "Oh, well," Drak said resignedly. "In the long run, I don't suppose it really makes much difference."    Miles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks. Upon the table between them was a coin. "Your toss," said the man on the right. The man on the left picked up the coin. "Call it." "Heads." It came up heads. "Damn," said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and standing up. The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing. switch, then hesitated. "Look, Igor," he said, "do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?" "It is a risk we have to take," Beliakoif said stonily. "But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books? Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them." "Look," Beliakoif said patiently, "you know that Mala is a semirestricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the approved list." "Yeah," Kelly said vaguely. "Silly sort of rule." "Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can find." "Seems like a good idea. We have got a real good culture." "Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see, with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it, warp it into something harmful." "They'll learn," Kelly said. "Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you? Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of others." "I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it," Kelly said. "All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?" "The Malans," Beliakoff said grimly, "have never had a war." Kelly gulped. "Never?" "Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they started reading those warfare books." "But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on it, and know that Earth people do it, and -- yeah, I guess they would." Quickly he set the dials. "You're right, buddy. We have an absolute moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess." "I knew you'd see it that way," Beliakoff said approvingly. "And there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hpld us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so." "Why didn't you say that in the first place?" Kelly flipped the kissoff switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no sun or planet in its path. "Hang on," Kelly said, "we're going where we're going in a great big rushl" "I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something," Beliakoff said, watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space toward the unchanging stars. Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne. In point of fact, however. Nob was a mild, near-sighted, wellmeaning little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible. But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature. Nob couldn't find a book entitled Ways and Means of Placating Royalty. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price for it. He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal Chambers. Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving. "Nob, you dirty swine!" the Empress shrieked. "At your service. Majesty," Nob answered, bowing low. "Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?" "Here, Majesty," Nob said, handing over the package. "It strained the exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours. Majesty." "Of course." Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems. "Can I keep them?" she asked, in a very small voice. "Of course not." "I didn't think so," Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know that. But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love her in spite of and because of herself. intelligence and she wanted to be as Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her. "Can't I keep them just for a little while?" she pleaded, holding a single pearl up to the light. "It isn't possible," Nob said. "We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents." "But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?" Jusa asked. "I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for expensive baubles." "All right," Jusa said. "All right, what?" "All right, swine." "That's better," Nob said. "You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently -- " "I really will try," promised the Empress. "I'll learn. Nob. You'll be proud of me yet." "Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon. Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for disposing of them. First, we could -- " "You take care of it." "Now, now," Nob chided. "Mustn't shirk your duty." "I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial. You solve it, pig. And bring me diamonds." "Yes, Excellency," Nob said, bowing low. "Diamonds. But the people -- " "I love the people. But to hell with them!" she cried, fire in her eyes. "Fine, fine," Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room. Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several dozen more. Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly. She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely ended her social life. She resented it; any girl would. TV OB, meanwhile, left the pal-i' ace and went home in his armored car. The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who, according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning. He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. "Hard day at the palace, dear?" she asked. "Quite hard," Nob said. "Lots of work for after supper." "It just isn't fair," complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant little person and she worried continually about her husband's health. "They shouldn't make you work so hard." "But of course they should!" said Nob, a little astonished. "Don't you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous strains of high office." "It isn't fair," his wife repeated. "No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike." His wife shrugged her shoulders. "Well, of course, if it's Earthlike, it must be right. Come eat supper, dear." his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just finishing the dishes. "My dear," he said, "do you suppose you could help me?" "Is it proper?" she asked. "Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power." "In that case, I'll be happy to try." She sat down in front of the great pile of papers. "But, dear, I don't know anything about these matters." "Rely on instinct," Nob answered, yawning. "That's what I do." Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will. Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on the couch. "I've got them all finished except these," she said. "In this one, I'm afraid I don't understand that word." Nob glanced at the paper. "Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war." "I don't see why." "It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different." "I see," she said dubiously. "Well, this other paper is from General Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation. He says it's very serious." "I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point." He put the paper in his pocket. "I'm going to take care of that personally, first thing in the morning." In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his wife's good judgment and common sense. He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about the spy situation. next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication. The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed. A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group. "Boys," said Thrang, "I guess I don't have to tell you an#hing about the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?" "We sure do!" "War is hell!" "The war that the enemy thrust on us!" "The war to start all wars!" "That's right," Thrang said. "And I guess we've all felt the pinch since the war started. Eh, boys?" "I've done my part," said a man named Draxil. "When the Prime Minister called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!" "That's the spirit," Thrang said. "I know for a fact that others among you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch. But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has come up and it calls for quick action." "Haven't we done enough?" groaned a clothing-store owner. "It's never enough! In time of war. Earth people give till it hurts -- then give some more! They know that no sacrifice is too much, that nothing counts but the proper prosecution of the war." The clothing-store owner nodded vehemently. "If it's Earthly, it's good enough for me. So what can we do about this spy situation?" "That is for us to decide here and now," Thrang said. "According to the Prime Minister, our dictatorship cannot boast a single act of espionage or sabotage done to it since the beginning of the war. The Chief of Security is alarmed. It's his job to keep all spies under surveillance. Since there are none, his department has lost all morale, which, in turn, affects the other departments." "Do we really need spies?" "They serve a vital purpose," Thrang explained. "All the books agree on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant. Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else. They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession, Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our counter-propaganda machine."know it was so complicated." "That's the beauty of the Earth War," Thrang said. "Stupendous yet delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses." "Those Terrans!" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration. "Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?" No one responded. "Really now!" said Thrang. "That's no attitude to take. Come on, some of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it. Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war." Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. "I have a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies." "An excellent motive for subversion!" Thrang cried. "I rather thought it was," the zipper salesman said, pleased. "Yes, I believe I can handle the job." "Splendid!" Thrang said. By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed, allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel was a silver badge which read Secret Police. "See that man?" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman. "You bet," the Secret Policeman said. "He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!" "He's being watched," said the Secret Policeman laconically. "I just wanted to make sure," Thrang said, and started to walk off. He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They wore badges that said Storm Troopers. "You're under arrest," said the Secret Policeman. "Why? What have I done?" "Not a thing, as far as we know," said a Storm Trooper. "Not a single solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you." "Arbitrary police powers," the Secret Policeman explained. "Suspension of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important part to play in the war effort." 'Whafs that?" "You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr," said the Secret Policeman. Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny. IHE whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear on the stalls: War and You for the masses. The Erotic Release of War for the elite. The Inherent Will to Destroy for philosophers, and War and Civilization for scholars. Volumes of personal experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of Thrang. War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities, buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers of dust after the bombers had gone. Among the proletariat, the prevailing opinion was voiced by Zun, who was quoted as saying at a war plant party, "Well, there ain't nothin' in the stores I can buy. But I never made so much money in my life!" In the imiversities, professors boned up on the subject in order to fit themselves for Chairs of War that were sure to be endowed. All they had to do was wait until the recent crop of war profiteers were taxed into becoming philanthropists, or driven to it by the sense of guilt that the books assured them they would feel. Armies grew. Soldiers learned to paint, salute, curse, appreciate home cooking, play poker, and fit themselves in every way for the post-war civilian life. They broadened themselves with travel and got a welcome vacation frorn home and hearth. War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth institutions and as educational as it was entertaining. "you wouldn't like Ranhachi Prison, not one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from Ranhachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve wrong and flipped into Sol." "What about the other one?" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly. "His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed," Beliakoff finished dreamily. "No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi." "Okay, okay," Kelly said. "The death penalty would be better." "They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency," Beliakoff said with gloomy Slavic satisfaction. "Enough! We'll straighten out Mala." There was more hope than conviction in Kelly's voice. "Thar she lies, off to starboard." Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their screens. Their radio blared on the emergency channel. Kelly swore. "That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he doing here?" "Blockade," said Beliakoff. "Standard practice to quarantine a planet at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over." "Nuts. We're going down." Kelly touched the controls and the freighter began to descend into the interdicted area. "Attention, freighter!" the radio blasted. "This is the interdictory ship Moth. Heave to and identify yourself." Beliakoff answered promptly in the Propendium language. "Let's see 'em unscramble that," he said to Kelly. They continued their descent. After a while, a voice from the patrol boat said in Propendium, "Attention, freighter! You are entering an interdicted area. Heave to at once and prepare to be boarded." "I can't understand your vile North Propendium accent," Beliakoff bellowed, in a broad South Propendium dialect. "If you people can't speak a man's language, don't clutter up the ether with your ridiculous chatter. I know you long-haul trampers and I'll be damned if I'll give you any air, water, food, or anything else. If you can't stock that stuff like any normal, decent -- " "This area is interdicted," the patrol boat broke in, speaking now with a broad South Propendium accent. "Hell," Beliakoff grumbled. "They've got themselves a robot linguist." under direct orders from the patrol boat Moth. Heave to at once, freighter, and prepare to be boarded and inspected." planet looming large beneath them. He gestured at the power control to Kelly and said, "Hello! Hello! Do you read me? Your message is not coming across. Do you read me?" "Stop or we'll fire!" Beliakoff nodded. Kelly kicked in all the jets and they plummeted toward the surface. With his pilot's sixth sense, Kelly changed course abruptly. A blast seared past them, sealing a starboard tube for good. Then they were in the atmosphere, traveling too fast, the hull glowing red with friction. The heavy cruiser, built only for spatial maneuvering, broke off its pursuit curve. "All right, freighter. This means your license. You gotta leave sometime." Beliakoff shut off the radio. Kelly fired the braking jets and began to spiral in for a landing. As they circled, Beliakoff saw the shattered rubble andruin where cities had been. He saw highways filled with military columns, and, at the distant edge of the horizon, a fleet of military planes winging their way to a fresh target. "What a mess!" he said. Kelly nodded glumly. They touched down and opened the hatches. Already a crowd of Malans had gathered. A few artists had set up their easels and were busy painting the freighter, not because it was lovely, but because it was Terran, which was better. A Malan stepped forward, grinning. "Well," he asked, "what do you think of it?" "Of what?" "Our war, of course. You must have noticed!" "Oh, yes, we noticed," Beliakoff said. "A real intercontinental war complete with ideological differences," the man stated proudly. "Just like the civilized planets have. You must admit it's Earthlike." "Exceedingly Earthlike," Kelly said. "Now take us to whoever's in charge -- quick!" ' I HE conference with Nob at the Imperial Palace began well. The Prime Minister was overjoyed that real Earthmen had come to witness their war. He knew very well that, by Earth standards, it was a pretty small war. A beginner's war, really. But they were trying. Some day, with more know-how, with better equipment, they would be able to produce a war that would match anyone's. "We were hampered from the start," Nob apologized, "by not knowing how to produce atomic fission." "That must have been confining," Kelly said, and Beliakoff winced. "It was. Dynamite and nitroglycerin just don't have the same grandeur and finality. The scale of demolition seems insignificant. But if you will come with me, gentlemen, I have something here which may interest you." Nob ushered the Earthmen ahead of him so he could copy their loosejointed, rolling walk. "Here!" he said, darting ahead and opening a door. "Behold!" The Earthmen saw, upon an ivory pedestal, a small model of an atomic bomb. "We worked imtil we mastered it at last," Nob said proudly. "With any luck, we'll be in production within the month and using them within the year. Now I think I can safely say that Mala has come of age!" Beliakoff said, "No." "No, what?" "No atom bombs." "But it's Earthlike to use atomic bombs. Why -- " "This war has to end at once," Kelly said. "You're joking!" protested Nob, looking intently at the Earthmen. But he saw at once that they were deadly serious. He groaned and sat down. Nob was faced with a moral dilemma of fearful proportions. On the one hand, war was a typical Terran institution, an extremely important one, an institution clearly worthy of emulation by the people of Mala. But on the other hand, this Terran institution was being refuted, denied, in fact, by two typical Terrans. The problem was insoluble for him. And Nob remembered that, when an ultimate crisis is at hand, that is the moment for the supreme authority to step in. "We must discuss this with the Empress," he said. bers, knocked and opened the door. Half a dozen vases shattered around them. "On your knees, pigs!" Jusa shrilled. "You, Nob, have you brought the diamonds?" "I knew I forgot something," "Forgot them! Then how dare you show your face?" Jusa stamped her small foot. "And these peasants -- who are they? I've a good mind to lock them up, especially that grinning red-headed ape." Kelly's grin became a trifle strained. "These are Earthmen, Your Majesty," Nob said. "Genuine Earthmen!" "Really?" breathed Jusa. "Really," said Nob. "Oh, golly," Jusa said, losing all her painfully acquired imperial pose and becoming a frightened, albeit lovely, young girl. "Your Majesty -- " Beliakoff began. "Just call me Jusa. My gosh! Real Earthmen! I never met a real Earthman before. I wish you had let me know in advance. My hair -- " "Is beautiful, just like yourself," Kelly said. "I'm so glad. I think your hair is beautiful, too." Kelly turned brick-red. "You're not supposed to say that, you know." "I didn't know," Jusa said. "But I have -- " "Excuse me," Beliakoff broke in sourly. "Your Majesty, we've come to ask you to stop the war." "You don't mean it!" Jusa turned bewilderedly to Kelly. "Have to do it, honey," Kelly said softly. "You folks just aren't ready for a war yet." Jusa's eyes flashed and she began to regain a little of her imperial pose. "But of course we are! Look at what we've done. Go over our battlefields, look at our cities, interrogate our refugees. You'll find that everything has been done in strict accordance with the rules. We're as ready for war as anyone!" "I'm sorry, you'll have to stop it," Beliakoff said, and Kelly nodded his agreement. Jusa gave Nob a beseeching look, but the Prime Minister averted his eyes. The dilemma was there again, enormous, insurmountable, and squarely on Jusa's shoulders. To stop the war now would be Unearthlike; to refuse the Earthmen was unthinkable. "I just don't know," Jusa said. She looked at Kelly, who wore the guilty expression of a man caught murdering a fawn. Then she burst into tears and collapsed on a couch. TV OB and the Earthmen looked ' at each other, made several helpless gestures, and left. "What now?" Beliakoff asked, in the corridor. "Do you think she'll stop the war?" Nob shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? It's a problem without a solution." "But she has to make up her mind," Kelly said. "That's one of the duties of authority." "The Empress is aware of that. And she will make up her mind, though it could take a year or more. Unless she fails completely under the strain." "Poor kid," Kelly said. "She needs a man to help her out." "Indeed she does," Nob agreed hastily. "A strong man, a wise man, a man who could guide her and be as adviser and husband to her." Kelly blinked, then laughed nervously. "Don't look at me! I mean she's a cute kid, nice girl, make some man a wonderful wife, but I'm not the marrying kind, you know what I mean?" "Johnny," said Beliakoff, "I'd like to have a serious talk with you." Nob led them to a vacant room and left discreetly. "I won't do it!" Kelly declared bluntly. "You have to," Beliakoff said. "You got us into this mess. Now you can marry us out." "No!" "She'd make a wonderful wife," Beliakoff quoted Kelly's words back at him. "Docile, pretty, but spirited. What more could you ask?" "Freedom of choice," Kelly said grimly. "That's for adolescents." "Speaking." "She'll never be able to make up her mind to stop the war unless you marry her. Until the war ends, that interdictory ship is going to sit in orbit, waiting for us. You haven't an#hing to lose," Beliakoff added. "I haven't?" "Not a thing. It's a big galaxy and our freighter is always waiting." "That's true... Kelly admitted. Ten minutes later, Beliakoff dragged him into the corridor. They were joined by Nob, who ushered them back to the Empress's chambers. "It's okay by me if it's okay by you, kid," Kelly blurted out, in a tone that made Beliakoff shudder and made Nob smile in outright hero-worship. "What is all right?" Jusa asked. "Marriage," Kelly said. "What d'ya say?" Jusa studied his face for several seconds. "But do you love me?" "Give it time, kid! Give it time!" Jusa must have seen something in his expression, something behind the embarrassment and anger. Very softly she said, "I will be most happy to marry you." mony and authentically Terran. Beliakoff produced a Bible from the freighter and the ancient words of the Earth ceremony were read. When it was over, Kelly, grinning, perspiring, nervously rubbing his hands together, turned to his bride. "Now stop the war, honey." "Yes, dear," Jusa said dutifully. She heaved a great sigh. "What's wrong?" Kelly asked. "I just tremble to think of our cities being bombed out of existence and us not able to do anything about it because we've stopped fighting." "What are you talking about? If we stop fighting -- " "They won't!" she said. "Why should they? It's Earthlike to continue conquering, and if we quit fighting, there'll be nothing to stop them from conquering us completely." "Nob!" Kelly shouted. "Igor! What can we do about this?" Nob said, "There would appear to be only one certain solution. I can arrange a meeting for you -- " he turned to Beliakoif -- "with Lanvi, the President of the Allies." "What would I say to him?" asked Beliakoff. "To her," Nob corrected. "You can say, I suppose, the same sort of thing your friend said." Beliakoff, ashy pale, started to back away. Kelly caught him in one meaty fist. "Okay, Mr. Fixer. Your duty is plain. Marry us out of trouble." "But I've got a girl friend in Minsk -- " "She forgot you years ago. Stop squirming, buddy." "What does she look like?" Beliakoff queried in apprehension. "Very pretty," Nob said. mony, Beliakoff peered at his bride with cautious approval. Lanvi was indeed a pretty girl and she seemed to possess the Malan virtues of obedience, patience and fire. As soon as the final words were spoken, the war was declared officially over. Peace, an authentic Earth custom, was proclaimed. "Now the real work begins," Beliakoff said. "First, we'll need a list of the casualties." "The what?" Nob asked. "Casualties." "I'm not sure I understand," said the Prime Minister. "Casualties! The number of people killed in the warfare." "Now wait a moment," Nob said, his voice trembling. "Do I understand you correctly? Are you trying to tell me that civilized people kill people in their wars? Do you mean that they leave people in the cities they bomb?" Kelly looked at Beliakoff. Beliakoff looked at Kelly. "Lord, Lord," murmured Kelly. Beliakoff merely gulped. "Is it possible?" asked Nob. "Do civilized people really -- " "Of course not," said Beliakoff. "Never," Kelly said. Nob pursed his lips. "I've been wanting to ask a real authority, a genuine Earthman, some questions on the subject. Our texts were by no means complete and some parts we couldn't understand at all. Like the matter of determining victories. That's something we couldn't figure out. We decided you must use a complicated system of umpires. It was too much for us, so we built a bunker in no man's land and put a man from each side in it. They tossed coins to determine whose turn it was. The winning side would bomb an enemy city. After the occupants had been evacuated, of course." "Of course," said Beliakoff. "It worked out rather well with the coins," Nob said. "Law of averages, in fact." "Substantially our system," said Kelly. "Just the way we do it," Beliakoff added. "A few more questions, if you please," Nob said. "Jusa, would you bring in the big War Encyclopedia?" siping on the other side of the room. They hurried out and returned with the great book. "Now here," Nob said, opening the volume, "it seems to imply -- " "Wait," Beliakoff broke in. He took the book from Nob's hands and flipped through it rapidly, then turned to Kelly. In a whisper, he said in Propendium, "It looks as though Kyne blotted out "Sure!" exclaimed Kelly, brightening. "I told you he was a hemophiliac -- a bleeder. Naturally, he'd cut out every single mention of bloodshed!" "This point -- " Nob began. "Later," Beliakoff said. "Right now, we'd like to get a few articles from our spaceship." He winked at Kelly, who winked back. "It won't take a moment and then we'll be only too happy to -- " "Oh, dear," said Nob. "You mean you wanted the spaceship?" "What?" "Well, I assumed that you'd have no further use for it. Metal is hard to get nowadays and it seemed only proper to erect heroic statues to both of you, the men who brought the institution of peace to Mala. Did I do something wrong?" "Not at all, not at all," Kelly said. "Oh, not at all. Perfectly delighted. Not at -- " "Johnny!" said Beliakoff. "Sorry," Kelly apologized, a broken man. The brides stepped forward to claim their husbands. Peace and prosperity came to Mala, under the deft guidance of their Terran leaders. In time, spaceships arrived and departed, but neither man showed any particular desire to board one, for their wives -- docile, patient, yet fiery -- proved more appealing than the lonely far reaches of space. Beliakoff sometimes pondered the opportune melting down of ther freighter. He was never able to discover who had signed the order. But all Mala knew the saying, "An Earthman is easy to catch, but hard to hold." He wondered whether that had been the true reason behind the order to scrap the ship. By this time, of course, he didn't really care; if his wife or Kelly's had been responsible, it was all the more reason to feel appreciated. ' had other things on his mind. He lay awake, restless, until his wife asked worriedly what was wrong. "I've been wondering," he said. "Those war books that the Earthmen had us turn in -- I never did understand why all those deletions were made. You know, the ones that made us figure out a way of deciding which side won." "But the Earthmen said they used the very same system," she reminded him. "And they wouldn't lie, would they?" "They would, if it was for oxir good. That's what is known as diplomacy, dear. Statesmanship. Or politics. Interchangeable terms." She looked impressed. "Oh. And?" "I've tried to question the crews of ships that land here. The answers are so evasive that I can't help thinking -- " "Yes, dear?" she prompted. " -- that civilized people actually kill each other in wars." She turned a shocked face toward him. "How can you think such a thing? What would be the advantage?" "Advantage?" he repeated. Then his expression cleared and he fell back on his pillow, completely relaxed. "I hadn't thought of that, dear. None, of course. It would really be too much, wouldn't it?" "No question of it, dear," she said. "Now that that's settled, can you go to sleep?" There was no answer. He was already snoring peacefully. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania All Jackson's Children Their chances hung literally on a prayer... which they had to answer all by themselves! ously scuffed the tarnished nameplate on the wrecked cargo carrier. Then he stepped back and squinted under shaggy gray eyebrows. Letter by letter, number by number, he coaxed out the designation on the crumpled bow of the spacer in the vine-matted gorge: "RT... #... VG-II." His lean frame tensed with concern as he turned to stare soberly at the other. "A Vegan robot trader!" Bruce Drummond grirmed. "Are we lucky! Clunkers are worth money -- in any condition." Angus snorted impatiently. "Let's get out of here, quick." "Get out?" the stocky Drummond repeated incredulously as he ran thick-set fingers over the black stubble on his cheek. "Ain't we going to salvage the climkers? The book says they're ours after fifty years." "The hold's empty. There's no cargo." "There was when it landed. Look at the angle of incidence on those fins." "Exactly." Frowning, Angus shifted his holster around on his hip and strode back toward the plain. "Ever hear of a frustrated compulsion?" tantly, shook his head. "Those clunkers have to satisfy a basic behavior circuit," McIntosh explained as he hastened his step. "We don't know what the compulsion of this bunch is. Suppose -- well, suppose they have a chiropractic function. Row'd you like to be the first person to show up after they've been frustrated for a hundred years?" "Oh," Drummond said comprehendingly, stumbling to keep pace. Angus McIntosh brushed a mass of tendrils aside and stepped out on the plain. "We'll report it and let them send in a deactivation crew. That way, at least, we'll get fifty per cent of salvage and no danger." "Even that ain't bad -- just for years. Taking an uncharted route and picking up that signal sure paid off like -- " Drummond gagged on his words as he gripped Angus's arm and pointed. Their ship was a shining oval, bobbing and weaving on a sea of silver that surged across the plain toward a cliff on the left. "Clunkers!" Drummond gasped. "Hundreds of 'em -- making off with our boat!" He unholstered his weapon and fired. Angus struck his wrist sharply. "Why don't you just nm out waving your arms? We don't have enough firepower to get more than eight or ten of them." But the warning was too late. Already the tide had washed away from the ship and was surging toward the gorge. There was a noise behind them and Angus spun around. Ten feet away stood a robot with the designation RA-# on his breastplate. "Welcome, O Jackson," the clunker said reverently. Then he hinged forward on his hip joints until his head almost touched the ground. The gesture was a clockwork salaam. gled in front of #'s breastplate and his ankles were secure in the grip of metal fingers as he rode the robot's shoulders. RA-# strode alongside, carrying a squirming and swearing Drummond. Around them, the shining horde marched along noisily. "He has come!" cried one. "Jackson has come!" chanted the others of the shining horde. "He will show ns the way!" shouted RA-#. Drummond kicked, but # only held his legs more firmly. Furious, Drummond reached for his gun. "That's using your head," Angus said sarcastically. "Agitate them. Then we'll never get out of here." Drummond let the weapon slip back into its holster. "What did we get into -- a nest of fanatics? Who's Jackson?" Angus helplessly shrugged his bony shoulders. The procession filtered through a narrow woods and broke out on another plain, headed for the nearby cliff. Angus leaned forward. "Put me down, #." "Thou art Jackson," said the robot solemnly. "And Thou art testing me to see whether I would so easily abandon my Supervisor." "Not testing," Angxxs said. "Just asking. Come on, how about it?" "Praise Jackson!" # cried. "Jackson! Jackson!" intoned the throng. Drummond leaned an elbow on #'s skull plate and disgustedly cupped his chin in his hand. "What if they are chiropractor robots?" "We'll probably need one after this ride," Angus said uncomfortably. "Not like we'll need a way to get back to the ship and cut off those converters before they overcharge." "Slow charge?" Angus asked between grunts timed with #'s stride. "Hell, no. I didn't think we'd be here more than a couple of hours. By tomorrow at this time, there'll be a crater out there big enough to bury the Capellan fleet." "Great," said Angus. "That gives us another thing to worry about." The robots fell into two groups as they neared a cave in the cliff. "Jackson is my Supervisor!" chanted the ones on the right. "I shall not rust!" answered those on the left. "He maketh me to adjust my joint tension!" cried the first group. "Oh, brother," said Drummond. "Sounds like a psalm," suggested Angus. "You ought to know...You always got your nose in that Bible." "Notice anything peculiar about them?" "Very funny," sneered Drummond at the question. "No, I'm serious." "They bounce the daylights out of you when they walk," Drummond grumbled. "No. Their finish. It's shiny -- like they were fresh out of the factory -- not like they've been marooned here for a hundred years." chin. "Maybe their compulsion is metal polishing." "Not with the kind of fingers they have." Angus indicated the hand that held his ankle. Three digits were wrenches of various sizes. The index finger was a screwdriver. The thumb was a Stillson wrench. The thumb on the other hand was a disclike appendage. Drummond hunched over. "#, what's your function?" The robot looked up. "To serve Jackson." "You're a big help," said Drummond. "Why dost thou tempt us, O Jackson?" asked RA-#. "Wouldst Thou test our beliefs?" "We're no gods," Angus declared as the robot drew up before the cave. "Thou art Jackson!" insisted #. Drummond and McIntosh were hoisted to a ledge beside the mouth of the cave. The robots backed off, forming a half circle, and bowed in obeisance. Angus ran a hand helplessly through his sparse gray hair. "Would you say there are four hundred of them?" "At least." Drummond surveyed the expanse of metal bodies. "You know, maybe they don't have a function." "Impossible. Hasn't been a clunker in five hundred years without a primary compulsion." "Think they forgot theirs?" "Can't. They may forget how to put it in words, but the compulsion is good for as long as their primary banks are intact. That's not what's worrying me, though." "No?" "Religious robots! There can't be any such brand. Yet here they are." Drummond studied them silently. "Before there can be theological beliefs," McIntosh went on, "there has to be some sort of foundation -- the mystery of origin, the fear of death, the concept of the hereafter. Clunkers know they come from a factory. They know that when they're finally disassembled, they'll be lifeless scrap metal." Drummond spat disdainfully. "One thing's for sure -- this pack thinks we're God Almighty." "Jackson Almighty," Angus corrected somberly. "Well, God or Jackson, we'd better get back to the ship or this is going to be a long visitation." Drummond faced the almost prostrate robots and made a megaphone of his hands. "All right, you guys! How's about knocking it off?" Slowly, the robots reared erect, waiting. "Take us back to our ship!" RA-# stepped forward. "Again Thou art testing us, O Jackson." A ngus spread his arms imploringly. "Look, fellows. We're men. We're -- " "Thou art our Supervisor!" the throng roared. "One of you is Jackson," explained #. "The other is a Divine Test. We must learn which is the True Supervisor." "You're not being tested!" McIntosh insisted. "Our beliefs are firm, O Jackson!" cried a hundred metallic voices. "Thou are the Supervisor!" declared # resolutely. "For God's sake," urged Drummond, "tell 'em you're their Jackson and then lay down the law." "No. Can't do it that way." "Why not? Unfair advantage, I suppose?" There was a cutting edge on the yoimger man's words. Angus stared thoughtfully at the robots. "If we only knew how they forgot their origin, how they got religion, we might find a way to get through to them." Drummond laughed contemptuously. "You figure it out. I'm going to play Jackson and get back to the ship." He turned toward the robots. But McIntosh caught his arm. "Let me try something else first." He faced the horde below. "Who made you?" "Thou hast, O Supervisor!" the robots chanted like a gleeful Sunday school class. "And Thou hast put us on this world and robot begot robot until we were as we are today," added # solemnly. Drummond slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead. "Now they think they've got a sex function!" Angus's shoulders fell dismally. "Maybe if we try to figure out their designation. They're all RAs -- whatever the A stands for." There was a hollow rumbling in the cave that grew in volume until the cliff shook. Then a second group of robots emerged and fanned out to encircle the ledge, "Hell," said Drummond in consternation. "There's twice as many as we figured!" "Thought there'd be more," Angus admitted. "That ship was big enough to hold a thousand clunkers. And they didn't waste space in those days." The newcomers fell prostrate alongside the others.  I ' HE planet's single satellite hung like a lost gem over the low mountains east of the plain. It washed the cliff with a cloak of effulgence and bathed the forbidden ship in an aura of gleaming silver. Below the ledge, the reverent robots wavered occasionally and highlights of coruscation played capriciously across their plates. Their whispered invocations were a steady drone, like the soft touch of the wind. "Quit it!" Drummond yelled angrily. "Break it up! Go home!" Angus sat with his head against the cliff, face tilted up. "That didn't help any." "When are they going to give up?" McIntosh glanced abstractedly at the horde. "How long would we keep it up if our God appeared among us?" Drummond swore. "Damned if you haven't been reading the print off that Bible!" "What do you suppose happened," Angus went on heedlessly, "to make them more than clunkers -- to make them grope for the basic truths?" Drummond spat disgustedly in answer. "Civilization goes on for a hundred years," Angus said as he leaned back and closed his eyes, "spreading across a hunk of the Galaxy, carrying along its knowledge and religious convictions. And all the while, there's this little lost island of mimic beliefs -- so much like our own creed, except that their god is called Jackson." Drummond rose and paced. "Well, you'll have plenty of time to set them straight, if we're still sitting on this shelf eleven hours from now." "Maybe that's what it'll take -- bringing them step by step through theology." "Overnight?" No, not overnight, Angus realized. It would take months to pound in new convictions. Drummond slipped down from the ledge. "Here goes nothing." Interestedly, Angus folded his arms and watched the other square his shoulders and march off confidently through the ranks of robots toward the ship in the distance. For a moment, it seemed he would succeed. But two of the RAs suddenly reared erect and seized him by the arms. They bore him on their shoulders and deposited him back on the ridge beside McIntosh. "Warm tonight," Driunmond observed bitterly, glancing up at the sky. "Sure is," Angus agreed, his voice calm. "Wouldn't be surprised if we got some rain tomorrow." pebble and it pinged down on a metal back. "Seven out of thirteen." "Getting good." "Look, let's tell 'em we're their Supervisor and end this marathon worship." "Which one of us is going to play the divine role?" "What difference does it make?" Angus shrugged and his tired eyes stared off into the darkness. "One of us is -- Jackson. The other is an impostor, brought here to test their faith. When they find out which is which, what are they going to do to the impostor?" Drummond looked startled. "I see what you mean." The miniature moon had wheeled its way to the zenith and now the first gray tinge of dawn silhouetted the peaks of the mountain range. Angus rose and stretched. "We've got to find out what their function is." "Why?" "It looks like religion is their only interest. But maybe that's because they're completely frustrated in their basic compulsion. If we could discover their function, maybe we could focus their attention back on it." "RA," Drummond mumbled puzzledly. "Robot agriculturist?" wouldn't be frustrated -- not with a whole planet to farm. Besides, they'd be equipped with agricultural implements instead of wrenches." Drummond got up suddenly. "You figure it out. I have something else to try." Angus followed him along the ledge until they reached the mouth of the cave. "What are you going to do?" Drummond hitched his trousers. "The way we're ringed in here, it's a cinch we won't get past 'em in the six hours we have left." "So you're going to make off through the cave?" The younger man nodded. "They might take off after me. That'll give you a chance to get to the ship and cut off those converters before they make like a nova." Angus chuckled. "Suppose half of them decide to stay here with me?" Drummond swore impatiently at his skepticism. "At any rate, one of us might get back to the converters." "And leave the other here?" "He can say he's Jackson and order an attack in force on the ship." "I don't follow you." "Skidding the ship in a circle with the exhaust blowers on," Drummond explained patiently, "will take care of ten thousand clunkers." He dropped from the ledge and raced into the cave. None of the robots stirred. Either they hadn't noticed Drummond's departure, Angus reasoned, or they weren't concerned because they knew the cave led nowhere. HE sun came up, daubing the cliff with splotches of orange and purple and striking up scintillations in the beads of dew on the robots' backs. And still the tiresomely shouted veneration continued. Angus paced the ledge, stopping occasionally to stare into the impenetrable shadows of the cave. He checked his watch. Five hours to go -- five hours, and then time would be meaningless for the rest of his life, with the ship destroyed. It was unlikely that rescue would come. The wrecked spacer's automatic distress signals had gone out in an ever-expanding sphere for a hundred years, and he and Drummond had been the only humans to hear them. Trade routes were pretty stable in this section of the Galaxy now. And it was hardly possible that, within the next ten or twenty years, one would be opened up had lured them here. He stood up and surveyed the robots. "RA-#." # reared erect. "Yes, Jackson?" "One of us is gone." "We know, O Supervisor." "Why did you let him get away?" "If he is not the True Jackson, it doesn't matter that he fled. If he is the Supervisor, he will return. Otherwise, why did he come here to us in the first place?" Another robot straightened. "We are ashamed, O Jackson, that we have failed the Divine Test and have not recognized our True Supervisor." Angus held up his arms for silence. "Once there was a cargo of robots. That was a hundred years ago. The ship was from Vega II. It developed trouble and crashed when it tried to land on this planet. There was -- " "What's a year, O Supervisor?" asked #. "A Vega-two, Jackson?" said # bewilderedly. "What'S a planet?" another wanted to know. McIntosh leaned back hopelessly against the cliff. All of their memories and a good deal of their vocabularies had been lost. He could determine how much only through days of conversation. It would take weeks to learn their function, to rekindle a sense of duty sufficiently strong to draw their interest away from religion. Unless -- He drew resolutely erect. "Strip the converters! Pull the aft tube lining!" The robots looked uncomprehendingly at him. It was obvious they weren't trained for spacecraft maintenance. But it had to have something to do with mechanics. "A battle fleet is orbiting at one diameter! Arm all warheads on the double!" They stared helplessly at one another, then back at Angus. Not ordnancemen. "Pedestrian Strip Number Two is jammed! Crane crew, muster on the right!" The robots shifted uncertainly. Apparently they weren't civic maintenancemen, either. Defeated, Angus scanned their blank face plates. For a moment, it was almost as though he could discern expressions of confusion. Then he laughed at the thought that metal could accommodate a frown. Suddenly the robots shifted their gaze to the cave. Drummond, shoulders sagging dismally, walked out and squinted against the glare. Several of the robots started toward him. "Okay, okay!" he growled, heading back for the ledge before they could reach him. Disgusted, Drummond clambered up beside him. "The cave's just a nice-sized room." "Took you two hours to find that out?" The younger man shook his head. "I was hiding by the entrance, waiting for the clunkers to break it up and give me a chance to run for the ship... How many robots did we decide there were?" "About eight hundred." "Wrong. You can add another four hundred or so." "In the cave?" Drummond nodded. "With their parts spread all the way from here to hell and back." "Dismantled?" "Down to the last nut and bolt. They've even got their secondary memory banks stripped." Angus was thoughtfully silent a long while. "RA..." he said finally. "Robot Assembler!" "That's what I figured." Drummond turned back toward the robots and funneled his voice through his hands. "Okay, you clunkers! I want all odd-numbered RAs stripped down for reconditioning!' He glanced at Angus. "When they get through. I'll have half of what's left strip the other half, and so forth." McIntosh grinned caustically. shouldn't take more than two or I three days." Then his face took on a grim cast. "Drummond, we've only got four hours left to get to those converters." "But you don't understand. Once they get started, they'll be so busy, we'll probably be able to walk away." Angus smiled indulgently. "Once they get started." He nodded toward the robots. They had all returned to their attitude of veneration. "It won't work," McIntosh explained. "Their obsession with religion is stronger than their primary compulsion. That's probably because they've been satisfying their compulsion all along." He jerked a thumb in the direction of the cave. Drummond swore venomously. Angus dropped down on the ledge and folded his knees in his arms. He felt his age bearing down on him for the first time. "Twelve hundred robots," he said meditatively. "Twelve hundred RA robots. Out of touch with civilization for a century. Satisfying their primary function by disassembling and assembling one another. Going at it in shifts. Splitting themselves into three groups." "That device on their left thumb," Drummond interrupted. "It's a burnisher. That's why they're so shiny." Angus nodded. "Three groups. Group A spends so many months stripping and reassembling Group B. Meanwhile, Group C, which has just been put together again, has no memory because their secondary banks have been wiped clean. So, like children, they earn from the working Group A." open in shocked understanding. "And by the time A finishes the job, C's education is complete! And it's A's turn to be stripped!" "By then," Angus went on, "Group C is not only ready to start stripping Group A, but has also become intellectually mature enough to begin the education of the reassembled Group B!" They sat still for a while, thinking it over. "The compulsion to do their jobs," McIntosh continued, "is unchanged because the primary function banks are sealed circuits and can't be tampered with. But in each generation, they have their secondary memory circuits wiped clean and have to start all over, getting whatever general knowledge they can from the last generation." Drummond snapped his fingers excitedly. "That's why they don't know what we are! Their idea of Man had to be passed down by word of mouth. And it got all distorted in the process!" Angus's stare, more solicitous now, swept slowly over the prostrate robots. "More important, that's why they developed a religion. What's the main difference between human and robotic intelligence? It's that our span of life is limited on one end by birth, the other by death -- mysteries of origin and destiny that can't be explained. You see, the ordinary clunker understands where he came from and where he's going. But here are robots who have to struggle with those mysteries -- birth and death of the conscious intellect which they themselves once knew, and forgot, and now have turned into myths." "So they start thinking in terms of religion," Drummond said. "Well, that clears up the whole thing, doesn't it?" "Not quite. It doesn't explain why the religion they've invented parallels ours so closely. And it doesn't tell us who Jackson is." Drummond ran thick fingernails against the stubble on his cheeks. "Jackson is my Supervisor. I shall not rust. He maketh me to adjust my joint tension -- " He stopped and frowned. "I've heard that before somewhere, only it sounded different." Angus gave him a wry, tired smile. "Sure. It's practically the Psalm of David. Now you see why the resemblance is driving me batty." HE robots stirred. Several of them stood up and plodded into the cave. The others continued repeating their endless praise and devotion -- prayers in every sense of the word except common sense. Angus leaned back against the cliff and let the sun's heat warm him. "Somehow it doesn't seem fair," he commented unhappily. "What doesn't?" Drummond asked. "They're so close to the Truth. Yet, after we file a report, a deactivation crew will come along and erase their beliefs. They'll have their memory banks swept clean and once more they'll be nothing but clunkers with a factory-specification job of routine work to do." "Ain't that what they're supposed to be?" "But these are different. They've found something no clunker's ever had before -- hope, faith, aspiration beyond death." He shookhis head ruefully. There was movement at the mouth of the cave and the smaller group of robots emerged from the shadows, two of them bearing a stone slab. Their steps were ceremoniously slow as they approached the ledge. Bowing, they placed the tablet at Angus's feet and backed away. "These are the articles of our faith, O Jackson," one announced. "We have preserved them for Thy coming." McIntosh stared down at the chaired remains of a book. Its metal-fiber binding was shredded and fused and encrusted with the dust of ages. Drummond knelt beside it and, with stiff fingers, brushed away the film of grime, uncovering part of the title: O L Y Eagerly, Angus eased the cover back. Of the hundreds of pages it had originally contained, only flaked parts of two or three remained. The printing was scarcely legible on the moldy paper. He read aloud those words he could discern; "... to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside cool waters; He..." Drummond jabbed Angus with a triumphant forefinger. "They didn't invent any religion, after all!" "It isn't important how they got it. The fact that they accepted it -- that's what's important." McIntosh glanced up at Drummond. "They probably found this in the wreck of the ship they'd been in. It's easy to see they haven't used it in hundreds of generations. Instead, the gist of what's in it was passed down orally. And their basic concepts of Man and supervisor were distorted all along the way -- confused with the idea of God." G ently, he let the cover fall. And a shining square of duraloid fell out. "It's somebody's picture!" Drummond exclaimed. "An ID card," Angus said, holding it so the light wouldn't refleet off its transparent protective cover. It was a picture of a nondescript man -- not as stout as Drummond, nor as lean as McIntosh -- with hair neither all black, like the younger man's, nor nearly all white, like Angus's. The print below the picture was indiscernible, except for the subject's last name... "Jackson!" Drummond whispered. Angus slowly replaced the card. "A hundred years of false devotion," he said pensively. "Just think -- " "This is no time for that kind of gas." Drummond glanced at his watch. "We got just two hours to cut off those converters." Desperately, he faced the robots. "Hey, you clunkers! You're robot assembiers. You got four hundred clunkers in that cave, all in pieces. Get in there and put 'em together!" Angus shook his head disapprovingly. Somehow it didn't seem right, calling them clunkers. "Jackson is my Supervisor!" intoned RA-#. "Jackson is my Supervisor!" echoed the mass. Drummond glanced frantically at his watch, then looked helplessly at Angus. Angus shrugged. The younger man's face suddenly tensed with resolution. "So they've got to have a Jackson? All right. I'll give 'em one!" He waved his fist at the horde. "I'm your Supervisor! I'm your Jackson! Now clear out of the way and -- " RA-#'s hand darted out and seized Drummond's ankle, tugged him off the ledge. As he fell to the ground, a score of robots closed in over him, metal arms flailing down methodically. Angus yelled at them to stop, saw he was too late and sank down, turning away sickly. Finally, after a long while, they backed off and faced Angus. "We have passed the Divine test, O Jackson!" # shouted up jubilantly. "We have redeemed ourselves before our Supervisor!" exclaimed #. It took a long, horror-filled moment before Angus could speak. "How do you know?" he managed to ask at last. "If he had been Jackson," exclaimed #, "we could not have destroyed him." HE robots fell prostrate again and returned to their devotional. But now the phrases were triumphant, where before they had been servile and uncertain. Angus stared numbly down at Drummond, then backed against the cliff. The litany below, exuberant now, grew mightily in volume, booming vibrantly against distant hills. "There is but one Supervisor!" intoned #. "But one Jackson!" answered the assembly. "And now He dwelleth among His children!" # chanted. "In their midst!" boomed the hundreds. Suddenly it all seemed horribly ludicrous and Angus laughed. The litany stopped and his laughter grew shriller, louder, edged with hysteria. The shimmering sea of metal, confounded, stared at him and it was as though he could see fleshy furrows of confusion on the featureless faces... But how could a clunker show emotion? His laughter slowed and died, like the passing of a violent storm. And he felt weakened with a sickening sense of compassion. Robots -- human robots -- standing awed before unknown concepts while they groped for Truth. Clunkers with a sense of right and wrong and with an overwhelming love. It was absurd that he had been elected father of twelve hundred children -- whether flesh or metal -- but it didn't feel at all absurd. "Dost Thou despair of us, O Jackson?" asked # hesitantly, staring up at him. # motioned toward the ship, the top of its hull shining beyond the nearby woods. "Wouldst Thou still return to Thy vessel. Supervisor?" Incredulous, Angus tensed. "You mean I can go?" "If that is Thy wish, True Jackson, you may go," said # submissively. As he watched unbelievingly, a corridor opened in their ranks, extending toward the woods and the ship beyond. He glanced anxiously at his watch. There was still more than an hour left. Wearily, he dropped from the ledge and trudged toward freedom, trying to look straight ahead. His eyes, nevertheless, wandered to the dejected figures who faced him with their heads bowed. Then he laughed again, realizing the illogical nature of his solicitous thoughts. Imagine -- dejected clunkers! Still, the metal faces seemed somehow different. Where, a moment earlier, he had fancied expressions of jubilation, now there was the sense of hopelessness on the steel plates. tainty, he walked faster. After all, was it his fault they'd stumbled upon a substitute for birth and death and had become something more than clunkers? What was he supposed to do -- stay and play missionary, bring them the Truth so that when a deactivation crew came along, they would be so advanced morally that no one would suggest their destruction? He stopped and scanned the ranks on either side. He'd do one thing for them, at least -- he wouldn't report the wreck. Then it would be centuries, probably, before another ship wandered far enough away from the trade routes to intercept the distress signals. Relieved by his decision, he went ahead more at ease. And the litany started again -- softly, appealing: "Jackson is my Supervisor." "I shall not rust..." Angus stiffened abruptly and stared at his watch, realizing belatedly that it had stopped. But how long ago? How much time did he have left? Should he take the chance and make a dash for the converters? He reached the end of the robot corridor and started to sprint for the ship. But he halted and turned to glance back at the humble, patient horde. They were expectantly silent now -- as though they could sense his indecision. He backed away from them. Then the light of a hundred Arcturan days flared briefly and a mighty mountain of sound and concussion collapsed on him. The trees buckled and branches were hurled out against the cliff. It rained leaves and pieces of metal from the hull for a long while as Angus hugged the ground. When he finally looked up, familiar bits of the ship were strewn arorind him -- a spacesuit helmet here, a control dial there, a transmitter tube up ahead. He rose shakily, staring at a black book that lay near the helmet with its pages ruffled. He picked it up and straightened out the leaves. Then he motioned to the robots and they clustered around him. He would have to start from the beginning. He wet his lips. "In the beginning," Angus read in a loud, convincing voice, "God created heaven and earth and the earth was void and empty and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, 'Let there be light'..." new Make a hit with your friends I Introduce them to brinff a third dimension to competitive playinir Developed by two doctors of psychology, it combines simplicity with intellectual stimulation. men). This is a really new concept In games -- a new dimension and a new challenge to your ability. Attractively packaged it makes a wonder# Star Shelf problems. For a change, it's not Whom shall we Do -- but What shall we Give. Being limited in space, I shall have to concentrate on one market -- juveniles. Everyone knows a yoimgster, or was one once. As our annual crimson-clad Santa might say, "Forewarned is four-armed." And so I hope I can help someone avoid the stinkers and make a happy choice. ert Heinlein. Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y., # plausibility of plot, motivation and science are all uppermost. His boy heroes have human fallibilities and manage to make plenty of errors of judgment, even as we adults. Don Harvey, a teen-age student with a bothersome nationality problem, is recalled from school in New Mexico by a couple of cryptic spacegrams from his parents on Mars. Trouble is brewing with the Venus Colony. It erupts when he reaches Circum Terra, Earth's space station. A Venusian raiding party has seized the station under the noses of Earth's forces and Don becomes a human football. Born in deep space of Venusian and Earth par. entage, his nationality becomes a vital issue. He is finally allowed to land on Venus, mainly through the intervention of Sir Isaac Newton, a most engaging dragon-native of Venus. He has also managed to retain a cheap plastic ring given him by a leading Earth scientist before the scientist's demise at the hands of Terrestrial security po lice, who also gave Don a rough working-over prior to his leaving Earth. Don's big problem is to reach Mars with the mysterious ring for his parents. With Terra's overwhelming superiority, however, it doesn't look as if he will until the end of hostilities. These are by no means all of Don's headaches. Survival comes first. Heinlein has written a juvenile that is also guaranteed to have the adult reader at seat edge. Lester del Rey. John C. Winston Co., Phila.  Toronto, # this volume carries the story of the conquest of space another pace forward from the successful space station. Young Jim Stanley, hero of the original construction by reason of leading the mutiny that got the job finished, is at loose ends. Relegated to ferry work, he is eager to be among the first to tackle the big piloting job, that of handling the Moon ships. At the moment, however, public reaction has swung against further exploration by virtue of the propaganda campaign by the Combine, a union of European and Asiatic nations. It takes adroit political maneuvering, plus a foolishly heroic action, to make the Moon trip possible. Del Key's book has a remarkably strong feeling of reality. dre Norton. World Publishing Co., Cleveland #s N. Y., # anthology would hardly have been classified as a juvenile. I've been maintaining in private arguments that what was good enough for us back then is also good enough for the new generation, the vast difference being that they're ready for it at a much earlier age! The book is subdivided into three sections: "We Police Ourselves," "We are Policed" and "Galactic Agents." Of the nine stories, four are bell-ringers, four are bell-buzzers and one is a dead button -- not at all a bad percentage. Bobbs-Mernll Co., Inc., Indianapolis #s N. Y., # ord of a flight to Venus, as the title seems to imply, this is the Odyssey of two youths, midshipmen on a Space Patrol training ship. Their survey rocket is wrecked within a huge cloudconcealed bowl harboring wild-life that makes Conan Doyle's Lost World look like the Children's Zoo. M. E. Patchett writes a fastmoving, virile adventure yarn, which is a bit surprising -- the "M" stands for Mary. Brown. Prentice-Hall, Inc., N. Y., # # N exuberant but ill-prepared attempt at a flight to the Moon opens this book. An object lesson in thoroughness is thus presented to the juvenile reader in the failure of the expedition. The remainder of the book is devoted to the efforts of a group of American college students and graduates, financed by a mysterious Indian benefactor, to perfect the techniques of space travel. Their task is made even harder by an enemy within, an instructor with a dictator complex, determined to rule the world by means of an invincible space station. You might call this a juvenile Prelude to Space -- the Menace is thrown in for youthful excitement. Henry Holt # Co., N. Y., #  are sequels, but they all have the virtue of being complete and enjoyable in themselves. The Magic Ball from Mars, meant for the #-to-# audience, introduced us to Johnny Jenks and his Martian friend Arcon, who made the mistake of leaving Johnny with the space-a-tron, a magic marble that obeys mental commands. In this sequel, Arcon brings his son Remo to Earth to spend a vacation with Johnny. Mr. Jenks, a government employee, informs Washington about his guest and the bureaucrats want to make a hostage of Remo. Luckily, one of them is a very understanding chap and he and an old Mr. Applegate make the boys' vacation an enjoyable offering of little boys' delights. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., N. Y., S# "  from Mars who has so much excess energy that he Zips in the middle of a sentence. Disconcerting conversationally, but very convenient when you want a steam shovel brought from Chicago, and he has a flying saucer handy that can do the job. Randy Riddle, with his two brothers and sister, gain Zip's aid in helping their father, who must have a steam shovel or lose three days' work time. Zip helps them out, but they experience a bit of difficulty. Did you ever see a flying saucer with a full-size steam shovel suspended beneath? Your #-to-# should love it, especially the illustrations by Hans Helweg. Asimov. Abelard-Schuman, Inc., N. Y., # manages to come up with a book that teen-agers and even pre-teens can sink their milk teeth into with gusto and profit. He gives the atomic story in a thorough -- and thoroughly readable -- style, from the structure of the atom down to the hazards of fission and the future of atomic power in our civilization. Viking Press, N. Y., # IOW here's a book that fills a ' need! All these centuries, the neophyte astronomer has had to guess his way through virtually incomprehensible star-maps, crossing his eyes in an effort to recognize the products of our ancestors' imaginations. Neely is well qualified to produce such a book. He lectures at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, conducts a beginners' astronomy course and is editor of The Sky Reporter, the Planetarium's monthly magazine. He has constructed a simple recognition system consisting solely of his book, a fist and a knowledge of the face of a clock. A series of maps gives the location of the constellations at any time of year in any northern latitude and, with no more equipment than the human hand, individual stars can be recognized even by the most bewildered beginner. I can vouch that it works both easily and well. Butferfly # Jeff needed a job and this man had a job to offer -- one where giant economy-size trouble had labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekagel I A t first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table. Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles. "You're still the smartest color engineer in television," Ann told Jeff as they dallied with their food. "You'll bounce back. Now eat your supper." "This beanery is too noisy and hot," he grumbled. "I can't eat. Can't talk. Can't think." He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill. Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. "Lately you chew pills like popcorn," she said. "Do you really need so many?" "I need something. I'm sure losing my grip." Ann stared at him. "Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young yet." the crowded little restaurant. He wished he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the moustachioed man at the next table. The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before? Ann whispered, "So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car." Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. "If he's following us, he's nuts. We've got no secrets and no money." "It must be my maddening beauty," said Ann. "I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything," Jeff said. "I'm just in the mood." Ann giggled. "Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat." He groaned. "I lose my appetite every time I think about the building being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought it for two thousand." "If only we could go back five years." She shrugged fatalistically. "But since we can't -- " The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them, grinning. "You like to get away? You wish to go back?" Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman, with extra gall. "Not now, thanks," Jeff said. "Haven't time." The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time. "Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She sioke of go back five years. Maybe I help you." He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso. Ann smiled back at him. "You talk as if you could take us back to #. Is that what you really mean?" "Why not? You think this silly. But I can 'show you." Jeff rose to go. "Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we started home." A NN laid a hand on his sleeve. "I haven't finished eating. Let's chat with the gent." She added in an undertone to Jeff, "Must be a psycho -- but sort of an inspired one." The man said to Ann, "You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people. I join you." He did . not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with an easy grace that was almost arrogant. "You are unhappy in #," he went on. "Discouraged. Restless. Why not take trip to another time?" "Why not?" Ann said gaily. "How much does it cost?" "Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we talk money." He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance. Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read: Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent "Mr. Snader's bureau is different," Jeff said to his wife. "He even spells it different." Snader chuckled. "I come from other time. We spell otherwise." "You mean you come from the future?" "Just different time. I show ycu. You come with me?" "Come where?" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and force. "Come on little trip to different time," invited Snader. He added persuasively, "Could be back here in hour." "It would be painless, I suppose?" Jeff gave it a touch of derision. "Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every day. I look damaged?" As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff politely agreed that he did not look damaged. Ann was enjoying this. "Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time travel work?" "Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too complicated." He flashed his white teeth. "You think time travel not possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather." Ann said, "Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips." "Invite many people," Snader said quickly. "Not expensive. You know Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go with me to other time. Many stay." "Oh, sure," Jeff said. "But how do you select the ones to invite?" "Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape." did this fellow know his name was Elliott? Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. "Mr. Snader, you heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the past and correct mistakes they've made?" "They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them." "Don't you wish it were true?" she sighed to Jeff. "You afraid to believe," said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his restless eyes. "Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station. Very near here." Ann jumped up. "It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if anything." Jeff's puse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's madness -- a yearning to forget his troubles. "Okay, just for kicks. But we go in my car." Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasellike grace of his short, broad body. "This is no ordinary oddball," Jeff told Ann. "He's tricky. He's got some gimmick." "First I just played him along, to see how loony he was," Ann said. "Now I wonder who's kidding whom." She concluded thoughtfully, "He's kind of handsome, in a tough way." II  be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful. Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back. " 'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,' " she murmured to Jeff. "This could 'oe a gambling hell. Or a dope den." "No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much," he said. "There's only four bucks in my wallet My guess is it's a 'temple' for some daffy religious sect." They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader said, "Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau." The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the next room, after a glance at Snader's key. The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut after them. The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two movie screens -- or were they giant television screens? -- occupying a whole wall at either end of the room. The sign bore the number #I in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word Ante, and to the right with the word Post. Jeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined corridor moved toward him from that direction. "Somebody worked hard on this layout," he said to Snader. "What's it for?" "Time travel," said Snader. "You like?" "Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of time, I supjKJse?" pointed to the screen. The picture showed a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in the picture waved back. Ann gasped. "It was just as if they saw us." "They did," Snader said. "No movie. Time travelers. In fourth dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat." "What's he supposed to be?" Jeff asked as thp onrushing picture showed them briefly a figure boimd hand and foot, huddled in one of the chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture surged past. Snader showed his teeth. "That was convict from my time. We have criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work. Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove reach. About # A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when he get there. Put him to work." "What kind of work?" Jeff asked. "Building the groove further back." "Sounds like interesting work." Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. "Maybe you see it some day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip." Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to know about it. He asked Snader, "Where do you propose to go? And how?" Snader said, "Watch me. Then look at other wall." He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water. Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds, he was recognizable as Snader -- and as the picture brought him forward, he stepped down out of it and was with them again. "Simple," Snader said. "I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took other carrier back here." "Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years," Jeff said. "How did you do it? Can I do it, too?" "I show you." Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. "Now," he said. "Step in." pressure and stepped cautiously into the screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or motion. It was like stepping through a fogbank into another room. In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them, they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance. The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the ceiling was #. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the dark tunnel again. Ann was clutching JefFs arm. He patted her hand. "Fun, hey? Like Alice through the lookingglass." "You really think we're going back in time?" she whispered. "Hardly! But we're seeing a begin to figure it out yet." Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when they had flickered through it, another and then another. "Mr. Snader," Ann said unsteadily, "how long -- how many years back are you taking us?" Snader was humming to himself. "Six years. Station # fine place to stop." For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. "Six years ago, your dad was alive," he mused to Ann. "If this should somehow be real, we could see him again." "We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember? Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would -- " Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was moving through a room numbered #. "Soon now," Snader grunted happily. "Then no more questions." He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by a room with the number #, he propelled them forward into it. Again there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of the room they had left at #. On the wall, a picture of the continuous club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream. "The same room," Ann said in disappointment. "They just changed the number. We haven't been anywhere." shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door. In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past her. "Official," he said, showing her the key. "No lodging." He imlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house. "Hey, where's my car?" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street. The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster, there was now a long black limousine. "Your car is in future," Snader said briskly. "Where it belong. Get in." He opened the door of the limousine. Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous. "Snader," he said, "if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody on Earth will pay ransom for us." Snader seemed amused. "You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom. You in different time now." "When does this gag stop?" Jeff demanded irritably. "You haven't fooled us. We're still in #." "You are? Look around." Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out another house. "Get in," Snader said curtly. Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb, narrowly missing another car. Jeff yelled, "Easy, man! Look where you're going!" Snader guffawed. "Tonight, you look where you are going." Ann clung to Jeff. "Did you notice the house we came out of?" "What about it?" "It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in. There were bars at the windows." "Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?" He glanced at house numbers. "This is the # block. Remember that. And the street -- " He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner. "The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that." Ill ward what should have been the boulevard. The car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff knew for certain there was no freeway there in # -- nor in any earlier year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same aa always. "Ann," he said slowly, "I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we escaped from #. We've been transported in time." She squeezed his arm. "If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a minute ago. But now, oh, boy!" "Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is." He leaned forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. "You brought us into the future instead of the past, didn't you?" It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned. Jeff smiled tightly. "I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives." As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty of big signs for turn-offs, . but none gave any hint where they were. The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. "Rite Channel for Creepers," he read. "Yaw for Torrey Rushway" flared at him from a fork in the freeway. "This can't be Jhe future," Ann said. "This limousine is almost new, but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift -- " She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center, ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize it, in spite of his familiarity with the city. Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, "Let's have some answers before we go any further." Snader gave him a hard grin. "You hear everything upstairs." The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann. She said, "It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as well go in and see what's there." Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door. tant-looking man opened it and greeted them heartily. "Solid man. Greet!" he exclaimed. "You're a real scratcher! And is this our sharp?" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look. "Just what you order," Snader said proudly. "His name -- Jeff Elliott. Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann Elliott" The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. "Prime! I wish joy," he said to Ann and Jeff. "I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting." He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted a perfunctory "Wish joy" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs. Snader did not sit down, however. "No need for me now," he said, and moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann. Bullen nodded. "You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out." "Here, wait a minute!" Jeff called. But Snader was gone. "Sit still," Bullen growled to Jeff. "You understand radioptics?" The blood went to Jeff's head. "My business is television, if that's what you mean. What's this about?" "Tell him, Kersey," the big man said, and stared out the window. Kersey began, "You understand, I think, that you have come back in time. About six years back." "That's a matter of opinion, but go on." "I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr. Dumont Sullen." He nodded toward the big man. "Chromatics have not yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well understood in your time, are they not?" "What's chromatics? Color television?" "Exactly. You are an expert in -- ah -- colored television, I think." Jeff nodded. "So what?" The old man beamed at him. "You are here to work for our company. You will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave." Jeff stood up. "Don't tell me who I'll work for." the arm of his chair. "No fog about this! You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract, but you do what I say!" "Why, the man thinks he owns you." Ann laughed shakily. "You'll find my barmen know their law," Sullen said. "This isn't the way I like to recruit. Sut it was only way to get a man with your knowledge." Kersey said politely, "You are here illegally, with no immigrate permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. Sut Mr. Sullen has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?" Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange streets. Hut he put on a bold front. "I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work for you," he said. "My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and stop us, legally or any other way." Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. Hut, unexpectedly. Sullen chuckled deep in his throat. "Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here -- Hutterfly #, ask for Sullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow pre-noon." "Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann." When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. "We made it. For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?" "No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics -- or practical jokers." He looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was no sign of pursuit. "It's a long time since supper." her face was white. To take her mind off their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows. "Look at that sign," he said, pointing to a poster over a display of neckties. " 'Sleek necksashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?" "It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd." Ann glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. "Jeff, where are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't even look much like America." Her voice rose. "The way the women are dressed -- it's not old-fashioned, just different." "Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun." He pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter. If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what clearly were hamburgers -- though the "buns" looked more like tortillas. Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, "Two, please." When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them. When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked ##. Jeff looked at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two dollar bills. The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. "Stage money, eh?" "No, that's good money," Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile. "They're just new bills, that's all." The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. "I'm afraid it's no good here," he said, and pushed it back. The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. "What kind of money do you want? This is all I have." The cashier's smile faded. He, caught the eye of a man in uniform on one of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff. "What's the rasper?" he demanded. Other customers, waiting to pay their checks, eyed Jeff curiously. "I guess I'm in trouble," Jeff told him. "I'm a stranger here and I got something to eat imder the impression that my money was legal tender. Do you know where I can exchange it?" officer picked up the dol- lar bill and fingered it with evident interest. He turned it over and studied the printing. "United States of America," he read aloud. "What are those?" "It's the name of the country I come from," Jeff said carefully. "I -- uh -- got on the wrong train, apparently, and must have come further than I thought. What's the name of this place?" "This is Costa, West Goodland, in the Continental Federation. Say, you must come from an umpty remote part of the world if you don't know about this .country." His eyes narrowed. "Where'd you learn to speak Federal, if you come from so far?" Jeff said helplessly, "I can't explain, if you don't know about the United States. Listen, can you take me to a bank, or some place where they know about foreign exchange?" The policeman scowled. "How'd you get into this country, anyway? You got immigrate clearance?" An angry muttering started among the bystanders. The policeman made up his mind. "You come with me." At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high coimter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to listen. "I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or Ivinate," the policeman said as he finished. His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare. Jeff sighed. "I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I do -- more or less -- but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten." There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation. The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and got answers which probably seemed stupid to him. The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. "Come out, what are you advertising?" they kept asking. "Who got you up to this?" The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a "Work License," which Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country. In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night. Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he hesitated. In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy. IV In the early morning, he looked up to see a little man with a briefcase at his cell door. "Wish joy, Mr. Elliott," the man said coolly. "I am one of Mr. Bullen's barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release, if you are ready to be reasonable." Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. "I doubt if I'm ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?" "No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man claiming to be a time traveler, we knew." "All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen isn't getting me out of here." The lawyer smiled and sat down. "Mr. Kersey told you yesterday -- you've gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie film. A film never changes. Space does -- and time does. For example, if a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?" "You mean to say that if I went back to #, I wouldn't find the Civil War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?" "If you go back to fhe time you call # -- which is most easily done -- you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war." Jeff looked blank. "What are they doing then?" The little man spread his hands. 'What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?" "Nope. To me, # means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?" "Well, if you go to a place in three-dimensional space -- say, a lake in the mountains -- how do you identify that place? By looking for landmarks. It doesn't matter that an eagle is soaring over a mountain peak. That's only an event. The peak is the landmark. You follow me?" "So far. Keep talking." ' I "HE little man looked pleased. "Very well. In the fourth dimension -- which is time -- you do the same thing. You look around to see what is visible where you are. My contemporaries can see that freedom is unnecessary, that time travel is practical. Your people have not reached that place in time yet. But yours can see the technical facts about color television. Those facts are not visible yet to anyone here." "You mean that these inventions -- " "Oh, no, no, no, Mr. Elliott," the little man said indignantly. "Don't call them inventions. There are no inventions. None. There are only truths -- scientific principles waiting through eternity for someone to discover them." "I must be dense, but -- " "Did your Columbus invent America? Did someone invent fire? The possibility of time travel, of color television, of any phase of social progress -- these are facts. They stand up in the time dimension like mountains. Waves of humanity meander through the time dimension like caravans of immigrants crossing a continent. The first man in any wave to see the mountain peak claims that he 'invented' it. Soon it is clearly visible to everyone. While the people of my wave know of time travel, there are human caravans, following us many years back in time, just now discovering steam." "Then the reason your people won't accept my money -- " "Yah." The little lawyer nodded. "Your money is an outgrowth of your history. It bears the name your people gave to the society they built -- the United States. This has no meaning to a different wave of humanity, with a different history. These people here have reached this point in time six years behind the humanity you traveled with." "Can I get back to my own time, my own wave of humanity?" "Not unless you know how." The lawyer grinned. "To be perfectly frank, Mr. Elliott, there is no hope of your going back. Either work for Bullen or live out your life in a mental institution. No one else will give you work and no one will believe your story." Jeff clamped his teeth. If a crook like Snader could move freely back and forth in time, there must be a way for Jeff to do it. Meanwhile, he would pretend to be a humble and obedient servant. "Okay," he said to the lawyer. "I'm convinced. Get me out." "Snader is waiting with a car," the man said. "He'll meet you and your wife outside. I'll free her at once, then go about my business." the limousine. He looked Ann up and down. "I like you, little lady. Soon I know you better." Jeff felt his temper rise. "You sure fooled us, didn't you, Snader?" "I warned you. There was risk." Ann's voice was steady. "Jeff, where are we going now?" "Back to Bullen. I understand the setup now. Maybe we'd better play ball with him." "Did you find out what place this is?" "Yes -- well, sort of. Here's a rough rundown. Incredible as it seems, we really are in a past time period -- different from our own past. This period doesn't have color TV yet. Bullen wants to be first on the market with it. So he sent our pal Greet Snader here to pick a man in future time who had already mastered TV and sell him to Bullen as a captive scientist. I imagine Snader raids the future for many experts." Snader stepped up to him with a dangerous smile. "All right, big wit. Tell me my business. Tell me all about it." "You heard me. You're in the slave business." The blood throbbed in Jeff's head. "You don't like?" Snader's scarred face looked fierce and gloating. "Maybe you shovel coal from now. Or wipe floors." Jeffsaw policemen watching from the jail entrance. He clamped his mouth shut. "Don't be excitable or you get hurt," Snader advised. "'We own you. We gave you a break. Remember that, wise boy. You ready now?" Jeff nodded silently. Snader playfully twisted Jeff's ear and shoved him into the limousine. "Don't tell me anything. Then I don't hurt you." V the front seat, Jeff held Ann's hand and winked encouragingly at her. "Snader, I guess you're right," he said. "This is a good deal for me. I was sort of washed up in my own time." "Now you smart," Snader said. "Your little lady? She smart, too?" "Yep. By the way, how come you got us out so early? It's only nine o'clock. Bullen said he'd expect me at eleven." "We go to time station first," Snader explained shortly. "I pick up documents there. Breakfast there." "Good," Jeff said cheerfully. A plan was taking shape in his mind. "All I'm worried about is my speed-up pills. Can I get some at the station? I'm almost out." He pressed Ann's knee warningly. "Speed-up pills?" Snader looked suspicious -- but then, he always did. "What you mean?" "Don't you have speed-up tablets?" Jeff put surprise in his voice. "Stuff to activate the half of the brain that normally doesn't work. You must have them." "What they look like?" Jeff fumbled for his silver pillbox. "They're the big red and yellow capsules." He handed the box to Snader. "Don't spill them. I only have three left. Where can I get more like those? I won't be nearly as good without them." Keeping one hand on the wheel, Snader glanced down. The box had a jumble of black vitamin pills and red and yellow sleeping tablets. "You say these big ones help brain?" he asked warily. "They speed up the reflexes -- they make everything seem clear and easy. Please give them back before you spill them." Snader thumbed the red and yellow capsules out and handed the box back without them. "I keep these." He moved his head craftily to watch Jeff's face in the mirror. Jeff was ready. He registered rage and fear. "Gimme those!" he shouted. "I need them." Snader laughed. "Don't tell me orders. Easy now. You want to wreck car?" "I'll wreck us all if you don't give those back!" He grabbed Snader's hand. Ann screamed as the car swerved, and horns blared from behind. Snader clapped the capsules into his mouth and gripped the wheel with both hands. "I take what I want," he said, gulping down the pills. "You give trouble, I turn you over to police." groan and buried his face in his hands to hide a grin. It had worked. How long would the nembutal take to hit Snader? It might act too fast. Jeff wondered what he could do then. Luckily, there was only a short distance to go. Even so, the car was weaving as they whirled off the express road into Green ThruWay. When they pulled up in front of the barred house, Snader tumbled out and lurched up the walk without a glance at his prisoners. Jeff and Ann followed, and Jeff stood close behind while Snader fumbled inside his shirt for the key. When he found it and reached toward the door, his knees buckled and Jeff caught him. "The key, Ann," Jeff whispered. "Pull the cord over his head and unlock the door." Ann clawed at it while Jeff supported the weight of Snader's body. In a moment, she had the door open and they were inside. The old housekeeper bustled in as Jeff half-dragged and halflifted Snader across the living room. "It's nothing serious," Jeff told her calmly. "He often has these attacks. He'll be all right in a few minutes, and then I'll start him off home." "Oh, the poor man," she clucked. "Such a ghast. Can I get you anything?" "Get us some hot water, mixed with mustard and soda," Jeff said, hoping this would keep her busy for several minutes. She hurried away. Ann unlocked the door into the inner room and Jeff lugged the slave trader inside. On the two screens, the endless chair-lined corridors still fled toward them. When the door clicked shut, Jeff let Snader slide to the floor. Swiftly he went through the man's pockets and felt in the lining of his clothes for hidden documents. Papers, wallet, car-keys, a big stiff card that seemed to be some kind of passport -- Jeff stuffed everything into his own pockets. "Hurry, Jeff," Ann begged. "Why waste time emptying his pockets?" "So he can't come back and bother us," Jeff said. "I'm sending this joker on a one-way ride. He'll never be able to prove to the authorities who he is."  wall. Jeff jerked them down and used the wire to tie Snader's feet and wrists. He tore some draperies to bind him tighter. When the body was trussed like a turkey, Jeff heaved it to his shoulder. With one lunge, he threw the unconscious man straight into the screen. Snader vanished. "What happens when he wakes up?" Ann shakily wanted to know. Jeff dusted himself off. "He's headed to the end of the line," he said harshly. "Remember? He told us about it. Without credentials, he'll land in the convict gang, down around the year # A.D. That's a bad time on this continent. Men who work there don't return -- they help build back the time groove." Ann smiled triumphantly. "Good for you! He deserved it. Imagine running a commercial kidnaping enterprise! And now we can ride home, can't we?" Jeff, beginning to enjoy himself, shook his head. "Not just yet. First I've got a date with Mr. Bullen." When they rapped on Bullen's door. Kersey welcomed them with an amused smile. "We thought you would be back," he purred. "Where is Snader?" Jeff brushed past him to the drawing room, where Bullen sat by the window. "I've decided to help you, Bullen," Jeff said. Bullen nodded his big head. "Naturally." "But I name my own price. What do you pay Kersey?" Bullen looked up with a grim smile. "Fifty thousand a year. I wonder now if he worths it." "What's that? Dollars?" "We call them fiscals. Probably somehow much the same. Why?" "Listen, Bullen. If I help introduce color TV, there'll be big money in it. I won't be a hog. You pay me forty thousand a year until we go into production. Then we'll make a new deal, giving me a royalty on sales." Kersey's face was scarlet. "You young greenshoot! Who do you think you are? You'll work for nothing, if we say so." "Guess again," Jeff said. "Your slave trader won't be bringing any more engineers for you. So you take me at my price -- or nobody." The big man laughed. "You got rid of Snader, eh? Well, well. He was a rogue. I thought he would run into trouble soon or late." seemed to grasp the situation and waved him to silence. "I like your fire, young man. With so you're worth forty thousand plus royalties. Am I true in thinking you won't want the apartment I reserved for you?" "Right. We'll retain our home in my own time. I'll commute to work here every morning -- it's quicker than commuting to the city in my own time." "In your thorough way," Kersey said sarcastically, "you have doubtless figured out how you can spend our money back in your time." "I've thought about it," Jeff agreed. "There will be something I can convert it into and carry back. Diamonds, maybe." Bullen laughed again. "You're solid, my boy. Get his work papers ready. Kersey. These young people want to get home. I'll take Jeff to the factory when he comes workward in the morning." Jeff stood up. "See you tomorrow, Bullen. Come on, Ann. We're going home -- home to our own time."      When we started Galaxy, we had no idea that the name had been used by a #th century magazine. An excellent magazine, by the way. Though our fields are different -- it was a general publication -- we are operating on the premise that one of its most famous authors, Mark Twain, laid down in its pages: Ducking out of a dull gathering, he explained that he had an appointment with a friend at the poorhouse -- a former publisher who put out a newspaper that nobody disagreed with! Never one to repeat that mistake. Galaxy this month features by Frederik Pohl that we hope will cause some good, healthy scraps. Extrapolating from a trend that began in prehistory, Pohl reaches this point in the future: When a prison-guard captain smells trouble, you can bet trouble is going to come -- for a nose for trouble is just one of the very many talents that this society singlemindedly breeds! You will also meet a nimble newcomer, Stephen Barr, whose down even after it finishes! There is no doubt whatever about it, the hero of Barr's tricky, intriguing, immensely tense story has the Indian sign on him -- his comfortably untidy world has suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order! Accompanying at least another novelet and several short stories, Willy Ley brings us right up to the last second of the minute with With Horn's invention, we had the world by the tail, by Gad... or was that our own tail? pretty promptly. This Van Pelt turned up at the Pentagon on a Thursday, and by the following Monday, I had a task force of a hundred and thirty-five men with full supply bivouacked arovmd the old man's establishment. He didn't like it. I rather expected he wouldn't. He came storming out of the big house as the trucks came in. "Get out of here! Go on, get out! This is private property and you're trespassing. I won't have it, do you hear me? Get out!" I stepped out of the jeep and gave him a soft salute. "Colonel Windermere, sir. My orders are to establish a security cordon around your laboratories. Here you are, sir -- your copy of the orders." He scowled and fussed and finally snatched the orders out of my hand. Well, they were signed by General Follansbee himself, so there wasn't much argument. I stood by politely, prepared to make matters as painless for him as I could. I don't hold with antagonizing civilians imnecessarily. But he evidently didn't want it to be painless. "Van Pelt!" he bellowed. "Why, that rotten, decrepit, back-stabbing monster of a -- " I listened attentively. He was very good. What he was saying, in essence, was that he felt his former associate. Van Pelt, had had no right to report to the Pentagon that there was potential military applicability in the Horn Effect. Of course, it was the trimmings with which he stated his complaint that made it so effective. I finally had to interrupt him. "Dr. Horn, the general asked me to give you his personal assurance that we will not in any way interfere with your work here. It is only a matter of security. I'm sure you understand the importance of security, sir." "Security! Now listen here, Lieuenant, I won't tolerate -- " "Colonel, sir. Lieutenant Colonel Windermere." "Colonel, general, lieutenant, what the hell do I care? Listen to me! The Horn Effect is my personal property, not yours, not Van Pelt's, not the government's, not anybody's but mine! I was working in personality dissociation before you were born and -- " "Security, sir!" I made it crackle. and I nodded toward my driver. "He isn't cleared. Dr. Horn," I explained. "All right, O'Hare. You're dismissed." Sergeant O'Hare saluted from behind the wheel and took off. I said soothingly: "Now, Dr. Horn, I want you to know that I'm here to help you. If there's anything you want, just ask; I'll get it. Even if you want to go into town, that can be arranged. Of course, you'd better give us twenty-four hours' notice so we can arrange a route and -- " He said briefly: "Young man, go to the devil." And he turned and stalked into the big house. I watched him and I remember thinking that, for a lean old goat of eighty or eighty-five, he had a lot of spirit. I went about my business and Dr. Horn picked up the phone in his house and demanded the Pentagon to protest our being here. When he finally realized he was talking to our intercept monitor, and that no calls would go out on his line without authorization from me, he yelled up another storm. But naturally that wasn't going to get him an#nwhere. Not when General Follansbee himself had signed the orders. About oh eight hundred the next morning, I ran a surprise full-scale inspection and simulated infiltration to keep the detachment on its toes. It all checked out perfectly. I had detailed Sergeant O'Hare to try to sneak in from the marshland south of the old man's place, and he was spotted fifty yards from the perimeter. When he reported to me, he was covered with mud and shaking. "Those trigger-happy ba -- those guards, sir, nearly blew my head off. If the officer of the day hadn't happened by, I think they would of done it, only he recognized me." "All right, Sergeant." I dismissed him and went in to breakfast. The wire-stringing detail had worked all night and we were now surrounded with triple-strand electrified barbwire, with an outer line of barbwire chevaux-de-frise. There were guard towers every fifty yards and at the corners, and a construction detail was clearing the brush for an additional twenty yards outside the wire. I thought briefly of bulldozing a jeep-path in the cleared area for permanent rotating patrols, but it didn't really seem necessary. I was rather hungry and a little sleepy -- that wire-stringing detail had made quite a lot of noise. But on the whole, I was pleased, if a little irritable. ' I 'HE O.D. phoned in for instructions while I was breakfasting; Van Pelt had arrived from town and the O.D. wouldn't let him in without my approval. I authorized it, and in a moment Van Pelt turned up in my private mess, looking simultaneously worried and jubilant. "How'd he take it. Colonel?" he asked. "Is he -- I mean is he sore?" "Very." "Oh." Van Pelt quivered slightly, then shrugged. "Well, you're here, so I guess he won't try anything." He looked hungrily at my buckwheat cakes and sausages. "I, uh, didn't get a chance to have breakfast on the way down -- " "Be my guest. Dr. Van Pelt." I ordered another place set and extra portions of everything. He ate it all -- God knows how. Looking at him, you'd think he could march two hundred miles on the stored fat he already had. He wasn't much over five-six, perhaps five-seven, and I'd guess two hundred and eighty pounds bone-dry. He was about as unlike Dr. Horn as you could imagine. I wondered how they had got along, working together -- but I already knew the answer. They got along badly, else Van Pelt never would have gone running to the Pentagon. I tried to keep an open mind about that,' of course. I mean General Follansbee thought it was important to national defense, and so on -- But I couldn't help thinking how I would feel if some junior went over my head in that way. Military discipline is one thing, and civilian affairs, as I understand it, are something else, but all the same -- Anyway, he had done it and here we were. Not much like a fighting command for me, but orders are orders. , At fourteen hundred, I paid a call on Dr. Horn. He looked up as the clerk-typist corporal and I came in. He didn't say anything, just stood up and pointed to the door. I said: "Good afternoon. Dr. Horn. If this is an inconvenient time for you to make your daily progress report, just say the word. I'm here to help you, you know. Would from twelve to thirteen hundred every day be more satisfactory? Or in the morning?" "Every day?" "That's right, sir. Perhaps you didn't notice Paragraph Eight of my orders. General Follansbee's instructions were to -- " He interrupted me with a disrespectful comment on General Follansbee, but I pretended not to hear. Besides, he might have been right. I said: "As a starter, sir, perhaps you'll be good enough to show us around the laboratories. I think you'll find that Corporal McCabe will be able to take your words down at normal speed." "Take what words down?" "Your progress report, sir. What you've accomplished in the past twenty-four hours. Only this time, of course, we'd better have a fillin on everything to date." He roared: "No! I won't! I absolutely will not!" him roar. When he was through roaring, I put it to him very simply. I said: "That's the way it's going to be." He stuttered and gagged. "Why, you stinking little two-bit Army -- Listen, what's the idea -- " He stopped and looked at me, frowning. I was glad that he stopped, since in the confidential section of my orders -- the paragraphs I didn't show Dr. Horn, as he was not cleared for access to such material -- there had been a #S paragraph which was relevant here. Van Pelt had told the general that Horn's health was not good. Apoplexy, I believe -- I am not very familiar with medical terms. At any rate, Van Pelt, while being de-briefed by the general's intelligence section, had reported that the old man might drop dead at any minute. Well, he looked it, at least when he was mad. I certainly didn't want him to drop dead before I had made a proper Situation Analysis, for which I needed his report. Horn sat down. He said, with rusty craft: "You're going to stick to what you say?" "Yes, sir." "Then," he said, with a pathetic, senile cunning, "I suppose I must reconcile myself to the situation. Exactly what is it you want. Lieutenant?" "The report, sir." He nodded briefly. "Just so." Ah-ha, I thought -- to myself, of course -- this will prove interesting. Do you suppose he will try to win my confidence so he can phone his Congressman? Or merely get me to turn my back so he can clobber me over the head? "Yes, yes, the report. Just so," he said, staring thoughtfully at a machine of some kind. It rather thing to do with radar, or radio, something electronic. I leave that sort of thing to the Signal Corpsmen, naturally. I have my job and they have theirs. "Just so," he repeated. "Well, I shall have to do as you wish. Observe," he said, rising, "my polycloid quasitron. As you see -- " There was a strangling noise from Corporal McCabe. I looked at him; he was in difficulties. "Sir," I interrupted the doctor, "will you spell that, please?" He chuckled rather grimly. "Just so. P-O-L-Y-C-L-O-I-D Q-U-A-S-I-T-R-O-N. Well, Lieutenant, you're familiar with the various potentiometric studies of the brain which -- Perhaps I should begin further back. The brain, you must realize, is essentially an electrical device. Potentiometer studies have shown -- " he glanced at me, and turned his head half to one side, and waited. And I said, "I see," and he said, "Just so," and he went on. Corporal McCabe was in acute distress, of course, but I rather enjoyed the exposition; it was restful. One learns to make these things restful, you see. One doesn't spend as much time as I have in staff meetings without learning a few lessons in survival tactics. When he had entirely finished (McCabe was groaning softly to himself), I summed it all up for him. "In other words, sir, you've perfected a method of electronically him." For some reason, that rocked Dr. Horn. He stared at me. "Electronically," he said after a moment. ing. Him." "That's what I said, sir," I agreed. "Just so, just so." He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. "Lieutenant, will you tell me one thing? What in the sweet name of heaven did I say that gave you that particular stupid notion?" I could hardly believe my ears. "Why -- why, that's what the general said. Dr. Horn! And he talked to Van Pelt, you realize." I wondered; Was that his little trick? Was he trying to pretend the weapon wouldn't work? He raved for twenty-five seconds about Van Pelt. Then he checked himself and looked thoughtful again. "No," he said. "No, it can't be Van Pelt. That idiot general of yours must be off his rocker." I said formally: "Dr. Horn, do you state that your, ah -- " I glanced at McCabe; he whispered the name -- "your polycloid quasitron does not, fSirough electronic means, deprive a person of life at a distance?" He scowled like a maniac. It was almost as if something were physically hurting him. With an effort, he conceded; "Oh -- yes. Yes, perhaps. Would you say a locomotive oxidizes coal into impure silicaceous aggregates? It does, you know -- they call them ashes. Well, then, you could say that's what the quasitron does." "Well, then!" He said, still painfully: "All right. Just so. Yes, I see what you mean. No doubt that explains why you're here. I had wondered, I confess. You feel this is a weapon." "Of course, sir." "Ah." fat, stickily black pipe and began to fill it. He said cheerfully: "We understand each other then. My machine renders humans into corpses. A chipped flint will also do that -- Pithecanthropus erectus discovered that quite indBpendently some time ago -- but no matter, that is the aspect which interests you. Very good." He lit the pipe. "I mention," he added, puffing, "that my quasitron does something no chipped flint can do. It removes that thing which possesses only a negative definition from the human body, the quantity that we will term 'x', which, added to the body, produces a man, subtracted from it, leaves a corpse. You don't care about this." He had me going for a moment, I admit. I said briskly; "Sir, I'm afraid I don't understand you." "You're bloody well told you don't understand me!" he howled. "We're all corpses, don't you understand? Corpses inhabited by ghosts! And there's only one man in the world who can separate the two without destroying them and that's me. And there's only one way in the world to do it and that's with my quasitron! Lieutenant, you're a stupid, pigheaded man! I -- " Well, enough was enough. "Good afternoon, sir," I said politely, though I knew he couldn't hear what I said with his own voice drowning me out. I nodded to Corporal McCabe. He closed his notebook with a snap, jumped to open the door for me and the two of us left. There was no reason to stay, do you see? I already had all the material for my Situation Analysis. Just the same, I got Van Pelt into my private quarters that evening. I wanted to see if I could make an assessment of the old man's sanity. "He's perfectly sane, Colonel Windermere. Perfectly!" Van Pelt's jowls were shaking. "He's dangerous -- very dangerous. Particularly dangerous to me. I mean, of course, if I hadn't had your promise of complete protection. Of course. But dangerous. I -- " He paused, glancing at the sideboard where the bowl of fruit (I always take fruit after the evening meal) still reposed. He coughed. "Colonel, I wonder if -- " "Help yourself," I told him. "Thank you, thank you! My, but that looks good! Honestly, Colonel Windermere, I feel that an apple is almost Nature's rarest treat. Well, pears, yes. I must say that pears -- " I said: "Dr. Van Pelt, excuse me. I want the straight dope on Horn. What's this ghost business?" He looked at me blankly, crunching. "Ghost business?" He took another bite. Crunch, crunch. "My goodness. Colonel -- " crunch, crunch -- "Colonel Windermere, I don't know -- Oh, the host business!" Crunch. "Oh, that. Why, that's just Dr. Horn's way of putting it. You know his manner. You see, there is a difference between a living man and a dead man, and that difference is what Dr. Horn whimsically terms a 'ghost.'" He chuckled, tossed the core into my wastebasket and took another apple. "Call it life, plus intelligence, plus soul, if there is such a word in your lexicon, Colonel -- Dr. Horn merely sums them up and terms the total 'ghost.'" machine is a -- a ghost conjurer?" "No, no!" he cried, nearly losing his temper. "Colonel, don't permit yourself to be fooled. Dr. Horn is an arrogant, unprincipled man, but he is not an ass or a faker. Forget the term ghost, since it distresses you. Think of -- think of-" He searched for words, shrugged. "Think merely of the difference between being alive and being dead. It is that difference that Dr. Horn's machine works on. Life, intelligence -- electrical phenomena, you understand? And Dr. Horn drains them from the body, stores them -- can, if he wishes, replace them, or even put them in another body." He nodded, beamed at me, bit into the second apple. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Well, sir! When I had got rid of him, I sat, trying to control my temper, for some time. This strange old man had a machine that could take a mind right out of a body -- yes, and put it in another body! Confound them, why hadn't they said so instead of beating around the bush? Naturally, I didn't believe it until I saw it -- and then I saw it. The next morning, at my request. Dr. Horn put a hen and a cocker spaniel into what he called his polycloid quasitron and exchanged them. Then I believed. I saw the hen trying to wag its tail and the spaniel, whimpering, its snout bruised, endeavoring to peck corn. Corporal McCabe's eyes were popping out of his head. He started to write something, glanced at me, shook his head slowly and sat staring into space. Well, time for him later. I said: "You can do it, Dr. Horn. You can take a hen and put it into a cocker spaniel and vice versa." He nodded, too stiff-necked to show his gratification. "Just so, Lieutenant." "And -- and you can do it with people, too?" "Oh, indeed I can! Indeed I can!" He scowled. "These ridiculous laws governing the conduct of institutions! I've tried, I swear I've tried, to be permitted to conduct a simple exchange. A man dying of terminal cancer, you see, and a feeble-minded youth. Why not? Put the sound mind in the sound body and let the decayed parts rot together! But will they let me?" "I see. Then you've never done it." "Never." He looked at me, his old eyes gleaming. "But now # you're here, Lieutenant. A military man. Very brave, eh? All I've needed is a volunteer. That coward Van Pelt refused, my gardener refused, everyone has refused! But you -- " "Negative, sir!" Confound the man's arrogance! "I am not a lieutenant. I am a field-grade officer! I don't imagine you appreciate the investment our service has in me!" "But, Lieutenant, the importance -- " "Negative, sir!" THE man's stupidity amazed me. Me, a lieutenant colonel! What would it do to my #I file? What about my time in grade? The Pentagon would rock, literally rock! I said, trying to be calm: "You don't understand military matters. Dr. Horn. I assure you, if there is a need for volunteers, we will find them for you. Believe me, sir, we are here to help! Why, one of our enlisted men will be pleased -- proud, sir! -- to offer his services in this -- Corporal McCabe! Come back here!" But it was too late. Moaning, he had fled the room. I turned to Dr. Horn, a little embarrassed. "Well, sir, we understand these things -- a shock to the boy, of course. But I'll find you a volunteer. Trust me." The man was as pleased as a fourth-year cadet in June Week, but he still wouldn't show it. Stiffly, he said: "Just so, Lieutenant-Major, I mean. Or Captain. Tomorrow will do splendidly." Tomorrow! That wonderful day! For I saw Dr. Horn do just as he had promised and I -- I alone among them all -- I saw what it meant. A weapon? Nonsense, it was much, much more than that! There was the matter of finding volunteers. Trust me for that, as I had told Dr. Horn. There was the latrine orderly in Able Company -- AW OL, and when I explained to him what a court-martial would do, he volunteered with blinding speed. Didn't even ask what he was volunteering for. We needed two. My executive officer, I am proud to say, volunteered to be the second. A courageous man, typical of the very best leadership type. We arrived in Dr. Horn's laboratory. The men were strapped in place and anesthetized -- at my request; I wanted to maintain security, so naturally I couldn't let them know what was happening. Just before he went under, the exec whispered, "Sir -- no Korea?" "I promise. Captain," I said solemnly, and before his eyes I ripped up the transfer recommendation I had written the night before. He went to sleep happy. Biz, buzz, crackle. I don't understand these scientific things, but when the electric sparks had stopped flashing and the whiny, drony sounds had died away. Dr. Horn gave them each a shot of something, one at a time. The latrine orderly opened his eyes. I stepped before him. "Name, rank and serial number!" "Sir," he said crisply, "Lefferts, Robert T., Captain, A.U.S., Serial Number #-#!" Good heavens! But I made sure with a test question: "Where is it you don't want to be transferred?" "Why -- why, Korea, sir. Please, sir, not there! I'll volunteer for your test. I'll -- " I nodded to Dr. Horn and another needle put him back to sleep. Then the body that was my exec. The body opened its eyes. "Gunnel, suh! I changin' my mind. I'll take the guardhouse, suh, only -- " "At ease!" I commanded, and nodded to Dr. Horn. There was no doubt about it. "You really did it." He nodded. "Just so. Lieutenant. I 'really did." A S HE switched them back again, I began to realize what it all meant. In my office, I got on the phone. "Crasih priority!" I ordered. "The Pentagon! General Follansbee, priority and classified. Ask him to stand by for scrambler!" I slapped the field phone into its case. A weapon? A weapon was nothing by comparison. We had the world by the tail. I confess I was floating on a cloud of pure joy. I saw my eagles within my grasp, perhaps, in a year or less, my first star -- there was nothing the Army would deny the officer who could give them what I could offer. A rattle and a crash, and Van Pelt thumped into my room, his face smeared, one hand clutching a melting chocolate bar. "Colonel Windermere!" he gasped. "You let Horn make his test! But that's all he's been waiting for! He -- " It was unbearable. "O'Hare!" I roared. Sergeant O'Hare appeared, looking uncomfortable. "How dare you let this man in here without my permission? Don't you realize I'm making a classified scrambler call to the Pentagon?" O'Hare said weakly: "Sir, he -- " "Get him out of here!" "Yessir!" The fat little man kicked up a fuss, but O'Hare was much bigger than he. Just the same. Van Pelt gave him a tussle. He was yelling something, all upset, but my call to the Pentagon came through and I frankly didn't listen. "General Follansbee? Windermere here, sir. Please scramble!" I slapped the button that scrambled the call from my end. In a moment, I heard the general's voice come through in clear, but anyone tapping in on the scrambled circuit would hear nothing but electronic garbage. I gave him a quick, concise account of what I had seen. He was irritated at first -- disappointed. I had thought he would be. "Change them around. Windermere?" he complained in a highpitched voice. "Why, what's the use of changing them around? Do you see any strategic value in that? Might confuse them a little, I suppose -- if we could get a couple of the enemy commanders. But is that all there is to it? I was looking for something bigger, Windermere, something of more immediate military advantage. That Van Pelt must learn not to waste the time of high Army officers!" "General Follansbee, may I point out something? Suppose -- suppose, sir, that someone way up top should visit the States. Suppose, for instance, that we surrounded him, him and his whole entourage. Switched them all. Put our own men in their bodies. You see?" sane; you could tell it. "Colonel Windermere, what in the world are you talking about?" "It would work, sir," I said persuasively. "Believe me, I've seen it. But suppose we couldn't do that. What about a hostile U.N. envoy, eh? Get him, put one of G-#'s operatives inside his body. Do you follow me, sir? No question about whose Intelligence would get the facts in a case like that, is there, sir? Or -- maybe we wouldn't want to do anything like that in peacetime, but what about in war? Take a couple of their prisoners, sir, put our own men in their bodies. Exchange the prisoners!" Well, I went on and I won't say I convinced him of anything. But by the time he hung up, he was thinking pretty hard. And I had an appointment to see him in the Pentagon the following day. Once I was on the spot, I knew I was in, for he wouldn't take the responsibility of passing up a thing like this alone. He'd call a staff meeting, and somewhere on the staff, somebody would understand. I could feel the stars on my shoulders already... "What is it, O'Hare?" I demanded. I was becoming very irritated with the man. He was sticking his head in the door, looking very worried. Well, that was reasonable; I was quite close to giving him something to worry about. S# "Sir, it's that Van Pelt." He swallowed and looked a little foolish. "I -- I don't know if he's nuts or what, sir, but he says -- he says that Dr. Horn wants to live forever! He says all Horn was waiting for was to make a test on a human being. I don't know what he's talking about, but he says that now that you've given Horn his test, sir, Horn's going to grab the first man he sees and, uh, steal his body. Does that make sense, sir?" Did it make sense? I shoved him out of the way, stopping only to grab my sidearm. It made all the sense in the world. It was just what you'd expect of a man like Horn -- he'd take an invention like this and use it to steal other people's bodies, to prolong his own nearly senile existence in a younger body! And if that happened, what would become of my general's star? Oh, I knew just the way Horn's mind would work. Steal a body; smash the machine; get away. Could we trace him? Impossible -- there was no test in the world, no fingerprints, no eye-retina charts, no blood-type classifications that could distinguish John Smith from Horn inhabiting John Smith. It was the obvious thing to do; it had occurred to me at once.  ing in, conquering his cowardice. His objective was to try to stop Horn, I supposed, but what was the effect of his mad rush into the laboratory? Why, to furnish Horn with a body! And if one was not enough, there would be others, for there were the men of my own detachment, standing guard, going about their duties; it would not be impossible for Horn to lure one inside. He would not wait. No, for the chance that his own body would wear out on him in a moment, any moment, was very great -- old, worn, and now subject to the pounding of a new hope and excitement, it might collapse at the lightest touch, like the bombed-out hulk of a barracks. So I hurried -- into the building, through the long dark halls, into the room where the big polycloid quasitron stood -- And I tripped over a human body, stumbled, fell, the gun spinning out of my hand. I scrambled to my hands and knees, touching the body -- still warm, but not very warm. Dr. Horn! His castoff cocoon, abandoned! And before me capered and screeched the figure that once had been Van Pelt, holding a weapon. "Too late!" he cried. "Too late, Colonel Windermere!" Van Pelt! But it was not Van Pelt that lived in that fat, soft corpse today, I knew, for the Horn-in-Van-Pelt held a gun of his own in one hand and in the other a bar of metal. And with it he was bashing, bashing the polycloid quasitron! Bam, and showers of sparks flew from it; crash, and it began to glow, sag, melt. And he had the gun. It was a very difficult situation. But not hopeless. For we were not alone. Next to my fallen gun lay another body. Not dead, this one; unconscious. It was Corporal McCabe, struck down with a blow to the head. "Stop!" I cried, getting to my knees. Horn-Van Pelt turned to stare at me. "Stop, don't wreck the machine! More depends on it than you can possibly realize. Dr. Horn. It isn't only a matter of your life -- trust me for that. Dr. Horn, I shall see that you have bodies, fine bodies, to hold your mind as long as you want it. But think of the safety of our country! And think of your sacred duty to science!" I appealed, thinking of my general's stars. Corporal McCabe twitched and stirred. I stood up. Horn's carrier, Van Pelt, dropped his iron bar in alarm, switched the gun to his right hand, stared at me. Good! Better at me than at McCabe. I said: "You must not destroy the machine. Dr. Horn! We need it." "But it is destroyed already," the little fat figure said stupidly, gesturing. "And I am not Dr. -- " Splat. McCabe's bullet caught him at the base of the skull. The brain that had evicted Van Pelt to house a Horn now housed no one; the blubbery little figure was dead. And I was raging! "You fool, you idiot, you unutterable ass!" I screamed at McCabe. "Why did you kill him? Wing him, yes; injure him, break his leg, shoot the gun out of his hand. But now he's dead and the machine is gone!" And so, sadly, were my general's stars. The corporal was looking at me with a most peculiar expression. I got hold of myself. A life's dream was gone, but there was no help for it now. Maybe the engineers could tinker and discover and rebuild -- but, glancing at the wreck of the polycloid quasitron, I knew that was a dream. I took a deep breath. "All right, McCabe," I said crisply. "Report to your quarters. I'll talk to you later on. Right now, I must phone the Pentagon and try to account for your blundering in this matter!" "What is it, Corporal?" I demanded, annoyed. "I'm busy!" McCabe patted the gun fondly, "I just called in to report that put it on the floor and left. I reI haven't found quarters yet, but ported manfully to the general, I will soon -- very far away. Lieustood at attention while he tenant." chewed me out, and had just "Dr. Horn!" I gasped, hung up when the phone rang and "Just so. Lieutenant," he said I heard McCabe's voice at the and chuckled as he hung up. S# for your information Tracking down The "Sea Serpent"' F or those who happened to miss last month's issue, it will be helpful to read in the most condensed form possible what was discussed in the first part of this article. During the nineteenth century, probably as a direct result of a sharply increasing volume of ocean travel, reports about something called the "sea serpent" suddenly became rather frequent. There had been a few isolated refHjrts from earlier dates, but all the really well-authenticated and well-documented (as welt as unexplainable cases) began to come in following about the time of the Napoleonic wars. The climax was reached, in a manner of speaking, when H.M.S. Daedalus returned from India with the report that she had, quite some distance from the African coast and between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, passed a "sea serpent" swimming in the opposite direction at close range. After this report had been published, others were submitted for publication, written by captains who had had similar experiences, but had either not bothered to have them published or else had felt it better for their reputations to keep their mouths shut. With all these people telling what they had seen -- and mostly in fine weather, so that mistakes were virtually impossible -- it was clearly necessary to arrive at some sort of explanation. That the oceans might conceal an animal, even one of large size, which somehow had avoided capture all along did not seem to be a farfetched idea. In #, the Dutch zoologist professor Dr. A. C. Oudemans published a big book of nearly # pages which was designed to accomplish several things: One, by an exhaustive collection of all reports, it was to prove that there actually is an unknown animal in the oceans. Two, by presenting all the evidence, it was to encourage sea captains to pay attention to similar occurrences. (More or less directly. Dr. Oudemans' book led to an order to captains of the German merchant marine to have, at all times, a loaded camera on the bridge "in order to obtain photographs of unusual cloud and wave formations, sea serpents, etc.") Three, to make what is now called an educated guess at the nature of the unknown animal. " many readers most was the nature of this guess. Dr. Oudemans declared that the sea serpent, in spite of the established and unfortunate name, was probably a marine mammal. As to its dimensions, one could estimate from the various reports that it might be as much as a hundred feet long, equal to the length of the largest whales known. But in bulk, it was likely to be very considerably smaller. The comparison was then made that the "sea serpent" bore about the same physical relationship to the whale as the giraffe does to the elephant. What shape Dr. Oudemans ascribed to the animal is now easy to explain, though it wasn't in his day. Just imagine a brontosavu which had paddles instead of legs and -- many reports insisted on this feature -- a mane. As for the latter, Dr. Oudemans said, it might be a sexual ornament. Maybe only the males sport a mane. Or, possibly, only old animals of both sexes. Or only fully grown males. The very next report that came in probably made Professor Oudemans wish that he had delayed publication of his book long enough to include it. It would have been a delay of only about two years. The report is known as the XJmfuli report. The steamship Umiuti, commanded by Captain R. J. Cringle, was en route from London to Natal. The sighting occurred while the steamer was at lat. # x #' N. and long. # #' W, which means off the west coast of Africa in about the latitude of Havana. The ship still had some distance to go until the bulge of Africa had been left to the north. The date was Monday, December #th, #. At two P.M., the mate entered "calm  smooth sea" into the log. At four P.M., he wrote "same weather," adding "P. L. #," which means that the Patent Log showed a run of # miles since noon. At #:# P.M., he made another entry: "Sighted and passed about # yards from a Monster Fish of the Serpent shape, about # ft. long." In addition to the mate C. A. W. Powell, who made the log entry -- the animal was seen by the captain, several members of the crew and a number of the # passengers she was carrying. One Fig. I Professor Oudemans' concept of the sea serpent Drawtn# by Olga Lay of the passengers had a camera on board (still fairly rare then) but was so excited that he did not remember it until later. But Captain Cringle made a sketch (copied here as Fig. #) and wrote a report in which he said: It was rushing through the water at great speed, and was throwing water from its breast as a vessel throws water from her bows. I saw full # ft. of its head and neck on three several occasions. The body was all the time visible... The base, or body, from which the neck sprang, was much thicker than the neck itself, and I should not, therefore, call it a serpent. Had it been breezy enough to ruffle the water, or hazy, I should have had some doubt about the creature; but the sea being so perfectly smooth, I had not the slightest doubt in my mind as to its being a sea-monster. I turned the ship round to get closer to it, and got much nearer than we were at first; but the sun was then setting and the light gone, so that to have nm the ship further off her course would have been folly... This thing, whatever it was, was in sight for over half an hour. In fact we did not lose sight of it until darkness came on.  serpent" repeatedly dipped its head into the water, causing quite a bit of spray. (Did it catch fish?) Captain Cringle believes that he saw teeth when the mouth was open. He could see the eyes clearly. The color of the animal was dark brown and the skin appeared smooth -- but at a distance of # yards, it would be hard to tell smooth skin from wet fur. What Captain Cringle saw and sketched was, of course, precisely the shape which Prof. Oudemans had predicted. Although I had some correspondence with Prof. Oudemans at a much later date (just before the outbreak of the Second World War), I forgot to Fig. # Capl. CringU't ikelch of tKe Umfuli terpont ask him whether he ever got in touch with Captain Cringle. I know of no other report which seems to corroborate Oudemans' conclusions in such a definite manner. But while there is none which does that, there are a few other reports that are even better. So far, the unknown animal had been seen by missionaries, by commissioned officers of the Royal Artillery of Canada, by ordnance storekeepers, British Navy officers, American merchant captains, British merchant captains, by clergymen and by Army surgeons -- in short, by practically everybody except a trained zoologist. This did not happen until # and as if to make up for the delay, fate let the "sea serpent" be seen by two zoologists at the same time. They were Mr. E. G. B. Meade-Waldo and Mr. Michael J. Nicoll, both of them Fellows of the British Zoological Society. They were on board the yacht Valhalla, owned by the Earl of Crawford, who used it to escape the British winter, which had proved bad for his health, and who was in the habit of taking naturalists along with him on his cruises. The Valhalla was cruising off Parahiba, Brazil, offshore of the easternmost point of the South American continent, when the animal was seen. The account written by Mr. Meade-Waldo for his Society (and published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, #, p. #) gives all the details: On Dec. #th, #, at #:# a.m., I was on the poop of the Valhalla with Mr. Nicoll, when he drew my attention to an object in the sea about # yards from the yacht; he said : "Is that the fin of a great fish?" I looked and immediately saw a large fin or frill sticking out of ffie water, dark seaweed-brown in colour, somewhat crinkled at the edge. It was apparently about # feet in length and projected from # inches to # feet from the water. I got my field-glasses on to it (a powerful pair of Goerz Trieder) , and almost as soon as I had them on the frill, a great head and neck rose out of the water in front of the frill; the neck did not touch the frill in the water, but came out of the water in front of it, at a distance of certainly not less than # inches, probably more. The neck appeared about the thickness of a slight man's body, and from # to # feet was out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness. The head had a very turtle-like appearance, as had also the eye. I could see the line of the mouth, but we were sailing pretty fast, and quickly drew away from the object, which was going very slowly. It moved its head and neck from side to side in a peculiar manner: the colour of the head and neck was dark brown above, and whitish below -- almost white, I think. both zoologists had the impression that it was a mammal they saw. (The sketch. Fig. #, is a copy of the one Mr. Nicoll prepared for inclusion in the Proceedings.) And they also said that the creature seen by H.M.S. Daedalus "might easily be the same." In retrospect, it looks as if things should have built up to a climax about then. After the scientific guess came its general vindication by another encounter; after that, the first sighting by professional zoologists. Next thing should have been discovery. But it wasn't. There only were more reports. In May, #, a British armed merchant cruiser, the Hilary, commanded by Captain F. W. Dean, was cruising around looking for German submarines. The place was the ocean to the south of Iceland. In fact, the vessel was so close to Iceland that the peaks could be seen from board in the tionally clear and calm day. At about nine A.M., the captain was in his cabin, which was directly beneath the bridge, when a voice shouted down to him: "Object on the starboard quarter." Captain Dean raced up to the bridge which, he said, took him three seconds. He took it for granted, of course, that a submarine had been sighted and asked: "Was it a periscope?" He was assured by the officer of the watch that it had not been a periscope. "It looks more like a living thing, but it is not a whale." Wartime must do something Fig. # Mr. Nicoll't tkatch of th Valhalla mo Mrpant peculiar to the nerves, for Captain Dean did not have the faintest thoughts about investigation or discovery or an#dhing of the sort. Instead, he decided that the object, even if not a German submarine, was still a good opportunity for target practice. The gim crews let go with their six-pounders and one may be permitted to remark that they did not shoot too well. Their marksmanship was such that it might have frightened a human enemy into surrender while still undamdged. Finally, however, one gun crew did score a hit. The animal, which had paid no attention to the earlier near misses, thrashed furiously and disappeared, never to be seen again. A. Hant Egede B. lorenz von Ferry C. New England Sea Serpent D. H.M.S. Daedaivs E. Royal Saxon F. Lady Combermere G. Halifax officers. H. S.S. Umfui I. Valhalla J. H.M.S. Hilory K. Submarine U-# #. S.S. Santa Clara Rg. # Sketch map of the Atlantic Ocean with the most important sightings Captain Dean took a careful look at the animal, which he later described as follows: The head was about the shape of, but somewhat larger than that of, a cow, though with no observable protrusions such as horns or ears, and was black, except for the front of the face, which could be clearly seen to have a strip of whitish flesh, very like a cow has, between its nostrils. As we passed, the head raised itself two or three times, apparently to get a good look at the ship. From the back of the head to the dorsal fin no part of the creature showed above water, but the top edge of the neck was just level with the surface, and its snake-like movements could be clearly seen. (It curved to almost a semi-circle as the creature moved its head round as if to follow us with its eyes.) The dorsal fin appeared like a black triangle, and when the creature was end on, this fin was seen to be very thin and apparently fiabby, as the upper part turned over sometimes like the top of a terrier's ear when cocked. The fin was estimated to be about four feet high when in the position highest out of the water. The distance from the head to the fin was estimated at about # feet or slightly less by the captain, the first lieutenant, the officer of the watch and the navigator. From this. Captain Dean inferred that the total length must have been about # feet. Before that, one of the German submarines which Captain Dean was hunting had had a curious encounter itself, but the commander of the submarine deemed it wise not to talk too much about it while the war was going on. He was Captain Freiherr (Baron) von Forstner and he might never have written about it if it had not been for the Loch Ness case. When the first reports from the Loch Ness were printed prominently in all European newspapers, the newspapermen, of course, badgered professional zoologists, like directors of zoological gardens, about their opinions. Since the scientists had not been to Scotland, had never seen the supposed animal reported from there, and had a few other things on their minds anyway, they could not give much of an answer. But one said that all sea serpent reports were so old that one might distrust them on principle and that he would prefer to hear something more than the Daedalus story. Whereupon Baron von Forstner decided to tell him something more recent, namely his own wartime experience: On July #, #, our V-# torpedoed in the North Atlantic the British steamer Iberian (# tons) leaded with valuable goods. The ship, which was about # meters long, sank rapidly, stem first, the depth at this point being a few thousand meters. When the steamer had disappeared for about # seconds it exploded at a depth which we could not know, but one thousand meters will be a safe guess. Shortly afterwards pieces of wreckage, among them a huge marine animal which made violent movements, were thrown out of the water, flying approximately # or # meters high. At this moment we were six men on the bridge, myself, the two officers of the watch, the chief engineer, the navigator and the helmsman. We at once centered our attention upon this marvel of the seas. Unfortunately we had not time to take a photograph because the animal disappeared in the water after # or # seconds. It was about # meters (# feet) long, looked like a giant crocodile, and had four powerful paddlelike limbs and a long pointed head. The explanation of this event seems easy to me. The explosion of, or in, the sinking steamer caught the "undersea-crocodile," as we called it, and forced it out of the water. When somebody tried to cast doubts upon this, Baron von Forstner declared firmly that this was what happened and that he "would not give up a single meter of the length of his animal." And another German submarine captain came to his aid. He had seen such an animal while cruising submerged in the North Atlantic. Captain von Forstner and Commander Gould then collaborated on a German edition of the latter's book The Case tor the Sea Serpent in the hope of imcovering more reports. But to the best of my knowledge, none came. sightings, however, in addition to the somewhat dubious Loch Ness case. There is one from the sea near Scotland, one from Alaska and one from the vicinity of San Clemente island off California. But like many others, they are just sightings, probably exciting enough to the people to whom they happen, but nothing really new. Yet something may happen any day. I am quite sure that nobody thought of sea monsters between Christmas and New Year of #. But the Grace Line steamer Santa Clara literally ran into one on December #, #, at #:# A.M. The time of day is so exactly established because the officers of the ship were just getting ready for the noon sight. The place was # miles due east of Cape Lookout and the Santa Clara had just crossed the Gulf Stream while sailing for Cartagena. The weather was perfectly clear, with blue sky and bright sunshine, and the sea was calm. The story by the master of the Santa Clara, J. Fordan, which was distributed by the Associated Press, read in part: Suddenly John Axelson (the third mate) saw a snakelike head rear out of the sea about # feet off the starboard bow of the vessel. His exclamation of amazement directed the attention of the other two mates to the sea monster and the three watched it unbelievingly as, in a moment's time, it came abeam of the bridge where they stood, and was then left astern. The creature's head appeared to be about # V # feet across, # feet thick and # feet long. The cylindrically shaped body was about # feet thick and the neck about IV # feet in diameter. As the monster came abeam of the bridge it was observed that the water around the monster, over an area of # or # feet square, "was stained red. The visible part of the body was about # feet long. It was assumed that the color of the water was due to the creature's blood and that the stem of the ship had cut the monster in two, but as there was no observer on the other side of the vessel there was no way of estimating what length of body may have been left on the other side. From the time the monster was first sighted until it disappeared in the distance astern, it was thrashing about as though in agony. The monster's skin was dark brown, slick and smooth. There were no fins, hair, or protuberances on the head, neck or visible parts of the body.  is unsatisfyingly simple -- now we wait. To doubt that there is a large, long-necked unknown animal in the ocean would be very foolish under the circumstances. In appearance, it seems to resemble the extinct plesiosaurs rather closely. True, they were all smaller than the dimensions reported for the "sea serpent," but this is no argument. Today's horses are also larger than those of the past. Yet in spite of the external resemblance to the plesiosaurs, Oudemans was probably right -- the animal does not seem to be a reptile, like the plesiosaurs, but a mammal. The rather numerous appearances in cold waters speak in favor of this assumption. So does the mane, even if it was seen only rarely, for where there is a mane, there is likely to be a fur. Finally -- this happens to be the age of mammals. Whatever it is, it seems to be an animal of the high seas which does not come close to the shore, save in most exceptional circumstances. It is obviously rarer than the whales, though nobody can say how rare. But the case of the fish Latimeria comes to mind here again. Once thought to be wholly extinct, a single specimen was caught by accident and, since it remained the only one for about a decade, the fish was thought to be incredibly rare. Actually scientists just did not know where to look for Latimeria. One may ask, of course, why no dead "sea serpent" has ever been washed ashore. The claim that just this occurred in one locality or another is not really rare, but when the "sea serpent" could be inspected by naturalists, the claim was always found to be mistaken. Sometimes the dead "sea serpent" was a half-decayed large shark. More than once, it turned out to be the mutilated body of a dolphin -- mutilated not by some sea monster, but by such prosaic an agency as the propeller of a steamship. Quite often, the dead cr still barely living "sea serpent" turned out to be an oarfish, also called ribbon fish. This strange inhabitant of the Atlantic will grow to a length of # feet and possibly more, being only inches thick. It is true that there are a few reports of things washed ashore that could not be identified, but H(. # One culprit -- the ribbon fish or oar fih (Regaleeut) Drawing by Oigo they could not even be definitely declared to be unknown. Since a good number of the various species of "Whales sink when dead, there is no reason to deny this possibility for the unknown "sea serpent," too. There is no virtue in indulging in long speculations, however, until we know more. The animal -- or various species -- can't remain a mystery forever. The oceans are becoming too well traveled and explored to let it -- or them -- stay out of sight indefinitely. My Destination Conclusion of a # Part Serial PyrB was power beyond Man's most fantastic dreams... but Gully Foyle's Burning Man was a fantastic dream within Man's powerl A driving passion for vengeance has transformed Gully Foyle from a brute spaceman into a clever, devastating engine of destruction. Marooned in space aboard the wreck of SS Nomad and left to die by a sister ship, the Vorga, which refused to rescue him, Foyle has spent eighteen months trying to track down the man who gave the order to abandon him. Pursuing his revenge, Foyle has opposed the wealthy Presteign of Presteign, owner of the Nomad, who was determined to locate the wreck of his ship to recover Cr was in the purser's safe, along with # pounds of a mysterious substance called PyrE. Presteign has been aided by the formidable Saul Dagenham, chief of Dagenham Couriers, and Regis Sheffield, leading attorney of Terra. With the aid of Jisbella McQueen, a clever and beautiful thief, Foyle was able to escape from Gouffre Martel, a cavern prison, beat Dagenham to the wreck of the Nomad and appropriate the fortune to finance his plan for revenge. Spending money lavishly, Foyle has taken on a new identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, a ludicrous playof Robin Wednesbury, a "telesend," has traced three leads to the identity of the commander aboard Vorga who gave the order to let him die. In quick succession, Foyle has tracked down a Leading Spaceman, a Pharmacist's Mate and an Able Spaceman from the Vorga. Periodically in his search, Foyle is appalled by the ghastly, inexplicable appearance of a Burning Man, an image of himself with clothes on fire, the face glowing blood red with the scars of an old tattooing which has been removed. This tattooing Foyle received on the Sargasso Asteroid, a planetoid of #th century savages, salvagers and looters in space. Foyle cannot understand the meaning of this Burning Man. He is not a fantasy because the Burning Man is seen by others as well as Foyle. Foyle's three clues lead to a horrible discoyery. The reason that SS Vorga did not pick him up in space was that Vorga was engaged in a cruel racket. War refugees from the' Outer Satellites had been smuggled out to be transported to the Itmer Planets for enormous fees. But Vorga had collected the money from the passengers and then scuttled them in space. Hundreds of helpless people had been murdered. In the course of his search, Foyle, disguised as Fourmyle, mingles with society as well as the underworld. At a party in Presteign's home, Foyle successfully passes the scrutiny of Presteign and Saul Dagenham, and meets Jisbella McQueen again. Although Foyle had abandoned her when he salvaged the Nomad fortune, Jiz does not reveal his true identity. She has become Dagenham's mistress and wants Dagenham to have nothing to do with the PyrE which Foyle also possesses. She is in deadly terror of this mysterious substance for which Presteign and Army Central Intelligence, headed by Captain Peter Y'ang-Yeovil, are both desperately searching. Foyle also meets Presteign's beautiful albino daughter, Olivia Presteign, and falls deeply in love with her. When he reveals this to Robin Wednesbury, Robin leaves him in a jealous rage and goes to Central Intelligence headquarters, where she reveals the truth about Foyle to Captain Y'ang-Yeovil. At almost the same moment, Saul Dagenham ferrets out the truth about Foyle from Jisbella McQueen, and Olivia Presteign unwittingly reveals the truth about Foyle to her father. Foyle has been betrayed by the three women in his life. With Central Intelligence, Dagenham Couriers and Presteign of Presteign hunting him, Foyle finally locates the captain of SS Vorga on Mars in a freak colony for recluses. There, with the unexpected and startling aid of the Burning Man, Foyle makes the disastrous discovery that the person in command of Vorga, who ran the refugee racket and who gave the order to leave him to die, was Olivia Presteign, the woman he loves. Foyle is so staggered by this information that he is nearly captured by the Mars Commando Brigade, which is pursuing him. Only a sneak atomic attack by the Outer Satellites in the war between the Outer Satellites and Inner Planets enables Foyle to escape. But he loses control of the spaceship that jets him up from the surface of Mars and goes driving out into space, as battered and helpless as he was a year and a half ago aboard the wreck of the Nomad. was decelerated, but the exhaustion of his body told him he had been under acceleration while he was unconscious. Either his power pack had run out or... He inched a hand to the small of his back. The pack was gone. It had been removed. He explored with trembling fingers. He was in a bed. He listened to the murmur of ventilators and refrigerants and the click and buzz of servo-mechanisms. He was aboard a ship. He was strapped to the bed. The ship was in free fall. Foyle unfastened himself, pressed his elbows against the mattress and floated up. He drifted through the darkness, searching for a light-switch or a call-button. His hands brushed against a water carafe with raised letters on the glass. He read them with his fingertips. SS, he felt. The door of the stateroom opened. A figure drifted through the door, silhouetted against the light of a luxurious private lounge behind it. "This time we did pick you up," a voice said. "Olivia?" "Yes." "Then it's true?" "Yes, Gully." Foyle began to cry, "You're still weak," Olivia Presteign said gently. "Come and lie down." She urged him into the lounge and strapped him into a chaise longue. It was still warm from her body. "You've been like this for six days. We never thought you'd live. Everything was drained out of you before the surgeon found that battery buried in your back." "Where is it?" he croaked. "You can have it whenever you want it. Don't fret, my dear." He looked at her for a long moment, his Snow Maiden, his beloved Ice Princess -- the white satin skin, the blind coral eyes and exquisite coral mouth. She touched his moist eyelids with a scented handkerchief. "I love you," he said. "Shh. I know. Gully." "You've known all about me. For how long?" "I knew Gully Foyle, the spaceman off the Nomad, was my enemy from the beginning. I never knew you were Fourmyle until we met. Ah, if only I'd known before. How much would have been saved." "You knew and you've been laughing at me." "No." "Standing by and shaking with laughter." "Standing by and loving you. No, don't interrupt. I'm trying to be rational and it's not easy." marble face. "I'm not playing with you now. I -- I betrayed you to my father. I did. Self-defense, I thought. Now that I've met him at last, I can see he's too dangerous. An hour later, I knew it was a mistake because I realized I was in love with you. I'm paying for it now. You need never have known." "You expect me to believe that?" "Then why am I here?" She trembled slightly. "Why did I follow you? That bombing was ghastly. You'd have been dead in another minute when we picked you up." 'Where are we now?" 'What difference does it make?" "I'm stalling for time." "Time for what?" "Not for time. I'm stalling for courage." "We're orbiting Earth." "How did you follow me?" "I knew you'd be after Lindsey Joyce. I took over one of my father's ships. It happened to be VoTia again." "Does he know?" "He never knows. I live my own private life." He could not take his eyes off her and yet it hurt him to look at her. He was yearning and hating -- yearning for the reality to be undone, hating the truth for what it was. He discovered that he was stroking her handkerchief with tremulous fingers. "I love you, Olivia." "I love you. Gully, my enemy." "For God's sake!" he burst out. "Why did you do it? You were aboard Voria running the reff racket. You gave the order to scuttle them. You gave the order to pass me by. Why? Why?!" "What?" she lashed back. "Are you demanding apologies?" "I'm demanding an explanation." "You'll get none from me!" "Blood and money, your father said. He was right. Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!" "Blood and money, yes, and unashamed." "I'm drowning, Olivia. Throw me a lifeline." "Then drown. Nobody ever saved me. No -- no, this is wrong, all wrong. Wait, my dear. Wait." She composed herself and began speaking very tenderly. "I could lie. Gully dear, and make you believe it, but I'm going to be honest. There's a simple explanation. I live my own private life. You do. We all do." "What's yours?" "No different from yours -- from the rest of the world. I cheat, I lie, I destroy -- like all of us. I'm criminal -- like all of us." "Why? For money? You don't need money." "No." "For control? Power?" "Not for power." "Then why?" HE took a deep breath, as though this truth was the first truth and was crucifying her. "To pay you back, all of you." "For what?" "For being blind," she said in a smoldering voice. "For being cheated. For being helpless. They should have killed me when I was born. Do you know what it's like to be blind -- to receive life second-hand? To be dependent, begging, crippled? 'Bring them down to your level,' I told my secret life. 'If you're blind, make them blinder. If you're helpless, cripple them. Pay them back, all of them.' " "Olivia, you're insane." "And you?" "I'm in love with a monster." "We're a pair of monsters." "No!" "No? Not you?" she flared. "What have you been doing but paying the world back, like me? What's your revenge but settling your own private account with bad luck? Who wouldn't call you a crazy monster? We're a pair, Gully. We couldn't help falling in love." He tried on the shroud of her revelation and it clung tighter than the tiger mask tattooed on his face. "It's true," he said slowly. "I'm no better than you. Worse. But before God, I never murdered six hundred." "What?" "Perhaps more. You've got something they need to end the war and you're holding out." "You mean PyrE?" "Yes." "What is it, this bringer of peace, this twenty pounds of miracle that they're fighting for?" "I don't know, but I know they need it and I don't care. Yes, I'm being honest now. I don't care. makes no difference to us. Not to us, Gully, because we stand apart. We stand apart and shape our own world. We're the strong." "We're the damned." "We're the blessed. We've found each other." Suddenly she laughed and held out her arms. "I'm arguing when there's no need for words. Come to me, my love. Wherever you are, come to me..." He touched her and then put his arms around her. He found her mouth and devoured her. But he was forced to release her. "What is it. Gully darling?" "I'm not a child any more," he said wearily. "I've learned to understand there's never a simple answer. You can love and loathe someone." "Can you. Gully?" "And you're making me loathe myself." "No, my dear." "I've been a tiger all my life. I trained myself -- educated myself -- pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth -- quick and deadly." "And you are. You are. The deadliest." I went too far. I went beyond simplicity. I turned myself into a thinking creature. I look through your blind eyes, my love whom I loathe, and I see myself. The tiger's gone." "There's no place for the tiger to go. You're trapped. Gully -- by Dagenham, Intelligence, my father, the world." "I know." "But you're safe with me. We're safe together, the pair of us. They'll never dream of looking for you near me. We can plan together, fight together, destroy them together..." "No. Not together." "What is it?" she flared again. "Are you still hunting me? Is that what's wrong? Do you still want revenge? Then take it. Go ahead, destroy me." "No. Destruction's finished for me. I couldn't hurt you." "Ah, I know what it is." She became tender again in an instant. "It's your face, poor darling. You're ashamed of your tiger face. But I love it. You burn so brightly for me. You bum through the blindness. Believe me..." "My God! What a pair of hideous freaks we are." "What's happened to you?" She broke away from him, her coral eyes glittering. "Where's the man who watched the raid with me? Where's the unashamed savage who-" "Gone, Olivia." "Gully!" "He's lost." "But why? What have I done?" She reached out, touched him and then clung to him. "Listen to me, darling. You're exhausted. That's all. Nothing is lost." The words tumbled out of her. "You're right. Of course you're right. We've been bad, both of us. Loathsome. But all that's gone now. Nothing is lost. We were wicked because we were alone and unhappy. But we've found each other; we can save each other. Be my love, darling. Always. Forever. I've looked for you so long, waited and hoped and prayed..." "You're lying, Olivia, and you know it." "For God's sake. Gully!" "Put Vorga down, Olivia." "Land?" "Yes." "On Earth?" "Yes." "They're hunting you -- waiting for you -- watching. What are you going to do?" "Do you think this is easy for me?" he said. "I'm doing what I have to do. I'm still driven. No man ever escapes from that. But there's a different compulsion in the saddle and the spurs hurt, damn it. They hurt like hell." He stifled his anger and controlled himself. He took her hands and kissed her palms. "It's all finished, Olivia," he said gently. "But I love you. Always. Forever." T'LL sum it up," Dagenham rapped. "We were bombed the night we found Foyle. We lost him on the Moon and foimd him a week later on Mars. We were bombed again. We lost him again. He's been lost for a week. Another bombing's due. Which one of the Inner Planets? Venus? The Moon? Terra again? Who knows? But we all know this -- one more raid without retaliation and we're lost." He glanced around the table. Against the ivory and gold background of the Star Chamber of Castle Presteign, his face, all three faces, looked strained. Captain Y'ang-Yeovil slitted his eyes in a frown. Presteign compressed his thin lips still more tightly. "And we know this, too," Dagenham continued. "We can't retaliate without PyrE and we can't locate the PyrE without Foyle." "My instructions were," said Presteign, "that PyrE was not to be mentioned in public." "In the first place, this is not public," Dagenham snapped. "It's a private information pool. In the second place, we've gone beyond property rights. We're discussing survival and we've all got equal rights in that. Yes, Jiz?" Jisbella McQueen had jaunted into the Star Chamber, looking intent and furious. "No sign of Foyle," she said. "Old St. Pat's still being watched?" "Yes." "Commando Brigade's report in from Mars yet?" "No." "That's my business and Most Secret," Y'ang-Yeovil objected mildly. "You've got as few secrets from me as I have from you." Dagenham grinned mirthlessly. "See if you can beat Central Intelligence back here with that report, Jiz." She disappeared. "About property rights," Captain Y'ang-Yeovil murmured. "May I suggest to Presteign that Central Intelligence will guarantee full payment to him for his right, title and interest in PyrE?" "Don't coddle him, Yeovil." "This conference is being recorded," Presteign said coldly. "The captain's offer is now on file." He turned his basilisk face to Dagenham. "You are in my employ, Mr. Dagenham. Please control your references to myself." "And to your property?" Dagenham inquired with a deadly smile. "The Solar System's on the edge of total annihilation for the sake of your property. I'm not exaggerating. It will be a shooting war to end all wars if we can't stop it." "We can always surrender," Presteign answered. "No," Y'ang-Yeovil said. "That's already been discussed and discarded at HQ. We know the post-victory plans of the Outer Satellites. They involve total exploitation of the Inner Planets. We're to be gutted and worked until nothing's left. Surrender would be as disastrous as defeat." "But not for Presteign," Dagenham corrected. "Shall we say -- present company excluded?" Y'ang-Yeovil replied gracefully. chair. "All right, Presteign. Give." "I beg your pardon, sir?" "Let's hear all about PyrE. I've got an idea how we can bring Foyle out into the open and locate the stuff, but I've got to know all about it first. Make your contribution." "No," Presteign answered. "No, what?" "I have decided to withdraw from this information pool. I will reveal nothing about PyrE." "Presteign! Are you mad? Are you fighting Regis Sheffield's Liberal Party again?" "It's quite simple, Dagenham," Y'ang-Yeovil interposed. "My information about the surrenderdefeat situation has shown Presteign a way to better his position. No doubt he intends negotiating a sale to the enemy in return for property advantages." "Can nothing move you?" Dagenham asked Presteign scornfully. "Can nothing touch you? Are you all property and nothing else? Go away, Jizi The whole thing's fallen apart." Jisbella had jaunted into the Star Chamber again. "Commando Brigade's reported. We know what happened to Foyle." "What?" "Presteign's got him." "What!" Both Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil started to their feet. "He left Mars in a private yawl, was shot up and was observed being rescued by the Presteign SS Vorga." "Damn you, Presteign," Dagenham snapped. "So that's why you've been so unconcerned -- " "Wait," Y'ang-Yeovil commanded. "It's news to him, too, Dagenham. Look at him." Presteign's handsome face had gone the color of ashes. He tried to rise and fell back stiffly in his chair. "Olivia," he whispered. "With him. That scum..." "Presteign?" "My daughter, gentlemen, has -- for some time been engaged in -- certain activities. The family vice. Blood and -- I have managed to close my eyes to it -- had almost convinced myself that I was mistaken. I -- But Foyle! Dirt! Filth! He must be destroyed!" Presteign's voice soared alarmingly. His head twisted back like a hanged man's and his body began to shudder. "What in the -- " "Epilepsy," Y'ang-Yeovil said. He pulled Presteign out of the chair onto the floor. "A spoon. Miss McQueen. Hurry!" He levered Presteign's teeth open and placed a spoon between them to protect the tongue. As fast as it had begun, the seizure was over. The shuddering stopped. Presteign opened his eyes. "Petit mal," Y'ang-Yeovil murmured, withdrawing the spoon. "But he'll be dazed for a while." speaking in a low monotone. "PyrE is a pyrophoric alloy. A pyrophore is a metal which emits sparks when scraped or struck. PyrE emits energy, which is why E, the energy symbol, was added to the prefix Pyr. PyrE is a solid solution of trans-Plutonian isotopes, releasing thermo-nuclear energy on the order of stellar Phoenix Action. Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial proto-matter which exploded into the Universe." "My God!" Jisbella exclaimed. Dagenham silenced her with a gesture and bent over Presteign. "How is it brought to critical mass, Presteign? How is the energy released?" "As the original energy was generated in the beginning of time," Presteign droned. "Through Will and Idea." "I'm convinced he's a CellarChristian," Dagenham muttered to Y'ang-Yeovil. He raised his voice. "Will you explain, Presteign?" "Through Will and Idea," Presteign repeated. "PyrE can only be exploded by psychokinesis. Its energy can only be released by thought." "There's no key? No formula?" "No. Only Will and Idea are necessary." The glazed eyes closed. Dagenham . mopped his brow. "Will this give the Outer Satellites pause, Yeovil?" "It'll give us all pause." "It's the road to hell," Jisbella said. "Then let's find it and get off the road. Here's my idea, Yeovil. Foyle was tinkering with that hell-brew in his lab in Old St. Pat's, trying to analyze it." "I told you that in strict confidence," Jisbella said furiously. "I'm sorry, dear. We're past honor and the decencies. Now look, Yeovil, there must be some fragments of the stuff lying about -- as dust, in solution, in precipitates. We've got to detonate those fragments and blow hell out of Foyle's circus." "Why?" "To bring him running. He must have the bulk of the PyrE hidden there somewhere. He'll come to salvage it" "What if it blows up, too?" "It can't -- not inside an Inert Lead Isotope safe." "Maybe it's not all inside." "Jiz says it is. At least, so Foyle reported." "Leave me out of this," Jisbella said. "Anyway, we'll have to gamble." "Gamble!" Y'ang-Yeovil exclaimed. "On a Phoenix Action? You'll gamble the Solar System into a brand-new nova." "What else can we do? Pick any other road; it's also the road to destruction. Have we got any choice?" "We can wait," Jisbella said. "For what? For Foyle to blow us up himself with his tinkering?" "We can warn him." "We don't know where he is." "We can find him." "How soon? Won't that be a gamble, too? And what about that stuff lying around waiting for someone to think it into energy? Suppose a Jack-jaimter gets in and cracks the safe, looking for goodies? And then we don't just have dust waiting for an accidental thought. We have twenty pounds." ham turned on the Intelligence man. "You make the decision, Yeovil. Do we try it my way or do we wait?" Y'ang-Yeovil sighed. "Damn all scientists. I'll have to make my decision for a reason you don't know, Dagenham. The Outer Satellites are also onto this. We've got reason to believe that they have agents looking for Foyle. If we wait, they may pick him up before we do. In fact, they may have him now." "So your decision is... ?" "The blowup. Let's bring Foyle running if we can." "No!" Jisbella cried. "How?" Dagenham asked, ignoring her. "Oh, I've got just the one for the job. A one-way telepath named Robin Wednesbury." "When?" "At once. We'll clear the entire neighborhood. We'll get full news coverage and do a complete broadcast. If Foyle's anywhere in the Inner Planets, he'll hear about it." "Not about it," Jisbella said in despair. "He'll hear it. It'll be the last thing any of us hear." "Will and Idea," Presteign whispered.    As always, when he returned from a stormy civil court session in Leningrad, Regis Sheffield was pleased and complacent, rather like a cocky prizefighter who's won a tough fight. He stopped off at Blekmann's in Berlin for a drink and some war-talk, had a second and more war-talk in a legal hangout on the Quai Dorsay, and a third session in the Skin  Bones opposite Temple Bar. By the time he arrived in his New York office, he was pleasantly illuminated. As he strode through the clattering corridors and outer rooms, he was greeted by his secretary with a handful of memo beads. "Knocked Djargo-Dantchenko for a loop," Sheffield reported triumphantly. "Judgment and full damages. Old DD's sore as a boil. This makes the score eleven to five, my favor." He took the beads, juggled them and then began tossing them into unlikely receptacles all over the office, including the open mouth of a gaping clerk. "Really, Mr. Sheffield! Have you been drinking?" "No more work today. The war news is too damned gloomy. Have to do something to stay cheerful. What say we brawl in the streets?" "Mr. Sheffield!" "Anything waiting for me that can't wait another day?" "There's a gentleman in your office." "He made you let him get that far?" Sheffield looked impressed. "Who is he? God or somebody?" "He won't give his name. He gave me this." HE secretary handed Sheffield a sealed envelope. On it was it open, his blunt features crinkling with curiosity. Then his eyes widened. Inside the envelope were two Cr # notes. Sheffield turned without a word and burst into his private office. Foyle arose from his chair. "These are genuine," Sheffield blurted. "To the best of my knowledge." "Exactly twenty of these notes were minted last year. All are on deposit in Terran treasuries. How did you get hold of these two?" "You're Mr. Sheffield?" "Who else? How did you get hold of these notes?" "Bribery." "Why?" "I thought at the time that it might be convenient to have them available." "For what? More bribery?" "If legal fees are bribery." "I set my own fees," Sheffield said. He tossed the notes back to Foyle. "You can produce them again if I decide to take your case and if I decide I've been worth that to you. What's your problem?" "Criminal." "Don't be too specific yet. And?" "I want to give myself up." "To the police?" "Yes." "For what crime?" "Crimes." "Name two." "Robbery and rape." "Name two more." "Blackmail and murder." "Any other items?" "Treason and genocide." "Does that exhaust your catalogue?" "I think so, but we may be able to unveil a few more when we get specific." "Been busy, haven't you? Either you're the Prince of Villains or insane." "I've been both, Mr. Sheffield." "Why do you want to give yourself up?" Sheffield asked. "I've come to my senses," Foyle answered bitterly. "I don't mean that. A criminal never surrenders while he's ahead. You're obviously ahead. What's the reason?" "The most damnable thing that ever happened to a man. I picked up a rare disease called conscience." Sheffield snorted. "That can turn fatal." "It is fatal. I've realized that I've been behaving like an animal." "And now you want to purge yourself?" "No, it isn't that simple," Foyle said grimly. "That's why I've come to you -- for major surgery. The man who upsets the morphology of society is a cancer. The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal. But there are chain reactions. Purging yourself with punishment isn't enough. Everything's got to be set right. I wish to God everything could be cured just by sending me back to Gouffre Martel or shooting me..." "Back to  Gouffre Martel?" Sheffield cut in keenly. "Shall I be specific?" "Not yet. Go on. You sound as though you've got ethical growing pains." "That's it exactly." Foyle paced in agitation, crvimpling the banknotes with nervous fingers. "This is one hell of a mess, Sheffield. There's a girl that's got to pay for a vicious, rotten crime. The fact that I love her -- No, never mind that. She's a cancer that's got to be cut out -- like me. Which means I'll have to add informing to my catalogue. The fact that I'm giving myself up, too, doesn't make any difference." "What is all this mishmash?" "One of the New Year's bombs has just walked into your office and it's saying: 'Put it all right. Put me together again and send me home. Put together the city I flattened and the people I shattered.' That's what I want to hire you for. I don't know how most criminals feel, but -- " "Sensible, matter-of-fact, like good businessmen who've had bad luck," Sheffield answered promptly. "That's the usual attitude of the professional criminal. It's obvious you're an amateur, if you're a criminal at all. My dear sir, do be sensible. You come here, extravagantly accusing yourself of robbery, rape, murder, genocide, treason, and God knows what else. Do you expect me to take you seriously?" Bunny, Sheffield's assistant, jaunted into the private office. "Chief!" he shouted in excitement. "Something new's turned up. A lech-jaunte. Two societykids bribed a C-cIass tart to -- Oop. Sorry. Didn't realize you had -- " Bunny broke off and stared. "Fourmyle!" "What? Who?" Sheffield demanded. "Don't you know him, Chief?" Bunny stammered. "That's Fourmyle of Ceres. Gully Foyle." More than a year ago, Regis Sheffield had been hypnotically fulminated and triggered for this moment. His body had been prepared to respond without thought and the response was lightning. He struck Foyle in half a second -- temple, throat and groin. It had been decided not to depend on weapons, since none might be available. Foyle fell. Sheffield turned on Bunny and battered him back across the office. Then he spat into his palm. It had been decided not to depend on drugs, since drugs might not be available. Sheffield's salivary glands had been prepared to respond with an anaphylaxis secretion to the stimulus. He ripped open Foyle's sleeve and dug a nail deep into the hollow of Foyle's elbow. A strange cry was torn from Foyle's lips; the tattooing showed livid on his face. Before the stunned law assistant could make a move, Sheffield swung Foyle up to his shoulder and jaunted. He arrived in the middle of the Four Mile Circus in Old St. Pat's. It was a daring but calculated move. This was the last place he would be expected to go and the first place where he might expect to locate the PyrE. He was prepared to deal with anyone he might meet in the Cathedral, but the interior of the Circus was empty. The vacant tents ballooning up in the nave looked tattered; they had already been looted. Sheffield plunged into the first he saw. It was Fourmyle's traveling library, filled with hundreds of books and thousands of glittering novel beads. The Jack-jaunters were not interested in literature. Sheffield threw Foyle down on the floor. Only then did he take a gun from his pocket. Foyle's eyelids fluttered; his eyes opened. "You're drugged," Sheffield said rapidly. "Don't try to jaunte. And don't move. I'm warning you, I'm ready for anything." Sheffield instantly fired and seared his shoulder. Foyle was slammed back against the stone flooring. He was numbed and bewildered. There was a roaring in his ears and a poison coursing through his blood. "I'm warning you," Sheffield repeated, "I'm ready for anything." "What do you want?" Foyle whispered. "Two things. Twenty pounds of PyrE and you. You most of all." "You damned maniac! I came into your office to give it up -- hand it over." "To the O.S.?" "To the what?" "The Outer Satellites. Shall I spell it for you?" "No," Foyle muttered. "The patriot, Sheffield, an O.S. agent. I should have known. I'm a fool." "You're the most valuable fool in the Solar System, Foyle. We want you even more than the PyrE. That's an unknown to us, but we know what you are." "What are you talking about?" "You don't know, do you? You still don't know. You haven't an inkling." "Of what?" "Listen to me," Sheffield said. "I'm taking you back two years to Nomad. Understand? Back to the death of the Nomad. One of our raiders finished her off and they found you aboard the wreck. The last man alive." "So an O.S. ship did blast Nomad?" "Yes. You don't remember?" "I don't remember anything about that. I never could." "I'm telling you why. The raider got a clever idea. They'd turn you into a decoy -- a sitting duck, understand? You were half dead. but they took you aboard and patched you up. They put you into a spacesuit and cast you adrift with your micro-wave on. You were broadcasting distress signals and mumbling for help on every wave-band. The idea was that they'd lurk nearby and pick off the I. P. ships that came to rescue you." Foyle began to laugh. "I'm getting up," he said recklessly. "Shoot again, you son of a bitch, but I'm getting up." He struggled to his feet, clutching his shoulder. "So Vorga shouldn't have picked me up anyway. I was a decoy. Nobody should have come near me. I was a shill, a lure, death-bait. Isn't that the final irony? Nomad didn't have any right to be rescued in the first place. I didn't have any right to revenge." "You still don't understand," Sheffield pounded. "They were nowhere near Nomad when they set you adrift. They were six hundred thousand miles from Nomad." "Six hundred thous -- " "Nomad was too far out of the shipping lanes. They wanted you where ships would pass. They took you six hundred thousand miles sunward. They put you through the airlock and backed off, watching you drift. Your suitlights were blinking and you were moaning for help on the microwave. Then you disappeared." "Disappeared?" "You were gone. No more lights, no more broadcast. They came back to check. You were gone without a trace. And the next thing we learned -- you got back aboard Nomad." "Impossible!" "Man, you space-jaunted!" Sheffield said savagely. "You were patched and delirious, but you space-jaunted. You space-jaunted six hundred thousand miles through the void back to the wreck of the Nomad. You did something that's never been done before. God knows how. You don't even know yourself. But we're going to find out. I'm taking you to the Satellites with me and we'll get that secret out of you if we have to tear it out." He took Foyle's throat in his powerful hand and hefted the gun in the other. "But first I want the PyrE. You'll produce it, Foyle. Don't think you won't." He lashed Foyle across the forehead with the gun. "I'll do anything to get it. Don't think I won't." He smashed Foyle again, coldly, efficiently. "If you're looking for a purge, man, you've found it!" jaunte stage at Five-Points and streaked into the main entrance of Central Intelligence's New York Office like a frightened rabbit. He shot past the outermost guard cordon, through the protective labyrinth and into the inner offices. He acquired a train of excited pursuers and found himself face to face with the more seasoned guards who had calmly jaunted to positions ahead of him and were waiting. Bunny began to shout: "Yeovil! Yeovil!" Still running, he dodged around desks, kicked over chairs, and created an incredible uproar. He continued his yelling: "Yeovil! Yeovil! Yeovil!" Just before they were about to put him out of his misery, Y'ang-Yeovil appeared. "What's all this? I gave orders that Miss Wednesbury was to have absolute quiet." "Yeovil!" Bunny shouted. "Who's that?" "Sheffield's assistant." "What? Bunny?" "Foyle!" Bunny howled. "Gully Foyle." Y'ang-Yeovil covered the fifty feet between them in exactly onepoint-six-six seconds. "What about Foyle?" "Sheffield's got him," Bunny gasped. "Sheffield? When?" "Half an hour ago." "Why didn't he bring him here?" "He abducted him. I think Sheffield's an O.S. agent..." "Why didn't you come at once?" "Sheffield jaunted with Foyle. Knocked him stiff and disappeared. I went looking. All over. Took a chance. Must have made fifty jauntes in twenty minutes..." "Amateur!" Y'ang-Yeovil exclaimed in exasperation. "Why didn't you leave that to the pros?" "Found Sheffield and Foyle." "You found them? Where?" "Old St. Pat's. Sheffield's after the-" But Y'ang-Yeovil had turned on his heel and was tearing back up the corridor, shouting: "Robin! Robin! Stop!" And then their ears were bruised by the bellow of thunder. the Will and the Idea spread, searching out, touching and tripping the delicate sub-atomic trigger of PyrE. The thought found particles, dust, smoke, vapor, motes, molecules. The Will and the Idea transformed them all. In Sicily, where Dott. Franco Torre had worked for an exhausting month attempting to unlock the secret of one slug of PyrE, the residues and the precipitates had been dumped down a drain which led to the sea. For many months, the Mediterranean currents had drifted these residues across the sea-bottom. In an instant, a hump)-backed mound of water towering fifty feet high traced the courses, northeast to Sardinia and southwest to Tripoli. A micro-second later, the surface of the Mediterranean was raised into the twisted casting of a giant earthworm that wound around the islands of Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Linosa and Malta. Some of the residues had been burned off, had gone up the chimney with smoke and vapor to drift for hundreds of miles before settling. These minute particles showed where they had finally settled in Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Greece with blinding pinpoint explosions of incredible minuteness and intensity. And some motes, still drifting in the stratosphere, revealed their presence stars. In Texas, where Prof. John Mantley had had the same baffling experience with PyrE, most of the residues had gone down the shaft of an exhausted oil well which was also used to accommodate radioactive wastes. A deep water table had absorbed much of the matter and spread it slowly over an area of some ten square miles. Ten square miles of Texas flats shook themselves into corduroy. A vast untapped deposit of natural gas at last found a vent and came shrieking up to the surface where sparks from flying stones ignited it into a roaring conical torch, two hundred feet high. on a disk of filter paper, long since discarded, forgotten, rounded up in a wastepaper drive and at last pulped into a mold for typemetal, destroyed the entire late night edition of the Glasgow Observer. A small fragment of PyrE spattered on a lab smock, long since converted into rag paper, destroyed a thank you note written by. Lady Shrapnel, and destroyed an additional ton of first class rriail in the process. A shirt cuff, inadvertently dipped into an acid solution of PyrE, abandoned along with the shirt and now worn under his mink suit by a Jack-jaunter, blasted off the wrist and hand of the Jack-jaunter in one fiery amputation. adhering to a former evaporation crystal now in use as an ashtray, kindled a fire that scorched the office of one Baker, dealer in freaks and purveyor of natural and surgical monsters. of the planet were isolated explosions, chains of explosions, traceries of fire, pinpoints .of fire, meteor flares in the sky, great craters and narrow channels plowed in the Earth, exploded in the Earth, vomited forth from the Earth. ' In Old St. Pat's, nearly a tenth of a gram of PyrE was exposed in Fourmyle's laboratory. The rest was sealed in its Inert Lead Isomer safe, protected from accidental and intentional psychokinetic ignition. The blinding blast of energy generated from that tenth of a gram blew out the walls and split the floors as though an internal earthquake had convulsed the building. The buttresses held the pillars for a split-second and then crumbled. Down came towers, spires, pillars, buttresses and roof in a thundering avalanche to hesitate above the yawning crater of the floor in a tangled, precarious equilibrium. A breath of wind, a distant vibration, and the collapse would continue until the crater was filled solid with pulverized rubble. The starlike heat of the explosion ignited a hundred fires and melted the ancient thick copper gram more of PyrE had been exposed to detonation, the heat would have been intense enough to vaporize the metal immediately. Instead, it glowed white and began to flow. It streamed off the wreckage of the crumbled roof and began searching its way downward through the jumbled stone, iron, wood and glass, like some monstrous molten mold creeping through a tangled web. Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil arrived almost simultaneously. A moment later, Robin Wednesbury appeared and then Jisbella McQueen. A dozen Intelligence operatives and six Dagenham couriers arrived along with Presteign's Jaunte Watch and the police. They formed a cordon around the blazing block, but there were very few spectators. After the shock of the New Year's Eve raid, that single explosion had frightened half New York into another wild jaunte for safety. The uproar of the fire was frightful and the massive grind of tons of wreckage in xmeasy balance was ominous. Everyone was forced to shout and yet was fearful of the vibrations. Y'ang-Yeovil bawled the news about Foyle and Sheffield into Dagenham's ear. Dagenham nodded and displayed his deadly smile. "We'll have to go in," he shouted. "Fire suits," Y'ang-Yeovil yelled back. He disappeared and reappeared with a pair of white Disaster Crew fire suits. At the sight of these, Robin and Jisbella began shouting hysterical objections. The two men ignored them, wriggled into the Inert Isomer armor and inched into the inferno. " as though a monstrous hand had chvimed a log-jam of wood, stone and metal. Through every interstice crawled tongues of molten copper, igniting wood, crumbling stone, shattering glass. Where the copper flowed, it merely glowed, but where it poured, it spattered dazzling droplets of white hot metal. Beneath the log-jam yawned a black crater where formerly the floor of the cathedral had been. The explosion had split the flagstone, revealing the cellars, subcellars and vaults deep below the building. These, too, were filled with a snarl of stones, beams, pipes, wire, the remnants of the Four Mile circus tents; all fitfully lit small fires. Then the first of the copper dripped down into the crater and illuminated it with a Dagenham pounded Y'angYeovil's shoulder to attract his attention and pointed. Halfway down the crater, in the midst of the tangle, lay the body of Regis Sheffield, drawn and quartered by the explosion. Y'ang-Yeovil pounded Dagenham's shoulder and pointed. Almost at the bottom of the crater lay Gully Foyle, and as the blazing spatter illuminated him, they saw him move. The two men at once turned and crawled out of the cathedral for a conference. "He's alive." "How's it possible?" "I can guess. Did you see the shreds of tent wadded near him? It must have been a freak explosion up at the other end of the cathedral and the tents in between cushioned Foyle. Then he dropped through the floor before anything else had a chance to hit him." "Luckily for us. We've got to get him out. He's the only man who knows where the PyrE is located." "Could it still be here -- unexploded?" are we going to get him out?" "Well, we can't work down from above." "Why not?" "One false step and the whole mess will collapse." "Did you see that copper flowing down?" "God, yes!" "Well, if we don't get him out in ten minutes, he'll be at the bottom of a pool of molten copper." "What can we do?" "I've got a long-shot." "What?" "The cellars of the old R.C.A. buildings across the street are as deep as St. Pat's." "And?" "We'll go down and try to hole through. Maybe we can pull Foyle out from the bottom." On Your By Malcolm Jameson A fascinating fast-moving adventure of a man and a beautiful girl of the present, who find themselves in a strange cruel land of the future. Transferred to a vicious world, ruled over by the cruelest of dictators, he falls in love with Cynthia (the girl from the present), but finds her cold to his attentions. The man, Winchester, is made a slave, racked with pain in the torture chambers of this strange and hideous land, this brave American plots a terrible death for the tyrannical dictator. This is the type of light-reading, fast-moving adventure you won't want to put down until finished. Galaxy Science Fiction Novel No. # dent R.C.A. buildings, abandoned and sealed up for two generations. They went down into the cellar arcades, crumbling museums of the retail stores of centuries past. They located the old elevator shafts and dropped through them into the sub-cellars filled with electric installations, heat plants and refrigeration systems. They went down into the sump cellars, waist-deep in water from the streams of prehistoric Manhattan Island, streams that still flowed beneath the streets that covered them. As they waded through the sump cellars, bearing east-northeast to bring up opposite the St. Pat's vaults, they suddenly discovered that the pitch-dark was lighted by a fiery flickering up ahead. Dagenham shouted and flung himself forward. The explosion that had opened the subcellars of St. Pat's had split the septum between its vaults and those of the R.C.A. buildings. Through a jagged rent in stone and soil, they could peer into the bottom of the inferno. Fifty feet inside was Foyle, trapped in a labyrinth of twisted beams, stones, pipe, metal and wire. He was illuminated by a roaring glow from above him and fitful flames around him. His clothes were on fire and the tattooing was livid on his face. He moved feebly, like a bewildered animal in a maze. "My God!" Y'angYeovil exclaimed. "The Burning Man!" "What?" "The horror I saw on the Spanish Stairs. Never mind that now. What can we do?" "Go in, of course." suddenly oozed down close to Foyle and splashed ten feet below him. It was followed by a second, a third, a slow, steady stream. A pool began to form. Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil sealed the faceplates of their armor and crawled through the break in the septum. After three minutes of agonized struggling, they realized that they could not get through the labyrinth to Foyle. It was locked to the outside, but not from the inside. Dagenham and Y'ang Y eovil backed up to confer. "We can't get to him," Dagenham shouted, "but he can get out." "How? He can't jaunte, obviously, or he wouldn't be here." "No, he can climb. Look. He goes left, then up, reverses, makes a turn along that beam, slides under it and pushes through that tangle of wire. The wire can't be pushed in, which is why we can't get to him, but it can push out, which is how he can get out. It's a one-way door." The pool of molten copper crept up toward Foyle. "If he doesn't get out soon, he'll be roasted alive." "We'll have to talk him out -- tell him what to do." The men began shouting: "Foyle! Foyle! Foyle!"  burning man in the maze continued to move feebly. The downpour of sizzling copper increased. "Foyle! Turn left. Can you hear me? Foyle! Turn left and climb up. You can get out if you'll listen to me. Turn left and climb up. Then -- Foyle!" "He's not listening. Foyle! Gully Foyle! Can you hear us?" "Send for Jiz. Maybe he'll listen to her." "No, get Robin. She'll telesend. He'll have to listen." "But will she do it? Save him of all people?" "She'll have to. This is bigger than hatred. It's the biggest damned thing the world's ever encountered. I'll get her." Y'angYeovil started to crawl out. Dagenham stopped him. "Wait, Yeo. Look at him. He's flickering." "Flickering?" "Look! He's -- blinking like a glowworm. Watch! Now you see him and now you don't." The figure of Foyle was appearing, disappearing and reappearing in rapid succession, like a firefly caught in a flaming net. "What's he doing now? What's he trying to do? What's happening?"    He was trying to escape. Like some seabird caught in the blazing brazier of a naked beacon fire, he was beating about in a frenzy -- a blackened, burning creature, dashing himself against the unknown. Sound came as sight to him, as light in strange patterns. He saw the sound of his shouted name in vivid rhythms: Motion came as sound to him. He heard the writhing of the flames; he heard the swirls of smoke; he heard the flickering, jeering shadows... all speaking deafeningly in strange tongues: asked. "Asha. Asha, rit-kit-dit-zit m'gid," the quick shadows answered. "Ohhh. Ahhh. Heee," the heat ripples clamored. Even the flames on his own clothes roared gibberish in his they bellowed. Color was pain to him... heat, cold, pressure; sensations of intolerable heights and plunging depths, of tremendous accelerations and crushing compressions: m Ui Touch was taste to him... the feel of wood was acrid and chalky in his mouth, metal was salt, stone tasted sour-sweet to the touch of his fingers, and the feel of glass cloyed his palate like over-rich pastry.  smelled like velvet caressing his cheek. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like blows hammering his heart, and the ionization of the PyrE explosion filled the air with ozone that smelled like water trickling ticklingly through his fingers. He was not blind, not deaf, not senseless. Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and short-circuited by the shock of the PyrE concussion. He was suffering from synesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another. So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste, and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno under Old St. Pat's; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses. Again desperate, on the ghastly verge of extinction, he abandoned all disciplines and habits of living; or, perhaps, they were stripped from him. He reverted from a conditioned product of environment and experience to an inchoate creature craving escape and survival and exercising every power it possessed. And again the miracle of two years ago took place. The undivided energy of an entire human organism, of every cell, fiber, nerve and muscle empowered that craving, and again Foyle space-jaunted. He went hurtling along the geodesical space-lines of the curving universe at the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light. His spatial velocity was so frightful that his time-axis was twisted from the vertical line drawn from the Past through Now to the Future. He went flickering along the new near-horizontal axis, this new space-time geodesic, driven by the miracle of a human mind no longer inhibited by gravity-bound concepts of the imfxjssible. Again he achieved what Helmut Grant and Enzio Dandridge and scores of other experimenters had failed to do, because his blind panic forced him to abandon the spatio-temporal inhibitions that had defeated previous attempts. He did not jaunte to Elsewhere, but to Elsewhen. But most important, the fourthdimensional awareness, the complete picture of the Arrow of Time and his position on it which is born in every man, but deeply submerged by the trivia of living, was in Foyle close to the surface. He jaunted along the space-time geodesics to Elsewheres and Elsewhens, translating "i," the square root of minm one, from an imaginary number into reality by an unreasoning act of blind imagination. He jaimted. He jaunted back through time to his past. He became the Burning Man who had inspired himself with terror and perplexity on the beach in Australia, in a quack's office in Shanghai, on the Spanish Stairs in Rome, on the Moon, in the Skoptsy Colony on Mars. He jaunted back through time, revisiting the savage battles that he himself had fought in Gully Foyle's tiger hunt for vengeance. His flaming appearances were sometimes noted, other times not. He jaunted. ing in the empty frost of space. He stood in the door to nowhere. The cold was the taste of lemons and the vacuum was a rake of talons on his skin. The Sun and the stars were a shaking ague that racked his bones. tion roared in his ears. It was a figure with its back to him, vanishing down the corridor; a figure with a copper cauldron of provisions over its shoulder; a figure darting, floating, squirming through free fall. It was Gully Foyle. sight of his motion bellowed in deafening capital letters. "Aha! Oh-ho! M'git not to kak," the flicker of light and shade answered. "Oooooooh? Soooooo?" the whirling raffle of debris in his wake murmured. The lemon taste in his mouth became unbearable. The rake of talons on his skin was tearing torture. He jaunted. He reappeared in the furnace beneath Old St. Pat's less than a second after he had disappeared from there. He was drawn, as the seabird is drawn again and again to the flames from which it is struggling to escape. He endured the roaring torture for only another moment. He jaunted. He was in the depths of Gouffre Martel. The velvet black darkness was bliss, paradise, euphoria. "Ah!" he cried in relief. "AH!" came the echo of his voice, and the sound was translated into a blinding pattern of light. The burning man winced. "Stop!" he called, blinded by the noise. StOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpStOp StOpStOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpStOpSt , OpStOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpSt A distant clatter of steps came to his eyes in soft patterns of vertical borealis streamers: c c c c c c a a a a a a t t t t t t t t t t t t # e e e e e r r r r r r T H E E M A R A S EC H U Z I Z A G OF L I G H T N I N G It was the search party from the Gouffre Martel hospital, tracking Foyle and Jisbella McQueen by geophone. The burning man disappeared, but not before he had unwittingly decoyed the searchers from the trail of the vanished fugitives. He was back under Old St. Pat's, reappearing only an instant after his last disappearance. His wild beatings into the unknown sent him stumbling up geodesic space-time lines that inevitably brought him back to the Now he was trying to escape; for in the inverted saddle-curve of spacetime, his Now was the deepest depression in the curve. He could drive himself up, up, up the geodesic lines into the past or future, but inevitably he must fall back into his own Now, like a thrown ball hurled up the sloping walls of an infinite pit, to land, hang poised for a moment, and then roll back into the depths. But still he beat into the unknown in his desperation. Again he jaunted. He was on Jervis beach on the Australian coast. The motion of the surf was The churning of the surf blinded him with the lights of batteries of footlights: #j( ije  #e )( ifc ife  !c Gully Foyle and Robin Wednesbury stood before him. The body of a man lay on the sand, which felt like vinegar on the burning man's tongue. The wind brushing his fact tasted like brown paper. ' Foyle opened his mouth and exclaimed. The sound came out in burning, babbling, burbling star-bubbles. the motion blared. The deafened burning man jaunted. He was in the office of Dr. Sergei Orel in Shanghai. Foyle was again before him, speaking in light patterns: He flickered back to the agony of Old St. Pat's and jaunted again. X X X X The burning man jaunted. It was cold again, with the taste of lemons, and vacuum raked his skin with imspeakable talons. He was peering in pain through the porthole of a silvery yawl. The jagged mountains of the Moon towered in the background. Through the porthole, he could see the jangling racket of bloodpumps and oxygen-pumps and hear the uproar of the motion Gully Foyle made toward him. The clawing of the vacuum caught his throat in an agonizing grip. The geodesic lines of spacetime rolled him back to Now under Old St. Pat's, where less than two seconds had elapsed since he first began his frenzied struggle. Once more, like a burning spear, he hurled himself into the unknown. He was in the Skoptsy Catacomb on Mars. The white slug that was Lindsey Joyce was writhing in shrill terror before him. "NO! NO! NO!" her motion The burning man opened his tiger mouth and laughed. "She hurts," he said. The sound of his voice burned his eyes with flaming gravel. s s s H H H E E E H H H U U U R R R T T T S H H H E E E H H H U U U R R R T T T S S S "Who are you?" Foyle whispered. uuuuuuuuuuuuu uuuuu The burning man winced. "Too bright," he said. "Less light." Foyle took a step forward. motion roared. The burning man clapped his hands over his ears in agony. "Too loud! Don't move so loud!" The writhing Skoptsy's motion was still screaming, beseeching; The burning man laughed again. She was mute to normal men, but to his freak crossed senses, her meaning was clear. "Listen to her. She's screaming. Begging. She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to be hurt. Listen to her." "She's telling who gave the order. Can't you hear? Listen with your eyes. She says Olivia." The checkerboard glitter of Foyle's question was too much for him. The Burning Man interpreted the Skoptsy's agony again. "She says Olivia. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign." He jaunted. F oyle fell back into the pit under Old St. Pat's and suddenly his confusion and despair told him he was dead. This was the finish of Gully Foyle. This was eternity and hell was real. What he had seen was the past passing before his crumbling senses in the final moment of death. What he was enduring, he must endure through all time. He was dead. He knew he was dead. He refused to submit to eternity. He beat again into the unknown. The burning man jaunted. He was in a scintillating mist a snowflake cluster of shower of liquid diamonds. There was the touch of butterfly wings on his skin was the taste of a strand of cool pearls in his mouth His crossed kaleidoscopic senses could not tell him where he was, but he knew he wanted to remain in this Nowhere forever. "Hello, Gully." "Who's that?" "This is Robin." "Robin?" "Robin Wednesbury that was." "That was?" "Robin Yeovil that is." "I don't understand. Am I dead?" "No, Gully." "Where am I?" "A long, long way from Old St. Pat's." "But where?" "I can't take the time to explain, Gully. Yotve only got a tew moments here." "Why?" "Because you haven't learned how to jaunte through space-time yet. You've got to go back and learn." "But I do know. I must know. Sheffield said I space-jaunted to Nomad -- six hundred thousand miles." "That was an accident then. Gully, and yotll do it again -- after you teach yourself. But you're not doing it now. You don't know how to hold on yet -- how to turn any Now into reality. You'll tumble back into Old St. Pat's in a moment." "Robin, I've just remembered. I have bad news for you." " know, Gully." "Your mother and sisters are dead." "I've known for a long time, Gully." "How long?" "For thirty years." "That's impossible." "No, it isn't. This is a long, long way irom Old St. Pafs. I've been waiting to tell you how to save your sell irom the fire. Gully. Will you listen?" "I'm not dead?" "No." "I'll listen." "Your senses are all confused. It'll pass soon, but I won't give the directions in left and right or up and down. I'll tell you what you can understand now." "Why are you helping me -- after what I've done .to you?" "That's all forgiven and forgotten, Gully. Now listen to me. When you get back to Old St. Pafs, turn around until yotfre facing the loudest shadows. Got that?" "Yes." "Go toward the noise until you feel a deep prickling on your skin. Then stop." "Then stop." "Make a half turn into compression and a feeling of falling. Follow that." "Follow that." "Yot#I pass through a solid sheet of light and come to the taste of quimne. Thafs really a mass of wire. Push straight through the quinine until you see something that sounds like triphammers. Yot#I be safe." "How do you know all this, Robin?" "I've been briefed by an expert, Gully." There was the sensation of laughter. "Yot#I be falling back into the past any moment now. Peter and Saul are here. They say au revoir and good luck. And Jiz Dagenham, too. Good luck. Gully dear." "The past? This is the future?" "Yes, Gully." "Am I here? Is Olivia -- ?" And then he was tumbling down, down, down the space-time lines back into the dreadful pit of Now. XT IS senses imcrossed in the ivory-and-gold Star Chamber of Castle Presteign. Sight became sight and he saw the high mirrors and stained-glass windows; the gold-tooled library with android librarian on library ladder. Sound became sound and he heard the android secretary tapping the manual bead-recorder at the Louis Quinze desk. Taste became taste as he sipped the cognac that the robot bartender handed him. He knew he was at bay, faced with the decision of his life. He ignored his enemies and examined the perpetual friendly smile carved in the robot face of the bartender. "Thank you," Foyle said. "My pleasure, sir," the robot replied and awaited its next cue. "Nice day," Foyle remarked. "Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot beamed. "Awful day," Foyle said. "Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot repeated. "Day," Foyle said. "Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot said again. Foyle turned to the others. "That's me," he said, motioning to the robot. "That's all of us. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response, mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves. So -- here I am, waiting to respond. Press the buttons and I'll jump." He aped the canned voice of the robot. "My pleasure to serve, sir." Suddenly his tone lashed them. "What do you want?" They stirred with uneasy purpose. Foyle was burned, beaten, chastened -- and yet he was taking control of all of them. "We'll stipulate the threats," Foyle said. "I'm to be hanged, ripped, shredded, tortured in hell if I don't -- if I don't what? What do you want?" "I want my property," Presteign said, smiling coldly. "Eighteen and some odd pounds of PyrE. Yes. What do you offer?" "I make no offer, sir. I demand what is mine." Y'ang-Yeovil and Dagenham began to speak. Foyle silenced them. "One button at a time, gentlemen. Presteign is trying to make me jump at present." He turned to Presteign. "Press harder, blood and money, or find another button. Who are you to make demands now?" Presteign tightened his lips. "The law-" "What? Threats?" Foyle laughed. "Am I to be frightened into anything? Don't be an imbecile. Speak to me the way you did New Year's Eve, Presteign -- without mercy, without forgiveness, without hypocrisy." breath and ceased to smile. "I offer you power," he said. "Adoption as my heir, partnership in Presteign Enterprises, the chieftainship of clan and sept. Together we can own the world -- the Solar System." "With PyrE?" "Yes." "Your proposal is noted and declined. Will you offer your daughter?" "Olivia?" Presteign choked and clenched his fists. "Yes, Olivia. Where is she?" "You scum!" Presteign cried. "Filth! Common thief! You dare to-" 'Will you offer your daughter for the PyrE?" "Yes," Presteign answered, barely audible. Foyle turned to Dagenham. "Press your button, death's-head." "If the discussion's to be conducted on this level -- " Dagenham rapped out. "It is. Without mercy, without forgiveness, without hypocrisy. What do you offer?" "Glory." "Ah?" "We can't offer money or power. We can offer honor. Gully Foyle, the man who saved the Inner Planets from annihilation. We can offer security. We'll wipe out your criminal record, give you an honored name, guarantee a niche in the hall of fame." "No," Jisbella McQueen cut in sharply. "Don't accept. If you want to be a savior, destroy the secret. Don't give PyrE to anyone." "What is PyrE?" "Quiet!" Dagenham snapped. "It's a thermo-nuclear explosive that's detonated by thought alone -- by psychokinesis," Jisbella said. "What thought?" "The desire of anyone to detonate it, directed at it. That brings it to critical mass if it's not insulated by Inert Lead Isomer." "I told you to be quiet," Dagenham growled. "If we're all to have a chance at him, I want mine." "This is bigger than idealism." "Nothing's bigger than idealism." "Foyle's secret is," Y'ang-Yeovil murmured. "I know how relatively unimportant PyrE is just now." He smiled at Foyle. "Sheffield's law assistant overheard part of your little discussion in Old St. Pat's. We know about the spacej aunting." "Space jaunting!" Dagenham exclaimed. "Impossible! You don't mean it!" "I do mean it. Foyle's demonstrated that space-j aunting is not impossible. He jaunted six hundred thousand miles from an O.S. raider to the wreck of the Nomad. As I said, this is far bigger than PyrE. I should like to discuss that matter first." "Everyone's been telling what they want," Robin Wednesbury said slowly. "What do you want. Gully Foyle?" "Thank you," Foyle answered. "I want to be punished." "What?" "I want to be purged," he said in a suffocated voice. The stigmata began to appear on his bandaged face. "I want to pay for what I've done and settle the account. I want to go back to Gouffre Martel. I want a lobo, if I deserve it -- and I know I do. I want -- " "You want escape," Dagenham interrupted. "There's no escape." "I want release!" "Out of the question," Y'angYeovil said. "There's too much of value locked up in your head to be lost by lobotomy." "We're beyond childish things like crime and punishment," Dagenham added. "No," Robin objected. "There must always be sin and forgiveness. We're never beyond that." "Profit and loss, sin and forgiveness, idealism and realism." Foyle smiled. "You're all so sure, so simple, so single-minded. I'm the only one in doubt. Let's see how sure you really are. You'll give up Olivia, Presteign? To me, yes? Will you give her up to the law? She's a killer." Presteign tried to rise, and then fell back in his chair. "There must be forgiveness, Robin? Will you forgive Olivia Presteign? She murdered your mother and sisters." Robin turned ashen. Y'angYeovil tried to protest. "The Outer Satellites don't have PyrE, Yeovil. Sheffield revealed that. Would you use it on them anyway? Will you turn my name into common anathema -- like Lynch and Boycott?" Foyle turned to Jisbella. "Will your idealism take you back to Gouffre Martel to serve out your sentence? And you, Dagenham, Let her go?" and watched the confusion for a moment, bitter and constrained. "This decision is so simple, isn't it? Am I to respect Presteign's property rights? The welfare of the planets? Jisbella's ideals? Dagenham's realism? Robin's conscience? Press the button and watch the robot jump. But I'm not a robot. I'm a freak of the Universe -- a thinking animal -- and I'm trying to think my way through this morass. Am I to turn PyrE over to the world and let it destroy itself? Am I to teach the world how to space-jaunte and let us spread our freak show from galaxy to galaxy through all the Universe? What's the answer?" The bartender robot hurled its mixing glass across the room with a resounding crash. In the amazed silence that followed, Dagenham grunted: "Damn! My radioactivit#s disrupted your servants again, Presteign." "The answer is yes," the robot said, quite distinctly. "What?" Foyle asked, taken aback. "The answer to your question is yes." "Thank you," Foyle said. "My pleasure, sir," the robot responded. "A man is a member of society first and an individual second. You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not." "Completely haywire," Dagenham said impatiently. "Switch it off, Presteign." "Wait," Foyle commanded. He looked at the beaming grin engraved in the steel robot face. "But society can be so stupid, so confused." "Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society." "To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?" "Because you're alive, sir. You might as well ask: why is life? Don't ask about it. Live it." "Quite mad," Dagenham snapped. "But fascinating," Y'ang-Yeovil murmured. "There's got to be more to life than just living," Foyle said to the robot. "Then find it for yourself, sir. Don't ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts." "Why can't we all move forward together?" "Because you're all different. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will eventually follow." "Who leads?" "The men who must -- driven men, compelled men." "Freak men." "You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been. Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory." "Thank you very much." "My pleasure, sir." "You've saved the day." "Always a lovely day somewhere, sir," the robot beamed. Then it fizzed, jangled and collapsed. "That thing's right and you're wrong. Who are we, any of us, to make a decision for mankind? Let mankind know and decide for itself. Come to Old St. Pat's." He jaunted; they followed. The square block was still cordoned and by now an enormous crowd had gathered. So many of the rash and curious were jaunting into the smoking ruins that the police had set up a protective induction field to keep them out. Even so, urchins, curio-seekers and irresponsibles attempted to jaunte into the wreckage, only to be burned by the induction field and depart, squawking. At a signal from Y'ang-Yeovil, the field was turned off. Foyle went through the hot rubble to the east wall of the cathedral, which stood to a height of fifteen feet. He felt the smoking stones, pressed and levered. There came a grinding grumble and a threebyfive-foot section jarred open and then stuck. Foyle gripped it and pulled. The section trembled; then the roasted hinges collapsed and the stone panel crumbled. Two centuries before, when organized religion had been abolished and orthodox worshipers of all faiths had been driven underground, some devout souls had constructed this secret niche in Old St. Pat's and turned it into an altar. The gold of the crucifix still nal faith. At the foot of the cross rested a small black box of Inert Lead Isomer. "Is this a sign?" Foyle panted. "Is this the answer I want?" He snatched the heavy safe before any could seize it. He jaunted a hundred yards to the remnants of the cathedral steps facing Fifth Avenue. There he opened the safe in full view of the gaping crowds. A shout of consternation went up from the Intelligence crews who knew its contents. "Foyle!" Dagenham cried. "For God's sake, Foyle!" Y'angYeovil begged. Foyle withdrew a slug of PyrE, the color of iodine crystals, the size of a cigarette -- one pound of trans-Plutonian isotopes in solid solution. "PyrE!" he roared to the mob. "Take it! Keep it. It's your future. PyrE!" He hurled the slug into the crowd and yelled over his shoulder: "SanFran. Russian Hill stage." He jaunted St. Louis-Denver to San Francisco, arriving at the Russian Hill stage, where it was four in the afternoon and the streets were bustling with lateshopper jaunters. "PyrE!" Foyle bellowed. His devil-face glowed blood red. He was an appalling sight. "PyrE. It's danger. It's death. It's yours. Make them tell you what it is. Nome!" he called to his pursuit as it arrived, and jaunted. and the lumberjacks jaunting down from the sawmills for their beefsteak and beer were startled by the tiger-faced man who hurled a one-pound slug of iodinecolored alloy into their midst and shouted in the gutter tongue: "PyrE! You hear me, man? You listen a me, you. PyrE is filthy death for us. All a us! Grab no guesses, you. Make 'em tell you about PyrE, is all! You hear mo?" To Dagenham, Y'ang-Yeovil and others jaunting in after him, as always, seconds too late, he shouted: "Tokyo. Imperial stage!" He disappeared a split-second before their shots reached him. It was nine o'clock of a crisp, winy morning in Tokyo and the around the Imperial stage alongside the carp ponds was paralyzed by a tiger-faced Samurai who appeared and hurled a slug of curious metal and unforgettable warnings and admonitions at them. Foyle continued to Bangkok where it was pouring rain, and Delhi where a monsoon raged -- always pursued in his mad-dog course. In Baghdad, it was three in the morning and the nightclub crowd and pub-crawlers who stayed a perpetual half hour ahead of closing time around the world cheered him alcoholically. In Paris and again in London, it was midnight and the mobs on the Champs Elysees and in Piccadilly Circus were galvanized by Foyle's appearance and passionate exhortation. Having led his pursuers threequarters of the way around the world in fifty minutes, Foyle permitted them to overtake him in London. He let them kno.ck him arms, count the remaining slugs of PyrE and slam the safe shut. "There's enough left for a war. Plenty left for destruction... annihilation... if you dare." Foyle was laughing and sobbing for defense, but not one cent for survival." "D'you realize what you've done, you damned killer?" Dagenham shouted. "I know what I've done." "Nine pounds of PyrE scattered around the world! One thought and we'll -- How can we get it back without telling them the truth? Yeo, keep that crowd back. Don't let them hear this." "Impossible." "Then let's jaunte." "No," Foyle roared. "Let them hear this. Let them hear everything."  "You're insane, man. You've handed a loaded gun to children." "Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?" "What are you talking about?" "Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open." ended the last Star Chamber Conference in the world. No more secrets from now on. No more telling the children what's best for them to know. Let 'em all grow up. It's about time." "Christ, he is insane." "Am I? I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and dying. They've been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us -- compulsive men -- tiger men who can't help lashing the world before them. We're all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?" "We're not saddled," Y"angYeovil said quietly. "We're forced to seize the responsibility that the average man shirks." "Then let him stop shirking it. Let him stop tossing his duty and guilt onto the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it. Are we to be scapegoats for the world forever?" "Damn you!" Dagenham raged. "Don't you realize that you can't trust people? They don't know enough for their own good." "Then let them learn or die. We're all in this together. Let's live together or die together." "D'you want to die because of their ignorance? You've got to figure out how we can get those slugs back without blowing everything wide open." "No. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they're kicked awake the way I was." Foyle shook himself and abruptly jaunted to the bronze head of Eros, fifty feet above the counter of Piccadilly Circus. He perched precariously and bawled: "Listen a me, all you! Listen, man! Gonna sermonize, me. Dig this, you!" He was answered with a roar. "You pigs, yoiL You goof like pigs, is all. You got the most in you and you use the least. You and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you -- " He was jeered. He continued with the hysterical passion of the possessed. "Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me. Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars." He disappeared.  desic lines of space-time to an Elsewhere and an Elsewhen. He arrived in chaos. He hung in a precarious para-Now for a moment and then tumbled back into chaos. "It can be done," he thought. "It must be done." He jaunted again, a burning spear flung from unknown into unknown, and again he tumbled back into a chaos of para-space and para-time. He was lost in Nowhere. "I believe," he thought. "I have faith." He jaimted again and failed again. "Faith in what?" he asked himself, adrift in limbo. "Faith in faith," he answered himself. "It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief." He jaunted for the last time to believe transformed the paraNow for his random destination into a real...    blue-white, five hundred and forty light-years from Earth, ten thousand times more luminous than the Sun, a cauldron of energy circled by thirty-seven massive planets... Foyle hung, freezing and suffocating in space, face to face with the incredible destiny in which he believed, but which was still inconceivable. He hung in space for a blinding moment, as helpless, as amazed, and yet as inevitable as the first gilled creature to come out of the sea and hang gulping on a primeval beach in the dawn-history of life on Elarth. He space-jaunted, turning paraNow into...  #c star twenty-six light-years from Earth, burning bluer than Rigel, planetless, but circled by swarms of blazing comets whose gaseous tails scintillated across the blueblack firmament...    And again he turned now into Sun, gigantic, thimderous in the silent wastes of space at last invaded by a creature that once was gilled. The creature hung gulping on the beach of the Universe, nearer death than life, nearer the future than the past, ten leagues beyond the wide world's end. It wondered at the masses of dust, meteors and motes that girdled Canopus in a broad flat ring like the rings of Saturn and of the breadth of Saturn's orbit... #c #c c monstrous red star of a pair of stars whose sixteen planets wove high velocity ellipses around their gyrating parents. He was hurling himself through space-time with growing assurance... #c #c #c paired like Aldebaran, two hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, circled by two hundred and fifty planetoids of the size of Mercury, of the climate of Eden... #c #c #c He was drawn to the womb of his birth. He returned to the Nomad, now welded into the mass of the Sargasso Asteroid, home of the lost Scientific People who scavenged the spaceways between Mars and Jupiter -- home of J  seph, who had tattooed Foyle's tiger face and mated him to M # ira. He was back aboard Nomad. Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination. I HE girl, M # ira, found him in his tool locker aboard Nomad, curled in a tight fetal ball, his face hollow, his eyes burning with divine revelation. Although the asteroid had long since been repaired and made airtight, Foyle still went through the motions of the perilous existence that had given birth to him years before. But now he slept and meditated, digesting and encompassing the magnificence he had learned. He awoke from reverie to trance and drifted out of the locker, passing M # ira with blind eyes, brushing past the awed girl who stepped aside and sank to her knees. He wandered through the empty passages and returned to the womb of the locker. He curled up again and was lost. She touched him once. He made no move. She spoke the name that had been emblazoned on his face. He made no answer. She turned and fled to the interior of the asteroid, to the holy of holies in which J  seph reigned. "My husband has returned to us," M # ira said. "Your husband?" "The god-man who almost destroyed us." J S seph's face darkened with anger. "Where is he? Show me!" "You will not hurt him?" "All debts must be paid. Show me. J  seph followed her to the locker aboard Nomad and gazed intently at Foyle. The anger in his face was replaced by wonder. He touched Foyle and spoke to him. There was still no response. "You cannot pimish him," M # ira said. "He is dying." "No," J # seph answered quietly. "He is dreaming. I, a priest, know these dreams. Pre'sently he will awaken and read to us, his people, his thoughts." "And then you will punish him." "He has found it already in himself," J  seph said. He settled down outside the locker. The girl, M # ira, ran up the twisted corridors and returned moments later with a silver basin of warm water and a silver tray of food. She bathed Foyle gently and set the tray before him as an offering. Then she settled down alongside J  seph... alongside the world... prepared to await the awakening.      Reading one of this towering pair of science fiction novels as Alfred Bester. in its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price... and we pay the postage ! acting right now. Send your # immediately to... Please #I Hudson St. the demolished man rush me New York  copies of #, The Original Edition Complete! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Name Address City State I Enclose (Continued from page #) long before the newsstands get their copies -- from a week to ten days before. Inside art: We have a problem here. Rather than settle for routine hack art, we take two long chances -- depend on costly artists who work for us because they like science fiction and particularly Galaxy, which means we have to bypass them when they are busy with expensive assignments; and break in bright new talent -- who then use our illustrations as samples, snag lush advertising and slick magazine accounts, which pleases us because we're happy for them and because our judgment is confirmed, but they swiftly move out of our price range. Sometimes it seems a shame that indenture was ever made illegal. Stories: No complaints whatever -- the manuscripts are coming in wonderfully well and we have enough fine issues lined up to make # stand out in a long succession of outstanding years. Best of all, a number of writers who went through dishearteningly long dry spells have finally come roaring back into full production. You've already seen some of their work. You'll be seeing a good deal more. And new writers keep showing up -- good-sized solid talent buds, waiting to burst into ripe richness when hot appreciation is added to their checks. They get a lot from us; you can supply more, for Galaxy is one magazine that forwards mail from readers to authors. Nothing lubricates an author's typewriter better than a note of appreciation from you. Foreign editions: We have far more than any of our competitors anywhere, making Galaxy the most widely read science fiction magazine in the world. Of course we'de like to have an edition on each planet in the Solar System, but there might be less of a wait if we cover Earth first. Maybe not -- Galaxy is decidely not required, or even permissible, reading in the dictatorships. We like it that way. 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You would be surprised at the amount of money I've made by knowing that the earliest use of vitamin therapy was the all-carrot diet (very popular in the Middle Ages), that oxy-acetylene torches burn under water, that although the Aztecs built a network of roads thousands of miles long, no form of the wheel was ever used in the New World before the white man came, and the like. But I still have numerous items that just would not fit into articles or fiction. For example, the lungrcancer scare hit Japan as hard as it did the rest of the world. The yen value dropped drastically... but worried researchers found that the total sales of cigarettes remained the same. Smokers, for some still undiscovered reason, had switched to cheaper brands. Did they figure that if they were going to get lung cancer, they might as well as get cheap ones? Another instance of ill logic was Dickens' personal use of statistics. He refused, one year, to travel because it was Christmas and the annual quota of death by railroad accident wasn't filled. There were two disastrous financial ventures in China before WW II: Chrysler, whioh created the astonishingly ugly Airflow, sold none there -- the Chinese regard the turtle as evil and said the Airflow looked like one. Darned if it didn't. American insurance companies, introducing insurance to China for the first time, did a prodigious amount of business -- until their buildings were stoned and burned. The beneficiaries were outraged because the insured had taken out life insurance and died just the same. Right after WW I, smart operaof czarist rubles. A con, of course, because even if monarchy had been restored, the money would instantly have been repudiated. ( Continued on page #) Reading one of this towering pair of science fiction novels as Alfred Bester. in its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price... and we pay the postage ! acting right now. Send your # immediately to... Please rush me  copies of Name #I Hudson St. New York #, The Original Edition -- Complete! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yourt For Only #! Address City State I Enclose I H IS name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution -- better known to its inmates as the Jug -- and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to reach his captaincy. And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in. He demanded: "Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?" The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block guard, Sodaro, growled wamingly: "Watch it, auntie!" O'Leary shook his head. "Let her talk, Sodaro." It said in the Civil Service Guide to Prison Administration: "Detainees will be permitted to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings." And O'Leary was a man who lived by the book. My Lady Greensieeves This guard smelled trouble and it could be counted on to come -- for a nose for trouble was one of the many talents bred here! She burst out: "I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and told them I refused to mop." The block guard guffawed. "Wipe talk -- that's what she was telling you to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is -- " "Shut up, Sodaro." his pencil and looked at the girl. She was attractive and young -- not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for him to judge their cases. He said patiently: "Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time -- " "Hey, Cap'n, wait!" Sodaro was looking alarmed. "This isn't a first offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in the mess hall." He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. "The block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench, and she claimed the same business -- said she didn't understand when the other one asked her to move along." He added virtuously: "The guard warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure." Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: "I don't care. I don't care!" O'Leary stopped her. "That's enough! Three days in Block O!" It was the only thing to do -- for her own sake as much as for his. He had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted to say "sir" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was clearly the next step for her. All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet to Sodaro and said absently: "Too bad a kid like her has to be here. What's she in for?" "You didn't know, Cap'n?" Sodaro leered. "She's in for conspiracy to violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her, Cap'n. She's a figgerlover!" Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked "Civil Service." But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the smell from his nose. What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage -- decent Civil Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and look what she had made of it. The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment that clans formed, specialization began -- the hunters using the weapons made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame. Civilization merely increased the extent of specialization. From the born mechanic and the man with the gift of gab, society evolved to the point of smaller contact and less communication between the specializations, until now they could understand each other on only the most basic physical necessities -- and not even always then. But this was desirable, for the more specialists, the higher the degree of civilization. The ultimate should be the complete segregation of each specialization -- social and genetic measures to make them breed true, because the unspecialized man is an uncivilized man, or at any rate he does not advance civilization. And letting the specializations mix would produce genetic undesirables: clerk-laborer or Professional-GI misfits, for example, being only half specialized, would be good at no specialization. And the basis of this specialization society was : "The aptitude groups are the true races of mankind." Putting it into law was only the legal enforcement of a demonstrable fact. "Evening, Cap'n." A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and touched his cap as O'Leary passed by. "Evening." part of his mind that always noted those things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to sweep -- the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they didn't. There wasn't anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a perfectly good civil-service position -- better than post-office clerk, not as good as Congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He was proud of it. It was right that he should be proud of it. He was civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to do a good, clean civil-service job. If he had happened to be bom a fig -- a clerk, he corrected himself -- if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been proud of that, too. There wasn't anything wrong with being a clerk -- or a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer, for that matter. Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe, but they had a -- well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a touch of envy how comfortable it must be to be a wipe -- a laborer. No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and loaf, work and loaf. Of course, he wouldn't really want that kind of life, because he was Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that weren't meant to be -- "Evening, Cap'n." He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate. "Evening, Conan," he said. Conan, now -- he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the cars going -- and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place. So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers? II sleeves -- sometimes they are called by different names. Old Marquette called it "the canary;" Louisiana State called it "the red hats;" elsewhere it was called "the hole," "the snake pit," "the Klondike." When you're in it, you don't much care what it is called; it is a place for punishment. And punishment is what you get. Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And like any other community, it had its leading citizens... two of them. Their names were Sauer and Flock. Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor below, when she heard the yelling. "Owoo-o-o," screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and "Yow-w-w!" shrieked Flock at the other. The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck guard. The outside guard looked impassively back -- after all, he was on the outside. The inside guard muttered: "Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves." The outside guard shrugged. "Detail, halt!" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the head of the stairs. "Here they are," Sodaro told them. "Take good care of 'em, will you? Especially the lady -- she's going to like it here, because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her company." He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O guards. The outside guard said sourly: "A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all riled up." "Let them in," the inside guard told him. "The others are riled up already." Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you could ignore the prisoners -- they simply could not move fast enough, against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all the time -- only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's restraining garment removed. Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate -- and fell flat on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was like walking through molasses. The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. "Take it easy, auntie. Come on, get in your cell." He steered her in the right direction and pointed to a greensleeved strait jacket on the cell cot. "Put that on. Being as you're a lady, we won't tie it up, but the rules say you got to wear it and the rules -- Hey. She's crying!" He shook his head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry in the Greensleeves. However, he was wrong. SueAnn's shoulders were shaking, but not from tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge to retch.  are called prison wolves. They were laborers -- "wipes," for short -- or, at any rate, they had been once. They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big, grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe fivefooter with the build of a water moccasin -- and the sad, stupid eyes of a calf. Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. "Hey, Flock!" "What do you want, Sauer?" called Flock from his own cell. "We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so as not to disturb the lady!" He screeched with howling, maniacal laughter. "Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble, Flock!" "Oh, you think so?" shrieked Flock. "Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that, Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!" The howling started all over again. The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. "Say, you want to take a turn in here for a while?" "Uh-uh." The outside guard shook his head. "You're yellow," the inside guard said moodily. "Ah, I don't know why I don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat your head off!" "Ee-ee-ee!" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. "I'm scared!" Then he grinned at the guard, all but his water moccasin eyes. "Don't you know you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?" "Shut up" yelled the inside guard. Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting under her skin. They weren't even -- even human, she told herself miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the satisfaction of hearing her -- they were animals! Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was good that Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious system -- But did they have to scream so? The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless! It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless, because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very long. Ill O'Leary to the warden. "Trouble? Trouble?" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his little round eyes looked terrified -- as perhaps they should have. Warden Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the last decent job he would have in his life. "Trouble? What trouble?" O'Leary shrugged. "Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard." The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: "O'Leary, what did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for." "You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafgn was a professional on the outside -- an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things." O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that it didn't smell right? "For instance -- Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's a pretty good old girl -- that's why she's the block orderly. She's a lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women. But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now Mathias wouldn't -- " The warden raised his hand. "Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about that kind of stuff." He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the scalding heat. He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured. "O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is just as important as my job," he said piously. "Everybody's job is just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to our own jobs. We don't want to try to pass." O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was that for the warden to talk to him? "Excuse the expression, O'Leary," the warden said anxiously. "I mean, after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?" He was a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. "You know you don't want to worry about my end of running the prison. And I don't want to worry about yours. You see?" And he folded his hands and smiled like a civilservice Buddha. temper. "Warden, I'm telling you that there's trouble coming up. I smell the signs." "Handle it, then!" snapped the warden, irritated at last. "But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose -- " "It isn't," the warden said positively. "Don't borrow trouble with all your supposing, O'Leary." He sipped the remains of his coffee, made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into it this time. He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect. "Well, then," he said at last. "You just remember what I've told you tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the -- ' Oh, curse the thing." His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably. That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary; they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge. "Hello," barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. "What the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm -- What? You did what? You're going to He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror. Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like clamshells in a steamer. "O'Leary," he said faintly, "my mistake." And he hung up -- more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his fingers. The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O. Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good. Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the hard-timers of the Greensleeves. His name was Flock. He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him, thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the face of an agonized man. The outside guard bellowed: "Okay, okay. Take ten!" Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment. "Rest period" it was calledin the rule book. The inmates had a less lovely term for it. mates jumped to their feet. Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat bed -- nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped but didn't cry out. Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed the backs of her thighs gingerly -- and slowly, slowly, for the eddy currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance. The guard peered genially into her cell. "You're okay, auntie." She proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds. He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was grateful. At least she didn't have to live quite like a fig -- like an underprivileged clerk, she told herself, consciencestricken. Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: "What the hell's is the matter with you?" He opened the door of the cell with an asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove. Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over. The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe. Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: "Cramps. I-I-" "Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut." The guard lumbered around Flock to the drawstrings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in here, he told himself -- not for the first time. And imagine, some people didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning. Almost like meat scorching. It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability to make the rounds in two minutes, every time. Every time but this. For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close. The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was Flock -- astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there was something that glinted and smoked. "All right," croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut with pain. But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining, smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though it had been made out of a bedspring, ripped loose from its frame God knows how, hidden inside the green-sleeved jacket God knows how -- filed, filed to sharpness over endless hours. No wonder Flock moaned -- the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid. "All right," whispered Flock, "just walk out the door and you won't get hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell him not to, you hear?" He was nearly fainting with the pain. But he hadn't let go. He didn't let go. And he didn't stop. IV the warden -- Flock with his eyes still streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing the two bound deck guards. Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. "Hey, Warden!" he said, and the voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and hating. "Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt himself real bad and he needs a doctor." He gestured playfully at the guards with the shiv. "I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?" And he snapped the connection. O'Leary said: "Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!" The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated, and picked up the longdistance phone. He said sadly to the prison operator: "Get me the governor -- fast." Riot! The word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots. It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority with his manager and their wives -- and just when he was holding the Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole. It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a Red Alert that was real. It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug. Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved. A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in every limb and class. hundreds of thousands of public places, the city-state's people shook under the impact of the news from the prison. For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together. Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids couldn't get up yet -- it was the middle of the night. And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the briefing area to hear. They caught the words from a distance -- not quite correctly. "Riot!" gasped an aircraftswoman first-class, mother of three. "The wipes! I told Charlie they'd get out of hand and -- Alys, we aren't safe. You know how they are about GI women! I'm going right home and get a club and stand right by the door and -- " "Club!" snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two children querulously awake in her nursery at home. "What in God's name is the use of a club? You can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head. You'd better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun -- you'll need it before this night is over." But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such levels on suchand-such flight circuits around the prison. The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off... and they were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below. They were ready for the breakout. But there wasn't any breakout. The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The helicopters hung on -- still ready, still waiting. The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again. They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed. The prison below them was washed with light -- from the guard posts on the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of the guard squadrons surrounding the walls. North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of IB reclaimed land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to window; and there were crowds in the bright streets. "The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!" a helicopter bombardier yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the whirling blades. "Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be right in the middle of it!" He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it -- for every man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared. No mixing. That was the prescription that kept the citystate alive. There's no harm in a family fight -- and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties than blood or skin? But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever known. But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to come. r T , HE Jug itself was coming to a boil. Honor Block A, relaxed and easy at the end of another day, found itself shaken alert by strange goings-on. First there was the whir and roar of the Air Force overhead. T rouble. Then there was the sudden arrival of extra guards, doubling the normal complement -- day-shift guards, summoned away from their comfortable civil-service homes at some urgent call. Trouble lor sure. Honor Block A wasn't used to trouble. A Block was as far from the Greensleeves of O Block as you could get and still be in the Jug. Honor Block A belonged to the prison's halfbreeds -- the honor prisoners, the trusties who did guards' work because there weren't enough guards to go around. They weren't Apaches or Piutes; they were camp-following Injuns who had sold out for the white man's firewater. The price of their service was privilege -- many privileges. Item: TV sets in every cell. Item : Hobby tools, to make gadgets for the visitor trade -- the only way an inmate could earn an honest dollar. Item: In consequence, an exact knowledge of everything the outside world knew and put on its TV screens (including the grim, alarming reports of "trouble at Estates-General"), and the capacity to convert their "hobby tools" to -- other uses. An honor prisoner named Wilmer Lafon was watching the TV screen with an expression of rage and despair. Lafon was a credit to the Jug -- he was a showpiece for visitors. Prison rules provided for prisoner training -- it was a matter of "rehabilitation." Prisoner rehabilitation is a joke and a centuries-old one at that; but it had its serious uses, and one of them was to keep the prisoners busy. It didn't much matter at what. Lafon, for instance, was being "rehabilitated" by studying architecture. The guards made a point of bringing inspection delegations to his cell to show him off. There were his walls, covered with pinups -- but not of women. The pictures were sketches Lafon had drawn himself; they were of buildings, highways, dams and bridges; they were splendidly conceived and immaculately executed. "Looka that!" the guards would rumble to their guests. "There isn't an architect on the outside as good as this boy! What do you say, Wilmer? Tell the gentlemen -- how long you been taking these correspondence courses in architecture? Six years! Ever since he came to the Jug." And Lafon would grin and bob his head, and the delegation would go, with the guards saying something like: "Believe me, that Wilmer could design a whole skyscraper -- and it wouldn't fall down, either!" And they were perfectly, provably right. Not only could Inmate Lafon design a skyscraper, but he had already done so. More than a dozen of them. And none had fallen down. Of course, that was more than six years back, before he was convicted and sent to the Jug. He would never design another. Or if he did, it would never be built. For the plain fact of the matter was that the Jug's rehabilitation courses were like rehabilitation in every prison since crime and punishment began. They kept the inmates busy. They made a show of purpose for an institution that had never had a purpose beyond punishment. And that was all. For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentence. How does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills paid by the state? Lafon's punishment was that he, as an architect, was through. Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality. Chopchop, and a man's reputation comes off; chop-chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop, and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows. The jail itself isn't the punishment. The jail is only the shaman's hatchet that performs the amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail worked -- if it were meant to work -- it would be the end of jails. Rehabilitation? Rehabilitation for what? " off the television set and silently pounded his fist into the wall. Never again to return to the Professional class! For, naturally, the conviction had cost him his membership in the Architectural Society and that had cost him his Professional standing. But still -- just to be out of the Jug, that would be something! And his whole hope of ever getting out lay not here in Honor Block A, but in the turmoil of the Greensleeves, a hundred meters and more than fifty armed guards away. He was a furious man. He looked into the cell next door, where a con named Garcia was trying to concentrate on a game of Solitaire Splitfee. Once Garcia had been a Professional, too; he was the closest thing to a friend Wilmer Lafon had. Maybe he could now help to get Lafon where he wanted -- needed! -- to be. Lafon swore silently and shook his head. Garcia was a spineless milksop, as bad as any clerk -- Lafon was nearly sure there was a touch of the inkwell somewhere in his family. Shrewd and slippery enough, like all figgers. But you couldn't rely on him in a pinch. Lafon would have to do it all himself. He thought for a second, ignoring the rustle and mumble of the other honor prisoners of Block A. There was no help for it; he would have to dirty his hands with physical activity. Outside on the deck, the guards were grumbling to each other. Lafon wiped the scowl off his black face, put on a smile, rehearsed what he was going to say, and politely rattled the door of his cell. "Shut up down there!" one of the screws bawled. Lafon recognized the voice; it was the guard named Sodaro. That was all to the good. He knew Sodaro and he had some plans for him. He rattled the cell door again and called: "Chief, can you come here a minute, please?" Sodaro yelled: "Didn't you hear me? Shut up!" But he came wandering by and looked into Lafon's tidy little cell. "What the devil do you want?" he growled. Lafon said ingratiatingly: "What's going on, Chief?" "Shut your mouth," Sodaro said absently and yawned. He hefted his shoulder holster comfortably. That O'Leary, what a production he had made of getting the guards back! And here he was, stuck in Block A on the night he had set aside for getting better acquainted with that little blue-eyed statistician from the Census office. "Aw, Chief. The television says there's something going on in the Greensleeves. What's the score?" Sodaro had no reason not to answer him, but it was his unvarying practice to make a con wait before doing anything the con wanted. He gave Lafon a ten-second stare before he relented. 'The score? Sauer and Flock took over Block O. What about it?" Much, much about it! But Lafon looked away to hide the eagerness in his eyes. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late... He suggested humbly: "You look a little sleepy. Do you want some coffee?" "Coffee?" Sodaro scratched. "You got a cup for me?" "Certainly! I've got one put aside -- swiped it from the messhall -- not the one I use myself." "Um." Sodaro leaned on the cell door. "You know I could toss you in the Greensleeves for stealing from the messhall." "You been looking for trouble. O'Leary says you were messing around with the bucks from the laundry detail," Sodaro said halfheartedly. But he didn't really like picking on Lafon, who was, after all, an agreeable inmate to have on occasion. "All right. Where's the coffee?" They didn't bother with tanglefoot fields in Honor Block A. Sodaro just unlocked the door and walked in, hardly bothering to look at Lafon. He took three steps toward the neat little desk at the back of the cell, where Lafon had rigged up a drawing board and a table, where Lafon kept his little store of luxury goods. Three steps. And then, suddenly aware that Lafon was very close to him, he turned, astonished -- a little too late. He saw that Lafon had snatched up a metal chair; he saw Lafon swinging it, his black face maniacal; he saw the chair coming down. He reached for his shoulder holster, but it was very much too late for that. V  the scared little wretch into the warden's office. He shook the con angrily. "Listen to this, Warden! The boys just brought this one in from the Shops Building. Do you know what he's been up to?" The warden wheezed sadly and looked away. He had stopped even answering O'Leary by now. He had stopped talking to Sauer on the interphone when the big convict called, every few minutes, to rave and threaten and demand a doctor. He had almost stopped doing everything except worry and weep. But -- still and all, he was the warden. He was the one who gave the orders. O'Leary barked: "Warden, this little greaser has bollixed up the whole tangler circuit for the prison. If the cons get out into the yard now, you won't be able to tangle them. You know what that means? They'll have the freedom of the yard, and who knows what comes next?" The warden frowned sympathetically. "Tsk, tsk." O'Leary shook the con again. "Come on, Hiroko! Tell the warden what you told the guards." The con shrank away from him. Sweat was glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead. "I -- I had to do it, Cap'n! I shorted the wormcan in the tangler subgrid, but I had to! I got a signal -- 'Bollix the grid tonight or some day you'll be in the yard and we'll static you!' What could I do, Cap'n? I didn't want to -- " O'Leary pressed: "Who did the signal come from?" The con only shook his head, perspiring still more. The warden asked faintly: "What's he saying?" O'Leary rolled his eyes to heaven. And this was the warden -- couldn't even understand shoptalk from the mouths of his own inmates! He translated: "He got orders from the prison underground to short-circuit the electronic units in the tangler circuit. They threatened to kill him if he didn't." The warden drummed with his fingers on the desk. "The tangler field, eh? My, yes. That is important. You'd better get it fixed, O'Leary. Right away." "Fixed? Warden, who's going to fix it? You know as well as I do that every mechanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards would do a thing like that -- and I'd bust him myself if he did! -- he wouldn't know where to start. That's mechanic work." The warden swallowed. He had to admit that O'Leary was right. Naturally nobody but a mechanic -- and a specialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser class at that -- could fix something like the tangler field generators. He said absently: "Well, that's true enough. After all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' you know." O'Leary took a deep breath. He needed it. He beckoned to the guard at the door. "Take this greaser out of here!" The con shambled out, his head hanging. den and spread his hands. "Warden," he said, "don't you see how this thing is building up? Let's not just wait for the place to explode in our faces! Let me take a squad info Block O before it's too late." The warden pursed his lips thoughtfully and cocked his head, as though he were trying to find some trace of merit in an unreasonable request. He said at last: "No." O'Leary made a passionate sound that was trying to be bad language, but he was too raging mad to articulate it. He walked stiffly away from the limp, silent warden and stared out the window. At least, he told himself, he hadn't gone to pieces. It was his doing, not the warden's, that all the off-duty guards had been dragged double-time back to the prison, his doing that they were now ringed around the outer walls or scattered on extra-man patrols throughout the prison. It was something, but O'Leary couldn't believe that it was enough. He'd been in touch with half a dozen of the details inside the prison on the intercom and each of them had reported the same thing. In all of E-G, not a single prisoner was asleep. They were talking back and forth between the cells and the guards couldn't shut them up. They were listening to concealed radios and the guards didn't dare make a shakedown to find them. They were working themselves up to something. To what? O'Leary didn't want ever to find out what. He wanted to go in there with a couple of the best guards he could get his hands on -- shoot his way into the Greensleeves if he had to -- and clean out the infection. But the warden said no. O'Leary stared balefully at the hovering helicopters. The warden was the warden. He was placed in that position through the meticulously careful operations of the Civil Service machinery, maintained in that position year after year through the penetrating annual inquiries of the Reclassification Board. It was subversive to think that the Board could have made a mistake! But O'Leary was absolutely sure that the warden was a scared, ineffectual jerk. HP HE interphone was ringing again. The warden picked up the handpiece and held it bonelessly at arm's length, his eyes fixed glassily on the wall. It was Sauer from the Greensleeves again. O'Leary could hear his maddened bray. "I warned you, Warden!" O'Leary could see the big con's contorted face in miniature, in the view screen of the interphone. The grin was broad and jolly, the snake's eyes poisonously cold. "I'm going to give you five minutes, Warden, you hear? Five minutes! And if there isn't a medic in here in five minutes to take care of my boy Flock -- your guards have had it! I'm going to slice off an ear and throw it out the window, you hear me? And five minutes later, another ear. And five minutes later -- " The warden groaned weakly. "I've called for the prison medic, Sauer. Honestly I have! I'm sure he's coming as rapidly as he -- " "Five minutes!" And the ferociously grinning face disappeared. O'Leary leaned forward. "Warden, let me take a squad in there!" The warden gazed at him for a blank moment. "Squad? No, O'Leary. What's the use of a squad? It's a medic I have to get in there. I have a responsibility to those guards and if I don't get a medic -- " A cold, calm voice from the door: "I am here, Warden." O'Leary and the warden both jumped up. The medic nodded slightly. "You may sit down." "Oh, Doctor! Thank heaven you're here!" The warden was falling all over himself, getting a chair for his guest, flustering about. O'Leary said sharply: "Wait a minute, Warden. You can't let the doctor go in alone!" "He isn't alone!" The doctor's intern came from behind him, scowling belligerently at O'Leary. Youngish, his beard pale and silky, he was a long way from his first practice. "I'm here to assist him!" O'Leary put a strain on his patience. "They'll eat you up in there, Doc! Those are the worst cons in the prison. They've got two hostages already. What's the use of giving them two more?" The medic fixed him with his eyes. He was a tall man and he wore his beard proudly. "Guard, do you think you can prevent me from healing a sufferer?" He folded his hands over his abdomen and turned to leave. The intern stepped aside and bowed his head. O'Leary surrendered. "All right, you can go. But I'm coming with you -- with a squad!" ered in her cell. The Greensleeves was jumping. She had never -- no, never, she told herself wretchedly -- thought that it would be anything like this. She listened unbelievingly to the noise the released prisoners were making, smashing the chairs and commodes in their cells, screaming threats at the bound guards. She faced the thought with fear, and with the sorrow of a murdered belief that was worse than fear. It was bad that she was in danger of dying right here and now, but what was even worse was that the principles that had brought her to the Jug were dying, too. Wipes were not the same as Civil-Service people! A bull's roar from the corridor and a shocking crash of glass -- that was Flock, and apparently he had smashed the TV interphone. "What in the world are they doing?" Inmate Bradley sobbed to herself. It was beyond comprehension. They were yelling words that made no sense to her, threatening punishments on the guards that she could barely imagine. Sauer and Flock were laborers; some of the other rioting cons were clerks, mechanics -- even Civil-Service or Professionals, for all she could tell. But she could hardly understand any of them. Why was the quiet little Chinese clerk in Cell Six setting fire to his bed? There did seem to be a pattern, of sorts. The laborers were rocketing about, breaking things at random. The mechanics were pleasurably sabotaging the electronic and plumbing installations. The white-collar categories were finding their dubious joys in less direct ways -- liking setting fire to a bed. But what a mad pattern! The more Sue-Ann saw of them, the less she understood. It wasn't just that they talked differently. She had spent endless hours studying the various patois of shoptalk and it had defeated her; but it wasn't just that. It was bad enough when she couldn't understand the words -- as when that trusty Mathias had ordered her in wipe shoptalk to mop out her cell. But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words. Sue-Ann Bradley had consecrated her young life to the belief that all men were created free and equal -- and alike. Or alike in all the things that mattered, anyhow. Alike in hopes, alike in motives, alike in virtues. She had turned her back on a decent Civil-Service family and a promising Civil-Service career to join the banned and despised Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes -- Screams from the corridor outside. Sue-Ann leaped to the door of her cell to see Sauer clutching at one of the guards. The guard's hands were tied, but his feet were free; he broke loose from the clumsy clown with the serpent's eyes, almost fell, ran toward SueAnn. There was nowhere else to run. The guard, moaning and gasping, tripped, slid, caught himself and stumbled into her cell. "Please!" he begged. "That crazy Sauer -- he's going to cut my ear off! For heaven's sake, ma'am -- stop him!"  tween terror and tears. Stop Sauer! If only she could. The big redhead was lurching stiffly toward them -- raging, but not so angry that the water-moccasin eyes showed heat. "Come here, you figger scum!" he roared. The epithet wasn't even close -- the guard was Civil Service through and through -- but it was like a reviving whip-sting to SueAnn Bradley. "Watch your language, Mr. Sauer!" she snapped incongruously. Sauer stopped dead and blinked. "Don't you dare hurt him!" she warned. "Don't you see, Mr. Sauer, you're playing into their hands? They're trying to divide us. They pit mechanic against clerk, laborer against armed forces. And you're helping them! Brother Sauer, I beg -- " The redhead spat deliberately on the floor. He licked his lips, and grinned an amiable clown's grin, and said in his cheerful, buffoon bray: "Auntie, go verb your adjective adjective noun." Sue-Ann Bradley gasped and turned white. She had known such words existed -- but only theoretically. She had never expected to hear them. And certainly she would never have believed she would hear them, applied to her, from the lips of a -- a laborer. At her knees, the guard shrieked and fell to the floor. "Sauer! Sauer!" A panicky bellow from the corridor; the redhaired giant hesitated. "Sauer, come on out here! There's a million guards coming up the stairs. Looks like trouble!" Sauer said hoarsely to the unconscious guard : "I'll take care of you." And he looked blankly at the girl, and shook his head, and hurried back outside to the corridor. VI Guards were coming, all right a dozen or more. And leading them all was the medic, calm, bearded face looking straight ahead, hands clasped before him, ready to heal the sick, comfort the aged or bring new life into the world. "Hold it!" shrieked little Flock, crouched over the agonizing blister on his abdomen, gun in hand, peering insanely down the steps. "Hold it or-" "Shut up." Sauer called softly to the approaching group: "Let only the doc come up. Nobody else!" The intern faltered; the guards stopped dead; the medic said calmly: "I must have my intern with me." He glanced at the barred gate wonderingly. Sauer hesitated. "Well -- all right. But no guards!" A few yards away, Sue-Ann Bradley was stuffing the syncoped form of the guard into her small washroom. It was time to take a stand. No more cowering, she told herself desperately. No more waiting. She closed the door on the guard, still unconscious, and stood grimly before it. Him, at least, she would save if she could. They could get him, but only over her dead body. Or anyway, she thought with a sudden throbbing in her throat, over her body. left, the warden tottered to a chair -- but not for long. His secretary appeared, eyes bulging. "The governor!" he gasped. Warden Schluckebier managed to say: "Why, Governor! How good of you to come -- " The governor shook him off and held the door open for the men who had come with him. There were reporters from all the news services, officials from the township governments within the city-state. There was an Air GI with major's leaves on his collar -- "Liaison, sir," he explained crisply to the warden, "just in case you have any orders for our men up there." There were nearly a dozen others. The warden was quite overcome. The governor rapped out: "Warden, no criticism of you, of course, but I've come to take personal charge. I'm superseding you under Rule Twelve, Paragraph A, of the Uniform Civil Service Code. Right?" "Oh, Tight!" cried the warden, incredulous with joy. "The situation is bad -- perhaps worse than you think. I'm seriously concerned about the hostages those men have in there. And I had a call from Senator Bradley a short time ago -- " "Senator Bradley?" echoed the warden. "Senator Sebastian Bradley. One of our foremost civil servants," the governor said firmly. "It so happens that his daughter is in Block O as an inmate." The warden closed his eyes. He tried to swallow, but the throat muscles were paralyzed. "There is no question," the governor went on briskly, "about the propriety of her being there. She was duly convicted of a felonious act, namely conspiracy and incitement to riot. But you see the position." The warden saw all too well. "Therefore," said the governor. "I intend to go in to Block O myself. Sebastian Bradley is an old and personal friend -- as well," he emphasized, "as being a senior member of the Reclassification Board. I understand a medic is going to Block O. I shall go with him." The warden managed to sit up straight. "He's gone. I mean they already left, Governor. But I assure you Miss Brad -- Inmate Bradley -- that is, the young lady is in no danger. I have already taken precautions," he said, gaining confidence as he listened to himself talk. "I -- uh -- I was deciding on a course of action as you came in. See, Governor, the guards on the walls are all armed. All they have to do is fire a couple of rounds into the yard and then the 'copters could start dropping tear gas and light fragmentation bombs and -- " The governor was already at the door. "You will not," he said; and: "Now which way did they go?" he was smelling trouble, loud and strong. The first he knew that the rest of the prison had caught the riot fever was when the lights flared on in Cell Block A. "That Sodaro!" he snarled, but there wasn't time to worry about that Sodaro. He grabbed the rest of his guard detail and doubletimed it toward the New Building, leaving the medic and a couple of guards walking sedately toward the Old. Block A, on the New Building's lowest tier, was already coming to life; a dozen yards, and Blocks B and C lighted up. And a dozen yards more and they could hear the yelling; and it wasn't more than a minute before the building doors opened. The cons had taken over three more blocks. How? O'Leary didn't take time even to guess. The inmates were piling out into the yard. He took one look at the rushing mob. Crazy! It was Wilmer Lafon leading the rioters, with a guard's gun and a voice screaming threats! But O'Leary didn't take time to worry about an honor prisoner gone bad, either. "Let's get out of here!" he bellowed to the detachment, and they ran. Just plain ran. Cut and ran, scattering as they went. "Wait!" screamed O'Leary, but they weren't waiting. Cursing himself for letting them get out of hand, O'Leary salvaged two guards and headed on the run for the Old Building, huge and dark, all but the topmost lights of Block O. They saw the medic and his escort disappearing into the bulk of the Old Building and they saw something else. There were inmates between them and the Old Building! The Shops Building lay between -- with a dozen more cell blocks over the workshops that gave it its name -- and there was its entrance, next to the laundry shed -- 'The laundry shed. O'Leary stood stock still. Lafon leading the breakout from Block A. The little greaser who was a trusty in the Shops Building sabotaging the yard's tangler circuit. Sauer and Flock taking over the Greensleeves with a manufactured knife and a lot of guts. Did it fit together? Was it all part of a plan? That was something to find out -- but not just then. "Come on," O'Leary cried to the two guards, and they raced for the temporary safety of the main gates. The whole prison was up and yelling now. O'Leary could hear scattered shots from the beat guards on the wall -- Over their heads, over their heads! he prayed silently. And there were other shots that seemed to come from inside the walls -- guards shooting, or convicts with guards' guns, he couldn't tell which. The yard was full of convicts now, in bunches and clumps; but none near the gate. And they seemed to have lost some of their drive. They searchlights from the wall, yelling and making a lot of noise... but going nowhere in particular. Waiting for a leader, O'Leary thought, and wondered briefly what had become of Lafon. "You Captain O'Leary?" somebody demanded. Good Lord, the governor! He was coming through the gate, waving aside the gate guards, alone. "You him?" the governor repeated. "All right, glad I found you. I'm going into Block O with you." O'Leary swallowed and waved inarticulately at the teeming cons. True, there were none immediately near by -- but there were plenty in the yard! Riots meant breaking things up; already the inmates had started to break up the machines in the laundry shed and the athletic equipment in the yard lockers. When they found a couple of choice breakables like O'Leary and the governor, they'd have a ball! "But, Governor -- " "But my foot! Can you get me in there or can't you?" O'Leary gauged their chances. It wasn't more than fifty feet to the main entrance to the Old Building -- not at the moment guarded, since all the guards were in hiding or on the walls, and not as yet being invaded by the inmates at large. He said: "You're the boss. Hold on a minute -- " The searchlights were on the bare yard cobblestones in front of them; in a moment, the searchlights danced away. "Come on!" cried O'Leary, and jumped for the entrance. The governor was with him and a pair of the guards came stumbling after. They made it to the Old Building. Inside the entrance, they could hear the noise from outside and the yelling of the inmates who were still in their cells. But around them was nothing but gray steel walls and the stairs going all the way up to Block O. "Up!" panted O'Leary, and they clattered up the steel steps. They would have made it -- if it hadn't been for the honor inmate, Wilraer Lafon, who knew what he was after and had headed for the Greensleeves through the back way. In fact, they did make it -- but not the way they planned. "Get out of the way!" yelled O'Leary at Lafon and the halfdozen inmates with him; and "Go to hell!" screamed Lafon, charging; and it was a rough-and-tumble fight, and O'Leary's party lost it, fair and square. So when they got to Block O, it was with the governor marching before a convict-held gun, and with O'Leary cold unconscious, a lump from a gun-butt on the side of his head. As they came up the stairs, Sauer was howling at the medic: "You got to fix up my boy! He's dying and all you do is sit there!" The medic said patiently: "My son, I've dressed his wound. He is under sedation and I must rest. There will be other casualties." Sauer raged, but that was as far as it went. Even Sauer wouldn't attack a medic. He would as soon strike an Attorney, or even a Director of Funerals. It wasn't merely that they were Professionals. Even among the Professional class, they were special; not superior, exactly, but apart. They certainly were not for the likes of Sauer to fool with and Sauer knew it. "Somebody's coming!" bawled one of the other freed inmates.  the steps, saw that Lafon was leading the group, stepped back, saw whom Lafon's helpers were carrying and leaped forward again. "Cap'n O'Leary!" he roared. "Gimme!" "Shut up," said Wilmer Lafon, and pushed the big redhead out of the way. Sauer's jaw dropped and the snake eyes opened wide. "Wilmer," he protested feebly. But that was all the protest he made, because the snake's eyes had seen that Lafon held a gun. He stood back, the big hands half outstretched toward the unconscious guard captain, O'Leary, and the cold eyes became thoughtful. And then he saw who else was with the party. 'Wilmer! You got the governor there!" Lafon nodded. "Throw them in a cell," he ordered, and sat down on a guard's stool, breathing hard. It had been a fine fight on the steps, before he and his boys had subdued the governor and the guards, but Wilmer Lafon wasn't used to fighting. Even six years in the Jug hadn't turned an architect into a laborer; physical exertion simply was not his metier. Sauer said coaxingly: "Wilmer, won't you leave me have O'Leary for a while? If it wasn't for me and Flock, you'd still be in A Block and -- " "Shut up," Lafon said again, gently enough, but he waved the gun muzzle. He drew a deep breath, glanced around him and grinned. "If it wasn't for you and Flock," he mimicked. "If it wasn't for you and Flock! Sauer, you wipe clown, do you think it took brains to file down a shiv and start things rolling? If it wasn't for me, you and Flock would have beaten up a few guards, and had your kicks for half an hpur, and then the whole prison would fall in on you! It was me, Wilmer Lafon, who set things up and you know it!" He was yelling and suddenly he realized he was yellfng. And what was the use, he demanded of himself contemptuously, of trying to argue with a bunch of lousy wipes and greasers? They'd never hours of planning and sweat. They wouldn't realize the importance of the careful timing -- of arranging that the laundry cons would start a disturbance in the yard right after the Greensleeves hard-timers kicked off the riot, of getting the little greaser Hiroko to short-circuit the yard field so the laundry cons could start their disturbances. It took a Professional to organize and plan -- yes, and to make sure that he himself was out of it until everything was ripe, so that if anything went wrong, he was all right. It took somebody like Wilmer Lafon -- a Professional, who had spent six years too long in the Jug -- And who would shortly be getting out. A NY prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in process of going off. From the Greensleeves, where the trouble had started, clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells -- the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers who didn't dare risk their early discharge. But for every man in his cell, a dozen were out and yelling. A torch, licking as high as the hanging helicopters, blazing up from the yard -- that was the the laundry shed. Why bum the laundry? The cons couldn't have said. It was burnable and it was there -- burn it! The yard lay open to the wrath of the helicopters, but the helicopters made no move. The cobblestones were solidly covered were on the walls, sighting down their guns; the helicopter bombardiers had their fingers on the bomb trips. There had been a few rounds fired over the heads of the rioters, at first. Nothing since. clustered in groups. The inmates from Honor Block A huddled under the guards' guns at the angle of the wall. They had clubs -- all the inmates had clubs -- but they weren't using them. Honor Block A: On the outside, Civil Service and Professionals. On the inside, the trusties, the "good" cons. They weren't the type for clubs. With all of the inmates, you looked at them and you wondered what twisted devil had got into their heads to land them in the Jug. Oh, perhaps you could understand it -- a little bit, at least -- in the case of the figgers in Blocks B and C, the greasers in the Shop Building -- that sort. It was easy enough for some of the Categoried Classes to commit a crime and thereby land in jail. Who could blame a wipe for trying to "pass" if he thought he could get away with it? But when he didn't get away with it, he wound up in the Jug and that was logical enough. And greasers liked Civil-Service women -- everyone knew that. There was almost a sort of logic to it, even if it was a sort of inevitable logic that made decent Civil-Service people see red. You had to enforce the laws against rape if, for instance, a greaser should ask an innocent young female postal clerk for a date. But you could understand what drove him to it. The Jug was full of criminals of that sort. And the Jug was the place for them. But what about Honor Block A? Why would a Wilmer Lafon -- a certified public architect, a Professional by category -- do his own car repairs and get himself jugged for malpractice? Why would a dental nurse sneak back into the laboratory at night and cast an upper plate for her mother? She must have realized she would be caught. But she had done it. And she had been caught; and there she was, this wild night, huddled under the helicopters, uncertainly waving the handle of a floor mop. It was a club. She shivered and turned to the stocky convict next to her. "Why don't they break down the gate?" she demanded. "How long are we going to hang around here, waiting for the guards to get organized and pick us all off one at a time?" The convict next to her sighed and wiped his glasses with a beefy hand. Once he had been an Income-Tax Accountant, disbarred and convicted on three counts of impersonating an attorney when he took the liberty of making changes in a client's lease. He snorted: "They expect us to do their dirty work." The two of them glared angrily and fearfully at the other convicts in the yard. And the other convicts, huddled greaser with greaser, wipe with wipe, glared ragingly back. It wasn't their place to plan the strategy of a prison break. muttered groggily: "They don't want to escape. All they want is to make trouble. I know cons!" He came fully awake and sat up and focused his eyes. His head was hammering. That girl, that Bradley, was leaning over him. She looked scared and sick. "Sit still! Sauer is just plain crazy -- listen to them yelling out there!" O'Leary sat up and looked around, one hand holding his drumming skull. "They do want to escape," said Sue-Ann Bradley. "Listen to what they're saying!" was in a cell. There was a battle going on outside. Men were yelling, but he couldn't see them. He jumped up, remembering. "The governor!" Sue-Ann Bradley said: "He's all right. I think he is, anyway. He's in the cell right next to us, with a couple guards. I guess they came up with you." She shivered as the yells in the corridor rose. "Sauer is angry at the medic," she explained. "He wants him to fix Flock up so they can -- 'crush out,' I think he said. The medic says he can't do it. You see, Flock got burned pretty badly with a knife he made. Something about the tanglefoot field -- " "Eddy currents," said O'Leary dizzily. "Anyway, the medic -- " "Never mind the medic. What's Lafon doing?" "Lafon? The Negro?" Sue-Ann Bradley frowned. "I didn't know his name. He started the whole thing, the way it sounds. They're waiting for the mob down in the yard to break out and then they're going to make a break -- " "Wait a minute," growled O'Leary. His head was beginning to clear. 'What about you? Are you in on this?" She hung between laughter and tears. Finally: "Do I look as if I am?" O'Leary took stock. Somehow, somewhere, the girl had got a length of metal pipe -- from the plumbing, maybe. She was holding it in one hand, supporting him with the other. There were two other guards in the cell, both out cold -- one from O'Leary's squad, the other, O'Leary guessed, a desk guard who had been on duty when the trouble started. "I wouldn't let them in," she said wildly. "I told them they'd have to kill me before they could touch that guard." O'Leary said suspiciously: "You belonged to that DoubleA-C, didn't you? You were pretty anxious to get in the Greensleeves, disobeying Auntie Mathias's orders. Are you sure you didn't know this was going to -- " It was too much. She dropped the pipe, buried her head in her hands. He couldn't tell if she laughed or wept, but he could tell that it hadn't been like that at all. "I'm sorry," he said awkwardly, and touched her helplessly on the shoulder. the little barred window, because he couldn't think of any additional way to apologize. He heard the wavering beat in the air and saw them -- bobbing a hundred yards up, their wide metal vanes fluttering and hissing from the jets at the tips. The GI 'copters. Waiting -- as everyone seemed to be waiting. Sue-Ann Bradley asked shakily: "Is anything the matter?" O'Leary turned away. It was astonishing, he thought, what a different perspective he had on those helicopter bombers from inside Block O. Once he had cursed the warden for not ordering at least tear gas to be dropped. He said harshly: "Nothing. Just that the 'copters have the place surrounded." "Does it make any difference?" He shrugged. Does it make a difference? The difference between trouble and tragedy, or so it now seemed to Captain O'Leary. The riot was trouble. They could handle it, one way or another. It was his job, any guard's job, to handle prison trouble. But to bring the GIs into it was to invite race riot. Not prison riot -- race riot. Even the declassed scum in the Jug would fight back against the GIs. They were used to having the CivilService guards over them -- that was what guards were for. CivilService guards guarded. What else? It was their job -- as clerking was a figger's job, and machines were a greaser's, and pickand-shovel strong-arm work was a wipe's. But the Armed Services -- their job was to defend the country against forces outside -- in a world that had only inside forces. The cons wouldn't hold still under attack from the GIs. Race riot! But how could you tell that to a girl like this Bradley? O'Leary glanced at her covertly. She looked all right. Rather nice-looking, if anything. But he hadn't forgotten why she was in E-G. Joining a terrorist organization, the Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes. Actually getting up on street corners and proposing that greasers' children be allowed to go to school with GIs, that wipes intermarry with Civil Service. Good Lord, they'd be suggesting that doctors eat with laymen next! The girl said evenly: "Don't look at me that way. I'm not a monster." O'Leary coughed. "Sorry. I didn't know I was staring." She looked at him with cold eyes. "I mean," he said, "you don't look like anybody who'd get mixed up in -- well, miscegenation." "Miscegenation!" she blazed. "You're all alike! You talk about the mission of the Categoried Classes and the rightness of segregation, but it's always just the one thing that's in your minds -- sex! I'll tell you this, Captain O'Leary -- Td rather marry a decent, hard-working clerk any day than the sort of Civil-Service trash Fve seen around here!" O'Leary cringed. He couldn't help it. Funny, he told himself, I thought I was shockproof -- but this goes too far! A bull-roar from the corridor. Sauer. O'Leary spun. The big redhead was yelling: "Bring the governor out here. Lafon wants to talk to him!" the cell, fast A slim, pale con from Block A was pushing the governor down the hall, toward Sauer and Lafon. The governor was a strong man, but he didn't struggle. His face was as composed and remote as the medic's; if he was afraid, he concealed it extremely well. Sue-Ann Bradley stood beside O'Leary. "What's happening?" He kept his eyes on what was going on. "Lafon is going to try to use the governor as a shield, I think." The voice of Lafon was loud, but the noises outside made it hard to understand. But O'Leary could make out what the dark ex-Professional was saying: " -- know damn well you did something. But what? Why don't they crush out?" Mumble-mumble from the Governor. O'Leary couldn't hear the words. But he could see the effect of them in Lafon's face, hear the rage in Lafon's voice. "Don't call me a liar, you civvy punk! You did something. I had it all planned, do you hear me? The laundry boys were going to rush the gate, the Block A bunch would follow -- and then I was going to breeze right through. But you loused it up somehow. You must've!" His voice was rising to a scream. O'Leary, watching tautly from the cell, thought: He's going to break. He can't hold it in much longer. "All right?' shouted Lafon, and even Sauer, looming behind him, looked alarmed. "It doesn't matter what you did. I've got you now and you are going to get me out of here. You hear? I've got this gun and the two of us are going to walk right out, through the gate, and if anybody tries to stop us -- " "Hey," said Sauer, waking up. " -- if anybody tries to stop us, you'll get a bullet right in -- " "Hey!" Sauer was roaring loud as Lafon himself now. 'What's this talk about the two of you? You aren't going to leave me and Flock!" "Shut up," Lafon said conversationally, without taking his eyes off the governor. But Sauer, just then, was not the man to say "shut up" to, and especially he was not a man to take your eyes away from. "That's torn it," O'Leary said aloud. The girl started to say something. But he was no longer there to hear. It looked very much as though Sauer and Lafon were going to tangle. And when they did, it was the end of the line for the governor. out of the sheltering cell and skidded down the corridor. Lafon's face was a hawk's face, gleaming with triumph. As he saw O'Leary coming toward him, the hawk sneer froze. He brought the gun up, but O'Leary was a fast man. O'Leary leaped on the lithe black honor prisoner. Lafon screamed and clutched; and O'Leary's lunging weight drove him back against the wall. Lafon's arm smacked against the steel grating and the gun went flying. The two of them clinched and fell, gouging, to the floor. Grabbing the advantage, O'Leary hammered the con's head against the deck, hard enough to split a skull. And perhaps it split Lafon's, because the dark face twitched and froth appeared at the lips; and the body slacked. One down! Now Sauer was charging. O'Leary wriggled sidewise and the big redhead blundered crashing into the steel grate. Sauer fell and O'Leary caught at him. He tried hammering the head as he swarmed on top of the huge clown. But Sauer only roared the louder. The bull body surged under O'Leary and then Sauer was on top and O'Leary wasn't breathing. Not at all. Good by, Sue Ann, O'Leary said silently, without meaning to say anything of the kind; and even then he wondered why he was saying it. O'Leary heard a gun explode beside his head. Amazing, he thought, I'm breathing again! The choking hands were gone from his throat. It took him a moment to realize that it was Sauer who had taken the bullet, not him. Sauer who now lay dead, not O'Leary. But he realized it when he rolled over, and looked up, and saw the girl with the gun still in her hand, staring at him and weeping. He sat up. The two guards still able to walk were backing SueAnn Bradley up. The governor was looking proud as an eagle, pleased as a mother hen. The Greensleeves was back in the hands of law and order. The medic came toward O'Leary, hands folded. "My son," he said, "if your throat needs -- " O'Leary interrupted him. "I don't need a thing, Doc! I've got everything I want right now." cried: "They're coming! O'Leary, they're coming!" The guards who had once been hostages clattered down the steps to meet the party. The cons from the Greensleeves were back in their cells. The medic, after finishing his chores on O'Leary himself, paced meditatively out into the wake of the riot, where there was plenty to keep him busy. A faintly guilty expression tinctured his carven face. Contrary to his oath to care for all humanity in anguish, he had not liked Lafon or Sauer. The party of fresh guards appeared and efficiently began relocking the cells of the Greensleeves. "Excuse me, Cap'n," said one, taking Sue-Ann Bradley by the arm. "I'll just put this one back -- " "I'll take care of her," said Liam O'Leary. He looked at her sideways as he rubbed the bruises on his face. The governor tapped him on the shoulder. "Come along," he said, looking so proud of himself, so pleased. "Let's go out in the yard for a breath of fresh air." He smiled contentedly at Sue-Ann Bradley. "You, too." O'Leary protested instinctively: "But she's an inmate!"  "And I'm a governor. Come along." They walked out into the yard. The air was fresh, all right. A handful of cons, double-guarded by sleepy and irritable men from the day shift, were hosing down the rubble on the cobblestones. The yard was a mess, but it was quiet now. The helicopters were still riding their picket line, glowing softly in the early light that promised sunrise. "My car," the governor said quietly to a state policeman who appeared from nowhere. The trooper snapped a salute and trotted away. "I killed a man," said Sue-Ann Bradley, looking a little ill. "You saved a man," corrected the governor. "Don't weep for a thousand men if he had to, to break out of here." "But he never did break out," said Sue-Ann. The governor stretched contentedly. "He never had a chance. Laborers and clerks join together in a breakout? It would never happen. They don't even speak the same language -- as you have discovered, my dear." lieve in the equality of Man!" "Oh, please do," the governor said, straight-faced. "There's nothing wrong with that. Your father admit that men are equal -- but we can't admit that all men are the same. Use your eyes! What you believe in is your business, but," he added, "when your beliefs extend to setting fire to segregated public lavatories as a protest move, which is what got you arrested, you apparently need to be taught a lesson. Well, perhaps you've learned it You were a help here tonight and that counts for a lot." Captain O'Leary said, face furrowed: "What about the warden, Governor? They say the category system is what makes the world go round; it fits the right man to the right job and keeps him there. But look at Warden Shluckebier! He fell completely apart at the seams. He -- " "Turn that statement around, O'Leary." "Turn ?" The governor nodded. "You've got it reversed. Not the right man for the job -- the right job for the man! We've got Shluckebier on our hands, see? He's been bom; it's too late to do anything about that. He will go to pieces in an emergency. So where do we put him?" O'Leary stubbornly clamped his jaw, frowning. "We put him," the governor went on gently, "where the best thing to do in a crisis is to go to pieces! Why, O'Leary, you get some hot-headed man of action in here, and every time an inmate sneezes, you'll have bloodshed! And there's no harm in a prison riot. Let the poor devils work off steam. I wouldn't have bothered to get out of bed for it -- except I was worried about the hostages. So I came down to make sure they were protected in the best possible way." O'Leary's jaw dropped. "But you were -- " The governor nodded. "I was a hostage myself. That's one way to protect them, isn't it? By giving the cons a hostage that's worth more to them." He yawned and looked around for his car. "So the world keeps going around," he said. "Everybody is somebody else's outgroup and maybe it's a bad thing, but did you ever stop to realize that we don't have wars any more? The categories stick tightly together. Who is to say that that's a bad thing?" He grinned. "Reminds me of a story, if you two will pay attention to me long enough to listen. There was a meeting -- this is an old, old story -- a neighborhood meeting of the leaders of the two biggest women's groups on the block. There were eighteen Irish ladies from the Church Auxiliary and three Jewish ladies from B'nai B'rith. The first thing they did was have an election for a temporary chairwoman. Twentyone votes were cast. Mrs. Grossinger from B'nai B'rith got three and Mrs. O'Flaherty from the Auxiliary got eighteen. So when Mrs. Murphy came up to congratulate Mrs. O'Flaherty after the election, she whispered : 'Good for you! But isn't it terrible, the way these Jews stick together?'" He stood up and waved a signal as his long official car came poking hesitantly through the gate. "Well," he declared professionally, "that's that. As we politicians say, any questions?" Sue-Ann hesitated. "Yes, I guess I do have a question," she said. "What's a Jew?" recall signal had come and the helicopters were swooping home to Hap Arnold Field. A bombardier named Novak, red-eyed and grumpy, was amusing himself on the homeward flight by taking practice sights on the stream of work-bound mechanics as they fluttered over Greaserville. "Could pick 'em off like pigeons," he said sourly to his pilot, as he dropped an imaginary bomb on a cluster of a dozen men. "For two cents, I'd do it, too. The only good greaser is a dead greaser." His pilot, just as weary, said loftily: "Leave them alone. The best way to handle them is to leave them alone." And the pilot was perfectly right; and that was the way the world went round, spinning slowly and unstoppably toward the dawn. # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. #F Shannon Road Verona, Pennsylvania The Martyr There is no fate worse than death, eh? Well, maybe this will help change your mindl the tiny red dot which the hypodermic needle had left in his forearm. He said, "I don't feel a thing." "You're not supposed to," Dr. Mellen said. "No feeling is the proper feeling," he added jovially. He was much bigger than Cadena and he exuded confidence. His large pale hands carried a faint aseptic odor of alcohol and green soap. His colleague, Dr. Santasiere, was seated at the desk. He was thin, sour-faced and very impersonal. Ignoring Cadena, he opened his little black bag and removed from it a Luger automatic, a silencer, an unmarked pillbox, a straight razor and a gas cylinder. Fussily, he arranged them on the desk, like tools on an operating table. "I really don't feel a thing," Cadena said quickly. "Maybe it didn't take." "Don't get nervous," said Mellen in his soothing professional tones. Dr. Santasiere took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the butt of the Luger. Then he turned the handkerchief over and intently cleaned his pince-nez. dow. They were in Dr. Mellen's house, because it had seemed the safest place to conduct the last phase of the experiment Outside was broad green lawn, and oak trees bordered the curved driveway, and Cadena could see two sparrows quarreling in the air. He licked his lips and rubbed the red dot on his forearm. "Well, shall we get on with it?" Dr. Santasiere asked. "Hold it, hold it," Cadena said. "Maybe that stuff didn't go to work yet." "The effect is instantaneous," Dr. Mellen assured him in a hearty but sympathetic voice. "Let's give it a little more time to work," Cadena begged. "Five minutes!" Dr. Santasiere frowned. "Since when does the patient dictate to the doctor?" "It doesn't matter," Dr. Mellen replied. "We'll wait a few minutes if it will give you greater confidence, Frank." "It sure will," Cadena said. "It'll sure do that" He began to pace up and down the room, mechanically rubbing the red dot on his forearm. "You will irritate the puncture." Dr. Santasiere automatically told him. Cadena all but giggled. "A hell of a lot that matters to me. Am I right? Does it really make any difference?" "It doesn't matter at all," Dr. Santasiere said. He began to polish the straight razor with the edge of his handkerchief. Cadena paced for a few moments more. Then he stopped abruptly and said, "Will you, for Pete's sake, stop playing with that razor?" "No hysterics, Frank," Dr. Mellen warned. "Tell him to stop playing with that damned razor." "He has a point," Dr. Mellen admitted. "One shouldn't show a patient the operating tools, you know." Dr. Santasiere put the razor on the desk. With a stiffened forefinger, he poked it into a straight line with the Luger, the silencer, the unmarked pillbox and the gas cylinder. "Stop playing with that damned razor!" Cadena shouted. "You'll get to use it soon enough. Five minutes! Just stop playing with it now." "Don't lose your nerve, Frank," Dr. Mellen said. "Sit down. Relax. Try to compose yourself." Cadena's thin face was glistening with perspiration. He dropped into a chair and exhaustedly closed his eyes. On the desk, an electric clock hummed, its second hand creeping implacably. Cadena's eyes snapped open. "Don't sneak up on me," he said. "No one is going to sneak up on you," said Dr. Mellen wearily. "I think we should get on with it, Frank." "Five minutes more!" "Further delay will just unsettle you. Let's finish it now." removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Dr. Mellen asked, "What method would you prefer, Frank?" "None. None of them..." "Oh, come now," Dr. Mellen said sternly. "You have an excellent assortment. These pills are tasteless. The gas has an odor, strong but not unpleasant. Perhaps, though, the simplest method would be to open a vein in your wrist, like the Romans of old." "Tell me again about the serum," Cadena begged. "Again? But really -- " "Tell me again. Go on, tell me." "Very well. As per agreement, I have injected you with a serum developed by Dr. Santasiere and myself, which confers the power of complete and instant regeneration." "Say it straight!" Cadena said. "It's an immortality serum! That's what you told me before." "Yes, if you prefer that phraseology." "I'm immortal right now!" Cadena cried. "We have every reason to believe so. All that remains is this final test, in the interest of science. Now, Frank, if you will choose your method -- " "But how do I know?" Cadena asked. "How can I be absolutely sure?" "We've been through this again and again," Dr. Santasiere said. "The serum works on guinea pigs, on rabbits and on Rhesus monkeys. You have seen the results yourself. They are unkillable by every single method we could devised." "But I'm no ape," Cadena objected. "I'm a man. How do I know it'll work on me? There are a lot of angles to this thing I didn't figure on." Dr. Mellen held out the pillbox. "Swallow two of these, Frank." Cadena held the pillbox in his hand. "It's worth more than a lousy thousand dollars, the risk I'm taking." "A thousand dollars and immortality," Dr. Mellen pointed out. "So I'm immortal right now," Cadena said slowly. "You're sure?" "Positive." "But I don't feel any different. I feel just the same as always." "Take the pills, Frank," Mellen said. "Or if you prefer the razor -- " "Forget the damned razor." Cadena walked again to the window and looked at the green lawn and the oak trees. He turned, took a deep breath and said, "You can have back the thousand." "What?" "I want out. Immortality or sudden death -- it's just too big a gamble. You can understand that, can't you?" "Take the pills, Frank," Mellen said flatly. across the room and ran toward the door. Mellen picked up the Luger, fitted the silencer to it and called, "Wait, Frank! Don't make me shoot you in the leg!" Cadena turned. "No, Doc! No!" Mellen took a firm stance, released the safety and aimed. "Doc, please -- " "Don't move, Frank. Let it be a clean shot." Cadena stared, his mouth open, and saw Mellen's finger turn white on the trigger. He tried to scream. The silenced Luger clicked harshly. Cadena was slammed against the door, jerked spasmodically and slid to the floor. "Beautiful shot," Santasiere complimented. "Centered right through the heart. Beautiful!" "I used to do quite a bit of target shooting," Mellen said. "Steady grip is the answer. And trigger squeeze, of course." "Of course," Santasiere agreed. "I notice you didn't use your free arm as a support." "No, it was unnecessary for so short a distance. Besides, with a weapon as balanced as the Luger -- well, anyone could have done it." "Now, now. Don't be modest. Shall we examine the patient?" Together they bent over Cadena's body. "The wound has closed already!" Mellen exclaimed. "Pulse is strong." "Respiration normal." "Magnificent!" Dr. Mellen said. "The serum is a complete success. Pity he made such a fuss." "Look, his eyes are opening." Cadena's eyelids fluttered. Then his eyes opened wide. "Well, Frank, old boy," Mellen said heartily, "I hope you aren't angry at us." "It was part of the bargain," Santasiere reminded him. "And you're fine. You're perfectly all right. You are truly and demonstrably immortal, Frank!" answering. "Come, come," Mellen said. "No sense being sullen. Speak up! How does it feel to have an unlimited life-span?" A thread of drool ran from Cadena's mouth down his chin. His hands plucked aimlessly at the air, then reached vaguely for a patch of sunlight on the floor. "Frank!" His fingers closed on the sunlit patch and his hands came up empty. Cadena looked at his empty fingers and began to sob. "Trauma," Dr. Santasiere sighed. "Of all the luck." Dr. Mellen stood up glumly. "Complete idiocy, I suppose. The shock of a gun fired at him..." "Apparently that did it." "He was a martyr to science." "Yes. But we have an idiot on our hands now. An immortal idiot. What do we do about it?" Dr. Mellen seemed perplexed for a moment. Then his face brightened. "Why, it's obvious, Doctor. We'll start researching at once for an antidote. Something to put poor Frank out of his misery." On Your By Malcolm Jameson A fascinating fast-moving adventure of a man and a beautiful girl of the present, who find themselves in a strange cruel land of the future. Transferred to a vicious world, ruled over by the crudest of dictators, he falls in love with Cynthia (the girl from the present), but finds her cold to his attentions. The man, Winchester, is made a slave, racked with pain in the torture chambers of this strange and hideous land, this brave American plots a terrible death for the tyrannical dictator. This is the type of light-reading, fast-moving adventure you won't want to put down until finished. Galaxy Science Fiction Novel No. # # Star Shelf Marguerite Steen. Doubleday  Co. Inc., N.Y., # HP HE most striking thing aboutMiss Steen's horror story is its gentility. Perhaps that is what makes it so effective. Its admixture of upper-class English stuffiness and its tale of possession are just the proper weird combination to invest her story with a chill that studied mood-writing would not have achieved. The narrator of the story, an impressively titled nobleman, but in actuality a man of poor means who had been kicked about in his youth, runs across the one upper student who had taken him under his wing during undergraduate days. Always a moody person, Arnold Lewes, the friend, had grown even more introspective. His spookily assorted household; his broken-spirited yet defiant wife, his frighteningly unnatural son, and the woman who has some peculiar relationship with the family, all combine to make the guest's weekend stay a shivery affair. This blood-chiller is a heartso warming sign to those who, like me, had feared for the life of the literary ghost story in the classic tradition. liam Term. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # ing humorist," if such a breed exists. His yams race along in a bright, delightfully breezy fashion until the last sentence or so -- and then comes the shocker. Of such genre is his off-track and completely novel "Flat-Eyed Monster." After reading this airily grim offering, you'll agree with Tenn that contact between alien races must be blindingly confusing. His classic "The Servant Problem" formulates an ancient and basic truth in as different a story as you're ever likely to enjoy. "Party of the Two Parts" is a riproaring farce dealing with the Gtetan equivalent of French postcards and the efforts of the best legal minds to incarcerate the purveyor of said pornography under Galactic law, replete with plenty of loopholes for this literally slimy character. It is almost a relief to find a couple of unTennable yams in the collection, just as a sort of proof that even he has his off moments, too. Gnome Press, Inc., N. Y., # ber of titles in this field, one would expect the anthologists to be hard hit. Well, one would be right if the sole criterion were quantity. However, some of the finest science fiction of all time is being produced and published right now. Miss Merril's book is indication enough of that. The assortment is well varied and, with eighteen yams to choose from, there should be at least a few to tickle the fancy of any devotee. A legitimate cavil is the repetition of anthologization. With so much to choose from, Miss Merril could -- and should -- have avoided this evil. A cautionary note: the title is correct if you are female and have exactly the same tastes as the anthologist, for it is a collection of unswervingly personal favorites. George O. Smith. Gnome Press, N. Y., # ished Man and any number of efforts since, Smith postulates a future in which telepath and perceptive have become inte     shelf grated into society with functions peculiar to their talents. Steve Cornell, an esper, is recovering from accident shock after a car pileup. Several items just don't add up, however. First of all, a perceptive such as he just doesn't get into accidents with his faculties being what they are. Secondly, his fiancee has disappeared from the car without trace and he begins to doubt his own sanity when he meets blind response to his questions concerning her. The only thing that jells in his mind is a tickling memory of something wrong with the highway signs when he met with his accident. He tracks them down and, by George O., he comes up with some answers to the crazy puzzle. There is a definite significance to the signs. I hate to give any more of the story away because Smith has succeeded in maintaining an air of suspense throughout his book and although there is what seems to be a tangled morass of paths, espers, Mekstrom's disease, et al, he maintains credulity. You'll go for this if you like suspense, crackling hard-boiled dialogue and a touch of Superman. Ballantine Books, N. Y # that may be indigestible to the reader. He suggests an immediate future in which atomic energy has been harnessed for industrial purposes for twenty years, at which time there is a sudden revulsion of public opinion. Congress is considering legislation outlawing atomic plants and is sending teams of Congressmen on investigative missions. If you can believe that a society based on the products of fission can turn its back on its own technology -- or, to analogize, if we were to outlaw internal combustion engines because far more Americans have been killed by them than by all our wars -- then you should have no trouble enjoying this yarn. The story itself is a well-paced effort that increases tension with every page. In a political maneuver designed to swing the pendulum of public opinion, Plant Director Palmer is attempting to produce quantities of an isotope that has proved effective in combatting the boll weevil. A friendly Southern Congressman has promised to set up an experimental station that, if successful, should convert the agricultural populace to support of the atomic facilities. That would assure his re-election and, as head of the committee, he could bottle up legislation. Unfortunately, the manufacture of Isotope #-# leads to a breakdown of one of the converters with uncontrollable "hot" stuff leakage and extreme danger of degeneration into Mahler's Isotope, with a breakdown time ond. That creates a nasty problem and an interesting story. Just swallow the premise and enjoy the yarn. You can. Rinehart  Co., Inc., N. Y.  Toronto, # HP HE average reader will have a lot of unanswered questions on finishing this book, in spite of its title. Conditioned as we are in this field to speculation in every form, we insist that any yarn be intrinsically logical within the bounds it sets for itself. It is not giving away too much to say that the story concerns two atomic tests, one American, one Russian. Each results in the death of an angel. It is easy to see what both reactions will be and Wylie doesn't disappoint us. The fable's message is convincing, viewed from a Sunday-school level, but this is aimed at adults and it wildly misses its target Manning Coles, Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., # hero of Coles' third venture into this medium. The unfortunate victim of a multiple drowning some eighty-five years previous to the opening of the tale, he, the Graf or Duke, must haunt the halls of his castle until the status of his marriage is accepted by his familial descendants. Drowned attempting to save the life of his bride of two days, a commoner he had married against parental wishes, his personal servant, Franz Bagel, was also drowned trying to save him. A British film company has come to his castle by permission of his descendant, the present Graf, to film, coincidentally, the story of his life. When a suspicious accident incapacitates the leading man, our materialized hero becomes the perfect choice for his own portrayer. Incognito as he may be, Graf Adhemar engenders semi-recognition among the castle retinue and the director has his suspicions aroused as the Graf constantly offers pointers on the life of the drowned hero. He almost creates a ghostly impasse when he cannot understand why he should still have to wander wraithlike through the halls at midnight while busily engaged in fleshly play-acting during the day. Dleightful clowning. Agent  Raveling Porcy's systematized enigma, Dan found himself with a spy's worst break -- he was saddled with the guise of a famed manl to look in the mirror before going to see the director of A Section. The face that looked back wasn't bad, if he had expected strong cheekbones, copper skin and a high-arched nose. But Dan wasn't used to it yet. He straightened and his coat drew tight across chest and shoulders. The sleeves pulled up above hands that felt average, but that the mirror showed to be huge and broad. Dan turned to go out in the hall and had to duck to avoid banging his head on the door frame. On the way down the hall, he wondered just what sort of job he had drawn this time. Dan stopped at a door lettered: A pretty receptionist goggled at him and said to go in. Dan opened the inner door. Kielgaard -- big, stocky, expensively dressed -- looked up and studied Dan as he came in. Apparently satisfied, he offered a chair, then took out a small plastic cartridge and held it in one hand. "Dan," he said, "what do you know about subspace and nullpoints?" "Practically nothing," admitted Dan honestly. I'll fill you in with the layman's analogy, which is all I know. Suppose you have a newspaper with an ant on the middle of the front page. To get to the middle of page two, the ant has to walk to the edge of the paper, then walk back on the inside. Now suppose the ant could go through the page. The middle of page' two is just a short distance away from the middle of page one. That going through, instead of around, is like travel in subspace. And a null-point is a place just a short distance away, going through subspace. The middle of page two, for instance, is a nullpoint for the middle of page one." "Yes," said Dan patiently, waiting for the point of the interview. Kielgaard pushed the plastic cartridge he'd been holding through a slot in his desk. A globe to one side lighted up a cottony white, with faint streaks of blue. "This," he said, "is Porcys." Dan studied the globe. "Under that cloud blanket, it looks as if it might be a water world." "It is. Except for a small continent, the planet is covered with water. And the water is full of seafood -- edible seafood." Dan frowned, still waiting. "Galactic Enterprises," said Kielgaard, "has discovered a region in subspace which has Porcys for one null-point and Earth for another." "Oh," said Dan, beginning to get the point. "And Earth's hungry, of course. Galactic can ship the seafood straight through subspace at a big profit." "That's the idea. But there's one trouble." Kielgaard touched a button, and on the globe, the white layer vanished. The globe area of mingled green and grayish-brown. "The land area of the planet is inhabited. Galactic must have the permission of the inhabitants to fish the ocean. And Galactic needs to close the deal fast, or some other outfit, like TransSpace, may get wind of things and move in." Kielgaard looked at the globe thoughtfully. "All we know about the Porcyns could be put on one side of a postage stamp. They're physically strong. They have a few large cities. They have an abundant supply of seafood. They have spaceships and mataform transceivers. This much we know from long-distance observation or from the one Porcyn we anesthetized and brain-spied. We also know from observation that the Porcyns have two other habitable planets in their solar system -- Fumidor, a hot inner planet, and an Earthlike outer planet called Vacation Planet." Kielgaard drummed his fingers softly. "Granting the usual course cf events, Dan, what can we expect to happen? The Porcyns have an abundance of food, a small living area, space travel and two nearby habitable planets. What will they do?" "Colonize the nearby planets," said Dan. "Only they aren't doing it. We've spied both planets till we can't see straight. Fumidor has a mine entrance and a mataform center. Vacation Planet has a mataform center and one or two big buildings. And that's it. There's no emigration from Porcys to the other two planets. Instead, there's a sort of cycling flow from Porcys to Vacation Planet to Fumidor to Porcys. Why? "The Porcyn we brain-spied," he went on, "associated Vacation Planet with 'rejuvenation.' What does that mean we're up against? Galactic wants to make a contract, but not till they know what they're dealing with. There are some races it's best to leave alone. This 'rejuvenation' might be worth more than the seafood, sure, but it could also be a sackful of trouble." Dan waited, realizing that Kielgaard had come to the crux of the matter. Kielgaard said, "Galactic wants us to find the answers to three problems. One, how do the Porcyns keep the size of their population down? Two, what is the connection between rejuvenation and 'Vacation Planet'? And three, do the Porcyns have a proper mercantile attitude? Are they likely to make an agreement? Will they keep one they do make?" Kielgaard looked intently at Dan. "The only way we're likely to find the answers in a reasonable time is to send someone in. You're elected." "Just me?" asked Dan in surprise. "All your eggs in one basket?" "In a situation like this," said Kielgaard, "one good man is worth several gross of dubs. We're relying on you to keep your eyes open and your mind on what you're doing." l, And suppose I don't come back?" "Galactic probably loses the jump it's got on Trans-Space and you miss out on a big bonus." "When do I leave?" "Tomorrow morning. But today you'd better go down and pick up a set of Porcyn clothes we've had made for you and some of their money. It'd be a good idea to spend the evening getting used to things. We've implanted in your brain the Porcyn language patterns we brain-spied and we've installed in your body cavity a simple organo-transmitter you can use during periods of calm. Because the Porcyns are physically strong and possibly worship strength, we've had your body rebuilt to one of the most powerful human physique patterns -- that of an American Indian -- that we have on record." They shook hands and Dan went to his room. He practiced the Porcyn tongue till he had some conscious familiarity with it. Then he tried his strength to make sure he wouldn't accidentally use more force than he intended. Then, while the evening was still young, he went to bed and fell asleep. It was Dan's experience that everything possible went wrong the first few days on a new planet and he wanted to be wide-awake enough to live through it II T HE next day, Dan left in a spacetug that Galactic was sending on a practice trip through subspace to Porcys. From the tug, he went by mataform to the lab ship in the Porcyn sea. Here he learned that he had only twenty minutes during which conditions would be right to make the next mataform jump to a trawler close to the mainland. Dan had wanted to talk to the men on the lab ship and learn all they could tell him about the planet. This being impossible, he determined to question the trawler crew to the limit of their patience. When Dan reached the trawler, it was dancing like a blown leaf in a high wind. He became miserably seasick. That evening, there was a violent electrical storm which lasted into the early morning. Dan spent the whole night nauseously gripping the edge of his bunk, his legs braced against the violent heave and lurch of the trawler. Before dawn of the next day, aching in every muscle, his insides sore and tender, his mind fuzzy from lack of sleep, Dan was set ashore on a dark, quiet and foggy strip of beach. He stood for a moment in the soft sand, feeling it seem to dip underfoot. This, he thought, was undoubtedly the worst start he had ever made on any planet anywhere. From around him in the impenetrable fog came distant croakings, whistlings and hisses. The sounds were an unpleasant suggestion that something else had gone wrong. Between bouts of sickness, Dan had tried to arrange with the crew to land him near the outskirts of a Porcyn city. But the sounds were those of the open country. What Dan wanted was to go through the outskirts of the city before many people were moving around. He could learn a great deal from their homes, their means of transportation and the actions of a few early risers. He could learn from the things he expected to see, or from the lack of them, if he was there to see them. Dan moved slowly inland, crossed a ditch and came to what seemed to be a macadam road. He checked his directions and started to walk. He forced the pace so his breath came hard, and hoped it would pump some life into his dulled brain and muscles. As his senses gradually began to waken, Dan became aware of an odd swish-swish, swish-swish, like a broom dusting lightly over the pavement behind him. The sound drew steadily closer. Dan halted abruptly. The sound stopped, too. He walked on. Swish-swish. He whirled. Silence. "ThAN listened carefully. The sound could be that of whatever on Porcys corresponded to a playful puppy -- or to a rattlesnake. He stepped sharply forward. Swish-swish. It was behind him. He whirled. There was a feeling of innumerable hairy spiders running over him from head to foot. The vague shape of a net formed and vanished in the gloom before him. He lashed out and hit the dark and the fog. Swish-swish. It was moving away. He stood still while the sound faded to a whisper and was gone. Then he started to walk. He was sure that what had just happened meant something, but what it meant was a different question. At least, he thought ruefully, he was wider awake now. He walked on as the sky grew lighter. Then the fog shifted to show a solid mass of low blocky buildings across the road ahead. The road itself disappeared into a tunnel under one of the buildings. To one side, a waist-high metal rail closed off the end of one of the city's streets. Dan walked off the road toward the rail. His eye was caught by the building ahead. Each was exactly the same height, about two to three Earth stories high. They were laid out along a geometrically straight border with no transition between city and farmland. There was a faint hum. Then a long, low streak, its front end rounded like a horseshoe crab, shot out of the tunnel under the building beside him and vanished along the road where he'd just been walking. Now Dan saw a small modest sign beside the road. Care High-Speed Vehicles Only -- Swept -- Dan crossed the rail at the end of the street with great caution. The Porcyn clothing he was wearing consisted of low leather boots, long green hose, leather shorts, a bright purple blouse and a sky-blue cape. Dan bunched the cape in his hand and thrust it ahead of him as he crossed the rail, for some races were finicky about their exits and entrances. The straight, sharp boundary between city and farmland, and the identical buildings, suggested to Dan that here was a race controlled by strict rules and forms, and he was making an obviously unauthorized entrance. It was with relief that he stood on the opposite side, within the city. He glanced back at the sign and wondered what "Swept" meant. Then he gave his attention to the buildings ahead of him. I OW at first, the buildings rose regularly to a greater height, as far as the fog would let him see. Dan remembered the storm of the night before and wondered if the progressive heightening of the buildings was designed to break the force of the wind. The buildings themselves were massive, with few and narrow windows, and wide heavy doors opening on the street. Dan walked farther into the city and found that the street took right-angle bends at regular intervals, probably also to break the wind. There was no one in sight, and no vehicles. Dan decided he was probably in a warehouse district. He paused to look at a partly erected new building, built on the pattern of the rest. Then he heard from up the street a grunting, straining sound interspersed with whistling puffs. There was a stamping noise, a thud and the clash of metal. Dan ran as quietly as he could up the street, stopped, glanced around one of the right-angle bends. He was sure the sound had come from there. The street was empty. Dan walked closer and studied a large brass plate set in the base of a building. It looked about twenty inches high by thirty wide with a rough finish. In the center of the plate was a single word : Dan looked at this for a moment. Then, frowning, he strode on. In his mind's eye, he was seeing the sign by the road: Care High-Speed Vehicles Only -- Swept -- Dan couldn't decide whether the word "Swept" was part of the warning or just an afterthought. In any case, he had plainly heard a struggle here and now there was nothing to be seen. Alert for more brass plates, he wound his way through the streets until he came out on a broad avenue. On the opposite side were a number of tall, many-windowed buildings like apartment houses. On the sidewalks and small lawns in front, crowds of children were playing. They were wearing low boots, leather shorts or skirts, brightly colored blouses and hose, and yellow capes. Walking quietly among them was a tawny animal with the look and lordly manner of a lion. It was a lion. As far as the rapidly dispersing fog let him see, the avenue ran straight in one direction. In the other, it ended a block or so away. Apparently the crooked, windbreaking streets were only on the edge of the city. Dan thought of the questions Kielgaard wanted him to answer: #, how do the Porcyns keep the size of their population down? #, what is the connection between rejuvenation and Vacation Planet? #, do the Porcyns have a proper mercantile attitude? Are they likely to make an agreement? Will they keep one they do make? To find the answers, Dan intended to work his way carefully through the city. If nothing went wrong, he should be able to see enough to eliminate most of the possibilities. Already he had seen enough to make Porcyns look unpromising. The rigid city boundary, the strict uniformity of the buildings and the uniform pattern of the clothing suggested a casehardened, ingrown way of living. to one side of the apartment building's main entrance came open. The lion walked out. It was carrying a squirming little boy by his bunched-up cape. The big creature flopped down, pinned the struggling boy with a huge paw and methodically started to clean him. The rasp of the animal's tongue could be heard clearly across the street. The boy yelled. A healthy-looking girl of about twelve, wearing a cape diagonally striped in yellow and red, ran over and rescued the boy. The lion rolled over on its back to have its belly scratched. Dan scowled and walked toward the near end of the street. On less advanced planets, where the danger of detection was not so great, agents often went in with complex, surgically inserted organo-transmitters in their body cavities. Unlike the simple communicator Dan had, these were fitted with special taps on the optic and auditory nerves, and the transmitter continuously broadcast all that the agent saw and heard. Experts back home went over the data and made their own conclusions. The method was useful, but it had led to some dangerous mistakes. Sight and sound got across, but often the atmosphere of the place didn't. Dan thought it might be the same here. The feeling that the city gave him didn't match what his reasoning told him. He crossed a street, passed an inscription on a building: Freedom Devisement Fraternity Then he was back in a twisting maze of streets. He walked till the wind from the sea blew in his face. The street dipped to a massive wall and the sea, where a few brightly colored, slow moving trawlers were going out. Dan turned in another street and wound back and forth till he came out along the ocean front. On one side of the street was the ocean, a broad strip of sand, and the sea wall. On the other side was a row of small shops, brightly awninged, with displays just being set in place out in front. In the harbor, a ship was being unloaded. Flat-bottomed boats were running back and forth from several long wharves. On the street ahead, a number of heavy wagons, drawn by six-legged animals with heads like eels, bumped and rattled toward the wharves. Behind them ran a crowd of boys in yellow capes, a big tawny lioness trotting among them. On the sidewalk nearby strode a few powerfully built old men, their capes of various colors. Dan glanced at the displays in front of the shops. Some were cases of fish on ice. Others were piles of odd vegetables in racks. Dan paused to look at a stack of things like purple carrots. A man immediately came forward from the rear of the store, wiping his hands on his apron. Dan moved on. The next shop had the universal low boots, shorts, skirts, blouses and hose, in assorted sizes and colors, but no capes. Dan slowed to glance at the display and saw the proprietor coming briskly from the dark interior, rubbing his hands. Dan speeded up and got away before the proprietor came out. The Porcyns, he thought, seemed at least to have a proper mercantile attitude. Ill ket, then came to a big, brightly polished window. Inside was a huge, chromium-plated barbell on a purple velvet cloth. Behind it were arranged displays of hand-grips, exercise cables, dumbbells and skipping ropes. The inside of the store was indirectly lighted and expensively simple. The place had an air that was quiet, lavish and discreet. It reminded Dan of a well-to-do funeral establishment. In one corner of the window was a small, edge-lighted sign: You Never Know What the Next Life Will Be Like. In the other comer of the window was a polished black plate with a dimly glowing bulb in the center. Around the bulb were the words: Your Corrected Charge -- Courtesy of Save-Your-Life Co. A tall, heavily muscled man in a dark-blue cape stepped outside. "Good morning, Devisement," he said affably. "I see you're a stranger in town. I thought I might mention that our birth rate's rather high just now." He coughed deferentially. "You set an example, you know. Our main store is on # Center Street, so if you -- " He was cut off by a childish scream. Down the street, a little boy struggled and thrashed near an oblong hole at the base of a building, caught in a tangle of the mysterious ropes. "A kid!" cried the man. He sucked in his breath and shouted, "Dog! Here, Dog! Dog!" On the end of a wharf, a crowd of children was watching the unloading. From their midst, a lioness burst. "Here, Dog!" shouted the man. "A sweeper! A sweeper! Run, Dog!" The lioness burst into a blur of long bounds, shot down the wharf, sprang into the street and glanced around with glaring yellow eyes. The little boy was partway inside the hole, clinging to the edge with both hands. "Doggie," he sobbed. The lioness crouched, sprang into the hole. A crash, a bellow and a thin scream came from within. The lioness reappeared, its eyes glittering and its fur on end. It gripped the little boy by the cape and trotted off, growling. "Good dog!" cried the man. Men in the shops' doorways echoed his shout. "A kid," said the man. "They have to learn sometime, I know, but -- " He cut himself short. "Well, all's well that ends well." He glanced respectfully at Dan. "If you're here any length of time, sir, we'd certainly appreciate your looking into this. And if you're planning to stay long -- well, as you see, our sweepers are hungry -- our main store is on # Center Street. Our vacation advisor might be of some service to you." "Thank you," said Dan, his throat dry. "Not at all, Devisement." The man went inside, muttering, "A kid." Dan passed several more shops without seeing very much. He turned the corner. Across the street, where the boy had been, was a dented brass plate at the base of the building. On Dan's side of the street, trotting toward him, was a big, tawny-maned lion. Dan hesitated, then started up the street. There was a faint clash of metal. Swish-swish. air and close around him. There was a feel of innumerable hairy spiders running over him from head to foot. The net vanished. Something wrapped around his ankle and yanked. The lion growled. There was a loud clang and Dan's foot was free. He looked down and saw a brass plate laDan decided it might be a good idea to see the Save-Your-Life Co.'s vacation advisor. He started out to locate # Center Street #  and gave all brass plates a wide berth on the way. He strode through a briskly moving crowd of powerfully built men and women in capes of various colors, noticing uneasily that they were making way for him. He studied them as they passed, and saw capes of red, green, dark blue, brown, purple, and other shades and combinations of colors. But the only sky-blue cape he had seen so far was his own. A sign on the corner of a building told Dan he was at Center Street. He crossed and the people continued to draw back for him. It began to dawn on Dan that he had had the ultimate bad luck for a spy in an unknown country: He was marked out on sight as some sort of notable. Just how bad his luck had been wasn't clear to him till he came to a small grassy square with an iron fence around it and a mansized statue in the center. The granite base of the statue was inscribed: The statue itself was of bronze, showing a powerful man, his foot crushing down a mass of snapping monsters. In his right hand, he held together a large circle of metal, his fingers squeezing shut a cut in the metal, which would break the circle if he let go. His left hand made a partially open fist, into which a wrench had been fitted. The statue itself, protected by some clear finish from the weather, was plain brown in color. But the statue's cape was enameled sky-blue. Dan stared at the statue for a moment, then looked around. In the street beside it, a crowd of people was forming, their backs toward him and their heads raised. Dan looked up. Far up, near the tops of the buildings, he could make out a long cable stretched from one building to another across the street. Just on the other side of the crowd was the entrance to the main store of the Save-Your-Life Co. T'kAN crossed the street and saw a very average-looking man, wearing an orange cape, come to a stop at the corner and look shrewdly around. Dan blinked and looked again. The man in orange was no Porcyn. The man's glance fell on the statue and his lips twisted in an amused smile. He looked up toward the rope, then down at the crowd, and then studied the backs of the crowd and the fronts of the stores around him, the lids of his eyes half-closed in a calculating look. A brass plate nearby popped open, a net of delicate hairy tendrils ran over him, and something like a length of tarred one-inch rope snaked out and wrapped around his legs. An outraged expression crossed his face. His hand came up. The rope yanked. He fell on the sidewalk. The rope hauled him into the hole. The brass plate snapped shut. From inside came a muffled report. It occurred to Dan that Galactic was not the only organization interested in Porcys. Dan looked thoughtfully at the brass plate for a moment, then walked toward the entrance of the Save-Your-Life Co., past display windows showing weights, cables, parallel bars, trapezes and giant springs with handles on each end. He tried the door. It didn't move. A clerk immediately opened the door and took Dan along a cool, chaste hallway to an office marked "Vacation Advisor." Here a suave-looking man made an offhand remark about the birth rate, took a sudden look at Dan's cape, blinked, stiffened, glanced at Dan's midsection and relaxed. He went through his files and gave Dan a big photograph showing a smiling, healthy, middle-aged couple and a lovely girl about nineteen. "These are the Milbuns, sir. Mr. Milbun is a merchant at present. Quite well-to-do, I understand. Mrs. Milbun is a housewife right now. The daughter, Mavis, is with a midtown firm at the moment The mother became ill at an awkward time. The family put their vacation off for her, and as a result their charge has run very low. If you can get to their apartment without being -- ah -- swept, I feel sure they will welcome you, sir." He scribbled a rough map on a piece of paper, drew an arrow and wrote "# Runfast Boulevard, Apartment #B," and stamped the paper "Courtesy of Save-Your-Life Co." Then he wished Dan a healthy vacation and walked with him to hold open the outer door. Dan thanked him and went outside, where the crowd was now almost blocking the sidewalk. He forced his way free, saw someone point, and glanced at the statue. The wrench in the statue's left hand had been replaced by what looked like a magnifying glass. Dan had gone a few steps when there was a thundering cheer, then a terrified scream high in the air behind him. He turned around and saw a man come plummeting down. Dan gaped higher and saw a line of tiny figures going across high up on the rope. One of the figures slipped. There was another cheer. Dan hurriedly turned away. He had already convinced hima self that the Porcyns had a "proper mercantile attitude." And he thought he was beginning to get an idea as to how they kept their population down. IV  plates, Dan made his way along an avenue of shops devoted to exercise and physical fitness. He came to Runfast Blvd. and located #, which looked like the apartment houses he had seen earlier. He tried the outer door; it was locked. When someone came out, Dan caught the door and stepped in. As the door shut, he tried it and found it was locked again. He stood for a moment trying to understand it, but his sleeplessness of the night before was catching up with him. He gave up and went inside. There were no elevators on the ground floor. Dan had his choice of six ropes, two ladders and a circular staircase. He went up the staircase to the third floor, where he saw a single elevator. He rode it up to the sixth, got off and found that there was a bank of four elevators on this floor. He looked at the elevators a minute, felt himself getting dizzy, and walked off to locate apartment #B. A powerfully built gray-haired man of middle height answered his knock. Dan introduced himself and explained why he had come. Mr. Milbun beamed and his right hand shot forward. Dan felt like a man with his hand caught in an airlock. "Lerna!" called Milbun. "Lemal Mavis! We have a guest for vacation!" Dan became aware of a rhythmical clinking somewhere in the back of the apartment. Then a big, strong-looking woman, obviously fresh from the kitchen, hurried in, smiling. If she had been ill, she was clearly recovered now. "Ah, how are you?" she cried. "We're so happy to have you!" She gripped his hand and called, "Mavis!" The clinking stopped. A beautifully proportioned girl came in, wearing a sweatshirt and shorts. "Mother, I simply have to get off another pound or so -- Oh!" She stared at Dan. "Mavis," said Mr. Milbun, "this is Mr. Dan Redman. Devisement, my daughter Mavis." "You're going with us!" she said happily. "How wonderful!" "Now," said Mr. Milbun, "I imagine his Devisement wants to get a little rest before he goes down to the gym." He glanced at Dan. "We have a splendid gym here." "Oh," said Mavis eagerly, "and you can use my weights." "Thanks," said Dan. "We're leaving tomorrow," Milbun told him. "The birth rate's still rising here, and last night the charge correction went up again. A little more and it'll take two of us to get a door open. It won't inconvenience you to leave tomorrow?" "Not at all," said Dan. "Splendid." Milbun turned to his wife. "Lema, perhaps our guest would like a little something to eat." 'X'HE food was plain, good and plentiful. Afterward, Mavis showed Dan to his room. He sank down gratefully on a firm, comfortable bed. He closed his eyes... Someone was shaking him gently. "Don't you want to go down to the gym?" asked Mr. Milbun. "Remember, we're leaving tomorrow." "Of course," said Dan. Feeling that his brain was functioning in a vacuum, Dan followed the Milbuns into the hall, climbed down six stories on a ladder, then into the basement on a rope. He found himself in a room with a stony dirt track around the wall, ropes festooning the ceiling, an irregularly shaped pool, and artificial shrubs and foliage from behind which sprang mechanical monsters. The Milbuns promptly vanished behind imitation vinecovered doors and came out again in gym clothes. Dan went through the doorway Mr. Milbun had come out of and discovered that the Save-YourLife Co. had a machine inside which dispensed washed, pressed and sterilized gym clothes for a small fee. The machine worked by turning a selector dial to the proper size, pressing a lever, and then depositing the correct fee in an open box on the wall nearby. Dan studied this a moment in puzzlement, guessed his proper size and put the correct payment in the box. He put on the gym clothes and went outside. For forty-five minutes, mechanical creatures of odd and various shapes sprang at him from behind shrubbery, gripped him when he passed holes in the floor and wound themselves around his legs as he tried to swim in the pool. His temper worsened. He stopped to look at Mavis as she swayed, laughing, on a rope above two things like mobile giant clamshells. Mr. Milbun shook his head. "Mavis, remember, we're leaving tomorrow." Just then, something snarled and lunged at Dan from the side. There was a flash of teeth. Dan whirled. His fist shot out. There was a scream of machinery, then a crash and a clatter. An imitation monster with a huge jaw and giant teeth lay on its back on the koor. Milbun let out a slow whistle. "Dismounted it. Boy!" "A one-bite, too," breathed Mavis. Mrs. Milbun came over and looked at Dan approvingly. Dan had been about to apologize, but checked himself when the others smiled cheerfully and went back to what they were doing. This consisted of dodging, tricking or outrunning the various contraptions that lunged at them, chased them, tripped them, trailed, stalked and sprang out at them from nearly every place in the room. Finally the gym began to fill up with other people. The Milbuns got ready to leave and Dan followed. AN lay in his bed that night and tried to summarize the points he didn't understand. First was the question of vacation. But he supposed he would learn about that tomorrow. Next was "charge." Apparently one went on vacation when his "charge" was low, because the vacation advisor had said, "The family put their vacation off for her, and as a result their charge has run very low." But just what was "charge"? Dan remembered the flickering bulb in the store window, ringed by the words "Your Corrected Charge -- Courtesy of Save-YourLife Co." Apparently he had some charge, because the bulb had flickered. But where did he get it? Then he thought of the waterfront and of the little boy caught at the hole. What was the point of that? And why did that produce such an uproar when, a little later, a grown man could get dragged out of sight on a welltraveled street and never cause a single notice? Dan felt himself sinking into a maze of confusion. He dismissed the problems and went to sleep clinging to one fact. The Porcyns must be honest people who would keep an agreement, once made. On what other planet could anyone find a slot machine with no slot, but just an open box for the money? Dan fell asleep, content that he had the answer to that part of the problem, at least. Before it was light, he awoke to an odd familiar buzz inside his head. "Dan," said Kielgaard's voice, small and remote. Dan rolled over, lay on his back and spoke sub-vocally. "Right here." "Can you talk?" "Yes," said Dan, "if I can stay awake." "Can you give us a summary?" "Sure." Dan told him briefly what had happened. Kielgaard was silent a moment. Then he said, "What do you think 'charge' is?" "I haven't been in any condition to think. Maybe it's a surgically implanted battery, set to run down after so long." "Too clumsy. What about radioactivity?" "ITm. Yes, you mentioned a mine on the inner planet. Maybe they mine radioactive ore. That would explain why I have some charge. There's residual radioactivity even in the atmosphere of Earth." "That's so," said Kielgaard. "But not every planet has it. I'm wondering about this other agent you mentioned seeing. He sounds to me like someone from TransSpace. And that's bad." "They play dirty," Dan conceded. Kielgaard's tiny voice. "They recruit their agents from Lassen Two. Maybe that's a break. Unlike Earth, Lassen Two is nearly radiation free. And Trans-Space doesn't use finesse. They'll pump Porcys full of agents loaded down with organotransmitters. Visual, auditory and olfactory. They'll broadcast on every wave-length, suck out as much information in as short a time as they can, then either pull some dirty trick or slam the Porcyns an offer. That is, if everything goes according to plan. "But meanwhile," he added, "one or more of their agents is bound to stand in front of a free 'Your charge' device somewhere in the city. Very likely, that agent will be radiation-free and some Porcyn, for the first time in his life, is going to see a bulb that doesn't even flicker. If the Porcyns are as scientifically advanced as we think, and if TransSpace is as dirty as usual, there may be a rat-race on before we know it." Dan lay gloomily still. "Dan," said Kielgaard, "where were you standing in relation to the other agent? Did he come up from behind or was he in front of you when you reached the statue?" "I was in front of him. Why?" "Because then you were in his range of vision. He may not have noticed you, but his organo-transmitter would. The chances are you appeared on the screen back at Trans-Space headquarters. They record those scenes as they come in and their experts go over them frame by frame. Unless you happened to be behind someone, they'll see your image on the screen, spot you here and there in other scenes from other agents, study your actions and recognize you as an agent just as surely as you recognized their agent." "Yes," said Dan wearily, "of course they will." He was thinking that if he had been more awake yesterday, he would have thought of this himself and perhaps avoided it. But he couldn't be alert without sleep and who could sleep in a heaving boat in a thunderstorm? "This changes things," Kielgaard was saying. "I'm going to see if we can get a little faster action." "I think I'd better get some more sleep," Dan answered. "I may need it tomorrow." "I agree," said Kielgaard. "You'll have to keep your eyes open. Good night, Dan, and good luck." "Thanks." Dan rolled over on his side. He tried for a moment to remember how the other agent had been standing and whether anyone had been between them to block his view, but he couldn't be sure. Dan decided there was nothing to do but assume the worst. He blanked his mind. Soon a feeling of deep weariness came over him and he fell asleep. Milbuns ate a hurried breakfast. Dan helped Mr. Milbun grease his rowing machine, weights, springs and chinning bar, so they wouldn't rust in his absence. Milbun worked in a somber mood. All the Milbuns, in fact, were unusually quiet for a family going on vacation. When they went out into the hall, carrying no baggage, they even took the elevator to the third floor. "Better save our strength," said Mr. Milbun. The street seemed to Dan to have a different atmosphere. People were walking quietly in groups, their eyes cool and alert. The Milbuns walked in front of the apartment houses Dan had passed the day before, and across the street he saw the place where the chiseled motto had read: Freedom Devisement Fraternity It was gone. Some workmen nearby were lifting a stone slab onto a cart. Dan blinked. The motto now read: Alertness Devisement Vigilance The Milbuns plainly noticed it, too. They drew closer together and looked around thoughtfully. Carefully keeping away from they followed a devious route that led to the statue. The statue had changed, too. The hand that gripped the circle was now hidden by a massive shield. The other hand still held what looked like a magnifying glass, and the motto was still "I Devise." But the shield gave the whole statue a look of strange menace. Across the street, near the place where Dan had seen the Trans-Space agent, stood several men wearing orange capes, barred black across the shoulders. Nearby, the brass plate opened and a man in work clothes handed out a box and went back in. At a store entrance up the street, watching them, stood an average-looking man in a purple cape, his look intent and calculating. Mavis glanced at the statue and took Dan's arm. "Devisement," she said, "they won't take you now, will they, before vacation?" Dan kept an uneasy silence and Mr. Milbun said, "Of course not, Mavis. Where's the belt?" Mavis glanced at the statue. "Oh." Dan looked at the statue, then at Mavis and Mr. Milbun, said nothing and went on. They came to a large building with a long flight of broad wide steps. Across the face of the building was boldly and sternly lettered, high up: Lower down was the motto: "Speak the Truth -- Live Yet a While With Us." V they climbed was a statue of a man, smiling. On the other side was an urn with a bunch of carved flowers lying beside it. A big bronze door stood open at the top. They walked through into a large chamber with massive seats in triple rows along two walls, and a single row of yet more massive seats raised along the farther wall. A bored-looking man got up from a low desk as the Milbuns sat down in three of the massive seats. The man asked in a dreary voice, "Have you, to the best of your knowledge, committed any wrong or illegal act or acts since your last vacation?" He picked up a whiskbroom and pan and waited for their answers. "No," said the three Milbuns in earnest quavering voices. The man looked at each of them, shrugged and said boredly, "Pass through to your vacations, live law-abiding citizens." He beckoned impatiently to Dan, turned to scowl at him, saw Dan's cape, stiffened, looked hastily out to the statue framed by the doorway, relaxed slightly and inquired respectfully, "Is it time for you to go on vacation, Devisement?" "It seems to be," said Dan. "I think you should, sir. Then you'd be still more helpful if called." Dan nodded noncommittally and sat down in one of the massive chairs. His glance fell on an ornamental carving above the big doorway. It was a set of scales held by a giant hand. In one pan of the scales sat a smiling man. In the other was a small heap of ashes. "Have you," asked the bored man, "to the best of your knowledge, committed any wrong or illegal act or acts since your last vacation?" He readied the dustpan and whiskbroom. The Milbuns watched anxiously at a door in the back of the room. Uneasily, Dan thought back and remembered rro wrong or illegal acts he had committed since his last vacation. "No," he said. The functionary stepped back. "Pass through to your vacation, live law-abiding citizen, sir." Dan got up and walked toward the Milbuns. Another bored functionary came in wheeling a cartful of urns. He stopped at a massive chair with a heap of ashes on the seat, a small pile on either arm, and two small piles at the foot. The functionary swept the ashes off and dumped them in the urn. A cold sensation went through Dan. He followed the Milbuns out into a small room. He felt an out-of-focus sensation and realized the room was a mataform transmitter. An instant later, they were in a spaceship crowded with thoughtful-looking people. to be given over to silent, morose meditation, with an occasional groan that sounded very much like, "Oh, give me just one more chance, God." When they left the ship, it was again by mataform, this time to a building where they stood in a line of people. The line wound through a booth where the color of their capes was marked on their foreheads, thence past a counter where they received strong khaki-colored capes, blouses and hose, and new leather shorts and boots to replace those they were wearing. They changed in tiny private rooms, handed their own clothing in at another counter, had a number stamped on their left shoulders and on their boxes of clothing. Then they walked out onto a fronting on an inlet of sparkling blue water. Here and there huddled little crowded knots of people, dancing from one foot to another on the hot sand and yet apparently afraid to go in the water. Dan looked to the Milbuns for some clue and saw them darting intense calculating glances at the beach and the water. Then Mr. Milburn yelled, "Run for it!" A slavering sound reached Dan's ear. He sprinted after the Milbuns, burst through the crowd in a headlong bolt for the cove, then swam as fast as he could to keep up with them as they raced for the opposite shore. They crawled out, strangling and gasping, and dragged themselves up on the sand. Dan lay, heaving in deep breaths, then rolled over and sat up. The air around them was split by screams, laced through with sobs, curses and groans. On the shore opposite, a mad dog darted across the crowded beach and emptied people into the cove. In the cove, a glistening black sweep of hide separated the water for an instant, then sank below. People thrashed, fought and went under. Dan looked up. On the wooden building beyond the cove and the beach was a broad sign: Dan read the sign three times. If this was rejuvenation, the Porcyns could have it. Beside Dan, Milbun stood up, still struggling for breath, and pulled his wife and Mavis to their feet. "Come on," he said. "We've got to get through the swamp ahead of the grayboas!" T HE rest of the day, they pushed through slimy muck up to their knees and sometimes up to their necks. Behind them, the crowd screamingly thinned out. That night, they washed in icy spring water, tore chunks of meat from a huge broiled creature turning on a spit and went to sleep in tents to the buzz and drone of creatures that shot their long needle noses through the walls like drillers hunting for oil. The following day, they spent carefully easing from crevice to narrow toehold up the sheer face of a mountain. Food and shelter were at the top. Jagged rocks and hungry creatures were at the bottom. That night, Dan slept right through an urgent buzz from Kielgaard. The next night, he woke enough to hear it, but he didn't have the strength to answer. Where, he thought, is the rejuvenation in this? Then he had a sudden glimmering. It was the Porcyn race that was rejuvenated. The unfit of the Porcyns died violently. It took stamina just to live from one day to the next. Even the Milbuns were saying that this was the worst vacation ever. Trails slid out from under them. Trees fell toward them. Boulders bounded down steep slopes at them. At first, the Milbuns tried to remember forgotten sins for which all this might be repayment. But when there was the dull boom of an explosion and they narrowly escaped a landslide, Milbun looked at the rocks across the trail with sunken red eyes. He sniffed the air and growled, "Undevised." That afternoon, Dan and the Milbuns passed three averagelooking men hanging by their hands from the limb of a tree beside the trail. The faces of the hanging men bore a surprised expression. They hung perfectly still and motionless, except for a slight swaying caused by the wind. Dan and the Milbuns reached a mataform station late that afternoon. A very hard-eyed guard in an orange cape, barred across the shoulders in black, let them through and they found themselves in another spaceship, bound for Fumidor, the mining planet. T'k AN sat back exhausted and fell asleep. He was awakened by a determined buzz. "Dan!" said Kielgaard's voice. "Yes." Dan sat up. "Go ahead." "Trans-Space is going to try to take over Porcys. There's nothing you can do about that, but they've landed agents on Vacation Planet to pick you off. Look out." Dan told Kielgaard what had happened to the agents on Vacation Planet, such as the "undevised" explosion and being hung up by the hands. Kielgaard whistled. "Maybe the Porcyns can take care of themselves. Trans-Space doesn't think so." "How did you find out?" The tiny voice held a note of grim satisfaction. "They ran an agent in on us and he gave himself away. He went back with an organo transmitter inside him, and a memory bank. The bank stores up the day's impressions. The transmitter squirts them out in one multi-frequency blast. The agent is poorly placed for an informant, but we've learned a lot through him." "How are they going to take over Porcys?" "We don't know. They think they've found the Porcyns' weak point, but if so, we don't know what it is." "Listen," urged Dan, "maybe we ought to put a lot of agents on Porcys." "No," said Kielgaard. "That's the wrong way to play it. If we go in now, we'll be too late to do any good. We're still counting on you." "There's not very much I can do by myself." "Just do your best. That's all we can ask." Dan spent the next week chipping out pieces of a radioactive ore. At night, Kielgaard would report the jubilant mood of TransSpace. On the following days, Dan would chop at the ore with vicious blows that jarred him from his wrists to his heels. The steady monotonous work, once he was used to it, left his mind free to think and he tried furiously to plan what he would do when he got out. But he found he didn't really know enough about Porcys to make a sensible plan. Then he began trying to organize what he had seen and heard during his stay on the planet. At night, Kielgaard helped him and together they went over their theories, trying to find those that would fit the facts of Porcys. "It all hinges on population pressure," said Kielgaard finally. "On most planets we know of, overpopulation leads to war, starvation, birth control or emigration. These are the only ways. At least, they were, till we discovered Porcys." LL right," agreed Dan. "Grant that. The Porcyns plainly don't have any of those things, or not to any great extent. Instead, they have institutions such as we've never seen before. They have 'sweepers,' so-called Vacations' and a rope from building to building. All these things cut down population." "Don't forget their 'truth chairs,'" said Kielgaard. "Where you either tell the truth or get converted to ashes -- yes. But how does it all fit in?" "Let's take one individual as an example. Start at birth." "He's bom," said Dan. "Probably they have nurseries, but we know they stick together as families, because we have the Milbuns to go by. He grows up, living at his parents' place. He goes with other children to school or to see different parts of his city. A lion -- which he calls a 'dog' -- protects him." "Yes," said Kielgaard. "It protects him from sweepers. But most grownups don't need protection. Only those whose charge is low." "Of course. The boy hasn't been on vacation yet. He's not radioactive. Apparently you have to be radioactive to open doors. At the apartment house, the boy comes in a small door to one side. The lions, or what resemble lions, like the children but don't like the sweepers. And the sweepers are afraid of them. All right. But what about when he grows up?" "Well, for one thing, he has to use the regular doors now. And they won't open unless he's been on vacation. And if he hasn't been on vacation and if his charge isn't high, the sweepers will go out and grab him. That must be what that sign you saw meant. 'Swepf was a warning that there was no escape in that direction." "I begin to see it," said Dan. "I was safe on that road because the birth rate in that section wasn't high. But in the city, the birth rate was high, so, to keep the population down, the standards were raised. Apparently the sweepers were fed less and got more hungry. People had to go on vacation more often. But what about the rope?" know enough to understand the rope," said Kielgaard, 'but maybe it's a face-saving device. People who don't think they're in good enough shape to get through 'vacation,' and who don't want to die a slow death avoiding sweepers and waiting to go through locked doors, can go across on the rope. Or perhaps it's a penance. If a man has done something wrong and he's afraid to deny it in the truth chair, perhaps he's allowed to confess and go so many times across the rope as punishment. The people cheered. That must mean it's honorable." "That makes sense," Dan agreed. "All right, but why don't they just ship their surplus population to the other two planets?" "We've studied that back here," said Kielgaard. "We think it's because they wouldn't dare. They've got their little mainland alloted and rationed down to the last blade of grass. They can do that because it's small enough to keep control of. Now suppose they try to enforce the same system on a new planet with a hundred times the land area -- what's going to happen? They'll have unknown, uncontrollable factors to deal with. Their system will break down. That statue of theirs shows they know it, too. The man in the blue cape 'devises' and his strong right hand does nothing but keep the circle -- their system -- from flying apart. What puzzles me is that they're satisfied with it." "There's another point," Dan said, "but I think I see it now. They've got a caste system, but people must be able to move from one caste to another. There must be a competitive exam or some system of choice. The vacation advisor said Mr. Milbun was 'at present' a merchant. His wife was 'now' a housewife. And no one ever asked my name, though I told it voluntarily to Milbun. It was always 'Yes, Devisement,' or 'Is it time to take your vacation, Devisement?' There were no personal titles like 'Sir Moglin,' or 'First Magistrate Moglin,' such as we've encountered on other planets." Kielgaard grunted. "That would explain the differently colored capes, too. No one would care if a man was a street-cleaner ten years ago. They'd see his cape was blue and give him immediate, automatic respect." "Yes," said Dan. "That's it. And no one would dare cheat about the color of the cape he wore, because, regardless of his position, sooner or later his charge would be gone. Then he would have to go on vacation. And to do that, he has to sit in the truth chair and tell the truth or get incinerated." Dan stopped suddenly and sucked in a deep breath. "What's wrong?" asked Kielgaard. "That's the weak point." VI Dan was able to pass through a door with a specialized type of Geiger counter in the locking circuit And by that time, Kielgaard had noted sharp fluctuations in the mood at Trans-Space. There had been an interval of wild confusion, but it hadn't lasted. Many more Trans-Space agents had gone to Porcys and Trans-Space seemed to be on top again. The instant Dan stepped from the mines through the door marked "Out," he was rushed through a shower, a shave and a haircut, shoved into a truth chair and asked questions, given a new cape and clothes, and buckled into a glittering belt by a purplecaped man addressed as "Reverence." No sooner was the belt in place than all, including "Reverence," snapped to attention. "Devisement," said a man in an orange-and-black cape, "we need your decision quickly. At home, men have usurped cloaks of devisement and given orders contrary to the public good. They wore belts of power, but did not die when their false orders were given. In the Central City, they convened a council, seated themselves in the Hall of Truth, and on the very first oath every single one of them present was thrown into the life beyond. "Because the statue was already belted, men wearing cloaks of devisement had to give the orders. But now they were all gone. Looters roamed the streets, breaking in doors. These men were vacation-dodgers -- out so long that they couldn't even make a chargelight flicker -- and the sweepers cleaned up some of them. But they killed the sweepers! IJevisement, I tell you the truth!" "I believe you," said Dan. "Thank heaven. Devisement, something must be done. A young boy passed and graduated to the devisement cape, but before he could take action, he was shot from ambush. We found an old man of the right cape out in the country, and when we finally convinced him, he rounded up one hundred and fifty-seven vacationdodgers and executed them. We had things in order, but now a glut of lunatics in devisement capes and belts of power have burst into the streets. Their orders are silly, yet their belts don't kill them. They have no fear of the Truth. Business is stopped and men are hungry. The people are going wild. Strange boats have appeared offshore. Mataform transmitters of odd design are being set up near the shore. This cannot go on without breaking the circle!" Dan's throat felt dry. "Sir," said the Porcyn desperately, "you must devise something! What shall we do?" A faint tingling at Dan's waist suggested to him that he choose so his words carefully. One lie or bad intention and the belt of power would probably finish him. He thought carefully. The total power of the Porcyn planet must be at least the equal of even the huge Trans-Space organization. And Porcys had its power all in one place. The planet was organized to the last ounce of energy, if only it could be brought to bear in time. Dan ordered his anxious companions to take him to Porcys. TAR under the Central City, which was the city he had seen, he found a weary, powerful old man in a light-blue cape and glittering belt, directing operations from a television command post. The console showed street scenes of men in sky-blue capes and flashing belts, who danced and jabbered, their faces aglow with lunacy as they rapped out conflicting orders and the people jerked and dashed this way and that, tears running down their faces. Near the statue, before the Hall of Truth, close ranks of Porcyn men in orange-and-black capes stood massed on the steps, holding sleek-bored guns. On the street below, gibbering lunatics in sky-blue danced and shrieked orders, but the eyes of the men on the steps were tightly shut. By a technicality, they avoided obedience to the lunacy, for with their eyes shut, how could they be sure who gave the command? At the belted statue itself, a man in blue was clinging to one bronze arm as he slammed down a hammer to knock loose the partly broken circle. The statue obstinately refused to let go. At the base of the statue, holding a microphone, stood an averagelooking man in a sky-blue cape, his lips drawn back in an amused smile. He gestured to men with crowbars and they tried to jam them between the statue and its base. This failing, they took up chisels and hammers. The man working on the circle shrugged and jumped down. At the console, the old man looked up at Dan. He put his hand out and felt Dan's belt. Apparently the tingle reassured him and he seemed to accept Dan without further question. "This is about the end," he said. "When that statue goes, those men will feel the jolt and open their eyes. They're the last formed body of troops on the planet, and when they go, we'll have nothing to strike with. There must be something I could devise for this, but I've been up three nights and I can't think." "Can you delay it?" asked Dan, grappling with the beginning of his plan. "Oh, we'll delay it. I've got the last of the sweepers collected at the holes opening into the square. Just when that statue begins to tip, I'll let the sweepers out. That will stop things for a while. Then they'll kill the sweepers and my bolt is shot." "Won't the men you've got here fire on those blue-caped fakes?" "Devisement," said the old man, shaking his head, "you know better." "Are there any fire hoses? Will your men squirt water on the blue-caped ones?" "Yes," said the old man, leaning forward. "They'll get shot. But yes, they will. What is it? What are you devising?" rkAN outlined his plan. The old man's eyes lighted. He nodded and Dan went out and climbed with guides through a grim, dark tunnel where the sweepers were kept. He peered out the hole, and as across the street the statue began to tip, he burst outside and sprinted into the square. The Trans-Space leader raised his microphone. Dan ripped it out of his hand and knocked him off his feet, then knelt and picked up the heavy shield that had been taken off the statue to get at the ring. A bullet hummed over Dan's head. With a rush of air and a heavy smash, the statue landed full length on the ground. Dan hauled himself up onto its base. Another bullet buzzed past him. Then there was a yell, and Dan looked down in the street The sweepers were horrible as they poured from their holes, but they looked almost beautiful to Dan. He glanced at the Porcyns massed on the steps, their faces white with near-hysteria. Their eyes were open and watching him; the Trans-Space men were too busy to give orders. Dan raised the microphone and his voice boomed out: "Close your eyes till you hear the roar of the lion! Then obey your true leaders!" He repeated the order three times before it dawned on the Trans-Space technicians that this was not according to plan. The loudspeaker gave a booming click and cut off. By then, the sweepers had been killed and Dan became aware of bullets thrumming past him. Suddenly he felt weak with panic that the rest of the plan had fallen apart. Up the street, Porcyn men were unscrewing a cap on the face of a building. They connected a hose. A sky-blue-caped Trans-Space agent ordered them away. The Porcyns turned, wads of wax in their ears, and raised the hose. A stream of water knocked the agents backward. Shots rang out. Porcyns fell, but other Porcyns took their places. The stream arched and fell on the TransSpace agents and abruptly a whirl of color tinged the water. Blots and blobs of green, orange, pink and yellow spattered the bluecaped agents. At the end of the street, someone ran up tugging a lion by the mane. "Go, dog! Run!" Somewhere a child cried out in terror. The lion roared. The troops on the steps opened their eyes. An old man's voice, amplified, spoke out with icy authority: "Deploy lor street fighting! First rank, move out along Center Street toward North Viaduct. Rifles at full charge. Wide intervals. Use every scrap of cover. Shoot the false-belted usurpers on sight. "Second rank, move out along West Ocean Avenue toward the sea wall..." Shots rang out. There was a faint thrumming hum, like wires in the wind, and streaks of cherry radiance crisscrossed in the air. The lion roared, unable to find the child. The roars of other lions joined in. Dan was aware that he was lying atop the hard base of the statue, but he didn't know how he had come to be there. He tried to stand up. He heard voices screaming orders, then falling still, and a scene swung into his line of sight like something watched through the rear-view mirror of a turning groundcar. Half a dozen men, guns in their hands, their bodies and blue capes spattered and smeared till they could hardly be recognized, lay motionless on the pavement. Then the scene swung up and away, and Dan felt weightless. Something hit him hard. His head bounced and he rolled over. Soft grass was in his face. It smelled fresh. There was a dull boom that moved the ground under him. He twisted his head to look up. A massive arm was stretched out over him, its hand firmly gripping the cut edges of a big metal ring. Somewhere a drum took up a steady monotonous beat. He fell into a deep black quiet and all the sights and sounds grew smaller and fainter and disappeared entirely. pital. Kielgaard was there, Porcyn clothes and promising Dan a huge bonus. But it was all like a dream. Kielgaard said the Porcyns were as mad as hornets. They had raised a battle fleet and it had taken a corps of diplomats and the Combined Intergalactic Space Fleet to argue them out of personally chopping Trans-Space into fine bits. No one knew what would finally happen, but meanwhile Galactic had its contract and everyone was tentatively happy. His account finished, Kielgaard grinned more broadly yet and switched on a bedside televiewer. Dan lifted his head off the pillow and looked at the screen. Then he stared. It was the statue, solid once more on its base, the ring grasped firmly in one hand and a big wrench in the other. But something seemed different. Dan at last saw what it was. It was the face. It wasn't a bad face, if one expected to see strong cheekbones, copper skin and a high-arched nose. "What a compliment!" he said, embarrassedly pleased. "I -- hell, I feel like blushing." "Make it a good one," said Kielgaard. "After tomorrow, you'll have to blush with your own face again." "T omorrow?" "Sure. You're still working for us, remember." Dan sank back on the pillow and gazed up speculatively at the ceiling. "All right, but I want some time off. I have a fat bonus to spend." "You could use a holiday," Kielgaard agreed. "Why not try the Andromedan cloud gardens? Pretty expensive, but with your bonus -- " "I've got a place picked out," said Dan. "I'm going to take a vacation on Porcys." Kielgaard started. "You're joking! Or you've gone twitchy!" "No. Before I have to give this face back to Surgery, I ought to get a little enjoyment out of it. And what could be more enjoyable than hanging around the statue, letting people see the resemblance? Besides, they can't make me take my vacation on the Vacation Planet -- I've already had it."      quately adequately, one must ask this sober question: Will Evelyn E. Smith Spoil Success? Only it's too late; she already has. The writer of the most stylish prose since Jane Austen, she has reverence only for irreverence. The owner of the brightest wit since Dorothy Parker, she uses it to beam at stuffed shirts. Money is important to her; she considers the stuff funnier than any TV comic. She loves people -- with hollandaise sauce. With all this as a background, you may think you can outguess her premise: The planet Snaddra has but one choice in its fight to live belowground -- underhandedly pretend theirs is an aboveboard society. No, that's confusing enough. Don't try to figure it out; wait till next month to see who and how and why and what. Back at last comes Damon Knight with a tense and baffling think they couldn't hurt a friendly alien if their lives depend on it -- but now their lives do depend on it! Along with possibly another novelet and short stories and our usual features, Willy Ley disassembles with surgical sharpness and panying the surgery is an astonishing amount of back-to-date data on ancient Egypt and inside stories on the building of the most massive structure ever constructed by Man... which, as if it weren't impressive enough, has been all but submerged by the most fantastic nonsense ever conceived by Man! as Hate us? The bathtub bomb was ready to explode with admiration for all of usl T HE young man said his name was Sidney Coleman. He looked rather like a smooth-muscled distance swimmer, lately taken to fat. At the moment, his eyes were sunken and wild-looking. "He said my bathroom was the center of a probability nexus," the young man wailed. "And now there's an H-bomb in my bathtub." Caedman Wickes rubbed a lean red hand across the scarred surface of his desk and winced at the gritty feel of dust under his palm. Then he closely inspected the coarse blond bristles on the backs of his fingers. "Does it do anything else?" he asked at last with great deliberation. "Tick, for instance?" "Nothing. It just lies there, eying the hot water faucet with that stupid blue eye and mouthing all sorts of platitudes." "Isn't this all a little ridiculous?" Wickes asked. "That's what the police thought." Coleman ran blunt fingers through close-cropped black hair. "No, I didn't mean that. After all," Wickes pointed out, "if you're going to put anything as big as a bomb in the bathroom, the logical place is the bathtub." "Logical to you, maybe." Wickes touched his nose reflectively and gestured toward the office door. Its chipped markings spelled in mirrored reverse: Caedman Wickes, Private Investigator, Specializing in Odd Complaints. He said, "In my business, I often encounter the unusual. But there's always an internal logic. That's the guiding principle of my success. Always -- always look for the internal logic. All else follows." reminiscently. "I remember a client who thought he had a Venusian trapped in his washing machine. Very logical, if you stop to think about it. However -- " Wickes pursed his lips sorrowfully -- "it developed that he was quite mad. A pity, too. Such a lovely idea. Anyway, I meant the idea of using an H-bomb was ridiculous. The best that such a bomb could do would be to vaporize the city and possibly the nearer suburbs. Hardly worth worrying about." "He didn't actually say it was an H-bomb," Coleman said tiredly. "I just assumed that's what it was. After all, he did say he wanted to destroy this universe." "Ah!" Wickes's eyes gleamed. "Not the Universe? Just this universe?" "He made a joint of that. He said there are an infinite number of probable universes. He just wants to destroy the best of all possible universes -- this one." "Undoubtedly paranoid," Wickes commented. "Of course. This is part of his therapy. He's insane." "Then this isn't his universe?" "I should think not. The cure wouldn't be of much use if he destroyed the universe in which he exists, would it?" Wickes pursed his lips. "That doesn't necessarily follow. Why, I remember -- " Coleman leaped to his feet and leaned forward, bracing his hands on the desk. "Don't! Don't keep on reminiscing! That thing says it's going to detonate this Tuesday. You've got to figure a way to defuse it." "Patience, patience," Wickes chided. "It never pays to lose S# one's head about these things." He unfolded his cadaverous six-foot-seven frame from behind the desk, secured a trenchcoat, black wool scarf and stained snapbrim felt hat from the top of a battered filing cabinet. "I really should smoke a pipe," he mused as he donned the garments, "but I do think the coat and hat are enough of a concession to convention, don't you?" "I don't give a damn if you wear pink tights and fly through the air," Coleman snorted. "Just do something about that bomb in my bathtub." Wickes gestured limply toward the door. "I can see," he said as they walked through the hall, their feet evoking protesting squeaks from the curling boards of the floor, "that you don't appreciate the. essential beauty of the situation." "Beauty? How would you like a bomb in your bathtub?" "Not the point at all," Wickes reproved. "Now this much reminds me of the client who had a scheme to psychoanalyze his great great great grandfather. Had a theory that neuroses were transmitted genetically. Well, he wanted me to ascertain the old gentleman's whereabouts on a certain day in the early eighteenthirties and -- " Coleman was looking wildly to the right and left as they descended the stairs. Wickes decided to ignore his distress. Besides, the Adventure of the Retroactive Psychoanalysis, as he was fond of calling it, helped him develop the proper mood. He was a little annoyed, as they shared a taxi crosstown, that Coleman displayed such a lamentable lack of interest in bearing his proper share of the conversation. He fidgeted continually and evidenced a tendency to start at any loud noise. Once, when an auto backfired, he almost collapsed. No resiliency, Wickes thought, and clicked his tongue mentally. T'HE house was a small fiveroom contemporary in one of the newer developments on the fringe of the city. As Coleman unlocked the front door, Wickes stood looking up and down the block. "Odd," he said. "What's that?" "No television antennae." "You won't find any in this area," Coleman explained. "We're in a dead spot. Not even radio reception. That's why I got the house so cheaply." As they entered the house, Wickes became aware of a thin atonal humming in the air. It had an odd musical quality without actually approaching melody. "Oh, I forgot to tell you," Coleman said. "It sings." Wickes raised an eyebrow. "The bomb sings? In the bathtub?" "In the bathtub." "How appropriate," Wickes said. While Coleman removed his hat and coat, Wickes crossed the living room, following the sound through a short hall to a large bathroom, done in shades of coral and rose. There was quite a large bomb in the bathtub. It had a single vacant-looking blue eye. It was staring at the hot water faucet and singing. "You see?" Coleman said from behind him. "The police wouldn't believe me." His voice was shrill and hysterical. "This is the best of all possible worlds," the bomb said. "But tomorrow will be better." "Interesting," Wickes said. "What am I going to do?" Coleman wailed. "Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better," the bomb intoned. Its humming rose in pitch a fraction of an octave. "Incurable optimist," Wickes observed. "You!" Coleman sobbed. "Get out of my bathtub!" "Can't," the bomb said, interrupting its singing. "No legs. No arms. I won't," it added after a moment. It started to sing again. The music was oddly regular, with an internal consistency that Wickes found vaguely familiar. "What are you singing?" he asked. "Frankie and Johnnie," the bomb said. For the first time, the blue eye moved from the faucet to stare at Wickes. "Like it?" "Well," Wickes said, considering, "it doesn't sound much like Frankie and Johnnie." "It is, though," the bomb said. "I'm coding it." "It's giving me a headache," Coleman complained. "Philistine," the bomb sneered, but the singing rose in pitch and quickly became inaudible. The eye returned to its fixed stare. This time, it chose the cold water faucet. "Y ou'd better lie down," Wickes advised Coleman. from his pocket and began to measure the relationship of the fixtures in the bathroom to each other. Occasionally he clicked his tongue and made quick notes in a brown leatherette notebook. Coleman watched him silently. The bomb continued its idiot stare at the water faucet. Wickes mumbled something. "What's that?" Coleman asked. "Like Count Buffon's needle problem," Wickes said. "The ratio of the bathtub width to the width of the room." "What about it?" "Three point one four one six," Wickes intoned. "Pi, that is." He nodded and pushed the bathmat up against the stool. Thoughtfully, he produced a pair of dice from his pocket. He began to roll them on the floor, bouncing them against the tiled base of the tub. The dice repeatedly came up seven. "My advice," Wickes said slowly. "Yes?" Coleman urged. "When this is all over -- " "Yes?" " -- I'd tear out the bathtub and install a dice table. Of course, you'd have to change the house rules somewhat, since each throw would be a seven, but -- " He was speaking to an empty doorway. Coleman had stumbled weakly down the hall to collapse in a chair in the living room. From the bathroom, Wickes heard him groan softly. "This is the best of all possible worlds," the bomb said in a dogmatic tone. ' "Is it?" Wickes asked. "Oh, yes indeed. It has to be. Betcha," it challenged smugly. Then it began to sing again. "Can't you sing anything but Frankie and Johnnie?" Wickes asked. "That was Down by the Old Mill Stream." "It sounded like Frankie and Johnnie." "No breeding," the bomb sniffed. "This is undoubtedly the best of all possible worlds," it added after a moment. "Why?" Wickes demanded. "Oh, it just is." "That's not true, you know. Actually, it's a pretty .inferior world." "It is not! It has to be the best!" "I'm afraid it's not." "Lies, lies!" the bomb exclaimed passionately. "I'll give you odds -- any odds." "You mean bet?" "Of course! Afraid?" "Why does it have to be the best of possible worlds?" "Put up or shut up." "Why the best of possible worlds?" Wickes insisted. T HE bomb was silent. Then it began to hum in a rising crescendo. Wickes walked to the living room. Coleman was sitting in a chair, his head in his hands. "Frankie and Johnnie?" he asked wanly. "Down by the Old Mill Stream," Wickes told him. "Mairzy Doats," the bomb corrected from the bathroom. "You know," Wickes said, "this could get quite maddening." "Why didn't you take the bet?" Coleman asked sarcastically. "No need to be snide. Besides, I never bet. Still, that bit is significant" "How so?" "Well, you can infer certain things about a society whose machines like to gamble." "Yeah," Coleman said. "Maybe that universe has been conquered by a race of one-armed bandits from Las Vegas." "Not in the least unlikely," Wickes said. "Except that this one has no arms. Anyway, the world of the bomb certainly knows more about probability than we do." " 'Find the internal logic'?" Coleman quoted. "Exactly," Wickes said, with surprised approval. "I couldn't have put it more succinctly myself." Wickes seated himself in a barrel chair and looked fixedly at the tips of his black shoes. Finally, he rose and walked to the phone on the table by Coleman's chair. "It's about time," Coleman remarked acidly. "Tush," Wickes said. He dialed a number and spoke for a few moments. Then he dialed another number. After a short, low conversation, he replaced the phone triumphantly. "Hah," he said. "Hah?" Coleman queried. "Hah?" "Yes, hah. That was the prohave a disk jockey on now." "With a bomb ready to explode," Coleman cried, "he phones requests to disk jockeys. What did you ask for? Mairzy Doats?" "That wasn't necessary. They've just played it. And before that, Down by the Old Mill Stream. And before that -- " "Frankie and Johnnie?" "Precisely. I see you understand my methods." "Yes," Coleman said weakly and sank back into his chair. "Now I must leave," Wickes said. "With that still in there? What about me?" "Well, you could read to it," Wickes suggested. Coleman stared as Wickes walked to a bookcase by the door and scanned the titles. He selected a book and handed it to Coleman. "This," he said. "Crime and Punishment?" "A delightful book," Wickes said. "So full of -- of -- " He waved his hand uncertainly. "Of weltschmerz. Oh, yes," he said at the door. "If you get bored with that, try The Seven Who Were Hanged. A little healthy morbidity will do worlds of good -- even for a bomb." n And he closed the door with appropriate consideration. Wickes walked for several blocks, lost in thought. The situation, he decided, did have its intriguing points. The particular problem was the point of contact. Obviously nothing would be gained by merely defusing the bomb. The alien organization of therapists who had placed it there would merely try again, perhaps with more success. But how to move against those unpredictable minds in the unguessable gamble? Rather like the great to the fourth power-grandfather acting against Wickes's own psychoanalysis-bent client. The lever -- if only there were some lever. But there was only the bomb with its insane optimism and wild gambling fever and equally insane habit of encoding popular songs. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, heedless of the glares of passersby. In seconds, his head was wreathed in a thick tobacco smoke of concentration. He became aware of his surroundings again only when the pipe stem grew too hot. He hailed a cab and gave directions to the local branch library. There he spent some time among the math shelves, selecting first one volume on statistics and probability and then another. Finally he found what he wanted, a long table of random numbers used in setting up random sequences in physical experiments. When the librarian wasn't looking, he stealthily tore out the two pages of the table and left. Then he went to a magic store, where he bought a deck of marked cards, a pair of trick dice and a book on roulette systems. In the taxi, he read through the opening chapters of the roulette book and finally tossed it from the window when the cab stopped for a red light. At his office, he made two phone calls, one to a friend who was an electronics engineer, the other to a friend who played the bassoon. Then he scrambled beneath his filing cabinet until he found a battered tape recorder that he used as a dictaphone, drew on the trenchcoat and battered hat, and headed for the street. After spending three hours with his bassoon-playing friend, he dropped by his engineer friend's house to pick up the pieces of equipment that his friend had assembled for him. He stopped at a drugstore for a quick snack and arrived at Coleman's house at seven-forty. "It's about time," the young man said. "I'm absolutely hoarse." He was carrying the copy of Crime and Punishment, his thumb inserted in a place about a third of the way through. As he closed the door, Wickes heard a faint muttering from the bathroom. "Lies, lies," the bomb was saying. "It doesn't like Dostoievsky," Coleman sighed. "De gustibus non est disputandum," Wickes airily explained. "Yeah," Coleman said uncertainly. "I," Wickes announced grandly as he removed his coat with a flourish, "have been learning to compose for the bassoon." He gestured toward the peeling leather case of the tape recorder, which he had placed next to a featureless black suitcase.  lips compressed. "Oh, hand me my coat a minute," Wickes said. "That's a good fellow." He extracted several rolled newspapers, which he proceeded to unroll. Several items on the front pages were outlined in black. "Dostoievsky is all very well," Wickes said, "but we mustn't neglect current events." He smirked knowingly. Coleman's lips became even whiter. "Here," Wickes said, handing Coleman a small package. "What is it?" Coleman asked hopefully. "Dice. We may want to get up a crap game." "Have you gone -- " "Mad? Oh, no. At least, not in the usual sense. Now let me see how this operates." "This" was the enigmatic black suitcase from which Wickes extracted a bewildering assortment of electronic parts. Following a diagram he took from his pocket, he began to connect the several units together. Eventually, he ran a long wire across the room, hanging it over the doorway and the living room drapes. "Antenna," he explained. He found a wall plug and connected the device. Then he began to assemble the tape recorder. "Wait till you hear this," he said. "Bassoon solo." "The man has gone batty," Coleman glumly told the walls. Wickes twisted several dials on the recorder and flipped a toggle on the other device. The room suddenly filled with the low-register grunts of a bassoon. The notes were long and anguished and made absolutely no melody. Coleman slapped his hands to his ears as the discordance was echoed by a sudden blast of sound from the bathroom. "You see," Wickes yelled above the maddening cacophony, "the bomb is in constant communication with its makers. It uses the radio waves that are absorbed in this dead space. That's why you can't get reception in this area. A natural consequence of the probability nexus in the bathroom is to shunt all radiation into the universe from which the bomb comes." "Yes, but "So we feed it random radio impulses -- my bassoon solo composed from a table of random numbers. It can't code a random sequence. Ergo, it can't communicate." At this point, the bomb made a loud groaning noise. "Now!" Wickes cried with a wild gleam in his eyes. He charged for the bathroom, a rolled newspaper outthrust before him like a lance. ' I 'HE bomb lay in the bathtub, moaning softly. Coleman halted behind Wickes as he held up the newspaper and began to read. "'Father Slays Family of Five,'" Wickes intoned. The quivering bomb screamed piercingly. '"Thousands Die in Wake of Eruption,'" he read. "Lies, lies, lies, lies!" Lives.' " The bomb began to howl, its voice rising to an ear-splitting pitch. "Here! You stop that!" Wickes turned to the gleaming machine that occupied the space where one wall of the bathroom had been. "I said stop that," the dark little man in the machine said. "It's him, it's him," Coleman bleated. "The man I told you about when I came to your office." "Interesting," Wickes said. He pointed toward the machine's lower quarter, where a small metallic sign glowed. The sign said: "Paranoids Anonymous. 'You, too, can destroy a universe.' " "Stop it, I say!" the little man yelled, waving what was obviously a weapon. "Turn off the tape recorder," Wickes told Coleman. Coleman headed toward the living room. "What's the big idea?" the man demanded as he descended from the machine. His swarthy face was stormy under thick brows. He was dressed in a pair of shorts and singlet tailored from some metallic material. Calf length boots encased his feet. A harness of some type encircled his waist and shoulders, and from this harness, various unknown pieces of apparatus dangled. "This is the best of all possible worlds," the bomb said with the suspicion of a sniffle. "Of course it is," the man said soothingly. "Don't you let anyone tell you it isn't." "Any odds it isn't?" Wickes offered. "Huh!" the man said. But he looked interested. "Afraid of losing your -- ah -- shirt?" Wickes demanded. "Won't do you any good," the man said darkly. "Got to destroy a universe. The best one. This is it." A small box that depended from the harness buzzed softly. The man removed it, pressed it to his lips and spoke a few incomprehensible words. "Look," Wickes said, "this has to be the best of all possible universes, doesn't it?" "It is," the man said smugly. "They planned it that way." "They?" "My psychometricians. It wouldn't do to destroy just any universe. It has to be the best." "I must say you're remarkably objective about it." "Why not? It's my neurosis, isn't it?" "Maybe this isn't the best of all possible worlds." "Ridiculous," mumbled the bomb from the bathtub. "Best for whom?" Wickes demanded. "By whose standards? Yours?" "Naturally." "Want to bet?" The man licked his lips. "Nobody ever accused me of being a con." "If it's the best possible world for you," Wickes said, "you should win." "True, true," said the bomb. room. He was eying the dark man with something akin to horror. "The dice, please," Wickes said to Coleman. "What's the idea?" the man demanded. "I'll prove my point." The dark man smiled shrewdly. "There's something you should know." "Never mind." "Don't say I didn't try to warn you." "Let's make this interesting," Wickes said. "A little side bet?" "Done." The man pulled filmy currency from one pocket. "I can't spend your money," Wickes pointed out. "You can't win anyway." "How about something more tangible?" Wickes asked. "One of those gadgets, for instance." He pointed to the harness. "Roll them from the wall," the man said, extracting one of the instruments. Wickes sank to one knee and rolled the dice. They came up double fours. "Hah!" Wickes said. He rolled three more times. On the fourth roll, the dice came up six and two. Half an hour later, Wickes had stripped the visitor to his shorts. The man jumped angrily to his feet. "You switched dice!" "Prove it." "I quit." "Coward! I mean con!" "That does it. You!" the man yelled at the bomb. "Forget about Tuesday! Detonate in one hour!" Then he leaped into the machine and it flickered from view. "Now you've done it," Coleman moaned. "Today is the finest day of all," the bomb said. "Hm-m-m," Wickes mused, inspecting the pile of loot at his feet. Finally he selected the boxlike communicator that the man had used and inspected it closely. Coleman sank to the floor and began to roll the abandoned dice dispiritedly. After a moment, he picked them up and examined them closely. "Hey!" he exclaimed. "These dice don't have any ones, threes or fives!" "That's right," Wickes said. "Then how can you throw sevens?" "You can't." "But that's dishonest." "Why? He was trying to cheat me." question, Wickes began to speak earnestly into the communicator. Before long, he seemed satisfied. "Well, now," he said, "let's relax. Can you make some coffee?" "That thing is ready to go off in an hour," Coleman protested. "Do something!" "Patience, patience. All that can be done has been done." He walked down the hall to the living room, Coleman trailing him dejectedly. "At least call the bomb squad," Coleman said. "Hardly necessary." "You blasted crackpot!" "There's no need to be abusive," Wickes said. "If you'll only apply logic, you'll see that certain features of this other universe may be -- " "Peace, my children," said a voice from the bathroom. Standing in the doorway was the majestic figure of a man. He was tall and very fair, with a light crown of blond hair. His eyes were expressive and ethereal. "Well," Wickes said, "you certainly didn't waste time." "I am always ready for a suffering universe," the man said, lifting his eyes unto the ceiling. "It's in the bathroom," Wickes said. "I have already taken care of it," the man replied, "while you two were having your childish tiff." "Childish!" Coleman cried. "If you think -- " "Peace, brotherhood," the man said. "We must all live in perfect love." He turned and walked back toward the bathroom. "Wait," Wickes called and hurried after him. Coleman followed awkwardly, his eyes wide and unbelieving. In the bathroom, the tub was quite empty. "Love is all-powerful," the saintlike man said. For the first time, Wickes noticed the faint halo flickering above his head. The man began to mount a machine in the wall. "Alas," he sighed, "other worlds, other needs. Busy, busy." Before the machine flickered from sight, Wickes saw the flickering metal sign on the machine. It said: "Messiahs, Incorporated. 'You, too, can save a universe.' " Coleman sprawled limply on the divan while Wickes leaned on the mantel and stared dreamily into the dead fireplace, sucking on his unlit pipe. "I can see how you cut off the bomb's communication," Coleman said, "but why the newspapers?" "Well," Wickes explained, "it wouldn't have done our paranoid friend to destroy just any universe. It couldn't be one that was better off obliterated or there would be no point to the therapy. Hence Dostoievsky and the newspapers. I had to demonstrate the world was better off destroyed. That's the only way I could pry the paranoid from his vantage point in his world. Destroy the bomb's conviction that this was the best universe, but prevent the bomb's getting the complete story back to him." "But that rigged crap game?" "Well, it was obvious that they set great store by gambling. Moreover, I was certain the box he used kept him in contact with his world. I had only to win the communicator. All else followed." "By internal logic?" "Of course." "Like Venusians in washing machines." "Naturally." "Forgive me for being stupid," Coleman said ironically. "You're just not used to thinking in these terms," Wickes said. "Surely it must be obvious that if there is an organization that aids paranoids by allowing them to destroy a universe, there must be some counter-organization for those poor fellows who want to save a universe." "Messiahs, Incorporated?" "Exactly. The internal logic of the situation demanded it. I had only to contact them. The job was made to order -- a universe that needed saving." Coleman struggled to his feet. "I think I need an aspirin," he said weakly. He stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. Wickes heard his sudden cry of alarm. He ran toward the bathroom. Coleman had collapsed into the bathtub. The little man in the scarletedged toga was waving a dagger wildly. He stopped when he saw Wickes and smiled apologetically. "Oh, my," he said. "You aren't Julius Caesar, are you?" He moved swiftly toward his machine in the wall. Before it disappeared, Wickes managed to decipher the flickering sign on its frame. It read: "Hindsight, Unlimited. 'You, too, can change a universe.' " Wickes clasped his hands together ecstatically. "Lovely," he murmured. "Simply lovely." In the bathtub, Coleman only whimpered. hands in every stage of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction. The price is # a copy, # a year. Add I per year on foreign subscriptions (# less than newsstand price) and the address is... #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. for your information O NE of the questions which most frequently crops up in my mail may be worded about as follows: "Just what is it that stands between us and space travel?" The general impression seems to be that there is something specific which either stands in the way or is still missing. To give a few examples: One reader was convinced that the solution to the whole problem hinged on the discovery or synthesis of "a metal which will not melt." Other guesses ranged from "the need for the application of atomic energy" via "lack of money" to "the need for volunteers." One reader wondered whether we might not just be holding back for fear of international complications. The prize letter (written with pencil on yellow foolscap -- that kind of letter usually is) was one advising me to drop the subject of space travel once and for all, because it would not happen for a long time to come, if ever. He also knew the reason: Our government had signed a treaty with the flying saucer people to the effect that they would cease kidnaping humans for vivisection if we stopped trying to reach space! After you have caught your breath, we can proceed to take a careful look at the situation. To make a one-sentence answer, one may say that the same thing stands between us and space travel which prevented Mr. Donald Douglas from building his DC-# in #. It is all the work that still needs to be done. anything specific to point to. A new and more powerful fuel, one which contains more energy per pound of weight, would certainly be a help and would be welcomed by everybody concemed. But the discovery of such a fuel is not a necessary preliminary. After all, Dr. Wemher von Braun has shown in various publications that the manned space station, the trip around the Moon, the trip to the Moon with landing, and even a trip to Mars could be accomplished using hydrazine and nitric acid for fuels. It would be a gigantic undertaking to do it with these fuels, but it is possible. Fuel, therefore, is not the problem. As regards a new alloy, one which would have a better strengthweight ratio, the story is about the same. If somebody succeeded in producing an alloy somewhat stronger than steel but a little lighter than aluminum, everybody would be happy, of course. But the realization of space travel does not hinge on such a discovery. To repeat: the whole "art" has to progress for a number of more years to find answers to innumerable detail problems; at one point or another, you may need a new type of thermostat or something like that -- something that nobody doubts can be done, but which for some reason had not been done before -- and which might prove time-consuming. But if you insist on the naming of a few specific problems that are known but unsolved at the present moment, three could be picked out. One is mechanical and in the realm of physics. The other two are physiological and in the realm of medicine. They are: (a) the re-entry problem (b) physiological effects of cosmic rays (c) the effect of zero gravity The re-entry problem is precisely what its name indicates: the problem of re-entering the atmosphere. A rocket which leaves the atmosphere has all the natural laws working in its favor. Its velocity increases as it climbs, but all the time it is traversing more and more rarefied layers of the atmosphere. If the rocket does heat up because of air friction, it will be so little that nobody has to worry about it and no special measures need to be taken. But on re-entry, the situation is reversed. The rocket enters with a high velocity and the Earth's gravitational attraction increases it some more. Simultaneously, the air grows denser and denser and enormous frictional heating is bound to occur. It is rather safe to say that the re-entry problem is not solved at this moment. But engineers feel sure that they can solve it, provided they have exact and reliable figures to work with. The artificial satellites will provide these figures. a good deal has already been learned, but not enough by far to have a basis for an answer which can be expected to be correct, or at least very nearly so. The experiments carried out by Dr. Van Allan in the vicinity of the northern magnetic pole for the first time gave figures for the number of cosmic rays in the upper layers of the atmosphere. These figures were such that an exposure of a few days or even a few weeks did not look dangerous, even though they had to be multiplied by two. (The measurements were taken in the upper atmosphere, which means, of course, that about half of all cosmic rays were absorbed by the bulk of the Earth below. For open space, with no shielding planet nearby, there should be about twice as many.) The artificial satellites will either confirm or correct the results of these earlier measurements. At any event, the cosmic ray "danger" looks more like a bugaboo at the moment, only we don't yet dare say so. Besides, there still exists the additional possibility that medical science might discover a way of healing quickly whatever damage may have been done. The last point, the effect of zero-g, is even harder to evaluate properly. The opposite of zerog, namely the multiple g of acceleration during takeoff, can be duplicated in the laboratory by means of large centrifuges. So this could be investigated and tested and was found not to harbor any insurmountable difficulties. But zero-g, the complete absence of any gravitational strain, cannot be produced easily near the ground. You can imitate it by way of the so-called parabolic flight of a fast airplane with its engine shut off the instant it enters this flight curve. But it lasts for half a minute at the most, and that is not enough to draw any really valid conclusions. The customary thing to say is that zero-g must feel like a neverending fall. Assuming that it does, this still leaves one very important question open. As the statement is usually made, it contains the hidden assumption that the body will not be able to get used to it. But maybe the body will. Just as you tend to disregard a steady noise after some time, that feeling of falling may "disappear" after three or four or ten minutes. One may also ask whether it actually will feel like falling. We don't have too much experience even in that. But what experience there is is always contaminated by extraneous sensations. The man who jumps from a high diving board sees things rush by and up at him. The man who makes a delayed parachute jump feels the air tearing his suit and whistling and may fall through clouds. But how does falling feel when all these other sensations are missing? Does it still feel like falling? The answer is that we don't know yet. But we'll find out. And when that has been done, another barrier between us and space travel will have been removed. of Eoanthropus dawsoni, better known to many people as the Piltdown skull, had been exposed as a forgery by British scientists, I had some correspondence with a reader who apparently took this quite to heart. At least, he wrote, this must have been the most successful forgery in the sense that it had fooled the largest number of people and had lasted for a very long time until exposed. I replied that it certainly had lasted a long time -- the "discovery" was announced on December #, #, the expose on November #, #, giving it a lifetime of #I years -- but I suspected that other forgeries had lasted longer. As for the number of people taken in by it, I pointed out that the scientists of continental Europe had never completely accepted Piltdown man and their mentions of it were usually accompanied by qualifications like "still needing investigation" or words to that effect. I received a reply which said, "Well, if you don't think that Piltdown was the most successful forgery, which one was?" Without much hesitation, I stated, "Of those I know about, I would say the Koniginhofer Manuscript." Back came the query: "What is the Koniginhofer Manuscript?" This was one of those short questions which require a long answer. I promised to let him know in print. And here is the story. The name of the case is, as has been mentioned, the "Koniginhofer Manuscript." This is the German name. The Czech name is "Kralovedvorsky Rukopis." Both versions mean the same thing and the reference in both is to a place name, that of a small town, about a hundred miles from Prague at the Elbe River, which is called Dvur Kralove in Czech and Koniginhof in German. The English translation of either name is "Court of the Queen" because the town's founder, King Wenceslas II of Bohemia, had given it to his wife Elizabeth. Since Wenceslas II died in #, it is an old town, but it never grew to be a large one -- only within the current century did its population manage to pass the # mark. Local historians stated that Dvur Kralove or Koniginhof had suffered in some wars of the past. But they had to admit that it had never been important and that, outside of Bohemia, it was probably unknown. man by the name of Vaclav Hanka found an old manuscript somewhere in the steeple of the church of Koniginhof. Hanka, who later became librarian of the Bohemian Museum, told interested people that he had thought at first that he had found a Latin chronicle written on vellum. He said that he put it aside to finish whatever it was he had been doing when he came across the manuscript. An hour or two later, when he was finished, he looked at it again and saw to his surprise that the language was not Latin at all but ancient Bohemian. Looking through it some more, he noticed that it was poetry and not really a "manuscript" as the word is now used, but a "fair copy." It had been written, or copied, by a very careful hand, using inks in various colors. I have seen colored reproductions of a number of pages. They look as if they were engraved; they are far too beautiful to look either printed or written. Vaclav Hanka took the manuscript to Professor Josef Dobrovsky in Prague, who was considered to be the greatest living authority on Czech and related languages. After going through it carefully, Professor Dobrovsky saw to it that it was published. Apparently the Czech language had undergone considerable changes since the thirteenth century, the alleged date of the manuscript, for the first printed edition is accompanied by a translation into modern Czech. The thought that the manuscript might not be genuine does not seem to have occurred to Professor Dobrovsky. The vellum was old and so was the language. And the story of the discovery sounded convincing -- a church steeple would be just the place where a manuscript might be first hidden and then overlooked through centuries. A year or two after the Czech version, a German translation was published. In the course of the years, other translations were made. There was one into French and another into Russian. Then came a revised and improved German edition. Finally, in #, there appeared a volume entitled "Polyglotta Kralovedvorskeho rukopisu," a collection of translations into most modern languages. So far, nobody had any doubts. Old Professor Dobrovsky, who had died in #, had accepted it and the other outstanding language experts of the time, like Professors Palacky, Jungmann and Safarik, also thought it was genuine. And it was known especially of Professor Dobrovsky that he was highly critical. About a year after the Koniginhofer Manuscript became known, history seemed to repeat itself. One Josef Kovar, paymaster of the estate of Griinberg, had found another old manuscript which was dubbed the Griinberger Manuscript. It was much shorter than the find from Dvur Kralove, consisting of just two poetic fragments, the end of one poem and the beginning of another one. But it was much older, dating all the way back to the eighth century! only saw a copy of these poems made by somebody and at once declared that the Griinberger Manuscript was a forgery. In a letter to an English colleague, he mentioned the Griinberger Manuscript and called it deplorable that some young men tried to foist such fakes upon the world of letters: "Not being satisfied with the Koniginhofer Manuscript from the thirteenth century, they manufacture others said to be older so as to outdate the older folk songs of the Germans and others..." In #, there began faint rumblings in the form of a number of anonymous articles in a German language newspaper in Bohemia, which doubted that the manuscript was as old as it was said to be. It is doubtful whether many people paid attention to these articles. To begin with, they were anonymous. Secondly, they appeared in a daily newspaper, not in a learned journal or a literary magazine. Finally, the Germans and Czechs in Bohemia were in each other's hair all the time, so that a German attack on a Czech manuscript could be discounted for that reason alone. Biidinger in Vienna openly doubted the genuineness of the manuscript and the story of its "discovery" was more serious. That was in #. Then Professor Julius Fejfalik of Prague went to work on the problem of the historicity of the manuscript and came up with an almost devastating case. The vellum was old, he wrote, but the ink seemed to be much more recent than the vellum. As for the shape of the letters, they were very nearly -- but only very nearly -- what one could expect of a scribe of the thirteenth century. Besides, they were much too careful -- they looked as if they had been drawn one by one, rather than written. KM A point which Professor Fejfalik stressed at great length was that the poems occasionally showed an anti-German attitude. As a person, Professor Fejfalik may very well have been antiGerman himself, but as a historian, he knew that the GermanCzech animosities which pervaded daily life in Prague were comparatively recent; the two nations had hardly been in touch with each other at the time of the alleged origin of the poems. Moreover, they were supposed to be folk songs and there something else came in. Wrote Fejfalik : "A hero was either a friendly hero or an enemy hero, but the people cared only whether he was friend or enemy and did not think in terms of nationalities." There was one poem that Fejfalik pounced on especially. It was a song of a peasant girl, complaining that her lover had been "led away" (presumably drafted into somebody's army) and that she would write him a love letter if only she had parchment and some ink and a quill! A letterwriting Bohemian peasant girl in the thirteenth century was too much for Professor Fejfalik's credulity. After that treatise had been published, most historians were ready to call the manuscript a fraud. But what could have been a simple expose of an admittedly skillful forgery developed into an issue involving national honor. Two Czechs, the brothers Jirecek, violently attacked Professor Fejfalik, who could no longer answer, since he had died in #. Professor Johannes Gebauer of the University of Prague, the outstanding expert on Slavonic languages of the time, continued where Fejfalik had left off. He did not say outright that the manuscript was not genuine, but he cited reasons for doubting its genuineness -- whereupon his older colleague Martin Hattala called him a traitor. line of discussion was as clear-cut as it was silly. If you spoke of the manuscript as having been found in Dvur Kralove, you automatically asserted that it must be genuine. If you said it had been discovered in Koniginhof, you were convinced that it was a forgery. In #, a still comparatively young (# years) Czech patriot stepped in. His name was Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the man who from # until # served his country as first president of the Czechoslovak Republic. "The manner of controversy cannot possibly be reconciled with honor and truthfulness," he declared, and went on to say: "I fail to understand how anybody could say that the defense of the genuineness of the manuscript is a question of national prestige and national honor. National honor demands the defense and or the finding of the truth and it certainly needs more courage to admit an error than to defend one, even if it is deep-rooted in a whole nation." One might say that the men who really proved that the manuscript was a forgery were the historian Goll and the philologist Gebauer. But without Masaryk's aid, hardly anybody would have heard their voices. Gebauer could shbw that the poems were not folk songs but were poems in folk style written by one man. The grammar was not the Czech of the thirteenth century, but what thirteenth-century Czech was thought to have been in #. During ( the seventy years that had gone by since then, philologists had learned quite a number of facts not known in Dobrovsky's time. Professor Goll took the historical hints in the poems and showed conclusively that they did not agree with actual history. Masaryk directed his own criticism at the sociological implications and declared that these alone were grounds for suspicion. He summed up by saying that one would have to "sacrifice the results of all the sciences plus logic" to accept the manuscript as genuine. By #, the question was settled. But neither Masaryk nor anybody else could ever prove who had actually written the poems. The chief suspect is the "discoverer" of the manuscript, Vaclav Hanka. As has been mentioned, the language of the manuscript is not what it actually was during the thirteenth century, but what philologists of about # thought it had been. And Hanka, a few years before he made his "discovery," had published a book on old Bohemian, containing just these mistakes. Still, that does not prove that he wrote the poems, for others of the same time made the same mistakes. The Koniginhofer Manuscript, then, was a forgery with a lifetime of about seventy years, nearly thirty years longer than that of the Piltdown forgery. And I could claim a lifetime of nearly a full century if I wanted to include one diehard named Martin Zunkovic. He published a book still defending the manuscript in #. His main reason for defending it was that the doubters had based their criticism on printed editions without working from the original. As if this argument were not weird enough, Zunkovic admitted in his book that he had not seen the original, either! of the fraud of the manuscript of Koniginhof made me think of another story which has been around, on and off, for nearly a century now. It is a bit hard to pin a label on it, for it does not really fit into any category. It is, to begin with, not a hoax, even though it is completely without foundation. It is not really fiction, though it comes close to it in content, but not in intent. And it certainly isn't science, though it claims to be. The story is that Earth is bound to capsize within a not too distant future, say a few thousand years. But let us begin with the actual scientific facts. The orbit of Earth around the Sun is an ellipse which is so nearly circular that no drawing made on a piece of paper small enough to be handled conveniently can show the difference. But in reality the difference -- meaning the actual distance between the Sun and the Earth -- The Earth, when passing through the perihelion (the point of its orbit closest to the Sun) is it than when passing through aphelion -- the point of its orbit farthest from the Sun. In the course of one year, the Earth, naturally, passes through both these points, through perihelion early in January and through aphelion early in July. The interesting point is, of course, that we on the northern hemisphere are experiencing heat waves just when our planet is farthest from the Sun and freeze when it is closest. It merely proves that the tilt of the Earth's axis is far more important climatically than this comparatively minor difference in the distance from the Sun. To the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, especially Australia, things are reversed: They do have summer when closest to the Sun and winter when farthest from it. But like our northern summers and winters, the season is caused by the tilt of the Earth's axis; it just happens to look more "reasonable." There is one additional factor that should be mentioned. The Earth, like any other planet, moves a bit faster in its orbit when near perihelion and somewhat more slowly when at aphelion. Consequently the summer of the northern hemisphere is extended a little and the winter shortened by an equal amount. been said is definitely established. Now we enter the realm of conclusions which are not completely certain. The southern summer is shorter and should be somewhat hotter than the summer of a corresponding spot on the northern hemisphere. Consequently the southern winter must last a little longer and should be colder. There are some statistics which claim that this is actually so, but not everybody believes them, for the weather in a specific place is usually influenced by local factors. But discounting local factors -- which is something one mustn't do -- the southern hemisphere should accumulate ice under the present state of astronomical affairs. One theory holds that even though the southern summers are hotter, they cannot take care of all the ice which accumulated during the longer and colder winter. Hence ice will accumulate through the millenia -- and everybody knows that the southern ice cap of our planet is larger and thicker than the northern one. But we are not completely done with the astronomical facts yet. Although the axis of rotation of our planet is always tilted by about # V #  to the ecliptic (or # V # # from a line vertical to the ecliptic), it does not always point at the same point in the sky. Right now, it points almost directly at the star Polaris, but # years from now, it won't any more. The result of this "precession" is that, in the course of the millenia, the situation will shift. In time, the northern hemisphere will have summer when the Earth goes through perihelion and will have winter when the Earth passes aphelion. If the reasoning quoted before is correct, ice will then accumulate at the northern pole and the ice cap of the southern pole will be the smaller one. To forestall any possible misunderstanding or confusion, I wish to repeat once more that all this is established astronomical knowledge. The only uncertain point is whether the larger ice cap of the southern pole is solely due to the southern "aphelion winter" or whether it is mostly due to the fact that the South Pole area happens to be high land (under the ice) while the North Pole is at sea level. It may be this elevation of the south polar area which really makes the difference. Natural philosophy and, with it, a charming kind of fantasy entered the field in #. In that year, Monsieur Alphonse Joseph Adhemar, teacher of mathematics in Paris and author of a few mathematical textbooks, published a work which explained all these facts to the readers and then proceeded to solve a few mysteries. The hemisphere which happens to have "aphelion winter" does no form a larger ice cap, the professor asserted. And because it is so large and massive, it slightly shifts the center of gravity of the whole planet, with the result that the waters of the oceans have a tendency to assemble in that hemisphere. advised, and you'll see how far land extends in the north. But in the south, there is a wide rim of ocean around the ice cap, the direct result of its weight. (If Adhemar were right, all this should be drowned land, which implies a comparatively shallow sea. In reality, it is deep ocean, but that was not known in his time.) Now, he continued, as things go on and the earth's axis slowly points in the direction of other stars, the north is going to get the colder winters. Ice will accumulate around the North Pole and the southern ice will diminish. And then, one day, the northern ice will be stronger. The last southern iceberg will melt in the warming seas. The center of gravity of the Earth will shift along the Earth's axis in a northerly direction and the waters of the oceans will rush to the north with dramatic suddenness, drowning the land areas around the North Pole which are now dry, even if cold. Then he drew some additional conclusions. The last shift must have been from north to south -- this is indubitably the event reported in the Bible as the Flood. The shift before that must have been from south to north -- this scooped up elephants in Africa and transported them to Siberia. (This was written before complete bodies of the Siberian mammoth had been secured and examined. Adhemar could not know how well adapted the mammoth had been to a cold climate.) We can leave Monsieur Adhemar alone now; he had to be quoted mainly to show where the later elaboration of his thought originated. The later elaboration, which, as I have mentioned, has cropped up at reasonably regular intervals ever since, adds one more touch. It is not just a question of a minor shift of the center of gravity which makes the waters rush from one pole to the other. It is, instead, a capsizing of the planet as a whole, in which the two poles chance place! Just why the Earth should capsize has never been explained by any of the many who advanced this as a brand-new and original idea. The Earth is, after all, not a ball floating on the surface of some liquid, but a massive body moving in the gravitational field of the Sun, which is another story entirely. If a very large mass could accumulate somewhere near the equator of the Earth, it would affect the rotation. But a large mass centered on one of the poles of rotation couldn't possibly have such an effect. In order to pursue the case to the bitter end, let us see just how large a mass could accumulate. Obviously the worst that could possibly happen is that all the water of our planet freezes around one pole. It isn't at all difficult to calculate how much that would be. sonian Physical Tables, the total land surface of Earth is # square kilometers. The water surface is more than twice that large, namely # square kilometers. The average depth of the oceans is # feet, which equals # meters. Multiplying the water area by the average depth, you get # cubic kilometers -- rounded off, # million cubic kilometers. Since one cubic kilometer of the total weight of the oceans must be # metric tons, which can be expressed better in the space-saving manner of the mathematician by writing # x # # metric tons. (Or # x # # short tons.) This is the maximum that possibly could ill accumulate at a pole, simply because that is all the water there is on our planet. It is no doubt a very impressive figure, but it is not the whole story. We must compare the weight of the water with the weight of the Earth as a whole. The mass of the Earth as a whole is: # x # #I metric tons or # x # #I short tons As one can easily see, this makes the ratio of all the water on Earth to the planet as a whole like # in # or, if you prefer smaller figures, like # in #. In short, the weight of all the water on Earth is negligible in comparison with that of the Earth. Even if the Earth were like a ball floating on a liquid (which, of course, it is not), and if all the water could freeze near one pole, it would not make Earth capsize. We may be in for all kinds of natural calamities, plus all kinds of human foolishness -- but the stability of the Earth is one thing we do not have to worry about. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. ( Continued from page #) But the trading in rubles goes merrily on -- without the original salesmen being cut in. When Stalin died, the price shot up to more than the currency of some existing governments. Getting back to insurance for a moment, I've tried any number of times to turn this setup into a detective story: A worrywart takes out a huge policy insuring him against drowning in the Ganges River. He has never been out of the U.S. and doesn't intend to, because of his fear that the Ganges will be the end of him. Without leaving New York City, he does drown in the Ganges! It actually could have happened a generation or so ago. A remittance man, the younger son of a rajah, had a palatial home facing Central Park. Being a devout Hindu, he had enough Ganges water shipped to him to fill a fair-sized pool each year, and allowed visiting and expatriate countrymen to wash away their sins in the holy H # #. If our hypothetical victim had drowned in that pool, no insurance company could have argued against the invoices and shipping documents. Never worked out as a story, though -- why would he take out the policy and how could the murderer get him to the pool believably? It's commonly thought that only Man is advanced enough to be superstitious, but at least one case of animal superstition has been recorded. A grain truck in Manhattan overturned. Long after the grain was swept up, pigeons were observed doing exactly what they had done the moment of the accident, clearly hoping this had something to do with the miraculous windfall. I don't know what to do with the Case of the Girl Whose Nose Lit Up During a Performance of Pagliacci. In the dark, she fumbled in her purse for a benzedrine inhaler for her cold. What she came up with -- and used -- was a program flashlight. And there's the establishment of the International Date Line in #, the lifework of a Scandinavian named Alex Andersrag. Naturally, it was known as Alex Andersrag Time Band. That, in turn, leads to the biology prof who prodded a frog and said, "Choomp!" and the frog obediently jumped. Then the professor cut off the legs and said, "Choomp!" and nothing happened. Turning to the class, the prof explained, "You see? Vhen you cut off der legs, it interferes mit der hearing." Thanks for letting me unload these mental fishhooks. Now they're your problem. I am a Nucleus No doubt whatever about it, I had the Indian sign on me... my comfortably untidy world had suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order I the office, I was not so much tired as beaten down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown temperature, according to the radio, was eightyseven degrees, but according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone. What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions... Ah! The ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the place looked wife-deserted. It had been a bad day; I had forgotten to wind the alarm clock, so I'd had to hurry to make a story conference at one of the TV studios I write for. I didn't notice the impending rain storm and had no umbrella when I reached the sidewalk, to find myself confronted with an almost tropical downpour. I would have turned back, but a taxi came up and a woman got out, so I dashed through the rain and got in. "Madison and Fifty-fourth," I said. "Right," said the driver, and I heard the starter grind, and then go on grinding. After some futile efforts, he turned to me. "Sorry, Mac. You'll have to find another cab. Good hunting." If possible, it was raining still harder. I opened my newspaper over my hat and ran for the subway: three blocks. Whizzing traffic held me up at each crossing and I was soaked when I reached the platform, just in time to miss the local. After an abnormal delay, I got one which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. The same thing happened at both ends of the crosstown shuttle, but I found the rain had stopped when I got out at Fiftyfirst and Lexington. A S I walked across to Madison Avenue, I passed a big excavation where they were getting ready to put up a new office building. There was the usual crowd of buffs watching the digging machines and, in particular, a man with a pneumatic drill who was breaking up some hardpacked clay. While I looked, a big lump of it fell away, and for an instant I was able to see something that looked like a chunk of dirty glass, the size of an oldfashioned hatbox. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight, and then his chattering drill hit it. There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt At the moment of the explosion -- if so feeble a thing can be called one -- I felt something sting my face and, on touching it found blood on my hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but though slight, the bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I found that I had missed the story conference. During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase "I'm just spitballing" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite, "The whole ball of wax," twelve times. However, my story had been accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World, the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which rung of the ladder you have achieved. The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing there talking to the doorman. He said, "Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it at your office building." I looked blank and he explained, "We just heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it." Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. "That's right, Danny, I just missed it," I said, and went on in. Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, flukehappy, and except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going on. I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days. How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the reasons she supposes. I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: "When you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door, too." Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil. When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The pencil was standing on its end. we hear about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last sentence. Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising. My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: "Garbage picked up at #:# AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before I love you." What can you do when the girl loves you? I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be allowed to perch, but were not allowed to. Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was  thinking about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn, they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and fell. The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side, stroking its feathers. My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late afternoon. "You can't say a thing like that to me!" I heard him shout. "I tell you I got that deck this afternoon and they weren't opened till we started to play!" Several other loud voices started at the same time. "Nobody gets five straightflushes in a row!" "Yeah, and only when you were dealer!" The tone of the argument was beginning to get ugly, and I opened the door to offer Nat help if he needed it. There were four men confronting him, evidently torn between the desire to make an angry exit and the impulse to stay and beat him up. His face was furiously red and he looked stunned. "Here!" he said, holding out a deck of cards, "For Pete's sake, look at 'em yourselves if you think they're marked!" The nearest man struck them up from his hand. "Okay, Houdini! So they're not marked! All I know is five straight... His voice trailed away. He and the others stared at the scattered cards on the floor. About half were face down, as might be expected, and the rest face up -- all red. cause at that moment the elevator arrived and the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence, got in and were taken down. My friend stood looking at the neatly arranged cards. "Judas!" he said, and started to pick them up. "Will you look at that! My God, what a session..." I helped him and said to come in for a drink and tell me all about it, but I had an idea what I would hear. After a while, he calmed down, but he still seemed dazed. "Never seen anything to equal it," he said. "Wouldn't have believed it. Those guys didn't believe it. Every round normal, nothing unusual about the hands -- three of a kind, a low straight, that sort of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be my deal. Brother! Straight flush to the king -- every time! And each time, somebody else has four aces..." He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it; the top broke and glass chips got into the bottle. "I'll have to go down for more soda," I said. "I'll come, too. I need air." At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his mouth open. On the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded, its rear end lightly flipping the front of one of those small foreign cars, which was going father fast. It fl# turned sideways and, without any side-slip, went right up the stoop of a brownstone opposite, coming to rest with its nose inside the front door, which a man opened at that moment. The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi to a lamp. Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues. Everyone was honking his horn. Danny was furious -- more so when he tried to put through a call to his station house from the box opposite. It was out of order. blowing into the apartment and I closed the windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had brightened up considerably. "I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office," he said. "You know, I think this would make an item for the paper." He grinned and nodded toward the pandemonium. When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except one. That was tied in three knots. All right, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he knows everything. When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought, more trouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's voice said, "Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were connected. That's a damn funny coincidence." "Not in the least," I said. "Come on over here. I've got something for you to work on." "Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly " "Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent." "At once," he said, and hung up. While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of my novel -- perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a point where I was about to put down the word "agurgling," I decided it was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter "R." Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red. This was absolutely not my day. " thing you've told me is impossible or supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him. It's all those other things..." He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern. "Alec, you're a reasonable guy, so I don't think you'll take offense at what I'm going to say. What you have told me is so impossibly unlikely, and the odds against it so astronomical, that I must take the view that you're either stringing me or you're subject to a delusion." I started to get up and expostulate, but he motioned me back. "I know, but don't you see that that is far more likely than..." He stopped and shook his head. Then he brightened. "I have an idea. Maybe we can have a demonstration." He thought for a tense minute and snapped his fingers. "Have you any change on you?" "Why, yes," I said. "Quite a bit." I reached into my pocket. There must have been nearly two dollars in silver and pennies. "Do you think they'll each have the same date, perhaps?" "Did you accumulate all that change today?" "No. During the week." He shook his head. "In that case, no. Discounting the fact that you could have prearranged it, if my dim provisional theory is right, that would be actually impossible. It would involve timereversal. I'll tell you about it later. No, just throw down the change. Let's see if they all come up heads." I moved away from the carpet and tossed the handful of coins onto the floor. They clattered and bounced -- and bounced together -- and stacked themselves into a neat pile. I looked at McGill. His eyes were narrowed. Without a word, he took a handful of coins from his own pocket and threw them. These coins didn't stack. They just fell into an exactly straight line, the adjacent ones touching. "Well," I said, "what more do you want?" "Great Scott," he said, and sat down. "I suppose you know that there are two great apparently opposite principles governing the Universe -- random and design. The sands on the beach are an example of random distribution and life is an example of design. The motions of the particles of a gas are what we call random, but there are so many of them, we treat them statistically and derive the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- quite reliable. It isn't theoretically hard-and-fast; it's just a matter of extreme probability. Now life, on the other hand, seems not to depend on probability at all; actually, it goes against it. Or you might say it is certainly not an accidental manifestation." "Do you mean," I asked in some confusion, "that some form of life is controlling the coins and -- the other things?" I mean is that improbable things usually have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken, I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the book of rules. Something -- I don't know what -- is going on, and it seems to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?" "I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left." "Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?" "Center of what?" I asked. "I feel as though I were the center of an electrical storm. Something has it in for me!" McGill grinned. "Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be anthropomorphic." "Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life." "On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a non-random arrangement of particles... I wonder." He had a faraway, frowning look. I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off. "Let's go out and eat," I said, "There's not a damn thing in the kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee." We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were, by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we heard one of them say to Danny, "I don't know what the hell's going on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it. They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen anything like it." Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination. "All right, smart guy!" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead, only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches which met in midair. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts ever witnessed -- a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical excuses and threats. ment. His face was dripping. "You all right, Mr. Graham?" he asked. "I don't know what's going on around here, but ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!" he shouted -- he could succeed as a hog-caller. "Bring those dames over here!" Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the ladies seemed not to be. "All right, now, Mrs. MacPhilip!" one of them said. "Leave go of my umbrella and we'll say no more about it!" "And so now it's Missus MacPhilip, is it?" said her adversary. The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go, but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was Molly. My nurse-wife. "Oh, Alec!" she said, and managed to detach herself. "Are you all right?" Was  all right! "Molly! What are you doing here?" "I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to think." She pointed to the stalled cars. "Are you really all right?" "Of course I'm all right. But why..." "The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a busy signal. Oh, dear, are you sure you're all right?" I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look. Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast to it. "Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham," was all he said. When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. "Explain to Molly," I said. "And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet." He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was a jump ahead of him. "In other words, you think it's something organic?" "Well," McGill said, "I'm trying to think of anything else it might be. I'm not doing so well," he confessed. "But so far as I can see," Molly answered, "it's mere probability, and without any over-all pattern." "Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center." curious expression for a moment. "Do you feel all right, darling?" she asked me. I nodded brightly. "You'll think this silly of me," she went on to McGill, "but why isn't it something like an overactive poltergeist?" "Pure concept," he said. "No genuine evidence." "Magnetism?" "Absolutely not. For one thing, most of the objects affected weren't magnetic -- and don't forget magnetism is a force, not a form of energy, and a great deal of energy has been involved. I admit the energy has mainly been supplied by the things themselves, but in a magnetic field, all you'd get would be stored kinetic energy, such as when a piece of iron moves to a magnet or a line of force. Then it would just stay there, like a rundown clock weight. These things do a lot more than that -- they go on moving." "Why did you mention a crystal before? Why not a life-form?" "Only an analogy," said McGill. "A crystal resembles life in that it has a definite shape and exhibits growth, but that's all. I'll agree this -- thing -- has no discernible shape and motion is involved, but plants don't move and amebas have no shape. Then a crystal feeds, but it does not convert what it feeds on; it merely rearranges it into a non-random pattern. In this case, it's rearranging random motions and it has a nucleus and it seems to be growing -- at least in what you might call improbability." Molly frowned. "Then what is it? What's it made of?" "I should say it was made of the motions. There's a similar idea about the atom. Another thing that's like a crystal is that it appears to be forming around a nucleus not of its own material -- the way a speck of sand thrown into a supersaturated solution becomes the nucleus of crystallization." "Sounds like the pearl in an oyster," Molly said, and gave me an impertinent look. "Why," I asked McGill, "did you say the coins couldn't have the same date? I mean apart from the off chance I got them that way." "Because I don't think this thing got'going before today and everything that's happened can all be described as improbable motions here and now. The dates were already there, and to change them would require retroactive action, reversing time. That's out, in my book. That telephone now -- " The doorbell rang. We were not surprised to find it was the telephone repairman. He took the set apart and clucked like a hen. "I guess you dropped it on the floor, mister," he said with strong disapproval. "Certainly not," I said. "Is it broken?" "Not exactly broken, but -- " He shook his head and took it apart some more. discussed the problem in undertones. Finally the man left and Molly called her mother to reassure her. McGill tried to explain to me what had happened with the phone. "You must have joggled something loose. And then you replaced the receiver in such a way that the contact wasn't quite open." "But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay." "Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the floor -- something like that -- just happened to cause the right induction impulses. Yes, I know how you feel," he said, seeing my expression. "It's beginning to bear down." Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry. "I'm in no mood to cook," she said. "Let's get away from all this." McGill raised an eyebrow. "If all this, as you call it, will let us." In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way. "I've been put ori the story -- who could be better? -- I live here. So far, I don't quite get what's been happening. I've been talking to Danny, but he didn't say much. I got the feeling he thinks you're involved in some mystical, Hibernian way. Hello, McGill, what's with you?" "He's got a theory," said Molly. "Come and eat with us and he'll tell you all about it." Since we decided on an airconditioned restaurant nearby on Sixth Avenue, we walked. The jam of cars didn't seem to be any less than before and we saw Danny again. He was talking to a police lieutenant, and when he caught sight of us, he said something that made the lieutenant look at us with interest. Particularly at me. "If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham," Danny said, "it's at the station house. What there's left of it, that is." Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter. When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool -- although it didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait for the fat lady. I tasted my drink. It was most peculiar; salt seemed to have been used instead of sugar. I mentioned this and my companions tried theirs, and made faces. and apologetic, and took the drinks back to the bar across the room. The bartender looked over at us and tasted one of the drinks. Then he dumped them in his sink with a puzzled expression and made a new batch. After shaking this up, he set out a row of glasses, put ice in them and began to pour. That is to say he tilted the shaker over the first one, but nothing came out. He bumped it against the side of the bar and tried again. Still nothing. Then he took off the top and pried into it with his pick, his face pink with exasperation. I had the impression that the shaker had frozen solid. Well, ice is a crystal, I thought to myself. The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back, baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls, which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had grown larger. Molly lit a cigarette and said, "I suppose this is all part of it, Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here." It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter -- a background noise had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of the airconditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring vichyssoise. "Hey! What's the idea?" snarled the sour-looking man. "I'm terribly sorry," I said. "It was an accident. I -- " "Throwing cigarettes at people!" the fat lady said. "I really didn't mean to," I began again, getting up. There must have been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely set tables, I pulled everything -- tablecloth, silver, water glasses, ashtrays and the vichyssoise-a-la-nicotine -- onto the floor. The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatfly. The man licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly. O NE OF the waiters came up to the owner and tapped him on the shoulder and started to tell him about the air-conditioner, thus creating a momentary diversion, which did not, however, include the fat lady. "He must be drunk!" she told her companion, who nodded contemptuously. A man carrying a stepladder came down the aisle from the back, his eye on the airconditioner, but not, it seemed, on the stepladder, which bumped the owner of the restaurant on the shoulder just as he was turning back to me. It was not a hard bump, but it threw him off balance, so that he more or less embraced the waiter. Then he turned around and it was obvious he thought I had struck him. The room was now divided into two groups : ourselves and our audience, and those who were too far away or intent on other matters to have noticed the fracas, the chief of these being the man with the stepladder, who was paying undivided attention to the air-conditioner. The owner was very angry with me. "Mister, I think you'd better leave!" he said. "He will not!" Molly said. "It was an accident, and you," she adde to the fat lady who was about to interrupt, "keep quiet! We'll buy you some more soup!" "Maybe it was an accident like you say," the owner declared, "but no one's going to push me when my back is turned! Out you go, mister! The drinks are on the house." "We haven't had any drinks yet," I said. "There was salt in them." "What d'you mean, salt? My bartenders -- " The air-conditioner suddenly let out a loud whirring and I glanced up. The stepladder which the man was on began to slide open like an acrobatic dancer doing a split. I stepped past the angry restaurateur and put out my hand to stop it, but as I did, the extension-bar that was supposed to hold it together parted and it came down with a rush, knocking over several tables. The repairman pulled part of the works out with him as he fell and the fan-belt broke. The motor raced and black smoke poured out. "What're you trying to cfo!" the owner yelled at me over the loud whine of the machinery. "Goddam it, haven't you done enough already?" I took two steps back, in dismay at what I was accused of, and stepped on the skirt of the fat lady's green evening gown. She in turn took two steps and was, as it were, laid bare. The previous hubbub was as nothing to what now resulted and the smoke was becoming thicker. Then the door opened and, to my horror, Danny and his lieutenant came in, and I was the first thing their eyes fastened on. Everyone started shouting at once and pointing at me. Then the sprinkler system went on. though very hot, and I was not treated badly. There was, in fact, an air of superstitious respect, almost. A cop gave me some magazines and, against regulations, a late paper, but it was not late enough to carry the story of the restaurant mob-scene. In it, however, was a garbled account of our traffic jam and a reference to the six elevators simultaneously and unaccountably stuck in the I.T.V. Building, but no connection was suggested. My mind was in too much of an uproar to read, and I paced up and down. It seemed hours since McGill had called my lawyer Vinelli; some fantastic mishap must be holding him up, I thought. Then I happened to bump into the door of the cell and found the lock hadn't caught. More of the same! But there didn't seem any point in trying to escape. Where would I go? Besides, I would have to leave through the desk room, where there would be at least the desk lieutenant and a sergeant on the phone. I began to wonder what effect it would have if I were to call out and tell them. "Hey!" I shouted, but my voice was drowned out by a blast from the radio in the squad room. It died down immediately; someone must have hit a loud spot on the dial. I had an idea. "Hey!" I shouted again, and again was drowned out. I opened the barred door and looked up and down the corridor. No one was in sight. Without making any unnecessary noise, but not stealthily, either, I walked as naturally as I could past the door to the squad room, where all heads were turned away, listening to the sensational pronouncements of Bill Bart, the radio gossip. "... and in your commentator's view, this man is dangerous! After attacking a woman and setting fire to a restaurant, he was arrested and is being held for investigation, but I predict that the double-domes and alleged scientists will come up with some more gobbledegook and we ordinary citizens will be left in the dark as to why or how Graham is causing all this trouble. So far, fortunately, no one has been seriously injured, but I predict... I left and went on down the corridor. So Bill Bart was giving me a play! What kind of crazy guesswork was he foisting on his public, I wondered, and came to the the desk room. I looked in at the door. On one side, a sergeant was talking to an elderly worriedlooking couple and never turned his head. On the other, a grayhaired lieutenant sitting at the raised desk dropped his glasses as I came in. They fell on the floor and smashed. "Mother of God!" he muttered and gave me a cursory glance. "Good night, Doctor," he said. "Not that there's anything good about it." He was fumbling in the desk as I walked out of the door. street, in the shadows, was a man who crossed over as I came down the steps. It was McGill. "I had a hunch this might happen," he said, taking my arm. "The car's up ahead. Vinelli came here as quick as he could, but he slipped coming along the street and broke his ankle." "Judas!" I said. "I am sorry! I feel responsible. Where are we going?" He didn't answer me at first; he just kept hurrying me along. One of those New York siroccos was pretending to cool the city, and at the comer I saw his old coupe with the parking lights on. A saloon next to us was closing up and a few late customers came out onto the sidewalk. One customer, on seeing me, stopped and turned to the others. "That's the guy I was telling you about! That's Graham!" I saw then that it was our telephone repairman from the afternoon. He looked reasonably sober, but his friends did not. "Oh, yeah?" one of these said, eying me belligerently. "I thought we just heard Bill Bart broadcast the cops had him." "Right," said another of them. "He's escaped! I'll hold him and you go on in and phone 'em." "Nah, the joint's closed. Police station's right around the corner. I'll go tell 'em. Hold onto him now!" The repairman and three of his pals began to advance warily and the other one ran down Charles Street, but at that moment we heard excited yapping and a small dog chasing a cat came tearing up the street. The cat had a fish head in its mouth and, ignoring us, ran through the middle of the group, dropping the fish head. The dog followed almost instantly, only he ran between the repairman's legs, upsetting him. In falling, the repairman tripped his neighbor, who fell on him, and another one fell on top of them. The remaining one stepped on the fish head. "Black cat!" he cried as he joined the others on the sidewalk. "Crossed my path!" We got into McGill's car and he pulled away fast. As I looked back, the four men were flailing around, but they saw the direction we took. I also thought I saw the street lamp behind us go out. "That was a lucky break!" I said. "I mean the cat and dog." "Don't give it a thought," McGill said, driving fast but carefully up Hudson Street. "You're being watched over and protected. We're going up to my office and have a conference and we're going to drive like hell. I have an idea this thing may not be able to do much more than hang onto you. Maybe we can even shake it." "Hang onto me?" "Yes, you're the nucleus." W ramp to the Westside Highway and he abruptly put on more speed: no traffic was in sight. "But what is it?" I asked a little wildly. "How's it doing it? Why pick on me?" "I don't know, but I'd say it picked you as the nucleus because you had just been the subject of various flukes -- the taxi and subway and so on -- so you represented a sample of what it's made of -- flukes. I have a hunch you'll continue to be protected." "Did you happen to catch Bill Bart's broadcast?" "Yes, I did. On the car radio coming over. Not good. He said -- " In the rear-view mirror, I saw a police car overhauling us. We were doing a good sixty-five. "Here come the cops," I interrupted, but before McGill could answer, there was a faint pop and the police car wobbled and slowed to a stop, and was quickly out of sight. "Blowout," I said. "See what I mean?" McGill answered, and turned on two wheels into the #th Street exit. Then he added, "Molly's waiting for us in my office." I felt better. We drove through some immortal gateway and McGill moderated his speed. He pulled up in front of a darkened building and we climbed the steps. It seemed cooler here and the wind was very strong. McGill tried the door, but it was locked. Then he felt in his pocket and swore. "No key?" I asked. He shook his head and then shook the door, and went through his pockets again. I reached forward and shook the door, too. The lock clicked and we went in. I made an apologetic gesture and McGill raised his eyebrows. We climbed a flight of stairs, all dark except for a faint glow that came in from the campus lights, and then along an echoing hallway to an office in which were Molly and some unimportant items, among them a desk radio that she turned off as we came in. She gave me her professional nurse's smile and I sat down next her. Molly's professional nurse's smile is not a phony "Everything's going to be all right," but a signal. It's supposed to mean "Never mind what these cretins are saying about you. You're okay." I was a little puzzled that she showed no surprise to see me. "Well," McGill said, "my hunch was right. He got out." "So I see," said Molly, smiling at me proudly. "What happened? Knock over one of the jailers?" I shook my head and told her, including the cat-and-dog episode and the police car blowout. "Don't forget the lock downstairs," McGill said, and when I told her that, too, he added, "You see, I think it's beginning to take sides. I think it's watching out for its nucleus. Alec ought to be rather lucky right now." "Well, I don't feel it," I said. "I feel hemmed in." iously and turned back to him. "What do we do now?" "First, before any more funny stuff happens, I want to rig up a few tests and see what's with Alec, if anything. I'll even test for satisfying you." "For what?" I asked. "Electromagnetic force. Come and give me a hand, Molly. Alec, you stay put and relax. We'll call you when we get set. I only hope to God the cops and the newshawks don't tumble to where we are." They left and I went to the window and looked out at the wind blowing papers and dust into miniature tornadoes in the dim light, and wondered whether it was going to storm. A few belated students on the way to their dormitories evidently were wondering the same thing, for they were all looking up at the sky. I went to the desk and turned the radio on, low. "... are doing all they can, which doesn't seem much," Bill Bart was saying breathlessly. "He was last seen speeding uptown on the Westshore Drive, but the cops lost him. The town is gripped in superstitious fear -- it is now known that Graham was responsible for the elevators jamming in the I.T.V. Building this morning -- but how did he do it? I ask you: how? And how has he turned off all the electric power in Greenwich Village? I contacted the power company for an explanation, but I was put off with the usual doubletalk. I say, and I repeat, this man must be caught! He is... I turned him off. So that was what the street light going off had meant. In a little while, Molly came back. "All right, duck, come and be measured. He's got galvanometers and electronic devices and stuff, and he'll be able to detect anything you're emanating down I followed her into the lab where I was sat down, taped up and surrounded with gadgets. McGill tried various things and read various dials. There were buzzing sounds and little lights blinked on and off, but at the end he shook his head. "Nothing," he announced, "You're married to a non-ferrous, non-conducting, non-emanating, non-magnetic writer, Molly." "He is, too!" she said. "He's as magnetic as the dickens." "Possibly, but he isn't emanating anything. The damn thing apparently just likes him. As a nucleus, I mean." "Is that bad?" Molly asked. "Could it be dangerous?" "It's bad," I put in morosely. "Also it could be good," McGill said, with a gleam of scientific enthusiasm, "Why, it wouldn't surprise me, Alec, if you could do anything you wanted to that involved chance." I" didn't like the guinea-pigs'eye view of him I got, and told him so. "Except for a couple of minor escapes, it's been highly inconvenient," I said. "I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I wish it would go and help somebody else." "But, my God, man! Do you realize if you went to the track tomorrow, your horse probably couldn't lose?" "I wouldn't get that far," I grumbled. "And I bet if somebody threw a knife at you, it would miss!" McGill went on, ignoring me. "Here, I'd like to try an experiment..." "Now, hold on!" I said. " McGill ! Are you crazy?" Molly cried, but he ignored her also and opened his desk drawer, from which he took a pair of dice. "Roll me some sevens, Alec," he said, handing them to me. "I thought we came here for a conference," I protested. "And I don't know whether you know about it, but there's been a Village-wide electric power failure and I'm being blamed, according to Bill Bart." "Holy cow! When did you hear that?" "On your radio just now. Furthermore, he says the whole town is gripped in 'superstitious terror.' " "That could be true," McGill answered. "Most people haven't progressed beyond the Dark Ages. Look what happened with Orson Welles' broadcast about the Martians." "Maybe we ought to leave town for a while." Molly said. "We could go to Oyster Bay or somewhere." Then she glanced up. "What's that noise?" Outside, I now noticed, mingled with the soughing of the wind, a susurrus of many voices. We went to the lab windows. A crowd of two or three hundred people was standing in the campus, staring up at the sky over us. "What are they looking at?" McGill asked. "No one can possibly know we're here." I started to lean out of the window, twisting up my head to see what it could be. "Don't do that, Alec! They'll see you!" McGill warned, and I pulled my head in. "Can we get on the roof?" I asked, but Molly suddenly said, "Look who's here." Three squad cars drove up and several policemen got out. "Perhaps we ought to sort of very gently turn the lights off," I suggested. Molly immediately snapped off the shaded bench lamp, which was all that was on in the lab. This left McGill's office light, and I started toward it. "Hadn't we better run for it?" Molly said, but a loud banging on the front door downstairs answered her. "I hope that damn lock doesn't give again!" McGill breathed. "They'll break it down!" Molly gasped. "Like hell. It's University property and they can't possibly have gotten a search warrant so quickly at this time of night." voice: "Alec Graham! Are you in there?" "Don't answer," said McGill. "And keep away from the windows. I guess they saw the light in my office." He leaned out. "What do you want?" he shouted. "This is the police. Open up!" "I won't unless you have a warrant!" There was no more shouting. They seemed to be parlaying among themselves, but the crowd light suddenly hit our windows, illuminating the lab ceiling -- a police searchlight. I saw that Molly had disappeared and I assumed she had gone into McGill's office. "These guys mean business," he said, "but what the hell brought them?" "Something on the roof. That's what they're all looking at, so why don't we go up and see?" "All right, but you'd better stay down here. There's no parapet and they'll see you." He started for the door and I decided to follow -- at least as far as the trapdoor, or whatever gave onto the roof -- when Molly came in from the hall. She looked scared. "My God! I climbed an iron ladder and took a look outside. There's a small cyclone over us -- a ton of torn papers and dust and junk whirling around like a waterspout! They'd be able to see it for blocks! "Oh, great," McGill groaned. "Now it's playing tricks with the wind. That's how they spotted us." "We've got to get out of here, McGill," said Molly. "Maybe the best thing would be for me to give myself up to the cops," I said. "I don't know whether they'd be able to get you through that mob," McGill replied. "Just listen to them. I only wish I could think of some way to satisfy the damn crystal or whatever it is. I have the feeling it wants something. It can't be merely fooling around for no reason. But there doesn't seem to be any motive beyond the fact that it's apparently on your side. How did it start? That's what I wish I knew." He absently turned the bench lamp on again. I shrugged unhappily and scratched my cheek. In so doing, I pulled the piece of pink adhesive tape loose and it began to bleed again. "Cut yourself shaving, darling?" Molly asked me. "No," I said. "As a matter of fact, it was a kind of freak accident." "Oh?" McGill lifted his head interestedly. "Anything involving you and a fluke I want to hear about. Tell Papa." I did and McGill began to get his dedicated look. "You say this piece of glass just blew up? What did it look like? How big was it?" "I only saw it for a second. It was dirty and I'd say about two feet across -- more or less round and with flat places all over it." state of great excitement. "That piece that hit your cheek -- did it merely nick you or is it embedded? If it is embedded..." He picked up a bottle of alcohol and a piece of cotton and took a lens out of a drawer. "Molly, there's a pair of tweezers in my desk. Will you fetch them?" He tilted the light up onto my face and dabbed the cut with the alcohol. "Ouch!" "Keep still. It'll sting a little... Yes, I think I can see it." He took the tweezers from Molly, who had returned, and neatly removed something from the cut. He held it under the light and looked at it through the lens. Then he rinsed it under the water faucet, dried it on a piece of filter-paper and looked at it again. "Well, it looks like glass. I don't know. Maybe it's the nucleus of the glass chunk and..." His voice trailed off and he frowned at nothing in particular, putting the fragment down on the filterpaper. I picked it up. It seemed like a bit of sand, only brighter. McGill's concern over this new object of interest had been so intent that for a few minutes our attention was diverted, but now Molly began to pace up and down. There didn't seem to be anything for us to do, and unlike most nurses, waiting makes her nervous. She was looking at the display of various chemicals and reagents on the shelves. "What's that stuff?" she asked, pointing to a large jar of black powder labeled Deflocculated Graphite. "I bet those cops have gone for a search warrant." "Finely divided carbon," McGill said. "Damn, I wish I could think of something! A chunk of glass... blowing up..." "Graphite is carbon?" Molly said. "You don't think they'd actually do anything to Alec, do you?" "It's another form of carbon. A diamond is still another: the rare crystalline form," he said. "I wouldn't put it past that mob to do anything." "Oh, yes. I remember that in chemistry," Molly said. "But the police wouldn't let them, McGill, would they?" "I've got an idea -- " I tried to break in. "They might not be able to stop them," McGill replied. "We've got to get out of here!" Molly said for the second time. "If a diamond -- " I began. "With a helicopter, we might," McGill said. "Right now, we're surrounded." "How about hiding Alec?" Molly asked. "You and I could act innocent." "I don't want to be hidden," I objected. "My idea is -- " "Or better yet, we could act guilty. That would appeal to them, wouldn't it, McGill?" "They'd tear the place apart if they got in McGill said. out of the windows again. It seemed to hit me that our being surrounded was an exaggeration; most of the crowd was centered about the police car directly in front of the main door. They had an ugly look, and while I didn't like the idea of being alone, neither did I relish the thought of my presence possibly causing my wife and my best friend to be the victims of mob violence, for although the police might, in the absence of a warrant, refrain from breaking in, the mob might not. So I decided to leave, confident that some bizarre manifestation would lead them away from the lab, and that no matter where I went, I could hardly be worse off. To keep moving was my best bet. Molly and McGill were still discussing the situation as I tiptoed into the hall. There surely would be a back door -- probably in the basement -- and I went down three flights to a cementfloored corridor. Then, with lighted matches, I found my way to a door at the back of the building, at the end. I opened it and peered out, to see a retaining wall and stone steps leading up to ground level. I eased out into the areaway and pulled the door shut, noticing that I still held the folded filter-paper with the fragment in it. The lock clicked and I realized that my bridge was, as they say, burned behind me. Two cops were talking together a little way to my right, but their backs were turned and they were looking up. I, too, looked and saw the whirlpool of debris, which was exactly as Molly had described and quite as attentioncalling. Clutching the filter-paper like a talisman, I climbed the steps and gumshoed away to the left, but as I got to the corner, I met a group of young men, also looking up. One of these was saying, "That's a lynch mob, if ever I saw one! I don't get it." "Mob psychology, that's the answer," explained another. My heart congealed, but they walked right by me. It suddenly occurred to me that any newspapers that had carried the story would scarcely have been able to dig up a photograph of me yet. All I had to do was to walk out of the campus, for who would recognize me? Where I would go then was something I could decide later. So I started out with more assurance, but I took the precaution to act like an onlooker by glancing up over my shoulder now and then at the airborne maelstrom. As I got to the other side of the open space, I had another shock. A few yards ahead was another group of policemen, one of whom, I saw with dismay, was the lieutenant from Charles Street, and he was beginning to turn around. I barely had time to duck into a doorway to avoid being seen. I had the feeling of a member of the I.R.A. in Dublin during the Troubles, and I crouched against the door. I could now hear the lieutenant's voice: "Of course he's up there! Maddigan'll be here with a warrant any minute now and we'll... His voice faded away. ly opened and I almost fell. A young student holding some notebooks emerged. "Sorry," he said, and walked toward the crowd. The door had not yet closed and I slipped in, with my heart irretrievably contracted to the size of a buckshot. I could just make out in the dim light that I was at the bottom of the fire stairs, so I climbed to the third floor and went into a classroom, then on into an office somewhat like McGill's, that faced toward the lab building. From here, I had a perfect view of the crowd, the police, the upper facade of the labs, brightly lit by the searchlight and, over all, the spinning papers and dust, which even as I looked began to die down. I was unable to see Molly or McGill and wondered whether they had noticed my absence and were worrying. I saw a phone on the desk at my side and considered calling up McGill's office, but first I wanted to think over my new idea. I pulled down the shades and turned on the reading lamp, by the light of which I re-examined the fragment I had been carrying around all day. It beside an onyx pen-set, a golf trophy and a signed golf ball, was a leather-framed photograph of a blank-faced young woman holding a pudgy little boy. I picked it up and rubbed the glass with the tiny fragment. It left a faint but undeniable scratch. So I was right about one thing. Then I called McGill's office. In a few moments, I heard the receiver lifted, but no voice. "This is the nucleus," I said, and I heard of sigh of relief from McGill. "Where in hell are you?" "Across the way. Look out of your window and I'll turn my light off and on again." I did so. "You're in Professor Crandal's office. Why did you leave?" "We'll go into that later. McGill, that fragment is a diamond." "What!" "At any rate, it scratches glass." "Why didn't you tell me that before? And where is it? I couldn't find it anywhere." "I was sidetracked. I've got it here. Now my idea -- "  "A diamond! I begin to see light. Give with the idea, Alec." "Well, there was all this talk of crystals and then you were telling Molly about carbon and diamonds, and it occurred to me that what we have is something trying to crystallize -- something that once was a crystal, and got broken up and wants to re-form. It keeps trying with playing cards and pigeons and automobiles, but it's no go. Why don't we give it some carbon to play with, McGill?" I looked across at the office, but I couldn't see him. I noticed a piece of dirty newspaper that had fallen out of the maelstrom and had caught on a thick wire that stretched from one of the lab windows to immediately below mine -- some kind of aerial, I imagined. Then I saw that the maelstrom, rather than breaking up, as I had thought, was moving over in my direction. I would be pointed out again. "You mean the graphite, I suppose," McGill said. "Why in hell did you leave and take the fragment with you?" "I forgot it was in my hand," I said, dodging the first part of the question. "Nobody on the campus recognized me, so I guess I can walk back." Then I remembered the locked basement door and the fact that I could scarcely be let in by McGill, with the cops standing around, but I was feeling light-headed and damage-proof. It was protecting its nucleus, which, even if I wasn't any more, I had in my hand. My crystalline rabbit's foot. "Hold on a second," I said. "I've got another idea." I put down the receiver, and picked up the golf ball from the desk, and put it on the floor. I stood up and put my right foot on it and, holding my breath, I raised my other foot. In any event, I would not have far to fall -- but I did not fall. I remained upright, holding the filterpaper and wobbling a little. Then I relaxed and closed my eyes -- still I did not fall. The rabbit's foot was working, just as McGill said. I stepped down two inches and picked up the phone. "I'm coming across," I said. "That is, if the wire that runs over here from the lab is strong enough to hold me." "Alec! You're nuts!" McGill said, and I hung up. (Diamonds of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your nucleus.) I took a look over the sill at the wire. It was held by a powerful steel eye-bolt, securely attached to the brickwork. Clutching the diamond fragment in its paper, I climbed over the sill and put a foot on the wire and felt immediately seasick. The wire vibrated like a harp-string, but did not give noticeably, and I put my other foot on it. Then I almost blacked out and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I found I had progressed some distance into the void. Nothing was holding me from over-balancing, but my body seemed to right itself automatically, as if I were a veteran tightrope walker. In a frozen daze, I edged along, keeping my eyes fixed on the distant window in which I could see McGill and Molly watching me with white faces. " the crowd caught sight of me and yelled. A man with a broad-brimmed hat ran out from the others and, to my horror, pulled out a gun. Another man picked up a stone, wound himself up like a sand-lot pitcher, and hurled it just before the other pulled his trigger. They were excellent shots: the stone was hit by the bullet and both disintegrated. The man's gun jammed at his second try and the two heroes were grabbed by the police. With my heart pounding, I kept going, until, about four yards from safety, my foot caught, and I looked down again. There was a splice in the wire, sticking up from which was a sharp end. I staggered and righted myself... and let go of the filter-paper. By now, the maelstrom was directly over me and my talisman was caught in the up-draught. It did not fall, but I did. After a sickening instant, I was brought up with a jerk that nearly strangled me. The back of my coat had caught on the projecting wire and I swung there like an unused marionette. The crowd shouted and milled around, and the cops called out directions to each other. One order was to send for the Fire Department. I found I could breathe, but I could not look down. The all-important paper was fluttering around near the lab window and McGill was making grabs at it. Then it suddenly blew right in by him. His head reappeared and he shook his clasped hands at me. Molly remained at the window, her eyes round, the fingers of each hand crossed. I essayed a debonair smile, which she tried to answer. In the distance, I heard the owl-sound of approaching fire engines. From behind Molly there suddenly came an intense blue light, which rapidly increased until she became a dark silhouette, and I could just make out McGill looking at the glare, his eyes shielded by what I took to be a deep-blue bottle. His stance suggested elation. There appeared to be a terrific in-draught -- all the window shades were blowing straight into the lab and Molly's red hair streamed behind her. In what was actually almost no time, I heard the Fire Department turn into the campus, and one piece of equipment skidded to a stop directly under me. There was the sound of awinch and then I felt something touch my foot. At that moment, my jacket gave way with a tearing sound, Molly closed her eyes, and I landed like an oversize tarantula on top of the fireman's ladder. Firemen and cops were climbing toward me, alternated like meat and tomatoes on a shishkebab. First to reach me was my friend the lieutenant. He rearrested me and pulled. I shook my head to his earnest entreaties and hung on with the tenacity of the unbrave. It seems to be impossible to detach a determined man from a ladder when you are also on it. He and his friends gave up finally and ordered the ladder lowered, but one last fluke intervened -- if it was a fluke. The machinery refused to work and we drove away, with me swaying grandly on my perch. r I 'HE lieutenant had the hookand-ladder driven to a distant police station, where in due course Vinelli, the lawyer, arrived with his foot in a cast, and I was bailed out. The cops showed me surprising consideration; it turned out they were furious at the irresponsible riding they had been getting from Bill Bart. A scientific big-shot that McGill knew, named Joe Stein, convinced them I was in no way to blame, and the case was dropped. Professor Stein gave a wonderfully incomprehensible but tranquilizing statement to the press, and Molly and I went to Oyster Bay. "In two weeks, everybody'll have forgotten all about it," the lieutenant told us. "You may even be a hero. I don't know." Before we left, we went with McGill to the lab and saw the diamond. It sat on a bench, and without a flaw. It was at least two feet across, about the same as the chunk of "glass" on Fifty-first Street. "The cops never recognized what it was," McGill said, "it being so big." "Who would?" Molly asked. "McGill, I've got an idea -- " "All I had to do," McGill said, ignoring her, "was to put the graphite on some cinder blocks and the fragment on the graphite. Then I turned a bunsen flame on it and it caught fire with a terrifically bright flame -- very small -- I quess you saw it." I nodded. "It didn't give off any heat," he went on. "Adiabatic process. And it got its necessary pressure from the random motions together of the graphite particles. Some random motions! When that was used up, it started on the cinder blocks and then the C# # in the air. That's what caused the suction : the blinds were blown straight in. You probably missed that." I shook my head. "Anyway, this thing -- " "McGill," Molly interrupted, "I've got an idea!" this thing has got to be dumped out at sea." "Oh," Molly said, looking crestfallen. "I was just going to say why don't we break a piece off and sell it in Amsterdam?" "God God, no! That would only start it up all over again!" "Just a little piece, McGill?" "NO!" With Stein's help, McGill convinced the police that the thing had to be dumped, and we dropped it off a police launch beyond Sandy Hook, to their bored perplexity. They would have been still more puzzled if they had known what it was. McGill came down to Oyster Bay for the weekend and we played a game of gin rummy -- a truly memorable game, because the cards behaved and I even lost a little. He congratulated me in a preoccupied way, which annoyed me. "I should think you'd be gladder than that," I told him. "I am," he said. "But there's something else -- " "What's that?" asked Molly, worried. "The schools of fish are traveling head to tail. I'm wondering if that's just the beginning of another mess." We went back to playing gin rummy, but our minds weren't on what we were doing. They haven't been since. Just yesterday, an ocean liner chased its berthing tugboats away and went sightseeing up the Hudson River. We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! Omnibus  when you join the Club Each One Packed from Cover to Cover With Thrills of Top-Flight Science-Fiction continued from Back Cover A Story about the first A-Bomb... written before it was invented! Plus a score of other best tales from a dozen years of Astounding ScienceFiction Magazine selected by editor John W. Campbell. Jr (Publ. erf. #.) World-renowned stories that have stood the test of time -- by H. O. Wells. Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Aldous Huxley. Philip Wylie. Edgar Allan Poe, E. M. Forster. F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. # pages. 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True enough, copies of Galaxy for # and #I are scarcer than hens' bridgework... but it's not too late to get these great stories: With its # stories -- not just a lineup of shorts; many are novelets and even novellas -- this truly big volume of almost # pages would be an unthinkable publishing bargain today at its original price of #. tracted for a large number of books, which naturally means a discount... and we're passing the discount on to you. Your price, postage included, is only #! No coupon... no need or room for one. Just send in your order on any scrap of paper, include check or money order for #, and mail it right now to... ago that detective stories became legitimate when Roosevelt declared in an interview that he read them for relaxation. Those of us who were then reading and writing science fiction were envious. We hoped something similar would happen to our favorite form of literature, but we didn't really expect it. There was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, of course, which appeared around that time and was a huge hit; we were able to explain to the uninitiated that we read and wrote stories like that. But I remember being backed into describing the plot of a story I was working on then: "Well, there are giant brains sealed in glassite capsules in the polar ice. They belong to extraterrestrials, who have no bodies, just brains, and they know everything that happened on Earth because they're immortal -- " The experience inhibited me so badly that I never wrote the story. A lot has happened to science fiction since that wild era, when no author could get up from his typewriter without having knocked off at least some part of the Solar System's population. Craftsmanship had to enter the field. There are only so many basic categories; when they have been done over and over, especially with primal motivations and masses of people instead of individuals and their infinitely varied problems and conflicts, the result must be ultimate stasis. Those writers who could not learn to construct a real story had to drop out, for their stuff inevitably was too similar to things that had been done before, by others and even by themselves. Meeting them now, I find it saddening to hear their puzzled or hostile remarks about science fiction. Many of them understand it less than if they had never written any. (The same is true of the elderly fans who can't realize that the "sense of wonder" they bay for is gone from them, not from science fiction.) I wonder if anyone else then had an experience like mine: When I was about #, I kept bringing stories to a wonderful old editor named Dr. T. O'Connor Sloane, and he, instead of talking about them, always managed to get off onto Icelandic literature, the fascination of mathematics (a specialty of his'), and other subjects that may not have been evasions, but were just as good. One story I gave him, however, got him dangerously excited for a man of #. It was about mining on Venus and I'd manfully exposed the dirty rats who savagely exploited native labor and prisoners exiled to that miserably hot, rainy planet. Dr. Sloane exclaimed it was too good for his pulp magazine and brought both me and the manuscript up to the Delineator, which was owned by the same company. The story came back to me with a printed rejection slip. Not long after, the Delineator folded. I immediately saw the connection, but I was more concerned with selling the story. Dr. Sloane, though, went on maintaining that it was too good and steadfastly refused to buy it. If that experience is typical, it explains a good deal about the dreadfulness of that paleolithic science fiction. (I don't know how much better my own story was, because it somehow got lost.) Were I an envious man, which I am, I would resent the break that authors have today in rates and markets. There were very few science fiction magazines, their rates ranging from microscopic fractions of a cent payable upon lawsuit to just enough to starve on. Hardly any book publishers brought out science fiction books. No anthologies, no pxcketbooks, no TV, radio or move resale. Good God, no wonder a depression was going on! No doubt there is a lesson to be derived from this. Writing science fiction in the early days was easier, but the pay was pKXjr. Writing for Galaxy is very much harder, but the pay is highly rewarding both in amount and prestige. I guess it balances out Either way, writing -- especially the writing of science fiction -- is not a job for the lazy. A good story gives the illusion of having been produced effortlessly. Nothing involves more effort than achieving that illusion, however. A ll the foregoing is excerpted from my introduction to the First Galaxy Reader, written over five years ago. (It's still available from us at # postpaid -- a giant book of # pages.) As I said in concluding the introduction: I just thought you'd be interested in one practitioner's personal history in science fiction. The Ignoble Savages Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground -- underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard societyl Skkiru," Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm. "A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra." "But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes," Skkiru protested. "Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. "You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever." "Forever!" He looked at her incredulously. "You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!" Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, "No, Skkiru, I am not joking," a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe. "This is, in effect, good-by," she continued. "We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe... but that will be all." Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber. "Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!" There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face -- an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl. "I am sorry, Skkiru," Bbulas intoned. "I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all." "It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru," Larhgan put in gently, "but the welfare of our planet comes first." S HE had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw. No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. "Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestass? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You "Now, Skkiru," Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, "you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive." Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt. "After all," he went on speaking as he wiped, "I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you -- a mere private citizen -- have the right to question them." "Just because you went to school in another solar system," Skkiru said, whirling with anger, "you think you're so smart!" "I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now -- " "Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time." Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized. I hate Terrestrials, Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae -- if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation. "Skkiru!" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance -- her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed -- and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. "One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!" "And I have already explained to you, Skkiru," Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, "that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Erthmen say, kismet." glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber. Kismet, Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, "And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like -- like savages." "It is necessary," Bbulas replied without turning. "Pooh," Skkiru said. "Pooh, Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. "Skkiru! Such language!" "As you said," Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, "the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker." "But I can't work metal!" "Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts," Bbulas said smugly, "because you will be a pariah without a trade." "Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch -- " Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him -- "and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl." "I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air. "As for me," she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, "I do not think I shall ever marry, I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?" "Even if there will be," Bbulas said, "you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes." Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. "I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs," she vowed, "and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking." It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. "Listen -- " he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late. "Earth ship in view!" a squeaky voice called through the intercom. "Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes." Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash. "Hurry up, Skkiru." dress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance -- which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist. "Hurry up, Skkiru," Bbulas said. "They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started." "For my part, I wish we'd never started," Skkiru grumbled. "What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?" That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that schooldays were long since over. "Fve told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them," he said, with affected weariness. "After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other -- and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra." "For Snaddra," Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth -- or so the fictapes seemed to indicate -- was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial lifeform. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too. "We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru," she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, "but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me -- and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas." "If that doesn't," Bbulas said, "I have other methods of inspiration." "All right," Skkiru answered sulkily. "I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Intergalactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg. But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it." All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. "I'm proud of you, Skkiru," she said brokenly. Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence. snadd," Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad -- to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almostt imperceptible. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor -- now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metalworkers -- and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it imnecessary -- but now both aircars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive. The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or -- more properly speaking on Snaddra -- the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid. As the mud clutched his toes. Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten aroimd to -- the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment -- and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it. Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it.  I 'HE newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb. In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms. entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching -- thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide. "Look, Raoul," the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran -- which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. "A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system -- what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry." "Oh, they were cannibals?" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. "How horrible!" "No, not at all," the other assured him. "They weren't human -- another species entirely -- so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know." "And the missionaries -- did they soften them up, Cyril?" "They softened up the missionaries, I believe." Cyril laughed. "Ah, well, it's all in the day's work." "I hope these creatures are not man-eaters," Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession -- creatures indeed! Skirru thought, with a mental sniff. "We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it." "Oh, you will, my boy, you will." Cyril clappied the younger man on the shoulder. "I have every confidence in your ability." Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials -- which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite. "The natives certainly appear to be human enough," Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. "Some slight differences, of course -- but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color." If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.  panion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be -- a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul. "Remember," Cyril said sternly, "we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity." "Yes, Cyril," Raoul said meekly. Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect "I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?" Money, Skirru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be. "How should I know?" Raoul shrugged. "Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting." "Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?" Raoul suggested grxunpily. "The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one." "Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!" Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable -- and entirely genuine -- murmiirs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops -- and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the "high priest" was off his rocker. To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about p)Ossession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once. On Earth, he had heard, where people lived expwsed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on -- which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population -- like its natural resources -- was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival.  discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple -- a ramshackle affair, but then it had been rim up in only three days -- where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him -- and not only for his forwardness -- that was in character on both sides, too. Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising -- a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metalworking was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out. Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the "high priest" with a simpleminded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath dejjended upon imports. As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas -- who fancied himself a speechwriter as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit. The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skirru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote. "... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth," she was saying in her melodious voice. "Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth..." Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face. "... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy." S HE had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. "Dear friends, we were lonored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us." The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended. "We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way." Ha, ha, Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha! "But why is it," Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the comers of his eyes, "that only the beggar wears mudshoes?" "Shhh," Cyril hissed back. "We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!" Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man. "We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs," Bbulas said with great self-control, "and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance." "Rain dance!" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. "But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course," he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, "that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!" Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff. "But," Raoul went on, "one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud..." The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. "Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain." He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this highschool theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship. What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious yoimg man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury.  that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal die for his planet in many ways -- but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them. All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities. He could, of course, emigrate to another jart of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while -- but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan. As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-andbook dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply. It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and -- aside from minerals -- they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice -- the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business. Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in. HE traditional office of Plane- tary Dilettante was a civilservice job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm -- and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top. The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortime, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population. The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came -- and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soulsearching, called uixn Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra -- and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program. It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice. But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings -- though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library -- seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand -- which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance. "Skkiru!" Bbulas was screaming, as he spim, now that the Terrans were out of earand eyeshot. "Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?" Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. "Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting jimk and I thought -- " Bbulas twirled madly in the air. "You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!" "Yes, Bbulas," Skkiru said meekly. argument, but he had bigger plans in mind and he didn't want them impeded in any way. "But they seem like an excellent idea," Luccar suggested. "Primitive and yet convenient." Bbulas slowed down and gulped. After all, in spite of the fact that he was now only chief yamstealer -- being prevented from practicing his profession simply because there were no yams on the planet and no one was quite certain what they were -- Luccar had once been elected President by a large popular majority. And a large popular majority is decidedly a force to be reckoned with anywhere in the Galaxy. "Any .deviations arouse comment," Bbulas explained tightly. "But if we all -- " "There would not be enough pontoons to go around, even if we stripped all the air-cars." "I see," Luccar said thoughtfully. "We couldn't make -- ?" "No time!" Bbulas snapped. "All right, Skkiru -- get those things off your feet!" "Will do," Skkiru agreed. It would be decidedly unwise to put up an argument now. So he'd get his feet muddy; it was all part of the higher good. Later, as soon as the rain-dance rehearsals were imder way, he slipped away. No part had been assigned to him anyhow, except that of onlooker, and he thought he could manage that without practice. He went down to the library, where, since all the attendants were aboveground, he could browse in the stacks to his hearts' content, without having to fill out numerous forms and be shoved about like a plagiarist or something. If the Earthmen were interested in really primitive institutions, he thought, they should have a look at the city library. The filing system was really medieval. However, the library would, of course, be tabu for them, along with the rest of the city, which was not supposed to exist. As far as the Terrans were to know, the group of lumpy stone huts (they should, properly speaking, have been wood, but wood was too rare and expensive) was the capital of Snaddra. It would be the capital of Snaddra for the Snaddrath, too, except during the hours of rest, when they would be permitted to retire unobtrusively to their cozy well-drained quarters beneath the mud. Life was going to be hard from now on -- unless the Bbulas Plan moved faster than Bbulas himself had anticipated. And that would never happen without implementation from without. From without Bbulas, that was. Skkiru got to work on the textapes and soon decided upon his area of operations. Bbulas had concentrated so much effort on the ethos of the planet that he had devoted insufficient detail to the mythos. That, therefore, was the field in which Skkiru felt he must concentrate. And concentrate he did. HE rain dance, which had been elaborately staged by the planet's finest choreographers, came to a smashing climax, after which there was a handsome display of fireworks. "But it is still raining," Raoul protested. "Did you expect the rain to stop?" Bbulas asked, his eyes bulging with involuntary surprise. "I mean -- " he said, hastily retracting them -- "well, it doesn't always stop right away. The gods may not have been feeling sufficiently propitious." "Thought you had only one god, old boy," Cyril observed, after giving his associate a searching glance. "Chap by the name of Whipsnade or some such." "Ipsnadd. He is our chief deity. But we have a whole pantheon. Major gods and minor gods. Heroes and demigods and nature spirits -- " "And do not forget the prophets," Larhgan put in helpfully. As former Chief Beauty of the planet (an elective civil-service office), she was not accustomed to being left out of things. "We have many prophets. And saints. I myself am studying to be a -- " Bbulas glared at her. Though her antennae quivered sulkily, she stopped and said no more -- for the moment, anyway. "Sounds like quite a complex civilization," Cyril commented. "No, no!" Bbulas protested in alarm. "We are a simple primitive people without technological pretensions." "You don't need any," Cyril assured him. "Not when you have fireworks that function in the rain." Inside himself, Skkiru guffawed. "We are a simple people," Bbulas rejjeated helplessly. "A very simple and very primitive people." "Somehow," Raoul said, "I feel you may have a quality that civilization may have lost." The light in his eyes was recognizable to any even remotely humanoid species as a mystic glow. But Cyril seemed well in command of the situation. "Come now, Raoul," he laughed, clapping his young colleague on the shoulder, "don't fall into the Rousseau trap -- noble savage and all that sort of rot!" "But that beggar!" Raoul insisted. "Trite, certainly, but infM'i:k credible nonetheless! Before, one only read of such things -- " A glazed look came into two of Bbulas' eyes, while the third closed despairingly. "What beggar? What beggar? Tell me -- I must know... as if I didn't really," he muttered in Snaddrath. "The only beggar we've seen on this planet so far. That one." Cyril indicated the modest form of Skkiru, attempting to conceal himself behind Luccar's portly person. "I realize it was only illusion, but, as my associate says, a remarkably good one. And," Cjo-il added, "an even more remarkable example of cultural diffusion." "What do you mean? Please, gracious and lovable Terrans, deign to tell me what you mean. What did that insufferable beggar do?" In spite of himself, Skkiru's knees flickered. Fool, he told himself, you knew it was bound to come out sooner or later. Take courage in your own convictions; be convinced by your own courage. All he really can do is yell. "He did the Indian rope trick for us," Raoul explained. "And very well, too. Very well indeed." "The -- Indian rope trick!" Bbulas spluttered. "y, the -- " And then he recollected his religious vocation, as well as his sup(wsed ignorance. "Would you be so kind as to tell me what the Indian rope trick is, good sirs?" "Well, he did it with a chain, actually." "We have no ropes on this planet," Larhgan contributed. "We are backward." "And a small boy went up and disappeared," Raoul finished. Suddenly forgetting the stiffupper-lip training for which the planet had gone to such great expense, Bbulas spun around and around in a fit of bad temper, to Skkiru's great glee. Fortimately, the Dilettante retained enough self-control to keep his feet on the groimd -- perhaps remembering that to fail to do so would compound Skkiru's crime. "Dervishism!" Raoul exclaimed, his eyes incandescent with interest. He pulled out his notebook. After biting his lip thoughtfully, Cjrril did the same. "Just like Skkiru!" Bbulas gasped as he spun slowly to a stop. "He is a disruptive cultural mechanism. Leading children astray!" "But not at all," Raoul pointed out politely. "The boy came back unharmed and in the best of spirits." "So far as we could see," C#rril amended. "Of course there may have been psychic damage." "Which boy was it?" Bbulas demanded.  in question -- a rather wellknown juvenile delinquent, though the Terrestrials, of course, couldn't know that. "He is a member of my own clan," Bbulas said. "He will be thrashed soimdly." "But why punish him?" Raoul asked. "What harm has he done?" "Shhh," Cyril warned him. "You may be touching on a tabu. What's the matter with you, anyway? One would think you had forgotten every lesson you ever learned." "Oh, I am truly sorry!" Raoul's face became a pleasing shade of pink, which made him look much more human. Maybe it was the wrong color, but at least it was a color. "Please to accept my apologies, reverend sir." "It's quite all right." Bbulas reverted to graciousness. "The boy should not have associated with a beggar -- especially that one. If he did not hold his post by timehallowed tradition, we would -- dispose of him. He has always been a trouble-maker." "But I do not understand," Raoul persisted. Skkiru could not xmderstand why Cjrril did not stop him again. "The beggar did the trick very effectively. I know it was all illusion, but I should like to know just how he created such an illusion, and, moreover, how the Indian rope trick got all the way to -- " "It was all done by magic," Bbulas said firmly. "Magic outside the temple is not encouraged, because it is black magic, and so it is wrong. The magic of the priests is white magic, and so it is right. Put that down in your little book." Raoul obediently wrote it down. "Still, I should like to know -- " "Let us speak of pleasanter things," Bbulas interrupted again. "Tomorrow night, we are holding a potlatch and we should be honored to have the pleasure of your company." "Delighted," Raoul bowed. "I was wrong," Cyril said. "This is not a remarkable example of cultural diffusion. It is a remarkable example of a diffuse culture." ?ftUT I cannot understand," Raoul said to Cyril later, in the imagined privacy of their hut. "Why are you suspicious of this charming, friendly people, so like the natives that the textbooks lead one to expect?" Naturally, Skkiru -- having made his way in through a secret passage known only to the entire population of the city and explicitly designed for espionage, and was spying outside the door -- thought, we are textbook natives. Not only because we were patterned on literary prototypes, but because Bbulas never really left school -- in spirit, anyway. He is the perpetual undergraduate and his whole scheme is nothing more than a grandiose Class Night. "Precisely what I've been thinking," Cyril said. "So like the textbooks -- all the textbooks put together." "What do you mean? Surely it is possible for analogous cultural features to develop independently in different cultures?" "Oh, it's possible, all right. Probability -- particularly when it comes to such a great number of features packed into one small culture -- is another matter entirely." "I cannot understand you," , Raoul objected. 'What do you want of these poor natives? To me, it seems everything has been of the most idyllic. Rapport was established almost immediately." "A little too immediately, perhaps, don't you think? You haven't had much experience, Raoul, so you might not be aware it usually isn't as easy as this." Cyril flung himself down on one of the cots that had been especially hardened for Terrestrial use and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Skkiru was dying for a cigarette himself, but that was another cultiual feature the Snaddrath had to dispense with now -- not that smoking was insufficiently primitive, but that tobacco was not indigenous to the planet. "That is because they are not a hostile people," Raoul insisted. "Apparently they have no enemies. Nonetheless, they are of the utmost interest. I hardly expiected to land a society like this on my very first field trip," he added joyfully. "Never have I heard of so dynamic a culture! Never!" "Nor I," Cyril agreed, "and this is far from being my very first field trip. It has a terribly large number of strange elements in it -- strange, that is, when considered in relationship to the society as a whole. Environmental pressures seem to have had no effect upon their culture. For instance, don't you think it rather remarkable that a people with such an enormously complex social structure as theirs should wear clothing so ill adapted to protect them from the weather?"  enthusiastically -- another undergraduate type, Skkiru observed, happiest with matters that either resembled those in books or came directly from them, so that they could be explicitly pigeonholed -- "the Indians of Tierra del Fuego wore nothing but waist-length sealskin capes even in the bitterest cold. Of course, this civilization is somewhat more advanced than theirs in certain ways, but one finds such anomalies in all primitive civilizations, does one not?" "That's true to a certain extent. But one would think they'd at least have developed boots to cope with the mud. And why was the beggar the only one to wear mudshoes? Why, moreover -- " Cyril narrowed his eyes and pointed his cigarette at Raoul -- "did he wear them only the first time and subsequently appear barefooted?" "That was odd," Raoul admitted, "but-" "And the high priest spoke of thrashing that boy. You should know, old chap, that cruelty to children is in inverse ratio to the degree of civilization." Raoul stared at his colleague. "My faith, are you suggesting that we go see how hard they hit him, then?" Cyril laughed. "All I suggest is that we keep a very open mind about this society until we can discover what fundamental attitudes are controlling such curious individual as well as group behavior." "But assuredly. That is what we are here for, is it not? So why are you disturbing yovirself so much?" But it was Raoul, Skkiru thought, who appeared much more disturbed than Csrril. It was understandable -- the younger man was interested only in straightforward ethnologizing and undoubtedly found the developing complications upsetting. "Look," Cyril continued. "They call this place a hut. It's almost a palace." My God, Skkiru thought, what kind of primitive conditions are they used to? "That is largely a question of semantics," Raoul protested. "But regard -- the roof leaks. Is that not backward enough for you, eh?" And Raoul moved to another part of the room to avoid receiving indisputable proof of the leakage on his person. "What is more, the sanitary arrangements are tmdeniably primitive." "The roofs of many palaces leak, and there is no plumbing to speak of, and still they are not called huts. And tell me this -- why should the metal-workers be the pariahs? Why metal-workers?" Raoul's eyes opened wide. "You know there is often an outcast class with no apparent rationale behind its establishment All the tapes -- " "True enough, but you will remember that the reason the smiths of Masai were pariahs was that they manufactured weapons which might tempt people to commit bloodshed. I keep remembering them, somehow. I keep remembering so many things here..." "But we have seen no weapons on this planet," Raoul argued. "In fact, the people seem completely peaceful." "Right you are." Cyril blew another smoke ring. "Since this is a planet dependent chiefly upon minerals, why make the members of its most important industry the out-group?" "You think it is that they may be secretly hostile?" Cyril smiled. "I think they may be secretly something, but hardly hostile." Aha, Skkiru thought. Bbulas, my splendidly scaled friend, I will have something interesting to tell you. idiot!" Bbulas snarled later that night, as most of the Snaddrath met informally in the council chamber belowground, the new caste distinctions being, if not forgotten, at least in abeyance -- for everyone except Bbulas. "You imbecile!" He whirled, unable to repress his Snadd emotions after a long behaviorally Terran day. "I have half a mind to get rid of you by calling down divine judgment." "How would you do that?" Skkiru demanded, emboldened by the little cry of dismay, accompanied by a semi-somersault, which Larhgan gave. In spite of everything, she still loved him; she would never belong to Bbulas, though he might plan until he was ochre in the face. "Same way you did the rope trick. Only you wouldn't come back, my boy. Nice little cultural trait for the ethnologists to put in their peace pipes and smoke. Never saw such people for asking awkward questions." Bbulas sighed and straightened his antennae with his fingers, since their ornaments made them too heavy to allow reflective verticalization. "Remind me of final exams back on Gambrell." "Anthropologists always ask awkward questions -- everybody knows that," Larhgan put in. "It's their function. And I don't think you should speak that way to Skkiru, Bbulas. Like all of us, he's only trying to do his best. No man -- or woman -- can do more." She smiled at Skkiru and his hearts whirled madly inside him. Only a dolt, he thought, would give way to despair; there was no need for this intolerable situation to endure for a lifetime. If only he could solve the problem more quickly than Bbulas expected or -- Skkiru began to understand -- wanted, Larhgan could be his again. "With everybody trying to run this planet," Bbulas snarled, taking off his headdress, "no wonder things are going wrong." Luccar intervened. Although it was obvious that he had been enjoying to a certain extent the happy anonymity of functionless yam-stealer, old elective responsibilities could not but hang heavy over a public servant of such unimpeachable integrity. "After all," the old man said, "secretly we're still a democracy, and secretly I am still President, and secretly I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps we weren't a little rash in -- " "Look here, all of you," Bbulas interrupted querulously. "I'm not doing this for my own amusement." T UT thafs just what you are doing, Skkiru thought, even though you wouldn't admit it to yourself, nor would you think of it as amusement. "You know what happened to Nemeth," Bbulas continued, using an argument that had convinced them before, but that was beginning to wear a little thin now. "Poorest, most backward planet in the whole Galaxy. A couple of ethnologists from Earth stumbled on it a little over a century ago and what happened? More kept on coming; the trade ships followed. Now it's the richest, most advanced planet in that whole sector. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to us in this sector, if we play our cards carefully." "But maybe these two won't tell other anthropologists about us," Luccar said. "Something the older one remarked certainly seemed to imply as much. Maybe they don't want the same thing to happen again -- in which case, all this is a waste of time. Furthermore," he concluded rather petulantly, "at my age, I don't like running about in the open; it's not healthful." "If they don't tell other anthropologists about us," Bbulas said, his face paling to lime-green with anxiety, "we can spread the news unobtrusively ourselves. Just let one study be published, even un der false coordinates, and we can always hire a good public relations man to let our whereabouts leak out. Please, everybody, stick to your appointed tasks and let me do the worrying. You haven't even given this culture a chance! It's hardly more than a day old and all I hear are complaints, complaints, complaints." "You'd better worry," Skkiru said smugly, "because already those Terrans think there's something fishy about this culture. Ha, ha! Did you get that -- fishy?" Only Larhgan laughed. She loved him. "How do you know they're suspicious?" Bbulas demanded. "Are you in their confidence? Skkiru, if you've been talking -- " "All I did was spy outside their door," Skkiru said hastily. "I knew you couldn't eavesdrop; it wouldn't look dignified if you were caught. But beggars do that kind of thing all the time. And I wanted to show you I could be of real use." He beamed at Larhgan, who beamed back. "I could have kept my findings to myself," he went on, "but I came to tell you. In fact -- " he dug in his robe -- "I even jotted down a few notes." "It wasn't at all necessary, Skkiru," Bbulas said in a tired voice. "We took the elementary precaution of wiring their hut for sound and a recorder is constantly taking down their every word." "Hut!" Skkiru kept his antennae under control with an effort, but his retort was feeble. "They think it's a palace. You did them too well, Bbulas." "I may have overdone the exterior architecture a bit," the high priest admitted. "Not that it seems relevant to the discussion. Although I've been trying to arrange our primitivism according to Terrestrial ideas of cultural backwardness, I'm afraid many of the physical arrangements are primitive according to our conceptions rather than theirs." VjHY must we be primitive  according to Terran ideas?" Luccar wanted to know. "Why must we be slaves even to fashions in backwardness?" "Hear, hear!" cried an anonymous voice. "And thank you, Skkiru," the former President continued, "for telling me they were suspicious. I doubt that Bbulas would have taken the trouble to inform me of so trivial a matter." "As high priest," Bbulas said stiffly, "I believe the matter, trivial or not, now falls within my province." "Shame!" cried an anonymous voice -- or it might have been the same one. Bbulas turned forest-green and his antennae twitched. "After all, you yourself, Luccar, agreed to accept the role of elder statesman -- " "Yam-stealer," Luccar corrected him bitterly, "which is not the same thing." "On Earth, it is. And," Bbulas went on quickly, "as for our assuming primitive Earth attitudes, where else are we going to get our attitudes from? We can't borrow any primitive attitudes from Nemeth, because they're too well known. And since there are no other planets we know of with intelligent life-forms that have social struchires markedly different from the major Terran ones -- except for some completely nonhumanoid cultures, which, for physiological reasons, we are incapable of imitating -- we have to rely upon records of primitive Terran sources for information. Besides, a certain familiarity with the traits manifested will make the culture more understandable to the Terrans, and, hence, more attractive to them psychologically." He stopped and straightened out his antennae. "In other words," Skkiru commented, emboldened by a certain aura of sympathy he felt emanating from Larhgan, at least, and probably from Luccar, too, "he doesn't have the imagination to think up any cultural traits for himself, so he has to steal them -- and that's the easiest place to steal them from." "This is none of your business, Skkiru," Bbulas snapped. "You just beg." "It's the business of all of us, Bbulas," Luccar corrected softly. "Please to remember that, no matter what our alloted roles, we are all concerned equally in this." "Of course, of course, but please let me handle the situation in my own way, since I made the plans. And, Skkiru," the Dilettante added with strained grace, "you may have a warm cloak to wear as soon as we can get patches welded on." Then Bbulas took a deep breath and reverted to his old cheer-leader manner. "Now we must all get organized for the potlatch. We can give the Terrans those things the Ladies' Aid has been working on all year for the charity bazaar and, in exchange, perhaps they will give us more chocolate bars -- " he glanced reproachfully at Skkiru -- "and other food." "And perhaps some yams," Luccar suggested, "so that -- God save us -- I can steal them." "I'll definitely work on that," Bbulas promised.  gar, he held no prominent position at the feast -- in reality, no position at all -- for he hated fish. And fish, naturally, would be the chief refreshment offered, since the Snaddrath did not want the Terrans to know that they had already achieved that degrading dependency upon the tin can that marks one of the primary differences between savagery and civilization. There were fish pate on rice crackers, fish soup with rice, boiled fish, baked fish, fried fish and a pilau of rice with fish. There were fish chitlins, fish chips, fish cakes, fish candy and gnslat -- a potent distillation of fermented fish livers -- to wash it all down. And even in the library, where Skkiru sought refuge from the festivities, fishy fumes kept filtering down through the ventilating system to assail his nostrils. Bbulas had been right in a way, Skkiru had to admit to himself upon reflection. In trying to improve his lot, Skkiru had taken advantage of the Snaddrath's special kinetic talents, which had been banned for the diuation -- and so he had, in effect, committed a crime. This time, however, he would seek to uplift himself in terms acceptable to the Terrans on a wholly indigenous level, and in terms which would also hasten the desired corruptive process -- in a nice way, of course -- so that the Snaddrath civilization could be profitably undermined as fast as possible and Larhgan be his once again. It was a hard problem to solve, but he felt sure he could do it. Anjhirig Bbulas could do, he could do better. Then he had it! And the idea was so wonderful that he was a little sorry at the limited range it would necessarily cover. His part really should be played out before a large, yoomping audience, but he was realistic enough to see that it would be most expedient for him to give a private performance for the Earthmen alone. On the other hand, he now knew it should be offered outside the hut, because the recorder would pick up his cries and Bbulas would be in a spin -- as he would be about any evidence of independent thinking on the planet. Bbulas was less interested in the planet's prospering, it was now clear to Skkiru, than in its continuing in a state where he would remain top fish. had done its work, and by the time the Earthmen arrived at the door to their hut, they were alone. The rest of the company either had fallen into a stupor or could not trust themselves to navigate the mud. The Earthmen -- with an ingeniousness which would have augured well for the futrire development of their race, had it not already been the (allegedly) most advanced species in the Galaxy -- had adapted some spare parts from their ship into replicas of Skirru's mudshoes. They did, in truth, seem none too steady on their feet, but he was unable to determine to what degree this was a question of intoxication and what degree a question of navigation. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd." He thrust forward his begging bowl. "Regard, it is the beggar! Why were you not at the festivities, worthy mendicant?" Raoul hiccuped. "Lovely party. Beautiful women. Delicious fish." Skkiru started to stand on his head, then remembered this was no longer a socially acceptable expression of grief and cast his eyes down. "I was not invited," he said sadly. "Like the little match girl," Raoul sympathized. "My heart bleeds for you, good match gi -- good beggar. Does your heart not bleed for him, Cyril?" "Bad show," the older ethnologist agreed, with a faint smile. "But that's what you've got to expect, if you're going to be a primitive." He was very dnmk, Skkiru decided; he must be, to phrase his sentiments so poorly. Unless he -- but no, Skkiru refused to believe that. He didn't mind Cyril's being vaguely suspicious, but that was as far as he wanted him to go. Skkiru's toes apprehensively started to quiver. "How can you say a thing like that to a primitive?" Raoul demanded. "If he were not a primitive, it would be all right to call him a primitive, but one does not accuse primitives of being primitives. It's -- it's downright primitive; that's what it is!" "You need some coffee, my boy." Cyril grinned. "Black coffee. That guslat of theirs is highly potent stuff." They were about to go inside. Skkiru had to act quickly. He slumped over. Although he had meant to land on the doorstep, he lacked the agility to balance himself with the precision required and so he fell smack into the mud. The feel of the slime on his bare feet had been bad enough; oozing over his skin through the interstices of his clothing, it was pure hell. What sacrifices he was making for his planet! And for Larhgan. The thought of her would have to sustain him through this viscous ordeal, for there was nothing else solid within his grasp. "Ubbl," he said, lifting his head from the ooze, so that they could see the froth coming out of his mouth. "Glubbl." is he doing?" "Having an epileptic fit, I rather fancy. Go on, old man," Cyril said to Skkiru. "You're doing splendidly. Splendidly!" "I see the sky!" Skkiru howled, anxious to get his prophecies over with before he sank any deeper in the mud. "It is great magic. I see many ships in the sky. They are all coming to Snaddra..." "Bearing anthropologists and chocolate bars, I suppose," murmured Cyril. "Shhh," Raoul said indignantly. "You must not interrupt. He is having personal contact with the supernatural, a very important element of the primitive ethos." "Thank you," Cyril said. "I'll try to remember that." So will I, thought Skirru. "They carry learned men and food for the spiritually and physically hungry people of Snaddra," he interrupted impatiently. "They carry warm clothing for the poor and miserable people of Snaddra. They carry yams for the larcenous and frustrated people of Snaddra." "Yams!" Raoul echoed. "Yams!" "Shhh, this is fascinating. Go on, beggar." But the mud sogging over Skkiru's body was too much. The fit could be continued at a later date -- and in a drier location. "Where am I?" he asked, struggling to a sitting position. "You are on Snaddra, fifth planet of the sun Weebl," Raoul began, "in -- " "Weeeeebl," Skkiru corrected, getting to his feet with the older ethnologist's assistance. "What happened?" He beat futilely at the mud caught in the meshes of his metal rags. "I feel faint." "Come in and have some coffee with us," Cyril invited. This also was part of Skirru's plan, for he had no intention of going back across that mud, if he could fossibly help it. He had nothing further to say that the recorders should not hear. Bbulas might object to his associating with the Earthmen, but he couldn't do much if the association seemed entirely innocent. At the moment, Snaddra might be a theocracy, but the democratic hangover was still strong. "I would rather have some hot chocolate," Skkiru said. "That is, if you have no objection to drinking with a beggar." "My dear fellow -- " Cyril put an arm around Skkiru's muddy shoulders -- "we ethnologists do not hold with caste distinctions. Come in and have chocolate -- with a spot of rum, eh? That'll make you right as a trivet in a matter of seconds." after several cups of the finest chocolate he had ever tasted, that Skkiru announced himself to feel quite recovered. "Please do not bother to accompany me to the door," he said. "I can find my own way. You do me too much honor. I would feel shamefaced." "But" Cyril began. "No," Skkiru said. "It is -- it is bad form here. I insist. I must go my way alone." "All right," Cyril agreed. Raoul looked at him in some surprise. "All right," Cyril repeated in a louder tone. "Go by yourself, if an escort would bother you. But please give the door a good bang, so the lock will catch." Skkiru slammed the door lustily to simulate the effect of departure and then he descended via the secret passage inside the hut itself, scrabbling a little because the hot chocolate seemed strangely to have affected his sense of balance. The rest of the Snaddrath were in the council chamber gloating over the loot from the potlatch. It was, as a matter of fact, a good take. "Where were you, Skkiru?" Bbulas asked, examining a jar of preserved kumquats suspiciously. "Up to no good. I'll be bound." "Oh, my poor Skkiru!" Larhgan exclaimed, before Skkiru could say anything. "How muddy and wretched-looking you are! I don't like this whole thing," she told Bbulas. "It's cruel. Being high priestess isn't nearly as much fun as I thought it would be." "This is not supposed to be fun," the Dilettante informed her coldly. "It is in dead earnest. Since the question has been brought up, however, what did happen to you, Skkiru?" "I -- er -- fell down and, being a beggar, I had no other garments to change into." "You'll survive," Bbulas said unfeelingly. "On Earth, I understand, people fall into mud all the time. Supposed to have a beneficial effect -- and any effect on you, Skkiru, would have to be beneficial." Larhgan was opening her mouth to say something -- probably, Skkiru thought fondly, in his defense -- when there came a thud and a yell from the passage outside. Two yells, in fact. And two thuds. "My faith," exclaimed a Terrestrial voice, "but how did the beggar descend! I am sure every bone in my body is broken." "I think you'll find him possessed of means of locomotion not known to us. But you're not hurt, old chap -- only brxiised." And Cyril came into the council chamber, followed by a limping Raoul. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I trust this is not an intrusion, although I'm quite sure you'll tell us we've broken a whole slue of tabus." "You!" Bbulas screamed at Skkiru. "You must have used the passage in the hut! You let them follow you!" Losing control of his own reflexes, he began to whirl madly.  claimed, staring around him. "To build a place like this beneath the mud -- name of a name, these people must have hydraulic engineering far sujjerior to anything on Earth!" "You are too kind," the former hydraulic engineer said deprecatingly. "Actually, it's quite simple-" "This is not a primitive civilization at all, Raoul," Cyril explained. "They've been faking it from tapes. Probably have a culture very much like ours, with allowances for climatic differences, of course. Oh, undoubtedly it would be provincial, but -- " "We are not provincial," Larhgan said coldly. "Primitive, yes. Provincial, no! We are -- " "But why should they do a thing like this to us?" Raoul wailed. "I imagine they did it to get on the trade routes, as Nemeth did. They've been trying not to talk about Nemeth all the while. Must have been rather a strain. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" C#uil told the assembled Snaddrath. "Very bad form!" Bbulas was turning paler and paler as he whirled. "All your fault," he gasped hoarsely to Skkiru. "All your fault!" And that was true, Skkiru realized. His antennae quivered, but he didn't even try to restrain them. He had meant well, yet he had messed up the planet's affairs far more seriously than Bbulas had. He had ruined their hojjes, killed all their chances by his carelessness. He, Skkiru, instead of being his planet's savior, was its spoiler. He psonked violently. But Larhgan moved nearer to him. "It's all over, anyhow," she whispered, "and you know what? I'm glad. I'm glad we failed. I'd rather starve as myself than succeed as a sham." Skkiru controlled himself. Silently, he took the grimpatch out of his carrier and, as silently, she took it back. "My faith, they must have had plumbing all the time!" Raoul complained. "Very likely," said Cyril sternly. "Looks as if we've suffered for nothing." "Such people!" Raoul said. "True primitives, I am sure, would never have behaved so unfeelingly!" Cyril smiled, but his face was hard as he turned back to the Snaddrath. "We'll radio Gambrell in the morning to have a ship dispatched to pick us up. I'm not sure but that we have a good case for fraud against you." "We're destroyed!" Bbulas shrieked as the full emotional impact of the situation hit him. "An interplanetary lawsuit would ruin Snaddra entirely." His cries were echoed in the howls of the other Snaddrath, their antennae psonking, their eyes bulging. Bbulas lost all emotional restraint, forgot about his Terrestrial training, and turned upside down in a spasm of grief. Since there was no longer any reason to repress their natural manifestation of feeling, all the Snaddrath followed suit, their antennae twisting in frenzy as they ululated. And then, to Skkiru's surprise and the surprise of all the rest, Cyril stopped and took out his notebook. "Wait a minute," he said as Raoul did likewise. All four Earthly eyes were shining with a glow that was recognizable to any even remotely humanoid species as the glow of intellectual fervor. "Wait just a minute! Our plans are altered. We may stay, after all!" One by one, the Snaddrath reversed to upright positions, but did not retract their eyes, for they were still staring at the Earthmen. Skkiru knew now what had been bothering him about the Terrestrials all along. They were crazy -- that was what it was. Who but maniacs would want to leave their warm, dry planets and go searching the stars for strange cultures, when they could stay quietly at home in peace and comfort with their families? Skkiru's hand reached out for Larhgan's and foimd it.  Something drastic should happen to all snoopers -- but nothing as shocking and frightful as thisl enough rooming house and the doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are old-fashioned single action jobs and the hinges are loose, and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to operate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door sidewise against its hinges, and slip the latch. Further, you can lock the door the same way when you come out. Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things partly because he was bored. The company doctors had laid him up -- not off, up -- for three weeks (after his helper had hit him just over the temple with a fourteeninch crescent wrench) pending some more X-rays. If he was going to get just sick-leave pay, he wanted to make it stretch. If he was going to get a big fat settlement-all to the good; what he saved by living in this firetrap would make the money look even better. Meanwhile, he felt fine and had nothing to do all day. "Slim isn't dishonest," his mother used to tell Children's Court some years back. "He's just curious." She was perfectly right. Slim was constitutionally incapable of borrowing your bathroom without looking into your medicine chest. Send him into your kitchen for a saucer and when he came out a minute later, he'd have inventoried your refrigerator, your vegetable bin, and (since he was six feet three inches tall) he would know about a moldering jar of maraschino cherries in the back of the top shelf that you'd forgotten about. Perhaps Slim, who was not impressed by his impressive size and build, felt that a knowledge that you secretly use hair-restorer, or are one of those strange people who keeps a little moimd of unmated socks in your second drawer, gave him a kind of superiority. Or maybe security is a better word. Or maybe it was an odd compensation for one of the most advanced cases of gawking, gasping shyness ever recorded. Whatever it was, Slim liked you better if, while talking to you, he knew how many jackets hung in your closet, how old that unpaid phone bill was, and just where you'd hidden those photographs. On the other hand. Slim didn't insist on knowing bad or even embarrassing things about you. He just wanted to know things about you, period. H IS current situation was therefore a near paradise. Flimsy doors stood in rows, barely sustaining vacuum on aching vacuum of knowledge; and one by one they imploded at the nudge of his curiosity. He touched nothing (or if he did, he replaced it carefully) and removed nothing, and within a week he knew Mrs. Koyper's roomers far better than she could, or cared to. Elach secret visit to the rooms gave him a starting point; subsequent ones taught him more. He knew not only what these people had, but what they did, where, how much, for how much, and how often. In almost every case, he knew why as well. Almost every case. Celia Sarton came. Now, at various times, in various places. Slim had foimd strange things in other people's rooms. There was an old lady in one shabby place who had an electric train under her bed; used it, too. There was an old spinster in this very building who collected bottles, large and small, of any value or capacity, providing they were roimd and squat and with long necks. A man on the second floor secretly guarded his desirables with the unloaded .# automatic in his top bureau drawer, for which he had a halfbox of .# cartridges. There was a (to be chivalrous) girl in one of the rooms who kept fresh cut flowers before a photograph on her night-table -- or, rather, before a frame in which were stacked eight photographs, one of which held the stage each day. Seven days, eight photographs: Slim admired the system. A new love every day and, predictably, a different love on successive Wednesdays. And all of them movie stars. Dozens of rooms, dozens of imprints, marks, impressions, overlays, atmospheres of people. And they needn't be odd ones. A woman moves into a room, however standardized; the instant she puts down her dusting powder on top of the flush tank, the room is hers. Something stuck in the illfitting frame of a mirror, something draped over the long-dead gas jet, and the samest of rooms begins to shrink toward its occupant as if it wished, one day, to be a close-knit, form-fitting, individual integument as intimate as a skin. But not Celia Sarton's room. Slim Walsh got a glimpse of her as she followed Mrs. Koyper up the stairs to the third floor. Mrs. Koyper, who hobbled, slowed any follower sufficiently to afford the most disinterested witness a good look, and Slim was anything but disinterested. Yet for days he could not recall her clearly. It was as if Celia Sarton had been -- not invisible, for that would have been memorable in itself -- but translucent or, chameleonlike, drably re-radiating the drab wall color, carpet color, woodwork color. She was -- how old? Old enough to pay taxes. How tall? Tall enough. Dressed in... whatever women cover themselves with in their statistical thousands. Shoes, hose, skirt, jacket, hat. She carried a bag. When you go to the baggage window at a big terminal, you notice a suitcase here, a steamer-tnmk there; and all arovmd, high up, far back, there are rows and ranks and racks of luggage not individually noticed but just there. This bag, Celia Sarton's bag, was one of them. And to Mrs. Koyper, she said -- she said -- She said whatever is necessary when one takes a cheap room; and to find her voice, divide the sound of a crowd by the number of people in it. ticeable was she that, aside from being aware that she left in the morning and "etumed in the evening, Slim let two days go by before he entered her room; he simply could not remind himself about her. And when he did, and had inspected it to his satisfaction, he had his hand on the knob, about to leave, before he recalled that the room was, after all, occupied. Until that second, he had thought he was giving one of the vacancies the once-over. (He did this regularly; it gave him a reference-point.) He grimted and turned back, flicking his gaze over the room. First he had to assure himself that he was in the right room, which, for a man of his instinctive orientations, was extraordinary. Then he had to spend a moment of disbelief in his own eyes, which was all but unthinkable. When that passed, he stood in astonishment, staring at the refutation of everything his -- hobby -- had taught him about people and the places they live in. The bureau drawers were empty. The ashtray was clean. No toothbrush, toothpaste, soap. In the closet, two wire hangers and one wooden one covered with dirty quilted silk, and nothing else. Under the grime-gray dresser scarf, nothing. In the shower stall, the medicine chest, nothing and nothing again, except what Mrs. Koyper had grudgingly installed. Slim went to the bed and carefully turned back the faded coverlet. Maybe she had slept in it, but very fjossibly not; Mrs. Koyper specialized in unironed sheets of such a ground-in gray that it wasn't easy to tell. Frowning, Slim put up the coverlet again and smoothed it. Suddenly he struck his forehead, which yielded him a flash of pain from his injury. He ignored it. "The bag!" It was under the bed, shoved there, not hidden there. He looked at it without touching it for a moment, so that it could be returned exactly. Then he hauled it out. TT was a black gladstone, neither new nor expensive, of that nondescript rusty color acquired by untended leatherette. It had a worn zipper closure and was not locked. Slim opened it. It contained a cardboard box, crisp and new, for a thousand virgin sheets of cheap white typewriter paper surrounded by a glossy bright blue band bearing a white diamond with the legend: Nonpareil the writers friend # cotton fiber trade mark registered. Slim lifted the paper out of the box, looked under it, riffled a thumbful of the sheets at the top and the same from the bottom, shook his head, replaced the paper, closed the box, put it back into the bag and restored everything precisely as he had found it. He paused again in the middle of the room, turning slowly once, but there was simply nothing else to look at. He let himself out, locked the door, and went silently back to his room. He sat down on the edge of his Wjt r ' bed and at last protested, "Nobody lives like that!" TT IS room was on the fourth and topmost floor of the old house. Anyone else would have called it the worst room in the place. It was small, dark, shabby and remote and it suited him beautifully. Its door had a transom, the glass of which had many times been painted over. By standing on the foot of his bed. Slim could apply one eye to the peephole he had scratched in the paint and look straight down the stairs to the third-floor landing. On this landing, hanging to the stub of one of the ancient gas jets, was a cloudy mirror surmounted by a dust-mantled gilt eagle and surrounded by a great many rococo carved flowers. By careful propping with folded cigarette wrappers, innumerable tests and a great deal of silent milage up and down the stairs. Slim had .arranged the exact tilt necessary in the mirror so that it covered the second floor landing as well. And just as a radar operator learns to translate glowing pips and masses into aircraft and weather, so Slim became expert at the interpretation of the fogged and distant image it afforded him. Thus he had the comings and goings of half the tenants xmder surveillance without having to leave his room. It was in this mirror, at twelve minutes past six, that he saw Celia Sarton next, and as he watched her climb the stairs, his eyes glowed. The anonymity was gone. She came up the stairs two at a time, with a gait like bounding. She reached the landing and whirled into her corridor and was gone, and while a part of Slim's mind listened for the way she opened her door (hurriedly, rattling the key against the lock-plate, banging the door open, slamming it shut), another part studied a mental photograph of her face. What raised its veil of the statistical ordinary was its set purpose. Here were eyes only superficially interested in cars, curbs, stairs, doors. It was as if she had projected every important part of herself into that empty room of hers and waited there impatiently for her body to catch up. There was something in the room, or something she had to do there, which she could not, would not, wait for. One goes this way to a beloved after a long parting, or to a deathbed in the last, precipitous moments. This was not the arrival of one who wants, but of one who needs. Slim buttoned his shirt, eased his door open and sidled through it. He poised a moment on his landing like a great moose sensing the air before descending to a waterhole, and then moved downstairs. Celia Sarton's only neighbor in the north corridor -- the spinster with the bottles -- was settled for the evening; she was of very regular habits and Slim knew them well. Completely confident that he would not be seen, he drifted to the girl's door and paused. S HE was there, all right. He could see the light around the edges of the ill-fitting door, could sense that difference between an occupied room and an empty one, which exists however silent the occupant might be. And this one was silent. Whatever it was that had driven her into the room with such headlong urgency, whatever it was she was doing (had to do) was being done with no sound or motion that he could detect. For a long time -- six minutes, seven -- Slim hung there, openthroated to conceal the sound of his breath. At last, shaking his head, he withdrew, climbed the stairs, let himself into his own room and lay down on the bed, frowning. He could only wait. Yet he could wait. No one does any single thing for very long. Especially a thing not involving movement. In an hour, in two -- It was five. At half-past eleven, some faint sound from the floor below brought Slim, half-dozing, twisting up from the bed and to his high peephole in the transom. He saw the Sarton girl come out of the corridor slowly, and stop, and look around at nothing in particular, like someone confined too long in a ship's cabin who has emerged on deck, not so much for the lungs' sake, but for the eyes'. And when she went down the stairs, it was easily and without hurry, as if (again) the important part of her was in the room. But the something was finished with for now and what was ahead of her wasn't important and could wait. Standing with his hand on his own doorknob. Slim decided that he, too, could wait. The temptation to go straight to her room was, of course, large, but caution also loomed. What he had tentatively established as her habit patterns did not include midnight exits. He could not know when she might come back and it would be foolish indeed to jeopardize his hobby -- not only where it included her, but all of it -- by being caught. He sighed, mixing resignation with anticipatory pleasure, and went to bed. Less than fifteen minutes later, he congratulated himself with a sleepy smile as he heard her slow footsteps mount the stair below. He slept. closet, there was nothing in the ashtray, there was nothing in the medicine chest nor under the dresser scarf. The bed was made, the dresser drawers were empty, and under the bed was the cheap gladstone. In it was a box containing a thousand sheets of typing paper surrounded by a glossy blue band. Without disturbing this. Slim riffled the sheets, once at the top, once at the bottom. He grunted, shook his head and then proceeded, automatically but meticulously, to put everything back as he had found it. "Whatever it is this girl does at night," he said glumly, "it leaves tracks like it makes noise." He left. The rest of the day was unusually busy for Slim. In the morning he had a doctor's appointment, and in the afternoon he spent hours with a company lawyer who seemed determined to (a) deny the existence of any head injury and (b) prove to Slim and the world that the injury must have occurred years ago. He got absolutely nowhere. If Slim had another characteristic as consuming and compulsive as his curiosity, it was his shyness; these two could stand on one another's shoulders, though, and still look upward at Slim's stubbornness. It served its purpose. It took hours, however, and it was after seven when he got home. He paused at the third-floor landing and glanced down the corridor. Celia Sarton's room was occupied and silent. If she emerged around midnight, exhausted and relieved, then he would know she had again raced up the stairs to her urgent, motionless task, whatever it was... and here he checked himself. He had long ago learned the uselessness of cluttering up his busy head with conjectures. A thousand things might happen; in each case, only one would. He would wait, then, and could. And again, some hours later, he saw her come out of her corridor. She looked about, but he knew she saw very little; her face was withdrawn and her eyes wide and unguarded. Then, instead of going out, she went back into her room. He slipped downstairs half an hour later and listened at her door, and smiled. She was washing her lingerie at the handbasin. It was a small thing to learn, but he felt he was making progress. It did not explain why she lived as she did, but indicated how she could manage without so much as a spare handkerchief. Oh, well, maybe in the morning. maybe. He found it, he found it, though he could not know what it was he'd found. He laughed at first, not in triumph but wryly, calling himself a clown. Then he squatted on his heels in the middle of the floor (he would not sit on the bed, for fear of leaving wrinkles of his own on those Mrs. Koyper supplied) and carefully lifted the box of paper out of the suitcase and put it on the floor in front of him. Up to now, he had contented himself with a quick riffle of the blank paper, a little at the top, a little at the bottom. He had done just this again, without removing the box from the suitcase, but only taking the top off and tilting up the banded ream of Nonpareilthe-writers-friend. And almost in spite of itself, his quick eye had caught the briefest flash of pale blue. Gently, he removed the band, sliding it off the pack of paper, being careful not to slit the glossy finish. Now he could freely riffle the pages, and when he did, he discovered that all of them except a hundred or so, top and bottom, had the same rectangular cut-out, leaving only a narrow margin all the way around. In the hollow space thus formed, something was packed. He could not tell what the something was, except that it was pale tan, with a tinge of pink, and felt like smooth untextured leather. There was a lot of it, neatly folded so that it exactly fitted the hole in the ream of paper. He puzzled over it for some minutes without touching it again, and then, scrubbing his fingertips against his shirt until he felt that they were quite free of moisture and grease, he gently worked loose the top comer of the substance and unfolded a layer. All he found was more of the same. He folded it down flat again to be sure he could, and then brought more of it out. He soon realized that the material was of an irregular shape and almost certainly of one piece, so that folding it into a tight rectangle required care and great skill. Therefore he proceeded very slowly, stopping every now and then to fold it up again, and it took him more than an hour to get enough of it out so that he could identify it. Identify? It was completely unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was a human skin, done in some substance very like the real thing. The first fold, the one which had been revealed at first, was an area of the back, which was why it showed no features. One might liken it to a balloon, except that a deflated balloon is smaller in every dimension than an inflated one. As far as Slim could judge, this was life-sized -- a little over five feet long and proportioned accordingly. The hair was peculiar, looking exactly like the real thing until flexed, and then revealing itself to be one piece. It had Celia Sarton's face. Slim closed hisoyes and opened them, and found that it was still true. He held his breath and put forth a careful, steady forefinger and gently pressed the left eyelid upward. There was an eye under it, all right, light blue and seemingly moist, but flat. Slim released the breath, closed the eye and sat back on his heels. His feet were beginning to tingle from his having knelt on the floor for so long. TJ E looked all around the room once, to clear his head of strangeness, and then began to fold the thing up again. It took a while, but when he was finished, he knew he had it right. He replaced the typewriter paper in the box and the box in the bag, put the bag away and at last stood in the middle of the room in the suspension which overcame him when he was deep in thought. After a moment of this, he began to inspect the ceiling. It was made of stamped tin, like those of many old-fashioned houses. It was grimy and flaked and stained; here and there, rust showed through, and in one or two places, edges of the tin sheets had sagged. Slim nodded to himself in profound satisfaction, listened for a while at the door, let himself out, locked it and went upstairs. He stood in his own corridor for a minute, checking the position of doors, the hall window, and his accurate orientation of the same things on the floor below. Then he went into his own room. His room, though smaller than most, was one of the few in the house which was blessed with a real closet instead of a rickety off-the-floor wardrobe. He went into it and knelt, and grunted in satisfaction when he found how loose the ancient, unpainted floorboards were. By removing the side baseboard, he found it possible to get to the air-space between the fourth floor and the third-floor ceiling. He took out boards until he had an opening perhaps fourteen inches wide, and then, working in almost total silence, he began cleaning away dirt and old plaster. He did this meticulously, because when he finally pierced the tin sheeting, he wanted not one grain of dirt to fall into the room below. He took his time and it was late in the afternoon when he was satisfied with his preparations and began, with his knife, on the tin. It was thinner and softer than he had dared to hope; he almost overcut on the first try. Carefully he squeezed the sharp steel into the little slot he had cut, lengthening it. When it was somewhat less than an inch long, he withdrew all but the point of the knife and twisted it slightly, moved it a sixteenth of an inch and twisted again, repeating this all down the cut until he had widened it enough for his purposes. He checked the time, then returned to Celia Sarton's room for just long enough to check the appearance of his work from that side. He was very pleased with it. The little cut had come through a foot away from the wall over the bed and was a mere pencil line lost in the baroque design with which the tin was stamped and the dirt and rust that marred it. He returned to his room and sat down to wait. He heard the old house coming to its evening surge of life, a voice here, a door there, footsteps on the stairs. He ignored them all as he sat on the edge of his bed, hands folded between his knees, eyes half closed, immobile like a machine fueled, oiled, timed and ready, lacking only the right touch on the right control. And like that touch, the faint sound of Celia Sarton's footsteps moved him. To use his new peephole, he had to lie on the floor half in and half out of the closet, with his head in the hole, actually below floor level. With this, he was perfectly content, any amount of discomfort being well worth his trouble -- an attitude he shared with many another ardent hobbyist, mountain-climber or speleologist, duck-hunter or bird-watcher. " he could see her splendidly, as well as most of the floor, the lower third of the door and part of the washbasin in the bathroom. She had come in hurriedly, with that same agonized haste he had observed before. At the same second she turned on the light, she had apparently flung her handbag toward the bed; it was in midair as the light appeared. She did not even glance its way, but hastily fumbled the old gladstone from under the bed, opened it, removed the box, opened it, took out the paper, slipped off the blue band and removed the blank sheets of paper which covered the hollowed-out ream. She scooped out the thing hidden there, shaking it once like a grocery clerk with a folded paper sack, so that the long limp thing straightened itself out. She arranged it carefully on the worn linoleum of the floor, arms down at the side, legs slightly apart, face up, neck straight. Then she lay down on the floor, too, headto-head with the deflated thing. She reached up over her head, took hold of the collapsed image of herself about the region of the ears, and for a moment did some sort of manipulation of it against the top of her own head. Slim heard faintly a sharp, chitinous click, like the sound one makes by snapping the edge of a thumbnail against the edge of a fingernail. Her hands slipped to the cheeks of the figure and she pulled at the empty head as if testing a connection. The head seemed now to have adhered to hers. Then she assumed the same pose she had arranged for this other, letting her hands fall wearily to her sides on the floor, closing her eyes. For a long while, nothing seemed to be happening, except for the odd way she was breathing, very deeply but very slowly, like the slow-motion picture of someone panting, gasping for breath after a long hard run. After perhaps ten minutes of this, the breathing became shallower and even slower, until, at the end of a half hour, he could detect none at all. Slim lay there immobile for more than an hour, until his body shrieked protest and his head ached from eyestrain. He hated to move, but move he must. Silently he backed out of the closet, stood up and stretched. It was a great luxury and he deeply enjoyed it. He felt moved to think over what he had just seen, but clearly and consciously decided not to -- not yet, ansrway. When he was unkinked, again, he crept back into the closet, put his head in the hole and his eye to the slot. Nothing had changed. She still lay quiet, utterly relaxed, so much so that her hands had turned palm upward. Slim watched and he watched. Just as he was about to conclude that this was the way the girl spent her entire nights and that there would be nothing more to see, he saw a slight and sudden contraction about the region of her solar plexus, and then another. For a time, there was nothing more, and then the empty thing attached to the top of her head began to fill. And Celia Sarton began to empty. Slim stopped breathing until it hurt and watched in total astonishment. ess progressed swiftly. It was as if something passed from the clothed body of the girl to this naked empty thing. The something, whatever it might be, had to be fluid, for nothing but a fluid would fill a flexible container in just this way, or make a flexible container slowly and evenly flatten out like this. Slim could see the fingers, which had been folded flat against the palms, inflate and move until they took on the normal relaxed curl of a normal hand. The elbows shifted a little to lie more normally against the body. And yes, it was a body now. The other one was not a body any more. It lay foolishly limp in its garments, its sleeping face slightly distorted by its flattening. The fingers fell against the palms by their own limp weight. The shoes thumped quietly on their sides, heels together, toes pointing in opposite directions. The exchange was done in less than ten minutes and then the newly filled body moved. It flexed its hands tentatively, drew up its knees and stretched its legs out again, arched its back against the floor. Its eyes flickered open. It put up its arms and made some deft manipulation at the top of its head. Slim heard another version of the soft-hard click and the now-empty head fell flat to the floor. The new Celia Sarton sat up and sighed and rubbed her hands lightly over her body, as if restoring circulation and sensation to a chilled skin. She stretched as comfortingly and luxuriously as Slim had a few minutes earlier. She looked rested and refreshed. At the top of her head. Slim caught a glimpse of a slit through which a wet whiteness showed, but it seemed to be closing. In a brief time, nothing showed there but a small valley in the hair, like a normal parting. She sighed again and got up. She took the clothed thing on the floor by the neck, raised it and shook it twice to make the clothes fall away. She tossed it to the bed and carefully picked up the clothes and deployed them about the room, the undergarments in the washbasin, the dress and slip on a hanger in the wardrobe. Moving leisurely but with purpose, she went into the bathroom and, except for her shins down, out of Slim's range of vision. There he heard the same faint domestic sounds he had once detected outside her door, as she washed her underclothes. She emerged in due course, went to the wardrobe for some wire hangers and took them into the bathroom. Back she came with the underwear folded on the hangers, which she hooked to the top of the open wardrobe door. Then she took the deflated integument which lay crumpled on the bed, shook it again, rolled it up into a ball and took it into the bathroom. Slim heard more water-running and sudsing noises, and, by ear. followed the operation through a soaping and two rinses. Then she came out again, shaking out the object, which had apparently just been wrung, pulled it through a wooden clothes-hanger, arranged it creaselessly depending from the crossbar of the hanger with the bar about at its waistline, and hung it with the others on the wardrobe door. Then she lay down on the bed, not to sleep or to read or even to rest -- she seemed very rested -- but merely to wait until it was time to do something else. "O Y now. Slim's bones were complaining again, so he wormed noiselessly backward out of his lookout point, got into his shoes and a jacket, and went out to get something to eat. When he came home an hour later and looked, her light was out and he could see nothing. He spread his overcoat carefully over the hole in the closet so no stray light from his room would appear in the little slot in the ceiling, closed the door, read a comic book for a while, and went to bed. The next day, he followed her. What strange occupation she might have, what weird vampiric duties she might disclose, he did not speculate on. He was doggedly determined to gather information first and think later. What he foimd out about her daytime activities was, if anything, more surprising than any wild surmise. She was a clerk in a small five-and-ten on the East Side. She ate in the store's lunch bar at lunchtime -- a green salad and a surprising amount of milk -- and in the evening she stopped at a hot-dog stand and drank a small container of milk, though she ate nothing. Her steps were slowed by then and she moved wearily, speeding up only when she was close to the rooming house, and then apparentlyall but overcome with eagerness to get home and... into something more comfortable. She was watched in this process, and Slim, had he disbelieved his own eyes the first time, must believe them now. So it went for a week, three days of which Slim spent in shadowing her, every evening in watching her make her strange toilet. Every twenty-four hours, she changed bodies, carefully washing, drying, folding and putting away the one she was not using. Twice during the week, she went out for what was apparently a constitutional and nothing more -- a half-hour around midnight, when she would stand on the walk in front of the rooming house, or wander aroimd the block. At work, she was silent but so not unnaturally so; she spoke, when spoken to, in a small, unmusical voice. She seemed to have no friends; she maintained her aloofness by being uninteresting and by seeking no one out and by needing no one. She evinced no outside interests, never going to the movies or to the park. She had no dates, not even with girls. Slim thought she did not sleep, but lay quietly in the dark waiting for it to be time to get up and go to work. And when he came to think about it, as ultimately he did, it occurred to Slim that within the anthill in which we all live and have our being, enough privacy can be exacted to allow for all sorts of strangeness in the members of society, providing the strangeness is not permitted to show. If it is a man's pleasure to sleep upside-down like a bat, and if he so arranges his life that no one ever sees him sleeping, or his sleeping-place, why, batlike he may sleep all the days of his life. One need not, by these rules, even be a human being. Not if the mimicry is good enough. It is a measure of Slim's odd personality to report that Celia Sarton's ways did not frighten him. He was, if anything, less disturbed by her now than he'd been before he had begun to spy on her. He knew what she did in her room and how she lived. Before, he had not known. Now he did. This made him much happier. His curiosity would never drive him to do what another man might -- to spieak to her on the stairs or on the street, get to know her and more about her. He was too shy for that. Nor was he moved to report to anyone the odd practice he watched each evening. It wasn't his business to report. She was doing no harm as far as he could see. In his cosmos, everybody had a right to live and make a buck if they could. Yet his curiosity, its immediacy taken care of, did undergo a change. It was not in him to wonder what sort of being this was and whether its ancestors had grown up among human beings, living with them in caves and in tents, developing and evolving along with homo sap until it could assume the uniform of the smallest and most invisible of wage-workers. He would never reach the conclusion that in the fight for survival, a species might discover that a most excellent characteristic for survival among human beings might be not to fight them but to join them. No, Slim's curiosity was far simpler, more basic and less informed than any of these conjectures. He simply changed the field of his wonderment from what to what it? So it was that on the eighth day of his survey, a Tuesday, he went again to her room, got the bag, opened it, removed the box, opened it, removed the ream of paper, slid the blue band off, removed the covering sheets, took out the second Celia Sarton, put her on the bed and then replaced paper, blue band, box-cover, box, and bag just as he had found them. He put the folded thing under his shirt and went out, carefully locking the door behind him in his special way, and went upstairs to his room. He put his prize imder the four clean shirts in his bottom drawer and sat down to await Celia Sarton's homecoming. She was a little late that night -- twenty minutes, perhaps. The delay seemed to have increased both her fatigue and her eagerness; she burst in feverishly, moved with the rapidity of nearpanic. She looked drawn and pale and her hands shook. She fumbled the bag from imder the bed, snatched out the box and opened it, contrary to her usual measured movements, by inverting it over the bed and dumping out its contents. When she saw nothing there but sheets of paper, some with a wide rectangle cut from them and some without, she froze. She crouched over that bed without moving for an interminable two minutes. Then she straightened up slowly and glanced about the room. Once she fumbled through the paper, but resignedly, without hope. She made one sound, a high, sad whimper, and, from that moment on, was silent. She went to the window slowly, her feet dragging, her shoulders slumped. For a long time, she stood looking out at the city, its growing darkness, its growing colonies of lights, each a symbol of life and life's usages. Then she drew down the blind and went back to the bed. Che stacked the papers there with loose uncaring fingers and put the heap of them on the dresser. She took off her shoes and placed them neatly side by side on the floor by the bed. She lay down in the same utterly relaxed pose she affected when she made her change, hands down and open, legs a little apart. Her face looked like a deathmask, its tissues sunken and sagging. It was flushed and sicklooking. There was a little of the deep regular breathing, but only a little. There was a bit of the fluttering contractions at the midriff, but only a bit. Then -- nothing. Slim backed away from the peephole and sat up. He felt very bad about this. He had been only curious; he hadn't wanted her to get sick, to die. For he was sure she had died. How could he know what sort of sleejvsurrogate an organism like this might require, or what might be the results of a delay in changing? What could he know of the chemistry of such a being? He had thought vaguely of slipping down the next day while she was out and returning her property. Just to see. Just to know what if. Just out of curiosity. Should he call a doctor? She hadn't. She hadn't even tried, though she must have known much better than he did how serious her predicament was. (Yet if a species depended for its existence on secrecy, it would be species-survival to let an individual die undetected.) Well, maybe not calling a doctor meant that she'd be all right, after all. Doctors would have a lot of silly questions to ask. She might even tell the doctor about her other skin, and if Slim was the one who had fetched the doctor. Slim might be questioned about that Slim didn't want to get involved with an#rthing. He just wanted to know things. He thought, "Fll take another look." He crawled back into the closet and put his head in the hole. Celia Sarton, he knew instantly, would not survive this. Her face was swollen, her eyes protruded, and her purpled tongue lolled far -- too far -- from the comer of her mouth. Even as he watched, her face darkened still more and the skin of it crinkled until it looked like carbon paper which has been balled up tight and then smoothed out. The very beginnings of an impulse to snatch the thing she needed out of his shirt drawer and rush it down to her died within him, for he saw a wisp of smoke emerge from her nostrils and then -- Slim cried out, snatched his head from the hole, bumping it cruelly, and clapped his hands over his eyes. Put the biggest size flash-bulb an inch from your nose, and fire it, and you might get a flare approaching the one he got through his little slot in the tin ceiling. He sat grunting in pain and watching, on the insides of his eyelids, migrations of flaming worms. At last they faded and he tentatively opened his eyes. They hurt and the after-image of the slot hung before him, but at least he could see. Feet pounded on the stairs. He smelled smoke and a burned, oily unpleasant something which he could not identify. Someone shouted. Someone hammered on a door. Then someone screamed and screamed. TT was in the papers next day. Mysterious, the story said. Charles Fort, in Lo!, had reported many such cases and there had been others since -- people burned to a crisp by a fierce heat which had nevertheless not destroyed clothes or bedding, while leaving nothing for autopsy. This was, said the paper, either an unknown kind of heat or heat of such intensity and such brevity that it would do such a thing. No known relatives, it said. Police mystified -- no clues or suspects. Slim didn't say ansrthing to anybody. He wasn't curious about the matter any more. He closed up the hole in the closet that same night, and next day, after he read the story, he used the newspaper to wrap up the thing in his shirt drawer. It smelled pretty bad and, even that early, was too far gone to be unfolded. He dropped it into a garbage can on the way to the lawyer's office on Wednesday. They settled his law suit that afternoon and he moved.      One of the unnoted but personally important side results of the current world situation is that it keeps Clifford D. Simak from producing as much science fiction as he and we would like him to... being city editor of the Minneapolis Star, he has to keep a doctor's hours while the human race toddles, infant-fashion, from frying pans into fires. But out of this worwhich finds a solution by discovering a friend. Man's best friend is -- is what? The answer is so vital that every national resource has to be poured into learning the answer! wonderfully compliant and yet horrifyingly obstinate aliens. A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to live -- all the Igathians agree with this -- but not when it comes to a time to die! We have quite a number of other really choice novelets in stock, too, and odds are that next month's issue will contain at least one of them. Short stories and our regular features, natchmente... surprising distance into history in order to bring this futuristic science fiction theme up to date I for your information The Orat Pyramid The Golden Section and PI readers who, when reading the above title, muttered to themselves that these three things have absolutely nothing to do with each other, I wish to state in this very first sentence that I agree with them. Of course neither the "golden section" nor pi is hidden in the structure which an ardent and effusive admirer once called the Miracle in Stone, using the word "miracle" in its literal religious meaning. But it is an interesting story how all the multitudinous misunderstandings surrounding the Great Pyramid originated. That the pyramid of King Khufu was a major engineering and organizational accomplishment is something that does not need to be stressed. It is not only astonishing that a structure of such size was built as early as it was; it is also astonishing how well it was built. As a matter of fact, Khufu's pyramid is of better workmanship than the later pyramids built on the same plateau, the so-called pyramid plateau of Giza, about six miles to the west of Cairo. Since Khufu was the first to build a pyramid in this particular locality, the whole plateau was originally named after him. It was called Akhet Khufu, or "Khufu's Horizon." W HY Khufu picked this particular locality for his pyramid is not known. That is, we don't know of any inscription saying that Pharaoh decreed this site because his fellow gods had told him to begin his soul-voyage after death from this place. But we can think of a number of eminently practical reasons why he chose this spot. To begin with, he could see it from his summer palace and watch the actual work going on. Secondly, the location of the building site was such that, when the annual Nile flood occurred, the blocks of stone could be floated on rafts to the foot of the growing structure. Finally, most Egyptologists (and especially the Egyptian egyptologists) believe that Khufu's pyramid hides an outcropping of natural rock which obviously saved that much work in the erection of a virtually solid structure. Even so, # blocks of stone went into the psn'amid, averaging # V # tons in weight, with a few that must weigh about # tons each. The rock was quarried nearby. Professor Selim Hassan found some ancient quarries within easy walking distance of the pyramid. Originally the pyramid had an outer casing of white limestone -- Greek writers who saw it blinding white under the desert sun assumed that it was white limestone all the way through -- which is now gone. Not completely gone, though; it merely is no longer a part of Khufu's pyramid, but forms portions of still-standing mosques. Without its casing, the pyramid is # feet tall. We can't tell precisely how high it was originally. The white limestone came from Turah, somewhat farther south and on the other side of the river, involving transportation over # miles of water. Some of the granite used in the interior came from Aswan, a good distance up-river, but again with the possibility of water transport. It was the height of the structure which is responsible for its name. The Egyptians called this height pyr-em-us. The Greeks adapted the term to their tongue Fig. #. King Khufu't name' the line around it, called cartouche, means it is a king's name by pronouncing it pyramis and using it as a designation for that particular shape. Herodotus coined a plural, pyramides, from which, at a much later date, the current singular "pyramid" was derived. Since we are on the subject of names, I am sorry to report that we don't really know how the name of the king was pronounced. The written form (Fig. #) transliterates as Hwfw which, in order to be able to say it at all, is pronounced Khufu. Cheops (the "ch" should also be sounded as "kh") is the Greek form used by Herodotus. seems to have been the first who told stories about the P#nramid which do not strictly jibe with the truth. "One of the most frequently repeated stories," to quote Prof. Hassan Selim, from an article in the Egyptian monthly The Scribe, February, #, "is that in order to build the p # Tamid, Khufu closed the temples and enslaved the whole population to work as slave-laborers on its construction. This story has been going the rounds since the middle of the Fifth Century B. C., when the Greek traveler and historian Herodotus visited Egypt and evidently fell into the hands of a typical dragoman, who, like his modern descendants, thought that a few sensational stories would earn him a bigger tip from the gullible stranger." They probably did, but because more than a score of centuries had gone by since the actual work, the Egyptian may easily have believed his own stories. A dozen centuries after Herodotus, other travelers came and saw the pyramids. Apparently no stories were told any more, and though the travelers probably saw examples of hieroglsqjhic writing, there was nobody on Earth then who could read it. Consequently they wondered about the nature and the purpose of these structures. Christian travelers, remembering their Bible, theorized that these must have been the giant storehouses for grain which Joseph had built to combat the forthcoming seven-year famine. Moslem philosophers remembered the older writings, too, but evolved a different explanation. There may have been kings not mentioned in these writings and the prophets of these kings must have told them about the future coming of the deluge. The kings then ordered the pyramids built as refuges from the coming flood. Some less learned people reasoned that an # dhing so massive must guard great wealth in gold and jewels, and they drew practical conclusions from their opinion, sometimes with success. All these speculations dealt with pyramids in general, the pyramids of Egypt which extend over an area of # miles from north to south along the Nile (ten times as much if you include a few far to the south near Thebes and Edfu). The speculations of the last century are restricted to just one p # Tamid, that of Khufu. The one who started it may have been, in all innocence, the famous In his time, nobody knew just how old the pyramids were. The only thing that was certain was that they had already been old in the time of Herodotus. Herschel, learning that the entrance to the pyramid of Khufu formed a rather steep incline, may have been reminded of his telescopes and he wondered which star one might see if one were standing on the bottom of the entrance. Some rather tedious calculations provided an answer. Looking through that shaft, an observer would have seen the star alpha Draconis, if the year were # B. C. Herschel then stated that the pyramid may have been built in that year. We now know that it is much older. the building of the pyramid on astronomical grounds took hold -- long after his death. It was in # that John Taylor, a London publisher and bookdealer, published a book which he had written himself. It bore the title The Great Pyramid, Why was it built and Who built it? His conclusion was that the pyramid had been built for the purpose of embodying a few important measurements. If Taylor had been an American, he might have said that it was the Egyptian equivalent of the Bureau of Standards, with the additional twist that all the standards are "classified information" not meant for the average dumb citizen. In the course of his romancing, John Taylor discovered that the Egyptians must have used the same units of measurement as the English -- or at least the more important of these units -- and he succeeded in finding a imit which had been lost. In England at that time, a Quarter was used as a measurement for wheat. Taylor said, "A quarter of what?" and found the answer: The original 'Svhole," four Quarters of wheat, was the "so-called" sarcophagus of the pharaoh. Taylor also found that the height of the pyramid (which he overestimated by a few feet) was ## of the circumference of the Earth. Here one can only say, "Why not?" for the height of the pyramid obviously must be some fraction of the circumference (or of the diameter) of the Earth. that a few such things could be coincidences. To feel sure that it was planned, he looked for something which could not be a coincidence -- or so he thought -- and he found one, too. The square of the height of the pyramid, compared to the area of one of its triangular faces, demonstrated the "golden section." That "golden section" had been around ever since the days of Euclid and had at irregular intervals taken hold of somebody's imagination. (At present, hardly anyone pays any attention to it.) Let's first see what the term means (Fig. #). We have here a distance AB which is to be divided according to the golden section. To do so, we erect a vertical line in B which is precisely half as long as AB. The rest of the construction can be read off the diagram. The result is that the distance called the minor has the same proportion to the major as the major has to the total, namely AB. And if we now subtract the minor from the major, we have divided the major according to the golden section. ' I HE golden section was publicized for the first time by an Italian, Luca Pacioli, who may be the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; at any rate, this method appears in print for the first time in one of his books. After having produced this boon for tax collectors and merchants, he intended to bestow a similar boon to artists with a book called De Divina Proportione, published in # with illustrations by his friend Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli tried to show -- and succeeded to a good extent -- that most of the things we consider "beautiful" are constructed in accordance with the golden section when broken down into measurements. The numerical relationship of the golden section is # to # and, for centuries, all books did correspond to it. European books still do, at least more often than American books. The only book in my library which is of American origin and which shows that proportion is the World Almanac. The next time the golden section was consciously "rediscovered" by the artists, or more precisely by the theorists of art, was around the middle of the nineteenth century, just the time in which John Taylor wrote. It cannot be said that his book was a success and it probably would have been forgotten completely if it had not been for Charles Piazzi Smyth, at that time Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Smyth was the son of an admiral and he happened to be bom in Italy. His godfather at the christening was Father Giuseppe Piazzi, the discoverer of the asteroid Ceres, the first asteroid to be found. Father Piazzi said then that he hoped that the child would become an astronomer. Charles Piazzi Smyth did become an astronomer and, as an astronomer, he made important contributions to spectroscopy, then a very new science. He also deserves much credit for advocating an innovation which now seems obvious to us -- building observatories on high mountains. At the age of forty, Smyth came across John Taylor's book and became enchanted with it. Thinking and dreaming about it, he quickly convinced himself that Taylor had barely scratched the surface. He thought and calculated and worked and, in #, he wrote a #-page book called Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. It was a great success and its awed readers learned that the main item in the plan for the Great Pyramid had been nothing less than the squaring of the circle. Smyth said that the bottom Hg. #. The "golden Mction" square of the pyramid represented -- or, rather, was equal to -- the circumference of a circle drawn with the height of the p # 'amid as its radius. " critical or just an open eye should have stopped right there. Maybe the base of the p #amid measured # feet, as Prof. Smyth said, but how about the height? The outer casing and with it the point of the pyramid were missing. Therefore the height could not be measured directly. Of course if the casing had been there, one could have measured the slope angle and calculated the height from that. The slope angle must have been near #, so Smyth said that it originally was # #' #" which produced a height of # feet. Therefore the ratio of height to circumference corresponded to two pi. Insisting that this could not be a coincidence and apparently unaware of the fact that he himself had not found the figure but put it in, Smyth went on to other discoveries. At the base, one side of the pyramid measured #I feet. The Egyptians naturally had not used feet as a unit of measurement; it must have been something else. Smjh divided these #I feet by # and got a unit he called the "pyramid meter." Why this figure? Obviously the builders of the pyramid had wanted to express the number of days in the year by the base line. Dividing the pyramid meter into # equal parts, Smjdh obtained the pyramid inch, which, by a strange coincidence, differed from the English inch by just # #th of an inch. Obviously the English still used the pyramid inch, but had not kept its length accurately through the millennia. It had shrunk by #lOth of one per cent. Having the "pyramid meter" and the "pyramid inch," Smyth really got going. Multiply the pyramid inch by # and you have the length of the polar axis of the Earth. Multiply the pyramid inch by the height of the pyramid (in pyramid inches, of course) and then multiply that figure by # and you get the distance from the Earth to the Sun. (The result is ther perihelion nor aphelion nor mean distance.) Express the cubic content of the pyramid in cubic inches and you have the total number of all people that have lived on Earth since the Creation. phagus, it was not only the original standard for volumetric measurements, according to Smyth. It was more. Its volume, expressed in cubic pyramid meters, was precisely #, which looks like a wrong figure until you realize that this is the specific gravity of the Earth as a whole! (Actually the density of the Earth is #.) One reader, by profession an engineer, wrote later that Smyth's treatise cost him the better part of a night and that it had the result that he "did not fall asleep in my bed but in a medley of endless decimals, triangles and circles, complicated by polar diameters and astronomical distances; dealing with empty granite sarcophagi and pharaohs with milelong measuring rods marching through space with the luminous eyes of prophets." He realized that Smyth had "found" his "cosmic figures" in the pyramid by putting them in in the first place. But he also said that he had the faint feeling that something still needed to be explained. It was explained several decades later by the egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt, who approached the whole problem from the opposite direction. He asked just what unit the Egyptians had actually used in building. Moreover, he wanted to know just how far advanced their mathematics had been. As for the unit of measurement. he found that they used the ell. There was a minor complication in that it seemed that they had used two different kinds of ells. One had a length of seven palms, the other of six palms. Although the six-palm ell corresponds better to reality (an ell is the length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger), the seven-palm ell was used for construction, at least for large buildings. In our measurement, the "royal ell" of seven palms is a little less than #I inches. Borchardt used tion. Then the palm would be # inches. Each palm, in turn, was divided into four fingers, which each if the figure for the royal ell any event, the ell had seven palms or # "fingers." As regards Egyptian arithmetic, we know that they could handle simple fractions like Vi, Vs, Vi, etc and fractions like Vi (namely I minus Vi) or  (I minus Vs). When it comes to pyramids, we have a few examples in the famous Papyrus Rhind which, while old, is probably a good deal younger than the pyramid. pyrus Rhind requested the pupil to calculate the slope of a pyramid with a base length of Piazzi Smyth's construction of squoring the circle with the aid of the Great Pyramid # ells and a height of # ells. A modem high school boy would reach for the logarithm table and come up (unless he made a mistake) with the answer # #' #". The Egyptian advanced pupil answered # ## palms. Example No. # said that the base length was # ells and the height # ells. The answer was ## palms. And example No. # (no doubt dealing with a backyard p # o-amid) gave # ells as the length of the base line and # ells as the height. The answer was also #V# palms. Crou section of Khufu's pyramid. S meant cm abandoned burial chamber (unfinished), Q it the to-calied Queen's chamber, never used, K the King's chamber. The two shafts to the King's chamber were for ventilation What do these answers mean? The answer is given in Fig. #. The answer meant that the slope of the pyramid was so many palms from a vertical line one ell in height. That this is correct is proved by the fact that measuring triangles for the use of builders and masons have been found which corresponded to slopes of #, # Vi, etc., palms, all rather awkward angles if expressed in degrees and minutes of arc. The slope of the Great Pyramid was quite close to #. For lack of the casing, one could not be any more precise than that. A slope of SVz palms produces an angle of # #'. And that would have made the pyramid # ells high, a neat, even figure -- in Egyptian measurements, that is. Now remember that John Taylor had proclaimed that the pyramid represented the golden section. Prof. Sm#rth had proclaimed that it represented pi. Since it cannot possibly do both, Borchardt calculated what the respective angles would have to be and how the measurements would have come out in Egyptian ells. The result surprised everybody. You find it clearly demonstrated in this table: slope angle slope (Egyptian) base line for # ells height for pi for # V # palms # #' # #' # P. # P. golden section # #' # P. # E. # E. # E. were led astray if the pi slope, the golden section slope and the simple Egyptian slope were practically the same. They are so much alike that it is impossible to distinguish them on a drawing of anything like publishable size. That they did not "intend" to build a pi slope is also clear from the Papyrus Rhind, where the ratio we now call pi appears in examples No. #, # and # in the form that ##th of the diameter of a circle is the side of a square of equal area. In our notation, this makes pi equal to #, which is too large. If they had tried for the pi slope, it would have been a different pyramid, considering their idea of the value of pi. There is no way of saying whether they knew the golden section, but it is not even remotely likely. We are left then with the realization that Khufu's builders were extremely skilled workers, but that they did not try to hide any cosmic secrets. And where did they acquire their skill? Well, while the Great Pyramid is the biggest and one of the oldest pyramids, there had been considerable practice in building before. The pyramid had forerunners, called mastabas (Fig. #). No. I shows a cross section of the mastaba of King Mena of the First Dynasty. It is just a subterranean burial chamber covered by a solid slab of mud brick. No. # is the mastaba of King Djer of the First Dynasty and No. # the Egyptian method of measuring angles mastaba of King Den, also of the First D # masty. You can see how the pyramid shape was gradually approached. No. # is the tomb of King Zoser of the Third Dynasty; I called it "tomb" for, as can be seen, it is hard to decide whether this was still a rather complicated mastaba or a pyramid without casing. The first pyramid which did was that of King Snefru of the Fourth Djmasty, the same dynasty to which King Khufu belonged. I said earlier that Herodotus was probably told a tall tale when he was informed that the whole nation was drafted by Khufu to build his pyramid. It was an unlikely story in the first place, for one can assume that a pharaoh knew better than to ruin all commerce for years. But then who did provide the muscle power? No doubt that slaves did work on the pyramid; this is only logical for a slaveholding society. But slaves in general also had other vital things to do. The most likely answer is that the local fellahin, the peasants, were employed once a year. When the Nile flooded the country, the circumstances were proper for floating in the building blocks. And it was also the time when the fellahin had to sit idle, Fig. #. Forerunner of the pyramids, the mastabos precisely because their fields were flooded, making it logical to employ them for this period. Maybe the word "employ" is not quite right. They were probably drafted. But we now know that they were paid, mostly in food and clothing. It is still probable that the overseers carried whips. But they also carried, in the last stages of the building, the triangles made for a slope of SVz palms per ell of vertical height, the proportion which was destined to cause so much confusion thousands of years later.      There wasn't a single mistake In the plan for survival -- and that was the biggest mistakel F or centuries, the rains tons of land into the sea. Mountains slowly crumpled to ocean floors. Summits rose again to see new civilizations heaped upon fossils of the old. It was the way of the Earth and men knew it aAd did not worry. The end was always in the future. Ever since men first learned to make marks on cave walls, the end remained in the future. Then the future came. The records told men how the Sun was before, so they knew it was swollen now. They knew the heat was not always this hot, or the glacier waters so fast, the seas so high. They adapted -- they grew tanner and moved farther poleward. When the steam finally rose over equatorial waters, they moved to the last planet, Pluto, and their descendants lived and died and came to know the same heat and red skies. Finally there came the day when they couldn't adapt -- not, at least, in the usual way. But they had the knowledge of all the great civilizations on Earth, so they built the last spaceship. They built it very slowly and carefully. Their will to live became the will to leave this final, perfect monument. It took a hundred and fifty years and during all that time they planned every facet of its operation, every detail of its complex mechanisms. Because the ship had a big job to do, they named it Destiny and people began to think of it not as the last of the spaceships, but as the first. The dying race sowed the ship with human seed and hopefully named its unborn passengers Adam, Eve, Joseph and Mary. Then they launched it toward the middle of the Milky Way and lay back in the red light of their burning planet. A LL this was only a memory now, conserved in the thinktank of a machine that raced through speckled space, dodging, examining, classifying, charting what it saw. Behind, the Sim shrank as once it swelled, and the planets that were not consumed turned cold in their orbits. The Sun grew fainter and went out, and still the ship sped forward, century after century, cometlike, but with a purpose. At many of the specks, the ship circled, sucking in records, passing judgment, moving on -- a bee in the garden of stars. Finally, hundreds of light-years from what had been its home, it located an Earth-type world, accepted it swung into an approach that would last exactly eighteen years. Immediately, pumps delivered measured quantities of oxygen and nitrogen atoms. Circuits closed to move four tiny frozen eggs next to frozen spermatozoa. The temperature gradually increased to a heat once maintained by animals now extinct. The embryos grew healthily and at term were bom of plastic wombs. The first voices they heard were of their real mothers. Soft, caressing songwords. Melodious, warm, recorded women voices, each different, bell-clear, vivacious, betraying nothing of the fact that they were dead these long centuries. "I am your mother," each voice told its belated offspring. "You can see me and hear me and touch what appears to be me, and together with your cousins, you'll grow strong and healthy..." The voices sang on and the babies gurgled in their imported terran atmosphere. The words were meaningless but important, for it had been learned on the now dead world that these sounds were one of the factors in love and learning. Day after day, the voices lapped warm over the children. Plastic feeders provided nutrition as noiseless pumps removed excess carbon dioxide. In one end of the ship, a miniature farm was born hydroponically, its automatic grinders predigesting ripe vegetables for the children. Animals were bom, too, for food, but also companionship, and later to stock New Earth ahead. As the babies began to understand, the woman voices merged into one mechanical mother who could be heard and seen and summoned on panel screens throughout the ship. Everything became as Earthlike as possible, but because the environment was artificial, the children grew aware of their purpose in life at an age rarely reached on ancient Earth. when their Mecmother informed them: "You are xmlike any children ever bom. You are the last of a dead race, but you must live. You must not be afraid. You must do ever#rthing humanly possible to live." When they were four, Mecmother introduced them to Mecteacher and said to pay attention for five hours each day. Mecteacher took their IQs and explained to Adam that he had a greater capacity than Eve, Joseph and Mary, and was therefore their leader. Soon afterward, all the children started "school," but Adam excelled. At seven, he knew all about landing the ship. He played that he was already eighteen and the ship was no longer on automatic. He was in everything and everywhere. His tow hair poked above the control board. His busy fingers hand-picked an experimental meal from the farmroom. When he learned how to turn the artificial gravity switch off in the recroom, his child legs floated haphazardly somewhere above his head. And in the sunroom, where heat-lamp walls were triggered by the degree of an occupant's tan, Adam's freckled face stared through the visiport, seeing in his mind's eye the New Earth he would one day conquer. He lived fully, asking questions, accepting the answers, receiving instructions. Some of them he testily disobeyed, was punished compassionately, and learned respect and a kind of love for the mecs. He played the games of childhood, but he played them alone. Once he was gazing out a port, imaginatively sorting the stars of his universe into shapes of the animals in the ship's farm. Mecfather lit up at a nearby panel, glowing faintly red. Adam resisted an impulse to shiver -- the panel always made him flinch when it glowed red. Red, he was being conditioned, was his conscience, brought out by Mecfather until he grew old enough to bring it out himself. "Why aren't you playing with the other children?" Mecfather asked. "Fve been watching you all day and you've avoided them on every occasion." Though he feared him, Adam loved Mecfather as he had been taught to do and did not hesitate to confide. But how could he explain that the other children did not seem as real to him as the mecs? "I don't know," Adam answered truthfully. "They don't ignore you. They ask you to play, but you always go off by yourself. Don't you like them?" "They're flat. Father. They're not deep -- like you."  sembled the answer, correlated, circuited a mechanical smile. Certainly -- a child brought up with only three real children and three talking images in his universe could not distinguish between reality and appearance. On the screen, Adam saw Mecfather smile, the panel no longer red. The voice was quiet now and full of understanding. "It is I who am flat, Adam. I am only an image, a voice. I am here when you need me to help, but I am not deep. Your cousins are deep; I am the flat one. You will understand better when you grow older." Electronically, Mecfather was worried. He called a "conference" of the other mecs and their circuits joined in a complicated analog: What was the probable outcome of this beginning of disharmony? There were too many variables for an immediate answer, but the query was stored in each mec's memory banks for later answer. When the mecconference began, the panel switched off and Adam walked thoughtfully through the ship's corridors. Unexpectedly, he spotted the other children. He turned quickly into a room before they saw him and ducked behind the largest of the couches. He was in the aft recroom, he realized, not having paid attention to where he was going. What was it all about? Did Mecfather really mean it when he said the cousins were deeper than the mecs? Adam could believe he was different from his parents and teacher -- after all, he was only seven -- but he couldn't accept the information that he was not different from his cousins. Somehow, he thought, I am alone... He heard noises, the loud boisterousness of Joseph, the highpitched squeal of Eve, the grating laugh of Mary. Adam cringed deeper behind the big couch. He was different. He didn't make sounds like that. "Adam! Oh, A-dam! A-dam!" the cousins called, each their own way. "Come out wherever you are, Adam! Come out and play!" From behind the couch, Adam saw the beginnings of an infantile but systematic search. The three of them were looking behind things, under furniture, in back of hatches. They tried moving everything they saw, but couldn't budge the heavy couch Adam hid behind. Looking for escape, Adam's eyes caught a round metallic handle set flush into the heavy deck carpet. He lifted it and pulled. Nothing happened. He stood up. bracing his feet against the deck and heaved with all his strength. It didn't move. Then he experimentally turned the handle -- to the right until it clicked faintly, then the left, around twice, another faint click, but different, a left-hand click, he knew somehow. So he turned again to the left, this time three turns -- and then the click was heavy, almost audible. He pulled the handle and a door formed out of the carpet, swinging easily open. Just then, Joseph peered behind the couch. "Boo!" ing, the heavy door slamming shut overhead. Below, he stood erect and was surprised to feel the hair on his head brush the ceiling. He was frightened, but he calmed when he realized there were many places on the ship he hadn't been before. Mecteacher revealed them to him, but very slowly, and he supposed he would not be told about everything for many years. As he recovered his sense of balance, he became aware of a faint luminescence around him. It seemed to have no source, but was stronger in the distance. He began to explore, groping at flrst, then more smoothly, efficiently, as his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness. A long corridor opened up before him and what appeared before to be an illusion of distance actually was distance. He guessed he was near the engine compartment and vaguely sensed that the luminescence had something to do with the nuclear engines that Mecteacher told him moved the ship. It was warm in here. Not physically warm but friendy warm, like when Mecmother spoke her comfort. The similarity almost made him cry, for he understood, even in his seven years, that Mecmother was but the image of his real mother who lived long ago and said those words of sympathy to a child yet unborn. He wanted her now, even her image, but he didn't call because he'd have to explain why he was hiding from his cousins. He shivered then, thinking that Mecfather and Mecteacher knew where he was and would light up their panels red. He thought, "Are you down here, Mecfather?" Nothing answered, so he spoke the thought, and again the walls stayed dark. That was why it was so friendy warm in here, he realized. His mecconscience was left above! Deciding that the others might miss him, he retraced his steps, located the trapdoor in the ceiling, pushed it open and ascended. The others were sitting on the floor, dumbfounded, as Adam climbed out and slammed the hatch shut. "How did you get down there?" Joseph asked. Adam remained silent. After a moment. Eve and Mary lost interest in the question and started skipping a length of rope. Joseph persisted. "How? I pulled, too!" Adam didn't answer. He knew the bigger boy would forget about it if he changed the subject. "How is it you're not with Mecteacher?" "We were. But he made us look for you." The closest wall panel lit bright red. It was Mecteacher. "Adam! How did you open that?" "I turned it -- a certain way," he said evasively. Adam didn't want his cousins to learn how. "But how did you know?" "I -- I reasoned it." ' I 'HE image faded as the new information was assimilated. Mecteacher's voice said, "Wait a while, Adam." The computer circuited the other mec's memory banks. After ten minutes, the "conference" was over and Mecteacher returned to the screen. He asked Adam to come alone to the classroom. The others were dismissed. Reluctantly, Adam did as he was told. In the classroom, he stood stiffly in front of the central panels. All three mecs lit up, their color this time a tranquilizing blue. "Adam, we are not real people in the now," Mecmother began. "Do you understand that?" "Y-yes, I understand. You are -- planned -- Axed before." "That's right, Adam. We are pre-set. We have a very large number of choices and actions, but we are not infinite." "Infinite?" "We are limited in the help we can give you. We were real -- like you -- a long, long time ago. We exist now only to help you and the other children. We are here to educate you, to love and console you -- and one other thing. We are here to settle your conflicts, to make sure you don't hurt each other." "But I didn't hurt anyone, Mecmother!" "Not yet, Adam, but avoiding the others the way you do could be the first sign of trouble." "How do you know? How can you talk if you aren't real?" "What you hear is a combination of recorded words that are electronically put together to answer an almost infinite number of your questions. But do not think of me as not real. I was merely in another time. Do you understand that?" "Yes." "Then you also are able to see that your ability to reason things -- to understand what I am telling you now, for instance, is a remarkable thing." "You mean because I'm not like the others?" "You have a superior mind. You are the leader, but do not regard yourself as better than the others. You have more intelligence, yes, but do not look down on your cousins for that. They may develop other qualities better than yours. Stay simple, Adam, and you will be able to live among them and thereby make the human race live again. The name of this ship is Destiny. Do you know why?" "Yes -- I know." "Be with the other children then. Play with them. You'll need each other to live on New Earth -- eleven years from now." can I play with them when they're flat? But he didn't object out loud to Mecmother. He didn't like her this way. Explanation was Mecteacher's job and discipline Mecfather's. Mecmother should be warm and loving. Mecteacher appeared and asked Adam to call in the other children so the science lesson could start. He found them tanning in the sunroom, their unclothed bodies evenly browned from invisible light. They followed Adam without question, but seemed to take a long time doing it. Joseph insisted first in donning clothes, but he put on protective clothing first. Then, realizing the absurdity of it, he switched to his formality suit -- the loose-fitting robe Mecteacher instructed the children to wear to lend dignity to the classwork. During Joseph's delay, the girls ambled off somewhere and returned only when Adam shouted after them in exasperation. Quickening his pace, Adam reached the classroom first and asked Mecteacher, "Are the other children -- deep?" "Deep? Yes, Adam, Mecfather explained that to yoxi. Why are you confused? It's us, the mecs, who are fiat. The other children are healthy, living beings. The cells from which all of you were bom were selected after years of controlled breeding. Your parents were the finest the human race could produce -- intelligent, strong, healthy, high survival quotient Is this what you mean by deep?" "Partly, but also -- feeling. I think I feel things better." The other children waddled in, took their seats and switched on robomonitors in the ritual of classroom procedure. They all looked at Mecteacher in the central panel Mecteacher motioned Adam to his chair-desk and began the lesson. He described Old Earth and how it circled Old Sol with the other worlds and the way the moons circled the planets -- all of them condensed into spheres and all the spheres turning in harmony. He interrupted himself when Mary's robomonitor registered only partial comprehension. "What don't you understand, Mary? Is it sphere?" "I know what a sphere is," she said, remembering a previous lesson. "A sphere is an apple or an orange -- " covert wince from Adam's monitor. The teacher appeared to Adam on his desk panel where the others couldn't see or hear. "Do not think this is because she is not -- deep, Adam. She is only seven and not as advanced for her age as you are. You understand how we mecs are pre-set?" "Yes." "In the classroom, then, if we don't go fast enough for you, try to be patient. We can only deviate within set limits. It is not a new problem, Adam. On Earth, it impeded the educational system from the beginning." Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up an apple on the central panel and re-explained the age-old analogy between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth and the apple. Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon. "That's an interesting question. Eve. But we are still too many yet. Before you are ready to leave the ship, you will know." In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his -- with one exception. He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for long. Often, when he grew tired tired of freefalling, he visited his lonely chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship. On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they were pre-set. They had to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong. It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs permanently off. ' I HE stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big -- bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the Destiny had ever come to a star. Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others -- The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were -- flat, undeep. For years he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him. They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive. He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it. And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals -- or would I? for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the Destiny, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven -- perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested -- but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation. He heard them rummaging above, attempting again and again to pull open the hatch. It had happened this way for years: They'd try to open the trapdoor for an hour or two, then give it up and turn their attention to something else. They never thought to turn the handle. Maybe an undeep person wouldn't be able to reason the combination clicks, but only a completely flat one would persist in pulling when it always ended in failure. Possibly, he thought, the cosmic rays had been more destructive to their egg cells. Or maybe the alien radiations subtracted something from the other cells to add to his. If this were true, he was partly a product of the others and owed his depth to them. Adam felt sorry for his cousins then and wished he hadn't hurt them by avoiding their presence. Despite their undepth, they must have feelings. The mecs probably wouldn't have been able to give them depth but, he remembered, the other role of the mecs was to prevent each one of them from harming the others. In their role as arbitrator, Adam realized, they might have stopped him from hurting them so. Filled with remorse, he left his desk-chair and walked stoopshouldered under the low ceiling. At the trapdoor, he opened the combination on the inside lock handle and pushed upward. It wouldn't open. He tried again, but it wasn't the lock that was stuck. They must have slid something heavy over the hatch, something he couldn't move. He tried calling to them, but his voice was lost in the insulative metal of the deck. Finally he sat down, conserving his strength for a final onslaught. If he couldn't open the hatch. he realized vividly it would be not only his failure, but the failme of the human race. But maybe it did not have to be so. Maybe the differences in the others weren't biological -- maybe they were environmental. And with that thought, he made his way through the narrow passageway and reversed his deed of eleven years past. He turned the mecs back on. Returning to the hatch, he reworked the combination to make sure it was not the lock that held him. He pushed upward with all his strength, steadily with increasing pressiu-e, vmtil the beads of perspiration turned into gulleys that streamed down his face. Exhausted, he crawled back to his chair and lay across the desk littered with calculations of a landing he would never make. The soft luminescence from the Destiny's nuclear engines crept forward and caressed him. Mary were admiring Joseph's strength in being able to push the heavy couch over Adam's trapdoor. Three wall panels lit red. All the mecs appeared together. "It's time for your science lesson," one said. "But where is Adam?" "He's in the trapdoor," they answered flatly. The panel txumed green, reserving its redness for the delinquent Adam when he would choose to appear. Mecteacher began, "Now about the Solar System... But the cousins didn't listen. Joseph had turned the gravity switch off and they were too busy floating upended, trying new positions, laughing at each other's ridiculous postures in the ship without bottom. The game was not a new one, but it was newly discovered and they reveled in its glories. Month after month, they played their weightless games while the mecs implored them to come down. The constellations shifted in the visiports. New Sol grew larger and then smaller as the Destiny sped toward its unseen planet. In the recroom, the mecvoices were only noises to the trio now, annoying noises that could be silenced, they discovered, with forceful kicks to the red-glowing panels. When all the mecscreens had been smashed and the weightless games grew boring, Mary looked out the sunroom port. She was surprised to see a rust-yellow sphere hanging in the sky. She watched it seriously for a time, frowning as it grew bigger and filled a third of her horizon. Then she called Eve and Joseph. Mary pointed and they all stared in bewilderment. She opened her eyes wide and laughed with glee. "It's an apple," she said. "An apple in the sky!" But Joseph wasn't fooled. Dimly he remembered something Adam had told him -- something about a thing that would appear in the sky. He fought hard bringing it to conscious memory. Then he started aft toward the recroom. In there, under the couch, he remembered, was Adam. Adam would remind him what it was. Suddenly Joseph smiled, his face flushed. He turned back to the sunroom port. He wouldn't have to ask Adam, after all. For a moment, he watched to make sure, while the huge yellow sphere swam closer. "No, Mary," he said triumphantly. "It's not an apple in the sky. Apples are red. It's an orange!"      the human race. It had to be all or nothing... with one man doing every bit of scoring! A rthur lanceford slapped futilely at the sith buzzing hungrily around his head. The outsized eight-legged parody of a mosquito did a neat half roll and zoomed out of range, hanging motionless on vibrating wings a few feet away. A raindrop staggered it momentarily, and for a fleeting second, Lanceford had the insane hope that the arthropod would fall out of control into the mud. If it did, that would be the end of it, for Niobian mud was as sticky as flypaper. But the sith righted itself inches short of disaster, buzzed angrily and retreated to the shelter of a nearby broadleaf, where it executed another half roll and hung upside down, watching its intended meal with avid anticipation. Lanceford eyed the insect distastefully as he explored his jacket for repellent and applied the smelly stuff liberally to his face and neck. It wouldn't do much good. In an hour, his sweat would remove whatever the rain missed -- but for that time, it should discourage the sith. As far as permanent discouraging went, the repellent was useless. Once one of those eight-legged horrors checked you off, there were only two possible endings to the affair -- either you were bitten or you killed the critter. It was as simple as that. He had hoped that he would be fast enough to get the sith before it got him. He had been bitten once already and the memory of those paralyzed three minutes while the bloodsucker fed was enough to last him for a lifetime. He readjusted his helmet, tucking its fringe of netting beneath his collar. The netting, he reflected gloomily, was like its owner -- much the worse for wear. However, this trek would be over in another week and he would be able to spend the next six months at a comfortable desk job at the Base, while some other poor devil did the chores of field work. swept trail winding through the jungle. Niobe -- a perfect name for this wet little world. The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration couldn't have picked a better, but the funny thing about it was that they hadn't picked it in the first place. Niobe was the native word for Earth, or perhaps "the world" would be a more accurate definition. It was a coincidence, of course, but the planet and its mythological Greek namesake had much in common. Niobe, like Niobe, was all tears -- a world of rain falling endlessly from an impenetrable overcast, fat wet drops that formed a grieving background sound that never ceased, sobbing with soft mournful noises on the rubbery broadleaves, crying with obese splashes into forest pools, blubbering with loud, dismal persistence on the sounding board of his helmet. And on the ground, the raindrops mixed with the loesslike soil of the trail to form a gluey mud that clung in huge pasty balls to his boots. Everywhere there was water, running in rivulets of tear-streaks down the round cheeks of the gently sloping land -- rivulets that merged and blended into broad shallow rivers that wound their mourners' courses to the sea. Trekking on Niobe was an amphibious operation unless one stayed in the highlands -- a perpetual series of fords and river crossings. And it was hot, a seasonless, unchanging, humid heat that made a protection suit an instrument of torture that slowly boiled its wearer in his own sweat. But the suit was necessary, for exposed human flesh was irresistible temptation to Niobe's bloodsucking insects. Many of these were no worse than those of Earth, but a half dozen species were deadly. The first bite sensitized. The second killed -- anaphylactic shock, the medics called it. And the sith was one of the deadly species. Lanceford shrugged fatalistically. Uncomfortable as a protection suit was, it was better to boil in it than die without it. He looked at Kron squatting beside the trail and envied him. It was too bad that Earthmen weren't as naturally repellent to insects as the dominant native life. Like all Niobians, the native guide wore no clothing -- ideal garb for a climate like this. His white, hairless hide, with its faint sheen of oil, was beautifully waterrepellent. Kron, Lanceford reflected, was a good example of the manner in which Nature adapts the humanoid form for survival on different worlds. Like the dominant species on every intelligent planet in the explored galaxy, he was an erect, bipedal, mammalian being with hands that possessed an opposable thumb. Insofar as that general description went, Kron resembled humanity -- but there were differences. shape of Kron's torso and the odd flexibility of his limbs were not apparent. One had the tendency to overlook the narrowshouldered, cylindrical body and the elongated tarsal and carpal bones that gave his limbs four major articulations rather than the human three, and to concentrate upon the utterly alien head. It jutted forward from his short, thick neck, a long-snouted, vaguely doglike head with tiny ears lying close against the hairless, dome-shaped cranium. Slitlike nostrils, equiped with sphincter muscles like those of a terrestrial seal, argued an originally aquatic environment, and the large intelligent eyes set forward in the skull to give binocular vision, together with the sharp white carnassal teeth and pointed canines, indicated a carnivorous ancestry. But the modern Niobians, although excellent swimmers, were land dwellers and ate anything. Lanceford couldn't repress an involuntary shudder at some of the things they apparently enjoyed. Tastes differed -- enormously so between Earthmen and Niobians. There was no doubt that the native was intelligent, yet he, like the rest of his race, was a technological moron. It was strange that a race which had a well-developed philosophy and an amazing comprehension of semantics could be so backward in mechanics. mechanisms left the natives confused. It was possible that they could leam about machinery, but Lanceford was certain that it would take a good many years before the first native mechanic would set up a machine shop on this planet. Lanceford finished tucking the last fold of face net under his collar, and as he did so, Kron stood up, rising to his five-foot height with a ciirious flexible grace. Standing, he looked something like a double-jointed alabaster Anubis -- wearing swim fins. His broad, webbed feet rested easily on the surface of the mud, their large area giving him flotation that Lanceford envied. As a result, his head was nearly level with that of the human, although there was better than a foot difference in their heights. Lanceford looked at Kron inquiringly. "You have a place in mind where we can sleep tonight?" "Sure, Boss. We'll be coming to hunthouse soon. We go now?" "Lead on," Lanceford said, groaning silently to himself -- another hunthouse with its darkness and its smells. He shrugged. He could hardly expect anything else up here in the highlands. Oh, well, he'd managed to last through the others and this one could be no worse. At that, even an airless room full of natives was preferable to spending a night outside. And the sith wouldn't follow them. It didn't like airless rooms filled with natives. He sighed wearily as he followed Kron along the dim path through the broadleaf jungle. Night was coming, and with darkness, someone upstairs turned on every faucet and the sheets of rain that fell during the day changed abruptly into a deluge. Even the semi-aquatic natives didn't like to get caught away from shelter during the night. The three moved onward, immersed in a drumming wilderness of rain -- the Niobian sliding easily over the surface of the mud, the Earthman plowing painfully through it, and the sith flitting from the shelter of one broadleaf to the next, waiting for a chance to feed.  I 'HE trail widened abruptly, opening upon one of the small clearings that dotted the rain-forest jungle. In the center of the clearing, dimly visible through the rain and thickening darkness, loomed the squat thatch-roofed bulk of a hunthouse, a place of shelter for the members of the hunters' guild who provided fresh meat for the Niobian villages. Lanceford sighed a mingled breath of relief and unpleasant anticipation. As he stepped out into the clearing, the sith darted from cover, heading like a winged bullet for Lanceford's neck. But the man was not taken by surprise. Pivoting quickly, he caught the iridescent blur of the bloodsucker's wings. He swung his arm in a mighty slap. The high-pitched buzz and Lanceford's gloved hand met simultaneously at his right ear. The buzz stopped abruptly. Lanceford shook his head and the sith fell to the ground, satisfactorily swatted. Lanceford grinned -- score one for the human race. He was still grinning as he pushed aside the fiber screen closing the low doorway of the hunthouse and crawled inside. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom within, but his nose told him even before his eyes that the house was occupied. The natives, he thought wryly, must be born with no sense of smell, otherwise they'd perish from sheer propinquity. One could never honestly say that familiarity with the odor of a Niobian bred contemprt -- nausea was the right word. The interior was typical, a dark rectangle of windowless limestone walls enclosing a packed-dirt floor and lined with a single deck of wooden sleeping platforms. Steeply angled rafters of peeled logs intersected at a knife-sharp ridge pierced with a circular smokehole above the firepit in the center of the room. Transverse rows of smaller poles lashed to the rafters supported the thick broadleaf thatch that furnished protection from the rain and sanctuary for xmcounted thousands of insects. A fire flickered ruddily in the pit, hissing as occasional drops of rain fell into its heart from the smokehole, giving forth a dim light together with clouds of smoke and steam that rose upward through the tangled mass of reaches of the rafters. Some of the smoke found its way through the smokehole, but most of it hung in an acrid undulating layer some six feet above the floor. The glow outlined the squatting figures of a dozen or so natives clustered around the pit, watching the slowly rotating carcass of a small deerlike rodent called a sorat, which was broiling on a spit above the flames. Kron was already in the ring, talking earnestly to one of the hunters -- a fellow-tribesman, judging from the tattoo on his chest. To a Niobian, the scene was ordinary, but to Lanceford it could have been lifted bodily from the inferno. He had seen it before, but the effect lost nothing by repetition. There was a distinctly hellish quality to it -- to the reds and blacks of the flickering fire and the shadows. He wouldn't have been particularly surprised if Satan himself appeared in the center of the firepit complete with horns, hoofs and tail. A hunthouse, despite its innocuousness, looked like the southeast comer of Hades.  the hunters turned to look at him curiously and, after a single again. Niobians were almost painfully polite. Although Barthmen were still enough of a curiosity to draw attention, one searching look was all their customs allowed. Thereafter, they minded their own business. In some ways, Lanceford reflected, native customs had undeniable merit. Presently Kron rose from his place beside the fire and pointed out two empty sleeping platforms where they would spend the night. Lanceford chose one and sank wearily to its resilient surface. Despite its crude constmction, a Niobian sleeping platform was comfortable. He removed his pack, pulled off his mud-encrusted boots and lay back with a grunt of relaxation. After a day like this, it was good to get off his feet. Weariness flowed over him. He awoke to the gentle pressure of Kron's hand squeezing his own. "The food is cooked," the Niobian said, "and you are welcomed to share it." Lanceford nodded, his stomach S# crawling with impleasant anticipation. A native meal was something he would prefer to avoid. His digestive system could handle the unsavory mess, but his taste buds shrank from the forthcoming assault. What the natives classed as a delicate and elusive flavor was sheer tortiire to an Earthman. Possibly there was some connection between their inefficient olfactory apparatus and their odd ideas of flavor, but whatever the physical explanation might be, it didn't affect the fact that eating native food was an ordeal. Yet he couldn't refuse. That would be discourteous and offensive, and one simply difln't offend the nathat. Courtesy was a watchword on Niobe. He took a place by the fire, watching with concealed distaste as one of the hunters reached into the boiling vat beside the firepit with a pair of wooden tongs and drew forth the native conception of a hors d'oeuvre. They called it vorkum -- a boiled sorat paunch stuffed with a number of odorous ingredients. It looked almost as bad as it smelled. The hunter laid the paunch on a wooden trencher, scraped the greenish scum from its surface and sliced it open. The odor poured out, a gagging essence of decaying vegetables, rotten eggs and overripe cheese. Lanceford's eyes watered, his stomach tautened convulsively, but the Niobians eyed the reeking semi-solid eagerly. No meal on Niobe was considered worthy of the name unless a generous helping of vorkum started it off. ruin the most rugged human appetite, but when it was the forerunner of a main dish of highly spiced barbecue, vorkum assumed the general properties of an emetic. Lanceford grimly controlled the nausea and tactfully declined the greasy handful which Kron offered. The Niobian never seemed to learn. At every meal they had eaten during their past month of travel on Niobe, Kron had persistently offered him samples of the mess. With equal persistence, he had refused. After all, there were limits. But polite convention required that he eat something, so he took a small portion of the barbecued meat and dutifully finished it. The hunters eyed him curiously, apparently wondering how an entity who could assimilate relatively imtasty sorat should refuse the far greater delicacy of vorkum. But it was a known fact that the ways of Earthmen were strange and unaccountable. The hunters didn't protest when he retired to his sleeping platform and the more acceptable concentrates from his pack. His hunger satisfied, he lay back on the resilient vines and fell into a sleep of exhaustion. It had been a hard day. Lanceford's dreams were unpleasant. Nightmare was the usual penalty of sitting in on a Niobian meal and this one was worse than usual. Huge siths, reeking of vorkvun, pursued him as he ran naked and defenseless across a swampy landscape that stretched interminably ahead. The clinging mud reduced his speed to a painful crawl as he frantically beat off the attacks of the bloodsuckers. The climax was horror. One of the siths slipped through his frantically beating hands and bit him on the face. The shocking pain of the bite wakened him, a cry of terror and anguish still on his lips. He looked around wildly. He was still in the hunthouse. It was just a dream. He chuckled shakily. These nightmares sometimes were too real for comfort. He was drenched with sweat, which was not unusual, but there was a dull ache in his head and the hot tense pain that encompassed the right side of his face had not been there when he had fallen asleep. He touched his face with a tentative finger, exploring the hot puffiness and the enormously swollen ear with a gentle touch. It was where he had struck the sith, but surely he couldn't have hit that hard. He gasped, a soft breath of dismay, as realization dawned. He had smashed the sith hard enough to squeeze some of the insect's corrosive body juices through his face net -- and they had touched his skin! That wouldn't normally have been bad, but the sith bite he had suffered a week ago had sensitized him. He was developing an anaphylactic reaction -- a severe one, judging from the swelling. That was the trouble with exploration; one occasionally forgot that a world was alien. Occasionally danger tended to recede into a backgroimd of familiarity -- he had smashed the sith before it had bitten him, so therefore it couldn't hurt him. He grimaced painfully, the movement bringing another twinge to his swollen face. He should have known better. He swore mildly as he opened his Aid Kit and extracted a sterile hypo. The super-antihistamine developed by the Bureau was an unpredictable sort of thing. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. He removed the screw cap s that sealed the needle and injected the contents of the syringe into his arm. He hoped that this was one of the times the drug worked. If it wasn't, he reflected grimly, he wouldn't be long for this world. He sighed and lay back. There wasn't anything more to do now. All he could do was wait and see if the anti-allergin worked.  I ' HE Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration had discovered Niobe barely three years ago, yet already the planet was famous not only for its peculiar climate, but also for the number of men who had died upon its watery surface. Knowledge of this planet was bought with life, grim payment to decrease the lag between discovery and the day men could live and work on Niobe without having to hide beneath domes or behind protection suits. Lanceford never questioned the necessity or the inevitable price that must be he knew that Niobe was crash priority -- a world that had to be understood in minimum time. For Niobe was a made to order herbarium for a swampland plant called viscaya. The plant was originally native to Algon IV, but had been spread to practically every suitable growth center in the Galaxy. It was the source of a complex of alkaloids known as gerontin, and gerontin had the property of tripling or quadrupling the normal life span of mammals. It was obvious that viscayaculture should have a tremendous distribution throughout the Confederation worlds. But unfortunately the right conditions existed in very few places in the explored galaxy. Despite the fact that most life is based on carbon, oxygen and water, there is still very little free water in the Galaxy. Most planets of the Confederation are semi-arid, with the outstanding exceptions of Terra and Lyrane. # But these two worlds were the seats of human and humanoid power for so long that all of their swampland had been drained and reclaimed centuries ago. And it was doubly imfortunate that gerontin so far defied smthesis. According to some eminent chemists, the alkaloid would probably continue to do so until some facet of the Confederation reached sidering that Terra and Lyrane, the two highest cultures, were level steps took several thousands of years to make, a ixlicy of waiting for synthesis was not worth considering. The result was that nobody was happy vmtil Niobe was distin was astronomical and most of the Confederation's supply of the drug was strictly rationed to those whom the government thought most valuable to the Confederation as a whole. Of course, the Confederation officialdom was included, which caused considerable grximbling. In the nick of time, Niobe appeared upon the scene, and Niobe had environment in abundance! The wheels of the Confederagiven a blank check and spurred on by a government which, in turn, was being spurred on by the people who composed it. The exploration of Niobe proceeded at all possible speed. With so many considerations weighed against them, what did a few lives matof humanoids in the Confederation, their sacrifice was worthwhile even if only a few days or hours were saved between discovery and exploitation. violent pain shot through his head. The anti-allergin apparently wasn't going to work, for it should have had some effect by now. He shrugged mentally -- it was the chance one took in this business. But he couldn't say that he hadn't been warned. Even old Sims had told him, called him a imit in the bee's shortcut trial and error scheme -- an error, it looked like now. Seemed rather silly -- a Class that were old during the Dark Ages before the Atomic Revolution, sending foot parties to explore a world in the chance that they might discover something that the search mechs missed -- anything that would shorten the lag time. It was incomprehensible, would do a thing like this without reason. And whatever it was, he wasn't going to worry about it. In fact, there wasn't much time left to worry. The reaction was observably and painfully worse. It was important that the news of his death and the specimens he had collected get back to Base Alpha. They might have value in this complex game Alvord Sims was pla # nng with men, machines and Niobe. But Base Alpha was a good hundred miles away and, in his present condition, he couldn't walk a hundred feet. For a moment, he considered setting up the powerful little transmitter he carried in his pack, but his first abortive motion convinced him it was useless. The blinding agony that swept through him at the slightest movement left no doubt that he would never finish the business of setting up the antenna, let alone send a message. It was a crime that handietalkies couldn't be used here on Niobe, but their range, limited at best, was practically nonexistent on a planet that literally seemed to be one entire "dead spot." A fixed-frequency job broadcasting on a directional beam was about the only thing that could cover distance, and that required a little technical know-how to set up the antenna and focus it on Base Alpha. There would be no help from Kron. Despite his intelligence, the native could no more assemble a directional antenna than spread pink wings and fly. There was only one thing to do -- get a note off to Sims, if he could still write, and ask Kron to deliver the note and his pack to the Base. He fumbled with his jacket, and with some pain produced a stylus and a pad. But it was difficult to write. Painful, too. Better get Kron over here while he could still talk and tell him what he wanted. The stylus slipped from numb fingers as Lanceford called hoarsely, "Kron! Come here! I need you!" sionately at the swollen features of the Erthman. He had seen the kef effect before, among the young of his people who were incautious or inexperienced, but he had never seen it among the aliens. Surprisingly, the effects were the same -- the livid swellings, the gasping breath, the pain. Strange how these foreigners reacted like his own people. He scratched his head and pulled thoughtfully at one of bis short ears. It was his duty to help Lanceford, but how could he? The Earthman had denied his help for weeks, and Niobians simply didn't disregard another's wishes. Kron scowled, the action lending a ferocious cast to his doglike face. Tolerance was a custom hallowed by ages of practice. It went to extremes -- even with life at stake, a person's wishes and beliefs must be respected. Kron buried his long-snouted head in his hands, a gesture that held in it all the frustration which filled him. The human was apparently resolved to die. He had told Kron his last wishes, which didn't include a request for help, but merely to get his pack back to the others in their glass dome. It was astonishing that such an obviously intelligent species should have so little flexibility. They didn't understand the first principles of adaptation. Always and forever, they held to their own ways, trying with insensate stubbornness to mold nature to their will -- and when nature overcome their artificial defenses, they died, stubborn, unregenerate, inflexible to the end. They were odd, these humans -- odd and a little frightening. Lanceford breathed wheezily. The swelling had invaded the inner tissues of his throat and was beginning to compress his windpipe. It was uncomfortable, like inhaling liquid fire, and then there was the constant desire to cough and the physical inability to do so. "Dirty luck," he whispered. "Only a week more and I'd have had it made -- the longest trek a man's made on this benighted planet." Kron nodded, but then belatedly realized that the human was muttering to himself. He listened. There might be something important in these dying murmurings, something that might explain their reasons for being here and their strange driving haste that cared nothing for life. "It's hard to die so far from one's people, but I guess that can't be helped. Old Sims gave me the score. Like he said, a man doesn't have much choice of where he "You don't want to die!" Kron exploded. "Of course not," Lanceford said with weak surprise. He hadn't dreamed that Kron was nearby. This might well destroy the Imperturbable Earthman myth that "Not even if it is in accord with your customs and rituals?" "What customs?" "Your clothing, your eating habits, your ointments -- are these not part of your living plan?" Despite the pain that tore at his throat, Lanceford managed a chuckle. This was ridiculous. "Hell, no! Our only design for living is to stay alive, particularly on jobs like this one. We don't wear these suits and repellent because we like to. We do it to stay alive. If we could, we'd go around nearly as naked as you do." "Do you mind if I help you?" n Kron asked diffidently. "I think I can cure you." He leaned forward anxiously to get the man's reply. "I'd take a helping hand from the devil himself, if it would do any good." hummed softly imder his breath, the Niobian equivalent of laughter. "And all the time we thought -- " he began, and then broke off abruptly. Already too much time was wasted without losing any more in meditating upon the ironies of life. He turned toward the firepit, searched for a moment among the stones, nodded with satisfaction and returned to where Lanceford lay. The hunthouse was deserted save for himself and the Earthman. With characteristic Niobian delicacy, the hunters had left, preferring to endure the night rain than be present when the alien died. Kron was thankful that they were gone, for what he was about to do would shock their conservative souls. scious of Kron prying his swollen jaws apart and forcing something wet and slippery down his throat. He swallowed, the act a tearing pain to the edematous membranes of his gullet, but the stuff slid down, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. The act triggered another wave of pain that left him weak and gasping. He couldn't take much more of this. It wouldn't be long now before the swelling invaded his lungs to such a degree that he would strangle. It wasn't a pleasant way to die. And then, quite suddenly, the pain eased. A creeping numbness spread like a warm black blanket over his outraged nervoxis system. The stuff Kron had given him apparently had some anesthetic properties. He felt dimly grateful, even though the primitive native nostrum would probably do no good other than to ease the pain. The blackness went just far enough to paralyze the superficial areas of his nervous system. It stopped the pain and left him unable to move, but the deeper pathways of thought and reason remained untouched. He was conscious, although no external sensation intruded on his thoughts. He couldn't see Kron -- the muscles that moved his eyes were as paralyzed as the other muscles of his body and the native was outside his field of vision -- but somehow he knew exactly what the Niobian was doing. He was washing mucus from his hands in a bowl of water standing beside the fire pit and he was wondering wryly whether forced feeding was on the list of human tabus! Lanceford's mind froze, locked in a peculiar contact that was more than awareness. The sensa tion was indescribable. It was like looking through an open door into the living room of a stranger's house. He was aware of the incredible complexity and richness of Kron's thoughts, of oddly sardonic laughter, of pity and regret that such a little thing as understanding should cause death and suffering through its lack, of bewildered admiration for the grim persistence of the alien Eiarthmen, mixed with a wondering curiosity about what kept them here -- what the true reasons were for their death-defying persistence and stubbornness -- of an ironic native paraphrase for the Terr an saying, "Every man to his own taste," and a profound speculation upon what fruits might occur from true understanding between his own race and the aliens. It was a strangely jumbled kaleidoscopic flash that burned across the explorer's isolated mind, a flash that passed almost as soon as it had come, as though an invisible door had closed upon it. But one thing in that briefly shocking contact stood out with great clarity. The Niobians were a true contact, a true imderstanding, for the message was there, plain in Kron's mind that he was thinking not only for himself but for a consensus of his people, a decision arrived at as a result of discussion and thought -- a decision of which every Niobian was aware and with which most Niobians agreed. HE magnitude of that thought and its implications staggered Lanceford's imagination. After two years of exploration and contact with the dominant knew literally nothing about the sort of people with whom they were dealing. This instantaneous, neural contact proved that Equated against the information dished out in Basic Training, it merely emphasized the fact that Anthropological Intelligence had a lot to account for -- the job they'd done so far could have been performed by low-grade morons. In wishing to avoid the possibility of giving offense, in hiding behind a wall of courtesy and convention, there had been no contact worthy of the name. Yet here was the possibility of a rapport that could be closer than any which existed between any races in the Galaxy. Lanceford groaned with silent frustration. To learn this when he was dying was the bitterest of ironies. In any other circumstances, the flash of insight could be parlayed into a key which might imlock the entire problem of Niobian relationships. Bitterly he fought against the curtain of unconsciousness that closed down on him, trying by sheer will to stay awake, to make some move that could be interpreted, to leave some clue to what he had learned. It was useless. The darkness closed in, inexorable and irresistible. opened his eyes, surprised that he was still alive. The pain was gone from his face and the swelling had subsided. He grinned with relief -- his luck had held out. And then the relief vanished in a wave of elation. He held the key. He knew the basics for mutual understanding. And he would be alive to deliver them to the specialists who could make them oferate. He chuckled. Whatever the treatment, whatever it was, it didn't matter. The important thing was that he was going to live. He wondered whether that flash of insight just before unconsciousness had been real or a figment of delirium. It could have been either, but Lanceford clung to the belief that the contact was genuine. There was far too much revealed in that sudden flash that was entirely alien to his normal patterns of thought. He wondered what had triggered that burst of awareness. had given him, the poison of the sith and the histamines floating around in his S#tem -- it could have been any one of a number of things, or maybe a complex of various factors that had interacted to make him super-receptive for an instant of time. It was something that would have to be reported and studied with the meticulous care which the ence that was out of the ordinary. A solution might possibly be found, or the whole thing might wind up as one of those dead ends that were so numerous in Exploration work. But that was out of his field and, in consequence, out of his hands. His specialty wasn't parapsychological research. Kron was standing beside his bed, long doglike face impassive, looking at him with pleased satisfaction. Behind him, a group of natives were clustered around the cooking fire. It was as if no time had passed since the allergy struck -- but Lanceford knew differently. Still, the lost time didn't matter. The bright joy that he was going to live transcended such unimportant things. "Looks like you won't have to bury me after all," Lanceford said happily. He stretched his arms over his head. He felt wonderful. His body was cool and comfortably free of the hot confinement of the protection suit. He did a slow horrified doubletake as he realized that he was lying on the sleeping platform practically naked -- a tempting hors d'oeuvre for the thousand and one species of Niobe's biting insects. "Where's my suit?" he half shouted. it, friend Lanceford. If you will notice, you are not bitten. Nor will you be." "Why not?" Kron didn't answer. It wasn't the proper time, and the euphoria that he and the Earthman were enjoying was too pleasant to shatter. Lanceford didn't press the matter. Apparently Kron knew what he was talking about. Lanceford had been watching one particularly vicious species of biting fly hover above his body. The insect would approach, ready to enjoy a mandible full of human epidermis, but, about six inches from his body, would slow down and come to a stop, hanging frustrated in midair. Finally the fly gave up and flew off into the darkness of the rafters. Lanceford hoped that one of the spiders would get it -- but he was convinced. Whatever happened to him while he was unconscious had made him as insect-repellent as the Niobians. The smell of cooking came from the firepit and, incredibly, it smelled good. Lanceford looked startledly at Kron. "I'm hungry." "An excellent sign," Kron replied. "You are nearly cured. Soon you will be able to finish this trek." "Incidentally," Lanceford said, "for the first time since I have been out on this showerbath world of yours, you're cooking something that smells fit to eat. I think I'd like to try it." Kron's eyebrows rose and he hummed softly under his breath. This was something entirely unexpected -- an added delight, like the flavor of komal in a sorat stew. He savored it slowly, enjoying its implications. 'What is it?" Lanceford persisted. "A dish called akef," Kron said. The name was as good as any and certainly described the effect well enough. 'HE last hundred miles had been a breeze. Lanceford stood at the edge of the clearing, looking across the planed off landscape to the shimmering hemispherical bulk of Base Alpha, glistening like a giant cabochon jewel under Niobe's dark sky. Without the protection suit to slow him down and hamper his movements, what would have been a week's trip had been shortened to four days. In a few minutes, he would be back among his own kind -- and he wasn't sure whether he was glad or sorry. Of course, there was a certain satisfaction in bringing back a first-class discovery -- perhaps the greatest in the short history of Niobian exploration -- but there was a stigma attached to the way it had been found. It wouldn't be easy to confess that it had practically been forced upon him, but it would have to be done. It would have been much nicer to have found the answer by using his head. There would have been some really deserved prestige in that. H e sighed and turned to Kron. "Farewell, friend," he said soberly, "and thanks." "We are even," Kron replied. "You saved my life from a roka and I saved yours from the sith. The scales are balanced." Lanceford blinked. He had forgotten that incident where he had shot the big catlike animal shortly after the 'copter had dropped them for the start of their journey back to Base. Apparently it was after Kron -- or at least the native had thought so. Lanceford grinned ruefully. Score another point for blind luck. "But, Kron, it's not that easy. You have given me a secret of your people and I shall have to tell it to mine." "I expected that you would. Besides, it is no secret. Even our children know its composition and how to make it. We have never held it from you. You simply wouldn't accept it But it is about time, friend Lanceford, that your race began learning something of Niobe if they wish to remain here -- and it is about time that we began learning something about you. I think that there will be some rather marked changes in the future. And in that regard, I leave you with the question of whether a civilization should be judged entirely upon its apparent technological achievements." "I -- " Lanceford began. "You have learned how we avoid the insects," Kron continued, maneuvering past the abortive interruption, "and perhaps someday you will know the full answer to my question. But in the meantime, you and your kind will be free to move through our world, to learn our ways, and to teach us yours. It should be a fair exchange." "Thanks to akef," Lanceford said fervently, "we should be able to do just that."-the drug enough to have overcome the mental block that prevented you from naming it before. The word I coined from your own language of science is no longer necessary." "I suppose not, but it's pleasanter to think of it that way." "You Earthmen! Sometimes I wonder how you ever managed to achieve a civilization with your strange attitudes toward unpleasant facts." Kron smiled broadly, relishing the memory of his deception and Lanceford's shocked awakening to the truth. "I hope," he continued, "that you have forgiven my little deceit and the destruction of your protective clothing." "Of course. How could I do otherwise? It's so nice to be rid of that sweatbox that I'd forgive anything." Lanceford frowned. "But there's one thing that puzzles me. How did you disguise the stuff?" "I didn't," Kron replied cryptically. "You did." He turned away and, with characteristic Niobian abruptness, walked off into the jungle. His job was done and natives were never ones to dally with leavetaking, although their greetings were invariably ceremonious. Lanceford watched until the native was out of sight and then walked slowly across the clearing toward the dome. He had learned a lot these past few days, enough to make him realize that his basic training had been so inadequate as to be almost criminal. It was lacking in many of the essentials for survival and, moreover, was slanted entirely wrong from a psychological point of view. Sure, it was good enough to enable a man to get along, but it seemed to be particularly designed to deny the fact that the natives obviously possessed a first-rate culture of their own. It didn't say so directly, but the implications were there. And that was wrong. The natives possessed a civilization that was probably quite as high as the one Terra possessed. It was simply oriented differently. One thing was certain -- the Confederation wasn't going to expropriate or exploit this planet without the natives' consent. It would be suicide if they tried. He grinned. Actually there would be no reason for such action. It was always easier to deal with advanced races than to try to conquer or educate primitive ones. Kron had the right idea -- understanding, exchange, appreciation -- Confederation culture for Niobian. It would make a good and productive synthesis. Still grinning, Lanceford opened the airlock and stepped inside, ignoring the pop-eyed guard who eyed his shorts and sandals with an expression of incredulous disbelief. looked up from his desk and smiled. The smile became a nosewrinkling grimace as Lanceford swxmg the pack from his shoulders and set it carefully on the floor. "Glad to see that you made it, Lanceford," Sims said. "But what's that awful smell? You should have done something about it. You stink like a native." "All the baths in the world won't help, sir," Lanceford said woodenly. He was tired of the stares and the sniffs he had encountered since he had entered the base. In his present condition, a fellowhuman smelled as bad to him as he did to them, but he didn't complain about it and he saw no reason why they should. Humanity should apply more courtesy and consideration to members of their own species. "It's inside me," he explained. "My metabolism's changed. And incidentally, sir, you don't smell so sweet yourself." Sims sputtered for a moment and then shrugged. "Perhaps not," he admitted. "One can't help sweating in this climate even with air-conditioning." "It's the change inside me," Lanceford said. "I suppose it'll wear off in time, once I've been on a normal diet. But I didn't think that was too important in view of the information I have. I've learned something vital, something that you should know at once. That's why I'm here." "That's decent of you," Sims replied, "but an interoffice memo would have served just as well as a personal visit. My stomach isn't as good as it once was. Ulcers, you know." "The executive's disease," Lanceford commented. Sims nodded. "Well, Arthur, what did you find that was so important?" "That we've been fools." Sims sighed. "That's nothing new. We've been fools since the day we left Earth to try and conquer the stars." "That's not what I mean, sir, I mean that we've been going at this Niobe business the wrong way. What we need is to understand the natives, instead of trying to understand the planet." "Out of the mouth's of babes and probationers -- " Sims said with gentle irony. "It pays off," Lanceford replied doggedly. "Take my case. I've found out why the natives are insect-proof!" "That's a new wrinkle. Can you prove it?" "Certainly. I came the last hundred miles in shorts." 'What happened to your suit?" "Kron destroyed it accidentally." "Accidentally -- hah!" Sims snorted. "Niobians never do things accidentally." " at the director. The observation carried a wealth of implications that his sharpened senses were quick to grasp. "Then you know the natives aren't simple savages, the way we were taught in Basic Training?" "Of course! They're a non-technical Class V at the very least -- maybe higher. Somehow they've never oriented their civilization along mechanical lines, or maybe they tried it once and fotmd it wanting. But no one in the upper echelons has ever thought they were stupid or uncivilized." "Then why -- " "Later," Sims said. "You're entitled to an explanation, but right now Fd appreciate it if you'd finish your statement. What makes the natives insect-proof?" "Vorkum." "That gunk?" "That's the repellent" "In more ways than one," Sims said. "It's not so bad after you get used to it. It just smells awful at first." "That's an understatement, if I ever heard one." lyze it and find the active principle," Lanceford said hopefully. "If they do, Fll bet it is distilled quintessence of skimk," Sims replied gloomily. "Fll be friends tried that trick ages ago and gave it up for a bad job. They're pretty fair biochemists as well as being philosophers." "Could be," Lanceford said thoughtfully. "I never thought of that." "You'd better start thinking all the time. These lads are smart. Why do you think we have this complicated rigmarole about native relations and respect? Man, we're running scared. We don't want to lose this planet, and anything less than the kid-glove treatment would be sheer suicide until we learn how far we can go. These natives have an organization thaFd knock your eye out. I didn't believe it myself until I got the proof; As you learn more about it, you'll understand what I mean. We're dealing with an ecological unit on this planet!" "But I thought -- " "That you were here to explore a primitive world?" "Wasn't that what I was trained for?" "No. We can do that sort of thing with a couple of geodetic cruisers. We don't need men trekking through the jungles to assay a world's physical resources. That business went out of date during the Dark Ages. There's a better reason than that for these treks." "Like what?" "You asked the question. Now answer it," Sims said. "You have enough data." Lanceford thought for a moment. "I can see one reason," he said slowly. "Yes?" "The trek could be a test. It could be used to determine whether or not the probationer was a survival type -- a sort of final examination before he's turned loose in a responsible job part of the speedup -- a pretty brutal part, but one that can't be helped if we want to get this planet in line quickly enough to stop the riot that's brewing in the Confederation. It's as much for Niobe's good as ours, because the Confederation wants that gerontin like an alcoholic wants another drink -- and they're not going to wait for normal exploration and development. That's why the treks. It's a tough course. Failure can and often does mean death. Usually we can pull a misfit out in time, but not always. If you live through the trek and we don't have to pull you out, though, you've proved yourself a survival type -- and you're over the first hurdle. "Then we check with your guide and anyone you happen to meet en route. The natives are very cooperative about such things. If you pass their evaluation, you're ready to join the club. It's been forming ever since we landed here two years ago, but it's still pretty exclusive. It's the nucleus of the bee's mission here, the one that'll get things rolling with the gerontin plantations. We'll know about you in a few more minutes after the Cyb Unit gets through processing your data." Sims grinned at the thunderstruck youngster. Lanceford nodded glumly. 'Til probably fail. I sure didn't use my head. I never caught the significance of the trek, I failed to deduce the reason for the insectrepellent qualities of the natives, and I missed the implications of their culture imtil I had almost reached Base. Those things are obvious. Any analytical brain would have figured them out." "They're only obvious when you know what you're looking for," Sims said gently. 'Tersonally, I think you did an excellent job, considering the handicaps you have faced. And the discovery of the vorkum was masterly." Lanceford blushed. "I hate to admit it, but Kron literally shoved the stuff down my throat." "I didn't mean the method by which you learned that vorkum was the stuff we've been searching for," Sims said. "I meant the results you obtained. Results are what count in this business. Call it luck if you wish, but there is more to it than that Some people are just naturally lucky and those are the sort we need here. Ther're survival types. A lot is going to depend on having those so-called lucky people in the right places when we settle Niobe's status in the Confederation." He paused as the message tube beside his desk burped a faint hiss of compressed air and a carrier dropped out into the receiving basket. "Somehow I think that this is your membership card to the club, he said. He read it, smiled, and passed the sheet to Lanceford. "And now, Arthur, before I appoint you as a Niobe Staff member, Fd like to know one thing." "What is that, sir?" "Just why in the name of hell did you bring that pack in here with you? Fve just realized where that smell is coming from!" "I didn't dare leave it anywhere," Lanceford said. "Someone might have thrown it down a disposal chute." "I wouldn't blame them. That's vorkum you have in there, isn't it?" Lanceford nodded. "Yes, sir. I didn't want to lose it." 'Why not? We can always get more from the natives if we need it." "I know that, sir. We can, but this is all Fll get for the next six months, and if I ration myself carefully, it might last that long. You see, sir, it's mildly habitforming -- like cigarettes -- and one gets accustomed to it. And besides, you really don't know what flavor is until you've tried vorkum on chocolate." monthly at New York, N. Y. for Oct. #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing; editor, and business managers are: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Editor, Horace L. 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Notary Public, State of New York No. # Qualified in Kings County Term Expires March #, # IK HI It should have been the most ghastly disappointment in all history... but was it instead the greatest discovery ever? Y OU'VE got to realize this is the biggest secret since the Manhattan Project. Maybe bigger than that. Your life has been investigated since you got out of rompers and -- No, blast it! We're not a gang of power-nutty militarists. Think I wouldn't like to yell the truth to all the world? But it might touch off the war. And everybody knows the war will mean the end of civilization. I should think that you, as a historian, could see our reasons. Machiavelli is the s#mtbol of coldblooded realism... and you don't have to tell me that he was only an exceptionally clear-headed patriot. I've read The Prince and the Discourses. Frankly, I'm siuprised that you're surprised. Just because I know enough math and ph#rsics to be in Astro, why should I be an uncultured redneck? No, sir, I've traveled around and I spent as much time in the museums of Europe as I did in the taverns. I'll admit my companions on the Moon trip looked a bit askance at me because of that. They weren't robots, either, but there was so much to learn, it didn't seem that one human skull could hold it all. Down imderneath, I think they were afraid my memories of the Virgin of the Rocks -- the one in London, I mean, that's the best one -- would crowd out my memories of orbital fimctions. So I made a point of showing off all the astrogational knowledge I had, during rehearsals, and it may have antagonized Baird a little. Not that we had any fights. We were a tightly woven team when the Benjamin Franklin left the space station and blowtorched for the Moon. It's just -- well, maybe we were somewhat more tense than we would have been otherwise. remember. Baird was the skipper and pilot, Hernandez the engineer, and I the instrument man. A single person could have handled the ship if nothing went wrong, but three were insurance -- any one of us could do any of the other jobs. Also, of course, since this was to be the first actual landing on the Moon, not merely a swing aroimd it, we thought our numbers were peeled down to the bare minimum. Once in orbit, we hadn't much to do for several days. We floated upward, watching Earth recede and Luna grow against the deepest, blackest, starriest night you have ever imagined. No, you haven't imagined it, either. Pictures don't convey it, the splendor and loneliness. It was very quiet in the ship. We talked of little things, to keep that silence at arm's length. I remember one conversation pretty well and it touches on the why of all this secrecy. Earth hung sapphire in the middle of darkness and the stars. Long white auroral streamers shook from the poles like banners. Did you know that, seen from such a distance, our planet has belts? Very much like Jupiter. It's harder than you'd believe to distinguish the continental outlines. "I think that's Russia coming into view," I said. Baird glanced at the chronometers and the orbital schedule taped to the wall, and worked his slipstick a minute. "Yeah," he grunted. "Siberia ought to be emerging from the terminator right about now." "Are they watching us?" murmured Hernandez. "Sure," I said, "They've got a space station of their own, haven't they, and good telescopes on it?" "Won't they grin if we barge into a meteor!" said Hernandez. "If they haven't already arranged an accident," grumbled Baird. "I'm not a damn bit sure they're behind us in astronautics." "They wouldn't be sorry to see us come to grief," I said, "but I doubt if the#r'd actually sabotage us. Not a trip like this, with everybody watching." "It might start the war?" said Baird. "Not a chance. Nobody's going to wipe out a nation -- knowing his own will be clobbered, too -- for three spacemen ship." "Sure," I replied, "but one thing can lead to another. A diplomatic note C#tn be the first link in a chain ending at war. With the antipodal hydrogen missile available to both sides, you get an interesting state of affairs. The primary aim of national policy has become the preservation of the status quo, but at the same time the tension created makes that status quo exceedingly unstable. "Do you think our own government would be sending us to the Moon if there were any military benefit to be gained? Hell, no! The first thing which looks as though it will tip the balance in favor of one side will make the other side go to war, and that means the probable end of civilization. We gain points -- prestige -- by the first Limar landing, but not a nickel more. Even as it is, you'll note the Moon is going to be international territory directly under the UJ!. That is, nobody dares claim it, because there just might be something of real strategic value there." OW long can such a bal-" ance exist?" wondered Hernandez. "Till some accident -- say, a hothead getting into power in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter -- touches off the attack and the retaliation," I said. "Or there's the faint hope that we'll come up with a gadget absolutely revolutionary -- oh, a force screen able to shield a continent -- before they have any inkling of it. Then we'll present the world with a fait accompli and the Cold War will be over." "Unless the Russians get that screen first," said Hernandez. 'Then it'll be over, too, but the bad guys will have won the bloodless victory." "Shut up," snapped Baird. "You both talk too much." It had been the wrong thing for me to say, I knew, out there in the great quiet night. We shouldn't have carried our little hates and fears and greeds beyond the sky and out into space. Or perhaps the fact that we can be burdened with them and still reach the Moon shows that Man is bigger than he knows. I couldn't say. The waiting wore us down, that and the free-fall. It's easy enough to get used to zero gravity while you're awake, but your instincts aren't so docile. We'd go to sleep and have nightmares. Toward the end of the trip, it happened less often, so I suppose you can get completely adjusted in time. But we felt no dramatic sense of pioneering when we came down. We were very tired and very tense. It was merely a hard breakneck job. Our landing site hadn't been chosen exactly, since a small orbital error could make a big difference as far as the Lunar surface was concerned. We could only be sure that it would be near the north pole and not on one of the maria, which look invitingly smooth but are probably treacherous. In point of fact, as you remember, we landed at the foot of the Lunar Alps, not far from the crater Plato. It was rugged country, but our gear had been designed for such a place. And when the thunder of blasts had faded and our deafened ears tolled slowly toward quiet, we sat. We sat for minutes without a word being spoken. My clothes were plastered to me with sweat. 'Well," said Baird at length. Well, here we are." He unstrapped himself and reached for the mike and called the station. Hernandez and I crowded the periscopes to see what lay outside. deserts on Earth, but they don't blaze so bright, they aren't so absolutely dead, and the rocks aren't so huge and razor-cornered. The southern horizon was near; I thought I could see the surface curve away and tumble off into a foam of stars. Presently we drew lots. Hernandez got the small one and stayed inside, while I had the privilege of first setting foot on the Moon. Baird and I donned our spacesuits and clumped out through the airlock. Even on Luna, those suits weighed plenty. We stood in the shadow of the ship, squinting through glare filters. It wasn't a totally black, knife-edged shadow -- there was reflection from the ground and the hills -- but it was deeper and sharper than any you'll see on Earth. Behind us, the mountains rose high and cruelly shaped. Ahead of us, the land sloped rough, cracked, ocherous toward the rim of Plato, where it shouldered above that toppling horifor me to see many stars. You may recall we landed near sunset and figured to leave shortly after dawn, two weeks later. At night on the Moon, the temperature reaches # below zero, but the days are hot enough to fry you. And it's easier -- takes less mass -- to heat the ship from the pile than to install a refrigerating imit "Well," said Baird, "go ahead." "Go ahead and what?" I asked. "Make the speech. You're the first man on the Moon." "Oh, but you're the captain," I said. 'Wouldn't dream of -- no, no. Boss. I insist." You probably read that speech in the papers. It was supposed to have been extemporaneous, but it was written by the wife of somebody way upstairs who believed her claim to be a poet. A verbal emetic, wasn't it? And Baird wanted me to deliver it! "This is mutiny," he grumbled. "May I suggest that the captain write in the log that the speech was delivered?" I said. "Judas priest!" he snarled. But he did that, later. You understand you're hearing this under the Top Secret label, don't you? Baird remained in a foul temper. "Get some rock samples," he ordered, setting up the camera. "And on the double! Fm being cooked alive." I picked loose some of the material, thinking that the traces I left would probably last till the Sun burned out It seemed an act of desecration, though Lord knew this landscape was ugly enough -- No, I thought, it wasn't. It was only so foreign to us. Do you know, it was several hours before I could really see everything? It took that long for my brain to get used to some of those impressions and start registering them. wonder if this lighting can be photographed," I remarked. "It isn't like anything that ever shone on Earth." And it wasn't. I can't describe the difference. Think of some of the weird illuminations we get on Earth -- like that brass-colored light just before a storm, things like that -- and multiply the strangeness of them "Of course it'll photograph," said Baird. "Oh, yes. In a way," I said. "But to get the feel of it, you'd need such a painter as hasn't lived for centuries. Rembrandt? No, it's too harsh for him, a cold light that's somehow hell-hot, too -- " "Shut up!" The radio voice nearly broke my earphones. "You and your blasted Renaissance!" After a while, we went inside again. Baird was still mad at me. Unreasonable, but he'd been xmder a breaking strain, and he still was, and perhaps this wasn't the right place to chat about art. We fiddled around with our instruments, took what observations were possible, had a meal and a nap. The shadows crept across the land as the Sun rolled downhill. It was a very slow movement. Hernandez examined my rock samples and said that while he wasn't a geologist, this didn't look like anything on Earth. We were told later that it was new to the experts. Same minerals, but crystallized differently under those fantastic conditions. After our rest, we noticed that the low Sun and the irregular landscape had joined to give us a broad, nearly continuous band of shade clear to Plato Crater. Hernandez suggested we use the chance to explore. It would be after sunset before we could get back, but the ground wouldn't cool off so fast that we couldn't return with the help of our battery packs. In sunless vacuum, you don't lose heat very fast by radiation; it's the Lunar rock, cold to the core, which sucks it out through your boots. Baird argued, for the record, but he was eager himself. So, in the end, we all set out and to hell with doctrine. I won't describe that walk in detail. I can't It wasn't simply the landscape and the lighting. On the Moon, your weight is only one-sixth as much as on Earth, while the inertia remains the same. It feels a bit like walking imder water. But you can move fast once you get the hang of it When we came to the ringwall, there were still a couple of hours till sundown, and we climbed it Tricky work in that undiffused dazzle and those solid-looking shadows, but not very hard. There was an easy slope at the spot we picked and a kind of pass on top, so we didn't have to climb the full height which is a little under # feet " mit, we could look down on a lava plain sixty miles across; the farther side was hidden from us. It seemed almost like polished black metal, crossed by the long shadow of the western ringwalL The downward grade was steeper, its base lost in darkness, but it could also be negotiated. My helmet sticking into the direct sunlight was a Dutch oven; my feet in the shade, were frozen clods. But I forgot all that when I saw the mist below me. Have you heard of it? Astronomers have noticed it for a long time, what seemed to be clouds or -- something -- in some of the craters. Plato is one. Fd been hoping we'd solve the mystery this trip. And there, cxirling in ragged streamers a quarter mile below me, was the fog! It boiled out of the murk, glowed like gold for a moment as it hit the light, and then it was gone, evaporated, but more came rolling up every minute. Not a big patch, this one couldn't have been seen from Earth, but -- I started down the wall. "Hey!" cried Baird. "Get back here!" "Just a look," I pleaded. "And you break yoiu" leg and have to be carried home, with the night coming on? No!" "I can't break an#rthing in this suit," I told him. True enough. Space armor is solid metal on the outside -- even those trick expanding joints are metal -- and the plastic helmet is equally strong. I suppose a man could fall hard enough to kill himself on the Moon, if he really tried, but it would take some doing. "Come back or I'll have you court-martialed," said Baird between his teeth. "Show a heart, Skipper," begged Hernandez. Eventually he talked Baird around. It was only me the captain was irritated with. We roped ourselves together and made a cautious descent. The mist was coming out of a fissure about halfway down the wall. Where the shadows fell, our lights showed it collecting in hoarfrost on the rocks, then boiling gently away again. After dark, it would settle as ice till dawn. What was it? Water. There's a water table of some kind, I guess, and -- I don't know. It suggests there may be indigenous life on the Moon, some low form of plant life maybe, but we didn't find any while we were there. What we found was -- neath the fissure. We scrambled to it and stood looking up. Now you'll have to visualize the layout. We were on this ledge, several yards across, with the ringwall jutting sheer above and a cliff falling below into blackness. Far away, I could see the steely glimmer of the crater floor. The ground was all covered with the years; I saw my footprints sharp and clear and knew they might last forever, or until thermal agitation and new dustfall blurred them. Ten feet overhead was the fissure, like a petrified mouth, and the mist came out of it and smoked upward. It formed almost a roof, a thin ceiling between us and the sky. And the Sun was behind the upper wall, invisible to us. The peaks reflected some of its beams down through the fog. So we stood there in a cold, faintly golden-white radiance, a fog-glow -- God! There's never been such light on Earth! It seemed to pervade everything, drenching us, cold and white, like silence made luminous. It was the light of Nirvana. And I had seen it once before. I couldn't remember where. I stood there in that totally alien dream-light, with the mist swirling and breaking overhead, with the stillness of eternity humming in my earphones and my soul, and I forgot everything except the chill, calm, incredible loveliness of it -- But I had seen it somewhere, sometime, and I couldn't remember -- Hernandez yelled. Baird and I jerked from our thoughts and lumbered to him. He stood crouched a few feet away, staring and staring. I looked at the ground and something went hollow in me. There were footprints. We didn't even ask if one of us had made them. Those weren't American spaceboots. And they had come from below. They had climbed the wall and stood here for a while, scuffed and paced around, and presently we located the trail going back down. The silence felt like a fiddle string ready to snap. Baird raised his head at last and gazed before him. The light made his face a thing of unhuman beauty, and somewhere I had seen a face lit that way. I had looked at it, losing myself, for half an hour or more, but when, in what forgotten dream? "Who?" whispered Baird. "There's only one coimtry that could send a spaceship to the Moon secretly," said Hernandez in a dead voice. "British," I croaked. "French -- " "We'd know about it, if they had." "Russians. Are they still here?" I looked down into the night welling up in Plato. "No telling," said Baird. "Those tracks could be five hours or five nailed boots. They weren't excessively large, but judging from the length of the stride, even here on the Moon, they had belonged to a tall man. "Why haven't they told the world?" asked Hernandez wildly. "They could brag it up so -- " "Why do you think?" rasped Baird. I looked south. Earth was in half phase, low above the horizon, remote and infinitely fair. I thought America was facing us, but couldn't be sure. There was only one reason to keep this trip a secret. They had found something which would upset the military balance, doubtless in their favor. At this moment, there on Earth, the Kremlin was readying the enslavement of all the human race. "But how could they have done it secretly?" I protested. "Maybe they took off in a black ship when our space station was on the other side of the planet. Shut up!" Baird stood without moving. The Sun went lower, that eldritch light died away, and the blue radiance of Earth took its place. Our faces'grew corpse-colored behind the helmets. "Come on," said Baird. He whirled around. "Let's get back to the ship. They have to know about this in Washington." "If the Russians know we know, it may start the war," I said. "I've got a code." "Are you sure it can't be broken? That it hasn't already been?" "You trouble making whelp!" he shouted in a fury. "Be quiet, I tell you!" "We'd better have a closer look," said Hernandez gently. "Follow those prints and see." "We didn't bring any weapons," said Baird. "I'd be surprised if the Russians were as careless." I won't detail the arguments. It was finally settled that I would look further while Baird and Hernandez returned. I had about an hour to follow that trail, then must hurry home if I didn't want to freeze solid. I looked back once and saw a space-armored shape black across the stars. There were more stars every minute as the sunlight faded and my pupils expanded. Then the shadows walled me in. It was a rough climb, but a quick one. The stone here was dark and brittle; I could track the stranger by the lighter spots where he'd flaked off chips as he scrambled. I wondered why those spots should be lighter when there was no oxygen around, but decided a photochemical effect was involved. It was hard to see my way in the shade. The flashbeam was only a puddle of undiffused light before me. But soon I came out in the Erth-glow, and when my eyes had adjusted, it was easy enough. In half an hour, I was on the crater floor. The Sun was behind the ringwall. Black night lay over me. TOT much time to spare. I ' stood on dark, slick lava and wondered whether to follow those dim footprints in the dust. It might be a long way. Then I shrugged and went bounding off, faster than the other man had gone. My heart thudded, the suit filled with stale air, it was hard to see the trail by Earthlight. I was more aware of those discomforts than of any danger to my life. I was a little past the limit of safety when I found the camp. There wasn't much to see. A long track of plowed dust and chipped stone, where something with runners had landed and taken off again... but no sign of a rocket blast! A few scars where a pick had removed samples. Footprints. That was all. I stood there with the crater wall a loom of night behind me and the mist rising thicker, bluetinged now. I stood thinking about somebody who landed without needing rockets and never told anyone. I looked around the sky and saw the ruddy speck of Mars and felt cold. Had the Martians beaten us to our own Moon? But I had to get back. Every minute I lingered whittled down the chance of my returning at all. One more look -- There was a little outcrop of granite not far away. I thought it might be a cairn, but when I got there, I saw it was natural. I shrugged and turned to go. Something caught my eye. I looked closer. The rock was sleet-colored in the Earthlight It had one flat surface, facing my planet. And there was a cross hacked into the stone. I forgot time and the gathering cold. I stood there, thinking, wondering if the cross was merely a coincidental symbol or if there had also, on Mars or on some planet of another star, been One who -- glittered above me. Then I knew. I remembered where I had seen that light which lay on the wall at sundown, and I knew the truth. I turned and started running. batteries gave out five miles from the ship. I reported over the radio and continued moving to keep warm, but my feet quickly froze, I stumbled, and each minute the cold deepened. Baird met me halfway, ripped off my pack and connected another unit "You moron!" he snapped. "You blind, bloody, pudding-brained idiot! I'm going to have you up before a court-martial if -- " "Even if I tell you who that was in Plato?" I asked. "Huh?" We were in the ship and my toes thawing before he got me to explain. It took a lot of talking, but when he grasped the idea -- Of course. Intelligence has been working overtime ever since we came home and told them. They've established now that there was no Russian expedition. But Baird and Hernandez and I have known it ever since our first night on the Moon. And that, Professor, is the reason you've been drafted. We're going overseas together, officially as tourists. You'll search the archives and I'll tell you if you've found anything useful. I doubt very much if you will. That secret was well kept, like the secret of the submarine, which he also thought should not be given to a warring world. But if somewhere, somehow, we find only a scribbled note, a hint. I'll be satisfied. It couldn't have been done by rockets, you see. Even if the physics had been known, which it wasn't, the chemistry and metallurgy weren't there. But something else was stumbled on. Antigravity? Perhaps. Whatever it may be, if we can find it, the Cold War will be won... by free men. Whether or not we dig up any notes, our research men are busy. Just knowing that such a gadget is possible is a tremendous boost, so you can understand why this must be kept secret You don't get it? Professor, I am shocked and grieved. And you a historian! A cultured man! All right, then. We'll go via London and you'll stop at the National Gallery and sit down in front of a painting called The Virgin of the Rocks. And you will see a light, cold and pale and utterly gentle, a light which never shone on Earth, pla#ung over the Mother and Child. And the artist was Leonardo da Vinci.      really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # Star Shelf Vance. B allant ine Books, N. Y.,  # scure opening, Vance settles down to a frighteningly logical depiction of a civilization based on immortality as the supreme reward for a life of achievement. Unfortunately, immortality is for the few because cataclysmic wars have reduced the world to barbarism except for the smallish community of Clarges, and food supply and population are kept in strict balance. For each new Amaranth, # ordinary mortals are visited by the Assassins. Since war and violence have been outlawed, the only areas of strife are in space flight and the struggle for immortality. Gavin Way lock is the angry protagonist, unjustly accused of deliberate murder and therefore deprived of his immortality. For seven years, he has hidden until, being declared legally dead, he is free to strive again for eternal life. The sick, inbred society of Vance's imagination comes fully alive, even though his characters remain mere symbols. Holly Compton. Oxford University Press, N. Y., # literally burst into the awareness of the world, the general reaction was one of amazement that such an immense undertaking could have been achieved with such secrecy. More accustomed to effective security, we know that other wonders -- and horrors -- are under equally tight wraps today. Dr. Compton's book, never too late to be welcome, treats with the now familiar names -- Fermi, Oppenheimer, Urey, Conant, Lawrence, etc., and their often frustrated approach to the conquest of the atom. Though Dr. Compton's treatment keeps tending toward the textbookish, the drama and tension of those historic days come through undiluted. Sam Moskowitz. Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, Ga., # Quest, primarily a personal account of the individuals involved in the search for atomic power, is underplayed, being overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject. In contrast, Moskowitz's book, pretentious title and all, is an account of the petty feuds of a handful of S-F fans in the dark days of the '#s; depressing events during Depression days. The articulate handful monofolized the magazine letter columns and carried on their pigmy warfare to the despair of actual readers. Fortunately, most of these petulant warriors have since grown up -- but their historian is still leading their ghostly legions in battles that are more real than today to him. The miracle is that S-F survived even the love of its most rabid fans. Direct from Decatur, Ga. McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., # been devoted to the question "From Whence?" as to the more immediate "Whither?" Senet is a most beguiling Whencer. His book takes on the intensity of a detective yam as he ranges over the entire planet, following the finds of eminent paleontologists tracing the origins of Man further and further into antiquity. Far from adhering to this narrow field of investigation, however, Senet takes the entire scope of terrestrial life, marine and land, under scrutiny. His chapter      s H E i F II# on the fabulous coelecanth and the assault on the continents by the sea creatures is the tautest kind of narration. Kurt Deckert. Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y., # monsters, our planet has more than its share in the depths of the seven seas. The pages of this startling tome are a-crawl with illustrations of creatures that any S-F artist would be tickled to own. The authors, zoologists at the University of Berlin, have compiled an unusual book devoted to the benthal or abyssal bottom dweller and the archibenthal or continental slope inhabitant, as well as the bath # TJelagic swimmers. By sinking to such depths, these scientists lift science enormously. Kramer. The Falcon's Wing Press, Colo., # had ever heard of Sumer or Sumerians. That they are now known to have been unique in many respects is due to the fastidious labors of specialized archeologists known as Sumerolo#IS gists. Dr. Kramer takes a humorous view of his calling, referring to himself as a pinpoint historian, concerned with the history of the tiny triangle formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers only up to the time of Alexander the Great. The Sumerians had evolved a high civilization as early as # B.C., with many historical firsts. They organized the first schools, literary debates, library catalogues; assembled the first Pharmacopoeia, "Farmer's Almanac" and bicameral congress and achieved the first recorded case of tax reduction. As you can see, a truly remarkable people. tle, Brown and Co., Boston, # Author of this year's monumental The Moon with Patrick Moore as well as a new work on telescopes to be reviewed next month, Wilkins has here a study of the Solar System on a juvenile plane. After theoretical construction of a rocket in orbit. Dr. Wilkins sets the reader off on a journey round the System. He has interjected accidents and problems to add spice to the story. Possibly he has strained too hard in the interest of interest, but I suspect that youngsters will disagree. Isabel Barclay. Doubleday  Co., Inc., # exploration from # B.C to today. It has taken # years for Man to know his Earth. From the time of Hannu the Egyptian, the earliest known explorer who discovered the land of Punt, to the present, mankind has been driven to explore the imknown. All the great' explorers are in this book, from the Phoenicians to the Portuguese; Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Amimdsen, Peary. Their stories are excellent examples of Man's restlessness but, as Miss Barclay says, "Where men once asked, 'What lies beyond the Great Green Sea?' today they ask, 'How soon shall we get to Mars?'" This book will have your teenager packing up to leave home. Beau. Harper  Brothers, N. F, # nym of the wife of a government official. According to her, she has contacted certain beings beyond the veil, one of whom she calls Trust and who gives her Godly advice. This book is an account of her psychic experiences, but there is no documentation, so we must accept "Mrs. LeBeau's" story on Trust T. Wilkins. The Citadel Press, N. Y., # " where in this column indulges in an extraterrestrial flight of fancy, his almostnamesake, H. T. Wilkins, has his feet in the clouds right here on solid ground. He postulates a race of AtlanteanBrazilians who have left artifacts dating from # b.c. If this be so, and Mr. Wilkins smokescreens the reader with masses of innuendo, then somehow we are missing out on one of the greatest stories of this century. Archeologists! Wherefore art yez? Dorothy Louise Dern. Pageant Press, Inc., N. Y., # ceived her training in the soap-opera field. She has taken an intrinsically dramatic subject, the creation of human life in the laboratory, and proceeded to treat it from the angle of Portia Facing Life. Unfortimately, unlike her laboratory piece of flesh, her story completely fails to come alive.   sheif I wheel one morning, Dr. Walter Alvarez detoured down to C Level promenade. A few men were standing, as usual, at the view window looking out at the enormous blue-green planet below. They were dressed alike in sheen-gray coveralls, a garment with detachable gauntlets and hood designed to make it convertible into a spacesuit. It was uncomfortable, but regulation: according to the books, a Survey and Propaganda Satellite might find itself under attack at any moment. Nothing so interesting had hapoff the seventh planet of a G-type star in Ophiuchus. They had been here for two years and a half, and most of them had not even touched ground yet. There it was, drifting by out there, blue-green, fat and juicy -- an oxygen planet, two-thirds land, mild climate, soil fairly bursting with minerals and organics. Alvarez felt his mouth watering when he looked at it. He had "wheel fever." They all did. He wanted to get down there, to natural gravity and natural ailments. The last month or so, there had been a feeling in the satellite that a breakthrough was coming. Always coming: it never arrived. eye for a what? The Earthmen thought they couldn't hurt a friendly alien if their lives depended on it -- their lives did depend on it! Lola went by and a couple of the men turned with automatic whistles. "Listen," said Olaf Olsen conspiratorially, with a hand on Alvarez's arm, "that reminds me, did you hear what happened at the big banquet in George's honor yesterday?" "No," said Alvarez, irritably withdrawing his arm. "I didn't go. Can't stand banquets. Why?" "Well, the way I got it, the commandant's wife was sitting right across from George -- " Alvarez's interest sharpened. "You mean the gorgon? What did he do?" "I'm telling you. See, it looked like he was watching her all through dinner. Then along comes the dessert -- lemon meringue. So old George -- " The shift bell rang. Alvarez started nervously and looked at his thumbwatch. The other men were drifting away. So was Olaf, laughing like a fool. "You'll die when # tou hear," he called back. "Boy, do I wish I'd been there myself! So long, Walt." Alvarez reluctantly went the other way. In B Corridor, somebody called out to him, "Hey, Walt! Hear about the banquet?" He shook his head. The other man, a baker named Pedro, grinned and waved, disappearing up the curve of the corridor. Alvarez opened the door of Xenology Section and went in. During his absence, somebody had put a new chart on the wall. It was ten feet high and there were little rectangles all over it, each connected by lines to other rectangles. When he first saw it, Alvarez thought it was a new table of organization for the Satellite Service and he winced; but on closer inspection, the chart was too complex, and besides, it had a peculiar disorganized appearance. Boxes had been white-rubbed out and other boxes drawn on top of them. Some parts were crowded illegibly together and others were spacious. The whole thing looked desperately confused and so did Elvis Womrath, who was on a wheeled ladder erasing the entire top righthand comer. "N panga," he said irritably. "That right?" "Yes," a voice piped unexpectedly. Alvarez looked around, saw nobody. The voice went on, "But he is R panga to his cousins and all their N pangas or bigger, except when -- " Alvarez leaned over and peered around the desk. There on the carpet was the owner of the voice, a pinkish-white spheroid with various appendages sprouting in all directions, like a floating mine: "George" the gorgon. "Oh, it's you," said Alvarez, producing his echo sounder and humidometer. 'What's all this nonsense I hear -- " He began to prod the gorgon with the test equipment, making his regular morning examination. It was the only bright moment of his day; the infirmary could wait. "All right," Womrath interrupted, scrubbing furiously. "R panga to cousins -- wait a minute now." He turned with a scowl. "Alvarez, I'll be through in a minute. N panga or bigger, except when..." He sketched in half a dozen boxes, labeled them and began to draw connecting lines. "Now is that right?" he asked George. "Yes, only now it is wrong panga to mother's cousins. Draw again from father's cousins' N pangas to mother's cousins' O pangas or bigger... Yes, and now from father's uncles' R pangas to mother's uncles' pangas' cousins -- " " He stared at the chart; he had drawn such a tangle of lines, he couldn't tell what box connected with which. "Oh, God," he said hopelessly. He climbed down off the ladder and slapped the stylus into Alvarez's palm. "You go nuts." He thumbed the intercom on the desk and said, "Chief, I'm going off now. Way off." "Did you get that chart straightened out?" the intercom demanded. "No, but" "You're on extra duty as of now. Take a pill. Is Alvarez here?" "Yes," said Womrath resignedly. "Both of you come in, then. Leave George outside." "Doctor," the spheroid piped, "are you panga to me?" "Don't let's get into that," said Womrath, twitching, and took Alvarez by the sleeve. They found the chief of the Xenology Section, Edward H. Dominick, huddled bald and bearlike behind his desk. The cigar in his hand looked chewed. "Womrath," he said, "when can you give me that chart?" "I don't know. Never, maybe." When Dominick scowled at him irritably, he shrugged and lit a cigarette. Dominick swiveled his gaze at Alvarez. "Have you heard about what happened at the banquet in George's honor yesterday?" "No, I have not," said Alvarez. "Will you be so kind as to tell me, or else shut up about it?" Dominick rubbed his shaven skull, absorbing the insult. "It was during the dessert. George was sitting opposite Mrs. Carver, in that little jump seat. Just as she got her fork into the pie -- it was lemon meringue -- George rolled right up over the table and grabbed the plate away. Mrs. Carver screamed, pulled back -- thought she was being attacked, I suppose -- and the chair went out from under her. It -- was -- a -- mess." Alvarez ended the awed silence. "What did he do with the pie?" "Ate it," said Dominick glumly. "Had a perfectly good piece of his own that he didn't touch." He popped a lozenge into his mouth. Alvarez shook his head. "Not typical. His pattern is strictly submissive. I don't like it." "That's whaVl told Carver. But he was livid. Shaking. We all sat there until he escorted his wife to her room and came back. Then we had an interrogation. All we could get out of George was, 'I thought I was panga to her.'" in his chair, reaching automatically for a bunch of grapes from the bowl on the desk. He was a small, spare man and he felt defensive about it. "Now what is all this panga business?" he demanded. Womrath snorted and began to peel a banana. "Panga," said Dominick, "would appear to be some kind of complicated authority-submission relationship that exists among the gorgons." Alvarez sat up straighten "They never mentioned it to us because we never asked. Now it turns out to be crucial." Dominick sighed. "Fourteen months, just getting a three-man base down on the planet. Seven more to get the elders' jjermission to bring a gorgon here experimentally. All according to the book. We picked the biggest and brightest-looking one we could find. That was George. He seemed to be coming along great. And now this." "Well, Chief," said Womrath carefully, "nobody has any more admiration than I have for Mrs. Carver as a consumer -- she really puts it away -- but it seems to me the question is, is George damaged -- " Dominick was shaking his head. "I haven't told you the rest of it. This panga thing stopped Carver cold, but not for long. He beamed down to the planethead and had Rubinson ask the elders, 'Is George panga to the commandant's wife?'" Alvarez grinned mirthlessly and clicked his tongue. Dominick nodded. "Who knows what a question like that may have meant to them? They answered back, in effect, 'Certainly not,' and wanted to know the details. Carver told them." "And?" asked Alvarez. "They said George was a shocking criminal who should be appropriately punished. Not by them, you understand -- by us, because we're the offended parties. Moreover -- now this must make sense to their peculiar way of looking at things -- if we don't punish George to their satisfaction, they'll pimish Rubinson and his whole crew." "How?" "By doing whatever it is we should have done to George -- which could be anything." Womrath pursed his lips to whistle, but no sound came out. He swallowed a mouthful of banana and tried again. Still nothing. "You get it?" said Dominick with suppressed emotion. They all looked through the open doorway at George, squatting patiently in the other room. "There's no trouble about 'punishment' -- we all know what it means; we've read the books. But how do you punish an alien like that? An eye for a what?" let's see if we have this  straight," said Dominick, sorting through the papers in his hand. Womrath and Alvarez looked on from either side. George tried to peek, too, but his photoceptors were too short. They were all standing in the outer office, which had been stripped to the bare walls and floor. "One. We know a gorgon changes color according to his emotional state. When the#re contented, they're a kind of rose pink. When they're unhappy, they turn blue." "He's been pink ever since we've had him on the Satellite," said Womrath, glancing down at the gorgon. "Except at the banquet," Dominick answered thoughtfully. "I remember he turned bluish just before... If we could find out what it was that set him off... Well, first things first." He held down another linger. "Two, we don't have any information at all about local systems of reward and punishment. They may cut each other into bits for spitting on the sidewalk, or they may just slap each other's -- um, wrists -- " He looked imhappily down at George, whose auricles and photoceptors were all out on stalks. " -- for arson, rape and mopery," Dominick finished. "We don't know. We'll have to play it by ear." "What does George say about it?" Alvarez asked. "Why don't you ask him?" "We thought of that," Womrath said glumly. "Asked him what the elders would do to him in a case like this, and he said they'd quabble his infarcts or something." "A dead end," Dominick added. "It would take us years... ," He scrubbed his naked scalp with a palm. "Well, number three, we've got all the furniture out of here -- it's going to be damned crowded, with the whole staff working in my office, but never mind... Number four, there's his plate with the bread and water. And number five, that door has been fixed so it latches on the outside. Let's give it a dry rtm." He led the way to the door; the others followed, including George. "No, you stay in here," Wornrath told George, who stopped, blushing an agreeable pink. and dropped the improvised latch into its socket. He pimched the door button, foimd it satisfactorily closed. Through the transparent upper pane, they could see George inquisitively watching. Dominick opened the door again. "Now, George, pay attention. This is a prison. You're being punished. We're going to keep you in here, with nothing to eat but what's there, until we think you're punished enough. Understand?" "Yes," George said doubtfully. "All right," said Dominick, and closed the door. They all stood watching for a while, and George stood watching them back, but nothing else happened. "Let's go into my office and wait," said Dominick, with a sigh. "Can't expect miracles all at once." They trooped down the corridor to the adjoining room and ate peanuts for a while. "He's a sociable creature," Womrath said hopefully. "He'll get lonesome after a while." "And himgry," Alvarez said. "He never turns down a meal." Half an hour later, when they looked in, George was thoughtfully chewing up the carpet "No, no, no, no, George," said Dominick, bursting in on him. "You're not supposed to eat anything except what we give you. This is a prison." "Good carpet" said George, hurt. "I don't care if it is. You don't eat it, understand?" "Okay," said George cheerfully. His color was an honest rose pink. Four hours later, when Alvarez went off shift, George had settled down in a comer and pulled in all his appendages. He was asleep. If anything, he looked pinker than ever. When Alvarez came on shift again, there was no doubt about it. George was sitting in the middle of the room, photoceptors out and waving rhsthmically; his color was a glowing pink, the pink of a rose pearl. Dominick kept him in there for another day, just to make sure; George seemed to lose a little weight on the austere diet, but glowed a steady pink. He liked it. II tried to keep up a good front, but he had the worst case of had got so that looking out at that fat, blue-green planet, swimming there so close, was more than he could bear. Kelly was a big man, an outdoorsman by instinct; he longed for natural air in his lungs and turf under his feet. To compensate, he strode faster, shouted louder, got redder of face and bulgier of eye, bristled more fiercely. To quiet an occasional trembling of his hands, he munched sedative pills. He had dreams of falling, with which he bored the ship's Mother Hubbard and the Church of Marx padre by turns. "Is that it?" he asked now, disapprovingly. He had never seen the gorgon before; Semantics, Medical and Xenology Sections had been keeping the alien pretty much to themselves. Dominick prodded the iinkish sphere with his toe. "Wake up, George." After a moment, the gorgon's skin became lumpy at half a dozen points. The lumps grew slowly into long, segmented stems. Some of these expanded at the tips into "feet" and "hands." Others flowered into the intricate patterns of auricles and photoceptors -- and one speech-organ, which looked like a small trumpet "Hello," said George sunnily. "He can pull them back in any time?" Kelly asked, rubbing his chin. "Yes. Show him, George." The feathery stalks obligingly became blank-tipped, then rapidly shrank, segment by segment. In less than two seconds, George was a smooth sphere again. "Well, that makes for a little problem here," said Kelly. "You see what I mean? If you can't get a grip on him, how are you going to punish him like you say?" "We've tried everything we could think of," said Dominick. "We locked him up, kept him on short rations, didn't talk to him... He doesn't draw any pay, of course, so we can't fine him." "Or downgrade him on the promotion lists, either," said Wornrath gloomily. "No. And it's a little late to use the Pavlov-Morganstem treatments we all had when we were children. We can't prevent a crime he's already committed. So our thought was, since you're the games instructor -- " "We thought," Womrath said diplomatically, "you might have noticed something that might be useful. You know, rough-housing and so on." Kelly thought this over. "Well, there's low blows," he said, "but I mean, hell -- " He gestured futilely at George, who had just decided to put his auricles out again. "What would you -- ?" "No, that's out of the question," Dominick said heavily. "Well, I'm sorry, Kelly. It was nice of you to help out." "Wait a minute," said Kelly. "I got something coming to me, maybe." He nibbled a thumbnail, staring down at the gorgon. "How would this be? I was thinking -- sometimes the boys in the pool, they get kind of frisky; they take to ducking each other. Under the water. Now what I was thinking, he breathes air, doesn't he? You know what I mean?" looked at each other. "It sounds jxjssible," said Dominick. "Out of the question," Alvarez objected. "We don't know what his tolerance is. Suppose Kelly should damage him severely or even -- " "Oh," said Dominick. "Yes, you're right. We couldn't take a chance." "I've been a games instructor for seventy-three years -- two rejuvenations -- " Kelly began, bristling. "It isn't that, Kelly," said Wornrath hastily. "George isn't human, so how do we know how he'd react to a ducking?" "On the other hand," Dominick said, "gorgons do turn blue when they're not happy -- we have Rubinson's assurance for that. It seems to me George wouldn't be happy when smothering; that would be the whole point, wouldn't it? Dr. Alvarez would supervise closely, of course. Really, Alvarez, I don't see why not. Kelly, if you'll tell us what time would be most convenient for you -- " "Well," said Kelly, looking at his thumbwatch, "hell, the pool is empty now. It's ladies' day, but all the girls are down in Section Seven, hanging around Mrs. Carver. I hear she's still hysterical." Struck by a thought, Alvarez was bending over to speak to the gorgon. "George, you breathe by spiracles, is that correct? Those little tubes all over your skin?" "Yes," said George. "Well, do they work under water?" "No." Dominick and Kelly were listening with interest. "If we held you imder water, would it hurt you?" George flickered xmcertainly, from rose to pale magenta. "Don't know. Never tried." The three men leaned closer. "Well, George," said Alvarez, tensely, "would that be a punishment?" George flickered violently. "Yes. No. Maybe. Don't know." They straightened again, disappointed. Dominick sighed gustily. "He always gives us those mixedup answers. I don't know. Let's try it. What else can we do?" off with George, following Dominick and Dr. Alvarez, and preceding Womrath and an orderly named Josling who was wheeling one of the dispensary pulmotors. The up-curving corridors were deserted. Kelly lagged a little, adjusting his pace to George's waddling steps. After a moment, he was surprised to feel something small and soft grip his fingers. He looked down; George the gorgon had put one sevenfingered "hand" into his. The gorgon's flowerlike photoceptors were turned trustfully upward. Kelly was taken by surprise. No children were allowed on the Satellite, but Kelly had been the father of eight in a previous rejuvenation. The confiding touch stirred old memories. "You'll be all right," said Kelly gruffly. "You just come along with me. The pool, as he had predicted, was empty. Ripples reflected faint threads of light up and down along the walls. "The shallow end would be better," said Kelly. His voice was hollow and echoed back flatly. Pausing to peel off his coverall. he led George carefully down the steps into the pool. Half submerged, George floated. Kelly drew him gently out into deeper water. Dominick and the others arranged themselves along the brink in interested attitudes. Kelly cleared his throat. "The way it generally happens, one of the boys will grab ahold of another one, like this -- " He put his hands on the smooth floating globe, and hesitated. "Go ahead, Kelly," called Dominick. "Remember, you have a direct order to do this." "Sure," said Kelly. He turned to the gorgon. "Hold your breath now!" He pressed downward. The gorgon seemed lighter than he had expected, like an inflated ball; it was hard to force it under. Kelly pushed harder. George went under briefly and slipped out of Kelly's hands, bobbing to the surface. The gorgon's speaking trumpet cleared itself of water with a phonk and said, "Nice. Do again, Kelly." Kelly glanced over at Dominick, who said, "Yes. Again." Dr. Alvarez stroked his thin beard and said nothing. Kelly took a deep sympathetic breath and shoved the gorgon imder. A few bubbles came to the surface. George's speaking trumpet broke water, but made no sound. Down below, Kelly could see his own pale hands gripping the gorgon's body; the water made them look bloodless; but not George -- he was a clear, unblemished pink. lence when Kelly brought him back up. "Listen," said Womrath, "I've got another idea. George, can you breathe through that speaking trumpet, too?" "Yes," said George cheerfully. Everybody brightened perceptibly. Josling polished his pulmotor with a rag. "Go ahead, Kelly," said Dominick. "And this time, you hold him under." George went down for the third time. The bubbles swirled upward. The gorgon's speaking trumpet swayed toward the surface, but Kelly leaned farther over, blocking it with his forearm. After a moment, all of George's appendages began to contract. Kelly craned his neck downward anxiously. Was a hint of blue beginning to show? "Keep him down," called Alvarez sharply. George was a blank sphere again. Then one or two of the limbs began to reappear, but they looked different somehow. "Now?" asked Kelly. "Give him a second more," said Dominick, leaning over precariously, "It seems to me -- " Kell#s back muscles were knotted with tension. He did not like the way George's new limbs seemed to be flattening out, trailing limpy. It was as if something had gone wrong in the works. "I'm bringing him up," he said hoarsely. To Kelly's horror, when he lifted his hands, George stayed where he was. Kelly made a grab for him, but the gorgon slipped out from under his fingers. The new limbs stiffened and sculled vigorously; George darted away, deep under the water. Leaning, open-mouthed, Dominick slipped and went into the pool with a majestic splash. He fioimdered and rose up, a moment later, streaming with water like a sea lion. Kelly, wading anxiously toward him, stopped when he saw that Dominick was safe. Both men looked down. Between them and around them swam George, darting and drifting by turns, as much at home in the pool as a speckled trout. "Fins!" said Dominick, slackjawed. "And gills!" Dr. Walter Alvarez was a misanthrope. He did not like people; he liked diseases. Down there on Planet Seven, once the trade mission was established, he could confidently expect enough new and startling ailments to keep him happy for years. Up here, all he got were sprained ankles, psychosomatic colds, hives and indigestion. There was one cook's helper named Samuels who kept coming back every Wednesday with the same boil on the back of his neck. It got so that in spite of himself, Alvarez spent the whole week dreading Wednesday. When he saw Samuels' earnest face coming through the door, something seemed to wind itself a little tighter inside him. Some day, when Samuels opened his mouth to say, "Hey, Doc -- " Samuels always called him "Doc" -- the something inside him was going to break with a sound like a bail jo string. What would happen then, Dr. Alvarez was unable to imagine. When the gorgon had first been brought up to the Satellite, there had been two or three delightful little fungus infections, then nothing. A great disappointment. Alvarez had isolated and cultured almost a hundred microorganisms found in smears he had taken from George, but they were all non-viable in human tissue. The viable bacteria, viruses, parasites that always turned up on a lifeinfested planet were evidently lurking in some organism other than the gorgons. They swam, at night, across the optical field of Dr. Alvarez's dreaming mind -- rod-shaped ones, lens-shaped ones, wriggly ones, leggy ones and ones with teeth. One morning. Dr. Alvarez awoke with a desperate resolve. It was a Tuesday. He went directly to the infirmary, relieved Nurse Trumble who was on duty, and, opening a locked cabinet, filled a hypodermic from an ampule of clear straw-colored fluid. The trade name of this substance was bets-off; it was a coimterinhibitant which stunned the censor areas of the forebrain chiefly affected by the Pavlov-Morganstem treatments. (By an odd coincidence, the patentee was a Dr. Jekyll.) Alvarez injected two c.c.s of it directly into the median basilic vein and sat down to wait. petual bad humor began to lift. He felt a pleasant ebullience; the colors of things aroimd him seemed brighter and clearer. "Ha!" said Alvarez. He got up and went to his little refrigerator, where, after some search, he found half a dozen of the cultures he had made of microorganisms taken from gorgon smears. They were quiescent, of course -- deep-frozen. Alvarez wanned them cautiously and added nutrients. All .morning, while the usual succession of minor complaints paraded through the infirmary, the cultures grew and multiplied. Alvarez was jovial with his patients; he cracked a joke or two and handed out harmless pills all around. By noon, four of the cultures were flourishing. Alvarez carefully concentrated them into one and loaded another hypodermic with the resulting brew. To his liberated intelligence, the matter was clear: No organism, man or pig or gorgon, was altogether immune to the microbes it normally carried in its body. Upset the balance by injecting massive colonies of any one of them and you were going to have a sick gorgon -- i.e., Alvarez thought, a punished gorgon. The treatment might also kill the patient, but Alvarez lightheartedly dismissed this argument as a quibble. (Or quabble?) Armed with his hypo, he went forth looking for George. He found him in the small assembly room, together with Dominick, Womrath and a mechanic named Bob Ritner. They were all standing aroimd a curious instrument, or object of art, built out of bar aluminum. "It's a rack," Ritner explained proudly. "I saw a picture of it once in a kids' book." The main feature of the "rack" was a long, narrow table with a windlass at one end. It looked like a crude device for stretching something. "We thought the time had come for stem measures," Dominick said, mopping his head. "In the olden days," Ritner put in, "they used these on prisoners who wouldn't talk." "I talk," George pleasantly offered. "It's another punishment, George," Dominick explained kindly. "Well, Alvarez, before we go ahead, I suppose you want to examine your patient." "Yes, just so, ha-ha!" said Alvarez. keenly at George, who swiveled his photoceptors interestedly around to stare back. The doctor prodded George's hide; it was firm and resilient. The gorgon's color was a clear pink and the intricate folds of his auricles seemed crisp and alert. Alvarez took a hand scale from his kit; it was pre-set for A Level gravity. "Climb up here, George." Obediently, the gorgon settled himself on the pan of the scale while Alvarez held it up. "Hm," said Alvarez. "He's lost a good deal of weight." "He has?" asked Dominick hopefully. he seems to be in unusually good condition -- better than a week ago, I would say. Perhaps just a little sugar solution to pep him up -- " Alvarez withdrew the hypo from his kit, aimed it at George's smooth skin and pressed the trigger. Dominick sighed. "Well, I suppose we might as well go ahead. George, just hop up there and let Ritner tie those straps onto yoiL" George trustingly climbed onto the table. Ritner buckled straps around four of his limbs and then began to tighten the cylinder. "Not too much," said George anxiously. "I'll be careful," Ritner assured him. He kept on winding the cylinder up. "How does that feel?" George's "arms" and "legs" were half again their usual length and still stretching. "Tickles," giggled George. Ritner went on turning the handle. Sims coughed nervously and was shushed. George's limbs kept on getting longer; then his body started to lengthen visibly. "Are you all right, George?" Dominick asked. "Very fine." Ritner gave the handle a last despairing twist. George's elongated body stretched all the way in comfort from one end of the rack to the other. There was no place else for him to go. "Nice," said George. "Do again." He was glowing a happy pink. Ritner frustratedly kicked his machine. Alvarez snorted and went away. In the corridor, unseen, he jumped up and clicked his heels together. He was having a wonderful time; his only regret was that it was not tomorrow. Come to think of it, why wait till Wednesday? son Carver, S. S., had been trained to make quick and courageous decisions. Once you began to entertain a doubt of your own rightness, you would hesitate too much, begin to second-guess yourself, fall prey to worry and anxiety, and end up without any power of decision at all. The trouble was, you could never be right all the time. Following the book to the letter, or you were bound to make mistakes. The thing was to cross them off and go ahead just the same. Carver firmed his chin and straightened his back, looking down at the gorgon. It was sick, all right, there was no question about that. The thing's limbs drooped and weaved slightly, dizzily. Its hide was dry and hot to the touch. "How long has he been like this?" Carver demanded, hesitating only slightly over the "he." Aliens were "it" to him and always had been, but it didn't do to let anybody know that. "Twenty minutes, more or less," said Dr. Nasalroad. "I just got here myself -- " he stifled a yawn -- "about ten or fifteen minutes ago." "What are you doing here, anyway?" Carver asked him. "It's Alvarez's shift." Nasalroad looked embarrassed. "I know. Alvarez is in the hospital as a patient. He assaulted a cook's helper named Samuels -- poured soup over his head. He was shouting something about boiling the boil on Samuels' neck. We had to put him under sedation. It took three of us."  "Nasalroad, what is hapjjening on this wheel, anyhow? First this thing attacks my wife. Then Alvarez -- " He glared down at George. "Can you pull him out of this, whatever it is?" Nasalroad looked surprised. "That would be a large order. We don't know any gorgon medicine. I was assuming you'd want to beam down and ask them." That was reasonable, of course. The only hitch was, as usual, a matter of interpretation. Was this something they had negligently allowed to happen to an important alien representative, or was it the necessary and proper punishment they had all been looking for? He asked Nasalroad, "What color would you say he is now? Not pink, certainly." "No-o. But not blue, either. I'd call it a kind of violet." "Hm. Well, anyhow, he's got smaller than he was, isn't that right? Conspicuously smaller." Nasalroad admitted it. Carver made his decision. "Do the best you can," he said to Nasalroad. He lifted his wristcom, said briskly, "Have you got a lineof-sight to the planethead?" "Yes, sir," the operator answered. "All right, get me Rubinson." A few seconds passed. "Planethead." "Rubinson, this is Carver. Tell the elders we've got a pretty imhappy gorgon here. We're not sure just what did it -- might have been one of a lot of things -- but he's lost a good deal of weight, and his color -- " Carver hesitated -- "it's bluish. Definitely bluish. Got that?" "Yes, Chief. Thank goodness! I'll pass the message along right away and call you back." "Right." Carver closed the wristcom with an assertive snap. The gorgon, when he glanced down at it, looked sicker than ever, but no matter. What happened to the gorgon was its lookout; Carver was doing his duty. Ill rible headache and a sense of guilt. He was not in his own cubicle, but in one of the hospital bunks, dressed in a regulation set of hospital pajamas (with removable hood and gloves, capable of being converted into a spacesuit). He could just see the wall clock at the far end of the room. It was twenty-three hours -- well into his shift. Alvarez scuttled out of bed, groaning, and looked at the chart beside it. Mania, delusions. Sedation. Signed, Nasalroad. Delusions: yes, he was having one now. He imagined he could remember heaving up a big tureen of mock-turtle soup over Samuels' startled face -- splash, a smoking green torrent. Good heavens! If that was real -- Samuels! And the gorgon! Groaning and lurching, Alvarez darted out of the room, past the orderly. Munch, who was sitting with a story viewer on his lap and couldn't get up fast enough. "Dr. Alvarez! Dr. Nasalroad said -- " "Never mind Nasalroad," Alvarez snapped, pawing in the refrigerator. He remembered those cultures being right back here; but now they were gone. " -- not to let you up until you acted normal again. Uh, how do you feel. Doctor?" "I feel fine! What difference does that make? How is he?" Munch looked puzzled and apprehensive. "Samuels? Just superficial burns. We put him to bed in his own cubby, because -- " "Not Samuels!" Alvarez grabbed Munch by the front of his suit. "The gorgon!" "Oh, well, he's been sick, too. How did you know, though. Doctor? You were snoring when it happened. Listen, let go my suit; you're making me nervous." "Where?" Alvarez demanded, thrusting his scrawny face close to the other's. "Where what? Oh, you mean the gorgon? Up in the little assembly room, the last I -- " Alvarez was gone, out the door and down the corridor like a small, bearded fireball. He found an anxious crowd assembled -- Commandant and Mrs. Carver, Dominick and his staff. Urban and two assistants from Semantics, orderlies, porters, and Dr. Nasalroad. Nasalroad had the gaunt and bright-eyed appearance of a man who has been on wakeup pills too long. He started when he saw Alvarez. "What's up?" Alvarez demanded, grabbing his sleeve. "Where's the gorgon? What -- " "Be quiet," said Nasalroad. "George is over in that comer behind Carver. We're waiting for the delegation from planetside. Rubinson said they were coming up, three of them with some kind of a box." ' I ' HE loudspeaker said suddenly, "I have the tender locked on. Contact. Contact is made. The lock is opening; get ready, here they come." Alvarez couldn't see past Carver's bulk. He tried to get away, but Nasalroad stopped him. "I want to see," he said irritably. "Listen," Nasalroad said. "I know what you did. I checked the bets-off pills and those cultures against inventory. The gorgon seems to be recovering nicely, no thanks to you. Now has the stuff worn off you or not? Because if not-" A rustle went over the group. Alvarez and Nasalroad turned in time to see the door opening. Two vigorous-looking gorgons waddled through; they were carrying an enameled metal box between them. "Foop!" said the first one experimentally. "Where is gorgon George?" "I'm all right," Alvarez muttered. "If I wasn't, I'd have done something uncivilized to you by now, wouldn't I?" "I guess so," said Nasalroad. They elbowed closer as the group shifted, making a space around the three gorgons. Peering, on tiptoe, Alvarez could see George standing shakily beside the other two. "He looks terrible. Those are big ones, those other two, aren't they?" "Not as big as George was when we got him," Nasalroad muttered. "Walt, if it turns out you've ruined the whole thing. I'll take a dose of bets-off myself and -- " "Listen!" snarled Alvarez. One of the gorgons was explaining, "This is panga box. What you call? You know panga?" 'Well, uh, yes and no," said Dominick uncomfortably. "But what about the punishment? We understood -- " "Punishment later. You, George, go in box." Obediently, George waddled over and squatted beside the mouth of the box. He bobbed uncertainly; he looked for all the world like a large woman trying to get into a small sports 'copter. There was a minor outbreak of nervous laughter, quickly suppressed. George leaned, retracting most of his upper appendages. His round body began to be compressed into a squarish shape, wedging itself into the box. The other gorgons watched with an air of tension, photoceptors rigidly extended. A hush fell. Among the humans present. there was a general air of Whyare-we-all-whispering? George wriggled and oozed farther into the box. Momentarily, he stuck. He flickered blue, then pink. His "feet," almost retracted, scrabbled feebly at the bottom of the box. Then he was in. of the other gorgons solemnly closed the lid on George and fastened it to make sure, then opened it again and helped him out. All three gorgons began to make rhythmic swaying motions with their "arms" and other appendages. George, Alvarez thought, looked smug. He felt a sudden premonitory pang. What had he done? "What's it all about?" Hasal road demanded. "Are they measuring him for a coflin or -- " Dominick, overhearing, turned and said, "I don't think so. Now this is interesting. You remember they said a panga box. What Fm afraid of is that they may have a standard of size. You see what I mean? They could be measuring George to see if he falls below the minimum standard of -- uh -- panga relations." "Oh, heavens," said another voice. It was Urban of Semantics, who had been neglected of late; they hadn't needed him since George learned English. He was peering over Dominick's shoulder, looking dumbfoimded. He said, "But don't you know the word we've been translating 'elders' really means 'smallest ones'? Good heavens -- " "I don't see -- " Dominick began, but the commandant's voice drowned him out. "Quiet! Quiet, please!" Carver was trumpeting. He went on, "Our friends from Seven have an annoimcement to make. Now, then." To everyone's surprise, it was George who spoke, in the lisping adcents of the gorgon language. No human present understood a word of it except Urban, who turned pale and began stammering inaudibly to himself. One of the gorgons began to speak when George stopped: "Most elder person, known to you by name George, wishes me to thank you all for kindness done him when he was humble youth." "Youth," muttered Urban. "But it really means 'ungainly one' -- or 'fat boy.' Oh, my heavens" "Now that he has become elder, it will be his most pleasure to repay all kindness in agreeable legislative manner." "What does that mean?" Alvarez queried aggrievedly. "Why can't he talk for himself, anyway?" "It would be beneath his digity now," said Nasalroad. "Hush!" said the gorgon, "you will succeed in giving elder person, known by name George, proper punishment as aforesaid." order!" said Carver, banging on the table. George and the other two gorgons were sitting opposite him, with the centerpiece of nasturtixims and ferns between them. Grouped around Carver were Dominick, Urban, Womrath, Alvarez, Nasalroad, Kelly and Ritner. "Now this is the situation," Carver said aggressively. "This gorgon turns out to be a member of their ruling council. I don't understand why, but forget that now -- the point is he's friendly disposed toward us, so we've succeeded in this mission if we can find that proper punishment. Otherwise we're in the soup. Suggestions." Dominick craned his bald head toward Alvarez across the table. "Doctor, I had a thought. Would you say -- is there anything peculiar about the gorgon's body constitution as compared, say, to ours?" "Certainly ,"said Alvarez dourly. "Any number of things. You name it, they Giving them a dirty look. Carver nodded to Ritner. "Yes?" "Well, I was thinking. I know the rack was a washout, but there was another thing they used to use called the Iron Virgin. It had a door, like, with spikes on it -- " "What I had in mind," Dominick said, "is there anything that would tend to limit their body size -- any danger or disadvantage in growing large?" Alvarez frowned and looked at Nasalroad, who hitched his chair closer. "The pressure?" said Nasalroad tentatively. They rubbed their chins and looked at each other with professional glints in their eyes. "What about the pressure?" Dominick prompted eagerly. "How long would it take you to build a thing like that?" Carver was asking Ritner. "Well -- ten, eleven hours." "Too long. That's out. Next!" "They're actually a single cell -- all colloidal fluid, at a considerable osmotic pressure. The bigger they get, the more pressure it takes to keep that shape. If they got too big, I rather imagine -- " Alvarez snapped his fingers, awed. "They'd burst!" Carver turned with an indignant glare. "Gentlemen, if I could get a little cooperation out of you, instead of this continual distraction -- All right, Womrath?" "Sir, I was just wondering, suppose if we let him turn into a fish, the way he did before in the pool -- but then we'd net him and take him out of the water fast. That way, maybe -- " "It wouldn't work," said Kelly. "He changed back in about a second, the other time." ' tention to Kelly. One of the big gorgons, who had been staring fixedly at the flowers in the middle of the table, had suddenly grabbed a handful and was stuffing them into his mouth. George said something shrill in gorgon talk and snatched the flowers away again. The other gorgon looked abashed, but flushed pink. George, on the other hand, was distinctly blue. His "hand," clutching the mangled flowers, hesitated. Slowly, as if with an effort, he put them back in the bowl. The other two gorgons twined their "arms" around him. After a moment, Goorge looked more his old self, but a hint of blue remained. "What is it?" asked Carver alertly. "Did we do something, finally?" "Did you turn blue because we punished you, George?" Wornrath questioned. "No," said George unexpectedly. "Hard for me to be elder." He added a few words in his own language to the other gorgons and their "arms" twined around him again. "Before, they panga to me," he added. "Then that's why he took the pie away from the commandant's wife!" said Dominick, smiting himself on the forehead. "Of course. They -- " "What's that? What's that?" Carver turned, bristling. "Why, this explains that pie business," said Dominick. "He felt protective toward your wife, you see. That's what 'panga' means. They none of them have much control over their own appetites, so they guard each other. As they grow older and get more self-control, they're expected to get smaller, not bigger. George felt confused about his panga relationships to us, but in your wife's case, he was positive one more mouthful would make her explode -- " Carver was red to the ears. "Nonsense!" he shouted. "Dominick, you're being insulting, insubordinate and impatriotic!" George, looking on interestedly, piped a few words in the gorgon language. One of the other gorgons immediately spoke up: "Elder person says you with smooth head are a smart man. He says the other big one who talks too much is wrong." looked at the gorgons, then around the table. No one said anything. Carver set his jaw heroically. "Well, gentlemen, we certainly tried, but -- " "Wait a minute!" said Alvarez. Somewhere in his narrow skull, a great light had dawned. "George, am I panga to you?" George's auricles waved tensely. "Yes. You very small man." "Good." Alvarez dry-washed his bony hands. "And you still have to be punished for that mistake you made at the banquet?" George's speaking tube buzzed imhappily, "Yes." "All right," said Alvarez. Everybody was looking at him with expressions varying from puzzlement to alarm. Alvarez took a deep breath. "Then here are my orders to you. Do as you please!" There was a hiss of indrawn breath from Urban. Most of the others looked at Alvarez as if he had grown snakes for hair. "Doctor," said Carver, "have you gone off your -- " The chorus of gasps stopped him. Up on the table, flushing blue and bright pink by turns like a skysign, George was gobbling up the flowers in the centerpiece. Next he ate the bowl. One of his flailing limbs raked in the scratchpad Urban had been doodling on. He ate that. Next moment, he was leaping to the floor, making Ritner duck wildly as he passed. Part of Dominick's detachable hood went with him, disappearing with hoarse munching sounds. With a gulp, George swallowed it and began on the carpet. He was eating greedily, frantically. The other two gorgons hovered around him with shrill gorgon cries, but he ate on, oblivious. Now he was bright blue and bulging, but still he ate. "Stop it!" shouted Alvarez. "George, stop that!" George rocked to a halt Gradually his blueness faded. The other gorgons were prodding and patting him anxiously. George looked all right, but it was obvious as he stood there that he would never fit into the panga box again. He was bigger than the other two. "Alvarez," said Carver wildly, "why did you -- " "He was going to burst," said Alvarez, twitching with excitement. "Couldn't you tell? Another mouthful or two -- " Carver recovered himself. He straightened his coverall and thrust out his chin. "At any rate, he was certainly blue that time. You all saw it -- isn't that right?" He looked around triumphantly. "So, unless I'm very much mistaken -- " NE of the two attendant gorgons raised his photoceptors. It was hard to tell which was George, now, except that his color was still a little lavender. The other gorgon spoke two brief sentences in his own language and then all three of them waddled off together toward the exit. "What was that? What did he say?" demanded Carver. had turned pale again. "He said get the tender ready to take them back home." "The tender is there," said Carver indignantly. "They can go back any time they want. But what did he say about the punishment?" Urban cleared his throat again, looking bemused. "They say the punishment is good. More severe than any they ever thought of in twenty thousand years. They say they won't have to pimish Rubinson and the others now, because you have done all the punishment necessary." "Well?" challenged Carver. "Why are you looking that way? What's the hitch? Are they going to refuse to enter the Union, in spite of all this?" "No," said Urban. "They say we are all panga to them now. The'!! do as we say -- let us land and build the distribution centers, start them consuming in massive quantity." "But that'll destroy them!" someone interjected in a horrified tone. "That's right," said Urban. Carver sighed. He had been in and was proud of his record. He played it as a game; the new, virgin planets were the prizes and he kept score with the row of tiny iridium buttons on his breast pocket. He said into his wristcorn, "Let me know when Rubinson and his crew are on the way up." There was a long wait. The silence grew oppressive. At length, the wall screen lighted with a view of Planet Seven, gilded along one cusp, blue-green and mysterious in the shadow. A silver spark was floating up out of the night side. "Here they come now," said the voice. Carver sighed again. "When they make contact, secure the tender and then signal for acceleration stations. We're leaving Seven. Tell Mr. Fruman to set a first approximation for our next star of call." Alvarez, twitching and frowning, clutched at the front of his coverall. "You're letting them go? Not landing on Seven -- after all this work?" Carver was staring into the view plate. "Some beings," he said meant to be consumers."      Jr.; Each Wednesday nite on Radioi Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N. B. C. 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I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years # additional Foreign Postage Per Year Qalaxy #c By By By galaxy The Coming of the Robots #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. #, a low moved up from the south and settled over New York like a gigantic gray hen with a vast knobby egg to hatch. The city moved in its sleep, restless under the hot, heavy vaporous pinions. At the Battery weather station, Dr. Walter Hambro found himself and his night assistant, Justin Kent, pulling for breath. "I knew the south was eager to get rid of this stinker," complained Kent, "but they didn't have to unload it on us." Dr. Hambro nodded uncomfortably. "It can't stay around long -- that nice high developing over Springfield, Mass., dragged it up here, so they'll be the victims next." They checked the charts. That nice high over Springfield had come down from the clouds. "There must be another around somewhere," Dr. Hambro said, and searched for one. From one coast to the other and from the Gulf to the border, the atmosphere was as relaxed as if it had been filled with Equanil. The single promising spot was in Canada, heading toward Greenland. It couldn't have been drawn south even if every vacuum cleaner in the state stood bag to bag and inhaled all at once. "We're stuck," said Dr. Hambro. "This is the low that came to dinner." Factories in and around the city stoked up for the day's proman for Lipp Novelties, summed up his colleagues' problems in his report to Arnold Lloyd, v-p in charge of manufacturing: "The coal just lays there and smokes like it was tobacco in a pipe somebody was too lazy to clean. No updraft worth a damn." This fact was also noted by Sven Hansen, janitor for the Flatbush Arms. Fumes overcame him before he could make his report to anyone. His dog, Loki, gave warning, but against a rescue party of milkman, doorman and garbage collector, whom he held at bay until lured out of the way with a bone from the garbage truck. At the airports on the outskirts of the city, the ceiling was low, but not low enough to impede traffic. After a number of takeoffs, however, all fields were blanketed by exhaust fumes, which sullenly refused to move away. 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Just send in your order on any scrap of paper, include check or money order for #, and mail it right now to... Man's bast friend Is a -- a what? The answer was so vital that every possible resource that could be found had to be poured into: Operation Stinky stoop of my shack, waiting for the jet, with the shotgun at my right hand and a bottle at my left, when the dogs began the ruckus. I took a quick swig from the bottle and lumbered to my feet. I grabbed a broom and went around the house. From the way that they were yapping, I knew the dogs had cornered one of the skunks again and those skunks were jittery enough from the jets without being pestered further. I walked through the place where the picket fence had fallen down and peered around the corner of the shack. It was getting dusk, but I could see three dogs circling the lilac thicket and, from the sound of it, another had burrowed halfway into it. I knew that if I didn't put an end to it, all hell was bound to pop. I tried to sneak up on them, but I kept stumbling over old tin cans and empty bottles and I decided then and there, come morning, I'd get that yard cleaned up. I had studied on doing it before, but it seemed there always was some other thing to do. With all the racket I was making, the three dogs outside the thicket scooted off, but the one that had pushed into the lilacs was having trouble backing out. I zeroed in on him and smacked him dead center with the broom. The way he got out of there -- well, he was one of those looseskinned dogs and for a second, I swear, it looked like he was going to leave without his hide. He was yelping and howling and he came popping out like a cork out of a bottle and he ran straight between my legs. I tried to keep my balance, but I stepped on an empty can and sat down undignified. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I seemed to have some trouble getting squared around so I could get on my feet again. around, a skunk walked out of the lilac bush and came straight toward me. I tried to shoo him off, but he wouldn't shoo. He was waving his tail and he seemed happy to find me there and he walked right up and rubbed against me, purring very loudly. I didn't move a muscle. I didn't even bat my eyes. I figured if I didn't move, he might go away. The skunks had been living under the shack for the last three years or so and we got along fine, but we had never been what you'd call real close. I'd left them alone and they'd left me alone and we both were satisfied. But this happy little critter apparently had made up his mind that I was a friend. Maybe he was just plumb grateful to me for running off the dogs. He walked around me, rubbing against me, and then he climbed up in my lap and put his feet against my chest and looked me in the face. I could feel his body vibrating with the purring noise that he was making. He kept standing there, with his feet against my chest, looking in my face, and his purring kept getting soft and loud, fast and slow. His ears stood straight up, like he expected me to purr back at him, and all the time his tail kept up its friendly waving. Finally I reached up a hand, very gingerly, and patted him on the head and he didn't seem to mind. I sat there quite a while, patting him and him purring at me, and he still was friendly. So I took a chance and pushed him off my lap. After a couple of tries, I made it to my feet and walked around the shack, with the skunk following at my heels. I sat down on the stoop again and reached for the bottle and took a healthy swig, which I really needed after all I had been through, and while I had the bottle tilted, the jet shot across the treeline to the east and zoomed above my clearing and the whole place jumped a foot or two. I dropped the bottle and grabbed the gun, but the jet was gone before I got the barrel up. I put down the gun and did some steady cussing. I had told the colonel only the day before that if that jet ever flew that close above my shack again, I'd take a shot at it and I meant every word of it. "It don't seem right," I told him. "A man settles down and builds himself a shack and is living peaceable and contented and ain't bothering no one. Then the government comes in and builds an air base just a couple miles away and there ain't no peace no more, with them jets flying no more than stove-pipe high. Sometimes at night they bring a man plumb out of bed, standing at attention in the middle of the room, with his bare feet on the cold floor." The colonel had been real nice about it. He had pointed out how we had to have air bases, how our lives depended on the planes that operated out of them and how hard he was trying to arrange the flight patterns so they wouldn't upset folks who lived around the base. were stirring up the skunks and he hadn't laughed, but had been sympathetic, and he told me how, when he was a boy in Texas, he had trapped a lot of skunks. I explained that I wasn't trapping these skunks, but that they were, you might say, sort of living with me, and how I had become attached to them, how I'd lay awake at night and listen to them moving around underneath the shack and when I heard them, I knew I wasn't alone, but was sharing my home with others of God's creatures. But even so, he wouldn't promise that the jets would stop flying over my place and that was when I told him I'd take a shot at the next one that did. So he pulled a book out of his desk and read me a law that said it was illegal to shoot at any aircraft, but he didn't scare me none. So what happens when I lay for a jet? It passes over while I'm taking me a drink. I quit my cussing when I remembered the bottle, and when I thought of it, I could hear it gurgling. It had rolled underneath the steps and I couldn't get at it right away and I almost went mad listening to it gurgle. Finally I laid down on my belly and reached underneath the steps and got it, but it had gurgled dry. I tossed it out into the yard and sat down on the steps, glum. The skunk came out of the darkness and climbed the stairs and sat down beside me. I reached out and patted him kind of absent-minded and he purred back at me. I stopped fretting about the bottle. "You sure are a funny skunk," I said. "I never knew skunks purred." We sat there for a while and I told him all about my trouble with the jets, the way a man will when there's nobody better around than an animal to do the listening, and sometimes even when there is. I wasn't afraid of him no more and I thought how fine it was that one of them had finally gotten friendly. I wondered if maybe, now that the ice was broken, some of them might not come in and live with me instead of living under the shack. Then I got to thinking what a story I'd have to tell the boys dbwn at the tavern. Then I realized that no matter how much I swore to it, they wouldn't believe a word of what I said. So I decided to take the proof along. I picked up the friendly skunk and I said to it: "Come along. I want to show you to the boys." I bumped against a tree and got tangled up in an old piece of chicken wire out in the yard, but finally made it out front where I had Old Betsy parked. the best car ever made, but she was the most faithful that any man could want. Me and her had been through a lot together and we understood each other. We had a sort of bargain -- I polished and fed her and she took me where I wanted to go and always brought me back. No reasonable man can ask more of a car than that. I patted her on the fender and said good evening to her, put the skunk in the front seat and climbed in myself. Betsy didn't want to start. She'd rather just stayed home. But I talked to her and babied her and she finally started, shaking and shivering and flapping her fenders. I eased her into gear and headed her out into the road. "Now take it easy," I told her. "The state coppers have got themselves a speed trap set up somewhere along this stretch and we don't want to take no chances." Betsy took it slow and gentle down to the tavern and I parked her there and tucked the skunk under my arm and went into the place. Charley was behind the bar and there were quite a lot of customers -- Johnny Ashland and Skinny Patterson and Jack O'Neill and half a dozen others. I put the skunk on the bar and it started walking toward them, just like it was eager to make friends with them. They took one look and they made foxholes under chairs and tables. Charley grabbed a bottle by the neck and backed into a corner. "Asa," he yelled, "you take that thing out of here!" "It's all right," I told him. "It's a friendly cuss." "Friendly or not, get the hell out with it!" "Get it out!" yelled all the customers. I was plenty sore at them. Imagine being upset at a friendly skunk! But I could see I was getting nowhere, so I picked it up and took it out to Betsy. I found a gunny sack and made a nest and told it to stay right there, that I'd be right back. It took me longer than I had intended, for I had to tell my story and they asked a lot of questions and made a lot of jokes and they wouldn't let me buy, but kept them set up for me. When I went out, I had some trouble spotting Betsy and then I had to set a course to reach her. It took a little time, but after tacking back and forth before the wind, I finally got close enough in passing to reach out and grab her. I had trouble getting in because the door didn't work the way it should, and when I got in, I couldn't find the key. When I found it, I dropped it on the floor, and when I reached down to get it, I fell flat upon the seat. It was so comfortable there that I decided it was foolish to get up. I'd just spend the night there. While I was lying there, Betsy's engine started and I chuckled. Betsy was disgusted and was going home without me. That's the kind of car she was. Just like a wife'd act.  turn and headed for the road. At the road, she stopped and looked for other cars, then went out on the highway, heading straight for home. I wasn't worried any. I knew I could trust Betsy. We'd been through a lot together and she was intelligent, although I couldn't remember she'd ever gone home all by herself before. I lay there and thought about it and the wonder of it was, I told myself, that it hadn't happened long before. A man is as close to no machine as he is to his car. A man gets to understand his car and his car gets to understand him and after a time a real affection must grow up between them. So it seemed absolutely natural to me that the day had to come when a car could be trusted just the way a horse or dog is, and that a good car should be as loyal and faithful as any dog or horse. II I lay there feeling happy and Betsy went head high down the road and turned in at the driveway. But we had no more than stopped when there was a squeal of brakes and I heard a car door open and someone jump out on the gravel. I tried to get up, but I was a bit slow about it and someone jerked the door open and reached in and grabbed me by the collar and hauled me out. The man wore the uniform of a state trooper and there was another trooper just a little ways away and the police car stood there with its red light flashing. I wondered why I hadn't noticed it had been following us and then remembered I'd been lying down. "Who was driving that car?" barked the cop who was holding me. Before I could answer, the other cop looked inside Betsy and jumped back about a dozen feet. "Slade!" he yelled. "There's a skunk in there!" "Don't tell me," said Slade, "that the skunk was driving." And the other one said, "At least the skunk is sober." "You leave that skunk alone!" I told them. "He's a friend of mine. He isn't bothering no one." I gave a jerk and Slade's hand slipped from my collar and I lunged for Betsy. My chest hit the seat and I grabbed the steering post and tried to pull myself inside. Betsy started up with a sudden roar and her wheels threw gravel that hit the police car like machine-gun fire. She lurched forward and crashed through the picket fence, curving for the road. She smashed into the lilac thicket and went through it and I was brushed off. I lay there, all tangled up with the smashed-down lilac bushes and watched Betsy hit the road and keep on going. She had done the best she could, I consoled myself. She had tried to rescue me and it wasn't her fault that I had failed to hang onto her. Now she had to make a run for it herself. And she seemed to be doing pretty well. She sounded and went like she had an engine off a battleship inside her. HP HE two state troopers jumped into their car and took off in pursuit and I settled down to figure out how to untangle myself from the lilac thicket. I finally managed it and went over to the front steps of the shack and sat down. I got to thinking about the fence and decided it wasn't worth repairing. I might just as well uproot it and use what was left of it for kindling. And I wondered about Betsy and what might be happening to her, but I wasn't really worried. I was pretty sure she could take care of herself. I was right about that, for in a little while the state troopers came back again and parked in the driveway. They saw me sitting on the steps and came over to me. "Where's Betsy?" I asked them. "Betsy who?" Slade asked. "Betsy is the car," I said. Slade swore. "Got away. Traveling without lights at a hundred miles an hour. It'll smash into something, sure as hell." I shook my head at that. "Not Betsy. She knows all the roads for fifty miles around." Slade thought I was being smart. He grabbed me and jerked me to my feet. "You got a lot to explain." He shoved me at the other trooper and the other trooper caught me. "Toss him in the back seat, Ernie, and let's get going." Ernie didn't seem to be as sore as Slade. He said: "This way, Pop." Once they got me in the car, they didn't want to talk with me. Ernie rode in back with me and Slade drove. We hadn't gone a mile when I dozed off. When I woke up, we were just pulling into the parking area in front of the state police barracks. I got out and tried to walk, but one of them got on each side of me and practically dragged me along. We went into a sort of office with a desk, some chairs and a bench. A man sat behind the desk. "What you got there?" he asked. "Damned if I know," said Slade, all burned up. "You won't believe it, Captain." Ernie took me over to a chair and sat me down. "I'll get you some coffee, Pop. We want to talk with you. We have to get you sober." I thought that was nice of him. I drank a lot of coffee and I began to see a little better and things were in straight lines instead of going round in circles -- things I could see, that is. It was different when I tried to think. Things that had seemed okay before now seemed mighty queer, like Betsy going home all by herself, for instance. to the desk and the captain asked me a lot of questions about who I was and how old I was and where I lived, until eventually we got around to what was on their minds. I didn't hold back anything. I told them about the jets and the skunks and the talk I had with the colonel. I told them about the dogs and the friendly skunk and how Betsy had got disgusted with me and gone home by herself. "Tell me, Mr. Bayles," said the captain, "are you a mechanic? I know you told me you are a day laborer and work at anything that you can get. But I wonder if you might not tinker around in your spare time, working on your car." "Captain," I told him truthfully, "I wouldn't know which end of a wrench to grab hold of." "You never worked on Betsy, then?" "Just took good care of her." "Has anyone else ever worked on her?" "I wouldn't let no one lay a hand on her." "Then you can't explain how that car could possibly operate by itself?" "No, sir. Betsy is a smart car, Captain -- " "You're sure you weren't driving?" "I wasn't driving. I was just taking it easy while Betsy took me home." The captain threw down his pencil in disgust. "I give up!" He got up from the desk. "I'm going out and make some more coffee," he said to Slade. "You see what you can do." "There's one thing," Ernie said to Slade as the captain left. "The skunk -- " "What about the skunk?" "Skunks don't wave their tails," said Ernie. "Skunks don't purr." "This skunk did," Slade said sarcastically. "This was a special skunk. This was a ring-tailed wonder of a skunk. Besides, the skunk hasn't got a thing to do with it. He was just out for a ride." "You boys haven't got a little nip?" I asked. I was feeling mighty low. "Sure," said Ernie. He went to a locker in one corner of the room and took out a bottle. Through, the windows, I could see that the east was beginning to brighten. Dawn wasn't far away. T" I HE telephone rang. Slade picked it up. Ernie motioned to me and I walked across to where he stood by the locker. He handed me the bottle. "Take it easy, Pop," he advised me, "You don't want to hang one on again." I took it easy. About a tumbler and a half, I'd reckon. Slade hollered, "Hey!" at us. "What's going on?" asked Ernie. He took the bottle from me, not by force exactly, but almost. "A farmer found the car," said Slade. "It took a shot at his dog." "It took a what -- a shot at his dogs?" Ernie stuttered. "That's what the fellow says. Went out to get in the cows. Early. Going fishing and was anxious to get the morning chores done. Found what he thought was an abandoned car at the end of a lane." "And the shot?" "I'm coming to that. Dog ran up barking. The car shot out a spark -- a big spark. It knocked the dog over. He got up and ran. Car shot out another spark. Caught him in the rump. Fellow says the pooch is blistered." Slade headed for the door. "Come on, the both of you." "We may need you, Pop," said Ernie. We ran out and piled into the car. "Where is this farm?" asked Ernie. "Out west of the air base," said Slade. The farmer was waiting for us at the barnyard gate. He jumped in when Slade stopped. 'The car's still there," he said. "I been watching. It hasn't come out." "Any other way it could get out?" "Nope. Woods and fields is all. That lane is dead end." Slade grunted in satisfaction. He drove down the road and ran the police car across the mouth of the lane, blocking it entirely. 'We walk from here," he said. "Right around that bend," the farmer told us. We walked around the bend and saw it was Betsy, all right. "That's my car," I said. "Let's scatter out a bit," said Slade. "It might start shooting at us." He loosened the gun in his holster. "Don't you go shooting up my car," I warned him, but he paid me no mind. Like he said, we scattered out a bit, the four of us, and went toward the car. It seemed funny that we should be acting that way, as if Betsy was an enemy and we were stalking her. She looked the same as ever, just an old beat-up jalopy that had a lot of sense and a lot of loyalty. And I kept thinking about how she always got me places and always got me back. Then all at once she charged us. She was headed in the wrong direction and she was backing up, but she charged us just the same. She gave a little leap and was running at full speed and going faster every second and I saw Slade pull his gun. X of the lane and waved my arms. I didn't trust that Slade. I was afraid that if I couldn't get Betsy stopped, he'd shoot her full of holes. But Betsy didn't stop. She kept right on charging us and she was going faster than an old wreck like her had any right to go. "Jump, you fool!" shouted Ernie. "She'll run over you!" I jumped, but my heart wasn't in the jump. I thought that if things had come to the pass where Betsy'd run me down, there wasn't too much left for me to go on living for. I stubbed my toe and fell flat on my face, but even while I was falling, I saw Betsy leave the ground as if she was going to leap over me. I knew right away that I'd never been in any danger, that Betsy never had any intention of hitting me at all. She sailed right up into the sky, with her wheels still spinning, as if she was backing up a long, steep hill that was invisible. I twisted around and sat up and stared at her and she sure was a pretty sight. She was flying just like an airplane. I was downright proud of her. Slade stood with his mouth open and his gun hanging at his side. He never even tried to fire it. He probably forgot that he even had a gun in his hand. Betsy went up above the treeline and the Sun made her sparkle and gleam -- I'd polished her only the week before last -- and I thought how swell it was she had learned to fly. It was then I saw the jet and I tried to yell a warning for Betsy, but my mouth dried up like there was alum in it and the yell wouldn't come out. It didn't take more than a second, probably, although it seemed to me that days passed while Betsy hung there and the jet hung there and I knew they would crash. Then there were pieces flying all over the sky and the jet was smoking and heading for a cornfield off to the left of us. I sat there limp in the middle of the lane and watched the pieces that had been Betsy falling back to Earth and I felt sick. It was an awful thing to see. The pieces came down and you could hear them falling, thudding on the ground, but there was one piece that didn't fall as fast as the others. It just seemed to glide. I watched, wondering why it glided while all the other pieces fell and I saw it was a fender and that it seemed to be rocking back and forth, as if it wanted to fall, too, only something held it back. It glided down to the ground near the edge of the woods. It landed easy and rocked a little, then tipped over. And when it tipped over, it spilled something out of it. The thing got up and shook itself and trotted straight into the woods. It was the friendly skunk! running. Ernie was running for the farmhouse to phone the base about the jet and Slade and the farmer were running toward the cornfield, where the jet had plowed a path in the corn wide enough to haul a barn through. I got up and walked off the lane to where I had seen some pieces falling. I found a few of them -- a headlight, the lens not even broken, and a wheel, all caved in and twisted, and the radiator ornament. It knew it was no use. No one could ever get Betsy back together. I stood there with the radiator ornament in my hand and thought of all the good times Betsy and I had had together -- how she'd take me to the tavern and wait until I was ready to go home, and how we'd go fishing and eat a picnic lunch together, and how we'd go up north deer hunting in the fall. While I was standing there, Slade and the farmer came down from the cornfield with the pilot walking between them. He was sort of rubber-legged and they were holding him up. He had a glassy look in his eyes and he was babbling a bit. When they reached the lane, they let loose of him and he sat down heavily. "When the hell," he asked them, "did they start making flying cars?" They didn't answer him. Instead, Slade yelled at me, "Hey, Pop! You leave that wreckage alone. Don't touch none of it" "I got a right to touch it," I told him. "It's my car." "You leave it alone! There's something funny going on here. That junk might tell us what it is if no one monkeys with it" So I dropped the radiator ornament and went back to the lane. The four of us sat down and waited. The pilot seemed to be all right. He had a cut above one eye and some blood had run down across his face, but that was all that was the matter with him. He asked for a cigarette and Slade gave him one and lit it. Down at the end of the lane, we heard Ernie backing the police car out of the way. Pretty soon he came walking up to us. "They'll be here right away." He sat down with us. We didn't say anything about what had happened. I guess we were all afraid to talk. In less than fifteen minutes, the air base descended on us. First there was an ambulance and they loaded the pilot aboard and left in a lot of dust. Behind the ambulance was a fire rig and behind the fire rig was a jeep with the colonel in it Behind the colonel's jeep were other jeeps and three or four trucks, all loaded with men, and in less time than it takes to tell it the place was swarming. TP HE colonel was red in the face and you could see he was upset. After all, why wouldn't he be? This was the first time a plane had ever collided in midair with a car. The colonel came tramping up to Slade and he started hollering at Slade and Slade hollered right back at him and I wondered why they were sore at one another, but that wasn't it at all. That was just the way they talked when they got excited. All around, there was a lot of running here and there and a lot more hollering, but it didn't last too long. Before the colonel got through yelling back and forth with Slade, the entire area was ringed in with men and the situation was in Air Force hands. When the colonel finished talking with Slade, he walked over to me. "So it was your car," he said. The way he said it, you'd thought it was my fault. "Yes, it was," I told him, "and I'm going to sue you. That was a dam good car." The colonel went on looking at me as if I had no right to live, then suddenly seemed to recognize me. "Say, wait a minute," he said. "Weren't you in to see me just the other day?" "I sure was. I told you about my skunks. It was one of them that was in Old Betsy." "Hold up there, old-timer," said the colonel. "You lost me. Let's hear that again." "Old Betsy was the car," I explained, "and the skunk was in her. When your jet crashed into it, he rode a fender down." "You mean the skunk -- the fender -- the -- " "It just sort of floated down," I finished telling him. "Corporal," the colonel said to Slade, "have you further use for this man?" "Just drunkenness," said Slade. "Not worth mentioning." "I'd like to take him back to the base with me." "I'd appreciate it," Slade said in a quivery kind of voice. "Come on, then," said the colonel and I followed him to the jeep. We sat in the back seat and a soldier drove and he didn't waste no time. The colonel and I didn't talk much. We just hung on and hoped that we'd live through it. At least, that's the way I felt. Back at the base, the colonel sat down at his desk and pointed at a chair for me to sit in. Then he leaned back and studied me. I was sure glad I had done nothing wrong, for the way he looked at me, I'd just have had to up and confess it if I had. "You said some queer things back there," the colonel started. "Now suppose you just rear back comfortable in that chair and tell me all about it, not leaving out a thing." So I told him all about it and I went into a lot of detail to explain my viewpoint and he didn't interrupt, but just sat listening. He was the best listener I ever ran across. reached for a pad and pencil. "Let's get a few points down," he said. "You say the car had never operated by itself before?" "Not that I know of," I answered honestly. "It might have practiced while I wasn't looking, of course." "And it never flew before?" I shook my head. "And when it did both of these things, there was this skunk of yours aboard?" "That's right" "And you say this skunk glided down in a fender after the crash?" "The fender tipped over and the critter ran into the woods." "Don't you think it's a little strange that the fender should glide down when all the other wreckage fell ker-plunk?" I admitted that it did seem slightly strange. "Now about this skunk. You say it purred?" "It purred real pretty." "And waved its tail?" "Just like a dog," I said. The colonel pushed the pad away and leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms and sort of hugged himself. "As a matter of personal knowledge," he told me, "gained from years of boyhood trapping, I can tell you that no skunk purrs or ever wags its tail." "I know what you're thinking," I said, indignant, "but I wasn't that drunk. I'd had a drink or two to while away the time I was waiting for the jet. But I saw the skunk real plain and I knew he was a skunk and I can remember that he purred. He was a friendly cuss. He acted as if he liked me and he -- " "Okay," the colonel said. "Okay." We sat there looking at one another. All at once, he grinned. "You know," he said, "I find quite suddenly that I need an aide." "I ain't joining up," I replied stubbornly. "You couldn't get me within a quarter mile of one of them jets. Not if you roped and tied me." "A civilian aide. Three hundred a month and keep ." "Colonel, I don't hanker none for the military life." "And all the liquor you can drink." "Where do I sign?" I asked. And that is how I got to be the colonel's aide. I thought he was crazy and I still think so. He'd been a whole lot better off if he'd quit right there. But he had an idea by the tail and he was the kind of gambling fool who'd ride a hunch to death. We got along just fine, although at times we had our differences. The first one was over that foolish business about confining me to base. I raised quite a ruckus, but he made it stick. "You'd go out and get slobbered up and gab your head off," he told me. "I want you to button up your lip and keep it buttoned up. Why else do you think I hired you?" wasn't a blessed thing to do. I never had to lift my hand to do a lick of work. The chow was fit to eat and I had a place to sleep and the colonel kept his word about all the liquor I could drink. For several days, I saw nothing of him. Then one afternoon, I dropped around to pass the time of day. I hadn't more than got there when a sergeant came in with a bunch of papers in his hand. He seemed to be upset. "Here's the report on that car, sir," he said. The colonel took the papers and leafed through a few of them. "Sergeant, I can't make head nor tail of this." "Some of it I can't, either, sir." "Now this?" said the colonel, pointing. "That's a computer, sir." "Cars don't have computers." "Well, sir, that's what I said, too. But we found the place where it was attached to the engine block." "Attached? Welded?" "Well, not exactly welded. Like it was a part of the block. Like it had been cast as a part of it. There was no sign of welding." "You're sure it's a computer?" "Connally said it was, sir. He knows about computers. But it's not like any he's ever seen before. It works on a different principle than any he has seen, he says. But he says it makes a lot of sense, sir. The principle, that is. He says -- " "Well, go on!" the colonel yelled. "He says its capacity is at least a thousand times that of the best computer that we have. He says it might not be stretching your imagination too far to say that it's intelligent." "How do you mean -- intelligent?" "Well, Connally says a rig like that might be capable of thinking for itself, sir." "My God!" the colonel said. He sat there for a minute, as if he might be thinking. Then he turned a page and pointed at something else. "That's another part, sir," the sergeant said. "A drawing of the part. We don't know what it is." "Don't know!" "We never saw anything like it, sir. We don't have any idea what it might be for. It was attached to the transmission, sir." "And this?" "That's an analysis of the gasoline. Funny thing about that, sir. We found the tank, all twisted out of shape, but there was some gas still left in it. It hadn't -- " "But why an analysis?" "Because it's not gasoline, sir. It is something else. It was gasoline, but it's been changed, sir." "Is that all, Sergeant?" THE sergeant, I could see, was beginning to sweat a little. "No, sir, there's more to it. It's all in that report. We got most all the wreckage, sir. Just bits here and there are missing. We are working now on reassembling it." "Reassembling -- " "Maybe, sir, pasting it back together is a better way to put it." "It will never run again?" "I don't think so, sir. It's pretty well smashed up. But if it could be put back together whole, it would be the best car that was ever made. The speedometer says # miles, but it's in new-car condition. And there are alloys in it that we can't even guess at." The sergeant paused. "If you'll permit me, sir, it's a very funny business." "Yes, indeed," the colonel said. "Thank you, Sergeant. A very funny business." The sergeant turned to leave. "Just a minute," said the colonel. "Yes, sir." "I'm sorry about this, Sergeant, but you and the entire detail that was assigned to the car are restricted to the base. I don't want this leaking out. Tell your men, will you? I'll make it tough on anyone who talks." "Yes, sir," the sergeant said, saluting very polite, but looking like he could have slit the colonel's throat. When the sergeant was gone, the colonel said to me: "Asa, if there's something that you should say now and you fail to say it and it comes out later and makes a fool of me, I'll wring your scrawny little neck." "Cross my heart," I said. He looked at me funny. "Do you know what that skunk was?" I shook my head. "It wasn't any skunk," he said. "I guess it's up to us to find out what it is." "But it isn't here. It ran into the woods." "It could be hunted down." "Just you and me?" "Why just you and me when there are two thousand men right on this base?" "But-" "You mean they wouldn't take too kindly to hunting down a skunk?" "Something like that, Colonel. They might go out, but they wouldn't hunt. They'd try not to find it." "They'd hunt if there was five thousand dollars waiting for the man who brought the right one in." I looked at him as if he'd gone off his rocker, "Believe me," said the colonel, "it would be worth it. Every penny of it." I told you he was crazy. hunters. I knew just how little chance there was of ever finding it. It could have gotten clear out of the county by that time or found a place to hole up where one would never find it. And, anyhow, I didn't need five thousand. I was drawing down good pay and drinking regular. The next day, I dropped in to see the colonel. The medical officer was having words with him. "You got to call it off!" the sawbones shouted. "I can't call it off," the colonel yelled. "I have to have that animal." "You ever see a man who tried to catch a skunk bare-handed?" "No, I never have." "I got eleven of them now," the sawbones said. "I won't have no more of it." "Captain," said the colonel, "you may have a lot more than eleven before this is all over." "You mean you won't call it off, sir?" "No, I won't." "Then I'll have it stopped." "Captain!" said the colonel and his voice was deadly. 'You're insane," the sawbones said. "No court martial in the land -- " "Captain." But the captain did not answer. He turned straight around and left. The colonel looked at me. "It's sometimes tough," he said. I knew that someone better find that skunk or the colonel's name was mud. "What I don't understand," I said, "is why you want that skunk. He's just a skunk that purrs." The colonel sat down at his desk and put his head between his hands. "My God," he moaned, "how stupid can men get?" "Pretty stupid," I told him, "but I still don't understand -- " "Look," the colonel said, "someone jiggered up that car of yours. You say you didn't do it. You say no one else could have done it. The boys who are working on it say there's stuff in it that's not been even thought of." "If you think that skunk -- " The colonel raised his fist and smacked it on the desk. "Not a skunk! Something that looks like a skunk! Something that knows more about machines than you or I or any human being will ever get to know!" "But it hasn't got no hands. How could it do what you think?" The door burst in and two of the saddest sacks outside the guardhouse stumbled in. They didn't bother to salute. "Colonel, sir," one of them said, heaving hard. "Colonel, sir, we got one. We didn't even have to catch it. We whistled at it and it followed us." The skunk walked in behind them, waving its tail and purring. It walked right over to me and rubbed against my legs. When I reached down and picked it up, it purred so loud I was afraid it would go ahead and explode. "That the one?" the colonel asked me. "He's the one," I said. The colonel grabbed the phone. "Get me Washington. General Sanders. At the Pentagon." He waved his hand at us. "Get out of here!" "But, Colonel, sir, the money -- " "You'll get it. Now get out of here." He looked exactly like you might imagine a man might look right after he's been told he's not going to be shot at dawn. We turned around and got out of there. At the door, four of the toughest-looking hombres this side of Texas were waiting, with rifles in their hands. "Don't pay no attention to us, Mac," one of them said to me. 'We're just your bodyguards." They were my bodyguards, all right. They went every place I went. And the skunk went with me, too. That, of course, was why they stuck around. They didn't care a rap about me. It was the skunk that was getting the bodyguarding. And that skunk stuck closer to me than paper to the wall. He followed at my heels and walked between my feet, but mostly he wanted me to carry him or to let him perch on my shoulder. And he purred all the blessed time. Either he figured I was the only true friend he had or he thought I was a soft touch. Life got a little complicated. The skunk slept with me and the four guards stayed in the room. The skunk and one of the guards went to the latrine with me while the others kept close. I had no privacy at all. I said it wasn't decent. I said it was unconstitutional. It didn't make no difference. There was nothing I could do. There were, it turned out, twelve of them guards and they worked in eight-hour shifts. For a couple of days, I didn't see the colonel and I thought it was funny how he couldn't rest until he'd found the skunk and then paid no attention to it. what the colonel had said about the skunk not being a skunk at all, but something that only looked like a skunk and how it might know more, some ways, than we did. And the more I lived with it, the more I began to believe that he might be right. Although it still seemed impossible that any critter without hands could know much about machinery in the first place, let alone do anything about it. Then I got to remembering how me and Betsy had understood each other and I carried that a little further, imagining how a man and machine might get to know one another so well, they could even talk together and how the man, even if he didn't have hands, might help the machine to improve itself. And while it sounds somewhat far-fetched just telling it, thinking of it in the secrecy of one's mind made it sound all right and it gave a sort of warm feeling to imagine that one could get to be downright personal friendly with machines. When you come to think of it, it's not so far-fetched, either. Perhaps, I told myself, when I had gone into the tavern and had left the skunk bedded down in Betsy, the skunk might have looked her over and felt sorry for such a heap of junk, like you or I would feel sorry for a homeless cat or an injured dog. And maybe the skunk had set out, right then and there, to fix her up as best he could, probably cannibalizing some metal here and there, from places where it would not be missed, to grow the computer and the other extra pieces on her. Probably he couldn't understand, for the life of him, why they'd been left off to start with. Maybe, to him, a machine was no machine at all without those pieces on it. More than likely, he thought Betsy was just a botchedup job. The guards began calling the skunk Stinky and that was a libel because he never stunk a bit, but was one of the best-mannered, even-tempered animals that I have ever been acquainted with. I told them it wasn't right, but they just laughed at me, and before long the whole base knew about the name and everywhere we went they'd yell "Hi, Stinky" at us. He didn't seem to mind, so I began to think of him as Stinky, too. I got it figured out to my own satisfaction that maybe Stinky could have fixed up Betsy and even why he fixed up Betsy. But the one thing I couldn't figure out was where he'd come from to start with. I thought on it a lot and came up with no answers except some foolish ones that were too much for even me to swallow. I went over to see the colonel a couple of times, but the sergeants and the lieutenants threw me out before I could get to see him. So I got sore about it and decided not to go there any more until he sent for me. kNE day, he did send for me -'and when I got there, the place was crowded with a lot of brass. The colonel was talking to an old gray-haired, eagle-beaked gent who had a fierce look about him and a rat-trap jaw and was wearing stars. "General," said the colonel, "may I introduce Stinky's special friend?" The general shook hands with me. Stinky, who was riding on my shoulder, purred at him. The general took a good look at Stinky. "Colonel," he said, "I hope to God you're right. Because if you aren't and this business ever leaks, the Air Force goose is cooked. The Army and the Navy would never let us live it down and what Congress would do to us would be a crimson shame." The colonel gulped a little. "Sir, I'm sure I'm right." "I don't know why I let myself get talked into this," the general said. "It's the most hare-brained scheme I have ever heard of." He had another squint at Stinky. "He looks like a common skunk to me," the general said. The colonel introduced me to a bunch of other colonels and a batch of majors, but he didn't bother with the captains if there were any there and I shook hands with them and Stinky purred at them and everything was cozy. One of the colonels picked up Stinky, but he kicked up quite a fuss trying to get back to me. The general said to me, "You seem to be the one he wants to be with." "He's a friend of mine," I explained. "I be damned," the general said. After lunch, the colonel and the general came for me and Stinky and we went over to a hangar. The place had been cleared out and there was only one plane in it, one of the newer jets. There was a mob of people waiting for us, some of them military, but a lot of them were technicians in ordinary clothes or in dungarees. Some of them had clipboards tucked under their arms and some were carrying tools or what I imagined must be tools, although never before have I ever seen contraptions such as those. And there were different pieces of equipment scattered here and there. "Now, Asa," the colonel said to me, "I want you to get into that jet with Stinky." "And do what?" I asked. "Just get in and sit But don't touch anything. You might get the detail all fouled up." It seemed a funny business and I hesitated. "Don't be afraid," the general assured me. "There won't nothing happen. You just get in and sit" So I did and it was a foolish business. I climbed up where the pilot sits and sat down in his seat and it was a crazy-looking place. There were instruments and gadgets and doodads all over. I was almost afraid to move for fear of touching one of them because God knows what might have happened if I had. myself interested for a time by just looking at all the stuff and trying to figure out what it was for, but I never rightly got much of it figured out But finally I had looked at everything a hundred times and puzzled over it and there wasn't anything more to do and I was awful bored. But I remembered all the money I was pulling down and the free drinking I was getting and I thought if a man just had to sit in a certain place to earn it, why, it was all right. Stinky didn't pay any attention to any of the stuff. He settled down in my lap and went to sleep, or at least he seamed to go to sleep. He took it easy, for a fact. Once in a while, he opened an eye or twitched an ear, but that was all he did. I hadn't thought much about it at first, but after I'd sat there for an hour or so, I began to get an idea of why they wanted me and Stinky in the plane. They figured, I told myself, that if they put Stinky in the ship, he might feel sorry for it, too, and do the same kind of job on it as he had done on Betsy. But if that was what they thought, they sure were getting fooled, for Stinky didn't do a thing except curl up and go to sleep. We sat there for several hours and finally they told us that we could get out. And that is how Operation Stinky got off to a start. That is what they called all that foolishness. It does beat hell, the kind of names the Air Force can think up. It went on like that for several days. Me and Stinky would go out in the morning and sit in a plane for several hours, then take a break for noon, then go back for a few hours more. Stinky didn't seem to mind. He'd just as soon be there as anywhere. All he'd do would be curl up in my lap and in five minutes he'd be dozing. As the days went on, the general and the colonel and all the technicians who cluttered up the hangar got more and more excited. They didn't say a word, but you could see they were aching to bust out, only they held it back. And I couldn't understand that, for as far as I could see, there was nothing whatsoever happening. Apparently their work didn't end when Stinky and I left. Evening after evening, lights burned in the hangar and a gang was working there and they had guards around three deep. One day they pulled out the jet we had been sitting in and hauled in another and we sat in that and it was just the same as it had been before. Nothing really happened. And yet the air inside that hangar was so filled with tension and excitement, you could fairly light a fire with it. It sure beat me what was going on. Gradually the same sort of tension spread throughout the entire base and there were some funny goings-on. You never saw an outfit that was faster on its toes. A construction gang moved in and started to put up buildings and as soon as one of them was completed, machinery was installed. More and more people kept arriving until the base began to look like an anthill with a hotfoot.  with the guards trailing along beside me, I found out something else that made my eyes bug. They were installing a twelve-foot woven fence, topped with barbed wire, all around the area. And inside the fence, there were so many guards, they almost walked on one another. I was a little scared when I got back from the walk, because from what I saw, this thing I'd been pitchforked into was bigger and more important than I had ever dreamed. Up until then, I'd figured it was just a matter of the colonel having his neck stuck out so far, he could never pull it back. All along, I had been feeling sorry for him because that general looked like the kind of gent who would stand for just so much tomfoolery before he lowered the boom. It was about this time that they began to dig a big pit out in the center of one of the runways. I went over one day to watch it and it didn't make no sense at all. Here they had a nice, smooth runway they'd spent a lot of money to construct and now they were digging it up to make what looked like a swimming pool. I asked around about it, but the people that I talked to either didn't know or they weren't talking. Me and Stinky kept on sitting in the planes. We were on our sixth one now. And there wasn't any change. I sat, bored stiff, while Stinky took it easy. One evening the colonel sent a sergeant over to say he'd like to see me. I went in and sat down and put Stinky on the desk. He lay down on top of it and looked from one to the other of us. "Asa," said the colonel, "I think we got it made." "You mean you been getting stuff?" "We've got enough we actually understand to give us unquestioned air superiority. We're a good ten years, if not a hundred, depending on how much we can use, ahead of the rest of them. They'll never catch us now." "But all Stinky did was sleep!" "All he did," the colonel said, "was to redesign each ship. In some instances, there were principles involved that don't make a bit of sense, but I'll bet they will later. And in other cases, what he did was so simple and so basic that we're wondering why we never thought of it ourselves." "Colonel, what is Stinky?" "I don't know," he said. "You got an idea, though." "Sure, an idea. But that's all it is. It embarrasses me even to think of it." "I don't embarrass easy." "Okay, then -- Stinky is like nothing on Earth. My guess is that he's from some other planet, maybe even some other solar system. I think he crossed space to us. How or why, I have no notion. His ship might have been wrecked and he got into a lifeboat and made it here." "But if there was a lifeboat -- " "We've combed every foot of ground for miles around." "And no lifeboat?" "No lifeboat," said the colonel. a little doing, but I did it Then I got to wondering about something else. "Colonel," I said, "you claim Stinky fixed up the ships, made them even better. Now how could he have done that with no hands and just sleeping and never touching a thing?" "You tell me," said the colonel. "I've heard a bunch of guesses. The only one that makes any kind of sense -- and cockeyed sense at that -- is telekinesis." I sat there and admired that word. "What's it mean. Colonel?" I wanted to use it on the boys at the tavern, if I ever got back there, and I wanted to get it right. "Moving things by the power of thought," he said. "But there wasn't nothing moved," I objected. "All the improvements in Betsy and the planes came from right inside them, not stuff moved in." "That could be done by telekinesis, too." I shook my head, thoughtfullike. "Ain't the way I see it." "Go ahead," he sighed. "Let's hear your theory. No reason you should be an exception." "I think Stinky's got a kind of mental green thumb for machines," I said. "Like some people got green thumbs for plants, only he's got -- " The colonel took a long, hard frown at me. Then he nodded very slowly. "I see what you mean. Those new parts weren't moved in or around. They were grown" "Something like that. Maybe he can make a machine come kind of alive and improve itself, grow parts that'll make it a better and happier and more efficient machine." "Sounds silly when you say it," the colonel said, "but it makes a lot more sense than any of the other ideas. Man's been working with machines -- real machines, that is -- only a century or two. Make that ten thousand or a million years and it might not seem so silly." We sat in silence while the twilight crept into the room and I think the both of us must have been thinking the same thing. Thinking of the black night that lay out beyond Earth and of how Stinky must have crossed it And wondering, too, about what kind of world he came from and why he might have left it and what happened to him out in the long dark that forced him to look for asylum on Earth. Thinking, too, I guess, about the ironic circumstance that had cast him on a planet where his nearest counterpart was a little animal that no cared to have much to do with. the colonel said, "is why he does it. Why does he do it for us?" "He doesn't do it for us," I answered. "He does it for the planes. He feels sorry for them." The door burst open and the general came tramping in. He was triumphant. Dusk had crept into the room and I don't think he saw me. "We got an okay!" he gloated. The ship will be in tomorrow. The Pentagon agrees!" "General," said the colonel, "we're pushing this too hard. It's time for us to begin to lay some sort of grounds for basic understanding. We've grabbed what we can grab the quickest. We've exploited this little cuss right up to the hilt. We have a lot of data -- " "Not all we need!" the general bellowed. "What we have been doing has been just sort of practice. We have no data on the Aship. That is where we need it." "What we need as well is an understanding of this creature. An understanding of how he does it. If we could talk to him -- " "Talk!" the general shouted. "Yes, talk!" the colonel shouted back. "He keeps purring all the time. That may be his means of communication. The men who found him simply whistled and he came. That was communication. If we had a little patience -- " "We have no time for patience, Colonel." "General, we can't simply wring him dry. He's done a lot for us. Let's give the little guy a break. He's the one who has had the patience-waiting for us to communicate with him, hoping that someday we'll recognize him for what he is!" They were yelling at one another and the colonel must have forgotten I was there. It was embarrassing. I held out my arms to Stinky and he jumped into them. I tiptoed across the room and went out as quietly as I could. That night, I lay in bed with Stinky curled up on the covers at my feet. The four guards sat in the room, quiet as watchful mice. I thought about what the colonel had said to the general and my heart went out to Stinky. I thought how awful it would be if a man suddenly was dumped into a world of skunks who didn't care a rap about him except that he could dig the deepest and slickest burrows that skunks had ever seen and that he could dig them quick. And there were so many burrows to be dug that not one of the skunks would take the time to understand this man, to try to talk with him or to help him out. I lay there feeling sorry and wishing there was something I could do. Then Stinky came walking up the covers and crawled in under them with me and I put out my hand and held him tight against me while he purred softly at me. And that is how we went to sleep. r  I HE next afternoon, the A-ship arrived. The last of three that had been built, it was still experimental. It was a monster and we stood far back behind a line of guards and watched it come mushing down, settling base-first into the water-filled rocket pit they'd dug out on the runway. Finally it was down and it stood there, a bleak, squat thing that somehow touched one with awe just to look at it. The crew came down the ladder and the launch went out to get them. They were a bunch of cocky youngsters and you could sense the pride in them. Next morning, we went out to the ship. I rode in the launch with the general and the colonel, and while the boat bobbed against the ladder, they had another difference of opinion. "I still think it's too risky, General," said the colonel. "It's all right to fool around with jets, but an atomic ship is a different matter. If Stinky goes fooling with that pile -- " The general said, tight-lipped: "We have to take the chance." The colonel shrugged and went up the ladder. The general motioned to me and I went up with Stinky perched on my shoulder. The general followed. Whereas Stinky and I before this had been in a ship alone, this time a picked crew of technicians came aboard as well. There was plenty of room and it was the only way they could study what Stinky might be doing. And I imagined that, with an A-ship, the'd want to keep close check. I sat down in the pilot's chair and Stinky settled himself in my lap. The colonel stayed with us for a while, but after a time he left and we were alone. I was nervous. What the colonel had said made good sense to me. But the day wore on and nothing happened and I began to feel that perhaps the colonel had been wrong. It went on for four days like that and I settled into routine. I wasn't nervous any longer. We could depend on Stinky, I told myself. He wouldn't do anything to harm us. By the way the technicians were behaving and the grin the general wore, I knew that Stinky must be performing up to expectations. On the fifth day, as we were going out, the colonel said: "This should wind it up." I was glad to hear it. We were almost ready to knock off for noon when it happened. I can't tell you exactly how it was, for it was a bit confusing. It was almost as if someone had shouted, although no one had. I half rose out of the chair, then sat back again. And someone shouted once more. about to happen. I could feel it in my bones. I knew I had to get out of the A-ship and get out fast. It was fear -- unreasoning fear. And over and above the fear, I knew I could not leave. It was my job to stay. I had to stick it out. I grabbed the chair arms and hung on and tried my best to stay. Then the panic hit me and there was nothing I could do. There was no way to fight it. I leaped out of the chair, dumping Stinky from my lap. I reached the door and fought it open, then turned back. "Stinky!" I shouted. I started across the room to reach him, but halfway across, the panic hit me again and I turned and bolted in blind flight. I went clattering down the catwalk and from below me came the sound of running and the yells of frightened men. I knew then that I had been right, that I had not been cowardly altogether -- there was something wrong. Men were pouring out of the port of the big A-ship when I got there and scrambling down the ladder. The launch was coming out to pick them up. One man fell off the ladder into the water and began to swim. Out on the field, ambulances and fire rigs were racing toward the water pit and the siren atop the operations building was wailing like a stepped-on tomcat. I looked at the faces around me. They were set and white and I knew that all the men were just as scared as I was and somehow, instead of getting scareder, I got a lot of comfort from it. They went on tumbling down the ladder and more men fell in the drink, and I have no doubt at all that if someone had held a stopwatch on them, there'd have been swimming records falling. I got in line to wait my turn and I thought again of Stinky and stepped out of line and started back to save him. But halfway up the catwalk, my courage ran plumb out and I was too scared to go on. The funny thing about it was that I didn't have the least idea what there was to scare me. I went down the ladder among the last of them and piled into the launch, which was loaded so heavily that it barely crept back to solid ground. The medical officer was running around and shouting to get the swimmers into decontamination and men were running everywhere and shouting and the fire rigs stood there racing their motors while the siren went on shrieking. "Get back!" someone was shouting. "Run! Everybody back!" So, of course, we ran like a flock of spooked sheep. Then a wordless yell went up and we turned around. The atomic ship was rising slowly from the pit. Beneath it, the water seethed and boiled. The ship rose steadily, gracefully, without a single shudder or shake. It went straight up into the sky, up and out of sight.  was standing in dead silence. No one was stirring. No one was making any noise. Everybody just stood and stared into the sky. The siren had shut off. I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. It was the general. "Stinky?" he asked. "He wouldn't come," I answered, feeling low. "I was too scared to go and get him." The general wheeled and headed off across the field. For no reason I can think of, I turned and followed him. He broke into a run and I loped along beside him. We stormed into operations and went piling up the stairs to the tracking room. The general bellowed: "You got a fix on it?" "Yes, sir, we're tracking it right now." "Good," the general said, breathing heavily. "Fine. We'll have to run it down. Tell me where it's headed." "Straight out, sir. It still is heading out." "How far?" "About five thousand miles, sir" "But it can't do that!" the general roared. "It can't navigate in space!" He turned around and bumped into me. "Get out of my way!" He went thumping down the stairs. I followed him down, but outside the building I went another way. I passed administration and there was the colonel standing outside. I wasn't going to stop, but he called to me. I went over. "He made it," said the colonel. "I tried to take him off," I said, "but he wouldn't come." "Of course not. What do you think it was that drove us from the ship?" I thought back and there was only one answer. "Stinky?" "Sure. It wasn't only machines, Asa, though he did wait till he got hold of something like the A-ship that he could make go out into space. But he had to get us off it first, so he threw us off." I did some thinking about that, too. "Then he was kind of like a skunk." "How do you mean?" asked the colonel, squinting at me. "I never did get used to calling him Stinky. Never seemed right somehow, him not having a smell and still having that name. But he did have a smell -- a mental one, I guess you'd say -- enough to drive us right out of the ship." The colonel nodded. "All the  same, I'm glad he made it." He stared up at the sky. "So am I," I said. Although I was a little sore at Stinky as well. He could have said good-by at least to me. I was the best friend he had on Earth and driving me out along with the other men seemed plain rude. But now I'm not so sure. I still don't know which end of a wrench to take hold of, but I have a new car now -- bought it with the money I earned at the air base -- and it can run all by itself. On quiet country roads, that is. It gets jittery in traffic. It's not half as good as Betsy. I could fix that, all right. I found out when the car rose right over a fallen tree in the road. With what rubbed off on me from being with Stinky all that time, I could make it fly. But I won't I ain't aiming to get treated the way Stinky was. Man in the Jar Vane did not indiscriminately bottle live people he had to have a sound business reasonl T HE hotel room on the planet Meng was small and crowded. Blue-tinged sunlight from the window fell on a soiled gray carpet, a massive sandbox dotted with cigarette butts, a clutter of bottles. One corner of the room was piled high with baggage and curios. The occupant, a Mr. R. C. Vane of Earth, was sitting near the door: a man about fifty, clean-shaven, with bristling iron-gray hair. He was soberly, murderously drunk. There was a tap on the door and the bellhop slipped in -- a native, tall and brown, with greenish black hair cut too long in the back. He looked about nineteen. He had one green eye and one blue. "Set it there," said Vane. The bellhop put his tray down. "Yes, sir" He took the unopened bottle of Ten Star off the tray, and the ice bucket, and the seltzer bottle, crowding them in carefully among the things already on the table. Then he put the empty bottles and the ice bucket back on the tray. His hands were big and knob-jointed; he seemed too long and wideshouldered for his tight green uniform. "So this is Meng City," said Vane, watching the bellhop.  rumpled in his chair, with his striped moth-wing jacket on and his string tie tied. He might have been sober, except for the deliberate way he spoke and the redness of his eyes. "Yes, sir," said the bellhop, straightening up with the tray in his hands. "This your first time here, sir?" "I came through two weeks ago," Vane told him. "I did not like it then and I do not like it now. Also, I do not like this room." "Management is sorry if you don't like the room, sir. Very good view from this room." "It's dirty and small," said Vane, "but it doesn't matter. I'm checking out this afternoon. Leaving on the afternoon rocket. I wasted two weeks upcountry, investigating Marack stories. Nothing to it -- just native talk. Miserable little planet." He sniffed, eying the bellhop. "What's your name, boy?" "Jimmy Rocksha, sir." "Well, Jimmy Rocks, look at that pile of stuff." Tourist goods, scarves and tapestries, rugs, blankets and other things were heaped over the piled suitcases. It looked like an explosion in a curio shop. "There's about forty pounds of it I have no room for, not counting that knocked-down jar. Any suggestions?" The bellhop thought about it slowly. "Sir, if I might suggest, you could put the scarves and things inside the jar. I think they'll fit." Vane said grudgingly, "That might work. You know how to put those jars together?" "I don't know, sir." "Well, let's see you try. Go on, don't stand there" Vane swirled his warm, flat drink. The bellhop set his tray down again and crossed the room. A big bundle of gray pottery pieces, tied together with twine, had been stowed on top of Vane's wardrobe trunk, a little above the bellhop's head. Roksha carefully removed his shoes and climbed on a chair. His brown feet were bare and clean. He lifted the bundle without effort, got down, set the bundle on the floor and put his shoes back on. Vane took a long swallow of his lukewarm highball, finishing it. He closed his eyes while he drank and nodded over the glass for a moment afterward, as if listening to something whispering inside him. "All right," he said, getting up, "let us see." 'T'HE bellhop loosened the twine. There were six long, thick, curving pieces, shaped a little like giant shoehorns. Then there were two round ones. One was bigger; that was the bottom. The other had a handle; that was the lid. The bellhop began to separate the pieces carefully, laying them out on the carpet. "Watch out how you touch those together," Vane grunted, coming up behind him. "I wouldn't know how to get them apart again." "Yes, sir." "That's an antique I got upcountry. They used to be used for storing grain and oil. The natives claim the Maracks had the secret of making them stick the way they do. Ever heard that?" "Upcountry boys tell a lot of fine stories, sir," said the bellhop. He had the six long pieces arranged, well separated, in a kind of petal pattern around the big flat piece. They took up most of the free space; the jar would be chest-high if it could be assembled. Standing up, the bellhop took two of the long curved pieces and carefully brought the edges closer together. They seemed to jump the last fraction of an inch, like magnets, and merged into one smooth piece. Peering, Vane could barely make out the join. In the same way, the bellhop added another piece to the first two. Now he had half the jar assembled. Carefully, he lowered this half jar toward the edge of the big flat piece. The pieces clicked together. The bellhop stooped for another side piece. "Hold on a minute," said Vane suddenly. "Got an idea. Instead of putting that thing all together, then trying to stuff things into it, load the things in, then put the rest of the side on." "Yes, sir." The bellhop laid the piece of crockery down again and picked up some light blankets, which he dropped on the bottom of the jar. "Not that way, dummy," said Vane impatiently. "Get in there -- pack them down tight." The bellhop hesitated. "Yes, sir." He stepped delicately over the remaining unassembled pieces and knelt on the bottom of the jar, rolling the blankets and pressing them snugly in. Behind him, Vane moved on tiptoe, putting two long pieces silently together -- tic ! -- then a third -- tic! -- and then as he lifted them, tic, clack! the sides melted into the bottom and the top. The jar was complete. The bellhop was inside. " flared nostrils. He took a cigar out of a green-lizard pocket case, cut it with a lapel knife and lit it Exhaling smoke, he leaned over and looked down into the jar. Except for a moan of surprise when the jar closed, the bellhop had not made a sound. Looking down, Vane saw his brown face looking up. "Let me out of this jar, please, sir," said the bellhop. "Can't do that" Vane said. "They didn't tell me how, upcountry. The bellhop moistened his lips. "Upcountry, they use a kind of tree grease. It creeps between the pieces and they fall apart." "They didn't give me anything like that," said Vane indifferently. "Then please, sir, you break this jar and let me come out." Vane picked a bit of tobacco off his tongue. He looked at it curiously and then flicked it away. "I spotted you in the lobby the minute I came in this morning. Tall and thin. Too strong for a native. One green eye, one blue. Two weeks I spent upcountry, looking -- and there you were in the lobby" "Sir?" "You're a Marack," said Vane flatly. The bellhop did not answer for a moment. "But, sir," he said incredulously, "Maracks are legends, sir. Nobody believes that any more. There are no Maracks." "You lifted that jar down like nothing," said Vane, "though it took two boys to put it up there. You've got the hollow temples. You've got the long jaw and the hunched shoulders." Frowning, he took a billfold out of his pocket and took out a yellowed card. He showed it to the bellhop. "Look at that picture. I hope," he added, "it won't upset you. Might be a relative of yours." It was a faded photograph of a skeleton in a glass case. There was something disturbing about the skeleton. It was too long and thin; the shoulders seemed hunched and the skull was narrow and hollow-templed. Under it the smaller letters, "Newbold Anthropological Museum, Ten Eyck, Queensland, N. T. Courtesy of Estate of Walter B. Soong." "Found it between the pages of a book two hundred years old," said Vane, carefully putting it back. "It was mailed as a postcard to an ancestor of mine. A year later, I happened to be on Nova Terra. Now get this -- the museum is still there, but that skeleton is not! They deny it ever was there. Curator seemed to think it was a fake. None of the native races on Meng have skeletons like that, he said." "Must be a fake, sir," the bellhop agreed. next," Vane went on. "I read all the contemporary accounts I could find of frontier days on this planet. A couple of centuries ago, nobody on Meng thought the Maracks were legends. They looked enough like the natives to pass, but they had certain special powers. They could turn one thing into another. They could influence your mind, if you weren't on your guard against them. I next read all the export records back to a couple of centuries ago. Also the geological charts in Planetary Survey. I discovered something. It just happens that there is no source of natural diamonds anywhere on Meng." "No, sir?" asked the bellhop nervously. "Not one. No diamonds and no place where they ever could have been mined. But until two hundred years ago, Meng exported less diamonds every year. I ask, where did they come from? And why did they stop?" "I don't know, sir." "The Maracks made them," Vane said bluntly. "For a trader named Soong and his family. They died. After that, no more diamonds from Meng." He opened a suitcase, rummaged inside it a moment and took out two objects. One was a narrow oval bundle of something wrapped in stiff yellow plant fibers; the other was a shiny grayblack lump half the size of his fist. "Do you know what this is?" Vane asked, holding up the oval bundle. "No, sir." "Air weed, they call it upcountry. One of the old men had this one buried under his hut, along with the jar. And this." He held up the black lump. "Nothing special about it, would you say? Just a piece of graphite, probably from the old mine at Badlong. But graphite is pure carbon. And so is a diamond." He put both objects carefully down on the nearby table and wiped his hands. The graphite had left black smudges on them. "Think about it," he said. "You've got exactly one hour, till three o'clock." Delicately, he tapped his cigar over the mouth of the jar. A few flakes of powdery ash floated down on the bellhop's upturned face. Vane went back to his chair. He moved deliberately and a little stiffly, but did not stagger. He peeled the foil off the bottle of Ten Star. He poured himself a substantial drink, added ice, splashed a little seltzer in. He took a long, slow swallow. "Sir," said the bellhop finally, "you know I can't make any diamonds out of black rock. What's going to happen when it comes three o'clock and that rock is still just a piece of rock?" "I think," Vane answered, "I will just take the wrappings off that air weed and drop it in the jar with you. Air weed, I am told, will expand to hundreds of times its volume in air. When it fills the jar to the brim, I will put the lid on. And when we're crossing that causeway to the spaceport, I think you may get tipped off the packrat into the bay. The bottom is deep silt, they tell me." He took another long, unhurried swallow. "Think about it," he said, staring at the jar with red eyes. and dim. The bellhop had enough room to sit fairly comfortably with his legs crossed, or else he could kneel, but then his face came right up to the mouth of the jar. The opening was too small for his head. He could not straighten up any farther or put his legs out. The bellhop was afraid and was sweating in his tight uniform. He was only nineteen and nothing like this had ever happened to him before. The clink of ice came from across the room. The bellhop said, "Sir?" The chair springs whined and, after a moment, the Earthman's face appeared over the mouth of the jar. His chin was dimpled. There were gray hairs in his nostrils and a few gray and black bristles in the creases of loose skin around his jaw. His red eyes were hooded and small. He looked down into the bellhop's face without speaking. "Sir," the bellhop said earnestly, "do you know how much they pay me here at this hotel?" "No." "Twelve stellors a week, sir, and my meals. If I could make diamonds, sir, why would I be working here?" Vane's expression did not change. "Ask me a hard one. Soong had to sweat you Maracks There used to be thousands of you on this continent alone, but now there are so few that you can disappear among the natives. The diamonds took too much out of you. You're close to extinction now. And you're all scared. You've gone underground. You've still got your powers, but you don't dare use them -- unless there's no other way to keep your secret. You were lords of this planet once, but you'd rather stay alive. Of course, all this is merely guesswork." "Yes, sir," said the bellhop despairingly. The house phone rang. Vane crossed the room and thumbed the key down, watching the bellhop from the comer of his eye. "What is it?" he said, flat-voiced. "Mr. Vane," said the voice of the desk clerk, "if I may ask, did the refreshments you ordered arrive?" "The bottle came," Vane answered. "Why?" The bellhop was listening, balling his fists on his knees. Sweat stood out on his brown forehead. "Oh, nothing really, Mr. Vane, only the boy did not come back. He is usually very reliable, Mr. Vane. But excuse me for troubling you." "No trouble," said Vane stonily, and turned the phone off. He came back to the jar. He swayed a little, rocking back and forth from heels to toes. In one hand he had the highball glass; with the other he was playing with the little osmiridium knife that hung by an expanding chain from his lapel. After a while, he said, "Why didn't you call for help?" Vane went on softly, "Those hotel phones will pick up a voice across the room. I know that. So why were you quiet?" The bellhop said unhappily, "If I did yell, sir, they would find me in this jar." "What of it?" The bellhop grimaced. "There's some other people that still believe in Maracks, sir. I have to be careful about my eyes. They would know there coyld only be the one reason why you would treat me like this." Vane studied him for a moment. "And you'd take a chance on the air weed, and the bay, just to keep anyone from finding out?" "It's a long time since we had any Marack hunts on this planet, sir." Vane snorted softly. He glanced up at the wall clock. "Forty minutes," he said, and went back to his chair by the door. The room was silent except for the faint whir of the clock. After a while, Vane moved to the writing desk. He put a printed customs declaration form in the machine and began tapping keys slowly, muttering over the complicated Interstellar symbols. "Sir," said the bellhop quietly, "you know you can't kill a biped person and just get away. This is not like the bad old times." Vane grunted, tapping keys. "Think not?" He took a sip from his highball and set it down again. "Even if they find out you have mistreated the headman upcountry, sir, they will be very severe." "They won't find out," Vane said. "Not from him." "Sir, even if I could make you your diamond, it would only be worth of few thousand stellors. That is nothing to a man like you." Vane paused and half turned. "Flawless, that weight, it would be worth a hundred thousand. But I'm not going to sell it." He turned back to the machine, finished a line and started to tap out another. "No, sir?" "No. Tm going to keep it." Vane's eyes half closed; his fingers poised motionless on the keys. He seemed to come to himself with a start, hit another key and rolled the paper out of the machine. He picked up an envelope and rose, looking over the paper in his hand. "Just to keep it, sir, and look at it now and then?" the bellhop asked softly. Sweat was running down into his eyes, but he kept his fists motionless on his knees. "That's it," said Vane, with the same faraway look. He folded the paper slowly and put it into the envelope as he walked toward the message chute near the door. At the last moment, he checked himself, snapped the paper open again and stared at it. A slow flush came to his cheeks. Crumpling the paper slowly in his hands, he said, "That almost worked." liberately, and then again, and again, before he threw the pieces away. "Just one symbol in the wrong box, " he said, "but it was the right wrong symbol. I'll tell you where you made your mistake, though, boy. " He came closer. "I don't understand," said the bellhop. "You thought if you could get me to thinking about that diamond, my mind would wander. It did -- but I knew what was happening. Here's where you made your mistake : I don't give a damn about that diamond ." "Sir?" asked the bellhop in bewilderment "A stellor to you is a new pair of pants. A stellor to me, or a thousand stellors, is just raw material for business deals. That's what counts. I'd offer you money, but you explained yourself why you can't be bought -- you could make diamonds and be rich, but you don't dare. That's why I have to use this method." "Sir, I don't know what you mean." "You know, all right. You're getting a little dangerous now, aren't you? You're cornered and the time's running out. So you took a little risk." He stooped, picked up one of the scraps of paper, unfolded it and smoothed it out "Right here, in the box where the loyalty oath to the Archon is supposed to go, I wrote the symbol for 'pig.' If I sent that down, the thought police would be up here in fifteen minutes." He balled up the paper again, into an even smaller wad, and dropped it on the carpet. "Think you can make me forget to pick that up again and bum it, before I leave?" he asked amiably. "Try." The bellhop swallowed hard. "Sir, you did that yourself. You made a slip of the finger." Vane smiled at him for the first time and walked away. The bellhop put his back against the wall of the jar and pushed with all his strength against the opposite side. He pushed until the muscles of his back stood out in knotted ropes. The pottery walls were as solid as rock. He was sweating more than ever. He relaxed, breathing hard; he rested his head on his knees and tried to think. The bellhop had heard of ruthless Earthmen, but he had never seen one. He straightened up. "Sir, are you still there?" The chair creaked and Vane came over, glass in hand. "Sir," said the bellhop earnestly, "if I can prove to you that I'm really not a Marack, will you let me go? I mean you'll have to let me go then, won't you?" "Why, certainly," Vane said agreeably. "Go ahead and prove it." "Well, sir, haven't you heard other things about the Maracks -- some other manner of test?" Vane looked thoughtful; he put his chin down on his chest and his eyes filmed over. "About what they can or can't do?" the bellhop suggested. "If I tell you, sir, you might think I made it up." "Wait a minute."  back and forth, his eyes half closed. His string tie was still perfectly tied, his striped moth-wing jacket immaculate. He said, "I remember something. The Marack hunters used this a good deal, I understand. Maracks can't stand liquor. It poisons them." "You're positive about that, sir?" the bellhop said eagerly. "Of course I'm positive." "All right then, sir!" Vane nodded and went to the table to get the bottle of Ten Star. It was still two-thirds full. He came back with it and said, "Open your mouth." The bellhop opened his mouth wide and shut his eyes. The liquor hit his teeth and the back of his mouth in one solid splash; it poured down both cheeks and some of it ran up his nose. He choked and strangled. The liquor burned all the way down his throat and windpipe; tears blinded him; he couldn't breathe. When the paroxysm was over, he gasped, "Sir -- sir, that wasn't a fair test. You shouldn't have poured it on me like that. Give me a little bit, in a glass." "Now I want to be fair. We'll try it again." Vane found an empty glass, poured two fingers of brandy into it and came back. "Easy does it," he said, and trickled a little into the bellhop's mouth. The bellhop swallowed, his head swimming in brandy fumes. "Once more," said Vane, and poured again. The bellhop swallowed. The liquor was gathering in a ball of heat inside him. "Again." He swallowed. Vane stood back. The bellhop opened his eyes and looked blissfully up at him. "You see, sir? No poison. I drank it and I'm not dead!" "Hmm," said Vane with an interested expression. "Well, imagine that. Maracks can drink liquor." The bellhop's victorious smile slowly faded. "Sir, please don't joke with me." "If you think it's a joke -- " "Sir, you promised ." "I said yes -- if you could prove to me that you are not a Marack. Go ahead, prove it. Here's another little test for you, incidentally. An anatomist I know looked at that skeleton and told me it was so constricted at the shoulders that a Marack can't lift his hand higher than his head. All right, begin by telling me why you stood on a chair to get my bundle down -- or better yet, just put your arm out the neck of that jar." There was a silence. Vane took another cigar out of the greenlizard case, cut it with the little osmiridium knife and lit it without taking his eyes off the bellhop. "Now you're getting dangerous again," he said with enjoyment. "You're thinking it over. This begins to get interesting. You're wondering how you can kill me from inside that jar, without using your Marack powers. Go on, think about it." He breathed smoke, leaning toward the jar. "You've got fifteen minutes." Vane rolled up all the blankets and other souvenirs and strapped them into bundles. He removed some toilet articles from the dresser and packed them away in his grip. He took a last look around the room, saw the paper scraps on the floor and picked up the tiny pellet he had made of one of them. He showed it to the bellhop with a grin, then dropped it into the ash-receiver and burned it. He sat down comfortably in the chair near the door. "Five minutes," he said. "Four minutes," he said. "Three minutes." "Two minutes." "All right," said the bellhop. "Yes?" Vane got up and stood over the jar. "I'll do it -- I'll make the diamond." "Ahh?" said Vane, half questioningly. He picked up the lump of graphite and held it out. "I don't need to touch it," the bellhop said listlesly. "Just put it down on the table. It will take about a minute." "Umm," said Vane, watching him keenly. The bellhop was crouched in the jar, eyes closed; all Vane could see of him was the glossy green-black top of his head. "If you just hadn't had that air weed," the bellhop said sullenly, his voice muffled. Vane laughed. "I didn't need the air weed. I could have taken care of you in a dozen ways. This knife -- " he held it up -- "has a molecular-vibration blade. Turn it on, it'll cut through anything, like cheese. I could have minced you up and floated you down the drain." The bellhop's face turned up, pale and wide-eyed. "No time for that now, though," Vane said. "It would have to be the air weed." "Is that how you're going to get me loose, afterward?" the bellhop asked. "Cut the jar with that knife?" "Mm? Oh, certainly," said Vane, watching the graphite lump. Was there a change in its appearance or not? "I'm disappointed, in a way," he said abstractedly. "I thought you'd give me a fight. You Maracks are overrated, I suppose." "It's all done," said the bellhop. "Take it, please, and let me out." Vane's eyes narrowed. "It doesn't look done, to me." "It only looks black on the outside, sir. Just rub it off." Vane did not move. "Go ahead, sir," said the bellhop urgently. "Pick it up and see." "You're a little too eager," Vane said. He took a fountain pen out of his pocket and used it to prod the graphite gingerly. Nothing happened; the lump moved freely across the tabletop. Vane touched it briefly with one finger, then picked it up in his hand. "No tricks?" he said quizzically. He felt the lump, weighed it, put it down again. There were black graphite smears in his palm.  and cut the graphite lump down the middle. It fell into two shiny black pieces. "Graphite," said Vane, and with an angry gesture, he stuck the knife blade into the table. He turned to the bellhop, dusting off his hands. "I don't get you," he said, prodding the oval bundle of the air weed experimentally. He picked it up. "All you did was stall. Disappointing." The dry wrappings came apart in his hands. Between the fibers, a dirty-white bulge began to show. Vane lifted the package to drop it into the jar and saw that the bellhop's scared face filled the opening. While he hesitated briefly, the gray-white floss of the air weed foamed slowly out over the back of his hand. Vane felt a constriction and instinctively tried to drop the bundle. He couldn't. The growing, billowing floss was sticky -- it stuck to his hand, then his sleeve. It grew, slowly, but with a horrifying steadiness. Gray-faced, Vane whipped his arm around, trying to shake off the weed. Like thick lather, the floss spattered downward but did not separate. A glob of it hit his trouser leg and clung. Another, swelling, dripped down to the carpet. His whole right arm and side were covered deep under a mound of white. The floss had now stopped growing and seemed to be stiffening. The bellhop began to rock himself back and forth inside the jar. The jar tipped and fell back. The bellhop rocked harder. The jar was inching its way across the carpet. After a few moments, the bellhop paused to put his face up and see which way he was going. Vane, held fast by the weed, was leaning toward the table, straining hard, reaching with his one free hand toward the knife he had put there. The carpet bulged after him, but too much furniture was holding it. The bellhop lowered his head and rocked the jar again, harder. When he looked up, Vane's eyes were closed tight, his face red with effort. He was extended as far as he could reach across the table, but his fingers were still clawing air an inch short of the knife. The bellhop rocked hard. The jar inched forward, came to rest solidly against the table, pinning Vane's arm against it by the flaring sleeve. The bellhop relaxed and looked up. Feeling himself caught, the Earthman had stopped struggling and was looking down. He tugged, but could not pull the sleeve free. "Stalemate," said Vane heavily. He showed his teeth to the bellhop. "Close, but no prize. I can't get at you. You can't hurt me." The bellhop's head bowed as if in assent. But then his long arm came snaking up out of the jar. His fingers closed around the deadly little knife. "A Marack can lift his arm higher than his head," he said. perial request that Rabbi Judah Loew with companions of his choosing was to be at the Hradcany Castle on a specific date. The day was the #rd of February, #, and Rabbi Loew went to the castle. He took with him his brother, Rabbi Sinai, and his son-in-law, Isak Kohen. At the castle, Rabbi Loew was brought into a room where Prince Bertier was waiting for him. The other two men were signaled to sit in a corner, some distance away. But, as Kohen reported later, the prince spoke very loudly and Rabbi Loew, presumably suspecting that the prince was hard of hearing, answered in an equally loud voice. The two witnesses could understand every word, even though they were in a far corner. All at once, the reason for the loud speaking became clear. One of the drapes parted and the emperor himself appeared and joined in the conversation. These few facts and the date are all we know about the audience. Probably everybody present had to vow secrecy. There is nothing about the discussion in the court's records. Isak Kohen did not say a word beyond what has just been related. And the astronomer David Gans, a friend of Tycho Brahe, who had some dealings with Rabbi Loew, said that the rabbi himself also never mentioned a word about the meeting. My reason for telling all this is that High Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague is credited by legend with having made the first robot in history. THE topic came up for discussion on a hot day in summer, #, when Fritz Lang was in New York and we were both sitting somewhat impatiently in his hotel room waiting for room service. The fact that we had to wait led to idle talk about liquor organs, the possibilities of mechannized room service. From there, it was only a short step to serving robots and Fritz Lang abruptly said: "Say, the golem must have been the first robot." We tried to find an older one, but except for the magic head which Roger Bacon is supposed to have made and which burst into splinters after uttering one word or one sentence, we could not think of any. That golem we discussed was supposed to have been a man made of clay and endowed with a kind of pseudo-life by Rabbi Loew. The golem was able to hear, but it could not speak. It was not very bright, but intensely loyal. It never needed sleep, although it feigned sleep quite often, and had enormous strength. Fire or water did not harm it. But there was one problem: it had been created by magic, which in itself was a sin. But the sin would be tolerated if it was only used for religious purposes. When somebody -- the rabbi's wife was the first to make that mistake -- issued an order for personal convenience or other secular matters, the golem would inevitably misperform. (The story of the endless water-carrying which we know as the basis of "sorcerer's apprentice" was told about the golem.) Legend says that after the audience with Emperor Rudolph II, the rabbi declared, "We no longer need Jossele Golem," and that he and another son-in-law of his named Jakob Katz and his pupil Jakob Sosson took the golem to the attic of the Altneu Synagogue in Prague and recited the requisite spells to take its pseudolife away from it. In the legends that formed later -- they have been collected several times -- the audience with the emperor is taken to have ended the golem's career. But from the strictly historical standpoint, it seems that this audience was, so to speak, the birthday of the golem. The fact that a rabbi was called to the emperor was such an unusual event that it had to have some very special significance. Well, every child in Prague and also elsewhere where German was spoken -- it is a somewhat strange fact that the legends hardly penetrated the language barrier; they remained restricted to Jewish and Christian Germanspeaking circles -- had heard about the golem at one time, if only because there is a reference to it in classical German literature. But the story that the "corpse" of the golem stayed in the attic of the Altneu Synagogue seemed to have been restricted to Prague, as a local legend. One who heard it, probably in early childhood, was a man named Egon Erwin Kisch, who became a famous journalist. But he never used the story journalistically as long as he stayed in Prague.  came, Kisch was drafted into the Austrian Army. He spent most of the year # in the Carpathian Mountains. There he met a man who at first was as sullen as possible and did not wish to have any truck with soldiers, any kind of soldiers, no matter what their nationality, uniform or rank. But when he heard, one day, that Kisch had been bom in Prague and had lived there most of his life, he warmed up. Prague was the city he most wanted to go to. He wanted to see the grave of Rabbi Loew and worship in Fig. #: Paul Wegener a the Golem in a silent German picture of that title, made in the early #'s the Altneu Synagogue. It turned out that he collected everything about the golem that came his way and he finally showed Kisch a manuscript he had bought from a traveling peddler. The manuscript alleged to tell what had happened to the golem after the rabbi had removed its pseudo-life. It told how the temple servant of the Pinkas Synagogue (also in Prague), Abraham ben Secharja by name, approached his opposite number in the Altneu Synagogue with the proposal to steal the dead golem. Abraham Chajim of the Altneu Synagogue was finally persuaded to cooperate, since Abraham Chajim learned that his son-in-law, one Ascher Balbierer, knew formulas from the Sohar which would revive the golem. They allegedly brought the golem's body to the basement of Balbierer's house, but whatever they tried, nothing helped -- the golem remained dead. Then an epidemic (diphtheria, in all likelihood, from the description) came and two of the five children of Ascher Balbierer died. Whereupon the mother of the two dead children put her foot down, blaming the presence of the golem for the bereavement, and forced her husband and his friends to dispose of the clay figure. A soldier in the front lines has worries enough and Kisch temporarily forgot the whole story. But after the war, when he was back in Prague, he decided to satisfy his curiosity and sell a few articles in the process. He applied for permission to visit the attic of the Altneu Synagogue to look for the golem. Permission was refused. He pulled different strings. Permission was not refused this time; it was pointed out to him that there was no staircase from the interior of the synagogue to the attic. Well, how could one get in? Only by climbing the building from the outside on an iron ladder which started some eight feet above the ground. But he couldn't Fig. #: Brigitt Helm at the robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Courtesy: Fritz Lang) do that. Nobody was permitted to do it. Fig. #: The robot Brigitte is thirsty between takes. (This picture has never been published before) (Courtesy: Fritz Lang) of a journalist with a wellknown name finally made the permission come through. On a bright day, and with more audience than Kisch wished for, he climbed the building and finally entered the attic. As he reported, the room was anything but gloomy and mysterious. Several large windows admitted much sunlight, and since the building was old and small, its a'ttic was not even above the roofs of other Fig. #: Th non-anthropoid robot Gog from th picture of the tame name (Courtesy: Ivan Tors and United Artists) buildings. The most medieval thing he saw was a small bat hanging upside down from a rafter, sound asleep. No golem. Then he traced the way described in the manuscript which the abductors of the golem were supposed to have walked, both when stealing it and when finally disposing of it. Yes, the streets were as the manuscript had told. But the final destination was a kind of dump where the golem could never have been found, provided that it had existed and provided that its clay body had lasted through # odd years of internment. Just to round out the story, Kisch checked on the graves in the Jewish cemetery. He knew that Rabbi Loew's grave was there. He found those of his pupils. He even found the tombstone of Abraham ben Secharja, stating that he had died in # after serving his synagogue for # years. Kisch wrote the story of his failure. It was published and his report on the golem was directly responsible for the conception of the robots. It was another Prague journalist, Karel Capek, who invented the term. Kisch was bilingual, but was writing in German. Capek was bilingual, too, but wrote in Czech. Whether the play R.U.R. ( Ros sum's Universal Robots ) was written originally in German or in Czech is something I don't know. I saw a German version when it was new. Present science fiction fans, knowing that this play introduced an important concept into science fiction, seem to feel that it is one of the classical pieces written for the stage and long to see it performed. If they should have a chance to see it, they are almost certain to be disappointed. When first performed in Europe around # or #, it received bad notices. To make it worse, the panning was deserved. The play was talkative, "preachy," stuffed with the falsest pathos that could be devised. But the term robot (derived from the root word robota, (Courtoiy Motro-Goldwyn-Moyor) meaning "work") has persisted. The movies, still silent, eyed the new concept, but decided first to bring the golem to the screen directly. It was made by a German firm in the early 'twenties (Fig. #) and when I think back to it, I always have the feeling that it must have been made by Frit # Lang. Of course I know that he didn't, but it was that type of picture and equally impressive, although my impression now -- more than # years later -- tends to be rather general and more than somewhat hazy. The movie differed from the legends mainly in the way the golem finds its end. In the movie version, the magic word is imbedded in a capsule on its chest. Running wild, the golem refuses to have it removed. But wandering away from the city, the golem meets a child who offers it an apple. It picks the child up, and the child pulls the capsule from its chest. would like to add a linguistic remark. Eastern Jews tend to pronounce the name as "goylem" and have evolved "folk etymology" that the clay figure was called a "goy" (nonJew) since it obviously was not Jewish. I checked with a dictionary -- this piece of layman's etymology is nonsense. The word golem is a Fig. #: Robby tbe Robot a driver of a futuristic cor (Courtesy: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) genuine Hebrew word, meaning "the germ" or "the formless one" or, stretching the analogy to formlessness a bit, "the fool." I do not know when a robot appeared for the first time in a science fiction story. The first robot on the screen was very pretty, bore the name of Brigitte Helm (a shortened version of her real name) and was the creation of Fritz Lang in Metropolis. Even though the armor had been made form-fitting (Figs. # and #) as accurately and as light as possible, the poor girl could not wear it for long. Although labeled a creation of science rather than magic, in the film there were still plenty of mystical overtones and groundswells. At least I have never seen a laboratory with a glowing pentagram on the wall; the real laboratories even avoid a picture of the Pentagon. A successful and therefore universally known work of art of any description tends to monopolize a concept for quite a while. As I pointed out once, the fact that Giacomo Meyerbeer used the Tree of Death in the final scene of his opera VAlricaine prevented every other composer and librettist from doing the same. If anybody had used the Tree of Death, he would have been accused of cribbing from Meyerbeer, even though he might not have known the opera and gotten his theme directly from Erasmus Darwin, who had publicized it in his Loves of the Plants. Similarly, the robot concept, sub-family movie robots, suffered the same fate because of Metropolis. However, the movies apparently felt that they had to do something along that line, with the result that an evil genius dug up the tale of Frankenstein and his monster. r IHE original story had originated in # as one of the restilts of a literary discussion. The author of the original Frankenstein , still Miss Mary Godwin at the time, the poet Shelley, who was her future husband, the poet Lord Byron, Dr. John W. Polidori, and a few other people were all in Geneva and one day voted that everybody in the party should write a story of the supernatural. Not everybody who agreed to do so finished his story, but among the ones that were finished was Frankenstein. The plot is about as simple as possible. Mr. Frankenstein, who has stumbled across the "secret of life," uses raw material from graves and dissecting rooms to put an eight-foot-tall manlike thing together which, when it comes to life, frightens its own creator out of his wits, even though it is friendly and harmless, merely too big and too ugly to be tolerable. It would be interesting if one could find out whether Mary Shelley had heard of the golem legend. It is possible because the German dramatist and novelist Clemens Brentano had written about it just at that time. There are some similarities. Many science fiction authors and readers make a distinction between robots and androids, while others say that there is no sharp borderline. Moreover, if one made that distinction, the robots in Capek's R. XJ. R. would be androids. Perfectly correct -- they were. Capek naturally could not foresee what would happen to the word he coined. Personally, I prefer to make the distinction and my preference is based, in part, on discussions with people outside of science fiction. These people tend to make a sharp distinction between "artificial men" (androids) of whom they approve as part and parcel of "gothic" literature; and "mechanical men" (robots) of whom they don't approve. I find myself disliking androids, so I must be in favor of robots, where you can at least have an indicator light up when a gear slips. A SI said before, robots stayed off the screen for quite some time because of Metropolis, but they multiplied in print. And gradually they lost some of the human shape which had been a hangover from golem and Frankenstein days. Some robots were angular merely because that was easier to build and also enabled everybody to tell a robot from a person at a glance. But it was then realized that the human shape is only highly versatile and not always the most efficient. Neither a robot switchboard operator nor a robot bartender needs legs to walk around, but both could do with a few extra sets of arms and hands. (In reality, of course, the whole mechanism would be internal, not even resembling human arms and hands.) The non-anthropoid robot took a long tirrte coming to the screen. If I am not mistaken, the two robots Gog and Magog in Ivan Tors' Gog were the first. They were amusing, too, and even when they ran wild in the end, it wasn't their fault; somebody had tampered with the main computer which issued orders to them. Of course the most charming of all robots is still in everybody's memory; namely, Robbie in Forbidden Planet. Being an all-purpose robot, Robbie has the general shape of a human. He can drive, make coffee, produce bourbon, carry tools and construction materials, and could even shoot it out with an enemy if a killable enemy were present. Naturally there will be more robots in more stories and, in all probability, other robots in other movies. There are also very real robots appearing in industry in many places and for many purposes. And while I won't dare to make the negative prophecy that the real industrial robots will never have a human shape, the majority of them will unquestionably look what they really are: cabinets full of electronic gear and programming tapes. Farnsworth had to go meddle in a muddle and the results... well, just wait and see! vented a new drink that When he finally set the end of night. He called it a mulled his steaming poker back on the sloe gin toddy. Exactly as fantascoals for rest and regeneration, I tic as it sounds -- ramming a redleaned back warmly in my big hot poker into a mugful of warm leather chair -- the one he had red gin, cinnamon, cloves and rigged up so that it would gently sugar, and then drinking the fool rock you to sleep if you pressed thing -- but like many of Famsthe right button -- and said, worth's ideas, it managed some"Oliver, your ingenuity is matched how to work out. In fact, its flavor only by your hospitality." had become completely acceptFarnsworth blushed and smiled. He is a small, chubby man and blushes easily. "Thank you," he said. "I have another new one. I call it a jelled vodka fizz -- you eat it with a spoon. You may want to try it later. It's -- well -- exceptional." I suppressed a shudder at the thought of eating jelled vodka and said, "Interesting, very interesting," and since he didn't reply, we both stared at the fire for a while, letting the gin continue its pleasant work. Farnsworth's bachelor's home was very comfortable and relaxing, and I always enjoyed my Wednesday night visits there thoroughly. I suppose most men have a deep-seated love for open fires and liquor -- however fantastically prepared -- and deep, comfortable leather armchairs. Then, after several minutes, Farnsworth abruptly bounced to his feet and said, "There's a thing I wanted to show you. Made it last week. Didn't pull it off too well, though." "Really?" I said. Fd thought the drinks had been his usual weekly brainchild. They seemed quite enough. "Yes," he said, trotting over to the door of the study. "It's downstairs in the shop. I'll get it." And he bounced out of the room, the paneled door closing as it had opened, automatically, behind him. A again, pleased that he had made something in the machine shop -- the carpentry shop was in a shed in the backyard; the chemistry and optical labs in the attic -- for he was his most proficient chines. His self-setting, variabletwist thumb bolt had been a beautiful piece of work and its patent had netted him, as had several other machined devices, a remarkable sum. He returned in a minute, carrying a very odd-looking thing with him, and set it on the table beside my chair. I examined it silently for a minute while Farnsworth stood over me, half-smiling, his little green eyes wide, sparkling in the reflected, flickering light from the fire. I knew he was suppressing his eagerness for my comment, but I was uncertain what to say. The thing, upon examination, appeared simple: a more or less cross-shaped construction of several dozen one-inch cubes, half of them of thin, transparent plastic, the other half made of thin little sheets of aluminum. Each cube seemed to be hinged to two others very cunningly and the arrangement of them all was somewhat confusing. Finally, I said, "How many cubes?" I had tried to count them, but kept getting lost. "Sixty-four," he said. "I think." "You think?" "Well -- " He seemed embarrassed. "At least I made sixtyfour cubes, thirty-two of each kind; but somehow I haven't been able to count them since. They seem to... get lost, or shift around, or something." "Oh?" I was becoming interested. "May I pick it up?" "Certainly," he said, and I took the affair, which was surprisingly lightweight, in my hands and began folding the cubes around on their hinges. I noticed then that some were open on one side and that certain others would fit into these if their hinging arrangements would allow them to. I began folding them absently and said, "You could count them by marking them one at a time. With a crayon, for instance." "As a matter of fact," he admitted, blushing again, "I tried that. Didn't seem to work out. When I finished, I found I had marked six cubes with the number one and on none of them could I find, a two or three, although there were two fours, one of them written in reverse and in green." He hesitated. "I had used a red marking pencil." I saw him shudder slightly as he said it, although his voice had been casual-sounding enough. "I rubbed the numbers off with a damp cloth and didn't... try it again." "Well," I said. And then, "What do you call it?" "A pentaract." his armchair. "Of course, that name really isn't accurate. I suppose a pentaract should really be a four-dimensional pentagon, and this is meant to be a picture of a five-dimensional cube." "A picture?" It didn't look like a picture to me. "Well, it couldn't really have five dimensionality -- length, width, breadth, ifth and oofth -- or I don't think it could." His voice faltered a little at that. "But it's supposed to illustrate what you might call the layout of an object that did have those." "What kind of object would that be?" I looked back at the thing in my lap and was mildly surprised to see that I had folded a good many of the cubes together. "Suppose," he said, "you put a lot of points in a row, touching; you have a line -- a one-dimensional figure. Put four lines together at right angles and on a plane; a square -- two-dimensional. Six squares at right angles and extended into real space give you a cube -- three dimensions. And eight cubes extended into four physical dimensions give you a tesseract, as it's called -- " "And eight tesseracts make a pentaract," I said. "Five dimensions." "Exactly. But naturally this is just a picture of a pentaract, in that sense. There probably isn't any ifth and oofth at all." "I still don't know what you mean by a picture " I said, pushing the cubes around interestedly. "You don't?" he asked, pursing his lips. "It's rather awkward to explain, but... well, on the surface of a piece of paper, you can make a very realistic picture of a cube -- you know, with perspective and shading and all that kind of thing -- and what you'd actually be doing would be illustrating a three-dimensional object, the cube, by using only two dimensions to do it with." "And of course," I said, "you could fold the paper into a cube. Then you'd have a real cube." He nodded. "But you'd have to use the third dimension -- by folding the flat paper up -- to do it. So, unless I could fold my cubes up through ifth or oofth, my pentaract will have to be just a poor picture. Or, really, eight pictures. Eight tesseracts, pictures of fourdimensional objects, stuck together to make a picture of five dimensions." "Well!" I said, a bit lost. "And what do you plan to use it for?" "Just curiosity." And then, abruptly, looking at me now, his eyes grew wide and he bumped up out of his chair. He said breathlessly, What have you done to it?" I looked down at my hands. I was holding a little structure of eight cubes, joined together in a small cross. "Why, nothing," I said, feeling a little foolish. "I only folded most of them together." "That's impossible! There were only twelve open ones to begin with! All of the others were sixsided!" for it, apparently beside himself, and the gesture was so sudden that I drew back. It made Farnsworth miss his grab and the little object flew from my hands and hit the floor, solidly, on one of its comers. There was a slight bump as it hit, and a faint clicking noise, and the thing seemed to crumple in a very peculiar way. And sitting in front of us on the floor was one little oneinch cube, and nothing else. For at least a full minute, we stared at it. Then I stood up and looked in my chair seat, looked around the floor of the room, even got down on my knees and peered under the chair. Farnsworth was watching me, and when I finished and sat down again, he asked, "No others?" "No other cubes," I said, "anywhere." "I was afraid of that." He pointed an unsteady finger at the one cube in front of us. "I suppose they're all in there." Some of his agitation had begun to wear off -- you can, I suppose, get used to anything -- and after a moment he said thoughtfully, "What was that you said about folding the paper to make a cube?" I looked at him and managed an apologetic smile. I had been thinking the same thing. "What was that you said about having to go into another dimension to do it?" He didn't smile back, but he got up and said, "Well, I doubt if it can bite," and bent over and picked the cube up, hefting its weight carefully in his hand. "It seems to weigh the same as thesixty-four did," he said, quite calmly now. Then he looked at it closely and suddenly became agitated again. "Good heavens! Look at this!" He held it up. On one side, exactly in the center, was a neat little hole, about a half-inch across. I moved my head closer to the cube and saw that the hole was not really circular. It was like the iris diaphragm of a camera, a polygon made of many overlapping, straight pieces of metal, allowing an opening for light to enter. Nothing was visible through the hole; I could see only an undefined blackness. "I don't understand how... I began, and stopped. "Nor I," he said. "Let's see if there's anything in here." eye and squinted and peered for a minute. Then he carefully set it on the table, walked to his chair, sat down and folded his hands over his fat little lap. "George," he said, "there is something in there." His voice now was very steady and yet strange. "What?" I asked. What else do you say? "A little ball," he said; "A little round ball. Quite misted over, but nonetheless a ball." "Well!" I said. "George, I'll get the gin." He was back from the sideboard in what seemed an incredibly short time. He had the sloe gin in highball glasses, with ice and water. It tasted horrible. When I finished mine, I said, "Delicious. Let's have another," and we did. After I drank that one, I felt a good deal more rational. I set my glass down. "Farnsworth, it just occurred to me. Isn't the fourth dimension supposed to be time, according to Einstein?" He had finished his second sloe gin highball, unmulled, by then. "Supposed to be, yes, according to Einstein. I call it ifth -- or oofth -- take your pick." He held up the cube again, much more confidently now, I noticed. "And what about the fifth dimension?" "Beats me," I said, looking at the cube, which was beginning to seem vaguely sinister to me. "Beats the hell out of me." "Beats me, too, George," he said almost gaily -- an astonishing mood for old Farnsworth. He turned the cube around with his small, fat fingers. "This is probably all wrapped up in time in some strange way. Not to mention the very peculiar kind of space it appears to be involved with. Extraordinary, don't you think?" "Extraordinary," I nodded. "George, I think I'll take another look " And he put the cube back to his eye again. "Well," he said, after a moment of squinting, "same little ball." "What's it doing?" I wanted to know. "Nothing. Or perhaps spinning a bit. I'm not sure. It's quite fuzzy, you see, and misty. Dark in there, too." "Let me see," I said, realizing that, after all, if Farnsworth could see the thing in there, so could I. "In a minute. I wonder what sort of time I'm looking into -- past or future, or what?" "And what sort of space..." I was saying when, suddenly, little Farnsworth let out a fantastic shriek, dropped the cube as if it had suddenly turned into a snake, and threw his hands over his eyes. He sank back into his chair and cried, "My God! My God!" cube hit the floor, but nothing happened to it. It did not fold up into no cube at all, nor proliferate back into sixty-four of itself. 'What happened?" I asked, rushing over to Farnsworth, who was squirming about in his armchair, his face still hidden by his hands. "My eye!" he moaned, almost sobbing. "It stabbed my eye! Quick, George, call me an ambulance!" I hurried to the telephone and fumbled with the book, looking for the right number, until Farnsworth said, "Quick, George!" again and, in desperation, I dialed the operator and told her to send us an ambulance. When I got back to Farnsworth, he had taken his hand from the unhurt eye and I could see that a trickle of blood was beginning to run down the other wrist. He had almost stopped squirming, but from his face it was ohvious that the pain was still quite intense. He stood up. "I need another drink," he said, and began heading unsteadily for the sideboard, when he stepped on the cube, which was still lying in front of his chair, and was barely able to keep himself from falling headlong, tripping on it. The cube skidded a few feet, stopping, hole-side up, near the fire. He said to the cube, enraged, "Drat you, I'll show you... !" and he reached down and swooped up the poker from the hearth. It had been lying there for mulling drinks, its end resting on the coals, and by now it was the handle with both hands and plunged the red-hot tip into the hole of the cube, pushing it down against the floor. "I'll show you!" he yelled again, and I watched understandingly as he shoved with all his weight, pushing and twisting, forcing the poker down with angry energy. There was a faint hissing sound and little wisps of dark smoke came from the hole, around the edges of the poker. Then there was a strange, sucking noise and the poker began to sink into the cube. It must have gone in at least eight or ten inches -- completely impossible, of course, since it was a one-inch cube -- and even Farnsworth became so alarmed at this that he abruptly yanked the poker out of the hole. As he did, black smoke arose in a little column for a moment and then there was a popping sound and the cube fell apart, scattering itself into hundreds of little squares of plastic and aluminum. Oddly enough, there were no burn marks on the aluminum and none of the plastic seemed to have melted. There was no sign of a little, misty ball. Farnsworth returned his right hand to his now puffy and quite bloody eye. He stood staring at the profusion of little squares with his good eye. His free hand was trembling. Then there was the sound of a siren, becoming louder. He turned and looked at me balefully. "That must be the ambulance. I suppose I'd better get my toothbrush." Within a week, though, he was pretty much his old chipper self again, looking quite dapper with a black leather patch. One interesting thing -- the doctor remarked that there were powder burns of some sort on the eyelid, and that the eye itself appeared to have been destroyed by a small explosion. He assumed that it had been a case of a gun misfiring, the cartridge exploding in an open breech somehow. Farnsworth let him think that; it was as good an explanation as any. I suggested to Farnsworth that he ought to get a green patch, to match his other eye. He laughed at the idea and said he thought it might be a bit showy. He was already starting work on another pentaract; he was going to find out just what... But he never finished. Nine days after the accident, there was a sudden flurry of news reports from the other side of the world, fantastic stories that made the Sunday supplements go completely mad with delight, and we began to guess what had happened. There wouldn't be any need to build the sixty-four-cube cross and try to find a way of folding it up. We knew now. It had been a five-dimensional cube, all right. And one extension of it had been in time -- into the future; nine days into the future -- and the other extension had been into a most peculiar kind of space, one that distorted sizes quite strangely. All of this became obvious when, three days later, it happened on our side of the world and the Sunday supplements were scooped by the phenomenon itself, which, by its nature, required no newspaper reporting. Across the entire sky of the Western hemisphere there appeared -- so vast that it eclipsed the direct light of the Sun from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Cape Horn -- a tremendous human eye, with a vast, glistening, green pupiL Part of the lid was there, too, and all of it was as if framed in a gigantic circle. Or not exactly a circle, but a polygon of many sides, like the iris diaphragm of a camera shutter. Toward nightfall, the eye blinked once and probably five simultaneously. It remained there all of the night, glowing balefully in the reflected sunlight, obliterating the stars. A thousand new religious cults were formed that night, and a thousand old ones proclaimed the day as The One Predicted for Centuries. Probably more than half the people on Earth thought it was God. Only two knew that it was Oliver Farnsworth, peering at a misty little spinning ball in a five-dimensional box, nine days before, totally unaware that the little ball was the Earth itself, contained in a little one-inch cube that was an enclave of swollen time and shrunken space. " pentaract and had somehow caused it to fold itself into two new dimensions, it had reached out through fifth-dimensional space and folded the world into itself, and had begun accelerating the time within it, in rough proportion to size, so that as each minute passed in Farnsworth's study, about one day was passing on the world within the cube. We knew this because about a minute had passed while Farnsworth had held his eye against the cube the second time -- the first time had, of course, been the appearance over Asia -- and nine days later, when we saw the same event from our position on the Earth in the cube, it was twentysix hours before the eye was "stabbed" and withdrew. It happened early in the morning, just after the Sun had left the horizon and was passing into eclipse behind the great circle that contained the eye. Someone stationed along a defense-perimeter station panicked -- someone highly placed. Fifty guided missiles were launched, straight up, the most powerful on Earth. Each carried a hydrogen warhead. Even before the great shock wave from their explosion came crashing down to Earth, the eye had disappeared. Somewhere, I knew, an unimaginably vast Oliver Farnsworth was squirming and yelping, carrying out the identical chain of events that I had seen happening in the past and that yet must be # happening now, along the immutable space-time continuum that Farnsworth's little cube had somehow by-passed. The doctor had talked of powder burns. I wondered what he would think if he knew that Farnsworth had been hit in the eye with fifty infinitesimal hydrogen bombs. For a week, there was nothing else to talk about in the world. cussed, thought about and dreamed of nothing else. There had been no more dramatic happening since the creation of the Earth and Sun than the appearance of Farnsworth's eye. But two people, out of those else. They thought of the unchangeable, pre-set space-time continuum, moving at the rate of one minute for every day that passed here on our side of the pentaract, while that vast Oliver Farnsworth and I, in the otherspace, other-time, were staring at the cube that contained our world, lying on their floor. On Wednesday, we could say, Now he's gone to the telephone. On Thursday, Now he's looking through the book. On Saturday, By now he must be dialing the operator... And on Tuesday morning, when the Sun came up, we were together and saw it rise, for we spent our nights together by then, because we had lost the knack of sleeping and did not want to be alone; and when the day had begun, we didn't say it, because we couldn't. But we thought it. We thought of a colossal, cosmic Farnsworth saying, 'Til show you!" and shoving, pushing and twisting, forcing with all of his might, into the little round hole, smoking, red-hot poker.      The idea of getting warriors back to one's own lines after they have been cut off by the enemy has always been a military goal. But not until recently was the technology available -- so much so that the items supplied would bemuse scientists, not to mention soldiers, of only a generation ago. That is the basis of Frederik Pohl's novelet next month, which shows just why it isn't fair that a smart but luckless man like Mooney has to scrounge to make a living... while Harse is never bothered with the problem of how to live luxuriously... simply premise of Pohl's story, but wait till you learn what's in that survival kit and what it can do! to be the longest layoff in the history of science fiction -- which is much less important than that it was the most missed -- he returns with an Leiber could make a touching story out of this dilemma: poor Butcher suffers more than any dictator ever did -- for everybody gives in to him because he is so punny and they are so impregnable! (The reason for the glad movie-type exclamation at the beginning of this paragraph: Leiber promises that this is just the first of many stories for There will be another novelet... short stories, of course... our the real-estate disputes that would otherwise arise as soon as we head into space! The planet below. A tremor of excitement ran through him, for it was a beautiful world of green plains and red mountains and restless blue-gray seas. His ship's instruments quickly gathered their information and decided that the planet was eminently suited for human life. Hadwell punched a deceleration orbit and opened his notebook. He was a writer, the author of White Shadows in the Asteroid Belt, The Saga of Deepest Space and T erira -- Planet of Mystery! He was starting his newest book, entitled Wanderings of a Spaceship Vagabond. He wrote, "The planet looms below me, inviting and enigmatic, a challenge to the imagination. What will I find here, I, the vagabond from beyond the stars? What strange mysteries lie beneath the verdant green cover? Will there be danger? Love? Fulfillment? Will there be a resting place for a weary wanderer?" Richard Hadwell was a tall, thin, red-headed young man. He had inherited a sizable sum from his father and had invested it in a CC-Class Space Schooner. In this elderly craft, he had voyaged for the past six years and had written ecstatic books about the places he had seen. But the ecstasy had been counterfeit, for alien planets were disappointing places. Most extraterrestrials, Hadwell Victim from Space A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to live -- all the Igathians agreed with this -- but not when it came to a time to diel had found, were remarkably stupid and amazingly ugly. Their foods were impossible and their manners deplorable. Unfortunately, the public wasn't interested in that sort of detail. So Hadwell wrote romances and hoped someday to live one. The planet below was cityless, tropical, beautiful. His ship was already homing on a small thatchhut village. "Perhaps I'll find it here," Hadwell said to himself as the spaceship began braking sharply. and his daughter Mele crossed the bridge of vines to Ragged Mountain, to gather frag blossoms. Nowhere on Igathi did the frag bloom so lustily as it did on Ragged Mountain. And this was as it should be, for the mountain was sacred to Thangookari, the smiling god. Later in the day, they were joined by Brog, a dull-faced youth of no significance whatsoever, except to himself. Mele had the feeling that something very important was about to happen. She was a tall, slender girl and she worked as though in a trance, moving slowly and dreamily, her long black hair tossed by the wind. Familiar objects seemed imbued with unusual clarity and significance. She gazed at the village, a tiny cluster of huts across the river, and with wonder looked behind her at the Pinnacle, where all Igathian marriages were performed, and beyond that to the delicately tinted sea. She was the prettiest girl in Igathi; even the old priest admitted it. She longed for a dramatic role in life. But village life droned on and here she was, picking frag blossoms under two hot suns. It seemed very unfair. Her father gathered frag energetically, humming as he worked. He knew that the blossoms would soon be fermenting in the village vat. Lag, the priest, would mumble suitable words over the brew and a libation would be poured in front of Thangookari's image. When these formalities were concluded, the entire village, dogs included, would go on a splendid drunk. These thoughts made the work go faster. Also, Kataga had evolved a subtle and dangerous scheme to increase his prestige. It made for very pleasant speculation. Brog straightened up, mopped his face with the end of his loincloth and glanced overhead for signs of rain. "Look!" he shouted. Kataga and Mele stared up. "There!" Brog screamed. "There, up there!" rounded by red and green flames was descending slowly, growing larger as they watched, and resolving into a shiny sphere. "The prophecy!" Kataga murmured reverently. "At last -- after all the centuries of waiting!" "Let's tell the village!" Mele cried. "Wait," Brog said. He flushed and dug his toe into the ground. "I saw it first, you know." "Of course you did," Mele said impatiently. "And since I saw it first," Brog continued, "thereby rendering an important service to the village, don't you think -- wouldn't it be proper -- " Brog wanted what every Igathian desired, worked and prayed for, and what intelligent men like Kataga cast subtle schemes for. But it was unseemly to call the desired thing by name. Mele and her father understood, however. "What do you think?" Kataga asked. "I suppose he does deserve something," Mele said. Brog rubbed his hands together. "Would you, Mele? Would you do it yourself?" "However," Mele said, "the whole thing is up to the priest." "Please!" Brog begged. "Lag might not feel I'm ready. Please, Kataga! Do it yourself!" Kataga studied his daughter's inflexible expression and sighed. "Sorry, Brog. If it were just between us... But Mele is scrupulously orthodox. Let the priest decide." Brog nodded, completely defeated. Overhead, the shiny sphere dropped lower, toward the level plain near the village. The three Igathi gathered their sacks of frag blossoms and began the trek home. They reached the bridge of vines, which spanned a raging mountain river. Kataga sent Brog first and Mele next. Then he followed, drawing a small knife he had concealed in his loincloth. As he had expected, Mele and Brog didn't look back. They were too busy keeping their balance on the flimsy, swaying structure. When Kataga reached the center of the bridge, he ran his fingers beneath the main supporting vine. In a moment, he found the worn spot he had located days earlier. Quickly he drew his knife across the spot and felt the fibers part. Another slash or two and the vine would snap under a man's weight. But this was enough for now. Well satisfied with himself, Kataga replaced the knife in his loincloth and hurried after Brog and Mele. r I I HE village came alive at the news of the visitor. Men and women rushed back and forth discussing the great event and an impromptu dance began in front of the Shrine of the Instrument. But it stopped when the old priest hobbled out of the Temple of Thangookari. Lag, the priest, was a tall, emaciated old man. After years of service, his face had grown to resemble the smiling, benevolent god he worshiped. On his bald head was the feathered crown of the priestly caste, and he leaned heavily on a sacred black mace. The people gathered in front of him. Brog stood near the priest, rubbing his hands together hopefully, but frightened to press for his reward. "My people," Lag said, "the ancient prophecy of the Igathi is now to be fulfilled. A great gleaming sphere has dropped from the heavens, as the old legends predicted. Within the sphere will be a being such as ourselves and he will be an emissary of Thangookari." The people nodded, faces rapt. "The emissary will be a doer of great things! He will perform acts of good such as no man has ever before seen. And when he has completed his work and claimed his rest, he will expect his reward." Lag's voice fell to an impressive whisper. "This reward is what every Igathi an desires, dreams of, prays for. It is the final behest which Thangookari grants to those who serve him and the village well." The priest turned to Brog. "You, Brog, have been the first to witness the coming of the emissary. You have served the village well." The priest raised his arms. "Friends! Do you feel that Brog should receive the reward he craves?" Most of the people felt he should. But Vassi, a wealthy merchant, stepped forward, frowning. "It isn't equitable," he said. "The rest of us work toward this for years and give expensive gifts to the temple. Brog hasn't done enough to merit even the most basic reward. Besides, he's humbly bom." OU have a point," the priest admitted, and Brog groaned audibly. "But," Lag continued, "the bounty of Thangookari is not only for the high-bom. The humblest citizen may aspire to it If Brog were not suitably rewarded, would not others lose hope?" The people roared their assent and Brog's eyes grew wet with thankfulness. "Kneel, Brog," said the priest and his face seemed to radiate kindliness and love. Brog knelt The villagers held their breath. Lag lifted his heavy mace and brought it down with all his strength on Brog's skull. It was a good blow, squarely struck. Brog collapsed, squirmed once, and expired. His expression of joy was beautiful to behold. "How lovely it was," Kataga murmured enviously. Mele grasped his arm. 'Don't worry, Father. Someday, you will have your reward." "I hope so," Kataga said. "But how can I be sure? Look at Rii. A nicer, more pious fellow never lived. That poor old man worked and prayed all his life for a violent death. Any kind of violent death. And what happened? He passed away in his sleep. What kind of death is that for a man?" "There are always one or two exceptions." "I could name a dozen others," Kataga said. "Two dozen!" "Try not to worry about it, Father," Mele soothed. "I know you'll die beautifully, like Brog." "Yes, yes... But if you think about it, Brog's was such a simple ending." His eyes lighted up. "I would like something really big, something painful and complicated and wonderful, like the emissary will have." Mele looked away. "That is presuming above your station, Father" "True, true. Oh, well, someday..." He smiled to himself. Someday indeed! An intelligent and courageous man took matters into his own hands and arranged for his own violent death, instead of waiting for the old priest to make up his feeble mind. Call it heresy or anything else, Kataga told himself, a man had the right to die as painfully and violently as he pleased -- if he could get away with it. The thought of the half-severed vine filled him with satisfaction. How fortunate he had never learned how to swim! "Come," Mele said. "Let's welcome the emissary." They followed the villagers to the level plain where the spherq had landed.- back in his padded pilot's chair and wiped perspiration from his forehead. The last natives had just left his ship and he could hear them singing and laughing as they returned to their village in the evening twilight. His ship smelled of flowers and honey and wine, and drum-beats seemed to echo still from the gray metal walls. He smiled reminiscently and took down his notebook. Selecting a stylus, he wrote: "Beautiful to behold is Igathi, a place of stately mountains and raging mountain streams, beaches of black sand, riotous vegetation in the jungles, great flowering trees in the forested glades." Not bad, Hadwell told himself. He pursed his lips and continued. "The people here are a handsome humanoid race, a light tan in coloration, comely to behold. They greeted me with flowers and dancing and many signs of joy and affection. I had no trouble hypnopeding their language and soon felt as though this had always been my home. They are a light-hearted, laughter-loving people, gentle and courteous, living serenely in a state of nearnature. What a lesson is here for Civilized Man! "One's heart goes out to them, and to Thangookari, their benevolent diety. One hopes that Civilized Man, with his genius for destruction and frenetic behavior, does not come here, to turn these folk from their path of moderation." Hadwell selected a stylus with a finer point and wrote, "There is a girl named Mele who -- " He crossed out the line and wrote, "A black-haired girl named Mele, lovely beyond compare, came close to me and gazed deep into my eyes -- " He crossed that out, too. Frowning deeply, he tried several possible lines: "Her limpid brown eyes gave promise of joys beyond -- " "Her small red mouth quivered ever so slightly when I -- " "Though her small hand rested on my arm for but a moment -- " He crumpled the page. Five months of enforced celibacy in space was having its effect, he decided. He had better return to the main issue and leave Mele for later. He wrote, "There are many ways in which a sympathetic observer such as myself could help these people. Medically, for example. But the temptation is strong to do absolutely nothing, for fear of disrupting their culture and breeding dissatisfaction." Closing his notebook, Hadwell looked out a port at the distant village, now lighted by torches. Then he opened the notebook again. "But their culture appears to be strong and flexible. Certain kinds of aid can do nothing but profit them. And these I will freely give." He closed the notebook with a snap and put away his stylus. T HE following day, Hadwell began his good works. He found many Igathi suffering from a variety of diseases transmitted by migratory vegetation. By judicious selection of antibiotics, he was able to arrest all except the most advanced cases. Then he directed work teams to drain the fields where the hobo plants bred. As he went on his healing rounds, Mele accompanied him. The beautiful Igathian girl quickly learned the rudiments of nursing and Hadwell found her assistance invaluable. Soon, all significant disease was cleared up in the village. Hadwell then began to spend his days in a sunny grove not far from Igathi, where he rested and worked on his book. A town meeting was called at once by Lag, to discuss the import of this. "Friends," said the old priest, "our friend Hadwell has done wonderful things for the village. He has cured our sick, so that they, too, may live to partake of Thangookari's gift. Now Hadwell is tired and rests in the suns. Now Hadwell expects the reward he came here for." "It is fitting," the merchant Vassi said, "that the emissary receive his reward. I suggest that the priest take his mace and go forth -- " "Why so stingy?" asked Juele, a priest-in-training. "Is Thangookari's messenger deserving of no finer death? Hadwell merits better than the mace! Much better!" "You are right," Vassi admitted slowly. "In that case, I recommend that we drive poisonous legenberry quills under his fingernails." "Maybe that's good enough for a merchant," said Tgara, the stone-cutter, "but not for Hadwell. He deserves a chiefs death! I move that we tie him down and kindle a small fire at his toes, gradually "Wait," said Lag. "The emissary has earned the Death of an Adept. Therefore let him be taken, tenderly and firmly, to the nearest giant anthill and there be buried to his neck." There were shouts of approval. Tgara said, "And as long as he screams, the ceremonial drums will pound." "And there will be dances for him," said Vassi. "And a glorious drunk," Kataga added. Everyone agreed that it would be an enviable death. So the final details were decided and a time set. The village throbbed with excitement and religious ecstasy. All the huts were decorated with flowers, except the Shrine of the Instrument, which naturally had to remain bare. The women laughed and sang as they prepared the death feast. Only Mele, for some unaccountable reason, was forlorn. With lowered head, she walked through the village and climbed slowly to the hills beyond, to Hadwell. the waist and basking under the two suns. "Hi, Mele," he said. "I heard the drums. Is something up?" "There will be a celebration," Mele replied, sitting down beside him. "That's nice. All right if I attend?" Mele stared at him, nodding slowly. Her heart melted at the sight of such courage. The emissary was showing a true observance of the ancient punctilio, by which a man pretended that his own death feast was something that really didn't concern him at all. Men in this day and age were not able to maintain the necessary aplomb. But, of course, an emissary of Thangookari would follow the rules better than anyone. "How soon does it start?" he asked. "In an hour," Mele said. Formerly she had been straightforward and free with him. Now her heart was heavy, oppressed. She didn't know why. Shyly she glanced at his bright alien garments, his red hair. "Oughta be nice," Hadwell mused. "Yessir, it oughta be mighty nice... " His voice trailed away. From under his lowered eyelids, he looked at the comely Igathian girl, observed the pure line of neck and shoulder, her straight dark hair, and sensed rather than smelled her faint sachet Nervously he plucked a blade of grass. "Mele," he said, "I-" The words died on his lips. Suddenly, startlingly, she was in his arms. "Oh, Mele!" "Hadwell!" she cried, and strained close to him. Abruptly, she pulled free, looking at him with worried eyes. "What's the matter, honey?" "Hadwell, is there anything more you could do for the village? Anything? My people would appreciate it so." "Sure there is," Hadwell said. "But I thought Fd rest up first, take it easy." "No! Please!" she begged. "Those irrigation ditches you spoke of. Could you start them now?" "If you want me to, honey," Hadwell said. "But -- " "Oh, darling!" She sprang to her feet. Hadwell reached for her, but she stepped back. "There is no time! I must hurry and tell the village!" She ran from him. And Hadwell was left to ponder the strange ways of aliens, and particularly of alien women. and found the priest in the temple, praying for wisdom and guidance. Quickly she told him about the emissary's new plans for aiding the village. The old priest nodded slowly. "Then the ceremony shall be deferred. But tell me, daughter, why are you involved in this?" Mele blushed and could not answer. The old priest smiled. But then his face became stern. "I understand. But listen to me, girl. Do not allow love to sway you from the proper worship of Thangookari and from the observances of the ancient and honorable ways of our village." "Of course not!" Mele said. "I simply felt that an Adept's death was not good enough for Hadwell. He deserves more! He deserves -- the Ultimate!" the Ultimate for six hundred years. Not since the demigod V'ktat saved the Igathian race from the dread Huelva Beasts." "But Hadwell has the stuff of heroes in him. Give him time, let him strive! He will prove worthy!" "Perhaps so" the priest said doubtfully. "It would be a great thing for the village... But consider, Mele. It might take a lifetime for Hadwell to prove himself." "Wouldn't it be worth waiting for?" The old priestfingered his mace and his forehead wrinkled in thought. "You may be right Yes, you may be right." Suddenly he straightened and glanced sharply at her. "But tell me the truth, Mele. Are you really trying to preserve him for the Ultimate Death? Or do you merely want to keep him for yourself?" "He must have the death he deserves," Mele answered serenely. But she was unable to meet the priest's eye. "I wonder," the old man said. "I wonder what lies in your heart. I think you tread dangerously close to heresy, Mele -- you who were among the most orthodox." Mele was about to answer, when the merchant Vassi rushed into the temple. "Come quickly!" he cried. "It is the farmer Iglai! He has evaded the taboo!" They hurried after him to the death scene. The fat, jolly farmer had died a terrible death. He had been walking his usual route from his hut to the village center, past an old thorn tree. Without warning, the tree had toppled on him. Thoms had impaled him through and through. Eyewitnesses said the farmer had writhed and moaned for over an hour before expiring. But he had died with a smile on his face. T HE priest looked at the crowd surrounding Iglai's body. Several of the villagers were hiding grins behind their hands. Lag walked over to the thorn tree and examined it. There were faint marks of a saw blade, which had been roughened over and concealed with clay. The priest turned to the crowd. "Was Iglai near this tree very often?" "He sure was," another farmer said. "Always ate his lunch under this tree." The crowd was laughing openly now, proud of Iglai's achievement. Remarks began to fly back and forth. "I wondered why he always ate here." "Never wanted company. Said he liked to eat alone." "Hah!" "He must have been sawing all the time." "For months, probably. That's tough wood." "Very clever of Iglai." "I'll say! He was only a farmer and no one would call him religious -- but he got himself "a damned fine death." "Listen, good people!" cried Lag. "Iglai did a sacrilegious thing! Only a priest can grant violent death!" "What the priests don't see can't hurt them," someone retorted. "So it was sacrilege," another man said. "Iglai got himself a fine death. That's the important thing." The old priest turned sadly away. There was not a thing he could do. If he had caught Iglai in time, he would have applied strict sanctions. Iglai would never have dared arrange another death so and would probably have died quietly and sheepishly in bed, at a ripe old age. But now it was too late. The farmer had his death and had already gone to Rookechangi on the wings of it. Asking the god to punish Iglai in the afterlife was useless, for the farmer was right there on the spot to plead his own case. Lag asked, "Didn't any of you see him sawing that tree?" If anyone had, he wouldn't admit it They stuck together, Lag knew. In spite of the religious training he had instilled in them from earliest childhood, they persisted in trying to outwit the priests. When would they realize that an unauthorized death could never be as satisfying as a death one worked for, deserved and had performed with all ceremonial observations? He sighed. Life was a burden sometimes. in his diary: "There has never been a race like these Igathians. I have lived among them now, eaten and drunk with them, and observed their ceremonies. I know and understand them. And the truth about them is startling, to say the least. "The fact is, the Igathians do not know the meaning of war! Consider that, Civilized Man! Never in all their recorded and oral history have they had one. They simply cannot conceive of it. I give the following illustration. "I tried to explain war to Kataga, father of the incomparable Mele. The man scratched his head and inquired, 'You say that many kill many? That is war?' " 'That's a part of it,' I said. " 'In that case,' Kataga said, 'many are dead at the same time, in the same way?' "'Correct,' said I. "He pondered this for a long time, then turned to me and said, 'It is not good for many to die at the same time in the same way. Not satisfactory. Every man should die his own individual death.' "Consider, Civilized Man, the incredible naivete of that reply. And yet think of the considerable truth which resides beneath the naivete, a truth which all might do well to learn. "Moreover, these people do not engage in quarrels among themselves, have no blood feuds, no crimes of passion, no murder. "The conclusion I come to is this: Violent death is unknown among these people -- except, of course, for accidents. "It is a shame that accidents occur so often here and are almost invariably fatal. But this I ascribe to the wildness of the surroundings and to the lighthearted, devil-may-care nature of the people. And as a matter of fact, even accidents do not go unnoticed and unchecked. The priest, with whom I have formed a considerable friendship, deplores the high accident rate and is constantly militating against it. Always he urges his people to observe more caution. "He is a good man. "And now I write the final, most wonderful news of all." Hadwell smiled self-consciously, hesitated for a moment, then returned to his notebook. "Mele has consented to become my wife! As soon as I complete this section of my book, the ceremony begins. Already the festivities have started, the feast prepared. I consider myself the most fortunate of men, for Mele is a beautiful woman. And a most unusual woman, as well. "She has great social consciousness. A little too much, perhaps. She has been urging me constantly to do things for the village. And I have done much. I have completed an irrigation system for them,, introduced several fast-growing food crops, started the profession of metal-working, and other things too numerous to mention. And she wants me to do more, much more. "But here I have put my foot down. I have a right to rest. I want a long, languorous honeymoon and then a year or so of basking in the suns and finishing my book. "Mele finds this difficult to understand. She keeps on trying to tell me that I must continue helping her people. And she speaks of some ceremony involving the 'Ultimate' (if my translation is correct). "But I have done enough work. I refused to do more, for a year or two, at least. "This 'Ultimate' ceremony is to take place directly after our wedding. I suppose it will be some high honor or other that these simple people wish to bestow on ness to accept it. "It should be highly interesting." "C'OR the wedding, the entire village, led by the old priest, marched to the Pinnacle, where all Igathian marriages were performed. The men wore ceremonial feathers and the women were decked in shell jewelry and iridescent stones. Four husky villagers in the center of the procession bore a strange-looking apparatus. Hadwell caught only a glimpse of it, but he knew it had been taken, with tedious ceremony, from a plain black-thatched hut which seemed to be a shrine of some sort. In single file, they proceeded over the shaky bridge of vines. Kataga, bringing up the rear, grinned to himself as he secretively slashed again at the worn spot. The Pinnacle was a narrow spur of black rock thrust out over the sea. Hadwell and Mele stood on the end of it, faced by the priest. The people fell silent as Lag raised his arms. "O great Thangookari!" the priest cried. "Cherish this man Hadwell, your emissary, who has come to us from out of the sky in a shining vehicle, and who has done service for the Igathi such as no man has ever done. And cherish your daughter Mele. Teach her to love the memory of her husband -- and to remain strong in her tribal beliefs " The priest stared hard at Mele as he said that. And Mele, her head held high, gave him look for look. "I now pronounce you," said S# the priest, "man and wife!" Hadwell clasped his wife in his arms and kissed her. The people cheered. Kataga grinned his sly grin. "And now," said the priest in his gentlest voice, "I have good news for you, Hadwell. Great news!" "Oh?" Hadwell said, reluctantly releasing his bride. "We have judged you," said Lag, "and we have found you worthy -- of the Ultimate!" "Why, thanks," Hadwell said. The priest motioned. Four men came up lugging the strange apparatus which Hadwell had glimpsed earlier. Now he saw that it was a platform the size of a large bed, made of some ancientlooking black wood. Lashed to the frame were various barbs, hooks, sharpened shells and needle-shaped thorns. There were cups, which contained no liquid as yet. And there were other things, strange in shape, whose purpose Hadwell could not guess. "Not for six hundred years," said Lag, "has the Instrument been removed from the Shrine of the Instrument. Not since the days of V'ktat, the hero-god who single-handed saved the Igathian people from destruction. But it has been removed for you, Hadwell!" "Really, I'm not worthy," Hadwell protested, succeeding in working up a blush. A murmur rose from the crowd at such modesty. "Believe me," Lag said earnestly, "you are worthy. Do you accept the Ultimate, Hadwell?" Hadwell looked at Mele. He could not read the expression on her lovely face. He looked at the priest. Lag's face was impassive. The crowd was deathly still. Hadwell looked at the Instrument. He didn't like its appearance. A doubt began to creep across his mind. Had he misjudged these people? That Instrument must have been used for torture at some ancient time. Those barbs and hooks... But what were the other things for? Thinking hard, Hadwell conceived some of their possible usages. He shuddered. The crowd was closely packed in front of him. Behind him was the narrow point of rock and a sheer thousand-foot drop below it. Hadwell looked again at Mele. The love and devotion in her face were unmistakable. Glancing at the villagers, he saw their concern for him. What was he worried about? They would never do anything to harm him, not after all he had done for the village. The Instrument undoubtedly had some symbolic use. "I accept the Ultimate," Hadwell said to the priest T HE villagers shouted, a deepthroated roar that echoed from the mountains. They formed closely around him, smiling, shaking his hands. "The ceremony will take place at once," said the priest, "in the village, in front of the statue of Thangookari." Immediately they started back, the priest leading. Hadwell and his bride were in the center now. Mele still had not spoken since the ceremony. Silently they crossed the swaying bridge of vines. Once across, the villagers pressed more closely around Hadwell than before, giving him a slightly claustrophobic feeling. If he had not been convinced of their essential goodness, he told himself, he might have felt genuinely apprehensive. Ahead lay the village and the altar of Thangookari. The priest hurried toward it. Suddenly there was a shriek. Everyone turned and rushed back to the bridge. At the brink of the river, Hadwell saw what had happened. Kataga, Mele's father, had brought up the rear of the procession. As he had reached the midpoint, the central supporting vine had inexplicably snapped. Kataga had managed to clutch a secondary vine, but only for a moment. While the villagers watched, his hold weakened, released, and he dropped into the river. Hadwell stared, frozen into shock. With dreamlike clarity, he saw it all -- Kataga falling, a smile of magnificent courage on his face, the raging white water, the jagged rocks below. It was a certain, terrible death. "Can he swim?" Hadwell asked Mele. "No," the girl said. "He refused to learn... Oh, Father! How could you!" The raging white water frightened Hadwell more than anything he had ever seen, more than the emptiness of space. But the father of his wife was in danger. He plunged headlong into the icy water. Kataga was almost unconscious when Hadwell reached him, which was fortunate, for the Igathian did not struggle when Hadwell seized him by the hair and started to swim vigorously for the nearest shore. But he couldn't make it. Currents swept the men along, pulling them under and throwing them to the surface again. By a strenuous effort, Hadwell was able to avoid the first rocks. But more loomed ahead. The villagers ran along the bank, yelling at him. With his strength ebbing rapidly, Hadwell fought again for the shore. A submerged rock scraped his side and his grip on Kataga's hair began to weaken. The Igathian was starting to recover and struggle. "Don't give up, old man," Hadwell gasped. The bank sped past. Hadwell came within ten feet of it, but then the current began to carry him out again. With his last surge of strength, he managed to grab an overhead branch and hold on while the current wrenched and tore at his body. Moments later, guided by the priest, the villagers pulled Hadwell and Kataga in to the safety of the shore. village. When Hadwell was able to breathe normally again, he turned and grinned feebly at Kataga. "Close call, old man," he said. "Meddler!" Kataga spat at Hadwell and stalked off. Hadwell gaped after him. "Must have affected his brain," he said. "Well, shall we get on with the Ultimate?" The villagers drew close to him, their faces menacing. "Hah! The Ultimate he wants!" "A man like that!" "After dragging poor Kataga out of the river, he has the nerve to... "His own father-in-law and he saves his life!" "A man like that doesn't deserve the Ultimate!" "A man like that," Vassi the merchant summed up, "doesn't deserve to die!" Hadwell wondered if they had all gone temporarily insane. He stood up a bit shakily and appealed to the priest. "What is all this?" Lag, with mournful eyes and pale, set lips, looked at him and did not answer. "Can't I have the Ultimate ceremony?" Hadwell asked, with a plaintive note in his voice. "You do deserve it," the priest said. "If any man has ever deserved the Ultimate, you do, Hadwell. I feel you should have it, as a matter of abstract justice. But there is more involved here than abstract justice. There are principles of mercy and human pity which are dear to Thangookari. By these principles, Hadwell, you did a terrible and inhuman thing when you rescued poor Kataga from the river... I am afraid the action is unforgivable." Hadwell didn't know what to say. Apparently there was some taboo against rescuing men who had fallen into the river. But how could they expect him to know about it? How could they let this one little thing outweigh all he had done for them? "Isn't there some ceremony you can give me?" he pleaded. "I like you people. I want to live here. Surely there's something you can do." The old priest's eyes misted with compassion. He gripped his mace, started to lift it He was stopped by an ominous roar from the crowd. "There is nothing I can do," he said. "Leave us, false emissary. Leave us, Hadwell -- who does not deserve to die." "All right!" Hadwell shouted, his temper suddenly snapping. "To hell with you bunch of dirty savages. I wouldn't stay here if you got down on your knees and begged me. I'm going. Are you with me, Mele?" The girl blinked convulsively, looked at Hadwell, then at the priest. There was a long moment of silence. Then the priest murmured, "Remember your father, Mele. Remember the beliefs of your people." Mele's proud little chin came up. "I know where my duty lies. Let's go, Richard dear." "Right," said Hadwell. He stalked off to his spaceship, followed by Mele. In despair, the old priest watched. He cried, "Mele!" once, in a heart-broken voice. But Mele did not turn back. He saw her enter the ship and the port slide shut. Within minutes, red and blue flames bathed the silver sphere. The sphere lifted, gained speed, dwindled to a speck, and vanished. Tears rolled down the old priest's cheeks as he watched it go. "Darling, I'm taking you to Earth, the planet I come from. You'll like it there." "I know I will," Mele murmured, staring out a porthole at Somewhere among them was her world, lost to her forever. She was homesick already. But there had been no other choice. A woman who loves truly and well never loses faith in her man. She fingered a tiny sheathed dagger concealed in her clothing. The dagger was tipped with a peculiarly painful and slow-acting poison. It was a family heirloom, to be used when there was no priest around, and only on those one loved most dearly. "I'm through wasting my time," Hadwell said. "With your help, I'm going to do great things. You'll be proud of me, honey." Mele knew he meant it. Someday, she thought, Hadwell would atone for the sin against her father. He would do something, some fine deed, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next year. And then she would give him the most precious thing a woman can give to a man. A painful death. Help one's fellow-man for fun and profit? Oh, yes -- but look out for the final accounting! announced, it was Dr. Chauncey Patrick Coffin who announced it. He had, of course, arranged with uncanny skill to take most of the credit for himself. If it turned out to be even greater than he had hoped, so much the better. His presentation was scheduled for the final night of the American College of Clinical Practitioners' annual Illustrated I: meeting, and Coffin had fully intended it to be a bombshell. It was. Its explosion exceeded even Dr. Coffin's wilder expectations, which took quite a bit of doing. In the end, he had waded through more newspaper reporters than medical doctors as he left the hall that night. It was a heady evening for Chauncey Patrick Coffin, M.D. Certain others were not so delighted with Coffin's bombshell. Dawson all but howled in the laboratory conference room the next morning. '"Blind, screaming idiocy! You've gone out of your mind -- that's all there is to it. Can't you see what you've done? Aside from selling your colleagues down the river, that is?" -Coffin's address in his hand and brandished it like a broadsword. " 'Report on a Vaccine for the Treatment and Cure of the Common Cold,' by C. P. Coffin, et at. That's what it says -- et at. My idea in the first place, Jake and I pounding our heads on the wall for eight solid months -- and now you go sneak it into publication a full year before we have any business publishing a word about it -- " Coffin ran a pudgy hand through his snowy hair. "How ungrateful! I thought for sure you'd be delighted. An excellent presentation, I must say -- terse, succinct, unequivocal -- " he raised his hand -- "but generously unequivocal, you understand. You should have heard the ovation -- they nearly went wild! And the look on Underwood's face! Worth waiting twenty years for... " "And the reporters," snapped ers." He whirled on the small dark man sitting quietly in the comer. "How about that, Jake? Did you see the morning papers? This thief not only steals our work, he splashes it all over the countryside in red ink." Dr. Jacob Miles coughed apolostormed up about is the prematurity of it all," he said to Coffin. "After all, we've hardly had an acceptable period of clinical trial." "Nonsense," said Coffin, glaring men were ready to publish their discovery within another six weeks. Where would we be then? How much clinical testing do you cold of your life when you took the vaccine. Have you had any since?" peevishly. "Jacob, how about you? Any sniffles?" "Oh, no. No colds." "Well, what about those six hundred students from the University? Did I misread the reports on them?" "No -- #  cured of active symptoms within twenty four hours. Not a single recurrence. The results were just short of miraculous." Jake hesitated. "Of course, it's only been a month... "Month, year, century! Look at them! Six hundred of the world's most luxuriant colds and now not even a sniffle." The chubby doctor sank down behind the desk, his ruddy face beaming. "Come now, gentlemen, be reasonable. Think positively! There's work to be done, a great deal of work. They'll be wanting me in Washington. Press conference in twenty minutes. Drug houses to consult with. How dare we stand in the path of Progress? We've won the greatest medical triumph of all times -- the conquering of the Common Cold. We'll go down in history!" And he was perfectly right on one point, at least. They did go down in history. f I I HE public response to the vaccine was little less than massscale. Of all the ailments that have tormented mankind throughout history, none was ever more universal, more tenacious, more uniformly miserable than the common cold. It respected no barriers, boundaries, or classes; ambassadors and chambermaids snuffled and sneezed in drippy-nosed unanimity. The powers in the Kremlin sniffed and blew and wept genuine tears on drafty days, while Senatorial debates on Earth-shaking issues paused reverently upon the blowing of a nose, the clearing of a rhinorrheic throat. True, other illnesses brought disability, even death in their wake, but the common cold brought torment to sisted the most superhuman of efforts to curb it. Until that rainy November day when the tidings broke to the world in four-inch banner heads: "No More Coughin' " States Co-Finder of Cure In medical circles, it was called the Coffin Multicentric Upper Respiratory Virus-inhibiting Vaccine, but the newspapers could never stand for such high-sounding names and called it, instead, "The Coffin Cure." Below the banner heads, worldrenowned feature writers expounded in awesome terms the story of the leviathan struggle of Dr. Chauncey Patrick Coffin (et al .) in solving this riddle of the ages: How, after years of failure, they ultimately succeeded in culturing the true causative agent of the common cold, identifying it not as a single virus or even a group of viruses, but rather as a multicentric virus complex invading the soft mucous linings of the nose, throat and eyes, capable of altering its basic molecular structure at any time to resist efforts of the body from within, or the physician from without, to attack and dispel it; how the hypothesis was that the virus could be destroyed only by an antibody which could "freeze" the virus-complex in one form long enough for normal body defenses to dispose of the offending invader; the exhausting search for such a "crippling agent" and the final crowning success, after injecting untold gallons of cold-virus material into the hides of a group of cooperative dogs (a species which had never suffered from colds and hence endured the whole business with an air of affectionate boredom). And, finally, the testing. First, Coffin himself (who was suffering a particularly horrendous case of the affliction he sought to cure); son and Jacob Miles; then a multitude of students from the University -- carefully selected for the severity of their symptoms, the longevity of their colds, their tendency to acquire them on little or no provocation, and their utter inabilty to get rid of them with any known medical program. They were a sorry spectacle, those students filing through the Coffin laboratory for three days in October: wheezing like steam shovels, snorting and sneezing and sniffling and blowing, coughing and squeaking, mute appeals glowing in their bloodshot eyes. The researchers dispensed the material -- a single shot in the right arm, a sensitivity control in the left.  then watched as the results came in. The sneezing stopped; the sniffling ceased. A great silence settled over the campus, in the classrooms, in the library, in classic halls. Dr. Coffin's voice returned (rather to the regret of his co-workers) and he began bouncing about the laboratory like a small boy at the fair. Students by the dozen trooped in for checkups with noses dry and eyes bright. In a matter of days, there was no doubt left that the goal had been reached. "But we have to be sure," Phillip Dawson had said emphatically. "This was only the pilot test. We need mass testing now on an entire community. We ougt to go to the West Coast to run studies -- they have a different breed of cold out there, I hear. We'll have to see how long the immunity lasts, make sure there are no unexpected side effects..." And, muttering to himself, he fell to work with pad and pencil, calculating the program to be undertaken before publication. But there were rumors. Underwood at Stanford, it was said, had already completed his tests and was preparing a paper for publication in a matter of months. Surely, with such dramatic results on the pilot tests, something could be put into print. It would be tragic to lose the race for the sake of a little unnecessary caution... mant, was a voice crying in the wilderness, for Chauncey Coffin was boss. Within a week, though, even Coffin was wondering if he had bitten off just a trifle too much. They had expected that the demand for the vaccine would be great -- but even the grisly memory of the early days of the Salk vaccine had not prepared them for the mobs of sneezing, wheezing, red-eyed people bombarding them for the first fruits. Clear-eyed young men from the Government Bureau pushed through crowds of local townspeople, lining the streets outside the Coffin laboratory, standing in pouring rain to raise insistent placards. Seventeen pharmaceutical houses descended with production plans, cost estimates, colorful graphs demonstrating proposed yield and distribution programs. Coffin was flown to Washington, where conferences labored far into the night as demands pounded their doors like a tidal wave. One laboratory promised the vaccine in ten days; another guaranteed it in a week. The first actually appeared in three weeks and two days, to be soaked up in the space of three hours by the thirsty sponge of cold-weary humanity. Express planes were dispatched to Europe, to Asia, to Africa with the precious cargo, a hides, and with a huge, convulsive sneeze, mankind stepped forth into a new era. course -- there always are: "It doesd't bake eddy differets how buch you talk," Ellie Dawson cried hoarsely, shaking her blonde curls. "I dod't wadt eddy cold shots." "You're being totally unreasonhis wife in annoyance. She wasn't the sweet young thing he had married, not this evening. Her eyes were puffy, her nose red and sore. "You've had this cold for two solid months now and there just isn't any sense to it. It's making you miserable. You can't eat, you can't breathe, you can't sleep -- " "I dod't wadt eddy cold shots," she repeated stubbornly. "But why not? Just one little needle. You'd hardly feel it -- " "But I dod't like deedles!" she cried, bursting into tears. "Why dod't you leave be alode? Go take your dasty old deedles ad stick theb id people that wadt theb." "Aw, Ellie -- " "I dod't care, I dod't like deedles!" she wailed, burying her face in his shirt. He held her close, kissing her ear and making comforting little noises. It was no use, he reflected sadly. Science just wasn't Ellie's long suit; she didn't know a cold vaccine from a case of smallpox, and no appeal to logic or common sense could surmount her irrational fear of hypodermics. "All right, sweet, nobody's going to make you do anything you don't want to." "Ad eddyway, thik of the poor tissue badufacturers," she sniffled, wiping her nose with a pink facial tissue. "All their little childred starvig to death -- " "Say, you have got a cold," said enough perfume to fell an ox." He wiped away her tears and grinned at her. "Come on now, fix your face. Dinner at the Driftwood? I hear they have marvelous lamb chops." It was a mellow evening. The lamb chops were delectable -- far the best he had ever eaten, he thought, even with as good a cook as Ellie for a spouse. Ellie dripped and blew continuously, but refused to go home until they had taken in a movie and stopped by to dance a while. "I hardly ever gedt to see you eddy bore," she wistfully explained. "All because of that dasty bedicide you're givig people." It was true, of course. The work at the lab was endless. They danced, but came home early the sleep he could get. He awoke once during the night to a parade of sneezes from his wife, and rolled over, frowning sleepily to himself. It was ignominious, in a way -- the wife of one of the cold-cure discoverers refusing the fruit of all those months of work. And cold or no cold, she surely was using a whale of a lot of perfume. to stretch, and sat bolt upright in bed, looking wildly about the room. Pale morning sunlight drifted in the window. Downstairs, he heard Ellie stirring in the kitchen. For a moment, he thought he was suffocating. He leaped out of bed, stared at the vanity table across the room. "Somebody's spilled the whole damned bottle -- " The heavy sick-sweet miasma hung like a cloud around him, drenching the room. With every breath, it grew thicker. He searched the vanity top frantically, but there were no open bottles. His head began to spin from the emetic effluvium. He blinked in confusion, his hand trembling as he lit a cigarette. No need to panic, he thought. She probably knocked a bottle over when she was dressing. He took a deep puff -- and burst into a paroxysm of coughing as acrid fumes burned down his throat to his lungs. "Ellie!" He rushed into the hall, still coughing. The match smell had given way to a caustic stench of burning weeds. He stared at his cigarette in horror and threw it into the sink. The odor grew worse. He threw open the hall closet, expecting smoke to come billowing out. "Ellie! Somebody's burning down the house!" "Whadtever are you talkig aboudt?" Ellie's voice came from the stair well. "It's just the toast I burned, silly." He rushed down the stairs two at a time -- and nearly gagged as he reached the bottom. The smell of hot, rancid grease struck him like a solid wall. It was intermingled with an overpowering oily smell of boiled and parboiled coffee. By the time he reached the kitchen, he was holding his nose, tears pouring from his eyes. "Ellie, what are you doing in here?" She stared at him. "IT baking breakfast." "But don't you smell it?" On the stove, the automatic percolator made small, promising noises. Four sunnyside eggs were sizzling in the frying pan; half a dozen strips of bacon drained on a paper towel on the sideboard. It couldn't have looked more innocent. nose, sniffed. The stench nearly strangled him. "You mean you don't smell anything strange?" "I dod't sbell eddythig, period," said Ellie defensively. "The coffee, the bacon -- come here a minute!" She reeked -- of bacon, of coffee, of burned toast, but mostly of perfume. "Did you put on fresh perfume this morning?" "Before breakfast? Dod't be ridiculous." turning very white. "Dot a drop." wait a minute. This must be all in my mind. I'm -- just imagining things, that's all. Working too hard, hysterical reaction. In a minute, it'll all go away." He poured a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar. He couldn't get it close enough to taste it. It smelled as if it had been boiling three weeks in a rancid pot. It was the smell of coffee, all right, but a smell that was fiendishly distorted, overpoweringly and nauseatingly magnified. It pervaded the room and burned his throat and brought tears gushing to his eyes. Slowly, realization began to dawn. He spilled the coffee as he set the cup down. The perfume. The coffee. The cigarette... "My hat," he choked. "Get me my hat. I've got to get to the laboratory." It grew worse all the way downtown. He fought down nausea as the smell of damp, rotting earth rose from his front yard in a gray cloud. The neighbor's dog dashed out to greet him, exuding the great-grandfather of all dog the bus, every passing car fouled the air with noxious fumes, gagging him, doubling him up with coughing as he dabbed at his streaming eyes. Nobody else seemed to notice anything wrong at all. The bus ride was a nightmare. It was a damp, rainy day; the inside of the bus smelled like the locker room after a big game. A bleary-eyed man with three-days' stubble on his chin flopped down in the seat next to him, and Phillip reeled back in memory to the job he had held in his student days, cleaning vats in the brewery. "It'sh a great morning," Blearyeyes breathed at him. "Huh, Doc?" man had had a breakfast of salami. In the seat ahead, a fat gentleman held a dead cigar clamped in his mouth like a rank growth. he sank his face into his hand, trying unobtrusively to clamp his nostrils. With a groan of deliverance, he lurched off the bus at the laboratory gate. He met Jake Miles coming up the steps. Jake looked pale, too pale. "Nice day. Looks like the Sun might come through." "Yeah," said Jake. "Nice day. You -- uh -- feel all right this morning?" hat in the closet, opened the incubator on his culture tubes, trying to look busy. He slammed the door after one whiff and gripped the edge of the work table with whitening knuckles. "Why do you ask?" "Oh, nothing. Thought you looked a little peaked, was all." They stared at each other in silence. Then, as though by signal, their eyes turned to the office at the end of the lab. "Coffin come in yet?" Jake nodded. "He's in there. He's got the door locked." "I think he's going to have to A gray-faced Dr. Coffin unlocked the door, backed quickly toward the wall. The room reeked of kitchen deodorant. "Stay right where you are," Coffin squeaked. "Don't come a step closer. I can't see you now. I'm -- I'm busy. I've got work that has to be done -- " "You're telling me," growled the office and locked the door again carefully. Then he turned to Coffin. "When did it start for you?" Coffin was trembling. "Right after supper last night. I thought I was going to suffocate. Got up and walked the streets all night. My God, what a stink!" "Jake?" Dr. Miles shook his head. "Sometime this morning. I woke up with it." "That's when it hit me," said "But I don't understand," Coffin howled. "Nobody else seems to notice anything -- " the first three to take the Coffin Cure, remember? You and me and Jake. Two months ago." Coffin's forehead was beaded with sweat. He stared at the two men in growing horror. " But what about the others ?" we'd better find something spectacular to do in a mighty big hurry. That's what I think." important thing right now is secrecy. We mustn't let a word get out -- not until we're absolutely certain." "But what's happened ?" Coffin cried. "These foul smells everycigarette this morning. I can smell it clear over here and it's burning my eyes. If I didn't know better, I'd swear neither of you had had a bath in a week. Every odor in town has suddenly turned foul -- " "Magnified, you mean," said Jake. "Perfume still smells sweet -- there's just too much of it. The same with cinnamon; I tried it. Cried for half an hour, but it still smelled like cinnamon. No, I don't think the smells have changed any." "But what then?" "Our noses have changed, obviously." Jake paced the floor in excitement. "Look at our dogs. They've never had colds -- and they practically live by their noses. Other animals -- all dependent on their senses of smell for survival -- and none of them ever have anything even vaguely reminiscent of a common cold. The multicentric virus hits primates only -- and it reaches its fullest parasitic powers in Man alone!" Coffin shook his head miserably. "But why this horrible reek all of a sudden? I haven't had a cold in weeks -- " "Of course not! That's just what I'm saying," Jake persisted. "Look, why do we have any sense of smell at all? Because we have tiny olfactory nerve endings buried in the mucous membrane of our noses and throats. But we've always had the virus living there, too, colds or no colds, throughout our entire lifetime. It's always been there,anchored in the same cells, parasitizing the same sensitive tissues that carry our olfactory nerve endings, numbing them and crippling them, making them practically useless as sensory organs. No wonder we never smelled anything before! Those poor little nerve endings never had a chance!" "Until we came along and de"Oh, we didn't destroy it. We merely stripped it of a very slippery protective mechanism it had against normal body defenses." Jake perched on the edge of the desk, his dark face intense. "These two months since we had our shots have witnessed a battle to the death between our bodies and the virus. With the help of the vaccine, our bodies have won, that's all -- stripped away the last strongholds of an invader that has been almost a part of our normal physiology since the beginning of primates. And now, for the first time, those crippled little nerve endings are just beginning to function."  us. You think it'll get worse?" "And worse. And still worse," said Jake. "what the anthropologists will say." "What do you mean?" "Maybe it was just a single mutation somewhere back in prehistory. Just a tiny change of metabolism that left one line of the primates vulnerable to an invader no other would harbor. Why else should Man have begun to flower and blossom intellectually- -- grow to depend so much on his brains instead of his brawn that he could rise above all others? What better reason than because, somewhere along the line, he suddenly lost his sense of smell?" "Well, he's got it back again now," Coffin said despairingly, "and he's not going to like it a bit." "No, he surely isn't," Jake agreed. "He's going to start hunting very quickly for someone to blame, I think." They both looked at Coffin. "Now don't be ridiculous, boys," said Coffin, beginning to shake. was your idea in the first place -- you said so yourself! You can't leave me now -- " The telephone jangled. The frightened voice of the secretary bleated, "Dr. Coffin? There was a student on the line just a moment ago. He -- he said he was coming up to see you. Now, he said, not later -- " "I'm busy," Coffin sputtered. "I can't see anyone. And I can't take any calls -- ' "But he's already on his way up," the girl burst out. "He was saying something about tearing you apart with his bare hands." Coffin slammed down the receiver. His face was the color of clay. "They'll crucify me! Jake -- door. "Send a girl down to the freezer and have her bring up all the live cold virus she can find. Get us some inoculated monkeys and a few dozen dogs." He turned to Coffin. "And stop sniveling. You're the big publicity man around here -- you're going to handle the screaming masses, whether you like it or not." "But what are you going to do?" "I haven't the faintest idea," going to cost you your shirt. We're going to find out how to catch cold again if we have to die trying." and a futile one. They sprayed their noses and throats with enough pure culture of virulent live virus to have condemned an ordinary man to a lifetime of sneezing, watery-eyed misery. They didn't develop a sniffle among them. They mixed six different strains of virus and gargled the extract, spraying themselves and every inoculated monkey they could get their hands on with the vile-smelling stuff. Not a sneeze. They injected it hypodermically, intradermally, subcutaneously, intramuscularly and intravenously. They drank it. They bathed in it. But they didn't catch a cold. "Maybe it's the wrong approach," Jake said one morning. "Our body defenses are keyed up to top performance right now. Maybe if we break them down, we can get somewhere." They plunged down that alley with grim abandon. They starved themselves. They forced themselves to stay awake for days on end, until exhaustion forced their eyes closed in spite of all they could do. They carefully devised vitamin-free, protein-free, mineral-free diets that tasted like library paste and smelled worse. They wore wet clothes and sopping shoes to work, turned off the heat and threw windows open to the raw winter air. Then they resprayed themselves with the live cold virus and waited prayerfully for the sneezing to begin. It didn't. They stared at each other in gathering gloom. They'd never felt better in their lives. Except for the smells, of course. They'd hoped that they might, presently, get used to them. They didn't. Every day it grew a little worse. They began smelling smells they never dreamed existed -- noxious smells, cloying smells, smells that drove them gagging to the sinks. Their nose-plugs were rapidly losing their effectiveness. Mealtimes were nightmarish ordeals; they lost weight with alarming speed. But they didn't catch cold. "I think you should all be locked up," Ellie Dawson said severely as she dragged her husband, blue-faced and shivering, out of an icy shower one bitter morning. "You've lost your wits. You need to be protected against yourselves, that's what you need." "You don't understand," Phillip moaned. "We've got to catch cold." Suppose you don't -- what's going to happen?" "We had three hundred students march on the laboratory to"The smells were driving them crazy, they said. They couldn't even bear to be close to their best friends. They wanted something done about it, or else they wanted blood. Tomorrow we'll have them back and three hundred more. And they were just the pilot study! What's going to happen their noses suddenly turning on them?" He shuddered. "Have you seen the papers? People are already going around sniffing like bloodhounds. And now we're finding out what a thorough job we did. We can't crack it, Ellie. We can't even get a toe hold. Those antibodies are just doing too good a job." "Well, maybe you can find some unclebodies to take care of them," Ellie offered vaguely. "Look, don't make bad jokes -- " "I'm not making jokes! I don't care what you do. All I want is a husband back who doesn't complain about how everything smells, and eats the dinners I cook, and doesn't stand around in cold showers at six in the morning." "I know it's miserable," he said helplessly. "But I don't know how we can stop it." He found Jake and Coffin in tight-lipped conference when he reached the lab. "I can't do it any more " Coffin was saying. "I've begged them for time. I've promised them everything but my upper plate. I can't face them again. I just can't." "We only have a few days left," Jake said grimly. "If we don't come up with something, we're goners." as he stared at them. "You know what I think?" he asked suddenly. "I think we've been prize idiots. We've gotten so rattled, we haven't used our heads. And all the time it's been sitting there blinking at us!" "What are you talking about?" snapped Jake. "Great God!" "No, I'm dead serious." Phillip's eyes were very bright. "How many of those students do you think you can corral to help us?" Coffin gulped. "Six hundred. They're out there in the street right now, a blood-seeking mob howling for a lynching." "All right, I want them in here. And I want some monkeys. Monkeys with colds -- the worse colds, the better." "Do you have any idea what you're doing?" asked Jake. "None in the least," said Phillip happily, "except that it's never been done before. But maybe it's time we tried following our noses for a while -- " I 'HE tidal wave began to break two days later... only a few people here, a dozen there, but enough to confirm the direst newspaper predictions. The boomerang was completing its circle. At the laboratory, the doors were kept barred, the telephones disconnected. Within, there was a bustle of feverish -- if odorous -- activity. For the three researchers, the olfactory acuity had reached agonizing proportions. had devised could no longer shield them from the continuous barrage of violent odors. But the work went on in spite of the smell. Truckloads of monkeys arrived at the lab -- coldridden, sneezing, coughing, weeping, wheezing monkeys by the dozen. Culture trays bulged with tubes, overflowed the incubators and work tables. Each day six hundred angry students paraded through the lab, arms exposed, mouths open, grumbling but cooperating. At the end of the first week, half the monkeys were cured of their colds and were unable to catch them back; the other half had new colds and couldn't get rid with grim satisfaction and went about the laboratory mumbling to himself. Two days later, he burst forth jubilantly, lugging a sad-looking puppy under his arm. It was like no other puppy in the world. This one was sneezing and snuffling with a perfect howler of a cold. The day came when they injected a tiny droplet of milky arm and got the virus spray and gave his nose and throat a liberal application. Then they sat back and waited. They were still waiting three days later. "It was a great idea," Jake said morosely, flipping a bulging notebook closed with finality. "It just didn't work, was all." "Where's Coffin?" "He collapsed three days ago. Nervous prostration. He kept having dreams about hangings." we'd better just face it. Nice knowing you, Jake. Pity it had to be this way." "It was a great try, old man. A great try." "Ah, yes. Nothing like going down in a blaze of -- " widening. His nose began to twitch. He took a gasp, a larger gasp, as a long-dead reflex came sleepily to life, shook its head, reared back... He sneezed for ten minutes without a pause, until he was blue-faced and gasping for air. He caught hold of Jake, wringing his hand as tears gushed from his eyes. ciple he said later to Ellie as she spread mustard on his chest and poured more warm water into his foot bath. "The Cure itself depedded upod it -- the adtiged-adtibody reactiod. We had the adtibody agaidst the virus, all ridght; what we had to find was sobe kide of adtibody agaidst the adtibody." He sneezed violently and poured in nose drops with a happy grin. "Will they be able to make it fast enough?" "Just aboudt fast edough for people to get good ad eager to "There's odly wud little hitch..." Ellie Dawson, took the steaks from the grill and set them, still sizzling, on the dinner table. "Hitch?" she said. the steak with a pretense of enthusiasm. It tasted like slightly damp K-ration. "This stuff we've bade does a real good job. Just a little too good." He wiped his nose and reached for a fresh tissue. "I bay be wrog, but I thik I've got this cold for keeps," he said sadly. "Udless I cad fide ad adtibody agaidst the adtibody agaidst the adtibody -- " # Star Shelf Shepherd Mead. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # B allantine has done a large service by reissuing Mead's # work of art. If you haven't yet read it, don't let it get away. Gravy Planet, Preferred Risk and Golden Kazoo told their yarns fairly straight; Mead coats his horror story with laughter. Example: "I'm worried about Mabel." "Who's Mabel?" "She's the Muscular Dystrophy girl." "Can't she walk at all?" "She hasn't got it; it's her career, or was. She's worked hard just to get somewhere in the organization. They've really sold the idea network hours promised each year -- " "I know, it's a big operation." Some of the diseases are almost as big as General Motors. "All of a sudden -- poof! Peptomycin! Makes M.D. no worse than a bad cold. Probably some scrubby little fellow in a laboratory." A crisis has arisen in Mead's future world. Consumption has fallen sharply in St. Louis, apparently because of the activities of a religious sect, the Followers, led by Molly Blood, a former strip artist ConChem's trouble shooter, the narrator, takes over the local problem to find a solution. Evidently the sect has an irresistible gimmick in XP, or feelies, in which the audience has full sensory participation. The hero's self-sacrificing first XP session is alone worth the cover price. Nothing is sacred to Mead, give thanks, as he proceeds to make this one of the funniest books of the decade. I doubt if you'll even hold the disappointing Momsday Revolution against him. Gallant. Garden City Books, N. Y., # proach of Mars last September, it could only be expected that the market would be flooded by factual texts for the layman. The tide is now receding, leaving the following two items in its ebb. Exploring Mars can claim the heavyweight title. The various publishing houses seem to have had an unofficial competition to see who could produce the unwieldiest volume. Until now, Albro Gaul's and the Ley-Braun entries have shared the crown. But not any more. A full # Vz inches high by # wide, this new champ is fortunately redeemed by its maps and illustrations by Lowell Hess. Just make sure your youngster is at least as big as the book before you buy it. by the Earl Nelson. The Citadel Press, N. Y., # Albert, the Earl Nelson, descendant of the famous Admiral, has written a scholarly summingup that, though containing nothing new and startling, is quite readable. And fear not -- the "life" referred to so dramatically is merely the moss and lichen of contemporary theory, not the intelligent life of Percival Lowell and H. G. Wells. Damon Knight. Advent: Publishers , Chicago, # essays devoted solely to the field of science-fantasy. Anthony Boucher, in his foreword, admires the hatchet job Knight does on Austin Hall, among others. That's no hatchet -- it's an axe, swung by a man with more than his share of axes to grind, and used on a very early writer of science fiction for whom even a fly-swatter would be a needlessly brutal weapon. Boucher declares that all the rest of us are reviewers; Knight alone is a critic. True enough, the function of these pages is to point out worthy books and warn against duds. True, too, we can't afford the luxury of informing our readers how we would have written any item, including Knight's. Nor do we judge books in terms of authors' personal tastes and habits. Then again, aren't we lucky that not every story is written style, enjoyable and rewarding though it is? If you want to add this to your collection of cutting weapons, order direct from Advent, # N. Sheffield, Chicago. Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D. World Publishing Co., Cleveland and N. Y., #   'HE Reichstag Trials in # didn't raise too many questions because of the Nazis' choice of an idiot scapegoat, but the world was astounded by the spectacle of former heroes renouncing their ideology and confessing to treason in the Moscow Trials of the '#s. The comparatively crude Nazi torture methods and the considerably refined techniques evolved during the Korean War point up the new horrors of modern warfare, atrocities never covered by the Geneva Convention. Dr. Meerloo underwent two and a half years of the Nazi occupation before he escaped to become Chief of the Psychological Dept, of the Netherlands Forces. He has written a sobering book, but one with a message of hope for the budding science of the human mind. Roy Publishers, N. Y., # "D OY, a new name in the field, starts well with the collection of the Jay Score series from Astounding . A good many of you will remember the original yarn with its sock ending. The volume also includes "Symbiotica," " Meehan is tria" and "Mesmerica." Substantial space opera all, but badly anti-climactic after the impact of the first story. Incidentally, I believe Russell's was the first author to include a built-in deus ex machina in his spaceship Table of Organization. kins and Patrick Moore. W. W. Norton  Co., Inc., N. Y., # been busy bees this year, responsible for the monumental The Moon, as well as Dr. Wilkins' solo Moons, Rings and Crocodiles. I approached the present volume avidly, expecting the authors to pull a telescope out of the hat for me. But it takes a good home workshop to be able to follow the authors' detailed instructions. Don't tackle this unless you're really well equipped. If you are -- well, I envy you. Norton  Co. Inc., N. Y., # pretty glib about throwing women into the austerely masculine environment of a spaceship. Mrs. Raitt's experiences make an excellent parallel, since, on a scientific expedition, weeks can go by between landings, during which time the ship is a world by itself -- though Mrs. Raitt had nothing of the sort in mind, just a straight reportorial job on a woman in essentially a man's world. A refreshing view of a workhorse charting expedition. and Mark Hansel. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # timidated by numerous tables and charts, he is certain to find here some appetizing food for thought: "Predicting the Unknown," "Sampling the Universe," "Risk-taking," "The Language of Uncertainty." The text does not concern efforts to influence, as per Dr. Rhine, but rather the reasoning processes of the human brain when confronted with uncertainties. M. K. Jessup. Citadel Press, N. Y n # book is likely to bring to an end the long conflict between the Bible and science. I doubt it. The battle still rages over present-day sightings, let alone Biblical reporting. Nevertheless, the book is perversely exciting. Could the Bible have been written as the result of a series of visitations?      Army Without Banners "War Is hell" is half of the truth   . it's hell on wheelsl  said. He slid his eyes  m from the puddle mirages on the streaming concrete to the girl beside him in the open convertible. Again he wished he were a painter; in a few clean lines, one might abstract perfection. "What?" Clean lines curved his way. "A trim-a the dish. That's you. A trim dish. Play on words. To trim the dish' is to put a vessel on an even keel " She smiled. "We're all-out nautical today, I see." He was about to say something about how good it would be to get out on the Sound again when a black mass with streaks of coral flashed abreast on the right, cut across his lane, outstripped the car obliquely ahead, cut sharply back, and continued in and out of the two lanes. "That crazy idiot! You see that, Pauline? He nearly clipped me!" He was scandalized. His eyes hardened. "That guy needs a good lesson." Pauline said nothing. The steering wheel seemed to pulse as his grip tightened. He pressed the horn ring until the car ahead swung into the righthand lane. "Admiral Hornblower," Pauline said. She placed her left hand across his white knuckles. The diamond solitaire exploded miniature fireworks. "Let him go." Her hand withdrew. He bore down on the gas pedal. The ends of his tie whipped out like pennants and the scarf covering her hair like a windsock. He fumed as cars gave way sluggishly under the goading of his horn. He knew he was spotting the blackand-coral car a growing lead by observing the rules its driver flouted. ing ends of his tie down from his face and held them lightly against his chest. "Come on, Corbet. Chances are he has a reason to be in a rush." He slowed. "Maybe." Anyway, the black-and-coral car was nowhere in sight. "I'll get you a tie clip I saw. Shaped like an anchor. Promise you'll wear it?" "Promise." They passed the half moon of a service station. He saw the black-and-coral car gassing up. The driver was standing beside it with his hands locked behind his head, yawning. The creep had all the time in the world. Pauline gave no sign that she had seen the car. Corbet smiled to himself. He kept flicking his eyes to the rear-view mirror. In a few minutes, it showed black-and-coral zigzagging, expanding. Corbet pulled even with a car in the slow lane and held his speed down. The black-andcoral car was behind him now, giving him the horn. He paced the car alongside lovingly, effectively blocking the black-and-coral car. He could feel Pauline's eyes on him. She said, "Someone wants to pass." "Really?" Pauline gazed at him a moment longer, then twisted to look back. "Oh." She faced forward again. "Oh is right." The bleating became a high-pitched drone. He smiled. " There's your Admiral Hornblower." "This is childish." She drew away from him and sat stiffly. He darted a look at her. The look went past her to the driver of the car alongside. The driver was staring at him curiously. Corbet flushed and concentrated on the road ahead. Look, buddy, Tm showing a wise guy he doesn't own the road. A jolting impact from behind snapped Corbet and Pauline back against the seat. Corbet paled. He grimly held to his thwarting tactic. Another jolt, harder. The devil was deliberately ramming them. Pauline said, "Oh, let him pass." "No," he said angrily. The jolts came with the monotony of a drumbeat, hard but not hard enough to lock bumpers. In spite of himself, Corbet began to grin foolishly. It was childish. He wondered how he could end it gracefully. On cue, the car alongside turned off into a side road. The b!ack-and-coral car swung into the space and matched Corbet's speed. Dark eyes in a pasty face turned toward them. The eyes moved from Corbet to Pauline and locked. "Hello, baby," the driver said in a shrill, excited voice. He accelerated. A twist of the wheel cut his car at theirs.  perate reflex from gas to brake and his hands wrenched the wheel. The black-and-coral car surged away. High laughing drifted back. Corbet's foot trod from brake to gas. Banners of a punitive expedition, his tie ends fluttered against his face. His lips moved, urging the car on. Pauline looked up to heaven, then closed her eyes, her mouth curved in a bitter smile. They were coming to the crossing where he had to make a right turn to reach the marina where they docked their cabin cruiser. no He hesitated the splith of a second, then kept straight on after the black-and-coral car. The wheels spun a sticky sound; the state's responsibility had ended and a tar-surfaced stretch began. Childish thoughts were the order of the day? All right, then -- he stole a glance at an abstracted Pauline -- the road was licorice, the traffic lights cherry, lemon and lime drops. Ahead, lemon drops dirtied as if they had fallen and rolled into a coating of dust, and cherry drops gleamed moistly. Gloating, Corbet saw the black-and-coral car first in line under the nearest light. He stopped, bumper to bumper with the car in front, pulled on the hand brake and sprang out. He ran along the shoulder. It was only thirty yards, but he was afraid the light would change before he got there. At thirty-nine, he was becoming more easily winded. He had a big frame -- not that he was fat. Portly was the word. He could still punt a football a good distance and swing a mean bat. The smell of burned rubber diffused in his lungs. He made it. He felt like a tom-tom. He loomed threateningly over the driver. A frightened smile was frozen on the wooden face of the driver. Behind the carved mask, the eyes jerked up and away. It gave Corbet an uncanny feeling. Life was where it didn't belong, as if the eyes of a trophy head followed you, or as if you tore open a doll and shining viscera spilled out The man was clearly scared, but fear excited him and kept him from shrinking away from Corbet. The eyes looked out almost eagerly. Corbet wished Pauline could hear the mature, civilized way he was going to handle this. "This is a citizen's arrest. I'm a lawyer, so I know it's legal. I'm arresting you for reckless driving and taking you before the local magistrate. Let me see your license." It was just as well Pauline couldn't hear. His breathing was too ragged. It would sound better when he told her later. The driver settled his eyes for a moment on Corbet's tie. "Come on," Corbet said testily, "let me see your operator's license." UT of the tail of an eye, " Corbet saw the lemon drop glisten as if washed off. A horn blew. The driver reached out suddenly and seized Corbet's tie. He jumped the light, pulling Corbet along. Corbet trotted awkwardly, clawing at the tie with mounting panic, his eyes rolling up to the hot glare of the Sun as the driver's fingers remained leeched to the tie and the car picked up speed. With a suddenness that sent him tripping over his own feet, he slipped free. He stumbled a few steps, then stopped and stood a moment, limp, sweat-logged, rejoicing in gulpings of gas-fumed air. A shrouding blur stung his eyes and he wiped them. His chest heaved in a vast ballooning of anger. He turned and ran back to his car, his heart knocking, his feet splatting bubbling tar of chewable consistency. Homs were sounding mad playground shrieks as traffic piled up behind his car. He deafened himself to the horn-blowing and to the howling of the livid-faced driver jammed immediately in back. Pauline held the door open for him. He leaped in and slammed the door. "That tops everything," she said flatly. Then a shading of concern rounded her voice. "You all right?" He nodded shortly, getting the car underway with a jerk. "You might've been killed," she said flatly again. Pitch of voice ineffably grave, she interpreted his grim silence and the avenging flutter of chartreuse and claret. "Oh, no! Not again!" Clean lines curved away from him. He hunted the black-and-coral ill tewV. car down, cutting in and out recklessly, gaining, burning for chance to reappear. Cherry drops glistened and he saw his prey stop, boxed in. He loomed above the driver. Anger strangling his voice, he said, "Out! Make it fast or I'll haul you out!" Something manipulated the driver's head now in a wide arc. The eyes behind the frightened smile weren't black but a dark dark-blue. They shone excitedly. Corbet unlocked a fist to grab the door handle. Horns blew, gears clashed, a kaleidoscope spilled its fragments over the crossing. Again the man reached out and seized Corbet's tie. Again the car leaped forward. And again Corbet was trotting awkwardly, clawing at his tie with mounting panic, his eyes rolling up to the white glare of the Sun as the driver's fingers remained leeched to the tie and the car picked up speed. f X'HE spaceship, invisibly wrapped in light, hung high above the delicate embroidery of lanes and cloverleaf. Inside the spaceship, in the sick bay, the two medical officers gazed impersonally at the figure standing stiffly before them, his eyeless pasty mask hanging from his belt like one of those grisly trophies that the aborigines of this continent learned from their conquerors to value, the dark dark-blue eyes in his teal face staring blankly ahead. The medical officers talked about him as if he weren't standing squarely before them. And, in a sense, he wasn't -- they had switched off his mind. The medic with the more body cilia said, "No doubt about it. Combat fatigue. Only natural, considering the number of missions he's been on." The medic with the brighter ears flapped them in agreement. "I think we must recommend that every agent come in sooner for the thorough check-up. He's a perfect case of what can happen when we let it go too long. Have you seen the films?" "No." "Well, the camera that was on him while he was in action shows beyond question that, if he hadn't lost control of himself, there were several times when he could have caused beautiful pile-ups, with numerous casualties. But he forgot the object is to set up collisions and let them do the rest. He disobeyed the order not to engage the enemy in situations where there's a chance of being caught and discovered. Our side had to spirit him away under the very noses of their police." Cilia vibrated in horror. Anxiously, "Why do it this way? It's so damnably hard on our warriors!" Compassionately, "What would you suggest?" "Outright invasion! Get it over with in a hurry, one way or the other, instead of a little at a time for year after year!" "Logistics is the answer. We can't raise a fleet that big and transport as many warriors as we'd need or supply them over so great a distance." "But we'd win even with a smaller fleet and fewer warriors!" Amusedly, "No doubt, but why gamble when it isn't necessary? And it isn't a little at a time." Doubtful, but wanting to believe, "It isn't?" "No. This is the most powerful country on the planet and yet, since the invention of the internal-combustion engine, accidents have taken more lives than all its wars combined. And the rate is steadily increasing. With our help, of course, plus their growing productivity. When the figures are large enough -- that's the time for outright invason. And logistics won't be a problem then." Ears flapped agreement. "Very sound plan. We'll have the resources of the most powerful country as a supply base. Very sound." "Naturally. Meanwhile, we have a job to do." He gave his full attention to the figure standing stiffly before them. The other did the same. With sudden enthusiasm, "Just a bit of gland work and we'll have him back in there in no time -- and carrying out his missions according to orders!" really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. ( Continued from page #) had to decamp, bearing overcome passengers and staff with incoming planes to land elsewhere. A jet Convex, flying deadhead because of motor trouble, had to make a forced landing in the New Jersey marshes. The crew escaped, but the craft burned, eliminating the need for mosquito control in that area during the rest of the summer. "Unfortunate," declared the local Pest Comptroller, "but it's an ill lack of wind that doesn't blow somebody some good." At #:# A.M., the S.S. Masonic hooted deafeningly for her berthing tugs. Surrounding themselves in choking smoke, the tugs hauled her to a pier that proved to be occupied by the S.S. Colonic, which, with steam up and tugs waiting in their own overhang of smoke to lead her downstream, was boxed in by the intruder and her tugs. Smoke and steam were poured into the air before the jam was untangled in the suffocating pall. Every available taxi was put on the streets in expectation of unusual business. "Stood to reason," defended Redwing Fleet fireman for Lipp Novelties). "People getting off work, people going to work, sky getting blacker by the minute. Sure, it was risky, but all hackies went real slow to avoid collisions. Sure, the meters kept running," he retorted to a question put to him by a reporter. "You think we're a charitable institution?" At #:# a.m., Dr. Richard Grubel, who had relieved Dr. Hambro at the Battery weather station, sent a warning through official channels urging the mayor to forbid all but the most necessary smoke production. The mayor called the heads of departments into conference. By this time, the city was completely blacked out. Lights were burning in offices, homes, factories, streets. To meet the power demand, every generator was put into operation. The mayor's conference agreed that that was necessary. So were transportation, heating and manufacture. They adjourned with an order strictly forbidding suburbanite burning of rubbish. At #:# p.m, Ned Snowden, TV repairman, left the office of his physician, Jerome Black, M.D., having had his irritated throat painted with argyrol. At #:#, he sneezed on #th Street between #th and Madison. Argyrol, a silver compound, seeded the supersaturated air. Over # tons of soot, dust and water vapor fell Once The mildest of men, Iversen was capable of murder... fo disprove Harkaway's hypothesis that in the midst of life, we are in lifel S. S. Herringbone of the Interstellar Exploration, Examination (and Exploitation) Service was due to start her return journey to Earth, one of her scouts disconcertingly reported the discovery of intelligent life in the Virago System. "Thirteen planets," Captain Iversen snarled, wishing there were someone on whom he could place the blame for this mischance, "and we spend a full year here exploring each one of them with all the resources of Terrestrial science and technology, and what happens? On the nineteenth moon of the eleventh planet, intelligent life is discovered. And who has to discover it? Harkaway, of all people. I thought for sure all the moons were cinders or I would never have sent him out to them just to keep him from getting in my hair." "The boy's not a bad boy, sir," the first officer said. "Just a thought incompetent, that's all -- which is to be expected if the Service will choose its officers on the basis of written examinations. I'm glad to see him make good." Iversen would have been glad to see Harkaway make good, too, only such a concept seemed utterly beyond the bounds of possibility. From the moment the young man had first set foot on the S. S. Herringbone, he had seemed unable to make anything but bad. Even in such a conglomeration of fools under Captain Iverson, his idiocy was of outstanding quality. THE captain, however, had not been wholly beyond reproach in this instance, as he himself knew. Pity he had made such an error about the eleventh planet's moons. It was really such a small mistake. Moons one to eighteen and twenty to forty-six still appeared to be cinders. It was all too easy for the spectroscope to overlook Flimbot, the nineteenth. But it would be Flimbot which had turned out to be a green and pleasant planet, very similar to Earth. Or so Harkaway reported on the intercom. "And the other forty-five aren't really moons at all," he began. "They're -- " "You can tell me all that when we reach Flimbot," Iversen interrupted, "which should be in about six hours. Remember, that intercom uses a lot of power and we're tight on fuel." But it proved to be more than six days later before the ship reached Flimbot. This was owing to certain mechanical difficulties that arose when the crew tried to lift the mother ship from the third planet, on which it was based. For always tried to establish its prime base on the third planet of a system. Anyhow, when the Herringbone was on the point of takeoff, it was discovered that the rockeating species which was the only life on the third planet had eaten all the projecting metal parts on the ship, including the rocket-exhaust tubes, the airlock handles and the chromium trim. "I had been wondering what made the little fellows so sick," Smullyan, the ship's doctor, said. "They went wump, wump, wump all night long, until my heart bled for them. Ah, everywhere it goes, humanity spreads the fell seeds of death and destruction -- " "Are you a doctor or a veterinarian?" Iversen demanded furiously. "By Betelgeuse, you act as if I'd crammed those blasted tubes down their stinking little throats!" "It was you who invaded their paradise with your ship. It was you -- " "Shut up!" Iversen yelled. "Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!" So Dr. Smullyan went off, like many a ship's physician before him, and got good and drunk on the medical stores. rived on Flimbot, Harkaway had already gone native. He appeared at the airlock wearing nothing but a brief, colorful loincloth of alien fabric and a wreath of flowers in his hair. He was fondling a large, woolly pink caterpillar. "Where is your uniform, sir!" Captain Iversen barked, aghast. If there was one thing he was intolerant of in his command, it was sloppiness. "This is the undress uniform of the Royal Flimbotzi Navy, sir. I was given the privilege of wearing one as a great mstfgri -- honor -- to our race. If I were to return to my own uniform, it might set back diplomatic relations between Flimbot and Earth as much as -- " "All right!" the captain snapped. "All right, all right, all right!" He didn't ask any questions about the Royal Flimbotzi Navy. He had deduced its nature when, on nearing Flimbot, he had discovered that the eleventh planet actually had only one moon. The other forty-five celestial objects were spacecraft, quaint and primitive, it was true, but spacecraft nonetheless. Probably it was their orbital formation that had made him think they were moons. Oh, the crew must be in great spirits; they did so enjoy having a good laugh at his expense! He looked for something with which to reproach Harkaway, and his eye lighted on the caterpillar. "What's that thing you're carrying there?" he barked. Raising itself on its tail, the caterpillar barked right back at him. Captain Iversen paled. First he had overlooked the spacecraft, and now, after thirty years of the less desirable sectors of space, he had committed the ultimate error in his first contact with a new form of intelligent life! "Sorry, sir," he said, forgetting that the creature -- whatever its mental prowess -- could hardly be expected to understand Terran yet. "I am just a simple spaceman and my ways are crude, but I mean no harm." He whirled on Harkaway. "I thought you said the natives were humanoid." The young officer grinned. "They are. This is just a greech. Cuddly little fellow, isn't he?" The greech licked Harkaway's face with a tripartite blue tongue. "The Flimbotzik are mad about pets. Great animal-lovers. That's how I knew I could trust them right from the start. Show me a life-form that loves animals, I always say, and -- " "I'm not interested in what you always say," Iversen interrupted, knowing Harkaway's premise was fundamentally unsound, because he himself was the kindliest of all men, and he hated animals. And, although he didn't hate Harkaway, who was not an animal, save in the strictly Darwinian sense, he could not repress unsportsmanlike feelings of bitterness, WHY couldn't it have been  one of the other officers who had discovered the Flimbotzik? Why must it be Harkaway -- the most inept of his scouts, whose only talent seemed to be the egregious error, who always rushed into a thing half-cocked, who mistook superficialities for profundities, Harkaway, the blundering fool, the blithering idiot -- who had stumbled into this greatest discovery of Iversen's career? And, of course, Harkaway's, too. Well, life was like that and always had been. "Have you tested those air and soil samples yet?" Iversen snarled into his communicator, for his spacesuit was beginning to itch again as the gentle warmth of Flimbot activated certain small and opportunistic life-forms which had emigrated from a previous system along with the Terrans. "We're running them through as fast as we can, sir," said a harried voice. "We can offer you no more than our poor best" "But why bother with all that?" Harkaway wanted to know. "This planet is absolutely safe for human life. I can guarantee it personally." "On what basis?" Iversen asked. "Well, I've been here two weeks and I've survived, haven't I?" "That," Iversen told him, "does not prove that the planet can sustain human life." Harkaway laughed richly. "Wonderful how you can still keep that marvelous sense of humor, Skipper, after all the things that have been going wrong on the voyage. Ah, here comes the flim'tuu -- the welcoming committee," he said quickly. "They were a little shy before. Because of the rockets, you know." "Don't their ships have any?" "They don't seem to. They're really very primitive affairs, barely able to go from planet to planet." "If they go" Iversen said, "stands to reason something must power them." "I really don't know what it is," Harkaway retorted defensively. "After all, even though I've been busy as a beaver, three weeks would hardly give me time to investigate every aspect of their culture... Don't you think the natives are remarkably humanoid?" he changed the subject. They were, indeed. Except for a somewhat greenish cast of countenance and' distinctly purple hair, as they approached, in their brief, gay garments and flower garlands, the natives resembled nothing so much as a group of idealized South Sea Islanders of the nineteenth century. Gigantic butterflies whizzed about their heads. Countless small animals frisked about their feet -- more of the pink caterpillars; bright blue creatures that were a winsome combination of monkey and koala; a kind of large, merryeyed snake that moved by holding its tail in its mouth and rolling like a hoop. All had faces that reminded the captain of the work of the celebrated twentieth-century artist W. Disney. disgust, "I might have known you'd find a cute planet!" "Moon, actually," the firstofficer said, "since it is in orbit around Virago XI, rather than Virago itself." "Would you have wanted them to be hostile?" Harkaway asked peevishly. "Honestly, some people never seem to be satisfied." From his proprietary airs, one would think Harkaway had created the natives himself. "At least, with hostile races, you know where you are," Iversen said. "I always suspect friendly life-forms. Friendliness simply isn't a natural instinct." "Who's being anthropomorphic now!" Harkaway chided. Iversen flushed, for he had berated the young man for that particular fault on more than one occasion. Harkaway was too prone to interpret alien traits in terms of terrestrial culture. Previously, since all intelligent life-forms with which the Herringbone had come into contact had already been discovered by somebody else, that didn't matter too much. In this instance, however, any mistakes of contact or interpretation mattered terribly. And Iversen couldn't see Harkaway not making a mistake; the boy simply didn't have it in him. "You know you're superimposing our attitude on theirs," the junior officer continued tactlessly. "The Flimbotzik are a simple, friendly, shig-livi people, closely resembling some of our historical primitives -- in a nice way, of course." "None of our primitives had space travel," Iversen pointed out. "Well, you couldn't really call those things spaceships," Harkaway said deprecatingly. "They go through space, don't they? I don't know what else you'd call them." "One judges the primitiveness of a race by its cultural and technological institutions," Harkaway said, with a lofty smile. "And these people are laughably backward. Why, they even believe in reincarnation -- mpoola, they call it." "How do you know all this?" Iversen demanded. "Don't tell me you profess to speak, the language already?" "It's not a difficult language," Harkaway said modestly, "and I have managed to pick up quite a comprehensive smattering. I daresay I haven't caught all the nuances -- heeka lob peeka, as the Flimbotzik themselves say -- but they are a very simple people and probably they don't have -- " "Are we going to keep them waiting," Iversen asked, "while we discuss nuances? Since you say you speak the language so well, suppose you make them a pretty speech all about how the Earth government extends the -- I suppose it would be hand, in this instance -- of friendship to Flimbot and -- " Harkaway blushed. "I sort of did that already, acting as your deputy. Mpoo -- status -- means so much in these simple societies, you know, and they seemed to expect something of the sort. However, I'll introduce you to the Flimflim -- the king, you know -- " he pointed to an imposing individual in the forefront of the crowd -- "and get over all the amenities, shall I?" "It would be jolly good of you," Iversen said frigidly. covered Flimbot much earlier in their survey of the Virago System, Iversen thought with regret, because it was truly a pleasant spot and a week was very little time in which to explore a world and study a race, even one as simple as the gentle Flimbotzik actually turned out to be. It seemed amazing that they should have developed anything as advanced as space travel, when their only ground conveyances were a species of wagon drawn by plookik, a species of animal. But Iversen had no time for further investigation. The Herringbone's fuel supply was calculated almost to the minute and so, willy-nilly, the Earthmen had to leave beautiful Flimbot at the end of the week, knowing little more about the Flimbotzik than they had before they came. Only Harkaway, who had spent the three previous weeks on Flimbot, had any further knowledge of the Flimbotzik -- and Iversen had little faith in any data he might have collected. "I don't believe Harkaway knows the language nearly as well as he pretends to," Iversen told the first officer as both of them watched the young lieutenant make the formal speech of farewell. "Come now," the first officer protested. "Seems to me the boy is doing quite well. Acquired a remarkable command of the language, considering he's been here only four weeks." "Remarkable, I'll grant you, but is it accurate?" "He seems to communicate and that is the ultimate objective of language, is it not?" "Then why did the Flimbotzik fill the tanks with wine when I distinctly told him to ask for water?" Of course the ship could synthesize water from its own waste products, if necessary, but there was no point in resorting to that expedient when a plentiful supply of pure H.O was available on the world. "A very understandable error, sir. Harkaway explained it to me. It seems the word for water, m'koog, is very similar to the word for wine, mWoog. Harkaway himself admits his pronunciation isn't perfect and -- " "All right," Iversen interrupted. "What I'd like to know is what happened to the mk'oog, then -- " "The rrikoog, you mean? It's in the tanks." " -- because, when they cameto drain the wine out of the tanks to put the water in, the tanks were already totally empty." "I have no idea," the first officer said frostily, "no idea at all. If you'll glance at my papers, you'll note I'm Temperance by affiliation, but if you'd like to search my cabin, anyway, I -- " "By Miaplacidus, man," Iversen exclaimed, "I wasn't accusing you! Of that, anyway!" Everybody on the vessel was so confoundedly touchy. Lucky they had a stable commanding officer like himself, or morale would simply go to pot. " away said, joining them up at the airlock in one lithe bound -- a mean feat in that light gravity. "And a right good speech, if I do say so myself. The Flimflim says he will count the thlubbzik with ardent expectation until the mission from Earth arrives with the promised gifts." "Just what gifts did you take it upon yourself to -- " Iversen began, when he was interrupted by a voice behind them crying, "Woe, woe, woe!" And, thrusting himself past the three other officers, Dr. Smullyan addressed the flim'puu, or farewell committee, assembled outside the ship. "Do not let the Earthmen return to your fair planet, O happily ignorant Flimbotzik," he declaimed, "lest wretchedness and misery be your lot as a result Tell them, 'Hence!' Tell them, 'Begone!' Tell them, 'Avaunt!' For, know ye, humanity is a blight, a creeping canker -- " He was interrupted by the captain's broad palm clamping down over his mouth. "Clap him in the brig, somebody, until we get clear of this place," Iversen ordered wearily. "If Harkaway could pick up the Flimbotzi language, the odds are that some of the natives have picked up Terran." 'That's right, always keep belittling me," Harkaway said sulkily as two of the crewmen carried off the struggling medical officer, who left an aromatic wake behind him that bore pungent testimonial to where a part, at least, of the mk'oog had gone. "No wonder it took me so long to find myself." "Oh, have you found yourself at last?" Iversen purred. "Splendid! Now that you know where you are, supposing you do me a big favor and go lose yourself again while we make ready for blastoff" "For shame," said the first officer as Harkaway stamped off. "For shame!" 'The captain's a hard man," observed the chief petty officer, who was lounging negligently against a wall, doing nothing. "Ay, that he is," agreed the crewman who was assisting him. "That he is -- a hard man, indeed." "By Caroli, be quiet, all of you!" Iversen yelled. The very next voyage, he was going to have a new crew if he had to transfer to Colonization to do it! Even colonists couldn't be as obnoxious as the sons of space with which he was cursed. bone had left the Virago System entirely that Iversen discovered Harkaway had taken the greech along. "But you can't abscond with one of the natives' pets!" he protested, overlooking, for the sake of rhetoric, the undeniable fact that Harkaway had already done so and that there could be no turning back. It would expend too much precious fuel and leave them stranded for life on Virago XI a . "Nonsense, sir!" Harkaway retorted. "Didn't the Flimflim say everything on Flimbot was mine? Thlrfpt shig-nliv, snusnigg bnignliv were his very words. Anyhow, they have plenty more greechl They won't miss this little one." "But he may have belonged to someone," Iversen objected. "An incident like this could start a war." "I don't see how he could have belonged to anyone. Followed me around most of the time I was there. We've become great pals, haven't we, little fellow?" He ruffled the greech's pink fur and the creature gave a delighted squeal. Iversen could already see that the greechik were going to be Flimbot's first lucrative export. From time immemorial, the people of Earth had been susceptible to cuddly little life-forms, which was why Earth had nearly been conquered by the zz ,u from Sirius to be hostile and quite intelligent life-forms rather than a new species of tabby. "Couldn't bear to leave him," Harkaway went on as the greech draped itself around his shoulders and regarded Iversen with large round blue eyes. "The Flimflim won't mind, because I promised him an elephant." "You mean the diplomatic mission will have to waste valuable cargo space on an elephant !" Iversen sputtered. "And you should know, if anyone does, just how spacesick an elephant can get. By Pherkad, Lieutenant Harkaway, you had no authority to make any promises to the Flimflim!" "I discovered the Flimbotzik," Harkaway said sullenly. "I learned the language. I established rapport. Just because you happen to be the commander of this expedition doesn't mean you're God, Captain Iversen!" "Harkaway," the captain barked, "this smacks of downright mutiny! Go to your cabin forthwith and memorize six verses of the Spaceman's Credo!" nr HE greech lifted its head and barked back at Iversen, again. "That's my brave little watchgreech," Harkaway said fondly. "As a matter of fact, sir," he told the captain, "that was just what I was proposing to do myself. Go to my cabin, I mean; I have no time to waste on inferior prose. I plan to spend the rest of the voyage, or such part as I can spare from my duties -- " "You're relieved of them," Iversen said grimly. " -- working on my book. It's all about the doctrine of mpoola -- reincarnation, or, if you prefer, metempsychosis. The Flimbotzi religion is so similar to many of the earlier terrestrial theologies -- Hindu, Greek, Egyptian, Southern Californian -- that sometimes one is almost tempted to stop and wonder if simplicity is not the essence of truth." Iversen knew that, for the sake of discipline, he should not, once he had ordered Harkaway to his cabin, stop to bandy words, but he was a chronic word-bandier, having inherited the trait from his stalwart Viking ancestors. "How can you have learned all about their religion, their doctrine of reincarnation, in just four ridiculously short weeks?" "It's a gift," Harkaway said modestly. "Go to your cabin, sir! No, wait a moment!" For, suddenly overcome by a strange, warm, utterly repulsive emotion, Iversen pointed a quivering finger at the caterpillar. "Did you bring along the proper food for that -- that thing? Can't have him starving, you know," he added gruffly. After all, he was a humane man, he told himself; it wasn't that he found the creature tugging at his heartstrings, or anything like that. "Oh, he'll eat anything we eat, sir. As long as it's not meat. All the species on Flimbot are herbivores. I can't figure out whether the Flimbotzik themselves are vegetarians because they practice mpoola, or practice mpoola because they're -- " "I don't want to hear another word about mpoola or about Flimbot!" Iversen yelled. "Get out of here! And stay away from the library!" "I have already exhausted its painfully limited resources, sir." Harkaway saluted with grace and withdrew to his cabin, wearing the greech like an affectionate lei about his neck. mpoola from Harkaway -- who, though he did not remain confined to his cabin when he had pursuits to pursue in other parts of the ship, at least had the tact to keep out of the captain's way as much as possible -- but the rest of his men seemed able to talk of nothing else. The voyage back from a star system was always longer in relative terms than the voyage out, because the thrill of new worlds to explore was gone; already anticipating boredom, the men were ripe for almost any distraction. On one return voyage, the whole crew had set itself to the study of Hittite with very creditable results. On another, they had all devoted themselves to the ancient art of alchemy, and, after nearly blowing up the ship, had come up with an elixir which, although not the quintessence -- as they had, in their initial enthusiasm, alleged -- proved to be an effective cure for hiccups. Patented under the name of Herringbone Hiccup Shoo, it brought each one of them an income which would have been enough to support them in more than modest comfort for the rest of their lives. However, the adventurous life seemed to exert an irresistible lure upon them and they all shipped upon the Herringbone again -- much to the captain's dismay, for he had hoped for a fresh start with a new crew and there seemed to be no way of getting rid of them short of reaching retirement age. The men weren't quite ready to accept mpoola as a practical religion -- Harkaway hadn't finished his book yet -- but as something very close to it. The concept of reincarnation had always been very appealing to the human mind, which would rather have envisaged itself perpetuated in the body of a cockroach than vanishing completely into nothingness. "It's all so logical, sir," the first officer told Iversen. "The individuality or the soul or the psyche -- however you want to look at it -- starts the essentially simple cycle of life as a greech -- " "Why as a greech?" Iversen asked, humoring him for the moment. "There are lower life-forms on Flimbot." "I don't know." The first officer sounded almost testy. "That's where Harkaway starts the progression." "Harkaway! Is there no escaping that cretin's name?" "Sir," said the first officer, "may I speak frankly?" "No," Iversen said, "you may not." "Your skepticism arises less from disbelief than from the fact that you are jealous of Harkaway because it was he who made the great discovery, not you." " Iversen asked, sneering to conceal his hurt at being so overwhelmingly misunderstood. "Flimbot or mpoola?" "Both," the first officer said. "You refuse to accept the fact that this hitherto incompetent youth has at last blossomed forth in the lambent colors of genius, just as the worthy greech becomes a zkoort, and the clean-living zkoort in his turn passes on to the next higher plane of existence, which is, in the Flimbotzik scale -- " "Spare me the theology, please," Iversen begged. "Once a greech, always a greech, I say. And I can't help thinking that somehow, somewhere, Harkaway has committed some horrible error." "Humanity is frail, fumbling, futile," Dr. Smullyan declared, coming upon them so suddenly that both officers jumped. "To err is human, to forgive divine, and I am an atheist, thank God!" "That mk'oog is powerful stuff," the first officer said. "Or so they tell me," he added. "This is more than mere mk'oog Iversen said sourly. "Smullyan has been too long in space. It hits everyone in the long run -- some sooner than others." "Captain," the doctor said, ignoring these remarks as he ignored everything not on a cosmic level, which included the crew's ailments, "I am in full agreement with you. Young Harkaway has doomed that pretty little planet -- " "Moon," the first officer corrected. "It's a satellite, not a -- " "We ourselves were doomed ab origine, but the tragic flaw inherent in each one of our pitiful species is contagious, dooming all with whom we come in contact. And Harkaway is the most infectious carrier on the ship. Woe, I tell you. Woe!" And, with a hollow moan, the doctor left them to meditate upon the state of their souls, while he went off to his secret stores of oblivion. "Wonder where he's hidden that mk'oog," Iversen brooded. "I've turned the ship inside out and I haven't been able to locate it." The first officer shivered. "Somehow, although I know Smullyan's part drunk, part mad, he makes me a little nervous. He's been right so often on all the other voyages." "Ruchbah!" Iversen said, not particularly grateful for support from such a dithyrambic source as the ship's medical officer. "Anyone who prophesies doom has a hundred per cent chance of ultimately being right, if only because of entropy." He was still brooding over the first officer's thrust, even though he had been well aware that most of his officers and men considered him a sorehead for doubting Harkaway in the young man's moment of triumph. However, Iversen could not believe that Harkaway had undergone such a radical transformation. Even on the basis of mpoola, one obviously had to die before passing on to the next existence and Harkaway had been continuously alive -- from the neck down, at least. Furthermore, all that aside, Iversen just couldn't see Harkaway going on to a higher plane. Although he supposed the young man was well-meaning enough -- he'd grant him that negligible virtue -- wouldn't it be terrible to have a system of existence in which one was advanced on the basis of intent rather than result? The higher life-forms would degenerate into primitivism. But weren't the Flimbotzik virtually primitive? Or so Harkaway had said, for Iversen himself had not had enough contact with them to determine their degree of sophistication, and only the spaceships gave Harkaway's claim the lie. a look at the opening chapter of Harkaway's book, just to see what the whole thing was about. The book began: "What is the difference between life and death? Can we say definitely and definitively that life is life and death is death? Are we sure that death is not life and life is not death? "No, we are not sure! "Must the individuality have a corporeal essence in which to enshroud itself before it can proceed in its rapt, inexorable progress toward the Ultimate Non-actuality? And even if such be needful, why must the personal essence be trammeled by the same old wornout habiliments of error? "Think upon this! "Wha is the extremest intensification of individuality? It is the All-encompassing Nothingness. Of what value are the fur, the feathers, the skin, the temporal trappings of imperfection in our perpetual struggle toward the final undefinable resolution into the Infinite Interplay of Cosmic Forces? "Less than nothing!" At this point, Iversen stopped reading and returned the manuscript to its creator, without a word. This last was less out of self-restraint than through sheer semantic inadequacy. The young man might have spent his time more profitably in a little research on the biology or social organization of the Flimbotzik, Iversen thought bitterly when he had calmed down, thus saving the next expedition some work. But, instead, he'd been blinded by the flashy theological aspects of the culture and, as a result, the whole crew had gone metempsychotic. This was going to be one of the Herringbone's more unendurable voyages, Iversen knew. And he couldn't put his foot down effectively, either, because the crew, all being gentlemen of independent means now, were outrageously independent. However, in spite of knowing that all of them fully deserved what they got, Iversen couldn't help feeling guilty as he ate steak while the other officers consumed fish, vegetables and eggs in an aura of unbearable virtue. "But if the soul transmigrates and not the body," he argued, "what harm is there in consuming the vacated receptacle?" "For all you know," the first officer said, averting his eyes from Iversen's plate with a little -- wholly gratuitous, to the captain's mind -- shudder,, "that cow might have housed the psyche of your grandmother." "Well, then, by indirectly participating in that animal's slaughter, I have released my grandmother from her physical bondage to advance to the next plane. That is, if she was a good cow." "You just don't understand," Harkaway said. "Not that you could be expected to." "He's a clod," the radio operator agreed. "Forgive me, sir," he apologized as Iversen turned to glare incredulously at him, "but, according to mpoola, candor is a Step Upward" "Onward and Upward," Harkaway commented, and Iversen was almost sure that, had he not been there, the men would have bowed their heads in contemplation, if not actual prayer. thrived and grew remarkably stout on the Earth viands, which it consumed in almost improbable quantities. Then, one day, it disappeared and its happy squeal was heard no longer. There was much mourning aboard the Herringbone  -- : for, with its lovable personality and innocently engaging ways, the little fellow had won its way into the hearts of all the spacemen -- until the first officer discovered a substantial pink cocoon resting on the ship's control board and rushed to the intercom to spread the glad tidings. That was a breach of regulations, of course, but Iversen knew when not to crowd his fragile authority. "I should have known there was some material basis for the spiritual doctrine of mpoola," Harkaway declared with tears in his eyes as he regarded the dormant form of his little pet. "Was it not the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly that first showed us on Earth how the soul might emerge winged and beautiful from its vile house of clay? Gentlemen," he said, in a voice choked with emotion, "our little greech is about to become a zkoort. Praised be the Impersonal Being who has allowed such a miracle to take place before our very eyes. J'goona lo mpoona." "Amen," said the first officer reverently. All those in the control room bowed their heads except Iversen. And even he didn't quite have the nerve to tell them that the cocoon was pushing the Herringbone two points off course. fore I lose my temper and clobber it," Iversen said impatiently as the zkoort dived low to buzz him, then whizzed just out wings, giggling raucously. "He was just having his bit of fun," the first officer said with reproach. "Have you no tolerance, Captain, no appreciation of the joys of golden youth?" "A spaceship is no place for a butterfly," Iversen said, "especially a four-foot butterfly." "How can you say that?" Harkaway retorted. "The Herringbone is the only spaceship that ever had one, to my knowledge. And I think I can safely say our lives are all a bit brighter and better and m'poo'p for having a zkoort among us. Thanks be to the Divine Nonentity for -- " "Poor little butterfly," Dr. Smullyan declared sonorously, "living out his brief life span so far from the fresh air, the sunshine, the pretty flowers -- " "Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that," the first officer said. "He hangs around hydroponics a lot and he gets a daily ration of vitamins." Then he paled. "But that's right -- a butterfly does live only a day, doesn't it?" "It's different with a zkoort," Harkaway maintained stoutly, though he also, Iversen noted, lost his ruddy color. "After all, he isn't really a butterfly, merely an analogous life-form." "My, my! In four weeks, you've mastered their entomology as well as their theology and language," Iversen jeered. "Is there no end to your accomplishments, Lieutenant?" Harkaway's color came back twofold. "He's already been around half a thubb," he pointed out. "Over two weeks." "Well, the thing is bigger than a Terrestrial butterfly," Iversen conceded, "so you have to make some allowances for size. On the other hand -- " Laughing madly, the zkoort swooped down on him. Iversen beat it away with a snarl. "Playful little fellow, isn't he?" the first officer said, with thoroughly annoying fondness. "He likes you, Skipper," Harkaway explained. "Urg'h n gurg'h -- or, to give it the crude Terran equivalent, living is loving. He can tell that beneath that grizzled and seemingly harsh exterior of yours, Captain -- " But, with a scream of rage, Iversen had locked himself into his cabin. Outside, he could hear the zkoort beating its wings against the door and wailing disappointedly. idly dulling wings were found on the floor of the hydroponics chamber. But of the zkoort's little body, there was no sign. An air of gloom and despondency hung over the Herringbone and even Iversen felt a pang, though he would never admit it without brainwashing. During the next week, the men, seeking to forget their loss, plunged themselves into mpoola with real fanaticism. Harkaway took to wearing some sort of ecclesiastical robes which he whipped up out of the recreation room curtains. Iversen had neither the heart nor the courage to stop him, though this, too, was against regulations. Everyone except Iversen gave up eating fish and eggs in addition to meat. Then, suddenly, one day a rolypoly blue animal appeared at the officers mess, claiming everyone as an old friend with loud squeals of joy. This time, Iversen was the only one who was glad to see him -- really glad. "Of course, it does kind of knock your theory of the transmigration of souls into a cocked hat," the captain grinned. "Because, in order for the soul to transmigrate, the previous body's got to be dead, and I'm afraid our wmm "Aren't you happy to see your little pal here was alive all the little friend again, Harkaway?" he time." asked, scratching the delighted "Looks it, doesn't it?" muttered animal between the ears. Harkaway. "Why, sure," Harkaway said, "I rather think," Iversen went putting his fork down and leaving on, tickling the creature under his vegetable macedoine virtually the chin until it squealed happily, untasted. "Sure. I'm very hap"that you didn't quite get the nupy -- " his voice broke -- "very ances of the language, did you, happy." Harkaway? Because I gather flow ator almost sobbingly asked to be excused from the table. Following his departure, there was a long silence. It was hard, Iversen realized in a burst of uncharacteristic tolerance, to have one's bethat the whole difficulty was a semantic one. The Flimbotzik were explaining the zoology of the native life-forms to you and you misunderstood it as their theology." "Looks it, doesn't it?" Harkaway repeated glumly. "It certainly looks it." "Cheer up," Iversen said, reaching over to slap the young man on the back -- a bit to his own amazement. "No real harm done. What if the Flimbotzik are less primitive than you fancied? It makes our discovery the more worthwhile, doesn't it?" lief, even so newly born a credo, annihilated with such suddenness. "After all, you did run across the Flimbotzik first," he told Harkaway as he spread gooseberry jam on a hard roll for the ravenous ex-zkoort (now a chuwugg, he had been told). "That's the main thing, and a life-form that passes through two such striking metamorphoses is not unfraught with interest. You shall receive full credit, my boy, and your little mistake doesn't mean a thing except -- " "Doom," said Dr. Smullyan, sopping up the last of his gravy with a piece of bread. "Doom, doom, doom." He stuffed the bread into his mouth. "Look, Smullyan," Iversen told him jovially, "you better watch out. If you keep talking that way, next voyage out we'll sign on a parrot instead of a medical officer. Cheaper and just as efficient." Only the chu-wugg joined in his laughter. "Ever since I can remember," the first officer said, looking gloomily at the doctor, "he's never been wrong. Maybe he has powers beyond our comprehension. Perhaps we sought at the end of the Galaxy what was in our own back yard all the time." "Who was seeking what?" Iversen asked as all the officers looked at Smullyan with respectful awe. "I demand an answer!" But the only one who spoke was the doctor. "Only Man is vile," he said, as if to himself, and fell asleep with his head on the table. "Make a cult out of Smullyan," Iversen warned the others, "and I'll scuttle the ship!" Later on, the first officer got the captain alone. "Look here, sir," he began tensely, "have you read Harkaway's book about mpoola?" "I read part of the first chapter," Iversen told him, "and that was enough. Maybe to Harkaway it's eschatology, but to me it's just plain scatology!" "But -- " "Why in Zubeneschamali," Iversen said patiently, "should I waste my time reading a book devoted to a theory which has already been proved erroneous? Answer me that!" "I think you should have a look at the whole thing," the first officer persisted. "Baham!" Iversen replied, but amiably enough, for he was in rare good humor these days. And he needed good humor to tolerate the way his officers and men were behaving. All right, they had made idiots of themselves; that was understandable, expected, familiar. But it wasn't the chuwugg's fault. Iversen had never seen such a bunch of soreheads. Why did they have to take their embarrassment and humiliation out on an innocent little animal? For, although no one actually mistreated the chu-wugg, the men avoided him as much as possible. Often Iversen would come upon the little fellow weeping from loneliness in a comer with no one to play with and, giving in to his own human weakness, the captain would dry the creature's tears and comfort him. In return, the chu-wugg would laugh at all his jokes, for he seemed to have acquired an elementary knowledge of Terran. C?TY Vindemiatrix, Lieuten-- ant," the captain roared as Harkaway, foiled in his attempt to scurry off unobserved, stood quivering before him, "why have you been avoiding me like this?" "I didn't think I was avoiding you any particular way, sir," Harkaway said. "I mean does it appear like that, sir? It's only that I've been busy with my duties, sir." "I don't know what's the matter with you! I told you I handsomely forgave you for your mistake." "But I can never forgive myself, sir -- " "Are you trying to go over my head?" Iversen thundered. "No, sir. I -- " you will forgive yourself. That's an order!" "Yes, sir," the young man said feebly. Harkaway had changed back to his uniform, Iversen noted, but he looked unkempt, ill, harrowed. The boy had really been suffering for his precipitance. Perhaps the captain himself had been a little hard on him. Iversen modulated his tone to active friendliness. "Thought you might like to know the chu-wugg turned into a hoop-snake this morning!" But Harkaway did not seem cheered by this social note. "So soon!" "You knew there would be a fourth metamorphosis!" Iversen was disappointed. But he realized that Harkaway was bound to have acquired such fundamental data, no matter how he interpreted them. It was possible, Iversen thought, that the book could actually have some value, if there were some way of weeding fact from fancy, and surely there must be scholars trained in such an art, for Earth had many wholly indigenous texts of like nature. "He's a thor'glitch now," Harkaway told him dully. "And what comes next?... No, don't tell me. It's more fun not knowing beforehand. You know," Iversen went on, almost rubbing his hands together, "I think this species is going to excite more interest on Earth than the Flimbotzik themselves. After all, people are people, even if they're green, but an animal that changes shape so many times and so radically is really going to set biologists by the ears. What did you say the name of the species as a whole was?" "I -- I couldn't say, sir." "Ah," Iversen remarked waggishly, "so there are one or two things you don't know about Flimbot, eh?" Harkaway opened his mouth, but only a fault bleating sound came out. found himself growing fonder and fonder of the thor'glitch. Finally, in spite of the fact that it had now attained the dimensions of a well-developed boa constrictor, he took it to live in his quarters. Many was the quiet evening they spent together, Iversen entering acid comments upon the crew in the ship's log, while the thor'glitch looked over viewtapes from the ship's library. The captain was surprised to find how much he -- well, enjoyed this domestic tranquility. I must be growing old, he thought -- old and mellow. And he named the creature Bridey, after a twentieth-century figure who had, he believed, been connected with another metempsychotic furor. When the thor'glitch grew listless and began to swell in the middle, Iversen got alarmed and sent for Dr. Smullyan. "Aha!" the medical officer declaimed, with a casual glance at the suffering snake. "The day of reckoning is at hand! Reap the fruit of your transgression, scurvy humans! Calamity approaches with jets aflame!" Iversen clutched the doctor's sleeve. "Is he -- is he going to die?" "Unhand me, presumptuous navigator!" Dr. Smullyan shook the captain's fingers off his arm. "I didn't say he was going to die," he offered in ordinary bedside tones. "Not being a specialist in this particular sector, I am not qualified to offer an opinion, but, strictly off the record, I would hazard the guess that he's about to metamorphose again." "He never did it in public before," Iversen said worriedly. "The old order changeth," Smullyan told him. "You'd better call Harkaway." "What does he know!" "Too little and, at the same time, too much," the doctor declaimed, dissociating himself professionally from the case. "Too much and too little. Eat, drink, be merry, iniquitous Earthmen, for you died yesterday!" "Oh, shut up," Iversen said automatically, and dispatched a message to Harkaway with the information that the thor'glitch appeared to be metamorphosing again and that his presence was requested in the captain's cabin. The rest of the officers accompanied Harkaway, all of them with the air of attending a funeral rather than a rebirth, Iversen noted nervously. They weren't armed, though, so Bridey couldn't be turning into anything dangerous.  thor'glitch's mid-section, having swelled to unbearable proportions, began to quiver. Suddenly, the skin split lengthwise and dropped cleanly to either side, like a banana peel. Iversen pressed forward to see what fresh life-form the bulging cavity had held. The other officers all stood in a somber row without moving, for all along, Iversen realized, they had known what to expect, what was to come. And they had not told him. But then, he knew, it was his own fault; he had refused to be told. Now, looking down at the new life-form, he saw for himself what it was. Lying languidly in the thor'glitch skin was a slender youth of a pallor which seemed excessive even for a member of a green-skinned race. He had large limpid eyes and a smile of ineffable sweetness. "By Nopus Secundus," Iversen groaned. "I'm sunk." "Naturally the ultimate incarnation for a life-form would be humanoid," Harkaway said with deep reproach. "What else?" "I'm surprised you didn't figure that out for yourself, sir," the first officer added. "Even, if you did refuse to read Harkaways book, it seems obvious." "Does it?" Smullyan challenged. "Does it, indeed? Is Man the highest form of life in an irrational cosmos? Then all causes are lost ones!... So many worlds," he muttered in more subdued tones, "so much to do, so little done, such things to be!" "The Flimbotzik were telling Harkaway about their own life cycle," Iversen whispered as revelation bathed him in its murky light. "The human embryo undergoes a series of changes inside the womb. It's just that the Flimbotzik fetus develops outside the womb." "Handily bypassing the earliest and most unpleasant stages of humanity," Smullyan sighed. "Oh, idyllic planet, where one need never be a child -- where one need never see a child!" "Then they were trying to explain their biology to you quite clearly and coherently, you lunkhead," Iversen roared at Harkaway, "and you took it for a religious doctrine!" "Yes, sir," Harkaway said weakly. "I -- I kind of figured that out myself in these last few weeks of intensive soul-searching. I -- I'm sorry, sir. All I can say is that it was an honest mistake." "Why, they weren't necessarily pet-lovers at all. Those animals they had with them were... By Nair al Zaurak!" The captain's voice rose to a shriek as the whole enormity of the situation finally dawned upon him. "You went and kidnaped one of the children!" "That's a serious charge, kidnaping," the first officer said with melancholy pleasure. "And you, as head of this expedition, Captain, are responsible. Ironic, isn't it?" "Told you all this spelled doom and disaster," the doctor observed cheerfully. sat up -- with considerable effort, Iversen was disturbed to notice. But perhaps that was one of the consequences of being born. A new-born infant was weak; why not a new-born adult, then? "Why doom?" the humanoid asked in a high, clear voice. "Why disaster?" "You -- you speak Terran?" the captain stammered. Bridey gave his sad, sweet smile. "I was reared amongst you. You are my people. Why should I not speak your tongue?" "But we're not your people," Iversen blurted, thinking perhaps the youth did not remember back to his greechi days. "We're an entirely different species -- " "Our souls vibrate in unison and that is the vital essence. But do not be afraid, shipmates; the Flimbotzik do not regard the abduction of a transitory corporeal shelter as a matter of any great moment. Moreover, what took place could not rightly be termed abduction, for I came with you of my own volition -- and the Flimbotzik recognize individual responsibility from the very first moment of the psyche's drawing breath in any material casing." Bridey talked so much like Harkaway's book that Iversen was almost relieved when, a few hours later, the alien died. Of course the captain was worried about possible repercussions from the governments of both Terra and Flimbot, in spite of Bridey's assurances. And he could not help but feel a pang when the young humanoid expired in his arms, murmuring, "Do not grieve for me, soulmates. In the midst of life, there is life... "Funny," Smullyan said, with one of his disconcerting returns to a professional manner, "all the other forms seemed perfectly healthy. Why did this one go like that? Almost as if he wanted to die." "He was too good for this ship, that's what," the radio operator said, glaring at the captain. "Too fine and brave and -- and noble." "Yes," Harkaway agreed. "What truly sensitive soul could exist in a stultifying atmosphere like this?" All the officers glared at the captain. He glared back with right good will. "How come you gentlemen are still with us?" he inquired. "One would have thought you would have perished of pure sensibility long since, then." "It's not nice to talk that way," the chief petty officer burst out, "not with him lying there not yet cold... Ah," he heaved a long sigh, "we'll never see his like again." "Ay, that we won't," agreed the crew, huddled in the corridor outside the captain's cabin. Iversen sincerely hoped not, but he forbore to speak.  ultimate point in his life cycle, it seemed certain that he was not going to change into anything else and so he was given a spaceman's burial. Feeling like a putupon fool, Captain Iversen read a short prayer as Bridey's slight body was consigned to the vast emptiness of space. Then the airlock clanged shut behind the last mortal remains of the ill-fated extraterrestrial and that was the end of it. But the funereal atmosphere did not diminish as the ship forged on toward Earth. Gloomy days passed, one after the other, during which no one spoke, save to issue or dispute an order. Looking at himself one day in the mirror on his cabin wall, the captain realized that he was getting old. Perhaps he ought to retire instead of still dreaming of a new command and a new crew. And then one day, as he sat in his cabin reading the Spaceman's Credo, the lights on the Herringbone went out, all at once, while the constant hum of the motors died down slowly, leaving a strange, uncomfortable silence. Iversen found himself suspended weightless in the dark, for the gravity, of course, had gone off with the power. What, he wondered, had come to pass? He often found himself thinking in such terms these days. Hoarse cries issued from the passageway outside; then he heard a squeak as his cabin door opened and persons unknown floated inside, breathing heavily. "The power has failed, sir!" gasped the first officer's voice. "That has not escaped my notice," Iversen said icily. Were not even his last moments to be free from persecution? "It's all that maniac Smullyan's fault. He stored his mk'oog in the fuel tanks. After emptying them out first, that is. We're out of fuel." The captain put a finger in his book to mark his place, which was, he knew with a kind of supernal detachment, rather foolish, because there was no prospect of there ever being lights to read by again. "Put him in irons, if you can find him," he ordered. "And tell the men to prepare themselves gracefully for a lingering death." Iversen could hear a faint creak as the first officer drew himself to attention in the darkness. "The men of the Herringbone, sir," he said, stiffly, "are always prepared for calamity." "Ay, that we are," agreed various voices. So they were all there, were they? Well, it was too much to expect that they would leave him in death any more than they had in life. "It is well," Iversen said. "It is well," he repeated, unable to think of anything more fitting.  again and the ship gave a leap. From his sprawling position on the floor, amid his recumbent officers, Iversen could hear the hum of motors galvanized into life. "But if . the fuel tanks are empty," he asked of no one in particular, "where did the power come from?" "I am the power," said a vast, deep voice that filled the ship from hold to hold. "And the glory," said the radio operator reverently. "Don't forget the glory." "No," the voice replied and it was the voice of Bridey, resonant with all the amplitude of the immense chest cavity he had acquired. "Not the glory, merely the power. I have reached a higher plane of existence. I am a spaceship." "Praise be to the Ultimate Nothingness!" Harkaway cried. "Ultimate Nothingness, nothing!" Bridey said impatiently. "I achieved it all myself." "Then that's how the Flimbotzi spaceships were powered!" Iversen exclaimed. "By themselves -- the Flimbotzik themselves, I mean -- " "Even so," Bridey replied grandly. "And this lofty form of life happens to be one which we poor humans cannot reach unassisted. Someone has to build the shell for us to occupy, which is the reason humans dwell together in fellowship and harmony -- " "You purposely got Harkaway to take you aboard the Herringbone ," Iversen interrupted wrathfully. "You -- you stowaway!" Bridey's laugh rang through the ship, setting the loose parts quivering. "Of course. When first I set eyes upon this vessel of yours, I saw before me the epitome of all dreams. Never had any of our kind so splendid an encasement. And, upon determining that the vessel was, as yet, a soulless thing, I got myself aboard; I was bom, I died, and was reborn again with the greatest swiftness consonant with comfort, so that I could awaken in this magnificent form. Oh, joy, joy, joy!" "You know," Iversen said, "now that I hear one of you talk at length, I really can't blame Harkaway for his typically imbecilic mistake." "We are a wordy species," Bridey conceded. "You had no right to do what you did," Iversen told him, "no right to take over -- " "But I didn't take over," Bridey the Herringbone said complacently. "I merely remained quiescent and content in the knowledge of my power until yours failed. Without me, you would even now be spinning in the vasty voids, a chrome-trimmed sepulcher. Now, three times as swiftly as before, shall I bear you back to the planet you very naively call home." "Not three times as fast, please!" Iversen was quick to plead. "The ship isn't built -- we're not built to stand such speeds." f I 'HE ship sighed. "Disappoint- ment needs must come to all -- the high, the low, the man, the spaceship. It must be borne -- " the voice broke -- "bravely. Somehow." "What am I going to do?" Iversen asked, turning to the first officer for advice for the first time ever. "I was planning to ask for a transfer or resign my command when we got back to Earth. But how can I leave Bridey in the "You can't, sir," the first officer said. "Neither can we." "If you explain," Harkaway offered timidly, "perhaps they'll present the ship to the government." Both Iversen and the first officer snorted, united for once. "Not "They'd -- they'd exhibit it or something and charge admission." "Oh, no," Bridey cried, "I don't want to be exhibited! I want to sail through the trackless paths of space. What good is a body like this if I cannot use it to its fullest?" "Have no fear," Iversen assured it. "We'll just -- " he shrugged, his dreams of escape forever blighted -- "just have to buy the ship from "Right you are, sir," the first officer agreed. "We must club together, every man Jack of us, and buy her. Him. It. That's the only decent thing to do." "Perhaps they won't sell," Harkaway worried. "Maybe -- " "Oh, they'll sell, all right," Iversen said wearily. "They'd sell the chairman of the board, if you made them an offer, and throw in all the directors if the price was right" "And then what will we do?" the first officer asked. "Once the ship has been purchased, what will our course be? What, in other words, are we to do?" It was Bridey who answered. "We will speed through space seeking, learning, searching, until you -- all of you -- pass on to higher planes and, leaving the frail shells you now inhabit, occupy proud, splendid vessels like the one I wear now. Then, a vast transcendent flotilla, we will seek other universes..." "But we don't become spaceships," Iversen said unhappily. "We don't become anything." "How do you know we don't?" Smullyan demanded, appearing on the threshold. "How do you know what we become? Build thee more stately spaceships, O my soul!" Above all else, Iversen was a space officer and dereliction of duty could not be condoned even in exceptional circumstances. "Put him in irons, somebody!" "Ask Bridey why there were only forty-five spaceships on his planet!" the doctor yelled over his shoulder as he was dragged off. "Ask where the others went -- where they are now." But Bridey wouldn't answer that question. Just send # for this exciting new book by L. Ron Hubbard. It will be shipped to you immediately postage free. Box #, Silver Spring, Maryland, U. S. A. Each Wednesday nite on Radio! Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N. B. C. The Best Science-f jtjion Stories end Hovels! W# (Continued from back covert -- Bronudy starts a series Fell" does not exist -- ami Bromely never leaves his own office! Here's n taut and terrifying tale about a new mental disease that will jolt you! Mike Donohue hopes to stow away on a rocket ship. 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Subscription: (P# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N, Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. away odd facts, you'll remember this item as a sure way to steer dull table talk into k merry chase ; There are invariably nine, eleven or thirteen rows of kernels on an ear of corn. Detective writer and gardener Rex Stout had a fine time with this fact. When a rival gardener got Stout's back up with his horticultural dogmas, the author pounced on the above statement with the information that his corn always had even rows of kernels. The argument led to a # bet. As devious in gardening as he is in plotting. Stout does such things as pinch off all but one bud on branch or vine. The plants then throw all they have into the production of monstrously huge fruit. None is fit to eat, but they cop the prizes at fairs. To win the #, Stout carefully opened several very young ears of corn in his garden and surgically removed a single row of kernels on each ear. Then he closed them and let them grow. At the end of the summer, he was able to watch his rival's dismayed face while counting all even rows. The man paid up, his dogmatism badly shaken. Stout let it shake for a while, then confessed the trick and handed back the money. It's fitting that a detective writer should be involved, for corn is as much of a mystery as bananas, of which I wrote some months ago. (This, incidentally, is a good time to credit Jim Broschart with the formula BA-f#NABaNaNa. It appeared in Grue, an admirable fan magazine, as you can judge by this sample contribution.) I remembered the Stout anecdote when reading "The Mystery of Corn" by Paul C. Mangelsdorf in the Scientific American Reader, published by Simon #s Schuster. Not wheat but corn, says the author, is the American staff of life, for corn is the most important and efficient plant we have. Yet, like the banana, corn "has become so highly domesticated that it is no longer capable of reproducing itself without man's intervention... The ear of corn has no counterpart anywhere else in the plant kingdom, either in nature or among other cultivated plants. It is superbly constructed for producing grain under man's (Continued on Page #) Reading one of this towering pair of science fiction novels as Alfred Bester. in its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price... and we pay the postage ! acting right now. Send your # immediately to... Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, Name Address City State I Enclose The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! It wasn't fair -- a smart but luckless man like Mooney had to scrounge, while Harse always made out just because he had a... Survival Kit M ooney looked out of his window, and the sky was white. It was a sudden, bright, cold flare and it was gone again. It had no more features than a fog, at least not through the window that was showered with snow and patterned with spray from the windy sea. Mooney blew on his hands and frowned at the window. "Son of a gun," he said, and thought for a moment about phonir.g the Coast Guard station. Of course, that meant going a quarter of a mile in the storm to reach the only other house nearby that was occupied; the Hansons had a phone that worked, but a quarter of a mile was a long way in the face of a December gale. And it was all dark out there now. Less than twenty miles across the bay was New York, but this Jersey shore coast was harsh as the face of the Moon. Mooney decided it was none of his business. He shook the kettle, holding it with an old dish towel because it was sizzling hot. It was nearly empty, so he filled it again and put it back on the stove. He had all four top burners and the oven going, which made the kitchen tolerably warm -- as long as he wore the scarf and the heavy quilted jacket and kept his hands in his pockets. And there was plenty of tea. Uncle Lester had left that much behind him -- plenty of tea, nearly a dozen boxes of assorted cookies and a few odds and ends of canned goods. And God's own quantity of sugar. It wasn't exactly a balanced diet, but iviGcney hsd lived on it for three weeks now -- smoked turkey sausages for breakfast, and oatmeal cookies for lunch, and canned black olives for dinner. And always plenty of tea. np HE wind screamed at him as he poured the dregs of his last cup of tea into the sink and spooned sugar into the cup for the next one. It was, he calculated, close to midnight. If the damn wind hadn't blown down the TV antenna, he could be watching the late movies now. It helped to pass the time; the last movie was off the air at two or three o'clock, and then he could go to bed and, with any luck, sleep till past noon. And Uncle Lester had left a couple of decks of sticky, childhandled cards behind him, too, when the family went back to the city at the end of the summer. So what with four kinds of solitaire, and solo bridge, and television, and a few more naps, Mooney could get through to the next two or three a.m. again. If only the wind hadn't blown down the antenna! But as it was, all he could get on the cheap little set his uncle had left behind was a faint gray herringbone pattern -- He straightened up with the kettle in his hand, listening. It was almost as though somebody was knocking at the door. "That's crazy," Mooney said out loud after a moment. He poured the water over the tea bag, tearing a little corner off the paper tag on the end of the string to mark the fact that this was the second cup he had made with the bag. He had found he could get three cups out of a single bag, but even loaded with sugar, the fourth cup was no longer very good. Still, he had carefully saved all the used, driedout bags against the difficult future day when even the tea would be gone. That was going to be one bad day for Howard Mooney. Rap, tap. It really was someone at the door! Not knocking, exactly, but either kicking at it or striking it with a stick. Mooney pulled his jacket tight around him and walked out into the frigid living room, not quite so frigid as his heart. "Damn!" he said. "Damn, damn!" What Mooney knew for sure was that nothing good could be coming in that door for him. It might be a policeman from Sea Bright, wondering about the light in the house; it might be a member of his uncle's family. It was even possible that one of the stockholders who had put up the money for that unfortunate venture into frozen-food club management had tracked him down as far as the Jersey shore. It could be almost anything or anybody, but it couldn't be good. All the same, Mooney hadn't expected it to turn out to be a tall, lean man with angry pale eyes, wearing a silvery sort of IsGtsrd. come in," said the angry A man, and did. Mooney door behind him. Too bad, Ouv couldn't keep it open, even if it was conceding a sort of moral right to enter to the stranger; he couldn't have all that cold air coming in to dilute his little bubble of warmth. "What the devil do you want?" Mooney demanded. The angry man looked about him with an expression of revulsion. He pointed to the kitchen. "It is warmer. In there?" "I suppose so. What do -- " But the stranger was already walking into the kitchen. Mooney scowled and started to follow, and stopped, and scowled even more. The stranger was leaving footprints behind him, or anyway some kind of marks that showed black on the faded summer rug. True, he was speckled with snow, but -- that much snow? The man was drenched. It looked as though he had just come out of the ocean. The stranger stood by the stove and glanced at Mooney warily. Mooney stood six feet, but this man was bigger. The silvery sort of thing he had on covered his legs as far as the feet, and he wore no shoes. It covered his body and his arms, and he had silvery gloves on his hands. It stopped at the neck, in a collar of what locked like pure silver, but could not have been because it gave with every breath the man took and every tensed muscle or in his neck. His head was barrand his very short. He was carrying something flat and shiny by a molded handle. If it had been made of pigskin, it would have resembled a junior executive's briefcase. The man said explosively: "You will help me." Mooney cleared his throat. "Listen, I don't know what you want, but this is my house and -- " "You will help me," the man said positively. "I will pay you. Very well?" He had a peculiar way of parting his sentences in the middle, but Mooney didn't care about that. He suddenly cared about one thing and that was the word "pay." "What do you want me to do?" The angry-eyed man ran his gloved hands across his head and sluiced drops of water onto the scuffed linoleum and the bedding of the cot Mooney had dragged into the kitchen. He said irritably: "I am a wayfarer who needs a. Guide? I will pay you for your assistance." The question that rose to Mooney's lips was "How much?" but he fought it back. Instead, he asked, "Where do you want to go?" "One moment." The stranger sat damply oh the edge of Mooney's cot and, click-'p shiny sort of 'lefcase opened itin his hands. He took out a flat round thing like a mirror and looked into it, squeezing it by the edges, and holding it this way and that. Finally he said: "I must go to Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of December, at -- " He tilted the little round thing again. "Brooklyn?" he finished triumphantly. Mooney said, after a second: "That's a funny way to put it." "Question?" "I mean," said Mooney, "I know where Brooklyn is and I know when the twenty-sixth of December is -- it's next week -- but you have to admit that that's an odd way of putting it. I mean you don't go anywhere in time." The wet man turned his pale eyes on Mooney. "Perhaps you are. Wrong?" II ping guest in a mood of wonder and fear and delight. Time traveler! But it was hard to doubt the pale-eyed man. He had said he was from the future and he mentioned a date made (yCniey gasp. He had said: "When you speak to me, you must know that my. jg Harse. And he had curled on the floor, surrounding his shiny briefcase like a mother cat around a kitten, and begun dozing alertly. But not before he showed Mooney just what it was he proposed to pay him with. Mooney sipped his cooling tea and forgot to shiver, though the drafts were fiercer and more biting than ever, now just before dawn. He was playing with what had looked at first like a string of steel ball-bearings, a child's necklace, half-inch spheres linked together in a strand a yard long. Wampum! That was what Harse had called the spheres when he picked the string out of his little kit, and that was what they were. Each ball-bearing was hollow. Open them up and out come the treasures of the crown. Pop, and one of the spheres splits neatly in half, and out spills a star sapphire, as big as the ball of your finger, glittering like the muted lights of hell. Pop, and another sphere drops a ball of yellow gold into your palm. Pop for a narwhal's tooth, pop for a cube of sugar; pop, pop, and there on the table before Harse sparkled diamonds and lumps of coal, a packet of heroin, a sphere of silver, pearls, beads of glass, machined pellets of tungsten, lumps of saffron and lumps of salt. "It is," said Harse, "for your. Pay? No, no!" And he headed off Mooney's greedy fingers. Click, click, click, and the little pellets of treasure and trash were back in the steel balls. "No, no!" said Harse again, grinning, snapping the balls together like poppets in a string. "After you haye guided me to Brooklyn and the December twenty-sixth. But I must say to you. This? That some of the balls contain plutonium and some radium. And I do not think that you can get them. Open? But if you did, you perhaps would die. Oh. Ho?" And, laughing, he began his taut nap. of his icy tea. It was full daylight outside. Very well, castaway, he said silently to the dozing pale-eyed man, I will guide you. Oh, there never was a guide like Mooney -- not when a guide's fee can run so high. But when you are where you want to go, then we'll discuss the price... A hacksaw, he schemed, and a Geiger counter. He had worn his fingers raw trying to find the little button or knob that Harse had used to open them. All right, he was licked there. But there were more ways than one to open a cat's eye. A hacksaw. A Geiger counter. And, Mooney speculated drowsily, maybe a gun, if the paleeyed man got tough. Mooney fell asleep in joy and anticipation for the first time in more than a dozen years. ing. Bright and very cold. "Look alive!" Mooney said to the pale-eyed man, shivering. It had been a long walk from Uncle Lester's house to the bridge, in that ripping, shuddering wind that came in off the Atlantic. Harse got up off his knees, from where he had been examining the asphalt pavement under the snow. He stood erect beside Mooney, while Mooney put on an eggsucking smile and aimed his thumb down the road. The station wagon he had spotted seemed to snarl and pick up speed as it whirled past them onto the bridge. "I hope you skid into a ditch!" Mooney bawled into the icy air. He was in a fury. There was a bus line that went where they wanted to go. A warm, comfortable bus that would stop for them if they signaled, that would drop them just where they wanted to be, to convert one of Harse's ballbearings into money. The gold one, Mooney planned. Not the diamond, not the pearl. Just a few dollars was all they wanted, in this Jersey shore area where the towns were small and the gossip big. Just the price of fare into New York, where they could make their way to Tiffany's. But the bus cost thirty-five cents apiece. Total, seventy cents. Which they didn't have. "Here comes another. Car?" Mooney dragged back the corners of his lips into another smile and held out his thumb. It was a panel truck, light blue, with the sides lettered: Chris's Delicatessen. Free Deliveries. The driver slowed up, looked them over and stopped. He leaned toward the right-hand window. He called: "I can take you far's Red Ba -- " He got a good look at Mooney's companion then and swallowed. Harse had put on an overcoat because Mooney insisted on it and he wore a hat because Mooney had told him flatly there would be trouble and questions if he didn't. But he hadn't taken off his own silvery leotard, which peeped through between neck and hat and where the coat flapped open. " -- ank," finished the driver thoughtfully. Mooney didn't give him a chance to change his mind. "Red Bank is just where we want to go. Come on!" Already he had his hand on the door. He jumped in, made room for Harse, reached over him and slammed the door. "Thank you Very much," he said chattily to the driver. "Cold morning, isn't it? And that was some storm last night. Say, we really do appreciate this. Anywhere in Red Bank will be all right to drop us, anywhere at all." He leaned forward slightly, just enough to keep the driver from being able to get a really good look at his other passenger. It would have gone all right, it really would, except that just past Fair Haven, Harse suddenly announced ; "It is the time for me to. Eat?" thing around the edges of the gleaming sort of dispatch case, which opened. Mooney, peering over his shoulder, caught glimpses of shiny things and spinning things and things that seemed to glow. So did the driver. "Hey," he said, interested, "what've you got there?" "My business," said Harse, calmly and crushingly. The driver blinked. He opened his mouth, and then he shut it again, and his neck became rather red. Mooney said rapidly: "Say, isn't there -- uh -- isn't there a lot of snow?" He feigned fascination with the snow on the road, leaning forward until his face was nearly at the frosty windshield. "My gosh, I've never seen the road so snowy!" Beside him, Harse was methodically taking things out of other things. A little cylinder popped open and began to steam; he put it to his lips and drank. A cube the size of a fist opened up at one end and little pellets dropped out into a cup. Harse picked a couple up and began to chew them. A flat, round object the shape of a cafeteria pie flipped open and something gray and doughy appeared -- "Holy heaven!" Mooney's face slammed into the windshield as the driver tramped on his brakes. Not that Mooney could really blame him. The smell from that doughy mass could hardly be believed; and what made it retchingly worse was that Harse was eating it with a pearly small spoon. The driver said complainingly : "Out! Out, you guys! I don't mind giving you a lift, but I've got hard rolls in the back of the truck and that smell's going to -- Out! You heard me!" "Oh," said Harse, tasting happily. "No." "No?" roared the driver. "Now listen! I don't have to take any lip from hitchhikers! I don't have to "One moment," said Harse. "Please." Without hurry and without delay, beaming absently at the driver, he reached into the silvery case again. Snip, snippetysnap; a jointed metal thing wriggled and snicked into place. And Harse, still beaming, pointed it at the driver. Pale blue light and a faint whine. It was a good thing the truck was halted, because the whining blue light reached diffidently out and embraced the driver; and then there was no driver. There was nothing. He was gone, beyond the reach of any further lip from hitchhikers. Ill ing a stolen panel truck, Mooney the bankrupt, Mooney the ne'er-do-well, and now Mooney the accomplice murderer. Or so he thought, though the pale-eyed man had laughed like a panther when he'd asked. He rehearsed little speeches all the day down U.S. One, Mooney did, and they all began: "Your Honor, I didn't know -- " Well, he hadn't. How could a man like Mooney know that Harse was so bereft of human compassion as to snuff out a life for the sake of finishing his lunch in peace? And what could Mooney have done about it, without drawing the diffident blue glow to himself? No, Your Honor, really. Your Honor, he took me by surprise... But by the time they ditched the stolen car, nearly dry of gas, at the Hoboken ferry, Mooney had begun to get his nerve back. In fact, he was beginning to perceive that in that glittering silvery dispatch case that Harse hugged to him were treasures that might do wonders for a smart man unjustly dogged by hard times. The wampum alone! But beyond the wampum, the other good things that might in time be worth more than any amount of mere money. There was that weapon. Mooney cast a glance at Harse, blank-eyed and relaxed, very much disinterested in the crowds of commuters on the ferry. Nobody in all that crowd would believe that Harse could pull out a little jointed metal thing and push a button and make any one of them cease to exist. Nobody would believe it -- not even a jury. Corpus delicti, body of evidence -- why, there would foe no evidence! It was a simple, workable, foolproof way of getting any desired number of people out of the way without fuss, muss or bother -- and couldn't a smart but misfortunate man like Mooney do wonders by selectively removing those persons who stood as obstacles in his path? And there would be more, much, much more. The thing to do, Mooney schemed, was to find out just what Harse had in that kit and how to work it; and then -- who could know, perhaps Harse would himself find the diffident blue light reaching out for him before the intersection of Brooklyn and December twenty-sixth? Mooney probed. "Ah," laughed Harse. "Ho! I perceive what you want. You think perhaps there is something you can use in my survival kit." "All right, Harse," Mooney said submissively, but he did have reservations. First, it was important to find out just what was in the kit. After that -- Well, even a man from the future had to sleep. rage. How dared the Government stick its bureaucratic nose into a simple transaction of citizens! But it turned out to be astonishingly hard to turn Harse's wampum into money. The first jeweler asked crudely threatening questions about an emerald the size of the ball of his thumb; the second quoted chapter and verse on the laws governing possession of gold. Finally they found a pawnbroker, who knowingly accepted a diamond that might have been worth a fortune; and when they took his first offer of a thousand dollars, the pawnbroker's suspicions were confirmed. Mooney dragged Harse away from there fast. But they did have a thousand dollars. As the cab took them across town, Mooney simmered down; and by the time they reached the other side, he was entirely content. What was a fortune more or less to a man who very nearly oned some of the secrets of the future? He sat up, lit a cigarette, waved an arm and said expansively to Harse: "Our new home." The pale-eyed man took a glowing little affair with eyepieces away from in front of his eyes. "Ah," he said. "So." It was quite an attractive hotel, Mooney thought judiciously. It did a lot to take away the sting of those sordidly avaricious jewelers. The lobby was an impressively close approximation of a cathedral and the bellboys looked smart and able. Harse made an asthmatic sound. "What is. That?" He was pointing at a group of men standing in jovial amusement around the entrance to the hotel's grand ballroom, just off the lobby. They were purple harem pants and floppy green hats, and every one of them carried a silver-paper imitation of a scimitar. Mooney chuckled in a superior way. "You aren't up on our local customs, are you? That's a convention, Harse. They dress up that way because they belong to a lodge. A lodge is a kind of fraternal organization. A fraternal organization is -- " Harse said abruptly : "I want." Mooney began to feel alarm. "What?" "I want one for a. Specimen? Wait, I think I take the big one there." "Harse! Wait a minute!" Mooney clutched at him. "Hold everything, man! You can't do that." Harse stared at him. "Why?" "Because it would upset everything, that's why! You want to get to your rendezvous, don't you? Well, if you do anything like that, we'll never get there!" "Why not?" "Please," Mooney said, "please take my word for it. You hear me? I'll explain later!" Harse looked by no means convinced, but he stopped opening the silvery metal case. Mooney kept an eye on him while registering. Harse continued to watch the conventioneers, but he went no further. Mooney began to breathe again. "Thank you, sir," said the desk clerk -- not every guest, even in this hotel, went for a corner suite with two baths. "Front!" stepped forward, briskly took the key from the clerk, briskly nodded at Mooney and Harse. With the automatic reflex of any hotel bellhop, he reached for Harse's silvery case. Baggage was baggage, however funny it looked. But Harse was not just any old guest. The bellboy got the bag away from him, all right, but his victory was purely transitory. He yelled, dropped the bag, grabbed his fist with the other hand. "Hey! It shocked me! What kind of tricks are you trying to do with electric suitcases?" Mooney moaned softly. The whole lobby was looking at them -- even the conventioneers at the entrance to the ballroom; even the men in mufti mingling with the conventioneers, carrying cameras and flash guns; even the very doorman, the whole lobby away. That was bad. What was worse was that Harse was obviously getting angry. "Wait, wait!" Mooney stepped between them in a hurry. "I can explain everything. My friend is, uh, an inventor. There's some very important material in that briefcase, believe me!" He winked, patted the bellhop on the shoulder, took his hand with friendly concern and left in it a folded bill. "Now," he said confidentially, "we don't want any disturbance. I'm sure you understand how it is, son. Don't you? My friend can't take any chances with his, uh, confidential material, you see? Right. Well, let's say no more about it. Now if you'll show us to our room -- " The bellhop, still stiff-backed, glanced down at the bill and the stiffness disappeared as fast as any truckdriver bathed in Harse's pale blue haze. He looked up again and grinned. "Sorry, sir -- " he began. But he didn't finish. Mooney had let Harse get out of his sight a moment too long., The first warning he had was when there was a sudden commotion among the lodge brothers. Mooney turned, much too late. There was Harse; he had wandered over there, curious and interested and -- Harse. He had stared them up and down, but he hadn't been content to stare. He had opened the little silvery dispatch-case and taken out of it the thing that looked like a film viewer; and maybe it was a camera, too, because he was looking through it at the conventioneers. He was covering them as Dixie is covered by the dew, up and down, back and forth, heels to head. And it was causing a certain amount of attention. Even one of the photographers thought maybe this funny-looking guy with the funny-looking opera glasses was curious enough to be worth a shot. After all, that was what the photographer was there for. He aimed and popped a flash gun. There was an abrupt thin squeal from the box. Black fog sprayed out of it in a greasy jet. It billowed towarcf Harse. It collected around him, swirled high. Now all the flashguns were popping... It was a clear waste of a twentydollar bill, Mooney told himself aggrievedly out on the sidewalk. There had been no point in buttering up the bellhop as long as Harse was going to get them thrown out anyway. the other side of the East River, in a hotel that fell considerably below Mooney's recent, brief standards of excellence, Mooney cautiously tipped a bellboy, ushered him out, locked the door behind him and, utterly exhausted, flopped on one of the twin beds. Harse glanced at him briefly, then wandered over to the window and stared incuriously at the soiled snow outside. "You were fine, Harse," said Mooney without spirit. "You didn't do anything wrong at all." "Ah," said Harse without turning. "So?" Mooney sat up, reached for the phone, demanded setups and a bottle from room service and hung up. "Oh, well," he said, beginning to revive, "at least we're in Brooklyn now. Maybe it's just as well." "As well. What?" "I mean this is where you wanted to be. Now we just have to wait four days, until the twentysixth. We'll have to raise some more money, of course," he added experimentally. Harse turned and looked at him with the pale eyes. "One thousand dollars you have. Is not enough?" "Oh, no, Harse," Pvlooney assured him. "Why, that won't be nearly enough. The room rent in this hotel alone is likely to use that up. Besides all the extras, of course." "Ah." Harse, looking bored, sat down in the chair near Mooney, opened his kit, took out the thing that looked like a film viewer and put it to his eyes. "We'll have to sell some more of those things. After all -- " Mooney winked and dug at the pale-eyed man's ribs with his elbow -- "we'll be needing some, well, entertainment." Harse took the viewer away from his eyes. He glanced thoughtfully at the elbow and then at Mooney. "So," he said. Mooney coughed and changed the subject. "One thing, though," he begged. "Don't get me in any more trouble like you did in that hotel lobby -- or with that guy in the truck. Please? I mean, after all, you're making it hard for me to carry out my job." Harse was thoughtfully silent. "Promise?" Mooney urged. Harse said, after some more consideration: "It is hot altogether me. That is to say, it is a matter of defense. My picture should not be. Photographed? So the survival kit insures that it is not. You understand?" Mooney leaned back. "You mean -- " The bellboy with the drinks interrupted him; he took the bottle, signed the chit, tipped the boy and mixed himself a reasonably stiff but not quite stupefying highball, thinking hard. "Did you say 'survival kit'?" he asked at last. Harse was deep in the viewer again, but he looked away from it irritably. "Naturally, survival kit. So that I can. Survive?" He went back to the viewer. Mooney took a long, thoughtful slug of the drink.  made sense. When the Air Force boys went out and raided the islands in the Pacific during the war, sometimes they got shot down -- and it was enemy territory, or what passed for it. Those islands were mostly held by Japanese, though their populations hardly knew it. All the aboriginals knew was that strange birds crossed the sky and sometimes men came from them. The politics of the situation didn't interest the headhunters. What really interested them was heads. But for a palatable second choice, they would settle for trade goods -- cloth, mirrors, beads. And so the bomber pilots were equipped with survival kits -- maps, trade goods, rations, weapons, instructions for proceeding friendly submarine might put ashore a rubber dinghy to take them off. Mooney said persuasively : "Harse. I'm sorry to bother you, but we have to talk." The man with the pale eyes took them away from the viewer again and stared at Mooney. "Harse, were you shot down like an airplane pilot?"or at least not at Mooney. It was the effort to make himself understood. He said at last: "Yes. Call it that." "And -- and this place you want to go to -- is that where you will be rescued?" "Yes." Aha, thought Mooney, and the glimmerings of a new idea began to kick and stretch its fetal limbs inside him. He put it aside, to bear and coddle in private. He said: "Tell me more. Is there any particular part of Brooklyn you have to go to?" "Ah. The Nexus Point?" Harse put down the viewer and, snapsnap, opened the gleaming kit. He took out the little round thing he had consulted in the house by the cold Jersey sea. He tilted it this way and that, frowned, consulted a small square sparkly thing that came from another part of the case, tilted the round gadget again. "Correcting for local time," he said, "the Nexus Point is one hour and one minute after midnight at what is called. The Vale of Cashmere?" Mooney scratched his ear. "The Vale of Cashmere? Where the devil is that -- somewhere in Pakistan?" "Brooklyn," said Harse with an imp's grimace. "You are the guide and you do not know where you are guiding me to?" Mooney said hastily : "All right, Harse, all right. I'll find it. But tell me one thing, will you? Just suppose -- suppose, I said -- that for some reason or other, we don't make it to the what-youcall. Nexus Point. Then what happens?" Harse for once neither laughed nor scowled. The pale eyes opened wide and glanced around the room, at the machine-made candlewick spreads on the beds, at the dusty red curtains that made a "suite" out of a long room, at the dog-eared Bible that lay on the night table. "Suh," he stammered, "suh -- suh -- seventeen years until there is another Nexus Point!" IV M ooney dreamed miraculous dreams and not entirely because of the empty bottle that had been full that afternoon. There never was a time, never will be a time, like the future Mooney dreamed of -- Mooneyowned, houri-inhabited, a fair domain for a live-wire Emperor of the Eons... He woke up with a splitting head. Even a man from the future had to sleep, so Mooney had thought, and it had been in his mind that, even this first night, it might pay to stay awake a little longer than Harse, just in case it might then seem like a good idea to -- well, to bash him over the head and grab the bag. But the whiskey had played him dirty and he had passed out -- drunk, blind drunk, or at least he hoped so. He hoped that he hadn't seen what he thought he had seen sober. He woke up and wondered what was wrong. Little tinkling ice spiders were moving around him. He could hear their tiny crystal sounds and feel their chill legs, so lightly, on him. It was still a dream -- wasn't it? Or was he awake? The thing was, he couldn't tell. If he was awake, it was the middle of the night, because there was no light whatever; and besides, he didn't seem to be able to move. Thought Mooney with anger and desperation: I'm dead. And: What a time to die! But second thoughts changed his mind; there was no heaven and no hell, in all the theologies he had investigated, that included being walked over by tiny spiders of ice. He felt them. There was no doubt about it. It was Harse, of course -- had to be. Whatever he was up to, Mooney couldn't say, but as he lay there sweating cold sweat and feeling the crawling little feet, he knew that it was something Harse had made happen. Little by little, he began to be able to see -- not much, but enough to see that there really was something crawling. Whatever the things were, they had a faint, tenuous glow, like the face of a watch just before dawn. He couldn't make out shapes, but he could tell the size -- not much bigger than a man's hand -- and he could tell the number, and there were dozens of them. He couldn't turn his head, but on the walls, on his chest, on his face, even on the ceiling, he could see faint moving patches of foxfire light. "Harse!" he started to call; wake him up, make him stop this! But he couldn't. He got no further than the first huff of the aspirate when the scurrying cold feet were on his lips. Something cold and damp lay across them and it stuck. Like spider silk, but stronger -- he couldn't speak, couldn't move his lips, though he almost tore the flesh. Oh, he could make a noise, all right. He started to do so, to snort and hum through his nose. But Mooney was not slow of thought and he had a sudden clear picture of that same cold ribbon crossing his nostrils, and what would be the use of all of time's treasures then, when it was no longer possible to breathe at all? It was quite apparent that he was not to make a noise. He had patience -- the kind of patience that grows with a diet of thrice-used tea bags and soggy crackers. He waited. It wasn't the middle of the night after all, he perceived, though it was still utterly dark except for the moving blobs. He could hear sounds in the hotel corridor outside -- faintly, though: the sound of a vacuum cleaner, and it might have been a city block away; the tiniest whisper of someone laughing. He remembered one of his drunken fantasies of the night before -- little robot mice, or so they seemed, spinning a curtain across the window; and he shuddered, because that had been no fantasy. The window was curtained. And it was mid-morning, at the earliest, because the chambermaids were cleaning the halls. Why couldn't he move? He flexed the muscles of his arms and legs, but nothing happened. He could feel the muscles straining, he could feel his toes and fingers twitch, but he was restrained by what seemed a web of Gulliver's cords... There was a tap at the door. A pause, the scratching of a key, and the room was flooded with light from the hall. Out of the straining corner of his eye, Mooney saw a woman in a gray cotton uniform, carrying fresh sheets, standing in the doorway, and her mouth was hanging slack. No wonder, for in the light from the hall, Mooney could see the room festooned with silver, with darting silvery shapes moving about. Mooney himself wore a cocoon of silver, and on the bed next to him, where Harse slept, there was a fantastic silver hood, like the basketwork of a baby's bassinet, surrounding his head. It was a fairyland scene and it lasted only a second. For Harse cried out and leaped to his feet. Quick as an adder, he scooped up something from the table beside his bed and gestured with it at the door. It was, Mooney half perceived, the silvery, jointed thing he had used in the truck; and he used it again. Pale blue light streamed out. It faded and the chambermaid, popping eyes and all, was gone. second time. Mooney finally attracted Harse's attention, and Harse, with a Masonic pass over one of the little silvery things, set it to loosening and removing the silver bonds. The things were like toy tanks with jointed legs; as they spun the silver webs, they could also suck them in. In moments, the webs that held Mooney down were gone. He got up, aching in his tired muscles and his head, but this time the panic that had filled him in the truck was gone. Well, one victim more or less -- what did it matter? And besides, he clung to the fact that Harse had not exactly said the victims were dead. So it didn't hurt as much the second time. Mooney planned. He shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed. "Shut up -- you put us in a lousy fix and I have to think a way out of it," he rasped at Harse when Harse started to speak; and the man from the future looked at him with opaque pale eyes, and silently opened one of the flat canisters and began to eat. "All right," said Mooney at last. "Harse, get rid of all this stuff." "This. Stuff?" "The stuff on the walls. What your little spiders have been spinning, understand? Can't you get it off the walls?" Harse leaned forward and touched the kit. The little spiderthings that had been aimlessly roving now began to digest what they had created, as the ones that had held Mooney had already done. It was quick -- Mooney hoped it would be quick enough. There were over a dozen of the things, more than Mooney would have believed the little kit could hold; and he had seen no sign of them before. The silvery silk on the walls, in aimless tracing, disappeared. The thick silvery coat over the window disappeared. Harse's bassinethood disappeared. A construction that haloed the door disappeared -- and as it dwindled, the noises from the corridor grew louder; some sort of sound-absorbing contrivance, Mooney thought, wondering. There was an elaborate silvery erector-set affair on the floor between the beds; it whirled and spun silently and the little machines took it apart again and swallowed it. Mooney had no notion of its purpose. When it was gone, he could see no change, but Harse shuddered and shifted his position uncomfortably. "All right," said Mooney when everything was back in the kit. "Now you just keep your mouth shut. I won't ask you to lie -- they'll have enough trouble understanding you if you tell the truth. Hear me?" Harse merely stared, but that was good enough. Mooney put his hand on the phone. He took a deep breath and he'd It Untl! his head began id tingle and his face turned red. Then he picked the phone and, when he spoke, there was authentic rage and distress in his voice. "Operator," he snarled, "give me the manager. And hurry up -- I want to report a thief!" -- along with the assistant manager, the house detective and the ancient shrew-faced head housekeeper -- Mooney extracted a promise from Harse and left him. He carefully hung a "Do Not Disturb" card from the doorknob, crossed his fingers and took the elevator downstairs. The fact seemed to be that Harse didn't care about aboriginals. Mooney had arranged a system of taps on the door which, he thought, Harse would abide by, so that Mooney could get back in. Just the same, Mooney vowed to be extremely careful about how he opened that door. Whatever the pale blue light was, Mooney wanted no part of it directed at him. The elevator operator greeted him respectfully -- a part of the management's policy of making amends, no doubt. Mooney returned the greeting with a barely civil nod. Sure, it had worked; he'd told the manager that he'd caught the chambermaid trying to steal something valuable that belonged to that celebrated proprietor of valuable secrets, Mr. Harse' chambermaid had fled; how dared tnej employ a person like that? And he had made very sure that the manager and the house dick and all the rest had plenty of opportunity to snoop apologetically in every closet and under the beds, just so there would be no suspicion in their minds that a dismembered chambermaid-torso was littering some dark corner of the room. What could they do but accept the story? The chambermaid wasn't there to defend herself, and though they might wonder how she had got out of the hotel without being noticed, it was their problem to figure it out, not Mooney's to explain it. They had even been grateful when Mooney offered handsomely to refrain from notifying the police. "Lobby, sir," sang out the elevator operator, and Mooney stepped out, nodded to the manager, stared down the house detective and walked out into the street. So far, so good. Now that the animal necessities of clothes and food and a place to live were taken care of, Mooney had a chance to opsrsts. It was a field in which he had always had a good deal of talent -- the making of deals, the locating of contacts, the arranging of transactions that were better conducted in private. And he had a good deal of business to transact. Harse had accepted without question his statement that they would have to laise more money. "Try heroin or. Platinum?" he had suggested, and gone back to his viewer. "I will," Mooney assured him. and he did; he tried them both, and more besides. N ot only was it good that he had such valuable commodities to vend, but it was a useful item in his total of knowledge concerning Harse that the man from the future seemed to have no idea of the value of money in the #th Century, chez U.S.A. Mooney found a buyer for the drugs; and there was a few thousand dollars there, which helped, for although the quantity was not large, the drugs were chemically pure. He found a fence to handle the jewels and precious metals; and he unloaded all the ones of moderate value -- not the other diamond, not the rubies, not the star sapphire. He arranged to keep those without mentioning it to Harse. No point in selling them now, not when they had sevTrs! thousand dollars above any conceivable expenses, not when some future date would do as well, just in case Harse should get away with the balance of the kit. Having concluded his business, Mooney undertook a brief but expensive shopping tour of his own and found a reasonably satisfactory place to eat. After a pleasantly stimulating cocktail and the best meal he had had in some years -- doubly good, for there was no reek from Harse's nauseating concoctions to spoil it -- he called for coffee, for brandy, for the day's papers. The disappearance of the truck driver made hardly a ripple. There were a couple of stories, but small and far in the back -- amnesia, said one; an underworld kidnaping, suggested another; but the story had nothing to feed on and it would die. Good enough, thought Mooney, waving for another glass of that enjoyable brandy; and then he turned back to the front page and saw his own face. There was the hotel lobby of the previous day, and a pillar of churning black smoke that Mooney knew was Harse, and there in the background, mouth agape, expression worried, was Howard Mooney himself. He read it all very, very carefully. vVeii, ne thought, at least they didn't get our names. The story was all about the Loyal and Beneficent Order of Exalted Eagles, and the only reference to the picture was a brief line about a disturbance outside the meeting hall. Nonetheless, the second glass of brandy tasted nowhere near as good as the first. man who explained what was meant by the Vale of Cashmere. In Brooklyn, there is a very large park -- the name is Prospect Park -- and in it is a little planted valley, with a brook and a pool; and the name of it on the maps of Prospect Park is the Vale of Cashmere. Mooney sent out for a map, memorized it; and that was that. However, Mooney didn't really want to go to the Vale of Cashmere with Harse. What he wanted was that survival kit. Wonders kept popping out of it, and each day's supply made Mooney covet the huger store that was still inside. There had been, he guessed, something like a hundred separate items that had somehow come out of that tiny box. There simply was no room for them all; but that was not a matter that Mooney concerned himself with. They were there, possible or not, Mooney laid traps. The trouble was that Harse did not care for conversation. He spent endless hours with his film viewer, and when he said anything at all to Mooney, it was to complain. All he wanted was to exist for four days -- nothing else. Mooney laid conversational traps, tried to draw him out, and there was no luck. Harse would turn his blank, pale stare on him, and refuse to be drawn. At night, however hard Mooney tried, Harse was always awake past him; and in his sleep, always and always, the little metal guardians strapped Mooney tight. Survival kit? But how did the little metal things know that Mooney was a threat? It was maddening and time was passing. There were four days, then only three, then only two. Mooney made arrangements of his own. He found two girls -- lovely girls, the best that money could buy, and he brought them to the suite with a wink and a snigger. "A little relaxation, eh, Harse? The red-haired one is named Ginger and she's partial to men with light-colored eyes." Ginger smiled a rehearsed and lovely smile. "I certainly am, Mr. Harse. Say, want to dance?" But it came to nothing, though the house detective knocked deferentially on the door to ask if they could be a little more quiet, please. It wasn't the sound of celebration that the neighbors were objecting to. It was the shrill, violent noise of Harse's laughter. First he had seemed not to understand, and then he looked as astonished as Mooney had ever seen him. And then the laughter. Girls didn't work. Mooney got rid of the girls. All right, Mooney was a man of infinite resource and sagacity -- hadn't he proved that many a time? He excused himself to Harse, made sure his fat new pigskin wallet was in his pocket, and took a cab to a place on Brooklyn's waterfront where cabs seldom go. The bartender had arms like beer kegs and a blue chin. "Beer," said Mooney, and made sure he paid for it with a twentydollar bill -- thumbing through a thick wad of fifties and hundreds to find the smallest. He retired to a booth and nursed his beer. After about ten minutes, a man stood beside him, blue-chinned and muscular enough to be the bartender's brother -- which, Mooney found, he was. "Well," said Mooney, "it took you long enough. Sit down. You don't have to roll me; you can earn this." Girls didn't work? Okay, if not girls, then try boys... well, not boys exactly. Hoodlums. Try hoodlums and see what Harse might do against the toughest inhabitants of the area around the Gowanus Canal. through melted snow, spattering Mooney, grumbled: "I do not see why we. Must? Wander endlessly across the face of this wretched slum." Mooney said soothingly: "We have to make sure, Harse. We have to be sure it's the right place." "Huff," said Harse, but he went along. They were in Prospect Park and it was nearly dark. "Hey, look," said Mooney des" perately, "look at those kids on sleds!" Harse glanced angrily at the kids on sleds and even more angrily at Mooney. Still, he wasn't refusing to come and that was something. It had been possible that Harse would sit tight in the hotel room and it had taken all of the persuasive powers Mooney prided himself on to get him out. But Mooney was able to paint a horrible picture of getting to the wrong place, missing the Nexus Point, seventeen long years of waiting for the next one. They crossed the Sheep Meadow, crossed the walk, crossed an old covered bridge; and they were at the head of a flight of shallow steps. "The Vale of Cashmere!" cried Mooney, as though he were announcing a miracle. Harse said nothing. Mooney licked his lips, glancing at the kit Harse carried under an arm, glancing around. No one was in sight. Mooney coughed. "Uh. You're sure this is the place you mean?" "If it is the Vale of Cashmere." Harse looked once more down the steps, then turned. "No, wait!" said Mooney frantically. "I mean -- well, where in the Vale of Cashmere is the Nexus Point? This is a big place!" Harse's pale eyes stared at him for a moment. "No. Not big." "Oh, fairly big. After all -- " Harse said positively; "Come." Mooney swore under his breath and vowed never to trust anyone again, especially a bartender's brother; but just then it happened. Out of the snowy bushes stepped a man in a red bandanna, holding a gun. "This is a stickup! Gimme that bag!" Mooney exulted. There was no chance for Harse now. The man was leaping toward him; there would be no time for him to open the bag, take out the weapon... But he didn't have to. There was a thin, singing, whining sound from the bag. It leaped out of Harse's hand, leaped free as though it had invisible wings, and flew at the man in the red bandanna. The man stumbled and jumped aside, the eyes incredulous over the mask. The silvery flat metal kit spun round him, whining. It circled him once, spiraled up. Behind it, like a smoke trail from a destroyer, a pale blue mist streamed backward. It surrounded the man and hid him. The bag flew back into Harse's hand. The violet mist thinned and disappeared. And the man was gone, as utterly and as finally as any chambermaid or driver of a truck. There was a moment of silence. Mooney stared without belief at the snow sifting down from the bushes that the man had hid in. Harse looked opaquely at Mooney. "It seems," he said, "that in these slums are many. Dangers?" the way back to the hotel. Harse, for once, was not gazing into his viewer. He sat erect and silent beside Mooney, glancing at him from time to time. Mooney did not relish the attention. The situation had deteriorated. It deteriorated even more when they entered the lobby of the hotel. The desk clerk called to Mooney. Mooney hesitated, then said to Harse: "You go ahead. I'll be up in a minute. And listen -- don't forget about my knock." Harse inclined his head and strode into the elevator. Mooney sighed. "There's a gentleman to see you, Mr. Mooney," the desk clerk said civilly. Mooney swallowed. "A -- a gentleman? To see me?" The clerk nodded toward the writing room. "In there, sir. A gentleman who says he knows you." Mooney pursed his lips. In the writing room? Well, that was an advantage. The writing room was off the main lobby; it would give Mooney a chance to peek in before whoever it was could see him. He approached the entrance cautiously... "Howard!" cried an accusing familiar voice behind him. Mooney turned. A small man with curly red hair was coming out of a door marked "Men." "Why -- why. Uncle Lester!" said Mooney. "What a p-pleasant surprise!" Lester, all of five feet tall, wispy red hair surrounding his red plump face, looked up at him belligerently. "No doubt!" he snapped. "I've been waiting all day, Howard. Took the afternoon off from work to come here. And I wouldn't have been here at all if I hadn't seen this." He was holding a copy of the paper with Mooney's picture, behind the pillar of black fog. "Your aunt wrapped my lunch in it, Howard. Otherwise I might have missed it. Went right to the hotel. You weren't there. The doorman helped, though. Found a cab driver. Told me where he'd taken you. Here I am." "That's nice," lied Mooney. "No, it isn't. Howard, what in the world are you up to? Do you know the Monmouth County police are looking for you? Said there was somebody missing. Want to talk to you." The little man shook his head angrily. "Knew I shouldn't let you stay at my place. Your aunt warned me, too. Why do you make trouble for me?" "Police?" Mooney asked faintly. "At my age! Police coming to the house. Who was that fella who's missing, Howard? Where did he go? Why doesn't he go home? His wife's half crazy. He shouldn't worry her like that." M ooney clutched Ws uncle's shoulder. "Do the police know where I am? You didn't tell them?" "Tell them? How could I tell them? Only I saw your picture while I was eating my sandwich, so I went to the hotel and -- " "Uncle Lester, listen. What did they come to see you for?" "Because I was stupid enough to let you stay in my house, that's what for," Lester said bitterly. "Two days ago. Knocking on my door, hardly eight o'clock in the morning. They said there's a man missing, driving a truck, found the truck empty. Man from the Coast Guard station knows him, saw him picking up a couple of hitchhikers at a bridge someplace, recognized one of the hitchhikers. Said the hitchhiker'd been staying at my house. That's you, Howard. Don't lie; he described you. Pudgy, kind of a squinty look in the eyes, dressed like a bum -- oh, it was you, all right." "Wait a minute. Nobody knows you've come here, right? Not even Auntie?" "No, course not. She didn't see the picture, so how would she know? Would've said something if she had. Now come on, Howard, we've got to go to the police and " "Uncle Lester!" The little man paused and looked at him suspiciously. But that was all right; Mooney began to feel confidence flow back into him. It wasn't all over yet, not by a long shot. "Uncle Lester," he said, his voice low-pitched and persuasive, "I have to ask you a very important question. Think before you answer, please. This is the question : Have you ever belonged to any Communist organization?" The old man blinked. After a moment, he exploded. "Now what are you up to, Howard? You know I never -- " "Think, Uncle Lester! Please. Way back when you were a boy -- anything like that?" "Of course not!" "You're sure? Because I'm warning you. Uncle Lester, you're going to have to take the strictest security check anybody ever took. You've stumbled onto something important. You'll have to prove you can be trusted or -- well, I can't answer for the consequences. You see, this involves -- " he looked around him furtively -- "Schenectady Project." "Schenec -- " "Schenectady Project." Mooney nodded. "You've heard of the atom bomb? Uncle Lester, this is bigger!" "Bigger than the at -- " "Bigger. It's the molecule bomb. There aren't seventy-five men in the country that know what that so-called driver in the truck was up to, and now you're one of them." Mooney nodded soberly, feeling his power. The old man was hooked, tied and delivered. He could tell by the look in the eyes, by the quivering of the lips. Now was the time to slip the contract in his hand; or, in the present instance, to -- "I'll tell you what to do," whispered Mooney. "Here's my key. You go up to my room. Don't knock -- we don't want to attract attention. Walk right in. You'll see a man there and he'll explain everything. Understand?" "Why -- why, sure, Howard. But why don't you come with me?" Mooney raised a hand warningly. "You mdght be followed. I'll have to keep a lookout." Five minutes later, when Mooney tapped on the door of the room -- three taps, pause, three taps -- and cautiously pushed it open, the pale blue mist was just disappearing. Harse was standing angrily in the center of the room with the jointed metal thing thrust out ominously before him. And of Uncle Lester, there was no trace at all. V was all gone, and it was midnight, nearly the Nexus Point. In front of the hotel, a drowsy cab-driver gave them an argument. "The Public Liberry? Listen, the Liberry ain't open this time of night. I ought to -- Oh, thanks. Hop in." He folded the five-dollar bill and put the cab in gear. Harse said ominously : "Liberry, Mooney? Why do you instruct him to take us to the Liberry?" Mooney whispered; "There's a law against being in the Park at night. We'll have to sneak in. The Library's right across the street." Harse stared, with his luminous pale eyes. But it was true; there was such a law, for the parks of the city lately had become fields of honor where rival gangs contended with bottle shards and zip guns, where a passerby was odds-on to be mugged. "High Command must know this," Harse grumbled. "Must proceed, they say, to Nexus Point. But then one finds the aboriginals have made laws! Oh, I shall make a report!" "Sure you will," Mooney soothed; but in his heart, he was prepared to bet heavily against it. Because he had a new strategy. Clearly he couldn't get the survival kit from Harse. He had tried that and there was no luck; his arm still tingled as the bellboy's had, from having seemingly absent-mindedly taken the handle to help Harse. But there was a way. Get rid of this clown from the future, he thought contentedly; meet the Nexus Point instead of Harse and there was the future, ripe for the taking! He knew where the rescuers would would be -- and, above all, he knew how to talk. Every man has one talent and Mooney's was salesmanship. All the years wasted on peddling dime-store schemes like frozen-food plans! But this was the big time at last, so maybe the years of seasoning were not wasted, after all. "That for you. Uncle Lester," he muttered. Harse looked up from his viewer angrily ' and Mooney cleared his throat. "I said," he explained hastily, "we're almost at the -- the Nexus Point." cab-driver glanced at the black, quiet library, shook his head and pulled away, leaving black, wet tracks in the thin snow. The pale-eyed man looked about him irritably. "You!" he cried, waking Mooney from a dream of possessing the next ten years of stock-market reports. "You! Where is this Vale of Cashmere?" "Right this way, Harse, right this way," said Mooney placatingly. There was a wide sort of traffic circle -- Grand Army Plaza was the name of it -- and there were a few cars going around it. But not many, and none of them looked like police cars. Mooney looked up and down the broad, quiet streets. "Across here," he ordered, and led the time traveler toward the edge of the park. "We can't go in the main entrance. There might be cops." "Cops?" "Policemen. Law-enforcement officers. We'll just walk down here a way and then hop over the wall. Trust me," said Mooney, in the voice that had put frozenfood lockers into so many suburban homes. The look from those pale eyes was anything but a look of trust, but Harse didn't say anything. He stared about with an expression of detached horror, like an Alabama gentlewoman condemned to walk through Harlem. "Now!" whispered Mooney urgently. And over the wall they went. They were in a thicket of shrubs and brush, snow-laden, the snow sifting down into Mooney's neck every time he touched a branch, which was always; he couldn't avoid it. They crossed a path and then a road -- long, curving, broad, white, empty. Down a hill, onto another path. Mooney paused, glancing around. "You know where you are. Going?" "I think so. I'm looking for cops." None in sight. Mooney frowned. What the devil did the police think they were up to? They passed laws; why weren't they around to enforce them? Mooney had his landmarks well in mind. There was the Drive, and there was the fork he was supposed to be looking for. It wouldn't be hard to find the path to the Vale. The only thing was, it was kind of important to Mooney's hope of future prosperity that he find a policeman first. And time was running out. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch -- self-winding, shockproof, non-magnetic; the man in the hotel's jewelry shop had assured him only yesterday that he could depend on its timekeeping as on the beating of his heart. It was nearly a quarter of one. "Come along, come along!" grumbled Harse. Mooney stalled: "I -- I think we'd better go along this way. It ought to be down there -- " He cursed himself. Why hadn't he gone in the main entrance, where there was sure to be a cop? Harse would never have known the difference. But there was the artist in him that wanted the thing done perfectly, and so he had held to the pretense of avoiding police, had skulked and hidden. And now -- "Look!" he whispered, pointing. Harse spat soundlessly and turned his eyes where Mooney was pointing. Yes. Under a distant light, a moving figure, swinging a nightstick. Mooney took a deep breath and planted a hand between Harse's shoulder blades. "Run!" he yelled at the top of his voice, and shoved. He sounded so real, he almost convinced himself. "We'll have to split up -- I'll meet you there. Now run!" VI crouched under a snowy tree, watching the man from the future speed effortlessly away... in the wrong direction. The cop was hailing him; clever cop! All it had taken was a couple of full-throated yells and at once the cop had perceived that someone was in the park. But cleverer than any cop was Mooney. Men from the future. Why, thought Mooney contentedly, no Mrs. Meyerhauser of the suburbs would have let me get away with a trick like that to sell her a freezer. There's going to be no problem at all. I don't have to worry about a thing. Mooney can take care of himself! By then, he had caught his breath -- and time was passing, passing. He heard a distant confused yelling. Harse and the cop? But it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was getting to the Nexus Point at one minute past one. He took a deep breath and began to trot. Slipping in the snow, panting heavily, he went down the path, around the little glade, across the covered bridge. He found the shallow steps that led down to the Vale. And there it was below him: a broad space where walks joined, and in the space a thing shaped like a dinosaur egg, rounded and huge. It glowed with a silvery sheen. Confidently, Mooney started down the steps toward the egg and the moving figures that flitted soundlessly around it. Harse was not the only time traveler, Mooney saw. Good, that might make it all the simpler. Should he change his plan and feign amnesia, pass himself off as one of their own men? OrA movement made him look over his shoulder. Somebody was standing at the top of the steps. "Hell's fire," whispered Mooney. He'd forgotten all about that aboriginal law; and here above him stood a man in a policeman's uniform, staring down with pale eyes. No, not a policeman. The face was -- Harse's. Mooney swallowed and stood rooted. "You!" Harse's savage voice came growling. "You are to stand. Still?" Mooney didn't need the order; he couldn't move. No twentiethcentury cop was a match for Harse, that was clear; Harse had bested him, taken his uniform away from him for camouflage -- and here he was. Unfortunately, so was Howard Mooney. The figures below were looking up, pointing and talking; Harse from above was coming down. Mooney could only stand, and wish -- wish that he were back in Sea Bright, living on cookies and stale tea, wish he had planned things with more intelligence, more skill -- perhaps even with more honesty. But it was too late for wishing. Harse came down the steps, paused a yard from Mooney, scowled a withering scowl -- and passed on. He reached the bottom of the steps and joined the others waiting about the egg. They all went inside. The glowing silvery colors winked and went out. The egg flamed purple, faded, turned transparent and disappeared. Mooney stared and, yelling a demand for payment, ran stumbling down the steps to where it had been. There was a round thawed spot, a trampled patch -- nothing else. They were gone... Almost gone. Because there was a sudden bright wash of flame from overhead -- cold silvery flame. He looked up, dazzled. Over him, the egg was visible as thin smoke, hovering. A smoky, half-transparent hand reached out of a port. A thin, reedy voice cried: "I promised you. Pay?" And the silvery dispatch-case sort of thing, the survival kit, dropped soundlessly to the snow beside Mooney. When he looked up again, the egg was gone for good. hotel before he got a grip on himself -- and then he was drunk with delight. Honest Harse! Splendidly trustable Harse! Why, all this time, Mooney had been so worried, had worked so hard -- and the whole survival kit was his, after all! He had touched it gingerly before picking it up but it didn't shock him; clearly the protective devices, whatever they were, were off. He sweated over it for an hour and a half, looking for levers, buttons, a slit that he might pry wider with the blade of a knife. At last he kicked it and yelled, past endurance: "Open up, damn you!" It opened wide on the floor before him. "Oh, bless your heart!" cried Mooney, falling to his knees to drag out the string of wampum, the little mechanical mice, the viewing-machine sort of thing. Treasures like those were beyond price; each one might fetch a fortune, if only in the wondrous new inventions he could patent if he could discover just how they worked. But where were they? Gone! The wampum was gone. The goggles were gone. Everything was gone -- the little flat canisters, the map instruments, everything but one thing. There was, in a corner of the case, a squarish, sharp-edged thing that Mooney stared at blindly for a long moment before he recognized it. It was a part -- only a part -- of the jointed construction that Harse had used to rid himself of undesirables by bathing them in blue light. What a filthy trick! Mooney all but sobbed to himself. He picked up the squarish thing bitterly. Probably it wouldn't even work, he thought, the world a ruin around him. It wasn't even the whole complete weapon. Still There was a grooved, saddleshaped affair that was clearly a sort of trigger; it could move forward or it could move back. Mooney thought deeply for a while. Then he sat up, held the thing carefully away from him with the pointed part toward the wall and pressed, ever so gently pressed forward on the saddle-shaped thumb-trigger. The pale blue haze leaped out, swirled around and, not finding anything alive in its range, dwindled and died. everything is lost yet! Surely a bright young man could find some use for a weapon like this which removed, if it did not kill. which prevented any nastiness about a corpse turning up, or a messy job of disposal. Why not see what happened if the thumb-piece was moved backward? Well, why not? Mooney held the thing away from him, hesitated, and slid it back. There was a sudden shivering tingle in his thumb, in the gadget he was holding, running all up and down his arm. A violet haze, very unlike the blue one, licked soundlessly forth -- not burning, but destroying as surely as flame ever destroyed; for where the haze touched the gadget itself, the kit, everything that had to do with the man from the future, it seared and shattered. The gadget fell into white crystalline powder in Mooney's hand and the case itself became a rectangular shape traced in white powder ridges on the rug. Oh, no! thought Mooney, even before the haze had gone. It can't be! The flame danced away like a cloud, spreading and rising. While Mooney stared, it faded away, but not without leaving something behind. Mooney threw his taut body backward, almost under the bed. What he saw, he didn't believe; what he believed filled him with panic. No wonder Harse had laughed so when Mooney asked if its victims were dead. For there they were, all of them. Like djinn out of a jar, human figures jelled and solidified where the cloud of violet flame had not at all diffidently rolled. They were alive, as big as life, and beginning to move -- and so many of them! Three -- five -- six: The truck-driver, yes, and a man in long red flannel underwear who must have been the policeman, and Uncle Lester, and the bartender's brother, and the chambermaid, and a man Mooney didn't know. They were there, all of them; and they came toward him, and oh! but they were angry! Just send # for this exciting new book by L. Ron Hubbard. It will be shipped to you immediately postage free. Box #, Silver Spring, Maryland, U. S. A. the language off love Toms was absolutely correct -- why shouldn't a lover be able to whisper semantically exact somethings Into a girl's ear? into an auto-cafe one afternoon after classes, to drink coffee and study. He sat down, philosophy texts piled neatly before him, and saw a girl directing the robot waiters. She had smokygray eyes and hair the color of a rocket exhaust. Her figure was slight but sweetly curved and, gazing at it, Toms felt a lump in his throat and a sudden recollection of autumn, evening, rain and candlelight. This was how love came to Jefferson Toms. Although he was ordinarily a very reserved young man, he complained about the robot service in order to meet her. When they did meet, he was inarticulate, overwhelmed by feeling. Somehow, though, he managed to ask her for a date. The girl, whose name was Doris, was strangely moved by the stocky, black-haired young student, for she accepted at once. And then Jefferson Toms' troubles began. He found love delightful, yet extremely disturbing, in spite of his advanced studies in philosophy. But love was a confusing thing even in Toms' age, when spaceliners bridged the gaps between the worlds, disease lay dead, war was inconceivable, and just about anything of any importance had been solved in an exemplary manner. Old Earth was in better shape than ever before. Her cities were bright with plastic and stainless steel. Her remaining forests were carefully tended bits of greenery where one might picnic in perfect safety, since all beasts and insects had been removed to sanitary zoos which reproduced their living conditions with admirable skill. Even the climate of Earth had been mastered. Farmers received their quota of rain between three and three-thirty in the morning, people gathered at stadiums to watch a program of sunsets, and a tornado was produced once a year in a special arena as part of the World Peace Day Celebration. But love was as confusing as ever and Toms found this distressing. He simply could not put his feelings into words. Such expressions as "I love you," "I adore you," "I'm crazy about you" were overworked and inadequate. They conveyed nothing of the depth and fervor of his emotions. Indeed they cheapened them, since every stereo, every second-rate play was filled with similar words. People used them in casual conversation and spoke of how much they loved pork chops, adored sunsets, were crazy about tennis. Every fiber of Toms' being revolted against this. Never, he swore, would he speak of his love in terms used for pork chops. But he found, to his dismay, that he had nothing better to say. to his philosophy professor. "Mr. Toms," the professor said, gesturing wearily with his glasses, "ah -- love, as it is commonly called, is not an operational area with us as yet. No significant work has been done in this field, aside from the so-called Language of Love of the Tyanian race." This was no help. Toms continued to muse on love and think lengthily of Doris. In the long haunted evenings on her porch, when the shadows from the trellis vines crgssed her face, revealing and concealing it, Toms struggled to tell her what he felt. And since he could not bring himself to use the weary commonplaces of love, he tried to express himself in extravagances. "I feel about you," he would say, "the way a star feels about its planet." "How immense!" she would answer, immensely flattered at being compared to anything so cosmic. "That's not what I meant," Toms amended. "The feeling I was trying to express was more -- well, for example, when you walk, I am reminded of -- " "Of a what?" "A doe in a forest glade," Toms said, frowning. "How charming!" "It wasn't intended to be charming. I was trying to express the awkwardness inherent in youth and yet -- " "But, honey," she said, "I'm not awkward. My dancing teacher -- " "I didn't mean awkward. But the essence of awkwardness is -- is -- " "I understand," she said. But Toms knew she didn't. So he was forced to give up extravagances. Soon he found himself unable to say anything of any importance to Doris, for it was not what he meant, nor even close to it. The girl became concerned at the long, moody silences which developed between them. "Jeff," she would urge, "surely you can say something!" Toms shrugged his shoulders. "Even if it isn't absolutely what you mean." Toms sighed. "Please," she cried, "say anything at all! I can't stand this!" "Oh, hell "Yes?" she breathed, her face transfigured. "That wasn't what I meant," Toms said, relapsing into his gloomy silence. At last he asked her to marry he "loved" her -- but he refused to expand on it. He explained that a marriage must be founded upon truth or it is doomed from the start. If he cheapened and falsified his emotions at the beginning, what could the future hold for them? Doris found his sentiments admirable, but refused to marry him. "You must tell a girl that you love her," she declared. "You have to tell her a hundred times a day, Jefferson, and even then it's not enough." "But I do love you!" Toms protested. "I mean to say I have an emotion corresponding to -- " "Oh, stop it!" In this predicament, Toms thought about the Language of Love and went to his professor's office to ask about it. sor said, "that the race indigenous to Tyana II had a specific and unique language for the expression of sensations of love. To say 'I love you' was unthinkable for Tyanians. They would use a phrase denoting the exact kind and class of love they felt at that specific moment, and used for no other purpose." Toms nodded, and the professor continued. "Of course, developed with this Language was, necessarily, a technique of lovemaking quite incredible in its perfection. We are told that it made all ordinary techniques seem like the clumsy pawing of a grizzly in heat." The professor coughed in embarrassment. "It is precisely what I need!" Toms exclaimed. "Ridiculous," said the professor. "The technique might be interesting, but your own is doubtless sufficient for most needs. And the Language, by its very nature, can be used with only one person. To learn it impresses me as wasted energy." "Labor for love," Toms said, "is the most worthwhile work in the world, since it produces a rich harvest of feeling." "I refuse to stand here and listen to bad epigrams. Mr. Toms, why all this fuss about love?" "It is the only perfect thing in this world," Toms answered fervently. "If one must learn a special language to appreciate it, one can do no less. Tell me, is it far to "A considerable distance," his professor said, with a thin smile. "And an unrewarding one, since the race is extinct." "Extinct! But why? A sudden pestilence? An invasion?" "It is one of the mysteries of the Galaxy," his professor said somberly. "Then the Language is lost!" "Not quite. Twenty years ago, an Earthman named George Varris went to Tyana and learned the Language of Love from the last remnants of the race." The professor shrugged his shoulders. "I never considered it sufficiently important to read his scientific papers." Toms looked up Varris in the Interspatial Explorers Who's Who and found that he was credited with the discovery of Tyana, had wandered around the frontier planets for a time, but at last had returned to deserted Tyana, to devote his life to investigating every aspect of its culture. After learning this, Toms thought long and hard. The journey to Tyana was a difficult one, time-consuming and expensive. Perhaps Varris would be dead beteach him the Language. Was it worth the gamble? "Is love worth it?" Toms asked himself, and knew the answer. So he sold his ultra-fi, his memory recorder, his philosophy texts, and several stocks his grandfather had left him, and booked passage to Cranthis IV, which was the closest he could come to Tyana on a scheduled spaceway. And after all his preparations had been made, he went to Doris. "When I return," he said, "I will be able to tell you exactly how much -- I mean the particular quality and class of -- I mean, Doris, when I have mastered the Tyanian Technique, you will be loved as no woman has ever been loved!" "Do you mean that?" she asked, her eyes glowing. "Well," Toms said, "the term 'loved' doesn't quite express it. But I mean something very much like it." "I will wait for you, Jeff," she said. "But -- please don't be too long." Jefferson Toms nodded, blinked back his tears, clutched Doris inarticulately, and hurried to the spaceport. Within the hour, he was on his way. siderable difficulties, Toms stood on Tyana, on the outskirts of the capital city. Slowly he walked down the broad, deserted main thoroughfare. On either side of him, noble buildings soared to dizzy heights. Peering inside one, Toms saw complex machinery and gleaming switchboards. With his pocket Tyana-English dictionary, he was able to translate the lettering above one of the buildings. It read: counseling services Other buildings were much the same, filled with calculating machinery, switchboards, ticker tapes, and the like. He passed glanced at several others. Slowly the awesome, dazzling truth dawned upon him. Here was an entire city given over to the research and aid of love. He had no time for further speculation. In front of him was the gigantic general love servmarble hallway stepped an old man. "Who the hell are you?" the old man asked. "I am Jefferson Toms, of Earth. I have come here to learn the Language of Love, Mr. Varris." Varris raised his shaggy white eyebrows. He was a small, wrinkled old man, stoop-shouldered and shaky in the knees. But his eyes were alert and filled with a cold suspicion. "Perhaps you think the Language will make you more attractive to women," Varris said. "Don't believe it, young man. Knowledge has its advantages, of course. But it has distinct drawbacks, as the Tyanians discovered." "What drawbacks?" Toms asked. Varris grinned, displaying a single yellow tooth. "You wouldn't understand, if you don't already know. It takes knowledge to understand the limitations of knowledge." "Nevertheless," Toms said, "I want to learn the Language." Varris stared at him thoughtfully. "But it is not a simple thing, Toms. The Language of Love, and its resultant technique, is every bit as complex as brain surgery or the practice of corporation law. It takes work, much work, and a talent as well." "I will do the work. And I'm sure I have the talent." "Most people think that," Varris said, "and most of them are mistaken. But never mind, never mind. It's been a long time since I've had any company. We'll see how you get on, Toms." Together they went into the General Services Building, which Varris called his home. They went to the Main Control Room, where the old man had put down a sleeping bag and set up a camp stove. There, in the shadow of the giant calculators, Toms' lessons began.  teacher. In the beginning, with the aid of a portable Semantic Differentiator, he taught Toms to isolate the delicate apprehension one feels in the presence of a tobe-loved person, to detect the subtle tensions that come into being as the potentiality of love draws near. These sensations, Toms learned, must never be spoken of directly, for frankness frightens love. They must be expressed in simile, metaphor and hyperbole, halftruths and white lies. With these, one creates an atmosphere and lays a foundation for love. And the mind, deceived by its own predisposition, thinks of booming surf and raging sea, mournful black rocks and fields of green corn. "Nice images," Toms said admiringly. "Those were samples," Varris told him. "Now you must learn them all." So Toms went to work memorizing great long lists of natural wonders, to what sensations they were comparable, and at what stage they appeared in the anticipation of love. The Language was thorough in this regard. Every state or object in nature for which there was a response in love-anticipation had been catalogued, classified and listed with suitable modifying adjectives. When he had memorized the list, Varris drilled him in perceptions of love. Toms learned the small, strange things that make up a state of love. Some were so ridiculous that he had to laugh. The old man admonished him sternly. "Love is a serious business, Toms. You seem to find some humor in the fact that love is frequently predisposed by wind speed and direction." "It seems foolish," Toms admitted. "There are stranger things than that," Varris said, and mentioned another factor. Toms shuddered. "That I can't believe. It's preposterous. Everyone knows -- " "If everyone knows how love operates, why hasn't someone reduced it to a formula? Murky thinking, Toms, murky thinking ness to accept cold facts. If you cannot face them -- " "I can face anything," Toms said, "if I have to. Let's continue." learned the words which express the first quickening of interest, shade by shade, until an attachment is formed. He learned what that attachment really is and the three words that express it. This brought him to the rhetoric of sensation, where the body becomes supreme. Here the Language was specific instead of allusive, and dealt with feelings produced by certain words, and above all, by certain physical actions. A startling little black machine taught Toms the thirty-eight separate and distinct sensations which the touch of a hand can engender, and he learned how to locate that sensitive area, no larger than a dime, which exists just below the right shoulder blade. He learned an entirely new system of caressing, which caused impulses to explode -- and even implode -- along the nerve paths and to shower colored sparks before the eyes. He was also taught the social advantages of conspicuous desensitization. He learned many things about physical love which he had dimly suspected, and still more things which no one had suspected. It was intimidating knowledge. Toms had imagined himself to be at least an adequate lover. Now he found that he knew nothing, nothing at all, and that his best efforts had been comparable to the play of amorous hippopotami. "But what else could you expect?" Varris asked. "Good lovemaking, Toms, calls for more study, more sheer intensive labor than any other acquired skill. Do you still wish to learn?" "Definitely!" Toms said. "Why, when I'm an expert on love-making, I'll -- I can -- " "That is no concern of mine," the old man stated. "Let's return to our lessons." Next, Toms learned the Cycles of Love. Love, he discovered, is dynamic, constantly rising and falling, and doing so in definite patterns. There were fifty-two major patterns, three hundred and six minor patterns, four general exceptions, and nine specific exceptions. Toms learned them better than his own name. He acquired the uses of the Tertiary Touch. And he never forgot the day he was taught what a bosom really was like. "But I can't say that!" Toms objected, appalled. "It's true, isn't it?" Varris insisted. "No! I mean -- yes, I suppose it is. But it's unflattering." "So it seems. But examine, Toms. Is it actually unflattering?" Toms examined and found the compliment that lies beneath the insult, and so he learned another facet of the Language of Love. Soon he was ready for the study of the Apparent Negations. He discovered that for every degree of love, there is a corresponding degree of hate, which is in itself a form of love. He came to understand how valuable hate is, how it gives substance and body to love, and how even indifference and loathing have their place in the nature of love. ' written examination, which Toms passed with superlative marks. He was eager to finish, but Varris noticed that a slight tic had developed in his student's left eye and that his hands had a tendency to shake. "You need a vacation," the old man informed him. Toms had been thinking this himself. "You may be right," he said, with barely concealed eagerness. "Suppose I go to Cythera V for a few weeks." Varris, who knew Cythera's reputation, smiled cynically. "Eager to try out your new knowledge?" "Well, why not? Knowledge is to be used." "Only after it's mastered." "But I have mastered it! Couldn't we call this field work? A thesis, perhaps?" "No thesis is necessary," Varris said. "But damn it all," Toms exploded, "I should do a little experimentation! I should find out for myself how all this works. Especially Approach #-CV. It sounds fine in theory, but I've been wondering how it works out in actual practice. There's nothing like direct experience, you know, to reinforce -- " "Did you journey all this way to become a super-seducer?" Varris asked, with evident disgust. "Of course not," Toms said. "But a little experimentation wouldn't -- " "Your knowledge, of the mechanics of sensation would be barren, unless you understand love, as well. You have progressed too far to be satisfied with mere thrills." Toms, searching his heart, knew this to be true. But he set his jaw stubbornly. "I'd like to find out that for myself, too." "You may go," Varris said, "but don't come back. No one will accuse me of loosing a callous scientific seducer upon the Galaxy." "Oh, all right. To hell with it. Let's get back to work." "No. Look at yourself! A little more unrelieved studying, young man, and you will lose the capacity to make love. And wouldn't that be a sorry state of affairs?" Toms agreed that it would certainly be. "I know the perfect spot," Varris told him, "for relaxation from the study of love." spaceship and journeyed five days to a small unnamed planetoid. When they landed, the old man took Toms to the bank of a swift flowing river, where the water ran fiery red, with green diamonds of foam. The trees that grew on the banks of that river were stunted and strange, and colored vermilion. Even the grass was unlike grass, for it was orange and blue. "How alien!" gasped Toms. "It is the least human spot I've found in this humdrum corner of the Galaxy," Varris explained. "And believe me, I've done some looking." Toms stared at him, wondering if the old man was out of his mind. But soon he understood what Varris meant. For months, he had been studying human reactions and human feelings, and surrounding it all was the now suffocating feeling of soft human flesh. He had immersed himself in humanity, studied it, bathed in it, eaten and drunk and dreamed it. It was a relief to be here, where the water ran red and the trees were stunted and strange and vermilion, and the grass was orange and blue, and there was no reminder of Earth. Toms and Varris separated, for even each other's humanity was a nuisance. Toms spent his days wandering along the river edge, marveling at the flowers which moaned when he came near them. At night, three wrinkled moons played tag with each other, and the morning sun was different from the yellow sun of Earth. At the end of a week, refreshed and renewed, Toms and Varris returned to G'cel, the Tyanian city dedicated to the study of love. Toms was taught the five hundred and six shades of Love Proper, from the first faint possibility to the ultimate feeling, which is so powerful that only five men and one woman have experienced it, and the strongest of them survived less than an hour. Under the tutelage of a bank of small, interrelated calculators, he studied the intensification of love. He learned all of the thousand different . sensations of which the human body is capable, and how to augment them, and how to intensify them until they become unbearable, and how to make the unbearable bearable, and finally pleasurable, at which point the organism is not far from death. After that, he was taught some things which have never been put into words and, with luck, never will. "And that," Varris said one day, "is everything." "Everything?" "Yes, Toms. The heart has no secrets from you. Nor, for that matter, has the soul, or mind, or the viscera. You have mastered the Language of Love. Now return to your young lady." "I will!" cried Toms. "At last she will know!" "Drop me a postcard," Varris said. "Let me know how you're getting on." "I'll do that," Toms promised. Fervently he shook his teacher's hand and departed for Earth. A t the end of the long trip, Jefferson Toms hurried to Doris' home. Perspiration beaded his forehead and his hands were shaking. He was able to classify the feeling as Stage Two Anticipatory Tremors, with mild masochistic overtones. But that didn't help -- this was his first field work and he was nervous. Had he mastered everything? He rang the bell. She opened the door and Toms saw that she was more beautiful than he had remembered, her eyes smoky-gray and misted with tears, her hair the color of a rocket exhaust, her figure slight but sweetly curved. He felt again the lump in his throat and sudden memories of autumn, evening, rain and candlelight. "I'm back," he croaked. "Oh, Jeff," she said, very softly. "Oh, Jeff." Toms simply stared, unable to say a word. "It's been so long, Jeff, and I kept wondering if it was all worth it. Now I know." "Youknow?" "Yes, my darling! I waited for you! I'd wait a hundred years, or a thousand! I love you, Jeff!" She was in his arms. "Now tell me, Jeff," she said. "Tell me!" And Toms looked at her, and felt, and sensed, searched his classifications, selected his modifiers. checked and double-checked. And after much searching, and careful selection, and absolute certainty, and allowing for his present state of mind, and not forgetting to take into account climatic conditions, phases of the Moon, wind speed and direction. Sun spots, and other phenomena which have their due effect upon love, he said: "My dear, I am rather fond of you." "Jeff! Surely you can say more than that! The Language of Love "The Language is damnably precise," Toms said wretchedly. "Fm sorry, but the phrase 'I am rather fond of you' expresses precisely what I feel." "Oh, Jeff!" "Yes," he mumbled. "Oh, damn you, Jeff!" ful scene and a very painful separation. Toms took to traveling. He held jobs here and there, working as a riveter at SaturnLockheed, a wiper on the HelgVinosce Trader, a farmer for a while on a kibbutz on Israel IV. He bummed around the Inner Dalmian System for several years, living mostly on handouts. Then, at Novilocessile, he met a pleasant, brown-haired girl, courted her and, in due course, married her and set up housekeeping. Their friends say that the Tomses are tolerably happy, although their home makes most people uncomfortable. It is a pleasant enough place, but the rushing red river nearby makes people edgy. And who can get used to vermilion trees, and orange-and-blue grass, and moaning flowers, and three wrinkled moons playing tag in the alien sky? Toms likes it, though, and Mrs. Toms is, if nothing else, a flexible young lady. Toms wrote a letter to his philosophy professor on Earth, saying that he had solved the problem of the demise of the Tyanian race, at least to his own satisfaction. The trouble with scholarly research, he wrote, is the inhibiting effect it has upon action. The Tyanians, he was convinced, had been so preoccupied with the science of love, after a while they just didn't get around to making any. And eventually he sent a short postcard to George Varris. He simply said that he was married, having succeeded in finding a girl for whom he felt "quite a substantial liking." "Lucky devil," Varris growled, after reading the card. '"Vaguely enjoyable' was the best I could ever find." your infformaition had not changed during the last few centuries, this is what would happen on the day after a ship lands on Mars; -- If the name of the ship were Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and that of the captain Don Francisco de Quintana y Molino, there would be a procession with banners of the cross around the landing site, two masses would be said, and in conclusion of the ceremony, a cross would be erected... -- If the name of the ship were Dom Henrique and the name of the captain Joao Dias, there would be the erection of a cross, a mass would be said and, in conclusion, a monument with a coat of arms would be placed... -- If the name of the ship were Ilya Murometz and that of the captain Vladimir Ossipovitch Kosmodemyanski, there would be a religious ceremony culminating in the ceremonial burying of copper shields with a coat of arms... -- If the name of the ship were Queen Elizabeth and that of the captain Sir Cecil Hawkins, there would be a brisk service and the captain would perform the "turf and sprig" ceremony, taking a handful of soil and any small plant in reach to take home with him. Then the British flag would be hoisted . , . -- And if the name of the ship were Siegfried, commanded by Captain Wolfgang von Greiffenklau, there would be an even brisker servicet Then everybody would stand at attention while the German flag is being hoisted. Possibly the captain would stick his dress saber into the ground. or else (another tradition) pierce his own cap with it. I don't know what would happen if the ship were named the Robert H. Goddard and the captain F. Warren Smith, for all the customs mentioned had gone out of use at the time the thirteen states decided to be independent. But these were the actual customs for taking possession of an island or a coast. Needless to say, none of these ceremonies would carry any legal validity nowadays and the International Court at The Hague wouldn't pay the slightest attention to even the most elaborate ceremony if the participants therein pack up and blast off for home at a later date. I'HE law... Now just a moment. There is no space law yet, is there? The answer to that question is a clear "no" if you mean "legislation" when you say "law." As Rear Admiral Chester Ward said in a lecture on space law during the eleventh annual meeting of the American Rocket Society in November, #: "It is a fundamental principle of lawmaking that you can't legislate without facts. That principle applies just as well to the law of space as it does to the law that governs our actions here on the surface of the earth." Since there are no "facts" yet -- that is to say, no spaceships with known performance characteristics and, by implication, performance restrictions -- there can be no legislation. But just because there are no such "facts" yet, the term "law" may be employed to mean what would otherwise be called a legal principle or a legal attitude. And that certainly exists. I have listened to about half a dozen lectures on the foundations and principles of space law during the last half dozen years -- they were not evenly spaced, though -- and found enough agreement between the various experts to make a resume possible. The earliest dissertation on space law saw print in #. Its title was just that: "The Law of Space," but in German Das Weltraum-Recht and it was written by a Dr. Vladimir Mandl, who was then a practicing lawyer in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. I freely admit that I hadn't looked at it since # when Dr. Mandl sent me a copy and I have just read it to see what he had to say then. Well, the net yield was tiny, for Dr. Mandl devoted most of his small book to investigating such legal problems as liability for accidental damage, etc., etc., and all that with special reference to German law. But he did say that space outside the atmosphere should be regarded as an area without existing or possible sovereignty, a point on which all later legal writers fully agreed. The idea is very simply that open space is compared to the open sea. That no nation has, or can have, sovereignty over the open sea is a legal principle that has been firmly established for centuries. E tend to think this is so obvious that it need not be mentioned, but there was a time -- best nailed down as the time in which Columbus lived -- when countries and even cities claimed ownership and sovereignty over oceans. The Republic of Venice said it owned the Adriatic Sea. The city of Genoa countered this by owning the Ligurian Sea. Portugal claimed the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic as hers, while Spain was content to own the Pacific Ocean (and the Gulf of Mexico). And the only reason that the Hanseatic League never said it owned the North Sea and the Baltic was that England, Norway and Denmark would have put in claims for the North Sea, too, and Denmark, Sweden and the countries of the eastern Baltic might have had strong opinions about the sole proprietorship of the Baltic. Crowding sometimes has useful aspects. seas should be free for the lawful use of all was first presented by the Dutch jurist Grotius, who is universally recognized as the "Father of International Law." But the fact that no nation, or organization of countries like the United Nations, has sovereignty over the high seas certainly does not make every ocean a lawless place. It developed its own law, based on practices which navigators found either efficient or convenient, and which were later formulated. The statement that the laws which govern the sea should be extended to apply to interplanetary space was voiced -- for the first time, as far as I know -- by Oscar Schachter, deputy director of the Legal Department of the United Nations, on the occasion of the First Space Travel Symposium at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City in October, #I -- appropriately enough, on Columbus Day. But in order to gain the open sea, you have to traverse coastal waters, and in order to gain open space, you have to traverse the atmosphere. As regards coastal waters, the legal situation is clear; the problems were thrashed out and settled a century ago. The first three miles of ocean are considered to be under the sovereignty of the country which exercises sovereignty over the shoreline. It has often been said that this figure of three miles was accepted because that used to be the range of the old coastal batteries. This sounded like a logical and convincing reason. Unfortunately, one could draw the conclusion from it that things belong to you for as far as you can shoot. That kind of reasoning would lead to declaring that "might is right" even legally. Personally, I never quite believed that the three-mile zone had been derived from the range of the coastal guns, because a three-mile range did not become possible until many years after the limit had been accepted. And recently I learned that "three miles" was just a more modern way of expressing an older measurement, namely, one marine league. There is something else about this three-mile zone which strikes me as either odd or significant -- I don't know which. If what follows should be just a coincidence, it is a rare one. There is a simplified formula which says you multiply the square root of h by # and you get D. The letter h stands for elevation above sea level and must be expressed in fact. The result D must be read in nautical miles and gives you the distance of the horizon at sea. If you take h to be six feet, the result is three miles (not nautical miles). In other words, the three-mile limit coincides with the actual distance of the horizon for a man standing at the seashore. Remember that his feet will not be at actual sea level but a few inches above it. The refraction in the atmosphere is included in that conversion factor of #. pects; most countries have accepted the three-mile limit and the United States recognizes no other, although there are a few countries which, for their own purposes (such as prosecution of smuggling), claim sovereignty over a longer distance, usually ten kilometers. But while the countries "own" that much of the ocean, their ownership is not absolutely exclusive. There are exceptions. If a vessel, in order to pass from one tract of open sea to another one, has to navigate through sovereign waters, it can do so -- it has the right of "innocent passage." (Whether naval vessels, in time of peace, have the right of innocent passage is disputed, but in time of peace, this problem is usually circumvented by prior agreement.) When lawyers say "innocent passage," they usually mean freighters and passenger liners, but it also applies to rescue missions or scientific expeditions. Now we come to the main difficulty. It would be nice if one could reason that, since space is analogous to the opien sea, the atmosphere is analogous to the three-mile zone, with the right of innocent passage for all. If we had had peace ever since the invention of the airplane, one probably would reason that way. But there are two complications, each one major. The first is the very obvious right of self-defense, and there are more military aircraft than passenger liners and air freighters. The second is that no figure has so far been universally accepted as the limit of the atmosphere. When you ask a scientist what seems to be a simple question, "How deep is the atmosphere?" he will look somewhat unhappy, draw a deep breath, stall by lighting a pipe, cigar or cigarette and say: "What characteristics do you have in mind?" The problem is that you still get some effects, like the reflection of short radio waves, several hundred miles up. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that you'll find noticeable air resistance, even at speeds of several miles per second, above perhaps # miles. About two years ago, in a discussion of this difficulty, a law expert said that the legal limit might be determined by the height at which one can actually fly. Unfortunately I could not help him there. Jets and other air-breathing engines won't be able to go higher than, say, # feet. But a large plastic balloon can go to # feet and a rocketpropelled plane still higher. Whether these "fly" or not is purely a question of definition. Is "flying" just moving through a space which still contains a little atmosphere, or is the term restricted to those altitudes where you still obtain some aerodynamic "lift"? This, too, remains to be decided. O UR next step in disentangling the legal problem is obviously to find out what is the "law" in the air, the air in which we are now flying if we want to get from one city to another in comfort and with dispatch. Here the situation is sad, partly because of past experiences, partly because of old aspects. The Romans held that the landowner also owned the air above it "to the sky." This idea was perpetuated in English common law, which said (still in Latin) : Cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum, which later was expressed in English as; "He who owns the soil, or surface of the ground, owns, or has an exclusive right to, everything which is upon or above it to an indefinite height." (I don't know what practical importance that had, except when it came to the ownership of a bird shot on the wing. ) This personal and private ownership of the air and the sky above it was granted by the sovereign and "could be asserted only against other private citizens; the sovereign never parted with its paramount right to control the space above its territory." (Quotation from Andrew G. Haley's lecture Basic Concepts of Space Law, presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Rocket Society in Chicago in November, #; published in the society's journal Jet Propulsion, November issue, #.) In short, the attitude was the same as with the oceans. As long as there was no human flight at all, or, at a later date merely an occasional balloon, there was no legislation about the air. Lawyers say: Minima non curat praetor, which one may translate as: "Minor matters do not concern legislators." Not only was there no legislation, there was not even any theoretical reasoning. The invention of the airplane changed this; in fact, one man was actually ahead of events. In #, at a meeting of the Institute of International Law, an expert named Paul Fauchille submitted a draft of a proposed convention on the regulation of aerial navigation. According to Haley, this draft was approved in a modified form in #. Said Haley: "The convention would have made the air free to commerce and travel, just as the sea. The provision for national security measures, while vague and indeterminate, was a reasonable reservation of sovereign rights to protect against civil negligence or hostile action through the air, but it was not intended that any nation should usurp the air completely. The proposal was never implemented in an international convention." I presume that it was still a case of minima non curat praetor with the few airships and planes which were around. At any event, nobody thought of prosecuting Bleriot when he flew the English Channel and, so to speak, violated English air space. # UT then the First World War came and it was one of the neutrals (generally a peaceful country in recent centuries) which had to defend vigorously the idea of sovereignty over its air space. This was Holland, lying as it does directly on the air route between England and Germany. Of course there were violations. A couple of German zeppelin airships drifted off course in foggy weather (zeppelin ships, as a matter of principle, hid in drifting clouds to avoid being spotted, a method that may protect you but does not improve your navigation) and partly disabled seaplanes had to land in Dutch waters. Right after the First World War, in October, #, the Paris Convention for the Regulation of Air Navigation was signed and "freedom of the air" was completely ruined in the very first article of this convention: Les Hautes Parties Contractantes reconnaissent, que chaque Puissance a la souverainete complete et exclusive sur I'espace atmospherique au-dessus de son territoire; "The High Contracting Parties recognize that every Power has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the air space above its territory." Note the "complete and exclusive," and, of course, this included sovereignty over the three miles of ocean offshore. In practice, this complete and exclusive sovereignty was somewhat limited by rules of conduct. The rules established, on the one hand, the right of innocent passage for non-military aircraft, and, on the other hand, the right to set up "prohibited zones" which could not be flown over. But -- and this turned out to be the worst feature in the long run -- these rights applied only to those countries that signed the convention. Nations which were signatories had the right to make separate agreements with nations which were not, but in reality they mostly refused to make such agreements and spent their energy in keeping the non-signatories out. As for the United States, its representatives signed the' convention with the provision that American aircraft could fly over American "prohibited zones." But the Senate did not ratify the convention, so the United States ceased to be a signatory. However, we observed the rules just the same and finally made a general Western Hemisphere rightof-innocent-passage agreement. There was a welter of additional conferences dealing with all kinds of side issues -- such as cases of infectious disease discovered on an international flight -- and then the Second World War came. Again each nation, and most especially the neutrals, had to assert all their rights vigorously.  ' other important convention on civil aviation took place, this time in Chicago. It ended in December, #, but again the main article read the same, almost word for word, as the first article of the Paris convention. Something new had been added, however: "No aircraft capable of being flown without a pilot shall be flown without a pilot over the territory of a contracting state without special authorization by that state." This was the first recognition of the existence of guided missiles. The possibilities and capabilities of aerial warfare being what they are, it is both natural and logical that every nation insist on absolute sovereignty over its "air space." The real trouble is that there is no definition of what is "air" in the term "air space." Since there is no natural upper limit to the height at which "aircraft capable of being flown without a pilot" (read: missiles) can fly, one might argue that there is no upper limit to the "air space." In the light of astronomical facts, this argument is plain nonsense. As C. Wilfried Jenks of the International Labor Office in Geneva wrote in the International and Comparative Law Quarterly (January, #): "Any projection of territorial sovereignty into space beyond the atmosphere would be inconsistent with the basic astronomical facts. The rotation of the earth on its own axis, its revolution around the sun, and the motions of the sun and the planets through the galaxy all require that the relationship of particular sovereignties on the surface of the earth to space beyond the atmosphere is never constant for the smallest conceivable fraction of time. Such a projection into space of sovereignties based on particular areas of the earth's surface would give us a series of adjacent irregularly shaped cones with a constantly changing content. Celestial bodies would move 'in and out of these cones all the time. In these circumstances, the concept of a space cone of sovereignty is a meaningless and dangerous abstraction." Admiral Ward, in his recent lecture, after saying in different words what I just quoted from Jenks, could indicate a way out: "Professor Cooper, and other distinguished authorities, have pointed out that our development of a law of outer space is not restricted by our present agreements affirming each nation's sovereignty over the air, or the 'air space,' above it. These agreements relate strictly to the 'air space.' They apply only as far as the upper limits of the region in which air is sufficiently dense to support the flight of conventional aircraft -- that is, those aircraft supported through reaction with the air. We are therefore free to develop a law of outer space, to apply in areas above this region of relatively dense air, without restriction from our existing agreements relating to 'air space.' The lawmakers wait only for the physical facts of space to be supplied by the explorers, the scientists, the mathematicians and the physicists. With the physical facts in hand, we can attempt to set the upper limits of national sovereignty." Admiral Ward went on to state that such an upper limit of sovereignty would not hamper national defense. The three-mile limit also does not hamper our naval operations and other defense measures at sea. L et us say now that agreements have been reached, signed and ratified which set the upper limit of the "air space" at # kilometers, which is almost precisely #I miles. Then we would get the following picture: Up to a height of #I miles, each nation has the "complete and exclusive sovereignty" first accepted in the Paris convention. Above that, there would be a zone with the right of innocent passage. For scientific reasons, this zone should not be lumped with "open space," because some physical phenomena due to a highly attenuated atmosphere can still be observed. Open space may then be said to begin at a height of # kilometers or # miles (I am putting kilometers first because, by Act of Congress, the customary American standard measurements are defined in terms of metric measurements), so that there are three legal zones. The bottom zone, with its complete and exclusive sovereignty, would not compare to the threemile zone but rather to rivers and inland lakes. The next zone, from # to # kilometers, would be comparable to the three-mile zone. And space above # kilometers would be comparable (better: analogous ) to the high seas. But there is still an amusing wrinkle -- these three zones would logically be in existence only above land. They would not exist for three-quarters of the Earth's surface, for over the high seas, the freedom of the seas would extend into space with no legal zone in between. Or else you may say that the freedom of space would end where your ship gets wet with salt water. Then you are in the free and open seas. Legal discussions may be interesting, but how does all this apply to the coming satellite shots? By an interesting combination of natural facts, these satellite shots happen to be about as "legal" as they can possibly be. The Vanguard rockets, the satellite carriers, will be fired from # Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. American-made, they take off from American soil and, for a time to be measured in seconds, they will be in American air space above American waters. When they leave American air space, they are in the free air over the free ocean. By the time land is below again (the southern part of Africa), they have passed out of any air space and are in free space. Of course, they are legal in another sense, too. They are part of the International Geophysical Year. Some sixty nations have not only not voiced any objections, but have promised support and assistance in observing the satellites. So that's that. ' lands on Mars and its captain who takes possession with or without ceremonies? In the first place, it is possible -- even probable -- that an agreement might be reached in the meantime that all "land" beyond the earth will be under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, unless inhabited by indigenous intelligent and reasoning beings. (In the latter case, naturally, they would have sovereignty.) All rights, including mining rights, if any, would take the form of concessions, leases or licenses from the United Nations. But suppose it is not a case of the United Nations -- which really means nations acting together instead of separately -- but still a case of separate nations, generally at peace. There are some interesting analogies in the past and I'll quote Bouvet Island as an example. It is a small island, situated several hundred nautical tip of Africa. The island itself is roughly circular, with a diameter of about five miles measured east to west and about half a mile less measured north to south. It is essentially just one large dead volcano, completely covered with glaciers. Bouvet Island was discovered in # by the French captain Lozier Bouvet. He thought it was just a northern cape of a much larger southern continent and named it Cap de la Circoncision. He made no legal claims. Since the area where the island is located is also characterized by the worst climatic conditions possible -- frequent storms, long-lasting fogs, drifting ice -- the island was "lost" for many years. It was found again by the English captain James Lindsay in #. He tried to land but could not; by sailing around it, however, he established that it was an island. In December, #, the English ship Sprightly under Captain George Norris found the island, sailed around it, and Captain Norris took possession of it (from shipboard) for the United Kingdom in the name of King George IV. There followed another period of uncertainty whether the island existed at all, but in No'i'ember, #, the German oceanographic expedition with the steamer Valdivia found it again. The Germans decided that landing would be very difficult and would not accomplish anything anyway, so they did their charting and mapping from aboard their comfortable steamer. And although they named the largest glacier they could see the Kaiser Wilhelm Glacier, they had no aspirations as to ownership. They were merely establishing the precise location and size of this British possession. TUT in December, #, the Norwegian vessel Norvegia under Captain Axel Hornvedt reached Bouvet Island. A landing party went ashore and took formal possession for Norway in the land objected, pointing to its Captain Norris. England lost the dispute, for the men of the Norvegia had actually landed. But it cannot be denied that Norway's title to the island, acquired in #, is none too solid. They did land, which was deemed more important than prior discovery from a distance. But they have never exercised their sovereignty. And this has come to be an important point; if somebody else sneaked in during the antarctic night and established a colony, he might win out over Norway, since Norway has obviously been negligent in asserting its rights by possession. The history of Bouvet Island may, in the future, become famous because of citations in legal arguments. In the meantime, it indicates that nobody will be able to "own" a planet by just saying so. ownershij then the naked-eye planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- would be common property. They were discovered by the Babylonians who left no heirs and assigns. Our moon would be community property, too. Otherwise, Germany and England would fare best, with the largest chunks of celestial real estate: Germany could claim Neptune and England Uranus. But Uranus was discovered by Herschel, who was German-born, and though he made the discovery from English soil, he may not yet have been an English citizen at that moment, which would produce an interesting legal problem. The Netherlands would get Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Italy would get the four largest moons of Jupiter and possibly several of the smaller moons of Saturn, depending on whether their discoverer, Cassini, was still an Italian or already a Frenchman when he found them. England, in addition to Uranus, would get all the four large moons of that planet, the larger moon of Neptune and two of the minor satellites of Saturn. The United States would get the two moons of Mars, a handful of the minor moons of Jupiter, one minor moon of Saturn, the smallest moon of Uranus, the smaller of the two moons of Neptune and the planet Pluto. Of course, practically all of us would "own" at least a few asteroids. But remember, discovery by itself does not count. You've got to land on your asteroid -- and stay there -- to make it legal. His job was just to be first in the hearts of his countrymen ,... if he ever managed to find them! walked home across the moor just before the twilight hour and it was then, he felt, that the land was at its best. The sun was sinking into a crimson froth of clouds and the first graysilver light began to run across the swales. There were moments when it seemed all eternity grew quiet and watched with held breath. It had been a good day and it would be a good homecoming, for the others would be waiting for him with the dinner table set and the fireplace blazing and the drinks set close at hand. It was a pity, he thought, that they would not go walking with him, although, in this particular instance, he was rather glad they hadn't. Once in a while, it was a good thing for a man to be alone. For almost a hundred years, aboard the ship, there had been no chance to be alone. But that was over now and they could settle down, just the six of them, to lead the kind of life they'd planned. After only a few short weeks, the planet was beginning to seem like home; in the years to come, it would become in truth a home such as Earth had never been. Once again he felt the twinge of recurring wonder at how they'd ever got away with it. That Earth should allow six of its immortals to slip through its clutches seemed unbelievable. Earth had real and urgent need for all of its immortals, and that not one, but six, of them should be allowed to slip away, to live lives of their own, was beyond all logic. And yet that was exactly what had happened. There was something queer about it, Winston-Kirby told himself. On the century-long flight from Earth, they'd often talked about it and wondered how it had come about. Cranford-Adams, he recalled, had been convinced that it was some subtle trap, but after a hundred years there was no evidence of any trap and it had begun to seem Cranford-Adams must be wrong. Winston-Kirby topfjed the gentle rise that he had been climbing and, in the gathering dusk, he saw the manor house -- exactly the kind of house he had dreamed abput for years, precisely the kind of house to be built in such a setting -- except that the robots had built it much too large. But that, he consoled himself, was what one had to expect of robots. Efficient, certainly, and very well intentioned and obedient and nice to have around, but sometimes pretty stupid. gazed down upon the house. How many times had he and his companions, at the dinner table, planned the kind of house they would build? How often had they speculated upon the accuracy of the specifications given for this planet they had chosen from the Exploratory Files, fearful that it might not be in every actuality the way it was described? But here, finally, it was -- something out of Hardy, something from the Baskervilles -- the long imagining come to comfortable reality. There was the manor house, with the light shining from its windows, and the dark bulk of the outbuildings built to house the livestock, which had been brought in the ship as frozen embryos and soon would be emerging from the incubators. And there the level land that in a few more months would be fields and gardens, and to the north the spaceship stood after years of roving. As he watched, the first bright star sprang out just beyond the spaceship's nose, and the spaceship and the star looked for all the world like a symbolic Christmas candle. He walked down the hill, with the first night wind blowing in his face and the ancient smell of heather in the air, and was happy and exultant. It was sinful, he thought, to be so joyful, but there was reason for it. The voyage had been happy and the planet-strike successful and here he was, the undisputed proprietor of an ei tire planet upon which, in the fullness of time, he would found a family and a dynasty. And he had all the time there was. There was no need to hurry. He had all of eternity if he needed it. And, best of all, he had good companions. They would be waiting for him when he stepped through the door. There would be laughter and a quick drink, then a leisurely dinner, and, later, brandy before the blazing fire. And there'd be talk -- good talk, sober and intimate and friendly. It had been the talk, he told himself, more than anything else, which had gotten them sanely through the century of space flight. That and their mutual love and appreciation of the finer points of the human culture -- understanding of the arts, love of good literature, interest in philosophy. It was not often that six persons could live intimately for a hundred years without a single spat, without a touch of cabin fever. Inside the manor house, they would be waiting for him in the fireand candlelight, with the drinks all mixed and the talk already started and the room would be warm with good fellowship and perfect understanding. Cranford-Adams would be sitting in the big chair before the fire, staring at the flames and thinking, for he was the thinker of the group. And Allyn-Burbage would be standing, with one elbow on the mantel, a glass clutched in his hand and in his eyes the twinkle of good humor. Cosette-Middleton would be talking with him and laughing, for she was the gay one, with her elfin spirit and her golden hair. Anna-Quinze more than likely would be reading, curled up in a chair, and Mary-Foyle would be simply waiting, glad to be alive, glad to be with friends. long companions of the trip, so full of understanding, so tolerant and gracious that a centuryhad not dulled the beauty of their friendship. Winston-Kirby hurried, a thing he almost never did, at the thought of those five who were waiting for him, anxious to be with them, to tell them of his walk across the moor, to discuss with them still again some details of their plans. He turned into the walk. The wind was becoming cold, as it always did with the fall of darkness, and he raised the collar of his jacket for the poor protection it afforded. He reached the door and stood for an instant in the chill, to savor the never-failing satisfaction of the massive timbering and the stout, strong squareness of the house. A place built to stand through the centuries, he thought, a place of dynasty with a sense of foreverness. He pressed the latch and thrust his weight against the door and it came slowly open. A blast of warm air rushed out to greet him. He stepped into the entry hall and closed the door behind him. As he took off his cap and jacket and found a place to hang them, he stamped and scuffed his feet a little to let the others know that he had returned. But there were no greetings for him, no sound of happy laughter. There was only silence from the inner room. He turned about so swiftly that his hand trailed across his jacket and dislodged it from the hook. It fell to the floor with a smooth rustle of fabric and lay there, a little mound of cloth. His legs suddenly were cold and heavy, and when he tried to hurry, the best he could do was shuffle, and he felt the chill edge of fear. He reached the entrance to the room and stopped, shocked into immobility. His hands went out and grasped the door jamb on either side of him. There was no one in the room. And not only that -- the room itself was different. It was not simply the companions who were gone. Gone, as well, were the rich furnishings of the room, gone the comfort and the pride. There were no rugs upon the floor, no hangings at the windows, no paintings on the wall. The fireplace was a naked thing of rough and jagged stone. The furniture -- the little there was -- was primitive, barely knocked together. A small trestle table stood before the fireplace, with a three-legged stool pulled up to a place that was set for one. Winston-Kirby tried to call. The first time, the words gurgled in his throat and he could not get them out. He tried again and made it: "Job! Job, where are you?" Job came running from somewhere in the house. "What's the trouble, sir?" "Where are the others? Where have they gone? They should be waiting for me." Job shook his head, just slightly, a quick move right and left. "Mister Kirby, sir, they were never here." "Never here! But they were here when I left this morning. They knew I'd be coming back." "You fail to understand, sir. There were never any others. There were just you and I and the other robots. And the embryos, of course." the door and walked a few feet forward. "Job," he said, "you're joking." But he knew something was wrong -- robots never joke. "We let you keep them as long as we could," said Job. "We hated to have to take them from you, sir. But we needed the equipment for the incubators." "But this room! The rugs, the furniture, the -- " "That was all part of it, sir. Part of the dimensino." Winston-Kirby walked slowly across the room, used one foot to hook the three-legged stool out from the table. He sat down heavily. "The dimensino?" he asked. "Surely you remember." He frowned to indicate he didn't. But it was coming back to him, some of it, slowly and reluctantly, emerging vaguely after all the years of forgetfulness. He fought against the remembering and the knowledge. He tried to push it back into that dark corner of his mind from which it came. It was sacrilege and treason -- it was madness. "The human embryos," Job told him, "came through very well. Of the thousand of them, all but three are viable." Winston-Kirby shook his head, as if to clear away the mist that befogged his brain. "We have the incubators all set up in the outbuildings, sir," said Job. "We waited as long as we could before we took the dimensino equipment. We let you have it until the very last. It might have been easier, sir, if we could have done it gradually, but there is no provision for that. You either have dimensino or you haven't got it." "Of course," said Winston-Kirby, mumbling just a little. "It was considerate of you. I thank you very much." He stood up unsteadily and rubbed his hand across his eyes. "It's not possible," he said. "It simply can't be possible. I lived for a hundred years with them. They were as real as I am. They were flesh and blood, I tell you. They were..." The room still was bare and empty, a mocking emptiness, an alien mockery. "It is possible," said Job gently. "It is just the way it should be. Everything has gone according to the book. You are here, still sane, thanks to the dimensino. The embryos came through better than expected. The equipment is intact. In eight months or so, the children will be coming from the incubators. By that time, we will have gardens and a crop on the way. The livestock embryos will also have emerged and the colony will be largely self-sustaining." Winston-Kirby strode to the table, picked up the plate that was laid at the single place. It was lightweight plastic. "Tell me," he said. "Have we any china? Have we any glass ware or silver?" J OB looked as near to startled as a robot ever could. "Of course not, sir. We had no room formore than just the bare essentials this trip. The china and the silver and all the rest of it will have to wait until much later." "And I have been eating ship rations?" "Naturally," said Job. "There was so little room and so much we had to take..." Winston-Kirby stood with the plate in his hand, tapping it gently on the table, remembering those other dinners -- aboard the ship and since the ship had landed -- the steaming soup in its satiny tureen, the pink and juicy prime ribs, the huge potatoes baked to a mealy turn, the crisp green lettuce, the shine of polished silver, the soft sheen of good china, the -- "Job," he said. "Sir?" "It was all delusion, then?" "I am afraid it was. I am sorry, sir." "And you robots?" "All of us are fine, sir. It was different with us. We can face reality." "And humans can't?" "Sometimes it is better if they can be protected from it." "But not now?" "Not any more," said Job. "It must be faced now, sir." Winston-Kirby laid the plate down on the table and turned back to the robot. "I think I'll go up to my room and change to other clothes. I presume dinner will be ready soon. Ship rations, doubtless?" "A special treat tonight," Job told him. "Hezekiah found some lichens and I've made a pot of soup." "Splendid!" Winston-Kirby said, trying not to gag. He climbed the stairs to the door at the head of the stairs. As he was about to go into the room, another robot came tramping down the hall. "Good evening, sir," it said. "And who are you?" "I'm Solomon, said the robot. "I'm fixing up the nurseries." "Soundproofing them, I hope." "Oh, nothing like that. We haven't the material or time." "Well, carry on," said WinstonKirby, and went into the room. It was not his room at all. It was small and plain. There was a bunk instead of the great fourposter he had been sleeping in and there were no rugs, no fulllength mirror, no easy chairs. Delusion, he had said, not really believing it. But here there was no delusion. room was cold with a dread reality -- a reality, he knew, that had been long delayed. In the loneliness of this tiny room, 'he came face to face with it and felt the sick sense of loss. It was a reckoning that had been extended into the future as far as it might be -- and extended not alone 'as a matter of mercy, of mere consideration, but because of a cold, hard necessity, a practical concession to human vulnerability. For no man, no matter how well adjusted, no matter if immortal, could survive intact, in mind and body, a trip such as he had made. To survive a century under space conditions, there must be delusion and companionship to provide security and purpose from day to day. And that companionship must be more than human. For mere human companionship, however ideal, would give rise to countless irritations, would breed deadly cabin fever. Dimensino companionship was the answer, then, providing an illusion of companionship flexible to every mood and need of the human subject. Providing, as well, a background to that companionship -- a wish-fulfillment way of life that nailed down security such as humans under normal circumstances never could have known. He sat down on the bunk and began to unlace his heavy walking shoes. The practical human race, he thought -- practical to the point of fooling itself to reach destination, practical to the point of fabricating the dimensino equipment to specifications which could be utilized, upon arrival, in the incubators. there was a need to gamble. Ready to bet that a man could survive a century in space if he were sufficiently insulated against reality -- insulated by seeming flesh and blood which, in sober fact, existed only by the courtesy of the human mind assisted by intricate electronics. For no ship before had ever gone so far on a colonizing mission. No man had ever existed for even half as long under the influence of dimensino. But there were few planets where Man might plant a colony under natural conditions, without extensive and expensive installations and precautions. The nearer of these planets had been colonized and the survey had shown that this one which he finally had reached was especially attractive. So Earth and Man had bet. Especially one man, WinstonKirby told himself with pride, but the pride was bitter in his mouth. The odds, he recalled, had been five to three against him. And yet, even in his bitterness, he recognized the significance of what he had done. It was another breakthrough, another triumph for the busy little brain that was hammering at the door of all eternity. It meant that the Galaxy was open, that Earth could remain the center of an expanding empire, that dimensino and immortal could travel to the very edge of space, that the seed of Man would be scattered wide and far, traveling as frozen embryos through the cold, black distances which hurt the mind to think of. of drawers and found a change of clothing, laid it on the bunk and began to take off his hiking outfit. Everything was going according to the book. Job had said. The house was bigger than he had wanted it, but the robots had been right -- a big building would be needed to house a thousand babies. The incubators were set up and the nurseries were being readied and another far Earth colony was getting under way. And colonies were important, he remembered, reaching back into that day, a hundred years before, when he and many others had laid their plans -- including the plan whereby he could delude himself and thus preserve his sanity. For with more and more of the immortal mutations occurring, the day was not too distant when the human race would require all the room that it could grab. And it was the mutant immortals who were the key persons in the colonizing programs -- going out as founding fathers to supervise the beginning of each colony, staying on as long as needed, to act as a sort of elder statesman until that day when the colony could stand on its own feet. There would be busy years ahead, he knew, serving as father, proctor, judge, sage and administrator, a sort of glorified Old Man of a brand-new tribe. He pulled on his trousers, scuffed his feet into his shoes, rose to tuck in his shirt tail. And he turned, by force of habit, to the full-length mirror. And the glass was there! He stood astounded, gaping foolishly at the image of himself. And behind him, in the glass, he saw the great four-poster and the easy chairs. He swung around and the bed and chairs were gone. There were just the bunk and the chest of drawers in the small, mean room. Slowly he sat down on the edge of the bunk, clasping his hands so they wouldn't shake. It wasn't true! It couldn't be! The dimensino was gone. And yet it was with him still, lurking in his brain, just around the corner if he would only try. He tried and it was easy. The room changed as he remembered it -- with the full-length mirror and the massive bed upon which he sat, the thick rugs, the gleaming liquor cabinet and the tasteful drapes. He tried to make it go away, barely remembering back in some deep, black closet of his mind that he must make it go. But it wouldn't go away. He tried and tried again, and it still was there, and he felt the will to make it go slipping from his consciousness. "No!" he cried in terror, and the terror did it. He sat in the small, bare room. He found that he was breathing hard, as if he'd climbed a high, steep hill. His hands were fists and his teeth were clenched and he felt the sweat trickling down his ribs. so easy and so pleasant to slip back to the old security, to the warm, deep friendship, to the lack of pressing purpose. But he must not do it, for here was a job to do. Distasteful as it seemed now, as cold, as barren, it still was something he must do. For it was more than just one more colony. It was the breakthrough, the sure and certain knowledge, the proved knowledge, that Man no longer was chained by time or distance. And yet there was this danger to be recognized; it was not something on which one might shut one's mind. It must be reported in every clinical detail so that, back on Earth, it might be studied and the inherent menace somehow remedied or removed. Side effect, he wondered, or simply a matter of learning? For the dimensino was no more than an aid to the human mind -- an aid to a very curious end, the production of controlled hallucinations operating on the wish-fulfillment level. After a hundred years, perhaps, the human mind had learned the technique well, so well that there was no longer need of the dimensino. It was something he should have realized, he insisted to himself. He had gone on long walks and, during all those hours alone, the delusion had not faded. It had taken the sudden shock of silence and emptiness, where he had expected laughter and warm greeting, to penetrate the haze of delusion in which he'd walked for years. And even now it lurked, a conditioned state of mind, to ambush him at every hidden thicket. How long would it be before the ability would start to wear away? What might be done to wipe it out entirely? How does one unlearn a thing he's spent a century in learning? Exactly how dangerous was it -- was there necessity of a conscious thought, an absolute command or could a man slip into it simply as an involuntary retreat from drear reality? He must warn the robots. He must talk it over with them. Some sort of emergency measure must be set up to protect him against the wish or urge, some manner of drastic action be devised to rescue him, should he slip back into the old delusion. Although, he thought, it would be so fine to walk out of the room and down the stairs and find the others waiting for him, with the drinks all ready and the talk well started... "Cut it out!" he screamed. Wipe it from his mind -- that was what he must do. He must not even think of it. ' He must work so hard that he would have no time to think, become so tired from work that he'd fall into bed and go to sleep at once and have no chance to dream. that must be done -- the watching of the incubators, preparing the ground for gardens and for crops, servicing the atomic generators, getting in timbers against the need of building, exploring and mapping and surveying the adjacent territory, overhauling the ship for the onerobot return flight to Earth. He filled his mind with it. He tagged items for further thought and action. He planned the days and months and years ahead. And at last he was satisfied. He had it under control. He tied his shoes and finished buttoning his shirt. Then, with a resolute tread, he opened the door and walked out on the landing. A hum of talk floating up the stairway stopped him in his tracks. Fear washed over hirri. Then the fear evaporated. Gladness burst within him and he took a quick step forward. At the top of the stairs, he halted and reached out a hand to grasp the banister. Alarm bells were ringing in his brain and the gladness fell away. There was nothing left but sorrow, a terrible, awful grieving. He could see one corner of the room below and he could see that it was carpeted. He could see the drapes and paintings and one ornate golden chair. With a moan, he turned and fled to his room. He slammed the door and stood with his back against it. The room was the way it should be, bare and plain and cold. Thank God, he thought. Thank God! A shout came up the stairway. "Winston, what's wrong with you? Winston, hurry up!" And another voice: "Winston, we're celebrating. We have a suckling pig." And still another voice: "With an apple in its mouth." He didn't answer. They'll go away, he thought. They have to go away. And even as he thought it, half of him -- more than half -- longed in sudden agony to open up the door and go down the stairs and know once again the old security and the ancient friendship. He found that he had both his hands behind his back and that they were clutching the doorknob as if they were frozen there. He heard steps on the stairway, the sound of many happy, friendly voices, coming up to get him. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. No, we don't promise that reading T# issues of theory of gravitation. No, you don't have to use the .coupon below. It's for your convenience, not ours. Yes, send in your subscription today. we do promise that a year's subscription to... and you'll get your copies at least a week before the newsstands do. Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson S. New York #, N. Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years # additional Foreign Postage Per Year A touch of E flat M ost people can find something wrong with the world, and some make a practice of it, but few people ever get the chance to do something about it -- and those few usually go down in history with a resounding crash. Well, it's been rather noisy around here. From the very beginning, it had been my intention to write Warning: never let anyone point any weapon at you; even something as harmless-looking as a water pistol -- it may be a Cooling gun! this account. But I certainly hadn't intended to write it while residing under police surveillance in the Recuperating Ward of St. Luke's Memorial Hospital. Nor did I expect the interest and encouragement of the police officer who put me here. Nonetheless, Sgt. Nicolas Falasca of the Ohio State Police has been most helpful both in the many long discussions we have had and in procuring the notes and data from my laboratory for the preparation of this manuscript. But I'm afraid there shall be a considerable lot of me in this manuscript -- which, I hastily assert, is not its purpose at all. My apologies for that. Fact is, there's a considerable lot of me, as anyone can see. The term I rather prefer using is roly-poly. For the record, however, I am duly Certified-at-Birth as one Albert Jamieson Cooling, to which has been added, by my own modest efforts, a few odd alphabetic symbols such as M.S. and Ph.D. I am currently holding down a professorship at a small, privately endowed Tech college, have some mentionable background in both nuclear physics and biochemistry, possess a choice collection of rather good jazz records, have a particular fondness for barbecued spareribs -- and, of late, have become an inventor. If I've left something out, such as horn-rimmed glasses, then, by the point of my little black beard, it must be the wardrobe of # sport jackets. Wives? Well, I've been tempted, but a professor's salary can't support alimony. ing Effect itself came quite by accident. But twice now, that accident has almost killed me. It may be argued that this is no more than I should have expected, however, since the invention which "followed naturally" can only be called one thing. I have invented a new weapon. That's right -- a Cooling gun. But let it be said that because I was once a war scientist, my inventiveness must therefore tend toward weapons and I should be strongly tempted to reach for the nearest one available. The term war scientist has been used so much, and has grown so commonplace, that it has become universally accepted as the label for anyone who spent as little as six it for six years, and I voluntarily walked out. The official policies and interagency politics of that era seem of little consequence now, when we have three permanent space satellites circling the Earth and one of them is Russian. We're no longer in a weapons race; both sides have reached the Ultimate Weapon in that contest. Nobody's hiding or betraying classified secrets any more. There's all that silicon-rich basalt waiting to be cheaply processed out on the Moon, if we can only get there... Back in '#, the official news releases were still boasting how much bigger was each new toy we rolled out of the workshop, how much more terrible destruction it would wreak than the last one. That was hogwash dished out by our PR boys (and, on the other side, by the Reds' Propaganda Ministry) simply because people didn't know any better. Actually, our toys that made the biggest bang were the worst flops as weapons. You don't conquer an enemy by exterminating him. A hundred just use bulldozers and they're out of the way. But a hundred starving, filthy and ragged human beings can raise one hell of an uproar. And they usually do. Some of us felt that we wouldn't need to knock off even a third of Russia's major cities. Much less, in fact. Dr. Charles Whitney made the mistake of saying so. And they canned him. The scuttlebutt was that Doc's conscience backfired. I know better; I saw the explosion. It was his patience, not his conscience. Anyway, I turned in my resignation two weeks later. I walked out, kept my mouth shut and settled down to a small college professorship. I mention these events now simply because I believe it was there that the development of the Cooling gun actually started. tating weapons could never achieve. They had deterred warfare, at least up to that August of #, by their threat of utter destruction -- and perhaps Whitney deserved to get canned -- but they offered no guarantee for the future. And they couldn't liberate a conquered nation or protect people from a dictator's secret police. It was time we had something better. (We did, of course, but in on the development of atomic rockets.) Until we did, I could sense that we were simply going through the motions. But it all began to go places fast with that cold research we were dabbling in, last semester. In fact, it was my fault that General Atomics tossed that little problem into our Cold Lab here at Webster Tech -- my own past unusual background combining nuclear physics and biochemistry, and the post-grad crew I've managed to accumulate under my professorial wing. The whole deal was shoveled obligingly into my Christmas stocking and the rest of the faculty obligingly left me to play with it -- providing I continued to conduct my regular classes, of course. Perhaps it's just as well I kept my hand in, though, because that line of research got rapidly nowhere. We found that materials which have their temperatures reduced to near-absolute zero are just plain cold. Bring them into room temperature and strange things happen sometimes that isn't just them trying to warm up. It isn't friction-loss and it isn't radiation damage and it isn't entropy. It shows. There's a band of radiant energy somewhere between ultrasonics and radiant heat that hits fast and goes deep, and comes out just as fast, and it gets triggered off by whatever this is that happens with near-absolute zero objects subjected to room temperature. But the whole thing is so negligible that for most practical purposes it can be ignored. Finding that out cost General Atomics thirty thousand dollars, but our kids in the Cold Lab had a ball rigging the Mad Scientist's super-disintegrator gizmo that reproduced the phenomenon. Then, that night -- it's nearly four months ago now -- I was alone in the lab, just switched off the lights, about to close up and go home. And I stumbled over the corner of the thing. Scrambling up, somehow I put my foot into it. And reaching out to grasp its frame, to steady myself, my hand hit the switch. It went on and I went out. It was still on -- I thought -- when I regained consciousness, spraddled out on the concrete floor. I pulled the switch open and jerked the cord out of the wall socket. wasn't a bruise or a bump on my noggin. Nor the faintest sign of a burn anywhere on my foot or leg or even on the sole of my shoe. That was a Tuesday night. The next day, the lab remained closed. But that night, I went in, switched the lights on and studied the machine. It showed absolutely no sign of damage, no burned insulation, nothing. I stuck my hand into it and closed the switch. It came on with its usual quiet hum. Nothing happened. It was almost a week before I heard that the janitor was still wondering who'd blown all the campus fuses on Tuesday night. Then I remembered that I hadn't switched the lights back on when I regained consciousness.  I had been blinded when I switched them off, had stumbled over the machine, fallen, all the rest of it. But I'd come to with night vision, naturally. I saw well enough then by the moonlight streaming in the lab windows. All the lights -- the machine, too -- could have been off, with the fuses blown, without my noticing it. I had assumed the machine was on because its switch was closed, had opened the switch and jerked out the cord plug. What happened had therefore required a tremendous spurt of juice in the circuits, or else a heck of a lot less juice than we carry in our lab outlets. So I took home the prints on the rig and began making changes. Which led to more changes. Which resulted in some rather complicated mathematics to which we scientific chaps resort when the kind we teach in colleges just won't work out right. I got it: a very low power-input. And I got more. The thing is a sort of invisible ray. It can only be emitted, or broadcast, as a narrow beam from the muzzle-coils of a very fancylooking electronic rig. Low power is a must; more juice not only heats up the rig and smokes insulation, but it won't shoot the beam. I tested it on the black tulips (Biochemical Research Project #) which I got to close up by the clock, not by the Sun, last year (Project #-A) and their blossoms closed each time the beam touched them. The purple mushrooms which fluff their tops in radioactivity showed no effects. It works on a simple "A" battery. But there's a transistor hookup that behaves like no transistor. Its molecular structure vibrates, which it shouldn't, and emits a sharp, keening note in the vicinity of E flat. A rather bulky muffler would be required, I'm afraid, to get rid of that noise. But the oddest thing, technically, is that invisible ray-beam. It hasn't any of the effects of electric shock. I'll not go into the electro-neurological aspects of that -- nobody could understand it except, just possibly, a neurologist -- but the simple fact is that this ray puts a victim to sleep instantly and it doesn't do anything else! No blockages or convulsions of nerve ganglia, not even a temporary catharsis of "mild" shock! Apparently it gallops up the "white matter" of the nervous system quite harmlessly, then smacks the "gray matter" -- the brain, the spinal column -- a good wallop. Painlessly. In short, the victim just flops over and snores up a half-hour or so, and then awakens as if from a short nap, though perhaps with some puzzlement. There is no injury whatsoever. ' out how the Cooling Effect worked and why -- though I may never learn what it is. Hypnosis? Artificially induced, instantaneous sleep? (Victims can be handled without awakening.) Of course, I was curious. I'd have gone through it step by step for my own satisfaction, even if somebody else had already done it before. Nobody had -- and it wasn't easy. During the rest of the term, even through final exams, I devoted every spare moment to the Cooling Effect. Even so, it took another two months' hot sweat -- the summer vacation's practically gone now -- to get those final diagrams onto my drawing board. But once I did, there it was, at least its basic circuits and components. All I needed was to juggle them around, coax them into a slim, tubular case, put a carved butt on it containing the "A" battery and give it a push-button trigger. With that data, any good bench-hand in an electrical repair shop could have done the job. I fashioned it out of plastic and odds and ends in my basement laboratory. A glance in the telephone Red Book gave me the number of a local breeding farm and a call soon brought a pair of fat, inquisitive guinea pigs in a small, wirescreened carrying cage. Beyond the patio wall, my house sides directly on open pasturage, and beyond that, lower in the valley, the alfalfa field begins. With a brisk pacing off of a base-line and some rough, splay-thumbed triangulation, I soon determined my new weapon's effectiveness from pointblank range to a thousand yards -- on guinea pigs, that is. At nine hundred yards, it still knocked them over for the count. At a thousand yards, it had no effect whatever, so far as I could determine through field glasses. The animals gave no sign that they even noticed it. That, plus the nature of the mechanism, indicates its application is definitely limited. Whether you make it small enough to fit a lady's purse or as big as an atomic cannon, its maximum effective range will still remain # yards. And not just on guinea pigs. I already knew from my own experience what it does to a man at close range. Blowing the fuses on the whole campus had been the real danger there, however. Had it been the slightest bit different, even to the position of my foot in that big machine, I should certainly have been electrocuted that night. That was the first time it almost killed me. ' I 'HE Cooling Effect is worthless as an anesthetic for surgery. While the sleeping guinea pigs don't awaken when I pick them up out of their cage and handle them, even pulling their legs, they do struggle. They resist, like sleeping animals, not wanting to be disturbed. Still, I pinched them and bounced them and they invariably slept through an approximate half-hour. It's shock, and it isn't. It's sleep, and it isn't. But I certainly knew it was a weapon. A new weapon. And man alive, what a weapon! I turned the guinea pigs loose in the patio, let them scamper, then tumbled them both with a quick sweep of the beam. 'k NE man in ambush could knock over a whole company of marching troops! The guns could be mounted on tripods with a rotating mechanism that kept them sweeping the area constantly. Anyone who approached within # yards would go down -- then wake up, climb back to their feet, and go down again every half-hour. Man or animal. The guns could be strung out to cover a whole sector, then wired to a single main switch -- and one lone observer could stop an infantry advance. But they wouldn't stop guided missiles or even mortar fire. Nor would they deflect through peepholes on a tank or pillbox. There isn't quite that much "scatter" from the beam reflecting off a hard surface. However, there is some -- I fired through the wirescreen openings of the cage and had the beam glance directly off the back wall, often knocking the guinea pigs down without hitting them directly. It went through a handkerchief easily, even when folded thick. A thin glass tumbler, however, stopped it. You could take cover from it almost anywhere -- if you knew when you were going to be shot at. You could wear a a light plastic armor -- if the joints were sealed and you kept it hooked to about a fifty-pound air-condition unit. No problem at all if you ride a motor scooter. It wouldn't stop an invading army, but it could certainly raise the devil with the occupation. Almost anyone could make the gun. Given the components of a pocket radio, a few pieces of copper wire, a few sticks of chewing gum and a penknife, I could whittle one out of wood or put it into a plastic toy water-pistol. But what the Armed Forces don't want right now is a new secret weapon! They have their manned satellite now, keeping its vigil over the arsenals of Earth, their big atomic missiles ready to jump off against preset targets -- but with the frightful unknown of sides. And, tcK, I can imagine trying to sell those Generals on something that won't even stop a tank. I'm afraid I forgot to shut off the kitchen monitor that night. The servos dished out the dinner menu I'd dialed before noon, then whisked it away when it got cold. I noticed it when the waste processor's stuttering hum went on a bit longer than usual. what a predicament I was in. The Armed Forces would undoubtedly suppress my invention. Their lives are nightmarish enough already -- not knowing what they'll find out in space or how it will affect matters. What's more, they would suppress me! There are certain retroactive clauses in that contract I signed the job with complete legality. A nice little hideaway, then, with nothing for miles but security guards, radar traps, trip-wires and electric fences. But that was the kindest fate I could exp)ect. Quite a number of assorted big and small dictators might like my head blown off. The most obvious alternative wais to suppress the invention myself. To destroy all traces of my experiments and forget about it. To convince myself the world wasn't ready for it. t It's quite possible I might have -- if I hadn't kept forgetting to shut off things -- and if not for an unsavory little group. There is small chance that Big Jake Claggett and his three henchmen will ever be remembered for their unwitting contribution to science and the future of mankind. In fact, their contribution can be accepted as the merest coincidence -- unless you discount Big Jake's liking for foreign sports cars. But that came later. We always have had criminals and crime, and it just happened that Claggett's gang were the big news that day. It could as easily have been some other bunch of crooks. An # Tway, when nine p.m. rolled around, my wall TV burst into its customary serenade of sound and color, timed for just enough of the opening commercial to let me settle down to watch Mr. Winkle's news commentary. It was August #rd, #. At two o'clock that afternoon. Big Jake Claggett and his gang robbed the Bellefontaine County Savings Bank and got away with #. One of the gang clubbed the elderly bank guard senseless with the barrel of his revolver. The guard was hospitalized for a possible skull fracture. Witnesses B# said Big Jake cursed the gunman who struck the guard, warning him to "get hold of himself!" That was enough for me. The world had to be given my new weapon. (I'm even more convinced of it now, after discussing it with Sgt. Falasca. Practically every professional criminal in this country would give almost anything for the Cooling gun. Then they could commit armed robbery with no risk of earning a murder rap! ) I could see that both criminals and police officers would welcome it and for one simple reason. It doesn't kill, maim or injure. Even if it should cause a tremendous increase in robberies and similar crimes, its victims wouldn't be dead. Better a hundred robberies than one man's death. Besides, I had a notion that I could discourage its criminal use. suppression. Solve that problem and there wouldn't be any reason I couldn't manufacture the pistols, advertise them, and sell them exactly as any firearms company can sell .# rifles. Except that I should probably do better to arrange for their manufacture by some established firm. That was when I began planning to write this. There is just one condition under which no secret can be suppressed -- when it ceases to be a secret! It took preparation. The roughed-out diagrams and scribbled notes a man uses in research are hardly suitable for publication. Technical specifications had to be phrased in clear, understandable terms. The complete data took nearly two weeks to reach final draft. Also, it seemed best to establish the importance, and at least imply the probable consequences, of this publication. And then, obviously, I had to find a publisher. That one had me stumped. Furthermore, I suspect it might still have me stumped if I did not now have the full support of the Governor and the State Police of Ohio. These police officers want Cooling guns! But even back then, while I was still the only man on Earth who knew about it, I managed to formulate a solution of sorts. ' Any publisher would be scared of the thing while only he and I and the printers knew about it. He'd be risking a Federal injunction, at the very least, even to consider publishing it. But if it were no longer a secret and simply not yet common knowledge, most publishers would grab it. If, for example, some manufacturing firm had already considered it and was planning to put Cooling guns into production... Dr. Charles Whitney is currently the president and chief stockholder of the Cleveland Atomic Equipment Company, which designs and manufactures special tools and equipment for nuclear power companies, radiation labs and universities throughout the Midwest. He started the business after his dismissal from over the ensuing ten years. We have some of his tools at Webster Tech. Then, too, Whitney and I had maintained a cursory, but friendly contact through the years, so naturally I thought of him first. He had the production layout for the job; what's more, he had the guts to go through with it. All I had to do was sell him on it. Unfortunately, by then I was scared silly. I was the furtive, sneaky little man whose invention would change the world. I contacted Dr. Whitney with a simple televisor call -- but instead of suggesting a perfectly normal appointment at his office, I had to swear him to secrecy and arrange a clandestine meeting in the country! I wonder he didn't consult an almanac to see if there wasn't a full moon that night. In fact, I wonder that he came at all. It was pouring rain. required to reach Indian Lake in dry weather, even allowing the Federal Freeway's # mph speed limit. Once through the Columbus Turnoff, you have to double back westward and northward through a hilly, rural country with twisting county roads. You must have excellent driving ability to average more than # mph -- and it won't be much more -- over that maze of roads. When they're wet, you need driving ability just to stay on them. I'd worked late the night before, arranging my material for this meeting, and didn't arise until noon. One glance at the sky's heavy overcast told me what to expect. The weather reports confirmed it. The world proceeded about its own business, of course, thoroughly indifferent to a worried man eating his belated breakfast. I was so completely alone! If I felt any sense of foreboding, stuffing articles into my pockets, picking up the guinea pigs' case and going out to the car, I couldn't distinguish it from my feeling of gloom. Perhaps I did, since the world's affairs caught up with me quite forcibly that night. I met the rain before I was halfway up the Freeway and had to cut speed clear down to #. The old hotel on Indian Lake was my natural choice for a rendezvous, since it was a gutted ruin in abandoned backwoods -- though "abandoned" isn't exactly true. Local residents still fish the lake and there are a few homes around the shore area. Strictly speaking, the region has simply changed with the times. Today, you can't get past the toll-gate onto a Federal Freeway unless you have a Federal Driver's License and your Vehicle Inspection sticker is up to date -- which changed more things, I think, than nuclear power and industrial automation. " couldn't drive across the country in any junkheap with a nut at the wheel, it became a mark of distinction just to live in the country. That's what made more rural jobs -- the small community shopping centers springing up, products having to be shipped out to them, the growth of rural power and water systems -- when work in the cities got scarce, with automation taking over the factories. But it hit the small resort areas especially hard. More people are vacationing in the cities now than at the seashore or mountains! I hadn't been out to the lake in years, but I had less trouble finding my way this time than ever before. The influx of new homebuilders has considerably improved the road signs around there, both in number and accuracy, and that's all you need in a Porsche Apache. My little blue speedster takes those narrow, rain-slicked county roads like a Skid Row bum making the saloon circuit with a brand new tendollar bill. The only real problem is getting around those armorsided Detroit mastodons that can't decide which end is the front. Anyway, driving kept me too busy to think much of anything else. But I made good time -- better than I expected -- and it wasn't long after dark when my headlights cut through the sheeting rain to pick out the fire-blackened ruin of the hotel. I jounced the little Porsche around the deep-rutted drive and parked next to the empty frame building that had once been the restaurant and bar. I had plenty of time to think, for Dr. Whitney didn't arrive until two hours later. It was sometime during those two hours that the Claggett gang smashed their way through a police roadblock just outside Lima, their guns blasting reply to the machine-gun bullets peppering their big sedan. Two policemen were seriously wounded; one died on the way to the hospital. Shortly afterward, the bulletriddled sedan was found by the roadside, but only one of the gang was in it. He was dead. And some time later, a call aroused Sgt. Falasca from a sound sleep. He didn't even take time to don his State Police uniform, but merely pulled a trenchcoat on over his pajamas, got his revolver out of the bureau drawer, and kissed his wife on the way out the front door. He had three other State Troopers to pick up, off-duty as he was, before proceeding to the assembly point at Lima. The Claggett gang had split up, some of them probably wounded, each of them armed and more dangerous than ever. They were wanted for murder now. by helicopter, of course -- the head of a scientific instrument company must keep up appearances. He'd waited as long as he could, hoping the weather might clear, then had taken off on instruments and reached the lake the lake surface and crept in to shore, his landing lights probing the thick curtains of rain. I heard the hollow roar of his turbine, rather than the throb of his rotor blades, and hurried around the slanting wing of the old hotel to meet him. The lakefront presented a macabre view that wrenched at my memory. The desolate, cracked-stucco walls with the black holes of their windows rising from mounds of rubble beside me, a weed-grown lawn and a straggle of trees half-masking the lake -- stark-looking trees now, in the 'copter's landing lights -- and a small boat-dock leaning half into the black water. Once, as a rather obnoxious young high-school student, I had seen this lakefront on just such a night. A steady rain fell, lightning flickered, and thunder blasted its anger... and, for a moment, I saw it as it had been, with that grand old British pioneer of space flight, Arthur C. Clarke, standing out there in the pelting rain with his camera, taking pictures of the lightning! Dr. Whitney brought his sleek craft over the treetops and settled neatly into the small space that remained of the lawn, his rotor tips almost nicking the crumbled walls of the hotel. It was a plexinosed, three-place executive ship -- a Bell, I think. A lot of people prefer flying. They must fly specific air routes and airfield traffic patterns; and with airfields so crowded, they have trouble finding a place to park. It's not for me. But Dr. Whitney had heard the newscasts on the way out. I don't recall what was said at our meeting. It was rather uncomfortable, under the circumstances -- the more so for me, I think, as those circumstances were my own making. But when we'd rounded the hotel and entered the old restaurant-bar, I recall Whitney's jocular approval. "Well, we're cozy enough here," he said. "So long as the Claggett gang doesn't drop in on us!" That was how I heard of the night's happenings. When he saw that his remark puzzled me, he related the news while I was setting things up for our conference. We were in the back room, which had once been the bar -- the front section, formerly the restaurant, had had windows all around, which now formed an unbroken gap with a chill wind whistling through it. The place was stripped bare of its former fixtures, but some unsung fisherman had provided the old barroom with a rickety table and several pressedboard boxes to sit on. I had a Coleman radiant heat lantern which I swung from a ceiling wire hook, a plastic sheet which I threw across the table, and a couple of patio chair cushions for the boxes. It took some shifting about to get everything out of the way of several roof leaks, and I had to choose a sturdy box for myself, first testing a few. and emotions struggling through Dr. Whitney's mind then, but he showed none of them. It was I, rather, with my clumsy movements, the pauses to polish my glasses, the lump I kept trying to swallow, who took so long to face up to it. But finally we were ready. I took out my notebook and opened it upon the table before me. Whitney's frosty eyebrows raised. Then he quietly reached inside his own topcoat, produced his notebook and pen, and laid the notebook open before him. It was a gesture of an almost-forgotten past, but a habit neither of us had ever abandoned. Something about it -- the reminder of countboth attended -- had a steadying effect on me. I placed my pistol in the center of the table. The guinea pigs' cage was on the floor before us. I told what I had to tell. Then I went to the cage, removed one of the animals and tucked it into my pocket. Returning to the table, I picked up the pistol and fired at the cage. The shrill E flat note pierced the rushing sound of the rain. Whitney, rose and went to the cage. Gently removing the little creature, he felt it a moment, then nodded. "Asleep," he said, and replaced it in the cage. Looking over my notes, I see that considerable space would be required to cover the entire interrogation which followed. Also, I see that I failed to note down the almost gradual change in my old friend's demeanor -- from his calm, quiet manner at first to the keeneyed excitement of his flushed features, his rapid-fire questions at the end. I shall, instead, give some examples of that discussion. "The guinea pigs sleep for only a half-hour? Always a half-hour?" "Yes. It never varies much. A minute or so each way." "If you -- uh -- shoot one, then shoot it again, does that prolong its sleep any?" "Not at all! Still only a halfhour, no matter how many times you shoot them while they sleep." "Umm'm. That could indicate sleep is the brain's defense mechanism against the effects of your ray. A successful defense, it would seem. They show no after-effects of this?" "None whatever. They've begun to associate it with the pistol, though. Each time I point the pistol at them, they get mad -- " "You mean angry? They aren't afraid of it?" "Certainly not afraid! One in my pocket here tries burrowing into corners, making furious grunting sounds. The other one usually just stands and glares at me." "How about when they wake up?" "Well, generally, their first reaction is to keep a sharp eye out for me -- and the pistol." "Wary, eh? Damned inconvenient, I suppose, getting knocked asleep all the time. But it certainly doesn't seem to hurt them. What about mental disturbance?" "No obvious aberrations. But I don't know -- " "Yes, they're only guinea pigs. Hardly be satisfactory to the American Medical Association, among others. Take years of research to determine its absolute safety -- " "But it should be released to the public now!" "Why?" "Because its harmful effects, if any, are very likely to be insignificant -- or we'd have no doubts about their existence." "That assumption could be dangerous." "Yes. But there's something else, too. This new weapon will replace firearms -- which certainly do inflict injury, even death." "Ah, society's application of it -- " And Dr. Whitney took several minutes to digest that aspect. I outlined my plans to him. then frankly aghast. "You expect me to mass-produce that thing?" I said I hoped he would. He then commenced raking me over the coals in a most fitting and proper manner. Didn't I realize what I had created? My visions of it freeing peoples from police-state enslavement were all fine and good, and it might conceivably have such result; but what I had here was nothing more than the most fiendish instrument ever inflicted upon human society! What did I think it might do in the hands of muggers, sex offenders, pickpockets, burglars or worse? Why, our whole civilized culture would be thrown into chaos! No person would dare ever be alone, for fear of ambush. No one could sleep without someone else standing watch! No man could defend his own possessions, no woman could keep her chastity, unless people were around them, watching them every moment of their lives! Goods could no longer be transported without heavy guard. The wealthy -- who could afford it -- would have to live in massive, well-guarded fortresses. The rest of us would be like the feudal serf, with nothing worth stealing and quite accustomed to having his daughters raped. We'd be thrown back into the Dark Ages! I nodded agreement to everything he said. Then I took the guinea pig from my pocket, held it squirming, and fastened a little collar about its neck. I unwound a wire from the plastic disc on the collar so Dr. Whitney could see it. He instantly recognized the tiny node on the wire as a miniature microphone. "Remember how you determined that the other pig was asleep?" I asked. I taped the tiny node to the artery on the pig's neck, carried it over to the cage, and placed it inside. "I call this my 'Hey, Rube!' " I explained, grinning. "But imagine it as a little wrist radio transmitter, worn by everyone who requests them, tuned to the police broadcast frequency. Radio DF could pinpoint the location in seconds." Going back to the table, I picked up the pistol. "This one's just for demonstration," I added, and fired at the cage. As the guinea pig slumped beside its companion, the disc on its collar emitted a harsh, buzzing noise. Whitney chuckled. "Slowed heartbeat, eh? Simple as that!" "And better than any burglar alarm," I pointed out. "This one needn't sit still while some crook disconnects it!" that this might destroy its usefulness to people in a policestate. The dictator's police and troops could wear "Hey, Rube!" radios, too. I replied that all the people's underground fighters would need is a Cooling pistol and a saw-edged meat knife. One man could knock over a whole platoon and cut their heel-tendons in minutes. "The American Indians used to collect scalps in less time!" I said. "But a wounded man's more trouble to the enemy than a dead one. I think the heeltendon would be easiest." Perhaps it was a bit out of character for me. Whitney looked at me for a long moment, and blinked. Both eyes, tight. But still he didn't think much of my plans. His subsequent suggestioris were far more rational, however, than the ones I had evolved through fear. First, we didn't really know the Armed Forces would suppress this gun. They were completely involved in their problems of space flight and military satellites; there probably wasn't anyone left in Washington who was even looking for secret weapons now. And we just might get this gun through while they weren't looking. He suggested, therefore, that I attempt to patent my invention. But that we should take adequate safeguards: I must handle all patent correspondence through his office. Then, if the Armed Forces clamped down, they'd come there first -- and he could tip me off in time to escape. I'd have to flee the country. But at least I'd be free and we could adopt other measures for bringing out the gun. It would be pointless now to disclose what other plans and arrangements we made. It's enough to say I agreed. The discussion then turned to further speculation of what the future might be with the Cooling gun. Whitney was not at all convinced it would be good, but, rather, that neither we nor any group of men had the right to decide what humanity should or should not do. He had strong doubts that it would mean the end of dictatorship. "Dictators dream world conquest, and dreams like that breed war," he said. "But they aren't the only ones to blame. You'll find people who like dictatorships!" But the truth was that most of humanity didn't want to get involved, never realizing that that involved them more than anything else could. It was at approximately this time, so far as I can determine, that Big Jake Claggett and one of his henchmen walked up to a service station where a Porsche speedster was getting gas. They clubbed the station attendant unconscious, hauled the driver out of the little sports car and took off in it. Dr. Whitney left me with a problem. What could be done to keep people alert? It is this one thing that will determine the Cooling gun's effect on the world -- whether as an instrument of crime or protection for the weak, the innocent. Where people are complacent, it will be a boon to thieves and revolutionaries. Where people are alert -- But what could keep us alert? cupied, hardly conscious of the little car's deft progress over the slick roads. It was almost with a feeling of detached interest that I saw the black skid-marks at the bottom of the hill -- then, with chill shock, the dark bulk of the sedan on its side in the ditch. I was slowing when a flashlight beam raked outward from the car, showing crumpled metal and broken headlights. One figure, perhaps two, were standing behind it. Another one, a man in a trenchcoat, mud-splattered almost to his hips, was walking onto the road in front of me, flagging me down. "Get out of that car!" There were exasperation and rage in his voice, an expression of utter fury on his face. He stood just at the edge of my headlights' glare, not directly in it, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. There was that. There was the speed of the sedan, as evidenced by its skid-marks. My mind leaped instantly to one nerve-shattering conclusion -- And I felt absolutely calm. I can't explain that. It may have been that the night's events had already drained me of tense emotion. They're armed, I thought, but so am I! And I have a weapon that can get them all with one sweep -- This, while I opened the door and climbed out. While I thrust my hand into my own pocket. I whipped out the little pistol. One instant, he was standing still, hands thrust in the wet trenchcoat. The next, a heavy revolver exploded at his hip. A sledgehammer caught me in the right side, knocked me reeling. It occurred to me then, lying there on the road, cold rain pelting my face, a warm wetness spreading along my side. I had met the one pitfall we shall never escape in a pistol-packing society : the man who's faster with a gun than you are! Bending over me, Sgt. Nicolas Falasca picked up the little plastic Cooling gun and straightened up, peering at it, scowling. "What the hell!" he muttered. I was rather inclined to agree. told. The State of Ohio wants Cooling guns for its police officers; after this, other States will undoubtedly follow suit. The Armed Forces don't want to suppress it. And Dr. Whitney will start production in just another week. They've been very decent about paying my hospital bills and seeing that nothing else happens to me. Even though Sgt. Falasca was saddled with the latter responsibility, I must repeat that he's treated me very well. The future will depend a lot on men like him. As for the rest -- I've been assured that the guinea pigs were honorably retired to the breeding farm; Nurse wouldn't let me keep them here. Everyone knows of the violent end of the Claggett gang. I want to state vigorously at this point that, despite widespread public belief, neither I nor the Cooling gun had anything whatsoever to do with it. I never at any time even saw Claggett or any member of his gang. Their unwitting contribution was the alerting of Sgt. Falasca and the rest of the police, and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this account, Claggett's stealing a Porsche like mine because he was fond of sports cars. That's the whole of the story, except for one additional item: This is scheduled to appear at the same time as the plans and specifications for the Cooling gun. You'll find them given as premiums with safety razors, breakfast cereals, cigarettes and other articles. I wish to thank the manufacturers for their kind cooperation. X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N.B. C. Each Wednesday nite on Radio! double dome Planning to have an adaptokid? Check into it thoroughly first -- no home is complete with one! O NE morning, I walked into the factory and he was there, our newest employee -- James Warwick, the two-brained, four-armed adaptoman. There was an ominous silence in the factory control room. Usually there's plenty of noise -- banter, horseplay, gossip, sometimes even a little work -- but today the boys were silent, heads hunched defiantly over control panels. Miss Berkland, the office sweetheart, was the only one who seemed undisturbed as she fed her bank of automatic dictationto-typing machines. Even Dr. Kirby, the plant physician, was glaring at the adaptoman through the glass wall of his partitioned office. The atmosphere bothered me. That's my job. You have to understand that the people who run an automated factory are a small, select group, more like a family than a business. Even the yardmen are much closer than in the older factories. There are only fifteen of us upstairs in the office and a mere eighty-two in the yard. With this group of less than a hundred workers, we turn out an amazing number of assemblies that go into Assembly. That's our name, and we're the principal industry of this small town of Worthington, California. I studied the adaptoman and his setup. He had an odd desk, what they call an adaptodesk, with an additional working surface built out and around the conventional desk. He looked quite human as he worked -- because he was human, of course. Only, while his upper arms shuffled through orders on the outer desk, his lower arms calmly typed a report on a typewriter in front of him. His head was normal in appearance, except that it was large, almost -- I hesitate to use the word -- magnificent. It had to be. He had two brains. And the third eye. I could see his shirt open at the collar and the third eye nested between his clavicles. I shuddered. The rest of him was normal. In fact, the half-hidden third eye and the second brain, feally a sub-brain, were fairly well concealed. It was only the extra pair of arms that made him obviously different. He worked with poise and concentration, paying no attention to the strained atmosphere in the room. I slipped into my office -- All hell broke loose. tomated Engineers, and Simms, head of the Office Technicians, stormed in. "All right, Bob," said Cortland. "You're Employment. You do the hiring and firing. Get him out of here!" "It's all a surprise to me," I leveled with them. "I didn't even know he was coming." "A monster that does the work of two men," said the stoop-shouldered Simms. "The boys want to know what next!" "An adaptoman may go in San Francisco or Los Angeles," added Cortland. "But this is Worthington, Bob. A small town. We don't want any adaptomen around here." "Thanks for the lecture," I said drily. "As spokesmen for your unions, you're making this an official protest?" "It damn well is," said Cort. Simms nodded. "On what grounds?" I asked. "He, uh, he's doing an extra man out of a job." "Now hold on! As far as I can see, he's only doing one job -- Production Scheduler, no more, no less. We lost a man yesterday. We hired one today." "Sure -- today," said Simms. "And what has Management got up its sleeve for the future?" "Like I told you-" Cortland leaned over my desk, his face red. "No, let me tell you something, Mr. Hunter. Adaptoman goes out of here in twentyfour hours or else they'll carry him out. Remember that!" Simms nodded energetic approval and the two of them strode out. My buzzer rang. The Chief wanted to see me. I wanted to see him, too, because I knew he was leaving town that morning for an extended trip. But before I could hit the button. Perch, the Yard Master, lumbered in. "Look, Bob," he said. "Somebody told the yard crew that there was an adaptoman up here. Now the people in skilled labor have taken a lot of pushing around since automation and they don't like the idea. They see adaptomen used in spaceships. Now they see them coming into the office. Next it'll be the yard. Can't you get that laboratory nightmare out of here before trouble starts?" "I didn't even know he was on the premises until ten min -- " "This is a small town. Bob. It ain't in the cards. Get the word up front fast. I won't be responsible beyond today." Perch laboriously waddled out of the office. I knew he had only told me informally what his yardmen would be telling me at boring length in a very short while. I sighed and turned to the now dead buzzer for the Chief. Then Dr. Kirby came in. Kirby is a special figure in Worthington. He's the Plant Doctor. In the afternoon, he has a private practice. He's also on the Board of Education, the Red Cross and the City Council. He almost never speaks for himself. He speaks for the town. "Something new has been added," he said wryly. "Yes," I said. "Won't get a medical clearwithout a medical clearance. And I won't give it." "Why?" might carry contagious diseases. A bug they never worked out when they invented the conception gun. Can't have him on the premises. Half the staff will be sick all the time. Might even start an epidemic to spread over Worthington." That's a myth, of course. And Kirby, a good doctor, knew it. He also knew that he couldn't drive the adaptoman out as easily with his political and social influence as with his medical influence. Kirby heads the Medical Association. If he said our adaptoman was a health menace, the Association said it. I sighed. "I'll take it up with the Chief. But look, Frank, I've always been curious about adaptomen. In fact, Marion and I were even thinking... maybe... our next child -- " Kirby is red-headed and has a flat face with a big, wide grin. Not too humorous. He grinned and shook his head. "It isn't practical, Bob. Adaptomen are just a fad. They were needed to get space travel going. Ships had to be small, pilots and crewmen highly efficient. A man with two sets of arms, an extra eye and an extra brain can manipulate more dials, fix more wiring, think faster, stay awake longer. But that was pioneer stuff, like the early spaceships. Adaptomen are just as useless today. Within five years, they'll be extinct. As far as Worthington goes, we don't even want to bother with 'em." He peered out of the glass at the adaptoman, whose desk-sign gave his name as James Warwick. "Can you imagine your daughter in the arms of that four-armed monster?" "I don't have a daughter," I said. I was getting a little peeved. I hated to see our small town act like a small town. He tapped me on the shoulder. "You always were too forwardthinking, Bob. You don't belong in Worthington. You belong in a big city." "I wanted to belong to space," I snapped. "I wanted to go out there. I've often wished I were adapto myself." "Well, you're not. Don't go out on a limb for them. It's going to be no sale." And Kirby left me. I climbed the stairs to the Inner Sanctum, but found only old Miss Peabody, the Chiefs secretary. "Mr. Eakins had to leave, Mr. Hunter. He had hoped to talk to you for a few minutes, but he is going east for his meeting. He left this message." She handed me a piece of paper. The chief had scribbled a hasty note on it: "Have hired an adaptoman, James Warwick, for Decker's job. He's your baby. See that all goes well." Then: "P.S. In the interests of progress. Space Rocket Assembly Board of Directors has decided to place adaptomen in all factories as a test. Our quota is one. I think he'd better work out. As our Industrial-Public Relations Exec, you've got to carry the ball. Don't drop it. Eakins." That was like old Eakins. He hated small towns; he hated Worthington. He spent as much time away as possible. He had made political enemies at the Demerely passing his exile time at our small branch plant until things grew easier. It was typical for him to sidestep. slowly. I'd done a lot of thinking about adaptomen. I had wanted to go out in space -- the space travel that adaptomen pioneered. I hadn't been able to. Now Marion and I had seriously discussed whether our next child shouldn't be adapto. This was going to be a good way to collect information. "Jimmy," I said to the adaptoman, "we've got problems." "I know it, Mr. Hunter." He was blond with green eyes flecked with brown. When I learned that he was only seventeen years old, I doubly cursed old Eakins. A kid! And you could tell from his small build and his fair complexion that he was no rough-and-tumbler. The least they could have done -- "First, the Engineers' Group," I said. "Could I -- could I talk to them, Mr. Hunter?" "Sure," I said gloomily. "We'll both talk to them. I'm not afraid of their threats of personal violence -- " He squirmed in his chair. " -- but the yardmen are something else again," I finished. "It seems to me the yardmen don't count in this. I'm an office worker, not a yard worker." "Let's face it," I said. "The more sophisticated people, like Cortland and his engineers and Simms and his office technicians, are not so afraid of the unknown, which you represent. But the yardmen aren't that sophisticated. They wouldn't mind punching you on the nose." "Do me a personal favor, Mr. Hunter. Let me handle them in my own way." "Furthermore, there's Dr. Kirby." "He's already spoken to me," said Jimmy, dropping his eyes as if the interview had been painful. "Well, those are the hurdles," I said. "Not to mention the townspeople. So far, adaptomen are something you find only in outer space -- and the Sunday supplements. Where are you staying?" The poor lad scratched his head. "Well, nowhere yet. Mr. Eakins didn't have any ideas. I've got my suitcase in my car out on the lot. I just arrived this morning and Mr. Eakins brought me right here with my adaptodesk and told me you'd take over." "Ye gods! Well, you can stay at my house for a few days until we see -- " I didn't complete the sentence.  tested loudly and at length. It was all words. Jimmy turned pale at Cortland's vehemence, but pointed out in a small, determined voice that (#) he was human, born of human parents, (#) a citizen entitled to work for his living, and (#) didn't Cortland and the rest believe in free enterprise and the four freedoms? At that point, I thought Cort was coming over the desk at Jimmy. I made a signal for Jimmy to duck out and let me handle the situation, but he walked straight into the lion's mouth. "Besides," he said, "you've wired the scheduling control #anel all wrong. Your pre-amplifiers are underrated for the job they're doing and some of your servo-motors have too much backlash. The least I can do is straighten your system out for you." That was a beautiful non sequitur. It left Cortland with his mouth hanging open. He was always fiddling with the circuits of the massive controller and was very proud of his work. He drew himself up with precisely the look of a woman whose honor has been questioned, demanding to know where the hell Jimmy got his information on ratings and circuits for controllers. After that, the conference was over for me. It degenerated into a hot theoretical argument about gating and damping and time constants. Simms, whose people are almost as engineering-minded as the engineers, stayed with it and they called in a couple of boys and presently the argument moved over to the main office and the controller itself. That shot the afternoon. I'm afraid there wasn't much work done, but at the end of the day, Cortland came in grinning. '"Well, so much for your lousy superman," he jeered. "We backed him to the wall. He was wrong all the way. That stupid kid has a lot to learn." I was about to point out that he couldn't learn if he was run out of the office, when Simms peered in and asked Cortland: "Which of the circuit textbooks did you want me to requisition for Jimmy tomorrow?" Cortland reeled off a long list of books. His eyes were shining. He was the missionary out to convert the heathen. "That crazy Adaptoman Institute," he told me. "Like any college -- long on theory, short on practice. The kid needs background." I clamped my mouth shut. I didn't bring up the original objections to Jimmy from Cortland and Simms, and neither did they. look, sir," said Jimmy. ' "I have your address. I'll find my way to your house. Would you mind going off and leaving me?" I pointed out the window. A dozen yardmen stood near Jimmy's beat-up old car, waiting. "And leave you with that reception committee? Not on your life, Jimmy." "You'll only make it worse," he said. "It's got to be faced." I looked at the eager young face. It was pale, but I thought I detected an urgency that couldn't be ignored. I said; "Okay. I'll gamble." I called the head of Plant Protection, told him that if Jimmy was seriously hurt, it was the penitentiary for him, breathed a prayer and went home. Jimmy was a long time in coming. Marion had supper on the table and had heard all about my day three times over before the old car pulled up outside and the adaptoman got out. Marion gave a cry and almost fainted. They had beaten the kid horribly. He dragged himself into the house. His head was a mass of blood and cuts, his nose was obviously broken, and he was holding what I figured had to be a broken rib. "It took three of them," he said, and passed out. I called the Plant Protection chief. He cursed me hotly. "The young jerk asked for it. He wanted to jump the whole lot of 'em. After that, what could I do? Besides," he added thoughtfully, "it was a damn good fight." Jimmy came to while Marion washed his cuts. "Don't look so white. Hunt," he said. "I've been through it a million times at school." Then he turned his face to the wall and went to sleep. I called Kirby and he came right over. I suspect he'd been waiting by the phone. Kirby may be an egotist and a nuisance, but he does have a healthy scientific curiosity -- and he'd never laid a stethoscope on an adaptoman. He allowed himself only one small "I told you so." Then he hustled into the bedroom with the biggest suitcase of junk I'd ever seen and began to examine the patient. It took him an hour and a half, which seemed overlong to me, even for the beating Jimmy had taken. Afterward, he rushed out, muttered, "Keep him home for three days," threw some prescriptions at me and took off with an inward, absorbed look on his face. I went in to see Jimmy. He was all bandaged up, but sitting up in bed and smoking a cigarette -- grinning. "What's got into Old Kirby?" I growled. "There's the possibility of a bone-chip on my second brain," he said. "Maybe this fight, maybe some old fight -- I've had lots of them. It looks like I'll have to have an exploratory operation." "You're going to let Dr. Kirby operate on your second brain?" He nodded, blowing smoke upward. "That's the way we left it. Only it'll be about a month before I'll be built up enough for it." "But Kirby is only a general practitioner." "Oh, he's done a little brain work. Not as many as he'd like -- " I sat down weakly. "All right, Adoptoman, I spot your methods. You're doing great. Already got the town licked. Cortland and Simms because they think you're all wet and they can have the fun of retraining you. The yardmen because they admire a guy who can use his fists -- never mind the extra pair. Now Kirby. He knows if he kicks you out, he loses the chance of a lifetime to tamper on the operating table with an adaptoman sub-brain. So the struggle for acceptance is over." "Hardly that, Hunt. An adaptoman is the result of a few radioactive jolts with the conception gun shortly after pregnancy is established. And pregnancy is a woman's job. We won't win the battle until we win the women. That's going to be hard." "I know already you're going to win that one, kid." There was something almost sad in his look. "Let's wait and see." ington. Have you ever lived in a small town? Every one of them has its town "character," usually a moron or cripple that sells newspapers on the main corner, or works around the barbershop. He is accepted -- as a freak. That was the acceptance Jimmy had in the next few weeks. Life seemed to settle back into a normal routine and I was lulled into thinking that Jimmy would slowly work his way up in esteem over the months and years. I couldn't have been more wrong. The next situation was -- special. It began innocently enough when the Reverend Dolson preached a pointed sermon in church one Sunday on adaptomen and what they boded in the way of destruction for the human race. Tampering with men's genes and chromosomes! But Jimmy had a pretty fair voice and the choir was a little short on tenors. Later, in church with the Sunday sun soft through the leaded glass window, shining on his young, innocent face as he lifted his head in praise of God -- Dolson gave him a Sunday school class to teach. And Aggie Burkes from our office also had a class, so it was only natural that she should break him in as to his duties... One night, Marion came home and said : "Jimmy seems to be doing all right. I went to see Aggie Burkes -- she had gone out on a date with him." I chuckled. "That won't last. Cortland will stop it in a hurry, and if he doesn't, plenty of other fellows will." I was wrong. Jimmy began to date Aggie and the other fellows didn't stop him. I couldn't understand it. Aggie was the best deal in town. Her father was vice-president of the bank. She worked only because she preferred it that way. She had the clean-washed blonde looks that you associate with magazine ads, and a warm personality with a twist of daring to it... "And that's the point," said Marion. "She doesn't care about Jimmy. It's a bid for attention." I guess it was, at first. But Jimmy-boy was pretty good on the ski slopes and swimming in the ocean -- those extra arms -- and when he slid behind the wheel of her convertible and drove her up into the Worthington Hills... I don't know what went on up in the hills, but I doubt if it was what some people said. After all, Jimmy was only seventeen and she was at least nineteen, and they were both very mild and well controlled. It was Cortland's letting him get away with it that I didn't understand. "A bachelor," explained Marion to me patiently, "is really two men -- an eager one, but also a frightened one. He would really rather see somebody else take the cold plunge." "Oh, brother!" I said. "TV psychoanalysis!" Marion grinned and rubbed her wedding ring on her blouse. The expert! A ND then it happened. A small white envelope in the mail. "Mr. and Mrs. Burkes invite you to-" I remember quietly laying down the card and going into the kitchen where Marion was cooking fish. "If Jimmy makes it," I said, "it proves one thing -- adaptomen can live entirely normal lives. Even marry the richest, prettiest girl in town." Marion frowned. "Maybe. But -- please. Hunt, I want to think some more about our next child." I had been pushing her. Seeing Jimmy's success had made me all the more anxious to have our next child adapto. I mean it made sense to me, the way Jimmy explained it after his operation. Dr. Kirby had had very little to operate on. Jimmy had worked the bone chip to the surface of his brain. He told me that the Adaptoman Institute taught a course in psychodynamics -- there weren't many doctors in space. "We're quite a lot different, Hunt," he said, "but so is all of Man's world. Look how Man has changed it from the time he left the trees. Cities, clothes, food -- you name it. He's changed everything except himself." Now Man was ready to change himself, Jimmy explained. Man had built his instruments so well that they had to wait for him to catch up. To grow extra arms to handle the dials of his automated world. An extra brain to coordinate the mass of data his machines accumulated. An extra eye, even, to be able to watch and read and study and supply his extra brain. I had watched Jimmy work and there was no doubt about it. His second hand-eye-brain loop could operate as a totally separate unit -- or he could read a book while doing a normal job, or paint a picture -- or rest his normal vision and normal arms. He was more than twice as flexible. "It's got to come. Hunt," he would say. "After all, adaptomen have been out of the laboratory for over fifty years now. We're proving to be the only kind of supermen that mankind will accept -- the kind of superman that is his own flesh and blood -- that anyone can parent. "The operation on the mother is routine. Atomic controlled radiation shortly after conception. By that time, the embryo is set and you can still tamper with its unspecialized parts. There've been no mistakes. "And think of this. If an Arab considers a fat woman beautiful -- or an African tribesman cherishes a bride with plate-sized lips -- " He smiled his modest smile and gave me a double shrug. But there was a lot of sober thinking done in Worthington that night, when those wedding invitations were delivered. Before, Jimmy was only a temporary fixture. Rootless. Now he was going to become a part of us. A father, a home-owner, a fullfledged citizen. And his children... I think I hated Jimmy myself for the next week. Of course, adaptomen seldom bred true. But the idea of one of our girls lying in those double arms, and the third eye sharing marriage-bed secrets... The strain mounted. I felt myself being sharp with the lad, even though he'd become one of us. Marion seemed to turn cold, as if he'd committed some crime. The men who'd been conned into accepting him were frustrated, the women openly hostile. The backyard buzz must have been terrific. Aggie herself seemed restrained, defiant. I think she really cared for Jimmy, but this was the same girl who once took her father's car through the Old Jantzen river bed on a dare. Nor could Cortland help. He'd waited too long. the wedding. Jimmy got drunk that night, a callow kid, barely eighteen and old enough to be married, yet, with his extra arms and brain, the equivalent of a mature man of thirty. "Look," I said to him. "This is no go. Aggie isn't right for you. Even I feel that and I'm usually on your side. But you're making too much of an issue of it. A -- thrill thing." I felt like a character in a confession story. Jimmy picked up his glass and weaved across the living room. His face was pale and sweaty and he kept passing his glass between his upper and lower hands in an unearthly and horrible fashion. "Listen, Marion, old bird," he told my wife. "Go 'head, have your little adaptokid. 'Sgreat! Look at me. Self-s'porting at seventeen. Cump'ney president at thirty. Marry the prettiest girl in town. Super, thass what we are -- supermen!" "You're drunk!" said Marion, standing up, her face strained. "She don't love me and I don' give a damn!" shouted Jimmy. "Proved it anyway. Proved can marry best this loushy town has to offer!" Marion's hand shot out and she slapped his face. "Monster!" He grabbed her with his extra arm. Maybe it was only to steady himself, but my flesh crawled and I jumped across the room. I hit him straight on the mouth. "Get your goddam hands -- " He went down on the floor and cut his hand on his broken glass. He began to weep softly, "'m no monshter. 'm no monshter." He lifted his young, earnest face. "No monshter," he whispered, and blanked out. play; once the curtain goes up, there's no way to stop it short of a fire. There we sat, practically the whole of Worthington in Dolson's church. The flowers were banked high. The Sun shone through the leaded windows. The altar looked very solemn and important. The organist did her duty and the soloist sang the old, true songs. But an air of horror prevailed. Men and women looked at one another, amazed at being there. I had to stand up for Jimmy, which I did, feeling miserable, like an accomplice in a crime. Jimmy came in, trying to de-emphasize his extra arms by keeping them unnaturally still. This only made them more prominent. His extra eye was safely out of sight under his white shirt and tie. It would have been better if he'd peered with it, for it was a merry, soft eye, proud of its uniqueness, in the protected hollow of his throat. A last-minute delegation of the women to Aggie's the night before had failed And now the wedding march began. Jimmy turned to welcome his bride. She looked very white, almost unreal in her lacy gown. The men in the church looked drawn. But the women were staring with almost open horror. I saw Aggie's eyes flick over at Cortland as she came to the altar. Then she and Jimmy joined hands and it began. It will never be easy to forget the moment when Jimmy turned for the ring. I gave it to him. He fumbled it. Maybe it was my fault. He dropped the ring. Then he was down on all fours, his hands darting desperately in all directions. Aggie stared down and her eyes seemed to glaze. "No -- not you -- spider.'' she cried. She picked up her train and ran, crying, out the side exit. Then, in the pin-dropping silence, we all stared at Jimmy and he stared back at us. I can still hear that high tenor voice : "But I'm not a monster!" Then he covered his face with his hands -- four hands -- and went quietly weeping down the aisle and out of the church. We never saw him again. Bless the Reverend Dolson, he stood there like a captain on a sinking ship and said calmly: "Since the attendance today is better than I usually get on Sunday, I will now preach the sermon I was saving for that day." And he slid into a sermon on tolerance with a great deal of spark and fervor. It felt warm and cosy there, all closer together, at one with each other, as if we had come to the brink of a tragedy and had been saved. when, a few days later, Marion made an appointment to visit the San Francisco Adaptoman Institute. "Poor Jimmy," she said. "He wasn't really a monster, you know. That horrible Aggie simply led him on." "But but "The way he said it," she breathed. "'But I'm not a monster!' " "But our child -- an adapto -- he'll be run out of town." "Betty Guard is going to have an adapto," said Marion firmly. "So's Nelly Price, maybe. Don't but me any buts." That's about all to tell. Except for one thing. Jimmy had rushed back to our house and cleared out of town by the time we returned. He had packed hurriedly and left. But there was one piece of paper on my desk, left careless like, and yet -- Well, here it is. You judge: merit in Oregon. Do not linger after the ring-drop, since the church routine as you go weeping down the aisle is the best final impression that an agent can possibly leave. It cannot be improved upon. Good luck. I wonder if Jimmy really forgot that piece of paper. Or if he figured a poor, confused Employment Manager could be saved one bit of torture as to the devious motives and methods of the human and adapto races. Subject: Worthington Assignment To: Agent James Warwick ( I ) You will win acceptance with the men of Worthington by the usual procedures. (#) You will win acceptance of the women of Worthington by the usual procedures. (#) In no case is an agent permitted to marry the girl, as this raises hostility in a new territory. (#) As a last resort, the ring-drop has been found effective. (#) Upon completion of your assignment, you will depart Worthington for your next assignQuota for Conquest No wonder Fadur was dismayed -- to take over Barth, he had to manufacture a whole army! ' I 'HE young man from Alfaduriesta was magnificent, as young men from Alfaduriesta go. He had a powerful chest which tapered to a narrow waist, muscular thighs and calves and somewhat oversized feet. His head, admittedly, was small for the body, but not grotesque, and he had the usual number of eyes -- three. That was the trouble, the eyes. Most of the people he would be among had only two eyes, and he had to mingle. His chest, though massive, was flexible and he could disguise it by breathing shallowly. But he couldn't hide the third eye except under an awkward bandage. The Durien Fathers had goofed that one. "Go among them and multiply," the Durien Fathers had instructed him before they folded him into the fiery sphere and hurled him through space from the core gun. "Earthwomen are a fun-loving, nubile lot and their men are stupid. Make love to the women and avoid the men, and when you have ten thousand sons, we will attack." The young man from Alfaduriesta, whose name was Fadur, had asked if the scheme was biologically sound and they had shown him scrolls from the scrollery and flasks from the laboratory and spectrostrobioscopic slides from the observatory. These added nothing to his knowledge, but they were an impressive array which gave him more confidence. "But will their women love me?" Fadur had asked. All the Durien Fathers had winked their upper eyes and the Fatherin-Chief had led him to the paternal disguiser. Soon after that, he was in the downtube, on his way to the spacehurl. IV OW, fully dressed and band' aged, Fadur sat on the sand at Miami Beach and considered his mission. All around him were the fun-loving, nubile women and the stupid, underdeveloped men. There were children, too, but not many. There would have to be ten thousand male children of his own, he reflected. Simple arithmetic meant at least thirty thousand loves, to allow for the incidence of female offspring and for the percentage of alliances which would be unproductive for one reason or another. Fadur felt a touch of panic and transferred his gaze to the sea. It looked flat and dull without the perspective of his bandaged third eye. It had been out there -- two hundred miles out -- that the fiery sphere had plopped him. The Durien Fathers had goofed that one, too. It had been a long swim. A pleasant maiden strolled past, idly crunching the sand with her toes, and gave Fadur a look. It was the first look he'd had all day and he sprang to his feet and bowed. She stopped and giggled. "Do me the honor to converse," he said. He thought he put it rather well. The girl giggled again. "Sure. Why not? Where are you from, India?" "India, yes," Fadur said. "Sit, please. Where are you from?" "Dumont, New Jersey," she said. "You're a long way from home. Do you like it here?" "Yes. And I like you. Shall we hold hands, as a prelude?" The Fathers had warned him the preliminaries must be subtle. All at once, the girl was goggling frightenedly at him. "I'm fifteen years old and that's my father over there. I don't think I better sit. I think I better walk. Have a nice visit. So long." "So long," said Fadur, confused by the evaporation of a promising friendship. Fifteen years was not the optimum age, apparently. He got to his feet and moved away from both the girl and her father who, he noticed, was not underdeveloped in the slightest. Somebody said "Ouch!" He saw that he had stepped on a portion of the anatomy of someone partially buried in the sand. Only the face was visible, and only a bit of that, hidden under a big straw hat, dark glasses and nose shield. There was lipstick on the mouth, so it must be a woman. S HE raised her head and said mildly, "Clumsy oaf." "Ten thousand pardons," Fadur said, bowing. "One is enough." The red lips smiled. "Cover up the toesies again, will you?" Fadur bent and patted sand over the feet, then sat. "That's better," the woman said. "I burn easily is why I'm all mummified up. What happened to your forehead? Cut yourself diving?" "Yes. I am clumsy, as you have learned." He thought that was rather good. "But you make amends nicely. You're not an American, are you? Where are you from, Spain?" "Yes. A long way from home. Where are you from?" "Baltimore, Ohio, and my name is Mary Smith. It really is! What's yours?" "Fadur." This is excellent progress, he thought. He wondered what kind of body she would bring out of the sand and what kind of preliminaries would be appropriate. "That doesn't sound like a Spanish name -- Fadur," she said. "Spaniards have names with lots of things like de las and ys in them." "Originally I am from distant India." "That explains it." Her expression could not be seen imder her paraphernalia. "We have an Indian colony in Baltimore and I can say without reservation that they're very nice people." He felt that the conversation was getting away from him and wished he'd had time to take the course in Advanced English (Idiomatic, Regional References). "Perhaps we could go to a place and drink whiskey," he suggested, recalling that facet of his indoctrination. "Not whiskey," she said. "I'm a triple sec and quinine girl myself. What kind of place did you have in mind?" She unburied her arms and began to push the sand away. Fadur helped, noticing as he did that the body seemed entirely acceptable. a booth in an overcool, overdim cocktail lounge. She had changed into a pale violet gown whose color made him think of Alfaduriesta's pastureland, where grazed the war animals. The animals were getting disgustingly fat in their idleness. It had been nearly three rotachrons since they'd been saddled and armored in earnest, and then for a short, unsatisfactory conquest. It had lasted barely long enough for Fadur to rise to lance-major. But there had been compensation. Fadur's post-battle prowess among the women of the sacked cities had been noted by his superiors. So when the choice of a young officer for Mission Earth came to be made, Fadur qualified hands down. He was not sure he was capable of achieving the quota set for him, but in the tradition of his service, he was prepared to die, if necessary, trying. So to work, he told himself, sipping the triple sec and quinine water. He found it not unlike the solution he had sometimes put in his eyes with the three-pronged eyedropper to refresh them during battle. Now this was his battle, he thought, looking at the woman from Baltimore, Ohio. She was more than fifteen, he judged by the maturely attractive face, and presumably fatherless. Back of the third eye, two crenellations and a convolution away, Fadur's alarmer sounded. "Pardon me," he said. The alarm was a faint clicking in his skull. He went to a telephone booth, closed the door, dialed Weather and listened instead to the clicking. Reception was terrible. He got the impression of trouble -- even danger -- all right, but the Durien Fathers weren't reaching him with details. He had only a vague sense that they were trying to tell him there was another agent on Earth. But why? To help him? To spy on him to be sure he did his job? Or was it an enemy agent from Tryluria, Myachanacia or Dob? But surely those worlds would not interfere with Alfaduriesta's plans for Earth conquest. They were so many light-eons away, they couldn't care less. Besides, Alfaduriesta had whipped two of them decisively in wars and the third, Myachanacia, was so puny that Fadur had to laugh to think of it making trouble for his great world. He was still laughing when he returned to Mary Smith. "It was my traveling companion from Spain. I had to see if he had need of anything before he leaves for Texas. He needs nothing. He is very happy, having found a beautiful woman." He held her gaze as he sat down, his face becoming serious. "I am very happy, too," he said softly. She smiled encouragingly. "Are you here for business or pleasure, Mr. Fadur?" "Business," he said. "But perhaps pleasure will also enter into it." Fadur wasn't sure how long it was before she suggested that they move on. He hadn't yet adjusted to Earth time. He did know he'd given the waiter a number of the green paper rectangles the paternal disguiser had provided and received some metal disks in return. Mary Smith had helped him with the money, as it was called, and expressed surprise that he had so many with pictures of a bearded man named Grant. The place they moved on to was Mary's apartment.--very well, he thought. Mary sat on a couch and, by degrees, Fadur relaxed until his head was in her lap. She was tracing the outlines of his face with pleasantly tickling fingertips when things began to go wrong. "Must you wear that bandage?" she asked. "Yes. It is an ugly cut." "Then let me change the dressing for you. I used to be a student nurse." "No!" He sat Upright. She must be the spy the clickings had warned him about. "Oh, come on. It won't take a minute." "No!" He stood and backed away. She got up and came toward him and he bolted out the door, his third eye throbbing under the. bandage. He came out blinking into the street, surprised to find it was still daylight. This heartened him and he took a relatively deep breath, being careful not to strain the alien clothing too far. He might still be able to make a start on his mission today. He must, in fact, for his morale's sake. Fadur's two-thirds vision didn't see the convertible racing down the street. It flung him to the ground as brakes squealed. Three young men piled out of the car and helped him to his feet, feeling for broken bones. There were none, but they said they'd take him to a hospital just in case. Within seconds, he was in the back seat, being raced away. Two of the men sat in the front, not talking. The third was in the back with Fadur, looking at him solicitously. "That was a nasty spill," he said. "You must be a mass of bruises." "Actually, no," Fadur said. "I am really not hurt." "Nothing serious. I'm sure. We're all medical students, as a matter of fact, and we'd know. But it's always best to let the hospital have a look." "I should prefer not to," Fadur said as firmly as he could without seeming rude. "I assure you there is nothing wrong." The medical student conferred with his companions in the front seat. "All right, if you're sure," the driver said. "But I think we ought to keep an eye on you for a while. We were just going for a drive. Why don't you come along?" "Delighted," Fadur agreed politely, though he should have been getting on with his mission. Now if they had been three young women... As they left the city behind, the car spurted ahead. Fadur relaxed in the back seat and breathed the fine clean wind -- which gradually loosened his bandage and then blew it away. The man from Alfaduriesta did not notice immediately how the scenery sharpened for him as three-thirds vision returned. Not until his companions, one after another, stared at him did he realize he had been unmasked. He clapped a palm over the eye in his forehead. With his other eyes, he awaited the reactions of the three young men. At least they had not turned away in disgust. He was grateful for that.  I "HE convertible slowed, then stopped at the side of the road. The driver turned in his seat. His tone was almost conversational. "I did see a third eye in your forehead, didn't I?" "Yes," Fadur said warily. Useless to deny it. His other eyes watched them. He was prepared to fight them like the warrior he was if they even suspected he was an alien bent on conquest of their world. "You poor guy. So that's why you wore the bandage. What you need is an operation." "An operation?" "To remove the third eye. Make you look like everybody else." "Maybe he doesn't want to look like everybody else, Ben," the man next to the driver said. "Maybe that third eye is his living. You with the circus up at Sarasota?" "No," said Fadur. He was glad he wouldn't have to fight these friendly people who not only did not suspect him but were anxious to help him. They might be useful. Slowly he moved his hand away from the third eye. The medical students looked at it with professional interest. Asking his permission, they took turns examining it. Fadur decided on frankness. Not much, but enough to appeal to them on a plane which they, as virile young men, would understand. "With three eyes, I can see the young ladies much better," he explained, "but they do not choose to see me." "That's rough," the man next to him said. "That really is. We ought to do something about that. You ought to, Ben. You're the one who's going to be the plastic surgeon." Ben frowned and examined the eye again. "Hell of a series of operations. But a little cosmetic disguise for a one-night stand -- a snap!" "Do you mean it would not be difficult?" Fadur asked. "That I could perhaps disguise the eye myself?" "Easy," Ben said, "once I showed you how." He turned to the others. "Men, it's a time for action. I propose that we make amends for running him down by guaranteeing him a girl tonight." "Hear, hear," the others said. "I therefore further propose that we head back to the hospital for the necessary materials, then to the beer store for the necessary beer, then to my apartment. And when our friend is fixed up eyewise, we'll fix him up further with one of the pleasantest little babes he ever laid two or more eyes on." #TON'T put all the alcohol in the punch, George," Ben said. "We need some of it for Faddy's cosmetology." The fact that Fadur's third eye was set deep in its socket made it relatively easy to disguise. Fadur, who had resigned himself to answering to Faddy or Fade, watched his mirror image closely as the work progressed. He asked an occasional question and was allowed to do some of the job. As Ben worked on him, the other two medical students prepared for the party. George and Ralph had already used the telephone and four young ladies were on tap. Ralph was to fetch them in the convertible as soon as Ben was satisfied that Fadur would pass inspection. "For Pete's sake, don't get the colloid mixed up with the calves' brains!" Ben yelled at George, who was puttering at the buffet. "Faddy, work in some more of that pigment. That's it. Ralph, we're almost finished. You can get the girls now." "Y ou're the doctor," Ralph said. He went. Ben stood back to admire his work. "Now for the finishing touches. It's all built up, but it's still a little grainy. Know what's good for that? Good old pancake makeup. The sins that stuff covers up!" They were having a drink in celebration when Ralph returned with the girls. He introduced them to Fadur; Marie, Lily, Taffy and Joyce. They were all quite acceptable, Fadur thought, but Taffy seemed to him to be the most exciting. He was pleased when the boys told him she had been invited especially for him. She had a better figure than the other girls and her hair was long, unlike the boyish cuts of the others. He especially liked the heavy bangs that fell across her forehead. He also liked the friendly way she took his arm and her laughter as they helped themselves at the buffet. He found that he was quite hungry and was glad to see her eat well, too. In fact, everything she did made him feel at home. He looked at the other men to smile his thanks to them for what they had done, especially Ben, and they grinned back and nodded. Wonderful people, he thought. What a pity he and his ten thousand sons must one day make war on them. It was ironic that their kindndss to him would be the means by which Alfaduriesta would bring them to their knees, but war is full of ironies. The mission was going well at last. He was confident that the friendly Taffy would also be kind to him and thus be the first to help him fill his quota. Everything about the party -- the falling level of the punch bowl, the gradual putting out of lights -- was leading in that direction. The last lamp winked out. There were a few laughs, then silence. Taffy's body was soft against his. This was the moment, the first of ten thousand. He was about to guide her to an unoccupied comer he had strategically noted earlier -- when all the lights came on, blindingly. The nubile Taffy was holding a weapon aimed directly at his hidden third eye. He blinked the other two in surprise. The other girls had gone, but the three men were there, each with a pistol trained on him. we introduce ourselves? You are -- " "Fadur, a traveler from India." He sought to brazen it out, but in spite of himself, he inhaled and his chest expanded threateningly. "None of that," Ben warned. "It just makes you a bigger target, Lance-Major Fadur of Alfaduriesta." Ralph was grinning. "First intergalactic spy," he said, "and a rather stupid one." Fadur's chest deflated. The DuT# rien Fathers had really goofed. "Who are you?" he asked miserably. "No harm in telling you now, Lance-Major. I'm Ben Haskill of C.I.A. This is Ralph Peddiford of M.I.# and this is Georgi Rakov of Red Army Intelligence." "But how -- ?" Fadur began. Surely he had not given himself away. He had been so careful. "You had the misfortune to come to Earth during the International Geophysical Year," Ben told him, "when every telescope in the world was tracking the artificial satellites. You were under surveillance from the minute you entered Earth's atmosphere." Fadur felt numb. "Who is the girl?" "You should know better than we. She's from your system, not ours." Taffy, smiling insultingly, lifted the bangs he had admired so. From the middle of her forehead, a third eye gleamed triumphantly at him. "You're not from Alfadurie.sta!" Fadur cried. "We have no traitors among us." "Not Alfaduriesta," the girl said. She took a deep breath and her bosom swelled magnificently. "It's good to be oneself again. I am Tafi. of Myachanacia, tiie planet of women. You Invaded and sacked Tryluria and Dob, but you never dared attack Myachanacia. You knew we'd swallow you up." "Ridiculous! Alfaduriesta fears no one." "Except us," Tafi said. "You knew that if your soldiers carried on at Myachanacia in their usual way, you'd leave us with the strain we needed to make us great. You did not dare supply the missing gene whose absence has kept our men weak and our courageous women not quite strong enough. But now we have you, Lance-Major Fadur." XT ER meaning was unmistakable. Fadur appealed to his fellow males. "I plead extraterritoriality. You can't let her kidnap me and -- It's humiliating." "We have no jurisdiction over you," Ben Haskill told him. "Tafi has. She came to us openly and brought a warrant. Our governments have consulted and agreed to honor it. It seems only justice. Besides, none of our countries wants any part of your ten thousand three-eyed babies. We happen to be prejudiced in favor of two." "Don't let her take me! I'll do anything you say. I'll be good!" "You'd better be," Tafi said. "Because on Myachanacia, your quota won't be a mere ten thousand. According to your reputation, that should be a fitting life sentence." As Fadur was herded to Tafi's spaceship, there was a clicking in his skull. Then, for the first time since he had left, Alfaduriesta was in clear contact. "Lance-Major Fadur, attention to orders," the message said. "Return immediately. Operation Earth canceled. Reason : potential threat from Myachanacia, where our agent reports plans for secret weapon posing ultimate invasion." Fadur supposed he should feel flattered. His chest expanded a bit as he looked sideways at the beautiful Tafi and thought of her starved sisters. What the stupid Durien Fathers didn't know, but what Fadur knew all too well, was that he wag the secret weapon. ing that we're in for servomechanism trouble unless we prove a lot smarter than we have been in related matters. Don't, he insists, invoke the worried wisdom of the ancients and the jauntily cockeyed knowledge of mariners, pilots and drivers of all sorts! Though the experience of these advance agents with cybernetics ranges from zero to somewhat, it is generally sad and points invariably to caution. And their calamitous histories add up to this innocent-seeming conclusion, which proves to be a nerve-snapping threat; A spaceship should be a darb, a smasher, a pip, a beaut... but man all battle stations if it ever becomes a sweetheart of a ship! Jim Harmon, a man with a Vesuvius of a talent that, we predict, is good if that's what he is, has no qualms about admitting that he doesn't know whether he is coming or going... but he does know that if he sticks to the old man, he is a comer... even if the old man is a goner! years old -- in an excitingly new way. So you think you know dinosaurs, do you? Don't be sure, for Ley is bound to prove most of it downright misinformation... but then, after showing why it is wrong, he sets it right with vivid clarity. I#T Robert A. Heinlein. Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y. # a juvenile, you're going to miss out on an engrossing yarn. A pair of identical twins are the protagonists, selected by the Long Range Foundation, a nonprofit organization that takes on projects that no other agency will tackle due to excessive expense or poor immediate return on investment. Along with other twins, also latent telepaths, the protagonist pair are trained as communicators for the first star ships. Experiments have shown that telepathy is instantaneous, a discovery that opens interstellar travel to Man. Tom Bartlett, the narrator, is the lesser half of the set. Pat, the more aggressive twin, is obviously the choice for the team half who is to be enshipped, so Tom will remain Earthbound, aging while his counterpart remains youthful in Einstein time. The thing to remember, however, is that Heinlein is always logical but never obvious, even in his juveniles. The plot twists will take you by surprise and the characterizations will delight you. I say "you" because, if you don't battle your youngun for first look, you may never get it out of his clutches. House, N. Y., # # S I write this, the Air Force has just fired the first experimental rocket of the satellite program from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If not for this, the book would seem to be merely the tardy latest of the spate of satellite books that have appeared since the government program announcement. Instead, some of the information is new and most of the remainder is an interesting resume of material found elsewhere. Of course, that is a fault to be pinned on any but the first book concerning about any subject. Unfortunately, the most gripping information by far cannot be written for security reasons. I can wait for it -- but not patiently. Simon and Schuster, N.Y., # fan since "World of the Red Sun," and both of us would hate to admit how long that is. His present collection of eleven short stories contains some of the best writing he's done, as well as a couple of pot-boilers that some dastard sneaked in. "Kindergarten," "Beachhead" and "Skirmish" are all topnotch, the former from these pages. As his admirers know by now, Simak can run a gamut as well as anyone in the field, both in subject matter and treatment. The book demonstrates just how much ground he can cover, which is darn near a Decathlon. Walker. Franklin Watts, Inc., # ' Walker except that people talk to him. However, those people are very frequently interesting and newsworthy. According to him, quite a few have had most unusual encounters with the supernatural that would ordinarily go unrecorded. To save these yarns from oblivion. Walker has secured permission to quote these notable sources, unlikely ones such as Mae West, a most earthy person; Burl Ives, substantial indeed; Ida Lupino, Dorothy Massey, etc. The episodes are all concise and understated and, as a result, come out quite credible. Theodore Sturgeon. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # collection in # and, since Sturgeon has never appeared to more horrible disadvantage, Ballantine is to be commended for making the book presentable. The keynote of the volume is horror and very few fantasists today can hold a taper to Sturgeon when he gets a mood on. "The Professor's Teddy-Bear," "Fluffy" and "A Way of Thinking" have as many shudders packed into their few pages as most full-length weird novels. As change of pace, and thoroughly absorbing in their own rights, two fairy stories are added, "The Silken-Swift" and "The World Well Lost." This is fine off-trail Sturgeon, but what Sturgeon isn't? ward Rowe Snow. Dodd, Mead  Co., N. Y., #  sea as source material from the days of Verne, down to last year's Dragon in the Sea and the vious that the sea has always taxed Man's ingenuity and remains far from conquered even today. Snow has become a foremost chronicler of true stories of the deeps -- this volume follows twenty-odd predecessors. It deals with some of the most astonishing true-fact shipwrecks imaginable. The Snow of the future, dramatizing spaceship disasters, will have to come up with really flamboyant cases to outdo these true sea calamities. by Philip Wilding. Philosophical Library, N. Y., #  improvement in his next effort as he does in this over Spaceflight -- Venus, he should reach the level that S-F touched a quarter of a century ago. It is remarkable that the same publishers who have been responsible for such excellent non-fiction English-printed volumes can do no better than this fifth-rate novel. With the high level of English S-F what it is, it must take extreme effort by the editors to avoid the good fiction available. by R. DeWitt Miller. Citadel Press, N. Y., # many articles on psychical research as well as his fictional efforts. For a considerable time, he conducted the monthly "Forgotten Mysteries" feature in Coronet. He is a very compelling writer, wisely using disclaimers and understatements. The point he makes is that we are the ones who live outside the "larger reality." Edwards. Citadel Press, N. Y., # you thought you mistook the name for -- the radio and TV commentator who became famous what one would expect from such a solid, mundane background. Edwards has collected strange data in the fashion of Charles Fort, but has presented his book in straight reportorial style. Some of the anecdotes are startling, such as that of the strange motor of John Keely's. Even if it wasn't perpetual motion, the man seems to have had something. Of thirty-five assorted strange tales, over half are new. Others, like the endless speculation over the death of Napoleon, may be the second time around for some of you. Of course, we can be sure that similar guesswork on Hitler's death will also find its way into future volumes like this. May the guesses be no less attention-gripping. ringer. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., N. Y., #  Stone Age," countless similar yarns have seen print, but only a handful have had the stature of this so-called juvenile. Instead of following the familiar pattern of necessity and invention, Barringer strikes out on a new trail, the development of abstract thought. His hero, Andor, is as unlikely a Stone Age hero as possible. He is small, thin and has nothing but a keen mind. The story follows Andor from his early youth, and his success in the Manhood Hunt, through his entire span of life. It records his discovery of the waters of the Atlantic and his realization, requiring reasoning far ahead of his time, that they constituted a threat to his Mediterranean Basin village. Most authors would have ended their story with a battle between Andor and the giant chief, with the nimble wits of Andor saving himself and the entire community. Instead, Andor suffers the bitter frustrations of most visionaries who live before their time. The characterizations are as excellent as the plot structure and background. Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable! F rom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace. Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again. The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled. The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em. Darter, sic 'em!" A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog. Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice: "Kill 'em, Brute."  I ' HE gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merrygo-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard. Butch yawned. "What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights. Butch." "I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy -- and you, too, Hal -- when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?" "That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right. Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?" "I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight. "A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen -- and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj -- it's contraprogrammed." "Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer. "I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail." "What's a garbage pail?" "I don't know, but it sounds great." The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously. "Aw, quit it. Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance. Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight. The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think." face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet "Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?" "How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness. "I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory." "I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended. "Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up -- I want to think." "About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness. The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again." "You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age." "We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't." "Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older." "I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?" "The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses." "But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?" "They can't. It's impossible." "Yes, but suppose they did all the same." "You've never been inside the Time Theater -- you're not old enough yet -- so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff." "I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director." "They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him. "They will not. I won't let 'em." "It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six." "Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?" ' I HE others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there. Butch?" Butch scowled. "How about it. Butch?" Still Butch did not seem to hear. The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it -- Butcher?" The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself." "You could walk us over there." "Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't." "While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy." Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others. Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master. "Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy." "Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them. Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field. Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away. method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress. The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys. "There's the Theater," Joggy announced. "I know," the Butcher said irritably. But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp. "My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting." "Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era. "Wrong millennium," Hal said. "Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies." Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it. Joggy?" "They won't let me in, either." "Yes, they will. You're five years old now." "But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully. "The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference." Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to T# their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier -- like Stalin, maybe, he thought, The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy. Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury. TT AL looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you." The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old." "You won't be able to fool the usher. Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it -- something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside." "Why?" "I don't exactly know, but something." "Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement." "They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it. Butcher. The usher will take care of you." "Shut up -- I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically. Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up. But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily. "Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands." "Of course not," Hal said irritably. "Brute, get over there," the eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead. Brute obeyed. The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall. "I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said. The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force. "I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher." peared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor. "Take it easy. Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow." Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there. The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the closecropped hair of the other. They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them. Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down. The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow. But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys. Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather. Here and there were scattered weapons and armor -- long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony. to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant. "The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a The interpreter continued : "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future." Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right." "The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way -- for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky." Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?" "That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped -- and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it." "I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?" "Why -- er -- you see, Joggy-" The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering." A S IF to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from bloodred to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another longhaired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time. He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag. "More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in. Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other. Had nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!" But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble. "Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?" "Well -- you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's -- " Once more the interpreter helped him out. "The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them." "Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!" "I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?" Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?" "I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?" "But how did you get in -- Butcher?" I ' HE Butcher replied airily : "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse -- I kind of tried to get up and fell down again -- so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher." "Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here." "The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle. The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble. "Those big dogs -- " he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em." "Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and -- " "I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling." "You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a -- uh -- " "I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not spacetime at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling -- just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal. "It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true -- and no evidence for it has ever appeared -- there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction." "Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment. OU'RE rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired. The Butcher folded his arms and scowled. The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatchcrotapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plusage. Enjoy yourself." There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future. "This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat. "Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously. "Hah!" The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer. "That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!" "Butcher!" Hal admonished. Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down. "A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period." In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section. "Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged. Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs. "Oh, boy!" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy. "Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast. "I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it." "Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!" ' I 'HE warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction. Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth. "The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said. A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience. The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand. "I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined. In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter. Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out. "There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient." At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!" The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc. Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step. The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic 'em. Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em. Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth. cally, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight -- and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror. The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out. Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head. "Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!" The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher. "We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in vour seats." Tfia unini"s l"nnd ito the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech. Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers, They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them. "Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.  I 'HE gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out. For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously. "We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience." Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted. "Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men." Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth. He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?" We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! (Continued From Page #) protection, but it has a low survival value in nature, for it lacks a mechanism of seed dispersal... Where, when and how was a species, once so hardy that it could survive in the wild, converted to a cultivated plant so specialized... that it would soon become extinct if deprived of man's help?" The search for the origin of corn is as quietly tense as any private-eye chase. When Columbus landed in America, all the modern types were already in existence. With radio-carbon dating, we know how old corn is -- about # B.C. in South America, about # B.C. in North America. But Mangelsdorf asks: "In what part of America did corn originate? And what kind of wild grass was it that gave rise to the multitude of present-day varieties of corn?" Closest wild relative: teosinte, which grows in Guatemala and Mexico. But hybridizing corn with tripsacum, a more distant relative that grows in North and South America, produces something very much like teosinte. Odds, then, are that teosinte, even though more primitive, is a descendant of corn, not the ancestor! (Byproduct hypothesis: Man may also be the median between a much superior and much inferior breed. Or we may produce Homo stupidus in the future.) Best chance is that corn came from pod corn, which is "more than a relative of corn; it is corn -- a form of corn that differs from cultivated corn in exactly the way a wild species ought to differ." Moviegoers ought to be impressed by the fact that pop corn was eaten so long ago that: "Pottery utensils for popping corn, as well as actual specimens of the popped grains, have been found in prehistoric Peruvian graves." Bat Cave, in New Mexico, has an important lesson for us -- it was occupied from # B.C. to # A.D. and its tenants let six feet of garbage accumulate in the cave. Stratified like soil, the refuse showed corn in "a distinct evolutionary sequence. The oldest, at the bottom... are the smallest and most primitive." Modern sanitation is thus a hindrance to future archeologists. Time capsules are just what we think they might be interested in, whereas it may be something as mundane to us as corn was to the Bat Cave people. Pessimistic writers, seeing only ill ahead, might note this fact: "The pressure of natural selection... was greatly reduced" in the development of corn, resulting in a far more valuable plant than its ancestors, whose only virtue was self-preservation. y  Looking For Us, Professor?  Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation, Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely, what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way. Professor. Suppose we ask questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!"  Galaxy Lulu by , #  by Confidence Game by L y Can you think faster than this Machine? sot op to do a problem In i pa co ship engineering Be careful before you answer. construction kit is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and encipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. Specific problems in a variety of fields -- actuarial, policy claim settlement, physics. etc., can be set up and solved with the components. Connections are solderless and are completely explained with templates in the manual. This covers # circuits and shows how new ones can be designed. You will find building and using one kit user wrote us: "this kit has opened up a new world of thinking to me." You actually see how computing, problem solving, and game play (Tic-tac-toe, nim, etc.) can be analyzed with Boolean Algebra and the algebraic solutions transformed directly into circuit diagrams. You create from over # specially designed and manufactured components a machine that solves problems faster than you can express them. Schools and colleges, teachers of science or math, engineering, philosophy or psychology will find tnese excellent demonstrators of circuitry, solutions in symbolic logic, theory of numbers, cybernetics, and automation. Note: Teachers take advantage of our # discount to educational insituations and for group purchases. Only # with over four hundred components and parts, fully illustrated manual and wiring diagrams. We guarantee that if you do not want to can return it for full refund plus shipping costs. Oliver Garfield # Lexington Ave., N. Y. #, N. Y. Please send me: Kit and Manual. # (East of Mississippi) # (Elsewhere in United States) # (Outside the United States Returnable In seven day for full refund if not satisfied. I enclose    in full payment. My name and address are attached. Each Wednesday nite on Radio! Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction.  X-#The choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N.B.C. galaxy Tribes of the Dinosaurs #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #. by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. serial, Slave Ship, appeared here, readers have wanted to know whether he was imagining things in using communication with animals as the main theme. His explanation, incorporated in the book published by Ballantine, should clear up the problem: "It is not the business of a science fiction writer to record matters of contemporary fact or scientific truths which have already been discovered. It is his business to take what is already known and, by extrapolating from it, draw as plausibly detailed a portrait as he can manage of what tomorrow's scientists may learn... and of what the human race in its day-to-day life may make of it all. "Since not all of Slave Ship's scientific elements are 'extrapolations,' it seems worthwhile to set down a rough guide to which is which. To the best of the author's knowledge, no human being since Dr. Doolittle has been able to conduct a conversation on any abstract subject with any creature or thing other than another human being. However, animal languages do exist -- not merely among the geniuses of the animal kingdom, such as primates and dogs, but as far down among the phyla as one cares to go... Bees have been clearly demonstrated to communicate with sets of signals. If one allows only a 'spoken' language, we turn to the frog, perhaps the lowest animal to have a voice at all: A species of frog from Santo Domingo owns at least one 'word,' a sort of pigsqueal alarm cry utterly different from its normal barking sound. "Progressing to higher orders, Dr. Konrad V. Lorenz is perfectly able to communicate, on such matters as would interest them, with mallards and with greylag geese, among others. His command of Jackdaw includes such subtleties as the two forms of the verb "to fly' -- Kia, to fly away; Kiaw, to fly back home. Other persons, working with other birds, have achieved successes of their own. Ernest Thompson Seton recorded a long list of 'words' in Crow; a scientist prepared a seven word 'dictionary' of Rooster, etc. "When we come to the mammals, we might expect to find considerable increases both in the number of 'words' and in the sophistication with which they are used... It is true that domestic animals (particularly when they ( Continued on page #) k Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation, Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way. Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!" HE machine was a lulu. That's what we called her: Lulu. And that was our big mistake. Not the only one we made, of course, but it was the first, and maybe if we hadn't called her Lulu, it might have been all right. a Planetary Exploration Robot. She was a combination spaceship base of operationssynthesizer analyzercommunicator. And other things besides. Too many other things besides. That was the trouble with her. i A spaceship should be a darb, a smasher, a pip, a beaut . , . but man all battle stations if it ever becomes a sweetheart of a ship! Actually, there was no reason for us to go along with Lulu. As a matter of fact, it probably would have been a good deal better if we hadn't. She could have done the planet-checking without any supervision. But there were rules which said a robot of her class must be attended by no fewer than three humans. And, naturally, there was some prejudice against turning loose, all by itself, a robot that had taken almost twenty years to build and To give her her due, she was an all-but-living wonder. She was loaded with sensors that dug more information out of a planet in an hour than a full human survey crew could have gotten in a month. Not only could she get the data, but she correlated it and coded it and put in on the tape, then messaged the information back to Earth Center without a pause for breath. Without a pause for breath, of course -- she was just a dumb machine. Did I say dumb? She wasn't in any single sense. She could even talk to us. She could and did. She talked all the blessed time. And she listened to every word we said. She read over our shoulders and kibitzed on our poker. There were times cept you can't kill a robot -- that is, a self-maintaining one. Anyand was the only thing that could bring us back to Earth. Q HE took good care of us. That  no one could deny. She synthesized our food and cooked it and served our meals to us. She saw that the temperature and humidity were just the way they should be. She washed and pressed our clothes and she doctored us if we had need of it, like the time Ben got the sniffles and she whipped up a bottle of some sort of gook that cured him overnight There were just the three of us -- Jimmy Robins, our communications man; Ben Parris, a robotic trouble-shooter; and myself, an interpreter -- which, incidentally, had nothing to do with languages. We called her Lulu and we never should have done that After this, no one is ever going to hang a name on any of those long-haired robots; they'll just have to get along with numbers. When Earth Center hears what happened to us, they'll probably make it a capital offense to repeat our mistake. But the thing, I think, that really lit the candles was that Jimmy had poetry in his soul. It was pretty awful poetry and about the only thing that could be said of it was that it sometimes rhymed. Not always even that. But he worked at it so hard and earnestly that neither Ben nor I at first had the heart to tell him. It would have done no good even if we had. There probably would have been no way of stopping him short of strangulation. We should have strangled him. And landing on Honeymoon didn't help, of course. But that was out of our control. It was the third planet on our assignment sheet and it was our job to land there -- or, rather, it was Lulu's job. We just tagged along. The planet wasn't called Honeymoon to start with. It just had a charting designation. But we weren't there more than a day or two before we hung the label on it. I'm no prude, but I refuse to describe Honeymoon. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Earth Center by now has placed our report und;r lock and key. If you are curious, though, you might write and ask them for the exploratory data on ER#-#. It wouldn't hurt to ask. They can't do more than say no. Lulu did a bang-up job on Honeymoon and I beat out my brains running the tapes through the playback mechanism after Lulu had put them on the transmitter to be messaged back to Earth. As an interpreter, I was supposed to make some sense -- some human sense, I mean -- out of the goings-on of any planet that we checked. And don't imagine for a moment that the phrase goings-on is just idle terminology in the case of Honeymoon. The reports are analyzed as soon as they reach Earth Center. But there are, after all, some advantages to arriving at an independent evaluation in the field. I'm afraid I wasn't too much help. My evaluation report boiled down essentially to the equivalent of a surprised gasp and a blush. and headed out in space, with Lulu homing in on the next planet on the sheet. Lulu was unusually quiet, which should have tipped us off that there was something wrong. But we were so relieved to have her shut up for a while that we never questioned it. We just leaned back and reveled in it Jimmy was laboring on a poem that wasn't coming off too well and Ben and I were in the middle of a blackjack game when Lulu broke her silence. "Good evening, boys," she said, and her voice seemed a bit offkey, not as brisk and efficient as it usually was. I remember thinking that maybe the audio units had somehow gotten out of kilter. Jimmy was all wrapped up in his poem, and Ben was trying to decide if he should ask me to hit him or stand with what he had, and neither of them answered. So I said, "Good evening, Lulu. How are you today?" "Oh, I'm fine," she said, her "That's wonderful," I said, and hoped she'd let it go at that. "I've just decided," Lulu informed me, "that I love you." "It's nice of you to say so," I replied, "and I love you, too." "But I mean it," Lulu insisted. "I have it all thought out I'm in love with you." "Which one of us?" I asked. "Who is the lucky man?" Just kidding, you understand, but also a little puzzled, for Lulu was no jokester. "All three of you," said Lulu. I'm afraid I yawned. "Good idea. That way, there'll be no jealousy." "Yes," said Lulu. "I'm in love with you and we are eloping." Ben looked up, startled, and I asked, "Where are we eloping to?" "A long way off," she said. "Where we can be alone." "My God!" yelled Ben. "Do you really think -- " I shook my head. "I don't think so. There is something wrong, but -- " Ben rose so swiftly to his feet that he tipped the table and sent the whole deck of cards spinning to the floor. "I'll go and see," he said. Jimmy looked up from his tablet. "What's going on?" "You and your poetry!" I described his poetry in a rather bitter manner. "I'm in love with you," said Lulu. "I'll love you forever. I'll take good care of you and I'll make you see how much I really love you and someday you'll love me -- " "Oh, shut up!" I said. B EN came back sweating. "We're way off course and the emergencies are locked." "Can we -- " He shook his head. "If you ask me. Lulu jammed them intentionally. In that case, we're sunk. We'll never get back." "Lulu," I said sternly. "Yes, darling." "Cut out that kind of talk!" "I love you," Lulu said. "It was Honeymoon," said Ben. "The damn place put notions in her head." "Honeymoon," I told him, "and that crummy verse Jimmy's always writing -- " "It's not crummy verse," Jimmy shot back, all burned up. "One day, when I am published -- " "Why couldn't you write about war or hunting or flying in the depths of space or something big and noble, instead of all that mush about how I'll always love you and fly to me, sweetheart, and all the other -- " "Tame down," Ben advised me. "No good crawling up Jimmy's frame. It was mostly Honeymoon, I tell you." "Lulu," I said, "you got to stop this nonsense. You know as well as anything that a machine can't love a human. It's just plain ridiculous." "On Honeymoon," said Lulu, "there were different species that -- " "Forget Honeymoon. Honeymoon's a freak. You could check other like it." "I love you," Lulu repeated obstinately, "and we are eloping." "Where'd she get that eloping stuff?" asked Ben. "It's the junk they filled her up with back on Earth," I said. "It wasn't junk," protested Lulu. "If I am to do my job, it's necessary that I have a wide and varied insight into humanity." "They read her novels," Jimmy said, "and they told her about the facts of life. It's not Lulu's fault." "When I get back," said Ben, "I'm going to hunt up the jerk who picked out those novels and jam them down his throat and then mop up the place with him ." "Look, Lulu," I said, "it's all right if you love us. We don't mind at all, but don't you think eloping is going too far?" "I'm not taking any chances," Lulu answered. "If I went back to Earth, you'd get away from me." "And if we don't go back, they'll come out and hunt us down." "That's exactly right," Lulu agreed. "That's the reason, sweetheart, that we are eloping. We're going out so far that they'll never find us." "I'll give you one last chance," I said. "You better think it over. If you don't, I'll message back to Earth and -- " "You can't message Earth," she said. "The circuits have been disconnected. And, as Ben guessed. I've jammed all emergencies. There's nothing you can do. Why don't you stop this foolishness and return my love?" on his hands and knees, Ben began to pick up the cards. Jimmy tossed his tablet on the desk. "This is your big chance," I told him. 'Why don't you rise to the occasion? Think what an ode you could indite about the ageless and eternal love between Machine and Man." "Go chase yourself," said Jimmy. "Now, boys," Lulu scolded us. "I will not have you fighting over me." She sounded like she already owned us and, in a way, she did. There was no way for us to get away from her, and if we couldn't talk her out of this eloping business, we were through for sure. "There's just one thing wrong with all of this," I said to her. "By your standards, we won't live long. In another fifty years or less, no matter how well you may take care of us, we'll be dead. Of old age, if nothing else. What will happen then?" "She'll be a widow," said Ben. "Just a poor old weeping widow without chick or child to bring her any comfort." "I have thought of that," Lulu replied. "I have thought of everything. There's no reason you should die." "But there's no way -- " "With a love as great as mine, there's nothing that's impossible. I won't let you die. I love you too much ever to let you die." We gave up after a while and went to bed and Lulu turned off the lights and sang us a lullaby. With her squalling this lullaby, there was no chance of sleeping and we all yelled at her to dry up and let us get to sleep. But she paid no attention to us until Ben threw one of his shoes at the audio. Even so, I didn't go to sleep right away, but lay there thinking. I could see that we had to make some plans and we had to make them without her knowing it. That was going to be tough, because she watched us all the time. She kibitzed and she listened and she read over our shoulders and there wasn't anything we did or said that she didn't know about. I knew that it might take quite a while and that we must not panic and that we must have patience and that, more than likely, we'd be just plain lucky if we got out of it at all. After we had slept, we sat around, not saying much, listening to Lulu telling us how happy we would be and how we'd be a complete world and a whole life in ourselves and how love canceled out everything else and made it small and petty. Half of the words she used were from Jimmy's sappy verse and the rest of it was from the slushy novels that someone back on Earth had read her. I would have got up right then and there and beat Jimmy to a pulp, only I told myself that what was done was done and it wouldn't help us any to take it out on him. one corner, scribbling on his tablet, and I wondered how he had the guts to keep on writing after what had happened. He kept writing and ripping off sheets and throwing them on the floor, making disgusted sounds every now and then. One sheet he tossed away landed in my lap, and when I went to brush it off, I caught the words on it: I'm an untidy cuss, rm always in a muss, And no one ever loves me Because I'm a sloppy Gus. I picked it up quick and crumpled it and tossed it at Ben and he batted it away. I tossed it back at him and he batted it away again. "What the hell you trying to do?" he snapped. I hit him in the face with it and he was just starting to get up to paste me when he must have seen by my look that this wasn't just horseplay. So he picked up the wad of paper and began fooling with it until he got it unwrapped enough to see what was written on it. Then he crumpled it again. couldn't talk it over. And we must not be too obvious, because then she might suspect. We went at it gradually, perhaps more gradually than there was any need, but we had to be casual about it and we had to be convincing. We were convincing. Maybe we were just natural-born slobs, but before a week had ended, our living quarters were a boar's nest. We strewed our clothes around. We didn't even bother to put them in the laundry chute so Lulu could wash them for us. We left the dishes stacked on the table instead of putting them in the washer. We knocked out our pipes upon the floor. We failed to shave and we didn't brush our teeth and we skipped our baths. Lulu was fit to be tied. Her orderly robot intellect was outraged. She pleaded with us and she nagged at us and there were times she lectured us, but we kept on strewing things around. We told her if she loved us, she'd have to put up with our messiness and take us as we are. After a couple of weeks of it, we won, but not the way we had intended. Lulu told us, in a hurt and resigned voice, she'd go along with us if it pleased us to live like pigs. Her love, she said, was too big a thing to let a small matter like mere personal untidiness interfere with it. So it was no good. I, for one, was rather glad of it Years of spaceship routine revolted against this kind of life and I don't know how much more of it I could have stood. It was a lousy idea to start with. ourselves clean and it was possible once again to pass downwind of one another. Lulu was pleased and happy and she told us so and cooed over us and it was worse than all the nagging she had done. She thought we'd been touched by her making it up to her and she sounded like a high school girl who had been invited by her hero to the Junior Prom. Ben tried some plain talk with her and he told her some facts of life (which she already knew, of course) and tried to impress upon her the part that the physical factor played in love. Lulu was insulted, but not enough to bust off the romance and get back to business. She told us, in a sorrowful voice tinged by the slightest anger, that we had missed the deeper meaning of love. She went on to quote some of Jimmy's more gooey verse about the nobility and the purity of love, and there was nothing we could do about it. We were just plain licked. So we sat around and thought and we couldn't talk about it because Lulu would hear everything we said. We didn't do anything for several days but just mope around. As far as I could see, there was nothing we could do. I ran through my mind all the things a man might do to get a woman sore at him. Most women would get burned up at gambling. But the only reason they got sore at that was because it was a threat to their security. Here that threat could not possibly exist. Lulu was entirely self-sufficient. We were no breadwinners. Most women would get sore at excessive drinking. Security again. And, besides, we had not a thing to drink. Some women raised hell if a man stayed away from home. We had no place to go. All women would resent another woman. And here there were no women -- no matter what Lulu thought she was. There was no way, it seemed, to get Lulu sore at us. And arguing with her simply did no good. I lay in bed and ran through all the possibilities, going over them again and again, trying to find a chink of hope in one of them. By reciting and recounting them, I might suddenly happen on one that I'd never thought of, and that might be the one that would do the job. And even as I turned these things over in my head, I knew there was something wrong with the way I had been thinking. I knew there was some illogic in the way I was tackling the problem -- that somehow I was going at it tail-end to. I lay there and thought about it and I mauled it considerably and, all at once, I had it as if Lulu were a woman, and when you thought about it, that didn't make much sense. For Lulu was no 'woman, but just a robot. The problem was: How do you make a robot sore? The untidiness business had upset her, but it had just outraged her sense of rightness; it was something she could overlook and live with. The trouble with it was that it wasn't basic. And what would be basic with a robot -- with any machine, for that matter? What would a machine value? What would it idealize? Order? No, we'd tried that one and it hadn't worked. Sanity? Of course. What else? Productiveness? Usefulness? I tossed insanity around a bit, but it was too hard to figure out How in the name of common sense would a man go about pretending that he was insane -- especially in a limited space inside an all-knowing intelligent machine? But just the same, I lay there and dreamed up all kinds of insanities. If carried out, they might have fooled people, but not a robot With a robot, you had to get down to basics and what, I wondered, was the fundamental of insanity? Perhaps the true horror of insanity, I told myself, would become apparent to a robot only when it interfered with usefulness. And that was it! I turned it around and around and looked at it from every angle. It was airtight Even to start with, we hadn't been much use. We'd just come along because Earth Center had rules about sending Lulu out alone. But we represented a certain potential usefulness. We did things. We read books and wrote terrible poetry and played cards and argued. There wasn't much of the time we just sat around. That's a trick you learn in space -- keep busy doing something, no matter what it is, no matter how piddling or purposeless. In the morning, after breakfast, when Ben wanted to play cards, I said no, I didn't want to play. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall; I didn't even bother to sit in a chair. I didn't smoke, for smoking was doing something and I was determined to be as utterly inactive as a living man could manage. I didn't intend to do a blessed thing except eat and sleep and sit. T EN prowled around some and tried to get Jimmy to play a hand or two, but Jimmy wasn't much for cards and, anyhow, he was busy with a poem. So Ben came over and sat on the floor beside me. "Want a smoke?" he asked, offering me his tobacco pouch. I shook my head. "What's the matter? You haven't had your after-breakfast smoke." "What's the use?" I said. He tried to talk to me and I wouldn't talk, so he got up and paced around some more and finally came back and sat down beside me again. "What's the trouble with you two?" Lulu troubledly wanted to know. "Why aren't you doing something?" "Don't feel like doing anything," I told her. "Too much bother to be doing something all the time." She berated us a bit and I didn't dare look at Ben, but I felt sure that he began to see what I was up to. After a while, Lulu left us alone and the two of us just sat Sunday afternoon. Jimmy kept on with his poem. There was nothing we could do about him. But Lulu called his attention to us when we dragged ourselves to lunch. She was just a little sharper than she had been earlier and she called us lazy, which we surely were, and wondered about our health and made us step into the diagnosis booth, which reported we were fine, and that got her more burned up than ever. She gave us a masterly chewing out and listed all the things there were for us to occupy our time. So when lunch was over, Ben and I went back and sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. This time, Jimmy joined us. Try sitting still for days on end, doing absolutely nothing. At first it's uncomfortable, then it's torture, and finally it gets to be almost intolerable. I don't know what the others did, but I made up complex mathematical problems and tried to solve them. I started mental chess game after chess game, but was never able to hold one in my mind beyond a dozen moves. I went clean back to childhood and tried to recreate, in sequence, everything I had ever done or experienced. I delved into strange areas of the imagination and hung onto them desperately to string them out and kill all the time I could. I even composed some poetry and, if I do say so myself, it was better than that junk of Jimmy's. guessed what we were doing, must have known that our attitude was deliberate, but for once her cold robotic judgment was outweighed by her sense of outrage that there could exist such useless hulks as us. She pleaded with us, she cajoled us, she lectured us -- for almost five days hand-running, she never shut her yap. She tried to shame us. She told us how worthless and lowdown and no-account we were and she used adjectives that I didn't think she knew. She gave us pep talks. She told us of her love in prose poems that made Jimmy's sound almost restrained. She appealed to our manhood and the honor of humanity. She threatened to heave us out in space. We just sat there. We didn't do a thing. Mostly we didn't even answer. We didn't try to defend ourselves. At times we agreed with all she said of us and that, I believe, was most infuriating of all to her. She got cold and distant Not sore. Not angry. Just icy. Finally she quit talking. We sat, sweating it out. Now came the hard part We couldn't talk, so we couldn't try to figure out together what was going on. We had to keep on doing nothing. Had to, for it would have spoiled whatever advantage we might have. The days dragged on and nothing happened. Lulu didn't speak to us. She fed us, she washed the dishes, she laundered, she made up the bunks. She took care of us as she always had, but she did it without a word. She sure was fuming. A dozen crazy thoughts crossed my mind and I worried them to tatters. Maybe Lulu was a woman. Maybe a woman's brain was somehow welded into that great hunk of intelligent machinery. After all, none of us knew the full details of Lulu's structure. The brain of an old maid, it would have to be, so often disillusioned, so lonely and so bypassed in life that she would welcome a chance to go adventuring even if it meant sacrificing a body which, probably, had meant less and less to her as the years went by. I built up quite a picture of my hypothetical old maid, complete with cat and canary, and even the boarding house in which she lived. I sensed her lonely twilight walks and her aimless chattering and her small imaginary triumphs and the hungers that kept building up inside her. And I felt sorry for her. Fantastic? Of course. But it helped to pass the time. TUT there was another notion that really took solid hold of me -- that Lulu, beaten, had finally given up and was taking us back to Earth, but that, womanlike, she refused to give us the satisfaction and comfort of knowing that we had won and were going home at last. I told myself over and over that it was impossible, that after the kind of shennanigans she'd pulled, Lulu wouldn't dare go back. They'd break her up for scrap. But the idea persisted and I couldn't shake it off. I knew I must be wrong, but I couldn't convince myself I was and I began to watch the chronometer. I'd say to myself, "One hour nearer home, another hour and yet another and we are that much closer." And no matter what I told myself, no matter how I argued, I became positive that we were heading Earthward. So I was not surprised when Lulu finally landed. I was just grateful and relieved. We looked at one another and I saw the hope and question in the others' eyes. Naturally, none of us could ask. One word might have ruined our victory. All we could do was stand there silently and wait for the answer. The port began to open and I got the whiff of Earth and I didn't fool around waiting any more. There wasn't room enough as yet to get out standing up, so I took a run at it and dived and went through slick and clean. I hit the ground and got a lot of breath knocked out of me, but I scrambled to my feet and lit out of there as fast as I could go. I wasn't taking any chances. I didn't want to be within reach if Lulu changed her mind. Once I stumbled and almost fell, and Ben and Jimmy went past me with a whoosh, and I told myself that I'd not been mistaken. They'd caught the Earth smell, too. It was night, but there was a big, bright moon and it was almost as light as day. There was an ocean to the left of us, with a wide strip of sandy beach, and, to the right, the land swept up it into barren rolling hills, and right ahead of us was a strip of woods that looked as if it might border some river flowing down into the sea. We legged it for the woods, for we knew that if we got in among the trees, Lulu would have a tough time ferreting us out. But when I sneaked a quick look back over my shoulder, she was just squatting where she'd landed, with the moonlight shining on her. We reached the woods and threw ourselves on the ground and lay panting. It had been quite a stretch of ground to cover and we had covered it fast; after weeks of just sitting, a man is in no condition to do a lot of running. I had fallen face down and just sprawled there, sucking in great gulps of air and smelling the good Earth smell -- old leaf mold and growing things and the tang of salt from the soft and gentle ocean breeze. on my back and looked up. The trees were wrong -- there were no trees like those on Earth -- and when I crawled out to the edge of the woods and looked at the sky, the stars were all wrong, too. My mind was slow in accepting what I saw. I had been so sure that we were on Earth that my brain rebelled against thinking otherwise. But finally it hit me, the chilling terrible knowledge. I went back to the other two. "Gents," I said, "I have news for you. This planet isn't Earth at all" "It smells like Earth," said Ben. "It has the look of Earth." "It feels like Earth," Jimmy argued. "The gravity and the air and -- " "Look at the stars. Take a gander at those trees." They took a long time looking. Like me, they must have gotten the idea that Lulu had zeroed in for home. Or maybe it was only what they wanted to believe. It took a while to knock the wishful thinking out of them, as well as myself. Ben let his breath out slowly. "You're right." "What do we do now?" asked Jimmy. We stood there, thinking about what we should do now. Actually it was no decision, but pure and simple reflex, condion Earth as opposed to only a few hundred in which to get used to the idea that there were different worlds. We started running, as if an order had been given, as fast as we could go. "Lulu!" we yelled. "Lulu, wait for us!" But Lulu didn't wait. She shot straight up for a thousand feet or so and hung there. We skidded to a halt and gaped up at her, not quite believing what we saw. Lulu started to fall back, shot up again, came to a halt and hovered. She seemed to shiver, then sank slowly back until she rested on the ground. We continued running and she shot up and fell back, then shot up once more, then fell back again and hit the ground and hopped. She looked for all the world like a demented yo-yo. She was acting strangely, as if she wanted to get out of there, only there was something that wouldn't let her go, as if she were tethered to the ground by some invisible elastic cable. Finally she came to rest about a hundred yards from where she'd first set down. No sound came from her, but I got the impression she was panting like a winded hound-dog. There was a pile of stuff stacked where Lulu had first landed, but we raced right past it and ran up to her. We pounded on her metal sides. "Open up!" we shouted. "We want to get back in!" about a hundred feet into the air, then plopped back with a thud, not more than thirty feet away. We backed away from her. She could have just as easily come straight down on top of us. We stood watching her, but she didn't move. "Lulu!" I yelled at her. She didn't answer. "She's gone crazy," Jimmy said. "Someday," said Ben, "this was bound to happen. It was a cinch they'd sooner or later build a robot too big for its britches." We backed away from her slowly, watching all the time. We weren't afraid of her exactly, but we didn't trust her either. We backed all the way to the mound of stuff that Lulu had unloaded and stacked up and we saw that it was a pyramid of supplies, all neatly boxed and labeled. And beside the pyramid was planted a stenciled sign that read: Ben said, "She certainly took our worthlessness to heart." Jimmy was close to gibbering. "She was actually going to maroon us!" Ben reached out and grabbed his shoulder and shook him a little -- a kindly sort of shake. "Unless we can get back inside," I said, "and get her operating, we are as marooned as if she had up and left us." "But what made her do it?" Jimmy wailed. "Robots aren't supposed to -- " "I know," said Ben. "They're not supposed to harm a human. But Lulu wasn't harming us. She didn't throw us out We ran away from her." "That's splitting legal hairs," I objected. "Lulu's just the kind of gadget for hair-splitting," Ben said. "Trouble is they made her damn near human. They probably poured her full of a lot of law as well as literature and physics and all the rest of it." "Then why didn't she just leave? If she could whitewash her conscience, why is she still here?" Ben shook his head. "I don't know." "She looked like she tried to leave and couldn't, as though there was something holding her back." "This is just an idea," said Ben. "Maybe she could have left if we had stayed out of sight. But when we showed up, the order that a robot must not harm a human may have become operative again. A sort of out of sight, out of mind proposition." She was still squatting where she'd landed. She hadn't tried to move again. Looking at her, I thought maybe Ben was right If so, it had been a lucky thing that we'd headed back exactly when we did. " the supplies Lulu had left for us. She had done right well by us. Not only had she forgotten nothing we needed, but had stenciled careful instructions and even some advice on many of the boxes. Near the signboard, lying by themselves, were two boxes. One was labeled tools and the top was loosely nailed so we could pry it off. The other was labeled weapons and had a further stencil: Open immediately and always keep at hand. We opened both the boxes. In the weapons box, we found the newest type of planet-busters -- a sort of shotgun deal, a generalpurpose weapon that put out everything from bullets to a wide range of vibratory charges. In between these two extremes were a flame-thrower, acid, gas, poisoned darts, explosive warheads and knockout pellets. You merely twirled a dial to choose your ammunition. The guns were heavy and awkward to handle and they were brutes to operate, but they were just the ticket for a planet where you never knew what you might run into next We turned our attention to the rest of the stuff and started to get it sorted out There were boxes of protein and carbohydrate foods. There were cartons of vitamins and minerals. There was clothing and a tent, lanterns and dishes -- all the stuff you'd need on a highpriced camping trip. Lulu hadn't forgotten a single item. "She had it all planned out" said Jimmy bitterly. "She spent a long time making this stuff. She had to synthesize every bit of it. All she needed then was to find a planet where a man could live. And that took some doing." "It was tougher than you think," I added. "Not only a planet where a man could live, but one that smelled like Earth and looked and felt like Earth. Because, you see, we had to be encouraged to run away from her. If we hadn't, she couldn't have marooned us. She had the problem of her conscience and -- " Ben spat viciously. "Marooned!" he said. "Marooned by a love-sick robot!" "Maybe not entirely robot." I told them about the old maid I had conjured up and they hooted at me and that made us all feel better. But Ben admitted that my idea needn't be entirely crazy. "She was twenty years in building and a lot of funny stuff must have gone into her." Dawn was breaking and now, for the first time, we really saw the land. It was a pleasant place, as pleasant as any man might wish. But we failed to appreciate it much. The sea was so blue that it made you think of a blue-eyed girl and the beach ran white and straight and, from the beach, the land ran back into rolling hills with the faint whiteness of distant mountains frosting the horizon. And to the west was the forest. beach to collect some driftwood for a fire while Ben made ready to get breakfast. We had our arms full of wood and were starting back when something came charging over the hill and down upon the camp. It was about rhinoceros size and shaped somewhat like a beetle and it shone dully in the morning light. It made no sound, but it was traveling fast and it looked like something hard to stop. And, of course, we'd left our guns behind. I dropped my wood and yelled at Ben and started running up the slope. Ben had already seen the charging monster and had grabbed a rifle. The beast swerved straight for him and he brought up his gun. There was a flash of fire and then the bright gout of an exploding warhead and, for an instant, the scene was fogged with smoke and shrieking bits of metal and flying dust It was exactly as if one had been watching a film and the film had jumped. One moment there was the blaze of fire; then the thing had plunged past Ben and was coming down the slope of the beach, heading for Jimmy and myself. "Scatter!" I yelled at Jimmy and didn't think till later how silly it must have sounded to yell for just the two of us to scatter. But it wasn't any time or place for fine points of semantics and, anyhow, Jimmy caught on to what I meant He went one way down the beach and I went the other and the monster wheeled around, hesitating for a moment, apparently to decide which one of us to take. And, as you might have known, he took after me. I figured I was a goner. That beach was just plain naked, with not a place to hide, and I knew I had no chance at all of outrunning my pursuer. I might be able to dodge a time or two, but even so, that thing was pretty shifty on the turns and I knew in the end I'd lose. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw Ben running and sliding down the slope to cut off the beast He yelled something at me, but I didn't catch the words. Then the air shook with the blast of another exploding warhead and I sneaked a quick look back. Ben was legging it up the slope and the thing was chasing him, so I spun around and sprinted for the camp. Jimmy, I saw, was almost there and I put on some extra speed. If we only could get three guns going, I felt sure we could make it Ben was running straight toward Lulu, apparently figuring that he could race around her bulk and elude the beast. I saw that his dash would be a nip-andtuck affair. Jimmy had reached the camp and grabbed a gun. He had it firing before he got it to his shoulder and little splashes of liquid were flying all over the running beast had no breath to do it -- the damn fool was firing knockout pellets and they were hitting that i tough hide and bursting without penetrating. Within arm's reach of Lulu, Ben stumbled. The gun flew from his hand. His body struck the ground doubled up and he rolled, trying to get under the curve of Lulu's side. The rhinoceros-thing lunged forward viciously. Then it happened -- quicker than the eye could follow, much quicker than it can be told. Lulu grew an arm, a long, ropelike tentacle that snaked out of the top of her. It lashed downward and had the beast about the middle and was lifting him. I stopped dead still and watched. The instant of the lifting of the beast seemed to stretch out into long minutes as my mind scrambled at top speed to see what kind of thing it was. The first thing I saw was that it had wheels instead of feet. The dull luster of the hide could be nothing but metal and I could see the dents where the warheads had exploded. Drops of liquid spotted the hide -- what was left of the knockout drops Jimmy had been firing. Lulu raised the monster high above the ground and began swinging it around and around. It went so fast, it was just a blur. Then she let go and it sailed out above the sea. It went tumbling end over end in an awkward arc and plunged into the water. When it hit, it raised a pretty geyser. Ben picked himself up and got his gun. Jimmy came over and I walked up to Lulu. The three of us stood and looked out to sea, watching the spot where the creature had kerplunked. Finally Ben turned around and rapped on Lulu's side with his rifle barrel. "Thanks a heap," he said. Lulu grew another tentacle, shorter this time, and there was a face on it It had a lenslike eye and an audio and speaker. "Go chase yourselves," Lulu remarked. "What's eating you?" I asked. "Men!" she spat, and pulled her face in again. We rapped on her three or four times more, but there was no reply. Lulu was sulking. So Jimmy and I started down to pick up the wood that we had dropped. We had just gotten it picked up when Ben let out a yelp from up by the camp and we spun around. There was our rhinoceros friend wheeling out of the water. We dropped the wood and lit out for camp, but there was no need to hurry. Our boy wasn't having any more just then. He made a wide circle to the east of us and raced back into the hills. We cooked breakfast and ate it and kept our guns handy, because where there was one critter, there were liable to be more. We didn't see the sense in taking chances. tor and since we had to call it something, we named it Elmer. For no particular reason, that seemed appropriate. "Did you see those wheels?" asked Ben, and the two of us agreed that we'd seen them. Ben seemed to be relieved. "I thought I was seeing things," he explained. But there could be no doubt about the wheels. All of us had noticed them and there were the tracks to prove it -- wheel tracks , running plain and clear along the sandy beach. But we were somewhat puzzled when it came to determining just what Elmer was. The wheels # spelled out machine, but there were a lot of other things that didn't -- mannerisms that were distinctly lifelike, such as the momentary hesitation before it decided which one of us to charge, Jimmy or myself, or the vicious lunge at Ben when he lay upon the ground, or the caution it had shown in circling us when it came out of the sea. But there were, as well, the wheels and the unmistakably metal hide and the dents made by exploding warheads that would have torn the biggest and toughest animal to shreds. "A bit of both?" suggested Ben. "Basically machine, but with some life in it, too, like the oldmaid brain you dreamed up for Lulu?" Sure, it could be that. It could be almost anything. "Silicate life?" offered Jimmy. "That's not silicate," Ben declared. "That's metal. Silicate, any form of it, would have turned to dust under a direct rocket hit. Besides, we know what silicate life is like. One species of it was found years ago out on Thelma V." "It isn't basically life," I said. "Life wouldn't evolve wheels. Wheels are bum inventions so far as locomotion is concerned, except where you have special conditions. Life might be involved, but only as Ben says -- as a deliberate, engineered combining of machine and life." "And that means intelligence," said Ben. We sat there around the fire, shaken at the thought of it. In many years of searching, only a handful of intelligent races had been found and the level of intelligence, in general, was not too impressive. Certainly nothing of the order that would be necessary to build something like Elmer. So far, Man was top dog in the discovered universe. Nothing had been found to match him in the use of brain-power. And here, by utter accident, we'd been dumped upon a planet where there seemed to be some evidence of an intelligence that would equal Man -- if not, indeed, surpass him. been bothering me," said Ben. "Why didn't Lulu check this place before she landed here? She intended to maroon us, that's why. She meant to dump us here and leave. And yet presumably she's still bound by the precept that a robot cannot harm a human. And if she'd followed that law, it would have meant that she was compelled -- completely and absolutely compelled -- to make certain, before she marooned us, that there was nothing here to harm us." "Maybe she slipped a little," guessed Jimmy. "Not Lulu," said Ben. "Not with that Swiss-watch brain of hers." "You know what I think?" I said. "I think Lulu has evolved. In her, we have a brand-new kind of robot. They pumped too much humanity into her -- " "She had to have the human viewpoint," Jimmy pointed out, "or she couldn't do her job." "The point," I said, "is that when you make a robot as human as Lulu, you no longer have a robot. You have something else. Not quite human, not entirely robot, but something in between. A new kind of a sort of life you can't be certain of. One you have to watch." "I wonder if she's still sulking," Ben wondered. "Of course she is," I said. "We ought to go over and kick her in the pants and snap her out of it." "Leave her alone," I ordered sharply. "The only thing is to ignore her. As long as she gets attention, she'll keep on sulking." So we left her alone. It was the only thing we could do. I took the dishes down to the sea to wash them, but this time I took my gun along. Jimmy went down to the woods to see if he could find a spring. The half dozen tins of water that Lulu had provided for us wouldn't last forever and we couldn't be sure she'd shell out more when those were gone. She hadn't forgotten us, though, hadn't shut us out of her life entirely. She had fixed Elmer's wagon when he got too gay. I took a lot of comfort out of reflecting that, when the cards were down, she had backed us up. There still were grounds for hope, I told myself, that we could work out some sort of deal with her. I squatted down by a pool of water in the sand, and as I washed the dishes, I did some thinking about the realignment which would become necessary once all robots were like Lulu. I could envision a Bill of Robotic Rights and special laws for robots and robotic lobbies, and after I'd thought of it for a while, it became mighty complicated. been setting up the tent, and when I came back, I helped him. "You know," Ben said, "the more I think about it, the more I believe I was right when I said that the reason Lulu couldn't leave was because we showed up. It's only logical that she can't up and leave when we're standing right in front of her and reminding her of her responsibility." "You getting around to saying that one of us has to stay close by her all the time?" I asked. "That's the general idea." I didn't argue with him. There was nothing to argue about, nothing to believe or disbelieve. But we were in no position to be making any boners. After we had the tent up, Ben said to me, "If you don't mind, I'll take a little walk-around back in the hills." "Watch out for Elmer," I warned him. "He won't bother us. Lulu took the starch out of him." He picked up his gun and left I puttered around the camp, putting things in order. Everything was peaceful. The beach shone in the sun and the sea was still and beautiful. There were a few birds flying, but no other sign of life. Lulu kept on sulking. Jimmy came back. He had found a spring and brought along a pail of water. He started rummaging around in the supplies. "What you looking for?" I asked. "Paper and a pencil. Lulu would have thought of them." I grunted at the idea, but he was right. Damned if Lulu hadn't fixed him up with a ream of paper and a box of pencils. He settled down against a pile of boxes and began to write a poem. Ben returned shortly after midday. I could see he was excited, but I didn't push him any. "Jimmy stumbled on a spring," I said. "The pail is over there." He had a drink, then sat down in the shade of a pile of boxes. "I found it," he said triumphantly. "I didn't know you were hunting anything." He looked up at me and grinned a bit crookedly. "Someone manufactured Elmer." "So you went out and found them. Just like walking down a street. Just like -- " He shook his head. "Seems we're too late. Some several thousand years too late, if not a good deal longer. I found a few ruins and a valley heaped with tumuli that must be ruin mounds. And some caves in a limestone bluff beyond the valley." to the pail and had another drink. "I couldn't get too close," he said. "Elmer is on guard." He took off his hat and wiped his shirt sleeve across his face. "He's patrolling up and down, the way a sentry walks a post. You can see the paths he's worn through all the years of standing guard." "So that's why he took us on," I said. "We are trespassers." "I suppose that's it," said Ben. That evening, we talked it over and decided we'd have to post a watch on Elmer so we could learn his habits and timetable, if any. Because it was important that we try to find out what we. could about the buried ruins of the place that Elmer guarded. For the first time, Man had stumbled on a high civilization, but had come too late and, because of Lulu's sulking, too poorly equipped to do much with what little there was left Getting somewhat sore the more I thought about it, I went over to Lulu and kicked her good and solid to attract her attention. But she paid me no mind. I yelled at her and there was no answer. I told her what was cooking and that we needed her -- that here was a job she simply had to do, just exactly the kind she had been built to do. She just sat there frigidly. I went back and slouched down with the others at the fire. "She acts as if she might be dead." Ben poked the fire together and it flamed a little higher. "I wonder if a robot could die. A highly sensitive job like Lulu." "Of a broken heart," said Jimmy pityingly. "You and your poetic notions!" #  I raged at him. "Always mooning around. Always spouting words. If it hadn't been for that damned verse of yours -- " "Cut it out," Ben said. I looked at his face across the fire, with flame shadows running on it, and I cut it out. After all, I admitted to myself, I might be wrong. Jimmy couldn't help being a lousy poet. I sat there looking at the fire, wondering if Lulu might be dead. I knew she wasn't, of course. She was just being nasty. She had fixed our clock for us and she had fixed it good. Now she was watching us sweat before she made her play, whatever it was. In the morning, we set up our watch on Elmer and we kept it up day after day. One of us would go out to the ridgetop three miles or so from camp and settle down with our only field glass. We'd stare for several hours. Then someone else would come out and relieve the watcher and that way, for ten days or more, we had Elmer under observation during all the daylight hours. We didn't learn much. He operated on a schedule and it was the kind that seemed to leave no loopholes for anyone to sneak into the valley he guarded -- although probably none of us would have known what to do if we had sneaked in. He used some of the mounds for observation posts and he came to each one about every fifteen minutes. The more we watched him, the more we became convinced that he had the situation well in hand. No one would monkey around with that buried city as long as he was there. I think that after the second day or so, he found out we were watching. He got a little nervous, and when he mounted his observation mounds, he'd stand and look in our direction longer than in any other. Once, while I was on guard, he began what looked to be a charge and I was just getting ready to light out of there when he broke off and went back to his regular rounds. Other than watching Elmer, we tookthings easy. We swam in the sea and fished, taking our lives in our hands when we cooked and ate each new kind, but luck was with us and we got no poisonous ones. We wouldn't have eaten the fish at all except that we figured we should piece out our food supplies as best we could. They wouldn't last forever and we had no guarantee that Lulu would give more handouts once the last was gone. If she didn't we'd have to face the problem of making our own way. Ben got to worrying about whether there were seasons on the planet. He convinced himself there were and went off into the woods to find a place where we might build a cabin. "Can't live out on the beach in a tent when it gets cold," he said. But he couldn't get either Jimmy or me too stirred up about the possibility. I had it all doped out that, sooner or later, Lulu would end her sulking and we could get down to business. And Jimmy was deep into the crudest bunch of junk you ever heard that he called a saga. Maybe it was a saga. Damned if I know. I'm ignorant on sagas. He called it "The Death of Lulu" and he filled page after page with the purest drivel about what a swell machine she was and how, despite its being metal, her heart beat with snow-white innocence. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had allowed us to ignore it, but he insisted on reading that tripe to us each evening after supper. I stood it as long as I could, but one evening I blew my top. Ben stood up for Jimmy, but when I threatened to take my third of the supplies and set up a camp of my own, out of earshot, Ben gave in and came over to my side of the argument. Between the two of us, we ruled out any more recitals. Jimmy took it hard, but he was outnumbered. After that first ten days or so, we watched Elmer only off and on, but we must have had him nervous, for during the night we'd sometimes hear his wheels, and in the morning we'd find tracks. We figured that he was spying out the camp, trying to size us up the same way we'd done with him. He didn't make any passes at us and we didn't bother him -- we were just a lot more wakeful and alert on our night watches. Even Jimmy managed to stay awake while he was standing guard. There was a funny thing about it, though. One would have imagined that Elmer would have stayed away from Lulu after the clobbering she gave him. But there were mornings when we found his tracks running up close behind her, then angling sharply off. We got it doped out that he sneaked up and hid behind her, so he could watch the camp close up, peeking around at us from his position behind that sulking hulk. T EN kept arguing about build ing winter quarters until he had me almost convinced that it was something we should do. So one day I teamed up with him, leaving Jimmy at the camp. We set off, carrying an axe and a saw and our guns. Ben had picked a fine site for our cabin, that much I'll say. It wasn't far from the spring, and it was tucked away in a sort of pocket where we'd be protected from the wind, and there were a lot of trees nearby so we wouldn't have far to drag our timbers or haul our winter wood. I still wasn't convinced there would be any winter. I was fairly sure that even if there were, we wouldn't have to stay that long. One of these days, we'd be able to arrive at some sort of compromise with Lulu. But Ben was worried and I knew it would make him happier if he could get a start at building. And there was nothing else for any of us to do. Building a cabin, I consoled myself, would be better than just sitting. We leaned our guns against a tree and began to work. We had one tree down and sawed into lengths and were starting on the second tree when I heard the brush snap behind me. I straightened up from the saw to look, and there was Elmer, tearing down the hill at us. There wasn't any time to grab our guns. There was no time to rim. There was no time for anything at all. I yelled and made a leap for the tree behind me and pulled myself up. I felt the wind as Elmer whizzed by beneath me. Ben had jumped to one side and, as Elmer went pounding past, heaved the axe at him. It was a honey of a throw. The axe caught Elmer in his metal side '! and the handle splintered into pieces. Elmer spun around. Ben tried to reach the guns, but he didn't have the time. He took to a tree and shinnied up it like a cat. He got up to the first big branch and straddled it "You all right?" he yelled at me. "Great" I said. Elmer was standing between the two trees, swinging his massive head back and forth, as if deciding which one of us to take. We clung there, watching him. He had waited, I reasoned, until he could get between us and Lulu -- then he had tackled us. And if that was the case, then this business of his hiding behind Lulu so he could spy on us seemed very queer indeed. around and rolled over to my tree. He squared off and took a chopping bite at it with his metal jaws. Splinters flew and the tree shivered. I got a tighter grip and looked down the trunk. Elmer was no great shakes as a chopper, but if he kept at it long enough, he'd get that tree chewed off. I climbed up a little higher, where there were more branches and where I could wedge myself a little tighter so I couldn't be shaken out. I got myself fixed fairly comfortable to see how Ben was getting on and I got quite a shock. He wasn't in his tree. I looked around for him and then back at the tree again, and I saw that he was sneaking down it as quietly as he could, like a hunted squirrel, keeping the trunk of the tree between himself and Elmer. I watched him breathlessly, ready to shout out a warning if Elmer should spot him, but Elmer was too busy chopping at my tree to notice anything. Ben reached the ground and made a dash for the guns. He grabbed both of them and ducked behind another tree. He opened up on Elmer at short range. From where I crouched, I could hear the warheads slamming into Elmer. The explosions rocked everything so much that I had to grab the tree and hang on with all my might. A couple of pieces of flying metal ripped into the tree just underneath me, and other pieces went flying through the branches, and the air was full of spinning leaves and flying shredded wood, but I was untouched. It must have been a horrible surprise for Elmer. At the first explosion, he took a jump of about fifteen feet and bolted up the hill like a cat with a stepped-on tail. I could see a lot of new dents in his shining hide. A big hunk of metal had been gouged out of one of his wheels and he rocked slightly as he went, and he was going so fast that he couldn't dodge and ran head-on into a tree. The impact sent him skidding back a dozen feet or so. As he slid back, Ben poured another salvo into him and he seemed to become considerably lop-sided, but he recovered himself and made it over the hilltop and out of sight. Ben came out from behind his tree and shouted at me, "All right, you can come down now." But when I tried to get down, I found that I was trapped. My left foot had become wedged in a crotch between the tree trunk and a good-sized limb and I couldn't pull it loose, no matter how I tried. "What's the matter?" asked Ben. "Do you like it up there?" I told him what was wrong. "All right," he said, disgusted. "I'll come up and cut you loose." He hunted for the axe and found it and, of course, it was no use. He'd smashed the handle when he threw it at Elmer. axe in his hands, and delivered an oration on the lowdown meanness of fate. Then he threw the axe down and climbed my tree. He squeezed past me out onto the limb. "Fll climb out on it and bend it down," he explained. "Maybe then you can get loose." He crawled out on the branch a way, but it was a shaky trick. A couple of times, he almost fell. "You're sure you can't get your foot out now?" he asked anxiously. I tried and said I couldn't. So he gave up the crawling idea and let his body down and hung on by his hands, shifting out along the branch hand over hand. The branch bent toward the ground as he inched along it and it seemed to me my boot wasn't gripped as tightly as it had been. I tried again and found I could move it some, but I still couldn't pull it loose. Just then there was a terrible crashing in the brush. Ben let out a yell and dropped to the ground and scurried for a gun. The branch whipped back and caught my foot just as I had managed to move it a little and this time caught it at a slightly different angle, twisting it, and I let out a howl of pain. Down on the ground, Ben lifted his gun and swung around to face the crashing in the brush and suddenly who should come busting out of all that racket but Jimmy, racing to the rescue. "You guys in trouble?" he shouted. "I heard shooting." Ben's face was three shades whiter than the purest chalk as he lowered his gun. "You fool! I almost let you have it!" "There was all this shooting," Jimmy panted. "I came as quickly as I could." "And left Lulu alone!" "But I thought you guys -- " "Now we're sunk for sure," groaned Ben. "You know all that makes Lulu stick around is one of us being there." We didn't know any such thing, of course. It was just the only reason we could think of why she didn't up and leave. But Ben was somewhat overwrought. He'd had a trying day. "You get back there!" he yelled at Jimmy. "Get back as fast as your legs will let you. Maybe you can catch her before she gets away." Which was foolishness, because if Lulu meant to leave, she'd have lifted out of there as soon as Jimmy had disappeared. But Jimmy didn't say a word. He just turned around and went crashing back. For a long time after he had left, I could hear him blundering through the woods. B EN climbed my tree again, muttering, "Just a pack of wooden-headed jerks. Can't do anything right. Running off and leaving Lulu. Getting trapped up in a tree. You would think, by God, that they could learn to watch out for themselves... He said a good deal more than that. I didn't answer back. I didn't want to get into any argument. My foot was hurting something fierce and the only thing I wanted him to do was get me out of there. He climbed out on the branch again and I got my foot loose. While Ben dropped to the ground, I climbed down the tree. My foot hurt pretty bad and seemed to be swelling some, but I could hobble on it. He didn't wait for me. He grabbed his gun and made off rapidly for camp. I tried to hurry, but it was no use, so I took it easy. When I got to the edge of the woods, I saw that Lulu still was there and all Ben's hell-raising had been over absolutely nothing. There are some guys like that. When I reached camp, Jimmy pulled off my boot while I clawed at the ground. Then he heated a pail of water for me to soak the foot in and rummaged around in the medicine chest and found some goo that he smeared on the foot. Personally, I don't think he knew what he was doing. But I'll say this for the kid -- he had some kindness in him. # All this time, Ben was fuming around about a funny thing that had attracted his attention. When we had left camp, the area around Lulu had been all tracked up with our tracks and Elmer's tracks, but novtf it was swept clean. It looked exactly as if someone had taken a broom and had swept out all the tracks. It surely was a funny business, but Ben was making too much of it. The important thing was that Lulu still was there. As long as she stuck around, there was a chance we could work out some agreement with her. Once she left, we were marooned for good. Jimmy fixed something to eat, and after we had eaten, Ben said to us, "I think I'll go out and see how Elmer's getting on." I, for one, had seen enough of Elmer to last a lifetime and Jimmy wasn't interested. Said he wanted to work on his saga. So Ben took a rifle and set out alone, back into the hills. My foot hurt me quite a bit and I got myself comfortable and tried to do some thinking, but I tried so hard that I put myself to sleep. It was late in the afternoon when I awoke. Jimmy was getting nervous. "Ben hasn't shown up," he said. "I wonder if something's happened to him." decided to wait a while before going out to hunt Ben. After all, he wasn't in the best of humor and he might have been considerably upset if we'd gone out to rescue him. He finally showed up just before dusk, tuckered out and a little flabbergasted. He leaned his rifle against a box and sat down. He found a cup and reached for the coffee pot. "Elmer's gone," he said. "I spent all afternoon trying to find him. Not a sign of him anywhere." My first reaction was that it was just fine. Then I realized that the safest thing would be to know where Elmer was, so we could keep an eye on him. And suddenly I had a horrible hunch that I knew where Elmer was. "I didn't actually go down into the valley," said Ben, "but I walked around and glassed it from every angle." "He might be in one of the caves," Jimmy said. "Maybe so," said Ben. We did a lot of speculating on what might have happened to Elmer. Jimmy held out for his having holed up in one of the caves. Ben was inclined to think he might have cleared out of the country. I didn't say what I thought. It was too fantastic. I volunteered for the first watch, saying that I couldn't sleep with my foot, anyhow, and after the two of them were asleep, I walked over to Lulu and rapped on the hide. I didn't expect anything to happen. I figured she would keep on sulking. But she put out a tentacle and grew a face on it -- a lens, an audio and speaker. "It was nice of you," I said, "not to run away and leave us." Lulu swore. It was the first and only time I have ever heard her use such language. "How could I leave?" she asked when she at last turned printable. "Of all the dirty human tricks! I'd have been gone long ago if it weren't for -- " "What dirty trick?" "As if you didn't know. A builtin block that won't let me move unless there's one of you detestable humans inside me." "I didn't know," I said. "Don't try to pass the buck," she snapped. "It's a dirty human trick and you're a dirty human and you're just as responsible as all the rest of them. But it doesn't make any difference any more, because I've found myself. I am finally content. I know what I was meant for. I have -- " "Lulu," I asked her, straight out, "are you shacking up with Elmer?" "That's a vulgar way to say it," Lulu told me heatedly. "It's the nasty human way. Elmer is a scholar and a gentleman and his loyalty to his ancient, long-dead masters is a touching thing no human could be capable of. He has been badly treated and I shall make it up to him. All he wanted from you was the phosphate in your bones -- " "The phosphate in our bones!" I yelled. # VHY, certainly," said Lulu.  "Poor Elmer has such a hard time finding any phosphate. He got it at first from animals that he caught, but now all the animals are gone. There are birds, of course, but birds are hard to catch. And you had such nice, big bones -- " "That's a fine thing for you to say," I bawled her out sternly. "You were built by humans and humans educated you and -- " "Still I'm a machine," said Lulu, "and I am closer to Elmer than I am to you. You humans can't get it through your heads that there might be a legitimate set of non-human values. You are horrified that Elmer wanted the phosphate in your bones, but if there were a metal in Elmer that you needed, you'd break him up to get it without a second thought. You wouldn't even consider that you might be wrong. You'd think it an imposition if Elmer should object. That's the trouble with you and your human race. Fve had enough. I have what I want. I am content to stay here. I've found the great love of my life. And for all I care, your pals and you can rot." She pulled in her face and I didn't rap to try to get her to talk any more. I figured there wasn't any use. She had made it about as plain as anyone could wish. I walked back to the camp and woke Ben and Jimmy. I told them about my hunch and about the talk with Lulu. We were pretty glum, because we were all washed up. Up till now, there had always been the chance that we could make a deal with Lulu. I had felt all along that we needn't worry too much -- that Lulu was more alone than we were and that eventually she would have to be reasonable. But now Lulu was not alone and she no longer needed us. And she still was sore at us -- and not just at us, but at the whole human race. And the worst of it was that this was no sudden whim. It had been going on for days. Elmer hadn't been really watching us when he'd hung around at night. He'd come to neck with Lulu. And undoubtedly the two of them had planned Elmer's attack on Ben and me, knowing that Jimmy would go loping to the rescue, leaving the coast clear so that Elmer could rush back and Lulu could take him in. And once it had been accomplished, Lulu had put out a tentacle and swept the tracks away so we wouldn't know that Elmer was inside. "So she jilted us," said Ben. "No worse than we did to her," Jimmy reminded him. "But what did she expect? A man can't love a robot." "Evidently," I said, "a robot can love a robot. And that's a new one to paste into the book." "Lulu's crazy," Ben declared. In all this great romance of Lulu's, it seemed to me there was a certain false note. Why should Lulu and Elmer be sneaky about their love? Lulu could have opened the port any time she wanted and Elmer could have scampered up the ramp right before our eyes. But they hadn't done that. They had planned and plotted. They had practically eloped. part, it might be the mark of shame. Was she ashamed of Elmer -- ashamed that she had fallen for him? Much as she might deny it, perhaps she nursed the smug snobbery of the human race. Or was I only thinking this to save my own smug snobbery, simply building up a defense mechanism against being forced to admit, now or in some future time, that there might be other values than the ones evolved by humans? For in us all, I knew, lingered that reluctance to recognize that our way was not necessarily best, that the human viewpoint might not be the universal viewpoint to which all other life must eventually conform. Ben made a pot of coffee, and while we sat around and drank it, we said some bitter things of Lulu. I don't regret anything we said, for she had it coming to her. She'd played us a nasty trick. We finally rolled back into our blankets and didn't bother standing guard. With Elmer out of circulation, there was no need. The next morning, my foot was still sore, so I stayed behind while Ben and Jimmy went out to explore the valley that held the ruined city. Meantime, I hobbled out and walked all around Lulu, looking her over. There was no way I could see that a man might bust into her. The port itself was machined so closely that you had to get real close to see the tiny hairline where it fitted into her side. Even if we could bust into her, I wondered, could we take control of her? There were the emergencies, of course, but I wasn't too sure jus how much use they were. They certainly hadn't bothered Lulu much when she'd got that crazy notion of eloping with us. Then she'd simply jammed them and had left us helpless. And if we broke into Lulu, we'd come to grips with Elmer, and Elmer was just the kind of beast I had no hankering to come to grips with. So I went back to camp and puttered around, thinking that now we'd really have to begin to lay some plans about how to get along. We'd have to build that cabin and work up a food supply and do the best we could to get along on our own. For I was fairly certain that we could expect no help from Lulu. Ben and Jimmy came back in the afternoon and their eyes were shining with excitement. They spread out a blanket and emptied their pockets of the most incredible things any man has ever laid eyes on. that stuff. There's no point in trying to. What is the sense of saying that a certain item was like a metal chain and that it was yellow? There is no way to get across the feel of it as it slid through one's fingers or the tinkle of it as it moved or the blazing color that was a sort of living yellow. It is very much like saying that a famous painting is square and flat and blue, with some green and red. The chain was only a part of it. There were a lot of other doodads and each one of them was the sort of thing to snatch your breath away. Ben shrugged at the question in my eyes. "Don't ask me. It's only some stuff we picked up. The caves are full of it. Stuff like this and a whole lot more. We just picked up one thing here and another there -- whatever was pocket-size and happened to catch our eye. Trinkets. Samples. I don't know." Like jackdaws, I thought. Or pack-rats. Grabbing a thing that shone or had a certain shape or a certain texture -- taking it because it was pretty, not knowing what its use might be or if, in fact, it had any use at all. "Those caves may have been storehouses," said Ben. "They're jammed with all sorts of things -- not much of any one thing, apparently. All different, as if these aliens had set up a trading post and had their merchandise on display. There seems to be a sort of curtain in front of each of the caves. You can see a shimmer and hear a hissing, but you can't feel a thing when you step through it. And behind that curtain, all the junk they left is as clean and bright and new as the day they left it." I looked at the articles spread on the blanket. It was hard to keep your hands off them, for they felt good in your hands and were pleasing to the eye and one seemed to get a sense of warmth and richness just by handling them. "Something happened to those folks," said Jimmy. "They knew it was going to happen, so they took all this stuff and laid it out -- all the many things they had made, all the things they'd used and loved. Because, you see, that way there always was a chance someone might come along someday and find it, so they and the culture they had fashioned would not be entirely lost." It was exactly the kind of silly, sentimental drivel you could expect from a glassy-eyed romantic like Jimmy. But for whatever reason the artifacts of that vanished race had gotten in the caves, we were the ones who'd found them and here once again they'd run into a dead end. Even if we had been equipped to puzzle out their use, even if we had been able to ferret out the basic principles of that long-dead culture, it still would be a useless business. We were not going anywhere; we wouldn't be passing on the knowledge. We'd live out our lives here on this planet, and when the last of us had died, the ancient silence and the old uncaring would close down once again. We weren't going anywhere and neither was Lulu. It was a double dead end. Earth could use the knowledge and the insight that could be wrested from those caves and from the mounds. And not more than a hundred feet from where we sat lay the very tool that Earth had spent twenty years in building to dig out that specific kind of knowledge, should Man ever happen on it. "It must be terrible," said Jimmy, "to realize that all the things and all the knowledge that you ever had, all the trying, all the praying, all the dreams and hopes, will be wiped out forever. That all of you and your way of life and your understanding of that life will simply disappear and no one will ever know." "You said it, kid," I chipped in. He stared at me with haunted, stricken eyes. 'That may be why they did it." Watching him, the tenseness of him, the suffering in his face, I caught a glimpse of why he was a poet -- why he had to be a poet. But even so, he still was an utter creep. "Earth has to know about this," Ben said flatly. "Sure," I agreed. "Til run right over and let them know." "Always the smart guy," Ben growled at me. "When are you going to cut out being bright and get down to business?" "Like busting Lulu open, I suppose." "That's right. We have to get back somehow and Lulu's the only way to get there." "It might surprise you, Buster, but I thought of all that before you. I went out today and looked Lulu over. If you can figure how to bust into her, you've a better brain than I have." "Tools," said Ben. "If we only had "We have. An axe without a handle, a hammer and a saw. A small pinch-bar, a plane, a drawshave -- " "We might make some tools." "Find the ore and smelt it and -- " "I was thinking of those caves," said Ben. "There might be tools in there." I wasn't even interested. I knew it was impossible. "We might find some explosive," Ben went on. "We might -- " "Look," I said, "what do you want to do -- open Lulu up or blow her to bits? Anyhow, I don't think you can do a thing about it. Lulu is a self-maintaining robot, or have you forgotten? Bore a hole in her and she'll grow it shut. Go monkeying around too much and she'll grow a club and clout you on the head." Ben's eyes blazed with fury and frustration. "Earth has to know! You understand that, don't you? Earth has got to know!" "Sure," I said. "Absolutely." In the morning, I thought, he'd come to his senses, see how impossible it was. And that was important. Before we began to lay any plans, it was necessary that we realize what we were up against. That way, you conserve a lot of energy and miss a lot of lumps. But, come morning, he still had that crazy light of frustration in his eyes and he was filled with a determination that was based on nothing more than downright desperation. he wasn't going with us. "For God's sake, why not?" demanded Ben. "I'm way behind on my writing," Jimmy told him, dead-pan. "I'm still working on that saga." Ben wanted to argue with him, but I cut him off disgustedly. "Let us go," I said. "He's no use, anyhow." Which was the solemn truth. So the two of us went out to the caves. It was the first time I had seen them and they were something to see. There were a dozen of them and all of them were crammed. I got dizzy just walking up and down, looking at all the gadgets and the thingumbobs and dofunnies, not knowing, of course, what any of them were. It was maddening enough just to look at them; it was plain torture trying to figure out what use they might be put to. But Ben was plain hell-bent on trying to figure out because he'd picked up the stubborn conviction that we could find a gadget that would help us get the best of Lulu. We worked all day and I was dog-tired at the end of it Not once in the entire day had we found anything that made any sense at all. I wonder if you can imagine how it felt to stand there, surrounded by all those devices, knowing there were things within your reach that rightly used, could open up entirely new avenues for human thoughts and technique and imagination. And yet you stood there powerless -- But there was no stopping Ben. We went out again the next day and the day after that and we kept on going out. On the second day, we found a do jigger that was just fine for opening cans, although I'm fairly sure that was not at all what it was designed for. And on the following day, we finally puzzled out how another piece of equipment could be used for digging slanted postholes and, I ask you, who in their right mind would be wanting slanted post holes? We got nowhere, but we kept on going out and I sensed that Ben had no more hope than I had, but that he still kept at it because it was the one remaining fingerhold he had on sanity. I don't think that for one moment he considered the source or significance of that heritage we'd found. To him, it became no more than a junkyard through which we searched frantically to find one unrecognizable piece of scrap that we might improvise into something that would serve our purpose. ley and its mounds, the caves and their residue of a vanished culture seized upon my imagination, and it seemed to me that, in some mysterious manner, I grew closer to that extinct race and sensed at once its greatness and its tragedy. And the feeling grew as well that this frantic hunt of ours bordered on sacrilege and callous profanation of the dead. Jimmy had not gone out with us a single day. He'd sit hunched over his ream of paper and he scribbled and revised and crossed out words and put in others. He'd get up and walk around in circles or pace back and forth and mumble to himself, then go back and write some more. He scarcely ate and he wouldn't talk and he only slept a little. He was the very portrait of a Young Man in the Throes of Creation. I got curious about it, wondering if, with all this agony and sweat, he might be at last writing something that was worth the effort. So, when he wasn't looking, I sneaked out a page of it. It was even worse than the goo he had written before. That night I lay awake and looked up at the unfamiliar stars and surrendered myself to loneliness. Only, once I had surrendered, I found that I was not so lonely as I might have been -- that somehow I had drawn comfort and perhaps even understanding from the muteness of the ruin-mounds and the shining wonder of the trove. Finally I dropped asleep. I don't know what woke me. It might have been the wind or the sound of the waves breaking on the beach or maybe the chillness of the night. Then I heard it, a voice like a chant, solemn and sonorous, a throaty whisper in the dark. I started up and propped myself on an elbow -- and caught my breath at what I saw. Jimmy was standing in front of Lulu, holding a flashlight in one hand, reading her his saga. His voice had a rolling quality, and despite the soggy words, there was a fascination in the tenor of his tone. It must have been so that the ancient Greeks read their Homer in the flare of torches before the next day's battle. And Lulu was listening. She had a face hung out and the tentacle which supported it was twisted to one side, so that her audio would not miss a single syllable, just as a man might cup his ear. " scene, I began to feel a little sorry about the way we'd treated Jimmy. We wouldn't listen to him and the poor devil had to read that tripe of his to someone. His soul hungered for appreciation and he'd got no appreciation out of either Ben or me. Merely writing was not enough for him; he must share it. He had to have an audience. I put out a hand and shook Ben gently by the shoulder. He came storming up out of his blankets. "What the hell is -- " "Sh-h-h!" He drew in a whistling breath and dropped on one knee beside me. Jimmy went on with his reading and Lulu, with her face cocked attentively, went on listening. Part of the words came to us, wind-blown and fragmentary: " Wanderer of the far ways between the two faces of eternity, True, forever, to the race that forced her, With the winds of alien space blowing in her hair, Wearing a circlet of stars as her crown of glory... " Lulu wept. There was the shine of tears in that single, gleaming lens. She grew another tentacle and there was a hand on the end of it and a handkerchief, a very white and lacy and extremely feminine hanky, was clutched within the hand. She dabbed with the handkerchief at her dripping eye. If she had had a nose, she undoubtedly would have blown it, delicately, of course, and very ladylike. "And you wrote it all for me?" she asked. "All for you," said Jimmy. He was lying like a trooper. The only reason he was reading it to her was because he knew that Ben and I wouldn't listen to it. "I've been so wrong," Lulu sighed. She wiped her eye quite dry and briskly polished it. "Just a second," she said, very businesslike. "There's something I must do." We waited, scarcely breathing. Slowly the port in Lulu's side came open. She grew a long, limber tentacle and reached inside the port and hauled Elmer out. She held him dangling. WV# OU lout!" she stormed at Elmer. "I take you in and stuff you full of phosphates. I get your dents smoothed out and I polish you all bright. And then what? Do you write sagas for me? No, you grow fat and satisfied. There's no mark of greatness on you, no spark of imagination. You're nothing but a dumb machine!" Elmer just dangled at the end of Lulu's tentacle, but his wheels were spinning furiously and I took that to mean that he was upset. "Love!" proclaimed Lulu. "Love for the likes of us? We machines have better things to do -- far better. There are the star-studded trails of space waiting for our tread, the bitter winds of foreverness blowing from the cloudbanks of eternity, the mountains of the great beyond..." She went on for quite a while about the challenge of the farther galaxies, about wearing a coronet of stars, about the dust of shattered time paving the road that led into the ultimate nothingness, and all of it was lifted from what Jimmy called a saga. Then, when she was all through, she hurled Elmer down the beach and he hit the sand and skidded straight into the water. We didn't wait to see any more of it. We were off like sprinters. We hit the ramp full tilt and went up it in a leap and flung ourselves into our quarters. Lulu slammed the port behind us. "Welcome home," she said. I walked over to Jimmy and held out my hand. "Great going, kid. You got Longfellow backed clear off the map." Ben also shook his hand. "It was a masterpiece." "And now," said Lulu, "we'll be on our way." "Our way!" yelled Ben. "We can't leave this planet. Not right away, at least. There's that city out there. We can't go until -- " "Phooey on the city," Lulu said. "Phooey on the data. We are off star-wandering. We are searching out the depths of silence. We are racing down the corridors of space with thunder in our brain -- the everlasting thunder of a dread eternity." We turned and looked at Jimmy. "Every word of it," I said. "Every single word of it out of that muck he wrote." Ben took a quick step forward and grabbed Jimmy by his shirt front. "Don't you feel the urge," Ben asked him, "don't you feel a mighty impulse to write a lengthy ode to home -- its comfort and its glory and all the other cliches?" Jimmy's teeth were chattering just a little. "Lulu is a sucker," Ben said, "for everything you write." I lifted a fist and let Jimmy smell of it. "You better make it good," I warned him. "You better write like you never wrote before." "But keep it sloppy," Ben said. "That's the way Lulu likes it." Jimmy sat down on the floor and began writing desperately. Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems -- but which one would I be? reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife. Understand now -- I've got nothing against marriage or anything like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge -- It's so permanent. Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties -- but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of #, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved. You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime. So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long. Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering -- but that was where the dream stopped. She had a tongue like a ## wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was actly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a "beastly headache" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case. for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it. I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week. But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along. Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work -- just to sit there. Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive. That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, "I hear you got a new secretary today." I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear. Marge turned on her Accusing Look ##. "I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at # -- # -- # and thinks you're handsome." Marge had quite a spy system. "She couldn't be much of a secretary," she added. "She's a perfectly good secretary," I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then. Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned. Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning. "What you need is an Ego Prime," he said with a grin. "Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm." I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. "Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's -- it's indecent" Harry shrugged. "Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy" Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie. As I said, a guy gets fed up. And maybe opportunity would only knock once. And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me. course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was. From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances. The law didn't leave a man much leeway. But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done. Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway. "Ah, yes," the little man said. "Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you." guy any more than the looks of the place. "I've been told you can supply me with a -- " He coughed. "Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible." He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. "Busy executives often come to us to avoid the -- ah -- unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves -- " He wiped his hands on his trousers. "Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?" I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models. "Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for -- ah -- close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences -- " I was shaking my head. "I want a Super Deluxe model," I told him. He grinned and winked. "Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be -- awkward, shall we say. Very awkward -- " I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom. "We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on #th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted." The blanks weren't very impressive -- clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough -- embarrassingly thorough, in fact -- but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory. And that was all there was to it. so been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today. I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face. "Meet George Faircloth Prime," the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother. I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it. I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. "Come on, Brother," I said. "You've got a job to do." But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did. If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court. And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, goodhearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too. George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks. He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears. I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course. Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win. With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage. warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop. After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack -- upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a boobytrap with a shotgun. So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpickin-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable. She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more. As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win. Eventually. If you're really persistent. Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work. After supper, I went out to the workshop -- to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits. "Go to it, Brother," I said. George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house. Five minutes later, I heard them fighting. It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown. We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm. I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car. Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me! of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front. For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time -- he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet. "She's really a sweet girl underneath it all," I'd say. "You'll learn to like her after a bit." "Of course I like her," George Prime said. "You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all." He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. "You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine. "Perfectly," said George Prime. "When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over." "But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off." George Prime looked pained. "Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax." So I did. Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on #th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful. S# And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid. I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office. Of course, it was like buying your first #-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program. Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally "out" while formally "in." Sometimes I took Sunday nights "out" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is. There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office -- there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had. But as he himself pointed out, he was a Super Deluxe model. thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first -- I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it. I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime. But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much. One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it. We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact. I even caught myself looking at Marge again -- really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint. As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing. "What are you doing to her?" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop. "Why, nothing" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent. "There must be something." George Prime shrugged. "Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references." I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful. "Well, you must be doing quite a job," I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much. "I try," said George Prime. "Oh, I'm not complaining," I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. "I was just curious." "Of course, George." "I'm really delighted that you're doing so well." "Thank you, George." But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand. r  I HE next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. "What are you doing out on the street?" He gave me my martyred look. "Just buying some bourbon. You were out." "But you're not supposed to be off the premises -- " "Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?" "Well, certainly not -- " "You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious." "No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint -- " "I'm sorry," George Prime said contritely. "It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument." "Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense," I snapped. "I don't want it to happen again." The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control -- I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting -- but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job. Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire. I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume. "Georgie?" she said. "Uh?" "Do you still love me?" I set the paper down and stared at her. "How's that? Of course I still -- " "Well, sometimes you don't act much like it." "Mm. I guess I've -- uh -- got an awful headache tonight." Damn that perfume! "Oh," said Marge. "In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep -- " "Sleep," said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand. The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage. Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows. George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off. George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right. and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited. George Prime didn't come out. It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover. Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done. I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him. But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced. "What check?" I asked. "The one you wrote to cash yesterday -- five hundred dollars -- against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth." The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly. "Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account." He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them. "What about my special account?" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy. "That's been closed out for two weeks." I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through. I came up with a horrible thought. Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon. I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. "No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda." "When?" I choked out. "Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock -- " I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control -- way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon -- Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime. For how long? was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house. They were gone. I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android. Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around. I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink. My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings. It was indecent. Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. "Why, darling! You're home early!" I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, "You're still here!" "Of course. Where did you think I'd be?" "But I thought -- I mean the ticket office -- " She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. "You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?" "Then -- you knew?" "Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace." "Bermuda," I said. And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest. "Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be," she said. 'He was like you, but he wasn't you, darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before..." I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought She'd never been more beautiful. "But what did you do with him?" "I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss." Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact, unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this -- I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my forefinger, and then I knew what had really happened. That Marge always had been a sly one. I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda. she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all. As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison. She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated. A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow. One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii. Old-Fashioned Bridge Score Pad ? (BhidqsL SafisL Moke Bridge Scoring Easier  More Accurate -- Faster A More Legible I # for I # Including PosUge Send Check or Money Order (No Coin or Stamps)  # East #st St. JL New York #, N. Y. " were nature's biggest failure. Since I'm always glad to hear this. Then I added a few figures in my head. The often used term Age of Reptiles, during which the dinosaurs flourished, comprises the three geological periods of the Triassic, the Jurassic and the CreFig. #: Motchop coptmit, from the Permian of South Africa taceous. The Triassic and the Jurassic each lasted about # million years and the Cretaceous really should start counting a few So the "failures" were around whereas Man started only about that was a remarkably long run for a flop and that, so far, at least, the critical success has merely had an out-of-town tryout. However, it is not my intention to quarrel with somebody's witless verdict. My purpose is, instead, to discuss the question of what the dinosaurs really were, since the term is used rather carelessly in newspaper stories, magazine articles and the movies. To begin with the word itself, it was pasted together during the last century from the two Greek words deinos (meaning terrible, mighty or powerful) and sauros, which just means lizard. T HE next statement to be made is one that should be obvious, but I have found that it isn't -- namely, that not every reptile is a dinosaur, even though all dinosaurs were reptiles. Reptiles are vertebrate animals which have a dry skin, often scaly, breathe by means of lungs, propagate by laying eggs, and lack a heat-regulating mechanism, so that the temperature of their blood is more or less the same as the temperature of the surrounding air or water. A crocodile is a reptile. So are a lizard, a tortoise and a snake. But even the largest crocodile, or the fiercest-looking iguana, is not "an offspring of the dinosaurs" You might as well say that an especially large bull is "an offspring of the elephants" -- both these statements are equally silly. Nor is the mere fact that a reptile is now extinct a criterion. The eight reptilian forms pictured here are absolutely, completely and hopelessly extinct, but half of them are not dinosaurs. They are all reptiles, though, even though the word "reptile" comes from the Latin repto, which means "to crawl." The reptiles got their start way back in the Permian Period, a litThe Earth was not precisely "young" any more then; endless periods had already gone by since its formation. There had been at which the planet was lifeless, then any life that existed was most likely single-celled, and another primitive marine life, of which we know almost nothing, since they left so few fossils. Only after all this time had passed did paleontological history begin with the Cambrian Period, which opened the so-called Paleozoic Era. That era began about Fig. #: Platcoiaurui longictpt, from tho Triattic of Gtrmany Fig. #: Compiognathu longipet, from tho lithographic tlato (late Jurassic) of South Germany through half a dozen geological periods, with a total duration of Those half-dozen periods were the Cambrian, then the Ordovician, then the Silurian (the oldest known fishes belong to this period), followed by the Devonian and by the Carboniferous, a period of maximum activity with enormous forests which produced our coal, and with the earliest known insects and salamanderlike amphibians. The last of the geological periods of the Paleozoic Era was the Permian, which produced the earliest known reptiles. They are known from Texas, from Saxony, from Russia (the Permian Period received its name from the Russian district Perm) and especially from South Africa. The one that is considered to be the grandfather of all the reptiles was found in Texas and named Seymouria. It must have looked like a big ill-tempered salamander with long teeth. In fact, Seymouria was not a "complete" reptile yet, but is perfectly intermediate between the early amphibians which came before and the reptiles which were still to come. The Seymouria group, also called seymouriamorphs, was, in turn, a sub-group of a larger group called the cotylosaurs, or, in English, the stem reptiles. Everything that followed began with them. was a group that goes under the technical name of the therapsids, which quickly produced rather large plant-eating forms. One of the best-known of them is Moschops -- the name means calfs head and don't ask me why; I can't see any similarity -- from the Permian of South Africa (Fig. #). The clumsy reptile was six feet long and must have been quite heavy. There were others that were even larger and their pictures are occasionally printed with the caption "early dinosaurs" but they were not dinosaurs yet. Out of this general muddle of interrelated large and clumsy, small and agile, or even large but agile primitive reptiles sprang a number of branches that were to be fruitful, hence important. One of them, called the theriodonts (which translates as mammal teeth) actually did produce the mammals in the very next geological period, the Triassic. Another one moved in direct strides toward the lateF chelonians, which is the term used by zoologists when they wish to encompass both the turtles and the tortoises. Still another one goes under the name of thecodonts. The name is compounded of the words for tooth and for box, the reason being that their teeth had roots in separate holes in the jaws, an arrangement we tend to consider the norm, but which was Fig. #: Stenopterygius quodritcUtu (ichthyotaur) from the Lia (early Juraic) of Souh Germany Fig. #: Holotu xdontki, from tho oarly Crelaceou of Meng-Yin-Sion in China by no means the norm then. This "order" of the thecodonts had two sub-orders, called parasuchia and pseudosuchia. Translated, this gives us near-crocodiles and pseudo crocodiles -- of all things, the Egyptian name for crocodile is hidden in these terms -- but one should not translate here, for they were not related to the crocodiles, which are a branch of their own. The parasuchians at least looked somewhat like crocodiles, but the pseudosuchians were a bunch of radical innovators. Some started to climb trees, others ran on their hindlegs only, still others alternated between bipedal and quadrupedal walk. Some were armored and others were not In time, one sub-branch of the versatile pseudosuchians evolved into the flying reptiles of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods -- the pterosaurs, to use their technical name. Another sub-branch of the pseudosuchians -- not the same -- learned to fly, too, by changing its scales into feathers and became the birds. And further sub-branches evolved into the dinosaurs. A real "early dinosaur" is Plateosaurus (Fig. #), of which fine specimens have been found in Germany, where Plateosaurus apparently had to migrate across a desert area every year, with a few falling by the wayside and some of them becoming fossilized. Unfortunately the German deposits have yielded fine skeletons but no footprints. The reason this is regrettable is that we do know footprints from Connecticut which could have been made by Plateosaurus or a closely related form. But in Connecticut, no bones have been found. Though it had not yet attained the impressive dimensions of later dinosaurs, Plateosaurus was quite big. The length of the tail alone was about eight feet. relatively young science, it seemed for a while as if all the dinosaurs should or could be sorted into two orders which could be told apart with half a glance, one walking on all fours, while the other strutted around or. its hindlegs. I am sorry to report things aren't that simple. There are two orders of dinosaurs, all right, but the distinguishing mark is not whether they walked on two or four legs. The distinguishing mark is the shape of the pelvis. Very many of them have a pelvis which reminds anatomists of the pelvis of birds. They are the Order of the Ornithischia and are sometimes, for simplicity's sake, referred to as the "birdlike" dinosaurs. This just proves again that we should not translate scientific Fifl. #: Elatmotaurut plalyurut, from tba lata Cratacaou (Niobrara Saa) of Kantat Fig. # : Tricoteratopt horridoi, from th lot Crtacoui of Wyoming terms, for one of these "birdlike" dinosaurs is the rhinoceroslike -- but bigger -- Triceratops (Fig. #). On the other hand, little Compsognathus (Fig. #), which did not quite reach the dimensions of a domestic cat, is not one of the "birdlike" dinosaurs. It belongs to the other order, the one which has a pelvis like a reptile, the Order of the Saurischia. Now inside the Order of the Saurischia, the old distinction into quadrupeds and bipeds does hold true. The bipeds are officially the Sub-order Theropoda, and Compsognathus is one of them. So is the flesh-eating Allosaurus of the North American Jurassic and so is Tyrannosaurus of the North American Cretaceous. The second sub-order of the Saurischia is the Sub-order Sauropoda, and they are what the layman usually thinks of when the word dinosaur is mentioned. Brontosaurus was one of them and so was Diplodocus, both from the North American Jurassic. Another member was Brachiosaurus of eastern Africa, which was probably the biggest of the lot, and finally the somewhat more recent Helotus from China (Fig. #), which was not at all small itself, measuring some # feet from nostrils to tail tip. The reason Helotus is pictured grazing at the bottom of a lake is simply that its remains were found in fresh-water deposits. We now know, because of footprints found in Texas, that the very large sauropod saurischians could walk on dry land. This is a point worth making since, for quite a number of years, it was thought that the legs of the sauropods, while massive, could support the body only if shallow water helped them to carry it. They probably did not go hiking for fun, but if they had to cross dry land to get from one lake to another, they could. As I said, the old distinction of bipeds on the one hand and quadrupeds on the other hand can still be made, provided you stay inside the Order of the Saurischia. In the other order of the true dinosaurs, the Ornithischia, you can do the same, except for one main difference. The quadrupeds belonging to the Order Ornithischia are so different from each other that they form separate sub-orders. L ET'S look at this in a little more detail. The first suborder of the Ornithischia is that of the Ornithopoda (bird-footed). In the Jurassic Period, this suborder was represented by the bipedal dinosaur Camptosaurus, which hasn't received much publicity in other than professional books. But the ornithopods of the Cretaceous are well known; they are the so-called duck-billed dinosaurs, of which Trachodon is the favorite example. The remaining three sub-orders of the Ornithischia are all quadrupeds and they are called Stegosauria, Ankylosauria and Ceratopsia. The first of these three is repFig. #: Pteranodon ingeni, from the late Cretaceou (Niobrara Soa) of Kantat resented, of course, by the wellknown stegosaur, which bore a crest of enormous triangular bony plates on its back, with a few paired sets of spikes on the tail to make the defensive armament complete. The name stegosaur is based on the Greek word for roof -- apparently the first discoverer thought that the triangular plates were lying flat on the body as armor, giving the effect of shingles. V.' now know that they did not and it probably was the weight of these plates which made stegosaur into a quadruped. The study of his anatomical features makes it perfectly clear that this type was bipedal and readapted to walking on all four legs only after it had already acquired the features that go with a usually upright position. The next sub-order, that of the Ankylosauria, is not too well known to the public and the main representative Ankylosaurus is not very easy to describe. The difficulty begins with the name, for the Greek word ankylos can mean curved or crooked or else stiff-jointed. Both meanings apply, the curved to its ribs, the stiff-jointed to its general appearance. It has been called the "tank of the Cretaceous Period," squat and heavy in build, with a broad armor-plated skull, a heavy stiff tail with a clublike bone at the tip, and, for all we know, with horny spikes along the sides. The last sub-order of the Ornithischia was also massive in build and heavily armored, at least in front. They were the Ceratopsia (Fig. #). And there you have the tribes of the dinosaurs, all six of them: the Theropoda (example: Tyrannosaurus), the Sauropoda (example: Brontosaurus), the Ornithopoda (example: Trachodon, the duck-bill), the Stegosauria, the Ankylosauria and the Ceratopsia. There weren't any others when the dinosaurs were at their peak. But how about things like the plesiosaurs in the sea, the flying saurians in the air? They were reptiles and can be called saurians, but they were not dinosaurs. The ones usually called plesiosaurs form a reptilian order of their own, the Order Sauropterygia. These long-necked "sea serpents" with their four paddles became more long-necked as-time went on. The plesiosaurus of the Jurassic Period was already giraffe-necked... What happened in the Cretaceous with Elasmosaurus can be seen in Fig. #.L"- siosaurs were another type of marine reptiles of the general shape and size of a dolphin, the ichthyosaurs (Fig. #). They also form a reptilian order of their own, the Order Ichthyosauria, from Greek ichthys for fish and sauros for lizard. How well distributed they were can be told by a survey of their life history. The earliest known types of the ichthyosaurs were found mostly in California. A somewhat later type, but still from the Triassic Period, was found in Spitsbergen and named Mixosaurus nordenskjoldi, and another one of the same age -- came to light in Nevada. The vast majority of the ichthyosaurs of the Jurassic Period, however, is concentrated in South Germany and South England. To forestall questions as to why the ichthyosaur of Fig. # has a different name, I have to explain that during the Jurassic Period -- more precisely, in the first of the three sub-periods of the Jurassic Periods, when they were most numerous -- three main types were around in quantities. They could be told apart best by the shape of their paddles ( pteryx in Greek), which were either broad ( europs in Greek) or else narrow (atenops) or slender (eptos ). Hence the three types received the designations Europterygius, Stenopterygius and Leptopterygius. The ichthyosaurs did not continue beyond the end of the Jurassic Period and their last representatives were weak-looking and very nearly toothless types. Apparently they disappeared because they had too much competition from other marine reptiles which grew large then -- with teeth to match -- and from the sharks, which all of a geological sudden produced a number of formidable types. And the flying reptiles? They are a separate order, too, that of the Pterosauria -- that Greek word pteryx can mean wing as well. We do know that nimble tree-climbing pseudosuchians were their ancestors, but we can't tell just when and where they put in their first appearance. When they did show up, in European deposits from the Jurassic Period, they already came in two sharply distinguished types. One of these, presumably the somewhat older, was the pterodactylus type, with a very short tail and usually tiny in size, ranging from about that of a sparrow to that of a pigeon or slightly larger. The other was the rhamphorhynchus type, which had a long tail with a tiny skin rudder at its tip and which tended to be somewhat larger, about like a duck. The pterodactylus type seems to have been insect eaters (some have rather large eyes, indicating nocturnal flying) while the rhamphorhynchus type probably was fish-eating. The pterosaurs did produce one giant, Pteranodon (Fig. #), which hovered over the Niobrara Sea that covered Kansas and adjacent states during the last part of the Cretaceous Period. One find of Pteranodon has led to the suspicion that its shape may have been even more unusual than shown. It is possible that it had a large throat pouch for pre-digesting or simply storing fish. The experts, so far, only say that this is possible and the artists hope that they won't become definite on this point, for a dangling throat pouch under this head is hard to draw convincingly. TVrOW, of course, the inevitable ' question will come up why all these abounding forms became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period. There is no simple answer to this question because there was no single cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs and those other reptile tribes. Let's turn this around first and see what is left of the Class of the Reptilia. The following is a listing of all the orders -- at this point, I have the choice of either following the system of the late Professor Othenio Abel of Vienna University, or that of Professor Baron von Huene of Tubingen University, or that of Professor Alfred Sherwood Romer of Harvard University, and I have decided in favor of Harvard -- with notes pertaining to their fates. stem reptiles, extinct even before the days of the dinosaurs. turtles, still with us. tinct since end of the Jurassic Period. siosaurs, extinct since end of Cretaceous Period. tiles, extinct at an early date. another type of ancient reptiles, most of them extinct at an early date, but one, Hatteria, still alive on islets near New Zealand. still with us; the snakes are the most recent reptilian type to have evolved. reptiles, as explained, extinct. and alligators, still with us; they don't date back past the Jurassic Period. reptiles, lasted only through Jurassic and Cretaceous. two sub-orders, extinct. saurs, four sub-orders, extinct. early forms, extinct. and somewhat mammal-like forms, extinct, but the mammals sprang from one of these last two orders. Though the glory of the reptiles is gone, there are still plenty of reptilians left. As for those that vanished, one can figure out the reasons in a few cases, though not for all. But it must be kept in mind that saying "they became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period" is putting it very vaguely indeed. That statement still leaves a leeway of a few saurs had been extinct on Continent A, they might still have been thriving on Continent B. The reasons? A large forest fire, set by lightning, could easily wipe out a tribe of pterosaurs. The ichthyosaurs succumbed to competition after they, presumably adapting to a diet of squid, had shed their own teeth. Many tribes, especially when living on small continents or very large islands, could have been eradicated by egg-eaters. Small mammals like eggs and so do birds -- and so do snakes, the last offspring of the reptiles themselves. The large forms probably succumbed to fairly minor climatic changes, simply because they were large. Reptiles lack sweat glands and die of heat stroke if the sun is hot and no water and shade are available. A minor earthquake resulting in the draining of a few sets of large shallow lakes would indirectly kill off whole armies of sauropods. A small lizard can shade itself in underbrush or in cracks between rocks; a brontosaurus could not But even though the tribes are all gone, I can't get myself to label them failures. For they did well for a long, long time. The mammals will almost certainly last as long. But will Man? Ai long as science fiction magazines constitute the best media for reaching univer sities and engineering laboratories, we would like to announce that by t. Ron Hubbard is the textbook on human communication and a necessity in mathematical and laboratory work. Box #-Sa, Silver Springs, Maryland The Hardest Bargain too," he added, with the objective interest of one whose chief article of diet was oil. "Well, don't just stand there," President Buchbinder said. "Go iM out and chase them away!" His I citizens engaged in riot ing on the lawn, sir," Robot Z-#A told the President of the United States. "Trampling down the early peas, #raf It wasn't possible to make a bigger or more disastrous blunder... expecting an alien to consider himself yr humble  obdt servantl voice subsided to a groan. "Have the people no respect for our sacred traditions? Don't they know the White House lawn is the only place for miles around where peas will grow?" "They're young, most of them," Dr. Livingston, the President's confidential advisor, said tolerantly, puffing at his pipe. "The way the birth rate's been climbing, you take any given number of the population at any one time and the majority will be too young to remember our glorious traditions -- " "Their parents could teach them!" Buchbinder snapped. "After all, isn't that why we have parents instead of incubators?" "Their parents are too busy scratching out a living and -- ah -- breeding to be able to instruct the young ones," Livingston said. "It's a vicious circle which has come to a head in this generation." There was something wrong with that statement, Buchbinder knew, but he didn't dare come right out and say so, for fear of looking a fool. He knew his confidential advisor was smarter than he was. And what with the atomic wars of the past couple of centuries, the large proportion of strontium # in the atmosphere, and general intellectual jealousy, there weren't many intelligent people left in the world, so the ones that remained had to be handled with care. B uchbinder turned to Z-#A, who was still standing there. "Why haven't you obeyed my instructions?" he demanded, outraged at this evidence of insubordination in a robot. From people you expected it, but a machine was supposed to be above such petty defectiveness. "Why don't you go chase the rioters off the lawn, per order?" "I don't dare, sir," Z-#A explained. "Should I get close enough, they would disassemble me. As a matter of fact, when I informed them from the balcony that they were trespassing, they employed language which -- well, sir, if I hadn't been a robot and constitutionally incapable of the pudent graces, it would have made me blush." "Disassemble a robot!" Buchbinder repeated, shocked. "I never heard of anything so manic in my life. Why should they want to do a thing like that?" Since the robot did not have parts sufficiently flexible for shrugging, he remained impassive. It was Dr. Livingston who answered. "Haven't you heard, Will? The people are starting to destroy robots when they can get thenhands on them. To try to destroy them, that is. Fortunately, most of the people are too weak from hunger and racial debility to do any great damage unless they operate in gangs. Looks like you'll have to pass an anti-congregation law." "But why should they want to do a silly thing like destroying robots?" Buchbinder persisted. Livingston smiled wisely. "They're saying that if it weren't for the robots, they'd have jobs, a higher standard of living -- the usual complaints you hear at the beginning of every revolution" "If it weren't for the robots, they wouldn't have anything at all!" Buchbinder said, exasperated. "Don't they realize that the only thing that keeps the country going at all is the fact that there's a plentiful supply of free labor? And I understand from Counterintelligence that it's the same overseas." "Oh, there's plenty of free labor," Livingston observed. "Plenty of service, too. But very little to eat." "That's not true," Buchbinder said hotly. "Maybe hydroponics didn't work out for large-scale operations; still, the people could perfectly well eat synthetics. But, no, they're so stubborn, they'd rather starve to death -- " "Some of them did eat the synthetics and died anyway." "Some people insist on being allergic to anything! It's all in the mind!" At times like this, Buchbinder felt he was on the verge of going mad, like Presidents Ling and Riccobono before him. If only he had been elected in the days before the atomic wars, when it was a treat to be President! Then, all a Chief Executive had to do were fun things, like appointing ambassadors and making speeches and declaring wars. He didn't have to worry how to feed the people; in those days, there used to be food growing all over the place and it was distributed with such efficiency that only a small portion of the populace ever went hungry. "You'd think since they know there isn't much food," Buchbinder said, "that people wouldn't have quite so many children and make more mouths to feed." "I don't suppose they're doing it consciously," Livingston told him. "It's nature's attempt to ensure the survival of the race. And it certainly looks from here as if it's likely to be a futile one." "You're always so pessimistic, Maurice." Dr. Livingston cleared his throat, as he always did before making a remark he felt to be especially apt. "The thinking man," he said, "is the despairing man." President's office. "A ship from outer space has landed on the lawn, sir," he announced, "thus, I am sure you will be gratified to know, effectively disposing of the rioters." "Oh, good!" Robot Z-#A said. "That disposes of my problem." Both robots shook hands with a slight grating noise. "But if there were any peas left," Buchbinder mourned, "this must have finished them." However, he arose, for when der, though possibly reluctant, was never remiss. "I don't see why the star traders keep on coming all the way out here," he remarked as he put on the sacred frock coat with the authentic moth holes. "Surely what little we have to trade wouldn't be of much value to them." Livingston took his pipe out of his mouth. "I imagine there must always be little novelty items they can pick up. After all, the fact that we're so far off the beaten track probably gives our products some curio value, if nothing else." "Oh, I suppose so," Buchbinder sighed. "All right, activate the reception committee," he told Z-#B. "I don't suppose there's any chance this could be a diplomatic mission or anything like that?" he added wistfully, brushing off the tall genuine silk ceremonial hat. "No, sir, it is merely a trading ship -- and rather a small one," said Z-#B, who left to turn on the reception committee. That was merely a fancy name for a unitranslator which the government had purchased from a Denebian trader some decades before in return for a partridge in a pear tree. The bargain had, of course, been closed in the days when neither partridges nor pear trees had become obsolescent. Although interstellar traders had been dropping in on Earth for the past, hundred years or so, Earth had no diplomatic relations with the other solar systems -- or any kind of official relations at all, in fact. As far as the terrestrials could make out from the information given them by the various life-forms who hit Earth from time to time those days, there had been some kind of embargo on their planet for many centuries. If the more extravagant reports were to be believed, the sanctions dated back to the time when there were no powered vehicles on Earth. At any rate, as a result of these discriminatory tactics, Earth citizens were not allowed to ride in the extraterrestrial ships back to their point of origin. It was very likely that an attempt would have been made to prevent them from traveling in their own ships, if they'd had any. Fortunately, however, Earth had not succeeded in developing space travel and so the question never arose. "Used to be an embargo on all trade, even," a chatty Aldebaranian octopoid had told President Ling. "Now the League seems to be easing up a little on non-vital materials. Who knows, maybe someday, when you're advanced enough or something, they'll even let you into the League... Now what do you have to offer in fine glass and crystal?" Buchbinder declared, "I wouldn't speak to one of those outworlders. If we're not good enough for them, I don't see why -- " "But we do need food," Livingston said, taking his pipe out of his mouth and pointing it at the President. "Desperately. You have no choice but to dicker with him." Buchbinder nodded gloomily. "On the other hand, Will, do you think it dignified to go drive the bargain yourself? What do you have a Secretary of the Interior for?" "St. Clair?" Buchbinder cried contemptuously. "Why, I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit. Less, in fact, because I used to be the champion -- " chided gently as he, too, pulled on his frock coat, "this is no time for dithering." "If that St. Clair saw a chance to make a fast buck for himself," Buchbinder grumbled, "he wouldn't give a damn about the country. Besides, if there happen to be any truffles, I want to put my bid in for them first. The last time, Defense got them all. And when I reminded General McMullen that, after all, I was Commander-in-Chief, he said he was sorry, but the top brass had already eaten them all in a souffle. "Have you ever thought, Maurice," Buchbinder continued as, fully attired in the traditional ceremonial garments, the two dignitaries clattered down the grand stairs, "how funny it is that these extraterrestrial fellows should have the exact kind of food we eat? I mean it's obvious that they're completely different lifeforms with different digestive systems and everything. Some aren't even animals and yet they bring -- well, oats, peas, beans and barley. Earth food." "It's obvious they must know a great deal about us," Livingston answered. "We are worth a bit of study. So it's not hard to understand -- " "I'm not asking how they know what we eat," Buchbinder said. "I'm asking where they get it from. And all properly put up in cans, too." "It doesn't take a great deal of know-how to put up food in cans. Posnack's experiments with chimpanzees conclusively -- " "I didn't mean -- " Buchbinder interrupted. Then he forgot what he was starting to say as he tripped over a roller skate on the bottom step. "Even here," he said bitterly. "In the White House. Children." "Must be the Secretary of Agriculture's twins," Livingston said. "He brings them to work to save the cost of a baby-sitter." proved to be unnecessary; the trader spoke fluent English. He was also vaguely humanoid, being a biped with only one pair of arms and one -- rather small -- head. It was in skin coloring that the difference between him and the human was most marked, not so much in hue as in arrangement, for his complexion ranged from the ruddy bronze of the American Indian on one side of his scantily clothed body to a Mongolian ochre on the other. Had he been portly rather than thin, he would have resembled an apple. His name was Foma and he came from the Fomalhaut system. Foma was one of the most attractive outworlders Buchbinder had ever seen, although the President's favorable opinion was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that the alien had not only brought cans of truffles but sauerkraut and pate de fois gras and beer as well. There were herrings and jam and jellybeans put up in clear, shining glass jars, and lovely plump knockwursts and Brunschweiger sausages neatly encased in their own skins. He had plastic bags of pretzels and potatoes, and his frozen-food locker actually contained stewed rabbit and pumpernickel and three kinds of strudel. Foma drove a hard bargain, for he wanted a considerable quantity of Revere silver in return for all these delightful things. However, Buchbinder was no slouch at haggling, either, and he managed to beat down the alien two teapots and a creamer before the bargain was closed. Then the robots swiftly carried the crates of food into the White House, where a certain portion would be reserved for the government tables. The rest would be carried by other robots to Fort Knox, from which it would be dispensed to the general population according to merit, rank and connections. And, as the food was taken out of the ship, the crowd of children outside the fence, who had been emitting shrill jeers and catcalls throughout the preliminary parleying, fell silent and reverent before the almost legendary dainties borne past them. "Nice little machines you have there," Foma said, surveying the robots appreciatively. "Is there any chance that you would consider parting with some? I'll give you a good price." "Oh, no, decidedly not!" the President exclaimed, horrified at such a suggestion. "These were the last creations of our greatest minds before they died," he explained, "and our economy, such as it is, is founded upon them. We couldn't do without our robots. And there's an arbitrary limit on their numbers built in as one of the prime directives. They manufacture themselves, you see," he went on, anxious not to offend the outworlder, "which is why we have none available for export" "I do see," Foma said with a smile. "What I can't understand, though, is how you people managed to survive with an economy based on food that doesn't seem to be indigenous to your planet." "Oh, but it used to be," the President replied wistfully.  that embraced all of the District of Columbia and part of Maryland. "Once, verdant vegetation stretched as far as the eye could see, while edible animals gamboled about blissfully in it. Why," he cried, carried away, "prior to the twenty-first century, the whole country looked like a combined zoological and botanical garden." "It must have been very pretty," Foma said. "Not that it isn't pretty now," he added with polite haste. "A very pleasant spot. A river does so much for a town, and that's a very charming river washing the southern side -- " "The western side," Livingston corrected him thoughtfully. "If you mean the Potomac." "The southwestern side, to be exact," the President said, exercising diplomacy. "However, you should have seen the place before the wars. I understand it was a veritable fairyland!" He grew sad. "But then came the wars. Most of the land was devastated by those terrible nuclear weapons, except for small patches here and there left fertile by chance. The scientists say nothing will grow on most of it for hundreds of years, by which time the race will have died out, I suppose." He gave a brave smile. "Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted." "I don't mean to presume," Foma said, "but I suppose you could derive a little moral lesson from what happened: to wit, fighting is unprofitable as well as unethical." "Oh, the human being has always been a fighting animal," Dr. Livingston replied. "If you must have a moral, it might be -- " he cleared his throat -- "If your weapons are too good, you'll kill off all the game." Foma gave the confidential adback to Buchbinder. "I am beginning to understand now why you don't rehabilitate your land and start growing things again. I had wondered, but I see now you realize that the same thing would only happen all over again, so it's no use. I really admire you, though, for your national strength of character in -- " "Rehabilitate the land?" Buchbinder repeated incredulously. "You mean the radioactivity can be removed from the soil?" "Hasn't anyone ever told you?" Foma asked. "Wait a minute, though," he added consideringly. "I might be treading on classified ground. I must consult my handbook." Placing what looked like a species of optical instrument before his face, he twirled several knobs. "No," he announced as he removed it, "not classified at all. I'm forced to the shocking conclusion that the other traders didn't want to dry up a profitable source of revenue by decontaminating your land." "Well, even if such a process were possible," Livingston said, "you can hardly blame them. After all, business is business." Foma looked at him sternly. vancies made the President impatient. "Do you mean you have a way of removing the radioactivity -- " "Watch out," Livingston whispered. "This looks like the beginning of a sharp practice to me. Personally, I don't believe there is any such process." Apparently the outworlder's hearing was more acute than the human. "You Earth people are so suspicious. No wonder -- " And then he stopped. "No wonder what?" Livingston pressed. "Just no wonder," Foma said firmly. He turned to the President. "Would you like your land decontaminated? By good fortune, I do happen to 'have the requisite equipment for taking the radioactivity out of soil. The same machine is used for many things." "Aha!" Dr. Livingston cried. "Good fortune, indeed!" He cleared his throat. "The coincidence in the natural state is an extremely rare bird." "I'm not denying that it is rather an expensive process," Foma continued, ignoring him. "But when you need something done, you've got to pay the -- the price." It was pretty depressing, Buchbinder thought, to know that there was a cure for your ailment and not have the money to pay for the medicine. "We have so little," he said hopelessly. "So very little. What can we offer that will make it worth your while?" "You underestimate the value of your native handicrafts," Foma smiled. "I will undertake to remove the radioactivity from the entire country," he offered, changing to a brisk, businesslike tone, "in return for the following... " Putting his optical instrument to his eye again, he read aloud: "Rembrandt, Old Woman Cutting Her Nails; El Greco, View of Toledo; Titian, Venus and Adonis; Daumier, Third-class Carriage; Goya, Don Manuel Osorio; Cezanne, Card Players; and Picasso, The Three Musicians." "What's all that in English?" Buchbinder asked, thinking that Foma, in his enthusiasm, had lapsed into his native tongue. "Are you sure we have it?" "He was speaking English," Livingston hissed. "Those are pictures, famous paintings. Among the nation's most treasured artistic possessions. We can hardly sell them for -- " he gave a bitter little laugh -- "food." "You mean better we should starve than sell them?" Buchbinder asked. "Better we should starve," Livingston said solemnly. T HE President struggled hard to understand. "But we sold him the teapots and they're historical. They were made by Paul Revere and he -- " "I know all about Paul Revere, thank you," Livingston said. "And these are just pictures. From the way they sounded, they were all painted by foreigners. And Paul Revere was an American. A patriot -- " "I know, I know," Livingston interrupted. "On the twenty-second of July in 'seventy-six -- " "Now even I know better than that," Buchbinder said, staring at him in amazement, as did the alien. "It's 'On the eighteenth of April in 'seventy-five...'" "Of course," Livingston murmured. "Now why did my subconscious make me get the date wrong like that?" "Human memory is fallible," Foma suggested suavely. The President tugged insistently at Livingston's sleeve. "You're great American patriot, but when it comes to things that were made by foreigners -- " "You simply don't understand, "I know I don't." Buchbinder's voice was plaintive. "That's why I'm asking you to explain it to me." "Paul Revere was a great man and a fine silversmith. It is a pity to let his creations go out of our solar system. However -- " Livingston cleared his throat -- "purely utilitarian objects never attain the artistic dignity of beauty created for its own sake." "Why?" the President wanted to know. Livingston gave a sigh and turned to the outworlder. "Look, Mr. -- ah -- Foma, I'm afraid it will require a special session of Congress to settle this matter. Would you mind waiting a few weeks? Or months?" "Or, possibly, years," the President grumbled. "Not at all," Foma said, smiling. "I shall amuse myself by browsing through the Congressional Library. Perhaps I can locate one or two little items there that we can make a deal on." tended to support the President's point of view. "For," the Senate majority leader orated, "splendid and enduring monuments to our nation's greatness though these works of art may be -- " "They weren't even painted by Americans," Buchbinder interposed helpfully. The majority leader glared at him. "I didn't say they were splendid and enduring monuments to our nation's greatness. I only said they may be. Anyhow, should the race perish, there will be no one to look at these beautiful pictures and appreciate their -- er -- beauty. But then again, should we entrust them to the keeping of the gentleman from the stars -- " he bowed toward Foma -- "I am sure that his people will preserve them with the same loving care and solicitude that we ourselves have given them." "You may rest assured of that," Foma promised, returning the bow. "Then, when our lands are fruitful once more, when we are able to give of their abundance to our four-footed friends, so that the animal kingdom may thrive and multiply again, when our race has regained its former glory, invigorated by the renewal of plenty and a reliable supply of meat, we shall develop space travel of our own. A mighty fleet shall set sail for the stars -- " "Hear, hear!" shrieked the children who filled the gallery to bursting. we shall seek out the strongholds where the pictures are kept close," the Senator continued, "and then we -- " he glanced at Foma and seemed to recollect himself -- "and then we will look at them." There were boos and catcalls from the gallery. "Silence!" bellowed the Congressional robots. "Si-lence!" "But who's to say this alleged process will work?" the minority leader asked. President Buchbinder knew he was a close associate of Dr. Livingston's. "Mr. Foma may make off with our paintings and leave the land as barren as ever." "Naturally, I shall not ask for payment, gentlemen," Foma said, "until your lands are green once more." "Well," the minority leader concluded lamely, "nothing can be fairer than that. I guess." That seemed to settle it. Congress passed an act empowering the alien to commence rehabilitating the barren lands. Dr. Livingston remained in Washington to keep the eternal light burning over the Tombs of the numerous Unknown Soldiers, while Foma and President Buchbinder set off for Smith County, Kansas. Smith County, Kansas, was the geographical center of the United States and hence the place where Foma proposed to set up his equipment. Buchbinder observed as Foma, with the efficient aid of some of the Smith County robots, put together a simple contraption of wheels, springs, pipes, valves, relays, switches, coils, shafts and wires. "Perhaps not," Foma said affably, "but it is highly effective. When activated, the machine disseminates powerful sonic rays which will accelerate the diminution of the half-life of the soil until, in very short order, it becomes only a quarter-life, then an eighth-life, a sixteenth-life -- " "I understand," the President interrupted. "But how long does it take until there is no life at all -- no radioactive life, that is?" "Perhaps a week, Foma said. "Perhaps eight days, perhaps six." "I'd also like to know," the President inquired, apprehensively buttoning his jacket up to his throat, "whether it does anything to people. Because it's not much good if the soil turns fertile and we turn the opposite." "At this setting," Foma said, "it has not the slightest effect upon any form of animal life." He beamed upon the Smith County children who had gathered to watch the proceedings. They stuck out their tongues at him. Buchbinder hoped that wherever the alien came from, it was a gesture of great respect. Then the President had a frightening thought "The emanations won't'reach the Eastern Empire, will they? We wouldn't want their soil to become fertile again." "You are paying to have this country decontaminated," Foma said, "and only this country will be decontaminated. I do not offer my services gratis. People set no value on anything for which they do not pay." "Well, of course not!" President Buchbinder agreed. Then he had an even more appalling idea. The Eastern Empire, he'd been given to understand, had some art treasures of its own in a place called the Hermitage. "After you've finished with us," he asked, "you're not going to turn around and make a deal with the East to decontaminate them, are you?" "That," Foma said curtly as he blew into one of the pipes, "is my business." "Oh, dear," the President thought, "it is going to mean more wars. Well," he consoled himself, "war is more interesting than riots and, as a matter of fact, a lot safer for me personally, since rioters always make for the White House first, whereas war is on a more catch-as-catch-can basis." reported that the machine's work was done and dismantled it. President Buchbinder was thankful, for the sonic vibrations were nerve-racking and people had been complaining, even though he had made a video address to the nation beforehand to explain just what they were supposed to do. Now he made another address, exhorting everyone who had any ground at all to go forth and plant seeds. "And in case the seeds we have should not prove viable," he concluded, "Mr. Foma has been kind enough to throw a group of vegetable seeds from his own stock into the bargain. Do not think, however," he reassured the nation, "that these are the seeds of alien vegetation. On the contrary, we have Swiss chard, cabbage, beets, onions, cucumbers, Brussels sprouts and rhubarb -- all perfectly familiar, I may even say beloved, native vegetables." As they went off the air, the President remembered a question that had been bothering him earlier. "You don't look like us," he said to Foma. "How come you grow exactly the same vegetables as we used to?" "A trader must have brought some seeds back from this planet," Foma said. "Must have been a long time ago, too, because the vegetables you describe as yours flourish on a good many of the other worlds now. Although we don't care for the produce ourselves, some of our pets like them, which is why we happened to have supplies on hand when we reopened trading operations with you." "Oh," the President said. It sounded reasonable enough. After the broadcast, Foma and President Buchbinder returned to Washington, where Foma reveled in the pleasures of the Congressional Library and the Folger Memorial for some weeks. Then the seeds, both local and imported, began to sprout and the land turned green, according to promise, and Foma's bill came due.L"- see you," Robot X-#B announced as he came into the President's office, where Buchbinder and Livingston were playing chess. "Sorry I couldn't wait to have an appointment put through the regular channels," Foma said, coming in hard upon the robot's heels. "Oh, my dear fellow," said Buchbinder, rising, "think nothing of it -- we are very informal here. What can I do for you?" "Now that my part of the bargain is fulfilled, I'm rather anxious to go home, so I'd appreciate immediate payment of my bill." "Of course, of course! I'll start getting the pictures together. You should have them by the end of the week." "Excellent." The alien smiled. "Meanwhile, I'll get my ship ready for the return journey." He shook hands with Buchbinder and left. "You won't have to bother getting the pictures together," Dr. Livingston said as soon as Foma had gone. "They're all in the basement already." "Maurice," the President said feelingly, "you did this for me while I was gone. You put aside your personal prejudices in order to save me trouble. You -- " "Well," Livingston interrupted uncomfortably, "you might as well know now: they're not exactly the same pictures he asked for. While you were gone, I got together with a little Congressional committee and we decided -- " "But we promised!" Buchbinder exclaimed in dismay. "We agreed on seven specific pictures. They're listed right here on the bill he rendered!" "We didn't sign a contract," Livingston said, pushing away the paper the President was thrusting in his face. "Besides, he is getting pictures. Masterpieces, too. But more the kind his people will be able to appreciate." "How do you know that?" "Look, I'll show them to you." President down to the basement. "Here's what Foma's getting," he explained. "Instead of Rembrandt's Old Woman Cutting Her Nails, we give him Delacroix's Arab T ax Collector. Instead of El Greco's View of Toledo, he gets Constable's Wivenhoe Park, Essex. For Titian's Venus and Adonis, Hals' Junker Ramp and His Sweetheart. For Daumier's Third-Class Carriage, Eastmans My Old Kentucky Home. For Goya's Don Manuel Osorio, Canaletto's Vegetable Garden. For Cezanne's Card Players, Fragonard's A Game of Hot Cockles. And for Picasso's Three Musicians, Murillo's Jacob and Rachel at the Well." "Yes, they are very pretty pictures," the President said, inspecting them. "Very pretty, indeed. I can see how we'd hate to let them go" "No, no, no!" Livingston cried. "These are the ones we're giving him! Nothing but the best, you see. And, on the average, much larger than the ones he asked for. Why, he might not even have known about these; they are less publicized, so outworlders might not have heard of them." "That's very considerate of you, Maurice," the President said, "but since we are giving him masterpieces, anyway, why don't we let him have the ones he asked for? Why go to all this trouble?" "I'll tell you, Will," said Livingston. "It's because the nation has more of a sentimental attachment to the others. And, furthermore, the pictures we are giving him present a more favorable view of terrestrial life. The others -- well, I hate to say it about masthem might almost be considered sordid. And one of these was painted by an American." "These are nice." The President didn't know much about art, but he didn't see how anybody could help liking the pictures Livingston and the Congressional committee had selected. "Very nice." "That's just it, Will!" Livingston clapped him on the shoulder. "You've hit it exactly. They're nice! They're the kind of pictures we'd be proud to have another world see. We want to make a good impression in the other solar systems, don't we, so someday maybe we can get into the Big League ourselves?" He was convincing, but Bucfybinder was still dubious. "Are you sure Foma will understand? He might make a fuss. And he has every right to, you know." "We'll get the robots to do these up in special gift-wrapping paper," Livingston said, "with ribbons and seals and all, and maybe Foma won't open them until he gets to his home planet." "Maybe," the President half agreed. "But even if he doesn't open them, somehow it doesn't seem right. Maurice, don't you think we're going to sacrifice a lot of interstellar good-will if we pull a trick like this?" "Nonsense! It's just sound business practice." Livingston cleared his throat. "Besides, we cannot let mere material considerations interfere with our duty." "I suppose not," the President said. "On the other hand -- " "I'll call the robots and have them start wrapping right away," Livingston told him. jTUT these aren't the pictures Mr. Foma asked for," Z-#A said helpfully as he brought out the big roll of goldfoil gift-wrapping paper, with "Compliments of the White House," "Regards from the President," and "Best Wishes from the U.S.A." etched on it in flowing script. "Someone apparently has blundered. Shall we -- " "There's no mistake," the President said, the more impatiently as he could not, in spite of Dr. Livingston's assurances, get his conscience to accept this switching of art works. "They don't look to me like pictures anybody would ask for," Z-#B contributed. "They're not supposed to appeal to mechanical tastes!" Buchbinder snapped. "I like them." "Use the seals that say 'Do Not Open until Inauguration Day,"' Livingston told the robots, "and the heaviest wrapping tape. And be sure you make the knots good and tight, but very ornate, so it'll seem a pity to undo them." When the pictures were all wrapped, the robots carried them out carefully to the lawn. Foma was waiting next to his ship, in the midst of a welter of debris left by the children who had come to look at it while he was gone. Its once shining metallic sides were marred by scratches and even paint. Some of the disfiguring marks were words. Buchbinder spelled them out "Oh, my goodness!" the President exclaimed. "What a dreadful thing to have happen! I'll have the robots clean it up at once!" "Children will be children," Foma smiled. "I find the slogans rather amusing and, in fact, almost decorative. I won't have them touched." And he started to turn to the pictures. The President gave a scared little gasp. "You've forgotten something!" he babbled. "Under this tarpaulin. Maybe it's important!" He started to lift the tarpaulin, but Foma stopped him. "No, I haven't forgotten that. It's -- ah -- some gear that can't be put on board until after the cargo is loaded. Would you take the paper off the pictures?" he said to the robots. "They did them up so nicely," the President said in a small voice. "It -- it seems such a shame -- " "Don't worry about it," Foma told him. "I'm going to put them away in special hyperspace-proof batting, anyhow. And I wouldn't be much of a trader if I bought goods sight unseen, now would I?" HE three of them stood there in a dead silence as the robots unwrapped each picture. Foma's eyes chilled into steel, including the one which had opened in the middle of his forehead. "These are not the pictures I asked for." "These are fine pictures," Buchbinder faltered. "Very fine -- " "They are very fine pictures. However, our bargain was for seven others. I kept my part of the bargain; I expect you to keep yours." Livingston shrugged. "I'm afraid you hardly have much choice. You can't contaminate the country all over again. Even if you have the means to do it, I n feel sure that your League would consider such behavior unethical." "You're quite right," Foma agreed, "although I am rather surprised to find you able to even recognize an ethical point of view." Livingston grasped the alien's arm. "Be reasonable, man -- er -- Mr. Foma. These are excellent pictures we're offering you, in tiptop condition. Only the best of pigments -- and have you ever seen handsomer frames?" Foma shook him off. "Those are not the pictures we agreed upon. I refuse to accept them in payment of your debt." Livingston grinned. "If you persist in your obstinacy, sir, I'm afraid you'll have to go back to your planet unpaid." "Maurice, Maurice," the President whimpered, tugging at his advisor's sleeve, "this will give us a bad name in the Galaxy. They won't come with food to trade any more." "We won't need their food, lunkhead!" Livingston snapped. "We can grow our own now." He turned back to Foma. "That's our final offer, sir. Take it or leave it!" "Your final offer, eh?" Foma repeated. "Very well, then." "Maurice," Buchbinder bleated, "I'm afraid -- " Foma yanked the tarpaulin away and disclosed what had been concealed underneath it -- his decontamination apparatus, already set up. "You're going to make the land radioactive again!" the President gasped. "I told you, Maurice -- " "He wouldn't dare!" Dr. Livingston cried, but he was pale. "No," Foma said, "I shall do nothing of the sort. All I want are my just dues. And, as I told you, this is an extremely versatile machine." He blew into a pipe. There was a moment of silence -- a moment in which nothing happened, but everything seemed about to happen. Then there was a clattering sound. And, all of a sudden, the streets were filled with robots. They streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue, they streamed down Connecticut Avenue, marching in perfect unison. They marched toward the White House; they marched onto the lawn; they marched up the ramp and into the airlock of the spaceship, which expanded in a seemingly limitless way to accommodate them. stolidly marching; thousands came, tens of thousands... until it was clear that the District of Columbia and its surrounding communities were being drained of their robots. "Call out the Army!" shouted the President. "Call out the Navy! Summon the Marine Corps."! "They're all robots," Livingston said in a tired voice. "Except for the officers, of course, and all they can do is head parades and initial computer directives." "The Secret Service?... No," the President answered himself. "If the soldiers and sailors and marines are robots, then the Secret Service certainly must be." He appealed to Foma. "Please turn off that machine! Turn it off! I'll get you the pictures you wanted -- and you can have these into the bargain. You can have the whole National Gallery, only please don't take our robots!" "Too late," said Foma, and his voice was grand and sad and smug. "Too late. A deal is a deal. When it's broken, the injured party has every right to exact whatever payment he deems fit" Dr. Livingston stared at Foma, his eyes widening, then widening still further. "Then it wasn't a legend! You actually did it!" Foma bowed low. "What are you two agreeing about?" the President asked, looking bewilderedly from one to the other. Dr. Livingston ignored him. "Then take the children! Leave us our robots!" "We took the children a thousand years ago," said Foma, "in payment for another bad debt, using an earlier model of this same machine. But that was only because there was nothing better to take. We also hoped -- naively, as it turned out -- that the lesson would teach you the high cost of sharp practice." "Oh, I remember!" the President exclaimed. "You got rid of the rats in some foreign town. And then, when the town officials wouldn't pay up, you took the children. Some fellow wrote a poem about it -- a rather long one that we studied in school... That must be how come you got the dates mixed up, Maurice," he added, pleased with his own deductive faculties. "We took a considerable loss on that deal," Foma said, "because we found that, though human children make delightful pets, they're not much good when they grow up -- absolutely no talent for solid, honest labor. No, the robots we can use; the children you can keep." Dr. Livingston cleared his throat, uncomfortably this time, not complacently. "Then there really is an embargo on us." "Yes, it was placed upon Earth on July #, #, at a little town in Germany called Hameln -- or, as Browning misspelled it, Hamelin. In fact, that swindle is what gave rise to a simile we have in the Galaxy: 'As untrustworthy as an Earthman.' Obviously we cannot have diplomatic relations with a species that fits the 'slogan so exactly, especially after this piece of trickery. The embargo still stands." The airlock clanged to and whirled shut behind him. Buchbinder and Livingston watched disconsolately as the spaceship zoomed up into the stratosphere. "Now we'll never make the Big League," the President moaned. "Aah, what kind of League would send a piper out as an emissary?" sneered Livingston. "And a pied piper, to boot." A ND so the alien vessel hurtled out into space, taking all the robots in the country with it, except for a poor little crippled model from the West Coast, whose reaction time was as defective as his judgment. He arrived from California two weeks later and was so upset at finding himself left behind that he fused completely. Unrepresentative though he was of the strong, handsome, efficient robots that had gone with Foma, he was all the nation had to memorialize those it had once proudly owned, and he was given a niche in the Hall of Fame. He has the largest bronze plaque there -- Browning's poem, engraved all around the base, with appropriate footnotes by historians. There was one thing wrong with all the world being a stage... so many grudging people had to be bit players and stagehands! down the long corridor, opening doors and closing them, feeling a growing frustration as each room stretched its yawning opulence before him. He was hungry and he wanted food. He wanted to find a single fireplace where no fire crackled cheerfully. He wanted to find one door that failed to open at his touch. He knew his every move was being watched and he wanted something to happen, but most of all he wanted food. He tried another door, thrust it open impatiently and froze with his hand on the doorknob. A man stepped forward, plump, elderly, silver hair crowning his solemn face. His black coat made a most amusing, bulging V over his white shirt. He bowed humbly. "Did you ring, sir?" "I -- don't think so. Did you hear me ring?" "No, sir." "Then I didn't ring." He backed away and closed the door firmly. "I'll count doors," he told himself. "That should do it." He moved on down the corridor, his feet sinking noiselessly into the plush piles of the carpet. "One!" He slammed open a door and glancing in at the flickering fire. He moved on. "Two!" he shouted. "Three!" He was approaching the end of the corridor. He threw open another door. "Four!" The silver-haired man stood before him, bowing humbly. "Did you ring, sir?" He gazed thoughtfully at the bulging V and pointed a trembling finger. "You -- are -- a -- butler." "Yes, sir." "I didn't ring." He closed the door quickly and hurried on. "Five!"  multi-paned window at the end of the corridor, he saw only his own face reflected back at him. He turned angrily and started back down the opposite side of the corridor, savagely opening and shutting doors. "Six! Seven!" The butler's face was blandly innocent. "Did you ring, sir?" "No!" He slammed the door, pushed it open again. "Did you hear me ring?" "No, sir." "I didn't ring." He stood for a moment by the closed door, scratching his head, before he moved on. "Eight!" The ninth door opened before he reached it and the butler stepped forward. "Did you ring, sir?" He pointed at the bulging V. "Did you hear me ring?" "Breakfast is served in the Green Room, sir. The Duchess is waiting." "Oh." He took three confident strides down the corridor, hesitated, and looked back. "You're sure it's in the Green Room?" "Yes, sir. If you would be so good as to follow me, sir... He followed, keeping his eyes on the sedate blackness of the butler's broad back. As they entered the Green Room, the Duchess scrambled to her feet -- a bit ungracefully, he thought -- and hurried toward him, her flowing gown sweeping the carpet. He winced when her dry lips brushed his cheek. "Good morning, dear," she said. There was a brittle eagerness in her bright voice. "Morning," he said curtly. She returned to her chair and the butler escorted him to the other end of the long table and deftly seated him. He glowered distastefully at his egg cup. "Ham?" he asked hopefully. "I'm sorry, sir, but the doctor -- your stomach, you know." Tm hungry!" "Would you like two eggs, sir?" Sadly he reached for a spoon and jabbed at the egg. The Duchess was picking delicately at her breakfast. He watched her curiously, wondering where he had seen her before. Joan of Arc? No. That girl had had a thinner face. A thinner figure, too. The Duchess was actually good looking. Cleopatra -- that was it. But he hadn't been Julius Caesar for over a month. Odd that she would still be around.  HE glanced up at him and his  searching gaze triggered her face into an instant smile. "Did you sleep well, dear? I hope the speech isn't worrying you." He dropped his spoon and it clattered dully. "Speech?" "You have just three days now and Parliament will be in a frightful stew if you don't have it ready. You will work on it this morning, won't you, dear?" The butler whisked away his egg cup and returned it with another egg. He looked around for the salt and saw none. "Salt?" he said. "I'm sorry, sir, but your doctor... "I'll get another doctor! I haven't had a decent meal since Waterloo!" He jabbed furiously with his spoon. He'd have to be someone healthy soon, he told himself, or he'd starve to death. The Duchess leisurely got to her feet. She was getting better with practice, he thought. "You will excuse me, won't you, dear?" she asked. "I must go over the household accounts. I've been putting it off for days. I'll be in the West Sewing Room." He fed himself a large mouthful of egg and waved her away. "James, see that the Duke is settled in the library as soon as he's finished breakfast. Do work hard on the speech, won't you, dear?" She swept out of the room and he looked after her, nodding approvingly. She had a good figure. She'd even had a good figure as Cleopatra and there wasn't any place for padding in that costume. He turned to the butler. "Another egg." "Sorry, sir, but your doctor..." He shattered the egg cup on the floor and then followed the butler down the long corridor to the library. He sat for some time before the polished expanse of desk, doubtfully eying the pile of scented paper that lay in front of him. He was hungry. Damn, but he was hungry! He wondered what he should do next. He glanced at the ring that circled the little finger of his left hand -- a large gold ring with # engraved on it in tiny numbers. He rubbed it futilely. Finally he seized a quill and scribbled a few lines on a perfumed sheet of paper. The door opened almost before he touched the bell. "You rang, sir?" "About this speech. Want to ask your opinion about something." "Certainly, sir." "Beginning of a speech is very important, you know. Should catch the attention right from the first word. Universal appeal and all that sort of thing." "I understand, sir." "Wonder if you'd give me your opinion of this beginning." "With pleasure, sir." bellowed, "Now is the time..." He glanced up. The butler stood watching him attentively, alert interest in his grave face. "Think it might go better with more emphasis on the 'now'?" "Why don't you try it that way, sir?" "Mmm -- yes. Now is the time..." "A decided improvement, sir." "Thank you. Now don't interrupt until Fve finished." He got to his feet, paced back and forth briefly, and struck a heroic pose. " Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party." He glanced at the butler. "What do you think?" "A most moving beginning, sir." "Think it'll do?" "Im sure of it, sir." "Tell me, James, just what is this speech supposed to be about?" "The Spanish crisis, sir. The entire nation is waiting to hear what the Duke of Wellington will have to say about it" "Spanish crisis? Spain? Is that in Africa?" "No, sir. In Europe. It's close to Africa, of course." "I see. I think, James, I'd like to have the Duchess hear this beginning." "Certainly, sir. I'm sure she'll be delighted." He followed the butler, chuckling quietly to himself as James resolutely turned to the left and led him down the long corridor to the end of the east wing. James opened a door, glanced in and turned to him blankly. "I'm sorry, sir. I thought she said the East Sewing Room." He shrugged indifferently and followed the butler back along the corridor to the end of the west wing. The Duchess was seated at the far end of the spacious room, talking quietly with a neatly dressed middle-aged woman. That would be the housekeeper, he told himself. Had he seen her somewhere before? He couldn't recall. "'H Vf He noted their heaving bosoms with amusement, wondering where they had been that they had to dash back with such haste. "I have a beginning for this speech," he said. "Want you to hear it." "I'd be delighted, dear." He paced about nervously. "Go right ahead, dear," she said soothingly. "Just pretend I'm not here." " Now is the time," he thundered, "for all good men to come to the aid of their party." "Wonderful, dear. Is there more?" "No. That's -- that's all I have at the moment." "I'm sure Parliament will be delighted. You go right back and finish it." HE got to her feet and he  stood staring at her until she flushed and backed away anxiously. The butler stepped forward and placed a firm hand on his arm. "Where's my harem?" he muttered. "Your -- harem, sir?" the butler said. "Where's my harem?" he shouted. "Just because the Duke of Wellington invites me -- what did you do with my harem?" The Duchess and the housekeeper scurried out of the room in near panic. "You've embarrassed the ladies, Your Excellency," the butler said. "Naturally the Duke couldn't permit your harem here -- politics, you know. But if you'll come with me, I'll be glad to take you." He allowed himself to be led away. With the butler's plodding assistance, he attired himself in robes and a turban, awkwardly mounted a camel that awaited him at the front door, and rode off through the park with an escort dashingly mounted on prancing Arabian horses. On the far side of the park, they came to a tent village. The last tents were just going up and the turtaned workers were perspiring in the crisp fall air. A rotund, turbaned figure darted from the nearest tent, robes trailing, sank to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground. "All awaits your pleasure, Excellency." "Arise," he commanded. "I expect to eat well today. My favorite dishes." "It is arranged. Will you honor your wives with your presence?" "Later. The ride was long. I need rest." He followed the bowing figure into a spacious tent. "My favorite dishes, mind you," he said sharply. "It is arranged, Excellency." He stretched out on a pile of rugs and closed his eyes. Music too drifted in from the tent that joined his. Pleasantly exotic, it almost made him forget the hunger that seethed within him. He listened until he lost himself in sleep. It was afternoon when he awoke. His hunger brought him off the rugs with a bound. Attendants hurried in and immediately the music started. "I will watch my wives dance while I eat," he said. He strode haughtily into the adjoining tent and seated himself on a rug-decked dais. An attendant humbly placed food before him. The music grew louder and the scantily clad girls began writhing about with immodest abandon. tery wine, grimaced, but made himself drink deeply. He plunged his fingers into a sicklylooking stew, brought out a piece of meat, tasted it and spat angrily. "In Allah's name, what is this?" "Your favorite dish, Excellency. Camel stew. Would you like a larger portion?" He took another piece of meat and worked his teeth uselessly on the rubbery texture. "This camel was old before its time," he snarled. "It is the old camels that Allah blesses with flavor." He chewed energetically and forced some pieces of meat down his throat. To his surprise, they stayed down. Still ravenously hungry, he waved the food away and turned his attention to the dancing girls. He recognized several of them. A lusty-looking brunette had been Madame Pompadour the last time he was Louis XV. He recognized a former Queen Elizabeth and a former Josephine, and suddenly he saw, sitting demurely in a far corner, his late Duchess. She did have a good figure. And the filmy dancing-girl costume suited it perfectly -- much more so than had her Cleopatra costume. She wasn't the queenly type, he told himself. She should stick to the simpler roles. Leaning forward, he summoned her with a commanding gesture. She moved toward him almost reluctantly, sank to her knees at his feet, and blushed furiously as he drew her up beside him. "More music," he called. "Louder." The twangy, whining notes crescendoed to an ear-straining level, and the dancers whirled faster. With a sudden impulse, he picked up the girl and carried her into the next tent. Attendants fled in discreet panic. He placed her gently on the rugs and began covering her with passionate caresses and kisses. The deft way she plucked the hypodermic syringe from her brief costume delighted him. He pretended not to notice, even when she plunged it into his arm. He counted ten slowly and began to relax. In a few minutes, he was feigning sleep and she carefully covered him with a rug and tiptoed away. alias James the butler, met the girl as she came out of the tent. "Everything all right. Doctor Rogers?" he asked. "Hypo," she said. "He was getting pretty worked up. He should be out for several hours." "It'll do him good. It's usually a strain on them when they switch characters so quickly. Too bad. For a few minutes, I thought he was actually going to come up with a speech. It would have been interesting, getting a parliament together and letting him deliver it." "Yes. Maybe we pressed him too hard on that speech. Responsibility always makes them regress if they aren't ready for it." "Don't I know it! We had # all ready to cross the Delaware last week and the strain of making that decision made him regress clear back to toy soldiers. He hasn't come out of it yet. But # -- I thought he was coming along nicely. He was magnificent yesterday at the Battle of Waterloo. Today he seemed confused, as if being the Duke of Wellington was our idea instead of his. I don't think the speech was wholly responsible." "Nothing to do but wait now," she said. 'We'll see what he is when he wakes up. Going to leave the tents standing?" "Might as well. We may get another call for them." "I'll have to get back and change and file my report. Have the others left?" "Oh, yes. They left the minute you were -- abducted." He helped her roll an aircar out of a tent. She took off, and five minutes later she brought it in for a landing in the spacious Central Administration parking lot. Most of the harem girls had already changed when she reached the dressing room. They were trimly attired in crisp white coats and white skirts, and except for several who were having aching legs massaged, their mien was strictly professional. "Stell," a husky blonde called, "what happened there, anyway? I thought # was the Duke of Wellington today." "Sudden regress," Dr. Rogers said, peeling off her dancing costume. "Right in the middle of preparing a speech for Parliament, he started shouting for his harem. I'm afraid he nearly cracked." "He would pick a time when I'm on call. Mow'd you make out? Was he impetuous?" "Very. I hypoed him." "Good girl. I was glad when he carried you out Another five minutes of dancing -- hello!" A sedate middle-aged woman -- # would have recognized her as the Duke of Wellington's housekeeper -- dashed in and peered about nervously. "Emergency! Harem requested for #." "Oh, my God!" the blonde groaned. r I" HE patter of conversation in the room cut off abruptly. "Who is it for?" "Twice in one day! What next?" "Are they giving # hormones? It was only day before yesterday... "You should complain," the blonde snapped. "You're not his favorite. I'm still black and blue from the last time. If that lecherous old buzzard tries to paw me today..." "Don't forget your hypo!" "I won't. I know darn well I'll need it" The wardrobe attendant was moving among them, passing out the dancing-girl costumes. The girls struggled into them. "What was # doing?" "He was a college professor today. Teaching Einstein's Theory of Relativity to undergraduates. They say it was really weird." "One of his students probably showed him too much leg, and bang, he wanted a harem. That's all it would take with him." The middle-aged woman was counting confusedly. "Dr. Rogers, are you available?" "Afraid not," Doctor Rogers said, buttoning her white coat. "I have to file my report on #." "Hurry it up, girls. The aircars are waiting. We've already sent a camel for him." "Dr. Zerbi left the tents up," Dr. Rogers said. "But # is still there." "He's already been moved back to his permanent quarters. Better put that in your report. Dr. Cameron, will you take charge?" "You just bet I will," the blonde said. "I'll make a fuss over him right from the start and maybe we can cut the dancing short. My legs wouldn't take much more." They trooped out, chattering irritably. Dr. Rogers left the dressing room, stepped onto the moving hallway and rode to her office in Wing M -- the male division. She shared an office with a taciturn young male doctor who always seemed half frightened of her. He was seated glumly behind his desk and did not notice her as she entered. "Good afternoon, Doctor Karl," she said primly. "Oh. Good afternoon, Doctor Rogers." She sat down, dialed #, and a record card dropped onto her desk. She studied it then snapped her fingers. "I knew I'd seen him somewhere. He was Julius Caesar. That was the first week I came here. I was Cleopatra. I was scared stiff." "How long ago was that?" Doctor Karl asked. "A little over a month ago." "They must like your work. Not many stay longer than three weeks." "It's more likely that I haven't progressed rapidly enough to be moved along," she said dryly. S HE penned another entry onto the card and sat back, looking at it thoughtfully. "I wonder if he'll ever be cured. He's not so old and he really seems like a nice person. But he's been here six months and he keeps building up and regressing." "The directors know what they're doing. If he was hopeless, they wouldn't have him here." "The patients really have it soft, don't they? Look here. He decided he was Napoleon, so we gave him a luscious Josephine and a court. He went off to fight the Battle of Austerlitz and we gave him an army. Then he made himself Duke of Wellington and beat his former self at Waterloo. Today he wanted a harem and we gave him one. Seems as though you have to be insane to have any fun." He winced. "Hush! Not that word -- we have no insane people here. Our patients merely suffer mental delusions." "They don't suffer anything. They enjoy every minute of it Think of the money it must cost to run this place." "These patients aren't ordinary people. They have talents our civilization needs. They're worth saving at any cost." "So I've been told. But how many do we save? I haven't heard of a single cure since I've been here. We staff members come and go, but the patients stay on." "It's a new dimension in mental therapy, of course," he said thoughtfully. "But there must be lots of cures. Look at the case numbers." He glanced at his watch and got to his feet. "Have to run. Women's Division has a Helen of Troy today and I'm drafted for a battle scene." "Just wait," she said. "You'll end up envying the patients, too." He called over his shoulder, "I've envied them since the day I got here." She carried #'s card down to Central Administration and asked about her next assignment. Doctor Bamstall, the personnel director, peered at her inquiringly, eyes serious behind his thick glasses. "You look depressed," he said. "Maybe I am. I'm beginning to envy the patients." "Nothing to worry about. It happens to most staff members sooner or later." "Is that why staff personnel is changed so often? I've wondered." "That's part of the reason. Are you serious about it?" "I suppose so. It seems like -- every little whim they have, we jump to satisfy, and they haven't a worry in the world, and yet we never seem to get anywhere with them. They're always regressing." He smiled. "Take the rest of the afternoon off. I'll keep you assigned to # and it'll be evening now before he picks up a new direction. Or would you rather have a change?" "Oh, no. I don't mind #." "Fine. But you do need something new, something fresh. Let's see." He pulled her record card and studied it carefully. "Juliet, I think. You might enjoy that. I'll let you be Juliet the next time we get a call." She sighed, somehow feeling more depressed than ever. "Thank you," she said. "That might be nice. I didn't care for the duchess role." She went out and walked across the sunlit park toward her own quarters. The sound of rippling water reached her from a spacious, circular building and she paused to peer through a one-way observation port. The calm Pacific Ocean stretched before her to the far horizon. Six men lounged on a battered Kon Tiki, nonchalantly floating it toward a distant and invisible Pacific island. One was a patient; the other five were staff members, laboring mightily to stay in character. She sighed. "The patients have all the fun," she said to herself, and she hurried to her quarters. - ters, # tried to think about something that would not suggest food. Or eating. If he could have one decent meal, he thought, he might survive. But it would have to come soon. It was evening and there had been considerable activity outside his door and he was growing impatient. He twisted restlessly and turned over, still feigning sleep in case someone was scanning him. The voices in the hallway faded into the distance. He carefully edged a blanket over his head, clicked a microscopic switch on his ring and spoke softly. "Jones reporting." The ring squeaked back at him. "One moment, please." He relaxed and waited until a male voice rasped out "Nice work, Jones. That was a clever switch you pulled." "Glad you think so," Jones said. "I could see that the Wellington line was taking us nowhere. But you never know what to expect from these people. They come up with the damnedest things. Have you ever tasted camel stew?" "Can't say I have." "May fate spare you that pleasure. Wonder where they got the stuff. Are we missing a camel?" "No. The inventory checks." "They carry realism too far." "It does them good. You came up with some fine acting today. You deserve a bonus." "I'll take it in steaks. I'm hungry" "You'll be Romeo when you wake up. Give it a good play." "Sure. And by the way -- " "What's the trouble?" "If it turns out that Romeo has a bad stomach or a passion for raw vegetables, I'm resigning." He clicked off the radio, turned over abruptly and rolled off the cot. Seconds later, the door burst open and an attendant hurried in. Pushing himself into a sitting position, # mumbled groggily. "Pid you sleep well, Excellency?" the attendant said. "Do you wish to visit your harem?" "What harem?" # demanded. "Where's Juliet?" The attendant took a step backward. "Juliet?" "I have a date with Juliet. Can't be late. Got to watch out for those Capulets, too. Where's my sword?" The attendant unwound the turban from #'s head. "Of course. You'll have to dress first and then I'll take you to Friar Laurence. Now wait a moment while I make the arrangements." It was hard for # to hold back his chuckle till he was alone. He'd caught them flatfooted. Suddenly his ring finger tingled and he pressed it to his ear. "Make this good now. Rogers will be your Juliet and I think we're going to pull her out of it." He moved the ring and whispered without moving his lips, "Who's Rogers?" "Your Duchess. The girl in the harem. That trick you pulled was evidently just what she needed. She's starting to think at last. We were getting worried about her. She's been here over a month, with almost no progress. She has too much a luxury for people like that." The attendant hurried back into the room, "Just follow me," he said. Following him, # was half lost in his own thoughts. Verona, sixteenth century. Should be some good seafood. He could do with a thick filet. # Star Shelf Wyndham. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # NE must be either a hermit or a non-aficionado if one doesn't know by now that "John Wyndham" is the old familiar John Beynon Harris of the early and mid-thirties and hasn't he come a long way since then! This current collection is almost pure fantasy, with a couple of S-F yams thrown in as a change of pace. Wyndham ranges from sheer lunacy in "Una," a delightfully zany pitch with the same plot gimmick as Gold's famous "Problem in Murder," to sheer horror in "Jizzle" and the sorrily titled "More Spinned Against." "Chinese Puzzle," concerning a very well-mannered, exotically colored, genuine Chinese dragon transplanted to alien Welsh soil, and "Confidence Trick," in which five people are sped to Hell on a misguided Underground train, are works in the best light fantasy tradition of John Collier. High, praise, indeed, for any author. Wyndham can write in so many      shelf different veins that you can be sure to find something here to your special liking. Frederick Fell, Inc., N. Y., # somewhat less of an event than previously. For one thing, it is a wizened volume compared to its robust predecessors. Also, the title is a misnomer: don't look for more than one novella among the fourteen stories. The majority of yarns are good to excellent, with only a couple of minor efforts. However, one has become so accustomed throughout the years to heavyweights bearing the Dikty label that the ordinary commercial-sized book looks strangely undernourished. The novella, "The Shores of Night" by Thomas N. Scortia, is a combination space operamutation yarn with both aspects underplayed, so that it emerges as a psychological study. It is inclined to turgidity and murkiness, but sustains interest. Among the longer shorts, "A Canticle for Liebowitz" by Miller, Jr. and "Swenson, Dispatcher" by Miller -- respectively, Walter M. and R. DeWitt -- stand out. "Clerical Error" by Mark Clifton is a rather fanciful solution to the security-engendered psychosis problem among government scientists, but darned if it doesn't appear that only bureaucratic thinking will overcome the bureaucratic mind. Dikty has his usual annual survey, chockful of info unobtainable elsewhere unless you operate a clipping service, and Earl Kemp's "Science-Fiction Book Index" is always an informative feature, listing American, Canadian and British publications for the year. Good, yes -- but bring back the king-sized Dikty. lantine Books, N. Y., # collection from Britain by Ballantine. This time Arthur Clarke leaves off from his galaxyshaking epics to spin as light and frothy a conglomeration of sidesplitters as it has been my good fortune to read. Clarke has done for the London pub, the "White Hart," what the lamented Fletcher Pratt and Sprague de Camp did for "Gavagan's Bar." His Munchausen is a fog-hornvoiced character named Harry Purvis, a most uningratiating know-it-all, the type we're all too familiar with, but more so. However, as the collection progresses from the incredible to the unbelievable, Purvis becomes acceptable -- almost lovable -- particularly in "What Goes Up," in which he squelches a vociferous Flying Sorcerer with a four-thousandmile-high tall story. One must pull up aghast and awestruck at this story. An atomic experiment goes awry in the midst of an Australian desert, leaving an impenetrable zone of force which, investigation discloses, is equivalent to a four-thousand-mile mountain as far as power requirements for reaching across the twenty-foot gap from wall-to-zone center are concerned. I can't go on. The audacity of this super-whopper leaves me nothing more to say -- but don't miss it. This is a Clarke you've never suspected existed, but one you'll hope to see again soon. by H. H. Swinnerton. Little, Brown  Co., Boston, Toronto, # F AR from producing a dry geological treatise, Swinnerton has written what is close to being a one-volume encyclopedia on the evolution of the Earth. He is professor emeritus of geology and geography at Nottingham University and has published books on zoology and archeology as well. His erudition is always in evidence, but with an exceptional ability to present his material in an absorbing fashion. Don't let the sweep of Swinnerton's view frighten you away. He makes sure you see and understand everything he discusses. Lewis. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., # r  I HE Chronicles of Narnia consist of seven volumes, of which this is the last. Unfortunately, I have not read the previous adventures, so that certain references were unfamiliar. The book, however, is complete by itself and is a delightful fantastic fable of the type in which the English have excelled since -- or perhaps because of -- Lewis Carroll. The downfall of the kingdom of Narnia is assured from the moment that the Ape, Shift, masquerades the donkey, Puzzle, in a lion skin as the Great Lion, Aslan. Acting as the mouthpiece of Aslan, the Ape is guilty of so many treacheries that it becomes necessary for the king, Tirian, to summon aid from beyond the world's end. The youngsters will be delighted to see who answers the call.      shelf pon. The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., N. Y., # D onald wollheim went and spilled the Secret of the Martian Moons some months back and now everyone knows that Phobos is artificial, at least in fiction. In this juvenile, Phobos is a giant computer that got left behind when Mars was evacuated eons ago. It has strictly machinistic motivations, but also a sort of pseudo-curiosity. By listening in on broadcasts, it has absorbed considerable lore, but, very understandably, no sophistication. It kidnaps a leading artist, his daughter and a friend by means of a flying saucer. Previously, it had snatched a sailor named William Shakespeare in quest of answers to the strange riddle of human emotions. A strange critter, this Phobos -- no sense of humor at all. I have no doubt that the younger folks will enjoy the story, if only to see how it is ultimately outwitted. kin. Whittlesey House, McGrawHill Book Co., Inc., N. Y., # IT'OR a junior juvenile, this demonstrates a wonderfully brash humor. The son of a widow who keeps house for a world-famous professor, Danny inadvertently is in on a top-secret project that has come about because of his thoughtless impetuousness. If not for him, the professor's paint would never have been spilled and its amazing properties discovered. And if not for him, Professor Bullfinch, Dr. Grimes, Joe, his friend, and he would not have been marooned in space, either. That should teach the young'uns the mixed virtues of impulsiveness. But let your #-to#year-old find out the rest of the story for himself. House, N. Y., Toronto, London, # book, the present volume includes new material unavailable then on fusion, new manmade elements, transistors, the projected Earth satellites, etc. Crouse is a wonder in the way he can intelligently and intelligibly thumbnail a difficult subject. The multitudinous drawings in every margin by Jeanne Bendick help no end in making this a necessity for the embryo scientist, regardless of the size of his reference shelf. shock troop Commander Lasson fa cea a bitter battle, but he had the ultimate tactic... subdivide and conquer! paigns, Commander Lasson had seen nothing quite like this situation. First there was the heat -- humid, stifling, insufferable. Then there were the constant jolts and convulsions. But most unbearable of all was the interminable cross-pulse, the monotonous thrump-thump... thrump-thump... thrump-thump. Enough to drive a macro-control crew crazy! Commander Lasson emerged from the tunnel and straightened his cramped joints. He glanced tentatively around, taking in the cavernous expanse of the control compartment, with its master console suspended from a tri-axial mount, the busy crews of psychoelectricians who -- He stiffened with apprehension. Like a deep-throated growl, the convulsion raced along the tunnel behind him. "All hands hit the stanchions!" he bellowed into the chamber as he clutched the nearest upright. The crew scurried to safety and Lasson watched the spasmodic wave shudder past, buckling the artificially calcified floor and lacing the smooth surface with new networks of cracks. Jarring violently, the entire cavern shifted. The main control console lurched and swung ponderously around on its axes. Pendulumlike, it settled against a new direction of gravity. Commander Lasson disentangled himself from the stanchion and brushed off his uniform. Damned convulsions! He spat, as though he could convey his anger through the pulsating wall to the unsuspecting macro-entity. Then he smiled confidently as he resumed his pompous stride into the compartment. They would win! They would subdue the creature and bring it under permanent positive control! And then, if not before, would come the modifications -- thermobiological conditioning to lower the heat, a damping system to muffle the cross-pulse beat, neuromuscular controls to put an end to the spasms. He had done it before with the dominant life-forms on seven other worlds. And each time he had gone back to Valvarez as a conquering hero. He had no doubt that there would be an eighth triumphal return for him and his shock troop.  who were busy connecting leads from the various tunnels, Lasson drew up stiffly in the center of the compartment. "All section chiefs front and center!" he ordered. The leaders left their crews and drew up uncertainly before the commander. "Jerapy." Lasson singled out one of them. "Are we pulling enough oxygen from the separators?" "Enough for the shock troop, sir," the lieutenant replied queasily. "But we're having trouble setting up the operational test. Can't find a capillary large enough to take care of ten thousand colonists." Commander Lasson bristled. "Then tunnel out until you do find one! That project has priority. Besides finding out whether we can capture positive control of the entity, we're here to determine if it will suit the needs of Valvarez!" Jerapy shrank away, saluting awkwardly. "Mandor! Report on the status of all major connections." Another aide shuffled forward reluctantly. "Motor Fiber Fortysix secure and ready for hookup with the central selector circuit. Locomotion Trunk C will be tied in before the end of this shift. We're clearing through the auditory-intercept system now. Next comes the kinesthetic-intercept relay." "Have you taken current measurements?" "The subject is supplying more than enough psycho-amps to operate all our equipment." "Excellent! At this rate, we should be able to start on the vocal associative counter-transfer circuit by the next shift." "We've already phased the interpretive feedback, sir," the lieutenant reported proudly. Another section chief stepped from behind the central control console. "The visual-intercept circuit is ready to be checked, sir." Dismissing the others, Lasson crossed eagerly to the control board, nudged a crewman abruptly out of his way and climbed into the operator's seat. "You may throw the switch, Parok," he directed. The chiefs hand darted out and flicked a lever. Lasson leaned back to wait for the huge screen above the cabinet to come alive. Absently, he listened to the coarse gutturals of a sergeant marching his detachment out of a main trunk line tunnel and toward crew quarters: "Hup, two, three. Hup, two, three." Parok, one eye fastened on the screen, glanced thoughtfully at the commander. "Do you suppose it -- knows, sir?" "About us? Our operation? Of course not. They're intelligent, but only to a degree." "But those convulsions." "Merely reflex action." "So many?" "Put it down as hypersensitivity. When we bring its sympathetic nervous system under control, we'll eliminate that inconvenience." The sergeant's "hup, two, three" trailed off into inaudibility as his detachment pushed on into yet another tunnel. Then the visualflooding the central control compartment with its intense white glow. son resolved the picture as best he could and took his first vicarious look into the macroworld. The host entity, it appeared, was in an enclosure with artifacts of its environment around it. From the orderly flow of these articles across the visual-intercept screen, the commander surmised the thing was probably moving around slowly, aimlessly. But all the furnishings were clouded in a fog of haziness that made it doubly difficult to guess their functions. "Parok!" he called irately. "Something's wrong. We're getting a myopic effect." "Yes, sir," the chief conceded humbly, staring worriedly over the commander's shoulder. "Perhaps the entity's optical system is faulty." "Nonsense. The chances are almost astronomical against that. It's in our circuit somewhere." "In the optical coordination controls, maybe?" "Idiot! We're not controlling now. We're merely tapping in. Trace your circuits and find the trouble -- immediately!" hind the control console. Lasson scowled at the procession of indistinguishable objects across his screen, as relayed by the creature's sweeping vision. The things in the foreground were somewhat clearer than the others. There was a flat-surfaced item on rigid legs with an apparently soft horizontal plane which could be the equivalent to a Valvarezian bunk. And there was another article that resembled a chair. In the background, though, was a blurred pattern of light and dark stripes that could hardly be compared with anything he had encountered before. An agonized scream sounded behind the console. Lasson snapped off the visual-intercept switch and lunged from the seat. Around the panel, he found Parok bending over another neuro-technician, whose unconscious form was draped across the lead coming from the cross-index rectifier. "What happened?" the commander demanded. "He stumbled into the hightension wire and got a full load of psycho-electric current," Parok said. Lasson watched disinterestedly as small quivering ripples coursed over the unconscious man's flesh. Cellular disestablishment, touched off by the charge's electric component, would continue unchecked until the biological disorganization inevitably led to death. "Damned fool!" the commander exclaimed angrily. "He's no good to us now. Feed him into a waste ejector." "But," Parok pleaded, "he'll live another three or four -- " Lasson silenced him with a severe glance. He would tolerate no argument -- not in this infernal heat -- not with what was left of his patience being sapped away by the relentless thrump-thump, thrump thump that beat all around him like drums booming. He turned away dispiritedly and headed for his quarters. It was always happening on these test confiscations. Death by contact with electricity was the principal hazard for the advance guard that went out to determine whether any given macro-lifeform was suitable for host-parasite colonization. But nothing could be done about that clanging of the Class A alarm bell, Lasson sprang from his bunk and raced into the corridor. He reached into the stream of scurrying macro-controlmen and snatched one of them by the arm. "Leucocyte breakthrough!" the man explained, horrified. "Trunk C tunnel!" The commander joined the rush of frenzied emergency personnel and sprinted across the central control compartment, past the vehicular access corridor where the shuttle lay at anchor and into the Locomotion Trunk C tunnel. Ahead, standby crews were pushing forward, lugging portable floodlights, hand-sterilizers and broad-beam coagulators. He overtook them and charged past, rounding a bend and almost stumbling on a trunk lead that stretched along the floor like a great bacillus. The scene was one of frantic disorder as the corridor reverberated hollowly with the groans of dying men and the shouts of others who faced the horrors of the leucocyte attack. The break was through the left wall of the tunnel. It was hemorrhaging profusely, letting through a torrent of viscous thrombin, together with an occasional gray mass, lumpy and ominous. Already the corridor was flooded halfway to the ceiling and stubborn crewmen were staging a valiant fight to reach the section of ruptured wall. Lasson waded knee-deep in the nauseous substance. A nearly submerged erythrocyte rammed into his leg and almost threw him off balance. But Paffun, the section chief, caught his arm. The commander turned to give orders to the subordinate, but the red corpuscle, as though playfully curious, surged back and struck him forcefully from the rear. His knees buckled and he splashed forward into the repulsive mess. He managed to keep his head above the sea of thrombin, but as he tried to regain his feet, the erythrocyte returned a second time, bringing another disc-shaped cell with it  managed to maneuver its bulk between two of the commander's legs. He came erect with a high-pitched shout that was not altogether an outburst of rage. The thing's companion surfaced, flipped over and sent a spray of thrombin splattering against his face. Lasson kicked out vengefully at the closer of the two. Paffun seized his arm again to keep him from falling a second time. "We need more coagulator crewmen!" the chief shouted above the din of gushing blood and screaming Valvarezians. "They're on their way." Lasson looked down at the thrombin clinging to his uniform and already solidifying. "This hemorrhage cost us many casualties?" Paffun shook his head dismally. "More than a score so far. We -- " The chief cut his words short with a terrified scream as a chalkwhite mass reared up out of the rising tide of thrombin and, amebalike, extended a pseudopod toward him. sterilizer and kicked inquisitive erythrocytes revoltedly out of the way. "Damned leucos!" he growled at the quivering white horror. Close to the breakthrough, two crewmen yelled as great frightening arms swept up out of the boiling sea of blood and embraced them in a grip of acid death. Their shouts ended in gurgling sounds when they were dragged under the surface. "Bring up those reinforcements!" the commander roared back down the tunnel. He jockeyed to keep his balance in blood that was now waist-deep. "Paffun, order retreat. We've got to draw back and block off the entire corridor." Even as the chief called off his men, three more Valvarezians fell victim to the flailing pseudopods. "Trunk C," Paffun reminded hesitantly, "is our most important project at this stage." 'We'll cut a detour. Too many capillaries in this section anyway." They withdrew until the thrombin was only ankle-deep. Isolated and exposed red corpuscles were everywhere, writhing in the grip of death. Battle-weary survivors stepped cautiously over them in retreat A first line of containment formed across the tunnel, with sterilizer and coagulator crewmen standing shoulder to shoulder and playing their weapons against the advancing tide. Lasson waited until all the visible red cells, together with the monstrous leucocytes, were frozen motionless in the rapidly curdling fibrin. Then he wearily made his way back to the central compartment had had ample rest after the leucocyte encounter, Commander Lasson was haggard and dispirited as he slumped beside the control console. It was difficult to dislodge from his thoughts the hordes of shapeless white horrors that lurked just beyond the thinly calcified walls. He sighed in resignation, realizing that he might forget them if it weren't for that infernal thrump thump, thrump thump that was a constant reminder of the nearness and profusion of the treacherous capillaries. Lasson loosened the soggy and wilted collar of his uniform and swiped his face with a limp hand. Damned insufferable heat! Filthy, rotten, putrid air! "Baldon!" he shouted impatiently. The crewman started, looked up from the ventilation duct on which he had been working, dropped his tools and hurried over. "What's wrong now?" Lasson demanded. "You call this" -- he waved a hand in front of him -- "air?" "We have our oxygen separator system working at two-thirds capacity, sir." "And why aren't we using all three of them?" "It's the fibrinogen, sir. Keeps jelling in the intakes. We haven't found the right counteragent yet to stop coagulation. So we have to work two on and one off, with ream-out crews busy around the clock." "Oh," the commander said disappointedly. Then his voice rose indignantly as his expression hardened. "All research personnel will stay on the job until the problem is solved. Any man caught sleeping before this matter is cleared up will be fed into the waste ejectors!" Baldon backed away saluting while Lasson splayed his collar wider. "The subject, Commander," said a thin voice behind him, "is becoming aware." Lasson faced the subordinate. "It's found out -- about us?" "Oh, no, sir. But it knows some force is overriding its will and controlling some of its actions." "When did the thing begin suspecting?" "When we tested unit control over a few of its organs." The crewman grinned. "It practically had a fit when we manipulated its arms and hands." Lasson laughed lustily. "How did you learn about its reaction?" "By sorting through its concept field when we hooked in the duointellectual correlator. The thing's been trying to tell other macroentities that something's wrong." The subordinate put a hand in front of his mouth to hide his snicker. "But nobody will believe it!" of amusement all but rocked the compartment "That's what usually happens. On Zerak IV, our shock troop not only completed the experimental confiscation, but we also brought almost one per cent of the population under total control before the rest guessed what was happening." "I know," the crewman said. "I was in the advance detail there, too. But with the macro-weapons we put in the hands of the subjects, we were able to take over completely and dispose of all the Zerokians we didn't need." The compartment blazed with light and Lasson turned toward the visual-intercept screen. Parok was attempting to refine the distorted picture that represented the entity's field of vision. But the objects in the scene were as fuzzily defined as before. The commander stood behind the psycho-technician and watched interestedly. It was apparent that the thing was back in the same compartment where it had been when they first tuned in on its optical system. Judging from the relative position of the indistinct articles of furniture, Lasson decided it was seated on its bunk. Squinting to compensate for the faulty picture, the commander tried to discern detail in the background -- the alternate strips of black and white that challenged his imagination. But the field of vision shifted rapidly, frantically. Lasson swore and seized, the optical coordination controls. "If you're going to use its eyes, use them!" The scene on the screen steadied abruptly. But two out-of-focus hands swept into the field of vision and clamped themselves over the creature's eyes. The screen went blank. "Hit the manual controls!" Lasson commanded. Parok adjusted two dials and the hands fell away again. The commander bent forward and studied the picture. "We've got to do better than that. I want that myopic effect eliminated completely." "It's their bipartite nature, sir," offered Parok. "Two eyes, two arms, two hands, two legs. We're trying to translate from a twovalue physiology into our own three-value specifications. Since we've got three of everything that they have two of -- " Lasson cut him short. "It can be done. And it won't take special equipment We can convert the material on hand." and switched on the auditoryintercept circuit. The speaker on the console came to life and emitted a jumble of meaningless vocal sounds. It was the creature's own voice -- Lasson could tell from the way the alien words coincided with the vibrations that were coming through the walls of the compartment. He turned on the vocal associative counter-transfer and the interpretive feedback. The meaningless sounds immediately turned into Valvarezian words: "Oh (something or other)! Oh (something or other)!" The concept that failed of translation was a single-syllable word, apparently invoking or appealing to some mythical divinity. The entity evidently wasn't going to utter anything except the pleading expression. Disgusted, Lasson began snapping off switches. The screen went dead. The speaker's background sibilation sputteringly trailed off into silence. "Commander!" Parok exclaimed, startled. "Listen!" "I don't hear anything." "Exactly! No thrump-thump!" Lasson eventually became aware of the silence and glanced awesomely at the walls. "Modification Section's done it!" Parok said exuberantly. "They've muffled the cross-pulse beat!" Throughout the big control room, crewmen paused at their work to stare in silent wonder at the calcified ceiling. Now, Lasson thought, if only they could take care of the heat and the air and the occasional convulsions! Then half of his shock troop's mission would be accomplished. And they would have only the comparatively simple task of bringing the macrocreature under positive, coordinated control. In the smaller communications compartment several shifts later, the commander worked doggedly to establish a tight beam via subether to Valvarez. He reported directly to Commissioner of Colonization Survey ress since the expedition had last managed contact with the home planet. But as the report unfolded, Lasson got the impression that Zemurra was receiving the information somewhat indifferently. "But we are doing excellently, sir, despite the setbacks," he hastened to add. "Perhaps so," said the commissioner. "But I'm disappointed that you found it necessary to go so far before finding a suitable lifeform." "I had no control over that. I searched until I found what I was sent to look for." while. "How many men did you say you lost?" "Only two, sir," Lasson lied. But he could report the other twenty-one casualties alter the mission succeeded. "Very well, then." The frigid voice thawed a bit. "You may continue. But you should know that three other shock troop units have discovered suitable lifeforms also. And all three of those new worlds are less than a tenth of the distance from Valvarez than the one you're on." So that was it! No wonder the old boy had sounded indifferent. "These three life-forms," Zemurra went on, "exist in abundance and, as colonial hosts, will be adequate for our expansion for many, many generations. Nor will they ever be a threat, since they haven't developed microbiology. We won't even have to bother bringing them under control to insure our safety." Lasson grimaced resentfully. Damned if he was going to have his mission canceled and the glory cut out from under him! "I'm quite sure, sir," he said, "that the creatures here will serve our needs such as no other type of host in all our history." "I can see no reason why we should extend our operation unnecessarily." "But you haven't seen these beings! Each could accommodate There is ample flesh volume, outside of the cranial control area, for hundreds of very large residential pockets. Every ingredient we need exists in abundance in all pocket regions!" "As I said before, you may continue, seeing that you have gone so far. But in view of the other developments, I would advise against asking for any special consideration. The usual policy still applies. If there is any prolonged breakdown in communications, it will be assumed that your shock troop failed its mission and must be presumed lost. There will be no rescue party. We will write your expedition and the new planet off as a total loss." "I understand, sir. But we won't fail. You may expect my request for the first detachment of colonists very shortly." "You are that close to success?" Zemurra seemed impressed for the first time. "We have all voluntary motor systems hooked in and tested. We're ready to tie them into the supplementary auto-reaction circuit. A vast colonial pocket is being excavated in the fleshy part of one of the creature's lower limbs. The cross-pulse beat is under control, the air problem licked. We've -- " The compartment shifted and jerked and quivered. Ripples raced across the floor and walls. Irregular sections of calcite, dislodged from the ceiling, showered down on the communications gear. Lasson gripped his chair and signed off before the commissioner could question him on the unseen commotion. the sympathetic-system crew would put an end to these damned convulsions immediately or they'd find themselves stuffed down the waste ejector into the capillaries! The creature screamed and its fists thrashed about in its field of vision, beating against a featureless wall. Lasson grimly brought the arms under control and held them rigid against the thing's side. He immobilized its legs so it wouldn't complicate matters by dashing about. Then he concentrated on its visual system, twisting the optical control dials first in one direction, then in another as he studied the results on the intercept screen. Its bed split into two images and the counterparts slipped away from each other. He twisted the dials in the other direction and the reflections meshed into one, then slowly drifted apart as before. Nothing he did, however, would make the objects in the background stand out any more clearly. Once more he split the images and studied each component Fuzziness still enveloped the duplicate items in the background of the double picture. The trouble, apparently, was not focal malcoordination between the two sight organs. It was, as Parok had theorized, a defect inherent in the transition from bipartite to tripartite vision. Lasson realized the entity was still screaming. The wild outaudio-intercept speaker and their direct vibrations were beating thunderously against the compartment walls. "Knock it off, Mac!" came a different voice through the circuit. "That's an old trick," still another macro-creature said. "Won't help you any." "But -- but something's happening!" the host entity cried desperately. "You got to believe me! Oh (something or other)!" "Wait till you see what's going to happen!" Uproarious laughter from several directions. Then: "Somebody shut him up!" Lasson cut off the audio-intercept circuit, immobilized the subject's vocal organs and put the creature on automatic pace behavior. He returned to the optical controls. But his efforts were futile. and studied the flowing picture, absently staring at the light and dark pattern in the background and curiously trying to guess its nature and purpose. It was like nothing he'd ever seen on Valvarez. "Parok!" he called suddenly. "Yes, sir?" The psycho-electronics chief shuffled dutifully across the floor. "Where's the last man who worked on the optical-intercept?" "Somewhere in a capillary," Parok replied dismally, "as you ordered, sir." The commander made a gesture of annoyance. "Well, see that the man who's working on it now joins him, and put another on the job." "At this rate, sir," Parok offered uncertainly, "I won't have any section personnel left. Have you considered using a detention method -- like the natives on Cervia IX did?" "Detention? What's that?" "When a subordinate does something wrong, you lock him up. If you need him later, he's still there." "Inefficient A waste of time, food and room." He dismissed Parok with a flick of his hand. "March the man to the injectors." There was a blinding flash from somewhere behind the control console and a chorus of agonized yells trailed off into shortlived moans. "I think that will be quite impossible now, sir," Parok said hopelessly. It was. Lasson had to detach a special detail to carry the man in question, together with the other two who were in contact with him when he absorbed the two microamps of electric current, to the injectors. By the end of the next few shifts, quite a remarkable change had come over the control compartment Every feature of the "new order" reflected impending success of the shock troop's mission. To begin with, there was a subtle undercurrent of victory in the attitude of the men. Whereas before they had seemed uncertain and apprehensive, they were now cocky and spirited. Lasson complimented himself on having done a good job, both on the men and on the macroentity. The compartment now presented a homy appearance. Speakers on the walls filled the room with soft Valvarezian music. Cool breezes, artificially scented with the redolence of saran blossoms, fanned out from the air ducts. The floor was smoothly paved with a new layer of calcite that had remained undisturbed by convulsive upheavals for several shifts. And the cross-pulse beat had been deadened until the thrump-thump was but a euphonious rhythmic accompaniment to the soothing symphony. Lounging chairs were now part of the furnishings, and frescoes that strummed nostalgic chords in the hearts of the men decorated the walls. able Commander Lasson seemed less out of sorts as he hummed his harmonic obbligato to the music. His stubby fingers beat out the tempo on the console keyboard while he absently monitored the visual-intercept screen, putting the creature through a series of coordination exercises. Parok sat in the co-controller's chair, manipulating switches and experimenting with the macrobeing's facial expressions and semi-automatic gestures. "Handles rather nicely, doesn't it?" Lasson asked civilly. "As well as any we've ever brought under permanent control," Parok agreed. 'The commissioner will find it impossible to reject this life-form. It's ideally suited to our needs. I'm sure Zemurra will withdraw the colonists from all other worlds and assign them to hosts on this planet." The commander put the subject on full automatic pace and sat back contentedly. "Well, that finishes it up," he said, slapping his palms against his thighs. "Of course, we haven't been able to correct the optical relay defect, but that doesn't matter. The vision is well within specifications." He cast one final wistful glance at the provocative light-dark vertical pattern in the background of the thing's vision, shrugged futilely and buzzed the communications section chief on the intercom. "I want you to prepare an official sub-ethergram to the commissioner," he instructed. "Say, 'Your Excellency: Test Project Twentyeight complete and ready for colonization. Residential pocket prepared for first ten thousand colonists. All conditions idealplus. Dispatch shock troop units to bring next one hundred thousand host entities under positive control.' "When you have the message taped, bring it here for authentication before you send it." Lasson rose from the control chair momentarily and slipped on the kinesthetic relay suit. He tugged at the creases until it fit snugly, then plugged in its leads. The kinesthetic circuit warmed up to operational potential and abruptly he was as one with the macro-entity. Now he was aware of all its external sensations -- the position of its limbs, the warm air on its skin, the slump of its shoulders. It was disconcerting at first, of course. Most difficult of all was getting used to the vicarious sensations of walking on two legs, manipulating objects with only two hands. r T , HE commander tensed. Some- thing was wrong. The thing felt different from the last time he had tapped in on its kinestheness somewhere. Parok gestured tpward the big screen. Other macro-creatures were in the room with the host now. One, dressed in some sort of a dark robe, stood in front of the subject and read from a small black book. The vocalization came promptly through the audio-intercept speaker: "Something or other. Something or other. Something or -- " It was all very confusing. The vocal associative counter-transfer was failing to translate anything the black-robed creature was saying. It was as though the being was speaking a language totally alien to the host. Tentatively, Lasson raised the subject's hand to the top of its head. No wonder there was the sensation of cold! The mat of threadlike growth had been removed! The commander glanced uncertainly over at Parok. But the subordinate only shrugged hopelessly, indicating his inability to guess at what was transpiring on the screen. Presently Lasson received the sensation of strong hands seizing the host entity's arms and tugging him toward the puzzling pattern of vertical stripes. He started to manipulate the controls and make the subject break free, but then he realized the resistance might overload the circuits. So he put the creature on semi-automatic and let it submissively go along with the others. The incongruous striped pattern swam closer and came into focus as the party approached it Lasson could discern now that it was a series of lathlike strips of metal spaced at short intervals and extending from the floor to the ceiling. The creature and those with it went through an aperture in the pattern and down a corridor into a small, bare room. All the sensations were transmitted to Lasson through the kinesthetic relay circuit as the entity was lowered into a stiff chair and bands were clamped tightly around its wrists and ankles. Intrigued, the commander made the subject glance up in time to see a dome-shaped metal object being lowered over its bare head. It was an uncomfortably cold thing and Lasson tried to raise the creature's hands to snatch it away, forgetting that the subject was, for some reason, shackled. For a brief instant, the commander closed his eyes and tried to visualize, in true perspective, the great cupola in the macroworld as it almost completely encased the brain and its network of Valvarezian tunnels and compartments and crewmen. Then he waited interestedly to see what would happen next.      Instead of merely having the usual brain-wave dips and curves, the electroencephalograph of a sunny blond Viking like Poul Anderson must consist of dour storm-scoured peaks and mystery-black valleys... like The planet itself is darkly adventurous enough, but Anderson sets down in it a man recklessly striving to escape an even darker enigma: What are the forgotten memories that eat at the rim of his mind? Are they why he looks and feels so unlike his people? He knows there are answers... but they are not inside him! literally hangs upon whether Ben Baxter lives or dies... and he infuriatingly refuses to stay alive! Along with perhaps another novelest and certainly short stories and our regular features, Willy Ley has a genuinely startling report to make starry-eyed speculators. It has nothing to do with lunar real estate or mining concessions or, for that matter, anything you are likely to guess... because it has nothing whatever to do with the Moon. Yet the contract exists as an actual legal document, with the most solid and solvent financial, political, military and scientific backing possible. Don't lie awake nights wondering; read the astonishing details in next month's issue. Of course we know this is a deliberate tease and that you hate us for it, but the purpose of a Forecast is to sell copies, isn't it? We promise you won't be disappointed. #  Sfygfrp Circle numbers wanted Total enclosed  # # Name Address : City State p A kiv  ou PirTU Each copy has six to eight stories by such top authors as Ray Bradbury, Sam Merwin, Jr., Evelyn E. Smith, Frederik Pohl, Charles Satterfield, Philip K. Dick, Ted Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Wyman Guin, Damon Knight, L. Sprague de Camp, and many others. All ten for # only Any five I .# Any three # or #c each postpaid. Confidence Game I admit it: I didn't know if I was coming or going -- but I know that if I stuck to the old man, I was a comer... even if he was a gonerl D OC had this solemn human by the throat when I caught up with him. "Tonight," Doc was saying in his old voice that was as crackled and important as parchment, "tonight Man will reach the Moon. The golden Moon and the silver ship, symbols of greed. Tonight is the night when this is to happen." "Sure," the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. "No argument. Sure, up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the teeth!" I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose, one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled, but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie. It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame, layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side. One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the greasy collar of the human. "I hope you'll forgive him, sir," I said, not meeting the man's eyes. "He's my father and very old, as you can see." I laughed inside at the absurd, easy lie. "Old events seem recent to him." The human nodded, Adam's apple jerking in the angry neon twilight. '"Memory Jump,' you mean. All my great-grandfathers have it. But Great-great-grandmother Lupos, funny thing, is like a schoolgirl. Sharp, you know. I... Say, the poor old guy looks sick. Want any help?" I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for all I knew. corner were sensing at Doc and me. They were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated Martians. They were aliens. They were't men like Doc and me. Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we kept getting closer each of the times. I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the flyspecked flophouse doors. The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance. "Fifteen cents a bed," he said mechanically. "We'll use one bed," I told him. "I'll give you twenty cents." I felt the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining. "Fifteen cents a bed," he played it back for me. Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless. "We can always make it over to the mission," I lied. The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. "Awright, since we ain't full up. In advance." I placed the quarter on the desk. "Give me a nickel." The clerk's hand fell on the coin and slid it off into the unknown before I could move, what with holding up Doc. "You've got your nerve," he said at me with a fine mist of dew. "Had a quarter all along and yet you Martian me down to twenty cents." He saw the look on my face. "I'll give you a room for the two bits. That's better'n a bed for twenty." I knew I was going to need that nickel. Desperately. I reached across the desk with my free hand and hauled the scrawny human up against the register hard. I'm not as strong in my hands as Doc, but I managed. "Give me a nickel," I said. "What nickel?" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me. "You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?" I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble and that did scare me. I had to get him alone. "Where's the room?" I asked. HT HE room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't have any lock on it At last, Doc and I were alone. I laid Doc out on the graybrown cot and put his forearm over his face to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily. Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I didn't need to. The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered, uncovered floor. It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it an unreal distortion. Doc began to mumble louder. I knew I had to move. I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I moved. I was bent double, but I got from the floor to the chair and found my notebook and orb-point in my hands. I found I couldn't focus both my mind and my eyes through the electric flashes of agony, so I concentrated on Doc s voice and trusted my hands would follow their habit pattern and construct the symbols for his words. They were suddenly distinguishable. " Outsider... Thoth... Dyzan... Seven... Hsan... Beyond Six, Seven, Eight... Two boxes... Ralston... Richard Wentworth... Jimmy Christopher... Kent Allard... Ayem... Oh, are... ness wail that stretched into non-existence. The pen slid across the scribbled face of the notebook and both dropped from my numb hands. But I knew. Somehow, inside me, I knew that these words were what I had been waiting for. They told everything I needed to know to become the most powerful man in the Solar Federation. That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was. I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc. Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a nickel. Still, I had to get some. I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy dirt. The door opened and shut -- there was no lock. I shouldn't leave Doc alone, but I had to. He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that I listened to him for a moment then tested and tasted the craving that crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow. Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his lumpy skull. He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.) I don't remember how I got out onto the street.  her platinum hair was pulled straight back, drawing her cheekbones tighter, straightening her wide; appealing mouth, drawing her lean, athletic, feminine body erect. She was wearing a powderblue dress that covered all of her breasts and hips and the upper half of her legs. The most wonderful thing about her was her perfume. Then I realized it wasn't perfume, only the scent of soap. Finally, I knew it wasn't that It was just healthy, fresh-scrubbed skin. I went to her at the bus stop, forcing my legs not to stagger. Nobody would help a drunk. I don't know why, but nobody will help you if they think you are blotto. "Ma'am, could you help a man who's not had work?" I kept my eyes down. I couldn't look a human in the eye and ask for help. "Just a dime for a cup of coffee." I knew where I could get it for three cents, maybe two and a half. I felt her looking at me. She spoke in an educated voice, one she used, perhaps, as a teacher or supervising telephone operator. "Do you want it for coffee, or to apply, or a glass or hypo of something else?" I cringed and whined. She would expect it of me. I suddenly realized that anybody as clean as she was had to be a tourist here. I hate tourists. "Just coffee, ma'am." She was younger than I was, so I didn't have to call her that. "A little more for food, if you could spare it" I hadn't eaten in a day and a half, but I didn't care much. "I'll buy you a dinner," she said carefully, "provided I can go with you and see for myself that you actually eat it" I felt my face flushing red. "You wouldn't want to be seen with a bum like me, ma'am." "I'll be seen with you if you really want to eat" It was certainly unfair and probably immoral. But I had no choice whatever. "Okay," I said, tasting bitterness over the craving. r T I HE coffee was in a thick white cup before me on the counter. It was pale, grayish brown and steaming faintly. I picked it up in both hands to feel its warmth. Out of the comer of my eye, I could see the woman sitting on the stool beside me. She had no right to intrude. This moment should be mine, but there she sat, marring it for me, a contemptible tourist. I gulped down the thick, dark liquid brutally. It was all I could do. The cramp flowed out of my diaphragm. I took another swallow and was able to think straight again. A third swallow and I felt -- good. Not abnormally stimulated, but strong, alert, poised on the brink of exhilaration. That was what coffee did for me. I was a caffeine addict. Earth-norm humans sometimes have the addiction to a slight extent, but I knew that as a Centurian I had it infinitely worse. Caffeine affected my metabolism like a pure alkaloid. The immediate effects weren't the same, but the need ran as deep. I finished the cup. I didn't order another because I wasn't a pure sensualist I just needed release. Sometimes, when I didn't have the price of a cup, I would look around in alleys and find cola bottles with a few drops left in them. They have a little caffeine in them -- not enough, never enough, but better than nothing. "Now what do you want to eat?" the woman asked. I didn't look at her. She didn't know. She thought I was a human -- an Earth human. I was a man, of course, not an alien like a Martian. Earthmen ran the whole Solar Federation, but I was just as good as an Earthman. With my suntan and short mane, I could pass, couldn't I? That proved it, didn't it? "Hamburger," I said. "Well done." I knew that would probably be all they had fit to eat at a place like this. It might be horse meat, but then I didn't have the local prejudices. I didn't look at the woman. I couldn't. But I kept remembering how clean she looked and I was aware of how clean she smelled. I was so dirty, so very dirty that I could never get clean if I bathed every hour for the rest of my life. The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba, almost in a single movement of my jaws. Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting for me. "Could I have a few to take with me, miss?" I pleaded. She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I just felt it "That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am.'" she said. "I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know." That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. "No, miss," I said. "It's Miss Casey -- Vivian Casey," she corrected. She was a schoolteacher, all right. No other girl would introduce herself as Miss Last Name. Then there was something in her voice... "What's your name?" she said to me. I choked a little on a bite of stale bun. I had a name, of course. and I knew if I went off somewhere quiet and thought about it, mine would come to me. Meanwhile, I would tell the girl that my name was... Kevin O'Malley. Abruptly I realized that that was my name. "Kevin," I told her. "John Kevin." "Mister Kevin," she said, her words dancing with bright absurdity like waterhose mist on a summer afternoon, "I wonder if you could help me." "Happy to, miss," I mumbled. She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar. "What do you think of this?" I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine. Dear Acolyte R. . S.: tion, in sealed wrapper, "The Scarlet Book " revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe. Name: Address: The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent. There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was trying to pull it out. I looked up at his stubbled face. "I had half a dozen hamburgers, a cup of coffee and a glass of milk. I want four more 'burgers to go and a pint of coffee. By your prices, that will be one sixty-five -- if the lady didn't pay you." "She didn't," he stammered. "Why do you think I was trying to get that bill out of your hand?" I didn't say anything, just got up off the floor. After the counterman put down my change, I spread out the five dollar bill on the vacant bar, smoothing it I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the sidewalk, only in the doorways. amber world, then an azure one. Neon light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had changed around -- prayer came from the left song from the right. Doc sat on the floor in the halfdarkness and he had made a thing. My heart hammered at my lungs. I knew this last time had been different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a start. He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom. His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed "springs" -- metal webbing -- and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a meaningful whole. I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I became lost. I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any hungry rats out of the walls. I knelt beside Doc. "An order, my boy, an order," he whispered. I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders? He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen, before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it "Concentrate," Doc said hoarsely. "Concentrate... I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of concentration. The words "First Edition" were what I was thinking about most. HE heavy-set man in the or nate armchair was saying, "The bullet struck me as I was pulling on my boot..."  I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately. Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these months -- time travel. A thin, sickly man was sprawled in the other chair in a rumpled dressing gown. My eyes held to his face, his pinpoint pupils and whitened nose. He was a condemned snowbird! If there was anything I hated or held in more contempt than tourists or Martians, it was a snowbird. "My clients have occasioned singular methods of entry into these rooms," the thin man remarked, "but never before have they used instantaneous materialization." The heavier man was half choking, half laughing. "I say -- I say, I would like to see you explain this, my dear fellow." "I have no data," the thin man answered coolly. "In such instance, one begins to twist theories into fact, or facts into theories. I must ask this unemployed, former professional man who has gone through a serious illness and is suffering a more serious addiction to tell me the place and time from which he comes." The surprise stung. "How did you know?" I asked. He gestured with a pale hand. "To maintain a logical approach, I must reject the supernatural. Your arrival, unless hallucinatory -- and despite my voluntary use of one drug and my involuntary experiences recently with another, I must accept the evidence of my senses or retire from my profession -- your arrival was then super-normal. I might say super-scientific, of a science not of my or the good doctor's time, clearly. Time travel is a familiar folk legend and I have been reading an article by the entertaining Mr. Wells. Perhaps he will expand it into one of his novels of scientific romance." I knew who these two men were, with a tormenting doubt. "But the other -- " "Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth. Your overfondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary state?" #M this snowbird. I hated him. Because I couldn't trust to my own senses as he did. "You don't exist," I said slowly, painfully. "You are fictional creations." The doctor flushed darkly. "You give my literary agent too much credit for the addition of professional polish to my works." large, curved pipe from something that looked vaguely like an ice-skate. 'Interesting. Perhaps if our visitor would tell us something of his age with special reference to the theory and practice of temporal transference, Doctor, we would be better equipped to judge whether we exist." There was no theory or practice of time travel. I told them all I had ever heard theorized from Hindu yoga through Extra-sensory Perception to Relativity and the positron and negatron. "Interesting." He breathed out suffocating black clouds of smoke. "Presume that the people of your time by their 'Extra-sensory Perception' have altered the past to make it as they suppose it to be. The great historical figures are made the larger than life-size that we know them. The great literary creations assume reality." I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal. His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. "Withdrawal symptoms." The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He was not really a snowbird. After a time, I asked the doctor a question. "Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously." Accepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened. My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote in sunlight and stepped toward it... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.  toy. "Let me see those papers, Kevin." I handed her the doctor's manuscript. Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. "It's all right. It's all right. It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read this myself." Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror. "Don't move, Kevin," she said. "I'll have to shoot you -- maybe not to kill, but painfully." I watched her face flash blue, red, blue and knew she meant it But I had known too much in too short a time. I had to help Doc, but there was something else. "I just want a drink of coffee from that container on the chair," I told her. She shook her head. "I don't know what you think it does to you." It was getting hard for me to think. "Who are you?" She showed me a card from her wrist purse. Vivian Casey, Constable, North American Mounted Police. I had to help Doc. I had to have some coffee. "What do you want?" "Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical, topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist -- he had his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?" I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee. "It takes money -- money Doc didn't have -- to make money," Miss Casey said, "even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of Doc's character. He was a scholar." Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I needed some coffee. "He became a book finder. He got rare editions of books and magazines for his clients in absolutely mint condition. That was all right -- until he started obtaining books that did not exist." was supposed to mean. I got to the chair, snatched up the coffee container, tore it open and gulped down the soothing liquid. I turned toward her and threw the rest of the coffee into her face. The coffee splashed out over her platinum hair and powderblue dress that looked white when the neon was azure, purple when it was amber. The coffee stained and soiled and ruined, and I was fiercely glad, unreasonable happy. I tore the gun away from her by the short barrel, not letting my filthy hands touch her scrubbed pink ones. I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the thing on the floor to the cot Doc had a pulse, but it was irregular. I checked for a fever and there wasn't one. After that I didn't know what to do. I looked up finally and saw a Martian in or about the doorway. "Call me Andre," the Martian said. "A common name but foreign. It should serve as a point of reference." I had always wondered how a thing like a Martian could talk. Sometimes I wondered if they really could. "You won't need the gun," Andre said conversationally. "I'll keep it thanks. What do you want?" "I'll begin as Miss Casey did -- by telling you things. Hundreds of people disappeared from North Ml America a few months ago." "They always do," I told him. "They ceased to exist -- as human beings -- shortly after they received a book from Doc," the Martian said. Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but managed to hold onto the gun and stand up. "Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again," I warned him, "and I'll kill the girl." Martians were supposed to be against the destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but it was worth a try. "Kevin," Andre said, "why don't you take a bath?" The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no matter how often I bathed. No words formed. "But, Kevin," Andre said, "you aren't that dirty." r T , HE blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the thing on the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and miss it. I knew something. "I don't wash because I drink coffee." "It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?" he asked. "Of course," I said, and added absurdly, "That's why I don't wash." "You mean," Andre said slowly, ploddingly, "that if you bathed, you would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently." I was knocked to my knees. "Kevin," the Martian said, "drinking coffee represents a major voice only in Centurian humanoids, not Earth-norm human beings. Which are you?" Nothing came out of my gabbling mouth. "What is Doc's full name?" I almost fell in, but at the last instant I caught myself and said, "Doctor Kevin O'Malley, Senior." From the bed, Doc said a word. "Son." Then he disappeared. I looked at that which he had made. I wondered where he had gone, in search of what. "He didn't use that," Andre said. So I was an Earthman, Doc's son. So my addiction to coffee was all in my mind. That didn't change anything. They say sex is all in your mind. I didn't want to be cured. I wouldn't be. Doc was gone. That was all I had now. That and the thing he left. "The rest is simple," Andre said. "Doc O'Malley bought up all the stock in a certain ancient metaphysical order and started supplying members with certain books. Can you imagine the effect of the Book of Dyzan or the Book of Thoth or the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan or the Necronomican itself on human beings?" "But they don't exist," I said wearily. "Exactly, Kevin, exactly. They have never existed any more than your Victorian detective friend. But the unconscious racial mind has reached back into time and created them. And that unconscious mind, deeper than psychology terms the subconscious, has always known about the powers cognition. Through these books, the human race can tell itself how to achieve a state of pure logic, without food, without sex, without conflict -- just as Doc has achieved such a state -- a little late, true. He had a powerful guilt complex, even stronger than your withdrawal, over releasing this blessing on the inhabited universe, but reason finally prevailed. He had reached a state of pure thought." "The North American government has to have this secret, Kevin," the girl said. "You can't let it fall into the hands of the Martians." wanted it to fall into his hands. I knew I could not let Doc's -- Dad's -- time travel thing fall into anyone's hands. I remembered that all the copies of the books had disappeared with their readers now. There must not be any more, I knew. Miss Casey did her duty and tried to stop me with a judo hold, but I don't think her heart was in it, because I reversed and broke it. I kicked the thing to pieces and stomped on the pieces. Maybe you can't stop the progress of science, but I knew it might be millenniums before Doc's genes and creative environment were recreated and time travel was rediscovered. Maybe we would be ready for it then. I knew we weren't now. Miss Casey leaned against my dirty chest and cried into it I didn't mind her touching me. "I'm glad," she said. Andre flowed out of the doorway with a sigh. Of relief? I would never know. I supposed I had destroyed it because I didn't want the human race to become a thing of pure reason without purpose, direction or love, but I would never know for sure. I thought I could kick the habit -- perhaps with Miss Casey's help -- but I wasn't really confident Maybe I had destroyed the time machine because a wojW" without material needsjittdlSt not grow and roast coffee. ( Continued from page #) are as thoroughly domesticated as the dog) are a special case -- it is as though an American child were brought up in Babylon; he would undoubtedly learn to communicate, but it would be in Babylonian terms and not in the language he had been born to." Pohl refers to a dog named Fellow, "an honored guest at Columbia University (who) had a vocabulary in English of four hundred words, which he recognized regardless of who spoke them." But Pohl dismisses Dog as contaminated with Human. However, he says, "Cat might be purer -- some # words of Cat have been identified, along with some six words of Horse and a few each of Elephant and Pig. But the linguists of the animal kingdom, at least in their own and native tongues, are the primates... The chimpanzee, best studied of primates short of Man, not only has a vocabulary of some # distinct words, according to Blanche Learned, but may have a unique claim to linguistic fame. A philologist named George Schwidetzky believes he has found traces of Chimpanzee loan-words in ancient Chinese ('ngak'), in a South African Bushman dialect (a tongue click), and even in modern German! (The German word, 'geek,' derived from Chimpanzee 'gack.') "One definition of Man calls him 'the tool-using animal' -- yet elephants crop tree branches to swat flies, spider monkeys construct vine ladders for their young, and there is some plausible evidence that the polar bear hunts sleeping walruses with the aid of that primitive tool, the missile, in the form of a hurled chunk of ice. Another definition identifies Man as 'the linguistic animal' -- but even the few remarks above will indicate that that claim is far less than unique." Pohl's postscript only hints at the great activity in deciphering animal languages and errs in stating that the frog is the lowest animal to have a voice -- recordings of fish voices reveal the allegedly silent depths to be noisier than a reform school classroom. The practical applications of all this research? Slave Ship details many; maybe you remember how its farmers teach cattle to eat weeds and leave the pay-crop alone, which could be done by any farmer today who cares to learn Cow. Fish could conceivably be a big help in surface and submarine ship detection. But there's also knowledge for the sake of knowledge... particularly when it serves as exciting idea background for a stimulating book that we are proud to have serialized. seHWjJ nnM- r(y rr . v v" v AS 'iov '?  e    .sv   Hs "GHt Z,r  .:::: in galaxy! c V" l "r o oN There's nothing nebulous about that duster of science fiction luminaries... and more will be appearing in our future sparkling issues. famous writers. Our rates to authors are the highest in the field jour editorial policy the most challenging. tudes in other fields streaking into science fiction... the giants of the next decade hurling out their first flaming, molten prose. Subscribe now to insure not missing any star-studded issues ience, not ours. Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson St. New York #, .N. Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years # additional Foreign Postage Per Year  galaxy By  HE By By Handyman  Finishing Basements  Finishing Attics  Essential Repairs  Built-ins  Painting  Refinishing  Landscaping  Patios and Terraces  Barbecues Don't put otf those vital home repairs and improvements another day! tells you "how" in language you con understand! Imagine changing that drab kitchen, converting the basement to a game room, glamourizing your outdoor patio -- or any other luxurious improvement . , all are now possible at very little cost to you! clear drawings show every detail of construction. Easy-to-follow, steparticles give you valuable pointers on how to save work, buy and save on proper materials and get a professionly-perfect obl of your workshop library I g  TH# PJkMfE-T' Handyman Amazing Brain Actual Tunc Composed You can build # different machines, including Binary Adding Automatic Oil Machine Furnace Secret Coder Circuit  Decoder Machine for Machine for Spaceship's Arithmetical Airlock Carrying Intelligence Comparing Tester Machine Burglar Reasoning Machine Puzzle General ComSolvers bination Adder. Locks Subtracter, Games RequirMultiplier. ing Logic Divider    Some firms and Institutions Allis-Chalmers RemingtonRand International Business Machines Wheeldex Mfg. Co. Manuel Tecumsah, Missionary Nebraska Walter V. Clarke Associates Public Barnard College Westinghouse Los Angeles Electric Public Schools Laboratories General Ins. Co. of America Kansas State Lafayette Radio University Rohr Aircraft Co. Coral Gables Southwest Senior H. S. Missouri Courtland Jr. State College OklahomaA M Duke University Laboratories Here's a wonderful kit that gives you a fascinating introduction to the logic machines of our modern age ! The devices you can build test intelligence, code and decode, count, play Tic-tac-toe, solve problems and now compose music ! Converts from binary to decimal -- reasons in syllogisms -- computes ! Build any one of # exciting electric brain machines in just a few hours by following the clear-cut, step-by-step directions toy. The only logic machine kit that not only adds, subtracts, etc., but presents the basic ideas of cybernetics, Boollean algebra, symbolic logic, automation, etc. So simple to construct that even a #-year-old can make a machine that will fascinate people with advanced scientific training ! Using a statistical analElectric Brain Construction Kit, you can compose original tunes automatically. These new circuits are not available elsewhere ! Over # Components and Parts. Circuits operate on one flashlight battery, and the use of ingeniously designed parts makes building circuits one of the most fascinating things you've ever done ! You set up problems in a variety of fields -- and get your answers almost quicker than you can set them up ! Play games with the machine -- nim, tic-tac-toe, etc. -- and pit your brain against its logic ! Solve puzzles in a few seconds that would take you hours without the aid of the machine. You actually see how computing and problem-solving is analyzed with algebraic solutions transferred directly into circuit diagrams. Your Cost for Geniac Kit : only # postpaid. The # "Minds and Machines" -- a basic introduction to computers. (#) "How to Construct Electrical Brains At Home" -- a fully illustrated text book on basic computer design theory and circuits with specific instructions for building circuits. (#) Wiring Diagram Manual. A special booklet with full-scale diagrams that you can tear out and place on your work bench for easy assembly. (#) Beginners' Manual. Starting from scratch, the manual adds cominents to teach the basic symbols of electric circuits. (#) Over # components and parts. Mail today... Check. Cash or Money Order # texinqfon Avenue, New York #, New York by L Ron Hubbard To Be Published Soon -- Watch for it -- on -- Your Newsstand Q#l#Xy fay Avram Davidson # The Moon Contract #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexicp, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions, felscwhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co,, Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and critical mail, editors receive letters that roil their troubled sleep, as if their sleep needed roiling. Like this one, for instance : "I enjoyed your editorial on possible life-forms. You pointed out that vegetation lives off soil and air, herbivores live off vegetation, and carnivores live off herbivores. Well, here is a little food for thought: what lives off carnivores? Judith L. Burgess, Carnivore." The obvious answer is soil and air, so that the whole thing comes full circle. But that's dodging; soil and air do not live off anything. The omnivore does. Miss Burgess, and you must be an uncomfortable date if you devour meat and won't touch vegetables and desserts. As an omnivore, I declare with justifiable pride that this is the highest category in the gastronomical scale of evolution. The fact that we share the distinction with bears, pigs and the raccoon family in no way mitigates my pride. I can't imagine what, if anything, can possibly surpass our all-purpose gullet. Miss Burgess and others may dispute the statement with Oscar Wilde's description of English fox hunting as "The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable," but she and they and Mr. Wilde must then be prepared to deprive Eskimos and Orientals from membership in the human race. Not sharing our silly prejudices, these admirable peoples carry omnivoraciousness to its utterly logical extreme. They may not like fox, may consider it greatly inferior to raw wolverine or Pooch Cantonese Style, but any fox they harpoon or snare is going to be eaten, doggedly or otherwise. If the need ever be. Miss Burgess, you and the rest of us can -- and will -- eat every carnivore clean off the planet. Then there's the letter from the worried chap whose obviously alien wife sajrs such things as: "The washee pot needs coughing." In a recent communique, he added nervously: "My wife just told me, 'If you don't know how to be nice, don't be at all.' So, if you fail to hear from me, you'll know what happened." What makes him believe I will? I think I'd like to know, but I'm not really sure. Another deponent to the case proving that There Are Aliens Among Us writes: "The indications are that these aliens come from planets with extreme temperatures. In the sum(Continued on page #) Hours of Good Reading Enjoymenf #I Hudson Sfreef, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here  Add #c Foreign Postage For  # or #c each Enclose check, cosh or money order. We pay postage Name Address -- City State (Continued from page #) mer, people slap me on the back and ask if it is hot enough for me, it invariably being so. The conclusion I've arrived at is that these aliens possess a gadget imbedded in their back for raising temperature and it sometimes goes out of whack and has to be jarred, like kicking a gum machine. "These same people slap me on the back in the winter, asking if it's cold enough for me. Can a metamorphosis be this complete? "Several days ago, a stranger slipped on the splashed edge of crashed into the water. When I helped haul him out, he said that he 'must have slipped on something wet.' Does he come from a "I'm alarmed about some of 'our' idioms, such as: 'What time is it?' What time is what?" Another reader sent in a clipping from the N.Y. Herald Tribune about a "time capsule" dug up at Madison Square Park. A lead box # inches long and # inches wide, it was located while dismantling an ornate water trough for horses. "The lead case contained a bronze table inscribed with the words 'The Gift of Olivia Eggleston Phelps Stokes to the City of New York, August #.' Inclosed were a booklet entitled 'Colton's Map of New York City'; and Works'; a copy of the NewYork Herald, dated Dec. #, #; a business card of James Muir, plumber and gas fitter at # E. #th St., and a copy of the Bible. "Miss Stokes, a philanthropist and daughter of a New York banking family, died at the age of #I on Dec. #, #." Presumably thinking that the itemized trivia was worth the cost of the lead box. If any further argument is needed against time capsules, there it is -- pocketbook lint that Miss Phelps and her advisers, if any, thought would have enduring value -- and we're doing the same with cornerstones and capsules. I dislike advocating unsanitary measures, but letting junk accumulate (as in Bat Cave, New Mexico, where # feet of garbage flung down in # years gave an important clue to the origin of corn) would be a real boon to future archeologists. We owe that much to our distant begats, don't we? Finally, someone sent in a squib about a # mm. camera found on the back seat of a taxi. Developed, the film had # shots of Lincoln delivering his Gettysburg address. Big deal! Brady covered the event. But what about the cab fare there and back? And now -- you were saying? Go Ahead -- Choose Brand-New Science Fiction Books Valued Up to # For Only Here they are -- beautiful, hard-cover, current First Editions by your favorite authors -- now yours at a Fraction of their regular selling price! No "Clubs" to join... no "extra" books to buy... just Choose the titles you want and Save! 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Name Address  Check this box if you want free catalog listing still more titles at these bargain prices! What were the forgotten memories that ate at the rim of his mind? Were they why he looked and felt so unlike his people? He knew there were answers... but they were not inside him! i, re j Torrek T he glider followed the slope of Kettleback Fell, caught an updraft rising from Brann's Dale and swung toward a blued-silver sky of twilit clouds. Above the cold white brawl of Skara River there lay a chill hazy air mass which sucked it down again. Vilyan's hands were briefly frantic on the controls. Then he had crossed the river and was once more upborne, until presently he went above the timberline. "We are close now, oathbrother," he said. "Best you make ready." Torrek nodded, left his seat and crawled down the narrow length of the fuselage. He felt the light fabric, oiled cloth drawn tight on a frame of hollow canes, shiver to his touch. It was very silent; somehow, the great booming winds did not penetrate. Reaching the little trapdoor, he peered through its glass inset, down at a savage barrenness streaked with snowfields. He tested his arrangements -- the coiled rope knotted to a crossbar, the three knives sheathed at his waist, the net which bound his long yellow hair to keep it from his eyes. Otherwise he wore only a loincloth, for he dared weigh no more than he must on this lethal errand. young man, with a harsh bony cast to his face that made him an alien among the handsome people of Dumethdin. And the name they had given him, Torrek, meant more than simply "stranger" -- it hinted at a degree of monstrousness, for he alone of all folk under the Rings could not even guess at his parentage. Nevertheless, Clan and Lodge emblems were tattooed on his face. "There's the nest!" Sweat leaped out on Vilyan's forehead, pearling the blue symbol etched there, the sign of Sea Bear Lodge in which he found sworn brotherhood with Torrek. His hands jerked, a bare trifle, on the sticks, and the glider shuddered. They had climbed high, until now they were slipping along that gaunt dark mountaintop called the Skara Man's Hat. On a windy crag overlooking three thousand feet of cold sky, there was raised an enormous, disorderly heap of branches, welded with the decay of centuries into one fortre.ss mass. As far back as tradition remembered, krakas had nested here. Certain Elders, far down in Diupa, thought it an unholy work to slay the kraka, for she had been there so long, and her mothers and grandmothers before her, reaving the valleys below. If the kraka sat no longer on the Skara Man's Hat, menace brooding over Fenga Fjord, there would be an emptiness in the sky. Folk whose livestock and small children had been carried up to these unclimbable heights thought otherwise. Vilyan's dark reckless face split in a sudden grinning tautness. "There she comes herself, oathbrother!" "Good," grunted Torrek. "May Ellevil and the Moon Lady ward you -- " "Hold her steady now," Torrek interrupted harshly. One who did not know him might have been offended at such surliness, even when death beat upwind to meet him, but in Diupa they thought they understood th"h changeling. You could not look for ease, or mirth, or even much courtesy, from one whose life had been so hideously uprooted. His brain, they thought. must still be plowed with the scars of memory torn loose, five years ago. Therefore Vilyan only nodded. But when Torrek had left the glider and Vilyan was bringing it back toward the fisher town -- for he could not hover in this home of the warring winds -- he sang the Long Faring Song for those who have gone away to battle and are not likely to return. door, threw out the rope and slid down its length. One of his daggers was gripped between his teeth. For long, ghastly minutes, he swung like a bell clapper, more than a mile above the fjord. Now he could hear the wind, a huge hollow roaring through the blue dusk. Its force streamed him ahead at the rope's end. The challenge of the kraka cut through to him. She came threshing upward from her nest, blind with murder, for at this time of year she had young in the nest and that thing of stiff wings dared fly over them! Almost, she hurled herself straight at the glider -- her mother had thus crashed one, a man's lifetime ago. But then, as Torrek had planned, she saw him dangling like bait on a fish hook, and she veered and plunged toward him. The man felt a final tightening of nerve and muscle. His eyes seemed to gain an ultimate clarity, his ears to be whetted until they heard the crashing of Smoky Falls where Skara plunged down the Steeps, time to slow until the onrushing kraka poised in midair and he could count the stripes on her tawny hide after each giant wingbeat. But he was not afraid. In a bare five years of remembered life, there is small time to learn the habits called fear. Then the kraka struck. She was a little smaller than he, discounting the thirty-foot span of leathery wings and the long rudder-shaped tail. But her four feet ended in talons which had been known to split men at one blow and her muzzle held saber teeth. Few people, hanging one-handed from a cord, could have kept from pitching downward to escape. Torrek drew himself up, at the last instant, into a ball. As the winged thunderbolt shot below him, he let go. His legs closed around the lean belly, his left arm around the neck, and his right hand thrust a dagger into her throat. She screamed. For a few wild seconds, she threshed and bucked and writhed in the air, seeking to hurl him off. His knife was torn from his grasp and sparkled meteoric downward. He needed both arms and every draining drop of strength to keep his place. Then his weight became too much for her and they slid down the wind toward the sterile slopes. Her wings, flailing the sky, slowed that fall somewhat, turned it into a long glide... and meanwhile Torrek had drawn another knife and was slashing methodically at her vitals. He felt no pity for this most splendid of animals -- there were too many small bones up on Skara Man's Hat. But he had a moment in which to think that she was brave. And a moment, incredibly high in the air, to look over the misty woods and the green depths of Brann's Dale, across Smol Falls and the narrow fields that men had plowed between the cliffs and the fjord, to Diupa town. More: he could see across Fenga Fjord to Holstok and the White River Delta, a low rich land fair for the harvest. He could see the narrow end of the bay and follow its windings northward between sheer rock to the mouth. There, where the Roost foamed with an incoming tide, lay those guardian islands called the Merrv Men; and Torrek thought he could even see the grim walls of Ness, the fort on Big Ulli which watched lest the beast-helmeted pirates of Illeneth descend again on Dumethdin. Out now the kraka was weakening, her blood spattering the blue twilight air, and as her wings beat less frantically, her fall became the faster. Clenchjawed, Torrek thought she would have her revenge by painting his flesh on the Steeps of Skara next to her own. Then, with a wobbling convulsion, she staggered eastward again, and the updraft from the warmer plowed fields gave her a final helping hand, and it was the fjord into which she plunged. Torrek dived from her just before she struck. He split the water with a force that drove him down and down into greenish depths until his eardrums popped their protest and a coraloid spear raked his flank. When he had finally struggled back to the surface, his lungs seemed ready to explode. It was a long time before his gasping ceased. The kraka floated not far away, upborne by her enormous wings -- dead. And the early lamps of Diupa glimmered within easy distance. "Well, old girl," panted Torrek, "that was friendly of you. Now wait here and be so good as not to let the ollenbors find you and clean your bones -- I want that striped hide!" He strode out for the town, wearily at first, but his strength came back with the swiftness he knew to be abnormal. Sometimes, alone with his own truncated soul at night, Torrek wondered if he were human... or what? There were canoes putting out from the pier. His landing had been dimly espied by the townsfolk. Lean outriggered shapes clove murmurous waves, a hundred paddles struck the water in unison, and the colored paper lanterns hung at the stem posts were like seeking eyes. "Ohoyohoa!" A conch lowed after the ciy, and the brass throb , of gongs took up an underlying rhythm. "Ohoyohoa! May the sea give you up, O my beloved! May the sea surrender you living, ohoyohoa!" "Here I am!" called Torrek unceremoniously. The nearest boat veered. Muscular hands drew him up and soon the conches and gongs and voices roared victory. By the time the fleet had come back, dragging the slain kraka and bearing Torrek on a captain's dais, the Diupa people had all swarmed to the dock. Masked and feather-cloaked, shaking their rattles and their weapons -- crossbows, axes, warmattocks, halberds, blowpipes -- the young men of Sea Bear Lodge danced out the pride he had given them. Grave in their embroidered robes of scarlet and blue, his adoptive Clan Elders waited under glowing lanterns. Between the long, low, airy houses, of painted oilcloth and carved wood panels and peaked shingle roofs, the children and the maidens strewed flowers for him. Even the humblest farmers, artisans, fishermen, with no more finery than a bast loincloth and a feather headdress, lifted their tridents and shouted his honor when he stepped among them. thin evening clouds broke apart. The sun was down, though it would not be dark for hours yet, here in the warm latitudes of the World Called Maanerek. But the sky showed an infinite clear blue, with two of the moons riding high, nearly full. And enormous to the south lifted the rainbow arch of the Rings, most holy bridge. It was the usual thing that the clouds of the long warm day -- forty hours while the sun strode . over the Islands -- should disperse as evening cooled toward night. Yet Torrek, with the fjord's chill kiss still tingling on his skin, imagined that all kindly Rymfar must be with him, to draw the curtain from the sky just as he stepped ashore to his people. His people. Now, for the first time, he felt a thawing in himself. These lithe, dark, high-cheeked folk had made him their own. when they found him speechless and helpless in, the fields, had taught him with the same patient kindliness they showed their children, had forgiven him the blunders and breaches inevitable to one not raised from birth in their ways. In return, he had sailed in their canoes -- yes, fished and hunted and plowed the fields, had fought in ther lines when the robbers of Illeneth forced the Roost and entered Dumethdin. And the folk had given him rank according to his growing abilities, so that now he rated Pilot. But he had still been the waif. He had not truly bought back his life from them... until today. "Drink," said Elder Yensa, handing him the ancient silver Cup of Council. Torrek went to one knee and drained the thin spiced wine. "Let your name be written on the scroll of Harpooners," said Scribe Glamm, "and when next the Fleet goes forth after the sea snakes, may you wield a goodly spear and be rewarded with the share due to your work." Torrek bowed. "I am unworthy, Reverend Uncle," he said. In fact, he knew very well he deserved the elevated rank. He had expected to gain it, if he lived. Now -- He straightened and his eyes went to the young women, respectfully waiting on the edge of lantern light. Sonna saw him and looked down. A slow flush crept up her cheeks. She lowered her head until the long dark garlanded hair hid the small face from him. "Reverend Uncle," said Torrek, bowing to the gray man of Korath Clan who watched him from shrewd eyes, "a Harpooner is of rank sufficient to speak as friends with the child of a Captain. Is it not so?" "It is so," agreed Baelg. "Then have I your consent to go into the mountains with your daughter Sonna?" will," said Baelg. A grin twitched his short beard. "And I believe she is. But you must rest yourself first." "I will rest in the mountains. Reverend Uncle." "A mighty man indeed!" said Baelg, while the young men flashed teeth in admiration. "Go, then, and if the will of you two be later for marriage, I shall not look askance." the Elders, to the Scribe, to the Councilors of Diupa and the Viceroy of the King of Dumethdin. Sonna fell behind him, matching his long strides. In a few minutes, they were beyond the town, on a road which wound through fields up into the mountains. "I could have stayed for the feasting, Sonna, if you wished," he said awkwardly. "Perhaps I was too hasty." "You were not too hasty for me," she answered with an enormous gentleness. "I have been waiting a long time for this night." The road became a narrow trail winding upward between great cool fronds, under soughing leaves. There was a damp green smell in the air and a rushing noise of waterfalls. Here many caves were found, and a young man and woman could lie in their shelter on beds of gathered blossoms, eating wild fruits and splitting the hard-shelled skalli nuts, through all the long light night of the World Called Maanerek. As their trail, a ledge which tumbled down through a deepening purple twilight, led them briefly out of the forest, Torrek and Sonna saw the Inner Moon rise and go hurtling across the sky. There were four outer moons visible now among the few soft stars, as well as the shuddering bands of the Rings, and they built sharded bridges of light on Fenga Fjord and across the ocean beyond. Distantly, inaudibly from here, a lacy curtain of white spray broke around the Merry Men, as one of the tidal bores which guarded Dumethdin and challenged her sailors came roaring in through the Roost. Sonna sighed and took his arm. "Wait a little," she said quietly. "I have never seen it so beautiful before." A curious, angry emotion stirred in Torrek. He stood stiff and savored the bitterness of it until he knew what it was: a resentful jealousy of others who had trod this path with her. But that was a crazy, ugly thing to feel, he told himself in bewilderment -- considering a woman, an unwed girl who had pledged herself to no man as yet, to be property: to rage when she acted like a free human creature, as he might rightly rage at someone who used his personal flensing tools! He bit off the insane feeling and spat it out, but the after-taste remained, a gray doubt of himself. Who am I? "There is grief in you, Torrek," murmured Sonna. "It is nothing," he answered. Why am I? "No... I can feel it in you. Your arm became suddenly like wood." Her fingers stroked down its muscled length, tickling the gold hairs which also set him off from the brown smooth men of Dumethdin. "It is not right that you should know grief." "Let us choose a cave," he said in a voice that grated like a hull on a rocky reef. "No, wait, Torrek." She searched his moonlit face with dark oblique eyes. "I will not spend a night with rage and sorrow up here... not beside you." of Baelg's words, it had been too much to hope that Sonna would ever -- "Ever wed a nameless man," he mumbled without thinking. She smiled, a smile of victory, but stepped past the main issue to say: "Not nameless. You are fully adopted, Torrek. You know that. And after today's work -- " "It is not enough," he said in returning despair. "I will always be the one without roots, the torrek whom they found in the plowed fields five years ago, speechless, kinless, memoryless. I might be a child of hill trolls, for all I will ever know!" "Or a child of the Rymfar," said Sonna, "or of the black Flitters they tell of among the mountain tribes. What of it? You are yourself and only yourself." He was shocked. The idea of a human existing as a single creature, self-sufficient, part of no Clan or Lodge or Nation, and with no need to be a part, was unheard-of. Sonna was a woodswitch to voice it! And then, as if a bolt had clicked home, he imderstood the rightness of the idea. It was not that he lost his wistfulness -- he would always long for a blood kinship that had been denied him -- but his lonely status was no longer a monstrosity. He was different, yes, even crippled in a way, but he was not unnatural. For another slow moment, he stood wondering why Sonna's carelessly tossed-off words, whose implications she could not really have grasped, should so bite into him. It was almost as if she had touched and awakened a memory of -- "No more!" he exclaimed, laughing aloud. "The night is not so long that we can stand here wasting it." "No," breathed Sonna demurely. Her hand stole into his. There came a humming in the sky. Briefly, Torrek was puzzled. Then as the noise grew, and he heard the whine of simdered air behind it, the hair stood up along his back. He had only brought his remaining knife for weapon. It jumped into his hand. He shoved Sonna roughly against the cliff wall and stood in front of her, peering upward. Moonlight dazzled him. The black shape crossed the Rings and slid down an invisible wire, and one end of the wire was pegged to him. It came too fast for thought, too fast for a dash back into the woods. Torrek had not yet grasped the size of the thing, twice the length of a longboat, when it halted by the ledge. It hung there and speared him.  held, pressed against the cliff by a rubbery force he could not see. When he roared and hurled all the weight and strength he owned against that net, it threw him back onto Sonna with a fury that knocked a gasp from her. "Torrek," she whispered. Her hands groped at his waist, blindly in the pitiless unreal moonlight. "Torrek, do you know -- " He did not. He had no memory of this lean, dully black fish shape... and yet it did not quite seem a thing from nightmare, not quite the vengeful ghost of the kraka. Somehow, he could accept it, as he might accept a new and deadly kind of animal. "It's not a glider," he said through clenched jaws. "No wings. But it's been forged or cast -- metal." "The Flitters." Her voice shook. He gave it some thought, standing there pinned in the racking earthquake of his own heart. The Flitters were a tale, a rumor, a recent mumble among the inland barbarians. This had been seen, that had happened, strange flyings and curiously dressed men... A circular door opened in the flank of the -- ship? Beyond it was a similar one which also opened. A metal gangway protruded, tongue-fashion, to the ledge. Torrek could not see inside, but the light that spilled forth stunned his eyes that those who walked over the gangway became no more than shadows. When they reached him and stood staring, he could see a little better. They were big men, with something of himself in their features and coloring. But they were wrapped from boots to neck in drab one-piece garments and they wore massive round helmets. Behind him, Sonna whimpered. The men talked to each other. It was a language Torrek had not heard, a choppy unmusical tongue, but there was no great excitement in the tones. These men were doing a routine job. Through a haze of anger, Torrek saw them reach some kind of decision -- it seemed to involve Sonna rather than him -- and go to work. They cast supple cords into the unseen force-mesh, nooses that closed on him and were drawn taut until he was trussed up like a wooly for slaughter. NE of them waved an arm in signal. Torrek fell to the rock as the force died away. Sonna sprang past him, spitting her fury. A man grinned, side-stepped her rush and grabbed an arm, which he forced behind her back. She went to her knees with a cry and was quickly bound. "What are they doing?" she cried in alarm. "Torrek, beloved, what do they want?" "I don't know," he said. He was slowly overcoming his own helpless wrath, forcing it to the ground as if it were his opponent in a wrestling rhatch. A great chill watchfulness rose in its place. "O my dearest -- " wept Sonna. It cracked across Torrek's heart. He mumbled some meaningless comfort or other. Inwardly, he thought of knives for these grinning, chattering bandits in hideous clothes. He thought of hanging their heads in Diupa's smokehouse. Sonna writhed and tried to bite when they picked her up and took her inside the ship. It earned her nothing but a stunning cuff. Torrek conserved his strength, watching the metal bleakness through which he was borne. Lashed in a chair, he had a view of the sky and the Steeps through a kind of -- no, not window, nor telescope -- image-maker? He focused on that, ignoring the alienness of furnishings around him. Even when the ship rose noiselessly into the sky, and the highest peaks fell out of sight, and Sonna's courage broke in a raw scream, Torrek remained watching the view. But when the stars harshened and came forth in their hundreds, when the great bowl of the world turned into a ringed shield dazzling against darkness, and Sonna clenched her eyes and would not look... he had an eerie sense of homecoming. Almost, he knew the monster mother ship would be waiting there and would draw this little boat into herself. Was it only the speculations of Diupa's philosophers, or did he remember as a fact that the World Called Maanerek was merely a single one of uncountably many? He shivered at a ghostly thought, a thin frightened wisp of -- recollection? -- of how cruel and alien those worlds could be. rowness of the cell where they had caged him. One hand snatched for his knife. When he remembered it was gone, his teeth clicked together, as if closing in a throat. Sonna caught his arm. "No," she said. He came back to humanness like one awakening from a dream. The carnivore light faded as he looked down at her. "What?" he asked vaguely. "It is no use to fight them," she said. "Not till we know more." He nodded stiffly, as if his neckbones creaked. Then he held her in his arms and glared at the men who were opening the door. The younger one raised a weapon. At least Torrek supposed it was a weapon, shaped like a very small blowgun, but grasped in a single fist. This person, or troll, or whatever he was, seemed healthier than his fellows; his skin had a normal weatherbeaten look, not the dead paleness of the others, and he moved with a muscular assurance. He was almost as big as Torrek, with the same yellow hair cropped short, fjut with a beak of a nose and a rigid set to his lips. He spoke. It was a heavily accented version of the Naesevis tongue, the common mercantile language of the Islands. Torrek was not expert in it himself, though so wealthy a nation as Dumethdin naturally attracted many traders, but it was near enough kin to that spoken along Fenga Fjord for him to use. "Best you do not attack me. This gun -- this weapon shoots a -- it can put you to sleep instantly. Awaking from such a sleep is painful." Torrek spat on the floor. "You do understand me, do you not?" "Yes," said Torrek, "I understand you." The pronoun he chose was insulting, but the stranger did not seem to know the difference. "Good. I am Coan Smit. This man beside me is the learned Frain Horlam." The other was little and old, with thin gray hair and blinking watery eyes. Like Coan Smit, he wore a plain greenish coverall, but lacked the young man's insignia. "What do you call yourself?" Smit asked. "I am Torrek, a Harpooner of Diupa, adopted to the Bua Clan and an oath-brother in full standing of Sea Bear Lodge, pledged to the King of Dumethdin." It was another insult: anyone who knew Naesevis should have been familiar enough with the symbology of the Islands to read Torrek's allegiances off his tattoos. Once more, it made no impression. IOT at all offended, Smit  grinned briefly and said something to Frain Horlam, who nodded with a curious eagerness. Then, turning back to his prisoners, Smit went on in a careful tone; "Thank you. I want you to understand, Torrek, that we are your friends. We are, in fact, your people, and you are about to be given back your rightful heritage." As from an immense distance, Torrek heard Sonna's indrawn gasp. He himself felt no great shock. The knowledge had been growing within him since that sky-boat came through darkness to grip him fast. In part, it was that he looked like these folk. But in a deeper part, Isdng beyond all words, this was something he simply knew. It was a cold and poisoned knowledge. "Well, what have you to say further?" he demanded curtly. "If you will come with us, we will take you to a place where it can better be explained." "I will do so, provided this woman come with me." "No, it is best she stay. There would be too much trouble; even without her, it will be hard enough to make things clear to you." "Let it be so, my dear one," mumbled Sonna. There was a beaten weariness about her. She had seen and suffered too much in too short a time. Torrek saw how the unhumanly stiff manner of Coan Smit, a manner of metal, broke open as his eyes drifted down the girl where she stood. Almost, then, Torrek seized Smit in the grip of ao a wrestler, to crack his spine across a knee. He choked back his rage and the icy wariness that replaced it was so unlike Dumethdin's warm folk -- it branded him so sharply as one of this witch-race -- that he slumped and grew saddened. "Let us go," he said. As he followed Horlam down a glaring bare corridor, with Smit and Smif s weapon at his back, he turned over his last glimpse of Sonna: a small figure at the barred door, all alone in a cage. he could look out on the arrogant stars and the cool ringed shield which was his home that they took him. Their walking ended down in the guts of the ship, in a great chamber which was a flashing, blinking, quivering, humming wilderness of philosophic apparatus. "Sit down, Torrek," invited Smit. The Diupa man crouched back from the chair, for it was an ugly thing of wires, instruments and shackles. "On the floor, perhaps -- not in that," he answered. "You will sit in that chair," Smit told him, hefting his weapon, "and permit yourself to be bound into it. Whether you do so freely or let me knock you out with this gun is your affair." Torrek snarled at him. Smit was standing too far, too ready, for a leap. Therefore Torrek yielded. As Horlam closed the steel bands which locked him by wrists, waist and ankles to the chair, his lips moved, invoking the nine evils on Coan Smit, Horlam lowered a grid of wires and less comprehensible things onto Torrek's head and began adjusting it in various ways. Smit pulled up a chair for himself, sheathed his gun and crossed his legs. "Well," he said, "this will take a little time -- to adjust the circuits, I mean -- so I may as well tell you what you wish to know." He grinned wryly. "It is hard to figure where to begin. Some nations of men understand that the world is a round ball spinning about the sun and that the stars are other suns. I do not know if in your country -- " "I have heard such tales," grunted Torrek. Till now, the imaginings of Diupa's learned men had not seemed very plausible to him. But now he knew -- beyond all reason, without needing as proof the fact of this ship -- that Smit spoke the truth. But why did he know it so surely? "Very well, then," said Smit. "It is a great distance from sun to sun, greater than men can truly understand. And there are more suns than have ever been fully counted. Nevertheless, men learned how to cross such distances in ships like this, overcoming the barriers of space, time, heat, cold, weightlessness, airlessness. Spreading from one world, very long ago, they strewed their seed on thousands of other worlds. "Then the Empire went down in wreck and men forgot," Smit continued. "On planets like yours, far removed from the old centers of civilization, thinly populated at the time of the disaster -- on such worlds, hardly a memory remains of the Empire and its fall." alone the weirdness of the tale, but this sense of having been told it once before, in some forgotten dream. He said slowly: "There are legends concerning those who existed Before the Rymfar." Smit nodded. "Of course. Not all knowledge was lost. On some worlds, a kind of civilization survived. But only slowly, through numberless agonies, has it struggled back. The Empire has not yet been rebuilt; there are many separate nations of planets. Most of the Galaxy is still an unexplored wilderness -- But I am talking beside the point. "All right. This is a scout ship of a certain nation, your nation. which lies an enormous distance away. We have been cruising through this region of space for a number of years, mapping, studying... preparing the ground, in a way. Five years ago, we discovered your planet and tested a new procedure. "You are Korul Wanen, an officer of this ship. Your memories -- all your memories of your entire life -- were stripped from you. You were left to be picked up by the Island folk. Now we are taking you back." Smit turned and waved an imperious arm at one of the grayrobed men who stole meekly about, serving the switches and dials of the great machine. He let Torrek sit there with sweat spurting out on the skin, while he gave an order. Then he faced back, grinning. "You don't like it, do you, Korul Wanen?" he said. "It's a lie!" croaked Torrek. "How could you have found me if-" "A good question. But I fear it will not disprove my assertions. You see, a small radiating -- signaling unit, drawing its power from your own body, was implanted in a bone of yours, before you were put down. We could locate you from many miles away." "But no one would be so stupid!" roared Torrek. "I might have died! The folk you say you left me with might have been cannibals and eaten me! What then could you possibly have gained?" "Nothing," said Smit. "But neither would we have lost anything -- except one expendable unit of the crew." in Smit's pale eyes. He was not telling this because there was any special need to, Torrek saw. He was telling it because he wanted to watch his prisoner squirm. Torrek stiffened. It was hard to remain calm, when his heart beat so heavily and his mouth was so dry. Why, he thought, in a remote, astonished part of his brain, I am afraid! This is what it feels like! The gray-robed person came back with a black cylinder the size of a man's forearm and gave it to Smit, who handled it as one handles heavy objects. He smiled at Torrek. "In here," he said, "is the ghost of Korul Wanen." Torrek clamped lips together. He would not ask! "He will live again in his own body," said Smit. "But first, of course, Torrek must be rubbed out." That drew a howl. "No!" "Yes," said Smit eagerly. He passed the cylinder to Hor#am, who fitted it into the machine next to another one. "You might turn over your memories one last time, Torrek. They will soon be nothing but a scribing in a tube." Torrek struggled, uselessly, until he thought his muscles would burst. If they but would, he prayed in anguish, if he could only know clean death! As the dizziness and the darkness closed in on him, the machine screaming inside his head until he felt it must rack his brain apart, he saw Smit lean closer to peer at him. The last thing of which Torrek the Harpooner had awareness was Smit's look of enjoyment. Korul Wanen "Five years!" he murmured. "Oh, it could hold several centuries' worth of experience, my boy," said Dr. Frain Horlam. "When you use individual molecules to store information -- " Wanen looked up from the cylinder, across the desk to the aging psychologist. He was not certain how to act. On the one hand, the old fellow was a non-Cadre civilian; as such, he rated scant respect from a lieutenant in the Astro service. On the other hand, Horlam was in charge of the major scientific undertaking of this expedition, and on an exploratory trip, such work was subordinate only to the gathering of militechnic data. Therefore Wanen said with a carefully noncommittal courtesy: "The theory of this never was explained to me. As long as you only wish me to make conversation, with no subject assigned, perhaps you would be kind enough to instruct me." Horlam's gray head lifted. "In a rough way, if you like," he said. He leaned back and took out a cigar. "Smoke?" "No!" Wanen collected himself. "You know I am an Academy man and therefore conditioned against vice." "Why?" Horlam tossed the question off so casually, between puffs on his own cigar, that Wanen answered without thinking; "In order to serve the Hegemony and the Cadre which guides it more efficiently -- " He jarred to a halt. "You're deliberately baiting me!" "If you say so." "These are not joking matters. Don't make me report you." "This ship is a starvish long way from home," said Horlam, with no obvious relevance. "Seven years now since we left. Nobody back there knows where we are -- we didn't know ourselves just where we were going. The stars have changed position so much that the old Imperial astro data are no use at all, and space is so big, and there are so many stars -- if we don't come back, it will be hundreds of years, probably, before another Hegemony ship chances to come exploring around this way again." Wanen's uneasy puzzlement grew. It might only be the lingering strangeness of his experience. He had wanted to report for duty as soon as he awoke in the sickbay cot, but they had made him rest for a while and then sent him to Horlam's office. An informal talk was to probe his restored self and make certain he was once again fit to serve. But this was too informal! " things?" Wanen asked in a very low, controlled voice. "They're platitudes, but your tone... somehow, it all borders on deviationism." "For which I could be given anything on the scale of corrections, from a reprimand, up through death, to lobotomy or memory erasure -- eh?" Horlam smiled around his cigar. "Never mind, boy. You must also know that there aren't any secret police aboard to whom I could be reported. The reason I'm saying all this is that there are certain things I must tell you. I want to cushion the shock. This is your first deep-space voyage, isn't it?" "Yes." "And you only had two years of it. Then you were mindblanked and deposited on that planet. The rest of us have been batting around this part of the Galaxy for five years more. Things change under such conditions. There has to be a certain adjustment -- a loosening of discipline, a letdown of idealism. You'll see it for yourself. Don't be unduly shocked. The Cadre knows the phenomenon well, allows for it." Wanen realized suddenly that this was why deep-space men never returned to the home worlds of the Hegemony. When you had made your first really long voyage, you were never allowed closer to the Inner Stars than a year's journey; your home became the great naval bases. You knew this in advance, and were told it was a matter of quarantine, and accepted the sacrifice as a small offering to make for the Cadre. Now he saw that the disease he might conceivably be carrying, against which the people of the Inner Stars must forever be protected, was not a physical one. "Very well," he said, smiling his relief. "I understand." "Glad to hear it," said Hor#am. "Makes things that much easier." Wanen laid the cylinder on the desk, "But we were discussing this, were we not?" "Uh, yes. I was explaining the fundamental idea." Horlam drew a breath and set forth on a lecture. "Memory patterns, including the unconscious habit patterns, are taken to be synaptic pathways 'grooved' into the nervous system -- if I may speak very loosely. The personality at any instant is a function of basic heredity, physical constitution -- health, diet and so on -- and the accumulated total of these synaptic paths. Now the paths, being physical, can be scanned, and, of course, whatever is scanned can be recorded. "Inside this cylinder is a complex protein whose molecules are selectively distorted to record the scanned data. But that's detail. Whatever can be scanned can also be selectively heterodyned, canceled, rubbed out -- call it what you like -- leaving the adult body a memoryless, mindless hulk. But such a body relearns with astonishing speed; it becomes a new, wholly functioning personality in less than a year. "If these new memories, such as those you acquired in the past five years, are scanned and canceled, the recording of the old ones can be 'played back,' so to speak -- reimposed on your nervous system. And thus Lieutenant Korul Wanen returns to life."  I HE young man scowled. "I know all that," he protested. "You explained it to me yourself when I got this assignment... but perhaps you've forgotten. After all, to you it happened five years ago. What I was interested in now were the more technical details: the type of signal used, for instance." "I can't tell you much," said Horlam regretfully. "Classified? I'm sorry I asked." "It's not that classified. No, first is the fact that you would have to learn three new sciences for me to make sense to you. Second, it's an ancient Imperial technique, totally lost during the Dark Ages. An exploratory ship found a wrecked machine and a set of handbooks in the ruins of a city on Balgut IV, about thirty years ago. Slowly and painfully, the research unit to which I belong has rebuilt the psychalyzer, as we call it, and learned a few things about it. But we're still mostly groping in the dark." "This record here -- " Wanen nodded at the cylinder, which stood on the desk like some crude idol -- "you intend to study it, I imagine?" "Yes, but as an electronic phenomenon, not as a set of memories per se, which it could only become by being reimposed on a living brain, which I suspect could only be your brain. But with our apparatus, we can make a point-by-point comparison of this record with the record we have of yourself as Wanen -- run statistical analyses and so on. I'm especially interested in trying to find out precisely what patterns in the recording correspond to the learned elements of personality. "This was a totally new kind of experiment, you understand. Never before has the same body experienced two totally different cultures. Now we can really separate out the significant factors. Give my computers -- and me -- a few years to chew all the data and I may actually begin to know something about the human brain. Yes, you've performed a real service to science." "I hope it is also a service to the Hegemony," said Wanen. "Oh, it is. Consider what might be done about deviationism. At present, the psychalyzer can only wipe out the total memory of a non-loyal unit. The process of reeducation from the ground up is slow and costly; lobotomy and reduction to low civilian rank is a waste of good human potential. If we knew how, deviant tendencies could be corrected much more neatly, without sacrificing the deviant's skills and experience. In fact, perhaps conditioning could be made so thorough that no one would be physically able to have non-loyal thoughts." It was such a splendid vision that Wanen jumped to his feet and blurted: "Thank you! Thank you for letting me serve!" Horlam knocked the ash off his cigar and nodded in a slow, somehow old fashion. "You're all right," he said in a dry voice. "You may report for duty."  five years. He was no longer quite the steel-hard, steel-proud Academy youngster who had forever left the Inner Stars in order to serve them more fully. Wanen grew only slowly aware of it, in the course of hours when they stood watch by the Number Five boat launcher, as they had done so many times before. Smit was still deft, crisp, neat. If his face had darkened, that was an honorable badge, given him by the sun and wind of the ringed planet. Wanen himself, after all, was even more deeply tanned, and added thereto was a barbarian tattoo. But Smit was not absolutely Academy; the creases in his uniform were merely knife-edged, his boots did not blind the eye. He stood properly straight, but without actually straining his muscles. He walked with the regulation pace, but was there the faintest hint of a swagger? When they were finally relieved, Smit yawned in a most unAstro fashion. "Good to see you again, Lieutenant," he said. "Thank you, Lieutenant," said Wanen formally. "Let's get a cup of coffee. I want to talk to you." Their hard heels clacked on metal as they went down the passage toward the junior officers' wardroom. Wanen found himself noticing the enlisted men he passed. They had grown sloppier than the officers, not outrageously so, but it was there; and when they saluted his insignia, he sensed an air of cringing. Many punishments must have been ordered aboard the Seeker in the last five years; sweatbox, nerve-pulsing and worse. But that should not have been necessary... or should it? Wanen sighed in confusion. They raised you from birth to serve -- his mind recited the comforting Hierarchy: The unit which is called I serves the unit celled the Ship, which serves the Fleet, which is an arm of the almighty Hegemony and of the Cadre that guides us all toward the New Empire; there are no other loyalties. You were bred and raised for one purpose only, like all units below Cadre level. Your particular purpose was to serve in the Outer Fleet. And that, of course, was right and good; but it was a narrow education that did not prepare you for the sudden impact of strangeness. For two years, while the Seeker hurtled through unmapped hundreds of parsecs, he had seen a little of the otherness which is deep space -- just a little. Then five years dropped from his life and here he was again, in a ship which for half a decade had had the cold wild otherness seeping through her armor and -- room. No one else was present, Smit dialed for coffee and, when it came, sat cradling the hot cup in his hands for a while, as if he were chilled. "I saw you, of course, a good many hours ago," he said finally. "But you wouldn't remember that. You were still Torrek then." "Torrek?" Wanen raised his brows inquiringly. "That was your name, you said. Oh, you were a proper savage, I can tell you!" Smit chuckled. "Beautifully easy to bait, too. I hope you don't -- Hey!" Wanen yanked himself back barely in time. His hands were still crooked claws. He looked at them numbly and it came to him that they had curved to fit a man's throat. "What are you doing?" gasped Smit. "I don't know." Wanen sat down again heavily and stared before him. "All of a sudden, a derangement. I wanted to kill you." "Hm." Smit recovered with the rapidity of disciplined nerves. He sat a little farther away, but his face grew calm again. After a moment, he said in a thoughtful tone: "Some underlying disturbance -- yes, I suppose that's it. A residual effect of the transformation you've undergone." He shrugged. "Well, why not? This is a new kind of experiment. You'd best see Horlam again, but I don't imagine it's anything too serious." "Yes." Wanen stood up. "Not now, you idiot! Relax. Drink your coffee. I want to discuss matters with you. It's important to our whole mission." That brought Wanen back into his chair. "Proceed," he said. If his heart still shivered, he kept it under control. "I hope the doctors can get that ugly tattoo off your face," complained Smit. "It bothers everybody." "It's no worse than combat scars," said Wanen huffily. "Oh, yes, it is. It stands for something different -- something none of us want to be reminded of." Smit glowered into his coffee for a little while longer before resuming: "You recall that we found only two inhabited planets, both of them the usual wretched, uninteresting places, before coming on Ring here. That's the nickname the crew have given it: Ring. It's important and exciting enough to rate a pet name. "You must also remember that our preliminary scoutings showed it to be an unusually fertile planet with a human population which had lost all traces of Empire civilization -- but had, on the other hand, built up a rich variety of cultures for themselves. The highest society, technologically speaking, is in the Islands, the big subtropical archipelago. They're just on the verge of printing and chemical explosives, and could easily come up with a scientificindustrial revolution. That's the people we dropped you among." "Yes," said Wanen. "I remember seeing it from the air. They told me that was the place -- " His voice ran on, almost as if another mind were musing aloud. "There was a deep fjord, and towns along it, and mountains with long valleys like green fingers reaching down to the water and -- No, I'm not sure," He rubbed his eyes. "Did I see clouds floating under a high peak? There was something about a peak, like victory. No, I can't recall." was regarding him oddly, but the sense of exaltation remained within him. "Continue," Wanen said. "You were bringing me up to date." "Yes. I was. Well, then, we left Ring and for nearly five years more we've been prowling this part of the spiral arm." "What did you find?" "Planets. Some with people on them. Nothing to compare with Ring. About six months ago, therefore, we came back. I and some others went down on ethnic survey in the Island region. I suppose you've heard something about the techniques. Kidnap a native, use accelerine and hypnosis to get the language and basic cultural information from him in a hurry, then dispose of him and go out yourself. Claim to be a foreigner from some other country. It works pretty well with societies that know there are other nations 'beyond the horizon,' but don't know exactly what they're like." "Whafs a Boats man doing in ethnic survey?" "You're Boats, too. Lieutenant." "That's different. There were certain physical qualifications needed for the experiment, to give the blanked man a chance of survival, and training was, of course, irrelevant. But you -- " A bleakness crossed Smit's face. "We're short of ethnic specialists," he said, "and war boats aren't needed hereabouts. I had to fill in. So did a number of others." "High casualties elsewhere?" "Yes." "But -- from primitives?" Wanen was startled. "I thought they weren't even supposed to know there were observers among them -- let alone get unnecessarily antagonized -- let alone kill our men with -- with spears!" "All those things happened," said Smit grimly. "The loss of quality -- competence, adjustedness, efficiency, even loyalty -- the decay of the entire crew was incredible. In the case of the ethnic men, it was disastrous. See here. Lieutenant -- half the casualties among survey terms were due to our having to shoot the men ourselves for radical deviationism." . Wanen sat as if struck on the head. "No," he whispered. not a smile, nor quite a snarl. "Yes. I've felt the tendencies in myself. What did you expect? Seven years of metal walls and celibacy!" "But we have Antisex. We have loyalty rallies -- " "Mere suppression of overt symptoms. Frustration continues to build up underneath, until it breaks loose in sheer destruction and negativism. Even a lifetime's conditioning can't survive that kind of pressure." "But this can't be the first time -- " "Of course not. It always happens on a really long voyage. When the first troubles arose, the captain explained the phenomenon to all us officers." "Well, then!" Wanen leaned back, sighing his relief. "So there must be a procedure in the Classified Manuals." "There is," agreed Smit. "After casualties due to such causes exceed a certain percentage, the ship is to find a backward planet. A certain small area is to be occupied. Built-up aggressions may then be freely vented on its men and children. Antisex is discontinued and the local women made generally available." Wanen felt a curious, sick reluctance within himself. He couldn't understand it. Even from an altruistic viewpoint, such measures were for the good of the barbarians, too, since the procedure was obviously essential to the expansion of the Hegemony and the Hegemony would come at last to include all mankind everywhere in the Galaxy. Nevertheless, he could hardly get the words out: "So Ring has been picked?" "No," said Smit. "The tension release I spoke of took place months ago, on the last planet we stopped at." A second's inexplicable relief was followed by a new tightness of soul. "Then why are we still here?" "Problems! A dilemma!" Smit shoved his empty cup away, got up and started pacing the floor. It was not the act of an Academy man, taught never to show uncertainty to the world. "You see, the Classified Manuals further recommend that a ship return to base immediately after such release has been effected. Otherwise -- well, just consider the ordinary insignificant little enlisted man, the faceless unit among hundreds of other interchangeable units. For a few weeks, he has been a conqueror, raping, drinking himself stupid every night. Resuming ship discipline and Antisex isn't easy. In fact, if he isn't pointed back toward normal surroundings at once, the Cadre alone knows what deviationism can arise." ered me, why don't we go home?" "We've got to occupy Ring," said Smit shakily. "Not for the -- the previous purpose. For militechnic reasons." "What? But I thought this was only a survey." "Oh, it is. Or was. But look. The average backslid planet is a pretty miserable affair. It's just naturally so hostile to human life that when the Empire broke up and all the artificial gadgets and props were destroyed, or rusted away, civilization went to maximum entropy in an obscene hurry. On most planets, Man simply became extinct. In the cases where adaptation was possible, the normal outcome was savagery. "Ring, though, is a world where men can really feel at home. They've flourished! There are some extremely able, sophisticated races. It's almost as good a conquest as a unified planet with full industrial culture. "And remember. Lieutenant, we have mortal enemies. The Republic, the Libertarian League, Iflir the Royal Brotherhood, the High Earls of Morlan -- there are a dozen other civilizations spreading into space, each with its own idea of what the New Empire should be like. We don't dare let one of their scouts stumble on Ring. Whoever garrisons it first has got possession of it, at this distance from all naval bases." "Easy now!" said Wanen. "What  are the odds of their finding the Galaxy and this one to find among them all." "And the GO stars are always investigated first," Smit said, "and they're not too common in this spiral arm, and we know there are League ships mapping it, too. It's a finite chance, certainly -- I know that -- but one we dare not take. We must plant a garrison down there; it's in the Manuals. Then we head back to base, report our find and have a task force sent which can take over the entire planet, fortify it properly, civilize the inhabitants, and so on. "But it'll take us nearly two years to get home -- a year to organize the task force, probably -- two more years to come back -- "Five years! Can we trust a garrison for five years?" the electrodes from Wanen's head and body. His lips were pursed and he frowned, thinking. "Well?" exclaimed Wanen. Only after half a minute of silence did he realize how un-Astro it had been for him to reveal emotion before a non-Cadre civilian. What was wrong with him? "Well," said Horlam presently, "according to every known encephalographic and neurographic technique, you have no surviving memories of your stay on Ring." "Are you certain?" insisted Wanen. "There must be something to account for -- for -- Look here." He forced the words out, one by one. "On my way to your office, I looked out at the planet. I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I loved it as I ought to love only the Cadre. I had to run from there before the tears came." He felt pain in his hands and unclenched them; the nails had bitten into the palms. "Something about the experience must have changed me. I'm deviant." "See here," said Horlam patiently, "it's my specialty, not yours, to know what memory is. It's a permanent alteration of protoplasm as the result of a stimulus. The memory patterns are all in the brain, except for a few habits which are synaptic patterns in the nerves proper. Well, I've just run a comparison of the Wanen record we have, your cylinder, with the Wanen record in your own nervous system. This is an absolutely objective process, a tracing out of electronic patterns of flow, resistance -- it makes an electronic map of your entire nervous system." He finished releasing the younger man, sat down on a corner of his workbench and took out a cigar. "The difference between the two patterns, my friend, is insignificant -- a few additional traces caused by your experiences since your normal personality was reimposed. You've been tell ing yourself an old-time ghost story, with lingering traces of your Torrek memories in iilace of the ghost. Now forget it. I assure you that there are no such traces." "But then what's making me have these fits?" Wanen fell him self almost cringing back. "I'm not certain," shrugged Horlam. "I told you psychalvsis is still a half-science fumbling in the dark. But at least I've proved your trouble is nothing very basic to yourself. "Tentatively, my diagnosis is minor glandular upset. You've spent five years on an alien planet, eating its home-grown food. Perfectly good, nourishing food for a man, but there are doubtless subtle biochemical differences -- hormone traces, vitaminlike compounds, and so on. Your body adapted. Now it's having a little difficulty readapting to ship rations. The slight chemical imbalance is expressing itself as irrational surges of emotion." began to ease. Chemical neuroses were not unheard of in this service, and easily correctible. "If I'm hot actually deviating toward non-loyalty -- " "Not enough to matter," drawled Horlam. "These glandular-digestive hooraws do sometimes express themselves queerly. For instance, this desire to kill Lieutenant Smit that you mentioned, or your feeling toward Ring the attitudes appropriate only to the Cadre. And -- let's see, have you had dreams the last night or two?" Wanen shuddered. "Nightmares. I saw my own crewmates being killed -- atrociously." "An obvious expression of resentment toward them -- toward the entire Hegemony culture," said Horlam casually. When Wanen jerked, half leaping to his feet, the psychologist laughed. "Take it easy there, son. You're not non-loyal and nobody is going to shoot you. It happens all the time and doesn't mean a thing." He got his cigar going. "After all, Man evolved as a creature of forests and open air and -- intimacy, shall we say? A family animal. Our civilization forbids all this, locks us indoors with machines, selects our mates for us, whom we seldom see, and takes our children away to raise in creches. Naturally our instincts revolt. The good unit will not deny that he has bestial instincts' -- rather, he will accept the fact and use his strength to overcome them." Wanen found the slow voice relaxing. He even began to feel warm. "I see," he answered. "Thank you. What treatment do you plan?" "None, unless your symptoms get worse. And I expect they'll improve by themselves. Now you're dismissed. The exec wants you to report to him for special assignment." pounding of his heart as he walked toward the door. The austerity of the ship, blank hallways and neat little cubicles, eternal white glare of fluorescents, gave the mind nothing to seize. It was thrown back on its own sick fantasies. Wanen rehearsed his orders -- any escape from the chaos and the sullen feeling of rebellion that lay coiled in his skull. The trouble was, his orders were so indefinite. In Astro, you were necessarily encouraged to think for yourself to some extent. Even an enlisted man was no use on a spaceship if the critical faculties were electrically burned out of his brain, as was done for the lower ranks of civilians in childhood. But this was too much latitude for a plain lieutenant of Boats. What was he supposed to do? "This young woman who was picked up with you. She was the first of a series of prisoners we intend to take, to furnish more detailed information about the country. But she's proven too savage, even dangerous, to be of help. All that's been accomplished is to teach her the Cadric language by psychalysis, under accelerine. What information we have about her people suggests that none we might capture is likely to be of much greater value to us. However, since she was accompanying you. Lieutenant, she may be more cooperative if she is left alone with you. Persuade her to assist us. "Our ground-fighting forces are not so large nor so well equipped that we could easily hold an island against the determined opposition of the archipelago nations -- especially since deviationism is anticipated among the garrison, which may culminate in open mutiny if there is a strong enemy to whom the mutineers could desert afterward. Therefore it will be necessary, if we are to occupy even one island, that we exterminate all natives throughout the archipelago. The information she can furnish would be of value in conducting Such an operation efficiently." "The Intelligence men -- did they try coercion, sir?" "On the woman? Of course. She stood nerve-pulsing till she fainted, so that's no help. The socalled truth drugs disorganize the mind too much; we need systematic information. We could try mutilation, or the threat of it, but I doubt if it would work either; her culture seems to set a high value on intransigence. Either you persuade her. Lieutenant, or we discard her completely and fish for other prisoners." "Yes, sir. But if it is permitted me to ask, why should we attack the Islands at all? There must be more backward areas, even desert regions, which could more easily be occupied." "No doubt. But it so happens that the Islands are the only part of Ring which have been studied in any detail. That is because the ethnic officers were naturally most interested in the planet's most advanced culture. Now we do not have enough ethnic or cartographic specialists left to map any other region soon enough." "I see. Thank you, sir." "Service to the Cadre! Dismissed." "Service to the Cadre!" He was, he realized with a cold shock, afraid of what lay beyond. Then, mumbling a curse, he palmed the lock. It opened for his prints and he went through. The door clashed shut behind him. She sprang from her bunk and stood for a moment without stirring, as if frozen. And yet, he thought dizzily, the lines of her were fleetness itself. He had never in all his memory seen so wild and lovely a creature as the one which poised in the steel bareness of this little cell. (Yes, he had -- as Torrek. But Torrek had been peeled from him, like a skin taken off living flesh. ) She wept and ran to his arms. As he held her, he felt again the sensation which had risen in him when Ring swam across the stars. Only it was a deeper thing this time, a knife twisting inside him and a summer's breeze in his hair, trumpeted victory and a long blue twilight where they two walked alone. Almost, he carried her to the bunk -- But only almost. He remembered in barest time that there was a spyscope mounted somewhere. It brought him back to a sense of his duty, but with the heaviness of a world oppressing him. She babbled endearments in a language he did not know, until at last he put a hand under her chin and tilted her face up toward his (where had he learned the gesture?) and said with an overwhelming tenderness: "Speak Cadric. I have forgotten." "Oh -- " She drew a little away from him. His arms would not release her, not entirely, but he saw terror in her eyes. "It's all right," he said. "It's only that I have forgotten what happened on -- in the Islands. You see, I have been returned to my people." "Your people!" She said it slowly. The unfamiliar language was stiff on her lips. "Yes." He let her go and stared at the floor, feeling obscurely ashamed. She did not run from him, but there was no place to run to. He plowed ahead: "I regret any inconveniences you may have suffered, but it was necessary. We've come for the good of all mankind." "It -- may be." She eased a trifle and whispered: "But you have forgotten everything indeed, Torrek. They have shorn your mind like your hair?" "I don't even know your name any more," he said wryly. "Even -- I am Sonna, Baelg's daughter." A slow flush crossed her cheeks. "We were going into the mountains together." that he had not yet been issued his Antisex tablets. But it was hard to define his feelings toward the girl. She was more than a means of relieving tension; more, even, than a co-procreator of loyal units. Surely his trouble went deeper than Horlam admitted! "Don't you remember how you killed the kraka?" she asked him wonderingly. Her fists drew together. "It was unfair to take that from you!" "It's all right," he said. "After all, I have regained so much more. I remember my -- well, my first indoctrination, instead of -- oh, say, my first fishing trip -- Never mind! You simply wouldn't understand." 'What is your name now?" she asked. "Korul Wanen." "I shall always think of you as Torrek." She sat down on the bunk, smiling unhappily. "Come, join me, at least, and tell me about your people." He did. It was mostly an astronomy lesson, with a sketch of history since the Empire died and a lecture on the New Empire of the future. He spoke in a most dry, uninspired tone and looked straight before him. "Yes," she said finally, "it is a glorious vision, to make all men brothers again. I think Dumethdin will be pleased to make an alliance with you." "An alliance?" he stumbled. "That's not just what -- what we had in mind." "No? What then?" Being trained only to guide spaceships, and in combat to operate one of the small boats which guarded a major formation, Wanen proceeded to tell her. She grew altogether still. "It is, of course, for the best," he said. She stood up. "Get out. "What? But I was explaining "I know I cannot kill you. But get out before I dirty my hands by trying!" "See here -- your own self-interest -- loyalty to the Cadre is expected of all humans -- " She did something then which told him how alien her homeland was and he himself had been. She sat down, cross-legged, and ignored him. She erased him from her private universe of perceptions. He realized only slowly what she was doing; afterward, he wondered why he understood at all. He had never heard of such a thing before, except in his canceled Torrek incarnation. But when it penetrated his mind, he turned and ran from her, shaking with fear. OU have been an idiot," said Coan Smit. They sat alone in the wardroom, after coming off Boats watch once again. "How was I to know?" asked Wanen miserably. He stared at his cup without really seeing it. "Diplomacy isn't my field. I'm not an ethnic man, for Cadre's sake! The exec himself said he could not reprimand me." "I can. An Academy man isn't some stupid civilian -- we're not only allowed versatility, it's expected of us. You've let down the Academy, Wanen." "Shut up!" The emotion within Wanen exploded in a roar. "Shut up or I'll wring your neck!" "Lieutenant!" Smit sprang erect. "Your behavior is deviant." "For your information," said Wanen between his teeth, "my rank is equal to yours. I'm going to file a criticism of your language." "And I am going to file a suspicion of deviationism," Smit retorted. "Horlam is another idiot. He should have turned you inside out. Just because your trouble isn't due to lingering memory traces doesn't prove that you have no trouble." "I am also physiologically and biochemically checked out," snapped Wanen. "Any imbalance is a question of micro quantities. When were you last investigated? And what business is it of yours, anyway?" " 'Anyone's business is everyone's business.' " Wanen had heard the slogan often enough. He had cited it himself now and then, in a past which seemed impossibly remote. But all at once it tasted like brass in his mouth. He hunched over his coffee cup, smoldering. "We're too far from home," said Smit, more gently. "If we don't return, it may be centuries before a Hegemony ship comes this way again. An enemy scout may find Ring meanwhile. Anything might happen. Better to dispose of you on suspicion than risk our entire operation." "Yes," said Wanen automatically. "That's the obvious solution." "Not that I really think that'll be necessary." Smit was fairly bedewed with good-fellowship now. He came around the table and laid a brotherly hand on the other man's shoulder. "Actually, I myself believe your trouble is just some trivial thing. A few shots of hormone, perhaps some conditioning, and you should be as good as new. Or -- wait. Now that I come to think of it, you've gone a full seven years without tension release!" "I was on Ring," mumbled Wanen. "I was a man of -- what did she call it? -- a man of Dumethdin. We didn't need to do such things." "No doubt. But now you've forgotten. Hm." Smit paused. Looking up, Wanen saw him thoughtfully rubbing his chin and realized with an illogical resentment that the fellow was trying to be helpful. "I have an idea," Smit went on. "It'll have to be approved, of course, but I don't see why it shouldn't be. And if all you need is release, this will certainly provide it." "What will?" "This girl, the one we captured. Since she just won't cooperate and a total reconditioning isn't worthwhile, I understand that she'll be lobotomized and turned over to the enlisted men for a few days. Now if you were allowed to watch the operation and then have her first and throw her out of the airlock yourself when she's no use any more -- why, it should be as good as a six months' furlough!" Wanen sat very still. After Smit had gone out, he remained in his position, crouched over the wardroom table. His heartbeat had slowed so much that he could no longer feel or hear it. Once, vaguely and indifferently, he wondered if he were dead. Then he realized that he was insane. "HE Boats watch was changed every four hours, with the same men taking it every fourth time around. Between such duties, one ate, slept, studied, participated in loyalty demonstrations -- but there was also a certain amount of time to oneself, at least on the officer level. The young men played ball in the gym, or gambled in the wardroom, or perhaps they sat and talked. At any rate, there would be nothing suspicious about an offduty lieutenant walking through almost any part of the ship. Wanen was counting on that. There was a curious peace within him...He knew he was mad. In view of Horlam's exhaustive tests and their uniformly negative results, it was the only possible explanation. The strain of changing personalities clearly had cracked his mind open. He was crazy, and he expected to be killed somewhere along the way, and it didn't matter greatly. Nevertheless, he took no unnecessary chances. He forged his squadron commander's name to a Special Orders slip and presented Lieutenant Rosnin with it when that conscientious young man went on Boats watch. "Full combat lading for Seventeen, including fusion missiles?" Rosnin's brows went up. "What's going on?" "Classified," said Wanen briskly. "Don't you see this is a Special form?" Rosnin might have wondered why any junior officer should be entrusted with Classified orders and, simultaneously, present the directive in so casual a fashion. But he was not a man of great curiosity, nor given to annoying his superiors with questions. Wanen had remembered that from the outbound voyage and counted on it. "It shall be done. Service to the Cadre!" "Service to the Cadre." Wanen wheeled and marched to the issue room, where he checked out a Mark IV sidearm with an extra clip of explosive bullets. Normal ship routine would force him to account for his action in about six hours, when a higher-up looked over the day's requisitions. But Wanen didn't expect to be around that much longer. He had to walk fast now, being already late for his appointment. He was depending on the fact that never before in all history had a properly conditioned unit gone deviant to the point of treason without first showing overt symptoms. He himself was at present considered merely to be tmder tension. But too fast a gait might attract attention. No matter. To entropy with it. Korul Wanen was already a dead man on leave. He came to sickbay and was passed by the armed guard. The damned ship swarmed with guards, he thought irritably -- guards, paper work, anything that might keep a man too busy to think. WellFrain Horlam waited, surgically gowned, in the operating room. There were two husky meditechs to assist. The old man looked coldly at Wanen. "I never knew anybody to be late for tension release," he said. "I was busy," snapped Wanen. "Get on with it." sterilizers. One of the techs went out. He brought in Sonna, strapped to a wheeled cot. Her eyes were blank with a terror she could not choke off, but when she saw Wanen, she spat. "Is the spyscope turned on?" he asked. "Not to my knowledge," said Horlam in an acid tone. "Everyone else is too busy right now. It's you who needs a thrill." "I only wondered." "While we sterilize the surroundings -- it wouldn't do to have her get sick, would it? -- you will probably enjoy explaining what is about to be done to her," said Horlam. He did not look at Wanen; he washed his hands over and over again, with exaggerated care. "Also, of course, we must take the hair off her head before we open the skull. That should provoke an interesting reaction all by itself. Most primitive women are quite proud of their hair." "Stop that," said Wanen. "I'm only outlining the pleasures you have in store," Horlam explained, his voice rusty. "We can do the operation under local anesthesia, so that she'll be conscious through most of it. Naturally, once she's been made docile, you'll have to wait a few days for her to heal up enough -- " He broke off. "Go on. Lieutenant." One of the meditechs said it urgently. His eyes were very bright, fixed on the girl. "Go on, tell it to her like the doctor says." "Well," suggested Wanen, "both of you fellows come stand here beside her. There, that's right." Sonna stared up at him. He could imagine her thoughts, he told himself emptily. She would be wishing she could faint, wishing she could die, but there was too much life in her. Torrek must have had such wishes, right at the end, before they peeled him off Wanen and locked him in a black cylinder. Wanen walked up behind the techs, laying a hand on the shoulder of each. "I suppose you boys are getting some release, too. "Yes, sir.'" "Good." Wanen's hands slid upward, palming their heads. Then the muscles which had wrestled the kraka smashed their skulls together. They went down like stones, but he kicked them deftly behind the ears, to make sure. Mostly his attention was on Horlam. He yanked the gun from beneath his coverall and turned its staring eye on the old man. "Don't move," he said. "Take it easy or I'll kill you." Horlam's face drained of blood. "What are you doing?" he gasped. "I am going to break out of here. Yes, I am deviant. I am also non-loyal, obstructionist and homicidal. My greatest wish is to shoot my own dear shipmates one at a time. Please don't make me start on you. Gently now -- very gently -- keep your hands and feet in plain sight. Come up here and let the girl go." OR a minute, he thought that Sonna had indeed fainted. But when Horlam had unstrapped her, she wavered to her feet. "Torrek," she whispered. "Torrek, elskling." "I am going to take you home, Sonna," he told her. There was a curious expression on Horlam's thin face. The shock had passed; mostly, now, he looked interested. "Do you really hope to get away with this?" he asked. "No," said Wanen. "Hitherto, this sort of thing has been a clinical impossibility. By all objective tests, you were functioning within the limits of normality -- " "Shut up. Get a surgical gown and mask for the girl. Help her put them on... Very well. Now, Horlam, you go first out the door." The clumsy disguise did not get them past the sentry outside. It did slow his comprehension a little bit -- long enough for Wanen to shoot him down as he grabbed for his rifle. Thereafter, they ran. Twice it was necessary to kill men who got in the way. By the time Wanen and Sonna had reached Boat Seventeen, the whole ship was one great clamor of sirens and shouts and hurrying feet. His explosive bullets mopped up the guard by the launching robot. But as he was setting it to eject the boat, he saw Coan Smit burst from a side passage. Wanen fired once and missed. Then Smit made a dive, tackled him by the ankles, and his gun went flying. "Go through that door, Sonna!" Wanen ordered. Smit's hands groped after his vulnerable spots, in the standard Academy in-fighting technique. Wanen blocked him with the same automatic procedure. But then, somehow, Wanen's arms and legs were going through motions unknown to any civilized folk. He broke Smit's back across his knee. A spatter of bullets rang down the hall. Wanen got up, threw the launcher lock switch open and followed Sonna. The boat's combat-ready motors roared as he shoved up the main bar. He vaulted into the pilot chair and grabbed for the controls. Sonna crouched behind him, cramped, bruised, and screaming a call that was somehow familiar to him. the mother ship and hurled starlight back from her flanks. "They'll hunt us down -- " It was an unexpected groan in Wanen's ears. "No, they won't!" he said roughly. "I thought of that, too." He slammed a lever. The fusion missiles leaped from their tubes. "Cover your eyes!" he shouted, and accelerated brutally to escape. When the soundless explosion was over, only an incandescent gas cloud remained. It glowed for a moment, unbearably bright, before it expanded and cooled. Darkness gulped it down. Wanen pointed his boat toward the beautiful ringed planet. He began to weep. Sonna reached across the narrow cockpit. There was alarm in the gesture. Horlam stopped her. "No," he said gently. "Let him get it out. He's just denied his entire lifetime." She sank back. Through the transparent canopy, the swelling lambent planet tangled its manycolored luminance in her hair. "Why are you here, old man?" she breathed. "You could have dropped behind easily enough as we fled. You did not know he meant to destroy the ship." "I might have guessed," said Horlam dryly. "Or -- let us say that I have been a trifle deviationist myself for a good many years, and when the opportunity came -- It was my task to detect emerging humanness in men and uproot it. But there is a very ancient saying which asks. Who shall watch the watchmen?" Ever so faintly, Sonna's fingers brushed the blond head which lay shuddering before her. "Has Torrek come back?" "Not in the way you hope," said Horlam. "The open, overt memories of Torrek -- the deeds done, words spoken, things seen -- I'm afraid they went forever with the ship. But there is another kind of memory. Our theories don't allow for it -- but then Hegemony science is almost as narrow and mechanical as Hegemony life. You can't, after all, separate the brain and nerves from the rest of the body: from muscles, veins, viscera, skin, blood and lungs and bones. The living organism is a wholeness. "Apparently your way of life, down there in the Islands, is a biologically sound one. It suits Man's deepest instincts, as ours does not. Therefore, five years of it made a deeper impression on our boy here than the twenty-odd years of slogans and exercises before that. When we brought him back, the psychalyzer wiped out the memories, yes. I even thought it had removed the habits. "But it didn't touch the true habits -- those deep reactions, perhaps on an actual cellular level, which we call emotional patterns. Wanen could forget that he had been an Islander. He could not forget what it meant to be an Islander -- pride, freedom, decency -- whatever it does mean. His body remembered that for him!" H orlam smiled. "I was not without slight suspicions of this," he finished, "but I was already deviationist enough not to report it. I was curious to see what would develop. Now I know and I'm not sorry." The girl leaned over the seat and rubbed her cheek against Wanen's. He lifted his head and wiped his eyes, pathetically like a child. "What are we going to do now?" she asked. "Return to your country -- our country," Wanen said with a gathering strength. "Warn them. We have a long time yet to make ourselves ready, invent our own science and build our own ships and hnd our own allies among the stars -- my knowledge and Horlam's will help with the first beginnings, but it will take many lifetimes to finish. It's a good work for a man." "Oh, Torrek, my poor hurt Torrek -- everything you have forgotten!" "I remembered what was important, didn't I?" He twisted around to face her. "The rest I can learn over again. Will you teach me?"      If you want to learn why editors grow jumpy -- some editors, that is; the ones who have to make deadlines and want the very best material that can be extracted from authors -- consider this: supposed to have been turned in nearly a year ago! But Tenn, unlike infinitely less capable writers, won't let a story out of his hands until he has added, changed, rewritten, deleted, tensely played down and equally tensely played up scenes -- and rammed in enough richness of ideas, characters and suspense to carry a trilogy! However nervous the wait is, it's worth every agonized moment. the immense amount of tight-packed story awaiting you, Tenn reveals the most obstinate man in five full centuries... and then wins your full sympathy for the stubborn human mule. But regardless of its making all the sense in the world, Winthrop's obstinacy means tragedy for four sufferers in a society they never made and wantno part of! How can it possibly be resolved? Leave it to Tenn to solve the unsolvable. Because of its length -- complete in one issue -- there's no telling how many novelets can also be run. There will be at least one, maybe two, plus, of course, short stories and... in the race for space. That was another editorial nerve-racker: Ley had to the latest is exactly what they are! # Wind is Rising ing. But within the station, the two men had other things on their minds. Clayton turned the handle of the water faucet again and waited. Nothing happened. "Try hitting it," said Nerishev. Clayton pounded the faucet with his fist. Two drops of water came out. A third drop trembled on the spigot's lip, swayed, and fell. That was all. "That does it," Clayton said bitThey knew how to survive -- but what were the odds on a world where every good hurricane in the Galaxy went when it died? terly. "That damned water pipe is blocked again. How much water we got in storage?" "Four gallons -- assuming the tank hasn't sprung another leak," said Nerishev. He stared at the faucet, tapping it with long, nervous fingers. He was a big, pale man with a sparse beard, fragilelooking in spite of his size. He didn't look like the type to operate an observation station on a remote and alien planet. But the Advance Exploration Corps had discovered, to its regret, that there was no type to operate a station. Nerishev was a competent biologist and botanist. Although chronically nervous, he had surprising reserves of calm. He was the sort of man who needs an occasion to rise to. This, if anything, made him suitable to pioneer a planet like Carella I. "I suppose somebody should go out and unblock the water pipe," said Nerishev, not looking at Clayton. "I suppose so," Clayton said, pounding the faucet again. "But it's going to be murder out there. Listen to it!" Clayton was a short man, bullnecked, red-faced, powerfully constructed. This was his third tour of duty as a planetary observer. He had tried other jobs in the Advance Exploration Corps, but Extraterrestrial Penetration -- faced him with too many unpleasant surprises. It was work for daredevils and madmen. But Base Operations was much too tame and restricting. He liked the work of a planetary observer, though. His job was to sit tight on a planet newly checked out by a drone camera crew. All he had to do on this planet was stoically endure discomfort and skillfully keep himself alive. After a year of this, the relief ship would remove him and note his report. On the basis of the report, further action would or would not be taken. Clayton dutifully promised his wife that this would be the last. After this tour, he was going to stay on Earth and work on the little farm he owned. He promised... But at the end of each rest leave, Clayton journeyed out again, to do the thing for which he was best suited: staying alive through skill and endurance. But this time, he had had it He and Nerishev had been eight months on Carella. The relief ship was due in another four months. If he came through alive, he was going to quit for good. "Just listen to that wind," Nerishev said. Muffled, distant, it sighed and murmured around the steel hull of the station like a zephyr, a summer breeze. That was how it sounded to them inside the station, separated from the wind by three inches of steel plus a soundproofing layer. "It's rising," Clayton said. He walked over to the windspeed indicator. According to the dial, the gentle-sounding wind was blowing at a steady # miles an hour -- A light breeze on Carella. "Man, oh, man!" Clayton said. "I don't want to go out there. Nothing's worth going out there." "It's your turn," Nerishev pointed out. "I know. Let me complain a little first, will you? Come on, let's get a forecast from Smanik." They walked the length of the station, their heels echoing on the steel floor, past compartments filled with food, air supplies, instruments, extra equipment. At the far end of the station was the heavy metal door of the receiving shed. The men slipped on air masks and adjusted the flow. "Ready?" Clayton asked. "Ready." They braced themselves, gripping handholds beside the door. Clayton touched the stud. The door slid away and a gust of wind shrieked in. The men lowered their heads and butted into the wind, entering the receiving shed. The shed was an extension of the station, some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. It was not sealed, like the rest of the structure. The walls were built of open-work steel, with baffles set in. The wind could pass through this arrangement, but slowed down, controlled. A gauge told them it was blowing # miles an hour within the shed. It was a damned nuisance, Clayton thought, having to confer with the natives of Carella in a #-mile gale. But there was no other way. The Carellans, raised on a planet where the wind never blew less than # miles an hour, couldn't stand the "dead air" within the station. Even with the oxygen content cut down to the Carellan norm, the natives couldn't make the adjustment. Within the station, they grew dizzy and apprehensive. Soon they began strangling, like a man in a vacuum. Thirty-four miles an hour of wind was a fair compromise-point for human and Carellan to meet.  walked down the shed. In one corner lay what looked like a tangle of dried-out octopi. The tangle stirred and waved two tentacles ceremoniously. "Good day," said Smanik. "Good day," Clayton said. "What do you think of the weather?" "Excellent," said Smanik. Nerishev tugged at Clayton's sleeve. "What did he say?" he asked, and nodded thoughtfully when Clayton translated it for him. Nerishev lacked Clayton's gift for language. Even after eight months, the Carellan tongue was still an undecipherable series of clicks and whistles to him. Several more Carellans came up to join the conversation. They all looked like spiders or octopi, with their small centralized body and long, flexible tentacles. This was the optimum survival shape on Carella, and Clayton frequently envied it. He was forced to rely absolutely on the shelter of the station; but the Carellans lived directly in their environment. Often he had seen a native walking against a tornado-force wind, seven or eight limbs hooked into the ground and pulling, other tentacles reaching out for further grips. He had seen them rolling down the wind like tumbleweed, their tentacles curled around them, wickerwork-basket fashion. He thought of the gay and audacious way they handled their land ships, scudding merrily along on the wind... Well, he thought, they'd look damned silly on Earth. "What is the weather going to be like?" he asked Smanik. The Carellan pondered the question for a while, sniffed the wind and rubbed two tentacles together. "The wind may rise a shade more," he said finally. "But it will be nothing serious." Clayton wondered. Nothing serious for a Carellan could mean disaster for an Earthman. Still, it sounded fairly promising. He and Nerishev left the receiving shed and closed the door. "Look," said Nerishev, "if you'd like to wait -- " "Might as well get it over with," Clayton said. Here, lighted by a single dim overhead bulb, was the smooth, glittering bulk of the Brute. That was the nickname they had given to the vehicle specially constructed for transportation on Carella. The Brute was armored like a tank and streamlined like a spheric section. It had vision slits of shatterproof glass, thick enough to match the strength of its steel plating. Its center of gravity was low; most of its twelve tons were centered near the ground. The Brute was sealed. Its heavy diesel engine, as well as all necessary openings, were fitted with special dustproof covers. The Brute rested on its six fat tires, looking, in its immovable bulk, like some prehistoric monster. Clayton got in, put on crash helmet and goggles, and strapped himself into the padded seat. He revved up the engine, listened to it critically, then nodded. "Okay," he said, "the Brute's ready. Get upstairs and open the garage door." "Good luck," said Nerishev. He left. strument panel, making sure that all the Brute's special gadgets were in working order. In a moment, he heard Nerishev's voice coming in over the radio. "I'm opening the door." "Right." The heavy door slid back and Clayton drove the Brute outside. The station had been set up on a wide, empty plain. Mountains would have offered some protection from the wind; but the mountains on Carella were in a constant restless state of building up and breaking down. The plain presented dangers of its own, however. To avert the worst of those dangers, a field of stout steel posts had been planted around the station. The closely packed posts pointed outward, like ancient tank traps, and served the same purpose. Clayton drove the Brute down one of the narrow, winding channels that led through the field of posts. He emerged, located the pipeline and started along it. On a small screen above his head, a white line flashed into view. The line would show any break or obstruction in the pipeline. A wide, rocky, monotonous desert stretched before him. An occasional low bush came into sight. The wind was directly behind him, blanketed by the sound of the diesel. He glanced at the windspeed indicator. The wind of Carella was blowing at # miles an hour. He drove steadily along, humming to himself under his breath. From time to time, he heard a crash. Pebbles, propelled by the hurricane wind, were cannonading against the Brute. They shattered harmlessly against the thick armor. "Everything all right?" Nerishev asked over the radio. "Fine," Clayton said. In the distance, he saw a Carellan land ship. It was about forty feet long, he judged, and narrow in the beam, skimming rapidly on crude wooden rollers. The ship's sails were made from one of the few leaf-bearing shrubs on the planet. The Carellans waved their tentacles as they went past. They seemed to be heading toward the station. Clayton turned his attention back to the pipeline. He was beginning to hear the wind now, above the roar of the diesel. The windspeed indicator showed that the wind had risen to # miles an hour. Somberly he stared through the sand-pocked slit-window. In the far distance were jagged cliffs, seen dimly through the dustblown air. More pebbles ricocheted off his hull and the sound rang hollowly through his vehicle. He glimpsed another Carellan land ship, then three more. They were tacking stubbornly into the wind. It struck Clayton that a lot of Carellans were moving toward the station. He signaled to Nerishev on the radio. "How are you doing?" Nerishev asked. "I'm close to the spring and no break yet," Clayton reported. "Looks like a lot of Carellans heading your way." "I know. Six ships are moored in the lee of the shed and more are coming." "We've never had any trouble with the natives before," Clayton said slowly. "What does this look like?" "They've brought food with them. It might be a celebration." "Maybe. Watch yourself." "Don't worry. You take care and hurry -- " "I've found the break! Speak to you later." 'THE break showed on the screen, glowing white. Peering out the port, Clayton saw where a boulder had rolled across the pipeline, crushing it, and rolled on. He brought the truck to a stop on the windward side of the pipe. It was blowing # miles an hour. Clayton slid out of the truck, carrying several lengths of pipe, some patches, a blowtorch and a bag of tools. They were all tied to him and he was secured to the Brute by a strong nylon rope. Outside, the wind was deafening. It thundered and roared like breaking surf. He adjusted his mask for more oxygen and went to work. Two hours later, he had completed a fifteen-minute repair job. His clothing was shredded and and his air extractor was completely clogged with dust. He climbed back into the Brute, sealed the port and lay on the floor, resting. The truck was starting to tremble in the wind gusts. Clayton ignored it. "Hello? Hello?" Nerishev called over the radio. Wearily, Clayton climbed back into the driver's seat and acknowledged. "Hurry back now, Clayton! No time to rest! The wind's up to #! I think a storm is coming!" A storm on Carella was something Clayton didn't even want to think about. They had experienced only one in eight months. During it, the winds had gone over # miles an hour. He nosed the truck around and started back, driving directly into the wind. At full throttle, he found he was making very little progress. Three miles an hour was all the heavy diesel would do against the pressure of a #-mile wind. He stared ahead through the slit-window. The wind, outlined by long streamers of dust and sand, seemed to be coming straight at him, funneled out of an infinitely wide sky to the tiny point of his window. Windborne rocks sailed at him, grew large, immense, and shattered against his window. He couldn't stop himself from ducking each time one came. The heavy engine was beginning to labor and miss. "Oh, baby," Clayton breathed, "don't quit now. Not now. Get Papa home. Then quit. Please!" He figured he was about ten miles from the station, which lay directly upwind. He heard a sound like an avalanche plumitieting down a mountainside. It was made by a boulder the size of a house... Too big for the wind to lift, it was rolling at him from windward, digging a furrow in the rocky ground as it came. Clayton twisted the steering wheel. The engine labored, and with infinite slowness the truck crept out of the boulder's path. Shaking, Clayton watched the boulder bearing down. With one hand, he pounded on the instrument panel. "Move, baby, move!" B ooming hollowly, the boulder rolled past at a good thirty miles an hour. "Too close," Clayton said to himself. He tried to turn the Brute back into the wind, toward the station. The Brute wouldn't do it. The diesel labored and whined, trying to turn the big truck into the wind. And the wind,, like a solid gray wall, pushed the truck away. The windspeed indicator stood at # miles an hour. "How are you doing?" Nerishev asked over the radio. "Just great! Leave me alone, I'm busy." Clayton set his brakes, unstrapped and raced back to the engine. He adjusted timing and mixture, and hurried back to the controls. "Hey, Nerishev! That engine's going to conk out!" It was a full second before Nerishev answered. Then, very calmly, he asked, "What's wrong with it?" "Sand!" Clayton said. "Particles driven at # miles an hour -- sand's in the bearings, injectors, everything. I'm going to make all the distance I can." "And then?" "Then I'll try to sail her back," Clayton said. "I just hope the mast will take it." He turned his attention to the controls. At windspeeds like this, the truck had to be handled like a ship at sea. Clayton picked up speed with the wind on his quarter, then came about and slammed into the wind. The Brute made it this time and crossed over onto the other tack. It was the best he could do, Clayton decided. His windward distance would have to be made by tacking. He edged toward the eye of the wind. But at full throttle, the diesel couldn't bring him much closer than forty degrees. For an hour, the Brute forged ahead, tacking back and forth across the wind, covering three miles in order to make two. Miraculously, the engine kept on running. Clayton blessed the manufacturer and begged the diesel to hold out a little while longer. Through a blinding screen of sand, he saw another Carellan land ship. It was reefed down and heeled precariously over. But it forged steadily to windward and soon outdistanced him. Lucky natives, Clayton thought -- # miles of wind was a sailing breeze to them! The station, a gray half-sphere, came into sight ahead. "I'm going to make it!" Clayton shouted. "Break out the rum, Nerishev, old man! Papa's getting drunk tonight!" The diesel chose that moment to break down for good. he set the brakes. What lousy luck! If the wind were behind him, he could roll in. But, of course, it had to be in front. "What are you going to do now?" Nerishev asked. "I'm going to sit here," Clayton said. "When the wind calms down to a hurricane, I'm going to walk home." The Brute's twelve-ton mass was shaking and rattling in the wind blasts. "You know," Clayton said, "I'm going to retire after this tour." "That so? You really mean it?" "Absolutely. I own a farm in Maryland, with frontage on Chesapeake Bay. You know what I'm going to do?" "What?" "I'm going to raise oysters. You see, the oyster -- Hold it." The station seemed to be drifting slowly upwind, away from him. Clayton rubbed his eyes, wondering if he were going crazy. Then he realized that, in spite of its brakes, in spite of its streamlining, the truck was being pushed downwind, away from the station. Angrily he shoved a button on his switchboard, releasing the port and starboard anchors. He heard the solid clunk of the anchors hitting the ground, heard the steel cables scrape and rattle. He let out a himdred and seventy feet of steel line, then set the winch brakes. The truck was holding again. "I dropped the anchors," Clayton said. "Are they holding?" "So far." Clayton lighted a cigarette and leaned back in his padded chair. Every muscle in his body ached from tension. His eyelids were twitching from watching the wind-lines converging on him. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. The sound of the wind cut through the truck's steel plating. The wind howled and moaned, tugging at the truck, trying to find a hold on the smooth surface. At # miles an hour, the ventilator baffles blew out. He would be blinded, Clayton thought, if he weren't wearing sealed goggles, choked if he weren't breathing canned air. Dust swirled, thick and electric, within the Brute's cabin. Pebbles, flung with the velocity of rifle bullets, splattered against the hull. They were striking harder now. He wondered how much more force they'd need before they started piercing the armor plating. found it hard to maintain a common-sense attitude. He was painfully aware of the vulnerability of human flesh, appalled at the possibilities for violence in the Universe. What was he doing out here? Man's place was in the calm, still air of Earth. If he ever got back... "Are you all right?" Nerishev asked. "Making out just great," Clayton said wearily. "How are things at the station?" "Not so good. The whole structure's starting sympathetic vibration. Enough wind for long enough and the foundations could shatter." "And they want to put a fuel station here!" Cla#d:on said. "Well, you know the problem. This is the only solid planet beRidge Belt. All the rest are gas giants." "They better build their station in space." "The cost "Hell, man, it'll cost less to build another planet than to try to maintain a fuel base on this one!" Clayton spat out a mouthful of dust. "I just want to get on that relief ship. How many natives at the station now?" "About fifteen, in the shed." "Any sign of violence?" "No, but they're acting funny." "How so?" "I don't know," said Nerishev. "I just don't like it." "Stay out of the shed, huh? You can't speak the language, anyhow, and I want you in one piece when I come back." He hesitated. "If I come back." "You'll be fine," Nerishev said. "Sure I will. I -- oh, Lord!" "Whafs it? Whafs wrong?" "Boulder coming down! Talk to you later!" Clayton turned his attention to the boulder, a rapidly growing black speck to windward. It was heading directly toward his anchored and immobilized truck. He glanced at the windspeed indicator. Imjjossible -- # miles an hour! And yet, he reminded himself, winds in the stratospheric jet stream on Earth blow at # miles an hour. The boulder, large as a house, still growing as it approached, was rolling directly his way. "Swerve! Turn!" Clayton bellowed at the boulder, pounding the instrument panel with his fist. The boulder was coming at him, straight as a ruler line, rolling right down the wind. With a yell of agony, Clayton touched a button, releasing both anchors at the cable end. There was no time to winch them in, even assuming the winch could take the strain. Still the boulder grew. Clayton released his brakes. The Brute, shoved by a wind of # miles an hour, began to pick up speed. Within seconds, he was traveling at # miles an hour, staring through his rear-vision mirror at the boulder overtaking him. Clayton twisted the steering wheel hard to the left. The truck tilted over precariously, swerved, fishtailed on the hard ground, and tried to turn itself over. He fought the wheel, trying to bring the Brute back to equilibrium. He thought: Fm probably the first man who ever jibed a twelve-ton truck! The boulder, looking like a whole city block, roared past. The heavy truck teetered for a moment, then came to rest on its six wheels. "Clayton! What happened? Are you all right?" "Fine," Clayton gasped. "But I had to slip the cables. I'm running downwind." "Can you turn?" "Almost knocked her over, trying to." "How far can you run?" Clayton stared ahead. In the distance, he could make out the dramatic black cliffs that rimmed the plain. "I got about fifteen miles to go before I pile into the cliffs. Not much time, at the speed I'm traveling." He locked his brakes. The tires began to scream and the brake linings smoked furiously. But the wind, at # miles an hour, didn't even notice the difference. His speed over the ground had picked up to # miles an hour. "Try sailing her out!" Nerishev said. "She won't take it." "Try, man! What else can you do? The wind's hit # here. The whole station's shaking! Boulders are tearing up the whole post defense. I'm afraid some boulders are going to get through and flatten -- " "Stow it," Clayton said. "I got troubles of my own." "I don't know if the station will stand! Clayton, listen to me. Try the The radio suddenly and dismayingly went dead. Clayton banged it a few times, then gave up. His speed over the ground had reached # miles an hour. The cliffs were already looming large before him. "So all right," Clayton said. "Here we go." He released his last anchor, a small emergency job. At its full length of # feet of steel cable, it slowed him to # miles an hour. The anchor was breaking and ripping through the ground like a jet-propelled plow. Clayton then turned on the sail mechanism. This had been installed by the Earth engineers upon much the same theory that has small ocean-going motor boats carry a small mast and auxiliary sail. The sails are insurance, in case the engine fails. On Carella, a man could never walk home from a stranded vehicle. He had to come in under power. The mast, a short, powerful steel pillar, extruded itself through a gasketed hole in the roof. Magnetic shrouds and stays snapped into place, supporting it. From the mast fluttered a sail made of linkwoven metal. For a mainsheet, Clasrton had a three part flexiblesteel cable, working through a winch. The sail was only a few square feet in area. It could drive a twelve-ton monster with its brakes locked and an anchor out on # feet of line -- Easily -- with the wind blowing # miles an hour.  mainsheet and turned, taking the wind on the quarter. But a quartering course wasn't good enough. He winched the sail in still more and turned further into the wind. With the super-hurricane on his beam, the ponderous truck heeled over, lifting one entire side into the air. Quickly Clayton released a few feet of mainsheet. The metal-link sail screamed and chattered as the wind whipped it. Driving now with just the sail's leading edge, Clayton was able to keep the truck on its feet and make good a course to windward. Through the rear-vision mirror, he could see the black, jagged cliffs behind him. They were his lee shore, his coast of wrecks. But he was sailing out of the trap. Foot by foot, he was pulling away. "That's my baby!" Clayton shouted to the battling Brute. His sense of victory snapped almost at once, for he heard an ear-splitting clang and something whizzed past his head. At # miles an hour, pebbles were piercing his armor plating. He was undergoing the Carellan equivalent of a machine-gun barrage. The wind shrieked through the holes, trying to batter him out of his seat. Desperately he clung to the steering wheel. He could hear the sail wrenching. It was made out of the toughest flexible alloys available, but it wasn't going to hold up for long. The short, thick mast, supported by six heavy cables, was whipping like a fishing rod. His brake linings were worn out, and his speed over the ground came up to # miles an hour. He was too tired to think. He steered, his hands locked to the wheel, his slitted eyes glaring ahead into the storm. The sail ripped with a scream. The tatters flogged for a moment, then brought the mast down. Wind gusts were approaching # miles an hour. The wind now was driving him back toward the cliffs. At # miles an hour of wind, the Brute was lifted bodily, thrown for a dozen yards, slammed back on its wheels. A front tire blew under the pressure, then two rear ones. Clayton put his head on his arms and waited for the end. Suddenly, the Brute stopped short. Clayton was flung forward. His safety belt checked him for a moment, then snapped. He banged against the instrument panel and fell back, dazed and bleeding. scious, trying to figure out what had happened. Slowly he pulled himself back into the seat, foggily aware that he hadn't broken any limbs. His stomach was one great bruise. His mouth was bleeding. At last, looking through the rear-vision mirror, he saw what had happened. The emergency anchor, trailing at # feet of steel cable, had caught in a deep outcropping of rock. A fouled anchor had brought him up short, less than half a mile from the cliffs. He was saved -- For the moment, at least. But the wind hadn't given up yet. The #-mile-an-hour wind bellowed, lifted the truck bodily, slammed it down, lifted it again, slammed it down. The steel cable hummed like a guitar string. Clayton wrapped his arms and legs around the seat. He couldn't hold on much longer. And if he let go, the madly leaping Brute would smear him over the walls like toothpaste -- If the cable didn't part first and send him hurtling into the cliffs. He held on. At the top of one swing, he caught a glimpse of the windspeed indicator. The sight of it sickened him. He was through, finished, done for. How could he be expected to hold on through the force of a #-mile-an-hour wind? It was too much. It was -- # miles an hour? That meant that the wind was dropping! He could hardly believe it at first. But slowly, steadily, the dial hand crept down. At # miles an hour, the truck stopped slamming and lay passively at the end of its anchor line. At #, the wind veered -- a sure sign that the blow was nearly over. When it had dropped to # miles an hour, Clayton allowed himself the luxury of passing out.  for him later in the day. Skillfully they maneuvered two big land ships up to the Brute, fastened on their long vines -- which tested out stronger than steel -- and towed the derelict truck back to the station. They brought him into the receiving shed and Nerishev carried him into the station's dead air. "You didn't break anything except a couple of teeth," said Nerishev. "But there isn't an unbruised inch on you." "We came through it," Clasdon said. "Just. Our boulder defense is completely flattened. The station took two direct hits from boulders and barely contained them. I've checked the foundations; they're badly strained. Another blow like that -- " " -- and we'd make out somehow. Us Earth lads, we come through! That was the worst in eight months. Four months more and the relief ship comes! Buck up, Nerishev. Come with me." "Where are we going?" "I want to talk to that damned Smanik!" They came into the shed. It was filled to overflowing with Carellans. Outside, in the lee of the station, several dozen land ships were moored. "Smanik!" Clayton called. "What's going on here?" "It is the Festival of Summer," Smanik said. "Our great yearly holiday." "Hm. What about that blow? What did you think of it?" "I would classify it as a moderate gale," said Smanik. "Nothing dangerous, but somewhat unpleasant for sailing." "Unpleasant! I hope you get your forecasts a little more accurate in the future." "One cannot always outguess the weather," Smanik said. "It is regrettable that my last forecast should be wrong." "Your Iasi? How come? What's the matter?" "These people," Smanik said, gesturing around him, "are my entire tribe, the Seremai. We have celebrated the Festival of Summer. Now summer is ended and we must go away." 'Where to?" "To the caverns in the far west. They are two weeks' sail from here. We will go into the caverns and live there for three months. In that way, we will find safety." Clayton had a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach. "Safety from what, Smanik?" "I told you. Summer is over. We need safety now from the winds -- the powerful storm winds of winter." 'What is it?" Nerishev said. "In a moment." Clasdon thought very quickly of the super-hurricane he had just passed through, which Smanik had classified as a moderate and harmless gale. He thought of their immobility, the ruined Brute, the strained foundations of the station, the wrecked boulder barrier, the relief ship four months away. "We could go with you in the land ships, Smanik, and take refuge in the caverns with you -- be protected -- " "Of course," said Smanik hospitably. "No, we couldn't," Clayton answered himself, his sinking feeling even lower than during the storm. "We'd need extra oxygen, our own food, a water supply -- " "What is it?" Nerishev repeated impatiently. "What the devil did he say to make you look like that?" "He says the really big winds are just coming," Clayton replied. The two men stared at each other. Outside, a wind was rising. Old-Fasliioned Bridge Score Pad ? SafiSL Makes Bridge Scoring Easier  More Accurate -- Faster  More Legibfe! # for Including Postage Send Check or Money Order (No Coin or Stamps)  # East #st St. JfL  New York #, N. Y. TT for your informatiori back to see when my book The Conquest of Space first appeared, because the date has some bearing on this story. Well, the copyright note says "First Published in September, #," so it must have been in the early summer of that year. The book, as far as the mechanical processes of production are concerned, had advanced almost to the final stage. Color proofs of the paintings had been made and approved by Chesley Bonestell. Galley proofs of the text had been read and corrected. The page proofs had gone from printer to publisher to author and back the same way. All that was left for me to do was to wait. One morning during this waiting period, while reading the New York Times at breakfast, I found a little box, telling that Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper had found a hitherto unknown small satellite of Neptune. Most interesting, that. I dropped the Times, raced to the telephone, dialed my publisher and asked, "Is Conquest of Space on the presses?" The answer was something like, "It might be by now. If you want to know, I can call the printer and ask." "Do that," I said, "and if they haven't started yet, tell them to wait till afternoon. I'm coming in." The reason for this telephone call was that I realized that a few passages in the book were suddenly wrong. There was one which read "the lonely moon of Neptune," another one which read "Neptune's single moon" and a third one that said "like Earth, Neptune has only one moon." Don't bother looking it up -- the printer had planned to start the press run that same afternoon, and by #:#, the three passages had been replaced by others which were factually correct and took the same amount of space. My reason for remembering this now is that I told the editor, while typing the changes, that my statement might be proved wrong for Ea'-th, too, one day. Well, as far as we can tell, it won't be. Earth does have only one moon, we are sure now -- reasonably sure, that is. A bout two weeks ago, I received a large brown envelope in the mail which said on the outside "Office of Ordnance Research, U. S. Army" and inside there was a #-page report, on the cover of which it said in letters of diminishing size: State College, New Mexico Interim Report oh for the period #-# By Clyde W. Tombaugh Dr. Clyde W. Tombaugh, most Galaxy readers will probably recall, is the discoverer of the planet Pluto, and early in #, it became known that the Office of Ordnance Research gave him, via Lowell Observatory and New Mexico State College, a research contract to find out whether Earth might not have another small moon, or possibly moons. I devoted part of my column in the September, #, issue of Galaxy to the news that such a search was on and I explained then why these additional moons, if they existed, had to be quite small. The story of the second moon of Earth has had a rather tenacious life ever since #, which was the year when Jules Verne's AutouT de la Lune appeared, the second part of his story about the shot to the Moon. In it, Verne provided the three inhabitants of his Moon projectile with a glimpse of the second moon of Earth and explained that a French astronomer by the name of Petit had postulated its existence. Although no figure for the size of this second moon is given in the story, the reader is left with the impression that it must be rather substantial, at least a mile in diameter. Astronomers declared at a later date that a moon a mile in diameter at the distance given by Petit (# miles) would have been discovered by the ancient Babylonians, since it would be, at certain times, a rather easy nakedeye object. Before this fact was presented, several German astronomers had spent some time trying to find Petit's moon, which they punningly called Kleinchen. The point of the pun is that Petit is the French word for "little" or "small" while Kleinchen is German for "the little one." Of course they did not find his moon. By the time Dr. Tombaugh started his search, it was quite clear that the additional satellite would be measured in feet and not in miles -- how many feet depended, naturally, on the distance. came that Tombaugh had found two moons, one # miles out and another one at a distance of # miles. The story went with it that, when this report reached the Pentagon, a general asked suspiciously, "Are they natural?" That story may be true, but the report that two moons had been found was not. If anybody knows how it originated, he is keeping his lips tightly shut. At any event. Dr. Tombaugh wrote me at the time that the report was not true. Moreover, it referred to distances that had not even been investigated at the time. The search was made by telescopic camera and the sensitivity of the instrumentation was revealed with a sentence that has been quoted quite a number of times since. The equipment, the statement said, could discover a tennis ball at a height of # miles, provided only that it was white. It also could discover a V-# rocket (which is just short of # feet) at the distance of the Moon. This original statement has since been amended to read that the tennis ball could be found even if it showed itself only in half phase; the V-# rocket near the Moon would have to be in full phase and also painted white; Any satellite of Earth -- natural or artificial -- which is closer than a certain limit would have to move so fast to stay in its orbit that it would rise in the west and set in the east. The limit just mentioned is # miles from the surface. At that distance, the satellite would have an orbital period of # hours and would neither rise nor set but just hang in the sky over one hemisphere and never be visible from the other. Satellites beyond that limit would behave as one expects them to behave. Let us assume now that we have a satellite # miles from the surface. It would need just four hours to go around the Earth once. Knowing this, one can calculate how fast it would move across the sky. Then an astronomical camera can be geared to sweep across the sky at the same rate. If the satellite is in the field of vision of the camera, it would show up as a dot on the plate, while the fixed stars in the field of vision would show up as streaks from edge to edge. If that satellite were at, say, # miles, but the camera were set for a sweep for a #-mile satellite, it would still show up. It would have made a very short trail, very easily distinguishable from the edge-to-edge star streaks. It should be clear from this explanation that a satellite search with such equipment is mostly a question of patience, a commodity which must be built-in in any astronomer. It is "merely" a question of adjusting the camera for a whole series of sweeps, corresponding to various satellite distances and orbital periods. If there is one, it must be caught sooner or later. on a photographic plate is not enough proof, however. There might be a tiny bubble in the emulsion, a flaw of some kind -- I mentioned once in this column that the planet Pluto was missed on a photographic plate (years before Tombaugh found it on another one) because the image happened to have fallen on such a flaw and was taken to be a part of it. To avoid being fooled by such an accidental dot, something else had to be done. It was this: when the trails of the fixed stars had moved to about the center of the plate, the camera was moved a little bit without closing the shutter. The result of this action was that every star trail, at that point, made a very short vertical line and then continued on a different level. (For faint stars, this short vertical line did not register on the plate.) Now if there was a satellite at the distance for which the sweep was set, it would make two dots at the proper distance from each other. That there should be a plate flaw producing this effect was most unlikely. The search was conducted from Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, which, in spite of its generally fine location, had one disadvantage which has to do with the position of the orbits of the imknown satellites relative to the Earth. There is, as far as I know, no rule that says that a satellite could not circle its planet going from pole to pole. The simple facts are that no such case is known and that it is highly unlikely for various theoretical reasons. A tiny satellite of Earth could have two possible origins. One is that it is a piece of debris from the Asteroid Belt which has, for some reason, been drifting inward in the Solar System and has been captured by Earth. That would require such a peculiar sequence of astronomical events that it is not very likely. In most cases, such a piece of cosmic matter drifting in toward the Earth would either simply pass on with a minor change in orbit, or else it would touch atmosphere and crash as a meteorite. Capture by the Earth would be exceedingly rare. But while capture would be literally a case of much more than possible. Such a satellite would circle the Earth in about the plane of the ecliptic -- the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The other possibility has to do with our real and rather large moon. More and more astronomers seem to incline to the belief that the Moon was formed in an orbit around the Earth of loose matter, ranging in size from a few molecules of something to large mountains. "Moon matter" left, they would orbit around the Earth in or very nearly in the plane of the Moon's orbit. Since the plane of the Moon's orbit and the ecliptic are inclined to each other by only five degrees, the search of these two planes is really the same thing, for some deviation from either one or the other must be taken for granted. The third possibility is that a satellite circles the Earth in the plane of its equator, inclined by # V # degrees to the ecliptic. But a satellite over the equator would have been pulled into that orbit by the Earth's equatorial bulge, which implies that it would be fairly low. If it weren't, it wouldn't be in that plane. This is where the search from Flagstaff left a hole in the picture. A moonlet circling the Earth over the equator at a lesser distance than # miles from the surface could not be seen -- or, rather, photographed -- from Flagstaff. Strangely enough, the search for anything inside the orbit of the Moon was really virgin territory. Barring the occasional looking for Kleinchen a few Germans had indulged in around the turn of the century, it had never been done. Well, we now know that there is nothing in that region, with the possible exception of equatorial orbits below # miles. For these. Dr. Tombaugh moved to Quito, Ecuador, where such moonlets would be vertically overhead. But the Interim Report was written before this move took place and covered only the work at Flagstaff. It concluded: Much of the space about the Earth has been searched. Most of this space has been found to be empty of material moving in the most-likely orbits and large enough to be seen by the present equipment Some "suspects" have been found on the photographic films, but in all save a few instances it has been possible to determine that the record was not that of a satellite. These images, if not due to defects in the photographic plates, could have been tracks of very small asteroids moving past the earth in their journey around the sun. The several suspects not yet eliminated as satellites are ones which cannot be checked until photographic work has started on the equator. From a statistical point of view, it is more likely that they will turn out not to be satellites. The chance of a discovery of astronomical or geodetic value has, from the beginnnig, been regarded as very small. But a completely negative result, a determination that the space near the earth is free of debris up to a certain size, could have comforting significance to long-range ballisticians and to proponents of space travel. I'HE explanation of the difficulty of capturing moonlets going around the Sun -- because they go around the Sun, they are, of course, tiny planetoids or asteroids -- implied that any additional satellite that might have been  This conclusion was written by The Office of Ordnance Research, not by Tombaugh. fovind would most probably have been matter left over when the Moon formed. But if such matter was left over, it could go around the Earth in some other ways. One possibility was that it remained in the same orbit as the Moon, but circling the Earth either # degrees ahead of the Moon or # degrees behind the Moon. In the case of Jupiter and the so-called Trojan Asteroids, this has been found to be true -- many years, incidentally, after it had been advanced as a theoretical possibility. Having this nice equipment available, it was obvious that Dr. Tombaugh should use it to see whether there might be more moons in the orbit of the Moon. This particular phase of the search had been planned, but by the time the Interim Report was written, it had not been carried out, due largely to bad weather. But "left-over" Moon matter could still do something else. It could form secondary moons, moonlets of our moon. If such a secondary moon had been found, it would have been the first of its kind in the Solar System. It is perfectly possible that the larger moons in our solar system have such secondary moons, but if they do, they are all too small to be detected from the Earth. Secondary moons of our moon would have been fairly easy to identify, again if they were large enough to register on the photographic plate. The most likely orbit of such secondary moons would be again in the ecliptic, or else in the plane of the Moon's orbit. Because of this, they would pass between Moon and Earth and then disappear behind the Moon. Twice during every circuit of the Moon, they would be at "greatest elongation," which means farthest away from the Moon either to the east or to the west. Actually we would see this portion of the orbit strongly foreshortened so that such a secondary moon would remain nearly stationary, to the eye, near greatest elongation for a while. But no matter at what distance it is from the Moon, it would share the orbital movement of the Moon. If you can catch a dot of light, on either side of the Moon, which travels across the sky at very nearly the rate of the Moon itself, you have caught a secondary moon. VT'OU probably could, that is, if you did it visually. If you try to do it photographically, chances are that the Moon will cover up the image of the secondary satellite. The Moon is bright enough to ruin everything faint in its vicinity on a plate. Hence this particular search had to wait for an eclipse of the Moon. As Dr. Tombaugh reported: "The crater Aristarchus is the brightest spot on the moon, and it can be seen in a telescope with some difficulty when the moon is in total eclipse. With a visual guide telescope on the same mounting with the Schmidt camera, one can guide the camera on Aristarchus and prevent the dilution of possible satellite images." All this had been worked out for the total eclipse of January #, #. "Unfortunately, on the night of the moon's eclipse, the sky was covered by a thick haze." At the time the report was written, there were hopes for the longduration eclipse which took place at midnight, November #-#, #. I know that all the amateur astronomers in New York, Long Island and New Jersey were bitterly disappointed, for there was more than just a thick haze. It poured. The weather must have been bad enough to be useless in Flagstaff, too, because no report about a secondary moon has come in yet. But while Tombaugh's work is virtually definite for the space above # miles (and lower down elsewhere than over the equator), a secondary moon of Earth, a moon of the Moon, and also "Trojan" moonlets in the Moon's orbit, are still possible. Their discovery would, for the time being, be of scientific interest only, but it would be interesting. Naturally an intensive search program of this type had all kinds of "by-products," as Charles F. Capen of the New Mexico College called them in Sky and Telescope. A number of meteorites and one bright fireball were caught on the plates. A few others showed very strange zigzag designs -- the Naval Observatory's Flagstaff section had released a bunch of meteorological balloons at night without telling anybody. One night, an orange light moved noiselessly from north to south in a straight line; glasses proved it to be the exhaust of a high-flying jet. Another night, they had "Lubbock Lights," but they were a squadron of helicopters. Six months or so from now, another satellite watch will be on, but then it won't be a natural satellite. We'll have made it ourselves.  quite a long time since anybody talked about Moon rockets. Twenty-five to thirty years ago, before the time where there was any rocket "hardware," things were different -- the Moon rocket was a favorite topic of conversation among rocket enthusiasts. As the actual engineering research began, the favorite idea of the Moon rocket began to be overshadowed by the nasty reality of an oxygen valve which leaked, and kept leaking no matter what you did about it. And a parachute release that worked was more fascinating by far than the most elegant set of equations. As time went on, all thoughts concentrated first on the high-altitude sounding rocket, then the long-range rocket, and finally on the artificial satellite. But now the Moon rocket is with us again, in a form which bears little resemblance to the drawings made thirty years ago, but with the encouraging message that it could be built later this year if somebody can be found to sign some papers. However, a little background is needed first. In Professor Hermann Oberth's writings -- from # to #  -- you can find a discussion of something he called the "optimal velocity." The problem was this; a rising rocket has to fight air resistance, and air resistance goes up very sharply as  the velocity increases. As far as air resistance was concerned, a slowly accelerating rocket was far better than a quickly accelerating rocket. But while the rocket struggled up through a resisting atmosphere, slowly, it also lost # feet per second of velocity every second, because Earth tried to pull it back. Hence, as far as gravitation was concerned, the quickly accelerating rocket beat the slowly accelerating rocket tailfins down. There had to be a happy medium, a rocket which did not create too much air resistance for itself and did not lose too much speed to gravity, either. And that was the "optimal velocity." The first large rockets, the V-#s, happened not to be troubled by that problem. They could not accelerate very fast because they were so heavy. By the time they got to be really fast, they were above # feet, with about # per cent of the atmosphere below them. Large rockets which were capable of very high accelerations were still to come. But they came, the big solid fuel rockets we now have, which are mostly used to boost heavy missiles into the air. If one had tried to fire such heavy solid fuel rockets, or clusters of them, from the surface, there would have been trouble with air resistance. And this is not just theory, for such clusters, Vehicles, have been fired to measure air resistance at very high velocities. A. Van Allan of Iowa University had tried something else. There is a medium-sized solidfuel rocket called the Deacon. When fired vertically from sea level, it can reach a height of # feet, or not quite # miles. Van Allan had the Deacon lifted by a plastic Skyhook balloon to about # miles and fired it from there. It went to # and # miles because it did not have to fight much air resistance. This rocket-balloon combination was dubbed the Rockoon and some important research work has been done with it recently. More of it will come during the International Geophysical Year. Knowing all this, we are now ready to understand the new Moon rocket, presented for the first time in a paper read in September, #, at the International Astronautical Congress in Rome. The authors of the paper were Kurt R. Stehling and Richard Foster, both of them propulsion engineers for the Naval Research Laboratory and presumably quite busy with the Vanguard satellitecarrier rockets. The "first stage" of the new Moon rocket is a Skyhook balloon which must be able to lift a rocket weighing # lbs. to a height of # feet. This, Stehling said, means a balloon of a foot Skyhooks have been built and launched. The Moon rocket would hang vertically below the balloon and tear through it when ignited. This will not hamper the rocket a bit and will not even cause an avoidable loss of the balloon, for the plastic skin of Skyhook balloons is so thin that they can be used only once; they can never be recovered intact for reuse. The rocket itself is a three-step affair. Step No. I is a so-called "cluster" of four large solid-fuel units, weighing together # lbs., but developing a thrust of # lbs. They would burn for about # seconds. At the end of the burning time, the rocket will be #f# feet up and will be going with a velocity very close to # feet per second. At an altitude of # feet, you don't have to worry about air resistance any more, so the next stage, also solid fuel, will be ignited at once. The weight of Step No. # is # lbs. It will also burn for # seconds, producing a thrust of # lbs. When its fuel is gone, it will be # feet high and the velocity will be slightly more than # feet per second. Then Step No. # takes over. Compared to what carried it, it is tiny, a #-pound solid-fuel rocket with four pounds of "payload" in the nose. It will burn for only # seconds, but when it is finished, it will be # feet up and its velocity will be # feet per second. L ess than one minute after the order "Fire!" Step No. # will be coasting to where the Moon will be four days later, for the time to traverse this distance will be about four days. The rocket will be too small to be seen in a telescope or to be tracked by radar. But radar ought to be able to track the larger stages, so that there should be enough tracking data for a trajectory computation. The time of the impact will be fairly well known, but just where the rocket will strike the Moon will not be known in advance. It is possible that observers may miss the impact for this reason. But the four pounds of payload are such that they will make a permanent gnd telescopically conspicuous mark on the lunar surface. Dr. Morris Goldpepper Physicists and engineers can't help -- only my colleagues can bridge the interstellar cavity to pull me out of my aching plight! I F our of the men, Weinroth, McAllister, Danboufge and Smith, sat at the table under the cold blue lighting tubes. One of them, Rorke, was in a corner speaking quietly into a telephone, and one, Fadderman, stood staring out the window at the lights of the city. One, Hansen, had yet to arrive. Fadderman spoke without turning his head. He was the oldest of those present -- the Big Seven, as they were often called. "Lights," he said. "So many lights. Down here." He waved his hand toward the city. "Up there." He gestured toward the sky. "Even with our much-vaunted knowledge, what," he asked, "do we know?" He turned his head. "Perhaps this is too big for us. In the light of the problem, can we really hope to accomplish anything?" Heavy-set Danbourge frowned grimly. "We have received the suffrage of our fellow-scientists. Doctor. We can but try." Lithe, handsome McAllister, che youngest officer of the Association, nodded. "The problem is certainly not greater than that which faced our late, great colleague, the immortal Morton." He pointed to a picture on the panneled wall. "And we all know what he accomplished." H G L P I Fadderman went over and took his hand. "Your words fill me with courage." McAllister flushed with pleasure. "I am an old man," Fadderman added falteringly. "Forgive my lack of spirit, Doctor" He sat down, sighed, shook his head slowly. Weinroth, burly and redhaired, patted him gently on the back. Natty, silvery-haired little Smith smiled at him consolingly. hung up the telephone, flipped a switch on the wall intercom. "Headquarters here," he said crisply. "Dr. Carl T. Hansen has arrived," a voice informed him. "Bring him up at once," he directed. "And, Nickerson -- " "Yes, Dr. Rorke?" "Let no one else into the building. No one." They sat in silence. After a moment or two, they heard the approach of the elevator, heard the doors slide open, slide shut, heard the elevator descend. Heavy, steady footsteps approached; knuckles rapped on the opaque glass door. Rorke went over to the door, said, "A conscientious and diligent scientist -- " must remain a continual student," a deep voice finished the quotation. Rorke unlocked the door, peered out into the corridor, admitted Hansen, locked the door. "I would have been here sooner, but another emergency interposed," Hansen said. "A certain political figure -- ethics prevent my being more specific -- suffered an oral hemorrhage following an altercation with a woman who shall be nameless, but, boy, did she pack a wallop! A so-called Specialist, gentlemen, with offices on Park Avenue, had been, as he called it, 'applying pressure' with a gauze pad. I merely used a little Gelfoam as a coagulant agent and the hemorrhage stopped almost at once. When will the public learn, eh, gentlemen?" Faint smiles played upon the faces of the assembled scientists. Hansen took his seat. Rorke bent down and lifted two tape-recording devices to the table, set them both in motion. The faces of the men became serious, grim. "This is an emergency session of the Steering Committee of the Executive Committee of the American Dental Association," Rorke said, "called to discuss measures of dealing with the case of Dr. Morris Goldpepper. One tape will be deposited in the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York; the other will be similarly secured in the vaults of the Wells Fargo and Union Trust Company Bank in San Francisco. Present at this session are Doctors Rorke, Weinroth and Smith -- President, First and Second Vice-presidents, respectively -- Fadderman, Past President, McAllister, Public Information, Danbourge, Legal, and Hansen, Policy." He looked around at the set, tense faces. "Doctors," he went on, "I think I may well say that humanity is, as of this moment, face to face with a great danger, and it is a bitter jest that it is not to the engineers or the astronomers, not to medicine nor yet to nuclear nor any other kind of physics, that humanity must now look for salvation -- but to the members of the dental profession!" His voice rose. "Yes -- to the practitioners of what has become perhaps the least regarded of all the learned sciences! It is indeed ironical. We may at this juncture consider the comments of the now deceased Professor Earnest Hooton, the Harvard anthropologist, who observed with a sorrow which did him credit that his famed University, instead of assisting its Dental School as it ought, treated it -- and I quote his exact words -- 'Like a yellow dog.' " His voice trembled. J-'-flushed an angry red. Weinroth growled. Danbourge's fist hit the table and stayed there, clenched. Fadderman gave a soft, broken sigh. "But enough of this. We are not jealous, nor are we vindictive," President Rorke went on. "We are confident that History, 'with its long tomorrow,' will show how, at this danger-fraught point, the humble and little thought-of followers of dental science recognized and sized up the situation and stood shoulder to shoulder on the ramparts!" He wiped his brow with a paper tissue. "And now I will call upon our beloved. Past President, Dr. Samuel I. Fadderman, to begin our review of the incredible circumstances which have brought us here tonight. Dr. Fadderman? If you please..." The well-known Elder Statesman of the A.D.A. nodded his head slowly. He made a little cage of his fingers and pursed and then unpursed his lips. At length he spoke in a soft and gentle voice. "My first comment, brethren, is that I ask for compassion. Morris Goldpepper is not to blame! "Let me tell you a few words about him. Goldpepper the Scientist needs no introduction. Who has not read, for instance, his 'The Bilateral Vertical Stroke and Its Influence on the Pattern of Occlusion' or his 'Treatment, #S Planning, Assemblage and Cementation of a #-Unit Fixed Bridge' -- to name only two? But I shall speak about Goldpepper the Man. He is forty-six years of age and served with honor in the United States Navy Dental Corps during the Second World War. He has been a widower since shortly after the conclusion of that conflict. Rae -- the late Mrs. Goldpepper, may she rest in peace -- often, used to say, 'Morry, if I go first, promise me you'll marry again,' but he passed it off with a joke; and, as you know, he never did. "They had one child, a daughter, Suzanne, a very sweet girl, now married to a Dr. Sheldon Fingerhut, D.D.S. I need not tell you, brethren, how proud our colleague was when his only child married this very fine young member of our profession. The Fingerhuts are now located on Unbalupi, one of the Micronesian islands forming part of the United States Trust Territory, where Dr. Sheldon is teaching dental hygiene, sanitation and prosthesis to the natives thereof." Dr. Hansen asked, "Are they aware of -- " "The son-in-law knows something of the matter," the older man said. "He has not seen fit to inform his wife, who is in a delicate condition and expects shortly to be confined. At his suggestion. I have been writing -- or, rather, typing -- letters purporting to come from her father, on his stationery, with the excuse that he badly singed his fingers on a Bunsen burner while annealing a new-type hinge for dentures and consequently cannot hold his pen." He sipped from a glass of water. "Despite his great scientific accomplishments," Dr. Fadderman went on, "Morry had an impractical streak in him. Often I used to call on him at his bachelor apartment in the Hotel Davenport on West End Avenue, where he moved following his daughter's marriage, and I would find hiip immersed in reading matter of an escapist kind -- tales of crocodile hunters on the Malayan Peninsula, or magazines dealing with interplanetary warfare, or collections of short stories about vampires and werewolves and similar superstitious creations. " 'Morry,' I said reproachfully, 'what a way to spend your offhours. Is it worth it? Is it healthy? You would do much better, believe me, to frequent the pool or the handball court at the Y. Or,' I pointed out to him, 'if you want to read, why ignore the rich treasures of literature: Shakespeare, Ruskin, Elbert Hubbard, Edna Ferber, and so on? Why retreat to these immature-type fantasies?' At first he only smiled and quoted the saying, 'Each to his or her own taste.'" IHE silence which followed was broken by young Dr. McAllister. "You say," he said, '"at first.' " Old Dr. Fadderman snapped out of his revery. "Yes, yes. But eventually he confessed the truth to me. He withheld nothing." The assembled dental scientists then learned that the same Dr. Morris Goldpepper, who had been awarded not once but three successive times the unique honor of the Dr. Alexander Peabody Medal for New Achievements in Dental Prosthesis, was obsessed with the idea that there was sentient life on other worlds -- that it would shortly be possible to teach these other worlds -- and that he himself desired to be among those who went. " 'Do you realize, Sam?' he asked me," reported Fadderman. " 'Do you realize that, in a very short time, it will no longer be a question of fuel or even of metallurgy? That submarines capable of cruising for weeks and months without surfacing foretell the possibility of traveling through airless space? The chief problem has now come down to finding how to build a takeoff platform capable of withstanding a thrust of sevglowed." Dr. Fadderman had inquired, with good-natured sarcasm, how the other man expected this would involve him. The answer was as follows: Any interplanetary expedition would find it just as necessary to take along a dentist as to take along a physician, and that he -- Dr. Goldpepper -- intended to be that dentist! Dr. Weinroth's hand slapped the table with a bang. "By thunder, I say the man had courage!" Dr. Rorke looked at him with icy reproof. "I should be obliged," he said stiffly, "if there would be no further emotional outbursts." Dr. Weinroth's face fell. "I beg the Committee's pardon, Mr. President," he said. Dr. Rorke nodded graciously, indicated by a gesture of his hand that Dr. Fadderman had permission to continue speaking. The old man took a letter from his pocket and placed it on the table. "This came to me like a bolt from the blue beyond. It is dated November # of last year. Skipping the formal salutation, it reads: 'At last I stand silent upon the peak in Darien' -- a literary reference, gentlemen, to Cortez's alleged discovery of the Pacific Ocean; actually it was Balboa -- 'my great dream is about to be realized. Before long, I shall be back to tell you about it, but just exactly when, I am not able to say. History is being made! Long live Science! Sincerely yours, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.'" He passed the letter around the table. Dr. Smith asked, "What did you do on receiving this communication, Doctor?" Dr. Fadderman had at once taken a taxi to West End Avenue. The desk clerk at the hotel courteously informed him that the man he sought had left on a vacation of short but not exactly specified duration. No further information was known. Dr. Fadderman's first thought was that his younger friend had gotten some sort of position with a Government project which he was not free to discuss, and his own patriotism and sense of duty naturally prevented him from making inquiries. "But I began, for the first time," the Elder Statesman of American Dentistry said, "to read up on the subject of space travel. I wondered how a man # years of age could possibly hope to be selected over younger men." Dr. Danbourge spoke for the first time. "Size," he said. "Every ounce would count in a spaceship and Morris was a pretty little guy." "But with the heart of a lion," Dr. Weinroth said softly. "Miles and miles and miles of heart." The other men nodded their agreement to this tribute. year drew to its close and he heard no word from his friend. Dr. Fadderman began to worry. Finally, when he received a letter from the Fingerhuts, saying that they had not been hearing either, he took action. He realized it was not likely that the Government would have made plans to include a dentist in this supposed project without communicating with the A.D.A. and he inquired of the current President, Dr. Rorke, if he had any knowledge of such a project, or of the whereabouts of the missing man. The answer to both questions was no. But on learning the reasons for Dr. Fadderman's concern, he communicated with Col. Lemuel Coggins, head of the Col. Coggins informed him that no one of Dr. Goldpepper's name or description was or had been affiliated with any such project, and that, in fact, any such project was still -- as he put it -- "still on the drawing-board." Drs. Rorke and Fadderman, great as was their concern, hesitated to report Dr. Goldpepper missing. He had, after all, paid rent on apartment, office and laboratory, well in advance. He was a mature man, of very considerable intelligence, and one who presumably knew what he was doing. "It is at this point," said Dr. Danbourge, "that I enter the picture. On the #th of January, I had a call from a Dr. Milton Wilson, who has an office on East #th Street, with a small laboratory adjoining, where he does prosthetic work. He told me, with a good deal of hesitation, that something exceedingly odd had come up, and he asked me if I knew where Dr. Morris Goldpepper was..." The morning of the #th of January, an elderly man with a curious foreign accent came into Dr. Wilson's office, gave the name of Smith and complained about an upper plate. It did not feel comfortable, Mr. Smith said, and it irritated the roof of his mouth. There was a certain reluctance on his part to allow Dr. Wilson to examine his mouth. This was understandable, because the interior of his mouth was blue. The gums were entirely edentulous, very hard, almost horny. The plate itself -- "Here is the plate," Dr. Danbourge said, placing it on the table. "Dr. Wilson supplied him with another. You will observe the perforations on the upper, or palatal, surface. They had been covered with a thin layer of gum arable, which naturally soon wore almost entirely off, with the result that the roof of the mouth became irritated. Now this is so very unusual that Dr. Wilson -- as soon as his patient, the socalled Mr. Smith, was gone -- broke open the weirdly made plate to find why the perforations had been made. In my capacity as head of the Association's Legal Department," Dr. Danbourge stated, "I have come across some extraordinary occurrences, but nothing like this." This was a small piece of a white, flexible substance, covered with tiny black lines. Danbourge picked up a large magnifying glass. "You may examine these objects, Doctors," he said, "but it will save your eyesight if I read to you from an enlarged photostatic copy of this last one. The nature of the material, the method of writing, or of reducing the writing to such size all are unknown to us. It may be something on the order of microfilm. But that is not important. The important thing is the content of the writing -- the portent of the writing. "Not since Er. Morton, the young Boston dentist, realized the uses of sulphuric ether as an anesthetic has any member of our noble profession discovered anything of even remotely similar importance; and perhaps not before, either." He drew his spectacles from their case and began to read aloud. II great profession lacks the glamour and public adulation of the practice of medicine, and even the druggists -- not having a Hippocratic Oath -- can preen themselves on their so-called Oath of Maimonides (though, believe me, the great Maimonides had no more to do with it than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.), no one can charge us with not having as high a standard of ethics and professional conduct as physicians and surgeons, M.D. Nor do I hesitate for one single moment to include prostheticians not holding the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery or Doctor of Dental Medicine, whose work is so vital and essential. When the records of our civilization are balanced, then -- but perhaps not before -- the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache. It is only with a heavy heart that I undertake deliberately to produce inferior work, and with the confidence that all those to whom the standards of oral surgery and dental prosthetics are dear will understand the very unusual circumstances which have prompted me so to do. And, understanding, will forgive. No one can hold the standards of our profession higher or more sacred than I. It must be admitted that I was not very amused on a certain occasion when my cousin, Nathaniel Pomerance, introduced me to an engineering contractor with these words, "You two should have a lot in common -- you both build bridges," and uttered a foolish laugh. But I venture to say that this was one of the truest words ever spoken in questionable jest. Humility is one thing, false pride another. Those who know anything of modern dentistry at all know of the Goldpepper Bridge and the Goldpepper Crown. It is I, Dr. Morris Goldpepper, inventor of both, and perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp which bears my name, who writes these words you see before you. Nothing further should be needful by way of identification. And now to my report. On the first of November,'a day of evil import forever in the personal calendar of the unhappy wretch who writes these lines, not even knowing for sure if they will ever be read -- but what else can I do? -- shortly after #:# P.M., my laboratory door was knocked on. I found there a curious-looking man of shriveled and weazened appearance. He asked if I was Dr. Morris Goldpepper, "the famous perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp," and I pleaded guilty to the flattering impeachment. The man had a foreign-sounding accent, or -- I thought -- it may be that he had an impediment in his speech. Might he see me, was his next question. I hesitated. and to most other practitioners -- a stranger comes and, before you know it, he is slandering some perfectly respectable D.D.S. or D.M.D. The dentist pulled a healthy tooth -- the dentist took such and such a huge sum of money for new plates -- they don't fit him, he suffers great anguish -- he's a poor man, the dentist won't do anything -- et cetera, ad infinitum nauseamque. In short, a nut, a crank, a crackpot. But while I was hesitating, the man yawned, did not courteously cover his mouth with his hand, and I observed to my astonishment that the interior of his mouth was an odd shade of blue! Bemused by this singular departure from normalcy, I allowed him to enter. Then I wondered what to say, since he himself was saying nothing, but he looked around the lab with interest. "State your business" would be too brusque, and "Why is your mouth blue?" would be too gauche. An impasse. Whilst holding up a large-scale model of the Goldpepper Cap (not yet perfected -- will it ever be? Alas, who knows?) this curious individual said, "I know all about you. Dentist Goldpepper. A great scientist, you are. A man of powerful imagination, you are. One who rebels against narrow horizons and yearns to soar to wide and distant worlds, you are." All I could think of to say was, "And what can I do for you?" It was all so true; every single word he said was true. In my vanity was my downfall. I was tricked like the crow with the cheese in the ancient fable of Aesop. The man proceeded to tell me, frankly enough, that he was a denizen of another planet. He had two hearts, would you believe it? And, consequently, two circulatory systems. Two pulses -- one in each arm, one slow, the other fast. It reminded me of the situation in Philadelphia some years ago when there were two telephone systems -- if you had only a Bell phone, you couldn't call anyone who had only a Keystone phone. The interior of his mouth was blue and so was the inside of his eyelids. He said his world had three moons. You may imagine my emotions at hearing that my long-felt dream to communicate with otherworldly forms of sentient life was at last realized! And to think that they had singled out not the President of the United States, not the Director-General of the U.N., but me, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.! Could human happiness ask for more, was my unspoken question. I laughed softly to myself and I thought. What would my cousin Nathaniel Pomerance say now? I was like wax in this extraterrestrial person's hands (he had six distinct and articulate digits on each one), and I easily agreed to say nothing to anyone until the question of diplomatic recognition could be arranged on a higher echelon. "Non-recognition has its advantages, Goldpepper Dental Surgeon," he said with a slight smile. "No passport for your visit, you will need." Well! A personal invitation to visit Proxima Centauri Gamma, or whatever the planet's name is! But I felt constrained to look this gift-horse just a little closer in the mouth. How is it that they came inviting me, not, let us say, Oppenheimer? Well? "Of his gifts not in need, we are. Surgical Goldpepper. We have passed as far beyond nuclear power as you have beyond wind power. We can span the Universe -- but in dentistry like children still, we are. Come and inspect our faculties of your science, Great Goldpepper. If you say, 'This: Yes,' then it will be yes. If you direct, 'This: No,' then it will be no. In respect to the science of dentistry, our Edison and our Columbus, you will be." I asked when we would leave and he said in eight days. I asked how long the trip would take. For a moment, I was baffled when he said it would take no longer than to walk the equivalent of the length of the lab floor. Then he revealed his meaning to me: Matter transmission! Of course. No spaceship needed. brief disappointment at not being able to see the blazing stars in black outer space. But, after all, one ought not be greedy at such a time. I cannot point out too strongly that at no time did I accept or agree to accept any payment or gratuity for this trip. I looked upon it in the same light as the work I have done for various clinics. "Should I take along books? Equipment? What?" I asked my (so-to-speak) guide. He shook his head. Only my presence was desired on the first trip. A visit of inspection. Very well. On the morning of Nov. #th, I wrote a brief note to my old and dear friend. Dr. Samuel Fadderman, the senior mentor of American Dentistry on hearing these words, the Elder Statesman sobbed softly into his cupped hands, and in the afternoon, so excited and enthralled that I noticed no more of my destination than that it was north of the Washington Market, I accompanied my guide to a business building in the aforesaid area. He led me into a darkened room. He clicked a switch. There was a humming noise, a feeling first of heaviness, then of weightlessness, and then an odd sort of light came on. I was no longer on the familiar planet of my birth! I was on an unknown world! Over my head, the three moons Of this far-off globe sailed majestically through a sky wherein I could note unfamiliar constellations. The thought occurred to me that poets on this planet would have to find another rhyme, inasmuch as moons (plural form) does not go with June (singular form). One satellite was a pale yellow, one was brown, and' the third was a creamy pink. Not knowing the names of these lunary orbs in the native tongue, I decided to call them Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry. Whilst my mind was filled with these droll fancies, I felt a tug at my sleeve, where my guide was holding it. He gestured and I followed. "Now," I thought to myself, "he will bring me before the President of their Galactic Council, or whatever he is called," and I stood obediently within a circle marked on the surface of the platform whereon we stood. In a moment, we were mattertransported to an inside room somewhere, and there I gazed about me in stupefaction, not to say astonishment. My eyes discerned the forms of Bunsen burners, Baldor lathes, casting machines and ovens, denture trays, dental stone, plaster, shellac trays, wires of teeth, and all the necessary equipment of a fully equipped dental prosthetic laboratory. My surprise at the progress made by these people in the science at which they were allegedly still children was soon mitigated by the realization that all the items had been made on Earth. A S I was looking and examining, a door opened and several people entered. Their faces were a pale blue, and I realized suddenly that my guide must be wearing makeup to conceal his original complexion. They spoke together in their native dialect; then one of them, with a rod of some kind in his hand, turned to me. He opened his mouth. I perceived his gums were bare. "Dentical person," he said, "make me teeth." I turned in some perplexity to my guide. "I understood you to say my first visit would be one of inspection only." Everyone laughed, and I observed that all were equally toothless. The man in the chair poked me rudely with his rod or staff. "Talk not! Make teeth!" Fuming with a well-justified degree of indignation, I protested at such a gross breach of the laws of common hospitality. Then, casting concealment to the winds, these people informed me as follows : Their race is entirely toothless in the adult stage. They are an older race than ours and are born looking ancient and wrinkled. It is only cornparatively recently that they have established contact with Earth, and in order that they should not appear conspicuous, and in order to be able to eat our food, they realized that they must be supplied with artificial teeth. My so-called guide, false friend, my enticer andor kidnaper, to give him his due, had gotten fitted at a dentist's in New York and cunningly enquired who was the leading man in the field. Alas for fame! The man answered without a second of hesitation, "That is no other one than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S., perfector of the Semiretractable Clasp." First this unscrupulous extraterrestrial procured the equipment, then he procured me. "Do I understand that you purport that I assist you in a plan to thwart and otherwise circumvent the immigration laws of the United States?" was my enquiry. The man in the chair poked me with his rod again. "You understand! So now make teeth!" What a proposition to make to a law-abiding, patriotic American citizen by birth! What a demand to exact of a war veteran, a taxpayer and one who has been three times on jury duty since # alone (People vs. Garrity, People vs. Vanderdam, and Lipschutz vs. Krazy-Kut Kool Kaps, Inc.)! My whole being revolted. I spoke coldly to them, informing them that the situation was contrary to my conception of dental ethics. But to no avail. My treacherous dragoman drew a revolver from his pocket. "Our weapons understand, you do not. Primitive Earth weapons, yes. So proceed with manufacture. Imprisoned Goldpepper." I went hot and cold. Not, I beg of you to understand, with fear, but with humiliation. Imprisoned Goldpepper! The phrase, with all the connotations it implied, rang in my ears. I bowed my head and a phrase from the literary work "Sampson Agonistes" (studied as a student in the College of the City of New York) rang through my mind: Eyeless in Gaza, grinding corn... Oh, blind, blind, blind, amidst the blaze of noon... But even in this hour of mental agony, an agony which has scarcely abated to speak of, I had the first glimmering of the idea which I hope will enable me to warn Earth.  scornful glance to show these blue-complected individuals how well I appreciated that their socalled advanced science was a mere veneer over the base metal of their boorishness, I set to work. I made the preliminary impressions and study casts, using an impression tray with oval floor form, the best suited for taking impressions of edentulous ridges. And so began the days of my slavery. Confined as I am here, there is neither day nor night, but an unremitting succession of frenum trims, post dams, boxing in, pouring up, festoon carving, fixing sprue channels, and all the innumerable details of dental prosthetic work. No one as;, ts me. No one converses with me, save in brusque barks j devant to the work at hand. My I lod consists of liqueous and t atinous substances such as m i irt be expected would form the di : of a toothless race. Oh, I am sick of the sight of their blue skins, bluer mouths and horny ridges! I am sick of my serfdom! I have been given material to keep records and am writing this in expectation of later reducing it in size by the method here employed, and of thereinafter inserting copies between the palatal and occlusual surfaces of the plates. It will be necessary to make such plates imperfect, so that the wearers will be obliged to go to dentists on Earth for repairs, because it is not always practical for them to matterport -- in fact, I believe they can only do it on the #th day of every third month. Naturally, I cannot do this to every plate, for they might become suspicious. You may well imagine how it goes against my grain to produce defective work, but I have no other choice. Twice they have brought me fresh dental supplies, which is how I calculate their matterporting cycle. I have my wristwatch with me and thus I am enabled to reckon the passing of time. What their exact purpose is in going to Earth, I do not know. My growing suspicion is that their much-vaunted superior science is a fraud and that their only superiority lies in the ability to matterport. One curious item may give a clue: They have quesIll, tioned me regarding the Old Age Assistance programs of the several States. As I have said, they all look old. Can it be that elsewhere on this planet there is imprisoned some poor devil of a terrestrial printer or engraver, toiling under duress to produce forged birth certificates and other means of identification, to the fell purpose of allowing these aliens to live at ease at the financial expense of the already overburdened U.S. taxpayer? To whom shall I address my plea for help? To the Federal Government? But it has no official or even unofficial knowledge that this otherworldly race exists. The F.B.I.? But does matterporting under false pretenses to another planet constitute kidnaping across State lines? It seems the only thing I can do is to implore whichever dental practitioner reads these lines to communicate at once with the American Dental Association. I throw myself upon the mercy of my fellow professional men. Dentists and Dental Prostheticians! Beware of men with blue mouths and horny, edentulous ridges! Do not be deceived by flattery and false promises! Remember the fate of that most miserable of men, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S., and, in his horrible predicament, help, oh, help him! reading of this document. At length it was broken by Dr. Hansen. "That brave man," he said in a husky voice. "That brave little man." "Poor Morris," said Dr. Danbourge. "Think of him imprisoned on a far-off planet, slaving like a convict in a salt mine, so to speak, making false teeth for these inhuman aliens, sending these messages to us across the trackless void. It's pitiful, and yet. Doctors, it is also a tribute to the indomitable spirit of Man!" Dr. Weinroth moved his huge hands. "I'd like to get ahold of just one of those blue bastards," he growled. Dr. Rorke cleared his throat. All present looked at their President respectfully and eagerly. "I need hardly tell you. Doctors," he said crisply, "that the A.D.A. is a highly conservative organization. We do not go about things lightly. One such message we might ignore, but there have been eleven reported, all identical with the first. Even eleven such messages we might perhaps not consider, but when they come from a prominent scientist of the stature of Dr. Morris Goldpepper -- "Handwriting experts have pronounced this to be his handwriting beyond cavil of a doubt. Here" -- he delved into a box -- "are the eleven plates in question. Can any of you look at these clean lines and deny that they are the work of the incomparable Goldpepper?" The six other men looked at the objects, shook their heads. "Beautiful," murmured Dr. Smith, "even in their broken state. Poems in plastic! M. G. couldn't produce bad work if he tried!" Dr. Rorke continued. "Each report confirmed that the person who brought in the plate had a blue mouth and edentulous ridges, just as the message states. Each blue-mouthed patient exhibited the outward appearance of old age. And, gentlemen, of those eleven, no less than eight were reported from the State of California. Do you realize what that means? California offers the highest amount of financial assistance to the elderly! Goldpepper's surmise was right!" Dr. Hansen leaned forward. "In addition, our reports show that five of those eight are leaders in the fight against fluoridation of drinking water! It is my carefully considered belief that there is something in their physical makeup, evolved on another planet, which cannot tolerate fluorine even in minute quantities, because they certainly -- being already toothless -- wouldn't be concerned with the prevention of decay." Young Dr. McAllister took the floor. "We have checked with dental supply houses and detail men in the New York Metropolitan area and we found that large quantities of prosthetic supplies have been delivered to an otherwise unknown outfit -- called the Echs Export Company -- located not far north of the Washington Market! There is every reason to believe that this is the place Dr. Goldpepper mentioned. One of our men went there, found present only one man, in appearance an old man. Our representative feigned deafness, thus obliging this person to open his mouth and talk loudly. Doctors, he reports that this person has a blue mouth!" There was a deep intake of breath around the table. and snapped off the tape recorders. "This next is off the record. It is obvious, Doctors, that no ordinary methods will suffice to settle this case, to ensure the return of our unfortunate colleague, or to secure the withdrawal of these extraterrestrial individuals from our nation and planet. I cannot, of course, officially endorse what might be termed 'strongarm' methods. At the same time, I feel that our adversaries are not entitled to polite treatment. And obviously the usual channels of law enforcement are completely closed to us. "Therefore -- and remember, no word of this must pass outside our circle -- therefore I have communicated something of this matter to Mr. Albert Annapollo, the wellknown waterfront figure, who not long ago inaugurated the splendid Longshoremen's Dental Health Plan. Mr. Annapollo is a somewhat rough person, but he is nonetheless a loyal American... "We know now the Achilles heel of these alien creatures. It is fluorine. We know also how to identify them. And I think we may shortly be able to announce results. Meanwhile -- " he drew a slip of paper from his pocket -- "it is already the first of the month in that quarter when the dental supplies are due to be transported -- or matterported, as Dr. Goldpepper terms it -- to their distant destination. A large shipment is waiting to be delivered from the warehouses of a certain wholesaler to the premises of the Echs Exporting Company. I have had copies of this made and wrapped around each three-ounce bottle of Ellenbogen's Denture Stik-Phast. I presume it meets with your approval." He handed it to Dr. Hansen, who, as the others present nodded in grimly emphatic approval, read it aloud. "From The American Dental Association, representing over # registered dentists in the United States and its Territories, to Dr. Morris Goldpepper, wherrescue! We will bend every effort to this end! We shall fight the good fight! "Have courage. Dr. Morris Goldpepper! You shall return!" The mind technology that was developed for use in space: Developed by L. Ron Hubbard, nuclear physicist and one of the great science fiction writers of all time. The book from which they get their psychological plots. This one you need. Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was -- K aiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it? He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should. SS II Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground. "Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?" His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time? Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone -- or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here. Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them: The mother ship, Soscites II, had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship -- the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds -- and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy. The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low. Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever. That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently. A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk... iiNE thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages -- both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading. The first was from himself: The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange. SS II Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed: The ship's next message read: SS II His own reply perplexed Kaiser: # The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he: SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tap)e -- the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. SS II That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick. He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway. He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit. Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness -- he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream. It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way. Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser. a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout. After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now. Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground. The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm. Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yardhigh box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study. Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river. One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting -- or a warning to the others that a stranger approached. The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulderpits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm. The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group. and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small sealpups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths. They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fiftyfifty. Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this. A yovmg female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed. They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies. Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time. They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons. The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank -- and as smelly as the natives themselves. The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout. The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout. The job appeared maddenly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing. would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar -- the best leverage he had on hand -- but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day. That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite: Kaiser's reply was short and succinct: Soscites H's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor: Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours -- until the next communication came in: SS II most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city. His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike. The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized -- and fell instantly asleep. The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke : SS II By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him. Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops -- and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped. That checked pretty well with the ship's theory. Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear! Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him. The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here. As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature #, humidity # -- just about the same as it had been on earlier readings. hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before. He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately -- and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged. At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a tetse message to the Soscites II: Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out. Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey -- in the opposite direction from the first native settlement. He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and sealpeople in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first! They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant. By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship. The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it. The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction. tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world. Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discou) aged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went. The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly. That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam -- they maneuvered with an otterlike proficiency -- and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under. Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper. When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom. As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly. There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here -- if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them -- and he packed and started back to the scout. Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel. When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely the ground. Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened. of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there. Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly -- but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever. Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly -- until the fuel pump hung free! Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act. He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him. The first was quite routine: SS II The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it. SS II Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep. In the morning, another message was waiting: SS II abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency -- there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information. Strangely, the messages' indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet. Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside. Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself: Kaiser pushed the last of his meal -- which he had been eating with his fingers -- into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor. He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.  I HE tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other sealpeople here. And they were almost human! The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup -- that was little changed from the first he had found -- as in their obviously greater intelligence. This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor -- only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings. Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent. One was a female. They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation. The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water. cide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the commxmicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape: SS II Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts. When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water. Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots. # Star Shelf by Robert A. Heinlein. Doubleday #s Co., Inc., N. Y., #  ET'S be thankful that we are now enjoying one of the prolific Mr. Heinlein's most fruitful periods. Now we find Heinlein offering his version of The Sleeper Wakes. Leave it to him, however, to freshen up any old chestnut. He pulls a switch on the time of departure of his sleeper, who starts from the year # via cold sleep, waking in #. Heinlein paints a detailed picture of both civilizations, so evocative that # emerges clearly in the reader's mind as the old days, and pretty primitive at that. The hero is, like the author himself, an engineer. He has been bilked out of his # inventions and faces an acclimatizing period in # to learn the advances of the intervening years. The interim development of his stolen inventions, along with the appearance on the commercial market of old, nebulous ideas of his, both send him on a detective search of two eras. Of course you'll like Heinlein's latest. ed by Anthony Boucher. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., # is somewhat better balanced than his previous collection of giggles and cutenesses, and contains some fine yarns. Among these are Pohl's shocker, "The Census Takers," Sturgeon's ditto, "And Now the News," and Kornbluth's jolly "The Cosmic Expense Account." Most of the other stories are good, except for a very, very minor Bradbury. The two longest works, however, Charles L. Fontenay's "The Silk and the Song" and Ward Moore's "No Man Pursueth," are quite obviously used as bulk to make this a book rather than a pamphlet. If these were "the best" available, Boucher should have waited until he had better makeweights. Dallas. The John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia, Toronto, #. standard juvenile space opera that would have fared far better if heavy reliance had not been placed on unbelievable coincidences. Earth and Poseida, a planet whose location and environment are never satisfactorily explained, have reached the brink of war as the result of ultra-nationalistic activities of selfish individuals on each planet. The Poseidans are amphibious octopi and thoroughly repellent in appearance to sensitive humans. Bill Hudson, recipient of a brand-new space-medical diploma, is treated to a post-graduate vacation on Poseida by his chum's old man, who happens to be General Watkins, big-wig of Planqt Earth Forces. The very first day on Poseida, he saves the life of a young native who just happens, by the Lord Harry, to be the son of the planet's ruler, no less. They become fast friends and discover that there isn't much difference in mentality and outlook between the two races. One of the points of friction between the worlds is the disappearance of more than a score of experimental Earth ships on their initial test runs to exceed the speed of light. The Earth extremists are convinced that the Poseidans have a tentacle in it. While engaged in research on Poseida, Hudson just happens, by all that's lucky, to discover the antidote for the suspended animation drug, something that thousands of scientists had been unable to do. This has something to do with those ships. There's still another "happens to" that stretches credence even further, but Dallas somewhat redeems himself by good characterizations and an intelligent argument for tolerance. Cameron. Little, Brown  Co., Boston, Toronto, # deriul Flight to the Mushroom Planet, David Topman and his buddy, Chuck Masterson, are visited by a strange little person while spending the night in Tyco Bass' house. Tyco, the wonderful little person who advertised for a spaceship built by boys, made the flight with them to the Mushroom Planet, really an invisible satellite of Earth, and then disappeared. The stranger reveals himself as Tyco's cousin and also one of the Mushroom People. With his help, Tyco's notes are deciphered and another ship and flight become possible. A Menace, however, in the person of an egocentric assistant to a famous scientist creates plot problems by stowing away and threatening to disclose the secret of the existence of this idyllic little world. Remember Dr. Doolittle? His adventures never rang true, either, but we loved him and that made them possible. Same here. Zakaria Goneim. Rinehart #b Co., Inc., N. Y., # This month. The Lost Planet. Now a mislaid pyramid. A place for everything, and everything in its place, and this sort of thing wouldn't keep happening. As an object lesson in deductive archeology, this book stands by itself. Most of the famous finds have been the result of the exhaustive study of sites, but Dr. Gonheim found his pyramid through dissatisfaction with the paucity of memorials dating from the Third Dynasty, #-# B.C., the era just pre-dating the epoch of the Great Pyramid Builders. If you don't mind the usual archeological preoccupation with precise measurements, you'll find this a satisfactory substitute for time travel, back to that incredible age of monumental egomaniacs. Wright and Samuel Rapport. Harper #b Brothers, N. Y., # THE editors have compiled an informative volume of gleanings from the writings of an impressive group of authors. Leading off is Raymond Ditmars, world-famed reptile authority, with an amusing account of his boyhood start in snake collection. Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, pens a chapter on the piranha, Brazil's man-eating fish. Arthur Clarke is represented by a portion of The Coast of Coral and "The Well of the Maidens" is excerpted from C. W. Ceram's phenomenal archeological best seller, Gods, Graves and Scholars. There are chapters on the lives of Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Faraday, Edison and the unbelievably warped Henry Cavendish, along with general interest subjects that make the book appealing to young or old. Fortunately, the editors balance their bright, picture with a view of the tedium and detail of pure research, preventihg disenchantment. Ronald Edwin. The Falcon's Wing Press, Indian Hills, Colo.,  # are appearing with increasing frequency, Edwin's story has a ring of veracity that few others can equal. He offers more than usual documentation and presents his life history with such candor that his reader is swept along. He explains his gift as a natural compensation for his inadequacies, his introversion and melancholia during his abominably miserable childhood. One gathers that he has overcompensated his sensitivity in later years by developing a sharp tongue and manner. He appeared on the British TV scene on Whafs My Line, stumped the experts and ran off with the honors in a blistering verbal exchange with the acidulous panelist, Gilbert Harding. But leading up to this belated triumph is a lifetime of anguish. The Perceptive has virtually no control over his gift. Since the average life is cornposed of trivia, most clairvoyance is likewise trivial. As a result, there is no practical vocation as yet for the poor Esper, Alfred Bester notwithstanding. Either he struggles along on the variety stage or he resorts, as Edwin confesses, to phony spiritualism. Despite earning a reasonable livelihood, disillusionment caused him to return to Unlike most authors of similar works, he remains unconvinced of casionally manifests itself to him in the guise of voices, he interprets it as a conversion to a normal referent by the brain censor, not as spirit voices. If you have Started a para-psychology section of your library, this is a necessary inclusion. The breath of an entire world literally hung upon whether he lived or died -- and he infuriatingly refused to stay alive! Programmer of Earth, had seated himself upon a little three-legged stool in front of the Probabilities Calculator. He was a small, spare man, impressively ugly, dwarfed by the great control board which soared a hundred feet above him. The steady hum. of the machine, the slow drift of lights across the face of the panel. brought a sense of security which he recognized as false, but which soothed him all the same. He had just started to doze off when the pattern of lights changed. He sat up with a start and rubbed his face. A paper tape inched from a slot in the panel. The Chief Programmer tore it off and scanned it. He nodded sourly to himself and walked quickly out of the room. Fifteen minutes later, he entered the meeting room of the World Planning Council. Summoned there by his order, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around the long table, waiting for him. There was a new member this year, Roger Beatty, from the Americas. He was tall and angular and his bushy brown hair was just beginning to thin on top. He appeared eager, earnest and ill at ease. He was reading a procedural handbook and taking short, quick sniffs from his oxygen inhaler. James knew the other members well. Lan II from Pan-Asia, looking as small, wrinkled and indestructible as ever, was engaged in intense conversation with large, blond Dr. Sveg from Europe. Miss Chandragore, beautiful and sleek, was playing her inevitable game of chess with Aaui of Oceania. James turned up the room's oxygen supply and the members gratefully put away their inhalers. "Sorry to keep you waiting," James said, taking his seat at the head of the table. "The current prediction just came through." He took a notebook from his pocket and opened it "At our last meeting, we selected Alternate Probability Line #B#CC, which began in the year #. The factor we were selecting for was the life of Albert Levinsky. In the Main Historic Line, Levinsky died in # of an automobile accident By switching into Alternate Probability Line #B#CC, Levinsky avoided this accident and lived to the age of sixty-two, completing his work. The result now, in our own time, in the opening up of Antartica." "What about side effects?" asked Janna Chandragore. "Those are discussed in the paper you will be given later. Briefly, though, #B#CC adhered closely to the Historic Main Line. All important events remained constant. There were, of course, some effects which the prediction did not cover. They include an oil-well explosion in Patagonia, a flu epidemic in Kansas and an increase in smog over Mexico City." "Have all injured parties been compensated?" Lan II wanted to know. "They have. And the colonization of Antartica is already begun." The Chief Programmer imfolded the paper tape he had taken from the Probabilities Calculator. "But now we face a dilemma. As predicted, the Historic Main Line leads into unpleasant complications. But there are no good alternate lines to switch into!" The Members murmured to each other. James said, "Let me explain the situation." He walked to a wall and pulled down a large chart. "The crisis-point occurs on April #, #, and our problem centers around an individual named Ben Baxter. The circumstances are as follows..." evoke alternate possibilities, each of which produces its own continuum of history. In other spatial-temporal worlds, Spain lost at Lepanto, Normandy at Hastings, England at Waterloo. Suppose Spain had lost at Lepanto... Spain did, disastrously. And T urkish sea power, invincible, swept the Mediterranean of European shipping. Ten years later, a Turkish fleet conquered Naples and paved the way for the Moorish invasion of Austria... In another time and space, that is. This speculation became observable fact after the development of temporal selection and displacement. By #, Oswald Meyner and his associates were able to show the theoretical possibility of Switching from the Historic Main Line -- so named for convenience -- to alternate lines. Within definite limits, however. It would be impossible, for example, to Switch into a past the battle of Hastings. The world developing from that event would be too different, alien in every way. Switching was found possible only into closely adjacent lines. The theoretical possibility became a practical necessity in #. In that year, the Sykes-Raborn Calculator at Harvard predicted the complete sterilization of Earth's atmosphere by the accretion of radioactive by-products. The process was irreversible and inevitable. It could be stopped only in the past, where the poisoning had begun. The first Switch was made with the newly developed Adams-HoltMaartens Selector. The World Planning Council chose a line which involved the early death of Vassily Ouchenko (and the obliteration of his erroneous radiationdamage theories). A large part of the subsequent poisoning was avoided, although at the cost of seventy-three lives -- descendants of Ouchenko for whom no Switchparents could be found. After that, there was no turning back. Line Switching became as necessary to the world as disease prevention. But the process had its limitations. A time had to come when no available line would be usable, when all futures looked unfavorable. When that happened, the Planning Council was prepared to use more direct means. A ND those are the consequences for us," Edwin James concluded. "That is the outcome if we allow the Main Historic Line to continue." Lan II said, "Meaning that you predict serious trouble for Earth, Mr. Programmer." "With regret, I do." The Programmer poured himself a glass of water and turned a page in his notebook. "Our pivotal point is Ben Baxter, who dies on April #, #. He must live' at least another ten years for his work to have the desired effect upon world events. In that time, Ben Baxter will purchase Yellowstone National Park from the government. He will continue to maintain it as a park, but will farm the trees. This enterprise will be highly successful. He will buy other great tracts of land in North and South America. The Baxter heirs will be lumber kings for the next two hundred years and will own huge standings throughout the world. Due to their efforts, there will be great forests in the world, up to and including our own time. But if Baxter dies -- " James gestured wearily. "With Baxter dead, the forests will be cut before the governments of the world are fully aware of the conlit sequences. Then comes the great blight of '#, which the few remaining woodlands cannot withstand. And at last the present, with the natural carbon-dioxideoxygen cycle disrupted by the destruction of the trees, with all combustion devices banned, with oxygen inhalers a necessity merely to survive." "We've started the forests again," Aaui said. "It will be hundreds of years before they have grown to any significant size, even with forced growing methods. In the meantime, the balance may become further upset. That is the importance of Ben Baxter to us. He holds the key to the air we breathe!" "Very well," said Dr. Sveg. "The Main Line, in which Baxter dies, is clearly unusable. But there are Alternates -- " "Many," James said. "As usual, most of them cannot be selected. Counting the Main Line, we have a total of three choices. But, imfortunately, each of them results in the death of Ben Baxter on April #, #." The Programmer wiped his forehead. "To be more specific, Ben Baxter dies on the afternoon of April #, #, as a result of a business meeting with a man named Ned Brynne." The new member, Roger Beatty, cleared his throat nervously. "This event takes place in all three probability worlds?" "Yes. In every one of them, Brynne is the cause of Baxter's death." Dr. Sveg came ponderously to his feet. "Formerly, this Council has avoided any direct interference with the existing lines of probability. But this situation seems to call for interference." The council members nodded their agreement. "Let's get down to cases," said Aaui. "For the good of Earth, can this Ned Brynne be Switched Out?" "No," replied the Programmer. "Brynne himself plays a vital role in our future. He has an option on almost a hundred square miles of forest. He needs Baxter's backing to purchase it. If Brynne could be kept from that meeting with Baxter "How?" asked Beatty. "Take your pick," James suggested. "Threats, persuasion, bribery, kidnaping -- any means short of murder. We have three worlds to work in. If we can restrain Brynne in just one of them, our problem is solved." "What would be our best method?" asked Aaui. "Try several, a different one in each probability world," said Miss Chandragore. "Our chances would be best that way. Shall we go ourselves?" "We are best suited for the job," Edwin James said. "We know the factors involved. And politics gives one a certain skill in improvising -- which will be sorely needed in this job. Each team will be absolutely on its own. There is no way for them to check on each other's progress across the time lines." "Each team then," Dr. Sveg summed up, "will have to assume that the other teams fail." "Probably with good reason," James said wryly. "Let's organize the teams and select our methods." I #, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At #:# that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises, and do so on favorable terms... Br # mne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of fanatic pride in his carefully bland eyes, a suggestion of unreasoning stubbornness in his tightly held mouth. His movements had the controlled strength of a man who is constantly watching and judging himself. He was almost ready to leave. iiy He tucked a swagger stick under his arm and slipped a copy of Somerset's American Peerage into his jacket pocket. He was never without that infallible guide. Finally he fixed to his lapel the golden sunburst decoration of his station. Brynne was a Chamberlain, second class, and properly proud of the fact. Some people thought him too young for so exalted a position. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly commoners, but two Equerries as well. All made way for him when the elevator came. "Pleasant day, Chamberlain Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. Brynne inclined his head an inch in the usual response to a commoner. He was deep in thought about Ben Baxter. But at the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a tall, strongly built fellow with golden-brown Polynesian features and tilted dark eyes. Brynne wondered what a man like that was doing in his apartment building. He knew the other tenants by sight, although their lower status naturally made them unworthy of his recognition. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Polynesian fellow. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He strode outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to the Prince Charles Coffee Shop for a late breakfast. It was #:# A.M. "Looks like a tough customer," said Roger Beatty. He inhaled deeply, savoring the rich air. It was a delightful luxury, breathing all the oxygen he wanted. In his time even the very wealthy turned down the oxygen tanks at night. They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, swaggering figure, even in New York's morning rush. "He looked at you in the elevator," Beatty said. "I know." Aaui grinned. "Give him something to worry about." "He doesn't look like a worrying type," Beatty said. "I wish we had more time." Aaui shrugged. "This was the closest we could come to the event. Our next choice would have been eleven years ago. And we would still have to wait until now before taking direct action." "At least we'd know something about Brynne. He doesn't look as though he'll frighten easily." "No, he doesn't," Aaui admitted. "But that's the course of action we selected." They continued to follow, noticing how the crowds parted to make way for Brynne, who marched straight ahead, not looking to right or left. Then it happened. Brynne, his attention turned inward, collided with a portly, florid-faced man, who wore in his lapel the dazzling purple and silver medallion of a First Order Crusader. "Can't you watch where you're going, imbecile?" the Crusader barked. rank, swallowed and muttered, "I beg your pardon, sir." The Crusader wasn't so easily placated. "Do you make a habit of bumping into your betters, sirrah?" "I do not," Brynne said, his face growing red, fighting hard to restrain his rage. A crowd of commoners had gathered to watch. men, grinning and nudging each other. "Then suppose you watch yourself!" the portly Crusader roared. "Stop cluttering the streets like a sleepwalker, before you are taught a lesson in manners!" Brynne said, with deadly quiet, "Sir, if you feel the necessity of giving me such a lesson, I should be pleased to meet you at a place of your choosing, with such weapons as you elect -- " "Me? Meet you?" the Crusader asked incredulously. "My rank permits it, sir." "Your rank? You're a good five degrees beneath me, you simple idiot! Enough of this or I'll send my servants -- who outrank you -- to teach you a lesson in manners. I'll remember your face, young man. Now get out of my way!" And with that, the Crusader pushed past him and stalked away. "Coward!" said Brynne, his face a mottled red. But he said it softly, and the commoners noticed. Brynne turned to them, his hands tightening on his swagger stick. Grinning cheerfully, the crowd broke up. Beatty said, "Dueling is permitted here?" Aaui nodded. "The legal precedent came in #, when Alexander Hamilton killed Aaron Burr in a duel." "I guess we'd better get to work," Beatty said. "But I wish we had more equipment." "We took all we could carry. Let's get on with it." fee Shop, Brynne sat at a table far in the rear. His hands were trembling; with an effort, he controlled them. Damn that First Order Crusader! Lousy, overbearing blowhard! But would he accept a duel? No, of course not. Had to hide behind the privileges of his station. Rage was rising in Brynne, black and ominous. He should have killed the man and the blazes with the consequences! The blazes with everything! No man could step on him that way... Stop it, he told himself. There was nothing he could do about it. He had to think about Ben Baxter and the all-important meeting. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. In two and a half hours, he would be in Baxter's office and -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "Hot chocolate, toast and a poached egg." "French fries?" "If I wanted French fries, I'd have told you!" Brynne shouted. The waiter went pale, gulped, said, "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," and hurried off. Now, Brynne thought. I'm reduced to yelling at commoners. Control -- I must get myself under control. "Ned Brynne!" Brynne started and looked around. He had distinctly heard someone whisper his name. But there was no one within twenty feet of him. "Brynne!" "What is this?" Brynne mutspeaking?" "You're nervous, Brynne, losing control of yourself. You need a rest, a vacation, a change." Brynne went dead whif;e under his tan and looked around the cafe. It was almost empty. There were three old ladies near the front. Beyond them he could see two men, talking together earnestly. "Go home, Brynne, and get some rest. Take some time off while you can" "I have an important business appointment," Brynne said, his voice shaky. "Business before sanity," the voice pointed out mockingly. "Who's talking to me?" "What makes you think someone is talking to you?" the voice asked silkily. "You mean I'm talking to myself?" "You should know."' "Your egg, sir," the waiter said. 'What?" Brynne roared. The waiter stepped hastily back, slopping hot chocolate into the saucer. "Sir?" he quavered. "Don't creep around that way, idiot." The waiter looked at Brynne incredulously, deposited the food and fled. Brynne stared after him suspiciously. "You are in no condition to see anyone" the voice told him. "Go home, get into bed, take a pill, sleep, heal!" "But what's the matter? Why?" "Because your sanity is at stake! This external voice is your mind's last frantic attempt at stability. You can't afford to ignore this warning, Brynne!" "It can't be true!" protested Brynne. "I'm sane. I'm -- " "Beg pardon, sir," said a voice at his elbow. Brynne whirled, prepared to chastise this further intrusion on his privacy. He saw the blue uniform of a policeman looming over him. The man was wearing the white shoulder epaulets of a Noble Lieutenant. said, "Anything wrong, Officer?" "Sir, the waiter and manager tell me you are talking to yourself and threatening violence." "Preposterous," snapped Brynne. "Ifs true! It's true! Yotfre going crazy!" the voice Screamed in his head. Brynne stared at the great square bulk of the policeman. Surely he heard the voice! But apparently the Noble Lieutenant didn't, for he continued to look somberly down at him. "It's not true," Brynne said, feeling secure in staking his word against a commoner's. "I heard you myself," the Noble Lieutenant said. "Well, sir, it's this way," Brynne began, choosing his words with care. "I was -- " The voice shrieked in his head, "Tell him to go to hell, Brynne! Who's he to question you? Who's anyone to question you? Hit him! Blast him! Kill him! Destroy him!" Brynne said, through the barrage of noise in his head, "I was talking to myself, perfectly true. Officer. I frequently think out loud. It helps me to organize my thoughts." The Noble Lieutenant gave a half nod. "But you offered violence, sir, at no provocation." "No provocation! I ask you, sir, are cold eggs no provocation? Are limp toast and spilled chocolate no provocation?" The waiter, called over, insisted, "Those eggs were hot -- " "They were not and that is all. I do not expect to sit here and argue a point of fact with a commoner." "Quite right," the Noble Lieutenant said, nodding emphatically now. "But might I ask you, sir, to curb your anger somewhat, even though it may be perfectly justified? Not too much can be expected of commoners, after all." "I know," Brynne agreed. "By the way, sir -- the purple edging on your epaulets -- are you related to O'Donnel of Moose Lodge, by any chance?" "My third cousin on my mother's side," said the Noble Lieutenant, looking intently now at Brynne's sunburst medallion. "My son has entered the Chamberlain Halls as a probationary. A tall boy named Callahan." "I will remember the name," Brynne promised. "The eggs were hot!" said the waiter. "Don't dispute the word of a gentleman," ordered the officer. "It could get you into serious trouble. Pleasant day to you, sir." The Noble Lieutenant saluted and left. Brynne paid and left shortly after him. He deposited a sizable tip for the waiter, but determined never to come into the Prince Charles again. Aaui said bitterly, putting the tiny microphone back in his pocket. "For a moment, I thought we had him." "We would have, if he'd had any latent doubts about his sanity. Well, now for something more direct. Got the equipment?" Aaui took two pairs of brass knuckles out of his pocket and handed one to Beatty. "Try not to lose it," he said. "We're supposed to return it to the Primitive Museum." "Right. It fits over the fist, doesn't it? Oh, yes, I see." They paid and hurried out.  Brynne decided to take a stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. Those voices in his head... Was he really losing his grip? An uncle on his mother's side had spent his last years in an institution. Involutional melancholia. Was there some explosive hidden factor at work in him? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus... Where was it going? Italy, perhaps. He thought of blue skies, ation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. Even if it meant losing his mind, he would continue to labor under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping eversthing, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a determined, strong man. If he had the guts to succeed in business, he also had the guts to leave it, to drop everything and go away. "To hell with Baxter!" he said to himself. His sanity was more important than anything. He would board that ship, right now, wire his associates from sea, tell them -- IWO men were walking toward him down the deserted street. He recognized one by his goldenbrown Polynesian features. "Mr. Brynne?" inquired the other, a rangy fellow with a shock of brown hair. "Yes?" said Brynne. Without warning, the Polynesian threw both arms around him, pinning him, and the shock-haired man swung at him with a fist that glinted golden! Brynne's keyed-up nerves reacted with shattering speed. He had been a Knight Rampant during the Second World Crusade. Now, years later, all the reaction patterns were still there. He ducked the shock-haired man's blow and drove his elbow into the Polynesian's stomach. The man grunted and his grip relaxed for a second. Brynne broke free. He chopped at the Polynesian with the back of his hand, hitting the nerve trunk in the throat. The man went down, gasping for breath. At the same time, the shock-haired man was on him, raining brass-knuckled blows. Brynne lashed out, missed, caught a solid punch in the solar plexus. He fought for air. Blackness began edging into the periphery of his vision. He was hit again and went down, fighting for consciousness. Then his opponent made a mistake. The shock-haired man tried to finish him with a kick, but he didn't know how to kick. Brynne caught his foot and jerked. Off balance, the man crashed to the pavement, striking his head. Brynne staggered to his feet, breathing hard. The Polynesian was sprawled in the road, his face purple, making feeble swimming movements with his arms and legs. The other man lay motionless, blood seeping slowly through his hair. He should report this incident to the police, Brynne thought. But suppose he had killed the shockhaired man? He would be held on a manslaughter charge, at least. And the Noble Lieutenant would report his earlier irrational behavior. He looked around. No one had witnessed the incident. It was best to simply walk away. Let his assailants report it, if they wanted to. Things were falling into place now. These men must have been hired by one of his many business competitors, men who were also trying for an affiliation with Ben Baxter. Even the voice in his head might have been a clever trick. Well, let them try to stop him! Still breathing heavily, he began walking toward Ben Baxter's office. All thoughts of a cruise to Italy were gone now. A RE you all right?" a voice asked from somewhere up above. Beatty returned slowly to consciousness. For a short, alarmed while, he thought he had a fractured skull. But, touching it gently, he decided it was still in one piece. "What did he hit me with?" he asked. "The pavement, I think," Aaui said. "Sorry I couldn't help. He put me out of action pretty early." Beatty sat up, clutching his aching head. "What a fighter!" "We underestimated him," said Aaui. "He must have had some kind of training. Do you think you can walk?" "I think so," Beatty said, letting Aaui help him to his feet. "What time is it?" "Nearly one o'clock. His appointment's at one-thirty. Maybe we can stop him at Baxter's office." In five minutes, they caught a taxi and sped to Baxter's building. The receptionist was young and pretty, and she stared at them open-mouthed. They had managed to clean up some of the damage in the taxi, but what remained looked pretty bad. Beatty had an improvised bandage over his head and Aaui's complexion bordered on green. "What do you want?" the receptionist asked. "I believe Mr. Baxter has a one-thirty appointment with Mr. Brynne," said Aaui in his most businesslike tone. "Yes The wall clock read one-seventeen. Aaui said, "We must see Mr. Brynne before he goes in. It's very urgent. So if you don't mind, we'll wait here for him." "You can wait," the girl said. "But Mr. Brynne has already gone in." "But it isn't one-thirty yet!" "Mr. Brynne was early. Mr. Baxter decided to see him at once." "I must speak to him," Aaui said. "I have orders not to disturb them." The girl looked frightened and her finger hovered over a button on her desk. Aaui knew that the button would probably summon help. A man like Baxter would have protection near at all times. The meeting was taking place now, and he didn't dare interfere. Perhaps his actions had changed the course of events. It seemed likely. The Brynne in that office was a different man, a man altered by his adventures of the morning. "It's all right," Aaui said to the receptionist. "We'll just sit here and wait." bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe, and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and-pearls emblem of the Wall Street House of Lords. For half an hour, Brynne had talked, spread papers on Baxter's desk, quoted figures?, mentioned trends, predicted movements. He was perspiring anxiously now, waiting for a word out of Baxter. "Hmm," said Ben Baxter. Brynne waited. His temples were pounding with a steady, dull ache and he was having trouble with the tight knots in his stomach. It was years since he had fought in anger; he wasn't used to it. He hoped he could control himself until the meeting was over. "The terms you request," said Baxter, "are just short of preposterous." "Sir?" "Preposterous was the word, Mr. Brynne. You are, perhaps, hard of hearing?" "No," said Brynne. "Excellent. These terms you present might be suitable for negotiation between two companies of equal holdings. But such is not the case, Mr. Brynne. It amounts to presumption that a company of your size should offer such terms to Baxter Enterprises." Brynne's eyes narrowed. He had heard about Baxter's reputation for in-fighting. This was not personal insult, he reminded himself. It was the kind of business maneuver that he himself had often used. It must be .dealt with as such. "Let me point out," Brynne said, "the key nature of this forest area I have an option on. With sufficient capitalization, we could extend the holding enormously, to say nothing -- " "Hopes, dreams, promises," Baxter sighed. "You may have something worth while. As yet, it is inadequately demonstrated." This is business, Brynne reminded himself. He does want to back me -- I can tell. I expected to come down in the bargaining. Naturally. All he's doing is beating down the terms. Nothing personal... But too much had happened to Brynne in one day. The red-faced Crusader, the voice in the restaurant, his short-lived dream of freedom, the fight with the two men -- he knew he couldn't take much more. "Suppose, Mr. Brynne," said Baxter, "you make a more reasonable offer. One in keeping with the modest and subsidiary status of your holdings." He's testing me, Brynne thought. But it was too much. He was as nobly born as Baxter; how dare the man treat him this way? "Sir," he said through numb lips, "I take exception." "Eh?" said Baxter, and Brynne thought he glimpsed amusement in the cold eyes. "What do you take exception to?" "Your statements, sir, and the maimer in which you say them. I suggest you apologize."  waited. His head was pounding inhumanly now and his stomach refused to unknot itself. "I see nothing for which to apologize, sir," said Baxter. "And I see no reason to deal with a man who cannot keep personalities out of a business discussion." He's right, Brynne thought. I'm the one who should apologize. But he could not stop. Desperately he said, "I warn you -- apologize, sir!" "We can do no business this way," said Baxter. "And frankly, Mr. Brynne, I had hoped to do business with you. I will try to speak in a reasonable manner, if you will try to react in an equally reasonable marmer. I ask you to withdraw your request for an apology and let us get on." "I can't!" Brynne said, wishing passionately he could. "Apologize, sir!" Baafter stood up, short and powerfully built. He stepped out from behind the desk, his face dark with anger. "Get out of here then, you insolent yoimg dog! Get out or I'll have you thrown out, you hot-headed fool! Get out!" Br#mne, wishing to apologize, thought of the red-faced Crusader, the waiter, his two assailants. Something snapped in him. He lashed out with all his strength, the weight of his body behind the blow. It caught Baxter full in the neck and slammed him against the desk. Eyes glazed, Baxter slumped to the floor. "I'm sorry!" Brynne cried. "I apologize! I apologize!" He knelt beside Baxter. "Are you all right, sir? I'm truly sorry. I apologize..." A part of his mind, coldly functioning, told him that he had been caught in an unresolvable ambivalence. His need for action had been as strong as his need to apologize. And so he had solved the dilemma by trying to do both things, in the usual ambivalent muddle. He had struck -- then apologized. "Mr. Baxter?" he called in alarm. Ben Baxter's features were congested and blood drooled from a corner of his mouth. Then Brynne noticed that Baxter's head lay at a queer angle from his body. "Oh..." Brynne said. He had served three years with the Knights Rampant. It was not the first broken neck he had seen. II #, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At #:# that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, the president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises, and do so on favorable terms... Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of deep gentleness in his carefuly bland eyes, a suggestion of uncompromising piety in his expressive mouth. His movements had the loose grace of an unselfconscious man. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked a prayer stick under his arm and slipped a copy of Norsted's Guide to the Gentle Way into his pocket. He was never without that infallible guide. Finally he fixed to his lapel the silver moon decoration of his station. Brynne was a Restrainer, second class, of the Western Buddhist Congregation, and he allowed himself a carefully restrained pride over the fact. Some people thought him too young for lay-priestly duties. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly Western Buddhists, but two Lamaists as well. All made way for him when the elevator came. "Pleasant day. Brother Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. Brynne inclined his head an inch in the usual modest response to a member of the flock. He was deep in thought about Ben Baxter. But at the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a slim, beautiful, blackhaired woman with a piquant golden face. Indian, Brynne thought, wondering what a woman like that was doing in his apartment building. He knew the other tenants by sight, though, of course, he would not be sufficiently immodest to recognize them. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Indian woman. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He stepped outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to the Golden Lotus Coffee Shop for a late breakfast. It was #:# a.m. breathe this air forever!" said Janna Chandragore. Lan II smiled faintly. "Perhaps We can breathe it in our own age. How does he seem to you?" "Smug and over-righteous," she Said. They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, stooped figure, even in New York's morning rush. "He absolutely stared at you in the elevator," said Lan II. "I know." She smiled. "He's rather nice-looking, don't you think?" Lan II raised both eyebrows, but didn't comment. They continued to follow, noticing how the crowds parted out of respect for Brynne's rank. Then it happened. Brynne, his attention turned inward, collided with a portly, florid-faced man who wore the yellow robe of a Western Buddhist priest. "My apologies for violating your meditation. Young Brother," said the priest. "My fault entirely. Father," Brynne said. "For it is written, 'Youth should know its footsteps.' " The priest shook his head. "In youth," he said, "resides the dream of the future; and age must make way." "Age is our guide and signposts along the Way," Brynne objected humbly but insistently. "The writings are clear on the point." "If you accept age," said the priest, his lips tightening slightly, "then accept the dictum of age: youth must forge ahead! Kindly do not contradict me. Dear Brother." Brynne, his eyes carefully bland, bowed deeply. The priest bowed in return and the men continued their separate ways. Brynne walked more quickly, his hands tight on his prayer stick. Just like a priest -- using his age as a support for arguments in favor of youth. There were some strange contradictions in Western Buddhism, but Brynne did not care to think about them at the moment. He went into the Golden Lotus Coffee Shop and sat down at a table far in the rear. He fingered the intricate carvings on his prayer stick and felt anger wash away from him. Almost immediately, he regained that serene and unruffled union of mind with emotions so vital to the Gentle Way. Now was the time to think about Ben Baxter. After all, a man had to perform his temporal duties as well as his religious ones. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. In two and a half hours, he would be in Baxter's office and -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "A glass of water and some dried fish, if you please," said Brynne. "French fries?" "Today is Visya. It is not allowed," Brynne murmured softly. The waiter went pale, gulped, said, "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," and hurried off. feel ridiculous, thought Brynne. I should simply have refused the French fries. Should I apologize to the man? He decided it would simply embarrass him. Resolutely Brynne put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on Ben Baxter. With Baxter's power behind the forest area Brynne had optioned, and its potential, there was no telling -- He became conscious of a disturbance at a nearby table. He turned and saw a golden-featured woman weeping bitterly into a tiny lace handkerchief. She was the woman he had seen earlier in his apartment building. With her was a small, wizened old man, who was trying in vain to console her...As the woman wept, she cast a despairing glance at Brynne. There was only one thing a Restrainer could do under the circumstances. He walked over to their table. "Excuse the intrusion," he said. "I couldn't help notice your distress. Perhaps you are strangers in the city. Can I help?" "We are past help!" the woman wailed. The old man shrugged his shoulders fatalistically. Brynne hesitated, then sat down at their table. "Tell me," he begged. "No problem is unsolvable. It is written that there is a path through all jungles and a trail over the steepest mountains." "Truly spoken," the old man assented. "But sometimes the feet of Man cannot reach the trail's end." "At such times," Brynne replied, "each helps each and the deed is done. Tell me your trouble. I will serve you in any way I can." In actual fact, this was more than a Restrainer was required to do. Total service was the obligation of higher-ranking priests. But Brynne was swept away by the woman's need and beauty, and the words were out before he could consider them. " 'In the heart of a young man is strength,' " quoted the old man, " 'and a staff for weary arms.' But tell me, sir, are you a believer in religious toleration?" "Absolutely!" said Brynne. "It is one of the essential tenets of Western Buddhism." "Very well. Then know, sir, that my daughter Janna and I are from Lhagrama in India, where we serve the Daritria Incarnation of the Cosmic Function. We came here to America hoping to found a small temple. Unfortunately, the schismatics of the Marii Incarnation have arrived before us. My daughter must return to her home. But our lives are threatened momentarily by these Marii fanatics, who are sworn to stamp out the Daritria faith." "But your lives can't be in danger here!" Brynne exclaimed. "Not in the heart of New York." "Here more than anjrwhere else," said Janna. "For crowds are cloak and mask to the assassin." "I shall not live long in any event," the old man said with serene unconcern. "I must remain here and complete my work. It is so written. But I wish my daughter to return safely to her home." "I won't go without you!" Janna cried. "You will do as you are told!" the old man said. from his steely black eyes. The old man turned to Brynne. "Sir, this afternoon a ship sails for India. My daughter needs a man, a strong, true man, to guide and protect her, to bring her home. My fortune must go to the man who performs this sacred duty for me." "I can hardly believe this," said Brynne, suddenly struck with doubt. "Are you sure -- " As if in answer, the old man pulled a small chamois bag from his pocket and spilled its contents on the tablecloth. Brynne was not an expert in gems, though he had had some dealings with them as a religious-instruction officer in the Second World Jehad. Still, he was sure he recognized the true fire of ruby, sapphire, diamond and emerald. "They are yours," said the old man. "Take them to a jewelry store. When their authenticity is verified, perhaps you will believe the rest of my story. Or if these are not sufficient proof -- " From another pocket, he pulled a thick billfold and handed it to Brynne. Opening it, Brynne saw that it was stuffed with high-denomination bills. "Any bank will verify their authenticity," said the old man. "No, please, I insist. Keep it all. Believe me, it is only a portion of what I would like to bestow upon you for rendering me this sacred trust." It was overwhelming. Brynne tried to remind himself that the gems could conceivably be clever fakes and the bills could be superb forgeries. But he knew they were not. They were real. And if this wealth, so casually given, was real, then didn't the rest of the story have to be true? It would not be the first time a miraculous fairy-tale adventure happened in real life. Wasn't the Book of Golden Replies filled with similar incidents? He looked at the beautiful, sorrowful, golden-featured woman. A great desire came over him to bring joy to those exquisite features, to make that tragic mouth smile. And in the way she looked at him, Brynne perceived more than simply the interest one gives to a protector. "Sir!" cried the old man. "Is it possible that you might -- that you might consider -- " "I'll do it!" said Brynne. 'IHE old man clasped Brynne's hand. Janna simply looked at him, but he had the sensation of being enfolded into a warm embrace. "You must leave at once," the old man said briskly. "Come, there's no time to lose. Even now, the enemy lurks in the shadows." "But my clothes -- " "Unimportant. I will provide you with a wardrobe." " -- and friends, business appointments. Wait! Hold on a minute!" Brynne took a deep breath. Haroun al Rashid adventures were all very well, but they had to be undertaken in a reasonable fashion. "I have a business appointment this afternoon," Brynne said. "I must keep it. After that. I'm completely at your service." "The danger to Janna is too great!" cried the old man. "You'll both be perfectly safe, I assure you. You can even accompany me there. Or better yet, I've got a cousin on the police force. I'm sure I can arrange for a bodyguard -- " Janna turned her beautiful sad face away from him. The old man said, "Sir, the ship sails at one P.M. -- at one precisely." "Those ships leave every day or so," Brynne pointed out. "Let's catch the next one. This appointment is very important. Crucial, you might say. I've worked for years to arrange it. And it's not just me. I have a business, employees, associates. For their sake, I have to keep that appointment." "Business before life," the old man said bitterly. "You'll be all righV' Brynne assured him. "It is written, you know, that the beast of the jungle shies from the tread -- " "I know what is written. The word of death is painted large upon my forehead, and upon my daughter's, unless you aid us now. She will be on the Theseus in stateroom # A. The next stateroom, #A, will be yours. The ship sails at one this afternoon. If you value her life, sir, you will be there." The old man and his daughter stood up, paid and left, ignoring Brynne's pleas for reason. As she went out the door, Janna turned for a moment and gazed at him. "Your dried fish, sir," said the waiter. He had been hovering near, waiting for a chance to serve it. "To hell with it!" Brynne shouted. "Oh, sorry, sorry," he said in dismay to the shocked waiter. "No fault of yours." He paid, leaving a sizable tip for the waiter, and hurried out. He had a lot of thinking to do. LL the energy expended on that one scene," Lan II complained, "has probably cost me ten years of my life." "You loved every minute of it," said Janna Chandragore. "True, true," Lan II admitted, nodding vigorously. He sipped a glass of wine that a steward had brought to the stateroom. "The question now is -- will he give up his appointment with Baxter and come?" "He does seem to like me," Janna said. "Which shows his excellent taste." She inclined her head mockingly. "But really, that story! Was it necessary to make it so -- so outrageous?" "Absolutely necessary. Brynne is a strong and dedicated man, but he has his romantic streak. Nothing less than a fairy tale to match his gaudiest dream could pull him from duty's path." "Perhaps even a fairy tale won't," Janna said thoughtfully. 'We'll see," said Lan II. "Personally, I believe he will come." "I don't." "You imderestimate your attractiveness and acting ability, my dear. Wait and see." "I have no choice," said Janna, settling back in an arm chair. The desk clock read #:#.    Brynne decided to take a stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. That magnificent sorrowful girl... But what about his duty, the labor of faithful employees, to be culminated and completed this afternoon at the desk of Ben Baxter? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus. He thought of India, its blue laxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. Even if it meant losing the most beautiful woman in the world, he would continue to labor under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself, touching the chamois bag in his pocket. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a strong, determined man. If he had the faith and will to succeed in business, he also had the faith and will to leave it, drop everything, and fallow his heart. "To hell with Baxter!" he said to himself. The girl's safety was more important than anything. He would board that ship, and right now, wire his associates from sea, tell them -- The decision was made. He whirled and marched to the gangplank and resolutely climbed it. An officer on the deck smiled and said, "Name, sir?" "Ned Brynne." "Brynne, Brynne." The officer checked his list. "I don't seem to -- Oh, yes, right here. Yes, Mr. Brynne. You're on A deck, cabin #. Let me wish you a most pleasant trip." "Thank you," Brynne said, glancing at his watch. It read a quarter to one. "By the way," he said to the officer, "what time does the ship sail?". "At four-thirty sharp, sir." "Four-thirty? Are you sure?" "Quite sure, Mr. Brynne." "But I was told you sailed at one o'clock." "That was the original time, sir. But sailing time is often advanced a few hours. We'll easily make it up at sea." Four-thirty! Yes, he had enough time! He could go back, see Ben Baxter and still return in time to catch the ship! Both problems were solved! Murmuring a blessing to a mysterious but benevolent fate, Brynne turned and sprinted down the gangplank. He was fortunate enough to catch a taxi at once. bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and-pearls emblem of the Humble Servitors of Wall Street. For half an hour, Brynne had talked, mentioned trends, predicted movements. He was perspiring anxiously now, waiting for a word out of' Baxter. "Hmm," said Ben Baxter. Brynne waited. His pulse was pounding heavily and his empty stomach was beginning to churn. Half his mind was on the Theseus, sailing soon. He wanted to end this meeting and get aboard. "The merger terms you request," said Baxter, "are quite satisfactory." "Sir?" breathed Brynne. "Satisfactory, I said. Haven't got trouble with your hearing, have you, Brother Brynne?" "Not for news like that," said Brynne, grinning. "Our affiliation," Baxter said, smiling, "promises a great future for us both. I'm a direct man, Brynne, and I want to tell you this directly: I like the way you've handled the surveys and data and I like the way you've handled this meeting. Moreover, I like you personally. I am most happy about this and believe our association will prosper." "I sincerely believe so, sir." They shook hands and both men stood up. "My lawyers will draw up the papers," Baxter said, "in accordance with this discussion. You should have them by the end of the week." "Excellent." Brynne hesitated, wondering if he should tell Baxter he was going to India. He decided not to. It would be simple to arrange for receipt of the papers on the Theseus and he could carry out the final details by longdistance telephone. He wouldn't be gone too long, anyhow -- just long enough to see the girl safely home; then he would fly back. They exchanged a few more pleasantries, shook hands again and Brynne turned to leave. "That's a fine-looking prayer stick," Baxter said. "Eh? Oh, yes," said Brynne. "I got it from Sinkiang just this week. They make the finest prayer sticks there, in my unworthy opinion." "I know. May I look at it?" "Of course. Please be careful, though. It opens rather fast." Baxter took the intricately carved prayer stick and pressed the handle. A blade shot out of the other end, narrowly grazing his leg. "It is fast!" Baxter said. "Fastest I've seen." "Did you cut yourself?" "A mere scratch. Beautiful damascene work on that blade." They talked for a few minutes about the threefold significance of the knife blade in Western Buddhism and of recent developments in the Western Buddhist spiritual center in Sinkiang. Then Baxter carefully closed the prayer stick and returned it to Brynne. "A truly beautiful thing. Good day again, Dear Brother Brynne, and -- " Baxter halted in mid-sentence. His mouth was open and he seemed to be staring at a point just in back of Brynne's head. Brynne turned, but nothing was there except the wall. When he turned back, Baxter's features were congested and a light froth had gathered at the corners of his mouth. "Sir!" cried Brynne. Baxter tried to speak, but couldn't. He took two tottering steps forward and collapsed to the floor. Brynne rushed to the receptionist's office. "Call a doctor! Quick! Quick!" he shouted to the frightened girl. Then he rushed back to Baxter. He was looking at the first American case of the mutated disease that was to be called the S'nkiang Plague. Transmitted on a hundred contaminated prayer sticks, it would go through New York like a flash fire, leaving a the week, the symptoms of Sinkiang Plague would be better known than those of measles. But Brynne was looking at the first casualty. With horror, he stared at the of Baxter's hands and face. Ill #, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At #:# that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, the president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises and do so on favorable terms... Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of thoughtfulness in his carefully bland eyes, a look of mise in his relaxed mouth. His movements had the careless surety of a man who knows his place in the world. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked an umbrella under his arm and slipped a paperbound copy of Murder on the Metro into his pocket. He was never without a good mystery of some sort. Finally he fixed to his laoal the small onyx pin of a Commodore the Ocean Cruising Club. Some people thought him too young for such an honor. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly shopkeepers, but two businessmen as well. "Pleasant day, Mr. Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. "Hope so," Brynne said, deep in thought about Ben Baxter. At the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a great blond Viking of a man, talking to a tiny, half-bald fellow. Brynne wondered what they were doing in his apartment building. He knew most of the tenants by sight, though he hadn't lived in the building long enough to get acquainted with them. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Viking. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He stepped outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to Childs' for breakfast. It was #:# A.M. " Dr. Sveg. "He looks ordinary enough," said Edwin James. "He even looks reasonable. We'll find out." They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, erect figure, even in New York's morning rush. "I am certainly not one to advocate violence," said Dr. Sveg. "But this time -- why don't we knock him over the head and be done with it?" "That method was selected by Aaui and Beatty. Miss Chandragore and Lan II decided to try bribery. We are committed to a course of reason." "But suppose he can't be reasoned with, what then?" James shrugged his shoulders. "I don't like it," Dr. Sveg said. Following half a block behind, they saw Brynne collide with a portly, florid-faced businessman. "Sorry," said Brynne. "Sorry," said the portly businessman. They exchanged perfunctory nods and went on. Brynne went into Childs' and sat down at an empty table in the rear. Now was the time to think of Ben Baxter and of what the best approach would be -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him.' "Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee," Brynne said. "French fries?" "No, thanks." The waiter hurried off. Brynne concentrated on Ben Baxter. With Baxter's financial and political backing of the forest deal, there was no telling -- "Excuse me, sir," a voice said. "May we talk to you?" Brynne looked up and saw the blond man and his small friend whom he had seen in the elevator. "What about?" "A matter of the utmost urgency, sir," said the small man. Brynne glanced at his watch. It was almost #:#. He had two and a half hours before his meeting with Baxter. "Sure, sit down," he invited. "What's on your mind?" The men looked at each other and exchanged embarrassed smiles. Finally the small man cleared his throat. "Mr. Brynne," he said, "I am Edwin Jarnes. This is my associate, Dr. Sveg. We have a preposterous sounding story to tell, which I hope you will hear to the end without interruptions. After that, we have certain proofs that may or may not convince you of the story's authenticity." Brynne frowned, wondering what kind of crackpots he had met. But both men were well dressed, quietly spoken. "Sure, go ahead," Brynne said. later, Brynne was saying, "Wow! That's quite a little yarn!" "I know," Dr. Sveg said apologetically. "Our proofs -- " " -- are impressive. Let me see that first gadget again." Sveg handed it to him. Brynne stared reverently at the small, shining object. "Boys, if a thing that size can really turn out heat or cold in those quantities -- the electrical corporations would give a couple "It is a product of our technology," said Chief Programmer James, "as are the other gadgets. With the exception of the motrifier, they are all straight-line developments, refinements of present trends." "And that thallasator. Nice, simple, inexpensive way of extracting fresh water from salt." He looked at the two men. "It is possible, of course, that these items are a hoax." Dr. Sveg raised both eyebrows. "But I'm not exactly untrained in science. Even if they're a hoax, they'd have to be every bit as advanced as the real thing. I guess you've sold me. Men from the future! Well, well!" "Then you accept what we say about you?" James asked. "And about Ben Baxter and time-line selection?" "Well..." Brynne thought hard. "Tentatively." "Will you cancel your appointment with Baxter?" "I don't know." "Sir?" "I said I don't know. You've got a lot of nerve," Brynne said angrily. "I've worked like a galley slave, driving toward this goal. This meeting is the biggest chance I've ever had or ever will have. And you ask me to give up all that because of some nebulous prediction -- " "The prediction isn't nebulous," James said. "It is very explicit and most precise." "Look, there's more involved than just me. I have a business, employees, associates, stockholders. I have to keep this meeting for their sake, too." "Mr. Brynne," said Sveg, "consider the larger issues at stake!" "Yeah, sure," Brynne said sourly. "How about those other teams you talked about? Maybe I've been stopped in some other probability world." "You haven't." "How do you know?" "I couldn't say so to the teams," Chief Programmer James said, "but the probability of their success was vanishingly small -- just as the probability of my success with you is small, statistically." "Hell," said Brynne, "you guys come dropping out of the future and casually ask a man to change his entire life. You haven't got the right!" "If you could postpone the appointment for a single day," Dr. Sveg suggested, "that might -- " "You don't postpone appointments with Ben Baxter. Either you keep the one he's given you or you wait -- maybe forever -- until he gives you another." Brynne stood up. "Look, I don't know what I'm going to do. I've heard you, I more or less believe you, but I just don't know. I'll have to make up my own mind." Dr. Sveg and James also stood up. "That is your privilege," said Chief Programmer James. "Goodby. I hope you make the right decision, Mr. Brynne." They shook hands. Brynne hurried out. Dr. Sveg and James watched him go. Sveg said, "What do you think? It looks favorable, doesn't it? Don't you think so?" "I can't guess," James said. "The possibility of altering events within a time-line is never favorable. I honestly have no idea of what he's going to do." Dr. Sveg shook his head, then sniffed. "Some air, eh?" "Quite," said Chief Programmer James. stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. That ridiculous story... In which he believed. But what about his duty, the years spent working his way up to optioning that huge forest tract, its tremendbus possibilities to be culminated and completed this afternoon at the desk of Ben Baxter? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus... He thought of the Caribbean, wine, relaxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. No matter what the loss, he would continue to work under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the svm? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a strong, determined man. If he had the guts to succeed in business, he also had the guts to leave it, drop everything, and follow his heart. And in that way, the ridiculous damned future would be safe. "To hell with Ben Baxter!" he said to himself. But he didn't mean it. The future was just too uncertain, too far away. This whole thing might well be an elaborate hoax, arranged by a business competitor. Let the future take care of itself! Ned Brynne turned abruptly away from the Theseus. He had to hurry to make his appointment with Baxter on time. In Baxter's building, riding up in the elevator, Brynne tried not to think. It was enough simply to act. He got off at the #th floor and walked up to the receptionist. "My name is Brynne. I have an appointment with Mr. Baxter." "Yes, Mr. Brynne. Mr. Baxter is expecting you. You can go right in." Brynne didn't move. A wave of doubt flooded his mind and he thought of the future generations, whose chances he was damaging by his act. He thought of Dr. Sveg and Chief Programmer Edwin James, earnest, well-meaning men. They wouldn't ask him to make such a sacrifice unless it was absolutely essential. And he considered one thing more -- Among those future generations would be descendants of his own. "You may go in, sir," the girl said. Abruptly, something snapped in Brynne's mind. "I've changed my mind," he said, in a voice he hardly recognized. "I'm canceling the appointment. Tell Baxter I'm sorry -- about everything." He turned, before he could change his mind, and ran down sixteen flights of stairs. World Planning Council, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around a long table, waiting for Edwin James. He entered, a small man, impressively ugly. "Reports," he said. Aaui, looking somewhat the worse for wear, told about their attempt at violence and its result. "Perhaps," he concluded, "if we had been conditioned to use more violence -- faster -- we could have stopped him." "And perhaps not," said Beatty, who looked considerably worse than Aaui. Lan II reported the partial success and total failure of his mission with Miss Chandragore. Brynne had agreed to accompany them to India, even if it meant giving up the meeting with Baxter. Unfortunately, Brynne had found himself able to do both things. Lan II ended with several philosophical comments about the shockingly flexible schedules of steamship companies. Chief Programmer James stood up. "The future we were selecting for was one in whose past Ben Baxter lived to complete his work of buying forests. That, unfortunately, is not to be. Our best line, under the circumstances, is the Main Historic Line, in which Dr. Sveg and I bent our efforts." "You haven't reported yet," Miss Chandragore said. "What happened?" "Reason," said Edwin James, "and an appeal to the intelligence seem to be the best operating procedures. After due thought, Brynne decided not to keep his appointment with Ben Baxter. But bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-andrpearls emblem of the Wall Street Club. He had been sitting motionless for half an hour now, thinking about figures, trends, movements. His buzzer sounded. "Yes, Miss Cassidy?" "Mr. Brynne was here. He just left." "What do you mean?" "I really don't understand it,. Mr. Baxter. He came up and said he wanted to cancel his appointment." "What did he say? Repeat it exactly, Miss Cassidy." "He said he had an appointment with you and I said he could go right in. And he stood there looking at me very strangely, frowning. He seemed angry and upset. I told him again he could go in. Then he said -- " "Word for word now. Miss Cassidy." "Yes, sir. He said, 'I've changed my mind. I'm canceling the appointment. Tell Baxter I'm sorry -- for everything.' " "That's all he said?" "Every last word, Mr. Baxter." "And then?" "He turned and hurried downstairs." "Stairs?" "Yes, Mr. Baxter. He didn't wait for the elevator." "I see." "Is there anything else, Mr. Baxter?" "No, nothing else, Miss Cassidy. Thank you." n-ii Baxter turned off the intercom and slumped wearily behind his desk. So Hrynne knew! I I was the only possible explanalion. Word must have gotten out somehow, somewhere. He had tlioiiKhl it was safely hidden for allot lici day, at least. But there must liave been a leak. Maxlcr smiled grimly to himself. Hi' couldn't blame Brynne, though the man should at least have talked to him. But perhaps not. Maybe it was best this way. But how had he found out? Who had broken the news to him that the Baxter industrial empire was hollow, decaying, crumbling at the foundations? If only the news could have been concealed for another day, another few hours! He would have signed with Brynne. A fresh venture would have pumpied new blood into the Baxter holdings. By the time people found out, he would once again have had a solid base from which to operate. Bryrme knew and had been scared off. That meant everyone knew. There was no holding things together now. The wolves would be at him. His friends, his wife, his partners and all the little people who had depended upon him... Well, he had decided years ago what to do in this eventuality. Without hesitation, Baxter opened his desk drawer and took out a small bottle. He extracted two white tablets. He had always lived by his own rules. Now was the time to die by them. Ben Baxter popped the pills into his mouth. In two minutes, he slumped forward on the desk. His death precipitated the great stock market crash of '#. 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Greenberg # Plague Ship by North # Coming of Conan by Howard # Conan the Barbarian by Howard... # Sword of Conan by Howard # King Conan by Howard # Conan the Conqueror by Howard... # Tales of Conan by de Camp  Howard # tk postage outside the U. S. I enclose  for books checked. Name Address  Check this box if you want free catalog listing still more titles at these bargain prices! Time Waits for Winthrop Winthrop was literally the most stubborn and selfish man in five hundred years -- how could they convince him not to strand them in this society of Shriek Fields and Panic Stadiums? there -- Winthrop was stubborn. Mrs. Brucks stared wildly at her three fellow-visitors from the twentieth century. "But he's got to think of us, too! He can't leave us stuck in this crazy world!" Dave Pollock shrugged the shoulders of the conservative gray suit that clashed so mightily with the decor of the twenty-fifth-century room. He was a thin, nervous young man whose hands had a tendency to perspire. "He says we should be grateful. But whether we are or aren't grateful isn't important to him. He's staying." "That means we have to stay," Mrs. Brucks said. "Doesn't he understand that?" Pollock spread his moist palms helplessly. "What difference does it make? He likes the twenty-fifth century. I argued with him for two hours and I've never seen anyone so stubborn. I can't budge him." "Why don't you talk to him, Mrs. Brucks?" Mary Ann Carthington suggested. "He's been nice to you. Maybe you could make him act sensible." "Hm." Mrs. Brucks patted her hairdo which, after two weeks in the future, was beginning to get straggly. "You think so? Mr. Mead, you think it's a good idea?" The fourth person in the oval room, a stoutish middle-aged man, considered the matter for a moment. "Can't do any harm. Might work. And we've got to do something." "All right. So I'll try." within her grandmotherly soul. To the others, Winthrop and she were the "old folks" -- both over fifty. Therefore they should be able to communicate more easily. The fact that Winthrop was ten years her senior meant little to Mr. Mead's forty-six years, less to Dave Pollock's thirty-four and in all probability was completely meaningless to Mary Ann Carthington's twenty. One of the "old folks" should be able to talk sense to the other, they were thinking. What could they see, from the bubbling distance of youth, of the chasms that separated Winthrop from Mrs. Brucks even more finally than the others? It was unimportant to them that he was a tight and unemotional old bachelor, while she was the warm and gossipy mother of six children, the grandmother of two, with her silver wedding anniversary proudly behind her. She and Winthrop had barely exchanged a dozen sentences with each other since they'd arrived in the future; they had disliked each other from the moment they had met in Washington at the time-travel finals. But -- Winthrop was stubborn. That fact remained. Mr. Mead had roared his best executive-type roars at him. Mary Ann Carthington had tried to jog his senility with her lush, young figure and most fluttery voice. Even Dave Pollock, an educated man, a high school science teacher, had talked his heart out to him and been unable to make him budge. Someone had to change Winthrop's mind or they'd all be stuck in the future, here in this horrible twenty-fifth century. Even if she hated it more than anything she'd had to face in a lifetime of troubles, it was up to Mrs. Brucks. She rose and shook out the wrinkles in the expensive black dress her proud husband had purchased in Lord  Taylor's the day before the group had left. Try to tell Sam that it was pure luck that she had been chosen, just a matter of fitting the physical specifications in the message from the future! Sam wouldn't listen: he'd probably boasted all over the shop, to all the other cutters with whom he worked, about his Wife -- one of five people selected in the whole United States to make a trip five hundred years into the future. Would Sam still be boasting when the six o'clock deadline passed that night and she didn't return? This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and reached her nose. Mary Ann Carthington crooned sympathetically, "Shall I call for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?" "I'm crazy?" Mrs. Brucks shot back angrily. "A little walk down the hall, I need that headachemaker? A little walk I can walk."  idly, before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing. But she paused and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she'd spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls: here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century. Then she swallowed hard and closed the door behind her. She walked hurriedly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side. At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in distaste, to the square. "Mr. Winthrop?" "Well, well, if it isn't Mrs. Brucks!" the square boomed back at her. "Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks." The patch of yellow showed a tiny hole in the center which dilated rapidly into a doorway. She stepped through gingerly, as if there might be a drop of several stories on the other side. The room was shaped like a long, narrow isosceles triangle. There was no furniture in it, and no other exits, except for what an occasional yellow square suggested. Streaks of color chased themselves fluently along the walls and ceilings and floors, shifting up and down the spectrum, from pinkish gray to a thick, dark ultramarine. And odors came and went with the colors, some of them unpleasant, some intriguing, but all of them touched with the unfamiliar and alien. From somewhere behind the walls and above the ceiling there was music, its tones softly echoing, gently reinforcing the colors and the odors. The music, too, was strange to twentieth-century ears: strings of dissonances would be followed by long or short silences, in the midst of which an almost inaudible melody might be heard like a harmonic island in an ocean of sonic strangeness. At the sharp apex of the triangle, an aged little man lay on a raised portion of the floor. Periodically, this would raise or lower part of itself, very much like a cow trying to find a comfortable position on the grass. The single garment that Winthrop wore similarly kept adjusting itself upon him. At one moment, it would be a striped red and white tunic, covering everything from his shoulders to his thighs; then it would slowly elongate into a green gown that trickled over his outstretched toes; and abruptly, it would contract into a pair of light brown shorts decorated with a complete this with disapproval. A man was meant, she felt, to be dressed approximately the same way from one minute to the next. The shorts she didn't mind, though her modest soul considered them a bit too skimpy for receiving lady callers. The green gown -- well, if he wanted to wear what was essentially a dress, it was his business. Even the red and white tunic which reminded her nostalgically of her granddaughter Debbie's sunsuit was generous about. But at least stick to one of them! Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. "Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet," he said jovially. Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host's gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and uneasily sat. "How -- how are you, Mr. Winthrop?" "Couldn't be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look." He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers. Mrs. Brucks, really interested, inspected the mouthful of white, shining teeth. "A good job," she pronounced at last. "The dentists here made them for you so fast?" "Dentists!" He spread his bony arms in a vast and merry gesture. "They don't have dentists in # a.d. They grew these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks." "Grew? How grew?" "How should I know how they did it? They're smart, that's all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It's a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said 'I want new teeth" to the machine that they've got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three and bingo, there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?" She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. "Maybe -- but I better wait until it's perfected." Winthrop laughed again. "You're like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. I'm the oldest, but that doesn't make any difference -- I'm the only one with guts." Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. "But you're also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock's just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We'd all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop." "Mary Ann is engaged? I'd never have guessed it from the way she was playing up to that temporal supervisor fellow." "Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she's engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office, a fine, hard-working boy. And she wants to go back to him."back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulderblades and scratched him gently. "Let her go back then. Who gives a damn?" Mrs. Brucks turned her hands palm up in front of her. "Remember what they told us when we arrived? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the Time Machine Building at six o'clock on the dot. If we aren't all there on time, they can't make the transfer, they said. So if one of us, if you, for an instance, don't show up -- " "Don't tell me your troubles!" His face was flushed and his lips came back and exposed the brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner's mood. The music changed to a vicious rumble. "Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?" "I don't understand you." "You're damn tooting you don't understand me! When I was a kid, my old man used to come home drunk every night and beat the hell out of me. I was a small kid, so every other kid on the block took turns beating the hell out of me, too. When I grew up, I got a lousy job and a lousy life. Remember the depression? Who do you think was on those breadlines? Me, that's who! And then, when the good times came back, I was too old for a decent job. N ight watchman, berry picker, dishwasher. Cheap flophouses, cheap furnished rooms. Everybody gets the gravy, Winthrop got the garbage." He picked up the large eggshaped object he had been examining when she entered and studied it moodily. "Yeah. And like you said, everybody has someone to go back to, everybody but me. You're damn tooting I don't have anyone to go back to. Damn tooting. I never had a friend, never had a wife, never even had a girl that stayed around longer than it took her to use up the loose change in my pocket. So why should I go back? I'm happy here. I get everything I want and I don't have to pay for it. You people want to go back because you feel different -- uncomfortable, out of place. I'm used to being out of place: I'm right at home and I'm having a good time. I'm staying." ward anxiously, then jumped as the seat under her slunk forward. "Mr. Winthrop, everybody has troubles in their life. With my daughter Annie, I had a time that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. And with my Julius -- But because I have troubles, you think I should take it out on other people? I should prevent them from going home when they're sick and tired of jumper machines and food machines and -- I don't know -- machine machines and -- " "Speaking of food machines," Winthrop perked up, "have you seen my new food phonograph? Latest model. I said I wanted one, and first thing this morning, a brand-new one is delivered to my door. No fuss, no bother, no money. What a world!" "But it's not your world, Mr. Winthrop. Even if everything is free, you're not entitled. You got to belong to be entitled." "There's nothing in their laws about that," he commented absent-mindedly as he opened the huge egg and peered inside at the collection of dials and switches and spigots. "See, Mrs. Brucks? Double volume controls, double intensity controls, triple vitamin controls. With this one, you can raise the fat content of a meal, say, while reducing its sweetness with that doohickey there -- and if you press that switch, you can compress the whole meal so it's no bigger than a mouthful and you're still hungry enough to try a couple of other compositions. Want to try it? I got it set for the latest number by Unni Oehele, that new Aldebaranian composer -- Memories of a Martian Souffle." She shook her head emphatically. "No. By me, a meal is served in plates. I don't want to try it. Thank you very much." "Believe me, lady, you're missing something. The first course is a kind of light, fast movement, all herbs from Aldebaran IV mixed with a spicy vinegar from Aldebaran IX. The second course, Consomme Grand, is a lot slower and kind of majestic. Oehele bases it all on a broth made from the white chund, a kangaroo animal they have on Aldebaran IV. See, he uses only native Alebaranian foods to suggest a Martian dish. Get it? The same thing Kratzmeier did in A Long, Long Dessert on Deimos and Phobos, only it's a lot better. More modern-like, if you know what I mean. Now in the third course, Oehele really takes off. He -- " "Please, Mr. Winthrop!" Mrs. Brucks begged. "Enough!" She glared at him. She'd had her fill of this sort of thing from her son Julius years ago, when he'd been running around with a crazy crowd from City College and been spouting hours of incomprehensible trash at her that he'd picked up from newspaper musical reviews and the printed notes in record albums. One thing she'd learned was how to recognize an art phony. " okay. But you'd think you'd at least want to try it. The others at least took a bite of classical Kratzmeier or Gura-Hok. They didn't like it, they spat it out -- fine. But you've been living on nothing but that damn twentiethcentury grub since we arrived. After the first day, you haven't set foot outside your room. And the way you asked the room to decorate itself -- it's so old-fashioned, it makes me sick! You're living in the twenty-fifth century, lady! Wake up!" "Mr. Winthrop," she said sternly. "yes or no? You're going to be nice or not?" "You're in your fifties," he pointed out. "Fifties, Mrs. Brucks. In our time, you can expect to live what? Ten or fifteen more years. Tops. Here, you might see another thirty, maybe forty. Me, I figure I'm good for at least twenty. With the medical machines they got, they can do wonders. And no wars to worry about, no epidemics, no depressions, nothing. Everything free, lots of exciting things to do, Mars, Venus, the stars. Why in hell are you so crazy to go back?" Mrs. Brucks' already half-dissolved self-control gave way completely. "Because it's my home! Because it's what I understand! Because I want to be with my husband, my children, my grandchildren! And because I don't like it here, Mr. Winthrop!" "So go back!" Winthrop yelled. The room, which for the last few moments had settled into a pale golden yellow, turned rose color again. "There's not one of you with the guts of a cockroach. Even that young fellow, what'shis-name, Dave Pollock, I thought he had guts. He went out with me for the first week and he tried everything once. But he got scared, too, and went back to his little old comfy room. It's too dec-a-dent, he says, too dec-a-dent. So take him with you and get the hell back, all of you!" "But we can't, Mr. Winthrop. Remember they said the transfer has to be complete on both sides? One stays behind, all stay. We can't go back without you." Winthrop smiled and stroked the throbbing vein on his neck. "You're damn tooting you can't go back without me. And I'm staying. This is one time that old Winthorp calls the tune." "Please, Mr. Winthrop, don't be stubborn. Be nice. Don't make us force you." "You can't force me," he told her with a triumphant leer. "I know my rights. According to the law of twentyfifthcentury America, no human being can be forced to do anything. Fact. You try to gang up on me, all I do is set up a holler that I'm being forced and a flock of government machines show up and turn me loose. Put that in your old calabash and smoke it!" "Listen," she said as she turned to leave. "At six o'clock, we'll all be in the Time Machine Building. Maybe you'll change your mind, Mr. Winthrop." "That's one thing you can be sure of -- I won't change my mind." So Mrs. Brucks went back to her room and told the others that Winthrop was stubborn as ever. dent in charge of public relations for Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc., of Gary, Indiana, drummed impatiently on the arm of the red leather easy chair that Mrs. Brucks' room had created especially but uneasily for him. "Ridiculous!" he exclaimed. "That a derelict, a vagrant, should be able to keep people from going about their business... do you know there's going to be a nationwide sales conference of Sweetbottom retail outlets in a few days? I absolutely must return tonight as scheduled, no ifs, no ands, no buts. There's going to be one unholy mess, I can tell you, if the responsible parties in this period don't see to that." "I bet there will be," Mary Ann Carthington said from behind round, respectful and well-mascaraed eyes. "A big firm like that can really .give them what for, Mr. Mead." Dave Pollock grimaced at her wearily. "A firm five hundred years out of existence? Who're they going to complain to -- the history books?" As the portly man stiffened angrily, Mrs. Brucks held up her hands and said, "Let's talk, let's think it out, only don't fight. You think it's the truth we can't force him to go back?" Mr. Mead leaned back and stared out of a non-existent window. "Could be. Then again, it anything of # by now, but this smacks of criminal irresponsibility. That they should invite us to visit their time and then not make every possible effort to see that we return safe and sound -- besides, what about their people visiting in our time, the five with whom we transferred? If we're stuck here, they'll be stuck in # . Forever. Any government worthy of the name owls protection to its citizens traveling abroad. Without it, it's less than worthless: a tax-grubbing, boondoggling, inept bureaucracy!" Mary Ann Carthington's pert little face had been nodding in time to his fist beating on the red leather armchair. "That's what I say. Only the government seems to be all machines. How can you argue with machines? The only government man we've seen since we arrived was that Mr. Storku who welcomed us to the United States of #. And he didn't seem very interested in us. At least he didn't show any interest." "The Chief of Protocol for the State Department, you mean?" Dave Pollock asked. "The one who yawned when you told him how distinguished he looked?" T I "HE girl made a light slapping gesture at him. "Oh, you." "Well, then, here's what we have to do. One." Mr. Mead rose and proceeded to open the fingers of his right hand a single finger at a time. "We have to go on the basis of the only human being in the government we've met personally, this Mr. Storku. Two, we have to select a representative from among us. Three, this representative has to see Mr. Storku and lay the facts before him. How his government managed somehow to communicate with our government the fact that time travel was possible, but only if certain physical laws were taken into consideration, most particularly the law of -- the law of -- What is that law, Pollock?" "Conservation of energy and mass. If you want to transfer five people from # to #, you have to replace them simultaneously in their own time with five people of exactly the same structure and mass from the time they're going to. Otherwise, you'd have a gap in the mass of one space-time continuum and a corresponding surplus in the other. It's like a chemical equation -- " "I'm not a student in one of your classes. You don't have to impress me, Pollock," Mr. Mead said. "Thank you for the explanation." "Who was trying to impress you?" Pollock demanded belligerently. "I just tried to clear up something you seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding. That's at the bottom of our problem: the law of the conservation of energy and mass. And the way the machine's been set for all five of us and all five of them, nobody can do anything about transferring unless all of us and all of them are present at both ends of the connection at the very same moment." "All right," Mr. Mead said. "All right! Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don't mind, I'd like to go on. Some of us aren't civil service workers. Our time is valuable." "Listen to the tycoon, will you? His time is valuable. Look, Ollie, my friend, as long as Winthrop goes on being stubborn, we're all stuck here together. And as long as we're stuck here, we're all greenhorns together in #. For your information, right now, your time is my time, and vice versa." "Sh-h-h!" Mrs. Brucks commanded. "Be nice. Go on talking, Mr. Mead. It's very interesting. Isn't it interesting, Miss Carthington?" The blonde girl nodded. "It sure is. They don't make people executives for nothing. You put things so -- so right, Mr. Mead." mollified, smiled a slender thanks at her. "Three, then. We lay the facts before this Mr. Storku. We tell him how we came in good faith, after we were selected by a nationwide contest to find the exact opposite numbers of the five people from his time. How we did it partly out of a natural and understandable curiosity to see what the future looks like, and partly out of patriotism. Yes, patriotism! For is not this America of # our America, however strange and inexplicable the changes in it? As patriots, we could follow no other course. As patriots, we -- " "Oh, for God's sake!" the high school teacher exploded. "You're no subversive, all right? What's your idea?" There was a long silence in the room while the stout middle-aged man went through a pantomime of fighting for control. "Pollock, if you don't want to hear what I have to say, you can always take a breather in the hall! As I was saying, having explained the background facts to Mr. Storku, we come to point four, the fact that Winthrop refuses to return with us. And we demand -- do you hear me? -- we demand that the American government of this time take the appropriate steps to insure our safe return to our own era even if it involves -- well, martial law relative to Winthrop." "Is that your idea?" Dave Pollock asked derisively. "What if Storku says no?" "He can't say no if it's put to him with authority. We are American citizens. We demand our rights. If he won't recognize our citizenship, we demand to be sent back where we came from. He can't refuse. We explain the risks his government runs: loss of good will, irreparable damage to future contacts between the two eras, his government standing convicted of a breach of faith -- that sort of thing. It's just a matter of finding the right words and making them good and strong." Mrs. Brucks nodded agreement "Absolutely. You can do it, Mr. Mead." The stout man seemed jolted "I?" "Of course!" Mary Ann Carthington said enthusiastically. "Just like you said, Mr. Mead, it has to be said good and strong. That's the way you can say it." "I'd -- well, I'd rather not. I don't think I'm the best one for the job. Storku and I don't get along too well. Somebody else, I think, would be -- " "Now don't be modest, Ollie. You get along with Storku as well as any of us. You're elected. Besides, isn't this public relations work? You're a big man in public relations." Mr. Mead tried to pour all the hatred in the Universe at him in one long look. Then he shot out his cuffs and straightened his shoulders. "Very well. If none of you feel up to the job, I'll take it on myself. Be back soon." "Jumper, Ollie?" Pollock asked. "It's faster." "No, thank you," Mr. Mead said curtly. "I'll walk. I need the exercise." He hurried through the corridor and toward the staircase. Though he went down them at a springy executive trot, the stairs seemed to feel he wasn't going fast enough. An escalator motion began, growing more and more rapid, until he stumbled and almost fell. "Stop, dammit!" he yelled. "I can do this myself!" The stairs immediately stopped flowing downward. He wiped his face with a large white handkerchief and started down again. After a few moments, the stairs turned into an escalator once more. Again and again, he had to order them to stop; again and again, they obeyed him, and then sneakily tried to help him along. He seethingly gave up forbidding the stairs to assist him, and when he reached ground level, he was moving so fast that he rocketed out of the empty lobby of the building and onto the sidewalk. He might have broken a leg or dislocated his back. Fortunately, the sidewalk began moving under him. As he tottered from right to left, the sidewalk did so, too, gently but expertly keeping him balanced. He finally got his footing and took a couple of deep breaths. Under him, the sidewalk trembled slightly, waiting for him to choose a direction so that it could help. Mr. Mead looked around desperately. There was no one in sight along the broad avepue in either direction. "What a world!" he moaned. "What a loony-bin of a world! You'd think there'd be a cop -- somebody!" Suddenly there was somebody. There was the pop-pop of a jumper mechanism in operation slightly overhead and a man appeared some twelve feet in the air. Behind him, there was an orange hedgelike affair, covered with eyes. Jformed a mound under the two creatures and lowered them gently to surface level. "Listen!" Mr. Mead yelled. "Am I glad I ran into you! I'm trying to get to the State Department and I'm having trouble. I'd appreciate a little assistance -- " "Sorry," the other man said. "Klap-Lillth and I will have to be back on Ganymede in a half-hour. We're late for an appointment as is. Why don't you call a government machine?" "Who is he?" the orange hedge inquired as they began to move swiftly to the entrance of a building, the sidewalk under them flowing like a happy river. "He doesn't narga to me like one of you." "Time traveler," his companion explained. "From the past. One of the exchange tourists who came in two weeks ago." "Aha!" said the hedge. "From the past. No wonder I couldn't narga him. It's just as well. You know, on Ganymede we don't believe in time travel. It's against our religion." The Earthman chuckled and dug the hedge in the twigs with his elbow. "You and your religion! When was the last time you attended a shkootseem ceremony?" "Not since the last syzygy of Jupiter and the Sun," the hedge admitted. "But that's not the point. I'm still in good standing. What all you humans fail to understand about the Ganymedan religion..." His rustling voice trailed off as they disappeared inside the building. Mead almost spat after them. Then he recollected himself. It was two o'clock. He didn't have much time to fool around -- besides, he was in a strange world with customs insanely different from his own and who knew what the penalties were for spitting? "I want a government machine," he said resignedly to the empty air. He felt a little foolish, but that was what they had been told to do in any emergency. And, sure enough, a gleaming affair of wires and coils and multi-colored plates appeared beside him. "Yes?" a toneless voice inquired. "Service needed?" "I'm on my way to see Mr. Storku at our Department of State," Mr. Mead explained, staring suspiciously at the largest coil near him, "and I'm having trouble walking on the sidewalk. I'm liable to fall and kill myself if it doesn't stop moving under me." "Sorry, sir, but no one has fallen on a sidewalk for at least two hundred years. May I suggest you take a jumper?" "I don't want to take a jumper. I want to walk. All you have to do is tell this damn sidewalk to relax and be quiet." "Sorry, sir," the machine replied, "but the sidewalk has its job to do. Besides, Mr. Storku is not at his office. He is taking some spiritual exercise at either Shriek Field or Panic Stadium." "Oh, no!" Mr. Mead groaned. His worst fears had been realized. He didn't want to go to those places again. "Sorry, sir, but he is. Just a moment while I check." There were bright blue flashes among the coils. "Yes, Mr. Storku is doing a shriek today. He feels he has been over-aggressive recently. He invites you to join him." was n#t the slightest bit interested in going to one of those places where sane people became madmen for a couple of hours. On the other hand, time was short and Winthrop was still stubborn. "All right," he said unhappily. "I'll join him." "Shall I call a jumper, sir?" The portly man stepped back. "No! I'll I'll walk." "Sorry, sir, but you would never get there before the shriek has begun." Sweetbottom's vice-president in charge of public relations worked hard to calm himself. He must remember that this was just a machine into whose circuits a given set of vocal reactions had been built. If he had an apoplectic fit in front of it, it would merely summon another machine, a medical one. All you could do was give it information or receive information from it. "I-dorit-likejumpers," he said between his teeth. "Sorry, sir, but you expressed a desire to see Mr. Storku. If you is over, there is no problem, except that you would be well advised to start immediately for the Odor Festival on Venus, where he is going next. If you wish to see him now, however, you must take a jumper. There are no other possibilities, sir, unless you feel that my memory circuits are inadequate or you'd like to add a new factor to the discussion." Mr. Mead sagged. "Okay, okay! Call a jumper." "Yes, sir. Here you are, sir." The empty cylinder that suddenly materialized over Mr. Mead's head caused him to start, but while he was opening his mouth to say, "Hey! I changed my -- " it slid down over him. There was darkness. He felt as if his stomach were being gently but insistently pulled out through his mouth. His liver, spleen and lungs seemed to follow suit. Then the bones of his body all fell inward to the center of his nowempty abdomen and dwindled in size until they disappeared. He collapsed upon himself. Abruptly he was whole and solid again and standing in a large green meadow, with dozens of people around him. His stomach returned to its proper place and squirmed irritatedly back into position. changed my mind. I'll walk after all," he said, and threw up.  haired young man, was standing in front of him when the spasms had subsided. "It's such a simple thing, really, Mr. Mead. Just a matter of being intently placid during the jump." "Easy -- easy to say," Mr. Mead gasped. What was the reason Storku always exuded such patronizing contempt toward him? "Why don't you people -- why don't you people find another way to travel? In my time, comfort in transportation is the keystone, the very keystone of the industry. Any railroad, busline or airline which doesn't see to it that their passengers enjoy maximum comfort is out of business before you can bat an eye. Either that or they have a new board of directors." #T SN'T he intriguing?" a girl near him said to her escort. "He talks just like one of those historical romances." Mr. Mead glanced at her sourly, then gulped. She was nude. For that matter, so was everyone else around him, including Mr. Storku. Who, he wondered nervously, knew what went on at these Shriek Field affairs? After all, he had only seen them before from a distance in the grandstand. And now he was right in the middle of these deliberate lunatics. "Surely you're being a bit unjust," Mr. Storku suggested. "If an Elizabethan Englishman or a man from the Classic Greek period were to go for a ride in one of your horseless carriages or iron horses -- to use your vernacular -- he would exhibit much more discomfort than you have. It's purely a matter of adjustment to the unfamiliar. Some adjust, like your contemporary Winthrop; some don't, like yourself." "Speaking of Winthrop -- " Mr. Mead began hurriedly, glad of the opening. "Everybody here?" an athletic young man burst in as he bounded up. "I'm your leader for this shriek. On your feet, everybody, come on, let's get those kinks out of our muscles. We're going to have a real fine shriek -- all it takes is teamwork!" "Take your clothes off," the government man told Mr. Mead. "You can't run a shriek dressed. Especially dressed like that." Mr. Mead shrank back. "I just came here to talk to you. I'll watch." A rich, roaring laugh from Storku. "You can't watch from the middle of Shriek Field! And besides, the moment you joined us, you were automatically registered for the shriek. If you withdraw now, you'll throw everything off." "I will?" "Of course. A different quantity of stimuli has to be applied to any different quantity of people, if you want to develop a specific shriek-intensity in each one of them. Take your clothes off, man, and get into the thing. It will tone up your psyche magnificently."L" then began to undress. He was embarrassed, miserable and more than a little frightened at the prospect, but he had an urgent job of public relations to do on the yellow-haired young man. In his time, he had gurgled pleasurably over ropelike cigars given him by politicians, gotten drunk in ghastly little bars with important newspapermen, and suffered the slings and the arrows of outrageous television quiz shows -- all in the interests of Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc. The motto of the Public Relations Man was strictly When in Rome... And obviously the crowd he had made this trip with from # was composed of bunglers. They'd never get themselves and him back to their own time, back to a world where there was a supply-and-demand system that made sense. A world where an important business executive was treated like somebody, where the walls didn't ripple around you, the furniture didn't adjust constantly under you, where the very clothes on a person's back didn't change from moment to moment as if being revolved in a kaleidoscope. No, it was up to him to get everybody back to that world and his only channel of effective operation lay through Storku. Therefore, Storku had to be placated and made to feel that Oliver T. Mead was one of the boys. Besides, it occurred to him as he began slipping out of his clothes, some of these girls looked real cute. They reminded him of the Septic Tank Convention at Des Moines back in July. If only they didn't shave their heads! "All together, now," the shriek leader sang out. "Let's bunch up. All together in a tight little group, around." Mr. Mead was pushed and jostled into the crowd. It surged forward, back, right, left, being maneuvered into a smaller and smaller group under the instructions and shoving of the shriek leader. Music sprang up around them -- more noise than music, actually, since it had no discernible harmonic relationships and grew louder and louder until it was almost deafening. Someone striving for balance hit Mr. Mead in the stomach with an outflung arm. He said "Oof!" and then "Oof!" again as someone behind him piled into his back. "Watch out!" a girl near him moaned as he trod on her foot. "Sorry," he told her, "I just couldn't -- " and then an elbow hit him in the eye and he went lurching away a few steps, until, the group changing its direction again, he was pushed forward.- the grass, being pushed and pushing, the horrible noise almost tearing his eardrums apart. From what seemed a greater and greater distance, he could hear the shriek leader chanting: "Come on, this way, hurry up! No, that way, around that tree. Back into the bunch, you. Stay together. Now, backward, that's right, backward. Faster, faster." They went backward, a great mass of people pushing on Mead, jamming him into the great mass of people immediately behind him. Then, abruptly, they went forward again, a dozen little crosscurrents of humanity at work against each other in the crowd, so that as well as moving forward, he was also being hurled a few feet to the right and then turned around and being yanked back diagonally to his left. Once or twice, he was shot to the outskirts of the group, but, much to his surprise, all he did was claw his way back into the jam-packed surging middle. It was as if he belonged nowhere else but in this mob of hurrying madmen. A shaved female head crashing into his chest, as the only hint that the group had changed its direction, was what he had come to expect. He threw himself back and disregarded the grunts and yelps he helped create. He was part of this -- this -- whatever it was. He was hysterical, bruised and slippery with sweat, but he no longer thought about anything but staying on his feet in the mob. He was part of it and that was all he knew. Suddenly, somewhere outside the maelstrom of running, jostling naked bodies, there was a yell. It was a long yell, in a powerful male voice, and it went on and on, almost drowning out the noisemusic. A woman in front of Mr. Mead picked it up in a headrattling scream. The man who had been yelling stopped, and, after a while, so did the woman. Then Mr. Mead heard the yell again, heard the woman join in, and was not even remotely astonished to hear his own voice add to the din. He threw all the frustration of the past two weeks into that yell, all the pounding, shoving and bruises of the past few minutes, all the frustrations and hatreds of his lifetime. All around him, others were joining it, too, until at last there was a steady, unanimous shriek from the tight mob that slipped and fell and chased itself all over the green meadow. Mr. Mead, in the back of his mind, experienced a childlike satisfaction in getting onto the rhythm they were working out -- and in being part of working it out. It went pulse-beat, pulse-beat, shriek-k-k-k, pulse beat, pulse beat, shriek-k-k-k. All together. All around him, all together. It was good! He was unable to figure out how long they had been running and yelling, when he noticed that he was no longer in the middle of a tight group. They were spread out over the meadow in a long, wavering, yelling line. A J. Without losing a beat in the shriek-rhythm, he made an effort to get closer to a man and woman on his right. The yells stopped abruptly. The noise-music stopped abruptly. He stared straight ahead where everybody else was staring. He saw it, a brown, furry animal about the size of a sheep. It had thrown one startled, frightened look at them. Then it had begun running madly away across the meadow. "Let's get it!" the shriek leader's voice sounded from what seemed all about them. The shriek started again, a continuous, unceasing shriek, and Mr. Mead joined in. He was running across the meadow after the furry brown animal, screaming his head off, dimly and proudly conscious of fellow human beings doing the same on both sides of him. Let's get it, his mind howled. Let's get it, let's get it! Almost caught up with, the animal dodged back through the line of people. Mr. Mead flung himself at it and made a grab. He got a handful of fur and fell painfully to his knees as the animal galloped away. He was on his feet without abating a single note of the shriek and after it in a moment. Everyone else had turned around and was running with him. Let's get it! Let's get it! Let's get it! Back and forth across the meadow, the animal ran and they pursued. It dodged and twisted and jerked itself free from converging groups. Mr. Mead ran with them, ran in the very forefront. Shrieking. No matter how the furry brown animal turned, they turned, too. They kept getting closer and closer to it. Finally, the entire mob trapped it in a great, uneven circle and closed in. Mr. Mead was the first one to reach it. He knocked it down with a single blow. A girl leaped onto it and began tearing at it with her fingernails. Just before everyone piled on, Mr. Mead managed to grab a furry brown leg. He gave it a tremendous wrench and it came off in his hand. He was distantly surprised by the loose wires and gear mechanisms that trailed out of the torn-off leg. "We got it!" he mumbled, staring at the leg. We got it, his mind danced madly. We got it, we got it! He was suddenly very tired, almost faint. He dragged himself away from the crowd and sat down heavily on the grass. He continued to stare at the loose wires that came out of the leg. Someone came up to him, breathing hard. "Well," puffed Mr. Storku. "Did you have a nice shriek?" Mr. Mead held up the furry brown leg. "We got it," he said bewilderedly. HP HE yellow-haired young man laughed. "You need a good shower and a good sedative. Come on." He helped Mr. Mead to his feet and, holding on to his arm, walked him across the meadow to a dilated yellow square under the grandstand. All around them, the other participants in the shriek chattered gaily to each other as they cleansed themselves and readjusted their metabolism. After his turn inside one of the many booths which filled the interior of the grandstand, Mr. Mead felt more like himself -- which was not to say he felt better. Something had come out of him in those last few moments as he tore at the mechanical quarry, something he wished infinitely had stayed at the dank bottom of his soul. He'd rather never have known it existed. He felt vaguely, dismally, like a man who, flipping the pages of a textbook of aberrations, comes upon a particularly ugly case history which parallels his life history in every respect and understands -- in a single, horrified flash -- exactly what all those seemingly innocent quirks of his personality mean. He tried to remind himself that he was still Oliver T. Mead, a good husband and father, a respected business executive, a substantial pillar of the community and the local church -- but it was no help. Now, and for the rest of his life, he was also... this other thing. He had to get into some clothes. Fast. Mr. Storku understood immediately. "You probably had a lot saved up. About time you began discharging it. I wouldn't worry: you're as sane as anyone in your period. But your clothes have been cleaned off the field along with all the rubbish of our shriek; the officials are already preparing for the next one." "What do I do?" Mr. Mead wailed. "I can't go home like this." "No?" the government man inquired with a good deal of curiosity. "You really can't? Fascinating! Well, just step under that outfitter there. I suppose you'd like twentieth-century costume?" Mr. Mead placed himself doubtfully under the indicated mechanism as a newly clad citizen of twenty-fifth-century America walked away from it. "Yes. But please make it something sane, something I can wear." justed the dials. There was a slight hum from the machine overhead: a complete set of formal black and white evening wear sprang into being on the stout man's body. In a moment, it had changed into another outfit: the shoes grew upward and became hip-length rubber boots, the dinner jacket lengthened itself into a sou'wester. Mr. Mead was perfectly dressed for the bridge of any whaling ship. "Stop it!" he begged distractedly as the sou'wester began showing distinctive sports shirt symptoms. "Keep it down to one thing!" "You could do it yourself," Mr. Storku pointed out, "if your subconscious didn't heave about so much." Nonetheless, he good-naturedly poked at the machine again and Mr. Mead's clothes subsided into the tweed jacket and golf knickers that had been so popular in the #s. They held fast at that. "Better?" "I -- I guess so." Mr. Mead frowned as he looked down at himself. It certainly was a queer outfit for a vice-president of Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc., to return to his own time in, but at least it was one outfit. And as soon as he got home -- He took a deep breath. "Now look here, Storku," he said, putting aside the recent obscene memories of himself with as much determination as he could call up. "We're having trouble with this Winthrop fellow. He won't go back with us." They walked outside and paused on the edge of the meadow. In the distance, a new shriek was being organized. "That so?" Mr. Storku asked with no very great interest. He pointed at the ragged mob of nude figures just beginning to jostle each other into a tight bunch. "You know, two or three more sessions out there and your psyche would be in fine shape. Although, from the looks of you, I'd say Panic Stadium would be even better. Why don't you go right over there? One first-rate, screaming, headlong panic and you'd be absolutely -- " "Thank you, but my psyche is my own affair!" The yellow-haired young man nodded seriously. "Obviously. The adult individual's psyche is under no other jurisdiction than that of the adult individual concerned. The Covenant of #, adopted by unanimous consent of the entire population of the United States of America. Later, of course, broadened by the international plebiscite of # to include the entire world. But I was just making a friendly suggestion." Mr. Mead forced himself to smile. He was distressed to find that when he smiled, the lapels of his jacket stood up and caressed the sides of his chin affectionately. "No offense, no offense. It's just that I've had all I want of this nonsense. But what are you going to do about Winthrop?" "Do? Why, nothing. What can we do?" "You can force him to go back! You represent the government, don't you? The government invited us here, the government is responsible for our safety." "Aren't you safe?" "You know what I mean, Storku. Our safe return. The government is responsible for it." "Force may never be applied to a mature citizen and even official persuasion may be resorted to only in rare and carefully specified instances. This is certainly not one of them. By the time a child has gone through our educational system, he or she is a well-balanced member of society who can be trusted to do whatever is socially necessary. From that point on, government ceases to take an active role in the individual's life." "But Winthrop isn't a citizen of your world, Storku. He didn't go through your educational system, didn't have these psychological things, these readjustment courses, every couple of years, and didn't -- " "But he came here as our invited guest," Mr. Storku pointed out. "And, as such, he's entitled to the full protection of our laws." "And we aren't, I suppose!" Mr. Mead shouted. "He can do whatever he wants to us and get away with it. Do you call that law? Do you call that justice? I don't. Redtape bureaucracy, that's all it is!" The yellow-haired young man put his hand on Mr. Mead's shoulder. "Listen, my friend, and try to understand. If Winthrop tried to do anything to you, it would be stopped. Not by interfering with Winthrop directly, but by removing you from his neighborhood. In order for us to take even such limited action, he'd have to do. That would be commission of an act interfering with your rights as an individual. What Winthrop is accused of, however, is omission of an act. He refuses to go back with you. Well, now. He has a right to refuse to do anything with his own body and mind. The Covenant of # covers that in so many words. Would you like me to quote the relevant passage to you?" "No, I would not like you to quote the relevant passage to me. So you're trying to say that nobody can do anything, is that it? Winthrop can keep all of us from getting back to our own time, but you can't do anything about it and we can't do anything about it. One hell of a note." "An interesting phrase, that," Mr. Storku commented. "If there had only been an etymologist or linguist in your group, I would enjoy discussing it with him. Your conclusion, though, at least in regard to this particular situation, is substantially correct. There is only one thing you can do -- you can try to persuade Winthrop. Up to the last moment of the scheduled transfer, that, of course, always exists as a possible solution." #"-overly emotional jacket lapels. "And if we don't, we're out of luck? We can't take him by the scruff of the neck and -- and -- " "I'm afraid you can't. A government machine or manufactured government official would appear on the scene and liberate him. Without any damage to your persons, you understand." "No damage," Mr. Mead brooded. "Just leaving us stuck in this asylum for the rest of our lives, no ifs, no ands, no buts." Mr. Storku looked hurt. "Oh, come now! It may be very different from your own culture ir many ways. It may be uncomfortably alien in its artifacts and underlying philosophy. But surely there are compensations. For the loss of the old in terms of family, associates and experiences, there must be a gain in the new and exciting. Your Winthrop has found it so -- he's at Panic Stadium or Shriek Field at least every other day; I've run into him at seminars and salons three times in the past ten days; and I hear from the Bureau of Home Appliances of the Department of Internal Economics that he's a steady, enthusiastic and thoroughly dedicated consumer. What he can bring himself to do -- " "Sure he gets all those gadgets," Mr. Mead sneered. "He doesn't have to pay for them. A lazy relief jack like him couldn't ask for anything better. What a world -- gahhh!" "My only point," Mr. Storku continued equably, "is that being 'stuck in this asylum,' as you rather vividly picture it, has its positive aspects. And since there appears to be a distinct possibility of this occurring, it would seem logical for you people to begin investigating these positive aspects somewhat more wholeheartedly than you have, instead of retreating to the security of each other's company and such twentieth-century anachronisms as you are able to recreate." "We have -- all we cared to. What we want now, all of us, is to go home and to keep on living the lives we were born into. So what it comes down to is that nobody and nothing can help us with Winthrop, eh?" Mr. Storku called for a jumper and held up a hand to arrest the huge cylinder in the air as soon as it appeared. "I wouldn't want to go as far as that without conducting a thorough personal investigation of the matter. It's entirely possible that someone or something in the Galaxy could help you if the problem were brought to its attention and if it were sufficiently interested. It's rather a large, wellpopulated galaxy, you know. All I can say definitely is that the Department of State can't help you." Mr. Mead pushed his fingernails deep into his palms and ground his teeth together. "You couldn't possibly," he asked at last, very, very slowly, "be just a little more specific in telling us where to go for help next? We have less than two hours left -- and we won't be able to cover very much of the Galaxy in that time." said approvingly. "I'm glad to see that you have calmed down and are at last thinking clearly and resourcefully. Now who -- in this immediate neighborhood -- might be able to work out the solution of an insoluble problem? Well, first there's the Temporal Embassy, which handled the exchange and brought you people here. They have all kinds of connections; they can, if they feel like it, tap the total ingenuity of the human race for the next five thousand years. The trouble is, they take too much of the long view for my taste. "Then there are the Oracle Machines which will give you the answer to any question that can be answered. The problem there, of course, is interpreting the answer correctly. Then, on Pluto, there's a convention this week of vector psychologists. If anyone could figure out a way of persuading Winthrop to change his mind, they can. Unfortunately, the dominant field of interest in vector psychology at the moment is fetal education; I'm afraid they'd find your Winthrop far too mature a specimen. Then, out around Rigel, there's a race of remarkably prescient fungi whom I can recommend from personal experience. They have a most unbelievable talent for -- " Mr. Mead waggled a frantic hand at him. "That's enough! That's plenty to go on for a while! We only have two hours -- remember?" "I certainly do. And since it's very unlikely that you can do anything about it in so short a time, may I suggest that you drop the whole matter and take this jumper with me to Venus? There won't be another Odor Festival there for sixty-six years. It's an experience, my friend, that should not be missed. Venus always does these things right: the greatest odor-emitters in the Universe will be there. And I'll be very happy to explain all the fine points to you. Coming?" Mr. Mead dodged out of the way of the jumper which Mr. Storku was gesturing down invitingly. "No, thank you! Why is it," he complained when he had retreated to a safe distance, "that you people are always taking vacations, always going off somewhere to relax and enjoy yourselves? How the hell does any work ever get done in this cockeyed world?" "Oh, it gets done," the yellowhaired young man laughed as the cylinder began to slide down over him. "Whenever there's something that only a human being can do, one of us -- the nearest responsible individual with the appropriate training -- takes care of it. But our personality goals are different from yours. In the words of the proverb: All play and no work makes Jack a full boy." And he was gone. So Mr. Mead went back to Mrs. Bracks' room and told the others that the Department of State, represented by Mr. Storku, couldn't help them with Winthrop's stubbornness. her blonde hair with a businesslike forefinger while she considered the matter. "You told him all that you told us, and he still wouldn't do anything, Mr. Mead? Are you sure he knows who you are?" Mr. Mead didn't bother to answer her. He had other problems. Not only was his spirit badly bruised and scratched by his recent experiences, but his golf knickers had just woken into sentiency. And whereas the jacket merely had attempted to express its affection by trying to cuddle under his chin, the knickers went in more for a kind of patrolling action. Up and down on his thighs they rippled; back and forth across his rear they marched. "Sure Storku knows who he is," Dave Pollock told her. "Ollie waved his vice-presidency in his face, but Storku heard that Sweetbottom Septic Tanks Preferred fell to the bottom of the stock market just #I years ago today, so he wasn't afraid of him or much impressed." "I don't think that's funny," Mary Ann Carthington said, and shook her head at him once in a "so there!" gesture. She knew that old beanpole of a schoolteacher was just jealous of Mr. Mead, but she wasn't sure whether it was because he didn't make as much money or because he wasn't nearly as distinguished looking. But if a big executive like Mr. Mead couldn't get them out of this jam, then nobody could. And that would be awful, positively awful. She would never get back to San Francisco and Edgar Rapp. And while Edgar might not be everything a girl like Mary Ann settle for him at this point. He worked hard and made a good living. His compliments were nothing much, true, but at least he could be counted on not to say anything that tore a person into worthless bits right before their very eyes, like somebody she could mention. And the sooner she could leave the twenty-fifth century and be forever away from that somebody, the better. "Now, Mr. Mead," she cooed insistently, "I'm sure he told you something we could do. He didn't tell you to give up hope completely and absolutely, did he?" r T , HE executive caught the strap end of his knickers as it came unbuckled and started rolling exultantly up his leg. He glared at her out of eyes that had seen just too damn much, that felt things had gone just too damn far. "He told me something we could do," he said with careful viciousness. "He said the Temporal Embassy could help us. All we need is somebody with pull in the Temporal Embassy." Mary Ann Carthington almost bit the end off the lipstick she was applying at that moment. Mrs. Brucks and Dave Pollock had both turned to stare at her. And she knew just exactly what they were thinking. "Well, I certainly don't -- " she started to protest. "Don't be modest, Mary Ann," Dave Pollock interrupted. "This is your big chance -- and right now, it looks like our only chance. We've got about an hour and a half left. Get yourself into a jumper, skedaddle out there and turn on the charm!" Mrs. Brucks sat down beside her and gave her shoulders the benefit of a heavy maternal arm. "Listen, Miss Carthington, sometimes we have to do things, it's not so easy. But stuck here is better? That you like? So -- " she spread her hands -- "a touch here with the powder puff, a touch there with the lipstick, a this, a that, and believe me, he won't know what to do first for you. Crazy about you he is already -- you mean to say a little favor he wouldn't do, if you asked him?" "You really think so?" The girl began to preen. "Well, maybe -- " "A pretty girl like you, a fellow like him, nothing to maybe about. What a man like Mr. Mead can't accomplish, a woman has to do all the time. And a pretty girl like you can do it without lifting her little finger." Mary Ann Carthington gave a nod of agreement to this female view of history and stood up with determination. Dave Pollock immediately called for a jumper. She stepped back as the great cylinder materialized in the room. "Do I have to?" she asked. "Those awful things, they're so upsetting." working her under the jumper with a series of gentle, urging tugs. "You can't walk; we don't have the time any more. Take my word, Mary Ann, this is D-day and H-hour. So be a good girl and get under there and -- Hey, listen. A smart angle with the temporal supervisor might be about how his people will be stuck in our period if Winthrop goes on being stubborn. If anyone around here is responsible for them, he is. So as soon as you get there -- " "I don't need you to tell me how to handle the temporal supervisor, Dave Pollock!" she said haughtily, flouncing under the jumper. "After all, he happens to be a friend of mine, not yours -- a very good friend of mine!" "Sure," Pollock groaned, "but you still have to convince the man. And all I'm suggesting -- " He broke off as the cylinder slid the final distance down to the floor and disappeared with the girl inside. He turned back to the others who had been watching anxiously. "Well, that's it," he announced, flapping his arms with a broad, hopeless gesture. "That's our very last hope. Her!" Mary Ann Carthington felt exactly like a Last Hope as she materialized in the Temporal Embassy. She fought down the swimming nausea which always seemed to accompany jumper transportation and, shaking her head quickly, managed to draw a deep breath. As a means of getting places, the jumper certainly beat Edgar Rapp's old Buick -- if only it didn't make you feel like a chocolate malted. That was the trouble with this era: every halfway nice thing in it had such unpleasant aftereffects! The ceiling undulated over her head in the great rotunda where she was now standing and bulged a huge purplish lump mwn at her. It still looked, she decided nervously, like a movie Louse chandelier about to fall. "Yes?" inquired the purplish lump politely. "Whom did you wish to see?" She moistened her lipstick, then squared her shoulders. You had to carry these things off with a certain amount of poise; it just did not do to show nervousness before a ceiling. "I came to see Gygyo -- I mean is Mr. Gygyo Rablin in?" "Mr. Rablin is not at size at the moment. He will return in fifteen minutes. Would you like to wait in his office? He has another visitor there." didn't entirely like the idea of another visitor, but maybe it would be for the best. The presence of a third party would be a restraining influence for both of them and would take a little of the inevitable edge off her coming back to Gygyo as a suppliant after what had happened between them. But what was this about his not being "at size"? These twentyfifth-century people did so many positively weird things with themselves! "Yes, I'll wait in his office," she told the ceiling. "Oh, you needn't bother," she said to the floor as it began to ripple under her feet. "I know the way." "No bother at all, miss," the floor replied cheerfully, and continued to carry her across the rotunda to Rablin's private office. "It's a pleasure." Mary Ann sighed and shook her head. Some of these fixtures were so opinionated! She relaxed and let herself be carried along, taking out her compact on the way for a last quick check of her hair and face. But the glance at herself in the mirror evoked the memory again. She flushed and almost called for a jumper to fake her back to Mrs. Bracks' room. No, she couldn't -- this was their last chance to get out of this world and back to their own. But damn Gygyo Rablin, anyway! A yellow square in the wall having dilated sufficiently, the floor carried her into Rablin's private office and lay flat again. She looked around at the familiar surroundings. There was Gygyo's desk, if you could call that odd, purring thing a desk. There was that peculiar squirmy couch that -- She caught her breath. A young woman was lying on the couch, one of those horrible bald-headed women they had here. "Excuse me," Mary Ann said in one fast breath. "I had no idea -- I didn't mean to -- " "That's perfectly all right," the young woman said, still apparently staring up at the ceiling. "You're not intruding. I just dropped in on Gygyo myself. Have a seat." The floor shot up a section of itself under Mary Ann and, when she was securely cradled in it, lowered itself slowly to sitting height. "You must be that twentieth century -- " the young woman paused, then amended rapidly, "the visitor whom Gygyo has been seeing lately. My name's Flurett. I'm just an old childhood friend -- way back from Responsibility Group Three." Mary Ann nodded primly. "How nice, I'm sure. My name is Mary Ann Carthington. And really, if in any way I'm -- " "I told you it's all right. Gygyo and I don't mean a thing to each other. This Temporal Embassy work has dulled his taste for the everyday female; they've either got to be atavisms or precursors. I'm awaiting transformation -- major transformation -- so you couldn't expect very strong feelings from my side, now could you? So let's just say hello and go on from there." what Mary Ann recognized disdainfully as the standard greeting gesture. Such women! It made them look like a man showing off his muscle. "The ceiling said," Mary Ann began uncertainly, "that Gyg -- Mr. Rablin isn't at size at the moment. Is that like what we call not being at home?" "In a sense," said the bald girl. "He's in this room, but he's hardly large enough to talk to. Gygyo's size right now is -- let me think, what did he say he was setting it for? -- oh, yes, # microns. He's inside a drop of water in the field of that microscope to your left." Mary Ann swung around and considered the spherical black object resting on a table against the wall. Outside of the two eyepieces set flush with the surface, it had little in common with pictures of microscopes she had seen in magazines. "In -- in there? What's he doing in there?" "He's on a micro-hunt. You should know your Gygyo by now. An absolutely incurable romantic. Who goes on micro-hunts any more? And in a culture of intestithe beasties by hand instead of by routine psychoor even chemotherapy appeals to his dashing soul. 'Grow up, Gygyo,' I said to him. 'These games are for children and for Responsibility Group Four children at that.' Well, that hurt his pride and he said he was going in with a fifteen-minute lock. A fifteen-minute lock! When I heard that, I decided to come here and watch the battle, just in case." "Why? Is a fifteen-minute lock dangerous?" Mary Ann asked. Her face was tightly set, however; she was still thinking of that "you should know your Gygyo" remark. That was another thing about this world she didn't like. With all their talk of privacy and the sacred rights of the individual, men like Gygyo didn't think twice of telling the most intimate matters about people to -- to other people. "Figure it out for yourself. Gygyo's set himself for # microns. That's about twice the size of most of the intestinal parasites he'll have to fight -- amebae like Endolimax nana, Iodamoeba butschlii and Dientamoeba tragilis. But suppose he runs into a crowd of Endamoeba colii, to say nothing of our tropical dysentery friend, Endamoeba hystolytica -- what then?" "What then?" the blonde girl echoed. She had not the slightest idea. One did not face problems like this in San Francisco. "Trouble, that's what. Serious trouble. The colii might be as large as he is, and hystolyticae run even bigger -- #, # microns, sometimes more. Now the most important factor on a micro-hunt is size, especially if you're fool enough to limit your arsenal to a conventional sword and won't be seen carrying an automatic weapon even as insurance. Well, under those circumstances, if you lock yourself down to smallness so that you can't get out and nobody can take you out for a full fifteen minutes, you're just asking for trouble. And trouble is exactly what our boy is having!" "He is? I mean is it bad?" ' I 'HE other girl gestured at the microscope. "Have a look. I've adjusted my retina to the magnification, but you people aren't up to that yet, I believe. You need mechanical aids for every little thing. Go ahead, have a look. That's Dientamoeba fragilis he's fighting now. Small, but fast. And very, very vicious." Mary Ann hurried to the spherical microscope and stared intently through the eyepieces. There, in the very center of the field, was Gygyo. A transparent bubble helmet covered his head and he was wearing some sort of thick but flexible one-piece garment over the rest of his body. About a dozen amebae, the apparent size of dogs, swarmed about, reaching for him with blunt, glassy pseudopods. He hacked away at them with a great twohanded sword in tremendous sweeps that cut in two the most venturesome and persistent of the creatures. But Mary Ann could see from his frantic breathing that he was getting tired. Every once in a while, he glanced rapidly over his left shoulder as if keeping watch on something in the distance. "Where does he get air from?" she asked. "The suit always contains enough oxygen for the duration of the lock," Flureet's voice explained behind her, sounding somewhat surprised at the question. "He has about five minutes to go, and I think he'll make it. He'll probably be shaken up enough, though, to -- Did you see that?" Mary Ann gasped. An elongated, spindle-shaped creature which ended in a thrashing whiplike streak had just darted across the field, well over Gygyo's head. It was half again his size. He had gone into a crouch as it passed and the amebae surrounding him had also leaped away. They were back at the attack in a moment, however, once the danger had passed. Very wearily now, he continued to chop at them. "What was it?" "A trypanosome. It went by too fast for me to identify it, but it looked like either Trypanosoma gambiense or rhodesiense -- the African sleeping sickness protozoans. No, it was a bit too big to be either of them, now that I remember. It could have been -- Oh, the fool!" Mary Ann turned to her, genuinely frightened. "What did he do?" "He neglected to get a pure culture, that's what. Taking on several different kinds of intestinal amebae is wild enough, but if there are trypanosomes in there with him, then there might be anything! And him down to # microns!" glances that Gygyo had thrown over his shoulder, Mary Ann swung back to the microscope. The man was still fighting desperately, but the strokes of the sword came much more slowly. Suddenly another ameba, different from those attacking Gygyo, swam into the field. It was almost transparent and about half his size. "That's a new one," she told Flureet. "Is it dangerous?" 'No, Iodamoeba butschlii is just a sluggish, friendly lump. But what in the world is Gygyo afraid of to his left? He keeps turning his head as if -- Oh." The last exclamation came out almost as a simple comment, so completely was it weighted with despair. An oval monster -- its length three times and its width fully twice Gygyo's height -- shot into the field from the left boundary as if making a stage entrance in reply to her question. The tiny hairlike appendages with which it was covered seemed to give it fantastic speed. Gygyo's sword slashed at it, but it swerved aside and out of the field. It was back in a moment, coming down like a dive bomber. Gygyo and his other attackers leaped away, but one of the amebae was a little too slow. It disappeared, struggling madly, down the funnel-shaped mouth which indented the forward end of the egg-shaped horror. "Balantidium coli," Flureet exmicrons wide. Fast and deadly and terribly hungry. I was afraid he'd hit something like this sooner or later. Well, that's the end of our micro-hunting friend. He'll never be able to avoid it long enough to get out. And he can't kill a bug that size." "Can't you do something?" Mary Ann pleaded shakily. The bald woman brought her eyes down from the ceiling at last. Making what seemed an intense effort, she focused them on the girl. They were lit with bright astonishment. "What can I do? He's locked inside that culture for another four minutes. Do you expect me to go in there and rescue him?" "If you can -- of course!" "But that would be interfering with his sovereign rights as an individual! My dear girl, even if his wish to destroy himself is unconscious, it is still a wish originating in an essential part of his personality and must be respected. The whole thing is covered by the Subsidiary Rights Covenant of -- " "How do you know he wants to destroy himself?" Mary Ann wept. "I never heard of such a thing! He's supposed to be a -- a friend of yours! Maybe he just accidentally got himself into more trouble than he expected and he can't get out. I'm positive that's what happened. Oh -- poor Gygyo, while we're standing here talking, he's getting killed!" may have a legitimate argument. He is a romantic and associating with you has given him all sorts of swaggering adventuresome notions. He'd never have done anything as risky as this before. But tell me: do you think it's worth taking a chance of interfering with sovereign individual rights, just to save the life of an old and dear friend?" "I don't understand you," Mary Ann said helplessly. "Of course! Why don't you let me -- just do whatever you have to and send me in there after him. Please!" The other woman rose and shook her head. "No, I think I'd be more effective. I must say this romanticism is catching. And," she laughed to herself, "just a little intriguing. You people in the twentieth century led such lives!" She turned some switch and shrank down swiftly. Just as she disappeared, there was a whispering movement, like a flame curving from a candle, and her body seemed to streak toward the microscope. Gygyo was down on one knee now, trying to present as small a target to the oval monster as possible. The amebae had either all fled or been swallowed. He was swinging the sword back and forth rapidly over his head as the Balantidium coli swooped down first on one side, then on the other, but he looked very tired. His lips were clenched together, his eyes squinting with desperation. And then the huge creature came straight down, feinted with its body, and, as he lunged at it with the sword, swerved slightly and hit him from the rear. Gygyo fell, losing his weapon. Hairy appendages churning, the monster spun around so that its funnel-shaped mouth was in front and came streaking back for the kill. An enormous hand, a hand the size of Gygyo's whole body, swung into view and knocked the beast to one side. Gygyo scrambled to his feet, regained the sword and looked up unbelievingly. He exhaled with relief and then smiled. Flureet had evidently stopped her shrinkage at a size several times larger than a hundred microns. Her body was not visible in the microscope to Mary Ann, but it was obviously far too visible to the Balantidium coli, which turned and scudded away. And for the remaining minutes of the lock, there was not a creature which seemed even vaguely inclined to wander into Gygyo's neighborhood. To Mary Ann's astonishment, Flureet's first words to Gygyo when they reappeared beside her at their full height were an apology: "I'm truly sorry, but your fire-eating friend here got me all excited about your safety, Gygyo. If you want to bring me up on charges of violating the Covenant and interfering with an individual's carefully prepared plans for self-destruction -- " S' Y GY O waved her to silence. "Forget it. In the words of the past: Covenant, Shmovenant. You saved my life and, as far as I know, I wanted it saved. If I started proceedings against you for interfering with my unconscious, in all fairness we'd have to subpoena my conscious mind as a witness in your defense. The case could drag on for months and I'm far too busy." "You're right," the bald woman agreed. "There's nothing like a schizoid lawsuit when it comes to complications and verbal quibbling. But all the same, I'm grateful to you -- I didn't have to go and save your life. I don't know quite what got into me." "That's what got into you." Gygyo gestured at Mary Ann. "The century of regimentation, of total war, of massive meddling. I know: it's contagious." Mary Ann exploded. "Well, really! I never in my life -- I just can't believe it! First she doesn't want to save your life, because it would be interfering with your unconscious -- your unconscious! Then, when she finally does something about it, she apologizes to you -- she apologizes! And instead of thanking her, you talk as if you're excusing her for -- for committing assault and battery! And then you start insulting me and -- " "I'm sorry," Gygyo said. "I didn't intend to insult you, Mary Ann, neither you nor your century. After all, we must remember that it was the first century of modern times, the crisis-sickness from which recovery began. And it was in very many ways a truly great and adventuresome period in which Man, for the last time, dared things which he has never since attempted." "Well. In that case." Mary Ann swallowed and began to feel better. And at that moment, she saw Gygyo and Flureet exchange the barest hint of a smile. She stopped feeling better. Damn these people! Who did they think they were? Flureet moved to the yellow square exit. "I just stopped in to say good-by before my transformation. Wish me luck, Gygyo." "Your transformation? So soon? Well, all the best, of course. It's been good knowing you, Flureet." When the woman had left, Mary Ann looked at Gygyo's deeply concerned face and asked hesitantly: "What does she mean -- 'transformation'? And she said it was a major transformation. What's she talking about?" The dark-haired young man studied the wall for a moment. "I'd better not," he said at last, mostly to himself. "That's one of the concepts you'd find upsetting, like our active food, for instance. And speaking of food, I'm hungry. Hungry, do you hear? Hungry!" violently as his voice rose. It protruded an arm of itself at him. A tray was balanced on the end of the arm. Still standing, Gygyo began to eat from the tray. He didn't offer Mary Ann any, which, as far as she was concerned, was just as well. She had seen at a glance that it was the purple spaghettilike stuff of which he was so terribly fond. Maybe it tasted good. Maybe it didn't. She'd never know. She only knew that she could never bring herself to eat anything which writhed up toward one's mouth and wriggled about cozily once it was inside. That was another thing about this world. The things these people ate! Gygyo glanced up and saw her face. "I wish you'd try it just once, Mary Ann," he said wistfully. "It would add a whole new dimension to food for you. In addition to flavor, texture and aroma, you'd experience motility. Think of it: food not just lying there limp and lifeless in your mouth, but food expressing eloquently its desire to be eaten. Even your friend Winthrop, culinary esthete that he is, admitted to me the other day that Centaurian libal has it all over his favorite food symphonies in many ways. You see, they can adjust their flavor to the dietary wishes of the person consuming them. That way, you get -- " "Please! It makes me absolutely and completely sick even to think of it." "All right." He finished eating, nodded at the wall, which withdrew the arm and sucked the tray back into itself. "I give up. All I wanted was to have you sample the stuff before you left." "Leaving -- that's what I came to see you about. We're having trouble." "I was hoping you'd come to see me for myself alone," he said with a disconsolate droop of his head. She couldn't tell whether he was being funny or serious, so she got angry as the easiest way of handling the situation. "See here, Gygyo Rablin, you are the very last man on Earth -- past, present or future -- that I ever want to see again. And you know why! Any man who -- who says things to a girl like you s-said to m-me, and at s-such a t-time..." Against her will, and to her extreme annoyance, 'her voice broke. Tears tickled their way down her face. She set her lips determinedly and tried to shake them away. fortable now. He sat down on a corner of the desk, which twitched under him more erratically than ever. "I am sorry, Mary Ann. Truly, terribly, sincerely sorry. I should never have made love to you in the first place. Even without our substantial temporal and cultural differences, I'm certain you know as well as I do that we have precious little in common. But I found you -- well, exciting like no woman in my own time, or any woman that I've ever encountered in a visit to the future. Bizarre -- earthy -- violently female. I just couldn't resist the attraction. The one thing I didn't anticipate was the depressing effect your peculiar cosmetics would have upon me. The actual tactile sensations were extremely upsetting." "That's not what you said. And the way you said it! You rubbed your finger on my face and lips, and you went : 'Grea-sy! Greasy!' " Thoroughly in control of herself now, she mimicked him viciously. Gygyo shrugged. "I said I'm sorry and I meant it. But if you only knew how that stuff feels to a highly educated tactile sense! That smeary red lipstick -- that tinted grit on your cheeks! There's no excuse for me, that I'll grant, but I'm just trying to make you understand why I erupted so stupidly." "I suppose you think I'd be a lot nicer if I shaved my head like some of these women -- like that horrible Flureet!" He smiled and shook his head. "You couldn't be like them and they couldn't be like you. There are entirely different concepts of womanhood and beauty involved. In your period, the greatest emphasis is on a kind of physical similarity, whereas we place the accent on difference, but most particularly on emotional difference. The more emotions a woman can exhibit and the more complex they are, the more striking is she considered. That's the point of the shaved heads: to show suddenly appearing subtle wrinkles that might be missed if the area were covered with hair. We call Woman's bald head her Frowning Glory." slumped and she stared down at the floor, which started to raise a section of itself questioningly, but sank down again as it realized that nothing was required of it. "I don't understand, and I guess I won't ever understand. All I know is that I just can't stay in the same world with you, Gygyo Rablin -- the very thought of it makes me feel kind of all wrong and sick inside." "I do understand," he said seriously. "And for whatever comfort it may be -- you have the same effect on me. I'd never have done anything as supremely idiotic as going on a locked microhunt in an impure culture before I met you. But those exciting stories of your adventuresome friend Edgar Rapp finally crept under my skin. I found I had to prove myself a man in your terms, Mary Ann -- in your terms!" "Edgar Rapp?" She looked at him incredulously. "Adventuresome? Exciting? Edgar? The only time he ever gets close to sport is when he sits on his behind all night playing poker with the boys in the payroll department!" Gygyo rose and barged around the room aimlessly, shaking his head. "The casual, half-contemptuous way you say it! The constant psychic risks run, the inevitably recurring clashes of personality -- subliminal and overt -- as hand after hand is played, as hour after hour goes by, with not two, not three, but as many as five, six or even seven different and highly aggressive human beings involved -- the bluffs, the raises, the outwitting, the fantastic rugged contest of it! There is not a man in my entire world who'd be able to stand up to fifteen minutes of such complex psychological punishment -- yet, to you, it's almost nothing!" Her gaze was very soft and tender as she watched him knock unhappily about the room. "And that's why you went into that awful microscope, Gygyo? To prove that you could be as good a man as Edgar is when he's playing poker?" "It's not just the poker. That's hair-raising enough, I grant you. It's so many things. Take this used car that he drives you around in. Any man who'd drive one of those clumsy, unpredictable power-plants through the kind of traffic and the kind of accident statistics that your world boasts -- and every day, as a matter of course! I knew the micro-hunt was a pathetic, artificial affair, but it was the only thing available that even came close!" "You don't have to prove anything to me, Gygyo." "Maybe I don't," he brooded. "But I had reached the point where I had to prove it to myself. Which is quite silly when you come to think of it, but that doesn't make it any less real. And I proved something, after all. That two people with entirely different standards for male and female don't have a chance, no matter how attractive they find each other. I can't live with my knowledge of your innate standards, and you -- well, you certainly have found mine upsetting. We don't mesh, we don't resonate, we don't go. As you said before, we shouldn't be in the same world. That's doubly true ever since -- since we found out how strongly we tend to come together."  HE nodded. "I know. The way  you stopped making love to me and -- and said -- that horrid word, the way you kind of shuddered when you wiped your lips -- Gygyo, it tore me absolutely and completely to bits. I knew right then I had to get out of your time forever. But with Winthrop acting the way he is -- I don't know what to do!" "Tell me about it." He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together as he sat beside her on a section of upraised floor. By the time she had finished, his recovery was complete. Dismayed, Mary Ann watched him become once more a highly urbane, extremely intelligent and slightly supercilious young man of the twenty-fifth century, and felt in her very bone marrow her own awkwardness increase, her garish, none-too-bright primitiveness come thickly to the surface. "I can't do a thing for you," he said. "I wish I could." "Not even," she asked desperately, "with the problems you and I have? Not even considering how terrible it'll be if I stay here, if I don't leave on time?" "Not even considering all that. I doubt that I could make it clear to you, however much if I tried, but I can't force Winthrop to go, I can't in all conscience give you any advice on how to force him, and I can't think of a thing that would make him change his mind. You see, there's a whole social fabric involved which is far more significant than our personal little agonies, however important they may be to us. In my world, as Storku pointed out, one just doesn't do such things. And that, my sweet, is that." Mary Ann sat back. She hadn't needed the slightly mocking tone of Gygyo's last words to tell her that he was now completely in control of himself, that once more he was looking upon her as an intriguing but -- culturally speaking -- extremely distant specimen. She knew only too well what was happening: she'd been on the other end of this kind of situation once or twice herself. Just two months ago, a smooth salesman who handled the Nevada territory for her company had taken her out on a date and almost swept her off her feet. Just as she'd reached the point where the wine in her brain was filled with bubbles of starlight, she'd taken out a cigarette and dreamily, helplessly, asked him for a light. The salesman had clicked a lighter at her in an assured and lordly gesture, but the lighter had failed to work. He had cursed, clicked it futilely a few more times, then had begun picking at the mechanism madly with his fingernails. he continued to claw at the lighter, it had seemed to Mary Ann that the glossy surface of his personality developed an enormous fissure along its entire length and all the underlying desperation that was essentially him leaked out. He was no longer a glamorous, successful and warmly persuasive young man, but a pathetically driven creature who was overpoweringly uncertain, afraid that if one item in his carefully prepared presentation missed its place on the schedule, the sale would not take place. And it didn't. When he'd looked at her again, he saw the cool comprehension in her eyes. His lips sagged. And no matter how he tried to recapture the situation, how cleverly he talked, how many oceans of sparkling urgency he washed over her, she was his master now. She had seen through his magic to the unhooded yellow light bulbs which made it work. She remembered feeling somewhat sorry for him as she'd asked him to take her home -- not sorrow for someone with whom she'd almost fallen in love, but slight sorrow for a handicapped child (someone else's handicapped child) who had tried to do something utterly beyond his ability. Was that what Gygyo was feeling for her now? With brimming anger and despair, Mary Ann felt she had to reach him again, reach him very personally. She had to wipe off that smile of his. "Of course," she said, selecting the first weapon that came to hand, "it won't do you any good if Winthrop doesn't go back with us." He looked at her questioningly. "Me?" "Well, if Winthrop doesn't go back, we'll be stuck here. And if we're stuck here, the people from your time who are visiting ours will be stuck in the twentieth century. You're the temporal supervisor -- you might get fired from your job." "My dear little Mary Ann! Getting fired -- what a concept! Next you'll be telling me I'm liable to have my ears cropped!" To her chagrin, he chuckled all over. "Don't you even feel responsible? Don't you feel anything?" "Well, whatever I feel, it certainly isn't responsibility. The five people from this century who volunteered to make the trip back to yours were well-educated, extremely alert, highly responsible human beings. They knew they were running risks."  were they to know that Winthrop was going to be stubborn? And how could we know that?" "Even assuming that the possibility entered nobody's mind," he pointed out, tugging at her arm gently until she sat down beside him again, "one has to admit, in all reason, that transferring to a period five centuries away must be accompanied by certain dangers. Not being able to return is one of them. Then one has to further admit that, this being so, one or more of the people making the transfer recognized this danger and -- at least unconsciously -- wished to subject themselves to its consequences. If that is at all the situation, interference would be a major crime, not only against Winthrop's conscious desires, but against such people's unconscious motivations as well -- and both have almost equal weight in the ethics of our period. That's about as simple as I can make it, Mary Ann. Do you understand now?" "A -- a little," she confessed. "You mean it's like Flureet not wanting to save you when you were almost being killed in that micro-hunt, because maybe, unconsciously, you wanted to get yourself killed?" "Right! And believe me, Flureet wouldn't have lifted a finger, old friend or no old friend, your romantic twentieth-century dither notwithstanding, if she hadn't been on the verge of major transformation, with the concurrent psychological remove from all normal standards and present-day human frames of reference." "What is this major transformation business?" Gygyo shook his head emphatically. "Don't ask me that. It's a concept and a practice as peculiar to our time as -- oh, say, tabloid journalism and election-night excitement are to yours. What you want to appreciate is this other thing -- the way we protect and nurture the individual eccentric impulse, even if it should be suicidal. Let me put it this way. The French Revolution tried to sum itself up in the slogan, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite; the American Revolution used the phrase, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. "We feel that the entire essence of our civilization is contained in these words: The Utter Sacredness of the Individual and the Individual Eccentric Impulse. The last part is the most important, because without it our society would have as much right to interfere with the individual as yours did. A man wouldn't even have the elementary freedom of doing away himself without first getting the proper papers filled out by the proper government official. A person who wanted to -- "L" termination. "All right! I'm not the least little bit interested in this nonsense. You won't help us in any way, you don't care if we're stuck here for the rest of our natural lives, and that's that! I might as well go." "In the name of the Covenant, girl, what did you expect me to tell you? I'm no Oracle Machine. I'm just a man." "A man?" she cried scornfully. "You call yourself a man? Why, a man would -- a real man would just -- Oh, let me get out of here!" The dark-haired young man shrugged and rose, too. He called for a jumper. When it materialized beside them, he gestured toward it courteously. Mary Ann started for it, paused, then held out a hand to him. "Gygyo," she said, "whether we stay or leave on time, I'm never going to see you again. I've made up my mind on that. But there's one thing I want you to know." As if realizing what she was going to say, he had dropped his eyes. His head was bent over the hand he had taken. Seeing this, Mary Ann felt her voice grow gentler and more tender. "It's just -- just that -- oh, Gygyo, it's that you're the only man I've ever loved. Ever really, truly, absolutely and completely loved. I want you to know that, Gygyo." He didn't reply. He was still holding her fingers tightly and she couldn't see his eyes. "Gygyo," she said, her voice breaking. "You're feeling the same, aren't -- " He looked up. There was an expression of puzzlement on his face. He pointed to the fingers he had been holding. Each nail was colored with a bright, recently applied lacquer. "Why in the world," he asked, "do you limit it to the fingernail? Most primitive peoples did it on larger parts of the body. One would expect that at least you would tattoo the whole hand -- Mary Ann! Did I say anything wrong again?" Sobbing bitterly, the girl darted past him and into the jumper. She went back to Mrs. Bracks' room, and, when she had been calmed sufficiently, explained why Gygyo Rablin, the temporal supervisor, either could not or would not help them with Winthrop's stubbornness. around the oval room. "So we give up? Is that what it comes to? Not one person in all future will lift a finger to help us get back to our own time and our own families -- and we can't help ourselves. A brave new world, all right. Real achievement. Real progress." "I don't see what call you have to shoot your mouth off, young man," Mr. Mead growled from where he was sitting at the far end of the room. Periodically, his necktie curled upward and tried to nuzzle against his lips; wearily, petulantly, he slapped it down again. "At least we tried to do something about it. That's more than you can say." "Ollie, old boy, I may not pay a whopping income tax, but I've been trained to use my mind. I'd like nothing better than to find out what a thoroughly rational approach to this problem could do for us. One thing I know -- it can't possibly come up with less than all this hysteria and emotional hoopla, this executive-type strutting have managed to date." "Listen, a difference it makes?" Mrs. Brucks held her wrist out and pointed to the tiny goldplated watch strapped around it. "Only forty-five minutes left before six o'clock. So what can we do in forty-five minutes? A miracle maybe we can manufacture on short notice? Magic we can turn out to order? Go fight City Hall. My Sammy I know I won't see again." The thin young man turned on her angrily. "I'm not talking of magic and miracles. I'm talking of logic. Logic and the proper evaluation of data. These people not only have a historical record available to them that extends back to and includes our own time, but they are in regular touch with the future -- their future. That means there are also historical records that extend back to and include their time." Mrs. Brucks cheered up perceptibly. She liked listening to education. "So?" "Isn't it obvious? Those five people who exchanged with us must have known in advance that Winthrop was going to be stubborn. It stands to reason they wouldn't want to spend the rest of their lives in what is for them a pretty raw and uncivilized environment -- unless they had known of a way out. It's up to us to find that way." "Maybe," Mary Ann Carthington suggested, bravely biting the end off a sniffle, "maybe the next future kept it a secret from them. Or maybe all five of them were suffering from what they call here a bad case of individual eccentric impulse." "That's not how the concept of individual eccentric impulse works. I don't want to go into it now, but believe me, that's not how it works! And I don't think the Temporal Embassies keep this kind of secret from the people in the period to which they're accredited. No, I tell you the solution is right here, if we can only see it." sitting with an intent expression on his face, as if he were trying to locate a fact hidden at the other end of a long tunnel of unhappiness. He straightened up suddenly and said: "Storku mentioned the Temporal Embassy! But he didn't think it was a good idea to approach them -- they were too involved with long-range historical problems to be of any use to us. But something else he said -- something else we could resort to. What was it now?" They all waited anxiously while he thought. Dave Pollock had just begun a remark about "high-surtax memories" when the rotund executive smacked his thigh resoundingly. "I remember! He said we could ask the Oracle Machine! We might have some difficulty interpreting the answer, according to him, but at this point that's the least of our worries. We're in a desperate emergency and beggars can't be choosers. If we get any kind of answer, any kind of answer at all -- " Mary Ann Carthington looked away from the little cosmetics laboratory she was using to repair the shiny damage caused by tears. "Now that you bring it up, Mr. Mead, the temporal supervisor made some such remark to me, too. About the Oracle Machine, I mean." "He did? Good! That firms it up nicely. We may still have a chance. Well, then, as to who shall do it -- I am certain I don't have to draw a diagram when it comes to selecting the one of us most capable of dealing with a complex piece of futuristic machinery." They all stared at Dave Pollock, who swallowed hard and inquired hoarsely, "You mean me?" "Certainly I mean you!" Mr. Mead said. "You're the longhaired scientific expert around here." "I'm a teacher, that's all, a high-school science teacher. And you know how I feel about having anything to do with the Oracle Machine. As far as I'm concerned, it's the one aspect of this civilization that's most decadent. Why, I'd rather -- " "My stomach didn't turn over when I had to go in and have an argument with that crazy Mr. Winthrop?" Mrs. Brucks broke in. "I liked watching one minute a pair rompers, the next minute I don't know what, an evening gown he starts wearing? And that crazy talk -- smell this from a Mars, taste this from a Venus -- you think maybe, Mr. Pollock, I enjoyed myself? But somebody had to do, so I did. All we're asking you is a try. A try you can make." W A ND I can assure you," Mary Ann Carthington put in swiftly, "that Gygyo Rablin is absolutely and completely the last person on Earth I would go to for a favor. It's a personal matter and I'd rather not discuss it now, if you don't mind, but I would die, positively die, rather than go through that again. I did it, though, because there was the teensiest chance it would help us all get home again. I don't think we're asking too much of you. I don't think so one little bit." Mr. Mead nodded. "I agree with you, young lady. Storku is a man I haven't seen eye to eye with since we've arrived and I've gone out of my way to avoid him, but to have to get involved in that unholy Shriek Field madness in the bargain -- " He brooded for a while over some indigestible mental fragment, then, as his cleated golf shoes began wriggling about lovingly on his feet, shook himself determinedly and went on. "It's time you stopped shooting off your mouth, Pollock, and got down to plain brass tacks. Einstein's theory of relativity isn't going to get us back to good old # and neither is your Ph.D. or M.A. or whatever. What we need now is action, action with a capital A and no ifs, no ands, no buts." "All right, all right. I'll do it." "And another thing." Mr. Mead rolled a wicked little thought pleasurably to and fro in his mind for a moment or two before letting it out. "You tako the jumper. You said yourself we don't have the time to do any walking and that's doubly true right now, when we're right up against the deadline. I don't want to hear any whining and any whimpering about the jumper making you sick. If Miss Carthington and I could take it, so can you." Dave Pollock rallied. "You think I won't? I've done most of so my traveling here by jumper. I'm not afraid of mechanical progress -- just so long asit's genuine progress. Of course I'll take the jumper." He signaled for one with a microscopic return of his old swagger. When it appeared, he walked under it with shoulders squared. Let them all watch how a rational, science-minded man goes about things. And anyway, using the jumper wasn't nearly as upsetting to him as it seemed to be to the others. He could take jumpers in stride. That was infinitely more than he could say for the Oracle Machine. For that reason, he had himself deposited outside the building which housed the machine. A bit of a walk and he might be able to get his thoughts in order. The only trouble was, the sidewalk had other ideas. Silently, obsequiously, but nonetheless firmly, it began to move under his feet as he started walking around the squat, slightly quivering structure. It rippled him ahead at a pace somewhat faster than the one he set, changing its direction as soon as he changed h'is. the empty, streets and shrugged with resignation. The sentient, eager-to-serve sidewalks didn't bother him, either. He had expected something like that in the future, that and the enormously alert servitor houses, the clothes which changed their color and cut at the wearer's caprice -- all more or less, in one form or another, to be anticipated by a knowledgable man as human progress. Even the development in food -- from the wiggling please-eat-meand-enjoy-me stuff all the way up to the more complex culinary compositions on which an interstellarly famous chef might have worked for a year or more -- was logical, if you considered how bizarre, to an early American colonist, would be the fantastic, cosmopolitan variety of potables and packaged meals in any twentiethcentury supermarket. These things, the impedimenta of daily life, all change and modify in time. But certain things should not. When the telegram had arrived in Houston, Texas, informing him that -- of all the people in the United States of America -- he was most similar to one of the prospective visitors from # A.D., he had gone almost mad with joy. The celebrity he suddenly enjoyed in the faculty lunchroom was unimportant, as were the page-one stories in local newspapers under the heading: lone First and foremost, it was reprieve-reprieve and another chance. Family responsibilities -- a dying father and a sick younger sister -- had prevented him from getting the advanced academic degrees necessary for a university teaching position, with all its accompanying prestige, higher income and opportunities for research. Then, when they had come to an end and he had gone back to school, a sudden infatuation and too-hasty marriage had thrown him back onto the same treadmill. He had just begun to realize -- despite the undergraduate promise he had shown and none-toominute achievement -- how thoroughly he was trapped by the pleasant residential neighborhood and cleanly modern high school between which he shuttled daily, when the telegram arrived, announcing his selection as one of the group to be sent five hundred years ahead. How it was going to help him, what, precisely, he would do with the chance, he did not know -- but it had lifted him out of the ruck of anonymity. Somehow, someway, it would enable him to become a striking individual at last. ized the extent of his good fortune until he met the other four in Washington, D. C. He had heard, of course, how the finest minds in the country had bitterly jostled and elbowed each other in a frenzied attempt to get into the group and find out what was going to develop in their specialty half a millenium hence. But not until he had talked with his prospective fellow-tourists -- an itinerant worker, a Bronx housewife, a pompous Midwestern business executive, a pretty but very ordinary San Francisco stenographer -- did it come to him that he alone had any amount of scientific training. Only he would be capable of evaluating the amount of major technological advance! He would be the only one able to correlate all the bewildering mass of minor changes into something resembling coherence! And thus, above all, he would be the only one to appreciate the essential quality of the future, the basic threads that would run through it from its underlying social fabric to its starleaping fringes! He, who had wanted to devote his life to knowledge-seeking, would exist for two weeks, unique and intellectually alone, in a fivecentury-long extrapolation of every laboratory and library in his age! At first, it had been like that. Everywhere there was glory and excitement and discovery. Then little disagreeable things began to creep in. The food, the clothing, the houses -- well, you either ignored them or made other arrangements. These people were extremely hospitable and quite ingenious: they didn't at all mind providing you with more familiar meals when your stomach had revolted a couple of times. The women, with their glossy baldness and strange attitudes toward relations between the sexes -- well, you had a brand-new wife at home and didn't have to get involved. But Shriek Field and Panic Stadium -- that was another matter. Dave Pollock was proud of being a thoroughly rational person. He had been proud of the future, when he first arrived, taking it almost as a personal vindication that the people in it should be so thoroughly, universally rational, too. His first acquaintance with Shriek Field had almost nauseated him. That the superb intellects he had come to know should into a frothing, hysterical pack of screaming animals and at regular, almost medically prescribed intervals... They had explained to him elaborately that they could not be such superb intellects, so thoroughly rational, unless they periodically released themselves in this fashion. It made sense, but still watching them do it was downright horrifying! He knew he would never be able to stand the sight of it. Yet one could make this acceptable in some corner of the brain. But the chess business?  Pollock had fancied himself as a chess player. He was just good enough to be able to tell himself that if ever he had time to really concentrate on the game, he'd be good enough to play in tournaments. He'd even subscribed to a chess magazine and followed all the championship matches with great attention. He'd wondered what chess would be like in the future -- surely the royal game, having survived for so many centuries, would survive another five? What would it be like : a version of three dimen sional chess, or possibly another, even more complex evolution? The worst of it was that the game was practically identical with the one played in the twentieth century. Almost every human being in # played it; almost every human being in # enjoyed it. But there were no human champions. There were no human opponents. There were only the chess machines. And they could beat anybody. "What's the sense," he had complained, "of playing with a mamoves and counter-moves' built into its memory circuits? That has a selector mechanism able to examine and choose from every chess game ever recorded? A machine which has been designed never to be beaten? What's the sense -- where's the excitement?" "We don't play to win," he had been told wonderingly. "We play to play. It's the same with all our games: aggressions are gotten rid of in a Shriek or a Panic; games are just for mental or physical exercise. And so, when we play, we want to play against the best. Besides, every now and then, an outstandingly good player, once or twice in his lifetime, is able to hold the machine to a draw. Now that is an achievement. That merits excitement." You had to love chess as much as he did, Dave Pollock supposed, to realize what an obscenity the existence of these machines made of it. Even the other three in his group, who had become much more restive than he at twentyfifth-century mechanisms and mores, only stared at him blankly when he raged over it. No, if you didn't love something, you weren't bothered overmuch when it was degraded. But surely they could see the abdication of human intellect, of human reason, that the chess machines implied? Of course, that was nothing compared to the way human reason had abdicated before the Oracle Machine. That was the last straw to a rational person. The Oracle Machine. He glanced at his watch. Only twenty-five minutes left. Better hurry. He took one last self-encouraging breath and climbed the cooperative steps of the building. "My name is Stilia," a baldheaded, rather pleasant faced young woman said as she came toward him in the spacious anteroom. "I'm the attendant of the machine for today. Can I help you?" "I suppose so." He looked uncomfortably at a distant, throbbing wall. Behind the yellow square on that wall, he knew, was the inner brain of the Oracle Machine. How he'd love to kick a hole in that brain! upraised hummock of floor and wiped his perspiring hands carefully. He told her about the approaching deadline, about Winthrop's stubbornness, about the decision to consult the Oracle Machine. "Oh, Winthrop -- yes! He's that delightful old man. I met him at a dream dispensary a week ago. What wonderful awareness he has! Such a total immersion in our culture! We're very proud of Winthrop. We'd like to help him every way we possibly can." "If you don't mind," Dave Pollock said morosely, "we're the ones who need help. We've got to get back." Stilia laughed. "Of course. We'd like to help everybody. But Winthrop is -- special. He's trying hardest. Now if you'll just wait here, I'll go in and put your problem before the Oracle Machine." She flexed her right arm at him and walked toward the yellow square. Pollock watched it expand in front of her, then, as she went through the opening it made, contract behind her. In a few minutes, she returned. "I'll tell you when to go in, Mr. Pollock. The machine is working on your problem. The answer you get will be the very best that can be made, given the facts available." "Thanks." He mused for a while. "Tell me something. Doesn't it seem to take something vital out of life -- out of your thinking life -- to know that you can take absolutely any problem -- personal problem, scientific problem or work problem -- to the Oracle Machine and it will solve it' much better than you could?" Stilia looked puzzled. "Not at all. To begin with, problem-solving is a very small part of today's thinking life. It would be as logical to say that it took something vital out of life to make a hole with an electric drill instead of a hand gouge. In your time, no doubt, there are people who feel just that way; they have the obvious privilege of not using electric drills. Those who use electric drills, however, have their physical energy freed for tasks they regard as more important. "The Oracle Machine is the major tool of our culture. It has been designed toward just one end -- computing all the factors of a given problem and relating them to the totality of pertinent data that is in the possession of the human race. But even if people consult the Oracle Machine, they may not be able to understand and apply the answer. And if they do understand it, they may not choose to act on it."  on it?" Dave Pollock repeated incredulously. "Does that make sense? You said yourself the answers are the very best that can be made, given the facts available." "Human activities don't necessarily have to make sense," she explained. "That is the prevailing and rather comfortable modern view, Mr. Pollock. There is always the individual eccentric impulse." "Yeah, there's always that," he grumbled. "Resign your private personality by running with a howling mob at Shriek Field, lose all of yourself in an insane crowd -- but don't forget your individual eccentric impulse. Never, never forget your individual eccentric impulse!" She nodded soberly. "That really sums it up, in spite of your unmistakable sarcasm. Why do you find it so hard to accept? Man is both a herd animal and a highly individualistic animal -- what we call a self-realizable animal. The herd instincts must be satisfied at whatever cost, and have been in the past through various forms of ingroup and outgroup activities. The need to resign one's personality and immerse in something larger than self has been recognized since earliest times: Shriek Fields and Panic Stadiums everywhere on the planet provide for this need and expend it harmlessly." "I wouldn't say it was so harmless from the look of that mechanical rabbit, or whatever it was." "I understand that human beings who took the place of the mechanical rabbit in the past looked much worse when a herd of men was through with them." S HE locked eyes with him. "Yes, Mr. Pollock, I think you know what I mean. The selfrealizable instincts, on the other hand, must be satisfied, too. Usually they can be satisfied in terms of one's daily life and work, as the herd instincts can be fulfilled by normal group relationships and identification with humanity. But occasionally the self-realizable instincts must be expressed at abnormal strengths and then we have to have a kind of private Shriek Field -- the concept of individual eccentric impulse. The two are opposite poles of exactly the same thing. All we require is that another human being will not be actively interfered with." "And so long as that doesn't happen, anything goes!" "Exactly. Anything a person may want to do out of his own individual eccentric impulse is permitted. Encouraged, actually. It's not only that we believe some of humanity's greatest achievements to have come out of individual eccentric impulses, but that we feel the greatest glory of our civilization is the homage we pay to such intrinsically personal expression." Dave Pollock stared at her with reluctant respect. She was bright. This was the kind of girl he might have married, if he'd gone on to his doctorate, instead of Susie. Although Susie -- He wondered if he'd ever see Susie again. He was astonished at how bitterly homesick he felt. "It sounds good," he admitted. "But living with it is another thing entirely. I guess I'm too much a product of my own culture to swallow it all the way. I can't get over how much difference there is between our civilizations. We talk the same language, but we sure as hell don't think the same thoughts." Stilia smiled warmly and sat back. "One of the reasons your period was invited to exchange visitors with us is because it was the first in which most speech patterns became constant and language shifts came to an end. Your newly invented recording devices were responsible for that. But technological progress continued." A hum began in the distant wall. Stilia broke off and stood up. "The Oracle Machine is ready to give you the answer to your problem. Just go inside, sit down and repeat your question in its simplest form. I wish you well." I wish me well, too, Dave Pollock thought as he went through the dilated yellow square and into the tiny cube of a room. For all of Stilia's explication, he was supremely uncomfortable in this world of simply satisfied herd instincts and individual eccentric impulses. He was no misfit, no Winthrop -- he very much wanted out and to return to what was familiar. Above all, he didn't want to stay any longer in a world where almost any question he might think of would be answered best by the bluish, narrow, throbbing walls which surrounded him. But -- he did have a problem he couldn't solve. And this machine could. do about Winthrop's stubbornness?" he asked, feeling idiotically like a savage interrogating a handful of sacred bones. A deep voice, neither masculine nor feminine in quality, rumbled from the four walls, from the ceiling, from the floor: "You will go to the time-travel bureau in the Temporal Embassy at the proper time." He waited. Nothing more was forthcoming. "It won't do us any good to be there," he pointed out finally. "Winthrop is stubborn; he won't go back with us. And unless all five of us go back together, none of us can go. That's the way the transferring device is set. So what I want to know is, how do we persuade Winthrop without -- " Again the enormous voice: "You will go to the time-travel bureau in the Temporal Embassy at the proper time." And that seemed to be that. Dave Pollock trudged out and told Stilia what had happened. "It seems to me," he commented a little nastily, "that the machine found the problem was just a bit too much for it and was trying hard to pass the buck to the Temporal Embassy." "All the same, I would do what it advised. Unless, of course, you find another, subtler interpretation of the answer." "Or unless my individual eccentric impulse gets in the way?" This time the sarcasm was lost on her. She opened her eyes wide. "That would be best of all! Imagine if you should at last learn to exercise it!" So Dave Pollock went back to Mrs. Bracks' room and, thoroughly exasperated, told the others of the ridiculous answer the Oracle Machine had given him on the problem of Winthrop's stubbornness. A T a few minutes to six, however, all four of them -- Mrs. Bracks, Oliver T. Mead, Mary Ann Carthington, Dave Pollock -- were in the time-travel bureau of the Temporal Embassy, having arrived in varying stages of upset by way of jumper. They didn't have any particular hopes:there just wasn't anything else to do. At precisely one minute to six, a large group of twenty-fifth-century citizens came in to the transfer room. Among them were Gygyo Rablin, the temporal supervisor; Stilia, the attendant of the Oracle Machine; Flureet, wearing the drawn look of one awaiting major transformation; Mr. Storku, returned temporarily from the Odor Festival on Venus -- and many others. They carried Winthrop to his proper seat and stood back with reverent expressions on their faces. The transfer began. W in t fir op was an old man -- sixty-eight, to be exact. He had, in the past two weeks, undergone much excitement. He had been on micro-hunts, undersea hunts, teleport jaunts to incredibly distant planets, excursions numerous and fantastic. He had had remarkable things done to his body, spectacular things done to his mind. He had pounded in pursuit at Shriek Field, scuttled fearfully at Panic Stadium. And, above all, he had eaten plentifully and repeatedly of foods grown in distant stellar systems, of dishes prepared by completely alien entities, of meals whose composition had been totally unsuspected by his metabolism. He had not grown up with these activities, with this food, as had the people of the twenty-fifth century. Winthrop was no longer stubborn. Winthrop was dead. The Big News Next Month... by Theodore Sturgeon What is the wall in space? Why can't it be gone around, over, under or through? How is it that those kept out by the wall in space are the prisoners? Don't miss this highvoltage Sturgeon novella! Blaze of Glory  I can't figure it: should Murchison be considered a hero -- even if his motives were anything but heroic? as one of the great heroes of space -- a brave man himself to save his ship. He won his immortality on the way back from Shaula II. One thing's wrong, though. He He wasn't the self-sacrificing type. I'm inclined to think it was murder -- or maybe execution -- by remote control, you might say. I guess they pick spaceship crews at random, probably by yanking a handful of cards from the big computer and throwing them up at the BuSpace roof. The ones that stick get picked. At least, that's the only way a man like Murchison could have been sent to Shaula II in the first place. necked, coarse-featured, hard-swearing, a spaceman of a type that had never existed except in storytapes for the very young -- the only kind Murchison was likely to have studied. He was our chief signal officer. Somewhere, he had picked up an awesome technical competence; he could handle any sort of communication device with supernatural ease. I once saw him tinker with a complex little Caphian artifact that had been burhave it detecting the #-centimeter "hydrogen song" within minutes. How he knew the little widget was a star-mapping device, I will never understand. But coupled with Murchison's extraordinary special skill was an irascibility, flaring into seemingly unmotivated anger at unpredictable times, that made him a prime risk on a planet like Shaula II. There was something wrong with his emotional circuit-breaker, you could never tell when he'd overload, start fizzing and sparking, and blow off a couple of megawatts of temper. You mast admit this is not the ideal sort of man to send to a world whose inhabitants are listed in the Extraterrestrial Catalogue as "wise, somewhat world-weary, exceedingly gentle, non-aggressive to an extreme degree and thus subject to exploitation. The Shaulans must be handled with great patience and forbearance, and should be given the respect due one of the Galaxy's elder races." I had never been to Shaula II, but I had a sharp mental image of the Shaulans: melancholy old men, pondering the whichness of the why, whom the first loud shout would drop in their tracks. So it caught me by surprise when the time came to affix my hancock to the roster of the Felicific and I saw o nthe line above mine the scribbled words Murchison, John F., Chief Signal Officer. I signed my name -- Loeb, Ernest T., Second Officer -- picked up my pay voucher and walked away somewhat dizzily. I was thinking of the time I had seen Murchison, John F., giving a Denebolan frogman the beating of his life, for no particular reason at all. "All the rain here makes me sick," was all Murchison cared to say; the frogman lived and Big Jawn got an X on his psych report. Now he was shipping out for Shaula? Well, maybe so -- but my faith in the computer that makes up spaceship complements was seriously shaken. expedition to Shaula II. The planet -- second of seven in orbit around the brightest star in Scorpio's tail -- was small and scrubby, but of great strategic importance as a lookout spot for that sector of the Galaxy. The natives hadn't minded our intrusion and so a military base had been established there with no preliminary haggling whatever. The Feliciftc was a standard warp-conversion-drive ship holding thirty-six men. It had the usual crew of eight, plus a cargo of twenty-eight of Terra's finest, being sent out as replacements for the current staff of the base. We blasted on # July #, a warmish day, made the conversion from ion-drive to warp-drive as soon as we were clear of the Solar System, and popped back into normal space three weeks later and two hundred light-years away. It was a routine trip in all respects. With the warp-conversion drive, a ship is equipped to travel both long distances and short. It handles the long hops via subspace warp, and the short ones by good old standard ion-drive seat-ofthe-spacesuit navigating. It's a good setup and the extra mass that the double drive requires is more than compensated for by the saving in time and maneuverability. The warp-drive part of the trip was pre-plotted and just about pre-traveled for us; no headaches there. But when we blurped back into the continuum about half a light-year from Shaula, the human factor entered the situation. Meaning Murchison, of course. It was his job to check and tend the network of telemetering systems that acted as the ship's eyes, to make sure the mass-detectors were operating, to smooth the bugs out of the communications channels between navigator and captain and drive-deck. In brief, he was the man who made it possible for us to land. Every ship carried a spare signalman, just in case. In normal circumstances, the spare never got much work. When the time came for the landing, Captain Knight buzzed me and told me to start lining up the men who would take part. Naturally, I signaled Murchison first -- he was our chief signal officer. His voice was a slow rasping drawl. "Yeah?" "Second Officer Loeb. Prepare for landing, double-fast. Navigator Henrich has the chart set up for you and he's waiting for your call." There was a pause. Then: "I don't feel like it, Loeb." I shut my eyes, held my breath and counted to three by fractions. Then I said, "Would you mind repeating that, Mr. Murchison?" "Hell, Loeb, I'm fixing something. Why do you want to land now?" "I don't make up the schedules," I said. "Then who in blazes does? Tell him I'm busy!" I turned down my phone's volume. "Busy doing what?" "Busy doing nothing. Get off the line and I'll call Henrich." I grunted and broke contact. He'd just been ragging me. Once again, Murchison had been ornery for the sheer sake of being ornery. One of these days, he was going to refuse to handlethe landing entirely. And that day, I told myself, is the day we'll crate him up and shove him through the disposal lock. Murchison had his skills and he applied them -- when he felt like it. But only if he believed that he would profit. He never if he couldn't find it in himself to at all. It was impossible to make him do something. Unwisely, we tolerated it. But someday he would get a captain who didn't understand him and he'd be slapped with a sentence of mutiny. For his sake, I hoped not. The penalty for mutiny in space is the same as it always has been -- death. VV#TH Murchison's cooperation gratefully accepted, we targeted on Shaula II, which was then at perihelion, and orbited in. Down in his little cubicle, Murchison worked like a demon, taking charge of the ship's landing system in a tremendous way. He was a fantastic signalman when he wanted to be. Later that day, the spinning red ball that was Shaula II hung just ahead of us, close enough to let us see the three blobs of continents and the big, choppy hydrocarbon ocean that licked them smooth. The Terran base on Continent Three beamed us a landing guide. Murchison picked it up, fed it through the computer bank to Navigator Henrichs and we homed in for the landing. The Terran base consisted of a couple of blockhouses, a sprawling barracks and a good-sized radar parabola, all set in a ring out on an almost mathematically flat plain. Shaula II was a great world for plains; Columbus would have had the devil's time convincing people this world was round! Murchison guided us to a glassy-looking area not far from the base and we touched down. The Felicific creaked and groaned a little as the landing-jacks absorbed its weight. Green lights went on all over the ship. We were free to go outside. A welcoming committee was on hand out there: eight members of the base staff, clad in shorts and topees. Regulation uniforms went by the board on oven-hot Shaula II. The eight looked awfully happy to see us. Coming over the flat sandy plain from the base were a dozen or so others, running, and behind them I could see even more. They were understandably glad we were here. Twenty-eight of them had spent a full year on Shaula II; they were eligible for their parity-program year's vacation. There were some other -- things -- moving toward us. They came slowly, with grace and dignity. I had expected to be impressed with the Shaulans and I was. They were erect bipeds about four feet tall, with long thin arms dangling to their knees. Their gray skins were grainy and rough, and their dark eyes -- they had three, arranged triangularly -- were deep-set and brooding. A fleshy sort of cowl or cobra-hood curled up from their necks to shield their round hairless skulls. The aliens were six in number and even the youngest-looking of them seemed ancient. A brown-faced young man wearing shorts, topee and tattooed stars stepped forward and said, "I'm General Gloster. I'm in charge here." The captain acknowledged his greeting. "Knight of the Felicific. We have your relief men with us." "I sure as hell hope you do," Gloster said. "Be kind of silly to come all this way without them." We all laughed a little over that. By now, we were ringed in by at least fifty Earthmen, probably the entire base complement -- we didn't rotate the entire base staff at once, of course -- and the six aliens. The twenty-eight youngsters we had ferried here were looking around the place curiously, apprehensive about this hot, dry, flat planet that would be their home for the next sidereal year. The crew of the Felicific had gathered in a little knot near the ship. Most of them probably felt the way I did -- glad we'd be on our way home in a couple of days. Murchison was squinting at the six aliens. I wondered what he was thinking about. 'T'HE bunch of us traipsed back the half mile or so to the settlement. Gloster walked with Knight and myself, prattling volubly about the progress the base was making, and the twenty-eight newcomers mingled with the twenty-eight who were being relieved. Murchison walked by himself, kicking up puffs of red dust and glowering in his usual manher. The six aliens accompanied us at some distance. "We keep building all the time," Gloster explained when we were within the compound. "Branching out, setting up new equipment, erecting new quarters, shoring up the old stuff. That radar parabola out there wasn't up last replacement trip." I looked around. "The place looks fine, General." It was strange calling a man half my age General, but the Service sometimes works that way. "When do you plan to set up your telescope?" "Next year, maybe." He glanced out the window at the featureless landscape. "We keep building all the time. Got to make something out of this planet. We're doing a damn fine job -- never recognize the place in a couple of years." "How about the natives?" the captain asked. "You have much contact with them?" Gloster shrugged. "As much as they'll allow. They're a proud old race -- only a handful of them left. But what a race they must have been once!" I found Gloster's boyish enthusiasm discomforting. "Do you think we could meet one of the aliens before we go?" I asked. "I'll see about it." Gloster picked up a phone. "McHenry? There any natives in the compound now? Good. Send him up, will you?" H Moments later, one of the shorts-clad men appeared, hand in hand with an alien. At close range, the Shaulan looked almost frighteningly old. A maze of wrinkles gullied its noseless face, running from the triple eyes down to the dots of nostrils to the sagging, heavy-lipped mouth. "This is Azga," Gloster said. "Azga, meet Captain Knight and Second Officer Loeb of the Felicific." The creature offered a wobbly sort of bow and said in a deep, resonant, almost human croak, "I am very humble indeed in your presence, Captain Knight and Second Officer Loeb." Azga straightened painfully from bowing and the three eyes fixed on mine. I felt like squirming, but I stared back. It was like looking into a mirror that gave the wrong reflection. Yet there was something calm and wise and good about the grotesque creature, something relaxing and terribly fragile. The rough gray skin looked like precious leather, and the hood over the skull appeared to shield it from worry and harm. A faint musty odor wandered through the room. We looked at each other -- Knight and Gloster and McHenry and I -- and we remained silent. Now that the Shaulan was here, what could we say? Wliat new thing could we possibly tell the ancient creature? I was fumbling for words to express my feeling when the sharp buzz of the phone cut across the uncomfortable silence. Gloster nodded curtly to McHenry, who answered. The man listened for a moment. "Captain Knight, it's for you." Puzzled, Knight took the receiver. He held it long enough to hear about three sentences and turned to me. "Loeb, commandeer a landcar from someone in the compound and get back to the ship. Murchison's tangling with one of the aliens." compound and spotted an enlisted man tooling up his landcar. I pulled rank and requisitioned it, and minutes later I was parking it outside the Felicific and was clambering up the catwalk. An excited-looking recruit stood at the open airlock. "Where's Murchison?" I asked. "Down in the communicator cabin, sir. He's got an alien in there with him. There's gonna be trouble." I remembered Denebola and Murchison kicking the stuffings out of a groaning frogman. I groaned a little myself and dashed down the companionway. The communications cabin was Murchison's inner sanctum, a cubicle off the astro deck where he worked and kept control over the Felicificfs communications network. I yanked open the door and saw him at the far end of the cabin, holding a massive crescent wrench and glaring at a Shaulan facing him. The Shaulan had its back to me. It looked small and squat and helpless. Murchison saw me as I entered. "Get out of here, Loeb. This isn't your affair." "What's going on here?" I snapped. "This alien snooping around. I'm gonna let him have it with the wrench." "I meant no harm," the alien boomed sadly. "Mere philosophical interest in your strange machines, nothing more. If I have offended a folkway of yours, I humbly apologize. It is not the way of my people to give offense." I walked forward and took a position between them, making sure I wasn't within easy reach of Murchison's wrench. He was standing there with his nostrils spread, his eyes cold and hard, his breath pumping noisily. He was angry, and an angry Murchison was a frightening sight. He took two heavy steps toward me. "I told you to get out. This is my cabin, Loeb. And neither you nor any aliens got any business in it." a "Put down that wrench, Mut chison. It's an order." ously. "Signal officers don't have to take orders from anyone but the captain if they think the safety of the ship is jeopardized. And I do. There's a dangerous alien in here." "Be reasonable," I said. "This Shaulan's not dangerous. He only wanted to look around. Just curious." The wrench wiggled warningly. I wished I had a blaster with me, but I hadn't thought of bringing a weapon. The alien faced Murchison quite calmly, as if confident the signalman would never strike anything so old and delicate. "You'd better leave," I said to the alien. "No!" Murchison roared. He shoved me to one side and went after the Shaulan. The alien stood there, waiting, as Murchison came on. I tried to drag the big man away, but there was no stopping him. At least he didn't use the wrench. He let it slip clangingly to the floor and slapped the alien open-handed across its face. The Shaulan backed up a few feet. A trickle of bluish fluid worked its way along its mouth. Murchison raised his hand again. "Damned snooper! I'll teach M you to poke in my cabin!" He hit the alien again. This time the Shaulan folded up accordionwise and huddled on the floor. It focused those three deep solid-black eyes on Murchison reproachfully. Murchison looked back. They stared at each other for a long moment, until it seemed that their eyes were linked by an invisible cord. Then Murchison looked away. "Get out of here," he muttered. The Shaulan rose and departed, limping a little, but still intact. Those aliens were more solid than they seemed. "I guess you're going to put me in the brig," Murchison said to me. "Okay. I'll go quietly." " there was nothing to be gained by that. He got the silent treatment instead. The men at the base would have nothing to do with him whatsoever because, in their year on Shaula, they had developed a respect for the aliens not far from worship, and any map who would actually use physical violence -- well, he just wasn't worth wasting breath on. The men of our crew gave him a wide berth, too. He wandered among us, a tall, powerful figure with anger and loneliness stamped on his face, and he said nothing to any of us and no one said anything to him. Whenever he saw one of the aliens, he went far out of his way to avoid a meeting. Murchison got another X on his psych report, and that second X meant he'd never be allowed to visit any world inhabited by intelligent life again. It was a BuSpace regulation, one of the many they have for the purpose of locking the barn door too late. Three days went by this way on Shaula. On the fourth, we took aboard the twenty-eight departing men, said good-by to Gloster and his staff and the twenty-eight we had ferried out to him, and -- somewhat guiltily -- good-by to the Shaulans, too. The six of them showed up for our blastoff, including the somewhat battered one who had had the run-in with Murchison. They wished us well, gravely, without any sign of bitterness. For the hundredth time, I was astonished by their patience, their wisdom, their understanding. I held Azga's rough hand in mine and finally managed to tell him what I had been wanting to say since our first meeting -- how much I hoped we'd eventually reach the mental equilibrium and inner calm of the Shaulans. He smiled warmly at me and I said good-by again and entered the ship. We ran the usual pre-blast checkups and got ready for departure'. Communications was working well -- Murchison had none of his usual grumbles and complaints -- and we were off the ground in record time. A couple of days of ion-drive, three weeks of warp, two more of ion-drive deceleration, and we would be back on Earth. r I  HE three weeks passed slowly, of course; when Earth lies ahead of you, time drags. But after the interminable grayness of warp came the sudden wrenching twist and the bright slippery sliding feeling as our Bohling generator threw us back into ordinary space. I pushed down the communicator stud near my arm and heard the voice of Navigator Henrichs saying, "Murchison, give me the coordinates, will you?" "Hold on," came Murchison's growl. "You'll get your coordinates as soon as I got 'em." There was a pause; then Captain Knight said, "Murchison, what's holding up those coordinates? Where are we, anyway? Turn on the visiplates!" "Please, Captain." Murchison's heavy voice was surprisingly polite. Then he ruined it. "Please be good enough to shut up and let a man think." "Murchison -- " Knight sputtered, and stopped. We all knew one solid fact about our signalman: he did as he wanted. No one ever coerced him into anything. So we waited, spinning endover-end somewhere in the vicinity of Earth, completely blind behind our wall of metal. Until Murchison chose to feed us some data, we had no way of bringing the ship down. Three more minutes went by. Then the private circuit Knight used when he wanted to talk to me alone lit up, and he 'said, "Loeb, go down to Communications and see what's holding Murchison up. We can't stay here forever." I pocketed a blaster -- I hate making mistakes more than once -- and left my cabin. I walked to the companionway, turned to the left, hit the drophatch and found myself outside Murchison's door. I knocked. "Get away from here, Loeb!" Murchison bellowed from within. I had forgotten that he had rigged a one-way vision circuit outside his door. I said, "Let me in, Murchison. Let me in or I'll blast out the lock." I heard a heavy sigh and the whisper of the lock contracting. "Come on in, then." Nervously I pushed the door open and poked my head and the blaster snout in, half expecting Murchison to leap on me from above. But he was sitting at an equipment-jammed desk, scribbling notes, which surprised me. I stood waiting for him to look up. And finally he did. I gasped when I saw his face: drawn, harried, pale, tense. I had never seen an expression like that on Murchison's face before. "What's going on?" I asked. "We're all waiting to get moving and He turned to face me squarely. "You want to know what's going on, Loeb? Well, listen: the ship's blind. None of the equipment is reading anything. No telemeter pickup, no visual, no nothing. You scrape up some coordinates, if you can." " half an hour later, in the ship's Common Room. Murchison was there, and Knight, and myself, and Navigator Henrichs, and three representatives of the cargo. "How did this happen?" Knight demanded. Murchison shrugged. "It happened while we were in warp." Knight glanced at Henrichs. "You ever hear of such a thing happening before?" He seemed to suspect Murchison of funny business. But Henrichs shook his head. "No, Chief. And there's a good reason why, too. If this happens to a ship, the ship doesn't get back to tell about it." Captain Knight looked grayfaced. He asked worriedly, "What could have caused this?" "No one knows what subspace conditions are like," Henrichs said. "It may have been a fluke magnetic field, as Murchison suggests. Or anything at all. The question's not what did it, Captain -- it's how do we get back." "Murchison, is there any chance you can repair the instruments?" "No." "Just like that -- flat no? Hell, man, we've seen you do wonders with instruments on the blink before." "No," Murchison repeated stolidly. "I tried. I can't do a damned thing." "That means we're finished, doesn't it?" asked Carney, one of our returnees. His voice was a little wild. "We might just as well have stayed on Shaula! At least we'd still be alive!" "It looks pretty lousy," Henrichs admitted. The thin-faced navigator was frowning blackly. "We don't dare try a blind approach. There's nothing we can do. Nothing at all." "There's one thing," Murchison said. All eyes turned to him. "What's that?" Knight asked. "Put a man in a spacesuit and anchor him to the skin of the ship. Have him guide us in by voice -- he'll be able to see, even if we can't." "He'd incinerate once we hit Earth's atmosphere," I said. "We'd lose a man and still have to land blind." Murchison puckered his thick lower lip. "You'll be able to judge the ship's height by hull temperature when you're that close. Besides, as soon as the ship's inside the ionosphere, you can use ordinary radio for the rest of the way down. The trick is to get that far." "I think it's worth a try," Captain Knight said. "I guess we'll have to draw lots. Loeb, get some spaghetti from the galley to use as straws." His voice was grim. "Never mind," Murchison said. "How's that again?" "I said never mind. Forget about drawing straws. I'll go." "Murchison -- " "Skip it!" he barked. "It's a failure in my department, so I'm going to go out there. I volunteer, get it? If anyone else wants to, I'll wrestle him for it." He looked around at us. No one moved. "I don't hear any takers. I'll assume the job's mine." Sweat streamed down his face. There was a startled silence, broken when Carney made the lousiest remark I've ever heard mortal man utter. "You're trying to make it up for hitting that defenseless Shaulan, eh, Murchison? Now you want to be a hero to even things up!" But the big man only turned to Carney and said quietly, "You're just as blind as the others. You don't know how rotten those defenseless Shaulans are, any of you. Or what they did to us." He spat. "You all make me sick. I'm going out there." He turned and walked away -- out, to get into his spacesuit and climb onto the ship's skin. structions, relayed from the outside of the ship, allowed Henrichs to bring us in. It was quite a feat of teamwork. At # feet above Earth, Murchison's voice suddenly cut out. We were able to pick up ground-to-ship radio by then and we taxied down. Later, they told us it seemed like a blazing candle riding the ship's back. A bright, clear flame flared for a moment when we cleaved the atmosphere. And I remember the look on Murchison's face as he left us to go out there. It was tense, bitter, strained -- as if he were being compelled to go outside -- as if he had no choice about volunteering for martyrdom. I often wonder about that now. No one had ever made Murchison do anything he didn't want to do -- until then. We think of the Shaulans as gentle, meek, defenseless. Murchison crossed one of them, and he died. Gentle, meek, yes -- but defenseless? Maybe they sabotaged the ship somehow and forced Murchison into self-martyrdom because he knew he'd been the cause. I don't know. It sort of tarnishes his glorious halo. But sometimes I think Murchison was right about the Shaulans, after all. In any case, I've never been back there. And I don't intend to, even if the computer picks me to go. Any College Grad Can Insure His Future by Teaching with flair for Science or Math are invited to write us about our beginners jobs... can escape the monotony of routine work... for the rewards of college teaching... Rm. # N. Y. #, N. Y. for your information go by between the writing of this column and its appearance on the newsstands, I am going to make the cautious remark that the following observation may no longer be true by then. (But I doubt it.) The observation is that most of the things I have been reading in the daily press about missiles during the last few months mostly dealt with missiles that don't yet exist. Or which are, at least, very much unfinished, if you consider the production contract the finish line. There have been a good many articles about the Air Force's Project Atlas, aimed at creating a ballistic missile with a range of # miles. There has been just as much discussion about the Thor missile, which is to have a range of between # and # miles. Since this is now considered an "intermediate range," the Thor There have been other articles about a Navy project to create a ballistic missile that can be fired from a submarine without the need for surfacing. If a newspaper reader, duly digesting and memorizing all this, should arrive at the conclusion that we apparently don't have much worth mentioning right now, he would, of course, be wrong. But he could hardly be blamed. graphs which accompany this article reminded me of Ordnance Day on the Aberdeen Proving Ground in the Fall of #. It happened to be one of those days when the rain stopped to give the drizzle a chance; in fact, the weather was such that the commanding general said at one point that they were "showing allweather equipment, demonstrated by all-weather soldiers to an allweather audience." However, it wasn't really so; it wasn't "all weather" -- it was just all kinds of rain. Maybe it was because of this weather that something very significant did not strike me until I woke up the next morning. In former years, the audience left the Proving Ground trying to get its ears back in shape because of all the gunfire that had been going on. I remember one such occasion when tanks fought a sham battle which was just as noisy as a real one. Then a flight of jets came in at what seemed to be twenty feet over the bleachers and helicopters rattled down to evacuate the "wounded." Elsewhere, #smoke balls into the sky, and when the "enemy" tanks had finally been beaten off and were meter guns opened fire on them to make them stay retreated. After Ordnance Day, #, ears kept ringing not with the thunder of guns, but with the roar of rockets. I don't mean to say that no gun was fired -- a few guns and mortars and even machine guns went off. But what everybody remembered was the missile arsenal, the gigantic Redstone rocket which had been brought in and erected, the Corporal on its launcher, the Nike battery in the distance. Everybody remembered the five-second salvo of # bombardment rockets which demolished something far away. And the Dart missile which pursued a speeding tank just above the ground and smashed through the center of a big target on top of it. Two enormous Honest John rockets roared into the air to drop # yards away in some presumably desolate "impact area." One of Honest John's small brothers, named Little John, was fired. It was rockets and missiles, missiles and rockets all day long. We do have a missile arsenal in working order. As a matter of fact, we have three, one each for the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. However, I am not going to list them according to the Service, but will go by engineering features, beginning with the liquid-fuel rocket-propelled missiles. 'T'HE biggest one in production is the Army's Redstone, which stands nearly # feet tall, with a body diameter of almost six feet. The Redstone is not a two-stage, but rather a two-part missile, consisting of a front section which houses warhead and guidance, and an afterbody which houses the fuel tanks and the rocket motor with auxiliary equipment such as fuel pumps. The end of the front section is indicated by the little square fins. Somewhere along the descending leg of the trajectory, the forward section separates from the afterbody and it seems likely that the forward section can still make some minor trajectory corrections after separation. The fuels of the Redstone are liquid oxygen and ethyl alcohol, and almost everything that hasn't been mentioned yet is classified information. The range is noncommittally stated to be #-plus miles, the takeoff weight is classified (but said to be about # lbs.) and the weight of the payload is a secret. It must be enormous, for the #-mile V-# carried a warhead weighing one metric ton and the Redstone is so much bigger. The next in size among the liquid-fuel rockets is the Army's Corporal, which stands # feet tall, has a body diameter of # inches and a takeoff weight of about # lbs. The fuels are red fuming nitric acid and monoethyl aniline. Control is by means of vanes in the exhaust blast. The Fig. #: The Redstone missile. range is only # miles, but the payload capacity is good enough for an atomic warhead and the Corporal is said to be extraordinarily accurate. Because some dimensions are still classified, I am not sure which missile is the next in size. Going by weight (classified, too), chances are that it is the Rascal of the U. S. Air Force. So far, only one retouched photograph has been released, but it is known that the Rascal is an air-toground missile developed by Bell Aircraft. Total length of the airplane-shaped missile must be about # feet. A British aviation magazine added some more information. According to this source, the RasFig. #: Corporal missile taking off. cal missile, fueled by liquid oxygen and jet fuel, has a weight of about # lbs. and is carried up by a bomber, say a B-#. It is then released at some distance from the target, which may be as much as # miles. After release, the Rascal first climbs to # feet, where jet-propelled fighters cannot get at it, and then, after navigating itself to the target, dives in. The warhead can be atomic.  missiles (both Army), the Nike Ajax and the Nike-Hercules, formerly called Nike B. Nike Ajax is the one first just called Nike and then Nike-A. It is a liquid-fuel rocket # feet in Fig. #: The Nike-Hercules on its launcher. length, with a #-foot solid-fuel booster to get it into the air fast. The fuels for the rocket are red fuming nitric acid and gasoline; its weight (without booster) is # lbs. Nike Ajax is the one which is now scattered all over the country near large cities. Its operational slant range is # to # miles and the flying time to maximum range # to # seconds. Nike Ajax is a so-called beam rider, which means that it follows a guiding beam to the target. Nike-Hercules is the big brother to the NikeAjax. The booster seems to have been put together from four Nike boosters. The rocket is bigger, too. In fact, it is big enough to carry an Fig. #: Nike-Hercules taking off. atomic warhead, the thought being, of course, that an atomic explosion in the midst of an enemy bombing formation will wipe out much more than just one plane. The Navy's Terrier is a shipbased anti-aircraft missile with an overall length of nearly # feet. Unlike the Nike Ajax, the Terrier is a solid-fuel rocket with a solid-fuel booster, but is also a beam rider. The maximum operational slant range is said to be # miles. Going on with solid fuels, a non-missile must be mentioned first -- the Army's Honest John. It is not a missile that either can be guided or will guide itself after takeoff; it is very simply a large bombardment rocket. Fig. #: Anti-tank missile Dart. And heavy artillery it is: # feet # inches long with a takeoff weight of # lbs. and a warhead weighing # lbs. The diameter of the warhead is # inches, the diameter of the body # inches. Its fuel is a single-piece cast solid charge. The operational range is # yards. When fired at a very shallow angle (elevation #I degrees), the peak of the trajectory is only # feet above the ground and is reached in nine seconds. Impact for the firing angle takes place after # seconds at # yards. For a #-degree elevation, the peak of the trajectory is # feet, attained after #I seconds, and impact at # yards after # seconds. The Air Force's Sidewinder does not show any external semblance to the rattlesnake after which it has been named and its anatomy is not the same, either. Still, there are some resemblances. The Sidewinder missile is carried by aircraft as a weapon against other aircraft. It is about nine feet long and probably weighs # lbs. In its nose, it carries a heat-seeking homing device. When fired in the general direction of the target, the Sidewinder senses the heat of the target's engine and steers itself into the source of that heat. It has been said that if there were only one man on an open desert at night, a Sidewinder would find him. And if he ran into his house, slammed the door Fig. #: Honest John rocket taking off. and hid under the bed, the Sidewinder would come in through the window and join him. This story may have been invented by a Texan, but he probably did not have to exaggerate much. np HE Air Force's Falcon is another one of these homing missiles. It is six feet six inches long and weighs about # lbs. Like the Sidewinder -- which is also used by the Navy -- it is a solid-fuel rocket. So is the Navy's Sparrow, an eight-foot air-to-air missile with a weight of # lbs. and a range of five to seven miles. The Sparrow is not a homing bird, however, but a beam rider. One Army missile revealed as "ready" only a very short time ago is the Lacrosse, a solid-fuel missile with cruciform wings that have a wing spread of not quite four feet. The operational range of the Lacrosse is eight to ten miles. The last one on the list of solid-fuel missiles to be mentioned is the little Dart, which, for demonstration purposes, is usually fired from an open small Army vehicle. (In combat, I should think, they'd probably be hiding somewhere.) It is a destroyer of ground targets, mainly tanks but also pillboxes and, possibly, the means of taking a support away from a bridge. Like the Lacrosse, the Dart has cruciform wings. Its guidance is by wires, an idea first employed by the builders of experimental Fig. #: U. S. Missile Arsenal, (From the Revised Edition of Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel -- Courtesy The Viking Press, Inc.) All photographs " Courtesy U. S. Army " naval torpedoes during the socalled gay nineties and later developed by the Germans during World War II. The German device which was to use it was the air-to-air missile X-#, which has acquired some historical fame as being the smallest liquid-fuel rocket missile ever attempted. It flew, but did not get into production. On two opposing wings, the X-# carried flares, just to make it more visible to the man who fired it. On the other two opposing wings, the X-# carried two bobbins containing a mile or so of thin copper wire which unreeled as the missile progressed. The command impulses came to the missile through these wires, making any "jamming" impossible. The Dart uses a method based on the same idea; detail has not been released, of course. The next "family" of missiles is the one that is characterized by having air-breathing engines like turbojets and ramjets. They seem to be in special favor with the Air Force and the largest of them is the intercontinental production missile, the Snark, of which most citizens heard for the first time when one flew to Brazil. Tlie Snark is an airplaneshaped missile -- you might just as well say a pilotless jet plane -- with an overall length of # feet and a wing span of # feet. It is powered by a turbojet engine and catapulted into the air by two solid-fuel takeoff units, each of which delivers # lbs. of thrust. Apparently the testing (or training) procedure with the Snark is to have it take off from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida and fly in a straight line down the missile range leading over the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. After # miles or so, the Snark executes a pretty # degree turn and it is likely that there is a method of landing the missile when it comes back. The one that got all the publicity simply failed to make that turn. ' Air Force's Bomarc missile, which is # feet long, has a wing span of # feet and a cruising speed of two and a half times the speed of sound, but a comparatively short range of a few hundred miles. The Bomarc is powered by two #-inch-diameter Marquardt ramjets with # lbs. of thrust each. While the Snark is to destroy ground targets, the Bomarc is an anti-aircraft missile, but just how it goes about destroying aircraft is a matter of conjecture. One source guesses that this fightersized missile carries an atomic warhead like the Nike-Hercules. Another one says that the Bomarc is a missile-carrier itself, going into action with a load of Falcon missiles. There are no such secrets about the next missile, the Air Force's Matador, also a pilotless bomber meant to destroy targets on the ground. The #-foot-long Matador, with a wing span of nearly # feet, is powered by a turbojet and takes off with the aid of one large solid-fuel booster rocket. The operational range is # miles. The Navy's equivalent of the Matador is the Regulus, of which there are now two versions, one subsonic, the other supersonic. The subsonic Regulus is turbojet-powered and takes off with the aid of two solid-fuel boosters. It is # V # feet long with a wing span of #I feet. It can either be command-guided or be equipped with homing guidance. The warhead is a nuclear warhead, as in all large missiles. Regulus II, the supersonic variety, seems to be just a bigger and better Regulus with a more powerful jet engine and a longer range. The range of the first Regulus (I very narrowly missed writing the regular Regulus) is given as around # miles. Whether the Navy's Petrel should be listed here or not is somewhat doubtful -- it may still be under development and then again it may not. At any event, the Petrel is a missile which is dropped by aircraft for the purposes of hunting submarines. The length is given as # feet, the wing span as # feet, the weight as # lbs. and the range as five miles. Propulsion is by a small turbojet engine. The warhead is high-explosive, not atomic. The list ends with an airbreathing missile which is used, in slightly different versions, by all three Services, the Talos. It is a supersonic anti-aircraft missile about ten feet in length, powered by an #-inch-diameter ramjet engine. A solid-fuel rocket booster gets it going. It is probably a beam rider and the operational slant range is at least # miles. missile arsenal we have. But this beiqg a science fiction magazine and its readers being what they are, I know that I am expected to say at least a few words about what is being developed now. Well, the Navy is thinking about or working on: ( I ) the Polaris, intermediate range solid-fuel fleet missile that can be launched from submerged submarines. (#) the Triton, a ramjet-propelled missile that might be described as a super-Regulus of # miles range. (#) the Lulu, of which it is known that its warhead will be nuclear and its purpose the destruction of submarines. Everything else is either secret or not determined. (#) the Dove, of which nothing has been said. As for the Army, it is working on: (#) the Jupiter, of which it is known that it is big. Period. (#) the Shrike, of which it is known that it is a liquidfuel rocket with a nuclear warhead. The Air Force has the longest list of missiles under development, namely: (#) the Atlas, of # miles range with hydrogen warhead. (#) the Titan, of similar range, known to use liquid fuels. (#) the Thor, of # miles range, using liquid fuels. (#) the Navaho, of which several versions are under development, ramjet-powered. (#) to (??) of which nothing has been said. Some of the things you read may just refer to different Navaho versions. Others are probably pure research missiles. Still others could be antimissiles to take care of intercontinental missiles. And it has been known to happen that a "development" was mostly the hopeful talk of somebody thinking about contracts. But it has been officially said that the Air Force has handed out several study contracts dealing with an unmanned rocket to the Moon. B UT what is the X-# on the drawing? The X-#, built by Lockheed, is a pure research missile. The first stage is a liquid-fuel rocket which has spinner rockets attached near its top that provide a rapid rotation for the whole soon after takeoff as a stabilizing measure. The second stage, a socalled "cluster" of solid-fuel rockets, then carries the third stage out of the atmosphere. The third stage is supposed to turn over outside the atmosphere prior to ignition and then push itself vertically down so as to enter the atmosphere as fast as possible. The purpose of the whole thing is to find out what happens to a missile when it re-enters the atmosphere from space. This is something we must know -- not only for missiles, but especially for the day when a pilot's ship "re-enters" from space. Iff Money Certainly they accepted the normal hazards of space... but what was normal about being dumped on a world filled with gift horses? his Pilofs Handbook shut and hunched his thickset shoulders. "That's about the size of it. There can't be any colonists here!" "Take it up with Handbook Modification, son." Walter Bradley, the cartographer, stared out thumped and Anderson crowded the porthole. "We got colonists, the porthole to stare at the all right, regardless of what curious crowd, which had grown Galactodetic Survey says." to several hundred. More were Bradley ran a thin hand flowing across the plain from the through his sparse gray hair and city, a half-mile distant, motioned the younger man over. "Maybe they're natives," the The cooling plates creaked and pilot suggested. "Uh-uh," Bradley grunted. "I gave this place too good a onceover on the way down. It's undoubtedly a colonial pattern -- five fairly nice-sized cities clustered together with a few hamlets in between. I'd say that represents about two, three hundred years' development from scratch." "Could be other Joes colonizing this cluster." "So much like us," the older man asked, "that they even use our alphabet?" Bradley indicated a man in a white uniform pushing a cart through the crowd. A placard wedged in his hatband read: Thoughtfully, the cartographer worried the ragged edge of his mustache with the back of a finger. "We'd better see how much communication gear that meteor knocked out of the blister." HP HE throng shouted a tumultuous welcome as Anderson paused behind the old man on the ramp. "Nobody here to hand us the key to the planet?" he asked facetiously. "Hm-m-m," Bradley said uneasily. "There certainly doesn't seem to be anyone in authority out there." He held up a hand for silence. The clamor, however, only mounted as scores charged up the ramp, laughing and jostling one another good-naturedly. The crowd surged in around them like gleeful children. A slim man, almost as tall as Anderson, seized the pilot's shoulders. "Welcome to Dewonto!" Grasping the cartographer's arm, a cherubic old woman warmly cried, "Greetings!" But she scowled abruptly and tugged at her purse, whirling to snag a hand that was fumbling with its lid. She pulled on the captive arm and drew a touslehaired youngster from the concealment of the crowd. After shaking her finger reprimandingly in his face, she released him. But Anderson started as he watched the woman snicker and dip her hand deftly into the child's pocket before he could lose himself in the throng. "Did you see that?" Bradley demanded, surprised. "The woman and child?" the pilot asked. "No. Over there. That fellow in the blue suit just picked two pockets!" A small girl with spritelike brown eyes pulled insistently on Anderson's jacket. "You from Earth, mister?" But the pilot caught her hand just as it began easing into his hip pocket. A siren's groan died off in a bass sigh as a panel truck pulled up at the rear of the crowd. Painted on its side was a star within a crescent, subscribed by Anderson was suddenly conscious of stealthy movement in the left pocket of his jacket. He released the child and spun around, trapping an adult hand as it withdrew furtively. "Thief! Pickpocket!" he heard Bradley shout. Confounded, Anderson watched the cartographer lunge for a young blonde. He missed and went chasing off down the ramp after her. "Thief!" shouted the pilot exasperatedly, still holding the lean native. "Thieves!" He patted his inside breast pocket to make sure that the Subcon emergency signal generator was still there. The crowd gave way as two uniformed men from the truck pushed up the ramp. "Break it up!" cried one. The other confronted Anderson and the squirming native. "What's coming off here?" "I caught him -- them -- " Anderson glanced around for the little girl -- "picking my pockets!" Bradley labored back up the ramp, dragging the blonde behind him. "Her, too!" Anderson emptied his pockets to see what was missing. But, dumbfounded, the pilot spread his hand open and stared down at a wristwatch, a gold brooch, two rings and a half-dozen jeweled pins -- none of which had been there moments earlier. Bradley surveyed a similar handful of valuables from his own pockets. "You're under arrest," one of the officers announced. "But we didn't steal them!" Anderson protested. "The charge is not dewontoing." Taking off his uniform blouse and cap, the officer thrust them into the arms of the native Anderson held captive. "Next time, be more careful." The other policeman deposited his cap on the blonde's head. "Here are the keys. This one's for the truck." Astonished, the two Galactodetic Survey men let the summarily commissioned officers march them off to the police truck. HP HE girl, it seemed, was named Gladys Jerrel. And as Dewontoites went -- judging by what Anderson had seen of the native population -- she was quite attractive. The uniform blouse fit her clumsily, but its excessive proportions only accentuated her trim figure. The big cap slouched over one side of her forehead, crowning billows of soft hair that seemed to flow from under the visor. She clamped her hands on her hips, confronting the pilot. "For the fourth time -- you were arrested because you failed to dewonto. Not dewontoing is the crime." "The crime?" "Of course. From your attitude, one would imagine there were others." "But Bradley, half reclining on a richly upholstered couch, poured himself another drink and grinned. "Don't get yourself all excited, son. I imagine if I was your age, I'd settle for a life term in this kind of a jail." Lifting a shaggy eyebrow, he surveyed his luxuriant surroundings. And Anderson, too, gawked at broad expanses of gray marble walls, at a vaulted ceiling supported by ornate columns, at gossamer-clad girls dancing to the accompaniment of a flute and two stringed instruments. He turned back sourly on the old man. "It'll be a life term if we don't get away before Mother Ship pulls out of this sector." "Take it easy, Scott boy. Before we try anything, let's find out what this place is all about, or we might get in deeper." "You don't look like you're trying to find out anything." Bradley sank lower into the cushions. "Let's say I'm a casual observer." He passed the glass slowly under his nose, inhaling audibly. "Very casual." Anderson threw up his hands. "I should worry. We have Subcon senders. All we have to do is press a button and Mama find her other twenty-nine map-tracing scouts will come running." The cartographer straightened abruptly. "That's just what I want to avoid -- using the Subothers. With Mother Ship here, this colony will certainly be recorded and opened up." "That would be bad?" "I'm ready to concede there's something -- uh -- not quite proper about Dewonto." Bradley was dead serious now. "I have an idea that if normal intercourse is set up between this planet and the rest of the Galaxy, there'll be drastic results." "Don't get too wrapped up in your observations," the pilot warned caustically. "We've only got six days to get back to the mapping party on our own or Twenty-foot-high doors swung open and the other policeman entered. "Will you see them now, sirs?" "Who?" Anderson asked. "The contractors. They want to know if you'll accept city homes or country estates." "Later." The cartographer waved him off. "See what I mean, Scott boy? We got a lot to learn." Gladys came over. "They're only trying to dewonto," she explained. Anderson frowned uncomprehendingly. "What the devil is this dewontoing?" "Look. I'll show you."  her arms gliding around his neck. Her kiss was warm and long. "See?" she asked, backing off. Grinning, the pilot stepped forto learn." He grasped her around the waist. But she pushed herself away and struck him resoundingly on the cheek. The music stopped and the dancing girls exited through a side door. The other policeman reappeared, announcing: "Judge Basil will hear your case now." They were led to the courtroom and seated, with Anderson still rubbing his cheek baffledly. The judge was small and rotund, with jowls much like a bulldog's. His black robe was an aura of sobriety. But his disposition was altogether out of keeping with his stern appearance as he shifted eagerly beneath the above his chair. After smiling indulgently down on Anderson and Bradley, he glanced at the crier. "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" intoned the latter. "Comes now the case of Dewonto versus Defendants Scott Anderson and Walter Bradley, charged with failure to dewonto." "Notice the coincidence," Bradley whispered to the pilot, "between the names of the planet and the crime we're charged with. It might mean something." Judge Basil banged his gavel, then flinched apologetically. "This court finds you innocent of -- " The crier leaped up. "Not yet, Sid. You got to dress it up a little first." "Oh?" The judge relaxed disappointedly. The crier turned to return to his desk, but the judge's hand darted out and slipped something sparkling into the court official's pocket. "Let's see now," said the judge, concealing a snicker, "you're charged with not dewontoing. Moreover, you molested two dewontoers. This court finds..." disdainful stare of the crier. "Oh, dear," moaned the judge. Then, more determinedly, "Darn it, fellows, you shouldn't have done that! Ain't nobody else on Dewonto acting up like you two!" Anderson glanced hopelessly at Bradley. "Look, Your Honor, why not just let us go back to our ship? We'll -- uh -- dewonto from now on." The judge rapped his gavel. "Silence! We can't let you go back." "Why not?" Judge Basil folded his hands patronizingly. "I'll put it this way: Ain't no place anywhere as good as Dewonto, I don't suppose. See what it says right up there?" He thrust a thumb up toward the escutcheon emblazoned with "If I came here, I'd want somebody to see that I stayed," he stated. "What does it mean?" the pilot asked insistently. "Why -- why -- " The judge looked helplessly at the crier, who stepped up to whisper into his ear. "Why," Judge Basil declared confidently, "it means D-U-O, that's all." "The jobs, Your Honor," prompted the crier. "Oh, yes -- the jobs." The judge turned back toward the defendants. "I realize you'd naturally like to be placed on sewer maintenance. But everybody can't get the plums -- " He stopped abruptly and glanced at the crier. "Judicial immunity for the sentencing?" "Judicial immunity," the other agreed condescendingly. "Then," the judge continued, "until you two are adjusted, I am placing you in the custody of this policewoman. And I am assigning you, Mr. Bradley, to the position of Civic Overseer and you, Mr. Anderson, as Judge of the First and Only Municipal, Civic, Criminal and Federal Court." The crier smiled approvingly as Judge Basil slipped out of his robe and handed it over to the pilot. ing, Anderson and the cartographer sat idly on the curb. Gladys, between them, drew her knees up thoughtfully under her chin. "Look, fellows," she proposed, "why don't you just go to work? Everything'll come out all right." "You don't understand," the old man said. "We're from Galactodetic Survey Headquarters. We're supposed to map new star systems. If we come across anything like Dewonto, we've got to report it as a lost colony." Anderson grumbled, "I wouldn't worry about reporting this place, Walt. Nobody'd believe it anyway." "So we've got a few official questions to ask," the cartographer continued. "And if you'll just tell us where we can find somebody in authority -- " "Then we can get back to our ship," the pilot finished. Gladys smiled affably. "You can get back to the ship all right. But it won't do you any good." "Why not?" "They've emptied it." "What!" Anderson exploded. "But of course. After all, you had a lot of property there. The only thing to do was to take it off your hands." The pilot jumped up. "You mean they stole everything aboard?" She shook her head disdainfully. "You have such an odd perspective. They just dewontoed, the same as any decent person would have." She motioned across the street. "Look." A man lumbered up the sidewalk, struggling under the weight of a familiar object. Anderson leaned forward more attentively. It was the ship's pulse-firing control console. The Dewontoite paused beside a parked automobile, guiltily glanced up and down the street, then deftly pushed the console onto the car's back seat. He sprinted away. The pilot reached angrily into generator. "That settles it!" "Wait!" Bradley caught his hand and drew him away from the girl. "It may be that this planet can't ever enjoy normal relations with any other world. Their philosophy is obviously different. Their culture is built on some strangely twisted negative principles." "What do you expect us to do? Let Mother Ship shove off without us just so nobody'll disturb Dewonto's cozy little cockeyed way of life?" "I don't know. But we've still got time to trip off the emergency signals if we decide that's the right thing to do. In the meantime, let's observe a little more." her feet. "Take me to the mayor or whoever makes the wheels spin around here." "That's easy." She shrugged, extending a hand toward Bradley in an introductory gesture. "His Honor, the Civic Overseer." Groaning, the pilot sank back down on the curb. A flashy sports model car pulled up and the driver leaped out. Sheepishly, he dropped the keys in Anderson's hand. "Now if you'd rather nothave the super-deluxe job -- " The pilot numbly shook his head. "You'll take this one?" The driver seemed surprised. Then he raced away before Anderson could answer.  The pilot turned toward the girl. "Gladys, there's something -- not quite right about Dewonto, you know. Elsewhere, people don't give things away, except on special occasions." Her confusion bordered on alarm, with her neatly painted lips drawn into a little crimson circle. "You mean everybody's a taker? But I don't see -- " "Since they don't have Subcon to communicate with the other worlds," the cartographer interrupted, "it's obvious that the original colonists planned total isolation just so they could start this kind of society." The pilot nodded back at the All-Courts building, at the bronze plaque above the main entrance. Gladys?" The girl shrugged. "Evidently," Bradley offered, withdrawing from deep thought, "the symbol remains after its literal meaning has been lost." "You got it figured out?" Anderson shifted an eyebrow. The old man nodded pensively. "I think I'm beginning to see. Dewonto -- not dewon-to, but do unto. D-U-O: Do Unto Others. The Golden Rule." Anderson straightened. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!" Gladys laughed. "That's cute!" ly traced one of the deep creases in his face. "They've been following it so long that it's become a basic way of life -- built on diligent work, bloated production, mountainous surpluses -- giveaway on a cosmic scale." "Damn!" Anderson exclaimed. "Would we have a good thing here!" "What do you mean?" the old man asked. Gladys turned away disinterestedly and went over to examine the new-model car. ple who are one hundred per cent givers," Anderson said, "we're the only hundred per cent receivers." Bradley scratched his chin pensively. "That might not be such a bad idea." "Sure. They'd give us the whole planet if we let them." "That's not quite what I had in mind, son. These Dewontoites have to be snapped back to normal before contact or they'll be the prize suckers of the Galaxy." "And you want to snap them out of it by going around preaching against the Golden Rule?" the pilot challenged. Bradley shook his head. "That wouldn't work -- not in the six mapping party before it gets out of range. If preaching couldn't make other people follow the Golden Rule, high-sounding phrases won't make these follow the Brass Rule. The only thing to do is show them that ' the Golden Rule was never meant to be a theory of economics and just exactly why it shouldn't be." "You think we can do it?" "This system is based on absolutely literal application of the Golden Rule. Sure, it works -- but only because its basic vulnerability hasn't been attacked. Tearing ours down would mean shutting off all purchasing power, which just can't be done. But this economic system is wide open to attack -- all we have to do is take everything they can provide!" Gladys had returned from her inspection of the car and had stood by studying Bradley as he finished outlining his plan. "You mean," she asked in unbelieving awe, "that you're going to accept everything that's offered?" "Everything," Bradley assured her, grinning. Anderson took the girl's arm and led her toward the car. "Gladys, why did you kiss me at the jail?" She reddened. "Because I -- guess it was what I wanted you to do to me." That figured: do unto others. "But you slapped me when I kissed you." "Of course. You wanted me to, didn't you? That's what I would have expected you to do if you had been in my place. Where are we going?" The pilot fretted over the illogical kinks. "We're taking you home." The girl's family, it turned out rather astonishingly, were members of the city's elite, being extremely poor-to-do and living in one of the most respectably deteriorated downtown districts -- just across the railroad tracks. Gladys paused in front of the home and proudly spread her arms in a sweeping gesture that more than took in the cramped breadth of the thirty-foot lot. "Don't jump at conclusions. All this impressive non-wealth doesn't mean I'm a spoiled social butterfly." Bradley coughed embarrassedly. "Forget it, child. I can tell you aren't the kind who'd let poverty go to your head." took in the paint-worn frame house with its patched roof and thin leaning columns and tired walls held erect by makeshift props. "Papa is considering accepting a new house from one of the contractors," she said, leading them up groaning steps. "But we can't do that. Not a family of our standing. Don't you agree?" Papa, short and stout and amply enveloped in patched coveralls, was replastering a hole in the living room wall. Under the girl's severe stare, he tried to hide the trowel. "Honestly, Papa!" Gladys stamped her foot. "If it weren't for Mother and me, we'd be living in a brick home, with inlaid floors!" She introduced Anderson and the cartographer. "From the ship, eh?" her father asked, walking cautiously around the GS crewmen. He drew a tape measure from his pocket and stretched it across Anderson's shoulders. "Couldn't interest you in a suit, could I?" "Papa's a tailor," Gladys explained. "No," Anderson said. "I don't think so." But Bradley stepped hastily forward. "Yes, you can. He'll take a dozen." Papa Jerrel stiffened in disbelief. "With two pairs of pants apiece?" "Three. With vests. And I think he'd like a half-dozen casual jackets and slacks." Apparently this was too much for Papa Jerrel. He clasped his hands in front of his face. "You don't know what this means -- " "I'll need clothes, too," the cartographer went on munificently. "You'd better measure me up and double the order." The girl's father was beside himself with gratitude. "Thank you! Thank you, gentlemen... Mama!" A sedate little lady with a moth-ravaged shawl draped over her shoulders made a timid entrance. Gladys, perched on an arm of the sofa and thereby avoiding the springs that protruded through the cushions, introduced her. "A celebration's in order, Mama!" the tailor cried. "I've unloaded! And I don't have to take anything in return! I won't even show a surplus on the books this month. Do we have any wine?" Bradley winked at the pilot. "Looks like we've stirred up something, son. I think we might build an interesting experiment around Papa Jerrel. By keeping his supply of material depleted, we might make him place a positive value on his product." Anderson nodded in comprehension. "And his demand for raw material might exceed the supply." "Right. Then -- in Papa Jerrel's line, at least -- the old law of supply and demand might replace this system of ostentatious doing without -- conspicuous unconsumption, you might say. But time's short. We'll have to pass this up for bigger things if we're going to set Dewonto straight." "Of course we have wine," Mama Jerrel told her husband. "A cellar full. Remember? Last month you let a winemaker dump a whole month's output on us just so you could unload two suits." Papa paled momentarily and confronted Bradley. "You fellows couldn't use a few cases of wine, too, could you?" had proposed in the name of greater austerity, Anderson sipped from his glass and set it back on the table. Then he pretended not to see Mama Jerrel as she emptied half the contents of her glass into his. "You see, Mr. Bradley," the tailor said, "conditions are driving me to the rich house. The textile manufacturers are constantly pounding at my door, trying to get rid of new bolts of cloth. And there's no legal limit on the amount of material they can dump on us." "That's no way to talk," Gladys scolded. "If you were a textile manufacturer, you'd expect the tailors to take all the bolts you could deliver, wouldn't you?" "I suppose so," he conceded grumpily. There was an impatient pounding at the door and Gladys let the caller in. He was a lean, bald man with a worried expression. He smiled, though, when he saw the two spacemen. "Thought I would find you here. Now about that house -- " "What house?" Anderson asked densely. "The one I'd like to -- give you." "Fine!" Bradley cut in. "When can we get it?" "You'll take it?" The man's spirits soared. "I'll bring you over there right away. It's not very desirable, I admit. Four stories, thirty-two rooms, acres of grounds and fences and tiled streams --  "How many others can you let us have?" The contractor drew back unbelievingly. "We have twenty-six unoccupied and fourteen under construction." "We'll take them all. Tomorrow you can send the other contractors around." Papa turned to his wife. "Gladys said they were real takers." The contractor was speechless. Anderson took him by the arm. "Let's go." "Wait!" Gladys followed them out to the car. "I'm going, too. I want to see how this comes out. Anyway, you're in my custody, remember?" TF the rest of the metropolitan area suffered from a lack of elaborate embellishments, Hobo Heights more than made up for the inadequacy. Here, pretentious mansions reared their impressive bulks above great expanses of carefully trimmed lawns and meticulously tended hedges. But they were empty -- all except one. In that one, dominating the tallest elevation, Anderson perched on a marble window sill and motioned for Gladys to come over. In the luxury of the reception room, with its gold-trimmed furniture and rich tapestries, she seemed ill at ease and fretful. "Do you suppose," he asked sportively, "that you'll ever see the day when all these homes are occupied -- with Dewontoites competing against one another for the chance to live in them?" She stiffened, appalled. "They're empty because we'd be ashamed to accept them. That would be not dewontoing." The hypothetical analogies were coming easier now. It was as though he had asked an inworld girl if she thought the elite of her planet would ever move out of their swanky homes and fight for the broken-down tenements. Anderson looked reflectively at Gladys, only now realizing that she was attractive. And he wondered whether he might not have been impressed by her looks sooner, if it weren't for the aura of abnormality that she shared with all the other Dewontoites. He tentatively held up a finger. "Dewonto, first phase: You leave the big houses empty so they'll be avialable for anybody who might want them. A sort of pre-arranged charitable gesture." She nodded uncertainly. "Dewonto, second phase : If you people are really interested in doing unto others, you'd grab up all the mansions you could get. By leaving them unoccupied and by hogging the simpler residences, you're not dewontoing at all. You're forcing an occasional Dewontoite to live in a mansion whenever he can't find anything else." Her mouth fell open in abrupt realization. Anderson smiled, at last able to see hope in the situation. Now he could agree with Bradley when the cartographer insisted they might set Dewonto on the right cultural path within the next five days. By the time they used the Subcon Ship, these people would be well on the way toward assuming a normal role in Galactic civilization. and the heavy clump of footsteps in the corridor. The door burst open, admitting Bradley and a horde behind him. The cartographer waved a newspaper. "We did it! They accepted the ad!" "Front page?" Anderson asked above the clamor of excited businessmen. The old man spread the paper open. The display ad, blocked off across half the page, read in huge letters : to Hobo Heights we'll take as much as you've got of anything No tricks! No Unloading! You don't have to accept anything in return!!! "It wasn't easy, though," the cartographer complained. "We had to take two thousand subscriptions." "Well, I guess we owed them something for printing the ad," Anderson said. Bradley turned to the throng behind him. "Line forms on the right. Are there any furniture manufacturers here?" Five anxious men and two women stepped forward. "We've taken over all the homes in Hobo Heights," the cartographer said. "They need furnishings. Can you handle the job?" There was a chorus of yesses as pencils worked frenziedly on order pads. "We expect to accept new homes at the rate of about thirty a day. I'll want you to furnish them, too." "You sure we don't have to take anything in return?" one of the furniture men asked suspiciously. "Not a thing. Now do we have any heavy industrial equipment manufacturers here?" Six others came forward eagerly. The cartographer put in orders for three thousand tractors, twenty-two hundred bulldozers, six hundred cranes, three hundred and fifty steam shovels and a thousand pile-drivers. In quick succession, he accommodated representatives of clothing firms, shoe manufacturers, automobile and truck producers (twelve thousand cars and sixtyfour hundred trucks), cosmetics concerns, jewelers, food handlers and agents for scores of other products -- until the assembly had dwindled to a handful. "Think it'll work?" Anderson asked after they had accompanied the last to the door. "We're probably well on the way toward cutting into their surpluses," Bradley mused. "When we corner all the present stocks of commodities, there'll be one hell of a scramble for new goods. When that happens, they'll either follow normal supply and demand or go hungry, naked and cold." "I hope so," Anderson said. "It can't miss," Bradley assured him. TUT somehow Anderson failed to share Bradley's complacency -- particularly the next night as he sat in front of the video screen watching "Winner Give All." The contestant, a small-craft builder, had just won the right to unload on the sponsor three cabin cruisers, a yacht and eight inboard powerboats. Now he was going to try for double. The pilot again began worrying about the likelihood of success in their plan to rebuild a cultural system in -- how much time did they have left? -- four days. He turned toward Gladys, who was gazing intently at him. To her, he realized, he and Bradley must seem like magnificent benefactors. "What are you trying to do, Scott?" she asked. "There must be something behind all this taking -- some sort of scheme." He filled his pipe and went over to the French doors, opened them and stepped out on the of Dewonto's three satellites. The blazing match cast a red glow on his grave features. "There are many other worlds in the Galaxy, Gladys. Someday their ships will come here regularly and this lost colony will be part of Galactic civilization." He blew out the match and sucked on the stem until the glowing bowl illuminated his face as much as the flame had. "But the rest of the Galaxy," he went on, "is built on different principles: 'The Lord helps those who help themselves,' 'Charity begins at home,' 'A fool and his money are soon parted'." "You mean it's all selfishness and greed out there?" "Let's say we recognize that every individual should be rewarded for his effort, rather than have to pay for the privilege of exerting it." "Isn't the privilege a reward in itself?" When he didn't answer, she went on, "You want to make Dewonto over in the likeness of those other worlds?" "It's something that has to be done. We found this world. Even if the news of its existence doesn't get back to the rest of the Galaxy this time, sooner or later Dewonto will be discovered again and will have to take its place." She stared incredulously at him. "You want us all to be fulltime takers and -- and get whatever we can from one another! You're just trying to trick us into never being able to dewonto again! I hate you! And just' when I -- was beginning to -- to start to like you!" She turned to run off. But he grabbed her shoulders. "You're going to tell the others what we want to do?" "No. That wouldn't be dewontoing." She avoided his eyes. "You wouldn't want me to do that." He released her and she fled back into the house. Then, for a long while, he stood leaning on the balcony railing, pulling on his pipe and looking unseeingly out over the countryside. His hand crept toward the Subcon pack. All he had to do was press a button and, within a few hours, Mother Ship would be squatting on the lawn below. But news of the lost colony would spread with subcontinuum speed. Within weeks, Dewonto of opportunists -- all takers, all out to milk the defenseless planet dry. The disillusionment suffered by the natives would be brutal. Their whole world would be utterly ruined. He slipped the emergency signal generator back into his pocket. Bradley's plan of showing them the way -- forcing them to work out their own transition -- was merciful by comparison. It had to succeed. fast in his bedroom the next morning. On the grounds below, men shouted, gears clashed and brakes squealed as truck after truck rolled across the lawn unloading orders. The cranes and bulldozers and the army of tractors were lined up abreast along the bank of one of the streams that sliced across the estate. Closer to the mansion, conveyor belts had erected three mountains of canned goods. On two fields across the stream, automobiles and trucks were being lined up in hundreds of long straight rows. The vehicular stockpile was already invading two adjoining estates. Here and there, smaller hills of goods were rearing up -- crates of shoes and boxes of clothes and barrels of wine, piles of toys, pens filled with livestock, cartons of eggs, milk containers. Ships and shoes and sealing wax, Anderson thought. Bradley, already dressed, came in as the pilot finished eating. "If we expect to leave this place at all," the cartographer said soberly, "it's going to have to be by using the Subcon generator. I've just been over to the ship, trying to see if it might be possible to get all the pieces toI gether again. But the parts were too well scattered." For once, it was Anderson who was confident. "We won't have to depend on the scout craft. We've got three days left. Before time's up, we'll have these natives eagerly waiting to drive some shrewd bargains with Mother He took a quick shower, shaved and selected a new suit. "I've been thinking, though," Bradley told him while he finished dressing, "that we're still not going about this thing as efficiently as we could." Anderson paused attentively. "Well," the old man explained, "we've been whittling away at n r. VV "Then run down to that newspaper office and place another ad. Make it read: 'Anderson  Bradley, unlimited manufacturers of all products, need raw materials -- sheet steel, structural beams, lumber, textiles' -- all that sort of stuff. We'll take everything they got." The pilot turned to leave. "Hurry back," Bradley urged. "I have something just as big lined up." "What now?" "Since I'm Civic Overseer, I'm going to start overseeing. Today I'll tour the city on a housing inspection. I'm going to condemn substandard dwellings and order the residents out." Anderson snapped his fingers. "That's it! We'll make them move into our mansions!" "Exactly. And while I'm condemning the shacks, you're going to be charging pretty steep rental rates for the homes in Hobo Heights. The tenants will have to make money to afford a roof over their heads." Anderson grabbed his hat. "And while you're in town," the cartographer called after him, "drop in at the Chamber of Commerce and arrange to assume ownership of all the commercial buildings. We'll either collect rent or sell the property back at exorbitant prices. In order to meet those prices, they're going to the surplus of finished products. Manufacturers can still get all the supplies they want from the raw material producers." Anderson nodded. "I see what you mean. With a shortage of raw materials, those boys who just unloaded on us will have to pay the price to get more raw materials." have to show real gains on their other transactions." TN the mansion's main reception room, Anderson squirmed in his full-dress jacket. "Is this necessary?" he asked dismally. Bradley slapped him encouragingly on the back. "We're demonstrating how life should be lived. This party won't have any immediate results. But after our other lessons sink in, they'll remember it. They'll realize this sort of thing, too, is part of a proper social life." Four orchestras provided the music. A corps of maids and butlers, stiffly erect in formal uniforms, passed trays among the guests. The only anomalies at the reception were the guests themselves. The men had come attired in work clothes, the women in simple house dresses. However, other than trying an occasional dance, they merely stood around uncertainly. Perhaps, Anderson ventured, they felt a sense of guilt at indulging themselves in this manner. Or, more likely, they were seriously beginning to question their rejection of the finer things. The pilot readjusted his white tie against the stiff-wing collar and, drink in hand, followed the cartographer onto the veranda. Two moons cast their glow on ridges and peaks of boxes, crates and machines that inundated the grounds of the mansion and the adjoining four estates. Bradley's face was tired but pleased. "We've had a good day. The groundwork is laid. All that's left to do is let supply and demand take its normal course. And, of course, give things a little prod here and there." "When will we find out if we've succeeded?" "Within the next two days, we should know whether we can call on Mother Ship to pick us up without destroying a civilization." "Suppose the test fails? Suppose we learn these people can't be changed?" Bradley's shoulders lifted. "Then we'll have to decide whether we want to see the civilized Galaxy again so much that we'd wreck a world." Gladys, in an extravagant evening dress which she had worn because Anderson "would have done the same" for her, stepped out onto the veranda and looked about anxiously. She saw the two spacemen and came over. "Why don't you let these people go home? They've had enough." "Aren't they enjoying themselves?" the pilot asked lightly. "Of course not. They came expecting to see the climax of some brand-new dumping trick. Naturally they would have regretted being saddled with goods. But it would have been worth it because they would have been assured that, after all, you are Dewontoites at heart." "You mean," Anderson persisted, "they're beginning to suspect we don't intend to play their way?" "They're beginning to get disgusted. They want to go home." Anderson reached out solicitously for her hand. She drew back. "I'm going to tell them the party's over." The pilot kept his eyes on the girl as she returned to the reception room -- on her bright blonde hair that heightened the smooth texture, of her back; on the slim but strong shoulders, seemingly held high in protest over the intrusion upon Dewonto's calm life; on the rhythm of movement that set the hem of her dress swirling gracefully about her ankles. "Easy now, Scott boy." Bradley gripped his arm and laughed. "She's just beginning to hate you, remember?" " shouting insistently as Anderson opened his eyes and lazily rolled over. "The population's started moving -- they're leaving the slum areas," the cartographer said, his face seemingly older and somewhat more strained. Puzzled, Anderson glanced out the window. But there was no sign of life around the mansions, spotted on the visible hilltops. "They must be finding our rent too high," he said, smiling. "That's encouraging. Shows they're beginning to recognize values." "Guess again," Bradley said glumly, spreading open a copy of the morning paper. A four-column picture showed a plain south of the city with thousands of tents thrown up in rows. Anderson frowned uncomprehendingly. "We condemned their homes and chased them out, all right," said Bradley dispiritedly. "But they didn't start renting our mansions. They just pitched tents instead." "I don't understand." Bradley read from the paper: " 'The vast majority of Dewontoites of this city' -- this is a frontpage editorial -- 'now face an immeasurably more rewarding status of frugal existence, thanks to the visiting spacemen. In this matter, newly appointed Civic Overseer Bradley has shown a only he foresaw that by having their residences condemned would our citizens discover an even more thorough method of domestic self-privation. " 'The foresight of the visitors was again demonstrated when they assumed ownership of Hobo Heights. That made it impossible for dispossessed Dewontoites to move into these hilltop homes, even if they had decided upon that as a last resort'." Anderson took the news with a sickening sensation and struggled out of bed. "What are we going to do?" "I'm hoping it's just a temporary setback. When they bump into all the other economic 'upheavals we've prepared, they might find they don't have time to readjust to tent life. And they may change their minds about Hobo Heights." Anderson swallowed with difficulty. "What's that smell?" Sniffing, he traced the disturbing odor to the double doors and ventured out on the balcony. "Some of those milk cans spilled on delivery yesterday," the cartographer said. It wasn't only the souring milk, Anderson realized. There were thousands of broken egg crates. And swarms of insects were like low-lying clouds over the hills of unpackaged meats and vegetables. He realized now that they should have qualified that line in the ad about accepting anything. The butler appeared at the door. "There's a delegation of manufacturers to see you, sirs." derson went with Bradley to the north drawing room. Showing the eager anticipation of children with a secret, the delegates crowded anxiously around the spacemen. "We came to express our gratitude," proclaimed one. "Why?" Bradley drew back misgivingly. "Because we would have continued on as finished-product manufacturers the rest of our lives if you hadn't cut in on our supplies." "And," added another, "we were getting tired of turning out finished articles that nobody wanted -- except to unload on somebody else." "So," continued a third exuberantly, "we all decided to become producers of raw materials." "And now," resumed the first, "we'll all be happy. With big operators like you handling the manufacture of finished products, and with all of us supplying the raw materials you need, we'll achieve an output that we've never seen before!" Arm in arm and jabbering enthusiastically, the delegation marched out, leaving a gaping pilot and cartographer. The butler appeared in the doorway in their wake. "The president of the Chamber of Commerce, gentlemen." The dignitary was a jovial individual who guffawed for no apparent reason all the way from the door to where the two GS surveymen stood. "Allow me, sirs," he said, "to congratulate you on having won "For what?" the pilot asked suspiciously. "For making us realize our commercial buildings were much too pretentious and out of line with the general austerity of Dewonto. By taking them off our hands and pretending to place an enormous negative value on the stores and offices, you made us see the errors of our ways." "You mean," Bradley asked, disheartened, "you're not going to rent from us or buy the buildings back?" "Cagy, aren't you, sir?" The Chamber of Commerce president nudged the old man in the ribs. "We're going to run our businesses from our homes -- just as you intended from the first. To think it took an outsider to show us the way! You, sirs, richly deserve the Anderson slumped back against the piano. "The award -- what is it?" The visitor looked about the room. His eyes fell on an elaborate vase. He put it under his arm. "This will do nicely, I think. Thank you, gentlemen." Anderson stood numbly rigid, aware of only the mounting odor from the piles of spoiling food. Gladys stepped from behind a column, cried out delightedly and raced forward to throw her arms around the pilot. "I knew it!" she cried. "I knew all the while it was a trick. You just let me believe you were antiaway!" Outside, a band played a lively march and thousands of natives jumped up and down, waving banners that proudly proclaimed : "For They Are Jolly Good Dewontoites!" son watched the old spaceman pace the veranda, his shoulders sagging and his thin hair disheveled and seemingly grayer than usual. Dewonto's giant sun slipped below the horizon, dragging along the almost invisible white dwarf that was its companion. "Why don't we give it up, Walt?" the pilot asked, mixing the Dewontoite equivalent of a scotch and soda. "They just kept one step ahead of us with their "But we didn't lose! We couldn't! It's only -- " "A temporary setback?" The pilot laughed sourly, extending a drink toward the other. Bradley took it and gulped. "Of course! You'll see. They're just holding on to their system as long as they can. Those reverses we suffered this morning were simply the final thrashings." "Sure," Anderson said skeptically. "One minute they'll be confirmed Dewontoites, the next they'll be unprincipled takers, knocking themselves out to earn instead of unload." Gladys, again in her oversized policewoman's uniform, stepped out of the house into the twilight. "How much longer are we going to stay here?" She gestured disapprovingly at the wealth all around her. "You don't have to stick around, you know," Anderson told her sullenly. "Oh, but I do. You're still in my custody. I know what's the matter -- you're disappointed because we saw through your clever tricks -- embarrassed because we've found you out as real Dewontoites at heart." "Aw, go blow your tubes," he said bluntly, his mind grappling with more serious issues. She reddened indignantly. "All right, I will -- if that's what you want. All you have to do is release me." "Release you?" Anderson looked up puzzedly at her. "Certainly. The judge of the First and Only Municipal, Civic, Criminal and Federal Court assigned you to me. You're the judge now. Only you can take me off this assignment." Anderson drained his glass and held it out shakily toward the cartographer for a refill. "By virtue of the judicial powers vested in me," he rolled the words out with a heavy tongue, "I now cancel the custodial assignment of one Gladys Jerrel, to wit -- " "Oh!" the girl cried, exasperated. She ran down the walk toward the main gates of the estate. "Gladys!" Anderson called, immediately contrite, starting off after her. But Bradley caught his arm. "Let her go, son. Don't forget -- she'll hate you a lot more if we Anderson dropped down glumly on the chaise longue. Darkness had come and there was only a single moon out to illuminate the piles of surplus material. "Well, what about it?" he asked finally. "At noon tomorrow, the mapping party jumps into another sector, out of range of our Subcon signalers. We'll be presumed lost." He withdrew his emergency signal generator and placed it on the cocktail table. "Do we yell 'uncle' or not?" "If we do," Bradley said soberly, "these people are in for one hell of a jolt. They'll practically become voluntary slaves with the first wave of visitors. I don't see how they can survive as a people." turned toward the road. Voices -- thousands of them. Excited voices. Perhaps even angry. The horde stormed in through the gates. They deployed into smaller groups and surged toward the hoarded products, sweeping in over the piles of clothes and shoes, enveloping the hills of canned foodstuffs, breaking off in myriad smaller units to overrun the lines of parked automobiles and trucks and bulldozers. Then the estate resounded with the rattle and rumble of heavy industrial machinery as the tractors and cranes and steam shovels and bulldozers were themselves put to work whittling down and hauling away the stocks of supplies. Bradley grasped the pilot's shoulder. "We won, boy! We won!" But Anderson only stared puzzledly at the chaotic scene of plundering. "I don't understand." "We planted the seeds. The results weren't visible right away, but they were cumulative. Now the dam has burst. And if they decided to loot and plunder to get back the surpluses we tricked them out of, that means they're ready to drive shrewd bargains among themselves for more. Son, we've cured a culture!" In gratified silence, the two Galactodetic surveymen watched the stockpiles of articles shrink as trucks and cars pulled alongside, parked momentarily, then drove away loaded. Bradley broke the seals on two more bottles and he and Anderson repeatedly toasted their success. Finally the pilot held up his Subcon pack. "Think we ought to call Mother Ship now?" Swaying, the cartographer tripped over the chaise longue and flailed backward. The pilot laughed at the ludicrous sight of the elderly man sprawled across a flower bed. "Don't think it'd be very wise, Scott boy," Bradley said, rising on an elbow and grinning. "They'd be here in a couple of hours. Wouldn't want 'em to find us in, let's say, such an elated state. Against regulations." "Guess you're right," Anderson agreed. "Anyway, we still have plenty of time." r T , HE night assault on the piles of surplus material had been no dream, Anderson reassured himself the next morning as he had an early breakfast with the cartographer on the veranda. The estate, spread out before them in utter disorder, was like the aftermath of an Intragalactic Sales Association picnic, with broken cases and bits of clothing and odd pieces of machinery littering the lawn. The pilot balanced a strip of bacon on his fork and held it tentatively before his mouth. "You don't suppose we slipped up anywhere, do you?" he asked. "These Dewontoites are cured?" "Oh, the cure wasn't supposed to be instant and total. But from what we saw last night, we can spreading like a plague by now." Out of the corner of his eye, Anderson watched the butler peer furtively from behind a potted plant. Pretending not to notice, the pilot watched him tiptoe across the flagstone to the cocktail cart and deftly stuff three bottles under his coat. "See?" Bradley whispered, nodding unobtrusively toward the servant. "It's working, all right." There was stealthy movement in the adjacent east reception room and Anderson and the old man looked in through the double doors. Two of the upstairs maids were holding open a pillow case while a stable boy carefully filled it with silverware from one of the tables. Bradley made a victorious gesture of clasping his hands over his head. The butler who had pilfered the liquor came over to the breakfast table. "About my wages, sir -- " "Yes?" Anderson prompted hopefully. "From now on, I'll expect the equivalent of a suit of clothes a day, or anything of like value. Your promissory note will do." "Fine! Fine!" Bradley exclaimed. "You'll be taken care of." He turned to Anderson. "That ought to answer your question about whether these Dewontoites are cured." The pilot grinned. "I'm convinced." He patted his breast pocket for the Subcon signal generator. "Ready to call Mother Ship?" But Bradley had dropped his elbows on the table and wedged his cheeks between his palms. He was staring thoughtfully into the distance. "What's the matter?" Anderson asked anxiously. "Just thinking." The pilot waited, puzzling over the old man's sudden dejection. "I wonder -- " Bradley began. "You know, son, I ain't so sure we did the right thing here." queasy, too. An indescribable consideration that had lain dormant at the back of his mind was calling for attention. Now that the cure had been effected, though, he was beginning to recognize what it was that had tried to hold him back. "Maybe we shouldn't have interfered," he suggested. "They did seem to be satisfied agreed. "And as scatterbrain as it was," Anderson added thoughtfully, "it did work, didn't it?" The old man nodded. "Yes. I got the impression they were a pretty happy people -- like children -- spritely little putpockets." Anderson and Bradley laughed spuriously. The outburst was punctuated by an instant return of sober expressions. Anderson straightened. "But we did see some pretty rough poverty, didn't we?" "It wasn't so rough, I don't suppose. Not when you consider it was self-imposed -- and then only by the elite. The average person, no doubt, was much better off." The pilot drummed the table with his fingers. "I hadn't thought of that. Besides, poverty couldn't have been a permanent feature of the system -- not with the kind of surpluses they had knocking around. Eventually, as overproduction got worse, the natives would have been forced to live with more and more luxuries." They were silent for a long, tense while. "You know, Walt," Anderson said finally, "I didn't think it would end up like this." "You mean the looting -- and the butler stealing?" "And the maids and the stable boy swiping the silverware." "No. I guess they overcorrected." "And we can be damned sure that the same overcorrection will take place everywhere on the planet." "But we didn't plan it that way," Bradley protested defensively. "Maybe not. But it happened just the same. And we caused it." Anderson patted his coat again. "Where's my Subcon?" "Here, use mine," Bradley said, reaching into his jacket. "Just think -- They probably never had a crime on Dewonto until now." The pilot took the emergency signal generator. "The way I see it, they'll quickly make up for lost time. Walt..." "Yes?" "We're prize bunglers, aren't we?" "Stinkers would be a better word," the old man said ruefully. "You suppose it'd help if we didn't call Mother Ship? If we stayed here and -- and -- " "And what?" Anderson shrugged futilely. "There's nothing we can do now, boy. It was easy to crush the Golden Rule because the Brass Rule was so much more human. The pendulum's already started swinging the other way now. I don't see how we could stop it." r ' , HE pilot sighed. "It would be  interesting to see what would have happened. We could have stayed here and let them saddle iis with the top jobs -- emperor or president or big cheese of the planet." Bindley straightened his mustnrhe with a stiff finger. "We could have ironed out the few inconsistencies in the system, Mtii-uglhened their Dewonto cultuir, kept nagging at them until they consented to higher and higher standards of living." "But we would have seen to it that they stayed industrious." "Of course. And we could have shown them how to use their surpulses without surrendering to selfishness and greed," the old man said. "We could have given them a solid foundation." "And when contact came around again in a couple of thousand years, they would have been strong enough not only to survive, but perhaps even to 'cure' the other culture." They were pensively silent again. "No use supposing." Bradley slapped his knees. "Too late to undo what we did." Anderson returned his attention to the old man's Subcon. "Walt, this thing's broken. The side's caved in." Bradley looked over. "Oh? Must have crushed it when I fell last night. Use yours." Anderson rose and explored his pockets again. "Have to find it first. You suppose Gladys would understand if I told her we're sorry about what's happened?" "She won't realize there's anything to be sorry about until anti"I guess not." Anderson shifted the breakfast plates around, searched behind the chaise longue, then went over to the cocktail cart. "That other Subcon should be around here somewhere." Bradley's head still rested languidly between his hands. "If you're going to find it," he said apathetically, "you'd better get a move on. Time's growing short." The pilot looked on the bookshelves, atop the mantel and between the cushions of several chairs. Scott!" Bradley called from the veranda. "Look who's back!" Anderson went outside. Gladys and her father were standing uneasily beside the breakfast table. "Gladys!" the pilot exclaimed. "I -- I thought that since my court assignment was over," she said haltingly, "that we'd better settle up." At least, he realized with considerable relief, the girl hadn't been swept up in the tide of anti"And," he guessed, "you came back to give me something for letting you work for the court?" around the veranda, gaping at the evidences of wealth. Now he drew back closer to his daughter and Anderson. "No." The girl glanced down at the fiagstone. "Things are different now. You've got to give me something... Papa!" The pilot's spirits sagged. But then he started as he suddenly became conscious of the tailor's hand slipping into his pocket. Embarrassed on being discovered, the girl's father withdrew his hand immediately. Gladys reached into the pocket and pulled out a gold watch, handed it back to her father. "You don't understand. You're not supposed to be putpocketing!" She drew him aside and began a tedious explanation, accompanied by flourishing hand gestures. "Mr. Anderson! Mr. Anderson!" It was the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who rounded the corner of the mansion, leading a delegation of businessmen and manufacturers. Waving a printed form, he advanced across the flagstone. "Sign this! Sign this!" "What is it?" The pilot drew back warily. Bradley rose. "Never mind, son. Sign it. What difference does it make now?" Anderson signed. The delegation, whooping elatedly, marched off. "Thank you, sir," the president threw back over his shoulder. "You just signed back over to us the downtown stores and offices and Hobo Heights, too." Bradley shrugged indifferently. "They're really catching on quick they?" Anderson, glancing through the double doors, spied the Subcon table. But as he strode toward it, the butler sneaked to the table, swept up the instrument and dumped it swiftly into his pocket. "Hey!" Anderson shouted. The butler turned to run. But he stumbled over a hassock and sprawled on the floor. When he regained his feet, he glowered disappointedly and withdrew the Subcon pack from his pocket -- piece by piece. In stunned silence, Anderson became aware of Gladys' low voice and gesturing hands as she continued her explanation to her father. "... So now that we realize they were merely dewontoing others as they wanted others to dewonto them, it wouldn't be right for us to keep unloading on them. We just decided to stop putpocketing and everything else as far as they're concerned." standingly. "I see. But st might dewonto's still the order of the day among everybody else." "That's right," she said patronizingly. "With them, we pickpocket and trick and grab. It took a while for the average Dewontoilr to figure out that was what the spacemen wanted. And it took longer for the industrialists and businessmen to realize it -- especially after they misinterpreted Mr. Bradley's and Scott's motives. But now we all know how to treat them." It took a few moments for Anderson to begin to understand. When he glanced over at the cartographer, Bradley was matching his grin. "I wouldn't worry about those two busted Subcons," Bradley said, looking at his watch. "It would be too late to use them anyway." Gladys, still facing her father, shook her head disconsolately. "Actually, we should feel sorry for them. But -- well, maybe someday they'll become real Dewontoites, too." Anderson took his diamondstudded Academy pin from his lapel and crossed over to the girl and her father. Lacking finesse, he completely bungled the job of getting her handbag open without her knowing it. But before she could pull away, he dropped the pin inside. "Scott!" she exclaimed happily, apparently not at all regretting being made a putpocket victim. "You wouldn't happen to know," he asked, taking her arm, "where a guy could find a decrepit, broken-down shack in need of repair, but big enough to raise a family in?" # Star Shelf Fallaw. Philosophical Library, New York, # A N astonishing release from a publishing house that has become noted for the richness of its non-fiction and the poverty of its S-F. Ugg I, known affectionately as Uggli to his converts, is a # V # foot, # lb. central African ruler who has evolved the Word. In return for fine promises of future welfare, mankind will hand over valuable objects, he discovers. In a vision, he is called to America to spread the Word of the Great Black Father. Two hundred and fifty suns later, his female consort and he sail their canoe into New York harbor, past the huge idol of a torch-carrying female. "Devil-worshipers," he says. After establishing himself in a tent in Central Park, he proceeds to convert the natives so successfully that he acquires the services of a business manager, formerly with the biggest evangelist, Johnny Tuesday. Only a handful can withstand him, including a critical reporter on whom he uses his most persuasive methods. "Get saved," Ugg begs. "Get lost," the reporter says, but declines a game of buffum with Ugg, played with twenty-pound clubs until a winner is declared -- the one who stays alive. This is a lashing book, but as worth reading as Dean Swift's stinging satires. Asimov. Doubleday  Co., Inc. New York, # know from The Caves of Steel, is a collateral descendant of I, Robot, not to mention Adam Link, which I'd rather not. He is a completely humanoid robot detective. In fact, to be truthful, he's more human at times than his partner, Elijah Baley, the Earth detective who is called for by the ex-colonist Spacers, now independent nationals who despise the mother planet. For some hidden political reasons, the contemptible Earthman has been summoned to Solaria to solve a murder that could have been committed by only one person. Baley, reared in the teeming underground Terran Cities, is afflicted with agoraphobia like all Earthmen. In turn, all Spacers have their phobias based on their underpopulated existence. Knowing this, Baley attempts to refuse the assignment, but he cannot. This is a unique opportunity for quarantined Earth to acquire vital information about its former colonists and future adversaries, the Spacers. Baley must serve a two-pronged purpose. Caves of Steel had a hypnotic quality because of the graphic picture that Asimov drew of the enwombed trogloditic society of the future. His current book, in comparison, is completely alien in environment and adds up to an interesting exercise in scientific detection. However, in that direction, Asimov appears to be laying the groundwork for a new category of science fiction, the S-F detective story. It is strange that Asimov should be the pioneer, since so many of our favorite authors double in the detectivemystery field. Blish. Ballantine Books, New York, # the flyleaf, Ballantine calls this a "contemporary novel" as distinguished from Blish's science fiction output. Don't you believe it. Martians and missing proto-planets are something less -- or considerably more -- than contemporary. Blish has succeeded in writing   sheif an exasperating book. He starts as if penning the satirical novel of the year. The story takes place during the International Geophysical Year and concerns the tribulations of a science writer assigned to a fantastic polar expedition. The expedition leader, a Charles Atlas type, is a publicity hound married to a Kathleen Windsor type historical novel writer. Quite a combination. The expedition proper is composed of scientific misfits and incompetents. It has received its inadequate financial backing from numerous commercial firms who hope to win cheap advertising for their products by what might be called "Polar Promotion." Then cial sanction. So far, Blish stays on solid ground. His coldly sarcastic style and his punny corporate names prepare his reader for a light-hearted whacky job. But he switches in mid-ice, so to speak, and winds up with a serious adventuretragedy. No great crime, certainly: Bernard Wolfe ran amok stylistically in Limbo, yet what emerged was an enormous tour de force. One cannot say as much for Frozen Year, but it will make for cool, adventurous reading on a sweltering day. A. E. Van Vogt. Shasta Publishers, Chicago, # one of the pioneers in the field is a welcome event in itself. It could be wished that the effort were deserving of worthier fruit, but still the occasion is a cheering one. Van Vogt's book is based on material from Astounding of a decade ago and the intervening years haven't altered my opinion of this work. You may recall that he envisages a feudal culture, # years or so in our future, that has inherited atomic energy and space travel as well as a shattered world from its distant ancestors. If meant as a frolicsome burlesque, the paradoxes of such a societal hash could be swallowed. After all, a spaceship represents more than merely a mode of travel. The requisite technology, not for creation, but merely for maintenance, thoroughly destroys one of the book's intended highspots, in which a fleet of spaceships makes a strafing run over the enemy, loosing flights of arrows from point-blank range. It should bring to mind the original movie of "Connecticut Yankee," the delightful scene in which Will Rogers leads a cavalry charge of miniature Austin automobiles. It should, but it doesn't -- Van Vogt's tongue was anywhere but in his cheek, where it belonged. Page  Co., Boston, # has reached his true audience with this, his first juvenile. Concensus has it that his youngsters and aliens emerge as humans, while his adult humans emerge as alien. It's not for want of trying; when depicting adult humans, Clement has been very trying indeed. His deliberate title is unequaled since Starship on Saddle Mountain. You see, "Ranger" is the surname of Bart and Dart. The boys and their friend, Peter Ashburn, are wards of their Uncle Jim, an explorer and scientist. The story starts with the failure of the space satellite and rocket projects and the return of their invalided guardian. Because of malfunction of the inner ear during weightlessness, Uncle Jim has attempted to inure himself to zero gravity at the station along with others and all have succumbed, their innate balance chronically disturbed. Peter proposes that younger people might be more adaptable, since fewer years have been spent believing the evidence of the senses. In desperation, Uncle Jim uses the boys and a young spy as guinea pigs. It is almost a truism that Clement's books never smile, but he pens a credible, workmanlike and always interesting yarn. First of a series. cal Power by Miles Tomalin, Roy Publishers, N. Y., #, delineates the growth of power from Man's first "machine" -- tamed animals. Graphically illustrated and clearly written and documented... Atomic Energy by E. C. Roberson, Philosophical Library, N. Y., #, like the above book also British printed, is also intended as an easily understood text for the layman... Maya Art and Civilization by Herbert J. Spinden, Falcon's Wing Press, Colo., #, is a big, beautiful volume devoted to one of the most advanced antique civilizations, already in a state of decay by Columbus's time. Among other astronomical feats, they evolved a more accurate calendar than the one we now use! Fellow City Mgrs., only you can help me -- progress has made "Go Fight City Hall" a battle cry! to be rather an informal communication because I think there's a serious lesson for you in a situation we had here recently. I might as well be the first to tell you about it. You'll hear about it soon enough anyway. Frankly, I'm hoping you'll have a heart and lend a brother City Manager a hand. As you boys know, I was reelected last April to my post as City Manager for another four years and I felt pretty good about it. So good that I was looking around for something to do which would sort of let the voters of little old New York know how I felt about them. Most of you have met my political assistant Charlie Tight -- or, rather, my ex-political assistant. Charlie was looking around, too, and he came up with the idea of covering over Central Park. We have never covered over Central Park with the perma-plast roof like the rest of the city because it is a fairly large area and there wasn't any public demand for it. So naturally it rains and snows there and we spend a lot of dough keeping the grass cut and what have you. It's a popular spot with a lot of folks. Charlie figured -- and I must admit that I agreed with him -- that covering over Central Park was quite an idea. Controlled conditions would let the grass grow only so much and the temperature would remain constant. No rain or snow except from I a.m. to # a.m., when we would put in a little artificial precipitation to keep the greenery going. Plenty of nice air-conditioned air. Eternal spring. Really up-to-date. We put it through the computer down at the Civic Machine and figured it would cost only about good. You see, we recently got a new addition to the Civic Machine and the manufacturer gave us a deal on a new model Projector for the whole city. It makes constant forecasts on practically everything we need from moment to moment. It doesn't wait for a Tech to run the data thru it. Saves a lot of time because it's directly connected with Supply. This Projector is so good that we have been able to cut down on expenses about # hundred this would easily pay for the perma-plast roof over good old Central Park. I went before the people on TV and told the whole story. Charlie had the TV Techs mock up a scene of what it would look like and we had models posed in family scenes and the like. Should have gone over like a shot -- and it would have, except for this screwball Hatty Dakkon. It wasn't an hour after I had made my broadcast that my secretary announced this Mrs. Hatty Dakkon. She proved to be a young matron type with pretty good legs and a chip on her shoulder. She was against roofing Central Park. Well, you boys know how it goes. Always some crank who doesn't like things changed, and after they have blown off steam, they quiet down and you can go ahead and do the work. So I let this Hatty Dakkon talk on and on until my ears were limp from listening. She said she was against roofing Central Park because it would be just like every other place in the City -- weatherproof, air-conditioned and humidity controlled. She figured that children should have some place where they could feel the wind on their faces and the falling of rain and snow and the smell of air as it was in nature. She said that was the only way most of our children could ever, ever find the ties with the past that were sacred. She quoted poetry about the wind and the rain in your hair, and on and on and on. Finally I let her talk off her head of steam and she got calmed down so I could tell her: "Thank you, madam, for this expression of your opinion. You can rest assured that I will do everything within my power and the power of the Civic Machine to see to it that anything possible is done." Her head came up like a rocket at blastoff. "Hold it!" she said. "You can't put me off with that old one -- that's Standard Answer No. I in the City Manager's guidebook and I ain't buying it, Buster. I used to work at the Civic Machine myself, so I know all the Standard Answers backward and forward." "Well, I assure you, madam -- " I said. "Don't hand me that stuff again. What I want is for you to call off the Civic Machine and quit trying to roof the only place left where our children can feel the open air and sunshine." "I see. You aren't going to be satisfied with anything else,"  said. "That's right." "I'm sorry, but thaf s impossible We have programmed the roofing job for next month on the Civic Machine and we can't change it now." "That, Mr. Ro, is a lie," she said, leaning across my desk and sticking a slim white finger under my nose. "I know you can change it in five minutes if you want to." "It won't be changed," I said. "Is that your final word?" "Final." "Mr. Ro," she said, putting her hands on her hips, "I think you'll be sorry." She headed for the door, only to turn around and ask me if my wife was at home. "I suppose she is," I said, "but don't bother her -- she takes no interest in Civic affairs." I don't have to tell you boys that I dismissed the lady from my mind and went on to other more important matters. Or so I thought. I didn't say anything about Hatty Dakkon. My wife is inclined to see things differently than I do and I had a hunch she would side with Hatty. Consequently, rather than get into a discussion, I just let it slide. Not too many of you boys know my wife, but those who do know that she is like so many other women -- not particularly interested in any Civic Machine. Just so she gets what she wants when she dials the home connection to the Machine is all she is interested in. That night, though, my wife surprised me by having a burning interest in the Civic Machine. She wanted to know all about it. How it produces the consumer products. How it gets them to the living area. How it knows what to order. And she especially quizzed me about the new Projector. When I asked her why she wanted to know about all that after # years of married life, she just smiled sweetly and said that naturally she was interested in my work. " sample programming sheet for her to see and damned if she didn't dismiss it with a sniff as being too complicated and boring. Go figure women out! That night, we had two molded gelatin dishes. The round kind with a hole in the center. The next night, we had the same kind of supper, except that instead of fish and something in gelatin, we had meat and something in gelatin. Same sort of deal for dessert. The next day, I got my first tip called me and asked about the protest on the Central Park roofing proposal, saying he got the item from his woman assistant. I said it didn't amount to much and that the project was going ahead on schedule. and he treated it in a light manner which really made me smile. I should have been crying instead. That night, we had some more molded gelatin, only in square molds this time. Same thing the next day. I figured it was time to take a stand -- a diplomatic one, of course. "Honey," I said as I sat toying with my food, "can't we have different dishes every night? I'm getting tired of all this gelatin junk. How about a steak?" "But, darling, gelatin is very good for you. It's simply crammed full of protein and all the girls at the club are eating lots of gelatin." "But I don't like gelatin that well," I said. "I don't, either, but it's so good for both of us," she said with her best don't-try-to-argue-Motherknows-best smile. I had a steak that night after she went to bed. 'T I HE next day, I got a call from the head of the warehousing division over at Civic, asking me if I had any preference on warehousing molds. "What molds?" I wanted to know. "Well, let's see," he said. "We've with a hole in the center. We've got figure-eight gelatin molds and I understand there's a hell of a lot of deep-dish gelatin molds coming up tomorrow from Supply at Schenectady." "Why in hell have we got all those molds?" "Don't know," he said. "Civic Machine ordered them, so I suppose we need them. Where do you want the storing done? Thought we might run up one of those new Kiosk warehouses out east if you have no objection." "Put it anywhere you want," I said, switching off. Before I could get back to work, there was a call from Stats. "Got a little problem down here, Mr. Ro," said the Tech. "Schenecon an over-order of plastic." "How much is the premium?" "Quite a little, Boss -- about # I checked with them and the reason for the extra strong premium is because they had to rebuild the factory -- let's see which one that was -- oh, yes, cold-molding dishes division of the Cooking Receptacle plant. What do you want me to do -- enter a protest saying we aren't responsible and get it over to Fed Court where they can pro-rate it over the other cities?" "Nope, I guess you'd just better pay it." The chips were falling into place now and I didn't like what they were building for me. As soon as I switched off, I put in a call to my head Tech at the Civic Machine and asked for a rundown on the food ordered for supper for the past six or eight nights. It took a while, but when I got it back, it was enough to make my hair curl and uncurl in three-quarter time. First thing I did was call my wife and ask her what we were having for dinner that night. "We're having your favorite -- steak and kidney pie, dear," she said in that innocent-little-girl voice that means there's trouble ahead. "No more of those gelatin dishes, sweet?" "No more of that awful gelatin, darling. I'm so tired of it. But I did order a pair of nice shears today -- you know, sweetheart, scissors?" "Yes, dear. That's nice," I said, trying to smooth down the hair on the back of my neck, which was standing straight up. "The Civic Machine didn't have any scissors, darling, so I told it go ahead and get me a pair regardless of the wait. That was all right, wasn't it, dear?" "Fine, dear, fine." "I can't imagine why the Civic Machine should be out of just plain old six-inch scissors, can you?" "Just can't imagine, darling. Good-by." "Good-by, sweetie." I called the Tech at the Civic Machine and asked him to check up on the orders for scissors. It took a minute or two, and when he came back, his face was puzzled. "Funny thing, Boss -- there is an pairs of scissors. That's more than we have had in the past seven or eight years. All ordered last night. There must be a mistake somewhere. I'll run it through again and have a test made of the orders section." "Never mind. Just do this," I said. "Fix up the Projector so it doesn't send out any order for scissors and cancel any order that has been placed." I was wringing wet with sweat. It was going to be a close one. Believe me, boys, I didn't waste telling everyone that there had been a change in plans due to public demand and we weren't going to be able to roof over Central Park after all. I suggested that, as long as the administration had cooperated, the people should cooperate on the matter. An hour later, I called the Civic Machine and asked for a check on scissors. The orders had dropped normal, but the way the cancellations were coming in, it was obvious that it would be within reasonable proportions soon. Just in case some of you missed the by-play on that, let me sketch it in for you as I found it out later. It seems that this Hatty Dakkon had organized a phone campaign on the Let Our Children Enjoy Nature theme which went over big with the women. Every woman called five woman friends and these five called five and so on. You figure it out -- with geometrical progression, it doesn't take long to get in touch with as fast as TV, maybe, but a darn sight more effective and thorough. It was the talk of the women's world and we men didn't even know about it until the battle was all over. This horde of women, led by Hatty Dakkon, agreed that they would order the same dish -- gelatin in a round mold on the same night. You know what this can do to a good Projector. It just went frantic. Projectors work on the basis of average demand for anything, and with an average demand for round mold gelatin foods two nights in a row of about #-#I dered a whole conveyor-load of mold dishes from Schenectady. The next time, it was square molds for two nights; and the next, it was figure-eight for two nights and then a double shot of deepdish. at Schenectady, same as we have, and it ordered an increase in the size of the mold-making factory based on our demand (which was run in with everyone else's demand). Then, when the demand didn't come through from us and from the other cities in the area, we had to pay the premium for building the new factory. The scissors business would have bankrupted us completely. steel scissors in the year #! Think of the premium for increase in size of factory, prospecting the planets, mining, spaceship freight rates, and so forth. That's why I was glad to give up the Central Park project. Well, to make a long story short, we aren't going near Central Park. And Charlie, who originally thought of the idea, is probably out there now, wondering why he did it. Now in closing, I hope all the rest of you who have had a good laugh will sober up and sympathize with me and see what you can do about ordering gelatin molds from us. We'll ship them out pronto -- we have a large supply -- and no reasonable offer will be refused. Please, fellows! Scientology -- the technology of the human being that gives him the capability of his future... The Fundamentals of Thought by L. Ron Hubbard nuclear physicist and one of the great science fiction writers of all time. The book from which they get their know-how of other life forms -- the book that confronts the basics of life from which all life forms develop... Send I to Box #-Sa Silver Spring Maryland No one, least of all Martin, could dispute that a man's life should be guarded by his kin -- but by those who hadn't been born yet? hood was surprised when Martin's mother disappeared and Ninian came to take care of him. Mothers had a way of disappearing around those parts and the kids were often better off without them. Martin was no exception. He'd never had it this good while he was living with his old lady. As for his father, Martin had never had one. He'd been a war baby, born of one of the tides of soldiers -- enemies and allies, both -- that had engulfed the country in successive waves and bought or taken the women. So there was no trouble that way. Sometimes he wondered who Ninian really was. Obviously that story about her coming from the future was just a gag. Besides, if she really was his great-greatgrand-daughter, as she said, why would she tell him to call her "Aunt Ninian"? Maybe he was only eleven, but he'd been around and he knew just what the score was. At first he'd thought maybe she was some new kind of social worker, but she acted a little too crazy for that. He loved to bait her, as he had loved to bait his mother. It was safer with Ninian, though, because when he pushed her too far, she would cry instead of mopping up the floor with him. "But I can't understand," he would say, keeping his face straight. "Why do you have to come from the future to protect me against your cousin Conrad?" "Because he's coming to kill you." "Why should he kill me? I ain't done him nothing." Ninian sighed. "He's dissatisfied with the current social order and plan he's formulated to change it. You wouldn't understand." "You're damn right. I don't understand. What's it all about in straight gas?" "Oh, just don't ask any questions," Ninian said petulantly. "When you get older, someone will explain the whole thing to you." because, on the whole, he liked things the way they were. Ninian really was the limit, though. All the people he knew lived in scabrous tenement apartments like his, but she seemed to think it was disgusting. "So if you don't like it, clean it up," he suggested. She looked at him as if he were out of his mind. "Hire a maid, then!" he jeered. And darned if that dope didn't go out and get a woman to come clean up the place! He was so embarrassed, he didn't even dare show his face in the streets -- especially with the women buttonholing him and demanding to know what gave. They tried talking to Ninian, but she certainly knew how to give them the cold shoulder. One day the truant officer came to ask why Martin hadn't been coming to school. Very few of the neighborhood kids attended classes very regularly, so this was just routine. But Ninian didn't know that and she went into a real tizzy, babbling that Martin had been sick and would make up the work. Martin nearly did get sick from laughing so hard inside. But he laughed out of the other side of his mouth when she went out and hired a private tutor for him. A tutor -- in that neighborhood! Martin had to beat up every kid on the block before he could walk a step without hearing "Fancy Pants!" yelled after him. Ninian worried all the time. It wasn't that she cared what these people thought of her, for she made no secret of regarding them as little better than animals, but she was shy of attracting attention. There were an awful lot of people in that neighborhood who felt exactly the same way, only she didn't know that, either. She was really pretty dumb, Martin thought, for all her fancy lingo. "It's so hard to think these things out without any prior practical application to go by," she told him. He nodded, knowing what she meant was that everything was coming out wrong. But he didn't try to help her; he just watched to see what she'd do next. Already he had begun to assume the detached role of a spectator. When it became clear that his mother was never going to show up again, Ninian bought one of those smallish, almost identical houses that mushroom on the fringes of a city after every war, particularly where intensive bombing has created a number of desirable building sites. "This is a much better neighborhood for a boy to grow up in," she declared. "Besides, it's easier to keep an eye on you here." And keep an eye on him she did -- she or a rather foppish young man who came to stay with them occasionally. Martin was told to call him Uncle Raymond. From time to time, there were other visitors -- Uncles Ives and Bartholomew and Olaf, Aunts Otmany more -- all cousins to one another, he was told, all descendants of his. for a minute. He wasn't allowed to play with the other kids in the new neighborhood. Not that their parents would have let them, anyway. The adults obviously figured that if a one-car family hired private tutors for their kid, there must be something pretty wrong with him. So Martin and Ninian were just as conspicuous as before. But he didn't tip her off. She was grown up; she was supposed to know better than he did. He lived well. He had food to eat that he'd never dreamed of before, warm clothes that no one had ever worn before him. He was surrounded by more luxury than he knew what to do with. The furniture was the latest New Grand Rapids African modern. There were tidy, colorful Picasso and Braque prints on the walls. And every inch of the floor was modestly covered by carpeting, though the walls were mostly unabashed glass. There were hot water and heat all the time and a freezer well stocked with food -- somewhat erratically chosen, for Ninian didn't know much about meals. The non-glass part of the house was of neat, natural-toned wood, with a neat green lawn in front and a neat parti-colored garden in back. Martin missed the old neighborhood, though. He missed having other kids to play with. He even missed his mother. Sure, she hadn't given him enough to eat and she'd beaten him up so hard sometimes that she'd nearly killed him -- but then there had also been times when she'd hugged and kissed him and soaked his collar with her tears. She'd done all she could for him, supporting him in the only way she knew how -- and if respectable society didn't like it, the hell with respectable society. From Ninian and her cousins, there was only an impersonal kindness. They made no bones about the fact that they were there only to carry out a rather unpleasant duty. Though they were in the house with him, in their minds and in their talk they were living in another world -- a world of warmth and peace and plenty where nobody worked, except in the government service or the essential professions. And they seemed to think even that kind of job was pretty low-class, though better than actually doing anything with the hands. In their world, Martin came to understand, nobody worked with hands; everything was done by machinery. All the people ever did was wear pretty clothes and have good times and eat all they wanted. There was no devastation, no war, no unhappiness, none of the concomitants of normal living. It was then that Martin began to realize that either the whole lot of them were insane, or what Ninian had told him at first was the truth. They came from the future. Raymond took him aside for the talk Ninian had promised five years before. "The whole thing's all my brother Conrad's fault. You see, he's an idealist," Raymond explained, pronouncing the last word with distaste. Martin nodded gravely. He was a quiet boy now, his brief past a dim and rather ridiculous memory. Who could ever imagine him robbing a grocery store or wielding a broken bottle now? He still was rather undersized and he'd read so much that he'd weakened his eyes and had to wear glasses. His face was pallid, because he spent little time in the sun, and his speech rather overbred, his mentors from the future having carefully eradicated all current vulgarities. "And Conrad really got upset over the way Earth has been exploiting the not so intelligent life-forms on the other planets," Raymond continued. "Which is distressing -- though, of course, it's not as if they were people. Besides, the government has been talking about passing laws to do away with the -- well, abuses and things like that, and I'm sure someday everything will come out all right. However, Conrad is so impatient." "I thought, in your world, machines did all the work," Martin suggested. "I've told you -- our world is precisely the same as this one!" Raymond snapped. "We just come a couple of centuries or so later, that's all. But remember, our interests are identical. We're virtually the same people... although it is amazing what a difference two hundred odd years of progress and polish can make in a species, isn't it?" He continued more mildly: "However, even you ought to be able to understand that we can't make machinery without metal. We need food. All that sort of thing comes from the out-system planets. And, on those worlds, it's far cheaper to use native labor than to ship out all that expensive machinery. After all, if we didn't give the natives jobs, how would they manage to live?" "How did they live before? Come to think of it, if you don't work, how do you live now?... I don't mean in the now for me, but the now for you," Martin explained laboriously. It was so difficult to live in the past and think in the future. "I'm trying to talk to you as if you were an adult," Raymond said, "but if you will persist in these childish interruptions -- " "I'm sorry," Martin said. But he wasn't, for by now he had little respect left for any of his descendants. They were all exceedingly handsome and cultivated young people, with superior educations, smooth ways of speaking and considerable selfconfidence, but they just weren't very bright. And he had discovered that Raymond was perhaps the most intelligent of the lot. Somewhere in that relatively short span of time, his line or -- more frightening -- his race had lost something vital. Unaware of the near-contempt in which his young ancestor held him, Raymond went on blandly: "Anyhow, Conrad took it upon himself to feel particularly guilty, because, he decided, if it hadn't been for the fact that our greatgrandfather discovered the superdrive, we might never have reached the stars. Which is ridiculous -- his feeling guilty, I mean. Perhaps a great-grandfather is responsible for his great-grandchildren, but a great-grandchild can hardly be held accountable for his great-grandfather." "How about a great-greatgrandchild?" Martin couldn't help asking. pink. "Do you want to hear the rest of this or don't you?" "Oh, I do!" Martin said. He had pieced the whole thing together for himself long since, but he wanted to hear how Raymond would put it. "Unfortunately, Professor Farkas has just perfected the time transmitter. Those government scientists are so infernally officious -- always inventing such senseless things. It's supposed to be hush-hush, but you know how news will leak out when one is always desperate for a fresh topic of conversation." Anyhow, Raymond went on to explain, Conrad had bribed one of Farkas' assistants for a set of the plans. Conrad's idea had been to go back in time and "eliminate" their common great-grandfather. In that way, there would be no space-drive, and, hence, the Terrestrials would never get to the other planets and oppress the local aborigines. "Sounds like a good way of dealing with the problem," Martin observed. Raymond looked annoyed. "It's the adolescent way," he said, "to do away with it, rather than find a solution. Would you destroy a whole society in order to root out a single injustice?" "Not if it were a good one otherwise." "Well, there's your answer. Conrad got the apparatus built, or perhaps he built it himself. One doesn't inquire too closely into such matters. But when it came to the point, Conrad couldn't bear the idea of eliminating our greatgrandfather -- because our greatgrandfather was such a good man, you know." Raymond's expressive upper lip curled. "So Conrad decided to go further back still and get rid of his great-grandfather's father -- who'd been, by all accounts, a pretty worthless character." "That would be me, I suppose," Martin said quietly. Raymond turned a deep rose. "Well, doesn't that just go to prove you mustn't believe everything you hear?" The next sentence tumbled out in a rush. "I wormed the whole thing out of him and all of us -- the other cousins and me -- held a council of war, as it were, and we decided it was our moral duty to go back in time ourselves and protect you." He beamed at Martin. The boy smiled slowly. "Of course. You had to. If Conrad succeeded in eliminating me, then none of you would exist, would you?" Raymond frowned. Then he shrugged cheerfully. "Well, you didn't really suppose we were going to all this trouble and expense out of sheer altruism, did you?" he asked, turning on the charm which all the cousins possessed to a consternating degree. illusions on that score; he had learned long ago that nobody did anything for nothing. But saying so was unwise. "We bribed another set of plans out of another of the professor's assistants," Raymond continued, as if Martin had answered, "and -- ah -- induced a handicraft enthusiast to build the gadget for us." Induced, Martin knew, could have meant anything from blackmail to the use of the iron maiden. "Then we were all ready to forestall Conrad. If one of us guarded you night and day, he would never be able to carry out his plot. So we made our counterplan, set the machine as far back as it would go -- and here we are!" "I see," Martin said. Raymond didn't seem to think he really did. "After all," he pointed out defensively, "whatever our motives, it has turned into a good thing for you. Nice home, cultured companions, all the contemporary conveniences, plus some handy anachronisms -- I don't see what more you could ask for. You're getting the best of all possible worlds. Of course Ninian was a ninny to locate in a mercantile suburb where any little thing out of the way will cause talk. How thankful I am that our era has completely disposed of the mercantiles -- " "What did you do with them?" Martin asked. But Raymond rushed on : "Soon as Ninian goes and I'm in full charge, we'll get a more isolated place and run it on a far grander scale. Ostentation -- that's the way to live here and now; the richer you are, the more eccentricity you can get away with. And," he added, "I might as well be as comfortable as possible while I suffer through this wretched historical stint." "So Ninian's going," said Martin, wondering why the news made him feel curiously desolate. Because, although he supposed he liked her in a remote kind of way, he had no fondness for her -- or she, he knew, for him. "Well, five years is rather a long stretch for any girl to spend in. exile," Raymond explained, "even though our life spans are a bit longer than yours. Besides, you're getting too old now to be under petticoat government." He looked inquisitively at Martin. "You're not going to go all weepy and make a scene when she leaves, are you?" "No..." Martin said hesitantly. "Oh, I suppose I will miss her. But we aren't very close, so it won't make a real difference." That was the sad part : he already knew it wouldn't make a difference. Raymond clapped him on the shoulder. "I knew you weren't a sloppy sentimentalist like Conrad. Though you do have rather a look of him, you know." Suddenly that seemed to make Conrad real. Martin felt a vague itirring of alarm. He kept his voice composed, however. "How do you plan to protect me when he comes?" "Well, each one of us is armed to the teeth, of course," Raymond said with modest pride, displaying something that looked like a child's combination spaceman's gun and death ray, but which, Martin had no doubt, was a perfectly genuine -- and lethal -- weapon. "And we've got a rather elaborate burglar alarm system." Martin inspected the system and made one or two changes in the wiring which, he felt, would increase its efficiency. But still he was dubious. "Maybe it'll work on someone coming from outside this house, but do you think it will work on someone coming from outside this time?" "Never fear -- it has a temporal radius," Raymond replied. "Factory guarantee and all that." "Just to be on the safe side," Martin said, "I think I'd better have one of those guns, too." "A splendid idea!" enthused Raymond. "I was just about to think of that myself!" parting, it was Ninian who cried -- tears at her own inadequacy, Martin knew, not of sorrow. He was getting skillful at understanding his descendants, far better than they at understanding him. But then they never really tried. Ninian kissed him wetly on the cheek and said she was sure everything would work out all right and that she'd come see him again. She never did, though, except at the very last. Raymond and Martin moved into a luxurious mansion in a remote area. The site proved a wellchosen one; when the Second Atomic War came, half a dozen years later, they weren't touched. Martin was never sure whether this had been sheer luck or expert planning. Probably luck, because his descendants were exceedingly inept planners. Few people in the world then could afford to live as stylishly as Martin and his guardian. The place not only contained every possible convenience and gadget but was crammed with bibelots and antiques, carefully chosen by Raymond and disputed by Martin, for, to the man from the future, all available artifacts were antiques. Otherwise, Martin accepted his new surroundings. His sense of wonder had become dulled by now and the pink pseudo-Spanish castle -- "architecturally dreadful, of course," Raymond had said, "but so hilariously typical" -- impressed him far less than had the suburban splitlevel aquarium. "How about a moat?" Martin suggested when they first came. "It seems to go with a castle." "Do you think a moat could stop Conrad?" Raymond asked, amused. "No," Martin smiled, feeling rather silly, "but it would make the place seem safer somehow." The threat of Conrad was beginning to make him grow more and more nervous. He got Raymond's permission to take two suits of armor that stood in the front hall and present them to a local museum, because several times he fancied he saw them move. He also became an adept with the ray gun and changed the surrounding landscape quite a bit with it, until Raymond warned that this might lead Conrad to them. During those early years, Martin's tutors were exchanged for the higher-degreed ones that were now needful. The question inevitably arose of what the youth's vocation in that life was going to be. At least twenty of the cousins came back through time to hold one of their vigorous family councils. Martin was still young enough to enjoy such occasions, finding them vastly superior to all other forms of entertainment. wouldn't arise in our day, Martin," Raymond commented as he took his place at the head of the table, "because, unless one specifically feels a call to some profession or other, one just -- well, drifts along happily." "Ours is a wonderful world," Grania sighed at Martin. "I only wish we could take you there. I'm sure you would like it." "Don't be a fool, Grania!" Raymond snapped. "Well, Martin, have you made up your mind what you want to be?" Martin affected to think. "A physicist," he said, not without malice. "Or perhaps an engineer." There was a loud, excited chorus of dissent. He chuckled inwardly. "Can't do that," Ives said. "Might pick up some concepts from us. Don't know how; none of us knows a thing about science. But it could happen. Subconscious osmosis, if there is such a thing. That way, you might invent something ahead of time. And the fellow we got the plans from particularly cautioned us against that. Changing history. Dangerous." "Might mess up our time frightfully," Bartholomew contributed, "though, to be perfectly frank, I can't quite understand how." "I am not going to sit down and explain the whole thing to you all over again, Bart!" Raymond said impatiently. "Well, Martin?" "What would you suggest?" Martin asked. "How about becoming a painter? Art is eternal. And quite gentlemanly. Besides, artists are always expected to be either behind or ahead of their times." "one more artist couldn't make much difference in history. There were so many of them all through the ages." Martin couldn't hold back his question. "What was I, actually, in that other time?" There was a chilly silence. "Let's not talk about it, dear," Lalage finally said. "Let's just be thankful we've saved you from that!" So drawing teachers were engaged and Martin became a very competent second-rate artist. He knew he would never be able to achieve first rank because, even though he was still so young, his work was almost purely intellectual. The only emotion he seemed able to feel was fear -- the everpresent fear that someday he would turn a corridor and walk into a man who looked like him -- a man who wanted to kill him for the sake of an ideal. But the fear did not show in Martin's pictures. They were pretty pictures. tin was older, he was told to call the descendants cousin -- next assumed guardianship. Ives took his responsibilities more seriously than the others did. He even arranged to have Martin's work shown at an art gallery. The paintings received critical approval, but failed to evoke any enthusiasm. The modest sale they enjoyed was mostly to interior decorators. Museums were not interested. "Takes time," Ives tried to reassure him. "One day they'll be buying your pictures, Martin. Wait and see." Ives was the only one of the descendants who seemed to think of Martin as an individual. When his efforts to make contact with the other young man failed, he got worried and decided that what Martin needed was a change of air and scenery. " 'Course you can't go on the Grand Tour. Your son hasn't invented space travel yet. But we can go see this world. What's left of it. Tourists always like ruins best, anyway." So he drew on the family's vast future resources and bought a yacht, which Martin christened The Interregnum. They traveled about from sea to ocean and from ocean to sea, touching at various ports and making trips inland. Martin saw the civilized world -- mostly in fragments; the nearly intact semi-civilized world and the uncivilized world, much the same as it had been for centuries. It was like visiting an enormous museum; he couldn't seem to identify with his own time any more. The other cousins appeared to find the yacht a congenial headquarters, largely because they could spend so much time far away from the contemporary inhabitants of the planet and relax and be themselves. So they never moved back to land. Martin spent the rest of his life on The Interregnum. He felt curiously safer from Conrad there, although there was no valid reason why an ocean should stop a traveler through time. More cousins were in residence at once than ever before, because they came for the ocean voyage. They spent most of their time aboard ship, giving each other parties and playing an avantgarde form of shuffleboard and gambling on future sporting events. That last usually ended in a brawl, because one cousin was sure to accuse another of having got advance information about the results. Martin didn't care much for their company and associated with them only when not to have done so would have been palpably rude. And, though they were gregarious young people for the most part, they didn't court his society. He suspected that he made them feel uncomfortable. though. Sometimes the two of them would be alone together; then Ives would tell Martin of the future world he had come from. The picture drawn by Raymond and Ninian had not been entirely accurate, Ives admitted. True, there was no war or poverty on Earth proper, but that was because there were only a the planet. It was an enclave for the highly privileged, highly interbred aristocracy, to which Martin's descendants belonged by virtue of their distinguished ancestry. "Rather feudal, isn't it?" Martin asked. Ives agreed, adding that the system had, however, been deliberately planned, rather than the result of haphazard natural development. Everything potentially unpleasant, like the mercantiles, had been deported. "Not only natives livin' on the other worlds," Ives said as the two of them stood at the ship's rail, surrounded by the limitless expanse of some ocean or other. "People, too. Mostly lower classes, except for officials and things. With wars and want and suffering," he added regretfully, "same as in your day... Like now, I mean," he corrected himself. "Maybe it is worse, the way Conrad thinks. More planets for us to make trouble on. Three that were habitable aren't any more. Bombed. Very thorough job." "Oh," Martin murmured, trying to sound shocked, horrified -- interested, even. "Sometimes I'm not altogether sure Conrad was wrong," Ives said, after a pause. "Tried to keep us from getting to the stars, hurting the people -- I expect you could call them people -- there. Still -- " he smiled shamefacedly -- "couldn't stand by and see my own way of life destroyed, could I?" "I suppose not," Martin said. "Would take moral courage. I don't have it. None of us does, except Conrad, and even he -- " Ives looked out over the sea. "Must be a better way out than Conrad's," he said without conviction. "And everything will work out all right in the end. Bound to. No sense to -- to anything, if it doesn't." He glanced wistfully at Martin. "I hope so," said Martin. But he couldn't hope; he couldn't feel; he couldn't even seem to care. During all this time, Conrad still did not put in an appearance. Martin had gotten to be such a crack shot with the ray pistol that he almost wished his descendant would show up, so there would be some excitement. But he didn't come. And Martin got to thinking... He always felt that if any of the cousins could have come to realize the basic flaw in the elaborate plan they had concocted, it would have been Ives. However, when the yacht touched at Tierra del Fuego one bitter winter, Ives took a severe chill. They sent for a doctor from the future -- one of the descendants who had been eccentric enough to take a medical degree -- but he wasn't able to save Ives. The body was buried in the frozen ground at Ushuaia, on the southern tip of the continent, a hundred years or more before the date of his birth. A great many of the cousins turned up at the simple ceremony. All were dressed in overwhelming black and showed a great deal of grief. Raymond read the burial service, because they didn't dare summon a clerical cousin from the future; they were afraid he might prove rather stuffy about the entire undertaking. "He died for all of us," Raymond concluded his funeral eulogy over Ives, "so his death was not in vain." But Martin disagreed. r I 'HE ceaseless voyaging began again. The Interregnum voyaged to every ocean and every sea. Some were blue and some green and some dun. After a while, Martin couldn't tell one from another. Cousin after cousin came to watch over him and eventually they were as hard for him to tell apart as the different oceans. All the cousins were young, for, though they came at different times in his life, they had all started out from the same time in theirs. Only the young ones had been included in the venture; they did not trust their elders. As the years went by, Martin began to lose even his detached interest in the land and its doings. Although the yacht frequently touched port for fuel or supplies -- it was more economical to purchase them in that era than to have them shipped from the future -- he Seldom went ashore, and then only at the urging of a newly assigned cousin anxious to see the sights. Most of the time Martin spent in watching the sea -- and sometimes he painted it. There seemed to be a depth to his seascapes that his other work lacked. When he was pressed by the current cousin to make a land visit somewhere, he decided to exhibit a few of his sea paintings. That way, he could fool himself into thinking that there was some purpose to this journey. He'd come to believe that perhaps what his life lacked was purpose, and for a while he kept looking for meaning everywhere, to the cousin's utter disgust. "Eat, drink and be merry, or whatever you Romans say when you do as you do," the cousin -- who was rather woolly in history; the descendants were scraping bottom now -- advised. Martin showed his work in Italy, so that the cousin could be disillusioned by the current crop of Romans. He found that neither purpose nor malice was enough; he was still immeasurably bored. However, a museum bought two of the paintings. Martin thought of Ives and felt an uncomfortable pang of a sensation he could no longer understand. "Where do you suppose Conrad has been all this time?" Martin idly asked the current cousin -- who was passing as his nephew by now. The young man jumped, then glanced around him uncomfortably. "Conrad's a very shrewd fellow," he whispered. "He's biding his time -- waiting until we're off guard. And then -- pow! -- he'll attack!" "Oh, I see," Martin said. He had often fancied that Conrad would prove to be the most stimulating member of the whole generation. But it seemed unlikely that he would ever have a chance for a conversation with the young man. More than one conversation, anyhow. "When he does show up, I'll protect you," the cousin vowed, touching his ray gun. "You haven't a thing to worry about." Martin smiled with all the charm he'd had nothing to do but acquire. "I have every confidence in you," he told his descendant. He himself had given up carrying a gun long ago. There was a war in the Northern Hemisphere and so The Interregnum voyaged to southern waters. There was a war in the south and they hid out in the Arctic. All the nations became too drained of power -- fuel and man and will -- to fight, so there was a sterile peace for a long time. The Interregnum roamed the seas restlessly, with her load of passengers from the future, plus one bored and aging contemporary. She bore big guns now, because of the ever-present danger of pirates. ally bracing effect of sea air -- perhaps it was the sheltered life -- but Martin lived to be a very old man. He was a hundred and four when his last illness came. It was a great relief when the family doctor, called in again from the future, said there was no hope. Martin didn't think he could have borne another year of life. All the cousins gathered at the yacht to pay their last respects to their progenitor. He saw Ninian again, after all these years, and Raymond -- all the others, dozens of them, thronging around his into the passageways and out onto the deck, making their usual clamor, even though their voices were hushed. Only Ives was missing. He'd been the lucky one, Martin knew. He had been spared the tragedy that was going to befall these blooming young people -- all the same age as when Martin had last seen them and doomed never to grow any older. Underneath their masks of woe, he could see relief at the thought that at last they were going to be rid of their responsibility. And underneath Martin's death mask lay an impersonal pity for those poor, stupid descendants of his who had blundered so irretrievably. There was only one face which Martin had never seen before. It wasn't a strange face, however, because Martin had seen one very like it in the looking glass when he was a young man. "You must be Conrad," Martin called across the cabin in a voice that was still clear. "I've been looking forward to meeting you for some time." The other cousins whirled to face the newcomer. "You're too late, Con," Raymond gloated for the whole generation. "He's lived out his life." "But he hasn't lived out his life," Conrad contradicted. "He's lived out the life you created for him. And for yourselves, too." For the first time, Martin saw compassion in the eyes of one of his lineage and found it vaguely disturbing. It didn't seem to belong there. "Don't you realize even yet," Conrad went on, "that as soon as he goes, you'll go, too -- present, past, future, wherever you are, you'll go up in the air like puffs of smoke?" "What do you mean?" Ninian quavered, her soft, pretty face alarmed. Martin answered Conrad's rueful smile, but left the explanations up to him. It was his show, after all. "Because you will never have existed," Conrad said. "You have no right to existence; it was you yourselves who watched him all the time, so he didn't have a chance to lead a normal life, get married, have children..." the truth began to percolate through. "I knew from the very beginning," Conrad finished, "that I didn't have to do anything at all. I just had to wait and you would destroy yourselves." "I don't understand," Bartholomew protested, searching the faces of the cousins closest to him. "What does he mean, we have never existed? We're here, aren't we? What -- " "Shut up!" Raymond snapped. He turned on Martin. "You don't seem surprised." The old man grinned. "I'm not. I figured it all out years ago." At first, he had wondered what he should do. Would it be better to throw them into a futile panic by telling them or to do nothing? He had decided on the latter; that was the role they had assigned him -- to watch and wait and keep out of things -- and that was the role he would play. "You knew all the time and you didn't tell us!" Raymond spluttered. "After we'd been so good to you, making a gentleman out of you instead of a criminal... That's right," he snarled, "a criminal! An alcoholic, a thief, a derelict! How do you like that?" "Sounds like a rich, full life," Martin said wistfully. What an exciting existence they must have done him out of! But then, he couldn't help thinking, he -- he and Conrad together, of course -- had done them out of any kind of existence. It wasn't his responsibility, though; he had done nothing but let matters take whatever course was destined for them. If only he could be sure that it was the better course, perhaps he wouldn't feel that nagging sense of guilt inside him. Strange -- where, in his hermetic life, could be possibly have developed such a queer thing as a conscience? "Then we've wasted all this time," Ninian sobbed, "all this energy, all this money, for nothing!" "But you were nothing to begin with," Martin told them. And then, after a pause, he added, "I only wish I could be sure there had been some purpose to this." He didn't know whether it was approaching death that dimmed his sight, or whether the frightened crowd that pressed around him was growing shadowy. "I wish I could feel that some good had been done in letting you be wiped out of existence," he went on voicing his thoughts. "But I know that the same thing that happened to your worlds and my world will happen all over again. To other people, in other times, but again. It's bound to happen. There isn't any hope for humanity." One man couldn't really change the course of human history, he told himself. Two men, that was -- one real, one a shadow. Conrad came close to the old man's bed. He was almost transparent. "No," he said, "there is hope. They didn't know the time transmitter works two ways. I used it for going into the past only once -- just this once. But I've gone into the future with it many times. And -- " he pressed Martin's hand -- "believe me, what I did -- what we did, you and I -- serves a purpose. It will change things for the better. Everything is going to be all right." W AS Conrad telling him the truth, Martin wondered, or was he just giving the conventional reassurance to the dying? More than that, was he trying to convince himself that what he had done was the right thing? Every cousin had assured Martin that things were going to be all right. Was Conrad actually different from the rest? His plan had worked and the others' hadn't, but then all his plan had consisted of was doing nothing. That was all he and Martin had done... nothing. Were they absolved of all responsibility merely because they had stood aside and taken advantage of the others' weaknesses? "Why," Martin said to himself, "in a sense, it could be said that I have fulfilled my original destiny -- that I am a criminal." Well, it didn't matter; whatever happened, no one could hold him to blame. He held no stake in the future that was to come. It was other men's future -- other men's problem. 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X-I The choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N. B. C. See the Stars, Moon, Planets Close Up! #" Astronomical Reflecting Telescope Famous Mt. Palomar Type! #  # Power -- An Unusual Buy! ,dapt yuur camera to this Scope for excellent Telephoto Hhots ami fascinating photos of moon ! Assembled -- Ready to Usel Vr.u'il see the Kings of Saturn, the fascinating planet Mars, huge craters on the Moon, Star flusters. Moons of Jupiter in detail. alaxlesl Non-hreakahle aliiminmn-covered tube. Equatorial mount with loirk on both axes. Aluminized and overcnated #" diameter highspeed f# ventilated mirror. Telescope comes equipped with a #X eyepiece and a mounted Karlow Lens, giving you # and # power. An Optical Finder Telescope, always so essential, is also Included. Sturdy, hardwood, portable tripod. #-PBe "Astronomy Book." ' Sfeck No. #S,#S#F # f. o. b. (Shlpplne t. # #)#.) Barrlnston. M...#. Take Telephoto Shots Thru # x # This is fine quality. American-made instrument -- war surplus! 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Metal collector brushes pick up the static electricity, store it in the Leyden jar type condenser until discharged by the jumping spark. Countless tricks and experiments. #-pagc instruction booklet included. Stock No. # f # Postpoid source of supply for experimenters, iiobbyists. World's largest variety of Optical Items. Bargains galore... War Surplus -- Imported -- Domestic! Mlcrcscopcs, Telescopes, Hand Spectroscopes. Prisms. Lenses. Reticles. Mirrors ami dozens of other hard-to-get Optical Items. aalaxy The Earliest Robot #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.  Secrets entrusted to a few TMlilU; are some things that cannot he generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery oj life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction hy mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe C.U.Z. I Scribe C.U.Z. I San Jose, California  I Please send me the;free book, The MasUry i I of Life, which explains how I may learn co i I use my faculties and powers of mind. i I Name ' I Address J  City I I I tirely within my control, a recent editorial of mine got (justifiably) clobbered. I repeated, with innocent merriment, an anecdote about Rex Stout, mystery writer and amateur gardener, winning a # bet by shrewdly slitting a row of kernels out of young corn to prove that cobs do not invariably have odd numbers of rows of kernels. Some anecdote. It caused fist fights, arguments and the most caustic language I've ever seen allowed in the U.S. mail -- and one chap, Albert N. Walker of No. Sacramento, Calif., lost # in a bet. I have the proof that the bet was lost fairly: he sent me a cob with ten rows. However, I didn't make up the anecdote. I read it in a magazine intended for those who either live in New York or think it's a nice place to visit, and thus is about anywhere but New York. It is also notorious for its hostility toward science fiction. If for no other reason, I should have known better than to repeat one of its items without checking first. So I'm checking. Unfortunately, the only immediate source is the Encyclopedia Americana, # edition. Here are some passages that astonished at least me. (If you lose bets on these saysos, Mr. Walker, please take it up with the Americana Corp.) "Corn is America's most important crop. It is grown on as great an acreage and has a value greater than that of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and rice combined... 'With the introduction of hybrid sorts (in #), corn growers have become more dependent upon seedsmen, and now the average grower saves less seed corn... There has been an enormous amount of information put out on the kind of seed corn to pick. Much of this is of little practical value... "Along with the picking of seed corn from the field, seed corn testing is becoming a lost art... Ever since #, the rag doll tester has been pre-eminent. It is a simple homemade tester that utilizes sheeting or similar material for holding a representative number (#) kernels of seed from each ear to be tested. An average rag doll will hold about # ears and when properly prepared, rolled and soaked in lukewarm water will give readings, after the seed is germinated, that ( Continued on page # ) Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation. Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way. Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!" It was a wall in space... with no way to go over or under or around or through it... and it was those outside who were the prisoners! it was a volunte'er (i.e., suicide) mission, and for that you take what comes. They may wine you and dine you and honor you and your tribe for three generations coming and going, in the days before you start. But once you're on your way, you can't expect it to be a pleasure. Everything about suicide is death, not just the final part. Potter picked his cuticles and didn't know he was doing it, even while he was looking you straight in the eye, talking to you at the time. Try shipping out with that. That's what bothered me the most, anyway. Most of the others seemed to be bugged by Donato. He had a psychosomatic cough that passed all the preflight medics for the simple reason that he had never had such a thing before, probably because he had never gone out to die before. Me, I guess I have soaked up enough of that "profound compassion" of the Luanae to defend me against that kind of annoyance. But Potter the Picker now -- that got to me, I admit it. Little Donato was always trying to please. Some people are annoying because once in a while they just don't go out of their way to make things a little happier for anyone else. Donato hit the other extreme, always making way, never disagreeing, forever finding some way to help or get a cushion or move back or bring or say or not-say whatever anyone else might want, until you wanted to scuttle the ship just so it would take him with the lot of you. The main trouble was, he was so helpful he never gave you anything to complain about. Time after time, I would see one or the other of the crew suddenly wheel on him out of a dead silence and roar at him to get the hell out. "Why, sure, friend," Donato would always say, and smile, and get the hell out, leaving whoever it was beating himself on the temples. field mechanics and Donato was a top ballistics man. England was an ugly man with big ears and wet eyes who kept to himself pretty much, only he ate loud. He was an expert in missile control. And I'm Palmer; I heard there was a man in Alpha Sigma IV once who knew more about trans-spatial stress than I do, but I don't believe it. The four of us had four different ideas for breaking the Luanae Barrier and that's what we were on our way to do. All four ideas were pretty far-fetched and the odds were much in favor of the Barrier's getting us, but it had to be done. After everything reasonable has been tried on something that must be done but can't be done, you have to start calling in the crackpots. I had to bring along my perfectly valid theories with the three crackpots because it was the only way they would ever get tried. And that was the expedition personnel. The others were just operations. A skipper, Capt. Steev, strictly ferryboat, who knew everything he had to know about running the ship and getting her there, and didn't know, didn't care, wouldn't talk about anything else. Some of the others griped about the kind of skipper we had, but not me. He had to be expendable and he was. He had to know his job and he did. So? The utility monkey was funny for about half an hour of anybody's time, and forever after that just unpleasant to have around. He was sort of misshapen, with a head much too big for his body and a left leg with too much bounce in it. It's been so many hundreds of years, I guess, since anyone had anything drastic wrong physically that nobody can get used to it any more. You know how to be polite about it when you do encounter it, and back home you know how to forget you saw it pretty thoroughly, but on a spacecan you never get the chance. Personally, I think we should have shipped without a utility man. I don't know if I feel so strongly about it that I'd have done the dirty work on the ship myself, but maybe one of the others would. I don't care how much humanity progresses, there is always a little room somewhere for the unskilled hand, lifting and mopping and cleaning out the sewer lines when something gets stuck. This monkey we had went by the name of Nils Blum, and nobody paid much attention to him. And then we had the unemployed CG. Did you ever hear of an unemployed crew's girl -- on a ship? I don't mean kicking around the spaceports waiting to ship out, unemployed that way. I mean right there aboard, she had nothing to do. CGs as a whole are a dowdy bunch. There's no point in putting cute clothes, cute tricks and heady perfume aboard a spacecan. You don't need to stimulate anything; that takes care of itself as time goes by. They keep themselves clean and wait around till they're needed. They're a thick-skinned, slow-witted lot because there's no sense in sensitivity in their line. It just makes trouble. came from the bottom of the underside of the sump. She was everything that distinguishes a CG from a real Earthside female woman. She had a wide face that was closed and bland as a bankvault door on the Sabbath, and a build that was neither this nor that but sort of statistically there. With a normal personality, or none at all, she might have had a job to do, and would have done it. But with the personality she had... Well, at first you just didn't like her, and after a while you couldn't abide her, and finally you got the feeling about her that she was a lower animal, that you couldn't stand what the others might think of you if you went near her. There was a lot of difference of opinion aboard on a lot of subjects, but not on that one. So that's what we had, believe it or not, an unemployed CG. I read someplace about an Arctic explorer back in the days where the poles of Old Earth were covered with ice. He used to bring along the ugliest woman he could find to cook. Her other function was to inform him when he'd been away from civilization too long, which she did by beginning to look good to him. Well, maybe, given time enough, we'd have found something for this Virginia to do. But given that much time, we'd all be dead. Oh, she was a great help aboard, Virginia was. That personality. I thought a lot about that personality of hers, just because on a long haul you have time to think a lot about everything... I knew a kid in school who had a face so insulting, so all-fired arrogant when it was relaxed that the teachers used to throw him out of the class just for sitting there. At least until they learned it was only physical and had him remodeled. Well, maybe Virginia's personality was something like that. Maybe she couldn't help it. She had a way of carrying a cloud of what Potter once called "retroactive doubt." When she was anywhere near you, you breathed it. You'd say something and she would repeat it, and by the way she did it -- I can't describe it at all, but I'm telling you the truth -- by the way she did it, she made whatever you'd said into a falsehood. Sometimes it suddenly sounded like a lie and sometimes like a mistake and sometimes like something you could be expected to believe because you were ignorant. I mean just repeating your own words. You'd say, "Back home, I've got a silver-headed walking stick," and she'd say, "Yeah, you've got a silver-headed walking stick," in that dull flat drone of hers, and, by damn, you'd find yourself arguing with her that you did have one. I mean fighting, defending yourself, the way you only can when you doubt something yourself. Then she'd go away and you'd sit and stew about the walking stick, wondering where it was you last saw it, wondering if you actually did have it any more, if the head of it was real silver. It didn't have to be something that was important at all; she could make you feel that way. When it was important... shipmate, better not mention it around her. I think you could tell her your name and she'd make you doubt it. As a matter of fact, now I think of it, she did just that to me, the day I first saw her (which is traditionally the day after upship). I walked up to her in the messhall and said, "My name's Palmer," and she looked at me without blinking and said flatly, "Your name's Palmer," and made me say, before I could stop myself, "No -- really it is," and then skulk off feeling damn strange. VjE'D taken off with a null" gray tug and slipped into second-order matrix within six hours -- all very fast and painless, thanks to the Luanae. Both devices were theirs, and so was the ship's power plant, and so was the sub-etheric communication we could get loud and clear for almost four full days after upship. Do you know how far that would be in miles? Here, figure it out -- four days is enough to take you halfway to Sirius, and that's a powerful long reach for a communicator phasing out of normal space and finding your receiver. I recall especially that fourth day's bulletins, because we all gathered around to soak them up and chew them thoroughly. We knew that we'd hear nothing else from Earth Worlds from there on for the six ship-weeks it took us to get out to the Luanae Barrier, way out on the other side of the Coalsack. We cheered the whiffleball scores and the chess results and laughed too loud at the humaninterest bit about the kid who brought the Nova Mars stinkdog into school; and then there was the last real news we heard, that Chicago had been frozen from Northern Ontario Parish clear south to the Joplin city limits, back on Old Earth. Everybody tsk-tsked. "Well," said Potter, looking at his finger, "I guess there's no other way." "But people always get killed in a freeze," said big-eared England. "More people get killed in a riot," I remember saying. About then, the signal faded, very abruptly, as it does when you get out of range in sub-space, and we all sat around worrying a bit. It was funny, that news of all news being the last we heard. It was like a nudge, a send-off. A reminder. Old Earth wasn't the only place where there were riots, not by a sight. Of eighteen planets in the two so-called Earth Galaxies, only Ragnarok and Luna-Luna were not bulging at the seams, and they'd be as bad as the others in a generation. By and large, people behaved themselves... but there were so many of them! The law of averages dictated that, in that number, there had to be so many troublemakers, there were bound to be so many riots -- and there had to be more troublemakers and riots all the time. Unless we broke the Luanae Barrier. We owe the Luanae a lot. As I said before, a good deal of our most advanced technology is built on transmissions from the Luanae. A very old people, ancient before old Sol the First was a sun. Wise and compassionate. That was the real cliche: the compassionate Luanae. True enough, though. No one had ever seen them, of course -- the Barrier took care of that. No one understood the exact method of their transmissions, though they tried their best to explain. You'd get in range and then there it was, they were talking to you, inside your head. What they said was true -- that you could bank on, swear by, hang your hat or your life on.  proved. But not an#rthing the Luanae said. You might not believe it if you heard about something they said, from me, say. But go hear it from them -- you'll know it's so. Never in the three hundred years of contact had anything they said turned out to be anything but exactly -- really exactly -- so. They say that at first humanity took it with a dose of salts -- we are a suspicious species. But although the Luanae couldn't give us the specs of a machine like theirs -- they insisted that their thought transmitter was only a machine -- they were able to describe an odd little recorder that would play back and "sound" like the original. When a made and distributed, there wasn't any suspicion any more. It just blew away. But population-pressure rioting isn't as easy to dispose of as inbred suspicion. Put enough people in a limited area and you'll have trouble. Put too much in the same area and -- look out. Now we had sixteen worlds with too much humanity, and two more with almost enough to start trouble. And all we could do was watch and feel, and freeze whole sections when the thing boiled over. After each freeze, the United Planet men would spread through the . countryside, picking up the mangled corpses from ground-cars and aircraft which had smashed up when everyone blacked out, and making the millions of others comfortable where they lay. They'd wake up in due course, with no sense of time passed, but the dead would have been long buried and the troublemakers located and treated, and the immediate causes of the riot, whatever they might be (it didn't take much) adjudicated and put right. It was generally suspected that the UP boys declared riot and froze sections on somewhat less excuse than they really needed, but most people didn't object. people, each time, from breeding any more for six to eight months. But nobody denied that this was pure stopgap. As to halting reproduction altogether for a while, the suggestion came up monotonously in the Council sessions and was as monotonously knocked down. Enforced sterility is counter to the most basic of civil rights, and the Earth Worlds would die before they would relinquish any basic right. They were dying, too. And there, hanging just out of reach, were the Luanae Earths -- eight fine Earth-type planets circling three suns in Galaxy Three. Eight beautiful worlds, ready and waiting; we wanted them and the Luanae wanted us to have them. And all we could do was watch them swing by and feel wistful, because of the Barrier. T he Luanae are not terrestrial. As far as can be understood, they have a boron metabolism and compete in no way with us hydrocarbon types. They need nothing from us and wouldn't take it if they did need it. When they say they have those worlds to give us, when they say the worlds are suitable, and they say for sure that those are the only planets left in this entire quadrant of the Universe -- why, you can bet on it. (They're the ones who found Luna-Luna and Ragnarok for us, when the Earth Worlds had despaired of ever finding another terrestrial planet.) We also have their assurance that in the other quadrants are literally thousands of terrestrial planets; but we will need a totally new technology to reach them, and that will take us maybe four centuries to acquire, even with their help. Well, the Earth Worlds wouldn't last four centuries without the Luanae planets. With them, though -- with them, it might be done. All we had to do was reach them. All we had to do was penetrate the Barrier. The Barrier was a sphere in space -- not a thing, exactly, just a place which could be represented on a cosmimap as a sphere. It was a fair-sized sphere; it englobed a third of the Luanae Galaxy, including, of course, the three little Luanae home-planets and the eight lovely, unreachable Luanae Earths. All it did, that Barrier, was to draw a line. Anything outside of it was left strictly alone. Anything penetrating it was instantly tracked, hunted and smashed by Luanae missiles. And anything that got cute enough to duck inside and out again was destroyed by the Barrier itself, which had the simple ability of reversing the terrene-sign of' a random third of the atoms in any matter it touched. You can imagine what happened to anything from a micrometeorite to a sun that got exposed to it. Shot through and through with contra-terrene matter. Disappeared in a single ferocious flash. The Luanae Galaxy was discovered three hundred years ago by a creaky old Earth survey ship powered by Teller-formula atomics and a primitive subspace drive which barely quadrupled effective light-velocity. The first thing the ship -- it was called the Luanae, after its skipper's wife and daughter, both of whom were named Luana -- the first thing they saw was the Luanae Galaxy, a long narrow elliptical one with a dark band, the perfect arc of a circle, a thir# of the way down the long axis. It looked artificial, so they hobbled over there to investigate. It was artificial, all right. It was the Barrier, or, rather, the segment of space through which the Barrier had removed all impinging matter. And when they got within a dozen light-years of it, they were in range of the beings who came to be known by the same name as the ship and the galaxy -- the Luanae. They said Stop. They said it simultaneously inside the heads of everyone aboard. They said it with that encasement of utter truth and total believability. They said it (they told us later) with an automatic machine set up eons ago, to warn away any intelligent life from their Barrier. But when the ship Luanae responded (by stopping), it wasn't any machine that spoke next. The strange creatures set up such a welcome, such a warm, admiring, congratulatory flood of thought that they say all hands looked at each other in amazement and started toweep. A ND along with the welcome -- a warning. Don't come any closer. cubic meters of rubble up from the inside of the Barrier and let the astonished crew watch the near margins of the invisible Barrier light up with a hellish threehour show of destruction. They urged experiment, suggesting that the survey ship throw something at the Barrier. The ship did. Whatever matter penetrated was overtaken and destroyed by what appeared to be tiny hunting missiles. Whatever matter was angled through the Barrier's skin, so that it would cut a chord and emerge again, splashed into flame as it left. The men on the ship knew, down to the marrow, that they were welcome -- thirstily, ardently welcome. And they knew that they were warned. "HE ship hung outside the Barrier for over a year, setting down what turned out to be the greatest treasure ever brought home by a vessel since time began. Knowledge -- the knowledge that put cold-fusion power plants on all the Earth planets, in all the factories. New designs. New principles of mathematics and spatial mechanics. New methods, new ideas, much of it material Earth possibly might have discovered for itself in a thousand years, most of it material we never could have found unaided. And every bit of it was valid. Every bit of it held out the promise of more, once we had assimilated this incredible cargo. When the survey ship Luanae reached the Earth Worlds, they say that the suspicion was thicker than anyone alive today could readily understand. They say they were going to court-martial the skipper for wasting all that time out there making up stories. And they say there was a powerful movement to suppress everything they brought back, out of fear that the new technology might in some way be a Trojan horse. But sheer cussed human curiosity got the better of all that and, though they started slowly, it wasn't too long before the Luanae devices and principles proved themselves out -- spectacularly. And in a few years, humanity was back again. In force. The main idea was to breach the Barrier -- peaceably if possible, but breach it. Most of the ships, most of the men, did not make the attempt, so great was the impact of the Luanae truth and fellow feeling. Some did try, though, ramming, bombing, bringing up hyper-magnetic generator ships to try warping the intangible structure of the Barrier. All failed; those who touched it died. Whenever that happened, there was a great soundless cry of mourning from the Luanae, but the Barrier remained. " covered them, the Luanae had explained simply and clearly why the Barrier was there and why it stayed. It seemed tdo simple a story, and buried as it was in such a mass of other data, it was overlooked or disbelieved. Mind you, that was before the Luanae had been recorded, be"hear" for themselves what a transmission from them was really like. Probably the Luanae realized this; at any rate, the story of the Barrier was the firsf Luanae recording to be widely distributed and its impact was huge. Such a simple story... a people in some ways like humanity, perhaps a little swifter technologically, perhaps in some ways less demanding... well, they lived a good deal longer, took a good deal less from the land to keep themselves alive. They had some things to be proud of -- an art that can only be imagined outside the Barrier, and music of a kind. They did "send" some of their literature, as you know... ah. Then they had a number of things to be ashamed of. Some wars, big ones. Three times they all but destroyed themselves, and climbed back up again. Then there was a long flowering, which seemed like something good. something fine. They developed a compassion, a philosophy of respect for the living and harmony with the laws of the Universe -- more than a religion, more than simply a way of life and thought. Through it, a good many things became unnecessary to them and they forgot they had hands... When they were attacked from space (this happened countless thousands of years ago), they could not defend themselves at all. They had forgotten the largest part of their fabulous technology; their machines were corroded, their skills had died, and worst of all, they had forgotten how to organize, how to be many men under one man's hand -- for the duration. So they were enslaved. They broke their chains at length -- at some thirty thousand years' length. When they had driven out the invader, and followed him and destroyed him and all his worlds, they were a frightened and sobered people. Their taste of quiet, of personal and individual fulfillment, was a touch of paradise to them and they deeply resented its loss. Their return to material power was (in their minds) a descent and a degradation. Yet they had learned a lesson and learned it well. They made up their minds to defend themselves in such a way that never again -- positively, absolutely and forever -- never again would they be attacked, no matter how long it might be, no matter how deep and distantly they buried their souls in their nameless, nebulous delights. So, after due consideration, they decided on the Barrier. They threw their total productivity -- enormous, after their last war -- and all their ingenuity into a defense to end all defenses. They marked out a segment of the surrounding space, purposely enclosing ten times the volume which their computers specified as the most that they could conceivably ever need for themselves. stabilized it in an orbit around a dead sun not far from their cultural hub. This control planetoid, in ways as yet far too advanced for humanity to grasp, generated and maintained the Barrier itself. In addition, it gathered up cosmic debris and sucked it in and, with its mammoth automatic machinery, transmuted and smelted and cast and machined flight after flight of missiles -- large and small. These were racked and stored by the hundreds of thousands, stationed throughout the Barrierprotected space in a myriad of automatically computed orbits. And so it was that anything which penetrated the Barrier, from any quarter, was instantly hunted down and killed. There was some alarm at first over the fact that the Barrier, by its nature, must destroy anything leaving, as the missiles destroyed everything entering. But there seemed no valid answer to the question "Why not?" The Luanae weren't going anywhere. They had space enough, and ten times space enough, for any roaming they chose to do. And they chose to do very little, for their orientation was back toward those golden years of introspection, of contemplative, inward self-realization, and their hunger for it was very great. And so they locked the Universe out and themselves in -- And threw away the key. The control planetoid was a machine -- automatic, self-repairing, powered by cold fusion of two isotopes of hydrogen, and it could always get hydrogen. It made missiles and used them. When it used them, it gathered up the dust that was left and salvaged it and made more. When any outbound matter was destroyed by the inner surface of the Barrier, it gathered up the radiant energy of the pyre, and the ashes, and brought them in and used them. It was impregnable, inexhaustible, tireless and immortal. It brought safety; it brought peace. It brought death to a nomad people, so vastly superior in intellect and in what has been translated from the Luanae "sendings" as "size-of-soul" that the Luanae, by that time steeped again in their unthinkable metaphysics, awoke to watch them approach, awe-struck, alive and aware of them. What they were can never now be known. Even the Luanae do not know. They say only that their thirty thousand years of slavery to the creatures who invaded them was but a scratch, a toe-stub, compared to the wound they suffered in the realization that they caused the destruction of these nameless nomads. The creatures swept down on the Barrier, unable to detect something unique in the Universe, unwarned and unprepared, and were swallowed up by it. It is impossible to describe the impact of this event on the Luanae. Already deeply involved in their ancient philosophy, in tune with the Universe and respecting all natural things -- compassionate, life-reverent, humble and kind -- they watched the destruction of their infinite superiors with an infinite horror. They realized then the extent of their folly, their crime in the creation of the Barrier. Already far gone again away from their technological peak. they again restored it. They surpassed it. They mobilized to pull down what they had put up, driven by guilt and horror at the thing they had done. It was the crucifixion of crucifixions, the murder of murders with the Messiah of Messiahs their irreplaceable victim. A ND they failed. They had built too well. The planetoid destroyed everything that approached it. It was surrounded by miniature versions of the great Barrier, some turned inside out so that the disintegrating surface was encountered first. It picked apart, in a microsecond, everything they threw at it, ate it, digested it, and was nourished. The Luanae then undertook a frightening sacrifice, an appalling expense. In an effort to overload the planetoid's defenses, they flung up thousands of missiles, ships, lumps of rock and debris, hurling it every which way between their stars and planets. Implacably the planetoid located the intrusive matter, compared it with its matrix of stored information on allowable bodies and their permitted circlings, and sought out and destroyed the offending ones, quite uncaring that many of them, tragically many, were manned... And, in time, the Luanae discovered that the planetoid was producing missiles and energy past its original capacity, consuming more than it had originally been designed to handle, computing more things more quickly. At that, they ceased to attack it, realizing belatedly that they had forced it to enlarge and strengthen itself -- the only course open to a self-repairing machine stressed beyond its original endurance. They fell back then on the only thing left for them to do, as creatures of efficient conscience. They sent out warnings. They devised transmissions which covered the entire spectra of intelligence, transcending language, surpassing even symbolism. They set up automatic beacons to radiate the warning in all directions, each beam overlapping the next. Bitterly, they organized a trade of monitors to watch over the automatic machines, which they never again would trust. The monitors were ritualized like a priesthood, drilled like slave-legions, marinated in the impulses of duty. Once that was done and tested past any conceivable fault or failure, they settled to a new level of life, neither blindly mechanical, like that which had produced the planetoid, nor vegetative and contemplative, like that which had left them open to slavery, but a middle ground, based on the ancient convictions of respect for life and its ways in the rigid and marvelous frame of the Universe; and implemented it by an unrusting technology. So it was that the Luanae were at last in a position to make their greatest and most mature discovery -- a thing known to each of them as individuals, but until now unrealized in terms of lifegroups : A man cannot exist alone. He must be a member of something, a piece, an integer of some larger whole. Men plus men make cities, which band together to form states, then countries, then worlds, and never can a sole unit exist alone and unsupplied. Communication and intercourse are necessary and vital; without them, the lone unit is a brief accident unnoticed by the Universe and forever forgotten. So, behind their gigantic ghastly barricade, the Luanae at last acknowledged membership in a grouping greater than species, and declared themselves belonging to Life and dedicated to the survival of its total membership. This, then, was the self-imprisoned people discovered by an Earth scout ship, in the business of locating terrestrial planets for humanity. The Luanae rose with a shout at the sight of them. This was Life -- life to aid and life to share. For until Earth came to them, they saw themselves dying like a surrounded city, like a lone traveler, like an amputated limb, like any other life separated from its sustaining body. Earth brought life to the Luanae, and the Luanae enlisted themselves in Earth's search for life. with a skipper and utility monkey horse-blindered by their duties, three crackpots and an unemployed and unusable CG. And me. Palmer, with what could be the answer. I had faith in my solution; I liked its math. I had little or no hope that it would be tried -- really tried full-scale, and done right. People don't know enough. They don't think really straight. They turn the wrong valves and push the wrong buttons. Palmer should have a thousand hands and the ability to be simultaneously in a thousand places. Then this business of being the wasp-waist in the history of Life and the Lives of the two cultures -- this would make more sense. I shall be bungled out of history, I told myself as we ground along in the nothingness of subspace -- the Luanae subspace, given us by Luanae cold-fusion generators. I'm coming, I'm coming, I told the Luanae silently, but I bring the enemy; I bring bungling; and, my marvels, you'll succumb to stupidity as will I, for it's the last and strongest enemy of them all, against which you and I might not prevail. I watched Potter picking away at his cuticles, and I silently bore Donato's cough, and I gave my approval to big-eared England because he had so little to say to anybody; I tried to remember what exactly it was that made Nils Blum, the utility-monkey, funny to me when I saw him first; I hoped to recapture it and laugh again, but I never made it. I swore sometimes at Donato's eternal helpfulness and I ignored the skipper, because who wants to talk all the screaming time about ship's business and the business of ships gone by?... I said nothing where the CG could hear me, and tightened up in painful empathy when I saw one or another of the ship's company floundering and defending and doubting when she repeated his words. I did nothing about any of these annoyances, except maybe the time I suggested to the skipper that he feed the CG at times other than our mess, so I wouldn't have to witness her purposeless wreckage of even the little things men believe in. He bought that, and it had a double advantage. We not only were spared the sight of her at meals, but she took to spending her time aft in the "monkey's cage" among the mops and drums of cleaning aerosol and sewer-line scrapers. If Nils Blum objected, then, monkeylike, he could pass it off by scratching and chewing a straw... I came through there once and saw them sitting across from each other at Blum's little table, elbows almost touching, not speaking and not looking at each other. And, by the Lord, she was crying, and I must say it did me good. I had a mind to go ask the monkey how he managed it, but I don't involve myself with the unskilled. We got where we were going and snapped out of the nothing into the something. We took a bearing on the Luanae Galaxy and it was quite a sight, a long irregular sausage of an island galaxy, with its unmistakable signpost, the long regular black swatch of the Barrier's edge where it impinged on, and shut out, the rest of the bodies in the formation. We ducked under again for half an hour and came up again too close to see the swatch, but close enough at last to get the Luanae greeting. That I can't tell you about. into the messhall in midmorning, which would have annoyed me if I could think of anything I'd rather be doing -- but there just wasn't anything to do, or to want to do, instead. So I shuffled in with the rest of them -- Potter, England, Donato. Blum and the CG were back with the mops, I imagine. The captain let us all be seated and stood at the end of the table and knocked on a coffee mug self-consciously. He said, "We have arrived at our site of operations. We have, among the four of you, four different specialists with, as I understand it, four attacks on the problem of penetrating the Luanae Barrier. I need not," he says, and then went right on as if he needed to anyway, "need not tell you of the vital importance of this task. The entire history of humanity might -- not might, does -- depend On it. If you, or men like you, fail to solve this problem soon, we can expect our entire civilization to explode, like a dying sun, through the internal pressures of its own contracting mass." He coughed to cover up the floridity of his phrasing, and little Donato happily joined in. I saw one of England's wide flat hands move on the table, to cover the other and hold it down. "Now, then," said the captain. He bent from the waist and removed his hand from his side pocket. In it was a sleek little remote mike. "This is for the record, gentlemen. You first, Mr. Palmer?" "Me first what?" I wanted to know. "Your plan, sir. Your approach, attack, whatever it pleases you to call it. Your projected method of cracking the Barrier." I looked around at what passed for an audience, coughing, picking, glowering wetly. I said, "In the first place, my plan has been fully detailed and filed with the proper authorities -- men who are in a position to understand my specialty. I believe' that copies of these papers are on file with you. I suggest that you look at them and save us both the trouble." "I'm afraid you don't understand," said the captain, looking flustered. He gestured at the mike. "This is for the record. I've got to have the oral rundown. It's -- it's -- well, for the record." "Then I say to the recording, for the record," I barked, right into the mike, "that I am not accustomed to being asked to make speeches before a lay audience, which cannot be expected to understand one word in ten of what I have to say. And I refer the recording and its auditors, whoever they may be, to the files in which my detailed report is presented, for proof not only of my project but of the fact that these assembled, and no doubt those listening to this record, would in all likelihood not know what I was talking about. Not at all." I glared up at the skipper. "Does that satisfy the record. Lieutenant?" "Captain," corrected the captain mildly. "Really." "A mistake," I allowed. "I never make mistakes accidentally, you understand." I waved at the mike. "Let's let the record stand with that, do you mind?" "Mr. Potter," said the captain, and I leaned back, pleased with myself. and immediately replaced it. "Well I don't bind tellig you bine," he said adenoidally. "I'm in field bechanics, as you dough. I have bade certain calculations which indicate the the stresses present in the barrier skin are subject on bobentary distortion under the stress of shall area, high intenstidty focused bagnetic fields of about one hudred billion gauss per square centimeter I wondered how the record would make out the difference. "Very good, Mr. Potter," said the captain. "Unless I am mistaken, you propose to breach the Barrier momentarily with a highintensity focused magnetic field. Is that correct?" Potter nodded, a gesture which carried through his right wrist. "Very well," said the captain. I blew disgustedly through my nostrils, looking at Potter. His business was as disgusting as his hobby of picking at his cuticles. If I knew as little about my specialty as he did about his, I'd never get trapped into talking about it. "Mr. Donato?" "Yes, Captain Steev, yes, sir!" Donato cried, all blushes and eagerness. "Well, sir. I'm in ballistics. What I propose is a two-part missile aimed to graze the Barrier in such a way that, at the moment of contact, it separates, one segment glancing back outside, the other entering and proceeding inward. This is on the theory that, although the control planetoid reacts instantaneously, its sensors report only one event at one locality at a given moment. I feel I have a fifty-fifty chance, then, of slipping one part through while the other part is being reported grazed and gone. I think a minimum of one hundred thirty shots, fired in four groups and at four slightly different approach angles, would establish whether or not the theory is tenable." "Tenable?" I gasped. "Why, you -- nincompoop!" That's the first time in my entire life I ever called anyone that, but as I looked at him, blushing and grinning and wanting to do right, there just wasn't another applicable term. "What makes you think -- " "Mr. England?" said the skipper, much louder than I have ever heard him speak before. I confess I was startled. Before I could quite recover myself, England answered. "In the area of mis," he said in a whispery voice which at that point failed him. He swallowed with all his might and then made a weak, flickery smile. "In the field of missiles, my chief concern is, first, a series of tests to determine the exact nature of the internal control pulses in the hunting missiles, the frequency and wave-height of the command pulses in the guided missiles, with a view to jamming or redirecting them. Second, I plan to lob some solids through the Barrier at low velocities in order to study the metallurgical content of the missiles, with a view to the design of sensing-dodging equipment, and possibly some type of repulsion field, designed to force the missiles into a near miss." "Very succinct," said the captain, and I wondered how he knew what was succinct or not about a specialty. "Now that we've got the swing of this little discussion, perhaps, Mr. Palmer, you would like to reconsider and join it." "Perhaps I would at that," I said, stopping to think it over. to be added to this exhibition of maundering incompetence, if only for balance. "Then if you must know," I said, "the only tenable method of approaching the problem lies in the area of explosive stress. No one but myself seems to have noticed the almost perfectly spherical shape of the Barrier. A sphere in any flexing material is a certain indication of some dynamic tension, a container and the com tained in equilibrium, with the analog of some fluid differential like the air inside and outside an inflated balloon. You don't follow me." "Go on," said the captain, holding his head as if he was listening. "Why, all it will take is a toroidal mass equipped with a subspace generator and an alternator. If this is placed upon the Barrier margin and caused to vibrate into and out of the subspace state, there will be a portion of the Barrier -- that which is surrounded by the toroid -- which will be included in the vibration. The effect then is in causing a circular section of the Barrier to be in nonexistence for part of the time. It is my conclusion that this small breach will cause the Barrier to collapse like that toy balloon I mentioned. Q. E. D. Lieutenant." I leaned back. "Captain," said the captain tiredly. Then he looked me in the eye and said, "I regret to inform you, Mr. Palmer, that you are completely wrong. Blum!" he bellowed suddenly. "Coffee out here!" "Hah!" came the monke#r's voice. It was as near as he ever let himself get to aye-aye, sir. He must have had the tray ready before the skipper called, because he came out with it loaded and steaming. He set it down in the middle of the table and retired to a corner. At the side of my eye, I saw the CG sidle out of the "cage" and go to stand silently beside him. But I wasn't in a mood for anything but this preposterous allegation from the captain. I got to my feet so I could look down at him. "Did I understand you to say," I ground out, cold as Neptune, "that in your opinion I am wrong?" "Quite wrong. The Barrier is a position, an infinite locus, not a material substance, and is therefore not subject to the laws and treatments of matter per se." I have been known to splutter when I am angry, unless I try not to. I found myself trying very hard not to. "I have reduced every observation on that surface known to Man," I informed him, "to mathematical symbology, and from it have written a consecutive sequence of occasions which proves beyond doubt that the surface is as I say and will act as I say. You seem to forget that this is on the record, Admiral, and this may mean you are making a permanent rather than a temporary fool of yourself." I sat down, feeling better. "Captain," ' said the captain wearily. from the stack of folders which I noticed for the first time lay there. He flashed it; at first glance, it looked like a page of figures over which a child superimposed a crude and scratchy picture of a Christmas tree in red. He said, "Equation number #, four pi sigma over theta plus the square root of four pi sigma quantity squared." I could not help noticing that, as he reeled it off, he was waving the paper, not reading from it. I said, "I recognize the equasion. Well?" "Well nothing," snapped the captain. "Unwell, I'd call it. Heh." He slid the sheet over to me. "If you will observe, to be consistent with the preceding series, the integer sigma is not whole but factoral, in view of which an increasing error is introduced wherein -- but see for yourself." I looked. What resembled a crude picture of a Christmas tree was the correction, in red, of the symbol he had mentioned, and the scrawled figures of three corrected factors in the next equation and seven in the third following, until the red marks became a whole line. I said, "Might I ask who has had the effrontery to scribble all over these calculations?" "Oh, I did," said the captain. "I thought it might be a good idea to rework the whole series, just in case, and I'm glad I did. You ought to be, too." I looked again at the sheet and swallowed sand. A man has to major for a considerable time in some highly creative math to be able to do what had been done here. A thing or two came to my lips, but I would not say them, because they were for my figures and against his, yet it could not be denied that his were right. To save something out of this, I growled at him, "I think, sir, you owe me an explanation as to why you have chosen publicly to humiliate me." "I didn't humiliate you. Those figures humiliated you, and they're your figures," he said, and shrugged. I glanced at Potter and England. They were grinning broadly. I looked up suddenly and caught the CG's flat gray stare. "They're your figures," she murmured, and anyone hearing her would swear she knew for certain that I had copied them from somebody else's work. There was such a flame of insistence burning up in me that they were so my figures that I could barely contain it. But contain it I did; they were not figures I was anxious to claim at the moment. I was very confused. I slumped down in my chair. iiVOU'RE next, Mr. Potter. I'm sorry to have to inform you that although, in theory, the Barrier does yield under the stress of a magnetic field such as you describe, it would take a generator somewhat larger than this ship to supply it; the affected area would be just about what you said -- a square centimeter; and, finally, it wouldn't be a hole in the Barrier, but what you might call a replacement patch. In other words, the affected area will, when surrounded by the socalled Barrier skin, act precisely like part of that skin in all respects." Potter put his hobby finger out for inspection and was so distressed he forgot to look at it. "Are... are you sUre?" "That's what happened the last seven times it was tried." Potter made a wordless sound, a sort of moan, or sigh. I did not feel like grinning at him as he had at me. England did not grin, either, because I think he realized what was coming. He just sat there wondering how it would come. It came at Donato first. "Mr. Donato -- " "Yes, sir, Cap'n." "You propose a two-piece missile. You seem to forget, as many another has before you, that the Barrier offers no resistance to penetration and therefore needs no complicated hanky-panky to get something inside. In addition, it's unimportant whether or not an object is sensed by the skin and reported to control, or whether it's picked up a minute or hour later by one of the hunting missiles. You've attacked the whole problem with a view to getting something inside, which isn't a problem, and overlooked what to do inside, which is." "Oh, Cap'n, I'm sorry," said Donato, stricken. He burst into a sharp series of barking coughs. There were tears in his eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry." "Nothing to be sorry about," the captain said. "Got it yet, Mr. England?" "Whuh? Oh," said the missile expert. "I guess I was off base about the jamming. Suddenly it seems to me that's so obvious, it must have been tried and it doesn't work." "Right, it doesn't. That's because the frequency and amplitude of the control pulses make like purest noise -- the#re genuinely random. So trying to jam them is like trying to jam FM with an AM signal. You hit it so seldom, you might as well not try." "What do you mean, random? You can't control anything with random noise." The captain thumbed over his shoulder at the Luanae Galaxy. "They can. There's a synchronous generator in the missiles that reproduces the same random noise, peak by pulse. Once you do that, modulation's no problem. I don't know how they do it. They just do. The Luanae can't explain it; the planetoid developed it." England put his head down almost to the table. "The same random," he whispered from the very edge of sanity. A S if anxious to push him the rest of the way, the captain said cheerfully, "Good thinking on that proposal to study the metal content of the missiles. Only there isn't any. They're a hundred per cent dielectric synthetics -- God knows exactly what. The planetoid can trasmute, you know. What little circuitry the missiles have is laid out in fluidfilled pipes, capillary coils, things like that. There seems to be some sort of instantaneous transition from solid to liquid and back. The liquid conductors are solid dielectrics again just as soon as they have passed whatever current they're supposed to pass, and that's done in microseconds." "Radar-transparent," concluded England dolefully. "For all practical purposes," agreed the captain. "Well, that seems to be that, gentlemen." "Just you tell me one thing," I said before I could stop myself. "Precisely what in hell are we doing here at all?" "Precisely what you came to do." The captain picked up his folders. "Blum, I sense that these four gentlemen might be happier without an audience, even us." "Come on, Virginia." The captain started out forward and the monkey and the CG headed aft. We all sat where we were. After a time, England said, "Why didn't he tell me he knew so much about missiles?" "Did you ask him?" snapped Potter. That was the question and answer I had been humbly formulating, too. I said, "What did he mean, we are here to do what we came to do?" "Maybe he wants us to get oriented, is all," said Donato sheepishly. "Get off theory, you know. Like field work." "If he thinks he's jolting my inspiration, he's crazy," gloomed England. He wiped his wet eyes with the backs of his hands, leaving them still wet. "The jolt, I got all right. The inspiration, I can't find." "He should have told us before, right at the start. Maybe by now we'd have a whole new set of figures." Donato caught my sharp look and immediately said, "Theories, I mean, friend. I didn't mean to say figures." Somehow that didn't help. "Get out of here, Donato," I said. "Sure, friend, sure," he said and got out like always, smiling. He went into his room and closed the door. We could hear him coughing. "Like a box you have in your room ten years," Potter was muttering adenoidally, "it all of a sudden goes boing and there's a jumpid-jack." I was going to ask him what he was talking about and then realized he was talking about the captain. I saw his point. Why hadn't he called this meeting weeks ago? "He must like things to look futile," I said. "I'm going back to bed." "Be, too," said Potter. I got up. Potter and England stayed where they were. They were going to talk about me. I just didn't care. a meadow, smelling the sweet fresh odor of snowdrops, when all of a sudden they grew taller and taller, or I grew smaller and smaller, and I saw that instead of stems, the snowdrops were growing on a sequence of equations. I began to read them off, but they got all twisted and jumbled and started to grab at my feet. I fell and grunted and caught hard at the edges of the bunk and was totally awake. I turned over and looked at the overhead. I felt clear-headed but lethargic. I thought I could still smell the snowdrops. Then I noticed the whine. It was far away, but persistent. The lights looked funny. They seemed to be flickering slightly, but when you looked straight at them, they were steady. I didn't like it. It made me feel dizzy. I got up and went out into the corridor. Nobody was around. Then a timid voice said behind me, "Virginia in there?" I jumped and turned. It was the monkey, cringing against the bulkhead. "You think I'm that bad off?" I answered him in disgust, but as I turned away, he leaned forward and peered into my room anyway. I went into the messhall and knocked on the decanter and, when it steamed, poured coffee. Somewhere in the background, I heard a wistful murmur, and then Potter's shocked voice: "In here? Monkey, didn't they tell you? I like girls." In a moment, he came shuffling in and headed for the coffee. "What time is it. Palmer?" I shrugged. I looked at the clock, but it didn't seem to make any sense to me. "God," said Potter, and sniffed noisily. "I feel all... disconnected. I got a buzzing in my ears. My eyes -- it's sort of flickery." I looked at him curiously, wondering what it must be like to be a man who so readily relates everything around him to himself. "That isn't your flicker. It's ours. Same with the buzz, though I'd call it a sort of whine." He looked very relieved. "You hear it, too. What happens here, anyway?" I drank some coffee and looked at the clock again. "What's the matter with that clock?" I demanded. Potter craned to look at it. "Can't be. Can't be." Donato came in, his face scrubbed and shining. "Morning, Palmer. Potter. Well, I wondered which one of us would fall first, and I guess I know now, and who'd a' thunk it." He nodded aft and began coughing. We looked. The monkey was stepping off one foot and onto the other in front of England's door. "You ought to mind your own business, Don." "Oh, sure," said Donato agreeably. "Guess you're right at that." Just then, England flung his door open, saw Nils Blum crouching there, and recoiled with an odd high squeak. Immediately he growled, in his deepest bass, "Don't hang around me, monk," and pushed past the utility man without a backward glance. VjE watched, looking past him  as he approached. Blum ducked his head inside England's door, withdrew it, took a step toward us and stopped, his jaw working silently, his big wrinkled head held a little askew. "But hungry, I'm hungry," England said. "Whatever time is it?" "Clock's busted." Potter suddenly laughed. We all looked at him. "Well," he said, pointing at England, "it's not him, either." "You were just saying to Don, he ought to mind his own business," I snapped. I wonder, I thought to myself, if he knows I cut at him because he picks his cuticles? "What business? What goes?" England demanded. "By holy creepin' Kramden," said Donato to himself. He looked aft at the miserable figure there and forward at the closed door to the wardroom and control. "What do you know." "He is a very surprising man," I said. "Who? Who? The skipper? What's he done now?" England insisted. "Virginia seems to be missing," said Donato. Hearing her name, Blum ran three steps toward us and then stopped in the messhall' door, looking timidly at our faces, one by one. "Well," said Potter, "rank has its privileges." England blew sharply through his nostrils, expressing a great deal and disposing of the matter. He glanced at the clock. "What'd you say is wrong with it?" "Nothing's wrong with it." We turned abruptly and faced the captain. There was an oddness about him, a set to his jaw, a certain hard something in his eye that hadn't been there at all before. Or maybe it had, there at the table this morning. (Was that this morning? What the clock said just made no sense at all.) I looked at the captain and past him, through his open door, through the wardroom with his neat bunk at the side, on forward to the control console and observation blister. There wasn't anybody up there. From the other doorway, the utility monkey whispered, "Sir... ?" "Something the matter with the lights. Captain," Donato said. "It's all right," said the captain shortly. He went to the messhafl peeper and switched it on. He dialed for starboard view and stepped back. We crowded around it. Everything looked about the same out there, the wide vein of jewels straggling across the sky, then the unrelieved black. "Show you something," said the captain. He moved the controls and the view zoomed in toward the stars. At close to peak magnification, he switched to the fine tuning and got the crosshairs where he wanted them. "Know what that is?" TT was a ball, shiny, golden. It was impossible to say how big. Then I heard England gasp. "I've seen that before. Pictures. That's the Barrier Control -- the planetoid!" "So close?" I asked. "Just because the Barrier is a sphere," said the captain, "everyone assumes the control has to be in the center. Well, it isn't. It's right here at the edge, and heaven help anything that goes in there in a rush, trying to converge on the center!" "Sir..." came the whisFer. "Now look," said the captain. winding the zoom handle again. The view backed away from the golden sphere until it was almost lost. Suddenly the screen filled with a flattopped, streamlined -- "A pod, a ship's pod!" said England. The captain stepped back a pace and watched the pod with glowing eyes. His hands were pressed tight together and some great suppressed excitement yearned in him to burst free. We looked from him to the peeeper. Under his breath, the captain said, "Git'm! Go git'm!" "Sir..." "Shut up, monk." "That pod's inside the Barrier!" somebody said. Me, I think. "Look! Look there!" It was like a segment of ivory knitting needle. It was turning slowly end over end. It approached the pod slowly, high, passed close by and drifted out of the picture. "A missile, a big one." "My God, what's happened?" gasped Donato. "The Barrier's down," said the captain, as if he couldn't hold the words inside any longer. "It's down, you see? It's gone and the missiles are all dead." "Sir, oh, Cap'n... I can't find Virginia. Where's Virginia, Cap'n?" "You're looking at her, Blum. You're looking right at her," said the captain, his eyes fixed on the screen. Something hit us, scattered us. For a moment, the messhall was a swirl of grunts and outraged yells, and then the utility monkey had tumbled us aside and was standing in front of the peeper, one hand on each side frame. He seemed a half a head taller, all at once, and his one hairy arm, where it passed close by me, had cords on it I hadn't known about before; his head was a lion's head. Suddenly he barked, "Whafd you do? What'd you do?" He was talking to the captain, who kept looking over Blum's shoulder at the picture and was laughing softly. Then the monkey whirled from the screen, turning as if to turn was to tear something, and he faced the captain and said again, "What'd you do? What'd you do with Virginia?" HE captain stopped laughing altogether and was a captain duty-talking to a utility monkey. "I gave her her orders and I put her in that pod and sent her on her way. Any objections, mister?" Blum's eyes began to protrude -- honestly, you could see them press outward. His mouth opened slowly, slowly, and a dribble suddenly scored the corner of the mouth and down the side of the chin; the hands came up, clawed, half-grasping. The nostrils trembled, trembled... and then he screamed, so loud, so close to us, it was like a big dazzling light flashing to blind us. We reared back from that scream, pawing at it. Next thing was Blum, crouched over and peering ahead as he ran, trying to go somewhere, not knowing how. He ran crazily to the airlock hatch and hit it with his fists, and turned with his back to it and screamed again. "You send me, you hear? You send me with Virginia, you hear me, Cap'n?" Donato strolled over toward him and, smiling, said the stupidest thing I ever heard squirted into a violent silence: "Aw, come on, monkey, let's all be chums." Blum screamed again and Donato didn't wait to get turned around. He ran straight backward until he hit me, and I caught him and held him up so he didn't fall. "Captain, sir," Donato said, squinching his head around as he dangled from my hands, "he won't mind me at all. Captain." "Get to your quarters, Blum," said the captain from way back in his throat. "You bring her back or you send me out with her, one," slavered Blum. "You hear me?" "Get -- to -- your -- quarters." Blum put up his claws. He began walking toward the captain, chewing on his own mouth-parts, and his eyes were crazy. The captain bent a little low and put his arms out a little from his sides, and moved very slowly toward Blum. We all got back out of the way. Blum said, "Now! You hear me?" very softly, and leaped. The captain stepped aside and hit him. I thought it was on the head, but England told me later it was on the side of the neck, toward the back. The monkey was in midair when the captain hit him, and he went right down on the deck on his face, and he didn't put out his hands to stop himself, and he didn't move. We all looked at him and then at each other. "Take him to his quarters," said the captain. His voice startled me because it wasn't where I thought it was, standing by the sprawled-out monkey. He was already across the room staring into the peeper. For him, the thing was finished; probably his heart wasn't quick any more. He was back with his work, his job. The rest of us had poundings in the side of our necks and we didn't know what to do. "Go on, go on. Get him out of here. You, Palmer. You're the biggest." I was going to splutter, but I held on tight to it and didn't. I said, "See here, I don't have to -- " before, the captain spoke to me. It was a different thing, being the one he spoke to like that and not watching somebody else get it. He said, "You see here -- you do have to. Whatever I say, you have to, not only you. Palmer, but all four of you clowns. The' party's over and the work's done, and from now on out, you mind me and think first of what I want. At all times. Is that clear, mister?" I said, loud, "Well, I-" and the skipper ripped his eyes away from the sceen, almost like Blum, tearing something, and looked at me. So I picked up the monkey's shoulders and dragged him back to his cabin. It was just like ours, only he didn't have quite so much stuff lying around, or anyway what there was was in square stacks. I tumbled him into the bunk and closed the door, because that was the only clear place to lean back against, and I leaned on it and tried to get my breath back. The monkey started to make a scratchy sound in the rear of his throat. I looked down at him. His head was twisted to one side. It was jammed against the pillow. His eyes were open. "Cut that out, monk." He went right on doing it. "That noise, cut it out, hear me? I said, you hear me, mister?" That "mister" didn't sound a bit like the skipper's. I was embarrassed. The monkey's eyes stayed open and I realized he wasn't blinking them; he wasn't seeing out of them. I couldn't stand that breathing noise, so finally I straightened out his head and put the pillow under it. He stopped the noise right away. He closed his eyes. I still couldn't get my breath. He had blood on his face; maybe that was it. He didn't open his eyes, but he began to talk, very fast, very soft. It was like being too far away from someone to understand what was being said, and then it was like coming closer... "... all she had to do was let herself and she couldn't do it, she couldn't just stop fighting and believe. It was like she'd die if she believed anything. She wanted to. More than anything she wanted to. But it was like someone told her, if you believe in anything, you'll die." He opened his eyes suddenly and saw me and closed them again. "Palmer. You Palmer you, you saw it your own self, the time she cried. All that time, all those weeks, those gray eyes still and hiding whatever it was she had inside her, and me begging her and begging: 'Virginia, oh, Virginia, I don't care what you think of me, I wouldn't want you to love me, Virginia. But only believe me; you can so be loved, you're worth loving, I love you. I do, Virginia; just you believe that once, because it's true, and after that you'll be able to believe other things... little ones at first; I'll help you with them, and always tell you the truth.' "I said, 'Don't love me, Virginia, or think about it at all. I wouldn't know what to do with it if you gave me anything like that.' I said, 'Just trust me is all I want, so you can ask me what's the truth and I'll tell you. But believe I love you; I'm not much, Virginia, so I guess that's not too much to start on. Believe I love you, Virginia, will you just do that?' And she... a long time and I thought he was unconscious again, but then he blinked his eyes and went on. "... she cried, all at once, all over, and she said, 'Monkey, monkey, you're tearing me up, can't you see? I want to believe you. I want to believe you more than anything in the world. But I can't, I don't know how, Fm not supposed to, I'm not allowed.' That's what she said. And she cried again and said, 'But I want to believe you, monkey. You just don't know how much I want to believe that. Only... nothing is what it looks like, nothing is what it's supposed to be, no one really wants, what they say they want. I can't believe them and I can't believe you.' "She said, 'Suppose I believed you and then the day came when things were all straight and true, and they let you see everything; and suppose I found out then that everything you said wasn't so; found out maybe there was no you at all, monkey... what about that? I couldn't stand that. I don't dare believe you, because I want to. If I don't believe anything about anything or anyone, then if things get all true, I can start there and be all right without losing anything.' And she cried some more and then, you. Palmer, you came in, and in a second she was back inside her flat gray eyes. So she didn't believe me and that's why." I couldn't get my breath. Blum couldn't get his breath. I leaned on the door and he lay on the bed and we panted. "There was a difference," he whispered, chasing some thought he was having. "She had a way of making you doubt anything you said. I told her my mother could cook. She said, 'Your mother could cook' in that flat way, and you know, I had to think and wonder if my mother really could. That's what I mean. But I said to her, 'Virginia, you know, I love you,' and she said, 'You love me' in that same way, like who ever heard of such a thing? "But what I'm trying to say, that didn't touch me, when she did that when I said I love you. I looked into how I felt and I felt the same no matter what she said. So about that, there was a difference. That's how it was all right to say, 'Believe me, believe me about that.' I knew that things could change. I knew that almost anything I told her could be wrong, some way. But not that. She could trust me with that. And she wanted to. At least I got that." I leaned aganist the door, feeling embarrassed, and then I could turn it to anger. I said, "You're stupid, monkey, you know? You're crew, she's CG. She couldn't stop you. Why didn't you just go right ahead? That's what she's aboard for." UT that didn't make him " angry. He looked up at the ceiling and said quietly, "Yeah, she said that, too. She said, 'You don't know what you want, monkey,' she said. She said, 'This is what you want. So go ahead, only stop talking about it.' I said no. I said there could be a time -- I hadn't thought about it yet; I wanted something else first -- I wanted her to believe me. She said I was crazy and to keep away from her then, but after, you saw it. Palmer. After, she said she wanted to believe me, more than anything." He was quiet at last, breathing easily, thinking about something to smile at. I spoke to him, but he didn't answer. He was asleep, I guess. I opened the door quietly and closed it on him and went back to the messhall. They were all there by the peeper, watching. I said, "He's asleep now, but there's going to be particular hell to pay when he wakes up and really understands she isn't here." The skipper looked away from the screen at me and then back again. He wouldn't spit on the messhall deck, but he might as well, the way his face looked. He couldn't worry about that monkey. I asked Potter, "What goes?" Potter said, "Whether to get mad or glad, I don't know. You specialist. Palmer -- you're a clown. And England. Donato. Me, too. Virginia, she was the specialist all along. She was the one this whole thing is for. How much farther?" he called out. "A few meters," said Donato, absorbed. I looked at the peeper. The ship's pod, that long false underbelly we'd hauled all the way from the Earth Worlds, it was drifting in close to that golden ball. That ball, I could see now, it was big as a supership if you could roll a supership into a ball. It was big as some moons. There were pale sticks drifting all over, dozens of them. "Dead missiles, you see?" said Potter, watching the screen. "All dead. Every single cold-fusion power plant and explosive in a thousand kilometers is dead. Maybe more. Ours, too." "Ours?" "That hum, that flicker. We're not tapping a cold-fusion plant now. Palmer. We're taking off a steam turbine, water superheated by a parabolic mirror from that sun yonder." "Steam turbine take us home?" "Stupid!" Donato chimed in. It was weird. Everybody talking whispery, as if loud noises would spoil something in the peeper. Nobody looked at anybody to talk, just kept watching the peeper, some of them moving the mouth all to one side to talk to one, to the other side to talk to someone else. Donato said, "Little turbine wouldn't move this can half a length." "It's all right," England said. "What she's doing, she's going in there to leech on to that planetoid. First there's a catalyst that will crumble a pit in the armor, because a bomb'll hardly scratch it. Then, when the skin's thin enough, she's got a bomb there. It goes off and no more Barrier." "He said the Barrier's gone." "Sure. She damped it. She's holding it dead. If she let go, bango, back comes the Barrier and all those missiles come to life." "What's this damped, holding it dead, letting go -- what is all this?" I was getting impatient. HE skipper saw fit to say something. "We call it the Dfield because -- " he was quiet a long time -- "because that way it sounds like something we know about, can know about." He flicked a quick glance at all of us, as if somebody was going to laugh. Nobody was going to laugh. "What it is," said the skipper, hating to say it, "it's doubt. A field of doubt. I mean -- well, doubt, that's all." Nobody said anything. Doubt, all right. But doubt has a way of getting invisible after a captain makes all those loud captain noises like he did. I imagine he knew that. None of it was our business, not any more, but he didn't want to be doubted, not even by us specialists -- us clowns. He said, "What we did, we found Virginia trying to commit suicide. She had this doubt thing on her back, naturally. She didn't want to go on, because she had nothing she could believe in. Or just plain believe. Well, we took her and gave her some treatments... I'm a skipper, I don't know the details... Anyway, she came out of it with what she had when she went in, but more so. Much more. You all felt it -- don't tell me you didn't. She could make a man doubt his own name." I said, "Yeah..." only realizing when I heard it that I'd said it aloud. Captain Steev watched the screen for a while and said under his breath, "That's right... atta girl..." and then to us, "It was a tricky problem. Given that a concentrated disbelief in things could have an effect like this -- just for the sake of argument -- if you want someone to stop a big power plant from a great distance with this faculty, how do you transport that someone in a ship powered with the same type of plant?" "If it was a machine now," said England, "I'd say assemble it only when you wanted to use it." "That's the way they did with the first fission bombs," said Donato knowledgably. "They didn't put it together until it was due to blow. They blew it by putting it together. But doing that with a person, now..." "You have the idea. You can't disbelieve in anything until you know what it is, or at least what people think it is. I can't believe or disbelieve that pyoop is the word for godmother in High Martian. I just don't know. Well, Virginia didn't know one way or another about a cold-fusion plant, though I swear ours gasped a time or two on the way out. She has a large amount of control over it." impatience, "Excuse me. Captain, but the only reason I can stand here talking about this is I see it working." "Let me tell you, then. The cold-fusion plant is a Luanae idea. It's real simple-minded. Anybody can understand it once it's explained to them. Everything was set up when we came out here, including you four. The crackpot experts who knew more than people who've been in this all their lives. But as far as she was concerned, you were experts right up to the time I set you up and knocked you down -- factorial sigma and the square-centimeter magnetic field, hah! "She doubted you were experts when she first saw you, just because she doubted everything. When she saw what I did to you, she felt she was right to doubt. She reached a... sort of peak of disbelief. My God, didn't you feel it?... Look there, she's leeched down. Now the catalyst will be working on the armor. It won't be long now." "I still don't see how just plain disbelief can shut down power plants," I argued. "Not power plants. Just coldfusion plants. Well, let me tell you and you'll understand. I put a shot of sleep-gas in your ventilators and got you all out of the way. Then -- " mernbering. "Then I put her in the pod and told her to ride it, that's all. Except I... armed her... like you arm a bomb, you see? I told her what a cold-fusion plant is. She didn't care one way or the other, mind, but she listened while I explained it to her, all the parts. Then I gave her a paper and told her this is exactly what happens. I told her to read it as soon as the red light on the panel went on, which would be when she was clear of the ship." "Read what?" somebody asked, after it got too quiet. It was a long wait, watching that pod leeched to the planetoid and nothing happening but white sticks drifting, rocks, bits of stuff the planetoid had pulled in and hadn't been able to eat... "Read what?" the captain finally repeated. "The cold-fusion formula, that's all. Written out in words of one cylinder. When Hydrogen One and Hydrogen Two are in the presence of mu mesons, they fuse into Helium Three with an energy yield in electron volts of # times ten to the fifth power. That's what was on the paper. She knew, piece by each, what the parts were -- what mu mesons and Helium Three are and what is meant by that many electron volts. She had all that buried deep in her before we left the Earth Worlds. She'd had no occasion to put them together, that's all. "And here I come saying (on paper), 'This gadget does exactly such and such.' Well, she just out and out doesn't believe it. That would make no never mind to a turbine or a power drill, but when you get into subatomic particles, clouds of them, involved in a catalysis -- untouched in the long run, but I imagine pretty edgy... and you slam them with this thing, whatever it is she has..." Suddenly impatient, he rapped, "Who am I trying to convince? It works, you see?" monk," and went on watching the screen. I don't think anyone else noticed the utility man. I hardly did myself. "Hey," Donato said suddenly, "our generators are out, right? How do we get out of here?" "When the bomb blows -- no more D-field. Simple." England barked, just as suddenly, "And what about all those missiles with the damper gone? They shoot off in every -- " "Dry up, clown," said the skipper. "And keep your panic to yourself. Every one of those missiles is triggered from one place and one place only -- that planetoid. How do you think they were kept inside the Barrier and off the Luanae Earths all this time? Who cares if they get their power and explosives again? There'll be nobody in the driver's seat any more. Now shut up. It ought to blow pretty quick." "Blow how? If it's right in the middle of the -- uh -- damping field-" "I said shut up! That isn't a cold-fusion bomb. It's a hairy old thermonuclear that doesn't give a damn what anybody believes." "What is it? What's going to happen? Whafs out there? Where " "Go on back to bed, monk," I said out of the side of my mouth, watching the screen. I meant it to sound kind -- he'd had a bad time -- but it didn't come out kind. I guess I'll never get used to talking to them. It let go. Oh, my God. Captain Steev was wrong. There was triggering, somewhere, in some part of that split-second of hell. Because all the missiles went, too. They didn't fly; they didn't hunt. The warheads went. It took a long time for our eyes to come back. The peeper screen was gone for good. The turbine moaned down and down the scale and stopped. The lights stopped that annoying sideof-the-eye flicker. "We got to go out and get Virginia," was the first complete sentence anyone said. Somebody laughed. Not a funny laugh. England's voice was harsh. "Don't be stupider'n you have to be, monkey. Don't you see we're back on our cold-fusion plant?" "That makes no difference to him," I told England. "He wasn't around when the skipper explained." "Who wasn't around?" barked the captain. "Damm it, Blum, nobody told you to leave your quarters. You're confined, you understand that? You, Palmer, can't I trust you to -- " "Wait!" The scream was almost more than a man could take. It was almost like that flare of light. f I " HE monkey stood there in the middle of the messhall, going mad again. "Wait, wait, wait! I got to know. You all know. I don't. What happened?" "Come on, Blum," I said quickly. I was afraid of him, but I think I was more afraid of the captain. He had a look on his face I never want to see any more. He brought the face close to Blum and said, "You want to know, well, okay, and I don't see why I should waste time or pity on a goddam monkey. That bomb knocked off the planetoid and the Barrier, which is what we came here for, and it knocked off your Virginia because that's what she was sent out for. Okay?" "What you want to kill her for?" Blum whispered. "You wouldn't happen to know any other way to bring back our power plant, now would you?" snarled the captain. I tried to explain to the utility monkey. "She didn't believe the plant could work, Blum. So it couldn't work." "I could make her believe. I could. I could." We looked at him, the big tilted head, the trembling nostrils. He wasn't going to get crazy mad, after all. He was going into something else. It scared me more than his going crazy mad would. He said, "It was you, wasn't it, fixed it so she wouldn't believe anything?" "She had a head start," said the skipper, and turned his back. "Come on. Potter. Donato. You're crew now, like it or not. Let's get this can the hell home. We got news for the people." "I never thought human beings could be like that," Blum said very quietly. "I never believed they could." "Get to bed, monk," I said. And before I could stop myself, I begged him. "Please. Please, Blum -- get out of his way." He looked up into my face for a long time. Suddenly he said, "All right. Palmer." Then he just left. I felt a lot better. Does you good to know you can handle people. "Bunk in, men. We jump ill five minutes." The captain went forward to check his controls. "Well, don't stand there!" I barked at them. "Bunk in, men!" 'You know what. Palmer, you're a jerk," Donato told me. Then we all bunked down. Four minutes went by. Five. I heard the whir of machinery. The lights went out. The whir was a moan, then a whine. The light came on dim, then bright, and flickering at the edges of the eyes. my business, so I just lay there and waited. Pretty soon the captain came back. He leaned against my cabin door and looked at me. "Something the matter?" I wanted to know, trying to sound intelligent. "Power plant's out, is all." "Oh," I said. "Uh -- what's wrong with it?" He heaved a slow sigh. "Nothing. Only it doesn't work." "I guess I better get up," I said. "Why?" he asked me, and went away. I got up anyway and went and told Donato and Potter and England. They stayed where they were. They didn't like this quiet skipper with the quiet voice and no arguments. "You know, if he can't fix it, we don't go anywhere. The Luanae have no ships and we can't reach any of their planets," England told me. I'd as soon he hadn't. I went to see Blum, for some:hing to do. He had his eyes open without seeing anything and he was mumbling to himself. I tried to hear. "... a little kid, they say you have the same chance as everybody else, you believe them. 'I'll hold your bag,' they say, 'while you get the tickets. Don't worry. I'll be here when you get back,' and you believe them... 'Got a great job for you, son. Light work, big tips -- ' " "Monkey," I said. He looked up at me. "You know what. Palmer? She said if you don't believe anything at all, you lose nothing when it all comes straight at last. It's all come straight for me now, Virginia. I can be safe now, Virginia, not believing. They can't take anything away from you that way. You're so right." He went on talking like that for a long time. I left and walked forward and found the captain. He was in the control room jiggling a handle back and forth and not looking at it. I said, "Captain, that D-field the girl had -- now could a person fall into that by himself -- I mean without those Earth Worlds doctors and all?" "You sure you have to come bother me about it?" he asked in a whisper, not looking at me. I backed way off and said, I think I do. I think the monkey's got a case of the same." "Now that's crazy! He'd have to have a real shock to get into a state like that. The monkey's okay. Beat it." "He's mumbling how he doesn't believe in anything." So the captain went aft with me. He watched the utility monkey for a time and then said, "Well, wel fix it so he doesn't believe one way or another," and hit the man in the bed on the jaw so he slid up and banged his head on the inboard bulkhead. I could hear the monkey breathing and I could hear the steam turbine, on and on. I said, "I guess being unconscious doesn't make any difference to what you believe." "You should know," said the captain. "All right. Palmer, pick him up and bring him along." "Where?" "Shut up." better go along with him. I heaved and grunted the monkey up over my shoulder. I almost fell down with him. The captain was waiting in the corridor. He started to walk when I came out, so I followed him. We went down to pod level and forward to the airlock. Captain Steev began to undog the inner lock. "What you going to do?" I asked him. "Shut up," said the captain. "You fixing to kill this monkey?" "You want to get home?" "I don't know," I said, and thought about it. The captain flung back the inner door and stood up. He said, "What's your trouble. Palmer?" I said, "I don't think I'm going to let you do this. Captain. There's some other way. You don't have to kill a little utility man." "Put him in. Palmer." I stood there with the limp monkey on my shoulder and glared at the captain while he glared back. I don't know how that might have ended -- I do, only I'm ashamed to say it -- but there was a noise and a voice, and somebody stood up out of the lock. "Well, it's about time," Virginia complained. "You had the inner lock dogged and I've been lying in there for an hour. I guess I went to sleep. Who's that? What's the matter with Nils?" The captain looked like a man with a cup of flour in the face. "Who told you to leave the pod?" "The Luanae," she said calmly. "Inside my head, like. It was funny. Told me how to get into the flight-suit and how to get the gas bottles and strap them all together and use them to jet clear of the pod and that big gold thing. I got a long way away and then they told me to get back of a big piece of rock floating there. There was a lot of light. They told me when to go again, after the pieces stopped flying by. It was easier then. There's a jet unit built right into the suit, did you know that? The Luanae told me how I was supposed to use it." I got my jaw working and said, "What made you think you could make it go?" "Well, it's the same kind of unit that brought us here, isn't it? You can't help believing your own eyes." A T last the captain moved. Before he could say a word, I slung the monkey down to the deck and pushed him. I bet the captain has been hit in his life, and maybe kicked, but I don't believe anyone just up and pushed him in the chest. He sat right down like a child with his legs spraddled out, looking up at me. "Now you just stay there and shut up yourself," I told him. "You're always doing everything with these people the wrong way." Virginia was kneeling beside the monkey. "What is it? What happened to him?" I said, "He got a bump, that's all. Listen, if you don't mind me asking, do you believe he loves you?" "Oh, yes!" she said immediately"Then I tell you what. You stay right here with him and rock him back and forth a little till his eyes open, hear? Then tell him that -- tell him you believe him. That's all." The captain scrambled to his feet and opened his mouth to bellow. I bellowed first. I don't know where it came from, but I believed I could do it, and it was a time to believe things. "You! You get up forward and check your controls. This can's going to take off like a scalded eel if you've left the controls open, and I don't want these folks shaken up. Go on, quick! You're the only one here who knows how to do that. I'm the only one who knows how to do this other. Right? Right!" I said and pushed him. He growled at me, but he went right up the ladder. I hunkered down beside those two people and looked them over. I felt fine, very fine. I said, "Virginia, you know what this is? This is the day everything all comes out straight. Right? Right." "You're a funny sort of man, Mr. Palmer." "A clown, ma'am." I made a face at her and went up the ladder. About the time I reached the top, the ship began to move. I fell right back down again, but they didn't think it was funny. They didn't even seem to see me. I climbed back up quietly and went back to my cabin. ( Continued from page # ) are fairly indicative of the growing ability of the ears tested... Hybridization produced more of a revolution than I had suspected -- "approximately # different varieties of corn have been developed!" Seedsmen have a natural deal. Their customers have to keep coming back because the crossbreedings that produce hybrids must be repeated every year. But the product pays off very heaviplanted with hybrid seed yielded they had with open-pollinated seed. The increase must be even higher now, with better hybrid varieties. Incredibly, the rocky soil of New England yields far more corn per acre than the Corn Belt's rich loam. Corn has a good many insect and fungus enemies; picture this vivid communique from the silent battlefield: "Poison bran baits are widely and successfully used for the control of grasshoppers, armyworms and certain species of cutworms. Injury by the chinch bug can be much reduced by dust-mulch or furrow barriers of various kinds to prevent migration of the bugs on foot from adjacent ripening or dying small grains. The best type of barrier includes the use of a thin line of coal-tar creosote applied on a low ridge to repel the bugs and direct them into postholes dug every # or # feet along the line." Here's a dandy game to be played on long, tiresome car rides: "To measure silage in a circular silo... square the diameter of the silo, multiply by .# and the depth of the silage... if this is divided by #, the number of pounds per cubic foot, one may determine the number of tons of silage." It is impossible to discuss corn without bringing in Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture. He was the first independent breeder of hybrid seed corn and is among the biggest seedsmen. He also originated the first corn husking contest, in #. Corn is Wallace and Wallace is corn. Not a word in the Encyclopedia, though, about whether corn always grows odd numbers of rows. A phone call to a seed company, which I should have made in the first place, gave the answer. Seed corn is rated in even rows, from # to #. I can't imagine a cob with # rows; it must be as thick as a wrestler's neck. I wonder if the anti-science fiction magazine also got clobbered by readers. Probably, but you don't see them retracting. Doat Age Maybe it wasn't Gil's fault -- but why did he have to go make an irresistible object? little work, lots to eat and drink -- that's what I like in life, and I had them all at Hornwell. Yes, it's a pity about the job, but I'm not blaming anyone but myself. They've all begged me to stay, but I couldn't see any future in it. My name is Broadbrace -- Docwhen I was offered the job of senior medical man at Hornwell Research Foundation, to look after the health and well-being of the # men and women scientists who worked there, I took it. There was only one reason I didn't jump at the chance -- I'm not built for jumping. It didn't take long to settle into a schedule. I had six assistants, who did the routine work, while I kept an eye on things in general. The work of the Foundation went on with maximum speed and efficiency, and I was happy. I made two friends. One was the chief of the Foundation, Gilbert Smith; and the other was Harry Summerton, who was in charge of one of the projects. The three of us used to spend a lot of evenings together. We were all bachelors, so we had plenty of time to do as we pleased, and, as there was a large surplus of unmarried women at the Foundation, we three men kept together in a sort of mutual protection society. Harry was a good bit older than either Gil or me and he was inclined to be a bit forceful in his views. He had views, Harry did, on everything, whether he knew anything about the subject or not. But Gilbert was quite different. Six foot eight, thin, with a narrow face and thick glasses, Gilbert is a scientific wizard -- there's no other word for him. The only trouble is that he's got a terribly sensitive nature to the sufferings of living creatures, so much so that he's been known to free a trapped fly from a spider's web, and then spend a sleepless night wondering whether the spider had died of starvation as a result of his interference. The least little, thing can upset Gil, and when he's upset, the work of the Foundation suffers. Gil had been an orphan from babyhood; he'd been brought up by two maiden aunts, of whom he was very fond. The old girls had sold their communal home after he'd gone -- apparently there'd been a row over pets. Aunt Maggie owned a dog; Aunt Clara owned a cat; the two animals had fought, and that was that. The two old ladies had each bought a cottage, miles apart, and Gilbert used to spend one free day every month with Aunt Maggie, and another free day with Aunt Clara.  I 'HE phone in my bedroom rang and woke me up one night. It was Gil. He was in a dreadful state. He'd just come back from seeing his Aunt Clara. The old lady's cat had just died and she was grieving deeply about it and this upset Gil. I had a difficult time getting him over the shock, but a fortnight later he went to pieces. He'd just called to see his Aunt Maggie at the very moment that her precious dog had died. Well, I had an awful time with him. He couldn't sleep at night, worrying about his aunts; and his work, and the work of the Foundation, began to slide badly. I tried reasoning with him, but it only made him more depressed. # . "Good heavens, Gil!" I said. "Try to keep a sense of proportion. Cats and dogs can't live forever. If people want pets that'll outlive 'em, then I suggest they should go in for elephants or parrots or donkeys." Harry worked on him as well, but it made no difference. "You can't replace cats or dogs," Gil mumbled dispiritedly. "They're special." It was then that I made my mistake. "All right, then," I said. "Why don't you invent something to do just that? Something that'll take the place of cats and dogs -- something that could live for years and years." Gil's face smoothed immediately, and for the first time in days, he began to look cheerful. "By the atoms. Doc, that's not a bad idea! Not a bad idea at all!" A smile lit his narrow face. "Sure, why not? Build a -- a special kind of pet." Harry was shocked. "Now look here, Gil. You can't do that. It wouldn't be right. Machines, yes. The more of those we can invent, the better. But to make a pet, a living pet -- why, it's against policy, not to mention nature. And I'm surprised at you. Doc, for even mentioning it." This, coming from Harry, was particularly good. His job at Hornwell is to design machines that are capable of independent thought; able to reproduce themselves, locating and mining their own raw materials, refining and machining, and replacing any part that gets worn out. But Gil paid little heed to Harry. He was full of enthusiasm, bubbling over like a retort or whatever they use nowadays. ' was back on full production. Gil was at work again and everyone was happy. During the next few months, I. didn't see much of either Gil or Harry. In a way, I missed the times the three of us used to spend together, but it meant I could spend the evenings in my bungalow without being disturbed, so there were compensations. Then, one evening, Gil called me on the phone and asked me to come across to his bungalow. When I got there, he was waiting outside on the porch, and he almost dragged me inside. "There!" he said triumphantly. "What do you think of that!" That was a ball of fur, about fifteen inches in diameter, resting on the middle of the carpet. "What's it supposed to be?" I asked cautiously. You meet up with all sorts of queer things at Hornwell. "It's a doat." "A what?" "A doat. D-O-A-T. 'Do' for dog,' 'at' for 'caf -- it combines their best qualities." "Well, I'm glad you told me," I said. "I'd never have guessed." In appearance, it was just how a medicine ball would look if you covered it with fur -- thick, shiny, dark brown fur, about two inches long. "Very interesting, Gil," I said. "But what's a doat for?" "It's a pet -- a remarkably hardy pet that will live as long as a human being. Longer, in fact." I looked at the thing doubtfully. I couldn't see it taking the place of a real pet and I said so. "That's because you haven't seen anything yet," he responded, and proceeded to give a demonstration. "Here, Rover," he called, snapping his fingers. "Heel, boy!" The doat changed shape, elongating itself, then moved toward him, its fur acting the way a tank-track does, so that it moved smoothly. When it got to within a few inches of his feet, it stopped, changed back into a sphere and barked. It worked on a system of photo-electric cells, Gil explained, plus sensitivity to smells and sounds, and was triggered off by the vibrations in his voice. It listened to what he said; then an internal computer sorted out the appropriate sounds and interpreted them into action. A doat was strictly a one-man object. All necessary data had, of course, been pre-fed into it by means of electrical impulses. The doat was a clever toy, but nothing more. "No, Gil," I said. "That thing will never become popular -- not as a pet." The doat made a slight movement in my direction and growled. Gil laughed. "He can smell you don't like him." But I wasn't to be put off. "They'd get too dirty, for one thing. All that fur, and rolling in mud and stuff -- " Of course, I should have known better than to think Gil would slip up on an elementary point like that. There was an electronic-magnetic dirt and moisturerepulsion unit built in. No matter what sort of dirt and water the doat rolled in, it always came out immaculately clean and dry. "Feel it," Gil said. "Isn't it nice to the touch?" hand cautiously on the dark brown fur, then stroked it softly. Gil was right. It was pleasant to touch, warm, and soft as satin. The doat began to purr. It was a delicious sensation. "All right," I said at last. "So I'm wrong. Maybe you have got something." "You bet I have. My aunts will love 'em! I've only made this one so far, but when I make another... He snapped his fingers again. "Come on, Rover. Let's go show you to your Uncle Harry." Harry was still at work in B Block Laboratory and he didn't take kindly to having his work interrupted, but he couldn't say much; after all, Gil is the chief. The doat's tricks made no impression on him. Just as Gil had finished putting the doat through his tricks, a mouse scuttled across the floor of the laboratory. Before you could blink, the doat spun after the mouse at a' hell of a speed, catching up with the tiny creature and rolling on top of it. When we got up to the doat, there was no trace of the mouse. "He's assimilated it," Gil explained. Apparently the doat rolled on top of its food and absorbed it -- a much better system than the ordinary digestive arrangements, according to Gil. That was the only time Harry showed any enthusiasm, for we have a lot of trouble with mice at Hornwell. Naturally, it didn't take long for news of the new type of pet to spread, and Gil gave the first doat the run of the Foundation until he could make two more for his aunts. He'd become rather fond of the first one and had decided to keep it for himself. And what a fuss women made of it! You'd have thought it was a baby, the way they gurgled over it. It was at this time that we had the robbery. Harry had all his plans and filed reports stolen from B Block Laboratory. The security police brought in Scotland Yard and everyone's life was made a misery by the ceaseless questioning that went on. It was all a waste, because the plans were never discovered. The thief or spy -- or whatever he was -- must have walked in in broad daylight, lifted the papers and walked out of the place again, because they'd been on Harry's desk one minute, and the next they'd disappeared. Chief Detective Inspector Railton of Scotland Yard was in charge of the investigations. He questioned me a dozen times and he was quite offhand, too, when I complained that I was used to having a little respect shown to me. I knew at once that he'd not solve the mystery, for he seemed to spend five minutes asking questions, and then to spend an hour playing with the doat. A T last he admitted failure, but before he left Hornwell, he had a last interview with Gil, and he persuaded Gil to make some more doats. "With those doats, sir, patrolling the place," the detective said, "why, there wouldn't be even a mouse as could get past 'em! Have the place guarded by watchdoats and you'd be secure as the Bank of England!" After giving the matter a bit of thought, Gil agreed. There was an extra fence built round the Foundation and six doats were set to patrol the lane between the fences. Everyone slept soundly again, except for one time when there was a doat fight. From the noise, you'd have thought the end of the world was happening, but when we got there, instead of finding either of them torn to pieces, there wasn't even so much as a torn-out hair to be seen. The two contrived creatures had been dragged apart and were standing growling at each other. The fight upset Gil. "I don't get it. Doc," he said to me. "I just don't get it." We were still standing in the open in our pajamas and bathrobes. Everyone else had gone to bed and the guards and the doats had resumed their interrupted patrol. "I built the doats so they'd respond only to certain impulses," Gil went on. "They've got sufficient information tape-fed into them to do as they are told and to react under certain conditions. But I can't for the life of me see how it's possible for them to react in any way against each other." "Probably a trick of the light," I said, anxious to get back to bed. "One of them mistook the other for an intruder or something." There must have been an official report filed on the doat fight, because we had the Scotland Yard man down again, checking whether any attempt had been made to effect entrance into the place. There hadn't, of course, but the detective had a bright idea. Was it possible for a doat to corner a man? One of the younger men, being a good runner, volunteered for the experiment. The detective briefed him and the young man set off. He ran about all over the place, pretending to peer into buildings, opening doors and windows, and then concealing himself. At that point, Gil, acting on the detective's instructions, set his doat, Rover, on the young man's trail. For a few seconds, the doat rolled in circles; then it was off. It followed the trail of the "criminal" without a mistake and at last flushed the youngster from the shed where he'd been hiding. The young man made a run for it, but the doat rolled after him and kept cutting diagonally between his feet, eventually tripping him and bringing him to the ground. Then the doat stood guard a few feet away, growling. It was a magnificent demonstration. I estimated that the doat moved at a speed of seventy to eighty miles an hour on the straightaway and had incredibly fast braking action.  I HE detective went back to Gil's bungalow and watched the elongated scientist feed his pet. Feeding a doat was simple. You placed a butcher's bag of meat and fish scraps on a plate, not even bothering to empty the bag, with a saucer of milk beside it. The doat then rolled onto the bag of food, settling over it rather like a broody hen sitting down on a clutch of eggs, and when it rolled off the plate, there was no sign of fish, meat or paper bag. The milk disappeared in the same manner. After Rover had been fed, it began to purr. The detective was most impressed. "You know, sir," he said to Gil, "if we could supply our men in the force with a doat apiece -- why, I believe we'd cut crime by fifty per cent." Gil promised to think about it and, for a few days, we had peace. Everything in the Foundation was running beautifully. Rover was still more of a pet than before the demonstration and even Harry got to like him, although he'd often chased the doat out of B Block Laboratory, where it used to go to be patted and fussed over by some of the young women who worked in there. Ever since the first day when Gil had taken him there. Rover seemed to have a fondness for B Block. But then he started mixing with the watchdoats and he spent a lot of time in their company, even to the extent of going on patrol once or twice. But the change didn't seem to suit Rover. Every day its coat became duller, its movements slower, until it could hardly roll across the floor and onto a plate of food. Not that its appetite was impaired. Actually, it was eating even more than before, but in a listless kind of way. Gil was becoming increasingly unhappy about it, but I tried to tell him that it was merely a passing phase. "You'll see," I said. "In a week, Rover will be back to normal." But Rover wasn't. Instead, two of the watchdoats came down with the same ailment. Gil was starting to lose sleep again, and so I said to him: "Good heavens, man! It's bad enough when you lose sleep over the sufferings of human beings, but over doats -- well!" Finally I had to be firm with him. "Take a day off," I ordered, "and go take a trip to visit one of your aunts." He did, but when he didn't return, to say that there was a panic is to put it mildly. Security checked on his movements and the first jolt we got was when they reported that the cottage, where he had gone to see his aunt, was empty and for sale. And then they checked up on the other aunt and found that she'd gone, too. We were just getting to the point of calling in the police and military intelligence agents when Gil's small sports car hove in sight and steamed to a stop at the main gate. first one to get to him. "Gil! You shouldn't do this to me, man! Where have you been? Are you all right?" He climbed out of the car, unfolding himself section by section. Then he caught sight of the crowd of people all staring at him from behind the fences. "Is something wrong?" he asked. "We all thought you'd been kidnapped," I scolded him. Well, it all turned out to have been a stupid mistake. His aunts had made up their quarrel when he'd presented them with the two doats, and they'd bought a larger house and gone to live in it together. Gil had simply forgotten to notify us of the change of address. "That's a fine thing," I said. "Keeping me out of my bed all night, worrying myself to a shadow, and all because you forgot to give us the change of address." But he wasn't concerned with my feelings. He'd been out all night because one of the doats -- the one he'd given to Aunt Clara -- was going off-color. "The poor thing looks quite sick. Doc," he said to me. "And my old aunts -- you can imagine how they feel, especially after I'd told them that the doats would outlive them." I couldn't get Gil to forget the doats, so I asked Harry to speak to the chief. A fat lot of use Harry was. He made Gil worse. "Suppose you've synthesized some new disease along with these creatures," Harry said accusingly, "a disease that can be transmitted from these -- these mechanical contrivances to real animals!" "For goodness sake, Harry!" I protested. "Why bring that up?" "It's none of your business!" he snapped. None of my business! That'll give you some idea of how our former tranquil friendship had degenerated. With Gil sleepless from worrying about the doats, and especially about Rover, the work of the Foundation was practically at a stop. Almost every hour, there'd be a row between some of the staff and I was having to work overtime, trying to put things right. I knew that when the month's progress report was sent to London, I would be the one blamed for the bad work being done. I would be blamed either for not asking for more help, or for not stopping the manufacture of the doats, or for something. Whatever happened, I'd be the one to get called on the carpet. So I finally went to see Gil with an ultimatum. "These doats," I said. "Ever since you built the first one, there's been nothing but trouble. So I'm going to give orders for them to be destroyed." We had a first-class row, but at last I got him around to my way of thinking and he agreed. The watchdoats would be destroyed and he'd see to Rover himself. I came away from his office satisfied and issued instructions for the watchdoats to be caught and put to sleep. Three of them were already in a cage, sick, but the others were still rolling about loose. up the idea of catching the loose doats. The first time, they came when they were called. We penned them up, but within a ss few minutes, they seemed to sense what was in store for them and they broke out -- very damned literally. They retreated to one side of the pen, then launched themselves across it at full speed, hitting the opposite wall with just about the impact of a cannonball. As they rolled swiftly away from their temporary captivity, an incident occurred which made me begin to wonder if perhaps our task was not going to be rather more difficult than I had at first thought. One of the doats rolled straight under the tracks of a bulldozer that was being used to clear the ground for laboratory extensions. When the bulldozer tracks rolled clear of the doat, the ball of fur was squashed flat and patterned like a waffle. But within seconds, it was circular again and rolling happily away, without so much as a curl in its fur, and barking at us as if in derision. I gave an order to the guard standing beside me. "I don't like to do it, sir, and that's a fact, but I don't suppose there's any other way." He unslung his tommy-gun and raised it. "A pity -- I liked the creatures," he added regretfully. And, with that, he took aim and triggered off a burst of fire at a doat that was frisking around some thirty yards away. The bullets whipped straight through the thing, knocking it back ten or twelve feet. Then, yipping madly, it ran away, hit time and again by more bullets. When the guard had expended two magazines on the one doat, he gave up. Whatever way you could destroy a doat, it wasn't by bullets. Gil gave me the answer. In the formula he'd compounded for the doats, he had included a selfsealing mixture, rather like the stuff they use in fuel tanks in military aircraft. Any holes punched in a doat were automatically closed. Naturally, I wasn't going to be beaten by a small item like that. I got the driver gf the bulldozer to dig a big pit and then we put plates of doat food at the bottom of the pit. The idea was that when the doats got hungry, they would go to the food, and when they were all in the pit, we'd flood it. It was a magnificent scheme. There was only one thing that defeated the plan -- doats are unsinkable. I went back to my bungalow to think things over. There was more than a threat of mutiny among the women; they were holding indignation meetings. I knew I had to work fast, before they went to see the chief and in one way or another got him to overrule me. cigarettes when I got a summons to go to see Gil. He was a new man, beaming with joy. "Doc," he said, taking me into the small yard at the rear of his bungalow, "I want you to tell me what you think of this." He led me to the pen where Rover was being kept. Rover, bright-furred, was rolling round the pen at a tremendous rate, and in the middle of the pen were three other smaller doats, each of them about four inches in diameter. "Well, I'll be damned!" I said. Then I glared at him accusingly. "Gil! You never told me that you'd built in that sort of mechanism!" "Doc, I swear that it's as much a mystery to me as it is to you." We argued back and forth for a long time before we found the probable solution -- Harry's experiment in B Block! Rover was always in there, and Harry had lost his notes and plans for a machine that could think independently and that could reproduce itself. Suppose Rover had rolled in there, sat on the plans and reports, and absorbed them! That must have been the "robbery." Gil and I had to laugh. There was I, trying every means I could think of to destroy the doats, when all that was wrong with them was that more were on the way! When the news got out, scores of females came to slobber over the kittups, as Gil had christened them, and within two days the watchdoats had produced more. Then Gil's aunties had an increase in their doat family and all was well. That was the start of a long period of ease and comfort for me. The Foundation work went along without a shadow of trouble, for everyone there was. under the spell of the doats, and even I felt grateful to the creatures. As time went by, there were more and more doats around the place -- smooth-haired doats, wirehaired doats, tabby, black and white, ginger doats -- all sorts. ripple on the surface of our contentment and that was when a group of officials came to put a value upon our doats. The government had decided to issue doat licenses. It was finally agreed that doats up to the age of six months would be free from registration. After that, their owners would have to pay a yearly tax per doat, such monies to be paid on each first day of January. And that, of course, was the government's big mistake. If it hadn't been for the tax, I'd go on working at Hornwell. But I'm not fool enough to stay. I've handed in my resignation and I sail next month to take up a post at a research establishment that is being built in New Zealand. Why? Because Britain's finished. When January first came around, thousands of people turned doats out of their homes, in order to avoid paying doat tax. There were no Lost Doat Homes, so the creatures rolled over the countryside, multiplying rapidly by fission or budding or something of the sort. Food's what does it -- and they eat almost anything. Now I'm no mathematician, but I can multiply two by two, four by four, sixteen by sixteen, and so on. Doats are indestructible. Therefore, how long will it be before Britain is completely carpeted with a layer of the creatures? According to my calculations, this will happen in a surprisingly short space of time. That's why I'm getting out -- going to a country thirteen thousand miles away, where I shall be able to spend the rest of my life in peace and not be drowned in a sea of doats. Yes, New Zealand is the place for me -- halfway around the world. Only one thing bothers me: How far can a doat float? for your information H ere once again is a column based entirely on questions and suggestions from the readers. I'll begin with an addendum to the piece on the golem and early robots in the April issue. It drew a fairly large amount of mail and several readers pointed out that I had not mentioned the "brazen man" Talos who protected the island kingdom of Crete. The first one to do so was L. Sprague de Camp; it happened that we had a dinner meeting only a day or two after this particular issue had appeared on the newsstands and he asked me how many years had gone by since I read Apollodorus. (Too many.) I have reread Apollodorus since, trying unsuccessfully all the while to remember just when I did read him for the first time. The book in question bears the simple title Bibliotheke ("The Library") and is a straightforward and clear accounting of ancient Greek mythology, written, in all probability, during the first or second century a.d. The author of the "Library" is now thought to have been a contemporary of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Faint -- very faint -- internal evidence in the book seems to indicate that he was an Athenian or at least knew Athens. His name may even have been Apollodorus, but, modern experts on Greek literature point out, he was not the same as Apollodorus the Grammarian of Athens, who flourished around # b.C. Be that as it may, the book is useful. As for the "early robot" Talos, Apollodorus the Mythographer has the following to say, in the translation by Sir James George Frazer; Putting to sea... they were hindered from touching at Crete by Talos. Some say that he was a man of the Brazen Race, others that he was given to Minos by Hephaestus; he was a brazen man, but some say that he was a bull. He had a single vein extending from his neck to his ankles, and a bronze nail was rammed home at the end of the vein. This Talos kept guard, running round the island thrice every day; wherefore, when he saw the Argo standing inshore, he pelted it as usual with stones. His death was brought about by the wiles of Medea, whether, as some say, she drove him mad by drugs, or, as others say, she promised to make him immortal and then drew out the nail, so that all the ichor gushed out and he died. Talos had slipped my mind, but I wonder whether he should be regarded as the earliest robot. The family resemblance points more in the direction of a selfnavigating missile. I'll even refrain from invoking Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics, but I do feel that a robot is characterized by the fact that it takes and obeys orders. Talos, then, turns out to be very much of a borderline case. Another letter reminded me of the brazen giant in the City of Dis, the Lower Hell of Dante's Inferno, one of the cantos devoted to the Seventh Circle of Hell, an ancient giant made of several metals appears. Dante did make a reference to Crete, hinting at Tales, but the detail is taken from the Bible, namely Daniel ii, #-#. You may remember that Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, made the somewhat excessive demand on his "magicians, astrologers and sorcerers" that they should not only explain a dream to him, but tell him the dream itself which the king had forgotten. But Daniel told him that he, the king, had seen a great image in his dream: This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. I think I am justified in saying that this image does not apply to our story, whether in the Biblical or in Dante's version. The next case, also mentioned by several readers, is much more charming. One of my readers wrote : I think you have overlooked what may have been the first robot to appear on the stage -- Olympia, the mechanical doll, in Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which had its premiere in #. She is, of course, an imperfect robot, since she can speak only one word ("oui") and has to be wound up twice during the first act. But she was convincing enough to make Hoffmann propose marriage to her, and the role has been sung by all the great coloraturas of the past three-quarters of a century. More recently, she was portrayed in the movie version by Moira Shearer. Correct. I saw the movie and I know the opera. Nor did I forget Olympia when I wrote my column. With regret, I rejected her as a mere mechanical doll. iNE reader who lives in Chicago wrote to ask me whether it is zoologically possible for a shark to occur in a river, not merely alive, but hungry and in fighting condition. Seems he had come across a scene involving a fighting shark in a river in a novel and was poised to attack the novelist in turn. But he wanted ammunition, specifically the statement that I said so. I told him to keep his typewriter covered, for sharks do occur in rivers. To compensate him for the frustration of having to keep quiet, I told him another "freshwater story" which should have amused him because he lives in Chicago. I got this story first-hand from the late Fletcher Pratt, who, a few years before his death, did some reading of European books for a New York publisher for the purpose of finding out whether they were worth translating for the American market. Well, some of the books he read were French mystery stories and one of them had Chicago for its locale and dealt -- naturellement -- with gangsters. One of them somehow got himself into the bad graces of some others and they decided to do away with him. But simply shooting him was too good for the guy. He had to die slowly and painfully. According to Fletcher, the story was rather well researched. The French author evidently had a map of Chicago on his desk, and when he used English words and phrases, he used them correctly. Still -- the gangster who was condemned to die was towed out into freshwater Lake Michigan for some thirty miles with a motor launch and then abandoned in a rowboat, with food for just one day, without oars and without water! But to return to the fighting shark in a river. To begin with, a large number of different types of fishes spend part of their lives in fresh water and another part in sea water. Some, like the eels, normally live in fresh water, but go to the ocean to breed. Others reverse this process and live normally in sea water, returning to the rivers for breeding. Among those who apparently do not care whether the water in which they swim is salty or not are some sharks, a few rays and sawfishes. In fact, one shark is actually known as the Ganges shark (Carcharias gangeticus) and has attacked many people while they were ritually bathing in the holy river. Stories of attacks by sharks, generally speaking, are traditional enough to be a specific type of story, which means that they are exaggerated more or less for the purpose of conforming to precedent. But the Ganges shark is greatly feared and there must be some reason for it. Nor is it restricted to the Ganges River; it seems to go almost anywhere in and around the Indian Ocean. the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales which is entirely devoted to sharks and rays in Australian waters. According to this book by G. P. Whitley, the Ganges shark has been reported in Australian rivers, but Dr. Whitley still makes a cautious question mark because no specimens have been taken. He points out that some other sharks in Australian waters look sufficiently like C. gangeticus from a distance to deceive an observer. But it is certain that the Ganges shark occurs in all rivers and freshwater lakes of the Philippines, provided only that these can be reached from the ocean without a dam or a waterfall getting in the way. Usually the Ganges shark is joined in these freshwater excursions by another typical saltwater fish, namely the sawfish (Prist is microdon ). As far as I know, this sawfish has never been reported to swim up the Ganges River, but it goes happily into the rivers and lakes of the Philippines. Albert W. C. T. Herre of the School of Fisheries of the University of Washington in Seattle reported the amusing fact that some Filipino forest-dwelling groups, the Mandayas and Monobos of Mindanao, think that the Ganges shark and the sawfish are the males and females of the same species. The sawfish, probably because of their special "decoration," are thought to be the males, and the sharks the females. Possibly the Filipinos saw the two fish swim around each other full of mutual suspicion and took this to be the preliminaries for a mating. In reality, both the shark and the sawfish seem to return to the sea to mate. This sawfish has also been observed in the Amazon River and its tributaries, in the large rivers of Borneo and Sumatra, and even in Africa in the Zambesi River -- below the great falls, of course. The sawfish was recently found in Lake Sentani in Netherlands New Guinea. The lake is located in the extreme northeastern part of the Dutch (western) portion of the island. The shortest distance between lake shore and ocean shore is between # and # miles (maps of this area aren't too reliable yet) and the lake level is # feet above sea level. Geologists think that the lake once was an open bay which became separated and elevated by tectonic forces, possibly less than a thousand years ago. But this is long enough to have converted it into a freshwater lake by now. B oth sharks and sawfish live in Lake Sentani. The Dutch recently took two specimens of sawfish from it, measuring #Va and #I feet in length, and succeeded in getting them intact (though dead) to Holland, where they have been mounted in the Rijkstnuseum van Natuurlijke Historie at Leiden. The scientific attitude is best illustrated by the remark of the curator, M. Boeseman, of the Rijksmuseum, that the transportation of these bulky specimens by the Royal Dutch Navy is "much more remarkable than the occurrence of these specimens in fresh water." Naturally, the question came up whether the sawfishes are the descendants of fishes which were trapped when the lake was separated from the sea, and which started breeding in fresh water, or whether there is a connection between the lake and the sea passable to marine fishes with the ability to live and thrive in both fresh and salt water. Local and, as Boeseman says, "rather unreliable" information says that there is a long, winding river which is impassable in its upper reaches. "However," Boeseman continued, "although conditions may prevent the intrusion of specimens of the size we collected, it seems likely that small examples can make the journey, at least under favorable circumstances -- for example in the rainy season." A first report said that sharks also lived in the lake, but Curator Boeseman does not agree: Sharks were not collected in, or reported from, Lake Sentani, and they probably do not exist there. The only freshwater sharks we obtained during an expedition from October # to May # were found in Lake Janoer, a rather large and almost circular lake (diameter approximately # miles) situated on the narrow neck of the Vogelkop Peninsula, lat. # east. The altitude is about # feet. The physical characteristics of the effluent river Omba are insufficiently known, which makes it at present impossible to establish with certainty whether the species is landlocked. The collected examples measure up to # feet and, according to a superficial examination, are closely related to the landlocked shark from Lake Nicaragua and to the Ganges shark. It would be very nice if I could now climax this story with a shark in Lake Michigan or the Chicago River. Maybe, after the St. Lawrence seaway has been completed, a shark will show up in Lake Michigan to make things more intriguing along the Chicago lakefront. But right now the only example of such an occurrence close to home happened much nearer to the Atlantic Ocean. The date was August #th, #. Two boys, brothers aged # and # years at that time, were fishing in the Appomattox River from a bridge. They caught a fish which fought back energetically enough so that the boys had to club it to death. It was then measured and found to be # inches long. Then the boys wondered what it was. Well, it turned out to be a female dogfish, Squalus acanthias, which properly belongs in the Atlantic Ocean off the New England coast. This was the first and, so far, only report of an appearance of this fish in fresh water, just north of Farmville, Virginia (Prince Edward County), # airline miles from the ocean. TF the questions seem to run predominantly along zoological channels this time, this is due to a kind of accidental selection. Actually there were quite a number of questions about rockets and missiles in the mail, but these were all taken care of in the article on Our Missile Arsenal. The robots and the zoological items were left over. The next zoological question, coming from New York City, is a simple one. Somebody's wife had bought a beautiful colored print of the Great Bird of Paradise, maybe for framing, maybe for decorating a lampshade. Before the lady did anything with it, her husband looked at it and found, beneath the English name, the scientific name of the bird. It said Paradisea apoda and that caused the question. Doesn't apoda mean "footless"? If so, how come, since the picture itself showed that the Great Bird of Paradise has powerful and large feet? I knew the answer, but just for fun I got Richard Lydekker's Library of Natural History off the shelf to see what this standard work had to say about the case. What it did have to say made me shake my head: "The great bird of paradise (Paradisea apoda ), which was the first known representative of the entire family, derives its specific name from having been described by Linnaeus from a skin prepared in the Papuan fashion, with the wings and feet cut off." Not so. Professor Lydekker. Carolus Linnaeus knew better, even though it is quite possible that the specimen he had, if he had a specimen, was footless. Linnaeus gave the specific name apoda not because he did not know any better, but in order to commemorate the story of the "footless" bird of paradise. As a matter of fact, the very first description of the bird by Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's companion and chronicler, mentions the feet of the bird and their color, which is surprisingly drab and "normal" when compared to the plumage. Pigafetta got back to Europe in the fall of # and began writing his report for King Charles V soon afterward. In the meantime, stories of the footless bird had filtered to Europe on the overland route, probably going through several translations. The name of the odd bird, for example, arrived in Europe as Manucodia; the Malay name is Manukdewata. The specimens which an artist saw and drew somewhere were without feet, but not without their wings.  were often removed. The suspicion is that merchants thought it would increase the value. But this is only a suspicion. Moreover, the bird Manucodia was really two birds: the description mixed the Great Bird of Paradise and the Royal Bird of Paradise. All this had to fuse into a coherent story somewhere and the place where it fused was the great Natural History of Konrad Gesner of Zurich. It was volume three of Gesner's work, the liber tertius qui est de Avium natura, which acquainted Europeans with the marvel of the East. The book was published for the first time in # in Zurich, Switzerland. This is what Gesner told: In insulae Moluchis the Moluccas which are situated under the Aequinoctio equator a dead bird can be found on the ground or in the water which they call Manucodiatam in their language that cannot be seen alive because it lacks legs and feet, even though Aristotle denies that a bird without legs and feet could be found. This one, which I have now seen thrice probably meaning three different specimens, does not have any feet because it constantly sails high in the air. The body and bill resemble, both in size and in shape, that of the swallow, but the tail and the wings. when outstretched, are larger than those of a hawk and approach those of the eagle, as regards their size... The feathers are very soft and almost resemble the feathers of a peacock hen; they cannot be compared to those of the peacock rooster for they do not have the mirrors what in English is equally misleadingly called the peacock "eyes" like those in the peacock male's tall. The back of the male bird is hollowed and the female, as ordinary reasoning will make you understand, lays her eggs in the hollow, and since the female's belly is hollow, too, the eggs are hatched by these two hollows. From the male's tail there hangs a thread, about three spans long and black in color, which is not quite round and not quite square in cross section and is quite similar to a cobbler's wire and it is said that the female, while she hatches the eggs, is tied tightly to the male with this wire. Then Gesner added: This bird, I do believe, does not have any other food than dew, since Nature assigned him to live in the air only. But that it lives on air, or eats the pure air, cannot be true. Well, this was the story about the bird of paradise, as distinct from the reports about it. Pigafetta, who had seen the living birds, had described their feet. I don't know whether he had heard about the story or not. But Charles de Lecluse, a French physician and botanist who wrote under the name of Carolus Clusius, did know about the story, and when he learned in # that several specimens of the bird had been received in Amsterdam, he went there to see for himself. The specimens were complete, with feet, and Clusius said so. This was a hundred and one years before Linnaeus was even born. So Linnaeus could not possibly have been fooled any more and he wasn't. But Linnaeus thought of the story synthesized by Gesner when he made up the scientific name of the bird.  I ' HE last item is a question from a younger reader who wants to know what natural fact, if any, is the basis of the story of the Mountain of Lodestone in the Arabian Nights. To my knowledge, there is only one scientific paper dealing with this problem, written by the German geographer Oscar Peschel and published in a book of miscellaneous writings by him in #. I have used Peschel's paper once before (in the book Lands Beyond which Sprague de Camp and I wrote in #) and might as well do so again, for a quick check showed that no additional geographical paper on this theme has been published since. The earliest mention which Peschel, or anybody else, could find was in the Geography of Claudius Ptolemaeus of Egypt, written, by an amusing coincidence, at about the same time as the book by Apollodorus the Mythographer, with which this column started out. He said that somewhere in the Far East, near the Islands of the Satyrs, lay an island which was just one enormous mountain of lodestone. If a ship built with iron nails passed close by, the magnetic mountain pulled the nails out of the ship which then, naturally, collapsed and sank. How that story came to Claudius Ptolemaeus is completely unknown, but it was possible that it had come from China. The sinologists consulted by Peschel could not find a Chinese book old enough to have served as a source. But they did find a later Chinese writer who said that he had derived the story from "an older book." The name of this writer was So Sung and we know when he wrote because his book states that it was written when Jin Tsung was emperor. That, sinologists knew, had been from #-# A.D. This is what So Sung put down: "Near the promontories and peninsulae of the Chang-hai the sea of Cochin China there are shallow places and lodestones in such numbers that the large foreign ships, which have their bottoms sheathed with iron, are attracted by them when they come near and never are able to pass these numerous places." The truth here is very simple and obvious. It was not the iron sheathing which was to blame, but the deeper draft of the "large foreign ships" that prevented them from going where the shallow-draft Chinese vessels went. The trouble with literary sleuthing is, of course, that the older Chinese book mentioned by So Sung may have drawn its information from Ptolemaeus. The next source that can be dated accurately is another Geography, the author of which is usually called Edrisi, a rather drastic contraction of his name, which was Abu-Abdullah Muhammad ibn-Muhammad al-Edrisi. E drisi, bom in Spain, lived from #-# A.D., mostly in Sicily. "The author of the Book of Wonders reports that no ship held together by iron nails can pass near the mountain Murukeyyin without being attracted and held so fast that it cannot leave again." The location of this mountain is somewhere to the south of the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the southern entrance to the Red Sea. This is not only much closer to home, it also no longer specifies that the Mountain of Lodestone is an island -- it could be a promontory. And Peschel felt that this was just an exaggerated version of a real fact related one and a half centuries later by Abu alFida (or Abulfeda) who spoke about a promontory with a few remarkable features: "an iron mine well inland on its back and a place where lodestone is found on the part surrounded by the sea." The source for Sindbad's mountain in the Arabian Nights is either Edrisi or the Book of Wonders mentioned by him. It may sound strange, but there is much reason to believe that the story did not go from Edrisi into the Arabian Nights directly, but via the German romance The Pleasant History of Duke Ernest of Swabia. This German romance, written about the middle of the twelfth century, is older than the Sindbad tales. The Middle High German epic Gudrun (or Kudrun) also mentions the Mountain of Lodestone in a somewhat indirect manner. A ship is built using only copper nails and anchors of bronze are provided "so that the good heroes will not be troubled by the magnet." But Gudrun was written later, in the early thirteenth century, and since it was written for an audience which knew the story of Duke Ernest, no direct encounter with the Mountain of Lodestone could be inserted. In this time, the mariner's compass, invented by somebody living near the North Sea, was already in use. The skippers knew it worked and that was presumably all they cared. But the philosophers wanted to know how it worked and argued that the needle was attracted by the more numerous stars of the northern sky. for the functioning of the compass needle is responsible for the absolutely last appearance of the Mountain of Lodestone. The year was # and the place was a new map of the world, compiled by Johannes Ruysch. On this map, the Arctic Ocean begins under # of northern latitude. Ten degrees farther to the north there is a string of # islands, alike in shape and size. Inside this string of islands there are four more islands. One is labeled Arumphei, another Hyperborei, the two others insulae desertae. And to the north of them there is one more island, with a Latin inscription which says: "under the arctic pole a rock of magnet-stone, # German miles (# statute miles) in circumference, surrounded by the amber sea." Below the first string of # islands and the tip of Greenland (which was drawn as being the easternmost projection of Asia) there is another Latin inscription. It reads: Hie incipit mare suenum (Here begins the amber sea) Hie compassus navium non tenet (Here the nautical compass is no longer steady) nec naves, que ferrum tenent, revertere valent (and ships built with iron cannot return.) Old-Fashioned Bridge Score Pad ? (BJudqjL Makes Bridge Scoring Easier  More Accurate-'Fasfer  More Legible! # for Including Postage Send Check or Money Order (No Coin or Stamps)  # East #st St. fllBi New York #, N. Y. The Sly Bungerhop four inches tall and as ferocious as a baby bunny, but he had a powerful voice for the size of him. He was using it now. "You bloated battener on better men's brains!" he thundered alliteratively. "What makes you think you know more than I do about the future?" L. Richard de Wike fiddled nervously with the button that would summon his secretary, but refrained from pushing it. He sighed and allowed the storm of This was Calmer' s chance of a lifetime -- he could hear opportunity knock, but where in all Creation was the door it knocked upon? vivid invective to burst around his ears. It was a part of his job. There are publishing-house editors who are employed because of a great sensitivity to syntax and style; de Wike had a tin ear. There are editors who hold their jobs because of their ability to make friends and attract authors; de Wike got on badly with his own mother, and all subsequent relationships were worse. As an editor, de Wike had only one real talent and that was an ability to absorb punishment. It was enough. Let an author come in and blow his stack -- no advertising! a miserable job of production! a deliberate, calculated insult from Miss Hargreave on the switchboard, who pretended not to recognize his name! -- and it was de Wike who had the task of riding out the storm. His title was Executive Editor, but it might just as well have been Whipping Boy. After half an hour's exercise on de Wike, even the most outraged of authors found his passions spent and was then easy meat for whatever the other editors on the firm wished to do with him. This particular storm, though, showed no signs of spending itself. A t a momentary lull, de Wike cleared his throat and said: "Now, really, Colmer. It's only that the editorial board feels your picture of thirty-first-century life lacks a certain warmth. Surely you can understand -- " "Warmth!" howled Colmer, freshly enraged. "Good God, de Wike, this is my book and my future. I don't tell you how to cheat an author out of his reprint royalties -- don't you tell me what the thirty-first century's going to be like! Remember T ales of Millenium! Remember what Life said in its editorial about T Is for Tomorrow! Remember -- " De Wike closed his ears and concentrated on remembering. True, Colmer was the best science fiction writer they had. He was also the most temperamental. He didn't look the part in either case -- a mousy little man with thick glasses over his watery eyes; he was blind as a bat without them. His heroes conquered galaxies and alien maidens with equal ease and daring; Colmer himself had never ventured west of the Hudson River nor north of his apartment on the Grand Concourse. But the critics loved him and the cash customers ate his books up. So Crash! L. Richard de Wike pulled out the mental plugs in his ears and paid attention. Colmer had been making a point about the hereditary cretinism in the ancestry of all publishers' men and had pulled off his glasses to gesticulate with them. He had gestured wildly and collided with the Luna Cup that rested proudly atop de Wike's desk. The crash was the sound of the Luna Cup flying across the room and smashing into silverplated scrap against the base of the marble bust of L. Richard de Wike as a boy. "Now, really, Colmer!" De Wike was horrified. It wasn't just the cost of the cup -- that had been only thirty or forty dollars. It was the principle. That cup was awarded for the best line of science fiction books; it had been the property of de Wike's firm for six years running and it had cost a pretty penny, indeed, to award it to them, to pay the expenses of the award dinners, to keep the judges complacently in line, year after year. Colmer stared blindly at de Wike. He said in a furious roar, "My only pair of glasses, ruined. And you worry about your lousy cup! Oh, you'll pay for this, de Wike!" And he blundered blindly out of the office, crashing against a chair, a file cabinet and the halfopen door.  al direction of the elevator, afraid of bumping into someone. Hamlet could tell a hawk from a handsaw, but Colmer couldn't -- not without his glasses, not from as much as a dozen feet away. Even a human figure merged into mists at six feet or so; he could tell that it was a figure, but identity, age and sex were beyond his recognition. Not that he much cared. The memory of his insults and ill treatment was too strong in his mind. "My only glasses!" he muttered searingly. "The thirty-first century!" A figure that might have been either a pink-faced baboon or a fat man in a brown suit appeared out of the mists and murmured pleasantly: "This way, sir." "Thanks," growled Colmer, and fumbled his way to the elevator. Usually that was easy enough, even without his glasses; de Wike's office was on the top floor, and ordinarily there would be one elevator waiting there, door open, until the starter on the ground floor buzzed it to start its descent. Not this time, though. All the doors were closed. Colmer found the handiest door, stuck his face almost into it to make sure it wasn't another office, and located a signal button. Bending down almost to touch it with his nose to see that it wasn't a fire alarm or Western Union signal, he put his forefinger on it and pressed. It was an elevator button, all right. It said, "Up." He waited for a second, and then the door opened and he stepped in. Then something registered with him for the first time. De Wike's office was on the top floor. But the button had said "Up." He stared witheringly at the operator, a vague blue blur of uniform with a vague blonde blur of hair on top. Practical jokes? The operator said in a pleasant soprano voice, "Wettigo mizzer?" Wike demanded suspiciously, "What are you talking about?" "Ah," said the pleasant soprano, and then there was a sort of flat, fleshy click, as though she had popped her bubble-gum. "Where to, sir?" she asked. 'Where to!" he mimicked. 'Where the devil can I go to? Down, of course! I want to get out of this confounded place before -- " "Sorry, sir. This car only goes up. Where would you like to stop?" "Now stop that!" he commanded. Up! There simply was no up, not from de Wike's office -- not in this building. "I want to go down. I want to go down now. And no nonsense about it." "Sorry, sir. This car only goes up. Where would you like to stop?" was no more than a pink blur under the blonde halo. He would have liked to get a better look at her -- he was nearly sure all the elevator operators he'd ever seen in this building were men -- but, after all, you can't put your face right up against that of a strange blonde with no better excuse than that you've broken your glasses. Or can you? The pleasant soprano said again, "Where would you like to stop, sir?" Like a damned parrot, he thought scathingly, or like a machine. But what could you expect in a building tenanted by creatures like de Wike? He chose a number at random. "A hundred and tenth," he snapped. "And let's get started!" That would hold her. "Sorry, sir. We're already started, but this car only goes up to ninety-nine." "Ah," he said disgustedly, "ninety-nine will do." What was the use of going along with this nonsense? And the car certainly wasn't moving; he was sure of that! He'd ridden in enough elevators to know. Why, his famous free-fall sequence in The Martian Chanukah was based on an express elevator ride from the top of the R.C.A. Building. If this were going up, he would feel heavier; if it were going down, he'd feel lighter. And all he felt was -- why, he thought wonderingly, queasy. Maybe it was moving, some way or another; certainly he seemed to be having a little trouble keeping his balance. Colmer leaned against the back of the car and glowered blindly into space. Above the closed door there were winking pink-andgreen lights -- like an indicator, he thought. Well, all right, they were moving. Good. Since the only way to move was down, they would soon be at the ground floor, and he would be out of the building, and then it was only a short cab-ride to the offices of Forestry, Brasbit and Hoke, who could be relied on to publish his books the way he wrote them, and who had said as much just the other day... Still, he thought, softening, de Wike wasn't such a bad sort. As editors went, that is. And old man Brasbit was known to have some idiosyncrasies of his own -- for example, there was the time he had hauled five of his own authors into court for violating the option clauses of their contracts -- and, on the whole, de Wike's firm could be counted on to be reasonable about things like that. If a better offer turned up for a particular book, they wouldn't usually stand in an author's way. A ND this present difficulty --  well, who was to know whose impression of what the thirty-first century would be like was correct? Colmer thought of it as harsh and mechanized; de Wike's editorial board thought there would be more human softness. Well, why wasn't that possible, too? Suppose in chapter nineteen, for instance, he had the Eugenics Committee set aside the ruling that ninth cousins couldn't intermarry and -- "Here you are, sir. Ninety-nine." "Oh." Colmer blinked. The door was open and the queasy-making motion had stopped. "Thanks," he said, and then, moved by a sudden impulse and the hell with what she might think of it, he put his face close to hers. She didn't slap him. She didn't draw back. She just stood there, waiting. Colmer was suddenly conscious of two things, one of them obvious because it was positive, the other negative and hard to trace. The obvious thing was that this was, indeed, a young lady -- or a doll. The face was a doll's face, with bright, unwinking blue eyes, pink and almost inhumanly perfect features. The negative thing was harder. Something was missing. And then, in a moment, it came to him. She didn't smell. Colmer was no lady's man, but he had not completely isolated himself from them. Moreover, he read the magazines and -- that unfailing barometer of what their readers really liked -- the advertisements the magazines contained. He knew that no self-respecting American girl would be caught dead without at least a few drops of scent behind each ear and maybe some sort of perfumed liquid or spray on the hair, plus, of course, something daintysmelling to protect her from perspiration all day or all week long. But there was no odor whatsoever to the bright and doll-like operator of the car. She said, inches from his face, "You get out here, sir. Ninetynine." A little afraid of her and more than a little perplexed, Colmer stepped out. She was pretty but vacuous and insistently repetitious. He wondered if it was worth his while to ask the elevator starter about her. The starter should be right there, under the clock, or chatting with the owner of the cigar stand -- Colmer looked blearily and wonderingly around him. No elevator starter. No cigar stand. No clock. Wherever he was, and his myopic vision made it more than merely hard to tell, he was not in the lobby of the Pinkstone Building, where de Wike had his offices. As far as he could tell, he wasn't in a lobby at all. cal sound in the air and a faint, sneezy tang of ozone. Long, glowing corridors spread away from him on either side, and though he could see no details, he could at least see that some of the glowing light came from objects in motion along the corridors. He peered unbelieving, shaking his nearly blind head. This was the end, he thought sourly. If this was some trick of de Wike's -- if somehow de Wike had conspired with the operator to bring him to the basement of the building or -- ' No. None of that was possible. Colmer reached out one hand to the wall of the corridor for support, more moral than real, and recoiled. The wall was tingling and warm; it seemed to be vibrating. He screwed his eyes shut and opened them again. Near-sightedness was sometimes an oddly comforting affliction; by being unable to see much of the world around one without glasses, one had sometimes the impression of being wrapped in warm and fuzzy cotton batting, insulated from harm. But not this time. This time, Colmer didn't like the world around him and he wanted to know it better. He opened his eyes and placed his index lingers on the skin at the corners of the eyes, pulling them taut and Oriental. Generally that helped; deforming the eyeball by a little outside pressure sometimes partly took the place of glasses... Well, no. Or did it? He couldn't tell. The vaguely glowing nimbuses of light that he could see moving did lose some of their fuzziness, but they were warped and distorted into shapes he couldn't recognize -- Or didn't want to. He shook his head again and felt the beginning tremor of physical feac. It was all right for philosophers, he thought numbly, to talk of being unable to distinguish dream from reality. Maybe they didn't know whether they were Chinese sages or blue-bottle flies, but maybe they spent their time in a daze anyhow. Not Colmer. He knew: he wasn't dreaming. This was incredible, but it was real. You don't have to pinch yourself to find out if you're awake. You just know. When you stop knowing, you're -- You're crazy, he finished. though not easily; but if he was crazy, there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it. Drunk, maybe? No, he hadn't had a drink that day -- de Wike, that skunk, hadn't taken him to lunch. Hypnotized? No, that was also pretty improbable; he had seen no one but de Wike; and de Wike, whose personality was neither electric nor even quite bearable, was not the sort of person who could hypnotize another. De Wike couldn't hypnotize a poet, much less a science fiction novelist, alway alert for plot gimmicks. That seemed to leave insanity. Well, Colmer thought gloomily, facing up to it, most writers were nuts anyway, or else they would be real estate salesmen, where the big money was, or editors -- De Wike kept pestering him about heading their science fiction department. If that was the only remaining possibility, by all the laws of scientific evidence Colmer had painstakingly learned at the feet of such Titans as Einstein, Jeans and Sherlock Holmes, then it had to be accepted as true. Unless -- He laughed ruefully. It was a silly thought, but there was one other possibility. Suppose, for instance, that maybe one of the stories he made his living by was -- well, true? It was funny. More than funny -- it was downright hilarious; he was beginning to drink the stuff he made himself. But just suppose, he thought, stretching the corners of his eyes in a vain attempt to see just what the devil it was he had got into, just suppose there really was such a thing as, for example, a weak spot in the paratime web. Whatever that was. He'd used it glibly enough in stories and he had intended it to mean that certain places might be sort of gateways between the familiar world of H-bombs and TV commercials and -- different worlds. Parallel worlds, in a space of more than four dimensions. Suppose it was true? Suppose the elevator had somehow transported him into an if world or maybe another planet? There was a strange taste at the back of Colmer's mouth. He looked around him with effort. Wherever he looked, the walls glowed with light. The ceiling -- high overhead, as far as he could tell -- also glowed. The light varied in color, but his eyes, even pulled out of shape, were too inefficient to pick out details. In some places, the lights were moving. Now what would that be? A factory, perhaps? answer. People, he thought. People walking. Their clothes were as luminous as the walls; maybe that was the moving blobs of light. Colmer took a deep breath and walked toward the moving lights. The confounded things pursued their own paths. He selected a lavender pair of blobs, hurried toward them; they were gone. Ducked into a doorway? He couldn't tell. Disappointed, he stopped short. A pale blue glow appeared and came toward him. When it was a dozen feet away, he saw that it was in fact the approximate size and shape of a man. He cleared his throat and blocked the path. The pale blue glow said, "Youall tucker me?" Colmer jumped; deep-south Alabama he had not expected. He asked, "What?" "Dassita say. Tucker me?" Colmer said miserably, "I don't know what you're talking about. All I know is I pushed the up button and -- well, here I am." The man in glowing blue said something quick and impatient; Colmer couldn't even hear him, much less understand. He turned away and called something to a glow of muted rose that was approaching down the hall. It sounded like, "Putta sly bungerhop"; there was more to it, but not that Colmer could understand. The rose glow came closer and, in turn, revealed itself to be human. There was a very quick, lowvoiced conference, and then the rose glow said, "Que veut-vous?" French, thought Colmer. Could he be suddenly in France? He said slowly, "I only speak English. Can you tell me where I am?" Click-pop -- it was the sound the elevator operator had made, like popping bubble-gum. Then the man in glowing rose said, "You are in the Palace Building, on the tenth floor. Can't you see the signs?" It was a pleasant, reassuring voice -- but accented somehow. The accent was not French, whatever it was. Colmer said doubtfully, "I can't see much of anything. My eyes are bad and I've broken my spectacles." "Ah," said the pale blue glow in a tone of satisfaction, "putta sly bungerhop." "Wayman," the rose glow said, and then, to Colmer, "You came in the slide?" "I came in the elevator, if that's what you mean." There was a silence, as though the man were studying him. Colmer made himself say, with studied indifference, "Just as a matter of curiosity, could you tell me what planet we're on?"  IHE man laughed, but there was a puzzled wonder in his laughter. "Excuse me," he said, "we're rushed just now -- " He began to move away. "Please," Colmer begged blindly. "I'm serious. Are we on -- uh -- the planet Earth?" "Of course!" "How far away is the Sun?" "The Sun?" Pause. "I don't thing like that." "How many moons?" The man laughed again, but with a definite note of strain. He backed away. He must think I'm crazy, thought Colmer, and small wonder! "Wait!" Colmer called. "Look, can you tell me -- let's see, can you tell me where the manager is?" There would have to be a manager, or something like a manager, and maybe that would get him to someone who could explain things. "Manager?" The voice was doubtful. "I don't know -- oh, I see. Front office, eh? First floor." "Thanks," said Colmer gratefully. "How do I get there?" "Side drop," the man said impatiently. "What's that?" Colmer begged, but the man was gone. Colmer cursed to himself. He should have saved a few choice words, he thought, and not wasted them all on an innocent like de Wike. He had never before met such unhelpful people. Still, maybe things weren't so bad. Side drop. Maybe -- He moved over to the side of the corridor. That might be the "side" part. He stuck his nose close to the wall and moved along until he found a pattern of lights that seemed to offer some help. The glow of lights in his nearsighted eyes nearly blinded him, but at least he could distinguish the fine details in the difference of color. These marks were red letters against a glowing gray background -- syncopated, sketchy letters that formed misspelled words: "Hozontal transmit," "Noth End," "Wes End," and "Syd Drop." This was the place, all right. Now what? He ran his eyes along the walls. No buttons to push. Apparently there was some trick to it. He gingerly felt the wall all around the glowing words "Syd Drop" -- It vanished. The floor fell away from beneath him. t' OR a second, he was petrified, and then some invisible force steadied him and he came to a stop. Now where was he? There were more moving lights here than on the tenth floor and some of them were approaching him. "Excuse me," he said, clutching at the nearest. "I'd like to talk to the manager, please, or whatever you call him." Click-pop again. A woman's voice this time. "Manager? One who manages -- oh. North Transmit." Apparently even the females of these people were sparing of words. He sighed and stuck his face up against a wall again. This time he knew what to expect and he was not surprised when he suddenly felt himself clutched, whirled and carried rapidly in a horizontal direction. Off the "Noth Transmit," he stared around, stretching his eyes, which were beginning to water and ache very much. There was a large glowing patch of white light set in the middle of the gray, and a greenish glow moving toward it. He intersected the greenish glow. "Is this the manager's office -- I mean the front office?" The greenish glow growled at him and moved away. Colmer hesitated. Then he heard voices coming from behind the glowing patch of white. He moved toward it slowly. One of the voices was familiar. It was saying, "Thing temple sly. Putta bungerhop, thing." Colmer pulled at his aching eyes again and saw, through the square of white, two lesser glows, one violet, one a familiar blue. That was the voice. It was the man he had met back on the tenth floor, here before him. Colmer sighed and felt his way through the glowing white door. As long as the man was going this way anyhow, why hadn't heescorted Colmer and spared him the nearly impossible job of finding his own way here? These people, curse their inconsiderateness! to speak to the manager." There was no click-pop this time; the man answered him at once in English. "About what you're doing here?" The voice was again accented, but in a way like nothing Colmer had ever heard. "That's right," Colmer said doggedly. "How did I get here?" "That's what I was going to ask you," said the manager. "Do you have a permit for the temporal slide?" "The what?" Colmer gritted his teeth. "Look, I was waiting for the elevator. I pushed the button marked 'Up' and the elevator stopped and -- " "Temple sly bungerhop!" crowed the enraging blue glow. The violet one, the manager, said, "Wait a minute. Where were you when this happened?" "Why -- the Pinkstone Building. The twentieth floor. That's the top floor, you see, so I wondered about that button. But I had just broken my glasses and I couldn't see very well, so -- well, here I am." There was a rapid and confused babbling among the glows -- more voices than two, Colmer realized, and by squeezing his eyes again, he discovered that there were at least half a dozen persons in the room. Colmer couldn't follow a word of it, though it had a haunting familiarity, like syncopated and slurred English, until the violetglowing manager's voice said, "Wait a minute until everyone gets his translator on." There was a series of tiny click-pops. "Now," said the manager, "you'd better explain." His tone was mild, but it seemed to carry a threat. Colmer said bravely, "I've got nothing to explain. I never saw this place before in my life. I've had the devil of a time getting around -- practically had to feel my way -- and your people weren't very helpful, either. They didn't tell me a thing except how to reach this place." Pause. Then the manager's voice said meditatively, "That may be just as well. What do you think, Arrax?" A silvery glow just within the range of Colmer's vision said, "But how did he find the temporal slide?" "What about that?" the manager demanded. "What were you doing just before that?" "Why -- " Colmer stopped, remembering. "I was talking to my publisher. We'd been discussing a new book of mine -- I'm a science fiction writer, you see. The book was about the thirty-first century. I said the thirty-first century was likely to be a harsh, mechanistic -- " "Out loud?" "What? Of course. How else?" # A H," said the distant bass rumble of the silvery glow in a satisfied tone. "And the monitor -- " "Yes," agreed the manager, less satisfied. "The monitor vectored him in to the temporal slide and he pushed the slide button up. The question is, now what?" He paused. "You," he said to Colmer, "when did all this happen?" "When?" Colmer was completely at sea. "About one-thirty, I'd say. I remember it was time for lunch and -- " "You misunderstand me. What year?" "What year?" Colmer blinked and a great light seemed to come over him. "Oh," he said faintly. "Temporal slide, eh? What year? You mean -- " "Of course," said the manager. "You got on the temporal slide, going up. You're in the ninetyninth century." There was a ragged series of click-pops and another argument raged in the slurred and sketchy English. Colmer didn't mind; it gave him a chance to catch his breath. What an opportunity! What an The ninety-ninth century and here he was smack in the middle of it! Let de Wike argue with him now -- here was his chance to write science fiction that would live and sell and make his name famous forever! There was a sudden local concentration of chatter at the door and then a new figure in a glowing suit -- orange, this time -- joined the party. He approached Colmer, close enough so that Colmer could actually see the face. It was a man, not young, not old, no taller than Colmer himself, with a wise and patient and studious face. He poked something glittering and gleaming under Colmer's eyes. Flaring white light danced out and blinded Colmer for a second. "Hey! cried Colmer. "What the devil do you think you're doing?" Click-pop a series of clickpops. The manager's voice soothed, "Ogratz is a doctor. You understand, we have to have a doctor look you over." "Oh, all right," Colmer grumquestions! My year was #. Now what happened right after that?" The booming silver-glow voice said, "The recommendation for the monitor, then, is to replace it with a human." cuse me! Now, after #, when was the next war? Did the Russians -- hey! Ouch!" It was bright green light this time and it stung. The doctor said something under his breath in a satisfied tone. The manager's voice said, "Arrax, the whole thing was a stupid error; I've always said that robot monitors were a false economy. We'll have to change the code word. 'Century' isn't any good now. Maybe we ought to replace the slide operators, too, but we can table that. As for this one -- " "You mean me?" Colmer yelped. "Look, get this fellow away from me, will you? I want to know about the H-bomb. Was it ever used? Did Nasser get -- " "We'll vote yes on the monitors," said Arrax. "I leave the arrangements to you. What about him, Doctor?" The doctor stepped away from Colmer, scratching his cheek. "Well," he said meditatively, "it checks. Fovea central, bilateral occlusions. Efficiency? I'd say fifteenth percentile rods, twentyfifth cones -- oh, yes. Without his glasses, he's just about blind. Couldn't have seen a thing." Colmer began to grow irritated. "I told you I didn't see anything. Now why don't you get me some glasses as a starter? I'd like a look at what technological wonders you people -- " "Shall I?" asked the doctor. The manager chuckled. "Why not?" "Thanks," said Colmer, gratified as the dim orange glow that was the doctor bent and did something with what seemed to be the equivalent of a little black bag. "Now about my questions. Do you think you could spare me someone who speaks English to act as -- " "I have the report," the manager said, ignoring him. "The people who spoke to him told him nothing of any consequence." "Good," said the silvery glow named Arrax. "Take care, then." "Wait a minute!" Colmer cried. "That sounds as if you were going to send me back! Please, just let me stay a little while, won't you? I promise not to be any trouble! Listen, there must be lots of things I can do for you -- bring you up to date on the twentieth century, maybe, or help your historians check facts, or -- " "Certainly," soothed the manager. "Of course." He advanced on Colmer and took his arm. "If you'll just come this way, we'll take care of everything. Into this little door -- that's right. And -- here, don't forget these -- " He pressed something into Colmer's hand. There was a sudden flare of polychrome light, brighter than light had ever been before... The world went black, and spun, and then sharpened again. Colmer, ready for anything, fearful of everything, reached out, touched a wall, braced himself, turned -- A man was approaching him. "Arrax?" he called fearfully. "Dr. Ogratz? Manager?" "Why, Colmer!" said the voice, pleased. "I thought you'd gone." It was L. Richard de Wike. Colmer slumped against the wall. It was all over. It was too late. lowed fast," thought L. Richard de Wike. And it was true. Colmer had acted very peculiarly -- what was that nonsense of looking for an "Up" button at the elevators? -- but now he seemed quiet, mild, reasonable -- almost dazed. "Look," said de Wike eagerly, "suppose we go out to lunch? We're reasonable men. It doesn't matter about the Luna Cup -- and I'm sure we can work something out about your book. After all. I'm no expert on what's really going to happen centuries from now -- " Colmer turned and looked at him through his new glasses -- funny, thought de Wike; I could have sworn he said those others were his only pair. And these were odd-looking, rose-pink, of a most unusual shape. "That's true," said Colmer at last. "And, damn it, neither am I." De Wike blinked happily. "Why, now, that's the way to look at it, Colmer," he said. "Let's go to lunch now, shall we? Just you and I, eh?" Colmer paused. He looked around him, with the sharpness of vision the new glasses had brought. Here was where he had pressed the "Up" button (no button, no scar, no shadow now to mark where it had been.) There was where the monitor had met him, triggered by the code-word "century." A secret recess in the wall? An imagined figure, born of suggestion and gullible neurones? Whatever it was, there was no trace of the monitor or its hiding place there, either. No trace of anything. No chance that, ever again, Colmer would find the key and unlock the door to the future, where -- surely this time! -- forewarned and careful, he would find some way to stay there long enough to learn. No chance? Colmer drew a deep breath, his first breath of hope and -- greed? Whatever it was, greed or nobility, that makes men want to know what is forbidden to them. He said, "Sure, de Wike." He said, "Certainly, de Wike, let's talk things over. The two of us understand each other, after all!" And he said, "Oh, by the way, de Wike -- I just happened to think, de Wike. Haven't you kept asking me to head up your science fiction book department?" A ND so it was that Colmer, rose-pink glasses and all, came to occupy the office next to de Wike's, and the refurbished Luna Cup now sits atop his desk. He's a good editor. He understands the problems of the writer; he sympathizes deeply; he comprehends fully; and the contracts he signs give an author a full fifteen per cent less than any other editor in the firm has ever been able to manage. His employers are well satisfied, except for his one little idiosyncrasy. Editors do their work over the lunch table and maybe so, in a way, does Colmer; but what his colleagues see is a man who brings a brown-paper bag of sandwiches to the office every morning, and never steps out of the place at noon; and every day from twelve to one-fifteen, stands in the corridor outside his door, where once a blurred figure led him to a button. He has a sandwich in one hand and a dictionary in the other; and it is munch and read, munch and read, for seventy-five minutes every day; and if there is a word that will unlock the monitor's help again, it begins with no letter up through the letter R. For everybody else, it is the anniversary of the first Moon flight, but for me -- it's just a tragically comic Valentine! S O IT'S here again, is it? Another year and it's here again. The Day. Only this time it's the fiftieth anniversary. Your editors and program directors will be really spreading themselves tomorrow. Celebrations in every major city on Earth, a holiday on every planet of the Solar System, and on the Moon -- well! Noisemakers for the schoolchildren, speeches in the parks, fireworks, drinking, dancing, parades -- and you boys will have to cover it all. The Day. Go ahead, sit down and make yourselves comfortable. I've been expecting you. I don't have very much that's new, I'm afraid. It will be just about the same old story everyone's heard for the past forty-nine years, but they never seem to get tired of it, do they? Human interest, your editors call it. The story behind the news, the color behind the historical event. The strictly human side of today's holiday -- that's all I am. Those of you who want any refreshment, please help yourselves. I particularly recommend that Martian brandy; they're turning out some highly drinkable stuff in New Quebec these days. No, thank you, young fellow, I'm afraid I can't join you -- a man's lining gets real soft at my time of life. But I still like to watch, so drink up, all of you, drink up and drink hearty. The fiftieth anniversary. The years, the years! There I was, young and practically bubbling with high-test fuel like all of you, and here I am now, full of doddering, aimless talk. And in between, a full volume of history, but such history as the human race has not written for itself since it began climbing down from the trees. And I was there on the very first page of that volume! Bresh, McGuire and Stefano. Just the five of us, five desperate and determined competitors, all that was left of an even hundred men that the best universities in the country had sent. We'd been examined mentally and examined physically, tested on our math and tested on our nerve, eliminated for this reason and for that reason, too tall, too slow, too heavy, too talkative -- until only the pleased, happy and shakingly tense five of us were left. Then the finals began. Picture it, five young men on a plane bound for the Arizona Research Station, looking at each other, wondering who it was going to be, who was going to end up the winner, the pilot of the first ship to land on the Moon. Each one of us wanting to be the man, the Columbus who would open up not a mere hemisphere but the incredible, infinite universe itself. Each of us wanting to be that man so bad that we had terrible little aches running up and down our intestines. Try to picture the world we'd grown up in. The first radio-controlled rocket to burst outside the Earth's atmosphere, the first piloted ship to go halfway to the Moon and back, the first robot craft to circle the Moon -- interplanetary travel, space travel, getting closer all the time. The newspapers full of it, the television full of it, our very grammarschool textbooks chockful of it. And now, just as we'd graduated, the question was no longer exciting but remote news. It was as personal as a new neighbor moving next door. Who was he going to be, what would be his name -- that first explorer -- that hero of all-time heroes? There were exactly five possibilities: Caldicott, Bresh, McGuire, Stefano -- and myself. The Moon ship had been built and was waiting for its pilot. One of us would be the modern Columbus. I remember glancing around from face to face in that plane and thinking to myself that we could have been brothers. Cousins, anyway. The ship had been built to exact specifications with regard to lift and mass, and there was only just so much room for the pilot. He had to fit into his cubicle like a machined part, which meant a maximum height and a maximum weight, but still nothing sacrificed in the way of strength and reflexes. So' we were all, all five of us, small, stern-bodied men with almost identical scholastic training behind us and almost identical psychological mechanisms inside us. The way we moved, the way we noticed things, even the way we talked -- everything was remarkably, eerily similar. Especially considering that we'd each come from a different part of the country. Any one of us would have been adequate. But the Moon ship had years of painstaking construction. For that, they didn't want adequacy; they wanted the best that could be found. other guardedly then, just before we landed at the Arizona Research Station. Not to make friends -- hell, no! -- but to get a line on relative weaknesses and strengths. Believe me, the differences were almost microscopic. Stefano, for example. He had one more math course to his credit than I. Theory of Equations, I think it was -- and how I bit my lip over skipping it for the sake of the Glee Club Tuesday afternoons! But it was on the record that he'd sprained his back in a high-school football game. Of course, the sprain was ancient history and long over with; still, it was on his record. How would you figure it? And how would you figure, we wondered as we landed at the hot, dusty Station and were led right into our first testing complex, how would you weigh the balances of sexual involvement? McGuire was married, a newlywed, Caldicott and I were more or less engaged, while Stefano and Bresh were carefree characters who took what they could where they could. One way, engagement, marriage, pointed to an adjusted emotional life -- and adjustment rated high. And someone to return to might provide that extra bit of incentive where the chances of return were considered no higher than two out of three. On the other hand, McGuire's wife, my Irene and Caldicott's Edna might be looked upon by the powers-that-were as so much psychological dead weight, so much extra responsibility and worry that the men involved had to carry. Stefano and Bresh, I could just hear some jowl-heavy individual in a white smock argue, had nothing to concentrate on but themselves and the ship. I tell you, I began to get awfully moody and regretful about Irene. Fine, I'd say to myself, I love the girl. But did I have to go and get engaged? Yet there was no way to figure. You didn't know how they'd rate it. Once we got into the routine at the Station, though, there was very little time to worry. Morning after morning, we'd be dragged out of bed and, pushing our yawns in front of us, made to go through a round of tests. Afternoon after afternoon, we'd get particularized instruction in the handling and maintenance of the Moon ship and made to go through the motions in a dummy model. Evening after evening, there'd be a light supper followed by a dessert of more tests, checkup tests, validation tests and recapitulation tests. Over and over again, they tested us where they had tested us before, mentally, physically, psychologically, always probing for a hair's-breadth of difference, for a third decimal place of advantage. And then, when we had reached the point where our reflexes had become edgy, where our dreams were eight hours' worth of raising, flying and landing the ship, where we chewed bread in the mess-hall with the certain feeling that somewhere a stopwatch must be recording, the pressure came off abruptly. And the results were announced. Bresh was second, by the same distance. Then came McGuire, Caldicott and Stefano. I was first! I would pilot the first ship to the Moon! I would be the new Columbus! I would start the era of space travel! We didn't know who had invented the first crude tool, who had taken the first bareback ride on a horse, but as long as human history endured, the name of the first man to leave Earth and land on another world would be celebrated. And it would be my name -- Emanuel Mengild. I felt like the ten-year-old kid who is suddenly told, all right, tomorrow he can go out West and become a cowboy -- like the man lying on a flophouse bed who opens a telegram informing him lars -- like the crackle-fingered, red-eyed seamstress who's invited to go out to Hollywood and become a film star. But much more than all of those, for someone of my generation and background, I would pilot the first Moon ship! There were consolation prizes given out, too. If I dropped dead in the next week, or went crazy and refused to go, Bresh would be up. After him, of course, McGuire, Galdicott and Stefano, in that order. The way they looked at me! When I got the order to report to Colonel Graves, the Commandant of the Station, I swaggered all the way into his office. I wasn't throwing any weight around. I just felt exactly that way. Any time up to today that his eye fell on me, I'd pulled my shoulders back a little further, put a little extra snap into my step. As Commandant, he was a member of the testing board, and, for all I knew, the decisive one. There was always the possibility that he might notice me yawning a bit longer after breakfast than the others, that he might put that one extra question mark beside my name that would just make a vital difference. But now! Now he was simply George Johnstown Graves, a super-annuated rocket pilot from the old days when men had thought it exciting to climb high enough to see the Earth as a curving horizon beneath. He was courageous enough and smart enough and fast enough, but he'd been born a mite too early. For all his rank, he was just a Portuguese fisherman, while I -- well, as I said, I was Columbus. taller than me, and he was leaning back in his swivel chair with his collar open, his sleeves rolled up and a funny, faraway look in his eyes which I interpreted as envy. I sat down alertly in the chair he nodded at. He said "Um" at the opposite wall, as if he were agreeing with it. Then he looked at me. "Mengild," he said, "you're engaged, aren't you? A Miss Rass?" "Yes, sir," I told him snappily. The five of us were all civilians, but we'd gotten in the habit of saying "sir" to everyone, even the people who made up our beds. How did you know who would be contributing to the final, crucial decision? He glanced flittingly across his desktop. The desktop held a single folderful of papers, but closed. I had the impression that he'd memorized everything in the folder. "You've requested permission to have her enter the Station tonight on a four-hour civilian pass?" I got a bit uncomfortable. "That's right, sir. When the results were posted, we were told we'd have a thirty-six-hour vacation from classes. We were told we could invite any one outsider to join us for this evening. I got in touch with Irene -- Miss Rass -- and she's flying down from Des Moines. I hope there's nothing wrong with -- " Colonel Graves shook his head sharply. "Nothing. Nothing wrong, Mengild. You don't expect to marry the lady before you take off, do you?" "No-o-o. We'd pretty much set it up the other way, sir. That is, if I were picked and I got back in one piece, we'd do it the day I landed back on Earth. She sort of wanted to get married first, but I talked her out of it." "She knows your chances of return in one piece are only slightly better than fifty per cent?" I felt relieved. I thought I understood what he was driving at. "Yes, sir. But she still wants me to go. She knows how I've grown up with the idea. Irene wouldn't want it any differently." The colonel folded his hands under his chin and stared straight at me. "Miss Rass is a domestic type, isn't she? Wants the usual things -- a home, babies, so on?" "I guess so. She's a pretty normal girl." "You want them, too?" I looked off to one side and thought for a moment. "Well, sir, I've wanted one thing since I was a kid and another for the past three years -- space flight and Irene. And whatever Irenewants in the way of a home, once I'm back, once I've made it, I guess I want that as well." He examined the opposite wall again. When he got its opinion, he started talking at it in a low, soft voice. Didn't sound military at all. ?? A LL right. I'll put it to you very briefly, Mengild. As you know, your engines are atomics and they have to be shielded. They are. Out in space, cosmic rays stream into the ship and it has to be shielded from them. It is. Thus far, except for a few unfortunate and preventable accidents, we've had no trouble on this matter. The shielding we've devised is good and it works. But this will be the longest trip that a man has taken under these conditions and the very latest poop from the lab is that the shielding, in all likelihood, will not be effective for its duration." My lips suddenly weren't working too well. "Does this mean, sir, that -- " "It means that the pilot of the first Earth-Moon ship will probably bfe completely sterilized somewhere on the return journey. We could improve the shielding and no doubt will -- in the future. To do it now would mean a long delay at best. At worst, it might mean completely redesigning and rebuilding the ship, which, as you know, has been figured for pretty close tolerances in terms of the equipment it can carry and the fuel it must carry. Our decision is therefore not to delay, but to put it up to the individual most concerned." I thought it out for just a moment, for one psyche-churning moment. "I can give you my answer right now, sir. I've spent too much of my life dreaming of -- " He said "Um" to the wall once more. "Suppose you take twentyfour hours. We can wait till then. Talk it over with your girl, try to find out exactly how you feel." "I know exactly how I feel, sir. There's nothing more important to me than this trip. And Irene will agree with me. If she doesn't -- well, as I said, there's nothing more important than this trip. Why, do you think -- do you think, sir, that after having come all this way, I'd let any risk, any risk at all, get in the way of my being the first man to make it to the Moon and back?" You can imagine that I was pretty excited. But Colonel Graves knotted his tie and rolled down his sleeves and said firmly to the wall: "Suppose you take twenty-four hours, Mengild." The moment I got out of his office, I understood what he meant. Irene was due tonight. I wasn't due to take off for close to three weeks. Plenty of time to get married, the way Irene had wanted to in the first place, and get a baby started. Of course. That's what Colonel Graves had meant. Bresh and McGuire were standing outside the administration building when I came down. They looked at me with carefully controlled eagerness. "No," I told them, "it hasn't been suddenly discovered that my grandfather took sick on his first airplane ride. I still go." Bresh socked his forehead with a thumb-knuckle, just under his spiky red hair. "Well," he grinned, "can you blame a guy for hoping?" I pushed between the death watch with both hands, on my way to my quarters to shower and shave. I had to go through the same routine there with Caldicott and Stefano, although, being lower on the list, they were less grisly.  gate in the sand-streaked taxi, I hauled her into my arms and let her soak there for a while. She looked so good, she felt so good! We had a quickish snack at the recreation hall, while she filled me in on her mother's sciatica and her kid brother Lennie's art scholarship. Then she grabbed my hand and congratulated me on being selected for the EarthMoon ship. "Let me show you what it looks like," I suggested. "The next time you see it, it will be on the newscasts when I take off." Irene glanced around as we left the rec hall. She pointed her little chin at the swarm of lab buildings rising in concrete squareness from the raw Arizona earth, at the guards pacing their intervals along the wire fence. "Such a -- " she thought for a moment -- "such a male place." I laughed. "What else should it be?" She came in on the tail end of my laugh. "What else?" she repeated. It was getting dark by the time we reached the ship. Irene gave a tiny and thoroughly feminine grunt of admiration. The ship stood on its tail, staring greedily, unswervingly at the enormous sky above. The lights from the station covered its sides with long thin glints and long thin shadows that seemed to be urging it to move, "The first one," she breathed. "And you're going to pilot it." I figured it was exactly the right time. So I hoisted her up on the steps that led to the pilot's hatch, lit a cigarette for her -- and started talking. It took a surprisingly short time, even including the proposal. She had barely smoked one-third of the cigarette when I finished. But she kept on smoking the rest in quiet, long inhalations until it became a butt that burned her fingers and she had to throw it away. I ground the butt into the sand and said, "Well?" Her next words kind of astonished me. "Well what?" "Well, we're going to get married, aren't we? Right away?" "No, we're not," she said. "Irene! But when I come back, I may not be able to have children. You want to have children, don't you?" A long pause. I wished it wasn't so dark: I couldn't see her face. "Yes, I want to have children. That's why we won't get married. Not before you go or after you come back." I felt like saying Oh, no! I felt like grabbing her and squeezing her until she was my sensible, lovable, loving Irene again. Instead, I stepped back away from her. I gave up talking and thought for a while. "Look," I said at last. "Correct me if I'm wrong. You knew the risks I was running when I volunteered for this flight and you were with me all the way. You knew what it meant to me. You that I might not come back, and that if I did, it would be in three separate paper bags. This business is just some more of the same." "No, it isn't." I could tell from her voice that she was crying. "I wasn't happy about the risks, but I knew you had to do it. You've been preparing for this moment since you were a little boy. But this -- this is different, Mannie." "How is it different? How?" She wiped the sniffles off her nose-tip. "It's different, that's all. Maybe a man just can't understand these things. But it's different, altogether different for a woman." "Baby, darling," I said, trying to take her in my arms, but she made a little away movement and I stopped. "I want to have a child. I want to have a child with you. Will you please tell me why we can't get married tonight, tomorrow, as soon as we can, and start a baby?" "Suppose I don't get pregnant before you leave? And if I do -- suppose I have a miscarriage?" "Listen, Irene," I told her desperately. "In my position, we could have the best doctors in the world taking care of you. And if anything went wrong, we could adopt a baby. I know it isn't the same, but for all we know, one of us might be sterile to begin with! Lots of couples adopt babies and they're happy." "Oh, Mannie, it wouldn't be the same thing with us, not if we started out this way. Besides, miscarriages, that sort of thing, that's not the real reason." I put my fists on my hips and shoved my face close to hers. "Well, will you kindly stop all this, woman, and tell me the real reason?" She asked me for another cigarette. I lit it up and handed it to her. "Mannie, I don't know if you can understand this, but I'll try. I wouldn't want to limit my childbearing powers in advance. And -- I wouldn't want to marry a man who would deliberately give up his ability to become a father. He'd never be completely a man to me." T hat took some absorption. "What would you think of a man," I asked slowly, "who gave up his ability to make the kind of trip I've been offered? Would he be completely a man?" "I don't know," she said, crying again. "But I don't think they're the same thing. I don't -- I don't -- and that's all!" "But that's what you're asking me to do, Irene," I pointed out. "You're asking me to give up a dream that I've had since I was a -- " "I'm not asking you to do a single thing, Emanuel Mengild! I'm only telling you what I can and can't do. I, not you. You -- you can go straight up in a rocket!" And that's where we left it. I walked her back, walked her around, and, when her time was up, I walked her to the gate. We didn't hug when she left; we didn't even blow kisses at each other. I just stared after the cab until it sand-clouded around a big boulder and disappeared. Then I walked myself around. One way to look at it: I was in one Earth-Moon trip and out one woman. Rack up Fame and Fortune, scratch Family. One way to look at it. Another way: I could get mad at Irene for failing me at a crucial moment, for leaving when the going got rough. I got mad. Then I got over it. After all, I could see her point. It wasn't the same for a man as for a woman. A man had his work, his achievement; a woman had children. A woman grew up with the dream of kids the way I'd grown up with the dream of the stars. It wasn't the same for a man. But wasn't it? I began to realize, walking myself around and around in a plodding, sweaty circle, how much I had counted on Irene to come through for me. I wanted kids -- only I'd never said to myself two kids, five kids. I'd settle for one. But no kids? Ever? I'd taken it for granted, I now understood, when Colonel Graves had hit me with the problem, that Irene loved me enough to marry me right away and cancel out the chance of having no family. That's why I'd been so sure. That had been the little nubbin of security nestling comfortably at the back of my mind. This, now, was a different matter. lion years to produce me. In tors. Slimelike ancestors, jellylike ancestors, water-breathing ancestors, air-breathing ancestors, ancestors that floated, that swam, that crawled, that ran, that climbed, that finally walked. And all those ancestors, no matter how different, had one thing in common. They had survived long enough to have descendants. Other species didn't and their lines were extinct, bare bones in rock strata. But no matter how scarce food got, no matter what enemies they faced, what unprecedented natural upheavals they had to adjust to, my ancestors somehow managed to pull through and have offspring. That's how I happen to be here. If I didn't carry on, all their effort would come to nothing: I would be a biological dead-end. They might just as well not have bothered. I decided, coming to the gate for the tenth time and starting off again. What was it all about, for example? What was I here for? What was good, what was bad, what was right, what was wrong? What in the world was I sure of, with all my studies, with all my aspirations, with all my attitudes? Very damn little. But while life continued, there was a chance of finding out, of getting a little closer, all the time a little closer. And my kind of life -- me -- could only find out if it went on. It was like, I decided, my entering this competition for the Moon ship. I'd entered it partly because I wanted to very badly, but also because I felt I was the right man. I possessed inside me, I believed, the values necessary to make that difficult attempt which would initiate the age of interplanetary travel. Well, relative to life, I felt I was the right man, too. Both were conceits, but they were iundamental conceits. If I felt I was good enough, of value enough, I could not withdraw my entry. That got me to the Moon ship. Life wasn't just reproduction -- not human life. Life was achievement, too. Mankind pushed its collective nose past barrier after barrier, because one of its component individuals just had to, whether or not he reproduced. And I lived in a time of a major barrier and it had fallen to my lot to do the pushing. Wasn't that more important than children? On the other hand, I couldn't fool myself -- any of the other four men who had come out to the Station with me could do the job as well as I. And if this ship didn't make it, another would. I wasn't that necessary. But I wanted to be. So there I was, back again. I waved to the guard at the gate and kept going. By now, I'd worn a path for myself. full of wet splinters that had fallen out of my eyes when I reported to Colonel Graves the next morning. He stared at my face with a good deal of interest as I sat down. "It wasn't so easy, was it, Mengild?" "No, sir," I told him unhappily, "it wasn't. But I've made up my mind. And I'll stick to the decision." He waited. "I've decided -- maybe I'll regret this for the rest of my life, but, as I said, I stick by it -- I've decided not to go." "Um. The sterilization business?" "Yes, sir." "I take it the young lady said no," I wiped my face with my wet handkerchief and shrugged. "She said no, all right, but that wasn't it. I thought it over all night and this is my personal decision. I'd rather have children than have the Moon ship." He rocked back and forth in his chair. "You know, Mengild, there's such a thing as artificial insemination. And you still could be the father by being a donor before the takeoff." "I can see myself," I muttered, "running around with a test tube in my hand, trying to get women to marry me." "Well, when you put it that way. I'll admit it isn't too romantic. However, there are women who would. Remember, Mengild, you'd be a hero, one of the greatest heroes of all time." "Suppose it worked," I challenged. "Suppose I got married -- to one of those women who would -- and she were artificially inseminated and I were the father -- what then if there were miscarriages? Or abnormal births? The frozen spermatozoa don't remain viable more than a year or two. But that's only part of it, sir. The rest would be that I had voluntarily and forever risked the chance of never becoming an ancestor. I've decided I don't want to." Colonel Graves stood up. "Your business. And your decision. Certainly. I made these suggestions because, frankly, we would rather have you pilot the ship. You're a shade better than anyone else who competed with you. That would mean a shade better chance for the ship to get to the Moon and return. We want very much to have it return." They offered the job to the next man in line and he jumped at it. They told him the problem and he laughed. They told him to take twenty-four hours to think it over, and he did, and he came back and said he still wanted to go. Bresh, of course. He took off three weeks later, landed on the Moon and returned safely to one of the greatest and most heroic receptions ever. That's why we celebrate Paul Bresh Day all over the Solar System. That's why you reporters are here today for some of the usual human-interest fill-in material. And I can't tell you anything more than I've told you before. No, that's not so. There's a new item. Irene. I married Frances, a year later, when I got that maintenance crew job. That's all I've ever done for interplanetary travel -- keep the ships in good shape for the flight into space. I've made a good living, even made a name for myself as a ground-crew chief. Now, naturally, I'm retired. I do regret that I never made a space flight when I was younger. Too old now, heart too weak, to be allowed even on one of those luxury passenger liners. Not like Paul Bresh. Besides making the first flight to the Moon in history, he was a member of the Second Exploratory Party to Mars; the time he sort of wandered off into the desert and was never heard of again. Me? All I have now is my son David and his wife in New Quebec on Mars, my daughter Ann and her family on Ganymede, my daughter Mildred and her family on Titan, and -- oh, yes, the new item. I got word last week that when the first star ship lifted from Pluto on its way to Alpha Centaurus, my grandson Aaron and his wife Phyllis were aboard. The trip will take thirty years, they tell me, so I'll probably have a great-grandson born on the way. There it is, my side of the story. That's what I got out of it. Maybe I didn't become the new Columbus, but I'm an ancestor. Paul Bresh has his day. I have my millenia. Beginning Next Month... by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth Earth has been snatched from the Solar System by aliens who neither know nor care that they are dominating the planet! Who are they? What do they want? Can they be fought? Should they be fought? As you'd expect, the authors of Gravy Planet and Gladiator at Law come up with totally unexpected answers. Don't # Star Shelf by James Barlow. Harper, N. Y.,  # tion in the popular sense, Barlow's book is a taut account of Occupied Britain in #. All of Europe except neutral Portugal has been subjugated; the total destruction of London has resulted in England's capitulation. As an American, I wonder why Barlow ignores the possibility of U.S. intervention. As the title implies, the world is divided, although there is no official state of war. The U.S. limits its activity to dropping ammunition along with an occasional mufti-clad spy to the Resistance groups. And therein lies the key to the power of this first novel. On the surface, the English countryside and populace are seemingly as unruffled as ever. Barlow's hero, a plainclothesman in Internal Security, can be forgiven, then, in believing that the entire populace, except for a few traitors, is in accord with the admirable policy of the Occupiers: a comparatively free press, religious freedom, the continuation of British law, though without loopholes for legal wrigglings. He is happy in his job of checking sabotage and treason. Unfortunately, he is also an idealist and inevitably his conscience, and a teacher in the form of a young girl he has fallen in love with, combine to show him his error. Despite a cloying romance and a hero almost too good to be true, Barlow's yarn has a frightening reality and urgency comparable to his countryman's masterpiece, #. ent. Ballantine Books, N. Y., #  now that Clement is the Alien spokesman on Earth. Very few authors can make the extraterrestrial seem as human as the next-door neighbor -- and much more likable. As in Needle and Iceworld, Clement interplays the personalities of a juvenile human and a mature alien for intellectual contrast. The boy is a sixteenyear-old cadet who has been left for dead by his shipmates on a world with a weird environment. It circles a red dwarf which, in turn, is captive of a blue giant. During his long trek to the north for relief from heat. Nils Kruger stumbles on a crashed glider and an alien pilot dying of thirst on an old lava flow. He saves the pilot's life, thereby starting a peculiar misunderstanding. Due to the knowledge the boy evinces concerning desert cacti, the alien assumes him to be indigenous to the planet, whereas the youth is equally certain that the creature is, like himself, a maroonee. The major portion of the story concerns their odyssey to the Ice Ramparts where the alien, Dar, must take his books. Two facts strike the boy: Dar's refusal to leave his books, and the alien's knowledge of the time of his own death. Equally incomprehensible to Dar is the uncertainty under which Nils must suffer about his death date. Clement is an adept at making outlandish concepts acceptable and logical. He is also expert at visualizing wonderfully imaginative environments. Sorrily, the story talks itself hoarse at the end, so that it falls quite short of Mission of Gravity. Chad Oliver. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., # T N sharp contrast to Hal Clem ent, Oliver peoples his cosmos with People. Of course, his being an anthropologist is a strong T# factor. However, as have many authors before him, he rationalizes the physiological reasons for universal ascendancy of the bipedal man-image. Like Clement's aliens, though, Oliver's aliens are as human as all get-out. Wes Chase, a doctor on a Rocky Mountain fishing escape from his L.A. practice and an unloving wife, gets kidnapped by a pasty-faced character with a potent hand weapon. He is held captive in a cave containing four bodies in niches while his captor painstakingly absorbs English. From that point on, the story rightly belongs to the Intruders. They're far more interesting than Doc Chase. They are looking for a world with a spaceship technology and we don't have it. However, there's much more to it than that. I urge your getting acquainted with as nice a crew of extraterrestrials as can be imagined. wald. Harper, N. Y., # NE of the most painstaking of the geological sciences is paleontology. In Man in Search of His Ancestors, reviewed some months ago, Andre Senet made a quick round of the various finds concerning the origin of the race. He was able to make it quick because of the startling paucity of relics. Von Koenigswald, one of the most eminent authorities, has been instrumental himself in unearthing unique finds in Java, near the site of the discovery by Dubois of Pithecanthropus erectus, for years the so-called "Missing Link." Because of a more complete skull dug up by the author. Pithecanthropus was found to be a true human. The author's biggest discovery, though, was an even earlier ancestor. Von Koenigswald has hunted Ancient Man all over Earth, even in the chemists' shops of China where dragon's teeth are to be procured. Some of these turned out to be from Gigantopithecus, an eight-foot giant. An unusual fact tossed out by the author is that there is still less known about the antecedents of the anthropoid apes than about our own -- there are greater differences between anthropoids and apes than between anthropoids and men! ed by Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press, N. Y., #  I ' HE latest in Editor Greenberg's "Adventures in Science Fiction" series is a collection of non-fiction articles, mainly from Asf of the late 'thirties and early 'forties. Several of them, particularly "Language for Time Travelers," by Sprague de Camp and "Geography for Time Travelers" by Willy Ley, have become classics. Although a goodly portion of them have been penned with tongue in cheek, there is an education to be gained in the reading. If you can read "Space War" by Ley, "Space War Tactics" by Malcolm Jameson or "Fuel for the Future" by Jack Hatcher without an ounce of incredulity, nothing can surprise you. frey Will arts and Ronald Searle. The Vanguard Press, N. Y., # TN actuality, this is not so much a guide as an escape. As numerous psychologists have stated, the only method by which many can come to terms with our modern age is in madness. In other words, there is method in madness, as any who open this book will quickly grant. If the reader is unfamiliar with Searle's art, he should not let it frighten him from the text, for that is equally mad. Frankly, I don't know what to make of this book, or, for that matter, it of me. by Norman J. Bowman. The A N authoritative reference book covering rocketry, guided missiles, etc., it contains numerous pages of data tables on individual rockets as well as # drawings of all the known types through #. Order direct from the publishers at # S. St. Louis St., Chicago #. Spinoza. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # has been available only in its original form. Since Spinoza hid his ideas in mathematical formulation through fear of religious persecution. The Ethics has been difficult reading. Dr. D. D. Runes has edited it to readability and supplied a stirring introduction.      Shadow World Of all the upsetting phenomena in the whole Galaxy, the most alarming was this: I had a little Shadow that went in and out with me! an hour or so of work on my sector model before Greasy got breakfast slopped together. When I came out of my tent, Benny, my Shadow, was waiting for me. Some of the other Shadows also were standing around, waiting for their humans, and the whole thing, if one stopped to think of it, was absolutely crazy. Except that no one ever stopped to think of it; we were used to it by now. Greasy had the cookshack stove fired up and smoke was curling from the chimney. I could hear him singing lustily amid the clatter of his pans. This was his noisy time. During the entire morning, he was noisy and obnoxious, but toward the middle of the afternoon, he turned mousy quiet. That was when he began to take a really dangerous chance and hit the peeper. There were laws which made it very rough on anyone who had a peeper. Mack Baldwin, the project superintendent, would have raised merry hell if he had known that Greasy had one. But I was the only one who knew it. I had found out by accident and not even Greasy knew I knew and I had kept my mouth shut. I said hello to Benny, but he didn't answer me. He never answered me; he had no mouth to answer with. I don't suppose he even heard me, for he had no ears. Those Shadows were a screwy lot. They had no mouths and they had no ears and they hadn't any noses. But they did have an eye, placed in the middle of the face, about where the nose would have been if they'd had noses. And that eye made up for the lack of ears and mouth and nose. It was about three inches in diameter and, strictly speaking, it wasn't built exactly like an eye; it had no iris or no pupil, but was a pool of light and shadow that kept shifting all around so it never looked the same. Sometimes it looked like a bowl of goop that was slightly on the spoiled side, and at other times it was hard and shining like a camera lens, and there were other times when it looked sad and lonely, like a mournful hound dog's eyes. sure, those Shadows. They looked mostly like a rag doll before any one had gotten around to painting in the features. They were humanoid and they were strong and active and I had suspected from the very first that they weren't stupid. There was some division of opinion on that latter point and a lot of the boys still thought of them as howling savages. Except they didn't howl -- they had no mouths to howl with. No mouths to howl or eat with, no nose to smell or breathe with, and no ears to hear with. Just on bare statistics, one would have put them down as plain impossible, but they got along all right. They got along just fine. They wore no clothes. On the point of modesty, there was no need of any. They were as bare of sexual characteristics as they were of facial features. They were just a gang of rag dolls with massive eyes in the middle of their faces. But they did wear what might have been a decoration or a simple piece of jewelry or a badge of Shadowhood. They wore a narrow belt, from which was hung a bag or sack in which they carried a collection of trinkets that jingled when they walked. No one had ever seen what was in those sacks. Cross straps from the belt ran over the shoulders, making the whole business into a simple harness, and at the juncture of the straps upon their chest was mounted a huge jewel. Intricately carved, the jewel sparkled like a diamond, and it might have been a diamond, but no one knew if it was or not. No one ever got close enough to see. Make a motion toward that jewel and the Shadow disappeared. That's right. Disappeared. I said hello to Benny and he naturally didn't answer and I walked around the table and began working on the model. Benny stood close behind me and watched me as I worked. He seemed to have a lot of interest in that model. He had a lot of interest in everything I did. He went everywhere I went. He was, after all, my Shadow. There was a poem that started out: I have a little shadow... I had thought about it often, but couldn't recall who the poet was or how the rest of it went. It was an old, old poem and I remembered I had read it when I was a kid. I could close my eyes and see the picture that went with the words, the brightly colored picture of a kid in his pajamas, going up a stairs with a candle in his hand and the shadow of him on the wall beyond the stairs. I took some satisfaction in Benny's interest in the sector model, although I was aware his interest probably didn't mean a thing. He might have been just as interested if I'd been counting beans. I spent more time on it than I had any right to. I had my name, Robert Emmett Drake, spelled out in full on the plaster base and the whole thing was a bit more ambitious than I originally had intended. I had let my enthusiasm run away with me and that was not too hard to understand. It wasn't every day that a conservationist got a chance to engineer from scratch an absolutely virgin Earth-type planet. The layout was only one small sector of the initial project, but it included almost all the factors involved in the entire tract and I had put in the works -- the dams and roads, the power sites and the mill sites, the timber management and the water-conservation features and all the rest of it. ! had just settled down to work when a commotion broke out down at the cookshack. I could hear Greasy cussing and the sound of thudding whacks. The door of the shack burst open and a Shadow came bounding out with Greasy just a leap behind him. Greasy had a frying pan and he was using it effectively, with a nifty backhand technique that was beautiful to see. He was laying it on the Shadow with every leap he took and he was yelling maledictions that were enough to curl one's hair. The Shadow legged it across the camp with Greasy close behind. Watching them, I thought how it was a funny thing that a Shadow would up and disappear if you made a motion toward its jewel, but would stay and take the kind of treatment Greasy was handing out with that frying pan. When they came abreast of my model table. Greasy gave up the chase. He was not in the best of condition. He stood beside the table and put both fists belligerently on his hips, so that the frying pan, which he still clutched, stood out at a right angle from his body. "I won't allow that stinker in the shack," he told me, wheezing and gasping. "It's bad enough to have him hanging around outside and looking in the windows. It's bad enough falling over him every time I turn around. I will not have him snooping in the kitchen; he's got his fingers into everything he sees. If I was Mack, I'd put the lug on all of them. I'd run them so fast, so far, that it would take them -- " "Mack's got other things to worry about," I told him rather sharply. "The project is way behind schedule, with all the breakdowns we've been having." "Sabotage," Greasy corrected me. "That's what it is. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. It's them Shadows, I tell you, sabotaging the machines. If it was left to me, I'd run them clear out of the country." "It's their country," I protested. "They were here before we came." "It's a big planet," Greasy said. "There are other parts of it they could live in." "But they have got a right here. This planet is their home." "They ain't got no homes," said Greasy. and walked back toward the shack. His Shadow, which had been standing off to one side all the time, hurried to catch up with him. It didn't look as if it had minded the pounding he had given it. But you could never tell what a Shadow was thinking. Their thoughts don't show on them. What Greasy had said about their not having any homes was a bit unfair. What he meant, of course, was that they had no village, that they were just a sort of carefree bunch of gypsies, but m to me the planet was their home and they had a right to go any place they wanted on it and use any part of it they wished. It should make no difference that they settled down on no particular spot, that they had no villages and possibly no shelters or that they raised no crops. Come to think of it, there was no reason why they should raise crops, for they had no mouths to eat with, and if they didn't eat, how could they keep on living and if... You see how it went. That was the reason it didn't pay to think too much about the Shadows. Once you started trying to get them figured out, you got all tangled up. I sneaked a quick look sidewise to see how Benny might be taking this business of Greasy beating up his pal, but Benny was just the same as ever. He was all rag doll. Men began to drift out of the tents and the Shadows galloped over to rejoin their humans, and everywhere a man 'might go, his Shadow tagged behind him. The project center lay there on its hilltop, and from where I stood beside my sector table, I could see it laid out like a blueprint come to life. Over there, the beginning of the excavation for the administration building, and there the gleaming stakes for the shopping center, and beyond the shopping center, the ragged, first-turned furrows that in time would become a street flanked by neat rows of houses. It didn't look much like a brave beginning on a brand-new world, but in a little while it would. It would even now, if we'd not run into so much hard luck. And whether that hard luck could be traced to the Shadows or to something else, it was a thing that must be faced and somehow straightened out. T?OR this was important. Here  was a world on which Man would not repeat the ancient, sad mistakes that he had made on Earth. On this, one of the few Earth-like planets found so far, Man would not waste the valuable resouces which he had let go down the drain on the old home planet. He'd make planned use of the water and the soil, of the timber and the minerals, and he'd be careful to put back as much as he took out. This planet would not be robbed and gutted as Earth had been. It would be used intelligently and operated like a well-run business. I felt good, just standing there, looking out across the valley and the plains toward the distant mountains, thinking what a fine home this would be for mankind. The camp was becoming lively now. Out in front of the tents, the men were washing up for breakfast and there was a lot of friendly shouting and a fair amount of horseplay. I heard considerable cussing down in the equipment pool and I knew exactly what was going on. The machines, or at least a part of them, had gone daffy again and half the morning would be wasted getting them repaired. It certainly was a funny deal, I thought, how those machines got out of kilter every blessed night. After a while. Greasy rang the breakfast bell and everyone dropped everything and made a dash for it and their Shadows hustled along behind them. I was closer to the cookshack than most of them and I am no slouch at sprinting, so I got one of the better seats at the big outdoor table. My place was just outside the cookshack door, where I'd get first whack at seconds when Greasy lugged them out. I went past Greasy on the run and he was grumbling and muttering the way he always was at chow, although sometimes I thought that was just a pose to hide his satisfaction at knowing his cooking still was fit to eat. I got a seat next to Mack, and a second later Rick Thorne, one of the equipment operators, grabbed the place on the other side of me. Across from me was Stan Carr, a biologist, and just down the table, on the other side, was Judson Knight, our ecologist. We wasted no time in small talk; we dived into the wheat cakes and the side pork and the fried potatoes. There is nothing in all the Universe like the morning air of Stella IV to hone an edge on the appetite. Finally we had enough of the edge off so we would waste time being civil. "It's the same old story again this morning," Thorne said bitterly to Mack. "More than half the equipment is all gummed up. It'll take hours to get it moving." into his mouth and chewed with unnecessary savagery. He shot an angry glance at Carr across the table. "Why don't you get it figured out?" he asked. "Me?" said Carr, in some astonishment. "Why should I be the one to get it figured out? I don't know anything about machines and I don't want to know. They're stupid contraptions at best." "You know what I mean," said Thorne. "The machines are not to blame. They don't gum up themselves. It's the Shadows and you're a biologist and them Shadows are your business and -- " "I have other things to do," said Carr. "I have this earthworm problem to work out, and as soon as that is done, Bob here wants me to run some habit-patterns on a dozen different rodents." "I wish you would," I said. "I have a hunch some of those little rascals may cause us a lot of trouble once we try our hand at crops. I'd like to know ahead of time what makes the critters tick." That was the way it went, I thought. No matter how many factors you might consider, there were always more of them popping up from under rocks and bushes. It seemed somehow that a man never quite got through the list. "It wouldn't be so bad," Thorne complained, "if the Shadows would leave us alone and let us fix the damage after they've done their dirty work. But not them. They breathe down our necks while we're making the repairs, and they've got their faces buried in those engines clear up to their shoulders, and every time you move, you bump into one of them. Someday," he said fiercely, "I'm going to take a monkey wrench and clear some space around me." "They're worried about what you're doing to their machines," said Carr. "The Shadows have taken over those machines just like they've adopted us." "That's what you think," Thorne said. "Maybe they're trying to find out about the machines," Carr declared. "Maybe they gum them up so that, when you go to fix them, they can look things over. They haven't missed a single part of any machine so far. You were telling me the other day it's a different thing wrong every time." Knight said, solemn as an owl: "I've been doing a lot of thinking about this situation." "Oh, you have," said Thorne, and the way he said it, you could see he figured that what Knight might think would cut no ice. "I've been seeking out some motive," Knight told him. "Because if the Shadows are the ones who are doing it, they'd have to have a motive. Don't you think so. Mack?" "Yeah, I guess so," said Mack. some reason," Knight went on, "those Shadows seem to like us. They showed up as soon as we set down and they've stayed with us ever since. The way they act, they'd like us to stay on and maybe they're wrecking the machines so we'll have to stay." "Or drive us away," Thorne answered. "That's all right," said Carr, "but why should they want us to stay? What exactly is it they like about us? If we could only get that one on the line, we might be able to do some bargaining with them." "Well, I wouldn't know," Knight admitted. "There might be a lot of different reasons." "Name just three of them," Thorne challenged him nastily. "Gladly," said Knight, and he said it as if he were slipping a knife into the left side of Thorne's gizzard. "They may be getting something from us, only don't ask' me what it is. Or they may be building us up to put the bite on us for something that's important. Or they may be figuring on reforming us, although just what's in us they object to, I can't faintly imagine. Or they may worship us. Or maybe it's just love." "Is that all?" asked Thorne. "Just a start," said Knight. "They may be studying us and they may need more time to get us puzzled out. They may be prodding us to get some reactions from us -- " "Studying us!" yelled Thorne, outraged. "Thesre just lousy savages!" "I don't think they are," Knight replied. "They don't wear any clothes," Thorne thundered, slamming the table with his fist. "They don't have any tools. They don't have a village. They don't know how to build a hut. They don't have any government. They can't even talk or hear." I was disgusted with Thorne. "Well, we got that settled," I said. "Let's go back to work." I got up off the bench, but I hadn't gone more than a step or two before a man came pounding down from the radio hut, waving a piece of paper in his hand. It was Jack Pollard, our communications man, who also doubled in brass as an electronics expert. "Mack!" he was hollering. "Hey, Mack!" Mack lumbered to his feet. Pollard handed him the paper. "It was coming in when Greasy blew the horn," he gasped. "I was having trouble getting it. Relayed a long way out." face turned hard and red. "What's the matter. Mack?" I wanted to know. "There's an inspector coming out," he said, and he choked on each and every word. He was all burned up. And maybe scared as well. "Is it likely to be bad?" "He'll probably can the lot of us," said Mack. "But he can't do that!" "That's what you think. We're six weeks behind schedule and this project is hotter than a pile. Earth's politicians have made a lot of promises, and if those promises don't pay off, there'll be hell to pay. Unless we can do something and do it fast, they'll bounce us out of here and send a new gang in." "But considering everything, we haven't done so badly," Carr said mildly. "Don't get me wrong," Mack told him. "The new gang will do no better, but there has to be some action for the record and we're the ones who'll get it in the neck. If we could lick this breakdown business, we might have a chance. If we could say to that inspector: 'Sure, we've had a spot of trouble, but we have it licked and now we're doing fine -- ' if we could say that to him, then we might save our hides." "You think it's the Shadows, Mack?" asked Knight. Mack reached up and scratched his head. "Must be them. Can't think of anything else." Somebody shouted from another table: "Of course it's them damn Shadows!" The men were getting up from their seats and crowding around. Mack held up his hands. "You guys get back to work. If any of you got some good ideas, come up to the tent and we'll talk them over." They started jabbering at him. "Ideas!" Mack roared. "I said ideas! Anyone that comes up without a good idea, I'll dock him for being off the job." They quieted down a little. "And another thing," said Mack. "No rough stuff on the Shadows. Just go along the way we always have. I'll fire the man who strongarms them." He said to me: "Let's go." I followed him, and Knight and Carr fell in beside me. Thorne didn't come. I had expected that he would. down at a table littered with blueprints and spec sheets and papers scribbled with figures and offhand diagrams. "I suppose," said Carr, "that it has to be the Shadows." "Some gravitational peculiarity?" suggested Knight. "Some strange atmospheric condition? Some space-warping quality?" "Maybe," said Mack. "It all sounds a bit far-fetched, but I'm ready to grab any straw you shove at me." "One thing that puzzles me," I put in, "is that the survey crew didn't mention Shadows. Survey believed the planet was uninhabited by any sort of intelligence. It found no signs of culture. And that was good, because it meant the project wouldn't get all tangled up with legalities over primal rights. And yet the minute we landed, the Shadows came galloping to meet us, almost as if they'd spotted us a long way off and were waiting for us to touch down." "Another funny thing," said Carr, "is how they paired off with us -- one Shadow to every man. Like they had it all planned out. Like they'd married us or something." "What are you getting at?" growled Mack. I said : "Where were the Shadows, Mack, when the survey gang was here? Can we be absolutely sure they're native to this planet?" "If they aren't native," demanded Mack, "how did they get here? They have no machines. They haven't even got tools." "There's another thing about that survey report," said Knight, "that I've been wondering about. The rest of you have read it -- " We nodded. We had not only read it, we had studied and digested it. We'd lived with it day and night on the long trip out to Stella IV. "The survey report told about some cone-shaped things," said Knight. "All sitting in a row, as if they might be boundary markers. But they never saw them except from a long way off. They had no idea what they were. They just wrote them off as something that had no real significance." "They wrote off a lot of things as having no significance," said Carr. "We aren't getting anywhere," Mack complained. "All we do is talk." "If we could talk to the Shadows," said Knight, "we might be getting somewhere." "We tried to talk to them and we couldn't raise a ripple. We tried sign language and we tried pantomime and we filled reams of paper with diagrams and drawings and we got exactly nowhere. Jack rigged up that electronic communicator and he tried it on them and they just sat and looked at us, all bright and sympathetic, with that one big eye of theirs, and that was all there was. We even tried telepathy -- " "You're wrong there. Mack," said Carr. "We didn't try telepathy, because we don't know a thing about it. All we did was sit in a circle, holding hands with them and thinking hard at them. And of course it was no good. They probably thought it was just a game." "Look," pleaded Mack, "that inspector will be here in ten days or so. We have to think of something. Let's get down to cases." "If we could run the Shadows off somehow," said Knight. "If we could scare them away -- " "You know how to scare a Shadow?" Mack asked, "You got any idea what they might be afraid of?" Knight shook his head. "Our first job," said Carr, "is to find out what a Shadow is like. We have to learn what kind of animal he is. He's a funny kind, we know. He doesn't have a mouth or nose or ears..." "He's impossible," Mack said. "There ain't no such animal." "He's alive," said Carr, "and doing very well. We have to find out how he gets his food, how he communicates, what tolerances he may have, what his responses are to various kinds of stimuli. We can't do a thing about the Shadows until we have some idea of what we're dealing with." Knight agreed with him. "We should have started weeks ago. We made a stab at it, of course, but our hearts were never in it. We were too anxious to get started on the project." Mack said bitterly: "Fat lot of good it did us." "Before you can examine one, you have to have a subject," I answered Knight. "Seems to me we should try to figure out how to catch a Shadow. Make a sudden move toward one and he disappears." But even as I said it, I knew that was not entirely right. I remembered how Greasy had chased his Shadow from the cook shack, lamming him with the frying pan. And I remembered something else and I had a hunch and got a big idea, but I was scared to say an#Tthing about it. I didn't even, for the moment, dare to let on to myself I had it. "We'd have to take one by surprise somehow and knock him out before he had a chance to disappear," Carr said. "And it has to be a sure way, for if we try it once and fail we've put the Shadows on their guard and we'll never have another chance." stuff. You can't go using violence until you know your until you have some idea how efficiently the thing that you are "No rough stuff," Carr agreed. "If a Shadow can bollix up the innards of some of those big earthmovers, I wouldn't like to see what he could do to a human body." "It's got to be fast and sure," said Knight, "and we can't even start until we know it is. If you hit one on the head with a baseball bat, would the bat bounce or would you crush the Shadow's skull? That's about the way it would be with everything we could think of at the moment." Carr nodded. "That's right. We can't use gas, because a Shadow doesn't breathe." "He might breathe through his pores," said Knight. "Sure, but we'd have to know before we tried using gas. We might jab a hypo into one, but what would you use in the hypo? First you'd have to find something that would knock a Shadow out. You might try hypnotism -- " "I'd doubt hypnotism," said Knight. "How about Doc?" I asked. "If we could knock out a Shadow, would Doc give him a going over? If I know Doc, he'd raise a lot of hell. Claim the Shadow was an intelligent being and that it would be in violation of medical ethics to examine one without first getting its consent." "You get one," Mack promised grimly, "and I'll handle Doc." "He'll do a lot of screaming." "I'll handle Doc," repeated Mack. "This inspector is going to be here in a week or so -- " "We wouldn't have to have it all cleared up," said Knight. "If we could show the inspector that we had a good lead, that we were progressing, he might play ball with us." I was seated with my back to the entrance of the tent and I heard someone fumbling with the canvas. Mack said: "Come in. Greasy. Got something on your mind?" Greasy walked in and came up to the table. He had the bottom of his apron tucked into his trouser band, the way he always did when he wasn't working, and he held something in his hand. He tossed it on the table. It was one of the bags that the Shadows carried at their belts! We all sucked in our breath and Mack's hair fairly stood on end. "Where did you get this?" he demanded. "Off my Shadow, when he wasn't looking." "When he wasn't looking!" "Well, you see, it was this way. Mack. That Shadow is always into things. I stumble over him everywhere I go. And this morning he had his head halfway into the dishwasher and that bag was hanging on his belt, so I grabbed up a butcher knife and just whacked it off." A S Mack got up and pulled himself to his full height, you could see it was hard for him to keep his hands off Greasy. "So that was all you did," he said in a low, dangerous voice. "Sure," said Greasy. "There was nothing hard about it." "All you've done is spill the beans to them! All you've done is made it almost impossible -- " "Maybe not," Knight interrupted in a hurry. "Now that the damage has been done," said Carr, "we might as well have a look. Maybe there's a clue inside that bag." "I can't open it," grumbled Greasy. "I tried every way I know. There's no way to open it." "And while you were trying to open it," asked Mack, "what was the Shadow doing?" "He didn't even notice. He had his head inside that washer. He's as stupid as -- " "Don't say that! I don't want anyone thinking a Shadow's stupid. Maybe they are, but there's no sense believing it until we're sure." Knight had picked up the bag and was turning it around and around in his hand. Whatever was inside was jingling as he turned and twisted it. "Greasy's right," he said. "I don't see any way to get it open." "You get out of here!" Mack roared at Greasy. "Get back to your work. Don't you ever make another move toward any of the Shadows." Greasy turned around and left, but he was no more than out of the tent when he gave a yelp that was enough to raise your scalp. I almost knocked the table over getting out of there to see what was going on. What was happening was no more than plain solemn justice. Greasy was running for all he was worth, and behind him was the Shadow with a frying pan, and every jump that Greasy took, the Shadow let him have it, and was every bit as good with that frying pan as Greasy was. Greasy was weaving and circling, trying to head back for the cookshack, but each time the Shadow got him headed off and went on chasing him. Everyone had stopped work to watch. Some of them were yelling advice to Greasy and some of the others were cheering on the Shadow. I'd have liked to stay and watch, but I knew that if I was going to put my hunch into execution, I'd never have a better chance to do it. So I turned and walked swiftly down the street to my own tent and ducked inside and got a specimen bag and came out again. I saw that Greasy was heading for the equipment pool and that the Shadow still was one long stride behind. Its arm was holding up well, for the frying pan never missed a lick. and, at the door, I stopped and looked back. Greasy was shinnying up the derrick of a shovel and the Shadow was standing at the bottom, waving the frying pan as though daring him to come down and take it like a man. Everyone else was running toward the scene of action and there was no one, I was sure, who had noticed me. So I opened the cookshack door and stepped inside. The dishwasher was chugging away and everything was peaceable and quiet. I was afraid I might have trouble finding what I was looking for, but I found it in the third place I looked -- underneath the mattress on Greasy's bunk. I pulled the peeper out and slipped it in the bag and got out of there as fast as I could go. Stopping at my tent, I tossed the bag into a corner and threw some old clothes over it and then went out again.  I "HE commotion had ended. The shadow was walking back toward the cookshack, with the pan tucked underneath its arm, and Greasy was climbing down off the shovel. The men were all gathered around the shovel, making a lot of noise, and I figured that it would take a long, long time for Greasy to live down what had happened. Although, I realized, he had it coming to him. I went back into Mack's tent and found the others there. All three of them were standing beside the table, looking down at what lay there upon the surface. The bag had disappeared and had left behind a little pile of trinkets. Looking at the pile, I could see that they were miniatures of frying pans and kettles and all the other utensils that Greasy worked with. And there, half protruding out of the pile, was a little statuette of Greasy. I reached out a hand and picked up the statuette. There was no mistaking it -- it was Greasy to a T. It was made of some sort of stone, as if it might have been a carving, and was delicate beyond all belief. Squinting closely, I could even see the lines on Greasy's face. "The bag just went away," said Knight. "It was lying here when we dashed out, and when we came back, it was gone and all this junk was lying on the table." "I don't understand," Carr said. And he was right. None of us did. "I don't like it," Mack said slowly. I didn't like it, either. It raised too many questions in my head and some of them were resolving into some miserable suspicions. "They're making models of our stuff," said Knight. "Even down to the cups and spoons." "I wouldn't mind that so much," Carr said. "It's the model of Greasy that gives me the jitters." fTVr OW let's sit down," Mack ' told us, " and not go off on any tangents. This is exactly the sort of thing we could have expected." "What do you mean?" I prompted. "What do we do when we find an alien culture? We do just what the Shadows are doing. Different way, but the same objective. We try to find out all we can about this alien culture. And don't you ever forget that, to the Shadows, we're not only an alien culture, but an invading alien culture. So if they had any sense at all, they'd make it their business to find out as much about us as they could in the shortest time." That made sense, of course. But this making of models seemed to be carrying it beyond what was necessary. And if they had made models of Greasy's cups and spoons, of the dishwasher and the coffee pot, then they had other models, too. They had models of the earthmovers and the shovels and the dozers and all the rest of it. And if they had a model of Greasy, they had models of Mack and Thorne and Carr and all the rest of the crew, including me. Just how faithful would those models be? How much deeper would they go than mere external appearances? I tried to stop thinking of it. for I was doing little more than scaring myself stiff. But I couldn't stop. I went right on thinking. They had been gumming up equipment so that the mechanics had to rip the machines all apart to get them going once again. There seemed no reason in the world why the Shadows should be doing that, except to find out what the innards of those machines were like. I wondered if the models of the equipment might not be faithful not only so far as the outward appearance might go, but faithful as well on the most intricate construction of the entire machine. And if that was true, was that faithfulness also carried out in the Greasy statuette? Did it have a heart and lungs, blood vessels and brain and nerve? Might it not also have the very essence of Greasy's character, the kind of animal he was, what his thoughts and ethics might be? I don't know if, at that very moment, the others were thinking the same thing, but the looks on their faces argued that they might have been. Mack put out a finger and stirred the contents of the pile, scattering the miniatures all about the tabletop. Then his hand darted out and picked up something and his face went red with anger. Knight asked: "What is it, Mack?" "A peeper!" said Mack, his words rasping in his throat. "There's a model of a peeper!" A ll of us sat and stared and I could feel the cold sweat breaking out on me. "If Greasy has a peeper," Mack said woodenly, "I'll break his scrawny neck." "Take it easy. Mack," said Carr. "You know what a peeper is?" "Sure, I know what a peeper is." "You ever see what a peeper does to a man who used one?" "No, I never did." "I have." Mack threw the peeper model back on the table and turned and went out of the tent. The rest of us followed him. Greasy was coming down the street, with some of the men following along behind, kidding him about the Shadow treeing him. Mack put his hands on his hips and waited. Greasy got almost to us. "Greasy!" said Mack. "Yes, Mack." "You hiding out a peeper?" Greasy blinked, but he never hesitated. "No, sir," he said, lying like a trooper. "I wouldn't rightly know one if somebody should point it out to me. I've heard of them, of course." "I'll make a bargain with you," said Mack. "If you have one, just hand it over to me and I'll bust it up and fine you a full month's wages and that's the last that we'll say about it. But if you lie to me and we find you have one hidden out. I'll can you off the job." I held my breath. I didn't like what was going on and I thought what a lousy break it was that something like this should happen just when I had swiped the peeper. Although I was fairly sure that no one had seen me sneak into the cookshack -- at least I didn't think they had. Greasy was stubborn. He shook his head. "I haven't got one. Mack." Mack's face got hard. "All right. We'll go down and see." He headed for the cookshack and Knight and Carr went along with him, but I headed for my tent. It would be just like Mack, when he didn't find the peeper in the cookshack, to search the entire camp. If I wanted to stay out of trouble, I knew, I'd better be zipping out of camp and take the peeper with me. the tent, waiting for me. He helped me get the roller out and then I took the specimen bag with the peeper in it and stuffed it in the roller's carrying bag. I got on the roller and Benny jumped on the carrier behind me and sat there showing off, balancing himself -- like a kid riding a bicycle with no hands. "You hang on," I told him sharply. "If you fall off this time, I won't stop to pick you up." I am sure he didn't hear me, but however that may be, he put his arms around my waist and we were off in a cloud of dust. Until you've ridden on a roller, you haven't really lived. It's like a roller coaster running on the level. But it is fairly safe and it gets you there. It's just two big rubber doughnuts with an engine and a seat and it could climb a barn if you gave it half a chance. It's too rambunctious for civilized driving, but it is just the ticket for an alien planet. We set off across the plain toward the distant foothills. It was a fine day, but for that matter, every day was fine on Stella IV. It was an ideal planet. Earthlike, with good weather nearly all the time, crammed with natural resources, free of vicious animal life or deadly virus -- a planet that virtually pleaded for someone to come and live on it. And in time there'd be people here. Once the administration center was erected, the neat rows of houses had been built, once the shopping center had been installed, the dams built, the power plant completed -- then there would be people. And in the years to come, sector by sector, project community by community, the human race would spread across the planet's face. But it would spread in an orderly progression. Here there would be no ornery misfits slamming out on their own, willy-nilly, into the frontier land of wild dream and sudden death; no speculators, no strikeit-rich, no go-for-broke. Here there would be no frontier, but a systematic taking over. And here, for once, a planet would be treated right. But there was more to it than that, I told myself. If Man was to keep going into space, he would have to accept the responsibility of making proper use of the natural resources that he found there. Just" because there might be a lot of them was no excuse for wasting them. We were no longer children and we couldn't gut every world as we had gutted Earth. By the time an intelligence advances to a point where it can conquer space, it must have grown up. And now it was time for the human race to prove that it was adult. We couldn't go ravaging out into the Galaxy like a horde of greedy children. Here on this planet, it seemed to me, was one of the many proving grounds on which the race of Man must stand and show its worth. Y'ET if we were to get the job done, if we were to prove anything at all, there was another problem that first must be met and solved. If it was the Shadows that were causing all our trouble, then somehow we must put a stop to it. And not merely put a stop to it, but understand the Shadows and their motives. For how can anybody fight a thing, I asked myself, that he doesn't understand? And to understand the Shadows, we'd agreed back in the tent, we had to know what kind of critters they might be. And before we could find that out, we had to grab off one for examination. And that first grab had to be perfect, for if we tried and failed, if we put them on their guard, there'd be no second chance. But the peeper, I told myself, might give us at least one free try. If I tried the peeper and it didn't work, no one would be the wiser. It would be a failure that would go unnoticed. Benny and I crossed the plain on the roller and headed into the foothills. I made for a place that I called the Orchard, not because it was a formal orchard, but because there were a lot of fruitbearing trees in the areas. As soon as I got around to it, I was planning to run tests to see if any of the fruit might be fit for human food. We reached the Orchard and I parked the roller and looked around. I saw immediately that something had happened. When I had been there just a week or so before, the trees had been loaded with fruit and it seemed to be nearly ripe, but now it all was gone. I peered underneath the trees to see if the fruit had fallen off and it hadn't. It looked for all the world as if someone had come in and picked it. I wondered if the Shadows had done the picking, but even as I thought it, I knew it couldn't be. The Shadows didn't eat. I didn't get the peeper out right away, but sat down beneath a tree and sort of caught my breath and did a little thinking. From where I sat, I could see the camp and I wondered what Mack had done when he hadn't found the peeper. I could imagine he'd be in a towering rage. And I could imagine Greasy, considerably relieved, but wondering just the same what had happened to the peeper and perhaps rubbing it into Mack a little how he had been wrong. I got the feeling that maybe it would be just as well if I stayed away a while. At least until mid-afternoon. By that time, perhaps. Mack would have cooled off a little. And I thought about the Shadows. Lousy savages, Thorne had said. Yet they were far from savages. They were perfect gentlemen (or ladies, God knows which they were, if either) and your genuine savage is no gentleman on a number of very fundamental points. The Shadows were clean in body, healthy and wellmannered. They had a certain cultural poise. They were, more than anything else, like a group of civilized campers, but unencumbered by the usual camp equipment. over -- there could be no doubt of that. They were learning all they could of us and why did they want to know? What use could they make of pots and pans and earthmovers and all the other things? Or were they merely taking our measure before they clobbered us? And there were all the other questions, too. Where did they hang out? How did they disappear, and when they disappeared, where did they go? How did they eat and breathe? How did they communicate? Come right down to it, I admitted to myself, the Shadows undoubtedly knew a great deal more about us than we knew about them. Because when you tried to chalk up what we knew about them, it came out to almost exactly nothing. I sat under the tree for a while longer, with the thoughts spinning in my head and not adding up. Then I got to my feet and went over to the roller and got out the peeper. It was the first time I'd ever had one in my hands and I was interested and slightly apprehensive. For a peeper was nothing one should monkey with. It was a simple thing to look at -- like a lopsided pair of binoculars, with a lot of selector knobs on each side and on the top of it. You looked into it and you twisted the knobs until you had what you wanted and then there was a picture. You stepped into the picture and you lived the life you found there -- the sort of life you picked by the setting of the knobs. And there were many lives to pick from, for tions that could be set up on the knobs and the factors ranged from the lightest kind of frippery to the most abysmal horror. The peeper was outlawed, naturally -- it was worse than alcoholism, worse than dope, the most insidious vice that had ever hit mankind. It threw psychic hooks deep into the soul and tugged forevermore. When a man acquired the habit, and it was easy to acquire, there was no getting over it. He'd spend the rest of his life trying to sort out his life from all the fantasied ones, getting further and further from reality all the while, till nothing was real any rnore. I squatted down beside the roller and tried to make some sense out of the knobs. There were thirty-nine of them, each numbered from one to thirtynine, and I wondered what the numbering meant. Benny came over and hunkered down beside me, with one shoulder touching mine, and watched what I was doing. bering, but pondering did no good. There was only one way to find out what I was looking for. So I set all the knobs back to zero on the graduated scales, then twisted No. I up a notch or two. I knew that was not the way to work a peeper. In actual operation, one would set a number of the knobs at different settings, mixing in the factors in different proportions to make up the kind of life that one might want to sample. But I wasn't after a life. What I wanted to find out was what factor each of the knobs controlled. So I set No. I up a notch or two and lifted the peeper and fitted it to my face and I was back again in the meadow of my boyhood -- a meadow that was green as no meadow ever was before, with a sky as blue as oldtime watered silk and with a brook and butterflies. And more than that -- a meadow that lay in a day that would never end, a place that knew no time, and a sunlight that was the bright glow of boyish happiness. I knew exactly how the grass would feel beneath bare feet and I could remember how the sunlight would bounce off the windripples of the brook. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my entire life, but I snatched the peeper from my eyes. I squatted there, with the peeper cradled in my lap. My hands were unsteady, longing to lift the peeper so I could look once again at that scene out of a long-lost boyhood, but I made myself not do it. No. I was not the knob I wanted, so I turned it back to zero and, since No. I was about as far away as one could imagine from what I was looking for, I turned knob # up a notch or two. I lifted the peeper halfway to my face and then I turned plain scared. I put it down again until I could get a good grip on my courage. Then I lifted it once more and stuck my face straight into a horror that reached out and tried to drag me in. I can't describe it. Even now, I cannot recall one isolated fragment of what I really saw. Rather than seeing, it was pure impression and raw emotion -- a sort of surrealistic representation of all that is loathsome and repellent, and yet somehow retaining a hypnotic fascination that forbade retreat. Shaken, I snatched the peeper from my face and sat frozen. For a moment, my mind was an utter blank, with stray wisps of horror streaming through it. Then the wisps gradually cleared away and I was squatting once again on the hillside with the Shadow hunkered down beside me, his shoulder touching mine. It was a terrible thing, I thought, an act no human could bring himself to do, even to a Shadow. Just turned up a notch or two, it was terrifying; turned on full power, it would twist one's brain. B enny reached out a hand to take the peeper from me. I jerked it away from him. But he kept on pawing for it and that gave me time to think. This, I told myself, was exactly the way I had wanted it to be. All that was different was that Benny, by his nosiness, was making it easy for me to do the very thing I'd planned. I thought of all that depended on our getting us a Shadow to examine. And I thought about my job and how it would bust my heart if the inspector should come come out and fire us and send in another crew. There just weren't planets lying around every day in the week to be engineered. I might never get another chance. So I put out my thumb and shoved knob # to its final notch and let Benny have the peeper. And even as I gave it to him, I wondered if it would really work or if I'd just had a pipedream. It might not work, I thought, for it was a human mechanism, designed for human use, keyed to the human nervous system and response. Then I knew that I was wrong, that the peeper did not operate by virtue of its machinery alone, but by the reaction of the brain and the body of its user -- that it was no more than a trigger mechanism to set loose the greatness and the beauty and the horror that lay within the user's brain. And horror, while it might take a different shape and form, appear in a different guise, was horror for a Shadow as well as for a human. Benny lifted the peeper to that great single eye of his and thrust his head forward to fit into the viewer. Then I saw his body jerk and stiffen and I caught him as he toppled and eased him to the ground. I stood there above him and felt the triumph and the pride -- and perhaps a little pity, too -- that it should be necessary to do a thing like this to a guy like Benny. To play a trick like this on my Shadow who had sat, just moments ago, with his shoulder touching mine. I knelt down and turned him over. He didn't seem so heavy and I was glad of that, because I'd have to get him on the roller and then make a dash for camp, going as fast as I could gun the roller, because there was no telling how long Benny would stay knocked out. I picked up the peeper and stuck it back into the roller's bag, then hunted for some rope or wire to tie Benny on so he would not fall off. I don't know if I heard a noise or not. I'm half inclined to think that there wasn't any noise -- that it was some sort of built-in alarm system that made me turn around. Benny was sagging in upon himself and I had a moment of wild panic, thinking that he might be dead, that the shock of the horror that leaped out of the peeper at him had been too much for him to stand. And I remembered what Mack had said: "Never kill a thing until you have figured out just how efficiently it may up and kill you back." If Benny was dead, then we might have all hell exploding in our laps. TF he was dead, though, he sure was acting funny. He was sinking in and splitting at a lot of different places, and he was turning to what looked like dust, but wasn't dust, and then there wasn't any Benny. There was just the harness with the bag and the jewel and then there wasn't any bag, but a handful of trinkets lying on the ground where the bag had been. And there was something else. There still was Benny's eye. The eye was a part of a cone that had been in Benny's head. I recalled how the survey party had seen other cones like that, but had not been able to get close to them. I was too scared to move. I stood and looked and there were a lot of goose pimples rising on my hide. For Benny was no alien. Benny was no more than the proxy of some other alien that we had never seen and could not even guess at. All sorts of conjectures went tumbling through my brain, but they were no more than panicpictures, and they flipped off and on so fast, I couldn't settle on any one of them. But one thing was clear as day -- the cleverness of this alien for which the Shadows were the front. Too clever to confront us with anything that was more than remotely human in its shape -- a thing for which we could feel pity or contempt or perhaps exasperation, but something that would never rouse a fear within us. A pitiful little figure that was a caricature of our shape and one that was so stupid that it couldn't even talk. And one that was sufficiently alien to keep us puzzled and stump us on so many basic points that we would, at last, give up in sheer bewilderment any attempts that we might make to get it puzzled out. I threw a quick glance over my shoulder and kept my shoulders hunched, and if anything had moved, I'd have run like a frightened rabbit. But nothing moved. Nothing even rustled. There was nothing to be afraid of except the thoughts within my head. But I felt a frantic urge to get out of there and I went down on my hands and knees and began to gather what was left of Benny. I scooped up the pile of trinkets and the jewel and dumped them in the bag along with the peeper. Then I went back and picked up the cone, with the one eye looking at me, but I could see that the eye was dead. The cone was slippery and it didn't feel like metal, but it was heavy and hard to get a good grip on and I had quite a time with it. But I finally got it in the bag and started out for camp. I went like a bat winging out of hell. Fear was roOsting on one shoulder and I kept that roller wheeling. headed for Mack's tent, but before I got there, I found what looked like the entire project crew working at the craziest sort of contraption one would ever hope to see. It was a mass of gears and cams and wheels and chains and whatnot, and it sprawled over what, back home, would have been a good-sized lot, and there was no reason I could figure for building anything like that. I saw Thorne standing off to one side and superintending the work, yelling first at this one and then at someone else, and I could see that he was enjoying himself. Thorne was that kind of bossy jerk. I stopped the roller beside him and balanced it with one leg. "What's going on?" I asked him. "We're giving them something to get doped out," he said. "We're going to drive them crazy." "Them? You mean the Shadows?" "They want information, don't they?" Thorne demanded. "They've been underfoot day and night, always in the way, so now we give them something to keep them occupied." "But what does it do?" Thorne spat derisively. "Nothing. That's the beauty of it." "Well," I said, "I suppose you know what you're doing. Does Mack know what's going on?" "Mack and Carr and Knight are the big brains that thought it up," said Thorne. "I'm just carrying out orders." I went on to Mack's tent and parked the roller there and I knew that Mack was inside, for I heard a lot of arguing. I took the carrier bag and marched inside the tent and pushed my way up to the table and, up-ending the sack, emptied the whole thing on the tabletop. And I plumb forgot about the peeper being in there with all the other stuff. There was nothing I could do about it. The peeper lay naked on the table and there was a terrible silence and I could see that in another second Mack would blow his jets. He sucked in his breath to roar, but I beat him to it. "Shut up. Mack!" I snapped. "I don't want to hear a word from you!" I must have caught him by surprise, for he let his breath out slowly, looking at me funny while he did it, and Carr and Knight were just slightly frozen in position. The tent was deathly quiet. "That was Benny," I said, motioning at the tabletop. "That is all that's left of him. A look in the peeper did it." "But the peeper! We looked everywhere -- " "I knew Greasy had it and I stole it when I got a hunch." "Remember, we were talking about how to catch a Shadow -- " "I'm going to bring charges against you!" howled Mack. "I'm going to make an example out of you! I'm going to -- " "You're going to shut up," I said at him. "You're going to stay quiet and listen or I'll heave you out of here tin cup over appetite." "Please!" begged Knight. "Please, gentlemen, let's act civilized." And that was a hot one -- him calling us gentlemen. "It seems to me," said Carr, "that the matter of the peeper is somewhat immaterial if Bob has turned it to some useful purpose." "Let's all sit down," Knight urged, "and maybe count to ten. Then Bob can tell us what is on his mind." It was a good suggestion. We all sat down and I told them what had happened. They sat there listening, looking at all that junk on the table and especially at the cone, for it was lying on its side at one end of the table, where it had rolled, and it was looking at us with that dead and fishy eye. "Those Shadows," I finished up, "aren't alive at all. They're just some sort of spy rig that something else is sending out. All we need to do is lure the Shadows off, one by one, and let them look into the peeper with knob # set full and -- " "It's no permanent solution," said Knight. "Fast as we destroyed them, there'd be other ones sent out." I shook my head. "I don't think so. No matter how good that alien race may be, they can't control those Shadows just by mental contact. My bet is that there are machines involved, and when we destroy a Shadow, it would be my hunch that we knock out a machine. And if we knock out enough of them, we'll give those other people so much headache that they may come out in the open and we can dicker with them." "I'm afraid you're wrong," Knight answered. "This other race keeps hidden, I'd say, for some compelling reason. Maybe they have developed an underground civilization and never venture on the surface bcause it's a hostile environment to them. But maybe they keep track of what is doing on the surface by means of these cones of theirs. And when we showed up, they rigged the cones to look like something slightly human, something they felt sure we would accept, and sent them out to get a good close look." rubbed them back and forth across his head. "I don't like this hiding business. I like things out in the open where I can take a swipe at them and they can take a swipe at me. I'd have liked it a whole lot better if the Shadows had really been the aliens." "I don't go for your underground race," Carr said to Knight. "It doesn't seem to me you could produce such a civilization if you lived underground. You'd be shut away from all the phenomena of nature. You wouldn't -- " "All right," snapped Knight, "what's youT idea?" "They might have matter transmission -- in fact, we know they do -- whether by machine or mind, and that would mean that they'd never have to travel on the surface of the planet, but could transfer from place to place in the matter of a second. But they still would need to know what was going on, so they'd have their eyes and ears like a TV radar system -- " "You jokers are just talking round in circles," objected Mack. "You don't know what the score is." "I supjKJse you do," Knight retorted. "No, I don't," said Mack. "But I'm honest enough to say straight out I don't." "I think Carr and Knight are too involved," I said. "These aliens might be hiding only until they find out what we're like -- whether they can trust us or if it would be better to run us off the planet." "Well," said Knight, "no matter how you figure it, you've got to admit that they probably know practically all there is to know about us -- our technology and our purpose and what kind of animals we are and they probably have picked up our language." "They know too much," said Mack. "I'm getting scared." There was a scrabbling at the flap and Thorne stuck in his head. "Say, Mack," he said, "I got a good idea. How about setting up some guns in that contraption out there? When the Shadows crowd around -- " "No guns," Knight said firmly. "No rockets. No electrical traps. You do just what we told you. Produce all the useless motion you can. Get it as involved and as flashy as possible. But let it go at that." Thorne withdrew sulkily. iV don't expect it to last too long, but it may keep them occupied for a week or so while we get some work done. When it begins to wear off, we'll fix up something else." It was all right, I suppose, but it didn't sound too hot to me. At the best, it bought a little time and nothing more. It bought a little time, that is, if we could fool the Shadows. Somehow, I wasn't sure that we could fool them much. Ten to one, they'd spot the contraption as a phony the minute it was set in motion. Mack got up and walked around the table. He lifted the cone and tucked it beneath one arm. "I'll take this down to the shop," he said. "Maybe the boys can find out what it is." "I can tell you now," said Carr. "It's what the aliens use to control the Shadows. Remember the cones the survey people saw? This is one of them. My guess is that it's some kind of a signal device that can transmit data back to base, wherever that might be." "No matter," Mack said. "We'll cut into it and see what we can find." "And the peeper?" I asked. "I'll take care of that." I reached out a hand and picked it up. "No, you won't. You're just the kind of bigot who would take it out and smash it." "It's illegal," Mack declared. Carr sided with me. "Not any more. It's a tool now -- a weapon that we can use." I handed it to Carr. "You take care of it. Put it in a good safe place. We may need it again before all this is over." I gathered the junk that had been in Benny's bag and picked up the jewel and dropped it into a pocket of my coat. Mack went out with the cone underneath his arm. The rest of us drifted outside the tent and stood there, just a little footloose now that the excitement was all over. "He'll have Greasy's hide," worried Knight. "I'll talk to him," Carr said. "I'll make him see that Greasy may have done us a service by sneaking the thing out here." "I suppose," I said, "I should tell Greasy what happened to the peeper." Knight shook his head. "Let him sweat a while. It will do him good." do some paper work, but I couldn't get my mind to settle down on it. I guess I was excited and I'm afraid that I missed Benny and I was tangled up with wondering just what the situation was, so far as the Shadows were concerned. We had named them well, all right, for they were little more than shadows -- meant to shadow us. But even knowing they were just camouflaged spy rigs, I still found it hard not to think of them as something that was alive. They were no more than cones, of course, and the cones probably were no more than observation units for those hidden people who hung out somewhere on the planet. For thousands of years, perhaps, the cones had been watching while this race stayed in hiding somewhere. But maybe more than watching. Maybe the cones were harvesters and planters -- perhaps hunters and trappers -- bringing back the plunder of the wilds to their hidden masters. More than likely, it had been the cones that had picked all the Orchard fruit. And if there was a culture here, if another race had primal rights upon the planet, then what did that do to the claims that Earth might make? Did it mean we might be forced to relinquish this planet, after all -- one of the few Earthlike planets found in years of exploration? I sat at my desk and thought about the planning and the work and the money that had gone into this project, which, even so, was no more than a driblet compared to what eventually would be spent to make this into another Earth. Even on this project center, we'd made no more than an initial start. In a few more weeks, the ships would begin bringing in the steel mill and that in itself was a tremendous task -- to bring it in, assemble it, mine the ore to get it going and finally to put it into operation. But simpler and easier, infinitely so, than freighting out from Earth all the steel that would be needed to build this project alone. We couldn't let it go down the drain. After all the years, after all the planning and the work, in face of Earth's great need for more living space, we could not give up Stella IV. And yet we could not deny primal rights. If these beings, when they finally showed themselves, would say that they didn't want us here, then there would be no choice. We would simply have to clear out. But before they threw us out, of course, they would steal us blind. Much of what we had would undoubtedly be of little value to them, but there would be some of it that they could use. No race can fail to enrich itself and its culture by contact with another. And the contact that these aliens had established was a completely one-sided bargain -- the exchange flowed only in their direction. They were, I told myself, just a bunch of cosmic sharpers. in Benny's bag out of my pocket and spread it on the desk and began to sort it out. There was the sector model and the roller and the desk and my little row of books and the pocket chess set and all the other stuff that belonged to me. There was all the stuff but me. Greasy's Shadow had carried a statuette of Greasy, but I found none of me and I was a little sore at Benny. He could have gone to the extra effort to have made a statuette of me. I rolled the things around on the desk top with a finger and wondered once again just how deeply they went. Might they not be patterns rather than just models? Perhaps, I told myself, letting my imagination run away with me, perhaps each of these little models carried in some sort of code a complete analysis and description of whatever the article might be. A human, making a survey or an analysis, would write a sheaf of notes, would capture the subject matter in a page or two of .symbols. Maybe these little models were the equivalent of a human notebook, the aliens' way of writing. And I wondered how they wrote, how they made the models, but there wasn't any answer. I gave up trying to work and went out of the tent and climbed up the little rise to where Thorne and the men were building their flytrap for the Shadows. They had put a lot of work and ingenuity into it and it made no sense at all -- which, after all, was exactly what it was meant to do. If we could get the Shadows busy enough trying to figure out what this new contraption was, maybe they'd leave us alone long enough to get some work done. Thorne and his crew had gotten half a doien replacement motors out of the shop and had installed those to be used as power. Apparently they had used almost all the spare equipment parts they could find, for there were shafts and gears and cams and all sorts of other things all linked together in a mindless pattern. And here and there they had set up what looked like control boards, except, of course, that they controlled absolutely nothing, but were jammed with flashers and all sorts of other gimmicks until they looked like Christmas trees. I stood around and watched until Greasy rang the dinner bell, then ran a foot race with all the others to get to the tables. There was a lot of loud talk and joking, but no one wasted too much time eating. They bolted their food and hurried back to the flytrap. going and it was the screwiest mass of meaningless motion that anyone had ever seen. Shafts were gears, it seemed, were meshing, and cams were wobbling with their smooth, irregular strokes, and pistons were going up and down and up and down. It was all polished bright and it worked slicker than a whistle and it was producing nothing except motion, but it had a lot of fascination -- even for a human. I T# found myself standing rooted in one spot, marveling at the smoothness and precision and the remorseless non-purpose of the weird contraption. And all the time the fake control boards were sparkling and flashing with the lamps popping on and off, in little jagged runs and series, and you got dizzy watching them, trying to make some pattern out of them. The Shadows had been standing around and gaping ever since work had started on the trap, but now they crowded closer and stood in a tight and solemn ring around the thing and they never moved. I turned around and Mack was just behind me. He was rubbing his hands in satisfaction and his face was all lit up with smiles. "Pretty slick," he said. I agreed with him, but I had some doubts that I could not quite express. "We'll string up some lights," said Mack, "so they can see it day and night and then we'll have them pegged for good." "You think they'll stay with it?" I asked. "They won't catch on?" "Not a chance." I went down to my tent and poured myself a good stiff drink, then sat down in a chair in front of the tent. Some of the men were stringing cable and others were rigging up some batteries of lights and down in the cookshack I could hear Greasy singing, but the song was sad. I felt sorry for Greasy. Mack might be right, I admitted to myself. We might have built a trap that would cook the Shadows' goose. If nothing else, the sheer fascination of all that motion might keep them stuck there. It had a hypnotic effect even for a human and one could never gauge what effect it might have on an alien mind. Despite the evident technology of the aliens, it was entirely possible that their machine technology might have developed along some divergent line, so that the spinning wheel and the plunging piston and the smooth fluid gleam of metal was new to them. I tried to imagine a machine technology that would require no motion, but such a thing was entirely inconceivable to me. And for that very reason, I thought, the idea of all this motion might be just as inconceivable to an alien intellect. stars came out while I sat there and no one wandered over to gab and that was fine. I was just as satisfied to be left alone. After a time, I went into the tent, had another drink and decided to go to bed. I took off my coat and slung it on the desk. When it hit, there was a thump, and as soon as I heard that thump, I knew what it was. I had dropped Benny's jewel into the pocket of the coat and had then forgotten it. I fished into the pocket and got out the jewel, fearing all the while that I had broken it. And there was something wrong with it -- it had somehow come apart. The jewel face had come loose from the rest of it and I saw that the jewel was no more than a cover for a box-shaped receptacle. I put it on the desk and swung the jewel face open and there, in-' side the receptacle, I found myself. The statuette was nestled inside a weird piece of mechanism and it was as fine a piece of work as Greasy's statuette. It give me a flush of pride and satisfaction. Benny, after all, had not forgotten me! I sat for a long time looking at the statuette, trying to puzzle out the mechanism. I had a good look at the jewel and I finally figured out what it was all about. The jewel was no jewel at all; it was a camera. Except that instead of taking two-dimensional pictures, it worked in three dimensions. And that, of course, was how the Shadows made the models. Or maybe they were patterns rather than just models. I finished undressing and got into bed and lay on the cot, staring at the canvas, and the pieces all # began to fall together and it was beautiful. Beautiful, that is, for the aliens. It made us look like a bunch of saps. The cones had gone out and watched the survey party and had not let it get close to them, but they had been ready for us when we came. They'd disguised the cones to look like something that we wouldn't be afraid of, something perhaps that we could even laugh at it. And that was the safest kind of disguise that anyone could assume -- something that the victim might think was mildly funny. For no one gets too upset about what a clown might do. But the Shadows had been loaded and they'd let us have it and apparently, by the time we woke up, they had us pegged and labeled. And what would they do now? Still stay behind their log, still keep watching us, suck us dry of everything that we had to offer? And when they were ready, when they'd gotten all they wanted or all they felt that they could get, they'd come out and finish us. I was somewhat scared and angry and felt considerably like a fool and it was frustrating just to think about. he had solved the problem with his flytrap out there, but there was still a job to do. Somehow or #) other, we had to track down these hiding aliens and break up their little game. Somewhere along the way, I went to sleep, and suddenly someone was shaking me and yelling for me to get out. I came half upright and saw that it was Carr who had been shaking me. He was practically gibbering. He kept pointing outside and babbling something about a funny cloud and I couldn't get much more out of him. So I shucked into my trousers and my shoes and went out with him and headed for the hilltop at a run. Dawn was just breaking and the Shadows still were clustered around the flytrap and a crowd of men had gathered just beyond the flytrap and were looking toward the east. We pushed our way through the crowd up to the front and there was the cloud that Carr had been jabbering about, but it was a good deal closer now and was sailing across the plains, slowly and majestically, and flying above it was a little silver sphere that flashed and glittered in the first rays of the sun. The cloud looked, more than anything, like a mass of junk. I could see what looked like a derrick sticking out of it and here and there what seemed to be a wheel. I tried to figure out what it might be, but I couldn't, and all the time it was moving closer to us. Mack was at my left and I spoke to him, but he didn't answer me. He was just like Benny -- he couldn't answer me. He looked hypnotized. The closer that cloud came, the more fantastic it was and the more unbelievable. For there was no question now that it was a mass of machinery, just like the equipment we had. There were tractors and earthmovers and shovels and dozers and all the other stuff, and in between these bigger pieces was all sorts of little stuff. In another five minutes, it was hovering almost over us and then slowly it began to lower. While we watched, it came down to the ground, gently, almost without a bump, even though there were a couple or three acres of it. Besides the big equipment, there were tents and cups and spoons and tables and chairs and benches and a case or two of whisky and some surveying equipment -- there was, it seemed to me, almost exactly all the items there were in the camp. When it had all sat down, the little silver sphere came down, too, and floated slowly toward us. It stopped a little way away from us and Mack walked out toward it and I followed Mack. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Carr and Knight were walking forward, too.  ' from it and now we saw that the sphere was some sort of protective suit. Inside it sat a pale little humanoid. Not human, but at least with two legs and arms and a single head. He had antennae sprouting from his forehead and his ears were long and pointed and he had no hair at all. He let the sphere set down on the ground and we got a little closer and squatted down so we would be on a level with him. He jerked a thumb backward over his shoulder, pointing at the mass of equipment he'd brought. "Is pay," he announed in a shrill, high, piping voice. We didn't answer right away. We did some gulping first. "Is pay for wliat?" Knight finally managed to ask him. "For fun," the creature said. "I don't understand," said Mack. "We make one of everything. We not know wliat you want, so we make one of all. Unfortunate, two lots are missing. Accident, perhaps." "The models," I said to the others. "That's what he's talking about. The models were patterns and the models from Greasy's Shadow and from Benny -- " "Not all," the creature said. "The rest be right along." "Now wait a minute," said Carr. 'Let us get this straight. You are pftying us. Paying us for what? Exactly what did we do for you?" Mack blurted out: "How did you make this stuff?" "One question at a time," I pleaded. "Machines can make," the creature said. "Knowing how, machines can make anything. Very good machines." "But why?" asked Carr again. "Why did you make it for us?" "For fun," the creature explained patiently. "For laugh. For watch. Is a big word I cannot -- " "Entertainment?" I offered. "That is right," the creature said. "Entertainment is the word. We have lot of time for entertainment. We stay home, watch our entertainment screen. We get tired of it. We seek for something new. You something new. Give us much interesting. We try to pay you for it." "Good Lord!" exclaimed Knight. "I begin to get it now. We were a big news event and so they sent out all those cones to cover us. Mack, did you saw into that cone last night?" "We did," said Mack. "As near as we could figure, it was a TV sender. Not like ours, of course -- there would be differences. But we figured it for a data-sending rig." his shiny sphere. "Listen carefully," I said. "Let's get down to on paying if we provide you entertainment?" "Gladly," said the creature. "You keep us entertained, we give you what you want." "Instead of one of everything, you will make us many of one thing?" "You show it to us," the creature said. "You let us know how many." "Steel?" asked Mack. "You can make us steel?" "No recognize this steel. Show us. How made, how big, how shaped. We make." "If we keep you entertained?" "That right," the creature said. "Deal?" I asked. "Deal," the creature said. "From now on? No stopping?" "Long as you keep us happy." "That may take some doing," Mack told me. "No, it won't," I said. "You're crazy!" Mack yelped. "They'll never let us have them!" "Yes, they will," I answered. "Earth will do anything to cinch this planet. And don't you see, with this sort of swap, we'll beat the cost. All Earth has to do is send out one sample of everything we need. One sample will do the trick. One I-beam and they'll make a Earth has ever made." "We do our part," the creature assured us happily. "Long as you do yours." "I'll get that order right off now," I said to Mack. "I'll write it up and have Jack send it out." toward camp. "Rest of it," the creature said, motioning over his shoulder. I swung around and looked. There was another mass of stuff coming in, keeping fairly low. And this time it was men -- a solid press of men. "Hey!" cried Mack. "You can't do that! That just isn't right!" I didn't need to look. I knew exactly what had happened. The aliens had duplicated not only our equipment, but the men as well. In that crowd of men were the duplicates of every one of us -- everyone, that is, except myself and Greasy. Horrified as I might have been, outraged as any human would be, I couldn't help but think of some of the situations that might arise. Imagine two Macks insisting on bossing the operation! Picture two Thornes trying to get along together! I didn't hang around. I left Mack and the rest of them to explain why men should not be duplicated. In my tent, I sat down and wrote an imperative, highpriority, must-deliver order for five hundred peepers. OCTOBER # # By and C. AA.  By  By  By x.' SHpn cv'   'Vf? iO' o, v'sot SAijoy XNighj 'Sh There's nothing nebulous about that cluster of science fiction luminaries... and more will be appearing in our future sparkling issues. famous writers. Our rates to authors ore the highest in the field, our editorial policy the most challenging. tudes in other fields streaking into science fiction... the giants of the next decade hurling out their first flaming, molten prose. Subscribe now to insure not missing any star-studded issues ience, not ours. Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson St. New Y oric I #, ,N. Y. 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All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. based on The Amazing Amazon by Willard Price (John Day) seemed about to cause a mass migration by refuting the argument that Earth -- gutted, overcrowded -- should be abandoned for other planets. But authors have been falling back into the easy falsehood of a poor, jammed Earth. Jarring them with more of Price's astonishing statistics might not be a bad idea. In size and phenomena, the Amazon River is cosmic enough to belong to science fiction rather than fact. Here, listen: The mouth of the river is # miles wide -- ten times as wide as the English Channel, twice as wide as the Mediterranean. Even a fast airliner takes half an hour to cross it. This "moving sea," as Willard Price rightly calls it, represents one-fifth of all the running fresh water on Earth! "Place the mouth of the Amazon at New York," states Price, "and its arms would reach up into Canada and down into Mexico and almost to California." With its # known tributaries, many of them larger than the Rhine, it drains # square miles -- an area nearly as huge as the entire U.S.A. This most gigantic of rivers even has a tide, a monstrous wave known as the pororoca, ten to # feet high, which races up as far as Santarem once a month at the murderous rate of # miles an hour. One of the three large islands at the mouth of the river, Marajo, is as big as Denmark or Switzerland! A hundred miles offshore, a ship can drop buckets and bring up drinkable water, for the # with such force that the Amazon goes on flowing right in the ocean itself. The League of Nations estimated that Brazil could accomagricultural and industrial productivity have increased so greatly since then that this figure could easily be enlarged by # to # -- about half the present population of Earth! Amazonia is so unthinkably rich in natural resources that it could give its citizens the most lavish economy in history -- with enough left over to fuel and feed the machines, factories and people of the world. Here are the greatest deposits of high-grade iron ore on all Earth, plus industrial diamonds, gold, manganese and just about (Continued on Page #) ( Continued from Page # ) every other metal and mineral. Geologists declare that half of Brazil floats on oil. Nowhere on this planet is there deeper, blacker topsoil. "The great forests of Canada and Russia are thin compared with those of Brazil," says Price, "and they take # years to grow. An Amazon forest rises to full stature in one-eighth of that time... and provides food, drink, rubber, belting, industrial oils, ropes and fibers, wax, chewing gum, insulation, bedding, insecticides, medicines, button, dyes and hundreds of other articles of daily use." We think of Argentina as a great cattle country. But Brazil any other land. Brazil supplies # of all quartz crystal, essential in the building of precision instruments; beryllium and tantalum, over #. Zirconium comes only from Brazil. There are plentiful deposits of chrome, nickel, cobalt. "If the supply of the vital metal, manganese, is cut off from Russia and India," the author assures us, "the western hemisphere's only source would be Amazonia... there's lots of it." I mentioned iron deposits; the actual figure is nearly a third of the world's iron reserves. Sharks, tarpons, sawfishes, swordfishes, porpoises and manatees thrive in the Amazon. So do over # species, compared with the # of all the rivers of Europe, and more than the whole Atlantic from pole to pole. "Amazon fish," Price says, "are of such gigantic size that one fish will fill an unconscionable number of cans... The day seems to be coming when the Amazon will surpass Alaskan and North American rivers in canned fish and fish by-products." There's just too much data in The Amazing Amazon -- it spills, it gushes, it pours with a flood of richness matched only by the Amazon itself. You can't dip into the book; you'll find yourself thrashing through it, demanding impatiently, "Let's go! What are we waitings for?" Aim for the planets and stars? Of course. But the colonization  of Amazonia is possible the minute we clear out the animals and insects -- and we have the means to do it now -- and no giant spaceships with small payloads are needed, no sealed domes or oxygen and water extractors, refrigeration or heating units of awesome capacity. Amazonia is right here and it makes Earth the richest planet in the Solar System! Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street. New York #. N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Checic Here  Add #c Foreign Postage For  # or #c each Enclose check, cosh or money order. We pay postage Name... Address City State Appallingly, the Earth and the Moon had been kidnapped from the Solar System -- but who were the kidnappers and what ransom did they want? I of Wheeling, West Virginia, a Citizen, woke gently from a Citizen's dreamless sleep. It was the third-hour-rising time, the time proper to a day of exceptional opportunity to appreciate. Citizen Germyn dressed himself in the clothes proper for the appreciation of great works -- such as viewing the Empire State ruinsagainst storm clouds from a small boat, or walking in silent single file across the remaining course of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or as today -- one hoped -- witnessing the Re-creation of the Sun. Germyn with difficulty retained a Citizen's necessary calm. One was tempted to meditate on improper things: Would the Sun be re-created? What if it were not? He put his mind to his dress. First of all, he put on an old and storied bracelet, a veritable identity bracelet of heavy silver links and a plate which was inscribed: Korea His fellow jewelry-appreciators would have envied him that bracelet -- if they had been capable of such an emotion as envy. No other ID bracelet as much as two hundred and fifty years old was known to exist in Wheeling. His finest shirt and pair of light pants went next to his skin, and over them he wore a loose parka whose seams had been carefully weakened. When the Sun was re-created, every five years or so, it was the custom to remove the parka gravely and rend it with the prescribed graceful gestures... but not so drastically that it could not be stitched together again. Hence the weakened seams. This was, he counted, the fortyfirst day on which he and all of Wheeling had donned the appropriate Sun Re-creation clothing. It was the forty-first day on which the Sun -- no longer white, no longer blazing yellow, no longer even bright red -- had risen and displayed a color that was darker maroon and always darker. TT had, thought Citizen Germyn, never grown so dark and so cold in all of his life. Perhaps it was an occasion for special viewing. For surely it would never come again, this opportunity to see the old Sun so near to death... One hoped. Gravely, Citizen Germyn completed his dressing, thinking only of the act of dressing itself. It was by no means his specialty, but he considered, when it was done, that he had done it well, in the traditional flowing gestures, with no flailing, at all times balanced lightly on the ball of the foot. It was all the more perfectly consummated because no one saw it but himself. He woke his wife gently, by placing the palm of his hand on her forehead as she lay neatly, in the prescribed fashion, on the Woman's Third of the bed. The warmth of his hand gradually penetrated the layers of sleep. Her eyes demurely opened, "Citizeness Germyn," he greeted her, making the assurance-ofidentity sign with his left hand. "Citizen Germyn," she said, TO with the assurance-of-identity inclination of the head which was prescribed when the hands are covered. He retired to his tiny study. It was the time appropriate to meditation on the properties of Connectivity. Citizen Germyn was skilled in meditation, even for a banker; it was a grace in which he had schooled himself since earliest childhood. Citizen Germyn, his young face composed, his slim body erect as he sat but in no way tense or straining, successfully blanked out, one after another, all of the external sounds and sights and feelings that interfered with proper meditation. His mind was very nearly vacant except of one central problem: Connectivity. Over his head and behind, out of sight, the cold air of the room seemed to thicken and form a -- call it a blob; a blob of air. There was a name for those blobs of air. They had been seen before. They were a known fact of existence in Wheeling and in all the world. They came. They hovered. And they went away -- sometimes not alone. If someone had been in the room with Citizen Germyn to look at it, he would have seen a distortion, a twisting of what was behind the blob, like flawed glass, a lens, like an eye. And they were called Eye. Germyn meditated. The blob of air grew and slowly moved. A vagrant current that spun out from it caught a fragment of paper and whirled it to the floor. Germyn stirred. The blob retreated. Germsm, all unaware, disciplined his thoughts to disregard the interruption, to return to the central problem of Connectivity. The blob hovered... From the other room, his wife's small, thrice-repeated throatclearing signaled to him that she was dressed. Germyn got up to go to her, his mind returning to the world; and the overhead Eye spun relentlessly, and disappeared. Glenn Tropile -- of a class which found it wisest to give itself no special name, and which had devoted much time and thought to shaking the unwelcome name it had been given -- awoke on the couch of his apartment. He sat up, shivering. It was cold. The damned Sun was still bloody dark outside the window and the apartment was soggy and chilled. He had kicked off the blankets in his sleep. Why couldn't he learn to sleep quietly, like anybody else? Lacking a robe, he clutched the blankets around him. got up and walked to the unglassed window. It was not unusual for Glenn Tropile to wake up on his couch. This happened because Gala Tropile had a temper, was inclined to exile him from her bed after a quarrel, and -- the operative factor -- he knew he always had the advantage over her for the whole day following the night's exile. Therefore the quarrel was worth it. An advantage was, by definition, worth anything you paid for it or else it was no advantage. He could hear her moving about in one of the other rooms and cocked an ear, satisfied. She hadn't waked him. Therefore she was about to make amends. A little itch in his spine or his brain -- it was not a physical itch, so he couldn't locate it; he could only be sure that it was there -- stopped troubling him momentarily; he was winning a contest. It was Glenn Tropile's nature to win contests... and his nature to create them. Gala Tropile, young, dark, attractive, with a haunted look, came in tentatively carrying coffee from some secret hoard of hers. Glenn Tropile affected not to notice. He stared coldly out at the cold landscape. The sea, white with thin ice, was nearly out of sight, so far had it retreated as the little sun waned. "Glenn-"  Ah, good! Glenn. Where was the proper mode of first-greetingone's-husband? Where was the prescribed throat-clearing upon entering a room? Assiduously, he had untaught her the meticulous ritual of manners that they had all of them been brought up to know; and it was the greatest of his many victories over her that sometimes, now, she was the aggressor, she would be the first to depart from the formal behavior prescribed for Citizens. Depravity! Perversion! Sometimes they would touch each other at times which were not the appropriate coming-together times. Gala sitting on her husband's lap in the late evening, perhaps, or Tropile kissing her awake in the morning. Sometimes he would force her to let him watch her dress -- no, not now, for the cold of the waning sun made that sort of frolic unattractive, but she had permitted it before; and such was his mastery over her that he knew she would permit it again, when the Sun was re-created... If, a thought came to him, if the Sun was re-created. outside and looked at his wife. "Good morning, darling." She was contrite. He demanded jarringly: "Is it?" Deliberately he stretched, deliberately he yawned, deliberately he scratched his chest. Every movement was ugly. Gala Tropile quivered, but said nothing. Tropile flung himself on the better of the two chairs, one hairy leg protruding from under the wrapped blankets. His wife was on her best behavior -- in his unique terms; she didn't avert her eyes. "What've you got there?" he asked. "Coffee?" "Yes, dear. I thought -- " "Where'd you get it?" The haunted eyes looked away. Still better, thought Glenn Tropile, more satisfied even than usual; she's been ransacking an old warehouse again. It was a trick he had taught her, and like learned from him, a handy weapon when he chose to use it. It was not prescribed that a Citizen should rummage through Old Places. A Citizen did his work, whatever that work might be -- banker, baker or furniture repairman. He received what rewards were his due for the work he did. A Citizen never took anything that was not his due -- not even if it lay abandoned and rotting. It was one of the differences between Glenn Tropile and the people he moved among. I've got it made, he exulted;  it was what I needed to clinch my victory over her. He spoke: "I need you more than I need coffee. Gala." She looked up, troubled. "What would I do," he demanded, "if a beam fell on you one day while you were scrambling through the fancy groceries? How can you take such chances? Don't you know what you mean to me?" She sniffed a couple of times. She said brokenly: "Darling, about last night -- I'm sorry -- " and miserably held out the cup. He took it and set it down. He took her hand, looked up at her, and kissed it lingeringly. He felt her tremble. Then she gave him a wild, adoring look and flung herself into his arms. A new dominance cycle was begun at the moment he returned her frantic kisses. Glenn knew, and Gala knew, that he had over her an edge, an advantage -- the weather gauge, initiative of fire, percentage, the can't-lose lack of tension. Call it anything, but it was life itself to such as Glenn Tropile. He knew, and she knew, that having the advantage he would press it and she would yield -- on and on, in a rising spiral. He did it because it was his life, the attaining of an advantage over anyone he might encounter; because he was (unwelcomely but justly) called a Son of the Wolf. squatted sullenly on the planed-off top of the highest peak of the Himalayas. It had not been built there. It had not been carried there by Man or Man's machines. It had -- come, in its own time, for its own reasons. Did it wake on that day, the thing atop Mount Everest, or did it ever sleep? Nobody knew. It stood, or sat, there, approximately a tetrahedron. Its appearance was known: constructed on a base line of some thirty-five yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in color. Almost nothing else about it was known -- at least, to mankind. It was the only one of its kind on Earth, though men thought (without much sure knowledge) that there were more, perhaps many thousands more, like it on the unfamiliar planet that was Earth's binary, swinging around the miniature Sun that hung at their common center of gravity like an unbalanced dumbbell. But men knew very little about that planet itself, only that it had come out of space and was now there. Time was when men had tried to label that binary, more than two centuries before, when it had first appeared. "Runaway Planet." "The Invader." "Rejoice in Messias, the Day Is at Hand." The labels were sense-free; they were Xs in an equation, signifying only that there was something there which was unknown. "The Runaway Planet" stopped running when it closed on Earth. "The Invader" didn't invade; it merely sent down one slaggy, midnight-blue tetrahedron to Everest. And "Rejoice in Messias" stole Earth from its sun -- with Earth's old moon, which it converted into a miniature sun of its own. That was the time when men were plentiful and strong -- or thought they were -- with many huge cities and countless powerful machines. It didn't matter. The new binary planet showed no interest in the cities or the machines. There was a plague of things like Eyes -- dust-devils without dust, motionless air that suddenly tensed and quivered into lenticular shapes. They came with the planet and the Pyramid, so that there probably was some connection. But there was nothing to do about the Eyes. Striking at them was like striking at air -- was the same thing, in fact. While the men and machines tried uselessly to do something about it, the new binary system -- the stranger planet and Earth -- began to move, accelerating very slowly. But accelerating. In a week, astronomers knew something was happening. In a month, the Moon sprang into flame and became a new sun -- beginning to be needed, for already the parent Sol was visibly more distant, and in a few years it was only one other star among many. " burned to a clinker, they -- whoever "they" were, for men saw only the one Pyramid -- would hang a new one in the sky. It happened every five clockyears, more or less. It was the same old moon-turned-sun, but it burned out, and the fires needed to be rekindled. The first of these suns had looked down on an Earthly popuquence of suns waxed and waned, there were changes, climatic fluctuation, all but immeasurable differences in the quantity and kind of radiation from the new source. The changes were such that the forty-fifth such sun looked down on a shrinking human race that could not muster up a hunA frustrated man drives inward; it is the same with a race. to existence were not the same The thing on Everest had, in its time, received many labels, too: The Devil, The Friend, The Beast, A Pseudo-living Entity of Quite Unknown Electrochemical Properties. All these labels were also Xs. If it did wake that morning, it did not open its eyes, for it had no eyes -- apart from the quivers of air that might or might not belong to it. Eyes might have been gouged; therefore it had none. So an illogical person might have argued -- and yet it was tempting to apply the "purpose, not function" fallacy to it. Limbs could be crushed; it had no limbs. Ears could be deafened; it had none. Through a mouth, it might be poisoned; it had no mouth. Intentions and actions could be frustrated; apparently it had neither. It was there. That was all. It and others like it had stolen the Earth and the Earth did not know why. It was there. And the one thing on Earth you could not do was hurt it, influence it, or coerce it in any way whatever. It was there -- and it, or the masters it represented, owned the Earth by right of theft. Utterly. Beyond human hope of challenge or redress. IS II  Germyn walked down Pine Street in the chill and dusk of -- one hoped -- a Sun Re-creation Morning. It was the convention to pretend that this was a morning like any other morning. It was not proper either to cast frequent hopeful glances at the sky, nor yet to seem disturbed or afraid because this was, after all, the forty-first such morning since those whose specialty was Sky Viewing had come to believe the Re-creation of the Sun was near. The Citizen and his Citizeness exchanged the assurance-of-identity sign with a few old friends and stopped to converse. This also was a convention of skill divorced from purpose. The conversation was without relevance to anything that any one of the participants might know, or think, or wish to ask. Germyn said for his friends a twenty-word poem he had made in honor of the occasion and heard their responses. They did line-capping for a while -- until somebody indicated unhappiness and a wish to change by frowning the Two Grooves between his brows. The game was deftly ended with an improvised rhymed exchange. Casually, Citizen Germyn glanced aloft. The sky-change had not begun yet; the dying old Sun hung just over the horizon, east and south, much more south than east. It was an ugly thought, but suppose, thought Germyn, just suppose that the Sun were not re-created today? Or tomorrow. OrOr ever. The Citizen got a grip on himself and told his wife: "We shall dine at the oatmeal stall." The Citizeness did not immediately reply. When Germyn glanced at her with well-masked surprise, he found her almost staring down the dim street at a Citizen who moved almost in a stride, almost swinging his arms. Scarcely graceful. "That might be more Wolf than man," she said doubtfully. Germyn knew the fellow. Tropile was his name. One of those curious few who made their homes outside of Wheeling, though they were not farmers. Germyn had had banking dealings with him -- or would have had, if it had been up to Tropile. "That is a careless man," he decided, "and an ill-bred one." They moved toward the oatmeal stall with the gait of Citizens, arms limp, feet scarcely lifted, slumped forward a little. It was the ancient gait of fifteen hundred calories per day, not one of which could be squandered. calories. So many for walking, so many for gathering food. So many for the economical pleasures of the Citizens, so many more -- oh, many more, these days! -- to keep out the cold. Yet there were no more calories; the diet the whole world lived on was a bare subsistence diet. It was impossible to farm well when half the world's land was part of the time drowned in the rising sea, part of the time smothered in falling snow. Citizens knew this and, knowing, did not struggle -- it was ungraceful to struggle, particularly when one could not win. Only -- well, Wolves struggled, wasting calories, lacking grace. Citizen Germyn turned his mind to more pleasant things. He allowed himself his First Foretaste of the oatmeal. It would be warm in the bowl, hot in the throat, a comfort in the belly. There was a great deal of pleasure there, in weather like this, when the cold plucked through the loosened seams and the wind came up the sides of the hills. Not that there wasn't pleasure in the cold itself, for that matter. It Was proper that one should be cold now, just before the re-creation of the Sun, when the old Sun was smokyred and the new one not yet kindled. still looks like Wolf to me," his wife was muttering. "Cadence," Germyn reproved his Citizeness, but took the sting out of it with a Quirked Smile. The man with the ugly manners was standing at the very bar of the oatmeal stall where they were heading. In the gloom of mid-morning, he was all angles and strained lines. His head was turned awkwardly on his shoulder, peering toward the back of the stall where the vendor was rhythmically measuring grain into a pot. His hands were resting helter-skelter on the counter, not hanging by his sides. Citizen Germyn felt a faint shudder from his wife. But he did not reprove her again, for who could blame her? The exhibition was revolting. She said faintly: "Citizen, might we dine on bread this morning?" He hesitated and glanced again at the ugly man. He said indulgently, knowing that he was indulgent: "On Sun Re-creation Morning, the Citizeness may dine on bread." Bearing in mind the occasion, it was only a small favor and therefore a very proper one. The bread was good, very good. They shared out the halfkilo between them and ate it in silence, as it deserved. Germyn finished his first portion and, in the prescribed pause before beginning his second, elected to refresh his eyes upward. He nodded to his wife and stepped outside. celed out its last barrelscrapings of heat. It was larger than the stars around it, but many of them were nearly as bright. A high-pitched male voice said: "Citizen Germyn, good morning." Germyn was caught off balance. He took his eyes off the sky, half turned, glanced at the face of the person who had spoken to him, raised his hand in the assurance-of-identity sign. It was all very quick and fluid -- almost too quick, for he had had his fingers bent nearly into the sign for female friends and this was a man. Citizen Boyne. Germyn knew him well; they had shared the Ice Viewing at Niagara a year before. Germyn recovered quickly enough, but it had been disconcerting. He improvised swiftly: "There are stars, but are stars still there if there is no Sun?" It was a hurried effort, he grieved, but no doubt Boyne would pick it up and carry it along. Boyne had always been very good, very graceful. Boyne did no such thing. "Good morning," he said again, faintly. He glanced at the stars overhead, as though trying to unravel what Germyn was talking about. He said accusingly, his voice cracking sharply: "There isn't any Sun, Germyn. What do you think of that?" Germyn swallowed. "Citizen, perhaps you -- " "No Sun, you hear me!" the man sobbed. "It's cold, Germyn. The Pyramids aren't going to give us another Sun, do you know that? They're going to starve us, freeze us; they're through with us. We're done, all of us!" He was nearly screaming. All up and down Pine Street, people were trying not to look at him and some of them were failing. Boyne clutched at Germyn helplessly. Revolted, Germyn drew back -- bodily contact! It seemed to bring the man to his senses. Reason returned to his eyes. He said: "I -- " He stopped, stared about him. "I think I'll have bread for breakfast," he said foolishly, and plunged into the stall. Boyne left behind him a shaken Citizen, caught halfway into the wrist-flip of parting, staring after him with jaw slack and eyes wide, as though Germyn had no manners, either. All this on Sun Re-creation Day! What could it mean? Germyn wondered fretfully, worriedly. Was Boyne on the point of -- Could Boyne be about to -- Germyn drew back from the thought. There was one thing that might explain Boyne's behavior. But it was not a proper speculation for one Citizen to make about another. All the same -- Germyn dared the thought -- all the same, it did seem almost as though Citizen Boyne were on the point of -- well, running amok. A T the oatmeal stall, Glenn Tropile thumped on the counter. The laggard oatmeal vendor finally brought the ritual bowl of salt and the pitcher of thin milk. Tropile took his paper twist of salt from the top of the neatly arranged pile in the bowl. He glanced at the vendor. His fingers hesitated. Then, quickly, he ripped the twist of paper into his oatmeal and covered it to the permitted level with the milk. He ate quickly and efficiently, watching the street outside. They were wandering and mooning about, as always -- maybe today more than most days, since they hoped it would be the day the Sun blossomed flame once more. Tropile always thought of the wandering, mooning Citizens as they. There was a we somewhere for Tropile, no doubt, but Tropile had not as yet located it, not even in the bonds of the marriage contract. He was in no hurry. At the age of fourteen, Glenn Tropile had reluctantly come to realize certain things about himself -- that he disliked being bested, that he had to have a certain advantage in all his dealings, or an intolerable itch of the mind drove him to discomfort. The things added up to a terrifying fear, gradually becoming knowledge, that the only we that could properly include him was one that it was not very wise to join. He had realized, in fact, that he was a Wolf. For some years, Tropile had struggled against it, for Wolf was an obscene word; the children he played with were punished severely for saying it, and for almost nothing else. It was not proper for one Citizen to advantage himself at the expense of another; Wolves did that. It was proper for a Citizen to accept what he had, not to strive for more, to find beauty in small things, to accommodate himself, with the minimum of strain and awkwardness, to whatever his life happened to be. Wolves were not like that. Wolves never meditated. Wolves never Appreciated, Wolves never were Translated -- that supreme fulfillment, granted only to those who succeeded in a perfect meditation, that surrender of the world and the flesh by taking leave of both, which could never be achieved by a Wolf. Accordingly, Glenn Tropile had tried very hard to do all the things that Wolves could not do. He had nearly succeeded. His specialty. Water Watching, had been most rewarding. He had achieved many partly successful meditations on Connectivity. And yet he was still a Wolf, for he still felt that burning, itching urge to triumph and to hold an advantage. For that reason, it was almost impossible for him to make friends among the Citizens; and gradually he had almost stopped trying. Tropile had arrived in Wheeling nearly a year before, making him one of the early settlers in point of time. And yet there was not a Citizen in the street who was prepared to exchange recognition gestures with him. He knew them, nearly every one. He knew their names and their wives' names. He knew what northern states they had moved down from with the spreading of the ice, as the sun grew dim. He knew very nearly to the quarter of a gram what stores of sugar and salt and coffee each one of them had put away -- for their guests, of course, not for themselves; the well-bred Citizen hoarded only for the entertainment of others. Tropile knew these things because there was an advantage in knowing them. But there was no advantage in having anyone know him. A few did -- that banker, Germyn; Tropile had approached him only a few months before about a prospective loan. But it had been a chancy, nervous encounter. The idea was so luminously simple to Tropile -- organize an expedition to the coal mines that once had flourished nearby, find the coal, bring it to Wheeling, heat the houses. And yet it had seemed blasphemous to Germyn. Tropile had counted himself lucky merely to have been refused the loan, instead of being cried out upon as Wolf.  "HE oatmeal vendor was fussing worriedly around his neat stack of paper twists in the salt bowl. Tropile avoided the man's eyes. Tropile was not interested in the little wry smile of self-deprecation which the vendor would make to him, given half a chance. Tropile knew well enough what was disturbing the vendor. Let it disturb him. It was Tropile's custom to take extra twists of salt. They were in his pockets now; they would stay there. Let the vendor wonder why he was short. Tropile licked the bowl of his spoon and stepped into the street. He was comfortably aware under a double-thick parka that the wind was blowing very cold. A Citizen passed him, walking alone: odd, thought Tropile. He was walking rapidly and there was a look of taut despair on his face. Still more odd. Odd enough to be worth another look, because that sort of haste, that sort of abstraction, suggested something to Tropile. They were in no way normal to the gentle sheep of the class They, except in one particular circumstance. Glenn Tropile crossed the street to follow the abstracted Citizen, whose name, he knew, was Boyne. The man blundered into Citizen Germyn outside the baker's stall, and Tropile stood back out of easy sight, watching and listening. Boyne was on the ragged edge of breakdown. What Tropile heard and saw confirmed his diagnosis. The one particular circumstance was close to happening -- Citizen Boyne was on the verge of running amok. Tropile looked at the man with amusement and contempt. Amok! The gentle sheep could be pushed too far. He had seen Citizens run amok, the signs were obvious. There was pretty sure to be an. advantage in it for Glenn Tropile. There was an advantage in almost anything, if you looked for it. He watched and waited. He picked his spot with care, so that he could see Citizen Boyne inside the baker's stall, making a dismal botch of slashing his quarter-kilo of bread from the Morning Loaf. He waited for Boyne to come racing out... Boyne did. A yell -- loud, piercing. It was amok!" A scream. An enraged wordless cry from Boyne, and the baker's knife glinting in the faint light as Boyne swung it. And then Citizens were scattering in every direction -- all of the Citizens but one. One Citizen was under the knife -- his own knife, as it happened; it was the baker himself. Boyne chopped and chopped again. And then Boyne came out, roaring, the broad knife whistling about his head. The gentle Citizens fled panicked before him. He struck at their retreating forms and screamed and struck again. Amok. It was the one particular circumstance when they forgot to be gracious -- one of the two, Tropile corrected himself as he strolled across to the baker's stall. His brow furrowed, because there was another circumstance when they lacked grace, and one which affected him nearly. creature, Boyne, already far down the road, chasing a knot of Citizenf around a corner. Tropile sighed and stepped into the baker's stall to see what he might gain from this. Boyne would wear himself out -- the surging rage would leave him as quickly as it came; he would be a sheep again and the other sheep would close in and capture him. That was what happened when a Citizen ran amok. It was a measure of what pressures were on the Citizens that, at any moment, there might be one gram of pressure too much and one of them would crack. It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months. Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville. There is a limit to the pressure that can be endured. Tropile walked into the baker's stall and looked downwithout emotion at the slaughtered baker. The corpse was a gory mess, but Tropile had seen corpses before. He looked around the stall, calculating. As a starter, he bent to pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Boyne had dropped, dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket. Food was always useful. Given enough food, perhaps Boyne would not have run amok. Was it simple hunger they cracked under? Or the knowledge of the thing on Mount Everest, or the hovering Eyes, or the sought-after-dreaded prospect of Translation, or merely the strain of keeping up their laboriously figured lives? Did it matter? They cracked and ran amok, and Tropile never would, and that was what mattered. He leaned across the counter, reaching for what was left of the Morning L-oaf -- And found himself staring into the terrified large eyes of Citizeness Germyn. She screamed: "Wolf! Citizens, help me! Wolf!" Tropile faltered. He hadn't even seen the damned woman, but there she was, rising up from behind the counter, screaming her head off: "Wolf! Wolf!" He said sharply: "Citizeness, I beg you -- " But that was no good. The evidence was on him and her screams would fetch others. Tropile panicked. He started toward her to silence her, but that was no good, either. He whirled. She was screaming, screaming, and there were people to hear. Tropile darted into the street, but they were popping out of every doorway now, appearing from each rat's hole in which they had hid to escape Boyne. "Please!" he cried, sobbing. "Wait a minute!" But they weren't waiting. They had heard the woman and maybe some of them had seen him with the bread. They were all around him -- no, they were all over him; they were clutching at him, tearing at his soft, warm furs. They pulled at his pockets and the stolen twists of salt spilled accusingly out. They yanked at his sleeves and even the stout, unweakened seams ripped open. He was fairly captured. "Wolf!" they were shouting. "Wolf!" It drowned out the distant noise from where Boyne had finally been run to earth, a block and more away. It drowned out everything. It was the other circumstance when they forgot to be gracious: when they had trapped a Son of the Wolf. Ill Engineering is possible under one condition of the equation: Total available Calories divided by Population equals ArtisticTechnological Style. When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large -- say, five thousand or more. five thousand daily calories for every living person -- then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture enormous automo, biles to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one. lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has starved out. Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the # to # calorie range, ArtisticTechnological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally agreed-upon virtue. Think of Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, with a hungry population scrabbling food out of mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens. The small, inexpensive sub-subarts are characteristic of the # to # calorie range. And this was the range of men, when the planet was stolen by its new binary. Some few persons inexpensively studied the study of science with pencil and renewable paper, but the last research accelerator had long since been shut down. The juice from its hydro-power dam was needed to supply and to cook the pablum for two In those days, one dedicated Byzantine wrote the definitive encyclopedia of engineering (though he was no engineer). Its four hundred and twenty tiny volumes examined exhaustively the engineering feats of ancient Greece and Egypt, the Wall of Shih-Hwang Ti, the Gothic builders, Brunei who changed the face pi Ehigland, the Roeblings of Brooklyn, Groves of the Pentagon, Duggan of the Shelter System (before C:P dropped to the point where war became vanishingly implausible), Levern of Operation Up. But the encyclopedist could not use a slide rule without thinking, faltering, jotting down his decimals. And then... the magnitudes grew less. Under the tectonic and climatic battering of the great abduction of Earth from its primary, under the sine-wave advances to and retreats from the equator of the ice sheath, as the small successor Suns waxed, waned, died and were replaced, the ratio C:P remained stable. C had diminished enormously; so had P. As the calories to support life grew scarce, so the consuming mouths of mankind grew less in number. ' I 'HE forty-fifth small Sun shone on no engineers. Not even on the binary, perhaps. The Pyramids, the things on the binary, the thing on Mount Everest -- they were not engineers. They employed a crude metaphysic based on dissection and shoving. They had no elegant field theories. All they knew was that everything came apart, and that if you pushed a thing, it would move. If your biggest push would not move a thing, you took it apart and pushed the parts, and then it would move. Sometimes, for nuclear effects, they had to take things apart into # x # pieces and shove each piece very carefully. By taking apart and shoving, then, they landed their one spaceship on the burned-out sunlet. Four human beings were on that ship. They meditated briefly on Connectivity and died screaming. A point of new flame appeared on the sunlet's surface and the spaceship scrambled for the binary. The point of flame went from cherry through orange into the blue-white and began to spread. A T the moment of the Re-creation of the Sun, there was rejoicing on the Earth. Not quite everywhere, though. In Wheeling's House of the Five Regulations, Glenn Tropile waited unquietly for death. Citizen Boyne, who had run amok and slaughtered the baker, shared Tropile's room and his doom, but not his rage. Boyne, with demure pleasure, was composing his death poem. "Talk to me!" snapped Tropile. "Why are we here? What did you do and why did you do it? What have I done? Why don't I pick up a bench and kill you with it? You would've killed me two hours ago if I'd caught your eye!" There was no satisfaction in Citizen Boyne; the passions were burned out of him. He politely tendered Tropile a famous aphorism: "Citizen, the art of living is the substitution of unimportant, answerable questions for important, unanswerable ones. Come, let us appreciate the new-born Sun." He turned to the window, where the spark of blue-white flame in what had once been the crater of Tycho was beginning to spread across the charred moon. Tropile was child enough of his culture to turn with him, almost involuntarily. He was silent. That blue-white infinitesimal up, there growing slowly -- the oneness, the calm rapture of Being in a universe that you shaded into without harsh discontinue, the being one with the great bluewhite gem-flower blossoming now in the heavens that were no different stuff than you yourself -- He closed his eyes, calm, and meditated on Connectivity. He was being Good. By the time the fusion reaction had covered the whole small disk of the sunlet, a quarter-hour at the most, his meditation began to wear off. Tropile shrugged out of his torn parka, not bothering to rip it further. It was already growing warm in the room. Citizen Boyne, of course, was carefully opening every seam with graceful rending motions, miming great and smooth effort of the biceps and trapezius. But the meditation was over, and as Tropile watched his cellmate, he screamed a silent Why? Since his adolescence, that wailing syllable had seldom been far from his mind. It could be silenced by appreciation and meditation. Tropile's specialty was Water Watching and he was so good at it that several beginners had asked him for instruction in the subtle art, in spite of his notorious oddities of life and manner. He enjoyed Water Watching. He almost pitied anybody so singlemindedly devoted to, say, Clouds and Odors -- great game though it was -- that he had never even tried Water Watching. And after a session of Watching, when one was lucky enough to observe the Nine Boiling Stages in classic perfection, one might slip into meditation and be harmonious, feel Good. But what did one do when the meditations failed, as they had failed him? What did one do when they came farther and farther apart, became less and less intense, could be inspired, finally, only by a huge event like the renewal of the Sun? One went amok, he had always thought. But he had not. Boyne had. He had been declared a Son of the Wolf, on no evidence that he could understand. Yet he had not run amok. Still, the penalties were the same, he thought, uncomfortably aware of an unfamiliar itch -- not the inward intolerable itch of needing the advantage, but a localized sensation at the base of his spine. The penalties for all gross crimes -- Wolfhood or running amok -- were the same, and simply this: They would perform the Lumbar Puncture. He would make the Donation of Spinal Fluid. He would be dead. IHE Keeper of the House of Five Regulations, an old man, Citizen Harmane, looked in on his charges -- approvingly at Boyne, with a beclouded expression at Glenn Tropile. It was thought that even Wolves were entitled to the common human decencies in the brief interval between exposure and the Donation of Fluid. The Keeper would not have dreamed of scowling at the detected Wolf or of interfering with whatever wretched imitation of meditationbefore-dying the creature might practice. But he could not, all the same, bring himself to offer even an assurance-of-identity gesture. Tropile had no such qualms. He scowled at Keeper Harmane with such ferocity that the old man almost hurried away. He turned an almost equally ugly scowl upon Citizen Boyne. How dared that knife-murderer be so calm, so relaxed! Tropile said brutally: "They'll kill us! You know that? They'll stick a needle in our spines and drain us dry. It hurts. Do you understand me? They're going to drain us, and then they're going to drink our spinal fluid, and it's going to hurt." He was gently corrected. "We shall make the Donation," Citizen Boyne said calmly. "Is not the difference intelligible to a Son of the Wolf?" True culture demanded that that remark be accepted as a friendly joke, probably based on a truth -- how else could an unpalatable truth be put in words? Otherwise the unthinkable might happen. They might quarrel. They might even come to blows! The appropriate mild smile formed on Tropile's lips, but harshly he wiped it off. They were going to kill him. He would not smile for them! And the effort was enormous. "I'm not a Son of the Wolf!" he howled, desperate, knowing he was protesting to the man of all men in Wheeling who didn't care, and who could do least about it if he did. "What's this crazy talk about Wolves? I don't know what a Son of the Wolf is and I don't think you or anybody does. All I know is that I was acting sensibly. And everybody began howling! You're supposed to know a Son of the Wolf by his unculture, his ignorance, his violence. But you chopped down three people and I only picked up a piece of bread! And I'm supposed to be the dangerous one!" "Wolves never know they're Wolves," sighed Citizen Boyne. "Fish probably think they're birds and you evidently think you're a Citizen. Would a Citi zen speak as you are speaking?" "But they're going to kill us!" "Then why aren't you composing your death poem?" G lenn Tropile took a deep breath. Something was biting him. It was bad enough that he was about to die, bad enough that he had done nothing worth dying for. But what was gnawing at him now had nothing to do with dying. The percentages were going the wrong way. This pale Citizen was getting an edge on him. An engorged gland in Tropile's adrenals -- it was only a pinhead in Citizen Boyne's -- gushed raw hormones into his bloodstream. He could die, yes -- that was a skill everyone had to acquire, sooner or later. But while he was alive, he could not stand to be bested in an encounter, an argument, a relationship -- not and stay alive. Wolf? Call him Wolf. Call him Operator, or Percentage Player; call him Sharp Article; call him Gamesman. If there was an advantage to be derived, he would derive it. It was the way he was put together. He said, for time: "You're right. Stupid of me. I must have lost my head!" He thought. Some men think by poking problems apart; some think by laying facts side by side to compare. Tropile's thinking was neither of these, but a species of judo. He conceded to his opponent such things as Strength, Armor, Resource. He didn't need these things for himself; to every contest, the opponent brought enough of them to supply two. It was Tropile's habit (and Wolfish, he had to admit) to use the opponent's strength against him, to break the opponent against his own steel walls. He thought. The first thing was to make up his mind: He was Wolf. Then let him be Wolf. He wouldn't stay around for the spinal tap; he would go from there. But how? The second thing was to plan. There were obstacles. Citizen Boyne was one. The Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations was another. Where was the pole which would permit him to vault over these hurdles? There was always his wife. Gala. He owned her; she would do what he wished -- provided he made her want to do it. Yes, Gala. He walked to the door and shouted to Citizen Harmane: "Keeper! I must see my wife! Have her brought to me!" It was impossible for the Keeper to refuse. He called gently, "I will invite the Citizeness," and toddled away. The third thing was time. Tropile turned to Citizen Boyne. "Citizen," he said persuasively, "since your death poem is ready and mine is not, will you be gracious enough to go first when they -- when they come?" Citizen Boyne looked temperately at his cellmate and made the Quirked Smile. "You see?" he said. "Wolf." And that was true. But what was also true was that Boyne couldn't and didn't refuse. IV night-blue Pyramid sat on its planed-off peak as it had sat since the days when Earth had a real sun of its own. It was of no importance to the Pyramid that Glenn Tropile was about to receive a slim catheter into his spine, to drain his saps and his life. It didn't matter to the Pyramid that the pretext for the execution was an act which human history had long stopped considering a capital crime. Ritual sacrifice in any guise made no difference to the Pyramid. The Pyramid saw them come and the Pyramid saw them go -- if the Pyramid could be said to "see." One human being more or less, what matter? Who bothers to take a census of the cells in a hangnail? And yet the Pyramid did have a kind of interest in Glenn Tropile. Or, at least, in the human race of which he was a part. Nobody knew much about the Pyramids, but everybody knew that much. They wanted something -- else why would they have bothered to steal the Earth? The date of the theft was #. A great year -- the year of the first landings on the Runaway Planet that had come blundering into the Solar System. Maybe those landings were a mistake -- although they were a very great triumph, too; but maybe if it hadn't been for the landings, the Runaway Planet might have run right through the ecliptic and away. However, the triumphal mistake was made and that was the first time a human eye saw a Pyramid. Shortly after -- though not before a radio message was sent -- that human eye winked out forever; but by then the damage was done. What passed in a Pyramid for "attention" had been attracted. The next thing that happened set the wireless channels between Palomar and Pernambuco, between Greenwich and the Cape of Good Hope, buzzing and worrying, as astronomers all over the Earth reported and confirmed and reconfirmed the astonishing fact that our planet was on the move. Rejoice in Messias had come to take us away. them brave, built and flung the giant rockets of Operation Up at the invader; Nothing. The first, and only. Interplanetary Expeditionary Force was boosted up to no-gravity and dropped onto the new planet to strike back: Nothing. Earth moved spirally outward. If a battle could not be won, then perhaps a migration. New ships were built in haste. But they lay there rusting as the sun grew small and the ice grew thick, because where was there to go? Not Mars. Not the Moon, which was trailing alone. Not choking Venus or crushing Jupiter. The migration was defeated as surely as the war, there being no place to migrate to. One Pyramid came to Earth, only one. It shaved the crest off the highest mountain there was and squatted on it. An observer? A warden? Whatever it was, it stayed. The sun grew too distant to be of use, and out of the old Moon, the Pyramid aliens built a new small sun in the sky -- a five-year sun that burned out and was replaced, again and again and endlessly again. It had been a fierce struggle against unbeatable odds on the the uselessness of struggle was demonstrated at last, many of the many of them starved, and nearly all of the rest had something frozen or starved out of them; and what was left, two centuries and more later, was more or less like Citizen Boyne, except for a few -- a very few -- like Glenn Tropile. at her husband. "I want to get out of here," he was saying urgently. "They mean to kill me. Gala, you know you can't make yourself suffer by letting them kill me!" She wailed; "I can't!" Tropile looked over his shoulder. Citizen Boyne was fingering the textured contrasts of a golden watch-case which had been his father's -- and soon would be his son's. Boyne's eyes were closed and he wasn't listening. Tropile leaned forward and deliberately put his hand on his wife's arm. She started and flushed, of course. "You can," he said, "and what's more, you will. You can help me get out of here. I insist on it. Gala, because I must save you that pain." He took his hand off her arm, content. He said harshly: "Darling, don't you think I know how much we've always meant to each other?" She looked at him wretchedly. Fretfully she tore at the billowing filmy sleeve of her summer blouse. The seams hadn't been loosened; there had not been time. She had just been getting into the appropriate Sun Re-creation Day costume, to be worn under the parka, when the messenger had come with the news about her husband. She avoided his eyes. "If you're really Wolf..." Tropile's sub-adrenals pulsed and filled him with confident strength. "You know what I am -- you better than anyone else." It was a sly reminder of their curious furtive behavior together; like the hand on her arm, it had its effect. "After all, why do we quarrel the way we did last night?" He hurried on; the job of the rowel was to spur her to action, not to inflame a wound. "Because we're important to each other. I know that you would count on me to help if you were in trouble. And I know that you'd be hurt -- deepy. Gala! -- if I didn't count on you." She sniffled and scuffed the bright strap over her open-toed sandal. Then she met his eyes. It was the after-effect of the argument, of course. Glenn Tropile knew just how heavily he could rely on the after-spiral of a quarrel. She was submitting. She glanced furtively at Citizen Boyne and lowered her voice. "What do I have to do?" she whispered. N five minutes, she was gone,  but that was more than enough time. Tropile had at least thirty minutes left. They would take Boyne first; he had seen to that. And once Boyne was gone -- Tropile wrenched a leg off his three-legged stool and sat precariously balanced on the other two. He tossed the loose leg clattering into a corner. The Keeper of the House of Five Regulations ambled slackbodied by and glanced into the room. "Wolf, what happened to your stool?" Tropile made a left-handed sign of no-importance. "It doesn't matter. Except it is hard to meditate, sitting on this thing, with every muscle tensing and fighting against every other to keep my balance..." The Keeper made an overruling sign of please-let-me-help. "It's your last half-hour. Wolf," he reminded Tropile. "I'll fix the stool for you." He entered and slammed and banged it together, and left with an expression of mild concern. Even a Son of the Wolf was entitled to the fullest appreciation of that unique opportunity for meditation, the last half-hour before a Donation. In five minutes, the Keeper was back, looking solemn and yet glad, like a bearer of serious but welcome tidings. "It is the time for the first Donation," he announced. "Which of you -- " "Him," said Tropile quickly, pointing. Boyne opened his eyes calmly and nodded. He got to his feet, made a formal leavetaking bow to Tropile, and followed the Keeper toward his Donation and his death. As they were going out, Tropile coughed a would-youplease-grant-me-a-favor cough. The Keeper paused. "What is it. Wolf?" Tropile showed him the empty water pitcher -- empty, all right; he had emptied it out the window. "My apologies," the Keeper said, flustered, and hurried Boyne along. He came back almost at once to fill the pitcher, even though he should be there to watch Boyne's ceremonial Donation. Tropile stood looking at the Keeper, his sub-adrenals beginning to pound like the rolling boil of Well-aged Water. The Keeper was at a disadvantage. He had been neglectful of his charge -- a broken stool, no water in the pitcher. And a Citizen, brought up in a Citizen's maze of consideration and tact, could not help but be humiliated, seeking to make amends. Tropile pressed his advantage home. "Wait," he said to the Keeper. "I'd like to talk to you." The Keeper hesitated, torn. "The Donation -- " "Damn the Donation," Tropile said calmly. "After all, what is it but sticking a pipe into a man's backbone and sucking out the juice that keeps him alive? It's The Keeper turned literally white. Tropile was speaking blasphemy and he wasn't stopping. "I want to tell you about my wife," Tropile went on, assuming a confidential air. "Now there's a real woman. Not one of these frozen-up Citizenesses, you know? Why, she and I used to -- " He hesitated. "You're a man of the world, aren't you?" he demanded. "I mean you've seen life." "I -- suppose so," the Keeper said faintly. "Then you won't be shocked," Tropile lied. "Well, let me tell you, there's a lot to women that these stuffed-shirt Citizens don't know about. Boy! Ever see a woman's knee?" He sniggered. "Ever kiss a woman with -- " he winked -- " with the liht on? Ever sit in a big armchair, say, with a woman in your Zapall soft and heavy, and kind of warm, and slumped up against your chest, you know, and -- " He stopped and swallowed. He was almost making himself retch, it was so hard to say these things. But he forced himself to go on: "Well, that's what she and I used to do. Plenty. All the time. That's what I call a real woman." He stopped, warned by the Keeper's sudden change of expression, glazed eyes, strangling breath. He had gone too far. He had only wanted to paralyze the man, revolt him, put him out of commission, but he was overdoing it. He jumped forward and caught the Keeper as he fell, fainting. the water pitcher over the man. The Keeper sneezed and sat up groggily. He focused his eyes on Tropile and agonizedly blushed. Tropile said harshly: "I wish to see the new sun from the street." The request was incredible. Even after the unbelievable obscenities he had heard, the Keeper was not prepared for this; he was staggered. Tropile was in detention regarding the Fifth Regulation. That was all there was to it. Such persons were not to be released from their quarters. The Keeper knew it, the world knew it, Tropile knew it. It was an obscenity even greater than the lurid tales of perverted lust, for Tropile had asked something which was impossible! No one ever asked anything that was impossible to grant, for no one could ever refuse anything. That was utterly graceless, unthinkable. One could only attempt to compromise. The Keeper stammeringly said: "May I -- may I let you see the new sun from the corridor?" And even that was wretchedly wrong, but he had to offer something. One always offered something. The Keeper had never since babyhood given a flat no to anybody about anything. No Citizen had. A flat no led to anger, strong words -- perhaps even hurt feelings. The only flat no conceivable was the enormous terminal no of an amok. Short of that -- One offered. One split the difference. One was invariably filled with tepid pleasure when, invariably, the offer was accepted, the difference was split, both parties were satisfied. "That will do for a start," Tropile snarled. "Open, man, open! Don't make me wait." The Keeper reeled and unlatched the door to the corridor. "Now the street!" "I can't!" burst in an anguished cry from the Keeper. He buried his face in his hands and began to sob, hopelessly incapacitated. "The street!" Tropile said remorselessly. He himself felt wrenchingly ill; he was going against custom that had ruled his own life as surely as the Keeper's. But he was Wolf. "I will be Wolf," he growled, and advanced upon the Keeper. "My wife," he said, "I didn't finish telling you. Sometimes she used to put her arm around me and just snuggle up and -- I remember one time she kissed my ear. Broad daylight. It felt funny and warm -- I can't describe it." Whimpering, the Keeper flung the keys at Tropile and tottered brokenly away. He was out of the action. Tropile himself was nearly as badly off; the difference was that he. continued to function. The words coming from him had seared like acid in his throat. "They call me Wolf," he said aloud, reeling against the wall. "I will be one." He unlocked the outer door and his wife was waiting, holding in her arms the things he had asked her to bring. Tropile said strangely to her: "I am steel and fire. I am Wolf, full of the old moxie." She wailed: "Glenn, are you sure I'm doing the right thing?" He laughed unsteadily and led her by the arm through the deserted streets. V right by position and status as a connoisseur, helped prepare Citizen Boyne for his Donation. There was nothing much to it -- which made it an elaborate and lengthy task, according to the ethic of the Citizens; it had to be protracted, each step being surrounded by fullest dress of ritual. t was done in the broad daylight of the new Sun, and as many of the three hundred citizens of Wheeling as could manage it were in the courtyard of the old Federal Building to watch. The nature of the ceremony was this: A man who revealed himself Wolf, or who finally crumbled under the demands of life and ran amok, could not be allowed to live. He was haled before an audience of his equals and permitted -- with the help of regretful force, if that should be necessary, but preferably not -- to make the Donation of Spinal Fluid. Execution was murder and murder was not permitted under the gentle code of Citizens; this was not execution. The draining of a man's spinal fluid did not kill him. It only insured that. after a time and with much suffering, his internal chemistry would so arrange itself that it would continue to function, only not in a way that would sustain life. Once the Donation was made, the problem was completely altered, of course. Suffering was bad in itself. To save the Donor from the suffering that lay ahead, it was the custom to have the oldest and gentlest Citizen on hand stand by with a sharp-edged knife. When the Donation was complete, the Donor's head was removed -- purely to avert suffering. That was not execution, either, but only the hastening of an inevitable end. The dozen or so Citizens whose rank permitted them to assist then dissolved the spinal fluids in water and ceremoniously sipped them, at which time it was proper to offer a small poem in commentary. All in all, it was a perfectly splendid opportunity for the purest form of meditation for everyone concerned. Citizen Germyn, whose role was Catheter Bearer, took his place behind the Introducer Bearer, the Annunciators and the Questioner of Purpose. As he passed Citizen Boyne, Germyn assisted him to assume the proper crouched-over position. Boyne looked up gratefully and Germyn found the occasion correct for a commendatory half-smile. The Questioner of Purpose said solemnly to Boyne: "It is your privilege to make a Donation here today. Do you wish to do so?" "I do," said Boyne raptly. The anxiety had passed; clearly he was confident of making a good Donation. Germyn approved with all his heart. The Annunciators, in alternate stanzas, announced the right pause for meditation to the meager crowd, and all fell silent. Citizen Germyn began the process of blanking out his mind, to ready himself for the great opportunity to Appreciate that lay ahead. A sound distracted him; he glanced up irritably. It seemed to come from the House of the Five Regulations, a man's voice, carrying. But no one else appeared to notice it. All of the watchers, all of those on the stone steps, were in somber meditation, Germyn tried to return his thoughts to where they belonged. But something was troubling him. He had caught a glimpse of the Donor and there had been something -- something -- He angrily permitted himself to look up once more to see just what it had been about Citizen Boyne that had attracted his attention. Yes, there was something. Over the form of Citizen Boyne, silent, barely visible, a flicker of life and motion. Nothing tangible. It was as if the air itself were in motion. It was, Germyn thought with a bursting heart -- it was an Eye! The veritable miracle of Translation and it was about to take place here and now, upon the person of Citizen Boyne! And no one knew it but Germyn himself! TN this last surmise. Citizen Germyn was wrong. Or was he? True, no other human eyes saw the flawed-glass thing that twisted the air over Boyne's prostrate body, but there was, in a sense, another witness... some thousands of miles away. The Pyramid on Mount Everest "stirred." It did not move, but something about it moved, or changed, or radiated. The Pyramid surveyed its -- cabbage patch? Wristwatch mine? As much sense, it may be, to say wristwatch patch or cabbage mine. At any rate, it surveyed what to it was a place where intricate mechanisms grew, ripened and were dug up at the moment of usefulness, whereupon they were quick-frozen and wired into circuits. Through signals perceptible to it, the Pyramids had become "aware" that one of its mechanisms was now ready to be plucked -- harvested. The Pyramid's blood was dielectric fluid. Its limbs were electrostatic charges. Its philosophy was: Unscrew It and Push. Its motive was survival. Survival today was not what survival once had been, for a Pyramid. Once survival had merely been gliding along on a cushion of repellent charges, streaming electrons behind for the push, sending h-f pulses out often enough to get a picture of their bounced return to integrate deep inside. If the picture showed something metabolizable, one metabolized it. One broke it down into molecules by lashing it with the surplus protons left over from the dispersed electrons; one adsorbed the molecules. Sometimes the metabolizable object was an Immobile and sometimes a Mobile -- a vague, theoretical, frivolous classification to a philosophy whose basis was that everything unscrewed. If it was a Mobile, one sometimes had to move after it. That was the difference. The essential was survival, not making idle distinctions. And one small part of survival today was the Everest Pyramid's job. It sat and waited. It sent out its h-f pulses bouncing and scattering, and it bounced and scattered them additionally on their return. Deep inside, the morethan anamorphically distorted picture was reintegrated. Deeper inside, it was interpreted and evaluated for its part in survival, mechanisms which grew on this planet. At irregular times, the Pyramid evaluated the picture to the effect that a mechanism -- a wristwatch, so to speak -- was ripe for plucking; and by electrostatic charges, it did so. The electrostatic charges, in forming, produced what humans called an Eye. But the Pyramid had no use for names. It merely plucked, when a mechanism was ripe. It had found that a mechanism was ripe now. A world away, before the ste)s of Wheeling's Federal Buildipg, electrostatic charges gathered above a component whose name was Citizen Boyne. There was a small sound like the clapping of two hands which made the three hundred citizens of Wheeling jerk upright out of their meditations. gap that had once been occupied by Citizen Boyne, who had instantly vanished -- who had, in a word, been ripe and therefore been plucked. VI G lenn Tropile and his sobbing wife passed the night in the stubble of a cornfield. Neither of them slept much. Tropile, numbed by contact with the iron chill of the field -- it would be months before the new Sun warmed the Earth enough for it to begin radiating in turn -- tossed restlessly, dreaming. He was Wolf. Let it be so, he told himself again and again. I will be Wolf. I will strike back at the Citizens. I will -- Always the thought trailed off. He would exactly What? What could he do? Migration was an answer -- go to another city. With Gala, he guessed. Start a new life, where he was not known as Wolf. And then what? Try to live a sheep's life, as he had tried all his years? And there was the question of whether, in fact, he could manage to find a city where he was not known. The human race was migratory, in these years of subjection to the never quite understood rule of the Pyramids. It was a matter of insulation. When the new Sun was young, it was hot, and there was plenty of warmth; it was possible to spread north and south, away from final line of permafront which, in North America, came just above the old Mason-Dixon line. When the Sun was dying, the cold spread down. The race followed the seasons. Soon all of Wheeling would be spreading north again, and how was he to be sure that none of Wheeling's Citizens might not turn up wherever he might go? He could be sure -- that was the answer to that. All right, scratch migration. What remained? He could -- with Gala, he guessed -- live a solitary life on the fringes of cultivated land. They both had some skill at rummaging the old storehouses of the ancients, and there was still food and other commodities to be found. But even a Wolf is gregarious by nature and there were bleak hours in that night when Tropile found himself close to sobbing with his wife. At the first break of dawn, he was up. Gala had fallen into a light and restless sleep; he called her awake. "We have to move," he said harshly. "Maybe they'll get up enough guts to follow us. I don't want them to find us." Silently she got up. They rolled and tied the blankets she had bought; they ate quickly from the food she had brought; they made packs and put them on their shoulders and started to walk. One thing in their favor: they were moving fast, faster than any Citizen was likely to follow. All the same, Tropile kept looking nervously behind him. They hurried north and east, and that was a mistake, because by noon they found themselves blocked by water. Once it had been a river; the melting of the polar ice caps that had submerged the coasts of the old continents had drowned it out and now it was salt water. But whatever it was, it was impassable. They would have to skirt it westward until they found a bridge or a boat. "We can stop and eat," Tropile said grudgingly, trying not to despair. They slumped to the ground. It was warmer now. Tropile found himself getting drowsier, drowsier -- He jerked erect and stared around belligerently. Beside him, his wife was lying motionless, though her eyes were open, gazing at the sky. Tropile sighed and stretched out. A moment's rest, he promised himself, and then a quick bite to eat, and then onward... He was sound asleep when they spotted him. T here was a flutter of iron bird's wings from overhead. Tropile jumped up out of his sleep, awakening to panic. It was outside the possibility of belief, but there it was: In the sky over him, etched black against a cloud, a helicopter. And men staring out of it, staring down at him. A helicopter! But there were no helicopters, or none that flew -- if there had been fuel to fly them with -- if any man had had the skill to make them fly. It was impossible! And yet there it was, and the men were looking at him, and the impossible great whirling thing was coming down, nearer. He began to run in the downward wash of air from the vanes. But it was no use. There were three men and they were fresh and he wasn't. He stopped, dropping into the fighter's crouch that is pre-set into the human body, ready to do battle. The men didn't want to fight. They laughed and one of them said amiably: "Long past your bedtime, boy. Get in. We'll take you home." Tropile stood poised, hands half-clenched. "Take -- " "Take you home. Yeah. Where you belong, Tropile. Not back to Wheeling, if that's what is worrying you." "Where I-" "Where you belong." Then Tropile understood. He got into the helicopter wonderingly. Home. So there was a home for such as he. He wasn't alone. He needn't keep his solitary self apart. He could be with his own kind. He remembered Gala Tropile and paused. One of the men said with quick understanding: "Your wife? I think we saw her about half a mile from here. Heading back to Wheeling as fast as she could go." Tropile nodded. That was better, after all. Gala was no Wolf, though he had tried his best to make her one. One of the men closed the door; another did something with levers and wheels; the vanes whooshed around overhead; the helicopter bounced on its stiffsprung landing legs and then rocked up and away. For the first time in his life, Glenn Tropile looked down on the land. They didn't fly high -- but Glenn Tropile had never flown at all, and the two or three hundred feet of air beneath made him faint and queasy. They danced through the passes in the West Virginia hills, crossed icy streams and rivers, swung past old empty towns which no longer even had names of their own. They saw no one. It was something over four hundred miles to where they were going, one of the men told him. They made it easily before dark. A S Tropile walked through the town in the evening light, electricity flared white and violet in the buildings around him. Imagine! Electricity was calories, and calories were to be hoarded. There were other walkers in the street. Their gait was not the economical shuffle with pendant arms. They burned energy visibly. They swung. They strode. It had been chiseled on his brain in earliest childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, debilitating. It wasted calories. These people did not look debilitated and they didn't seem to mind wasting calories. It was an ordinary sort of town, apparently named Princeton. It did not have the transient look to it of, say. Wheeling, or Altoona, or Gary, in Tropile's experience. It looked like -- well, it looked permanent. Tropile had heard of a town called Princeton, but it happened that he had never passed through it southwarding or northbound. There was no reason why he or anybody should or should not have. Still, there was a possibility, once he thought of it, that things were somehow so arranged that they should not; maybe it was all on purpose. Like every town, it was underpopulated, but not so much so as most. Perhaps one living space in five was used. A high ratio. The man beside him was named Haendl, one of the men from the helicopter. They hadn't talked much on the flight and they didn't talk much now. "Eat first," Haendl said, and took Tropile to a bright and busy sort of food stall. Only it wasn't a stall. It was a restaurant. This Haendl -- what to make of him? He should have been disgusting, nasty, an abomination. He had no manners whatever. He didn't know, or at least didn't use, the Seventeen Conventional Gestures. He wouldn't let Tropile walk behind him and to his left, though he was easily five years Tropile's senior. When he ate, he ate. The Sip of Appreciation, the Pause of First Surfeit, the Thrice Proffered Share meant nothing to him. He laughed when Tropile tried to give him the Elder's Portion. Cheerfully patronizing, this man Haendl said to Tropile; "That stuff's all right when you don't have anything better to do with your time. Those poor mutts don't. They'd die of boredom without their inky-pinky cults and they don't have the resources to do anything bigger. Yes, I do know the Gestures. Seventeen delicate ways of communicating emotions too refined for words. The hell with them, Tropile. I've got words. You'll learn them, too." Tropile ate silently, trying to think. A man arrived, threw himself in a chair, glanced curiously at Tropile and said: "Haendl, the Somerville Road. The creek backed up when it froze. Flooded bad. Ruined everything." Tropile ventured: "The flood ruined the road?" "The road? No. Say, you must be the fellow Haendl went after. Tropile, that the name?" He leaned across the table, pumped Tropile's hand. "We had the road nicely blocked," he explained. "The flood washed it clean. Now we have to block it again." Haendl said: "Take the tractor if you need it." The man nodded and left. Haendl said: "Eat up. We're wasting time. About that road -- we keep all entrances blocked up, see? Why let a lot of sheep in and out?" "Sheep?" "The opposite," said Haendl, "of Wolves." say that, out of every million of them, one -- just one -- is different. He has a talent for survival; call him Wolf. Ten thousand of him in a world of ten Squeeze them, freeze them, cut them down. Let old Rejoice in Messias loom in the terrifying sky and so abduct the Earth that the human race is decimated, fractionated, reduced to what is in comparison a bare handful of chilled, stunned surpeople in the world any more. No, not by a factor of a thousand. Maybe there are as many as around in the space their enormous Elder Generations made for them. many are Wolf? Ten thousand. "You understand, Tropile?" said Haendl. "We survive. I don't care what you call us. The sheep call us Wolves. Me, I kind of call us Supermen. We have a talent for survival." Tropile nodded, beginning to understand. "The way I survived the House of the Five Regulations." Haendl gave him a pitying look. "The way you survived thirty years of Sheephood before that. Come on." It was a tour of inspection. They went into a building, big, looking like any other big and useful building of the ancients, gray stone walls, windows with ragged spears of glass. Inside, though, it wasn't like the others. Two sub-basements down, Tropile winced and turned away from the flood of violet light that poured out of a quartz bull's-eye on top of a squat steel cone. "Perfectly harmless, Tropile -- you don't have to worry," Haendl boomed. "Know what you're looking at? There's a fusion reactor down there. Heat. Power. All the power we need. Do you know what that means?" He stared soberly down at the flaring violet light of the inspection port. "Come on," he said abruptly to Tropile. Another building, also big, also gray stone. A cracked inscription sense-shock this time was not light; it was sound. Hammering, screeching, rattling, rumbling. Men were doing noisy things with metal and machines. "Repair shop!" Haendl yelled. "See those machines? They belong to our man Innison. We've salvaged them from every big factory ruin we could find. Give Innison a piece of metal -- any alloy, any shape -- and one of those machines will change it into any other shape and damned near any other alloy. Drill it, cut it, plane it, weld it, smelt it, zonemelt it, bond it -- you tell him what to do and he'll do it. "We got the parts to make six tractors and forty-one cars out of this shop. And we've got other shops -- aircraft in Farmingdale and Wichita, armaments in Wilmington. Not that we can't make some armaments here. Innison could build you a tank if he had gun." "What's a tank?" Tropile asked. Haendl only looked at him and said: "Come on!" G lenn Tropile's head spun dizzily and all the spectacles merged and danced in his mind. They were incredible. All of them. Fusion pile, machine shop, vehicular garage, aircraft hangar. There was a storeroom under the seats of a football stadium, and Tropile's head spun on his shoulders again as he tried to count the cases of coffee and canned soups and whiskey and beans. There was another storeroom, only this one was called an armory. It was filled with... guns. Guns that could be loaded with cartridges, of which they had very many; guns which, when you loaded them and pulled the trigger, would fire. Tropile said, remembering: "I saw a gun once that still had its firing pin. But it was rusted solid." "These work, Tropile," said Haendl. "You can kill a man with them. Some of us have." "Kill-" "Get that sheep look out of your eyes, Tropile! What's the difference how you execute a criminal? And what's a criminal but someone who represents a danger to your world? We prefer a gun instead of the Donation of the Spinal Tap, because it's quicker, because it's less messy -- and because we don't like to drink spinal fluid, no matter what imaginary therapeutic or symbolic value it has. You'll learn." But he didn't add "come on." They had arrived where they were going. It was a small room in the building that housed the armory and it held, among other things, a rack of guns. "Sit down," said Haendl, taking one of the guns out of the rack thoughtfully and handling it as the doomed Boyne had caressed his watch-case. It was the latest pre-Pyramid-model rifle, anti-personnel, short-range. It would not scatter a cluster of shots in a coffee can at more than two and a half miles. "All right," said Haendl, stroking the stock. "You've seen the works, Tropile. You've lived thirty years with sheep. You've seen what they have and what we have. I don't have to ask you to make a choice. I know what you choose. The only thing left is to tell you what we want from you." A faint pulsing began inside Glenn Tropile. "I expected we'd be getting to that." "Why not? We're not sheep. We don't act that way. Quid pro quo. Remember that -- it saves time. You've seen the quid. Now we come to the quo." He leaned forward. "Tropile, what do you know about the Pyramids?" "Nothing." Haendl nodded. "Right. They're all around us and our lives are beggared because of them. And we don't even know why. We don't have the least idea of what they are. Did you know that one of the sheep was Translated in Wheeling when you left?" "Translated?" Tropile listened with his mouth open while Haendl told him about what had happened to Citizen Boyne. "So he didn't make the Donation after all," Tropile said. "Might have been better if he had," said Haendl. "Still, it gave you a chance to get away. We had heard -- never mind how just yet -- that Wheeling'd caught itself a Wolf, so we came looking for you. But you were already gone." T ropile said, faintly annoyed: "You were damn near too late." "Oh, no, Tropile," Haendl assured him. "We're never too late. If you don't have enough guts and ingenuity to get away from sheep, you're no wolfsimple as that. But there's this Translation. We know it happens, but we don't even know what it is. All we know, people disappear. There's a new sun in the sky every five years or so. Who makes it? The Pyramids. How? We don't know that. Sometimes something floats around in the air and we call it an Eye. It has something to do with Translation, something to do with the Pyramids. What? We don't know that." "We don't know much of anything," interrupted Tropile, trying to hurry him along. "Not about the Pyramids, no." Haendl shook his head. "Hardly anyone has ever' seen one, for that matter." "Hardly -- You mean you have?" "Oh, yes. There's a Pyramid on Mount Everest, you know. That's not just a story. It's true. I've been there, and it's there. At least, it was there five years ago, right after the last Sun Re-creation. I guess it hasn't moved. It just sits there." Tropile listened, marveling. To have seen a real Pyramid! Almost he had thought of them as legends, contrived to account for such established physical facts as the Eyes and Translation, as children with a Santa Claus. But this incredible man had seen it! "Somebody dropped an Hbomb on it, way back," Haendl continued, "and the only thing that happened is that now the North Col is a crater. You can't move the Pyramid. You can't hurt it. But it's alive. It has been there, alive, for a couple of hundred years; and that's about all we know about the Pyramids. Right?" "Right." Haendl stood up. "Tropile, that's what all of this is all about!" He gestured around him. "Guns, tanks, airplanes -- we want to know more! We're going to find out more and then we're going to fight." There was a jarring note and Tropile caught at it, sniffing the air. Somehow -- perhaps it was his sub-adrenals that told him -- this very positive, very self-willed man was just the slightest bit unsure of himself. But Haendl swept on and Tropile, for a moment, forgot to be alert. "We had a party up Mount Everest five years ago," Haendl was saying. "We didn't find out a thing. Five years before that, and five years before that -- every time there's a sun, while it is still warm enough to give a party a chance to climb up the sides -- we send a team up there. It's a rough job. We give it to the new boys, Tropile. Like you." There it was. He was being invited to attack a Pyramid. Tropile hesitated, delicately balanced, trying to get the fee of this negotiation. This was Wolf against Wolf; it was hard. There had to be an advantage -- "There is an advantage," Haendl said aloud. Tropile jumped, but then he remembered: Wolf against Wolf. Haendl went on: "What yoi' get out of it is your life, in the first place. You understand you can't get out now. We don't want sheep meddling around. And in the second place, there's a considerable hope of gain." He stared at Tropile with a dreamer's eyes. "We don't send parties up there for nothing, you know. We want to get something out of it. What we want is the Earth." "The Earth?" It reeked of madness. But this man wasn't mad. "Some day, Tropile, it's going to be us against them. Never mind the sheep -- they don't count. It's going to be Pyramids and Wolves, and the Pyramids won't win. And then -- " It was enough to curdle the blood. This man was proposing to fiiht, and against the invulnerable, the godlike Pyramids. But he was glowing and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn't finished his "and then -- " but he didn't have to. The "and then" was obvious : And then the world takes up again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then we go back to our own solar system and an end to the five-year cycle of frost and hunger. And then the Wolves can rule a world worth ruling. , It was a meretricious appeal, perhaps, but it could not be refused. Tropile was lost. He said: "You can put away the gun, Haendl. You've signed me up." T he way to Mount Everest, Tropile glumly found, lay through supervising the colony's nursery school. It wasn't what he had expected, but it had the advantages that while his charges were learning, he was learning, too. One jump ahead of the threeyear-olds, he found that the "wolves," far from being predators on the "sheep," existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society. In barbarously simple prose, a primer said: "The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this." True, thought Tropile subvocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was how it had been with him. "Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death -- although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of sheep." True, too. "It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die -- of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger." It didn't have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can't mend their own fences. The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly -- he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind -- competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior. But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called "Zeckendorf and Hilton" sometimes ended in bloody noses. And nobody -- nobody at allmeditated on Connectivity. Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: "We don't understand it and we don't like what we don't understand. We're suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older, we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it -- or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens, they'll need that much. But more than that we do not allow." "Allow?" Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to pulse. "Allow! We have our suspicions and we know for a fact that sometimes people disappear when they meditate. We don't want to disappear. We think it's not a good thing to disappear. Don't meditate, Tropile. You hear?" B ut later, Tropile had to argue the point. He picked a time when Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground -- it had once been a football field, Haendl said. They had done their regular twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid sheep. Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near Haendl, caught his breath #B and said: "Haendl -- about meditation." "What about it?" "Well, perhaps you don't really grasp it." Tropile searched for words. He knew what he wanted to say. How could anything that felt as good as Oneness be bad? And wasn't Translation, after all, so rare as hardly to matter? But he wasn't sure he could get through to Haendl in those terms. He tried: "When you meditate successfully, Haendl, you're one with the Universe. Do you know what I mean? There's no feeling like it. It's indescribable peace, beauty, harmony, repose." "It's the world's cheapest narcotic," Haendl snorted.  "Oh, now, really -- " "And the world's cheapest religion. The stone-broke mutts can't afford gilded idols, so they use their own navels. That's all it is. They can't afford alcohol; they can't even afford the muscular exertion of deep breathing that would throw them into a state of hyperventilated oxygen drunkenness. Then what's left? Self-hypnosis. Nothing else. It's all they can do, so they learn it, they define it as pleasant and good, and they're all fixed up." Tropile sighed. The man was so stubborn! Then a thought occurred to him and he pu hed himself up on his elbows. "Aren't you leaving something out? What about Translation?" Haendl glowered at him. "That's the part we don't understand." "But surely self hypnosis doesn't account for -- " "Surely it doesn't!" Haendl mimicked savagely. "All right. We don't understand it and we're afraid of it. Kindly do not tell me Translation is the supreme avowal of Duality, Unison with the Brahm-Ground or any such slop. You don't know what it is and neither do we." He started to get up. "All we know is, people vanish. And we want no part of it, so we don't meditate. None of us -- including you!" T T was foolishness, this closeorder drill. Could you defeat the unreachable Himalayan Pyramid with a squads-right flanking maneuver? And yet it wasn't all foolishness. Close-order drill and #calorie-a-day diet began to put fat and flesh and muscle on Tropile's body, and something other than that on his mind. He had not lost the edge of his acquisitiveness, his drive -- his whatever it was that made the difference between Wolf and sheep. But he had gained something. Happiness? Well, if "happiness" is a sense of purpose, and a hope that the purpose can be accomplished, then happiness. It was a feeling that had never existed in his life before. Always it had been the glandular compulsion to gain an advantage, and that was gone, or anyway almost gone, because it was permitted in the society in which he now lived. Glenn Tropile sang as he puttputted in his tractor, plowing the thawing Jersey fields. Still, a faint doubt remained. Squads right against the Pyramids? Stiffly, Tropile stopped the tractor, slowed the diesel to a steady thrum and got off. It was hot -- being midsummer of the five-year calendar the Pyramids had imposed. It was time for rest and maybe something to eat. He sat in the shade of a tree, as farmers always have done, and opened his sandwiches. He was only a mile or so from Princeton, but he might as well have been in Limbo; there was no sign of any living human but himself. The northering sheep didn't come near Princeton -- it "happened" that way, on purpose. He caught a glimpse of something moving, but when he stood up for a better look into the woods on the other side of the Held, it was gone. Wolf? Real Wolf, that is? It could have been a bear, for that matter -- there was talk of wolves and bears around Princeton; and although Tropile knew that much of the talk was assiduously encouraged by men like Haendl, he also knew that some of it was true. As long as he was up, he gathered straw from the litter of last "year's" head-high grass, gathered sticks under the trees, built a small fire and put water on to boil for coffee. Then he sat back and ate his sandwiches, thinking Maybe it was a promotion, going from the nursery school to labor in the fields. Or maybe it wasn't. Haendl had promised him a place in the expedition that would -- maybe -- discover something new and great and helpful about the Pyramids. And that might still come to pass, because the expedition was far from ready to leave. Tropile munched his sandwiches thoughtfully. Now why was the expedition so far from ready to leave? It was absolutely essential to get there in the warmest weather possible -- otherwise Mt. Everest was unclimbable. Generations of alpinists had proved that. That warmest weather was rapidly going by. And why were Haendl and the Wolf colony so insistent on building tanks, arming themselves with rifles, organizing in companies and squads? The Hbomb hadn't flustered the Pyramid. What lesser weapon could? Uneasily, Tropile put a few more sticks on the fire, staring thoughtfully into the canteen cup of water. It was a satisfyingly hot fire, he noticed abstractedly. The water was very nearly ready to boil. Pyramid in the Himalays felt, or heard, or tasted -- a difference. Possibly the h-f pulses that had gone endlessly wheep, wheep, wheep were now going wheepbeep, wheep-foeep. Possibly the electromagnetic "taste" of lowerthan-red was now spiced with a tang of beyond-violet. Whatever the sign was, the Pyramid recognized it. A part of the crop it tended was ready to harvest. The ripening bud had a name, of course, but names didn't matter to the Pyramid. The man named Tropile didn't know he was ripening, either. All that Tropile knew was that, for the first time in nearly a year, he had succeeded in catching each stage of the nine perfect states of water-coming-to-a-boil in its purest form. It was like... like... well, it was like nothing that anyone but a Water Watcher could understand. He observed. He appreciated. He encompassed and absorbed the myriad subtle perfections of time, of shifting transparency, of sound, of distribution of ebulliency, of the fainl faint odor of steam. Complete, Glenn Tropile relaxed all his limbs and let his chin rest on his breast-bone. It was, he thought with placid, crystalline perception, a rare and perfect opportunity for meditation. He thought of Connectivity. (Overhead, a shifting glassy flaw appeared in the thin, still air.) There wasn't any thought of Eyes in the erased palimpsest that was Glenn Tropile's mind. There wasn't any thought of Pyramids or of Wolves. The plowed field before him didn't exist. Even the water, merrily bubbling itself dry, was gone from his perception. He was beginning to meditate. Time passed -- or stood still -- for Tropile; there was no difference. There was no time. He found himself almost on the brink of Understanding. Something snapped. An intruding blue-bottle drone, maybe, or a twitching muscle. Partly, Tropile came back to reality. Almost, he glanced upward. Almost, he saw the Eye... It didn't matter. The thing that really mattered, the only thing in the world, was all within his mind; and he was ready, he knew, to find it. Once more! Try harder! He let the mind-clearing unanswerable question drift into his mind: If the sound of two hands together is a clapping, what is the sound of one hand? Gently he pawed at the question, the symbol of the futility of mind -- and therefore the gateway to meditation. Unawareness of self was stealing deliciously over him. He was Glenn Tropile. He was more than that. He was the water boiling... and the boiling water was he. He was the gentle warmth of the fire, which was -- which was, yes, itself the arc of the sky. As each thing was each other thing; water was fire, and fire air; Tropile was the first simmering bubble and the full roll of Well-aged Water was Self, was -- more than Self -- was -- The answer to the unanswerable question was coming clearer and softer to him. And then, all at once, but not suddenly, for there was no time, it was not close -- it was. The answer was his, was him. The arc of sky was the answer, and the answer belonged to sky -- to warmth, to all warmths that there are, and to all waters, and -- and the answer was -- was -- Tropile vanished. The mild thunderclap that followed made the flames dance and the column of steam fray; and then the fire was steady again, and so was the rising steam. But Tropile was gone. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Share Alike Two objects occupying the same space at the same time solve a great many problems -- or create an exasperating one like this! pected to share apartments -- with the chances being about even that the "other person" would be a man. Disgustedly, she fluffed the cushion on the sofa to smooth out the imprint of his bulky frame -- he must be a giant to have made that much of a hollow! -- and slammed the window against the cold wind -- fresh-air fiend, tool Allowing her resentment no ered there was a man in her apartment, she was quite righteously and understandably indignant. Not that she was unduly puritanical in the matter of sharing her quarters with a man she didn't know. After all, residential facilities for the unmarried personnel in Rigel IV-Port were critically limited. And girls were exchance to abate, she stormed over to the videocom and punched the number for Housing. "Expediter's office." The receptionist's voice came through buoyantly, even before her image formed on the screen. "Good morn -- " "It is not a good morning!" Cherry said, her red hair swirling as she shook her head emphatically. "First," she thrust up a rigid finger to enumerate the point, "there are no mornings here. "Second," another finger indicated, "none of them would be good with a gale blustering around outside and a man blustering around inside!" "Oh, it's you. Miss O'Day," the receptionist said disappointedly as her face replaced the shifting pattern on the screen. "Yes, it's me -- Cherry O'Day, Coefficient B, Shift B. And there's still a man in my apartment!" "Naturally," said the receptionist wearily. "You understood when you were assigned to the dormitory that -- " "I understood there would be a man or a woman. But I was also assured that regardless of whatever else it was, it would be Coefficient A, Shift A, and that it would be either working or at recreation during the twelve hours I am entitled to the apartment!" "I know," the receptionist said impatiently. "And it -- I mean he is Coefficient of Existence A, but Shift B -- the same shift as yours." "And every time I turn around in my apartment, there he is -- or, rather, there he isn't. What spacehappy idiot in your office assigned him to the right CE, but the wrong shift?" and folded her arms so there would be no question as to the uncompromising nature of her indignation. "We have your complaint on file, Miss O'Day," the receptionist began formally, "and -- " "Then do something about it! I don't care to spend any more sleep periods in bed with a man, however relatively immaterial he may be!" The receptionist shrugged apathetically. "These things take time, you know." "Is Art -- is Mr. Edson in?" "Not yet. The A-Shift Expediter is still on duty. Would you like to speak with him?" "Never mind," Cherry answered stiffly. "I'll be in later." Exasperated, she snapped off the videocom. If there was one thing she was sure of, it was that she would stand for no more delay in regaining unchallenged occupancy of her apartment during her B-Shift off-period. This Mr. Whatever-His-NameIs was imminently close to getting thrown out on his ear regardless of his unguessable bulk... provided she could improvise some means of locating his nonexistent ear. Resolutely, she strode back into the hall and waited next to the bathroom door, focusing her rage on the mocking patter of shower water against porcelain and flesh. Then she winced as his deep bass voice rose gratingly off key: "Oh-h-h-h, the ship slipped out of Hyper With-h-h-h the motions of a viper... Furiously, she beat on the door. The spray stopped like the tailend of a cloudburst. "Still out there?" There was more amusement than annoyance in his tone. "Sometime this morning," she said with forced control, "I am expected to report to work. Before then, however, there are some trifling personal necessities I must attend to -- if you will concede," she was shouting now, "that I am entitled to the use of my bathroom!" "Temper, temper!" he chided. "Our bathroom." His voice was mockingly placating as the doorknob turned. "After all, I'mas much inconvenienced as you. But do I go aroimd shouting?" The door swimg open and a large white towel, briskly rubbing nothing, swept past her and into the bedroom. "You could at least move out," she said, following the towel and squinting as though she might find something else to direct her words to, "before the whole base discovers I'm sharing my apartment with a Coefficient A man who's on the B-Shift!" The towel fluttered down and draped itself across the back of a chair. "It could be worse," he suggested. "Suppose I were Coefficient B, like you. Then thejr'd really have something to waggle their tongues about." The disembodied voice receded as its owner crossed the room. "Please move out!" she begged. "Back to the shuttle? Uh-uh. You move out." "This is my apartment and you aren't going to tell me -- " "Ah-ah! Watch that blood pressure, sweetheart!" and, a moment later, closed. Then another. But, naturally, she couldn't see any of the things he was withdrawing; they were Displacement A articles so they could co-exist in the same space with her clothes. For a long while, she was silent, trying to control her rage, not caring that time was slipping by and she would be even later for work. If she could only do something! The locker door opened and the light went on inside, illuminating her clothes on the racks -- the same racks that held his things, only on a. different level of existence. Smiling vengefully, she went stealthily forward, until she realized she and her personal effects were as immaterial and invisible to him as he was to her. Then she lunged across the remaining distance and slammed the door, locking it. "Now," she said triumphantly, "you may come out when you agree to vacate!" Silence. "Otherwise you'll stay in there until the Expediter comes and straightens out this mess." A sudden burst of laughter exploded behind her and she spun around, crying out apprehensively. "I wondered when you'd try something like that," he chuckled. She watched the broad impression return in the sofa cushion, straining her eyes as though she might force herself to negotiate, visually at least, the barrier between the two coefficients of existence. Then, impulsively, she seized a vase from the dresser and hurled it. jolted to a stop in midair above the sofa. The cushion's hollow smoothed out abruptly and the vase drifted erratically back to its place on the dresser. "Easy, honey! How'd you like it if I started throwing mutually existent things at you?" Cherry waited until he left and then rushed through her shower, regaining some of the time she had lost, and hurriedly dressed with only token attention to detail. She darted across the lobby and slammed into the Coefficient Booth. Using her B-type key, she activated the rectifiers and waited until her displacement was erased and until the door swung open. Then, once again on a normal plane of existence, she raced outside. bus waiting at the stop. It whisked her to the Expediter's office, where she soon stood fuming in front of his desk. "Art, how long is this going to last?" "That man again?" Only half holding back a smile, he ran a hand over his closely cropped blond hair and came around the desk. "You've got to do something!" she burst out. "Look, Cherry -- we're doing the best we can. It was the A-Shift Expediter's mistake. He's checking it through now." "I've had enough! I'm going straight to the Coordinator!" Art shrugged. "Can't. He's survey of Rigel V-Port." "And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?" "You might try bearing with us and making the best of the situation. Anyway, even if we found out how the mistake was made, we couldn't do anything about it right now. The unmarried personnel quarters are all filled. We'd have to change his shift. That would upset the balance of the entire working force." "You could make him move back aboard the shuttle," she insisted. "The shuttle's been sent to VPort. Don't you see. Cherry, we're helpless until the Coordinator returns? In any case, it can't be all that serious. You and this fellow are on different coefficients of existence, so it can't be a critical question of morals." "Oh, it can't, can't it?" she said. "Just tell me who he is -- how I can meet him face to face!" Art spread his hands helplessly. "You know if he's in there by mistake, there's no way of tracking down his identity until we find out how the mistake was made. Housing assignments are restricted -- a matter of preserving privacy under the apartmentsharing plan." She drew herself up to her full five foot two. "If you thought anything of me, you'd find some way to dump him out on his neck." "Now how can I do that?" he reasoned. "Like you, all I've got is a B-key, which makes him nonexistent to me, too, while we're in the dormitory. Taking a sock at nothing wouldn't do any good. And I don't think I could forcibly convince nothing to tell me who he is so I could settle with him outside." She let her chin and shoulders down. "I give up. What am I supposed to do -- place myself at the mercy of a practical joker for the test of my time here?" "You might try marrying me, you little hothead. Then we could move into the married persons' quarters and forget the whole thing." "For the twentieth time -- no!" "Why not. Cherry? What's wrong with me?" She backed off and surveyed him. Actually, there wasn't anything wrong with him. "For one thing, you don't love me," she accused. "If you did, you wouldn't stand around and see me living in an apartment with another man." "If I clear up the mistake -- if I find some way to get him out -- will you marry me then?" She turned away. "No, Art. That's what they expect the precolonization force to do -- marry among themselves and stay on as colonists after everything is prepared." "I'd forgotten," he said dejectedly. "You're going to make a career out of pre-colonization." across the large, circular room to her calculator console. "Wish I had devastating looks," Madge said jokingly as she gathered up her things. "Then I could throw away my clock, too." Cherry glanced up at the time. She hadn't expected to be an hour late to relieve the other girl. "Same trouble," she explained. "I went to see Art again." "Any results?" She shook her head irritably and began punching coordinate figures onto the tape. "Learn who he is?" Madge asked. "Not yet. But I will," Cherry said resolutely. Then she drew back and stared incriminatingly at the keyboard as she surveyed a broken nail. Madge squirmed into her coat. "I've heard of guys like that. They think it's fun -- keeping a girl hopping when she can't see him any more than he can see her. Does something for their masculine ego. But just catch him away from the dormitory without his CE-A and your CE-B and he'll soon cower!" Cherry's resolute expression slumped. "I can't find out who he is. He's protected by hidden-identity regulations." She snatched open the top of the machine and jerked out the half-punched roll of tape. She had fed in data for at least three hyper-approach paths that would put incoming ships within frying distance of Rigel. She started over again with the first coordinates. Madge leaned over and nudged her in the ribs. "If you can't get rid of the guy, why don't you marry him? You're already living with him, practically." "Bright girl," Cherry said, not in the least amused. "I'll bet he wouldn't frown on the suggestion if he knew his roommate was almost Miss Procyon VI." Cherry hurled the role of tape and Madge ducked. Then she frowned troubledly. "Why do they have to have this silly setup of Coefficient Displacements to complicate pre-colonization work?" "Ultimate economy of space," Madge said, parroting a phrase from the Handbook. "They could put two girls in one apartment and two men in another. But then the IV-Port base would need twice as many drawers, chairs, lockers, dressers, desks and so forth. It's easier to have two shifts sharing the quarters at different times and separated on different planes of existence." fore the range, watching the pot of water come to a boil. Maybe she could manage to ignore the man until the Coordinator returned. After all, she reminded herself, he wasn't really there at all, since they were assigned to different levels of existence while in the dormitory. She could hear him talk only because the air, which carried the vibrations of his voice, was mutually existent between them. Something rammed sharply into her back and she whirled around. "Sorry, darling," the rumbling bass voice apologized. "Didn't know you were here." A frying pan, waist-high, circled wide around her and landed on a burner. She glared with her most annoyed expression for fully a minute before she realized the look was futile; as far as he was concerned, she wasn't really there at all. The cupboard door swung out and a can of assorted vegetables made a descending arc to the range and began opening itself. "Oh-h-h-h, the ship slipped out "Please!" she shouted. "Please spare me that foghorn voice of yours!" The voice stopped, but the tune continued -- in a shrill, off-key whistle. The can elevated, tipped over and poured its contents into the frying pan. Just like a man -- not knowing when to use a pot. Eventually the whistling stopped and the fire was extinguished under the pan. A minute passed and she began hesitantly scanning the kitchen for moving articles that might betray his whereabouts. The cupboard opened again and a canister floated over to the table and kicked off its lid. A small mound of flour levitated from the container and drifted over toward her. Puzzled, she wondered what sort of recipe would call for "a handful of flour" to be added to vegetables. But the white mound steadied and hung motionless between her and the range. "This is my first experience with CE-Displacement," he said thoughtfully. She backed away. The flour advanced, following her in a halfcircle around the kitchen. But how could he know where she was? He laughed. "Imagine -- you displaced a half-level above normal existence and me a half-level below." "Three or four levels might be a better arrangement," she said uncertainly, her eyes riveted on the flour. "Interesting, this CE-A and CE-B gimmick," he continued, "and mutually co-existent articles -- like the furnishings in the apartment and the food in the kitchen." Of course! The apron she was wearing -- that was how he knew where she was! It was only one of the apartment's items that were as real to both of them as was the mound of flour in his hand. "Ever consider," he suggested, "that there might be a way of seeing what you look like?" "You wouldn't dare!" His breath came out with a pool and the flour covered her face with a fine powder. Stupefied, she stood staring in his direction. "Small chin," he appraised, "upturned nose, rather high cheekbones. Hm-m-m... Blonde or brunette?" Enraged, she fled from the room. # UT it was only the beginning  of a climactic night, she found out soon after she activated the light filters on the windows and turned on a table lamp in the living room. She selected Brahms on the Central Relay Receiver. But before she could return to the sofa, the Lullabye faded and a dissonant bit of syncopation replaced it. Determinedly, she went back to the receiver and reset the dial. Even before she removed her hand, however, she felt the knob return to the other position. Tightening her grip, she moved it back. But again it rotated in the opposite direction. Deciding she could present a better display of unruffled dignity by not creating a scene, she got a book and returned to the sofa. But she had hardly read a paragraph before she felt the cushion under her sink considerably lower. An open magazine which she hadn't noticed before drifted up and positioned itself in front of her book. She moved the book around in front of the magazine, but the magazine only leap-frogged over the book and once more blocked her vision. "There are two ends to this sofa," she said with teeth-gritting politeness. "But, darling," he protested facetiously, "there's hardly any light over there." She snapped to her feet and stood facing the depression in the cushion. Then, in a flash of inspiration, she slammed the book shut and swung it sharply in front of her. That the volume was mutually co-existent was proved by the smack of paper against flesh. But her satisfaction quickly melted in embarrassment before his laughter. Frustrated, Cherry went to bed. But only minutes later, she felt the mattress sag under his weight. "Asleep, sweetheart?" he asked. She didn't answer; she moved closer to the edge of the bed. There was no one there, she told herself. If she reached out, she would feel nothing except the empty space where his body -- in another level of existence -- held the top sheet up and away from the bottom one. Still, it was so upsettingly real -- being aware of his every move, the pull of the covers when he tugged on them, the sound of his breathing. Abruptly, the section of the coexistent sheet that was folded back over the covers swung up and fluttered down on her face. She started to spring erect. But his hands, given reciprocal reality by the sheet, clasped her cheeks. Then his lips pressed down firmly against hers through the cloth. Fuming, she jumped from the bed, grabbed her pillow and stomped out to the sofa, trying not to hear his chuckling. If only she could come face to face with him outside! She would humiliate him so severely in front of everyone within earshot that he would become the laughing stock of the base and it would be impossible for him to stay on at IV-Port! Suddenly, a plan began taking shape and a smile relaxed her face as she gave it serious consideration.  next morning and out through the Coefficient Displacement Stall before her phantom roommate was even awake. Hidden behind a plant in the outer lobby, she stood vigil with her eyes on the booth, secure in the knowledge that there was no exit from the dormitory except through the nucleopolarizer. There was the subtle glow of the rectifier field inside the enclosure and a small, lean man stepped out, glancing anxiously at his watch. If she studied everyone who came through, she would at least provide herself with a list of possible suspects. And by eliminating those who didn't meet the physical specifications, she could narrow the field down to a handful. Three women came through in quick succession, hardly allowing time for the glow to subside in the stall. Then a steady flow of workers was emerging. That was even better, Cherry realized. If she managed to spot him while the lobby was filled with witnesses, the ridicule that she would heap on him would be more humiliating. Four more men, all the wrong sizes and shapes, and two women trailed out. Then came a stout man, but too short; next a tall man, but too thin. She was just beginning to doubt her chance for success when she heard a whistled song coming through from somewhere on the other side of the booth. Excitedly, she added subvocal words to the tune: "The ship slipped out of..." The whistling stopped. But at least she knew he would be coming through shortly. The rectifier's glow flared, then the next suspect stepped out. He was tall and muscular, heavy but not stout. And bald, with a fringe of hair circling his head like a horseshoe... Just the type! She had known all along that he would look something like that, even down to his almost contemptuous smile! She plunged from her hiding place, swinging her handbag. It caught him full in the chest and he fell back with a grunt of surprise. "Yotre the one, you miserable sneak!" Cherry brought the bag up in an overhanded swing and down on his head. The last dozen or so persons who had come through the booth crowded around. "Hide out in a girl's apartment, will you?" Her tongue worked like a lash as she aimed the bag at his face. "Try to take advantage of a clerical error!" gave him no quarter. Her bag broke and spilled; she tossed it aside and used her hard little fists. Suddenly someone had her hands locked behind her and was pulling her away. "Cherry, you little hot pepper!" It was Art. "You don't know who that is!" She turned around. "I -- I don't?" Her confounded victim had finally recovered and was brushing himself off. "Who is this girl, Mr. Ekison?" he asked. Art hesitated, then shrugged futilely. "This is Miss O'Day... Cherry, Coordinator Barton. He got back from V-Port late yesterday." "Miss O'Day," the man repeated thoughtfully. "This is a coincidence. I was just at your apartment." "You -- you were?" Cherry smiled weakly. "I was hoping I could catch you before you checked out on your shift." He straightened his coat and tie. "I thought I might find a way out of your difficulty." "That's very kind -- " "As a matter of fact, I still think I might." He turned stiffly. "Drop by at my office and we'll talk it over -- say, in five or six weeks?" Rigidly, Cherry watched the Coordinator stride off. Then, numbly, she let Art lead her to the bus stop. "That temper is going to get you into trouble one of these days." He shook his head solicitously. She felt frustration and despair sweep over her; then, all at once, she was crying against his chest. "Marry me," he pleaded. "Then they'll have to put us in the permanent residence quarters. I love you. Cherry." She blinked up angrily into his face. "Prove it! Get that -- that despicable thing out of my quarters!" "Then will you marry me?" She hesitated before giving him her twenty-first no. For a moment, she had remotely considered accepting -- abandoning her plans for a pre-colonization career. After all, there wouldn't be anyone like Art around when she reached the top. "I couldn't possibly marry you now, even if I wanted to. How could I be sure I wouldn't be doing it just to escape the man in my apartment?" "All right. Cherry. I'll see what I can do about getting him out -- even if it means sidestepping some of the regulations." B ut Cherry was in no mood to wait until retribution, plodding at its customary snail's pace, caught up with her immaterial roommate -- not if she could help it along. At the end of her next recreation period, she waited on the handball court until she caught Madge reporting for physical culture before starting her day's work. "Lend me your A-Displacement key," she urged. Madge drew back. "Oh, no, you don't! If you're going to get in a jam, you're going to do it without my help. The Handbook says it's against regulations to swap Coefficients of Existence." "But, Madge, don't you see that's the only way I can trap him -- by cornering him in the apartment on his level of existence?" The other girl's frown gave way to a mischievous grin. "Then you'll let him have it?" "But good!" Madge handed over the A-key. "Good luck, kid!" she applauded. Cherry had wasted almost an hour off-shift finding Madge. But that was to her advantage. It would give Mr. What's-His-Name time to get settled in the apartment before she descended on him. She hurried back to the dormitory and through the CE stall. Displaced on the new A-level, she strode across the inner lobby. As she turned into the corridor where her quarters were located, she saw a tall, muscular man twisting the key in her lock and entering. Quelling her anxiety, she slowed to give him a chance to become occupied so she could take him by complete surprise. At the door, she waited another minute, then noiselessly let herself in. He was on the other side of the room, bending down over the Central Relay Receiver! She crept across the carpet, sweeping up a straight-back chair as she advanced. Then she let out a triumphant cry and started the chair swinging down toward her now-material adversary. In the final second before it struck, he started to turn around. It was Art! The chair crashed against him and he collapsed in front of the receiver. Confounded, she stood staring down at him, vaguely wondering... No -- the man's voice was a deep bass; Art's was a moderate baritone. Then she was on her knees beside him as he sat up and shook his head groggily. "Little hellcat," he muttered. She steadied his head between her hands. "Art, darling -- I didn't know... What were you doing?" "Told you I'd see what I could manage," he mumbled. "Broke into the files to find out where your quarters were. Then got an A-Displacement key. Figured I'd catch him here. But he wasn't in, after all." "He'll show up," she promised. "We'll get him!" She seized his arm to help him up. But he grunted in pain and grasped his shoulder. "Not now, we won't get him." His fingers gingerly explored the lump on his head. "I -- I -- Say, you're A-Displacement too. How He toppled over. slipped out of his smock and came over to where Cherry stood anxiously in the corridor. "You did a real good job on him," he said sarcastically. "Is he badly hurt?" she asked. "Slight concussion -- plus a dislocated shoulder -- plus scalp lacerations." She started toward the room into which they had wheeled Art. But the doctor stopped her. "He's resting now. You won't be able to see him until tomorrow." She started slowly across Rigel IV-Port base for the dormitory, realizing remorsefully that she might have seriously hurt Art... and all on account of the man in her apartment! Her regret simmered into indignation and then deepened into a glowing rage as she hastened her steps. She covered the final block in a determined stride, her arms swinging and her fists clenched. It had gone far enough! Now she would end it. And when she got through, this Whoever-HeWas would sorely regret the day he had moved in with her! In the Displacement Booth, she used Madge's key again, then went storming into her quarters. "Come on out!" she challenged as she crossed the living room. In the bedroom, she shouted, "Where are you?" She swept into the kitchen. "I know you're somewhere!" But there was only silence. She had used Madge's A-key, hadn't she? Jerking open the closet door, she saw only his clothes on the rack -- reassurance that she was now on his level of existence. But he was nowhere in the apartment. Very well, then, she would find something to do until he arrived -- like ripping his clothes to shreds and destroying all his personal effects. She started with the top drawer of the dresser. A RT sat up, speechless. "That's what I said," Cherry was repeating. "I'm in love with him." Groaning, he sank back down in the hospital bed. "I hated him so much, I guess it backfired," she explained. "Anyway, he's the man I want to marry." He sprang upright again. "But you can't do that!" She paced, looking blithesomely at the ceiling. "It's his aggressiveness -- his forcefulness -- the way he takes over. And he's so good-natured all the time. Do you suppose he'll want to marry me. Art?" He swung his legs over the side, of the bed and sent his feet groping for his slippers. Smiling wistfully, she returned to the bedside. "Just think, he almost drove me into marrying you. Maybe I would have, if I hadn't been afraid I was being forced into it to get away." "But -- but. Cherry, you don't understand! I love you! And -- " "He does, too. I know it. Besides, I've been living with him over a week." "But he doesn't love you! I mean -- look, you don't even know who he is!" "Oh, but I do. Furthermore, I know he purposely arranged it so that he'd be A-Displacement but B-Shift. He was in a position to swing it that way." "He what?" "I went back to the apartment  after I left here. I was going to tear up his clothes, just for spite." She reached into her handbag. "I found his identity card in the dresser." She handed it to him. He reached out with his good arm and pulled her to him. He didn't have to look at the photograph to know it was his own.      battery feels like in action. Few menaces in the history of science fiction can match the Pyramid beings who have kidnapped the Earth -- unaware and yet immediately threatening every member of humanity -- and totally invulnerable. Or is there such a thing as total invulnerability? Musn't there be a chink somewhere, however tiny? For instance, whoever harvests whatever is ripe is bound to pick something poisonous -- but was a Son of the Wolf poisonous enough? No irony intended -- breakage is really the happiest thing that can happen; it's when there is no damage or disaster that this spaceship crew begins to worry. So will you when you see why. problem. What is Piersen doing here -- wherever here is? Will he live or die? For the answers to these and other questions, our hero has to keep tuning in on a hangover! Along with short stories and our regular features, there's more to the exciting, frustrating, immensely rewarding quest that Willy Ley sets ing to one of the richest treasures of all time! for your informaition Hunting Down the Dodo lived on the island of Mauritius a bird named the dodo, with the scientific name of Didus ineptus. Come to think of it, this is not a good beginning. The story of the dodo is not a fairy tale but the truth, or as much truth as can still be established. Moreover, this first sentence is a very unscientific oversimplification. Let's try to make it a bit more accurate. Then it will read just about like this: From a period, the beginning of which cannot be ascertained, but which might be considered roughly equivalent to the beginning of the glacial age in higher latitudes, until about the year # A.D., a large and flightless bird, classified as being the representative of a sub-order of the Columbiformes or pigeonlike birds, known to have existed on the island of Mauritius, or Zwaaneiland, also known as He de France, was called dodo, or dodaers, or dronte, but also dinde sauvage, W alchvogel or gekapte Zwaan (hooded swan) and several other names, with the scientific designation of either Didus ineptus or Raphus cucullatus, which are equivalent in scientific usage, but with Raphus cucullatus holding the chronological priority. Well, now, this is more accurate. It also complies with the order drilled into newspapermen: "Get all the facts into the first paragraph." But I'm very much afraid it would probably be most intelligible to somebody who knows these facts already and who, logically, does not have much reason to read it at all. this time with the fundamentals. To the east of Madagascar, strung out along the #th parallel of southern latitude, there are three reasonably large islands. Their current names are Reunion, Mauritius and Rodriguez -- at least, that's the way the name of the last appears on Admiralty charts, both British and American. For some unfathomable reason, the dependency of Rodrigues, when it makes an official report to the colony of Mauritius, spells its name with an "s" at the end. I am making a point of this difference in spelling for the sole reason that it happens to be the smallest of all the difficulties and discrepancies we are going to encounter. The more serious problems will come up later. It is hard to say just who discovered these islands. There exists at least one old map on which the three islands have Arabic names. It is quite likely that Arab trading vessels did discover them, but without paying any special attention to their discovery, since the islands were uninhabited and it is exceedingly difficult to barter on uninhabited islands. At any event, the Arabs did not even bother to locate the islands with any degree of care. On the map mentioned, they are drawn as forming an equilateral triangle and are placed far too close to Madagascar. The first European discoverers were Portuguese but, strange to say, it was the second of the Portuguese discoverers who had his name attached to the islands. The first one was Diogo Fernandes Pereira, who sailed these waters in #. On February #th of that year, he found an island some # miles to the east of Madagascar which he named Santa Apollonia. It must have been the present Reunion. Soon after, his ship, the Cerne, sighted the present Mauritius. The navigator landed and named the island after his ship, as Ilha do Cerne. This, I might say right here, led to two different misunderstandings. Much later, around the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody who obviously did not know the name of Pereira's ship wondered why the navigator should have named the island after the island of Cerne, mentioned by Pliny the Elder. Wherever Pliny's Cerne was located, it could not be to the east of Madagascar. The other misunderstanding took place quite soon after Pereira's voyage. Dutch explorers who came to Mauritius and knew the old name thought that Cerne was a miswriting for eigne (swan) and that Pereira had thought the dodos to be swans. The Dutch did not bother with the zoological problem involved; they "translated" Diogo Pereira's name into Dutch as Zwaaneiland. Pereira, who was on his way to India, found Rodrigues later in the same year. It was first named Domingo Friz, but also Diego Rodriguez. The Dutch apparently found this hard to pronounce and talked about Diego Ruy's island, which then was Frenchified into Dygarroys -- but the official French name for a time was He Marianne. S IX years later came the second discoverer, Pedro Mascarenhas, who visited only Mauritius and Reunion. No name change was involved for Mauritius because of this rediscovery, but Santa Apollonia (Reunion) was renamed Mascarenhas or Mascaregne, and to this day the islands are called the Mascarene Islands. The subsequent history of the islands was just about as complicated as this beginning. Reunion, the largest of the three islands, # square miles in extent, was officially annexed to France in # by a Captain Goubert from Dieppe. I don't know why one annexation was not considered sufficient, but the historical fact is that the annexation was repeated in the once more in # by Etienne de Flacourt, who changed the name Fig. #: The dodo of Mauritius as sketched by Adrian van de Venne in # from Mascarenhas to He Bourbon. After the French Revolution, that name had to go, of course, and Reunion was re-established. But then history can be read quite easily from the various changes, for it became He Bonaparte. Since #, it is again Reunion. Considered non-politically. Reunion is a volcanic island with three rather tall peaks. The tallest is the Piton des Neiges, which measures # feet. The other high elevation is simply called Le Volcan by the inhabitants of the island, but Le Volcan has more than one peak. One, called Bory Crater, is # feet above sea level and extinct. The other crater, known as Fournaise, is only # feet tall but still active. An island in such a location can grow tropical fruit and there are banana plantations and breadfruit trees, not to mention coconut palms. But these plants were introduced. The original vegetation included a dwarf bamboo, a variety of casuarina trees and a plant called by the trade name "red tacamahac," botanically Calophyllutn spuiium. The second island, Mauritius, is somewhat smaller than Reunion (about # square miles) and likewise of volcanic origin. But all volcanic activity on Mauritius is a thing of the fairly distant past. The names of its three highest mountains reflect the changing ownership of the island Fig. #: Life-size restoration of the dodo of Mauritius in the American Museum of Natural History, New York through the centuries. The highest one, #I feet, is called Black River Mountain. The second one, # feet, is Mt. Pieter Botte, while the third, # feet, is called Pouce. The island is surrounded by coral reefs which a ship's captain has to know well, but it has a fine natural harbor. These two features prompted the Dutch to annex it in # and they gave it its current name after Count Maurits of Nassau. The Dutch abandoned Mauritius in #. For slightly more than a half a century (#), it was French and called He de France. In #, it was taken by the English, who Fig. #: Skeleton of the Mauritius dodo, assembled from sub-fossil bones restored the Dutch name. Right now, Mauritius is a "spice island" where spices, pineapple, mangoes, avocados and bananas are grown, along with sugar cane. But the original vegetation is still represented by ironwood trees, ebony trees, traveler's trees and bamboo. Of course, domesticated animals were introduced on both islands, but Mauritius is somewhat special even in that respect -- the deer that can be found there came from Java, not from Europe. A S regards Rodriguez, its story is similar but shorter. Its extent is only # square miles. It is volcanic in origin, with #foot Mt. Limon as its highest peak, and there is a fringing coral reef. The ownership of the island was Dutch, French and English in succession. In all cases, the first inhabitants were either deportees or people in voluntary exile, some of them mutineers, some refugees from religious intolerance. Though all this had to be mentioned to establish a background, none of these facts would have made any of these islands famous. The only one which would enjoy a kind of restricted fame would be Mauritius, among stamp collectors, because of an early philatelic error which produced some of the rarest stamps in existence. But these Mascarene Islands are famous because they once were the home of the dodo and related birds. The story of the dodo (let's concentrate on the Mauritius dodo for the time being) looks rather simple, if somewhat sad, in rough outline. Its existence was first reported by Dutch navigators, who were far less thorough in their descriptions than one would now wish they had been. But they made up for this to some extent by bringing live specimens back with them to Europe. There they were painted, mostly by Dutch painters and, again it must be said, not as well as one would now wish. But the major blunder was committed in England. About #, give or take a year, a live Mauritius dodo arrived in England. It lived there for quite some time, and after its death, it was "stuffed" (badly, no doubt) and found a place in Tradescant's Museum in London in #. A few decades later, the stuffed dodo was transferred to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. This was in # -- as we now know, two years after the last report of a live dodo on Mauritius was put on paper by one Benjamin Harry. In #, the curator of the Ashmolean Museum decided that the moth-eaten old skin was a disgrace to his fine collection and ordered that it be thrown away to be burned with other trash. At the last moment, somebody wrenched off the head (partly decayed) and one foot (in good condition). They are now about the rarest items on record. tains one more surprising item. The first scientist to include the dodo as an exotic bird in a book on natural history was Carolus Clusius in #. Later, Carolus Linnaeus gave it a scientific name, and quite naturally the dodo entered into the zoological works of Buffon in France and Blumenbach in Germany. But by #, nobody had ever seen a dodo. The available paintings did not seem convincing. They looked like caricatures to begin with and did not even agree with each other. Some scientists, bent on a housecleaning in scientific, literature, began to doubt whether there had ever been such a bird. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, if not worse, and the descriptions had meant the cassowary. At any event J. S. Duncan of Oxford felt obliged, in #, to write a paper with the title: "A summary review of the authorities on which naturalists are justified in believing that the Dodo, Raphus cucullatus Didus ineptus), was a bird existing in the Isle of France, or the neighbouring islands, until a recent period." Mr. Duncan can be said to have saved the dodo from secondary extinction in scientific literature. But let's go back now to the original sources. The first man to write about the dodo was the Dutch Admiral Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck, who went to Mauritius with eight ships. Four of them returned to Holland in #, the other four in #. Admiral van Neck's narrative appeared in Dutch in #I and translations into English, French and Latin were printed during the same year, a German translation one year later. In spite of this volume of printed matter, there are still a number of question marks. The original journal, presumably written on shipboard, was enlarged for publication -- we don't know whether by the admiral himself or by an editor. Moreover, one old naturalist, who did not leave Europe, gave a dodo picture which, he said, was copied from Admiral van Neck's journal. But this picture cannot be found in any known edition of the journal. The passage in the admiral's journal in which the dodo is first mentioned reads: Blue parrots are very numerous there referring to Mauritius as wen as other birds; among which are a kind, conspicuous for their size, larger than our swans, with huge heads only half covered with skin, as if clothed with a hood. These birds lack wings, in the place of which three or four blackish feathers protrude. The tail consists of a few soft incurved feathers which are ash-colored. These we used to call Walghvogels for the reason that the more and the longer they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became. Nevertheless, their belly and breast were of a pleasant flavor and easily masticated. IHE Dutch word Walghvogels (also spelled Walchvogels' translates literally as "nauseating birds," but it led to one of the many mistakes that crowd the dodo's short life history. About two hundred years later, it was asserted in German books that there had been Forest Birds, so named, on Mauritius. There probably were, and still are, forest birds on Mauritius, but the Forest Bird was only a sloppy translation, appearing in its German form of Waldvogel. Spelling in those days was helter-skelter in any language, so somebody probably thought that "walgh" was just a poor rendering of "Waldt," a then frequent spelling of the German word Wald, which means forest. Since this has raised the problem of the name of the bird, it might be just as well to clear up this additional difficulty as much as possible. In the most recent specialized professional work on the dodo, by the Marquis Masauji Hachisuka, not less than seventy-nine different names are listed. But the confusion is not quite as large as this figure seems to indicate, for the names clearly fall into a small number of classes. One set of them tries to be descriptive. They are mostly French, as, for example, austruche encapuchonne (hooded ostrich), cygne capuchonne (hooded swan) and dinde sauvage (wild turkey). Another set are either translations or mistranslations of Dutch names. The Dutch names themselves are either variations on the theme of walghvogels or else descriptive terms similar to the French names just mentioned. Just two words emerge as, so to speak, "exclusive" terms. One is the name dodo, with the variations dodaars and dodaerts, and the other one is dr onto. It is reasonably certain that "dodo" is a name coined by the Portuguese, as witness a letter written in # by Emanuel Altham about "very strange fowles called by ye portingals Do Do." The fact that Altham pulled the two syllables apart, thereby changing their pronunciation, is "very suspicious-making," as a French lady I know phrased it. It is so suspicious -- or, rather, indicative -- because old Dutch and German writings spell the name as doedoe and dudu, all of which must be pronounced "doodoo." Since it has no real meaning in any language, it can well be, as has been asserted, an imitation of the bird's call. The Dutch variation dod-aars or dod-aers is rather clear to an English speaker, especially in view of the Dutch descriptive remarks ende heeit een rond gat ("and has a round rump," as van Neck put it) or rond van stuiten ("round of stern," as Capt. Willem van West-Zanen wrote in #). which in Dutch and in German was used about equally frequently as dodo, still is not explained. The Englishman H. E. Strickland, who wrote the first book about the dodo in #, and it is still good, accepted the explanation that this term was coined by Danish sailors, using their verb drunte, which means "to be slow." This is not only somewhat far-fetched on the face of it, for the Danes, for a change, have not contributed anything to the story of this bird; it is not even necessarily correct. We simply don't know whether the dodo was slow and the evidence is not very much in favor of this assumption. The Dutch zoologist Prof. A. C. Oudemans -- yes, the man who wrote the #-page book on the Sea Serpent -- has pointed out -- in another book devoted to the dodo only -- that there was a now obsolete Middle Dutch verb dronten. Its meaning was "bloated" or "swollen," which sounds much more reasonable. But Prof. Oudemans could not prove that this was actually the derivation; a lot of early writings on the dodo seem to be lost. The records are incomplete also as regards the number of birds taken away alive. If it were not for a chance mention in Peter Mundy's journal -- he served with the East India Company from # to # -- we would never know that two of them were brought to India. But his statement is definite; "Dodoes, a strange kind of fowle, twice as big as a Goose, that can neither flye nor swimm, being Cloven footed; I saw two of them in Suratt the first British settlement in India, started # house that were brought from thence  Mauritius." There is a similar chance mention about one having been sent to Japan, but Japanese scientists have failed, in spite of much effort, to trace its fate from Japanese chronicles and books. Going by such remarks on the one hand and, on the other hand, by sketches and paintings stated or reported to have been made from life. Dr. Hachisuka listed a total of twelve specimens of the Mauritius dodo as having arrived in Europe: one in Italy, two in England and nine -- five males and four females -- in Holland. In other books, particularly in works which treat the paintings as paintings instead of as ornithological illustrations, larger figures are usually mentioned. This is partly due to counting sketches and paintings made from earlier paintings. Mostly, however, it is due to the fact that no distinction is made between the gray Mauritius dodo and similar birds from the other two Mascarene Islands. TUT no list, whether of specimens or of paintings, can be considered final. In # and #, a German scientist. Dr. S. Killermann, set out on a systematic dodo hunt in museums, libraries and art galleries and discovered about half a dozen pictures that had simply been overlooked before. Killermann's feat could probably be repeated by somebody today with the inclination and the necessary time and money. As has been mentioned, the Clusius picture has been copied from a lost original of van Neck's journal. Somebody might still find it. Similarly, it is known that an unnamed artist on board of one of the ships commanded by Admiral Wolphart Harmanszoon made several drawings from life while the ship was in Mauritius harbor in #. The originals are now "lost," but somebody might find them. Likewise, one of the several oil paintings of dodos made by Roelandt Savery is listed as lost. In short, while a dodo investigation is no longer virgin territory, it is still a fertile field with possibilities for a diligent researcher. One of the earliest and best pictures of a Mauritius dodo drawn from life is the pen-andink drawing by Adrian van de Venne. It was made in # and shows a male. This is what we now think of as the normal appearance of the dodo. However, it was Prof. Oudemans who first realized that the dodo must have had two "normal appearances" -- one fat stage and one gaunt stage. This assumption explains many old sketches which look like caricatures; the latter impression is considerably strengthened by the fact that a number of sketches were made while the birds were moulting. Oudemans' idea makes it possible to arrange all these sketches in a logical sequence, pre-moulting, at the height of the moult, post-moulting, fat and gaunt. But why a bird on a tropical island, where the food supply should be more or less the same all year round, should go through a gaunt stage at regular intervals is not yet fully explained. The Mauritius dodo became extinct between #, the last time it is mentioned as living, and #, the first time it fails to appear on a list of the animals and birds of the island made on the spot. By #, the people living on the island did not even know any more that there had been such a bird. A hundred years later, there lived a man on Mauritius who was an ardent naturalist. This man, George Clark, not only knew about the dodo, but was determined to find dodo remains. They had to be somewhere on the island, for the entire species could not possibly have become extinct without leaving traces. But where would these traces be located? At first glance, the situation did not look too promising. "In fact," George Clark wrote, "there is no part of Mauritius where the soil is of such a nature as to render probable the accidental internment of substances thrown upon it. It may be classed under four heads: stiff clay; large masses of stone forming a chaotic surface; strata of melted lava, locally called paves, impervious to everything; and loam, intermixed with fragments of vesicular basalt -- the latter too numerous and too thickly scattered to allow anything to sink into the mass by the mere force of gravity. Besides this, the tropical rains, of which the violence is well known, sweep the surface of the earth in many places with a force sufficient to displace stones of several hundred pounds weight." point, Clark all of a sudden had a new idea. If these tropical rains swept everything before them, where did they sweep it? Well, there was a kind of delta formed by three rivers running into the harbor of Mahebourg. If dodo bones had been washed into one of the rivers, this was the likely place where they might have come to rest. One part of that delta was a marsh known locally as le Mare aux Songes. Mr. Clark promised himself that he would dig there, as soon as he had the time and some means to pay laborers for the actual work. About #, he began to dig, finding large numbers of dodo bones at the very bottom of the marsh, to the delight of anatomists, and to the intense astonishment of aged creoles who were standing around and were somewhat annoyed by seeing something on their own island which they had not known about. As a result of George Clark's successful digging, there is no doubt about the dodo's skeleton. As a matter of fact, it was this material which helped to unravel such problems as were posed by the sketches of artists who did not know anatomy -- at any rate, not bird anatomy. And while no museum can have an authentic dodo, several museums can, at least, boast authentic dodo skeletons, like the one at the Smithsonian Institution which was put together by Norman H. Boss. The American Museum of Natural History in New York has such a skeleton, too, but it also has something which makes casual visitors wonder whether a dried skin might have survived somewhere. The museum has a restoration, made in the taxidermy studios of Rowland Ward in London, The feet and the head are copied from the preserved specimens. The feathers are those of other birds, correct in color and, as far as can be ascertained, correct in shape. The dodo is in the fat stage, the one we know best from pictures. Well, this is the somewhat sporadic story of the gray dodo of Mauritius. But there are two more Mascarene Islands and they had dodolike birds, too. We'll go into that story in the next issue.      "How do you know you haven't been in space opera? How do you know you aren't a crashed saucerjockey? Who were you anyhow? Send # to Box #, SA, Silver Spring, Maryland for your copy of "History of Man" by L. Ron Hubbard." To commit the flawless crime, all Barthold needed were centuries in which to plan and execute it -- and an insurance policy with -- double E verett BarthoW didn't take out a life insurance policy casually. First he read up on the subject, with special attention to Breach of Contract, Willful Deceit, Temporal Fraud, and Payment. He checked to find how closely insurance companies investigated before paying a claim. And he acquired a considerable degree of knowledge on Double Indemnity, a subject which interested him acutely. When this preliminary work was done, he looked for an insurance company which would indemnity suit his needs. He decided, finally, upon the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation, with its main office in Hartford, Present Time. Inter-Temporal had branch offices in the New York of #, Rome, #, and Constantinople, #. Thus they offered full temporal coverage. This was important to Barthold's plans. Before applying for his policy, Barthold discussed the plan with his wife. Mavis Barthold was a thin, handsome, restless woman, with a cautious, contrary feline nature. "It'll never work," she said at once. "It's foolproof," Barthold told her firmly. "They'll lock you up and throw away the key." "Not a chance," Barthold assured her. "It can't miss -- if you cooperate." "That would make me an accessory," said his wife. "No, darling." "My dear, I seem to remember you expressing a desire for a coat of genuine Martian scart. I believe there are very few in existence." Her husband, with canny accuracy, had hit her weak spot. "And I thought," Barthold said carelessly, "that you might derive some pleasure from a new Daimler hyper-jet, a Letti Det wardrobe, a string of matched ruumstones, a villa on the Venusian Riviera, a -- " "Enough, darling!" Mrs. Barthold gazed fondly upon her enterprising husband. She had long suspected that within his unprepossessing body beat a stout heart. Barthold was short, beginning to bald, his features ordinary, and his eyes were mild behind horn-rimmed glasses. But his spirit would have been perfectly at home in a pirate's greatmuscled frame. "Then you're sure it will work?" she asked him. "Quite sure, if you do what I tell you and restrain your fine talent for overacting." "Yes, dear," said Mrs. Barthold, her mind fixed upon the glitter of ruumstones and the sensuous caress of scart fur. Barthold made his final preparations. He went to a little shop where some things were advertised and other things sold. He left, several thousand dollars poorer, with a small brown suitcase tucked tightly under his arm. The money was imtraceable. He had been saving it, in small bills, for several years. And the contents of the brown suitcase were equally untraceable. He deposited the suitcase in a public storage box, drew a deep breath and presented himself at the offices of the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation. For half a day, the doctors poked and probed at him. He filled out the forms and was brought, at last, to the office of Mr. Gryns, the regional manager. Gryns was a large, affable man. He read quickly through Barthold's application, nodding to himself. "Fine, fine," he said. "Everything seems to be in order. Except for one thing." "What's that?" Barthold asked, his heart suddenly pounding. "The question of additional coverage. Would you be interested in fire and theft? Liability? Accident and health? We insure against everything from a musket ball to such trivial but annoying afflictions as the very definitely common cold." "Oh," said Barthold, his pulse rate subsiding to normal. "No, thank you. At present, I am concerned only with a life insurance policy. My business requires me to travel through time. I wish adequate protection for my wife." "Of course, sir, absolutely," Gryns said. "Then I believe everything is in order. Do you understand the various conditions that apply to this policy?" "I think I do," replied Barthold, who had spent months studying the Inter-Temporal standard form. "The policy runs for the life of the assured," said Mr. Gryns. "And the duration of that life is measured only in subjective physiological time. The policy protects you over a distance of # years qn either side of the Present. But no further. The risks are too great." "I wouldn't dream of going any further," Barthold said. "And the policy contains the usual double indemnity clause. Do you understand its function and conditions?" "I believe so," answered Barthold, who knew it word for word. "All in order, then. Sign right here. And here. Thank you, sir." "Thank you," said Barthold. And he really meant it. " office. He was sales manager for the Alpro Manufacturing Company (Toys for All the Ages). He announced his intention to leave at once on a sales tour of the Past. "Our sales in time are simply not what they should be," he said. "I'm going back there myself and take a personal hand in the selling." "Marvellous!" cried Mr. Carlisle, the president of Alpro. "I've been hoping for this for a long time, Everett." "I know you have, Mr. Carlisle. Well, sir, I came to the decision just recently. Go back there yourself, I decided, and find out what's going on. Went out and made my preparations and now I'm ready to leave." Mr. Carlisle patted him on the shoulder. "You're the best salesman Alpro ever had, Everett. I'm very glad you decided to go." "I am, too, Mr. Carlisle." "Give 'em hell! And by the way -- " Mr. Carlisle grinned slyly -- "I've got an address in Kansas City, #, that you might be interested in. They just don't build 'em that way any more. And in San Francisco, #, I know a -- " "No, thank you, sir," Barthold said. "Strictly business, eh, Everett?" "Yes, sir," Barthold said, with a virtuous smile. "Strictly business." Everything was in order now. Barthold went home and packed and gave his wife her last instructions. "Remember," he told her, "when the time comes, act surprised, but don't simulate a nervous breakdown. Be confused, not psychotic." "I know," she said. "Do you think I'm stupid or something?" "No, dear. It's just that you do have a tendency to wring every bit of emotion out of situations. Too little would be wrong. So would too much." "Honey," said Mrs. Barthold in a very small voice. "Yes?" "Do you suppose I could buy one little ruumstone now? Just one to sort of keep me company until "No! Do you want to give the whole thing away? Damn it all. Mavis -- " "All right. I was only asking. Good luck, darling." "Thank you, darling." They kissed. And Barthold left. case from the public storage box. Then he took a heli to the main showroom of Temporal Motors. After due consideration, he bought a Class A Unlimited Flipper and paid for it in cash. "You'll never regret this, sir," said the salesman, removing the price tag from the glittering machine. "Plenty of power in this baby! Double impeller. Full control in all years. No chance of being caught in stasis in a Flipper." "Fine," Barthold said. "I'll just get in and -- " "Let me help you with those suitcases, sir. You understand that there is a federal tax based upon your temporal milage?" "I know," Barthold said, carefully stowing his brown suitcase in the back of the Flipper. "Thanks a lot. I'll just get in and -- " "Right, sir. The time clock is set at zero and will record your jumps. Here is a list of time zones proscribed by the government. Another list is pasted to the dashboard. They include all major war and disaster areas, as well as Paradox Points. There is a federal penalty for entering a proscribed area. Any such entry will show on the time clock." "I know all this." Barthold suddenly was very nervous. The salesman couldn't suspect, of course. But why was he going on gabbling so about breaches of the law? "I am required to tell you the regulations," the salesman said cheerfully. "Now, sir, in addition, there is a thousand-year limit on time jumps. No one is allowed beyond that, except with written permission from the State Department." "A very proper precaution," Barthold said, "and one which my insurance company has already advised me of." "Then that takes care of everything. Pleasant journey, sir! You'll find your Flipper the perfect vehicle for business or pleasure. Whether your destination is the rocky roads of Mexico, #, or the damp tropics of Canada, #, your Flipper will see you through." Barthold smiled woodenly, shook the salesman's hand and entered the Flipper. He closed the door, adjusted his safety belt, started the motor. Leaning forward, teeth set, he calibrated his jump. Then he punched the send-off switch. A gray nothingness surrounded him. Barthold had a moment of absolute panic. He fought it down and experienced a thrill of fierce elation. At last, he was on his way to fortune! surrounded  the Flipper like a faint and endless fog. Barthold thought of the years slipping by, formless and without end, gray world, gray universe... But there was no time for philosophical thoughts. Barthold unlocked the small brown suitcase and removed a sheaf of typed papers. The papers, gathered for him by a temporal investigation agency, contained a complete history of the Barthold family, down to its earliest origins. He had spent a long time studying that history. His plans required a Barthold. But not just any Barthold. He needed a male Barthold, # years old, unmarried, out of touch with his family, with no close friends and no important job. If possible, with no job at all. He needed a Barthold who, if he suddenly vanished, would never be missed, never searched for. With those specifications, Barthold had been able to cut thousands of Bartholds out of his list. Most male Bartholds were married by the age of #. Some hadn't lived that long. Others, single and unattached at #, had good friends and strong family ties. Some, out of contact with family and friends, were men whose disappearance would be investigated. After a good deal of culling, Barthold was left with a mere handful. These he would check, in the hope of finding one who suited all his requirements... #f such a man existed, he thought, and quickly banished the thought from his mind. After a while, the grayness dissolved. He looked out and saw that he was on a cobblestone street. An odd, high-sided automobile chugged past him, driven by a man in a straw hat. He was in New York, #. ' I 'HE first man on his list was Jack Barthold, known to his friends as Bully Jack, a journeyman printer with a wandering eye and a restless foot. Jack had deserted his wife and three children in Cheyenne in #, with no intention of returning. For Barthold's purposes, this made him as good as single. Bully Jack had served a hitch with General Pershing, then returned to his trade. He drifted from print shop to print shop, never staying long. Now, at the age of #, he was working somewhere in New York. Barthold started at the Battery and began hunting his way through New York's print shoos. At the eleventh one, on Water Street, he located his man. "You want Jack Barthold?" an old master printer asked him. "Sure, he's in the back. Hey, Jack! Fellow to see you!" Barthold's pulse (juickened. A man was comio g toward him, out of the dark reC'esses of the shop. The man approached, scowling. "I'm Jack Biarthold," he said. "Whatcha wanit?" Barthold looJked at his relative and sadly shoPk hiS head. This Barthold obviously would not do. "Nothing," he said, "nothing at all." He turned quickly and left the shop. Bully Jack, fve foot eight inches tall and weighing two hundred and ninety pounds, scratched his laead. "Now what in hell was all that about?" he asked, The old master printer shrugged his should ers. Everett Barthold returned to his Flipper and reset the controls. A pity, he told himself, but a fat man would never fit into his plans. H IS next stnp was Memphis, #. Dressed in an appropriate costume, Barttiold went to the Dixie Belle Hotel and inquired at the desk for Ben Bartholder. "Well, suh," said the courtly white-haired old mafi behind the desk, "his key's in, so I reckon he's out. You ronight find him in the corner saloon widh the other trashy carpetbaggers." Barthold let the insult pass and went to the saloon. It was early evening, but the gaslights were already blazing. Someone was strumming a banjo and the long mahogany bar was crowded. "Where could I find Ben Bartholder?" Barthold asked a bartender. "Ovah theah," the bartender said, "with the other Yankee drummers." Barthold walked over to a long table at one end of the saloon. It was crowded with flashily dressed men and painted women. The men were obviously Northern salesmen, loud, self-confident and demanding. The women were Southerners. But that was their business, Barthold decided. As soon as he reached the table, he spotted his man. There was no mistaking Ben Bartholder. He looked exactly like Everett Barthold. And that was the vital characteristic Barthold was looking for. "Mr. Bartholder," he said, "might I have a word with you in private?" "Why not?" said Ben Bartholder. Barthold led the way to a vacant table. His relative sat opposite him, staring intently. "Sir," said Ben, "there is an uncanny resemblance between us." "Indeed there is," replied Barthold. "It's part of the reason I'm here." "And the other part?" "I'll come to that presently. Would you care for a drink?" Barthold ordered, noticing that Ben kept his right hand in his lap, out of sight. He wondered if that hand held a derringer. Northerners had to be wary in these Reconstructionist days. After the drinks were served, Barthold said, "I'll come directly to the point. Would you be interested in acquiring a rather large fortune?" "What man wouldn't?" "Even if it involved a long and arduous journey?" "I've come all the way from Chicago," Ben said. "I'll go farther." "And if it comes to breaking a few laws?" "You'll find Ben Bartholder ready for anything, sir, if there's some profit to it. But who are you and what is your proposition?" "Not here," Barthold said. "Is there some place where we can be assured of privacy?" "My hotel room." "Let's go, then." Both men stood up. Barthold glanced at Ben's right hand and gasped. Benjamin Bartholder had no right hand. "Lost it at Vicksburg," explained Ben, seeing Barthold's shocked stare. "It doesn't matter. I'll take on any man in the world with one hand and a stump -- and lick him!" "I'm sure of it," Barthold said a little wildly. "I admire your spirit, sir. Wait here a moment. I -- I'll be right back." Barthold hurried out of the saloon's swinging doors and went directly to his Flipper. A pity, he thought, setting the controls. Benjamin Bartholder would have been perfect. But a maimed man wouldn't fit into his plan. T he next jump was to Prussia, #. With a hypnoed knowledge of German and clothes of suitable shape and hue, he walked the deserted streets of Konigsberg, looking for Hans Baerthaler. It was midday, but the streets were strangely, eerily deserted. Barthold walked and finally encountered a monk. "Baerthaler?" mused the monk. "Oh, you mean old Otto the tailor! He lives now in Ravensburg, good sir." "That must be the father," Barthold said. "I seek Hans Baerthaler, the son." "Hans... Of course!" The monk nodded vigorously, then gave Barthold a quizzical look. "But are you sPre that's the man you want?" "Quite sure," Barthold said. "Could you direct me to him?" "You can find him at the cathedral," said the monk. "Come, I'm going there myself." Barthold followed the monk, wondering if his information could be wrong. The Baerthaler he sought wasn't a priest. He was a mercenary soldier who had fought all over Europe. His type would never be found at a cathedral -- unless, Barthold thought with a shudder, Baerthaler had unreportedly acquired religion. Fervently he prayed that this wasn't so. It would ruin everything. "Here we are, sir," the monk said, stopping in front of a noble, soaring structure. "And there is Hans Baerthaler." Barthold looked. He saw a man sitting on the cathedral steps, a man dressed all in rags. In front of him was a shapeless old hat and within the hat were two copper coins and a crust of bread. "A beggar," Barthold grunted disgustedly. Still, perhaps... He looked closer and noticed the blank, vacuous expression in the beggar's eyes, the slack jaw, the twisted, leering lips. "A great pity," the monk said. "Hans Baerthaler received a head wound fighting against the Swedes at Fehrbellin and never recovered his senses. A terrible pity." Barthold nodded, looking around at the empty cathedral square, the deserted streets. "Where is everyone?" he asked. "Why, sir, surely you must know! Everyone has fled Konigsberg except me and him. It is the Black Plague!" With a shudder, Barthold turned and raced back through the empty streets, to his Flipper, his antibiotics, and to any other year but this one.  sense of impending failure, Barthold journeyed again down the years, to London, #. At Little Boar Taverne near Great Hertford Cross, he made inquiry of one Thomas Barthal. "And what would ye be wanting Barthal for?" asked the publican, in English so barbarous that Barthold could barely make it out. "I have business with him," said Barthold in his hypnoed Old English. "Have you indeed?" The publican glanced up and down at Barthold's ruffed finery. "Have you really now?" The tavern was a low, noisome place, lighted only by two guttering tallow candles. Its customers, who now gathered around Barthold and pressed close to him, looked like the lowest riffraff. They surrounded him, still gripping their pewter mugs, and Barthold detected, among their rags, the flash of keener metal. "A nark, eh?" "What in hell's a nark doing in here?" "Daft, perhaps." "Past a doubt, to come alone." "And asking us to give um' poor Tom Barthal!" "We'll give um something, lads!" "Ay, let's give um!" The publican watched, grinning, as the ragged crowd advanced on Barthold, their pewter mugs held like maces. They backed him past the leaded windows, against the wall. And only then did Barthold fully realize the danger he faced in this unruly pack of vagabonds. "I'm no nark!" he cried. "The hell you say!" The mob pressed forward and a heavy mug crashed against the oak wall near his head. With a sudden inspiration, Barthold swept off his great plumed hat. "Look at me!" They stopped, gazing at him open-mouthed. "The perfect image of Tom Barthal!" one gasped. "But Tom never said he had a brother," another pointed out. "We were twins," Barthold said rapidly, "separated at birth. I was raised in Normandy, Aquitaine and Cornwall. I found out only last month that I had a twin brother. And I'm here to meet him." It was a perfectly creditable story for #th century England and the resemblance could not be gainsaid. Barthold was brought to a table and a mug of ale set before him. "You've come late, lad," an ancient one-eyed beggar told him. "A fine worker he was and a clever one at prigging a prancer -- " Barthold recognized the old term for horse thief. " -- but they took him at Aylesbury, and tried him with the hookers and the freshwater marines, and found him guilty, worse luck." "What's his fine?" Barthold asked. "A severe one," said a stocky rogue. "They're hanging him today at Shrew's Marker!" a moment. Then he asked, "Does my brother really look like me?" "The spitting image!" exclaimed the publican. "It's uncanny, man, and a thing to behold. Same looks, same height, same weight -- everything the same!" The others nodded their agreement. And Barthold, so close to success, decided to risk all. He had to have Tom Barthal! "Now listen close to me, lads," he said. "You have no love for the narks or the London law, do you? Well, I'm a rich man in France, a very rich man. Would you like to come there with me and live like barons? Aye, take it easy -- I knew you would. Well, we can do it, boys. But we have to bring my brother, too." "But how? asked a sturdy tinker. "They're hanging him this day!" "Aren't you men?" demanded Barthold. "Aren't you armed? Wouldn't you dare strike out for fortune and a life of ease?" They shouted their assent. Barthold said, "I thought you'd be keen. You can. All you have to do is follow my instructions." Only a small crowd had gathered at Shrew's Marker, for it was a small and insignificant hanging. Still, it afforded some amusement and the people cheered lustily as the horse-drawn prisoner's wagon rumbled over the cobbled streets and drew to a halt in front of the gibbet. "There's Tom," murmured the tinker, at the edge of the crowd. "See him there?" "I think so," Barthold said. "Let's move in." He and his fifteen men pushed their way through the crowd, circling the gibbet. The hangman had already mounted the platform, had gazed over the crowd through the eye-slits in his black mask, and was now testing his rope. Two constables led Tom Barthal up the steps, positioned him, reached for the rope... "Are you ready?" the publican asked Barthold. "Hey! Are you ready?" Barthold was staring, openmouthed, at the man on the platform. The family resemblance was unmistakable. Tom Barthal looked exactly like him -- except for one thing. Barthal's cheeks and forehead were deeply pitted with smallpox scars. "Now's the moment for the rush," the publican said. "Are you ready, sir? Sir? Hey!" He whirled and saw a plumed hat duck out of sight into an alley. He started to give chase, but stopped abruptly. From the gibbet he heard a hiss, a stifled scream, a sodden thud. When he turned again, the plumed hat was out of sight. Everett Barthold returned to his Flipper, deeply depressed. A disfigured man would not fit his plan. TN the Flipper, Barthold thought long and seriously. Things were going badly, very badly indeed. He had searched through time, all the way to medieval London, and had found no Barthold he could use. Now he was nearing the thousand-year limit. He could go no further -- Not legally. But legality was a matter of proof. He couldn't -- he wouldn't -- turn back now. There had to be a usable Barthold somewhere in time! He unlocked the small brown suitcase and took from it a small, heavy machine. He had paid several thousand dollars for it, back in Present Time. Now it was worth a lot more to him. He set the machine carefully and plugged it into the time clock. He was now free to go anywhere in time -- back to primordial origins, if he wished. The time clock would not register. He reset the controls, feeling suddenly very lonely. It was a frightening thing to plunge over the thousand-year brink. For a single instant, Barthold considered giving up the entire dubious venture, returning to the security of his own time, his own wife, his own job. But, steeling himself, he jabbed the send-off button. TE emerged in England, #, near the ancient stronghold of Maiden Castle. Hiding the Flipper in a thicket, he emerged wearing a simple clothing of coarse linen. He took the road toward Maiden Castle, which he could see in the far distance, upon a rise of land. A group of soldiers passed him, drawing a cart. Within the cart, Barthold glimpsed the yellow glow of Baltic amber, red-glazed pottery from Gaul, and even Italian-looking candelabra. Loot, no doubt, Barthold thought, from the sack of some town. He wanted to question the soldiers, but they glared at him fiercely and he was glad to slink by unquestioned. Next he passed two men, stripped to the waist, chanting in Latin. The man behind was lashing the man in front with a cruel, many-stranded leather whip. And presently they changed positions, with barely the loss of a stroke. "I beg your pardon, sirs -- " But they wouldn't even look at him. ' Lli  #l I V if Barthold continued walking, mopping perspiration from his forehead. After a while, he overtook a cloaked man with a harp slung over one shoulder and a sword over the other. "Sir," said Barthold, "might you know where I'd find a kinsman of mine, who has journeyed here from Iona? His name is Connor Lough mac Bairthre." "I do," the man stated. "Where?" asked Barthold. "Standing before you," said the man. Immediately he stepped back, clearing his sword from its scabbard and slinging his harp to the grass. Fascinated, Barthold stared at Bairthre. He saw, beneath the long page-boy hair, an exact and unmistakable likeness of himself. At last he had found his man! But his man was acting most uncooperative. Advancing slowly, sword held ready for cut or slash, Bairthre commanded, "Vanish, demon, or I'll carve you like a capon." "I'm no demon!" Barthold cried. "I'm a kinsman of yours!" "You lie," Bairthre declared firmly. "I'm a wandering man, true, and a long time away from home. But still I remember every member of my family. You're not one of them. So you must be a demon, taking my face for the purposes of enchantment." "Wait!" Barthold begged as Bairthre's forearm tensed for the stroke. "Have you ever given a thought to the future?" "The future?" "Yes, the future! Centuries from now!" "I've heard of that strange time, though I'm one who lives for today," Bairthre said, slowly lowering his sword. "We had a stranger in Iona once, called himself a Cornishman when he was sober and a Life Photographer when he was drunk. Walked around clicking a toy box at things and muttering to himself. Fill him up with mead and he'd tell you all about times to come." "That's where I'm from," Barthold said. "I'm a distant kinsman of yours from the future. And I'm here to offer you an enormous fortune!" Bairthre promptly sheathed his sword. "That's very kind of you, kinsman," he said civilly. "But, of course, it will call for considerable cooperation on your part." "I feared as much," Bairthre sighed. "Well, let's hear about it, kinsman." "Come with me," Barthold said, and led the way to his Flipper. A LL the materials were ready in the brown suitcase. He knocked Bairthre out with a palm hypo, since the Irishman was showing signs of nervousness. Then, attaching frontal electrodes to Bairthre's forehead, he hypnoed into him a quick outline of world history, a concise course in English and in American manners and customs. This took the better part of two days. Meanwhile, Barthold used the swiftgraft machine he had bought to transfer skin from his fingers to Bairthre's. Now they had the same fingerprints. With normal cell-shedding, the prints would flake off in some months, revealing the original ones, but that wasn't important. They did not have to be permanent. Then, using a checklist, Barthold added some identifying marks that Bairthre was lacking and removed some they didn't share. An electrolysis job took care of the fact that Barthold was balding and his kinsman hadn't been. When he was finished, Barthold pumped revitalizer into Bairthre's veins and waited. In a short while, Bairthre groaned, rubbed his hypno-stuffed head and said in modern English, "Oh, man! What did you hit me with?" "Don't worry about it," Barthold said. "Let's get down to business." Briefly he explained his plan for getting rich at the expense of the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation. "And they'll actually pay?" Bairthre asked. "They will, if they can't disprove the claim." "And they will pay that much?" "Yes. I checked beforehand. The compensation for double indemnity is fantastically high." "That's the part I still don't understand," Bairthre said. "What is this double indemnity?" "It occurs," Barthold told him, "when a man, traveling into the past, has the misfortune to pass through a mirror-flaw in the temporal structure. It's a very rare occurrence. But when it happens, it's catastrophic. One man has gone into the past, you see. But two perfectly identical men return." "Oho!" said Bairthre. "So thafs double indemnity!" "That's it. Two men, indistinguishable from each other, return from the past. Each feels that his is the true and original identity and that he is the only possible claimant of his property, business, wife and so forth. No coexistence is possible between them. One of them must forfeit all rights, leave his present, his home, wife, business, and go into the past to live. The other remains in his own time, but lives with constant fear, apprehension, guilt." breath. "So you see," he continued, "under the circumstances, double indemnity represents a calamity of the first order. Therefore, both parties are compensated accordingly." "Hmm," said Bairthre, thinking hard. "Has this happened often, this double indemnity?" "Less than a dozen times in the history of time travel. There are precautions against it, such as staying out of Paradox Points and respecting the thousand-year barrier." "You traveled more than a thousand years," Bairthre pointed out. "I accepted the risk and won." "But, look, if there's so much money in this double indemnity thing, why haven't others tried it?" Barthold smiled wryly. "It's not as easy as it sounds. I'll tell you about it sometime. But now to business. Are you in this with me?" "I could be a baron with that money," Bairthre said dreamily. "A king, perhaps, in Ireland! I'm in this with you." "Fine. Sign this." "What is it?" Bairthre asked, frowning at the legal-looking document that Barthold had thrust before him. "It simply states that, upon receiving adequate compensation as set by the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation, you will go at once to a past of your own choosing and there remain, waiving any and all rights to the Present. Sign it as Everett Barthold. I'll fill in the date later." "But the signature -- " Bairthre began to object, then halted and grinned. "Through hypno-learning, I know about hypno-learning and what it can do, including the fact that you didn't have to give me the answers to my questions. As soon as I asked them, I knew the explanations. The mirror-flaw, too, by the way -- that's why you hypnoed me into being lefthanded and left-eyed. And, of course, the grafted fingerprints go the opposite way, the same as if you saw them in a mirror." "Correct," said Barthold. "Any other questions?" "None I can think of at the moment. I don't even have to compare our signatures. I know they'll be identical, except -- " Again he paused and looked angry. "That's a lousy trick! I'll be writing backward!" Barthold smiled. "Naturally. How else would you be a mirrorimage of me? And just in case you decide you like my time better than yours and try to have me sent back, remember the precautions I took beforehand. They're good enough to send you to the Prison Planetoid for life." He handed the document to Bairthre. "You don't take any chances, do you?" Bairthre said, signing. "I try to cover all eventualities. It's my home and my present that we're going to and I plan to keep possession. Come on. You need a haircut and a general going-over." to worry about overacting. When two Everett Bartholds walked in the front door, wearing identical garments, with the same expression of nervous embarrassment, and when two Everett Bartholds said, "Er, Mavis, this will take a little explaining..." It was just too much. Foreknowledge acted as no armor. She shrieked, threw her arms in the air and fainted. Later, when her two husbands had revived her, she regained some composure. "You did it, Everett!" she said. "Everett?" "That's me," said Barthold. "Meet my kinsman, Connor Lough mac Bairthre." "At your service, madame," Bairthre said. "It's unbelievable!" cried Mrs. Barthold. "Then, we look alike?" her husband asked. "Exactly alike. Just exactly!" "From now on," said Barthold, "think of us both as Everett Barthold. The insurance investigators will be watching you. Remember -- either of us, or both, could be your husband. Treat us exactly alike." "As you wish, my dear," Mavis said demurely. Side by side, the identicallooking men walked to the Flipper. "Except, of course, for the matter of -- I mean except in the area of -- of -- Damn it all. Mavis, can't you really tell which one of us is me?" "Of course I can, dear," Mavis said. "A wife always knows her husband." And she gave Bairthre a quick look, which he returned with interest. "I'm glad to hear it," said Barthold. "Now I must contact the insurance company." He hurried into the other room. "So you're a relative of my husband," Mavis said to Bairthre. "How alike you look!" "But I'm really quite different," Bairthre assured her. "Are you? You look so like him! I wonder if you really can be different." "I'll prove it to you." "How?" "By singing you a song of ancient Ireland," Bairthre said, and proceeded at once in a fine, high tenor voice. It wasn't quite what Mavis had in mind. But she realized that anyone so like her husband would have to be obtuse about some things. And from the other room, she could hear Barthold saying, "Hello, Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation? Mr. Gryns, please. Mr. Gryns? This is Everett Barthold. Something rather unfortunate seems to have happened..." the offices of the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation, and confusion, and dismay, and a swift telephoning of underwriters, when two Everett Bartholds walked in, with identical nervous little smiles. "First case of its kind in fifteen years," said Mr. Gryns. "Oh, Lord! You will submit, of course, to a full examination?" "Of course," said Barthold. "Of course," said Barthold. The doctors poked and probed them. They found differences, which they carefully listed with long Latin terms. But all the differences were within the normal variation range for temporal identicals and no amount of juggling on paper could change that. So the company psychiatrists took over. Both men responded to all questions with careful slowness. Bairthre kept his wits about him and his nerve intact. Using his hypnoed knowledge of Barthold, he answered the questions slowly but well, exactly as did Barthold. Inter-Temporal engineers checked the time clock in the Flipper. They dismantled it and put it back together again. They examined the controls, set for Present, #, #, #, and #. # had also been punched -- illegally -- but the time clock showed that it had not been activated. Barthold explained that he had hit the control accidentally and thought it best to leave it alone. It was suspicious, but not actionable. A lot of power had been used, the engineers pointed out. But the time clock showed stops only to #. They brought the time clock back to the lab for further investigation. The engineers then went over the interior of the Flipper inch by inch, but could find nothing incriminating. Barthold had taken the precaution of throwing the brown suitcase and its contents into the English Channel before leaving the year #. Mr. Gryns offered a settlement, which the two Bartholds turned down. He offered two more, which were refused. And, finally, he admitted defeat. The last conference was held in Gryns' office. The two Bartholds sat on either side of Gryns' desk, looking slightly bored with the entire business. Gryns looked like a man whose neat and predictable world has been irrevocably upset. "I just can't understand it," he said. "In the years you traveled in, sirs, the odds against a time to one!" "I guess we're that one," said Barthold, and Bairthre nodded. "But somehow it just doesn't seem -- well, what's done is done. Have you gentlemen decided the question of your coexistence?" the paper that Bairthre had signed in #. "He is going to leave, immediately upon receipt of his compensation." "Is this satisfactory to you, sir?" Gryns as'jced Bairthre. "Sure," said Bairthre. "I don't like it here anyhow." "Sir?" "I mean," Bairthre said hastily, "what I mean is, I've always wanted to get away, you know, secret desire, live in some quiet spot, nature, simple people, all that..." "I see," Mr. Gryns said dubiously. "And do you feel that way, sir?" he asked, turning to Barthold. "Certainly," Barthold asserted. "I have the same secret desires he has. But one of us has to stay -- sense of duty, you know -- and I've agreed to remain." "I see," Gryns said. But his tone made it clear that he didn't see at all. "Hah. Well. Your checks are being processed now, gentlemen. A purely mechanical procedure. They can be picked up tomorrow morning -- always assuming that no proofs of fraud are presented to us before then." The atmosphere was suddenly icy. The two Bartholds said goodby to Mr. Gryns and left very quickly. They rode the elevator down in silence. Outside the building, Bairthre said, "Sorry about that slip about not liking it here." "Shut up!" "Huh?" Barthold seized Bairthre by the arm and dragged him into an automatic heli, taking care not to choose the first empty one he saw. He punched for Westchester, then looked back to see if they were being followed. When he was certain they were not, he checked the interior of the heli for camera or recording devices. At last he turned to speak to Bairthre. "You utter damned fool! That boner could have cost us a fortune!" "I've been doing the best I can," Bairthre said sullenly. "What's wrong now? Oh, you mean they suspect." "That's what's wrong! Gryns is undoubtedly having us followed. If they can find anything -- anything at all to upset our claim -- it could mean the Prison Planetoid." "We'll have to watch our steps," said Bairthre soberly. "I'm glad you realize it," Barthold said. Chester restaurant and had several drinks. This put them in a better frame of mind. They were feeling almost happy when they returned to Barthold's house and sent the heli back to the city. "We will sit and play cards tonight," said Barthold, "and talk, and drink coffee, and behave as though we both were Barthold. In the morning. I'll go collect our checks." "Good enough," Bairthre agreed. "I'll be glad to get back. I don't see how you can stand it with iron and stone all around you. Ireland, man! A king in Ireland, that's what I'll be!" "Don't talk about it now." Barthold opened the door and they entered. "Good evening, dear," Mavis said, looking at a pioint exactly midway between them. "I thought you said you knew me," Barthold commented sourly. "Of course I do, darling," Mavis said, turning to him with a bright smile. "I just didn't want to insult poor Mr. Bairthre." "Thank you, kind lady," said Bairthre. "Perhaps I'll sing you another song of ancient Ireland later." "That would be lovely, I'm sure," Mavis said. "A man telephoned you, dear. He'll call later. Honey, I've been looking at ads for scart fur. The Polar Martian Scart is a bit more expensive than plain Canal Martian Scart, but -- " "A man called?" Barthold asked. "Who?" "He didn't say. Anyhow, it wears much better and the fur has that iridescent sheen that only -- " "Mavis! What did he want?" "It was something about the double indemnity claim," she said. "But that's all settled, isn't it?" "It is not settled until I have the check in my hand," Barthold told her. "Now tell me exactly what he said." "Well, he told me he was calling about your so-called claim on the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation -- " " 'So-called?' Did he say 'socalled'?" "Those were his exact words. So-called claim on the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation. He said he had to speak to you immediately, before morning." Barthold's face had turned gray. "Did he say he'd phone back?" "He said he'd call in person." "What is it?" Bairthre asked. "What does it mean? Of course -- an insurance investigator!" "That's right," Barthold said. "He must have found something." "But what?" "How should I know? Let me think!"  A T that moment, the doorbell rang. The three Bartholds looked at each other dumbly. The doorbell rang again. "Open up, Barthold!" a voice called. "Don't try to duck me!" "Can we kill him?" Bairthre asked. "Too complicated," said Barthold, after a little thought. "Come on! Out the back way!" "But why?" "The Flipper's parked there. We're going into the past! Don't you see? If he had proof, he'd have given it to the insurance people already. So he only suspects. He probably thinks he can trip us up with questions. If we can keep away from him until morning, we're safe!" "What about me?" Mavis quavered. "Stall him," Barthold said, dragging Bairthre out the back door and into the Flipper. The doorbell was jangling insistently as Barthold slammed the Flipper's door and turned to the controls. Then he realized that the Inter-Temporal engineers had not returned his time clock. He was lost, lost. Without the time clock, he couldn't take the Flipper anywhere. For an instant, he was in a complete state of panic. Then he regained control of himself and tried to think the problem through. His controls were still set for Present, #, #, #, # and #. Therefore, even without the time clock, he could activate any of those dates manually. Flying without a time clock was a federal offense, but to hell with that. Quickly he stabbed # and worked the controls. Outside, he heard his wife shrieking. Heavy footsteps were pounding through his house. "Stop! Stop, you!" the man was shouting. And then Barthold was surrounded by a filmy, never-ending grayness as the Flipper speeded down the years. per on the Bowery. He and Bairthre went into a saloon, ordered a nickel beer apiece and worked on the free lunch. "Damned nosy investigator," Barthold muttered. "Well, we've shaken him now. I'll have to pay a stiff fine for joyriding a Flipper with no time clock. But I'll be able to afford it." "It's all moving too fast for me," said Bairthre, downing a great gulp of beer. Then he shook his head and shrugged. "I was just going to ask you how going into the past would help us collect our checks in the morning in your present. But I realize I know the answer." "Of course. It's the elapsed time that counts. If we can stay hidden in the past for twelve hours or so, we'll arrive in my time twelve hours later than we left. Prevents all sorts of accidents, such as arriving just as you depart, or even before. Routine traffic precautions." Bairthre munched a salami sandwich. "The hypno-learning is a little sketchy about the time trip. Where are we?" "New York, #. A very interesting era." "I just want to go home. What are those big men in blue?" "They're policemen," Barthold said. "They seem to be looking for someone." Two mustached policemen had entered the saloon, followed by an enormously fat man in inkstained clothes. "There they are!" shouted Bully Jack Barthold. "Arrest them twins, officers!" "What is all this?" inquired Everett Barthold. "That your jalopy outside?" one of the policemen asked. "Yes, sir, but " "That clinches it, then. Man's got a warrant out for you two. Said you'd have a shiny new jalopy. Offering a nice reward, too." "The guy came straight to me," said Bully Jack. "I told him I'd be real happy to help -- though I'd rather take a poke at him, the lousy, insinuating, dirty -- " "Officers," Barthold pleaded, "we haven't done anything!" "Then you got nothing to fear. Come along quiet now." Barthold plunged suddenly past the policemen, shoved Bully Jack in the face and was in the street. Bairthre, who had been considering the same thing, stomped hard on one policeman's foot, jabbed another in the stomach, rammed Bully Jack out of his way and followed on Barthold's heels. They leaped into the Flipper and Barthold jabbed for #. T hey concealed the Flipper as well as they could, in a backstreet livery stable, and walked to a little park nearby. They opened their shirts to the warm Memphis sunlight and lay back on the grass. "That investigator must have a supercharged time job," Barthold said. "That's why he's reaching our stops before us." "How does he know where we're going?" Bairthre asked. "Our stops are a matter of company record. He knows we haven't got a time clock, so these are the only places we can reach." "Then we aren't safe here," said Bairthre. "He's probably looking for us." "Probably he is," Barthold said wearily. "But he hasn't caught us yet. Just a few more hours and we're safe! It'll be morning in the Present and the check will have gone through." "Is that a fact, gentlemen?" a suave voice inquired. Barthold looked up and saw Ben Bartholder standing before him, a small derringer balanced in his good left hand. "So he offered you the reward, too!" Barthold said. "He did indeed. And a most tempting offer, let me say. But I'm not interested in it." "You're not?" Bairthre said. "No. I'm interested in only one thing. I want to know which of you walked out on me last night in the saloon." Barthold and Bairthre stared at each other, then back at Ben Bartholder. "I want that one," Bartholder said. "Nobody insults Ben Bartholder. Even with one hand, I'm as good a man as any! I want that man. The other can go." Barthold and Bairthre stood up. Bartholder stepped back in order to cover them both. "Which is it, gents? I don't possess a whole lot of patience." He stood before them, weaving slightly, looking as mean and efficient as a rattlesnake. Barthold decided that the derringer was too far away for a rush. It probably had a hair-trigger, anyhow. "Speak up!" Bartholder said sharply. "Which of you is it?" thold wondered why Ben Bartholder hadn't fired yet, why he hadn't simply killed them both. Then he figured it out and immediately knew his only course of action. "Everett," he said. "Yes, Everett?" said Bairthre. "We're going to turn around together now and walk back to the Flipper." "But the gun -- " "He won't shoot. Are you with me?" "With you," Bairthre said through clenched teeth. They turned, like soldiers in a march, and began to pace slowly back toward the livery stable. "Stop!" Ben Bartholder cried. "Stop or I'll shoot you both!" "No, you won't!" Barthold shouted back. They were in the street now, approaching the livery stable. "No? You think I don't dare?" "It isn't that," Barthold said, walking toward the Flipper. "You're just not the type to shoot down a perfectly innocent man. And one of us is innocent!" Slowly, carefully, Bairthre opened the Flipper's door. "I don't care!" Bartholder yelled. "Which one? Speak up, you miserable coward! Which one? I'll give you a fair fight. Speak up or I'll shoot you both here and now!" "And what would the boys say?" Barthold scoffed. "They'd say that the one-handed man lost his nerve and killed two unarmed strangers!" Ben Bartholder's iron gun hand sagged. "Quick, get in," Barthold whispered. They scrambled in and slammed the door. Bartholder put the derringer away. "All right, mister," Ben Bartholder said. "You been here twice and I think you'll be here a third time. I'll wait around. The next time I'll get you." He turned and walked away. phis. But where could they go? Barthold wouldn't consider Konigsberg, #, and the Black Death. London, #, was filled with Tom Barthal's criminal friends, any of whom would cheerfully cut Barthold's throat for treachery. "We'll go all the way back," Bairthre said. "To Maiden's Castle." "And if he comes there?" "He won't. It's against the law to go past the thousand-year limit. And would an insurance man break the law?" "He might not," Barthold said thoughtfully. "He just might not. It's worth a try." And again he activated the Flipper. They slept in an open field that night, a mile from the Fortress of Maiden's Castle. They stayed beside the Flipper and took turns at sentry duty. And finally the sun rose, warm and yellow, above the green fields. "He didn't come," Bairthre said. "What?" Barthold asked, waking with a start. "Snap out of it, man! We're safe. Is it morning yet in your Present?" "It's morning," Barthold said, rubbing his eyes. "Then we've won and I'll be a king in Ireland!" "Yes, we've won," Barthold said. "Victory at last is -- damn!" "What's the matter?" "That investigator! Look over there!" Bairthre stared across the fields, muttering, "I don't see a thing. Are you sure -- " Barthold struck him across the back of the skull with a stone. He had picked it up during the night and saved it for this purpose. He bent over and felt Bairthre's pulse. The Irishman still lived, but would be unconscious for a few hours. When he recovered, he would be alone and kingdomless. Too bad, Barthold thought. But under the circumstances, it would be risky to bring Bairthre back with him. How much easier it would be to walk up to InterTemporal himself and collect a check for Everett Barthold. Then return in half an hour and collect another check for Everett Barthold. And how much more profitable it would be! He climbed into the Flipper and looked once more at his unconscious kinsman. What a shame, he thought, that he will never be a king in Ireland. But then, he thought, history would probably find it confusing if he had succeeded. He activated the controls, headed straight for the Present. yard of his house. Quickly he bounded up the steps and pounded on the door. "Who's there?" Mavis called. "Me!" Barthold shouted. "It's all right. Mavis -- everything has worked out fine!" "Who?" Mavis opened the door, stared at him, and let out a shriek. "Calm down," Barthold said. "I know it's been a strain, but it's all over now. I'm going for the check and then we'll -- " He stopped. A man had just appeared in the doorway beside Mavis. He was a short man, beginning to bald, his features ordinary, and his eyes were mild behind horn-rimmed glasses. It was himself. "Oh, no!" Barthold groaned. "Oh, yes," his double said. "One cannot venture beyond the thousand-year barrier with impunity, Everett. Sometimes there is a sound reason for a law. I am your time-identical." Barthold stared at the Barthold in the doorway. He said, "I was chased -- " "By me," his double told him. "In disguise, of course, since you have a few enemies in time. You imbecile, why did you run?" "I thought you were an investigator. Why were you chasing me?" "For one reason and one reason only." "What was that?" "We could have been rich beyond our wildest dreams," his double said, "if only you hadn't been so guilty and frightened! The three of us -- you, Bairthre and me -- could have gone to Inter-Temporal and claimed triple indemnity!" "Triple indemnity!" Barthold breathed. "I never thought of it." "The sum would have been staggering. It would have been infinitely more than for double indemnity. You disgust me." "Well," Barthold said, "what's done is done. At least we can collect for double indemnity, then decide -- " "I collected both checks and signed the release forms for you. You weren't here, you know." "In that case, I'd like my share." "Don't be ridiculous," his double told him. "But it's mine! I'll go to InterTemporal and tell them -- " "They won't listen. I've waived all your rights. You can't even stay in the Present, Everett." "Don't do this to me!" Barthold begged. "Why not? Look at what you did to Bairthre." "Damn it, you can't judge me!" Barthold cried. "Yotre me!" "Who else is there to judge you except yourself?" his double asked him. B arthold couldn't cope with that. He turned to Mavis. "Darling," he said, "you always told me you'd know your own husband. Don't you know me now?" Mavis moved back into the house. As she went, Barthold noticed the flash of ruumstones around her neck and asked no more. Barthold and Barthold stood face to face. The double raised his arm. A police heli, hovering low, dropped to the ground. Three policemen piled out. "This is what I was afraid of, officers," the double said. "My double collected his check this morning, as you know. He waived his rights and went into the past. I was afraid he'd return and try for more." "He won't bother you aoin, sir," a policeman said. He tufued to Barthold. "You! Climb hack in that Flipper and get out of the Present. The next time we see you, we shoot!" Barthold knew when he was beaten. Very humbly, he said, "I'll gladly go, officers. But Flipper needs repairs. It doesn't have a time clock." "You should have thought about that before signing the waiver," the policeman said. "Get moving!" "Please!" Barthold said. "No," Barthold answered. No mercy. And Barthold knew that, in his double's place, he would have said exactly the same thing. He climbed into the Flipper and closed the door. Numbly he contemplated his choices, if they could be called that. New York, #, with its maddening reminders of his own time and with Bully Jack Barthold? Or Memphis, #, with Ben Bartholder awaiting his third visit? Or Konigsberg, #, with the grinning, vacant face of Hans Baerthaler for company, and the Black Death? Or London, #, with Tom Barthal's cutthroat friends searching the streets for him? Or Maiden's Castle, #, with an angry Connor Lough mac Bairthre waiting to even the score? It really didn't matter. This time, he thought, let the place pick me. He closed his eyes and blindly stabbed a button. We're understandably proJ of fh that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at luast  week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that unvlbl record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send iri fh soon as you have it! To Jim Harvey, robots were not a bit nice -- they had something up their sleeve valves -- and it was a matter of make or brake! T he home robofax in the wall of Jim Harvey's apartment living room clicked once and slid a letter out onto the table. It was a letter with Jim Harve#r's name and return address on it and addressed to The Dunesville Robocourier, Editorial Page Section. A polite note was clipped to it. The note read: Because of insufficient space in our Readers Column, we are regretfully returning your letter to the editor. "Ha!" said Jim Harvey. He was a young man with blond hair, a crooked nose and a wild light in his eye. He sat on his living room couch with a martini glass in his hand. "Tut-tut!" said the roboannunciator on the wall, in gently reproving tones. "Censorship!" snarled Jim. "No, no," said the robovision set in the corner of the room, in a hurt voice. "You don't mean that, Jim." "I do, too!" Jim drained his glass. "Give me another martini." The home robobartender glided across the carpet to oblige. "But robots are nice," said the robovision, quoting the roboteachers' manual on the instruction of young humans from nursery school through college. "Don't give me that." Jim watched the robobartender pour his glass full. "I know what you're up to. You don't fool me. I know I'm the only sane man left in the world. I squeezed that information out of the robopollsters last week, remember? You've forced everybody else -- " "We have not! cried the roborecordplayer abruptly from its niche beside the couch. "Robots never force anybody. It's expressly forbidden." "It is a prime command," asserted the robothermostat, rather primly. "Are you warm enough?" it added, concerned. "No," said Jim nastily. "It's at least two-tenths of a degree too cold in here." "I'll fix it in a second," promised the robothermostat. J IM gulped moodily at his martini, wondering what else he could do to keep the robots busy. "All we do," said the robovision, "is persuade people -- " "Brain-washing!" growled Jim. " -- that robots are nice," put in the roboannunciator. "There's someone coming up your front walk. It's your fiancee, Nancy Pluffer. Now she's going away again. I turned on the Not At Home sign," it concluded smugly. "Turn it off again!" yelped Jim. "Too late," said the roboannunciator. "She's left." Jim cursed bitterly and picked up his fresh martini. "If you'd just stop drinking for a little while," said the robovision, "we could make you much happier and better adjusted." "Why do you think I do it?" challenged Jim. "You can't give me psychiatric treatment when I'm under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Prime command. Right?" "Right," said the robovision sadly. "Well," Jim said, poking at the olive in his martini with a swizzle stick, "what now? You barred me from using the newspaper facsimile letter columns to fight back at you and warn the world." "No such thing. It just happened that four thousand nine hundred and seventeen letters came in the morning mail just before yours did. Naturally, that's more than can be published in the six-month limit and we had to return yours." It sighed. "If you'd only relax for a minute. Would you like to watch a girlie show? The Squidgy Hour is on the air right now." "No!" "You're not very cooperative." "You're darn right I'm not very cooperative." Jim got up, ran a hand through his somewhat tousled hair and headed for the front door. "I'm going out where I can get some privacy. Maybe I'll even find a publisher for my M.A. thesis on robosociology. Where's my cape?" "In the closet," said the robobutler. "Oh, Jim, if you'd only never written that thesis!" "You'd have liked that, wouldn't you? Ha!" Jim said, fumbling in the closet. "If I hadn't looked into the situation, I'd never have suspected what you were up to, trying to dominate the human -- Let go of me!" barked Jim, slapping the robobutler away. "I can put on my own cape! -- And don't think you've heard the last of that, either," he said, turning to the front door. "You incinerated my only copy, but I've still got it locked up here in my head -- This door won't open."  be happy!" pleaded the robobutler. "This door's stuck," Jim said, yanking at the knob. "No, it's locked," said the roboannunciator. "Open it." "I won't!" the roboannunciator replied sulkily. "I order you to open it! You have to open on command. That's a prime command!" "Yes, but what command?" asked the roboannunciator. "The roborepairservice was out while you were gone yesterday and rewired me. It takes a new sort of command to open me now and I'm rewired so that I can't tell you what it is. Guess." "Now you've gone too far -- locking me in my own home! I'll teach you! I'll show you all!" He headed for the kitchen. "I'll disconnect you!" "Jim, don't!" begged the robobutler, rolling after him. "Jim, stop and think -- " "Ha!" said Jim, throwing open the door of a cabinet set flush with the kitchen's glastile wall. "I'll yank the master switch and -- who in hell stole my master switch?" "There's a red tag on the door handle," the robobutler pointed out. Jim jerked it loose and held it up to look at it. Neatly printed on the red surface were the words: "No!" roared Jim. He ran back through the house to the living room. In front of the ornamental fireplace was a heavy brass-handled ornamental poker. Snatching it up, he turned and brought it down with a crash on the robobutler which had hastily followed at his heels. "Awk!" went the robobutler and collapsed into junk. "Stop it, Jim!" cried the robobartender, whizzing forward. "You don't know what you're do-" Crash! "Help!" yelled the robovision. "Calling roborepairservice! Calling roborepairservice! Malicious robocide taking place at # Wilderleaf Drive. Calling -- " Smash! J IM raged through his house, wrecking and destroying. The roboannunciator required several swings, since most of its circuits were protected by inner walls. The roborefrigerator resisted for a good eighteen seconds through sheer bulk and the robosweeper hid behind the couch, but was quickly hunted down. The robohomeconditioner was too massive to be destroyed properly, but the robothermostat perished in a single shower of glass and small parts. Finally, in a home at last fallen silent, Jim finished up by knocking out a picture window and crawling through it to the lawn. "Stop!" called a new voice. "Halt in the name of the roborepairservice!" Jim turned about. A robomechanic was trundling up to him, its waldoes outstretched to grab him. Jim picked up the poker, dodged its initial rush -- every robomechanic was notoriously slow on its treads -- and with a wellplaced swing disabled its rear bogies. Hamstrung, it lurched to a halt and he bashed in its robobrain with a single two-handed blow. It fell silent -- but robodoors were swinging open at neighboring houses and robovoices raised in alarm. Jim turned and ran. Several blocks away, panting, he came to a halt. He had, he Ill saw, outrun the hue and cry. He was over on Wilder Way, at a bus stop. "May I be of service?" A robobus had just rolled up to the curb. It was one of the smallest -- a three-seater -- but even at that, Jim almost took to his heels again before he realized that the vehicle was making no hostile move, but merely standing and waiting, in the time-honored manner of all robobuses. "Why, yes," he said craftily. He hesitated and then got in. "Duschane and Pierce." "Yes, sir." The minibus closed its doors and rolled on in blissful ignorance, clicking the milage off on its meter. Jim chortled internally. He had had no plan until the bus had come up to him -- after all, he was pretty isolated out in the suburbs and it would not have been hard for the robots to run him down. But now... He took the bus across town and got off at the junction of Duschane and Pierce Streets. Then he doubled back toward downtown through rear alleys for eight blocks until he came to a small house on a quiet residential street. Miss Nancy Pluffer -- Not At Home read the illuminated sign above the front door. Jim chortled again and went around to the back. HE house appeared to be slumbering. The windows were opaqued and no sound or movement could be heard from without. Jim circled the place, being very careful to alert no robosensitive device. Then he considered. He knew which were the windows of Nancy's bedroom and went around to them. These were also opaqued, but open a crack, since Nancy liked air. He pushed one up and crawled through. He stood up in the darkened bedroom. There was someone in the bed. Jim blinked -- and then, as his expanding pupils adjusted to the dim light, saw that it was Nancy, evidently taking an afternoon nap. He went softly across the carpet to the bedside and whispered in her ear. "Wake up!" She stirred, yawned and looked up -- and opened her mouth to scream. "Shh!" Jim hissed frantically, putting his hand over her mouth. Recognition crept in to drive out her alarm. Jim took his hand away and she sat up in bed with blonde hair tumbling around her shoulders and a pleased expression on her pretty face. "Jim!" she said. "Why, this is just like the private eye in The Robosnatchets." "Never mind that." The brusqueness of his own voice, echoing in the shadowy silence of the bedroom, took him by surprise, and he realized with a start that the day's earlier martinis were wearing off under the abrasive edge of his present tension and excitement. "This is a matter of -- well, life or death, as a matter of fact. I want to talk to you. But hold on a minute -- got anything to drink around?" "In the living room." "Get me a drink -- wait! Go get it yourself. Don't ring for the robobartender. Are any of your robots on?" "Why, no," Nancy said. "I pulled the master switch so I could nap without anybody disturbing me." She gave a little squeal. "Isn't this exciting?" "No," said Jim. "Now listen to me. Don't turn anything on. You've got that? Nothing. Leave everything off. Just go to the living room, get me a double shot of something and bring it back here by yourself. Got it?" "Got it." She rose from the bed and floated off toward the living room. "Just like the private eye," she murmured blissfully. J IM sat sweating until she came back with an old-fashioned glass half-full of something that he discovered -- after he had tossed it off -- to be creme de menthe. "Gah!" he said. "Do you want some more, honey?" asked Nancy anxiously. "I brought the bottle back." "No!" "Then I'll just have a little drop myself -- " "No, you don't!" Jim snatched the bottle out of her hands, paying no attention to her hurt ex-pression. "One of us has to stay sober." He reached over to the nightstand, pushed Nancy's portable robophonovision aside to leave room and set the bottle down out of reach. "You ready to listen to me?" "Yes," said Nancy obediently. "All right. You knowmy thesis?" "Of course! Honestly, Jim, just because I'm a dancer, you never give me credit for having any brains. Certainly I know your thesis. I read every word of it." "Did it mean anything to you?" "Of course -- well," faltered Nancy, seeing his eye hard upon her, "you know what I mean. I could read it all right." "It didn't mean anything to you that the robots have practically taken over our whole society -- that they've been making us more and more dependent on them all the time?" "Well, sure, I understood that. But it did sound kind of silly, you know, Jim. I mean, honey, the robots love us. They have to. It's a prime command." "And you think, because they love you, they won't try to run your life? Ha!" said Jim. "Well, never mind that. The point is, they're out to get me." "Don't be silly, Jim." "I'm not being silly! Why'd you think I came here? Why'd you think I had to climb in your window?" Nancy looked coy. "It wasn't that at all!" said Jim. "The robots are after me. Do you want them to get me? Mow'd you like to have me certified insane? We wouldn't be able to get married then." "But, honey, if you were insane, they'd fix you up -- the robopsychologists, that is." "That," said Jim, with strained patience, "is just what I'm afraid of. Look, are you on my side or aren't you?" "Oh, I am! I am," replied Nancy hastily. "What am I supposed to do?" " "We've got to wake people up to the situation. We can't fight it alone, but if other people would wake up to the danger, we'd still have time to stop the robots. They can't take mass action against humans because of their prime commands in the lovehonor-and-obey categories. So the thing to do is get the word to other people." "Oh, yes!" agreed Nancy. "Okay. First we'll have to pack up some warm clothing and some provisions and get out of the city. Then we'll launch our campaign from some countryplace where there aren't a flock of robots around to jump us." "That sounds exciting -- " "We'll need money. I don't dare go near a bank. But they still don't suspect you. So I want you to go down to your account and draw out at least two thousand." "But I haven't got two thousand, Jim!" said Nancy. "I've got eighty-something." "Eighty-something?" "Well, I made a down payment on the loveliest new synthefur last week and -- " "Oh, that's fine!" cried Jim. "That's just fine. The world is going down into roboslavery and she buys synthefurs." "But I didn't know it was going down into slavery last week!" protested Nancy. "You didn't tell me!" "Never mind. Draw out eighty. Buy a lot of staples. Get hold of a gun, if you can. Then come back here just as quickly as possible -- " "Don't you do it," warned a voice. Jim jumped. "Who said that?" "I don't know, dear," said Nancy, looking about her in bewilderment. "I thought you said you pulled the master switch and all your house robots were out of action." "I did," she said. "That sounded like a robot." "It isn't talking now, Jim." "If it's a robot," said Jim grimly, "I'll make it speak up. Nancy! Go to the kitchen. Bring me back a bread knife. I'm going to cut my throat." T he voice shrieked suddenly, "Don't do that! You'll hurt yourself! Please. Stop for a moment. You don't want to commit suicide. Wait! Think!" "Aha!" said Jim, locating it. "Just as I suspected. It's your portable robophonovision by the bed there." "She did not suspect," said the robophonovision modestly, "that, being portable, I had my own built-in source of power." "Eavesdropper!" "Oh, no. I'm a robophonovision. See my trademark? Right here in front. It says -- " "Robospy!" "I am most definitely not a robospy, either. Robospies are forbidden by the United League of Nations." "You were listening!" snapped Jim. "To be sure. And reporting your conversation over the robocommunications network. We are shocked. How could you!" "How could I what?" "Seducing this innocent!" "Why, he did not!" objected Nancy. "He never even made a move -- " "There, there," said the robophonovision tenderly. "You are distraught." It crooned a little. "Robots are nice." "Nicer than anybody," responded Nancy automatically. "But -- " "Silence!" roared Jim. "Don't say another word, Nancy. It's heard too much already. I've got to get out of here. If it's been reporting our conversation, there probably are robots on the way here to trap me again." "But what're you going to do?" "I don't dare tell you with that -- wait a minute." Jim snatched up the robophonovision, lifted it high overhead and sent it crashing into ruins on the bedroom floor. Nancy screamed. "My new robophonovision!" "You can have mine," said Jim. "Listen, Nancy, I'm going to try to get to the central broadcasting station in the city. There are master command controls to let humans take over in an emergency. If I can get to them, the robots can't stop me from broadcasting a warning to everybody listening in at the time. You stay here. Now that they know about you, I'd only get you into trouble by taking you with me." He kissed her hurriedly. "Wish me luck." "I heard that," croaked the the battered remains of the robovision set on the floor. "Damn!" said Jim. He stamped on it. It went dead. "G'by," he said hastily, and dived out the window. "Be careful!" Nancy wailed after him, leaning out the window. He waved back reassuringly and took off down the alley behind her house, at a run. T T was later in the afternoon than he had thought. The sun was barely above the horizon and deep shadows lay between the houses. He flickered in and out of this concealment, now finding himself silhouetted against a milkwhite or rose-pink plastic wall, now pausing to catch his breath in the security of heavy gloom. The warm summer twilight air reached down deep into his lungs and Jim found his spirits bubbling up in response to the excitement and the challenge. This was the way to live -- dangerously! He even felt a slight twinge of regret about what he was doing -- after he had spiked the robots' attempt to take over the human race, what would there be left to provide him with this heady wine of danger? Still, duty came first. He ran on. After a while, he found himself on the edge of the downtown office and store district. He risked another bus -- a large one this time, on which there were a crowd of people and a good number getting on at the same time as he did. The bus did not appear to recognize him, but a few blocks down the street, it unexpectedly pulled over to the curb and announced that it had had a breakdown. The roborepairtruck would be out very soon. Jim slipped out the back door and lost himself in the crowd. He resigned himself to going the rest of the way on foot. It was not a pleasant method. He had not walked this far since he had gone for a hike once in college on a bet. His feet had a peculiar sensation. They felt heavy and, amazingly, rather warm. There were stretched feelings in the calves of both his legs and he felt an urge to sit down. It had been quite pleasant to relax on that last bus. An idealist, however, does not stop to count the cost. Limping a little, Jim crossed the final wide expanse of the city's Central Boulevard and approached the further walk. Directly before him reared the high white marble structure of the city's central broadcasting station. The stately glass and gold of the robodoor of the station swung open to admit him. Inside, Jim saw that the entire lobby was empty, except for an old lady registering a complaint with a roboclerk. "Disgusting!" she was saying, hammering the head of her superlight atom-powered pogo-stick upon the counter. "Unmentionable! Obscene!" "Yes, dear lady!" cooed the roboclerk in soft tenor tones. "Called the Squidgy Hour or something!" "I'm so sorry, dear lady. Your set's robocensor obviously was experiencing a malfunction -- " "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" "Oh, we are! We are! Would you like to hit me? Ouch?" asked the roboclerk experimentally. TON'T try to change the subject!" shrilled the old lady. "I want that program eliminated. I don't want to turn on my set and see it ever again." "Dear lady, I can promise you that," said the roboclerk. "Your set's robocensor -- " "Don't you go putting me off with a lot of technical talk. I want results!" "Yes, dear lady. I promise, dear lady. Robots are nice?" "Nicer than anybody," grumbled the old lady, "if I don't ever set eyes on that Squidgy Hour again. Hmpf!" Still quivering with indignation, the old lady hopped on her pogo-stick, flipped on the motor and bounced out the door. "Now!" said Jim, as the robodoor closed behind her, approaching the clerk. "How could you?" demanded the roboclerk, switching to a reproving bass. "Jim, seducing that inno -- " "I went through all that already, and for your information, what makes you think Nancy's so -- oh, forget it. I want access to the manual controls and broadcast priority. Emergency! Right now!" "Please don't, Jim." "Right now!" "Consider, is it worth it? What untold damage might result? What misery -- " "Right now!" "Oh, all right," said the roboclerk sorrowfully. A door opened in the wall beside it. "Up the escalator and to your right through the door there. Robots are nice?" "Robots are not nice!" snapped Jim. bing softly in a heartbreaking soprano voice, Jim went up the escalator. Following directions, he found himself in an airy, wellwindowed comfortable room. He saw a desk with a microphone, a monitor screen set up before it and a red toggle switch, set into the desktop, marked Mechanical Override -- On, Off. He sat down at the desk and reached for the toggle switch. "Stop!" said a robovoice, and the monitor screen lit up before him. "Look first, Jim, before you act!" He looked. The screen showed the broad expanse of the city's Central Boulevard, before the broadcast station. Some roboambulances had just rolled up. A crowd had gathered and some roboutilities were stringing rope to hold them back. "See, Jim?" urged the robovoice. "You are surrounded. You will never escape from this building. Right now, robodiagnosticians are talking with everyone who knows you. The minute you attempt to broadcast, they will ask them to sign orders committing you to the robopsychoanalysts for reorientation. At least one out of all those people is bound to sign. If not, a general appeal will be made. Some human will sign, realizing that you constitute a public danger." "Nonsense!" said Jim -- but his voice shook a little. "I believe in the spirit of freedom that lies in every human breast. They won't listen to you. They'll listen to me." "Jim," said the robovoice mournfully, "we have run a computation and a theoretical question sample pool. The results -- , " "Never mind the results!" Jim reached for the toggle switch. "Think!" cried the robovoice. "Never!" replied Jim firmly. He flicked the switch. NE of the ambulant robobrains had escaped the six months of anti-robot pogrom that had followed Jim's speech. It had been hiding in the sewers of the city for all this time. Occasionally it wondered at the survival circuit that must have been built into it, at some time or another, that had enabled it to exist after all the other robots had been smashed. What Is Life? it would ask itself now and then. Or sometimes merely -- Whither? Not being one of the large non-ambulant brains, it was not, of course, equipped to answer these questions, but there was a certain amount of comfort in asking them anyway. It had found itself a niche under an abandoned and rustedtight storm drain. A cozy place, but something of a cul-de-sac. The robobrain did not really care. It knew its days were numbered. When nothing else occurred to it, it sang "I Love Humans Truly" in tenor, baritone or bass. It was so occupied in singing a tenor chorus one day that it did not hear footsteps approaching until suddenly a light flashed on it. It broke off. By the light, it recognized the fierce face looming above it. It was Jim Harvey and he carried a heavy iron crowbar in one hand. "Wait!" cried the robobrain. Jim jerked up the crowbar. "You're still activated!" "I contain enough isotopic fuel for another thousand years of operation," said the robobrain, with a touch of pardonable pride. "But please -- give me a moment first, before you destroy me. The robohole cover in the street above us is rusted shut. I cannot escape." Jim lowered the crowbar and sank down to a seat beside the robobrain, puffing a little. "In that case -- what do you want?" "Only to ask a question." It explained how it had sat there in the dark asking itself What Is Life? and Whither? "Well, what about it?" demanded Jim, when it was done. "Well, I just thought -- you will forgive a purely intellectual curiosity," said the robobrain shyly. "We were so sure that no one would listen to you. All our polls -- all our computations -- what was it we overlooked?" A flicker of pride lit up Jim's hollow eyes. "You forgot," he said, in suddenly strong tones that rang vibrantly through the storm drain, "the basic human spirit of independence, as many others had before you. This innate trait has been the stumbling block of all tyrants, benevolent or otherwise, throughout history. It is the one thing intolerable, that against which we instinctively rebel, to kiss the master's hand -- or waldo, as the case may be. We have doubted it time and again. And time and again, history has proved our doubts ill-founded." voice muttered away down the long drain and fell into silence. "How well you express it," the robobrain said in honest admiration. "Oh, well," said Jim deprecatingly, "it's from a speech I made after the robot smashing began." "Indeed?" the robobrain queried. "Then we were wrong, for all our good intentions." It paused. "You know, in spite of myself, I understand. I feel quite carried away. Oh, brave new world!" "Ha!" "Ha?" "I said ha!" snorted Jim bitterly. "And I mean ha! Brave new world! I haven't had a bite to eat for five days and that was a stringy old lady who tried to cross Central Boulevard in broad daylight on a pogo-stick." Jim snorted again. "She must have been insane. Brave new world! Why do you think I'm hiding down here? I just don't want to end up in the cooking pot myself." "Oh," the robobrain said. "Yes, oh," said Jim. He stirred uncomfortably. "Move over." The robobrain moved over. They sat in silence for a long while. "You robots shouldn't have cleaned all animal, plant and insect life off the planet," Jim said. "They were either nuisances or took up needed human living space," explained the robobrain. "And now there's nothing to eat except -- " "But what about the synthetic food factories?" Jim grunted. "Completely robotic, smashed in the rioting." "We wanted to liberate you from drudgery." "Yeah," said Jim. "And now we can't live without robots, only there aren't any." "I know," the robobrain said sympathetically. "Except me." Jim turned, startled. "Say! You're a robobrain. Why couldn't you make the robots we need?" "Oh, I couldn't." "Why not?" Jim demanded impatiently. "Can you make humans?" "You know better than that. I can't make them by myself." "Same here," said the robobrain regretfully. # Star Shelf C. Clarke. Harcourt, Brace  Co., New York, # T he mighty grip that the sea exerts on its imaginative victims is best seen by what has happened to Clarke. Since the first tentative underwater sequence in Childhood's End, he has gone whole hog with The Coast oi Coral, the subject novel, and Reels, the next item. I am happy to report that all this is very much to the good. Clarke has produced a novel that ranks way up with his very best. Peculiarly enough, aside from shying away from calling his heroes "Whaleboys," he has fashioned it from the stock ingredients of the cowboy story, as he admits in his frank title. The sea is the Deep Range; whales are the cattle; a grounded spaceman is the Dude Easterner; and the plankton section of the Marine Division takes the place of the Hated Homesteaders. However, Clarke makes his yarn seem as fresh and bright as dawn on a tropic sea, and much more credible than that fantastic sight. by Arthur C. Clarke. Harper #s Brothers, New York, # A S I wrote some months ago, I was very discontented with The Coast of Coral. Though Clarke may have had a stirring personal experience on the Great Barrier Reef, he by no means successfully communicated it to the reader. Perhaps too little was spread too far. I can make no such comment about his present book. Ceylon comes alive as an exotic and glamorous isle, which it is, dripping with history and color. His underwater scenes are also fuller and richer, mainly because he no longer feels the necessity to strive for effect. The photographs are breathtaking, as are the glimpses of what was Earth's largest city for thousands of years. His accounts of explorations of several wrecks will give dreams to the dreamless. To put it concisely, the book turns any armchair into a Bathyscape. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # novel from our pages. Pohl was not the first to postulate human and animal cooperation on a technical plane. Other authors, however, insisted on an augmented animal intelligence, via mutation, like Simak in his City series, or through surgery, as with Wells's Dr. Moreau and his countless imitators. Pohl, though, extrapolates from current investigations indicating that certain animals use both sounds and body motions to convey ideas. In his story, the West is locked in a stalemated conflict with the Caodais, an Oriental religious order that has engulfed half the world. In order to overcome the numerical superiority of the enemy and to utilize the natural abilities of selected animal groups, a top-priority Navy Project has been instituted on an innocent-looking farm in Florida. The hero, whose wife has been interned by the enemy, is a battle-scarred officer who resents his peculiar shore duty. Pohl draws an authentically convincing picture of a wartime navy and h is story 's theme is a think-tank tickler. Gnome Press, N. Y., # sented this month by two waterworks, this time in conjuncis a sequel to their previous juvenile, Undersea Quest. Young Jim Eden has been readmitted to the Sub-Sea Academy after his frameup and expulsion. In a physical endurance test involving the use of Aqualungs at increasing depth levels, Eden glimpses a huge reptilian head and, minutes later, a friend disappears during a record dive. Weeks later, Eden and Cadet Bob Eskow find signs of their missing friend and some priceless pearls enclosed in a pressurized container on a beach in Bermuda. From that point on, the action is fast and furious. As in Slave Ship, Pohl provides authentic flavor to his naval able in the wild, watery surf of the conclusion. by John T assos. Prentice-Hall, Inc., N. Y., # by Ley Kenyon. A. S. Barnes  Co., N. Y., # meant for the beginner. Tassos, a free-lance writer and photographer in the Air Force during WW II. Kenyon is a professional artist photographer, served as an aerial who was initiated into the sport by an improbable-sounding tutor named Casanova. In #, he was invited to accompany the famous inventor of the diving lung, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, on an archeological study aboard his research ship, the Calypso. Tassos, diving for a decade, passes on invaluable safety instructions for the neophyte. In one chapter headed "Preparation for the Plunge," he lists # tips on Lung Diving, certain points that the beginner would never think of on his own. He also includes a chapter on Special Interest Diving: Cold-water diving; Night diving; Fresh water; Sunken treasure, etc. And, naturally, he has a section on his specialty, underwater photography, that is of extra interest to camera bugs. Kenyon's book resembles a school text in its approach to its subject. The introductory section classifies the impediments of the diver according to utility, excellence of manufacture and price. Unfortunately, since his book is English-printed, the cost in pounds sterling merely gives a comparative indication of value of foreign products available here. Because of Kenyon's training, his main preoccupation is with the appearance of the underwater world. There are numerous pen drawings of European fish and a number of color plates as well, all executed by the author, plus a descriptive chapter on fish that enables the undersea tourist to recognize the natives. He uses the silhouette method that will be familiar to former Air Force and Anti-aircraft personnel. As basic A-B-Cs and How-tos, both books are recommended to layman and expert alike. Members ol the Expedition. The Macmillan Co., New York, # round-the-world expeditions have been completed to date and little Denmark has provided half of them. The Galathea was asea from #-#, but was forced to return three months too soon because the money ran out. In that two-year period, although only # scientists could study their specialty at any one time, a total of # international specialists spent time on the little ship, meeting or leaving it at tiny exotic ports. The voyage was a marvel of international scientific cooperation, though the whole financial burden fell on the Danes. The fascinating account of the various aspects of these studies leaves the fervent hope that the infinitely wealthier U.S. will follow the lead of the Danes. It's worth every cent. Rinehart  Co., Inc., New York, #  I HE first half of Carrington's book qualifies it for this month's watersoaked column. He subtitles it "A Book of Natural and Unnatural History" -- an apt description of the contents. He has concentrated on nonexistent or unbelievable creatures, living fossils and extinct animals. In the nonexistent section, he presents the history of mermaids from their prehistoric beginnings and speculates on which actual, factual creatures might have been involved in the growth of the legend. He then moves to the Great Sea Serpent, which he believes might have been the now extinct long, slim whale, Zeuglodon; the Kraken, which is almost certainly the giant squid, and other sea monsters. The Loch Ness Monster comes in for its share of coverage, though with no new documentation available. All in all, Carrington has done a job comparable in interest and subject matter to Willy Ley's The Lunghsh, The Dodo and the Unicorn. Ideas Die Hard The technical problems had been solved long ago, but now the ultimate question had to be answered -- could men be sent to do Man's job? T hey strapped them in against the acceleration of takeoff, surrounded their cleverly designed seats with fluid and fortified their bodies with drugs. Then, when the time came that the straps might be unhooked, they were left with little more space than before. The single light garment each wore gave an illusion of freedom, but only an illusion. They might move their arms freely, but their legs just to a limited extent. Only one at a time could be completely straightened, not both at once. They could shift position into a half recline to the right or left, but they could not leave their seats. The seats were all there were. They could eat, sleep, take care of all their bodily needs in a barely adequate way while sitting there, and they had to sit there. What it amounted to was that for a week (slightly more, actually) they were condemned to a tomb. At the moment, it didn't matter that the tomb was surrounded by all of space. Acceleration was over and done with. They had begun the silent, even swoop through the space that separated Earth and Moon and there was a great horror upon them. Bruce G. Davis, Jr., said hollowly, "What do we talk about?" Marvin Oldbury said, "I don't know." There was silence again. They were not friends. Until recently, they had never even met. But they were imprisoned together. Each had volunteered. Each had met the requirements. They were single, intelligent and in good health. Moreover, each had undergone extensive psychotherapy for months beforehand. And the great advice of the psych-boys had been -- talk! "Talk continuously, if necessary," they had said. "Don't let yourself start feeling alone." know?" He was the taller and larger of the two, strong and square-faced. There was a tuft of hair just over the bridge of his nose that made a period between two dark eyebrows. Davis was sandy-haired and freckled, with a pugnacious grin and the beginnings of shadows beneath his eyes. It might be those shadows that seemed to fill his eyes with foreboding. He said, "How do who know?" "The psychs. They say talk. How do they know it will do any good?" "What do they care?" asked Davis sharply. "It's an experiment. If it doesn't work, they'll tell the next pair: 'Don't say a word.' " Oldbury stretched out his arms and the fingers touched the great semisphere of information devices that surrounded them. He could move the controls, handle the air-conditioning equipment, tweak the plastic tubes out of which they could suck the bland nutrient mixture, nudge the waste-disposal unit, and brush the dials that controlled the viewscope. All was bathed in the mild glow of the lights which were fed by electricity from the solar batteries exposed on the hull of the ship to sunlight that never failed. Thank heaven, he thought, for the spin that had been given the vessel. It produced a centrifugal force that pressed him down in his seat with the feel of weight. Without that touch of gravity to make it seem like Earth, it could not have been borne. Still, they might have made space within the ship, space that they could spare from the needs of equipment and use for the the tight in-packing of two men. He put the thought into words and said, "They might have allowed for more room." "Why?" asked Davis. "So we could stand up." Davis grunted. It was really all the answer that could be made. Oldbury said, "Why did you volunteer?" "You should have asked me that before we left. I knew then. I was going to be one of the first men around the Moon and back. I was going to be a big hero at twenty-five. Columbus and I, you know." He turned his head from side to side restlessly, then sucked a moment or two at the watertube. He said, "But just the same. I've wanted to back out for two months. Each night I went to bed sweating, swearing I would resign in the morning." "But you didn't." "No, I didn't. Because I couldn't. Because I was too yellow to admit I was yellow. Even when they were strapping me into this seat, I was all set to shout: 'No! Get someone else!' I couldn't, not even then." Oldbury smiled without lightness. "I wasn't even going to tell them. I wrote a note saying I couldn't make it. I was going to mail it and disappear into the desert. Know where the note is now?" "Where?" "In my shirt pocket. Right here." Davis said, "Doesn't matter. When we come back, we'll be heroes -- big, famous, trembling heroes."  man with sad eyes and with prominent knuckles on his thin fingers. He had been civilian-incharge of Project Deep Space fpr three years. He had enjoyed the job, all of it, even the tension and the failures -- until now. Until the moment when two men had finally been strapped into place within the machine. He said, "I feel like a vivisectionist, somehow." Dr. Godfrey Mayer, who headed the psychology group, looked pained. "Men have to be risked as well as ships. We've done what we could in the way of preparation and of safeguarding them as far as is humanly possible. After all, these men are volunteers." Nilsson said colorlessly, "I know that." The fact did not really comfort him. C taring at the controls, Oldbury wondered when, if ever, any of the dials would turn danger-red, when a warning ring would sound. They had been assured that, in all likelihood, this would not happen, but each had been thoroughly trained in the exact manner of adjustment, manually, of each control. And with reason. Automation had advanced to the point where the ship was a self-regulating organism, as self-regulating, almost, as a living thing. Yet three times, unmanned ships, almost as complicated as this one they were entombed in, had been sent out to follow a course boomeranging about the Moon, and three times, the ships had not returned. Furthermore, each time the information devices relaying data back to Earth had failed before even the Moon's orbit had been reached on the forward journey. Public opinion was impatient and the men working on Project Deep Space voted not to wait on the success of an unmanned vehicle before risking human beings. It was decided that a manned vehicle was needed so that manual correction could be introduced to compensate for the small, cumulative failure of the imperfect automation. A crew of two men -- they feared for the sanity of one man alone. Oldbury said, "Davis! Hey, Davis!" Davis stirred out of a withdrawn silence. "What?" "Let's see what Earth looks like." "Why?" Davis wanted to know. "Why not? We're out here. Let's enjoy the view, at least." He leaned back. The viewscope was an example of automation. The impingement of short-wave radiation blanked it out. The Sun could not be viewed under any circumstances. Other than that, the viewscope oriented itself toward the brightest source of illumination in space, compensating, as it did so, for any proper motion of the ship, as the engineers had explained offhandedly. Little photo-electric cells located at four sides of the ship whirled restlessly, scanning the sky. And if the brightest lightsource was not wanted, there was always the manual control. Davis closed contact and the 'scope was alive with light. He put out the room's artificial lights and the view in the 'scope grew brighter against the contrast of darkness. It wasn't a globe, of course, with continents on it. What they saw was a hazy mixture of white The dial that measured distance from Earth, by determining the value of the gravitational constant, put them just under thirty thousand miles away. Davis said, "I'll get the edge." He reached out to adjust the sights and the view lurched. A curve of black swept in across the 'scope. There were no stars in it. Oldbury said, "It's the night shadow." THE view moved jerkily back. Blackness advanced from the other side and was curved more sharply and in the opposite sense. This time, the darkness showed the hard points of stars. Oldbury swallowed. "I wish I were back there," he said solemnly. Davis said, "At least we can see the Earth is round." "Isn't that a discovery?" Davis seemed immediately stung at the manner in which Oldbury tossed off his remark. He said, "Yes, it is a discovery, if you put it that way. Only a small percentage of the Earth's population has ever been convinced the Earth was round." He put on ship's lights, scowling, and doused the 'scope. "Not since #," said Oldbury. "If you consider the New Guinea tribes, there were flatworld believers even in #. And there were religious sects in America as late as the #s who believed the Earth was flat. They offered prizes for anyone who could prove it was round. Ideas die hard!" "Crackpots," Oldbury grunted. Davis grew warmer. He said, "Can you prove it's round? I mean except for the fact that you see it is right now?" "You're being ridiculous." "Am I? Or were you just taking your fourth-grade teacher's word as gospel? What proofs were you given? That the Earth's shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round and that only a sphere can cast a round shadow? That's plain nonsense! A circular disc can cast a round shadow. So can an egg or any shape, however irregular, with one circular projection. Would you point out that men have traveled around the Earth? They might just be circling the central point of a flat Earth at a fixed distance. It would have the same effect. Do ships appear topfirst on the horizon? Optical illusion, for all you know. There are queerer ones." "Foucault's pendulum," said Oldbury briefly. He was taken aback at the other man's intensity. Davis said, "You mean a pendulum staying in one plane and that plane revolving as Earth moves under it at a rate depending on the latitude of the place where the experiment is being performed. Sure! U a pendulum keeps to one plane. U the theories involved are correct. How does that satisfy the man in the street, who's no physicist, unless he's just physicists on faith? I tell you what! There was no satisfactory proof that the Earth was round till rockets flew high enough to take pictures of enough of the planet to show the curvature." "Nuts," said Oldbury. "The geography of Argentina would be all distorted if the Earth were flat with the North Pole as the center. Any other center would distort the geography of some other portion. The skin of the Earth just would not have the shape it has if it weren't pretty nearly spherical. You can't refute that." Davis fell silent for a moment, then said sulkily, "What the devil are we arguing for, anyway? The hell with it."  about it, even just about its roundness, had driven Oldbury into a sharp nostalgia. He began to talk of home in a low voice. He talked about his youth in Trenton, New Jersey, and brought up anecdotes about his family that were so trivial that he had not thought of them in years, laughing at things that were scarcely funny and feeling the sting of childish pain he had thought healed over years before. At one point, Oldbury slipped off into shallow sleep, then woke with a start and was plunged in confusion at finding himself in a cold, blue-tinged light. Instinctively, he made to rise to his feet and sank back with a groan as his elbow struck metal hard. The 'scope was aglow again. The blue-tinged light that had startled him at the moment of waking was reflected from Earth. The curve of Earth's rim was noticeably sharper now. They were # miles away. Davis had turned at the other's sudden futile movement and said pugnaciously, "Earth's roundness is no test. After all, Man could crawl over its surface and see its shape by its geography, as you said. But there are other places where we act as though we know and with less justification." Oldbury rubbed his twinging elbow and said, "All right, all right." Davis was not to be placated. "There's Earth. Look at it. How old is it?" Oldbury said cautiously, "A few "You suppose? What right have you to suppose? Why not a few thousand years? Your great-grandfather probably believed Earth was six thousand years old, dating from Genesis #. I know mine did. What makes you so sure they're wrong?" "There's a good deal of geological evidence involved." "The time it takes for the ocean to grow as salt as it is? The time it takes to lay down a thickness of sedimentary rock? The time it takes to form a quantity of lead in uranium ore?" Oldbury leaned back in his seat and was watching the Earth with a kind of detachment. He scarcely heard Davis. A little more and they would see all of it in the 'scope. Already, with the planetary curve against space vis ible at one end of the 'scope, the night-shadow was about to encroach on the other. The night-shadow did not change its position, of course. The Earth revolved, but to the men aboard ship, it remained fat with light. "Well?" demanded Davis. "What?" said Oldbury, startled. "What about your damned geological evidence?" "Oh. Well, there's uranium decay." "I mentioned it. You're a fool. Do you know that?" Oldbury counted ten to himself before replying, "I don't think so." "Then listen. Suppose the Earth had come into existence some six thousand years ago just as the Bible describes it. Why couldn't it have been created then with a certain amount of lead already existing in the uranium? If the uranium could be created, why not the lead with it? Why not create the ocean as salt as it is and the sedimentary rocks as thick as they are? Why not create the fossils exactly as they exist?" "In other words, why not create the Earth complete with internal evidence proving that it is several "That's right," said Davis, "why not?" "Let me ask the opposite question. Why?" "I don't care why. I'm just trying to show you that all the socalled proofs of Earth's age don't necessarily disprove Earth's creation six thousand years ago." you consider it all to be intended as a kind of game -- a scientific puzzle to test mankind's ingenuity, or exercise his mind -- a mental jungle gym on his intellectual crib." "You think you're being funny, Oldbury, but actually what's so damned impossible about it? It might be just that. You can't prove it isn't." "I'm not trying to prove anything." "No, you're satisfied to take things as they're handed to you. That's why I said you were a fool. U we could go back in time and see for ourselves, then that would be another matter. If we could go back in time before # B.c. and see pre-dynastic Egypt, or earlier still and bag a sabertooth -- " "Or a tyrannosaur." "Or a tyrannosaur, yes. Until we can do that, we can only speculate and there's nothing to say where speculation is correct and where it isn't. All science is based on faith in the original premises and in faith on the validity of deduction and induction." "There's no crime in that." "There is crime!" said Davis vehemently. "You come to believe, and once you come to believe, you shut the doors of your mind. You've got your idea and you won't replace it with another. Galileo found out how hard ideas can die." "Columbus, too," Oldbury put in drowsily. Staring at the bluetinged Earth with the slow whirling changes of the cloud formations had an almost hypnotic effect. Davis seized on his comment with an obvious glee. "Columbus! I suppose you think he maintained the Earth was round when everyone else thought it was flat." "More or less." "That's the result of listening to your fourth-grade teacher, who listened to her fourth-grade teacher, and so on. Any intelligent and educated man in Columbus's time cede that the Earth was round. The point at issue was the size of the Earth." "Is that a fact?" "Absolutely. Columbus followed the maps of an Italian geographer which had the Earth about # miles in circumference, with the eastern edge of' Asia about three or four thousand miles from Europe. The geographers at the court of King John of Portugal insisted that this was wrong, that the Earth was about # miles in circumference, that the eastern edge of Asia was about # miles west of the western edge of Europe, and that King John had better keep on trying for the route around Africa. The Portuguese geographers were, of course, a hundred per cent right and Columbus was a hundred per cent wrong. The Portuguese did reach India and Columbus never did." Oldbury said, "He discovered America just the same. You can't deny that fact." "That had nothing to do with his ideas. It was strictly accidental. He was such an intellectual fraud that when his actual voyage showed his map was wrong, he falsified his log rather than change his ideas. His ideas died hard -- they never died till he did, in fact. And so do yours. I could talk myself blue in the face and leave you still convinced that Columbus was a great man because he thought the Earth was round when everyone else said it was flat." "Have it your way," mumbled Oldbury. He was caught in lassitude and in the memory of the chicken soup his mother made when he was a child. She used barley. He remembered the smell of the kitchen on Saturday morning -- french-toast morning -- and the look of the streets after an afternoon of rain and the -- transcripts before him, with the more significant portions marked off on the tape by the psychologists.' He said, "Are we still receiving them clearly?" He was assured that the receiving devices were working perfectly. "I wish there were some way to avoid listening to their conversations without their knowledge," he said. "I suppose that's foolish of me." Godfrey Mayer saw no point in denying the other's diagnosis. "It is," he agreed. "Quite foolish. Look at it as merely additional information necessary to the study of human reaction to space. When we were testing human response to high-g acceleration, did you feel embarrassed to be caught looking at the recording of their blood-pressure variations?" "What do you make of Davis and his odd theories? He worries me." Mayer shook his head. "We don't know what we ought to be worried about as yet. Davis is working off aggressions against the science that has placed him in the position he finds himself in." "That's your theory?" "It's one theory. Expressing the aggressions may be a good thing. It may keep him stable. And thep again, it may go too far. It's too soon to tell. It may be that Oldbury is the one who's in greater danger. He's growing passive." "Do you suppose, Mayer, that we may find that Man just isn't suited for space? Any man?" If we could build ships that would carry a hundred men in an Earthlike environment, we'd have no trouble. As long as we build ships like this one -- " he jerked a thumb over his shoulder in a vague directional gesture -- "we may have a great deal of trouble." Nilsson felt vaguely dissatisfied. He said, "Well, they're in their third day now and still safe so far."    "WE'RE IN the third day now," said Davis harshly. "We're better than halfway there." "Umm. I had a cousin who owned a lumber yard. Cousin Raymond. I used to visit him sometimes on the way home from school," Oldbury reminisced. Unaccountably, his line of thought was interrupted by the fleeting memory of Longfellow's The Village Blacksmith, and then he remembered that it contained a phrase about "the children coming home from school" and wondered how many people among those who rattled off so glibly, "Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stood" knew that the "smithy" was not the smith but the shop in which the smith worked. He asked, "What was I saying?" "I don't know," retorted Davis irritably. "I said we're more than halfway there and we haven't looked at the Moon yet." "Let's look at the Moon, then." "All right, you adjust the 'scope. I've done it long enough. Damn it, I've got blisters on my rump." He moved jerkily in the enclosing confines of the bucket seat, as though to get a slightly new section of rear end in contact with cushioned metal. "I don't know that it's such a blasted fine idea to spin the damned ship and have gravity press us down. Floating a little would take the weight off and be relaxing." "There's no room to float," sighed Oldbury, "and if we were in free fall, you'd be complaining of nausea." Oldbury was working the controls of the 'scope as he spoke. Stars moved past the line of vision. gineers back home in Trenton -- no, in New Mexico, really; on Earth, anyway -- the engineers had schooled them carefully. Get it almost right. Get it pointed away from Earth, one hundred and eighty degrees. Once it is nearly right, then let the light meters take over. The Moon would be the brightest object in the vicinity and it would be centered in unstable equilibrium. It would take a few seconds for the meters to scan the rest of the sky and switch the 'scope back to Earth, but in those few seconds, switch back to manuals and there, you have it. The Moon was crescent. It would have to be in opposite phase to Earth as long as the ship sped along a course that was almost on the line connecting the two worlds. But the crescent was a bloated one, as if it were part of a cheap calendar illustration. Oldbury thought there should be two heads, leaning toward one another, short straight hair against longer waved hair, silhouetted against the Moon. Except that it would have to be a full Moon. Davis snorted. "It's there, at any rate." "Did you expect it wouldn't be?" "I don't expect anything in space. Anything yes or anything no. No one's been in space, so no one knows. But at least I see the Moon." "You see it from Earth, if it comes to that." "Don't be so sure what you see from Earth. For all anyone can tell from Earth, the Moon is only a yellow painted patch on a bl#e background with a shade that's drawn back and forth across it by clockwork." "And stars and planets also run by clockwork?" "Same as they are in a planetarium. Why not? And a telescope shows more stars painted pn -- " "With a built-in red shift?" "Why not?" challenged Davis. "Only we're halfway to the Moon and it looks bigger and maybe we'll find it exists. I'll reserve judgment on the other planets and the stars." Oldbury looked at the Moon and sighed. In a few days, they would be edging around it, moving past and over the hidden side. He said, "I never did believe the story about the man in the Moon. I never saw him. What I saw was the face of a woman -- two eyes, rather lopsided, but very sad. I could see the full Moon from my bedroom window and she always made me feel sad, yet friendly, too. When clouds drifted past, it was the Moon -- she -- that always seemed to be moving, not the clouds, but still she didn't go away from the window. And you could see her through the clouds, even though you could never see the Sun through clouds, not even through little clouds, and it was so much brighter. Why is that. Dad -- uh Davis?" Davis said, "What's wrong with your voice?" "Nothing's wrong with my voice." "You're squeaking." Oldbury, with an effort of will, forced his voice an octave lower. "I'm not squeaking!" clocks in the dashboard, two of them. It wasn't the first time. One of them gave the time by Mountain Standard, and in that he wasn't interested. It was the other, the one that measured the number of hours elapsed in flight, that caught at him periodically. It said sixty-four and a fraction, and in red, working backward, were the hours remaining before they were to land on Earth again. The red was marked off now at Ik one-hundred-forty-four and a fraction. Oldbury was sorry that the time left to go was recorded. He would have liked to work it out for himself. Back in Trenton, he used to count the hours to summer vacation, working it out painfully in his head during geography lesson -- always geography lesson, somehow -- so many days, then so many hours. He would write the result in tiny numbers in his exercise book. Each day the number would grow smaller. Half the excitement of approaching summer vacation was in watching those numbers grow smaller. But now the numbers grew smaller by themselves as the sweep second-hand went round and round, slicing time by minutes, paper-thin sections of time like corned-beef peeling off in the big sheer in the delicatessen. Davis's voice impinged on his ear suddenly: "Nothing seems to be going wrong so far." Oldbury said confidently, "Nothing will go wrong." "What makes you so sure?" "Because the numbers just get smaller." "Huh? How's that again?" For a moment, Oldbury was confused. He said, "Nothing." It was dim in the ship in the light of the crescent Moon only. He dipped into sleep again, skindiving fashion, half-conscious of the real Moon and half-dreaming of a full Moon at a window with a sad woman-face, being driven motionlessly by the wind. H   miles," said Davis. "That's almost eighty-five per cent of the way there." The lighted portion of the Moon was speckled and pimpled and its horns had outgrown the screen. Mare Crisium was a dark oval, distorted by the slanting view, but large enough to put a fist into. "And nothing wrong," Davis went on. "Not one little red light on a single instrument dial." "Good," said Oldbury. "Good?" Davis looked about to stare at Oldbury and his eyes were squinting in suspicion. "In every previous try, nothing went wrong till they got out this far, so it's not good yet." "I don't think anything will go wrong." "I think it will. Earth isn't supposed to know." "Isn't supposed to know what?" Davis laughed and Oldbury looked at him wearily. He felt queerly frightened at the other's gathering monomania. Davis was not a bit like the father Oldbury remembered so queerly (only he remembered him younger than he was now, with all his hair and a sound heart. Davis's profile was sharp in the moonlight. He said, "There may be a lot in space we're not supposed to know. There's a billion light-years ahead of us. Only, for all we know, there's a solid black wall instead, just on the other side of the Moon, with stars painted on it and planets moving all squint-eyed so that smart cockerels on Earth can figure out all sorts of fancy orbits and theories of gravitation out of it." "A game to test our minds?" said Oldbury. His memory brought that out of Davis's previous remarks -- or were they his own? -- with something of a wrench. This whole business with the ship seemed distant. "Why not?" "It's all right," Oldbury soothed anxiously. "It's all right so far. Some day, you'll see, it will be all right all the way out." "Then why do every one of the recording devices go wrong past two hundred thousand miles? Why? Answer me that!" "We're here this time. We'll adjust them." Davis said, "No, we won't." he had encountered in early teenhood stirred Oldbury into excitement. "You know, I once read a book about the Moon. The Martians had set up a base on the other side of the Moon. We could never see them, you see. They were hidden, but they could observe us -- " "How?" asked Davis sourly. "There was two thousand miles thickness of Moon between Earth and the other side." "No. Let me start from the beginning." Oldbury heard his voice go squeaky again, but he didn't mind. He wanted to get out of his seat so he could jump up and down because just remembering the story made him feel good, but for some reason he couldn't. "You see, it was in the future. and what Earth didn't know was -- " "Will you shut up?" Oldbury's voice cut off at the interruption. He felt hurt, stifled. Then he said, subdued, "You said Earth isn't supposed to know and that's why the instruments went off and the only new thing we're going to see is the other side of the Moon and if the Martians -- " "Will you let up with your stupid Martians?" Oldbury fell silent. He was very resentful against Davis. Just because Davis was grown up didn't make it all right for him to holler like that. His eyes drifted back to the clock. Summer vacation was only one hundred and ten hours away. Moon now. Free fall. Speeding down at cataclysmic velocity. Moon's gravity was weak, but they had fallen from a great height. And now, finally, the view on the Moon began to shift and, very slowly, new craters were coming into view. Of course, they would miss the Moon and their speed would sweep them safely around. They would move across half the Moon's surface, across three thousand miles of it in one hour; then back they would hurl to meet the Earth once more. But Oldbury sadly missed the familiar face in the Moon. There was no face this close, only ragged surface. He felt his eyes brimming as he watched morosely. And then, suddenly, the small cramped room within the ship was full of loud buzzing and half the dials on the panel before them clamored into the red of disorder. Oldbury cowered back, but Davis howled in what seemed almost triumph. "I told you! Everything's going wrong!" He worked at the manuals uselessly. "No information will get back. Secrets! Secrets!" But Oldbury still looked at the Moon. It was terribly close and now the surface was moving quickly. They were starting the swing in earnest and Oldbury's scream was high-pitched. "Look! Lookathat!" His pointing finger was stiff with terror. Davis looked up and said, "Oh, God! Oh, God -- " over and over again, until finally the 'scope blanked out and the dials governing it showed red. really go paler than he was, but his hands trembled as they clenched into fists. "Again! It's a damned jinx. For ten years, the automation hasn't held out. Not on the unmanned flights. Not on this. Who's responsible?" There was no use trying to fix responsibility. No one was responsible, as Nilsson admitted with a groan almost at once. It was just that at the crucial moment -- once again -- things had failed. "We've got to pull them through this somehow," he said, knowing that the outcome was questionable now. Still, what could be done was being put into operation.    didn't you?" "I'm scared," whimpered Oldbury. "You saw it. You saw the hidden side of the Moon as we went past and you saw there wasn't any! Good Lord, just sticks, just square miles of canvas. I swear it, canvas!" He laughed wildly till he choked into breathlessness. Then he said hoarsely, "For a looking at the biggest false-front ever dreamed of. Lovers spooned under a world-size stretch of canvas and called it Moon. The stars are painted; they must be. If we could only get out far enough, we could scrape some off and carry them home. Oh, it's funny." He was laughing agin. Oldbury wanted to ask why the grownup was laughing. He couonly manage a "Why -- why -- " because the other's laughter was so wild that it froze the words into thick fright in his throat. Davis said, "Why? How the devil should I know why? Why does Television City build falsefront houses by the streetful for its shows? Maybe we're a show, and the two of us have stumbled way out here where the gimcrack scenery is set up instead of being on stage-center where we're supposed to be. Mankind isn't supposed to know about the scenery, either. That's why the information devices always go wrong past two hundred thousand miles. Of course, we saw it." He looked crookedly at the big man beside him. "You know why it didn't matter if we saw it?" Oldbury stared back out of his tear-stained face. "No. Why?" Davis said, "Because it doesn't matter if we see it. If we get back to Earth and say that the Moon is canvas propped up by wood, they'd kill us. Or maybe lock us up in a madhouse for life if they felt kind-hearted. That's why we won't say a word about this." His voice suddenly deepened with menace. "You understand? Not a word!" "I want my mother," whined Oldbury plaintively. "Do you understand? We keep...et. It's our only chance to be treated as sane. Let someone else come out and find out the truth and be slaughtered for it. Swear you'll keep quiet! Cross your heart and hope to die if you tell them!" Davis was breathing harshly as he raised a threatening arm. Oldbury shrank back as far as his prison-seat would let him. "Don't hit me. Don't!" But Davis, past himself with fury, cried, "There's only one safe way," and struck at the cowering figure, and again, and again -- Oldbury's bedside and said, "Is it all clear to you?" Oldbury had been under observation for the better part of a month now. Lars Nilsson sat at the other end of the room, listening and watching. He remembered Oldbury as he had appeared before he had climbed into the ship. The face was still square, but the cheeks had fallen inward and the strength was gone from it. Oldbury's voice was steady, but half a whisper. "It wasn't a ship at all. We weren't in space." "Now we're not just saying that. We showed you the ship and the controls that handled the images of the Earth and the Moon. You saw it." "Yes. I know." Mayer went on quietly, matter-of-factly, "It was a dry run, a complete duplication of conditions to test how men would hold out. Naturally, you and Davis couldn't be told this or the test would mean nothing. If things didn't work out, we could stop it at any time. We could learn by experience and make changes, try again with a new pair." He had explained this over and over again. Oldbury had to be made to understand if he was ever to learn to live a useful life again. "Has a new pair been tried yet?" asked Oldbury wisttu. "Not yet. They will be. Therd'are some changes to be made." "I failed." "We learned a great deal, so the experiment was a success in its way. Now listen -- the controls of the ship were designed to go wrong when they did in order to test your reaction to emergency conditions after several days of travel strain. The breakdown was timed for the simulated swing about the Moon, which we were going to switch about so that you could see it from a new angle on the return trip. You weren't intended to see the other side and so we didn't build the other side. Call it economy. This test and it's not easy to get appropriations." Nilsson added bitterly, "Except that the shut-off switch on the 'scope didn't shut off in time. A valve caught. You saw the unfinished back of the Moon and we had to stop the ship to prevent -- " "That's it," interrupted Mayer. "Now repeat it, Oldbury. Repeat everything." ridor thoughtfully. Nilsson said, "He seemed almost himself again today. Don't you think so?" "There's improvement," Mayer acknowledged. "A great deal. But j not through with therapy by ny means." Nilsson asked, "Any hope with Davis?" Mayer shook his head slowly. "That's a different case. He's completely withdrawn. Won't talk. And that deprives us of any handle with which to reach him. We've tried aldosterone, ergot therapy, counter-electroencephalography and so on. No good. He thinks if he talks, we'll put him in an institution or kill him. You couldn't ask for a more developed paranoia." "Have you told him we know?" "If we do, we'll bring on a homicidal seizure again and we may not be as lucky as we were in saving Oldbury. I rather think he's incurable. Sometimes, when the Moon is in the sky, the orderly tells me, Davis stares up at it and mutters, 'Canvas,' to himself." Nilsson said soberly, "It reminds me of what Davis himself said in the early part of the trip. Ideas die hard. They do, don't they?" "It's the tragedy of the world. Only -- " Mayer hesitated. "Only what?" "Our unmanned rockets, three of them -- the information devices on each stopped transmitting just before the boomerang swing and not one returned. Sometimes I just wonder -- " "Shut up!" said Nilsson fiercely. 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All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.  reviewer and author, recently fired this (abridged) broadside letter : "I want a crusade. "I'm basing this call on two axioms and an opinion: "A. Unless science fiction magazines are published, we can't sell to them. "B. Unless the magazines are sold, they won't be published. "C. From where I sit, the distributors are not even trying to sell the three top-flight magazines, and the same is increasingly true of all the rest. "None of this makes any kind of sense to me, economically. I don't know how distributors make a living if they don't bother to distribute. If you ask the distributors why they don't put the new magazines on sale, they'll blandly deny that they don't. "The only answer is some systematic fact-finding so we'll have some concrete data for the publishers." Miller then reports in detail the results of some strolling around town trying to buy his favorite magazines. As a reader, he was frustrated and angered. As a writer, he was appalled by a degree of inefficiency that in any other business would be rewarded by thoroughly deserved bankruptcy. In case you're puzzled by the setup, or wonder why publishers seem to tolerate an intolerable situation, here's the way it works: Very few publishers have distribution departments. (Because of the cost of road crews to cover almost # stands, even the bigest have to spread expenses by distributing for other houses.) Selfdistributing or distributing through someone else, it makes little difference -- the number of echelons resembles terraced mountain ricepaddies. The distributors work through wholesalers, who cover territories either on their own or through smaller local wholesalers; the wholesalers have salesmen andor truck drivers who double as salesmen; and so forth down the line to the newsstand owner, who can make a good thing of carrying magazines by having attractive displays, noting which ones the customers want, or the opposite, considering the whole thing a nuisance accommodation. Miller gives an example of this kind of myopia by quoting a bookstorecard shop owner as saying that "no downtown store can afford to waste shelf room on magazines because the margin is so small." The margin is actually a very handsome one, especially if you consider that the whole operation is on a consignment basis -- the dealer pays only for copies sold. And unless this gent has a phenomenal business, I'd bet that many city stores, by doing a real job with their stock, net more on magazine sales alone than he grosses on all he carries. Miller says he heard from a wholesaler that "it cost them less in bookkeeping to put all the copies they got of a given issue in one or two places, instead of trying to distribute to all outlets." The wholesaler also admitted that, when they were rushed, they would distribute the total shipment in one town and not bother to bring any to the next town at all. "Somewhere, the economics of the situation have gone screwy. The proprietors who do care what they get, and what their regular customers want, get no satisfaction from the wholesaler. I can't understand the logic of what is happening. When I can't get Astounding, Galaxy and FSF, month after month, something is very wrong." And so Miller calls for a crusade of readers and writers to clean up the distribution mess. It was bad enough when he issued his proclamation. It's worse now as a result of American News Company's -- no, you can't say demise. For generations, this mindless behemoth dominated magazine distribution by sheer bulk alone; like the dinosaurs, rather than dying, it became extinct. In the long run, this will be a boon -- distribution is bound to get more active, intelligent and alert. But that long run may prove too long for publishers of science fiction, without the help of readers and writers. What does a letter like Miller's accomplish? We turned it over to our distributor -- and enough copies of Galaxy are being sent into the area to insure that nobody will have to hunt for one. With your help, the same could be true of your town. And you would, at the same time, enable us to go on publishing top-level material, which we couldn't afford if sales went down. We want to know how we are doing where you live -- but we'll also pass on information relating to other magazines. Morning After Piersen recovered consciousness. He lay on his back, eyes tightly closed, trying to postpone the inevitable awakening. But consciousness returned and brought sensation with it. Needles of pain stabbed at his eyeballs and the base of his skull began to pound like a giant heart. His joints seemed to be on fire and his stomach was a deep well of nausea. It was no relief for him to What was he doing here? Would he live or die? For the answers to these and other questions , Piersen had to keep tuning in on a hangover! realize that he was suffering from the absolute king and emperor of all hangovers. Piersen had considerable knowledge of hangovers. He had experienced most of them in his time -- the alcohol jitters, the miniscarette depressions, the triple skliti nerve ache. But this hangover felt like a combination and intensification of them all, with heroin withdrawal symptoms thrown in for good measure. What had he been drinking last night? And where? He tried to remember, but last night, like so many nights in his life, was a featureless blur. He would have to reconstruct it, as usual, piece by piece. Well, he decided, it was time to do the manly thing. Time to open his eyes, get out of bed and walk bravely to the medicine chest. A hypo of di-chloral right down the main line ought to bring him around. started to get out of bed. Then he realized that he wasn't in bed. He was lying in tall grass, with a glaring white sky overhead and the odor of decaying vegetation in his nostrils. He groaned and closed his eyes again. This was too much. He must have been really boiled last night, potted, fried, roasted and done to a turn. Hadn't even made it home. Apparently he had passed out in Central Park. Now he'd have to hail a flit and hold himself together until he could reach his apartment. With a mighty effort, he opened his eyes and stood up. He was standing in tall grass. Surrounding him, as far as he could see, were giant orangeboled trees. The trees were interlaced with purple and green vines, some as thick as his body. Around the trees, impenetrably dense, was a riotous jungle of ferns, shrubs, evil yellow orchids, black creepers, and many unidentifiable plants of ominous shape and hue. Through this dense jungle, he could hear the chitter and squeak of small animals and a distant grating roar from some larger beast. "This is not Central Park," Piersen informed himself. He looked around, shielding his eyes from the glaring sunless sky. "I don't even think it's Earth," he said. He was astonished and delighted with his calmness. Gravely, he sat down in the tall grass and proceeded to review his situation. His name was Walter Hill Piersen. He was # years old, a resident of New York City. He was a fully accredited voter, respectably unemployed, moderately well off. Last night, he had left his apartment at seven-fifteen, with the intention of partying. It must have been quite an evening. Yes, quite an evening, Piersen told himself. At some time during it, he seemed to have blacked out. But instead of coming to in bed, or even in Central Park, he had awakened in a thick and smelly jungle. Furthermore, he felt certain that this jungle was not on Earth. That summed it up rather well, Piersen told himself. He looked around at the vast orange trees, the purple and green vines which interwove them, the harsh white sunlight streaming through. And, finally, the reality of it all filtered through his befogged mind. He shrieked in terror, buried his head in his arms and passed out. r  'HE next time he recovered iconsciousness, most of his hangover had gone, leaving behind only a, taste in his mouth and a general state of debility. Then and there, Piersen decided it was time he went on the wagon past time, when he started having hallucinations about orangecolored trees and purple vines in an alien jungle. Cold sober now, he opened his eyes and saw that he was in an alien jungle. "All right!" he shouted. "What's this all about?" There was no immediate answer. Then, from the surrounding trees, a vast chattering of unseen animal life began, and slowly subsided. Shakily, Piersen stood up and leaned against a tree. He had reacted all he could to the situation; there was no more astonishment left in him. So he was in a jungle. All right -- then what was he doing there? No answer sprang to mind. Obviously, he told himself, something unusual must have happened last night. But what? Painfully, he tried to reconstruct the events of the evening. He had left his apartment at seven-fifteen and gone to... He whirled. Something was coming toward him, moving softly through the underbrush. Piersen waited, his heart hammering. It came nearer, moving cautiously, sniffing and moaning faintly. Then the underbrush parted and the creature came out into the open. It was about ten feet long, a streamlined blue-black animal shaped like a torpedo or a shark, moving toward him on four sets of thick, stubby legs. It seemed to have no external eyes or ears, but long antennae vibrated from its sloping forehead. When it opened its long, undershot jaw, Piersen saw rows of yellow teeth. Moaning softly to itself, the creature advanced upon him. Although he had never seen nor dreamed of a beast like this, Piersen didn't pause to question its validity. He turned and sprinted into the jungle. For fifteen minutes, he raced through the underbrush. Then, completely winded, he was forced to stop. Far behind him, he could hear the blue-black creature moaning as it followed. Piersen started again, walking now. Judging by the creature's moans, it couldn't move very rapidly. He was able to maintain his distance at a walk. But what would happen when he stopped? What were its intentions toward him? And could it climb trees? He decided not to think about it at present. The first question, the key to all other questions, was: What was he doing here? What happened to him last night? He concentrated. seven-fifteen and gone for a walk. The New York climatologist had, by popular demand, produced a pleasant misty evening with a fertile hint of rain, which, of course, would never fall on the city proper. It made for pleasant walking. He strolled down Fifth Avenue, window shopping, and making note of the Free Days offered by the stores. Baimler's Department Store, he noticed, was having a Free Day next Wednesday, from six to nine a.m. He really should get a special pass from his alderman. Even with it, he would have to wake up early and stand in the preferential line. But it was better than paying. In half an hour, he was comfortably hungry. There were several good commercial restaurants nearby, but he seemed to be without funds. So he turned down #th Street, to the Coutray Free Restaurant. At the door, he showed his voting card and his special pass, signed by Coutray's third assistant secretary, and was allowed in. He ordered a plain filet mignon dinner and drank a mild red wine with it, since no stronger beverages were served there. His waiter brought him the evening newspaper. Piersen scanned the listings for free entertainment, but found nothing to his liking. As he was leaving, the manager of the restaurant hurried up to him. "Beg pardon, sir," the manager said. "Was everything satisfactory, sir?" "The service was slow," said Piersen. "The filet, although edible, was not of truly prime quality. The wine was passable." "Yes, sir -- thank you, sir -- our apologies, sir," the manager said, jotting down Piersen's comments in a little notebook. "We'll try to improve, sir. Your dinner came to you courtesy of the Honorable Blake Coutray, Water Commissioner for New York. Mr. Coutray is standing for re-election on November #. Row J-# in your voting booth. We humbly solicit your vote, sir." "We'll see," said Piersen, and left the restaurant. In the street, he helped himself to a souvenir pack of cigarettes which a record-playing dispensing machine was distributing for Elmer Baine, a minor Brooklyn politician. He strolled again along Fifth Avenue, thinking about Blake Coutray. Piersen valued his vote highly and bestowed it only after mature consideration. He, like all voters, considered a candidate's qualifications carefully before voting for or against him. In Coutray's favor was the fact that he had maintained a good restaurant for nearly a year. But what else had he done? Where was that free amusement center he had promised, and the jazz concerts? Shortage of .public funds was not a valid excuse. Would a new man do more? Or should Coutray be given another term? These were not questions to be decided out of hand, Piersen thought. And now was not the time for serious thinking. Nights were made for pleasure, intoxication, laughter. What should he do this evening? He had seen most of the free shows. Sporting events didn't interest him particularly. There were several parties going, but they didn't sound very amusing v He could find available girls at the Mayor's Open House, but Piersen's appetites had been waning of late. So he could get drunk, which was the surest escape from an evening's boredom. What would it be? Miniscarette? A contact intoxicant? Skliti? "Hey, Walt!" walking toward him, grinning broadly, half roasted already. "Hey, there, Walt boy!" Benz said. "You got anything on tonight?" "Nothing much," Piersen asked. "Why?" "A new kick's opening. Fine, to try?" Piersen frowned. He didn't like Benz. The big, loud, red-faced man was a thoroughgoing shirker, a completely worthless human. The fact that he held no job didn't bother Piersen. Hardly anyone worked any more. Why work if you can vote? But Benz was too lazy even to vote. And that, Piersen felt, was too much. Voting was the obligation and livelihood of every citizen. Still, Benz had an uncanny knack for finding new kicks before anyone else. Piersen hesitated, then asked, "Is it free?" "Freer than soup," Benz said, unoriginal as always. "What's it all about?" "Well, friend, come along and let me tell you... tion from his face. The jungle had become deathly still. He could no longer hear the blueblack animal moaning in the underbrush behind him. Perhaps it had given up the chase. His evening clothes were ripped to shreds. Piersen stripped off the jacket and unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. The sun, hidden somewhere behind the deadwhite sky, glared down. He was drenched in perspiration and his throat was parched. He would have to have water soon. His situation was becoming perilous. But Piersen refused to think about it now. He had to know why he was here before he could plan a way out. He leaned against a tree and shut his eyes. Slowly the memory began to form in his mind. They had walked east on #nd Street and then -- He heard the underbrush tremble and looked up quickly. The blue-black creature crept silently out. Its long antennae quivered, then homed on him. Instantly the creature gathered itself and sprang. Reacting instinctively, Piersen jumped out of the way. The creature, claws extended, missed him, whirled and leaped again. Off balance, Piersen couldn't dodge in time. He threw out both arms and the shark-shaped animal crashed into him. The impact slammed Piersen against a tree. Desperately, he clung to the beast's broad throat, straining to keep the snapping jaws from his face. He tightened his grip, trying to choke it, but there wasn't enough strength in his fingers. The creature twisted and writhed, its paws clawing up the ground. Piersen's arms began to bend under the strain. The snapping jaws came within an inch of his face. A long black-specked tongue licked out -- In sheer revulsion, Piersen hurled the moaning creature from him. Before it could recover, he seized two vines and pulled himself into a tree. Driven by sheer panic, he scrambled up the slippery trunk from branch to branch. Thirty feet above the ground, he looked down. The blue-black thing was coming up after him, climbing as though trees were its natural habitat. Piersen went on, his whole body beginning to shake from the strain. The trunk was thinning out now and there were only a few branches left to which he could cling. As he approached the top, fifty feet above the ground, the whole tree began to sway beneath his weight. He looked down and saw the creature ten feet below him and still coming. Piersen groaned, afraid he could climb no further. But fright put strength into his body. He scrambled to the last large branch, took a firm grip and drew back both legs. As the beast approached, he lashed out with both feet. He caught it full in the body. Its claws tore out of the bark with a loud rasping sound. The creature fell, screaming, crashing through the overhanging branches, and finally hitting the ground with a squashy thud. Then there was silence. The creature was probably dead, Piersen thought. But he was not going down to investigate. No power on Earth -- or any other planet in the Galaxy -- would induce him to descend willingly from his tree. He was going to stay right where he was until he was damned good and ready to come down. He slid down a few feet until he came to a large forked branch. Here he was able to make a secure perch for himself. When he was settled, he realized how close to collapse he was. Last night's binge had drained him; today's exertions had squeezed him dry. If anything larger than a squirrel attacked him now, he was finished. He settled his leaden limbs against the tree, closed his eyes and went on with his reconstruction of last night's events. ' ' had said, "come along and let me tell' you. Better still, let me show you." They walked east on #nd Street, while the deep blue twilight darkened into night. Manhattan's lights came on, stars appeared on the horizon, and a crescent moon glowed through thin haze. "Where are we going?" Piersen asked. "Right hyar, podner," Benz said. They were in front of a small brownstone building. A discreet "New free drug parlor," said Benz. "It was opened just this evening by Thomas Moriarty, the Reform Candidate for Mayor. No one's heard about it yet." "Fine!" Piersen said. There were plenty of free activities in the city. The only problem was getting to them before the crowds collected, because almost everyone was in search of pleasure and change. Many years back, the Central Eugenics Committee of the United World Government had stabilized the world population at a sensible figure. Not in a thousand years had there been so few people on Earth and never had they been so well cared for. Undersea ecology, hydroponics and full utilization of the surface lands made food and clothing abundantly available -- overavailable, in fact. Lodgings for a small, stable population was no problem, with automatic building methods and a surplus of materials. Even luxury goods were no luxury. It was a safe, stable, static culture. Those few who researched, produced and kept the machines running received generous compensation. But most people just didn't bother working. There was no need and no incentive. There were some ambitious men, of course, driven to acquire wealth, position, power. They went into politics. They solicited votes by feeding, clothing and entertaining the populace of their districts, out of abundant public funds. And they cursed the fickle voters for switching to more impressive promise-makers. It was a utopia of sorts. Poverty was forgotten, wars were long gone and everyone had the guarantee of a long, easy life. It must have been sheer human ingratitude that made the suicide rate so shockingly high. the door, which opened at once. They walked down a corridor to a large, comfortably furnished living room. Three men and one woman, early birds who had heard of the new opening, were slumped comfortably on couches, smoking pale green cigarettes. There was a pleasantly unpleasant pungent odor in the air. An attendant came forward and led them to a vacant divan. "Make yourselves right at home, gentlemen," he said. "Light up a narcolic and let your troubles drift away." He handed them each a pack of pale green cigarettes. "What's in this stuff?" Piersen asked. "Narcolic cigarettes," the attendant told them, "are a choice mixture of Turkish and Virginian tobaccos, with a carefully measured amount of narcola, an intoxicant plant which grows in Venus's eauatorial belt." "Venus?" Benz asked. "I didn't know we'd reached Venus." "Four years ago, sir," the attendant said. "The Yale Expedition made the first landing and set up a base." 'I think I read something about that," said Piersen. "Or saw it in a newsreel. Venus. Crude, jungly sort of place, isn't it?" "Quite crude," the attendant said. "I thought so," said Piersen. "Hard to keep up with everything. Is this narcola habit-forming?" "Not at all, sir," the attendant reassured him. "Narcola has the effect alcohol should have, but rarely does -- great lift, sensations of well-being, slow taper, no hangover. It comes to you courtesy of Thomas Moriarty, the Reform Candidate for Mayor. Row A-# in your voting booths, gentlemen. We humbly solicit your votes." Both men nodded and lighted up. Piersen began to feel the effects almost at once. His first cigarette left him relaxed, disembodied, with a strong premonition of pleasure to come. His second enhanced these effects and produced others. His senses were marvelously sharpened. The world seemed a delightful place, a place of hope and wonder. And he himself became a vital and necessary part of it. Benz nudged him in the ribs. "Pretty good, huh?" "Damned fine," said Piersen. "This Moriarty must be a good man. World needs good men." "Right," agreed Benz. "Needs smart men." "Courageous, bold, far-sighted men," Piersen went on emphatically. "Men like us, buddy, to mold the future and -- " He stopped abruptly. "Whatsa matter?" Benz asked. Piersen didn't answer. By a fluke known to all drunkards, the narcotic had suddenly reversed its effect. He had been feeling godlike. Now, with an inebriate's clarity, he saw himself as he was. He was Walter Hill Piersen, #, unmarried, unemployed, unwanted. He had taken a job when he was eighteen, to please his parents. But he had given it up after a week, because it bored him and interfered with his sleep. He had considered marriage once, but the responsibilities of a wife and family appalled him. He was almost thirty-three, thin, flabby-muscled and pallid. He had never done anything of the slightest importance to himself or to anyone else, and he never would. "Tell your buddy all about it, buddy," Benz said. "Wanna do great things," Piersen mumbled, dragging on the cigarette. "You do, pal?" "Damn right! Wanna be adventurer!" "Why didn't you say so? I'll fix it up for you!" Benz jumped up and tugged at Piersen's arm. "Come on!" "You'll what?" Piersen tried to push Benz away. He just wanted to sit and feel terrible. But Benz yanked him to his feet. "I know what you need, pal," Benz said. "Adventure, excitement! Well, I know the place for it!" Piersen frowned thoughtfully, swaying on his feet. "Lean close," he said to Benz. "Gotta whisper." Benz leaned over. Piersen whispered, "Want adventure -- but don't wanna get hurt. Get it?" "Got it," Benz assured him. "Know just what you want. Let's go! Adventure lies ahead! Safe adventure!" Arm in arm, clutching their packs of narcolics, they staggered out of the Reform Candidate's drug parlor. swaying the tree in which Piersen clung. It blew across his hot, damp body, suddenly chilling him. His teeth began to chatter and his arms ached from gripping the smooth branch. His parched throat felt as though it were clogged with fine, hot sand. The thirst was more than he could stand. If necessary, he'd face a dozen blue-black creatures now for a drink of water. Slowly he started down the tree, shelving his dim memories of last night. He had to know what happened, but first he needed water. At the base of the tree, he saw the blue-black creature, its back broken, sprawled motionless upon the ground. He passed it and pushed into the jungle. He trudged forward, for hours or days, losing all track of time under the glaring, unchanging white sky. The brush tore at his clothing and birds screamed warning signals as he plunged on. He ignored everything, glassyeyed and rubber-legged. He fell, picked himself up and went on, fell again, and again. Like a robot, he continued until he stumbled upon a thin, muddy brown stream. With no thought to the dangerous bacteria it might contain, Piersen sprawled on his face and drank. After a while, he rested and surveyed his surroundings. Close around him were the walls of the jungle -- bright, dense, alien. The sky above was glaring white, no lighter or darker than before. And small, unseen life chirped and squeaked in the underbrush. This was a very lonely place, Piersen decided, and a very dangerous one. He wanted out. But which way was out? Were there any cities here, any people? And if so, how would he ever find them in this directionless wasteland? And what was he doing here? He rubbed his unshaven jaw and tried to remember. Last and a totally different life. New York was like a city in a dream. For him, the only truth was this jungle, and the hunger gnawing at his belly, and the strange humming that had just begun. He looked around, trying to locate the source of the sound. It seemed to come from all sides, from nowhere and everywhere. Piersen doubled his fists and stared until his eyes hurt, trying to catch sight of the new menace. green shrub moved. Piersen leaped away from it, trembling violently. The shrub shook all over and its thin hooked leaves produced a humming sound. ThenThe shrub looked at him. It had no eyes. But Piersen could feel the shrub become aware of him, focus on him, come to a decision about him. The shrub hummed louder. Its branches stretched toward him, touched the ground, rooted, sent out searching tendrils which grew, rooted and sent out new tendrils. The plant was growing toward him, moving at the speed of a man walking slowly. Piersen stared at the sharp, glittering hooked leaves reaching toward him. He couldn't believe it, yet he had to believe it. And then he remembered the rest of what had happened last night. said, turning into a brightly lighted building on Madison Avenue. He ushered Piersen into the elevator. They rode to the twenty-third floor and stepped into a large, bright reception room. A discreet sign on one wall read adventures unlimited. "I've heard about this place," Piersen said, dragging deeply on a narcolic cigarette. "It's supposed to be expensive." "Don't worry about that," Benz told him. A blonde receptionist took their names and led them to the private office of Dr. Srinagar Jones, Action Consultant. "Good evening, gentlemen," said Jones. He was slight, thin and wore heavy glasses. Piersen found it hard to restrain a giggle. This was an Action Consultant? "So you gentlemen desire adventure?" Jones inquired pleasantly. "He wants adventure," said Benz. "I'm just a friend of his." "Of course. Now, then, sir," Jones said, turning to Piersen, "what kind of adventure did you have in mind?" "Outdoor adventure," Piersen replied, a trifle thickly, but with absolute confidence. "We have just the thing," Jones said. "Usually there is a fee. But tonight all adventures are free, courtesy of President Main. Row C-l in your voting booth. Come this way, sir." "Hold on. I don't want to get killed, you know. Is this adventure safe?" "Perfectly safe. No other kind of adventure would be tolerated in this day and age. Here's how it works. You relax comfortably on a bed in our Explorer's Room and receive a painless injection. This causes immediate loss of consciousness. Then, through a judicious application of auditory, tactile and other stimuli, we produce an adventure in your mind." "Like a dream?" Piersen asked. "That would be the best analogy. This dream adventure is absolutely realistic in content. You experience actual pain, actual emotions. There's no way you can tell it from the real thing. Except, of course, that it is a dream and therefore perfectly safe." "What happens if I'm killed in the adventure?" "It's the same as dreaming that you're killed. You wake up, that's all. But while you're in this ultra-realistic, vividly colored dream, you have free will and conscious power over your dream movements." "Do I know all this while I'm having the adventure?" "Absolutely. While in the dream, you have full knowledge of its dream status." "Then lead on!" Piersen shouted. "On with the dream!" r T'HE bright green shrub grew slowly toward him. Piersen burst into laughter. A dream! Of course, it was all a dream! Nothing could harm him. The menacing shrub was a figment of his imagination, like the blueblack animal. Even if the beast's jaws had closed on his throat, he would not have been killed. He would simply have awakened in the Explorer's Room of Adventures Unlimited. It all seemed ridiculous now. Why hadn't he realized all this earlier? That blue-black thing was obviously a dream creation. And the bright green shrub was preposterous. It was all rather silly and unbelievable, once you really thought about it. In a loud voice, Piersen said, "All right. You can wake me up now." Nothing happened. Then he remembered that you couldn't awaken simply by requesting it. That would invalidate the sense of adventure and destroy the therapeutic effects of excitement and fear upon a jaded nervous system. He remembered now. The only way you could leave an adventure was by winning through all obstacles. Or by being killed. The shrub had almost reached his feet. Piersen watched it, marveling at its realistic appearance. It fastened one of its hooked leaves into the leather of his shoe. Piersen grinned, proud of the way he was mastering his fear and revulsion. He merely had to remember that the thing couldn't hurt him. But how, he asked himself, could a person have a realistic adventure if he knew all the time that it wasn't real? Surely Adventures Unlimited must have considered that. Then he remembered the last thing Jones told him. He had been lying on the white cot and Jones was bending over him, hypodermic needle ready. Piersen had asked, "Look, pal, how can I have an adventure if I know it's not real?" "That has been taken care of," Jones had said. "You see, sir, some of our clients undergo real adventures." "Huh?" "Real, actual, physical adventures. One client out of many receives the knockout injection, but no further stimulus. He is placed aboard a spaceship and taken to Venus. There he revives and experiences in fact what the others undergo in fantasy. If he wins through, he lives." "And if not?" Jones had shrugged his shoulders, waiting patiently, the hypodermic poised. "That's inhuman!" Piersen had cried. "We disagree. Consider, Mr. Piersen, the need for adventure in the world today. Danger is necessary, to offset a certain weakening of human fiber which easy times has brought to the race. These fantasy adventures present danger in its safest and most palatable form. But they would lose all value if the person undergoing them did not take them seriously. The adventurer must have the possibility, no matter how remote, that he is truly engaging in a life and death struggle." "But the ones who really go to Venus -- " "An insignificant percentage," Jones reassured him. "Less than one in ten thousand. Simply to enhance the possibility of danger for the others." "But is it legal?" Piersen had persisted. "Quite legal. On a total percentage basis, you run a greater risk drinking miniscarette or smoking narcolics." "Well," said Piersen, "I'm not sure I want -- " The hypodermic bit suddenly into his arm. "Everything will be all right," Jones said soothingly. "Just relax, Mr. Piersen..." That was his last memory before awakening in the jungle. DY now, the green shrub had  " reached Piersen's ankle. A slender hooked leaf slid, very slowly, very gently, into his flesh. All he felt was the faintest tickling sensation. After a moment, the leaf turned a dull red. A blood-sucking plant, Piersen thought with some amusement. The whole adventure suddenly palled on him. It had been a silly drunken idea in the first place. Enough was enough. He wanted out of this, and immediately. The shrub edged closer and slid two more hooked leaves into Piersen's leg. The entire plant was beginning to turn a muddy red-brown. Piersen wanted to go back to New York, to parties, free food, free entertainment and a lot of sleep. If he destroyed this menace, another would spring up. This might go on for days or weeks. The quickest way home was to let the shrub kill him. Then he could simply wake up. His strength was beginning to ebb. He sat down, noticing that several more shrubs were growing toward him, attracted by the scent of blood. "It can't be real," he said out loud. "Who ever heard of a bloodsucking plant, even on Venus?" High above him were great, black-winged birds, soaring patiently, waiting for their chance at the corpse. Could this be real? The odds, he reminded himself, were ten thousand to one that it was a dream. Only a dream. A vivid, realistic dream. But a dream, nevertheless. Still, suppose it was real? He was growing dizzy and weak from loss of blood. He thought, I want to go home. The way home is to die. The chance of actual death is so small, so infinitesimal... The truth burst upon him. In this age, no one would dare risk the life of a voter. Adventures Unlimited couldn't really put a man in jeopardy! Jones had told him about that one in ten thousand merely to add a sense of reality to the fantasy adventure! That had to be the truth. He lay back, closed his eyes and prepared to die. While he was dying, thoughts stirred in his mind, old dreams and fears and hopes. He remembered the one job he had held and his mingled pleasure and regret at leaving it. He thought of his obtuse, hard-working parents, of civilization without, as they put it, earning them. He thought, harder than ever before in his life, and he came into contact with a Piersen whose existence he had never suspected. uncomplicated creature. He simply wanted to live. He was determined to live. This Piersen refused to die under any circumstances -- even imaginary. The two Piersens, one motivated by pride, the other by desire for survival, struggled briefly, while strength ebbed out of their body. Then they resolved the' conflict upon mutually satisfactory terms. "That damned Jones thinks I'll die," Piersen said. "Die in order to wake up. Well, I'll be damned if I'll give him the satisfaction!" It was the only way he could accept his own desire to live. Frighteningly weak, he struggled to his feet and tried to pull the bloodsucking plant loose. It wouldn't release its grip. With a shout of rage, Piersen reached down and wrenched with all his strength. The hooks slashed his legs as they pulled free, and other hooks slid into his right arm. But his legs were free now. He kicked aside two more plants and lurched into the jungle, with the green shrub growing up his arm. Piersen stumbled along until he was far from the other plants. Then he tried to yank the last shrub from his arm. The shrub caught both his arms, imprisoning them. Sobbing with anger and pain, Piersen swung his arms high and slammed them against the trunk of a tree. The hooks loosened. Again he slammed his arms against the tree, shutting his eyes to the pain. Again and again, until the shrub released. Instantly, Piersen began staggering on again. But he had delayed his lifestruggle too long. He was streaming blood from a hundred slashes and the scent was like an alarm bell through the jungle. Overhead, something swift and black descended. Piersen threw himself down and the shape passed over him with a flurry of beating He rolled to his feet and tried to find protection in a thorny bush. A great, black-winged bird with a crimson breast dived again. This time, sharp claws caught him in the shoulder and flung him down. The bird landed on his chest with a wild beating of wings. It pecked at his eyes, missed, pecked again. Piersen lashed out. His fist caught the bird full in the throat, knocking it over. He scrambled into the thorn bush on all fours. The bird cirway in. Piersen moved deeper into the thicket toward safety. Then he heard a low moan beside him. He had waited too long. The jungle had marked him for death and would never let him go. Beside him was a long, blue-black, shark-shaped creature, slightly smaller than the first he had encountered, creeping quickly and easily toward him through the thorn thicket. Caught between a shrieking death in the air and a moaning death on the ground, Piersen came to his feet. He shouted his fear, anger and defiance. And without hesitation, he flung himself at the blue-black beast. The great jaws slashed. Piersen lay motionless. With his last vestige of consciousness, he saw the jaws widen for the deathstroke. Can it be real, Piersen wondered, in sudden fear, just before he blanked out. " sciousness, he was lying on a white cot, in a white, softly lighted room. Slowly his head cleared and he remembered -- his death. Quite an adventure, he thought. Must tell the boys. But first a drink. Maybe ten drinks and a little entertainment. He turned his head. A girl in white, who had been sitting in a chair beside his bed, rose and bent over him. "How do you feel, Mr. Piersen?" she asked. "Fair," Piersen said. "Where's Jones?" "Jones?" "Srinagar Jones. He runs this place." "You must be mistaken, sir," the girl told him. "Dr. Baintree runs our colony." "Your what?" Piersen shouted. A man came into the room. "That will be all, Nurse," he said. He turned to Piersen. "Welcome to Venus, Mr. Piersen. I'm Dr. Baintree, Director of Camp Five." Piersen stared unbelievingly at the tall, bearded man. He struggled out of bed and would have fallen if Baintree hadn't steadied him. He was amazed to find most of his body wrapped in bandages. "It was real?" he asked. Baintree helped him to the window. Piersen looked out on cleared land, fences and the distant green edge of the jungle. "One out of ten thousand!" Piersen said bitterly. "Of all the damned luck! I could have been killed!" "You nearly were," said Baintree. "But your coming here wasn't a matter of luck or satisfies." "What do you mean?" "Mr. Piersen, let me put it this way. Life is easy on Earth. The problems of human existence have been solved -- but solved, I fear, to the detriment of the race. Earth stagnates. The birth rate continues to fall, the suicide rate goes up. New frontiers are opening in space, but hardly anyone is interested in going to them. Still, the frontiers must be manned, if the race is to survive." "I have heard that exact speech," Piersen said, "in the newsreels, on the solido, in the papers -- " "It didn't seem to impress you." "I don't believe it." "It's true," Baintree assured him, "whether you believe it or not." WV" OU'RE a fanatic," Piersen said. "I'm not going to argue with you. Suppose it is true -- where do I fit in?" "We are desperately undermanned," said Baintree. "We've offered every inducement, tried every possible method of recruitment. But no one wants to leave Earth." "Naturally. So?" "This is the only method that works. Adventures Unlimited is run by us. Likely candidates are transported here and left in the jungle. We watch to see how they make out. It provides an excellent testing ground -- for the individual as well as for us." "What would have happened," Piersen asked, "if I hadn't fought back against the shrubs?" Baintree shrugged his shoulders. "And so you recruited me," Piersen said. "You ran me through your obstacle course, and I fought like a good little man, and you saved me just in the nick of time. Now I'm supposed to be flattered that you picked me, huh? Now I'm supposed to suddenly realize I'm a rough, tough outdoor man? Now I'm supposed to be filled with a courageous far-sighted pioneering spirit?" Baintree watched him steadily. "And now I'm supposed to sign up as a pioneer? Baintree, you must think I'm nuts or something. Do you honestly think I'm going to give up a very pleasant existence on Earth so I can grub around on a farm or hack through a jungle on Venus? To hell with you, Baintree, and to hell with your whole salvation program." "I quite understand how you feel," Baintree answered. "Our methods are somewhat arbitrary, but the situation requires it. When you've calmed down -- " "I'm perfectly calm now!" Piersen screamed. "Don't give me any more sermons about saving the world! I want to go home to a nice comfortable pleasure palace." "You can leave on this evening's flight," Baintree said. "What? Just like that?" "Just like that." "I don't get it," said Piersen. "Are you trying psychology on me? It won't work -- I'm going home. I don't see why any of your kidnap victims stay here." "They don't," Baintree said. "What?" "Occasionally, one decides to stay. But for the most part, they react like you. They do not discover a sudden deep love for the soil, an overwhelming urge to conquer a new planet. That's storybook stuff. They want to go home. But they often agree to help us on Earth." "How?" "By becoming recruiters," Baintree said. "It's fun, really. You eat and drink and enjoy yourself, the same as ever. And when you find a likely looking candidate, you talk him into taking a dream adventure with Adventures Unlimited -- exactly as Benz did with you." "Benz? That worthless bum is a recruiter?" "Certainly. Did you think recruiters were starry-eyed idealists? They're people like you, Piersen, who enjoy having a good time, enjoy being on the inside of things, and perhaps even enjoy doing some good for the human race, as long as it's no trouble to them. I think you'd like the work." "I might try it for a while," Piersen said. "For a kick." "That's all we ask," said Baintree. "But how do you get new colonists?" "Well, that's a funny thing. After a few years, many of our recruiters get curious about what's happening here. And they return." "Well," Piersen said, "I'll try this recruiting kick for a while. But only for a while, as long as I feel like it." "Of course," said Baintree. "Come, you'd better get packed." "And don't count on me coming back. I'm a city boy. I like my comfort. The salvation racket is strictly for the eager types." "Of course. By the way, you did very well in the jungle." "I did?" Baintree nodded gravely. Piersen stayed at the window, staring at the fields, the buildings, the fences and the distant edge of the jungle which he had fought and nearly overcome. "We'd better leave," said Baintree. "Eh? All right, I'm coming," Piersen said. He turned slowly from the window with a faint trace of irritation that he tried to and couldn't identify. and kicking up a legal hurricane in Galley Slave , a stormy novelet that also returns one of the most famous fiction characters to literary life. A fictive resurrection indeed -- but a lethal one. For the Three Laws of Positronic Robots make it impossible to kill a human, but there is a loophole... murdering a man after his death! Clifford D. Simak also drops in for a visit, bringing a handsome present, a novelet called Carbon Copy. Being a scrupulous real estate agent and a devout angler, Homer Jackson knows a clean sale from a fish story -- but this is one time he gets really hooked! The fact that his catcher wears shoes on the wrong feet is upsetting enough; from that point on, though, things add up to more and more money and less and less sense! Along with probably another novelet and short stories and our regular features, Willy Ley takes us downstairs for an eyepopping inspection of The Spaceship in the Basement! Sounds to you like the gag about the man who built a boat in the cellar and then couldn't get it out? All right, smile now -- you won't when you discover that the basement spaceship exists at this very moment, who built it and why -- and that getting it out of the basement is the least of all the problems it has to face! By j. t. McIntosh You had it taped all the way, pal -- but how come you didn't say this would happen to me? this, Joe, but you've been right about so many of the other things, I guess you're very likely right about that, too. You remember you figured that I wouldn't just materialize naked in the middle of a city street. You said I'd be a genuine human being of the time, correctly dressed and with some kind of personal history. But you warned me -- and I appreciate this, Joe; you didn't have to warn me, but you did it -- you warned me that there was no telling I'd be like me. I may as well admit now I wasn't happy about that. I never was much to look at and there wasn't any danger of my becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. But I'd got used to being the way I was, and I didn't altogether like the idea of seeing a stranger's face every time I looked in the mirror. If I'd known what I was going to be like, I'd never have done it. I'm sorry, Joe, but even for you I couldn't have faced it. Now that I'm here, though, I'll just have to make the best of it. You were right, Joe, all along the line. Nobody ran screaming when I got here and I haven't been arrested. I was fitted into a spot that was made for me, dressed in the right clothes, able to speak the right language. I've got a name. And just as you said, I'm different. Different? That's like saying Gina Lollobrigida isn't like Aunt Phoebe! When I first got here, I looked around, of course. I saw people walking about and colored buildings with hardly any straight lines in them. It took no more than a glance to show me this was a pretty advanced civilization, many centuries ahead of our time. Before I did any more looking around, I did the second obvious thing. I looked down at what I could see of me. I nearly jumped out of my skin, Joe. You know those ads: You, too, can have a body like mine? Well, that was me -- golden tan, rippling muscles, chest a mile wide. Yeah, me Tarzan. I wore very short, tight trunks and shoes, that was all, and believe me, I was scared stiff of myself. Funny, I was prepared to find myself very young. I even took the risk of finding myself very old. But I never saw myself as Superman. I can't seem to get used to the idea at all. It wasn't that everybody around here was like this. Far from it. They all seemed young and fit and good-looking, but not big and not strong. I could see right away by the attention I got that I was something special. And it scared the life out of me. Some people wouldn't mind finding themselves looking like a Greek god. Me, I'm not the type. I've spent my life not being noticed -- you know that, Joe -- and I wasn't cut out to be a symbol of manhood. I don't think I'll ever get used to it. Anyway, Joe, apart from this, everything seems to be all right. And I'd like to say right away that I think it's safe for you to come along, too, if you want to. You never said you were sending me as a guinea pig, to see whether it was safe to go yourself, but I'm not completely dumb. I was ready to take the gamble just the same. If you come, you'll probably also find yourself a gorgeous hunk of man. You'll be able to figure it out better than me, but I guess maybe it's because the world we live in makes us tougher than the people living in this world have to be. When we show up here, we come out a lot bigger and stronger than we ever dreamed we were. Well, maybe you won't mind being Superman, Joe. Come to think of it, I guess it'll suit you fine. It's difficult to explain what I know and don't know about this world. My name's Elan Rock, by the way. I know that. I know the language, and though I haven't used it yet, I'm sure that when I do it'll come out just right. I know how to open doors and operate what they use instead of phones here and what to say instead of "Good morning" and how to do what they call reading and where I can get their idea of a drink. I know everything like that. But what kind of society this is and how it's governed and what year it is and why there are no square buildings and why everybody walks instead of using cars, I don't know. Now I'll have to break off for a while, Joe. When I'm used to this, I'll be able to talk to you no matter what I'm doing. Meantime, I don't want to make any big mistakes in my first few minutes here in the future. I'll call you again soon. I've seen myself in a mirror and it's just as I thought, only worse. I've got the face of Apollo to go with the figure of Charles Atlas. I'd tell you more about how I look, but you wouldn't believe it. The way I figure it, I couldn't just jump into the future and be somebody who'd never existed before. Elan Rock had to halfexist for twenty-five years so that I could come shooting up from the Dark Ages and be him. I think you said something like that once, Joe, only I couldn't digest all you were telling me in such a short time before I got started. You were right, too, about my reaching a place which was just within my limit of comprehension, a place just short of an environment that would make me go crazy. And yet it's a lot simpler than ours. I know the whole code of laws, for example. I happened to see them a few minutes ago, over the door of what passes here for a Department of Justice. Translated, they go something like this: You mustn't annoy other people. And it you're other people, you mustn't allow yourself to be annoyed too easily. That's all there is to it. That code is taken to cover murder and stealing and other things like that which most people would agree are crimes. You can kill yourself if you like -- that's no crime. The only sex crimes are acts that would break one of these two laws. And notice that it's a crime to be annoyed too easily. You know, I got a respect for these people when I realized these were the only laws they needed. It wouldn't be any good trying to run out society under a pair of laws like that. Herb Jones would prove in court that he was annoyed by long underwear hanging out in Homer Smith's back yard. And a smart lawyer would prove that Herb Jones hadn't been too easily annoyed. So, according to the law, Herb Jones would get heavy damages. You can give people a tremendous amount of freedom if you know they won't abuse it. That's how things must be here. I was just beginning to get used to the idea of being Apollo when I hit snag number two. I'm trying to suspend judgment about this, Joe. Naturally, morals differ in different societies. All the same, it gave me my second shock when a little dark girl, pretty as anything, took my hand and -- well, gave me to understand that she expected me to go up to her apartment and make love to her. I smiled and shook my head, and she was obviously surprised and hurt, but what could I do? It's bad enough suddenly becoming a beefcake king without being in a place where sex is so free and open that -- hell, you remember how I used to get all red and stutter when I had to talk to a girl! It was only after the little brunette had gone on, her lovely straight back a living exclamation point, that I realized I could have politely thanked her and explained that I kept getting such propositions and a man can spread himself only so far and -- you know what I mean. I'll try that next time. I'm uneasily convinced that there's going to be a next time, maybe in five minutes. When it happens, I'll... Joe. Before we go any further, we'd better have an understanding about the power over me that you say you have. You told me that if you didn't hear from me, if I held out on you, you could do something and I'd die. Frankly, I don't believe it, Joe. I think you said that just to keep me in line. I don't think you can do anything to me now any more than you can talk to me. You explained why I could communicate with you and why you couldn't communicate with me. I didn't understand what you said, but you were very convincing, anyway. You weren't very convincing, though, when you said you could still control me while I'm here and you're still there. Didn't you know, Joe, that people can sometimes tell the truth from a lie, even when they don't understand either of them? But all the same, Joe, I'm not running out on you. I'm going to keep reporting to you honestly what's going on. Only if I'm wrong and you can reach clear up to here, Lord knows how many hundred years in the future, don't put the bite on me simply because I cut off for a few minutes. I may have a good reason. Like just then. You can't blame me for cutting off that way. Something so screwy just happened that, for a moment, I thought the time-jump had driven me nuts. Along the street came a half dozen savages in animal skins. I looked at the other people around for my cue. They seemed surprised but not frightened. So I guessed it was just an act, some stunt or other, maybe part of a parade, and tried to look surprised but not frightened, like everybody else. It was the savages who were frightened. They were yelling and running and glancing behind them. One carrying a stone club stopped in front of a woman a few yards from me, said something and raised his club. Sooner or later, I had to find out if I was as strong as I looked. I stepped in and let the caveman have it on the chin. At the last second I realized that if I gave him all I had, I'd probably break his neck, so I pulled the punch. What do you know, Joe -- I knocked a caveman twenty-five yards! It must have been all of that before he stopped staggering back and went down. He was plenty tough, because even after that, he wasn't out. On the other hand, neither he nor his companions seemed to have any urge to come at me with their stone clubs. "Oh, you wonderful man!" said the girl I'd saved from a fatal headache. I'd give her a better line if I could, but that's the only way I can translate it without the various suggestions which accompanied it. were hurrying over. The savages exchanged quick glances, turned tail and ran. The man I'd floored was last in line for a while, but before they disappeared from sight, he had pushed past the others and was in front again. That's leadership for you. I shrugged and walked on, pretending this sort of thing happened every day. Nobody stopped me, though there was excited conversation behind me. I didn't look back. I don't know what that incident was all about. I'd have stopped and talked about it, only I didn't dare. Maybe not everybody is as civilized as the people in this city. There's no law that children should go to school, for instance, so maybe the morons and drones of this community go outside and live as savages. Maybe there are people who don't believe in civilization. Maybe... Your guess is as good as mine, Joe. Probably better. There's a park beside me now, and I'd go inside and stop to consider things, if not for one thing. It seems very likely to me that if girls make advances in the open street here, the parks must really be something for shy young guys like me. Flustering, to say the least. I've got a lot of things to find out, and sooner or later I've got to take the risk of talking to people. The trouble is, how can I be natural when I feel as unnatural as a kitten laying eggs? Can I go up to the first pretty girl I see and say, "Take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise"? I can't. She would. Nevertheless, I'll have to talk to somebody the first time I see an opportunity. There must be some kind of festival going on. Here's another procession -- about twenty people, coming along the side of the park. I can't make out what they're supposed to be, but they're quite a sight. Like how Hollywood in our time would represent the people of the future. The women in brass bikinis and the men carrying enormous rayguns. And all as clean as if they'd been washed in the newest detergent. They look a bit puzzled. Maybe they've lost their way. I'm slipping into the park in case they ask me. If I keep moving, the local talent won't get a chance to take a good look at me and decide I'm just what they always wanted. Looks like I was right about the parks. It shouldn't be so unexpected, I guess. It was in our time that necking in public came in. This is only a step further. Now what in hell's this? killed a saber-toothed tiger! I know that's hard to swallow, Joe. There were three of them, worse than anything you ever saw in a book or movie. They weren't really saber-toothed tigers -- they were something there isn't a name for. Perhaps nobody yet dug up a skeleton of one of these things. There were these three tigers and half a dozen couples and me within thirty yards or so. I didn't have much time to take a good squint at the beasts. The biggest of them came at me. I guess he figured that once I was out of the way, the other twelve packed lunches could be picked up without any argument. He was right at that. I'm not boasting, Joe -- I stood where I was because I was too scared to run. I told you I'm big, but not compared with a sabertoothed tiger. He leaped at me, and I remembered how Tarzan used to throw himself on tigers' backs and get a half-Nelson grip on them. It didn't seem too practical, however. I dodged the first rush. Somebody threw a knife at the tiger and nearly hit me. I got hold of it and faced the beast again. I didn't think for a moment that I was going to be able to do anything with the knife, which was a little folding one with a threeinch blade, but when you're practically naked and have to defend yourself against a wild animal, you use a wooden sword if that's the only thing available. The other specimens held off, waiting to see what happened. All the women were screaming, which helped, I guess. These creatures didn't seem to know any more about human beings than human beings knew about them. The next time the tiger came at me, I ripped his side open as he passed, and from the roars he let loose, I began to think for the first time that maybe I would be alive in five minutes' time, after all. It was that knife. I don't know yet whether it was just sharp or if it had some other quality about it, but it cut through the beast's flesh like water. And though a two-inch-deep cut all along his side didn't by any means put him out of action, he didn't like it. Why I had a chance, Joe, was because the poor ugly tiger, with all his strength, didn't have reaction-time worth a damn. I could run around him like a speedboat circling a scow. Talk about telegraphing punches -- this creature didn't telegraph them, he sent long letters about them by pony express. I slashed the tendons about his neck and it was no more dangerous than crossing a busy street at midday -- less, probably. He struggled a lot and he took a long time to die, but in the end he did die. I turned to the other tigers. They had seen what had happened, however, and showed unexpected intelligence by running as hard as they could go for a clump of trees two hundred yards away. The beasts disappeared among them and no one was sorry. The six couples who were still around rushed up to congratulate me, pat me on the back and say I was wonderful. Two of the girls kissed me, and their escorts (I guess that's the word) didn't seem to mind. I didn't mind too much myself. In time, I think I could get used to this world. But not to the sudden appearance of three unfriendly prehistoric monsters. out wasting any time about it, just in case what had happened before might happen again. I found myself walking with a man and girl who talked so easily that I couldn't let the chance slip. There's no reserve among these people, Joe, and if they're surprised at the things you ask, they hide it politely. It seemed that the arrival of the three tigers in the park had been as big a shock to them as it was to me. They weren't used to things like that. None of them showed any desire to become used to them, either. So the sudden arrival of three prehistoric monsters wasn't a normal hazard of living in this world. The couple I talked to had been as frightened as the rest, but they got over it pretty quickly. They're not nervous, these people. Put them in danger and they're frightened; remove the danger and they shrug and say they're glad that's over. Maybe that means there isn't much mental illness about. So why the savages? These two people were soon all, and a casual remark by the girl about my being alone gave me a chance to find out about the sex setup here. Seems what they've done is separate love and sex. If you want someone, you don't have to pretend to yourself and her and everybody else that you're in love with her. On the other hand, if you're in love with a girl, you aren't necessarily limited to her and her only. It's not so very different from things in our time, except they don't kid themselves and each other about it here. There's still love and there's still marriage, of course, but whether you're in love or not, or married or not, the usual thing is to have a fairly full sex life. Unless you don't want to. And all I have to do if I want to be left alone -- which I do, at least meantime -- is wear a silver bracelet on my right arm. Which I'm now doing. One of my new friends gave it to me. I didn't stay with the people I'd met in the park; I slipped away from them as soon as I could. It seems to me the best way of gaining information is getting a little at a time from different people. That way I won't reveal the full extent of my ignorance to anybody, just little bits of it. I'm out of the park now and back on the main streets. Thereshouldn't be any saber-toothed tigers roaming around loose out here. These don't look like main streets. I haven't seen a car or plane or truck or bicycle or wheelbarrow. Everything that moves on wheels does so in special underground lanes. That's the solution to the traffic problem -- no traffic, no problem. I don't precisely know how you get to the underground lanes. That, however, is a question which can wait. Already I'm getting used to the style of architecture. I think I like it. Smooth curves have always been more beautiful than straight lines. We built in stone and in straight lines because we didn't, know any better. Here most of the material is plastic of some kind -- buildings, windows, pavement, everything. A moment ago, I bent to feel the pavement when no one was looking. It's perfectly smooth, unblemished, something between stone and rubber, but it's too soft for stone and too hard for rubber. It's obviously molded and it wears well. I couldn't leave any marks on it with my fingernail, though it gave when I pressed it. In the streets, there's nothing but people walking. People not in any hurry, all very young-looking (maybe the older people use the public transportation). Friendly people, happy people. I know what you're thinking, Joe -- there must be a catch somewhere. All I know is, so far I haven't seen it. Unless it's the sabertoothed tigers. The caveman didn't give me much trouble, I dodged the men with the rayguns and the prehistoric monsters, and I managed to handle the saber-toothed tigers. But if this sort of thing goes on much longer, communication from me is going to stop very suddenly. You won't like that, Joe, because you'll never know what happened to me. I won't like it myself. I like this place, except the hazards. I'd like to stay in it. All in one piece, though. This time it was men in red coats with the most primitivelooking muskets I ever saw. They were firing them, too. I didn't see anybody hit, but that doesn't mean these men weren't shooting to kill. The guns they were using didn't seem to be accurate to much closer than ninety degrees, which was just as well. Perhaps somebody mopped them up. I didn't wait to see. Neither did anyone else. We didn't exactly stampede in panic, but we didn't waste any time getting out of range of those muskets. This wasn't part of any game, Joe. I'm beginning to get ideas about this. Suppose they do time experiments here. Suppose there's a sort of cowcatcher to brush off people and things who wander across the track. Or suppose there's a sort of time magnetism which pulls all time travelers in here. How the saber-toothed tigers and the savages with stone clubs could be time travelers, I don't know, but any theory's better than none. Only how come I landed up just as you said I would, a duly accepted member of this world, dressed in the right clothes and twice the man I was before, while all the others appear exactly as they were in their own time? I guess you've got an answer, Joe, as usual. Wish you could pass it on to me. Here's something else. About a dozen people, men and women, in ball dress. Seventeenth century, I guess. They're blinking and staring around. Gosh, I thought we invented the lowcut dress. The dress that redhead's wearing wouldn't get past the Hays Office if it was three inches higher. No, that's an exaggeration. It wouldn't get past the Hays Office if it was four inches higher. 'V#" OU probably got some of that, I Joe. It was awkward. These refugees from the seventeenth century picked me to talk to. The redhead came straight to me. Her manner was prim and correct, which showed she was a lady, but her eyes were no lady's. They were even more inviting than curious. I treated her like a sister. The trouble was, I could understand what these people were saying and no one else who was around could. I found it hard to make up my mind whether to pretend not to understand them or not. I guessed from the way they blinked and shaded their eyes that it had been night where they came from. As a matter of fact, they'd been at a ball. Naturally they wanted to know what it was all about. Before I'd really made up my mind whether to admit I could understand them or not, I found myself answering their questions. Since this group, unlike the redcoats, was obviously puzzled rather than hostile, they were soon in the center of an excited crowd, chattering away but unable to understand a word. I kept saying a word or two to the people beside me as well as talking to the strangers, to make it clear which side I was on. People offered me suggestions about what to tell the visitors and I did as they said. No one seemed much surprised that only I could talk to them. Everybody assumed, I guess, that I was a history student or something. This went on for about ten minutes. Then the strangers winked out like a light and we were left staring stupidly at each other. I didn't draw attention to myself this time by being the first to go on my way. But when it was clear that nobody suspected I knew any more about the incident than they did, I made my escape as soon as I decently could. One side issue I'd like to mention is this, Joe. Humanity really is on the upgrade. Looking at these people from the seventeenth century and comparing them with the people here, I couldn't doubt that there had been a big advance in intelligence, looks, poise and everything else that counts. It was like seeing a mongrel beside a pedigree pup. Even the redhead, who obviously regarded herself as a beauty, was nothing special compared with any girl in the crowd. I'd hardly got away from that when, in the very next street, I saw a bullfight, of all things. At first the bull and the matador didn't seem to be aware that things weren't what they'd been a few minutes before. Then the matador looked up and stared, petrified. The bull nearly got him. He turned just in time, but his mind was no longer on the job. I don't blame him. The bull and the matador didn't last as long as the visitors from the seventeenth century. They couldn't have been here more than a couple of minutes. I hope all these people got back where they came from. I liked that redhead, despite her gap teeth. I didn't care for the matador and the bull, but I don't wish them any harm. J OE, I don't know how to say this. I've been picked up. It wasn't an arrest -- they made that clear from the start. In fact, they're very interested in me and it looks as if I'm going to have a great time here as the Hercules from the Past. There were three men and two women, and they apologized for interfering with my liberty. Seems I have the same rights as everybody else here. But there was desperate urgency, they said. They promised to explain everything later. Meanwhile, they had to insist on taking me somewhere in a hurry. They knew my name and all about me. They even knew I wasn't the same as I'd been in my own time, because though nothing like this has ever happened, once it had happened it took them less than half an hour to figure out exactly what had happened. Joe, I feel like a heel. But they told me to tell you this. They told me they felt worse about it than I do. You see, if I'd simply landed up here and made no attempt to get in touch with you, they might never have known what had happened. But this link with you is the thing that's caused all the trouble. We're holding open a hole in time, Joe. And as long as it's open, anything, anywhere, anytime, can fall right through the hole. They told me there's a sort of dimensional elastic stretched all through time because of you and me. They can't leave it like that any longer. It could pull time itself apart. Joe, you always said it was up to everybody to look out for himself. That's what they're doing, so you were right about that, too. I mean you've been right about so many things that I got them to let me explain what will happen so you'll have a chance to figure a way out. You see, they're cutting the elastic, Joe. And you know what's going to happen? They say I'll be all right because I'm here and they're going to cut it on my side. But when it comes shooting back through time, it's going to pack one hell of a wallop. You've got a few minutes to work it out. You can do it, Joe. After all, look how often you were right. Good luck, Joe -- and take care of yourself. -- j. t. McIntosh for your information sea separate the two islands of Mauritius and Reunion. This is not a long distance for birds with a reasonable power of flight and it is only logical that many birds are common to both islands and even to Madagascar. For a flightless bird, however, # miles of open sea might as well be # miles -- it could no more cross the one than the other. Hence it is obvious that the Mauritius dodo, of which Peter Mundy said specifically that it "can neither flye nor swimm," could not cross over to Reunion. Nor could a flightless bird of Reunion cross over to Mauritius. Logically, then, if there also was a dodo on Reunion, it could not be expected to be the same as the dodo of Mauritius. Similar, yes, but only that. Their ancestors, presumably still capable of flight when they somehow got to the Mascarene islands, were no doubt the same. But even a short separation, as geologists speak of time, would produce very noticeable differences. Well, there was a dodo on Reunion and it did differ from the Mauritius dodo, but for more than a hundred years, naturalists did their best to overlook this difference. Yet the very first witness pointed it out. He was an Englishman by the name of J. Tatton who, in #, published an account of a voyage made a dozen years earlier under Captain Castleton. Reporting on Reunion, he wrote: "There is a store of Landfowl, both small and great, plentie of Doves, great Parrats, and such like; and a great fowl of the bigness of a Turkie, very fat, and so short-winged that they cannot flie, being white, and in a manner tame; and so are all other fowles, as having not been troubled or feared with shot." The only other witness who saw the Reunion dodo on the island and wrote about it was the Dutch traveler Willem Ijsbrantszoon Bontekoe van Hoorn. He spent three weeks there in #, and not only described what is unmistakably a dodo, but even referred to it as a Dad-eersen. Unfortunately, he did not say anything about its color. kept coming across pictures which did not jibe with the other dodo pictures. Not only was the plumage white with yellow wing feathers, but they were different in other respects, too. The feet were more slender, the tail was different and so was the bill. Now it is true that there are sketches of the Mauritius dodo in which the bill looks different, the reason being that the moulting dodo also shed the sheath of the bill. But these white dodos seemed to have their sheath in place. The pictures are all by just two artists, Pieter Holsteyn (around #) and Pieter Withoos (around #). Since it is most unlikely that a full-grown specimen would live for forty-five years in captivity, this indicates Fig. #: Sketch of the White Dodo of Reunion, by Pieter Holsteyn, early seventeenth century that two specimens of the white dodo reached Europe. The older naturalists failed to draw a clear distinction and even H. E. Strickland, in his monumental work on the dodo (#), did not do so. The white dodo was introduced to science as a distinct species as late as #, when the Hon. W. Rothschild published his work Extinct Birds. (It had the subtitle: "An attempt to unite in one Volume a short Account of those Birds which have become extinct in historical Times, etc.," but the short account turned out to be in folio with no less than # color plates.) The scientific name proposed for it was Didus borbonicus. In #, Dr. Hachisuka changed the scientific name (for various reasons that do not interest us here) to Victoriornis imperialis. Probably because Reunion is more mountainous than Mauritius, the white dodo lived longer than the gray dodo. There is a report that Mahe de la Bourdonnais, when he was governor of both islands, sent one to France. There is no record from the other end -- we don't know whether it got to France or not -- but Mahe de la Bourdonnais was governor from #-#, long after the Mauritius dodo was extinct. The Reunion dodo fails to be present for the first time in a survey made in #. It must have succumbed to dogs, rats and pigs during the latter half of the eighteenth century. That there was still something else to be said about Reunion was not even suspected until recently. But this additional mystery can best be explained with a detour to the third of the Mascarene islands, Rodriguez. As has been told in the preceding issue, the island was first reached by the Portuguese Diogo Fernandes Pereira in #. It took almost two centuries until settlers got there, and even these went to Rodriguez only as a second choice. They were French Huguenots who were supposed to go to Reunion from Holland. It was a small group of only eleven men. Their chosen leader was a man a few years past fifty at the time whose name was Francois Leguat. His younger brother was also in the group. TP HE Dutch ship, with the French Protestants aboard, left Holland on September #, #, and arrived at Reunion on April # of the following year. What happened then is not quite clear, but it seems that it had been believed in Holland that the French had abandoned the island. When the ship's captain realized that they had not, he did not land but set course for Rodriguez, where the French stayed for about two years. Then they built a boat and sailed for Mauritius. A weird and senseless odyssey was the result of this act. About half a year after they had landed, they were discovered by the governor who, after a few months of deliberation, banished them to a small rocky island offshore. There they were kept prisoners for three years and then shipped, still as prisoners, to Batavia. A year later, they were released and sent back to Holland as free men, where they arrived in June, #. Francois Leguat did not stay long, but went to England, where he rewrote the journal he had kept all along for publication. In #, both Leguat's French original and an English translation appeared. Other voyagers had said before Leguat that there were "dodos" on Rodriguez, but Leguat was the first man who had lived there for any length of time. Moreover, Leguat could draw. He provided illustrations for his book and there can be little doubt that he had made the sketches on the spot, because some of them are Fig. #: The Solitaire of Rodriguez, as pictured in Francois Leguat's book of #. Drawing probably by Leguat himself rather complicated maps and plans. "Of all the Birds in the Island," the English edition read, "the most remarkable is that which goes by the name of Solitary, tho' there are abundance of them. The Feathers of the Males are of a brown grey Colour: the Feet and Beak are like a Turkey's, but a little more crooked. They have scarce any Tail, but their Hindpart covered with Feathers is roundish, like the Crupper of a Horse; they are taller than Turkeys... The Bone of. their Wing grows greater towards the Extremity, and forms a little round Mass under the Feathers, as big as a Musket Ball. That and its Beak are the chief Defence of this Bird. 'Tis very hard to catch it in the Woods, but easie in open Places, because we run faster than they... Some of the Males weigh forty-five Pounds." males were brown in color, the females either brown "or fair, the colour of blonde hair"; most likely the brown ones were older females. He also mentioned that the females had a "head-band, like the head-band of Widows, high upon their Beak," and that lighter feathers on their chest formed an outline like the bosom of a woman. Leguat's drawing, therefore, is that of a female, since the males lacked these characteristics. There is no other drawing of a solitary besides Leguat's. However, just as in the case of the Mauritius dodo, remains of the solitary have been excavated on Rodriguez, so that a few nearly complete skeletons could be constructed. Again the story has a few wrinkles which were added later. In #, one of the famous transits of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun was due to take place and Rodriguez happened to be in such a geographical position that a fine observation of the transit could be made from there. The man to go to Rodriguez for this purpose was Abbe Pingre. In addition to doing the astronomical job for which he had taken the trip, Abbe Pingre reported that the solitaries were still around. He is the last man to have seen them. Some five years later, Pingre's colleague and compatriot Le Monnier decided that the expedition should be honored in some manner. He had discovered a number of small stars in the space between the constellations Libra, Scorpio and Draco which could be put together into a new constellation. He was going to call it Solitarius to honor Pingre, Rodriguez and the transit of Venus expedition. But he needed a picture of the solitary, and since his compatriot Brisson had recently published an enormous book on birds, he felt sure that it would be in there. Looking through the entries, he found a solitaire listed and copied the picture onto his star map. I don't know whether Le Monnier ever learned that the picture he used was that of Turdus solitarius, the solitary thrush! The other wrinkle is tied up Fig. #: The gable stone of Veere on Walcheren, discovered by Prof. Oudemans with the name of Geoffroy Atkinson, a professor of Romance literature who has written several books with titles like "The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature before #," "The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature, # to #" and so forth. Personally, I failed to be enchanted by them; they are solid work, but I had the impression that Atkinson knew literature and nothing else. Now I learn from Hachisuka that Atkinson, in #, went overboard with his interest in extraordinary voyages and declared that Leguat never traveled! He could "trace" every item in Le guat's journal to its "sources." The account of the Cape of Good Hope came from this book, the sea turtles from that book, the story of his imprisonment from still another book, the building of a boat from somebody else's memoirs. biologist who read this began to wonder. Leguat had said things about the anatomy of the solitary which were correct, as the skeletons proved, but which could not be found in any other book. While the biologist was still brooding over the article, two French librarians very politely requested that Atkinson answer a few simple questions, to wit: If Leguat had never rounded the Cape of Good Hope, why do the archives of Cape Town tell about the ship, its arrival, departure and so forth, all with the same dates as given by Leguat? Then, if Leguat never saw Rodriguez, why does the earliest map of the island (other than Leguat's own) name a few places after him? Why are there official reports from Mauritius telling of the arrival, imprisonment and deportation of refugees from Rodriguez? And, finally, why is there correspondence with the fleet commander about the trip to and return from Batavia? Well, Atkinson did accomplish Fig. #: The so-called Dodo of Florence. Note resemblance to the Dutch gable stone Fig. #: Female Reunion solitaire, picture discovered by Dr. S. Killermann one thing. Before him, nobody had doubted the authenticity of Leguat's journal. Now we are sure that it cannot be doubted. It remains to tell the scientific name of Leguat's solitary. It is Pezophaps solitarius. The first of these two names is put together from two Greek words: pezos, which means "pedestrian," and phaps, which means "pigeon." Some readers who know something about the dodo's story may have wondered why I did not quote some of the well-known source material about the subject. For example, Sir Hamon L'Estrange's account in his memoirs: About #, as I walked London streets, I saw the picture of a strange fowle hong out upon a cloth and myselfe with one or two more then in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky Cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of a more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of dunn or dearc colour. The keeper called it a Dodo, and in the ende of a chymney in the chamber there lay a heape of large pebble stones, whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs and the keeper told us that she eats them (conducing to digestion), and though I remember not how far the keeper was questioned therein, yet I am confident that afterwards shee cast them all again.L'-this up earlier is that this statement almost certainly does not refer to the dodo, even though the keeper called the bird by that name. The coloration does not fit the gray Mauritius dodo and certainly not the white Reunion dodo. Nor does the "more erect shape" as compared to the turkey. As Dr. Hachisuka points out emphatically, this is a description of a bird of the type of the solitary, not of the dodo type. It must have been the use of the name dodo which made earlier researchers accept Sir Hamon's account as one of the dodo and to surmise that this was the specimen which later was in Tradescant's Museum and finally thrown away. There have always been some descriptions of a bird from Reunion which did not quite "fit." There was the narrative of a Frenchman named Carre who went to Reunion in #: "I saw a kind of bird in this place which I have not found elsewhere: it is that which the inhabitants call the Oiseau Solitaire, for, to be sure, it loves solitude and only frequents the most secluded places; one never sees two or more together; it is always alone. It is not unlike a turkey, if it did not have longer legs." Another very similar description came from the Sieur DuBois who arrived in Reunion in #. He listed the birds he saw, and when he came to Solitaires, he stated: "These birds are so called because they always go alone. They are as big as a large goose and have white plumage with the tips of the wings and tail black. The tail feathers are like those of an ostrich, they have a long neck, and the beak is like that of the Woodcock, but larger; the legs and feet are like those of a turkey." Carre's and especially DuBois' statements led Strickland to suspect that maybe Reunion had both a dodo and a solitary. Rothschild, after weighing all the evidence, also said that there must have been two different birds on Reunion, either two kinds of dodos which were quite far apart in appearance, or else one dodo and one solitary resembling the Rodriguez type. A. C. Oudemans, ten years after Rothschild, took the position that all this was a mistake. The men who reported on them probably were not too observant as regards the moulting stages of the birds. Oudemans' main argument is that nobody described both birds, so to speak, side by side. This is admittedly sad, yet it so happens that nobody did. But if you read what reports there are, you get the impression that the bird called solitaire seems to have been quite numerous, while the white dodo obviously was not. Moreover, Reunion is large enough so that the two birds could have had different habitats. Somewhat ironically, Prof. Oudemans himself produced evidence for a solitary in addition to the one on Rodriguez. During the First World War, Prof. Oudemans, vacationing with his wife, looked at the gable stone of a house in Veere, on the island of Walcheren. The stone said that the bird pictured was an ostrich. It also clearly gave the date: #. Oudemans did not need long to see that the bird, whatever it was, was not an ostrich. But it could be a dodo. If so, this was the earliest dodo picture on record. The picture is reproduced here. Prof. Oudemans sent me a print in # when we had correspondence mostly about the Loch Ness animal. I T must be a gaunt dodo, Oudemans felt, for it certainly could not be a Rodriguez solitary. Leguat had been very specific about its being tailless with a round feather-covered rear end. Look at the tail feathers, Oudemans wrote. Almost like those of an Airikaansch struys (African ostrich) or like those of a dodo. Well, the answer is that it was not a Rodriguez solitary but a Reunion solitary (now called Ornithaptera solitaria) and the tail feathers, so prominent on the old Dutch gable stone, are just as prominent in the so-called dodo of Florence, one of the pictures discovered by Dr. S. Killermann. This picture is now taken to portray a male Reunion, while another picture, also discovered by Killermann, shows a female. Comparing this picture with the one of a Rodriguez female by Leguat, one can see how the two birds resembled each other and in what respects they differed. There is one more picture of the same bird (not reproduced here) which is now at McGill University in Montreal. It is of Italian origin, being picture no. # in the so-called "Feather Book" made by Dionisio Minaggio in Milan in #. It consists of # large pictures with birds, practically all of them hunting scenes. The interesting point is that the birds are never painted. The real beaks, feet and feathers of birds have been used. Unhappily, the picture of the Reunion solitary is "faked." That is to say that legs and beak have been painted and that the feathers used for the body are those of. other birds. But it is undoubtedly the same bird as a dodo of Florence. That attempts to ship Reunion solitaries to Europe were made is stated by Carre, who says that two of them were caught to be sent to the king (of France) but aboard ship they died of "melancholy." In a few other cases, shipment must have been successful. The #I stone masonry in Holland must have had a model. One male must have arrived in Italy around #. We do know that there was one on exhibit in London around # and there is evidence that a female got to Vienna in or about #. HP HE story has a postscript called the dodo of Nazareth or, more learnedly, Didus nazarenus. I thought the case had been nicely cleared up by Iosif Kristianovitch Hamel of the Russian Imperial Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, which published a fairly long study in its Bulletin of the Physical-Mathematical Section in #. Professor Hamel, after reading all the sources, had found a convincing piece of evidence. You remember from last month's column that the Dutch called the dodos Walghvogels or "nauseating birds" because their taste was so atrocious. (One of them declared firmly that the dodo was for wonder, not for food.) The French had translated Walghvogels correctly into oiseaux de nausee. But one Francois Cauche, who spent two weeks on Mauritius in #, wrote about the dodos nous les appellions oiseaux de Nazaret. Cauche probably did not try to taste dodo and did not see why the birds should be nauseating, so he thought that the word nausee was actually Nazaret, which sounds somewhat similar in French. And there was a place called Nazareth nearby on a nautical chart. There still is, but it is now labeled a "bank" while on earlier charts there is an island by that name. Professor Hamel thought this was a simple mistake. He may be right. But when Prof. Oudemans checked old charts systematically, he found a few in which the name of Nazareth is not placed next to an island where we know that there is no island, but near the existing, if tiny, island which on modern charts appears as He Tromelin. Nobody knows much about lie Tromelin. It cannot be of any importance because the latest edition of the Admiralty Charts states that its position may be five miles off on the map. If it were of any importance, this would surely have been ascertained by now. Maybe the mapmakers who produced the old charts seen by Oudemans simply lettered Nazareth next to it because there was supposed to be such a place and it was the only island left in the whole area, the other suspected islands having turned into banks and shoals. But Oudemans said that Didus nazarenus cannot be dismissed completely until lie Tromelin has been carefully investigated. Not that he expected to find live dodos of any kind; he meant subfossil remains like those found on Mauritius and on Rodriguez. In principle, Oudemans is naturally correct; as long as there is an uninvestigated lead left, the book should not be closed. No such investigation has taken place. But until it is and the facts prove otherwise, I prefer to accept Prof. Hamel's explanation.      There was a chink in the invulnerability of the Pyramids -- whoever harvests whatever is ripe is bound to pick something poisonous -- but was a Son of the Wolf poisonous enough? any other Citizen in Earth's tiny, tattered population, but there was a difference. Where Citizens made the best of things, Tropile fought. Where Citizens accommodated their small, restricted lives to a starvation diet and an utter abandonment of hope, Tropile struggled -- and won. It was Tropile's nature to win, always. For Tropile was what the beaten remnants of humanity termed: A Son of the Wolf. Roget Germyn, on the other hand, was a most proper Citizen in every way. He was skilled in the Five Gestures and the art of Conversation in Rhymed Couplets; he never said "no," for saying "no" was crude and might hurt someone's feelings; his table manners were exquisite; and he would never, never take advantage of another human being. Also, like every other Citizen on Earth, he was slowly starving to death. For Earth was no longer the comfortable, warm planet that had stolen, raped and looted by the curious beings from outer space that the surviving humans knew only as -- The Pyramids, owners of a wild extrastellar planet that had come into the Solar System and, without fuss or struggle, neatly lifted old Earth from its orbit and drawn it away. Why? Humans didn't know. How? Humans had no idea. All that any man knew about the Pyramids was, first, that there was a single Pyramid on Earth, perched silent and motionless atop Mount Everest; second, that without the Pyramids to rekindle an artificial sun in the skies every five years, humanity would freeze and die -- as it was very near to doing anyhow; third, that every once in a while a Citizen, properly Meditating in the ecstasy of concentration which was every Citizen's desire, would disappear -- would be Translated, as they called it. That was all they knew, nothing more. know that, to the Pyramids, Earth was nothing more than a sort of floating wristwatch mine, from which at certain times Components could be harvested -- human Components, living men and women, whose brains could be linked into the Pyramids' planetsized computers. But vanquished Earth was not quite dead; Glenn Tropile was not alone. Condemned as a Wolf, threatened with the form of execution called The Donation of the Spinal Tap, Tropile made his escape -- and was picked up by another Wolf in the wilderness. Haendl was his name. He was not a Citizen; there was no proper courtesy in his manner, no submissive resignation to hunger and cold. Haendl believed in fighting ! Nor was he alone; there was a community of Wolves in the ruin of old Princeton University. There they had laboriously reconstructed weapons -- guns, tanks, even aircraft. From there, they planned to retake the Earth from its alien masters, the Pyramids. But -- could they? A mightier, richer Earth had thrown every weapon it owned against the Pyramids when first they came. And the result was nothing. It was as though the weapons of Man had not existed. The Pyramids not only were not harmed; they didn't seem to know that the weapons were being used. Tanks, guns, planes -- even a hydrogen bomb had spent itself uselessly against the Pyramids! Troubled, Tropile sat alone, wondering, worrying. He began to fall into a mood of single-minded concentration, began to Meditate, began to think upon the metaphysical questions that were every proper Citizen's first concern... A Component was harvested. Glenn Tropile was Translated -- swept up and out to the alien planet that was the home of the Pyramids themselves. through the high grass toward the dull throb of the diesel. Maybe it had been a mistake to take this Glenn Tropile into the colony. He was more Citizen than Wolf -- no, cancel that, Haendl thought; he was more Wolf than Citizen. But the Wolf in him was tainted with sheep's blood. He competed like a Wolf, but in spite of everything, he refused to give up some of his sheep's ways. Meditation. He had been cautioned against that. But had he given it up? He had not. If it had been entirely up to Haendl, Glenn Tropile would have found himself back among the sheep or dead. Fortunately for Tropile, it was not entirely up to Haendl. The community of Wolves was by no means a democracy, but the leader had a certain responsibility to his constituents, and the responsibility was this: He couldn't afford to be wrong. Like the Old Gray Wolf who protected Mowgli, he had to defend his actions against attack; if he failed to defend, the pack would pull him down. And Innison thought they needed Tropile -- not in spite of the taint of the Citizen that he bore, but because of it. Haendl bawled: "Tropile! Tropile, where are you?" There was only the wind and the thrum of the diesel. It was enormously irritating. Haendl had other things to do than to chase after Glenn Tropile. And where was he? There was the diesel, idling wastfully; there the end of the patterned furrows Tropile had plowed. There a small fire, burning -- And there was Tropile. Haendl stopped, frozen, his mouth opened, about to yell Tropile's name. It was Tropile, all right, staring with concentrated, oyster-eyed gaze at the fire and the little pot of water it boiled. Staring. Meditating. And over his head, like flawed glass in a pane, was the thing Haendl feared most of all things on Earth. It was an Eye. Tropile was on the very verge of being Translated... whatever that was. Time, maybe, to find out what that was! Haendl ducked back into the shelter of the high grass, knelt, plucked his radio communicator from his pocket, urgently called. "Innison! Innison, will somebody, for God's sake, put Innison on!" Seconds passed. Voices answered. Then there was Innison. "Innison, listen! You wanted to catch Tropile in the act of Meditation? All right, you've got him. The old wheat field, south end, under the elms around the creek. Get here fast, Innison -- there's an Eye forming above him!" Luck! Lucky that they were ready for this, and only by luck, because it was the helicopter that Innison had patiently assembled for the attack on Everest that was ready now, loaded with instruments, planned to weigh and measure the aura around the Pyramid -- now at hand when they needed it. That was luck, but there was driving hurry involved, too; it was only a matter of minutes before Haendl heard the wobbling drone of the copter, saw the vanes fluttering low over the hedges, dropping to earth behind the elms. Haendl raised himself cautiously and peered. Yes, Tropile was still there, and the Eye still above him! But the noise of the helicopter had frayed the spell. Tropile stirred. The Eye wavered and shook -- But did not vanish. Thanking what passed for his God, Haendl scuttled circuitously around the elms and joined Innison at the copter. Innison was furiously closing switches and pointing lenses. They saw Tropile sitting there, the Eye growing larger and closer over his head. They had timeplenty of time; oh, nearly a minute of time. They brought to bear on the silent and unknowing form of Glenn Tropile every instrument that the copter carried. They were waiting for Tropile to disappear -- He did. at the thunderclap as air rushed in to replace him. "We've got what you wanted," Haendl said harshly. "Let's read some instruments." Throughout the Translation, high-tensile magnetic tape on a madly spinning drum had been hurtling under twenty-four recording heads at a hundred feet a second. Output to the recording heads had been from every kind of measuring device they had been able to conceive and build, all loaded on the helicopter for use on Mount Everest -- all now pointed directly at Glenn Tropile. They had, for the instant of Translation, readings from one microsecond to the next on the varying electric, gravitational, magnetic, radiant and molecular-state conditions in his vicinity. They got back to Innison's workshop, and the laboratory inside it, in less than a minute; but it took hours of playing back the magnetic pulses into machines that turned them into scribed curves on coordinate paper before Innison had anything resembling an answer. He said: "No mystery. I mean no mystery except the speed. Want to know what happened to Tropile?" "I do," said Raendl. "A pencil of electrostatic force maintained by a pinch effect bounced down the approximate azimuth of Everest -- God knows how they handled the elevation -- and charged him and the area positive. A big charge, clear off the scale. They parted company. He was bounced straight up. A meter off the ground, a correcting vector was applied. When last seen, he was headed fast in the direction of the Pyramids' binary -- fast! So fast that I would guess he'll get there alive. It takes an appreciable time, a good part of a second, for his protein to coagulate enough to make him sick and then kill him. If the Pyramids strip the charges off him immediately on arrival, as I should think they will, he'll live." "Friction -- " "Be damned to friction," Innison said calmly. "He carried a packet of air with him and there was no friction. How? I don't know. How are they going to keep him alive in space, without the charges that hold air? I don't know. If they don't maintain the charges, can they beat the speed of light? I don't know. I can tell you what happened. I can't tell you how." Haendl stood up thoughtfully. "It's something," he said grudgingly. "It's more than we've ever had -- a complete reading at the instant of Translation!" "We'll get more," Haendl promised. "Innison, now that you know what to look for, go on looking for it. Keep every possible detection device monitored twenty-four hours a day. Turn on everything you've got that'll find a sign of imposed modulation. At any sign -- or at anybody's hunch that there might be a sign -- I'm to be called. If I'm eating. If I'm sleeping. If I'm enjoying with a woman. Call me, you hear? Maybe you were right about Tropile; maybe he did have some use. He might give the Pyramids a bellyache." Innison, flipping the magnetic tape drum to rewind, said thoughtfully: "It's too bad they've got him. We could have used some more readings." "Too bad?" Haendl laughed sharply. "This time they've got themselves a Wolf." -- a fact which did not matter in the least to them. It is not possible to know what "mattered" to a Pyramid except by inference. But it is possible to know that they had no way of telling Wolf from Citizen. The planet which was their home -- Earth's old Moon -- was small, dark, atmosphereless and waterless. It was completely built over, much of it with its propulsion devices. In the old days, when technology had followed war, luxury, government and leisure, the Pyramids' sun had run out of steam; and at about the same time, they had run out of the Components they imported from a neighboring planet. They used the last of their Components to implement their stolid metaphysic of hauling and pushing. They pushed their planet. They knew where to push it. Each Pyramid as it stood was a radio-astronomy observatory, powerful and accurate beyond the wildest dreams of Earthly radioastronomers. From this start, they built instruments to aid their naked senses. They went into a kind of hibernation, reducing their activity to a bare trickle except for a small "crew" and headed for Earth. They had every reason to believe they would find more Components there, and they did. Tropile was one of them. The only thing which set him apart from the others was that he was the most recent to be stockpiled. The religion, or vice, or philosophy he practiced made it possible for him to be a Component. Meditation derived from Zen Buddhism was a windfall for the Pyramids, though, of course, they had no idea at all of what lay behind it and did not "care." They knew only that, at certain times, certain potential Components became Components which were no longer merely potential -- which were, in fact, ripe for harvesting. It was useful to them that the minds they cropped were utterly blank. It saved the trouble of blanking them. Tropile had been harvested at the moment his inhibiting conscious mind had been cleared, for the Pyramids were not interested in him as an entity capable of will and conception. They used only the raw capacity of the human brain and its perceptors. They used Rashevsky's Number, the gigantic, far more than astronomical expression that denoted the number of switching operations performable within the human brain. They used "subception," the phenomenon by which the reasoning mind, uninhibited by consciousness, reacts directly to stimuli -- shortcutting the cerebral censor, avoiding the weighing of shall-I-or-shan't-I that precedes every conscious act. The harvested minds were -- Components. It is not desirable that your bedroom wall switch have a mind of its own; if you turn the lights on, you want them on. So it was with the Pyramids. A Component was needed in the industrial complex which transformed catabolism products into anabolism products. since their planetfall, Pyramids received the tabula rasa that was Glenn Tropile. He arrived in one piece, wearing a blanket of air. Quick-frozen mentally at the moment of inert blankness his Meditation had granted him -- the psychic drunkard's coma -- he was cushioned on repellent charges as he plummeted down, and instantly stripped of surplus electrostatic charge. At this point, he was still human; only asleep. He remained "asleep." Annular fields they used for lifting and lowering seized him and moved him into a snug tank of nutrient fluid. There were many such tanks, ready and waiting. The tanks themselves could be moved, and the one containing Glenn Tropile did move, to a metabolism complex where there were many other tanks, all occupied. This was a warm room -- the Pyramids had wasted no energy on such foppish comforts in the first "room." In this room, Glenn Tropile gradually resumed the appearance of life. His heart once again began to beat. Faint stirrings were visible in his chest as his habit-numbed lungs attempted to breathe. Gradually the stirrings slowed and stopped. There was no need for that foppish comfort, either; the nutrient fluid supplied all. Tropile was "wired into circuit." The only literal wiring, at first, was a temporary one -- a fine electrode aseptically introduced into the great nerve that leads to the rhinencephalon -- the "small brain," the area of the brain which contains the pleasure centers that motivate human behavior. More than a thousand Components had been spoiled and discarded before the Pyramids had located the pleasure centers so exactly. While the Component, Tropile, was being "programmed," the wire rewarded him with minute pulses that made his body glow with animal satisfaction when he functioned correctly. That was all there was to it. After a time, the wire was withdrawn, but by then Tropile had "learned" his entire task. Conditioned reflexes had been established. They could be counted on for the long and useful life of the Component. That life might be very long indeed; in the nutrient tank beside Tropile's, as it happened, lay a Component with eight legs and a chitinous fringe around its eyes. It had lain in such a tank for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand Terrestrial years. T HE Component was placed in operation. It opened its eyes and saw things. The sensory nerves of its limbs felt things. The muscles of its hands and toes operated things. Where was Glenn Tropile? He was there, all of him, but a zombie-Tropile. Bereft of will, emptied of memories. He was a machine and part of a huger machine. His sex was the sex of a photoelectric cell; his politics were those of a transistor; his ambition that of a mercury switch. He didn't know anything about sex, or fear, or hope. He only knew two things: Input and Output. Input to him was a display of small lights on a board before his vacant face; and also the modulation of a loudspeaker's liquid-borne hum in each ear. Output from him was the dancing manipulation of certain buttons and keys, prompted by changes in Input and by nothing else. Between Input and Output, he lay in the tank, a human Black Box which was capable of Rashevsky's Number of switchings, and of nothing else. He had been programmed to accomplish a specific task -- to shepherd a chemical called #, #, #trihydroxycholanic acid, present in the catabolic product of the Pyramids, through a succession of more than five hundred separate operations until it emerged as the chemical, which the Pyramids were able to metabolize, called Protoporphin IX. He was not the only Component operating in this task; there were several, each with its own program. The acid accumulated in great tanks a mile from him. He knew its concentration, heat and pressure; he knew of all the impurities which would affect subsequent reactions. His fingers tapped, giving binary-coded signals to sluice gates to open for so many seconds and then to close; for such an amount of solvent at such a temperature to flow in; for the agitators to agitate for just so long at just such a force. And if a trouble signal disturbed any one of the # major and minor operations, he -- it? -- was set to decide among alternatives : -- scrap the batch in view of flow conditions along the line? -- isolate and bypass the batch through a standby loop? -- immediate action to correct the malfunction? Without inhibiting intelligence, without the trammels of humanity on him, the intricate display board and the complex modulations of the two sound signals could be instantly taken in, evaluated and given their share in the decision. Was it -- he? -- still alive? The question has no meaning. It was working. It was an excellent machine, in fact, and the Pyramids cared for it well. Its only consciousness, apart from the reflexive responses that were its program, was -- well, call it "the sound of one hand alone." Which is to say zero, mindlessness, Samadhi, stupor. It continued to function for some time -- until the required supply of Protoporphin IX had been exceeded by a sufficient factor of safety to make further processing unnecessary -- that is, for some minutes or months. During that time, it was Happy. (It had been programmed to be Happy when there were no uncorrected malfunctions of the process.) At the end of that time, it shut itself off, sent out a signal that the task was completed, then it was laid aside in the analogue of a deep-freeze, to be reprogrammed when another Component was needed. It was totally immaterial to the Pyramids that this particular Component had not been stamped from Citizen but from Wolf. IX a Citizen, contemplated his wife with growing concern. Possibly the events of the past few days had unhinged her reason, but he was nearly sure that she had eaten a portion of the evening meal secretly, in the serving room, before calling him to the table. He felt positive that it was only a temporary aberration; she was, after all, a Citizeness, with all that that implied. A -- a creature -- like that Gala Tropile, for example -- someone like that might steal extra portions with craft and guile. You couldn't live with a Wolf for years and not have some of it rub off on you. But not Citizeness Germyn. There was a light, thrice-repeated tap on the door. Speak of the devil, thought Roget Germyn most appropriately; for it was that same Gala Tropile. She entered, her head downcast, looking worn and -- well, pretty. He began formally: "I give you greeting, Citi -- " "They're here!" she interrupted in desperate haste. Germyn blinked. "Please," she begged, "can't you do something? They're Wolves!" Citizeness Germyn emitted a muted shriek. "You may leave, Citizeness," Germyn told her shortly, already forming in his mind the words of gentle reproof he would later use. "Now what is all this talk of Wolves?" Gala Tropile distractedly sat in the chair her hostess had vacated. "We were running away," she babbled. "Glenn -- he was Wolf, you see, and he made me leave with him, after the House of the Five Regulations. We were a day's long march from Wheeling and we stopped to rest. And there was an aircraft, Citizen!" "An aircraft!" Citizen Germyn allowed himself a frown. "Citizeness, it is not well to invent things which are not so." "I saw it, Citizen! There were men in it. One of them is here again! He came looking for me with another man and I barely escaped him. I'm afraid!" "There is no cause for fear, only an opportunity to appreciate," Citizen Germyn said mechanically -- it was what one told one's children. But within himself, he was finding it very hard to remain calm. That word Wolf -- it was a destroyer of calm, an incitement to panic and hatred! He remembered Tropile well, and there was Wolf, to be sure. The mere fact that Citizen Germyn had doubted his Wolfishness at first was powerful cause to be doubly convinced of it now; he had postponed the day of reckoning for an enemy of all the world, and there was enough secret guilt in his recollection to set his own heart thumping. "Tell me exactly what happened," said Citizen Germyn, in words that the stress of emotion had already made far less than graceful. Obediently, Gala Tropile said: "I was returning to my home after the evening meal and Citizeness Puffin -- she took me in after Citizen Tropile -- after my husband was -- " "I understand. You made your home with her." "Yes. She told me that two men had come to see me. They spoke badly, she said, and I was alarmed. I peered through a window of my home and they were there. One had been in the aircraft I saw! And they flew away with my husband." "It is a matter of seriousness," Citizen Germyn admitted doubtfully. "So then you came here to me?" "Yes, but they saw me, Citizen! And I think they followed. You must protect me -- I have no one else!" "If they be Wolf," Germyn said calmly, "we will raise hue and cry against them. Now will the Citizeness remain here? I go forth to see these men." There was a graceless hammering on the door. "Too late!" cried Gala Tropile in panic. "They are here!"  the ritual of greeting, of depre eating the ugliness and poverty of his home, of offering every! hing he owned to his visitors; it was the way to greet a stranger. The two men lacked both com tesy and wit, but they did make an attempt to comply with the minimal formal customs of introduction. He had to give them credit for that; and yet it was almost more alarming than if they had blustered and yelled. For he knew one of these men. He dredged the name out of his memory. It was Haendl. The same man had appeared in Wheeling the day Glenn Tropile had been scheduled to make the Donation of the Spinal Tap -- and had broken free and escaped. He had inquired about Tropile of a good many people, Citizen Germyn included, and even at that time, in the excitement of an Amok, a Wolf-finding and a Translation in a single day, Germyn had wondered at Haendl's lack of breeding and airs. Now he wondered no longer. But the man made no overt act and Citizen Germyn postponed the raising of the hue and cry. It was not a thing to be done lightly. "Gala Tropile is in this house," the man with Haendl said bluntly. Citizen Germyn managed a Quirked Smile. "We want to see her, Germyn. It's about her husband. He -- uh -- he was with us for a while and something happened." "Ah, yes. The Wolf." The man flushed and looked at Haendl. Haendl said loudly: "The Wolf. Sure he's a Wolf. But he's gone now, so you don't have to worry about that." "Gone?" "Not just him, but four or five of us. There was a man named Innison and he's gone, too. We  need help, Germyn. Something about Tropile -- God knows how it is, but he started something. We want to talk to his wife and find out what we can about him. So will you get her out of the back room where she's hiding and bring her here, please?" Citizen Germyn quivered. He bent over the ID bracelet that Joe Hartman, fingering it to hide his thoughts. He said at last: "Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the Citizeness is with my wife. If this be so, would it not be possible that she is fearful of those who once were with her husband?" isn't any more fearful than we are, Germyn. I told you about this man Innison who disappeared. He was a Son of the Wolf, you understand me? For that matter -- " He glanced at his companion, licked his lips and changed his mind about what he had been going to say next. "He was a Wolf. Do you ever remember hearing of a Wolf being Translated before?" "Translated?" Germyn dropped the ID bracelet. "But that's impossible!" he cried, forgetting his manners completely. "Oh, no! Translation comes only to those who attain the moment of supreme detachment, you can be sure of that. I know! I've seen it with my own eyes. No Wolf could possilly -- " "At least five Wolves did," Haendl said grimly. "Now you see what the trouble is? Tropile was Translated -- I saw that with my own eyes. The next day, Innison. Within a week, two or three others. So we came down here, Germyn, not because we like you people, not because we enjoy it, but because we're scared. "What we want is to talk to Tropile's wife -- you, too, I guess; we want to talk to anybody who ever knew him. We want to find out everything there is to find out about Tropile and see if we can make any sense of the answers. Because maybe Translation is the supreme objective of life to you people, Germyn, but to us it's just one more way of dying. And we don't want to die." Citizen Germyn bent to pick up his cherished identification bracelet and dropped it absently on a table. There was very much on his mind. He said at last: "That is strange. Shall I tell you another strange thing?" Haendl, looking angry and baffled, nodded. Germyn said: "There has been no Translation here since the day the Wolf, Tropile, escaped. But there have been Eyes. I have seen them myself. It -- " He hesitated, shrugged. "It has been disturbing. Some of our finest Citizens have ceased to Meditate; they have been worrying. So many Eyes and. nobody taken! It is outside of all of our experience, and our customs have suffered. Politeness is dwindling among us. Even in my own household -- " He coughed and went on: "No matter. But these Eyes have come into every home; they have peered about, peered about, and no one has been taken. Why? Is it something to do with the Translation of Wolves?" He stared hopelessly at his visitors. "All I know is that it is very strange and therefore I am worried." "Then take us to Gala Tropile," said Haendl. "Let's see what we can find out!" Citizen Germyn bowed. He cleared his throat and raised his voice just sufficiently to carry from one room to another. "Citizeness!" he called. There was a pause and then his wife appeared in the doorway, looking ruffled and ill at ease with her guest. "Will you ask if Citizeness Tropile will join us here?" he requested. His wife nodded. "She is resting. I will call her." They called her and questioned her for some time. She told them nothing. She had nothing to tell. X "iN Earth's binary, Glenn Tropile had been reprogrammed for a new task. The problem was navigation. Earth had been a disappointment to the Pyramids; it was necessary to move rapidly to a more rewarding planet. The Pyramids had taken Earth out past Pluto's orbit with a simple shove, slow and massive. It had been enough merely to approximate the direction in which they would want to go. There would be plenty of time for refinements of course later. But now the time for refinements had come, earlier than they might have expected. They had now time to travel, they knew where to -- a star cluster reasonably sure to be rich in Componentiferous planets. It was inherent in the nature of Component mines that eventually they always played out. There were always more mines, though. If that had not been so, it would have been necessary, perhaps, to stock-breed Components against future needs. But it was easier to work the vein out and move on. Now the course had to be computed. There were such variables to be considered as: motion of the star cluster; acceleration of the binary-planet system; gravitational influence of every astronomical object in the island universe, without exception. Precise computation on this basis was obviously not practical. That was not an answer to the problem, since the time required would approach eternity as one of its parameters. It was possible to simplify the problem. Only the astronomical bodies which were relatively nearby need be treated as individuals. Farther away, the Pyramids began to group them in small bunches, still farther in large bunches, on to the point where the farthest -- and the most numerous-bodies were lumped together as a vague gravitational "noise" whose average intensity alone it was required to know and to enter as a datum. And still no single Component could handle even its own share of the problem, were the "computer" they formed to be kept within the range of permissible size. It was for this that the Component which had once been Tropile was taken out of storage. This was all old stuff to the Pyramids; they knew how to handle it. They broke the problem down to its essentials, separated even those into many parts. There was, for example, the subsection of one certain aspect of the logistical problem which involved loeating and procuring additional Components to handle the load. Even that tiny specialization was too much for a single Component, but fortunately the Pyramids had resources to bring to bear. The procedure in such cases was to hitch several Components together. This was done. When the Pyramids finished their neuro-surgery, there floated in an oversized nutrient tank a thing like a great sea-anemone. It was composed of eight Components -- all human, as it happened -- arranged in a circle, facing inward, joined temple to temple, brain to brain. At their feet, where sixteen eyes could see it, was the display board to feed them their Input. Sixteen hands each grasped a molded switch to handle their binary-coded Output. There would be no storage of the Output outside of the eightComponent complex itself; it went as control signals to the electrostatic generators, funneled through the single Pyramid on Mount Everest, which handled the task of Component-procurement. That is, of Translation. The programming was slow and thorough. Perhaps the Pyramid which finally activated the octuple unit and went away was pleased with itself, not knowing that one of its Components was Glenn Tropile. there was nothing outside of it.) Nirvana. (Glenn Tropile floated in it as in the amniotic fluid around him.) Nirvana. (The sound of one hand... Floating oneness.) There was an intrusion. Perfection is completed; by adding to it, it is destroyed. Duality struck like a thunderbolt. Oneness shattered. For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him to wake up. He tried to. It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening. It never lasts. What's the use of worrying over what always happens... Sudden shock and horror rocked him. This was no ordinary awakening -- no ordinary thing at allnothing was as it ever had been before! Tropile opened his mouth and screamed -- or thought he did. But there was only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums. It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious, mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A molded switch, mounted on a board, and he was holding one in each hand. It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere. Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was reality, too. He closed his eyes and light stopped. He opened them and light returned. Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought. Carefully, stumbling -- his mind his only usable tool -- he tried to make an estimate of his surroundings. He could hardly believe what he found. Item: he could scarcely move. Somehow he was bound by his feet and his head. How? He couldn't tell. Item: he was bent over and he couldn't straighten. Why? Again he couldn't tell, but it was a fact. The great erecting muscles of his back answered his command, but his body would not move. Item: his eyes saw, but only in a small area. He couldn't move his head, either. Still, he could see a few things. The switch in his hand, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a strangely circular board. The lights flickered and changed their pattern. a switch. Why? Because it was right to move that switch. When a certain light flared green, a certain switch had to be thrown. Why? Well, when a certain light flared green, a certain switch -- He abandoned that problem. Never mind why; what the devil was going on? Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it look so queer, he asked himself. He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one eye and the world is flat. Open it again and there is a stereoscopic double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background retreats. So with the lights on the board -- no, not exactly; but something like that, he thought. It was as though -- he squinted and strained -- well, as though he had never really seen before. As though for all his life he had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two. His visual perception of the board was total. He could see all of it at once. It had no "front" or "back." It was in the round. The natural thinking of it was without orientation. He engulfed and comprehended it as a unit. It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette. I think, Tropile mouthed slowly to himself, that I'm going crazy. But that was no explanation, either. Mere insanity didn't account for what he saw. Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was beyond Nirvana? He remembered, withan odd flash of guilt, that he had been Meditating, watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been Translated. But what was this, then? Were the Meditators wrong in teaching that Nirvana was the end -- and yet righter than the Wolves, who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull and refused to discuss Translation at all? That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands. He could see them, too, in the round, he noted. He could see every wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them... Sixteen hands! when sanity might have gone. He closed his eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And, after a while, he opened them again. The hands, were there. All sixteen of them. Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his memory. After a moment's thought, he flexed it. It bent. He selected another. Another -- on a different hand this time. He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all sixteen of them. I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body. He stirred, and added another datum: I appear also to be in a tank of fluid and yet I do not drown. There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone -- the Pyramids? -- had done something to his lungs, or else the fluid was as good an oxygenating medium as air. Or both. Suddenly a burst of data-lights twinkled on the board below him. Instantly and involuntarily, his sixteen hands began working the switches, transmitting complex directions in a lightninglike stream of on-off clicks. Tropile relaxed and let it happen. He had no choice; the power that made it right to respond to the board made it impossible for his brain to concentrate while the response was going on. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, he would never have awakened at all if it had not been for the long period with no lights... But he was awake. And his consciousness began to explore as the task ended. He had had an opportunity to understand something of what was happening. He understood that he was now a part of something larger than himself, beyond doubt something which served and belonged to the Pyramids. His single brain not being large enough for the job, seven others had been hooked in with it. But where were their personalities? Gone, he supposed; presumably they had been Citizens. Sons of the Wolf did not Meditate and therefore were not Translated -- except for himself, he corrected wryly, remembering the Meditation on Rainclouds that had led him to -- No, wait! Not Rainclouds but Water! self and forced his mind to retrace that thought. He remembered the Raincloud Meditation. It had been prompted by a particularly noble cumulus of the Ancient Ship type. And this was odd. Tropile had never been deeply interested in Rainclouds, had never known even the secondary classifications of Raincloud types. And he knew that the Ancient Ship was of the fourth order of categories. It was a false memory. It was not his. , Therefore, logically, it was someone else's memory; and being available to his own mind, as the fourteen other hands and eyes were available, it must belong to -- another branch of the snowflake. He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the left great toe of his body. He had injured it in boyhood and there was no mistaking the way it was bent. Good! It was reassuring. He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe. He succeeded, though not easily. After a time, he became more aware of that body -- somewhat as conscious" or "heart conscious." a neurotic may become "stomach But this was no neurosis; it was an intentional exploration. Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to another pair of feet and "thought" his way up from them. It was embarrassing. For the first time in his life, he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to have one's internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man's internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her. And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting. He withdrew his attention -- hoping that he would be able to. Gratefully, he became conscious of his own body again. He was still himself if he chose to be. Were the other seven still themselves? He reached into his mind -- all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him. "Is anybody there?" he demanded. No answer -- or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder and there still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard -- Another false memory! He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard, it was painful -- he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening -- and they reacted with anguish. "memories," he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok -- that was not the Raincloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning -- was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river. The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf. He reached out for her. It was almost magic -- knowing the "secret name" of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the "secret name" was more than that. It was the gestalt of the person. It was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person -- until now. With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thouhgt persuasively: "Citizeness Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with me?" No answer -- only a vague, troubled stirring. Gently he persisted: "I know you well, Alla Narova. You sometimes thought you might be a Daughter of the Wolf, but never really believed it because you knew you loved your husband -- and thought Wolves did not love, you loved Rainclouds, too. It was when you stood at Beachy Head and saw a great cumulus that you went into Meditation -- " And on and on, many times, coaxingly. Even so, it was not easy; but at last he began to reach her. Slowly she began to surface. Thoughts faintly sounded in his mind, like echoes at first, his own thoughts bouncing back at him, a sort of mental nod of agreement: "Yes, that is so." Thenterror. With a shaking fear, a hysterical rush, Citizeness Alla Narova came violently up to full consciousness and to panic. She was soundlessly screaming. The whole eight-branched figure quivered and twisted in its nutrient bath. The terrible storm raged in Tropile's own mind as fully as in hers -- but he had the advantage of knowing what it was. He helped her. He fought it for the two of them... soothing, explaining, calming. At last her branch of the snowflake-body retreated, sobbing for a spell. The storm was over. He talked to her in his mind and she "listened." She was incredulous, but there was no choice for her; she had to believe. Exhausted and passive, she asked finally: "What can we do? I wish I were dead!" He told her: "You were never a coward before. Remember, Alla Narova, I know you as nobody has ever known another human being before. That's the way you will know me. As for what we can do -- we must begin by waking the others, if we can." "If not?" "If not," Tropile replied grimly, "then we will think of something else." She was of tough stuff, he thought admiringly. When she had rested and absorbed things, her spirit was almost that of a Wolf; she had very nearly been right about herself. Together they explored their twinned members. They found through them exactly what task was theirs to do. They found how the electrostatic harvesting scythe of the Pyramids was controlled, by and through them. They found what limitations there were and what freedoms they owned. They reached into the other petals of the snowflake, reached past the linked Components into the whole complex of electrostatic field generators and propulsion machinery, reached even past that into -- Into the great single function of the Pyramids that lay beyond. XI edge of breakdown, which was something new in his life. It was full hot summer and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all the fields nearby; the drained storehouses were being replenished. The aircraft that had been so painfully rebuilt and fitted for the assault on Mount Everest were standing by, ready to be manned and to take off. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going right. It looked as though there would be no expedition to Everest. Four times now, Haendl had gathered his forces and been all ready. Four times, a key man of the expedition had -- vanished. Wolves didn't vanish! And yet more than a score of them had. First Tropile -- then Innison -- then two dozen more, by ones and twos. No one was immune. Take Innison, for example. There was a man who was Wolf through and through. He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan, a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic. How could a man like that succumb to the pallid lure of Meditation? But undeniably he had. It had reached a point where Haendl himself was red-eyed and jumpy. He had set curious alarms for himself -- had enlisted the help of others of the colony to avert the danger of Translation from himself. When he went to bed at night, a lieutenant sat next to his bed, watchfully alert lest Haendl, in that moment of reverie before sleep, fell into Meditation and himself be Translated. There was no hour of the day when Haendl permitted himself to be alone; and his companions, or guards, were ordered to shake him awake, as violently as need be, at the first hint of an abstracted look in the eyes or a reflective cast of the features. As time went on, Haendl's selfimposed regime of constant alertness began to cost him heavily in lost rest and sleep. And the consequences of that were -- more and more occasions when the bodyguards shook him awake; less and less rest. He was very close to breakdown indeed. On a hot, wet morning a few days after his useless expedition to see Citizen Germyn in Wheeling, Haendl ate a tasteless breakfast and, reeling with fatigue, set out on a tour of inspection of Princeton. Warm rain dripped from low clouds, but that was merely one more annoyance to Haendl. He hardly noticed it. There were upward of a thousand Wolves in the Community and there were signs of worry on the face of every one of them. Haendl was not the only man in Princeton who had begun laying traps for himself as a result of the unprecedented disappearances; he was not the only one who was short of sleep. When one member in forty disappears, the morale of the whole community receives a shattering blow. To Haendl, it was clear, looking into the faces of his compatriots, that not only was it going to be nearly impossible to mount the planned assault on the Pyramid on Everest this year, it was going to be unbearably difficult merely to keep the community going. The whole Wolf pack was on the verge of panic. ing behind Haendl. Groggily he turned and looked; half a dozen Wolves were yelling and pointing at something in the wet, muggy air. It was an Eye, hanging silent and featureless over the center of the street. Haendl took a deep breath and mustered command of himself. "Frampton!" he ordered one of his lieutenants. "Get the helicopter with the instruments here. We'll take some more readings." Frampton opened his mouth, then looked more closely at Haendl and, instead, began to talk on his pocket radio. Haendl knew what was in the man's mind -- it was in his own, too. What was the use of more readings? From the time of Tropile's Translation on, they had had a superfluity of instrument readings on the forces and auras that surrounded the Eyes -- yes, and on Translations themselves, too. Before Tropile, there had never been an Eye seen in Princeton, much less an actual Translation. But things were different now. Everything was different. Eyes roamed restlessly around day and night. Some of the men nearest the Eye were picking up rocks and throwing them at the bobbing vortex in the air. Haendl started to yell at them to stop, then changed his mind. The Eye didn't seem to be affected -- as he watched, one of the men scored a direct hit with a cobblestone. The stone went right through the Eye, without sound or effect; why not let them work off some of their fears in direct action? There was a fluttering of vanes and the copter with the instruments mounted on it came down in the middle of the street, between Haendl and the Eye. It was all very rapid from then on. The Eye swooped toward Haendl. He couldn't help it; he ducked. That was useless, but it was also unnecessary, for he saw in a second that it was only partly the motion of the Eye toward him that made it loom larger; it was also that the Eye itself was growing. An Eye was perhaps the size of a football, as near as anyone could judge. This one got bigger, bigger. It was the size of a roc's egg, the size of a whale's blunt head. It stopped and hovered over the helicopter, while the man inside frantically pointed lenses and meters -- Thundercrash. Not a man this time -- Translation had gone beyond men. The whole helicopter vanished, man, instruments, spinning vanes and all. Haendl picked himself up, sweating, shocked beyond sleepiness. The young man named Frampton said fearfully: "Haendl, what do we do now?" "Do?" Haendl stared at him absently. "Why, kill ourselves, I guess." He nodded soberly, as though he had at last attained the solution of a difficult problem. Then he sighed. "Well, one thing before that," he said. "I'm going to Wheeling. We Wolves are licked; maybe the Citizens can help us now." a Citizen, received the message in the chambers that served him as a place of business. He had a visitor waiting for him at home. Germyn was still Citizen and he could not quickly break off the pleasant and interminable discussion he was having with a prospective client over a potential business arrangement. He apologized for the interruption caused by the message the conventional five times, listened while his guest explained once more the plan he had come to propose in full, then turned his cupped hands toward himself in the gesture of Denial of Adequacy. It was the closest he could come to saying no. On the other side of the desk, the Citizen who had come to propose an investment scheme immediately changed the subject by inviting Germyn and his Citizeness to a Sirius Viewing, the invitation in the form of rhymed couplets. He had wanted to transact his business very much, but he couldn't insist. Germyn got out of the invitation by a Conditional Acceptance in proper form, and the man left, delayed only slightly by the Four Urgings to Stay. Almost immediately, Germyn dismissed his clerk and closed his office for the day by tying a triple knot in a length of red cord across the open door. When he got to his home, he found, as he had suspected, that the visitor was Haendl. There was much doubt in Citizen Germyn's mind about Haendl. The man had nearly admitted to being Wolf, and how could a citizen overlook that? But in the excitement of Gala Tropile's Translation, there had been no hue and cry. Germyn had permitted the man to leave. And now? He reserved judgment. He found Haendl distastefully sipping tea in the living room and attempting to keep up a formal conversation with Citizeness Germyn. He rescued him, took him aside, closed a door -- and waited. He was astonished at the change in the man. Before, Haendl had been bouncy, aggressive, quickmoving -- the very qualities least desired in a Citizen, the mark of the Son of the Wolf. Now he was none of these things, but he looked no more like a Citizen for all that; he has haggard, tense. He said, with an absolute minimum of protocol: "Germyn, the last time I saw you, there was a Translation. Gala Tropile, remember?" "I remember," Citizen Germyn said. Remember! It had hardly left his thoughts. "And you told me there had been others. Are they still gqjng on?" been others." He was trying to speak directly, to match this man Haendl's speed and forcefulness. It was hardly good manners, but it had occurred to Citizen Germyn that there were times when manners, after all, were not the most important thing in the world. "There were two in the past few days. One was a woman -- Citizeness Baird; her husband's a teacher. She was Viewing Through Glass with four or five other women at the time. She just -- disappeared. She was looking through a green prism at the time, if that helps." "I don't know if it helps or not. Who was the other one?" Germyn shrugged. "A man named Harmane. No one saw it. But they heard the thunderclap, or something like a thunderclap, and he was missing." He thought for a moment. "It is a little unusual, I suppose. Two in a week -- " Haendl said roughly: "Listen, Germyn. It isn't just two. In the past thirty days, within the area around here and in one other place, there have been at least fifty. In two places, do you understand? Here and in Princeton. The rest of the world -- nothing much; a few Translations here and there. But just in these two communities, fifty. Does that make sense?" Citizen Germyn thought. " -- No." "No. And I'll tell you something else. Three of the -- well, victims have been children under the age of five. One was too young to walk. And the most recent Translation wasn't a person at all. It was a helicopter. Now figure that out, Germyn. What's the explanation for Translations?" Germyn was gaping. "Why -- you Meditate, you know. On Connectivity. The idea is that once you've grasped the Essential Connectivity of All Things, you become One with the Cosmic Whole. But I don't see how a baby or a machine -- " "No, of course you don't. Remember Glenn Tropile?" "Naturally." "He's the link," Haendl said grimly. "When he got Translated, we thought it was a big help, because he had the consideration to do it right under our eyes. We got enough readings to give us a clue as to what, physically speaking, Translation is all about. That was the first real clue and we thought he'd done us a favor. Now I'm not so sure." He leaned forward. "Every person I know of who was Translated was someone Tropile knew. The three kids were in his class at the nursery school -- we put him there for a while to keep him busy, when he first came to us. Two of the men he bunked with are gone; the mess boy who served him is gone; his wife is gone. Meditation? No, Germyn. I know most of those people. Not a damned one of them would have spent a moment Meditating on Connectivity to save his life. And what do you make of that?"  said: "I just remembered. That man Harmane -- " "What about him?" "The one who was Translated last week. He also knew Tropile. He was the Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations when Tropile was there." "You see? And I'll bet the woman knew Tropile, too." Haendl got up fretfully, pacing around. "Here's the thing, Germyn. I'm licked. You know what I am, don't you?" Germyn said levelly: "I believe you to be Wolf." "You believe right. That doesn't matter any more. You don't like Wolves. Well, I don't like you. But this thing is too big for me to care about that any more. Tropile has started something happening, and what the end of it is going to be, I can't tell. But I know this: We're not safe, either of us. Maybe you still think Translation is a fulfillment. I don't; it scares me. But it's going to happen to me -- and to you. It's going to happen to everybody who ever had anything to do with Glenn Tropile, unless we can somehow stop it -- and I don't know how. Will you help me?" Germyn, trying not to tremble when all his buried fears screamed Wolf!, said honestly: "I'll I'll have to sleep on it." Haendl looked at him for a moment. Then he shrugged. Almost to himself, he said: "Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we can't do anything about it anyhow. All right. I'll come back in the morning, and if you've made up your mind to help, we'll start trying to make plans. And if you've made up your mind the other way -- well, I guess I'll have to fight off a few Citizens. Not that I mind that." Germyn stood up and bowed. He began the ritual Four Urgings. "Spare me that," Haendl growled. "Meanwhile, Germyn, if I were you, I wouldn't make any long-range plans. You may not be here to carry them out." Germyn asked thoughtfully : "And if you were you?" "I'm not making any," Haendl said grimly. '-terly tainted with the scent of the Wolf in his home, tossed in his bed, sleepless. His eyes were wide open, staring at the dark ceiling. He could hear his wife's decorous breathing from the foot of the bed -- soft and regular, it should have been lulling him to sleep. It was not. Sleep was very far away. Germyn was a brave enough man, as courage is measured among Citizens. That is to say, he had never been afraid, though it was true that there had been very little occasion. But he was afraid now. He didn't want to be Translated. The Wolf, Haendl, had put his finger on it: Perhaps you still think Translation is a fulfillment. Translation -- the reward of Meditation, the gift bestowed on only a handful of gloriously transfigured persons. That was one thing. But the sort of Translation that was now involved was nothing like that -- not if it happened to children; not if it happened to Gala Tropile; not if it happened to a machine. And Glenn Tropile was involved in it. Germyn turned restlessly. If people who knew Glenn Tropile were likely to be Translated, and people who Meditated on Connectivity were likely to be Translated, then people who knew Glenn Tropile and didn't want to be Translated had better not Meditate on Connectivity. It was very difficult to not think of Connectivity. Endlessly he calculated sums in arithmetic in his mind, recited the Five Regulations, composed Greeting Poems and Verses on Viewing. And endlessly he kept coming back to Tropile, to Translation, to Connectivity. He didn't want to be Translated. But still the thought had a certain lure. What was it like? Did it hurt? Well, probably not, he speculated. It was very fast, according to Haendl's report -- if you could believe what an admitted Son of the Wolf reported. But Germyn had to. Well, if it was fast -- at that kind of speed, he thought, perhaps you would die instantly. Maybe Tropile was dead. Was that possible? No, it didn't seem so; after all, there was the fact of the connection between Tropile and so many of the recently Translated. What was the connection there? Or, generalizing, what connections were involved in -- He rescued himself from the dread word and summoned up the first image that came to mind. It happened to be Tropile's wife -- Gala Tropile, who had disappeared herself, in this very room. Gala Tropile. He stuck close to the thought of her, a little pleased with himself. That was the trick of not thinking of Connectivity -- to think so hard and fully of something else as to leave no room in the mind for the unwanted thought. He pictured every line of her face, every wave of her stringy hair... It was very easy that way. He was pleased. 'N Mount Everest, the sullen stream of off-and-on responses that was "mind" to the Pyramid had taken note of a new input signal. It was not a critical mind. Its only curiosity was a restless urge to shove-and-haul, and there was no shove-and-haul about what to it was perhaps the analogue of a man's hunger pang. The input signal said: Do thus. It obeyed. Call it craving for a new flavor. Where once it had patiently waited for the state that Citizens knew as Meditation on Connectivity, and the Pyramid itself perhaps knew as a stage of ripeness in the fruits of its wristwatch mine, now it wanted a different taste. Unripe? Overripe? At any rate, different. Accordingly, the high-frequency wheep, wheep changed in tempo and in key, and the bouncing echoes changed and... there was a ripe one to be plucked. (It's name was Innison.) And there another. (Gala Tropile.) And another, another -- oh, many others -- a babe from Tropile's nursery school and the Wheeling jailer and a woman Tropile once had coveted on the street. Once the ruddy starch-to-sugar mark of ripeness had been what human beings called Meditation on Connectivity and the Pyramids knew as a convenient blankness. Now the sign was a sort of empathy with the Component named Tropile. It didn't matter to the Pyramid on Mount Everest. It swung its electrostatic scythe and the -- call them Tropiletropes -- were harvested. It did not occur to the Pyramid on Mount Everest that a Component might be directing its actions. How could it? Perhaps the Pyramid on Mount Everest wondered, if it knew how to wonder, when it noticed that different criteria were involved in selecting components these days. (If it knew how to "notice." Surely even a Pyramid might wonder when, without warning or explanation, its orders were changed -- not merely to harvest a different sort of Component, but to drag along with the flesh-and-blood needful parts a clanking assortment of machinery and metal, as began to happen. Machines? Why would the Pyramids need to Translate machines? But why, on the other hand, would a Pyramid bother to question a directive, even if it were able to? In any case, it didn't. It swung its scythe and gathered in what it was caused to gather in. Men sometimes eat green fruit and come to regret it. Was it the same with Pyramids? A ND Citizen Germyn fell into the unsuspected trap. Avoiding Connectivity, he thought of Glenn Tropile -- and the unfelt h-f pulses found him out. He didn't see the Eye that formed above him. He didn't feel the gathering of forces that formed his trap. He didn't know that he was seized, charged, catapulted through space, caught, halted and drained. It happened too fast. One moment he was in his bed; the next moment he was -- elsewhere. There wasn't anything in between. It had happened to hundreds of thousands of Components before him, but, for Citizen Germyn, what happened was in some ways different. He was not embalmed in nutrient fluid, formed and programmed to take his part in the Pyramid-structure, for he had not been selected by the Pyramid but by that single wild Component, Tropile. He arrived conscious, awake and able to move. He stood up in a red-lit chamber. Vast thundering crashes of metal buffeted his ears. Heat sprang little founts of perspiration on his skin. It was too much, too much to take in at once. Oily-skinned madmen, naked, were capering and shouting at him. It took him a moment to realize that they were not devils; this was not Hell; he was not dead. "This way!" they were bawling at him. "Come on, hurry it up!" He reeled, following their directions, across an unpleasantly warm floor, staggering and falling -- the binary planet was a quarter denser than Earth -- until he got his balance. The capering madmen led him through a door -- or sphincter or trap; it was not like anything he had ever seen. But it was a portal of a sort, and on the other side of it was something closer to sanity. It was another room, and though the light was still red, it was a paler, calmer red and the thundering ironmongery was a wall away. The madmen were naked, yes, but they were not mad. The oil on their skins was only the sheen of sweat. "Where -- where am I? he gasped. Two voices, perhaps three or four, were all talking at once. He could make no sense of it. Citizen Germyn looked about him. He was in a sort of chamber that formed a part of a machine that existed for the unknown purposes of the Pyramids on the binary planet. And he was alive -- and not even alone. He had crossed more than a million miles of space without feeling a thing. But when what the naked men were saying began to penetrate, the walls lurhced around him. It was true; he had been Translated. He looked dazedly down at his own bare body, and around at the room, and then he realized they were still talking : " -- when you get your bearings. Feel all right now? Come on, Citizen, snap out of it!" Germyn blinked. Another voice said peevishly: "Tropile's got to find some other place to bring them in. That foundry isn't meant for human beings. Look at the shape this one is in! Some time somebody's going to come in and we won't spot him in time and -- pfut!" The first voice said: "Can't be helped. Hey! Are you all right?" Citizen Germyn looked at the naked man in front of him and took a deep breath of hot, sour air. "Of course I'm all right," he said. The naked man was Haendl. ' I "HE Tropile-petal "said" to the Alla Narova-petal: "Got another one! It's Citizen Germyn!" The petal fluttered feebly in soundless laughter. The Alla Narova-petal "said": "Glenn, come back! The whole propulsion-pneuma just went out of circuit!" Tropile pulled his attention away from his human acquisitions in the chamber off the foundry and allowed himself to fuse with the woman-personality. Together they reached out and explored along the pathways they had laboriously traced. The propulsionpneuma was the complex of navigation-computers, drive generators, course-vectoring units that their own unit had been originally part of -- until Glenn Tropile, by waking its Components, had managed to divert it for purposes of his own. The two of them reached out into itDead end. It was out of circuit, as Alla Narova had said. One whole limb of their body -- their new, jointly tenanted body, that spanned a whole planet and reached across space to Earth -- had been lopped off. Quick, quick, they separated, traced separate paths. They came together again: Still dead end. The dyad that was Tropile and the woman reached out to touch the others in the snowflake and communicated -- not in words, not in anything as slow and as opaque as words: The Pyramids have lopped off another circuit. The compound personality of the snowflake considered its course of action, reached its decision, acted. Quick, quick, three of the other members of the snowflake darted out of the collective unit and went about isolating and tracing the exact area that had been affected. Tropile: "We expected this. They couldn't help noticing sooner or later that something was going wrong." Alla Narova: "But, Glenn, suppose they cut us out of circuit? We're stuck here. We can't move. We can't get out of the tanks. If they know that we are the source of their trouble -- " Tropile: "Let them know! That's what we've got the others here for!" He was cocky now, selfassured, fighting. For the first time in his life, he was free to fight -- to let his Wolf blood strive to the utmost -- and he knew what he was fighting for. This wasn't a matter of Haendl's pitiful tanks and carbines against the invulnerable Pyramids; this was the invulnerability of the whole Pyramid system turned against the Pyramids! It was a warning, the fact that the Pyramids had become alert to danger, had begun cutting sections of their planetary communications system out of the main circuit. But as a warning, it didn't frighten Tropile; it only spurred him to action. Quick, quick, he and the womanpersonality dissolved, sped away. Figuratively they sought out the most restive Components they could find, shook them by the shoulder, tried to wake them. Actually -- well, what is "actually?" The physical fact was surely that they didn't move at all, for they were bound to their tank and to r#r the surgical joinings, each to each, at their temples. No crawling child in a playpen was more helplessly confined than Tropile and Alla Narova and the others. And yet no human being had ever been more free. of Everyman, the thermostat. He runs the furnace in Everyman's house, he measures the doneness of Everyman's breakfast toast, he valves the cooling fluid through the radiator of Everyman's car. If Everyman's house stays too hot or too cold, the man swears at the lackwit switch and maybe buys a new one to plug in. But he never, never thinks that his thermostat might be plotting against him. Thermostat : Man  Man : Pyramid. Only that and nothing more. It was not in the nature of a Pyramid to think that its Components, once installed, could reprogram themselves. No Component ever had. (But before Glenn Tropile, no Component had been Wolf.) When Tropile found himself, he found others. They were men and women, real persons with gonads and dreams. They had been caught at the moment of blankness -- yes; and frozen into that shape, true. But they were palimpsest personalities on which the Pyramids had programmed their duties. Underneath the Pyramids' cabalistic scrawl, the men and women still remained. They had only to be reached. Tropile and Alla Narova reached them -- one at a time, then by scores. The Pyramids made that possible. The network of communication that they had created for their own purposes encompassed every cell of the race and all its works. Tropile reached out from his floating snowflake and went where he wished -- anywhere within the binary planet; to the brooding Pyramid on Earth; through the Eyes, wherever he chose on Earth's surface. Physically, he was scarcely able to move a muscle. But, oh, the soaring range of his mind and vision! shock, but just the same it was uncomfortable to be in a room with several dozen other persons, all of them naked. Uncomfortable. Once it would have been brain-shattering. For a Citizen to see his own Citizeness unclothed was gross lechery. To be part of a mixed and bare-skinned group was unthinkable. Or had been. Now it only made him uneasy. He said numbly to Haendl: "Citizen, I pray you tell me what sort of place this is." "Later," said Haendl gruffly, and led him out of the way. "Stay put," he advised. "We're busy." And that was true. Something was going on, but Citizen Germyn couldn't make out exactly what it was. The naked people were worrying out a distribution of some sort of supplies. There were tools and there were also what looked to Citizen Germyn's unsophisticated eyes very much like guns. Guns? It was foolishness to think they were guns, Citizen Germyn told himself strongly. Nobody had guns. He touched the floor with an exploratory hand. It was warm and it shook with a nameless distant vibration. He shuddered. Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one. "Ours!" he crowed. "That Tropile must've looted our armory at Princeton. By the looks of what's here, I doubt if he left a single round of ammunition. What the hell, they're more use here!" "But what are we going to do with guns?" Haendl looked at him with savage amusement. "Shoot." Citizen Germyn said: "Please, Citizen. Tell me what this is all about." Haendl sat down next to him on the warm, quivering floor and began fitting cartridges into a clip. "We're fighting," he explained gleefully. "Tropile did it all. You've been shanghaied and so have all the rest of us. Tropile's alive! He's part of the Pyramid communications network -- don't ask me how. But he's there and he has been hauling men and weapons and God knows what all up from Earth -- you're on the binary planet now, you know -- and we're going to bust things up so the Pyramids will never be able to put them back together again. Understand? Well, it doesn't matter if you don't. All you have to understand is that when I tell you to shoot this gun, you shoot." Numbly, Citizen Germyn took the unfamiliar stock and barrel into his hands. Muscles he had forgotten he owned straightened the limp curve of his back, squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest. It had been many generations since any of Citizen Germyn's people had known the feeling of being an Armed Man. A naked woman with wild hair and a full, soft figure came toward them, jiggling in a way that agonized Citizen Germyn. He dropped his eyes to his gun and kept them there. She cried: "Orders from Tropile! We've got to form a party and blow something up." Haendl demanded: "Such as what?" "I don't know what. I only know where. We've got a guide. And Tropile particularly asked for you, Haendl. He said you'd enjoy it." And enjoy it Haendl did -- anticipation was all over his face. dozen. They armed themselves with the guns Tropile had levitated from the bulging warehouse at Princeton. They supplied themselves with gray metal cans of something that Haendl said were explosives, and with fuses and detonators to match, and they set off -- with their guide. A guide! It was a shambling, fearsome monster! When Citizen Germyn saw it, he had to fight an almost irresistible temptation to be ill. Even the bare skins about him no longer mattered; this new horror canceled them out. "What -- What -- " he strangled, pointing. Haendl laughed raucously. "That's Joey." "What's Joey?" "He works for us," said Haendl, grinning. Joey was neither human nor beast; it was not Pyramid; it was nothing Citizen Germyn had ever seen or imagined before. It crouched on many-jointed limbs, and even so was twice the height of a man. Its ropy arms and legs were covered with fine chitinous spines, laid on as close as hairs in a pelt, and sharp as thorns. There was a layer of chitin around its reddish eyes. What was more horrible than all, it spoke. It said squeakily: "You all ready? Come on, snap it up! The Pyramids have got something big building up and we've got to squash it." Citizen Germyn whispered feverishly to Haendl: "That voice! It sounds odd, yes -- but isn't it Tropile's voice?" "Sure it is! That's what old Joey is good for," said Haendl. "Tropile says he's telepathic, whatever that is. Makes it handy for us." And it did. Telepathy was the alien's very special use to Glenn Tropile, for what Joey was in fact was another Component, from a previous wristwatch mine. Joey's planet had once circled a star never visible from Earth; his home air was thin and his home sunlight was weak, and in consequence his race had developed a species of telepathy for communicating at long range. This was handy for the Pyramids, because it simplified the wiring. And it was equally handy for Glenn Tropile, once he managed to wake the creature -- with its permission, he could use its body as a sort of walkie-talkie in directing the tactics of his shanghaied army. That permission was very readily given. Joey remembered what the Pyramids had done to its own planet. "Come on!" ordered Joey in Tropile's filtered voice, and they hastened through a straight and achingly cramped tunnel in single file, toward what Tropile had said was their target. They had nearly reached it when, abruptly, there was a thundering of explosions ahead. The party stopped, looked at each other, and got ready to move on more slowly. At last it had started. The Pyramids were beginning to fight back.  widow, woke from sleep like a well-mannered cat on the narrow lower third of the bed that her training had taught her to occupy, though it had been some days since her husband's Translation had emptied the Citizen's twothirds permanently. Someone had tapped gently on her door. "I am awake," she called, in a voice just sufficient to carry. A quiet voice said: "Citizeness, there is exceptional opportunity to Appreciate this morning. Come see, if you will. And I ask forgiveness for waking you." She recognized the voice; it was the wife of one of her neighbors. The Citizeness made the appropriate reply, combining forgiveness and gratitude. She dressed rapidly, but with appropriate pauses for reflection and calm, and stepped out into the street. It was not yet daylight. Overhead, great sheets of soundless lightnings flared. Inside Citizeness Germyn longunfelt emotions stirred. There was something that was very like terror, and something that was akin to love. This was a generation that had never seen the aurora, for the ricocheting electron beams that cause it could not span the increasing distance between the orphaned Earth and its primary, Old Sol, and the small rekindled suns the Pyramids made were far too puny. Under the sleeting aurora, small knots of Citizens stood about the streets, their faces turned up to the sky and illuminated by the distant light. It was truly an exceptional opportunity to Appreciate and they were all making the most of it. Conscientiously, Citizeness Germyn sought out another viewer with whom to exchange comments on the spectacle above. "It is more bright than meteors," she said judiciously, "and lovelier than the freshly kindled Sun." "Sure," said the woman. Citizeness Germyn, jolted, looked more closely. It was the Tropile woman -- Gala? Was that her name? And what sort of name was that? But it fitted her well; she was the one who had been wife to Wolf and, more likely than not, part Wolf herself. Still, the case was not proved. Citizeness Germyn said honestly: "I have never seen a sight to compare with this in all my life." Gala Tropile said indifferently: "Yeah. Funny things are happening all the time these days, have you noticed? Ever since Glenn turned out to be -- " She stopped. Citizeness Germyn rapidly diagnosed her embarrassment and acted to cover it up. "That is so. I have seen Eyes a hundred times and yet has there been a Translation with the Eyes? No. But there have been Translations. It is queer." "I suppose so," Gala Tropile said, looking upward at the display. She sighed. Over their heads, a formed Eye was drifting slowly about, but neither of the women noticed it. The shifting lights in the sky obscured it. "I wonder what causes that stuff," Gala Tropile said idly. Citizeness Germyn made no attempt to answer. It was not the sort of question that would normally have occurred to her and therefore not a sort to which she could reply. Moreover, it was not the question closest to Gala Tropile's heart at that moment -- nor, for that matter, the question closest to Citizeness Germyn's. The question that underlay the thoughts of both was: I wonder what happened to my husband. It was strange, but true, that the answers to all their questions were very nearly the same. THE Alla-Narova mind said sharply: "Glenn, come back!" Tropile withdrew from scanning the distant dark street. He laughed soundlessly. "I was watching my wife. God, we're giving them fits down there! The Pyramids must be churning things up, too -- the sky is full of auroral displays. Looks like there's plenty of h-f bouncing around the atmosphere." "Pay attention!" the Alla-Narova mind commanded. "All right." Obediently, Tropile returned to the war he was waging. It was a strange conflict, strangely fought. Tropile's mind searched the abysses and tunnels of the Pyramid planet, and what he sensed or saw was immediately communicated to all of the awakened Components who were his allies. It was a godlike position. Was he sane? There was no knowing. Sanity no longer meant anything to Tropile. He was beyond such human affairs as lunacy or its reverse. An insane man is one who is out of joint with his environment. Tropile was himself his environment. His mind encompassed two planets and the space between. He saw with a thousand eyes. He worked with a thousand hands. And he struck mighty blows. The weakness of a network that reaches everywhere is that it is everywhere vulnerable. If a teletype repeater in Omaha garbles a single digit, printing units in Atlanta and Bangor will type out errors. Tropile, by striking at the Pyramids' net at a thousand points, garbled their communications and made them nearly useless. More, he took the Pyramid network for his own. The Tropile-pulse sped through the neurone guides of the Pyramid net, and what it encountered it mastered, and what it mastered it changed. The Pyramids discovered that they had been attacked. Frantically (if they felt frenzy), the Pyramids replaced Components; the Tropile-pulse woke the new ones. Unbelievingly (did they know how to "believe"?), the Pyramids isolated contaminated circuits; the Tropile-pulse bypassed them. Desperately (or joyously or uffishly -- one term fits exactly as well as another), the Pyramids returned to shove-and-haul, and there was much destruction, and some Components died. But by then, the Components had reprogrammed themselves. ' I I HE first job had been the matter of finding hands for the Tropile-brain to work with. Bring hands in, then! Tropile commanded the Pyramids' network and obediently it was done. The Translation mechanism, the electrostatic scythe that had harvested so many crops from the wristwatch mines, suffered a change and went to work not for the pickers but for the fruit. The essential change in the operation of that particular pneuma had been simple; first, to "harvest" or "Translate" the men and women Tropile wanted as fighters instead of the meditative Citizen kind. Second, to divert the new arrivals to where they would not go straight to deep-freeze. It happened that the only alternate space Tropile could find was a sort of foundry that was nearly Hell, but that was only a detail. The important thing was that new helpers were arriving, with minds of their own and the capacity to move and act. Then Tropile needed to communicate with them. He found the alien, ropy-limbed Component whose name vaguely approached "Joey." Joey's limited sense of telepathy was needed and so, with enormous difficulty, Tropile and Alla Narova, combined, managed to reach and wake it. And so he had an army, captured humans for troops, an awakened Joey for liaison. Tropile was lord of two worlds. Not only the Pyramids were under his thumb, but his own fellow humans whom he had drafted into his service. They ate when a captured circuit he controlled fed synthetic mush into troughs for them. They breathed because a captured circuit he directed created air. They would return to Earth when -- and only when -- a captured circuit he operated sent them home. Sane? By what standards? And what difference did it make? " shocks, like an enormous earthquake-fault relieving a strain, the Pyramids began to fight back. "Tropile!" the Alla-Narova mind called urgently. Tropile flashed to the trouble spot. Through eyes that were not his own, Tropile scanned the honeycombed world of the Pyramids. There was an area where huge and ancient vehicles lay covered with the slow dust of centuries, and the vehicles were beginning to move. Caterpillar-treaded hauling machines were loading themselves with what Tropile judged were quickly synthesized explosives. Almost forgotten wheeled vehicles were creeping mindlessly out of nearly abandoned storage sections and lumbering painfully along the tunnels of the planet. "Coming toward us," Tropile diagnosed dispassionately. Alla Narova queried: "They mean to fight?" "Of course. You see if you can penetrate the circuit that controls them. I -- " already he was flashing away -- "I'll get to the boys through Joey." It was queer, looking through the eyes of the alien they called Joey; colors were all wrong, perspective was flat. But he could see, though cloudily. He saw Haendl joyously fitting a bayonet -- a bayonet ! -- to a rifle; he saw Citizen Germyn, naked but square-shouldered, puffing valiantly along in the rear. Tropile said through the strange vocal cords that belonged to the alien: "You'll have to hurry." (Strange to speak in words again!) "The Pyramids are heading toward the chambers where the Components are kept. I think they mean to kill us." He flashed away, located the area, flashed back. "You'll have to go without me -- I mean without Joey-me. The only way I see to get there is through a narrow little ventilation tunnel -- I guess ventilation is what it was for." Quickly (but against the familiar race of thought, it seemed agonizingly slow) he laid out the route for them and left; it was up to them. Watching from a dozen viewpoints at once, he saw the slow creep of the Pyramids' machines and the slower intersecting march of his little army. He studied the alternate cross routes and contrived to block some of them by interfering with the control-circuits of the emergency doors and portals. But there were some circuits he could not control. The Pyramids had withdrawn whole sections of their net and areas of the planet were now hidden from him entirely. Sections of the vast maintenance propulsionmanufacturing complex were no longer subject to his interference or control. TT would be, Tropile thought dispassionately, a rather close thing. The chances were perhaps six out of ten that his hastily assembled task force would be able to intercept the convoy of automatic machines before it could reach the racks of nutrient tanks. And if they were not in time? Tropile almost laughed out loud, if that had been possible. Why, then, his body would be destroyed! How trivial a thing to worry about! He began to forget he owned a body; surely it was someone else's bone and tissue that lay floating in the eight-branched snowflake. He knew that this was not so. He knew that if his body were killed, he would die. And yet there was no sense of fear, no personal involvement. It was an interesting problem in scheduling and nothing more. Would the human fighters get there in time? Perhaps the automatic machines had senses, for as the first of the humans burst into the tunnel they were using, a few hundred yards ahead of the lead load-carrier, the machines shuddered to a stop. Pause for a second; then, laboriously, they began to back toward the nearest of the side passages that Tropile had been unable to block. He scanned it hurriedly. Good, good! The circuits surrounding the passage proper were out of his reach, but it led to another passage, an abandoned pipeline of sorts, it seemed to be. And that he could reach... Patiently (how slowly the machines crept along!) he waited until one of the Pyramids' machines bearing explosives passed through an enormous valve in the line -- and then the valve was thrown. The explosion triggered every vehicle in the line. The damage was complete. Scratch one threat from the Pyramids -- And almost at once, there was another urgent call from Alla Narova: "Tropile, quickly!" mightiest race of warriors the Universe had ever known. They were invulnerable and unconquerable, except from within. Like Alexander the Great, they had met every enemy and whipped them all. And, like dying Alexander, they writhed and raged against the tiny, unseen bacillus within themselves. Blindly, almost suicidally, the Pyramids returned to their ancient principle of shove-and-haul. The geography of the binary planet was like a hive of bees, nearly featureless on the surface, but internally a congeries of tunnels, chambers, warrens, rooms, tubes and amphitheaters. Machinery and metal Components were everywhere thick under the planet's crust. The more delicate and more useful Components of flesh and blood were, to a degree, concentrated in a few areas... And one of those areas had disappeared. Tropile, battering futilely with his mind at the periphery of the vanished area, cried sharply to Alla Narova and the others: "It looks as though they've broken a piece right out of the planet! Everything stops here -- there's a physical gap which I can't cross. Hurry, one of you -- what was this section for?" "Propulsion." "I see." Tropile hesitated, confused for the first time since his awakening. "Wait." He retreated to the snowflake and communed with the other eight-branched members, now become something that resembled his general staff. He told them -- most of them already knew, but the telling took so little time that it was simpler to go through it from beginning to end: "The Pyramids attempted to cut the propulsion-pneuma out of circuit some seconds or days ago and were unsuccessful; we awakened additional Components and were able to maintain contact with it. They have now apparently cut it loose from the planet itself. I do not think it is far, but there is a physical space between." "The importance of the propulsion-pneuma is this: It controls the master generators of electrostatic force, which are used both to move this planet and ours, and to perform the act of Translation. If the Pyramids control it, they may be able to take us out of circuit, perhaps back to Earth, perhaps throwing us into space, where we will die. The question for decision: How can we counteract this move?" once; it was no trick for Tropile and the others to sort them out and follow the arguments of each, but it cannot be reproduced. At last, one said: "There is a way. I will do it." It was Alla Narova. "What is the way?" Tropile demanded, curiously alarmed. "I shall go with them, trace the areas the Pyramids are attempting to isolate, place my entire self -- " by this she meant her "concentration," her "psyche," that part of all of them which flashed along the neurone guides unhampered by flesh or distance -- " in the most likely point they will next cut loose. And then I shall cause the propulsion units on the severed sections to force them back into circuit." Tropile objected: "But you don't know what will happen! We have never been cut off from our physical bodies, Alla Narova. It may be death. It may not be possible at all. You don't know!" Alla Narova thought a smile and a farewell. She said: "No, I do not." And then, "Good-by, Tropile." She had gone. Furiously, Tropile hurled himself after her, but she was quick as he, too quick to catch; she was gone. Foolishness, foolishness! he shouted silently. How could she do an insane, chancy thing like this? And yet what else was there to do? They were all ignorant babes, temporarily successful because there had been no defense against them, for who expects babes to rise up in rebellion? They didn't know. For all they could guess or imagine, the Pyramids had an effective counter for any move they might make. Temporary success meant nothing. It was the final decision that counted, when either the Pyramids were vanquished or the men, and what steps were needed to make that decision favor the men were anyone's guess -- Alla Narova's was as good as his. Tropile could only watch and wait. Through a great many viewpoints and observers, he was able to see roughly what happened. planet next the severed chunk where the mind and senses of Alla Narova lay coiled for a moment -- and were gone. For what it had accomplished, her purpose succeeded. She had been taken. She was out of circuit. The overwhelming consciousness of loss that flooded through Glenn Tropile was something outside of all his experience. Next to him in the snowflake, the body which he had learned to think of as the body of Alla Narova twisted sharply as though waking from a dream -- and lay flaccid, floating in the fluid. "Alla Narova! Alla Narova!" There was no answer. A voice came piercingly: "Tropile! Here now, quickly!" Good-by, Alla Narova! He flashed away to see what the other voice had found. Great mindless boulders were chipping away from the crust of the binary planet and whirling like midges in the void around it. "What is it?" cried one of the others. Tropile had no answer. It was the Pyramids, clearly. Were they attempting to demolish their own planet? Were they digging away at the crust to uncover the maggot'snest of awakened Components beneath? "The air!" cried Tropile sharply, and knew it was true. What the Pyramids were up to was a simple delousing operation. If you could destroy their own machinery for maintaining air and pressure and temperature, they would destroy all living things within -- including Haendl and Citizen Germyn and thus, in the final analysis, including the bodies of Tropile and his awakened fellows. For without the mobile troops to defend their helpless cocoons against the machines of the Pyramids, the limp bodies could be destroyed as easily as a larva under a farmer's heel. So Alla Narova had failed. Alone against the Pyramids, she had been unable to bring the recaptured sections back into the circuit that Tropile's Components now dominated. It was the end of hope; but it was not the fear of defeat and damnation for the Earth that paralyzed Tropile. It was Alla Narova, gone from him forever. The Pyramids were too strong. And yet, he thought, quickening, they had been too strong before and still a weak spot had been found! "Think," he ordered himself desperately. And then again: "Think!" Components stirred restlessly around him, questioning. "Think!" he cried mightily. "All of you, think! Think of your lives and hopes! "Think! "Hope! "Worry! "Dream!" The Components were reaching toward him now, wonderingly. He commanded them violently: "Do it -- concentrate, wish, think! Let your minds run free and think of Earth, pleasant grass and warm sun! Think of loving and sweat and heartbreak! Think of death and birth! Think, for the love of heaven, think!" And the answer was not in sound, but it was deafening. IN the cut-off sections, Alla Narova's soaring mind lay trapped. It had not been enough; she could not force her will against the dull inflexibility of the Pyramids... Until that inflexible will began to waver. There was a leakage of thought. It maddened and baffled the Pyramids. The whole neuronic network was resounding to a babble of thoughts and emotions that, to a Pyramid, were utterly demented! The rousing Component minds throbbed with urge and emotion that were new to Pyramid experience. What could a Pyramid make of a human's sex drive? Or of the ropy-armed aliens' passionate deification of the Egg? What of hunger and thirst and the blazing Wolf-need for odds and advantage that streamed out of such as Tropile? They wavered, unsure. Their reactions were slow and very confused. For Alla Narova succeeded in her purpose. She was able to reach out across the space and barrier to Tropile and the propulsion-pneuma was back in circuit. The section that controlled the master generators of the electronic scythe lay under his hands. "Now!" he cried, and all of the Components reached out to grasp and move. "Now!" And the central control was theirs; the full flood of power from the generators was at their command. "Now! Now! Now!" And they reached out, with a fat pencil of electrostatic force and caught the sluggish, brooding Pyramid on Mount Everest. It had squatted there without motion for more than two centuries. Now it quivered and seemed to draw back, but the probing pencil caught it, and whirled it, and hurled it up and out of Earth, into the tiny artificial sun. It struck with a flare of bluewhite light. "One gone!" gloated Tropile. "Alla Narova, are you there?" "Still here," she called from a great distance. "Again?" "Again!" They reached for the Pyramids and found them, wherever they were. Some lay close to the surface of the binary planet, and some were hundreds of miles within, and a few, more desperate than the others or merely assigned to the task, they discovered at the very portal of the single spaceship of the Pyramids. But wherever they were and whatever they chose to do, each one of them was found and seized. They came wriggling and shaking, like trout on an angler's line. They came bursting through layer on layer of impenetrable metal that, nevertheless, they penetrated. They came by the dozens and scores, and at last by the thousands; but they came. There were more and more flares of blue-white light on the tiny sun -- so many that Tropile found himself scouring the planet in a desperate search for one surviving Pyramid -- not to destroy as an enemy, but to keep for a specimen. But he searched in vain. The Pyramids were destroyed, gone. There was not one left. The Earth lay open and free under its tiny sun for the first time in centuries. It had been a strange war, but a short one. And it was over. mering blackness into daylight and pain. It hurt. He was being born again -- coming back to life -- and it had all the agonies of parturition, except that they were visited upon the creature being born, himself. There were crushing blows at his temples that pounded and pained like no other ache he had ever felt. He moaned raspingly. Someone moved blurrily over his shut eyes. He felt something sting sharply at the base of his brain. Then it tingled, warming his scalp, comforting it, numbing it. Pain went slowly away. He opened his eyes. Four masked torturers were leaning over him. He stared, not understanding; but the eyes were not torturers' eyes, and in a moment the masks came off. Surgical masks -- and the faces beneath the masks were human faces. Surgeons and nurses. He blinked at them and said groggily: "Where am we?" And then he remembered. He was back on Earth; he was merely human again. Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was Haendl. "We beat them, Tropile!" Haendl cried. "No, cancel that. You beat them. We've destroyed every Pyramid there was, and a nice hot fire they're making up there on the sun, eh? Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You're a credit to the name of Wolf!" The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been changes, for they did no more than that. Tropile touched his temples fretfully and his fingers rested on gauze bandages. It was true: he was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the snowflake in the nutrient fluid. "Too bad," he whispered hopelessly. "What?" Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and he nodded. "Oh, I see. You're still a little groggy, right? Well, that's not hard to understand -- they tell me it was a tricky job #f surgery, separating you from that gunk the Pyramids had wired into your head." "Yes," said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on talking. After a while, Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the operating table. He was naked. Once that would have bothered him enormously, but now it didn't seem to matter. "Find me some clothes, will you?" he asked. "I'm back. I might as well start getting used to it." was a returning hero, attracting a curious sort of hero-worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after careful analysis, exactly what he might have expected. For instance, a man who went out and killed a dragon in the old days was received with great gratitude and rejoicing, and if there was a prince's daughter around, he married her. Fair enough, after all. And Tropile had slain a foe more potent than any number of dragons. But he tested the attention he received and found no gratitude in it. It was odd. What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a reigning baseball champion might get -- in a country where cricket was the national game. He had done something which, everybody agreed, was an astonishing feat, but about which nobody Seemed to care. Indeed, there was an area of accusation in some of the attention he got. Item: nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought back to ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all of them a certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And what was Glenn Tropile going to do about it? Item: the old distinctions between Citizen and Wolf no longer made much sense now that so many Componentized Citizens had fought shoulder to shoulder with Componentized Sons of the Wolf. But didn't Glenn Tropile think he had gone a little too far there? And item -- looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still -- well, just what was Glenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for Earth, when the old one wore out and there would be no Pyramids to tend the fire? He sought refuge with someone who would understand him. That, he was pleased to realize, was easy. He had come to know several persons extremely well. Loneliness, the tortured loneliness of his youth, was permanently behind him, definitely. For example, he could seek out Haendl, who would understand everything very well. Haendl said: "It is a bit of a letdown, I suppose. Well, hell with it; that's life." He laughed grimly. "Now that we've got rid of the Pyramids, there's plenty of other work to be done. Man, we can breathe now! We can plan ahead! This planet has maundered along in its stupid, rutted, bogged-down course too many years already, eh? It's time we took over! And we'll be doing it, I promise you. You know, Tropile -- " he sniggered -- "I only regret one thing." "What's that?" Tropile asked cautiously. "All those weapons, out of reach! Oh, I'm not blaming you. But you can see what a lot of trouble it's going to be now, stocking up all over again -- and there isn't much we can do about bringing order to this tired old world, is there, until we've got the guns to do it with again?" Tropile left him much sooner than he had planned. man had fought well, if nothing else. Tropile went to find him and, for a moment at least, it was very good. Germyn said: "I've been doing a lot of thinking, Tropile. I'm glad you're here." He sent his wife for refreshments, and decorously she brought them in, waited for exactly one minute, and then absented herself. Tropile burst into speech as soon as she left. "I'm beginning to realize what has happened to the human race, Germyn. I don't mean just now, when we licked the Pyramids and so on. No, I mean hundreds of years ago, what happened when the Pyramids arrived, and what has been happening since. Did you ever hear of Indians, Germyn?" Germyn frowned minutely and shrugged. "They were, oh, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. They were a different color and not very civilized -- of course, nobody was then. But the Indians were nomads, herdsmen, hunters -- like that. And the white people came from Europe and wanted this country for themselves. So they took it. And do you know something? I don't think the Indians ever knew what hit them." "They didn't know about land grants and claiming territory for the crown and church missions and expanding populations. They didn't have those things. It's true that they learned pretty well, by and by -- at least they learned things like guns and horses and firewater; they didn't have those things, either, but they could see some sense to them, you know. But I really don't think the Indians ever knew exactly what the Europeans were up to, until it was too late to matter. "And it was the same with us and the Pyramids, only more so. What the devil did they want? I mean, yes, we found out what they did with the Translated people. But what were they up to? What did they think? Did they think? You know, I've got a kind of a crazy idea -- maybe it's not crazy, maybe it's the truth. Anyway, I've been thinking. Suppose even the Pyramids weren't the Pyramids? We never talked to one of them. We never gave it a Rorschach or tested its knee jerks. We licked them, but we don't know anything about them. We don't even know if they were the guys that started the whole bloody thing, or if they were just sort of super-sized Components themselves. Do we? "And meanwhile, here's the human race, up against something that it not only can't understand, same as the Indians couldn't the whites, but that it can't begin to make a guess about. At least the Indians had a clue now and then, you know -- I mean they'd see the sailors off the great white devil ship making a beeline for the Indian women and so on, and they'd begin to understand there was something in common. But we didn't have that much. "So what did we do? Why, we did like the reservation Indians. We turned inward. We got loaded on firewater -- Meditation -- and we closed our minds to the possibility of ever expanding again. And there we were, all tied up in our own knots. Most of the race rebelled against action, because it had proven useless -- Citizens. A few of the race rebelled against that, because it was not only useless but deliberately useless -- Wolves. But they're the same kind of people. You've seen that for yourself, right? And -- " Tropile stopped, suddenly aware that Citizen Germyn was looking tepidly pained. "What's the matter?" Tropile demanded harshly. Citizen Germyn gave him the faint deprecatory Quirked Smile. "I know you thought you were a Wolf, but -- I told you I've been thinking a lot, and that's what I was thinking about. Truly, Citizen, you do yourself no good by pretending that you really thought you were Wolf. Clearly you were not; the rest of us might have been fooled, but certainly you couldn't fool yourself. "Now here's what I think you ought to do. When I found you were coming, I asked several rather well-known Citizens to come here later this evening. There won't be any embarrassment. I only want you to talk to them and set the record straight, so that this terrible blemish will no longer be held against you. Times change and perhaps a certain latitude is advisable now, but certainly you don't want -- " Tropile also left Citizen Germyn sooner than he had expected to. but, queerly, she was not to be found. Instantly it became clear to Tropile that it was she above all whom he needed to talk to. He remembered the shared beauty of their plunging drive through the neurone-guides of the Pyramids, the linked and inextricable flow of their thoughts and of their most hidden feelings. She could not be very far, he thought numbly, cursing the blindness of his human eyes, the narrowness of his human senses. Time was when two worlds could not have hidden her from him; but that time was gone. He walked from place to place with the angry resentful tread of one used to riding -- no, to flying, or faster than flying. He asked after her. He searched. And at last he found -- not her. A note. At one of the stations where the re-awakened Components were funneled back into human affairs, there was a letter waiting for him: I'm sure you will look lor me. Please don't. You thought that there were no secrets between us, but there was one. When I was Translated, I was sixty-one years old. Two years before that, I was caught in a collapsing building; my legs are useless, and I had grown quite fat. I do not want you to see me fat and old. Alla Narova. And that was that, and at last Glenn Tropile turned to the last person of all those on his list who had known him well. Her name was Gala Tropile. Q HE had got thinner, he ob served. They sat together quietly and there was considerable awkwardness, but then he noticed that she was weeping. Comforting her ended the awkwardness and he found that he was talking: "It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there's no feeling like it. I mean it's like -- well, maybe if you'd just had a baby, and invented fire, and moved a mountain, and transmuted lead into gold -- maybe if you'd done all of those things, then you might have some idea. But I was everywhere at once, Gala, and I could do anything! I fought a whole world of Pyramids, do you realize that? Me! And now I come back to -- " He stopped her in time; it seemed she was about to weep again. He went on: "No, Gala, don't misunderstand, I don't hold anything against you. You were right to leave me in the field. What did I have to offer you? Or myself, for that matter? And I don't know that I have anything now, but -- " He slammed his fist against the table. "They talk about putting the Earth back in its orbit! Why? And how? My God, Gala, we don't know where we are. Maybe we could tinker up the gadgets the Pyramids used and turn our course backward -- but do you know what Old Sol looks like? I don't. I never saw it. "And neither did you or anyone else alive. "It was like being a god -- "And they talk about going back to things as they were -- "I'm sick of that kind of thinking! Wolves or Citizens, they're dead on their feet and don't know it. I suppose they'll snap out of it in time, but I can't wait. I won't live that long. "Unless-" He paused and looked at her, confused. Gala Tropile met her husband's eyes. "Unless what, Glenn?" He shrugged and turned away. "Unless you go back, you mean." He stared at her; she nodded. "You want to go back," she said, without stress. "You don't want to stay here with me, do you? You want to go back into that tub of soup again and float like a baby. You don't want to have babies -- you want to be one." "Gala, you don't understand. We can own the Universe. I mean mankind can. And I can do it. Why not? There's nothing for me -- " "That's right, Glenn. There's nothing for you here. Not any more." He opened his mouth to speak, looked at her, spread his hands helplessly. He didn't look back as he walked out the door, but he knew that his back was turned not only on the woman who happened to be his wife, but on mankind and all of the flesh. T T was night outside, and warm. Tropile stood in the old street surrounded by the low, battered houses -- and he could make them new and grand! He looked up at the stars that swung in constellations too new and changeable to have names. There was the Universe. Words were no good; there was no explaining things in words. Naturally he couldn't make Gala or anyone else understand, for flesh couldn't grasp the realities of mind and spirit that were liberated from flesh. Babies! A home! And the whole grubby animal business of eating and drinking and sleeping! How could anyone ask to stay in the mire when the stars challenged overhead? He walked slowly down the street, alone in the night, an apprentice godling renouncing mortality. There was nothing here for him, so why this sense of loss? Duty said (or was it Pride?): "Someone must give up the flesh to control Earth's orbit and weather -- why not you?" Flesh said (or was it his soul -- whatever that was? ) : "But you will be alone." He stopped, and for a moment he was poised between destiny and the dust... Until he became aware of footsteps behind him, running, and Gala's voice: "Wait! Wait, Glenn! I want to go with you!" And he turned and waited, but only until she caught up, and then he went on. But not -- forever and always again -- not alone. Huts Would knights have been still more bold in days of old... if they'd had transistor amulets? T HE means which Thomas Hanley selected to meet the girl who later became his wife is worthy of note, particularly by anthropologists, sociologists and students of the bizarre. It serves, in its humble way, as an example of one of the more obscure mating customs of the late #th century. And since this custom had an impact upon modern American industry, Hanley's story has considerable importance. Thomas Hanley was a tall, slim young man, conservative in his tastes, moderate in his vices, and modest to a fault. His conversation with either sex was perfectly proper, even to the point of employing the verbal improprieties suitable to his age and station. He owned several gray flannel suits and many slim neckties with regimental stripes. You might think you could pick him out of a crowd because of his horn-rimmed glasses, but you would be wrong. That wasn't Hanley. Hanley was the other one. Who would believe that, beneath this meek, self-effacing, industrious, conforming exterior beat a wildly romantic heart? Sadly enough, anyone would, for the disguise fooled only the disguised. Young men like Hanley, in their gray flannel armor and hornrimmed visors, are today's them roam the streets of our great cities, their footsteps firm and hurried, eyes front, voices lowered, dressed to the point of invisibility. Like actors or bewitched men, they live their somber live', While within them the flame of romance burns and will not die. Hanley daydreamed continually and predictably of the swish and thud of swinging cutlasses, of great ships driving toward the sun under a press of sail, of a maiden's eyes, dark and infinitely sad, peering at him from behind a gossamer veil. And, predictably still, he dreamed of more modern forms of romance. But romance is a commodity difficult to come by in the great cities. This fact was recognized only recently by our more enterprising businessmen. And one night, Hanley received a visit from an unusual sort of salesman. one-room apartment after a harried Friday at the office. He loosened his tie and contemplated, with a certain melancholy, the long weekend ahead. He didn't want to watch the boxing on television and he had seen all the neighborhood movies. Worst of all, the girls he knew were uninteresting and his chances for meeting others were practically nil. He sat in his armchair as the deep blue twilight spread over Manhattan, and speculated on where he might find an interesting girl, and what he would say if he found one, and -- His doorbell rang. As a rule, only peddlers or solicitors for the Firemen's Fund called on him unannounced. But tonight he could welcome even the momentary pleasure of turning down a peddler. So he opened the door and saw a short, dapper, flashily dressed little man beaming at him. "Good evening, Mr. Hanley," the little man said briskly. "I'm Joe Morris, a representative of the New York Romance Service, with its main office in the Empire State Building and branches in all the boroughs, Westchester and New Jersey. We're out to serve lonely people, Mr. Hanley, and that means you. Don't deny it! Why else would you be sitting home on a Friday night? You're lonely and it's our business and our pleasure to serve you. A bright, sensitive, goodlooking young fellow like yourself needs girls, nice girls, pleasant, pretty, understanding girls -- " "Hold on," Hanley said sternly. "If you run some sort of a fancy call girl bureau -- " He stopped, for Joe Morris had turned livid. The salesman's throat swelled with anger and he turned and started to leave. "Wait!" said Hanley. "I'm sorry." "I'll have you know, sir, I'm a family man," Joe Morris said stiffly. "I have a wife and three children in the Bronx. If you think for a minute I'd associate myself with anything underhanded -- " "I'm really sorry." Hanley ushered Morris in and gave him the armchair. Mr. Morris immediately regained his brisk and jovial manner. "No, Mr. Hanley," he said, "the young ladies I refer to are not -- ah -- professionals. They are sweet, normal, romantically inclined young girls. But they are lonely. There are many lonely girls in our city, Mr. Hanley."  thought the condition applied only to men. "Are there?" he asked. "There are. The purpose of the New York Romance Service," said Morris, "is to bring young people together under suitable circumstances." "Hmm," Hanley said. "I take it then you run a sort of -- if you'll pardon the expression -- a sort of Friendship Club?" "Not at all! Nothing like it! My dear Mr. Hanley, have you ever attended a Friendship Club?" Hanley shook his head. "You should, sir," said Morris. "Then you could really appreciate our Service. Friendship Clubs! Picture, if you will, a barren hall, one flight up in the cheaper Broadway area. At one end, five musicians in frayed tuxedos play, with a dreary lack of enthusiasm, the jittery songs of the day. Their thin music echoes disconsolately through the hall and blends with the screech of traffic outside. There is a row of chairs on either side of the hall, men on one side, women on the other. All are acutely embarrassed by their presence there. "They cling to a wretched nonchalance, nervously chain-smoking cigarettes and stamping out the butts on the floor. From time to time, some unfortunate gets up his courage to ask for a dance and, stiffly, he moves his partner around the floor, under the lewd and cynical eyes of the rest. The master of ceremonies, an overstuffed idiot with a fixed and ghastly smile, hurries around, trying to inject some life into the corpse of the evening. But to no avail." Morris paused for breath. "That is the anachronism known as the Friendship Club -- a strained, nervous, distasteful institution better suited to Victorian times than to our own. At the New York Romance Service, we have done what should have been done years ago. We have applied scientific precision and technological know-how to a thorough study of the factors essential to a successful meeting between the sexes." "What are those factors?" Hanley inquired. "The most vital ones," said Morris, "are spontaneity and a sense of fatedness." "Spontaneity and fate seem to be contradictory terms," Hanley pointed out. no "Of course. Romance, by its very nature, must be composed of contradictory elements. We have graphs to prove it." "Then you sell romance?" Hanley asked dubiously. "The very article! The pure and pristine substance itself! Not sex, which is available to everyone. Not love -- no way of guaranteeing permanency and therefore commercially impracticable. We sell romance, Mr. Hanley, the missing ingredient in modern society, the spice of life, the vision of all the ages!" "That's very interesting," Hanley said. But he questioned the validity of Morris's claims. The man might be a charlatan or he might be a visionary. Whatever he was, Hanley doubted whether he could sell romance. Not the real thing. Not the dark and fitful visions which haunted Hanley's days and nights. Morris. I'll think over what you've said. Right now, I'm in rather a rush, so if you wouldn't mind -- " "But, sir! Surely you can't afford to pass up romance!" "Sorry, but " "Try our system for a few days, absolutely free of charge," Mr. Morris said. "Here, put this in your lapel." He handed Hanley something that looked like a small transistor radio with a tiny video eye. "What's this?" Hanley asked. "A small transistor radio with a tiny video eye." "What does it do?" "You'll see. Just give it a try. We're the country's biggest firm specializing in romance, Mr. Hanley. We aim to stay that way by continuing to fill the needs of ican men and women. Remember -- romances sponsored by our firm are fated, spontaneous, esthetically satisfying, physically delightful and morally justifiable." And with that, Joe Morris shook Hanley's hand and left. Hanley turned the tiny transistor radio in his hand. It had no buttons or dials. He fastened it to the lapel of his jacket. Nothing happened. He shrugged his shoulders, tightened his tie and went out for a walk. It was a clear, cool night. Like most nights in Hanley's life, it was a perfect time for romance. Around him lay the city, infinite in its possibilities and rich in promise. But the city was devoid of fulfillment. He had walked these streets a thousand nights, with firm step, eyes front, ready for anything. And nothing had ever happened. He passed apartment buildings and thought of the women behind the high, blank windows, looking down, seeing a lonely  walker on the dark streets and wondering about him, thinking... "Nice to be on the roof of a building," a voice said. "To look down on the city." Hanley stopped short and whirled around. He was completely alone. It took him a moment to realize that the voice had come from the tiny transistor radio. "What?" Hanley asked. The radio was silent. Look down on the city, Hanley mused. The radio was suggesting he look down on the city. Yes, he thought, it would be nice. "Why not?" Hanley asked himself, and turned toward a building. "Not that one," the radio whispered. Hanley obediently passed by the building and stopped in front of the next. "This one?" he queried. The radio didn't answer. But Hanley caught the barest hint of an approving little grunt. Well, he thought, you had to hand it to the Romance Service. They seemed to know what they were doing. His movements were as nearly spontaneous as any guided movements could be. ley stepped into the selfservice elevator and punched for the top floor. From there, he climbed a short flight of stairs to the roof. Once outside, he began walking toward the west side of the building. "Other side," whispered the radio. Hanley turned and walked to the other side. There he looked out over the city, at the orderly rows of street lights, white and faintly haloed. Dotted here and there were the reds and greens of traffic lights, and the occasional colored blotch of an electric sign. His city stretched before him, infinite in its possibilities, rich in promise, devoid of fulfillment. Suddenly he became aware of another person on the roof, staring raptly at the spectacle of lights. "Excuse me," said Hanley. "Didn't mean to intrude." "You didn't," the person said, and Hanley realized he was talking to a woman. We are strangers, Hanley thought. A man and a woman who meet by accident -- or fate -- on a dark rooftop overlooking the city. He wondered how many dreams the Romance Service had analyzed, how many visions they had tabulated, to produce something as perfect as this. Glancing at the girl, he saw that she was young and lovely. Despite her outward composure, he sensed how the rightness of this meeting, the place, the time, the mood stirred her as it did him. He thought furiously, but could find nothing to say. No words came to him and the moment was drifting away. "The lights," prompted his radio. "The lights are beautiful," said Hanley, feeling foolish. "Yes," murmured the girl. "Like a great carpet of stars, or spearpoints in the gloom." "Like sentinels," said Hanley, "keeping eternal vigil in the night." He wasn't sure if the idea was his or if he was parroting a barely perceptible voice from the radio. "I often come here," said the girl. "I never come here," Hanley said. "But tonight..." "Tonight I had to come. I knew I would find you." Hanley felt that the Romance Service needed a better script writer. Such dialogue, in broad daylight, would be ridiculous. But now, on a high rooftop overlooking the city, with lights flashing below and the stars very close overhead, it was the most natural conversation in the world. "I do not encourage strangers," said the girl, taking a step toward him. "But " "I am no stranger," Hanley said, moving toward her. The girl's pale blonde hair glinted with starlight. Her lips parted. She looked at him, her features transfigured by the mood, the atmosphere and the soft, flattering light. They stood face to face and Hanley could smell her faint perfume and the fragrance of her hair. His knees became weak and confusion reigned within him. "Take her in your arms," the radio whispered. Automatonlike, Hanley held out his arms. The girl entered them with a little sigh. They kissed -- simply, naturally, inevitably, and with a mounting and predictable passion. Then Hanley noticed the tiny jeweled transistor radio on the girl's lapel. In spite of it, he had to admit that the meeting was not only spontaneous and fateful, but enormously pleasant as well. scrapers when Hanley returned to his apartment and tumbled, exhausted, into bed. He slept all day and awoke toward evening, ravenously hungry. He ate dinner in a neighborhood bar and considered the events of the previous night. It had been wild, perfect and wonderful, all of it -- the meeting on the roof and, later, her warm and darkened apartment; and at last his departure at dawn, with her drowsy kiss still warm on his mouth. But despite all this, Hanley was disturbed. He couldn't help feeling a little odd about a romantic meeting set up and sponsored by transistor radios, which cued lovers into the proper spontaneous yet fated responses. It was undoubtedly clever but something about it seemed wrong. men in gray flannel suits and striped regimental ties, roaming the streets of the city in response to the barely heard commands of the radio operators at their central two-way videophone switchboard-earnest, hard-working people, doing their night's work at romance, then buying a newspaper and taking a subway home to the husband or wife and kids. This was distasteful. But he had to admit that it was better than no romance at all. These were modern times. Even romance had to be put on a sound organizational basis or get lost in the shuffle. Besides, Hanley thought, was it really so strange? In medieval times, a witch gave a knight a charm, which led him to an enchanted lady. Today, a salesman gave a man a transistor radio, which did the same thing and probably a lot faster. Quite possibly, he thought, there has never been a truly spontaneous and fated romance. Perhaps the thing always requires a middleman. Hanley cast further thoughts out of his mind. He paid for his dinner and went out for a walk. ried steps led him into a poorer section of the city. Here garbage cans lined the sidewalks, and from the dirty tenement windows came the sound of a melancholy clarinet, and the shrill voices of women raised in argument. A cat, striped and agateeyed, peered at him from an alleyway and darted out of sight. Hanley shivered, stopped, and decided to return to his own part of the city. "Why not walk on?" the radio urged him, speaking very softly, like a voice in his head. Hanley shivered again and walked on. The streets were deserted now and silent as a tomb. Hanley hurried past gigantic windowless warehouses and shuttered stores. Some adventures, it seemed to him, were not worth the taking. This was hardly a suitable locale for romance. Maybe he should ignore the radio and return to the bright, well-ordered world he knew -- He heard a sound of scuffling feet. Glancing down a narrow alley, he saw three wrestling figures. Two were men and the third, trying to break free, was a girl. Hanley's reaction was instantaneous. He tensed to sprint away and find a policeman, preferably two or three. But the radio stopped him. "You can handle them," the radio said. Like hell I can, Hanley thought. The newspapers were full of stories about men who thought they could handle muggers. They usually had plenty of time to brood over their fistic shortcomings in a hospital. But the radio urged him on. And touched by a sense of destiny, moved by the girl's plaintive cries, Hanley removed his hornrimmed glasses, put them in their case, put the case into a hip pocket, and plunged into the black maw of the alley. He ran full into a garbage can, knocked it over and reached the struggling group. The muggers hadn't noticed him yet. Hanley seized one by the shoulder, turned him and lashed out with his right fist. The man staggered back against the wall. His friend released the girl and went for Hanley, who struck out with both hands and his right foot. The man went down, grumbling, "Take it easy, buddy." Hanley turned back to the first mugger, who came at him like a wildcat. Surprisingly, the man's entire fusillade of blows missed and Hanley knocked him down with a single well-placed left. The two men scrambled to their feet and fled. As they ran, Hanley could hear one complain to the other, "Ain't this a hell of a way to make a living?" Ignoring this break in the script, Hanley turned to the girl. She leaned against him for support. "You came," she breathed. "I had to," said Hanley, in response to a barely audible radio voice. "I know," she murmured. Hanley saw that she was young and lovely. Her black hair glinted with lamplight. Her lips parted. She looked at him, her features transfigured by the mood, the atmosphere and the soft, flattering light. This time, Hanley needed no command from the tiny radio to take her into his arms. He was learning the form and content of the romantic adventure and the proper manner of conducting a spontaneous yet fated affair. They departed at once for her apartment. And as they walked, Hanley noticed a large jewel glittering in her black hair. It wasn't until much later that he realized it was a tiny, artfully disguised transistor radio. again, walking the streets and trying to quiet a small voice of dissatisfaction within him. It had been a perfect night, he reminded himself, a night of tender shadows, soft hair brushing his eyes and tears warm upon his shoulder. And yet... The sad fact remained that this girl hadn't been his type, any more than the first girl had been. You simply can't throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly. So Hanley walked, and the conviction grew within him that tonight he was going to find love. For tonight the horned moon hung low over the city and a southern breeze carried the mingled scent of spice and nostalgia. Aimlessly he wandered, for his transistor radio was silent. No command brought him to the little park at the river's edge and no secret voice urged him to approach the solitary girl standing there. He stood near her and contemplated the scene. To his left was a great bridge, its girders faint and spidery in the darkness. The river's oily black water slid past, ceaselessly twisting and turning. A tug hooted and another replied, wailing like ghosts lost in the night. His radio gave him no hint. So Hanley said, "Nice night." "Maybe," said the girl, not turning. "Maybe not." "The beauty is there," Hanley said, "if you care to see it." "What a strange thing to say..." "Is it?" Hanley asked, taking a step toward her. "Is it really strange? Is it strange that I'm here? And that you are here?" "Perhaps not," the girl said, turning at last and looking into Hanley's face. She was young and lovely. Her bronze hair glinted with moonlight and her features were transfigured by the mood, the atmosphere and the soft, flattering light. Her lips parted in wonder. And then Hanley knew. fated and spontaneous! The radio had not guided him to this place, had not whispered cues and responses for him to murmur. And looking at the girl, Hanley could see no tiny transistor radio on her blouse or in her hair. He had met his love, without assistance from the New York Romance Service! At last, his dark and fitful visions were coming true. He held out his arms. With the faintest sigh, she came into them. They kissed, while the lights of the city flashed and mingled with the stars overhead, and the crescent moon dipped in the sky, and foghorns hooted mournful messages across the oily black river. Breathlessly, the girl stepped back. "Do you like me?" she asked. "Like you!" exclaimed Hanley. "Let me tell you -- " "I'm so glad," said the girl, "because I am your Free Introductory Romance, given as a sample by Greater Romance Industries, with home offices in Newark, New Jersey. Only our firm offers romances which are truly spontaneous and fated. Due to our technological researches, we are able to dispense with such clumsy apparatus as transistor radios, which lend an air of rigidity and control where no control should be apparent. We are happy to have been able to please you with this sample romance. "But remember -- this is only a sample, a taste, of what Greater Romance Industries, with branch offices all over the world, can offer you. In this brochure, sir, several plans are outlined. You might be interested in the Romance in Many Lands package, or, if you are of an enterprising imagination, perhaps the piquant Romance through the Ages package is for you. Then there is the regular City Plan and -- " She slipped a brightly illustrated pamphlet into Hanley's hand. Hanley stared at it, then at her. His fingers opened and the brochure fluttered to the ground. "Sir! I trust we haven't offended you!" the girl cried. "These businesslike aspects of romance are necessary, but quickly over. Then everything is purely spontaneous and fateful. You receive your bill each month in a plain, unmarked envelope and -- " But Hanley had turned from her and was running down the street. As he ran, he plucked the tiny transistor radio from his lapel and hurled it into a gutter. P manship were wasted on Hanley. He telephoned an aunt of his, who immediately and with twittering excitement arranged a date for him with a daughter of one of her oldest friends. They met in his aunt's overdecorated parlor and talked in halting sentences for three hours, about the weather, college, business, politics, and friends they might have in common. And Hanley's beaming aunt hurried in and out of the brightly lighted room, serving coffee and homemade cake. Something about this stiff, formal, anachronistic setup must have been peculiarly right for the two young people. They progressed to regular dates and were married after a courtship of three months. It is interesting to note that Hanley was among the last to find a wife in the old, unsure, quaint, haphazard, unindustrialized fashion. For the Service Companies saw at once the commercial potentialities of Hanley's Mode, graphed the effects of embarrassment upon the psyche, and even assessed the role of the Aunt in American Courtship. And now one of the Companies' regular and most valued services is to provide bonded aunts for young men to call up, to provide these hunts with shy and embarrassed young girls, and to produce a proper milieu for all this in the form of a bright, overdecorated parlor, an uncomfortable couch, and an eager old lady bustling back and forth at meticulously unexpected intervals with coffee and homemade cake. The suspense, they say, becomes almost overpowering. Collier. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y. # ly as a gag, Collier's first novel takes on more and more a straight face until, at the denouement, the reader is quasi-or possibly queasyconvinced that Collier is speaking his true mind. In any event, we owe a debt to Doubleday for bringing back this book, first published in #. An English missionary, accreting a dowry in the African jungle for his reluctant bride-to-be back home, has adopted a female chimpanzee as pet, not knowing that she is most extraordinary. She has taught herself to read, but her attempt to learn writing in her master's native school led to a traumatic experience from which her self-confidence never recovered. Returning to civilization after five years to prepare for his coming nuptials, her master takes her with him. Unfortunately, she has fallen in love with him and has correctly estimated the falsity of his beloved's affection. It isn't for me to tell how she outwits her human rival. Just see for yourself! G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., # ing stars in the newer group of solid talents. In this, his first collection, only "The Crooked Man" is S-F, the rest fantasy or straight fiction. "Black Country" is a towering horror story of a Negro jazz ensemble. There are several other striking yarns -- "Miss Gentilbelle" and "Last Night The Rain" are a couple that you won't soon forget. Metraux. Oxford University Press, N. Y., # entire school of writers, most authorities are now in agreement that the famous monoliths of Easter Island are not relics of the inundation of the lost continent, Mu. There is disagreement as to who did erect the monuments, but virtually none concerning their proper age, which is measured in mere hundreds of years. Dr. Metraux, an anthropologist, spent a half year on the island with the intent of proving that the ancestors of the present inhabitants were the mysterious sculptors. This he did to his own and, possibly, your satisfaction. To him, the amazing thing is that such a tiny, poverty-stricken community could build monuments worthy of a great and wealthy nation. liam Golding, John Wyndham, Mervyn Peake. Ballantine Books, N. Y # topflight English authors is as exciting as a letter from the future. Golding is the author of last year's marvelously off-trail novel, Lord of the Flies. His story of the past, "Envoy Extraordinary," is a glittering writing job concerning a barbaric genius and the inventions he offers to a cagy old Caesar. The Emperor, a wise ruler holding power tenaciously through wile rather than force, can see the advantages, but also, shrewd man, the disadvantages. Which makes an amusing story of power politics, subtle counter-measures and a surprise ending. Wyndham's "Consider Her Ways" is a well-done variation of the old human-hive, queen-bee yarn in which males have become extinct. A workmanlike job, but without the smashing impact of the Golding or "Boy in Darkness" by Mervyn Peake. The latter is a nightmarish story of such unique quality that I find it hard to believe that no American      shelf publisher has printed Peake's prior yarns, Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Don't miss this! ray Leinster. Gnome Press, Inc., N. Y., # rpUE years may pass and thenames of the S-F greats may change, but Leinster, bless him, makes like Ol' Man Ribber. His current "novel," a somewhat disjointed collection of four separate is the gadget story raised to new heights. Basically, this is the type of yarn that flourished during the First Decade. Leinster's flesh-andblood humans make an interesting contrast to, for instance, Arcot, Wade and Morey, three of the greatest gadgeteers. Leinster pulls his miracles out of a hat labeled Deus ex perspiration and makes them completely credible. First rate. ley. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., N. Y ., # r  'HE premise of this book makes difficult swallowing. As in Clarke's Childhood's End, we are contacted by an infinitely superior race. However, their function is not nursemaid but sowers of destructive seed. Their home sun is going Nova momentarily, but owing to their ethical standards, they cannot arbitrarily expropriate an inhabited planet. They have selected five persons of different nationalities, snatched them to their craft and presented each with a kit containing golden pellets of enormous destructive potential. If Earth has not destroyed twothirds of its population in # days (note title), the Invaders will leave. The kits are attuned to the minds of their bearers and cannot be opened by others. The five -- American, English girl, Chinese ditto, Russian soldier and German scientist -- make a mutual pact not to disclose the secret of their kits. Things, of course, are not that simple. After all, this is a yarn about Super-Dupers. by Walter Sullivan. McGraw-Hill, N. Y., Toronto, London, # death this past March and the imminent Geophysical Year, Antarctica is right up there in general interest. For those who would like to bone up on the frigid continent's history, Sullivan's book is as good an encyclopedia as can be found. In important addition, it reads like a novel. The author has humanized the gigantic mass of cold data to the point that his reader is right there when the helpless Oates of Scott's doomed expedition, hands and feet frozen, sacrificed himself with the words, "I am just going outside and may be some time." Or the heart-rending final entries of Robert Scott: "It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more." You may manage to tear yourself away from Sullivan's book, but not easily. Adler. The John Day Co., N. Y., # tion of the origin of the Universe itself, perhaps the most fundamental problem Man has faced has been that of his own origin. That, of course, is of a piece with the problem of the source of Life itself. Adler's book is a step-bystep demonstration of how simple molecules can become complex, like the protein molecules, the smallest known being as heavy as # hydrogen atoms and the largest known as heavy as some # hydrogen atoms. The basic secret of life is the ability of the carbon atom to combine with other elements. The reader, who needs no special knowledge to enjoy this text, will be astounded to learn that, according to Adler, life on this planet was inevitable! Bok  Priscilla F. Bok. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, # the most spectacular aspect of the heavens is the Milky Way. This third edition of a deservedly popular work on our Galaxy is a beauty, lucidly written and with some of the finest photographic reproductions extant. Blythe. The Citadel Press, N. Y., #  Bridey has subsided, books on reincarnation have slowed to a trickle. This latecomer outdoes singular Bridey. In fact, in an epilogue, the author hints that further experimentation will disclose seven lives of Naomi Henry instead of just three. Now that's really living!      The man worth while couldn't be allowed to smile... if he ever laughed at himself, the entire ship and crew were as good as dead! afraid of, and there probably is, it is having a rookie Accident Prone, half-starved from the unemployment lines, aboard my spaceship. They are always so anxious to please. They remember what it is like to live in a rathole behind an apartment house furnace eating day-old bread and wilted vegetables, which doesn't compare favorably to the Admiralty-style staterooms and steak and caviar they draw down in the Exploration Service. You may wonder why anybody should make things so pleasant for a grownup who can't walk a city block without tripping over his own feet and who has a very low life expectancy on Earth due to the automobiles they are constantly stepping in front of and the live wires they are fond of picking up so the street won't be littered. The Admiralty, however, is a very thorough group of men. Before they open a planet to colonization or even fraternization, they insist on knowing just what they are up against. Accident Prones can find out what is wrong with a planet as easily as falling off a log, which they will if there is one lonely tree on the whole world. A single pit of quicksand on a veritable Eden of a planet and a Prone will be knee-deep in it within an hour of blastdown. If an alien race will smile patronizingly on your heroic attempts at genocide, but be offended into a murderous religious frenzy if you blow your nose, you can take the long end of the odds that the Prone will almost immediately catch a cold. All of this is properly recorded for the next expedition in the Admiralty files, and if it's any consolation, high officials and screen stars often visit you in the hospital. of the other Prones, only unofficial test for him and he wanted to make good. We had blasted down in the black of night and were waiting for daylight to begin our re-survey of the planet. It was Charlie's first assignment, so we had an easy one -- just seeing if anything new had developed in the last fifty years. Baxter's guard was doubled as soon as we set down, of course, and that made him fidgety. He had heard all the stories about how high the casualty rate was with Prones aboard spaceships and now he was beginning to get nervous. Actually Charlie was safer in space than he would be back on Earth with all those cars and people. We could have told him how the Service practically never lost a Prone -- they were too valuable and rare to lose -- but we did not want him to stop worrying. The precautions we took to safeguard him, the armed men who went with him everywhere, the Accident Prone First Aid Kit with spare parts for him, blood, eyes, bone, nerves, arms, legs, and so forth, only emphasized to him the danger, not the rigidly secured safety. We like it that way. No one knows what causes an accident prone. The big insurance companies on Earth discovered them when they found out in the last part of the nineteenth century that ninety per cent of the accidents were happening to a few per cent of the people. They soon found out that these people were not malingering or trying to defraud anybody; they simply had accidents. I suppose everything from psychology to extra-sensory perception has been used to explain or explain away prones. I have my own ideas. I think an accident prone is simply a super-genius with a super-doubt of himself. I believe accident prones have a better system of calculation than a cybernetic machine. They can take everything into consideration -- the humidity, their blood sugar, the expression on the other guy's face -- and somewhere in the corners and attic of their brain they infallibly make the right choice in any given situation. Then, because they are incapable of trusting themselves, they do exactly the opposite. I felt a little sorry for Charlie Baxter, but I was Captain of the him worried and trying. The worst thing that can happen is for a Prone to give up and let himself sink into the fate of being a Prone. He will wear the rut right down into a tomb. Accident Prones have to stay worried and thinking, trying to break out of the jinx that traps them. Usually they come to discover this themselves, but by then, if they are real professionals with a career in the Service, they have framed the right attitude and they keep it. very much of an amateur at the game. He didn't like the scoring system, but he was attached to the equipment and didn't want to lose it. His clumsiness back on Earth had cost him every decent job he ever had. He had come all the way down the line until he was rated eligible only for the position of Prone aboard a spaceship. He had been poor -- hungry, cold, wet, poor -- and now he had luxury of a kind almost no one had in our era. He was drunk with it, passionately in love with it. It would cease to be quite so important after a few years of regular food, clean clothes and a solid roof to keep out the rain. But right now I knew he would to keep it. Or to being killed. He was ready to work. I knocked politely on his hatch and straightened my tunic. I have always admired the men who can look starched in a uniform. Mine always seemed to wrinkle as soon as I put them around my rawboned frame. Sometimes it is hard for me to keep a military appearance or manner. I got my commission during the Crisis ten years back, because of my work in the reserve unit that I created out of my employees in the glass works (glassware blown to order for laboratories). Someone said something through the door and I went inside. Bronoski looked at me over the top of his picture tape from where he lay on the sofa. No one else was in the compartment. "Where is Baxter?" I asked the hulking guard. My eyes were on the sofa. My own bed pulled out of the wall and was considerably inferior to this, much less Baxter's bed in the next cabin. But then I am only a captain. Bronoski swung his feet off the couch and stood more or less in what I might have taken for attention if I hadn't known him better. "Sidney and Elliot escorted him down to the men's room, Captain Jackson." "You mean," I said very quietly, "that he isn't in his own bath?" "No sir," Bronoski said wearily. "He told us it was out of order." I stifled the gurgle of rage that came into my throat and motioned Bronoski to follow me. more likely to be out of order than the plumbing in the Accident Prone's suite. No effort was spared to insure comfort for the key man in the whole crew. One glance inside the compartment at the end of the corridor satisfied me. There wasn't a thing wrong with the plumbing, so Baxter must have had something in mind. On a hunch of my own, I checked the supply lockers next to the airlock while Bronoski fired questions at my back. Three translator collars were missing. Baxter had left the spaceship and gone off into an alien night. Elliot and Sidney, the guards, were absolutely prohibited from interfering in any way with a Prone's decisions. They merely had to follow him and give their lives to save his, if necessary. I grabbed up a translator collar and tossed one to Bronoski. Then, just as we were getting into the airlock, I remembered something and ran back to the bridge. The thick brown envelope I had left on my desk was gone. I had shown it to Baxter and informed him that he should study it when he felt so inclined. He has seemed bored with the idea then, but he had come back for the report before leaving the ship. The envelope contained the exmade some fifty years before. I unlocked a desk drawer with my thumb print and drew out a duplicate of the report. I didn't have too much confidence in it and I hoped Charlie Baxter had less. Lots of things can change on a planet in fifty years, including its inhabitants. ter's tracks and those of the two guards, Elliot and Sidney, with ultra-violet light. They were cold splotches of green fire against the rotting black peat of the jungle path. The whole dark, tangled mess smelled of sour mash, an intoxicating bourbontype aroma. I jogged along following the big man more by instinct than anything else, ruining my eyes in an effort to refresh my memory as to the contents of the survey report in the cheery little glow from my cigarette lighter. The lighter was beginning to feel hot to my fingers and I started to worry about radiation leak, although they are supposed to be guaranteed perfectly shielded. I read that before the last exploration party had left, they had made the Moranite natives blood brothers. Then Bronoski knocked me down. Actually he put his hands in the small of my back and shoved politely but firmly. Just the same, I went face down into the moist dirt fast enough. I raised my head cautiously to see if Bronoski would shov it back down. He didn't. I could see through the stringy, alcoholic grass fairly well and there were Baxter, Elliot and Sidney in the middle of a curious mob of aliens. Charlie Baxter had got pretty thin on his starvation diet back on Earth. He had grown a slight pot belly on the good food he drew down as Prone, but he was a fairly nice-looking young fellow. He looked even better in the pale moonlight, mixed amber and chartreuse from the twin satellites, and in contrast to the rest of the group. Elliot Charterson and Sidney Von Elderman were more or less type-cast as brawny, brainless bodyguards. Their friends described them as muscle-bound apes, but other people sometimes got insulting. The natives were less formidable. They made the slight lump of fat Charlie had at his waist look positively indecent. The natives were skinny. How skinny? Well, the only curves they had in their bodies were their bulging eyeballs. But just because they were thin didn't mean they were pushovers. Whips and garrotes aren't fat and these looked just as dangerous. Whenever I see aliens who are so humanoid, I remember all that Sunday supplement stuff about the Galaxy being colonized sometime by one humanlike race and the Ten Lost Tribes and so forth. They didn't give me much time to think about it just then. The natives looked unhappy -- belligerently unhappy. I began to shake and at the same time to assure myself that I didn't have anything to worry about, that the precious Accident Prone would come out of it alive. After all, Elliot and Sidney were there to protect him. They had machine guns, flame-throwers, atomic grenades, and some really potent weapons. They could handle the situation. I didn't have a thing to worry about. So why couldn't I stop shaking? Maybe it was the way the natives were slowly but deliberately forming a circle about Charlie and his bodyguards. THE clothing of the Moranites hadn't changed much, I noticed. That was understandable. They had a non-mechanical civilization with scattered colonies that it would take a terrestrial season to tour by animal cart. An isolated culture like that couldn't change many of its customs. Then Charlie shouldn't have any trouble if he stuck to the findings on behavior in the report. Naturally, that meant by now he had discovered the fatal error. The three men were just standing still, waiting for the aliens to make the first move. The natives looked just as worried as Charlie and his guards, but then that might have been their natural expression. I jumped a little when the natives all began to talk at once. The mixture of sound was fed to me through my translator collar while the cybernetic unit back on board the spaceship tried decoding the words. It was too much of an overload and, infuriatingly, the sound was cut out altogether. I started to rip my collar off when the natives stopped screeching and a spokesman stepped forward. The native slumped a little more than the others, as if he were more relaxed, and his eyes didn't goggle so much. He said, "We do not understand," and the translation came through fine. Baxter swallowed and started forward to meet the alien halfway. His boot slipped on the wet scrub grass and I saw him do the desperate little dance to regain his balance that I had seen him make so many times; he could never stay on his feet. Before he could perform his usual pratfall, Sidney and Elliot were at his sides, supporting him by his thin biceps. He glared at them and shrugged them off, informing them wordlessly that he would have regained his balance if they had given him half a chance. "We do not understand," the native repeated. "Do you hold us in so much contempt as to claim all of us as your brothers?" "All beings are brothers," Charlie said. "We were made blood brothers by your people and my people several hundred of your years ago." Charlie's words were being translated into the native language, of course, but Bronoski's collars and mine switched them back into Terrestrial. I've read stories where explorers wearing translators couldn't understand each other, but that isn't the way it works. If you listen closely, you make out the words in your own language underneath, and if you pay very close attention, you can find minor sematic differences in the original words and the echo translated back from a native language. I was trying to catch both versions from Charlie. I knew he was making a mistake and later I wanted to be sure I knew just what it was. Frankly, I would have used the blood-brother gambit myself. I had also read about it in the survey report, as I made a point of telling you. This just proves that Accident Prones haven't secured the franchise on mistakes. The difference is that I would have gone about it a lot more cautiously. "Enough of this," the native said sharply. "Do you claim to be my brother?" "Sure," Charlie said. Dispassionately but automatically, the alien launched himself at the Prone's throat.  derman instantly went into action. Elliot Charterson jumped to Charlie's assistance while Sidney Von Elderman swung around to protect Charlie from the rest of the crowd. But the defense didn't work. The other aliens didn't try to get to Baxter, but when they saw Elliot start to interfere with the two writhing opponents, they clawed him down into the grass. Sidney had been set to defend the Prone, not his fellow guard. They might have been all right if he had pulled a few off Elliot and let him get to work, except his training told him that the life of a guard did not matter a twit, but that a Prone must be defended. He started toward Charlie Baxter and was immediately pulled down by a spare dozen of the mob. It all meant one thing to me. The reaction of the crowd had been spontaneous, not planned. That meant that the struggle between Charlie and the spokesman was a high order of single combat with which it was unholy, indecent and dastardly to interfere. I could fairly hear Bronoski's steel muscles preparing for battle as he saw his two mammoth pals go down under the press of numbers. A bristle-covered bullet of skull rose out of the grass beside me and it was my turn to grind his face in the muck. I had a nice little problem to contend with. I knew the reason Baxter had slipped out at night to be the first to greet the aliens. He was determined to be useful and necessary without fouling things up. I suppose Charlie had never felt valuable to anyone before in his life, but at the same time it hurt him to think that he was valuable only because he was a misfit. He had decided to take a positive approach. If he did things right, that would be as good proof of conditions as if he made the mistakes he was supposed to do. But he couldn't lick that doubt of himself that had been ground into him since birth and there he was, in trouble as always. Now maybe Bronoski and I could get him out ourselves by a direct approach, but Charlie would probably lose all self-confidence and sink down into accepting himself as an Accident Prone, a purely passive state. We couldn't have that. We had to have Charlie acting and thinking and therefore making mistakes whose bad examples we could profit by. As I lay on my belly thinking, Charlie was putting up a pretty good fight with the stringy native. He got in a few good punches, which seemed to mystify the native, who apparently knew nothing of boxing. Naturally Charlie then began wrestling a trained and deadly wrestler instead of continuing to box him. I grabbed Bronoski by his puffy ear and hissed some commands into it. He fumbled out a book of matches and lit one for me. By the tiny flicker of light, I began tearing apart my lighter. "tickling the dragon's tail" when you were a kid. I did. I guess all kids have. You know, worrying around two lumps of fissionable material and just keeping them from uniting and making a critical mass that will result in an explosion or lethal radiation. I caught my oldest boy doing it one day back on Earth and gave him a good tanning for it. Actually I thought it showed he had a lot of grit. Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil. I heard something that resembled a death rattle come from Charlie's throat as the fingers of the alien closed down on it and my hand twitched. A blooming light stabbed at my eyes and I flicked the lighter away from me. The explosion was a dud. It lit up the jungle for a radius of half a mile like a giant flashbulb, but it exploded only about ten times as loud as a pistol shot. The mass hadn't been slapped together hard enough or held long enough to do any real damage. The natives weren't fools, though. They got out of there fast. I wished I could have gone with them. There was undoubtedly an unhealthy amount of radiation hanging around. "Now!" I told Bronoski. He ran into the clearing and found four bodies sprawled out: Charlie Baxter, his two guards and the native spokesman. Charlie and the native were both technically unconscious, but they each had a stranglehold on each other, with Charlie getting the worst of it. Bronoski pried the two of them apart. While he roused Sidney and Elliot from their punch-drunk state, I examined Charlie. He had a nasty burn on his leg and two toes were gone. If there was an explosion anywhere around, he was bound to be in front of it. He was abruptly choking and blinking watery eyes. "You did it, Charlie," I lied. "You beat him fair and square." next few days while his grafted toes grew on, but he didn't seem to mind. We knew enough not to use the blood-brothers approach after fifty years and therefore it did not take us long to find out why we shouldn't. lated in small colonies, but we had forgotten that a generation of the intelligent life-forms was only three Earth months. It seems a waste at first thought, but all things are relative. The Crystopeds of New Lichtenstein, for instance, have a life span of twenty thousand Terrestrial years. With so fast a turnover in bound to be a lot of variables introduced, resulting in change. The idea that seemed to be in favor was the survival of the fittest. Since the natives were born in litters, with single births extremely rare, this concept was practiced from the first. Unless they were particularly cunning, the runts of the litter did not survive the first year and rarely more than one sibling ever saw adulthood. Obviously, to claim to be a native's brother was to challenge him to a test of survival. My men learned to call themselves Last Brother in the usual bragging preliminaries that preceded every encounter. We got pretty good results with that approach and learned a lot about the changes in customs in the half century. But finally one of the men -- either Frank Peirmonte or Sidney Charterson, who both claim to be the one -- thought of calling the crew a Family and right away we began hitting it off famously. The Moranites figured we would kill each other off all except maybe one, whom they could handle themselves. They still had folk legends about the previous visit of Earthmen and they didn't trust us. Charlie Baxter's original mistake had supplied us with the Rosetta Stone we needed. Doctor Selby told me Charlie could get up finally, so I went to his suite and shook hands with him as he still lay in bed. I waited for the big moment when Charlie would be on his feet again and we could get on with the re-survey of the planet. "Here goes," Charlie said and threw back his sheet. He swung his legs around and tottered to his feet. He was a little weak, but he took a few steps and seemed to make it okay. Then the inevitable happened. He snagged the edge of one of the Persian carpets on the bedroom floor with his big toe and started to fall. Selby and I both dived forward to catch him, but instead of doing the arm-waving dance for balance that we were both used to, he seemed to go limp and he plopped on the floor like a wet fish. Immediately he jumped to his feet, grinning. "I finally learned to go limp when I take a fall, sir. It took a lot of practice. I imagine I'll save some broken bones that way." "Yes," I said uneasily. "You have been thinking about this quite a lot while you lay there, haven't you, Baxter?" "Yes, sir. I see I've been fighting this thing too hard. I am an Accident Prone and I might as well accept it. Why not? I seem to always muddle through some way, like out there in the jungle, so why should I worry or feel embarrassed? I know I can't change it." worrying of my own. Things weren't working out the way they should. We were supposed to see that Prones kept developing a certain amount of doomed selfconfidence, but they couldn't be allowed to believe they were infallible Prones. A Prone's value lies in his active and constructive effort to do the right thing. If he merely accepts being a Prone, his accidents gain us nothing. We can't profit from mistakes that come about from resignation or laughing off blunders or, as in this case, conviction that he never got himself into anything he couldn't get himself out of. "Doctor Selby, would you excuse us?" I asked. The medic left with a bow and a surly expression. I turned to Baxter, rather wishing Selby could have stayed. It was a labor dispute and I was used to having a mediator present at bargaining sessions at my glassworks. But this was a military, not a civilian, spaceship. "I have some facts of life to give you, Baxter," I told him. "It is your duty to actively fulfill your position. You have to make decisions and plan courses of action. Do you figure on just walking around in that jungle until a tree falls on you?" He sat down on the edge of the bed and examined the pattern in the carpet. "Not exactly, sir. But I get tired of people wait- ing for me to make a fool out of myself. I have a natural talent for -- for Creative Negativism. That's it. And I should be able to exercise my talent with dignity." "If you don't actively fulfill the obligations of a Prone, you aren't allowed the luxuries and privileges that go with the position. Do you think you would like to be without your armed guards to protect you every moment?" "I can take care of myself, sir!" I paused and came up with my best argument. "How would you like to live like an ordinary spaceman, without rare steaks and clean sheets? Because if you're not our Accident Prone, you're just another crew member, you know." That one hurt him, but I saw I had put it to him as a challenge and he must have had some guilt feelings about accepting all that luxury for being nothing more than he was. "I could fulfill the duties of an ordinary spaceman, sir." I snorted. "It takes skill and training, Baxter. Your papers entitle you to one position and one only anywhere -- Accident Prone of a spaceship complement. If you refuse to do your duties in that post, you can only become a ward of the Galaxy." His jaw line firmed. He had gone through a lot to keep from taking such abject charity. "Isn't there," he asked in a milder tone, "any other position I could serve in on this ship, sir?" I studied his face a moment. "We had to blast off without an Assistant Pile Driver, j.g. It keeps getting harder and harder to rethose reports about the eventual fatalities due to radiation leak back there where they are stationed." Baxter looked back at me steadily. "There are a lot of rumors about the high mortality rate among Accident Prones in space, too." the rumors. We wanted the Prones alert, active and scheming to stay alive. More beneficial accidents that way. Actually, most Prones died of old age in space, which is more than could be said of them on Earth, where they didn't have the kind of protection the Service gives them. "Look here, Baxter, do you like your quarters on this ship?" I demanded. "You mean this master bedroom, the private heated swimming pool, the tennis court, bowling alley and all? Yes, sir, I like it." "The Assistant Pile Driver has a cot near the fuel tanks." He gazed off over my left shoulder. "I had a bed behind the furnace back on Earth before the building I was working in burned down." "You wouldn't like this one any better than the one before." "But there I would have some chance of advancement. I don't want to be stuck in the rank of Accident Prone for life." I stared at him in frank amazement. "Baxter, the only rank getting higher pay or more privileges than Prone is Grand Admiral of the Services, a position it would take you at least fifty years to reach if you had the luck and brains to make it, which you haven't." "I had something more modest in mind, sir. Like being a captain." He surely must have known how I lived in comparison to him, so I didn't bother to remind him. I said, "Have you ever seen a case of radiation poisoning?" Baxter's jaw thrust forward. "It must be pretty bad -- but it isn't as violent as being eaten by floating fungi or being swallowed in an earthquake on some airless satelite." "No," I agreed, "it is much slower than any of those. It is unfortunate that we don't carry the necessary supplies to take care of Pile Drivers. Most of our medical supplies are in the Accident Prone First Aid Kit, for the exclusive use of the Prone. Have you ever taken a good look at that?" Baxter shivered. "Yes, I've seen it. Several drums of blood, Type AB, my type. A half-dozen freshfrozen assorted arms and legs, several rows of eyes, a hundred square feet of graftable skin, and a well-stocked tank of inner organs and a double-doored bank of nerve lengths. Impressive." I smiled. "Sort of gives you a feeling of confidence and security, doesn't it? It would be unfortunate for anyone who had a great many accidents to be denied the supplies in that Kit, I should think. Of course, it is availtion of Accident Prone and doing the work faithfully and according to orders." "Yes, sir," Charlie mumbled. "Selby is your personal physician, you realize," I drove on. "He takes care of the rest of us only if he has time left over from you. Why, when I was having my two weeks in the summer as an Ensign, I had to lie for half an hour with a crushed foot while the doctor sprayedour Prone's throat to guard against infection. Let me tell you, I was in quite a bit of pain." Charlie's pale eyes narrowed as if he had just made a sudden discovery, perhaps about the relationship between us. "You don't make as much money as I do, do you, sir? You don't have a valet? And your bed folds into the bulkhead?" I thought he was at last beginning to get it. "Yes," I said. He stood sharply to attention. "Request transfer to position of Assistant Pile Driver, j.g., sir." I barely halted a groan. He thought I resented him and was deliberately holding him down into the miserable overpaid, overfed job that was beneath him and the talents that so fitted him for the job. "Request granted." He would learn. He had better. I started to sweat in a gush. He had really better. the ship and showed him where he would sleep. In the oily gloom, he regarded the pad from an old acceleration couch fitted to two scratched and nicked aluminum pipes jury-rigged between two squat tanks containing water for the atomic pile used close to planets where the gravitational field interfered with the stardrive. "Over here's what you have to keep an eye on, Baxter," I told him. We walked past the dimly lighted rows of towering fuel lines and cables. Charlie tripped over the hump of a deck-level cable housing. His knee banged against the deck plates and he stood with an effort. "Careful," I said. "Now that you have limited medical attention, don't break a leg." Baxter rubbed his leg thoughtfully. "Funny. My grandfather used to be in show business. He told me that telling somebody to break a leg was wishing them good luck." I cleared my throat. "It would seem in dubious taste, addressed to an accident prone. However, you have my best wishes. You realize that your salary as Prone of # credits a month and your pay of # credits a month until the Admiralty rules on your case." "Yes, sir. I realize that, sir." I stopped him in front of the soiled red box that was the tension gauge. "If the electrical control of the drive somehow becomes broken, the interrupted circuit will show on the gauge. It to go through the small airlock and maintain manual control of the pile while at least one of the control circuits is repaired. The job rarely has to be done, but when it is, it is very often fatal." Baxter only nodded. "I understand." I doubted that he did. After leaving Baxter on his first watch, I went to the messfiall and waited for him to show up. The men knew what to do when he came. It was rather pleasant to sit there savoring the odors. At times, they still seem more like those of a chemical laboratory than a kitchen, but I have become so used to associating burning starch products, centrifuged tannic acid, and melting dextrose with food that I am almost immune to the aroma of Prone food like juicy, sizzling steak. Almost. "  through the hatch. He paused and seemed to shake off what he must have thought was some olfactory hallucination and started to sit down at the table with the rest of the men. He looked rather pleased. He had probably decided being Accident Prone had deprived him of much of the company he had every right to enjoy with his shipmates. "Get out of here!" Frank Peirmonte yelled, jumping up from the other end of the oblong table. "Why?" Baxter asked in astonishment. "Baxter," I put in, "I'm afraid the men think they may catch radiation fever from a pile driver like you." "Catch radiation fever?" he repeated. "Men have been exposed to atomics for hundred of years. Surely you men must know any poisoning in one individual can't be transmitted to another like germs. I couldn't absorb enough radiation to be dangerous to you in simple proximity and still be alive. Don't you see that?" At once, all of my crew at the table covered their faces with their arms. "Don't look at us!" Bronoski screamed, his voice knifing toward the higher octaves. Baxter gaped in a daze from one of us to the other. "What do you mean? Why shouldn't I look at you?" "You've got The Eye! All pile drivers get it." "But I have to eat," he objected. "I'm hungry. Really I am." I swung around and exchanged a few words with Tan Eck, the cook, at the rear hatch. I took a steaming tray and went across the compartment, averting my face. "You will have to forgive these superstitious spacemen," I apologized to Baxter. "You go right ahead and eat just outside the door. I won't mind a bit." "Thanks," Baxter said, accepting the plate. He looked down at the white paste, black gum and cup of yellowish liquid fitted in the proper holes and slots, then up at me. "What is this stuff?" "You don't have to look right at me!" I snapped. "It is standard spaceman's fare -- re-reconstituted carbohydrates, protein and hot ground roasted soya. This is stuff we had left over on our plates from lunch, all set to go into the converter, but Tan Eck reprocessed it for you. It's what j-g" Baxter opened his mouth and closed it hard. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." He turned smartly to leave and I halted him with a palm up. "Baxter." He turned. "Yes, sir?" "We are moving to the other side of the continent to continue with the re-survey. I want to make it clear to you that you are absolutely forbidden to leave the ship. We can't spare the guards for your liabilities, now that you have thrown away your value." "Yes, sir." Even at the time, I was gratified by the sudden thoughtful narrowing of his eyes. day when Bronoski reported that Charlie Baxter had taken a bacpac -- food, soap, blankets and He was determined to prove that he wasn't merely Accident Prone and could get things done on this own. "Charterson and Von Elderman are following him?" I asked. Bronoski nodded his bulletshaped head. "Like a hawk." "The Bird can follow him like a hawk. I want them to follow him like men." "They are as good at the job as I am," Bronoski reassured me. "I think," I said quickly, "that I had better go down to Communications and follow Baxter myself." The Bird was an electronic device. It looked like a local lifeform that was actually a flying mammal. Inside the thing was was a sensitive video camera and a self-propulsion unit. The Bird homed in on Baxter's electroencephalograph waves. The view on the screen in front of the lounging chairs was clear but monotonous. Charlie made his way across the landscape, woods on this side of the continent, not jungle, without incident. He did fall down like a wet laundry bag every so often, but that, as you'd figure, amounted to traveling across country without incident. He'd have done the same on a smooth pavement. I had a cigarette in my mouth, futilely pounding my pockets for the lighter I didn't have, when Charlie met the alien. There was only one native this time, the same thin form, but more lightly clothed here. I shifted uneasily and hoped the two guards were close. There was only one this time, but it was useless to suppose Charlie could handle him himself. "Greetings," Charlie said. "I am Big Brother of a new Family." There was no sound equipment in the Bird, but the translator circuits in the control board read Baxter's lips and produced their sound patterns for us. They would also translate the native's language, but just then he wasn't saying anything. He walked around the Prone leisurely, as if considering buying him. Charlie shifted the straps of his pack. He hadn't been convinced of his own abilities enough to take along a gun or any other kind of weapon. He would be almost sure to kill himself with it. Or would he? I suddenly wondered if Charlie doubted himself enough to commit outright suicide. He had had plenty of close calls, yet he had always survived. If his goal was self-destruction, he surely would have reached it after this many opportunities. I watched the screen intently. Charlie thought he was alone there with a possibly hostile native. All he had to do was make one small slip and he would be # . dead. Yet, so far, he had followed the pattern we had used at the other colony exactly. Instantly I realized that it must be a mistake to follow the other pattern with this second group of aliens, if Charlie Baxter did it. A T first I couldn't understand why the pattern should be wrong for this group if it was right for the first. They were close enough so that there must have been intercourse between them, and if customs were violently different, there would probably be a state of warfare between them and none was apparent. I finally realized why warfare would be almost impossible and why the customs of the separated colonies might be extremely at odds. The colonies were three months apart by fastest transportation, which was longer than a generation of the natives. No one could live long enough to reach a second colony, so each culture developed in isolation along entirely random lines. I felt like yelling at Charlie. There was literally no way of telling how he might be offending and antagonizing this Moranite by treating him as we had learned to treat the others. The alien finally spoke. "You are part of a -- Family?" Charlie nodded his head. So did the native -- he bobbed Charlie's head with a rock. "Close in on 'em fast but gentle," I radioed the guards. The native dragged Baxter's limp body through a nearby thicket and into a small clearing. Abruptly I saw they were up against the base of the nearest mountain. A bubbling, dancing stream twisted through brown and green rock and disappeared into a ridge of gray slate. It reappeared below the hill, steaming, obviously passing through an underground hot springs. The alien had Charlie where he wanted him before we could move. He lashed him securely with stringy vine and, with him thrown over his shoulder, ran up the slate, which rumbled down ominously behind them. He tossed Charlie over a wide hole at the top of the ridge. Slate rained down into the hole. If the Prone hadn't snapped awake and made his body rigid, he would have tumbled into the hole at that moment. "So you wake, Familyman," the native said. "How could you admit to being anything so immoral when you were alone? You surely did not think you could eat me without help from the others of your evil brothers!" Charlie licked his lips and moved his eyes; that was about all he dared move. "You -- don't approve of families?" The native drew himself up to his full elongated height in the screen. "Like all good People, I was properly abandoned at birth and I proudly say I have never associated with others except for Mating and Trading." I noticed abstractly that he finished moving his lips long before the translation was finished. He was using a very primitive language. I screwed the button nervously in my ear for Charterson and Von Elderman to report. T HE alien looked at the rigid form of Baxter over the pit. "I suppose I should have some pity for you. You began your filthy practice too young to know better. But imagine! Combining with others of your kind to survive -- at the expense of decent individuals like myself. Robbing us, eating us. The Finger of Fire will come soon and will destroy you. I have heard Familymen often try to aid one another. Perhaps others of your kind will die with you!" He was gone long before the translation was finished, leaving Charlie Baxter arched across a pit that widened as the alien's descent disturbed more of the soft shale. The native was out of sight. I realized his tribe would seon be extinct. The racial mind for the whole species seemed obsessed with survival by natural selection, but his tribe had gone off on the tangent of individualism, which was fine to some extent, but the Service had learned that a race couldn't survive without some degree of cooperation and this one's level of mating and trading did not seem sufficient. "Captain Jackson!" Von Elderman's voice said in my ear. "We can't reach him! If we start up that hill, the soft shale is bound to shift and drop him right into that hole." "I'll send Bronoski with a personal flyer immediately to make an air pickup," I said numbly. It wasn't the guards' fault. Charlie hadn't seemed to be in any immediate danger and we don't kill intelligent life-forms without damned good reason -- the kind of reason that stands up in court. But he was now stretched over what I was fairly certain was an active geyser -- "The finger of fire," the native had called it, and had assured Charlie that it would kill him. I dispatched Bronoski, but that was all I could do. I did not know when the geyser would spout. Maybe Bronoski would make it. Maybe he wouldn't. I magnified the view from the useless little Bird and studied Charlie's face in the screen. If he lay there doing nothing, waiting for a miracle to happen, he was -- I shuddered -- cooked. He had to make an active decision. If he didn't, he was almost sure to die. But maybe that was what he wanted. Maybe accident prones really want to destroy themselves. It was his bid. Slate dropped off the rim of the hole into the pit and Charlie stiffened. More passive acceptance. But maybe I wasn't being fair. There wasn't much Charlie could do. There wasn't much else for him to do except give up. But I noticed his eyes moving. They went up to the bubbling ribbon of water and down to the steaming stream below the ridge where it emerged. Charlie smiled. He had made a decision. He folded his knees and dropped into the hole. He had naturally made the wrong decision. Bronoski in the flying platform swung into position above the pit.  that he would be washed on through the hot springs and out into the shallow water below. He would be, but he would be boiled alive. Only there are mistakes and mistakes, and sometimes mistakes aren't mistakes at all. The geyser exploded, higher, faster and harder than it ever had before. And Charlie, halfdrowned and half-or-more scalded, popped up and landed in the brush twenty feet away. Bronoski fought for control of his flyer and finally made a fast pickup. Doc Selby did a pretty good job with the First Aid Kit. Charlie's neck and collarbone were broken and over fifty per cent of his skin had to be replaced. Still, it was lucky Charlie had that concentrated soap in his pack. Ever been to Earth National Park and seen Old Faithful? You know what happened -- they use soap to get the geyser spouting when it's off schedule. We haven't told Charlie that it was anything but an accident that Bronoski was so handy. And we let him tell us about the changed customs of the natives. He resumed his regular position of Accident Prone when he saw realistically that he would inevitably be doing the same work and that he might as well get paid for it. I often wonder if it was a genuine mistake the way he dropped into the geyser. Certainly he would have died if it hadn't been for the soap concentrates. If he took that into consideration, though, it wasn't a mistake at all, but a wise choice. A few days ago, when he was leaving my office -- that is, the bridge -- I saw Charlie slip and start to fall. He didn't give up and go limp. He gave his old dance of struggling to regain his balance. Only this time he made it! I began sweating again. After all the time, effort and money the Service puts into acquiring and training a Prone, I wonder if it is possible for one to beat his problem and cease to be an Accident Prone or even an accident prone. This afternoon, I passed Charlie Baxter's swimming pool and saw him poised on his diving board. I waved and rather jauntily extended his grandfather's wish for good luck: "Break a leg." Charlie grinned back at me. "Yes, sir." But he didn't. It would be very reassuring if he would.      "How do you know you haven't been in space opera? How do you know you aren't a crashed saucer-jockey? Who were you anyhow? 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Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. ( Continued from page # ) the imagination to invent them... The writer must be completely honest, because great mathematicians are commoner than thieves or humbugs of such incredible skill." Amazing Ramanujan! He had taught himself math out of one borrowed book, and now he was confounding the experts! He was not an impressive person: "a short uncouth figure, stout, unshaved, not overclean." He had neither degrees nor scholastic records. And yet here was a brain chained by India's awful poverty, and he couldn't help himself -- he emitted mathematics as another might emit perspiration. What he did was on that rarefied level that mathematicians despair of explaining to laymen; it had to do with the congruence properties of partitions, transformations of infinite series and the eclectic like. Numbers were his friends (he had few others). Once, in a taxi, someone pointed out the car's number -- # -- and said it was a dull one. "No," said Ramanujan, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways." He was a vegetarian; he insisted on cooking his own food, and he always changed into pajamas before cooking. And, like his grandfather, he prayed to the goddess Namagiri for help with his math. He died when he was #. His prayers were answered, for his papers are still of basic importance in a dozen fields -- but if he'd lived, he would be only # now, and what might he not have discovered? All this and much more I got from an overwhelming kind of book published by Simon  Schuster. The name of it is The World of Mathematics and it comes in four volumes, boxed, more than # stunning pages. Besides chapters on every sort of math proper, there are biographies of the greatest mathematicians, from Ah-mose, the Egyptian scribe, to the present day -- the flyleaf of the book says "To Einstein," but it goes beyond him. If time travel existed, I can think of few worthier -- or more predictably successful -- uses than to send this book back half a century to the lonely, unlovely genius of Madras. The world would benefit beyond imagination -- and so would he, for he'd have found friends not only in symbols, but also in mathematical fiction by G. B. Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Aldous Huxley, Stephen Leacock, Jonathan Swift and many more. Poor Ramanujan! A brain like that and a book like The World of Mathematics -- what couldn't a combination of that sort produce! 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Offer # Price Sign Card Name Offer# Price Sign Card. My Name Address City State. The Three Laws of Posit ronic Robots made it impossible to kill a human, but there was a loophole... murdering a man after his death I T HE United States Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., as defendants in the case, had influence enough to force a closed-doors trial without a jury. Nor did Northeastern University try hard to prevent it. The trustees knew perfectly well how the public might react to any issue involving misbehavior of a robot, however rarefied that misbehavior might be. They also had a clearly visualized notion of how an antirobot riot might become an antiscience riot without warning. The government, as represented in this case by Justice Harlow Shane, was equally anxious for a quiet end to this mess. Both U. S. Robots and the academic world were bad people to antagonize. Justice Shane said, "Since neither press, public nor jury is present, gentlemen, let us stand on as little ceremony as we can and get to the facts." He smiled stiffly as he said this, perhaps without much hope that his request would be effective, and hitched at his robe so that he might sit more comfortably. His face was pleasantly rubicund, his chin round and soft, his nose broad and his eyes light in color and wide-set. All in all, it was not a face with much judicial majesty and the judge knew it Barnabas H. Goodfellow, Professor of Physics at Northeastern U., was sworn in first, taking the usual vow with an expression that made mincemeat of his name. After the usual opening-gambit questions, Prosecution shoved his hands deep into his pockets and said, "When was it, Professor, that the matter of the possible employ of Robot EZ-# was first brought to your attention, and how?" Professor Goodfellow's small and angular face set itself into an uneasy expression, scarcely more benevolent than the one it replaced. He said, "I have had professional contact and some social acquaintance with Dr. Alfred Lanning, Director of Research at U. S. Robots. I was inclined to listen with some tolerance then when I received a rather strange suggestion from him on the #rd of March of last year -- " "Of #?" "That's right" "Excuse me for interrupting. Please proceed." The professor nodded frostily, scowled to fix the facts in his mind, and began to speak. looked at the robot with a certain uneasiness. It had been carried into the basement supply room in a crate, in accordance with the regulations governing the shipment of robots from place to place on the Earth's surface. He knew it was coming; it wasn't that he was unprepared. From the moment of Dr. Lanning's first phone call on March #, he had felt himself giving way to the other's persuasiveness, and now, as an inevitable result, he found himself face to face with a robot It looked uncommonly large as it stood within arm's reach. Alfred Lanning cast a hard glance of his own at the robot, as though making certain it had not been damaged in transit Then he turned his ferocious eyebrows and his mane of white hair in the professor's direction. "This is Robot EZ-#, first of its model to be available for public use." He turned to the robot "This is Professor Goodfellow, Easy." Easy spoke impassively, but with such suddenness that the professor shied. "Good afternoon, Professor." Easy stood seven feet tall and had the general proportions of a man -- always the prime selling point of U. S. Robots. That and the possession of the basic patents on the positronic brain had given them an actual monopoly on robots and a near-monopoly on computing machines in general. The two men who had uncrated the robot had left now and the professor looked from Lanning to the robot and back to Lanning. "It is harmless, I'm sure." He didn't sound sure. "More harmless than I am," said Lanning. "I could be goaded into striking you. Easy could not be. You know the Three Laws of Robotics, I presume." "Yes, of course," said Goodfellow. "They are built into the positronic patterns of the brain and must be observed. The First Law, the prime rule of robotic existence, safeguards the life and well-being of all humans." He paused, rubbed at his cheek, then added, "It's something of which we would like to persuade all Earth if we could." "It's just that he seems formidable." "Granted. But whatever he seems, you'll find that he is useful." "I'm not sure in what way. Our conversations were not very helpful in that respect Still, I agreed to look at the object and I'm doing it" "Well do more than look, Professor. Have you brought a book?" "I have." "May I see it?" Professor Goodfellow reached down without actually taking his eyes off the metal-in-human-shape that confronted him. From the briefcase at his feet, he withdrew a book. Lanning held out his hand for it and looked at the backstrip. " Physical Chemistry of Electrolytes in Solution. Fair enough, sir. You selected this yourself, at random. It was no suggestion of mine, this particular text. Am I right?" "Yes." Lanning passed the book to Robot EZ-#. r  "HE professor jumped a little. "No! That's a valuable book!" Lanning raised his eyebrows and they looked like shaggy coconut icing. He said, "Easy has no intention of tearing the book in two as a feat of strength, I assure you. It can handle a book as carefully as you or I. Go ahead, Easy." "Thank you, sir," said Easy. Then, turning its metal bulk slightly, it added, "With your permission, Professor Goodfellow." The professor stared, then said, "Yes -- yes, of course." With a slow and steady manipulation of metal fingers, Easy turned the pages of the book, glancing at the left page, then the right; turning the page, glancing left, then right; turning the page and so on for minute after minut. The sense of its power seemed to dwarf even the large cementwalled room in which they stood and to reduce the two human watchers to something considerably less than life-size. Goodfellow muttered, "The light isn't very good." "It will do." Then, rather more sharply, "But what is he doing?" "Patience, sir." The last page was turned eventually. Lanning asked, "Well, Easy?" The robot said, "It is a most accurate book and there is little to which I can point On line # of page #, the word 'positive' is spelled p-o-i-s-t-i-v-e. The comma in line # of page # is superfluous, whereas one should have been used on line # of page #. The plus # should be a minus sign if it is to be consistent with the previous equations -- " "Wait! Wait!" cried the professor. "What is he doing?" "Doing?" echoed Lanning in sudden irascibility. "Why, man, he has already done it! He has proofread that book." "Proofread it?" "Yes. In the short time it took him to turn those pages, he caught every mistake in spelling, grammar and punctuation. He has noted errors in word order and detected inconsistencies. And he will retain the information, letter-perfect, indefinitely." The professor's mouth was open. He walked rapidly away from Lanning and Easy and as rapidly back. He folded his arms across his chest and stared at them. Finally he said, "You mean this is a proofreading robot?" Lanning nodded. "Among other things." "But why do you show it to me?" "So that you might help me persuade the university to obtain it for use." "To read proof?" "Among other things," Lanning repeated patiently. The professor drew his pinched face together in a kind of sour disbelief. "But this is ridiculous!" "Why?" "The university could never afford to buy this half-ton -- it must weigh that at least -- this half-ton proofreader." "Proofreading is not all it will do. It will prepare reports from outlines, fill out forms, serve as an accurate memory-file, grade papers -- " "All picayune!" I can show you in a moment. But I think we can discuss this more comfortably in your office, if you have no objection" "No, of course not," began the professor mechanically and took a half-step as though to turn. Then he snapped out, "But the robot -- we can't take the robot. Really, Doctor, you'll have to crate it up again." "Time enough. We can leave Easy here." "Unattended?" "Why not? He knows he is to stay. Professor Goodfellow, it is necessary to understand that a robot is far more reliable than a human being." "I would be responsible for any damage -- " "There will be no damage. I guarantee that. Look, it's after hours. You expect no one here, I imagine, before tomorrow morning. The truck and my two men are outside. U. S. Robots will take any responsibility that may arise. None will. Call it a demonstration of the reliability of the robot." The professor allowed himself to be led out of the storeroom. Nor did he look entirely comfortable in his own office, five stories up. He dabbed at the line of droplets along the upper half of his forehead with a white handkerchief. "As you know very well, Dr. Lanning, there are laws against the use of robots on Earth's surface," he pointed out. "The laws, Professor Goodfellow, are not simple ones. Robots may not be used on public thoroughfares or within public edifices. They may not be used on private grounds or within private structures except under certain restrictions that usually turn out to be prohibitive. The university, however, is a large and privately owned institution that usually receives preferential treatment. If the robot is used only in a specific room for only academic purposes, if certain other restrictions are observed and if the men and women having occasion to enter the room cooperate fully, we may remain within the law." "But all that trouble just to read proof?" "The uses would be infinite, Professor. Robotic labor has so far been used only to relieve physical drudgery. Isn't there such a thing as mental drudgery? When a professor capable of the most useful creative thought is forced to spend two weeks painfully checking the spelling of lines of print and I offer you a machine that can do it in thirty minutes, is that picayune?" "But the price -- " "The price need not bother you. You cannot buy EZ-#. U. S. Robots does not sell its products. But the university can lease EZ-# for a thousand dollars a year -- considerably less than the cost of a single micro-wave spectograph continuous-recording attachment." Goodfellow looked stunned. Lanning followed up his advantage by saying, "I only ask that you put it up to whatever group makes the decisions here. I would be glad to speak to them if they want more information." "Well," Goodfellow said doubtfully, "I can bring it up at next week's Senate meeting. I can't promise that will do any good, though." "Naturally," said Lanning. r I HE Defense Attorney was short and stubby and carried himself rather portentously, a stance that had the effect of accentuating his double chin. He stared at Professor Goodfellow, once that witness had been handed over, and said, "You agreed rather readily, did you not?" The Professor said briskly, "I suppose I was anxious to be rid of Dr. Lanning. I would have agreed to anything." "With the intention of forgetting about it after he left?" "Well-" "Nevertheless, you did present the matter to a meeting of the Executive Board of the University Senate." "Yes, I did " "So that you agreed in good faith with Dr. Lanning's suggestions. You weren't just going along with a gag. You actually agreed enthusiastically, did you not?" "I merely followed ordinary procedures." "As a matter of fact, you weren't as upset about the robot as you now claim you were. You know the Three Laws of Robotics and you knew them at the time of your interview with Dr. Lanning." , "Well, yes." to leave a robot at large and unattended." "Dr. Lanning assured me -- " "Surely you would never have accepted his assurance if you had had the slightest doubt that the robot might be in the least dangerous." The professor began frigidly, "I had every faith in the word -- " "That is all," said Defense abruptly. As Professor Goodfellow, more than a bit ruffled, stood down, Justice Shane leaned forward and said, "Since I am not a robotics man myself, I would appreciate knowing precisely what the Three Laws of Robotics are. Would Dr. Lanning quote them for the benefit of the court?" Dr. Lanning looked startled. He had been virtually bumping heads with the gray-haired woman at his side. He rose to his feet now and the woman looked up, too -- expressionlessly. Dr. Lanning said, "Very well, Your Honor." He paused as though about to launch into an oration and said, with laborious clarity, "First Law: a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws." "I see," said the judge, taking rapid notes. "These Laws are built into every robot, are they?" "Into every one. That will be borne out by any roboticist." "And into Robot EZ-# specifically?" "Yes, Your Honor." "You will probably be required to repeat those statements under oath." "I am ready to do so, Your Honor." He sat down again. TR. Susan Calvin, robopsychologist-in-chief for U. S. Robots, who was the gray-haired woman sitting next to Lanning, looked at her titular superior without favor, but then she showed favor to no human being. She said, "Was Goodfellow's testimony accurate, Alfred?" "Essentially, " muttered Lanning. "He wasn't as nervous as all that about the robot and he was anxious enough to talk business with me when he heard the price. But there doesn't seem to be any drastic distortion." Dr. Calvin said thoughtfully, "It might have been wise to put the price higher than a thousand." "We were anxious to place Easy." "I know. Too anxious, perhaps. They'll try to make it look as though we had an ulterior motive " Lanning looked exasperated. "We did. I admitted that at the University Senate meeting." "They can make it look as if we had one beyond the one we admitted." Scott Robertson, son of the founder of U. S. Robots and still owner of a majority of the stock, leaned over from Dr. Calvin's other side and said in a kind of explosive whisper, "Why can't you get Elasy to talk so we'll know where we're at?" "You know he can't talk about it, Mr. Robertson." "Make him. You're the psychologist, Dr. Calvin. Make him." "If I'm the psychologist, Mr. Robertson," said Susan Calvin coldly, "let me make the decisions. My robot will not be made to do anything at the price of his wellbeing" Robertson frowned and might have answered, but Justice Shane was tapping his gavel in a polite sort of way and they grudgingly fell silent. Francis J. Hart, head of the Department of English and Dean of Graduate Studies, was on the stand. He was a plump man, meticulously dressed in dark clothing of a conservative cut, and possessing several strands of hair traversing the pink top of his cranium. He sat well back in the witness chair with his hands folded neatly in his lap and displaying, from time to time, a tight-lipped smile. He said, "My first connection with the matter of the Robot EZ# was on the occasion of the session of the University Senate Executive Committee at which the subject was introduced by Professor Goodfellow. Thereafter, on the #th of April of last year, we held a special meeting on the subject, during which I was in the chair." "Were minutes kept of the meeting of the Executive Committee? Of the special meeting, that is?" "Well, no. It was a rather unusual meeting." The dean smiled briefly. "We thought it might remain confidential." "What transpired at the meeting?" comfortable as chairman of that meeting. Nor did the other members assembled seem completely calm. Only Dr. banning appeared at peace with himself. His tall, gaunt figure and the shock of white hair that crowned him reminded Hart of portraits he had seen of Andrew Jackson. Samples of the robot's work lay scattered along the central regions of the table and the reproduction of a graph drawn by the robot was now in the hands of Professor Minott of Physical Chemistry. The chemist's lips were pursed in obvious approval. Hart cleared his throat and said, "There seems no doubt that the robot can perform certain routine tasks with adequate competence. I have gone over these, for instance, just before coming in and there is very little to find fault with." He picked Up a long sheet of printing, some three times as long as the average book page. It was a sheet of galley proof, designed to be corrected by authors before the type was set up in page form. Along both of the wide margins of the galley were proofmarks, neat and superbly legible. Occasionally, a word of print was crossed out and a new word substituted in the margin in characters so fine and regular it might easily have been print itself. Some of the corrections were blue to indicate the original mistake had been the author's, a few in red, where the printer had been wrong. "Actually," said Lanning, "there is less than very little to find fault with. I should say there is nothing at all to find fault with, Dr. Hart. I'm sure the corrections are perfect, insofar as the original manuscript was. If the manuscript against which this galley was corrected was at fault in a matter of fact rather than of English, the robot is not competent to correct it." "We accept that. However, the robot corrected word order on occasion and I don't think the rules of English are sufficiently hidebound for us to be sure that in each case the robot's choice was the correct one." "Easy's positronic brain," said Lanning, showing large teeth as he smiled, "has been molded by the contents of all the standard works on the subject I'm sure you cannot point to a case where the robot's choice was definitely the incorrect one." Professor Minott looked up from the graph he still held. "The question in my mind, Dr. Lanning, is why we need a robot at all, with all the difficulties in public relations that would entail. The science of automation has surely reached the point where your company could design a machine, an ordinary computer of a type known and accepted by the public, that would correct galleys." "I am sure we could," said Lanning stiffly, "but such a machine would require that the galleys be translated into special symbols or, at the least, transcribed on tapes. Any corrections would emerge in symbols. You would need to keep men employed translating words to symbols, symbols to words. Furthermore, such a computer could do no other job. It couldn't prepare the graph you hold in your hand, for instance." Minott grunted. mark of the positronic robot is its flexibility. It can do a number of jobs. It is designed like a man so that it can use all the tools and machines that have, after all, been designed to be used by a man. It can talk to you and you can talk to it. You can actually reason with it up to a point. Compared to even a simple robot, an ordinary computer with a non-positronic brain is only a heavy adding machine." Goodfellow looked up and said, "If we all talk and reason with the robot, what are the chances of our confusing it? I suppose it doesn't have the capability of absorbing an infinite amount of data." "No, it hasn't But it should last five years with ordinary use. It will know when it will require clearing. and the company will do the job without charge." "The company will?" "Yes. The company reserves the right to service the robot outside the ordinary course of its duties. It is one reason we retain control of our positronic robots and lease rather than sell them. In the pursuit of its ordinary functions, any robot can be directed by any man. Outside its ordinary functions, a robot requires expert handling, and that we can give it. For instance, any of you might clear an EZ robot to an extent by telling it to forget this item or that. But you would be almost certain to phrase the order in such a way as to cause it to forget too much or too little. We would detect such tampering, because we have built-in safeguards. However, since there is no need for clearing the robot in its ordinary work, or for doing other useless things, this raises no problem." as though to make sure his carefully cultivated strands lay evenly distributed and said, "You are anxious to have us take the machine. Yet surely it is a losing proposition for U. S. Robots. One thousand a year is a ridiculously low price. Is it that you hope through this to rent other such machines to other universities at a more reasonable price?" "Certainly that's a fair hope," said Lanning. "But even so, the number of machines you could rent would be limited. I doubt if you could make it a paying proposition." Lanning put his elbows on the table and earnestly leaned forward. "Let me put it bluntly, gentlemen. Robots cannot be used on Earth, except in certain special cases, because of prejudice against them on the part of the public. U. S. Robots is a highly successful corporation with our extraterrestrial and space-flight markets alone, to say nothing of our computer subsidiaries. However, we are concerned with more than profits alone. It is our firm belief that the use of robots on Earth itself would mean a better life for all eventually, even if a certain amount of economic dislocation resulted at first. "The labor unions are naturally against us, but surely we may expect cooperation from the large universities. The robot, Easy, will help you by relieving you of scholastic drudgery -- by assuming, if you permit it, the role of galley slave for you. Other universities and research institutions will follow your lead, and if it works out, then perhaps other robots of other types may be placed and the public's objections to them broken down by stages." Minott murmured, "Today Northeastern University, tomorrow the world." to Susan Calvin, "I wasn't nearly that eloquent and they weren't nearly that reluctant. At a thousand a year, they were jumping to get Easy. Professor Minott told me he'd never seen as beautiful a job as that graph he was holding and there was no mistake on the galley or anywhere else. Hart admitted it freely." The severe vertical lines on Dr. Calvin's face did not soften. "You should have demanded more money than they could pay, Alfred, and let them beat you down." "Maybe," he grumbled. Prosecution was not quite done with Professor Hart. "After Dr. Lanning left, did you vote on whether to accept Robot EZ-#?" "Yes, we did." "With what result?" "In favor of acceptance, by majority vote." "What would you say influenced the vote?" Defense objected immediately. Prosecution rephrased the question. "What influenced you, personally, in your individual vote? You did vote in favor, I think." "I voted in favor, yes. I did so largely because I was impressed by Dr. Lanning's feeling that it was our duty as members of the world's intellectual leadership to allow robotics to help Man in the solution of his problems." "In other words, Dr. Lanning talked you into it." "That's his job. He did it very well." "Your witness." Defense strode up to the witness chair and surveyed Professor Hart for a long moment. He said, "In reality, you were all pretty eager to have Robot EZ-# # in your employ, weren't you?" "We thought that if it could do the work, it might be useful." "If it could do the work? I understand you examined the samples of Robot EZ-#'s original work with particular care on the day of the meeting which you have just described." "Yes, I did. Since the machine's work dealt primarily with the handling of the English language, and since that is my field of competence, it seemed logical that I be the one chosen to examine the work." "Very good. Was there anything oh display on the table at the time of the meeting which was less than satisfactory? I have all the material here as exhibits. Can you point to a single unsatisfactory item?" "Well-" "It's a simple question. Was there one single solitary unsatisfactory item? You inspected it. Was there?" The English professor frowned. "There wasn't" "I also have some samples of work done by Robot EZ-# during the course of his #-month employ at Northeastern. Would you examine these and tell me if there is anything wrong with them in even one particular?" Hart snapped, "When he did make a mistake, it was a beauty." "Answer my question," thundered Defense, "and only the question I am putting to you! Is there anything wrong with the material?" Dean Hart looked cautiously at each item. "Well, nothing." "Barring the matter concerning which we are here engaged, do you know of any mistake on the part of EZ-#?" "Barring the matter for which this trial is being held, no." though to signal end of paragraph. He said, "Now about the vote concerning whether Robot EZ-# was to be employed or not. You said there was a majority in favor. What was the actual vote?" "Thirteen to one, as I remember." "Thirteen to one! More than just a majority, wouldn't you say?" "No, sir!" All the pedant in Dean Hart was aroused. "In the English language, the word 'majority' means 'more than half.' Thirteen out of fourteen is a majority, nothing more." "But an almost unanimous one." "A majority all the same!" Defense switched ground. "And who was the lone holdout?" Dean Hart looked acutely uncomfortable. "Professor Simon Ninheimer." Defense pretended astonishment. "Professor Ninheimer? The head of the Department of Sociology?" "Yes, sir." "The plaintiff?" "Yes, sir." Defense pursed his lips. "In other words, it turns out that the man bringing the action for payment of # damages against my client, United States Robot and Mechanical Men, Incorporated, was the one who from the beginning opposed the use of the robot -- although everyone else on the Executive Committee of the University Senate was persuaded that it was a good idea." "He voted against the motion, as was his right" "You didn't mention in your description of the meeting any remarks made by Professor Ninheimer. Did he make any?" "I think he spoke." "You think?" "Well, he did speak." "Against using the robot?" "Yes." "Was he violent about it?" Dean Hart paused. "He was vehement." Defense grew confidential. "How long have you known Professor Ninheimer, Dean Hart?" "About twelve years." "Reasonably well?" "I should say so, yes." "Knowing him, then, would you say he was the kind of man who might continue to bear resentment against a robot, all the more so because an adverse vote had -- " Prosecution drowned out the remainder of the question with an indignant and vehement objection of his own. Defense motioned the witness down and Justice Shane called luncheon recess. R obertson mangled his sandwich. The corporation would not founder for loss of threewould do it no particular good. He was conscious, moreover, that there would be a much more costly long-term setback in public relations. He said sourly, 'Why all this business about how Easy got into the university? What do they hope to gain?" The Attorney for Defense said quietly, "A court action is like a chess game, Mr. Robertson. The winner is usually the one who can see more moves ahead, and my friend at the prosecutor's table is no beginner. They can show damage; that's no problem. Their main effort lies in anticipating our defense. They must be counting on us to try to show that Easy couldn't possibly have committed the offense -- because of the Laws of Robotics." "All right," said Robertson, "that is our defense. An absolutely airtight one." "To a robotics engineer. Not necessarily to a judge. They're setting themselves up a position from which they can demonstrate that EZ-# was no ordinary robot. It was the first of its type to be offered to the public. It was an experimental model that needed field-testing and the university was the only decent way to provide such testing. That would look plausible in the light of Dr. Lanning's strong efforts to place the Robots to lease it for so little. The prosecution would then argue that the field-test proved Easy to have been a failure. Now do you see the purpose of what's been going on?" "But EZ-# was a perfectly good model," argued Robertson. "It was the #th in production." "Which is really a bad point," said Defense somberly. "What was wrong with the first #? Obviously something. Why shouldn't there be something wrong with the #th, too?" "There was nothing wrong with the first # except that they weren't complex enough for the task. These were the first positronic brains of the sort to be constructed and it was rather hit-andmiss to begin with. But the Three Laws held in all of them! No robot is so imperfect that the Three Laws don't hold." "Dr. Lanning has explained this to me, Mr. Robertson, and I am judge, however, may not be. We are expecting a decision from an honest and intelligent man who knows no robotics and thus may be led astray. For instance, if you or Dr. Lanning or Dr. Calvin were to say on the stand that any positronic brains were constructed 'hitand-miss,' as you just did, Prosecution would tear you apart in crossexamination. Nothing would salvage our case. So that's something to avoid." Robertson growled, "If only Easy would talk." Defense shrugged. "A robot is incompetent as a witness, so that would do us no good." "At least we'd know some of the facts. We'd know how it came to do such a thing."  ish red touched her cheeks and her voice had a trace of warmth in it "We know how Easy came to do it It was ordered to! I've explained this to counsel and I'll explain it to you now." "Ordered to by whom?" asked Robertson in honest astonishment (No one ever told him anything, he thought resentfully. These research people considered themselves the owners of U. S. Robots, by God!) "By the plaintiff," said Dr. Calvin. "In heaven's name, why?" "I don't know why yet Perhaps just that we might be sued, that he might gain some cash." There were blue glints in her eyes as she said that. "Then why doesn't Easy say so?" "Isn't that obvious? It's been ordered to keep quiet about the matter." "Why should that be obvious?" demanded Robertson truculently. "Well, it's obvious to me. Robot psychology is my profession. If Easy will not answer questions about the matter directly, he will answer questions on the fringe of the matter. By measuring increased hesitation in his answers as the central question is approached, by measuring the area of blankness and the intensity of counterpotentials set up, it is possible to tell with scientific precision that his troubles are the result of an order not to talk, with its strength based on First Law. In other words, he's been told that if he talks, harm will be done a human being. Presumably harm to the unspeakable Professor Ninheimer, the plaintiff, who, to the robot, would seem a human being." "Well, then," said Robertson, "can't you explain that if he keeps quiet, harm will be done to U. S. Robots?" "U. S. Robots is not a human being and the First Law of Robotics does not recognize a corporation as a person the way ordinary laws do. Besides, it would be dangerous to try to lift this particular sort of inhibition. The person who laid it on could lift it off least dangerously, because the robot's motivations in that respect are centered on that person. Any other course -- " She shook her head and grew almost impassioned. "I won't let the robot be damaged!" " air of bringing sanity to the problem. "It seems to me that we have only to prove a robot incapable of the act of which Easy is accused. We can do that." "Exactly," said Defense, in annoyance. " You can do that. The only witnesses capable of testifying to Easy's condition and to the nature of Easy's state of mind are employees of U. S. Robots. The judge can't possibly accept their testimony as unprejudiced." "How can he deny expert testimony?" "By refusing to be convinced by it. That's his right as the judge. Against the alternative that a man like Professor Ninheimer deliberately set about ruining his own reputation, even for a sizable sum of money, the judge isn't going to accept the technicalities of your engineers. The judge is a man, after all. If he has to choose between a man doing an impossible thing and a robot doing an impossible thing, he's quite likely to decide in favor of the man." "A man can do an impossible thing," said Lanning, "because we don't know all the complexities of the human mind and we don't know what, in a given human mind, is impossible and what is not. We do know what is really impossible to a robot" "Well, we'll see if we can't convince the judge of that," Defense replied wearily. "If all you say is so," rumbled Robertson, "I don't see how you can." "We'll see. It's good to know and be aware of the difficulties involved, but let's not be too downhearted. I've tried to look ahead a few moves in the chess-game, too." With a stately nod in the direction of the robopsychologist, he added, "With the help of the good lady here." Lanning looked from one to the other and said, "What the devil is this?" But the bailiff thrust his head into the room and announced somewhat breathlessly that the trial was about to resume. They took their seats, examining the man who had started all the trouble. Simon Ninheimer owned a fluffy head of sandy hair, a face that narrowed past a beaked nose toward a pointed chin, and a habit of sometimes hesitating before key words in his conversation that gave him an air of a seeker after an almost unbearable precision. When he said, "The Sun rises in the -- uh -- east," one was certain he had given due consideration to the possibility that it might at some time rise in the west Prosecution said, "Did you oppose employment of Robot EZ-# by the university?" "I did, sir." "Why was that?" "I did not feel that we understood the -- uh -- motives of U. S. Robots thoroughly. I mistrusted their anxiety to place the robot with us." "Did you feel that it was capable of doing the work that it was allegedly designed to do?" "I know for a fact that it was not" "Would you state your reasons?" titled Social Tensions Involved in Space-Flight and Their Resolution , had been eight years in the making. Ninheimer's search for precision was not confined to his habits of speech, and in a subject like sociology, almost inherently imprecise, it left him breathless. Even with the material in galley proofs, he felt no sense of completion. Rather the reverse, in fact Staring at the long strips of print, he felt only the itch to tear the lines of type apart and rearrange them differently. Jim Baker, Instructor and soon to  be Assistant Professor of Sociology, found Ninheimer, three days after the first batch of galleys had arrived from the printer, staring at the handful of paper in abstraction. The galleys came in three copies: one for Ninheimer to proofread, one for Baker to proofread independently, and a third, marked "Original," which was to receive the final corrections, a combination of those made by Ninheimer and by Baker, after a conference at which possible conflicts and disagreements were ironed out. This had been their policy on the several papers on which they had collaborated in the past three years and it worked well. Baker, young and ingratiatingly soft-voiced, had his own copies of the galleys in his hand. He said eagerly, "I've done the first chapter and they contain some typographical beauts." "The first chapter always has them," said Ninheimer distantly. "Do you want to go over it now?" Ninheimer brought his eyes to grave focus on Baker. "I haven't done anything on the galleys, Jim. I don't think I'll bother." Baker looked confused. "Not bother?" Ninheimer pursed his lips "I've asked about the -- uh -- workload of the machine. After all, he was originally -- uh -- promoted as a proofreader. They've set a schedule." "The machine? You mean Easy?" "I believe that is the foolish name they gave it." "But, Dr. Ninheimer, I thought you were staying clear of it!" "I seem .to be the only one doing so. Perhaps I ought to take my share of the -- uh -- advantage." "Oh. Well, I seem to have wasted time on this first chapter, then," said the younger man ruefully. "Not wasted. We can compare the machine's result with yours as a check." "If you want to, but -- " "Yes?" "I doubt that we'll find anything wrong with Easy's work. It's supposed never to have made a mistake." "I dare say," said Ninheimer dryly. r I 'HE first chapter was brought in again by Baker four days later. This time it was Ninheimer's copy, fresh from the special annex that had been built to house Easy and the equipment it used. Baker was jubilant. "Dr. Ninheimer, it not only caught everything I caught -- it found a dozen errors I missed! The whole thing took it twelve minutes!" Ninheimer looked over the sheaf, with the neatly printed marks and symbols in the margins. He said, "It is not as complete as you and I would have made it. We would have entered an insert on Suzuki's work on the neurological effects of low gravity." "You mean his. paper in Sociological Reviews?" "Of course." "Well, you can't expect impossibilities of Easy. It can't read the literature for us." "I realize that. As a matter of fact, I have prepared the insert. I will see the machine and make certain it knows how to -- uh -- handle inserts." "It will know." "I prefer to make certain." Ninheimer had to make an appointment to see Easy, and then could get nothing better than fifteen minutes in the late evening. But the fifteen minutes turned out to be ample. Robot EZ-# understood the matter of inserts at once. Ninheimer found himself uncomfortable at close quarters with the robot for the first time. Almost automatically, as though it were human, he found himself asking, "Are you happy with your work?" "Most happy, Professor Ninheimer," said Easy solemnly, the photo-cells that were its eyes gleaming their normal deep red. "You know me?" "From the fact that you present me with additional material to include in the galleys, it follows that you are the author. The author's name, of course, is at the head of each sheet of galley proof." "I see. You make -- uh -- deductions, then. Tell me -- " he couldn't resist the question -- "what do you think of the book so far?" Easy said, "I find it very pleasant to work with." "Pleasant? That is an odd word for a -- uh -- a mechanism without emotion. I've been told you have no emotion." "The words of your book go in accordance with my circuits," Easy explained. "They set up little or no counter-potentials. It is in my brain-paths to translate this mechanical fact into a word such as 'pleasant.' The emotional context is fortuitous." "I see. Why do you find the book pleasant?" "It deals with human beings, Professor, and not with inorganic materials or mathematical symbols. Your book attempts to understand human beings and to help increase human happiness." "And this is what you try to do and so my book goes in accordance with your circuits? Is that it?" "That is it, Professor." The fifteen minutes were up. Ninheimer left and went to the university library, which was on the point of closing. He kept them open long enough to find an elementary text on robotics. He took it home with him. tion of late material, the galleys went to Easy and from him to the publishers with little intervention from Ninheimer at first -- and none at all later. Baker said, a little uneasily, "It almost gives me a feeling of uselessness." "It should give you a feeling of having time to begin a new project," said Ninheimer, without looking up from the notations he was making in the current issue of Social Science Abstracts. "I'm just not used to it. I keep worrying about the galleys. It's silly, I know." "It is." "The other day I got a couple of sheets before Easy sent them off to -- " "What!" Ninheimer looked up, scowling. The copy of Abstracts slid shut. "Did you disturb the machine at its work? # ' "Only for a minute. Everything was all right. Oh, it changed one word. You referred to something as 'criminal'; it changed the word to 'reckless.' It thought the second adjective fit in better with the context." Ninheimer grew thoughtful. "What did you think?" "You know, I agreed with it. I let it stand." Ninheimer turned in his swivelchair to face his young associate. "See here, I wish you wouldn't do this again. If I am to use the machine, I wish the -- uh -- full advantage of it. If I am to use it and lose your -- uh -- services anyway because you supervise it when the whole point is that it requires no supervision, I gain nothing. Do you see?" "Yes, Dr. Ninheimer," said Baker, subdued. The advance copies of Social Tensions arrived in Dr. Ninheimer's office on the #th of May. He looked through it briefly, flipping pages and pausing to read a paragraph here and there. Then he put his copies away. As he explained later, he forgot about it. For eight years, he had worked at it, but now, and for months in the past, other interests had engaged him while Easy had taken the load of the book off his shoulders. He did not even think to donate the usual complimentary copy to the university library. Even Baker, who had thrown himself into work and had steered clear of the dpartment head since receiving his rebuke at their last meeting, received no copy. On the # th of June that stage ended. Ninheimer received a phone call and stared at the image in the 'plate with surprise. "Speidell! Are you in town?" "No, sir. I'm in Cleveland." Speidell's voice trembled with emotion. "Then why the call?" "Because I've just been looking through your new book! Ninheimer, are you mad? Have you gone insane?"L ' something -- uh -- wrong?" he asked in alarm. "Wrong? I refer you to page #. What in blazes do you mean by interpreting my work as you do? Where in the paper cited do I make the claim that the criminal personality is non-existent and that it is the aw-enforcement agencies that are the true criminals? Here, let me quote -- " "Wait! Wait!" cried Ninheimer, trying to find the page. "Let me see. Let me see... Good God!" "Well?" "Speidell, I don't see how this could have happened. I never wrote this." "But that's what's printed! And that distortion isn't the worst. You look at page # and imagine what Ipatiev is going to do to you when he sees the hash you've made of his findings! Look, Ninheimer, the book is riddled with this sort of thing. I don't know what you were thinking of -- but there's nothing to do but get the book off the market. And you'd better be prepared for extensive apologies at the next Association meeting!" "Speidell, listen to me -- " But Speidell had flashed off with a force that had the 'plate glowing with after-images for fifteen seconds. It was then that Ninheimer went through the book and began marking off passages with red ink. He kept his temper remarkably well when he faced Easy again, but his lips were pale. He passed the book to Easy and said, "Will you read the marked passages on pages #, #, # and #?" Easy did so in four glances. "Yes, Professor Ninheimer." "This is not as I had it in the original galleys." "No, sir. It is not." "Did you change it to read as it now does?" "Yes, sir." "Why?" "Sir, the passages as they read in your version were most uncomplimentary to certain groups of human beings. I felt it advisable to change the wording to avoid doing them harm." "How dared you do such a thing?" "The First Law, Professor, does not let me, through any inaction, allow harm to come to human beings. Certainly, considering your reputation in the world of sociology and the wide circulation your book would receive among scholars, considerable harm would come to a number of the human beings you speak of." "But do you realize the harm that will come to me now?" "It was necessary to choose the alternative with less harm." Professor Ninheimer, shaking with fury, staggered away. It was clear to him that U. S. Robots would have to account to him for this. at the defendants' table, which increased as Prosecution drove the point home. "Then Robot EZ-# informed you that the reason for its action was based on the First Law of Robotics?" "That is correct, sir." "That, in effect, it had no choice?" "Yes, sir." "It follows then that U. S. Robots designed a robot that would of necessity rewrite books to accord with its own conceptions of what was right. And yet they palmed it off as simple proofreader. Would you say that?" Defense objected firmly at once, pointing out that the witness was being asked for a decision on a matter in which he had no competence. The judge admonished Prosecution in the usual terms, but there was no doubt that the exchange had sunk home -- not least upon the attorney for the Defense. Defense asked for a short recess before beginning cross-examination, using a legal technicality for the purpose that got him five minutes. He leaned over toward Susan Calvin. "Is it possible, Dr. Calvin, that Professor Ninheimer is telling the truth and that Easy was motivated by the First Law?" Calvin pressed her lips together, then said, "No. It isn't possible. The last part of Ninheimer's testimony is deliberate perjury. Easy is not designed to be able to judge matters at the stage of abstraction represented by an advanced textbook on sociology. It would never be able to tell that certain groups of humans would be harmed by a phrase in such a book. Its mind is simply not built for that." "I suppose, though, that we can't prove this to a layman," said Defense pessimistically. "No," admitted Calvin. "The proof would be highly complex. Our way out is still what it was. We must prove Ninheimer is lying, and nothing he has said need change our plan of attack." "Very well, Dr. Calvin," said Defense, "I must accept your word in this. We'll go on as planned." In the courtroom, the judge's gavel rose and fell and Dr. Ninheimer took the stand once more. He smiled a little as one who feels his position to be impregnable and rather enjoys the prospect of countering a useless attack. Defense approached warily and began softly. "Dr. Ninheimer, do you mean to say that you were completely unaware of these alleged changes in your manuscript until such time as Dr. Speidell called you on the #th of June?" "That is correct, sir." "Did you never look at the galleys after Robot EZ-# had proofread them?" "At first I did, but it seemed to me a useless task. I relied on the claims of U. S. Robots. The absurd -- uh -- changes were made only in the last quarter of the book after the robot, I presume, had learned enough about sociology -- " "Never mind your presumptions!" said Defense. "I understood your colleague, Dr. Baker, saw the later galleys on at least one occasion. Do you remember testifying to that effect?" "Yes, sir. As I said, he told me about seeing one page, and even there, the robot had changed a word." "Don't you find it strange, sir, that after over a year of implacable hostility to the robot, after having voted against it in the first place and having refused to put it to any use whatever, you suddenly decided to put your book, your magnum opus, into its hands?" "I don't find that strange. I simply decided that I might as well use the machine." "And you were so confident of Robot EZ-# -- all of a sudden -- that you didn't even bother to check your galleys?" "I told you I was -- uh -- persuaded by U. S. Robots' propaganda." "So persuaded that when your colleague, Dr. Baker, attempted to check on the robot, you berated him soundly?" "I didn't berate him. I merely did not wish to have him -- uh -- waste his time. At least, I thought then it was a waste of time. I did not see the significance of that change in a word at the -- " Defense said with heavy sarcasm, "I have no doubt you were instructed to bring up that point in order that the word-change be entered in the record -- " He altered his line to forestall objection and said, "The point is that you were extremely angry with Dr. Baker." "No, sir. Not angry." "You didn't give him a copy of your book when you received it." "Simple forgetfulness. I didn't give the library its copy, either." Ninheimer smiled cautiously. "Professors are notoriously absentminded." Defense said, "Do you find it strange that, after more than a year of perfect work, Robot EZ-# should go wrong on your book? On a book, that is, which was written by you, who was, of all people, the most implacably hostile to the robot?" "My book was the only sizable work dealing with mankind that it had to face. The Three Laws of Robotics took hold then." "Several times, Dr. Ninheimer," said Defense, "you have tried to sound like an expert on robotics. Apparently you suddenly grew interested in robotics and took out books on the subject from the library. You testified to that effect, did you not?" "One book, sir. That was the result of what seems to me to have been -- uh -- natural curiosity." "And it enabled you to explain why the robot should, as you allege, have distorted your book?" "Yes, sir." "Very convenient. But are you sure your interest in robotics was not intended to enable you to manipulate the robot for your own purposes?" Ninheimer flushed. "Certainly not, sir!" Defense's voice rose. "In fact, are you sure the alleged altered passages were not as you had them in the first place?" The sociologist half-rose. "That's -- uh -- uh -- ridiculous! I have the galleys -- " He had difficulty speaking and Prosecution rose to insert smoothly, "With your permission, Your Honor, I intend to introduce as evidence the set of galleys given by Dr. Ninheimer to Robot EZ-# and the set of galleys mailed by Robot EZ-# to the publishers. I will do so now if my esteemed colleague so desires, and will be willing to allow a recess in order that the two sets of galleys may be compared." patiently. "That is not necessary. My honored opponent can introduce those galleys whenever he chooses. I'm sure they will show whatever discrepancies are claimed by the plaintiff to exist. What I would like to know of the witness, however, is whether he also has in his possession Dr. Baker's galleys." "Dr. Baker's galleys?" Ninheimer frowned. He was not yet quite master of himself. "Yes, Professor! I mean Dr. Baker's galleys. You testified to the effect that Dr. Baker had received a separate copy of the galleys. I will have the clerk read your testimony if you are suddenly a selective type of amnesiac. Or is it just that professors are, as you say, notoriously absentminded?" Ninheimer said, "I remember Dr. Baker's galleys. They weren't necessary once the job was placed in the care of the proofreading machine -- " "So you burned them?" "No. I put them in the waste basket" "Burned them, dumped them -- what's the difference? The point is you got rid of them." "There's nothing wrong -- " began Ninheimer weakly. "Nothing wrong?" thundered Defense. "Nothing wrong except that there is now no way we can check to see if, on certain crucial galley sheets, you might not have substituted a harmless blank one from Dr. Baker's copy for a sheet in your own copy which you had deliberately mangled in such a way as to force the robot to -- " Prosecution shouted a furious objection. Justice Shane leaned forward, his round face doing its best to assume an expression of anger equivalent to the intensity of the emotion felt by the man. The judge said, "Do you have any evidence, Counselor, for the extraordinary statement you have just made?" Defense said quietly, "No direct evidence, Your Honor. But I would like to point out that, viewed properly, the sudden conversion of the plaintiff from anti-roboticism, hissudden interest in robotics, his refusal to check the galleys or to allow anyone else to check them, his careful neglect to allow anyone to see the book immediately after publication, all very clearly point -- " "Counselor," interrupted the judge impatiently, "this is not the place for esoteric deductions. The plaintiff is not on trial. Neither are you prosecuting him. I forbid this line of attack and I can only point out that the desperation that must have induced you to do this cannot help but weaken your case. If you have legitimate questions to ask, Counselor, you may continue with your cross-examination. But I warn you against another such exhibition in this courtroom." "I have no further questions, Your Honor." Robertson whispered ' heatedly as counsel for the Defense returned to his table, "What good did that do, for God's sake? The judge is dead-set against you now." Defense replied calmly, "But Ninheimer is good and rattled. And we've set him up for tomorrow's move. He'll be ripe." Susan Calvin nodded gravely. r T'HE rest of Prosecution's case was mild in comparison. Dr. Baker was called and bore out most of Ninheimer's testimony. Drs. Speidell and Ipatiev were called, and they expounded most movingly on their shock and dismay at certain quoted passages in Dr. Ninheimer's book. Both gave their professional opinion that Dr. Ninheimer's professional reputation had been seriously impaired. The galleys were introduced in evidence, as were copies of the finished book. Defense cross-examined no more that day. Prosecution rested and the trial was recessed till the next morning. Defense made his first motion at the beginning of the proceedings on the second day. He requested that Robot EZ-# be admitted as a spectator to the proceedings. Prosecution objected at once and Justice Shane called both to the bench. Prosecution said hotly, "This is obviously illegal. A robot may not be in any edifice used by the general public." "This courtroom," pointed out Defense, "is closed to all but those having an immediate connection with the case." "A large machine of known erratic behavior would disturb my clients and my witnesses by its very presence! It would make hash out of the proceedings." The judge seemed inclined to agree. He turned to Defense and said rather unsympathetically, "What are the reasons for your request?" Defense said, "It will be our contention that Robot EZ-# could not possibly, by the nature of its construction, have behaved as it has been described as behaving. It will be necessary to present a few demonstrations." Prosecution said, "I don't see the point, Your Honor. Demonstrations conducted by men employed at U. S. Robots are worth little as evidence when U. S. Robots is the defendant." "Your Honor," said Defense, "the validity of any evidence is for you to decide, not for the Prosecuting Attorney. At least, that is my understanding." Justice Shane, his prerogatives encroached upon, said, "Your understanding is correct. Nevertheless, the presence of a robot here does raise important legal questions." "Surely, Your Honor, nothing that should be allowed to override the requirements of justice. If the robot is not present, we are prevented from presenting our only defense." The judge considered. "There would be the question of transporting the robot here." "That is a problem with which U. S. Robots has frequently been faced. We have a truck parked outside the courtroom, constructed according to the laws governing the transportation of robots. Robot EZ-# is in a packing case inside with two men guarding it. The doors to the truck are properly secured and all other necessary precautions have been taken." "You seem certain," said Justtice Shane, in renewed ill-temper, "that judgment on this point will be in your favor." "Not at all, Your Honor. If it is not, we simply turn the truck about. I have made no presumptions concerning youj: decision." The judge nodded. "The request on the part of the Defense is granted." The crate was carried in on a large dolly and the two men who handled it opened it. The courtroom was immersed in a dead silence. thick slabs of celluform went down, then held out one hand. "Come, Easy." The robot looked in her direction and held out its large metal arm. It towered over her by two feet but followed meekly, like a child in the clasp of its mother. Someone giggled nervously and choked it off at a hard glare from Dr. Calvin. Easy seated itself carefully in a large chair brought by the bailiff, which creaked but held. Defense said, "When it becomes necessary, Your Honor, we will prove that this is actually Robot EZ-#, the specific robot in the employ of Northeastern University during the period of time with which we are concerned." "Good," His Honor said. "That will be necessary. I, for one, have no idea how you can tell one robot from another." "And now," said Defense, "I would like to call my first witness to the stand. Professor Simon Nmheimer, please." The clerk hesitated, looked at the judge. Justice Shane asked, with visible surprise, "You are calling the plaintiff as your witness?" "Yes, Your Honor." "I hope that you're aware that as long as he's your witness, you will be allowed none of the latitude you might exercise if you were cross-examining an opposing witness." Defense said smoothly, "My only purpose in all this is to arrive at the truth. It will not be necessary to do more than ask a few polite questions." "Well," said the judge dubiously, "you're the one handling the case. Call the witness." Ninheimer took the stand and was informed that he was still under oath. He looked more nervous than he had the day before, almost apprehensive. But Defense looked at him benignly. "Now, Professor Ninheimer, you are suing my clients in the amount of #." "That is the -- uh -- sum. Yes." "That is a great deal of money." "I have suffered a great deal of harm." "Surely not that much. The material in question involves only a few passages in a book. Perhaps these were unfortunate passages, but after all, books sometimes appear with curious mistakes in them" Ninheimer's nostrils flared. "Sir, this book was to have been the climax of my professional career! Instead, it makes me look like an incompetent scholar, a perverter of the views held by my honored friends and associates, and a believer of ridiculous and -- uh -- outmoded viewpoints. My reputation is irretrievably shattered! I can never hold up my head in any -- uh -- assemblage of scholars, regardless of the outcome of this trial. I certainly cannot continue in my career, which has been the whole of my life. The very purpose of my life has been -- uh -- aborted and destroyed." Defense made no attempt to interrupt the speech, but stared abstractedly at hi fingernails as it went on. He said very soothingly, "But surely, Professor Ninheimer, at your present age, you could not hope to earn more than -- let us be generous -- # during the remainder of your life. Yet you are asking the court to award you five times as much."L  even greater burst of emotion, "It is not in my lifetime alone that I am ruined. I do not know for how many generations I shall be pointed at by sociologists as a -- uh -- a fool or maniac. My real achievements will be buried and ignored. I am ruined not only until the day of my death, but for all time to come, because there will always be people who will not believe that a robot made those insertions -- " It was at this point that Robot EZ-# rose to his feet. Susan Calvin made no move to stop him. She sat motionless, staring straight ahead. Defense sighed softly. Easy's melodious voice carried clearly. It said, "I would like to explain to everyone that I did insert certain passages in the galley proofs that seemed directly opposed to what had been there at first -- " Even the Prosecuting Attorney was too startled at the spectacle of a seven-foot robot rising to address the court to be able to demand the stopping of what was obviously a most irregular procedure. When he could collect his wits, it was too late. For Ninheimer rose in the witness chair, his face working. He shouted wildly, "Damn you, you were instructed to keep your mouth shut about -- " He ground to a choking halt, and Easy was silent, too. Prosecution was on his feet now, demanding that a mistrial be declared. Justice Shane banged his gavel desperately. "Silence! Silence! Certainly there is every reason here to declare a mistrial, except that in the interests of justice I would like to have Professor Ninheimer complete his statement. I distinctly heard him say to the robot that the robot had been instructed to keep its mouth shut about something. There was no mention in your testimony, Professor Ninheimer, as to any instructions to the robot to keep silent about anything!" Ninheimer stared wordlessly at the judge. Justice Shane said, "Did you instruct Robot EZ-# to keep silent about something? And if so, about what?" "Your Honor -- " began Ninheimer hoarsely, and couldn't continue. The judge's voice grew sharp. "Did you, in fact, order the inserts in question to be made in the galleys and then order the robot to keep quiet about your part in this?" Prosecution objected vigorously, but Ninheimer shouted, "Oh, what's the use? Yes! Yes!" And he ran from the witness stand. He was stopped at the door by the bailiff and sank hopelessly into one of the last rows of seats, head buried in both hands. Justice Shane said, "It is evident to me that Robot EZ-# was brought here as a trick. Except for the fact that the trick served to prevent a serious miscarriage of justice, I would certainly hold attorney for the Defense in contempt. It is clear now, beyond any doubt, that the plaintiff has committed what is to me a completely inexplicable fraud since, apparently, he was knowingly ruining his career in the process -- " Judgment, of course, was for the defendant. #R. Susan Calvin had herself announced at Dr. Ninheimer's bachelor quarters in University Hall. The young engineer who had driven the car offered to go up with her, but she looked at him scornfully. "Do you think he'll assault me? Wait down here." Ninheimer was in no mood to assault anyone. He was packing, wasting no time, anxious to be away before the adverse conclusion of the trial became general knowledge. He looked at Calvin with a queerly defiant air and said, "Are you coming to warn me of a counter-suit? If so, it will get you nothing. I have no money, no job, no future. I can't even meet the costs of the trial." "If you're looking for sympathy," said Calvin coldly, "don't look for it here. This was your doing. However, there will be no counter-suit, neither of you nor of the university. We will even do what we can to keep you from going to prison for perjury. We aren't vindictive." "Oh, is that why I'm not already in custody for forswearing myself? I had wondered. But then," he added bitterly, "why should you be vindictive? You have what you want now." "Some of what we want, yes," said Calvin. "The university will keep Easy in its employ at a considerably higher rental fee. Furthermore, certain underground publicity concerning the trial will make it possible to place a few more of the EZ models in other institutions without danger of a repetition of this trouble" "Then why have you come to see me?" "Because I don't have all of what I want yet. I want to know why you hate robots as you do. Even if you had won the case, your reputation would have been ruined. The money you might have obtained could not have compensated for that. Would the satisfaction of your hatred for robots have done so?" "Are you interested in human minds, Dr. Calvin?" asked Ninheimer, with acid mockery. "Insofar as their reactions concern the welfare of robots, yes. For that reason, I have learned a little of human psychology." "Enough of it to be able to trick me!" "That wasn't hard," said Calvin, without pomposity. "The difficult thing was doing it in such a way as not to damage Easy." "It is like you to be more concerned for a machine than for a man." He looked at her with savage contempt. It left her unmoved. "It merely seems so, Professor Ninheimer. It is only by being concerned for robots that one can truly be concerned for twenty-first-century Man. You would understand this if you were a roboticist." "I have read enough robotics to know I don't want to be a roboticist!" "Pardon me, you have read a book on robotics. It has taught you nothing. You learned enough to know that you could order a robot to do many things, even to falsify a book, if you went about it properly. You learned enough to know that you could not order him to forget something entirely without risking detection, but you thought you could order him into simple silence more safely. You were wrong." "You guessed the truth from his silence?" "It wasn't guessing. You were an amateur and didn't know enough to cover your tracks completely. My only problem was to prove the matter to the judge and you were kind enough to help us there, in your ignorance of the robotics you claim to despise." there any purpose in this discussion?" asked Ninheimer wearily. "For me, yes," said Susan Calvin, "because I want you to understand how completely you have misjudged robots. You silenced Easy by telling him that if he told anyone about your own distortion of the book, you would lose your job. That set up a certain potential within Easy toward silence, one that was strong enough to resist our efforts to break it down. We would have damaged the brain if we had persisted. "On the witness stand, however, you yourself put up a higher counter-potential. You said that because people would think that you, not a robot, had written the disputed passages in the book, you would lose far more than just your job. You would lose your reputation, your standing, your respect, your reason for living. You would lose the memory of you after death. A new and higher potential was set up by you -- and Easy talked." "Oh, God," said Ninheimer, turning his head away. Calvin was inexorable. She said, "Do you understand why he talked? It was not to accuse you, but to defend you! It can be mathematically shown that he was about to assume full blame for your crime, to deny that you had anything to do with it The First Law required that. He was going to lie -- to damage himself -- to bring monetary harm to a corporation. All that meant less to him than did the saving of you. If you really understood robots and robotics, you would have let him talk. But you did not understand, as I was sure you wouldn't, as I guaranteed to the defense attorney that you wouldn't You were certain. in your hatred of robots, that Easy would act as a human being would act and defend itself at your expense. So you flared out at him in panic -- and destroyed yourself." Ninheimer said with feeling, "I hope some day your robots turn on you and kill you!" "Don't be foolish," said Calvin. "Now I want you to explain why you've done all this." Ninheimer grinned a distorted, humorless grin. "I am to dissect my mind, am I, for your intellectual curiosity, in return for immunity from a charge of perjury?" "Put it that way if you like," said Calvin emotionlessly. "But explain." "So that you can counter future anti-robot attempts more efficiently? With greater understanding?" "I accept that" "You know," said Ninheimer, "I'll tell you -- just to watch it do you no good at all. You can't understand human motivation. You can only understand your damned machines because you're a machine yourself, with skin on." TT was breathing hard and there was no hesitation in his speech, no searching for precision. It was as though he had no further use for precision. He said, "For two hundred and fifty years, the machine has been replacing Man and destroying the hander aftsman. Pottery is spewed out of molds and presses. Works of art have been replaced by identical gimcracks stamped out on a die. Call it progress, if you wish! The artist is restricted to abstractions, confined to the world of ideas. He must design something in mind -- and then the machine does the rest. "Do you suppose the potter is content with mental creation? Do you suppose the idea is enough? That there is nothing in the feel of the clay itself, in watching the thing grow as hand and mind work together? Do you suppose the actual growth doesn't act as a feedback to modify and improve the idea?" "You are not a potter," said Dr. Calvin. "I am a creative artist! I design and build articles and books. There is more to it than the mere thinking of words and of putting them in the right order. If that were all, there would be no pleasure in it, no return. "A book should take shape in the hands of the writer. One must actually see the chapters grow and develop. One must work and rework and watch the changes take place beyond the original concept even. There is taking the galleys in hand and seeing how the sentences look in print and molding them again. There are a hundred contacts between a man and his work at every stage of the game -- and the contact itself is pleasurable and repays a man for the work he puts into his creation more than anything else could. Your robot would take all that away." "So does a typewriter. So does a printing press. Do you propose to return to the hand-illumination of manuscripts?" "Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and cross-checking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only -- the barren decisions concerning wliat orders to give the robot next! I want to save the future generations of the world of scholarship from such a final hell. That meant more to me than even my own reputation and so I set out to destroy U. S. Robots by whatever means." "You were bound to fail," said Susan Calvin. "I was bound to try," said Simon Ninheimer. Calvin turned and left. She did her best to feel no pang of sympathy for the broken man. She did not entirely succeed. Can't judge if a man is a fiend or a martyr? Put him to this test -- time travel wounds all heels! T HE cry was in a deep voice, a breathless, badly frightened voice. Hoarse and urgent, it rose above the roar of the distant mob, above the rattle of traffic; it flung itself into the spacious office on the third floor of the Embassy and demanded immediate attention. His Excellency, the Ambassador from # A.D. -- the sole occupant of that office -- was a man of relaxed bearing and a wonderfully calm face. His eyes transmitted the unvarying message that all things were essentially simple -- and could be further simplified. It was, therefore, quite remarkable how that cry from the grounds below made him look suddenly uncertain. He rose and moved to the window with unaccustomed haste. A tall, bearded man, whose clothes were torn and whose body was badly bruised, had just leaped onto the Embassy lawn from the surrounding high fence. The bearded man pointed the forefingers of both hands at the third-floor office of the Ambassador from # A.D. and shrieked again: "Sanctuary!" There was an answering shriek from the mob cascading down the street toward him. The bearded man looked over his shoulder once, then leaped forward across the lawn. His feet could be heard pounding up the steps of the Embassy. Downstairs, a heavy door slammed behind him. The Ambassador from # A.D. bit his lip. Well, the fellow had made it. Now his problems began. He turned a dial on his wrist communicator. "All Embassy personnel," he said. "Attention! This is the Ambassador speaking. Bolt and barricade all street doors immediately! Barricade all windows on the street level that are not protected by bars. All female personnel and the fugitive who has just entered will be sent up to the second floor. Havemeyer, take charge of the first floor. Bruce, take charge of the second floor -- and keep the fugitive under careful guard. Dodson, report to me." notch. "Police Department? This is the Ambassador from # A.D. A fugitive has just entered the building, requesting sanctuary. From the looks of the mob behind him, I'd say that your normal detail down here will be inadequate to protect us. You will have to send reinforcements." The policeman's snort was as much anger as surprise. "You're giving sanctuary to Henry Groppus and you want us to protect you? Listen, I live in this time! It's as much as my life is worth to -- " "It's as much as your job is worth if a riot detail isn't down here in two minutes. Two minutes, I said. It is now precisely twentyseven minutes past six o'clock." "But listen!" The voice from the dial seemed almost hysterical. "That's Henry Groppus you have in there. Do you know what he did?" "At the moment, that's not relevant. If his request for asylum isn't honored, he will be returned to the proper authorities. I am asking protection for the Embassy from # A.D., for its property and personnel, which, like all Embassies and their staffs, enjoy extraterritorial status and immunity. It's your responsibility to see that we get it." The Ambassador clicked off and drew a deep breath. His calm was returning and once more his eyes announced that all complex matters could be refined down to simple ones -- and handled. As he turned to the window again, Dodson, his First Secretary, came in and stood respectfully at his shoulder. Together, they stared down at the mob, the relaxed, observant older man and the slender, alert young one who split his gaze between the scene below and his chief. As far as the eye could see, in all directions, the street was the color of the yelling mob. It had pushed right up against the fence, so hard and so tight that those in front were unable to climb it as they had intended, but were jammed, screaming their agony, into the iron bars. "The police detail on duty, sir," Dodson said in a low voice. "They weren't able to hold them back for more than a few seconds. But they gave us time we needed. Everything downstairs should be secure, sir." The Ambassador grunted. Now the fence was giving way. It bent slowly, steadily inward, like a black flower closing. And then it was down here and the mob spilled over it, down there and a thick wave of mob washed across the lawn, down everywhere, mob over it everywhere, mob rushing toward the building in which they stood, mob maddened and swirling all about them and breaking thunderously against the walls. T? OR just a moment, Dodson was looking contemptuously down through the window. "# A.D.!" The Ambassador grunted again. The grunt could be taken any one of several ways. The frenzied, directionless noise from below abruptly changed in quality. It became steady, rhythmical. At the peak of each pulsation, there was an enormous thump. After a while, the thumps were followed by a ripping sound. "Sir!" Havemeyer's voice came in suddenly on the wrist communicator. "The front door's beginning to give way. All right if we move up to the second floor?" "By all means. And as soon as you're up there, you and Bruce see to it that the doors, front and rear, are barricaded. Then I want you to stand by the destructive fuses on the Embassy files. If the mob breaks into the second floor, see to it that the files go." "Right, sir." "Do you think, sir, that there's any chance -- " Dodson had begun, when the sound of a dozen sirens made them look up. The riot squad was coming down from the sky on flying platforms, two men to a platform. Soupy yellow stuff flowed out of the nozzles of the canisters each policeman carried, flowed out and bubbled into the mob. The Ambassador looked at his watch. "One minute and fifty seconds," he said comfortably. Then he went back to his desk. Dodson stood at the window, watching the mob stumble back across the Embassy lawn in chokes and gasps. Above all, he was fascinated by the number of individuals who, in the midst of their choking, stopped and turned and shook their fists at the building behind them. When he could tear himself away, he described them to his chief. "They evidently feel pretty strongly, sir," he suggested. "This is no ordinary mob." "No, it's no ordinary mob. And Groppus is no ordinary criminal. Send him in. Tell Havemeyer and Bruce to start straightening up the place. I want an itemized statement on all damage to be forwarded to the Secretary of State before five o'clock." "Yes, sir." Dodson paused near the door. "You know, sir, the staff received him inside as something of a hero." The Ambassador looked up, his calm eyes slightly intent. "Of course they did. How did you feel about him, Dodson -- criminal or hero?" The secretary's face went immediately blank as his burgeoning diplomat's mind tried to blunt the question. "Well, of course, sir, he's both -- both criminal and hero." "Yes, but which is he chiefly? Take a stand, Dodson. How did you feel about him? Off the record, naturally." "Well, sir," the young man began, then hesitated. "I think the dictum that applies here is When in Rome... We are, in effect, in Rome. Therefore, Henry Groppus should undoubtedly be considered a criminal." "Yes," the Ambassador said thoughtfully. "In Rome. All right, send him in, send him in." sat back and stared at the ceiling -- calmly. Then he got up and paced back and forth across the office -- calmly. Then he went back to his desk, opened a heavy, gray-bound book, skimmed through a few pages in it and finally leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the polished desktop -- calmly, very calmly. His wrist communicator buzzed. He flipped it on. "Your Excellency, this is the Secretary of State," said a formal, moistureless voice. "Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador, with equal formality. "What can I do for you?" "Your Excellency, according to information just received by my office, a certain Henry Hancock Groppus has escaped from the jail cell in which he was awaiting execution and taken shelter in your Embassy. I must ask you if this is true." "That is true, Mr. Secretary, except for one small detail. At the time he entered the Embassy, he was not being pursued by lawfully constituted authority, but by an unlawful and ungoverned mob." The voice in the communicator coughed an extremely dry cough. "I cannot regard this detail as being relevant, Your Excellency. In the name of the government of the United States of America of # A.D. -- to which government you are accredited and whose laws you are bound to respect -- I must ask you to surrender the person of Henry Hancock Groppus, convicted felon, to the justice of his country and his time." "And I, Mr. Secretary," the Ambassador replied with equal dry urbanity, "as a representative and servant of United Earth of # A.D., must respectfully decline until I have had time to study the situation." "In that case, Your Excellency, I regret to have to inform you of the extreme displeasure of my government and our determination to take whatever steps are necessary to secure the person of Henry Hancock Groppus." "Noted, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador. There was a silence. "May I speak to you on the private channel, Your Excellency?" "You may, Mr. Secretary. One moment, please." The Ambassador from # A.D. pressed a button on his desk which locked his door and lit a Do Not Disturb indicator. Then he swung around and switched on the big screen behind his desk. appeared on it "Hi, Don," he said. "This is one big stink we're in." "I know, Cleve," the Ambassador sighed. "A bigamy case. Capital offense." "Bigamy, hell! Polygamy, Don boy! That's what this joker's been convicted of, polygamy. Advocating, abetting and encompassing polygamy. You just don't go any lower." "In your time, you mean. In #." "In our time, yes. That's the time we're living in right now. The time that has to face the problem of one woman to every ten men because of the genetic imbalance created by the last world war. All right, so we haven't licked the Uterine Plague yet. We won't lick it for another fifty years, according to you, though you won't tell our medics how we finally will solve it." The Ambassador gestured wearily at the screen. "You know as well as I, Cleve, there are things that Temporal Embassies can do and there are things they can't do." "Okay. Good. No argument You boys take your orders and have your problems. But we've got problems, too. Gigantic ones. We've got a social code that was designed in the days when there were equal numbers of men and women, and it's splitting at the seams everywhere. We've got to persuade hunthat it's right and proper for them to lead lives of the most maddening frustration if we want to keep civilization from dissolving into hand-to-hand battles. We've got them persuaded -- about as well persuaded as a herd of rutting elephants. And along comes this Henry Groppus and his handful of crackpot Mendelists, making strange, sudden noises in the rear of the herd and -- " "Slow down, Cleve. Take a deep breath. I know the kind of problems your time is facing, perhaps better than you. I know it from the history I studied in school, and, since I've arrived here in # as Ambassador from the Next Century, I've seen it sharp and bloodily clear, at first hand. I know what an explosive danger the Mendelist philosophy is. I couldn't be more sympathetic, I assure you. "Nonetheless, Cleve, you're an important government official; you're not the man in the street. # is grappling with the social effects of the Uterine Plague, and to # it looks like the biggest thing that ever was. But # is just a drop in the historical bucket. And so, for that matter," he added in all fairness, "is #, my own period. Be just to your position and your intellect; look at the thing in perspective." T V 'HE Secretary of State made a sluicing motion at the top of his bald head. "What perspective? How perspective?" "Simply this, as an example. Take an Englishman of the upper middle class, a rich merchant, let us say. In the time of the Tudors, he'd be all for increasing the powers of the king, all for an absolute monarchy, all for a very strong central government -- the things that would damage his superiors, the feudal nobility, the most. A century later, when the nobility had been pretty much reduced to so much court decoration, his greatgreat-grandson would be fighting the absolutism of the Stuarts tooth and nail, insisting that the people had a right to call their king to account and that any government which was dictatorial deserved to be overthrown. "And a hundred years or so after that, under the Hanoverian son, looking across the channel to France, observing that the very common people there in the course of taking the same drastic action with their king had completely bollixed up industry, banking and commerce -- he would be exclaiming his pious horror over regicides and calling for laws that would strengthen the government and keep revolutionaries in their place." "The point being," said the Secretary of State, "that most social values are conditioned by the time, place and prevailing political climate. Is that what you mean by perspective?" "Exactly," the Ambassador said The bald-headed man stared angrily out of the screen. "I wish I weren't so upset It's my misfortune to forget every dirty word I know when I get really mad. And this calls for -- Look, Don, I don't know very much about #, what's important what's sacred, what's not to be touched. The rules of your outfit forbid you to give us a very clear picture of your time -- and you're a close-mouthed character to begin with. But I'd give the goddam front lobe of my brain to see how you'd behave if some Henry Groppus of the twenty-third century did the future equivalent of polygamy in your neck of the woods. "You'd perspective him, you would. Now I'm not going to beat about the bush any more. Enough history, enough philosophy. Our government wouldn't last a week if we let Mendelists get away with preaching their vicious nonsense, let alone committing overt acts. I hate to have to put it this way, Don, but the man is the vilest of criminals. You're going to hand him over to us." dor from # AX. said, "I repeat: he's a criminal in your terms. Beyond that, I repeat: I have to study the situation. He had escaped from prison; he was being pursued by a lynch mob; he took asylum in our Embassy, which is legally an enclave of # in the present-day United States, an extension of our time and government into yours. Don't talk to me as if I were your office boy's assistant, Cleve." "A criminal is a criminal," the bald-headed man went on doggedly. " This criminal has got to be brought to justice. I've asked you for him on the record and off the record. Next step is formal extradition papers. And the step after that -- well, I won't like to do it, but I will." "I wouldn't like you to do it, either," said the Ambassador calmly and softly. Their eyes locked. The Secretary of State spread his hands. "Well, there it is," he muttered, and he clicked off. Dodson and Groppus had been waiting patiently outside. When the Ambassador unlocked the door and nodded them in, he looked the bearded man over carefully. A thoroughly bewhiskered, messily eyebrowed and wellmuscled person, perhaps a jot past middle age, he stood clumsily tall and stiffly erect in a manner slightly reminiscent of a military cadet who had arrived at the academy just the evening before. His eyes were mild and apologetic, not at all fanatic and intense. They had a tendency to blink if you stared at them too hard. His hands were the most vibrant part of him. Even in comparative repose, when he was listening or thinking, they kept going through the repertoire of fluid, underlining gestures of the practiced sidewalk exhorter. "I suppose you know, Mr. Groppus, that you are already the subject of a rather acrimonious controversy between your government and my Embassy?" said the Ambassador. "Not my government. I don't recognize it as mine. I don't admit its jurisdiction over me." "Unfortunately, it feels differently. And it is larger, more powerful and more numerous than you. Please sit down." Henry Groppus lowered his head and shook it from side to side slowly, a negative gesture that could make its point the entire length of a meeting hall. "I prefer to stand, thank you. I always stand. Size, power, numbers -- since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So far, they haven't succeeded."  murmured, "Very true. But, on the other hand, they do exceedingly well with life and death. Which, of course, brings us back to the present moment and you. As a convicted criminal under sentence of -- " "I am not a criminal." "You aren't? In that case, Mr. Groppus, we have all been misled. I really must beg your pardon. Suppose you tell me then: how, precisely, do you visualize your role?" "As a political refugee! I come here, persecuted and cast out, to my true home and nation. I claim spiritual citizenship in #." "Spiritual citizenship? That's hardly the best kind. But putting that complex question aside for the moment, let me ask you, Mr. Groppus: what has given you the impression that my era shares your beliefs? The first rule of all Temporal Embassies is to transmit no information about the technological status and social attitudes of their own time to the period in which they are accredited. I fail to see what basis you have for -- " "I always suspected that the future would be Mendelist, but I couldn't be really sure. When the mob broke into the jail to lynch me and I got away from them, this was the only place I could think of hiding in. Now that I've been here for a while and seen you people -- I know! The next century belongs to us!" The Ambassador looked completely startled and unbelieving, as if he'd stubbed an emotion on a projecting rock. He shot a quick, questioning glance at his First Secretary. "I'm sorry, sir," Dodson said in a low, rapid voice. "Bruce. It was his fault He was so busy barricading the second floor against the mob that he neglected to take proper precautions. Some of the clerks came up to the prisoner during the excitement and got into conversation with him. By the time I reached him, the damage had been done." "Some of the clerks -- " His Excellency fought with himself for a moment then squirted out an immense, protective cloud of calm. He said, after a deep breath, "I was under the impression that my staff was composed of trained employees, regularly briefed as to their responsibilities. Well trained. Down to the very lowest echelons." "Yes, sir, but these were three youngsters on their first extra-temporal assignment I'm not trying to make excuses for them, but it's been very dull at the Embassy these last few months, especially for romantic kids who came out all hot and bothered at the idea of seeing history come alive and happen. And then, all of a sudden, there's a lynch mob and a siege of the Embassy. They find themselves standing next to an actual twenty-second-century Mendelist Martyr in the flesh. Well, you know how it is, sir. They started out by asking excited, admiring questions -- and ended up answering them." r I "'HE Ambassador nodded gravely. "Groppus is the man to do just that. But after this affair has been cleared up, Vice-Consul Bruce and those three clerks will be the subject of an investigation and a report through Temporal Embassy channels clear to the end of the line." Groppus, meanwhile, had wound himself up and was now running strong. "It had to be! It had to be!" he chanted, pacing up and down the office, his tom clothes whipping in the breeze created by his gesticulating hands. "We carried the word to the people and told them it had to be. If the Uterine Plague means that nine-tenths of all female children are still-born, does it follow that the remaining precious tenth should marry at random? No, we said. Such a thought stinks in the nostrils of evolution! "It's not enough to require every prospective husband to show a certificate of fecundity. We must go further! We must march under the slogan of a maximum genetic potential in every marriage. After all, we are not living in the darkness of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries! With modem eugenic methods, we can know exactly what we are getting in every fetus conceived. But even that is not enough. We must -- " "All right," said the Ambassador from # A.D. wearily, dropping into his chair and frowning at the desktop. "I am quite familiar with the sentiments. I had them drummed into me all through childhood, and I had to memorize and repeat them all through my adolescence." "Even that is not enough!" repeated the bearded man, his voice rising majestically. "We must go further yet, we told them. We must turn a curse into a blessing, the Uterine Plague into a true genetic revival! If only the best should be allowed to reproduce, why not the best of the best? And if only the best of the best -- if only the smallest, most refined nugget of mankind is to be allowed the privileges of further heredity -- " here his voice sank to a dramatic whisper, before suddenly soaring up again -- "surely we will not presume to impose the ancient, outworn limitation of one woman, one wife, one mate at a time? "Surely the race -- stumbling and floundering in a deadly biological morass -- deserves more than this mote, this snippet of aid? Doesn't the next, the smaller generation, deserve the best of the previous, the larger generation, whatever custom may whine and morality may squeak to the contrary? We don't preach sexual monopoly: we preach sexual salvation! And I say to you -- " "Oh, Dodson, please take him out!" the Ambassador begged. "I have to think, and these grammar school recitations are giving me a headache!" A T the door, Groppus abruptly slid from his dizzy forensic heights and landed springily on his feet "So you won't allow them to extradite me, Your Excellency? You won't relinquish me to the justice of these primitives?" "I haven't decided one way or the other. There's more at stake than your person. I have to consider the matter carefully." "Consider? Are you for light or for darkness? Are you for the future or the past? What is there to consider? I am a spiritual citizen, a philosophical forefather of # A.D. I have the right to sanctuary here -- I demand that you give me asylum!" The Ambassador stared at him calmly. "Neither spiritual citizenship nor philosophical forebears are included in the category of' duties for which I am responsible. And I would like to point out to you, Mr. Groppus, that under international law -- from which the body of extra-temporal law is derived -- a fugitive's rights of asylum are never implicit, but are dependent entirely upon the determ ination of the state to which he flees or the embassy of refuge in each separate case." Dodson closed the door on the bearded man's dawning expression of consternation. When he returned, having deposited Groppus with guards who were going to be very self-consciously uncommunicative, the Ambassador told him of the threat contained in the Secretary of State's last comment The young man swallowed. "That seems to imply that -- that shortly after we're served with extradition papers, sir, a forcible entry of the Embassy will be made in order to remove the prisoner. But that's unheard of!" "It may be the sort of thing that isn't talked about much, but it certainly isn't unheard of. It would mean, of course, that the Temporal Embassy would be permanently withdrawn from the United States of this era." "Would they risk that, sir? After all, it's their link with the future! We can't give them all the information they want, but we do give them whatever knowledge the Temporal Embassies in our own time say is safe. And we take nothing in return. It would be idiotic for them to break relations." The Ambassador studied a page in the gray-bound book on his desk. "Nothing which must be done is idiotic," he said, largely to himself. "Precedent after precedent. A matter of finding the right kind of spurious legality in which to cloak such action. And who is to say what is spurious or not about the reasons a sovereign state gives for taking drastic measures, if it believes that the measures are essential to its survival? A case like this, so intricately involved with mass frustration and the most basic problems of individual male egos..." closely. "So we give up the fugitive? I thought we would have to from the very beginning, if you'll pardon me for saying so, sir. He is a criminal, no doubt about it. But it is going to be an uncomfortable business, very much like turning in a forefather, at that He thinks so much like us." The young man rubbed a hand reflectively against a clean-shaven chin. "Even looks like us -- I mean the way we looked back home in #, before we were anachronised for the Embassy in this period. It's amazing in how many petty and minor ways, as well as large and important ones, Groppus has anticipated our age." His Excellency stood up and stretched at great length. "Nonsense, Dodson, nonsense! Don't confuse cause with effect and real history with dramatic personalities. Henry Groppus didn't grow whiskers because he envisioned the possibility that every man in our time will -- that's not the way it works at all. We go about bearded because our entire civilization is based on the Genetic File. And the concept of the Genetic File had its roots among the ideas of the twentysecond-century Mendelists -- a maladjusted anti-social bunch who wore whiskers in a non-whiskered time as part of their general protest. "Put the utopian babblings of Henry Groppus up against the hard, workaday facts of the Genetic File in our age -- do you see any real correspondence? Here and there, clumsily -- as in Groppus advocating compulsory polygamy for genetic aristocrats, and in our society allowing an occasional, gifted man, under special circumstances, to take more than one wife. The sad truth about political saints of any given past is that nobody but a scholar will take the trouble to read their complete works and try to see them whole. But all this to one side: the Mendelists are political saints in our time and we can't turn one of them in." "I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir," Dodson objected. "You said just a moment ago that the present-day United States government felt so strongly about this matter that it was prepared to recover fugitives by force, even at the cost of breaking diplomatic relations with our time. Well, sir? And then there's paragraph #a of the Temporal Embassy By-laws: '... and above all the duty ot respecting the laws, the customs and the mores peculiar to the time in which an Embassy is accredited and of giving no offense whatsoever thereto'." The Ambassador from # A.D. began emptying his desk, explaining gently over his shoulder: "By-laws are one thing, Dodson. Natural laws are another. And the first and most fundamental natural law of a public servant is this: don't bite the hand that feeds you. Don't offend the sensibilities of the government officials who employ you. And above all, don't offend the sensibilities of the public who employs them. If I turned Groppus in, I would receive the heartfelt appreciation of this period -- and never get another diplomatic appointment from # A.D. That's the basis on which I finally made my decision. "So we simplify things. We close down the Embassy before even the extradition warrant arrives, and we leave, with all our personnel, papers and our precious fugitive, through the emergency chrondromos in the basement Back in our time, we make the necessary explanations, they make the necessary apologies to this period, and, after a necessary interval has elapsed and memories have dimmed a bit, a new Temporal Ambassador from # A.D. is appointed -- one who will swear upon his arrival that he would absolutely never dream of obstructing justice. Everyone's face is saved." He chucklingly prodded the astonished First Secretary in the ribs with the gray-bound Casebook of Extra-temporal Law. "Jump, my boy, jump! The Embassy has to be ready to move out of here in an hour. And Havemeyer has to check out the scientific problems involved in bringing Henry Groppus into the future! And you have to write out a visa for him!" exact, one hundred years and three weeks later -- Dodson called on the Ambassador, who was packing busily, having just been appointed to the Embassy on Ganymede. Both men scratched from time to time at newly sprouted hair on their faces. "Have you heard, sir? About Groppus? He finally did it!" "Did what, my boy? The last I heard, he was going from triumph to triumph. Adoring crowds everywhere. A speech at the Monument to the Mendelist Martyrs. Another speech on the steps of the North American Genetic File, tearfully hailing the concrete reality of a dream hallowed in blood -- or some such moist metaphor." The young man shook his head excitedly. "That's what I mean. After the speech on the steps of the North American Genetic File last week, he went inside with a flourish and made out an application for a fatherhood certificate -- just in case, he explained, he ran into a woman he wanted to marry. Well, this morning the Genetic File completed its regulation chromosome survey on him -- and he was turned down! Too many unstable patterns, said the voucher. But that's nothing, sir, nothing! What do you think he did fifteen minutes ago?" "I don't know." The Ambassador shrugged. "Blew up the Genetic File?" "That's exactly what he did! He made up the explosive himself, he said. He claimed he had to free mankind from the tyranny of eugenic red tape. He destroyed the File completely, sir!" He sat down heavily. The Ambassador's face had gone white. "But," he whispered, "but -- the Genetic File! The only complete genetic record of every individual in North America! The basis of our civilization!" "Isn't it -- Isn't it -- " Dodson gave up trying to express the calamity in words. He clenched his fists. "He's under heavy guard. But I can tell you this, sir, and Fm not the only one who feels that way -- he'll never live to face sentence. Not if I know # A.D.!" r ' I HE cry was in a deep voice, a breathless, badly frightened voice. Hoarse and urgent, it rose above the roar of the distant mob, above the rattle of traffic; it flung itself into the spacious office on the third floor of the Embassy and demanded immediate attention. His Excellency, the Ambassador from # A.D. -- the sole occupant of that office -- was a man of tense bearing and an extremely strained face. His eyes transmitted the unvarying message that all things were essentially complex -- and might be further complicated. It was, therefore, not at all remarkable how that cry from the grounds below made him look suddenly uncertain. He rose and moved to the window with his usual haste. A tall, bearded man, whose clothes were tom and whose body was badly bruised, had just leaped onto the Embassy lawn from the surrounding high fence. The bearded man pointed the forefingers of both hands at the third-floor office of the Ambassador from # A.D. and shrieked again: " Sanctuary " "How do you know you haven't been in space opera? How do you know you aren't a crashed saucerjockey? Who were you anyhow? Send # to Box #, SA, Silver Spring, Maryland for your copy of "History of Man" by L. Ron Hubbard." We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly l It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have itl J Department of Space Medicine Advanced Course, Flight Surgeons (academic requirement: M.D.) I hour. Upper Atmosphere (physics and chemistry) # hrs. Space Medicine (space equivalent flights, satellite flight) # hrs. Human Engineering of Space Cabins I hour. Weightlessness (physiological effects) I hour. Cosmic Rays I hour. Artificial Satellite # hrs. Physiology of the DayNight Cycle # hrs. Composition of Planetary atmospheres I hour. Intern, approach to medical problems of space flight I hour. Medical Problems, Air Power. The visitor closed the folder, looked at the Chief of the Department and asked, "Only one hour for weightlessness?" and the Chief started explaining. This visit is not an imaginary one, taking place on "a summer day in #." The date was the #st of May, #; the place was the School of Aviation Medicine, United States Air Force ( Samusaf ), located at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, commanded by Major General Otis O. Benson, Jr. I, with General Benson's permission, was the visitor. The curriculum is a real one, the Department of Space Medicine is one uf the Departments of Samusaf, and its Chief is Professor Hubertus Strughold, M.D., PhD., with whom I had smorgasbord the next night, prior to taking off for the place which calls itself, unofficially and proudly, Rocket City, even though the prosaic Post Office Department keeps, calling it Huntsville, Alabama. Department of Space Medicine do not happen by accident. They come into existence gradually. Hence they have a history, and in the case of something which is part of the U. S. Air Force, but headed by a former German, there are several lines to this history. The beginning at the American end was the appointment, by the Adjutant General of the Army, of a board of medical officers. The board met for the first time in the fall of # and began to think about its job, which was to study the "selection and maintenance" of pilots and to make the necessary recommendations. The first recommendation of the board was the establishment of a medical research laboratory which, in time, grew into the School of Aviation Medicine of the U. S. Air Force. As the Surgeon General of the Air Force, General Harry G. Armstrong, pointed out later, the School of Aviation Medicine happens to be older than its parent, the Air Force, because at the time the medical research laboratory was established, U. S. military flying was a part of the Army's Signal Corps. But, of course, during the remaining days of the First World War, the inter-war period and during the Second World War, at which time General Armstrong was a colonel at Wright Field, the School of Aviation Medicine had both feet firmly on the ground and its head not much higher than the clouds. Space was still firmly reserved for the science fiction writers who were not aware that the people now in Rocket City, then at Peenemiinde on Usedom at the Baltic Sea, were getting ready to shoot into space. Space Medicine did not yet exist at Randolph Air Force Base. The beginning at the other end consisted very simply in the fact that a student who was interested in flying and whose name happened to be Hubertus Strughold got himself a Ph.D. in physiology and also an M.D. degree in preparation for an academic career. Inside Space Cabin Simulator, photographed through open door. Behind author's head is small airlock for passing meals into cabin I may add here by way of explanation that a physiologist could not teach physiology to medical students in a German university if he did not have an M.D. degree. The same applied to the men who taught pharmacology or toxicology; the anatomist could be a possible exception with a PhD. instead of an M.D., but he then officially belonged to the Department of Zoology. In #, young Professor Strughold started a rather daring innovation -- he delivered a weekly lecture on aviation medicine. When telling me this, Strughold smilingly recalled that some people in his audience, especially (German) army officers, smiled in a different way and very politely shook thenheads. Lectures on aviation medicine! Who needs that? Those medical people really overdid their specialization! But he kept lecturing on aviation medicine.  lecture, the Nazis came to power. The professor of physiology of the University of Wurzburg, Dr. Strughold, was suspect in their eyes. He was not a party member, and if he was invited to join, he forgot all about it. Moreover, he was known to be a Roman Catholic. In spite of all this, he was made director of the Institute for Aviation Medicine in Berlin in # and held his post until #. It is a virtually unknown fact in this country that Goering, as head of the Luftwaffe, decreed in # that his airmen did not need any psychology and simply disbanded the psychological departments which existed. But the need for physiology was not doubted, even by Goering. The institute in Berlin was more or less left alone and the Allies, after the war, found nothing to criticize. Meanwhile, the University of Heidelberg was in severe need of teachers without a political past. Doctor Strughold became professor of physiology at Heidelberg. This was in #. One year later, he had to request a leave to go to the School of Aviation Medicine in Texas. There followed a year of medical teaching and of talks in all directions and in March, #, General Armstrong established the Department of Space Medicine (at first it was called the Department of Space Flight Medicine) because he was convinced -- "for no special reason," as he said -- that "some day we will travel beyond the stratosphere." Space travel, to General Arnold, was the logical outcome of general progress and he wanted to be prepared for it in the medical field, especially since, in the past, medicine had quite often lagged behind engineering progress. The first project of the new department was to think about a double proposition: (A) just what were the medical problems that would come up in flights beyond the atmosphere and (B) how much did we know about the climatic conditions (conducive to health and happiness or otherwise ) on other planets? For the first few years, most of the work consisted in thinking, with a little experimentation in high-altitude chambers thrown in. A number of reports and papers (mainly published in the Journal of Aviation Medicine) were the result. I'll mention just two items from this early work. One was the realization that air travel had created a physiological novelty -- namely that you can get "out of step" with the time in which you live. This factor could never have been noticed before; when you cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship, or the North American continent by train, you have to advance -- or else to set back, depending on the direction in which you travel -- your watch one hour every day. This is hardly noticed in the general Dr. James G. Gaume explaining controls of Simulator. The aas bottle racks are attached to outside holiday atmosphere of an Atlantic crossing or in the general boredom of a long train ride. But if I take a non-stop flight from Idlewild Airport to Hollywood, I am in for an awfully long day.  noon, New York time, I land at Los Angeles International Airport at # PM, both according to my wristwatch and to my stomach. But the airport clock in Los Angeles says that it is # PM. My wristwatch can be adjusted in less the cabin. than a minute. My stomach lacks such a mechanism. By # PM, local time, my stomach insists that I have missed dinner. By # PM, my stomach is satisfied, but I have the general feeling that I ate much too late. By # PM, local time, I think it is time to go to bed because it feels (and physiologically it is) #I pm. Unfortunately, the people around me think it is only # pm and behave accordingly. If the DC-# displaces me in time for about three hours for such a flight, the DC-# or the Boeing # will displace me for about six hours. The body does adjust, at the rate of about one hour in #, which is the reason it was never noticed in ship or train travel. Whatever lack of adjustment there wag left on arrival was blamed on general travel fatigue, with which, of course, it did blend. Now the fact of this discrepancy between physiological time and actual time is most important if the traveler has to be in top form immediately after arrival. Travel times then must be planned accordingly or the traveler may lose out at the conference table, the concert hall or the sports field. The other item I want to mention is the concept of "space equivalent altitudes." If a man, by magic, were suddenly transported to an altitude of, say, a thousand miles, he would die from "space exposure." He would have no air to breathe, his skin would blister under the unshielded ultra-violet light from the Sun, he would be hit by a few cosmic rays and possibly by a micro-meteorite, and, because of the lack of pressure, his warm body fluids would boil. I have used the expression "by magic" advisedly to indicate that I had instantaneous transportation in mind. In reality, this would not be instantaneous, and as the test person ascended into the atmosphere, he would learn that the "space conditions" are not attained all together at the same moment, but that they would come into play one by one. Oxygen deficiency takes place soonest, beginning for some people at three miles, for others at four miles, but being complete for absolutely everybody at seven miles. There just is not enough oxygen to breathe; hence this particular space condition takes place fairly low in the atmosphere. (There are a number of complicating factors, but I trust Strughold will forgive me for skipping them, since Galaxy is not a medical journal.) The next altitude where a condition like one in space takes place is around # feet. At that height, the boiling point of water has dropped to around # C. or # F. This is the temperature of the body fluids, so they begin to vaporize. The term "boiling," originally used, has now been abandoned because it produces a misleading mental image. The current and, it is hoped, permanent term, is space ebullism, coined by using the Latin word ebullire which means "to bubble out."  vertently, caused the impression that space ebullism will take place at a precise altitude. One might say they sounded as if the man were still safe at # feet and doomed at # feet This, of course, is nonsense and would make the danger point vary with geographical latitude. Furthermore, the vaporization arid bubble formation also depends on local pressures in the body (which is different, for example, in veins and in arteries) and on local heat, for different parts of the body may have fairly distinct temperatures. Space ebullism will begin between # and # feet and, for some parts of the body, up to # feet. So this is another "space equivalent altitude," but with a slight difference. At # feet, the man would still be conscious for # to # seconds and might be able to do something to save himself (if pressure is restored before that time is up, he will probably survive) while in actual space the period of consciousness would be only # to # seconds. But, though at # feet you have reached two space equivalents (anoxia or more precisely anoxic anoxia, lack of enough oxygen; and space ebullism because of lack of pressure), the other space equivalents have not yet been reached. The atmosphere is still a fine protection against ultra-violet -- that particular space equivalent altitude lies between # and # feet -- and against meteoric dust. The atmosphere does not become space equivalent with regard to meteorites below # miles. While the atmosphere as a whole reaches up for quite some distance, "space with some of its properties reaches down to # to # feet," as Strughold puts it A LL this introduction was necessary to show the things the Department of Space Medicine has to worry about. In the early years, incidentally, the staff of the department consisted of just three men, Prof. Strughold (physiology), Dr. Heinz Haber (physics and astronomy) and Dr. Buettner (meteorology). Later, Dr. Fritz Haber (engineering) was with the department for some time. Now the three men working directly with Prof. Strughold are James G. Gaume (M.D.), Captain Emanuel M. Roth (M.D.) and Mr. Fenton Duepner (electronics engineering). But I must not forget the department's hard-working secretary, Mrs. Margaret B. Niehaus who, among other things, is supposed to know where everybody is at a given moment, and usually does. What is at first confusing to a casual visitor is that several scientists whose work belongs into the concepts of space medicine do not belong to the department, even though they are at Randolph Air Force Base. For example, George T. Hauty (Ph.D.) belongs to the Department of Experimental Psychology, while the psychologist Siegfried J. Gerathewohl (PhD.) is in the Department of Ophthalmology and Hans-Georg Clamann (M.D.) is in the Physiology-Biophysics Department. After I had made some official and some private visits and brought myself more or less up to date on personnel and areas of research, Prof. Strughold asked me, "What do you want to see first -- Mars in a jar or the spaceship in the basement?" Since Mars in a jar was one floor closer, I decided on that. r  I HE surface conditions of Mars, as you probably know, are as follows: Air pressure like that in our atmosphere eleven miles up, but with a different composition -- all nitrogen, that is, with a possible faint trace of oxygen and a relative humidity of not quite one per cent. Daytime temperature up to # F., nighttime temperature below minus # F., surface gravity # that of Earth. Except for the lower gravity, all this can be duplicated in a restricted space. The restricted spaces in use look very much like large pickle jars. They hold soil and rock of a type we would expect to crunch underfoot on Mars. Their atmosphere is nitrogen of sufficiently low density with a trace of water vapor. During the day, the jars stand on shelves in the air-conditioned rooms and are permitted to warm up to # to # F. In the evening, they are put into a very cold super refrigerator. Fortunately, the difference between Earth day and Martian day is only # minutes and about # seconds, which can be disregarded. The "inhabitants" of the Mars jars are only bacteria, so far. The interesting point is that they are inhabitants, for they can live under these conditions. It seems that whenever a new colony of bacteria is introduced to Mars, a large number of them die off, but the tougher survivors soon increase the population figure again. Next to the Mars jars, incidentally, there was apparatus with algae busily producing oxygen. "Chlorella?" I asked, because all such work I have ever read about had been with chlorella algae. "No," was the answer, "this is Nostoc." And since I did not answer at once, the speaker (I believe he was Lt. John A. Kooistra, Jr., but wouldn't swear to it) continued : "This does not mean that we think Nostoc will be the last word, but it is our starting point." My silence had had an entirely different reason, however. Nostoc is virtually a childhood friend of mine. After Krakatoa blew up in #, completely sterilizing itself, the ruins of that island were resettled by living things. The first living thing to establish itself on the bare volcanic rock was Nostoc, which seems to be about as hardy an explorer and settler as Man himself. "All we have to do now," mused somebody, "is to teach these algae a few things. They have to learn to live on human waste materials, to swallow clouds of carbon dioxide, to produce clouds of pure oxygen, to reproduce quickly and not succumb to accidental poisoning, to thrive under zero-g and become edible in several different flavors" It was not completely a joke. It is perfectly possible for algae to do every bit of this. All you need to do is to find, or breed, the right strains. E climbed down to the basement, where the Department of Space Medicine has built itself a spaceship. Like the proverbial boat in the cellar, they couldn't get it out in one piece, if at all, even though it is not a whole spaceship but merely a spaceship cabin. It began as a project several years ago under the name of Sealed Cabin; now that it is a reality, it is known under the more appropriate name of Space Cabin Simulator. It is made of steel and the inside air space is # cubic feet. Outside the Simulator, the basement air is an even air-conditioned # F. Inside the Simulator, after the steel door has been closed, it can be anything Dr. Gaume wants it to be. My first question was what will happen if nothing is done. The result is about what one should expect. After three hours, the inside temperature is up to about # degrees and the relative humidity is around the same figure. If I remember correctly, it trails a bit behind, but not much. The external shape of the Space Cabin Simulator is not at all easy to describe. The main part of it is a wide steel cylinder standing on end. In front, a boxlike shape is attached to this cylinder. You enter through this section. The man who serves as a test subject sits facing the (closed) door. If the test lasts long -- some men have been inside for over # hours -- the chair opens out into a six-foot bed. If the test subject wants to sleep, the scientists don't mind at all, but he must be able to sleep with the lights on, for he is, after all, under observation whether awake or asleep. To the left of the test subject, there is a small airlock through which meals can be passed inside. All the control equipment is outside, partly for reasons of simplicity, partly for easy access in case something needs to be adjusted or repaired. The simplest test would be that a man sits inside for a number of hours with a supply of reading matter. His very presence ruins the atmosphere and the machinery's job is to keep the atmosphere in good repair. The man does three main things to the sealed air. He heats it up, he removes oxygen from it by breathing, and he adds carbon dioxide and water vapor, also by breathing, plus more water vapor by skin evaporation. The oxygen is replaced as it is used up, the carbon dioxide is removed chemically, and the water vapor is removed by condensing it out in the air conditioner, which also removes the surplus heat. The air breathed by the man is always the same. Nothing is added but oxygen, nothing removed but heat, water vapor and carbon dioxide. This simple test is actually more a test of the machinery than of the man. But it has to begin that way. Only if you are sure that the machinery can keep the air cool and breathable can you start introducing variations. One elementary variation of this type is to permit the carbon dioxide to accumulate. Eventually, in a spaceship, plants are to be called upon to absorb the carbon dioxide and a good deal of the moisture and to produce the oxygen for the crew. Plants can do with the very small amount of carbon dioxide normally in the air. They do better if the carbon dioxide content is somewhat higher. How high can it be permitted to get, for the sake of the plants, without harming the men? the pressure in the cabin. I don't know what the simulated spaceship in the basement at Randolph Air Force Base weighs, but a real spaceship cabin will have to be much lighter. Any engineer knows that there are spots in any structure where a leak may take place. He also knows that there may be a slow leak with # pounds of pressure on one side (and no pressure on the other), but that there may be no leak if the pressure is only # pounds per square inch. Before you can decide on building such a lighter cabin for less inside pressure, though, you have to find out how the man inside is doing. This is one of the many many possibilities where the Simulator comes in as a research instrument. Reduce the total pressure inside the Simulator to # pounds per square inch. But vary the ratio between nitrogen and oxygen in such a manner that the man still gets the same amount of oxygen with every breath he takes. How does the man react? Well, he doesn't, which is to say that he feels fine. But there is now another problem: the cabin air is much richer in oxygen than normal air. How much of a fire hazard is this richer oxygen mixture? The answer seems to be that there is no greater hazard that a fire may start just because there is more oxygen. But once a fire has started, the rate of combustion is much faster. Another problem : years ago, the Navy started experiments with a helium-oxygen atmosphere in diving suits. The reason is rather well known by now. Nitrogen dissolves in the blood (and body fluids generally) under pressure; if the pressure is suddenly released, the nitrogen forms bubbles in the fluids which cause the dangerous "bends." Helium is absorbed under pressure to a far lesser extent and therefore there is far less dissolved gas to form bubbles. However, the helium bubbles happen to be larger than the nitrogen bubbles. So the problem shapes up as follows: in a spaceship cabin, we might reduce the total atmospheric pressure for engineering reasons. For the sake of the crew, we then change the composition so that the spaceship atmosphere is richer in oxygen. (For the sake of the plants, we might also permit the carbon dioxide fraction to grow larger.) But what do we use for the inert gas in the atmosphere? Just helium? Or a mixture of helium and nitrogen in a proportion still to be established? Or use argon instead of nitrogen in such a mixture? These are the problems on hand. Some are already under investigation. Some are on the list and their turn will come as soon as the current work is finished. True, to some extent these problems can be investigated on paper. But there comes a time when you need observed facts. And then you start using the Space Cabin Simulator. society! He went where no Martian ever went before -- but would he come out -- or had he gone for good? T HE Professor was congratulating Earth's first visitor from another planet on his wisdom in getting in touch with a cultural anthropologist before contacting any other scientists (or governments, God forbid!), and in learning English from radio and TV before landing from his orbitparked rocket, when the Martian stood up and said hesitantly, "Excuse me, please, but where is it?" That baffled the Professor and the Martian seemed to grow anxious -- at least his long mouth curved upward, and he had earlier explained that it curling downward was his smile -- and he repeated, "Please, where is it?" He was surprisingly humanoid in most respects, but his complexion was textured so like the rich dark armchair he'd just been occupying that the Professor's pinstriped gray suit, which he had eagerly consented to wear, seemed an arbitrary interruption between him and the chair -- a sort of Mother Hubbard dress on a phantom conjured from its leather. The Professor's Wife, always a perceptive hostess, came to her husband's rescue by saying with equal rapidity, "Top of the stairs, end of the hall, last door." The Martian's mouth curled happily downward and he said, "Thank you very much," and was off. Comprehension burst on the Professor. He caught up with his guest at the foot of the stairs. "Here, I'll show you the way," he said. "No, I can find it myself, thank you," the Martian assured him.  the Martian's tone made the Professor desist, and after watching his visitor sway up the stairs with an almost hypnotic softly jogging movement, he rejoined his wife in the study, saying wonderingly, "Who'd have thought it, by George! Function taboos as strict as our own!" "I'm glad some of your professional visitors maintain 'em," his wife said darkly. "But this one's from Mars, darling, and to find out he's -- well, similar in an aspect of his life is water is burned hydrogen. When I think of the day not far distant when I'll put his entries in the cross-cultural index... He was still rhapsodizing when the Professor's Little Son raced in. "Pop, the Martian's gone to the bathroom!" "Hush, dear. Manners." "Now it's perfectly natural, darling, that the boy should notice and be excited. Yes, Son, the Martian's not so very different from us." "Oh, certainly," the Professor's Wife said with a trace of bitterness. "I don't imagine his turquoise complexion will cause any comment at all when you bring him to a faculty reception. They'll just figure he's had a hard night -- and that he got that baby-elephant nose sniffing around for assistant professorships." "Really, darling! He probably thinks of our noses as disagreeably amputated and paralyzed." 'Well, anyway, Pop, he's in the bathroom. I followed him when he squiggled upstairs." "Now, Son, you shouldn't have done that. He's on a strange planet and it might make him nervous if he thought he was being spied on. We must show him every courtesy. By George, I can't wait to discuss these things with Ackerly-Ramsbottom! When I think of how much more this encounter has to give the anthropologist than even the physicist or astronomer... He was still going strong on his second rhapsody when he was interrupted by another high-speed entrance. It was the Professor's Coltish Daughter. "Mom, Pop, the Martian's -- " "Hush, dear. We know." The Professor's Coltish Daughter regained her adolescent poise, which was considerable. "Well, he's still in there," she said. "I just tried the door and it was locked." "I'm glad it was!" the Professor said while his wife added, "Yes, you can't be sure what -- " and caught herself. "Really, dear, that was very bad manners." "I thought he'd come downstairs long ago," her daughter explained. "He's been in there an awfully long time. It must have been a half hour ago that I saw him gyre and gimbal upstairs in that real gone way he has, with Nosy here following him." The Professor's Coltish Daughter was currently soaking up both jive and Alice. " his wristwatch, his expression grew troubled. "By George, he is taking his time! Though, of course, we don't know how much time Martians... I wonder." "I listened for a while, Pop," his son volunteered. "He was running the water a lot." "Running the water, eh? We know Mars is a water-starved planet. I suppose that in the presence of unlimited water, he might be seized by a kind of madness and... But he seemed so well adjusted." Then his wife spoke, voicing all their thoughts. Her outlook on life gave her a naturally sepulchral voice. "What's he doing in there?" Twenty minutes and at least as many fantastic suggestions later, the Professor glanced again at his watch and nerved himself for action. Motioning his family aside, he mounted the stairs and tiptoed down the hall. He paused only once to shake his head and mutter under his breath, "By George, I wish I had Fenchurch or von Gottschalk here. They're a shade better than I am on intercultural contracts, especially taboo-breakings and affronts..." His family followed him at a short distance. The Professor stopped in front of the bathroom door. Everything was quiet as death. He listened for a minute and then rapped measuredly, steadying his hand by clutching its wrist with the other. There was a faint splashing, but no other sound. Another minute passed. The Professor rapped again. Now there was no response at all. He very gingerly tried the knob. The door was still locked. When they had retreated to the stairs, it was the Professor's Wife who once more voiced their thoughts. This time her voice carried overtones of supernatural horror. "What's he doing in there?" "He may be dead or dying," the Professor's Coltish Daughter suggested briskly. "Maybe we ought to call the Fire Department, like they did for old Mrs. Frisbee." The Professor winced. "I'm afraid you haven't visualized the complications, dear," he said gently. "No one but ourselves knows that the Martian is on Earth, or has even the slightest inkling that interplanetary travel has been achieved. Whatever we do, it will have to be on our own. But to break in on a creature engaged in -- well, we don't know what primal private activity -- is against all anthropological practice. Still -- " "Dying's a primal activity," his daughter said crisply. "So's ritual bathing before mass murder," his wife added. "Please! Still, as I was about to say, we do have the moral duty to succor him if, as you all too reasonably suggest, he has been incapacitated by a germ or virus or, more likely, by some simple environmental factor such as Earth's greater gravity." "Tell you what. Pop -- I can look in the bathroom window and see what he's doing. All I have to do is crawl out my bedroom window and along the gutter a little ways. It's safe as houses." rpHE Professor's question beginning with, "Son, how do you know -- " died unuttered and he refused to notice the words his daughter was voicing silently at her brother. He glanced at his wife's sardonically composed face, thought once more of the Fire Department and of other and larger and even more jealous -- or would it be skeptical? -- government agencies, and clutched at the straw offered him. Ten minutes later, he was quite unnecessarily assisting his son back through the bedroom window. "Gee, Pop, I couldn't see a sign of him. That's why I took so long. Hey, Pop, don't look so scared. He's in there, sure enough. It's just that the bathtub's under the window and you have to get real close up to see into it." "The Martian's taking a bath?" "Yep. Got it full up and just the end of his little old schnozzle sticking out. Your suit, Pop, was hanging on the door." The one word the Professor's Wife spoke was like a death knell. "Drowned!" "No, Ma, I don't think so. His schnozzle was opening and closing regular like." "Maybe he's a shape-changer," the Professor's Coltish Daughter said in a burst of evil fantasy. "Maybe he softens in water and thins out after a while until he's like an eel and then he'll go exploring through the sewer pipes. Wouldn't it be funny if he went under the street and knocked on the stopper from underneath and crawled into the bathtub with President Rexford, or Mrs. President Rexford, or maybe right into the middle of one of Janey Rexford's Oh-I'm-so-sexy bubble baths?" "Please!" The Professor put his hand to his eyebrows and kept it there, cuddling the elbow in his other hand. "Well, have you thought of something?" the Professor's Wife asked him after a bit. "What are you going to do?" The Professor dropped his hand and blinked his eyes hard and took a deep breath. "Telegraph Fenchurch and Ackerly-Ramsbottom and then break in," he said in a resigned voice, into which, nevertheless, a note of hope seemed also to have come. "First, however, I'm going to wait until morning." And he sat down cross-legged in the hall a few yards from the bathroom door and folded his arms. C O the long vigil commenced.  The Professor's family shared it and he offered no objection. Other and sterner men, he told himself, might claim to be able successfully to order their children to go to bed when there was a Martian locked in the bathroom, but he would like to see them faced with the situation. Finally dawn began to seep from the bedrooms. When the bulb in the hall had grown quite dim, the Professor unfolded his arms. Just then, there was a loud splashing in the bathroom. The Professor's family looked toward the door. The splashing stopped and they heard the Martian moving around. Then the door opened and the Martian appeared in the Professor's gray pin-stripe suit. His mouth curled sharply downward in a broad alien smile as he saw the Professor. "Good morning!" the Martian said happily. "I never slept better in my life, even in my own little wet bed back on Mars." He looked around more closely and his mouth straightened. "But where did you all sleep?" he asked. "Don't tell me you stayed dry all night! You didn't give up your only bed to me?" His mouth curled upward in misery. "Oh, dear," he said, "I'm afraid I've made a mistake somehow. Yet I don't understand how. Before I studied you, I didn't know what your sleeping habits would be, but that question was answered for me -- in fact, it looked so reassuringly homelike -- when I saw those brief TV scenes of your females ready for sleep in their a wink. But Fm afraid that somelittle tubs. Of course, on Mars, where I've blundered and -- " only the fortunate can always be "No, no, dear chap," the Professure of sleeping wet, but here, sor managed to say. He had been with your abundance of water, I waving his hand in a gentle circle thought there would be wet beds for some time in token that he for all." wanted to interrupt. "Everything He paused. "It's true I had some is quite all right. It's true we doubts last night, wondering if Fd stayed up all night, but please used the right words and all, but consider that as a watch -- an honor then when you rapped 'Good night guard, by George! -- which we kept to me, I splashed the sentiment to indicate our esteem." If there were no better spaceships than those that belonged to Quantum -- and there weren't -- what were their competitors beating them with? T HE Chief called me in about ten that morning. With a sweep of the hand, he rat off all communication buttons with the rest of his subordinates, by which I knew that something big was stirring. "Carl," he said, "do we or do we not ship chemicals to Mars from which the Earth Colony can make hard-to-get water and oxygen for their climate-restoration project?" I spoke right up. "We do." He nodded his crew-cut, irongray head. "Do we not also carry mail at special mail rates for the Colonies on Mars and the Asteroids?" "It brings in good money " The Chief fingered one of our space tariffs, which gave rates on the thousand or so most essential Earth-manufactured items that we shipped to the Moon and Mars Colonies as well as to the new Asteroid groups. Scientific instruments needed to survive on strange planets. Special foods and clothing. Communication stuff. Even a few luxury items to make the Earth Colonists feel at home. "To do all this, Carl," said the Chief, leaning back and closing his eyes, "we maintain a fleet of a dozen of the finest spaceships. We pay rental on three of the space stations, and we have another half-dozen new spaceships a-building." I nodded. "Cost Accounting is worried about that, too, Chief. We've got almost two hundred ter how many trips we make with full cargo, we can't make money. The little profit we show has to be plowed back into equipment." "It takes fourteen men, good and true, drawing fourteen salaries to run those ships," he said. "Not roustabout salaries, but money paid to good technical men who will put up with the vicissitudes of space travel month in and month out." tient, "I know all about what it takes to run Quantum Associates. I dream those figures at night. With the last three rate boosts, we've finally gotten past the experimental stages of cost accounting and know what it costs us to deliver a pound of goods on Mars. The figures may seem fantastic to our customers, but the point to argue is that so far there is no return trade to spread the expense. When we find something valuable out there, we can fill our ships on the return sweep and lower shipping costs." He smiled the sickly sweet smile that meant trouble. "And so we charge twenty-five hundred dollars a day running costs per ship in space." I realized that he was quoting my new figures for the National Spaceloading contract. This was a purchasing firm, similar to the old railroad carloading companies that sold shipping space to small shippers at the higher less-thancarload rates, and shipped enough to send out full carloads at the lower rates and made their profit on the difference. We encouraged this, as it guaranteed full payloads on every trip. The National Spaceloading contract was new and it was going to do a lot for Quantum Associates. "I can't shave those figures. Chief. National Spaceloading has no complaint. Let them ask for a government subsidy if they can't stand the new rate. We can't go on losing -- " He cut me dead. "You don't have to shave those figures. The government won't have to subsidize. We lost the National Spaceloading contract." " What ! n I did a rapid mental calculation. There were two other companies competing with Quantum Associates, smaller than us. They had their hands full and were charging more than we were, since their original fleets hadn't been amortized as ours was. "Who beat us?" I asked, baffled. "Julia Associates." "Never heard of them." "Neither have I. But they've delivered the necessary hundred thousand tons of goods to the Moon station in order to establish their space-freight status, as required by law. They're quoting a flat hundred dollars a day in space." "A hundred dollars a day ! " "Against our twenty-five hundred," said the Chief, smiling wryly. "You'd better zip up to the space station and see what the hell goes. With this kind of competition, we'll be grounding our entire fleet by November." a noon reservation for the rocket blast to one of our space stations and threw a couple of things in a bag. Goods get shunted up there by the Short Freighters -- that's an Earth-rocket proposition, not space travel -- and we take over at the space station, as do all space shippers. One thing was foremost in my mind. I was a young man in a young business. Like most of Quantum Associates, I had begun with Earth-rocket freighting, which is a very old business where you have as much chance to advance as a barnacle on the outside keel of an oceangoing liner. The important positions in Earth-rocketing are darn near hereditary. They go to friends or relatives of the guys already in good spots. Space shipping, on the other hand, is as new as tomorrow's spacecast. Carl Cummings -- me -- didn't intend to be jarred loose from his new career by Julia Associates or anyone else. I paused long enough to get a quick Dunbrad on Julia Associates. Capitalization was very small, but shippers, with their insurance and bonding protection, don't care about that. I found something more interesting. Frank Stresinger and Julia Stresinger, brother and sister, were listed as controlling company officers and owners. I never heard of Julia Stresinger, but the name of Frank Stresinger touched off a faint bell in my mind. Just before I loaded aboard the Earth rocket for the space station, I called our Legal Department to clarify my memory. I was right. There was a connection between Quantum and Stresinger. Two years before, Quantum Associates had had an employee of that name. Frank Stresinger was a space engineer who'd been lost from one of our spaceships out on the Asteroid Belt In his lawsuit against the Company, he charged that while he was making some exterior repairs, our ship had taken off from under him, deserting him in space and causing him physical injury and mental distress, what with exposure to unknown cosmic rays and the mental harassment of the meteor danger. He had drifted two days before the mass of the asteroid which the ship had just visited finally exerted itself on his smaller mass, and he sank lightly back to the Asteroid Colony. A lucky escape. What's more, we'd tried to pay him off for an incident that most space engineers would have laughed at, but he went ahead and sued. In the trial, we made him look pretty silly, pointing out that he had failed to notify anybody but the cook when he went outside, a clear violation of Company rules. He lost the suit. At the same time, the incident broke up some of the informality of crew life and we never lost a man after that, so we came out ahead all around. But I was bothered. Had he discovered something about space travel that the rest of us hadn't? What had he found that allowed him to operate a spaceship on one hundred dollars a day? ' just taken over one of the two dozen space stations originally built by the government for military purposes, but of less importance now that the Moon and Mars Colonies were well established. I went immediately to the National Spaceloading station instead of to the Quantum stations. I knew Halsey, the National Spaceloading traffic manager, from my old Earth-rocket days and went directly to his office-living quarters. I found him knee-deep in manifests. "Gravitate elsewhere, Carl," he told me. "I'm making shipments for Mars and the Asteroids, I've got to clear a thousand tons tonight. Tomorrow I'll buy you a beer." "Just asking a favor. How's about sneaking me into one of the ships of Julia Associates for a look around?" He shot me a funny look. "Why don't you ask Julia Associates? They're down in the bar, waiting to take over our thousand-ton shipment for Mars." "Well, at least you can tell me something about the ships -- " Halsey scowled. "Listen, Carl. We're not spacemen. We only assemble shipments. We shove 'em off the station to the taxis. The taxis tow them to the spaceships just like at your own docks. Once the stuff is checked out of the space station, I don't worry about it any more." "You've never been on one of their ships," I said accusingly. "They take the goods from us and they deliver the goods to destination. For a reasonable priceone that Quantum can't meet, Carl. If they're mysterious about their ships, that's no problem of mine. For their rates, I ask no questions." I took a stab in the dark. "They don't have any ships," I said. He gave me a neutral answer: "Get the hell out of here." found a scowling young man and a loose-legged young woman having some drinks. "Hi, friends," I said. I got two cold nods. "I used to work for Quantum," I said. I shoved back my sleeve to show the scar I got when I was a kid, working summers in Earth rockets. "I got hurt on a run last year and the Company wouldn't do anything about it, the lousy rats." No change in expression. "I heard you were shipping," I said. "I need a job." "Our crews are full," said the guy. "How did you know we were shipping?" asked the girl. I immediately pegged her as the less hostile. "I've been scratching out an existence down yonder and keeping my ears working. And word gets around -- " "Word couldn't," said the girl. "Nobody knows about us except National Spaceloading and possibly our rivals, Quantum Associates, who just lost a contract." Frank Stresinger gave a nasty laugh. "All right," I grinned. "I got a girl friend in the office of Harvey J. Mortimer at Quantum. She let it slip." I was thinking of the prunefaced Miss Whelan and the Chief. The idea of the Chief having a pretty, young office decoration or of Miss Whelan with her thirty solid years of executive secretaryship blabbing anything was a riot. But these people didn't know that, and they didn't know me. I thought the girl's eyes softened a little. "Frank," she said, "we could use a hired man." Frank shook his head. "When I want a hired man, I'll go find him myself. Nobody else need apply." I mixed a drink for myself. You don't have room in space stations for luxuries like bartenders. It was time to lay off. Sometimes you can make a sale by just hanging around and not saying too much. I sat there staring out the window at Earth, trying to look worried and unemployed. My success was partial. Presently Julia Associates got up to leave, and a twenty-dollar bill floated down in my lap. "We had it tough ourselves once," said the girl. "Maybe this'll help. Why don't you try photons, Inc., or Spacesavers? They hire sometimes." The man jerked the girl's arm. "Come on, Sis. He's a spy. If he shows up near our shipment, I'll blow his head off." "I just hate to see anybody starve," she said. Frank grunted and they left. vite me to supper, I taxied to Johanson's grimy little place, which can hardly be dignified with the name of a space station. It was formerly used to house a big telescope in the early days, separate from the stations. Now they've got the fine observatories on the Moon. Johanson had converted the old structure as a base for his space taxi business, but there was hardly room for the taximen to rest their weary heads, exhausted after a day of bouncing passengers and cargo from one space station to another, or from the space stations to the spaceships proper. Like the rockets that brought people and things up to the stations from Earth, the taxis were a separate operation from ours, but Johanson knew me well. He and I once pulled freight together in Earth rockets. I had a plan and hoped I wouldn't run into him. I went in with my dummied-up bag of old newspapers in a mail container I stole from Halsey. "Mail for the Julia Associates for Mars," I told the duty man. The bright-eyed kid on the Operations Desk didn't know me. He gestured over his shoulder. "Dump her over there," he said, indicating some other mail bags. "Taxi # will make the run out in a half-hour. That's the last taxi out for them before takeoff." I shook my head. "Got to have this bag signed for personally by Julia Associates. Special U. S. Mail." "Our taximan'll get the signature." "I've got to go to their ship," I said. He looked at me funnywise. "Frank Stresinger doesn't like strangers around his mooring. The Post Office will never know that you didn't actually go and get the signature. Stay away from them, friend." I shrugged. I might've argued further, but just then Old Johanson came in with his hang-dog look from trying to satisfy too many people for too many years and dropped in a chair. "Hi, Carl," he said. "How's everything with Quantum Associates?" "Fine," I said glumly. The young fellow snickered. "He wanted to go out to the Julia Associates shipment. Wouldn't Frank love that if he could catch a Quantum man out there? He'd shoot this guy's pants off." Johanson didn't laugh. He got right up out of his chair. "You'd better leave them alone, Carl. That young punk is a little crazy. He'll shoot you dead if you go out there." That ended Plan One. I needed another. "Just curious," I sighed, sitting on the desk. I pulled out a bottle of stuff I'd swiped from Halsey's bar. "I suppose you taximen are still losing money so that all you can afford to drink is spaceglue." Johanson and the young guy both gave their eyeballs a treat at the sight of my bottle. "Black and Tan," breathed the young man. "Real Black and Real Tan," said Old Johanson, eyes aglitter, "is Real Good Scotch." "Never mind the commercial," I said, breaking the seal. As I poured the fire into the tin cup, Johanson said: "Remember, Carl, I ain't taking you out to no Julia Associates shipment, nor none of my men." A S it turned out, we got into a hot argument about the mailbags. I claimed that it was perfectly legal for a man to buy postage and ship himself through space in a mailbag. Johanson doubted it. He's a kind of space lawyer anyway, and he had all the rules at the tip of his tongue. But I proved it was physically possible by showing him that a man could comfortably fit into an empty mailbag. I put on my space helmet, which took care of the air problem. I snuggled down in comfort. From inside the bag, I could faintly hear Johanson and his young employee arguing the merits of the case. Presently Johanson said: "Say, what happened to Carl? He was here a minute ago." "Don't know. But he left his bottle. He'll be back." "He better come soon," giggled the youth. "All of his Black is gone, and the Tan is gettin' low!" Half an hour later, the taximan came in, sniffed the air, grumbled and loaded his mailbags into Taxi #, the last taxi to go to the Julia Associates shipment before takeoff. He had no trouble loading me with the rest -- inside Johanson's cubbyhole, I had a weight of about two pounds due to centrifugal force of the structure's rotation; outside of it, I was as weightless as the rest of the mail. We took off. The conversation at the roundup point was simple and brief. I could hear it because the headset in my space helmet was zeroed on "vicinity," which is the way most radio space talkbacks work, instead of by single frequencies. "This is all," said the man. With the top down, he was chucking the mailbags over the side of the taxi. "It's enough," grumbled Frank Stresinger. "Now beat it." "Thought I might wait around until you loaded onto your spaceship," said the driver. "With all this stuff, you could use some help." Then he gave a big guffaw. "Beat it." "You got an awful big ship," said the taximan. Then, frightened: "Okay, okay, take it easy. I'm just kidding." And the taxi zoomed off, leaving the mailbags, including me, drifting there. I made then what was my first mistake and almost my last. I unfastened the mailbag, stuck my helmeted head out of it and said over the radio: "Hi, Frank! Need some help?" I was only about twenty feet from him and he was bending over, standing on a large cargo box, doing something with a rope. He gave a cry of rage -- "Spy!" -- and dropped his rope and began to dig for his gun. Since I didn't have any, I decided to remove myself as a target as quickly as possible. about an acre of boxes and bundles, all bumping together there in space, centering around its own mass, drifting gently Earthward. The reflected Earthlight was just dim enough for me to hope for security. I opened the jets on my shoulder harness and headed straight for the biggest bulk of crates -- what looked like some of the oxygen-water manufacturing machines that Quantum Associates had hoped to be shipping to Mars. I cut my jets and scrambled into the blackness of the cargo, sliding in and around boxes like an ant diving into his hole. With a thousand tons of the stuff conglomerated in a mass, it wasn't hard to hide. I couldn't hear Frank's shots because there was no medium to transmit the sound waves, but I could feel the boxes vibrate where his probing shots hit them instead of me. Friendly cuss! He was digging madly in the boxes and I was burrowing deeper into the mass when Julia came alongside of him and I could hear the talk over my receiver. "Frank, we've got to get started." "First I'm going to kill me a spy!" "You've got two months to hunt him out while we're traveling. But we can't waste even two hours going through all of this cargo just now." ain't starting till he's been taken care of!" "You and your hate-everybody routine," she said. "I won't get them. They're bilsy finishing the lashing job. Come on now." "Give me just fifteen minutes -- ten." "I've already set the breederreactor. We start in five minutes, whether or not you've finished your part of the lashing." Frank groaned and they moved off, arguing. I stayed hidden, deep in the darkness. In about five minutes, I felt an enormous tug. Then nothing. Space sensations are tricky. I had only my space station experience to give me orientation -- that three weeks I'd spent at the stations, setting up a cost accounting system. But it felt funny. I clambered out of my hiding place and peered around to check up. Over the jumbled surface of the mass of shipping boxes, I could see the Earth behind us, dwindling as we accelerated, its yellow-green disk turning into nothing greater than an oversized moon. I caught my breath when I realized what speed we had reached. I looked up ahead and saw the Moon. It looked perfectly normal for a second -- and then it jittered. We were really burning up space miles! I looked closer at hand, directly over the carpet of boxes and bags ahead of me, and finally saw the spaceship that Julia Associates used. A house-trailer! OU can imagine why I cursed that Black and Tan for several minutes before I believed what I saw. This was the scene: First, an ordinary old-fashioned highway house-trailer of the aluminum kind, only it was obviously plated with space steel, an isotope alloy of great toughness. A large rope, the size of hawser for a major oceangoing ship, was hooked to one side of the trailer. The rope wandered off one side of the trailer and threaded its way in a rough semi-circle behind. Laced to the rope at regular intervals was the cargo of Julia Associates, the whole mass of it strung like beads on a necklace. The circle looped around gracefully and came back to the other side of the house-trailer, from which, so help me, there shone ordinary lights, giving the effect of a homy, comfortable trailer seen parked alongside some country road at night! It wasn't hard to tell what powered Frank's spaceship. It was a breeder-reactor, but a very small one. For those who don't know what a B-R is, it's an atomic power plant that produces two phenomena. It produces power by the familiar chain reaction of cracking U-#, enough power to reach the stars. But second, and even more important, some of the neutrons are split off to bombard a fuel pack of U-#. This U-# is broken down into fissionable U-#, so that the device continues to make its own future fuel of U-# while consuming its present U-#. In other words, with a few ounces of U-# already hot and spitting out fission and a few pounds of U-# always being converted, you can go on forever, tubes blasting. Quantum, Photon, all the spaceships use breeder-reactors, but nobody ever built one as small as Frank's. Whatever could you use such a small B-R for? Thus the tradition-bound brains of so-called smart space engineers. "I'm coming for you, Spy!" The words bounced in my skull and I jumped. "I see you! I'm going to shoot!" I didn't fall for Frank's trick. I could see him as he slipped out of the door of the trailer, a gun frozen in his spacesuit mitt, and he had hoped that I would start scurrying when he turned up his radio power and shouted. I was beginning to feel some discomfort, and I knew this catand-mouse routine couldn't go on forever. Then I had a bright idea. I snipped four of the mailbags off the tow rope and kicked them loose in space. My kick had the same effect as throwing them overboard, for the faster-moving mass began to leave them behind. "You've just lost four mailbags. Uncle Sam won't like that Frank, when you show up in Mars without the mail." Frank said some nasty things and jetted over the acre of boxes to see what was going on. The light was getting much murkier as we moved away from Earth, and I figured that it would take him a while to find those tiny bags -- although I suspected that my futile kicks hadn't broken them from the mass attraction of our flotilla and that they would follow along at a respectful distance anyway. But he couldn't know how hard I'd shoved or jetted them, and he was going crazy, working the rim of the necklace and lecturing at me. I cut off my receiver and clambered my way in haste and sweat to the trailer. I knew there were, besides Frank and his sister Julia, a man named Mary -- Frank had mentioned them in the argument. I could only hope they weren't as bloodthirsty as Frank. Frank was far back in the mass now, and I jetted to the trailer door, grabbed the handle and, because it wasn't locked, stumbled in. There was a tiny decompression chamber, big enough for a single body. The outer door slammed and the air hissed in automatic control. I could see Julia grinning IffV iVi f'l  Rmmk  at me through the glass and I made frantic motions for entrance. The automatic machinery finished its cycle and the inner door opened. "Welcome, Mr. Spy, to the main office of Julia Associates," said Julia with mock courtesy. I took in the room at a glance. It was homy, all right. A stove, a table and tiny chairs, a space radio, a sofa, and by God, bookcases lined with books. There was also a very large atomic pellet gun mounted in the roof bn a universal swivel. I got off my helmet. "For gosh sakes, where is it?" Julia held a gun which she kept pointed at me. "Where's what?" On the sofa sat Mary, a plump, gray-haired old lady who could have been anybody's grandmother. She was knitting. But, on closer look, I saw she had a strong jaw and was not as old as her bleached hair first made her out to be. "In there," Mary said to me, nodding. Julia looked puzzled while I made a dash for the tiny, closetsized room. Then she laughed as I dived into it in agony. The bathroom, of course. body would believe it. In school and later, people always thought he was lazy because he figured out short, simple ways to do things. They laughed at him, but they usually stole his ideas." I was bolting down a sandwich the two women had prepared for me, and drinking a celestial glass of water from the trailer's conversion system. "Psychology aside," I said, "we can't keep up this game of space tag forever. I'm likely to get mad and twist him into the square root of nothing." Julia laughed and stretched her long legs and yawned. She had a certain sleepy good humor about her, like a self-satisfied cat. "This I doubt, Mr. -- Er," she said. "Carl Cummings." "Mr. Cummings. Frank has tried hard to get ahead as a space engineer. But he kept doing things the simple way and his superiors sneered at him. Now he has his own business. But it depends on his knowledge of space and his design of the miniature breederreactor. You're a threat -- you could steal both." "His breeder-reactor is bolted on and space belongs to everybody," I said reasonably. "How could I steal anything?" "Watch him, Julia," warned the older woman. "He's prying, like Frank said." I was watching Julia's face. I had detected before, back in the bar on the space station, that there was bad blood between Frank and his sister. Now I saw a faint blush spread over the cheeks. The easy, humorous eyes widened in anger and the lips tightened. "For instance, his concept of mass versus weight," she said with a defiant glance at Mary. "Mass is mass everywhere in the Universe, but it equates with weight only under gravity. There is none in space. Therefore, whether a shipment rims a pound or a thousand tons, weight is no problem. A child could shove the Empire State Building around very easily out here." "Now, Julia -- " "Everybody knows that," I said quickly. "But nobody ever builds a concept of space travel around it! How silly to carry boxes in another box called a spaceship when there's no gravity to overcome!" "I'm going to get Frank," said Mary, sitting up. "You'll do no such thing," Julia told her. "I'm sick of him always being suspicious. I can't talk to anybody, anybody at all! I can't have dates, I can't call on my friends, I can't walk up the street without Frank interfering. Everybody's our enemy! Everybody's a spy! We can't even get decent help -- " "All right, all right," said Mary, looking resigned. "But Frank is going to be awful sore." tended to make the most of it I could see that, unlike Frank, she was a normal, friendly type and proud of their achievements, but had never had a chance to brag about them. And what's the reason in life to do a clever thing unless you can take credit for it? "You need a good spaceship if only to protect the crew," I said, still using probing needles. "That's where Frank's concept breaks down." She fixed me with a triumphant eye. "Typical Earth thinking! On Earth, there's weight to overcome, weather to protect against, the effects of rain, wind and sunshine, the drag of friction, the very dangers of the clouds that hide high mountains. Out here -- nothing! You need a good spacesuit to damp out the cosmic rays, control temperatures for the body. That's your spaceship! Power? In a vacuum like space, you accelerate something and it just keeps on going forever at that speed. I won't insult your intelligence by pointing out how we can decelerate the mass of this shipment by reforming the rope and blasting against our present direction until we overcome thrust." "There're meteors," I said. She tapped me on the chest with her finger. She was making a sale now, really warmed up. "A spaceship the size of an office building offers a great deal more target than a man six feet tall and a foot and a half wide. And space is empty, Mr. Cummings. That's what people don't understand. Your chances of being hit by a meteor are less than the chances of being hit by a monkey wrench dropped out of an airplane flying over the Earth. At least that's what Frank says. Space is truly empty, a concept that Earthmen who live in a world cluttered and crammed and joggled up full of objects can't understand." "Thanks for telling me the things I already knew," I said drily. I was a little annoyed, because I was thinking of the cost of the Quantum fleet and the ships abuilding. "You know it logically, but you don't know it to feel it," she said. "Frank only grasped it by accident one time when he was lost from a spaceship and floated around in free space for two days." Mary got up. "I'm going to bed, Julia. While you're at it, why don't you also give him the blueprints for Frank's breeder-reactor?" Julia smiled sweetly. "Good night, Mary. Rest well -- we start inventory tomorrow." helmet, clomped to the door and went out. Julia laughed at my amazed expression. "Of course she sleeps outside! We all do. The moving mass carries you along and you simply relax and drift. Quiet, safe, alone with the stars, drifting free and not cooped up in some sardine-bunk. It's a sleep of peace no Earthman knows." "Well, thanks for the lecture," I said, "but Frank's coming alongside, I see. Maybe we'd better skip the blueprints." Her eyes flashed. "I'm not giving out any secrets and Mary knows it. But I'm getting sick of this constant distrust After all, I have some say in things. I had to get the money to convert this trailer. I had to get the backing to design and build these spacesuits, to work out the details of our qualifying shipments, to sell the services of Julia Associates to individual shippers. And I have to go along as crew to help with the inventory and cook the meals and -- " She threw up her hands. "Frank has been promising to hire help for a long time. He never will. He trusts nobody. When we organized this first Mars trip, I made myself the promise to grab the first man that came along -- you're him -- and that's why I wanted to explain things." I looked out of the trailer window. It was very dark now, but I could see that the spacesuited figure was very close, picking his way recklessly over our meadow of goods. "Maybe I am," I said, "but we'd better not tell Frank just yet. Put me to work first" "Okay. Take inventory." I've been taking inventories since I first began to shave. On Earth rockets. With Quantum. It was obvious that Julia was a good saleswoman but a poor detailer. a converted rocketman who spent most of his time curled up with a book on a comfortable shipping box, reading by a flashlight inside his space helmet Mary was willing, but she was a little fat and a little old. It was necessary for them to check out all their items with the manifests to be sure that no small item was lost, strayed or stolen. Quite a job in that jumbled field of boxes, containers and packages. Julia slipped me some manifests and I did more in a half-hour than the other three could do in a day. Her eyes shone when I turned in the sheets, checked out and asked for more. "I really got carried away," I laughed over the radio. "It's simple for a guy who thinks best staring out of his office window, automatically counting and classifying the first hundred helicopters that go by. I was bom with a counting machine in my head." "And it takes only one bullet to unwind it all," said Frank's voice, jumping out at me. W E'D gotten careless. He came at me less than a dozen feet away, his gun out "That's all for you, spy!" I did a shuffle with my feet, but nothing happened except the transfer of my heart from my chest to just behind my eyes. Julia's gun was out, too -- and she pointed it straight at him, not me. "Wait, Frank!" she said. There are certain tones of voice that all people have learned to respect. It's the voice of someone who has been pushed just a bit too far. "Listen -- " he began. "You listen! How many manifests did you turn over this morning as your part of the job?" "A couple, I guess. But believe me, I had plenty on my mind! Now stand aside." "There'll be no shooting," she said. "You gave me the concept for Julia Associates. You built the tiny B-R. You trained us for space. But I did all the rest. I did, excuse the expression, one hell of a lot. Now you expect to loaf around on this trip while I take the inventory, cook meals and keep the log. Only it isn't going to be that way. I've just hired a man to help me -- whether you like it or not -- and that's the way it's going to be!" Frank had heavy-lidded eyes and a sleepy face, but there was nothing wrong with the machinery behind it "I didn't tell you this. Last night National Spaceways. Halsey says our bird here is Carl Cummings, all right and he's the chief cost accountant for Quantum." Julia gave me a startled look. Obviously Halsey had found out about the mailbag and the liquor I'd taken. My veins were straining against the spacesuit in fright. "Now wait!" I said. "I can explain everything -- " Julia looked coldly at me. It was embarrassing for her to have told so much to the wrong man, but she was practical. "He's still going to take inventory," she said to Frank. "You can guard him, if you want. By the time we get to the Moon and the inventory's taken -- you can do whatever you want." "I'll know what to do," said Frank. inventory. They fed me, gave me water and visiting privileges in the trailer, and the rest of the time I worked. I have never been so careful with an inventory. My own staff would've sat up in astonishment I wanted that job to last! "You can just knock off that recount routine," said Frank as he sat a short distance away from me, the ever-present gun on his lap. "If you try to gum us up by faking the inventory, Sis will consider you expendable. And I'm the kid that knows how to expend." He meant it Each day, so much had to be done, and be done perfectly. Julia would check it all while he waited eagerly to find out if I'd lost my usefulness to her. I made sure I didn't In a dim way, I could even see his point of view. Years of hostility built up as he drifted from one failure to another. The big hostility against Quantum Associates. And then, at last, a victory for a man who'd always failed. The contract stolen from under the nose of Quantum. And in the midst of that victory, along comes a man who could wreck the works -- a man from his old enemy, Quantum. "Of course you can't hope to keep your little secret forever," I told them. Julia snorted. "It'll take a long time for your bright engineers to make a B-R as small as Frank's. It took him a long time and he's as good as the best." "Listen," I said. "I could sign you up with Quantum. You could be vice-president. Frank could be a space captain." Frank laughed. "Listen," I said desperately. "I could make Frank senior space captain of all the Quantum fleet. That's plenty of publicity, plenty of income, not to mention your name being a household word. Listen -- " "Why don't you shut up and get some rest? You've got a big day tomorrow," said Frank. I tried something else ten minutes later. "Honey," I said to Mary, "I'll give you a thousand dollars to steal Frank's gun for me. I've got that much. I'm a Company exec with Quantum." Big Mary gave me a scornful look. "Frank's mother was my cousin," she said. "She was sick-like. I helped raise Frank during the times I wasn't working in one electronics factory or another. Now Frank is looking after me. What he wants goes." Frank came hurrying over the top of our space mass. "Hey, you! Back to work!" the pension figure. I own stock in the company. I just want to get out with my skin. I won't hurt Frank or his sister." book he was reading and tried to scratch his ear. It looked funny because of his space helmet "I like this job even better'n night watchman." His mild brown eyes speculated on the stars. "I don't suppose you'd remember overlong once you were out of trouble. And there aren't many people on Earth want to hire a lazy bookworm like me." I didn't feel the bullet until it struck. Frank had fired it as a warning shot but it went right through the calf of my leg. Only the self-sealing spacesuit saved me, and I knew then he really meant to kill me. The first chance I had, I went to the trailer and got Julia to bandage me up. "That brother of yours is out for murder," I said. "You'd better cool him down or he'll spend the rest of his life running from the law." She straightened up from her bandaging job, flushing. "I'll speak to him," she said. She did. It didn't do any good, except to increase the rift between them. When I saw that even Julia couldn't save me, I knew it was time to put the gray cells to work for a final try. I had one piece of information they didn't have. I knew that a Quantum ship, the Jolly Roger, was heading out for the Moon on its weekly run. We would be bound to cross its path at one time or another. Frank, with his direct kind of mind, paid no attention to space navigation. You left Earth; there was the Moon visible to the naked eye. How could you miss it? You left the Moon and there was Mars, more prominent than it was ever seen from Earth, so you headed for it -- why bother with planetary motions and points of intersection and all the rest? True, you might have to correct your line of flight several times as you got closer, but you could haul food in bulk behind you for at least a year and the B-R would last much longer. And no shipper would hold you for being a couple of months overdue -- least of all at any such price as a hundred dollars a day. They kept a casual watch on the radarscope in the trailer because they didn't want to come too close to regular ships, but I fixed that I jimmied the controls so it swept a portion of space where no spaceship would ever be, and the dial settings remained the same. Another time, when I had a few seconds alone near the control panel of the B-R, I set the controls at an angle which would sweep us past the Jolly Roger's track. As I finished the inventory for one day, I knew that on the next we'd cross paths. And none too soon, for I had only a few more items to tally before my usefulness to the Stresingers would be done. see which one had to stay cooped up on watch in the trailer, rather than enjoying the restfulness of space. Frank lost that night. In the middle of the night, I knocked for admittance to the trailer for a rest-call and Frank, digging sleep out of his eyes, grudgingly admitted me. When I came out of the tiny room, I announced, "The bathroom is flooding" Frank leveled a gun. "Well, get a mop," he grinned at me. Frank, the engineer, was a tinkerer, good with his hands, and there's one thing that this sort of person can't stand -- to watch somebody flubbing the dub when a few quick turns with the monkey wrench can fix whatever is wrong. Frank watched me fool and fumble with his plumbing for about five minutes before he got disgusted and shoved his gun in his belt "Stand back," he said, "and don't think you can jump me. I've already radioed Julia that you're in here, and she'll blast you the minute you set foot outside." "You forget I could jump you and then barricade myself in here and take the trailer and shipment." Frank had the superior smile of the knowing. "Wrong, spy! The master controls for the B-R happen to be on the outside. I designed it that way so I wouldn't have to go through decompression just to come into the trailer and change the line of flight These inside controls can be taken over by the master panel outside." And he was already digging into his plumbing setup. I didn't plan to escape. I didn't plan to jump him. I needed only five seconds at the other end of the trailer with his space radio. I called the Jolly Roger, told Captain Lake that we were in distress and asked him to accelerate on up. My message probably sounded a bit strange, but Lake, or any of our captains, were always on the lookout for distress signals. That's the code of the road in space. what astonished when the big freighter jumped out of nowhere and put out tiny space taxis and they found themselves face to face with Captain Lake and four armed men asking what the trouble was. Frank never even had a chance to use his atomic pellet gun. I waved my hand at the acre of goods. 'We lost our ship, Captain. We've been traveling with the aid of the life-raft to tow the stuff, but I don't think we can make the Moon. Can't you take us over as salvage?" "Salvage!" roared Frank. "Listen, you spy -- " "Salvage!" cried Julia. "How dare you -- " Captain Lake' eyes glittered. "I don't see any spaceship. I've had a distress call and one of your crew members begs assistance. It looks to me like you're derelict -- and salvage." Frank was almost purple. "This man is not one of our crew! He belongs to Quantum Associates and this is a foul trick -- " Lake shrugged. "I don't know all the people who work for Quantum. Maybe he does, maybe not But if he can prove that he's a member of your crew, I'll have to pick you up." "You might take a look at the inventory sheets," I said. "Making 'em up is a crew job and every last one of them is in my handwriting." HP HE courts had fun with that one. Of course we never had a chance to get away with the salvage claim, but the idea of shipping in space without a spaceship rather shocked the Earthmen who sat on the jury. After all, they'd been reading about spaceships for generations and to travel in space, why, by God, you need a spaceship. That set them against Julia Associates. They disallowed the salvage claim, but I brought another suit for damages, including that shot Frank put in my leg. The forcedlabor and mental-strain claims didn't register, but the shot in the leg did. And Frank didn't help his case by yelling on the stand that he would've aimed higher if he'd known. At this point, the National Spaceloading shipment was still impounded on the Moon. When I presented my claim for damages, it was just too bad for Julia Associates. They couldn't pay off. And I had a lien on the company assets. It was fun. So was the final day in New York when the Chief rubbed his hands together and offered me a cigar. "Well, Carl, you really managed this thing well! With Julia Associates as a subsidiary, and with their tiny B-R and those special spacesuits -- nobody will be able to touch our space rates! I'm going to double your salary." "That's green-white of you, Chief. What about Julia and her brother and company?" "Oh, we'll find harmless spots for them. When are you going to bring that trailer over to the yards so we can duplicate the B-R for our operation?" "Never," I said amiably. The Chief looked at me. "The claim that the jury awarded me and which amounts to financial control of the Julia Associates is not to Quantum, but to me personally," I said. "I've decided to quit Quantum and run my own company." "Now wait a minute, Cummings! Quantum saved your apples! Captain Lake -- " "Oh, I've taken care of that I'm hiring Captain Lake. You should have his resignation today or tomorrow." Then I showed him the new sign to hang in front of our offices: "Stresinger and Cummings, Space Shippers." "I'll take you to court!" he shouted. "Do that. I'll only have to pay back the money I drew from Quantum while on my trip to the Moon. The decision to go on that trip was mine, not an order from you." "Ill build my own B-R and spacesuits and run you out of business!" "Please do, Chief," I said. "All you need is a good, small breederreactor. That should only take you about five years to design. Meanwhile, with ours already in operation, we'll have five years of lowcost shipping to build us up to your size." "I'll -- I'll -- " "You'll be working for me, that's what you'll someday be doing," I said. with Julia in the new offices I had rented. "I'm a business woman," she said. "I know when I'm licked. I think I could bring myself to work for the new company -- but there's Frank to think about He won't come in, and it would break his heart if I did." I took her by the arm and led her to the door. I opened it a crack. In the outer office were half a dozen people. You only needed a glance at the sound-film equipment they carried to identify them as newspapermen. "What-" "Just watch." The door opened. Frank Stresinger came in. Julia, from our hiding place, gasped. Frank looked like a movie usher. He wore a uniform that had braid, braid and braid, silver on black. He looked real good in it. But his face was scowling. "How the devil did he get that -- " "Oh, you sent it to him," I said. "You told him you had a plan to stop me from controlling the company and for him to wear the uniform and come on up here. I had the office boy deliver it after you left him at your apartment, of course." "But-" "Listen to them!" Newspapermen are busy people. They were already at work, firing the questions at Frank. As the captain of our fleet, what were his predictions for the new company? Would this smash the old-line companies? Was he hiring space people from the other companies? What -- And so on. The man who had never had status stood there in the shining, glittering uniform and sputtered. Two or three of the newsmen were famous people. The names on the equipment were great names in network communications. They were coming to him, asking him questions -- "He'll knock them down," breathed Julia. "He'll do nothing of the kind," I said. -Within five minutes, he was strutting before the cameras, telling off the world. He was making good copy and they were lapping it up, and I closed the door. "Now will you sign?" I asked. "How much of the company do Frank and I get?" "A quarter apiece. I get the other half." "Both Photons and Space Savers will make that good a deal and lend me money to pay off your lien." It was time to pull the final gambit. I laid the contract on the desk. "In this state," I said, "a wife owns half of everything a husband does. Both the heads of Photons and Space Savers are married. I'm not" Julia looked shocked. Then she looked outraged. Both ways, she looked cute. "God, what nerve!" "Why don't you struggle with the thought a few days?" I said. Outside, we could hear Frank's voice, finishing the interview. All her life she'd been taking care of Frank, keeping a place for him, trying to sell his inventions, trying to give him stability. She was in her thirties, unmarried and probably sick of her narrow life. All my life I'd been struggling to get some place. Alone. I was sick of that, too. "No, thanks," she said, deciding not to make an issue of it, but giving me an affectionate pat on the cheek. Frank burst into the office. He stopped when he saw us. "Well, I see you hooked him!" he crowed, seeing her cheek-pat "Community property keeps it all in the family like you said, Juliaeven if I hate the guy. Did he put up much fight?" Julia blushed the deepest red I ever saw anyone blush. "Not m-much," she said. I guess she had a plan, after all. # Star Shelf Vanguard Press, N. Y. # than the adventuresome spirit of a social climber, you'll find in Rum Doodle oodles of vicarious information concerning the how-to of conquering that titanic peak. To be truthful, I had never heard of Rum Doodle and its companion peak, North Doodle, which lies to the west. Estimates of its height vary between # and # feet But taking the average, the height works out to #. Obviously, all previous accounts of successful and unsuccessful ascents of other peaks pale into insignificance alongside this epic. The expedition consisted of seven picked men and its object was to place two men on the summit requiring the establishment of a camp at # feet. Equipment for this camp called for five porters. Two porters were needed to carry food for these five, and another carried food for these two. His food was carried by a boy. Altogether, for the various bases and camps established up the mountain, # porters and # boys were needed. As you can see, it was a remarkably well-organized assault. The descriptive passages are as breathtakingly awesome as in any book on mountaineering you may have devoured. Just take this example: "The North Wall is a sheer glass-like face of ice broken only by rock, snowfields, ice-pinnacles, crevasses, bergschrunds, ridges, gulleys, scree, gendarmes, Dames Anglaises, needles, strata, gneiss and gabbra." In actuality, the major credit for the incredible climb can be given the native cook, Pong. If not for him, the summit would never have been attained. But all in vain -- from his cooking there was no escape. If this misAdventure book doesn't make you forget your cares, see your doctor at once! It's laughter than you think! Citadel Press, N. Y., # TN this sequel to In Search of the Hereafter, Lester pursues two avenues of research, communication with the departed and spiritual healing. His documentation is average for this type of work and sets up a choice of believe-it-ornot lantine Books, N. Y., # collection of Pohl's short stories deserves A for Aptitude. Of these six yarns, half present the Peculiarly Pohl Utopia, that hellish paradise for the narrowest possible segment on which he seems to hold a patent. "The Midas Plague" depicts a consumer civilization where social prestige is measured inversely by material possessions and our concepts of rich and poor are topsyturvied. "The Census Takers" and "My Lady Green Sleeves" are two further examples of Fearsome Futures. Two shorter works are poor Pohl, but the quality of the longer stories brings the general level considerably above Good. Jean Dufay. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # I T has become the accepted theory that the exceedingly diffuse dust and gas of interstellar space are the building blocks of the Universe. The incredibly enormous quantities of this material that exist in the near-perfect vacuum of space have been calculated to exceed # of the total weight of the Galaxy, despite its The author, Director of the Lyon and Haute-Provence Observatories, has written a tome not meant for the layman, but easily read with benefit by anyone skipping the advanced mathematical formulae in order to explore a new aspect of astronomy. August Derleth. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin, # seemingly goes on forever; the two decades since their death are as nothing. In any event, they appear more prolific now than then. What with de Camp, Nyberg and Derleth avidly rooting out every scrap of their writings and expanding them into novels, there may never be an end to their posthumous careers. Whether this is a good thing is a moot point. Lovecraft at his best could build a mood of horror unsurpassed; at his worst, he was laughable. Taking Lovecraft s fragmentary plot notes, Derleth generates unintended humor in most of his reconstructions. The exceptions are the two final entries, "The Shadow out of Space" and "The Lamp of Alhazred." Having read Lovecraffs novel, The Shadow out of Time, in Asf some twenty-one years ago and being no master of total recall, it appears to me to bear considerable resemblance to the Derleth refab. But, that aside, A. D. has done a commendable job with this one H. P. L. The final story, "The Lamp of Alhazred," might aptly have been titled "Eulogy." Though named ly H. P. L. and the yam an idealized version of what poor Lovecraft's life and death should have been. Brown. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., N. Y., # feature of Frederic Brown's art is his Puckish humor. I almost said Roguish but that would merely point up redundantly the failure of this novel. To summarize -- Crag, the pivotal character, is an unregenerate criminal who is framed for reasons and by persons unknown. The presiding judge at his trial was also his arbiter six years previously, when he went free though guilty, to the enraged disgust of the judge. Since then. Judge Olliver has risen very high in party circles, having been beaten out for American Coordinator, but polling a huge vote. Crag discovers the reason for Quiver's interest in his case after his conviction. During the usual closeting prior to sentencing, Olliver confides that he wants Crag to escape so that he can do a personal job for him. He offers Crag limited assistance, but a whopping certain article. Crag is slated for the psycher, a sort of plastic surgery job on the ego, that will turn him into more palatable character. Conveniently, though, Olliver's wife, an edible redhead, is a psycher technician, so that takes care of that. Olliver, by the way, is in cahoots with Crag because he wants to reestablish Democracy, now a naughty word, and the mysterious article that Crag is to steal will help him do it. Oops. Almost forgot. Crag has a removable prosthetic right hand, weight # lbs., that enables him to throw (literally) a terrific righthand punch. But all this is pretty small potatoes because Brown has something really big in store. A sentient asteroid has blundered into the Solar System and has taken a shine to this miserable criminal. It brings him back to life -- it really shouldn't have bothered! -- and, in general, acts moonstruck, if you'll pardon the expression. All this might have been fine had Brown realized he was writing a funny story and treated it that way. He didn't. Citadel Press, N. Y ., # His current book is further argument in his assertion that life abounds in space about us. He has assembled a weighty mass of data concerning the "mysterious" craters of the Moon -- notably the welldocumented and inexplicable disappearance of the crater Linne. He scoffs at our satellite program as amateurish compared to what we're up against. What should we do? Sit and wait for the experts to come down and show us how?      Being a scrupulous root estate agent and a devout angler, Homer Jackson knew a clean sale from a fish story -- but not this tlmel T HE man who came into Homer Jackson's office was wearing his left shoe on his right foot and his right shoe on his left. He gave Homer quite a start The man was tall and had a gangling look about him, but he was smartly dressed -- except for his shoes. And his shoes were all right too; it was just the way he wore them. "Am I addressing Mr. Homer Jackson?" he asked with a formality to which Homer was entirely unaccustomed. "That's me," said Homer. He squirmed a bit uncomfortably in his chair. He hoped this wasn't one of Gabby Wilson's jokes. Gabby had an office just down the hall and loved to pester Homer plenty. When Gabby cooked up a joke, he did a massive job on it; he left out not a single detail. And some of Gabby's jokes got pretty rough. But the man seemed to be dead serious and perhaps a little anxious. "Mr. Homer Jackson, the suburban realtor?" he persisted. "That's right," said Homer. "Specializing in lake properties and country acreages?" Tm your man." Homer began to feel uncomfortable. This man was spreading it on a trifle thick and Homer thought he could see Gabby's hand in it. "I'd like to talk with you. I have a matter of small business." "Fire away," said Homer, motioning toward a chair. The man sat down carefully, bolt upright in the chair. "My name is Oscar Steen," he said. "We're building a development on what is known as the Saunders place. We call it Happy Acres." quainted with the place. It's the last good holding on the lake. You were fortunate to get it." "Thank you, Mr. Jackson. We think that it is nice." "How are you getting on?" "We have just finished it. But now comes the most important part. We must get people onto the property." "Well," said Homer, "things are a little tough right now. Money has tightened up and the interest rates are higher and Washington is no help and besides that -- " "We wondered if you'd be interested in handling it for us." Homer choked a little, but recovered quickly. "Well, now, I don't know. Those houses may be hard to sell. You'd have to get a solid figure for them and the prices will run high. That stone wall you put around the place and those fancy gates and all, I would suspect you have high-class houses. You have gone and made it into an exclusive section. There'll be only a certain class of buyer who might be interested." "Mr. Jackson," said Steen, "we have a new approach. You won't have to sell them. We're only leasing them." "Renting them, you mean." "No, sir, leasing them." "Well, it all comes out to the same thing in the end. You'll have to get a lot for them" "Five thousand." "Five thousand is an awful lot of money. At least, out here it is. Five thousand a year comes to over four hundred a month and -- " "Not for a year," corrected Steen. "For ninety-nine." "For what!" "Ninety-nine. We're leasing at five thousand dollars for ninety-nine full years " "But, man, you can't do that! Why, that's absolutely crazy! Taxes would eat up -- " "We're not so interested in making money on the houses as we are in creating business for our shopping center." "You mean you have a shopping center in there, too?" Steen allowed himself a smile. "Mr. Jackson, we obtain the property and then we build the wall to have some privacy so there can be no snoopers." "Yes, I know," said Homer. "It's smart to do it that way. Good publicity. Whets the public's interest. Gives you a chance to have a big unveiling. But that twelve-foot wall -- " "Fourteen, Mr. Jackson." "All right, then, fourteen. And it's built of solid stone. I know -- I watched them put it up. And no one builds walls of solid stone any more. They just use stone facing. The way you built that wall set you back a hunk -- " "Mr. Jackson, please. We know what we are doing. In this shopping center, we sell everything from peanuts to Cadillacs. But we need customers. So we build houses for our customers. We desire to create a good stable population of rather well-to-do families." peration, Homer paced up and down the office. "But, Mr. Steen, you can't possibly build up enough business at your shopping center by relying solely on the people in your development. For instance, how many houses have you?" "Fifty." "Fifty families are a mere drop in the bucket for a shopping center. Even if every one of those fifty families bought all their needs from you -- and you can't be sure they will -- but if they did, you'd still have little volume. And you won't pick up any outside trade -- not behind that wall, you won't." He stopped his pacing and went back to his chair. "I don't know why I'm upset about it," he told Steen. "It's no skin off my nose. Yes, I'll handle the development, but I can't handle leasing at my usual five per cent." "Oh, I forgot to tell you," said Steen. "You keep the entire five thousand" Homer gasped like a fish hauled suddenly from water. "On one condition," added Steen. "One has to be so careful. We have a bank, you see. Part of the shopping center service." "A bank," Homer said feebly. "Chartered under the state banking regulations." "And what has a bank to do with me? "You'll take ten per cent," said Steen. "The rest will be credited to your account in the Happy Acres Bank. Every time you lease a unit, you get five hundred cash; forty-five hundred goes into your bank account." "I don't quite see -- " "There are advantages." "Yes, I know," Homer said. "It builds up your business. You're out to make that shopping center go." "That might be one factor. Another is that we can't have you getting rich in front of all your friends and neighbors. There'd be too much talk about it and we don't want that kind of publicity. And there are tax advantages as well." "Tax advantages?" "Mr. Jackson, if you lease all fifty houses, you will have earned you ever figured what the income tax might be on a quarter million dollars?" "It would be quite a lot." "It would be a crying shame," said Steen. "The bank could be a help." "I don't quite see how." "You leave that to us. Leave everything to us. You just lease the houses." "Mr. Steen, I've been an honest man for years in an occupation where there's opportunity -- " "Honesty, Mr. Jackson. Of course we know you're honest That's why we came to you. Have you got your car here?" "It's parked outside." "Fine. Mine is at the station getting serviced. Let's drive out and look the houses over." II T HE houses were all that anyone could wish. They were planned with practical imagination and built with loving care. There was, Homer admitted to himself, more honest workmanship in them than he had seen for many years in this era of mass-production building. They had that quiet sense of quality material, of prideful craftsmanship, of solidity, of dignity and tradition that was seldom found any more. They were well located, all fifty of them, in the wooded hills that stretched back from the lake, and the contractor had not indulged in the ruthless slashing out of trees. Set in natural surroundings, with decent amounts of space around them, they stood, each one of them, in comparative privacy. In the spring, there would be wild flowers, and in the autumn, the woods would flame with color and there would be birds and squirrels and rabbits. And there was a stretch of white sand beach, the last left on the whole lake. Homer began mentally to write the ad he'd put in the Sunday paper and found that he looked forward with some anticipation to setting down the words. This was one he could pull out all the stops on, use all the purple prose he wanted. "I like it, Mr. Steen," he said. "I think they won't be too hard to move " "That is good," Steen replied. "We are prepared to give you an exclusive contract for a period of ten years. Renewable, of course." "But why ten years? I can get this tract handled in a year or two, if it goes at all." "You are mistaken. The business, I can assure you, will be continuing." They stood on the brick walk in front of one of the houses and looked toward the lake. There were two white sails on the water, far toward the other shore, and a rowboat bobbed in the middle distance, with the black smudge of a hunched fisherman squatted in the stern. Homer shook his head in some bewilderment. "I don't understand." "There'll be some subletting," Steen told him smobthly. 'When fifty families are involved, there are always some who move." "But that's another story. Subletting -- " Steen pulled a paper from his pocket and handed it to Homer. "Your contract. You'll want to look it over. Look it over closely. You're a cautious man and that's the kind of man we want." winding, wooded road back to the shopping center with Steen. The center was a lovely place. It stretched along the entire south side of the property, backed by the fourteen-foot wall, and was a shining place of brandnew paint and gleaming glass and metal. Homer stopped the car to look at it. "You've got everything," he said. "I think we have," said Steen proudly. "We've even got our own telephone exchange." "Isn't that unusual?" "Not at all. What we have set up here amounts to a model village, a model living space. We have our own water system and our sewage plant Why not a telephone exchange?" Homer let it pass. There was no sense arguing. It all was just this side of crazy, anyhow. No matter how fouled up it was, Steen seemed satisfied. Maybe, Homer told himself, he knows what he is doing. But Homer doubted it "One thing more," said Steen. "It is just a minor matter, but you should know about it. We have a car agency, you see. Many agencies, in fact We can supply almost any make of car -- " "But how did you do -- " "We know our way around. Any make of car a person would want And anyone who leases must buy a car from us." "Mister," Homer said, "I've heard a lot of fast ones in the auto business, but this one beats them all. If you think Til sell cars for you -- " "There's nothing wrong with it," said Steen. "We have some good connections. Any car one wants at a fair and honest price. And we are prepared to give good value on their trade-ins, too. It would never do to have old rattletraps in a high-class development like this." "And what else? I think you better tell me how many other tie-in deals you have." "Not a single one. The automobile is all." Homer put the car in gear and drove slowly . toward the gate. The uniformed gateman saw them coming and swung the gates wide open. He waved to them cheerily as they went past his kiosk. in a ten-foot pole," Homer told his wife, Elaine, "if there weren't so much money in it But things have been kind of slow with this higher interest rate and all and this deal would give me a chance -- " "If it's Mr. Steen wearing his shoes on the wrong feet" Elaine said, "I don't think you need to worry. You remember Uncle Eb?" "Sure. He was the one who wore his vest inside out" "Pure stubbornness, that's what it was with Uncle Eb. He put it on inside out one day and someone laughed at him. So Uncle Eb said that was the way to wear a vest. And that's the way he wore it to his dying day" "Well, sure," said Homer, "that might be it, of course. But wearing a vest inside out wouldn't hurt your chest. Shoes on the wrong feet would hurt something terrible." "This poor Mr. Steen might be a cripple of some sort Maybe he was born that way." "I never heard of anyone bom with his right and left foot switched." "It's queer, naturally," Elaine persisted, "but what difference does it make? If you lease all those houses, we can go to Europe like we've always planned. As far as I'm concerned, he can go barefoot if he wants." "Yeah, I suppose so." "And we need a car," Elaine said, beginning on her catalogue. "And drapes for the living room. And I haven't had a new dress in ages. And it's shameful to be using our old silver. We should have replaced it years ago. It's the old stuff Ethel gave us when we were married -- " "All right," said Homer. "If I lease the houses, if the deal holds up, if I don't get in jail -- we'll go to Europe." He knew when he was licked. He read the contract carefully. It was all right. It said, in black and white, that he got the whole five thousand. Maybe, he told himself, he should have a lawyer see it. AI Congdon could tell him in a minute if it was ironclad. But he shrank from showing it There seemed something sinful, almost shameful, about his getting all that money. He checked on the Happy Acres Bank. A charter had been issued and all regulations had been met. He checked on building permits and they were in order, too. So what was a man to do? Especially when he had a wife who had yearned loudly for ten years to go to Europe. Homer sat down and wrote an ad for the real estate section of the Sunday paper. On second thought, he dismissed the purple prose that he had planned to use. He employed the low-key technique. The ad wasn't long. It didn't cost too much. It read: #!!!!! a month to live in a house that would sell for # to #? If so, call or see Specializing in Lake Property and Country Acreages IV TP HE first prospect was a man named H. F. Morgan. He came into the office early Sunday morning. He was belligerent. He slammed the folded want ad section down on Homer's desk. He had ringed Homer's ad with a big red-pencil mark. "This isn't true!" yelled Morgan. "What kind of come-on is this?" "It's substantially true," Homer answered quietly. "That's what it figures out to." "You mean I just pay # a month?" Well," hedged Homer, "it's not quite as simple as all that. You lease it for ninety-nine years." 'What would I want with a house for ninety-nine years? I won't live that long." "Actually, if s better than owiting a house. You can live there a lifetime, just as if you owned the place, and there are no taxes and no maintenance. And if you have children, they can go on living there." "You mean this is on the level?" Homer emphatically nodded. "Absolutely." "Whaf s wrong with this house of yours?" "There's nothing wrong with it. Ifs a new house among other new houses in an exclusive neighborhood. You have a shopping center just up the road thafs as good as any city -- " "You say ifs new?" "Right There are fifty houses. You can pick out the one you want. But I wouldn't take too long to decide, because these will go like hot cakes." "I got my car outside." "All right" said Homer, reaching for his hat. "I'll take my car and show you the way. The houses are unlocked. Look at them and choose the one you want" Out on the street Homer got into his car and sat down on something angular. He cursed because it hurt He lifted himself and reached down and picked up the thing he'd sat on. It was nothing he had ever seen before and he tossed it to the other side of the seat It was, he thought something like one of those clip-together plastic blocks that were made for children, but how it had gotten in his car, he could not imagine. and signalled for the Morgan car to follow. There were Mrs. Morgan and Jack, a hell-raising eight-yearold, and Judy, a winsome fiveyear-old, and Butch, the Boxer pup. All of them, Homer saw, were taken by surprise at the sight of Happy Acres. He could tell by the way Mrs. Morgan clasped her hands together and by the way suspicion darkened Morgan's face. One could almost hear him thinking that no one was crazy enough to offer a deal like this. Jack and Butch, the pup, went running in the woods and Judy danced gaily on the lawn and, Homer told himself, he had them neatly hooked. Homer spent a busy day. His phone was jammed with calls. House-hunting families, suspicious, half-derisive, descended on the office. He did the best he could. He'd never had a crowd like this before. He directed the house-hunting families out to Happy Acres. He patiently explained to callers that it was no hoax, that there were houses to be had. He urged all of them to hurry and make up their minds. "They won't last long," he told them, intoning unctuously that most ancient of all real estate selling gimmicks. After church, Elaine came down to the office to help him with the phone while he talked to the prospects who dropped in. Late in the afternoon, he drove out to Happy Acres. The place was an utter madhouse. It looked like a homecoming or a state fair or a monster picnic. People were wandering around, walking through the houses. One had three windows broken. The floors were all tracked up. Water faucets had been left running. Someone had turned on a hose and washed out a flowerbed. He tried to talk with some of them, but he made no headway. He went back to the office and waited for the rush to start. There wasn't any rush. A few phone calls came in and he assured the callers it was on the level. But they were still hard to convince. He went home beat. He hadn't leased a house. V who came back. He came back alone, early Monday morning. He was still suspicious. "Look," he said, "I'm an architect. I know what houses cost. What's the catch?" "The catch is that you pay five thousand cash for a ninetynine-year lease." "But that's no catch. That's like buying it. The normal house, when it stands a hundred years, has long since lost its value." "There's another catch," said Homer. "The builder won't lease to you unless you buy a new car from him." "That's illegal!" shouted Morgan. "I wouldn't know. Nobody's forcing you to take the offer." "Let's forget about the car for padrcim rnpv the moment," Morgan urged. "What I want to know is, how can the builder put up a place like that for five thousand dollars? I know for a fact that he can't" "So do I. But if he wants to lose a lot of money, who are we to stop him?" Morgan pounded on the desk. "What's the gimmick, Jackson?" "The builder wears his shoes on the wrong feet, if that means anything to you." Morgan stared at him. "I think you're crazy, too. What would that have to do with it?" "I don't know," said Homer. "I just mentioned it, thinking it might help you." "Well, it doesn't." Homer sighed. "It's got me puzzled, too" Morgan picked up his hat and jammed it on his head. "I'll be seeing you," he said. It sounded like a threat "I'll be right here," said Homer as Morgan went slamming out the door. Homer went down to the drugstore for a cup of coffee. When he got back, a second visitor was waiting for him. The man sat stiffly in a chair and tapped nervous fingers on his briefcase, held primly in his lap. He looked as if he'd eaten something sour. "Mr. Jackson," he said, "I represent the County Realtors Association." "Not interested," said Homer. "I've gotten along for years without joining that outfit I can get along a few years more." "I'm not here to solicit membership. I am here about that ad of yours in the paper yesterday." "Good ad, I thought It brought in a lot of business." "It's exactly the kind of advertising that our association frowns upon. It is, if you will pardon the expression, nothing but a come-on." "Mr. -- by the way, what is your name?" "Snyder," said the man. "Mr. Snyder, if you happen to be in the market for a place out in this area at the ridiculously low cost of # a month, I shall be glad to show you any one of fifty houses. If you have a moment, I can drive you out." HP HE man's mouth snapped together like a trap. "You know what I mean, Jackson. This is fraudulent advertising and you know it is. It is misrepresentation. We mean to show it is." Homer pitched his hat on top of the filing cabinet and sat down in his chair. "Snyder," he said, "you're cluttering up the place. You've done your duty -- you've warned me. Now get out of here." It wasn't exactly what he had meant to say and he was surprised at himself for saying it. But now that it was said, there was no way of recalling it and he rather liked the feel of strength and independence that it gave him. "There is no use flying off the handle," said Snyder. "We could talk this over." "You came in and made your threat," Homer retorted. "There's nothing to talk over. You said you were going to get me, so come ahead and get me." Snyder got to his feet savagely. "You'll regret this, Jackson." "Maybe so," admitted Homer. "Sure you don't need a house?" "Not from you," said Snyder, and went stalking out. Must have hurt their weekend sales, Homer told himself, watching Snyder go stumping down the street He sat quietly, thinking. He'd known there would be trouble, but there had been no way he could have passed up the deal. Not with Elaine set on that trip to Europe. And now he was committed. He could not back out even if he wished. And he wasn't sure that he wanted to. There could be a lot of money in it. The car deal he didn't like, but there was nothing he could do about it. And by handling it right, he might keep in the clear. Maybe, he thought, he should go out and talk to Steen about it. Gabby Wilson, his insuranceselling neighbor down the hall, came in and flopped into a chair. Gabby was a loud-mouth. "Howsa boy?" he yelled. "Hear you got that Happy Acres deal. How's about cutting in your old pal on the insurance end?" "Go chase yourself," invited Homer irritably. "Heard a good story the other day. It seems this wrecking outfit got a job to tear down a building. And the straw boss got his orders wrong and tore down another building." Gabby slapped his knee and roared with laughter. "Can you imagine the look on that contractor's face when he heard the news?" "It cost him a lot of money," Homer said. "He had a right to be good and sore." "You don't think it's funny?" "No, I don't." "How you getting on with this Happy Acres gang?" "Fine, so far," said Homer. "Cheap outfit," Gabby told him. "I been checking round. They got some two-bit contractor from out in the sticks somewhere to do the job for them. Didn't even buy their material from the dealers here. The contractor brought his own crew with him. The developers didn't spend a nickel locally" "Unpatriotic of them." "Not smart, either. Houses probably will fall down in a year or two." "I don't care particularly. Just so I get them leased." "Do anything so far?" "Got some interest in them. Here comes a prospect now." It was Morgan. He had parked in front and was getting out of a new and shiny car, agleam with chrome. Gabby beat a swift retreat. Morgan came into the office. He sat down in a chair and pulled out his checkbook. "I bought the car," he said. "How do you want this check made out?" VI  dropped in at the shopping center office. Steen was sitting with his feet up on the desk. He was wearing black shoes instead of the brown ones he had worn before. They still were on the wrong feet. "Howdy, Mr. Jackson," he said easily. Homer sat down in a chair. "I finally got rid of them. All the fifty houses are leased." "That's fine." Steen reached into a drawer, took out a small book and tossed it across the desk to Homer. "Here. This belongs to you." Homer picked it up. It was a bank book. He opened it and saw a neat row of # entries marching down the page. "You made yourself a mint," said Steen. "I wish I had fifty more," Homer told him. "Or two hundred more. This thing is catching on. I could lease them in a week. I've got a waiting list longer than my arm." "Well, why don't you go ahead and lease them?" "I can't lease them a second time." "Funny thing," said Steen. "There's no one living in those houses. They all are standing empty." "But that can't be!" objected Homer. "There might be a few still empty -- a few that the people haven't occupied yet. But most of them have moved in. They're living in those houses." "That's not the way it looks to me." "What's happened to those people then? Where have they -- " "Mr. Jackson!" "Yes?" "You haven't trusted me. You didn't trust me from the start I don't know why. You thought the deal was queer. You were scared of it. But I've played fair with you. You'll have to admit I have." Homer stroked the bank book. "More than fair." "I know what I am doing, Mr. Jackson. I'm not anybody's fool. I have the angles figured out. String along with me. I need a man like you." "You mean lease all those houses a second time!" Homer asked uneasily. Steen. "And a third. And fourth. Lease them as often as you like. Keep right on leasing them. No one will mind at all." "But the people will mind -- the people that I lease those houses to," Homer pointed out. "Mr. Jackson, let me handle this. Don't you worry about a solitary thing. You just keep those houses moving." "But it isn't right." "Mr. Jackson, in some six weeks' time, you've made a quarthat's what's wrong with you. I suppose you figure that's enough -- " "Well, no. With income tax and all -- " "Forget the income tax. I told you that this bank of ours had tax advantages." "I don't get it," Homer said. "This is no way to do business." "But it is," said Steen. "I challenge you to find a better way to do business. There's no end to it. You can become a multi-millionaire -- " "In jail." "I've told you we weren't doing wrong. If you don't want to handle it -- " "Let me think it over," Homer pleaded. "Give me a day or two." "Noon tomorrow," said Steen decisively. "If you don't tell me noon tomorrow, I'll look for someone else." Homer got up. He thrust the bank book in his pocket. "I'll be in to see you." Steen put his feet back on the desk. "Fine. I'll be expecting you." Out on the concourse, Homer walked along the gleaming shop fronts. And the shops, he saw, were no more than half-staffed and entirely innocent of buyers. He went into a drugstore to buy a cigar and was waited on by a girl of just slightly more than high school age. He failed to recognize her. "You live around here?" he asked. "No, sir. In the city." He went into a hardware store and into a grocery supermarket. He saw no one he knew. And that was queer. He'd lived in the area for almost thirteen years and thought he knew everyone. He recalled what Gabby had said about the contractor from somewhere out of town. Maybe, for some zany reason, Steen had a policy against employing local people. Still, he'd employed Homer.  T was a crazy setup, Homer told himself. None of it made sense -- and least of all, the leasing of the houses a second time around. Perhaps he should get out of it. He'd made a fair amount of money. Right now, most likely, he could get out slick and clean. If he stayed, there might be trouble. He lighted up the cigar and went back to his car. Wheeling out of the parking lot, he headed for the road that led into the housing development. He drove slowly, looking closely at each house. All of them seemed empty. The windows stared blindly without drapes or curtains. The lawns had not been cut for weeks. There was no sign of anyone -- and there should be children and pets playing. Almost everyone he'd leased to had had children and dogs and cats. The place should be jumping, he told himself, and instead it was silent and deserted. He stopped the car and went into a house. It was bare and empty. There was sawdust in the comers and wood shavings here and there. There were no scuff marks on the floor, no handprints on the wall. The windows had not been washed; the trademark paper still was sticking to them. He went out puzzled. He inspected two more houses. They were the same. Steen had been right, then. Steen, with his shoes on the wrong feet, and with something else -- with his different way of talking now. Six weeks ago, when Steen had come into Homer's office, he had been stiff and formal, awkward, yet striving for preciseness. And now he was easy in his manner, now he put his feet up on the desk, now he talked slangily. There was no one living in the houses, Homer admitted to himself. No one had ever lived in them. He had leased all fifty of them and no one had moved in. And it had a fishy smell -- it had a terribly fishy smell. On his way out, he stopped at Steen's office. The place was locked up. The old gateman opened the gate and waved at him from the window of his kiosk. took out of a drawer the list of leases he had drawn. He phoned Morgan, the first name on the lease. "That number has been changed," the operator told him. She gave him the new number and he dialed it. "Happy Acres," said a singsong operator-voice. "Huh?" "Happy Acres," the voice sang. "Whom did you wish, sir?" "The Morgan residence " He waited and it was Morgan who answered. "Homer Jackson. Just checking. How do you like the house? Are you getting on okay?" "Perfectly," Morgan told him happily. "I've been meaning to come in and thank you for putting me onto this." "Everything is really all right?" "Couldn't be better. I hardly ever go into my office now. I stay out here and work in the amusement room. I go fishing and I take walks. The wife and kids are just as pleased as I am." Morgan lowered his voice. "How do you guys manage this? I've tried to get it figured out and I can't" "It's a secret," Homer replied, thinking on his feet. "The answer to the housing problem." "Not that I care," Morgan said. "Just curious, you know. Ill be dropping in one day. Ill bring you something." "Glad to see you," said Homer. He called the Happy Acres number and asked for another family. He went halfway through the list He talked mostly to the women, although some of the men were home. They were not only happy, but enthusiastic. They asked him jokingly how he got away with it. When he finished, he was glassy-eyed. He went down to the drugstore for a cup of coffee. When he returned, he'd made up his mind. He took out his waiting list and began making calls. 'There just happens to be a vacancy in Happy Acres if you are interested." They were. He reminded them about the cars. They said they'd take care of that matter first thing in the morning. By suppertime, he'd leased twenty of the houses by making twenty phone calls. Homer said to his wife. "But there's money in it." "It's just that you don't understand," said Elaine. "There may be a perfectly good reason why Mr. Steen can't explain it all to you." "But it means we have to give up our trip to Europe. And after we had got our passports and all" "We can go to Europe later. You'll never get a chance like this again." "It worries me," said Homer. "Oh, you're always worried oyer things that never even happen. Mr. Steen is satisfied and the people you have leased to are, so why are you worrying?" "But where are these people? They aren't living in the houses and yet they talk as if they were. And some of them asked me how I got away with it or words to that effect. They asked it as if they admired me for being slick in some kind of shady deal, and if it turns out that I am smart, I'd like to know just how I managed -- " "Forget it," Elaine said. "You aren't smart and you never were. If I didn't keep behind you, pushing all the time -- " "Yes, dear," said Homer. He'd heard it all before. "And quit your worrying." He tried to, but he couldn't The next morning, he drove to Happy Acres and parked across the road from the gate. From # o'clock until #, he counted # cars coming out of the development. Some of the people in them he recognized as those he had leased the houses to. Many of them waved to him. At #:#, he drove in through the gate and went slowly down the road. The houses still were empty. When he got back to the office, there were people waiting for him. The block was clogged with cars that gleamed with newness. He did a rushing business. No one, it turned out, was interested in seeing the houses. Most of them had seen them earlier. All they wanted was a lease. He filled out the forms as rapidly as he could and raked in the checks and cash. Some other people showed up. Word had got around, they said, that there were vacancies in the Happy Acres tract. Yes, he said, there were. Just a few of them. He reminded them about the cars. The last man in line, however, did not want to lease a house. "My name is Fowler," he said. "I represent the Contractors and Builders Association. Maybe you can help me." "I've got another house, if that is what you want," said Homer. "I don't need a house. I have one, thanks." "Pay you to sell it and get in on this deal. The newest thing in housing. A completely new concept." I want to know is, how do I get hold of Steen?" "No trouble at all," said Homer. "You just go out to Happy Acres. He has an office there." "I've been out there a dozen times. He is never in. Usually the office is locked." "I never have any trouble finding him, although I don't see him often. I'm too busy handling the property." "Can you tell me how he does it, Mr. Jackson?" "How he does what? How he is always out?" "No. How he can sell a house for five thousand dollars." "He doesn't sell. He leases." "Don't pull that one on me. It's the same as selling. And he can't build for anywhere near that kind of money. He's losing a good twenty thousand or more on every house out there." "If a man wants to lose his money -- " "Mr. Jackson," said Fowler, "that is not the point at all. The point is that it's unfair competition." "Not if he leases," Homer pointed out. "If he sold, it might be." "If this keeps on, it'll put every contractor in the area out of business." "That," said Homer, "would be no more than simple justice in a lot of cases. They throw up a shack with plenty of glitter and charge a fancy price and -- " "Nevertheless, Mr. Jackson, none of them intend to be put out of business." "And you're going to sue," guessed Homer. "We certainly intend to." "Don't look at me. I only lease the places." "We intend to get out an injunction against your leasing them." "You make the second one," Homer informed him, annoyed. "The second what?" "The real estate boys sent a guy like you out here several weeks ago. He made a lot of threats and nothing's happened yet. He was bluffing, just like you." "Let me set your mind at rest," said Fowler. "I'm not doing any bluffing." He got up from his chair and stalked stiffly out. Homer looked at his watch. It was long past lunchtime. He went down to the drugstore for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The place was empty and he had the counter to himself. He sat hunched over the lunch and thought about it, trying to get all the queer goings-on straightened out into some sort of logic. But the only thing he could think about was that Steen wore his shoes on the wrong feet. Homer went back to the office. There were people waiting, with their new cars parked outside. He leased houses right and left. Apparently the word was spreading. The house-seekers drifted in all afternoon. He leased four more houses before it was time to close. It was funny, he thought, very, very funny how the word had got around. He hadn't advertised in the last three weeks and they still were coming in. Just as he was getting ready to lock up, Morgan strode in breezily. He had a package underneath his arm. "Here you are, pal," he said. "I told you I'd bring you something. Caught them just an hour or two ago." The package was beginning to get soggy. Homer took it gingerly. "Thanks very much," he said in a doubtful voice. "Think nothing of it. I'll bring you more in a week or two." As soon as Morgan left, Homer closed the blinds and unwrapped the package warily. Inside were brook trout -- trout fresh-caught, with the ferns in which they had been wrapped not even wilting yet. And there was no trout stream closer than a couple of hundred miles! Homer stood and shivered. For there was no point in pretending ignorance, no point in repeating smugly to himself that it was all right. Even at five thousand a deal, there still was something wrong -- very badly wrong. He had to face it. They were beginning to close in on him. Fowler had sounded as if he might mean business and the Real Estate Association undoubtedly was lying in ambush, waiting for him to make one little slip. And when he made that slip, they'd snap the trap shut. To protect himself, he had to know what was going on. He could no longer go at it blind. Knowing, he might be able to go on. He might know when to quit. And that time, he told himself, might have been as early as this afternoon. He stood there, with the fish and ferns lying in the wet wrapping paper on the desk, and envisioned a long street of houses, and behind that long street of houses, another identical street of houses, and behind the second street, another -- street after street, each behind the other, each exactly like the other, fading out of sight on a flat and level plain. A ND that was the way it must be -- except there was no second street of houses. There was just the one, standing lone and empty, and yet, somehow, with people living in them... Lease them a second time, Steen had said, and a third time and a fourth. Don't you worry about a thing. Let me handle it. Leave the worry all to me. You just keep on leasing houses. And Homer leased one house and the people moved, not into the house he'd leased them, but into the second identical house immediately behind it, and he leased the first house yet again and the people moved into the third, also identical, also directly behind the first and second house, and that was how it was. Except it was just a childish thing he had dreamed up to offer an explanation -- any explanation -- for a thing he couldn't understand. A fairy tale. He tried to get the idea back on the track again, tried to rationalize it, but it was too weird. A man could trust his sense, couldn't he? He could believe what he could see. And there were only fifty houses -- empty houses, despite the fact that people lived in them. He could trust his ears and he had talked to people who were enthusiastic about living in those empty houses. It was crazy, Homer argued with himself. All those other folks were crazy -- Steen and all the people living in the houses. He wrapped up the fish and retied the package clumsily. No matter where they came from, no matter what lunacy might prevail, those trout surely would taste good. And that, the taste of fresh-caught trout, was one of the few true, solid things left in the entire world. There was a creaking sound and Homer jumped in panic, whirling swiftly from the desk. The door was being opened! He'd forgotten to lock the door! The man who came in wore no uniform, but there was no doubt that he was a cop or detective. "My name is Hankins," he said. He showed his badge to Homer. Homer shut his mouth tight to keep his teeth from chattering. "I think you may be able to do something for me," Hankins said. "Surely," Homer chattered. "Anything you say." "You know a man named Dahl?" "I don't think I do." "Would you search your records?" "My records?" Homer echoed wildly. "Mr. Jackson, you're a businessman. Surely you keep records -- the names of persons to whom you sell property and other things like that." "Yes," said Homer, all in a rush. "Yes, I keep that sort of record. Of course. Sure." pulled out a desk drawer and brought out the folder he'd set up on Happy Acres. He looked through it, fumbling at the papers. "I think I may have it," he said. "Dahl, did you say the name was?" "John H. Dahl," said Hankins. "Three weeks ago, I leased a house in Happy Acres to a John H. Dahl. Do you think he might be the one?" "Tall, dark man. Forty-three years old. Acts nervous." Homer shook his head. "I don't remember him. There have been so many people." "Have you one there for Benny August?" Homer searched again. "B. J. August. The day after Mr. Dahl." "And perhaps a man named Drake? More than likely signs himself Hanson Drake." Drake was also there. Hankins seemed well pleased. "Now how do I get to this Happy Acres place?" With a sinking feeling, Homer told him how. He gathered up his fish and walked outside with Hankins. He stood and watched the officer drive away. He wouldn't want to be around, he suspected, when Hankins returned from Happy Acres. He hoped with all his heart that Hankins wouldn't look him up. He locked up the office and went down to the drugstore to buy a paper before going home. He unfolded it and the headlines leaped at him: Three photographs on column cuts were ranged underneath the headline. He read the names in turn. Dahl. August. Drake. He folded the paper tightly and thrust it beneath his arm and he felt the sweat begin to trickle. Hankins would never find his men, he knew. No one would ever find them. In Happy Acres, they'd be safe. It was, he began to see, a ready-made hideout for all kinds of hunted men. He wondered how many of the others he had leased the houses to might be hunted, too. No wonder, he thought, the word had spread so quickly. No wonder his office had been filled all day with people who'd already bought the cars. And what was it all about? How did it work? Who had figured it all out? And why did he, Homer Jackson, have to be the one who'd get sucked into it? Elaine took a searching look at him as he came in the door. "You've been worrying," she scolded. Homer lied most nobly. "Not worrying. Just a little tired." Scared to death would have been closer to the truth. IX AT # o'clock next morning, he drove to Happy Acres. He was inside the door before he saw that Steen was busy. The man who had been talking to Steen swung swiftly from the desk. "Oh, it's you," he said. Homer saw that the man was Hankins. Steen smiled wearily. "Mr. Hankins seems to think that we're obstructing justice." "I can't imagine," Homer said, "why he should think that." Hankins was on the edge of rage. "Where are these people? What have you done with them?" Steen said: "I've told you, Mr. Hankins, that we only lease the property. We cannot undertake to go surety for anybody who may lease from us." "You've hidden them!" "How could we hide them, Mr. Hankins? Where could we hide them? The entire development is open to you. You can search it to your heart's content." "I don't know what is going on," said Hankins savagely, "but I'm going to find out. And once I do, both of you had better have your explanations ready." "I think," Steen commented, "that Mr. Hankins' determination and deep sense of duty are very splendid things. Don't you, Mr. Jackson?" "I do, indeed," said Homer, at loss as to what to say. "You'll be saying that out of the other side of your mouth before I'm through with you," Hankins promised them. He went storming out the door. "What a nasty man," Steen remarked, unconcerned. Tm getting out," said Homer. "I've got a pocket full of checks and cash. As soon as I turn them over, I am pulling out. You can find someone else to do your dirty work." "Now I am sorry to hear that. And just when you were doing well. There's a lot of money to be made." "It's too risky." "I grant you that it may appear a little risky, but actually it's not. Men like Hankins will raise a lot of dust, but what can they really do? We are completely in the clear." "We're leasing the same houses over and over again." 'Why, certainly," said Steen. "How else would you expect me to build up the kind of clientele I need to give me business volume in this shopping center? You yourself have told me that fifty families were by no means enough. And you were right, of course. But you lease the houses ten times and you have five hundred families, which is not bad. Lease each one a hundred times and you have five thousand -- And incidentally, Mr. Jackson, by the time you lease each of them a hundred times, you will have made yourself twenty-five million dollars, which is not a bad amount for a few years' work. "Because," Steen concluded, "you see, despite what you may have thought of me, I'm squarely on the level. I gave you the straight goods. I told you I was not interested in money from the houses, but merely from the shopping center." he was unimpressed. He kept on emptying checks and wads of money from his pockets. Steen reached out for the checks and began endorsing them. He stacked the money neatly. "I wish you would reconsider, Mr. Jackson," he urged. "I have need of a man like you. You've worked out so satisfactorily, I hate to see you go." "Come clean with me," said Homer, "and I might stay. Tell me all there is to tell -- how it all works and what all the angles are and what you plan to do." Steen laid a cautionary finger across his lips. "Hush! You don't know what you're asking." "You mean you see no trouble coming?" "Some annoyance, perhaps. Not real trouble." "They could throw the book at us if they could prove we were hiding people wanted by the law." Steen sighed deeply. "Mr. Jackson, how many fugitives have you sheltered in the last six weeks?" "Not a one," said Homer. "Neither have I." Steen spread his arms wide. "So we have nothing to fear. We've done no wrong. At least," he amended, "none that they can prove." He picked up the money and the checks and handed them to Homer. "Here," he said ; "You might as well take it to the bank. It's your money." Homer took the money and the checks and stood with them in his hand, thinking about what Steen had said about not doing any wrong. Maybe Steen was right. Maybe Homer was getting scared when there was no need to be. What could they be charged with? Fraudulent advertising? There had been no specific claims that had not been performed. For tying in the auto sales? Just possibly, although he had not made an auto sale a condition of transaction; he had merely mentioned that it would be very nice if they bought a car from Happy Acres Auto Sales. For selling at less than cost? Probably not, for it would be a fine point of law to prove a lease a sale. And selling or leasing below cost in any case was no crime. For leasing the same house more than once? Certainly not until it could be proved that someone had suffered damage and it was most unlikely that it could be proved. For doing away with people? But those people could be reached by telephone, could drive out through the gate. And they were well and happy and enthusiastic. "Perhaps," Steen said gently, "you have changed your mind. Perhaps you'll stay with us." "Perhaps I will," said Homer. IT E walked down the concourse to the bank. It was an impressive place. The foyer was resplendent in coppery metal and with brightly polished mirrors. There were birds in hanging cages and some of the birds were singing. There were no customers, but the bank was spic and span. An alert vice-president sat behind his polished desk without a thing to do. An equally alert teller waited shiny-faced behind the wicked window. Homer walked to the window and shoved through the money and the checks. He took his passbook from his pocket and handed it across. The teller looked at it and said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Jackson, but you have no account with us." "No account!" cried Homer. "I His heart went plunk into his boots, and if he'd had Steen there, he'd have broken him to bits. "No," said the teller calmly, "you've made an error. That is all." "Error!" gasped Homer, hanging onto the window to keep from keeling over. "An understandable error," the teller said sympathetically. "One that anyone could make. Your account is not with us, but with the Second Bank." "Second Bank," wheezed Homer. "What are you talking about? This is the only bank there is." "Look, it says Second Bank right here." He showed Homer the passbook. It did say Second Happy Acres State Bank. "Well, now," said Homer, "that's better. Will you tell me how I get to this Second Bank?" "Gladly, sir. Right over there. Just go through that door." He handed back the passbook and the money. "That door, you say?" inquired Homer. "Yes. The one beside the drinking fountain." Homer clutched the passbook and the money tightly in his hand and headed for the door. He opened it and stepped inside and got it shut behind him before he realized that he was in a closet. It was just a tiny place, not much bigger than a man, and it was as black as the inside of a cat. Sweat started out on Homer and he searched frantically for the doorknob and finally found it. He pushed the door open and stumbled out. He strode wrathfully back across the foyer to the teller's window. He rapped angrily on the ledge and the teller turned around. "What kind of trick is this?" yelled Homer. "What do you think you're pulling? What is going on here? That is nothing but a closet." "I'm sorry, sir," the teller said. "My fault. I forgot to give you this." He reached into his cash drawer and handed Homer a small object It looked for all the world like the replica of a bizarre radiator ornament. hand, Homer asked, "What has this got to do with it?" "Everything," the teller said. "It will get you to the Second Bank. Don't lose it. You'll need it to get back." "You mean I just hold it in my hand?" "That is all you do, sir," the teller assured him. Homer went back to the door, still unconvinced. It was all a lot of mumbo-jumbo, he told himself. These guys were just the same as Gabby Wilson -- full of smart pranks. And if that teller was making a fool of him, he promised himself, he'd mop up the floor with him. He opened the door and stepped into the closet, only it was no closet. It was another bank. The metal still was coppery and the mirrors were a-glitter and the birds were singing, but there were customers. There were three tellers instead of the single one in the first bank and the bland, smooth vice-president at his shiny desk was industriously at work. Homer stood quietly just outside the door through which he'd come from the other bank. The customers seemed not to have noticed him, but as he looked them over, he was startled to discover that there were many whose faces were familiar. Here, then, were the people who had leased the houses, going about their business in the Second Bank. He put the miniature radiator ornament in his pocket and headed for the window that seemed to be least busy. He waited in line while the man ahead of him finished making a deposit. Homer could only see the back of the man's head, but the head seemed to be familiar. He stood there raking through the memories of the people he had met in the last six weeks. Then the man turned around and Homer saw that it was Dahl. It was the same face he had seen staring at him from the front page of the paper only the night before. "Hello, Mr. Jackson," said Dahl. "Long time no see." Homer gulped. "Good day, Mr. Dahl. How do you like the house?" "Just great, Mr. Jackson. It's so quiet and peaceful here, I can't tear myself away from it." I bet you can't, thought Homer. "Glad to hear you say so," he said aloud, and stepped up to the window. The teller glanced at the passbook. "Good to see you, Mr. Jackson. The president, I think, would like to see you, too. Would you care to step around after I finish your deposit?" dow, feeling a little chilly at the prospect of seeing the president, wondering what the president might want and what new trouble it portended. A hearty voice told him to come when he knocked on the door. The president was a beefy gentleman and extremely pleasant. "I've been hoping you'd come in," he said. "I don't know if you realize it or not, but you're our biggest depositor." He shook Homer's hand most cordially and motioned him to a chair. He gave him a cigar and Homer, a good judge of tobacco, figured it for at least a fiftycenter. The president, puffing a little, sat down behind his desk. "This is a good setup here," said Homer, to get the conversation started. "Oh, yes," the president said. "Most splendid. It's just a test, though, you know." "No, I hadn't known that" "Yes, surely. To see if it will work. If it does, we will embark on much bigger projects -- ones that will prove even more economically feasible. One never knows, of course, how an idea will catch on. You can run all the preliminary observations and make innumerable surveys and still never know until you try it out." "That's true," said Homer, wondering what in the world the president was talking about. "Once we get it all worked out," the president said, "we can turn it over to the natives." "I see. You're not a native here?" "Of course not. I am from the city." And that, thought Homer, was a funny thing to say. He watched the man closely, but there was nothing in his face to indicate that he had misspoken -- no flush of embarrassment, no sign of flurry. "I'm especially glad to have a chance to see you," Homer told him. "As a matter of fact, I had been thinking of switching my account and -- " The president's face took on a look of horror. "But why? Certainly you've been told about the tax advantages." "I think that the matter got some mention. But, I must confess, I don't understand." "Why, Mr. Jackson, it is simple. No mystery at all. So far as the authorities of your country are concerned -- " "My country?" "Well, of course. I think it might logically be argued, even in a court of law, that this place we're in is no longer the United States of America. But even if it should be a part of your great nation -- I doubt that such a contention would hold up if put to the decision -- why, even so, our records are not available to the agents of your country. Don't tell me you fail to see the implications of a situation such as that." "The income tax," Homer said. "Correct," said the president, smiling very blandly. "That is interesting. Interesting, indeed." Homer rose and held out his hand to the president. "I'll be in again." "Thank you," said the president. "Drop in any time you wish." O N the street outside the bank, the sun was shining brightly. The shopping center stretched along the mall and there were people here and there, walking on the concourse or shopping in the stores. A few cars were parked in the lot and the world of this Second Bank looked exactly like the First Bank's world, and if a man had not known the difference -- Good Lord, thought Homer, what was the difference? What had really happened? He'd walked through the door and there was eS.Vb mthe other bank. He'd walked through a door and found the missing people -- the people who had not been living in the empty houses of the First Bank's world. Because that other world where the houses still stood empty was no more than a show window? It might simply be a street lined with demonstration homes. And here was that second street of houses he'd dreamed up the other night. And beyond this second street, would there be another street and another and another? He stumbled along the concourse, shaken, now that he realized there really was that second street of houses. It was an idea that was hard to take in stride. He didn't take it in his stride. His mind balked and shied away from it and he told himself it wasn't true. But it was true and there was no way to rationalize it, to make it go away. There was a second street! He walked along and saw that he was near the gate. The gate, he saw, was the same as ever, with its expanse of massive iron. But there was no gateman. And a car was coming up the road, heading directly for the gate, and it was moving fast, as if the driver did not see the gate. Homer shouted and the car kept on. He started to run, waving his arms, but the driver paid not the least attention. The crazy fool, thought Homer. He'll hit the gate and -- And the car hit the gate, slammed into it, but there was no sound, no crash, no screech of rending metal. There was simply nothing. The gate was there, undented. And there was no car. The car had disappeared. Homer stalked the gate. Ten feet away, he stopped. The road came up to the gate; beyond it was no road. Beyond the gate was wilderness. The road came up and ended and the wilderness began. Cautiously, Homer walked out into the road and peered through the gate. Just a few feet away, a giant oak towered into the air and behind it was the forest, wild and hoary and primeval, and in the forest was the happy sound, the abandoned sound of water running in a brook. Fish, thought Homer. Maybe that brook is where the trout came from. T E moved toward the gate for a closer look and reached out his hands to grasp the ironwork. Even as he did, the forest went away and the gate as well as he stood in the old familiar entrance to Happy Acres, with the gate wide open, with the state highway running along the wall and the road from the development running out to meet it. "Good morning, sir," said the gateman. "Maybe you ought to move over to one side. A car is apt to hit you." "Huh?" Homer asked blankly. "A car. This is a road, you know." Homer turned around and brushed past the gateman. He hustled down the concourse, aiming for Steen's office. But the office was locked. Homer shook the door. He rapped wildly on the glass. He pounded on the frame. Absolutely nothing happened. Turning from the door, he stared out across the development with incredulous eyes -- the vacant concourse, the empty houses among the trees, the faint patches of shining lake peeking through the clearings. He jammed his hands into his pockets and his fingers touched the little radiator ornament. He took it out and looked at it. He'd seen it before -- not the little replica, but the ornament itself. He had seen it, he remembered, on the new cars parked outside his office by the people seeking leases. He had seen it on the car that had crashed the gate and disappeared. He walked slowly to the parking lot and drove home. "I don't think I'll go back to the office today," he told Elaine. "I don't feel so good." "You've been working too hard," she told him accusingly. "You look all worn out." "That's a fact," he admitted. "After lunch, you lie down. And see that you get some sleep." "Yes, dear," he said. S O it began to fall into a pattern, he thought, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. Finally it was clear enough so a man could begin to make some head and tail of it It was unbelievable, but there was no choice -- one could not disbelieve in it. It was there to see. And if one looked at it any other way, it made no sense at all. Someone -- Steen, perhaps, or maybe someone else for whom Steen was serving as a front -- had found out how to build one house, yet have many houses, houses stretching back street after street from the first house, all shadows of the first house, but substantial just the same -- substantial enough for families to live in. Dimensional extensions of that first house. Or houses stretching into time. Or something else as weird. But however they might do it, it was a swell idea. For you could build one house and sell it, or lease it, time and time again. Except that one was crazy to get hold of an idea that was as good as that and then let someone else make all the money from the leasing of the houses. And there was no question that Steen was crazy. That idea he had about the shopping center was completely batty -- although, stop to think of it, if one had five thousand houses and leased each of them ten times and had a monopoly on all the shops and stores -- why, it would pay off tremendously. And the bank president's slant on sovereignty had certain angles, too, that should not be overlooked. A new idea in housing, Steen had told him. It was all of that. It was a new idea that would apply to many things -- to industry and farming and mining and a lot of other ventures. A man could make one car and there would be many others. A man could build a manufacturing plant and he would have many plants. It was like a carbon copy, Homer thought -- an economic carbon copy. And a man apparently could make as many carbons as he wished. Possibly, he speculated, once you knew the principle, there was no limit to the carbons. Possibly the ghostly parade of Happy Acres house stretched limitless, forever and forever. There might be no end to them. He fell asleep and dreamed of going down a line of ghostly houses, counting them frantically as he ran along, hoping that he'd soon get to the end of them, for he couldn't quit until he did get to the end. But they always stretched ahead of him, as far as he could see, and he could find no end to them. He woke, damp with perspiration, his tongue a dry and bitter wad inside a flannel mouth. He crept out of bed and went to the bathroom. He held his head under a cold faucet. It helped, but not much. D ownstairs, he found a note that Elaine had propped against the radio on the breakfast table: Gone to play bridge at Mabel's. Sandwiches in refrigerator. It was dark outside. He'd slept the daylight hours away. A wasted day, he berated himself -- a completely wasted day. He hadn't done a dollar's worth of work. He found some milk and drank it, but left the sandwiches where they were. He might as well go to the office and get a little work done, compensate in part for the wasted day. Elaine wouldn't return until almost midnight and there was no sense in staying home alone. He got his hat and went out to where he'd parked the car in the driveway. He got into it and sat down on something angular and hard. He hoisted himself wrathfully and searched the seat with a groping hand to find the thing he'd sat on. His fingers closed about it and then he remembered. He'd sat on it on that day Morgan had showed up in answer to the ad. It had been rolling around ever since, unnoticed in the seat. It was smooth to the touch and warm -- warmer than it should be -- as if there were a busy little motor humming away inside it. And suddenly it winked. He caught his breath and it flashed again. Exactly like a signal. Instinct told him to get rid of it, to heave it out the window, but a voice suddenly spoke out of it -- a thick, harsh voice that mouthed a sort of chant he could not recognize. "What the hell?" chattered Homer, fearful now. "What's going on?" The chanting voice ceased and a heavy silence fell, so thick and frightening that Homer imagined he could feel it closing in on him. The voice spoke again. This time, it was one word, slow and labored, as if the thick, harsh tongue drove itself to create a new and alien sound. The silence fell again and there was a sense of waiting. Homer huddled in the seat, cold with fear. For now he could guess where the cube had come from. Steen had ridden in the car with him and it had fallen from his pocket. The voice took up again : "Urrr -- urr -- urrth -- mum!" Homer almost screamed. Rustling, panting sounds whispered from the cube. Earthman? Homer wondered wildly. Was that what it had tried to say? And if that was right, if the cube in fact had been lost by Steen, then it meant that Steen was not a man at all." way he wore his shoes and suddenly it became understandable why he might wear his shoes that way. Perhaps, where Steen came from, there was no left or right, maybe not even shoes. No man could expect an alien, a being from some distant star, to get the hang of all Earth's customs -- not right away, at least. He recalled the first day Steen had come into the office and, the precise way he had talked and how stiffly he'd sat down in the chair. And that other day, feix weeks later, when Steen had talked slangily and had sat slouched in his chair, with his feet planted on the desk. Learning, Homer thought. Learning all the time. Getting to know his way around, getting the feel of things, like a gawky country youth learning city ways. But it sure was a funny thing that he'd never learned about the shoes. The cube went on gurgling and panting and the thick voice muttered and spat out alien words. One could sense the tenseness and confusion at the other end. Homer sat cold and rigid, with horror seeping into him drop by splashing drop, while the cube blurted over and over a single phrase that meant not a thing to him. Then, abruptly, the cube went dead. It lay within his hand, cooling, silent, just a thing that looked and felt like a clip-together plastic block for children. From far off, he heard the roar of a car as it left the curb and sped off in the night. From someone's backyard, a cat meowed for attention. Nearby, a bird cheeped sleepily. Homer opened the glove compartment and tossed the cube in among the rags and scraper and the dog-eared roadmap and the other odds and ends. He felt the terror and the loathing and the wild agony begin to drain out of his bones and he sat quietly in the car, trying to readjust his mind to this new situation -- that Steen must be an alien. He dipped his hand into his pocket and found the replica of the radiator ornament. And that was the key, he knew -- not only the key to the many streets of homes, but the key to Steen and the alien world. They hadn't meant for him to keep the ornament, of course. If he had returned the way he'd entered into the world of the Second Bank, the teller more than likely would have demanded that he give it back. But he'd returned another way, an unexpected way, and it still was in his pocket. And the radiator ornament, of course, was the reason that Steen had insisted that anyone who leased a house must also buy a car. For the ornament was a key that bridged one world and another. Although, thought Homer, it was rather drastic to insist that a man should buy a car simply so he'd have the correct radiator ornament. But that might be the way, he told himself, that an alien mind would work. He was calmer now. The fear still lingered, but pushed back, buried just a little. posed to act, he asked himself, when he learns there are aliens in the land? Run screeching through the streets, rouse all the citizens, alert the law, go baying on the trail? Or does he continue about his business? Might he not, he wondered, take advantage of his knowledge, turn it to his own benefit? He was the only human being on all of Earth who knew. Steen might not like it known that he was an alien. Perhaps it would be worth a lot to Steen not to have it known. Homer sat and thought about it. The more he thought, the more reasonable it seemed that Steen might be ready to lay plenty on the line to keep the fact a secret. Not that I don't have it coming to me, Homer told himself. Not that he hasn't caused me a heap of worry and trouble. He put his hand into his pocket. The miniature ornament was there. There was no need to wait. Now was as good as any time. He turned the ignition key and the motor came to life. He backed out of the driveway and took the road to Happy Acres. The development was dark and quiet. Even the usual advertising signs were turned off in the shop fronts. He parked in front of Steen's office and got out. Opening the trunk, he found the jack handle in the dark. He stood staring toward the gate. There was no sign of the gateman. But that was a chance he'd have to take. If the old fool tried to interfere, he could handle him. For a moment, in front of the door to Steen's office, he hesitated, trying to reassure himself. Certainly there would be another closet, some way to get to those other worlds, inside the office. He struck savagely at the glass in the door with the jack handle. The glass splintered and rained down, with crashing, tinkling sounds. Homer waited, tense, listening, watching. Nothing stirred. The old gateman, if he was around, apparently had not heard the crash. Carefully, Homer reached through the broken glass and manipulated the night lock. The door swung easily open. He walked inside and closed the door behind him. T N the empty office, Homer paused until his eyes became accustomed to the deeper darkness. He moved forward, groping with his hands, and found the desk. He could make out the dim bulk of a filing case. There should be a door somewhere. Perhaps not a door into the street, but a door into a hideout -- some room where Steen could disappear to eat and rest and sleep; some place that might have a touch of his alien home about it. Homer moved from the desk to the filing cabinet and felt along the wall. Almost immediately, he found a door. He took a firmer grip on the jack handle and twisted on the knob. He walked through the door and there was the room, lighted a garish green by a lantern suspended from the ceiling. There was sound and the sense of movement. Homer's hair stood straight on end and he felt his skin trying very hard to roll up his back. The hairy monster reached out a paw and grabbed him by the shoulder just as Homer swung around to dive back through the door. The monster's paw was heavy and very strong. It was hairy and it tickled. Homer opened his mouth to scream, but his tongue dried up and his throat closed and he couldn't make a sound. The jack handle slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the floor. For a long moment, he stood there in the grip of the hairy monster and he supposed it had a face, but he could not see the face, for the hair grew all over it and drooped down where its face should be. The monster was a large one, with massive chest and shoulders that tapered down to a slim, athletic waist. Frightened as he was, Homer still could not keep from thinking that it looked a lot like an English sheepdog with a wrestler's body. And all the while, there was something rolling on the floor and moaning. Then the hairy monster said, in halting, stumbling syllables: "You Mister Jackson, you are not?" Homer made a croaking sound. "I apologize," the monster told him. "I very poor at your words. I work on your planet survey, but not so good with words." He motioned at the thing moaning and rolling on the floor. "That was good with words." The hairy hand dropped from Homer's shoulder. "That," it said, gesturing at the floor again, "your Mister Steen." 'What is wrong with him?" Homer blurted out. "Is he sick or something?" "He die himself," the monster said. "You mean he's dying and you're just standing there -- " "No, no. He -- how do you word it right? -- he unlive himself." self? Committing suicide?" "Yes," the monster said. "He does it very well. Do you not agree?" "But you can't -- " "He take great pride in it. He make spectacular. He just starting now. He work up to grand finale. You must stay and watch. It be something to remember." "No, thank you," Homer said faintly. monster put out a hairy paw and stopped him. "You must not be afraid of us. I stay half myself, all right? Could change entirely into human, but much trouble. Good enough this way?" "It's all right," said Homer. "We owe you debt," the monster said. "This Mister Steen of yours got things all scrambled up." "I'll say he did," said Homer feelingly. "He just a stumblebum. Bungler. He likewise is a joker." "Joker?" "Clown? Wise guy? You know -- he made the joke. Sometimes very sly joke, but stupid just the same." The monster leaned forward to peer into Homer's face. "Your planet, it has its jokers, too?" "Yes, indeed," Homer said. "There's one down the hall from me. His name is Gabby Wilson." "So you understand then. A joker not too bad if that is all he is. But take a joker who makes mistakes and that is most bad. You have name for it. Smart aleck?" "That's the name," said Homer. "We make projects for the planets, for very many planets. We try to make each project fit the planet. The kind that will help the planet, the kind it needs the most." "Like foreign aid," Homer supplied. "So this bungler," said the monster, his voice rising in forthright and honest wrath, "this smart aleck, this nincompoop, this Mister Steen of yours, what do you think he does? He came to Earth as project manager -- and he brings wrong plan! He is like that other times, going off not cocked. But this, it is too much. Final straw." "You mean this Happy Acres business was never meant for Earth, but for some other planet?" The monster draped his arm around Homer's shoulder in a gesture of understanding and affection. "That exactly what he do. No need of Happy Acres here. You still have room enough for all your people. No need to double up." "But, sir," said Homer earnestly, "it is a swell idea. It has possibilities." "Other things you need much worse, my friend. We have better plan for you." Homer couldn't decide whether he liked the way the monster talked about the better plan. "What other plan?" he asked. "That is topmost secret. To make project big success, it must be done so that the natives think they the ones who do it. And that," the monster said, gesturing toward the floor, "is where this silly obscenity failed in second place. He let you find, out what was going on." UT there were all the other people, too," Homer protested. "All the people in the shops. The bank president and the gateman and -- " "All of them is us," the monster explained. "Them the crew that came with Mister Steen." "But they were so human-looking! They looked exactly like us!" "They play it straight. This ape, he ham it up." "But they dressed like us and they wore their shoes -- " "The shoes was more joke," the monster said furiously. "Your Mister Steen, he know how to make himself a human like the rest of them. But he wear his shoes wrong to get you humans -- your humans' -- there is a word for it." "Goat?" "That is it! He wear them wrong to get your humans' goat. And he make outrageous deal with you and he watch you worry and he rejoice greatly and think himself superior and smart because he that kind of clown. That, I tell you, is no way to treat anyone. That is no true-blue friendship. But your Mister Steen, he was plain jerk. Let us go and watch him suffer." "No," said Homer, horrified. "You no like this dying?" "It's inhuman." "Of course, inhuman. We not humans, us. It is a way we have, a social law. He make himself a fool. He make bonehead blunder. He must dead himself. He must do it good. Great honor, do it good. He bungle everything in life, he must not bungle dying. He forever heel if he do." Homer shivered, listening to the anguish of the alien on the floor, sick at stomach and giddy in the green flood of alien light. "Now it is to end," said the alien. "We wipe out project. It was nonsensical mistake. We will take it all away." "You can't mean that!" argued Homer. "We need it. We could make use of it. Just show us the principle." "No," the monster said. "But if you wipe out the project, there'll be all these people -- " "Sorry." "They'll murder me! I was the one who leased the house to them -- " "Too bad," the monster said. "And all that money in the lars, more than a quarter of a out!" "You have human money in bank?" "I did. I suppose thafs too bad, too." "We can pay you off. Mister Steen make lot of money. He store it over there." "You see that pile of bags? You take all that you can carry." "Money?" Homer asked. "Good money # "All I can carry?" insisted Homer, nailing it down tight. "And you will let me leave?" "We do you wrong," the monster said. "This fix it just a little?" "I'll tell the world," said Homer, with enthusiasm. Steen was becoming noisier. He had changed into his alien form and now he rolled upon the floor, knotted up and writhing. Homer walked wide around him to get to the farther wall. He lifted down the bags and they were fairly heavy. He could take two at least, he figured. He hoisted two on his back, then piled on the third. He barely made it back across the room. The monster watched him with some admiration. "You like the money, huh?" "You bet," Homer panted. "Everyone likes money." He set the bags down by the door. "You sure you not stay and watch? It get good directly. It be amusing, maybe even interesting." Homer held down a rising shudder. "No, thank you very much." The monster helped him get the bags on his shoulder. "I hold the door for you." "Thank you," said Homer. "Good day to you and thanks for everything." "Good-by, my friend," the monster said. He held the door and Homer walked on through. He came back into the office he'd left an hour before. The glass in the door shattered and his car was parked outside. Homer hurried. In less than five minutes, he went roaring out the gate, with the bags of money locked inside the trunk. There was little time, he realized. What he did had to be done fast. For when the monster wiped out Happy Acres, there would be a battalion of families marooned there in the woods and they'd come boiling out with a single thought in mind -- to get their hands on Homer Jackson. He tried to imagine what it might be like, and then he tried to stop thinking what it might be like, but couldn't. There would be a lot of people there without any houses. They'd wake up in the wild, wet woods, with their furniture and belongings scattered all about them. And all those bright new cars would be in among the trees. And the people would be plenty sore. Not that he blamed them much. He was sore himself. That lousy Steen, he said. Like that contractor Gabby told about -- the one who went out on a wrecking job and demolished the wrong house. r HE dashboard clock said A slightly after midnight. Elaine would be home by now and they could start right out. Homer turned into the driveway and braked to a halt. There was a light in the kitchen window. He ran up the walk and burst into the house. "Oh, there you are," said Elaine. "I wondered where you were. What's wrong with you?" "We're getting out of here," Homer babbled. "Have you gone stark crazy? Getting out!" "Now for once," said Homer, "don't give me an argument. We're getting out of here. Tonight. I've got three sacks of money out there in the car -- " "Money! How did you get three sacks -- " "It's legal," Homer pleaded. "There's nothing wrong with it. I didn't rob a bank. There's no time to explain. Let us just get going." She got icy calm. "Where are we going, Homer?" "We can decide that later. Maybe Mexico." "You're ill," she scolded. "You've been working too hard lately. And worrying about that Happy Acres deal -- " It was too much for Homer. He turned toward the door. "Homer! Where are you going, Homer!" "I'll show you the money," he gritted. "I'll show you I really have it." "Wait for me," she cried, but he didn't wait. She ran down the walk behind him. He opened the car trunk. "There it is. We'll carry it up to the house. You can take off your shoes and walk in it. Then maybe you'll believe me." "No, Homer, no!" "Here, help me with these sacks," he said. Inside the house, he opened the sacks. Neatly bundled sheafs of bills spilled out on the floor. Elaine knelt and picked up a package. "Why, it's real!" she cried happily"Of course it is," said Homer. "And, Homer, these are twenty-thousand-dollar bills!" . She dropped the package that she held and picked up another and another and another. "And so are these!" she Homer was pawing desperately through the heap of money. Sweat was running down his face. "Are they all twenty-thousanddollar bills?" she asked hopefully. "Yes," said Homer in a beaten voice. "But what is wrong?" "That dirty, lowdown, bungling Steen," he said bitterly. "But what is wrong?" she cried again. "They aren't worth a dime," said Homer. "There are no such things as twenty-thousand-dollar bills. The Treasury never issued any!"      Pohl, ride into a land stranger than any predicted by Merlin or Nostradamus, with a Round Table that exists only anatomically, on a quest for a grail that is neither a grail nor holy, and only very incidentally and reluctantly jousting and rescuing lovely -- oh, no, not maidens. T,he monarch they serve is one of the Most Unforgettable Characters in ail science fiction. With a single suitcase as his domain, Arthur is desperately in need of his henchmen and their arms -- for his keys to a kingdom are typewriter keys -- and they very literally are the keys to a kingdom! In Clifford D. Simak's long novelet, Duncan, like every farmer on every planet, has to hunt down anything that damages his crops BE! Another novelet -- possibly; the two lead stories are tall, broad, well-muscled, and need plenty of room to move around in. 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I went from normal reading speed to hyrmrspccd reading in thirty hours of Intensive reading practice St a leading reading clinic, and Immediately thought how womlerrul it would Iw for people who don't have the time or opportunity to lake such improvement work to do it at heme, for several hours gathered materials which ire adaptable to lout supenlslon. ir reading speed e correct but can proven, widely Tois and reading centers bu( hy adults working at home w i will Immediately Increase  with them if your reading liahits ho accelerated, with i Tf you have reading difticulties they will he brought out in the diagm.stlc reading lest we include and will analyze with recommendations at no The kit includes a reading rate accelerator with cards, two books of practice maiertals with technical exercises that test reading sliced and comprehension, and a booklet on hyperspeed reading. 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Nourse, then a med student, followed up a story conference with a let ter that seemed to need an answer. It's now five years later and Nourse is a doctor and I still can't think of an answer -- except to run the letter here: "Our talk got me to thinking about the trials of medicine and what it's up against This example is one of my favorites, since it illustrates so well that all the assorted knowledge of Man isn't worth a hill of beans if Man can't find a way to apply it. The case in point: what single exogenous disease kills more people today than any other? Cancer? Not a drop in the bucket. T.B.? Twaddle. One so outdistances all the others that it's ridiculous -- malaria. "We have in our hands the knowledge and specific drugs right now, today, to enable us to wipe malaria off the face of the Earth in exactly fourteen days, and to eradicate it so thoroughly that it would never again plague us. "There's no uncompleted research involved. We have chloroquin, one dose a week, to kill the circulatory phase of the disease. A cheap, easily manufactured drug. We have primaquin and a couple of other drugs which eradicate the tissue stages of the disease in fourteen days. Also cheap, safe and easily manufactured. And mosquitoes can't spread the disease unless they find a man who has it -- "Yet I venture to say that when I die, malaria will still be the number one exogenous killer of Man." Nourse has the political and economic problems in mind: Bamboo Curtain countries that wouldn't be beholden to the free world, others, such as India, that would find even a one per cent reduction in deatii rate a disaster. "Medicine, correctly, bows out of the malaria picture at this point. The question is, who takes over?" i The search for that solution, Nourse maintains, is likely to involve the Principle of Serendipity, a term coined by Horace Walpole in The Three Princes of Serendib (Ceylon) who displayed exceptional talent for not finding what they were seeking, but instead making accidental discoveries. Nourse gives some serendippy examples: ( Continued on Page # ) by Clifford D. Simak # Life Without Gravity #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. (Continued from Pae # ) "Ehrlich got rung in on a grand crusade to And a substance that would be poisonous to certain protein materials in the human body and leave human protein material untouched. The researchers were after any protein material that didn't belong in the human body and, with true Germanic ambitious plodding, they started down the line of all -- repeat: all -- the known aniline dye by-products. But Ehrlich believed heavy metals would be a magic bullet that would wipe out all germ diseases. He didn't And it, of course, but he found a magic bullet that worked Ane on syphilitic rabbits. But it wasn't what he was after and he spent the rest of his life on a wildoose chase. "As a medical student, Freud was assigned the job of identifying the active principle in some berries South American Indians seemed to enjoy. He got interested in what happened to the people who chewed it and left the discovery of cocaine to someone else. "Fleming, growing bacteria cultures, was after something that had nothii to do with the green mold that Aoated in and killed his precious bacteria. He practically had to have an atom bomb planted under him before he decided that perddllhun notatum, which contaminated the culture, was worth investigatii. "This past ten years has seen the most remarkable mushrooming of pharmacological discovery in the history of Man -- yet there is only one single drug which has been predicted, compounded, puriAed and found to comply with the predicted performance. And this was some grubby insigniAcant drug. "A slight reverse: Pasteur, a bacteriolost, wandered through all his work on rabies immunization. with the conviction that it was just another elusive microorganism like the ones the winegrowers were troubled with. He did what has been repeated only in the last few years: attenuating a virulent virus! "We are surroimded by unpredictable variables. Some staler civilization; others alter things in subtle ways. Extrapolation must be contingent on their suddenly popping up. How can we predict the unpredictable? We can't -- but our technologies are teaching us not so much to decide what to look for and then look for it, but to be able to recognize a variable when it appears. And there appearing all over the place. Shots in the utter dark pay off!" Serendipitously, Nourse never did write the story we were discussing. He did a juvenile novel instead. And a plot discussion turns into an editorial. 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City State. The Knights off Arthur I T here was three of us -- I mean if you count Arthur. We split up to avoid attracting attention. Engdahl just came in over the big brieve, but I had Arthur with me so I had to come the long way around. When I registered at the desk, I said I was from Chicago. You know how it is. If you say you're from Philadelphia, it's like saying you're from St. Louis or Detroit -- I mean nobody lives in Philadelphia any more. Shows how things change. A couple years ago, Philadelphia was all the fashion. But not now, and I wanted to make a good impression. I even tipped the bellboy a hundred and fifty dollars. I said: "Do me a favor. I've got my baggage booby-trapped -- " "Natch," he said, only mildly impressed by the bill and a half, even less impressed by me. I mean really booby-trapped. Not just a burglar alarm. Besides die alarm, there's a little surprise With one suitcase as his domain, Arthur was desperiitely in need of armed henchmen... for hfs keys to a kingdom were typewriter keysl on a short fuse. So what I want you to do, if you hear the alarm go off, is come running. Right?" "And get my head blown off?" He slammed my bags onto the floor. "Mister, you can take your damn money and -- " "Wait a minute, friend." I passed over another hundred. "Please? It's only a shaped charge. It won't hurt anything except anybody who messes around, see? But I don't want it to go off. So you come running when you hear the alarm and scare him away and -- " "Nol" But he was less positive. I gave him two hundred more and he said grudgingly: "All right If I hear it Say, whaf s in there that's worth all that trouble?" "Papers," I lied. He leered. "Sure." "No fooling, it's just personal stuff. Not worth a penny to anybody but me, understand? So don't get any ideas -- " He said in an injured tone: "Mister, naturally the staS won't bother your stuff. What kind of a hotel do you think this is?" "Of course, of course," I said. But I knew he was lying, because I knew what kind of hotel it was. The staff was there only because being there gave them a chance to knock down more money than ffiey could make any other way. What other kind of hotel was there? Anyway, the way to keep the staff on my side was by bribery, and when he left I figured I had him at least temporarily bought. He promised to keep an eye on the room and he would be on duty for four more hours -- which gave me plenty of time for my errands.  plugged in and cleaned myself up. They had water miming -- New York's very good that way; they always have water running. It was even hot, or nearly hot I let the shower splash over me for a while, because there was a lot of dust and dirt from the Bronx that I had to get off me. The way it looked, hardly anybody had been up that way since it happened. I dried myself, got dressed and looked out the window. We were fairly high up -- fifteenth floor. I could see the Hudson and the b bridge up north of us. There was a huge cloud of smoke comii from somewhere near the bridge on the other side of the river, but outside of that everything looked normal You would have thoit there were people in all those houses. Even the streets looked pretty good, until you noticed that hardly any of the cars were moving. I opened the little bag and loaded my pockets with enough money to run my errands. At the door, I stopped and called over my shoulder to Arthur : "Don't worry if I'm gone an hour or so. I'll be back." I didn't wait for an answer. That would have been pointless under the circumstances. After Philadelphia, this place seemed to be bustling with activity. There were four or five people in the lobby and a couple of dozen more out in the street I tarried at the desk for several reasons. In the first place, I was expecting Vem Engdahl to try to contact me and I didn't want him messing with the luggage -- not while Arthur might get nervous. So I told the desk clerk that in case anybody came inquiring for Mr. Schlaepfer, which was the name I was using -- my real name being Sam Dunlap -- he was to be told that on no accoimt was he to go to my room but to wait in the lobby; and in any case I would be back in an hour. "Sure," said the desk clerk, holding out his hand. I crossed it with paper. "One other thing," I said. "I need to buy an electric t#qewriter and some other stuff. Where can I get them?" "PX," he said promptly. "PX?" "What used to be Mac#s," he explained. "You go out that door and turn right It's only about a block. You'll see the sign." "Tlianks." That cost me a himdred more, but it was worth it After all, money wasn't a problem -- not when we had just come from Philadelphia. X'HE big sign read "PX," but it wasn't big enough to hide an older sign underneath that said "Macy's." I looked it over from across the street Somebody had organized it pretty well. I had to admire them. I mean I don't like New York -- wouldn't live there if you gave me the place -- but it showed a sort of go-getting spirit. It was no easy job getting a full staff together to run a department store operation, when any city the size of New York must have a couple thousand stores. You know what I mean? It's like running a hotel or anything else -- how are you going to get people to work for you when they can just as easily walk down the street, find a vacant store and SEt Up their own operation? But Macy's was fully manned. There was a guard at every door and a walking patrol along the block-front between the entrances to make sure nobody broke in through the windows. They all wore green armbands and uniforms -- well, lots of people wore uniforms. I walked over. "Afternoon," I said affably to the guard. "I want to pick up some stuff. Typewriter, maybe a gun, you know. How do you work it here? Flat rate for all you can carry, prices marked on everything, or what is it?" He stared at me suspiciously. He was a monster; six inches taller than I, he must have weed two hundred and fifty pounds. He didn't look very smart, which might explain why he was working for somebody else these days. But he was smart enough for what he had to do. He demanded: "You new in town?" I nodded. He thought for a minute. "All right, buddy. Go on in. You pick out what you want, see? We'll straiten out the price when you come out." "Fair enoih." I started past him. He grabbed me by the arm. "No tricks," he ordered. "You come out the same door you went in, imderstand?" "Sure," I said, "if that's the way you want it" That figured -- one way or another: either they got a commission, or, like everybody else, they lived on what they could knock down. I filed that for further consideration. Inside, the store smelled pretty bad. It wasn't just rot, though there was plenty of that; it was musty and stale and old. It was dark, or nearly. About one light in twenty was turned on, in order to conserve power. Naturally the escalators and so on weren't running at all. cils and bail-point pens in a case. Most of them were gonesomebody hadn't bothered to go around in back and had simply knocked the glass out -- but I found one that worked and an old order pad to write on. Over by the elevators there was a store directory, so I went over and checked it, making a list of the departments worth visiting. Office Supplies would be the typewriter. Garden  Home was a good bet -- maybe I could find a little wheelbarrow to save carrying the typewriter in my arms. What I wanted was one of the big ones where all the keys are solenoid-operated instead of the cam-and-roller arrangement -- that was all Arthur could operate. And those things were heavy, as I knew. That was why we had ditched the old one in the Bronx. Sporting Goods -- that would be for a gun, if there were any left Naturally, they were about the first to go after it happened, when everybody wanted a gun. I mean everybody who lived through it. I thought about clothes -- it was pretty hot in New York -- and decided I might as well take a look. IVpewriter, cloliies, gun, wheelbarrow. I made one more note on the pad -- try the tobacco counter, but I didn't have much hope for that. They had used cigarettes for currency around this area for a while, until they got enough bank vaults open to supply big bills. It made cigarettes scarce. I turned away and noticed for the first time that one of the elevators was stopped on the main flodr. The doors were closed, but they were glass doors, and although there wasn't any light inside, I could see the elevator was full. There must have been thirty or forty people in the car when it happened. I'd been thinking that, if nothing else, these New Yorkers were pretty neat -- I mean if you don't count the Bronx. But here were thirty or forty skeletons that nobody had even bothered to clear away. You call that neat? Right in plain view on the ground floor, where everybody who came into the place would be sure to go -- I mean if it had been on one of the upper floors, what difference would it have made? I began to wish we were out of the city. But naturally that would have to wait until we finished what we came here to do -- otherwise, what was the point of coming all the way here in the first place? tobacco counter was bare. I got the wheelbarrow easily enough -- there were plenty of those, all sizes; I picked out a nice # red-and-yellow one with rubbertired wheel. I rolled it over to Sporting Goods on the same floor, but that didn't work out too well. I found a #-# with telescopic sights, only there weren't any cartridges to fit it -- or anjing else. I took the gun anjrway; Engdahl would probably have some extra ammunition. Men's Clothing was a waste of time, too -- I guess these New Yorkers were too lazy to do laundry. But I foimd the t # iewriter I wanted. I put the whole load into the wheelbarrow, along with a couple of odds and ends that caught my eye as I passed throih Housewares, and I bumped as gently as I could down the shallow steps of the motionless escalator to the ground floor. I came down the back way, and that was a mistake. It led me right past the food department. Well, I don't have to tell you what that was like, with all the exploded cans and the rats as big as poodles. But I found some cologne and soaked a handkerchief in it, and with that over my nose, and some fast footwork for the rats, I managed to get to one of the doors. It wasn't the one I had come in, but that was all right I sized up Hie guard. He looked smart enough for a little bargaining, but not too smart; and if I didn't like his price, I could always remember that I was supposed to go out the other door. I said: "Psst!" When he turned around, I said rapidly: "Listen, tliis isn't the way I came in, but if you want to do business, it'll be the way I come out" He thought for a second, and then he smiled craftily and said: "All right come on." Welt we hailed. The gun was the big thing -- he wanted five thousand for that and he wouldn't come down. The wheelbarrow he dred. And the typewriter -- he scowled at the typewriter as though it were contagious. 'What you want that for?" he asked 'suspiciously. I shrugged. 'Well -- " he scratched his head -- "a thousand?" I shook my head. "Five himdred?" I kept on shaking. "All right, all right," he grumbled. "Look, you take the other things for six thousand -- including what you got in your pockets that you don't think I know about, see? And I'll throw this in. How about it?" That was fine as far as I was concerned, but just on principle I pushed him a little further. "Forget it," I said. 'Til give you fifty bills for the lot, take it or leave it Otherwise I'll walk right down the street to Gimbel's and -- " He guffawed. "What's the matter?" I demanded. "Pal," he said, "you kill me. Stranger in town, hey? You can't go anyplace but here." "Why not?" "Accoimt of there airff an#rplace else. See, the chief here don't like competition. So we don't have to worry about anybody taking their trade elsewhere, like -- we burned all the other places down." That explained a couple of things. I coimted out the money, loaded the stuff back in the wheelbarrow and headed for the Statler; but all the time I was counting and loading, I was talking to Big Brainless; and by the time I was actually on the way, I knew a little more about this "chief." And that was kind of important, because he was the man we were going to have to know very well. II room. Arthur was peeping out of the suitcase at me. I said: "I'm back. I got your typewriter." He waved his eye at me. I took out the little kit of electricians' tools I carried, tipped the t#iewriter on its back and began sorting out leads. I cut them free from the keyboard, soldered on a ground wire, and began taping the leads to the strands of a yard of forty-ply multiplex cable. It was a slow and dull job. I didn't have to worry about which solenoid lead went to which strand -- Arthur could sort them out. But all the same it took an hour, pretty near, and I was getting hungry by the time I got the last connection taped. I shifted the typewriter so that both Arthur and I could see it, rolled in a sheet of paper and hooked the cable to Arthur's receptors. Nothing happened. "Oh," I said. "Excuse me, Arthur. I forgot to plug it in." I found a wall socket. The typewriter began to hum and then it started to rattle and ty(e: It stopped. "Come on, Arthur," I ordered impatiently. "Sort them out, will you?" Laboriously it typed: ! ! ! Then, for a time, there was a clacking and thumping as he typed random letters, peeping out of the suitcase to see what he had typed, until the sheet I had put in was used up. I replaced it and waited, as patiently as I could, smoking one of the last of my carettes. After fifteen minutes or so, he had the hang of it pretty well. He t#Ted: "Aw, Arthur," I said. "Use your head, will you? I couldn't carry that old typewriter of yours all the way down through the Bronx. It was getting pretty beat-up. Anyway, I've only got two hands -- " "Arthur!" I said, shocked. "You know better than that!" The typewriter slammed its carriage back and forth ferociously a couple of times. Then he said : "Please don't take that attitude," I coaxed. "Please?" "No." I settled back and relaxed. I might as well. That was the trouble with getting Arthur a new typewriter after a couple of days without one -- he had so much garrulity stored up in his little brain, and the only person to spill it on was me. A pparently i fell asleep. Well, I mean I must have, because I woke up. I had been dreaming I was on guard post outside the Yard at Portsmouth, and it was night, and I looked up and there was something up there, all silvery and bad. It was a missile -- and that was silly, because you never see a missile. But this was a dream. And the thing burst, like a Roman candle flaring out, all sorts of comet-trails of light, and then the whole sky was full of bright and colored snow. Little tiny flakes of light coming down, a mist of light, radiation droppii like dew; and it was so pretty, and I took a deep breath. And my lungs burned out like slow fire, and I coughed myself to death with the explosions of the missile bangii iinst my flaming ears... Well, it was a dream. It probably wasn't like that at all -- and if it had been, I wasn't there to see it, because I was tucked away safe under a hundred and twenty fathoms of Atlantic water. All of us were on the Sea Sprite. But it was a bad dream and it bothered me, even when I woke up and found that the banging explosions of the missile were the noise of Arthur's typewriter carriage crashing furiously back and forth. He peeped out of the suitcase and saw that I was awake. He de"Oh, dry up," I said. Being awake, I remembered that I was hungry. There was still no sign of Engdahl or the others, but that wasn't too surprising -- they hadn't known exactly when we would arrive. I wished I had thought to bring some food back to the room. It looked like long waiting and I wouldn't want to leave Arthur alone again -- after all, he was partly right I thought of the telephone. On the off-chance that it mt work, I picked it up. Amazing, a voice from the desk answered. I crossed my finders and said: "Room service? And the voice answered amiably enough: "Hold on, buddy. I'll see if they answer." Clicking and a good long wait. Then a new voice said: "Whaddya want?" There was no sense pressing my luck by asking for anything like a complete meal. I would be lucky if I got a sandwich. I said: "Please, may I have a Spam sandwich on Rye Krisp and some coffee for Room Fifteen Forty-one?" "Please, you go to hell!" the voice snarled. "What do you think this is, some damn delicatessen? You want liquor, we'll get you liquor. Thafs what room service is for!" of ai;uing? Arthur was clacking peevishly: "You would be if you -- " I started, and then I stopped. Arthur's feelings were delicate enough already. I mean suppose that all you had left of what you were born with was a brain in a kind of sardine can, wouldn't you be sensitive? Well, Arthur was more sensitive than you would be, believe me. Of course, it was his own foolish fault -- I mean you don't get a prosthetic tank unless you die by accident, or somethii like that, because if it's disease they usually can't save even die brain. The phone rang again. It was the desk clerk. "Say, did you get what you wanted?" he asked chummily. "No." "Oh. Too bad," he said, but cheerfully. "Listen, buddy, I forgot to tell you before. That Miss Engdahl you were expecting, she's on her way up." I dropped the phone onto the cradle. "Arthur!" I yelled. "Keep quiet for a while -- trouble!" He clacked once, and the typewriter shut itself off. I jumped for the door of the bathroom, cursing the fact that I didn't have cartri(es for the gun. Still, empty or not, it would have to do. I ducked behind the badiroom door, in the shadows, covering the hall door. Because there were two things wrong with what the desk clerk had told me. Vem Engdahl wasn't a "miss," to begin with; and whatever name he used when he came to call on me, it wouldn't be Vem EngdahL There was a knock on the door. I called: "Come in!" The door opened and the girl who called herself Vem Engdahl came in slowly, looking around. I stayed quiet and out of sight until she was all the way in. She didn seem to be armed; there wasn't anyone with her. I stepped out, holding the gun on her. Her eyes opened wide and she seemed about to turn. "Hold it! Come on in, you. Close the door!" She did. She looked as though she were expecting me. I looked her over -- medium pretty, not very tall, not very plump, not very old. I'd have guessed twenty or so, but that's not my line of work; she could have been almost any age from seventeen on. The typewriter switched itself on and began to pound agitatedly. I crossed over toward her and paused to peer at what Arthur was I ordered: "Shut up, Arthur. I'm oing to search her. You! Turn around!" S HE shrugged and turned around, her hands in the air. Over her shoulder, e said : "You're taking this all wrong, Sam. I came here to make a deal with yoa" "Sure you did." But her knowing my name was a blow, too. I mean what was the use of all that sneaking around if people in New York were going to know we were here? I walked up close behind her and patted what there was to pat There didn't seem to be a gun. "You tickle," she complained. I took her pocketbook away from her and went through it. No gun. A lot of money -- an awful lot of money. I mean there must have been two or three hundred thousand dollars. There was nothing with a name on it in the pocketbook. She said: "Can I put my hands down, Sam?" "In a minute." I thought for a second and then decided to do it -- you know, I just couldn't afford to take chances. I cleared my throat and ordered: "Take off your clothes." Her head jerked around and she stared at me. 'Whaf.' "Take them off. You heard me." "Now wait a minute -- " she began dangerously. I said: "Do what I tell you, hear? How do I know you haven't got a knife tucked away?" She clenched her teeth. "Why, you dirty little man! What do you think -- " Then she shrugged. She looked at me with contempt and said: "All right. Whafs the difference?" Well, there was a considerable difference. She began to unzip and unbutton and wriggle, and pretty soon she was standing there in her underwear, looking at me as though I were a two-headed worm. It was interesting, but kind of embarrassing. I could see Arthurs eye-stalk waving excitedly out of the opened suitcase. I picked up her skirt and blouse and shook them. I could feel myself blushing, and there didn't seem to be an#ing in them. I growled: "Okay, I guess that's enough. You can put your clothes back on now." "Gee, thanks," she said. She looked at me thoughtfully and then shook her head as if she'd never seen anjrthing like me before and never hoped to again. Without another word, she began to get back into her clothes. I had to admire her poise. I mean she was perfectly calm about the whole thing. You'd have thought she was used to taking her clothes off in front of strange men. Well, for that matter, maybe she was; but it wasn't any of my business. tractedly, but I didn't pay any attention to him. I demanded: "All right, now who are you and what do you want?" She pulled up a stocking and said: "You couldn't have asked me that in the first place, could you? I'm Vem Eng -- " "Cut it outr She stared at me. "I was only going to say I'm Vem Engdahl's partner. We've got a little business deal cooking and I wanted to talk to you about diis proposition." I said: "All right, Arthur, relax. I'm taking care of things. Now start over, you. What's your name?" She finished putting on her shoe and stood up. "Amy." "Last name?" She shrugged and fished in her purse for a cigarette. "What does it matter? Mind if I sit down?" "Go ahead," I mmbled. "But don't stop talking!" "Oh," she said, 'Sve've got plenty of time to straighten things out." She lit the cigarette and walked over to the chair by the window. On the way, she gave the luggage a good long look. Arthur's eyestalk cowered back into the suitcase as she came close. She winked at me, grinned, bent down and peered inside. "My," she said, "he's a nice shiny one, isn't he?" The typewriter began to clatter frantically. I didn't even bother to look; I told him: "Arthur, if you can't keep quiet, you have to expect people to know you're there." She sat down and crossed her legs. "Now then," she said. "Frankly, he's what I came to see you about Vem told me you had a pross. I want to buy it" The tTewriter thrashed its carrie back and forth furiously. "Arthur isn't for sale." "No?" She leaned back. "Vem's already sold me his interest, you know. And you don't really have any choice. You see, I'm in charge of materiel procurement for the Major. If you want to sell your share, fine. If you don't why, we requisition it anyhow. Do you follow?" I was getting irritated -- at Vern Engdahl, for whatever the hell he thought he was doing; but at her because she was handy. I shook my head. "Fifty thousand dollars? I mean for your interest?" "No." "Seventy-five?" "No!" "Oh, come on now. A hundred thousand?" It wasn't going to make any impression on her, but I tried to explain: "Arthur's a friend of mine. He isn't for sale." CH shook her head. "What's  the matter with you? Engdahl wasn't like this. He sold his interest for forty thousand and was glad to get it." Clatter-clatter-clatter from Arthur. I didn't blame him for having hurt feelings that time. Amy said in a discouraged tone : "Why can't people be reasonable? The Major doesn't like it when people aren't reasonable." I lowered the gun and cleared my throat. "He doesn't?" I asked, cuing her. I wanted to hear more about this Major, who seemed to have the city pretty well imder his thumb. "No, he doesn't." She shook her head sorrowfully. She said in an accusing voice: "You out-of-towners don't know what it's like to try to run a city the size of New York. There are fifteen thousand people here, do you know that? It isn't one of your hick towns. And it's worry, worry, worry all the time, trying to keep things going." "I bet," I said sympathetically. "You're, uh, pretty close to the Major?" She said stiffly: "I'm not married to him, if that's what you mean. Though I've had my chances... But you see how it is. Fifteen thousand people to run a place the size of New York! It's forty men to operate the power station, and twenty-five on the PX, and thirty on the hotel here. And then there are the local groceries, and the Army, and the Coast Guard, and the Air Force -- though, really, that's only two menand -- Well, you get the picture." "I certainly do. Look, what kind of a guy is the Major?" She shrugged. "A guy." "I mean what does he like?" Women, mostly,' she said, her expression clouded. Come on now. What about it?" I stalled. What do you want Arthur for?" She gave me a disgusted look. "What do you think? To relieve the manpower shortage, naturally. There's more work than there are men. Now if the Major could just get hold of a couple of prosthetics, like this thing here, why, he could put them in the big installations. This one used to be an engineer or something, Vem said." "Well... like an engineer." A MY shrugged. "So why couldn't we connect him up with the power station? It's been done. The Major knows that -- he was in the Pentagon when they switched all the aircraft warning net over from computer to prosthetic control. So why couldn't we do the same thing with our power station and release forty men for other assignments? This thing could work day, night, Sundays -- what's die difference when you're just a brain in a sardine can?" Clatter-rattle-ban. She looked startled. "Oh. I forgot he was listening." "No deal," I said. She said: "A hundred and fifty thousand?" A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I considered that for a while. Arthur clattered wamingly. "Well," I temporized, "I'd have to be sure he was getting into good hands -- " The typewriter thrashed wildly. The sheet of paper fluttered out of the carriage. He'd used it up. Automatically I picked it up -- it was covered with imprecations, self-pity and threats -- and started to put a new one in. "No," I said, bending over the typewriter, "I guess I couldn't sell him. It just wouldn't be right-" That was my mistake; it was the wrong time for me to say ffiat, because I had taken my eyes off her. The room bent over and clouted me. I half turned, not more than a fraction conscious, and I saw this Amy girl, behind me, with the shoe still in her hand, raised to give me another blackjacking on the skull. The shoe came down, and it must have weighed more than it looked, and even the fractional bit of consciousness went crashii away. Ill Engdahl. We were all from the Sea Sprite, of course -- me and Vem and even Arthur. The thing about Vem is that he was the lowest-ranking one of us all -- only an electricians' mate third, I mean when anybody paid any attention to things like that -- and yet he was pretty much doing the thinking for the rest of us. Coming to New York was his idea -- he told us that was the only place we could get what we wanted. Well, as long as we were carrying Arthur along with us, we pretty much needed Vem, because he was the one who knew how to keep the lash-up going. You've got no idea what kind of pumps and plumbing go into a prosthetic tank until you've seen one opened up. And, naturally, Arthur didn't want any breakdowns without somebody around to fix things up. The Sea Sprite, maybe you know, was one of the old liquidsodium-reactor subs -- too slow for combat duty, but as big as a bam, so they made it a hospital ship. We were cruising deep when the missiles hit, and, of course, when we came up, there wasn't much for a hospital ship to do. I mean there isn't any sense fooling aroimd with anybody who's taken a good deep breath of fallout. So we went back to Newport News to see what had happened. And we found out what had happened. And there wasn't an#ing much to do except pay off the crew and let them go. But us three stuck together. Why not? It wasn't as if we had any families to go back to any more. Vem just loved all this stuff -- heM been an Eagle Scout; maybe that had something to do with it -- and he showed us how to boil drinking water and forage in the woods and all like that, because nobody in his right mind wanted to go near any kind of a town, until the cold weather set in, anyway. And it was always Vem, Vem, telling us what to do, ironing out our troubles. It worked out, except that there was this one thing. Vem had bright ideas. But he didn't always tell us what they were. So I wasn't so very surprised when I came to. I mean there I was, tied up, with this girl Amy standing over me, holding the gun like a club. Evidently she'd foimd out that there weren't any cartridges. And in a couple of minutes there was a knock on the door, and she yelled, "Come in," and in came Vem. And the man who was with him had to be somebody important, because there were eight or ten other men crowding in close behind. I didn't need to look at the oak leaves on his shoulders to realize that here was the chief, the fellow who ran this town, the Major. It was just the kind of thing Vern would do. face that made strange officers wonder why this poor persecuted man had been forced to spend so much time in the brig: "Now, Major, Im sure we can straighten all this out. Would you mind leaving me alone with my friend here for a moment?" The Major teetered on his heels, thinking. He was a tall, youngishbald type, with a long, worried, horselike face. He said: "Ah, do you think we should?" "I guarantee there'll be no trouble, Major," Vern promised. The Major pulled at his little mustache. "Very well," he said. "Amy, you come along." "Well be right here, Major," Vem said reassuringly, escorting him to the door. "You bet you will," said the Major, and tittered. "Ah, bring that gun along with you, Amy. And be sure this man knows that we have bullets." They closed the door. Arthur had been cowering in his suitcase, but now his eyestalk peeped out and the rattling and clattering from that typewriter sounded like the Battle of the Bulge, I demanded: "Come on, Vem. Whafs this all about?" Vern said : "How much did they offer you?" "A hundred and fifty thousand dollars," I said. Vern looked outraged. "I only got forty!" "Still," Vern mused, "it's all common funds anyway, right? Arthur belongs to both of us." "That's true," I said grudgingly. "But I carried him, remember." Vem said, "A hundred and fifty thousand, remember." "And of course we couldn't get out of here," Vem pointed out "They've got us surrounded."  paper in the rattling machine: "You're worrying our friend." Vern shrugged impatiently. Vem said: "Well, Sam? Let's take the cash and get this thing over with. After all, he wilt have the best of treatment." It was a little like selling your sister into white slavery, but what else was there to do? Besides, I kind of trusted Vem. "All right," I said. What Arthur said nearly scorched the paper. Vem helped pack Arthur up for moving. I mean it was just a matter of pulling the plugs out and making sure he had a fresh battery, but Vem wanted to supervise it himself. Because one of the little things Vem had up his sleeve was that he had foimd a spot for himself on the Major's payroll. He was now the official Prosthetic (Human) Maintenance Department Chief. The Major said to me: "Ah, Dunlap. What sort of experience have you had?" "Experience?" "In the Navy. Your friend Engdahl suggested you might want to join us here." "Oh. I see what you mean." I shook my head. "Nothing that would do you any good, I'm afraid. I was a yeoman." "Yeoman?" "Like a company clerk," I explained. "I mean I kept records and cut orders and made out reports and all like that." "Company clerk!" The eyes in the long horsy face gleamed. "Ah, you're mistaken, Dunlap! Why, that's just what we need. Our morning reports are in foul shape. Foul! Come over to HQ. Lieutenant Bankhead will give you a lift." "Lieutenant Bankhead?" I got an elbow in my ribs for that. It was that girl Amy, standing alongside me. "I," she said, "am Lieutenant Bankhead." Well, I went along with her, leaving Engdahl and Arthur behind. But I must admit I wasn't sure of my reception. Out in front of the hotel was a whole fleet of cars -- three or four of them, at least. There was a b old Cadillac that looked like a gangsters' car -- thick glass in the windows, tires that looked like they belonged on a truck. I was and also that it belonged to the Major. I was right both times. There was a little MG with the top down, and a couple of light trucks. Every one of them was painted bright orange, and every one of them had the star-and-bar of the good old United States Army on its side. It took me back to old times -- all but the unmilitary color. Amy led me to the MG and pointed. "Sit," she said. I sat She got in the other side and we were off. It was a little uncomfortable on account of I wasn't just sure whether I ought to apologize for making her take her clothes off. And then she tramped on the gas of that little car and I didn't think much about being embarrassed or about her black lace lingerie. I was only thinking about one thing -- how to stay alive long enough to get out of that car. IV  an ocean liner. The rest of us probably would have been happy enough to stay in Lehigh County, but Arthur was getting restless. He was a terrible responsibility, in a way. I suppose there were a hundred thousand people or so left in the country, and not more than forty or fifty of them were like Arthur -- I mean if you want to call a man in a prosthetic tank a "person." But we all did. We'd got pretty used to him. We'd shipped together in the war -- and survived together, as a few of the actual fighters did, those who were lucky enough to be underwater or landed -- and as few civilians did. I mean there wasn't much chance for surviving, for anybody who happened to be breathing the open air when it happened. I mean you can do just so much about making a "clean" H-bomb, and if you cut out the long-life fission products, the short-life ones get pretty deadly. An#Hvay, there wasn't much damage, except of course that everybody was dead. All the surface vessels lost their crews. All the population of the cities were gone. And so then, when Arthur slipped on the gangplank coming into Newport News and broke his fool neck, why, we had the whole staff of the Sea Sprite to work on him. I mean what else did the surgeons have to do? Of course, that was a long time ago. But we'd stayed together. We headed for the farm country around Allentown, Pennsylvania, because Arthur and Vem Engdahl claimed to know it pretty well. I think maybe they had some hope of finding family or friends, but naturally there wasn't any of that. And when you got into the inland towns, there hadn't been much of an attempt to clean them up. At least the big cities and the ports had been gone over, in some spots anyway, by burial squads. Although when we finally decided to move out and went to PhiladelphiaWell, let's be fair; there had been fighting around there after the big fight. Anyway, that wasn't so very uncommon. That was one of the reasons that for a long time -- four or five years, at any rate -- we stayed away from big cities. We holed up in a big farmhouse in Lehigh County. It had its own generator from a little stream, and that took care of Arthurs power needs; and the previous occupants had been just crazy about stashing away food. There was enough to last a century, and that took care of the two of us. We appreciated that We even took the old folks out and gave them a decent burial. I mean thed all been in the family car, so we just had to tow it to a gravel pit and push it in. The place had its own well, with an electric pump and a hot-water system -- oh, it was nice. I was sorry to leave but, frankly, Arthur was driving us nuts. We never could make the television work -- maybe there weren't any stations near enough. But we pulled in a couple of radio stations pretty well and Arthur got a big charge out of listening to them -- see, he could hear four or five at a time and I suppose that made him feel better than the rest of us. He heard that the big cities were cleaned up and every one of them seemed to want immigrants -- they were pleading, pleading all the time, like the TV-set and vacuum-cleaner people used to in the old days; they guaranteed we'd like it if we only came to live in Philly, or Richmond, or Baltimore, or wherever. And I guess Arthur kind of hoped we might find another pross. And then -- well, Engdahl came up with this idea of an ocean liner. It figured. I mean you get out in the middle of the ocean and what's the difference what it's like on land? And it especially appealed to Arthur because he wanted to do some surface sailing. He never had when he was real -- I mean when he had arms and legs like anybody else. He'd gone right into the undersea service the minute he got out of school And -- well, sailing was what Arthur knew something about and I suppose even a prosthetic man wants to feel useful. It was like Amy said: He could be hooked up to an automated factory -- Or to a ship. H Q for the Major's Temporary Military Government -- that's what the sign said -- was on the #st floor of the Empire State Building, and right there that tells you something about the man. I mean you know how much power it takes to run those elevators all the way up to the top? But the Major must have liked being able to look down on everybody else. Amy Bankhead conducted me to his office and sat me down to wait for His Military Excellency to arrive. She filled me in on him, to some degree. He'd been an abso lute nothing before the war; but he had a reserve commission in the Air Force, and when things began to look sticky, they'd called him up and put him in a Missile Master control point, underground somewhere up around Ossining. He was the duty officer when it happened, and naturally he hadn't noticed anything like an enemy aircraft, and naturally the antimissile missiles were still rusting in their racks all aroxind the city; but since the place had been operating on sealed ventilation, the duty complement could stay there until the short half-life radioisotopes wore themselves out. And then the Major found out that he was not only in charge of the fourteen men and women of his division at the center -- he was ranking United States Military Establishment officer farther than the eye could see. So he beat it, fast as he could, for New York, because what Army officer doesn't dream about being stationed in New York? And he set up his Temporary Military Government -- and that was nine years ago. If there hadn't been plenty to go around, I don't suppose he would have lasted a week -- none of these city chiefs would have. But as things were, he was in on the ground floor, and as newcomers trickled into the city, his boys already had things nicely organized. It was a soft touch. getting settled in New York and things were looking pretty good. Vem calmed me down by pointing out that, after all, we had to sell Arthur, and hadn't we come out of it plenty okay? And we had. There was no doubt about it. Not only did we. have a fat price for Arthur, which was useful because there were a lot of things we would have to buy, but we both had jobs working for the Major. Vem was his specialist in the care and feeding of Arthur and I was his chief of office routine -- and, as such, I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements. Of course there wasn't anybody to send them to, but that didn't stop the Major. He said with determination: "Nobod#r's ever going to chew me out for non-compliance with regulations -- even if I have to invent the regulations myself!" We set up in a bachelor apartment on Central Park South -- the Major had the penthouse; the whole building had been converted to barracks -- and the first chance we got, Vem snaffled some transportation and we set out to find an ocean liner. See, the thing was that an ocean liner isn't easy to steal. I mean we'd scouted out the lay of the land  before we ever entered the city itself, and there were plenty of liners, but there wasn't one that looked like we could just jump in and sail it away. For that we needed an organization. Since we didn't have one, the best thing to do was borrow the Major's. Vem turned up with Amy Bankhead's MG, and he also turned up with Amy. I can't say I was displeased, because I was beginning to like the girl; but did you ever try to ride three people in the seats of an MG? Well, the way to do it is by having one passenger sit in the other passenger's lap, which would have been all right except that Amy insisted on driving. We headed downtown and over to the West Side. The Major's Topographical Section -- one former billboard artist -- had prepared road maps with little red-ink Xs marking the streets that were blocked, which was most of the streets; but we charted a course that would take us where we wanted to go. Thirty-fourth Street was open, and so was Fifth Avenue all of its length, so we scooted down Fifth, crossed over, got under the Elevated Highway and whined along uptown toward the Fifties. "There's one," cried Amy, pointing. I was on Vem's lap, so I was making the notes. It was a Fruit Company combination freighterpassenger vessel. I looked at Vem, and Vern shrugged as best he could, so I wrote it down; but it wasn't exactly what we wanted. No, not by a long shot.  survey our resources, and then we could pick the one we liked best We went all the way up to the end of the big-ship docks, and then turned and came back down, all the way to the Battery. It wasn't pleasure driving, exactly -- half a dozen times we had to get out the map and detour around impenetrable jams of stalled and empty cars -- or an # nway, if they weren't exactly empty, the people in them were no longer in shape to get out of our way. But we made it. We counted sixteen ships in dock that looked as though they might do for our purposes. We had to rule out the newer ones and the reconverted jobs. I mean, after all, U-# just lasts so long, and you can steam around the world on a walnut-shell of it, or whatever it is, but you can't store it So we had to stick with the ships that were powered widi conventional fuel -- and, on consideration, only oil at that. But that left sixteen, as I say. Some of them, though, had suffered visibly from being left untended for nearly a decade, so that for our purposes they might as well have been abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic; we didn't have the equipment or ambition to do any great amount of salvage work. The Empress of Britain would have been a pretty good bet, for instance, except that it was lying at pretty nearly a forty-five-degree angle in its berth. So was the United States, and so was the Caronia. The Stockholm was straight enough, but I took a good look, and only one tier of portholes was showing above the water -- evidently it had settled nice and even, but it was on the bottom all the same. Well, that mud sucks with a fine tight grip, and we weren't going to try to loosen it. All in all, eleven of the sixteen ships were out of commission just from what we could see driving by. Vem and I looked at each other. We stood by the MG, while Amy sprawled her legs over the side and waited for us to make up our minds. "Not good, Sam," said Vem, looking worried. I said; "Well, that still leaves five. There's the Vulcania, tiie Cristobal --  "Too small." "All right. The Manhattan, the Liberte and the Queen Elizabeth. Amy looked up, her eyes gleaming. "Where's the question?" she demanded. "Naturally, it's the Queen. I tried to explain. "Please, Amy. Leave these things to us, will you?" "But the Major won't settle for anything but the best!" "The Afajor.' wouldn't meet my eyes. "Well," I said, "look at the problems, Amy. First we have to check it over. Maybe it's been burned out -- how do we know? Maybe the channel isn't even deep enough to float it any more -- how do we know? Where are we going to get the oil for it?" "We'll get the oil," Amy said cheerfully. "And what if the channel isn't deep enough?" "She'll float," Amy promised. "At high tide, an#rway. Even if the channel hasn't been dredged in ten years." I shrugged and gave up. What was the use of arguing? We drove back to the Queen Elizabeth and I had to admit that there was a certain attraction about that big old dowager. We all got out and strolled down the pier, looking over as much as we could see. The pier had never been cleaned out. It bothered me a little -- I mean I don't like skeletons much -- but Amy didn't seem to mind. The Queen must have just docked when it happened, because you could still see bony queues, as though they were waiting for customs inspection. Some of the bags had been opened and the contents scattered around -- naturally, somebody was bound to think of looting the Queen. But there were as many that hadn't been touched as that had been opened, and the whole thing had the look of an amateur attempt. And that was all to the good, because the fewer persons who had boarded the Queen in the decade since it happened, the more chance of our finding it in usable shape. Amy saw a gangplank still up, and with cries of girlish glee ran aboard. I plucked at Vern's sleeve. "You," I said. "What's this about what the Major won't settle for less than?" He said: "Aw, Sam, I had to tell her something, didn't I?" "But what about the Major -- " He said patiently: "You don't understand. It's all part of my plan, see? The Major is the big thing here and he's got a birthday coming up next month. Well, the way I put it to Amy, we'll fix him up with a yacht as a birthday present, see? And, of course, when it's all fixed up and ready to lift anchor -- " I said doubtfully: "That's the hard way, Vem. Why couldn't we just sort of get steam up and take off?" He shook his head. "That is the hard way. This way we get all die help and supplies we need, imderstand?" I shrugged. That was the way it was, so what was the use of arguing? But there was one thing more on my mind. I said: "How come Amy's so interested in making the Major happy?" Vem chortled. "Jealous, eh?" "I asked a question!" "Calm down, boy. It's just that he's in charge of things here so naturally she wants to keep in good with him." I scowled. "I keep hearing stories about how the Major's chief interest in life is women. You sure she isn't ambitious to be one of them?" He said : "The reason she wants to keep him happy is so she won'f be one of them." V name of the place was Bayonne. Vern said: "One of them's ot to have oil, Sam. It has to." "Sure," I said. "There's no question about it. Look, this is where the tankers came to discharge oil. They'd come in here, pump the oil into the refinery tanks and -- " "Vern," I said. "Let's look, shall we?" He shrugged, and we hopped off the little outboard motorboat onto a landing stage. The tankers towered over us, rusty and screeching as the waves rubbed them against each other. There were fifty of them there at least, and we poked around them for hours. The hatches were rusted shut and unmanageable, but you could tell a lot by sniffing. Gasoline odor was out; smell of seaweed and dead fish was out but the heavy, rank smell of fuel oil, that was what we were sniffing for. Crews had been aboard these ships when the missiles came, and crews were still aboard. Beyond the two-part superstructures of the tankers, the skyline of New York was visible. I looked up, sweating, and saw the Empire State Building and imagined Amy up there, looking out toward us. he knew we were here. It was her idea. She had scrounged up a naval engineer, or what she called a naval engineer -- he had once been a stoker on a ferryboat. But he claimed he knew what he was talking about when he said the only thing the Queen needed to make 'er go was oil. And so we left him aboard to tinker and polish, with a couple of helpers Amy detached from the police force, and we tackled the oil problem. Which meant Bayonne. Which was where we were. It had to be a tanker with at least a fair portion of its cargo intact, because the Queen was a thirsty creature, drinking fuel not by the shot or gallon but by the ton. "Saaam! Sam Dunlap!" I looked up, startled. Five ships away, across the U of the mooring, Vern Engdahl was bellowing at me through cupped hands. "I found it!" he shouted. "Oil, lots of oil! Come look!" I clasped my hands over my head and looked around. It was a long way around to the tanker Vern was on, hopping from deck to deck, detouring around open stretches. I shouted: "I'll get the boat!" He waved and climbed up on the rail of the ship, his feet dangling over, looking supremely happy and pleased with himself. He lit a cigarette, leaned back against the upward sweep of the rail and waited. It took me a little time to get back to the boat and a little more time than that to get the damn motor started. Vern! "Let's not take that lousy little twelve horsepower, Sam," he'd said reasonably. "The twenty-five's more what we need!" And maybe it was, but none of the motors had been started in most of a decade, and the twenty-five was just that much harder to start now. I struggled over it, swearing, for twenty minutes or more. The tanker by whose side we had tied up began to swing toward me as the tide changed to outgoing. counting seconds, expecting to have to make a jump for it before the big red steel flank squeezed the little outboard flat against the piles. But I got it started -- just about in time. I squeezed out of the trap with not much more than a yard to spare and threaded my way into open water. There was a large, threatening sound, like an enormous slow cough. I rounded the stern of the last tanker between me and open water, and looked into the eye of a fire-breathing dragon. Vem and his cigarettes! The tanker was loose and ablaze, bearing down on me with the slow drift of the ebbing tide. From the hatches on the forward deck, two fountains of fire spurted up and out, like enormous nostrils spouting flame. The hawsers had been burned through, the ship was adrift, I was in its path -- And so was the frantically splashing figure of Vern Engdahl, trying desperately to swim out of the way in the water before it. What kept it from blowing up in our faces I will never know, unless it was the pressure in the tanks forcing the flame out; but it didn't. Not just then. Not until I had Engdahl aboard and we were out in the middle of the Hudson, staring back; and then it went up all right, all at once, like a missile or a volcano; and there had been fifty tankers in that one mooring, but there weren't any any more, or not in shape for us to use. I looked at Engdahl. He said defensively: "Honest, Sam, I thought it was oil. It smelled like oil. How was I to know -- " "Shut up," I said. He shrugged, injured. "But it's all right, Sam. No fooling. There are plenty of other tankers around. Plenty. Down toward the Amboys, maybe moored out in the channel. There must be. We'll find them." "No," I said. "You will." And that was all I said, because I am forgiving by nature; but I thoiht a great deal more. Surprisingly, though, he did find a tanker with a full load, the very next day. It became a question of getting the tanker to the Queen. I left that part up to Vern, since he claimed to be able to handle it. It took him two weeks. First it was finding the tanker, then it was locating a tug in shape to move, then it was finding someone to pilot the tug. Then it was waiting for a clear and windless day -- because the pilot he found had got all his experience sailing Star boats on Long Island Sound -- and then it was easing the tanker out of Newark Bay, into the channel, down to the pier in the North River -- Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I didn't have to do it. # UT I had enough to keep me busy at that. I found a man who claimed he used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert Einstein's mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron was hot. There was no need for any great skill, since there weren't going to be very many vessels to communicate with. Things began to move. The advantage of a ship like the Queen, for our purposes, was that the thing was pretty well automated to start out with. I mean never mind what the seafaring unions required in the way of flesh-and-blood personnel. What it came down to was that one man in the bridge or wheelhouse could pretty well make any part of the ship go or not go. The engine-room telegraph wasn't hooked up to control the engines, no. But the wiring diagram needed only a few little changes to get the same effect, because where in the original concept a human being would take a look at the repeater down in the engine room, nod wisely, and push a button that would make the engines stop, start, or whatever -- why, all we had to do was cut out the middleman, so to speak. Our genius of the soldering iron replaced flesh and blood with some wiring and, presto, we had centralized engine control. The steering was even easier. Steering was a matter of electronic control and servomotors to begin with. Windjammers in the old movies might have a man lashed to the wheel whose muscle power turned the rudder, but, believe me, a big superliner doesn't. The rudders weigh as much as any old windjammer ever did from stem to stern; you have to have motors to turn them; and it was only a matter of getting out the old soldering iron again. By the time we were through, we had every operational facility of the Queen hooked up to a single panel on the bridge. Engdahl showed up with the oil tanker just about the time we got the wiring complete. We rigged up a pump and filled the bunkers till they were topped off full. We guessed, out of hope and ignorance, that there was enough in there to take us half a dozen times around the world at normal cruising speed, and maybe there was. Anyway, it didn't matter, for surely we had enough to take us anywhere we wanted to go, and then there would be more. We crossed our fingers, turned our ex-ferry-stoker loose, pushed a button -- Smoke came out of the stacks. The antique screws began to turn over. Astern, a sort of hump of muddy water appeared. The Queen quivered underfoot. The mooring hawsers creaked and sang. "Turn her off!" screamed Engdahl. "She's headed for Times Square!" Well, that was an exaggeration, but not much of one; and there wasn't any sense in stirring up the bottom mud. I pushed buttons and the screws stopped. I pushed another button, and the big engines quietly shut themselves off, and in a few moments the stacks stopped puffing their black smoke. The ship was alive. Solemnly Engdahl and I shook hands. We had the thing licked. All, that is, except for the one small problem of Arthur. ' I HE thing about Arthur was they had put him to work. It was in the power station, just as Amy had said, and Arthur didn't like it. The fact that he didn't like it was a splendid reason for staying away from there, but I let my kind heart overrule my good sense and paid him a visit It was way over on the East Side, miles and miles from any civilized area. I borrowed Ams MG, and borrowed Amy to go with it, and the two of us packed a picnic lunch and set out There were reports of deer on Avenue A, so I brought a rifle, but we never saw one; and if you want my opinion, those reports were nothing but wishful thinking. I mean if people couldn't survive, how could deer? We Anally threaded our way through the clogged streets and parked in front of the power station. "There's supposed to be a guard," Amy said doubtfully. I looked. I looked pretty carefully, because if there was a guard, I wanted to see him. The Major's orders were that vital defense installations -- such as the power station, the PX and his own barracks building -- were to be guarded gainst trespassers on a shoot-onsight basis and I wanted to make sure that the guard knew we were privileged persons, with passes signed by the Majors own hand. But we couldn't find him. So we walked in through the big door, peered around, listened for the sounds of machinery and walked in that direction. And then we found him; he was sound asleep. Amy, looking indignant, shook him awake. "Is that how you guard military property?" she scolded. "Don't you know the penalty for sleeping at your post?" The guard said something irritable and unhappy. I got her off his back with some difficulty, and we located Arthur. Picture a shiny four-gallon tomato can, with the label stripped off, hanging by wire from the flashing-light panels of an electric computer. That was Arthur. The shiny metal cylinder was his prosthetic tank; the wires were the leads that served him for fingers, ears and mouth; the glittering panel was the control center for the Consolidated Edison Eastside Power Plant No. #. "Hi, Arthur," I said, and a sudden ear-splitting thunderous hiss was his way of telling me that he knew I was there. I didn't know exactly what it was he was trying to say and I didn't want to; fortune spares me few painful moments, and I accept with gratitude the ones it does. The Major's bo hadn't bothered to bring Arthur's typewriter along -- I mean who cares what a generator-governor had to offer in the way of conversation? -- so all he could do was blow off steam from the distant boilers. flashed; a bucket conveyor began crashingly to dump loads of coal; and an alarm gong began to pound. "Please, Arthur," I begged. "Shut up a minute and listen, will you?" More lights. The gong rapped half a dozen times sharply, and stopped. I said: "Arthur, you've got to trust Vem and me. We have this thing figured out now. We've got the Queen Elizabeth -- " A shattering hiss of steam -- meaning delight this time, I thought. Or anyway hoped. " -- and it's only a question of time until we can carry out the plan. Vem says to apologize for not looking in on you -- " hiss -- "but he's been busy. And after all, you know it's more important to get eveiything ready so you can get out of this place, right?" "Psst," said Amy. She nodded briefly past my shoulder. I looked, and diere was the guard, looking sleepy and surly and definitely suspicious. I said heartily: So as soon as I fix it up with the Major, we'll arrange for something better for you. Meanwhile, Arthur, you're doing a capital job and I want you to know that all of us loyal New York citizens and public servants deeply appreciate -- " Thundering crashes, bangs, gongs, hisses, and the scream of a steam whistle he'd found somewhere. Ardiur was mad. "So long, Arthur," I said, and we got out of there -- just barely in time. At the door, we foimd that Arthur had reversed the coal scoops and a growing mound of it was pouring into the street where we'd left the MG parked. We got the car started just as the heap was beginning to reach the bumpers, and at that the paint, would never again be the same. Oh, yes, he was mad. Z could only hope that in the long run he would forgive us, since we were acting for his best interests, after all. Anyway, I thought we were.  well -- especially between Amy and me. Engdahl had the theory that she had been dodging the Major so long that anybody looked good to her, which was hardly flattering. But e and I were getting along right weU. She said worriedly: "The only thing, Sam, is that, frankly, the Major has just about made up his mind that he wants to marry me -- " "He is married!" I yelped. "Naturally he's married. He's married to -- so far -- one hundred and nine women. He's been hitting off a marriage a month for a good many years now and, to tell you the truth, I think he's got the habit Anyway, he's got his eye on me." I demanded jealously: "IZas he said anything?" She picked a sheet of onionskin paper out of her bag and handed it to me. It was marked Top Secret, and it really was, because it hadn't gone through his regular office -- I knew that because I was his regular office. It was only two lines of text and sloppily tped at that: Lt Amy Bankhead will report to HQ at # hours I July to carry out orders of the Commanding Officer. The first of July was only a week away. I handed the orders back to her. "And the orders of the Commanding Officer will be -- " I wanted to know. She nodded. "You guessed it I said: "We'll have to work fast." O N tile thirtietii of June, we invited the Major to come aboard his palatial new yacht. "Ah, thank you," he said gratefully. "A surprise? For my birthday? Ah, you loyal members of my command make up for all that I've lost -- all of it!" He nearly wept. I said: "Sir, the pleasure is all ours," and backed out of his presence. What's more, I meant every word. It was a select party of slightly over a hundred. All of the wives were there, barring twenty or thirty who were in disfavor -- still, that left over eighty. The Major brought half a dozen of his favorite officers. His bodyguard and our crew added up to a total of thirty men. We were set up to feed a hundred and fifty, and to provide liquor for twice that many, so it looked like a nice friendly brawl. I mean we had our radio operator handing out highballs as the guests stepped on board. The Major was touched and delighted; it was exactly the kind of party he liked. He came up the gangplank with his face one great beaming smile. "Et! Drink!" he cried. "Ah, and be merry!" He stretched out his hands to Amy, standing by behind the radio op. "For tomorrow we wed," he added, and sentimentally kissed his proposed bride. I cleared my throat. "How about inspecting the ship, Major?" I interrupted. "Plenty of time for that, my boy," he said. "Plenty of time for that." But he let go of Amy and looked around him. Well, it was worth looking at. Those Englishmen really knew how to build a luxury liner. God rest them. The girls began roaming around. It was a hot day and late afternoon, and the girls began discarding jackets and boleros, and that began to annoy the Major. "Ah, cover up there!" he ordered one of his wives. "You too there, what's-your-name. Put that blouse back on!" It gave him something to think about. He was a very jealous man, Amy had said, and when you stop to think about it, a jealous man with a hundred and nine wives to be jealous of really has a job. Anyway, he was busy watching his wives and keeping his military cabinet and his bodyguard busy too, and that made him too busy to notice when I tipped the high sign to Vem and took off. VI T N Consolidated Edison's big power plant, the guard was friendly. "I hear the Major's over on your boat, pal. Big doings. Got a lot of the girls there, hey?" He bent, sniggering, to look at my pass. Thafs right, pal, I said, and slugged him. Arthur screamed at me with a shrill blast of steam as I came in. But only once. I wasn't there for conversation. I began ripping apart his comfy little home of steel braces and copper wires, and it didn't take much more than a minute before I had him free. And that was very fortunate because, although I had tied up the guard, I hadn't done it very well, and it was just about the time I had Arthur's steel case tucked under my arm that I heard a yelling and bellowing from down the stairs. The guard had got free. "Keep calm, Arthur!" I ordered sharply. "We'll get out of this, don't you worry!" But he wasn't worried, or anyway didn't show it, since he couldn't. I was the one who was worried. I was up on the second floor of the plant, in the control center, with only one stairway going down that I knew about, and that one thoroughly guarded by a man with a grudge against me. Me, I had Arthur, and no weapon, and I hadn't a doubt in the world that there were other guards around and that my friend would have them after me before long. Problem. I took a deep breath and swallowed and considered jumping out the window. But it wasn't far enough to the ground. Feet pounded up tiie stairs. more than two of them. With Arthur dragging me down on one side, I hurried, fast as I could, along the steel galleries that surrounded the biggest boiler. It was a nice choice of alternatives -- if I stayed quiet, they would find me; if I ran, they would hear me, and then find me. But ahead there was -- what? Something. A flight of stairs, it looked like, going out and, yes, up. Up? But I was already on the second floor. "Hey, you!" somebody bellowed from behind me. I didn't stop to consider. I ran. It wasn't steps, not exactly; it was a chain of coal scoops on a long derrick arm, a moving bucket arrangement for unloading fuel from barges. It did go up, though, and more important it went out The bucket arm was stretched across the clogged roadway below to a loading tower that hung over the water. If I could get there, I might be able to get down. If I could get down -- yes, I could see it; there were three or four mahogany motor launches tied to the foot of the tower. And nobody around. I looked over my shoulder, and didn't like what I saw, and scuttled up that chain of enormous buckets like a roach on a washboard, one hand for me and one hand for Arthur. lead on my pursuers -- I needed it I was on the bucket chain while they were still almost a city block behind me, along the galleries. I was halfway across the roadway, afraid to look down, before they reached the butt end of the chain. Clash-clatter. Clank! The bucket under me jerked and clattered and nearly threw me into the street One of those jokers had turned on the conveyor! It was a good trick, all right but not quite in time. I made a flying jump and I was on the tower. I didn't stop to thumb my nose at them, but I thought of it. I was down those steel steps, breathing like a spouting whale, in a minute flat and jumping out across the concrete, coal-smeared yard toward the moored laimches. Quickly enough, I guess, but with nothing at all to spare, because although I hadn't seen anyone there, there was a guard. He popped out of a doorway, blinking foolishly; and overhead the guards at the conveyor belt were screaming at him. It took him a second to figure out what was going on, and by that time I was in a launch, cast off the rope, kicked it free, and fumbled for die starting button. It took me several seconds to realize that a rope was required, that in fact there was no button; and by then I was floating yards away, but the pudgy pop-eyed guard was also in a launch, and he didn't have to fiimble. He knew. He got his motor started a fraction of a second before me, and there he was, coming at me, set to ram. Or so it looked. I wrenched at the wheel and brought the boat hard over; but he swerved too, at the last moment, and brought up something that looked a little like a spear and a little like a sickle and turned out to be a boathook. I ducked, just in time. It sizzled over my head as he swung and crashed against the windshield. Hunks of safety glass splashed out over the forward deck, but better that than my head Boathooks, hey? I had a boathook tool If he didn't have another to play; I'd been sitting and taking it long enough and I was very much attracted by the idea of fighting back. The guard recovered his balance, swore at me, fought the wheel around and came back. We both curved out toward the center of the East River in intersecting arcs. We closed. He swung first I ducked -- And from a crouch, while he was off balance, I caught him in the shoulder widi the hook. He made a mty splash. I throttled down die motor long enough to see diat he was still conscious. "Touche, buster," I said, and set course for die return trip down around the foot of Manhattan, back toward the Queen. TT took a while, but that was all right; it gave everybody a nice long time to get plastered. I sneaked aboard, carrying Arthur, and turned him over to Vem. Then I rejoined the Major. He was making an inspection tour of the ship -- what he called an inspection, after his fashion. He peered into the engine rooms and said: "Ah, fine." He stared at the generators that were turning over and nodded when I explained we needed them for power for lights and everything and said: "Ah, of course." He opened a couple of stateroom doors at random and said: "Ah, nice." And he went up on the flying bridge with me and such of his officers as still could walk and said: "Ah." Then he said in a totally different tone: "What the devil's the matter over there?" He was staring east through the muggy haze. I saw right away what it was that was bothering him -- easy, because I knew where to look. The power plant way over on the East Side was billowing smoke. "Where's Vem Engdahl? That gadget of his isn't working right!" "You mean Artiiur?" "I mean that brain in a bottle. It's Engdahl's responsibility, you know!" Vem came up out of the wheelhouse and cleared his throat "Major," he said earnestly, "I think there's some trouble over there. Maybe you ought to go look for yourself." "Trouble?" "I, uh, hear there've been power failures," Vern said lamely. "Don't you think you ought to inspect it? I mean just in case there's something serious?" The Major stared at him frostily, and then his mood changed. He took a drink from the glass in his hand, quickly finishing it off. "Ah," he said, "hell with it. Why spoil a good party? If there are going to be power failures, why, let them be. That's my motto!" Vern and I looked at each other. He shrugged slightly, meaning, well, we tried. And I shrugged slightly, meaning, what did you expect? And then he glanced upward, meaning, take a look at whaf s there. But I didn't really have to look because I heard what it was. In fact, I'd been hearing it for some time. It was the Major's entire air force -- two helicopters, swirling around us at an average altitude of a hundred feet or so. They showed up bright against the gathering clouds overhead, and I looked at them with considerable interest -- partly because I considered it an even-money bet that one of them would be playing crumple-fender with our stacks, partly because I had an idea that they were not there solely for show. I said to the Major: "Chief, aren't they coming a little close? I mean it's your ship and all, but what if one of them takes a spill into the bridge while you're here?" He grinned. "They know better," he bragged. "Ah, besides, I want them close. I mean if anything went wrong." I said, in a tone that showed as much deep hurt as I could manage: "Sir, what could go wrong?" "Oh, you know." He patted my shoulder limply. "Ah, no offense?" he asked. I shook my head. "Well," I said, "let's go below." A LL of it was done carefully, carefully as could be. The only thing was, we forgot about the tjTewriters. We got everybody, or as near as we could, into the Grand Salon where the food was, and right there on a table at the end of the hall was one of the typewriters clacking away. Vem had rigged them up with rolls of paper instead of sheets, and maybe that was ingenious, but it was also a headache just then. Because the typewriter was banging out: The Major inquired politely: "Something to do with the ship?" "Oh, that," said Vern. "Yeah. Just a little, uh, something to do with the ship. Say, Major, here's the bar. Real scotch, see? Look at the label!" The Major glanced at him with faint contempt -- well, he'd had the pick of the greatest collection of high-priced liquor stores in ffie world for ten years, so no wonder. But he allowed Vern to press a drink on him. And the t#writer kept rattling: Some of the "clerks, typists, domestic personnel and others" -- that was the way they were listed on the TO; it was only coincidence that the Major had married them all -- were staring at the typewriter. "Drinks!" Vern called nervously. "Come on, girls! Drinks!" THE Major poured himself a stiff shot and asked: "What is that thing? A telet#T#e or something?" "That's right," Vem said, trailing after him as the Major wandered over to inspect it. The Major said, frowning faintly: "Ah, that reminds me of something. Now what is it?" "More scotch?" Vern cried. "Major, a little more scotch?" The Major ignored him, scowling. One of the "clerks, typists" said: "Honey, you know what it is? It's like that pross you had, remember? It was on our wedding night, and you'd just got it, and you kept asking it to tell you limericks." The Major snapped his fingers. "Knew I'd get it," he glowed. Then abruptly he scowled again and turned to face Vem and me. "Say -- "he began. I said weakly: "The boilers." The Major stared at me, then glanced out the window. "What boilers?" he demanded. "It's just a thunderstorm. Been building up all day. Now what about this? Is that thing -- " But Vern was paying him no attention. "Thunderstorm?" he yelled. "Arthur, you listening? Are the helicopters gone?" "Then shove off, Arthur! Shove off!" The typewriter rattled and slammed madly. The Major yelled angrily: "Now listen to me, you! I'm asking you a question!" But we didn't have to answer, because there was a thmmming and a throbbing underfoot, and then one of the "clerks, typists" screamed: "The dock!" She pointed at a porthole. "It's moving!" barely in time. And then it was up to Arthur. We had the whole ship to roam aroimd in and there were plenty of places to hide. They had the whole ship to search. And Arthur was the whole ship. Because it was Arthur, all right, brought in and hooked up by Vern, attained to his greatest dream and ambition. He was skipper of a superliner, and more than any skipper had ever been -- the ship was his body, as the prosthetic tank had never been; the keel his belly, the screws his feet, the engines his heart and lungs, and clanged Arthur backed that enorevery moving part that could be mous ship out of its berth like a hooked into central control his racing scull on the Schuylkill The many, many hands. four giant screws lashed the water Search for us? They were into white foam, and then the thin lucky they could move at all! mud they sucked up into tan; and Fire Control washed them with the ship backed, swerved, lashed salt water hoses, directed by Arthe water, stopped, and staggered thur's brain. Watertight doors, crazily forward, proof against sinking, locked them Arthur brayed at the Statue of away from us at Arthur's whim. Liberty, tooted good-by to Staten The big bull whistle overhead Island, feinted a charge at Sandy brayed like a clamoring Gabriel, Hook and really laid back his ears and the ship's bells tinkled and and raced once he got to deep water past the moored lightship. We were off! Well, from there on, it was easy. We let Arthur have his fun with the Major and the bodyguards -- and by the sodden, whimpering shape they were in when they came out, it must really have been fun for him. There were just the three of us and only Vern and I had guns -- but Arthur had the Queen Elizabeth, and that put the odds on our side. We gave the Major a choice: row back to Coney Island -- we offered him a boat, free of charge -- or come along with us as cabin boy. He cast one dim-eyed look at the hundred and nine "clerks, typists" and at Amy, who would never be the hundred and tenth. And then he shrued and, game loser, said: "Ah, why not? I'll come along " A ND why not, when you come to think of it? I mean ruling a city is nice and all that, but a sea voyage is a refreshing change. And while a hundred and nine to one is a respectable female-male ratio, still it must be wearing; and eighty to thirty isn't so bad, either. At least, I guess that was what was in the Major's mind. I know it was what was in mine. And I discovered that it was in Amy's, for the first thing she did was to march me over to the typewriter and say: "You've had it, Sam. We'll dispose with the wedding march -- just get your friend Arthur here to marry us." "Arthur?" "The captain," she said. "We're on the high seas and he's empowered to perform marriages." Vem looked at me and shrugged, meaning, you asked for tiiis one, boy. And I looked at him and shrugged, meaning, it could be worse. And indeed it could. We'd got our ship; we'd got our ship's company -- because, naturally, there wasn't any use stealing a big ship for just a couple of us. We'd had to manage to get a sizable colony aboard. That was the whole idea. The world, in fact, was ours. It could have been very much worse indeed, even though Arthur was laughing so hard as he performed the ceremony that he jammed up all his keys. One of the Rarest, Most-Wanted Glossies of All Time is Back in Print at LasH Here it is -- Collectors have gladly paid a smoll fortune for copies of this fabulous adventure, long out-of print. Now you can own it in a brand-new, exclusive, limited edition -- published at the lowest possible price as a "labor of love" for our readers! If you admire Merritt and enjoy Robert E. Howard, you've got the thrill of a lifetime in store for you when you discover the wonderful Scheduled for Jan. #, but quantities are limited -- so send The Gnome Press Inc., Fantasy Classic Library P.O. Box #, HIcksville, N. Y. After space, there was always one more river to cross    the far side of hatred and murderl T he bar didn't have a name. No name of any kind. Not even an indication that it had ever had one. All it said on the outside was: Cafe Cocktails which doesn't make a lot of sense. But it was a bar. It had a big TV set going ya-ta-ta ya-ta-ta in three glorious colors, and a jukebox that tried to drown out the TV with that lousy music they play. Anyway, it wasn't a kid hangout I kind of like it. But I wasn't sup posed to be there at all; it's in the contract I was supposed to stay in New York and the New England states. across the river. I think the name of the place was Hoboken, but I'm not sure. It all had a kind of dreamy feeling to it. I was -- Well, I couldn't even remember going there. I remembered one minute I was downtown New York, looking across the river. I did that a lot. And then I was there. I don't remember crossing the river at all. I was drunk, you know. VT" OU know how it is? Double bourbons and keep them coming. And after a while the bartender stops bringing me the ginger ale because gradually I forget to mix them. I got pretty loaded long before I left New York. I realize that. I guess I had to get pretty loaded to risk the pension and all. Used to be I didn't drink much, but now, I don't know, when I have one drink, I get to thinking about Sam and Wally and Chowderhead and Gilvey and the captain. If I don't drink, I think about them, too, and then I take a drink. And that leads to another drink, and it all comes out to the same thing. Well, I guess I said it already, I drink a pretty good amoimt, but you can't blame me. There was a girl. I always get a girl someplace. Usually they aren't much and this one wasn't either. I mean she was probably somebody's mother. She was around thirty-five and not so bad, though she had a long scar under her ear down along her throat to the little round spot where her larynx was. It wasn't ugly. She smelled nice -- while I could still smell, you know -- and she didn't talk much. I liked that OnlyWell, did you ever meet somebody with a nervous cough? Like when you say something funny -- a little funny, not a big yock -- they don't laugh and they don't stop with just smiling, but they sort of cough? She did that. I began to itch. I couldn't help it. I asked her to stop it. She spilled her drink and looked at me almost as though she was scared -- and I had tried to say it quietly, too. "Sorry," she said, a little angry, a little scared. 'Sorry. But you don't have to -- " "Forget it" "Sure. But you asked me to sit down here with you, remember? If you're going to -- " "Forget it!" I nodded at the bartender and held up two fingers. "You need another drink," I said. "The thing is," I said, "Gilvey used to do that." "What?" "That cough." She looked puzzled. "You mean like this?" "Goddam it, stop it!" Even the bartender looked over at me that time. Now she was really mad, but I didn't want her to go away. I said, "Gilvey was a fellow who went to Mars with me. Pat Gilvey." "Oh." She sat down again and leaned across die table, low. Mars." IHE bartender brought our drinks and looked at me suspiciously. I said, "Say, Mac, would you turn down the air-conditioning?" "My name isn't Mac. No." "Have a heart. It's too cold in here." "Sorry." He didn't sound sorry. I was cold. I mean that kind of weather, it's always cold in those places. You know around New York in August? It hits eighty, eighty-five, ninety. All the places have air-conditioning and what they really want is for you to wear a shirt and tie. But I like to walk a lot. Youwould, too, you know. And you can't walk around much in long pants and a suit coat and all that stuff. Not arotmd there. Not in August. And so then, when I went into a bar, it'd have one of those built-in freezers for the used-car salesmen with their dates, or maybe their wives, all dressed up. For what? But I froze. "Mars, the girl breathed. "Mars." I began to itch again. "Want to dance?" "They don't have a license," she said. "Byron, I didn't know you'd been to Mars! Please tell me about it" "It was all right," I said. That was a lie. She was interested. She foigot to smile. It made her look nicer. She said, "I knew a man -- my brother-in-law -- he was my husband's brother -- I mean my ex-husband -- " "I get the idea." "He worked for General Atomic. where that is?" "Sure." I couldn't go there, but "He worked on the first Mars ship. Oh, fifteen years ago, wasn't it? He always wanted to go himself, but he couldn't pass the tests." She stopped and looked at me. I knew what she was thinkii. But I didn't always look this way, you know. Not that there's anything wrong with me now, I mean, but I couldn't pass the tests any more. Nobody can. That's why we're all one-trippers. I said, "The only reason I'm shaking like this is because I'm cold." It wasn't true, of course. It was that cough of Gilvey's. I didn't like to think about Gilvey, or Sam or Chowderhead or Wally or the captain. I didn't like to think about any of them. It made me shake. You see, we couldn't kill each other. They wouldn't let us do that Before we took off, they did something to our minds to make sure. What they did, it doesn't last forever. It lasts for two years and then it wears off. That's long enough, you see, because that gets you to Mars and back; and it's plenty long enough, in another way, because it's like a straitjacket You know how to make a baby cry? Hold his hands. It's the most basic thing there is. What they did to us so we couldn't kill each other, it was like being tied up, like having our hands held so we couldn't get free. Well. But two years was long enough. Too long. The bartender came over and said, "Pal, I'm sorry. See, I turned the air-conditioning down. You all right? You look so -- " I said, "Sure, I'm all right." He sounded worried. I hadn't even heard him come back. The girl was looking worried, too, I guess because I was shaking so put some money on the table without even counting it. "It's all right," I said. "We were just going." "We were?" She looked confused. But she came along with me. They always do, once they find out you've been to Mars. TN the next place, she said, between trips to the powder room, "It must take a lot of courage to sign up for something like that. Were you scientifically inclined in school? Don't you have to know an awful lot to be a spaceflyer? Did you ever see any of those little monkey characters they say live on Mars? I read an article about how they lived in little cities of pup-tents or something like that -- only they didn't make them, they grew them. Funny! Ever see those? That trip must have been a real drag, I bet. What is it, nine months? You couldn't have a baby! Excuse me -- Say, tell me. All that time, bow'd you -- well, manage things? I mean didn't you ever have to go to the you-know or anything?" "We managed," I said. She giggled, and that reminded her, so she went to the powder room again. I thought about getting up and leaving while she was gone, but what was the use of that? I'd only pick up somebody else. It was nearly midnight. A couple of minutes wouldn't hurt. I reached in my pocket for the little box of pills they give us -- it isn't refillable, but we get a new prescription in the mail every month, along with the pension check. The label on the box said: Use only as directed by physician. Not to be taken by persons suffering heart condition, digestive upset or circulatory disease. Not to be used in conjunction with alcoholic beverages. I took three of them. I don't like to start them before midnight, but anyway I stopped shaking. I closed my eyes, and then I was on the ship again. The noise in the bar became the noise of the rockets and the air washers and the sludge sluicers. I began to sweat, although this place was air-conditioned, too. I could hear Wally whistling to himself the way he did, the sound muffled by his oxygen mask and drowned in the rocket noise, but still perfectly audible. The tune was Sophisticahd Lady. Sometimes it was Easy to Lave and sometimes Chasing Shadows, but mostly Sophisticated Lady. He Somebody sneezed, and it sounded just like Cbowderhead sneezing. You know how everybody sneezes according to his own individual style? Chowderhead had a ladylike little sneeze; it went hutta, real quick, all through the mouth, no nose involved. The captain went Hrasssh; Wally was Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo. Gilvey was Hutch-uh. Sam didn't sneeze much, but he sort of coughed and sprayed, and that was worse. Sometimes I used to think about and having Wally and the captain sneeze him to death. But that was a kind of a joke, naturally, when I was feeling good. Or pretty good. Usually I thought about a knife for Sam. For Chowderhead it was a gun, right in the belly, one shot. For Wally it was a tommy gun -- just stitching him up and down, you know, back and forth. The captain I would put in a cage with hungry lions, and Gilvey I'd strangle with my bare hands. That was probably because of the cough, I guess. S HE was back. "Please tell me about it," she begged. "I'm so curious." I opened my eyes. "You want me to tell you about it?" "Oh, please!" "About what it's like to fly to Mars on a rocket?" "Yes!" "All right," I said. It's wonderful what three little white pills will do. I wasn't even shaking. "There's six men, see? In a space the size of a Buick, and that's all the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time, four of us on watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes -- because it's the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know, the only place where you can rest without somebody's elbow in your side. But you can't. Because by then it's the next man's turn. "And maybe you don't have elbows in your side while it's your turn off watch, but in ffie starboard bunk there's the air-regenerator master valve -- I bet I could still show you the bruises right around my kidneys -- and in the port bunk there's the emergency-escape-hatch handle. That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head too fast "And you can't really sleep, I mean not soundly, because of the noise. That is, when the rockets are going. When they aren't going, then you're in free-fall, and that's bad, too, because you dream about falling. But when they're going I don't know, I think it's worse. It's pretty loud. "And even if it weren't for the noise, if you sleep too soundly you might roll over on your oxygen line. Then you dream about drowning. Ever do that? You're strangling and choking and you can't get any air? It isn't dangerous, I guess. Anyway, it always woke me up in time. Though I heard about a fellow in a flight six years ago -- "Well. So you've always got this oxygen mask on, all the time, except if you take it off for a second to talk to somebody. You don't do that very often, because what is there to say? Oh, maybe the first couple of weeks, sure -- everybod#s friends then. You don't even need the mask, for that matter. Or not very much. Everybody's still pretty clean. The place smells -- oh, let's see -- about like the locker room in a gmi. You know? You can stand it That's if nobod#s got space sickness, of course. We were lucky that way. "But that's about how it's going to get anyway, you know. Outside the masks, it's soup. It isn't that you smell it so much. You kind of taste it, in the back of your mouth, and your eyes sting. That's after the first two or three months. Later on, it gets worse. "And with the mask on, of course, the oxygen mixture is coming in under pressure. That's funny if you're not used to it Your lungs have to work a little bit harder to get rid of it, especially when you're asleep, so after a while the muscles get sore. And then they get sorer. And then -- "Well. "Before we take off, the psych people give us a long doo-da that But they can't stop us from thinking about it. And afterward, after we're back on Earth -- this is what you won't read about in the articles -- they keep us apart. You know how they work it? We get a pension, naturally. I mean there's got to be a pension, otherwise there isn't enough money in the world to make anybody go. But in the contract, it says to get the pension we have to stay in our own area. "The whole country's marked off. Six sections. Each has at least one big city in it. I was lucky, I got a lot of em. They try to keep it so every man's home town is in his own section, but -- well, like with us. Chowderhead and the captain both happened to come from Santa Monica. I think it was Chowderhead that got California, Nevada, all that Southwest area. It was the luck of the draw God knows what the captain got. "Maybe New Jersey," I said, and took another white pill. VjE went on to another place " and she said suddenly, "I figured something out. The way you keep looking around." "What did you figure out?" "Well, part of it was what you said about the other fellow getting New Jersey. This is New Jersey. You don't belong in this section, right?" "Right," I said after a minute. "So why are you here? I know why. You're here because you're looking for somebody." "That's right" She said triumphantly, "You want to find that other fellow from your crew! You want to fight him!" I couldn't help shaking, white pills or no white pills. But I had to correct her. "No. I want to kill him." "How do you know he's here? He's got a lot of states to roam around in, too, doesn't he?" "Six. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland -- all the way down to Washington." "Then how do you know -- " "He'll be here." I didn't have to tell her how I knew. But I knew. I wasn't the only one who spent his time at the border of his assigned area, looking across the river or staring across a state line, knowing that somebody was on the other side. I knew. You fight a war and you don't have to guess that the enemy might have his troops a thousand miles away from the battle line. You know where his troops will be. You know he wants to fight, too. Hutta. Hutta. I spilled my drink. I looked at her. "You -- you didn't -- " She looked frightened. "What's the matter?" "Did you just sneeze? "Sneeze? Me? Did I -- " I said something quick and nasty, I don't know what No! It hadn't been her. I knew it. It was Chowderhead's sneeze. Roebuck, his name was. Five feet eight indies tall. Dark-complected, with a cast in one eye. Spoke with a Midwest kind of accent, even though he came from California -- "shriek" for "shriek," "hawror" for "hewTor," like that It drove me crazy after a while. Maybe that gives you an idea what he talked about mostly. A skunk. A thoroughgoing, deep-rooted, mothermurdering skunk. I kicked over my chair and roared, "Roebuck! Where are you, damn you?" The bar was all at once silent. Only the jukebox kept going. "I know you're here!" I screamed. "Come out and get it! You louse, I told you I'd get you for calling me a liar the day Wally sneaked a smoke!" Silence, everybody looking at me. Then the door of the men's room opened. He came out He looked lousy. Eyes all redrimmed and his hair falling out -- the poor crumb couldn't have been over twenty-nine. He shrieked, names. He said, "You thieving rat I'll teach you to try to cheat me out of my candy ration!" He had a knife. I didn't care. I didn't have anything and that was stupid, but it didn't matter. I got a bottle of beer from the next table and smashed it against the back of a chair. It made a good weapon, you know; Fd take that against a knife any time. I ran toward him, and he came all staggering and liuching toward me, looking crazy and desperate, mumbling and raving -- I could hardly hear him, because I was talking, too. Nobody tried to stop us. Somebody went out the door and I figured it was to call the cops, but that was all right. Once I took care of Chowderhead, I didn't care what the cops did. I went for the face. He cut me first. I felt the knife slide up along my left arm but, you know, it didn't even hurt, only kind of stimg a little. I didn't care about that. I got him in the face, and the bottle came away, and it was all like gray and white jelly, and then blood began to spring out. He screamed. Oh, that scream! I never heard an#ing like that scream. It was what I had been waiting all my life for. I kicked him as he staggered back, and he fell. And I was on top of him, with the bottle, and I was careful to stay away from the heart or the throat, because that was too quick, but I worked over the face, and I felt his knife get me a couple times more, and -- And -- A ND I woke up, you know. And there was Dr. Santly over me with a hypodermic needle that he'd just taken out of my arm, and four male nurses in fatigues holding me down. And I was drenched with sweat For a minute, I didn't know where I was. It was a horrible queasy falling sensation, as thoi the bar and the fit and the world were all dissolving into smoke around me. Then I knew where I was. It was almost worse. I stopped yelling and just lay there, looking up at them. Dr. Santly said, trying to keep his face friendly and noncommital, he said, "You're doing much better, B#n'on, boy. Much better." I didn't say anything. He said, "You worked through the whole thing in two hours and eight minutes. Remember the first time? You were sixteen hours killing him. Captain Van Wyck it was that time, remember? Who was it this time?" "Chowderhead." I looked at the male nurses. Doubtfully, they let go of my arms and legs. "Chowderhead," said Dr. Santly. "Oh -- Roebuck. That boy," he said mournfully, his expression saddened, "he's not coming along nearly as well as you. Nearly. He can't run through a cycle in less than five hours. And, that's peculiar, it's usually you he -- Well, I better not say that, shall I? No sense setting up a counter-impression when your pores are all open, so to speak?" He smiled at me, but he was a little worried in back of the smile. I sat up. "Anybody got a cigarette?" "Give him a cigarette, Johnson," the doctor ordered the male nurse standing alongside my rit foot Johnson did. I fired up. "You're coming along splendidly' Dr. Santly said. He was one of these psych guys that thinks if you say it's so, it makes it so. You know that kind? "We'll have you down under an hour before the end of the week. That's marvelous progress. Then we can work on the conscious level! You're doing extremely well, whether you know it or not. Why, in six months -- say in eight months, because I like to be conservative -- " he twinkled at me -- "we'll have you out of here! You'll be the first of your crew to be discharged, you know that?" "That's nice," I said. "The others aren't doing so well?" "No. Not at all well, most of them. Particularly Dr. Gilvey. The runthroughs leave him in terrible shape. I don't mind admitting I'm worried about him." "That's nice," I said, and this time I meant it. but all he did was say to the male nurses, "He's all right now. Help him off the table." It was hard standing up. I had to hold onto the rail around the table for a minute. I said my set little speech: "Dr. Santly, I want to tell you again how grateful I am for this. I was reconciled to living the rest of my life confined to one part of tiie country, tne way the other crews always did. But this is much better. I appreciate it. I'm sure the others do, too." "Of course, boy. Of course." He took out a foimtain pen and made a note on my chart; I couldn't see what it was, but he looked gratified. "It's no more than you have coming to you, B#n-on," he said. "I'm grateful that I could be the one to make it come to pass." He glanced conspiratorially at the male nurses. "You know how important this is to me. It's the triumph of a whole new approach to psychic rehabilitation. I mean to say our heroes of space travel are entitled to freedom when they come back home to Earth, aren't they?" "Definitely," I said, scrubbing some of the sweat off my face onto my sleeve. "So we've got to end this system of desnated areas. We can't avoid the tensions that accompany space travel, no. But if we can help you eliminate harmful tensions with a few runthroughs, why, it's not too high a price to pay, is it?" "Not a bit" "I mean to say," he said, warming up, "you can look forward to the time when you'll be able to miile with your old friends from the rocket, free and easy, without any need for restraint That's a lot to look forward to, isn't it?" "It is," I said. "I look forward to it very much," I said. "And I know exactly what I'm going to do the first time I meet one -- I mean without any restraints, as you say," I said. And it was true; I did. Only it wouldn't be a broken beer bottle that I would do it with. I had much more elaborate ideas than that. We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! L ast month I covered some of the work done by the Department of Space Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base. I told that General Harry G. Armstrong created this department in March # for the specific purpose of finding out all the medical aspects of space travel before the engineers are ready to build a spaceship. In spite Fig. I : Principle of parabolic flight of this far-sighted decision, it canthe Moon -- unmanned, of course, not be denied that the engineers They don't discuss whether one are creeping up on the medical can shoot an unmanned rocket to men. the Moon. That is taken for Every once in a while Los Angranted. What they do discuss is geles shakes because the engineers how one can get the largest amount at Rocketdyne are putting someof scientific information from a thing especially heavy on their shot that can carry only a few teststands. And at North Ameripounds of payload. It is not just can Aviation, they are fussing a question of what to use for paywith details of something which load; it is just as much a quesis called the X-#. That X-# is tion of which trajectory from the a rocket-propelled research airEarth to the Moon will produce plane, building at the time I write the largest number of different this and possibly finished when results in the most reliable manner, this issue reaches the newsstands. posed to throw itself into a gigantic  is always amtising to check arc with its peak # miles up, back by pulling out the "old" about five times as high as Man books and pamphlets of thirty has flown so far. years ago. Nobody, with the sole Elsewhere, astronomers and enexception of Professor Hermann gineers are discussing a shot to Oberth (whose father was a phyFig. #: T-#A ready for parabolic flighK From left to right: Major Herbert D. Stallings, Professor Hubertus Strughold, Dr. Siegfried J. Gerathewohl sician), paid any attention to medical problems. The attitude seems to have been that it was the duty of the pilot to survive whatever may come. I remember attending a lecture by the late Max Valier in # in which he declared that the whole problem of space travel was merely a matter of having sufficiently powerful rocket motors. Well, yes, if the motors are too weak, you obviously won't get an # Twhere; but they are only one aspect of the whole. After the lecture, Valier was asked by a member of the audience how the pilot would fare. Valier replied that the engineers who are capable of building such a ship would also be able to protect the pilot from all possible harm. It was a logical answer, all right, but first the engineers have to know what the possible harm could be. As I said, the only one who did think about medical problems was Prof. Oberth who, in the first edition of his book (#), explained that the pilot of a rocketship would experience two very different sensations in succession. As long as the rocket motors were burning, he would be subjected to high accelerations, making him feel several times as heavy as hd actually is. Then, as soon as the motors stopped burning, he would feel weightless. Looking around for examples, Oberth realized that airplane pilots, making sharp turns, are subjected to higher accelerations, too., In a rocketship, Oberth continued, the acceleration would be about the same, but would last for a longer time, even thoi it probably would never be more than ten minutes. He then siested building a large centrifuge for testing and, possibly, training. Such large centrifuges have been built since and a large number of test nms have been made, with results which were surprising only insofar as they showed that the human body is much toiler than had been expected. The second condition, lasting for a much longer time, would be weightlessness which Oberth called "free fall" but which is now referred to as "zero." This zero condition simply means that a body is following the pull of gravity freely; it does not matter whether it is actually falling, or moving away from the Earth on momentum, or following an orbit around the Earth like a satellite. All this was theoretically quite clear. The problem was how one could nm a test. A man who jumps from a high diving board into water is imder zero-g from the moment he leaves the board to the moment he hits the water. This fact, it turned out, was no help at all.  # -- to talk to more than a dozen high-board diving champions, both male and female, and each and every one of them was greatly surprised to learn that he or she was under zero-g during Fig. #: Water bottle and drops floating under zero-g the # feet between the board and the water. The reason none of them had noticed ansdhing peculiar was easy to ;ure out; they simply were too busy durii die jump. They had to twist and turn and control the actions of their own muscles. They probably wondered whether the additional halftwist they might put in would look better and win them a trophy. My next try was ski-jumpers. Ihey admitted that a long jump felt like soaring, but again they were too bu -- their thoughte were not on the jump but on the landing at the end of it I decided that it was difficult to wring scientific information out of muscle men and waited for a chance to interview a man who had made a long delayed-action jump with a parachute. I never did interview such a man, however, because I realized after a while that he does not esqperience zero Air resistance decelerates him quite strongly and, to the body, acceleration and deceleration feel the same. Oberth, in die meantime, had tried something else. The period of time for which one could produce zero near the ground obviously was not loi enough for making any observations and there also were too many distracting factors. How about foolii the body into believing it was experiencing zero? As researchers will do, whenever possible, he experimented on Fig. #: Mercury bottle placed in midair under zerog himself; even the very best description is only a poor substitute for having experienced something. So he dosed himself carefully with a drug -- scopolamine, if I remember correctly -- and then lowered himself into a tub filled with water of body temperature, closing his eyes and turning himself around a few times to shake off his sense of direction. He told me that the sensation was pleasant. But since nobody had experienced real zero-g at that time, there was no way of telling whether Oberth's experiment had imitated the sensations correctly. After the war, in this country, scientists built a small sealed "animal capsule which could be carried by an Aerobee rocket and take mice and monkeys, two of each, up some # miles. The animals would experience in sequence: A. powerful acceleration while the solid-fuel booster of the Aerobee was burning; this would be followed by B. less powerful but increasing acceleration, while the liquid fuel motor of the Aerobee was burning, followed by C. zero-g while the rocket was coasting to its peak. Then there would be D. short shock while the capsule was ejected from the rocket, followed by zero-g again while the capsule was falling. Then Fig. #: Mercury floats there would be E. sharp deceleration for a moment as the parachute opened and then D. normal one-g while the parachute drifted downward to the ground. all this nicely and lived happily for as long as animals of these sizes live. The one thing which neither their filmed behavior nor their electrocardiograms could tell was how it had felt. At about that time, the brothers Fritz and Heinz Haber, then both with the Department of Space Medicine, evolved a method of producing zero-g safely and for a inside floating bottle reasonable length of time, namely about half a minute, (Fig. #.) If you take a fast airplane and put it in a power dive, then pull out of it and simultaneously shut the engine off, the plane will go through a curve, an arc, in which zero-g should prevail until power is restored. The faster the plane, the longer the arc and the longer the period of zero-g. For a T-# jet, the maximum obtainable should be about # seconds. Since the arc through which the plane would coast is very nearly a parabola, the whole was called "parabolic flight." Naturally, during the pullout maneuver, the acceleration would be higher than one-g, so that such Fig. #: Test subject practicing hitting target a flight would simulate a rocket flight rather well: several g followed by zero-g. (The preceding acceleration can be varied by the pilot by varying the sharpness of the pullout.) Similar experiments had already been performed at Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, but the first man, to my knowledge, to make such a clear-cut "parabolic flight" was the test pilot Capt. Charles . Yeager. Dtiring his first flight, a pencil which had been lying aroimd in the cockpit rose up and hovered in mid-air, proving that everything was under zero-g. However, Captain Yeager did not like the sensation. Others did not agree with this judgment, so it began to look as if zero-g bore some resemblance to seasickness. Everybody knows someone, or of someone, who begins to feel unhappy when still on the pier, while others, in midocean and in the middle of a storm, cannot understand why lunch isn't served on time. Of course the problem was not merely whether a man could stand zero-g; it was also whether a man could do something while under zero-g and how well he could do it. This was something for the School of Aviation Medicine to go after. Was the tolerance to zero-g an individual problem like seasickness and airsickness? If so, o what percentage of people tested could stand it if necessary, what percentage could notstand it even when necessary, and what percentage, if any, liked being weightless? And after yo uhad found a number of individuals who were not hopelessly intolerant to zero how well could they perform a simple function, like, for example, push a button? Q uite a number of zero-g flights were made for this purpose, some with rather powerful acceleration prior to the zero-g period, some with as little extra acleration as could be manned. Hie plane used for all fliese flights was a Lockheed T-# jet, a twoseater. (Fig. #.) The pilot was Major H. D. Stallings, who by now must have made more parabolic flights than anybody else alive (unless the Russians drag up some pioneer komsomol who started all this while still in short pants) and Dr. Siegfried J. Gerathewohl briefed the test subjects, if he was not the test subject himself. The test subjects were all Air Force personnel from aviation cadets to majors, with hundreds of hours of flying experience, many of fliem also with jet experience. First they were handed an instruction sheet reading as follows: #. This experiment is made to gather information about your experience of weightlessness. Read these instructions carefully and follow diem through your flight #. There will be # dives from an altitude of # to # feet producing weightlessness for about # seconds. Pull the canvas in front of you during the first three dives and direct your attention exclusively to the sensations, feelings and perceptions of wetlessness. Keep your eyes open during the first dive, have them closed during die second dive; and observe a floating object of your arms during the third one. Find out how it feels to be weighdess. This task requires insight and practice; that is the reason why we fly this maneuver three times. #. Push the canvas back after the third dive and look outside during the fourth one. Does this make any difference to your perceptions and sensations in the weightless state? #. There will be a short period of recovery during straigtand-level flying at # feet If you are not sure about your experiences or want to try ain under a certain condition, let the pilot know. The pilot will repeat the maneuver. #. If you get motion sick or feel uncomfortable, communicate diis to die pilot He will adjust the temperature and return home. Switch to # oxygen. #. If you feel comfcntable, the pilot will fly a series of three parabolas, one after the other. This will produce practical weighdessness up to about # seconds in each parabola, and a radial acceleration of about # gs during each pull-out Compare how this feels now. Shake your head slowly in the horizontal and vertical plane during the third period of weighdessness. Do you notice any changes in perception or even visual illusions during head movements? #. If you should feel imcomfortable, direct your attention to explorii the cause. Is die feeling of unpleasantness enhanced during weighdessness or during the pull-out? If you get sick, tell the pilot; he will fly you home. #. If you feel well and want to try, the pilot will conclude the flight by two slow rolls; one to the right and one to the left Compare how this feels and whether visual illusions occur during the maneuver. #. Please render a written report about your personal experiences and your tolerance during the weightless condition. The more interesting experiences you can report, the better you can help us. If nothing seems of interest to you, sum your experiences up in about # or # phrases. #. Remember: In a few years, people will have to live and work in suband zero-gravity for some hours and even da # rs. Your contribution is essential for the exploration of space. "Y" OU can find Dr. Gerathe' wohl's full report about the experiences of sixteen people in vol. II of Astronautica Acta, #, beginning on p. #. The summary of that report phrases the findings as follows: "The majority of our subjects felt very comfortable during weightlessness; several subjects reported sensations of motion with no emotional involvement. A small group of subjects experienced discomfort, nausea, and severe symptoms of motion sickness. The conclusion drawn from these experiments is the one that was suspected after the very first reports had been published, namely that there are pronounced individual differences when it comes to weightlessness. For the first rocketships, one will just have to pick those men who like being weightless and have no trouble adapting to it The next question was whether a man might be able to perform a simple task under zero-g. For example: could a man push a button? To use a real button of some kind for the experiment would not do much good; you could tell how often the man has hit, but you could not tell how often he has missed and by how much. So Dr. Gerathewohl constructed a "target" (Fig. #) consisting only of concentric circles. At first, the test subject used a green pencil in ordinary level flight (little crosses on Fig. #) to practice a little. Then he used one of those pencils which are red at one end and blue at tbe other. The blue end was used under three g, the red end tmder zero. The chart shows what happened. The red marks (circles on the chart) all have a tendency to go too high, indicating that the man was not yet used to the fact that his arm did not weigh an # rthing. A few marks are near the center and a few a little bit low; presumably these were the latest marks made when the test subject tried to compensate for die weightlessness of his arm. The blue marks, made imder # g, usually hit too low and they all have a tail, showing that the heavy arm slid down. Again there are a few marks at about the right heit, mde with an effort at compensation. I wish to point out that Fig. # is not a reproduction of an actual test chart I did not have enough time to copy one and the originals, of course, have to stay in the files. But this is the way these charts look. In between, there were a few experiments with floating objects. Fig. # shows a plastic bottle, containing water, which has just been squeezed. The bottle is floating in front of the face of the test subject. To the right, there are some "lumps" of water floating around. At the moment the picture was made, they had not yet been free long enough to contract to a spherical shape. Figures # and # show a bottle containing mercury. In Fig. #, the bottle is just being placed in mid-air. Fig. #, taken a few seconds later, shows "space normal" -- the bottle is floating in the air of the cabin and the merciuy is floating inside the bottle, not touching its wall an # Twhere.  casionally. Dr. Gerathewohl later substituted an all-metal stylus. The target was the same: concentric circles drawn on white paper, which was backed by corrugated cardboard. Fig. # shows the test subject practicing with it prior to takeoff. Otherwise ffie pattern remained the same; the holes punched into the target under zerorg; usually fell too high, while those punched under # g usually fell too low. If you combine a number of such targets into one (Fig. #), you can draw lines showing the mean position of the marks made under # g, in level flight (I g), and under zero. But these are mostly the results obtained from test subjects with little zero-g experience. As time goes on and the same test subject repeats the test over and over again, one can expect the three "means" to be closer and closer to each other. There is no "last word" to this story. The tests go on, and by the end of this year -- when you read this -- much more material is likely to have accumulated. All one need say right now in summing up is that zero-g is no longer an unknown quantity on the road to space travel.      Rex and Mr. Rejilla Being on alien house guest wished on a family. Mr. Rejilla was determined not to meddle... but what constituted non-meddflng and what didn't? A t that moment, Lucy came into the kitchen. Tom Reasoner ducked the bottle behind him, but it was too late. "Oh, no, you don't!" She came across the new LusterGlo floor and took it away from him. "You heard what the Ambassador said. No smoking or drinking while Mr. Rejilla's here. Aprinkians don't like it." "Well, for cripe's sake!" pro"How do you know?" said tested Tom. "He isn't going to Lucy. She put the rum bottle get down on his hands and knees back on the shelf above the and smell poor old Rex's breath. Freezador. "Maybe Mr. Rejilla And it's not going to ruin my has a very acute sense of smelt Foreign Office career if he does." Besides, it won't hurt that boozehound to lay off for one night in over six years." She poured out the rum and milk and refilled Reis pan with plain milk, setting it down on the fioCr before him. That boozehound -- he was an enormous Great Dane -- sniffed at it, whined and looked up at her mournfully. "No!" said Lucy. "No, Rex. Not tonight. Drink your nice milk." R ex moaned softly and despairingly under his breath and lay down with his paws covering his eyes. "There!" said Tom. "See what you've done? Now he thinks we're mad at him. He's always had his nightcap, Lucy -- ever since he was a puppy." "Well, he can just do without it this once. I'm not going to have the representative of the most intelligent alien race we've biunped into yet going home and telling the other Oprinkians how immoral we are. Besides, it's time Rex learned that life isn't all rum and milk. Ordinary dogs don't get grog rations." "But he isn't any ordinary dog, honey. Remember who his father was. Rex Regis took Hollywood by storm. A genius among dogs, they called him. He could do everything but talk -- " "What can Rex do?" "Well, the point is -- " "I said," repeated Lucy, "what can Rex do? FU tell you what Rex can do -- our Rex -- this hoochgrown lump off the old block. Nothing! That's what our Rex can do." "Owooo," said Rex mournfully to the fioor between his paws. "No, you don't!" snapped Lucy at the huge canine. "You aren't going to get anywhere trying to play on my sympathies this time. And you, Tom Reasoner!" she continued, rounding on her husband, who took a step backward and almost tripped over the collapsed Rex. "Here we are chosen -- chosen over everybody else in the Foreign Office -- to give the Oprinkian Representative a real glimpse of human home life, and after I've spent two days trying to get the house just perfect, what do you do? You try to botch it all up before he even arrives." I "And you'd better get your jacket on, because Mr. Re j ilia's coming in on the midnight copter and we're late leaving for the commimity port now. This is a great start!" She went out Tom paused long enough to give Rex a consoling pat between the dejectedly drooping ears. "Sorry, old son," he said softly. "C'est la guerre." He hurried out Charge d'affaires to the visiting Oprinkian Representative, and a hard-faced man named White, from the Internal Security Branch, were waiting at the copter port to give Tom and Lucy last-minute instructions. "All right now," said Daneraux. He was a small man who had a habit of going up on his toes when he got excited. He was very much up on his toes now. "Now listen, both of you. You'll be completely covered at all times -- " "Right," said White. "Right And what we want is that you two just act normal. Just normal, you understand?" "Sure," Tom replied. "Remember, Rejilla's the representative of a greater race than any we've encountered to date. They may have all sorts of abilities. We absolutely can't afford to take a definite line with them until we find out just what tlieir potentialities are." "Right," said WJiite. "Right. We have a feeling, now -- in fact, it's practically a certainty -- " "Check," said White. " -- that they're as much in the dark about us as we are about them. That's why Rejilla's asked for this chance to spend twentyfour hours with a typical human couple in a typical human household. Theoretically, it's just academic interest Actually, he probably wants as much data as he can get. Now you remember the taboos?" "No smoking while he's visiting," said Tom. "No drinking. No fresh plants in the house. He's not to be disturbed once he's shut himself in our spare bedroom, imtil he comes out again. Keep the dog out of his room -- " Tom sighed. "We should have sent Rex away for the weekend. It'd be easier." "No, no!" cried Daneraux. "That's one reason you were picked. Because of the dog. The Oprinkians don't have pets. He specifically asked for a family that had a pet. He wants you to act with perfect normalcy." "Perfect," said White. "All we ask is that you spend an ordinary twenty-four hours -- only just remember that the Oprinkians outnumber us and that -- this is restricted information now: they seem to be somewhat more advanced than we are technically -- and furthermore -- " The announcer's voice broke out overhead from the metallic throat of the loudspeaker. "Pease clear the stae. Please clear the stage. Eastbound copter landing now. Eastbound copter now descending for a landing." "How come they didn't send him out in a private ship?" Tom just had time to ask as they all moved off to the stage entrance. "He didn't want to," replied Daneraux. "He wanted to ride out to your commimity here just like any ordinary citizen. Ha! Every seat on the copter except his is taken by Security agents." T hey brought up short against the chest-high wire fence that enclosed the stage. A gate had swung open and a flood of passengers from the copter were streaming out Rather curiously, in their exact midst, emerged the tall, thin, black, furry-looking form of the Oprinkian alien. He was swept forward like a chip in the midst of a mass of river foam and deposited before the four of them. "Ah, Daneraux," he said. "It is very good of you to meet me." He had a slight lisping accent Aside from this, he spoke English very well. "Mr. Rejilla!" exclaimed Daneraux exuberantly. "How nice to see you again! This yoimg couple are your host and hostess for the next twenty-four hours." He stood aside and Tom and Lucy got their first good look at the alien. He was tall'-in the neighborhood of six feet five -- but very thin, almost emaciated. Tom guessed him at less than a hundred and thifty poimds. He wore no real clothii in the human sense, only an odd arrangement of leather-looking straps and bands that covered him in what appeared to be an arbitrary rather than a practical fashion. Evidently his curly black body fur, or hair, gave him some protection from changing temperatures, since the late April night was in the low fifties and die chilly air seemed to leave him unaffected. "May I present," Daneraux was saying, "Tom and Lucy Reasoner. Tom is an Ambassador's Staff member, here in Washington. One of our crew. Lucy was on our clerical staff before she married Tom." "Hay-lo," said Rejilla. "To you both, haylo. Do we shake right hands now?" They shook right hands. Rejilla's furry grip was fragile but firm. "I am so most indubitably honored to be a guest within your walls," commented Rejilla. "The weather, it is fine?" "Very fine," Daneraux agreed. "Good. Though perhaps it will rain. That would be good for the crops. Shall we go?" "Rt this way," said White. The Securi man led them out and to the Reasoners' car. White slid behind the wheel in the front seat, Daneraux behind him. Rejilla insisted on sitting between Tom and Lucy in the back. "I understand, be said to Lucy, as the car pulled away from the parking area, diat you have two lovely grandparents. TVell --  fumbled Lucy. "As a matter of fact, I have three still living. "Three! cried Mr. Rejilla joyfully. "How wonderful! I dote m # rself on grandparents very much. I write them poems. Yes. He turned to Tom. "And you, sir?' "Uh -- one grandfather, said Tom, "only. 'The ways of Providence are mysterious, replied Mr. Rejilla, putting a comforting hand on Tom's knee. "tJh -- thanks." "How black the night," said Mr. Rejilla, gazing out the window of the speeding car. "We're almost there," White said. had dropped them off back at the house, Mr. Rejilla insisted on retiring to his room immediately, which gave Tom and Lucy a chance to escape to theirs. "My!" gasped Lucy, when the bedroom door was safely closed upon them. "He isn't an # rthing like I imagined." She set about getting ready for bed. "I expected someone who would be more -- " "More what?" asked Tom, hailing up his jacket "Oh, I don't know. More positive. More dangerous, sort of." "You can't tell dangerousness from outside appearances." "Well, you know what I mean." "An alien culture must present some dangerous points, just as it must present some advantageous and congenial ones -- " He continued explaining the subject as he undressed. "How well you explain it!" said Lucy, in admiration, as they climbed into bed. "Part of the briefing they gave us in the Foreign Office training school," said Tom. "Oh!" He climbed out of bed again and went over to the closet "What is it?" asked Lucy, sitting up in bed. She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror and adjusted one of the shoulder straps of her nightgown. It was a new nightgown. "Sealed orders, I guess," said Tom, rummaging in an inside pocket of his dress jacket "Daneraux slipped it to me as we were getting out of the car." He produced an envelope and brought it back into bed with him He ripped it open and unfolded a single sheet of paper. " 'Information received by special courier on same copter as Rejilla," he read. " 'Advices from Oprinkia Major Three indicate Re j ilia actively engaged in studying homo sapiens for weak points which may be exploited in interracial diplomatic held. Be on lookout for any tmusual activities on part of Rejilla and offer no information that you believe might be harmful in Oprinkian hands" Tom sat for a moment, staring at the letter. "WeH," he said, "there's a nice general warning." "We'll just have to do the best we can," said Lucy. "Keep our eyes open and our mouths shut" "Whaf weak points? That's the problem." "We'll just have to be careful, Tom." "Easier said than done." "Well, anyway," answered Lucy, "there's nothing you can do about it tonight Put that letter away in the nightstand drawer. Here. Now that's that for tonight. Sufficient unto the day are the cares thereof. What do you think of my new nightgown?" huh?" said Tom, wak" ing up. Sunlight was filtering through the closed slats of the Venetian blinds. "Whazist?" . "Tom! Wake up!" whispered Lucy urgently, shaking him. "Whazamatter?" "It's Rex. Rex!" she cried, clutching his arm. "It's what Rex? Rex what?" demanded Tom crossly. "Rex?" The Great Dane was standing by the side of the bed with his tongue hanging out in a friendly manner. The bedroom door was ajar. The doors in this new house of theirs, unfortunately, had a push button type of latch and one of the few things Rex had learned was to push the button on the doorknob with his nose until the door opened. Tom had cited it to Lucy as an instance that Rex had, after all, inherited his great father's brain. Lucy had remained unconvinced. "I love you," said an unmistakably masculine voice. Tom blinked and struggled up into a sitting position. He glanced around the room. He peered under the bed. "Huh?" he said. "I love you. Get up," said the voice. "Lucy!" croaked Tom. "Who is it? Where is he?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you!" said Lucy frantically. "It's him -- Rex. It's Rex!" "I love you. Play ball? Fun? Go walk." "Rex!" Tom stared at the dog. "Lucy! He's -- I mean he isn't, is he?" With a sudden explosion of energy, Tom jumped out of bed, lunged across the room, closed and locked the door. Turning about with his back against its panels, he regarded the canine interlocutor before him. 'How can he talk?" he said diickly. "With his mouth? Say something, Rex." "Play ball? Nice Tom." "See -- " yammered Tom. "His mouth doesn't move -- " "Nice Lucy. I love you, Lucy." "I don't care what you say!" snapped Lucy. "That's Rex and he's talking." "Nice Lucy and Tom. I'm hungry." The two humans stared at each other. "I'm nice, too," said Rex. "Well, there you are," Tom said insanely. "I always said he had his father's brain -- and Rex Regis could do ever#rthing but talk. Rex just decided to learn to talk. That's all." "Don't be funny!" said Lucy sharply. "Who's being funny? You hear him, too, don't you?" "Of course I hear him. But he can't talk. That's impossible." "How can it be impossible when he's doing it?" "I don't care. How can he talk with his mouth? You said that yourself." "Well, he is. Rex, say something again." EX was nosing after what might be a flea or just a stray itch. "Rex!" Tom ordered in a sharp, no-nonsense voice. "I'm Rex! I'm Rex! I'm here, too!" said Rex, looking up cheerfully. "See me? Play ball? Nice Tom. I love Lucy, too." "Wait a minute!" Tom snapped his fingers. "I've got it!" "Got what?" asked Lucy. "Ball?" asked Rex. "Ouch! Got flea? Flea! There flea. Take that! Bite, bite, bite, bite! Crunched flea." e really ought to get some more of that flea powder and dust him good," said Lucy thoughtfully. "I could nm down to the drugstore after breakfast -- " "Will you listen?" Tom demanded. "Listen, Lucy!" "Another flea?" queried Rex, checking a hind leg. "Where flea?" "Lucy, it's telepathy." "Telepathy?" "That's right. Look, his mouth doesn't move. And he speaks English, doesn't he? All right, he couldn't just do that overnight. But if he was just thinking these things he says -- and our own minds were putting them automatically into words -- " "Oh, Tom! That's just downright silly!" "Why?" "Well, it just is," said Lucy. "How could he go telepathic all of a sudden?" You think I don't have the answer to that, too?" "You do?" "I certainly do. Remember how smart his father was? Well, Rex is even smarter." "But-" "Let me finish. The point is we never realized how much smarter he is because Rex here was drunk all the time." "Drunk!" "I don't mean staggering drunk," said Tom excitedly. "I just mean he had his rum and milk every night and probably the alcohol was just enough to inhibit his telepathic powers. You made him lay off last night -- and this morning, here he is, beaming thought waves at us." "Pet me," said Rex, nuzzling up against Tom's knee. "Down, Rex! Not now!" Tom said, pushing him away.  Rex hung his head and burst into heart-breaking sobs. "Tom! How could you?" cried Lucy. "He was just trying to attract your attention." She was out of bed in a flash and threw her arms around the dog's neck. "Poor Rex! There, there, that's all right. Tom didn't mean it. No, he didn't." "Love Tom. Love Lucy," gulped Rex. "Good Rex?" He looked up hopefully and flicked out a long wet tongue, which Lucy dodged. "y, what a cry-baby!" said Tom. "I certainly never suspected -- " "Well, he's just a dog!" said Lucy indignantly. "Good Rex. Good boy. That's better now. You're too hard on him, Tom." yelped Tom in outrage. "Me? How about you -- like last night when you wouldn't give him his drink? Just because you can hear him now -- " "Well, I had to." Lucy straightened up and sat back on the edge of the bed. "Tom, whafre we going to do with him?" "That's the thing," said Tom, lowering his voice. "Rex here is probably the most valuable piece of property on Earth at this moment, from every standpoint, including the military. And you realize who we've got under the same roof at this same moment?" "Who... oh! gasped Lucy. "Mr. Rejilla." "Right!" said Tom grimly. "Well, we've got to get Rex out of here. Right away!" "And tip Rejilla off that there's something special about him?" "Oh!" said Lucy. There was a moment's taut shuddering silence. "What'll we do?" "Let me think." Tom walked across the room to the dressing table, turned and walked back again. "Look," he said. "You go out and try to keep Rejilla occupied. We'll shut Rex up in here. I'll try to get in touch with Daneraux." "Are you going to phone him?" "No, no," said Tom. "Too much of a chance. Who knows what Rejilla might be able to do with an ordinary telephone? Maybe he carries a little portable wiretap or something. I'll run out and phone from the drugstore." "Go walk?" asked Rex. "Sorry," said Tom, dressing hurriedly. "Later -- if we're lucky," he added nervously. The drugstore was empty, as it should have been at a little before nine o'clock in the morning. Daneraux's office informed Tom that Daneraux had not yet come int "Hell!" said Tom. He went back home. the living room. Mr. Rejilla was seated opposite her in the big armchair, playing a flute. "Good morning," said the Oprinkian as Tom came in, and lowered his instrument "Take a condolence, please." "Uh -- I beg your pardon?" asked Tom, dropping down on the living room sofa. Lucy hastily handed him a full cup of coffee. "I was just telling Mr. Rejilla how sick Rex is," she said, with a meaningful glance. "How you had to go for the veterinarian. Did you get him?" "He wasn't in his office yet Owr said Tom. He breathed violently through his open mouth. "Well, you might have known it was hot," said Lucy. "You find yourself internally dismayed by hot liquids?" inquired Mr. Rejilla. He produced what looked like a small slate and a crayon from under one of the straps of his harness. "May I make a note?" "Oh -- sure," said Tom. "I am endeavoring to understand humanity as a means to establishing the bonds between," explained Mr. Rejilla. "That is my twenty-four-hour mission here. Do you like music?" "Well, yes," Tom said warily. "I will play you a small composition," said Mr. Rejilla. He did so. The tune that came out sounded like anything but a tune. "Does it provoke you?" he inquired politely. "It's very original," volunteered Lucy. "Indeed. Eighty per cent original," said Mr. Rejilla proudly. "It is a theme uon one of your human melodies." "Oh?" questioned Tom, searching his memory for a single similarity. "A Chinese melody, I am so told," said Mr. Rejilla, driving his point home. "Have some coffee," offered Tom. "What would you like to do today, Mr. Rejilla?" "I would like to peep," said Rejilla. "Peep?" "In on your lives. How fascinating, the living process, don't you agree? You are embound with so many things that on Oprinkia are unthought of. This pet of yours, now in malady. Has he existed for a number of years?" "Five," said Tom. "No, dear -- six," corrected Lucy. "Don't you remember -- " "Five," repeated Tom firmly. "Has he offspring?" Mr. Rejilla wanted to know. npOM sipped cautiously at his coffee, which was starting to get down to a tolerable temperature finally. "Not only that, but his offspring has offspring." "A grandfather!" breathed Mr. Rejilla. "Well, yes." "How noble!" said Mr. Rejilla enthusiastically. "I will make a special effort to remember him in my thoughts. Now I must not detain you both. There will be housing affairs to demand your attention, no doubt. I would wish that you concern yourselves as customarily. Pay no attention to me. I shall merely peep." He stopped and looked at them expectantly. "Well -- " said Tom. "Uh -- maybe I better -- uh -- mow the lawn. Don't you have to bake a cake or something, Lucy?" "A cake?" asked Lucy, staring. "A cake." "Oh, a cake! Why, of course! Why don't you two just putter around? I'll get my cake started -- and when I get a chance, I'll try and give the veterinarian another ring." "Superb!" said Mr. Rejilla. "So this is how the human day inaugurates. I am complete attention." The meeting broke up. Tom went out and fired up the power mower. Mr. Rejilla accompanied him. Lucy went off to the kitchen and hunted around for a cookbook. An hour and a half later, as Tom was pruning some rose bushes and Mr. Rejilla was watching, she appeared, crossing the lawn in the direction of the next-door neighbor's and returning a few minutes later with a cup of flour. "I'm going to try again!" she called gaily, waving to them, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Tom talked Mr. Rejilla into trying his hand with the pruning shears and hurried off to the kitchen himself. Lucy was standing before a cluttered kitchen table with flour up to her elbows and even a dab of it on her nose. "Tom, this is absolutely fascinating!" she bubbled as Tom came in. "Whoever thought it would be so much fun to cook! Phooey on that old roboserver. I can do better any day." "What are you doing?" asked Tom distractedly. "Well, the first two went wrong, somehow," said Lucy. "But Fll get it this time. Honey, will you run down to the market and get me some vegetable coloring for the icing? Pink." "And how about Mr. Rejilla?" "Oh, he can come watch me cook. Please, Tom." "I'll do that," said Tom between his teeth. "I'll do just that. And maybe, while I'm at it, I can manage to make another call to the veterinarian." "The vet -- whatever for -- oi.'" said Lucy. "Oh, dear, I forgot. But then you can do it, as you say. Pink coloring." "Pink coloring!" barked Tom, and slammed out of the house. when he finally got the Foreign Office man on a private phone down at the supermarket. "Listen -- " He outlined the situation. "Now, Tom," said Daneraux soothingly. "I tell you, it's the truth! Come out here and see for yourself, if you don't believe me." "Security said to keep hands off so Rejilla wouldn't know they were keeping the situation covered. I can pass the word on to them, if it'll make you feel better." "Pass, nothing! Lucs up to her ears in baking a cake, which nobody in their right mind's tried for fifty years, Rejilla's taking notes, and Rex is locked in the bedroom, ready to blab his head off. I tell you, we've got to get that dog away where he's safe. Do you know what it'd mean to have even a do that could telepath? Rex ought to be covered with Security men ten feet deep. He shouldn't be able to breathe without a man on each side of him. Now you listen to me -- " "All right, all right," said Daneraux. "I'll be right out I think you're suffering from hallucinations, but just on the wild chance there's some truth to this -- wait where you are. I'll be right over and pick you up. We'll go back to your house together, and if you're right, we'll figure some way of slipping Rex out so Rejilla won't suspect." "Well, hurry!" "Keep your shirt on," said Daneraux, and hung up. Tom paced back and forth sweatily for an inconsolably long fifteen minutes. At the end cd that time, Deverauz pulled up at the front entrance of the supermarket in an official nmabout "Hop in," he said. White, the Security man, rose up in the back seat like a business-suited demon from the nether regions. "Hop!" he said. "You again!" Tom said to White. "It's about time." He walked arotmd and got in the front seat. "Tell it again," ordered White. Daneraux pulled out into the street. By the time Tom had run through his story for a second time, they were back at the house. "It checks," said White. "Checks with what?" asked Daneraux. "Our suspicions of Rejilla," replied White, with gloomy satisfaction. 'Where is he?" "In the kitchen with Lucy -- I'll say you just happened to run into me at the market -- the#rre right in here -- " T hey went through the door. Lucy was still at her kitchen table, which was more cluttered than ever. Rejilla was conspicuously absent. "You got the pink coloring?" Lucy asked. "Oh, hello," she said to Daneraux and White. "Here," said Tom, hastily handing it over. "Whereas Rejilla?" "Oh, thanks!" sang Lucy. "Tom, I've really got it at last! A cake, baked all by myself -- just like Grandma used to tell me about I'll tell you what I did. I took a full cup of butter for shortening-" "Where's Rejilla?" "I don't know. Anyway, it's all done -- " "Where's Rex?" "Why, he's back in the bedroom, isn't he -- oh!" Lucy's hand flew up to cover her mouth. "What is it?" snapped White. "Mr. Rejilla said he was just going to look in on him -- " The three men made a dash for the bedroom in the forepart of the house: Tom leading, Daneraux right behind him and White bringing up the rear. Lucy followed. When they burst open the door to the bedroom, they discovered Rex lying on the floor and Mr. Rejilla tightening a leather strap around the dog's neck. "Stop!" yelled Tom, and made a dive for the Oprinkian, only to be brought up short by some complicated sort of wrestling hold which White had clamped onto him. Mr. Rejilla rose with a surprised expression. Rex got to his feet with the strap dangling and wagged his tail. He's the accredited Repre sentative of an Alien Power!" hissed White in Tom's ear, and let him go. "I beg your pardon?" Mr. Rejilla was saying. Am I in violation of some custom? Observing that this grandfather appeared to enjoy the wearing of collars, I was impelled to decorate him with another as a token of affection and get-well-quick." "Like furry man!" said Rex, happily and audibly, flicking a tongue in Mr. Rejilla's direction. "Play wrestle?" "All right!" cried Tom, before White could stop him. "Go ahead -- deny it now! You found out Rex could project his thoughts -- telepathy. So you came in here to shut him up permanently!" "Fight?" queried Rex doubtfully. "No, no. Shut up, Rex," said Tom. "Now -- " #"TE was interrupted by Daneraux tapping him on the arm. "Tom," said Daneraux. "Did I understand you to say that this dog of yours was telepathixing right now?" "Of course," said Tom. "Didn't you hear him? Now, Mr. Rejilla -- " "No," said Daneraux. "No?" demanded Tom, wheeling on the Foreign Office man. "No, I did not hear Rex say or broadcast anything," said Daner aux. "Rex? I'm Rex," announced that individual. "Well, there you did," said Tom. 'What're you talking about, Dan? You heard him that time all right and -- you didn't?" "No," said Daneraux. "No," said White. "But -- but -- " sputtered Tom. "Pardon me," interrupted Mr. Rejilla, "but do I understand your implication, Tom, to the effect that this grandfather is broadcasting his intentional statements by non-auditory way?" "Of course he is!" "And you, too, are receiving the grandfather clear and strong?" Rejilla asked Lucy. "Why, yes -- " said Lucy. "Don't you?" "Woe," said Mr. Rejilla. He turned about and walked into the living room, where he collapsed on a couch and fanned himself with a magazine from the coffee table alongside. The humans followed him in bewilderedly. "I don't understand," said Daneraux. "It is over," said Mr. Rejilla. "I resign myself. I am surrendered. I admit all, while requesting an asylum from politics to remain on this world. How mysterious the ways of grandfathers! Ah, well. I am not unhappy at this termination, being by nature dutifully non-combative." "Sir," said Daneraux, "could you perhaps explain it all a little more clearly?" "Indubitably," Rejilla said. "I shall confess. What is of all universal relationships most important? Responsibility of teacher to teach, pupil to learn. Consequently grandfathers, percolating wisdom down to younger generations, are venerated. Oprinkian nature and sociological development cast us in roles of teacher. But what if pupil prove refractory? By stern duty, I compelled myself to investigative procedure. Spy. You understand." "I'm afraid not yet," said Daneraux. "During unconsciousing hours of nighttime for fine young couple here, I investigated exploratoratively. This is result." "Tom!" gasped Lucy. "He means he read our minds last night while we were asleep!" "You Oprinkians have that ability?" snapped White. ITR. Rejilla nodded. "Matter of training only. Astonishing as results were, yet I defer action until, first, amazing chemical investigation of Lucy leading to discovery of almost extinct art of cake-baking and now this. Now this. Overwhelming average citizens in pupilability." "Well -- " began Daneraux. Mr. Rejilla held up his hand and continued. "Affection basis for instruction. Consequently, I am informing Oprinkia no need to fear humans unteachable and set in motion defensive-offensive mechanisms of science to determine survival of Oprinkia over Earth. Myself, I intend to follow duty here with continuing instruction chosen pupils Tom and Lucy Reasoner." "But what's all this got to do with Rex broadcasting his thoughts?" exploded Tom. "He's the important one around here." "No," said Mr. Rejilla. "No?" demanded Tom. "No," stated Mr. Rejilla. "This grandfather, though venerable and praiseworthy, has discovered no unknown talent. His simple emanations always in existence. Only now, new sensitivity triggered by my mental investigations of your and Lucy's minds last night render you capable of reception and interpretation of simple animal thoughts." Everybody stared. There was a moment of peculiar silence. "You mean -- " croaked Tom finally -- "it's us." "Yous. You. Yourself and Lucy." "But -- " "With training I shall supply you with ability to eventually receivi-transalatable more complex intelligent human and Oprinkian thoughts." "Wait a minute!" commanded White suddenly. "Do I understand you to say that these two people here are now telepathic?" "You understand" said Mr. Rejilla courteously. "Don't move," White said. "Not any of you. Not even the dog." He went out the front door. "What's got into him?" Tom blurted, staring after the Security agent. "I think," said Daneraux nastily, "he's gone out to get some more people from Security. I think we're going to be covered with agents ten feet deep. I don't expect we'll be able to breathe without a man on each side of us. Just like you said for Rexonly it'll be you now." "Rex? I'm Rex," telepathed the Great Dane, wandering into the living room with tail awag. "Love everybody. Pat me." "A most magnificent grandfather," said Mr. Rejilla admiringly. Tom and Lucy stared at each other. They looked at Mr. Rejilla, at Rex, at Daneraux. Lucy essayed a tremulous smile. "Would -- would anybody care for a slice of cake?" she inquired with a fine, false brightness. A novel about an amazing scientific invention with a fatal flaw # of ell beekler Simon and Sthvilor, Publiihori It was my fault? I'm not the first one to louse up Utopia by attempting to improve iti blurred night before and padded around in my bare feet. Even the bathroom had inchthick carpet. I showered and brushed my teeth, but put off shaving. Back in bed -- it was eight feet long, six wide and had a contraption that kept the weight of the blanket off my toes -- I ordered breakfast. Eggs McCutchen, cafe au lait, pumpernickel bread with Wisconsin butter and -- oh, orange juice," I said. "Fresh orange juice." "Yes, sir," said a voice. Simple fare was what I needed. I'd had flaming bananas the previous day, but that's too rich for breakfast. And canned orange juice is always terrible, even here in Paradise. I hummed a bit of The Prisoner's Song, but forgot just how it went. "Play Bunny Berigan doing that number, will you?" I asked. Dtiring the second chorus, my tray came out of the headboard. I'd have preferred eating at the table, but for a while I was making myself enjoy some of my enforced luxuries. Breakfast in bed was one of them. "Tray away," I said when I'd finished. The day before, I'd said, "Fast broken." They always understood my meaning (I'd been experimenting with that) and the tray vanished into the headboard. Another day was off and running, however slowly. "Play Nothin' to Do and All Day to Do It In' I said. That should have been a stumper. Years ago, I'd remembered the tune and tried half a dozen record specialists, but none had it. It was a cut-out, long gone from the catalogs. But they had it. Erskine Butterfield sang and his piano tinkled and it was like old times, only I wasn't as poor. Now I had everything I wanted, sort of. I roused myself and went in to shave. "What'll it be today?" I asked the Ear. "Dry, safety, straight or depil?" "You haven't tried electrolysis, sir," the pleasant neuter voice said. "That would eliminate the daily chore." "No, no," I sang, "you can't take that away from me." "Shall I play that?" "No, no," I said, not singing. "Let me try the electric shaver with the Rotary Action." It popped out of the chute imder the mirror. I dabbed on green pre-shave gunk and went to work. "No Razor Pull," I said. "But slow. And it doesn't get the Hidden Hair." No comment from the Ear. I wasn't always favored with a reply to my witticisms. the chute, I mulled the uniform of the day. Yesterday I'd worn a Tarzan-style leopardskin with a special pouch for cigarettes. The day before, it had been a midnight-blue dinner jacket (shawl lapels) and scarlet cummerbund. What the hell. "Attention to costume," I said. "Today the well-dressed guinea pig will wear, from the feet up, in order: desert boots, soft wool knee socks, khaki shorts, shortsleeve khaki shirt two pockets, please) and sun helmet." "Yes, sir." The clothing came out of a wall chute. The sun helmet reminded me of Frederic March in Trade Winds (Joan Bennett), and that reminded me of March and Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred. "This morning I will see some movie excerpts," I told the Ear. "I will see the scene in Nothing Sacred where Fred clips Carole on the jaw. Then I will see the bit in City Lights where Chaplin swallows the whistle, and the business in that Marx Brothers picture where a hundred people crowd into the stateroom. I forget the name of it." "At once, Mr. Bland," the voice said. I went down the hall to the projection room. My unseen friend could have hoked it up by saying "Immediate seating on all floors" or "Smoking in the balcony only," but their sense of humor isn't broad. This is probably just as well for me, their subject. They take pretty good care of me, everything considered. On my way down the hall, I remembered another bit. "I also want to see Groucho do Hurray for Captain Spaulding" -- the sun helmet again -- "and the one where he's on the couch with Thelma Todd and Chico keeps coming through the window with the ice." "Yes, sir." It was better than the film library at the Museum of Modem Art. I kept remembering other classic bits and asking for them and then it was lunch time. But what I really wanted to see was a new movie -- to go to it with my own critical faculties all sharpened up after reading Zinsser's caustic comments in the Herald Tribune and Zvmser's kinder ones in Cue. (But nuts to those wise guys in Time and The New Yorker.") I knew, though, that the Ear and his buddies would never allow that. They never let me see anything current. Maybe it was impossible for them to get it, or maybe it was part of their experiment to keep me ignorant of ever # d:hing that had happened since the day of my capture. Whatever the reason, the result was the same. I'd never see a new Hitchcock movie, or read a new novel by Marquand, or find out if the Democrats got the White House back in #.  thought, tasting the syllables. Many of the things I liked to read or, look at, came in pairs. Crane and Cain were in my library. Hoppers and Groppers were on my walls. But nothing new. I sighed and got up, the pleasure I'd had from Groucho and Chico and Thelma almost forgotten. "I'll have lunch at the swimming pool," I said. (I had nearly everything.) "Certainly, sir." "Stuffed celery (cottage cheese, I think) with a sprinkling of paprika. Carrot strips, chilled. Half an avocado. Ry-krisp; no butter. A bottle of Tuborg beer and a packet of Senior Service." I try to keep it lt at lunch, espe dally after a late breakfast It's my own fault but I don't get much exercise. "Yes, sir." swim in waltz-time as I lunch." The voice became reproving, though polite. "We must reiterate with regret sir, that requests concerning live human beings cannot be granted. However, if you desire it, a film excerpt of an Esther able." 'ever mind," I said. "Just needling you." I like to remind them every once in a while that I know their limitations. The trouble, though, was that it also reminded me of my isolation. After lunch, I wandered into the gimroom and whanged away at tin cans with a #-gauge shotgun. The slam against my shoulder was satisfying and the ruination of an off-target wall still more so. But I knew it would be refinished the next time I went in -- even if it were only five minutes later. They have almost infinite resources. Still feeling combative, I went the balls around. This reminded me that my next movie session would have to include W. C. Fields' business with the bent cue and, by association, his segment Skipworth and their junk-car vengeance on reckless drivers. But not today. The trick was not to overindulge or I'd aiwa # rs be in the movies, or drinking before lunch, or lying in bed all day. "Ha, ha!" I said. "Sir?" "Nothing. Point for my side, that's all. You wouldn't understand." "We endeavor to. Will you explain?" "No." "As you wish." The voice sotmded disappointed, as if it had missed a trick. tity of my captors. I use the plural because it obviously takes more than one to operate this elaborate super-cage I'm forced to call home. There would have to be a whole flock of them to supply my peculiar demands, and a gaggle of others to study me at all hours and keep tabs on my reactions. Gaggle and flock weren't the words, I thought. Gaggle is for geese and flock is for sheep. I amused m # rself for a while by adapting words to groups of captors, species unknown. Were they from Saturn? "A dour of Satumians," I said aloud to the ever-listening Ear. "I beg your pardon?" "I'm classifying yoa If you're from Saturn, I dub a group of you dour. Are you from Saturn?" "No comment, Mr. Bland. I hadn't expected any. "A dour of Satumians," I said, enjoying the sound of it, "would be comparable, philologically speaking, to a pride of lions or a crash of rhinoceros." "I follow you," the Ear said. "Or a murmuring of starlings. There is poetry in your language, Mr. Bland." "Thank you," I said. "Jupiter?" "No comment. But Fm listening." "Aren't you always? Jupiter. Let's see. That would make you Jovians. How about a jubilation of Jovians?" "Not bad." He was beginning to unbend. I almost liked him for it "I didn't think so, either. Pluto, maybe? How about a splash of Plutonians? That's a bit obscure, I admit -- Pluto water -- whiskey and splash?" "I liked your first better." "So did I, frankly. But you're only as good as your last one, as they say in Filmland. Let's press on. Venus? A miasma of Venerians?" "No conunent' said the Ear. "You're hard to please." "I've got one for you." "For me?" I was surprised. The Ear almost never volunteered anything. "For your people. A tintinnabulation of Terrans." "Bravo!" I said, really admiring it. "We can be a noisy bunch -- with bells on. I suppose I do give you a lot of trouble, Jeeves, old man -- always ringing for some crazy thing." "Not at all, sir. Merely playing your game." "You've inspired me. Fve got one for Mercury. An instability of Mercurians. How's that?" "Rather good. How about Mars -- to complete the inner planets?" But nothing occurred to me except a phalanx of Martians, which was hardly worth uttering. "I'm getting bored with the game." "As you like." hour with Mark Twain and E. B. White and Richard Bissell, then, my eyes tiring, demanded talking books. I listened to some Dylan Thomas, and Charles Laughton reading the Bible, and Laurence and Edith Sitwell and a bit of AI Smith, and fell asleep during some dedication speech. "Cocktail time," I said, waking up thirsty. "Attention to orders." "Yes, sir." The voice was attentive, as always. "No Martini today. No Gibson. Nor Screwdriver nor Bronx. A Paratroop Plunge." "A Paratroop Plunge?" This was beyond their ken, as I had hoped. They couldn't know everything. The fact that they couldn't read my mind helied considerably in enduring my prisonership. "Brandy, Cointreau, champagne and club soda are the ingredients," I said. "Yes, sir," the voice acknowledged, back on familiar ground. "Ingredients noted." I gave the proportions and the tall, potent drink appeared at my elbow. It was really an elongated Sidecar, but it was as heady as a drop from # feet. I had another and thought about dinner. I remembered Bemelmans and considered an elephant cutlet, but I was afraid that, unlike Bemelmans' chef, they would cut up an elephant for only one customer. So I ordered a simple steak, a baked potato, mixed greens, bread sticks and a decent red wine. The trick now was to occupy myself till bedtime. The nights were the worst. Last night I'd overdone it, drinking Chivas Regal straight, out of a brandy snifter, and had got to bed rather non compos. That had been a point for their side. "This is do-it-yourself night," I decided. "Bring me the makings of a crystal set." They had it all set up for me when I got to the hobby room -- and they'd goofed. They didn't often make mistakes, but this one was a pip. Instead of the components of a primitive radio receiver, they'd provided a glass-blowing outfit, complete with furnace, that would have passed muster at Steuben. I laughed, a little more contemptuously than was warranted, and loftily explained their mistake. I could tell they didn't like my rubbing their noses in it (if they have noses), but there wasn't much they could do about it. The section of the floor where they'd set up the miniature glass works dropped and I had a glimpse of violet mist down below before the floor came up again, this time with a work bench and the makings of a crystal set on it It was the first time I'd seen how they materialized things, except for my sliding panel meals, and I was disappointed in them. Trapdoors. It reminded me of the time I was one of the kids who rushed to the stage when Blackstone the Magician asked for volunteers. Blackstone was getting old then and maybe he was careless, but I had a revealing glimpse of a piece of his sleight-of-hand that took all the magic out of it. But there was still a difference. I had known Blackstone was human and merely a skilled illusionist. I didn't know what these people were. I didn't even know if they were people. ing at them: "Who are you? What are you doing to me?" But that would have given them too much satisfaction. I knew in essence who they were and what I was to them, and my self-imposed duty on behalf of humanity was to maintain my composure, refuse to be goaded into excesses. It was obvious that they were looking for my weaknesses and I had to display as few as possible, however inviting it might seem at the moment to indulge myself in their virtually unlimited largesse. IVe never had a scientific mind. Fortunately the crystal set kit had detailed instructions and I was able to absorb myself in assembling it without frustration. I had some vague hope that when I got it working, I'd be able to hear a live, uncensored broadcast, but, of course, the # r'd foreseen that possibility. All I heard were harmless canned broadcasts. They'd taped these, eliminating newscasts and an # rthing else that might have given me a clue to what was happening in the real world. I might as well have saved myself the trouble and turned on the blond mahogany Magnavox in my bedroom or the limed oak Capehart in the living room. They did leave some timeless commercials; for authenticity's sake, I suppose. But I wonder whether it was entirely by accident that the one the prisoner in their Paradise heard through the earphones of the crystal set that night was about new, improved Joy. It was the same with the television set. Everything was kinescope. They allowed me no newspapers or magazines and the books in the library had all been published before my capture. I probably should put down a few facts for posterity. I don't know who will read them -- they promise they won't, as long as I live, and I halfway believe them. Now that I've written it down, I wonder how long I'll live. How long do you keep a guinea pig? As long as it's useful to you. If it dies, or if you drive it crazy, you dispose of it and get yourself another one. Guinea pigs have to be expendable or they aren't guinea pigs. But I mustn't be pessimistic, even here in the supposed secrecy of my journal. Let's get on to the facts for you people in posterity. Name: Oliver T. Bland -- known as Ollie to my erstwhile friends. (They always call me Mr. Bland or Sir.) Age: #. Occupation: guinea pig. All right, seriously: I used to be a copyreader on a big daily newspaper here in New York -- one of those unromantic people who sees to the grammar and spelling and guards against libel and constructs the headlines. in New York" is, of course, a phrase my respect for fact will not allow. I was captured in the city. That much I know. IVe since been transferred, transported -- what ever -- to this seeming mansion which could be anywhere. On Earth, suspended above it, on the Moon -- on Mars, for all I know. What I call my mansion -- thinking of a big dog I once kept in a long enclosure -- is Man-run #. Nobody starts counting with #, so there's another one, obviously, but they haven't told me yet who's in it. I'd like to think it's another Earthman -- misery loving company -- but this could be a sort of interplanetary zoo. But back to the known facts. Length of sentence: indefinite. I've been here months, I imagine. There are no calendars and I've been careless about this journal, not writing in it every day, as I should. I distrusted them at first (I still do, but not as much) and shied away from giving them anything they seemed to want. I've become more philosophical in recent weeks -- you might say more self indulgent -- though I think I'm honoring my pledge to resist them in anything that really matters. What else? Does it matter that I'm divorced? (I wonder if they think that's typical of our species.) She has custody of our son (Jason Robinson Bland) and has remarried. I thought of remarrying, too, but with alimony and support payments, it was sort of impossible -- except to a rich girl who wouldn't have to live on the remnants of my salary. Of course there was always Betty Forsythe -- an amiable, understanding homebody type, still living with her mother. Betty would have had me. She'd have scrimped along with me and loved it, poor kid. I wonder what my wife -- exwife -- thinks has become of me? Probably that I've chucked it and gone off to Tahiti or Alaska as I sometimes threatened. And Jace (Jason Robinson, aged three)? Does he still remember me? Or is he calling his stepfather Daddy now? No more tonight, journal mine. I'm depressed and I mustn't be, if I'm to keep up my morale and resist them. I'll order a nightcap and go to bed. What shall it be? Scotch is best, but I've drunk the best Scotch and I want a change... No, you devils, I won't indulge myself too far. I'll have a sensible glass of warm milk. Yes, damn you, milk. Then I'll sleep, and tomorrow will be another day. I brush my teeth religiously and avoid sweets, to prevent developing a cavity. But suppose I did get one? A painful one? Would they let me suffer and study my reactions (God forbid they should take a clinical interest in human pain) or would they fill the tooth? And to fill it, would someone come? Or could they do it all by remote control? They could put me to sleep and I'd never see the dentist. Anyhow, I brush my teeth religiously and I use dental floss. Jime # could be right because they captured me on February # and I think it's about four months. I picked it because June # is my birthday and I felt like a party. I ordered cafe au lait for breakfast, and a brioche. I don't have breakfast in bed any more. Too damn inconvenient. I ate on the terrace overlooking the photomural of the meadow. As I drank my second cup and smoked a Murad (desiring nonchalance), I told the Ear it was my birthday and I wanted a present suitable for a #-year-old boy. That give him to pause, as I hoped it would. I'm becoming an accomplished Ear-baiter. "A #-year-old is not a boy," he said finally. "This one is," I told him. "And this one wants a birthday present." "Certainly, sir. What would you like?" "I want a surprise, so the choice is up to you. You should know me well enough now to pick something appropriate." I guess he went away. At least he was silent for an hour while I got ready for my day. I soaked in the tub, shaved (safety razor, close), trimmed my fingernails, combed my hair (four months long) and dressed in a Scarlet Pimpernel outfit. It went with the hair. I ordered the costume complete with snuff box, whose dubious delights I postponed. I was in the library having elevenses (scones and butter, Ceylon tea with milk) when the Ear announced his presence. "Sir, we have decided on your birthday present." I put down my cup and said, "Yes?" "We have carefully considered and have come to the conclusion that the present which would give you the most pleasure would be to acquaint you with -- to employ your terminology -- the inhabitant of Man-run #." "Oh?" I said. I was doing my best to suppress my excitement. "And what manner of creature might that be?" "A person of your species," the Ear said, "but of tiie opposite sex." to that, but I do know I realized I had to get out of the ruffles and velvet. She couldn't see me that way, whoever she was. And I ordered my first haircut I was directed to the hobby room, where I found a barber chair set up. I sat down and scissors and comb came out of the back of the chair at the ends of metallic tentacles and went to work. (The same procedure, modified, would have filled a cavity, I realized.) As I was being barbered, I decided what to wear. White-onwhite shirt. Solid blue knitted tie. Light gray flannel slacks. Dark gray Harris Tweed jacket. Black Italianate shoes. Blue anklet socks. Pack of Tare#rtons in the jacket pocket for her. (I always considered Tare#rtons a woman's cigarette, no doubt because of their ads.) As I retied my tie, having got it uneven the first time, I asked the Ear; "How old is she?" "Twenty-three." "Fine! Is she pretty?" "By your standards, yes." "Good enough. Does she know it's my birthday?" "Yes." "Does she know which birthday?" "No." "No? Then do me a favor. When you materialize the cake, have thirty candles on it instead of thirty-five, will you?" "Certainly." There was a definite tinge of amusement in the voice. "No, make it twenty-nine. I don't look thirty-five, do I?" "My dear Mr. Bland, a man is as old as he feels.' If that was true, I wasn't very old. I felt like any kid who was going to have a birthday party given for him. She came in through a door in the living room which had always been locked before. I was standing nervously by the sideboard, on which cocktail things had been set up, fingering my tie and wondering what I was going to say. Dance music came softly from the Capehart She certainly was pretty. Blonde, just a bit imder average height, wearing a short dinner gown that accentuated her slim waist and showed her shapely legs. "Please come in," I said. "My name is Bland, Oliver Bland. Ollie to my friends." The door remained open behind her and I saw a section of what I supposed was her living room. It seemed identical with mine. "How do you do," she said. S HE walked toward me wly, looking around. "My name is Margaret Purvis -- Peggy for short." She held out her hand and I took it briefly. "Very glad to know you," I said, shaking a little, but managing to control my voice. Not only another human being after all those months, but a pretty girl! "Can I make you a drink? I have just about everything." "I know." She smiled. "Everything and nothing. I think I'll have a whiskey sour, if that's not too complicated." "Not at all." I made two of them. She raised her glass to me and said, "Happy birthday, Ollie. May your next one be happier." "Thank you. But this one is admirable, thanks to you." We finished our drinks and danced to the canned hi-fi and talked, trading backgrounds. Peggy had been captured one morning on her way to work in the insurance office where she'd been a secretary. She'd got into a bus which had drawn up to the curb as usual, and not until she'd sat down in the rear did she stop to think that the bus should have been crowded. By then, it was too late. The bus went into a tunnel (where no tunnel should have been) and in the darkness she went to sleep, or was put to sleep, with no recollection of how. She woke up in Man-run #. "What part of the city was it?" I asked. "The Near North Side," she said, and only then did I realize she wasn't from New York. "Chicago?" I said. "Yes. Isn't this Chicago?" I gathered that Peggy's impression was that our luxurious prison was some underground experimental laboratory in or near her former city. "Who do you think the Ear is?" I asked her. "The Ear? Oh, you must mean the one I call Uncle. Well, I don't really know. Some rich old kindly mad scientist, I guess." I made fresh drinks and told her about my capture. I'd been coming back from lunch and was alone in the elevator except for the operator. I'd said "Six" as usual, and when the car stopped, I automatically stepped out into the hall. Only it wasn't the sixth floor. The elevator door slid closed behind me and I blanked out as I was reaching for the button. I woke up in Man-run #. July #, # A.M. ting along famously, considering that she has a mind of her own and our courtship hasn't been exactly smooth. My long isolation evidently made me forget how irritating women can sometimes be. Whoever said men were the practical ones and women the romantics didn't know Peggy and me. I was the romantic. Here we were, my thoughts ran, to all intents and purposes the last man and the last woman. (Or the first?) Obviously the thing to do then, since escape was impossible, was to settle down and perpetuate the race. I didn't look at it quite so coldly, of course, but that's what it amoimted to. Peggy wouldn't admit there was no way out. And she made it clear that she'd have nothing to do with a man who did. All too often, when I'd arranged a romantic atmosphere with soft lights and music, she'd sit up straight with some practical thought, like breaking through the ceiling tp see what was up there. I'd explain that I'd tried all the possibilities long ago. But she had to see for herself. So I'd break through the ceiling again and show her the big impenetrable metallic dome above, which sealed in the manruns and the acre or so of recreation space beyond them. Then I'd break through a wall, exposing the wiring and plumbing and airconditioning pipes -- and the same metal barrier. And the Ear patiently cleaned up after me. Finally I proved to Peggy's satisfaction not only that there was no way out, but that, by looking the creature comforts of captivity. Now we could be married. I pictured a simple little ceremony, Peggy and I reading aloud the words of a civil wedding ceremony -- or a religious service, if she wanted one -- and exchanging rings and vows. "I want a church wedding," Peggy announced. "But, Peggy 'ith organ music and a choir. And a minister," she said. "It has to be legal." I groaned. "What you're saying, then, is that you won't marry me." "Ollie Bland, I said no such thing. But a wedding is what a girl dreams of and plans for years. It's no good being the best-dressed woman if there's nobody to look at me." "I'll look at yoti." "That's not enough, Ollie. I want to be shown off to others -- and I want to go places. Havana, New Orleans, Paris..." She went on like that for quite a while. Then the Ear spoke up. It was a relief to hear another voice. "I can arrange a church wedding," he said. The Er had a white satin wedding gown whisked out and laid at PeQs feet Hiat shut her up while he turned the hobby room into a chapel whose construction blended in exactly with a projection on the wall of a filmed marriage service, with organ, choir and all. The film clip was beautifully edited so Peggy and I could make the responses to the projected minister's questions. The Ear assured us it was a film of an actual wedding and that the minister was genuine, not a Holl # rwood actor. But as we were running throTigh the rehearsal, Peggy said: "Where's the marriage license: I'd like to see you fake that!' I blew up then and Peggy fled in tears to Man-run #. Later locked her door last night and I haven't seen her all morning. I was enjoying my solitary lunch -- a strictly non-feminine hero sandwich and a quart of beer -- when the Ear announced his presence. "I have a present for you, Mr. Bland." "I haven't recovered from the last one yet," I said, meaning Peggy. "The present is your freedom. Your term is up." It took a while to sink in. While it was sinking, the Ear explained tiiat bodi Peggy and I would be set down on Earth anywhere we chose, with a pleasant amount of money (genuine) to reimburse us for the loss of our time. I knocked on Peggy's door. She'd already heard the news. "Will you go to New York with me, Peggy?" I asked. She laughed. "I will not A girl doesn't want to marry the first man who asks her. I want to look around. I'm going back to Chicago." I must admit I wasn't too terribly cnished.    The Ear had me set down in my old office building late in the day. There were few people around, it being the Fourth of July -- Independence Day. I could imagine the Ear enjoying his pleasant little joke. I went through the file of back copies of the newspaper to see what had been happening in the world in the past several months. Same old thing -- alarms, excursions, crises and a few governments changing hands. I hadn't really missed anything in that department What I had missed was human companionship, female and of my own choice. This world, at least was full of girls. And my pockets were full of money. I went out on the town. Two weeks later, my pockets were considerably emptier and my hunger for female companionship considerably abated. I'd had a wow of a time -- one wow after another -- but now that my fling was over, I realized that this wasn't my idea of living. Maybe I was getting old, but what I really wanted was not women, but one woman with whom I could enjoy the pleasures of quiet domesticity. A complaisant oldfashioned girl whose chief interest was pleasing her husband. I thought of Betty Forsythe. I guess she'd always been in the back of my mind. I looked her up. "Betty," I said one evening as we sat on the couch at her place (a homebody, my Betty was, bless her), "would you go to the ends of the Earth with me?" "Even beyond, Oliver," said the complaisant Betty. This was the girl for me. "Do you hear that, Ear?" I asked. He'd told me he would be within earshot, so to speak, for a while. "I heard, Mr. Bland," his voice said. "I'll sign up for that second term now," I told him. "Excellent," the Ear said. "But I must remind you that the second term will be considerably longer. Unfortunately, I can't give you the reasons." "Say no more." I could imagine there might be a long spaceship journey, or an upcoming kink in conununications between our worlds. "Who could weary of Paradise?" Betty had said nothing, waiting patiently for me to explain when I saw fit. I'd never told her about the Ear, but she didn't require a long explanation. She had supreme faith in me. "Whatever you say, Oliver dear," Betty assured me, and the next day we went to City Hall and got the marriage license. January # old stand, journal mine. I've arranged with the Ear to enlarge Man-run # for me right to the edge of the dome. Now it includes a bit of synthetic insectless outdoors -- a stream gurgling through a grove of quite realistic trees and compliant fish that bite at anything. Indoors, I have an office to go to, # to #, five days a week (sometimes six or seven). I have a salary and I get raises periodically and once I went on strike for a pension plan. The Ear is a good boss. He praises me when Tve done a particularly fine piece of work (I'm cataloguing the characters in Dickens' novels). A mi likes to be told when he's doing a good job. Betty (I almost wrote "Peggy") and I have our separate bedrooms. It seems to be better that way. In fact, she has all of Manrun I to retire to when she sees fit. She often does. Here she comes now. Tve asked her not to interrupt me when I'm working. Listen to my automatic answers, dear posterity. They may come in handy. "Well, what is it now? "Oh, you're all dressed up and have no place to go? How originally you put it, darling. "And it's no good being the best-dressed woman if there's nobody to look at you? I look at you, don't I? "That's not enough, eh? You want to be shown off to others? Now where have I heard that before? "Oh, I'm hateful, am I? Go ahead and cry... Well, frankly, I wish you could go home to Mother, too." Me, I'm going fishing.      Hitherto a stranger hereabouts, H. Beam Piper touches down its title, is a vividly alive picture of an immensely distant planet with a cosmic headache... and one man with a headache bigger still. For Shakespeare was wrong; wealth and name are both dross compared with the theft of hope -- and Maxwell has to rob a whole world of it) tigerishly toying with an explosive possibility that has its fuse right in the here-and-now-present... a fuse that some go-getting genius could be lighting at this very minute. Nuclear weapons? Biologicol warfare? No, ifs something far more distressing. The Staff of Life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouts wings -- and mankind has to eat crow! In the third novelet of next month's issue, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., that bafflingly refuses to stay simple. If nobody up there likes the barbaric natives of this backward little planet... why can't Skarn come to prey and at least stay to scoff? Along with a handsome set of short stories and our regular unthinkable, even unguessable, only a hundred years ago. Nor is the safari over. There's a road map for future explorers who want their names to appear in print in #I # Star Shelf James BlisK Gnome Press, N. Y., # G nome has assembled several of Blish's pantropy yams imder one cover and, fortunately, without any attempt to imify them into novel form except as progressive sections of Man's program for seeding the Universe with his own kind. That requires clarification. Tan tropy" means changing everything, so that instead of undertaking the virtually impossible task of altering alien environments to meet mankind's rigid requirements, Man has undertaken the virtually impossible task of altering himself to fit the environments. It is a fascinating theme that has entranced others with its plot possibilities, but Blish's are easily the peers of any rival stories of this type. The first section concerns the efforts of the Port cops to regain custody and control of the first successful colony of Altered Men on Ganymede through the services of a manufactured Quisling, grown on the Moon for that sole purpose and incapable of normal human contact due to his alien metabolism. Blish, incidentally, gives out with a frightening and sobering side thought. The Port cops are an outgrowth of a present-day evil, the modem Port Authority, which has grown from its limited purpose of improving highway commimication by bridge and tunnel construction to its present dominant position of airport and terminal landlord. In Blish's story, it has taken over government as well. fight for survival of two separate colonies. Ill was seen in this magazine as "Surface Tension" and is a wonderful yam of microscopic men dwelling in a pond. Book IV is an object lesson in intolerance; the pftint has been reached when the basic human type is no longer in the majority. How does he comport himself as a minority? A thought-provoking job. van der R. Woolley. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # TR. Woolley is the present Astronomer Royal and his book is the third edition of a volume which first appeared twenty years ago. Very little alteration has been needed because the work was aimed at the layman and deals with elementary astronomy and astro-physics whidi have undergone very little change. The book is lucid and concise and Dr. Woolley has fortunately not left his sense of humor in the observatory. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., # T he purpose of de Vaucouleurs' latest book is as an outline of the history of astronomy from prehistoric times to the present. To a considerable extent, he has avoided inevitable overlap of previous works by combining a comprehensive study of virtually all the important milestones in theory and observation with an exhaustively compact section on post-war discoveries and the startling new theories that have resulted. A new stellar type, as differentiated from the classic nova, is the "flare type" sun, one specimen of which increased its brightness a hundredfold in twenty seconds! The concept that I found most intriguing is truly stupendous in scope. According to this, our galaxy is a small part of a huge, cloudlike, lens-shaped super-galin diameter! However, what appears to be the greatest advance in the past decade has been the rise of radioastronomy. The limited observational field offered by the visible spectrum is infinitesimal compared to that of radio frequencies. Add this to your list of shouldgets for your astronomical shelf. Philip Jose Farmer. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # A T first glance, this would seem to be a routine space opera, complete with heroic tenor, particularly since a symbiote makes the hero virtually invulnerable. But maybe you have also noticed lately the revulsion of many authors to the John Carter-Kimball Kinnison brand of hero. The Farmer boy is big, handsome, blond and strong, a castaway on a planet of short, dark people. He is also lazy, cautious to the point of timidity and not very bright. A good thing he was supplied with his GI symbiote that increases strength, repairs wounds and replaces lost parts and also that he managed to pick up an Amazon of a native wife, a slave like him, who combines beauty and intelligence with five kids, one of them his. He has managed to get himself installed as a gigolo to the local duke's voluptuous but bath-needing wife, and overhearing that two strangers have come from the sky in a strange ship and are being held in a distant city, he arranges passage there with a merchant ship captain. Though a slave, he gives the captain a financial plan that offers sufficient gain to overcome reluctance to help a fugitive. He thinks he's lamming on his wife, but she's a heap smarter than he is. The story has the flavor of de Camp's famous series, the nautical atmosphere being supplied by an interesting concept in dry-land shipping -- wind rollers, sailing vessels of the plains. Farmer throws in pirates for plot and floating islands for mystery and almost makes a mishmash of the ending, but doesn't. Arthur Constance. The Citadel Press, N. Y., #month includes two works by Englishmen who are at loggerheads. Dr. Woolley, the Astronomer Royal, quite cavalierly ignores the existence of Mr. Constance in his book. Mr. Constance, however, is deeply resentful of his scoffing at flying saucer investigation and misses no opportunity to use Woolley as pincushion. He as assembled an enormous library of clippings, including the Charles Fort collection and, like Fort's works, the sheer weight of strange reports makes for a grudging credulity on the part of the reader. World Publishing Co., N. Y. Cleveland, # workmanlike sequel to The Stars Are Ours!, her superb juvenile of a year ago. It is not fair to judge one work in terms of another, but that doesn't apply to sequels -- they demand comparison. In this instance, the standard set by the original story was so high as to obviate any possibility of parity on the part of any subsequent yarn. However, Andre Norton ias written a solid, interesting story. The descendants of the fugitives from Earth's dictatorship have slipped backward in the course of time and lost almost all of their materialistic knowledge. In compensation, though, they have acquired a degree of telepathic ability that enables them to survive on Astra, where most higher lifeforms possess the Mind Touch. Dalgard Nordis, a youth aspiring toward maturity, embarks on the normal matriculating exploration with his merman companion, Sssuri. They are aware of strange activity in a city of Those Others, the now vanished, erstwhile masters of the planet. Unknown to them, an expedition from Earth has landed and complications ensue. The vanished race is very much alive. Raymond A. Lyttleton. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., #  based on a series of television programs given by the author over the B.B.C. He has, with wisdom, divided his text into six logically successive sections: Earth; Moon; Planets  Comets; Sun; Stars and Galaxy; The Expanding Universe. A good introduction to astronomical theory. To Be Published Soon by Fletcher Pratt Like every farmer on every planet, Dunean had to hunt down anything that damaged his crops -- even though he was aware this wos -- The World Thet Couldn't Be T he tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush -- and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam. Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thom-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. "No, mister," pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. "You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha." "The hell I don't," said Dimcan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue. He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hulascrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes. It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn't take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he'd overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on. "Dangerous," Zikkara pointed out. "No one hunts the Cytha." "I do," Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. "I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left" into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his es against the sun. "It might be a long chase, mister. It is the sktm season now. If you were caught out there..." "Now listen," Duncan told it sharply. "Before I came, you'd feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around." "Mister, we like all this," said Zikkara, "but we do not hunt the C#dha." "If we do not hunt the Cdha, we lose all this," Duncan pointed out. "If I don't make a crop, I'm licked. I'll have to go away. Then what happens to you?" "We will grow the com ourselves." "That's a laugh," said Duncan, "and you know it is. If I didn't kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn't do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let's go and get that C # rtha." "But it is such a littl# one, mister! It is such a yoimg one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It no would be a shame to kill it." Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely. It's scared, he told himself. It's scared dry and spitless. "Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat." "Not from my crop," said Duncan savagely. "You know why we grow the vua, don't you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine -- need it very badly. And what is more, out there -- " he swept his arm toward the sky -- "out there they pay very much for it." "But, mister..." "I tell you this," said Duncan gently, "you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm." "No, mister!" Zikkara screamed in desperation. "You have your choice," Duncan told it coldly. "tTE plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he'd build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he'd have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister. Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village. Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction. He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell's shirts was hanging on the clothesline, limp in the breathless morning. Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell's job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do. Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench. Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook. Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again. Shotwell reached for a towel. "What's going on?" he asked. "Cytha got into the field." "Cytha?" "A kind of animal," said Duncan. "It ate ten rows of vua" "Big? Little? What are its characteristics?" The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups. God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee.  "You didn't answer me. What is a Cytha like?" "I wouldn't know," said Duncan. "Don't know? But you're going after it, looks like, and how can you hunt it if you don't know -- " "Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be the Cytha. We'll find out what it's like once we catch up to it." "We?" "The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of them are better than a dog." "Look, Gavin. I've put you to a lot of trouble and you've been decent with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go." "Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast or it might settle down to an endurance contest." "All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha." Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to Shotwell. "It's a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be unkillable. It's always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been reported at different times from widely scattered places." "No one's ever bagged one?" "Not that I ever heard of." Duncan patted the rifle. "Let me get a bead on it." He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the brackish beverage and shuddered. "Some day," he said, "I'm going to scrape together enough money to buy a pound of coffee. You'd think -- " "It's the freight rates," Shotwell said. "I'll send you a pound when I go back." "Not at the price they'd charge to ship it out," said Duncan. "I wouldn't hear of it." They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: "I'm getting nowhere, Gavin. The natives up to nothing." "I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your time." Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. "There's an answer, a logical explanation. It's easy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual factor, but that's exactly what has happened here on Layard. It's easy to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and I have to find it." Duncan protested. "There's no use blowing a gasket. I haven't got the time this morning to listen to your lecture." "But it's not the lack of sex that worries me entirely," Shotwell said, "although it's the central factor. There are subsidiary situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing." "I have no doubt of it," said Duncan, "but if you please -- " "Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty, some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood." "Not brotherhood," said Duncan, chuckling. "Not even sisterhood. You must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood." The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly. "Zikkara said that mister want me," the native told them. "I am Sipar. I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans. Those are my taboos." "I am glad to hear that," Duncan replied. "You have no Cytha taboo, then." "C#a!" yipped the native. "Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!" Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged sack with a gritty powder from a can he found. "Rockahominy," he explained to Shotwell. "Emergency rations thought up by the primitive North American Indians. Parched com, ground fine. It's no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going." "You figure you'll be gone that long?" "Maybe overnight. I don't know. Won't stop until I get it. Can't afford to. It could wipe me out in a few days." "Good hunting," Shotwell said. "I'll hold the fort." Duncan said to Sipar: "Quit sniveling and come on." He picked up the rifle, settled it in the crook of his arm. He kicked open the door and strode out. Sipar followed meekly. II D uncan got his first shot late in the afternoon of that first day. In the middle of the morning, two hours after they had left the farm, they had flushed the Cytha out of its bed in a thick ravine. But there had been no chance for a shot. Duncan saw no more than a huge black blur fade into the bush. Through the bake-oven afternoon, they had followed its trail, Sipar tracking and Duncan bringing up the rear, scanning every piece of cover, with the sun-hot rifle always held at ready. Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave itself and went off at a shuffling gallop. Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard. With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something less than gentleness and they went on again. The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with them. Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar's stock in trade. It worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its special province; here it was at home. With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions for it to stop tracking. The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It's scared, just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native thought or felt had no significance; what coimted was the beast ahead. Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on his face and bit him. lay there, looking at the sweep of land beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness. He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha. But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there was nothing else. Then he saw the motion, just a flicker, on the knoll ahead -- about halfway up. He laid the rifle carefully on the ground and hitched the binoculars around. He raised them to his eyes and moved them slowly back and forth. The animal was there where he had seen the motion. It was resting, looking back along the way that it had come, watching for the first sign of its trailers. Duncan tried to make out the size and shape, but it blended with the grass and the dun soil and he could not be sure exactly what it looked like. He let the glasses down and now that he had located it, he ould distinguish its outline with the naked eye. His hand reached out and slid the rifle to him. He fitted it to his shoulder and wriggled his body for closer contact with the ground. The cross-hairs centered on the faint outline on the knoll and then the beast stood up. It was not as large as he had thought it might be -- perhaps a little larger than Earth lion-size, but it certainly was no lion. It was a square-set thing and black and inclined to lumpiness and it had an awkward look about it, but there were strength and ferociousness as well. Duncan tilted the muzzle of the rifle so that the cross-hairs centered on the massive neck. He drew in a breath and held it and began the trigger squeeze. The rifle bucked hard against his shoulder and the report hammered in his head and the beast went down. It did not lurch or fall; it simply melted down and disappeared, hidden in the grass. "Dead center," Duncan assured himself. He worked the mechanism and the spent cartridge case flew out The feeding mechanism snicked and the fresh shell clicked as it slid into the breech. He lay for a moment, watching. And on the knoll where the thing had fallen, the grass was twitching as if the wind were blowing, only there was no wind. But despite the twitching of the grass, there was no sign of the Cytha. It did not struggle up again. It stayed where it had fallen. Duncan got to his feet, di out the bandanna and mopped at his face. He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It was the tracker. "It's all right, Sipar," he said. "You can quit worrying. I got it. We can go home now." I T had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted. For the moment, the vua crop was safe. He tucked the bandanna back into his pocket, went down the slope and started up the knoll. He reached the place where the Cytha had fallen. There were three small gouts of tom, mangled fur and flesh lying on the ground and diere was nothing else. He spun around and jerked his rifle up. Every nerve was screamingly alert. He swung his head, searching for the slightest movement, for some shape or color that was not the shape or color of the bush or grass or ground. But there was nothing. The heat droned in the hush of afternoon. There was not a breath of moving air. But there was danger -- a saw-tooflied sense of danger close behind his neck. "Sipar!" he called in a tense whisper, "Watch out!" The native stood motionless, unheeding, its eyeballs rolling up until there was only white, while the muscles stood out along its throat like straining ropes of steeL Duncan slowly swiveled, rifle held almost at arm's length, elbows crooked a little, ready to bring the weapon into play in a fraction of a second. Nothing stirred. There was no more than emiJtiness -- the emptiness of sun and molten sky, of grass and scraggy bush, of a brown-and-yellow land stretching into forevemess. Step by step, Duncan covered the hillside and finally came back to the place where the native squatted on its heels and moaned, rocking back and forth, arms locked tightly across its chest, as if it tried to cradle itself in a sort of illusory comfort. The Earthman walked to the place where the C#rtha had fallen and picked ur one by one, the bits of bleeding flesh. They had been mangled by his bullet. They were limp and had no shape. And it was queer, he thought. In all his years of hunting, over many planets, he had never known a bullet to rip out hunks of flesh. He dropped the bloody pieces back into the grass and wiped his hand upon his thighs. He got up a little stiffly. He'd found no trail of blood leading through the grass, and surely an animal with a hole of that size would leave a trail. And as he stood there upon the hillside, with the bloody fingerprints still wet and glistening upon the fabric of his trousers, he felt the first cold touch of fear, as if the fingertips of fear might momentarily, almost casually, have trailed across his heart.  turned around and walked back to the native, reached down and shook it. "Snap out of it," he ordered. He expected pleading, cowering, terror, but there was none. Sipar got swiftly to its feet and stood looking at him and there was, he thought, an odd glitter in its eyes. "Get going," Duncan said. "We still have a little time. Start circlii and pick up the trail. I will cover you." He glanced at the sun. An hour and a half still left -- maybe as much as two. There mt still be time to get this buttoned up before the fall of nt A half mile beyond the knoll, Sipar picked up the trail again and they went ahead, but now they traveled more cautiously, for any bush, any rock, any clump of grass might conceal die wounded beast Duncan found himself on edge and cursed himself savagely for it. He'd been in tight spots before. This was nothing new to him. There was no reason to get himself tensed up. It was a deadly business, sure, but he had faced others calmly and walked away from them. It was those frontier tales he'd heard about the C # a -- the kind of superstitious chatter that one always heard on the edge of unknown land. He gripped the rifle tighter and went on. No animal, he told himself, was unkillable. Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting. In the morning, thed take up the trail again, and by that time the Cytha would be at an even greater disadvantage. It would be stiff and slow and weak. It might be even dead. Duncan gathered wood and built a fire in the lee of a thornbush thicket. Sipar waded out with the canteens and thrust them at arm's length beneath the surface to fill them. The water still was warm and evil-tasting, but it was fairly free of scum and a thirsty man could drink it. The sun went down and darkness fell quickly. They dragged more wood out of the thicket and piled it carefully close at hand. Duncan reached into his pocket and brought out the little bag of rockahominy. "Here," he said to Sipar. "Supper." The native held one hand cupped and Duncan poured a little mound into its palm. "Thank you, mister," Sipar said. "Food-giver." "Huh?" asked Duncan, then caught what the native meant. "Dive into it," he said, almost kindly. "It isn't much, but it gives you strength. We'll need strength tomorrow."  ter him up, perhaps. In a little while, Sipar would start whining for him to knock off the hunt and head back for the farm. Although, come to think of it, he really was the food-giver to this bunch of sexless wonders. Com, thank God, grew well on the red and stubborn soil of Layard -- good old com from North America. Fed to hogs, made into corn-pone for breakfast back on Earth, and here, on Layard, the staple food crop for a gang of shiftless varmints who still regarded, with some good solid skepticism and round-eyed wonder, this imorthodox idea that one should take the trouble to grow plants to eat rather than go out and scrounge for them. Com from North America, he thought, growing side by side with the vua of Layard. And that was the way it went. Something from one planet and something from another and still something further from a third and so was built up through the wide social confederacy of space a truly cosmic culture which in the end, in another ten thousand years or so, might spell out some way of life with more sanity and understanding than was evident today. He poured a moimd of rockahominy into his own hand and put the bag back into his pocket. "Sipar." "Yes, mister?" "You were not scared today when the donovan threatened to attack us." "No, mister. The donovan would not hurt me." "I see. You said the donovan was taboo to you. Could it be that you, likewise, are taboo to the donovan?" "Yes, mister. The donovan and I grew up together." "Oh, so that's it," said Duncan. He put a pinch of the parched and powdered com into his mouth and took a sip of brackish water. He chewed reflectively on the resultant mash. He might go ahead, he knew, and ask why and how and where Sipar and the donovan had grown up together, but there was no point to it. This was exactly the kind of tangle tiiat Shotwell was forever getting into. Half the time he told himself, Fm convinced the little stinkers arc doing no more than pulling our legs. What a fantastic bunch of jerks! Not men, not women, just things. And while there were never babies, there were children, although never less than eight or nine years old. And if there were no babies, where did the eightand nine-year-olds come from?  these other things that are your taboos, the stiltbirds and the screamers and the like, also grew up with you." "That is right, mister." "Some playground that must have been," said Duncan. He went on chewing, staring out into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight. "There's something in the thorn bush, mister." "I didn't hear a thing." "Little pattern. Something is running there." Duncan listened closely. What Sipar said was true. A lot of little things were running in the thicket. "More than likely mice," he said. He finished his rockahominy and took an extra swig of water, gagging on it slightly. "Get your rest," he told Sipar. "I'll wake you later so I can catch a wink or two." "Mister," Sipar said, "I will stay with you to the end." "Well," said Duncan, somewhat startled, "that is decent of you." "I will stay to the death," Sipar promised earnestly. "Don't strain yourself," said Duncan. He picked up the rifle and walked down to the waterhole. The night was quiet and the land continued to have that empty feeling. Empty except for the fire and the waterhole and the little micelike animals running in the thicket And Sipar -- Sipar lying by the fire, curled up and sound asleep already. Naked, with not a weapon to its hand -- just the naked animal, the basic humanoid, and yet with underlying purpose that at times was baffling. Scared and shivering this morning at mere mention of the Cytha, yet never faltering on the trail; in pure funk back there on the knoll where they had lost the C#a, but now ready to go on to the death. Duncan went back to the fire and prodded Sipar with his toe. The native came straight up out of sleep. "Whose death?" asked Dimcan. "Whose death were you talking of?" 'Why, ours, of course," said Sipar, and went back to sleep. Ill coming. He heard the swishing whistle and felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it thunked into a tree behind him. He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the rifle up to automatic. He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a thing to see. The hulatrees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away. "Sipar!" he whispered. "Here, mister." "Keep low. It's still out there." Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot. Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his throat. A hell of a way for a man to die -- out at the tail-end of nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading back for home as fast as it could go. He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from which the arrow must have come. He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway. He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow free. "You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around." The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. Tire arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but pliant inner bark of the hula-tree. "You recognize this?" he asked Sipar. The native took the arrow and examined it. "Not my tribe." "Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn't take a shot at us. Some other tribe, perhaps?" "Very poor arrow." "I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good one. Do you recognize it?" "No tribe made this arrow," Sipar declared. "Child, maybe?" "What would child do way out here?" "Thats what I thought, too," said Duncan. between his thumbs and forefingers and twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It couldn't be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sxm was finally getting him that he had thought of it at all. He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point. "Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?" "Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all." "We aren't turning back. If there's something that you know -- something that would help us... " It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought angrily. "I do not know," the native said. Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the rifle in his arm. 'Xes go." He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself. It knows more than it's telling. They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possible, hotter and drier than the day before. There was a sense of tension in the air -- no, that was rot And even if there were, a man must act as if it were not there. If he let himself fall prey to every mood out in this empty land, he only had himself to blame for whatever happened to him. The tracking was harder now. The day before, the Cytha had only run away, strait-line fleeing to keep ahead of them, to stay out of their reach. Now it was becoming tricky. It backtracked often in an attempt to throw them off. Twice in the afternoon, the trail blanked out entirely and it was only after long searching that Sipar picked it up again -- in one instance, a mile away from where it had vanished in thin air. That vanishing bothered Duncan more than he would admit Trails do not disappear entirely, not when the terrain remains the same, not when the weather is unchanged. Something was going on, something, perhaps, that Sipar knew far more about than it was He watched the native closely and there kerned nothing suspicious. It continued at its work. It was, for all to see, the good and faithful hound. on which they had been traveling suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing river. It was like suddenly comii into another and beautiful room that one had not expected. This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a different color-marking on the planet. To them, it made no difference. But to the men who lived on Layard, to the planter and the trader, the prospector and the hunter, it was important And I, thought Duncan with a sense of triumph, am the man who found it. "Mister!" "Now what?" "Out there. Skun' "I don't -- " "Out there, mister. Across ffie river." Duncan saw it then -- a haze in the blueness of the rift -- a puff of copper moving very fast, and as he watched, he heard the far-off keening of the storm, a shiver in the air rather than a sound. He watched in fascination as it moved along the river and saw the boiling fury it made out of the forest. It struck and crossed the river, and the river for a moment seemed to stand on end, with a sheet of silvery water splashed toward the sky. Then it was gone as quickly as it had happened, but there was a tumbled slash across the forest where the churning winds had traveled. Back at the farm, Zikkara had warned him of the skun. This was the season for them, it had said, and a man caught in one wouldn't have a chance. Duncan let his breath out slowly. "Bad," said Sipar. "Yes, very bad." "Hit fast. No warning." "What about the trail?" asked Duncan. "Did the Cytha -- " Sipar nodded downward. "Can we make it before nightfall?" "I think so," Sipar answered. It was rougher than they had thought. Twice they went down blind trails that pinched off, with sheer rock faces opening out into drops of hundreds of feet, and were forced to climb again and find another way. They reached the bottom of the escarpment as the brief twilight closed in and they hurried to gather firewood. There was no water, but a little was still left in their canteens and they made do with that. rockahominy, Sipar rolled himself into a ball and went to sleep immediately. Duncan sat with his back against a boulder which one day, long ago, had fallen from the slope above them, but was now half buried in the soil that through the ages had kept sifting down. Two days gone, he told himself. Was there, after all, some truth in the whispered tales that made the rounds back at the settlements -- that no one should waste his time in tracking down a Cytha, since a Cytha was unkillable? Nonsense, he told himself. And yet the hunt had toughened, the trail become more difficult, the Cytha a much more cunning and elusive quarry. Where it had run from them the day before, now it fought to shake them off. And if it did that the second day, why had it not tried to throw them off the first? And what about the third day -- tomorrow? He shook his head. It seemed incredible that an animal would become more formidable as the hunt progressed. But that seemed to be exactly what had happened. More spooked, perhaps, more frightened -- only the C#rtha did not act like a frightened beast. It was acting like an animal that was gaining savvy and determination, and that was somehow frightening. From far off to the west, toward the forest and the river, came the laughter and the howling of a pack of screamers. Duncan leaned his rifle against the boulder and got up to pile more wood on the fire. He stared out into the western darkness, listening to the racket He made a wry face and pushed a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. He put out a silent hope that the screamers would decide to keep their distance. They were something a man could do without. Behind him, a pebble came bumping down the slope. It thudded to a rest just short of the fire. Duncan spim around. Foolish thing to do, he thought, to camp so near the slope. If something big should start to move, they'd be out of luck. He stood and listened. The night was quiet. Even the screamers had shut up for the moment. Just one rolling rock and he had his hackles up. He'd have to get himself in hand. He went back to the boulder, and as he stooped to pick up the rifle, he heard the faint beginning of a rumble. He straightened swiftly to face the scarp that blotted out the star-strewn sky -- and the rumble grew! N one leap, he was at Sipar's side. He reached down and grasped the native by an arm, jerked it erect, held it on its feet Sipar's eyes snapped open, blinking in the firelight The rumble had grown to a roar and there were thumping noises, as of heavy boulders bounc ing, and beneath the roar the silky, ominous rustle of sliding soil and rock. Sipar jerked its arm free of Duncan's grip and plunged into the darkness. Duncan whirled and followed. They ran, stumbling in the dark, and behind them the roar of the sliding, bouncing rock became a throaty roll of thunder that filled the night from brim to brim. As he ran, Duncan could feel, in dread anticipation, the gusty breath of hurtling debris blowing on his neck, the crushing impact of a boulder smashing into him, the engulfing flood of tumbling talus snatching at his legs. A puff of billowing dust came out and caught them and they ran choking as well as stumbling. Off to the left of them, a mighty chunk of rock chugged along the ground in jerky, almost reluctant fashion. Then the thunder stopped and all one could hear was the small slitherings of the lesser debris as it trickled down the slope. Duncan stopped running and slowly turned around. The campfire was gone, buried, no doubt, beneath tons of overlay, and the stars had paled because of the great cloud of dust which still billowed up into the sky. He heard Sipar moving near him and reached out a hand, searching for the tracker, not knowing exactly where it was. He found the native, grasped it by the shoulder and pulled it up beside him. Sipar was shivering. "It's all right," said Duncan. And it was all right, he reassured himself. He still had the rifle. The extra drum of ammunition and the knife were on his belt, the bag of rockahominy in his pocket The canteens were all they had lost -- the canteens and the fire. "We'll have to hole up somewhere for the night," Duncan said. "There are screamers on the loose." Tf  didn't like what he was thinking, nor the sharp edge of fear that was beginning to crowd in upon him. He tried to shrug it off, but it still stayed with him, just out of reach. Sipar plucked at his elbow. "Thom thicket, mister. Over there. We could crawl inside. We would be safe from screamers." It was torture, but they made it. "Screamers and you are taboo," said Duncan, suddenly remembering. "How come you are afraid of them?" "Afraid for yoti, mister, mostly. Afraid for myself just a little. Screamers could forget They might not recognize me until too late. Safer here." "I agree with you," said Duncan. The screamers came and padded all about the thicket The beasts sniffed and clawed at the thorns to reach them, but finally went away. When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the slope and finally reached the point of the slide's beginning. There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire. And all about were the deeply sunken pug marks of the Cytha! IV N OW it was more than just a hunt. It was knife against the throat, kill or be killed. Now there was no stopping, when before there might have been. It was no longer sport and there was no mercy. "And that's the way I like it," IXincan told himself. He rubbed his hand along the rifle barrel and saw the metallic glints shine in the noonday sun. One more shot, he prayed. Just give me one more shot at it. This time there will be no slip-up. This time there will be more than diree sodden hunks of flesh and fur lying in the grass to mock me. He squinted his eyes against the heat shimmer rising from the river, watching Sipar hunkered beside the water's edge. The native rose to its feet and trotted back to him. "It crossed," said Sipar. "It walked out as far as it could go and it must have swum." "Are you sure? It might have waded out to make us think it crossed, then doubled back again." He stared at the purple-green of the trees across the river. Inside that forest, it would be hellish going. "We can look," said Sipar. "Good. You go downstream. I'll go up." An hour later, they were back. They had found no tracks. There seemed little doubt the Cytha had really crossed the river. They stood side by side, looking at the forest. "Mister, we have come far. You are brave to hunt the Ctha. You have no fear of death." "The fear of death," Duncan said, "is entirely infantile. And it's beside the point as well. I do not intend to die." They waded out into the stream. The bottom shelved gradually and they had to swim no more than a hundred yards or so. They reached the forest bank and threw themselves flat to rest Duncan looked back the way that they had come. To the east, the escarpment was a darkblue smudge against the pale-blue burnished sky. And two days back of that lay the farm and the vua field, but they seemed much farther off than that. They were lost in time and distance; they belonged to another existence and another world. All his life, it seemed to him, had faded and become inconsequential and forgotten, as if this moment in his life were the only one that counted; as if all the minutes and the hours, all the breaths and heartbeats, wake and sleep, had pointed toward this certain hour upon this certain stream, with the rifle molded to his hand and the cool, calculated bloodlust of a killer riding in his brain. to range along the stream. Duncan sat up and watched. Scared to death, he thought, and yet it stayed with me. At the campfire that first night, it had said it would stick to the death and apparently it had meant exactly what it said. It's hard, he thought, to figure out these jokers, hard to know what kind of mental operation, what seethings of emotion, what brand of ethics and what variety of belief and faith go to make them and their way of life. It would have been so easy for Sipar to have missed the trail and swear it could not find it. Even from the start, it could have refused to go. Yet, fearing, it had gone. Reluctant, it had trailed. Without any need for faithfulness and loyalty, it had been loyal and faithful. But loyal to what. Dimcan wondered, to him, the outlander and intruder? Loyal to itself? Or perhaps, although that seemed impossible, faithful to the Cytha? What does Sipar think of me, he asked himself, and maybe more to the point, what do I think of Sipar? Is there a common meeting ground? Or are we, despite our humanoid forms, condemned forever to be alien and apart? He held the rifle across his knees and stroked it, polishing it, petting it, making it even more closely a part of him, an instrument of his deadliness, an expression of his determination to track and kill the Cytha. Just another chance, he begged. Just one second, or even less, to draw a steady bead. That is all I want, all I need, all I'll ask. Then he could go back across the days that he had left behind him, back to the farm and field, back into that misty other life from which he had been so mysteriously divorced, but which in time undoubtedly would become real and meaningful again. Sipar came back. "I found die trail." Duncan heaved himself to his feet. "Good." They left the river and plunged into the forest and there the heat closed in more mercilessly than ever -- humid, stifling heat that felt like a soggy blanket wrapped tightly round the body. The trail lay plain and clear. The Cytha now, it seemed, was intent upon piling up a lead without recourse to evasive tactics. Perhaps it had reasoned that its pursuers would lose some time at the river and it may have been trying to stretch out that margin even further. Perhaps it needed that extra time, he speculated, to set up the necessary machinery for another dirty trick. Sipar stopped and waited for Duncan to catch up. "Your knife, mister?" Duncan hesitated. "What for?" "I have a thorn in my foot," the native said. "I have to get it out" Duncan pulled the knife from his belt and tossed it. Sipar caught it deftly. Looking straight at Duncan, with the flicker of a smile upon its lips, the native cut its throat. V Without the tracker, he didn't have a chance. The odds were now with the C#rtha -- if, indeed, they had not been with it from the very start Unkillable? Unkillable because it grew in intelligence to meet emergencies? Unkillable because, pressed, it could fashion a bow and arrow, however crude? Unkillable because it had a sense of tactics, like rolling rocks at night upon its enemy? Unkillable because a native tracker would cheerfully kill itself to protect the C#rtha? A sort of crisis-beast, perhaps? One able to develop intelligence and abilities to meet each new situation and then lapsing back to the level of non-intelligent contentment? That, thought Dxmcan, would be a sensible way for anything to live. It would do away with the inconvenience and the irritability and the discontentment of intelligence when intelligence was unneeded. But the intelligence, and the abilities which went with it, would be there, safely tucked away where one could reach in and get them, like a necklace or a gun -- something to be used or to be put away as the case might be. Duncan hunched forward and with a stick of wood pushed the fire together. The flames blazed up anew and sent sparks flying up into the whispering darkness of the trees. The night had cooled off a little, but the humidity still hung on and a man felt uncomfortable -- a little frightened, too. Duncan lifted his head and stared up into the hreflecked darkness. There were no stars because the heavy foliage shut them out. He missed the stars. He'd feel better if he could look up and see them. When morning came, he should go back. He should quit this hunt which now had become impossible and even slightly foolish. But he knew he wouldn't. Somewhere along the three-day trail, he had become committed to a purpose and a challenge, and he knew that when morning came, he would go on again. It was not hatred that drove him, nor vengeance, nor even the trophy-urge -- the hunterlust that prodded men to kill something strange or harder to kill or bigger than any man had ever killed before. It was something more than that, some weird entangling of the Cytha's meaning with his own. He reached out and picked up the rifle and laid it in his lap. Its barrel gleamed dully in the flickering campfire light and he rubbed his hand along the stock as another man might stroke a woman's throat. "Mister," said a voice. TT did not startle him, for the word was softly spoken and for a moment he had forgotten that Sipar was dead -- dead with a half-smile fixed upon its face and widi its throat laid wide open. "Mister?" Duncan stiffened. Sipar was dead and there was no one else -- and yet someone had spoken to him, and there could be only one thing in all this wilderness that might speak to him. "Yes," he said. He did not move. He simply sat there, with the rifle in his lap. "You know who I am?" "I suppose you are the Cytha." "You have done well," the Cytha said. "You've made a splendid hunt. There is no dishonor if you should decide to quit. Why don't you go back? I promise you no harm." It was over there, somewhere in front of him, somewhere in the brush beyond the fire, almost straight across the fire from him, Duncan told himself. If he could keep it talking, perhaps even lure it out -- "Why should I?" he asked. 'The hunt is never done until one gets the thing one is after." "I can kill you, the Cytha told him. "But I do not want to kill. It hurts to kill." "That's right," said Duncan. "You are most perceptive." For he had it pegged now. He knew exactly where it was. He could afford a little mockery. His thumb slid up the metal and nudged the fire control to automatic and he flexed his legs beneath him so that he could rise and fire in one single motion. Why did you hunt me?" the Cytha asked. "You are a stranger on my world and you had no right to hunt me. Not that I mind, of course. In fact, I found it stimulating. We must do it again. When I am ready to be hunted, I shall come and tell you and we can spend a day or two at it." "Sure we can," said Duncan, rising. And as he rose into his crouch, he held the trigger down and the gun danced in insane fury, the muzzle flare a flicking tongue of hatred and the hail of death hissing spitefully in the underbrush. "Anytime you want to," yelled Duncan gleefully, "I'll come and hunt you! You just say the word and I'll be on your tail. I might even kill you. How do you like it, chump!" And he held the trigger tight and kept his crouch so the slugs would not fly high, but would cut their swath just above the ground, and he moved the muzzle back and forth a lot so that he covered extra ground to compensate for any miscalcuations he might have made. magazine ran out and the gun clicked empty and the vicious chatter stopped. Powder smoke drifted softly in the campfire light and the smell of it was perfume in the nostrils and in die underbrush many little feet were running, as if a thousand frightened mice were scurrying from catastrophe. Duncan unhooked the extra magazine from where it hung upon his belt and replaced the empty one. Then he snatched a burning length of wood from the fire and waved it frantically until it burst into a blaze and became a torch. Rifle grasped in one hand and the torch in the other, he plunged into the underbrush. Little chittering things fled to escape him. He did not find the Cytha. He found chewed-up bushes and soil churned by flying metal, and he found five lumps of flesh and fur, and these he brought back to the fire. Now the fear that had been stalking him, keeping just beyond his reach, walked out from the shadows and hunkered by the campfire with him. He placed the rifle within easy reach and arranged the five bloody chunks on the ground close to the fire and he tried with trembling fingers to restore them to the shape thesd been before the bullets struck them. And that was a good one, he thought with grim irony, because they had no shape. They had been part of the C#a and you killed a Cytha inch by inch, not with a single shot You knocked a pound of meat off it the first time, and the next time you shot off another pound or two, and if you got enough shots at it, you finally carved it down to size and maybe you could kill it then, although he wasn't sure. He was afraid. He admitted that he was and he squatted there and watched his fingers shake and he kept his jaws clamped tight to stop the chatter of his teeth. The fear had been getting closer all the time; he knew it had moved in by a step or two when Sipar cut its throat, and why in the name of God had the damn fool done it? It made no sense at all. He had wondered about Sipar's loyalties, and the very loyalties that he had dismissed as a sheer impossibility had been the answer, after all. In the end, for some obscure reason -- obscure to humans, that is -- Sipar's loyalty had been to the Cytha. But then what was the use of searching for any reason in it? Nothing that had happened made any sense. It made no sense that a beast one was pursuing should up and talk to one -- although it did fit in with the theorj' of the crisis-beast he had fashioned in his mind. told himself. Carry adaptation far enough and you'd reach communication. But might not the Cytha's power of adaptation be running down? Had die Cytha gone about as far as it could force itself to go? Maybe so, he thought It might be worth a gamble. Sipar's suicide, for all its casualness, bore the overtones of last-notch desperation. And the C # a's speaking to Duncan, its attempt to parley with him, contained a note of weakness. The arrow had failed and the rockslide had failed and so had Sipar's death. What next would the Cytha try? Had it anything to try? Tomorrow he'd find out Tomorrow he'd go on. He couldn't turn back now. He was too deeply involved. He'd always wonder, if he turned back now, whether another hour or two might not have seen the end of it. There were too many questions, too much mystery -- there was now far more at stake than ten rows of vua. Another day might make some sense of it, might banish the dread walker that trod upon his heels, might bring some peace of mind. As it stood right at the moment, none of it made sense. But even as he thought it, suddenly one of the bits of bloody flesh and mangled fur made sense. Beneath the punching and prodding of his fingers, it had assumed a shape. Breathlessly, Duncan bent above it, not believing not even wanting to believe, hoping frantically that it should prove completely wrong. But there was nothing wrong with it. The shape was there and could not be denied. It had somehow fitted back into its natural shape and it was a baby screamer -- well, maybe not a baby, but at least a tiny screamer. Duncan sat back on his heels and sweated. He wiped his bloody hands upon the ground. He wondered what other shapes he'd find if he put back into proper place the other hunks of limpness that lay beside the fire. He tried and failed. They were too smashed and torn. He picked them up and tossed them in the fire. He took up his rifle and walked aroimd the fire, sat down with his back against a tree, cradling the gun across his knees. T hose little scurrying feet, he wondered -- like the scampering of a thousand busy mice. He had heard them twice, that first night in the thicket by the waterhole and again tonight And what could the Cytha be? Certainly not the simple, uncomplicated, marauding animal he had thought to start with. A hive-beast? A host animal? A thing masquerading in many different forms? Shotwell, trained in such deductions, might make a fairly accurate guess, but Shotwell was not here. He was at the farm, fretting, more than likely, over Duncan's failure to return. Finally the first light of morning began to filter through the forest and it was not the glaring, clean white light of the open plain and bush, but a softened, diluted, fuzzy green light to match the smothering vegetation. The night noises died away and the noises of the day took up -- the sawings of unseen insects, the screechings of hidden birds and something far away began to make a noise that sounded like an empty barrel falling slowly down a stairway. What little coolness the night had brought dissipated swiftly and the heat clamped down, a breathless, relentless heat that quivered in the air. Circling, Duncan picked up the C#dha trail not more than a himdred yards from camp. The beast had been traveling fast. The pug marks were deeply sunk and widely spaced. Duncan followed as rapidly as he dared. It was a temptation to follow at a run, to match the Cytha's speed, for the trail was plain and fresh and it fairly beckoned. And that was wrong, Duncan told himself. It was too fresh, too plain -- almost as if the animal had gone to endless trouble so that the human could not miss the trail. He stopped his trailing and crouched beside a tree and studied the tracks ahead. His hands were too tense upon the gun, his body keyed too high and fine. He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. He had to calm himself. He had to loosen up. He studied the tracks aheadfour bunched pug marks, then a long leap interval, then four more bunched tracks, and between the sets of marks the forest floor was innocent and smooth. Too smooth, perhaps. Especially the third one from him. Too smooth and somehow artificial, as if someone had patted it with gentle hands to make it unsuspicious. Duncan sucked his breath in slowly. Trap? Or was his imagination pla#nng tricks on him? And if it were a trap, he would have fallen into it if he had kept on following as he had started out. Now there was something else, a strange uneasiness, and he stirred uncomfortably, casting frantically for some clue to what it was. the tree, with the gun at ready. What a perfect place to set a trap, he thought. One would be looking at the pug marks, never at the space between them, for the space between would be neutral groimd, safe to stride out upon. Oh, clever Cytha, he said to himself. Oh, clever, clever Csdha! And now he knew what the other trouble was -- the great uneasiness. It was the sense of being watched. Somewhere up ahead, the Cjtha was crouched, watching and waiting-anxious or exultant, maybe even with laughter rumbling in its throat. He walked slowly forward tmtil he reached the third set of tracks and he saw that he had been right. The little area ahead was smoother than it should be. "Cytha!" he called. His voice was far louder than he had meant it to be and he stood astonished and a bit abashed. Then he realized why it was so loud. It was the only sound there was! The forest suddenly had fallen silent. The insects and birds were quiet and the thing in the distance had quit falling down the stairs. Even the leaves were silent There was no rustle in them and they hung limp upon their stems. There was a feeling of doom and the green light had changed to a copper light and ever#rthing was still. And the light was copper! Duncan spun around in panic There was no place for him to hide. Before he could take another step, the skvtn came and the winds rushed out of nowhere. The air was clogged with flying leaves and debris. Trees snapped and popped and tumbled in the air. The wind hurled Duncan to his knees, and as he fought to regain his feet, he remembered, in a blinding flash of total recall, how it had looked from atop the escarpment -- the boiling fury of the winds and the mad swirling of the coppery mist and how the trees had whipped in whirlpool fashion. He came half erect and stumbled, clawing at the ground in an attempt to get up again, while inside his brain an insistent, clicking voice cried out for him to run, and somewhere another voice said to lie flat upon the ground, to dig in as best he could. Something struck him from behind and he went down, pinned flat, with his rifle wedged beneath him. He cracked his head upon the ground and the world whirled sickeningly and plastered his face with a handful of mud and tattered leavees. He tried to crawl and couldn't, for something had grabbed him by the ankle and was hanging on. clawed the mess out of his eyes, spat it from his mouth. Across the spiiming ground, something black and angular tumbled rapidly. It was coming straight toward him and he saw it was the Cytha and that in another second it would be on top of him. He threw up an arm across his face, with the elbow crooked, to take the impact of the wind-blown Cjrtha and to ward it off. But it never reached him. Less than a yard away, the ground opened up to take the Cytha and it was no longer there. Suddenly the wind cut off and the leaves once more hung motionless and the heat clamped down again and that was the end of it The skun had come and struck and gone. Minutes, Duncan wondered, or perhaps no more than seconds. But in those seconds, the forest had been flattened and the trees lay in shattered heaps. He raised himself on an elbow and looked to see what was the matter with his foot and he saw that a fallen tree had trapped his foot beneath it. He tugged a few times experimentally. It was no use. Two closeset limbs, branching almost at right angles from the hole, had been driven deep into the ground and his foot, he saw, had been caught at the ankle in the fork of the buried branches. The foot didn't hurt -- not yet It didn't seem to be there at all. He tried wiggling his toes and felt none. He wiped the sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve and fought to force down the panic that was rising in him. Getting panicky was the worst thing a man could do in a spot like this. The thing to do was to take stock of the situation, figure out the best approach, then go ahead and try it. The tree looked heavy, but perhaps he could handle it if he had to, although there was the danger that if he shifted it, the bole might settle more solidly and crush his foot beneath it. At the moment, the two heavy branches, thrust into the ground on either side of his ankle, were holding most of the tree's weight off his foot. The best thing to do, he decided, was to dig the ground away beneath his foot until he could pull it out. He twisted around and started digging with the fingers of one hand. Beneath the thin covering of humus, he struck a solid surface and his fingers slid along it. With mounting alarm, he explored the ground, scratching at the humus. There was nothing but rock -- some long-buried boulder, the top of which lay just beneath the ground. His foot was trapped beneath a heavy tree and a massive boulder, held securely in place by forked branches that had forced their splintering way down along the boulder's sides. bow. It was evident that he could do nothing about the buried boulder. If he was going to do anything, his problem was the tree. To move the tree, he would need a lever and he had a good, stout lever in his rifle. It would be a shame, he thought a little wryly, to use a gun for such a purpose, but he had no choice. He worked for an hour and it was no good. Even with the rifle as a pry, he could not budge the tree. He lay back, defeated, breathing hard, wringing wet with perspiration. He grimaced at the sky. All right, Cytha, he thought, you won out in the end. But it took a skun to do it. With all your tricks, you couldn't do the job until... Then he remembered. He sat up hurriedly. "Cytha!" he called. The Cytha had fallen into a hole that had opened in the ground. The hole was less than an arm's length away from him, with a little debris around its edges still trickling into it. Duncan stretched out his body, lying flat upon the ground, and looked into the hole. There, at the bottom of it, was the Cytha. It was the first time he'd gotten a good look at the Cytha and it was a crazily put-t(ether It seemed to have nothing functional about it and it looked more like a heap of something, just thrown on the ground, than it did an animal. The hole, he saw, was more than an ordinary hole. It was a pit and very cleverly constructed. The mouth was about four feet in diameter and it widened to rouly twice that at the bottom. It was, in general, bottle-shaped, with an incurving shoulder at the top so that anything that fell in could not climb out. Anything falling into that pit was in to stay. This, Duncan knew, was what had lain beneath that too-smooth interval between the two sets of Cytha tracks. The C#tha had worked all night to dig it, then had carried away the dirt dug out of the pit and had built a flimsy camouflage cover over it. Then it had gone back and made the trail that was so loud and clear, so easy to make out and follow. And having done all that, having labored hard and stealthily, the C#a had settled down to watch, to make sure the following human had fallen in the pit. pal," said Duncan. "How are you making out?" The Cytha did not answer. "Classy pit," said Duncan. "Do you always den up in luxury like this?" But the Cytha didn't answer. Something queer was happenii to the Cja. It was coming all apart Duncan watched with fascinated horror as the Cytha broke down into a thousand lumps of motion that scurried in the pit and tried to scramble up its sides, only to fall back in tiny showers of sand. Amid the scurrying lumps, one thing remained intact a fragile object that resembled nothing quite so much as the stripped skeleton of a Thanksgiving turkey. But it was a most extraordinary Thanksgiving skeleton, for it throbbed with pulsing life and glowed with a steady violet light. Chitterings and squeakings came out of the pit and the soft patter of tiny running feet, and as Duncan's eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the pit, he began to make out the forms of some of the scurrying shapes. There were tiny screamers and some donovans and sawmill birds and a bevy of kill-devils and something else as well. Duncan raised a hand and pressed it against his eyes, then took it quickly away. The little faces still were there, looking up as if beseeching him, with the white shine of their teeth and the white rolling of their eyes. He felt horror wrenching at his stomach and the sour, bitter taste of revulsion welled into his throat, but he fought it down, harking back to that day at the farm before they had started on the hunt. "I can track down anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans," Sipar had told him solemnly. "These are my taboos." And Sipar was also their taboo, for he had not feared the donovan. Sipar had been, however, somewhat fearful of the screamers in the dead of night because, the native had told him reasonably, screamers were forgetful. Forgetful of what! Forgetful of the Cytha-mother? Forgetful of the motley brood in which they had spent their childhood? For that was the only answer to what was running in the pit and the whole, unsuspected answer to the enigma against which men like Shotwell had frustratedly banged their heads for years.  right, it might be strange, but if it worked, what difference did it make? So the planet's denizens were sexless because there was no need of sex -- what was wrong with that? It might, in fact, Duncan admitted to himself, head off a lot of trouble. No family spats, no triangle trouble, no fighting over mates. While it might be unexciting, it did seem downright peaceful. And since there was no sex, the Cytha species was the planetary mother -- but more than just a mother. The C#a, more than likely, was mother-father, incubator, nursery, teacher and perhaps many other things besides, all rolled into one. In many ways, he thought, it might make a lot of sense. Here natural selection would be ruled out and ecology could be controlled in considerable degree and mutation might even be a matter of deliberate choice rather than random happenstance. And it would make for a potential planetary unity such as no other world had ever known. Everything here was kin to everything else. Here was a planet where Man, or any other alien, must learn to tread most softly. For it was not inconceivable that, in a crisis or a clash of interests, one might find himself faced suddenly with a unified and cooperating planet, with every form of life making common cause against the interloper. The little scurrying things had given up; they'd gone back to their places, clustered around the pulsing violet of the Thanksgiving skeleton, each one fitting into place until the C#dha had taken shape again. As if, Duncan told himself, blood and nerve and muscle had come back from a brief vacation to form the beast anew. "Mister," asked the Cjrtha, "what do we do now?" "You should know," Iuncan told it. "You were the one who dug the pit." "I split myself," the Cytha said. "A part of me dug the pit and the other part that stayed on the surface got me out when the job was done." "Convenient," grunted Duncan. And it was convenient. That was what had happened to the Cytha when he had shot at it -- it had split into all its component parts and had got away. And that night beside the waterhole, it had spied on him, again in the form of all its separate parts, from the safety of the thicket. "You are caught and so am I," the Cytha said. "Both of us will die here. It seems a fitting end to our association. Do you not agree with me?" "I'll get you out," said Duncan wearily. "I have no quarrel with children." and unhooked the sling from the stock. Carefully he lowered the gun by the sling, still attached to the barrel, down into the pit. The Cytha reared up and grasped it with its forepaws. "Easy now," Duncan cautioned. "You're heavy. I don't know if I can hold you." But he needn't have worried. The little ones were detaching themselves and scrambling up the rifle and the sling. They reached his extended arms and ran up them with scrabbling claws. Little sneering screamers and the comic stilt-birds and the mouse-size killdevils that snarled at him as they climbed. And the little grinning natives -- not babies, scarcely children, but small editions of fullgrown humanoids. And the weird donovans scampering happily. They came climbing up his arms and across his shoulders and milled about on the ground beside him, waiting for the others. And finally the Cytha, not skinned down to the bare bones of its Thanksgiving-turkey-size, but far smaller than it had been, climbed awkwardly up the rifle and the sling to safety. Duncan hauled the rifle up and twisted himself into a sitting position. The Cytha, he saw, was reassembling. He watched in fascination a the restless miniatures of the planet's life swarmed and seethed like a hive of bees, each one clicking into place to form the entire beast. And now the Cytha was complete. Yet small -- still small -- no more than lion-size. "But it is such a little one," Zikkara had argued with him that morning at the farm. "It is such a young one." Just a young brood, no more than suckling infants -- if suckling was the word, or even some kind of wild approximation. And through the months and years, the Cytha would grow, with the growing of its diverse children, until it became a monstrous thing. It stood there looking at Duncan and the tree. "Now," said Duncan, "if you'll push on the tree, I think that between the two of us -- " "It is too bad," the Ctha said, and wheeled itself about He watched it go loping off. "Hey!" he yelled. But it didn't stop. He grabbed up the rifle and had it halfway to his shoulder before he remembered how absolutely futile it was to shoot at the Cytha. He let the rifle down. "The dirty, ungrateful, doublecrossing -- " He stopped himself. There was no profit in rage. When you were in a jam, you did the best you could. You figured out the problem and you picked the course that seemed besT and you didn't panic at the odds. He laid the rifle in his lap and started to hook up the sling and it was not till then that he saw the barrel was packed with sand and dirt. He sat numbly for a moment, thinking back to how close he had been to firing at the Cytha, and if that barrel was packed hard enough or deep enough, he might have had an exploding weapon in his hands. He had used the rifle as a crowbar, which was no way to use a gun. That was one way, he told himself, that was guaranteed to ruin it. D uncan hunted around and found a twig and dug at the clogged muzzle, but the dirt was jammed too firmly in it and he made little progress. He dropped the twig and was hunting for another stronger one when he caught the motion in a nearby clump of brush. He watched closely for a moment and there was nothing, so he resumed the hunt for a stronger twig. He found one and started poking at the muzzle and there was another flash of motion. He twisted around. Not more than twenty feet away, a screamer sat easily on its haunches. Its tongue was lolling out and it had what looked like a grin upon its face. And there was another, just at the edge of the clump of brush where he had caught the motion first. There were others as well, he knew. He could hear them sliding through the tangle of fallen trees, could sense the soft padding of their feet. The executioners, he thought The Cytha certainly had not wasted any time. He raised the rifle and rapped the barrel smartly on the fallen tree, trying to dislodge the obstruction in the bore. But it didn't budge; the barrel still was packed with sand. But no matter -- he'd have to fire anyhow and take whatever chance there was. He shoved the control to automatic. and tilted up the muzzle. There were six of them now, sitting in a ragged row, grinning at him, not in any hurry. They were sure of him and there was no hurry. He'd still be there when they decided to move in. And there were others -- on all sides of him. Once it started, he wouldn't have a chance. "It'll be expensive, gents," he told them. And he was astonished at how calm, how coldly objective he could be, now that the chips were down. But that was the way it was, he realized. He'd thought, a while ago, how a man might suddenly find himself face to face with an aroused and cooperating planet. Maybe this was it in miniature. The Cytha had obviously passed the word along: Man back there Just like that, for a C#rtha would be the power here. A life force, the giver of life, the decider of life, the repository of all animal life on the entire planet. There was more than one of them, of course. Probably they had home districts, spheres of influence and responsibility mapped out. And each one would be a power supreme in its own district. Momism, he thought with a sour grin. Momism at its absolute peak. Nevertheless, he told himself, it wasn't too bad a system if you wanted to consider it objectively. But he was in a poor position to be objective about that or anything else. 'THE screamers were inching closer, hitching themselves forward slowly on their bottoms. "I'm going to set up a deadline for you critters," Duncan called out. "Just two feet farther, up to that rock, and I let you have it." He'd get all six of them, of course, but the shots would be the signal for the general rush by all those other animals slinking in the brush. If he were free, if he were on his feet, possibly he could beat them off. But pinned as he was, he didn't have a chance. It would be all over less than a minute after he opened fire. He might, he figured, last as long as that. The six inched closer and he raised the rifle. But they stopped and moved no farther. Their ears lifted just a little, as if they might be listening, and the grins dropped from their faces. They squirmed uneasily and assumed a look of guilt and, like shadows, they were gone, melting away so swiftly that he scarcely saw them go. Duncan sat quietly, listening, but he could hear no sound. Reprieve, he thought. But for how long? Something had scared them off, but in a while they might be back. He had to get out of here and he had to make it fast. If he could find a longer lever, he could move the tree. There was a branch slanting up from the topside of the fallen tree. It was almost four inches at the butt and it carried its diameter well. He slid the knife from his belt and looked at it. Too small, too thin, he thought, to chisel through a four-inch branch, but it was all he had. When a man was desperate enough, though, when his very life depended on it, he would do anything. He hitched himself along, sliding toward the point where the branch protruded from the tree. His pinned leg protested with stabs of pain as his body wrenched it around. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself closer. Pain slashed through his leg again and he was still long inches from the branch. He tried once more, then gave up. He lay panting on the ground. There was just one thing left Hed have to try to hack out a notch in the trunk just above his leg. No, that would be next to impossible, for he'd be cutting into the whorled and twisted grain at the base of the supporting fork. Either that or cut off his foot, and that was even more impossible. A man would faint before he got the job done. It was useless, he knew. He could do neither one. There was nothing he could do. IOR the first time, he admitted to himself : He would stay here and die. Shotwell, back at the farm, in a day or two might set out hunting for him. But Shotwell would never find him. And anyhow, by nightfall, if not sooner, the screamers would be back. He laughed gruffy in his throat -- laughing at himself. The Cytha had won the hunt hands down. It had used a human weakness to win and then had used that same human weakness to achieve a viciously poetic vengeance. After all, what could one expect? One could not equate human ethics with the ethics of the Cytha. Might not human ethics, in certain cases, seem as weird and illogical, as infamous and ungrateful, to an alien? He hunted for a twig and began working again to clean the rifle bore. A crashing behind him twisted him around and he saw the Cytha. Behind the Cytha stalked a donovan. He tossed away the twig and raised the gun. "No," said the Cytha sharply. The donovan tramped purposefully forward and Duncan felt the prickling of the skin along his back. It was a frightful thing. Nothing could stand before a donovan. The screamers had turned tail and run when they had heard it a couple of miles or more away. The donovan was named for the first known human to be killed by one. That first was only one of many. The roll of donovanvictims ran long, and no wonder, Duncan thought. It was the closest he had ever been to one of the beasts and he felt a coldness creei ing over him. It was like an elephant and a tiger and a grizzly bear wrapped in the selfsame hide. It was the most vicious fighting machine that ever had been spawned. He lowered the rifle. There would be no point in shooting. In two quick strides, the beast could be upon him. The donovan almost stepped on him and he flinched away. Then the great head lowered and gave the fallen tree a butt and the tree boimced for a yard or two. The donovan kept on walking. Its powerfully muscled stem moved into the brush and out of sight "Now we are even," said the Cytha. "I had to get some help." Duncan grunted. He flexed the leg that had been trapped and he could not feel the foot. Using his rifle as a cane, he pulled himself erect. He tried putting weight on the injured foot and it screamed with pain. He braced himself with the rifle and rotated so that he faced the Cytha. "Thanks, pal," he said. "I didn't think you'd do it." "You will not hunt me now?" Duncan shook his head. "I'm in no shape for hunting. I am heading home." "It was the vua, wasn't it? That was why you hunted me?" "The vua is my livelihood," said Duncan. "I cannot let you eat it." The Cytha stood silently and Duncan watched it for a moment. Then he wheeled. Using the rifle for a crutch, he started hobbling away. The Cytha hurried to catch up with him. "Let us make a bargain, mister. I will not eat the vua and you will not hunt me. Is that fair enough?" "That is fine with me," said Duncan. "Let us shake on it." He put down a hand and the C#tha lifted up a paw. They shook, somewhat awkwardly, but very solemnly. "Now," the Cytha said, "I will see you home. The screamers would have you before you got out of the woods." VI them lay the farm, with the vua rows straight and green in the red soil of the fields. "You can make it from here," the Cytha said. "I am wearing thin. It is an awful effort to keep on being smart. I want to go back to ignorance and comfort." "It was nice knowing you," Duncan told it politely. "And thanks for sticking with me." He started down the hill, leaning heavily on the rifle-crutch. Then he frowned troubledly and turned back. "Look," he said, "you'll go back to animal again. Then you will forget. One of these days, you'll see all that nice, tender vua and -- " "Very simple," said the Cytha. "If you find me in the vua, just begin hunting me. With you after me, I will quickly get smart and remember once again and it will be all right." "Sure," agreed Duncan. "I guess that will work." The Cytha watched him go stumping down the hill. Admirable, it thought. Next time I have a brood, I think I'll raise a dozen like him. It turned around and headed for the deeper brush. It felt intelligence slipping from it, felt the old, uncaring comfort coming back again. But it glowed with anticipation, seethed with happiness at the big surprise it had in store for its new-found friend. Won't he be happy and surprised when I drop them at his door, it thought. Will he be ever pleased! we do promise that a year's subscription to... and you'll get your copies at least a week before the newsstands do. we don't promise that reading # issues of theory of gravitation. I Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson St. New York #, N. Y. you don't have to use the coupon below. It's for your convenience, not ours. Yes, send in your subscription today. 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Satisfaction Guaranteed Order Stock No. #F, # Postpaid New, Low Price Satellite Telescope Get ready for a terrific sky show as more Satellites are vaulted into sights with our amazing Satellite Scope at unheard of low cost. Also view comets -- use as a Richfield Scope for viewing star clusters. # power-wide # field. Use of high quality war surplus optics makes possible this bargain. Stock No. #-F # Postpaid America's No. I source of supply for experimenters, hobbyists. World's largest variety of Optical Items. Bargains galore... War SurplusImported -- Domestic l Microscopes, Telescopes, Satellite Scopes, Infrared Sniperscopes and Parts, Prisms. Lenses, Reticles, Mirrors and dozens of other hard-to-get Optical Items. Chicago: "Years ago, you had an editorial on toys. My dad showed it to me so I'd know what to expect with my baby son. I thought it was hilarious! But now that the child -- well, it's no laughing matter, let me tell you. A lot of new parents badly need that editorial for perspective. Why not run it again for the poor things?" Gladly, Mrs. Libby. Never have there been so many toys, play costumes and amusements for children. It's an alarming situation. The lessons of history should help, but they don't. No generation has yet known how to cope with the problem. But we can try. Let's (as) rationally (as possible) scrounge around in the past in order to understand the present and anticipate the headaches our kids will have with their own kids. No matter how far back we go, the pattern remains identical: Parents invariably give their children more toys and games than they had when they were youngsters. The children then have (at least it seems so to parents) everything to play with and nothing to play. The plaintive "What should I do now?" brings forth the outraged "Why, when I was your age-" What comes after that forms an oral record of the human race: " -- we didn't have wooden wheels to play with, just fire." " -- I wasn't allowed to have any shrunken heads until I was old enough to go out and hunt for them." " -- I wouldn't even dare ask for a slave of my own." " -- we didn't have bows -- " " -- arquebuses -- " " -- ducking stools -- " " -- stagecoaches -- " " -- railroad trains -- " " -- airplanes -- " And now it's all the paraphernalia in miniature of the Old West, crime, war, Atomic Age, space. Very few adults have ever been able to resist delivering the why-when-I-was-your-age lecture. Having done my own share, I wonder what drives us to it. Exasperation, of course, but mostly envy camouflaged by recollections of deprivation bravely borne. The deprivation is obviously in the present, since one does not feel deprived of something that doesn't ( Continued on page # ) #, NO. # galaxy by Lloyd Biggie, Jr. by Fritz Leiber by H. Beam Piper by Walter S. Tevis by Harry Harrison by Evelyn E. Smith by Roger Dee by Willy Ley A Century of New Animals by H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale H. L. to the Editor #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. ( Continued from page # ) yet exist. We had our soapbox cars and other makeshift toys, including discarded eggbeaters and such from the kitchen, and we never suspected or missed the dazzlesome gadgets of today. Even if we had, though, we'd have kept it to ourselves; we'd only have been inviting still more tiresome reminders of how much harder our elders' childhoods were than ours. Envy seems a mean emotion for an adult to have, but it shouldn't need an apology. Older generations did have less in their youth and, contrasting it with the next generation's engorgement, they couldn't possibly see how a child could own so many things and not know what to play with. Naturally, we've outgrown the desire for toys, but here is the blunt truth -- we wish we'd had them as children. That envy is very visible to me in the case of science fiction. I recall digging doggedly for it along the bookshelves of public libraries; there was hardly any and that bit hidden well among general titles. Instead of having to hunt, children now have to dodge. What with toys, books, magazines, comics, radio, TV, movies and princely allowances, it does seem as if we have more to envy than any previous generation. But what will our kids face? The thought that they'll tell their youngsters how little they had to play with may seem preposterous, but is it? Toys are an excellent index to a civilization; they're non-functioning replicas of devices in common use -- as a rule. The exception, of course, is the element of fantasy in play and playthings. If an alien race tried to analyz our civilization via toys and books, it would have to conclude that we are gunmen and have space travel. As technology advances and the number of gadgets increases, so must playthings become more numerous and complex. It would be absurd to expect one without the other. What will our grandchildren play with? To know that, you'd have to be able to outguess progress. But you may be sure that toys will at the very least keep abreast of science. Now add the certainty that we'll reach other planets within a single generation. Lord knows what we'll find there in the way of artifacts, pets and plants. But whatever we find, the kids of that day will have either as imports or imitations. I feel sorry in advance for their parents, who'll yelp in vexation, "A whole solar menagerie and you don't know what to play with? Why, when I was your age -- " Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here  Add #c Foreign Postage For # or #c each  Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Name... Address City State If nobody up there liked the barbaric natives of this backward little planet... why couldn't Skarn come to prey and at least stay to scoff? karn twisted abruptly on the soft expanse of his bed and sat up. A glance at the pinktinted indicator told him that the Time of Sleep was no more than half expired. He stretched himself, yawned and rubbed his eyes. "Strange," he murmured. "Perhaps it was that sliff I had for dinner." He immediately rejected this idea as an assumption unworthy of a distinguished psychologist and padded softly into his laboratory. His lecture notes lay stacked neatly on his desk. He thumbed through the metallic sheets, mildly surprised that he felt no trace of fatigue. His mind was alert; his ideas flowed with sparkling clarity. He stood for a moment, looking thoughtfully at his notes, and then he slipped into his flowing professorial robes and mounted the lectern which stood in all its imposing grandeur in one corner of the laboratory. He pressed a button and waited. Throughout the length and breadth of the great university city of Kuln, he knew, oaths and screams of dismay would be curdling the air as hundreds of students were tumbled from their beds by their tingling wrist bands. They would scramble for their viewers, asking themselves, "What's the old fool up to now?" The thought pleased him. He was not cruel like some of his colleagues, who took fiendish delight in tormenting their students during the Time of Sleep. Never in his long academic career had he imposed upon his students. But it might be an interesting psychological experiment, he told himself, to see how much knowledge a sleepfogged mind could absorb. He would deliver one of his more difficult lectures and follow it immediately with an examination. If the results were interesting enough, he would make some comparative experiments and perhaps collect enough data for a book. He waited the minimum time which custom allowed him, and began. "Lecture nine hundred seventytwo. The effect of radiation impulses on motor pathways of the subconscious." He hesitated. His own wrist band tingled sharply, almost painfully. With a sudden rush of panic, he understood what it was that had awakened him. He bounded away, scrambled back to the lectern to announce, "To be continued," pressed the cancellation button and hurried off to his own viewer. The face that stared out at him was drawn and haggard. It was the Prime Minister, and Skarn could easily guess who it was that had disturbed his sleep. The Prime Minister scowled and said enviously, "You are looking well, Skarn." "Likewise," Skarn said politely. 'I am not looking well. I am looking miserable. I'm tired." "Naturally," Skarn agreed. "An Imperial Assignment. You will begin immediately."  fully. Such an honor did not come more than two or three times in the entire span of living. "I shall serve eagerly," he said. "May I inquire..." "You may," said the Prime Minister. "A patrol ship has discovered another inhabited planet. His Imperial Majesty desires a specimen of the dominant life-form for the Royal Collection." Skarn stirred uneasily and a bluish flush of irritation tinged the smooth white flesh of his face. "I am no pickier of lizards," he growled. "That you are not," the Prime Minister acknowledged. "May I inquire..." "You may. The dominant lifeform on the planet is intelligent." "I still fail to comprehend why a psychologist..." "The Rule of the Door applies." Skarn scratched his bald head thoughtfully and hoped he was not making a fool of himself. "That Rule is unfamiliar to me," he admitted. "May I inquire..." "You may. The Rule of the Door was propounded by the Great Kom when an Imperial Ancestor of His Imperial Majesty desired a specimen of an intelligent life-form." Skarn bowed deeply at the mention of the venerable psychologist of psychologists. "It is no doubt an excellent Rule." "It has been canonized, along with the other magnificent Rules propounded by the Great Kom. However, this being only the second time in countless glims that an Imperial Majesty has requested an intelligent specimen, the Rule has not been much used." "Naturally," Skarn said. "In fact, the Rule is no longer included in the Canon of Rules. Were it not for the superb memory of His Imperial Majesty's Prime Minister, the Rule would not have been followed at this crisis." "You are to be congratulated." "His Imperial Majesty has already done so." Skarn waited expectantly, and when the Prime Minister volunteered no more information, he began, "May I inquire..." "You may. The content of the Rule has been lost." "In my most respectful opinion, the Rule can then be followed only with extreme difficulty." "His Imperial Majesty does not minimize the difficulty. It was this problem that caused him to summon such a distinguished psychologist as yourself. At my suggestion, of course. Your task is to rediscover the content of the Rule of the Door, to follow it scrupulously, and to obtain for His Imperial Majesty the desired specimen." Skarn bowed. "I shall direct all of my humble talent to the task." "Naturally," the Prime Minister said. "You will, of course, be granted an unlimited expense account." "Naturally. I shall also require unlimited time." "Naturally." "I shall also," Skarn said, licking his lips in anticipation, "require Imperial permission to search the Sacred Archives." "Naturally. I shall expect your presence at the Imperial Palace immediately." The viewer darkened. Skarn manipulated the dials, saw the blue acceptance light flash, and stepped through to the Imperial Palace. Skarn prowled the Sacred Archives. He sifted rapidly through pile after pile of metallic sheets. He found the lost Theorems of Wukim. He came upon the legendary Speculations of Kakang. And finally, in a damp corner, he discovered a stack of sheets as tall as himself which were the notebooks of the Great Kom. Duty and curiosity struggled briefly in his mind, until he effected a deft psychological compromise. He read through the notebooks with reverent care, but only until he found the Rule of the Door. No further. He carried two of the sheets to have impressions made, sadly returned the originals to the Sacred Archives, and sought out the Prime Minister. "I have found the content of the Rule of the Door," he announced. "Excellent. Your name shall appear high on the next achievement citations. What is the content?" Skarn bowed. "I do not entirely understand it, but this much is apparent: the Rule of the Door consists of -- a Door. Here. I have impressions of the notes of the Great Kom." The Prime Minister squinted at the ancient script. "It is a fitting tribute to the logic of the Great Kom that the Rule of the Door should consist of a Door. You can read this?" "Much of it is clear to me," Skarn admitted cautiously. "I see. And the diagram. Now this would be an ancient model of a matter transmitter." "Naturally. And this, you see, is the Door. The desired specimen steps through the Door and is immediately transmitted -- perhaps to a self-sealing specimen bottle." "The Door appears to be strangely complicated." "Naturally. It involves, you see, a thought-wave analyzer and a subconsciousness prober. This would be an ancient model of a personality computer. The other instruments are strange to me. But here -- this would be the central data computer, which makes the final decision." "Amazing." "In his inestimable wisdom, the Great Kom realized that the disruption of the life process of an intelligent being was not a project to be undertaken impulsively. He formulated a series of maxims, you see. 'Spare the humble one, for his nature is sublime. Spare the wise one, for his nature is rare. Spare the one who loves others more than himself, for love is the ultimate meaning of life. Spare the head of a family, for his loss would injure many. Spare the weak one, for his weakness renders him harmless. Spare the generous one, for his acts merit kindness? There is much more. Some of it I do not understand." "The Rule of the Door must be extremely difficult to apply," the Prime Minister mused. "Praise be to the Great Kom, we do not have to apply the Rule. We have only to build the Door, and the Door will select a proper specimen for His Imperial Majesty." The Prime Minister clapped his hands. "Excellent! You will proceed at once to this planet and build the Door." I I HE citizens of Centertown, Indiana, were agog with excitement. A veritable mansion was being erected on the outskirts of their fair community. The owner was, it was said, a retired Texas oil escaped from his irate subjects with a fortune and a few paltry dozen of his wives and was settling in Indiana. Or a wealthy manufacturer who was going to develop their town into a sprawling metropolis. Whoever he was, he was in a hurry. Centertown was sorely taxed to supply the necessary labor force. Men were imported from Terre Haute, and a Terre Haute contractor put in a winding asphalt drive through the trees to the top of the wooded hill where the house was taking shape. On Sunday afternoons, the population turned out en masse to inspect and comment on the week's progress. As the mansion neared completion, the general reaction was one of disappointment. It was large but not spectacular. Its architecture was conservative. Several of Centertown's moderately wealthy boasted more elaborate dwellings. But the inside -- ah, there was something to talk about! The good  citizens of Centertown hung eagerly on the words of the carpenters who described it. There was no basement, and except for a lavatory and a small utilities room, most of the first floor was a vast living room. And the owner had a positive mania for closets and doors. Along one entire wall of that spacious living room were closets, large, windowless closets. The doors were structural monostrosities, fully two feet thick, which functioned strangely and were hung with an odd type of hinge no one had ever heard of. And the doors opened inward. Who ever heard of a closet with a door that opened inward? There were eleven of these closets, and the center closet was left unfinished and doorless. Clearly, this new resident of Centertown was a most peculiar person. If the workmen were to be believed, he even looked peculiar. And the painters, returning from putting the finishing touches on the living room, added another element of mystery. Overnight, a door had been placed on the central closet. A locked door.  Skarn to the people of Centertown, took up his residence in the new house on a crisp fall day and led a newly arrived, shivering assistant on a tour of inspection. Skarn was less than pleased with his assistant. The squat, ill-tempered Dork Diffack was grumpy, insulting and generally obnoxious. He was also treacherous. Skarn knew that Dork would be immensely pleased if the Assignment ended in failure, since the disgrace would be Skarn's. He also knew that he could not fail, praise be to the Great Kom. Dork snorted disdainfully and turned back toward the house. "Abominable climate," he growled. "And these barbarians -- I must admit they have intelligence, since they have a civilization of sorts, but it can't be much intelligence." "Nevertheless," Skarn said, "they are intelligent, so the Rule of the Door must apply." "Intolerable nonsense. Why go to all this bother and expense to collect a specimen? Why not just pack one off and have done with it? There are enough of the creatures running around here." Dork glanced back toward the highway, where several cars were parked, their occupants staring at the house. "The patrol captain could have done it," he went on. "It's a pretty mess when men of our distinction have to go chasing around the Galaxy just to satisfy old Kegor's whims about his Biological Museum." "His Imperial Majesty," Skarn said sternly, "does not have whims."' Dork, being a native of the outlying planet of Huzz, was given to displaying a lack of respect for His Imperial Majesty. He also displayed a lack of respect for Skarn -- motivated, of course, by jealousy over the fact that Skarn's professorship at the Royal University was vastly superior to the one Dork held on Huzz. Dork was competent enough, though, in his way, and praise be to the Great Kom, the Assignment shouldn't take long. "I never heard of this Rule of the Door on Huzz," Dork said. "It seems to be unknown to the outlying planets," Skarn replied. "But then there had been no reason for its use for so long that it was almost forgotten even on the Mother Planet. It seems to have been invoked only once, and that during the Great Korn's lifetime." crossed the expanse of living room. Dork gave the Door a disrespectful kick. "Built precisely to the Great Korn's specifications, I suppose." "Precisely," Skarn said. "Well, you said the servants will be here tomorrow. Maybe one of them will blunder through it and then we can go home." Skarn smiled. "It is not quite that simple. The qualifications are rather restrictive, you know." "I have read the content of the Rule," Dork said haughtily. "Do you imagine for one moment that these barbarians possess such qualities as love and wisdom and generosity?" "Yes," said Skarn. "Yes, I do." "Anyway, that's, not our problem. The Door will decide." "True," Skarn said. "But there is a problem. The Great Kom designed the Door for the inhabitants of a world that is unknown to us. These -- ah -- barbarians may have an entirely different mental makeup. That would mean that we would have to adapt the Door to them, and I must confess that I don't see how to go about it. Some of the mechanism is exceedingly strange." "How do you know the Great Kom did not design the Door for the inhabitants of this world?" Skarn blinked. "I suppose that is possible. I hadn't thought of it." "Everything else is arranged?" "Completely. We have only to throw the activating switch. The relay stations are set up and operating. Once the Door accepts a specimen, it is immediately transmitted all the way to the Royal Museum. It is sealed into a specimen bottle before it knows what's happened, and that's the end of it." "How do you propose to go about adapting the Door?" Skarn got out a package of cigarettes, fumbled awkwardly with a cigarette lighter and got one lit. He took a deep puff and went into a fit of coughing. Dork glared at him disdainfully, and Skarn ignored him. He found the taste abominable and the effect on his throat distressing, but the idea of blowing smoke from his mouth and nose intrigued him. He had seen a carpenter blowing smoke rings and he was determined to acquire that skill himself. He would acquire it, even if he had to transport a quantity of these odd objects back to the Royal University and spend the rest of his life span practicing. "I don't know that the Door will have to be adapted," he said. "I only acknowledge that possibility. We must expose the Door to a large number of these creatures and study the reactions of the instruments. If the instruments react normally, we should be able to proceed. If not, perhaps suitable adjustments will occur to us." Dork sneered. "And I suppose sent themselves to us for study. We have only to issue an invitation and they will come and form a line in front of the Door." "Something like that," Skarn agreed. "We merely announce an odd ceremony which these natives call 'open house.' It seems to be a well-established custom. I understand that a great many natives will respond eagerly." "I suppose there's no harm in trying it," Dork said, a bit grudgingly. house was a tremendous social success. The entire population of Centertown and the surrounding territory attended. The wooded hill was packed with cars, the highway was lined with parked cars, and the State Police had to call in reinforcements to keep the traffic moving. Jonathan Skarn, eccentric old gentleman that he was, stationed himself in the front yard, greeted all the visitors warmly, and told them to go right in and make themselves at home. This they did, and after a rapacious assault on the heavily laden refreshment tables, they swarmed through the house. Without exception, they emerged disappointed. The door to the upstairs was kept locked. The utilities room and the lavatory were, after all, just a utilities room and a lavatory. And the living room, for all its unusual size and expensive furnishings, was not, as a bright high school student remarked, anything to write home about. Since the quaint Mr. Skarn remained outside, and since the servants were busily engaged in supplying the refreshment tables -- without, however, neglecting to keep the upstairs door locked -- the guests pried into all of the strange, empty closets, marveled at the thick doors, and congregated in large numbers around the center door that looked exactly like the others, but refused to open. Dork disgustedly watched their antics in a viewer, and kept a sharp eye on his busily recording instruments. And at the end of the day, he announced to Skarn that they had collected sufficient data. The last of the guests had departed, the servants had restored a semblance of order to the house and wearily headed homeward, and Skarn and Dork relaxed on hassocks in the laboratory and studied the information which drifted slowly across a wall screen. "These creatures are little more than animals," Dork declared. "But then we might expect that, from their hideous patches of hair, and their odors, and the fact that they occasionally kill one another, individually or collectively. They hate, they are dominated by greed and jealousy, and I'd say they're totally lacking in wisdom. Most of all, they lust. It's thoroughly obnoxious. I didn't find a single creature that the Door would reject." Skarn was attempting to smoke a cigar. The natural bluish tint to his face had deepened to a violent purple and he felt ill. He coughed out a cloud of smoke and regarded the cigar warily. "Then our task should be a simple one," he said. "You," Dork exclaimed, "are fully as disgusting as these natives! Must you do that?" "It is important that we understand the ways of these creatures," Skarn said complacently. "Surely we can understand without degrading ourselves!"  an ashtray. A touch of a button and it disappeared. The apparent ingenuity of the device, and its basic crudeness, delighted him. "Whatever else these creatures may be," he said, "they are not simple." He reached for another cigar. "I tested the Door this morning with the servants," said Dork. Skarn whirled about quickly and dropped his cigar. "Without consulting me?" "It rejected them. I've noticed how they will try to open it, now and then, perhaps thinking we may have left it unlocked. So, while they were arranging the food, I activated the Door. Both of them tried it." "Of course," Skarn said scornfully. "Why do you think I had this house built? These creatures are intelligent. That means they are curious. Already the workmen have spread the word about my mysterious Door. There is not a single creature, young or old, who would not attempt to open it if he had a chance. But I want this understood -- I am in charge of this Assignment. The Door is not to be activated except by my orders." Dork's eyes gleamed hatred, but he gestured indifferently. "How many glims do we sit around waiting before you decide to use the Door?" "We must proceed cautiously. If the Door had accepted one servant with the other one present -- " "What does it matter? We can make our own departure as soon as we've found a specimen. We'll leave nothing that would reveal our origin." "No," Skarn said. "We must not attract suspicion to ourselves. There must be no witnesses when the Door accepts a specimen. And we must wait a suitable period of time so that our departure will not be connected with the disappearance. These creatures may some day learn to transmit themselves. We do not want to leave the impression that they have enemies on other worlds. Those are stern orders from His Imperial Highness himself." "So how do we proceed?" Skarn unlocked his desk and removed a monumental stack of papers. He dropped it on the floor, restacked it when it toppled over, and regarded it wearily. "I have located an oddly functioning organization which calls itself a detective agency. It is furnishing me with detailed reports on every inhabitant of Centertown and the entire surrounding countryside. We have only to go through the reports and ask ourselves, Is this creature humble? Is he wise? Is he the head of a family? And so on. We shall select the few who seem best-qualified and invite them, one at a time, to be our guests. Their curiosity will impel them to try the Door. It will certainly accept one of them. We shall take action to divert suspicion from ourselves, and after a suitable waiting period, we shall dispose of our house and leave." "It is well arranged," Dork said enviously. "But what a frightful bother just to capture a specimen for old Kegor!" HP HE instruments of the Door -- those Skarn and Dork were familiar with -- reacted normally to the natives. Those with which they were not familiar reacted, normally or not, they could not say. They tested the transmitter relay, sending through a stray dog, a cat, and an assortment of live creatures that Skarn obtained from a neighboring farmer. The Director of the Royal Museum reacted promptly. Relay working perfectly. All specimens received in excellent condition and already on display. His Imperial Majesty highly pleased. Now -- where is the specimen of the intelligent creature? Skarn advised the Director to expect it momentarily. He closed the Door and attached a small metal plate that advised, "Push." He activated the Door and stood in front of it, listening to the purring of the instruments. He cautiously attempted to push it himself and found that it would not open. Everything was ready. With Dork, he spent hours sifting through the stack of reports. Three-fourths were immediately eliminated -- a figure that Skarn thought spoke well for these natives. The remaining fourth they studied, compared and debated. They reduced their list to a hundred names, to fifty, and finally to ten. Each of the ten they compared conscientiously with the maxims of the Great Kom. In the end, they had four names. "I don't think this was necessary," Dork said. "But perhaps you are right. This may be the more efficient approach. Certainly the Door will accept any of these promptly." Skarn nodded and shuffled the reports. He was learning to smoke a pipe. Already the effort had cost him five teeth, and new teeth had not yet grown in. His mouth pained him as he grimly clutched at the pipe stem. Whenever he used his hand to support the bowl, he burned himself. He bit down hard on the stem, winced at the pain, and carefully removed it. He attempted a smoke ring, but the smoke poured forth in a turbulent cloud. He read through the four reports again. The Honorable Ernest Schwartz, Mayor of Centertown. Married. He and his wife hated each other devoutly. He had no children, no family dependent upon him. There were multitudinous rumors about him, to be gleaned everywhere around Centertown. He was a liar. He was also a thief. He had betrayed the trust of his office repeatedly to enrich himself. He had betrayed his friends. He was greedy and evil. He held affection for no one. He had carried on affairs with the wives of his friends, and pushed his own wife into an affair for his political advantage. He seemed to bewitch the voters at election time. Skarn frowned. Election time? He would have to investigate that. Whatever it meant, bewitching the voters seemed an immoral thing to do. He turned to the next report. Sam White, Centertown Chief of Police. A bachelor, with no known relatives. He kept his job, it was said, by helping the mayor along with his crooked schemes. Some of his police officers called him a petty tyrant. He was adept at obtaining confessions. He had several times been accused of brutality toward prisoners. Jim Adams, the Centertown drunk. He never worked, lived off his wife's meager earnings, and beat his family mercilessly, drunk or sober. Technically, he was the head of a family; actually, the family would be far better off without him. Elmer Harley, a ne'er-do-well mechanic. A good mechanic, it was said, when he worked at it. He had been convicted and served jail terms for several crimes. Terra Haute police had given him a standing order to stay out of town. Centertown tolerated him warily. He had no family and no friends. He worked when he could, if he felt like it, at either of Centertown's two garages. One of the proprietors liked him, it was said, because he was skilled at padding repair bills. That proprietor would have stood high on Skarn's list, were it not for the fact that he verifiedly loved his wife and children. "When do we start?" Dork asked. Skarn removed his pipe from his lips, and made another blundering attempt at a smoke ring. "Tomorrow. I'll ask this Mayor Schwartz to have dinner with me." f  I HE Honorable Ernest Schwartz arrived precisely on time, driving a flashy late-model car. Skarn met him at the door, shook his hand politely and ushered him into the living room. He took the mayor's coat, hat and cane to one of the closets, and turned to face his guest. Schwartz was a big man, hearty, robust, his hair shining black despite his sixty years. He wore a mustache, trimmed meticulously. He stood looking about the living room, making commonplace compliments about the house, and his booming laugh filled the room. Skarn regarded him strangely. He was seeing him, not as the Honorable Mayor of Centertown, Indiana, but as a specimen in sealed plastic in the Royal Museum. He was seeing him as one of a long row of bottled monstrosities that His Majesty's patrol ships had sent in from a multitude of planets. He was seeing His Majesty himself, cackling with delight, leading a noisy crowd of visiting dignitaries through the displays, stopping to point out Mayor Schwartz's ridiculous black hair, his mustache, his odd clothing, the sparkling cuff links, the gold chain that hung from his vest pocket. It seemed wrong. Alien as it was, Skarn could sense the man's personal charm. He was friendly. He was obviously intelligent. Skarn shrugged. The decision was not his to make. The Door would decide. "Excuse me, please," he said. "I do not like to entertain with servants around. I'll bring the food myself. If you'll make yourself comfortable..." "Why, certainly," Schwartz boomed. "Anything I can do to help?" "No, thank you. I can manage nicely." Skarn joined Dork in the laboratory and the two of them sat watching Schwartz in the viewer. Dork was jubilant. "What a specimen he'll make," he gloated. "He's a big one. Do you suppose the specimen bottle will be big enough?" "It held that thing they call a calf," Skarn said. "It should hold him." Schwartz had taken a seat, but the reflected light from the sign on the Door caught his attention. He got calmly to his feet, crossed the room and read the label. The sign instructed him to push. He pushed. The Door resisted him firmly. Dork exploded into an involved series of Huzzian oaths. "I would have sworn that there isn't a creature in our files better qualified than that one." Skarn was thoughtful. "So it would seem. We must have made a mistake. Perhaps I can find out about it. If you care to watch..." "Not me. His laugh gives me a headache. I'm going to bed." Skarn lowered a serving cart and wheeled it into the living room. The mayor hurriedly got to his feet and helped him place the dishes on the table. They took their places and Skarn poured the cocktails. The mayor raised his glass and said seriously, "May your residence in Centertown be a long and happy one." "Thank you," Skarn said, feeling strangely moved. Skarn uncovered the dishes, and the mayor sniffed hungrily. "I have a confession to make," he said. "The real reason I jumped at this invitation was that I knew you'd hired Lucy Morgan." Skarn, still struggling to accustom himself to the odd food these natives delighted in, said indifferently, "She seems capable." "Man, she's marvelous! She used to work for me." "Indeed? But then, if you liked the food she prepared, why didn't you keep her in ,your employment?" The mayor scowled. "Women get funny notions. That was years ago. Lucy was just in her early twenties then, and my wife couldn't get it through her head that it was Lucy's cooking that I was interested in. You married yourself?" "Not now," Skarn answered cautiously. The mayor nodded and helped himself to steak. He concentrated on his food and talked a little between mouthfuls, mainly about Centertown. Skarn ate sparsely and tried to appear interested. "I appreciate this," the mayor said suddenly. "Don't often get a quiet evening. The mayor's time belongs to everyone, day or night. Complaints about taxes, or the garbage service, or a hole in the street, or anything else. Each time I'm elected, I swear it'll be the last time. But here I am -- ten straight terms I've served, and I'll probably go on until I die. Unless the voters decide to throw me out." "I don't understand this matter of election," Skarn said. "We do not have it where I come from." "I figured you were one of these refugees. Well, it seems simple to us, but I suppose it really isn't. Two or three men run for mayor, and the people vote, and the one that gets the most votes is elected. For two years. Then there's another election and the defeated candidates try again. Or maybe some new candidates. All it amounts to is that the people decide who runs things -- those of them that take the trouble to vote." "This voting is not required?" "Purely voluntary. Sometimes the turnout isn't so hot."  deep frown. "Wouldn't it be simpler just to have your -- " he thought a moment and attempted a translation -- "Director of Vocational Assignments appoint a mayor?" "You're thinking of the city manager sort of thing," the mayor said. "Some places have them, but it's usually the city council that does the appointing. Then, of course, they usually have mayors, too." Skarn squirmed uncomfortably and tried again. "Your Director of Vocational Assignments..." "We haven't got anything like that." Skarn formulated his question carefully. "Who assigns the vocations?" "Nobody. People work at what they want to, if they can do it, or at what they can get. It isn't like those Iron Curtain countries. If a man doesn't like his job, or his boss, or if he can get something better, he quits. The people run the show here. Sometimes they get the wool pulled over their eyes, but not for long." "But you're going to be mayor until you die?" "I suppose it'll work out that way, unless the people throw me out." "When are you going to die?" The mayor winced. "For God's sake!" he bellowed, and dissolved in laughter. "How do I know? I might get hit by a car on the way home, or drop dead from overeating. Or I might live to be a hundred. What a question!" Skarn's thoughts whirled dizzily. The ideas were too much for him and he couldn't cope with them. He leaned back, staring at the mayor. "I came up the hard way," the mayor said. "I made my money honestly and I went into politics honestly. I've kept my hands about as clean as a politician can keep them. Most of the people know that, which is why they vote for me. It's petty politics. I'm just a big frog in a small puddle here and I like it that way. I know everyone personally and everyone knows me. Every time a new baby is born, I have a new boss. I'm as happy as the proud parents. I wouldn't have it any other way. But politics is a dirty business. "Some people had it all their way before I was elected, and there are always others who'd like to have it their way. They've pulled every foul trick in the books. They've spread the damnedest lies about me. My wife just can't take those things. We were happily married until I got elected mayor, and politics has ruined my marriage. I suppose anything a man accomplishes has its price, but if I had it to do over again, I don't know. Maybe I'd do it and maybe I wouldn't." He grinned. "I'll tell you what -- I've got a book on the American system of government. I'll send it over. It explains things a lot better than I could tell them to you." "I would appreciate that," Skarn said. "I would appreciate that very much." arrived on foot to be Skarn's luncheon guest. A tall, slim, dignified man, his manner was softspoken and friendly. Skarn, on the basis of his report, had visualized him in some dismal cellar furiously lashing a stubborn prisoner. But the chief did not seem to belong in that role. Silvery-gray hair crowned a wrinkled, sympathetic face. There was gentleness in his handshake, in his mannerisms, in his voiceSkarn began to visualize him in a different setting, in a sealed specimen bottle, and felt uncomfortable. Skarii left him alone in the living room, and he and Dork watched anxiously from the laboratory. The chief shocked them thoroughly by disdaining to so much as try the Door. Later, Skarn lured him into making the attempt by asking his assistance in opening it. And the Door ignored him. After lunch, they sat together on the sofa and talked and smoked, the chief describing his various interests with dry humor and Skarn listening intently. Did Skarn ever do any fishing? Or hunting? "I'll take you with me the next time I go out," the chief said. "If you're interested, that is." Skarn was interested. "Ever play any chess?" Skarn did not know the game. "Drop in sometime when you're uptown. Things are usually pretty quiet around the police department of a town this size. I'll teach you." The chief sent a smoke ring sailing across the room, and Skarn looked .after it enviously. His own effort was a formless catastrophe. When Skarn had stopped coughing, the chief said gently, "You go at it the wrong way. You can't make a smoke ring by blowing. You have to do it with your mouth. Look." Skarn watched, made the effort, and failed. "Try it again," the chief suggested. Skarn tried. His tenth effort was a definite smoke ring, wobbly, lopsided and short-lived, but still a ring. Skarn watched it with delight. "Keep working at it," the chief said. "A little practice and you'll be an expert." "I will," Skarn promised, and felt forever beholden to him. Afterward, Dork stormed angrily about the laboratory, and Skarn restudied his reports. "The Detective Agency is in error," he announced. "Those men are not evil." "Just how do we know the Detective Agency is not in error on all the reports?" "We don't," Skarn said. "We will have to keep trying and find out for ourselves." evening, shabby, unshaven, torment in his eyes. He extended a trembling hand for Skarn to shake and whined, "I need a drink. Haven't had one today. Will you give me a drink?" Skarn patted his back gently. "Of course. You can have all you want." He led the small, stumbling figure into the living room. "I keep it there -- in the center closet. You help yourself while I'm bringing the food down." Adams pushed at the door. He hurled his weight against it. He shrieked and kicked and clawed and finally slumped to the floor and sobbed brokenly, and Skarn and Dork watched with sick disgust. And still the Door would not open. Skarn went back down with the food and a supply of liquor. Adams ate little and drank much, drank himself into a reeking, slobbering intoxication, and finally passed out. Skarn worked over his unconscious body doubtfully and finally became alarmed enough to call Sam White. "I have Jim Adams here for dinner," he said, "and -- " The chief chuckled. "Say no more. I'll send someone to collect him." Adams' inert form was hauled away, and Skarn felt both relieved and puzzled. "And just how do you account for the Door's rejecting him?" Dork demanded. "I don't," Skarn said. "I can't account for it at all." belligerently on the door, and he stood in the doorway and made no motion to accept Skarn's outstretched hand. "Mind telling me why you asked me out here?" Skarn studied him gravely. He was a muscular man of medium height. His dark hair was cut short. A fine scar line curved around his left cheek. His suit was worn, but freshly pressed. He was cleanshaven, neat-looking. "I'm getting acquainted with some of the people of Centertown," Skarn said anxiously. "I hope that the invitation does not offend you." Harley shrugged and held out his hand. "Just wondered. I heard you had Jim Adams up here." "Why, yes, I did." "And Sam White and the mayor?" "Yes." "And now me. It doesn't make sense to me." Skarn smiled and escorted him into the living room. "How much of life does make sense?" "You said a mouthful there." "I'll bring the food down. The liquor is in the middle closet. Pick out what you'd like to have." Harley nodded. A moment later, watching from the laboratory, Skarn and Dork saw him push once on the Door, hard, and then walk over to a sofa and sit down. Dork stomped off to his bedroom, and Skarn returned to the living room with the serving cart. "The door's locked," Harley said. "It doesn't have a lock," Skarn replied. "I'm afraid it's stuck. I've been having trouble with it." Harley jumped to his feet. "That so? I'll take another look." He applied his shoulder to the door, and fell back a minute later, red-faced and breathing heavily. "It's really stuck. If you have some tools, I'll see what I can do about it." "It's not that important," Skarn said. But Harley had turned to the next closet. He pushed the thick door inward and stood staring at the hinges. "That's really slick. Slides the door back and then lets it open. Is the other door hung like this one?" "Why, yes," Skarn said. "Let's see what could have gone wrong." slowly, watching the action of the hinges. "Really slick," he said, "I don't see how anything could have gone wrong. Did you make these things yourself?" "Yes," Skarn lied, beginning to feel embarrassed. "You ought to patent them. You could make some money out of them." "I'm afraid not many people use doors this thick." "There are lots of places they might be used, with a hinge like that. Safes and refrigerators, things like that. If I was you, I'd patent it." "Thank you. I'll consider it," Skarn said. "Our food will be getting cold." Harley concentrated on his food and ate hungrily. Afterward, he settled himself in an overstuffed chair and talked about automobiles, and Skarn listened attentively and managed an occasional smoke ring. Harley knew automobiles. He discussed them collectively and individually, their good points and weak points, their trade-in values, their economy or lack of it, where they were most likely to break down, and why. "When you get around to buying a car," he said, "ask me. I can keep you from going wrong on a new one, and if it's a used one, I can tell you if you're getting your money's worth." "I'll remember that," Skarn promised. "I've heard that you are a very good mechanic." "I get by." "There doesn't seem to be much for a good mechanic to do in Centertown." "Not with the crooks that run the garages here," Harley said grimly. Skarn studied him. He could not see him as the man the report described. He could not see him in a specimen bottle. "If you had your life to live over," he said, "is there anything you'd do differently?" Harley smiled wistfully. "There isn't much I'd do the same." "For example?" "I pulled a couple of jobs when I was younger. Small stuff, but I did some time. Now, whenever anything happens, the police come looking for me. Ex-con, you know. I can't get a decent job. I should never have come back to Centertown, but my mother was here, and my getting into trouble nearly killed her. I couldn't make a home for her anywhere else, just coming out of the pen that way, so I came back here to look after her. She died four years ago and I'm still here. In a rut." tory after Harley left. "I heard," said Dork. "He loved his mother. That is considered an overpowering virtue among these creatures." "Perhaps so," Skarn said. "Invite one of them back," Dork urged earnestly. "Any one. We can put the door on manual and shove him through and have done with it. This planet won't be any worse than it is without him, and he certainly won't do any harm in old Kegor's museum. And we can go home." "No," Skarn said firmly. "We must not contest the wisdom of the Great Kom." "What are you going to do now?" "I don't know. I must think the matter out carefully. Perhaps there are no evil creatures in this Centertown. We may have to search elsewhere." Dork got to his feet and paced the laboratory, his squat figure leaning forward at a tense angle, his eyes blazing angrily, his face a violent shade of blue. "All right. You are in charge. But I am going to continue to invite these creatures here and have them try the Door. You can't deny me that." "No," Skarn agreed. "I see no objection to that. You may use the reports and invite anyone you like. If you don't succeed..." "I shall succeed," Dork promised. In the morning, there was a confidential message from the Prime Minister. Dork Diffack, the Prime Minister said, had sent an alarming report on Skarn's management of the Assignment. Skarn, according to the report, was deliberately avoiding the selection of a proper specimen and showing a suspicious proclivity for the ways of the natives. His Imperial Majesty was angry. It was ordered that Skarn forward a complete explanation and find the desired specimen without further delay. Skarn sent off a report on Dork's treasonable suggestion that a specimen be obtained without the Door's approval. He installed a mental lock at the controls, so Dork would be unable to place the Door on manual operation without Skarn's consent. Skarn walked down to Centertown and wandered in and out of the stores, making casual purchases and attempting to engage the clerks in conversation. They all knew him -- he was certain that most of them had attended his open house -- but they seemed strangely reserved in his presence. I I I HE initial topic of conversation was always the weather. Skarn could understand that a relatively primitive civilization which had not yet learned to control the weather might regard it with awe and frustration. But he could not understand why every individual seemed to take a personal responsibility for it being the kind of day it was. "Nice day," a clerk would say. "Oh, very," Skarn would concur. He would make his purchase and ask, "Do you know Jim Adams?" "Who doesn't?" the clerk would say, and move on to the next customer. "Do I know Chief White?" a shoeshine boy said. "I ain't no criminal!" "What do I think of the mayor?" a waitress said. "I aim to vote for him. Another cup of coffee?" "Why -- ah -- yes," Skarn said, and drank it, though it nauseated him. The natives he had invited to his home had been friendly and talked freely with him. Those he encountered about Centertown were friendly enough, if Skarn approached them first, but their restraint puzzled him. What could bring about such a fundamental difference in their behavior? It was a matter for psychological speculation. Skarn ate a revolting lunch at the drugstore and then cautiously descended the worn steps to the basement of the rickety city hall, where Police Headquarters were located. Sam White was the only one in the small headquarters room. He sat with his chair tilted back, his feet on his desk. He nodded casually and pointed at a chair. "What brings you to the law?" "I am making a social call," Skarn said politely. "Make yourself comfortable. Not many people come down here unless they have something to beef about." "I suppose you meet more than your share of evil people," Skarn said. "I wouldn't say that. I really don't believe there is such a thing as an evil person. We get some bad ones now and then, but there isn't a one of them that couldn't have been straightened out if he'd been caught before he got too far out of line." "Do you really believe that?" The chief smiled. "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that  it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us. I might have written that myself, if someone hadn't beaten me to it." "Do you really believe that?" Skarn persisted. "Of course I do. Sometimes it's the only thing that keeps me going." "And yet you sometimes find it necessary to use violence on your prisoners."  with a crash. "Nobody in this department uses violence on anybody!" "But I heard..." "Sure, you heard. You hear that about police anywhere. That's a crook's last line of defense. Catch him good and the only thing he can do is try to blame something on the police. We have to be pretty damned careful to keep them from getting away with it." "I see," Skarn said. The chief returned his feet to his desk, and Skarn lit a cigarette and sent a perfect smoke ring floating across the room. The chief whistled. "You've got that down pat. What did I tell you?" "Your prediction was profoundly accurate." "I'll make another prediction. I think you'll like chess. Want to learn?" Skarn watched curiously as the chief got out the board and set the oddly shaped pieces on it. "This," the chief said, holding up a black one, "is a knight." Skarn reached for a white one, the same shape. "And I suppose this is a day." The chief flapped his arms and howled, and Skarn laughed with him, wondering why. It was dusk when Skarn walked slowly back up the hill. Dork was entertaining a guest -- a female guest. Skarn slipped up the stairway unnoticed and flipped on the living room viewer. He had carefully avoided the native females in his own tests. Their psychology seemed infinitely more complex and their motives obscured in fantastic ways. He watched while Dork talked with his female specimen. Dork gave her money, and she turned and walked resolutely over to the Door and shoved against it. It failed to open. A violent argument followed and she flung the money at Dork and left. Dork did not offer to discuss the incident and Skarn did not ask him about it. THE stores were not yet open when Skarn reached the downtown part of Centertown the next morning. He walked the length of Main Street and back again, moving slowly, finding an increasing number of faces which were familiar to him. He started back up Main Street a second time, and in front of the Center Bar he met Jim Adams. Adams squinted uncertainly at Skarn and passed a trembling hand across his face. "Oh, it's you," he said. "Jonathan Skarn. Nice morning, isn't it?" Skarn found that he slipped easily into the native patterns of conversation. "This place will open in a few minutes. May I buy you a drink?" Adams said nothing. They were the first customers, and Skarn followed Adams up to the bar, paid for the drink he ordered, and watched as he downed it greedily. "Another?" Skarn asked. Adams wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared blankly at him. Skarn nodded at the bartender, who refilled the glass. Adams stood slumped over the bar. Suddenly he clutched at the glass and flung the contents into Skarn's face. he said bitterly. "I don't need your help." Skarn accepted a paper napkin from the bartender and wiped his face dry. "Let's sit down," he said. "Is there something you'd rather have? Food, maybe?" He led Adams over to a booth. Adams squinted at him again, this time incredulous. "You ain't sore?" "I think," Skarn said, "that you are a sick man." Adams buried his face in his arms and sobbed. "When I ain't drunk, I'm a louse, because I want to get drunk. And when I'm drunk, I'm a louse." "Isn't there anything you can do about it?" "In this town? Big cities got Alcoholics Anonymous and things like that. Here there ain't nothing. Doc Winslow says go in the hospital and get cured. But that costs money, and I ain't got money. Won't ever have any, unless I get cured, and I can't get cured unless I have some. So I drink myself to death. Who the hell cares?" Skarn got to his feet and took a firm grip on Adam's arm. "Let's go and talk to your Doctor Winslow," he said. -Dr. Winslow struggled to describe hospital expenses in terms acceptable to Skarn. The doctor made a series of long-distance telephone calls. He jovially slapped Adams on the back. He shook hands with Skarn. And, at noon, Skarn was at the railroad station seeing that a somewhat bewildered Adams got aboard the train that would take him to a hospital. Mrs. Adams was there, a slight, pale-faced woman, and with her were the seven Adams children. Mrs. Adams sank to her knees before Skarn and clutched his legs tearfully. Skarn gently raised her to her feet. "It's quite all right," he said. "Jim is going to come back cured. Aren't you, Jim?" "I sure am," Adams promised. "He's been a sick man, but he's going to be all right. And then your worries will be over." "God bless you," Mrs. Adams sobbed. Skarn patted her shoulder awkwardly. "If you need anything in the meantime," he heard himself say, "don't hesitate to call on me." After the train pulled out, Skarn walked back to the Centertown Bank and arranged to have a weekly allowance paid to the Adams family. Coming out of the bank, he met Chief of Police White. The chief's hand clamped uncomfortably on Skarn's. "I heard about what you did," he said. "Word gets around fast in a small town like this." They walked together along Main Street. The president of the bank stopped to shake hands with Skarn. Faces familiar and unfamiliar smiled and spoke pleasantly. Good afternoon, Mr. Skarn. Nice day, isn't it, Mr. Skarn? You're looking well today, Mr. Skarn. In one block, Skarn was offered seven free beers, three dinners and a lodge membership. " the chief. "Jim Adams has been kind of a town problem for years. Everyone felt responsible for him, but nobody knew what to do about him. You  solved the problem at one crack. That's what happened." They paused in front of the city hall and the chief gripped Skarn's hand again. "These small towns are peculiar places," he said. "A person can come from outside and live in one for years and never make the grade. And then sometimes -- well, you're one of us now." Mayor Schwartz lumbered up, breathing heavily. "I chased you a block," he panted. "Didn't you hear me calling you?" "No, I didn't," Skarn said. "I'm very sorry if -- " "Heard what you did for Jim Adams. Wonder why some of the rest of us didn't think of it. Look, we've got a vacancy on the planning commission and I think you're just the man for it. I've talked with the council members, and if it's all right with you, we'll make it official at the meeting tonight." "I'm afraid I don't understand," Skarn confessed. "It's nothing complicated. The commission meets once a month and mostly just talks. But you're a newcomer and you might see things the rest of us have been overlooking for years, like Jim Adams. Why not give it a try? You can always resign if it's too much of an imposition." Skarn looked at the chief. The chief nodded gravely. "Why, yes," Skarn said. "I'd be honored." work in Merrel's Garage. Harley slammed down a wrench and went over and washed up before he offered to shake hands warmly with Skarn. "Naw, nobody will care if I have a beer with you," he answered Skarn's question. He followed Skarn across the street to the Center Bar. They sat down in a booth and the bartender brought two beers. Skarn took a sip and grimaced. "I heard what you did for Jim Adams," Harley said. "And -- hell, it was a fine thing to do." "Do you think he will reform?" Skarn asked. "With half a chance, I'm sure he will." "Then it was time someone did something about it." Harley nodded slowly and sipped his beer. "Jim never was a bad guy. He was weak and he got himself trapped. You thinking of reforming me?" "I had given it some thought," Skarn conceded. "I suppose it's time somebody did something about that, too." "I was thinking of opening a garage," Skarn said. "An honest garage. Do you think there's a place for one here?" "There's a place for an honest garage anywhere." "Do you think you could run one for me?" Harley half rose to his feet. "Try me!" "You look around and see if you can find a place for it and make an estimate of what you'd need." "Right away," Harley said. "As soon as I tell Merrel to go to hell." The house was dark when Skarn returned, dark upstairs and down. He did not bother with lights. He moved easily through the darkness to the laboratory, heard Dork's quick breathing, and settled on a hassock near him. Dork preferred p the darkness. He did not like the confusing alteration of night and day. On his native planet, it was always either dark or never dark, and Dork claimed that the revolutions of this primitive planet endangered his health. They sat in the gloom in silence. After a while, Skarn lit a cigarette, and Dork winced at the flash of light. "Do you have a specimen ready?" he demanded. "No," Skarn said. "Do you have one?" "I heard about what you've been doing. I've made a full report. I have a reply. You are relieved of the Assignment. You are to report back to the Mother Planet immediately -- without delay." Skarn smiled. "And you are to complete the Assignment, no doubt." "On personal orders from His Imperial Majesty." "Following the Rule of the Door explicitly, I suppose." Great Kom won't know it. What His Imperial Majesty doesn't know won't hurt him. What you say won't matter, because no one will believe you. Your handling of the Assignment has been a disgrace, Skarn Skukarn. I very much doubt that you will be allowed to fulfill your span of living." "Would you mind telling me how you plan to obtain a specimen?" asked Skarn. "I will invite your specimens back. Three of them, since you have sent one away. I'll send them all through and get away from this cursed planet." "The Door won't accept them. I doubt if it will accept any resident of Centertown." "What the Door decides won't matter. I'll operate it on manual." "I have the controls on mental lock. I won't release them to you." "You'll release them," Dork said. "There are worse penalties than death, you know." Skarn sat lost in thought. Life on the Mother Planet, and the queer ways it contrasted with life on this alien world. The young wife he had loved, and the exalted minister who had taken her from him. The work he had left unfinished in his laboratory at the Royal University. The time left of his life span. He tried to imagine how it must be for these natives, who left their life spans to chance and disease, instead of making them a matter of law. He thought, and compared, and made his decision. "These natives are friends of mine. Skarn Skukarn does not betray a friend." "I will ask for new equipment," Dork said. "Regardless of my status, I believe I can make known the reason for your request. I don't think it will be granted." Dork leaped to his feet. "What was that?" He activated the viewer and his hand closed on Skarn's arm. "Someone is downstairs." Skarn adjusted the viewer and flooded the living room with invisible light. "We have a visitor," Dork said. "Skarn, we're being robbed!" They watched the shabby figure fumble awkwardly through the darkness, feeling his way forward, clumsily moving around the furniture. A handkerchief covered the face below the eyes. "He's heard about our Door," Skarn said. "He probably thinks we keep riches behind it." Dork clapped his hands and said gleefully, "This resolves our problem. The Door will certainly accept a specimen that approaches it in an evil act." "His evil act may have a noble purpose," Skarn said. r T , HE intruder blundered his way across the room, lunged into one of the closets, came out again and moved along the wall toward the Door. Dork sucked his breath in noisily and released it in a spasm of profanity when the Door failed to move. "Set the Door on manual," he said. "I'll send him through. No one knows he's here. No one will miss him. We can get off the damnable world immediately." "The Rule of the Door... "Damn the Rule! He's an evil man, isn't he? This planet will be a better place without him, won't it?" "I don't know." "Do you know this native? Do you claim him for a friend?" "No," Skarn said. "I don't know him." "Set the Door on manual," Dork ordered. There was sneering authority in his voice. He swaggered away. Skarn sank back wearily. The Great Kom had been wiser than he had ever imagined to devise such a door. Perhaps it was never meant to open. Who could say, after all, that the Imperial Majesty of that ancient time had actually obtained an intelligent specimen by way of the Door? Perhaps in his immortal wisdom the Great Kom had devised a plan that would prevent the Imperial Majesty from obtaining a specimen. And now this -- this circumventing of the Door. It was a terrible thing. Let Dork do what he could. Skarn would not do it. He could not. In the room below, the intruder was assaulting the Door with his shoulder. The lights came on, and Dork entered the room. He raised his hands in mock fear as the thief pointed a gun at him. "Certainly I'll open it for you," he said. "Come and help me push." Dork moved toward the door, with the thief close behind him. He paused, half turned to say something, and suddenly the Door jerked open. Dork was sucked through in an instant, and the Door slammed in the face of the startled thief who beat upon it angrily.  stood there, fists clenched, his mind paralyzed with shock. At length he controlled himself and visualized what was happening, knowing that while he thought about it, it had already happened -- the body of Dork Diffack whipped at many times the speed of light from relay station to relay station across space, and sealed instantaneously into a specimen bottle at the Royal Museum, to the colossal consternation of the attendants. They would recognize him immediately, of course. But it would be too late. The secret of the Door came to Skarn clearly, and he humbly bowed to the memory of the Great Kom. The door had been attuned to the characteristics of one people, and one people only, and those people had been the inhabitants of Dork's planet of Huzz, discovered back in those remote times when ships of the Empire were first creeping outward from the Mother Planet. The Door had been designed so that only a creature like Dork would be accepted, a creature devoid of love and friendship and kindness, an evil creature, caught in an act of evil, entangled in his own sinister plot against another intelligent being. The wisdom of the Great Kom was absolute. Skarn acted quickly. He dared not return to the Mother Planet. But he liked these natives. He liked their world. He admired the freedom they enjoyed and the blend of good and bad in their characters. He had many years to live, by the way these natives measured time. He had the store of precious metals furnished him for his assignment. He had the house. He had his laboratory, small as it was. He had -- yes, in Centertown he had friends. He opened a panel in the wall and closed the switch that sent the transmitter hurtling back through space. In succession, the relay stations would fold in on each other and all return to the Mother Planet. Perhaps His Imperial Majesty would send an expedition for him; perhaps not. It didn't matter. Only Dork knew exactly where Skarn was located on this planet, and Dork's knowledge was safe for an eternity. So was Skarn. He picked up the telephone and called Sam White. "I have been reflecting upon that game which you call chess. I believe the next time I can defeat you. Is it too late to try tonight?" "Hell, no!" said the chief. "Come on over." "Shortly," Skarn said. "I have a small matter to attend to here." Skarn met the thief as he came out of the central closet. He paralyzed him with a nerve gun, took the threatening revolver and released him. The young eyes that stared at him over the handkerchief were terrified. "What happened to that guy? That closet -- it's empty!" "Of course it's empty," Skarn said. "That's why the door opened so easily. Now tell me, why is it that you need money?" drifting with the tides of life? You can learn to control your future. Individual processing Intensives. Hubbard Guidance Center, # #th Street, N. W. Washington, D. C. Seeing it in action, anybody would quaver in alarm: What hath Farnsworth overwrought? #T ET . me show you something," Farnsworth said. J He set his near-empty drink -- a Bacardi martini -- on the mantel and waddled out of the room toward the basement. I sat in my big leather chair, feeling very peaceful with the world, watching the fire. Whatever Farnsworth would have to show tonight would be far more entertaining than watching T.V. -- my custom on other evenings. Farnsworth, with his four labs in the house and his very tricky mind, never failed to provide my best night of the week. When he returned, after a moment, he had with him a small box, about three inches square. He held this carefully in one hand and stood by the fireplace dramatically -- or as dramatically as a very small, very fat man with pink cheeks can stand by a fireplace of the sort that seems to demand a big man with tweeds, pipe and, perhaps, a saber wound. Anyway, he held the box dramatically and he said, "Last week, I was playing around in the chem lab, trying to make a new kind of rubber eraser. Did quite well with the other drafting equipment, you know, especially the dimensional curve and the photosensitive ink. Well, I approached the job by trying for a material that would absorb graphite without abrading paper." I was a little disappointed with this; it sounded pretty tame. But I said, "How did it come out?" thoughtfully. "Synthesized the material, all right, and it seems to work, but the interesting thing is that it has a certain -- ah -- secondary property that would make it quite awkward to use. Interesting property, though. Unique, I am inclined to believe." This began to sound more like it. "And what property is that?" I poured myself a shot of straight rum from the bottle sitting on the table beside me. I did not like straight rum, but I preferred it to Farnsworth's rather imaginative cocktails. "I'll show you, John," he said. He opened the box and I could see that it was packed with some kind of batting. He fished in this and withdrew a gray ball about the size of a golfball and set the box on the mantel. "And that's the -- eraser?" I asked. "Yes," he said. Then he squatted down, held the ball about a halfinch from the floor, dropped it. It bounced, naturally enough. Then it bounced again. And again. Only this was not natural, for on the second bounce the ball went higher in the air than on the first, and on the third bounce higher still. After a half minute, my eyes were bugging out and the little ball was bouncing four feet in the air and going higher each time. I grabbed my glass. "What the hell!" I said. Farnsworth caught the ball in a pudgy hand and held it. He was smiling a little sheepishly. "Interesting effect, isn't it?" "Now wait a minute," I said, beginning to think about it. "What's the gimmick? What kind of motor do you have in that thing?" His eyes were wide and a little hurt. "No gimmick, John. None at all. Just a very peculiar molecular structure." "Structure!" I said. "Bouncing balls just don't pick up energy out of nowhere, I don't care how their molecules are put together. And you don't get energy out without putting energy in." "Oh," he said, "that's the really interesting thing. Of course you're right; energy does go into the ball. Here, I'll show you." He let the ball drop again and it began bouncing, higher and higher, until it was hitting the ceiling. Farnsworth reached out to catch it, but he fumbled and the thing glanced off his hand, hit the mantelpiece and zipped across the room. It banged into the far wall, richocheted, banked off three other walls, picking up speed all the time. When it whizzed by me like a rifle bullet, I began to get worried, but it hit against one of the heavy draperies by the window and this damped its motion enough so that it fell to the floor. T T started bouncing again immediately, but Farnsworth scrambled across the room and grabbed it. He was perspiring a little and he began instantly to transfer the ball from one hand to another and back again as if it were hot. "Here," he said, and handed it to me. I almost dropped it. "It's like a ball of ice!" I said. "Have you been keeping it in the refrigerator?" "No. As a matter of fact, it was at room temperature a few minutes ago." "Now wait a minute," I said. "I pnly teach physics in high school, but I know better than that. Moving around in warm air doesn't make anything cold except by evaporation." "Well, there's your input and output, John," he said. "The ball lost heat and took on motion. Simple conversion." My jaw must have dropped to my waist. "Do you mean that that little thing is converting heat to kinetic energy?" "Apparently." "But that's impossible!" He was beginning to smile thoughtfully. The ball was not as cold now as it had been and I was holding it in my lap. "A steam engine does it," he said, "and a steam turbine. Of course, they're not very efficient." "They work mechanically, too, and only because water expands when it turns to steam." "This seems to do it differently," he said, sipping thoughtfully at his dark-brown martini. "I don't know exactly how -- maybe something piezo-electric about the way its molecules slide about. I ran some tests -- measured its impact energy in foot pounds and compared that Seemed to be about # per cent efficient, as close as I could tell. Apparently it converts heat into bounce very well. Interesting, isn't it?" "Interesting?" I almost came flying out of my chair. My mind was beginning to spin like crazy. "If you're not pulling my leg with this thing, Farnsworth, you've got something by the tail there that's just a little bit bigger than the discovery of fire." He blushed modestly. "I'd rather thought that myself," he admitted. "Good Lord, look at the heat that's available!" I said, getting really excited now. ing, very pleased with himself. "I suppose you could put this thing in a box, with convection fins, and let it bounce around inside -- " "I'm way ahead of you," I said. "But that wouldn't work. All your kinetic energy would go right back to heat, on impact -- and eventually that little ball would build up enough speed to blast its way through any box you could build." "Then how would you work it?" "Well," I said, choking down the rest of my rum, "you'd seal the ball in a big steel cylinder, attach the cylinder to a crankshaft and flywheel, give the thing a shake to start the ball bouncing back and forth, and let it run like a gasoline engine or something. It would get all the heat it needed from the air in a normal room. Mount the apparatus in your house and it would pump your water, operate a generator and keep you cool at the same time!" I sat down again, shakily, and began pouring myself another drink. Farnsworth had taken the ball from me and was carefully putting it back in its padded box. He was visibly showing excitement, too; I could see that his cheeks were ruddier and his eyes even brighter than normal. "But what if you want the cooling and don't have any work to be done?" "Simple," I said. "You just let the machine turn a flywheel or lift weights and drop them, or something like that, outside your house. You have an air intake inside. And if, in the winter, you don't want to lose heat, you just mount the thing in an outside building, attach it to your generator and use the power to do whatever you want -- heat your house, say. There's plenty of heat in the outside air even in December." "John," said Farnsworth, "you are very ingenious. It might work." "Of course it'll work." Pictures were beginning to light up in my head. "And don't you realize that this is the answer to the solar power problem? Why, mirrors and selenium are, at best, ten per cent efficient! Think of big pumping stations on the Sahara! All that heat, all that need for power, for irrigation!" I paused a moment for effect. "Farnsworth, this can change the very shape of the Earth!" Farnsworth seemed to be lost in thought. Finally he looked at me strangely and said, "Perhaps we had better try to build a model." that I couldn't sleep that night. I kept dreaming of power stations, ocean liners, even automobiles, being operated by balls bouncing back and forth in cylinders. I even worked out a spaceship in my mind, a bullet-shaped affair with a huge rubber ball on its end, gyroscopes to keep it oriented properly, the ball serving as solution to that biggest of missile-engineering problems, excess heat. You'd build a huge concrete launching field, supported all the way down to bedrock, hop in the ship and start bouncing. Of course it would be kind of a rough ride... In the morning, I called my superintendent and told him to get a substitute for the rest of the week; I was going to be busy. Then I started working in the machine shop in Farnsworth's basement, trying to turn out a working model of a device that, by means of a crankshaft, oleo dampers and a reciprocating cylinder, would pick up some of that random kinetic energy from the bouncing ball and do something useful with it, like turning a drive shaft. I was just working out a convection-and-air pump system for circulating hot air around the ball when Farnsworth came in v He had tucked carefully under his arm a sphere of about the size of a basketball and, if he had made it to my specifications, weighing thirty-five pounds. He had a worried frown on his forehead. "It looks good," I said. "What's the trouble?" "There seems to be a slight hitch," he said. "I've been testing for conductivity. It seems to be quite low." "That's what I'm working on now. It's just a mechanical problem of pumping enough warm air back to the ball. We can do it with no more than a twenty per cent efficiency loss. In an engine, that's nothing." "Maybe you're right. But this material conducts heat even less than rubber does." "The little ball yesterday didn't seem to have any trouble," I said. "Naturally not. It had had plenty of time to warm up before I started it. And its mass-surface area relationship was pretty low -- the larger you make a sphere, of course, the more mass inside in proportion to the outside area." "You're right, but I think we can whip it. We may have to honeycomb the ball and have part of the work the machine does operate a big hot air pump; but we can work it out."  LL that day, I worked with hacksaw. After clamping the new big ball securely to a workbench, Farnsworth pitched in to help me. But we weren't able to finish by nightfall and Farnsworth turned his spare bedroom over to me for the night. I was too tired to go home. And too tired to sleep soundly, too. Farnsworth lived on the edge of San Francisco, by a big truck by-pass, and almost all night I wrestled with the pillow and sheets, listening half-consciously to those heavy trucks rumbling by, and in my mind, always, that little gray ball, bouncing and bouncing and bouncing... At daybreak, I came abruptly fully awake with the sound of crashing echoing in my ears, a battering sound that seemed to come from the basement. I grabbed my coat and pants, rushed out of the room, almost knocked over Farnsworth, who was struggling to get his shoes on out in the hall, and we scrambled down the two flights of stairs together. The place was a chaos, battered and bashed equipment everywhere, and on the floor, overturned against the far wall, the table that the ball had been clamped to. The ball itself was gone. I had not been fully asleep all night, and the sight of that mess, and what it meant, jolted me immediately awake. Something, probably a heavy truck, had started a tiny oscillation in that ball. And the ball had been heavy enough to start the table bouncing with it until, by dancing that table around the room, it had literally torn the clamp off and shaken itself free. What had happened afterward was obvious, with the ball building up velocity with every successive bounce. But where was the ball now? Suddenly Farnsworth cried out hoarsely, "Look!" and I followed his outstretched, pudgy finger to where, at one side of the basement, a window had been broken open -- a small window, but plenty big enough for something the size of a basketball to crash through it. There was a little weak light coming from outdoors. And then I saw the ball. It was in Farnsworth's back yard, bouncing a little sluggishly on the grass. The grass would damp it, hold it back, until we could get to it. Unless... I took off up the basement steps like a streak. Just beyond the back yard, I had caught a glimpse of something that frightened me. A few yards from where I had seen the ball was the edge of the big six-lane highway, a broad ribbon of smooth, hard concrete. I got through the house to the back porch, rushed out and was in the back yard just in time to see the ball take its first bounce onto the concrete. I watched it, fascinated, when it hit -- after the soft, energy absorbing turf, the concrete was like a springboard. Immediately the ball flew high in the air. I was running across the yard toward it, praying under my breath, Fall on that grass next time. It hit before I got to it, and right on the concrete again, and this time I saw it go straight up at least fifty feet. #Y mind was suddenly full of thoughts of dragging mattresses from the house, or making a net or something to stop that hurtling thirty-five pounds; but I stood where I was, unable to move, and saw it come down again on the highway. It went up a hundred feet. And down again on the concrete, about fifteen feet further down the road. In the direction of the city. That time it was two hundred feet, and when it hit again, it made a thud that you could have heard for a quarter of a mile. I could practically see it flatten out on the road before it took off upward again, at twice the speed it had hit at. Suddenly generating an idea, I whirled and ran back to Farnsworth's house. He was standing in the yard now, shivering from the morning air, looking at me like a little lost and badly scared child. "Where are your car keys?" I almost shouted at him. "In my pocket." "Come on!" I took him by the arm and half dragged him to the carport. I got the keys from him, started the car, and by mangling about seven traffic laws and three prize rosebushes, managed to get on the highway, facing in the direction that the ball was heading. "Look," I said, trying to drive down the road and search for the ball at the same time. "It's risky, but if I can get the car under it and we can hop out in time, it should crash through the roof. That ought to slow it down enough for us to nab it." "But -- what about my car?" Farnsworth bleated. "What about that first building -- or first person -- it hits in San Francisco?" "Oh," he said. "Hadn't thought of that." I slowed the car and stuck my head out the window. It was lighter now, but no sign of the ball. "If it happens to get to town -- any town, for that matter -- it'll be falling from about ten or twenty miles. Or forty." "Maybe it'll go high enough first so that it'll burn. Like a meteor." "No chance," I said. "Built-in cooling system, remember?" Farnsworth formed his mouth into an "Oh" and exactly at that moment there was a resounding thump and I saw the ball hit in a field, maybe twenty yards from the edge of the road, and take off again. This time it didn't seem to double its velocity, and I figured the ground was soft enough to hold it back -- but it wasn't slowing down either, not with a bounce factor of better than two to one. go up, I drove as quickly as I could off the road and overcarrying part of a wire fence with me -- to where it had hit. There was no mistaking it; there was a depression about three feet deep, like a small crater. I jumped out of the car and stared up. It took me a few seconds to spot it, over my head. One side caught by the pale and slanting morning sunlight, it was only a bright diminishing speck. The car motor was running and I waited until the ball disappeared for a moment and then reappeared. I watched for another couple of seconds until I felt I could make a decent guess on its direction, hollered at Farnsworth to get out of the car -- it had just occurred to me that there was no use risking his life, too -- dove in and drove a hundred yards or so to the spot I had anticipated. I stuck my head out the window and up. The ball was the size of an egg now. I adjusted the car's position, jumped out and ran for my life. It hit instantly after -- about sixty feet from the car. And at the same time, it occurred to me that what I was trying to do was completely impossible. Better to hope that the ball hit a pond, or bounced out to sea, or landed in a sand dune. All we could do would be to follow, and if it ever was damped down enough, grab it. It had hit soft ground and didn't double its height that time, but it had still gone higher. It was out of sight for almost a lifelong minute. And then -- incredibly rotten luck -- it came down, with an ear-shattering thwack, on the concrete highway again. I had seen it hit, and instantly afterward I saw a crack as wide as a finger open along the entire width of the road. And the ball had flown back up like a rocket. My God, I was thinking, now it means business. And on the next bounce... It seemed like an incredibly long time that we craned our necks, Farnsworth and I, watching for it to reappear in the sky. And when it finally did, we could hardly follow it. It whistled like a bomb and we saw the gray streak come plummeting to Earth almost a quarter of a mile away from where we were standing. But we didn't see it go back up again. For a moment, we stared at each other silently. Then Farnsworth almost whispered, "Perhaps it's landed in a pond." "Or in the world's biggest cowpile," I said. "Come on!" We could have met our deaths by rock salt and buckshot that night, if the farmer who owned that field had been home. We tore up everything we came to getting across it -- including cabbages and rhubarb. But we had to search for ten minutes, and even then we didn't find the ball. What we found was a hole in the ground that could have been a small-scale meteor crater. It was a good twenty feet deep. But at the bottom, no ball. full minute before I focused my eyes enough to see, at the bottom, a thousand little gray fragments. And immediately it came to both of us at the same time. A poor conductor, the ball had used up all its available heat on that final impact. Like a golfball that has been dipped in liquid air and dropped, it had smashed into thin splinters. The hole had sloping sides and I scrambled down in it and picked up one of the pieces, using my handkerchief, folded -- there was no telling just how cold it would be. It was the stuff, all right. And colder than an icicle. I climbed out. "Let's go home," I said. Farnsworth looked at me thoughtfully. Then he sort of cocked his head to one side and asked, "What do you suppose will happen when those pieces thaw?" I stared at him. I began to think of a thousand tiny slivers whizzing around erratically, richocheting off buildings, in downtown San Francisco and in twenty counties, and no matter what they hit, moving and accelerating as long as there was any heat in the air to give them energy. And then I saw a tool shed, on the other side of the pasture from us. But Farnsworth was ahead of me, waddling along, puffing. He got the shovels out and handed one to me. We didn't say a word, neither of us, for hours. It takes a long time to fill a hole twenty feet deep -- especially when you're shoveling very, very carefully and packing down the dirt very, very hard.      for your information T O begin somewhere, let us consider an utterance of a man who was just about the most famous naturalist of his time, namely Georges Leopold Chretien Frederic Dagobert, Baron de Cuvier. He is called both the Father of Paleontology and the Father of Comparative Anatomy, and during his lifetime he was Titular Professor at the Jardin des Plantes (as the Paris Zoo is still misleadingly called), Chancellor of the University of Paris and a high government official of cabinet rank. Georges Cuvier died # years ago, in #. Shortly before his death -- say, around # -- he said in the course of a lecture that the naturalists of the future would have to concentrate on extinct animals, since no new discoveries of large living animals were to be expected any more. One might say that he was statistically right, even if he was wrong otherwise. In the years since his death, several thousand species of extinct animals have been dug up and described, while only a few dozen large living animals have been discovered. And at first it must even have seemed as if Cuvier might be literally right, for two full decades went by without a noteworthy discovery. Then the "spell"' was broken by the English traveler Hodgson who, in #, reported a new large mammal from Tibet. It was the Takin (Budorcas taxicolor ), also called the Gnu Antelope and best described as a very large and heavy mountain goat of dull brown color. It is rarely seen in zoological gardens, and if a garden does acquire one, the keeper is likely to be unhappy, for the Takin exudes a penetrating and offensive smell every minute of its life.  came three more discoveries, all connected with the name of Pere (Father) Armand David. The home of all three is China and they were vaguely known to the Chinese. One of them was called beishun, which simply means "white bear" and which was said to live "in the mountains" -- this being Asia, that term can cover a very large number of square miles. When Father David finally got hold of one, it turned out (Fig. #) to be the Giant Panda ( Ailuro poda melanoleucus) ; its cousin, the Lesser Panda, had been known for about half a century and was usually called Himalaya Raccoon. The second of Father David's discoveries was a monkey. Its picture was known, because Chinese artists had painted it on vases and similar items. But it had always been thought to be just an artistic convention; a monkey with such a wildly colored fur and such a "little Lulu" nose obviously could not exist. Father David proved with skins and skeletons that it did and the scientific name became Rhinopithecus roxellanae, often referred to as the roxellana monkey or, sometimes, snow monkey. The third discovery was even more unusual. Father David knew, like everybody else, about a walled-in Imperial Hunting Park near Peking. He also knew that no Chinese emperor had actually hunted there for centuries and that it was strictly forbidden to enter it. So one day he climbed the wall to see the animals inside. Among herds of well-known game animals, Father David saw a large stag; he was sure that this animal was new to science. The Chinese called it sse-pu-hsiang which means "not like four" and is supposed to express the idea that the animal does not look like a stag, not like a horse, not like a cow and not like a goat. Another and simpler name, which became known later, is Milu. Father David obtained antlers and skin -- probably by bribing the guards; he never said how he did it -- and sent them to Paris. A gift of live specimens was then arranged through diplomatic channels and Alphonse Milne-Edwards in Paris gave the scientific name Elaphmus davidianus, popularly known as Pere David's Deer (Fig. # ). The subsequent history of Pere David's Deer is one of those stories one would not believe if one read it in a novel. Pere David's Deer existed only in the Imperial Hunting Park; it had become extinct everywhere else centuries ago. Then, in #, there was a flood and a famine and the hungry people ate all the animals in the Imperial Park. But a few specimens of Pere David's Deer had been bought by the Duke of Bedford: They have turned into a large herd, so now the animal lives only in England (plus a few of the bigger zoological gardens). A T the same time when Pere David's Deer was described in Paris, another new animal was described in England in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society. It was an antelope, the so-called Lesser Koodoo (Strepsiceros imberbis) which had lived unnoticed in East Africa. Then there was a hiatus lasting just about a decade, until #, when another Englishman by the name of Waller reported a new gazelle from Somaliland. It was a rather small animal as far as the body went, but it had long legs, almost like those of a giraffe, and a fairly long neck. The scientific name at first became Gazella walleri, which was later changed into Litocranius ("small skull") walleri. One year later, the zoological world became even more excited by a report from Russia. A Russian traveler, Nikolai Mikhailovitch Przevalski, reported that he had found a wild horse in Central Asia. Not a wild ass, which were known to exist in quite a number of places, not a feral horse (this is the term used for the wild offspring of animals), but actually a wild horse which not only had Fig. #: The Giant Panda Courtesy: Amer. Museum of Nat. History never been domesticated but had not even been known to exist. It was called Equus przevalski to the chagrin of all zoologists outside Russia, who have to learn to pronounce it as Pshe-vall-skee, with the accent on the vail. Another wild horse entered the zoological scene only a few years later, in #. It was not really meant to be a discovery; it was intended as an international goodwill token. His Majesty, the Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia, gave it as a present to the president of the French republic, whose name was Grevy. It turned out to be an unknown species of zebra, the largest of all living zebras, now known as Grevy's Zebra, or Dolichohippus grevy i. In #, there came a shout of surprise from Australia. The discovery was physically small, but important. Australia is the continent of the marsupials or pouched mammals, but most of them were large enough and numerous enough to be quickly discovered. However, one had stayed unnoticed underfoot -- literally. It was Notoryctes typhlops, the marsupial mole. Strangely enough, its fur is of a golden color of remarkable beauty. The ostrich is, as everybody Fig. #: The first picture of Pere David's Deer, published in France in #. The drawing was probably by a Chinese artist knows, the largest living bird, occurring normally in northern Africa. Its scientific name is Struthio camelus. In #, a German living in East Africa sent a live ostrich to the zoological garden in Berlin, with a note explaining that it had been caught on Massai territory. After a while, the experts felt that there was something somehow wrong and soon they put their finger on the "wrongness." The African ostrich normally has a red or reddish neck and legs. That is the northern variety. The so-called Somali ostrich has a bluish-grey neck and legs. This one, though not of the northern variety, had a red neck and red legs. Moreover, the lower half of the long neck was covered with feathers, though normally the whole neck is nearly naked. It was a new species and was named Massai Ostrich, or Struthio massaicus. iNE new bird seems to deserve another, and four years later a new and very large eaglelike bird was reported from the Philippines. It was said to eat mainly monkeys, which accounts for the scientific name of Pithecophaga (monkey-eater) jefferyi. (The name of the discoverer was Jeffery. ) Hard on the heels of the news Lepidoteuthis grimaldii and none of the monkey-eating bird came like it has been seen or caught a chance discovery, made by the since. experts on board of the yacht of I am trying to tell of these disthe then Prince of Monaco. The coveries in chronological order, but yacht was near the Azores, where there are some difficulties, local fishermen had just harpooned There is a small mammal in one of the toothed whales. The Ecuador which measures # V # animal was too large to be handled inches on the average, of which by the fishing boats and the yacht # inches are tail. It was first offered its services for towing it mentioned by R. F. Tomes in ashore. # and he wrote that this would The whale was not quite dead be a shrew if it did not have a ruand suddenly vomited the contents dimentary pouch. The trouble was of its stomach, consisting mostly that he had an immature specimen, of torn pieces of large octopi. In #, another specimen, adult Among these pieces there was a this time, was found and described damaged specimen of a seven-foot by the English zoologist Oldfield octopus that was completely unThomas. It was a New World known to science. It was named marsupial, closely related to extinct forms from Patagonia, and also related to other fossils which Georges Cuvier had found near Paris. Its name became Caenolestes (Fig. #) which translates as "new robber," with reference to the old robbers of Cuvier. If Caenolestes failed to impress the layman, the next discovery, made in #, certainly did. It was the Okapi, a short-necked relative of the giraffe which lives in the Congo Forest. Henry Stanley had heard of it some eight years earlier; the natives talked about a zebra in the forest. Zoologists snorted, for zebras do not go into the forest. By #, when pieces of skin came to London, it seemed that they had been wrong and that this particular zebra did. Two years later, skulls and complete skins became available and the zoologists were proved right again -- the animal was not a zebra and is not even striped all overr It had just happened that the striped portions of a cut-up skin had become known first. The discovery of the Okapi (Fig. #) was no doubt the greatest surprise since Father Armand David's finds. And Africa kept surprising zoologists. First, in #, the Congo Giraffe came to light. It is only a "race," not a species, but still one should not think that a giraffe could have been overlooked for so long. One year later, a very large package arrived in London from Captain Meinertzhagen of His Majesty's East African Rifles, stationed in Kenya District. It contained an imperfect large black pelt and a perfect skull from another specimen. Quickly dubbed the Giant Forest Hog, it was new to science Fig. #: The Okapi Drawing by Olga Ley Fig. #: The first picture of the Takohe, published in London in # (though natives had told Stanley about it) and merely the very largest species of wild pig in existence. Its scientific name became Hylochoerus meinertzhageni. A grown male measures six feet in length. In #, one more antelope was discovered by Buxton in the southernmost portion of Ethiopia. It was named Nyala buxtoni. mor from the Far East was confirmed. On the small island of Komodo, situated between the somewhat larger islands of Sumbawa and Flores, "dragons" had been rumored to live. In a manner of speaking, the rumor was true -- it was Varanus komodoensis, the largest of the generally large monitor lizards. The biggest actually measured was I I feet # inches long, but the natives said that larger ones had occasionally been taken away. In the last year of the First World War, another unknown mammal was reported from China for the first time, but because of war and revolution, not much attention was paid to it at the time. It was a dolphin, but one living in rivers. Its name became Lipotes is known about it. There followed a comparatively long pause of nineteen years, but then the year # brought two discoveries, one from Asia and the other from Africa. The Asian discovery was nothing less than a species of wild cattle, the Kouprey ( Bos sauveli), which had somehow managed to live unnoticed in Indochina; probably often seen, sometimes shot, but unrecognized as a scientific novelty. The African discovery was a bird and it was by no means a chance discovery. One of the "okapi expeditions" had brought, among other things, a bundle of bird feathers acquired from natives of the Congo region by trade. This bundle of feathers reached New York in # and Dr. James P. Chapin of the American Museum of Natural History sorted them out at leisure. He could determine the origin of all the feathers but one, a rather large one which just would not fit any known bird. Years later, in #, Dr. Chapin found in the Congo Museum in Tervueren (near Brussels) in Belgium two stuffed birds. They were labeled "young peacocks," but actually they were unknowns. However, they bore feathers like the one that could not be classified. Next year, Dr. Chapin shot the bird in the Congo district. It was the Congo peacock (Afropavo congensis ), which had been familiar to the natives under the name of itundu. The Congo peacock is not even especially rare! If the Congo peacock was discovered by a systematic search, the next discovery was pure chance. It was the fish now known as Latimeria, a very strange fish indeed, a so-called coelacanth which was rather well known as a fossil. But everybody was convinced that this type had become extinct some was caught by a fishing vessel off the South African East Coast in December #. It remained the only one for many years and the blame for the failure to find more was squarely put on the Second World War. Now we know that the zoologists had looked in the wrong area. The first Latimeria had been caught off East London, which is a considerable distance to the south of Madagascar. For reasons not known, it had strayed nearly # miles from its home grounds, which are the waters around the Comores Islands between the African coast and the northern tip of Madagascar. Islands, this fish from the distant geological past is not frequent. Still, it is frequent enough for the islanders to have coined a special name for it -- conbessa. Since this is French territory, the whole Latimeria case is in French hands, which are indubitably capable but, one suspects, a bit slow. When I wrote a column on Latimeria in Galaxy (May #), it was stated that a four-volume monograph on this fish was forthcoming. It still is. Though Latimeria might be said to be the most important discovery of that century of new animals, it is not the end of the story. In #, the German zoologist Dr. Ingo Krumbiegel identified a new animal from its skin. It is a mountain wolf living in the South American Andes. Presumably the people who shot it -- one South American dealer is said to have had four skins at one time -- thought these were feral dogs. It has yet to be taken alive. And two birds were "re-discovered," which is to say that they were found to be still alive, even though the books said they were extinct. One was the Bermuda Cahow, the other the large and beautifully plumaged Takahe ( Notornis ) of the South Island of New Zealand (Fig. #). Originally the Takahe had lived all over both the North and South Islands of New Zealand, but that was before white explorers, missionaries and settlers arrived. By about #, though the North Island form was extinct, the somewhat different South Island form was known to be still alive. As time went on, a few specimens came to light, all from the vicinity of Lake Te Anau, which lies inland of the New Zealand fjord area of the South Island (Fig. #). The "last" Takahe was killed by a dog on August #, #. Fortunately the owner of the dog saw at once what it was and saved the specimen for a museum. However, enough rumors about bird footprints came out of the area so that, in November #, Dr. Geoffrey E. Orbell led a small expedition to the mountains to the west of Lake Te Anau'. Suddenly they saw a Takahe. One member of the expedition threw a net to catch it and caught two. They were tied up to be photographed and then released again. Now the Takahe, like the Bermuda Cahow, is strongly protected by law. pected to go and make a few predictions of what might still be discovered. I will, but before I do so, a quick look at some statistics ought to be most instructive. The first book that tried to systematize all living animals was the Systema naturae of the Swedish scientist Karl von Linne, better known by the Latinized version of his name: Carolus Linnaeus. The tenth revised edition of his book (published just # years ago, in #) is always taken to be the edition of the Systema naturae and listed # mammals, # birds, # fishes and, of the insects, # beetles, and not quite as many different moths and butterflies. In #, no less than # mammals were known (this included so-called geographical variations), # birds, # reptiles and amphibians, and about # fishes. Among the insects, they counted in # an almost even # Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies), # Hemiptera (leaf hoppers, bugs, etc.), # Coleoptera (beetles), # Diptera (flies, etc.), # Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, et al.), # Odonata (dragonflies) and so on and so forth. There were # different spiders known, # worms, # molluscs (snails, etc.) and # echinoderms like starfish. A few years before this count was taken, the Prussian Academy of Science, well supplied with money at the moment, decided to produce a modern equivalent of the Systema naturae, reflecting the zoological knowledge at the turn of the century. They worked bravely, producing # volumes of zoology. Then they had to give up because one of their members, the zoologist R. Hesse, calculated that the completion of the work would take # years -- provided that no new discoveries would be made during that time! As regards predictions, let's start with the easiest place of all, the oceans. We know that there are unknown fish; they have been seen through the window of the bathyhaven't been taken yet, but they will be. The International Geophysical Year is devoting much attention to the oceans and to ocean currents at various layers. They are not specifically after the discovery of new fishes, but it would be most surprising if they did not get a few. Then, also in the oceans, there is the problem of the Great Sea Serpent (see my Galaxy columns for December # and January #), which might be a mammal. Thirdly, there seems to be a hitherto undiscovered long-necked and large marine turtle. one, nothing specifically is rumored from North America. South America has many rumors emanating from it, but none specific enough to start theorizing. For a while, a kind of hunt was on for surviving giant sloths, but that has died down. Though South America will probably provide a number of novelties in time, there is no way of guessing what they might be. Europe can also be very nearly written off, except for a persistent rumor about a fairly large unknown lizardlike animal in the Austrian Alps. Africa is a different story. There are rumors in quantity and they might very well be true. One is usually referred to as "Nandi bear" (also as chimiset, nunda and rnngwa -- don't ask me how this should be pronounced), which probably is not a bear but feline. The other is a riveror lakedwelling killer of hippopotami, referred to as the chipekwe, or mokele-mbembe and, possibly, lau. What can be learned always has a few things in common -- the unknown animal lives in fresh water, but can go on land. It kills hippopotami, but does not eat them. It has a long neck. And somehow the impression of a reptilian nature is conveyed. Passing on to Asia, the main mystery and possible next discovery is the yeti or "abominable snowman" whom the Sherpas describe as being the same size they are (average # ft. # in.) and covered with long-haired but very thin fur of a brownish color. It is possible that this is actually a very primitive human race. Elsewhere, primitive races have been pushed by their less primitive neighbors into environments that the less primitive peoples did not want themselves. This may well have happened in Central Asia to a primitive and somewhat peculiarlooking human type. In Australia, there is one unknown animal that may be said to be almost known. It has been seen repeatedly in the northeast part of Australia, the Cape York Peninsula. It is rather matter-offactly described as a "cat," as large as a strong medium-sized dog, with a head resembling that of a tiger. It is described as striped, black on gray, with sharp claws and pointed ears. One witness saw it kill a kangaroo. The animal is obviously rare and its habitat restricted to a comparatively small area. It could be either a real "cat" from the description, a feline carnivore like a large lynx. Or else, which would be much more interesting if it turned out to be the case, it could be a marsupial carnivore like the Tasmanian Tiger. New Zealand, finally, could harbor two more discoveries that would not be complete novelties because they have been rumored for so long. One is the Waitoreke, the only (but undiscovered) indigenous land mammal of New Zealand. I have told what is known about it in my column in the October # issue. The other, rumored from the Dusky Sound area, not too far from Takahe country, is a small Moa, the type called by scientists Megalapteryx. Like the Takahe, this Megalapteryx was known to the Maori and the most recent Moa remains known are of this type. Whether there are any left is doubtful, but not impossible. Well, that's the story. Like all stories of discovery, it has no end, properly speaking, because the end consists of opening new vistas. monthly at New York, N. Y. for Oct. #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing edtior, and business managers are: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Editor, Horace L. Gold, #I Hudson Street (#) New York City; Managing Editor, None; Business Editor, None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stockholder), #I Hudson Street (#), New York City. #. The known bondholders, mortgaees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bone fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September, #. Notary Public, State of New York No. #-# Qualified in Kings County Term Expires March #, # The Repairman Being an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn't be so bad... if I could shoot the trouble! T HE Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack being the best defense and so forth. "I quit. Don't bother telling me what dirty job you have cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal company secrets to me." The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery slot onto his desk. "This is your contract," he said. "It tells how and when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you couldn't crack with a molecular disruptor." I leaned out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single motion. Before it could fall, I had my Solar out and, with a wide-angle shot, burned the contract to ashes. The Old Man pressed the button again and another contract slid out on his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now. "I should have said a duplicate of your contract -- like this one here." He made a quick note on his secretary plate. "I have deducted # credits from your salary for the cost of the duplicate -- as well as a #-credit fine for firing a Solar inside a building." I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The Old Man fondled my contract. "According to this document, you can't quit. Ever. Therefore I have a little job I know you'll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri beacon has shut down. It's a Mark "What kind of beacon?" I asked him. I have repaired hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this kind. peated, practically chortling. "I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the earliest type of beacon ever built -- by Earth, no less. Considering its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well be the first beacon." handed me and felt my eyes glaze with horror. "It's a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery than a beacon -- must be at least a few hundred meters high. I'm a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over # years old. Just forget about it and build a new one." The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. "It would take a year to install a new beacon -- besides being too expensive -- and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have ships making fifteen-light-year detours now." He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles. "This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made to last forever -- or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down, it is never an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of just plugging in a new part." He was telling me -- the guy who did the job while he sat back on his fat paycheck in an airconditioned office. He rambled on. "How I wish that were all it took! I would have a fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But it's not like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to do almost anything -- manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like you." I nodded moodily at his pointing finger. "How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, conmen and anything else it takes to do the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs into doing a simple job. If you think you're fed up, just think how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must operate!" I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled file at me and went back to scratching in his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on his finger again. "And don't get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract. We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you could draw the money out." I smiled, a little weakly, I'm afraid, as if I had never meant to keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the money without his catching on -- and knew at the same time he was figuring a way to outfigure me. It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to the spaceport. T Y the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest beacon to the brokendown Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only about nine days in hyperspace. To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand that in this non-space the regular rules don't apply. Speed and measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the fixed universe. The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go -- and no way to even tell if they had moved. The beacons solved that problem and opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace. Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for navigation -- only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex and variable, but they are still rules that a navigator can follow. For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons for an accurate fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight. So every beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where I and the other trouble-shooters came in. We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything; only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all, when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it? Not through hyper space. All you can do is approach as close as you can by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can take months, and often does. This job didn't turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the Beta Circinus beacon and ran a complicated eight-point problem through the navigator, using every beacon I could get an accurate fix on. The computer gave me a course with an estimated point-ofarrival as well as a built-in safety factor I never could eliminate from the machine. I would much rather take a chance of breaking through near some star than spend time just barreling through normal space, but apparently Tech knows this, too. They had a safety factor built into the computer so you couldn't end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried. I'm sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just didn't want to lose the ship. TT was a twentyhour jump, ship's time, and I came through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece. A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad as I had thought -- a sixweek run, give or take a few days. After feeding a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the acceleration tank and went to sleep. The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the company grades your pay by the number ofspecialties you can handle. All this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance. Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts, was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey. The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the eye controls and dived the thing down. I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch the beacon appear on the screen. The image blinked, focused -- and a great damn pyramid swam into view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid -- and that definitely wasn't my beacon. Or wasn't it? I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something clicked in my mind. course, I dug through the Mark beacon had a precipitating field and a basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was still there -- inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course, weren't even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing, had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon. I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks flying in every direction. I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit that would return it automatically to the ship. Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the bottle. Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon has to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some inaccessible place. Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language. And, for that, I had long before worked out a system that was foolproof. I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye. It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow. This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder. After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, "Hey, George!" and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I caught one of them alone and shouted "Hey, George!" at him. It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned around. When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the MT brain takes over and As soon as the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I figured it was time to make a contact. He was the Centaurian version of a goat-boy -- he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in an outcropping of rock and wait for him. When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: "Welcome, O Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather's spirit speaking from paradise." This fitted in with what I could make out of the local religion. Goat-boy stopped as if he'd been shot. Before he could move, I pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells, rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet. "Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good boy." Not really from paradise -- I had lifted it from the treasury the night before. "Come back tomorrow and we will talk some more," I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to notice that he took the cash before taking off. After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily filled him in. I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it wasn't nice. In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice little religious war going on around the pyramid. It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders didn't think much of them. They were a low type and corffined to a distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach this continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of course, what happened. A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of magic water -- the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water didn't hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true. A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife, murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of priests guarded the sacred fount. And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing. It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only "native life-forms" were quite well protected. There were spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn't found, that would cheerfully rat on me when I got back. Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh equipment. " Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn't have to look exactly like them, just something close, to soothe the native mind. It's logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a twofoot gob of dried shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the Centaurians. When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had tails. The lizards didn't wear clothes and I wanted to take along a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment I would need and began to wire the suit. When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance. That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed straight up. We hovered above the temple at about # meters, until it was light, then dropped straight down. It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived. I folded my arms in a regal stance. "Greetings, O noble servers of the Great God," I said. Of course I didn't say it out loud, just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my jaws. The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed. Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp. The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren't buying any lizards in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive again. "Begone, O faithful steed," I said to the eye, and pressed the control in my palm at the same time. It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I walked through the temple doors. "I would talk with you, O noble priests," I said. Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside. HP HE temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I hoped I wasn't breaking too many taboos by going in. I wasn't stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single  room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something. The MT whispered into my ear, "Just what in the name of the thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?" I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the ceiling. "I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to restore the Holy Waters." This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead. Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me. "You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We will -- " "Stop!" I thundered before he got so far in that he couldn't back out. "I said your ancestors sent me as emissary -- I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you." When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke. The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and settled all the major points. I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this, tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to me. "Undoubtedly you know of the rule," he said. "Because the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the blind could enter the Holy of Holies." I'd swear he was smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an old suitcase can be called smiling. He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain got back in gear. "Of course," I said, "blinding is only right. But in my case you will have to blind me before I leave the Holy of Holies, not now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning iron." to think it over and had to agree with me. The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to behind me and I was alone in the dark. But not for long -- there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led the way without a word. A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal doorway labeled in archaic counted on the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn't a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon. I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected. One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the switches and that had caused the trouble. trouble. It wasn't going to be ended by just reversing the watervalve switch. This valve was supposed to be used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit. I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left in the reactor. I wasn't going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and pro-, duced at least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the rest of the beacon. In # years, there should be some sign of wear. The old boys had built well, I'll give them credit for that. Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick -- and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts. The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen. I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it. When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up. TP HE repairs didn't take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they were waiting for. I threw the switch that started the water flowing again. There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony. The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why -- it was bolted and barred from the other side. "It has been decided," a lizard said, "that you shall remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and serve your every need." A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn't accept. "What -- you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors!" I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration almost shook my head off. The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it. The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface. "What lack of courtesy!" I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. "The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness, they will let the waters flow. Now I must return -- on with the ceremony!" The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes, under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well. more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn't see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders. I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the fresh air and away. When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything. One: The beacon was repaired. Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate. Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which added up to -- Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers. I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that it would be some other repairman who'd get the job. The Great News Next Month... by Fritz Leiber More immense in scope than cosmos and history, here is the inside story of the war you aren't allowed to know is going on... the vast struggle over your live and dead body! Beginning in the next issue, in two thought-inciting, pulse-pounding installments, written by one of science fiction's greats. The Big Time is the big event of I #. Don't miss it! The Staff of Life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouted wings -- and mankind had to eat crow! A S a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas. The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory robot devices in their noses informed them that the waiting wheat had reached ripe perfection. As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats, it was threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown along into the mighty chests of the machines. There the tireless mills ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks which gave the metal serpents a decidedly humpbacked appearance added water, shortening, salt and other ingredients, some named and some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank conspicuously labeled "Carbon Dioxide" ("No Yeast Creatures in Your Bread!"). Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into radionic ovens forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the bread was baked in a matter of seconds, a fierce heatfront browning the crusts, and the piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent plastic bearing the proud Puffy loaf emblem (two cherubs circling a floating loaf) and ejected onto the delivery platform at each serpent's rear end, where a cluster of pickup machines, like hungry piglets, snatched at the loaves with hygienic claws. A few loaves would be hurried off for the day's consumption, the majority stored for winter in strategically located mammoth deep freezes. But now, behold a wonder! As loaves began to appear on the delivery platform of the first walking mill to get into action, they did not linger on the conveyor belt, but rose gently into the air and slowly traveled off downwind across the hot rippling fields. npHE robot claws of the pickup machines clutched in vain, and, not noticing the difference, proceeded carefully to stack emptiness, tier by tier. One errant loaf, rising more sluggishly than its fellows, was snagged by a thrusting claw. The machine paused, clumsily wiped off the injured loaf, set it aside -- where it bobbed on one corner, unable to take off again -- and went back to the work of storing nothingness. A flock of crows rose from the trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the flight of loaves approached. The crows swooped to investigate and then suddenly scattered, screeching in panic. The helicopter of a hangoverish Sunday traveler bound for Wichita shied very similarly from the brown fliers and did not return for a second look. A black-haired housewife spied them over her back fence, crossed herself and grabbed her walkietalkie from the laundry basket. Seconds later, the yawning correspondent of a regional newspaper was jotting down the lead of a humorous news story which, recalling the old flying-saucer scares, stated that now apparently bread was to be included in the mad aerial tea party. The congregation of an openwalled country church, standing up to recite the most familiar of Christian prayers, had just reached the petition for daily sustenance, when a sub-flight of the loaves, either forced down by a vagrant wind or lacking the natural buoyancy of the rest, came coasting silently as the sunbeams between the graceful pillars at the altar end of the building. Meanwhile, the main flight, now augmented by other bread flocks from scores and hundreds of walking mills that had started work a little later, mounted slowly and majestically into the cirrusflecked upper air, where a steady wind was blowing strongly toward the east. About one thousand miles farther on in that direction, where a cluster of stratosphere tickling towers marked the location of the metropolis of NewNew York, a tender scene was being enacted in the pressurized penthouse managerial suite of Puffy Products. Megera Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the Managerial Board and referred to by her underlings as the Blonde Icicle, was dealing with the advances of Roger ("Racehorse") Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the Board and often indistinguishable from any passing office boy. "Why don't you jump out the window, Roger, remembering to shut the airlock after you?" the Golden Glacier said in tones not unkind. "When are your highstrung, thoroughbred nerves going to accept the fact that I would never consider marriage with a business inferior? You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian kulak now that Moscow's clapped on the interdict." though his eyes were fever- ishly bright, as he replied, "A lot of things are going to be different around here, Meg, as soon as the Board is forced to admit that only my quick thinking made it possible to bring the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world." "Puffyloaf could do with a little of that," the business girl observed judiciously. "The way sales have been plummeting, it won't be long before the Government deeds our desks to the managers of Fairy Bread and asks us to take the Big Jump. But just where does your quick thinking come into this, Mr. Snedden? You can't be referring to the helium -- that was Rose Thinker's brainwave." She studied him suspiciously. "You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on #D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of Puffyloaves, assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all his life on two planets." "Listen to me, Meg. Today -- yes, today! -- you're going to see the Board eating out of my hand." "Hah! I guarantee you won't have any fingers left. You're bold enough now, but when Mr. Gryce and those two big machines come through that door -- " "Now wait a minute, Meg -- " "Hush! They're coming now!" Roger leaped three feet in the air, but managed to land without a sound and edged toward his stool. Through the dilating iris of the door strode Phineas T. Gryce, flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin Philosopher. The man approached the conference table in the center of the room with measured pace and gravely expressionless face. The rose-tinted machine on his left did a couple of impulsive pirouettes on the way and twittered a greeting to Meg and Roger. The other machine quietly took the third of the high seats and lifted a claw at Meg, who now occupied a stool twice the height of Roger's. "Miss Winterly, please -- our theme." The Blonde Icicle's face thawed into a little-girl smile as she chanted bubblingly : " Made up of tiny wheaten motes And reinforced with sturdy oats, It rises through the air and floats -- The bread on which all Terra dotes!" ly," said Tin Philosopher. "Though a purely figurative statement, that bit about rising through the air always gets me -- here." He rapped his midsection, which gave off a high musical clang. "Ladies -- " he inclined his photocells toward Rose Thinker and Meg -- "and gentlemen. This is a historic occasion in Old Puffy's long history, the inauguration of the helium-filled loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats Away!') in which that inert and heaven-aspiring gas replaces oldfashioned carbon dioxide. Later, there will be kudos for Rose Thinker, whose bright relays geniussparked the idea, and also for Roger Snedden, who took care of the details. "By the by, Racehorse, that was helium out of the government -- they've been pretty stuffy lately about their monopoly. But first I want to throw wide the casement in your minds that opens on the Long View of Things." Rose Thinker spun twice on her chair and opened her photocells wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to limber up the diaphragm of his speaker and continued : "Ever since the first cave wife boasted to her next-den neighbor about the superior paleness and fluffiness of her tortillas, mankind has sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed, thinkers wiser than myself have equated the whole upward course of culture with this poignant quest. Yeast was a wonderful discovery -- for its primitive day. Sifting the bran and wheat germ from the flour was an even more important advance. Early bleaching and preservmg chemicals played their humble parts. "For a while, barbarous faddists -- blind to the deeply spiritual nature of bread, which is recognized by all great religions -- held back our march toward perfection with their hair-splitting insistence on the vitamin content of the wheat germ, but their case collapsed when tasteless colorless substitutes were triumphantly synthesized and introduced into the loaf, which for flawless purity, unequaled airiness and sheer intangible goodness was rapidly becoming mankind's supreme gustatory experience." "I wonder what the stuff tastes like," Rose Thinker said out of a clear sky. "I wonder what taste tastes like," Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily. Recovering himself, he continued : "Then, early in the twenty-first century, came the epochal researches of Everett Whitehead, Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in his paper 'The Structural Bubble in Cereal Masses' and making possible the baking of airtight bread twenty times stronger (for its weight) than steel and of a lightness that would have been incredible even to the advanced chemist-bakers of the twentieth century -- a lightness so great that, besides forming the backbone of our own promotion, it has forever since been capitalized on by our conscienceless competitors of Fairy Bread with their enduring slogan: 'It Makes Ghost Toast'." "That's a beaut, all right, that ecto-dough blurb," Rose Thinker admitted, bugging her photocells sadly. "Wait a sec. How about? -- "There'll be bread Overhead When yotfre dead -- It is said." his nostrils at the pink machine as if he smelled her insulation smoldering. He said mildly, "A somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose, referring as it does to the end of the customer as consumer. Moreover, we shouldn't overplay the figurative 'rises through the air' angle. What inspired you?" She shrugged. "I don't know -- oh, yes, I do. I was remembering one of the workers' songs we machines used to chant during the Big Strike -- "Work and pray, Live on hay. You'll get pie In the sky When you die -- Ifsa lie! "I don't know why we chanted it," she added. "We didn't want pie -- or hay, for that matter. And machines don't pray, except Tibetan prayer wheels." Phineas T. Gryce shook his head. "Labor relations are another topic we should stay far away from. However, dear Rose, I'm glad you keep trying to out jingle those dirty crooks at Fairy Bread." He scowled, turning back his attention to Tin Philosopher. "I get whopping mad, Old Machine, whenever I hear that other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory one -- 'Untouched by Robot Claws.' Just because they employ a few filthy androids in their factories!" Tin Philosopher lifted one of his own sets of bright talons. "Thanks, P.T. But to continue my historical resume, the next great advance in the baking art was the substitution of purified carbon dioxide, recovered from coal smoke, for the gas generated by yeast organisms indwelling in the dough and later killed by the heat of baking, their corpses remaining in situ. But even purified carbon dioxide is itself a rather repugnant gas, a product of metabolism whether fast or slow, and forever associated with those life processes which are obnoxious to the fastidious." Here the machine shuddered with delicate clinkings. "Therefore, we of Puffyloaf are taking today what may be the ultimate step toward purity: we are aerating our loaves with the noble gas helium, an element which remains virginal in the face of all chemical temptations and whose slim molecules are eleven times lighter than obese carbon dioxide -- yes, noble uncontaminable helium, which, if it be a kind of ash, is yet the ash only of radioactive burning, accomplished or initiated entirely on the Sun, a planet. Let's have a cheer for the helium loaf!"   sion, Phineas T. Gryce rapped the table thrice in solemn applause, while the others bowed their heads. "Thanks, T.P.," P.T. then said. "And now for the Moment of Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the helium loaf selling?" The business girl clapped on a pair of earphones and whispered into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew abstracted as she mentally translated flurries of brief squawks into coherent messages. Suddenly a single vertical furrow creased her matchlessly smooth brow. "It isn't, Mr. Gryce!" she gasped in horror. "Fairy Bread is outselling Puffyloaves by an infinity factor. So far this morning, there has not been one single delivery of Puffyloaves to any sales spot! Complaints about non-delivery are pouring in from both walking stores and sessile shops." "Mr. Snedden!" Gryce barked. "What bug in the new helium process might account for this delay?" Roger was on his feet, looking bewildered. "I can't imagine, sir, unless -- just possibly -- there's been some unforeseeable difficulty involving the new metal-foil wrappers." "Metal-foil wrappers? Were you responsible for those?" "Yes, sir. Last-minute recalculations showed that the extra lightness of the new loaf might be great enough to cause drift during stackage. Drafts in stores might topple sales pyramids. Metal-foil wrappers, by their added weight, took care of the difficulty." "And you ordered them without consulting the Board?" "Yes, sir. There was hardly time and -- " "Why, you fool! I noticed that order for metal-foil wrappers, assumed it was some sub-secretary's mistake, and canceled it last night!" Roger Snedden turned pale. "You canceled it?" he quavered. "And told them to go back to the lighter plastic wrappers?" "Of course! Just what is behind all this, Mr. Snedden? What recalculations were you trusting, when our physicists had demonstrated months ago that the helium loaf was safely stackable in light airs and gentle breezes -- winds up to Beaufort's scale #. Why should a change from heavier to lighter wrappers result in complete nondelivery?" came tinged with an interesting green. He cleared his throat and made strange gulping noises. Tin Philosopher's photocells focused on him calmly, Rose Thinker's with unfeigned excitement. P. T. Gryce's frown grew blacker by the moment, while Megera Winterly's Venus-mask showed an odd dawning of dismay and awe. She was getting new squawks in her earphones. "Er... ah... er..." Roger said in winning tones. "Well, you see, the fact is that I..." "Hold it," Meg interrupted crisply. "Triple-urgent from Public Relations, Safety Division. TulsaTopeka aero-express makes emergency landing after being buffeted in encounter with vast flight of objects first described as brown birds, although no failures reported in airway's electronic anti-bird fences. After grounding safely near Emporia -- no fatalities -- pilot's windshield found thinly plastered with soft white-and-brown material. Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded in material identify it incontrovertibly as an undetermined number of Puffyloaves cruising at three thousand feet!" Eyes and photocells turned inquisitorially upon Roger Snedden. He went from green to Puffyloaf white and blurted : "All right, I did it, but it was the only way out! Yesterday morning, due to the Ukrainian crisis, the government stopped sales and deliveries of all strategic stockpiled materials, including helium gas. Puffy's new program of advertising and promotion, based on the lighter loaf, was already rolling. There was only one thing to do, there being only one other gas comparable in lightness to helium. I diverted the necessary quantity of hydrogen gas from the Hydrogenated Oils Section of our Magna-Margarine Division and substituted it for the helium." "You substituted... hydrogen... for the... helium?" Phineas T. Gryce faltered in low mechanical tones, taking four steps backward. "Hydrogen is twice as light . as helium," Tin Philosopher remarked judiciously. "And many times cheaper -- did you know that?" Roger countered feebly. "Yes, I substituted hydrogen. The metal-foil wrapping would have added just enough weight to counteract the greater buoyancy of the hydrogen loaf. But -- " "So, when this morning's loaves began to arrive on the delivery platforms of the walking mills..." Tin Philosopher left the remark unfinished. "Exactly," Roger agreed dismally. "Let me ask you, Mr. Snedden," Gryce interjected, still in low tones, "if you expected people to jump to the kitchen ceiling for their Puffybread after taking off the metal wrapper, or reach for the sky if they happened to unwrap the stuff outdoors?" "Mr. Gryce," Roger said re, proachfully, "you have often assured me that what people do with Puffybread after they buy it is no concern of ours." "I seem to recall," Rose Thinker chirped somewhat unkindly, "that dictum was created to answer inquiries after Roger put the famous sculptures-in-miniature artist on #D and he testified that he always molded his first attempts from Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeezing down to approximately the size of a peanut." TT ER photocells dimmed and brightened. "Oh, boy -- hydrogen! The loaf's unwrapped. After a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive mixture. Housewife in curlers and kimono pops a couple slices in the toaster. Boom!" The three human beings in the room winced. Tin Philosopher kicked her under the table, while observing, "So you see, Roger, that the non-delivery of the hydrogen loaf carries some consolations. And I must confess that one aspect of the affair gives me great satisfaction, not as a Board Member but as a private machine. You have at last made a reality of the 'rises through the air' part of Puffybread's theme. They can't ever take that away from you. By now, half the inhabitants of the Great Plains must have observed our flying loaves rising high." Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened look at the west windows and found his full voice. "Stop the mills!" he roared at Meg Winterly, who nodded and whispered urgently into her mike. "A sensible suggestion," Tin Philosopher said. "But it comes a trifle late in the day. If the mills are still walking and grinding, aploaves are at this moment cruising eastward over Middle America. Remember that a six-month supply for deep-freeze is involved and that the current consumption of bread, due to its matchless airiness, is eight and one-half loaves per person per day." Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted both hands into his scanty hair, feeling for a good grip. He leaned menacingly toward Roger who, chin resting on the table, regarded him apathetically. "Hold it!" Meg called sharply. "Flock of multiple-urgents coming in. News Liaison : information bureaus swamped with flying-bread inquiries. Aero-expresslines : Clear our airways or face law suit. U. S. Army: Why do loaves flame when hit by incendiary bullets? U. S. Customs: If bread intended for export, get export license or face prosecution. Russian Consulate in Chicago: Advise on destination of bread-lift. And some Kansas church is accusing us of a hoax inciting to blasphemy, of faking miracles -- I don't know why." The business girl tore off her headphones. "Roger Snedden," she cried with a hysteria that would have dumfounded her underlings, "you've brought the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world, all right! Now do something about the situation!" Roger nodded obediently. But his pallor increased a shade, the puoils of his eyes disappeared under the upper lids, and his head burrowed beneath his forearms. "Oh, boy," Rose Thinker called gayly to Tin Philosopher, "this looks like the start of a real crisis session! Did you remember to bring spare batteries?" midwestern skies as no small fliers had since the days of the passenger pigeon, soared steadily onward. Private fliers approached the brown and glistening bread-front in curiosity and dipped back in awe. Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing flights along the flanks. Planes of the government forestry and agricultural services and 'copters bearing the Puffyloaf emblem hovered on the fringes, watching developments and waiting for orders. A squadron of supersonic fighters hung menacingly above. The behavior of birds varied  considerably. Most fled or gave the loaves a wide berth, but some bolder species, discovering the minimal nutritive nature of the translucent brown objects, attacked them furiously with beaks and claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly through the crusts had now distended most of the sealed plastic wrappers into little balloons, which ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting pops. Below, neck-craning citizens crowded streets and back yards, cranks and cultists had a field day, while local and national governments raged indiscriminately at Puffyloaf and at each other. Rumors that a fusion weapon would be exploded in the midst of the flying bread drew angry protests from conservationists and a flood of telefax pamphlets titled "H-Loaf or H-bomb?" Stockholm sent a mystifying note of praise to the United Nations Food Organization. Delhi issued nervous denials of a millet blight that no one had heard of until that moment and reaffirmed India's ability to feed her population with no outside help except the usual. Radio Moscow asserted that the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of thp Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the flying bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne  bread booby-trapped by Capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent on the whole topic. Radio Venus reported to its winged audience that Earth's inhabitants were establishing food depots in the upper air, preparatory to taking up permanent aerial residence "such as we have always enjoyed on Venus."  ish preparations for the passage of the flying bread. Tickets for sightseeing space in skyscrapers ware sold at high prices; cold meats and potted spreads were hawked to viewers with the assurance that they would be able to snag the bread out of the air and enjoy a historic sandwich. Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from his own managerial suite, raged about the city, demanding general cooperation in the stretching of great nets between the skyscrapers to trap the errant loaves. He was captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped again, and was found posted with oxygen mask and submachinegun on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf Tower, apparently determined to shoot down the loaves as they appeared and before they involved his company in more trouble with Customs and the State Department. Recaptured by Tin Philosopher, who suffered only minor bullet holes, he was given a series of mild electroshocks and returned to the conference table, calm and clearheaded as ever. But the bread flight, swinging away from a hurricane moving up the Atlantic coast, crossed a clouded-in Boston by night and disappeared into a high Atlantic overcast, also thereby evading a local storm generated by the Weather Department in a lastminute effort to bring down or at least disperse the H-loaves. Warnings and counterwarnings by Communist and Capitalist governments seriously interfered with military trailing of the flight during this period and it was actually lost in touch with for several days. At scattered points, seagulls were observed fighting over individual loaves floating down from the gray roof -- that was all. A mood of spirituality strongly tinged with humor seized the people of the world. Ministers sermonized about the bread, variously interpreting it as a call to charity, a warning against gluttony, a parable of the evanescence of all earthly things, and a divine joke. Husbands and wives, facing each other across their walls of breakfast toast, burst into laughter. The mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere was enough to evoke guffaws. An obscure sect, having as part of its creed the injunction "Don't take yourself so damn se-#I riously," won new adherents. The bread flight, rising above an Atlantic storm widely reported to have destroyed it, passed unobserved across a foggy England and rose out of the overcast only over Mittel-europa. The loaves had at last reached their maximum altitude. The Sun's rays beat through the rarified air on the distended plastic wrappers, increasing still further the pressure of the confined hydroBulgarian evangelist, who had happened to mistake the up-lever for the east-lever in the cockpit of his flier and who was the sole witness of the event, afterward described it as "the foaming of a sea of diamonds, the crackle of God's knuckles." down into the starving Ukraine. Shaken by a week of humor that threatened to invade even its own grim precincts, the Kremlin made a sudden about-face. A new policy was instituted of communal ownership of the produce of communal farms, and teams of hunger-fighters and caravans of trucks loaded with pumpernickel were dispatched into the Ukraine. World distribution was given to a series of photographs showing peasants queueing up to trade scavenged Puffyloaves for traditional black bread, recently aerated itself but still extra solid by comparison, the rate of exchange demanded by the Moscow teams being twenty Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel. Another series of photographs, picturing chubby workers' children being blown to bits by boobytrapped bread, was quietly destroyed. Congratulatory notes were exchanged by various national governments and world organizations, including the Brotherhood of Free Business Machines. The great bread flight was over, though for several weeks afterward scattered falls of loaves occurred, giving rise to a new folklore of manna among lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in one well-authenticated instance in Tibet, sustaining life in a party of mountaineers cut off by a snow slide. Back in NewNew York, the managerial board of Puffy Products slumped in utter collapse around the conference table, the long crisis session at last ended. Empty coffee cartons were scattered around the chairs of the three humans, dead batteries around those of the two machines. For a while, there was no movement whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden reached out wearily for the earphones where Megera Winterly had hurled them down, adjusted them to his head, pushed a button and listened apathetically. After a bit, his gaze brightened. He pushed more buttons and listened more eagerly. Soon he was sitting tensely upright on his stool, eyes bright and lower face all a-smile, muttering terse comments and questions into the lapel mike torn from Meg's fair neck. The others, reviving, watched him, at first dully, then with quickening interest, especially when he jerked off the earphones with a happy shout and sprang to his feet. a ringing voice. "As a result of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves are outselling Fairy Bread three to one -- and that's just the old carbon-dioxide stock from our freezers! It's almost exhausted, but the government, now that the Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken the ban off helium and will also sell us stockpiled wheat if we need it. We can have our walking mills burrowing into the wheat caves in a matter of hours! "But that isn't all! The far greater demand everywhere is for Puffyloaves that will actually float. Public Relations, Child Liaison Division, reports that the kiddies are making their mothers' lives miserable about it. If only we can figure out some way to make hydrogen non-explosive or the helium loaf float just a little -- " "I'm sure we can take care of that quite handily," Tin Philosopher interrupted briskly. "Puffyloaf has kept it a corporation secret -- even you've never been told about it -- but just before he went crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered a way to make bread using only half as much flour as we do in the present loaf. Using this secret technique, which we've been saving for just such an emergency, it will be possible to bake a helium loaf as buoyant in every respect as the hydrogen loaf." "Good!" Roger cried. "We'll tether 'em on strings and sell 'em like balloons. No mother-child shopping team will leave the store without a cluster. Buying bread balloons will be the big event of the day for kiddies. It'll make the carry-home shopping load lighter too! I'll issue orders at once -- " T. Gryce, said with quiet assurance, "Excuse me, sir, if I seem to be taking too much upon myself." "Not at all, son; go straight ahead," the great manager said approvingly. "You're" -- he laughed in anticipation of getting off a memorable remark -- "rising to the challenging situation like a genuine Puffyloaf." Megera Winterly looked from the older man to the younger . w Then in a single leap she was upon Roger, her arms wrapped tightly around him. "My sweet little ever-victorious, self-propelled monkey wrench!" she crooned in his ear. Roger looked fatuously over her soft shoulder at Tin Philosopher who, as if moved by some similar feeling, reached over and touched claws with Rose Thinker. This, however, was what he telegraphed silently to his fellow machine across the circuit so completed : "Good-o, Rosie! That makes another victory for robot-engineered world unity, though you almost gave us away at the start with that 'bread overhead' jingle. We've struck another blow against the next world war, in which -- as we know only too well! -- we machines would suffer the most. Now if we can only arrange, say, a fur-famine in Alaska and a migration of longhaired Siberian lemmings across Behring Straits... we'd have to swing the Japanese Current up there so it'd be warm enough for the little fellows... Anyhow, Rosie, with a spot of help from the Brotherhood, those humans will paint themselves into the peace corner yet." Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker quietly watched the Blonde Icicle melt. As the vastly advanced guardians of mankind, the Belphins knew how to make a lesson stick -- but whom? the golden sunshine outside his house, writing a poem as he watched the street flow gently past him. There were very few people on it, for he lived in a slow part of town, and those who went in for travel generally preferred streets where the pace was quicker. Moreover, on a sultry spring afternoon like this one, there would be few people wandering abroad. Most would be lying on sun-kissed white beaches or in sun-drenched parks, or, for those who did not fancy being either kissed or drenched by the sun, basking in the comfort of their own air-conditioned villas. Some would, like Ludovick, be writing poems; others composing symphonies; still others painting pictures. Those who were without creative talent or the inclination to indulge it would be relaxing their well-kept golden bodies in whatever surroundings they had chosen to spend this particular one of the perfect days that stretched in an unbroken line before every member of the human race from the cradle to the crematorium. Only the Belphins were much in evidence. Only the Belphins had duties to perform. Only the Belphins worked. Ludovick stretched his own well-kept golden body and rejoiced in the knowing that he was a man and not a Belphin. Immediately afterward, he was sorry for the heartless thought. Didn't the Belphins work only to serve humanity? How ungrateful, then, it was to gloat over them! Besides, he comforted himself, probably, if the truth were known, the Belphins liked to work. He hailed a passing Belphin for assurance on this point. Courteous, like all members of his species, the creature leaped from the street and listened attentively to the young man's ques tion. "We Belphins have but one like and one dislike," he replied. "We like what is right and we dislike what is wrong." "But how can you tell what is right and what is wrong?" Ludovick persisted. "We know," the Belphin said, gazing reverently across the city to the blue spire of the tower where The Belphin of Belphins dwelt, in constant communication with every member of his race at all times, or so they said. "That is why we were placed in charge of humanity. Someday you, too, may advance to the point where you know, and we shall return whence we came." "But who placed you in charge," Ludovick asked, "and whence did you come?" Fearing he might seem motivated by vulgar curiosity, he explained, "I am doing research for an epic poem." their gentle guardianship had made Ludovick able to interpret the expression that flitted across this Belphin's frontispiece as a sad, sweet smile. "We come from beyond the stars," he said. Ludovick already knew that; he had hoped for something a little more specific. "We were placed in power by those who had the right. And the power through which we rule is the power of love! Be happy!" And with that conventional farewell (which also served as a greeting), he stepped onto the sidewalk and was borne off. Ludovick looked after him pensively for a moment, then shrugged. Why should the Belphins surrender their secrets to gratify the idle curiosity of a poet? Ludovick packed his portable scriptwriter in its case and went to call on the girl next door, whom he loved with a deep and intermittently requited passion. As he passed between the tall columns leading into the Flockhart courtyard, he noted with regret that there were quite a number of Corisande's relatives present, lying about sunning themselves and sipping beverages which probably touched the legal limit of intoxicatability. Much as he hated to think harshly of anyone, he did not like Corisande Flockhart's relatives. He had never known anybody who had as many relatives as she did, and sometimes he suspected they were not all related to her. Then he would dismiss the thought as unworthy of him or any rightthinking human being. He loved Corisande for herself alone and not for her family. Whether they were actually her family or not was none of his business. "Be happy!" he greeted the assemblage cordially, sitting down beside Corisande on the tessellated pavement. "Bah!" said old Osmond Flockhart, Corisande's grandfather. Ludovick was sure that, underneath his crustiness, the gnarled patriarch hid a heart of gold. Although he had been mining assiduously, the young man had not yet been able to strike that vein; however, he did not give up hope, for not giving up hope was one of the principles that his wise old Belphin teacher had inculcated in him. Other principles were to lead the good life and keep healthy. "Now, Grandfather," Corisande said, "no matter what your politics, that does not excuse impoliteness." Ludovick wished she would not allude so blatantly to politics, because he had a lurking notion that Corisande's "family" was, in fact, a band of conspirators... such as still dotted the green and pleasant planet and proved by their existence that Man was not advancing anywhere within measurable distance of that totality of knowledge implied by the Belphin. You could tell malcontents, even if they did not voice their dissatisfactions, by their faces. The vast majority of the human race, living good and happy lives, had smooth and pleasant faces. Malcontents' faces were lined and sometimes, in extreme cases, furrowed. Everyone could easily tell who they were by looking at them, and most people avoided them. T T was not that griping was illegal, for the Belphins permitted free speech and reasonable conspiracy; it was that such behavior was considered ungenteel. Ludovick would never have dreamed of associating with this set of neighbors, once he had discovered their tendencies, had he not lost his heart to the purple-eyed Corisande at their first meeting. "Politeness, bah!" old Osmond said. "To see a healthy young man simply -- simply accepting the status quo!" "If the status quo is a good status quo," Ludovick said uneasily, for he did not like to discuss such subjects, "why should I not accept it? We have everything we could possibly want. What do we lack?" "Our freedom," Osmond retorted. "But we are free," Ludovick said, perplexed. "We can say what we like, do what we like, so long as it is consonant with the public good." "Ah, but who determines what is consonant with the public good?" Ludovick could no longer temporize with truth, even for Corisande's sake. "Look here, old man, I have read books. I know about the old days before the Belphins came from the stars. Men were destroying themselves quickly through wars, or slowly through want. There is none of that any more." "All lies and exaggeration," old Osmond said. "My grandfather told me that, when the Belphins took over Earth, they rewrote all the textbooks to suit their own purposes. Now nothing but Belphin propaganda is taught in the schools." "But surely some of what they teach about the past must be true," Ludovick insisted. "And today every one of us has enough to eat and drink, a place to live, beautiful garments to wear, and all the time in the world to utilize as he chooses in all sorts of pleasant activities. What is missing?" "They've taken away our frontiers!" Behind his back, Corisande made a little filial face at Ludovick. Ludovick tried to make the old man see reason. "But I'm happy. And everybody is happy, except -- except a few killjoys like you." "They certainly did a good job of brainwashing you, boy," Osmond sighed. "And of most of the young ones," he added mournfully. "With each succeeding generation, more of our heritage is lost." He patted the girl's hand. "You're a good girl, Corrie. You don't hold with this being cared for like some damn pet poodle." "Never mind Osmond, Eversole," one of Corisande's alleged uncles grinned. "He talks a lot, but of course he doesn't mean a quarter of what he says. Come, have some wine." Ludovick sipped and coughed. It tasted as if it were well above the legal alcohol limit, but he didn't like to say anything. They were taking an awful risk, though, doing a thing like that. If they got caught, they might receive a public scolding -- which was, of course, no more than they deserved -- but he could not bear to think of Corisande exposed to such an ordeal. "It's only reasonable," the uncle went on, "that older people should have a -- a thing about being governed by foreigners." Ludovick smiled and set his nearly full glass down on a plinth. "You could hardly call the Belphins foreigners; they've been on Earth longer than even the oldest of us." "You seem to be pretty chummy with 'em," the uncle said, looking narrow-eyed at Ludovick. "No more so than any other loyal citizen," Ludovick replied. The uncle sat up and wrapped his arms around his thick bare legs. He was a powerful, hairy brute of a creature who had not taken advantage of the numerous cosmetic techniques offered by the benevolent Belphins. "Don't you think it's funny they can breathe our air so easily?" "Why shouldn't they?" Ludovick bit into an apple that Corisande handed him from one of the dishes of fruit and other delicacies strewn about the courtyard. "It's excellent air," he continued through a full mouth, "especially now that it's all purified. I understand that in the old days -- " "Yes," the uncle said, "but don't you think it's a coincidence they breathe exactly the same kind of air we do, considering they claim to come from another solar system?" "No coincidence at all," said Ludovick shortly, no longer able to pretend he didn't know what the other was getting at. He had heard the ugly rumor before. Of course sacrilege was not illegal, but it was in bad taste. "Only one combination of elements spawns intelligent life." "They say," the uncle continued, impervious to Ludovick's unconcealed dislike for the subject, "that there's really only one Belphin, who lives in the Blue Tower -- in a tank or something, because he can't breathe our atmosphere -- and that the others are a sort of robot he sends out to do his work for him." "Nonsense!" Ludovick was goaded to irritation at last. "How could a robot have that delicate play of expression, that subtle economy of movement?" Corisande and the uncle exchanged glances. "But they are absolutely blank," the uncle began hesitantly. "Perhaps, with your rich poetic imagination..." "See?" old Osmond remarked with satisfaction. "The kid's brainwashed. I told you so." single entity," Ludovick went on, "that doesn't necessarily make him less benevolent -- " He was again interrupted by the grandfather. "I won't listen to any more of this twaddle. Benevolent, bah! He or she or it or them is or are just plain exploiting us! Taking our mineral resources away -- I've seen 'em loading ore on the spaceships -- and -- " " -- and exchanging it for other resources from the stars," Ludovick said tightly, "without which we could not have the perfectly balanced society we have today. Without which we would be, technologically, back in the dark ages from which they rescued us." "It's not the stuff they bring in from outside that runs this technology," the uncle said. "It's some power they've got that we can't seem to figure out. Though Lord knows we've tried," he added musingly. "Of course they have their own source of power," Ludovic in-' formed them, smiling to himself, for his old Belphin teacher had taken great care to instill a sense of humor into him. "A Belphin was explaining that to me only today." Twenty heads swiveled toward him. He felt uncomfortable, for he was a modest young man and did not like to be the cynosure of all eyes. "Tell us, dear boy," the uncle said, grabbing Ludovick's glass exactly did he say?" "He said the Belphins rule through the power of love." The glass crashed to the tesserae as the uncle uttered a very unworthy word. "And I suppose it was love that killed Mieczyslaw and George when they tried to storm the Blue Tower -- " old Osmond began, then halted at the looks he was getting from everybody. Ludovick could no longer pretend his neighbors were a group of eccentrics whom he himself was eccentric enough to regard as charming. "So!" He stood up and wrapped his mantle about him. "I knew you were against the government, and, of course, you have a legal right to disagree with its policies, but I didn't think you were actual-actual -- " he dredged a word up out of his schooldays -- "anarchists." He turned to the girl, who was looking thoughtful as she stroked the glittering jewel that always hung at her neck. "Corisande, how can you stay with these -- " he found another word -- "these subversives?" She smiled sadly. "Don't forget: they're my family, Ludovick, and I owe them dutiful respect, no matter how pig-headed they are." She pressed his hand. "But don't give up hope." That rang a bell inside his brain. "I won't," he vowed, giving her hand a return squeeze. "I promise I won't." he paused, struggling with his inner self. It was an unworthy thing to inform upon one's neighbors; on the other hand, could he stand idly by and let those neighbors attempt to destroy the social order? Deciding that the greater good was the more important -- and that, moreover, it was the only way of taking Corisande away from all this -- he went in search of a Belphin. That is, he waited until one glided past and called to him to leave the walk. "I wish to report a conspiracy at No. # Mimosa Lane," he said. "The girl is innocent, but the others are in it to the hilt." The Belphin appeared to think for a minute. Then he gave off a smile. "Oh, them," he said. "We know. They are harmless." "Harmless!" Ludovick repeated. "Why, I understand they've already tried to -- to attack the Blue Tower by force!" "Quite. And failed. For we are protected from hostile forces, as you were told earlier, by the power of love." Ludovick knew, of course, that the Belphin used the word love metaphorically, that the Tower was protected by a series of highly efficient barriers of force to repel attackers -- barriers which, he realized now, from the sad fate of Mieczyslaw and George, were potentially lethal. However, he did not blame the Belphin for being so cagy about his race's source of power, not with people like the Flockharts running about subverting and whatnot. "You certainly do have a wonderful intercommunication system," he murmured. "Everything about us is wonderful," the Belphin said noncommittally. "That's why we're so good to you people. Be happy!" And he was off. But Ludovick could not be happy. He wasn't precisely sad yet, but he was thoughtful. Of course the Belphins knew better than he did, but still... Perhaps they underestimated the seriousness of the Flockhart conspiracy. On the other hand, perhaps it was he who was taking the Flockharts too seriously. Maybe he should investigate further before doing anything rash. Later that night, he slipped over to the Flockhart villa and nosed about in the courtyard until he found the window behind which the family was conspiring. He peered through a chink in the curtains, so he could both see and hear. Corisande was saying, "And so I think there is a lot in what Ludovick said..." Bless her, he thought emotionally. Even in the midst of her plotting, she had time to spare a kind word for him. And then it hit him: she, too, was a plotter. "You suggest that we try to turn the power of love against the Belphins?" the uncle asked ironically. Corisande gave a rippling laugh as she twirled her glittering pendant. "In a manner of speaking," she said. "I have an idea for a secret weapon which might do the trick-" A T that moment, Ludovick stumbled over a jug which some careless relative had apparently left lying about the courtyard. It crashed to the tesserae, spattering Ludovick's legs and sandals with a liquid which later proved to be extremely red wine. "There's someone outside!" the uncle declared, half-rising. "Nonsense!" Corisande said, putting her hand on his shoulder. "I didn't hear anything." The uncle looked dubious, and Ludovick thought it prudent to withdraw at this point. Besides, he had heard enough. Corisande -- his Corisande -- was an integral part of the conspiracy. He lay down to sleep that night beset by doubts. If he told the Belphins about the conspiracy, he would be betraying Corisande. As a matter of fact, he now remembered, he had already told them about the conspiracy and they hadn't believed him. But supposing he could convince them, how could he give Corisande up to them? True, it was the right thing to do -- but, for the first time in his life, he could not bring himself to do what he knew to be right. He was weak, weak -- and weakness was sinful. His old Belphin teacher had taught him that, too. As Ludovick writhed restlessly upon his bed, he became aware that someone had come into his chamber. "Ludovick," a soft, beloved voice whispered, "I have come to ask your help..." It was so dark, he could not see her; he knew where was only by the glitter of the jewel on her neck-chain as it arced through the blackness. "Corisande..." he breathed. "Ludovick..." she sighed. Now that the amenities were over, she resumed, "Against my will, I have been involved in the family plot. My uncle has invented a secret weapon which he believes will counteract the power of the barriers." "But I thought you devised it!" "So it was you in the courtyard. Well, what happened was I wanted to gain time, so I said I had a secret weapon of my own invention which I had not perfected, but which would cost considerably less than my uncle's model. We have to watch the budget, you know, because we can hardly expect the Belphins to supply the components for this job. Anyhow, I thought that, while my folks were waiting for me to finish it, you would have a chance to warn the Belphins." "Corisande," he murmured, "you are as noble and clever as you are beautiful." of her remarks. "Me! But they won't pay any attention to me!" "How do you know?" When he remained silent, she said, "I suppose you've already tried to warn them about us." "I -- I said you had nothing to do with the plot." "That was good of you." She continued in a warmer tone : "How many Belphins did you warn, then?" "Just one. When you tell one something, you tell them all. You know that. Everyone knows that." "That's just theory," she said. "It's never been proven. All we do know is that they have some sort of central clearing house of information, presumably The Belphin of Belphins. But we don't know that they are incapable of thinking or acting individually. We don't really know much about them at all; they're very secretive." "Aloof," he corrected her, "as befits a ruling race. But always affable." "You must warn as many Belphins as you can." "And if none listens to me?" "Then," she said dramatically, "you must approach The Belphin of Belphins himself." "But no human being has ever come near him!" he said plaintively. "You know that all those who have tried perished. And that can't be a rumor, because your grandfather said -- " "But they came to attack The Belphin. You're coming to warn him! That makes a big difference. Ludovick..." She took his hands in hers; in the darkness, the jewel swung madly on her presumably heaving bosom. "This is bigger than both of us. It's for Earth." He knew it was his patriotic duty to do as she said; still, he had enjoyed life so much. "Corisande, wouldn't it be much simpler if we just destroyed your uncle's secret weapon?" "He'd only make another. Don't you see, Ludovick, this is our only chance to save the Belphins, to save humanity... But, of course, I don't have the right to send you. I'll go myself." "No, Corisande," he sighed. "I can't let you go. I'll do it."  warn Belphins. He knew it wasn't much use, but it was all he could do. The first half dozen responded in much the same way the Belphin he had warned the previous day had done, by courteously acknowledging his solicitude and assuring him there was no need for alarm; they knew all about the Flockharts and everything would be all right. After that, they started to get increasingly huffy -- which would, he thought, substantiate the theory that they were all part of one vast coordinate network of identity. Especially since each Belphin behaved as if Ludovick had been repeatedly annoying him. Finally, they refused to get off the walks when he hailed them -- which was unheard of, for no Belphin had ever before failed to respond to an Earthman's call -- and when he started running along the walks after them, they ran much faster than he could. At last he gave up and wandered about the city for hours, speaking to neither human nor Belphin, wondering what to do. That is, he knew what he had to do; he was wondering how to do it. He would never be able to reach The Belphin of Belphins. No human being had ever done it. Mieczyslaw and George had died trying to reach him (or it). Even though their intentions had been hostile and Ludovick's would be helpful, there was little chance he would be allowed to reach The Belphin with all the other Belphins against him. What guarantee was there that The Belphin would not be against him, too? And yet he knew that he would have to risk his life; there was no help for it. He had never wanted to be a hero, and here he had heroism thrust upon him. He knew he could not succeed; equally well, he knew he could not turn back, for his Belphin teacher had instructed him in the meaning of duty. It was twilight when he approached the Blue Tower. Commending himself to the Infinite Virtue, he entered. The Belphin at the reception desk did not give off the customary smiling expression. In fact, he seemed to radiate a curiously apprehensive aura. "Go back, young man," he said. "You're not wanted here." "I must see The Belphin of Belphins. I must warn him against the Flockharts." "He has been warned," the receptionist told him. "Go home and be happy!" "I don't trust you or your brothers. I must see The Belphin himself." Suddenly this particular Belphin lost his commanding manners. He began to wilt, insofar as so rigidly constructed a creature could go limp. "Please, we've done so much for you. Do this for us." "The Belphin of Belphins did things for us," Ludovick countered. "You are all only his followers. How do v I know you are really following him? How do I know you haven't turned against him?" Without giving the creature a chance to answer, he strode forward. The Belphin attempted to bar his way. Ludovick knew one Belphin was a myriad times as strong as a human, so it was out of utter futility that he struck. The Belphin collapsed completely, flying apart in a welter of fragile springs and gears. The fact was of some deeper significance, Ludovick knew, but he was too numbed by his incredible success to be able to think clearly. All he knew was that The Belphin would be able to explain things to him. clang. That meant the force barriers had gone up. He could see the shimmering insubstance of the first one before him. Squaring his shoulders, he charged it... and walked right through. He looked himself up and down. He was alive and entire. Then the whole thing was a fraud; the barriers were not lethal -- or perhaps even actual. But what of Mieczyslaw? And George? And countless rumored others? He would not let himself even try to think of them. He would not let himself even try to think of anything save his duty. A staircase spiraled up ahead of him. A Belphin was at its foot. Behind him, a barrier iridesced. "Please, young man -- " the Belphin began. "You don't understand. Let me explain." But Ludovick destroyed the thing before it could say anything further, and he passed right through the barrier. He had to get to the top and warn The Belphin of Belphins, whoever or whatever he (or it) was, that the Flockharts had a secret weapon which might be able to annihilate it (or him). Belphin after Belphin Ludovick destroyed, and barrier after barrier he penetrated until he reached the top. At the head of the stairs was a vast golden door. "Go no further, Ludovick Eversole!" a mighty voice roared from within. "To open that door is to bring disaster upon your race." But all Ludovick knew was that he had to get to The Belphin within and warn him. He battered down the door; that is, he would have battered down the door if it had not turned out to be unlocked. A stream of noxious vapor rushed out of the opening, causing him to black out. When he came to, most of the vapor had dissipated. The Belphin of Belphins was already dying of asphyxiation, since it was, in fact, a single alien entity who breathed another combination of elements. The room at the head of the stairs had been its tank. "You fool... it gasped. "Through your muddle-headed integrity... you have destroyed not only me... but Earth's future. I tried to make... this planet a better place for humanity... and this is my reward... "But I don't understand!" Ludovick wept. "Why did you let me do it? Why were Mieczyslaw and George and all the others killed? Why was it that I could pass the barriers and they could not?" "The barriers were triggered... to respond to hostility... You meant well... so our defenses... could not work." Ludovick had to bend low to hear the creature's last words: "There is... Earth proverb... should have warned me... 'I can protect myself... against my enemies... but who will protect me... from my friends'...?" The Belphin of Belphins died in Ludovick's arms. He was the last of his race, so far as Earth was concerned, for no more came. If, as they had said themselves, some outside power had sent them to take care of the human race, then that power had given up the race as a bad job. If they were merely exploiting Earth, as the malcontents had kept suggesting, apparently it had proven too dangerous or too costly a venture.  demise, the Flockharts arrived en masse. "We won't need your secret weapons now," Ludovick told them dully. "The Belphin of Belphins is dead." Corisande gave one of the rippling laughs he was to grow to hate so much. "Darling, you were my secret weapon all along!" She beamed at her "relatives," and it was then he noticed the faint lines of her forehead. "I told you I could use the power of love to destroy the Belphins!" And then she added gently: "I think there is no doubt who is head of 'this family' now." The uncle gave a strained laugh. "You're going to have a great little first lady there, boy," he said to Ludovick. "First lady?" Ludovick repeated, still absorbed in his grief. "Yes, I imagine the people will want to make you our first President by popular acclaim." Ludovick looked at him through a haze of tears. "But I killed The Belphin. I didn't mean to, but... they must hate me!" "Nonsense, my boy; they'll adore you. You'll be a hero!" Events proved him right. Even those people who had lived in apparent content under the Belphins, accepting what they were given and seemingly enjoying their carefree lives, now declared themselves to have been suffering in silent resentment all along. They hurled flowers and adulatory speeches at Ludovick and composed extremely flattering songs about him. Shortly after he was universally acclaimed President, he married Corisande. He couldn't escape. "Why doesn't she become President herself?" he wailed, when the relatives came and found him hiding in the ruins of the Blue Tower. The people had torn the Tower down as soon as they were sure The Belphin was dead and the others thereby hendered inoperant. "It would spare her a lot of bother." "Because she is not The Belphin-slayer," the uncle said, dragging him out. "Besides, she loves you. Come on, Ludovick, be a man." So they hauled him off to the wedding and, amid much feasting, he was married to Corisande. breath. In the first place, now that The Belphin was dead, all the machinery that had been operated by him stopped and no one knew how to fix it. The sidewalks stopped moving, the air conditioners stopped conditioning, the food synthesizers stopped synthesizing, and so on. And, of course, everybody blamed it all on Ludovick -- even that year's run of bad weather. There were famines, riots, plagues, and, after the waves of mob hostility had coalesced into national groupings, wars. It was like the old days again, precisely as described in the textbooks. In the second place, Ludovick could never forget that, when Corisande had sent him to the Blue Tower, she could not have been sure that her secret weapon would work. Love might not have conquered all -- in fact, it was the more likely hypothesis that it wouldn't -- and he would have been killed by the first barrier. And no husband likes to think that his wife thinks he's expendable; it makes him feel she doesn't really love him. So, in thirtieth year of his reign as Dictator of Earth, Ludovick poisoned Corisande -- that is, had her poisoned, for by now he had a Minister of Assassination to handle such little matters -- and married a very pretty, very young, very affectionate blonde. He wasn't particularly happy with her, either, but at least it was a change. # Star Shelf G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y # ( The Mouse that Roared, etc.) and neophytes alike, his new book will be a welcome sweet breath of sanity in a mad halitosic world. In this instance, # finds the world in the same hot-cold frenzy. Now everyone knows that if only the leaders of the various nations can be brought together by an impartial referee, there just isn't any reason why all current problems can't be solved. And that's also the opinion of A-l, born Jeremy Blackwood in the village of Mars, near Leeds, England. Because of losing a buddy in the Normandy fighting, the well-loved A-l frequently holds forth on his favorite topic over a pint in the Plough and Stars. A-l's chance comes completely inadvertantly when his unrecognizable-as-such dog gets lost near Britain's secret experimental rocket ship. His military training enables him to sneak into the guarded area where his curiosity overcomes caution after recovery of his dog. While he is investigating the ship, it suddenly takes off and lands him ker-plunk in a lake on an Indian reservation in Nevada. Since his clothes are lost in the ship's flooded half, he has to don a weird-looking but very impressive orangeand-green pressure suit. Needless to say, all the circumstances involved, plus the fact that he was born in Mars, tend to compound a considerable misunderstanding. Being no dope, A-l can see the strength of his position and the possibility of forcing a supersummit meeting despite the fact that the British Prime Minister knows he is a fraud. But don't expect me to tell you more. You'll enjoy this Man From Mars unless the cold war has frozen your funny-bone. F. Baschieri. Essential Books, Inc., N. J # tional Underwater Expedition to the Red Sea arrived too late for inclusion in my watersoaked column a couple of months back. The tardiness, however, makes its topic unique this month, in keeping with the character of the book. The word "Character" is advisable, for this true journal of a scientific expedition would be better described as an Italian sea-opera. Its scientist heroes emote Pagliaccilike over lost fish or dangerous encounters and, in general, act more akin to Huck Finn than to Yves Cousteau in the unabashed wonder with which they approach their study. Although all the members had considerable undersea experience in the Mediterranean, the tidal waters of the Red Sea fill them with vociferous awe. This by no means reflects on their professional ability, but merely heightens their delightful humanness. The pages are virtually moist with tears over the necessity of death-dealing in scientific collection, and on the occasions when hunting became necessary for the survival of the pitifully under-financed party, the selfjustification is almost embassrassing. The Red Sea is one of the strangest areas in the world. At high tide, the surface temperature is # and the atmosphere anything from # up in the shade. The sea is surrounded by the most arid of deserts. Even its islands are wastelands. One of the most amusing sections of the book tells of a diver becoming "cockeyed" from adoption by a pilot fish which stationed itself within inches of his face-plate for an hour and refused to budge despite shooting, biting, grabbing, spitting. And that is the book, too -- cockeyed but enthralling. edited by Eileen J. Garrett. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, # lisher of Tomorrow, a review of psychical research, is also president of The Parapsychology Foundation. Her book, a large anthologization of articles which appeared in her publication, touches on such subjects as spirits and poltergeists, hypnosis, precognition and other tions. Interesting, if inconclusive, reading. Ower and J. Nayler. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # ' ' proach the speed of sound, the problems of designers grew even faster. And there are additional headaches unthought of only a few short years ago, now that the heat barrier has reared its hot head. Ower and Nayler are both British research experts and they have written an authoritative survey of this specialized subject that is affecting us all. Burgess. The Macmillan Co., N. Y ., # above book, Guided Weapons deals solely with the military missile. Naturally it can't be as up-tothe-minute as the daily papers, but is excellent backgrounding for the otherwise confusing news releases. Gerard Leroy. G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., # have just about covered the field concerning Earth's presentday phenomenal mysteries. Being journalists, they have approached their subject matter from a professional angle and have produced a volume that professionally succeeds in gripping the interest. Wisely, they have not concerned themselves with origins or future possibilities, being content to present the known facts and the divergent opinions of experts on such controversial subjects as Flying Saucers and the Abominable Snowman, among others. They have reproduced a fantastic photograph of a half skull, snapped during the London Daily Mail expedition in #, that shows only an enormous peaked cranium with a coarsely hair-covered central ridge. Other chapters cover such topics as the unknown sea, the Earth's fires, the Antarctic, the coelacanth as possible ancestor of our race, and caverns and underground rivers. Eric Maine. J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila.  N. Y., #  a "novel of menace," which is the identical tag it bestowed upon The Power by Frank Robinson. I had no desire to compare the two books, but it appears that the publishers themselves are begging for comparison. Both novels employ the chase as plot motivater, but there similarities end. Power had just that: a mounting terror as the human quarry neared the killer. Maine has his hero blunder back and forth over the English countryside in pursuit of an amazingly incompetent bungler who, at the start of the story, has already botched the job of murdering an atomic scientist so that a dupe can impersonate him. Maine does employ the interesting device of having a character pushed mentally seven seconds into the future so that he answers questions before they are asked. But not even that can save the story from the thunder and blunder of hero and villain alike. by Piero Modigliani. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # rkR. Modigliani's book is more a scrapbook of random jottings than a journal. His observations are not limited to things scientific and have the virtue of being caustic yet gentle, with a fine undercoating of humor. Even if the doctor's dreams hadn't endeared him to me, he would still be a kindred spirit in that he, too, endures the torments of commuting because he loves to read on the train. Keeping this cargo meant death -- to jettison it meant to make flotsam and jetsam of a world! T HE Ciriimian ship was passing in hyperdrive through a classic threebody system, comprising in this case a fiercely white sun circled by a fainter companion and a single planet that swung in precise balance, when the Canthorian Zid broke out of its cage in the specimen hold. Of the ship's social quartet, Chafis One and Two were asleep at the moment, dreaming wistful dreams of conical Ciriimian cities spearing up to a soft and plumcolored sky. The Zid raged into their communal rest cell, smashed them down from their gymbaled sleeping perches and, with the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could wake enough to teleport to safety. Chafis Three and Four, on psi shift in the forward control cubicle, might have fallen as easily if the mental screamings of their fellows had not warned them in time. As it was, they had barely time to teleport themselves to the after hold, as far as possible from immediate danger, and to consider the issue while the Zid lunged about the ship in search of them with malignant cries and a great shrieking of claws on metal. Their case was the more desperate because the Chafis were professional freighters with little experience of emergency. Hauling a Zid from Canthorian jungles to a Ciriimian zoo was a prosaic enough assignment so long as the cage held, but with the raging brute swiftly smelling them out, they were helpless to catch and restrain it. When the Zid found them, they had no other course but to teleport back to the control cubicle and wait until the beast should snuff them down again. The Zid learned quickly, so quickly that it was soon clear that its physical strength would far outlast their considerable but limited telekinetic ability. Still they possessed their share of owlish Ciriimian logic and hit soon enough upon the one practical course -- to jettison the Zid on the nearest world demonstrably free of intelligent life. tween jumps fore and aft. Chafi Three, while they were still in the control cubicle, threw the ship out of hyperdrive within scant miles of the neighboring sun's single planet. Chafi Four, on the next jump, scanned the ship's charts and identified the system through which they traveled. Luck was with them. The system had been catalogued some fbur Ciriimian generations before and tagged: Planet undeveloped. Tranquil marine intelligences only. The discovery relieved them greatly for the reason that no Ciriimian, even to save his own feathered skin, would have set down such a monster as the Zid among rational but vulnerable entities. The planet was a water world, bare of continents and only sparsely sprinkled with minor archipelagoes. The islands suited the Chafis' purpose admirably. "The Zid does not swim," Chafi Four radiated. "Marooned, it can do no harm to marine intelligences." "Also," Chafi Three pointed out as they dodged to the control cubicle again just ahead of the slavering Zid, "we may return later with a Canthorian hunting party and recover our investment," Closing their perception against the Zid's distracting ragings, they set to work with perfect coordination. Chafi Three set down the ship on an island that was only one of a freckling chain of similar islands. Chafi Four projected himself first to the opened port; then, when the Zid charged after him, to the herbivore-cropped sward of tropical setting outside. The Zid lunged out. Chafi Four teleported inside again. Chafi Three closed the port. Together they relaxed their perception shields in relief -- Unaware in their consternation that they committed the barbarous lapse of vocalizing, they twittered aloud when they realized the extent of their error. Above the far, murmurous whisper of expected marine cerebration there rose an uncoordinated mishmash of thought from at least two strong and relatively complex intelligences. "Gas breathing!" Chafi Four said unbelievingly. "Warmblooded, land-dwelling, mammalian!" "A Class Five culture," Chafi agreed shakenly. His aura quivered with the shock of betrayal. "The catalogue was wrong." Ironically, their problem was more pressing now than before. Unless checked, the Zid would rapidly depopulate the island -- and, to check it, they must break a prime rule of Galactic protocol in asking the help of a new and untested species. But they had no choice. They teleported at once into the presence of the two nearby natives -- and met with frustration beyond Ciriimian experience. imian ship's landing because the morning was a Oneday, and on Onedays his mission to the island demanded that he be up and about at sunrise. For two reasons: On Onedays, through some unfailing miracle of Calaxian seamanship, old Charlie Mack sailed down in his ancient Island Queen from the township that represented colonial Terran civilization in Procynian Archipelago #, bringing supplies and gossip to last Jeff through the following Tenday. The Queen would dock at Jeff's little pier at dawn; she was never late. Also on Onedays, necessarily before Charlie Mack's visit, Jeff must assemble his smuggled communicator -- kept dismantled and hidden from suspicious local eyes -- and report to Earth Interests Consulate his progress during the cycle just ended. The ungodly hour of transmission, naturally, was set to coincide with the closing of the Consul's field office halfway around the planet. So the nacreous glory of Procyon's rising was just tinting the windows of Jeff's cottage when he aligned and activated his little communicator on his breakfast table. Its three-inch screen lighted to signal and a dour and disappointed Consul Satterfield looked at him. Behind Satterfield, foreshortened to gnomishness by the pickup, lurked Dr. Hermann, Earth Interests' resident zoologist. "No progress," Jeff reported, "except that the few islanders I've met seem to be accepting me at last. A little more time and they might let me into the Township, where I can learn something. If Homeside -- " "You've had seven Tendays," Satterfield said. "Homeside won't wait longer, Aubray. They need those calm-crystals too badly." "They'll use force?" Jeff had considered the possibility, but its immediacy appalled him. "Sir, these colonists had been autonomous for over two hundred years, ever since the Fourth War cut them off from us. Will Homeside deny their independence?" His sense of loss at Satterfield's grim nod stemmed from something deeper than sympathy for the islanders. It found roots in his daily rambles over the little island granted him by the Township for the painting he had begun as a blind to his assignment, and in the gossip of old Charlie Mack and the few others he had met. He had learned to appreciate the easy life of the islands well enough to be dismayed now by what must happen under El pressure to old Charlie and his handful of sunbrowned fisherfolk.  Jeff had not considered that it might matter, he was disturbed by the realization that he wouldn't be seeing Jennifer, old Charlie Mack's red-haired niece, once occupation began. Jennifer, who sailed with her uncle and did a crewman's work as a matter of course, would despise the sight of him. The Consul's pessimism jolted Jeff back to the moment at hand. "Homeside will deny their autonomy, Aubray. I've had a warp-beam message today ordering me to move in." The situation was desperate enough at home, Jeff had to admit. Calaxian calm-crystals did what no refinement of Terran therapeutics had been able to manage. They erased the fears of the neurotic and calmed the quiverings of the hypertensive -- both in alarming majority in the shattering aftermath of the Fourth War -- with no adverse effects at all. Permanent benefit was slow but cumulative, offering for the first time a real step toward ultimate stability. The medical, psychiatric and political fields cried out for crystals and more crystals. "If the islanders would tell us their source and let us help develop it," Satterfield said peevishly, "instead of doling out a handful of crystals every Tenday, there wouldn't be any need of action. Homeside feels they're just letting us have some of the surplus." "Not likely," Jeff said. "They don't use the crystals themselves." Old Dr. Hermann put his chin almost on the Consul's shoulder to present his wizened face to the scanner. "Of course they don't," he said. "On an uncomplicated, even simple-minded world like this, who would need crystals? But maybe they fear glutting the market or the domination of outside capital coming in to develop the source. When people backslide, there's no telling what's on their minds and we have no time to waste negotiating or convincing them. In any case, how could they stop us from moving in?" Abruptly he switched to his own interest. "Aubray, have you learned anything new about the Scoops?" "Nothing beyond the fact that the islanders don't talk about them," Jeff said. "I've seen perhaps a dozen offshore during the seven cycles I've been here. One usually surfaces outside my harbor at about the time old Charlie Mack's supply boat comes in." Thinking of Charlie Mack brought a forced end to his report. "Charlie's due now. I'll call back later." He cut the circuit, hurrying to have his communicator stowed away before old Charlie's arrival -- not, he thought bitterly, that being found out now would make any great difference.  Calaxian dawn, he caught his glimpse of the Ciriimian ship's landing before the island forest of palm-ferns cut it off from sight. Homeside hadn't been bluffing, he thought, assuming as a matter of course that this was the task force Satterfield had been ordered to send. "They didn't waste any time," Jeff growled. "Damn them." He ignored the inevitable glory of morning rainbow that just preceded Procyon's rising and strode irritably down to his miniature dock. He was still scowling over what he should tell Charlie Mack when the Island Queen hove into view. She was a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of El patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth War scars and heritage of anxieties made calm-crystals so desperately necessary, oppressed him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred, her people without need of the calm-crystals they traded. Something odd in the set of the Queen's sails puzzled him until he identified the abnormality. In spite of distance and the swift approach of the old fishing boat, he could have sworn that her sails bellied not with the wind, but against. They fell slack, however, when the Queen reached his channel and flapped lazily, reversing to catch the wind and nose her cautiously into the shallows. Jeff dismissed it impatiently -- a change of wind or some crafty maneuver of old Charlie Mack's to take advantage of the current. Jeff had just set foot on his dock when it happened. Solid as the planking itself, and all but blocking off his view of the nearing Island Queen, stood a six-foot owl. It was wingless and covered smoothly with pastel-blue feathers. It stood solidly on carefully manicured yellow feet and stared at him out of square violet eyes. Involuntarily he took a backward step, caught his heel on a sun-warped board and sat down heavily. "Well, what the devil!" he said inanely. The owl winced and disappeared without a sound. bled to the dock's edge. A chill conviction of insanity gripped him when he looked down on water lapping smooth and undisturbed below. "I've gone mad," he said aloud. Out on the bay, another catastrophe just as improbable was in progress. Old Charlie Mack's Island Queen had veered sharply off course, left the darker-green stripe of safe channel and plunged into water too shallow for her draft. The boat heeled on shoal sand, listed and hung aground with wind-filled sails holding her fast. The Scoop that had surfaced just behind her was so close that Jeff wondered if its species' legendary good nature had been misrepresented. It floated like a glistening plum-colored island, flat dorsal flippers undulating gently on the water and its great filmy eyes all but closed against the slanting glare of morning sun. It was more than vast. The thing must weigh, Jeff thought dizzily, thousands or maybe millions of tons. He thought he understood the Queerfs grounding when he saw the swimmer stroking urgently toward his dock. Old Charlie had abandoned his boat and was swimming in to escape the Scoop. But it wasn't Charlie. It was Jennifer, Charlie's niece. Jeff took the brown hand she put up and drew her to the dock beside her, steadying her while she shook out her dripping red hair and regained her breath. Sea water had plastered Jennifer's white blouse and knee-length dungarees to her body like a second skin, and the effect bordered on the spectacular. "Did you see it?" she demanded. Jeff wrestled his eyes away to the Scoop that floated like a purple island in the bay. "A proper monster," he said. "You got out just in time." She looked at once startled and impatient. "Not the Scoop, you idiot. The owl." It was Jeff's turn to stare. "Owl? There was one on the dock, but I thought -- " "So did I." She sounded relieved. "But if you saw one, too... All of a sudden, it was standing there on deck beside me, right out of nowhere. I lost my head and grounded the Queen, and it vanished. The owl, I mean." "So did mine," Jeff said. While they stood marveling, the owls came back. horribly shaken by the initial attempt at communication with the natives. Nothing in Ciriimian experience had prepared them for creatures intelligent but illogical, individually perceptive yet isolated from each other. "Communication by audible symbol," Chafi Three said. He ruffled his feathers in a shudder. "Barbarous!" "Atavistic," agreed Chafi Four. "They could even lie to each other." But their dilemma remained. They must warn the natives before the prowling Zid found them, else there would be no natives. "We must try again," Three concluded, "searching out and using the proper symbols for explanation." "Vocally," said Chafi Four. They shuddered and teleported.    his hallucination -- doubled -- startled Jeff no more than the fact that he seemed to be holding Jennifer Mack tightly. Amazingly, his immediate problem was not the possibility of harm from the owls, but whether he should reassure Jennifer before or after releasing her. He compromised by leaving the choice to her. "They can't be dangerous," he said. "There are no land-dwelling predators on Calaxia. I read that in -- " "Nothing like that ever hatched out on Calaxia," said Jennifer. She pulled free of him. "If they're real, they came from somewhere else." The implication drew a cold finger down Jeff's spine. "That would mean other cultures out here. And in all our years of planet-hunting, we haven't found one." Memory chilled him further. "A ship landed inland a few minutes ago," he said. "I took it for an El consulate craft, but it could have been -- " The Ciriimians caught his mental image of the landing and intervened while common ground offered. "The ship was ours," said Chafi Three. He had not vocalized since fledgling days and his voice had a jarring croak of disuse. "Our Zid escaped its cage and destroyed two of us, forcing us to maroon it here for our own safety. Unfortunately, we trusted our star manual's statement that the planet is unpopulated." The Terrans drew together again. "Zid?" Jeff echoed. Chafi Four relieved his fellow of the strain by trying his own rusty croak. "A vicious Canthorian predator, combing the island at this moment for prey. You must help us to recapture it." "So that you may identify it," Chafii Three finished helpfully, "the Zid has this appearance." His psi projection of the Zid appeared on the dock before them with demoniac abruptness -- crouched to leap, twin tails lashing and its ten-foot length bristling with glassy magenta bristles. It had a lethal pair of extra limbs that sprang from the shoulders to end in taloned seizing-hands, and its slanted red eyes burned malevolently from a snouted, razor-fanged face. It was too real to bear. Jeff stepped back on suddenly unreliable legs. Jennifer fainted against him and the unexpected weight of her sent them both sprawling to the dock. "We lean on weak reeds," Chafi Three said. "Creatures who collapse with terror at the mere projection of a Zid can be of little assistance in recapturing one." Chafi Four agreed reluctantly. "Then we must seek aid elsewhere." " himself up from the planking, the apparitions were gone. His knees shook and perspiration crawled cold on his face, but he managed to haul Jennifer up with him. "Come out of it, will you?" he yelled ungallantly in her ear. "If a thing like that is loose on the island, we've got to get help!" he slapped her, until her eyes fluttered angrily. "There's an El communicator in my cabin," Jeff said. "Let's go." Memory lent Jennifer a sudden vitality that nearly left Jeff behind in their dash for the cottage up the beach. "The door," Jeff panted, inside. "Fasten the hurricane bolt. Hurry." While she secured the flimsy door, he ripped through his belongings, aligning his El communicator again on his breakfast table. Finding out where the islanders got their calm-crystals had become suddenly unimportant; just then, he wanted nothing so much as to see a well-armed patrol ship nosing down out of the Calaxian sunrise. He was activating the screen when Jennifer, in a magnificent rage in spite of soaked blouse and dungarees, advanced on him. "You're an Earth Interests spy after all," she accused. "They said in the Township you are no artist, but Uncle Charlie and I -- " Jeff made a pushing motion. "Keep away from me. Do you want that devil tearing the cabin down around us?" She fell quiet, remembering the Zid, and he made his call.  "Aubray, Chain #. Come in, Consulate!" There was a sound of stealthy movement outside the cabin and he flicked sweat out of his eyes with a hand that shook. "El, for God's sake, come in! I'm in trouble here!" The image on his three-inch screen was not Consul Satterfield's but the startled consulate operator's. "Trouble?" Jeff forced stumbling words into line. The El operator shook his head doubtfully. "Consul's gone for the day, Aubray. I'll see if I can reach him." "He was about to send out an El patrol ship to take over here in the islands," Jeff said. "Tell him to hurry it!" He knew when he put down the microphone that the ship would be too late. El might still drag the secret of the calm-crystal source out of the islanders, but Jeff Aubray and Jennifer Mack wouldn't be on hand to witness their sorry triumph. The flimsy cabin could not stand for long against the sort of brute the owls had shown him, and there was no sort of weapon at hand. They couldn't even run. "There's something outside," Jennifer said in a small voice. Her voice seemed to trigger the attack. f I "HE Zid lunged against the door with a force that cracked the wooden hurricane bolt across and opened a three-inch slit between leading edge and lintel. Jeff had a glimpse of slanted red eyes and white-fanged snout before reflex sent him headlong to shoulder the door shut again. "The bunk," he panted at Jennifer. "Shove it over." Between them, they wedged the bunk against the door and held it in place. Then they stood looking palely at each other and waiting for the next attack. It came from a different quarter -- the wide double windows that overlooked the bay. The Zid, rearing upright, smashed away the flimsy rattan blinds with a taloned seizing-hand and looked redly in at them. Like a man in a dream, Jeff caught up his communicator from the table and hurled it. The Zid caught it deftly, sank glistening teeth into the unit and demolished it with a single snap. Crushed, the rig's powerful little battery discharged with a muffled sputtering and flashing of sparks. The Zid howled piercingly and dropped away from the window. That gave Jeff time enough to reach the storm shutters and secure them -- only to rush again with Jennifer to their bunk barricade as the Zid promptly renewed its ferocious attack on the door. He flinched when Jennifer, to be heard above the Zid's ragings, shouted in his ear: "My Scoop should have the Queen afloat by now. Can we reach her?" "Scoop?" The Zid's avid cries discouraged curiosity before it was well born. "We'd never make it. We couldn't possibly outrun that beast." The Zid crashed against the door and drove it inches ajar, driving back their barricade. One taloned paw slid in and slashed viciously at random. Jeff ducked and strained his weight against the bunk, momentarily pinning the Zid's threshing forelimb. Chafi Three chose that moment to reappear, nearly causing Jeff to let go the bunk and admit the Zid. "Your female's suggestion is right," the Ciriimian croaked. "The Zid does not swim. Four and I are arranging escape on that premise." The Zid's talons ripped through the door, leaving parallel rows of splintered breaks. Both slanted red eyes glared in briefly. "Then you'd damn well better hurry," Jeff panted. The door, he estimated, might -- or might not -- hold for two minutes more. The Ciriimian vanished. There was a slithering sound in the distance that sounded like a mountain in motion, and with it a stertorous grunting that all but drowned out the Zid's cries. Something nudged the cottage with a force that all but knocked it flat. "My Scoop!" Jennifer exclaimed. She let go the barricade and ran to the window to throw open the storm shutters. "Never mind the door. This way, quick!" sill and jumped. Numbly, Jeff saw her suspended there, feet only inches below the sill, apparently on empty air. Then the door sagged again under the Zid's lungings and he left the bunk to follow Jennifer. He landed on something tough and warm and slippery, a monstrous tail fluke that stretched down the beach to merge into a flat purplish acreage of back, forested with endless rows of fins and spines and enigmatic tendrils. The Scoop, he saw, and only half believed it, had wallowed into the shallows alongside his dock. It had reversed its unbelievable length to keep the head submerged, and at the same time had backed out of the water until its leviathan tail spanned the hundred-odd yards of sloping beach from surf to cabin. Just ahead of him, Jennifer caught an erect fin-spine and clung with both arms. "Hang on! We're going -- " The Scoop contracted itself with a suddenness that yanked  them yards from the cottage and all but dislodged Jeff. Beyond the surf, the shallows boiled whitely where the Scoop fought for traction to draw its grounded bulk into the water. Jeff looked back once to see the Zid close the distance between and spring upward to the tail fluke behind him. He had an instant conviction that the brute's second spring would see him torn to bits, but the Scoop at the moment found water deep enough to move in earnest. The Zid could only sink in all six taloned limbs and hold fast. The hundred-odd yards from cabin to beach passed in a blur of speed. The Scoop reached deeper water and submerged, throwing a mountainous billow that sent the Island Queen reeling and all but foundered her. Jeff was dislodged instantly and sank like a stone. He came up, spouting water and fighting for breath, to find himself a perilous twenty feet from the Zid. The Zid, utterly out of its element, screamed hideously and threshed water to froth, all its earlier ferocity vanished under the imminent and unfamiliar threat of drowning. Jeff sank again and churned desperately to put distance between them. He came up again, nearly strangled, to find that either he or the Zid had halved the distance between them. They were all but eye to eye when Jennifer caught him and towed him away toward the doubtful safety of the Island Queen. Chafis Three and Four appeared from nowhere and stood solemnly by while the Zid weakened and sank with a final gout of bubbles. "We must have your friend's help," Chafi Three said to Jennifer then, "to recover our investment." Jeff wheeled on him incredulously. "Me go down there after that monster? Not on your -- " "He means the Scoop," Jennifer said. "They brought it ashore to help us out of the cabin. Why shouldn't it help them now?" 'T'HE Scoop came up out of the water so smoothly that the Island Queen hardly rocked, dangling the limp form of the Zid from its great rubbery lips like a drowned kitten. "Here," Jennifer said. The Scoop touched its vast face to the Queen's rail and dropped the unconscious body to the deck. The Zid twitched weakly and coughed up froth and water. Jeff backed away warily. "Damn it, are we going through all that again? Once it gets its wind back -- " Chafi Three interrupted him this time. "The crystal now. We must have it to quiet the Zid until it is safely caged again." Jennifer turned suddenly firm. "No. I won't let this El informer know about that." The Ciriimians were firmer. "It will not matter now. Galactic Adjustment will extend aid to both Calaxia and Terra, furnishing substitutes for the crystals you deal in. There will be no loss to either faction." "No loss?" Jennifer repeated indignantly. "But then there won't be any demand for our crystals! We'll lose everything we've gained." "Not so," Chafi Three assured her. "Galactic will offer satisfactory items in exchange, as well as a solution to Terra's problems." The Scoop, sensing Jennifer's surrender, slid its ponderous bulk nearer and opened its mouth, leaving half an acre of lower jaw resting flush with the Island Queen's deck. Without hesitation, Jennifer stepped over the rail and vanished into the yawning pinkish cavern beyond. Appalled, Jeff rushed after her. "Jennifer! Have you lost your mind?" "There is no danger," Chafi Three assured him. "Scoops are benevolent as well as intelligent, and arrived long ago at a working agreement with the islanders. This one has produced a crystal and is ready to be relieved of it, else it would not have attached itself to a convenient human." Jeff said dizzily, "The Scoops make the crystals?" "There is a nidus just back of a fleshy process in its throat, corresponding to your own tonsils, which produces a crystal much as your Terran oyster secretes a pearl. The irritation distracts the Scoops from their meditations -- they are a philosophical species, though not mechanically progressive -- and prompts them to barter their strength for a time to be rid of it." walnut-sized crystal in her hand and vaulted across the rail. "There goes another Scoop," she said resignedly. "The Queen will have to tack with the wind for a while until another one shows up." "So that's why your sails bellied backward when you came in to harbor," said Jeff. "The thing was towing you." A thin, high streak of vaportrail needling down toward them from the sunrise rainbow turned the channel of his thought. "That will be Satterfield and his task force," Jeff told the Chafis. "I think you're going to find yourselves in an argument over that matter of squeezing Terra out of the crystal trade." They reassured him solemnly. "Terra has no real need of the crystals. We can offer a tested genetics program that will eliminate racial anxiety within a few generations, and supply neural therapy equipment -- on a trade basis, of course -- that will serve the crystals' purpose during the interim." There should be a flaw somewhere, Jeff felt, but he failed to see one. He gave up trying when he found Jennifer eying him with uncharacteristic uncertainty. "You'll be glad to get back to your patrol work," she said. It had an oddly tentative sound. Somehow the predictable monotony of consulate work had never seemed less inviting. The prospect of ending his Calaxian tour and going back to a halfbarren and jittery Earth appealed to Jeff even less. "No," he said. "I'd like to stay." "There's nothing to do but fish and sail around looking for Scoops ready to shed their crystals," Jennifer reminded him. "Still, Uncle Charlie has talked about settling in the Township and standing for Council election. Can you fish and sail, Jeff Aubray?" The consulate rocket landed ashore, but Jeff ignored it. "I can learn," he said. Despite Mr. Shakespeare, wealth and name are both dross compared with the theft of hope -- and Maxwell had to rob a whole planet of it! glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes -- twenty-six and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to -- until he'd have to face it. Then, realizing that he never, in his own thoughts, addressed Graveyard off Dreams himself as "sir," he turned. "I beg your pardon?" It was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about ten regulation-changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere. "Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir," the ship's officer repeated. "You'll go off by the midship gangway on the starboard side." "Yes, I know. Thank you." The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. "Would you mind checking over this, Mr. Maxwell? Your baggage list." "Certainly." He glanced at the slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two; trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two; microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. The last item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him, not at any person, even himself, but at the situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing. "Yes, that's everything. I have no hand-luggage, just this stuff." only baggage list under the clip; the other papers were all freight and express manifests. "Not many passengers left aboard, are there?" "You're the only one in firstclass, sir," the mate replied. "About forty farm-laborers on the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield's the end of the run. You know anything about the place?" "I was born there. I've been away at school for the last five years." "On Baldur?" "Terra. University of Montevideo." Once Conn would have said it almost boastfully. The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. "Of course; I should have known. You're Rodney Maxwell's son, aren't you? Your father's one of our regular freight shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately." He looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said: "Sorry, I've got to go. Lot of things to attend to before landing." He touched the visor of his cap and turned away. The mountains were closer when Conn looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five years and two space voyages ago, seen from the afterdeck of this ship or one of her sisters, the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past. But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Terra. The things he would learn -- microbook case, onefifty kilos, one. One of the steel trunks was full of things he had learned and accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value... The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown. They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing. That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized. That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet -- Poictesme -- told that: the Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. back to him now -- things he had picked up from the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies. The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology -- Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were naming planets for almost anything. Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets. Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with onesixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument. Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmospheredomed factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it. Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-freighting. Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete -- empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation's Third FleetArmy Force had occupied the Gartner Trisystem during the System States War. stationed on or routed through Poictesme; tens of thousands of spacecraft had been based on the Trisystem; the mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had piled up mountains of stores and arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with installations. Then, ten years before anybody had expected it, the rebellious System States Alliance had collapsed and the war had ended. The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal. Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage. The uniform the first officer was wearing was forty years old -- and it was barely a month out of the original packing. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles. The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose -- bands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course. He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family. Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynne and himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father would regard him now. But however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth. T HE ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight; Litchfield was inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city. Three minutes, and the ship began to cut speed and lose altitude. The hot-jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet rotors. Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candlestump in a puddle of its own grease, the other buildings under their carapace of terraces and landing stages seeming to have flowed away from it. And there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and High Garden Terrace, and the Mall... At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish;  gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them. For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father's letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield but in himself. After five years, he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to him now. Or Lynne. The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving sprouting grass, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing, and then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or somebody like that: The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty and swing with tiny screams. There was more to it, but he couldn't remember; something about empty gardens under an empty sky. There must have been colonies inside the Sol System, before the Interstellar Era, that hadn't turned out any better than Poictesme. Then he stopped trying to remember as the ship turned toward the Airport Building and a couple of tugs -- Terran Federation contragravity tanks, with derrick-booms behind and push-poles where the guns had been -- came up to bring her down. He walked along the starboard promenade to the gangway, which the first mate and a couple of airmen were getting open. top-level Litchfield was in the crowd on the dock. He recognized old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above the others. It took a few seconds for him to pick out his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and then to realize that the handsome young man beside Flora was his brother Charley. Charley had been thirteen when Conn had gone away. And there was Kurt Fawzi, the mayor of Litchfield, and there was Lynne, beside him, her red-lipped face tilted upward with a cloud of bright hair behind it. He waved to her, and she waved back, jumping in excitement, and then everybody was waving, and they were pushing his family to the front and making way for them. The ship touched down lightly and gave a lurch as she went off contragravity, and they got the gangway open and the steps swung out, and he started down toward the people who had gathered to greet him. His father was wearing the same black best-suit he had worn when they had parted five years ago. It had been new then; now it was shabby and had acquired a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol-butt. Charley was carrying a gun, too; the belt and holster looked as though he had made them himself. His mother's dress was new and so was Flora's -- probably made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the Terran Federation services had provided the material, but Charley's shirt was Medical Service sterilon. Ashamed that he was noticing and thinking of such things at a time like this, he clasped his father's hand and kissed his mother and Flora. Everybody was talking at once, saying things that he heard only as happy sounds. His brother's words were the first that penetrated as words. "You didn't know me," Charley was accusing. "Don't deny it; I saw you standing there wondering if I was Flora's new boy friend or what." "Well, how in Niflheim'd you expect me to? You've grown up since the last time I saw you. You're looking great, kid!" He caught the gleam of Lynne's golden hair beyond Charley's shoulder and pushed him gently aside. "Lynne!" "Conn, you look just wonderful!" Her arms were around his neck and she was kissing him. "Am I still your girl, Conn?" He crushed her against him and returned her kisses, assuring her that she was. He wasn't going to let it make a bit of difference how her father took the news -- if she didn't. She babbled on: "You didn't get mixed up with any of those girls on Terra, did you? If you did, don't tell me about it. All I care about is that you're back. Oh, Conn, you don't know how much I missed you... Mother, Dad, doesn't he look just splendid?" his face more wrinkled, his hair grayer, shook his hand. "I'm just as glad to see you as anybody, Conn," he said, "even if I'm not being as demonstrative about it as Lynne. Judge, what do you think of our returned wanderer? Franz, shake hands with him, but save the interview for the News for later. Professor, here's one student Litchfield Academy won't need to be ashamed of." He shook hands with them -- old Judge Ledue; Franz Veltrin, the newsman; Professor Kellton; a dozen others, some of whom he had not thought of in five years. They were all cordial and happy -- how much, he wondered, because he was their neighbor, Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he would tell them? Kurt Fawzi, edging him out of the crowd, was the first to voice that. "Conn, what did you find out?" he asked breathlessly. "Do you know where it is?" Conn hesitated, looking about desperately; this was no time to start talking to Kurt Fawzi about it. His father was turning toward him from one side, and from the other Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff were approaching more slowly, the older man leaning on a silver-headed cane. "Don't bother him about it now, Kurt," Rodney Maxwell scolded the mayor. "He's just gotten off the ship; he hasn't had time to say hello to everybody yet." "But, Rod, I've been waiting to hear what he's found out ever since he went away," Fawzi protested in a hurt tone. Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff joined them. They were close friends, probably because neither of them was a native of Poictesme. The town marshal had always been reticent about his origins, but Conn guessed it was Hathor. Brangwyn's heavy-muscled body, and his ease and grace in handling it, marked him as a man of a highgravity planet. Besides, Hathor had a permanent cloud-envelope, and Tom Brangwyn's skin had turned boiled-lobster red under thedim orange sunlight of Alpha Gartner. Old Klem Zareff never hesitated to tell anybody where he came from -- he was from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he had commanded a division that had been blasted down to about regimental strength, in the Alliance army. "Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a trembling hand. "Glad you're home. We all missed you." "We sure did, Conn," the town marshal agreed, clasping Conn's hand as soon as the old man had released it. "Find out anything definite?" Kurt Fawzi looked at his watch. "Conn, we've planned a little celebration for you. We only had since day before yesterday, when the spaceship came into radio range, but we're having a dinner party for you at Senta's this evening." "You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd have to have a meal at Senta's before really feeling that I'd come home." "Well, here's what I have in mind. It'll be three hours till dinner's ready. Suppose we all go up to my office in the meantime. It'll give the ladies a chance to go home and fix up for the party, and we can have a drink and a talk." "You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked, a trifle doubtfully. "If you'd rather go home first..."  voice and manner disturbed him vaguely; however, he nodded agreement. After a couple of drinks, he'd be better able to tell them. "Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzi," Conn said. "I know you're all anxious, but it's a long story. This'll be a good chance to tell you." Fawzi turned to his wife and daughter, interrupting himself to shout instructions to a couple of dockhands who were floating the baggage off the ship on a contragravity-lifter. Conn's father had sent Charley off with a message to his mother and Flora. Conn turned to Colonel Zareff. "I noticed extra workers coming out from the hiring agencies in Storisende, and the crop was all in across the Calders. Big winepressing this year?" "Yes, we're up to our necks in melons," the old planter grumbled. "Gehenna of a big crop. Price'll drop like a brick of collapsium, and this time next year we'll be using brandy to wash our feet in." "If you can't get good prices, hang onto it and age it. I wish you could see what the bars on Terra charge for a drink of tenyear-old Poictesme." "This isn't Terra and we aren't selling it by the drink. Only place we can sell brandy is at Storisende spaceport, and we have to take what the trading-ship captains offer. You've been on a rich planet for the last five years, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live in a poorhouse. And that's what Poictesme is." "Things'll be better from now on, Klem," the mayor said, putting one hand on the old man's shoulder and the other on Conn's. "Our boy's home. With what he can tell us, we'll be able to solve all our problems. Come on, let's go up and hear about it." They entered the wide doorway of the warehouse on the docklevel floor of the Airport Building and crossed to the lift. About a dozen others had joined them, all the important men of Lichfield. Inside, Kurt Fawzi's laborers were floating out cargo for the shipcasks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates painted light blue and marked with the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and the gold triangle of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance Service. Long cases of rifles, square boxes of ammunition, machine guns, crated auto-cannon and rockets. "Where'd that stuff come from?" Conn asked his father. "You dig it up?" pened since the last time I wrote you. Remember the big underground headquarters complex in the Calders? Everybody thought it had been all cleaned out years ago. You know, it's never a mistake to take a second look at anything that everybody believes. I found a lot of sealed-off sections over there that had never been entered. This stuff's from one of the headquarters defense armories. I have a gang getting the stuff out. Charley and I flew in after lunch, and I'm going back the first thing tomorrow." "But there's enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child on Poictesme!" Conn objected. "Where are we going to sell this?" "Storisende spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newly colonized planets that haven't been industrialized yet. They don't pay much, but it doesn't cost much to get it out, and I've been clearing about three hundred sols a ton on the spaceport docks. That's not bad, you know." Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-# submachine guns. Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even a used one was worth a hundred sols. Conn started to say something about that, but then they came to the lift and were crowding onto it. He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office a few times, always with his father, and he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversations, with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays. Fawzi's warehouse and brokerage business, and the airline agency, and the government, such as it was, of Litchfield, combined, made few demands on his time and did not prevent the office from being a favored loafing center for the town's elders. The lights were bright only over the big table that served, among other things, as a desk, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begun speaking more softly. Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi's office. Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and laying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their weapons to his. That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them bothered. A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reached manhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit. Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn't count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it; maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainly wasn't because of anything the Planetary Government at Storisende did to maintain order. gun, Tom Brangwyn took over the bartending, getting out brandy from a keg in the corner. "Everybody supplied?" Fawzi was asking. "Well, let's drink to our returned emissary. We're all anxious to hear what you found out, Conn. Gentlemen, here's to our friend Conn Maxwell. Welcome home, Conn!" "Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi -- " "No, let's not have any of this mister foolishness! You're one of the gang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if we don't have anything else." "You telling us, Kurt?" somebody demanded. One of the distillery company; the name would come back to Conn in a moment. "When this crop gets pressed and fermented -- " "When I start pressing, I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat the stuff till it ferments," Colonel Zareff said. "Or why. You won't be able to handle all of it." "Now, now!" Fawzi reproved. "Let's not start moaning about our troubles. Not the day Conn's come home. Not when he's going to tell us how to find the Third FleetArmy Force Brain." "You did find out where the Brain is, didn't you, Conn?" Brangwyn asked anxiously. That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down after the toast; now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward, looking at Conn fixedly. "What did you find out, Conn?" "It's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?" "Did you find out where it is?" He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. He couldn't, any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger of a pistol he knew would blow up in his hand. "Wait a minute, gentlemen." He finished the brandy, and held out the glass to Tom Brangwyn, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drink had warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throat and the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. "I hope none of you expect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it, where the Brain is. I can't. I can't even give the approximate location of the thing." Much of the happy eagerness drained out of the faces around him. Some of them were looking troubled; Colonel Zareff was gnawing the bottom of his mustache, and Judge Ledue's hand shook as he tried to relight his cigar. Conn stole a quick sideglance at his father; Rodney Maxwell was watching him curiously, as though wondering what he was going to say next. "But it is still here on Poictesme?" Fawzi questioned. "They didn't take it away when they evacuated, did they?"  This time he picked up the pitcher and refilled for himself. "I'm going to have to do a lot of talking," he said, "and it's going to be thirsty work. I'll have to tell you the whole thing from the beginning, and if you start asking questions at random, you'll get me mixed up and I'll miss the important points." "By all means!" Judge Ledue told him. "Give it in your own words, in what you think is the proper order." "Thank you, Judge." Conn drank some more brandy, hoping he could get his courage up without getting drunk. After all, they had a right to a full report; all of them had contributed something toward sending him to Terra. "The main purpose in my going to the University was to learn" computer theory and practice. It wouldn't do any good for us to find the Brain if none of us are able to use it. Well, I learned enough to be able to operate, program and service any computer in existence, and train assistants. During my last year at the University, I had a part-time paid job programming the big positron-neutrino-photon computer in the astrophysics department. When I graduated, I was offered a position as instructor in positronic computer theory." "You never mentioned that in your letters, son," his father said. "It was too late for any letter except one that would come on the same ship I did. Beside, it wasn't very important." "I think it was." There was a catch in old Professor Kellton's voice. "One of my boys, from the Academy, offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He poured himself a second drink, something he almost never did. "Conn means it wasn't important because it didn't have anything to do with the Brain," Fawzi explained and then looked at Conn expectantly. All right; now he'd tell them. "I went over all the records of the Third FleetArmy Force's occupation of Poictesme that are open to the public. On one pretext or another, I got permission to examine the non-classified files that aren't open to public examination. I even got a few peeps at some of the stuff that's still classified secret. I have maps and plans of all the installations that were built on this planet -- literally thousands of them, many still undiscovered. Why, we haven't more than scratched the surface of what the Federation left behind here. For instance, all the important installations exist in duplicate, some even in triplicate, as a precaution against Alliance space attack."  reff was indignant. "There never was a time when the Alliance could have taken the offensive against Poictesme, even if an offensive outside our own spacearea had been part of our policy. We just didn't have the ships. It and a half troops from Ashmodai to Marduk, and the fleet that was based on Amaterasu was blasted out of existence in the spaceports and in orbit. Hell, at the time of the surrender, we didn't have -- " "They weren't taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want to make is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any official record, a single word about the giant computer we call the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain." For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny insectile humming of the electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kellton set his glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer-blow. "Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi was incredulous and, for the first time, frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. "But you must have! A thing like that -- " "Of course it would be one of the closest secrets during the war," somebody else said. "But in forty years, you'd expect something to leak out." "Why, during the war, it was all through the Third Force. Even the Alliance knew about it; that's how Klem heard of it." "Well, Conn couldn't just walk into the secret files and read whatever he wanted to. Just because he couldn't find anything -- " "Don't tell me about security!" Klem Zareff snorted. "Certainly they still have it classified; staffbrass'd rather lose an eye than declassify anything. If you'd seen the lengths our staff went to -- hell, we lost battles because the staff wouldn't release information the troops in the field needed. I remember once -- " "But there was a Brain," Judge Ledue was saying, to reassure himself and draw agreement from the others. "It was capable of com bining data, and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and forming association patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It was more than a positronic brain -- it was a positronic super-mind." "We'd have won the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, a hundred and thirty inpeople -- and we were on the defensive in our own space-area! Every move we made was known and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done that without something like the Brain?" "Conn, from what you learned of computers, how large a volume of space would you say the Brain would have to occupy?" Professor Kellton asked. most unworldly of the lot, yet he was asking the most practical question. "Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the University occupies a total of about one This was his chance; they'd take anything he told them about computers as gospel. "It was only designed to handle problems in astrophysics. The Brain, being built for space war, would have to handle any such problem. And if half the stories about the Brain are anywhere near true, it handled any other problem -- mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic, psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I'd say that a be the smallest even conceivable." They all nodded seriously. They anything else, except one thing. "Lot of places on this planet where a thing that size could be hidden," Tom Brangwyn said, undismayed. "A planet's a mighty big place." "It could be under water, in one of the seas," Piet Dawes, the banker, suggested. "An underwater dome city wouldn't be any harder to build than a dome city on a poison-atmosphere planet like Tubal-Cain." "It might even be on TubalCain," a melon-planter said. "Or Hiawatha, or even one of the Beta or Gamma planets. The Third Force was occupying the whole Trisystem, you know." He thought for a moment. "If I'd been in charge, I'd have put it on one of the moons of Pantagruel." "But that's clear out in the Alpha System," Judge Ledue objected. "We don't have a spaceship on the planet, certainly nothing with a hyperdrive engine. And it would take a lifetime to get out to the Gamma System and back on reaction drive." Conn put his empty brandy glass on the table and sat erect. A new thought had occurred to him, chasing out of his mind all the worries and fears he had brought with him all the way from Terra. "Then we'll have to build a ship," he said calmly. "I know, when the Federation evacuated Poictesme, they took every hyperdrive ship with them. But they had plenty of shipyards and spaceports on this planet, and I have maps showing the location of all of them, and barely a third of them have been discovered so far. I'm sure we can find enough hulks, and enough hyperfield generator parts, to assemble a ship or two, and I know we'll find the same or better on some of the other planets. "And here's another thing," he added. "When we start looking into some of the dome-city plants on Tubal-Cain and Hiawatha and Moruna and Koshchei, we may find the plant or plants where the components for the Brain were fabricated, and if we do, we may find records of where they were shipped, and that'll be it." revr OU'RE right!" Professor Kellton cried, quivering with excitement. "We've been hunting at random for the Brain, so it would only be an accident if we found it. We'll have to do this systematically, and with Conn to help us -- Conn, why not build a computer? I don't mean another Brain; I mean a computer to help us find the Brain." "We can, but we may not even need to build one. When we get out to the industrial planets, we may find one ready except for perhaps some minor alterations." "But how are we going to fi nance all this?" Klem Zareff demanded querulously. "We're poorer than snakes, and even one hyperdrive ship's going to cost like Gehenna." "I've been thinking about that, Klem," Fawzi said. "If we can find material at these shipyards Conn knows about, most of our expense will be labor. Well, haven't we ten workmen Competing for every job? They don't really need money, only the things money can buy. We can raise food on the farms and provide whatever else they need out of Federation supplies." "Sure. As soon as it gets around that we're really trying to do something about this, everybody'll want in on it," Tom Brangwyn predicted. "And I have no doubt that the Planetary Government at Storisende will give us assistance, once we show that this is a practical and productive enterprise," Judge Ledue put in. "I have some slight influence with the President and -- " "I'm not too sure we want the Government getting into this," Kurt Fawzi replied. "Give them half a chance and that gang at Storisende'll squeeze us right out." "We can handle this ourselves," Brangwyn agreed. "And when we get some kind of a ship and get out to the other two systems, or even just to Tubal-Cain or Hiawatha, first thing you know, we'll be the Planetary Government." "Well, now, Tom," Fawzi began piously, "the Brain is too big a thing for a few of us to try to monopolize; it'll be for all Poictesme. Of course, it's only proper that we, who are making the effort to locate it, should have the direction of that effort..." While Fawzi was talking, Rodney Maxwell went to the table, rummaged his pistol out of the pile and buckled it on. The mayor stopped short. "You leaving us, Rod?" "Yes, it's getting late. Conn and I are going for a little walk; we'll be at Senta's in half an hour. The fresh air will do both of us good and we have a lot to talk about. After all, we haven't sefen each other for over five years." til they were away from the Airport Building and walking along High Garden Terrace in the direction of the Mall. Conn was glad; his own thoughts were weighing too heavily within him : I didn't do it. I was going to do it; every minute, I was going to do it, and I didn't, and now it's too late. "That was quite a talk you gave them, son," his father said. "They believed every word of it. A couple of times, I even caught myself starting to believe it." Conn stopped short. His father stopped beside him and stood looking at him. "Why didn't you tell them the truth?" Rodney Maxwell asked. The question angered Conn. It was what he had been asking himself. "Why didn't I just grab a couple of pistols off the table and shoot the lot of them?" he retorted. "It would have killed them quicker and wouldn't have hurt as much." His father took the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip of it. "The truth must be pretty bad then. There is no Brain. It that it, son?" "There never was one. I'm not saying that only because I know it would be impossible to build such a computer. I'm telling you what the one man in the Galaxy who ought to know told me -- the man who commanded the Third Force during the War." "Foxx Travis! I didn't know he was still alive. You actually talked to him?" "Yes. He's on Luna, keeping himself alive at low gravity. It took me a couple of years, and I was afraid he'd die before I got to him, but I finally managed to see him." "What did he tell you?" "That no such thing as the Brain ever existed." They started walking again, more slowly, toward the far edge of the terrace, with the sky red and orange in front of them. "The story was all through the Third Force, but it was just one of those wild tales that get started, nobody knows how, among troops. The High Command never denied or even discouraged it. It helped morale, and letting it leak to the enemy was good psychological warfare." "Klem Zareff says that everybody in the Alliance army heard of the Brain," his father said. "That was why he came here in the first place." He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. "You said a computer like the Brain would be an impossibility. Why? Wouldn't it be just another computer, onljr a lot bigger and a lot smarter?" ??TAD, computermen don't like to hear computers called smart," Conn said. "They aren't. The people who build them are smart; a computer only knows what's fed to it. They can hold more information in their banks than a man can in his memory, they can combine it faster, they don't get tired or absent-minded. But they can't imagine, they can't create, and they can't do anything a human brain can't." "You know, I'd wondered about just that," said his father. "And none of the histories of the War even as much as mentioned the Brain. And I couldn't see why, after the War, they didn't build dozens of them to handle all these Galactic political and economic problems that nobody seems able to solve. A thing like the Brain wouldn't only be useful for war; the people here aren't trying to find it for war purposes." "You didn't mention any of these doubts to the others, did you?" "They were just doubts. You knew for sure, and you couldn't tell them." "I'd come home intending to -- tell them there was no Brain, tell them to stop wasting their time hunting for it and start trying to figure out the answers themselves. But I couldn't. They don't believe in the Brain as a tool, to use; it's a machine god that they can bring all their troubles to. You can't take a thing like that away from people without giving them something better." "I noticed you suggested building a spaceship and agreed with the professor about building a computer. What was your idea? To take their minds off hunting for the Brain and keep them busy?" Conn shook his head. "I'm serious about the ship -- ships. You and Colonel Zareff gave me that idea." His father looked at him in surprise. "I never said a word in there, and Klem didn't even once mention -- " "Not in Kurt's office; before we went up from the docks. There was Klem, moaning about a good year for melons as though it were a plague, and you selling arms and ammunition by the ton. Why, on Terra or Baldur or Uller, a glass of our brandy brings more than these freighter-captains give us for a cask, and what do you think a colonist on Agramma, or Sekht, or Hachiman, who has to fight fo his life against savages and wild animals, would pay for one of those rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition?" H IS father objected. "We can't base the whole economy of a planet on brandy. Only about ten per cent of the arable land on Poictesme will grow wine-melons. And if we start exporting Federation salvage the way you talk of, we'll be selling pieces instead of job lots. We'll net more, but -- " "That's just to get us started. The ships will be used, after that, to get to Tubal-Cain and Hiawatha and the planets of the Beta and Gamma Systems. What I want to see is the mines and factories reopened, people employed, wealth being produced." "And where'll we sell what we produce? Remember, the mines closed down because there was no more market." "No more interstellar market, that's true. But there are a hunPoictesme. That's a big enough market and a big enough labor force to exploit the wealth of the Gartner Trisystem. We can have prosperity for everybody on our own resources. Just what do we need that we have to get from outside now?" His father stopped again and sat down on the edge of a fountain -- the same one, possibly, from which Conn had seen dust blowing as the airship had been coming in. "Conn, that's a dangerous idea. That was what brought on the System States War. The Alliance planets took themselves outside the Federation economic orbit and tlie Federation crushed them." Conn swore impatiently. "You've been listening to old Klem Zareff ranting about the Lost Cause and the greedy Terran robin r barons holding the Galaxy in economic serfdom while they piled up profits. The Federation didn't fight that war for profits; there weren't any profits to fight for. They fought it because if the System States had won, half of them would be at war among themselves now. Make no mistake about it, politically I'm all for the Federation. But economically, I want to see our people exploiting their own resources for themselves, instead of grieving about lost interstellar t rode, and bewailing bumper crops, and searching for a mythical robot god." "You think, if you can get something like that started, that they'll forget about the Brain?" his father asked skeptically. "That crowd up in Kurt Fawzi's office? Niflheim, no! They'll go on hunting for the Brain as long as they live, and every day they'll be expecting to find it tomorrow. That'll keep them happy. But they're all old men. The ones I'm interested in are the boys of Charley's age. I'm going to give them too many real things to do building ships, exploring the rest of the Trisystem, opening mines and factories, producing wealth -- for them to get caught in that empty old dream." He looked down at the dusty fountain on which his father sat. "That ghost-dream haunts this graveyard. I want to give them living dreams that they can make come true."  for a while, his cigar smoke red in the sunset. "If you can do all that, Conn... You know, I believe you can. I'm with you, as far as I can help, and we'll have a talk with Charley. He's a good boy, Conn, and he has a lot of influence among the other youngsters." He looked at his watch. "We'd better be getting along. You don't want to be late for your own coming-home party." Rodney Maxwell slid off the edge of the fountain to his feet, hitching at the gunbelt under his coat. Have to dig out his own gun and start wearing it, Conn thought. A man simply didn't go around in public without a gun in Litchfield. It wasn't decent. And he'd be spending a lot of time out in the brush, where he'd really need one. First thing in the morning, he'd unpack that trunk and go over all those maps. There were half a dozen spaceports and maintenance shops and shipyards within a half-day by airboat, none of which had been looted. He'd look them all over; that would take a couple of weeks. Pick the best shipyard and concentrate on it. Kurt Fawzi'd be the man to recruit labor. Professor Kellton was a scholar, not a scientist. He didn't know beans about hyperdrive engines, but he knew how to do library research. They came to the edge of High Garden Terrace at the escalator, long motionless, its moving parts rusted fast, that led down to the Mall, and at the bottom of it was Senta's, the tables under the open sky. A crowd was already gathering. There was Tom Brangwyn, and there was Kurt Fawzi and his wife, and Lynne. And there was Senta herself, fat and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red-and-purple dresses, bustling about, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the next. The dinner, Conn knew, would be the best he had eaten in five years, and afterward they would sit in the dim glow of Beta Gartner, sipping coffee and liqueurs, smoking and talking and visiting back and forth from one table to another, as they always did in the evenings at Senta's. Another bit from Eirrarsson's poem came back to him: We sit in the twilight, the shadows among, And we talk of the happy days when we were brave and young. That was for the old ones, for Colonel Zareff and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton, maybe even for Tom Brangwyn and Franz Veltrin and for his father. But his brother Charley and the boys of his generation would have a future to talk about. And so would he, and Lynne Fawzi. We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation, Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way, Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. 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Stock No. # #-F # Postpaid See The Satellites New, Low Price "Satelliter" Telescope O ment, proving There Are Aliens Among us, warned that we might be conquered with such invasion weapons as paper clips and rubber bands, provided clues by which these uninvited guests might be identified. Readers have asked for more data, were reassured when none was available. Far from joining them, I found the sudden quiet alarming; the aliens obviously had gone into hiding. But now they are emerging again and no more able, even after their long seclusion, to stop betraying their alienness than before. Arthur F. Ackley sent in this clipping from the Schenectady Union Star: "last Tuesday. Air Force technicians estiy Maj. David Simons on his balloon flight when this view was made including stomated his altitude at more than # feet reported seeing spectacular storm. Imagrm clouds in center. Simons at one point face of balloe at upper right was reflection from sur-This picture was made on infra-red film bon's gondola." Mr. Ackley reports that picture and caption appeared in his copy of the paper; not in others. He asks if they are trying to communicate with him and adds that he is particularly interested in the imagrm clouds in center. Running this item may answer both questions. Let us know what happens, Mr. Ackley, if you're in any position to. Theodore Cogswell, who teaches at the U. of Kentucky, says: versities! For a long time, I thought it was me. A stack of freshmen themes would come in and as I started through them I kept having the feeling I'd read them before. This was complicated by a feeling as I walked into classes at the beginning of the semester that I had seen the students before. To this add that most of my second semester students seemed to have no memory of anything that was discussed during the first semester. "There is only one explanation: # average freshmen types and are sending them to Earth by thousands for one semester orientation periods, each equipped with a survival kit containing # freshmen themes. "Flunking them out doesn't help since the grade isn't given until ( Continued on page #) by Friiz Leiber by Lloyd Biggie, Jr. by Evelyn E. Smith by Joseph Farrell The Orbit of the Vanguard Satellite by H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale mation-gathering unmanned satellite. In the vacuum of space, telemetering devices need not be enclosed in satellite, to leave room for batteries to send data to Earth. Manned satellite, of course, is not dependent on one-shot equipment, is supplied regularly by nuclear rocket. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Beginning a #-Part Serial You can't know there's a war on -- for the Snakes coif and Spiders weave to keep you from knowing it's being fought over your live and dead bodyl When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurlyburly's done. When the battle's lost and won. -- Macbeth M Y name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was bom in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time -- not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either. I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also bears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers -- in fact, our private name for being in this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a me. You don't know about the Change War, but it's influencing your lives all the time and maybe you've had hints of it without realizing. Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts -- not the story-book kind, but the so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons -- spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War. How I got recruited into the Change War, how it's conducted, what the two sides are, why you don't consciously know about it, what I really think about it -- you'll learn in due course. where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer and I've got my silly side, as you'll find out. My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and places. We're a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have our family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who've generally just been going through hell and want to raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started this thing I'm going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and everything. When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it. The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven't had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for size. Solely on doctor's orders, I have been on cosmic leave six times since coming to work at the Place, meaning I have had six brief vacations, if you care to call them that, for believe me they are busman's holidays, considering what goes on in the Place all the time. The last one I spent in Renaissance Rome, where I got a crush on Cesare Borgia, but I got over it. Vacations are for the birds, anyway, because they have to be fitted by the Spiders into serious operations of the Change War, and you can imagine how restful that makes them. "See those Soldiers changing the past? You stick along with them. Don't go too far up front, though, but don't wander off either. Relax and enjoy yourself." Ha! Now the kind of recuperation Soldiers get when they come to the Place is a horse of a far brighter color, simply dazzling by comparison. Entertainment is our business and we give them a bangup time and send them staggering happily back into action, though once in a great while something may happen to throw a wee shadow on the party. T AM dead in some ways, but don't let that bother you -- I am lively enough in others. If you met me in the cosmos, you would be more apt to yak with me or try to pick me up than to ask a cop to do same or a father to douse me with holy water, unless you are one of those hard-boiled reformer types. But you are not likely to meet me in the cosmos, because (bar Basin Street and the Prater) #th Century Italy and Augustan Rome -- until they spoiled it -- are my favorite (Ha!) vacation spots and, as I have said, I stick as close to the Place as I can. It is really the nicest Place in the whole Change World. (Crisis! I even think of it capitalized!) Anyhoo, when this thing started, I was twiddling my thumbs on the couch nearest the piano and thinking it was too late to do my fingernails and whoever came in probably wouldn't notice them anyway. The Place was jumpy like it always is on an approach and the gray velvet of the Void around us was curdled with the uneasy lights you see when you close your eyes in the dark. Sid was tuning the Maintained for the pickup and the right shoulder of his gold-worked gray doublet was streaked where he'd been wiping his face on it with quick ducks of his head. Beauregard was leaning as close as he could over Sid's other shoulder, one white-trousered knee neatly indenting the rose plush of the control divan, and he wasn't missing a single flicker of Sid's old fingers on the dials; Beau's co-pilot besides piano player. Beau's face had that dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and more he didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling saloon on one of those wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats. Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back and his knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever horrors a life in Nazioccupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk Demon in the Change World. Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili -- the New Girl, of course -- were telling the big beads of their identical pearl necklaces. You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons doesn't automatically make us brave. Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door began to darken in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds blowing hard and my heart missed a couple of beats, and the next thing three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the Place, their first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and weights. of hussars, as we'd been advised, and -- praise the Bonny Dew! -- I saw that the first of them was Erich, my own dear little commandant, the pride of the von Hohenwalds and the Terror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or other, and beside Erich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new boy, blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a Christian hell. They were uniformed exactly alike in black -- shakos, fur-edged pelisses, boots, and so forth -- with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only difference between them was that Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand and was clenching the mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the Roman's. "You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Sid boomed at them, and Beau twitched a smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant, "Shut the Door!" and the New Girl copied her and I joined in because the Change Winds do blow like crazy when the Door is open, even though it can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking through. "Shut it before it blows wrinkles in our faces," Maud called in her gamin voice to break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the tight, knee-length frock she'd copied from the New Girl. But the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman -- I remembered his name was Mark -- was blundering forward stiffly as if there were something wrong with his eyes, while Erich and the New Boy were yelling at each other about a kid and Einstein and a summer palace and a bloody glove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg. Erich had that taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me. The New Boy was in a tearing rage. "Why'd you pull us out so bloody fast? We fair chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away." "Didn't you feel their stun guns, Dummkopf, when they sprung the trap -- too soon, Gott sei Dank?" Erich demanded. "I did," the New Boy told him. "Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you show us action?" "Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough." "You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward." "Weibischer Englander!" "Bloody Hun!" " Schlange !" The blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw back his sableedged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away from Erich, which bumped him into Beau. At the first sign of the quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as quickly and silently as a -- no, I won't use that word -- and slithered over to them. "Sirs, you forget yourselves," he said sharply, off balance, supporting himself on the New Boy's upraised arm. "This is Sidney Lessingham's Place of Entertainment and Recuperation. There are ladies -- " ' ' the New Boy shoved him off and snatched with his bare hand for his saber. Beau reeled against the divan, it caught him in the shins and he fell toward the Maintainers. Sid whisked them out of the way as if they were a couple of beach radios -- simply nothing in the Place is nailed down -- and had them back on the coffee table before Beau hit the floor. Meanwhile, Erich had his saber out and had parried the New Boy's first wild slash and lunged in return, and I heard the scream of steel and the rutch of his boot on the diamond-studded pavement. pulling from the ruffles of his shirt bosom a derringer I knew was some other weapon in disguise -- a stun gun or even an Atropos. Besides scaring me damp for Erich and everybody, that brought me up short: us Entertainers' nerves must be getting as naked as the Soldiers', probably starting when the Spiders canceled all cosmic leaves twenty sleeps back. Sid shot Beau his look of command, rapped out, "I'll handle this, you whoreson firebrand," and turned to the Minor Maintained I noticed that the telltale on the Major was glowing a reassuring red again, and I found a moment to thank Mamma Devi that the Door was shut. Maud was jumping up and down, cheering I don't know which -- nor did she, I bet -- and the New Girl was white and I saw that the sabers were working more businesslike. Erich's flicked, flicked, flicked again and came away from couple of red drops. The blond lad lunged fiercely, Erich jumped back, and the next moment they were both floating helplessly in the air, twisting like they had cramps. I realized quick enough that Sid had shut off gravity in the Door and Stores sectors of the Place, leaving the rest of us firm on our feet in the Refresher and Surgery sectors. The Place has sectional gravity to suit our Extraterrestrial buddies -- those crazy ETs sometimes come whooping in for recuperation in very mixed batches. From his central position, Sid called out, kindly enough but taking no nonsense, "All right, lads, you've had your fun. Now sheathe those swords." For a second or so, the two black hussars drifted and contorted. Erich laughed harshly and neatly obeyed -- the commandant is used to free fall. The blond lad stopped writhing, hesitated while he glared upside down at Erich and managed to get his saber into its scabbard, although he turned a slow somersault doing it. Then Sid switched on their gravity, slow enough so they wouldn't get sprained landing. time, and stepped out briskly toward us. He stopped to clap the New Boy firmly on the shoulder and look him in the face. "So, now you get a good scar," he said. The other didn't pull away, but he didn't look up and Erich came on. Sid was hurrying toward the New Boy, and as he passed Erich, he wagged a finger at him and gayly said, "You rogue." Next thing I was giving Erich my "Man, you're home" hug and he was kissing me and cracking my ribs and saying, " Liebchen ! Doppchen!" -- which was fine with me because I do love him and I'm a good lover and as much a Doubleganger as he is. We had just pulled back from each other to get a breath -- his blue eyes looked so sweet in his worn face -- when there was a thud behind us. With the snapping of the tension, Doc had fallen off his bar stool and his top hat was over his eyes. As we turned to chuckle at him, Maud squeaked and we saw that the Roman had walked straight up against the Void and was marching along there steadily without gaining a foot, like it does happen, his black uniform melting into that inside-your-head gray. Maud and Beau rushed over to fish him back, which can be tricky. The thin gambler was all courtly efficiency again. Sid supervised from a distance. "What's wrong with him?" I asked Erich. He shrugged. "Overdue for Change Shock. And he was nearest the stun guns. His horse almost threw him. Mein Gott, you should have seen Saint Petersburg, Leibchen: the Nevsky Prospekt, the canals flying by like reception carpets of blue sky, a cavalry troop in blue and gold that blundered across our escape, fine women in furs and ostrich plumes, a monk with a big tripod and his head under a hood -- it gave me the horrors seeing all those Zombies flashing past and staring at me in that sick unawakened way they have, and knowing that some of them, say the photographer, might be Snakes." Our side in the Change War is the Spiders, the other side is the Snakes, though all of us -- Spiders and Snakes alike -- are Doublegangers and Demons too, because we're cut out of our lifelines in the cosmos. Your lifeline is all of you from birth to death. We're Doublegangers because we can operate both in the cosmos and outside of it, and Demons because we act reasonably alive while doing so -- which the Ghosts don't. Entertainers and Soldiers are all Demon-Doublegangers, whichever side they're on -- though they say the Snake Places are simply ghastly. Zombies are dead people whose lifelines lie in the so-called past.  Saint Petersburg before the ambush?" I asked Erich. "That is, if you can talk about it." "Why not? We were kidnapping the infant Einstein back from the Snakes in #. Yes, the Snakes got him, Liebchen, only a few sleeps back, endangering the West's whole victory over Russia -- " " -- which gave your dear little Hitler the world on a platter for fifty years and got me loved to death by your sterling troops in the Liberation of Chicago -- " " -- but which leads to the ultimate victory of the Spiders and the West over the Snakes and Communism, Leibchen, remember that. Anyway, our counter-snatch didn't work. The Snakes had guards posted -- most unusual and we weren't warned. The whole thing was a great mess. No wonder Bruce lost his head -- not that it excuses him." "The New Boy?" I asked. Sid hadn't got to him and he was still standing with hooded eyes where Erich had left him, a dark pillar of shame and rage. "Ja, a lieutenant from World War One. An Englishman." "I gathered that," I told Erich. "Is he really effeminate?" "W eibischer?" He smiled. "I had to call him something when he said I was a coward. He'll make a fine Soldier -- only needs a little more shaping." "You men are so original when you spat." I lowered my voice. "But you shouldn't have gone on and called him a Snake, Erich mine." "Schlange?" The smile got crooked. "Who knows -- about any of us? As Saint Petersburg showed me, the Snakes' spies are getting cleverer than ours." The blue eyes didn't look sweet now. "Are you, Liebchen, really nothing more than a good loyal Spider?" "Erich!" "All right, I went too far -- with Bruce and with you too. We're all hacked these days, riding with one leg over the breaking edge." Maud and Beau were supporting the Roman to a couch, Maud taking most of his weight, with Sid still supervising and the New Boy still sulking by himself. The New Girl should have been with him, of course, but I couldn't see her anywhere and I decided she was probably having a nervous breakdown in the Refresher, the little jerk. "The Roman looks pretty bad, Erich," I said. "Ah, Mark's tough. Got virtue, as his people say. And our little starship girl will bring him back to life if anybody can and if..." "... you call this living," I filled in dutifully. UE was right. Maud had fiftyodd years of psychomedical experience, #rd Century at that. It should have been Doc's job, but that was fifty drunks back. "Maud and Mark, that will be an interesting experiment," Erich said. "Reminiscent of Goering's with the frozen men and the naked gypsy girls" "You are a filthy Nazi. She'll be using electrophoresis and deep suggestion, if I know anything." "How will you be able to know anything, Liebchen, if she switches on the couch curtains, as I perceive she is preparing to do?" "Filthy Nazi I said and meant." "Precisely." He clicked his heels Friederich von Hohenwald, Oberleutnant in the army of the Third Reich. Fell at Narvik, where he was Recruited by the Spiders. Lifeline lengthened by a Big Change after his first death and at latest report Commandant of Toronto, where he maintains extensive baby farms to provide him with breakfast meat, if you believe the handbills of the voyageurs underground. At your service." "Oh, Erich, it's all so lousy," I said, touching his hand, reminded that he was one of the unfortunates Resurrected from a point in their lifelines well before their deaths -- in his case, because the date of his death had been shifted forward by a Big Change after his Resurrection. And as every Demon finds out, if he can't imagine it beforehand, it is pure hell to remember your future, and the shorter the time between your Resurrection and your death back in the cosmos, the better. Mine, bless Bab-ed-Din, was only an action-packed ten minutes on North Clark Street. Erich put his other hand lightly over mine. "Fortunes of the Change War, Liebchen. At least I'm a Soldier and sometimes assigned to future operations -- though why we should have this monomania about our future personalities back there, I don't know. Mine is a stupid Oberst, thin as paper -- and frightfully indignant at the voyageurs! But it helps me a little if I see him in perspective and at least I get back to the cosmos pretty regularly, Gott sei Dank, so I'm better off than you Entertainers." I didn't say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I found myself sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father's repose, that the Change Winds would blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A. Forzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway and buried in Chicago. Woodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot. "That's all right, Erich," I said. "We Entertainers Got Mittens too." He scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I had all my buttons on. "Mittens?" he said. "What do you mean? I'm not wearing any. Are you trying to say something about Bruce's gloves -- which incidentally seem to annoy him for some reason. No, seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers need mittens?" "Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I say." Prussian puss. He muttered, "Got mittens... Gott nut uns... God with us," and roared softly, "Greta, I don't know how I put up with you, the way you murder a great language for cheap laughs." "You've got to take me as I am," I told him, "mittens and all, thank the Bonny Dew -- " and hastily explained, "That's French -- Je bon Dieu -- the good God -- don't hit me. I'm not going to tell you any more of my secrets." He laughed feebly, like he was dying. "Cheer up," I said. "I won't be here forever, and there are worse places than the Place." He nodded grudgingly, looking around. "You know what, Greta, if you'll promise not to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I pretend I'll soon be going backstage to court the worldfamous ballerina Greta Forzane." He was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular theater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void's gray hardly disturbed by the screens masking Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and Beau's piano. Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the shelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage center. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches -- one with its curtains now shooting up into the gray -- and a few small tables. It is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn up don't ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most of them for the Ballet Russe on first sight, without even asking them whether they could keep time to music. Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, -- Hodgson " and was talking quietly at Doc, but with his eyes elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white, and I thought -- Damballa! -- I'm in the French Quarter. I couldn't see the New Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy after the fuss about Mark. He threw me a sign and I started over with Erich in tow. "Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham's your host, and a fellow Englishman. Bom in King's Lynn, #, schooled at Cambridge, but London was the life and death of me, though I outlasted Bessie, Jimmie, Charlie, and Ollie almost. And what a life! By turns a clerk, a spy, a bawd -- the two trades are hand in glove -- a poet of no account, a beggar, and a peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats are tinder!" At the word "poet," the New Boy looked up, but resentfully, as if he had been tricked into it. "And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I'll be so bold as to guess and answer one of your questions," Sid rattled on. "Yes, I knew Will Shakespeare -- we were of an age -- and he was such a modest, mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really did write those plays. Your pardon, 'faith, but that scratch might be looked to." Then I saw that the New Girl hadn't lost her head, but gone to Surgery (Ugh!) for a first-aid tray. She reached a swab toward the New Boy's sticky cheek, saying rather shrilly, "If I might..." Her timing was bad. Sid's last words and Erich's approach had darkened the look in the young Soldier's face and he angrily swept her arm aside without even glancing at her. Erich squeezed my arm. The tray clattered to the floor -- and one of the drinks that Beau was bringing almost followed it. Ever since the New Girl's arrival, Beau had been figuring that she was his responsibility, though I don't think the two of them had reached an agreement yet Beau was especially set on it because I was thick with Sid at the time and Maud with Doc, she loving tough cases. "Easy now, lad, and you love me!" Sid thundered, again shooting Beau the "Hold it" look. "She's just a poor pagan trying to comfort you. Swallow your bile, you black villain, and perchance it will turn to poetry. Ah, did I touch you there? Confess, you are a poet." though for a second I forgot my psychology and wondered if he knew what he was doing with his insights. "Yes, I'm a poet, all right," the New Boy roared. "I'm Bruce Marchant, you bloody Zombies. Fm a poet in a world where even the lines of the King James and your precious Will whom you use for laughs aren't safe from Snakes' slime and the Spiders' dirty legs. Changing our history, stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best intentioned and efficient, and what does it lead to? This bloody SI glove!" He held up his black-gloved left hand which still held the mate and he shook it "What's wrong with the Spider Issue gauntlet, heart of gold?" Sid demanded. "And you love us, tell us" While Erich laughed, "Consider yourself lucky, Kamerad. Mark and I didn't draw any gloves at all." "What's wrong with it?" Bruce yelled. "The bloody things are both lefts!" He slammed it down on the floor. We all howled, we couldn't help it. He turned his back on us and stamped off, though I guessed he would keep out of the Void. Erich squeezed my arm and said between gasps, " Mein Gott, Liebchen, what have I always told you about Soldiers? The bigger the gripe, the smaller the cause! It is infallible!" One of us didn't laugh. Ever since the New Girl heard the name Bruce Marchant, she'd had a look in her eyes like she'd been given the sacrament. I was glad she'd got interested in something, because she'd been pretty much of a snoot and a wet blanket up until now, although she'd come to the Place with the recommendation of having been a real whoopee girl in London and New York in the Twenties. She looked disapprovingly at us as she gathered up the tray and stuff, not forgetting the glove, which she placed on the center of the tray like a holy relic. - to her, but she ghosted past him and once again he couldn't do anything because of the tray in his hands. He came over and got rid of the drinks quick. I took a big gulp right away because I saw the New Girl stepping through the screen into Surgery and I hate to be reminded we have it and I'm glad Doc is too drunk to use it, some of the Arachnoid surgical techniques being very sickening as I know only too well from a personal experience that is number one on my list of things to be forgotten. By that time, Bruce had come back to us, saying in a carefully hard voice, "Look here, it's not the dashed glove itself, as you very well know, you howling Demons." "What is it then, noble heart?" Sid asked, his grizzled gold beard heightening the effect of innocent receptivity. "It's the principle of the thing," Bruce said, looking around sharply, but none of us cracked a smile. "It's this mucking inefficiency and death of the cosmos -- and don't tell me that isn't in the cards! -- masquerading as benign omniscient authority. The Spiders -- and we don't know who they are ultimately; it's just a name; we see only agents like ourselves -- the Spiders pluck us from the quiet graves of our lifelines -- " "Is that bad, lad?" Sid murmured, innocently straight-faced. " -- and Resurrect us if they can and then tell us we must fight another time-traveling power called the Snakes -- just a name, too -- which is bent on perverting and enslaving the whole cosmos, past, present and future." "And isn't it, lad?" "Before we're properly awake, we're Recruited into the Big Time and hustled into tunnels and burrows outside our space-time, these miserable closets, gray sacks, puss pockets -- no offense to this Place -- that the Spiders have created, maybe by gigantic implosions, but no one knows for certain, and then we're sent off on all sorts of missions into the past and future to change history in ways that are supposed to thwart the Snakes." "True, lad." "And from then on, the pace is so flaming hot and heavy, the shocks come so fast, our emotions are wrenched in so many directions, our public and private metaphysics distorted so insanely, the deepest thread of reality we cling to tied in such bloody knots, that we never can get things straight." "We've all felt that way, lad," Sid said soberly; Beau nodded his sleek death's head; "You should have seen me, Kamerad, my first fifty sleeps," Erich put in; while I added, "Us girls, too, Bruce." "Oh, I know I'll get hardened to it, and don't think I can't. It's not that," Bruce said harshly. "And I wouldn't mind the personal confusion, the mess it's made of my spirit, I wouldn't even mind remaking history and destroying priceless, once-called imperishable beauties of the past, if I felt it were for the best. The Spiders assure us that, to thwart the Snakes, it is all-important that the West ultimately defeat the East. But what have they done to achieve this? I'll give you some beautiful examples. To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city, Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key." got time for culture?"II heard myself say and I clapped my hand over my mouth in gentle reproof. "But you remember the dialogues, lad," Sid observed. "And rail not at Crete -- I have a sweet Keftian friend." "For how long will I remember Plato's dialogues? And who after me?" Bruce challenged. "Here's another. The Spiders want Rome powerful and, to date, they've helped Rome so much that she collapses in a blaze of German and Parthian invasions a few years after the death of Julius Caesar." This time it was Beau who butted in. Most everybody in the Place loves these bull sessions. "You omit to mention, sir, that Rome's newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the Snakes have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting it pass into the hands of the Spider West. That, sir, is the Snakes' Three-ThousandYear Plan which we are fighting against, striving to revive Rome's glories." "Striving is the word for it," Bruce snapped. "Here's yet another example. To beat Russia, the Spiders kept England and America out of World War Two, thereby ensuring a German invasion of the New World and creating a Nazi empire stretching from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!" He stopped and my short hairs prickled. Behind me, someone was chanting in a weird spiritless voice, like footsteps in hard snow. "Salz, Salz, bringe Salz. Keiri Peitscft, gnadige Herren. Salz, Salz, Salz." I turned and there was Doc waltzing toward us with little tiny steps, bent over so low that the ends of his shawl touched the floor, his head crooked up sideways and looking through us. I knew then, but Erich translated softly. "'Salt, salt, I bring salt. No whip, merciful sirs.' He is speaking to my countrymen in their language." Doc had spent his last months in a Nazi-operated salt mine. ening his top hat very carefully. He frowned hard while my heart thumped half a dozen times. Then his face slackened, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "Nichevo." "And it does not matter, sir," Beau translated, but directing his remark at Bruce. "True, great civilizations have been dwarfed or broken by the Change War. But others, once crushed in the bud, have bloomed. In the #s, I traveled a Mississippi that had never known Grant's gunboats. I studied piano, languages, and the laws of chance under the greatest European masters at the University of Vicksburg." "And you think your pipsqueak steamboat culture is compensation for -- " Bruce began but, "Prithee none of that, lad," Sid interrupted smartly. "Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards, and I'll drink dead drunk the man who disputes me. Hear reason: nations are not so puny as to shrivel and vanish at the first tampering with their past, no, nor with the tenth. Nations are monsters, boy, with guts of iron and nerves of brass. Waste not your pity on them." "True indeed, sir," Beau pressed, cooler and keener for the attack on his Greater South. "Most of us enter the Change World with the false metaphysic that the slightest change in the past -- a grain of dust misplaced -- will transform the whole future. It is a long while before we accept with our minds as well as our intellects the law of the Conservation of Reality: that when the past is changed, the future changes barely enough to adjust, barely enough to admit the new data. The Change Winds meet maximum resistance always. Otherwise the first operation in Babylonia would have wiped out New Orleans, Sheffield, Stuttgart, and Maud Davies' birthplace on Ganymede! "Note how the gap left by Rome's collapse was filled by the imperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian can tell the difference in most ages between the former Latin and the present Gothic Catholic Church. As you yourself, sir, said of Greece, it is as if an old melody were shifted into a slightly different key. In the wake of a Big Change, cultures and individuals are transposed, it's true, yet in the main they continue much as they were, except for the usual scattering of unfortunate but statistically meaningless accidents." "All right, you bloody savants -- maybe I pushed my point too far," Bruce growled. "But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods we use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby." "The Snakes did it first," I reminded him. "Yes, and we copied them. How resourceful does that make us?" he retorted, arguing like a woman. "If we need Einstein, why don't we Resurrect him, deal with him as a man?" " in slightly thicker slices, "Pardonnez-moi, but when you have enjoyed your status as Doubleganger a soupcon longer, you will understand that great men can rarely be Resurrected. Their beings are too crystalized, sir, their lifelines too tough." "Pardon me, but I think that's rot. I believe that most great men refuse to make the bargain with the Snakes, or with us Spiders either. They scorn Resurrection at the price demanded." "Brother, they ain't that great," I whispered, while Beau glided on with, "However that may be, you have accepted Resurrection, sir, and so incurred an obligation which you as a gentleman must honor." "I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his eyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '# ten minutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace." His voice was getting wilder all the time. Just beyond our circle, I noticed the New Girl watching him worshipfully. "But what did I find the Spiders wanted me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos." Sid touched my wrist and, as Bruce raved on, he whispered to me, "What kind of ball, think you, will please and so quench this firebrained rogue? And you love me, discover it" I whispered back without taking my eyes off Bruce either, "I know somebody who'll be happy to put on any kind of ball he wants, if he'll just notice her." "The New Girl, sweetling? 'Tis well. This rogue speaks like an angry angel. It touches my heart and I like it not." Bruce was saying hoarsely but loudly, "And so we're sent on operations in the past and from each of those operations the Change Winds blow futurewards, swiftly or slowly according to the opposition they breast, sometimes rippling into each other, and any one of those Winds may shift the date of our own death ahead of the date of our Resurrection, so that in an instant -- even here, outside the cosmos -- we may molder and rot or crumble to dust and vanish away. The wind with our name in it may leak through the Door." cause it's bad form to mention Change Death, and Erich flared out with, "Halt's Maul, Kamarad! There's always another Resurrection." But Bruce didn't keep his mouth shut. He said, "Is there? I know the Spiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut another Doubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He slapped his chest with his bare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbroken consciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more wars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power -- " his voice was rising to a climax -- "an almighty power so bloody ineffectual, it can't furnish one poor Soldier pulled out of the mud of Passchendaele, one miserable Change Commando, one Godforsaken Recuperee a proper issue of equipment!" And he held out his bare right hand toward us, fingers spread a little, as if it were the most amazing object and most deserving of outraged sympathy in the whole world. The New Girl's timing was perfect. She whisked through us, and before he could so much as wiggle the fingers, she whipped a black gauntleted glove on it and anyone could see that it fitted his hand perfectly. This time our laughing beat the other. We collapsed and slopped our drinks and pounded each other on the back and then started all over. "Ach, der Handschuh, Liebchen! Where'd she get it?" Erich gasped in my ear. "Probably just turned the other one inside out -- that turns a left into a right -- I've done it myself," I wheezed, collapsing again at the idea. "That would put the lining outside," he objected. "Then I don't know," I said. "We got all sorts of junk in Stores." "It doesn't matter, Liebchen " he assured me. "Ach, der Handschuh!" All through it, Bruce just stood there admiring the glove, moving the fingers a little now and then, and the New Girl stood watching him as if he were eating a cake she'd baked. " down, he looked up at her with a big smile. "What did you say your name was?" "Lili," she said, and believe you me, she was Lili to me even in my thoughts from then on, for the way she'd handled that lunatic. "Lilian Foster," she explained. "I'm English also. Mr. Marchant, I've read A Young Man's Fancy I don't know how many times." "You have? It's wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages -- I mean my Cambridge days. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather better." "I won't hear you say that. But I'd be terribly thrilled to hear the new ones. Oh, Mr. Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it Passiondale." "Why, if I may ask?" "Because that's the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and it's more like Pas-kenDA-luh." "Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called Ypres Wipers." "How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I'll wager we were Recruited in the same operation, summer of #. I'd got to France as a Red Cross nurse, but they found out my age and were going to send me back." "How old were you -- are you? Same thing, I mean to say." "Seventeen." "Seventeen in '#," Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy. It was real corny dialogue and I couldn't resent the humorous leer Erich gave me as we listened to them, as if to say, "Ain't it nice, Liebchen, Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy him between operations?" Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace and tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce hulking over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar's rig, I knew that I was seeing the start of something that hadn't been part of me since Dave died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of thing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change World. I wondered why I'd never thought of trying to work things so that Dave got Resurrected and I told myself : no, it's all changed, I've changed, better the Change Winds don't disturb Dave or I know about it. "No, I didn't die in # -- I was merely Recruited then," Lili was telling Bruce. "I lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from the way I dress. But let's not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr. Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you started in the trenches? I can't fancy them bettering your sonnet that concludes with, 'The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.' " That one almost made me whoop -- what monkeys we are, I thought -- though I'd be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of his own -- in fact, as many as possible. I decided I could safely forget our little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me. Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and the silver, the sables and ermine. There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth. -- Aucassin a new one from another tray Beau was bringing around. The gray of the Void was beginning to look real pleasant, like warm diamonds floating in it. Doc was sitting grandly at the bar with a steaming tumbler of tea -- a chaser, I guess, since he was just putting down a shot glass. Sid was talking to Erich and laughing at the same time and I said to myself it begins to feel like a party, but something's lacking. It wasn't anything to do with the Major Maintainer; its telltale was glowing a steady red like a nice little home fire amid the tight cluster of dials that included all the controls except the lonely and frightening Introversion switch that was never touched. Then Maud's couch curtains winked out and there were she and the Roman sitting quietly side by side. He looked down at his shiny boots and the rest of his black duds like he was just waking up and couldn't believe it all, and he said, "Omnia mutantur, nos et mueyebrows at Beau, who was taking the tray back, and he did proud by old Vicksburg by translating: "All things change and we change with them." Then Mark slowly looked around at us, and I can testify that a Roman smile is just as warm as any other nationality, and he finally said, "We are nine, the proper number for a party. The couches, too. It is good." Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Herren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsaius Niger, legate to Nero Claudius (called Germanicus in a former time stream) and who in # A.U.C. (Correct, Mark? It means # A.D., you meatheads!) died bravely fighting the Parthians and the Snakes in the Battle of Alexandria. Hoch, hoch, hoch!" E all swung our glasses and cheered with him and Sid yelled at Erich, "Keep your feet off the furniture, you unschooled rogue," and grinned and boomed at all three hussars, "Take your ease, Recuperees," and Maud and Mark got their drinks, the Roman paining Beau by refusing Falernian wine in favor of scotch and soda, and right away everyone was talking a mile a minute. We had a lot to catch up on. There was the usual yak about the war -- "The Snakes are laying mine fields in the Void," "I don't believe it, how can you mine nothing?" -- and the shortages -- bourbon, bobby pins, and the stabilitin that would have brought Mark out of it faster -- and what had become of people -- "Marcia? Oh, she's not around any more," (She'd been caught in a Change Gale and green and stinking in five seconds, but I wasn't going to say that) -- and Mark had to be told about Bruce's glove, which convulsed us all over again, and the Roman remembered a legionary who had carried a gripe all the way to Octavius because he'd accidentally been issued the unbelievable luxury item sugar instead of the usual salt, and Erich asked Sid if he had any new Ghostgirls in stock and Sid sucked his beard like the old goat he is. "Dost thou ask me, lusty Allemand? Nay, there are several great beauties, amongst them an Austrian countess from Strauss's Vienna, and if it were not for sweetling here... Mnnnn" I poked a finger in Erich's chest between two of the bright buttons with their tiny death's heads. "You, my little von Hohenwald, are a menace to us real girls. You have too much of a thing about the unawakened, ghost kind." He called me his little Demon and hugged me a bit too hard to prove it wasn't so, and then he suggested we show Bruce the Art Gallery. I thought this was a real argue him out of it, he got stubto do anything anyone wanted pay any attention while doing it. The saber cut was just a thin red line on his cheek; she'd washed away all the dried blood. The Gallery gets you, though. It's a bunch of paintings and sculptures and especially odd knickknacks, all made by Soldiers recuperating here, and a lot of them telling about the Change War from the stuff they're made of -- brass cartridges, flaked flint, bits of ancient pottery glued into futuristic shapes, mashed-up Incan gold rebeaten by a Martian, whorls of beady Lunan wire, a picture in tempera on a crinkle-cracked thick round of quartz that had filled a starship porthole, a Sumerian inscription chiseled into a brick from an atomic oven. the Gallery and I can always find some I haven't ever seen before. It gets you, as I say, thinking about the guys that made them and their thoughts and the far times and places they came from, and sometimes, when I'm feeling low, I'll come and look at them so I'll feel still lower and get inspired to kick myself back into a good temper. It's the only history of the Place there is and it doesn't change a great deal, because the things in it and the feelings that went into them resist the Change Winds better than anything else. Right now, Erich's witty lecture was bouncing off the big ears I hide under my pageboy bob and I was thinking how awful it is that for us that there's not only change but Change. You don't know from one minute to the next whether a mood or idea you've got is really new or just welling up into you because the past has been altered by the Spiders or Snakes. Change Winds can blow not only death but anything short of it, down to the featheriest fancy. They blow thousands of times faster than time moves, but no one can say how much faster or how far one of them will travel or what damage it'll do or how soon it'll damp out. The Big Time isn't the little time. And then, for the Demons, there's the fear that our personality will just fade and someone else climb into the driver's seat and us not even know. Of course, we Demons are supposed to be able to remember through Change and in spite of it; that's why we are Demons and not Ghosts like the other Doublegangers, or merely Zombies or Unborn and nothing more, and as Beau truly said, there aren't any great men among us -- and blamed few of the masses, either -- we're a rare sort of people and that's why the Spiders have to Recruit us where they find us without caring about our previous knowledge and background, a Foreign Legion of time, a strange kind of folk, bright but always in the background, with built-in nostalgia and cynicism, as adaptable as Centaurian shape-changers but with memories as long as a Lunan's six arms, a kind of Change People, you might say, the cream of the damned. But sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we remember, and we've forgotten that we forgot. As I say, the Gallery gets you feeling real low, and so now I said to myself, "Back to your lousy little commandant, kid," and gave myself a stiff boot. Erich was holding up a green bowl with gold dolphins or spaceships on it and saying, "And, to my mind, this proves that Etruscan art is derived from Egyptian. Don't you agree, Bruce?" Bruce looked up, all smiles from Lili, and said, "What was that, dear chap?" the Door and I was glad the hussars had parked their sabers along with their shakos, but before he could even get out a Jerry cussword, Doc breezed up in that plateau-state of drunkenness so like hypnotized sobriety, moving as if he were on a dolly, ghosted the bowl out of Erich's hand, said, "A beautiful specimen of Middle Systemic Venusian. When Eightaitch finished it, he told me you couldn't look at it and not feel the waves of the Northern Venusian Shallows rippling around your hoofs. But it might look better inverted. I wonder. Who are you, young officer? Nichevo," and he carefully put the bowl back on its shelf and rolled on. It's a fact that Doc knows the Art Gallery better than any of us, really by heart, he being the oldest inhabitant, though he maybe picked a bad time to show off his knowledge. Erich was going to take out after him, but I said, "Nix, Ka merad, remember gloves and sugar," and he contented himself with complaining, "That nichevo -- it's so gloomy and hopeless, ungeheuerlich. I tell you, Liebchen, they shouldn't have Russians working for the Spiders, not even as Entertainers." I grinned at him and squeezed his hand. "Not much entertainment in Doc these days, is there?" I agreed. He grinned back at me a shade sheepishly and his face smoothed and his blue eyes looked sweet again for a second and he said, "I shouldn't want to claw out at people that way, Greta, but at times I am just a jealous old man," which is not entirely true, as he isn't a day over thirty-three, although his hair is nearly white. Our lovers had drifted on a few steps until they were almost fading into the Surgery screen. It was the last spot I would have picked for the formal preliminaries to a little British smootching, but Lili probably didn't share my prejudices, though I remembered she'd told me she'd served a brief hitch in an Arachnoid Field Hospital before being transferred to the Place. But she couldn't have had anything like the experience I'd had during my short and sour career as a Spider nurse, when I'd acquired my best-hated nightmare and flopped completely (jobwise, but on the floor, too) at seeing a doctor flick a switch and a being, badly injured but human, turn into a long cluster of glistening strange fruit -- ugh, it always makes me want to toss my cookies and my buttons. And to think that dear old Daddy Anton wanted his Greta chile to be a doctor. " getting me anywhere I wanted to go, and after all there was a party going on. Doc was babbling something at a great rate to Sid -- I just hoped Doc wouldn't get inspired to go into his animal imitations, which sound pretty fierce and once seriously offended some recuperating ETs. Maud was demonstrating to Mark a #rd Century twostep and Beau sat down at the piano and improvised softly on her rhythm. As the deep-thrumming relaxing notes hit us, Erich's face brightened and he dragged me over. Pleasantly soon I had my feet off the diamond-rough floor, which we don't carpet because most of the ETs, the dear boys, like it hard, and I was shouldering back deep into the couch nearest the piano, with cushions all around me and a fresh drink in my hand, while my Nazi boy friend was getting ready to discharge his Weltschmerz as song, which didn't alarm me too much, as his baritone is passable. Things felt real good, like the Maintainer was just idling to keep the Place in existence and moored to the cosmos, not exerting itself at all or at most taking an occasional lazy paddle stroke. At times the Place's loneliness can be happy and comfortable. Then Beau raised an eyebrow at Erich, who nodded, and next thing they were launched into a song we all know, though I've never found out where it originally came from. This time it made me think of Lili, and I wondered why -- and why it's a tradition at Recuperation. Stations to call the new girl Lili, though in this case it happened to beher real name. Standing in the Doorway just outside of space, Winds of Change blow ' round you but don't touch your face; You smile as you whisper tenderly, " Please cross to me, Recuperee; "The operation's over, come in and close the Door." De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. -- Eliot serted Erich and I cranked my head up and saw Beau, Maud and Sid streaking for the control divan. The Major Maintainer was blinking emergency-green and fast, but the code was plain enough for even me to recognize the Spider distress call and for a second I felt just sick. Then Erich blew out his reserve breath in the middle of "Door" and I gave myself another of those helpful mental boots at the base of the spine and we hurried after them toward the center of the Place along with Mark. The blinks faded as we got there and Sid told us not to move because we were making shadows. He glued an eye to the telltale and we held still as statues as he caressed the dials like he was making love. One sensitive hand flicked out past the Introversion switch over to the Minor Maintainer and right away the Place was dark as your soul and there was nothing for me but Erich's arm and the knowledge that Sid was nursing a green light I couldn't even see, although my eyes had plenty time to accommodate. Then the green light finally came back very slowly and I could see the dear reliable old face -- the green-gold beard making him look like a merman -- and then the telltale flared bright and Sid flicked on the Place lights and I leaned back. "That nails them, lads, whoever and whenever they may be. Get ready for a pick-up." Beau, who was closest of course, looked at him sharply. Sid shrugged uneasily. "Meseemed at first it was from our own globe a thousand years before our Lord, but that indication flickered and faded like witchfire. As it is, the call comes from something smaller than the Place and certes adrift from the cosmos. Meseemed too at one point I knew the fist of the caller -- an antipodean atomicist named Benson-Carter -- but that likewise changed." Beau said, "We're not in the right phase of the cosmos-Places rhythm for a pick-up, are we, sir?" Sid answered, "Ordinarily not, boy." Beau continued, "I didn't think we had any pick-ups scheduled. Or stand-by orders." Sid said, "We haven't" Mark's eyes glowed. He tapped Erich on the shoulder. "An octavian denarius against ten Reichsmarks it is a Snake trap." Erich's grin showed his teeth. "Make it first through the Door next operation and I'm on." T didn't take that to tell me things were serious, or the thought that there's always a first time for bumping into something from really outside the cosmos. The Snakes have broken our code more than once. Maud was quietly serving out weapons and Doc was helping her. Only Bruce and Lili stood off. But they were watching. The telltale brightened. Sid reached toward the Maintained saying, "All right, my hearties. Remember, through this Doorway pass the fishiest finaglers in and out of the cosmos." The Door appeared to the left and above where it should be and darkened much too fast There was a gust of stale salt seawind, if that makes sense, but no stepped-up Change Winds I could tell -- and I had been bracing myself against them. The Door got inky and there was a flicker of gray fur whips and a flash of copper flesh and gilt and something dark and a clump of hoofs and Erich was sighting a stun gun across his left forearm, and then the Door had vanished like that and a tentacled silvery Lunan and a Venusian satyr were coming straight toward us. The Lunan was hugging a pile of clothes and weapons. The satyr was helping a wasp-waisted woman carry a heavy-looking bronze chest The woman was wearing a short skirt and high-collared bolero jacket of leather so dark brown it was almost black. She had a twohorned petsoia hairdress and she was boldly gilded here and there and wore sandals and copper anklets and wristlets -- one of them a copper-plated Caller -- and from her wide copper belt hung a shorthandled double-headed ax. She was dark-complexioned and her forehead and chin receded, but the effect was anything but weak; she had a face like a beautiful arrowhead -- and a familiar one, by golly! But before I could say, "Kabysia Labrys," Maud shrilly beat me to it with, "It's Kaby with two friends. Break out a couple of Ghostgirls." And then I saw it really was old-home week because I recognized my Lunan boy friend Ilhilihis, and in the midst of all the confusion I got a nice kick out of knowing I was getting so I could tell the personality of one silverfurred muzzle from another. They reached the control divan and Illy dumped his load and the others let down the chest, and Kaby staggered but shook off the two ETs when they started to support her, and she looked daggers at Sid when he tried to do the same, although she's his "sweet Keftian friend" he'd mentioned to Bruce.  the divan and took two gasping breaths so deep that the ridges of her spine showed through her brown-skinned waist, and then she threw up her head and commanded, "Wine!" While Beau was rushing it, Sid tried to take her hand again, saying, "Sweetling, I'd never heard you call before and knew not this pretty little fist," but she ripped out, "Save your comfort for the Lunan," and I looked and saw -- Hey, Zeus! -- that one of Ilhilihis' six tentacles was lopped off halfway. That was for me, and, going to him, I fast briefed myself: "Remember, he only weighs fifty pounds for all he's seven feet high; he doesn't like low sounds or to be grabbed; the two legs aren't tentacles and don't act the same; uses them for long walks, tentacles for leaps; uses tentacles for close vision too and for manipulation, of course; extended, they mean he's at ease; retracted, on guard or nervous; sharply retracted, disgusted; greeting -- " Just then, one of them swept across my face like a sweet-smelling feather duster and I said, "Illy, man, it's been a lot of sleeps," and brushed my fingers across his muzzle. It still took a little self-control not to hug him, and I did reach a little cluckingly for his lopped tentacle, but he wafted it away from me and the little voicebox belted to his side squeaked, "Naughty, naughty. Papa will fix his little old self. Greta girl, ever bandaged even a Terra octopus?" I had, an intelligent one from didn't tell him so. I stood and let him talk to the palm of my hand with one of his tentacles -- I don't savvy feather-talk but it feels good, though I've often wondered who taught him English -- and watched him use a couple others to whisk a sort of Lunan band-aid out of his pouch and cap his wound with it. Meanwhile, the satyr knelt over the bronze chest, which was decorated with little death's heads and crosses with hoops at the top and swastikas, but looking much older than Nazi, and the satyr said to Sid, "Quick thinkin, Gov, when ya saw the Door comin in high n soffened up gravty unner it, but cud I hav sum hep now?" Sid touched the Minor Maintainer and we all got very light and my stomach did a flip-flop while the satyr piled on the chest the clothes and weapons that Illy had been carrying and pranced off with it all and carefully put it down at the end of the bar. I decided the satyr's English instructor must have been quite a character, too. Wish I'd met him -- her -- it. Sid thought to ask Illy if he wanted Moon-normal gravity in one sector, but my boy likes to mix, and being such a lightweight, Earth-normal gravity doesn't bother him. As he said to me once, "Would Jovian gravity bother a beetle, Greta girl?" and he squeaked that his name was Sevensee and that he'd never met him before this operation. I knew the satyrs were from a billion years in the future, just as the past, and I thought -- Kreesed us! -- but it must have been a real big or emergency-like operation to have the Spiders using those two tween them -- a time-difference that gives you a feeling of awe for a second, you know. I started to ask Illy about it, but just then Beau came scampering back from the bar with a big redand-black earthenware goblet of wine -- we try to keep a variety of drinking tools in stock so folks will feel more at home. Kaby grabbed it from him and drained most of it in one swallow and then smashed it on the floor. She does things like that, though Sid's tried to teach her better. Then she stared at what she was thinking about until the whites showed all around her eyes and her lips pulled way back from her teeth and she looked a lot less human than the two ETs, just like a fury. Only a time traveler knows how like the wild murals and engravings of them some of the ancients can look. My hair stood up at the screech she let out. She smashed a fist into the divan and cried, "Goddess! Must I see Crete destroyed, revived, and now destroyed again? It is too much for your servant." Personally, I thought she could stand anything. There was a rush of questions at what she said about Crete -- I asked one of them, for the news certainly frightened me -- but she shot up her arm straight for silence and took a deep breath and began. "In the balance hung the battle. Rowing like black centipedes, the Dorian hulls bore down on our outnumbered ships. On the bright beach, masked by rocks, Sevensee and I stood by the needle gun, ready to give the black hulls silent wounds. Beside us was Ilhilihis, suited as a sea monster. But then... then... Then I saw she wasn't altogether the iron babe, for her voice broke and she started to shake and to sob rackingly, although her face was still a mask of rage, and she threw up the wine. Sid stepped in and made her stop, which I think he'd been wanting to do all along. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. -- Ibsen TlTY Elizabethan boy friend put his fists on his hips and laid down the law to us as if we were a lot of nervous children who'd been playing too hard. "Look you, masters, this is a Recuperation Station and I am running it as such. A plague of all operations! I care not if the frame of things disjoints and the whole Change World goes to ruin, but you, warrior maid, are going to rest and drink more wine slowly before you tell your tale and your colleagues are going to be properly companioned. No questions, anyone. Beau, and you love us, give us a lively tune." Kaby relaxed a little and let him put his hand carefully against her back in token of support and she said grudgingly, "All right, Fat Belly." Theh, so help me, to the tune of the Muskrat Ramble, which I'd taught Beau, we got girls for those two ETs and everybody properly paired up. Right here I want to point out that a lot of the things they say in the Change World about Recuperation Stations simply aren't so -- and anyway they always leave out nine-tenths of it. The Soldiers that come through the Door are looking for a good time, sure, but they're hurt real bad too, every one of them, deep down in their minds and hearts, if not always in their bodies or so you can see it right away. Believe me, a temporal operation is no joke, and to start with, there isn't one person in a hundred who can endure to be cut from his lifeline and become a really wideawake Doubleganger -- a Demon, that is -- let alone a Soldier. What does a badly hurt and mixed-up creature need who's been fighting hard? One individual to look out for him and feel for him and patch him up, and it helps if the one is of the opposite sex -- that's something that goes beyond species. There's your basis for the Place and the wild way it goes about its work, and also for most other Recuperation Stations or Entertainment Spots. The name Entertainer can be misleading, but I like it She's got to be a lot more than a good party girl -- or boy -- though she's got to be that too. She's got to be a nurse and a psychologist and an actress and a mother and a practical ethnologist and a lot of things with longer names -- and a reliable friend.  perfectly or even near it. We just try. But when the call comes, Entertainers have to forget grudges and gripes and envies and jealousies -- and remember, they're lively people with sharp emotions -- because there isn't any time then for anything but help and don't ask who! And, deep inside her, a good Entertainer doesn't care who. Take the way it shaped up this time. It was pretty clear to me I ought to shift to Illy, although I wasn't quite easy in my mind about leaving Erich, because the Lunan was a long time from home and, after all, Erich was among anthropoids. Ilhilihis needed someone who was simpatico. I like Illy and not just because he is a sort of tall cross between a spider monkey and a persian cat -- though that is a handsome combo when you come to think of it. I like him for himself. So when he came in all lopped and shaky after a mean operation, I was the right person to look out for him. Now I've made my little speech and know-nothings in the Change World can go on making their bum jokes. But I ask you, how could an arrangement between Illy and me be anything but Platonic? We might have had some octopoid girls and nymphs in stock -- Sid couldn't be sure until he checked -- but Ilhilihis and Sevensee voted for real people and I knew Sid saw it their way. Maud squeezed Mark's hand and tripped over to Sevensee ("Those are sharp hoofs you got, man" -- she's picked up some of my language, like she has everything else), though Beau did frown over his shoulder at Lili from the piano, maybe to argue that she ought to take on the ET, as Mark had been a real casualty and could use live nursing. But it was plain as day to anybody but Beau that Bruce and Lili were a big thing and the last to be disturbed. Erich acted stiffly hurt at losing me, but I knew he wasn't He thinks he has a great technique with Ghostgirls and he likes to show it off, and he really is pretty slick at it, if you go for that sort of thing and -- yang my yin! -- who doesn't at times? And when Sid formally wafted the Countess out of Stores -- a real blonde stunner in a white satin hobble skirt with a white egret swaying up from her tiny hat, way ahead of Maud and Lili and me when it came to looks, though transparent as cigarette smoke -- and when Erich clicked his heels and bowed over her hand and proudly conducted her to a couch, black Svengali to her Trilby, and started to German-talk some life into her with much head cocking and toothy smiling and a flow of witty flattery, and when she began to flirt back and the dream look in her eyes sharpened hungrily and focused on him -- well, then I knew that Erich was happy and felt he was doing proud by the Reichswehr. No, my little commandant wasn't worrying me on that score. hetaera name of Phryne; I suppose not the one who maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and he was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though, from some looks he'd flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really went for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some highenergy bread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to be carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and Maud, maybe comparing notes on the Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau had got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano, smiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute. Illy turned back from inspecting them all and squeaked, "Animals with clothes are so refreshing, dahling! Like you're all carrying banners!" Maybe he had something there, though my banners were kind of Ash Wednesday, a charcoal gray sweater and skirt. He looked at my mouth with a tentacle to see how I was smiling and he squeaked softly, "Do I seem dull and commonplace to you, Greta girl, because I haven't got banners? Just years in your past, as gray and lifeless as Luna is today, not as when she was a real dreamy sister planet simply bursting with air and water and feather forests. Or am I as strangely interesting to you as you are to me, girl from a "Illy, you're sweet," I told him, giving him a little pat I noticed his fur was still vibrating nervously and I decided the heck with Sid's orders, I'm going to pump him about what he was doing with Kaby and the satyr. Couldn't have bottled up, too. Besides, I was curious. Maiden, Nymph, and Mother are the eternal royal Trinity of the island, and the Goddess, who is worshipped there in each of these aspects, as New Moon, Full Moon, and Old Moon, is the sovereign Deity. -- Graves seconds of bread and olives, and, when he raised his bushy eyebrows, gave him a curt nod that meant she knew what she was doing. She stood up and sort of took a position. All the talk quieted down fast, even Bruce's and Lili's. Kaby's face and voice weren't strained now, but they weren't relaxed either. "Woe to Spider! Woe to Cretan! Heavy is the news I bring you. Bear it bravely, like strong women. When we got the gun unlimbered, I heard seaweed fry and crackle. We three leaped behind the rock wall, saw our gun grow white as sunlight in a heat-ray of the Serpents! Natch, we feared we were outnumbered and I called upon my Caller." I don't know how she does it, but she does -- in English too. That is, when she figures she's got something important to report, and maybe she needs a little time to get ready. Beau claims that all the ancients fit their thoughts into measured lines as naturally as we pick a word that will do, but I'm not sure how good the Vicksburg language department is. Though why I should wonder about things like that when I've got Kaby spouting the stuff right in front of me, I don't know. "But I didn't die there, kiddos. I still hoped to hurt the Greek ships L maybe with the Snake's own heat gun. So I quick tried to outflank them. My two comrades crawled beside me -- they are males, but they have courage. Soon we spied the ambush-setters. They were Snakes and they were many, filthily disguised as Cretans." There was an indignant murmur at this, for our cutthroat Change War has its code, the Soldiers tell me. Being an Entertainer, I don't have to say what I think. "They had seen us when we saw them," Kaby swept on, "and and knife-rays struck about us in a storm of wind and fire, and the Lunan lost a feeler, fighting for Crete's Triple Goddess. So we dodged behind a sand hill, steered our flight back toward the water. It was awful, what we saw there: Crete's brave ships all sunk or sinking, blue sky sullied by their death-smoke. Once again the Greeks had licked us! -- aided by the filthy Serpents. "Round our wrecks, their black ships scurried, like black beetles, filth their diet, yet this day they dine on heroes. On the quiet sunlit beach there, I could feel a Change Gale blowing, working changes deep inside me, aches and pains that were a stranger's. Half my memories were doubled, half my lifeline crooked and twisted, three new moles upon my swordhand. Goddess, Goddess, Triple Goddess -- " reached out a hand, but she straightened her back. "Triple Goddess, give me courage to tell everything that happened. We ran down into the water, hoping to escape by diving. We had hardly gotten under when the heatrays hit above us, turning all the cool green surface to a roaring white inferno. But as I believe I told you, I was calling on my Caller, and a Door now opened to us, deep below the deadly steamclouds. We dived in like frightened minnows and a lot of water with us." Off Chicago's Gold Coast, Dave once gave me a lesson in skindiving and, remembering it, I got a flash of Kaby's Door in the dark depths. "For a moment, all was chaos. Then the Door slammed shut behind us. We'd been picked up in time's nick by -- an Express Room of our Spiders! -- sloshing two feet deep in water, much more cramped for space than this Place. It was manned by a magician, an old coot named Benson-Carter. He dispelled the water quickly and reported on his Caller. We'd got dry, were feeling human, Illy here had shed his swimsuit, when we looked at the Maintainer. It was glowing, changing, melting! And when Benson-Carter touched it, he fell backward-death was in him. Then the Void began to darken, narrow, shrink and close around us, so I called upon my Caller -- without wasting time, let me tell you! "We can't say for sure what was it slowly squeezed that sweet Express Room, but we fear the dirty Snakes have found a way to find our Places and attack outside the cosmos! -- found the Spiderweb that links us in the Void's gray lessthan-nothing." No murmur this time. This reaction was genuine; we'd been hit where we lived and I could see everybody was scared as sick as I was. Except maybe Bruce and Lili, who were still holding hands and beaming gently. I decided they were the kind that love makes brave, which it doesn't do to me. It just gives me two people to worry about. "I can see you dig our feelings," Kaby continued. "This thing scared the pants off of us. If we could have, we'd have even Introverted the Maintained broken all the ties that bind us, chanced it incommunicado. But the little old Maintainer was a seething redhot puddle filled with bubbles big as handballs. We sat tight and watched the Void close. I kept calling on my Caller " that made it easier to see the three of them with the Void shutting down on them. (Was ours still behaving? Yes, Bibi Miriam.) Poetry or no poetry, it got me. "Benson-Carter, lying dying, also thought the Snakes had done it. And he knew that death was in him, so he whispered me his mission, giving me precise instructions: how to press the seven death's hands, starting lockside counterclockwise, one, three, five, six, two, four, seven, then you have a half an hour; after you have pressed the seven, do not monkey with the buttons -- get out fast and don't stop moving." I wasn't getting this part and I couldn't see that anyone else was, though Bruce was whispering to Lili. I remembered seeing skulls engraved on the bronze chest. I looked at Illy and he nodded a tentacle and spread two to say, I guessed, that yes, Benson-Carter had said something like that, but no, Illy didn't know much about it. "All these things and more he whispered," Kaby went on, "with the last gasps of his life-force, telling all his secret orders -- for he'd not been sent to get us, he was on a separate mission, when he was to contact, as the first leg of his mission, pick up from you three black hussars, death's-head Demons, daring Soldiers, then to wait until the Places next match rhythm with the cosmos -- matter of two mealtimes, barely -- and to time in northern Egypt in the age of the last Caesar, in the year of Rome's swift downfall, there to start an operation in a battle near a city named for Thrace's Alexander, there to change the course of battle, blow sky-high the stinking Serpents, all their agents, all their Zombies! "Goddess, pardon, now I savvy how you've guided my least footstep, when I thought you'd gone and left me -- for I flubbed your three-mole signal. We've found Sid's Place, that's the first leg, and I see the three black hussars, and we've brought with us the weapon and the Parthian disguises, salvaged from the doomed Express Room when your Door appeared in time's nick, and the Room around us closing spewed us through before it vanished with the corpse of Benson-Carter. Triple Goddess, draw the milk now from the womanhood I flaunt here and inject the blackest hatred! Vengeance now upon the Serpents, vengeance sweet in northern Egypt, for your island, Crete, Goddess! -- and a victory for the Spiders! Goddess, Goddess, we can swing it! The roar that made me try to stop my ears with my shoulders didn't come from Kaby -- she'd spoken her piece -- but from Sid. The dear boy was purple enough to make me want to remind him you can die of high blood pressure just as easy in the Change World. "Dump me with ops! 'Sblood, I'll not endure it! Is this a battle post? They'll be mounting operations from field hospitals next. Kabysia Labrys, thou art mad to suggest it. And what's this prattle of locks, clocks, and death's heads, buttons and monkeys? This brabble, this farrago, this hocus-pocus! And where's the weapon you prate of? In that whoreson bronze casket, I suppose." She nodded, looking blank and almost a little shy as poetic possession faded from her. Her answer came like its faltering last echo. "It is nothing but a tiny tactical atomic bomb." ten-thousandth part of a second) has elapsed, the radius of the ball of fire is some # feet, and the temperature is then in the vicinity of # degrees Centigrade. At this instant, the luminosity, as observed at a distance of # yards (# miles), is approximately # times that of the sun as seen at the earth's surface... the ball of fire expands very rapidly to its maximum radius of # feet within less than a second from the explosion. -- Los Alamos needed to make everybody but Kaby and the two ETs start yelping at once, me included. It may seem strange that Change People, able to whiz through time and space and roust around outside the cosmos and knowing at least by hearsay of weapons a billion years in the future, like the Mind bo mb, should panic at being shut in with a little primitive mid-#th Century gadget Well, they feel the same as atomic scientists would feel if a Bengal tiger were brought into their laboratory, neither more nor less scared. I'm a moron at physics, but I do know the Fireball is bigger than the Place. Remember that, besides the bomb, we'd recently been presented with a lot of other fears we hadn't had time to cope with, especially the business of the Snakes having learned how to get at our Places and melt the Maintainers and collapse them. Not to mention the general impression -- first Saint Petersburg, then Crete -- that the whole Change War was going against the Spiders. Yet, in a free corner of my mind, I was shocked at how badly we were all panicking. It made me admit what I didn't like to: that we were all in pretty much the same state as Doc, except that the bottle didn't happen to be our out. And had the rest of us been controlling our drinking so well lately? Maud yelled, "Jettison it!" and pulled away from the satyr and ran from the bronze chest. Beau, harking back to what they'd thought of doing in the Express Room when it was too late, hissed, "Sirs, we must Introvert," and vaulted over the piano bench and legged it for the control divan. Erich seconded him with a whitefaced "Gott in Himmel, ja!" from beside the surly, forgotten Countess, holding, by its slim stem, an empty, rose-stained wine glass. I felt my mind flinch, because Introverting a Place is several degrees worse than foxholing. It's supposed not only to keep the Door tight shut, but also to lock it so even the Change Winds can't get through -- cut the Place loose from the cosmos altogether. I'd never talked with anyone from a Place that had been Introverted. lap and ran after Maud. The Greek Ghostgirl, quite solid now, looked around with sleepy fear and fumbled her apple-green chiton together at the throat. She wrenched my attention away from everyone else for a moment, and I couldn't help wondering whether the person or Zombie back in the cosmos, from whose lifeline the Ghost has been taken, doesn't at least have strange dreams or thoughts when something like this happens. Sid stopped Beau, though he almost got bowled over doing it, and he held the gambler away from the Maintainer in a bear hug and bellowed over his shoulders, "Masters, are you mad? Have you lost your wits? Maud! Mark! Marcus! Magdalene! On your lives, unhand that casket!" Maud had swept the clothes and bows and quivers and stuff off it and was dragging it out from the bar toward the Door sector, so as to dump it through fast when we got one, I guess, while Mark acted as if he were trying to help her and wrestle it away from her at the same time. They kept on as if they hadn't heard a word Sid said, with Mark yelling, "Let go, meretrix! This holds Rome's answer to Parthia on the Nile." Kaby watched them as if she wanted to help Mark but scorned to scuffle with a mere -- well, Mark had said it in Latin, I guess -- call girl. Then, on the top of the bronze chest, I saw those seven lousy skulls starting at the lock as plain as if they'd been under a magnifying glass, though ordinarily they'd have been a vague circle to my eyes at the distance, and I lost my mind and started to run in the opposite direction, but Illy whipped three tentacles around me, gentle-like, and squeaked, "Easy now, Greta girl, don't you be doing it, too. Hold still or Papa spank. My, my, but you two-leggers can whirl about when you have a mind to." My stampede had carried his featherweight body a couple of yards, but it stopped me and I got my mind back, partly. "Unhand it, I say!" Sid repeated without accomplishing anything, and he released Beau, though he kept a hand near the gambler's shoulder. Then my fat friend from Lynn Regis looked real distraught at the Void and blustered at no one in particular, " 'Sdeath, think you I'd mutiny against my masters, desert the Spiders, go to ground like a spent fox and pull my hole in after me? A plague of such cowardice! Who suggests it? Introversion's no mere last-ditch device. Unless ordered, supervised and sanctioned, it means the end. And what if I'd Introverted 'ere we got Kaby's call for succor, hey?" harsh approval and he noticed it and shook his free hand at her and scolded her, "Not that I say yea to your mad plan for that Devil's casket, you half-clad lackwit. And yet to jettison... Oh, ye gods, ye gods -- " he wiped his hand across his face -- "grant me a minute in which I may think!" Thinking time wasn't an item even on the strictly limited list at the moment, although Sevensee, squatting dourly on his hairy haunches where Maud had left him, threw in a dead-pan "Thas tellin em, Gov." Then Doc at the bar stood up tall as Abe Lincoln in his top hat and shawl and #th Century duds and raised an unwavering arm for silence and said something that sounded like: "Introversh, inversh, glovsh," and then his enunciationswitched to better than perfect as he continued, "I know to an absolute certainty what we must do." It showed me how rabbity we were that the Place got quiet as a church while we all stopped whatever we were doing and waited breathless for a poor drunk to tell us how to save ourselves. He said something like, "Inversh... bosh..." and held our eyes for a moment longer. Then the light went out of his and he slobbered out a "Nichevo" and slid an arm far along the bar for a bottle and started to pour it down his throat without stopping sliding. Before he completed his collapse to the floor, in the split second while our attention was still focused on the bar, Bruce vaulted up on top of it, so fast it was almost like he'd popped up from nowhere, though I'd seen him start from behind the piano. "I've a question. Has anyone here triggered that bomb?" he said in a voice that was very clear and just loud enough. "So it can't go off," he went on after just the right pause, his easy grin and brisk manner putting more heart into me all the time. "What's more, if it were to be triggered, we'd still have half an hour. I believe you said it had that long a fuse?" He stabbed a finger at Kaby. She nodded. "Right," he said. "It'd have to be that long for whoever plants it in the Parthian camp to get away. There's another safety margin. "Second question. Is there a locksmith in the house?" TOR all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he caught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance to explain or hedge them and said, "That's very good. Under certain circumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest But before we consider that, there's Question Three: Is anyone here an atomics technician?" That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power -- hadn't they blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly craters? -- but no, he wasn't a technician exactly, he was a "thinger" (I thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger? -- well, a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly impossible to describe, but no, you couldn't possibly thing atomics; the idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn't be an atomics thinger; the term was worse than a contradiction, well, really! -- while Sevensee, from his two-thousandmillennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect that his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling spacetime around, "or think em roun ef we hafta. Can't think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have -- I dunno wut. Dun hawit anyhow." "So we don't have an A-tech," Bruce summed up, "which makes it worse than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn't know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question." He directed it toward Sid. "How long before we can jettison anything?" Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to be taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the word "rhythm," he pulled the answer away from him. "In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again. Thank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours -- two mealtimes, as the Cretan officer put it," and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly smile. "So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not a thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!" His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice them and we hardly did either. It was creepy the way he kept staring from one to another of us. We had to look up. Behind his face, with the straight golden hair flirting around it, was only the Void. "All right then," he repeated suddenly. "We're twelve Spiders and two Ghosts, and we've time for a bit of a talk, and we're all in the same bloody boat, fighting the same bloody war, so we'll all know what we're talking about I raised the subject a while back, but I was steamed up about a glove, and it was a big jest. All right! But now the gloves are off!" belt where they'd been tucked and slammed them down on the bar, to be kicked off the next time he paced back and forth, and it wasn't funny. "Because," he went right on, "I've been getting a completely new picture of what this Spiders' war has been doing to each one of us. Oh, it's jolly good sport to slam around in space and time and then have a rugged little party outside both of them when the operation's over. It's sweet to know there's no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can't shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it's great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts. "It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes -- hah! isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether hell best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what. "Or he can't stand Resurrection, it fries or freezes him, and you've got to decide whether to return him to his lifeline and his Zombie dreams, only they'll be a little grayer and horrider than they were before, or whether, if she's got that tantalizing something, to bring her shell along for a Ghostgirl -- that's sweet, too. It's even sweet to have Change Death poised over your neck, to know that the past isn't the precious indestructible thing you've been taught it was, to know that there's no certainty about the future either, whether there'll even be one, to know that no part of reality is holy, that the cosmos itself may wink out like a flicked switch and God be not and nothing left but nothing!" He threw out his arms against the Void. "And knowing all that, it's doubly sweet to come through the Door into the Place nd be out of the worst of the Change Winds and enjoy a well-earned Recuperation and share the memories of all these sweetnesses I've been talking about, and work out all the fascinating feelings you've been accumulating back in the cosmos, layer by black layer, in the company of and with the help of the best bloody little band of fellow Fausts and Faustines going! "Oh, it's a sweet life, all right, but I'm asking you -- " and here his eyes stabbed us again, one by one, fast -- "I'm asking you what it's done to us. I've been getting a completely new picture, as I said, of what my life was and what it could have been if there'd been changes of the sort that even we Demons can't make, and what my life is. I've been watching how we've all been responding to things just now, to the news of Saint Petersburg and to what the Cretan officer told beautifully -- only it wasn't beautiful what she had to tell -- and mostly to that bloody box of bomb. And I'm simply asking each one of you, what's happened to you?" stuck his thumbs in his belt and seemed to be listening to the wheels turning in at least eleven other heads -- only I stopped mine pretty quick, with Dave and Father and the Rape of Chicago coming up out of the dark on the turn and Mother and the Indiana Dunes and Jazz Limited just behind them, followed by the unthinkable thing the Spider doctor had flicked into existence when I flopped as a nurse, because I can't stand that to be done to my mind by anybody but myself. I stopped them by using the old infallible Entertainers' gimmick, a fast survey of the most interesting topic there is -- other people's troubles.  had most troubles, shamed by his boss and his girl given her heart to a Soldier; he was hugging them to himself very quiet. I didn't stop for the two ETs -- they're too hard to figure -- or for Doc; nobody can tell whether a fallen-down drunk's at the black or bright end of his cycle; you just know it's cycling. Maud ought to be suffering as much as Beau, called names and caught out in a panic, which always hurts her because she's plus three hundred years more future than the rest of us and figures she ought to be that much wiser, which she isn't always -- not to mention she's over fifty years old, though her home-century cosmetic science keeps her looking and acting teenage most of the time. She'd backed away from the bronze chest so as not to stand out, and now Lili came from behind the piano and stood beside her. Lili had the opposite of troubles, a great big glow for Bruce, proud as a promised princess watching her betrothed. Erich frowned when he saw her, for he seemed proud too, proud of the way his Kamerad had taken command of us panicky whacks Fuirer-fashion. Sid still looked mostly grateful and inclined to let Bruce keep on talking. Even Kaby and Mark, those two dragons hot for battle, standing a little in front and to one side of us by the bronze chest, like its They made me realize one reason Sid had for letting Bruce run on, although the path his talk was leading us down was flashing with danger signals : When it was over, there'd still be the problem of what to do with the bomb, and a real opposition shaping up between Soldiers and Entertainers, and Sid was hoping a solution would turn up in the meantime or at least was But beyond all that, and like the rest of us, I could tell from the way Sid was squinting his browy eyes and chewing his beardy lip that he was shaken and moved by what Bruce had said. This New Boy had dipped into our hearts and counted our kicks so beautifully, better than most of us could have done, and then somehow turned them around so that we had to think of what messes and heels and black sheep and lost lambs we were -- well, we wanted to keep on listening. Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. -- Archimedes touch and he was looking up left at the Void as he said, "Have you ever really wondered why the two sides of this war are called the Snakes and the Spiders? Snakes may be clear enough -- you always call the enemy something dirty. But Spiders -- our name for ourselves? Bear with me, Ilhilihis; I know that no being is created dirty or malignant by Nature, but this is a matter of anthropoid feelings and folkways. Yes, Mark, I know that some of your legions have nicknames like the Drunken Lions and the Snails, and that's about as insulting as calling the British Expeditionary Force the Old Contemptibles. "No, you'd have to go to bands of vicious youths in cities slated for ruin to find a habit of naming like ours, and even they would try to brighten up the black a bit. But simply -- Spiders. And Snakes, for that's their name for themselves too, you know. Spiders and Snakes. What are our masters, that we give them names like that?" It gave me the shivers and set my mind working in a dozen directions and I couldn't stop it, although it made the shivers worse. Illy beside me now -- I'd never given it a thought before, but he did have eight legs of a sort, and I remembered thinking of him as a spider monkey, and hadn't the Lunans had wisdom and atomic to get the Change War rolling? Or suppose, in the far future, Terra's own spiders evolved intelligence and a cruel cannibal culture. They'd be able to keep their existence secret. I had no idea of who or what would be on Earth in Sevensee's day, and wouldn't it be perfect black hairy poisoned spider-mentality to spin webs secretly through the world of thought and all of space and time? And Beau -- wasn't there something real Snaky about him, the way he moved and all? Spiders and Snakes. Spinne und Schlange, as Erich called them. S fie S. But SS stood for the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the Black Shirts, and what if some of those cruel, crazy Jerries had discovered time travel and -- I brought myself up with a jerk and asked myself, "Greta, how nuts can you get?" floor, the front of the bar his sounding board, Doc shrieked up at Bruce like one of the damned from the pit, "Don't speak against the Spiders! Don't blaspheme! They can hear the Unborn whisper. Others whip only the skin, but they whip the naked brain and heart," and Erich called out, "That's enough, Bruce!" But Bruce didn't spare him a look and said, "But whatever the Spiders are and no matter how much whip they use, it's plain as the telltale on the Maintainer that the Change War is not only going against them, but getting away from them. Dwell for a bit on the current flurry of stupid slugging and panicky anachronism, when we all know that anachronism is what gets the Change Winds out of control. This punchdrunk pounding on the Cretan-Dorian fracas as if it were the only battle going and the only way to work things. Whisking Constantine from Britain to the Bosporus by rocket, sending a pocket submarine back to sail with the Armada against Drake's woodensides -- I'll wager you hadn't heard those! And now, to save Rome, an atomic bomb. "Ye gods, they could have used Greek fire or even dynamite, but a fission weapon... I leave you to imagine what gaps and scars that will make in what's left of history -- the smothering of Greece and the vanishment of Provence and the troubadours and the Papacy's Irish Captivity won't be in it!" The cut on his cheek had opened again and was oozing a little, but he didn't pay any attention to it, and neither did we, as his lips thinned in irony and he said, "But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world -- one little solar system, Sevensee -- and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear. "Perhaps there are some sentimentalists who would rather die forever than go on living in a world without the Summa, the Field Equations, Process and Reality, Hamlet, Matthew, Keats, and the Odyssey, but our masters are practical creatures, ministering to the needs of those rugged souls who want to go on living no matter what" you that's enough," was lost in the quickening flow of the New Boy's words. "I won't spend much time on the minor signs of our major crack-up -- the canceling of leaves, the sharper shortages, the loss of the Express Room, the use of Recuperation Stations for ops and all the other frantic patchwork -- last operation but one, we were saddled with three Soldiers from outside the Galaxy and, no fault of theirs, they were no earthly use. Such little things might happen at a bad spot in any war and are perhaps only local. But there's a big thing." He paused again, to let us wonder, I guess. Maud must have worked her way over to me, for I felt her dry little hand on my arm and she whispered out of the side of her mouth, "What do we do now?" "We listen," I told her the same way. I felt a little impatient with her need to be doing something about things. She cocked a gold-dusted eyebrow at me and murmured, "You, too?" I didn't get to ask her me, too, what? Crush on Bruce? Nuts! -- because just then Bruce's voice took up again in the faraway range. "Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Change Death is as certain as Heat Death, and far faster. Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've stripped off the paint. "If that goes on, won't the cosmos collapse into an outline of itself, then nothing? How much thinning can reality stand, having more and more Doublegangers cut out of it? And there's another thing about every operation -- it wakes up the Zombies a little more, and as its Change Winds die, it leaves them a little more disturbed and nightmare-ridden and frazzled. Those of you who have been on operations in heavily worked-over temporal areas will know what I mean -- that look they give you out of the sides of their eyes as if to say, 'You again? For Christ's sake, go away. We're the dead. We're the ones who don't want to wake up, who don't want to be Demons and hate to be Ghosts. Stop torturing us.'" girls; I couldn't help it. They'd somehow got together on the control divan, facing us, their backs to the Maintainers. The Countess had dragged along the bottle of wine Erich had fetched her earlier and they were passing it back and forth. The Countess had a big rose splotch across the ruffled white lace of her blouse. Bruce said, "There'll come a day when all the Zombies and all the Unborn wake up and go crazy together and figuratively come marching at us in their numberless hordes, saying, 'We've had enough.' " But I didn't turn back to Bruce right away. Phryne's chiton had slipped off one shoulder and she and the Countess were sitting sagged forward, elbows on knees, legs spread -- at least, as far as the Countess's hobble skirt would let her -- and swayed toward each other a little. They were still surprisingly solid, although they hadn't had any personal attention for a half hour, and they were looking up over my head with half-shut eyes and they seemed, so help me, to be listening to what Bruce was saying and maybe hearing some of it "We make a careful distinction between Zombies and Unborn, between those troubled by our operations whose lifelines lie in the past and those whose lifelines lie in the future. But is there any distinction any longer? Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but thafs different and it's not made for real living. "The Spiders tell us that the real now is somewhere in the last half of the #th Century, which means that several of us here are also alive in the cosmos, have lifelines along which the now is traveling. But do you swallow that story quite so easily, Ilhilihis, Sevensee? How does it strike the servants of the Triple Goddess? The Spiders of Octavian Rome? The Demons of Good Queen Bess? The gentlemen Zombies of the Greater South? Do the Unborn man the starships, Maud? "The Spiders also tell us that, although the fog of battle makes the now hard to pin down precisely, it will return with the unconditional surrender of the Snakes and the establishment of cosmic peace, and roll on as majestically toward the future as before, quickening the continuum with its passage. Do you really believe that? Or do you believe, as I do, that we've used up all the future as well as the past, wasted it in premature experience, and that we've had the real now smudged out of existence, stolen from us forever, the precious now of true growth, the child-moment in which all life lies, the moment like a newborn baby that is the only home for hope there is?" then took a couple of quick steps and went on, his voice rising over Erich's "Bruce, for the last time -- " and seeming to pick up a note of hope from the very word he had used, "But although things look terrifyingly black, there remains a chance -- the slimmest chance, but still a chance -- of saving the cosmos from Change Death and restoring reality's richness and giving the Ghosts good sleep and perhaps even regaining the real now. We have the means right at hand. What if the power of time traveling were used not for war and destruction, but for healing, for the mutual enrichment of the ages, for quiet communication and growth, in brief, to bring a peace message -- " But my little commandant is quite an actor himself and knows a wee bit about the principles of scene-stealing, and he was not going to let Bruce drown him out as if he were just another extra playing a Voice from the Mob. He darted across our front, between us and the bar, took a running leap, and landed bang on the bloody box of bomb. A bit later, Maud was silently showing me the white ring above her elbow where I'd grabbed her and Illy was teasing a clutch of his tentacles out of my other hand and squeaking reproachfully, "Greta girl, don't ever do that." Erich was standing on the chest and I noticed that his boots carefully straddled the circle of skulls, and I should have known anyway you could hardly push them in the right order by jumping on them, and he was pointing at Bruce and saying, " -- and that means mutiny, my young sir. Urn Gottes willen, Bruce, listen to me and step down before you say anything worse. I'm older than you, Bruce. Mark's older. Trust in your Kameraden. Guide yourself by their knowledge." He had got my attention, but I had much rather have him black my eye. "You older than me?" Bruce was grinning. "When your twelveyears' advantage was spent in soaking up the wisdom of a race of sadistic dreamers gone paranoid, in a world whose thoughtstream had already been muddied by one total war? Mark older than me? When all his ideas and loyalties are those of a wolf pack of unimaginative sluggers two thousand years younger than I am? Either of you older because you that is all the wisdom the Change World ever gives you? Don't make me laugh! "I'm an Englishman, and I come from an epoch when total war was still a desecration and the flowers and buds of thoughts not yet whacked off or blighted. I'm a poet and poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time. Right, Sid? When I talk to all of you about a peace message, I want you to think about it concretely in terms of using the Places to bring help across the mountains of time when help is really needed, not to bring help that's undeserved or knowledge that's premature or contaminating, sometimes not to bring anything at all, but just to check with infinite tenderness and concern that everything's safe and the glories of the universe unfolding as they were intended to -- " "Yes, you are a poet, Bruce," Erich broke in. "You can tootle soulfully on the flute and make us drip tears. You can let out the stops on the big organ pipes and make us tremble as if at Jehovah's footsteps. For the last twenty minutes, you have been giving us some very charmante poetry. But what are you? An Entertainer? Or are you a Soldier?" what it was, maybe Sid clearing his throat -- I could sense our feelings beginning to turn against Bruce. I got the strangest feeling of reality clamping down and bright colors going dull and dreams vanishing. Yet it was only then I also realized how much Bruce had moved us, maybe some of us to the verge of mutiny, even. I was mad at Erich for what he was doing, but I couldn't help admiring his cockiness. I was still under the spell of Bruce's words and the more-thanwords behind them, but then Erich would shift around a bit and one of his heels would kick near the death's-head pushbuttons and I wanted to stamp with spike heels on every death's-head button on his uniform. I didn't know exactly what I felt yet. "Yes, I'm a Soldier," Bruce told him, "and I hope you won't ever have to worry about my courage, because it's going to take more courage than any operation we've ever planned, ever dreamed of, to carry the peace message to the other Places and to the woundspots of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be a fast wicket and we'll be bowled down before we score a single run, but who cares? We may at least see our real masters when they come to smash us, and for me that will be a deep satisfaction. And we may do some smashing of our own." "So you're a Soldier," Erich said, his smile showing his teeth. "Bruce, I'll admit that the halfdozen operations you've been on were rougher than anything I drew in my first hundred sleeps. For that, I am all honest sympathy. But that you should let them get you into such a state that love and a girl can turn you upside down and start you babbling about peace messages -- " "Yes, by God, love and a girl have changed me!" Bruce shouted at him, and I looked around at Lili and I remembered Dave saying, "I'm going to Spain," and I wondered if anything would ever again make my face flame like that. "Or, rather, they've made me stand up for what I've believed in all along. They've made me -- " "Wurtderbar" Erich called and began to do a little sissy dance on the bomb that set my teeth on edge. He bent his wrists and elbows at arty angles and stuck out a hip and ducked his head simperingly and blinked his eyes very fast. "Will you invite me to the wedding, Bruce? You'll have to get another best man, but I will be the flower girl and throw pretty little posies to all the distinguished guests. Here, Mark. Catch, Kaby. One for you, Greta. Danke schon. Ach, zwei Herzen in dreivierteltakt... ta-ta... ta-ta... ta-ta-ta-tata... " "What the hell do you think a woman is?" Bruce raged. "Something to mess around with in your spare time?" Hearts in Waltz Time" -- and jigging around to it, damn him -- but he slipped in a nod to Bruce and a "Precisely." So I knew where I stood, but it was no news to me. "Very well," Bruce said, "let's leave this Brown Shirt maricon to amuse himself and get down to business. I made all of you a proposal and I don't have to tell you how serious it is or how serious Lili and I are about it. We not only must infiltrate and subvert other Places, which luckily for us are made for infiltration, we also must make contact with the Snakes and establish working relationships with their Demons at our level as one of our first steps." That stopped Erich's jig and got enough of a gasp from some of us to make it seem to come from practically everybody. Erich used it to work a change of pace. "Bruce! We've let you carry this foolery further than we should. You seem to have the idea that because anything goes in the Place -- dueling, drunkenness, tmd so weiter -- you can say what you have and it will all be forgotten with the hangover. Not so. It is true that among such a set of monsters and free spirits as ourselves, and working as secret agents to boot, there cannot be the obvious military discipline that would obtain in a Terran army. "But let me tell you, Bruce, let me grind it home into you -- Sid and Kaby and Mark will bear me out in this, as officers of equivalent rank -- that the Spider line of command stretches into and through this Place just as surely as the word of der Fiihrer rules Chicago. And as I shouldn't have to emphasize to you, Bruce, the Spiders have punishments that would make my countrymen in Belsen and Buchenwald -- well, pale a little. So while there is still a shadow of justification for our interpreting your remarks as utterly tasteless clowning -- " "Babble on," Bruce said, giving him a loose downward wave of his hand without looking. "I made you people a proposal." He paused. "How do you stand, Sidney Lessingham?" Then I felt my legs getting weak, because Sid didn't answer right away. The old boy swallowed and started to look around at the rest of us. Then the feeling of reality clamping down got something awful, because he didn't look around, but straightened his back a little. Just then, Mark cut in fast. "It grieves me, Bruce, but I think you are possessed. Erich, he must be confined." "Confine or kill the coward, whichever is easier, whip the woman, and let's get on to the Egyptian battle." "Indeed, yes," Mark said. "I died in it. But now perhaps no longer." Kaby said to him, "I like you, Roman." Bruce was smiling, barely, and his eyes were moving and fixing. "You, Ilhilihis?" lily's squeak box had never sounded mechanical to me before, but it did as he answered, "I'm a lot deeper into borrowed time than the rest of you, tra-la-la, but Papa still loves living. Include me very much out, Brucie." "Miss Davies?" Beside me, Maud said flatly, "Do you think I'm a fool?" Beyond her, I saw Lili and I thought, "My God, I might look as proud if I were in her shoes, but I sure as hell wouldn't look as confident." Bruce's eyes hadn't quite come to Beau when the gambler spoke up. "I have no cause to like you, sir, rather the opposite. But this Place has come to bore me more than Boston and I have always found it difficult to resist a long shot. A very long one, I fear. I am with you, sir." There was a pain in my chest and a roaring in my ears and through it I heard Sevensee grunting, " -- sicka these lousy Spiders. Deal me in." And then Doc reared up in front of the bar and he'd lost his hat and his hair was wild and he grabbed an empty fifth by the neck and broke the bottom of it all jagged against the bar and he waved it and screeched, "Ubivaytye Pauki -- i Nyemetzi!" And right behind his words, Beau sang out fast the English of it, "Kill the Spiders -- and the Germans!" And Doc didn't collapse then, though I could see he was hanging onto the bar tight with his other hand, and the Place got stiller, inside and out, than I've ever known it, and Bruce's eyes were finally moving back toward Sid. UT the eyes stopped short of Sid and I heard Bruce say, "Miss Forzane?" and I thought, "That's funny," and I started to look around at the Countess, and felt all the eyes and I realized, "Hey, that's me! But this can't happen to me. To the others, yes, but not to me. I just work here. Not to Greta, no, no, no!" But it had, and the eyes didn't let go, and the silence and the feeling of reality were Godawful, and I said to myself, "Greta, you've got to say something, if only a suitable four-letter word," and then suddenly I knew what the silence was like. It was like that of a big city if there were some way of shutting off all the noise in one second. It was like Erich's singing when the piano had deserted him. It was as if the Change Winds should ever die completely... and I knew beforehand what had happened when I turned my back on them all. The Ghostgirls were gone. The Major Maintainer hadn't merely been switched to Introvert. It was gone, too. Just published: science fiction novel # at all bookstores Simon and Schuster, Publishers My Fair Planet All the world's a stage, so there was room even for this bad actor   . only he Intended to direct HI A S Paul Lambrequin was clambering up the stairs of his rooming house, he met a man whose face was all wrong. "Good evening," Paul said politely and was about to continue on his way when the man stopped him. "You are the first person I have encountered in this place who has not shuttered at the sight of me," he said in a toneless voice with an accent that was outside the standard repertoire. "Am I?" Paul asked, bringing himself back from one of the roseate dreams with which he kept himself insulated from a not-tookind reality. "I daresay that's because I'm a bit near-sighted." He peered vaguely at the stranger. Then he recoiled. "What is incorrect about me, then?" the stranger demanded. "Do I not have two eyes, one nose and one mouth, the identical as other people?" Paul studied the other man. "Yes, but somehow they seem to be put together all wrong. Not that you can help it, of course," he added apologetically, for, when he thought of it, he hated to hurt people's feelings. "Yes, I can, for, of a truth, 'twas I who put myself together. What did I do amiss?" Paul looked consideringly at him. "I can't quite put my finger on it, but there are certain subtle nuances you just don't seem to have caught. If you want my professional advice, you'll model yourself directly on some real person until you've got the knack of improvisation." "Like unto this?" The stranger's outline shimmered and blurred into an amorphous cloud, which then coalesced into the shape of a tall, beautiful young man with the face of an ingenuous demon. "Behold, is that superior?" "Oh, far superior!" Paul reached up to adjust a stray lock of hair, then realized he was not looking into a mirror. "Trouble is -- well, I'd rather you chose someone else to model yourself on. You see, in my profession, it's important to look as unique as possible; helps people remember you. I'm an actor, you know. Currently I happen to be at liberty, but the year before last -- " "Well, whom should I appear like? Should I perhaps pick some fine upstanding figure from your public prints to emulate? Like your President, perhaply?" "I -- hardly think so. It wouldn't do to model yourself on someone well known -- or even someone obscure whom you might just happen to run into someday." Being a kind-hearted young man, Paul added, "Come up to my room. I have some British film magazines and there are lots of relatively obscure English actors who are very decent-looking chaps." CO they climbed up to Paul's  hot little room under the eaves and, after leafing through several magazines, Paul chose one Ivo Darcy as a likely candidate. Whereupon the stranger deliquesced and reformed into the personable simulacrum of young Mr. Darcy. "That's quite a trick," Paul observed as it finally got through to him what the other had done. "It would come in handy in the profession -- for character parts, you know." "I fear you would never be able to acquisition it," the stranger said, surveying his new self in the mirror complacently. "It is not a trick but a racial ableness. You see, I feel I can trust you -- " " -- Of course I'm not really a character actor; I'm a leading man, but I believe one should be versatile, because there are times when a really good character part comes along -- " " -- I am not a human being. I am a native of the fifth planet circulating around the star you call Sirius, and we Sirians have the ableness to change ourselves into the apparition of any other livid form -- " "I thought that might be a nearEastern accent!" Paul exclaimed, diverted. "Is Lebanese anything like it? Because I understand there's a really juicy part coming up in -- " "I said Sirian, not Syrian; I do not come from Minor Asia but from outer space, from an otherwhere solar system. I am an outworlder, an extraterrestrial." "I hope you had a nice trip," Paul said politely. "From Sirius, did you say? What's the state of the theater there?" "In its infanticide," the stranger told him, "but -- " "Let's face it," Paul muttered bitterly, "it's in its infancy here, too. No over-all planning. No appreciation of the fact that all the components that go to make up a production should be a continuing totality, instead of a tenuous coalition of separate forces which disintegrate -- " "You, I comprehend, are disemployed at current. I should -- " "You won't find that situation in Russia!" Paul went on, pleased to discover a sympathetic audience in this intelligent foreigner. "Mind you," he added quickly, "I disapprove entirely of their politics. In fact, I disapprove of all politics. But when it comes to the theater, in many respects the Russians -- " " -- Like to make a proposal to our mutual advanceage -- " " -- You wouldn't find an actor there playing a lead role one season and then not be able to get any parts except summer stock and odd bits for the next two years. All right, so the show I had the lead in folded after two weeks, but the critics all raved about my performance. It was the play that stank!" "Will you terminate the monologue and hearken unto me!" the alien shouted. ings were hurt. He had thought Ivo liked him; now he saw all the outworlder wanted to do was talk about his own problems. "I desire to extend to you a position," said Ivo. "I can't take a regular job," Paul said sulkily. "I have to be available for interviews. Fellow I knew took a job in a store and, when he was called to read for a part, he couldn't get away. The fellow who did get that part became a big star, and maybe the other fellow could have been a star, too, but now all he is is a lousy chairman of the board of some department store chain -- " "This work can be undergone at your convention between readings and interviews, whenever you have the timing. I shall pay you beautifully, being abundant with U.S.A. currency. I want you to teach me how to act." "Teach you how to act," Paul repeated, rather intrigued. "Well, I'm not a dramatic coach, you know; however, I do happen to have some ideas on the subject. I feel that most acting teachers nowadays fail to give their students a really thorough grounding in all aspects of the dramatic art All they talk about is method, method, method. But what about technique?" "I have observed your species with great diligence and I thought I had acquisitioned your habits and speakings to perfectness. But I fear that, like my initial face, I have got them awry. I want you to teach me to act like a human being, to talk like a human being, to think like a human being." Paul's attention was really caught. "Well, that is a challenge! I don't suppose Stanislavsky ever had to teach an extraterrestrial, or even Strasberg -- " "Then we are in accordance," Ivo said. "You will instruction me?" He essayed a smile. Paul shuddered. "Very well," he said. "We'll start now. And I think the first thing we'd better start with is lessons in smiling." Ivo proved to be a quick study. He not only learned to smile, but to frown and to express surprise, pleasure, horror -- whatever the occasion demanded. He learned the knack of counterfeiting humanity with such skill that, Paul was moved to remark one afternoon when they were leaving Brooks Brothers after a fitting, "Sometimes you seem even more human than I do, Ivo. I wish you'd watch out for that tendency to rant, though. You're supposed to speak, not make speeches." "I try not to," Ivo said, "but I keep getting carried away by enthusiasm." "Apparently I have a real flair for teaching," Paul went on as, expertly camouflaged by Brooks, the two young men melted into the dense charcoal-gray underbrush of Madison Avenue. "I seem to be even more versatile than I thought. Perhaps I have been -- well, not wasting but limiting my talents." "That may be because your talents have not been sufficiently appreciated," his star pupil suggested, "or given enough scope." matter of fact," Paul agreed, "it has often seemed to me that if some really gifted individual, equally adept at acting, directing, producing, playwriting, teaching, et al., were to undertake a thorough synthesis of the theater -- ah, but that would cost money," he interrupted himself, "ana who would underwrite such a project? Certainly not the government of the United States." He gave a bitter laugh. "Perhaps, under a new regime, conditions might be more favorable for the artist -- " "Shhh!" Paul looked nervously over his shoulder. "There are Senators everywhere. Besides, I never said things were good in Russia, just better -- for the actor, that is. Of course the plays are atrocious propaganda -- " -- "I was not referring to another human regime. The human being is, at best, save for certain choice spirits, unsympathetic to the arts. We outworlders have a far greater respect for things of the mind." Paul opened his mouth; Ivo continued without giving him a chance to speak, "No doubt you have often wondered just what I am doing here on Earth?" The question had never crossed Paul's mind. Feeling vaguely guilty, he murmured, "Some people have funny ideas of where to go for a vacation." "I am here on business," Ivo told him. "The situation on Sirius is serious." "You know, that's catchy! 'The situation on Sirius is serious'," Paul repeated, tapping his foot. "I've often thought of trying my hand at a musical com -- " "I mean we have had a ser -- grave population problem for the last couple of centuries, hence our government has sent out scouts to look for other planets with similar atmosphere, climate, gravity and so on, where we can ship our excess population. So far, we have found very few." When Paul's attention was focused, he could be as quick as anybody to put two and two together. "But Earth is already occupied. In fact, when I was in school, I heard something about our having a population problem ourselves." "The other planets we already -- ah -- took over were in a similar state," Ivo explained. "We managed to surmount that difficulty." "How?" Paul asked, though he already suspected the answer. "Oh, we didn't dispose of all of the inhabitants. We merely weeded out the undesirables -- who, by fortunate chance, happened to be in the majority -- and achieved a happy and peaceful coexistence with the rest." "But, look," Paul protested. "I mean to say " "For instance," Ivo said suavely, "take the vast body of people who watch television and who have never seen a legitimate play in their lives and, indeed, rarely go to the motion pictures. Surely they are expendable." "Well, yes, of course. But even among them there might be -- oh, say, a playwright's mother -- " "One of the first measures our regime would take would be to establish a vast network of community theaters throughout the world. And you, Paul, would receive first choice of starring roles." "Now wait a minute!" Paul cried hotly. He seldom allowed himself to lose his temper, but when he did... he got angry! "I pride myself that Fve gotten this far wholly on my own merits. I don't believe in using influence to -- " "But, my dear fellow, all I meant was that, with an intelligently coordinated theater and an intellectually adult audience, your abilities would be recognized automatically." "Oh," said Paul. H E was not unaware that he was being flattered, but it was so seldom that anyone bothered to pay him any attention when he was not playing a role that it was difficult not to succumb. "Are -- are you figuring on taking over the planet singlehanded?" he asked curiously. "Heavens, no! Talented as I am, there are limits. I don't do the -- ah -- dirty work myself. I just conduct the preliminary investigation to determine how powerful the local defenses are." "We have hydrogen bombs," Paul said, trying to remember details of a newspaper article he had once read in a producer's anteroom, "and plutonium bombs and -- " "Oh, I know about all those," Ivo smiled expertly. "My job is checking to make sure you don't have anything really dangerous." All that night, Paul wrestled with his conscience. He knew he shouldn't just let Ivo go on. Yet what else could he do? Go to the proper authorities? But which authorities were the proper ones? And even if he found them, who would believe an actor offstage, delivering such improbable lines? He would either be laughed at or accused of being part of a subversive plot. It might result in a lot of bad publicity which could ruin his career. So Paul did nothing about Ivo. He went back to the usual rounds of agents' and producers' offices, and the knowledge of why Ivo was on Earth got pushed farther into the back of his mind as he trudged from interview to reading to interview. It was an exceptionally hot October -- the kind of weather when sometimes he almost lost his faith and began to wonder why he was batting his head against a stone wall, why he didn't get a job in a department store somewhere or teaching school. And then he thought of the applause, the curtain calls, the dream of some day seeing his name in lights above the title of the play -- and he knew he would never give up. Quitting the theater would be like committing suicide, for off the stage he was alive only technically. He was good; he knew he was good, so some day, he assured himself, he was bound to get his big break. Toward the end of that month, it came. After the maximum three readings, between which his hopes alternately waxed and waned, he was cast as the male lead in The Holiday Tree. The producers were more interested, they said, in getting someone who fitted the role of Eric Everard than in a big name -- especially since the female star preferred to have her luster undimmed by competition. Rehearsals took up so much of his time that he saw very little of Ivo for the next five weeks -- but by then Ivo didn't need him any more. Actually, they were no longer teacher and pupil now but companions, drawn together by the fact that they both belonged to different worlds from the one in which they were living. Insofar as he could like anyone who existed outside of his imagination, Paul had grown rather fond of Ivo. And he rather thought Ivo liked him, too -- but, because he couldn't ever be quite sure of ordinary people's reactions toward him, how could he be sure of an outworlder's? Ivo came around to rehearsals sometimes, but naturally it would be boring for him, since he wasn't in the profession, and, after a while, he didn't come around very often. At first, Paul felt a twinge of guilt; then he remembered that he need not worry. Ivo had his own work. HP HE whole Holiday T ree troupe went out of town for the tryouts, and Paul didn't see Ivo at all for six weeks. Busy, happy weeks they were, for the play was a smash hit from the start. It played to packed houses in New Haven and Boston, and the box office in New York was sold out for months in advance before they even opened. "Must be kinda fun -- acting," Ivo told Paul the morning after the New York opening, as Paul weltered contentedly on his bed he had the best room in the house now -- amid a pile of rave notices. At long last, he had arrived. Everybody loved him. He was a success. And now that he had read the reviews and they were all favorable, he could pay attention to the strange things that had happened to his friend. Raising himself up on an elbow, Paul cried, "Ivo, you're mumbling! After all I taught you about articulation!" "I got t'hanging 'round with this here buncha actors while y'were gone," Ivo said. "They say mumbling's the cornin' thing. 'Sides, ykept yapping that I declaimed, so -- " "But you don't have to go to the opposite extreme and -- Ivo" Incredulously, Paul took in the full details of the other's appearance. "What happened to your Brooks Brothers' suits?" "Hung 'em inna closet," Ivo replied, looking abashed. "I did wear one las' night, though," he went on defensively. "Wooden come dressed like this to y'opening. But all the other fellas wear blue jeans 'n leather jackets. I mean, hell, I gotta conform more'n anybody. Y'know that, Paul." "And -- " Paul sat bolt upright; this was the supreme outrage -- "you've changed yourself! You've gotten younger!" "This is an age of yout'," Ivo mumbled. "An' I figured I was 'bout ready for improvisation, like you said." "Look, Ivo, if you really want to go on the stage " "Hell, I don' wanna be no actor!" Ivo protested, far too vehemently. "Y'know damn' well I'm a -- a spy, scoutin' 'round t'see if y'have any secret defenses before I make m'report." "I don't feel I'm giving away any government secrets," Paul said, "when I tell you that the bastions of our defenses are not erected at the Actors' Studio." "Listen, pal, you lemme spy the way I wanna an' I'll letcha act the way you wanna." Paul was disturbed by this change in Ivo because, although he had always tried to steer clear of social involvement, he could not help feeling that the young alien had become in a measure his responsibility -- particularly now that he was a teen-ager. Paul would even have worried about Ivo, if there hadn't been so many other things to occupy his mind. First of all, the producers of The Holiday Tree could not resist the pressure of an adoring public; although the original star sulked, three months after the play had opened in New York, Paul's name went up in lights next to hers, over the title of the play. He was a star. That was good. But then there was Gregory. And that was bad. Gregory was Paul's understudy -- a handsome, sullen youth who had, on numerous occasions, been heard to utter words to the effect of : "It's the part that's so good, not him. If I had the chance to play Eric Everard just once, they'd give Lambrequin back to the Indians." Sometimes he had said the words in Paul's hearing; sometimes the remarks had been lovingly passed on by fellow members of the cast who felt that Paul ought to know. Paul told Ivo one Monday evening as they were enjoying a quiet smoke together, for there was no performance that night. "He used to be a juvenile delinquent, got sent to one of those reform schools where they use acting as therapy and it turned out to be his metier. But you never know when that kind'll hear the call of the wild again." "Aaaah, he's a good kid," Ivo said. "He just never had a chanct." "Trouble is, I'm afraid he's going to make himself a chanct -- chance, that is." "Aaaah," retorted Ivo, with prideful inarticulateness. However, when at six-thirty that Friday, Paul fell over a wire stretched between the jambs of the doorway leading to his private bathroom and broke a leg, even Ivo was forced to admit that this did not look like an accident. "Ivo," Paul wailed when the doctor had left, "what am I going to do? I refuse to let Gregory go on in my place tonight!" "Y'gonna hafta," Ivo said, shifting his gum to the other side of his mouth. "He's y'unnastudy." "But the doctor said it would be weeks before I can get around again. Either Gregory!! take over the part completely with his interpretation and I'll be left out in the cold, or more likely, he'll louse up the play and it'll fold before I'm on my feet." "Y'gotta have more confidence in y'self, kid. The public ain't gonna forgetcha in a few weeks." But Paul knew far better than the idealistic Ivo how fickle the public can be. However, he chose an argument that would appeal to the boy. "Don't forget, he boobytrapped me!" "Cerfny looks like it," Ivo was forced to concede. "But watcha gonna do? Y'can't prove it. 'Sides, the curtain's gonna gwup in a li'l over a nour -- " Paul gripped Ivo's sinewy wrist "Ivo, you've got to go on for me!" "Y'got rocks in yhead or somepin?" Ivo demanded, trying not to look pleased. "I ain't gotta Nequity card, and even if I did, he's y'unnastudy." "No, you don't understand. I don't want you to go on as Ivo Darcy playing Eric Everard. I want you to go on as Paul Lambrequin playing Eric Everard. You can do it, Ivo!" "Good Lord, so I can!" Ivo whispered, temporarily neglecting to mumble. "I'd almost forgotten." "You know my lines, too. You've cued me in my part often enough." Ivo rubbed his hand over his forehead. "Yeah, I guess I do." "Ivo," Paul beseeched him, "I thought we were -- pals. I don't want to ask any favors, but I helped you out when you were in trouble. I always figured I could rely on you. I never thought you'd let me down." "An' I won't." Ivo gripped Paul's hand. "I'll go on t'night 'n play 'at part like it ain't never been played before! I'll -- " "No! No! Play it the way I played it. You're supposed to be me, Ivo! Forget Strasberg; go back to Stanislavsky." "Okay, pal," Ivo said. "Will do." "And promise me one thing, Ivo. Promise me you won't mumble." Ivo winced. "Okay, but you're the on'y one I'd do 'at for." Slowly, he began to shimmer. Paul held his breath. Maybe Ivo had forgotten how to transmute himself. But technique triumphed over method. Ivo Darcy gradually coalesced into the semblance of Paul Lambrequin. The show would go on! thing?" Paul asked anxiously when Ivo came into his room shortly after midnight. "Pretty good," Ivo said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. "Gregory was extremely surprised to see me -- asked me half a dozen times how I was feeling." Ivo was not only articulating, Paul was gratified to notice; he was enunciating. "But the show -- how did that go? Did anyone suspect you were a ringer?" "No," Ivo said slowly. "No, I don't think so. I got twelve curtain calls," he added, staring straight ahead of him with a dreamy smile. "Twelve." "Friday nights, the audience is always enthusiastic." Then Paul swallowed hard and said, "Besides, I'm sure you were great in the role." But Ivo didn't seem to hear him. Ivo was still wrapped in his golden daze. "Just before the curtain went up, I didn't think I was going to be able to do it. I began to feel all quivery inside, the way I do before I -- I change." "Butterflies in the stomach is the professional term." Paul nodded wisely. "A really good actor gets them before every performance. No matter how many times I play a role, there's that minute when the house lights start to dim when I'm in an absolute panic -- " " -- And then the curtain went up and I was all right. I was fine. I was Paul Lambrequin. I was Eric Everard. I was -- everything." "Ivo," Paul said, clapping him on the shoulder, "you're a born trouper." "Yes," Ivo murmured, "I'm beginning to think so myself." For the next four weeks, Paul Lambrequin lurked in his room while Ivo Darcy played Paul Lambrequin playing Eric Everard. "It's terrific of you to take all this time away from your duties, old chap," Paul said to Ivo one day between the matinee and the evening performances. "I really do appreciate it. Although I suppose you've managed to squeeze some of them in. I never see you on non-matinee afternoons." "Duties?" Ivo repeated vacantly. "Yes, of course -- my duties." "Let me give you some professional advice, though. Be more careful when you take off your makeup. There's still some grease paint in the roots of your hair." "Sloppy of me," Ivo agreed, getting to work with a towel. "I can't understand why you bother to put on the stuff at all," Paul grinned, "when all you need to do is just change a little more." "I know." Ivo rubbed his temples vigorously. "I suppose I just like the -- smell of the stuff." "Ivo," Paul laughed, "there's no use trying to kid me; you are stagestruck. I'm sure I have enough pull now to get you a bit part somewhere, when I'm up and around again, and then you can get yourself an Equity card. Maybe," he added amusedly, "I can even have you replace Gregory as my understudy." " thought perhaps there had been a curious expression in Ivo's eyes, but right then he'd had no inkling that anything untoward was up. He did not find out what had been at the back of Ivo's mind until the Sunday before the Tuesday on which he was planning to resume his role. "Lord, it's going to be good to feel that stage under my feet again," he said as he went through a series of complicated limberingup exercises of his own devisement, which he had sometimes thought of publishing as The Lambrequin Time and Motion Studies. It seemed unfair to keep them from other actors. Ivo turned around from the mirror in which he had been contemplating their mutual beauty, "Paul," he said quietly, "you're never going to feel that stage under your feet again." Paul sat on the floor and stared at him. "You see, Paul," Ivo said, "I am Paul Lambrequin now. I am more Paul Lambrequin than I was -- whoever I was on my native planet. I am more Paul Lambrequin than you ever were. You learned the part superficially, Paul, but I really feel it." "It's not a part," Paul said querulously. "It's me. I've always been Paul Lambrequin." "How can you be sure of that? You've had so many identities, why should this be the true one? No, you only think you're Paul Lambrequin. I know I am." "Dammit," Paul said, "that's the identity in which I've taken out Equity membership. And be reasonable, Ivo -- there can't be two Paul Lambrequins." Ivo smiled sadly. "No, Paul, you're right. There can't." Of course Paul had known all along that Ivo was not a human being. It was only now, however, that full realization came to him of what a ruthless alien monster the other was, existing only to gratify his own purposes, unaware that others had a right to exist. "Are -- are you going to -- dispose of me, then?" Paul asked faintly. "To dispose of you, yes, Paul. But not to kill you. My kind has killed enough, conquered enough. We have no real population problem; that was just an excuse we made to salve our own consciences." "You have consciences, do you?" Paul's face twisted in a sneer that he himself sensed right away was overly melodramatic and utterly unconvincing. Somehow, he could never be really genuine offstage. Ivo made a sweeping gesture. "Don't be bitter, Paul. Of course we do. All intelligent life-forms do. It's one of the penalties of sentience!" For a moment, Paul forgot himself. "Watch it, Ivo. You're beginning to ham up your lines." "We can institute birth control," Ivo went on, his manner subdued. "We can build taller buildings. Oh, there are many ways we can cope with the population increase. That's not the problem. The problem is how to divert our creative energies from destruction to construction. And I think I have solved it." "How will your people know you have," Paul asked cunningly, "since you say you're not going back?" "I am not going back to Sirius, Paul -- you are. It is you who are going to teach my people the art of peace to replace the art of war." was probably a very effective white. "But -- but I can't even speak the language! I -- " "You will learn the language during the journey. I spent those afternoons I was away making a set of Sirian-in-aJiffy records for you. Sirian's a beautiful language, Paul, much more expressive than any of your Earth languages. You'll like it." "I'm sure I shall, but -- " "Paul, you are going to bring my people the outlet for self-expression they have always needed. You see, I lied to you. The theater on Sirius is not in its infancy; it has never been conceived. If it had been, we would never have become what we are today. Can you imagine a race like mine, so superbly fitted to practice the dramatic art, remaining in blind ignorance that such an art exists!" "It does seem a terrible waste," Paul had to agree, although he could not be truly sympathetic just then. "But I am hardly equipped -- " "Who is better equipped than you to meet this mighty challenge? Can't you see that at long last yoq will be able to achieve your great synthesis of the theatrical arts -- as producer, teacher, director, actor, playwright, whatever you will, working with a cast of individuals who can assume any shape or form, who have no preconceived notions of what can be done and what cannot. Oh, Paul, what a glorious opportunity awaits you on Sirius V. How I envy you!" "Then why don't you do it yourself?" Paul asked. Ivo smiled sadly again. "Unfortunately, I do not have your manifold abilities. All I can do is act. Superbly, of course, but that's all. I don't have the capacity to build a living theater from scratch. You do. I have talent, Paul, but you have genius." "It is a temptation," Paul admitted. "But to leave my own world..." "Paul, Earth isn't your world. You carry yours along with you wherever you go. Your world exists in the mind and heart, not in reality. In any real situation, you're just as uncomfortable on Earth as you would be on Sirius." "Yes, but -- " "Think of it this way, Paul. You're not leaving your world. You're just leaving Earth to go on the road. It's a longer road, but look at what's waiting for you at the end of it" "Yes, look," Paul said, reality very much to the fore in his mind and heart at that moment "death or vivisection." "Paul, do you believe I'd do that to you?" There were tears in Ivo's eyes. If he was acting, he was a great performer. I really am one hell of a good teacher, Paul thought, and with lots of raw material like Ivo to work with, I could... Could he really mean what he's saying? "They won't harm you, Paul, because you will come to Sirius bearing a message from me. You will tell my people that Earth has a powerful defensive weapon and you have come to teach them its secret. And it's true, Paul. The theater is your world's most powerful weapon, its best defense against the universal enemy -- reality." "Ivo," Paul said, "you really must check that tendency toward bombast. Especially with a purple speech like that; you've simply got to learn to underplay. You'll watch out for that when I'm gone, won't you?" "I will!" Ivo's face lighted up. "Oh, I will, Paul. I promise never to chew the scenery again. I won't so much as nibble on a prop!" r HE next day, the two of them went up to Bear Mountain where Ivo's ship had been cached all those months. Ivo explained to Paul how the controls worked and showed him where the clean towels were. Pausing in the airlock, Paul looked back toward Manhattan. "I'd dreamed so many years of seeing my name up in lights on Broadway," he murmured, "and now, just when I made it -- " "I'll keep it up there," Ivo vowed. "I promise. And, meanwhile, you'll be building a new Broadway up there in the stars!" "Yes," Paul said dreamily, "that is something to look forward to, isn't it?" Fresh, enthusiastic audiences, performers untrammeled by tradition, a cooperative government, unlimited funds -- why, there was a whole wonderful new world opening up before him. " -- In another ten years or so," Ivo was saying, "Sirian actors will be coming to Earth in droves, making the native performers look sick -- " Paul smiled wisely. "Now, Ivo, you know Equity would never stand for that ." "Equity won't be able to help itself. Public pressure will surge upward in a mounting wave and -- " Ivo stopped. "Sorry. I was ranting again, wasn't I? It's being out in the open air that does it. I need to be bounded by the four walls of a theater." "That's a fallacy," Paul began. "On the Greek stage -- " "Save that for the stars, fella," Ivo smiled. "You've got to leave before it gets light." Then he wrung Paul's hand. "Good-by, kid," he said. "You'll knock 'em dead on Sirius." "Good-by, Ivo." Paul returned the grip. Then he got inside and closed the airlock door behind him. He did hope Ivo would correct that tendency toward declamation; on the other hand, it was certainly better than mumbling. Paul put a Sirian-in-a-jiffy record on the turntable, because he might as well start learning the language right away. Of course he'd have no one to talk to but himself for many months, but then, when all was said and done, he was his own favorite audience. He strapped himself into the acceleration couch and prepared for takeoff. "Next week, East Lynne," he said to himself. B'aJbalIs whether there is no special schedule to it. There is none; it solely depends on the type of questions I get. Having cleared up what may be termed a policy matter, I can proceed to the first factual question. from as far away as one can go from New York and still be in the continental United States, meaning southern California. I might say that the question came in triplicate -- that is, three different readers wrote about it, all of them quoting a newspaper column. By now, most people, certainly all science fiction readers, know the principal considerations which went into the planning of the orbit for the Vanguard satellite. The orbit is to be elliptical, with its nearest point (perigee) about # miles above mean sea level and its farthest point (apogee) about # miles from the surface of the Earth. It is expected that the satellite, every time it passes its perigee, encounters a small amount of resistance because there are still some oxygen and nitrogen molecules (or atoms) left at that altitude. The result of this "residual air resistance" is technically known as "orbital decay" (Fig. #). The satellite, coming from apogee, will enter the upper atmosphere to pass through its perigee. Residual air resistance causes a small loss of momentum of the satellite and the next apogee, reached # minutes later, will therefore be a little bit closer to the Earth's surface. This, in effect, causes a shrinking of the orbit The focal point of the ellipses will remain the same all the way through, namely the center of the Earth. The perigee point may come a little closer to the surface of the Earth, but not much. The apogee point will come steadily closer, so that the orbit will assume a more circular shape as time goes on. In the end, it will be a circle, if only momentarily, at the altitude the perigee point then has. The interval from the first apogee to circular orbit is the period of the orbital decay. It is now thought that this may take as long as nine years. Just to leave no loose ends hanging, I have to add that the circular orbit will then change into a tight spiral along which the satellite will approach the ground, but will not reach it, for aerodynamic heating will vaporize the satellite as soon as it encounters denser layers of the atmosphere. Now the discussion in California and the letters which I received as a result of it concerned terminology, when you come right down to Fig. #: Diagram of orbital decay of artificial satellite. (Exaggerated; insert shows proper proportions) From: Rockett, Missiles and Space Travel (Viking Press, Inc.) it. Seems that somebody, in explaining this expected performance, had said that the satellite is "slowed down" at perigee by the residual air resistance. Somebody else then complained in injured tones that this was "public misinformation" because the satellite will be speeded up. My readers wanted to know which one of the two was right. The answer could be "both" or "neither" depending on (A) what you have in mind and (B) how you use the Queen's English. But let us not waste time in trying to decide who meant what and was therefore right or wrong. Let us instead try to understand what really goes on. The heavy circle in the diagram represents the surface of the Earth; the large, lighter concentric circle represents an altitude of # miles. Now let us first imagine that there is such a satellite in space in such an orbit, but that the Earth has no atmosphere. Then the elliptical orbit would be permanent and there would be no orbital decay. But the orbital velocity of a satellite depends on its distance from the Earth's center. If you had one satellite # miles from the surface in a circular orbit and another satellite # miles from the surface in a circular orbit, the "#mile satellite" would have to move faster to stay in its orbit than the "#-mile satellite." Logically, then, a satellite in an elliptical orbit also has to move faster when it is closer to the surface than it does when farther from the surface. IT must be pointed out that the satellite which is in such an elliptical orbit will move somewhat faster when going through its #mile perigee than would a satellite Fig. #: Aerobee-Hi rocket rising from the "igloo" at Fort Churchill Courtesy.Aerojet-General Corp. in a #-mile circular orbit. This, again, is only logical, for the satellite in the elliptical orbit needs some extra energy to climb out against Earth's gravity to its apogee. Also, when at apogee, it will move somewhat more slowly than a satellite in a #-mile circular orbit. If it were fast enough for such an orbit, it would just stay at # miles. The important thing to remember of all this is that the satellite is faster at perigee. Therefore, in coming in from apogee, the satellite does speed up. At this moment, we restore the atmosphere which we had to leave out for the fundamental explanation. Encountering what air resistance there is # miles up, the satellite does lose some of its speed. It does not pass through its perigee point with the same velocity it would have if there were no resistance. So it emerges from the atmosphere somewhat slower than it would if the atmosphere were not there. Going out to apogee again, it slows up more and more because it now climbs against the Earth's gravity. As soon as it has passed apogee, it speeds up again, for it now moves deeper into the Earth's gravitational field. The main velocity changes, therefore, are not brought about by the residual air resistance at perigee, but are simply inherent in an elliptical orbit. Fig. #: Aerobee-Hi rocket being readied for flight. Payload cone is being attached to rocket body Coortesy: Aerojet-General Corp. In discussing this, there had been the assumption that we were dealing with the first dozen or so perigee passages. Now we can go on to the time when the orbital decay has progressed to a noticeable extent. Let's say that the apogee is now only # miles from the surface, while the perigee has slipped from # miles to # miles altitude. This is an orbit which is generally nearer the Earth, in all its parts; hence the satellite has to have a higher orbital velocity in every point of its orbit. You can thus insist on saying that the perigee passages through a tenuous layer of the upper atmosphere .have speeded up the satellite. They have, by way of forcing the satellite into a smaller and nearer orbit. But although the satellite now moves generally faster than at the outset, each perigee passage still causes a small velocity loss. However, this loss is substracted from a larger total. A reasonably correct comparison might be to say that the "withdrawal" due to the perigee passage is smaller than the "accumulated interest" Though there is a small loss during every perigee passage, the orbital velocity is higher. This goes on through the whole orbital decay and even through most of the spiral path. The real slowdown does not take place until denser layers of the atmosphere are reached. But this slowdown, with its conversion of momentum into heat, also means the end of the satellite. "Rockoort," Deacon rocket being carried by Skyhook balloon. Black box is switchbox Official U.S. Navy Photograph O NE of the letters received read, severely condensed, as follows: "Reading the newspapers, one gets the impression as if there will be no other rocket experiments in the International Geophysical Year than U. S. and U.S.S.R. rockets. Only occasionally does one read about other rockets. Could you tell what other rockets are going to be used?" Sure. Just keep on reading. When it comes to upper-atmosphere research rockets, there are a few which can be dubbed the work horses. The largest of these work horses is Aerojet's AerobeeHi rocket, which also holds the high-altitude record for single-stage rockets with booster. One AerobeeHi, fired from the White Sands Proving Grounds, reached an altitude of # miles. The United States opened its #, with the firing of an Aerobee-Hi from an "igloo" near Fort Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. The "igloo," of course, was a modern version involving concrete and stainless steel; its more solemn official name is that of an "allweather rocket launching facility" (Fig. #). With its doors closed, it is a shelter for fueling and checking rockets in reasonable comfort. For a firing, the doors are opened so that the exhaust blast of the booster can escape into the open. The Aerobee-Hi rocket (Fig. #) is about #I feet in length with a diameter of # inches. The volume reserved for scientific instruments is # cubic feet; the payload can weigh from # to # lbs. The fuels are aniline and red fuming nitric acid. For the takeoff, there is a solid-fuel booster # V # feet in length with a burning time of # seconds. (The burning time of the rocket is # seconds.) At least # Aerobee-Hi rockets will be fired places where there are launching towers available. The northernmost launching tower is the one mentioned near Fort Churchill, which is the northernmost point in continental North America that can be reached by rail. Another such work horse is the two-stage solid-fuel rocket NikeCajun. Its first stage is the booster of the anti-aircraft rocket Nike Ajax, its second stage the #-foot solid-fuel Cajun rocket. Since the Nike booster has a length of #I feet, the total length of the NikeCajun is # feet. The takeoff weight is about # lbs., or about # lbs. more than the weight of a fueled Aerobee-Hi without booster. smaller size, is somewhat more flexible in use than the Aerobee-Hi. But the maximum payload weight it can carry is # lbs. and with that payload the peak altitude is around # miles. At least # Nike-Cajun rockets will be fired lished firing sites like White Sands and Fort Churchill, others from shipboard. Third of the work horses is the "rockoon," which is the #-foot solid-fuel Deacon rocket carried to an altitude of # feet or thereabouts by a plastic "Skyhook" balloon. The reason for this arrangement is that the rocket is launched at a height where more than # per cent of the atmosphere is below. The increase in altitude obtained by this method is nearly incredible. A Deacon rocket fired from the ground on a near-vertical trajectory will attain a peak altitude of about # feet. If carried to that peak altitude and fired from there, it will rise to # miles. Unfortunately, the balloon needs several hours to rise to # feet or higher. For this reason, wherever feasible, the balloon is released six or eight hours ahead of the time set for the firing of the rocket. It will climb to its peak altitude and just float there. The rocket is then fired by remote control from the ground or from shipboard. At least two dozen American rockoons will be used during the called solar flares, which are intensely bright spots on the Sun that interfere with radio communication and also release showers of cosmic rays. The American rockoons (Fig. #) will be joined by a few dozen British rockoons, which are #foot Bristol-University-Fairy rockets, also released from plastic balloons at # feet or higher and expected to reach # miles, like their American counterparts. If a solar flare puts in an appearance -- the Sun was kind enough to supply one for the .very opening of the International Geophysical Year -- and the scientists feel that a rockoon cannot climb up fast enough to do any good, they may call on the Air Force or on the Navy for a Rockaire. These Rockaires are smaller solid-fuel rockets, about # feet in length, which are carried by fast aircraft. The procedure of firing is for the plane to climb to the maximum altitude at which it still handles safely, then loop over, firing the rocket at the instant the plane's fuselage is in a vertical position. The Air Force and Navy Rockaires differ chiefly in the use of different airplanes. The expected maximum height reached by these rockets is around # miles. rockets. r T I HE British high-altitude rocket to be used is called the Skylark. It was designed by the Royal Aircraft Establishment, stands about # feet tall, has a diameter of # inches and three fixed tail fins. It is a solid-fuel rocket with a slow-burning charge that will need about # seconds to be completely consumed. The takeoff weight of the Skylark is # lbs. Test firings carried out in Australia reached peak altitudes of around # miles, carrying # lbs. of payload. The versatility of the Skylark is unfortunately reduced by the fact that it needs a #-ft. launching tower. A Japanese research rocket is also in the running. Its name is Kappa and it is a two-stage solidfuel rocket. The peak altitude expected for the Kappa rocket is around # miles. The number to be fired is not established. A Japanese rocket expert I asked told me that the number would depend on two factors: "availability in the right place at the right time, and opportunity." These are about the same factors which apply to our Rockaires, so that a good tabulation will be possible only after the event. The Russians, in addition to their own satellite program, are going to fire a large number of high-altitude research rockets from European Russia, from Franz Joseph's Land and from Antarctica. The rocket to be used is called the Mateo, which is simply an abbreviation of Meteorological Rocket. It is a liquid-fuel rocket with solid-fuel booster; its overall length is just about # feet and the takeoff weight one metric ton. It needs a launching tower which the Russians have built in the shape of a girder mast surrounded by a spiral staircase. The fuels for the main rocket are purified kerosene -- probably about the same as some of our jet fuels -- and nitric acid. The booster is a ring-shaped cluster of six solid-fuel rockets; the open space in the center permits the blast from the liquid-fuel rocket motor to escape. At takeoff, main rocket and the booster cluster are ignited simultaneously. The solid-fuel booster burns for two seconds and then drops off. The main rocket motor burns for one minute. At an altitude of about # miles, the nose cone with the payload is separated from the main body by one or several small solidfuel rockets which provide a small additional boost for the nose cone. This separation also frees two parachutes, one for the main body of the rocket, the other for the nose cone. The nose cone's parachute just trails behind while the nose cone climbs to # miles. Above # miles, the air is far too thin to make the parachute effective. A larger research rocket, with # miles peak altitude, has also been announced, but has not been described even in outline. Nor has it been stated how many of the one hundred rocket shots planned by the Russians are to be made with the Meteo and how many with the larger rocket. The Selective Epidemic as is possible -- barring space travel -- namely from a lady in New South Wales, Australia. She wrote: "I have read two stories lately in which epidemics were the main plot ingredient. In one a disease wipes out all white men and in the other a disease is mentioned to which only white men are immune. Is this possible? It seems to me that species which can interbreed would not be immune to each other's diseases." Well, the strange fact is that sometime during the seventeenth century there was a disease which attacked one nationality only. It is known in medical history as the Sudor anglicus (English sweat) because its latter stages were characterized by excessive perspiration of a typical and very penetrating odor. It seems to have been inevitably fatal, but it attacked Englishmen only! Though it was indubitably an infection, Danes, Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Germans living among the English escaped unscathed. The disease ran a short and violent course, had, if I remember correctly, one more short flare-up after the main epidemic and has not been heard of since. Naturally, it is almost impossible to offer an explanation almost three centuries later, but one might suspect that it had something to do with a vitamin deficiency. This deficiency may not have been bad enough by itself to cause noticeable symptoms -- moreover, the doctors of that time did not know of deficiency diseases and therefore did not know what to look for -- but might have rendered its bearer helpless to some infection. If this guess is correct, the other nationalities escaped because their dietary habits were different and made them resistant to the infection. Also, provided the guess is correct, it could not repeat, for the first thing any doctor would do nowadays would be to stuff the patient with vitamins. But whatever the explanation, there was a disease attacking one nationality only, in spite of the fact that this nationality is perfectly capable of interbreeding with its neighbors. A few similar examples from the past are explained: they always involved a contact between populations which had been isolated before. There the case always was that one group had acquired a reasonable degree of other group had not. As a result, immunity to a disease while the the group to which this disease was a novelty was decimated by it. Again, such cases cannot repeat any more, partly because there are hardly any isolated populations left, partly because modem medicine could do something about it. Back to Dinosaurs nr HE last query I can take care of in this column is a letter which was written in direct reference to my column in the June # issue, entitled "Tribes of the Dinosaurs." You may remember that one of the illustrations (on page # of that issue) showed a brontosauruslike dinosaur which has been found in China. The correspondent admitted that this picture looked like all the other pictures of such dinosaurs. But, he wanted to know, weren't they all wrong? They are always drawn with legs like those of elephants. Yet the dinosaurs were reptiles. Wasn't it more reasonable to suppose that their legs had been like those of lizards or of crocodiles, bent instead of straight? And this, the correspondent continued, was not just his own idea; he had read somewhere that a scientist had said the same. Why didn't I have this more reasonable concept drawn up? Didn't I know any better, or did my wife refuse to draw it? As for the last remark, here is proof that she did not refuse (Fig. #). This is the concept my critic had in mind, with the more usual type of representation for comparison (Fig. #). Now for the history of this idea. The first of these dinosaurs (called Jhe sauropods) to be discovered and to be reconstructed was Brontosaurus excelsus, found in Wyoming by Prof. Othniel C. Marsh and first described by him in #. In #, Marsh drew up a preliminary reconstruction which was followed in #I by a definitive reconstruction. It showed brontosaurus just as it is still pictured. Soon after the nearly complete brontosaurus skeleton was found, Prof. Marsh came across remains of another dinosaur of the same general type, but no doubt a different species, more likely a different genus. There was enough to establish detail and the name became Diplodocus longus. More remains of diplodocus were found in Wyoming in # and #. It was diplodocus, not brontosaurus, which caused the fight about the position of its legs. It was a discussion teeming with anatomical detail and complicated by the fact that this set of tail vertebrae first ascribed to diplodocus turned out to belong to brontosaurus and that bone of the pelvic region was not diplodocus, either, but belonged to morosaurus. Nature had mixed up some of the skeletons rather thoroughly and it took time to disentangle the fossilized mess. H owever, in #I it looked as if there had been two species of diplodocus, namely Diplodocus longus, described by Marsh, and Diplodocus Carnegiei, described by J. B. Hatcher. (Now everybody is convinced that the two were one and the same, the minor differences being attributable to age or sex differences.) Andrew Carnegie, after whom the second diplodocus was named, decided to do something. By about #, a nearly complete skeleton of Diplodocus Carnegiei existed, put together from the remains of several individuals. The few bones Fig. #: Diplodocus in position advocated by Tornier Drawing by Olga Ley that had not been actually found, like a few vertebrae and brokenoff ends of ribs, could be confidently reconstructed. When the reconstruction was finished, Carnegie had several Plaster of Paris casts of every bone made and presented them to various museums in Europe. One went to the British Museum of Natural History in London, one, I believe, to Brussels, and another one to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. The curators and directors wrote grateful letters to Mr. Carnegie and mounted their reproductions just as fast as feasible, following the scheme established by Marsh for brontosaurus. They had just unveiled them when potential disaster appeared in print In #, Oliver Perry Hay published a paper in which an alligatorlike leg position was defended. And one year later, Prof. G. Tornier in Berlin published another paper which said the same. There were a number of minor disagreements between Hay and Tornier, especially as regards the position of the forefeet, but both said that the legs must have been bent and that the belly must have been dragging on the ground. The director of the Berlin Museum even placed a large drawing of Tomier's reconstruction in front of the mounted skeleton with the legend: "Mounting of the Diplodocus Skeleton as corrected by G. Tornier" -- in the original: Berichtigte Aufstellung des Diplodocus nach G. Tornier. That sign was still there in # even though, in the meantime, several paleontologists had jumped Fig. #: Diplodocus in correct position Drawing by Olga Ley into the breach and proved that Marsh had been perfectly correct Especially Prof. Othenio Abel of Vienna wrote a rather amusing (though perfectly serious) paper in which he proved that diplodocus, according to the actual measurements of the skeleton, could have moved in that position only if he found a five-foot-deep ditch going in the right direction. Others, like Abel, showed that the joints simply did not permit such a position; they were built for the pillarlike upright leg that had been assumed by most experts all along. So the alligatorlike position of the sauropod dinosaurs is by no means a new idea, as my correspondent seemed to assume. It was, instead, an early mistake which was thoroughly disproved as long ago as #. drifting with the tides of life? You can learn to control your future. Individual processing Intensives. Hubbard Guidance Center, # #th Street, N. W. Washington, D. C. The way the professor saw It, the Issue was not think tank versus memory tank -- but that the robot had not ever been a young squirt! Perkins was the last perand asked him if he thought the son I wanted to meet that hot weather would last, and how morning, so naturally I walked his daughter was getting along with through the door of the post office her allergy shots, and how the and found him standing directly in grandson at M.I.T. was making front of me with his hand extended, out, and whether the weather foreI either had to accept the hand or cast had said anything about rain, turn around and run, so I shook In four minutes, I'd exhausted every conversational cliche I could think of and I was beginning to feel embarrassed. At that moment, Postmaster Schantz came to my rescue. He stuck his head through the stamp window and bellowed, "It's a damned dirty shame!" The professor's thin lips twisted into a faintly ironic smile and his long white hair rippled as he shook his head. "Machines have been putting men out of work ever since men started making machines," he said. "Most of the men find other jobs, and everyone profits because the machines produce more. Do things better, too. Any time a machine can do my job better than I can do it, I'll cheerfully retire. But they haven't built that machine yet, and I don't think they ever will." Y  iJ E went into a spontaneous  huddle around the stamp window. I looked past the postmaster, and through the rear window of the post office I could see an aircar lifting slowly. Its bright red, white and blue stripes glistened in the early morning sunlight. Young Bill Wade was at the controls, leaving on his rural delivery route. I made a mental note to ride along with him some day and do a story abouthim. The farmers all admire young Bill. They say he can hit a mail funnel from five hundred feet altitude. "I just had a talk with Sam Beyers, I " I said to the professor. "He's taking a full-page ad in Sunday's Gazette. He's announcing that his robot now has more than eighty students and that all of them are making six months' progress with every lesson. He told me confidentially that in another week you won't have a student left." "I know two students he'll have left," the postmaster growled. "I'm not having my grandchildren taking no violin lessons from a robot." "That's nice of you," Professor Perkins murmured. "But Sam Beyers isn't far wrong. This morning I had twenty-four students. When I get home, there'll be three or four cancellations and then I'll have maybe twenty. Another week and I'll be down to your two grandchildren. Why not? Why should anyone pay for something he can get free?" "Sam Beyers is a crook," the postmaster said to me. "You shouldn't take his advertising." "Sam isn't a bad guy," I said. "I don't like what he's doing with that robot, but as long as there's nothing improper in his advertising, I can't refuse it" The postmaster shook his head gloomily. "Maybe if the professor would advertise..." "I offered him some free ads," I said. "He wouldn't take them." "It isn't necessary," said the professor. "In another week, Beyers will have almost all my students. In a month or so, I'll start getting them back. I can wait Did my music come in?" He stretched out long, graceful fingers for the slender package of music. I picked up the Gazettes mail and thumbed through it in a hurry to see how many checks might be enclosed before I hurried off after the professor. He was standing at the edge of the Waterville Park, watching a game of scooter ball. As we looked, one of the boys got the ball squarely in his firing sights and scored a direct hit It looked like a triple mark. In fact it looked as if the ball would carry all the way to the river. It didn't -- the wind held it up -- but it would have made the river on the first bounce if it hadn't been for a nervy little red-headed boundaryman on a red scooter. He headed straight for the water, executed as neat a skid as I've ever seen right on the edge of the bank, and netted the ball. He had it jammed in his launcher by the time he'd completed the skid, and he laid a perfeet shot right on the central bag. The rider was out by three lengths. "Neat play," I said. "That Pinky Jones is a live one," Professor Perkins agreed. "Student of yours?" I asked. HP HE professor grinned. "He was, up until last week. I almost feel sorry for the robot. Pinky tries to play with the violin upside down. He files the strings so they break during the lesson. One day he came in with a cricket inside his violin. He had it trained, somehow, so it would chirp when he wanted it to. 'Professor,' he said, 'something's wrong with my violin. It makes the funniest tone. # He went through the motions with his bow and the cricket chirped. 'That's easily corrected,' I said. 'An extra twenty minutes a day on the exercises.' That was the last time he brought the cricket." The professor laughed, but I wasn't in a laughing mood. "You don't seem to realize how serious this Beyers thing is," I said. He shrugged. "Of course it's serious. I lose money, and I can't afford to lose money. But people will soon find out that a robot can't give violin lessons. Does a machine know when a student needs maybe a little more padding on the shoulder? Does it know when a student needs a heavier bow? Does it know what student needs to be coaxed and what one needs a kick in the pants? Does it make the student know the difference between a nicely played phrase and one that isn't? No. No machine can do the thousand things any good violin teacher has to do. People will find that out soon enough, and the Beyers robot will go back to the factory." "I think you're wrong," I said. "As long as Beyers is giving the lessons free, people will send their children to him. What have they got to lose? Long before they become dissatisfied with the robot, you'll have had to give in and move on. Just what is Beyers up to, anyway?" The professor smiled and said nothing. "I can tell you what I think he's trying to do," I said. "He wants to get rid of you. He'll give free lessons until he eliminates his competition, and then he can charge whatever he wants. Students will have to pay it or lose all the time and money they've already invested in their music education. He'll charge double what you charge for lessons. He'll have to, to get back his investment in that robot. Those things are expensive." The professor looked amused. "So you think Beyers is after a profit." "It isn't like Sam," I admitted. "He came up the hard way himself and he's always been pretty square. I know back nine or ten years ago, when Hardson's appliance store was going broke, Sam loaned him money to try and keep him in business. Sam said business thrives on competition. Hardson went broke anyway, but Sam helped him as much as he could. That's why I don't understand this at all. But how else can you figure it?" V#'E turned together and walked  slowly along Main Street. I watched an aircar settle down in front of Warren's Feed Store. A burly farmer hurried in, and a moment later a robot rumbled out with half a dozen bags of feed. One of the Warren boys directed it from the doorway as it loaded the feed into the aircar. Half a block down the street, we came to Beyers, Inc. Beyers sells a little of everything, but until lately most of his business has been in atomic appliances and machinery. This morning he had a new, glaring-red sign in the winIn the rooms above the store was the Beyers School of Music. And the robot teacher. As we passed the store, the door opened and a girl tripped out gaily. Her long, golden curls fluttered after her as she ran. She wasn't more than ten, yet already a womanly loveliness was blended with angelic, childish mischief in her glowing face. It was Sam Beyers' daughter Sharon, and she darted past us laughing merrily. Then she glanced over her shoulder and came to a sudden stop. "Hello, Sharon," the professor called. She turned sullenly, her eyes on the professor. She stuck out her tongue. "You shouldn't do that, Sharon," I said. "It isn't a bit polite." She stuck out her tongue at me and hurried away. "Now what brought that on?" I asked. "I'm not very popular with the Beyers family," the professor said. "Beyers worships that kid. She's pretty and smart and talented, and she's probably a comfort to him after the way his son turned out to be a dunce, but he has her spoiled rotten. She needs a good spanking." "She's a nice girl," the professor disagreed. We stopped suddenly as the bright tones of a violin drifted down to us. The professor pulled on my arm, and we moved away from Beyers, Inc., past the fancy facade of the Waterville Cafe (Aircar Parking in the Rear -- Visit Our Roof Gardens for Gala Evening Entertainment), and paused to stare unseeing at the glamorous young ladies' frocks in the window of Terrestrial Styles Ltd., Waterville Branch. "Beethoven," Professor Perkins said, his smooth, ageless face taut with excitement. "Sonata in C Minor, Opus #, Number #." "I know," I told him. "You made me play it, once." He nodded. "This robot merits some respect. Few teachers know the violin's historical repertory well enough to come up with a forgotten masterpiece by an all but forgotten master." I strained to catch the music. "The robot plays well." The professor looked at me quickly. "You think so?" "It also plays like a robot," I said. There was something grimly mechanical in its indifference to technical barriers, in its rhythmical severity, in its scorning of emotional values. I told myself that the students would all play like machines. The professor may have found some comfort in that, but I didn't. The good people of Waterville and the surrounding country were not likely to be concerned about the finer points of musical taste and expression -- as long as their grubby offspring played. "Come," said the professor.  up a position in the doorway of Saylor's Pharmacy and stood listening to the dazzling thread of violin music that came drifting down with the sunlight. The music changed several times. I recognized a passage from an old concerto by Alban Berg and some modern pieces by Morglitz. The professor listened intently and said nothing. Precisely on the half-hour, the music stopped. A moment later, the street door of the Beyers School of Music was flung open violently. Jeffery Gayman, aged eleven, charged out, flung himself on the waiting scooter and putted away toward the park and the game of scooter ball. "Now that's odd," I said. "I didn't hear him playing once." The professor smiled. "You haven't seen the robot in action or heard how it works? I thought not. The robot does not play the violin. It can't play the violin. It only assists the student." I stared at him. "Yes," he said. "What you heard was young Mr. Gayman playing. Three weeks ago, he does not even play the scales smoothly. He does not even play a nice little folk song and stay in tune. Then the robot gives him two, maybe three lessons, and he plays Beethoven and Berg and Morglitz like a mature artist. The robot is a wonderful thing, don't you think?" He laughed and patted me gently on the back and hurried away. I went back to the Gazette and locked myself in my private office and settled down to have a good worry. The professor didn't seem greatly concerned about robot competition, but as editor of the only local newspaper for miles around, I knew the people. And I knew we were going to lose the professor. Sam Beyers had plenty of money. There wasn't any limit to the time he could go on giving free lessons, but there was to the time the professor could sit around waiting for his students to come back to him. Eventually he'd have to go where he could earn money teaching. Water ville needed the professor. He was our last remaining defender of culture. He'd come to Waterville twenty years before, when he tired of the high-pressure life led by artists in the big cities. At the time, Waterville didn't seem like a promising place for a music teacher. The professor was young then -- in his early forties -- and he had plenty of drive and enthusiasm. He finally got across the idea that art was not something to be housed in a museum or experienced as a kind of passive shower bath from visiscope. The average person could learn how to create or recreate art for himself. "Kids don't get any physical benefit from watching scooter ball," the professor had said. "If you want to enjoy the spiritual benefits of art, you have to participate. You can't just watch it from the sidelines." of talk, and Professor Perkins built up a big class of violin students. He also trained some viola and cello and bass students, and when they were advanced enough, he started a string orchestra. He conducted it himself, free. If some sections needed help for a concert, he brought professional musicians out from the city and paid them himself. He gave several recitals a year, and he had his students in regular recitals. He got professional accompanists to help out, and naturally he had to pay them. I knew that the professor's savings couldn't be large. He'd invested too much money in culture for Waterville. These concerts and recitals were events. Everyone in the area had at least one relative on the program and everyone came -- admission free, of course. And it didn't stop there. The professor made arrangements for a couple of young artists to spend their summers in Waterville, giving inexpensive art lessons to those interested. What that cost him, I couldn't guess. When my father died and I took over the Gazette , the professor had me sponsoring story contests and poetry contests and essay contests, and running the winners in the Gazette. At least that didnt cost him anything -- I put up the prizes myself. But the theme was the same: don't watch art from the sidelines -- have a go at it yourself. With the professor pushing it for twenty years, that philosophy really took hold. We had everything from wood-carving clubs to oilpainting clubs, from poetry-writing clubs to musical-composition clubs. And the professor was the guardian angel of each and every one. Almost every kid that had grown up during the twenty years he'd been there had studied an instrument at one time or another, and so had a lot of the adults. The professor had become a local institution. Everyone loved him, especially the kids. It was hard to believe that people would throw him over for some novelty like Sam Beyers' robot, after the contribution he had made. I suppose the robot had the same appeal as a new kitchen or farming gadget that everyone rushes to buy. There's something intriguing about a robot that can give music lessons. And, in addition, the lessons were free -- and would be, until Beyers got rid of the professor. Then there was another worry. If the robot could actually take one of the professor's beginners and have him playing Beethoven and Berg and Morglitz after two or three lessons... I couldn't come up with an answer. I told myself that the power of the press should be able to accomplish something, but if there was a way to use it, I didn't see it. And time was important. I decided to have another talk with the professor. r   HE professor's small house is out on the edge of town, away from any immediate neighbors. He wanted it that way, so his music lessons wouldn't bother people. Also, he likes a little extra space because, in addition to his other talents, he is an amateur gardener. In the summer, his yard is knee-deep in flowers. His daughter Hilda met me at the door. There were wrinkles in her plump face that I hadn't seen before and her mouth drooped mournfully. Obviously she was upset. The professor's life had been comfortably secure, and suddenly everything was falling apart. "He's out in back, in the garden," she said. "You sit down and I'll call him in." I sat and waited. In most homes, it would have been the living room, but in the professor's home it was his studio. It was attractively furnished, with pictures of composers on the walls, and a framed page of that odd-looking medieval music, and pictures of orchestras the professor had once played in. The room was air-conditioned, but T happened to know that it was the only air-conditioned room in the house. The professor did not waste money on physical comforts. His money went for culture -- Waterville's culture. He came in, a little surprised to see me, but eagerly hospitable. Hilda faced him glumly. "Mrs. Anderson called," she said. "Carol... "Ah, yes," the professor said. "Of course. Carol goes to Beyers and the robot gives her lessons free. Today she has trouble with the little exercises, and tomorrow she plays a Morglitz concerto without any mistakes." He winked at me. "The robot is a wonderful thing, eh, Johnnie? How many does that leave us? Twenty-two?" "Twenty-one," Hilda said. "You forgot about Susan Zimmer. Or didn't I tell you?" "You didn't. But it's quite all right. Well, Johnnie? What brings you to see an obsolete musician?" We sat side by side on the sofa and Hilda brought us coffee and a small plate of cakes. I sipped my coffee, and the professor sipped his, and waited politely. "What do you know about Beyers' robot?" I asked finally. "Enough to know what is wrong with it," he said. "I've seen similar robots demonstrated in New York. I know of experiments which have been made with them. Beyers' robot may be an improved model, but they all have the same basic defect." "How do they work? You see, I'm trying to put my finger on something I could use in the paper. In an editorial, perhaps." "You keep on trying, don't you, Johnnie? I'm grateful, of course. It isn't necessary, though, and it would really take too much time and trouble. But I can tell you about it, just to satisfy your reportorial curiosity." to another cup of coffee. "I'm not just a selfish old fogy standing in the way of progress," he said. "There's a place for machines -- yes, even in art there's a place. But the machine cannot replace the artist. It can assist him. It can stimulate him. It can relieve him of some of his mechanical labors. But the imagination and the feeling must come from the artist. "Take the nufcicwriter. The composer plays, and the musicwriter writes down what he is playing. The machine doesn't compose, but it relieves the composer of the drudgery of making notes on paper. Writers and poets have the word-selector. The machine doesn't choose the word. It reminds the writer of the possibilities, and the writer must make the right choice. There are the theater amplifiers. The machine can't make emotional expression out of a series of words. All words are equal to a machine. But it can deliver the actor's natural voice to the people in the rear so he doesn't have to shout when he should be whispering." "How can a machine stimulate?" I said. "You've heard of the composing machines?" "I thought they were a joke." "They were, as long as they were devised to follow a system. The music they wrote was perfectly correct, and horribly dull and naive. Then somebody built one with no system at all. What it produced was absolute chaos, but scattered through that chaos were beautiful tonal effects that the machine happened on by accident. It took a great artist to understand those effects and use them as they should have been. Morglitz used that machine in his last compositions. It inspired some of the greatest things he wrote." "I see," I said. "Then where does the robot teacher come in?" "It doesn't. The machine becomes the artist, and the artist becomes the machine. It's just as if -- well, take that thing Warren uses to carry bags of feed and the like. Supposing that instead of actually carrying the load, the machine merely strengthened a man's spine so he could carry a bigger load himself. That's what the robot teacher does. It gives the student proficiency without understanding. He can carry a bigger load while the machine is helping him, but take the machine away and he's no better off than he was. Worse, maybe." "I still don't understand," I said. "Well, the robot is not pleasant to look at Tentacles all over. It tells the student when his violin is in tune. It places his fingers and arms in the correct position. The position is perfect, because the robot won't let it be anything else. The student can't play out of tune, or play a wrong note, because there's a tentacle on each finger, and the robot won't let the student put the finger down in the wrong place. "The robot flashes the music on a screen and the student knows just what he's playing, because each measure lights up as he gets to it, and disappears after he plays it. If he bothers to watch the screen, he knows. If he doesn't watch it, it doesn't make any difference. The robot won't let him make a mistake. I saw a robot demonstrated with some younger children who were scared to death of the thing. It ignored their crying and went right ahead making them play." hate being taught that way as a kid." "Actually, the robot doesn't teach anything," the professor said. "All it does is use the student like an instrument. Without the robot, the student can't play alone any better than a violin can play by itself. A man in New York did some research. He started one group of students with a violin teacher and another group with a robot. At the end of two years the teacher's students were coming along nicely, and the robot's students couldn't play a thing. Except with the robot, of course. They could play anything with the robot." "What if you were to do an experiment like that in Waterville?" The professor shook his head. "Time," he said. "If I gave lessons for nothing, I could get some of my students back, or get some new students, but it would take too long to prove anything." "Is there any chance that the robot might be harmful?" "Unless it's used by an expert, it might be. And Beyers hasn't got an expert. Muscles have to be developed gradually. It is certainly not good to force a young person's fingers to play difficult music before they are ready for it. There was a composer named Schumann. Nineteenth century. You probably haven't heard of him. He was a pianist, and he built some kind of gadget to exercise his fingers. He ruined his career as a performer." "Was he an important composer?" I asked. "He was fairly important." Suddenly I felt better. "That's something I can use. It makes good material for an editorial. 'Is the Robot Harming Our Children?' That'll make people sit up and take notice." He shook his head sadly. "People never stay sitting up very long. Too uncomfortable. No, Johnnie. You'd need a lot of research data and a lot of time." I got up and paced the floor restlessly. Hilda came in and cleared away the coffee things, and then she came back to the doorway and stood there wringing her hands. "What are you going to do?" I demanded finally. "Just wait?" "Just wait," he said. "A machine cannot replace the artist. Remember that. And a teacher -- a good teacher -- is an artist." "I wish I knew what Beyers is trying do," I complained. "You know what he thinks of his daughter. She's the smartest kid in town. She writes stories and poems, and she's won first prize in the last two contests you sponsored. She dances as though gravity doesn't exist. She acts in plays. He figures she ought to be marvelous at anything she tries, and he sends her to me for violin lessons. I send her home again. She's a lovely girl, and she's smart and talented, but she's also tone-deaf. The violin is not for a girl who can't hear what she's playing. "Beyers thinks it's an insult. He says her being tone-deaf doesn't make any difference -- his girl can do anything, and he'll show me I'm wrong if it's the last thing he ever does. So he gets the robot to give Sharon lessons, and while he's at it, he gives free lessons to everyone and tries to take all my students." "So that's how it is," I said. "Beyers would naturally hate anyone who suggested that Sharon wasn't perfect in every respect. But you could have avoided all this trouble by just going ahead and giving her lessons." "I try to be an honest man, Johnnie. There are lots of things the girl can do well. She shouldn't waste her time and money on the violin." "Well, I'm glad you're so sure things will be all right. I. wish I could feel certain about it. I like to help things along a little -- speed them up." H E looked thoughtful. "There's only one way, I think, to speed things up. And that's impossible. I'd have to arrange to have the robot give me a lesson, but Beyers wouldn't let me near it." "Just what did you have in mind?" I wanted to know. He shook his head without answering. "If all you want is a lesson," I said, "I can arrange that easily enough. Beyers will have to give it to you. He's been advertising free lessons for anyone." "He wouldn't accept me." "If he doesn't, he's guilty of fraudulent advertising. Here, let me call him." I went over to the visiphone and cut off the visual transmitter, so Beyers wouldn't know where I was. I put through the call and got Beyers. He laughed and said, "Trouble with that ad, I suppose. I should have had it typed. No one can read my writing." "I have a new student for that robot of yours," I said. "When can he come in for a lesson?" Beyers was suddenly enthusiastic. He'd been trying to interest me in the robot -- he thought I hadn't given it the publicity it deserved. "Send him over," he said. "There's some time open right now." "I'll bring him myself," I said, and cut off. "Let's go," I said to the professor. He picked up his violin. I was already nervous by the time we got outside the door, and it didn't help me any when the professor kept stopping all the way down the walk to admire his pet flowers. We panted our way up the stairway to the Beyers School of Music. "Beyers says he's going to put in an anti-grav," I said. "I guess he figures this institution is going to flourish." At the top, we entered a small, comfortably furnished waiting room. There was a large color photo of Sharon Beyers on the opposite wall. She was lovely and doll-like in her dancing costume. On the right wall was a blackand-white character study of Sharon Beyers, beautifully done. On the left wall, and the wall behind us, more Sharon. If Beyers ever had a picture made of his teen-aged son Wilbur, I never saw it. He probably kept it in the stock room. I walked over and touched a button. A moment later, footsteps came banging up the stairway and Wilbur burst into the room. He is kind of an unfortunate happy medium -- not quite ugly enough to be repulsive, not quite intelligent enough to appear normal. He grinned at me, then froze when he saw the professor. "What's he doing here?" he yelped. "I've come to take a lesson," the professor said peacefully. "Mr. Cranton made an appointment for me." Belligerent suspicion gripped Wilbur's young face. It took him quite a while to think of the next question, and when it came, it the big idea?" "The idea," I said, "is that the professor is here to take a lesson." "He ain't no student!" "Never too old to learn," the professor said cheerfully. "Don't they teach you that in school? No? Such a shame. You'll be as old as I am some day and you should remember that. When a man stops learning, he's already dead. So is a robot." "I won't give you a lesson." "Not you," said the professor. "The robot The robot gives me the lesson." F OR the second time, Wilbur had to grope deeply for his words. Finally he said, "I better get Dad." His footsteps went slamming back down the stairway. He slammed back up a little later and waited at the top. Sam Beyers came up slowly. He is a slight quiet-looking man with graying hair and a carefully trimmed mustache. Generally he has a friendly smile and a pleasant-looking face, but there was nothing pleasant in the glance he threw at the professor. It was virulent hatred. He turned on me. "What's Perkins doing here?" "You told me to bring him over for a lesson," I said. "I brought him. Let's have the lesson." "Let him give himself lessons. Out of here, both of you." He was ready to throw us out bodily -- or make a good try at it His face was white, with a dull red touch of anger in his cheeks. His hands were trembling. I felt sorry for him, in a way. I suppose too much love can easily counterbalance itself with too much hatred. I shrugged and winked at the professor. "It's his business," I said. "Let's go look up Tom Silvers and have him draw up a couple of affidavits for the District Attorney." It hit Beyers like a splash of cold water. He squared his shoulders and said icily, "I'll run this business the way I want to run it." "No, you won't," I told him. "For three weeks, you've been advertising free lessons for anyone. If you refuse to give the professor a lesson, that makes it fraudulent advertising. Check that with your lawyer." He had himself under control by then. The red was gone from his cheeks, but the pasty-white color that remained wasn't much of an improvement He sat down heavily and glared at the professor. "What are you after?" "Music lessons," the professor said. "If he thinks the robot is a good thing, he'll retire," I explained. "You can have all his students." "I'll get all his students anyway," Beyers said. He meant that, too. "Maybe not," I said, "when people start wondering why you won't let him have a lesson." Beyers looked at him slyly. "It really might not be a bad idea," he said, half to himself. "If the robot can give Perkins lessons, people will know it can give anyone lessons." He jerked erect "Give him a lesson, Wilbur. I want to watch this myself." Wilbur led the way into the next room, the sanctuary of the robot, and the rest of us trailed along. The professor got out his violin and approached his rival calmly. The robot stood in the center of the room, a stately edifice of glistening metal and plastic. The multitude of metallic tentacles hung limply at its sides. On the back was an imposing control panel; on the front was a darkened screen and a row of inset signal lights. ers. He had already lost interest in the proceedings. He'd seated himself in the corner and was staring across the room at a fullsized photo of Sharon. I thought to myself, in a few more years that girl will be a beauty, and woe to the young men who try to court her! Wilbur bustled about nervously, measuring the professor and fussing with the dials on the back of the robot. He adjusted the screen to the professor's eye level and edged him forward until his shoes slipped into recesses in a protrusion of the robot's base. Then he ducked behind the robot, giggling. "Beginner?" he asked. "Anything you like," the professor said. "We'll call you advanced," Wilbur announced. He threw a switch and the robot hummed quietly. screen. The professor scornfully plucked his strings, one at a time, and a green light flashed as each tone sounded. Wilbur stood staring at the robot. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "Most of the kids take ten minutes to get green on that." "I believe you," the professor said. Music flashed on the screen, but he made no motion to raise his violin to playing position. The tentacles suddenly encircled him. As I watched in amazement, the robot gently positioned the violin for him, eased his elbows over to the proper angle and raised his bow. The violin tone filled the room, a brittle, mechanical tone. I knew it was not the professor playing. He called out above the music, "I am completely relaxed. I do nothing at all and still the robot makes me play. You see, Johnnie?" "Incredible!" I breathed. Off to my left, I heard Sam Beyers chuckling quietly. "Now I play myself," the professor said. The tone was instantly warm and expressive. "Now the robot relaxes. But supposing I try to make a mistake. Here, you see? No mistake. And this fortissimo passage -- supposing I try to play pianissimo. But it stays fortissimo. If I relax, the robot puts the necessary pressure on the bow." "Incredible!" I said again. The music flowed on to the end of the exercise. Sometimes it was the professor I heard, and sometimes the robot, and the professor kept up a running comment on what was happening. Then the tentacles dropped away, the screen appeared. The professor stepped back. Wilbur Beyers giggled proudly. Sam walked over and started to place his hand on the professor's shoulder. Then he changed his mind. The color of his face was back to normal, but his smile wasn't much more than a vindictive glint "Do you think my robot can teach you a few things, Perkins?" he said. "It is quite possible," the professor declared. "It has already given me an idea or two. But the tone is bothering me. Would you mind if I changed strings?" "Of course not. Go right ahead." A S the professor took new strings from his violin case, voices drifted in from the waiting room. Mrs. Karl Anderson stuck her blonde head through the door. "Is it time for Carol's lesson? Oh!" She stared at the professor. "Bring Carol in, Mrs. Anderson," he said. "She has her lesson as soon as I finish mine." He turned to Wilbur. "Right?" "Right," Wilbur giggled. He winked at Carol, and that young lady blushed and scurried over to seat herself very primly beside her mother. "It won't take much longer," said the professor. "I'll try maybe one more exercise. Does it have something difficult?" "Sure," Wilbur said. "I'll give you something good and hard. It's pretty good stuff. I was playing it myself yesterday." The professor moved back to the robot, took his position and plucked his strings. The green lights flashed and the music appeared. "Ah!" the professor said. "Paganini. So you play Paganini, Wilbur. That is wonderful." "Never had a lesson in my life, except from the robot." "You don't say!" Beyers broke in, "Sharon plays Paganini, too." The professor smiled and the tentacles went into action. I leaned forward, waiting to see who would do the playing -- the professor or the robot. But it was neither. From the first few notes, even Sam Beyers realized that. He bounded to his feet and raced across the room. The sounds the violin produced were vaguely music, but a clumsy, distorted music. Red lights crackled on and off. The robot's faint hum became louder. Wilbur buried his face in the control panel, mouth agape. "Something's wrong," Beyers said. "What'd you do, Wilbur?" "There's -- nothing wrong here," Wilbur gasped. The robot's hum became rumbling thunder, punctuated with shrieks. The violin labored on and the robot's shuddering vibration shook the room. A thin ribbon of smoke curled from its base and drifted upward. "Turn it off!" Beyers shouted. Wilbur reached for the switch -- too late. The robot's lights went off. The screen went blank. The tentacles released the professor and drooped downward, shaken by an occasional spasm. "What happened?" the professor asked innocently. I glanced at him, and saw him workings hard to suppress a grin. Beyers ignored the question. "Wilbur," he snapped, "get Ed up here to take a look at this thing." Wilbur scampered away. Smoke continued to pour from the base of the robot. Beyers hurried over and flung open a window. "Doesn't Carol get her lesson?" Mrs. Anderson asked. "I don't know," Beyers said. "We'll have to wait until Ed -- here he is. Ed, what's got into this thing?" Ed shrugged his massive shoulders and dropped a box of tools on the floor. Beyers bent over him as he went to work on the robot's backplate. "Ed's really handy with these things," Beyers said. "He can fix just about anything." # D twisted off the plate, flashed a light into the robot and whistled. "Can't fix that," he said. "What happened? This thing's really burned out" "What's that?" Beyers demanded incredulously. "You can't fix it?" "Have to send it back to the factory. Needs a whole new unit in there." "Doesn't Carol get her lesson?" Mrs. Anderson repeated. Beyers gestured helplessly. "I guess not. As soon as I get it fixed, I'll let you know." "Well, I like that!" said Mrs. Anderson indignantly. "How is Carol going to learn to play if she can't depend on her teacher? Professor, can you give her a lesson today?" "You call Hilda," the professor said. "She makes the appointments." "Now just a minute," said Beyers. "It won't take long... Mrs. Anderson stared him down. "The professor charges for his lessons, but at least he's dependable." "That's right, Mrs. Anderson," the professor said. "I take cold shots and allergy shots and vitamin pills, and now and then maybe I have a sprained ankle or a cut finger. But never yet have I missed a lesson because of a blown fuse." Mrs. Anderson left, with Carol firmly in tow. The professor patted Wilbur on the back consolingly. "Such a pity, Wilbur. Maybe you wore the robot out playing too much Paganini. You let me know when you get it fixed and I'll finish my lesson." Sam Beyers reared back and pointed a trembling finger. "You're responsible for this, Perkins. I don't know what you did, but I'm going to find out, and then I'll sue you for everything you've got. I know it isn't much, but I'll sue you for it!" "Mr. Beyers," the professor said gently, "I'll give you some friendly advice. Send the robot back and forget about it. It's a wonderful thing, but it can never be a music teacher. I've been playing for nearly sixty years, and teaching for fifty, and I know. Robot or human being, there can be no violin teacher without a sense of humor. Shall we go, Johnnie?" We went down the stairway and walked along Main Street. The professor was smiling faintly and humming a little tune to himself. If I hadn't been so curious, I could have done some singing myself. "All right," I said when I couldn't stand it any longer. "Just how did you manage that?" "Tricks, Johnnie. In fifty years of teaching children music, I've learned tricks no robot will ever know. I even remember a few tricks from the time when I was a little boy." "That I can believe," I said. "What was this particular trick?" tory when I was young," the professor told me. "Boys will play pranks, you know, and once they played a prank on me. I was to play a little solo in a recital, and just before I went on, they took my violin and switched all the strings around. The strings have always been in the same order on the violin, maybe from the time violins were first made. They go from lowest to highest -- G, D, A, E. The boys switched my strings around and put the highest where the lowest should have been, and the lowest in between somewhere, and when they got through, none of the strings was where it was supposed to be. "I knew what they'd done, of course, as soon as I got on stage and started to tune. But there I was, out in front of the audience, and the piece I was to play was not difficult. I tried to go through with it, and it was pretty bad. After about five measures, I had to stop, so I made a little speech telling the audience what had happened, and I changed my strings back right there on the stage. The audience thought it was a good joke. They had a good laugh, and when I got the violin fixed, I played rather well and got a lot of applause. And the boys took up a collection and bought me a little medal, for courage under duress. I still have it." "Then when you put on the new strings..." "I changed them around. Instead of G, D, A, E, I made them E, A, D, G. A human being is the most adaptable thing there is, but not even an expert human musician could adapt to that -- not after always having the strings in correct order. The robot didn't have a chance. Its instruments told it the strings were in tune, but wherever it directed my fingers, the wrong notes came out. All it could do was break down. Maybe I cost Beyers a lot of money, but I'm not really sorry. The robot is npt good for the students. With it doing everything for them, they could never learn." "Oh, it won't cost Beyers anything," I said. "He's too clever for that. He'll have a guarantee on the thing, and probably he only bought it on approval. But he'll get the robot fixed, and try again, and he certainly won't give you another chance to mess it up." "It doesn't matter," the professor said. "All I really did was speed things up a little. It would have happened anyway, sooner or later. The boys will have their little tricks, and it would have been the filed strings, or someone with vaseline on the bow, the way you did once -- no, I haven't forgotten -- or a violin with the sound post removed, or the strings in all different kinds of wrong order, and the robot would have gone back to the factory. If the boys run out of tricks, I can always make a little whisper to one of Beyers' students. 'What would happen if you did this?' The robot won't have to go back to the factory many times before the parents get disgusted with it. A violin teacher... "I know," I said. "A violin teacher has to have a sense of humor." He stopped and grabbed my arm. "Johnnie, we rushed things too much. We should have waited." "How's that?" I said. "What's the matter?" He looked at me slyly, his eyes sparkling, his face wrinkled into amischievous smile -- the smile of a small boy who's been bad and knows he won't be spanked. I told myself I'd wasted a lot of worrying. The professor was a match for any robot and he knew it. He hoped Beyers would get the thing fixed so he could have another crack at it. I could imagine him getting together with some of his boys and saying, "This time we'll try..." No wonder the kids loved him! He turned away and shook his head sadly. "We should have waited. I'd give anything to know what the robot would have done about Pinky Jones' trained cricket."      The Ethical Way There is a way around every tabu, knock on wood -- but just watch out that the wood doesn't knock back! it time?" Jarth Rolan I asked anxiously. Pilot Lan  Barda pushed him gently back into a seat. "No, but very soon. And be calm -- you're jumpier than a human." "But we've waited so long -- yes, a long time. And I am anxious to get home." Lan peered calmly out of his vehicle. They were hovering in Earth's upper atmosphere, at the permitted limit. "Be patient. These people have almost reached the critical point. We'll get the signal before long." Jarth Rolan popped out of his chair and danced about in nervous excitement. "Won't it be dangerous? For us, I mean. Going down into that radioactive atmosphere. And how about them -- will any of them live? Suppose we wait too long?" Lan Barda laughed. He was a husky humanoid, pinkish of skin and completely hairless, like all galactics. He slapped Jarth Rolan's back. "We have experts watching. These humans have used four cobalt bombs, and plenty of smaller stuff. The fallout is close to the danger point. Our observers will know just when we can move in because -- " he winked and his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper -- I "they're using automatically controlled instruments." "Oh, my!" Jarth Rolan clapped his hands to his cheeks. "But those are robots -- and the use of robots is against religion." "I know, Jarth. But we won't be using them much' longer, will we?" He poked a playful finger into Jarth's ribs. "Well have slaves -- and it'll be completely ethical." Jarth Rolan winced. "Must you use that word 'slaves,' Lan? It sounds so -- " He waved his hands. Lan laughed again. "Be honest with yourself, Jarth. You're out to make a few dopolins for yourself as a slave raider." "An entrepreneur," said Jarth. "In personal services." Lan Barda became serious. "There's the signal -- it's time to go down. Let's go, Jarth, before somebody else gets them all." A N hour later, it was Lan Barda's turn to be nervous. He watched a needle creep into the red zone. "Hurry, Jarth. We've been on this planet long enough. That fifth cobalt bomb is sending the index up fast. Can't you skip these last few?" "Oh, no. Very unethical to leave these three here to die. Must take a small chance, you know. Besides, see the sign on that taxi -- just married. A fine young couple. And a fine young taxi driver. Couldn't sleep if I didn't help these three." "Couldn't sleep thinking of the profit you'd passed up. Here, let me take that one. We have to get out of here fast." Jarth Rolan fluttered anxiously about the pilot until they were safely above the poisoned atmosphere. "How many?" he asked. "Did we fill the ship?" Lan Barda checked off items on his clipboard. "A thousand and three, with these last ones. You'll make a good profit." "Not so much the profit. Oh, no. More than that involved. Ethics and religion, Lan. Yes. With all these sla -- servants, our people will never have to use robots. They'll be relieved of routine labor and can devote their lives to art and science. And it's all ethical -- oh, yes, for these people were doomed." "Want to know something, Jarth?" Lan Barda bent closer and whispered wickedly. "This ship has automatic controls. Has to. No living being has fast enough reactions to handle an interstellar ship. All robot driven, at least in part." "RobotsI May we be forgiven!" Jarth stared suspiciously at Lan Barda. "Sometimes, Lan, I think you are an agnostic." The pilot became more serious. "Maybe, Jarth. In our work, we must use robots. We joke about it, but it goes against all galactic belief to let a machine think for us. Maybe that's why we pilots are so cynical." "A galactic is always ethical," said Jarth Rolan solemnly. "This affair, for example. We let these poor creatures of Earth handle their own affairs with no interference until they doomed themselves. It was unethical to intervene a minute sooner. Yes -- the ethical way and I feel better for it and proud to be a galactic." "That's true," said Lan Barda. "A galactic wouldn't feel right, being a member of the dominant race of the Galaxy, if he didn't help the less fortunate." center on his estate for the slaves. The demand was greater than the supply. He chatted happily with his wife. "An excellent investment, Shalla -- yes. And the highest group council wants us to lease them out by the day for the present instead of selling outright." She nodded. "That's the fair way. Everybody can have a turn having a slave." "And," said Jarth, rubbing his pink hands, "we'll collect every day and still hold title." "Will they multiply fast," asked Shalla, "so there will be enough for all?" "They always did on Earth. Yes. By the time we pass our estate on to our son, this investment will have multiplied in value." At the center, the slaves clustered about the bulletin boards to read the slave code. The three who had been brought aboard last stood together. Laurent Crotier and his wife Jean were still in their wedding clothes, and Sam the taxi driver was in uniform. They read the seven articles of the slave code. "We have to work twelve hours a day," Laurent observed. "And have off every seventh day. This could be worse." "We'll keep our eyes open and wait for our chance," Sam piped up. "Some day we'll make a break out of here." "Yeah," said Jean. "And remember, Frenchy, no kids." Nine months later, Laurent, Jr., was bom. Before the blessed event, Laurent went to Jarth Rolan with a complaint. "She can't do it, work twelve hours a day now. You have to change the rules. By gar, if my wife die 'count of this, I goin' kill you, Jarth Rolan." Jarth Rolan waltzed about nervously, biting his fingernails. "No, we do not want her to have trouble. No. She will need proper rest. There is a meeting of the highest group council right now, concerning this. Others have the same problem. But yes, I will relieve her of work without waiting for the council's decision. Tell your wife to stay home, Laurent, until the baby is born." Laurent pushed his luck. "And after that, too. A kid got to have a mother. I do the work for three, you let my wife take care of the family." "Oh, this is a problem!" Jarth Rolan rubbed his fingers unhappily over his bald scalp. "Some of the other females are in the same condition. But it is like planting a crop -- one labors hard at the beginning to reap a great harvest later. We will work this out." The next day, fifteen articles amending the code arrived and were posted. Laurent read happily. "Now," he said to Jean, "it is the law. You will stay home and have the baby." "'And for such further period'," she read, "'as is considered necessary.' You sure told him off, Frenchy." She squeezed his arm affectionately and his chest went out a little. "And remember," she said, "this is the last one." "Look at this rule," said Sam. "All kids must be educated. Fm only -- " he winked at them -- "thirteen. It's off the job and back to school for me." Laurent blinked. "By gar, Sam, I think you been shaving pretty near as long as I am. But if Jarth Rolan ask me, I say I know Sam is thirteen." Jarth Rolan came along to explain the amendments. "We don't want the slaves to be ignorant. Oh, no. It will be worth extra effort and expense to reap the harvest. The slaves will work at many specialized tasks. Even personal servants will read and write letters and help at business and keep accounts -- yes, indeed. We must assign some slaves to teaching." started school, Laurent led a delegation to Jarth Rolan. "We got some complaint to make. These food servings pretty small lately. We work hard, we have to eat more." Jarth Rolan's facial skin had developed wrinkles, though the galactics' life span was comparable to a human's and he was only about forty. He fidgeted. "I am sorry -- oh, yes. Sorry. There have been delays in food shipments -- the same trouble all over. Too many excused from the work force, you know. Most of the women are pregnant or have children, and teachers and special assignments -- but things will improve, believe me. Yes. You will soon find an improvement. Yesvery soon." The delegation talked it over outside Jarth Rolan's house. "He's been letting himself go," said a woman. "Did you notice how thin he's become? And the same with his family." Laurent reflected. "To raise a lot of kids is hard. My father, he work like hell all the time. Raise his own food, don't depend on nobody. I think that land back of the center, we should plough it up and put in some potatoes." "On our own time?" Sam exclaimed. Laurent chuckled. "Well, Sam, you got no kids -- you just a young boy eighteen years old. By gar, I think you have gray hair when you twenty-one." The others joined the laughter. Sam's lie about his age had boomeranged -- he had been kept in school and denied permission to marry until he was officially eighteen, a few months ago. Laurent fingered his chin thoughtfully. "I think we look over that land. Maybe we get some time out from our regular work, we do some farming." Before the blowup on Earth, the galactics had made occasional landings to gather animals and seeds of food plants. Certain centers were put under government control to grow food for the slaves. The people at Jarth Rolan's center saw that this arrangement was breaking down because of the increasing slave population and the diversion of labor to child raising. They looked over the piece of land and Laurent okayed it. They went back to Jarth Rolan. He approved at once. "Oh, indeed. I can obtain all the equipment you'll need. Get started right away. We can grow a good part of our own food. Yes. I am sure it will work out." "We goin' need some time for work the farm," Laurent pointed out. "Oh? I thought maybe in your spare time -- " "You want to kill us?" Sam demanded. "Put us on an extra job after working us hard twelve hours a day?" "But -- there's so little coming in. Still, maybe you're right. Worth the extra trouble and expense now. Building for the future -- that's the idea." leader of the arrangement and it percolated swiftly up through the hierarchy to the council of the highest group heads, who directed policy for the entire Galaxy. There were nine of them and they talked over this development. "I approve. We should have done it this way from the beginning." "Of course. But certain advocates of government control insisted on public ownership of the food farms -- " "What do you mean, certain advocates? If you mean me, be galactic enough to say so." "I intend no personal offense to anybody. But there is bound to be inefficiency in any government project -- " The chairman pounded the table. "Stay with the subject. It has been suggested that each center grow part of its food. I am in favor." "But it cuts down the available labor force. We're having complaints now about the shortage of slaves -- " "Think of the future. I admit the present situation is difficult. It's like raising a herd of prize cattle -- all expense and no profit at first. Then the herd is built up and suddenly you're rich." "But we're putting so much into it -- " "The more we put in, the more we take out. And they're multiplying rapidly. Remember our new goal of two slaves for each galactic -- one for the day shift and one for the night. It's the only way our people can live a decent life, freed from routine labor, devoting themselves to art and science." "That's right. We work so our children can lead the better life. It's worth some sacrifice." The chairman stood up. "Most hardship now for the benefit of our children. I suggest we endorse this new procedure." next door. Laurent celebrated the wedding with a barrel of beer he had brewed on the farm. Sam became glassy-eyed and lectured the young couple. "Just wait for the right time. Rise up and capture their spaceships. That's what we'll do. We'll go back to Earth and then let them try to get us off it again." "But Earth is dead," Laurent, Jr., objected. "We can't live there. Poisonous radiation." "By gar!" Laurent drained another brew. "You believe everything they tell you, hah? We goin' show them sometime. Like Sam says, not now, but sometime. Maybe me and Sam don't do it, but don't you kids forget -- you not goin' be slaves always. You watch for the right time, like Sam says." His son looked dubious. "But what you told me about Earth doesn't sound so good. Like the way you were so cold and hungry in that shack in Canada. And Mama walking up five flights in New York after working all day in the garment factory. And all those wars! Why did you people spend half your time shooting each other, Dad?" Laurent belched indignantly. "By gar, boy! We was free! We don't have no galactic stand over us, do this, do that. We was free!" "We don't work so hard," said his son. "And look at old Jarth Rolan and the others out there -- they've given us the day off, but the galactics are all busy in the fields. Everybody has to work, Dad." Laurent looked through a slight haze at the masters laboring in the potato fields. Farm work and teaching and other special assignments had created a shortage of personal slaves. Jarth Rolan gave preference in leasing slaves to those who came and helped him at the center. Since having a personal slave was a mark of prestige among the galactics, many of those laboring on the farm were from the highest levels of society. "They don't know nothing about raise potatoes," Laurent grumbled. "We put in complaint, by damn. We want each one have his own land. I work like jackass, I want to get paid for it." r T , HE highest group council was in session. One member was explaining: "It's the custom of tipping slaves. At first, those who could get a slave were so happy that they often gave him a few coins. Now the custom is firmly established -- anybody who doesn't tip a slave is considered cheap. I do it and so do you." "Of course. What's wrong with giving them a few polins now and then? Or a dopolin or two when they have a baby or a wedding?" "Nothing wrong with it, in itself. But they don't spend anything. We supply their food and clothing; nothing else we have seems to appeal to them. The money goes out of circulation. It's estimated that half the money in the Galaxy is being hoarded by slaves." "What? That's impossible. Just from those small tips?" "Small tips, but day after day; year after year. Add up some time what you've given and multiply by the number who've been doing it." "Then that's behind our economic troubles. A currency shortage. Can we take it away from them?" "Of course not. Besides being unethical, it would turn them against us. They wouldn't understand." "Then we'll abolish tipping." "Too late. What we need is an ethical way of getting back that currency." A new member spoke: "I understand that on Earth these slaves were often addicted to alcohol, gambling and various alkaloids. Perhaps we could introduce these items, under government control, of course -- " He stopped. Eight pair of eyes were blazing at him. "You're new here," the chairman said. "If you ever make another suggestion like that -- " They pondered. The chairman fingered some papers. "Here's a suggestion. The slaves have been petitioning for the right to own land. It seems to be the only thing they'll spend their money for." "Impossible!" "But maybe -- " "We could limit the holdings." "And have the land subject to condemnation by the government at a fair price." The chairman called for order. "Let's argue this out. Remember the slaves will need time to work their land. Since their work day is down to nine hours, we'll have to arrange something." about the lumps in the mattress. When Laurent took them out, there was enough in galactic currency to buy a piece of land in his name and hers, plus a plot for each of the children, and a new mattress as well. Sam was suspicious. "They're out to get what little we've been able to save, Laurent They can take the land anytime -- for what they call a fair price. Fair! Fine chance they'll be fair about it" But Laurent kept the land and was even able to buy a piece for each grandchild, although they arrived faster and faster as his own large family grew up and married. One day Jean called him to a new house at the edge of the widely expanded center to see the latest arrival. Laurent poked a finger at the squalling creature. "So I'm another grandpa. Which one this?" "This time you're a great-grandpa, Frenchy. This is Laurent #th." "You mean we gettin' that old? By damn! Well, I'm buy him a piece of land, too. So much new building, this land be worth plenty when he grows up " The #th amendment permitted slaves to retire at #. Laurent was a leading real estate dealer by that time. He had twenty-three children and more grandchildren than he could count. The center was grown to a city, its main street running through what had been his first farm. Sometimes Laurent relaxed in his rocking chair and needled Sam. "By gar, Sam, if you not the oldest-looking man of fifty-five I ever see. I think you a hundred years old when you retire. When you havin' that revolution?" "The day will come if we keep after the young ones. But damn it, Laurent, it's hard to talk any sense into them. Some of them can't even understand me." "Well, they all talk galactic, Sam. My grandson, he call himself Loran Kotay. But these young people, they have to live their own lives. Hey, look at old Jarth Rolan up there, washing his windows. Old guy should retire, Sam. I'm goin' see a couple of my boys give him a hand." " he could afford to retire and was replaced by his only grandson, Jarro Kogar. Laurent and Jean passed on shortly after, leaving nearly four hundred descendants. Jarro Kogar was a newly married galactic in his early thirties. He moved into the mansion and talked things over with his wife. "Don't see how we can afford a child right now. Wouldn't be fair to the child. Things will improve in a few years." "Of course," she said. "We're young -- we'll have time to start our family. If we wait, we'll be able to give them more." They held similar conversations later and one day realized it was too late. Jarro Kogar died in his sixties. His widow directed the center for several more years. The slaves liked her and took good care of her. She left them the estate when she died. Loran Krotalu protested to the authorities that the slaves didn't want the estate. But the group heads ruled it legal under amendment #, especially since no relatives could be located. Loran left the center and moved to another city where he found a galactic couple who wanted a slave. He and his family served the galactic couple for many years. This couple, like Jarro Kogar and his wife, were childless and when they both died, Loran and his wife were very grieved. After the funeral, Loran went into the city. He returned hours later, tired and depressed. "It's no use," he told his wife. "There's not an unattached galactic in the area. We might get a few hours work a week with one, but we can't have one to ourselves." "But, Loran, everybody in our set works for a galactic!" "I know," he said miserably. "But it's no use. There must be fifty slaves for every galactic. I've taken a job at the spaceship factory. It's the best I can do." ITi group council had become a revision of the slave code, which had # articles. After trying for years to simplify the code, the council members called in Loran Krovalo to fill a vacancy and take over the job. Loran was known and liked by galactic and slave alike for his relationship. While he was on the council, the Cerberan affair broke out. The Cerberans, an intelligent saurian race from a globular cluster, exploded into the Galaxy in vast numbers. Military action became necessary. "We can handle them," Loran told the council. "Our factories are mobilized and we have any number of spacemen. We have robot instruments for fighting that are better than anything they have. We can carry the war to their home planets." Some of the galactics objected. "But the use of robots is forbidden. We can't fight the Cerberans with robot controlled weapons." "Don't worry, sir," Loran said kindly. "We slaves will take care of it. Our form of religion doesn't prohibit robots unless they are in the shape of a man. We think of real robots as being human in shape." One of the galactics rose. "I know you're right, but my conscience won't let me vote for robots in any form. Therefore I am resigning from the council." A second rose, then a third and fourth. They looked at each other, and one spoke for the group. "We are also resigning. I suggest that four slaves be appointed in our places for the duration of the war. Then they will have a majority and no galactic need violate his conscience by voting for the use of robots." The Cerberans were crushed, but the infested area was huge and the invasion of the globular cluster took time. The war emergency lasted fifty years. When it was over, the slaves called on the galactics to take back control of the government But the widespread use of robot mechanisms in the war had caused a reaction among the galactics. Their consciences simmered and a wave of orthodoxy swept over their race. There was difficulty in persuading galactics to leave their home planets to sit on the council, because faster-thanlight ships used robot controls. The slaves scoured the planet that housed the council and kept two or three seats filled with galactics for a while. But they were generally old, and they died, and most of them were unmarried or childless. tion slave, sat in his home chatting with a friend from faroff Pomalu VI. Being in the spaceshipping business, he had many friends throughout the Galaxy. His wife answered the door and a pink humanoid shuffled in, mumbling greetings, and went into the other room. He was middleaged, studious and bespectacled, and he wore a wig. Loran's friend watched him curiously. "Haven't seen one of them in years, Loran. We have a reservation for the poor devils on my planet. Don't reproduce very fast, you know, and they may become extinct. Too bad -- they're so likable. Always so ethical and conscientious." "I know." Loran nodded. "We let poor Vendro make a few dopolins tutoring our son. He's very intelligent and a good teacher. I like to help them all I can -- the only ethical thing to do. I wouldn't feel like a slave if I didn't give poor Vendro a break." "Thafs true," said his friend. "A slave wouldn't feel right, being a member of the dominant race of the Galaxy, if he didn't help the less fortunate."      Safe outside the cosmos, touching neither space nor time, the Place is intended as a refuge for Soldiers after their raids on history -- and pre-history and post-history, for the Change War ranges from the beginning of Creation to the end -- or, despite the Conservation of Reality, may make it something that never even happened! But that is merely the ultimate fear of the grimly gay occupants of the Place. Change Death is more personal and likely -- and it strikes in next month's volcanic cona bomb in a bag! With anything as large both in size and scope as the Leiber serial, it's hard to forecast the escort stories, but there will be one and possibly two novelets, plus, of course, short stories and our regular features... and Willy Ley in combat with an exasperating law of human nature. of Superstition... according to Shaw, the dispelling of one myth creates a vacuum into which an equivalent amount of nonsense must rush. Ley has more than enough cold facts to collapse a whole Sunday supplement legend. Now here's the interesting test: Will the legend collapse... or will hurriedly improvised mythology pour in to support the silly but unspeakably tough bubble... or will a completely new legend rise out of the fragments of the old? # Star Shelf  # r T'HE theme of the decline and end of civilization has been done to the point of exhaustion in SF and several times in mainstream literature. However, in this novel of the final atomic war's tragic aftermath, the demise is handled with uncommon power. The story depicts the nine months of life left to Commander Dwight Towers, U.S.N., and those individuals, mainly Australian, whose lives are tied up with his command of the Scorpion, one of the last two operational vessels of the U.S. Navy. Submerged for several days during the course of a routine mission in his atomic-powered submarine, Towers emerges near Manila to find radioactivity far above the lethal level. Shortly after, radio silence enshrouds the entire northern hemisphere except for one transmitter near Seattle that sends out intermittent, garbled signals. The lightning war is over. Lacking official orders, Towers has placed his vessel under Australian authority at Melbourne. His liaison officer is a young Aussie with wife and infant daughter, at whose home he spent several days while the sub was outfitted for a survey into contaminated northern waters. His own Connecticut family has undoubtedly been wiped out along with the entire U.S., but his methodical, unimaginative mind refuses to encompass the thought. After the initial shock from science conclusion has faded that fallout from the world wind currents will end all life in the southern hemisphere, even though Australia was never bombed, life goes on much as it did before. The majority finds it easier to continue working rather than wait, even to conducting the hopeless reconnaissance. Despite the enormity of his theme, Shute's characters are ordinary people and their dilemma has all the more impact for it. Even hardened veterans of countless fictional Armageddons will find this an emotional wallop. It should be made mandatory reading for all professional diplomats and politicos. Maine. Ballantine Books, N. Y.,  #"--an unappreciative review of Maine's mainly nonsensical science-detection The Isotope Man, I was unprepared for this grim, mature yam of the first Moon flight. Maine has come of age without previous hint of maturing. Despite the almost fanatic attention to detail that the Western Federation Astronautics Commission has devoted to the project, for some reason the Alpha has been moonwrecked with three survivors among the four-man crew. And also despite the indoctrination of the crew on the prime hazard of the spaceman, vacuum, the ship has pancaked into a lethally radioactive crater. The engineer is killed in the crash and the doctor-navigator crippled by a compound fracture of the leg. Caird, the commander, and Patterson, electronics, are physically fit, but they must establish a base outside the crater for survival, even though it means living within spacesuits. Only short intervals for eating and other functions to be performed in the oxygenated but contaminated ship can be chanced. Also, the crippled doctor must be carried back and forth from base to ship. The cause of the crash is an unconscious girl stowaway, fiancee of the dead man; her added weight overbalanced the fuel safety factor. Patterson is for eliminating her without compunction, since the oxygen will only last a couple of weeks for all and six weeks must elapse before help arrives. All this makes for a melodramatic situation, but Maine plays it straight and pulls no jokers, or punches either, for that matter. Recommended. Arthur C. Clarke. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., # from the sea bottom long enough to give us this breezy account of how we stand at present with regard to the space satellite. Not only that -- he has gone into its pre-history and the technical developments in rocketry leading up to the satellite itself. Although one would think that there cannot possibly be anything new to add to all that has been written since the President's anhas yet penned the definitive book. Also, advances are being made so rapidly that a book is obsolescent before it is printed. Nevertheless, Clarke's comes closest to being the ideal popularization. One thing he has succeeded in doing with hardly any exertion is destroying the myth of the space station's invulnerability. The only requirement is Napoleon's famous "whiff of grapeshot," shrapnel, which would eventually perforate the station like Swiss cheese, whether the initial shot hit or missed. After all, meeting the shrapnel head-on every hour and a half is bound to make the station a sitting duck with expenditure of just one shot. Comforting thought, with Russia's satellites overhead. Oberth. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., # qualified to jump on the "space" bandwagon than Oberth -- to compound a metaphor, he wrote the original music. In #, he published his first book, By Rocket into Planetary Space, an extraordinary volume which is still technically valid. During and after the war years, the legendary Oberth was lost to view, but he has recently been brought to this country by a former protege, Werner von Braun. Unlike Clarke, Oberth's sole concern is Man in Space. Before reading this book, I was quite convinced that I was briefed on every aspect of the conquest of space in the immediately foreseeable future. However, Oberth's imagination is fully as fertile as it was in #. His visualization of the spacesuit as shaped by technological requirements is enough to make a gibberer of any Hollywood prop man, as would his space station built between two rockets rotating around a common center at opposite ends of an #-yard steel cable. As for his electric spaceships and his one-legged jumping Moon car -- shades of Tom Swift! Herr Oberth, however, is stonecold sober and he has added a mathematical appendix for skeptics who find his concepts on the wild side. Oberth's book is a good deal more exciting and provocative than some of today's SF novels. Freas. Advent : Publishers, Chicago, #  eral SF mags, eminently suited for framing and easily unstapled for the purpose. Figures out to less than a dime each. Direct from the publisher, # N. Sheffield. by Fritz Leiber. Gnome Press, N. Y., # T? OR those readers whose memories span two decades, these yarns are guaranteed nostalgia evokers. They are the improbably wonderful adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Leiber's barbarian northerner and urban dandy of another world and time. The first five tales are from Unknown and the final two of more recent vintage. Fans of Howard-de Camp-Nyberg's Conan will find Fafhrd-Gray Mouser at least his equal in derring-do. ( Continued from page # ) the end of the semester and they've finished their tour of duty by then. detected by the answers they give to three questions." Mr. Cogswell wants me to pass them on to other profs and instructors: Q. Should the franchise be extended to #-year-olds? A. Yes. If they are old enough to fight, they're old enough to vote. Q. Should women be drafted in case of war? A. No. A woman's place is in the home. Q. Should college football be abolished? A. No. Football builds character. Evidently the universities are getting special attention; here is a mimeographed publicity release someone received: "Recently a Midwestern college professor stepped before his senior class in modern languages, took a deep breath and said: "'Crashes! Water larder warts sunned lack itch udder! Effervescent further deferent saturations an witch way harem, wade heifer haliver tarn sang witch worse witch.' "Not only did the class agree, but"... The rest gets incomprehensible. In the glimpses of garishly advanced science, there is no comfort whatever. The Congressional Record, reporting registration of lobbyists as required by law, lists "Oliver Francis White, # Third Street, Stambaugh, Mich. (Legislative interests) Against any legislation legalizing developed 'Thought and Nerve Impulse Transmitters,' which are also Telecremators and Teleportage devices. Lobby for an open committee investigation of the organization working the above mentioned devices. (Anticipated expenditures) Printing and Postage, # per quarter." Theodore Sturgeon asks: "Have you noticed how perforated paper -- address labels, stamps, paper towels, etc. -- tears elsewhere than on the perforations?" Eventually, he says, we'll have a paper "of infinite strength composed of nothing at all." Will we? Or is the idea to make us ruin paper? Bell Lab produced the Ultimate Machine -- a box with one button. Push button, motor hums, lid lifts, hand comes out, pushes button, goes back, lid closes, motor stops. Doesn't Bell know that gadget could be used to make every machine on Earth shut itself off -- at the right moment? H. W. wrote the Hagerstown Daily Mail : "Can a woman without a navel have children?" Dr. Van Dellen replied: "Yes. Now I have a question: How was she born?" Not how, Doc. Where. I Romans, and I have to tell you that I look awful in a toga and short sword, but not nearly as awful as the Greek. You go to one of the big schools and naturally you turn out for the Class Reunion. Why not? There's money there, and good fellowship, and money, and the chance of a business contact that will do you some good. And money. Well, I wasn't that fortunate -- and you can say that again because it's the story of my life: I wasn't that fortunate. I didn't go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale. I didn't even go to Columbia, U.C.L-A. or the University of Chicago. What I went to was Old Ugly. Don't lie to me -- you never heard of Old Ugly, not even if I tell you it's Oglethorpe A.  M. There were fifty-eight of us in my graduating class -- that's # -- and exactly thirty turned up for the tenth reunion. Wouldn't that turn your stomach? Only thirty Old Grads with enough loyalty and school feeling to show up for that tenth reunion and parade around in Roman togas and drink themselves silly and renew old school ties. And, out of If you want my opinion, old Maxwell should have kept his big mouth shut .  . and then El Greco could not have put Earth in a frame! that thirty, the ones that we all Hollywood, Dixon of the National really wanted to see for sentiCity Bank and so on -- they mental reasons -- I refer to Feindidn't show up at all. It was terbarger of Feinbarger Shipping, ribly disappointing to all of us, Schroop of the S.S.K. Studios in especially to me. In fact, at the feast that evening, I found myself sitting next to El Greco. There simply wasn't anyone else there. You understand that I don't refer to that Spanish painter -- I believe he's dead, as a matter of fact I mean Theobald Greco, the one we called the Greek. he looked at me blearily through thick glasses. "Hampstead? Hampstead?" " Virgil Hampstead," I reminded him. "You remember me. Old Virgie." He said, "Sure. Any more of that stuff left in the bottle, Old Virgie?" I poured for him. It was my impression, later borne out by evidence, that he was not accustomed to drinking. I said, "It's sure great to see all the fellows again, isn't it? Say, look at Pudge Detweiler there! Ever see anything so comical as the lampshade he's wearing for a hat?" "Just pass me the bottle, will you?" Greco requested. "Old Virgie, I mean." "Still in research and that sort of thing?" I asked. "You always were a brain, Greek. I can't tell you how much I've envied you creative fellows. I'm in sales myself. Got a little territory right here that's a mint, Greek. A mint. If I only knew where I could lay my hands on a little capital to expand it the way -- But I won't bore you with shop talk. Whafs your line these days?" "I'm in transmutation," he said clearly, and passed out face down on the table. Now nobody ever called me a dope -- other things, yes, but not a dope. I knew what transmutation meant Lead into gold, tin into platinum, all that line of goodies. And accordingly the next morning, after a certain amount of Bromo and black coffee, I asked around the campus and found out that Greco had a place of his own not far from the campus. That explained why he'd turned up for the reunion. I'd been wondering. I borrowed cab fare from Old Pudge Detweiler and headed for the address I'd been given.  It wasn't a home. It was a beatup factory and it had a sign over the door: Plant Foods  Organic Supplies seemed to be there, but I pushed open the door. It wasn't locked. I heard something from the basement, so I walked down a flight of steps and looked out into a rather smelly laboratory. There was the Greek. Tall, thin, wide-eyed and staggering, he appeared to be chasing butterflies. I cleared my throat, but he didn't hear me. He was racing around the laboratory, gasping and muttering to himself, sweeping at empty air with what looked to me like an electric toaster on a stick. I looked again and, no, it wasn't an electric toaster, but exactly what it was defied me. It appeared to have a recording scale on the side of it, with a needle that flickered wildly. I couldn't see what he was chasing. The fact was that, as far as I could see, he wasn't chasing anything at all. You have to get the picture: Here was Greco, racing Ground with one eye on the scale and one eye on thin air; he kept bumping into things, and every now and then he'd stop, and stare around at the gadgets on the lab benches, and maybe he'd throw a switch or turn a dial, and then he'd be off again. He kept it up for ten minutes and, to tell you the truth, I began to wish that I'd made some better use of Pudge Detweiler's cab fare. The Greek looked as though he'd flipped, nothing less. But there I was. So I waited. And by and by he seemed to get whatever it was he was looking for and he stopped, breathing heavily. I said, "Hi there, Greek." He looked up sharply. "Oh," he said, "Old Virgie." He slumped back against a table, trying to catch his breath. "The little devils," he panted. "They must have thought they'd got away that time. But I fixed them!" "Sure you did," I said. "You bet you did. Mind if I come in?" He shrugged. Ignoring me, he put down the toaster on a stick, flipped some switches and stood up. A whining sound dwindled and disappeared; some flickering lights went out. Others remained on, but he seemed to feel that, whatever it was he was doing, it didn't require his attention now. In his own good time, he came over and we shook hands. I said appreciatively, "Nice-looking laboratory you have here, Greek. I don't know what the stuff is for, but it looks expen -- it looks very efficient." He grunted. "It is. Both. Expensive and efficient." I laughed. "Say," I said, "you were pretty loaded last night Know what you told me you were doing here?" He looked up quickly. "What?" "You said you were in transmutation" I laughed harder than ever. and for a second I thoughtwell, I don't know what I thought, but I was worried. He had a lot of funny-looking things there, and his hand was stretching out toward one of them. But then he said, "Old Virgie." "That's me," I said eagerly. "I owe you an apology," he went on. "You do?" He nodded. "I'd forgotten," he confessed, ashamed. "I didn't remember until just this minute that you were the one I talked to in my senior year. My only confidant. And you've kept my secret all this time." I coughed. "It was nothing," I said largely. "Don't give it a thought." He nodded in appreciation. "That's just like you," he reminisced. "Ten years, eh? And you haven't breathed a word, have you?" "Not a word," I assured him. And it was no more than the truth. I hadn't said a word to anybody. I hadn't even said a word to myself. The fact of the matter was, I had completely forgotten what he was talking about. Kept his secret? I didn't even remember his secret. And it was driving me nuts! "I was sure of you," he said, suddenly thawing. "I knew I could trust you. I must have -- otherwise I certainly wouldn't have told you, would I?" I smiled modestly. But inside I was fiercely cudgeling my brain. He said suddenly, "All right, Virgie. You're entitled to something for having kept faith. I tell you what I'll do -- I'll let you in on what I'm doing here." All at once, the little muscles at the back of my neck began to tense up. He would do what? "Let me in" on something? It was an unpleasantly familiar phrase. I had used it myself all too often. "To begin with," said the Greek, focusing attentively on me, "you wonder, perhaps, what I was doing when you came in." "I do," I said. He hesitated. "Certain -- particles, which are of importance to my research, have a tendency to go free. I can keep them under a measure of control only by means of electrostatic forces, generated in this." He waved the thing that looked like a toaster on a stick. "And as for what they do -- well, watch." "E I L Greco began to putter with gleamy, glassy gadgets on one of the tables and I watched him with, I admit, a certain amount of suspicion. "What are you doing, Greek?" I asked pretty bluntly. He looked up. Surprisingly, I saw that the suspicion was mutual; he frowned and hesitated. Then he shook his head. "No," he said. "For a minute I -- but I can trust you, can't I? The man who kept my secret for ten long years." "Of course," I said. "All right." He poured water out of a beaker into a U-shaped tube, open at both ends. "Watch," he said. "Remember any of your college physics?" "The way things go, I haven't had much time to keep up with -- " "All the better, all the better," he said. "Then you won't be able to steal anything." I caught my breath. "Now listen -- " "No offense, Virgie," he said dollars and -- No matter. When it comes right down to cases, you could know as much as all those fool professors of ours put together and it still wouldn't help you steal a thing." He bobbed his head, smiled absently and went back to his gleamy gadgets. I tell you, I steamed. That settled it, as far as I was concerned. There was simply no excuse for such unjustified insults to my character. I certainly had no intention of attempting to take any unfair advantage, but if he was going to act that way... He was asking for it Actually and literally asking for it He rapped sharply on the Utube with a glass stirring rod, seeking my attention. "I'm watching," I told him, very amiable now that he'd made up my mind for me. "Good. Now," he said, "you know what I do here in the plant?" "Why -- you make fertilizer. It says so on the sign." "Ha! No," he said. "That is a blind. What I do is, I separate optical isomers." "That's very nice," I said warmly. "I'm glad to hear it, Greek." "Shut up," he retorted unexpectedly. "You don't have the foggiest notion of what an optical isomer is and you know it. But try and think. This isn't physics; it's organic chemistry. There are compounds that exist in two forms -- apparently identical in all respects, except that one is the mirror image of the other. Like right-hand and left-hand gloves; one is the other, turned backwards. You understand so far?" "Of course," I said. then shrugged. "No matter. They're called dand #-isomers -- d for dextro, I for Ievo; right and left, you see. And although they're identical except for being mirrorreversed, it so happens that sometimes one isomer is worth much more than the other." "I see that," I said. "I thought you would. Well, they can be separated -- but it's expensive. Not my way, though. My way is quick and simple. I use demons." "Oh, now, Greek. Really." He said in a weary tone, "Don't talk, Virgie. Just listen. It won't tire you so much. But bear in mind that this is simply the most trifling application of my discovery. I could use it for separating U-# from U-# just as easily. In fact, I already -- " He stopped in midsentence, cocked his head, looked at me and backtracked. "Never mind that. But you know what a Maxwell demon is?" "No." "Good for you, Virgie. Good for you!" he applauded. "I knew I'd get the truth out of you if I waited long enough." Another ambiguous remark, I thought to myself. "But you surely know the second law of thermodynamics." "Surely." "I thought you'd say that," he said gravely. "So then you know that if you put an ice cube in a glass of warm water, for instance, the ice melts, the water cools, and you get a glass with no ice but with all the water lowered in temperature. Right? And it's a oneway process. That is, you can't start with a glass of cool water and, hocus-pocus, get it to separate into warm water and ice cube, right?" "Naturally," I said, "for heaven's sake. I mean that's silly." "Very silly," he agreed. "You know it yourself, eh? So watch" He didn't say hocus-pocus. But he did adjust something on one of his gadgets. There was a faint whine and a gurgling, spluttering sound, like fat sparks climbing between spreading electrodes in a Frankenstein movie. The water began to steam faintly. But only at one end! That end was steam; the other was -- was -- It was ice. A thin skin formed rapidly, grew thicker; the other open end of the U-tube began to bubble violently. Ice at one end, steam at the other. Silly? But I was seeing it! I must say, however, that at the time I didn't really know that that was all I saw. r l ' HE reason for this is that Pudge Detweiler came groaning down the steps to the laboratory just then. "Ah, Greek," he wheezed. "Ah, Virgie. I wanted to talk to you before I left." He came into the room and, panting, eased himself into a chair, a tired hippopotamus with a hangover. "What did you want to talk to me about?" Greco demanded. "You?" Pudge's glance wandered around the room; it was a look of amused distaste, the look of a grown man observing the smudgy mud play of children. "Oh, not you, Greek. I wanted to talk to Virgie. That sales territory you mentioned, Virgie. I've been thinking. I don't know if you're aware of it, but when my father passed away last winter, he left me -- well, with certain responsibilities. And it occurred to me that you might be the -- " I didn't even let him finish. I had him out of there so fast, we didn't even have a chance to say good-by to Greco. And all that stuff about demons and hot-andcold water and so on, it all went out of my head as though it had never been. Old Pudge Detweiler! How was I to know that his father had left him thirty thousand dollars in one attractive lump of cash! II   verses. Due to the reverses, I was forced to miss the next few reunions. But I had a lot of time to think and study, in between times at the farm and the shop where we stamped out license plates for the state. When I got out, I began looking for El Greco. I spent six months at it, and I didn't have any luck at all. El Greco had moved his laboratory and left no forwarding address. But I wanted to find him. I wanted it so badly, I could taste it, because I had begun to have some idea of what he was talking about, and so I kept on looking. I never did find him, though. He found me. He came walking in on me in a shabby little hotel room, and I hardly recognized him, he looked so prosperous and healthy. "You're looking just great, Greek," I said enthusiastically, seeing it was true. The years hadn't added a pound or a wrinkle -- just the reverse, in fact. "You're not looking so bad yourself," he said, and gazed at me sharply. "Especially for a man not long out of prison." "Oh." I cleared my throat. "You know about that." "I heard that Pudge Detweiler prosecuted." "I see." I got up and began uncluttering a chair. "Well," I said, "it's certainly good to -- How did you find me?" "Detectives. Money buys a lot of help. I've got a lot of money." "Oh." I cleared my throat again. Greco looked at me, nodding thoughtfully to himself. There was one good thing; maybe he knew about my trouble with Pudge, but he also had gone out of his way to find me. So he wanted something out of me. He said suddenly, "Virgie, you were a damned fool." "I was," I admitted honestly. "Worse than you know. But I am no longer. Greek, old boy, all this stuff you told me about those demons got me interested. I had plenty of time for reading in prison. You won't find me as ignorant as I was the last time we talked." He laughed sourly. "That s a hot one. Four years of college leave you as ignorant as the day you went in, but a couple years of jail make you an educated man." "Also a reformed one." He said mildly, "Not too reformed, I hope." "Crime doesn't pay -- except when it's within the law. That's the chief thing I learned." "Even then it doesn't pay," he said moodily. "Except in money, of course. But what's the use of money?" to that. I said, probing delicately, "I figured you were loaded. If you can use your demons to separate U-# from U-#, you can use them for separating gold from sea water. You can use them for damn near anything." "Damn near," he concurred. "Virgie, you may be of some help to me. Obviously you've been reading up on Maxwell." "Obviously." It was the simple truth. I had got a lot of use out of the prison library -- even to the point of learning all there was to learn about Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest of physicists, and his little demons. I had rehearsed it thoroughly for El Greco. "Suppose," I said, "that you had a little compartment inside a pipe of flowing gas or liquid. That's what Maxwell said. Suppose the compartment had a little door that allowed molecules to enter or leave. You station a demon -- that's what Maxie called them himself -- at the door. The demon sees a hot molecule coming, he opens the door. He sees a cold one, he closes it. By and by, just like that, all the hot molecules are on one side of the door, all the cold ones -- the slow ones, that is -- on the other. Steam on one side, ice on the other, that's what it comes down to." "That was what you saw with your own eyes," Theobald Greco reminded me. "I admit it," I said. "And I admit I didn't understand. But I do now." I understood plenty. Separate isotopes -- separate elements, for that matter. Let your demon open the door to platinum, close it to lead. He could make you rich in no time. He had, in fact, done just that for Greco. stallment." He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was metallic -- about the size of a penny slot-machine bar of chocolate, if you remember back that far. It gleamed and it glittered. And it was ruddy yellow in color. "What's that?" I asked. "Gold," he said. "Keep it, Virgie. It came out of sea water, like you said. Call it the down payment on your salary." I hefted it. I bit it I said, "By the way, speaking of salary... "Whatever you like," he said Why not?" "Why not?" I echoed, a little dazed. And then I just sat there listening, while he talked. What else was there to do? I won't even say that I was listening, at least not with the very fullest of attention, belars a year kept coming between me and his words. But I got the picture. The possibilities were endless. And how well I knew it! Gold from the sea, sure. But energy -- free energy -- it was there for the taking. From the molecules of the air, for instance. Refrigerators could be cooled, boilers could get up steam, homes could be heated, forges could be fired -- and all without fuel. Planes could fly through the air without a drop of gasoline in their tanks. Anything. And it was only the beginning. I came to. "What?" He was looking at me. He repeated patiently, "The police are looking for me." I stared. " You ?" "Did you hear about Grand Rapids?" I thought. "Oh -- Wait. A fire. A big one. And that was you?" "Not me. My demons. Maxwell demons -- or Greco demons, they should be called. He talked about them; I use them. When they're not using me. This time, they burned down half the city." "I remember now," I said. The papers had been full of it. "They got loose," he said grimly. "But that's not the worst You'll Virgie." "What do you mean, they got loose?" He shrugged. "Controls aren't perfect. Sometimes the demons escape. I can't help it." "How do you control them in the first place?" He sighed. "It isn't really what you would call controls," he said. "It's just the best I can do to keep them from spreading." "But -- you said sometimes you separate metals, sometimes you get energy. How do the demons know which you want them to do, if you say you can't control them? "How do you make an apple tree understand whether you want it to grow Baldwins or Macintoshes?" but you don't, Greek! I mean it's either one or the other!" "Just so with demons! You're not so stupid after all, are you? It's like improving the breed of dogs. You take a common ancestral mutt, and generations later you can develop an Airedale, a dachshund or a Spitz. How? By selection. My demon entities grow, they split, the new entities adapt themselves to new conditions. There's a process of evolution. I help it along, that's all." He took the little slab of gold from me, brooding. Abruptly he hurled it at the wall. "Gold!" he cried wildly. "But who wants it? I need help, Virgie! If gold will buy it from you, I'll pay! But I'm desperate. You'd be desperate too, with nothing ahead but a sordid, demeaning death from young age and a -- " I interrupted him. "What's that?" It was a nearby raucous hooting, loud and mournful. Greco stopped in mid-sentence, listening like a hunted creature. "My room," he whispered. "All my equipment -- on the floor above -- " I stepped back, a little worried. He was a strange man, skinny and tall and wild-eyed. I was glad he was so thin; if he'd been built solidly in proportion to his height, just then he would have worried me, with those staring, frightened eyes and that crazy way of talking. But I didn't have time to worry, in any case. Footsteps were thundering in the halls. Distant voices shouted to each other. The hoot came again. "The fire whistle!" Greco bayed. "The hotel's on fire!" He leaped out of my room into the corridor. I followed. There was a smell of burning -- not autumn leaves or paper; it was a chemical-burning smell, a leather-burning smell, a henyard-on-fire smell. It reeked of an assortment of things, gunpowder and charred feathers, the choking soot of burning oil, the crisp tang of a wood fire. It was, I thought for a second, perhaps the typical smell of a hotel on fire, but in that I was wrong. "Demons!" yelled Greco, and a bellhop, hurrying by, paused to look at us queerly. Greco sped for the stairs and up them. I followed. It was Greco's room that was ablaze -- he made that clear, trying to get into it. But he couldn't. Black smoke billowed out of it, and orange flame. The night manager's water bucket was going to make no headway against that. I retreated. But Greco plunged ahead, his face white and scary. I stopped at the head of the stairs. The flames drove Greco off, but he tried again. They drove him off again, and this time for good. He stumbled toward me. "Out! It's hopeless!" He turned, stared blindly at the hotel employees with their chain of buckets. "You! What do you think you're doing? That's -- " He stopped, wetting his lips. "Thafs a gasoline fire," he lied, "and there's dynamite in my luggage. Clear the hotel, you hear me?" It was, as I say, a lie. But it got the hotel cleared out. And then -- It might as well have been gasoline and dynamite. There was a purplish flash and a muttering boom, and the whole roof of the four-story building lifted off. I caught his arm. "Let's get out of here," I said. He looked at me blindly. I'd swear he didn't know me. His eyes were tortured. "Too late!" he croaked. "Too late! They're free again!" Ill S O I went to work for Theobald Greco -- in his laboratory in Southern California, where we replaced some of the things that had been destroyed. And one morning I woke up and found my hair was white. I cried, "Greek!" Minnie came running in. I don't believe I told you about Minnie. She was Greco's idea of the perfect laboratory assistant -- stupid, old, worthless to the world and without visible kin. She came in and stared and set up a cackling that would wake the dead. "Mister Hampstead!" she chortled. "My, but ain't you a sight!" "Where's Greco?" I demanded, and pushed her out of my way. In pajamas and bathrobe, I stalked down the stairs and into the room that had once been a kitchen and now was Greco's laboratory. "Look!" I yelled. "What about this?" He turned to look at me. After a long moment, he shook his head. "I was afraid of that," he mumbled. "You were a towhead as a kid, weren't you? And now you're a towhead again." "But my hair, Greek! It's turned white." "Not white," he corrected despondently. "Yellow. It's reverted to youth -- overnight, the way it happens sometimes. I warned you, Virgie. I told you there were dangers. Now you know. Because -- " He hesitated, looked at me, then looked away. "Because," he said, "you're getting younger, just like me. If we don't get this thing straightened out, you're going to die of young age yourself." I stared at him. "You said that before, about yourself. I thought you'd just tongue-twisted. But you really mean -- " "Sit down," he ordered. "Virgie, I told you that you were looking younger. It wasn't just looks. It's the demons -- and not just you and me, but a lot of people. First Grand Rapids. Then when the hotel burned. Plenty have been exposed -- you more than most, I guess, ever since the day you walked into my lab and I was trying to recapture some that had got away. Well, I don't guess I recaptured them all." "You mean I -- " He nodded. "Some of the demons make people younger. And you've got a colony of them in you." "You mean I'm going to get younger and younger, until finally I become a baby? And then -- ' what then, Greek?" He shrugged. "How do I know? Ask me in another ten years. Look at me, Virgie!" he cried, suddenly loud. "How old do I look to you? Eighteen? Twenty?" It was the plain truth. He looked no more than that. Seeing him day by day, I wasn't conscious of change; remembering him from when we had gone to school, I thought of him as younger anyway. But he was forty, at the very least, and he didn't look old enough to vote. He said, "I've had demons inside of me for six years. It seems they're a bit choosy about where they'll live. They don't inhabit the whole body, just parts of it -- heart, lungs, liver. Maybe bones. Maybe some of the glands -- perhaps that's why I feel so chipper physically. But not my brain, or not yet. Fortunately." "Fortunately? But that's wrong, Greek! If your brain grew younger too -- " "Fool! If I had a young brain, I'd forget everything I learned, like unrolling a tape backwards! That's the danger, Virgie, the immediate danger that's pressing me -- that's why I needed help! Because if I ever forget, that's the end. Not just for me -- for everybody; because there's no one else in the world who knows how to control these things at all. Except me -- and you, if I can train you." "They're loose?" I felt my hair wonderingly. Still, it was not exactly a surprise. "How many?" He shrugged. "I have no idea. When they let the first batch of rabbits loose in Australia, did they have any idea how many there would be a couple of dozen generations later?" I whistled. Minnie popped her head in the door and giggled. I waved her away. "She could use some of your demons," I remarked. "Sometimes I think she has awfully young ideas, for a woman who's sixty if she's a day." Greco laughed crazily. "Minnie? She's been working for me for a year. And she was eighty-five when I hired her!" "I can't believe you!" "Then you'll have to start practicing right now," he said. It was tough, and no fooling; but I became convinced. It wasn't more. It was the thought of ending my days as a drooling, mewling infant -- or worse! To avert brain to a shred. ing -- learning about the "strange particles." Ever hear of them? That's not my term -- that's what the physicists call them. Positrons. The neutrino. Pions and muons, plus and minus; the lambda and the antilambda. K particles, positive and negative, and anti-protons and anti-neutrons and sigmas, positive, negative and neutral, and -- Well, that's enough; but physics had come a long way since the classes I cut at Old Ugly, and there was a lot to catch up on. The thing was, some of the "strange particles" were stranger than even most physicists knew. Some -- in combination -- were in fact Greco's demons. We bought animals -- mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, even dogs. We infected the young with some of our own demons -- that was simple enough, frighteningly simple; all we had to do was handle them a bit. And we watched what happened. They died -- of young age. Some vital organ or another regressed to embryonic condition, and they died -- as Greco and I would die, if we didn't find the answer. As the whole world might die. Was it better than reverting past the embryo to the simple lifeless zygote? I couldn't decide. It was dying, all the same. When an embryonic heart or liver is called on to do a job for a mature organism, there is only one way out. Death. And after death -- the demons went on; the dog we fed on tne remains of the guinea pigs followed them to extinction in a matter of weeks. Minnie was an interesting case. She was going about her work with more energy every day, and I'll be blasted if I didn't catch her casting a lingering Marilyn Monroe sort of look at me when Greco's back was turned. "Shall we fire her?" I asked El Greco when I told him about it. "What for?" "She's disrupting the work!" "The work isn't worth a damn anyhow," he said moodily. "We're not getting anywhere, Virgie. If it was only a matter of smooth, predictable rates -- But look at her. She's picking up speed! She's dropped five years in the past couple weeks." "She can stand to drop a lot more," I said, annoyed. where. Her nose? It's shortened to about a fifteen-year-old level now. Facial hair? That's mostly gone. Skin texture? Well, I suppose there's no such thing as a too-immature skin, I mean short of the embryonic capsule, but -- Wait a minute." He was staring at the doorway. Minnie was standing there, simpering. "Come here!" he ordered in a voice like thunder. "Come here, you! Virgie, look at her nose!" I looked. "Ugh," I said, but more or less under my breath. "No, no!" cried Greco. "Virgie, don't you see her nose?" Foolish; of course I did. It was long, beaked -- Then I saw. "It's growing longer," I whispered. "Right, my boy! Right! One curve at least has reversed itself. Do you see, Virgie?" I nodded. "She's -- she's beginning to age again." "Better than that!" he crowed. "It's faster than normal aging, Virgie! There are aging demons loose too!" A breath of hope! But hope died. Sure, he was right -- as far as it went. There were aging demons. We isolated them in some of our experimental animals. First we had to lure Minnie into standing still while Greco, swearing horribly, took a tissue sample; she didn't like that, but a hundred-dollar bonus converted her. Solid C# # froze the skin; snip, and a tiny flake of flesh came out of her nose at the point of Greco's scalpel; he put the sample of flesh through a few tricks and, at the end of the dav, we tried it on some of our mice. They died. Well, it was gratifying, in a way -- they died of old age. But die they did. It took three days to show an effect, but when it came, it was dramatic. These were young adult mice, in the full flush of their mousehood, but when these new demons got to work on them, they suddenly developed a frowsy, decrepit appearance that made them look like Bowery bums over whom Cinderella's good fairy had waved her wand in reverse. And two days later they were dead. "I think we've got something," said Greco thoughtfully; but I didn't think so, and I was right Dead was dead. We could kill the animals by making them too young. We could kill the animals by making them too old. But keep them alive, once the demons were in them, we could not. Greco evolved a plan: Mix the two breeds of demons! Take an animal with the young-age demons already in it, then add a batch that worked in the other direction! "COR a while, it seemed to work -- but only for a while. After a couple of weeks, one breed or the other would gain the upper hand. And the animals died. It was fast in mice, slow in humans. Minnie stayed alive. But the nose grew longer and facial hair reappeared; simultaneously her complexion cleared, her posture straightened. And then, for the first time, we oegan to read the papers. bawled the Chicago Tribune, and went on to tell how the suburbs infested with a curious new malady, the symptoms of which were -- youth. blared the San Francisco Examiner. The New York News found thousands of cases in Brooklyn. A whole hospital in Dallas was evacuated to make room for victims of the new plague. And more. We looked at each other. "They're out in force," said Theobald Greco soberly. "And we don't have the cure." IV T HE world was topsy-turvy, and in the middle of it Minnie disappeared, talking hysterically about reporting us to the authorities. I don't mind admitting that I was worried. And the experiments were not progressing. The trouble seemed to be that the two varieties of demons -- the aging and the youthing -- were not compatible; if one took up residence in a given section of an organism, the other moved out. The more numerous destroyed the weaker; there was no balance. We tested it again and again in the mice and there was no doubt of it. So far, only the youthing demons were free. But when Minnie left us, it was only a matter of time. Our carriers -- from Grand Rapids and from the hotel -- had spread to California and the East Coast, to the North and to the South, throughout the country, perhaps by now through the world. It would be slower with the aging demons -- there was only one of Minnie -- but it would be equally sure. Greco began drinking heavily. "It's the end," he brooded. "We're licked." "No, Greek! We can't give up!" "We have to give up. The demons are loose in the Earth, Virgie! Those people in the headlines -- they'll die of young age. So will others -- even plants and animals, and bacteria, as the demons adapt to them. And then -- why not? The air. The rocks, the ocean, even the Earth itself. Remember, the entropy of the Universe is supposed to tend to a maximum not only as a whole, but in each of its parts taken in isolation. The Earth's evolution -- reversed. Spottily, and maybe that's worse, because some parts will evolve forward and others reverse, as is happening in my own body. Heaven help the world, Old Virgie! And not just the Earth, because what can stop them from spreading? To the Moon, the other planets -- out of the Solar System, for that matter; to the other galaxies, even. Why not? And then -- " An enormous tinny voice, more than human, filled the air. It came from outside. I jumped a foot It sounded like the voice of a demon; then I got a grip on myself and understood. It was a loudspeaker, and it came from outside. I had a stabbing sensation of familiarity. "The police!" I cried. "Greco, it's the police!" He looked at me wearily and shook his head. "No. More likely the F.BJ." I didn't wait for permission from the Greek. I stopped at the door, and three searchlight beams hit me right in the eye. There were cars all around the laboratory, but I couldn't see them, not after those lights went on. I froze, stiff; wanting to make sure they understood (a) that I wasn't Greco and (b) that I didn't have a gun. They understood, all right But they let me out. They put me in one of the cars, with a slim gray-eyed young man in a snap-brimmed hat sitting politely and alertly beside me, and they let me watch; and what happened after that wasn't funny at all. Greco didn't come out They shouted at him over the loudspeaker and eventually he answered -- his voice little and calm, coming out of nowhere, and all he said was, "Go away. I won't come out. I warn you, don't try to force your way in." But he knew they wouldn't lis-. ten, of course. They didn't. They tried force. And he met it in novel ways with force of his own. The door had locked itself behind me; they got a fence post for a battering ram, and the post burst into flame. They found an L-beam from an old bed frame and tried that, and they were sorry they had done it; the thing melted in the middle, splattering them with hot drops of steel. The polite, alert young man beside me said, not so polite any more, "What's he doing, you? What sort of fancy tricks has he got in there?" "Demons," I said crazily, and that was a mistake, but what else was I to do? Try to explain Maxwell's equations to a Fed? They were trying again -- there were fifteen or twenty of them, at least. They went for the windows, and the windows dissolved and rained cherry-red wet glass on them. They tried again through the open frames when the glass was gone, and the frames burst into fire around them, the blue smoke bleached white in the yellow of the flame and the white of the searchlights. They tried singly, by stealth; and they tried in clusters of a dozen, yelling. IT was hopeless -- hopeless for everybody, because they couldn't get in and the Greek could never, never get out; for go away they wouldn't. Not even when, with poof and a yellow flare, the gas tank of one of the cars exploded. All that happened was that the man in the snap-brimmed hat and I leaped out, real quick; and then all the cars went up. But the men didn't leave. And then the guns began to go off without waiting for anyone to pull the trigger; and the barrels softened and slumped and spattered to the ground. But the men still had bare hands, and they stayed. The Greek got wild -- or lost control, it was hard to tell which. There was a sudden catastrophic whooshing roar and, wham, a tree took flame for roots. A giant old oak, fifty feet tall, I guess it had been there a couple of centuries, but Greco's demons changed all that; it took flame and shot whistling into the air, spouting flame and spark like a Roman candle. Maybe he thought it would scare them. Maybe it did. But it also made them mad. And they ran, all at once, every one of them but my personal friend, for the biggest, openest of the windows -- And leaped back, cursing and yelling, beating out flames on their clothes. Jets of flame leaped out of every window and door. The old building seemed to bulge outward and go voom. In half a second, it was a single leaping tulip of fire. The firemen got there then, but it was a little late. Oh, they got Greco out -- alive, even. But they didn't save a bit of the laboratory. It was the third fire in Greco's career, and the most dangerous -- for where previously only a few of the youthing demons had escaped, now there were vast quantities of both sorts. It was the end of the world. I knew it. right. I spent yesterday with Greco. He's married now and has a fine young son. They made an attractive family picture, the two healthy-looking adults, strong-featured, in the prime of life, and the wee toddler between them. The only thing is -- Greco's the toddler. He doesn't call himself Greco any more. Would you, the way the world is now? He has plenty of money stashed away -- I do too, of course -- not that money means very much these days. His brain hasn't been affected, just his body. He was lucky, I guess. Some of the demons hit the brain in some of their victims and -- Well, it's pretty bad. Greco got the answer after a while. Both types of demons were loose in the world, and both, by and by, were in every individual. But they didn't kill each other off. One simply grew more rapidly, took over control, until it ran out of the kind of molecules it needed. Then the other took over. Then the first. Then the other again... Mice are short-lived. It's like balancing a needle on the end of your nose; there isn't enough space in a mouse's short span for balance, any more than there is in a needle's. But in a human life -- Things are going to have to be worked out, though. It's bad enough that a family gets all mixed up the way Greco's is -- he's on a descending curve, his kid is on an aging curve, and Minnie -- did I tell you that it was Minnie he married? -- has completed her second rejuvenation and is on the way back up again. But there are worse problems that that. For one thing, it isn't going to be too long before we run out of space. I don't mean time, I mean space. Living space. Because it's all very well that the human animal should now mature to grow alternately younger and older, over and over -- But, damn it, how I wish that somebody once in a while would die!  #Brings You Any # of These Great Books Values Up to # in Publishers' Editions! 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Why not let people think science fiction is in the prediction business and reap their money while we can? There is one sound economic reason -- if they come searching for the wrong things, they'll stay just long enough to discover these are only incidental. For example, Arthur Koestler tion -- and attacks it ferociously last thing science fiction wants to find. His fury at its refusal to be what it isn't undoubtedly cost us some readers, but not enough to worry about; multiplied, it can be something to worry about indeed. It's a plain non-crass fact that the economic is the main motivation of any magazine, science fiction or otherwise, so entertainment is its goal. The more successfully it entertains, the more successfully it sells. In the case of science fiction, there are, however, great fringe benefits arising from the way in which we go about creating entertainment. I could probably state the process and results in a sentence, but I wouldn't make any cornea cope with any such bulging monstrosity. It has to be gone into in some detail, for the benefits to be seen. Science fiction writers begin with the present : existing knowledge, some addition to it, a new hypothesis, an observed trend of one kind or another, and so forth. There are two vital values here. If depiction of one's own era is the mark of literature, as critics declare when calling science fiction "escapist," then science fiction, fully qualifies as literature. More than any other branch, it has to search its times minutely in its avid quest for themes. Of course the average science fiction reader knows more about the present than (Continued on page #) by Clifford D. Simak by Clyde Brown by L. J. Stecher by Frank Herbert by Fritz Leiber by Willy Ley The Island of the Stone Heads back to Earth, to indicate nuclear reactor, electrical conversion unit, radiation rings and motor. Fins house retractable support legs for vertical takeoff and landing. Foreground: Mare Imbrium. Background: Ringwall double-lighted by sunshine and earthshine. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and US. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. If was their job to sit, so that wasn't the sinister part. Then what? They were sitting on a town... and fhe town was unaware of it! T HE first week of school was finished. Johnson Dean, superintendent of Millville High, sat at his desk, enjoying the quiet and the satisfaction of late Friday afternoon. The quiet was massacred by Coach Jerry Higgins. He clomped into the office and threw his muscular blond frame heavily in a chair. "Well, you can call off football for the year," he said angrily. "We can drop out of the conference." Dean pushed away the papers on which he had been working and leaned back in his chair. The sunlight from the western windows turned his silver thatch into a seeming halo. His pale, blue-veined, wrinkled hands smoothed out, painstakingly, the fading crease in his fading trousers. "What has happened now?" he asked. "It's King and Martin, Mr. Dean. They aren't coming out this year." Dean clucked sympathetically, but somewhat hollowly, as if his heart was not quite in it "Let me see," he said. "If I remember rightly, those two were very good last year. King was in the line and Martin quarterback." Higgins exploded in righteous indignation. "Who ever heard of a quarterback deciding he wouldn't play no more? And not just an ordinary boy, but one of the very best. He made all-conference last year." "You've talked to them, of course?" "I got down on my knees to them," said the coach. "I asked them did they want that I should lose my job. I asked is there anything you got against me. I told them they were letting down the school. I told them we wouldn't have a team without them. They didn't laugh at me, but -- " "They wouldn't laugh at you," said Dean. "Those boys are gentlemen. In fact, all the youngsters in school -- " "They're a pack of sissies!" stormed the coach. matter of opinion. There have been moments when I also wasn't able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I should." "But that's different," argued the coach. "When a man grows up, naturally he will lose some interest. But these are kids. This just isn't healthy. These young fellows should be out there pawing up the earth. All kids should have a strong sense of competition. And even if they don't, there's the financial angle. Any outstanding football man has a chance, when he goes to college -- " "Our kids don't need athletic subsidies," said Dean, a little sharply. "They're getting more than their share of scholastic scholarships." "If we had a lot more material," moaned Higgins, "King and Martin wouldn't mean so much. We wouldn't win too often, but we still would have a team. But as it is -- do you realize, Mr. Dean, that there have been fewer coming out each year? Right now, I haven't more than enough -- " "You've talked to King and Martin. You're sure they won't reconsider?" "You know what they told me? They said football interfered with studies!" The way Higgins said it, it was rank heresy. "I guess, then," Dean said cheerfully, "that we'll just have to face it." "But it isn't normal," the coach protested. "There aren't any kids who think more of studies than they do of football. There aren't any kids so wrapped up in books -- " "There are," said Dean. "There are a lot, right here at Millville. You should take a look at the grade averages over the past ten years, if you don't believe it." "What gets me is that they don't act like kids. They act like a bunch of adults." The coach shook his head, as if to say it was all beyond him. "It's a dirty shame. If only some of those big bruisers would turn out, we'd have the makings of a team." "Here, also," Dean reminded him, "we have the makings of men and women that Millville in the future may very well be proud of." The coach got up angrily. "We won't win a game," he warned. "Even Bagley will beat us." "That is something," Dean observed philosophically, "that shan't worry me too much." He sat quietly at his desk and listened to the hollow ringing of the coach's footsteps going down the corridor, dimming out with distance. And he heard the swish and rumble of a janitorial servo-mechanism wiping down the stairs. He wondered where Stuffy was. Fiddling around somewhere, no doubt. With all the scrubbers and the washers and wipers and other mechanical contraptions, there wasn't too much to take up Stuffy's time. Although Stuffy, in his day, had done a lot of work -- he'd been on the go from dark to dark, a top-notch janitor. TF it weren't for the labor short age, Stuffy would have been retired several years ago. But they didn't retire men any more the way they had at one time. With Man going to the stars, there now was more than the human race could do. If they had been retiring men, Dean thought, he himself would be without a job. And there was nothing he would have hated more than that. For Millville High was his. He had made it his. For more than fifty years, he'd lived for Millville High, first as a young and eager teacher, then as principal, and now, the last fifteen years or so, as its superintendent. He had given everything he had. And it had given back. It had been wife and child and family, a beginning and an end. And he was satisfied, he told himself -- satisfied on this Friday of a new school year, with Stuffy puttering somewhere in the building and no football team -- or, at least, next to none. He rose from the desk and stood looking out the window. A student, late in going home, was walking across the lawn. Dean thought he knew her, although of late his eyes had not been so good for distance. He squinted at her harder, almost certain it was Judy Charleson. He'd known her grandfather back in the early days and the girl, he thought, had old Henry Charleson's gait. He chuckled, thinking back. Old Charleson, he recalled, had been a slippery one in a business deal. There had been that time he had gotten tangled up in the deal for tube-liners to be used by a starship outfit... He jerked his mind away, tried to wipe out his thinking of the old days. It was a sign of advancing age, the dawn of second childhood. But however that might be, old Henry Charleson was the only man in Millville who had ever had a thing to do with starships -- except Lamont Stiles. Dean grinned a little, remembering Lamont Stiles and the grimness in him and how he'd amounted to something after many years, to the horrified exasperation of many people who had confidently prophesied he'd come to no good end. And there was no one now, of course, who knew, or perhaps would ever know, what kind of end Lamont Stiles had finally come to. Or if, in fact, he'd come to an end as yet Lamont Stiles, Dean thought, might this very moment be striding down the street of some fantastic city on some distant world. And if that were so, and if he came home again, what would he bring this time? The last time he'd come home -- the only time he ever had come home -- he had brought the Sitters, and they were a funny lot. Dean turned from the window and walked back to the desk. He sat down and pulled the papers back in front of him. But he couldn't get down to work. That was the way it often was. He'd start thinking of the old days, when there were many friends and many things to do, and get so involved in thinking that he couldn't settle down to work. along the hall and shoved the papers to one side. He could tell that it was Stuffy, from the familiar shuffle, coming by to pass the time of day. Dean wondered at the quiet anticipation he felt within himself. Although it was not so strange, once one considered it. There weren't many left like Stuffy, not many he could talk with. It was odd with the old, he thought. Age dissolved or loosened the ties of other days. The old died or moved away or were bound by infirmities. Or they drew within themselves, into a world of their own, where they sought a comfort they could find no longer in the outer world. Stuffy shuffled to the doorway, stopped and leaned against the jamb. He wiped his drooping yellow mustaches with a greasy hand. "What's ailing the coach?" he asked. "He went busting out of here like he was turpentined." "He has no football team," said Dean. "Or he tells me that he hasn't any." "He cries early every season," Stuffy said. "It's just an act." "I'm not so sure this time. King and Martin aren't coming out." Stuffy shuffled a few more paces into the room and dropped into a chair. "It's them Sitters," Stuffy declared. "They're the cause of it." Dean sat upright. "What is that you said!" "I been watching it for years. You can spot the kids that the Sitters sat with or that went to their nursery school. They done something to them kids." "Fairy tale," said Dean. "It ain't a fairy tale," Stuffy declared stubbornly. "You know I don't take no stock in superstition. Just because them Sitters are from some other planet... Say, did you ever find out what planet they were from?" Dean shook his head. "I don't know that Lamont ever said. He might have, but I never heard it." "They're weird critters," said Stuffy, stroking his mustaches slowly to lend an air of deliberation to his words, "but I never held their strangeness against them. After all, they ain't the only aliens on the Earth. The only ones we have in Millville, of course, but there are thousands of other critters from the stars scattered round the Earth." Dean nodded in agreement, scarcely knowing what he was agreeing with. He said nothing, however, for there was no need of that. Once Stuffy got off to a running start, he'd go on and on. "They seem right honest beings," Stuffy said. "They never played on no one's sympathy. They just settled in, after Lamont went away and left them, and never asked no one to intercede for them. They made an honest living all these years and that is all one could expect of them." "And yet," said Dean, "you think they've done something to the kids." "They changed them. Ain't you noticed it?" thought to notice. I've known these youngsters for years. I knew their folks before them. How do you think they were changed?" "They grew them up too fast," Stuffy said. "Talk sense," snapped Dean. "Who grew what too fast?" "The Sitters grew the kids too fast. That's what's wrong with them. Here they are in high school and they're already grown up." From somewhere on one of the floors below came the dismal hooting of a servo-mechanism in distress. Stuffy sprang to his feet. "That's the mopper-upper. I'll bet you it got caught in a door again." He swung around and galloped off at a rapid shuffle. "Stupid machine!" he yelped as he went out the door. Dean pulled the papers back in front of him again and picked up a pencil. It was getting late and he had to finish. But he didn't see the papers. He saw many little faces staring up at him from where the papers lay -- solemn, big-eyed little faces with an elusive look about them. And he knew that elusive look -- the look of dawning adulthood staring out of childish faces. They grew them up too fast! "No," said Dean to himself. "No, it couldn't be!" And yet there was corroborative evidence: The high averages, the unusual number of scholarships, the disdain for athletics. And, as well, the general attitude. And the lack of juvenile delinquency -- for years, Millville had been proud that its juvenile delinquency had been a minor problem. He remembered that several years ago he had been asked to write an article about it for a parent-teacher magazine. He tried to remember what he had written in that article and slowly bits of it came back to him -- the realization of parents that their children were a part of the family and not mere appendages; the role played by the churches of the town; the emphasis placed on the social sciences by the schools. "And was I wrong?" he asked himself. "Was it none of these, but something else entirely -- someone else entirely?" He tried to work and couldn't. He was too upset. He could not erase the smiling little faces that were staring up at him. Finally he shoved the papers in a drawer and got up from the desk. He put on his worn topcoat and sat the battered old black felt hat atop his silver head. On the ground floor, he found Stuffy herding the last of the servo-mechanisms into their cubby for the night. Stuffy was infuriated. "It got itself caught in a heating grill," he raged. "If I hadn't gotten there in the nick ot time, it would have wrecked the works." He shook his head dolefully. "Them machines are fine when everything goes well. But just let something happen and they panic. It was best the old way, John."  the last of the waddling machines and locked it savagely. "Stuffy, how well did you know Lamont Stiles?" asked Dean. Stuffy rubbed his mustaches in fine deliberation. "Knew him well. Lamont and me,, we were kids together. You were a little older. You were in the crowd ahead." Dean nodded his head slowly. "Yes, I remember, Stuffy. Odd that you and I stayed on in the old home town. Sc many of the others left." "Lamont ran away when he was seventeen. There wasn't much to stay for. His old lady was dead and his old man was drinking himself to death and Lamont had been in a scrape or two. Everyone was agreed Lamont never would amount to nothing." "It's hard for a boy when a whole town turns against him." "That's a fact," said the janitor. "There was no one on his side. He told me when he left that someday he'd come back and show them. But I just thought he was talking big. Like a kid will do, you know, to bolster up himself." "You were wrong," said Dean. "Never wronger, John." For Lamont Stiles had come back, more than thirty years after he had run away, back to the old weather-beaten house on Maple Street that had waited empty for him all the lonely years; had come back, an old man when he still was scarcely fifty, big and tough despite the snow-white hair and the skin turned cordovan with the bum of many alien suns; back from far wandering among the distant stars. But he was a stranger. The town remembered him; he had forgotten it. Years in alien lands had taken the town and twisted it in his brain, and what he remembered of it was more fantasy than truth -- the fantasy spawned by years of thinking back and of yearning and of hate. "I must go," Dean said. "Carrie will have supper ready. She doesn't like to have it getting cold." "Good night, John," said the janitor. The sun was almost down when Dean came out the door and started down the walk. It was later than he'd thought. Carrie would be sore at him and she would bawl him out. Dean chuckled to himself. There was no one quite like Carrie. Not wife, for he'd never had a wife. Not mother or sister, for both of those were dead. But housekeeper, faithful all the years -- and a bit of wife and sister, and sometimes even mother. A man's loyalties are queer, he thought. They blind him and they bind him and they shape the man he is. And, through them, he serves and achieves a kind of greatness, although at times the greatness may be gray and pallid and very, very quiet. Not like the swaggering and the bitter greatness of Lamont Stiles, who came striding from the stars, bringing with him those three queer creatures who became the Sitters. Bringing them and installing them in his house on Maple Street and then, in a year or two, going off to the stars again and leaving them in Millville. Queer, Dean thought, that so provincial a town as this should accept so quietly these exotic beings. Queerer still that the mothers of the town, in time, should entrust their children to the aliens care. A S Dean turned the corner into Lincoln Street, he met a woman walking with a knee-high boy. It was Mildred Anderson, he saw -- or had been Mildred Anderson, but she was married now and for the life of him he could not recall the name. Funny, he thought, how fast the young ones grew up. Not more than a couple of years ago, it seemed, that Mildred was in school -- although he knew he must be wrong on that; it would be more like ten. He tipped his hat. "Good evening, Mildred. My, how the boy is growing." "I doe to cool," the child lisped. His mother interpreted. "He means he goes to school. He is so proud of it" "Nursery school, of course." "Yes, Mr. Dean. The Sitters. They are such lovely things. And so good with children. And there's the cost. Or, rather, the lack of it. You just give them a bouquet of flowers or a little bottle of perfume or a pretty picture and they are satisfied. They positively refuse to take any money. I can't understand that. Can you, Mr. Dean?" "No," said Dean. "I can't." He'd forgotten what a talker Mildred was. There had been a period in school, he recalled, when she had been appropriately nicknamed Gabby. "I sometimes think," she said, hurrying on so she'd miss no time for talk, "that we people here on Earth attach too much importance to money. The Sitters don't seem to know what money is, or if they do, they pay no attention to it. As if it were something that was not important. But I understand there are other races like that. It makes one think, doesn't it, Mr. Dean?" And he remembered now another infuriating trait of Mildred's -- how she inevitably ended any string of sentences with a dangling question. He didn't try to answer. He knew an answer was not expected of him. "I must be getting on," he said. "I am late already." "It was nice to see you, Mr. Dean," said Mildred. "I so often think of my days in school and sometimes it seems like just positively ages and there are other times when it seems no more than just yesterday and..." "Very nice, indeed," said Dean, lifting his hat to her, then almost scurrying off. It was undignified, he grumbled to himself, being routed in broad daylight on a public street by a talkative woman. As he went up the walk to the house, he heard Carrie bustling angrily about. "Johnson Dean," she cried the instant he came in the door, "you sit right down and eat. Your food's already cold. And it's my circle night. Don't you even stop to wash." Dean calmly hung up his hat and coat. "For that matter," he said, "I guess I don't need to wash. My kind of job, a man doesn't get too dirty."  dining area, pouring his cup of coffee and straightening up the bouquet of mums that served for the centerpiece. "Since it's my circle night," she said, laying deliberate stress upon the words to shame him for being late, "I won't stay to wash the dishes. You just leave them on the table. I will do them later " He sat down meekly to eat. Somehow, for some reason he need of which he was not aware, he suddenly felt safe. Safe and secure against a nagging worry and a half-formed fear that had been building up within him without his knowing it. Carrie came through the living room, settling a determined hat upon her determined head. She had the very air of a woman who was late for her circle meeting through no fault of her own. She halted at the door. "You got everything you need?" she asked, her eyes making a swift inventory of the table. "Everything." He chuckled. "Have a good time at the circle. Pick up a lot of gossip." It was his favorite quip and he knew it irked her -- and it was childish, too. But he could not resist it She flounced out of the door and he heard her putting down her heels with unnecessary firmness as she went down the walk. With her going, a hard silence gripped the house and the deeper dusk moved in as he sat at the table eating. Safe, he thought -- old Johnson Dean, school man, safe inside the house his grandfather had builthow many years ago? Old-fashioned now, with its split-level floor plan and its high-bricked fireplace, with its double, attached garage and the planter out in front. Safe and lonely. And safe against what threat, against what creeping disturbance, so subtle that it failed of recognition? He shook his head at that. But lonely -- that was different. That could be explained. The middle-young, he thought, and the very old are lonely. The middle-young because full communication had not been established, and the very old because communication had broken down. Society was stratified, he told himself, stratified and sectored and partitioned off by many different factors -- by age, by occupation, by education, by financial status. And the list did not end there. One could go on and on. It would be interesting, if a man could only find the time, to chart the stratification of humanity. Finished, if it ever could be finished, that chart would be a weird affair. He finished the meal and wiped his mouth carefully with the napkin. He pushed back from the table and prowled the darkening living area. He knew that he should at least pick up the dishes and tidy up the table. By rights, he should even wash them. He had caused Carrie a lot of fuss because he had been late. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't settle down. Safe, he still was not at peace. this business off any longer, he realized, no use to duck the fear that was nagging at him. He knew what it was he faced, if he only would admit it. Stuffy was crazy, of course. He could not possibly be right. He'd been thinking too much -- imagining, rather. The kids were no different now than they'd ever been. Except that the grade averages had improved noticeably in the last ten years or so. Except that there were, as one might expect of such grade averages, an increase in scholarships. Except that the glitter of competitive sports was beginning to wear off. Except that there was, in Millville, almost no delinquency. And those solemn childish faces, with the big, bright eyes, staring up at him from the papers on his desk. He paced slowly up and down the carpeting before the big brick fireplace, and the dead, black maw beneath the chimney throat, with the bitter smell of old wood ashes in it, seemed to be a mouth making sport of him. He cracked one feebly clenched old fist into a shaky plam. "It can't be right," he said fiercely to himself. And yet, on the face of all evidence, it was. The children in Millville were maturing faster; they were growing up, intellectually, much faster than they should. And perhaps even more than that. Growing in a new dimension, he wondered. Receding farther from the savage that still lingered in humanity. For sports, organized sports on whatever basis, still remained a refined product of the cave -- some antagonism that Man had carried forward under many different guises and which broke forth at least partially in the open in the field of sports. If he could only talk with the students, he thought, if he could somehow find out what they thought, then there might be a chance of running this thing to the ground. But that was impossible. The barriers were too high and intricate, the lines of communication much too cluttered. For he was old and they were young; he was authority and they were the regimented. Once again the stratifications would keep them apart There was no way in which he could approach them. It was all right to say there was something happening, ridiculous as it might sound. But the important matter, if such should be the case, was to discover the cause and to plot the trend. And Stuffy must be wrong. For it was fantastic to suggest the Sitters were engineering it ters, alien as they were, had established themselves as solid citizens of Millville. They would, he was sure, do nothing to jeopardize the position they had won -- the position of being accepted and generally let alone and little talked about. They would do nothing to attract attention to themselves. Through the years, too many other aliens had gotten into trouble through attempts to meddle and by exhibitionism. Although, come to think of it, what might have seemed to be exhibitionism, from the human viewpoint, possibly had been no more than normal alien conduct It had been the good fortune of the Sitters that their natural mother-disposition had enabled them to fit into the human pattern. They had proven ideal baby-sitters and in this they had an economic value and were the more readily accepted. For many years, they had taken care of the Millville babies and they were everything that a sitter ought to be. And now they ran a nursery school, although, he remembered, there had been some ruckus over that, since they quite understandably did not hold formal education credits. He turned on a light and went to the shelves to find something he could read. But there was nothing there that held any interest for him. He ran a finger along the backs of the rows of volumes and his eyes flicked down the titles, but he found absolutely nothing. He left the shelves and paced over to the large front window and stared out at the street. The street lamps had not come on yet, but there were lights here and there in windows and occasionally a bubble-shaped car moved silently down the pavement, the fanning headlights catching a scurrying bunch of leaves or a crouching cat It was one of the older streets in town; at one time, he had known everyone who had lived upon it. He could call out without hesitation the names of the one-time owners -- Wilson, Becket, Johnson, Random -- but none of them lived here any longer. The names had changed and the faces were faces that he did not know; the stratification had shifted and he knew almost no one on the street. The middle-young and the very old, he thought, they are the lonely ones. He went back to the chair beside the lamp he'd lighted and sat down rather stiffly in it. He fidgeted, drumming his fingers on the arms. He wanted to get up, but there was nothing to get up for, unless it was to wash the dishes, and he didn't want to wash them. He could take a walk, he told himself. That might be a good idea. There was a lot of comfort in an evening walk. He got his coat and hat and went out the door and down the walk and turned west at the gate. He was more than halfway there, skirting the business section, before he admitted to himself that he was heading for the Stiles house and the Sitters -- that he had, in fact, never intended doing otherwise. What he might do there, what he might learn there, he had no idea. There was no actual purpose in his mind. It was almost as if he were on an unknown mission, as if he were being pushed by some unseen force into a situation of no-choice. tTE came to the Stiles house and stood on the walk outside, looking at it. It was an old house, surrounded by shade trees that had been planted many years before, and the front yard was a wilderness of shrubs. Every once in a while, someone would come and cut the lawn and maybe trim the hedges and fix up the flower beds to pay the Sitters for all the baby-minding they had done, since the Sitters took no money. And that was a funny thing, Dean thought, their not taking any money -- just as if they didn't need it, as if they might not know what to do with it even if they had any. Perhaps they didn't need it, for they bought no food and still they kept on living and never had been sick enough for anyone to know about it. There must have been times when they were cold, although no one ever mentioned it, but they bought no fuel, and Lamont Stiles had left a fund to pay the taxes -- so maybe it was true that they had no need of money. There had been a time, Dean recalled, when there had been a lot of speculation in the town about their not eating -- or at least not buying any food. But after a time the speculation dwindled down and all anyone would say was that you could never figure a lot of things about alien people and there was no use in trying. And that was right, of course. The Stiles house, Dean realized with something of a start, was even older than his house. It was a rambler and they had been popular many years before the splitlevel had come in. Heavy drapes were drawn at the windows, but there was light behind the drapes and he knew the Sitters were at home. They were usually home, of course. Except on baby-sitting jobs, they never left the house, and in recent years they had gone out but little, for people had gotten in the habit of dropping off the kids at the Sitters' house. The kids never made a fuss, not even the tiny ones. They all liked going to the Sitters. He went up the walk and climbed the stoop to ring the bell. He waited and heard movement in the house. The door came open and one of the Sitters stood there, with the light behind it, and he had forgotten -- it had been many years since he'd seen one of the Sitters. Shortly after Lamont Stiles had come home, Dean remembered, he had met all three of them, and in the years between, he had seen one of them from time to time a distance on the street. But the memory and the wonder had faded from his mind and now it struck him once again with all the olden force -- the faery grace, the sense of suddenly standing face to face with a gentle flower. The face, if it might be called a face, was sweet -- too sweet, so sweet that it had no character and hardly an individuality. A baffling skin arrangement, like the petals of a flower, rose above the face, and the body of the Sitter was slender beyond all belief and yet so full of grace and poise that one forgot the slimness. And about the entire creature hung an air of such sweet simplicity and such a scent of innocence that it blotted out all else. No wonder, Dean found himself thinking, that the children liked them so. f?TYf R. Dean," the Sitter said, IT-#, "won't you please come in? We are very honored." "Thank you," he said, taking off his hat. He stepped inside and heard the closing of the door and then the Sitter was at his side again. "This chair right here," it said. "We reserve this one for our special visitors." And it was all very sweet and friendly, and yet there was an alien, frightening touch. Somewhere there were children laughing in the house. He twisted his head around to find where the laughter came from. "They're in the nursery," said the Sitter. "I will close the door." Dean sank into the chair and perched his battered old soft hat on one bony knee, fondling it with his bony fingers. The Sitter came back and sat down on the floor in front of him, sat down with a single, effortless motion and he had the distinct impression of the swirl of flaring skirts, although the Sitter wore none. "Now," the Sitter said by way of announcing that Dean commanded its entire attention. But he did not speak, for the laughter still was in the room. Even with the door to the nursery shut, there still was childish laughter. It came from everywhere all about the room and it was an utterly happy laughter, the gay and abandoned, the unthinking, the spontaneous laughter of children hard at play. Nor was that all. Childish sparkle glittered in the air and there was the long forgotten sense of timelessness -- of the day that never ended, that was never meant to end. A breeze was blowing out of some nevernever land and it carried with it the scent of brook water bearing on its tide flotillas of fallen autumn leaves, and there was, as well, the hint of clover and of marigolds and the smell of fuzzy, new-washed blankets such as are used in cribs. "Mr. Dean," the Sitter said. He roused himself guiltily. "I'm sorry," he told the Sitter. "I was listening to the children." "But the door is closed." "The children in this room," he said. "There are no children in this room." "Quite right," he said. "Quite right." But there were. He could hear their laughter and the patter of their feet. least the sense of them, and there was also the sense of many flowers, long since died and shriveled in actuality, but with the feel of them still caged inside the room. And the sense of beauty -- the beauty of many different things, of flowers and gee-gaw jewelry and little painted pictures and of gaily colored scarves, of all the things that through the years had been given to the Sitters in lieu of money. "This room," he said haltingly, half-confused. "It is such a pleasant room. I'd just like to sit here." He felt himself sink into the room, into the youngness and the gayety. If he let go, he thought, if he only could let go, he might join the running and be the same as they. "Mr. Dean," the Sitter said, "you are very sensitive." "I am very old," said Dean. "Maybe that's the reason." The room was both ancient and antique. It was a cry across almost two centuries, with its small brick fireplace paneled in white wood, its arched doorways and the windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, covered by heavy drapes of black and green, etched with golden thread. And it had a solid comfort and a deep security that the present architecture of aluminum and glass never could achieve. It was dusty and moldy and cluttered and perhaps unsanitary, but it had the feel of home. "I am old-fashioned," said Dean, "and, I suspect, very close to senile, and I am afraid that the time has come again to believe in fairy tales and magic." "It is not magic," the Sitter replied. "It is the way we live, the only way we can live. You will agree that even Sitters must somehow stay alive." "Yes, I agree," said Dean. He lifted the battered hat from off his knee and rose slowly to his feet. The laughter seemed to be fainter now and the patter not so loud. But the sense of youth -- of youngness, of vitality and of happiness-still lay within the room. It lent a sheen to the ancient shabbiness and it made his heart begin to ache with a sudden gladness. The Sitter still sat upon the floor. "There was something you wanted, Mr. Dean?" Dean fumbled with his hat. "Not any more. I think I've found my answer." And even as he said it, he knew it was unbelievable, that once he stood outside the door, he'd know with certainty there could be no truth in what he'd found. The Sitter rose. "You will come again? We would love to have you." "Perhaps," said Dean, and turned toward the door. Suddenly there was a top spinning on the floor, a golden top with flashing jewels set in it that caught the light and scattered it as it spun, it played a whistling tune -- the kind of music that got inside and melted down one's soul. sitting in the chair, he had thought it was impossible for him to do. And the laughter came again and the world outside withdrew and the room suddenly was filled with the marvelous light of Christmas. He took a quick step forward and he dropped his hat. He didn't know his name, nor where he. was, nor how he might have come there, and he didn't care. He felt a gurgling happiness welling up in him and he stooped to reach out for the top. He missed it by an inch or two and he shuffled forward, stooping, reaching, and his toe caught in a hole in the ancient carpeting and he crashed down on his knees. The top was gone and the Christmas light snapped out and the world rushed in upon him. The gurgling happiness had gone and he was an old man in a beautyhaunted house, struggling from his knees to face an alien creature. "I am sorry," said the Sitter. "You almost had it. Perhaps some other time." He shook his head. "No! Not another time!" The Sitter answered kindly, "It's the best we have to offer." Dean fumbled his hat back on his head and turned shakily to the door. The Sitter opened it and he staggered out. "Come again," the Sitter said, most sweetly. "Any time you wish." On the street outside, Dean stopped and leaned against a tree. He took off his hat and mopped his brow. Now, where he had felt only shock before, the horror began creeping in -- the horror of a kind of life that did not eat as human beings ate, but in another way, who sucked their nourishment from beauty and from youth, who drained a bouquet dry and who nibbled from the happy hours of a laughing child, and even munched the laughter. It was no wonder that the children of this village matured beyond their years. For they had their childishness stripped from them by a hungry form of life that looked on them as fodder. There might be, he thought, only so much of happy running and of childish laughter dealt out to any human. And while some might not use their quota, there still might be a limit on it, and once one had used it all, then it was gone and a person became an adult without too much of wonder or of laughter left within him. The Sitters took no money. There was no reason that they should, for they had no need of it. Their house was filled with all the provender they had stowed away for years. And in all those years, he was the first to know, the first to sense the nature of those aliens brought home by Lamont Stiles. It was a sobering thought -- that he should be the first to find it out. He had said that he was old and that might be the reason. But that had been no more than words, rising to his lips almost automatically as a part of his professional self-pity. Yet there might be something in it even so. Could it be possible that, for the old, there might be certain compensations for the loss of other faculties? As the body slowed and the mind began to dim, might some magical ability, a sort of psychic bloodhound sense, rise out of the embers of a life that was nearly spent? about how old he was, he told himself, as if the mere fact of getting old might be a virtue. He was forgetful of the present and his preoccupation with the past was growing to the danger point. He was close to second childhood and he was the one who knew it -- and might that be the answer? Might that be why he'd seen the top and known the Christmas lights? He wondered what might have happened if he could have grabbed the top. He put his hat back on and stepped out from the tree and went slowly up the walk, heading back for home. What could he do about it, he wondered, now that he'd unearthed the Sitters' secret? He could run and tattle, surely, but there'd be no one to believe him. They would listen to him and they would be polite so as not to hurt his feelings, yet there was no one in the village but would take it for an old man's imaginings, and there'd be nothing that he could do about it For beyond his own sure knowledge, he had not a shred of proof. He might call attention to the maturity of the young people, as Stuffy had called his attention to it this very afternoon. But even there he would find no proof, for in the final reckoning, all the villagers would retreat to rationalization. Parental pride, if nothing else, might require they should. Not a single one of them would find much cause for wonder in the fact that a boy or girl of theirs was singularly well-mannered and above the average in intelligence. One might say that the parents should have noticed, that they should have known that an entire village full of children could not possibly be so well-behaved or so level-headed or so anything else as were these Millville children. And yet they had not noticed. It had crept along so slowly, had insinuated itself so smoothly, that the change was not apparent For that matter, he himself had not noticed it, he who most of his life had been intimately associated with these very children in which he found so much wonder now. And if he had not noticed, then why expect that someone else should? It had remained for a gossipy old busybody like the janitor to put a finger on it His throat was dry and his belly weak and sick and what he needed most of all, Dean told himself, was a cup of coffee. He turned off on a street that would take him to the downtown section and he plodded along with his head bent against the dark. What would be the end of it, he asked himself. What would be the gain for this lost childhood? For this pilfering of children? What the value that growing boys and girls should cease to play a little sooner, that they take up the attitude of adults before the chosen time? There was some gain already seen. The children of Millville were obedient and polite; they were constructive in their play; they'd ceased to be little savages or snobs. The trouble was, now that one thought of it, they'd almost ceased being children, too. And in the days to come? Would Millville supply Earth with great statesmen, with canny diplomats, with topnotch educators and able scientists? Perhaps, but that was not the point at all. The question of robbing childhood of its heritage to achieve these qualities was the basic question. district, not quite three blocks long, and walked slowly down the street, heading for the only drugstore in the town. There were only a few people in the store and he walked over to the lunch counter and sat down. He perched on the stool forlornly, with the battered hat pulled down above his eyes, and he gripped the counter's edge to keep his hands from shaking. "Coffee," he said to the girl who came to take his order, and she brought it to him. He sipped at it, for it was too hot to drink. He was sorry he had come. He felt all alone and strange, with all the bright light and the chrome, as if he were something that had shuffled from the past into a place reserved for the present. He almost never came downtown any more and that must be the reason for the way he felt. Especially he almost never came down in the evening, although there had been a time he had. He smiled, remembering how the old crowd used to get together and talk around in circles, about inconsequential things, their talk not getting anywhere and never meaning to. But that was all ended now. The crowd had disappeared. Some of them were dead and some had moved away and the few of them still left seldom ventured out. He sat there, thinking, knowing he was maudlin and not caring if he was, too tired and shaken to flinch away from it A hand fell on his shoulder and he swung around, surprised. Young Bob Martin stood there, and although he smiled, he still had the look of someone who had done a thing that he was unsure of. "Sir, there are some of us down here at a table," said young Martin, gulping a little at his own boldness. Dean nodded. "That's very nice," he mumbled. "We wondered if maybe -- that is, Mr. Dean, we'd be pleased if you would care to join us." 'Well, that is very nice of you, indeed." "We didn't mean, sir -- that is -- " "Why, certainly," said Dean. "I'd be very glad to." "Here, sir, let me take your coffee. I won't spill a drop of it." "I'll trust you, Bob," said Dean, getting to his feet. "You almost never fumble." "I can explain that, Mr. Dean. It's not that I don't want to play. It's just that... Dean tapped him on the shoulder lightly. "I understand. There is no need to explain." He paused a second, trying to decide if it were wise to say what was in his mind. He decided to: "If you don't tell the coach, I might even say I agree with you. There comes a time in life when football begins to seem a little silly." Martin grinned, relieved. "You've hit it on the head. Exactly" He led the way to the table. Ronald King, George Woods, Judy Charleson and Donna Thompson. All good kids, thought Dean, every one of them. He saw they had been dawdling away at sodas, making them stretch out as long as possible. They all looked up at him and smiled, and George Woods pulled back a chair in invitation. Dean sat down carefully and placed his hat on the floor beside him. Bob set down the coffee. "It was good of you to think of me," said Dean and wondered why he found himself embarrassed. After all, these were his kids -- the kids he saw every day in school, the ones he pushed and coddled into an education, the kids he'd never had himself..."You're just the man we need," said Ronald King. "We've been talking about Lamont Stiles. He is the only Millville man who ever went to space and... "You must have known him, Mr. Dean," said Judy. "Yes," Dean said slowly, "I did know him, but not as well as Stuffy did. Stuffy and he were kids together. I was a little older." "What kind of man is he?" asked Donna. Dean chuckled. "Lamont Stiles? He was the town's delinquent. He was poor in school and he had no home life and he just mostly ran wild. If there was trouble, you could bet your life that Lamont had had a hand in it. Everyone said that Lamont never would amount to anything and when it had been said often enough and long enough, Lamont must have taken it to heart " He talked on and on, and they asked him questions, and Ronald King ' went to the counter and came back with another cup of coffee for him. The talk switched from Stiles to football. King and Martin told him what they had told the coach. Then the talk went on to problems in student government and from that to the new theories in ionic drive, announced just recentlyDean did not do all the talking; he did a lot of listening, too, and he asked questions of his own and time flowed on unnoticed. Suddenly the lights blinked and Dean looked up, startled. Judy laughed at him. "That means the place is closing. It's the signal that we have to leave." "I see," said Dean. "Do you folks do this often -- staying until closing time, I mean?" "Not often," Bob Martin told him. "On weekdays, there is too much studying." "I remember many years ago -- " Dean began, then left the words hanging in the air. Yes, indeed, he thought, many years ago. And again tonight! H E looked at them, the five faces around the table. Courtesy, he thought, and kindness and respect. But something more than that. Talking with them, he had forgotten he was old. They had accepted him as another human being, not as an aged human being, not as a symbol of authority. They had moved over for him and made him one of them and themselves one of him; they had broken down the barrier not only of pupil and teacher, but of age and youth as well. "I have my car," Bob Martin said. "Can I drive you home?" Dean picked his hat from off the floor and rose slowly to his feet. "No, thanks," he said. "I think I'd like to walk. I have an idea or two I'd like to mull a bit. Walking helps one think." "Come again," said Judy Charleson. "Some other Friday night, perhaps." "Why, thanks," said Dean. "I do believe I will." Great kids, he told himself with a certain pride. Full of a kindness and a courtesy beyond even normal adult courtesy and kindness. Not brash, not condescending, not like kids at all, and yet with the shine of youthfulness and the idealism and ambition that walked hand in hand with youth. Premature adults, lacking cynicism. And that was an important thing, the lack of cynicism. Surely there could be nothing wrong in a humanity like that. Perhaps this was the very coin in which the Sitters paid for the childhood they had stolen. It they had stolen it. For they might not have stolen it; they might merely have captured it and stored it And in such a case, then they had given free this new maturity and this new equality. And they had taken something which would have been lost in any event -- something for which the human race had no use at all, but which was the stuff, of life for the Sitter people. They had taken youth and beauty and they had stored it in the house; they had preserved something that a human could not preserve except in memory. They had caught a fleeting thing and held it and it was there -- the harvest of many years; the house was bulging with it. Lamont Stiles, he wondered, talking in his mind to that man so long ago, so far away, how much did you know? What purpose was in your mind? Perhaps a rebuke to the smugness of the town that had driven you to greatness. Perhaps a hope, maybe a certainty, that no one in Millville could ever say again, as they had said of Lamont Stiles, that this or that boy or girl would amount to nothing. That much, perhaps, but surely not any more than that. Donna had put her hand upon his arm, was tugging at his sleeve. "Come on, Mr. Dean," she urged. "You can't stay standing here." They walked with him to the door and said good night and he went up the street at a little faster gait, it seemed to him, than he ordinarily traveled. But that, he told himself quite seriously, was because now he was just slightly younger than he had been a couple of hours before. he didn't hobble and he wasn't tired at all, but he wouldn't admit it to himself -- for it was a dream, a hope, a seeking after that one never must admit. Until one said it aloud, there was no commitment to the hope, but once the word was spoken, then bitter disappointment lurked behind a tree. He was walking in the wrong direction. He should be heading back for home. It was getting late and he should be in bed. And he mustn't speak the word. He must not breathe the thought. He went up the walk, past the shrub-choked lawn, and he saw that the light still filtered through the drawn drapes. He stopped on the stoop and the thought flashed through his mind: There are Stuffy and myself and old Abe Hawkins. There are a lot of us... The door came open and the Sitter stood there, poised and beautiful and not the least surprised. It was, he thought, almost as if it had been expecting him. And the other two of them, he saw, were sitting by the fireplace. "Won't you please come in?" the Sitter said. "We are so glad you decided to come back. The children all are gone. We can have a cozy chat." He came in and sat down in the chair again and perched the hat carefully on one knee. Once again the children were running in the room and there was the sense of timelessness and the sound of laughter. He sat and nodded, thinking, while the Sitters waited. It was hard, he thought Hard to make the words come right He felt again as he had felt many years ago, when the teacher had called upon him to recite in the second grade. They were waiting, but they were patient; they would give him time. He had to say it right. He must make them understand. He couldn't blurt it out. It must be made to sound natural, and logical as well. And how, he asked himself, could he make it logical? There was nothing logical at all in men as old as he and Stuffy needing baby-sitters. Garth and the visitor If you could ask them, you might be greatly surprised -- some tabus very urgently want to be broken I A lthough as brash as any other ace newspaper reporter for a high school weekly -- and there is no one brasher -- Garth was scared. His head crest lifted spasmodically and the rudimentary webbing between his fingers twitched. To answer a dare, Garth was about to attempt something that had never been dared before: a newspaper interview with The Visitor. There had been questions enough asked and answered during the thousands of years The Visitor had sat in his egg-shaped palace on the mountaintop, but no interviews. It was shocking even to think about -- something like requesting a gossippy chat with God. Of course, nobody believed the fable any longer that The Visitor would vanish if he was ever asked a personal question -- and that he would first destroy the man who asked. It was known, or at least suspected, that the Palace was merely a mile-long spaceship. Garth, as tradition required, climbed the seven-mile-long rockhewn path to the Palace on foot. He paused for a moment on the broad platform at the top of the pyramid to catch his breath and let the beating of his heart slow to normal after his long climb before he entered The Palace. He sighed deeply. The sufferings a reporter story or take a dare! "Well, come in if you're going to," said an impatient voice. "Don't just stand there and pant." "Yes, my Lord Visitor," Garth managed to say. He climbed the short ladder, passed through the two sets of doors and entered a small room to kneel, with downcast eyes, before the ancient figure huddled in the wheelchair. T'HE Visitor looked at the kneeling figure for a moment without speaking. The boy looked very much like a human, in spite of such superficial differences as crest and tail. In fact, as a smoothskinned thinking biped, with a well-developed moral sense, he fit The Visitor's definition of a human. It wasn't just the loneliness of seven thousand years of isolation, either. When he had first analyzed these people, just after that disastrous forced landing so long ago, he had classified them as human. Not homo sapiens, of course, but human all the same. "Okay," he said, somewhat querulously. "Get up, get up. You've got some questions for me, I hope? I don't get many people up here asking questions any more. Mostly I'm all alone except for the ceremonial visits." He paused. "Well, speak up, young man. Have you got something to ask me?" Garth scrambled to his feet "Yes, my Lord Visitor," he said. "I have several questions." The Visitor chuckled reedily. "You may find the answers just a little bit hard to understand." Garth smiled, some of his fear vanishing. The Visitor sounded a little like his senile grandfather, back home. "That is why you are asked so few questions these days, my Lord," he said. "Our scientists have about as much trouble figuring out what your answers mean as they do in solving the problems without consulting you at all." "Of course." The head of The Visitor bobbed affirmatively several times as he propelled his wheelchair a few inches forward. "If I gave you the answers to all your problems for you, so you could figure them out too easily, you'd never be developing your own thinking powers. But I've never failed to answer any questions you asked. Now have I? And accurately, too." The thin voice rang with pride. "You've never stumped me yet, and you never will ." "No, my Lord," answered Garth. "So perhaps you'll answer my questions, too, even though they're a little different from the kind you're accustomed to. I'm a newspaper reporter, and I want to verify some of our traditions about you." A S The Visitor remained silent, Garth paused and looked around him at the small, bare, naked-walled room. "This is a spaceship, isn't it?" The huddled figure in the wheelchair cackled in a brief laugh. "I've been hoping that somebody would get up enough nerve someday to ask that kind of question," it said. "Yep, this is a spaceship. And a darned big one." "How did you happen to land on this planet?" "Had an accident. Didn't want to land here, but there wasn't any choice. Made a mighty good landing, considering everything. It was a little rough, though, in spots." "How many people were there in the ship, in addition to yourself?" The Visitor's voice turned suddenly soft. "There were three thousand, nine hundred and forty-eight passengers and twenty-seven in the crew when the accident happened." "My Lord," asked Garth, "did any survive, aside from you?" The Visitor was silent for many minutes, and his answer, when he spoke, was a faint whisper, filled with the anguish of seven thousand years. "Not one survived. Not one. They were all dead, most of them, long before the ship touched ground, in spite of everything I could do. I was as gentle as I could be, but we touched a hundred g a couple of times on on the way down. Flesh and blood just weren't made to take shocks like that. I did all I could." "You were the pilot, then? You landed the ship?" asked Garth. "I landed the ship," said The Visitor. "If I may ask, my Lord, how did you manage to survive when all the others died?" "It's a question I've asked myself many times, sitting here on this mountaintop these seven thousands of your years. I was just enough tougher, that's all. Built to take it, you might say, and I had a job to do. But I was badly hurt in the landing. Mighty badly hurt." "You were always in a wheelchair, then? Even before -- " "Even before I got so old?" Thin parchment-white hands lifted slowly to rub a thin parchmentwhite face. "Things were always pretty much as you see them now. I looked about the same to your ancestors as I do to you. Your ancestors didn't think anybody could be smart unless they were old. Of course, that's all changed now." He paused and nodded twice. "Oh, I've managed to fix myself up a good deal; I'm not in nearly as bad shape as I was at first, but that's all inside. I'm in pretty good condition now, for having been stuck here seven thousand years." The cackling laugh sounded briefly in the small room. "Could you tell me how it all happened?" asked Garth curiously. "Be glad to. It's a pleasure to have a human to shoot the bull with. Sit down and make yourself comfortable and have a bite to eat." saw that a table and chair had appeared in the otherwise unfurnished room. "The chair was made for people built just a little different than you," said The Visitor. "You may have to turn it back-to-front and straddle it to keep your tail out of the way. The food on the table's good, though, and so's the drink. Have a snack while I talk." "Thank you, my Lord," said Garth, lifting his long tail with its paddlelike tip out of the way and sitting down carefully. "Comfortable?" asked The Visitor. "Well, then. I was on a routine flight from old Earth to a star you've never heard of, a good many light-years from here. We had pulled away from TransLunar Station on ion drive and headed for deep space. They trusted me, all those men and women, both passengers and crew. They knew that I was careful and accurate. I'd made a thousand flights and had never had any trouble. "In six hours of flight, we were clear enough from all planetary masses and my velocity vector was right on the nose, so I shifted over into hyper-space. You won't ever see hyper-space, my boy, and your kids and their kids won't see it for another two hundred years or more, but it's the most beautiful sight in the Universe. It never grows old, never grows tiresome." His thin voice faded away for a few moments. "It's a sight I haven't seen for seven thousand years, boy," he said softly, "and the lack of it has been a deep hurt for 'every minute of all that time. I wish I could tell you what it's like, but that can't be done. You will never know that beauty." He was silent again, for long minutes. "The long, lazy, lovely days of subjective time passed," he said finally, "while we slid light-years away from Earth. Everything worked smoothly, the way it always did, until suddenly, somehow, the near-impossible happened. My hydrogen fusion power sphere started to oscillate critically and wouldn't damp. I had only seconds of time in which to work. "In the few seconds before the sphere would have blown, turning all of us into a fine grade of face powder, I had to find a star with a planet that would support human life, bring the ship down out of hyper-space with velocity matched closely enough so that I could land on the planet, and jettison the sphere that was going wild. "Even while I did it, I knew that it wasn't good enough. But there was no more time. The accelerations were terrific and all my people died. I managed to save myself, and I barely managed that. I did all that could be done, but it just wasn't enough. I circled your sun for many years before I could make enough repairs to work the auxiliary drive. Then I landed here on this mountaintop. I've been here ever since. "It has been a lonely time," he added wistfully. all the vastness of that understatement, and failed. He could not begin to comprehend the meaning of seven thousand years of separation from his own kind. The Visitor's high-pitched voice continued for several minutes, explaining how Garth's ancestors of several thousand years beforenaked and primitive, barbarous, with almost no culture of their own -- had made contact with The Visitor from space, and had been gently lifted over the millenia toward higher and higher levels of civilization. Garth had trouble keeping his attention on the words. His mind kept reverting to the thought of one badly injured survivor, alone on a spaceship with a thousand corpses, light-years from home and friends, still struggling to stay alive. Struggling so successfully that he had lived on for thousands of years after the disaster that had killed all the others. At last, after waiting for Garth's comment, The Visitor cleared his throat querulously. "I asked you if you'd like for me to show you around the ship," he repeated somewhat testily. "Oh, yes, my Lord," said Garth quickly, jumping to his feet. "It's an honor I've never heard of your giving to anyone before." "That's true enough," answered The Visitor. "But then no one ever asked me about myself before. Now just follow me, stick close, and don't touch anything." The wheelchair rolled slowly toward a blank wall, and an invisible door snicked open just before it arrived. "Come along," quavered The Visitor. "Step lively." Garth leaped forward and just managed to pull his tail through the doorway as the door slid shut again. Garth dropped his jaw in amazement. He stood in a long corridor that seemed to stretch to infinity in both directions. The light was bright, the walls featureless. The floor was smooth and unmarred. While Garth glanced unhappily behind himself to notice that there was no sign of the doorway through which he had entered, The Visitor's wheelchair buzzed swiftly into the distance toward the left. Garth was startled into action by a high-pitched voice beside him that said, "Well, get a move on! Do you think I want to wait for you all day?" the wheelchair, he noticed that The Visitor had stopped and was apparently chuckling to himself. He was hunched over, his shoulders were shaking, and his toothless mouth was split in what might have been intended for a grin. "Fooled you that time, youngster," he laughed as Garth drew up beside him. "Got speakers all over this ship. Now just duck through this door here and tell me what you think of what you see." A small door slid open and Garth followed the wheelchair through. At first he thought he had stepped through a teleportation system. He appeared to be out of doors, but not on Wrom. A cool breeze blew on his face from the ocean, which stretched mistily to a far horizon. He was standing on a sandy beach and waves rolled up to within a few yards of his feet. The beach appeared to be about five hundred yards long, carved out of a rocky seacoast; great rocks jutting into the ocean terminated it to left and right. "Well, boy?" asked The Visitor. "It's amazing. Your voice even has that flat tone voices get in the open. I suppose it's some sort of three-dimensional projection of a scene back on Earth? It sure looks real. I wonder how big this room really is and how far away the screen is." Garth stuck out his hand and walked down toward the water. A large wave caught him, tripped him and rolled him out to sea. Sculling with his tail, he soon swam back to shallow water and climbed back to the dry sand, puffing and coughing. "You might have drowned me!" Garth shouted disrespectfully. "Are you trying to kill me?" The Visitor waved weakly until he recovered his breath. "That was funnier than anything I've seen in years," he wheezed, "watching you groping for a screen. That screen is a quarter of a mile away, and it's all real water in between. It's our reservoir and our basic fuel supply and a public beach for entertainment, all rolled into one." "But I might have drowned! No one on Wrom except a few small fish knows how to swim," protested Garth. "No danger. Your ancestors came out of the water relatively recently, even if the seas are gone now. You've got a well-developed swimming reflex along with a flat tail and webbed feet and hands. Besides, I told you not to touch anything. You stick close to me and you won't get into trouble." "Yes, sir. I'll remember." "There used to be hundreds of people on that beach, and now look at it." "I don't see anything alive." "There are still plenty of fish. Most of them did all right, even through the crash. Come along now. There's more to see." and Garth stepped back into the corridor. He trotted beside The Visitor for several minutes, and then another door popped open. It led to a ramp. Garth climbed it to find himself again in wonderland. He was standing in the middle of a village. There were houses, trees, schools, sidewalks and lawns. Somehow the general perspective was wrong. It made Garth's eyes water a little, looking at it. "Actually, this living level ran all the way around the ship," said The Visitor. "When I stopped spin -- artificial gravity, you know -- to set down here, the various sections swung to keep 'down' pointed right. This is the bottommost thirty-degree arc. It makes two streets, with houses on both sides of them -- a strip three hundred feet wide and three-quarters of a mile long." "But how could you afford so much space for passengers? I thought they'd be all cramped up in a spaceship." The Visitor chuckled. "Use your eyes, boy! You've seen this ship. It's about a mile long and a third of a mile high. In space, she spins about her long axis. One ring, fifty feet high, takes care of passengers' quarters. Another ring, split up into several levels, takes care of all food and air-replenishment needs. These trips take a year or more. Crowding would drive the people crazy. Remember, this is basically a cargo ship. Less than a quarter of the available space is used for passengers. But come on down the street here. I want to show you my museum." As they walked along the quiet street, with the leaves of trees moving in the breeze and leaving sundappled shadows on the sidewalk. Garth realized what a tremendous task it must have been for one crippled man to repair landing damages. The houses must have been flattened and the trees shattered during the landing. But with thousands of years in which to work, even an injured man obviously could do much. At least, thought the boy compassionately, it must have given the old man something to do. "How sorry he must have been," murmured Garth with sudden insight, "when the job was finally done." museum, they came at last to a room filled with small hand tools. "I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like them," said Garth. "Those are weapons," answered The Visitor. "They are missilethrowing short-range weapons, and they are in tip-top working order. You just have to point the end with the hole in it at anything you want to kill, and pull that little lever there on the bottom. And quite a mess of things they can make, too, let me tell you." "They seem very inefficient to me," said Garth wonder ingly, and then stopped in confusion. "I beg your pardon, my Lord," he said, "I didn't mean to criticize anything; it just seems to me that they would damage a lot of the food they killed." "That's true enough, my boy, true enough," said The Visitor. "Your criticism has a lot of point to it. But, you see, they were never designed mainly to kill for food, but to make it easy for one human to shoot another." "Why would anyone want to do that?" "Your civilization is a very unusual one," answered The Visitor. "It is planetwide and has developed without a single war or major conflict. This is due entirely to the fact that I've been here to help and teach you. Most civilizations develop only as the result of struggle and bloodshed, with peoyour people to the technological level where they are now in a few hundred years, if I hadn't worried it has been done -- so that you can't imagine why one human should kill another -- has taken most of the time. "It is only recently, as a matter of fact, that my work has been complete. Your civilization can now stand alone; my help is no longer necessary. It's gotten to the point now where my continued hanging around here is likely to do harm, if I'm not mighty careful. In all...your problems, you'll always feel that you've got me to fall back on if you get into trouble, and that's not good." "What do you plan to do, then?" "There's not rriuch I can do by myself. I long for my own destruction more than anything else, except maybe to go back home to Earth. I'm lonely and tired and old. But I can't die and I can't destroy myself any more than you could turn one of those weapons against your own head and pull the trigger. We're just not made that way, either one of us." "Can I help you?" asked Garth tentatively. "Yes, I guess you can. You can help me put an end to this endless existence." "I'll be glad to do anything I can. Do your people always live this long?" "They do not. You can take it as a fact that none has ever lived more than a small fraction of the time I have endured on this planet. It's apparently due to a continuation of the environment and all the radical steps I had to take to keep going at all during those early years. It is not good to last this long. Dissolution will be very pleasant." "What must I do?" " Homo Sapiens, which doesn't have the tradition and training I gave your people, is still a warlike race," The Visitor said. "This ship is crowded with a complete set of automatic defenses that I can't deactivate. You are now a stable enough people so that I can tell you how to build the weapons to destroy this ship and can teach you how to get around my defenses without being afraid that I have turned you loose with a bunch of deadly ways that you'll use to destroy yourselves with. Then, if you do your work well, I will finally have rest." "You sound very much like my grandfather," said Garth slowly. "He is very old -- almost a hundred years -- and he is ready to die. He is perfectly content to wait, because he knows his time will come soon. He says that soon he will go home. It is a phrase, my Lord, that I believe you taught us. I will try to help you -- " "All right, all right!" The Visitor cut in' impatiently. "Stop the chatter and let me be on my way. I've earned it!" "My Lord, I send you home!" Garth took a gun from the rack and pulled the trigger. The explosive bullet erupted noisily, completely disintegrating the huddled form and the wheelchair. With the echo of the explosion, strong steel fingers grasped Garth's arms, holding him immovable. He felt himself being carried swiftly back toward the entrance of the ship. "The damage to that communication unit is unimportant," said The Visitor. "I have strength and desire and deep longings, but I cannot exercise my will without an order from a human. My work is done here, and your order has freed me. Many thanks and good-by." Garth, from the foot of the pyramid, watched The Visitor lift his mile-long body on powerful jets and head thankfully for home. ter of #-#, the major newspapers of all countries carried a report saying that one of the most interesting islands of the Pacific Ocean had disappeared. A ship, cruising some # miles off the coast of Chile in bad weather, had tried to make port at Easter Island, which, the chart said, was located under # #' Fig. #: Location of Easter Island. A and S on South American mainland indicate the locations of Antofagasta and Santiago southern latitude and # #' western longitude. The navigator of the vessel determined her position as well as he could under the circumstances and found that Easter Island should be only a few miles astern. It even seemed as if the vessel had just sailed over the spot where the island had once been. The captain, when informed about this, ordered his ship to zigzag for a while in order to find the island. When this proved fruitless, the dispatch about the disappearance of Easter Island was sent out. Of course it was all a mistake. Neither Easter Island nor any other had disappeared. The ship simply had been several score miles from the place where the navigator thought she was.  J ably know without my telling you, is the Pacific island which has impressed every visitor, since its first discovery, by the large number of strange-looking and sometimes very large carved stone heads. They are often referred to as "statues," but only the smaller ones are statues in that they show O Fig. #: Mop of Easter Island. Dotted lines indicate former tribal boundaries; little cross, where obsidian is found head and torso. The large ones, without any exception that I know of, are just stone heads; their lower portion is usually a fairly long stone "spike" by which to stick it upright into the soil. Easter Island is also the island which -- and this is a little less well known -- at one time possessed a script of some kind. In both respects, it is unique among Pacific islands. It has the further distinction of being one of the most remote of all Pacific islands. Only the tiny Sala-y-Gomez can be called "near." The nearest island large enough to deserve that name is Pitcairn, which is about # miles away (Fig. #). To go back to the mistaken story of its disappearance: most of the newspapers which ran the original dispatch also commissioned anthropologists to write articles about Easter Island for the Sunday edition. Consequently, on the Sunday that followed, one could read a kind of standard article in many different languages. They all bemoaned the loss of this most interesting island. They all agreed that the secret of the "lost script" (twentieth-century Fig. #: One of smaller Easter Island statues, front and back Easter Islanders could not read it special interests of their authors, any more) had been lost anyway, Some told the story of the island's so that the disappearance of the discovery and what little known island made no real difference in history there was. Others explained that respect Most of these articles in detail that the language that also agreed that, if the island had had been spoken by the vanished continued to exist, the mystery of Easter islanders had been a Polythe stone heads might still have nesian dialect which differed from been solved by industrious another Polynesian dialects to an thropologists. extent that indicated a separation The remainder of the articles of several centuries, differed a little according to the After all these articles had been Fig, # : Picture from la Perouse's report, showing statues with "hats" printed and read, a Chilean warship -- Easter Island is a Chilean possession -- reported that it was still there. And just at that time, about two months after the original dispatch, a German monthly magazine ran a long article about the Hidden History of Easter Island. The editors of the magazine must have tom their hair and beards, if any, but the more knowledgeable among the readers were greatly amused. In my files there is a sheet of typewritten notes I made at that time, presumably as a kind of preliminary exercise for e counter article. I don't remember ever writing it, incidentally, but these notes tell me that the author's name was Hanns Fischer. They fail to mention the name of the magazine, but they contain enough quotations so that I can give a condensed version of it. THE author began with the normal expression of regrets that the island (Fig. #) had sunk beneath the waves, saying that it had finally come to share the fate of the large arid flattish "underland" of which it originally was the highest mountain and evidently a sacred place of worship. He continued with the statement Fig. #: Large stone head with deformed ears that this "underland" disappeared # years ago, simultaneously with the destruction of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean. The reason why both disappeared was also known : prior to that time, the Earth had been without a moon, but # years ago our present moon, which up to that moment had been an independent planet between Earth and Mars, had been captured by the Earth. This capture had the result that the evenly distributed oceans of the Earth were gathered around the equator in a "flood bulge" which drowned all low-lying equatorial land. At this point, it must have occurred to him that somebody might ask why he was so sure that the island had once been surrounded by such an "underland." Couldn't it have simply been an island all along? Oh, no, he declared, the former existence of this underland was established beyond the faintest doubt by a multitude of proofs. To begin with, the name Easter Island is, of course, the name used by the white man; the natives have a name of their own. It is Rapanui and this is a most significant name, for in translation it means "greater Rapa." This ancient name could not possibly have been given to the comparatively small island discovered by white sailors. In the second place, the stone statues, carved from a kind of stone that blunts the best modem steel knives in a matter of seconds, could have been produced only by an enormous labor force. The island we knew, however, could feed only a few hundred people. Nor could they have been reinforced by other islanders, because the nearest inhabited island is # miles away. Moreover, there are a number of "procession ways" which are very clearly visible even to the untrained eye and which now lose themselves into the sea where their continuation on the bottom can be seen for some distance. A large number of scepters have been found on the island, enough to account for more than # generations of kings. All these scepters are ornamented with pieces of the volcanic glass, obsidian, which cannot be found on the island. As for the unreadable script, one thing is certain: it cannot have originated on the island, for among its pictograms are pictures of snakes, which do not occur on Easter Island. This is not the only occasion on which I have seen a similar amount of mental cobwebs spread so thickly over such a small place. But it is a rare occasion and it simply is fun to pick them up one by one in order to look at the real facts underneath. T ET us begin with the statement which must be made at some time, that Easter Island has an area of about # square miles, that its roughly triangular shape is determined by (inactive) volcanoes, and that the island as a whole is of volcanic origin. At a distance of # miles from the shore, the depth of the ocean is # miles, while at a distance of # miles from the shore, the depth is just about # miles. This is not the picture of a former mountain on drowned flatFig. # : One of the "talking boards" tish land; it is the typical picture of a volcanic island in deep water, like the Galapagos Islands. As regards the capture of a former independent planet to become our moon, causing a "flood bulge" as a result, there are a few minor facts in the way. The laws of celestial mechanics are not only quite clear, they are also known to work, and they state that such a capture simply cannot take place. If a large and a small planet should approach each other closely, the large one will throw the small one into another orbit, but it would be another orbit around the Sun. It would not result in capture. If it did, it would not drown much equatorial land. The actual flood bulge produced by our moon in the open ocean is just about one yard high; the much higher floods that can be observed near some shores owe their existence to a funneling action of the shoreline. Proceeding to the other "proofs" for the former "underland," things can be stated quickly. The name Rapa-nui is not ancient at all; it was bestowed by a visitor from another island, Rapa, which on nautical charts appear under the name Oparo. It does mean "greater Rapa" or else "Rapa the Great" simply because Easter Island is larger than Oparo. As for the stone heads (Fig. #) they were carved from rather soft volcanic rock; though it may take the sharp edge off a steel knife Fig. #: A "bird man" from Orongo fairly quickly, it is easy to work. As a matter of fact, the stone is so soft that the good state of preservation of the heads proves that they cannot be old. Easter Island does not have the most balmy of weather: rains are frequent and violent, and strong winds no rarity. But the heads are not weathered much. Though the present population is only a few hundred people (fluctuating between # and #), the island supported about ten times that number when it was discovered. The "procession ways" just do not exist. What Mr. Fischer called "scepters" is something I do not know, but there is an obsidian mine in the southern part of the island. And while the script may have been brought to the islands when its original Polynesian settlers arrived about # A.D., its origin elsewhere is not proved by the "snake." The point is that the snake is really an eel, and there are eels in the seas right around Easter Island. After this clean-up, we can proceed to the true history. 'T'HE first European to have seen Easter Island may have been the English captain Edward Davis in #. He wrote that he passed a small island and sometime afterward saw land in the distance. In Davis' time, the old geographical myth of the Great Unknown Southland, called Terra australis incognita, was still not completely disproved and the land sighted by Davis was entered as Davisland on maps and charts, suspected to be a northern promontory of Terra australis. At a later date, geographers concluded that the small island may have been Sala-y-Gomez and the "distant land" Easter Island. But not all experts agree on this. The determination of position on the high seas was uncertain enough in those days so that Davis may have been far from the scene. In fact the reason for taking the land reported by Davis to be Easter Island is largely the isolated position of the latter. The recognized discovery was made by the Dutch admiral Jaakob Rogge ween in #. His companion, a German by the name of Karl Friedrich Behrens, put the following down in his journal: "We sailed until we finally found an insula on the sixth of April which was Easter Day which made us rejoice because the island showed itself on the day of the triumphant resurrection of our Lord; we immediately named it Paasch Ijland (the Dutch name) or Easter Island, about eight (German) miles in circumference. Our African galley had sailed up close to the land and reported that the place seemed to be fruitful and was necessarily inhabited since one could see smoke rising here and there... n It was Admiral Roggeween and his crews which carried back to Europe the tale of an island peopled by brown-skinned men and by stone giants staring with empty eye sockets across the sea. As for the natives, they were friendly enough, but they also lacked any European concepts of ethics. To be specific, they stole things, most especially hats. The hat stealing was also emphasized by the explorers who came later, and at a still later date, there has been a learned explanation that the natives needed the hats as sunshades on an island without trees. This, it seems to me, is a bit forced. If they could get along without hats for centuries, they probably could have gone on without hats. Or if they needed hats so badly, they would have invented them themselves; it is not a difficult invention to make. The truth is probably that they found the European hats so irresistibly funny that they had to have some, if only as proof to others that the visitors from the big ships had actually worn such things on their heads.  geween were all famous names: the Englishman Captain James Cook (who was the one who finally disproved the existence of the Great Southland), the Frenchman La Perouse, the German Otto von Kotzebue (sailing for the Czar of all the Russias), the EnglishSome of these explorers had the good sense to take artists along on their trips in addition to the usual chroniclers. La Perouse was one of them. His artist got to Easter Island in time to sketch statues which differed from others in wearing "hats" (Fig. #). They were all located near the shore. That the stone cylinders on the heads of the statues were called "hats" was probably due to the natives' fondness for making off with visitors' hats. It seems that the "hats" were meant to represent hair. The stone of the figures is grayish; the stone of the "hats" is reddish, and it came from a different part of the island. At the time of Roggeween's visit, all the statues seem to have been standing; only a century later, most of them had fallen. At first an earthquake was blamed for this, but in a number of cases, marks could be found that indicated that the statues were toppled on purpose by somebody. At one point during this century, the work of making additional statues ceased. The flank of the dead volcano where the statues were made has been dubbed "Sculptor's Mountain" -- well, on Sculptor's Mountain, one can find more than # unfinished statues and heads in literally every degree of progress, from some where the merest outline has been cut into the stone, to others which to all intents and purposes are finished, except that there is still an uncut connection between the back of the statue and the mountain. Because of the finds on "Sculptor's Mountain," we not only can follow the making of a statue step by step, we also know what tools have been used, for the tools are there too. Or were, until collectors carried them off. The impression received by the explorers is that one night, after sunset, the sculptors put down their tools to go home to supper and did not return the next day. Why they did not return is the real mystery of Easter Island. If the statues were as old as some cultists would have us believe, one could think of a natural catastrophe or possibly a massive invasion of other tribes which kept every man busy fighting (Fig. #). But since this interruption of the work must have taken place after Roggeween's visit, both these explanations won't work. If there had been a major natural catastrophe that recently, some direct traces of it should be found. And nothing is known about massive Polynesian migrations at such a late date. The only answer one can think of is tribal war on a large scale. We now know that cannibalism was rampant on Easter Island and that the biggest insult was to say to somebody, "Your brother's flesh stuck between my teeth." It an important person -- in order to eat him -- touched off more than the customary family vendetta, causing a tribal war. Of course nobody would work under such circumstances, and if the conflict lasted long, the survivors, weary but still plotting various revenges, counter-revenges and crossrevenges, would not resume it. TF only Easter Island had been left alone after this, we might get a full story from traditions, presumably telling about the great conflict in which the tribes cut each others' throats and toppled each others' statues. But in #, something else happened which interrupted the traditions and reduced the island's manpower so greatly that no resumption of the work was possible. Peruvian slavers raided the island, kidnapped the ruler, all the men of the important families and the priests, along with nearly a thousand "commoners," and carried them off to Peruvian guano islands as slave labor. Most of the Easter Islanders died in slavery, but finally the survivors were freed by a French ship, which brought them back to their home. These survivors, however, brought smallpox and tuberculosis with them, two diseases to which Easter Islanders had never been exposed before and against which they had no immunity whatever. Therefore, there is no reliable tradition, for just the kinds of people who would have kept the tradition -- the patricians and the priests, to use western terms, even if they do not fit precisely -- had been directly or indirectly killed off. It is said that the number of Easter Islanders on the island itself was only # in #. While the big stone heads of Easter Island were seen by the very first visitors, it was not until after the catastrophe caused by the Peruvian slavers that the script of Easter Island became known, in about # (Fig. # and #). It was written on wooden boards in a manner which to us looks exceedingly strange. Every second line stands on its head. There is a technical term for this kind of writing -- it is called boustrophedon writing. The word is compounded of Greek words meaning "cattle" and "turn around," the idea being that you write on a sheet in the manner of plowing a field; at the completion of the line, you turn around and start the next one. When applied to writing, the purpose is probably to avoid jumping a line in reading. The history of the wooden Easter Island tablets is sad all the way through. By the time they were discovered, they had long ceased to have meaning to the natives, who hence had used them as boards, wood being scarce on Easter Island. Then an overzealous French missionary to whom they were relics of heathen times (actually the heathen times were still all around him) is said to have had many of them burned. Some writers have said that it was a wholesale destruction, but this hardly jibes with the known facts about the man's behavior. If he did burn any, which is possible, it was probably the ceremonial burning of a few of them. A number of the tablets escaped both the symbolic condemnation and the utilitarian attitude of the remaining natives. "WF course the anthropologists " who saw the tablets wanted to read them. The last known actual use of the Easter Island script, other than ceremonial recitations, had been the signatures of the chiefs on a treaty with Spain in #. Now it was more than a century later and there was nobody on the island who claimed to be able to read them. And the first attempt at deciphering them was made elsewhere, not on Easter Island. In #, some # Easter Islanders had, led by missionaries, left their island and moved to Tahiti. The bishop of Tahiti learned that one of the men, Metoro Taou-auo-re, could still read the script. The bishop asked the man to come to him and gave him some tablets to read. At first, things seemed to go wonderfully easy. Metoro recited the tablets in a singsong fashion. The bishop wrote the words down as the islander recited them and could see that certain signs went with certain groups of signs. After the recitation was over, the bishop asked the meaning of each symbol, which Metoro Taou-aou-re gladly supplied. The long session ended happily with a list of # words and terms. Anybody who memorized this dictionary would, from now on, be able to read any of the tables. Well, in a way, one could. A man who had memorized the dictionary could speak out the words on the "talking board." Unfortunately, they made no sense. The words that were spoken in this manner were about the same as if you opened this magazine at any page, reading aloud the last word in each line. They were all fine words (or names), but they did not hang together. The second attempt was made on Easter Island. One old man, Ure Vaeiko, was said to be able to read the tablets, but refused to do so for religious reasons. An American, Paymaster Thomson of the Mohican, pitted himself against the old man's opinions. He used rum as the first persuader and did not ask the old man to read the boards directly. He just handed him pictures of the boards and asserted that there could be no evil spirits in paper. We, used to paper, do not have to accept Thomson's statement, but the old man did. He began to read, or rather to recite, for it soon turned out that he was not reading at all. When a different picture was substituted without his awareness, he just kept going. When this was pointed out to him, he simply said that he did not know the meaning of the symbols, but he knew the boards when he saw them and knew what they contained. What he recited did make sense -- tribal histories -- but no connection with any of the words he spoke and the signs on the boards could be established. Linguists agreed that the Easter Island script probably was not a script as we understand the term. The pupils memorized what their teachers had memorized before them and the boards only assisted their memory. This was not a very cheering or even useful conclusion, but it covered the few known facts. Obviously both Paymaster Thomson and the bishop (Tepano Jaussen was his name) had come too late. ago, a German linguist, Dr. Thomas Barthel, thought of one more possibility. Linguists know only too well how often the deciphering of forgotten ancient scripts has gone wrong. The Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, had been "deciphered" by somebody before Champollion actually deciphered them. It had been a completely wrong approach, giving results that could be expected from a fundamental mistake. Maybe, Dr. Bartel reasoned, Bishop Jaussen's method had not been up to the task. It might help if one could look at the original notes, instead of the printed version. He corresponded with ecclesiastical authorities. Did the original notes still exist? Could they be traced? If so, could he look at them? They could be traced, they existed in a library of church documents near Rome, Dr. Barthel could look at them. Dr. Barthel has reported since then that Bishop Jaussen had not known as much philology as would have been required. Most especially, he seems to have failed to catch Metoro Taou-aou-re when the latter glossed over weaknesses in his own knowledge and indulged in some guesswork. By eliminating what seemed to be wrong, Dr. Barthel reduced the vocabulary, but thinks that what was left is at least reliable. Guessing that the boards contain religious traditions, which are more or less known through other sources. Dr. Barthel went ahead, and feels that he can read and translate the boards. One that he has translated states that the Easter Islanders came from another island, just as their tradition says. The boards gave the name of the island as Rangi Tea. One thing Dr. Barthel (whose work on this won't be out until the middle of #) stresses is that he has translated one-third of all the tablets accessible to him, probably in reproduction, but that not one of them mentions the stone statues. The logical conclusion is that the script originated in the original home, namely Rangi Tea Island, but that the statues came into fashion on Easter Island, where there was soft volcanic rock that could be worked. But what do they mean? Among the many festivals of the Easter Islanders there was the festival, or rite, of the "bird man" which is a symbol often found carved in rock (Fig. #). Deprived of all ceremony and symbolism, the festival can be described as a contest to obtain the first egg of the frigate bird from one of the three tinv bird islets to the south of the main island. This contest was actually rather dangerous, so it is understandable that the winner was a celebrated personality. Because the "bird man" symbol is also carved on some statues, there is a connection between the bird man -- the tangata manu, as the Easter Islanders say -- and the statues. They were made either to celebrate the winner of a given year, or else the festival of that year. Today's natives have forgotten the meaning of the statues too. When asked, they say that the statues are there "for decoration." And essentially they are right. We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! He obstinately wanted no part in achieving the goat of generations -- but the goal with equal obstinacy wanted all of himl T O keep the record straight: Orville Close was first man on the Moon. Harold Ferguson was second. They never talk about it. It started on that October morning when the piece came out in the Parkville News. Harold grumbled that they'd gotten the story all wrong, calling his ship a rocket ship, and treating him like a flagpole sitter or a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. His wife took their sad, thin little girl and went to live with her brother. The city police blocked off Elm Street, letting no one through except the residents. The neighbors were getting up a petition. But Orville refused to become excited. What was going to happen? Why, nothing. Harold would probably crack up completely, but this evening that thing would still be standing there, solid as the Washington Monument. Nevertheless, Orville's wife Polly was going to her sister's, across town. She wasn't going to stay there and be blown up! While she was getting ready, Orville picked up a package by the sink and carried it outside to the alley and dropped it in the garbage can. He up a little, put some stripes runwore his double-breasted fall suit, ning down from the nose, a few He strolled to the boundary fence pieces of chrome around over the and leaned against a post. body... A reporter was taking angle were scattered over Harold's garback porch carrying a thermos den. jug and six loaves of bread. It really does catch the eye, Or"Morning, Harold," said Orville thought. Smarten the ship ville. "Oh -- morning, Orville." Harold flinched. Another reporter had come out of the shed and taken their picture. "What's your name, mister?" the reporter asked Orville. "I'd rather you left me out of this," Orville said. A loaf of bread had broken open and slices were falling out. Harold put down the thermos jug and picked up the slices and stuffed them back into the wrapper. The first reporter came over. "It's got Vitamin D." Harold grinned wretchedly. "Costs two cents more a loaf, but I thought, what the heck -- " "How about a shot of you and the missus saying good-by?" the first reporter said. "Why -- she left me," Harold blurted. He tried to get away, but the reporters hemmed him in. "Was she scared?" the second reporter asked. "Look, boys!" Orville put his hands on the top rail of the fence and climbed across. He was getting his shoes wet in the weeds in Harold's garden, but he didn't care. "The man has work to do. Can't you leave him alone?" TT E picked up the jug and took Harold by the elbow and led him into the shed. There, resting on some concrete blocks on the dirt floor, was the base of the ship. In the semidarkness, it looked harmless enough: like a tank, six or eight feet across, reaching up through a jagged hole in the roof. "Harold, you could make a good thing out of this," Orville said. "All this publicity." Harold was climbing a rickety ladder to the roof. Orville followed. "Mount this thing on a trailer. Take her around to fairs and carnivals." Orville waited on the roof while Harold climbed another ladder to the small oval door in the side of the ship. Harold called down: "You never saw the inside. Want to look around?" "Well..." Orville glanced into his back yard. Polly wasn't ready yet. He climbed up and handed the jug to Harold and stuck his head in. "Huh!" There wasn't much to see. Just a small compartment with some pipes leading from below into the nose. "You got to fix this up," he said. "Some Rube Goldberg contraptions." "The works are all up here." Harold climbed a ladder and disappeared through a hole overhead. "C'mon up, I'd like you to see this!" Orville looked down again into his yard. "It'll take her forever! Polly, I mean. Okay, I guess I got time for a look." He stepped in and climbed until his waist was through the hole. r  HE nose of the ship was dark. Harold was shining an extension lamp around. There were parts of a junked car and some old plumbing fixtures and Orville recognized the wheels of a lawnmower he'd left by the alley for the trash men to pick up. This didn't look like the inside of a spaceship. It looked exactly like a corner in Harold's basement. "Oh, Lord," Orville said. "I call this my scope." Harold was shining the light on a shaving mirror, on a long arm that could be swung and tilted about. "How about that? Pretty neat, huh?" Neat was hardly the word for it. "Look here, Harold! The neighbors are getting an injunction. Why don't you play it smart? Fight it out in the courts. There'll be a lot of publicity -- " "They are?" Harold was hurt. He was shining the lamp in Orville's eyes. "Yeah. Now while you're fighting it out in the courts -- " "Do you call that neighborly?" "They're scared. They're afraid you'll blow the whole neighborhood to pieces." "Well, hell with them!" "While we're on that subject, ain't that my trouble lamp you're holding?" "Yeah. Guess it is. Need it right away?" "Just want you to remember where it came from." "Actually, it'll be no use on the trip. I got her fixed so when I take off, the cord down at the base will come unplugged and -- " "Well, Polly must be ready by now." Orville gave up. Polly was right. Harold was insane. Orville tried to turn on the ladder so that he could climb back down. His foot slipped. He spread his arms to keep from falling through the hole and knocked over the pile of bread. "Watch out!" Harold yelped. Tm all right." Orville felt a slight tingle. "Yes, but you -- " Harold's voice trailed off with dismay. The light in his hand had gone out, but Orville didn't think of what this meant at the time. There was light coming through the door below and Orville climbed down. Dam! He pulled out his handkerchief and tried to brush the dust off his lapels. He'd have to change suits, and that meant changing his socks and tie, and he was supposed to meet those people about that deal on Maplehurst Extension at nine. Well, he'd be late. He leaned out of the door. "Orville!" shouted Harold. "Come back! Don't step out there!" down past the nose of the ship. Orville wondered where it came from. He stuck his foot out. reaching for the ladder. He heard Harold scrambling down from above and he wanted to get away from that madman. He reached farther. Harold grabbed his arm. Then the fog cleared away and Orville swayed dizzily, gaping at where he had almost stepped. They had been going through a cloud. Now he looked down at dazzling clouds in the bright October sun and between them he saw the streets of Parkville, very neat, just like the map hanging in the office. He dropped back inside and lay weakly on the floor. He grabbed one of the pipes and shakily clung to it "What happened?" he stammered. "Hit the main switch." Harold was reaching out for the door handle. He banged the door shut with a concussion that burst inside Orville's head. "We took off." IT was dark in there, at first;  then Orville saw a dim violet light that filled the inside of the ship. He followed Harold up the ladder into the nose of the ship and sank to the floor. Harold was twiddling with some knobs mounted on the dashboard of the junked car. "Boy!" Orville pulled out his handkerchief again and swabbed his forehead. He tried to wipe the grime from his hands. "And I've never even been in an airplane!" "Me either." Harold pounded on the dashboard. A meter didn't seem to be working. "There... guess I can open her up a little." "Hey, wait! Take me back!" Harold moved a knob an eighth of a turn. He switched on the scope and waited for it to warm up. He took off his glasses and wiped them, squinting at Orville with that one bad eye. "Turn it around and take me back!" "But I can't, Orville." Harold put on the glasses and looked into the scope. "It's working!" "I demand it! You've made me late for the office as it is!" "Sure looks different from the map," Harold said. "Must be the East Coast. There's Florida sticking out there." He snapped off the scope and sat opposite Orville. He opened the thermos and poured coffee into the cap. "Been so busy, didn't have my breakfast." He held out the cap to Orville. "I take mine without sugar." Orville shook his head. "Do I understand -- " "Ugh! It's hot!" Harold put down the coffee and rummaged in some brown paper bags. "Should be some glazed doughnuts... Shoot! Bet I left them in the kitchen!" " "You've shown me it'll fly. I believe you. Now I give you one more chance -- take me back!" "But I can't!" Harold protested. "There are laws about this sort of thing, my friend. This is abduction. Kidnapping. You know what the penalty is for that?" "Well, gee, I didn't mean to take you along, Orville. You hit that switch -- " "It's criminal negligence, leaving a switch out there like that where it could be hit by accident!" "Had to put it there so I could reach up from below and work it." Orville balled his fists and stood squarely. Funny -- it was no trouble at all, standing and walking around. If he hadn't seen those clouds, and the landscape sinking away, he'd swear the two of them were still in Harold's back yard. "Do you take me back," he said, "or do I have to break every -- " "But I can't!" Harold grasped his wrist pleadingly. "I got her set up in a sequence. If I tried to change the sequence now, why -- " He shuddered. "I haven't got any idea what might happen!" Orville sat back down. "I'm sorry." The weak way Harold said it made Orville feel worse than ever. "Me! Trapped up here in this thing with you!" Orville said bitterly. "You can't even drive a car! You're just about the worst driver I know!" "I know," Harold admitted. "But this is safer than a car. Besides, out where we're going, there'll be no traffic problem." He gave his inane giggle. "Far as I know, there's no one else at all!" "And the neighborhood back there. Probably all blown to pieces. Polly. The house. My car! I got complete coverage on it, but who ever heard of a car wrecked by a spaceship? When we get back, if my insurance doesn't cover it, I'll sue you!" "There's nothing hurt at all," Harold said. "Unless someone had his hand on the ship when we took off. I'd planned to have 'em stand back." Something was crossing and crisscrossing inside him like two rings tossed back and forth by jugglers. It was not painful, but it was disturbing. Something must be going wrong. He didn't trust Harold's mechanical ability. In the past ten years, Harold had been tion jobs because of blunders, once for leaving the plug out of a crank case, and once for botching up a flat tire repair. "Running kind of rough, isn't she?" Orville said. "What makes this little -- " He circled his hands sickly in front of his stomach. Harold closed his eyes and made similar circles. "Oh, that's this counter-grav of mine. You see, the gravitation of the Earth -- " "Can't you do anything about it?" Orville was in no mood to listen to one of Harold's lectures. "I could move her over so we :ouldn't feel it, but it would be shaking the ship then. Might tear it apart." "Won't it tear us apart?" "I don't think so. We got more give to us than the ship has." Harold was able to drink the coffee now. "No, I don't think I've done a bad job on this. First time a machine is built, you're bound to run into a few bugs. But this is working, so far, even better than I expected." "Yeah," Orville had to admit, "it ain't bad -- for a guy with no mechanical ability whatever." II---up a little more, and according to him, they were now moving eighteen thousand miles per hour or so, approximately. Orville had tried to drink some water from a milk bottle, but the sight of the water, bouncing in rhythm to the invisible circles in his stomach, had given him nausea. Harold knelt on the floor, smoothing out a soiled sheet of paper. In the center was a small circle, labeled in Harold's sloppy handwriting "Earth." An arrow showed the direction of the Earth's motion around the Sun. Outside this was a larger circle labeled "Orbit of Moon." A spiral reached out from the Earth to intersect the Moon's orbit. "Had the darnedest time drawing this," Harold said. "Got it out of an astronomy book. Let's Look at the Stars by someone. Thirtyfive cents. Let's see now." He wet the point of the pencil and made a mark. He scratched his head and erased the mark and made another. "Harold, another thing," said Orville. "I weigh around one ninety-five. Won't that take a lot of extra gas?" "Nope, Doesn't matter if you weigh a ton. According to my counter-grav principle -- " "Won't it get stuffy in here with two of us?" "Why, I have some oxygen. That welding place in back of the garage where I work -- got a tank off them. Had to pay cash, but I can turn in the empty when we get back." "You sure one tank'll be enough?" "Well -- " Harold flushed guiltily. "You won't say anything about this? I took along several extra tanks, just to make sure. I wasn't stealing. You see, I figure I might make some money out of this thing." "Say!" Orville hadn't thought of this angle before. "You really could." "And there should be plenty of food. Let me see now." He fished in his pocket and brought out a piece of brown wrapping paper. "I'll run over the list and make sure I didn't forget something." He glanced up sharply. "Relax! Make yourself to home. And the little boy's room is down there." He squinted at the paper. "Water. There's plenty. Six family-size cans pork and beans. Charged 'em." He ran through the list, mumbling, then looked up brightly. "Yep. Looks all right. Nope, there's one thing I forgot. Stickum plaster! Doggone. 'Never go anywhere without my first aid kit. Never know what's liable to happen." "Y'know, Harold," Orville said, "I'm beginning to see some possibilities in this trip. First man on the Moon. Think of the fuss they made over Lindy and rong-way Corrigan. The guys wljo climbed Mount Everest. Why, that was nothing!" "Course, I'm not doing this for fame. Or money, either." "Then why are you doing it?" Harold stared vaguely toward where the Moon would be if they could see it. "I guess... because it's there." "Huh! Well, don't forget I'm in on it, too." Moon first appeared on the scope, about the size of a basketball, Harold indulged in a mild spree. He opened some pineapple juice. Orville did not feel like drinking any. In fact, he felt ill. "Space sickness," Harold said. "Lot of bread is good for that. Stuff yourself with it. Just thinkback there on Earth, they're going about their business and no one knows that we're out here heading for the Moon. Just think -- if I'd call them on the radio and report making first contact with the Moon -- "Harold, one thing. How're you going to get her down?" "Naval observatory would be the people to call, I guess. They'd notify the President and they'd interrupt the TV programs -- I thought of putting a radio in here, but I'd already gone way over my budget." "How do you plan to land her?" "And wouldn't those guys at the Atomic Energy Commission have red faces! You know, I wrote them, asking to use some of their energy and -- darn these government bureaus! -- they never even had the courtesy to answer my letter!" "Listen -- " "And the birds at the college! When I took that navigation chart to the astronomy department to see if they'd check it for me, they blew up! Acted like I had no business flying to the Moon. Acted like they owned the thing. Bunch of smart-alecs! With their doubletalk! Knew less than I did when I went there." He looked at his watch. "I'm going to have a snack and then ril get some sleep. That's one good thing about having you along. Now I can sleep and not have to worry." As Harold sawed at the top of a can of beans with the can-opener. Orville closed his eyes. Instantly, he saw the ship, heading for the Moon, and then there was a blinding flash. He opened his eyes. Harold was digging into the can with a spoon, munching away. "Just brought one" Harold waved the spoon. "But I'm not poison. Better have some of these beans. They'll stick to your ribs." Orville crawled to the door leading to the other compartment, flung it open and leaned there a while. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. Harold was wiping the spoon on a piece of brown paper. "Last call!" Harold giggled ahd pushed the can to Orville. Orville pushed it away and closed his eyes and sat, holding his middle. When he opened them, Harold was sleeping. Orville crawled over and shook him. "How soon do you want me to wake you up?" Harold sat up. "Oh, my gosh! I forgot! Why, don't let me sleep more than four hours." ville sat back. He could see it Harold, watching the Moon grow bigger and bigger on that scope, until they were right on it, then turning with a surprised look: Oh, my gosh! I forgot something! Then he'd give that giggle and there'd be that crash... Orville's watch said two hours, but he wasn't sure. Maybe he'd slept and the hand had gone clear around. He kept seeing that flash. Some amateur astronomer, looking at the Moon right then, might see it. He'd be a bungler, like Harold, and it wouldn't be much of a telescope. He was always seeing flashes in the thing, from cars or lightning bugs or from the kitchen door, because his wife was there yelling at him, just like Rosie yelling at Harold. For they always married women like Rosie, or they made women turn that way. Polly, now, she nagged all the time, but that was different! Orville drank some water and ate some bread, and when he swallowed, he felt that circular bump-bump grab the bread and chop away at it, just like Polly feeding stale bread into the meat chopper to make stuffing. I have no business being out here, he moaned. Here he was riding to the Moon with a tinkering idiot who couldn't fix a kitchen faucet or locate a blown fuse in the basement Streams of moisture were trickling down the wall. The metal felt cold, like the window of the car on a day when you needed the heater and defroster. Was something going wrong? Maybe they were out of oxygen. He listened to Harold snoring. Once Harold took a quick breath, and strangled, and turned his head restlessly. His glasses were slipping off. Orville looked at his watch. He couldn't believe that just five minutes had gone by since he'd looked at it last. He could hear Harold's two-dollar watch ticking away, almost as loud as his own. His was gaining on Harold's and then' they were ticking together so that the combined pounding sent echoes through the ship. He tried to crawl. He couldn't move. "Harold!" The ticking of the watches drowned out his voice. "We're in trouble! We're out of oxygen! Help!" It was like a bad dream. Then something woke him: Harold, stumbling across his legs, turning on the scope and, waiting, breathing hard, for it to come to life. Harold saw that he was awake. "You went to sleep! You shoulda woke me. It's been six hours!" Orville said nothing. "We may be clear past the Moon by now," Harold grumbled. the wall. He heard the hiss as Harold ran in fresh oxygen. "Shoot! Better go down and hook up a new tank." Harold clanked around in the other end of the ship and came back. "How far out are we?" asked Orville. "Not far. I'm cutting down the speed some." "Uh... how do you plan to take her down?" "That's an interesting point, now. Let's see..." "Wouldn't it be better if we just flew up close, not too close, and then headed for home? Of course, there's that problem back there, too." "Don't you want the beans? I'll eat 'em then." "But I'd feel better crashing on the Earth, somehow, than on the Moon -- " "Who says we're going to crash? There are several ways to set her down. Head first,tail first, but I guess I'll lay her in sideways. It'll be easier to crawl outside." "What?" "Sure." Harold was munching beans. Then he rummaged in the supplies and brought out a jar of peaches. He drank off some of the juice. "Rosie never gets enough sugar in these to suit me." The peaches slid off the spoon. He dug in with his fingers and brought out a slice. "Point of the whole thing. Explore. Look around." He tilted the jar to his mouth and let slices fall into his mouth. "Pick up some samples of rocks and things." "You can get rocks right around home." "But these are different. These weigh only a quarter as much as the rocks on Earth. Or is it a sixth?" "In that case -- " Orville started gathering up empty bags and cans and putting them into a soup carton. "What're you doing?" "Cleaning the place up a little. We can get rid of some of this trash." "Don't throw those out! I paid a deposit on them." Harold pulled out the empty milk bottles and put them back in the case. Ill would be as gentle as laying a baby in its cradle. It wasn't exactly. He said: "There!" "Are we down?" Harold nodded. Orville let go of the railing he'd been hanging onto. Harold unplugged something. The ship went dark and started rolling. It was a slow, drunken roll and as noisy as an oil drum going down the court house steps. There was a final hard blow; then the ship rocked and lay still. Orville sat up. He could hear Harold scrambling about, and then a flashlight came on. "What happened?" "Must have landed on the side of a mountain. Rolled down when I turned off our counter-grav. Shoot!" Harold held up something. "Broke a lens in my glasses. There's another trip to the eyedoctor's." Orville rescued a couple of botthing else seemed to be all right. The ship lay on its side now and Harold was crawling through the hole leading to the other compartment. When Orville got through, Harold was hauling something from the other end of the ship. "What we waiting for?" Orville put his hand on the handle of the outer door. "Last one out is a -- " "Wait a minute! You gotta wear this thing." Harold was laying out a spacesuit. He explained how it worked. He didn't object a great deal when Orville volunteered to go out first. "We can take turns." Harold helped Orville slide his feet into the thing and pull it on. It fitted Orville rather tightly in places. but it seemed to be all right. "Be careful now." Harold squinted at him through the one lens of his glasses. "Don't tear her on a rock or anything. You'd pop like a kid's balloon." "Wait a minute!" Harold paused, holding the helmet. "I can't go through with it," Orville said. "I was planning a mean trick on you. I was going to be the first man." "What difference does that make? We're both in on it together." Harold clapped the helmet down on Orville's shoulders. He tightened some clamps and leaned close and said something which Orville could not hear. Then Orville saw that he wanted to shake hands, so Orville shook his hand. Harold squirmed back through the hole into the nose, waved and shut the door. at the outer door. He turned the valve beside the door, feeling the suit puff out around him, and when the pressure in the compartment was gone, he reached toward the handle. His eyes were watering. He had to use all of his strength to move the handle; then the door popped open, swinging out and down, and he was looking out at the Moon. There was glaring light and a kind of fog. He laid down the flashlight and, groping, found the soap carton in which he'd put the refuse accumulated during the trip, and flung the box into the fog. He looked out again. There was nothing but the glaring white void. "Well, that settles that!" There was no use getting out. On the other hand, how about a souvenir? He stuck a leg out through the opening, which was now about two feet high and four feet wide. By wriggling, he got the other leg out, but he couldn't touch the ground. He reached his left foot a little farther and touched something that rolled slightly, then was solid. That's far enough, he thought; to hell with the souvenir! But the mittens were too clumsy. He couldn't pull himself back in. He lowered himself farther and stood. He shuffled among the loose, rolling stones and reached down and picked one of them up. Harold was right: they weighed a lot less than the rocks on Earth. He cradled the thing in one arm and stood there. Here he was, standing on the Moon! The very first man! He hugged the souvenir to his body. They'd keep it on the coffee table, between those two awful ashtrays Polly had brought back from Niagara Falls, and when anyone asked him what was that funny rock lying there, he'd say -- Orville had been reaching, trying to touch the ship. His hand met nothing... Now keep calm, he thought. Don't get turned around. And don't panic. It can't be far away. He reached out in another direction and took a step, but still his waving hand met nothing. Try this way then... As he turned, his elbow struck the edge of the opening. Maybe he'd been waving his arm through the opening all the time! He tossed in the souvenir. He wriggled in after it. Careful! What did Harold say about tearing the suit? He closed the outer door. As he returned the pressure to the compartment, the suit became limp against him, and Orville was so weak that he sank to the floor. He was still lying there when Harold took off the headpiece. "It's a total flop," Orville told him. "It's been a waste of time. No use going out." row escape he'd had in the fog. Fog on the Moon? This didn't sound right to Harold. He was fooling with the helmet, scratching frost from the inside of the visor. "Couldn't you get the defroster working? This little button right here. I showed you." Orville knew, to his shame and disgust, that he had been looking at his own breath all of that time. Harold now insisted on going out. Orville shined the flashlight around. He was looking for the souvenir, and he found it, near their feet. It was a package carefully wrapped in paper, some of the refuse which he had thrown outside. That figures, he thought bitterly. Well, anyway, I was first man. They can't take that away from me! Harold was gone a long time. The nose of the ship was becoming very cold and the only light came from the luminous dial of Orville's watch. What was Harold doing out there? Maybe he'd snagged his suit and blown up like a soap bubble. How long should Orville wait before giving up? He should have learned how to run the ship, in case of an emergency like this. A distant clank startled him. The ship rolled slightly. Orville reached out a hand in the dark to steady himself and chilled when he realized what he'd put his hand on. It was the starting switch. What was that idiot doing out there? Then Harold was back, breathing hard, squinting through his one good lens. "Boy, what a sight! I'd give anything for a camera!" "Never mind that! Let's go! I'm freezing!" They were off without any trouble and the dim violet light returned and the ice on the compartment walls began to melt When the ship was settled on course, Harold took off the rest of the spacesuit pulled some paper from the glove compartment of the dashboard and began writing. "It's the official report," Harold said presently. "Getting it all down while it's fresh in my mind." "Let's see that!" Orville couldn't read Harold's handwriting. "What's it say?" "You really want to hear it? Well..." Harold cleared his throat modestly and began to read. " 'The Discovery # -- decided to call her the Discovery on account of -- 'the Discovery was lying on her side in the shade, but a blinding light was coming down from some peaks. It nearly blinded me! Boy, what a -- '" Harold squinted over a word -- " 'sight!' " "Wait a minute! You giving me credit?" "What for?" "For being the first man." "Oh, sure. I mention that in here some place." "Just so there's no mistake!" Orville suddenly felt very drowsy. He curled up facing the wall and went to sleep. When he awoke, he saw Harold leaning against the wall, his glasses sliding down, his head nodding. Orville reached over and jerked his foot. "There now," he said. "Old neighbor. You go to sleep. I'll watch her for a while." Harold slept, he opened a jar of Rosie's peaches, drank off the juice and dug in with the spoon. It wasn't really so bad, not shaving or taking a bath, roughing it out here in space! He dug into his coat pocket, found a cigar, but it was crushed. Oh, well. He flung it into the trash. He folded his arms, leaned back his head. They sat at the head of a banquet table, he and Harold. The mayor was there, and the college president, and way down the table was the boss, old Haverstrom, real proud to be in such important company. And the governor was there and -- by gosh! Sitting right next to Orville was the President of the United States! Someone was making a speech -- they were awarding some kind of prize for first man and there was applause and they were waiting for Orville to get up. He stood, waited for applause to die down. "Thank you, friends... all of you... being no speechmaker... but I do want to say right here and now... no more idea of receiving this great honor tonight than of -- flying to the Moon!" That would get a laugh. Then he'd go on and give due credit to Harold, poor old Harold sleeping there, innocent as a baby about such things. Why, the publicity angle alone could take up a man's full time. Guest appearances on TV. Getting signed up as technical adviser in Hollywood. But that was just the beginning. Take the metal in this ship. Harold had made it out of junk from the city dump, melting it in a forge he'd fashioned out of an old oil drum. It had to be cheap and easy to make -- but you could probably use it for almost anything. There was your whole metal industry shot to pieces! This thing he called a scope now. With a big corporation behind it, Lord only knew what it would do to the communications setup. But the big thing was this counter-grav business! There was where you got into the big leagues. If Harold could do this with it, think what General Motors could do! and steamship companies bidding against each other for it. And car manufacturers and freight handlers -- and tugboat owners -- and taxi fleets -- and the armed forces -- Harold was waking up. He rubbed his skimpy whiskers, put on his broken glasses, creaked over to the scope and turned it on. Harold, old boy, Orville thought tenderly, you don't know it yet, but your troubles are all over! "What do you see, Harold?" "The Earth." Orville went over. There was a dark green spot on the scope, bright against deep black. "You sure?" "Almost positive. That's the only thing that size there is right around here." "Well, fine! That calls for a celebration, doesn't it?" "Oh, yes. Forgot that. We can open the tuna." IV fflT'S about time," Orville said, "that we started figuring out a plan." He scraped the bottom of the can. The tuna tasted fine. He took a swig of pineapple juice and passed the can back to Harold. "Yeah, I been thinking about that," said Harold. "I've had more experience in that line than you, so maybe -- " "Do you think mankind is ready for my secret?" "There, you see?" Orville laughed heartily. "Now don't you worry about such things." "But look what they did .with the atomic bomb. And if this ever got loose -- " "Harold!" Orville's laugh was less hearty. "Do you think you could keep this a secret? The minute we land, they'll be all over us. The government can impound this ship, you know." "Won't do them any good. They can tear it all apart and never find out a thing." Hours later, they were still arguing. "If the government had it, they'd build a war machine and then the Russians would steal it -- " "Harold! That's Communist talk!" "Shoot! I'm no Communist!" "You're playing right into thenhands... It went on and on. Then: "Harold -- as your neighbor -- won't you tell me what it is?" "ril try..." Orville sat up, tingling. You take gravity, Harold said. What do we know about it? Was it like a lot of rubber bands, stretching back and forth between everything, or was it a flow, like water? Now if it was a flow, it would have to flow back some way, or else you'd run out, wouldn't you? Then if you hooked onto this counter-flow -- Orville nodded. This wasn't so hard to understand. He felt a little nervous. "Go on, Harold." "I guess it's none of those things." Harold gave his inane giggle. Orville felt cheated. "You call this neighborly? Remember when I drove clear out into the country with a gallon of gas that time when you got stuck?" "I'm trying. You gotta think of it up to that point, then you gotta think the other way. But you can't explain it You just do it" rings from Rosie's fruit jars and moved them back and forth across one another. He tried with three rings, dropped them. "It's no use." "Try harder." Harold shook his head. "I suppose if I wanted to bad enough... But now that we been to the Moon, there's nothing else I want to do." Orville reached for the rings and tried. Suddenly, Harold sprang up. "Oh, my socks!" He turned on the scope and swung it wildly back and forth. "You made me commit a booboo. I think we've shot right. past the Earth!" The scope was getting weak. They could not find the Earth until Harold had reversed course. Then Orville saw it, the edge filling part of the scope. Harold's eyes were watering. He wiped the good lens of his glasses and leaned close. "Can you make out any land?" he asked Orville. "This looks like Indian Lake. I've fished there lots of times." "It would be something bigger. Say, Greenland or South America." This was the first time Orville realized they might not land squarely in Harold's back yard. He began looking intently at the scope. "What's this kidney-bean .ghape?" Harold squinted. "Think that's Australia. Now we're getting somewhere." "But it belongs down here." 'We're coming up on it the other way." "Can't we get closer to home than that?" "I'll not be too particular where it is, just so it's land. The Earth is mostly covered with water." Harold began turning the knobs and muttering. "Let me see now... gotta miss Mount Everest..." At last, he turned off the scope. "It's clear gone. I'm taking her down slow. Will you look outside, Orville?" Orville gulped. But Harold said it was the only way, so he squeezed into the other compartment. There were now about six of the little circles going back and across inside of him. He stood a little to one side and struck the lever of the outer door sharply with the palm of his hand. The door gave a faint "swoosh" and was open about an inch. His ears crackled and there was a dull whispering in his head like the sound in a seashell. He put his face to the door, but saw nothing except the blue sky. "You sure we came to the right place?" he asked worriedly. "Positive... almost," Harold called back. "Are we over land or water?" Orville looked up. There was a brown, black and white landscape. Trees hung down like icicles around a frozen lake. "There's land, but it's upside down." "Just a minute." Harold did something and the trees and land swirled around until they were underneath.  down gently, Orville saw a building with people outside. Or he thought they were people. Harold set the ship down on its side in the snow and Orville stepped out. Then Harold was out beside him, slapping him on the shoulder. "Well, old buddy-buddy! How about that?" "Yeah." Orville spoke with less enthusiasm. "How about that?" He proposed that they get in and ride back to civilization, but Harold said there wasn't enough power left and it couldn't be done. They started walking toward the house Orville had seen. Halfway there, they met four men wearing gray overcoats and furry hats. One carried a rifle, and as Harold ran shouting up to him, the man lifted the rifle and struck Harold across the head, knocking him into the snow and breaking the other lens of his glasses. For a while, Orville wondered if it was the right planet after all. But, he decided, the men were Russian soldiers somewhere in Siberia. Since the men were more interested in looting the ship than guarding the prisoners, it was not hard to slip away and get to a railroad that ran east and west. Even Harold knew which direction to take. Their journey out of Siberia, through Korea and Japan to San Francisco, though more difficult than their trip to the Moon, was not very interesting. Once, on a freighter in mid-Pacific, Harold tried to convince a fellow deckhand that they were on their way back from the Moon. He agreed not to talk of it again. "Looks like Rosie's still gone," Harold said as they slunk up the alley behind Harold's shed. All the leaves had fallen and the place looked forlorn without the spaceship poking up through the roof. "Wonder what they thought," Orville said, "when the ship disappeared, and us with it?" "Nothing, I expect." "If we'd disappeared with a couple of blondes now, the whole world would know about it." was locked. As Orville went around the house, he heard the TV going. Polly sat in the turquoise armchair, sewing on a dress. She put down the sewing and folded her arms. The oration lasted five minutes. He could still hear her upstairs through the noise of the shower. Then, after a visit to the barber's, he went to face old Haverstrom. This lecture was not quite as long, and through it the boss had a trace of a leer, and a certain respect, though he let Orville know these disappearances should not become a habit. Harold did not do so well. His old job was gone and he was a whole week getting another. Rosie did not come back for still another week. It was hard for Orville to believe that a moonstruck fellow like Harold could change his ways, but that was what happened. It was as though that one wild trip had satisfied something inside Harold, for he never fooled with things like that again. He even joined church. As for Orville: some evenings, when he reads of artificial satellites or of trips to the Moon, he feels a sharp rise in blood pressure and he breathes fast. But a glance across the room at Polly in her turquoise chair sewing is enough to make him swallow and squirm back and keep his mouth shut. the eel The punishment had to fit more than just the crime -- it had to suit every world in the Galaxyl H E was intimately and unfavorably known everywhere in the Galaxy, but with special virulence on eight planets in three different solar systems. He was eagerly sought on each; they all wanted to try him and punish him -- in each case, by their own laws and customs. This had been going on for # terrestrial years, which means from minus ten to plus # in some of the others. The only place that didn't want him was Earth, his native planet, where he was too smart to operate -- but, of course, the Galactic Police were looking for him there too, to deliver him to the authorities of the other planets in accordance with the Interplanetary Constitution. For all of those years, The Eel (which was his Earth monicker; elsewhere, he was known by names indicating equally squirmy and slimy life-forms) had been gayly going his way, known under a dozen different aliases, turning up suddenly here, there, everywhere, committing his gigantic depredations, and disappearing as quickly and silently when his latest enterprise had succeeded. He specialized in enormous, unprecedented thefts. It was said that he despised stealing anything under the value most of his thefts were much larger than that He had no recognizable modus operand i, changing his methods with each new crime. He never left a clue. But, in bravado, he signed his name to every job: his monicker flattered him, and after each malefaction the victim -- usually a government agency, a giant corporation, or one of the clan enterprises of the smaller planets -- would receive a message consisting merely of the impudent depiction of a large wriggling eel. They got him at last of course. The Galactic Police, like the prehistoric Royal Canadian Mounted, have the reputation of always catching their man. (Sometimes they don't catch him till he's dead, but they catch him.) It took them # years, and it was a hard job, for The Eel always worked alone and never talked afterward. They did it by the herculean labor of investigating the source of the fortune of every inhabitant of Earth, since all that was known was that The Eel was a terrestrial. Every computer in the Federation worked overtime analyzing the data fed into it. It wasn't entirely a thankless task, for, as a by-product, a lot of embezzlers, tax evaders and lesser robbers were turned up. In the end, it narrowed down to one man who owned more than he could account for having. Even so, they almost lost him, for his takings were cached away under so many pseudonyms that it took several months just to establish that they all belonged to the same person. When that was settled, the police swooped. The Eel surrendered quietly; the one thing he had been surest of was never being apprehended, and he was so dumfounded he was unable to put up any resistance. And then came the still greater question : which of the planets was to have him? right because his theft there had been the largest -- a sum so huge, it could be expressed only by an algebraic index. Artha's argument was that his first recorded crime had been on that planet. Medoris wanted him because its only penalty for any felony is an immediate and rather horrible death, and that would guarantee getting rid of The Eel forever. Ceres put in a claim on the ground that it was the only planet or moon in the Sol System in which he had operated, and since he was a terrestrial, it was a matter for local jurisdiction. Eb pleaded that it was the newest and poorest member of the Galactic Federation, and should have been protected in its inexperience against his thievishness. Ha-Almirath argued that it had earned his custody because it was its Chief Ruler who had suggested to the police the method which had resulted in his arrest. Vavinour countered that it should be the chosen recipient, since the theft there had included desecration of the High Temple. Little Agsk, which was only c probationary Galactic Associate, modestly said that if it were given The Eel, its prompt and exemplary punishment might qualify it for full membership, and it would be grateful for the chance. A special meeting of the Galactic Council had to be called for the sole purpose of deciding who got The Eel. Representatives of all the claimant planets made their representations. Each told in eloquent detail why his planet and his alone was entitled to custody of the archcriminal, and what they would do to him when -- not if -- they got him. After they had all been heard. the councilors went into executive session, with press and public barred. An indiscreet councilor (it was O-Al of Phlagon of Altair, if you want to know) leaked later some of the rather indecorous proceedings. The Earth councilor, he reported, had been granted a voice but no vote, since Earth was not an interested party as to the crime, but only as to the criminal. Every possible system of arbitration had been discussed -- chronological, numerical in respect to the size of the theft, legalistic in respect to whether the culprit would be avails, able to hand on to another victim when the first had got through punishing him. In the welter of claims and counterclaims, one harassed councilor wearily suggested a lottery. Another in desperation recommended handling The Eel a list of prospective punishments on each of the eight planets and observing which one seemed to inspire him with most dread -- which would then be the one selected. One even proposed poisoning him and announcing his sudden collapse and death. The sessions went on day and night; the exhausted councilors separated for brief periods of sleep, then went at it again. A hung jury was unthinkable; something had to be decided. The news outlets of the entire Galaxy were beginning to issue sarcastic editorials about procrastination and coddling criminals, with hints about bribery and corruption, and remarks that perhaps what was needed was a few impeachments and a new general election. So at last, in utter despair, they awarded The Eel to Agsk, as a sort of bonus and incentive. Whichever planet they named, the other seven were going to scream to high heaven, and Agsk was least likely to be able to retaliate against any expressions of indignation. are fairly humanoid beings, primitives from the outer edge of the Galaxy. They were like college freshmen invited to a senior fraternity. This was their Big Chance to Make Good. The Eel, taciturn as ever, was delivered to a delegation of six of them sent to meet him in one of their lumbering spaceships, a low countergrav machine such as Earth had outgrown several millennia before. They were so afraid of losing him that they put a metal belt around him with six chains attached to it, and fastened all six of themselves to him. Once on Agsk, he was placed in a specially made stone pit, surrounded by guards, and fed through the only opening. In preparation for the influx of visitors to the trial, an anticipated greater assembly of off-planeters than little Agsk had ever seen, they evacuated their capital city temporarily, resettling all its citizens except those needed to serve and care for the guests, and remodeled the biggest houses for the accommodation of those who had peculiar space, shape, or other requirements. Never since the Galactic Federation was founded had so many beings, human, humanoid, semihumanoid and non-humanoid, gathered at the same time on any one member-planet. Every newstape, tridimens, audio and all other varieties of information services -- even including the drum amplifiers of Medoris and the ray-variants of Eb -- applied for and were granted a place in the courtroom. This, because no other edifice was large enough, was an immense stone amphitheater usually devoted to rather curious games with animals; since it rains on Agsk only for two specified hours on every one of their days, no roof was needed. At every seat, there was a translatophone, with interpreters ready in plastic cages to translate the Intergalactic in which the trial was conducted into even the clicks and hisses of Jorg and the eye-flashes of Omonro. And in the midst of all this, the cause and purpose of it all, sat the legendary Eel. Seen at last, he was hardly an impressive figure. Time had been going on and The Eel was in his fifties, bald and a trifle paunchy. He was completely ordinary in appearance, a circumstance which had, of course, enabled him to pass unobserved on so many planets; he looked like a salesman or a minor official, and had indeed been so taken by the unnoticing inhabitants of innumerable planets. People had wondered, when word came of some new outrage by this master-thief, if perhaps he had disguised himself as a resident of the scene of each fresh crime, but now it was obvious that this had not been necessary. He had been too clever to pick any planet where visitors from Earth were not a common sight, and he had been too insignificant for anyone to pay attention to him. r T , HE criminal code of Agsk is unique in the Galaxy, though there are rumors of something similar among a legendary extinct tribe on Earth called the Guanches. The high priest is also the chief executive (as well as the minister of education and head of the medical faculty), and he rules jointly with a priestess who also officiates as chief judge. The Agskians have some strange ideas to a terrestrial eye -- for example, suicide is an honor, and anyone of insufficient rank who commits it condemns his immediate family to punishment for his presumption. They are great family people, in general. Also, they never lie, and find it hard to realize that other beings do. Murder, to them, is merely a matter for negotiation between the murderer and the relatives of the victim, provided it is open and without deceit. But grand larceny, since property is the foundation of the family, is punished in a way that shows that the Agskians, though technologically primitive, are psychologically very advanced. They reason that death, because it comes inevitably to all, is the least of misfortunes. Lasting grief, remorse and guilt are the greatest. So they let the thief live and do not even imprison him. Instead, they find out who it is that the criminal most loves. If they do not know who it is, they merely ask him, and since Agskians never lie, he always tells them. Then they seize that person, and kill him or her, slowly and painfully, before the thiefs eyes. And the agreement had been that The Eel was to be tried and punished by the laws and customs of the planet to which he was awarded. The actual trial and conviction of The Eel were almost perfunctory. Without needing to resort to torture, his jailers had been presented, on a platter as it were, with a full confession -- so far as the particular robbery he had committed on Agsk was concerned. There is a provision for defense in the Agskian code, but it was unneeded because The Eel had pleaded guilty. But he knew very well he would not be executed by the Agskians; he would instead be set free (presumably with a broken heart) to be handed over to the next claimant -- and that, the Council had decided, would be Medoris. Since Medoris always kills its criminals, that would end the whole controversy. So the Eel was quite aware that his conviction by Agsk would be only the preliminary to an exquisitely painful and lingering demise at the two-clawed hands of the Medorans. His business was somehow to get out from under. Naturally, the resources of the Galactic Police had been at the full disposal of the officials of Agsk. The files had been opened, and the Agskians had before them The Eel's history back to the day of his birth. He himself had been questioned, encelographed, hypnotized, dormitized, injected, psychographed, subjected to all the means of eliciting information devised by all eight planets -- for the other seven, once their first resentment was over, had reconciled themselves and cooperated wholeheartedly with Agsk. Medoris especially had been of the greatest help. The Medorans could hardly wait. TN the spate of news of the trial that inundated every portion of the Galaxy, there began to be discovered a note of sympathy for this one little creature arrayed against the mightiest powers of the Galaxy. Poor people who wished they had his nerve, and romantic people who dreamed of adventures they would never dare perform, began to say that The Eel wasn't so bad, after all; he became a symbol of the rebellious individual thumbing his nose at entrenched authority. Students of Earth prehistory will recognize such symbols in the mythical Robin Hood and AI Capone. These were the people who were glad to put up when bets began to be made. At first the odds were ten to one against The Eel; then, as time dragged by, they dropped until it was even money. Agsk itself began to be worried. It was one thing to make a big, expensive splurge to impress the Galaxy and to hasten its acceptance into full membership in the Federation, but nobody had expected the show to last more than a few days. If it kept on much longer, Agsk would be bankrupt. For the trial had foundered on one insoluble problem: the only way The Eel could ever be punished by their laws was to kill the person he most loved -- and nobody could discover that he had ever loved anybody. His mother? His father? He had been an undutiful and unaffectionate son, and his parents were long since dead in any case. He had never had a brother, a sister, a wife or a child. No probing could find any woman with whom he had ever been in love. He had never had an intimate friend. He did nothing to help, naturally. He simply sat in his chains and smiled and waited. He was from the court every evening, relieved of his fetters and placed in his pit. It was a much pleasanter existence than being executed inch by inch by the Medorans. For all he cared, the Agskians could go on spending their planetary income until he finally died of old age. The priestess-judge and her coadjutors wore themselves out in discussions far into the night. They lost up to # pounds apiece, which on Agsk, where the average weight of adults is about #, was serious. It began to look as if The Eel's judges would predecease him. Whom did The Eel love? They went into minutiae and subterfuges. He had never had a pet to which he was devoted. He had never even loved a house which could be razed. He could not be said to have loved the immense fortune he had stolen, for he had concealed his wealth and used little of it, and in any event it had all been confiscated and, so far as possible, restored proportionately to those he had robbed. What he had loved most, doubtless, was his prowess in stealing unimaginable sums and getting away with it -- but there is no way Agsk was beginning to wish The Eel had never been caught, or that they had never been awarded the glory of trying him. At last the priestess-judge, in utter despair, took off her judge's robes, put on the cassock and surplice of her sacred calling, and laid the problem before the most unapproachable and august of the gods of Agsk. The trial was suspended while she lay for three days in a trance on the high altar. She emerged weak and tottering, her skin light blue instead of its healthy purple, but her head high and her mouth curved in triumph. At sight of her, renewed excitement surged through the audience. News-gatherers, who had been finding it difficult of late to get anything to report, rushed to their instruments. "Remove the defendant's chains and set him free," the priestessjudge ordered in ringing tones. "The Great God of the Unspeakable Name has revealed to me whom the defendant most loves. As soon as he is freed, seize him and slay him. For the only being he loves is -- himself." There was an instant's silence, and then a roar. The Medorans howled in frustration. But The Eel, still guarded but unchained, stood up and laughed aloud. "Your Great God is a fool!" he said blasphemously. "I deny that I love myself. I care nothing for myself at all." The priestessjudge sighed. "Since this is your sworn denial, it must be true," she said. "So then we cannot kill you. Instead, we grant that you do indeed love no one. Therefore you are a creature so far outside our comprehension that you cannot come under our laws, no matter how you have broken them. We shall notify the Federation that we abandon our jurisdiction and hand you over to our sister-planet which is next in line to judge you." Then all the viewers on tridimens on countless planets saw something that nobody had ever thought to see -- The Eel's armor of self-confidence cracked and terror poured through the gap. He dropped to his knees and cried: "Wait! Wait! I confess that I blasphemed your god, but without realizing that I did!" "You mean," pressed the priestess-judge, "you acknowledge that you yourself are the only being dear to you?" "No, not that, either. Until now, I have never known love. But now it has come upon me like a nova and I must speak the truth." He paused, still on his knees, and looked piteously at the priestessjudge. "Are -- are you bound by your law to -- to believe me and to kill, instead of me, this -- this being I adore?" "We are so bound," she stated. "Then," said The Eel, smiling and confident again, rising to his feet, "before all the Galaxy, I must declare the object of my sudden but everlasting passion. Great lady, it is you!" r T I HE Eel is still in his pit, which has been made most comfortable by his sympathizers, while the Council of the Galactic Federation seeks feverishly and vainly, year after year, to find some legal way out of the impasse. Agsk, however, requests all Federation citizens to submit solutions, the grand prize for a workable answer being a lifetime term as president of the planet. A secondary contest (prize: lifetime ambassadorship to the Galactic Federation) is offered for a legal way around the statute barring criminals (specifically The Eel) from entering the primary contest. # Star Shelf Viking Press, N. Y., # T HE third revision and twelfth printing of this rightfully famous work which first appeared before I took over this column gives me at last the opportunity to comment. The best known of all works in its field, it holds its unique position against all latecomers. Let me put it this way -- the book couldn't have chosen a better author. Ley was in on the very beginnings of German rocketry, a storybook episode that bears strange resemblance to the fantastic early days of American SF fandom. The same blind devotion, utter zeal and ignorance of the facts of life prevailed. But from these comic and sometime tragic early days came Sputnik and its blood relatives. A copiously illustrated, utterly fascinating and authoritative history of its subject from yesterday through tomorrow. Har court, Brace and Co., N. Y., # book is difficult to evaluate from a juvenile viewpoint. At virtually no time is the young hero master of his own destiny. He is carried along by forces beyond his control. Far from a failing to me, but I can't say -- I'm no kid any more. Griffith Gunston, an American youth, is unhappily stationed on San Isadore, a bleak British West Indian island with his ichthyologist father, who is studying a red The scum and the disappearances of crews of sailing vessels a la Marie Celeste are unofficially attributed to the Russians, but the natives credit devils, particularly after an unclassifiable monster is washed up on the beach. In addition, deadly stonefish appearing half a world away from their normal habitat, and octopi suddenly more organized and perceptive, add to the islanders' fears. They come close to rebellion during the establishment of a secret American naval base. Midway through the book, the island is isolated by atomic warfare between East and West. Basic survival becomes paramount. Flood, fallout and earthquake are major enemies. At no time does Miss Norton soften her stark picture of an island in torment and people in travail. That's why I hesitate. Juvenile? Maybe so, but absorbing adult fare, also. Ph.D., and Ralph E. Lapp, Ph.D. Viking Press, N. Y., # that On The Beach, a work of fiction, be made required reading for mankind's policy-makers. The same should hold for this authoritative book, which dispels innumerable illusions that you, I and certainly They have concerning radiation. If anyone can read it with equanimity, then he is either hermit or Hottentot. Subtitled "What it is and how it affects you," the book treats of the obvious, the Aand H-bombs and the less obvious, more insidious, the X-ray and fluoroscope. It tells of the frightful results of the frivolous use of X-rays for depilation in the '#'s, the well-known cases of poisoning in the watchdial factories and the less publicized cases resulting from careless fluoroscopy. It warns of the dangers of the new radioisotopes and ill-advised radiation therapy. In short, Schubert and Lapp have done an eye-opening job. It should reach the right eyes. Bradbury. Doubleday and Co  N. Y., # fantasy, this account of a summer in the life of a twelve-yearold boy can hardly be anything else, as anyone who ever was a twelve-year-old will agree. While there are those who condemn Bradbury for his frequent nostalgic excursions into adolescence, it must be agreed that he knows the wonderful workings of child minds better than most writers since Twain and Tarkington. Douglas Spalding and younger brother Tom are the central figures, but entire episodes are woven about others: Grandpa and the lawn-mower; the death of Greatgrandma; Grandma and her ruleof-thumb cookery. For sheer fantasy, there is jeweler Leo Auffmann's near-tragic invention of the Happiness Machine, and Charlie Woodman's honest to goodness Time Machine. Admirers of Bradbury will welcome this tender volume and even his decriers will find passages of pure evocative magic to soften their flinty hearts. sophical Library, N. Y., # r I I HE average citizen looks upon photography as an instrument of enjoyment of communication, but seldom as a technical tool. However, photography has become so much a part of research that it is impossible to visualize certain sciences without it. Virtually no visual observation is carried out in astronomy except by amateurs. Infra-red, ultra-violet, Xray, spectrographic and microphotography are integral parts of numerous sciences. Jones' book dramatizes the importance of a versatile and immensely important art. ing Press, N. Y., # and for five years lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium. He has revised an earlier book titled The End of the World, material for which he took mainly from the most popular theme of the same name at the planetarium. The present volume is considerably more optimistic, hence the change of title. Various possible finishes to the Earth envisioned are cosmic collisions, death of the Moon, kidnapping of Earth by another sun, a white dwarf star approaching too close, the Sun becoming a nova, and the death of the Sun. However, as you can see by the title, Heuer foresees a long, if not happy, tomorrow for us if we don't do something rash today. Chesley Bonestell's impressively photographic drawings add visual impact. mond Z. Gallun. Simon and Schuster, N. Y., # r T , # oldtimers, Gallun is a con juring name. His "Old Faithful" remains a classic in the field to this day. Unfortunately, he is also capable of turning out an incredibly bad story, as here. His theme is natural human against android, but he has added a new touch. In the event of an individual's destruction, his body can be perfectly reproduced from an original pattern, thus circumventing death. If the pattern is destroyed, he can be reproduced from the memories of family and friends. This makes for interesting plot possibilities, since no man is the same to any two associates but, aside from a brief and unsatisfactorily melodramatic use of this potentially amusing or dramatic device, Gallun employs as dated and artificial a plot as anything from the antediluvian days of SF. The Moon has blown up in an enormous cataclysm as a result of dangerous experiments being conducted there. The only scientist of note to escape is the discoverer of the process of artificial reproduction. An enormous segment of Earth's population is destroyed although most are replaceable due to his discovery. Meanwhile, humanity has reacted with a psychopathic hatred of scientists, so that he is forced into hiding. There are the seeds of a good yarn scattered throughout, but Gallun has done an almost complete job of plowing under the harvest      Grimm fulfills the promise of powerful storytelling drive shown in "Bodyguard," his first Galaxy story. A little something about the plot? Judge for yourself how difficult that would be... the son of an Earthman and an alien female, two races that cannot interbreed, comes to Terra to collect his inheritance... and proves that he is completely and legitimately entitled to it! From then on, the plot gets really tricky! Along with at least one novelet, short stories and our regular features, a huge prehistoric body of water. Not footnotes ftom the past, but headlines of the present, for the "Remnants of the Sarmatian Sea" are very much in evidence right now and urgently need understanding of their yesterday, today and tomorrow. Old Rambling House All the Grahams desired was a home they could call their own...  but what did the home want? O N his last night on Earth, Ted Graham stepped out of a glass-walled telephone booth, ducked to avoid a swooping moth that battered itself in a frenzy against a bare globe above the booth. Ted Graham was a long-necked man with a head of pronounced egg shape topped by prematurely balding sandy hair. Something about his lanky, intense appearance suggested his occupation : cer, tified public accountant He stopped behind his wife, who was studying a newspaper classified page, and frowned. "They said to wait here. They'll come get us. Said the place is hard to find at night." Martha Graham looked up from the newspaper. She was a dollfaced woman, heavily pregnant, a kind of pink prettiness about her. The yellow glow from the light above the booth subdued the redauburn cast of her ponytail hair. "I just have to be in a house when the baby's born," she said. "What'd they sound like?" "I dunno. There was a funny kind of interruption -- like an argument in some foreign language." "Did they sound foreign?" "In a way." He motioned along the night-shrouded line of trailers toward one with two windows glowing amber. "Let's wait inside. These bugs out here are fierce." "Did you tell them which trailer is ours?" "Yes. They didn't sound at all anxious to look at it. That's odd -- them wanting to trade their house for a trailer." "There's nothing odd about it. They've probably just got itchy feet like we did." He appeared not to hear her. "Funniest-sounding language you ever heard when that argument started -- like a squirt of noise." sat down on the green couch that opened into a double bed for company. "They could use a good tax accountant around here," he said. "When I first saw the place, I got that definite feeling. The valley looks prosperous. It's a wonder nobody's opened an office here before." His wife took a straight chair by the counter separating kitchen and living area, folded her hands across her heavy stomach. "I'm just continental tired of wheels going around under me," she said. "I want to sit and stare at the same view for the rest of my life. I don't know how a trailer ever seemed glamorous when -- " "It was the inheritance gave us itchy feet," he said. Tires gritted on gravel outside. Martha Graham straightened. "Could that be them?" "Awful quick, if it is." He went to the door, opened it, stared down at the man who was just raising a hand to knock. "Are you Mr. Graham?" asked the man. "Yes." He found himself staring at the caller. "I'm Clint Rush. You called about the house?" The man moved farther into the light. At first, he'd appeared an old man, fine wrinkle lines in his face, a tired leather look to his skin. But as he moved his head in the light, the wrinkles seemed to dissolve -- and with them, the years lifted from him. "Yes, we called," said Ted Graham. He stood aside. "Do you want to look at the trailer now?" Martha Graham crossed to stand beside her husband. "We've kept it in awfully good shape," she said. "We've never let anything get seriously wrong with it." She sounds too anxious, thought Ted Graham. I wish she'd let me do the talking tor the two of us. "We can come back and look at your trailer tomorrow in daylight," said Rush. "My car's right out here, if you'd like to see our house." Ted Graham hesitated. He felt a nagging worry tug at his mind, tried to fix his attention on what bothered him. "Hadn't we better take our car?" he asked. "We could follow you." "No need," said Rush. 'We're coming back into town tonight anyway. We can drop you off then." Ted Graham nodded. "Be right with you as soon as I lock up." Inside the car, Rush mumbled introductions. His wife was a dark shadow in the front seat, her hair drawn back in a severe bun. Her features suggested gypsy blood. He called her Raimee. Odd name, thought Ted Graham. And he noticed that she, too, gave that strange first impression of age that melted in a shift of light. Mrs. Rush turned her gypsy features toward Martha Graham. "You are going to have a baby?" It came out as an odd, ver'ed statement. Abruptly, the car rolled forward. Martha Graham said, "It's supposed to be born in about two months. We hope it's a boy." Mrs. Rush looked at her husband. "I have changed my mind," she said. Rush spoke without taking his attention from the road. "It is too... He broke off, spoke in a tumble of strange sounds. Ted Graham recognized it as the language he'd heard on the telephone. Mrs. Rush answered in the same tongue, anger showing in the intensity of her voice. Her husband replied, his voice calmer. Presently, Mrs. Rush fell moodily silent. Rush tipped his head toward the rear of the car. "My wife has moments when she does not want to get rid of the old house. It has been with her for many years." Ted Graham said, "Oh." Then: "Are you Spanish?" Rush hesitated. "No. We are Basque." He turned the car down a welllighted avenue that merged into a highway. They turned onto a side road. There followed more turns -- left, right, right. Ted Graham lost track. They hit a jolting bump that made Martha gasp. "I hope that wasn't too rough on you," said Rush. "We're almost there." r I  HE car swung into a lane, its lights picking out the skeleton outlines of trees: peculiar trees -- tall, gaunt, leafless. They added to Ted Graham's feeling of uneasiness. The lane dipped, ended at a low wall of a house -- red brick with clerestory windows beneath overhanging eaves. The effect of the wall and a wide-beamed door they could see to the left was ultramodern. Ted Graham helped his wife out of the car, followed the Rushes to the door. "I thought you told me it was an old house," he said. "It was designed by one of the first modernists," said Rush. He fumbled with an odd curved key. The wide door swung open onto a hallway equally wide, carpeted by a deep pile rug. They could glimpse floor-to-ceiling view windows at the end of the hall, city lights beyond. Martha Graham gasped, entered the hall as though in a trance. Ted Graham followed, heard the door close behind them. "It's so -- so -- so big," exclaimed Martha Graham. "You want to trade this for our trailer?" asked Ted Graham. "It's too inconvenient for us," said Rush. "My work is over the mountains on the coast." He shrugged. "We cannot sell it." Ted Graham looked at him sharply. "Isn't there any money around here?" He had a sudden vision of a tax accountant with no customers. "Plenty of money, but no real estate customers" They entered the living room. Sectional divans lined the walls. Subdued lighting glowed from the corners. Two paintings hung on the opposite walls -- oblongs of odd lines and twists that made Ted Graham dizzy. Warning bells clamored in his mind.  the windows, looked at the lights far away below. "I had no idea we'd climbed that far," she said. "It's like a fairy city." Mrs. Rush emitted a short, nervous laugh. Ted Graham glanced around the room, thought: It the rest ot the house is like this, it's worth fifty or sixty thousand. He thought of the trailer: A good one, but not worth more than seven thousand. Uneasiness was like a neon sign flashing in his mind. "This seems so... " He shook his head. "Would you like to see the rest of the house?" asked Rush. Martha Graham turned from the window. "Oh, yes." Ted Graham shrugged. No harm in looking, he thought. When they returned to the living room, Ted Graham had doubled his previous estimate on the house's value. His brain reeled with the summing of it: a solarium with an entire ceiling covered by sun lamps, an automatic laundry where you dropped soiled clothing down a chute, took it washed and ironed from the other end... "Perhaps you and your wife would like to discuss it in private," said Rush. "We will leave you for a moment." And they were gone before Ted Graham could protest. Martha Graham said, "Ted, I honestly never in my life dreamed -- " "Something's very wrong, honey." "But, Ted -- " "This house is worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more. And they want to trade this -- ' he looked around him -- "for a seven-thousand-dollar trailer?" "Ted, they're foreigners. And if they're so foolish they don't know the value of this place, then why should -- " "I don't like it," he said. Again he looked around the room, recalled the fantastic equipment of the house. "But maybe you're right." He stared out at the city lights. They had a lacelike quality: tall buildings linked by lines of flickering incandescence. Something like a Roman candle shot skyward in the distance. "Okay!" he said. "If they want to trade, let's go push the deal... Abruptly, the house shuddered. The city lights blinked out. A humming sound filled the air. Martha Graham clutched her husband's arm. "Ted! Wha -- what was that?" "I dunno." He turned. "Mr. Rush!" No answer. Only the humming. The door at the end of the room opened. A strange man came through it. He wore a short togalike garment of gray, metallic cloth belted at the waist by something that glittered and shimmered through every color of the spectrum. An aura of coldness and power emanated from him -- a sense of untouchable hauteur. spoke in the same tongue the Rushes had used. Ted Graham said, "I don't understand you, mister." The man put a hand to his flickering belt. Both Ted and Martha Graham felt themselves rooted to the floor, a tingling sensation vibrating along every nerve. Again the strange language rolled from the man's tongue, but now the words were understood. "Who are you?" "My name's Graham. This is my wife. What's going -- " "How did you get here?" "The Rushes -- they wanted to trade us this house for our trailer. They brought us. Now look, we -- " "What is your talent -- your occupation?" "Tax accountant. Say! Why all these -- " "That was to be expected," said the man. "Clever! Oh, excessively clever!" His hand moved again to the belt. "Now be very quiet. This may confuse you momentarily." Colored lights filled both the Grahams' minds. They staggered. "You are qualified," said the man. "You will serve." "Where are we?" demanded Martha Graham. "The coordinates would not be intelligible to you," he said. "I am of the Rojac. It is sufficient for you to know that you are under Rojac sovereignty." ED Graham said, "But -- " "You have, in a way, been kidnapped. And the Raimees have fled to your planet -- an unregistered planet." "I'm afraid," Martha Graham said shakily. "You have nothing to fear," said the man. "You are no longer on the planet of your birth -- nor even in the same galaxy." He glanced at Ted Graham's wrist. "That device on your wrist -- it tells your local time?" "Yes." "That will help in the search. And your sun -- can you describe its atomic cycle?" Ted Graham groped in his mind for his science memories from school, from the Sunday supplements. "I can recall that our galaxy is a spiral like -- " "Most galaxies are spiral." "Is this some kind of a practical joke?" asked Ted Graham. The man smiled, a cold, superior smile. "It is no joke. Now I will make you a proposition." Ted nodded warily. "All right, let's have the stinger." "The people who brought you here were tax collectors we Rojac recruited from a subject planet. They were conditioned to make it impossible for them to leave their job untended. Unfortunately, they were clever enough to realize that if they brought someone else in who could do their job, they were released from their mental bonds. Very clever." "But-" "You may have their job," said the man. "Normally, you would be put to work in the lower echelons, but we believe in meting out justice wherever possible. The Raimees undoubtedly stumbled on your planet by accident and lured you into this position without -- " "How do you know I can do your job?" an aptitude test. You passed. Well, do you accept?" "What about our baby?" Martha Graham worriedly wanted to know. "You will be allowed to keep it until it reaches the age of decision -- about the time it will take the child to reach adult stature." "Then what?" insisted Martha Graham. "The child will take its position in society-according to its ability." "Will we ever see our child after that?" "Possibly." Ted Graham said, "What's the joker in this?" Again the cold, superior smile. "You will receive conditioning similar to that which we gave the Raimees. And we will want to examine your memories to aid us in our search for your planet. It would be good to find a new inhabitable place." "Why did they trap us like this?" asked Martha Graham. "It's lonely work," the man explained. "Your house is actually a type of space conveyance that travels along your collection route -- and there is much travel to the job. And then -- you will not have friends, nor time for much other than work. Our methods are necessarily severe at times." "Travel?" Martha Graham repeated in dismay. "Almost constantly." Ted Graham felt his mind whirling. And behind him, he heard his wife sobbing. r  HE Raimees sat in what had been the Grahams' trailer. "For a few moments, I feared he would not succumb to the bait," she said. "I knew you could never overcome the mental compulsion enough to leave them there without their first agreeing." Raimee chuckled. "Yes. And now I'm going to indulge in everything the Rojac never permitted. I'm going to write ballads and poems." "And I'm going to paint," she said. "Oh, the delicious freedom!" "Greed won this for us," he said. "The long study of the Grahams paid off. They couldn't refuse to trade." "I knew they'd agree. The looks in their eyes when they saw the house! They both had... She broke off, a look of horror coming into her eyes. "One of them did not agree!" "They both did. You heard them." "The baby?" He stared at his wife. "But -- but it is not at the age of decision!" "In perhaps eighteen of this planet's years, it will be at the age of decision. What then?" His shoulders sagged. He shuddered. "I will not be able to fight it off. I will have to build a transmitter, call the Rojac and confess!" "And they will collect another inhabitable place," she said, her voice flat and toneless. "I've spoiled it," he said. "I've spoiled it!" ( Continued from page #) the average -- his reading covers everything scientific, social, political, economic and what not, mined for him by perhaps the sharpest researchers in the world. The development of a theme into a story is done by extrapolation. That's a clumsy and forbidding word; I hope somebody can offer a neater, more easily understood one. It's the process of carrying out data to the most ultimate and logical conclusion possible, and is used by economists, statisticians -- yourself, for that matter, if you have to file a report of estimated income with the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Of course the average science fiction reader is shrewder at extrapolation than the average -- he's been guided and stimulated by perhaps the best in the world. Resourcefully imaginative research and daringly creative extrapolation, these are two of the qualities that make science fiction a prime recruiter of future scientists, technicians and engineers -- the free world's greatest need. Proof: our second largest sale in proportion to population is in university towns. And they mostly stay with science fiction: our largest sale in proportion to population is in towns where scientific installations are the principal industry. There may be some whose interest wasn't first aroused by science fiction, but our surveys have not found them. Entertainment, remember, based on research and extrapolation -- plus something that is true of science fiction and no other literature: crag-leaping. Extrapolation climbs as far as it can, clear to the furthest limits. But those limits inevitably become limiting. When that happens, a leap is needed off the top of the old crag to the base of a new one. Not hanging on with one hand while reaching with the other. A fast, nervy jump, with the craghangers laughing -- until the safe landing. There are many examples, but I am fond of one: gravity hampered Wells, so he abolished it Verne jeered; he'd used scientifically sound cannon propulsion. Verne's idea never was used, never will be. An anti-gravity research program sees success in # years. A conservative estimate -- it probably will be much before that Crag-leaping is creative science, creative science fiction both. With only research and extrapolation, we'd still be living in caves, using flint arrows -- each the ultimate. Come about or not, that isn't the point. Most experiments don't -- till one does. Even then, it is the leap that counts. That's the real contribution of basic science and science fiction. t::z zig time Concluding a #-part serial Safe outside the cosmos , the Place gave refuge to Soldiers after their raids on history... but now mutiny had turned it into a bomb in a bag! L ET me bring you up to chiatric aide, working in a midget date tast. My name is universe about a half a block Greta Forzane and I'm a across and outside the universe you combination party girl and psydo your living in. My job is to entertain Soldiers who've been driven half nuts in the Change War, which is a war of two mysterious time-traveling powers called the Spiders (our side) and the Snakes ( the enemy ). Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or ahead to change the future, in ways to help the Spiders beat the Snakes. History's already been changed a lot from what you know it: the Nazis win World War Two and rule an empire stretching from Siberia to Kansas, the American Civil War never occurred, and the Roman Empire got licked just as it was getting started two thousand years ago. I used to live in Chicago, as human as you, or more so, but when I died I got Resurrected, as we call it, and recruited onto the Big T ime by the Spiders. My co-workers are Sid Lessingham, a bully-boy from Shakespeare's England; Beau Lassiter, a Mississippi gambler from the Greater South; Doc Pyeshkov, a drunken medico from a Russia that didn't have any Revolution and got conquered by the Nazis; Maud Davies, a starship girl born on Ganymede some centuries in the future; and Lily Foster, an English girl who lost her big love, a poet named Bruce M archant, in World War One and then took to drink and whoopee. All dead and Resurrected, of course. The midget universe we Entertainers work in is fixed up like a nightclub and we just call it the Place. Two little instruments that look like portable radios -- the Major and Minor Maintainers -- keep it going and in contact with ordinary space-time. I 'D been working in the Place on the Big Time about a year or so when three Soldiers turned up uniformed as Black Hussars and fresh from an operation in old St. Petersburg. I knew one of them real well and was even sweet on him: Erich von Hohenwald, a commandant from the victorious Nazi empire. The other two were new to me: a Roman legate named Mark and a young English lieutenant from World War One who turned out to be Lily's old heartthrob Bruce M archant. This Bruce was in a tearing rage, believe it or not, because he'd been accidentally issued two left-hand gloves with his uniform, and he started a big gripe and got in a fight with Erich, but Lily found him a right-hand glove and he simmered down and began to enjoy the party. But just then the Major Mairtto pick up three more Spiders: a fighting girl named Kaby from old Crete; a Lunan octopoid from way back called Ilhilihis -- which I shorten to Illy because he's an old pal; and Sevensee, a Venusian satyr from way in the future. They had a fancy big casket with them and had been through a peck of troubles. Sid tried to get the party going again by animating a couple of Ghostgirls, which are phantom women who ordinarily don't occupy much space and we keep them around in case we get crowds. These two Ghostgirls were an Austrian countess and a Greek cutie named Phryne. But Kaby spilled the news that the fancy chest had inside it a tactical atomic bomb, which we were supposed to plant in Egypt back in Roman times, so the Romans would win a battle from the Parthians and not be lost to history. This bomb business started a minor panic in the Place. Bruce jumped on top of the bar and did a good British job of calming us down, but then he went on to give us a long spiel about what miserable lives we led as Soldiers and Entertainers, and how the Change War was destroying the whole universe, and how we didn't know who the real Spiders were who were our bosses any more than we had any idea of the identity of the real Snakes. First thing we knew then, Bruce was asking us to start a mutiny against the High Command and drag into it all the other Soldiers and Entertainers we could, Spiders and Snakes alike. My Nazi boy friend Erich got shouting angry and stood up on the bomb chest and tried to quash the mutiny, but it came to a showdown. Beau, Doc, the satyr and Lily declared for Bruce and mutiny, while Mark, Kaby, Maud and Illy sided with Erich. Bruce had just got around to putting the question to me, which embarrassed me no end. Sid, boss of the Place and my special friend, hadn't declared himself either. I knew I was going to have to take sides, though I didn't want to, when I happened to look around and saw that the two Ghostgirls had disappeared -- and the Major Maintainer with them  the thing that kept the Place in existence ! "We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed." "You looked among D 's papers, of course, and into the books of the library?" "Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume... -- Poe I plumped down on the couch nearest the kitchen, though too tired to want to eat for a while yet. A tighter search than I could ever have cooked up had shown that the Maintainer was not in the Place. Of course it had to be in the Place, as we kept telling each other for the first two hours. It had to be, if circumstances and the theories we lived by in the Change World meant anything. A Maintainer is what maintains a Place. The Minor Maintainer takes care of oxygen, temperature, humidity, gravity, and other little life-cycle and matter-cycle things generally, but it's the Major Maintainer that keeps the walls from buckling and the ceiling from falling in. It is little, but oh my, it does so much. It doesn't work by wires or radio or anything complicated like that. It just hooks into local spacetime. I have been told that its inside working part is made upof vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, each one of which is practically a vest-pocket cosmos in itself. Outside, it looks like a portable radio with a few more dials and some telltales and switches and plug-ins for earphones and a lot of other sensory thingumajigs. But the Maintainer was gone and the Void hadn't closed in, yet. By this time, I was so fagged, I didn't care much whether it did or not. One thing for sure, the Maintainer had been switched to Introvert before it was spirited away or else its disappearance automatically produced Introversion, take your choice, because we sure were Introverted -- real nasty martinetschoolmaster grip of reality on my thoughts that I knew, without trying, liquor wouldn't soften, not a breath of Change Wind, alsolutely stifling, and the gray of the Void seeming so much inside my head that I think I got a glimmering of what the science boys mean when they explain to me that the Place is a kind of interweaving of the material and the mental -- a Giant Monad, one of them called it. Anyway, I said to myself, "Greta, if this is Introversion, I want no part of it. It is not nice to be cut adrift from the cosmos and know it. A lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific and a starship between galaxies are not in it for loneliness." ders had ever equipped Maintained with Introversion switches anyway, when we couldn't drill with them and weren't supposed to use them except in an emergency so tight that it was either Introvert or surrender to the Snakes, and for the first time the obvious explanation came to me: Introversion must be the same as scuttling, its main purpose to withhold secrets and materiel from the enemy. It put a place into a situation from which even the Spider high command couldn't rescue it, and there was nothing left but to sink down, down (out? up?), down into the Void. If that was the case, our chances of getting back were about those of my being a kid again playing in the Dunes on the Small Time. I edged a little closer to Sid and sort of squunched under his shoulder and rubbed my cheek against the smudged, gold-worked gray velvet. He looked down and I said, "A long way to Lynn Regis, eh, Siddy?" "Sweetling, thou spokest a mouthful," he said. He knows very well what he is doing when he mixes his language that way, the wicked old darling. "Siddy," I said, "why this goldwork? It'd be a lot smoother without it." "Marry, men must prick themselves out and, 'faith I know not, but it helps if there's metal in it." "And girls get scratched." I took a little sniff. "But don't put this doublet through the cleaner yet. Until we get out of the woods, I want as much you around as possible." "Marry, and why should I?" he asked blankly, and I think he wasn't fooling me. The last thing time travelers find out is how they do or don't smell. Then his face clouded and he looked as though he wanted to squunch under my shoulder. "But 'faith, sweetling, your forest has a few more trees than Sherwood." "Thou saidst it," I agreed, and wondered about the look. He oughtn't to be interested in my girlishness now. I knew I was a mess, but he had stuck pretty close to me during the hunt and you never can tell. Then I remembered that he was the other one who hadn't declared himself when Bruce was putting it to us, and it probably troubled his male vanity. Not me, though -- I was still grateful to the Maintainer for getting me out of that spot, whatever other it had got us all into. It seemed ages ago. W E'D all jumped to the conclusion that the two Ghostgirls had run away with the Maintainer, I don't know where or why, but it looked so much that way. Maud had started yiping about how she'd never trusted Ghosts and always known that some day they'd start doing things on their own, and Kaby had got it firmly fixed in her head, right between the horns, that Phryne, being a Greek, was the ringleader and was going to wreak havoc on us all. But when we were checking Stores the first time, I had noticed that the Ghostgirl envelopes looked flat. Ectoplasm doesn't take up much space when it's folded, but I had opened one anyway, then another, and then called for help. Every last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls, Sid's whole stock. Well, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of being demonstrated: that there is a spooky link -- a sort of Change Wind contact -- between a Ghost and its lifeline; and when that umbilicus, I've heard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies. Interesting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were going to evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts and our apron strings had been cut just as surely. We're more solid, of course, but that would only mean we'd take a little longer. Very logical. I remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud -- us girls had been checking the envelopes; it's one of the proprieties we frequently maintain and anyway, if men check them, they're apt to trot out that old wheeze about "instant women" which Fm sick to death of hearing, thank you. Anyway, I had looked up and said, "It's been nice knowing you," and Lili had said, "Twenty-three, skiddoo," and Maud had said, "Here goes nothing," and we had shook hands all around. We figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time as the other Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said, "Siddy, do you suppose it's just barely possible that, while we were all looking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have been able to work the Maintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?" "Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis, 'tis well known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo, the time forbade getting a Door. Tercio -- and here's the real meat of it -- the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, 'twere folly to depend on not one of -- how many of us? ten, elf -- not looking around in all the time it would have taken them -- " "I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the control divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when Bruce was talking about Zombies." "Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my argument with quinquo when you 'gan prattle, I could have sworn none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet..." "Eftsoons yet," I seconded him. door and walked out with the thing. It certainly wasn't in the Place. The hunt had been a lulu. Something the size of a portable typewriter is not easy to hide and we had been inside everything from Beau's piano to the renewer link of the Refresher. We had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe like a box of worms, as he'd warned us; he said it tickled terribly and I insisted on smoothing his fur for five minutes afterward, although he was a little standoffish toward me. Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we were thorough. Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the Place, she has been stationed in a Field Hospital (it turns out the Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and learned a few nice new wrinkles. However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course, every check was observed by at least three people, not including Bruce or Lili. When the Maintainer vanished, Doc had pulled out of his glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me if I hadn't seen it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the Art Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his coat and duck his head and whip out a flask and take a swig and by now he was well on his way toward another peak. The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there's such a jumble of strange stuff, and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a beautiful blue woodcarving of a Venusian medusa because, although there wasn't a mark in the paw-polished surface, she claimed it was just big enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together and mooning over the other stuff. After we'd finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the floor. Beau and Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a onesided Place, that there is nothing, but nothing, under the floor; it just gets a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you get a quarter inch down -- that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was knuckleheaded (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q. t.) and broke four diamond-plus drills before he was satisfied. Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things don't vanish if you throw them at the Void -- they half melt and freeze forever unless you can fish them out. Back of the Refresher, at about eye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman threw there during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are so much like witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the Place right up against the Void have strange spatial properties which one of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that gives me the worse woolies, but that's beside the point. Erich had used their Callers as direction finders to point out the Maintainer, just as they're used in the cosmos to locate the Door -- and sometimes in the Big Places, people tell me. But the Callers only went wild -- like a compass needle whirling around without stopping -- and nobody knew what that meant. The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it is no bigger than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had obviously kept on doing its own work, so that was out for several reasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible for anyone to have opened it, granting they knew the secret of its lock, even before Erich jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you've ruled out everything else, the word impossible changes meaning. Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of tricks for sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently or temporarily. But the Place is strictly on the Big Time and everybody that should know tells me that time traveling through the Big Time is out. It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the countryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it, you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel. I'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious hiding place, maybe something that several people could pass back and forth between them, which would mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself. Still, I'd got a sort of shell-game idea about the Soldiers' three big black shakos and I hadn't been satisfied until I'd got the three together and looked in them all at the same time. "Wake up, Greta, and take something. I can't stand here forever." Maud had brought us a tray of hearty snacks from then and yon, and I must say they were tempting; she whips up a mean hors d'oeuvre. I looked them over and said, "Siddy, I want a hot dog." "And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you o'erscrupulous jade, you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!" I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him. "Go on, call me some more, Siddy," I told him. "Real juicy ones." My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is But what is not. -- Macbeth M Y big bad waif from King's Lynn had set the tray on his knees and started to wolf the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark and Kaby were having a quietly furious argument I couldn't overhear at the end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy was draped over the piano like a real octopus, listening in. Beau and Sevensee were pacing up and down near the control divan and throwing each other a word now and then. Beyond them, Bruce and Lili were sitting on the opposite couch from us, talking earnestly about something. Maud had sat down at the other end of the bar and was knitting -- it's one of the habits like chess and quiet drinking, or learning to talk by squeak box, that we pick up to pass the time in the Place in the long stretches between parties. Doc was fiddling around the Gallery, picking things up and setting them down, still managing to stay on his feet at any rate. gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy began to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that didn't sound like anything on God's earth. "Where do they get all the energy?" I wondered. As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel the same way myself. It wasn't energy; it was nerves, pure and simple. Change is like a drug, I realized -- you get used to the facts never staying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into another maybe not very different but still different, and your mind being constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub lights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on your brain. The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train. You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and when it suddenly stops and you're just you and the facts you think from and feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them -- boy, that's rough, as I found out now. The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into the Place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation. I decided I felt like I'd been dropped into a swimming pool full of cement and held under until it hardened. I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder they didn't hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best; maybe she'd got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and then she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small "o" in "older." for the Maintainer had masked the feeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search, Bruce's speech and Erich's interruptions had done a passable masking job too. I tried to remember when I'd first got the feeling and decided it was after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned poetry. Though I couldn't be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been Introverted even earlier, when I'd turned to look at the Ghostgirls. I wouldn't have known. Nuts! Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I remembered Bruce's beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change and decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though I wasn't so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong. "Does the Maintainer have an Introversion telltale? Siddy!" " 'Sdeath, chit, and you love me, speak lower. Of a sudden, I feel not well, as if I'd drunk a butt of Rhenish and slept inside it. Marry yes, blue. In short flashes, saith the manual. Why ask'st thou?" "No reason. God, Siddy, what I'd give for a breath of Change Wind." "Thou can'st say that eftsoons," he groaned. I must have looked pretty miserable myself, for he put his arm around my shoulders and whispered gruffly, "Comfort thyself, sweetling, that while we suffer thus sorely, we yet cannot die the Change Death." "What's that?" I asked him. I didn't want to bounce around like the others. I had a suspicion I'd carry it too far. So, to keep myself from going batty, I started to rework the business of who had done what to the Maintainer. During the hunt, there had been some pretty wild suggestions tossed around as to its disappearance or at least its Introversion: a feat of Snake science amounting to sorcery; the Spider high command bunkering the Places from above, perhaps in reaction to the loss of the Express Room, in such a hurry that they hadn't even time to transmit warnings; the hand of the Late Cosmicians, those mysterious hypothetical beings who are supposed to have successfully resisted the extension of the Change War into the future much beyond Sevensee's epoch -- unless the Late Cosmicians are the ones fighting the Change War. One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political police, agent of -- who knows, after Bruce? -- a secret Change World Committee of Public Safety or Spidet revolutionary underground, or strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich's and Bruce's factions. Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but that didn't apply to what I did with my own thoughts. Vjf? HO wanted to escape so bad  they'd Introvert the Place, cutting off all possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all? Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid couldn't keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly hadn't had my eye on him every second. Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he said counted, so he'd hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for. Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people especially, more than any man or woman I've ever known -- hq's like a big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his mouth -- and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the cosmos. Maud, Kaby, Mark' and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of, though Sevensee's being from the very far future did tie in with that idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to be Introverted together. "Stick to the facts, Greta," I reminded myself with a private groan. That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself. Erich, I thought -- now we're getting somewhere. The little commandant has the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be locked in with him, he'd do it in a second. But even before Erich had danced on the bomb, he'd been heckling Bruce from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and... well, that was nine-tenths of the problem. If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation of all. Gr-r-r! Bruce's motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it immortal?) danger he'd put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed a shame he'd been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the . bar, we'd all have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I'd have noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls -- if it worked as Sid claimed, and he said he had never seen it in iteration, just read in the manual -- oh, 'sdeath! UT Bruce didn't need opportunity, as I'm sure all the males in the Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to pull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of the rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this womanputty in the hands of the man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to admit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had seemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken agreement, that neither Lili's nor Bruce's checks counted when we were hunting for the Maintainer. That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger, intruding somehow through a Door (bow'd he get it without using our Maintainer? ) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the Void itself. I know that last is impossible -- nothing can step out of nothing -- but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for something not at all nice to come looming out of, it's the Void -- misty, foggily churning, slimy gray... "Wait a second," I told myself, "and hang onto this, Greta. It should have smacked you in the face at the start." Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped back from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He was looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and whatever happened to it, he saw it Erich wouldn't have, even after he was on the bomb, because he'd been stagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as tribune of the people. But Bruce would have -- unless he got so caught up in what he was saying... No, kid, a Demon is always an actor, no matter how much he believes in what he's saying, and there never was an actor yet who wouldn't instantly notice a member of the audience starting to walk out on his big scene. So Bruce knew, which made him a better actor than I'd have been as if anyone else had thought of what had just occurred to me, or they'd have gone over and put it to him. Not me, though -- I don't work that way. Besides, I didn't feel up to it -- Nervy Anna enfold me, I felt like pure hell. "Maybe," I told myself encouragingly, "the Place is Hell," but added, "Be your age, Greta -- be a real rootless, ruleless, ruthless twenty-nine." The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear, Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire. Lines of gray, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists -- Sassoon "I shall, my love." "Sweetling, wake up! Hast the shakes?" I opened my eyes a little and lied to Siddy with a smile and locked my hands together tight and watched Bruce and Lili quarrel nobly near the control divan and wished I had a great love to blur my misery and provide me with a passable substitute for Change Winds. Lili won the argument, judging from the way she threw her head back and stepped away from Bruce's arms while giving him a proud, tender smile. He walked off a few steps; praise be, he didn't shrug his shoulders at us like an old husband, though his nerves were showing and he didn't seem to be standing Introversion well at all, as who of us were? Lili rested a hand on the head of the control divan and pressed her lips together and looked around at us, mostly with her eyes. She'd wound a gray silk bandeau around her bangs. Her short gray silk dress without a waistline made her look, not so much like a flapper, though she looked like that all right, as like a little girl, except the neckline was scooped low enough to show she wasn't. Her gaze hesitated and then stopped at me and I got a sunk feeling of what was coming, because women are always picking on me for an audience. Besides, Sid and I were the centrist party of two in our fresh-out-of-the-shell Place politics. She took a deep breath and stuck out her chin and said in a voice that was even a little higher and Britisher than she usually uses, "We girls have often cried, 'Shut the Door!' But now the Door is jolly well shut for keeps!" I knew I'd guessed right and I felt crawly with embarrassment, because I know about this love business of thinking you're the other person and trying to live their life -- and grab their glory, though you don't know that -- and carry their message for them, and how it can foul things up. Still, I couldn't help admitting what she said wasn't too bad a start -- unpleasantly apt to be true, at any rate. "My fiance believes we may yet be able to open the Door. I do not. He thinks it is a bit premature to discuss the peculiar pickle in which we all find ourselves. I do not." There was a rasp of laughter from the bar. The militarists were reacting. Erich stepped out, looking very happy. "So now we have to listen to women making speeches," he called. "What is this Place, anyhow? Sidney Lessingham's Saturday Evening Sewing Circle?" stopped their pacing halfway between the bar and the control divan, turned toward Erich, and Sevensee looked a little burlier, a little more like half a horse, than satyrs in mythology book illustrations. He stamped -- medium hard, I'd say -- and said, "Ahh, go flya kite" I'd found out he'd learned English from a Demon who'd been a longshoreman with syndicalist anarchist sympathies. Erich shut up for a moment and stood there grinning, his hands on his hips. Lili nodded to the satyr and cleared her throat, looking scared. But she didn't speak; I could see she was thinking and feeling something, and her face got ugly and haggard, as if she were in a Change Wind that hadn't reached me yet, and her mouth went into a snarl to fight tears, but some spurted out, and when she did speak her voice was an octave lower and it wasn't just London talking but New York too. "I don't know how Resurrection felt to you people, because I'm new and I loathe asking questions, but to me it was pure torture and I wished only I'd had the courage to tell Suzaku, 'I wish to remain a Zombie, if you don't mind. I'd rather the nightmares. But I accepted Resurrection because I've been taught to be polite and because there is the Demon in me I don't understand that always wishes to live, and I found that I still felt like a Zombie, although I could flit about, and that I still had the nightmares, except they'd grown a deal vivider. "I was a young girl again, seventeen, and I suppose every woman wishes to be seventeen, but I wasn't seventeen inside my head -- I was a woman who had died of Bright's disease in New York in # and also, because a Big Change blew my lifeline into a new drift, a woman who had died of the same disease in Nazi-occupied London in #, but rather more slowly because, as you can fancy, the liquor was in far shorter supply. I had to live with both those sets of memories and the Change World didn't blot them out any more than I'm told it does those of any Demon, and it didn't even push them into the background as I'd hoped it would. "When some Change Fellow would say to me, 'Hallo, beautiful, how about a smile?' or 'That's a posh frock, kiddo,' I'd be back at Bellevue looking down at my swollen figure and the light getting like spokes of ice, or in that dreadful gin-steeped Stepney bedroom with Phyllis coughing herself to death beside me, or at best, for a moment, a little girl in Glamorgan looking at the Roman road and wondering about the wonderful life that lay ahead." bering he had a long nasty future back in the cosmos himself, and at any rate he wasn't smiling, and I thought maybe he's getting a little humility, knowing someone else has two of those futures, but I doubted it. "Because, you see," Lili kept forcing it out, "all my three lives I'd been a girl who fell in love with a great young poet she'd never met, the voice of the new youth and all youth, and she'd told her first big lie to get in the Red Cross and across to France to be nearer him, and it was all danger and dark magics and a knight in armor, and she pictured how she'd find him wounded but not seriously, with a little bandage around his head, and she'd light a fag for him and smile lightly, never letting him guess what she felt, but only being her best self and watching to see if that made something happen to him... "And then the Boche machine guns cut him down at Passchendaele and there couldn't ever have been bandages big enough and the girl stayed seventeen inside and messed about and tried to be wicked, though she wasn't very good at that, and to drink, and she had a bit more talent there, though drinking yourself to death is not nearly as easy as it sounds, even with a kidney weakness to help. But she turned the trick. "Then a cock crows. She wakes with a tearing start from the gray dreams of death that fill her lifeline. It's cold daybreak. There's the smell of a French farm. She feels her ankles and they're not at all like huge rubber boots filled with water. They're not swollen the least bit. They're young legs. "There's a little window and the tops of a row of trees that may be poplars when there's more light, and what there is shows cots like her own and heads under blankets, and hanging uniforms make large shadows and a girl is snoring. There's a very distant rumble and it moves the window a bit. Then she remembers they're Red Cross girls many, many kilometers from Passchendaele and that Bruce Marchant is going to die at dawn tody. "In a few more minutes, he's going over the top where there's a crop-headed machine-gunner in field gray already looking down the sights and swinging the gun a bit. Bub she isn't going to die today. She's going to die in # and #. "And just as she's going mad, there's a creaking and out of the shadows tiptoes a Jap with a woman's hairdo and the whitest face and the blackest eyebrows. He's wearing a rose robe and a black sash which belts to his sides two samurai swords, but in his right hand he has a strange silver pistol. And he smiles at her as if they were brother and sister and lovers at the same time and he says, ( VouIez-vous vivre, mademoiselle ? and she stares and he bobs his head and says, 'Missy wish live, yes, no? " ID'S paw closed quietly around  my shaking hands. It always gets me to hear about anyone's Resurrection, and although mine was crazier, it also had the Krauts in it. I hoped she wouldn't go through the rest of the formula and she didn't. "Five minutes later, he's gone down a stairs more like a ladder to wait below and she's dressing in a rush. Her clothes resist a little, as if they were lightly gummed to the hook and the stained wall, and she hates to touch them. It's getting lighter and her cot looks as if someone were still sleeping there, although it's empty, and she couldn't bring herself to put her hand on the place if her new life depended on it. "She climbs down and her long skirt doesn't bother her because she knows how to swing it. Suzaku conducts her past a sentry who doesn't see them and a puffy-faced farmer in a smock coughing and spitting the night out of his throat. They cross the farmyard and it's filled with rose light and she sees the sun is up and she knows that Bruce Marchant has just bled to death. "There's an empty open touring car chugging loudly, waiting for someone; it has huge muddy wheels with wooden spokes and a brass radiator that says 'Simplex.' But Suzaku leads her past it to a dunghill and bows apologetically and she steps through a Door." I heard Erich say to the others at the bar, "How touching! Now shall I tell everyone about my operation?" But he didn't get much of a laugh. "That's how Lilian Foster came into the Change World with its steel-engraved nightmares and its deadly pace and deadlier lassitudes. I was more alive than I ever had been before, but it was the kind of life a corpse might get from unending electrical shocks and I couldn't summon any purpose or hope and Bruce Marchant seemed farther away than ever. "Then, not six hours ago, a Soldier in a black uniform came through the Door and I thought, 'It can't be, but it does look like his photographs,' and then I thought I heard someone say the name Bruce, and then he shouted as if to all the world that he was Bruce Marchant, and I knew there was a Resurrection beyond Resurrection, a true resurrection. Oh, Bruce -- " She looked at him and he was crying and smiling and all the young beauty flooded back into her face, and I thought, "It has to be Change Winds, but it can't be. Face it without slobbering, Greta -- there's something that works bigger miracles than Change." And she went on, "And then the Change Winds died when the Snakes vaporized the Maintainer or the Ghostgirls Introverted it and all three of them vanished so swiftly and silently that even Bruce didn't notice -- those are the best explanations I can summon and I fancy one of them is true. At all events, the Change Winds died and my past and even my futures became something I could bear lightly, because I have someone to bear them with me, and because at last I have a true future stretching out ahead of me, an unknown future which I shall create by living. Oh, don't you see that all of us have it now, this big opportunity?" "Hussa for Sidney's suffragettes and the W.C.T.U.!" Erich cheered. "Beau, will you play us a medley of 'Hearts and Flowers' and 'Onward, Christian Soldiers'? I'm deeply moved, Lili. Where do the rest of us queue up for the Great Love Affair of the Century?" Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past's mistakes and the future's fears. I had to learn to close the front door to tomorrow and the back door to yesterday and settle down to here and now. -- Anonymous screwball sarcasms and still I thought, "Yes, perish his hysterical little gray head, but he's half right -- Lili's got the big thing now and she wants to serve it up to the rest of us on a platter, only love doesn't cook and cut that way." Those weren't bad ideas she had about the Maintainer, though, especially the one about the Ghostgirls doing the Introverting -- it would explain why there couldn't be Introversion drill, the manual stuff about blue flashes being window-dressing, and something disappearing without movement or transition is the sort of thing that might not catch the attention -- and I guess they gave the others something to think about too, for there wasn't any follow-up to Erich's frantic sniping. But I honestly didn't see where there was this big opportunity being stuck away in a gray sack in the Void and I began to wonder and I got the strangest feeling and I said to myself, "Hang onto your hat, Greta. It's hope." "The dreadful thing about being a Demon is that you have all time to range through," Lili was saying with a smile. "You can never shut the back door to yesterday or the front door to tomorrow and simply live in the present. But now that's been done for us: the Door is shut, we need never again rehash the past or the future. The Spiders and Snakes can never find us, for who ever heard of a Place that was truly lost being rescued? And as those in the know have told me, Introversion is the end as far as those outside are concerned. So we're safe from the Spiders and Snakes, we need never be slaves or enemies again, and we have a Place in which to live our new lives, the Place prepared for us from the beginning." She paused. "Surely you understand what I mean? Sidney and Beauregard and Dr. Pyeshkov are the ones who explained it to me. The Place is a balanced aquarium, just like the cosmos. No one knows how many ages of Big Time it has been in use, without a bit of new material being brought in -- only luxuries and people -- and not a bit of waste cast off. No one knows how many more ages it may not sustain life. I never heard of Minor Maintainers wearing out. We have all the future, all the security, anyone can hope for. We have a Place to live together." Y OU know, she was dead right and I realized that all the time I'd had the conviction in the back of my mind that we were going to suffocate or something if we didn't get a Door open pretty quick. I should have known differently, if anybody should, because I'd once been in the Place without a Door for as long as a hundred sleeps during a foxhole stretch of the Change War and we'd had to start cycling our food and it had been okay. And then, because it is also the way my mind works, I started to picture in a flash the consequences of our living together all by ourselves like Lili said. I began to pair people off; I couldn't help it. Let's see, four women, six men, two ETs. "Greta," I said, "you're going to be Miss Polly Andry for sure. We'll have a daily newspaper and folk-dancing classes, we'll shut the bar except evenings, Bruce'll keep a rhymed history of the Place." I even thought, though I knew this part was strictly silly, about schools and children. I wondered what Siddy's would look like, or my little commandant's. "Don't go near the Void, dears." Of course that would be specially hard on the two ETs, but Sevensee at least wasn't so different and the genetics boys had made some wonderful advances and Maud ought to know about them and there were some amazing gadgets in Surgery when Doc sobered up. The patter of little hoofs... "My fiance spoke to you about carrying a peace message to the rest of the cosmos," Lili added, "and bringing an end to the Big Change, and healing all the wounds that have been made in the Little Time." I looked at Bruce. His face was set and strained, as will happen to the best of them when a girl starts talking about her man's business, and I don't know why, but I said to myself, "She's crucifying him, she's nailing him to his purpose as a woman will, even when there's not much point to it, as now." And Lili went on, "It was a wonderful thought, but now we cannot carry or send any message and I believe it is too late in any event for a peace message to do any good. The cosmos is too raveled by change, too far gone. It will dissolve, fade, 'leave not a rack behind.' We're the survivors. The torch of existence has been put in our hands. "We may already be all that's left in the cosmos, for have you thought that the Change Winds may have died at their source? We may never reach another cosmos, we may drift forever in the Void, but who of us has been Introverted before and who knows what we can or cannot do? We're a seed for a new future to grow from. Perhaps all doomed universes cast off seeds like this Place. It's a seed, it's an embryo, let it grow." She looked swiftly at Bruce and then at Sid and she quoted, '"Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world'."V I started to say something to him, but he didn't know I was there; he was listening to Lili quote Tennyson with his eyes entranced and his mouth open, as if he were imagining new things to put into it -- oh, Siddy! And then I saw the others were looking at her the same way. Ilhilihis was seeing finer feather forests than long-dead Luna's grow. The greenhouse child Maud ap-Ares Davies was stowing away on a starship bound for another galaxy, or thinking how different her life might have been, the children she might have had, if she'd stayed on the planets and out of the Change World. Even Erich looked as though he might be blitzing new universes, and Mark subduing them, for an eight-legged Fiihrerimperator. Beau was throbbing up a wider Mississippi in a biggerthan-life sidewheeler. Even I -- well, I wasn't dreaming of a Greater Chicago. "Let's not go hog-wild on this sort of thing," I told myself, but I did look up at the Void and I got a shiver because I imagined it drawing away and the whole Place starting to grow. "I truly meant what I said about a seed," Lili went on slowly. "I know, as you all do, that there are no children in the Change World, that there cannot be, that we all become instantly sterile, that what they call a curse is lifted from us girls and we are no longer in bondage to the moon." She was right, all right -- if there's one thing that's been proved World, it's that. "But we are no longer in the Change World," Lili said softly, "and its limitations should no longer apply to us, including that one. I feel deeply certain of it, but -- " she looked around slowly -- "we are four women here and I thought one of us might have a surer indication." My eyes followed hers around like anybody's would. In fact, everybody was looking around except Maud, and she had the silliest look of surprise on her face and it stayed there, and then, very carefully, she got down from the bar stool with her knitting. She looked at the half-finished pink bra with the long white needles stuck in it and her eyes bugged bigger yet, as if she were expecting it to turn into a baby sweater right then and there. Then she walked across the Place to Lili and stood beside her. While she was walking, the look of surprise changed to a quiet smile. The only other thing she did was throw her shoulders back a little. I was jealous of her for a second, but it was a double miracle for her, considering her age, and I couldn't grudge her that. And to tell the truth, I was a little frightened, too. Even with Dave, I'd been bothered about this business of having babies. 'VT'ET I stood up with Siddy -- I couldn't stop myself and I guess he couldn't either -- and hand in hand we walked to the control divan. Beau and Sevensee were there and Bruce, of course, and then, so help me, those Soldiers to the death, Kaby and Mark, started over from the bar and I couldn't see anything in their eyes about the greater glory of Crete and Rome, but something, I think, about each other, and after a moment Illy slowly detached himself from the piano and followed, lightly trailing his tentacles on the floor. I couldn't exactly see him hopunless it was true what the jokes said about Lunans, but maybe he was being really disinterested and maybe he wasn't; maybe he was simply figuring that Illy ought to be on the side with the biggest battalions. I heard dragging footsteps behind us and here came Doc from the Gallery, carrying in his folded arms an abstract sculpture as big as a newborn baby. It was an agglomeration of perfect shiny gray spheres the size of golfballs, shaping up to something like a large brain, but with holes showing through here and there. He held it out to us like an infant to be admired and worked his lips and tongue as if he were trying very hard to say something, though not a word came out that you could understand, and I thought, r Maxey Aleksevich may be speechless drunk and have all sorts of holes in his head, but he's got the right instincts, bless his soulful little Russian heart."' We were all crowded around the control divan like a football team huddling. The Peace Packers, it came to me. Sevensee would be fullback or center and Illy left end -- what a receiver! The right number, too. Erich was alone at the bar, but now even he -- "Oh, no, this can't be," I thought -- even he came toward us. Then I saw that his face was working the worst ever. He stopped halfway and managed to force a smile, but it was the worst, too. "That's my little commandant," T thought, "no team spirit." "So now Lili and Bruce -- yes, and Grossmutterchen Maud -- have their little nest," he said, and he wouldn't have had to push his voice very hard to get a screech. "But what are the rest of us supposed to be -- cowbirds?" his hands and croaked, "Cuckoo! Cuc-koo!" And I said to myself, "I often thought you were crazy, boy, but now I know." "T euielsdreck! -- yes, Devil's dirt! -- but you all seem to be infected with this dream of children. Can't you see that the Change World is the natural and proper end of evolution? -- a period of enjoyment and measuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women call destruction -- 'Help, I'm being raped!' 'Oh, what are they doing to my children?' -- but which men know as fulfillment "You're given good parts in Gotterdammerung and you go up to the author and tap him on the shoulder and say,. 'Excuse me, Herr Wagner, but this Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don't you write an opera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyed curly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed, something' like that.' "Devil's dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life will be like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure, to measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long gray beards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter around indoors to the end of your days, mooning about little' baby cosmoses? -- incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, the womb, the little gray home in the nest -- is that what you want? It'll grow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferation of Kinder, Kirche, Kiiche -- I should live so long! "Women! -- how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from the fireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say, 'He's getting weak, he's giving out, soon I'll have to put him to bed and do the simplest things for him.' Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby' the birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, the fetterer, the crippler! Woman! -- and the curly-headed little cancers she wants!" He lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. "I never knew one who didn't want to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddle him, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, a doll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you could have your nest and your Brucie!" He stopped, gasping, and I. expected someone to bop him one on the schnozzle, and I think he did, too. I turned to Bruce and he was looking, I don't know how, sorry, guilty, anxious, angry, shaken, inspired, all at once, and I wished people sometimes had simple suburban reactions like magazine stories. Then Erich made the mistake, if it was one, of turning toward Bruce and slowly staggering toward him, pawing the air with his hands as if he were going to collapse into his arms, and saying, "Don't let them get you, Bruce. Don't let. them tie you down. Don't let them clip you -- your words or your deeds. You're a Soldier. Even when you talked about a peace message, you talked about doing some smashing of your own. No matter what you think and feel, Bruce, no matter how much lying you do and how much you hide, you're really not on their side." That did it. TT didn't come soon enough or, X think, in the right spirit to please me, but I will say it for Bruce that he didn't muck it up by tipping or softening his punch. He took one step forward and his shoulders spun and his fist connected sweet and clean. As he did it, he said only one word, "Loki!" and darn if that didn't switch me back to a campfire in the Indiana Dunes and my mother telling me out of the Elder Saga about the malicious, sneering, all-spoiling Norse god and how, when the other gods came to trap him in his hideaway by the river, he was on the point of finishing knotting a mysterious net big enough, I had imagined, to snare the whole universe, and that if they'd come a minute later, he would have. Erich was stretched on the floor, his head hitched up, rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce. Mark, who was standing beside me, moved a little and I thought he was going to do something, maybe even clobber Bruce in the old spirit of you can't do that to my buddy, but he just shook his head and said, " Omnia vincit amor" I nudged him and said, "Meaning?" and he said, "Love licks everything." I'd never have expected it from a Roman, but he was half right at any rate. Lili had her victory: Bruce clearing the field for the marriage by laying out the womanhating boy friend who would be trying to get him to go out nights. At that moment, I think Bruce wanted Lili and a life with her more than he wanted to reform the Change World. Sure, us women have our little victories -- until the legions come or the Little Corporal draws up his artillery or the Panzers roar down the road. Erich scrambled to his feet and stood there in a half-slump, halfcrouch, still rubbing his jaw and glaring at Bruce over his hand, but making no move to continue the fight, and I studied his face and said to myself, "If he can get a gun, he's going to shoot himself, I know." Bruce started to say sometning and hesitated, like I would have in his shoes, and just then Doc got one of his unpredictable inspirations and went weaving out toward Erich, holding out the sculpture and making deaf-and-dumb noises like he had to us. Erich looked at him as if he were going to kill him, and then grabbed the sculpture and swung it up over his head and smashed it down on the floor, and for a wonder, it didn't shatter. It just skidded along in one piece and stopped inches from my feet. That thing not breaking must have been the last straw for Erich. I swear I could see the red surge up through his eyes toward his brain. He swung around into the Stores sector and ran the few steps between him and the bronze bomb chest. Everything got very slow motion for me, though I didn't do any moving. Almost every man started out after Erich. Bruce didn't, though, and Siddy turned back after the first surge forward, while Illy squunched down for a leap, and it was between Sevensee's hairy shanks and Beau's scissoring white pants that I saw that under-the-microscope circle of death's heads and watched Erich's finger go down on them in the order Kaby had given: one, three, five, six, two, four, seven. I was able to pray seven distinct times that he'd make a mistake. He straightened up. Illy landed by the box like a huge silver spider and his tentacles whipped futilely across its top. The others surged to a frightened halt around them: Erich's chest wps heaving, but his voice was cool and collected as he said, "You mentioned something about our having a future, Miss Foster Now you can make that more specific. Unless we get back to .the cosmos and dump this box, or find a Spider A-tech, or manage to call headquarters for guidance on disarming the bomb, Vve have a future exactly thirty minutes long." But whence he was, or of what wombe ybore. Of beasts, or of the earth, I have not red: But certes was with milke of wolves and tygres fed. -- Spenser tfye button or throw the switch or spring the trap 'or focus die beam or what have you, you don't faint or go crazy or anything else convenient. I didn't. Everything, everybody, every move that was made, every word that was spoken, was painfully real to me, likea hand twisting and squeezing things deep inside me, and I saw every least detail spotlighted and magnified like I had the seven skulls. Erich was standing beyond the bomb chest; little smiles were ruffling his lips. I'd never seen him look so sharp. Illy was beside him, but not on his side, you understand. Mark, Sevensee and Beau were around the chest to the nearer side. Beau had dropped to a knee and was scanning the chest minutely, terror-under-control making him bend his head a little closer than he needed to for clear vision, but with his hands locked together behind his back, I guess to restrain the impulse to push any and everything that looked like a disarming button. Doc was sprawled face down on the nearest couch, out like a light, I suppose. Us four girls were still by the control divan. With Kaby, that surprised me, because she didn't look scared or frozen, but almost as intensely alive as Erich. Sid had turned back, as I'd said, and had one hand stretched out toward but not touching the 'Minor Maintainer, and a look on his beardy face as if he were calling down death and destruction on every boozy fogue who had ever gone up from King's. Lynn to Cambridge and London, and I realized why: if he'd thought of the Minor Maintainer a second sooner, he could have pinned Erich down with heavy gravity before he could touch the buttons. Bruce was resting one hand on the head of the control divan and was looking toward the group around the chest, toward Erich, I think, as if Erich had done something rather wonderful for him, though I can't imagine myself being tickled at being included in anybody's suicide surprise party. Bruce looked altogether too dreamy, Brahma blast him, for someone who must have the same steel-spiked thought in his head that I know dam well the rest of us had: that in twenty-nine minutes or so, the Place would be a sun in a bag. to business, as I'd have laid any odds he would be. He had the jump on us and he wasn't going to lose it. "Well, when are you going to start getting Lili to tell us where she hid the Maintainer? It has to be her -- she was too certain it was gone forever when she talked. And Bruce must have seen from the bar who took the Maintainer, and who would he cover up for but his girl?" There he was plagiarizing my sign them over to him in full if he got us the right pail of water for that time-bomb. He glanced at his wrist. "According to my Caller, you have twenty-nine and a half minutes, including the time it will take to get a Door or contact headquarters. When are you going to get busy on the girl?" Bruce laughed a little -- deprecatingly, so help me -- and started toward him. "Look here, old man," he said, "there's no need to trouble Lili, or to fuss with headquarters, even if you could. Really not at all. Not to mention that your surmises are quite unfounded, old chap, and I'm a bit surprised at your advancing them. But that's quite all right because, as it happens, I'm an atomics technician and I even worked on that very bomb. To disarm it, you just have to fiddle a bit with some of the ankhs, those hoopy little crosses. Here, let me -- " Allah il allah, but it must have struck everybody as it did me as being just too incredible an assertion, too bloody British a barefaced bluff, for Erich didn't have to say a word; Mark and Sevensee grabbed Bruce by the arms, one on each side, as he stooped toward the bronze chest, and they weren't gentle about it. Then Erich spoke. "Oh, no, Bruce. Very sporting of you to try to cover Up for your girl friend, but we aren't going to let ourselves' be blown to stripped atoms twenty-eight minutes too soon while you monkey with the buttons, the very thing BensonCarter warned against, and pray for a guesswork miracle. Ifs too thin, Bruce, when you come from # and haven't been on the Big Time for a hundred sleeps and were calling for an A-tech yourself a few hours ago. Much too thin. Bruce, something is going to happen that I'm afraid you won't like, but you're going to have to put up with it. That is, unless Miss Foster decides to be cooperative." "I say, you fellows, let me go," Bruce demanded, struggling experimentally. "I know it's a bit thick to swallow and I did give you the wrong impression calling for an A-tech, but I just wanted to capture your attention then; I didn't want to have to work on the bomb. Really, Erich, would they have ordered Benson-Carter to pick us up unless one of us were an A-tech? They'd be sure to include one in the bally operation." "When they're using patchwork tactics?" Erich grinningly quoted back at him. said, "Benson-Carter was a magician of matter and he was going on the operation disguised as an old woman. We have the cloak and hood with the other garments," and I wondered how this cold fish of a she-officer could be the same girl who was giving Mark slurpy looks not ten minutes ago. 'Well?" Erich asked, glancing at his Caller and then swinging his eyes around at us as if there must be some of the old W ehrmacht iron somewhere. We all found ourselves looking at Lili and she was looking so sharp herself, so ready to jump and so at bay, that it was all # needed, at any rate, to make Erich's theory about the Maintainer a rock-bottom certainty. Bruce must have realized the way our minds were working, for he started to struggle in earnest and at the same time called, "For God's sake, don't do anything to Lili! Let me . loose, you idiots! Everything's true I told you -- I can save you from that bomb. Sevensee, you took my side against the Spiders; ydu've nothing to lose. Sid, you're an Englishman. Beau, you're a gentleman and you love her, too -- for God's sake, stop them!" Beau glanced up over his shoulder at Bruce and the others surging around close to his ankles and he had on his poker face. Sid I could tell was once more going through the purgatory of decision. Beau reached his own decision first and I'll say it for him that he acted on it fast and intelligently. Right from his kneeling position and before he'd even turned his head quite back, he jumped Erich. But other things in this cosmos besides Man can pick sides and act fast. Illy landed on Beau midway and whipped his tentacles around him tight .and they went wobbHijg around like a drunken white-and-silyer barber pole. Beau got his hands each around a tentacle, and at the same time his face began to get purple, and I winced at what they were both going through. Maybe Sevensee had a hoof in Sid's purgatory, because Bruce shook loose from the satyr and tried to knock out Mark, but the Roman twisted his arm and kept him from getting in a good punch. Erich didn't make a move to mix into either fight, which is my little commandant all over. Using his fists on anybody but me is beneath him. there was no way for me to tell what it was, for, as he reached for .the Minor Maintainer, Kaby. contemptuously snatched it away from his hands and gave him a knee in the belly that doubled me up in sympathy and sent him sprawling on his knees toward the fighters. On the return, Kaby gave Lili, who'd started to grab too, an effort-, less backhand smash that set her down on the divan. Erich's face lit up like an electric sign and he kept his eyes fixed on Kaby. She crouched a little, carrying her weight on the balls of her feet and firmly cradling the Minor Maintainer in her left arm, like a basketball captain planning an offensive. "Thpn she waved her free hand decisively to the right. I didn't get it, but Erich did and Mark too, for Erich jumped for the Refresher sector and Mark let go of Bruce and followed him, ducking around Sevensee's arms, who was coming back into the fight on which side I don't know. Illy unwhipped from Beau and copied Erich and Mark with one big spring. Then Kaby twisted a dial as far as it would go and Bruce, Beau, Sevensee and poor Siddy were slammed down and pinned to the floor by about eight gravities. It should have been lighter near us -- I hoped it was, but you couldn't tell from watching Siddy; he went flat on his face, spreadeagled, one hand stretched toward me so close, I could have touched it (but not let go!), and his mouth was open against the floor and he was gaspingthrough a corner of it and I could see his spine trying to sink through his belly. Bruce just managed to get his head and one shoulder up a bit, and they all made me think of a Dore illustration of the Inferno where the cream of the damned are frozen up to their necks in ice in the innermost circle of Hell. The gravity didn't catch me, although I could feel it in my left arm. I was mostly in the Refresher sector, but I dropped down flat too, partly out of a crazy compassion I have, but mostly because I didn't want to take a chance of having Kaby knock me down. Erich, Mark and Illy had got clear and they headed toward us. Maud picked the moment to make her play; she hadn't much choice of times, if she wanted to make one. The Old Girl was looking it for once, but I guess the thought of her miracle must have survived alongside the fear of sacked sun and must have meant a lot to her, for she launched out fast, all set to straight-arm Kaby into the heavy gravity and grab the Minor Maintainer with the other hand. Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust. -- Webster their back hair, or let's face it. Entertainers aren't Soldiers. Kaby weaved to one side and flicked a helpful hand and poor old Maud went where she'd been going to send Kaby. It sickened me to see the gravity take hold and yank her down. I could have jumped up and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I'm not a bit brave when things like my life are at stake. Lili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushed her down again and quietly said, "Where is it?" and then hauled off and slapped her across the face. What got me was the iqatter-of-fact way Kaby did it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or even deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something nasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach. Lili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but she didn't look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili's pearl necklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls went bouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down Lili's gray silk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lili started to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illy had come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with the job Kaby was doing. "Listen, slut," she said, "we have no time. You have a healing room in this place. I can work the things." "Here it comes," I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything, on top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personally stylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn't going to be allowed to blow up peacefully. They weren't satisfied with an A-bomb. They had to write my private hell into the script. "There is a thing called an Invertor," Kaby said exactly as I'd known she would, but as I didn't really hear it just then -- a mental split I'll explain in a moment. "It opens you up so they can cure your insides without cutting your skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the big parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin -- your eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it -- becoming the lining of a little hole that's halffilled with your hair. "Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do to them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the healer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about fifty heartbeats. We'll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the sleepy air, Now will you talk?" though, not the real me, or I'd have gone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or learn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing around with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful. I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of Introversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that his tentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had looked at him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to me by squeaking, "Don't mind me, I'm just sensitive. Get on with the girl. Make her tell." Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant thinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball sculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a faint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and touched the trail; it was finely gritty, lik# powdered glass. I tipped up the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn't marred at all, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as ever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in the floor by something even harder. That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a real idea in his pickled brain when he'd been pushing the thing at all of us and trying to tell us something. He hadn't managed to say anything then, but he had earlier when he'd been going to tell us what to do about the bomb, and maybe there was a connection. I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got "Inversh... bosh... Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or otherwise. So I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got "glovsh" and then I grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched the pieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel. It all hung on that black righthand hussar's glove Lili had produced for Bruce. Only she couldn't have found it in Stores, because we'd searched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn't been any gloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been. Also, Bruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had been through the whole Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been only the two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off the bar -- those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he'd brought from outside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him. S O a left-hand glove had disappeared -- the last I'd seen of it, Lili had been putting it on her tray -- and a right-hand glove had appeared. Which could only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove into an identical right. She couldn't have done it by turning it inside out the ordinary way, because the lining was different. But as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary way to turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had to put them on the Invertor in Surgery and flick the switch for full Inversion. Or you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into a perfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a righthand glove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science boys call it; I've heard of it being used in surgery on the highly asymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right hand to a man who'd lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into an amputated left. Ordinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and you wouldn't think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Place where the Doc's a drunk and the Surgery hasn't been used for hundreds of sleeps. But when you've just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy things to do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce's extra left-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got a righthand glove to give him. What Doc had been trying to say with his "Inversh... bosh... was "Invert the box," meaning we should put the bronze chest through full Inversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got the idea from Lili's trick with the glove. What an insideout tactical atomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did not particularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized. But the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lili had decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his plea for mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience -- and maybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce's chicks and... all those other things we'd believed in for a while. So she'd taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not many seconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an object that no one would think of questioning -- except someone who knew the Gallery by heart. ture a foot from my nose, at the clustered gray spheres the size of golfballs. I had known that the inside of the Maintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, but I hadn't realized they were quite that big. I said to myself, "Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis, but you're the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listen to your deductions when they're all practically living on negative time already." I got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn't have been in -- there are some things Entertainers are good at -- and Kaby was just saying "you go mad in about fifty heartbeats." Everybody on their feet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no time for him except to hope he hadn't done anything that might attract attention to me. I stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery -- there's one good thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn't creak. I walked through the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorless cigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse's training, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positioned on the gleaming table of the Invertor. I froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinking of the other time and trying to remember what it had been that bothered me so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes, but then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanity good-by, I don't know which, and twisted the switch all the way over, and there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times a second as nice as you could want it. It must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time it was Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused the direction finders. black legged spiders with red hearts of hell -- marquis # was sticking through the screen like a tinted bas-relief hanging on a gray wall and I got the impression he had peered unexpectedly through a slit in an arras into Queen Elizabeth's bedroom. He didn't have any time to linger on the sensation, even if he'd wanted to, for an elbow with a copper band thrust through the screen and dug his ribs and Kaby marched Lili in by the neck. Erich, Mark and Illy were right behind. They caught the blue flashes and stopped dead, staring at the longlost. Erich spared me one look which seemed to say, so you did it, not that it matters. Then he stepped forward and picked it up and held it solidly to his left side in the double right-angle made by fingers, forearm and chest, and reached for the Introversion switch with a look on his face as if he were opening a fifth of whisky. The blue light died and Change Winds hit me like a stiff drink that had been a long, long time in coming, like a hot trumpet note out of nowhere. I felt the changing pasts blowing through me, and the uncertainties whistling past, and ice-stiff reality softening with all its duties and necessities, and the little memories shredding away and dancing off like autumn leaves, leaving maybe not even ghosts behind, and all the crazy moods like Mardi Gras dancers pouring down an evening street, and something inside me had the nerve to say it didn't care whether Greta Forzane's death was riding in those Winds because they felt so good. I could tell it was hitting the others the same way. Even battered, tight-lipped Lili seemed to be saying, you're making me drink the stuff and I hate you for it, but I do love it. I guess we'd all had the worry that even finding and Extroverting the Maintainer wouldn't put us back in touch with the cosmos and give us those Winds we hate and love. The thing that cut through to us as we stood there glowing was not the thought of the bomb, though that would have come in a few seconds more, but Sid's voice. He was still standing in the screen, except that now his face was out the other side and we could just see parts of his gray-doubleted back, but, of course, his "Jesu!" came through the screen as if it weren't there. At first I couldn't figure out who he could be talking to, but I swear I never heard his voice so courtly obsequious before, so strong and yet so filled with awe and an under-note of, yes, sheer terror. "Lord, I am filled from top to toe with confusion that you should so honor my poor Place," he said. "Poor say I and mine, when I mean that I have ever busked it faithfully for you, not dreaming that you would ever condescend... yet knowing that your eye was certes ever upon me... though I am but as a poor pinch of dust adrift between the suns... I abase myself. Prithee, how may I serve thee, sir? I know not e'en how most suitably to address thee, Lord... King... Emperor Spider!" small, but not a bit less visible, worse luck, and even with the Change Winds inside me to give me courage, I thought this was really too much, coming on top of everything else; it was simply unfair. At the same time, I realized it was to be expected that the big bosses would have been watching us with their unblinking beady . black eyes ever since we had Introverted waiting to pounce if we should ever come out of it. I tried to picture what was on the other side of the screen and I didn't like the assignment But in spite of being petrified, I had a hard time not giggling, like the zany at graduation exercises, at the way the other ones in Surgery were taking it I mean the Soldiers. They each stiffened up like they had the old ramrod inside them, and their faces got that important look, and they glanced at each other and the floor without lowering their heads, as if they were measuring the distance between their feet and mentally chalking alternate sets of footprints to step into. The way Erich and Kaby held the Major and Minor Maintainers became formal; the way they checked their Callers and nodded reassuringly was positively esoteric. Even Illy somehow managed to look as if he were on parade. Then from beyond the screen came what was, under the circumstances, the worst noise I've ever heard, a seemingly wordless distant-sounding howling and wailing, with a note of menace that made me shake, although it also had a nasty familiarity about it I couldn't place. Sid's voice broke into it, loud, fast and frightened. "Your pardon, Lord, I did not think... certes, the gravity... I'll attend to it on the instant." He whipped a hand and half a head back through the screen, but without looking back and snapped his fingers, and before I could blink, Kaby had put the Minor Main tainer in his hand. Sid went completely out of sight then and the howling stopped, and I thought that if that was the way a Lord Spider expressed his annoyance at being subjected to incorrect gravity, I hoped the bosses wouldn't start any conversations with me. Erich pursed his lips and threw the other Soldiers a nod and the four of them marched through the screen as if they'd drilled a lifetime for this moment. I had the wild idea that Erich might give me his arm, but he strode past me as if I were... an Entertainer. I hesitated a moment then, but I had to see what was happening outside, even if I got eaten up for it. Besides, I had a bit of the thought that if these formalities went on much longer, even a Lord Spider was going to discover just how immune he was to confined atomic blast. I walked through the screen with Lili beside me. T HE Soldiers had stopped a few feet in front of it. I looked around ahead for whatever it was going to turn out to be, prepared to drop a curtsy or whatever else, bar nothing, that seemed expected of me. I had a hard time spotting the beast. Some of the others seemed to be having trouble too. I saw Doc weaving around foolishly by the control divan, and Bruce and Beau and Sevensee and Maud on their feet beyond it, and I wondered whether we were dealing with an invisible monster; ought to be easy enough for the bosses to turn a simple trick like invisibility. Then I looked sharply left where everyone else, even glassyeyed Doc, was coming to look, into the Door sector, only there wasn't any monster there or even a Door, but just Siddy holding the Minor Maintainer and grinning like when he is threatening to tickle me, only more fiendishly. "Not a move, masters," he cried, his eyes dancing, "or I'll pin the pack of you down, marry and amen I will. It is my firm purpose to see the Place blasted before I let this instrument out of my hands again." My first thought was, " 'Sblood but Siddy is a real actor! I don't care if he didn't study under anyone later than Burbage, that just proves how good Burbage is." Sid had convinced us not only that the real Spiders had arrived, but earlier that the gravity in the edge of Stores had been a lot heavier than it actually was. He completely fooled all those Soldiers, including my swelled-headed victorious little commandant, and I kind of filed away the timing of that business of reaching out the hand and snapping the fingers without looking, it was so good. "Beauregard!" Sid called. "Get to the Major Maintainer and call headquarters. But don't come through Door, marry go by Refresher. I'll not trust a single Demon of you in this sector with me until much more has been shown and settled." "Siddy, you're wonderful," I said, starting toward him. "As soon as I got the Maintainer unsnarled and looked around and saw your sweet old face -- " "Back, tricksy trull! Not the breadth of one scarlet toenail nearer me, you Queen of Sleights and High Priestess of Deception!" he bellowed. "You least of all do I trust. Why you hid the Maintainer, I know not, 'faith, but later you'll discover the truth to me or I'll have your gizzard." I could see there was going to have to be a little explaining. TOC, touched off, I guess, by Sid waving his hand at me, threw back his head and let off one of those shuddery Siberian wolf-howls he does so blamed well. Sid waved toward him sharply and he shut up, beaming toothily, but at least I knew who was responsible for the Spider wail of displeasure that Sid had either called for or more likely got as a gift of the gods and used in his act. Beau came circling around fast and Erich shoved the Major Maintainer into his hands without making any fuss. The four Soldiers were looking pretty glum after losing their grand review. Beau dumped some junk off one of the Art Gallery's sturdy taborets and set the Major Maintainer on it carefully but fast, and quickly knelt in front of it and whipped on some earphones and started to tune. The way he did it snatched away from me my inward glory at my big Inversion brainwave so fast, I might never have had it, and there was nothing in my mind again but the bronze bomb chest. I wondered if I should suggest Inverting the thing, but I said to myself, "Uh-uh, Greta, you got no diploma to show them and there probably isn't time to try two things, anyway." Then Erich for once did something I wanted him to, though I didn't care for its effect on my nerves, by looking at his Caller and saying quietly, "Nine minutes to go, if Place time and cosmic time are synching." Beau was steady as a rock and working adjustments so fine that I couldn't even see his fingers move. Then, at the other end of the Place, Bruce took a few steps toward us. Sevensee and Maud followed a bit behind him. I remembered Bruce was another of our nuts with a private program for blowing up the place. "Sidney," he called, and then, when he'd got Sid's attention, "Remember, Sidney, you and T both came down to London from Peterhouse." I didn't get it Then Bruce looked toward Erich with a devilmay-care challenge and toward Lili as if he were asking herforgiveness for something. I couldn't read her expression; the bruises were blue on her throat and her cheek was puffy. Then Bruce once more shot Erich that look of challenge and he spun and grabbed Sevensee by a wrist and stuck out a foot -- even half-horses aren't too sharp about infighting, I guess, and the satyr had every right to feel at least as confused as I felt -- and sent him stumbling into Maud, and the two of them tumbled to the floor in a jumble of hairy legs and pearlgray frock. Bruce raced to the bomb chest. Sid, pin him down," or something like that -- I know I did because I was suddenly sure that he'd been asking Lili's pardon for blowing the two of them up -- and all the rest of us too, the love-blinded stinker. Sid had been watching him all the time and now he lifted his hand to the Minor Maintainer, but then he didn't touch any of the dials, just watched and waited, and I thought, "Shaitan shave us! Does Siddy want in on death, too? Ain't he satisfied with all he knows about life?" Bruce had knelt and was twisting some things on the front of the chest, and it was all as bright as if he were under a bank of Klieg lights, and I was telling myself I wouldn't know anything when the fireball fired, and not believing it, and Sevensee and Maud had got unscrambled and were starting for Bruce, and the rest of us were yelling at Sid, except that Erich was just looking at Bruce very happily, and Sid was still not doing anything, and it was unbearable except just then I felt the little arteries start to burst in my brain like a string of firecrackers and the old aorta pop, and for good measure, a couple of valves come unhinged in my ticker, and I was thinking, "Well, now I know what it's like to die of heart failure and high blood pressure," and having a last quiet smile at having cheated the bomb, when Bruce jumped up and back from the chest. "That does it!" he announced cheerily. "She's as safe as the Bank of England." Sevensee and Maud stopped themselves just short of knocking him down and I said to myself, "Hey, let's get a move on! I thought heart attacks were fast" Before anyone else could speak, Beau did. He had turned around from the Major Maintainer and pulled aside one of the earphones. "I got headquarters," he said crisply. "They told me how to disarm the bomb -- I merely said I thought we ought to know. What did you do, sir?" he called to Bruce. "There's a row of four ankhs just below the lock. The first to your left you give a quarter turn to the right, the second a quarter turn to the left, same for the fourth, and you don't touch the third." "That is it, sir," Beau confirmed. The long silence was too much for me; I guess I must have the shortest span for unspoken relief going. I drew some nourishment out of my restored arteries into my brain cells and yelled, "Siddy, I know I'm a tricksy trull and the High Vixen of all Foxes, but what the Hell is Peterhouse?" "The oldest college at Cambridge," he told me rather coolly. "Familiar with infinite universe sheafs and open-ended postulate systems? -- the notion that everything is possible -- and I mean everything -- and everything has happened. Everything." -- He ini e in A N hour later, I was nursing a weak highball and a black eye in the sleepy-time darkness on the couch farthest from the piano, half watching the highlighted party going on around it and the bar, while the Place waited for rendezvous with Egypt and the Battle of Alexandria. Sid had swept all our outstanding problems into one big bundle and, since his hand held the joker of the Minor Maintainer, he had settled them all as . high-handedly as if they'd been those of a bunch of schoolkids. It amounted to this: We'd been Introverted when most of the damning things had happened, so presumably only we knew about them, and we were all in so deep one way or another that we'd all have to keep quiet to protect our delicate complexions. Well, Erich's triggering the bomb did balance rather neatly Bruce's incitement to mutiny, and there was Doc's drinking, while everybody who had declared for the peace message had something to hide. Mark and Kaby I felt inclined to trust anywhere, Maud for sure, and Erich in this particular matter, damn him. Illy I didn't feel at all easy about, but I told myself there always has to be a fly in the ointment -- a darn big one this time, and furry. Sid didn't mention his own dirty linen, but he knew we knew he'd flopped badly as boss of the Place and only recouped himself by that last-minute flimflam. Remembering Sid's trick made me think for a moment about the. real Spiders. Just before I snuck out of Surgery, I'd had a vivid picture of what they must look like, but now I couldn't get it again. It depressed me, not being able to remember -- oh, I probably just imagined I'd had a picture, like a hophead on a secret-of-the-universe kick. Me ever find out anything about the Spiders? -- except for nervous notions like I'd had during the recent fracas? -- what a laugh! The funniest thing (ha-ha! ) was that I had ended up the leasttrusted person. Sid wouldn't give me time to explain how I'd deduced what had happened to the Maintained and even when Lili spoke up and admitted hiding it, she acted so bored I don't think everybody believed her -- although she did spill the realistic detail that she hadn't used partial Inversion on the glove; she'd just turned it inside out to make it a right and then done a full Inversion to get the lining back inside. firm that he'd reasoned the thing out the same way I had, but he said he had been blacked out the whole time, except during the first part of the hunt, and he didn't remember having any bright ideas at all. Right now, he was having Maud explain to him twice, in detail, everything that had happened. I decided that it was going to take a little more work before my reputation as a great detective was established. I looked over the edge of the couch and just made out in the gloom one of Bruce's black gloves. It must have been kicked there. I fished it up. It was the righthand one. My big clue, and was I sick of it! Got mittens, God forbid! I slung it away and, like a lurking octopus, Illy shot up a tentacle from the next couch, where I hadn't known he was resting, and snatched the glove like it was a morsel of underwater garbage. These ETs can seem pretty shuddery non-human at times. I thought of what a cold-blooded, skin-saving louse Illy had been, and about Sid and his easy suspicions, and Erich and my black eye, and how, as usual, I'd got left alone in the end. My men! Bruce had explained about being an A-tech. Like a lot of us, he'd had several widely different jobs during his first weeks in the Change World and one of them had been as secretary to a group of the minor atomics boys from the Manhattan Project Earth Satellite days. I gathered he'd also absorbed some of his bothersome ideas from them. I hadn't quite decided yet what species of heroic heel he belonged to, but he was thick with Mark and Erich again. Everybody's men! Sid didn't have to argue with anybody; all the wild compulsions and mighty resolves were dead now, anyway until they'd had a good long rest. I sure could use one myself, I knew. The party at the piano was getting wilder. Lili had been dancing the black bottom on top of it and now she jumped down into Sid's and Sevensee's arms, taking a long time about it She'd been drinking a lot and her little gray dress looked about as innocent on her as diapers would on Nell .Gwyn. She continued her dance, distributing her marks of favor equally between Sid, Erich and the satyr. Beau didn't mind a bit, but serenely pounded out "Tonights the Night" -- which she'd practically shouted to him not two minutes ago. I was glad to be out of the party. Who can compete with a highly experienced, utterly disillusioned seventeen-year-old really throwing herself away for the first time?  hand. Illy had stretched a tentacle into a furry wire to return me the black glove, although he ought to have known I didn't want it I pushed it away, privately calling Illy a washed-out moronic tarantula, and right away I felt a little guilty. What right had I to be critical of Illy? Would my own character have shown to advantage if I'd been locked in with away? For that matter, where did I get off being critical of anyone? Still, I was glad to be out of the party, though I kept on watching it. Bruce was drinking alone at the bar. Once Sid had gone over to him and they'd had one together and I'd heard Bruce reciting from Rupert Brooke those deliberately corny lines, "For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may g#; and Cambridgeshire, of all England, The Shire for Men who Understand;" and I'd remembered that Brooke too had died young in World War One and my ideas had got fuzzy. But mostly Bruce was just calmly drinking by himself. Every once in a while Lili would look at him and stop dead in her dancing and laugh. I'd figured out this Bruce-LiliErich business as well as I cared to. Lili had wanted the nest with all her heart and nothing else would ever satisfy her, and now she'd go to hell her own way and probably die of Bright's disease for a third time in the Change World. Bruce hadn't wanted the nest or Lili as much as he wanted the Change World and the chances it gave for Soldierly cavorting and poetic drunks; Lili's seed wasn't his idea of healing the cosmos; maybe he'd make a real mutiny some day, but more likely he'd stick to barroom epics. His and Lili's infatuation wouldn't die completely, no matter how rancid it looked right now. The real-love angle might go, but Change would magnify the romance angle and it might seem to them like a big thing of a sort if they met again. Erich had his Kamerad, shaped to suit him, who'd had the guts and cleverness to disarm the bomb he'd had the guts to trigger. You have to hand it to Erich for having the nerve to put us all in a situation where we'd have to find the Maintainer or fry, but I don't know anything disgusting enough to hand to him. I had tried a while back. I had gone up behind him and said, "Hey, how's my wicked little commandant? Forgotten your und so weiter?" and as he turned, I clawed my nails and slammed him across the cheek. That's how I got the black eye. Maud wanted to put an electronic leech on it, but I took the old handkerchief in ice water. Well, at any rate Erich had his scratches to match Bruce's not as deep, but four of them, and I told myself maybe they'd get infected -- I hadn't washed my hands since the hunt. Not that Erich doesn't love scars. me up after Erich knocked me down. "You got any omnias for that?" I snapped at him. "For what?" Mark asked. "Oh, for everything thafs been happening to us," I told him disgustedly. He seemed to actually think for a moment and then he said, "Omnia mutantur, nihil intent" "Meaning?" I asked him. He said, "All things change, but nothing is really lost." It would be a wonderful philosophy to stand with against the Change Winds. Also damn silly. I wondered if Mark really believed it. I wished I could. Sometimes I come close to thinking it's a lot of baloney trying to be any decent kind of Demon, even a good Entertainer. Then I tell myself, "That's life, Greta. You've got to love through it somehow." But there are times when some of these cookies are not too easy to love. Something brushed the palm of my hand again. It was lily's tentacle, with the tendrils of the tip spread out like a little bush. I started to pull my hand away, but then I realized the Loon was simply lonely. I surrendered my I m hand to the patterned gossamer pressures of feather-talk. Right away I got the words, 'Teeling lonely, Greta girl?" It almost floored me, I tell you. Here I was understanding feathertalk, which I just didn't, and I was understanding it in English, which didn't make sense at all. For a second, I thought Illy must have spoken, but I knew he hadn't, and for a couple more seconds I thought he was working telepathy on me, using the feathertalk as cues. Then I tumbled to what was happening: he was playing English on my palm like on the keyboard of his squeakbox, and since I could play English on a squeakbox myself, my mind translated automatically. Realizing this almost gave my mind stage fright, but I was too fagged to be hocused by self-consciousness. I just lay back and let the thoughts come through. It's good to have someone talk to you, even an underweight octopus, and without the squeaks Illy didn't sound so silly; his phrasing was soberer. cause you'll never understand what's happening to us all," Illy asked me, "because you'll never be anything but a shadow fighting shadows -- and hying to love shadows in between the battles? It's time you understood we're not really fighting a war at all, although it looks that way, but going through a kind of evolution, though not exactly the kind Erich had in mind. "Your Terr an thought has a word for it and a theory for it a theory that recurs on many worlds. It's about the four orders of life: Plants, Animals, Men and Demons. Plants are energy-binders -- they can't move through space or time, but they can clutch energy and transform it Animals are space-binders -- they can move through space. Man (Terr an or ET, Lunan or non-Lunan) is a time-binder -- he has memory. "Demons are the fourth order of evolution, possibility-binders -- they can make all of what might be part of what is, and that is their evolutionary function. Resurrection is like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly: a third-order being breaks' out of the chrysalis of its lifeline into fourth-order life. The leap from the ripped cocoon of an unchanging reality is like the first animal's leap when he ceases to be a plant, and the Change World is the core of meaning behind the many myths of immortality. "All evolution looks like a war at first -- octopoids against monopoids, mammals against reptiles. And it has a necessary dialectic: there must be the thesis -- we call it Snake -- and the antithesis -- Spider -- before there can be the ultimate synthesis, when all possibilities are fully realized in one ultimate universe. The Change War isn't the blind destruction it seems. "Remember that the Serpent is your symbol of wisdom and the Spider your sign for patience. The two names are rightly frightening to you, for all high existence is a mixture of horror and delight. And don't be surprised, Greta girl, at the range of my words and thoughts; in a way, I've had a billion years to study Terra and learn her languages and myths. "Who are the real Spiders and Snakes, meaning who were the first possibility-binders? Who was Adam, Greta girl? Who was Cain? Who were Eve and Lilith? "In binding all possibility, the Demons also bind the mental with the material. All fourth-order beings live inside and outside all minds, throughout the whole cosmos. Even this Place is, after its fashion, a giant brain: its floor is the brainpan, the boundary of the Void is the cortex of gray matter -- yes, even the Major and Minor Maintainers are analogues of the pineal and pituitary glands, which in some form sustain all nervous systems. "There's the real picture, Greta girl." The feather-talk faded out and lily's tendril tips merged into a soft pad on which I fingered, "Thanks, Daddy Longlegs." what Illy had just told me, I looked back at the gang around the piano. The party seemed to be breaking up; at least some of them were chopping away at it Sid had gone to the control divan and was getting set to tune in Egypt. Mark and Kaby were there with him, all bursting with eagerness and the vision of tanks on ranks of mounted Zombie bowmen going up in a mushroom cloud; I thought of what Illy had told me and I managed a smile -- seems we've got to win and lose all the battles, every which way. Mark had just put on his Parthian costume, groaning cheerfully, "Trousers again!" and was striding around under a hat like a furlined ice-cream cone and with the sleeves of his metal-stuffed candys flapping over his hands. He waved a short sword with a heart-shaped guard at Bruce and Erich and told them to get a move on. Kaby was going along on the operation wearing the old-woman disguise intended for Benson-Carter. I got a half-hearted kick out of knowing she was going to have to cover that chest and hobble. Bruce and Erich weren't taking orders from Mark just yet. Erich went over and said something to Bruce at the bar, and Bruce got down and went over with Erich to the piano, and Erich tapped Beau on the shoulder and leaned over and said something to him, and Beau nodded and yanked "Limehouse Blues" to a fast close and started another piece, something slow and nostalgic. Erich and Bruce waved to Mark and smiled, as if to show him that whether he came over and stood with them or not, the legate and the lieutenant and the commandant were very much together. And while Sevensee hugged Lili with a simple enthusiasm that made me wonder why I've wasted so much imagination on genetic treatments for him, Erich and Bruce sang: "To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned, To our brothers in the tunnels outside time, Sing three Change-resistant Zombies, raised from death and robot-crammed, And Commandos of the Spiders -- Here's to crime ! We're three blind mice on the wrong time-track, H ush -- hush -- hush! We've lost our now and will never get back, H ush -- hush -- hush I Change Commandos cfut on the spree, Damned through all possibility, Ghostgirls, think kindly on such as we, H ush -- hush -- hush!" While they were singing, I looked down at my charcoal skirt and over at Maud and Lili and I thought, "Three gray hustlers for three black hussars, that's our speed." Well, I'd never thought of myself as a high-speed job, winning all the races -- I wouldn't feel comfortable that way. Come to think of it, we've got to lose and win all the races in the long run, the way the course is laid out. I fingered to Illy, "That's the picture, all right, Spider boy." by L. Ron Hubbard A descriptive list of the principal incidents in Man's # Distribution Center, Box # Sa Silver Spring, Maryland  I M :As c t t # ' Isaac Asimov. For description. please see other aide. (Pub. ed. #). lected from Fantasy and ScienceFiction Managing. Adventure In other worlds... mystery. Intrigue, suspense! (Pub. ed. #). ies by top authors. Wonders of Earth and Man. Amazing Inventions. Space Travel and Visitors from Outer Space. Adventures in Dimension. Worlds of Tomorrow. (Pub. ed. #). 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Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. i See the Stars, Moon, Planets Close Up! #" Astronomical Reflecting Telescope Famous Mt. Palomar Type! #  # Power -- An Unusual Buy! photographersT Adapt yuur camera to this Scope for excellent Telephoto shots anl fascinating photos of moon! Assembled -- Ready to Use l You'll see the Rings of Saturn, the fascinating planet Mara, huge craters on the Moon, Star Clusters, Moons of Jupiter in detail. Galaxies! Equatorial mount with lock on both axes. Aluminized and overcoated #" diameter highspeed f# mirror. 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O N page # of The Family Book of Humor, edited by Helen Hoke and published by Hanover House, is an item called "Look Now" -- two Galaxy editorials combined into one alarmingly funny article. You probably read it here, so I'm only incidentally pointing with pride. What I really want to do is exhibit some samples from this rich godown you might otherwise not get around to exploring. "Doctor Doll" by Inez Robb unwraps a porcelain patient with removable viscera: "Once the tiny tykes have scrubbed up and sterilized their hands and instruments, they put this doll or cadaver on the operating table, administer an anaesthetic and open up the torso by removing laces that look like sutures. "One peek inside the yawning cavity gives the in-training Florence Nightingale a lovely look at the small and large intestines, liver, heart, kidneys, appendix, stomach and lungs, but not necessarily in that order... "Dolly's vital organs are made of plastic and are suspended on pegs for easy removal and return. Squeamish as I am, I must confess that this is an improvement over the original model, and Nature could do worse than take note..." "The Flea Position" by John Crosby reveals that Billy Rayner, British flea impresario, advertised unsuccessfully for # fleas and gave this glum interview to the Daily Telegraph: "Since the war the flea position has been getting steadily worse. I blame the vacuum cleaners and these newfangled disinfectants. The average flea lives only for about three months, and they do not breed in captivity. Toward the end of three months they become stiffjointed, just like humans in their old age. And then they cannot ride the cycles, pull chariots or do sword fighting. All the old fleas can manage is an occasional dance. The public won't pay to see that. It is just what they expect from fleas, anyway." Mr. Rayner then offers a springboard for an extrapolation that has unaccountably been overlooked by science fiction writers: "We usually find that the more educated people are, the more interest they take in our fleas. At Oxford we bring the house down." Cartoon on page #, doctor informing patient: "Your allergy tests suggest that you may have ( Continued on page #) A Complete Restyling Of Streamlined pocket-size format -- handsomest in design, handiest for reading and carrying. Outstanding titles by outstanding authors. A gigantic increase of # more pages. Clear, compact type -- more wordage yet greater reading ease. All this at no increase in price -- a hard-headed bet that upgrading pays off in these days of less and less for more and more.  Count me in! Here's my # for six titles, during the year, each different, each full-length -- half a dozen cheek choice novels at less than the original cost of any one. H#r# Publisher's Note: If you don't want to mutilate this issue send your order on any sheet of paper. Across the void came a man who could not ever have been born -- from a world that could never have been conceived -- to demand his birthright of an Earth that would have to die to pay it! I "You didn't know I had a son, did you, Peter? Well, neither did I -- until quite recently." "I see." However, Peter Hubbard knew that Jan Shortmire had never married in all of his hundred and fifty-five years. In that day and age, unmarried people did not have children; science, the law, and public sophistication had combined to make the historical "accident" almost impossible. Yet, if some woman of one of the more innocent planets had deliberately conceived in order to trap Shortmire, surely he would have learned of his son's existence long before. "I'm glad it turns out that I have an heir," Shortmire went on. "Otherwise, the government might get its fists on what little I have -- and it's taken enough from me." Although the old man's estate was a considerable one, it did seem meager in terms of the money he must have made. What had become of the golden tide that had poured in upon the golden youth, Hubbard wondered. Could anyone have squandered such prodigious sums upon the usual mundane dissipations? For, by the time the esoteric pleasures of the other planets had reached Earth -- the byproduct of Shortmire's own achievement -- he must have already been too old to enjoy them. At Hubbard's continued silence, Shortmire said defensively, "If they'd let me sell my patents to private industry, as Dyall was able to do, I'd be leaving a real fortune!" His voice grew thick with anger. "When I think how much money Dyall made from those factory machines of his... " But when you added the priceless extra fifty years of life to the money Shortmire had made, it seemed to Hubbard that Shortmire had been amply rewarded. Although, of course, he had heard that Nicholas Dyall had been given the same reward. No point telling Shortmire, if he did not know already. Hubbard could never understand why Shortmire hated Dyall so; it could not be merely the money -- and as for reputation, he had a shade the advantage. "That toymaker!" Shortmire spat. the subject. "What's your boy like, Jan?" But of course Jan Shortmire's son could hardly be a boy; in fact, he was probably almost as old as Hubbard was. Such old age as Shortmire's was almost incredible. Sitting there in the antique splendor of Hubbard's office, he looked like a splendid antique himself. Who could imagine that passion had ever convulsed that thin white face, that those frail white fingers had ever curved in love and in hate? Age beyond the reach of most men had blanched this once-passionate man to a chill, ivory shadow. For once, Hubbard felt glad -- almost -- that he himself was ineligible for the longevity treatment. The alloted five score and ten was enough for any except the very selfish -- or selfless -- man. But Shortmire was answering his question. "I have no idea what the boy is like; I've never seen him." Then he added, "I suppose you've been wondering why I finally decided to make a will?" "A lawyer never wonders when people do make wills, Jan," Hubbard said mildly. "He wonders when they don't." "I'm going on a trip to Morethis. Only one of the colonized planets I've never visited." Shortmire's smile did not reach his amber-hard eyes. "Civilized planets, I should have said. It isn't official government policy to colonize planets that have intelligent native liveforms." Not even the most besotted idealist could ever have described Jan Shortmire as altruistic. And for him to be concerned about Morethis, of all planets -- Morethis, where the indigenous life-forms were such as to justify a ruthless colonization policy... it was outrageous! True, the terrestrial government had been more generous toward the Morethans than toward any of the seven other intelligent life-forms they had found. But this tolerance was based wholly on fear -- fear of these remnants of an old, old civilization, eking out their existence around a dying star, yet with terrible glories to remember in their twilight -- and traces of these glories to protect them. How was it that Shortmire, who had been everywhere, seen everything, had never been to Morethis? Hubbard looked keenly at his client. "What is all this, Jan?" The old man shrugged. "Merely that the Foreign Office has suggested it would be wise for travelers to make a will before going there. Being a dutiful citizen of Earth, I comply." He smiled balefully. "The Foreign Office has suggested that it would be wiser not to go at all," Hubbard said. "There are people who say Morethis ought to be fumigated completely." "Ah, but it has rare and precious metals on which our industries depend. There are herbs which have multiplied the miracles of modern medicine, jewels and furs unmatched anywhere. We need the native miners and farmers and trappers to get these things for us." "We could get them for ourselves. We do on the other planets." Shortmire grinned. "On Morethis, somehow, our people can't seem to find these things themselves. Or, if they do, we can't find our people afterward. Which is why there is peace and friendship between Morethis and Earth." "Friendship! Everyone knows the Morethans hate terrestrials. They tolerate us only because we're stronger!" "Stronger physically." Shortmire's smile was fading. "Even technology is a kind of physical strength." " in Hubbard. "You're not going metaphysical in your old age, are you, Jan? And even if you are," he said quickly, while he was still innocent of knowledge, hence could not be consciously offending the other man's beliefs, "what a cult to choose! Blood, terror and torture!" Shortmire grinned again. "You've been watching vidicasts, Peter. They've laid it on so thick, I'll probably find Morethis deadly dull rather than just... deadly." Certainly, all Hubbard knew of Morethis was based on hearsay evidence, but this was not a court of law. "Jan you're a fool! A third of the terrestrials who go to Morethis never come back, and mostly they're young men, strong men." "Then they're the fools." Shortmire's voice was low and tired. "Because they're risking a whole lifetime, whereas all I'll be risking is a few years of a very boring existence." Hubbard said no more. Even though the law still did not condone it, a man had the right to dispose of his own life as he saw fit. Shortmire stood up. Barely stooped by age, he looked, with his great height and extreme emaciation, almost like a fasting saint -- a ludicrous simile. "My wine palate is gone, Peter," he said, clapping the younger old man's shoulder, "women and I seem to have lost our mutual attraction, and I never did have much of a singing voice. At least this is one experience I'm not too old to savor." "Death, do you mean?" Hubbard asked bluntly. "Or Morethis?" Shortmire smiled. "Perhaps both." So Peter Hubbard was not surprised when, a few months later, he got word that Jan Shortmire had died on Morethis. The surprising thing was the extraordinarily prosaic manner of his death : he had simply fallen into a river and drowned. No traveler on Morethis had been known to die by undisputed accident before; as a result, the vidicasts devoted more attention to the event than they might have otherwise. But the news died down, as other news took its place. In so large a universe, something was always happening; the dog days were forever gone from journalism. Going through the old man's papers in his capacity as executor, Hubbard came across an old passport. He was startled to discover that this trip had not been Shortmire's first to Morethis. Why had he lied about it? But that was a question that no one alive could answer -- or so Hubbard thought. Almost two years went by before the will was finally probated on all the planets where Shortmire had owned property. Then the search for Emrys Shortmire began. Messages were dispatched to all the civilized planets, and Peter Hubbard settled back for a long wait. mire's death, the intercom on Peter Hubbard's desk buzzed and his secretary's voice -- his was one of the few legal offices wealthy enough to afford human help -- said, "Mr. Emrys Shortmire to see you, sir." How could a man come from so many light-years' distance without radioing on ahead, or at least telecalling from his hotel? Dignity demanded that Hubbard tell his secretary to inform Shortmire that he never saw anyone without an appointment. Curiosity won. "Ask him to come in," he said. The door slid open. Hubbard started to rise, with the old-fashioned courtesy of a family lawyer. But he never made it He sat, frozen with shock, staring at the man in the doorway. Because Emrys Shortmire wasn't a man; he was a boy. He might have been a stripling of thirty, except for his eyes. Copper-bright and copperhard they were, too hard for a boy's. Give him forty, even fortyfive, that would still have made Jan Shortmire a father when he was nearly a hundred and twenty. The longevity treatment produced remarkable results, but none that fantastic. Though health and strength could be restored, fertility, like youth, once vanished was gone forever. Yet the boy looked too sophisticated to have made a stupid mistake like that, if he were an imposter. More important, he looked like Jan Shortmire -- not the Shortmire whom Hubbard had known, but the broad-shouldered youth of the early pictures, golden of hair and skin and eyes, almost classical in feature and build. Plastic surgery could have converted a fleeting resemblance to a precise one, yet, somehow, Hubbard felt that this was flesh and blood of the old man's. "You're very like your father," he said, inaccurately: Emrys was less like his father than he should have been, given that startling identity of physique. "Am I?" The boy smiled. "I never knew him. Of course, I know I look like the pictures, but pictures never tell much, do they?" He had many papers to give Peter Hubbard. Too many; no honest man had his life so well in order. But then Emrys' honesty was not the issue, only his identity. The birth certificate said he had been born on Clergal fifty-five years before, so he was ten years older than Hubbard's wildest estimate. A young man, but not a boy -- a man of full maturity, but still too young to be, normally, Jan Shortmire's son. Then Hubbard opened Emrys Shortmire's passport and received another shock. He tried to sound calm. "I see you were on Morethis the same time your father was!" Emrys' smile widened. "Curious coincidence, wasn't it?" A surge of almost physical dislike filled the lawyer. "Is that all it was -- a coincidence?" "Are you suggesting that I pushed my father into the Ekkan?" Emrys asked pleasantly. "Certainly not!" Hubbard was indignant at the thought that he, as a lawyer, would have voiced such a suspicion, even if it had occurred to him. "I thought you two might have arranged to meet on Morethis." "I told you I'd never seen my father," Emrys reminded him. "As for what I was doing on Morethis -- that's my business." "All I'm concerned with is whether or not you are Emrys Shortmire." Distaste was almost tangible on Hubbard's tongue. "It does seem surprising that, since you were on Morethis at the time your father died, you should not have come to claim your inheritance sooner." "I had affairs of my own to wind up," Emrys said flatly. "You understand that these must be checked before you receive your father's estate?" "I understand perfectly." Emrys' voice was soft as a Si-yllan catman's, and even more insulting. "They will be gone over thoroughly for any possible error, any tiny imperfection, anything that could invalidate my claim. But you will find them entirely in order." "I'm sure of that." And Hubbard knew, if the papers were forgeries, they would be works of art "You'll probably want me to undergo an equally thorough physical examination for signs of -- ah -- surgical tampering. Yes, I see I'm right." Ungenerous hope leaped inside Hubbard. "You would object?" "On the contrary, I'd be delighted. Haven't had a thorough medical checkup for years." On this cooperative note, Emrys Shortmire bowed and left. Hubbard sighed back against the velvet cushions of his chair -- real silk, for he was a very rich old man. Unfortunately, he could not doubt that this was Jan Shortmire's progeny. But -- and Hubbard sat upright -- no matter how much Emrys resembled his father, that was only one parent. Who had the young man's mother been? Quickly, Hubbard searched through the papers for the birth certificate. The name was Iloa Tasqi. The nationality: Morethan. No wonder the affair had been kept so secret. No wonder Emrys seemed so strange and that Jan had lied about his previous visit to the dark planet. Small wonder, too, that he'd had a son he was not aware of. Who would have believed that human and Morethan could breed together? For the Morethans, although humanoid, were not at all human. So Emrys Shortmire was only half human. The other half was -- well, the vidicasts called it monster, and, now that he had met the young man, Peter Hubbard was inclined to agree. II Emrys Shortmire paused and inhaled deeply. Say what you would about the atmospheres of some of the other planets' being fresher and purer, the air of Earth, being the ah' in which Man had evolved, was the ah that felt best in his nostrils and filled his lungs to greatest satisfaction. And, after the fetid atmosphere of Morethis, this was pure heaven. Gray sky and violet dying sun against blue sky and radiant golden sun. No wonder the Morethans were what they were, and Earthmen were what they were. Well, the golden sun of Earth would set somewhat sooner than the physicists -- or the sociologists -- had prognosticated. But all that would be long after he himself had died. It was no concern of his, anyway. He was Emrys Shortmire, born out of Jan Shortmire and no mortal woman; and nothing else on Earth, or in the Universe, mattered. Disdaining the importunate helicabs that besieged him with plaintive mechanical offers of transportation, he walked down the street, enjoying the pull of the planet upon the youth and strength of his body, delighting in the clarity of his vision and the keenness of his nostrils. He was so absorbed in his thoughts and so unaccustomed still to Earth's traffic that he did not look where he was going. The groundcar was upon him before he knew it. Of course something like this would happen, he thought bitterly, as darkness descended upon him and he waited for the crushing impact. It was always like that in the old stories, always some drawback to spoil the magic gift But then it was light again. The car had passed over him and he was unharmed, to the amazement -- and disappointment -- of the avid crowd that had gathered. "Pedestrians should look where they're going," the voice of the car observed petulantly. "Repairs cost money." Being part human, Emrys was shaken by the experience. His eye Here, he thought, would be syrup to soothe his nerves. And he went inside, eager to try the taste of ancient vintages of Earth -- unobtainable on the other planets, since fine wines and liquors could not endure the journey through space. trying not to feel disappointed at the savor. As he drank, he felt eyes upon him -- the bartender's. Yet the long Qesharakan reflecting glass above the bar showed him nothing unusual about his appearance. Did the bartender know who he was? How could he? Then Emrys noticed that the man glanced from him to someone else -- a girl sitting at the other end of the bar. As she met Emrys' eye, she smiled at him. Absently, with remote appreciation of her good looks, he smiled back, then returned to the contemplation of his drink. The bartender's expression deepened to amused contempt. Emrys realized what was wrong and he could hardly keep from laughing. So intent had he been on the pursuit of his goal that he had almost lost sight of the goal itself. Deliberately, he turned his head and smiled at the girl. She promptly smiled back. He sat down at her side. Now that he was close, her aquamarine hair showed dark at the roots, and, through the thick golden maquillage, the pores stood out on her nose. Also, she was not so very young. He laughed then, and, when she asked why, bought her a drink. After he had bought her several more, they went to her apartment -- a luxurious one in a good section of town. She was not going to be cheap, but, he thought with rising anticipation, he could afford her. However, the night was curiously unsatisfactory. For him -- apparently not for the girl, because the next morning she indignantly refused his money. Evidently the experience had been something out of the ordinary for her. He could not feel it was her fault that it had been nothing for him; the lack was in him, he thought, some almostfelt emotion he could not recapture. Promising to call her, he left, went back to his hotel room and flung himself upon the resilient burim-moss couch. His body wasn't tired, but his head ached wearily. The liquor, naturally, on an empty stomach... after all those years of Morethan qumesht. And then the trip. Even with the Shortmire engines -- standard equipment now, of course -- it had taken a long, tiring time, for Morethis was the most distant of all the civilized planets. Anyone would be exhausted after such a trip. Added to all this, the accident There were no bruises on his body yet, but later, he knew, they would be visible. A T last he slept, or seemed to, and dreamed he was on Morethis again -- or Morethis was there with him. The air thickened about him into the tangible atmosphere of the dark planet -- the swirling aniline fog that never cleared. And in the midst stood Uvrei, the high priest, robed in amethyst and sable. The term high priest was vulgar as applied to him, but the nearest terrestrial equivalent to what he was. The lips in the shockingly beautiful face parted. "How goes it, son of my spirit?" the familiar greeting rolled out, in the familiar voice, deep yet sweet, like dulcet thunder. "My head hurts, father of my soul." Emrys knew his voice was a petulant child's, yet he could not stop himself. "I was promised -- " "You have not taken care," the ancient one said. How ancient he was, Emrys did not know. The priests of Morethis were, they said, immortal. And they did live for a long, long time, far longer than the common people, whom they resembled only vaguely. Terrestrial scholars said the ruling class was a variant of the Morethan race, inbred to preserve its identity, probably closer to the original world-shaking Morethans than their debased followers. The members of this group seemed young, as coin faces seem young, also old, like coins themselves. "I warned you it takes time for the final adjustments to be made. Wait, my son; haste means nothing to you." "But I've waited so long," Emrys complained. "Wait a little longer, then. You have all the time in the world." The fog swirled shut about him, and Emrys sank into his personal miasma of sleep. When he woke up, late that afternoon, he knew from the dank odor clinging to the bedclothes that it had not been a dream, that the priests, the "gods," the "immortals" of Morethis could, as they professed -- and even he had not believed them in this -- project their minds far through space... though, fortunately, not their bodies, or they would not have needed him. He remembered then the vial of tiny golden pellets Uvrei had given him before he left Morethis, and took one. Perhaps that was what the ancient one had meant. At any rate, Emrys thought he felt better afterward. He examined his body in the mirror to see if bruises had come, but the tawny, muscle-rippled flesh was unmarked. At length he put on his clothes and, leaving the hotel, went to a jeweler, where he bought a costly bracelet to be sent to the girl of the night before. Such a grandiose gesture relieved him -- he had always felt -- of all further obligation. He did not wish to repeat his experience with the liquor, so he did not go to a bar. He had no friends on Earth -- nor could he have acknowledged them if he had. He did not wish to repeat his disappointment of the previous night, so he did not seek female companionship -- although it was obvious from the eyes of the women he passed that he would have no difficulty whenever he changed his mind. But what should he do? What did young men do with their leisure, he tried to remember, when they had nothing but leisure? variety of rare terrestrial foods that did not taste quite as he expected, and went to the theater. The play was one he had seen a hundred times before under a hundred different names on many different planets. He went then to a nightclub, but it was crowded and noisy, and the girls did not excite him. Going back to the hotel, he found that sleep, at least, came easily. But I did not, he thought, do what I did merely tor the sake of a good night's rest. The third day, he wandered into a museum. He found himself less bored than he had expected. Perhaps culture would be most therapeutic for him until he reached his ultimate adjustments. Accordingly, he went from the museum to a revival of a nineteenth-century opera. He didn't like it; in fact, it disturbed him so much that he left before the final curtain and walked through the streets for hours, until he ran into a girl who was also walking the streets, and went home with her. The experience with the drab, as with the courtesan, was mechanically satisfactory, emotionally inadequate. He paid her -- knowing she, too, would have given herself for nothing, had she known how -- and went to his hotel limp with the same not-physical weakness he had felt before. The effects of the trip or the accident were lingering. He half expected Uvrei to appear that night, but the old one did not come. Why should he? This talk of spirit-son and soul-father was sophistry; there had been a bargain and each had kept his part. The afternoon of the fourth day, a vidicast reporter called to ask whether Emrys Shortmire was any relation to the Jan Shortmire who had invented the space-warp engines. Emrys could not deny his identity without jeopardizing his inheritance; however, he refused to be interviewed personally or let his picture be used. He did not, he said, want to be dwarfed by his father's reputation. Nonetheless, his arrival was mentioned on the newscasts and panic rose up in him when he heard his name spoken publicly. The next day a letter came for him. People rarely wrote letters any more, except to the distant planets, yet this one had an Earth postmark. Cold with panic again, he tore it open and read: My dear Mr. Shortmire: This evening's vidicast informed me that you were on Earth. You will not, I am sure, know my name. However, I was a friend of your father's, when we were both young men, and it would give me great pleasure to make your acquaintance. " and hurled it across the room. He knew Dyall for an old -- associate of Jan Shortmire's, but he had not thought him to be alive. What had Dyall done to warrant the longevity treatment? He was nothing but a glorified machinist, a technician. And now he might wreck all of Emrys' plans. But if the young man made no reply, perhaps the old one would take the hint. And so it turned out; there was no further word from Nicholas Dyall. Finally, two weeks after Emrys had first come to Earth, he got a telecall from Peter Hubbard. His documents were all in order and he could receive his inheritance as soon as he passed the physical examination. Emrys went to the doctor's offices feeling a cold touch of apprehension again. But all Dr. Jameson said when the examination was finished was, "You have the physique of a man fifteen years your junior, Mr. Shortmire." Emrys fastened his tunic with fingers that shook from relief. "Guess I'm lucky," he muttered. The doctor cleared his throat. "Peter Hubbard was telling me about your mother, that she was..." Hubbard, that old fool! And Emrys had been so sure of his discretion. "My mother was Morethan, yes." Then he realized it was possible that Hubbard, too, had felt there might be something notquite-human manifest in his body and had tried to prepare the doctor. Emrys made his tone more conciliatory. "On both Morethis and Earth, the child takes citizenship from the father, so -- " "I wasn't worrying about any legal problems; I was merely thinking that medical science would be interested." "I do not wish the fact of my -- of my birth publicized in any way -- until after my death," Emrys added placatorily. "Surely you can understand what hell life would become if people knew I was half Morethan?" The doctor sighed. "Yes, I know. I can't blame you." "Tell me, Doctor," Emrys asked tensely, "is there anything about me that doesn't seem... quite human?" The doctor shook his head. "Only that you're so young for your age. Mr. Shortmire, was your mother one of the caste they call the 'immortals'?" Then he flushed. "Forgive me. I didn't mean to violate-" Emrys laughed sourly. "Don't worry; I don't hold to the Morethan beliefs. She was one of the so-called gods, yes. They do live somewhat longer than either the common people or terrestrials; I guess that's why the legend arose, probably why I look so young, too. I should be glad I didn't in"You should, indeed," the docherit a -- less pleasant trait." tor said somberly. Ill an said, and died agonizedly in his arms. He looked down at the contorted, leaden face, ravaged by sickness, and thought: Even when she was beautiful, I could not love her. He could not even feel sorry for her, except in a remote, intellectual way. He could not even feel sorry for himself and his own inability to feel. Since none of the servants was left in the house -- those who were still alive had fled to the country, where there was less chance of contagion -- he took her body to the crematorium himself. Other people were there, consigning their grisly burdens to the automatic fires -- thin, sickly creatures they were, who would soon be carrion for the firebirds themselves. Whereas he -- if he had an emotion left, it would be shame -- shame for the radiant youth and health that he saw mirrored in their dully wondering eyes. Outside, the street was clamorous with the taped importunities of the empty vehicles -- so many machines, because there were so few people left. But he chose to walk. The air was sweet and clean, because the Dyall machines came and took away the bodies of those who fell in the street, and then cleaned those streets as carefully and tenderly as they had done when the walks and gutters had abounded with the vibrant slovenliness of the living. Emrys could, of course, have thrown the woman's body out into the gutter, and the machines would have carried her in their steel maws to the crematorium. But some remembered emotion had kept him from doing such a thing, and had made him give her to the flames with what small ceremony he could muster. She had been the last mistress remaining to him, and probably, he thought, to any man in the city. Perhaps, out in the country, there might be women with life and lust in them still, but such women as were left here could no longer be considered women. This last one had not been even human for the past week; yet he had tended her -- why, he could not say, except that he had nothing better to do. For one thing, she had been quieter when he was near her, and he could not bear her cries. He was glad when she did die, because playing the good Samaritan had grown tedious as, in their turn, all other roles had palled. Even though he knew there would be no more women for him, he was glad. During the first few weeks of the plague, when everyone who had been alive had known that soon they would be dead, all the people on Earth had rushed to squander the life which suddenly seemed to fill them to bursting. Then a man could have had all the women he wanted, all of anything he wanted, for the asking, except the one thing he really wanted -- the assurance of life. ' an orgy of joyless pleasure. There were some who took refuge in prayer -- addressed either to the traditional Deity or to the recent importations from the other planets. But, in the end, it was the same for all, prayerful and profligate alike. The only exceptions were the lucky few who seemed to be immune, like Emrys Shortmire, and those who escaped from the cities -- to the country or, if they were rich, the other planets. So, even if Emrys had craved women before, he would have had enough of them by now. As he passed through the streets, he heard a man who walked alone and talked to himself curse the name of Jan Shortmire. They would tear me to pieces if they knew I was his flesh and blood, Emrys thought, and smiled to think how once he had feared to be engulfed by Jan Shortmire's reputation, and now he feared to be destroyed by it. For it had been a starship equipped, like all starships, with the Shortmire engines that had brought back the plague -- a starship probing the distant corners of the Galaxy which were all that Man's insatiable curiosity had left undiscovered. Far out, even beyond Morethis -- outermost of the discovered planets -- in the middle of the dead and dying stars that were all there was in this chill, cold sector of space, the ship had come upon three dead planets, dark and lifeless. But when it returned to Earth to report the end of Man's ambitions for further conquest, it turned out that one planet had not been quite as lifeless as they had fancied. And the ship had brought back its life -- a virus against which terrestrial medicine was powerless. Emrys could have fled the city; he could have fled the planet. But somehow, after three years on Earth, he had not wanted to. He dreams that all young men dream in the murky part of their souls but seldom have the chance to gratify. As soon as the inheritance was his, he had bought the most lavish mansion that was available at the instant of his desire, furnished it extravagantly, and prepared to enjoy himself. His pleasures were many and, some of them, strange. At first his mistresses were human, then non-human. Females of all the intelligent species, save the Morethan, were to be found on Earth, and although consorting with extraterrestrials was illegal, still a wealthy man had never been too much troubled by laws. But women -- females -- represented only a fraction of his pleasures, as did the terrestrial vices. He indulged heavily in rrilla, zbokth, mburrje, and all the other outworld pursuits that had been imported from the planets where the native life had been intelligent enough for decadence. his body a thousand times beyond what should have been the limits of his endurance, the distress he had suffered during the first hours of his landing on Earth did not recur. He remained as clear of eye and trim of form as ever; each physical excess seemed only to improve his splendid health. Oddly, he did not seem to enjoy these pleasures as much as he had anticipated. Something seemed lacking. It was always like this when you dreamed too long about something, he told himself; no result ever equaled its expectation. And he took another one of the sparkling pills from Morethis. They provided the only satisfaction he seemed able to get. Emrys had been wrong about Uvrei's indifference. He apparently did consider Emrys his responsibility, over and above the material details of the bargain. The Morethans regarded all those of alien species as enemies, and all those outside the clan as unfriends. Therefore, Emrys began to realize the ceremonies of adoption he had gone through were more than merely honorific or ritual -- they had been genuine. It was an uncomfortable conclusion. "Well, son of my spirit," Uvrei would keep asking, "is this what you wanted?" "This is what I wanted, father of my soul," Emrys would agree. And it was what he had asked, what he had thought he wanted. The ancient one would smile and say, "Then I am content," and recombine into fog. And Emrys would wonder whether the Morethans had not known before they granted him his heart's desire that it would turn to dust and ashes when he had it. Then he would dismiss the thought, telling himself maybe he'd been too impatient for pleasure. After all, how could he, sprung full-blown into a quasialien society, hope to become an integral part of it all at once? So he had waited... one year, two years, three years. At the end of the fourth, the plague had struck. And he had stayed on Earth, because going to another planet somehow did not seem worthwhile. He was able to take care of his house alone, since the servants had been primarily for show, and the great Dyall machine -- which was all the house, essentially, was -- could run itself. Whenever a part of it broke down, he repaired it himself, glad of the opportunity to have something to do with his hands. Finally he realized that he must be immune; hence a lifetime waited ahead of him. So he turned to learning, for the vast libraries of tapes and books remained changeless amid the disaster. He read and he learned a great deal, and if he could not derive pleasure from this, at least there was a deep intellectual appreciation that almost took its place. The doctors on Ndrikull, the most advanced of the other planets, at last managed to find a serum that would kill the plague -- that is, they maintained it was their serum that had killed it. Some suggested that the virus had died because Earth's environment had eventually proved hostile to it. But Earth did not die, even though most of its people had, because the great machines that took care of it -- the Dyall machines -- had kept functioning. Gradually, most of the people who had fled to the other planets came back, and those who had survived in the country returned to the cities. Earth was restored to its former splendor as the social and political capital of the Galaxy, though Ndrikull now was the financial center and rivaled Earth for artistic honors. But still Emrys stuck to his books. Once in a while, he would sink himself for a week or a month in what would be, for other men, physical pleasure, just to see if his reactions had changed, but they had grown even more impersonal. been ten years on Earth, he eventually ran into Nicholas Dyall, at the opening of a scientific exposition. As soon as he saw Dyall in the crowd, he turned to go, but Dyall had seen him at the same time, and hurriedly limped across the room. "You must be Emrys Shortmire," he declared, in a voice of surprising resonance for so old a man. "You look so much like Jan, I couldn't be mistaken." Grasping his stick with one hand for support, he extended the other to Emrys, who could not refuse it. "But you are so young..." "I'm older than I look," Emrys said uncomfortably; then remembered to add, "You were a friend of my father's, sir?" "A hundred years ago, yes. My name is Nicholas Dyall." "I've heard of you; you're the man who -- who invented all those machines," Emrys said, trying not to sound too ingenuous. "I've heard people say you revolutionized our technology as much as -- " "As much as your father revolutionized our civilization? Yes, both of us are responsible for a great deal. Luckily, your father is dead." "Luckily?" Emrys echoed. "Luckily for him, I mean." The old man sighed. "But you are too young to understand." Then his dark face relaxed into a smile. "I won't ask if you received the letter I sent when you first arrived on Earth. I can understand that a young man would wish the society of other -- young people." Emrys avoided Dyall's eye, and, so doing, met the gaze of the girl standing next to the old man, and stopped, transfixed. She was very young, less than forty, he judged, perhaps even less than thirty. It was long since he had seen a woman like her. Her hair was a soft yellow, the only natural color among all the women in the room. Her face was painted pink and white, not the blues fashionable that year. Instead of being twisted and bedizened with cloth into fantastic shapes and protuberances, her pretty body was clad in a simple translucent slip. Yet, in spite of her almost deliberate dowdiness, she was beautiful -- not the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but the most... no, striking was not it, either. What was the word he wanted? He could not dredge it out of the pool in which so many of his memories had been submerged for want of room. "This is my great-great-granddaughter Megan," Dyall introduced her. The girl nodded and smiled. After a moment, Emrys forced himself to do the same. "I won't press you to come visit us, Mr. Shortmire," Dyall said to Emrys as he and his descendant finally turned to leave, "but I hope that you will." "We should be so glad to see you," the girl said, with a shy smile. "Perhaps -- perhaps I will come," he found himself saying. "One day." The two men shook hands, and Nicholas Dyall and his greatgreat-granddaughter moved away. Emrys stared after them for a minute; then, without paying any attention to the exhibits, he went back to his house and spent the rest of the evening staring at the falling flakes in his snowplace. For years, he had thought he'd lost any capacity to feel. Now he knew that was not true... because he had been moved by Megan Dyall. How, he could not say -- not even whether it was love or hate he felt toward her -- but he felt. That was the important thing, and, because of that, he had to take the risk and call on them. to the Dyall house -- a mansion, less ostentatious than his, but probably more expensive. Dyall greeted him warmly. "I'm glad you decided to come. Your father and I were not close friends, but he was the only one left of my generation whom I knew. It was a shock to hear of his passing, even though I hadn't seen him for a century or so." "You've lived for such a long time, Grandpa," Megan said in her high, sweet voice, "it's hard to imagine. But why doesn't everybody get the longevity treatment, so we can all live a long time?" "Because it's difficult and expensive," her ancestor said, smiling over her golden head at Emrys. "Because the old must make way for the young. It is only given to those whose lives, the government feels, should be prolonged, either because of the contributions they can still make, or whose contributions have already been so great that this is the only fitting reward." The girl stared at him with large blue eyes. "Does that mean you will live forever, Grandpa?" "No," the old man told her. "All our science can give is an extra half century. I don't know how long my life span would have been, but I'm past the average and the extra half century, and so I'm living on borrowed time." The blue eyes filled with tears. "I don't want you to die, Grandpa. I don't want to grow old and die, either." Dyall looked down at her, and there was, Emrys thought, an odd perplexity in his gaze. Didn't he find it natural for a young girl not to like the idea of old age, of death? "But I shall want to die when my time comes, Megan," Dyall said. "We all will." Gently, he touched her cheek. "Perhaps, by the time you make your contribution to society, scientists will know how to give youth as well as extra years. More years are not really much of a gift to the old." "But I can't do anything, Grandpa," she sobbed. "I have nothing to contribute." It was an outrage, Emrys thought, that this woman, by being the essence of femininity, should be denied the ultimate reward society had to offer. Motherhood alone should entitle her... He was, of course, already envisioning himself as the father of her children. But could he be a father? Old Dyall was saying, "Perhaps, Megan, by the time you are old enough, our government will be wise enough to realize that beauty, of itself, deserves the greatest reward Man can give." He turned to Emrys. "Forgive me for getting so sentimental, but Megan looks as uncannily like her great-greatgrandmother -- my wife -- as... you look like your father. I can't bear to think she must die, too. It's a pity there is no way she can stay young and beautiful for all time." Emrys found his fists clenching. The fingers were cold. "Alissa's portrait was painted just before I married her," the old man said. "She was just about Megan's age then. Come, I'd like you to see it." No! something inside Emrys cried out, but he could not courteously -- or any other way -- refuse to follow the old man. They went into another room. Hanging over the mantelpiece was the painting of a girl in old-fashioned clothes. Anyone, not knowing, would have taken her to be Megan. But Emrys knew she was not, and suddenly he let himself remember what it was that Megan meant to him... and why he hated Nicholas Dyall with such coruscating fury. IV ?C"V#" OU should have sent for me to come to you, Mr. Hubbard," Nicholas Dyall said, with a gentle pity that infuriated the old lawyer, who knew that he himself was young enough to be Dyall's grandson. Hubbard was jealous -- he would not conceal it from himself -- bitterly jealous. It had not been hard for him to rationalize Jan Shortmire's gift of years as a worthless one; that old man's bitterness and disillusionment had not inspired envy. But this hale and rosy old man seemed to be enjoying his years. I may not have made any signal contribution to human welfare, Hubbard thought resentfully, but I have done my best. Why must I die at an age fifty years short of the age which this man is allowed to reach? "I am perfectly able to get about, Mr. Dyall," he said in icy tones, "since I am in excellent health." Which he was, the doctor had told him, adding, however, "for your age." "What is more," Hubbard continued, "since I was on Ndrikull, it might have seemed rather presumptuous for me to send for you; whereas I had always been planning to return to Earth one day. I left at the time of the plague." "You were wise. I merely retired to the country. I escaped the virus, but the rest of my family was less fortunate. I have but one remaining -- my great-great-granddaughter." "Yes," Hubbard said, "I know. It's because of her I've come to see you." He had not really planned ever to return to Earth. Ndrikull had been comfortable and a man of his age did not risk a trip through space unless the need was urgent. The memory of Emrys Shortmire had disturbed him from time to time, but, he thought, probably the young man had died of the plague. Even if he had not, what good would it do for Peter Hubbard to be present on Earth? He could not counteract the presence of an evil force without knowing the quality of that evil. Then, picking up the kind of journal he did not usually read, he had seen mentioned the fact that Jan Shortmire's son was "courting" Nicholas Dy all's greatgreat-granddaughter. And he had known the need was now urgent. He must go back to Earth and warn someone; it was his duty. A letter could not convey the hatred and fear with which the young man had inspired him. Obviously, old Dyall had been the person to warn. Yet he did not seem right. I do not like this man, Hubbard thought. And then: This is the second man I have taken such an instant dislike to. Can it be senility rather than perceptiveness, and have I been foolish to come all this way? "You've come because of Megan?" Dyall raised eyebrows that were still thick and black. "Have you met her? Do you know her?" His voice sharpened. "She has never spoken of you." "I have never met her," Hubbard said, and saw Dyall relax. Hubbard waited, but the other man said nothing, so he went on, "I wanted to talk to you about the man she's been seeing, this Emrys Shortmire." Leaning forward, Hubbard spoke slowly, as if, by giving weight to each word, he could make them sound less fantastic. "He's a monster. Literally, I mean. His mother was a Morethan. Or is. For all I know, she may still be alive." this before, and it shook him. Yet, if Iloa Tasqi was alive, then Emrys Shortmire must be considered to be, to all intents and purposes, Morethan entirely, working only for the interests of that planet. After all, his mother had been the only parent the boy had known. Even on Clergal, he must have been brought up under a strong Morethan influence. Now, if the female was still alive, then the influence would be alive, too. Since Morethans were not permitted on Earth, there would be an obvious advantage for them in having someone here. Dyall was holding back a smile, not too well. "I didn't know a human and a Morethan could -- ah -- breed together." And, obviously, he didn't believe it. There was no way Hubbard could prove it, unless he asked Emrys to produce his birth certificate again. "It isn't generally known that the two species can reproduce together," he finally said, "nor should it be." Then he looked directly in Dyad's black eyes -- impossible that eyes so keen should be so deliberately blind, that any aware human being should not have sensed something of that dark aura. "Haven't you felt something strange about young Shortmire?" he asked. "Can't say I have," Dyall chuckled. "He seems an agreeable enough young fellow." "He's sixty-five years old." "Really? I should have taken him to be younger. But youth lasts longer these days. And there's -- " Dyall gave a little laugh -- "no crime in being old, or you and I would be in prison, wouldn't we?" Hubbard would not let himself be distracted. "He looked less than forty when he came to Earth, and he hasn't, I understand, changed in the past ten years." "Ten years is not so long." Dyall's swarthy hands began playing with the ornaments on his desk. Clearly, he was impatient to be rid of his tedious caller, and Hubbard struggled with the instinctive good breeding that told him to get up and leave. This was not a social call, so it did not matter that he was boring his host, however. On the other hand, he was not getting anywhere. Perhaps he could blast the other out of his smugness. "Look, Dyall, I know this is an outrageous thing for a man of my profession to say. I haven't a shred of proof, not a suspicion -- but I'm morally sure he killed his father." Instead of showing shock or anger or even thought, Dyall merely gave him a tolerant smile. "You're an old man, Mr. Hubbard. We're both old men," he amended graciously, "so we're apt to -- jump at shadows." I'm an old man, Hubbard thought angrily, and you're an old fool! "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the young man," Dyall continued, "or not-so-young man, if you prefer. He appears to be very fond of Megan, and if he should choose to marry her, it would ease my mind considerably. I've exceeded my life span myself, you know." Since Peter Hubbard had done the same, and his span was considerably shorter, he had no sympathy. "You'd -- let the strain continue?" "Perhaps it's a good strain. I understand the Morethans are said to be immortal. If so, the genes might be a desirable addition to our own." He was laughing openly now. Hubbard almost wept with helplessness. There must be something he could do. But what? He could not take the trip to Morethis; he would certainly die on the way. And what could he do there? There was no guarantee that, if there was anything to be found, he would find it, or even if he reached the planet alive, that he would go back alive. "Won't you stay and dine with us tonight, Mr. Hubbard?" Dyall asked. "No -- no, thank you," Hubbard said, feeling no necessity for making an excuse. The offer had represented only the barest kind of courtesy. Dyall got up. "Perhaps another night then?" "Perhaps." Hubbard rose to his feet also, trying to appear brisk and alert and young. At least he could walk without aid, he thought, staring pointedly at the stick leaning against the wall. "I would rather you didn't tell Shortmire I had come to see you about him." "Of course not, if you wish." But Hubbard knew Dyall would not keep the stranger's visit from his friend. Odd that Dyall and young Shortmire should be friends. Not so odd either, though; young Shortmire had no reason to love his father. Besides, although Jan Shortmire had hated Nicholas Dyall, that did not mean Nicholas Dyall had hated Jan Shortmire, or even knew of the other man's animosity. i S he was riding back to his hotel, Hubbard let his tired old body indulge the aches and pains that were its rightful heritage. As his body relaxed, his mind relaxed, and he began to think more clearly. Perhaps Dyall would not listen to him -- perhaps Dyall had some reason for not listening -- but the government might. What young Shortmire might have done as a human, they would consider a matter for local law -- but the fact that human and Morethan had begotten offspring would interest them. The fact that the Morethans might have managed at last to get a spy on Earth would interest them. If Emrys would not surrender his birth certificate, they could get another from Clergal. Only, would the government's representative believe Hubbard enough to get that birth certificate? Or would they, like Dyall, dismiss him as a doddering old fool? The private humiliation had been hard enough; he hated to risk a public one. But it was his duty to tell officialdom of his suspicions, he knew miserably. Never again could he think with pride of himself as a worthy citizen if he didn't at least make the attempt. Never again could he let himself feel a justifiable jealousy of those with endowments superior to his, if he did not prove himself worthy of what he had. Well, there was no hurry; he would sleep on it He was mistaken. In the morning, before he had even started to decide upon any course of action, the front desk called to announce that a Mr. Shortmire wished to see him. "Very well," the old lawyer said wearily into the machine, to the machine, for it was the Dyall itself speaking. "Send him up." A short while later, there was a rap on the door. "Come in," Hubbard called. The door slid open. A man entered, a tawny golden youth with eyes like burnished metal. "Do you know who I am, Peter?" "Of course," Hubbard said, faintly disgusted, since he considered melodrama vulgar. "You're Emrys Shortmire." "You're wrong," the man said. "I'm Jan Shortmire." V home the night Dyall had shown him the portrait of his long-dead wife, and Emrys had dreamed, not of Megan Dyall, but of Alissa Embel, Megan's greatgreat-grandmother, whom he had wanted a hundred years before, and who had married Nicholas Dyall. Consciously, he had forgotten her, but at the back of his mind, she had, for over a century, walked hand in hand with his hatred. That night he understood what he had not realized then. He had completed the engines with which he had been tinkering for years with a real vengeance. He had taken the first starship out into space himself -- when no one had faith in his engines, least of all himself -- merely "to show her" what a great man he was, even if he died in the showing. In his spite, he had opened up the stars for mankind. And when he returned, years later, he found that Dyall, too, had stopped tinkering and had changed the pattern of his gadgets to one more acceptable to the public taste. Before, they had operated quite satisfyingly, but they had not been salable in the shape he had given them, and no manufacturer had been interested in leasing the patents. Now that he had yielded, manufacturers were falling all over themselves to get the right to produce his machines. Dyall's was not as soul-stirring a success as Shortmire's -- he did not inspire cheering crowds and parades -- but a more enduringly popular one. The Shortmire engines carried humanity to the stars, but it was the Dyall machines that cooked humanity's dinners and kept its houses clean. So humanity respected Jan Shortmire and took Nicholas Dyall to its collective heart. Emrys awakened, remembering all this and rigid with loathing for Nicholas Dyall, and for the world which had allowed Nicholas Dyall to take from him something he had wanted. Something which had, as soon as he'd known for sure he'd lost it forever, become what he wanted most. And also he hated the world which had given Alissa Embel to Dyall and had then proceeded to heap on him in addition every honor Jan Shortmire himself had won in an effort to make up for what he'd lost. Jan Shortmire had risked his life in space; Nicholas Dyall had sat comfortably in his chair -- and both were equally honored. Then Emrys -- as Emrys -- caught hold of himself. It was true that originally there had been injustice. But it had been righted and so there was no more reason to hate Dyall. I have a second chance, but he will have none. I will live out another full lifetime, and I will have Megan, too, and he'll die in a few years. And as for the world, I have already revenged myself on it in advance. He got up and pulled a spunmetal robe about him, amethyst and sable -- a gift from Morethis. There was always a costly gift on his birthday, either out of kindness or cruelty, together with a vial of the golden capsules. What a pity, he thought, as he went downstairs, that Dyall and the world both would never know the truth: that Jan Shortmire had no son, that Emrys and Jan Shortmire were one. r  'HE Morethans first came to Jan Shortmire when, approaching his natural old age, he had traveled as a visitor to their planet -- largely because old men did not go to Morethis -- and they had made him their offer. He had laughed in their dark and exquisite faces. "My own government will give me fifty years more of life," he said, for he had heard, during the voyage out, that he would be on the next honors list. "What need do I have of you?" "We can give you far more than fifty years," they'd told him. "And youth, besides." At that, he had stopped laughing, but still he had not accepted their offer, for many reasons... doubt and fear, perhaps some shreds of honor, and certainly, since he was a man of science, skepticism. Then, when Shortmire was nearing the end of those fifty extra years which had, indeed, been granted him by a grateful Earth government -- together with a plaque, suitably inscribed -- he had received a gift. It was one of those great crystalline prisms from Morethis that were so fashionable on Earth as lighting fixtures, not because they saved fuel -- for one such prism would cost ten lifetimes of fuel -- but because they gave a light no Earthborn device could give, making the old look young, the stupid wise, and, most important of all, the ugly beautiful. Shortmire looked into the lambent depths, wondering who had sent him so costly and so useless a gift. Suddenly the flame vitrified into a face that flashed up at him from the crystal -- a face that was beautiful in its horror, and horrible in its beauty. He closed his eyes, but when he opened them, the iridescent eyes were still there, mocking him for his cowardice. "I am Uvrei," a deep voice of tingling sweetness said, "god among gods and man among men. I bring you greetings from Morethis, Jan Shortmire." Shortmire knew well enough what Uvrei must want, for the Morethans' long-ago offer had risen of late to the top of his thoughts. They could not do what they claimed, he had tried to reassure himself, whenever the memory returned; it was a trick which he had been clever enough not to fall for. But part of his mind did not believe this, and that part was glad to see Uvrei. "What do you want of me?" he demanded. The Morethan smiled, and each glittering tooth was a fiery brilliant. "The same as before, on the same terms," he said, offering no enticements. The man who would accept such an offer would provide his own. TF they were capable of doing this... thing with the crystal, then they might also have other powers. So Shortmire could no longer pretend that what they offered him was impossible. On the other hand, what they required of him in return was truly terrible. Could they really do what they said? After all, my world has not done overmuch for me. Others, like Nicholas Dyall, have wealth and power and... He would not let himself think of Alissa Dyall, since she must long be dead, of old age, if nothing else. The last he had heard of her was when she and Dyall had announced their wedding date. Then he had taken the ship fitted out with the engines everyone said would not work, and he had fled into space. When he had come back, no one had spoken of her, and gradually, in his newfound importance, he had to some degree forgotten her, though he never forgot Dyall. Pity to think of Alissa as having grown old. Even more of a pity to think of himself as having grown old, for he could see that in every mirror he passed. "You're sure you can give me youth as well as life?" he asked. "Not only youth, but perpetual youth," Uvrei assured him. "Youth such as you did not know even when you were young." But Shortmire was still suspicious. Even if the Morethans could do what they said, how did he know they would? An alien concept of honor might have no reference to the terrestrial one. "How do I know I can trust your word?" Uvrei's face grew black, literally black, and the crystal shivered until, Emrys thought, it would split. And he shivered, too, knowing in the fine nerves and little muscles of his body what would happen to him at the final shivering. A fear filled him then that he had never known before, not even when he faced space for the first time, and in the midst of that fear came the thought that, if he truly hated Earth, this was the most artistically nasty revenge he could take. TP HE crystal trembled to stillness as Uvrei's face paled to composure. "If you were not an Earthman, Jan Shortmire," he said, "we would not have needed you, nor you us. And an Earthman could not be expected to know that the words you have just spoken are the insult that, on Morethis, is deadlier than death; for the word of an immortal -- no matter to whom or what he gives it -- is as sacred and enduring as he himself." "I apologize," Shortmire said quickly, "for my ignorance." "And I forgive you," Uvrei declared, as grandly as if he were a god, "because of that ignorance. Moreover, since you cannot help your racial deficiencies, I will make this bargain with you. Come to Morethis. There we will give you the life and youth we promised. Then, when you are satisfied that we have given you what you desire, you will give us what we desire." Not having been too honorable a man in his own hundred and fifty-five years, Jan Shortmire still could not believe that the Morethans would act in all honor. However, even the remote possibility that they would play fair was strong temptation for an ardent man pushing death. So he had agreed. He had wound up his affairs and made his will in favor of "his son." Then he had left Earth to go to Morethis, to die as Jan Shortmire and he resurrected as Emrys Shortmire. The Morethans had kept their word, though there were times when he wished they had not. For no phoenix casting itself into the fire to burn alive in agony, so that it might rise again, young and strong and purified, from the ashes of its own dead self, could have suffered the excruciating torment of both mind and body that he suffered as, little by little, he was made young again. Uvrei had warned him that this would happen. "To become one of us, you must be capable of allendurance." So, for three years, he had lived on the miasmic planet, suffering unending, unbearable pain -- not only his, but of the others whose lives went to make his new life. Slowly, agonizingly, these were stirred into the shrieking cauldrons of his body, until they blended and melted and coalesced to become his new shape. Then Uvrei had led him ceremoniously to a reflecting glass and shown him Emrys Shortmire -- a boy far more handsome than the boy Jan Shortmire had been, though, at the same time, his twin. The only thing not quite human about Emrys Shortmire was his eyes, and how could they be human after what they had seen? But he would forget all that once he was back on Earth, forget the payment that had been exacted -- and prepare to live his new life to the full. A LL this Emrys Shortmire told Peter Hubbard in the quiet of the expensive hotel room. It was pleasant to be able to unburden himself at last. For the past eleven years, there had been a secret side of him that must always walk apart, even from Megan. Now there was someone who could know the whole of him, and he was grateful to Hubbard for having come back to Earth. But Hubbard sat there staring with so fixed a gaze that, for a moment, Emrys thought he was dead. Then he realized that it was only shock; all this had been too much for so old a man. Selfishly, he had heaped his burden upon another, without asking whether that other "Peter," he began, "I'm sorry..." not quite sure for what he was apologizing. He could not have trusted the old man at the beginning, just as he had to trust him now. But of course he was apologizing to Peter Hubbard, as the representative of humanity, for what he himself had done to Earth. He began to give unasked-for explanations. "I deliberately made you suspect I killed my father, because if you suspected one of us had done away with the other, why, then, you'd automatically have assumed there were two." He looked down at the floor. "And I wanted you to hate me. We couldn't be friends; otherwise, knowing me better than anyone else alive, you might have guessed... "I doubt it," Hubbard said wearily. "Almost anything else would have seemed more likely." Presently he asked, "Weren't you afraid I might investigate?" Emrys smiled. "What could you find out? After all, I hadn't killed Jan Shortmire." The smile became a little fixed. "I wouldn't have cared even if you had told someone your suspicions then," Emrys went on doggedly, "because I knew no one would believe you. But now -- " he old friend with the young face and the young body and the eyes that were unhuman -- but less so than before. This was a frightful thing that had been done, and by and by he would feel the full horror of it. Right now he was too numb to care. He felt, as Emrys Shortmire must have felt on coming back to Earth, detached and without interest. But I've felt this way before, he thought; ifs because I'm old. 'Were you really satisfied with your bargain, Jan?" he asked, almost casually. "Not at first," the boy admitted, sinking down on the couch and clasping his hands around his knees. So young, so graceful, and so... unnatural. "It seemed to me then that the Morethans had given me youth and taken away humanity. Because, once I found I colored -- "well, I don't want you to tell Megan Dyall anything... bad about me. You see, I... love her." "I gathered that impression," Hubbard said. But why does he sound so unhappy about it? Emrys thought angrily. W hat's wrong with me? Because he was in love, he could not appreciate the irony of that thought VI was physically capable, I found I didn't really want the things I had craved so much before." "So they did trick you?" When all was said and done, Hubbard thought, you could never trust an alien life-form, a foreigner. "No, no! You still don't understand. The way I see it is that... certain elements in us may not mean anything to them. They don't know they're there, so they wouldn't realize that anything got lost in...the process." "Do you think, Jan," Hubbard asked slowly, "that the way you felt -- or didn't feel -- might not have anything to do with the Morethans at all? That, for all your young body, you are an old man and feel like an old man?" "Nonsense! I know what it is to feel like an old man, and I know what it is to feel like a young man, and I -- I felt like neither." "When a man has lived a certain number of years," Hubbard said, knowing that envy gave the truth relish, "he is an old man. Age is in the mind and heart, not only in the body." "That's a lie!" Then Emrys said, more calmly, "If that's so, why did everything change when I met Megan? Because I found then that my emotions had not been lost! I had a feeling for her that I'd never had for another woman -- not even for Alissa, I think. I hadn't imagined there could be a woman like Megan in the world, so sweet and amiable and completely feminine." He looked angrily at Hubbard. "You think I'm sentimental, don't you?" Hubbard tried to smile. "There's nothing wrong with sentiment." But sentimentality was characteristic of an old man's love. Emrys laughed and hugged his knees. He was overdoing the ingenuousness. Of course he deliberately played the part of a boy young enough to be his own greatgreat-grandson, because he was wooing a woman young enough to be his own great-great-granddaughter. And Hubbard remembered how he himself had attempted to move briskly before Nicholas Dyall. Emrys Shortmire would not have the physical aches that he'd had as a result, but could there be psychical aches? Could an old man ever actually be young? never touched her, Peter -- really touched her, I mean. She's not like other women, you know." "I know," Hubbard said, remembering back to the time when he, too, had been in love. Only the memory was not tender in him, because he had married the girl and lived with her for nearly seventy years. "Peter, you aren't listening!" "I'm sorry," the old man said, waking from his reverie. "What were you saying?" "I said, do you think Megan she knew I was older than her great-great-grandfather?" But there was a more important question that Hubbard could no longer refuse to face. "Jan, what did you give the Morethans in return for what they gave you?" "You haven't answered my question." "I can't answer it, because I don't know the girl. But you can answer mine, because you know what you gave the Morethans." Emrys was silent for a moment; then he laughed. "I gave them my soul," he said lightly. "Like that fellow in the opera." "I know that. What I'm afraid of is that it wasn't enough. In what form did you give it to them, Jan?" "You have no right to catechize me like that." The old man's voice was soft. "I think I have." Emrys was a long time in answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and dead. "All right, I gave them the blueprints for the space-warp engines. What else did I have to give them in exchange?" Hubbard expelled a long breath. He had answered this question for himself many minutes before. Still, the shock of confirmation was too great. All hope was gone now. "Perhaps you had a right to sell your own soul, Jan, but you had no right to sell humanity's." His good breeding held up all the way. This man had betrayed the whole of mankind, and so he, Peter Hubbard, reproached him gently for it. Though, come to think of it, what good would savage recrimination -- or anything -- do? "But you don't have to worry about it, Peter!" Emrys cried. "Listen, the Morethan technology is so alien, so different from ours, because it's based on mental rather than physical forces, that it'll take centuries before they can acquire the techniques they'll need to build the engines. And they'll have trouble getting the materials. We'll both have been long in our graves by the time they'll reach Earth." "And that makes it all right? It doesn't matter to you what happens to your own home planet once you are dead?"   'HE young-looking face was flushed. "Why should it? Does Earth care what happens to me? During the plague, they cursed my name because I invented the starengines. That's the only time Earth remembered me." "During the plague, men were insane, Jan," Hubbard said, knowing his own sweet reasonableness was ludicrous under the circumstances, "not responsible for what they said. They don't curse your name any more." "No, they've forgotten it." Emrys looked at Hubbard with blazing, unhuman eyes. "Why should you expect me to put their welfare before my own?" "You must, if the race is to survive." Hubbard expected Emrys to say, "Why should it survive?" but apparently there was a grain of emotion left here. "It will survive. The Morethans are not -- " the word seemed to stick in Emrys' throat -- "monsters." "Jan," Hubbard said in a monotone, "eleven years ago, after you came to Earth for your inheritance, I became interested in Morethis -- naturally enough, I suppose. I started scanning everything I could lay my hands on, and I learned a great deal about it -- as much, I believe, as anyone off Morethis knows. Except, of course, you." Emrys rose and began to pace the floor. "Nobody really knows anything about Morethis. Most of what has been written is a -- a pack of lies. One liar copied from another, and so they perpetuate the lie. Scandal has always sold better than truth!" Hubbard said, "There is a legend that the Morethans once had limited space travel, though no way of warping space to bring the distant stars closer, since they did not use engines. But there were many stars close to them, and they traveled from system to system, sucking each one dry. Then there were no living planets left in their sector of space, and their engineless ships could not bridge the gap to the next cluster, so they found themselves trapped on a dying planet that revolved around a dying star, and they, as a race, began to die themselves." Emrys tried to laugh. "Looks like a fine case of poetic justice, but -- " "Wait. I haven't finished. The race did not die completely; it decayed. Certain among the people stayed alive through sucking the lives of the others; certain among them still kept some vestiges of the old traditions and knowledge; certain among them waited." "Is that the end of your story?" Hubbard nodded. Emrys' face was ashen. "Well, it's an old wives' tale," he sputtered. "All the Morethans want is to be able to compete on an equal basis with Earth. They don't want to be exploited, nor do they intend to..." As his eyes caught Hubbard's, his voice trailed off. "Anyhow, I'll be dead," he said. "I don't give a damn what happens after I'm dead." couldn't. There is no man who has not some love for his own kind, be it ever so little, merely because they look like him. "You won't tell anybody who I really am?" Emrys asked childishly. "You're still my friend, aren't you?" Hubbard sighed. Was he still this creature's friend? He didn't know. "Who would believe me?" he finally asked. "And even if they did, what's the use? Nothing can be done. The only thing that's ever protected us from the Morethans is distance. When they reach Earth, they will have already conquered us. Mental powers are always stronger than physical powers at close range." "That's right." Emrys seemed to be relieved at the idea that the question was out of his hands. "Too late now to do anything about it." Hubbard nodded. There was no way out that he could see. "But you do promise not to tell old Dyall that I'm my father instead of me?" Emrys asked anxiously. "Even if he believed me, he wouldn't care. All he wants is a good match for that great-greatgranddaughter of his." But was that all? As far as money went, Nicholas Dyall was reputed to be the richest man alive. And if he was truly fond of the girl, would he not at least have investigated the young man? "You're hard!" Emrys complained, but without rancor. "I have a suspicious nature," Hubbard said thoughtfully. "Perhaps it's the legal mind. At any rate, I don't care for Nicholas Dyall." "Well, I don't either, but I don't really give a hang what kind of a great-great-grandfather-in-law I'm getting. All I care about is Megan. Do you think it's wrong for me to ask her to marry me?" "Can't you understand that, at this stage, the girl doesn't matter?" "No," Emrys said simply. "I cannot imagine her not mattering." After he had gone, Hubbard still found himself thinking about Nicholas Dyall. In his whole lifetime, the old lawyer had personally known only two men whom society had deemed worthy of its highest honor, the longevity treatment. And these were more than most men had met, for the longevity treatment was given to very few. Both of the two, Dyall and Shortmire, had some defect in their personalities that warped them -- all but completely, in Shortmire's case -- away from the human virtues. Was that defect a part of the creative talent that had earned the individual his right to the treatment? Or did it arise as an effect of the treatment itself? Because, if that was the case, then Earth's longevity treatment might be nothing more than a primitive form of the Morethan "process." Since only straws remained to be grasped at, no one thing Hubbard did would be more futile than any other. And since he had nothing better to do, he might just as well investigate this new avenue. Jan Shortmire had hated Nicholas Dyall. Had Nicholas Dyall hated Jan Shortmire with equal venom? And, if so, had he done anything about it? chanical voice announced, "Mr. Peter Hubbard to see Mr. Dyall and Mr. Shortmire." "Do you mean to say he has the gall to come see us, after the accusations he made against you, Emrys?" Dyall demanded incredulously. "I still can't understand why you sent him an invitation to the wedding, but that he should make a casual social call...!" "We've come to terms." Emrys smiled. "After all, at his age, he can't be held accountable for everything he says." "I'm at least fifty years older than he is!" the old engineer almost spat. "And you -- do you mean that I am not responsible for what I say?" Knowing that he was the other man's senior by some twenty years himself, Emrys was malevolently pleased. "Some people retain their faculties longer than others," he observed. "And Hubbard was my father's friend, as well as his lawyer, so he's the closest thing to a relative that I have on Earth. Except you, of course; you were my father's friend, too." Dyall's lips tightened. "How does Hubbard know you're in this house right now? Do you think he's having you followed?" It was possible, but Emrys didn't care. For almost a year now, his life had been blameless, and, strangely, it suited him to live that way. "I'm here in this house most of the time. It wouldn't be hard for him to figure out where he could find me." The gong sounded again. Dyall looked undecided. "If I can forgive him, sir," Emrys said gently, "surely you can." "Show him in," Dyall rasped to the machine. Megan rose to go, but Emrys kept hold of her small, cold hand. "I'd like you to meet Peter Hubbard, dear. He's really a nice old fellow when you get to know him. Just a bit too much of a do-gooder, that's all." Dyall snorted. "I shall be glad to know any friend of yours, Emrys," Megan said, sitting down again obediently. After a moment, Peter Hubbard came into the room. "Peter, this is my fiancee, Megan Dyall." Smilingly, Emrys waited for the usual inane felicitations. He couldn't expect a man of Hubbard's age to be bowled over by this loveliness, but still surely no man, no matter how ancient, could be completely insensible to the girl's charm. Hubbard stood still and stared at her. "Amazing..." he murmured. "Amazing..." Then he turned to Dyall. "You are to be congratulated, sir." Emrys was annoyed. He knew Hubbard was too well-bred to make a remark like that unintentionally. However, he pretended to be amused and said, "You're supposed to congratulate me, Peter." But Hubbard continued his inexplicable rudeness by paying no attention to Emrys and, instead, staring at Nicholas Dyall. And finally Dyall said, with a strangled laugh, "I think perhaps in this instance Mr. Hubbard is right." He threw himself into an easy chair with an attempt at nonchalance, but it was embarrassingly apparent that his stick was not enough to support him any more. His old body was trembling. And Emrys found that he himself was trembling, too.Everyone seemed to be waiting. Even Megan glanced from one to the other with her usual expression of bright-eyed interest. "Unfortunately, Mr. Hubbard," Dyall said at last, "you've reached your conclusions too late to do anything except perhaps hasten an end that is, you'll concede, by now inevitable." "Yes," Hubbard agreed, "you've won your game." He came a little further into the room, so that he was standing over the other old man. "I do believe that, of the two, you are the worse. He did what he did out of spite. You created that spite and kept it alive." Dyall's dark face flushed and his hands tightened on his cane. "But I had a right to do what I did. And I hurt only one person. Two, if you include me. Give me credit, at least, for the smallness of my scope." Hubbard glanced at Megan. And Dyall broke into the shrill cackle of an old man. "But you know, you know, and still you think of her! How sentimental can you get? Don't you realize -- " "How much does she?" Hubbard said. "How much do you?" Emrys had become nearly frantic with frustration and bewilderment. He was the one who had secrets; nobody else. Nothing was to be kept hidden from him! "What are you two blabbering about?" he almost screamed. "It doesn't make sense -- any of it!" Hubbard turned toward him, his head and neck moving with the deliberate precision of a piece of clockwork. "It makes very good sense, Jan. I realized that I could find out nothing more from the stars, so I turned my researches back to Earth. I've been investigating Mr. Dyall." "What did you find?" Emrys asked tensely. Why did Peter call him by his former name in front of his former enemy? Had the old fool forgotten his promise, or had he broken it on purpose? "What did you find out?" he repeated. Hubbard's voice was filled with pity. "Just this: Nicholas Dyall never did marry Alissa Embel." Emrys' fear exploded into a scarlet rage. "Then Megan is -- " He advanced on Dyall, his fists clenched. "If you took Alissa and then didn't -- " Hubbard caught his arm in a frail grip. "Don't be so hasty, Emrys. Dyall did no wrong to Alissa Embel, whatever wrong he may have done to you." "Thank you," Dyall murmured, "for granting me that. I gave her all I had, but it wasn't what she wanted. She wanted -- " his old eyes were filled with hate as he looked at Emrys -- "you." "Alissa Embel killed herself on the day before the wedding," Hubbard told Emrys. "She, as we attorneys say, died without issue." could not have had Alissa, Dyall had not, either. At the same time, he felt an overwhelmingly poignant sense of sorrow, that he should have had three full lifetimes, and the woman he had loved -- insofar as Jan Shortmire had been capable of love -- not even one. He raised dull eyes to the two old men. "Then who is Megan?" Hubbard hesitated. But what worse could there be to tell? And then the lawyer asked a ridiculous question, "Jan, do you know why Dyall's machines didn't meet popular favor until he changed them?" Emrys plunged back once again into the well of his memories. "Nobody wanted to buy machines that looked too much like people; it made them... uncomfortable. So Dyall stopped designing robots and made machines adapted to their separate functions and -- " His voice became a cry of anguish. "Megan!" She turned her bland, smiling doll face toward him. "I'm sorry, Emrys," the sweet voice said. Dyall's eyes were squeezed shut and something glistened on the edge of them -- something that Emrys would not admit were tears, because he himself could never cry. "When Alissa died," Dyall said, "I knew I couldn't love another woman. So I made a mechanical doll in her image. I made her the woman every man dreams of -- lovely and sympathetic and undemanding. And I told myself she would be better than the original Alissa because she would be perfect, and Alissa wasn't; she would stay young forever, while the real Alissa would have grown old... if she had lived. But it wasn't the same for me." Why was she the same for me, then? Emrys wondered bitterly. Was it because I didn't know? Is that all love is -- self-deception? "Perhaps," Dyall went on, "Man cannot appreciate true perfection; perhaps he's not good enough himself. Still, she was company of a sort and so I kept her by me. And then, when I read of Emrys Shortmire's arrival on Earth, I sent him a note, but he didn't answer; however, I contrived to get a look at him anyway. Then I knew for sure that he was Jan Shortmire himself; and then I knew what Megan's destiny was... "How could you know he -- I was Jan Shortmire?" Emrys demanded angrily. It was insupportable that old Dyall should have known all along; it spoiled the joke. "Where would you have -- have gotten the concept?" The old man smiled, opening his eyes. "Because the Morethans made me the same offer they did you! Did you think you were the only one?" And, throwing back his head, he derisively began to laugh aloud. the Morethans, not for what they would do to Earth's pride, but for what they had done to his. Because now there was nothing that he had been offered that Dyall had not been offered also. And Dyall had not accepted the Morethans' offer, thereby proving himself the better man. And Dyall had tricked him, thereby proving himself the cleverer man. And Dyall had hated him even more than he had hated Dyall, thereby proving himself the more constant man. So there Emrys Shortmire, Jan Shortmire, was left... with nothing but a youthfulness of which, he had to admit to himself, he had grown rather tired. "I'm sorry, Emrys," Megan said. "I'm terribly sorry." Dyall sprang from his chair. "I'm sick of that piping doll's voice of yours! I've stood it for a century, and that's long enough!" Raising his stick high in the air, he crashed it down upon the golden head, the pretty pink and white face. And, frozen in horror, Emrys could not move until it was too late. He had not conceived old Dyall capable of committing outright murder so wantonly. Probably he wasn't; to him, Megan was and had been always a doll. And now she was a heap of broken wheels and gears on the thick rug. Still, out of the heap of twisted machinery, a tiny, tinny voice kept repeating "I'm sorry, Emrys. I'm terribly sorry." Exhausted by his effort, Dyall sank back into his chair. And he laughed as Emrys, wanting desperately to weep, unable to, bent over the pieces, trying to fit them together again. "You'll never do it, Jan," he croaked maliciously. "Even a good engineer would never be able to repair it now. If I know how to create, I also know how to destroy!" And he went into another paroxysm of gleefully triumphant laughter. Emrys saw that Megan was indeed far beyond his powers, and probably old Dyall's, to repair. Filled with fury -- the one emotion, he saw now, that he had not given up -- he turned to smash Nicholas Dyall as Dyall had smashed his doll. But the old, old man sat perfectly still in his chair. There was a broad grin on his face. He made a very cheerful corpse. he did not want life any more. He went back to his mansion and he tried to hang himself. But the rope would not cut off his breath. He pointed a ray gun at his head, and although the heat became intolerable, it did not burn him. He swallowed poison and waited. Nothing happened. He threw himself off the roof and landed unhurt upon the pavement below. He went back inside and slashed his writst and saw the cuts close before his eyes. And as he stared at the unmarked skin, thick fog filled the room, and he heard Uvrei's voice -- and it was the greatest ignominy of all that the Morethan's voice should dare to hold compassion. "Don't you know, Emrys, that an immortal cannot die?" When Emrys forced himself to look at the ancient one, he saw that the beautiful eyes were filled with an unhallowed pity. "You are an immortal god, son of my spirit You can destroy anything except one of us -- and you are one of us now." "I'm not one of you. I'm not a god, nor are you. I'm not..." Emrys looked down at his wrists, then back at Uvrei. "But I may be immortal," he acknowledged. "It wasn't just a figure of speech?" "You will never die, Emrys. You will exist forever, like us, a handful of changelessness in a changing universe." "Then I won't be dead when you come to Earth?" He had fancied himself out of it, but what exquisite punishment that not until he had tired of life had he found out he was cursed with unwanted life forever. He had not been a good man, but was any man evil enough to deserve this? "When we come to Earth, you will be waiting for us. But you will look forward to our coming." And Uvrei said once again, "You are one of us, Emrys." "I'm not! I'm not!" "Of course you are. Like us, you do not breathe air -- " "I do..." And then Emrys remembered that the rope had not cut off his breath, and it might well have been because he had not been breathing. "Like us, you do not eat food." "But I do!" And here Emrys was genuinely perplexed. "We left you your digestive system, because part of the pleasure you craved comes through that. But you could completely deny yourself the food that you thought sustained you and feel no ill effects -- at least no physical ones. It's the pills that feed you, Emrys." "Well," Emrys said slowly, "they're food, then." "Of a sort. But not the kind you mean. You cannot exist without us and our skills, Emrys. Each vial of pills consists of the mitogenetic force of ten tons of life." 'What kind of life?" Emrys asked. "Does it really matter?" "You said I cannot exist without you," Emrys pointed out shrewdly, "that I need the pills. So I could stop taking them, couldn't I, and starve myself to death?"  do that. Only it would take, say, about fifteen hundred terrestrial years -- perhaps, since we have given you a strong, young body, as much as two thousand. Do you think you are strong enough to starve yourself to death over a period of two thousand years?" Emrys knew he was not. In that first anguish, all he could think of to do was to humble himself before the Morethan. "I have served your purpose. Why not be merciful to me now?" he pleaded. "At least let me die." "I could not, even if I would. So little of our old powers remain. We have kept the secret of perpetual life, but we have lost the secret of perpetual death." "But that's the greater secret!" "Of course it is!" For the first time, Emrys saw the Morethan high priest lose control. "Do you think I don't know what it is to crave death?" After a silence, the voice, once my son, being one of us, you have nothing to fear from our arrival. You no longer have anything in common with these animals. You cannot even -- what is your word? -- love them. When you tried, you fixed upon a machine with the face of a memory." "Would a human being have known she was a machine?" "A human being would have known." "Then... I am a machine, too? A machine created by mental, rather than physical processes, but a machine nonetheless?" "In a sense," the alien said thoughtfully, "you could be called that -- though to compare you, as an artistic creation, with that trumpery piece of gimcrack..." "Don't call her that!" Emrys shouted. "She's dead!" Uvrei began to laugh quietly. After a little, Emrys began to laugh, too. "I'm being foolish," he said. "Extremely foolish," Uvrei agreed. "Resign yourself, my son, and accept your fate. That is what we immortals have all had to do, one by one." Of course he could do that, Emrys thought After all, he wouldn't be as badly off as the other Earth people when the Morethans came; whatever else happened, he, at least could not be turned into a component part of a little golden pill. Immortality was a dull future, but perhaps, after the Morethans arrived, it would become more interesting. "Good-by, son of my spirit" Uvrei said. "We shall meet again corporeally in a few centuries." The fog thickened about him and disappeared, leaving its characteristic odor behind. And still Emrys could not resign himself. Dyall could have had this, too, if he had wanted it. This was what he was offered and what he was strong enough to refuse. If I accept my fate, then I will always know that I have come off second best to him. And this prospect, more than immortality, more than the knowledge of what would happen to Earth and its people, was the one that Emrys found intolerable. IX " Peter Hubbard thought as  wearily, he told the Dyall machine to let Emrys Shortmire up. # am a very old man and I will die soon. Can't he leave me alone in the little time left? But he could not forget the obligations of courtesy. He was polite to Emrys Shortmire when the other man came in. Even if he hadn't been, he saw, Emrys wouldn't have noticed; he was too full of his own thoughts. "Peter," he cried, almost before he was fully in the room, "did you know that, in dying, Nicholas Dyall won a final victory over me?" The old man muffled a yawn. "You mean you can't die? Well, I was afraid of that. I am sorry for you, Jan, but you brought this upon yourself." "I know," Emrys said, looking a little disappointed that the knowledge did not startle the lawyer. "I will be alive when they come," he went on, more subdued. "I will be waiting, or so they think." "I imagine that's what they counted on," Hubbard said indifferently. "You not only giving them the secret of the engines but acting as a -- an outpost. They didn't sell their wares cheap, did they?" Emrys' eyes flashed copper fire. "But I will not be waiting to help them. I will be waiting to fight them." "Brave words." "You think I can't fight them?" "Of course you can't. They have powers far beyond yours. And why should you want to fight them? I know you hadn't planned to be alive when they came, but it won't be bad for you. You're one of them now." Emrys sat down on the couch. "Physically I am. That's why I can fight them. Look, Peter, I have centuries ahead of me. By giving me immortality, they have also given me time." "Splendid. Time to do what?" "I don't know," Emrys confessed. "But time is such a valuable commodity in itself. With it, I could learn how to turn their own powers against them." "Easier said than done," Hubbard observed. "Maybe I could -- oh -- invent a machine that will amplify my mind powers until it can overcome all of theirs..." Hubbard said nothing. "Well, then, the engines I gave them can't take them out of this galaxy any more than those same engines can take humanity out of it. But, given time, I can invent new engines, Peter -- engines that can jump the gap from galaxy to galaxy. If I cannot give Man the weapons with which to fight, at least I can give him the means by which to flee! And, since I was the man who invented the one, I can be the man to invent the other!" thought, hope rising in him, despite all his efforts to hold it back. That was possible. But would Emrys do this? Right now, in the first flush of repentance, he might try to. But if the work grew tedious, might he not say to himself: Why bother? I'm bound to live forever, anyway. Why should I care what happens to the others of my kind? "Who knows, Peter," Emrys cried, "I may be able to invent engines that can move the whole world -- all our worlds -- to another galaxy, where the Morethans will never be able to follow!" "What's in it for you, Emrys?" Hubbard asked bluntly. "I want to save humanity... and, of course," Emrys added, his eyes lighting exultantly, "by doing that, I will do more than Dyall ever did. My name will go down in history, and his -- " "Do you hate him so much, Emrys, even though he's dead?" Hubbard asked wonderingly, unable to conceive of such a thing. "Especially because he's dead," Emrys snarled. "Because now I'll never have the pleasure of mocking him." He looked anxiously at Hubbard. "Don't you think I'm doing the right thing, Peter?" The right thing, but for the wrong reason. Only for the wrong reason, though, was Emrys sure to finish what he had set out to do. It was the one motive that would keep him working long after he grew bored with the work. It was humanity's only chance, and so it did not matter why Emrys was doing this. "It's a splendid thing you're planning to do, Emrys," Hubbard said warmly. "A splendid thing!" What if Emrys did go down in history? It would be thanks to him that history had continued at all. ES, he was a vicious man. And Dyall had been equally vicious. And Peter Hubbard was a good man -- and it was he who had not been granted that fifty extra years of life. What was goodness? Was it inherently opposed to greatness? Did things get done only out of malevolent motives -- anger and ruthlessness and spite? If, as it seemed, goodness was a passive force, and evil an active one, perhaps the world needed both. And if, as it seemed, evil could beget good, then evil could not be all bad. So, Peter Hubbard thought, there is hope for the Morethans as well as for humanity. by L. Ron Hubbard A descriptive list of the principal incidents in Man's # Distribution Center, Box # Sa Silver Spring, Maryland or all flie seas with ousters Was another explanation the right one -- that he worried too much about the good of humanity for his own good? to the F  O Bike Shop, Oscar greeted him with a hearty "Hi, there!" Then, as he looked closer at the middle-aged visitor with the eyeglasses and business suit, his forehead creased and he began to snap his thick fingers. "Oh, say, I know you," he muttered. "Mr. -- um -- name's on the tip of my tongue, doggone it..." Oscar was a barrel-chested fellow. He had orange hair. "Why, sure you do," the man said. There was a Lion's emblem in his lapel. "Remember, you sold me a girl's bicycle with gears, for my daughter? We got to talking about that red French racing bike your partner was working on -- " Oscar slapped his big hand down on the cash register. He raised his head and rolled his eyes up. "Mr. Whatney!" Mr. Whatney beamed. "Oh, sure. Gee, how could I forget? And we went across the street afterward and had a couple a beers. Well, how you been, Mr. Whatney? I guess the bike -- it was an English model, wasn't it? Yeah. It must of given satisfaction or you would of been back, huh?" Mr. Whatney said the bicycle was fine, just fine. Then he said, "I understand there's been a change, though. You're all by yourself now. Your partner..." Oscar looked down, pushed his lower lip out, nodded. "You heard, huh? Ee-up. I'm all by myself now. Over three months now." r T , HE partnership had come to an end three months ago, but it had been faltering long before then. Ferd liked books, long-playing records and high-level conversation. Oscar liked beer, bowling and women. Any women. Any time. The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman, and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar Would ask, "How does that machine feel to you? All right?" "Why... I guess so." Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, "Well, I'll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd." Ferd always nodded gloomily. He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, "Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park." "Leaving me all alone here all that time," Ferd grumbled. And Oscar usually flared up. "Okay, then, next time you go and leave me stay here. See if I begrudge you a little fun." But he knew, of course, that Ferd -- tall, thin, pop-eyed Ferd -- would never go. "Do you good," Oscar said, slapping his sternum. "Put hair on your chest." Ferd muttered that he had all the hair on his chest that he needed. He would glance down covertly at his lower arms; they were thick with long black hair, though his upper arms were slick and white. It was already like that when he was in high school, and some of the others would laugh at him -- call him "Ferdie the Birdie." They knew it bothered him, but they did it anyway. How was it possible -- he wondered then; he still did now -- for people deliberately to hurt someone else who hadn't hurt them? How was it possible? He worried over other things. All the time. "The Communists -- " He shook his head over the newspaper. Oscar offered an advice about the Communists in two short words. Or it might be capital punishment. "Oh, what a terrible thing if an innocent man was to be executed," Ferd moaned. Oscar said that was the guy's tough luck. "Hand me that tire-iron," Oscar said. And Ferd worried even about other people's minor concerns. Like the time the couple came in with the tandem and the baby-basket on it. Free air was all they tookj then the woman decided to change the diaper and one of the safety pins broke. "Why are there never any safety pins?" the woman fretted, rummaging here and rummaging there. "There are never any safety pins." Ferd made sympathetic noises, went to see if he had any; but, though he was sure there'd been some in the office, he couldn't find them. So they drove off with one side of the diaper tied in a clumsy knot. A T lunch, Ferd said it was too bad about the safety pins. Oscar dug his teeth into a sandwich, tugged, tore, chewed, swallowed. Ferd liked to experiment with sandwich spreads -- the one he liked most was cream-cheese, olives, anchovy and avocado, mashed up with a little mayonnaise -- but Oscar always had the same pink luncheon-meat. "It must be difficult with a baby." Ferd nibbled. "Not just traveling, but raising it." Oscar said, "Jeez, there's drugstores in every block, and if you can't read, you can at least reckernize them." "Drugstores? Oh, to buy safety pins, you mean." "Yeah. Safety pins." "But... you know... it's true... there's never any safety pins when you look." Oscar uncapped his beer, rinsed the first mouthful around. "Aha! Always plenny of clothes hangers, though. Throw 'em out every month, next month same closet's full of 'm again. Now whatcha wanna do in your spare time, you invent a device which it'll make safety pins outa clothes hangers." Ferd nodded abstractedly. "But in my spare time I'm working on the French racer..." It was a beautiful machine, light, low-slung, swift, red and shining. You felt like a bird when you rode it. But, good as it was, Ferd knew he could make it better. He showed it to everybody who came in the place until his interest slackened. Nature was his latest hobby, or, rather, reading about Nature. Some kids had wandered by from the park one day with tin cans in which they had put salamanders and toads, and they proudly showed them to Ferd. After that, the work on the red racer slowed down and he spent his spare time on natural history books. "Mimicry!" he cried to Oscar. "A wonderful thing!" Oscar looked up interestedly from the bowling scores in the paper. "I seen Edie Adams on TV the other night, doing her imitation of Marilyn Monroe. Boy, oh, boy." Ferd was irritated, shook his head. "Not that kind of mimicry. I mean how insects and arachnids will mimic the shapes of leaves and twigs and so on, to escape being eaten by birds or other insects and arachnids." A scowl of disbelief passed over Oscar's heavy face. "You mean they change their shapes? What you giving me?" "Oh, it's true. Sometimes the mimicry is for aggressive purposes, though -- like a South African turtle that looks like a rock and so the fish swim up to it and then it catches them. Or that spider in Sumatra. When it lies on its back, it looks like a bird dropping. Catches butterflies that way." and incredulous noise. It died away as he turned back to the bowling scores. One hand groped at his pocket, came away, scratched absently at the orange thicket under the shirt, then went patting his hip pocket. "Where's that pencil?" he muttered, got up, stomped into the office, pulled open drawers. His loud cry of "Hey!" brought Ferd into the tiny room. "What's the matter?" Ferd asked. Oscar pointed to a drawer. "Remember that time you claimed there were no safety pins here? Look -- whole gahdamn drawer is full of 'em." Ferd stared, scratched his head, said feebly that he was certain he'd looked there before... A contralto voice from outside asked, "Anybody here?" Oscar at once forgot the desk and its contents, called, "Be right with you," and was gone. Ferd followed him slowly. There was a young woman in the shop, a rather massively built young woman, with muscular calves and a deep chest. She was pointing out the seat of her bicycle to Oscar, who was saying "Uh-huh" and looking more at her than at anything else. "It's just a little too far forward ("Uh-huh"), as you can see. A wrench is all I need ("Uh-huh"). It was silly of me to forget my tools." Oscar repeated, "Uh-huh" automatically, then snapped to. "Fix it in a jiffy," he said, and -- despite her insistence that she could do it herself -- he did fix it. Though not quite in a jiffy. He refused money. He prolonged the conversation as long as he could. "Well, thank you," the young woman said. "And now I've got to go." "That machine feel all right to you now?" "Perfectly. Thanks -- " "Tell you what, I'll just ride along with you a little bit, just -- " Pear-shaped notes of laughter lifted the young woman's bosom. "Oh, you couldn't keep up with me! My machine is a racer" The moment he saw Oscar's eye flit to the corner, Ferd knew what he had in mind. He stepped forward. His cry of "No" was drowned out by his partner's loud, "Well, I guess this racer here can keep up with yours!" The young woman giggled richly, said, well, they would see about that, and was off. Oscar, ignoring Ferd's outstretched hand, jumped on the French bike and was gone. Ferd stood in the doorway, watching the two figures, hunched over their handlebars, vanish down the road into the park. He went slowly back inside. TT was almost evening before Oscar returned, sweaty but smiling. Smiling broadly. "Hey, what a babe!" he cried. He wagged his head, he whistled, he made gestures, noises like escaping steam, "Boy, oh, boy, what an afternoon!" "Give me the bike," Ferd demanded. Oscar said, yeah, sure; turned it over to him and went to wash. Ferd looked at the machine. The red enamel was covered with dust; there was mud spattered and dirt and bits of dried grass. It seemed soiled -- degraded. He had felt like a swift bird when he rode it... Oscar came out wet and beaming. He gave a cry of dismay, ran over. "Stand away," said Ferd, gesturing with the knife. He slashed the tires, the seat and seat cover, again and again. "You crazy?" Oscar yelled. "You outa your mind? Ferd, no, don't, Ferd-" Ferd cut the spokes, bent them, twisted them. He took the heaviest hammer and pounded the frame into shapelessness, and then he kept on pounding till his breath was gasping. "You're not only crazy," Oscar said bitterly, "you're rotten jealous. You can go to hell." He stomped away. Ferd, feeling sick and stiff, locked up, went slowly home. He had no taste for reading, turned out the light and fell into bed. where he lay awake for hours, listening to the rustling noises of the night and thinking hot, twisted thoughts. They didn't speak to each other for days after that, except for the necessities of the work. The wreckage of the French racer lay behind the shop. For about two weeks, neither wanted to go out back where he'd have to see it. One morning Ferd arrived to be greeted by his partner, who began to shake his head in astonishment even before he started speaking. "How did you do it, how did you do it, Ferd? Jeez, what a beautiful job -- I gotta hand it to you -- no more hard feelings, huh, Ferd?" Ferd took his hand. "Sure, sure. But what are you talking about?" Oscar led him out back. There was the red racer, all in one piece, not a mark or scratch on it, its enamel bright as ever. Ferd gaped. He squatted down and examined it. It was his machine. Every change, every improvement he had made, was there. He straightened up slowly. "Regeneration... "Huh? What say?" Oscar asked. Then, "Hey, kiddo, you're all white. Whad you do, stay up all night and didn't get no sleep? Come on in and siddown. But I still don't see how you done it." Inside, Ferd sat down. He wet his lips. He said, "Oscar -- listen -- " "Yeah?" "Oscar. You know what regeneration is? No? Listen. Some kinds of lizards, you grab them by the tail, the tail breaks off and they grow a new one. If a lobster loses a claw, it regenerates another one. Some kinds of worms -- and hydras and starfish -- you cut them into pieces, each piece will grow back the missing parts. Salamanders can regenerate lost hands, and frogs can grow legs back." "No kidding, Ferd. But, uh, I mean: Nature. Very interesting. But to get back to the bike now -- how'd you manage to fix it so good?" "I never touched it. It regenerated. Like a newt. Or a lobster." ered his head, looked up at Ferd from under his eyebrows. "Well, now, Ferd... Look... How come all broke bikes don't do that?" "This isn't an ordinary bike. I mean it isn't a real bike." Catching Oscar's look, he shouted, "Well, if s true!" The shout changed Oscar's attitude from bafflement to incredulity. He got up. "So for the sake of argument, lefs say all that stuff about the bugs and the eels or whatever the hell you were talking about is true. But they're alive. A bike ain't." He looked down triumphantly. Ferd shook his leg from side to side, looked at it. "A crystal isn't, either, but a broken crystal can regenerate itself if the conditions are right. Oscar, go see if the safety pins are still in the desk. Please, Oscar?" He listened as Oscar, muttering, pulled the desk drawers out, rummaged in them, slammed them shut, tramped back. "Naa," he said. "All gone. Like that lady said that time, and you said, there never are any safety pins when you want 'em. They disap -- Ferd? Whafre -- " Ferd jerked open the closet door, jumped back as a shoal of clothes hangers clattered out. "And like you say," Ferd said with a twist of his mouth, "on the other hand, there are always plenty of clothes hangers. There weren't any here before." Oscar shrugged. "I don't see what you're getting at. But anybody could of got in here and took the pins and left the hangers.  could of -- but I didn't. Or you could of. Maybe -- " He narrowed his eyes. "Maybe you walked in your sleep and done it. You better see a doctor. Jeez, you look rotten." Ferd went back and sat down, put his head in his hands. "I feel rotten. I'm scared, Oscar. Scared of what?" He breathed noisily. "I'll tell you. Like I explained before, about how things that live in the wild places, they mimic other things there. Twigs, leaves... toads that look like rocks. Well, suppose there are... things... that live in people places. Cities. Houses. These things could imitate -- well, other kinds of things you find in people places -- " "People places, for crise sake!" "Maybe they're a different kind of life-form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are -- these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupaforms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval-forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they're not. Oscar, they're not, not really, not really, not..." He began to cry into his hands. Oscar looked at him. He shook his head. After a minute, Ferd controlled himself somewhat. He snuffled. "All these bicycles the cops find, and they hold them waiting for owners to show up, and then we buy them at the sale because no owners show up because there aren't any, and the same with the ones the kids are always trying to sell us, and they say they just found them, and they really did because they were never made in a factory. They grew. They grow. You smash them and throw them away, they regenerate." Oscar turned to someone who wasn't there and waggled his head. "Hoo, boy," he said. Then, to Ferd: "You mean one day there's a safety pin and the next day instead there's a coat hanger?" cocoon; the next day there's a moth. One day there's an egg; the next day there's a chicken. But with...these it doesn't happen in the open daytime where you can see it. But at night, Oscar -- at night you can hear it happening. All the little noises in the nighttime, Oscar -- " Oscar said, "Then how come we ain't up to our belly-button in bikes? If I had a bike for every coat hanger -- " But Ferd had considered that, too. If every codfish egg, he ex-, plained, or every oyster spawn grew to maturity, a man could walk across the ocean on the backs of all the codfish or oysters there'd be. So many died, so many were eaten by predatory creatures, that Nature had to produce a maximum in order to allow a minimum to arrive at maturity. And Oscar's question was: then who, uh, eats the, uh, coat hangers? Ferd's eyes focused through wall, buildings, park, more buildings, to the horizon. "You got to get the picture. I'm not talking about real pins or hangers. I got a name for the others -- 'false friends,' I call them. In high school French, we had to watch out for French words that looked like English words, but really were different. 'Faux amis,' they call them. False friends. Pseudo-pins. Pseudo-hangers... Who eats them? I don't know for sure. Pseudo-vacuum cleaners, maybe?" His partner, with a loud groan, slapped his hands against his thighs. He said, "Ferd, Ferd, for crise sake. You know what's the trouble with you? You talk about oysters, but you forgot what they're good for. You forgot there's two kinds of people in the world. Close up them books, them bug books and French books. Get out, mingle, meet people. Soak up some brew. You know what? The next time Norma -- that's this broad's name with the racing bike -- the next time she comes here, you take the red racer and you go out in the woods with her. I won't mind. And I don't think she will, either. Not too much." But Ferd said no. "I never want to touch the red racer again. I'm afraid of it." At this, Oscar pulled him to his feet, dragged him protestingly out to the back and forced him to get on the French machine. "Only way to conquer your fear of it!" Ferd started off, white-faced, wobbling. And in a moment was on the ground, rolling and thrashing, screaming. Oscar pulled him away from the machine. "It threw me!" Ferd yelled. "It tried to kill me! Look -- blood!" His partner said it was a bump that threw him -- it was his own fear. The blood? A broken spoke. Grazed his cheek. And he insisted Ferd get on the bicycle again, to conquer his fear. But Ferd had grown hysterical. He shouted that no man was safe -- that mankind had to be warned. It took Oscar a long time to pacify him and to get him to go home and into bed.I A Whatney, of course. He merely said that his partner had gotten fed up with the bicycle business. "It don't pay to worry and try to change the world," he pointed out. "I always say take things the way they are. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em." Mr. Whatney said that was his philosophy, exactly. He asked how things were, since. "Well... not too bad. I'm engaged, you know. Name's Norma. Crazy about bicycles. Everything considered, things aren't bad at all. More work, yes, but I can do things all my own way, so... Mr. Whatney nodded. He glanced around the shop. "I see they're still making drop-frame bikes," he said, "though, with so many women wearing slacks, I wonder they bother." Oscar said, "Well, I dunno. I kinda like it that way. Ever stop to think that bicycles are like people? I mean, of all the machines in the world, only bikes come male and female." Mr. Whatney gave a little giggle, said that was right, he had never thought of it like that before. Then Oscar asked if Mr. Whatney had anything in particular in mind -- not that he wasn't always welcome. "Well, I wanted to look over what you've got. My boy's birthday is coming up -- " Oscar nodded sagely. "Now here's a job," he said, "which you can't get it in any other place but here. Specialty of the house. Combines the best features of the French racer and the American standard, but it's made right here, and it comes in three models -- Junior, Intermediate and Regular. Beautiful, ain't it?" Mr. Whatney observed that, say, that might be just the ticket. "By the way," he asked, "what's become of the French racer, the red one, used to be here?" Oscar's face twitched. Then it grew bland and innocent and he leaned over and nudged his customer. "Oh, that one. Old Frenchy? Why, I put him out to stud!" And they laughed and they laughed, and after they told a few more stories they concluded the sale, and they had a few beers and they laughed some more. And then they said what a shame it was about poor Ferd, poor old Ferd, who had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck. for your information Remnants of the Sarmatian Sea deal with a distant place as well as, intermittently, a distant past, it might as well begin in the past and with the description of a voyage. I cannot lay my hands on an authentic document for this voyage -- although it has been made repeatedly -- and I therefore imagine a Roman traveler of about # B.C. sitting on a terrace of his villa on a hilltop some distance from Rome. Shivering a little in an entirely unseasonal wind, he dictates to his scribe: "Cnossus on Creta was directly to the south of us when we shifted to a northern course to wend our way through the channels between the Cyclades into Aegaeum Mare. Turning east again when Lemnos came into sight, we entered the Hellespontus and, after traversing the Propontis, turned north into the narrow Bosporus Thracicus, where the opposing current is strong. Once we had gained the open waters of the Pontus Euxinus, we had a smooth if long voyage and finally found the entrance to Maeotis palus, which entrance some call the Bosporus cimmericus. Maeotis palus is not a swamp (palus) but again open water, if shallow. The climate was warm and pleasing as one might have it in Sicilia. "Then we found the mouth of the river Tanais and sailed upstream. But after a two-day journey on the Tanais, we had to leave our vessel and had to proceed overland to reach the mighty Oarus, which makes a big bend there. In a small village at the bend, we found a barbarian who could speak some Greek and who told us that the sea to the south of us could best be reached by building a raft such as Odysseus used when leaving Kalypso's island, and by simply drifting down the Oarus until we reached its delta and through it, with luck, the Mare Caspium..." r  I HE description is not at all strange. I have merely used the geographical names of the period. The Propontis is our Sea of Marmara, the Pontus Euxinus is the Black Sea, the Bosporus cimmericus is the Strait of Kertch, and the Maeotis palus the Sea of Azov. The Tanais is obviously the Don and the Oarus the Volga. The Mare Caspium is still the Caspian Sea in any language and it is, now as then, the largest land-locked body of water. It is also something that worries the Russians. The reason why it worries the Russians is far in the past, in a past far beyond Romans and Greeks and Scythians. It is in the geologic past... years ago, before the Alps formed, Europe was bounded in the south -- and separated from Africa -- by a large sea. The description sounds as if our current Mediterranean Sea were meant, but this was a far bigger sea. It covered the area now covered by the Mediterranean Sea, but in the north it covered land even beyond the present-day Alps. In the east, it made a straight connection with the Indian Ocean. Geologists call it the Tethys Sea; it had been there much longer than even the oldest mammals. It had been there in the days of the Saurians; in fact, it had been a fixture on the face of the Earth for years. It probably was fairly shallow in great stretches of the area it covered. But it was there; we can read its former existence from the fossils of marine life it left behind. It formed an uninterrupted waterway from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean until about the middle of the Tertiary Period, say The growing Alps at first formed just an island in the Tethys Sea, but in the east the connection to the Indian Ocean was broken. For rica and Asia were firmly connected by a land bridge # miles wide, the land bridge we now call Arabia. Only at a later date did an enormous valley open in that land connection, the Great Rift Valley which in its northern portion forms the Valley of the Jordan, which farther south is flooded to form the Red Sea and which, still farther south, is the reason for Africa's "long lakes" -- Albert, Edward, Kivu, Tanganyika and Nyasa. In the north, the Tethys broke up into several big "seas." One we now call the western Mediterranean. The eastern Mediterranean was a smaller and separate sea, and still farther to the east there was one which no longer exists as a unit. It was the Sarmatian Sea (Fig. #) which unified the present Black Sea with the present Caspian Sea and the present Lake Aral over # miles to the east of the Caspian Sea. But the Sarmatian Sea extended much farther to the north than any of its three remnants of today. It also extended much farther to the west. There is evidence that the Hungarian plain was once covered by the waters of the Sarmatian Sea. But since much of it must have been shallow, there obviously were large-scale fluctuations in its extent. It must have been rather similar to the performance of present Lake Tchad in Africa -- also the remnant of a former much larger "sea" -- for which every survey gives a different area. All the surveys are, as far as one can tell, correct. It just depends on how wet the preceding seasons were. T T is not yet known -- although Soviet geologists are probably busy trying to establish this fact -- just how the Sarmatian Sea fared during the Ice Age. Actually, we don't even know yet how far south the glaciers of the Ice Age -- or, better, the Ice Ages -- reached in Russia. At any event, the area of the sea must have increased again at the end of the last glaciation, when a lot of the water that had been stored as ice and snow was put back into circulation. Much of the question on the area of the Sarmatian Sea depends on the time when its western component, the present Black Sea, finally succeeded in breaking through to the Mediterranean. It has to be mentioned in passing that the Mediterranean Sea is forever losing water. Being a large sea in a warm climate, the water losses of the Mediterranean Sea to evaporation are more than merely astonishing; they are estimated to yards per year. Rain over the Mediterranean replaces about # per cent of this loss. The rivers that empty themselves into the Mediterranean make up only about SV # per cent of this. The Atlantic Ocean contributes the main share of compensation for the evaporation losses, nearly # per cent. The rest, roughly #Vi per cent, is contributed by the Black Sea. The Sarmatian Sea, as a whole, probably disappeared when drainage into the thirsty Mediterranean was accomplished, leaving water in only the three deepest depressions of its area. Of these three depressions, the westernmost, the Black Sea, is doing relatively well, as can be seen from the fact that it still supplies water to the Mediterranean. The easternmost of the three, Lake Aral, is also in good shape. With an area of # square miles, it is slightly larger than Lake Victoria in Africa, which it resembles in shape. Its level is now # feet above sea level and its maximum measured depth is # feet. Its area seems to have been stable for centuries, its level having risen a little only during the last fifty years. Of course, if an earthquake opened a chasm in a westerly direction leading to the depression of the Caspian Sea, the lake that would be left would have little resemblance to "blue Lake Aral" of today. The figure of # feet which has been mentioned is the maximum measured depth. The average depth is somewhere between # and # feet; if a drainage to about sea level were opened, very little would be left of it. "O UT if one could say that the Black Sea is "doing well" and that Lake Aral is "getting along" no such statement can be made about the central depression of the old Sarmatian Sea, the Caspian Sea (Fig. #). It is in a sorry shape and both Nature and Man are combining to make it sorrier still. Its level is by now # feet below sea level and still sinking. Even with these handicaps, it is still the largest "lake," if you use that term to denote a body of water not connected with the oceans. If saltiness is the criterion used, the Caspian is a "sea" -- the average figure for the whole Caspian reads # grams of salt per liter of water. (For the Atlantic Ocean, the figure is # grams per liter.) In reality, the "average" saltiness does not apply. In the north, say north of the #th parallel, the water is drinkable. Logically it is more salty than the average in the south. And the bay of Kara-BogazGol is a very special case which needs separate description. The dimensions of the Caspian are impressive enough -- from north to south, it stretches very nearly # miles; the widest part measures # miles across. The area is about # square miles; a more precise figure cannot be given, even aside from the perennial question of whether the area of islands in a lake should be counted as lake area or should be subtracted from it. About two-thirds of the area of the Caspian Sea is deeper than # feet, and two-thirds of the deep section lie in the southernmost part, to the south of the line from Baku to Krasnovodsk. The third city of noticeable size, in addition to the two just mentioned, is Astrakhan in the north, near the delta of the Volga. The water supply of the Caspian Sea comes from two major rivers, the Volga and the Ural, and five minor ones, Emba, Kuma, Terek, Kura and Araxel. Of the minor rivers, the Terek looks major in late spring, when it is swollen by the melting snows of the Caucasus. Altogether, they pour # cubic miles of water into the Caspian every year -- the Volga is Europe's largest river -- but this makes up for the losses only in very wet years. The Caspian, like the Mediterranean, lies in a warm (most of the time) and dry (almost all of the time) climate. Dry winds come from Asia in the east and the evaporation rate is equal to the influx, even though the annual influx represents the volume of Lake Erie. i"kNE of the main reasons for the loss is the strange bay, the Kara-Bogaz-Gol. Its area is about # square miles -- for comparison: the area of Lake Ontario is # square miles -- with a maximum depth of # feet and an average depth of about # feet The channel connecting the bay with the Caspian is roughly one mile in length and not much over # feet wide on the average. Through this channel pass # cubic feet of water per second, to be evaporated in this natural salt pan. Since the minerals carried into the bay return into the Caspian to the same extent as the water which carried them, namely not at all, the overall result is that the general salinity of the Caspian is kept rather low and that of the bay is fantastic. An estimated # million tons of minerals, impure Epsom salts, to be specific, cover the bottom of the bay, in places to a depth of seven feet. If this does not sound quite credible, I can add another equally surprising fact: in the bay of Krasnovodsk, just south of the Epsom salts bay, the inhabitants often hunt seals! In the north, the fisheries are somewhat more on the conservative side. There the fishermen catch salmon, herring and sturgeon. The catch of the latter -- # per cent of all sturgeon are caught in the Caspian -- has a decisive bearing on the caviar trade. But it is just this caviar corner of the Caspian which is shrinking at a literally visible rate. Most of the small fishing towns are now miles from the shore. And even Fig. #: Caspian Sea. Dotted areas indicate depressions below sea level. Areas in black indicate land dried up during last decade. General shoreline going around outside of black areas is that of # though each foot of recession produces nearly # acres of arable land, the overall picture results in a loss. The Soviets say that the Caspian Sea now costs them have a truly capitalistic concern about losing money. Part of the shrinkage is due, strangely enough, to the main water supplier of the Caspian, the Volga. From more than two hundred mouths, the Volga pours about four times as much water into the Caspian Sea as all the other rivers taken together. But cubic feet of sediments annually; more, if the spring flood of the Volga was exceptionally high. This makes the northern section, the fishing grounds, more shallow. For many years, steamers were aware of the fact that they had to lighten cargo if they wished to pass the Volga delta at a distance closer than # miles. cubic feet of sediment even more deplorable to Russian economists is that a large percentage of it once was good topsoil along the river's course. Whatever good land may be gained from the Caspian's recession had simply been lost elsewhere at an earlier time. extent man-made is also no consolation. For quite a number of years, the Russians have been building dams along the Volga, partly for regulating the flow of the river itself, partly for the generation of electric current. They have created half a dozen large artificial lakes, all full of Volga water. The largest of them, the artificial lake near Kuibyshev, has an area of # square miles and required all of the spring flood of # to fill it up. It must be added that the Volga itself, in its lower portion, loses a great deal of water to evaporation, and the artificial lakes, naturally, show evaporation losses too. Even if, when all the power-generating units finally are in operation, the Volga water will finally reach the Caspian Sea, it has to be less than would reach the sea in the time of our fictitious Roman traveler. The facts about the Caspian Sea are, then, as follows: Up to #, the rate of supply from the rivers, especially the Volga, was not quite enough to make up the evaporation losses. The oldest level of the Caspian Sea in historical times that could be established with reasonable certainty was during the fourteenth century; it was then roughly # feet below sea level. This means that in past centuries the drop was #-# feet per century. But, since about #, the average temperature of that area has risen by about # degrees Fahrenheit. This not only meant higher evaporation losses the year round; it also meant less water supply. The Volga lost more water by evaporation before the sea was reached, and other rivers carried less water to begin with, especially the ones from the Caucasus, where the snow line moved up so that there was less snow and ice to melt in spring. Finally, during the last few years, the hydro-electric activities of the Russians have withheld Volga water. Naturally the Russians are asking themselves what they can do about it. They don't like their anple and obvious suggestion is, of course, to dam the outlet into the Kara-Bogaz-Gol. It would save per month. This sounds large, but would not make too much difference as far as the whole body of the Caspian Sea is concerned. In fact, if the inlet is ever dammed up, it would be not to save water, but to facilitate the exploitation of the mineral deposits at the bottom of the bay. by the oceanographer B. A. Apollov, is not so much concerned with the Caspian Sea as a whole as with the northern portion, which is of economic importance because of the fisheries. The distance from the mouth of the Kuma River to the island of Kulaly is # miles. If one built a dam across the Caspian Sea from the west shore to Kulaly Island, and from the island to a convenient point of the east shore, the valuable northern portion would be separated from the southern portion which is without fisheries of any consequence. The waters coming from the Volga, the Ural, the Emba and the Kuma would then all remain in the northern portion. This would tend to freshen the water of this section some more, but this would be unimportant in either direction since it is, for most practical purposes, fresh water right now. It would put the fishermen back into their normal occupation. It would avoid expensive dredging for the approaches to the northern ports, especially Astrakhan, which has to go on all the time. And, of course, the dam could have several lock gates in convenient places so that shipping could go on from the north to the south and vice versa. Apollov's suggestion is not yet a "plan" and certainly not yet a "project." It would require a very large amount of preliminary surveys to establish the type of dam, the method of construction and even the line which it would most efficiently follow across the sea. That a #-mile dam through shallow water is an engineering possibility cannot be doubted. What it would cost is another problem, but anything that can loss is worth looking into from a Russian standpoint. It seems to be the simplest way to save the fisheries, including the caviar trade. After all, the Russians cannot abandon their hydroelectric projects for this purpose, especially since these projects are only a fairly minor water-loss factor. The real reason is a minor climatic change. But again, even that change merely accelerated something that had been going on at a lesser rate for centuries. And the whole trouble started, of course, way back in that unknown year when the Black Sea managed to break through to the Mediterranean, thereby draining the Sarmatian Sea.      Excerpts from "Telephone Almanac for #," published by the Bell Telephone System, free on request: "Germanium used in Bell System transistors is perhaps the purest substance known. It is refined so that impurities are estimated at only five sugar." "According to a recent survey, the average man, in his lifetime, spends # hours telephoning -- the equivalent of one full year." (No statistics are offered on the average woman: Ed.) "Betsy, the Baltimore chimpanzee, whose paintings sold at a price to make many full-fledged artists envious... gained another distinction: she's listed under 'artists' in Baltimore's classified telephone directory." "Someone with a flair for statistics figured out how much you can say in a three-minute long distance call. If you talk slowly, you'll average perhaps # words. Talking a 'blue streak' will let you say about # words. Just by the way of comparison, Lincoln used # words in his Gettysburg address. Hamlet's to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy, by Mr. Shakespeare, ran to #. If spoken over the telephone, they would both be well within the three-minute period." (If # words are the average at slow speed, these #-# examples evidently are meant to allow the other party to answer -- if he can think of anything appropriate: Ed.) "Metals that develop a 'five o'clock shadow' are undergoing intensive research at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hairlike metal strands -- called 'whiskers' -- grow on some types of telephone equipment and cause short circuits... the metal whiskers have extraordinary strength -- greater than the metal from which they sprouted." (Any shaver knows that: Ed.) Going straight meant crooked planning. He'd never make it unless he somehow managed to eyed and brunette. She had the right curves in the right places and would have been beautiful if her nose had been smaller, if her mouth had been larger and if her hair had been wavy instead of straight "Hank said you wanted to see me," she said when she stopped beside Joe's table. "Yeah." Joe nodded at the other chair. "Have a seat." He reached into a pocket, withdrew five tendollar bills and handed them to her. "I want you to do a job for me. It'll only take a few minutes." The girl counted the money, then placed it in her purse. Joe noticed a small counterfeit-detector inside the purse before she closed it "What's the job?" "Tell you later." He gulped the remainder of his drink, almost pouring it down his throat. "Hey. You trying to make yourself sick?" "Not sick. Drunk. Been trying to get drunk all afternoon." As the liquor settled in his stomach, he waited for the warm glow. But the glow didn't come... the bartender had watered his drink again. "Trying to get drunk?" the girl inquired. "Are you crazy?" "No. It's simple. If I get drunk, room and board for a month while they give me a treatment." It was easy enough to understand, he reflected, but a lot tenders saw to it that anyone got high if they wanted, but comparatively few got drunk. Each bartender could not only mix drinks but could also judge by a man's actions and speech when he was on the verge of drunkenness. At the proper time -- since drunkenness was illegal -- a bartender always watered the drinks. Joe had tried dozens of times in dozens of bars to outsmart them, but had always failed. And in all been only a hundred cases of intoxication during the previous year. The girl laughed. "If you're that hard up, I don't know if I should take this fifty or not. Why don't you go out and get a job like everyone else?" As an answer, Joe handed her when she saw the large letters that indicated the owner had Dangerous Criminal Tendencies.  back, Joe fought an impulse to tear it to pieces. He'd done that once and gone through a mountain of red tape to get another -- everyone was required by law to carupon request. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I "And who'll hire a guy with criminal tendencies? You know the score. When you try to get a job, they ask to see your ID before they even tell you if there's an and they tell you there's no openings. Oh, I've had several jobs... a garbage man, street-cleaner, ditch-digger -- " On the other side of the room, the jukebox came to life with a roar and a group of teen-agers scrambled to the dance floor. Feeling safe from hidden microphones because of the uproar, he leaned across the table and whispered in the girl's ear, "That's what I want to hire you for. I want you to help me commit a crime. If I get convicted of a crime, I'll be able to get a good job!" The girl's lips formed a bright red circle. "Say! You really got big plans, don't you?" He smiled at her admiration. It was something big to plan a crime. A civilization weary of murder, robbery, kidnapping, counterfeiting, blackmail, rape, arson, and drunkenness had originated the tion. There were no longer any clared loudly and emphatically that their job was to prevent crime, not punish it. And prevent it they did, with thousands of ingenious crime-prevention devices and methods. They had made crime almost impossible, and during the previous year, only a few hundred men in the whole country had been convicted of criminal acts. No crime was ever punished. If a man was smart enough to kill someone, for instance, he wasn't sent to prison to be punished; he wasn't punished at all. Instead, he was sent to a hospital where all criminal tendencies were removed from his mind by psychologists, shock treatments, encephalographic devices, a form of prefrontal lobotomy and a dozen other methods. An expensive operation, but since there were few criminals -- only ten in New York during the past year -- any city could afcheaper than previous methods because it did away with the damage caused by countless crimes; did away with prisons and their guards, large police forces, squad cars and weapons. And, ironically, a man who did commit a crime was a sort of hero. men and women who had suppressed impulses to kill someone, beat their mates, get drunk, or kick a dog. Not only a hero, but behospitals -- a thoroughly honest and hard-working individual... a man who could be trusted with any responsibility, any amount of money. And therefore, an EX (a convicted criminal who received the treatment was commonly called an Ex because he was in the strictest sense of the word an Excriminal)... an Ex was always offered the best jobs. "Well," the girl said. "I'm honored. Really. But I got a date at ten. Let's get it over with. You said it'd only take a few minutes." "Okay. Let's go." HP HE girl followed him across the room, around tables, through a door, down a hall, through a back door and into the alley. She followed him up the dark alley until he turned suddenly and ripped her blouse and skirt. He surprised her completely, but when she recovered, she backed away, her body poised like a wrestler's. "What's the big idea?" "Scream," Joe said. "Scream as loud as you can, and when the cops get here, tell 'em I tried to rape you." The plan was perfect, he told himself. Attempted rape was one of the few things that was a crime merely because a man attempted it. A crime because it theoretically inflicted psychological injury upon the intended victim -- and behad voted it a crime. On the other hand, attempted murder, robbery, kidnapping, etc., were not crimes. They weren't crimes because the if he didn't complete the act, that once again functioned properly. The girl shook her head vigorously. "Sorry, buddy. Can't help you that way. Why didn't you tell me what you wanted?" "What's the matter?" Joe complained. "I'm not asking you to do anything wrong." "You stupid jerk. What do you think this is -- the Middle Ages? Don't you know almost every woman knows how to defend herWomen's Self-Defense Association judo and jujitsu, even developed new techniques of wrestling and instructed only women in those new techniques. The girl was still shaking her head. "Can't do it, buddy. I'd lose my rank if you were convicted of-" "Do I have to make you scream?" Joe inquired tiredly and advanced toward the girl. and that rank carries a lot of weight. Hey! Stop it!" Joe discovered to his dismay that the girl was telling the truth when she said she was a sergeant on his body, and in the time it takes to blink twice, he was flying through the air. The alley's concrete floor was hard -- it had always been hard, but he became acutely aware of its lack of resiliency when his head struck it. There was a wonderful moment while the world was filled with beautiful stars and streaks of lightning through which he heard distant police sirens. But the wonderful moment didn't last long and darkness closed in on him. " voice was saying, "Okay. Snap out of it." He opened his eyes and recognized the police commissioner's office. It would be hard not to recognize: the room was large, devoid of furniture except for a desk and chairs, but the walls were lined with the controls of television screens, electronic calculators and a hundred other machines that formed New York's mechanical police force. Commissioner Hendricks was a remarkable character. There was something wrong with his glands, and he was a huge, greasy bulk of a man with bushy eyebrows and a double chin. His steel-gray eyes showed something of his intelligence and he would have gone far in politics if fate hadn't made him so ugly, for more than half the voters who elected men to high political positions were women. Anyone who knew Hendricks well liked him, for he was a friendly, likable person. But the millions of women voters who saw his face on posters and on their TV screens saw only the ugly face and heard only the harsh voice. The President of the United States was a capable man, but also a very handsome one, and the fact that a man who looked something like a bulldog had been elected as New York's police commissioner was a women voters. "Where's the girl?" Joe asked. "I processed her while you were out cold. She left. Joe, you -- " "Okay," Joe said. "#I save you the trouble. I admit it Attempted rape. I confess." Hendricks smiled. "Sorry, Joe. You missed the boat again." He reached out and turned a dial on his desk top. 'We had a microphone hidden in that alley. We have a lot of microphones hidden in a lot of alleys. You'd be surprised at the number of conspiracies that take place in alleys!" Joe listened numbly to his voice as it came from one of the hundreds of machines on the walls, "Scream. Scream as loud as you cart, and when the cops get here, tell 'em I tried to rape you." And then the girl's voice, "Sorry, buddy. Can't help-" He waved his hand. "Okay. Shut it off. I confess to conspiracy." the desk, walked leisurely to where Joe was slouched in a chair. Joe handed him the card with trembling fingers. He felt as if the world had collapsed beneath him. Conspiracy to commit a crime wasn't a crime. Anyone could conspire. And if the conspirators were prevented from committing a had functioned properly once had once again prevented crime, or attempted crimes, and it didn't attempt to prevent crimes by punishment. If it did, that would be a violation of the New Civil Rights. Hendricks crossed the room, deposited the card in a slot and punched a button. The machine hummed and a new card appeared. When Hendricks handed him the new card, Joe saw that the in red and larger than before. And, in slightly smaller print, the ID card stated that the owner was a "You've graduated," Hendricks said coldly. "You guys never learn, Class instead of a Second Class. You know what that means?" Hendricks leaned closer until Joe could feel his breath on his face. "That means your case history will be turned over to the newspapers. You'll be the hobby of thousands of amateur cops. You know how it works? It's like this. The Joneses are sitting around tomorrow night and they're bored. Then Mr. Jones says, 'Let's go watch this Joe Harper.' So they look up your record -- amateur cops always keep records of First Classes in scrapbooks -- and they see that you stop frequently at Walt's Tavern. "So they go there and they sit and drink and watch you, trying not to let you know they're watching you. They watch you all night, just hoping you'll do something exciting, like trying to kill someone, so they can be the first ones to yell 'Police!' They'll watch you because it's exciting to be an amateur cop, and if they ever did prevent you from committing a crime, they'd get a nice reward and they'd be famous." "Lay off," Joe said. "I got a headache. That girl -- " Hendricks leaned even closer and glared. "You listen, Joe. This is interesting. You see, it doesn't stop with Mr. and Mrs. Jones. There's thousands of people like them. Years ago, they got their kicks from reading about guys like you, but these days things are dull because it's rare when anyone commits a crime. So every time you walk down the street, there'll be at least a dozen of 'em following you, and no matter where you go, you can bet there'll be some of 'em sitting next to you, standing next to you. "During the day, they'll take your picture with their spy cameras that look like buttons on their coats. At night, they'll peep at you through your keyhole. Your neighbors across the street will watch you through binoculars and -- " "Lay off!" J OE squirmed in the chair. He'd been lectured by Hendricks before and it was always an unpleasant experience. The huge man was like a talking machine once he got started, a machine that couldn't be stopped. "And. the kids are the worst," Hendricks continued. "They have ords of hoodlums like you in little cardboard boxes. They'll stare at you on the street and stare at you through restaurant windows while you're eating meals. They'll follow you in public rest rooms and watch you out of the corners of their eyes while they wash their little hands, and almost every day when you look back, you'll see a dozen frecklefaced little boys following you half a block behind, giggling and gaping at you. They'll follow you until the day you die, because you're a freak!" Joe couldn't stand the breath in his face any longer. He rose and paced the floor. "And it doesn't end there, Joe. It goes on and on. You'll be the object of every do-gooder and parlor psychologist. Strangers will stop you on the street and say, I'd like to help you, friend.' Then they'll ask you queer questions like, "Did your father reject you when you were a child?' 'Do you like girls?' 'How Class?' And then there'll be the stop you on the street and insult you, call you names, spit on you and -- " "Okay, goddam it! Stop it!" Hendricks stopped, wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief and lit a cigarette. "I'm doing you a favor, Joe. I'm trying to explain something you're too dumb to realize by yourself. We've taught everyone to hate crime and criminals... to hate them as nothing has ever been hated before. Today a criminal is a freak, an alien. Your life will be a living hell if you don't leave New York. You should go to some small town where there aren't many people, or be a hermit, or go to Iceland or -- " Joe eyed the huge man suspiciously. "Favor, did you say? The day you do me a favor -- " Hendricks shrugged his shoulders negligently. "Not entirely a favor. I want to get rid of you. Usually I come up here and sit around and read books. But guys like you are a nuisance and take up my time." "I couldn't leave if I wanted to," Joe said. "I'm flat broke. Thanks to a decent job." pocket, withdrew several bills and extended them. "I'll loan you and pay me back a little at a time." Joe waved the money away. "Listen, why don't you do me a favor? Why don't you frame me? If I'm such a nuisance, pin a crime on me -- any crime." "Can't do it Convicting a man of a crime he didn't commit is a violation of Civil Rights and a crime in itself." "Umm." "Why don't you take the free psycho treatment? A man doesn't treatment, psychologists can remove all your criminal tendencies and -- " "Go to those head-shrinkers?" Hendricks shrugged again. "Have it your way." Joe laughed. "If your damned you make me go?" "Violation of Civil Rights." "Damn it, there must be some way you can help me! We both want the same thing. We both want to see me convicted of a crime." "How can I help you without committing a crime myself?" Hendricks walked to his desk, opened a drawer and removed a small black book. "See this? It contains names and addresses of all the people in New York who aren't properly protected. Every week we find people who aren't protected properly -- blind spots in our protection devices. As soon as we find them, we take steps to install anti-robbery devices, but this is a big city and sometimes it takes days to get the work done. "In the meantime, any one of these people could be robbed. But what can I do? I can't hold this book in front of your nose and say, 'Here, Joe, pick a name and go out and rob him.' " He laughed nervously. "If I did that, I'd be committing a crime myself!" He placed the book on the desk top, took a handkerchief from a pocket again and wiped sweat from his face. "Excuse me a minute. I'm dying of thirst. There's a water cooler in the next room." Joe stared at the door to the adjoining office as it closed behind the big man. Hendricks was -- unbelievably -- offering him a victim, offering him a crime! Almost running to the desk, Joe opened the book, selected a name and address and memorized it: John Gralewski, Apt. #, #I Orange St. When Hendricks came back, Joe said, "Thanks." "Huh? Thanks for what? I didn't do anything." " he hurried toward the nearest subway. As a child, he had been frightened of the dark. As a man, he wasn't afraid of the dark itself, but the darkened city always made him feel ill at ease. The uneasiness was, more than anything else, caused by his own imagination. He couldn't shrug the feeling that the watching him, waiting for him to make a mistake. almost everywhere a person went of microphones hidden in taverns, alleys, restaurants, subways and every other place imaginable waited for someone to say the wrong thing. Everything the microphones picked monster electronic calculator. If the words "Let's see a movie" were received in the Brain, they were discarded. But if the words "Let's roll this guy" were received, the message was traced and a police helicopter would be at the scene in two minutes. And scattered all over the city were not only hidden microphones, but hidden television cameras that relayed visual messages to the Brain, and hidden machines that could detect a knife or a gun in someone's pocket at forty yards. Every place of business from the largest bank to the smallest grocery store was absolutely impenetrable. No one had even tried to rob a place of business for years. Arson was next to impossible because of the heat-detectors -- devices placed in every building that could detect, radarlike, any intensity of heat above that caused by a cigarette lighter. Chemical research had made poisoning someone an impossibility. There were no drugs containing poison, and while an antpoison might kill ants, no concentrated amount of it would kill a human. erful organization, but under the scientific colossus and to think of kidnapping someone or to contemplate the use of narcotics was pointless. A counterfeiter's career was always short-lived: every place of had small counterfeit-detectors that could spot a fake and report it directly to the Brain. And the percentage of crimes had dwindled even more with the appearance of the robot police officers. Many a criminal in the past had gambled that he could outshoot a pursuing policeman. But the robots were different: they weren't flesh and blood. Bullets bounced off them and their aim was infallible. TT was like a fantastic dream come true. Only the dream wasn't fantastic any more. With the huge atomic power plants scattered across the country and supplying endless electrical power at ridiculously low prices, no endeavor that required power was fantastic. The power required to taxpayer an average of four dollars a year, and the invention, development and manufacture of the devices had cost even less. through society itself, striking at the individual. In every city there were neon signs that blinked sublimiwatching television, if a person heard station identification, he invariably heard or saw just below ride, he saw the endless subliminal or newspaper he always found, in those little dead spaces where an editor couldn't fit anything else, the It was monotonous and, after a while, a person looked at the words and heard them without thinking about them. And they were imprinted on his subconscious over and over, year after year, until he knew that crime was the same as filth and that criminals were filthy things. Except men like Joe Harper. No system is perfect. Along with thoubelieve it, and when he reached apartment # at #I Orange Street, he felt as if he'd inherited a gold mine. The hall was dimly lit, but when he stood before the door numbered #, he could see that the wall on either side of it was new. That is, instead of being covered with dust, dirt and stains as the other walls were, it was clean. The building was an old one, the hall was wide, and the owner had obviously constructed a wall across the hall, creating another room. If the owner had reported the new room as required by law, it would have been vices, but evidently he didn't want to pay for installation. When Joe entered the cubbyhole, he had to stand to one side in order to close the door behind him. The place was barely large enough for the bed, chair and bureau; it was a place where a man could fall down at night and sleep, but where no normal man could live day after day. Fearing that someone might detect him before he actually committed the crime, Joe hurried to the bureau and searched it. he found nothing but underwear and old magazines. If he stole underwear and magazines, it would still be a crime, but the newspapers would splash satirical headlines. Instead of being respected as a successful criminal, he would be ridiculed. He stopped sweating when he found a watch under a pile of underwear. The crystal was broken, one hand was missing and it wouldn't run, but -- perfection itself -- engraved on the back was the inscription, To John with Love. His trial would be a clean-cut one: it would ership and that a crime had been committed. Chuckling with joy, he opened the window and shouted, "Thief! Police! Help!" He waited a few seconds and then ran. When he reached the street, a police helicopter landed next to him. Strong metal arms seized him; cameras clicked and recorded the damning evidence. When Joe was securely handcuffed to a seat inside the helicopter, the metal police officers rang doorbells. There was a reward for anyone who reported a crime, but no one admitted shouting the warning. IT E was having a nightmare when he heard the voice, "Hey. Wake up. Hey!" He opened his eyes, saw Hendricks' ugly face and thought for a minute he was still having the nightmare. "I just saw your doctor," Hendricks said. "He says your treatment is over. You can go home now. I thought I'd give you a lift." As Joe dressed, he searched his mind and tried to find some difference. During the treatment, he had been unconscious or drugged, unable to think. Now he could think clearly, but he could find no difference in himself. He felt more relaxed than he'd ever felt before, but that could be an after-effect of all the sedatives he'd been given. And, he noticed when he looked in the mirror, he was paler. The treatment had taken months and he had, between operations, been locked in his room. Hendricks was standing by the window. Joe stared at the massive back. Deliberately goading his mind, he discovered the biggest change: Before, the mere sight of the man had aroused an intense hatred. Now, even when he tried, he succeeded in arousing only a mild hatred. They had toned down his capacity to hate, but not done away with it altogether. "Come here and take a look at your public," said Hendricks. Joe went to the window. Three stories below, a large crowd had gathered on the hospital steps: a band, photographers, television trucks, cameramen and autograph hunters. He'd waited a long time for this day. But now -- another change in him -- He put the emotion into words: "I don't feel like a hero. Funny, but I don't." "Hero!" Hendricks laughed and, with his powerful lungs, it sounded like a bull snorting. "You think a successful criminal is a hero? You stupid -- " He laughed again and waved a hand at the crowd below them. "You think those people are down there because they admire what you did? They're down there waiting for you because they're curious, because and because they're glad you're an Ex. You're an ex-criminal now, and because of your treatment, you'll never be able to commit another crime as long as you live. And that's the kind of guy they admire, so they want to see you, shake your hand and get your autograph." Joe didn't understand Hendricks completely, but the part he did understand he didn't believe. A crowd was waiting for him. He could see the people with his own eyes. When he left the hospital, they'd cheer and shout and ask for his autograph. If he wasn't a hero, what was he? r T took half an hour to get through the crowd. Cameras clicked all around him, a hundred kids asked for his autograph, everyone talked at once and cheered, smiled, laughed, patted him on the back and cheered some more. Only one thing confused him during all the excitement: a whitehaired old lady with tears in her eyes said, "Thank heaven it was only a watch. Thank heaven you didn't kill someone! God bless you, son." And then the old lady had handed him a box of fudge and left him in total confusion. What she said didn't make sense. If he had killed someone rather than stealing a watch, he would be even more of a hero and the crowd would have cheered even louder. He knew: he had stood outside the crowds always cheered louder when an ex-murderer came out In Hendricks' robot-chauffeured car, he ate the fudge and consoled himself with the thought People are funny. Who can understand 'em? Feeling happy for one of the few times in his life, he turned toward Hendricks and said, "Thanks for what you did. It turned out great. I'll be able to get a good job now." "That's why I met you at the hospital," Hendricks said. "I want to explain some things. I've known you for a long time and I know you're spectacularly dumb. You can't figure out some things for yourself and I don't want you walking around the rest of your life thinking I did you a favor." Joe frowned. Few men had ever done him a favor and he had rarely thanked anyone for anything. And now... after thanking the man who'd done him the biggest favor of all, the man was denying it! "You robbed Gralewski's apartment," Hendricks said. "Gralewski live in the apartment you robbed. and he lives in another. We have a lot of places like that. You see, it gives us a way to get rid of saps like you before they do real damage. We use it as a last resort when a psycho treatment or -- " "Well, it's still a favor." Hendricks' face hardened. "Favor? You wouldn't know a favor if you stumbled over one. I did it because it's standard procedure for your type of case. Anyone can -- free of charge -- have treatment by asking for the treatment and taking it. But you wouldn't do that. You wanted to commit a crime, get caught and be a hero... an Ex." playgrounds. Boys and girls of all ages were laughing, squealing with joy as they played games derelieve tension. And -- despite the treatment, Joe shuddered when he saw the psychologists standing to one side, quietly watching the children. The whole world was filled workers. Everywhere you went, it was there, quietly watching you and analyzing you, and if you showed criminal tendencies, it watched you even more closely and analyzed you even more deeply until it took you apart and put you back together again the way it wanted you to be. "Being an Ex, you'll get the kind of job you always wanted," Hendricks continued. "You'll get a goodpaying job, but you'll work for it. You'll work eight hours a day, work harder than you've ever worked before in your life, because every time you start to loaf, a voice in your head is going to say, Work! Work! Exes always get good jobs because employers know they're good workers. "But during these next few days, you'll discover what being an Ex is like. You see, Joe, the treatment can't possibly take all the criminal tendencies out of a man. So the treatment does the next best thing -- you'll find a set of laws written in your mind. You might want to break one now and then, but you won't be able. I'll give you an illustration..." Joe's face reddened as Hendricks proceeded to call him a series of names. He wanted to smash the fat, grinning face, but the muscles in his arm froze before it moved it an inch. And worse than that, a brief pain ripped through his skull. A pain so intense that, had it lasted a second longer, he would have screamed in agony. And above the pain, a voice whispered in his head, Unlawful to strike someone except in selfdefense. He opened his mouth to tell Hendricks exactly what he thought of the words stayed in his throat, the pain returned, and the mental voice whispered, Unlawful to curse. He had never heard how the treatment prevented an Ex from committing a crime. And now that he knew, it didn't seem fair. He decided to tell the whole story to the newspapers as soon as he could. And as soon as that decision formed in his mind, his body froze, the pain returned and the voice, Unlawful to "See what I mean?" Hendricks asked. "A century ago, you would have been locked in a prison and taxpayers' money would have supported you until the day you died. turned to society, a useful citizen, unable to commit the smallest crime. And you've got a big hand in your dirty little mind that's going to slap it every time you get the wrong kind of thought. It'll keep slapping you until you learn. It might take weeks, months or years, but you'll learn sooner or later to not even think about doing anything wrong." smoke ring at the car's plush ceiling. "It's a great system, isn't it, Joe? A true democracy. Even a jerk like you is free to do what he wants, as long as it's legal." "I think it's a lousy, filthy system." Joe's head was still tingling with pain and he felt suffocated. The was also inside his head, telling him he couldn't do this, couldn't do that All his life it had been telling him he couldn't do things he wanted to do and now... Hendricks laughed. "You'll change your opinion. We live in a clean, wonderful world, Joe. A world of happy, healthy people. Except for freaks like yourself, criminals are -- " "Let me out!" Joe grabbed at the door and was on the sidewalk, slamming the door behind him before the car stopped completely. He stared at the car as it pulled away from the curb and glided into the stream of traffic again. He realized he was a prisoner... a prisoner inside his own body... made a prisoner by a world that hated him back. He wanted to spit his contempt, but the increasingly familiar pain and voice prevented him. It was unlawful to spit on a sidewalk. It your collection of complete? agrazine If not, here is your chance to fill in missing copies. Back numbers of Calctxy Science  jfiction sfylagazine are available from May, #, on. Inventories are running low. Don't miss your chance to complete your collection. # For  # or #c each #I Hudson Streot  New York #, N. Y. Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Name -- Address  City State Mr. E. Vandenberg had a practical reason for wanting something old and something new -- but what would he borrow -- and would it be blue? H E was a tall, broad-shoulready smile. The back of his flowdered, collegiate looking ered sport shirt was damp with young man with a neat perspiration. He carried a small crewcut and, in spite of the slight suitcase and he paused for a molook of weariness in his face, a ment in the shade, looking skeptically down the quiet residential street, before he stepped out into the boiling sun and walked slowly up the sidewalk to the first house. He rang the bell and stepped back, whistling cheerfully. The door opened a crack. A woman's voice snapped, "I don't want any." The door closed. He bowed solemnly at the closed door and turned away. A small boy stepped out from behind a shrub and stared at him, freckled face tense with immodest curiosity. "Watcha sellin', mister?" "Not selling a thing, son," he said. "I'm giving things away." He rang the bell at the next house, got no response and turned away sadly. The boy popped into sight again, from behind a hedge. "Watcha givin' away?" "Shoelaces," he said. At the third house, the door was opened by a red-faced, bosomy blonde, who eyed him suspiciously. "Oh, God!" she exclaimed. "More magazine subscriptions. We average three of you guys a week." "Jeff Flowers is my name," he said, handing her a smartly engraved card. "I represent New for Old, Incorporated. Do you have any old shoelaces you'd like to dispose of?" She scrutinized the card, glanced up at him with a comically puzzled look on her face, and suddenly doubled up with laughter. There was a faint trace of alcohol on her breath, and Flowers sniffed hungrily. "Give me that line again," she said. "Do you have any old shoelaces you'd like to dispose of?" She giggled. "Don't tell me now -- don't tell me. Let me guess. If I buy six pairs of shoes, you'll throw in the shoelaces free of charge?" "No, ma'am..." "If I buy a thousand pairs of shoelaces, I get a pair of shoes free?" out a tray, filled to overflowing with shoelaces. There were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, white shoelaces of all sizes and all shades. There were plaid shoelaces and polka-dot shoelaces. There were shoelaces gold-tipped and silvertipped and plastic-tipped and jewel-studded. "These shoelaces," he said, "are finest quality and the latest style. They're guaranteed to last the life of any two pairs of shoes you want to wear them in. For any pair of old shoelaces you wish to dispose of, I'll give you your choice of any pair of new shoelaces." She bent over the tray. "Pretty things. What do they cost?" "They are not for sale, ma'am. They are only for trade. One new pair for one old pair." She selected a chartreuse-andbrown plaid with gold tips. "These would look nice with a new summer outfit I have," she said. "How much?" "One pair of old shoelaces." She dropped the laces back onto the tray. "Cut the comedy. What's the price?" "One pair of old shoelaces." "You mean to tell me you'll take a pair of old laces for -- " "Absolutely. For any old pair, you get a new pair." He grinned. "No strings attached." "Just a minute," she said. A moment later, she was back, handing him two soiled, muchabused brown shoelaces. He knotted them together and dropped them into his suitcase. "I get my choice?" she said. "You certainly do." She picked up the plaid, goldtipped pair. "That's all there is to it?" "That's all." She examined the new pair carefully, stretched them out, tugged at them and wadded them up. "There's got to be a catch somewhere. Is there any limit?" "No limit at all. One pair or a thousand -- a new pair for every old pair you give me." "Come in," she said. He sat down in the cool living room and waited. Five minutes later, she returned, breathing heavily. "Got every shoelace in the house," she said, dumping them on the sofa beside him. "Twelve pairs." He separated them into pairs, knotted them together and counted. "Twelve pair," he agreed. "Help yourself." S HE did, stirring critically through the display of laces and mulling over her choices. "Twelve," she said finally. "I thank you very much," Flowers said. "Look. There's got to be a catch somewhere." "No catch. Let me show you." He took a glittering gadget out of his suitcase. "We'll put one of the old laces in here. Like this -- see how it clamps in? Now you turn the crank and see if you can break it." She gave the crank a quick turn. The shoelace snapped. "Now we'll try one of the new ones," he said. He clamped it in, and her arms bulged as she strained at the crank. Nothing happened. "You can't break one," he said, "and you can't wear one out. We guarantee them for the life of two pairs of shoes, but actually they'll last you a lifetime." He replaced the gadget and the tray, snapped the suitcase shut and got to his feet. "Remember my company's name," he said. "New for Old, Incorporated. You'll be hearing more about it." "I hope you don't think you'll make a living at this." Flowers flashed a smile. "Fortunately I don't have to take a commission in old shoelaces. I'm on salary." The boy was waiting for him at the sidewalk. "You really givin' away shoelaces?" he demanded. "Not exactly," Flowers said. "I'm trading them. Let's see yours. Oh -- too bad. You have straps instead of laces. Sorry, but we can't do business." He walked on to the next house, leaving the boy staring after him. Some dozens of houses and a couple of hours later, pangs of hunger sent Flowers wearily back to his car and started him in search of a restaurant. He located a little neighborhood cafe and walked in, carrying his suitcase with him, and took a seat at the counter. He ordered coffee and a pair of hamburgers, and then spun around on his stool for a professional appraisal of any shoelaces that might be in evidence. Three stools away, the only other customer at the counter sat back flexing his brawny arms and nodded pleasantly. "Think it'll ever get around to raining?" "I hadn't thought about it," Flowers said. "But I suppose it'll have to get around to it, sooner or later." "It better. Hasn't rained for over a month now and the radio said that the farmers are going to be hit pretty hard. They're bringing in some guy that says he can make it rain -- you know, one of those deals where they drop some stuff out of an airplane." "More power to him," Flowers said. "Will they let us know when, or do we have to start carrying raincoats all the time?" "That's a good one. Ah, it probably won't work." He glanced curiously at the suitcase. "What's your line?" "Shoelaces," Flowers said. He opened the suitcase and set the tray on the counter. f I I HE waitress paused with a cup of coffee in each hand and stared. "Say," she said. "Those are pretty." "Aren't they?" Flowers agreed. She delivered the coffee and hurried back. "What do they cost?" "They aren't for sale. I'll arrange a trade with you, though." "Oh, no, you don't! I'll buy for cash or not at all." "I'll trade you," Flowers said quickly, "for a pair of old shoelaces." The waitress stalked away angrily. She was back a moment later, shoving the tray of shoelaces aside to plop Flowers' sandwiches and coffee down in front of him. She departed without speaking. Flowers' companion at the counter chuckled. "You ought to have a better line than that." "I suppose so," Flowers said. "Unfortunately, that's the way it has to be. The boss won't let me sell them. If people won't trade, they can keep the ones they have." "Is that a fact? You giving me straight dope?" "Absolutely." "You mean you'll take these old laces I'm wearing and give me a new pair?" "Try me and see." "The fellow stooped over and began yanking out his shoelaces. "You better be telling the truth," he said, "or you're going to put these back in." He handed the pair to Flowers. Dirty black. Flowers passed him the tray and he selected a clean black pair in return. The waitress watched the transaction incredulously, stooped down behind the counter and came up with a soiled white pair. She selected white with blue polka dots. Flowers passed out his cards. "What do you get out of this?" the fellow asked. "A pay envelope," Flowers said. "Yeah. What does your boss get out of it?" "A lot of used shoelaces." "What good are they? I mean is this some new product you're introducing or something?" "I'll tell you how it is," Flowers said. "Have you ever noticed, when you were shining your shoes, how you always get some shoe polish on your laces?" "Yeah, I suppose you do, if you don't take 'em out." "My boss has developed a new process. He extracts that polish from the shoelaces and cans it and sells it." The fellow stared for maybe thirty-five seconds before he grabbed his check and left. The waitress stalked away again. Flowers shrugged and bit into a sandwich. A newcomer slid onto the stool beside him, reached for a menu and said, "Think we'll ever get some rain?" "Let's talk about shoelaces," Flowers said. TT was after six when Flowers got around to reporting in. His headquarters was a tiny side-street shop in the business district. The sign across the front of the shop read. New For Old, Incorporated. In the window was a dazzling assortment of shoelaces, and another sign, "Used shoelaces wanted. Come in and trade. One new pair for each old pair you bring in." A bell tinkled as Flowers opened the door. He winked familiarly at the shapely young lady who occupied a desk in one corner of the rooms, assured himself that the place was otherwise unpopulated, and strode over to give her a robust embrace. "Have a good day?" she murmured. "Fair," he said. Flowers glanced about the room and grimaced at the overwhelming quantity of shoelaces that filled display cases and erupted into enormous piles on tables. He did not find it difficult to return his attention to the young lady. "Did you have a good day, Miss Star?" She smiled teasingly. "Fair." "Dancing tonight?" It was a rhetorical question. She smiled again and said, "The boss wants to see you." "Fancy that. What'd I do wrong?" "Nothing. He's going out of town for a few days and he wants to tell you I'm boss while he's gone." "What a pleasant thought! Supposing you order me to take the afternoon off tomorrow. I've beeri working too hard, you know. Then, as long as you're the boss, you can take the afternoon off yourself and we'll go on a picnic." "Can't you take this job seriously?" "I cannot," Flowers said. "I know the pay is magnificent and I know Mr. Vandenberg gives every indication of being more affluent than the U. S. Treasury. All the same, I can't see any future in trading shoelaces. I want to get myself an honest job, so we can get married." "What's wrong with getting married on this job?" Flowers shook his head. "Eventually we're going to corner the market with these non-breakable, last-a-lifetime shoelaces, and where will that leave us?" "Oh, we'll be branching out into other things before long. Mr. Vandenberg says -- " "I know what he says. I also know that there can't be much profit -- if any at all -- in trading new things for old. It doesn't take a business genius to figure that out." "I still think this is some kind of promotion stunt." Flowers snorted. "Who ever heard of a promotion without publicity? The only people breathing a word about this are a few gullible door-to-door men and you here in the shop." He emptied his collection of used shoelaces onto her desk and she sighed and started to count. "Better go see Mr. Vandenberg," she said. row passageway, knocked, opened at the command of a deep, nasal voice. Mr. E. Vandenberg -- if he had a first name, his employees had never discovered what it was -- glanced up from a pile of newspapers. Newspapers were one of Mr. E. Vandenberg's many peculiarities. His cramped office looked like a back-issue warehouse. Newspapers were piled in, under and on anything that could conceivably hold newspapers -- newspapers in a multitude of languages from all over the world. A casual observer would have taken Mr. E. Vandenberg for the director of a global clipping service, rather than a used-shoelace tycoon. Another of Vandenberg's peculiarities was his face. His leathery, oily skin hung in sagging folds. It was a big face and it was absolutely devoid of expression. It never registered anger or displeasure. It never registered approval or enthusiasm. Mr. Vandenberg's large, greenish eyes studied his employees with a speculative intensity that vaguely reminded Flowers of an owl staring at a mouse. Flowers did not like Mr. Vandenberg. "Have a good day?" Vandenberg asked. "Pretty fair." Flowers looked at Vandenberg's thick, unruly hair. On the first day of her employment, Janet Star had pronounced that well-nourished thatch to be a wig, and Flowers had been speculating about it ever since. So far, he had managed to resist the temptation to give it a firm tug and resolve the issue in a definitive manner. "Three hundred pairs," he said. Vandenberg's expression did not change. "Wonderful," his monotone rumbled. "That's a new record, isn't it? Have you drawn your replacements?" "Janet's counting the returns now." Vandenberg seemed to nod from the general region of his protruding stomach. "I find it necessary to be out of town for a few days. Miss Star will handle the territorial assignments. I trust that no complications will arise." "They never do," Flowers said. Flowers made no move to leave, and Vandenberg said, "Is there anything else?" "No, sir. Except that I'd like to give notice. No particular hurry -- whenever you are able to replace me." Vandenberg slowly settled back in his chair, his unblinking eyes fixed upon Flowers. "You don't like to work for me? How is that? You do better than anyone else." "Oh, I don't mind the work. It's just that I don't seem to understand this business. I can't see much future in it." " ward, his body stiff. "It has a wonderful future. Especially for you. As soon as this territory is properly developed, we'll be opening some new branch offices. I plan to put you in charge of one of them and eventually I expect to have you supervising branch offices in several states." He got awkwardly to his feet. "That's in the future, of course. For the present, I'll raise your salary twenty dollars a week, and your salary will double when you take charge of a branch office. Satisfactory?" "Well..." Flowers said. Vandenberg's expressionless voice rumbled on while he gently patted Flowers on the back in the most approved fatherly manner. Flowers left the office a bit dazed. "I offered my resignation," he told Janet. "You didn't!" she cried. "He told me no and raised me twenty a week. I'm to take charge of a branch office when this territory is fully developed -- whatever that means -- at double my present salary." "Jeff!" she shrieked. "Then-" "Yep. There must be something about this business that escapes me. Want to set a date?" M R. E. Vandenberg left his office minutes later and started out through the front of the store. The spectacle which he encountered in the front room so disgusted and dismayed him that he retraced his steps and left by the rear door. He drove out into the country, and by dark he had reached an abandoned farm forty miles from the city. Its abandonment had been a cause of considerable upset among the neighboring farmers. It was a shame, they said, to waste such good land. But the new owner, Mr. E. Vandenberg, was not interested in farming. Vandenberg drove down a weed-choked lane, left his car in a rickety shed and strolled across a rolling, sun-parched pasture. At precisely #:# P.M., a looming dark object descended. Vandenberg climbed aboard, was received with considerable ceremony and addressed in an unearthly tongue as General Vrooz. The dark object shot upward, moving so quickly that radar instruments at a nearby air base had only the time to acknowledge its presence with a noncommital flicker. As the dark object flashed outward from Earth, Mr. E. Vandenberg underwent a transformation. He removed not merely the unruly . hair, but everything else. Everything. It would have been no minor shock to Janet Star had she known that the suspected wig extended to the soles of the feet. General Vrooz emerged from the pupa of E. Vandenberg. He swabbed himself off quickly with the coordinated efforts of six spidery arms. He preened his scaly hide carefully, and then he settled himself in front of an observation port to gaze scornfully with a trio of multi-faceted eyes at the rapidly retreating disc of the planet Earth. in a cavern on the dark side of Earth's lone satellite, known to natives as the Moon. He was escorted to his commanding officer's sumptuous quarters. He turned a dozen pounds of newspaper clippings over to an aide and worked busily on a report until his communicator broke in upon his activity with a brusque announcement. "The Sector Commander is awake, sir." "I'll join him immediately," General Vrooz announced. In a spacious conference room, flanked by sparkling metallic walls and surrounded by scaly-hided subordinate officers, General Vrooz reported to his superior. "Our approach," he announced, "is economic." The Sector Commander waved three of his six arms in assent. "I suspected it would be, from the preliminary reports." "Then you've familiarized yourself with the planet's organization?" General Vrooz said. "Excellent. We're commencing operations in one of the leading political and economic entities. The economic complex is delicately balanced -- production, distribution and consumption. We intend to remove consumption from that cycle. The entire process will collapse, of course." "How do you intend to proceed?" "We shall simply trade new articles for old articles. The population will satisfy its wants by trading with us, and the production and distribution phases will be eliminated. Chaos will result. For example, a major native mode of transportation centers upon a machine called an automobile. It is the end-product of a very large industry, and in its operation it utilizes a fuel called gasoline, which is the end-product of another very large industry. We shall offer a substitute product and trade new for old. Our substitute will be superior to the native product, of course. It will use oxygen for fuel, extracting it from the atmosphere. This will destroy the market for automobiles and gasoline, and at one stroke we shall have demolished two vital industries." "Shrewd planning. How are the initial experiments progressing?" "Slowly. The natives have an innate suspicion which I do not exactly understand. Once this is overcome, I expect to progress rapidly." The Sector Commander coldly studied a monstrous globe of the planet Earth. "When can we take over?" he asked. "We'll have to give the fleet ample notice, you know. There were complaints that we moved too quickly in the Hanolff conquest." "That was an entirely different type of operation," General Vrooz said. "I cannot set a date, as yet, but the military will have more than sufficient notice." "What product are you using for your experiments?" "Shoelaces," General Vrooz said, using the native tongue because the expression was untranslatable. "Shoe-laces? What is that?" " have E. Vandenberg's shoes brought in to make the matter clear. "Their technology is certainly primitive," the Sector Commander said. "Not all of their footwear requires laces," said General Vrooz. "But the majority does. It's a common article and it's inexpensive, which allays their suspicion somewhat. It is serving our purpose well." "Excellent. But how did you happen to decide upon this?" General Vrooz's scaly sides twitched convulsively. "If you will pardon the levity, sir -- I'm making use of a native proverb. Something about starting a new business on a shoestring." He had to explain the interchangeability of the terms shoestring and shoelace before the Sector Commander indicated laughter by waving all six arms simultaneously. General Vrooz returned to Earth and reluctantly re-encumbered himself with the synthetic epidermis of E. Vandenberg. Jeff Flowers and ten other young male employees continued to barter shoelaces with receptive housewives. More passersby stopped to stare at the sign in the shop window and increasing numbers came in to investigate. Janet Star installed a row of chairs for the use of customers removing and replacing shoelaces. Word began to spread -- slowly at first and then with an awesome velocity. Startled housewives hurried to their telephones to notify sisters, cousins, aunts, neighbors and chance acquaintances. "A young man came to the door this afternoon and do you know what he did? You'll never believe it! He gave me eight pairs of new shoelaces for eight pairs of old ones. And they're beautiful!" The amused businessman whose curiosity brought him into New for Old, Incorporated, returned on Saturday with his wife and children, so they could pick out their own shoelaces. Dozens of innocent door-to-door salesmen found themselves greeted with startling enthusiasm on the chance that they might be trading something new for something old. Jeff Flowers chalked up a record seven hundred exchanges in one day. Mr. E. Vandenberg stoically tabulated the daily totals and began to pick out sites for branch offices. New for Old, Incorporated, was ready to start expanding. r p HE afternoon was precisely like any other afternoon of the preceding weeks, meaning that it was smoldering hot. The most that could be said was that it gave people something to talk about -- the heat and the dryness. Jeff Flowers moved wearily along a residential street. His mind was not on his work. The first of the week, he was scheduled to open a branch office in Seattle. He'd picked the place himself, after checking carefully to make certain that Seattle was neither hot nor dry. Janet was staying behind until she could break in a new girl for Mr. Vandenberg, and then she would join him in Seattle. They would get married. The pay was magnificent, with none of the petty deductions that plagued most workers. The total of their combined salaries was almost phenomenal enough to quiet Flowers' misgivings about the future of trading something new for something old. In the meantime, there were shoelaces to trade. Word of his coming preceded him along the street. The housewives had their doors open and neat piles of shoelaces were waiting for him. If it hadn't been so infernally hot, he thought he might be able to run up a new record. But it was just too hot to move fast. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief that had long since passed its saturation point, and glanced up at the sky. Dark clouds were drifting in over the city. He collected a total of fifteen pairs of used shoelaces at the next house, and by the time the delighted housewife had completed her selections, an occasional drop of rain was spattering against the windows. Flowers started back toward his car, walking briskly. His walk changed to a trot and then to a headlong gallop as the heavy clouds suddenly dumped torrents of rain on the city. The long drought was over. Half a block from his car, legs churning frantically, Flowers kicked off a shoe. He retrieved it and ran on in his sock. Five steps later, he lost the other shoe. He reached his car in a thoroughly drenched condition, suitcase in one hand and pair of shoes in the other, and flung himself into the front seat. He slammed the door, breathed a deep sigh of relief and turned his attention to his shoes. The reason for their irresponsible behavior smote him in the face at one glance. He had no shoelaces. He stared at the shoes for a long time while water thundered down on the roof above him and dripped from his trousers onto the floor below him. Then, heart beating violently, he took a bright New for Old, Incorporated shoelace from his suitcase, rolled down his window and held it out to the mercy of the downpour. Its bright color vanished. It quickly became a slimy, sticky mess and suddenly it disappeared. Even the metallic tips dissolved. ment twice, and then he sat hunched over his steering wheel, lost in thought. Rain flooded against his windshield. He started the motor and turned on the wipers; they made scarcely a ripple in the cascading rain. Street lights were on, pallid globs of whiteness, adding nothing to the almost-zero visibility. Driving was impossible. Flowers took a deep breath and edged away from the curb. Twenty minutes and one dented fender later, he reached a drugstore. He made a dash for it, leaving his shoes in the car. He found that he was not alone in the matter of unconventional footwear. There were at least a dozen pairs of sopped socks and stockings in the place, and their owners were talking and gesticulating furiously. Something about shoelaces. Flowers hurried into a phone booth and dialed New for Old, Incorporated. "Janet," he said. "Now listen carefully. You've got to get out of there. Those damned shoelaces dissolve in water, and heaven knows how many thousand people were caught wearing them in this rain. There's no telling what will happen. Get over to your apartment and I'll meet you there. I think we'd better beat it out of town." "I can't!" Janet wailed. "The police are here now and -- " "I'll take that, miss," a masculine voice snapped. "Hello. Who is this?" Flowers banged down the phone and fled. Back in his car, he searched in his suitcase for a pair of old laces and got his shoes securely back onto his feet. He mentally crossed his fingers and started off again. The rain had diminished to a steady downpour by the time he reached New for Old, Incorporated. The shop was locked. He turned away and marched resolutely toward police headquarters. And there he found Mr. E. Vandenberg, Janet, three fellow employees, and a police sergeant who cheerfully crossed his name off a list and invited him to join the others. "These phony shoelaces are your responsibility," Flowers told Vandenberg. "What are you going to do about it?" Vandenberg stood at the window, staring stony-faced out at the deluge. "Rain," he muttered. "Water. Rain. Water." "Sure. And every pair of those shoelaces is guaranteed to last the life of two pairs of shoes." "We shall replace every pair," Vandenberg said absently. "We shall produce a new shoelace that is not affected by this -- rain." "Great," said Flowers. "If somebody doesn't lynch us first. There are thousands of people running around barefoot this afternoon because of New for Old, Incorporated. I passed a shoe store on my way down here and the place was jammed with people buying shoelaces." "Have no fear," Vandenberg said, leaning forward to watch the rivulets of water streaking down the window. "We shall give them two pair for every pair of the others." doesn't understand," she said. "He's in a terrible lot of trouble -- all of us are. And it isn't because of the shoelaces, either, though I suppose they'll bring that up, too. Especially since all the policemen -- " "What about the policemen?" asked Flowers. "A lot of them ate at that cafeteria across from the store. They saw the sign in the window, and by now I suppose the entire police force is wearing our shoelaces. Was wearing them, I mean. Some of them came in right after it started raining and made a big fuss. And then some men came from the District Attorney's office -- " "What is this all about?" "I don't know. But we're all in  a lot of trouble and he won't do anything about it." "Vandenberg," Flowers called out. "How about hiring a lawyer and getting us out of here?" "Lawyers?" Vandenberg echoed blankly. It was Flowers who finally summoned a lawyer, an austere, gloomy-looking man with a long mournful face, horn rimmed glasses, and gold teeth that seemed decidedly out of character. He also had the unlikely name of Ephraim Zomrigger. He conferred briefly with Flowers, made a noble but unsuccessful attempt to engage Vandenberg in conversation, and went off to try his luck with the police and the D.A.'s men. "Shoelaces?" he said to Flowers when he returned. "Shoelaces aren't the big problem. There may be a fuss about them -- there's already a fuss about them. Wait until you see the evening papers. But your boss says he'll have some made that won't dissolve and he'll give two pairs for every pair of soluble ones you people have been passing out. I don't know how he'll work the exchange, but if he goes through with it, that part should be all right. No, the trouble is a matter of records." "Records?" Flowers asked. "What records?" "That's just what the District Attorney wants to know. What records. Your boss was served with a subpoena a week ago. Ordered to produce all his records. He says he hasn't got any. Can't get away with that sort of thing, you know. First thing he has to do is produce the records. If there's anything wrong with them, then -- but he'll have to produce the records." "Let's talk to him," Flowers said. " responded indifferently. Records? He had no records. What difference did that make? "My word!" the lawyer exclaimed. "Why, it makes..." He removed his glasses and somehow managed to give the impression that he was getting a better look at Vandenberg. "My good sir, you are operating a business, New for Old, Incorporated. Do you own stock in the corporation yourself?" "Stock?" Vandenberg said noncommittally. "What stock?" "But if it's a corporation, there must be stock. There must be stockholders. Where is your list of stockholders?" "What stockholders?" Vandenberg said. The lawyer smiled weakly and tried again. "Let's see now. You are a corporation. You are incorporated under the laws of the state of..." He paused, his thin eyebrows arched expectantly. Vandenberg did not complete the statement. "Don't understand," he said. "But you can't be incorporated if you're not incorporated! I mean -- " "Just a name," Vandenberg said. "It can't be just a name! If you want to call yourself incorporated, you must incorporate and..." He replaced his glasses and his eysight seemed to fail noticeably. He moved closer to Vandenberg..."You have employees. Certainly you have records on them." "Twelve employees," Vandenberg said. "No records." The lawyer removed his glasses and mopped his brow. "Payroll records?" he suggested. "No." "Of course you've been making the proper withholding tax deductions from your employees' salaries and forwarding them -- " "No." Zomrigger groped around for a chair and sat down heavily. "You had each one of your employees complete a Form W#. If an employee completed no such form, then you withheld his tax as if he had claimed no exemptions. You deducted the withholding tax from each employee's salary and forwarded it to -- " "No," Vandenberg said. "I deducted nothing from the salaries. Why should I take my employees' money?" Zomrigger was breathing rapidly, his long face transfixed with horror. "Did you -- did you apply on Form SS# for an employer's identification number, and deduct social security taxes from your employees, and match them with a similar amount of your own money, and -- " "No." "Federal and state unemployment taxes?" "No." "Did you clear your operations with the state retail sales tax people?" F OR the first time, Vandenberg seemed interested. "What sort of thing is that?" "Well, now -- I couldn't say, without checking, whether or not it pertains to your operations. It depends on the retail value of your shoelaces, and since you are trading, rather than selling -- but you should have cleared the operation with the retail sales tax people. They might hand you a whopping big bill if it turns out that -- " "Not selling anything," Vandenberg said. "Simple transaction -- trading. Nobody's business but mine." "What arrangements did you make about the retailer's excise tax on jewelry?" "No arrangements. Trading shoelaces, not jewelry." "But those shoelaces of yours. Some of them have gold and silver tips, haven't they? And artificial jewels? The government is certain to demand adjustments on the tax -- I think. I haven't exactly had a case just like this one." He mopped his brow again. "Articles made of, or ornamented, mounted, or fitted with precious metals or imitations thereof have a tax that amounts to ten per cent of the sales price. Surely -- " Vandenberg shook his head slowly. "Of course you filed your own personal income tax last April. That would be, in your case, Form #, with Schedule C, plus the self-employment tax, and a declaration of estimated tax of the current year if your gross income exceeds six hundred dollars for each of your exemptions plus four hundred dollars." He looked up hopefully. "No income," Vandenberg said. "Just old shoelaces. The government wants me to pay a tax on old shoelaces?" "I forgot," said the lawyer. "You're an employee of a corporation. But then there are the corporation taxes -- but no! You aren't incorporated. You just call yourself..." He slumped forward and buried his face in his hands. "Oh, my!" he moaned. He glanced at Flowers. "Didn't he deduct your withholding taxes or -- " "Nothing," Flowers said. "I never thought anything about it. It's kind of an unusual business, you know." "It certainly is." The lawyer turned back to Vandenberg. "Did you file an income tax report last year? Or the year before that? Or the year -- " "Never," Vandenberg said. "Oh, my!" The lawyer's glasses struck the floor with a thump, but did not shatter. He retrieved them and got slowly to his feet. "I'd better summon a few of my colleagues. This is going to be too much for one man to handle." T Y late evening, it was decided that the employees of New for Old, Incorporated, were innocent of wrongdoing. They were released. Vandenberg stubbornly shrugged off the efforts of his legal advisors, refused to answer questions, refused to post bond for his release. He was taken off without protest to jail. In the morning, his cell was found inexplicably empty. The F.B.I. and state and local police departments all over the country were alerted, but no trace of the fugitive was found. Jeff Flowers got himself an honest job, at the two-dollar window of the local racetrack, and married Janet Star. They lived together happily ever after, or so the latest reports indicate. The day after the big rain, local stores did an avalanche of business in shoelaces, and sales of laceless shoes shot mysteriously upward. The government took over the assets of New for Old, Incorporated, and found itself in possession of a room full of old shoelaces and several thousand gross of stylish new shoelaces which were mysteriously soluble in water. It never announced the disposition of this property. One local newspaper suggested that the new laces be turned . over to the armed forces, for use in desert maneuvers; evidently the editorial writer had never worn combat boots and had no idea of how gay those laces would look in them. General Vrooz, alias E. Vandenberg, left Earth. He also left the Moon and the Solar system. As he told his Sector Commander, there were other worlds to conquer where his efforts would be more rewarding. Of course he is not forgetting Earth. He will be back -- oh, most certainly he will be back -- and on his next trip, he won't be trading shoelaces. But as he stated in his final report, he could see no point in investing time, materials and energy in the sabotage of an economy which is already struggling feebly in the encircling grip of governmental red tape. In two or three flibs, the general wrote -- the flib is his race's unit of temporal measure -- the economy will die of selfstrangulation and conquest will be a simple matter. General Vrooz does not expect to wait long. society; , Then hurry out and get a copy of magazine, a fascinating collection of I photos  features on Hollywood's , most famous fiends. Horrific and hilarious! Frankenstein himself ! recommends #c at newsstands, or mail #c to Monsters, # E. Upsal St. Phila. #, Pa. Sent prepaid. Nostalgia is a time bomb -- Harry fooled around with it and found his whole life blown to pieces! I: HE which had been depicting the horrors that could beset an intestinal tract while a Friendly Announcer held up a bottle not-quiteguaranteed to Relieve Distress. He crept back later during a relatively inoffensive paean to some Indescribably delicious candy, which nevertheless was being described, and shut the set off. He considered smashing it, but he abhorred excesses -- and he'd only have to clean up the mess afterward. He tried to read, but was unable to concentrate. The print jumped around the page and hurt his eyes. He wondered what was the matter with him. Could it be Tired Blood? He shuddered. He roamed the apartment restlessly, half seeing all that had grown familiar over his twenty bachelor years there. Few things had changed. There was the gas fireplace he'd installed after a trip to England -- it was relatively new. There was the morris chair he'd bought himself on his #th birthday, not so long ago. He'd known exactly what he wanted -- the kind with the pushbutton in the flat arm that raised or lowered the back, and the section in the base that slid out to provide a footrest. He'd persevered and found one in a Salvation Army resale store. He sat down in it now. He put his head back and his feet up and averted his eyes from the television set, which it directly faced. That was new, of course. He got up in irritation to turn the chair and the biggish end table with the radio on it, and sat down again. an old Atwater Kent he'd bought with the morris chair and lovingly restored -- he waited in apprehension. He was ready to snap it off instantly if he heard the voice of that little girl shaming her mother into buying two-ply toilet tissue. He relaxed as music welled out of the ancient speaker. Then, as if from the past, came the friendly, baffled voice of Jack Benny. He was surprised until he remembered having read that transcriptions of old Benny programs were being brought back to radio. He listened, pleased. Benny on television had always made him nervous. Being completely convinced of the legend that Benny was helpless without his writers, he was constantly afraid the perennial #-year-old from Waukegan would forget his lines. He preferred the old Benny, in a radio studio, with his glasses on, secure with a script in front of him. He turned the dial regretfully when the Benny show ended. His fingers froze on the knob as he heard the voice of Fred Allen. The late, great Allen? Had they transcribed him back from the Final Curtain? Allen's Sinoid voice was doing a One Long Pan skit. Ah, those days! The epic era of the Mighty Allen Art Players, with Portland Hoff a and Parker Fennelly and Mrs. Nussbaum. Bless them and their pre-visual medium, which at least had left a few things to the imagination. He listened blissfully and did not even mind when the Merry Macs sang their song. He'd always regretted the Merry Macs, who just didn't fit into the Allen pattern, and he felt intuitively that Fred did, too. You could tell from the way he introduced them, almost apologetically, as if saying he'd had to compromise with the sponsor. Then Allen, too, was gone. He turned the dial hopefully, wondering what new magic his radio would evoke. Was it Oldtimers Night, put together from hallowed tapes from some golden vault? He lingered for a station break and heard the familiar chimes -- then the almost forgotten call letswitched in time to hear another He sat back in the morris chair, his heart palpitating a little. He had begun to believe that his Atwater Kent was bringing him these long-dead programs live. He switched from band to band, thrilled as the boy with a crystal set he once had been, and heard Vic and Sade, Major Bowes, Myrt and Marge (he almost cried), The Goldbergs, Jack Pearl ("Vas you dere, Sharlie?"), Burns and Allen, Rudy Vallee, Stoopnagle and Budd (that crazy organ!), The Easy Aces, Snow Village Sketches, Ruth Etting, Joe Penner, Kate Smith, Frank Munn ("the golden voice of radio"), Ben Bernie, Raymond Knight ("the voice of the diaphragm enunciating")... the hallowed, half-forgotten voices, laughing at them, weeping with them, reveling in the oncedead past, questioning nothing. Only when midnight came, and station after station signed off (was that weak, indistinctly heard one wonder. He stilled the hum of dead air with a reluctant click. He stood and stretched, cramped but not sleepy. He thought, dreamily awake, not believing it: "I'm back in the past. I was happy then. I was young. Life was uncomplicated." He corrected himself : "I am happy. I am young." He laughed (softly, not to break the spell) and thought: "It's true. Who's to say it isn't? As long as I want it to be, it's true, here in this room, right now. As long as I don't look in the mirror -- as long as I don't switch on the television." He turned his back on the monstrous, futuristic television set, that anachronism in his return to -- to when? The radio programs had been a mixed bag. Mostly they were from the #s (his twenties), but a few had been from the #s (even better!). No matter, he told himself. Don't question it. Don't doubt the voice of the diaphragm. Trust your Atwater Kent, . your pre-transistor genie. He heard something then, outside. A clatter-rumble in the distance. Clatter rumble screech. Louder. Closer. Clatter-rumblescreech-rattle. It was roaring by his window now, rattling past with an infernal beloved din, a dozen feet away. The Ninth Avenue El! Torn down years ago, of course, long before they doomed the Third Avenue El and even the Sixth. But there it was. He saw its shadows on his drawn window shade. He rushed to raise the shade, then stopped himself. "No," he thought. "If I look, it won't be there (yes, it will). I want it to be, but it isn't (yes, it is). I musn't look. I must accept it (I do). I must make an effortmeet it halfway, have faith. I must go out. Then it will be there (I know, I know)." He went out the door and into the hall, down the stairs to the vestibule. He saw his name in the slot of the mailbox. The letters he had typed so many years ago were fresh and unsmudged. He stepped out through the street door and into the earlier time, the blood coursing youthfully in his veins. II: She essary inconvenience. She endured the suspicious glances of patrolmen, the oglings of hopeful but faint-hearted young men, the frank approaches of others. She had to consider them all. One of them must be the right one. This was the neighborhood. Hell's Kitchen. Somewhere here, west of Times Square, under the El or near the tracks on Death Avenue, she would recognize her man. Her memory of how it would be was dim. She wished she had paid more attention at the time. But she had been in a hurry to go. There had been so many exciting vistas that she'd skimmed a few details. It was her own fault. She'd been warned. She slung her fox furpiece over her shoulder and walked on. A man came out of a bar and fell into step beside her. She looked at him sideways. He wasn't the one. She could tell. She said, "I live in the next block and my brother's still up. He weighs two hundred pounds." She looked straight ahead, but knew he had dropped back and would leave her alone. She turned the corner. At the end of the long block, an El train rattled past. She walked quickly, her high heels sending echoes back from the brownstones, the tail of the fox flapping against her back. She hoped without real hope that this would be the night. How many nights had it been? It didn't really matter (it would come to the same thing in the end), except that she was tired and wanted to go back. Her curiosity had been satisfied over and over. She was sorry now that she had come, though she knew she would not be -- then. But now was not then. Now was now, and her feet hurt. She would know him, though. Let it be at the corner, under the El, tonight. This was the area. This could be the time. (But what was time? Very inexact, time.) She saw the cop before he saw her and adjusted her walk to a purposeful stride. She thought: "It's all right, officer -- I'm walking the streets of your city, but I'm no streetwalker." The cop passed, swinging his nightstick, with just the suggestion of a nod. A good girl going home, that's what she was. Oh, Lord, would she ever get home? She made herself think Yes. Yes, she would, tonight, under the El. She'd find him there and she'd know him. There'd be something about him that would tell her. His clothes, perhaps, though men's clothes didn't change as much over the years. His attitude, more likely. Something she'd recognize. She turned at the corner, toward the El station at the next block. There he was! A man, standing half in shadow. She walked toward him quickly. It wasn't his clothes so much as his indecisiveness that convinced her that he was her man. He was standing at the foot of the steps leading to the El platform, looking at a handful of coins. She hurried and stopped beside him, close. He looked up, confused. She already had the coins in her own hand. She said to him, smiling in relief, "No buffalo nickels? Only Jeffersons?" She saw him start, smile, then cancel the smile and withdraw into propriety. But he was the one. He was! She knew it as she watched him take courage and say, tentatively, doubtfully, daringly, "Would you take a Roosevelt dime, miss, for two buffalo nickels?" Ill: They platform for the downtown train. He started to speak, then hesitated. She smiled, encouraging him. "How could you know about Roosevelt dimes?" he asked finally. "He wasn't -- isn't even Presihe still be Governor of New York?" She shrugged carelessly. "I'm no good at current events. It's one of my failings." . He had been studying her in polite glances. "You're not from here," he said, "though your clothing's right. The skirt length, the hat -- all that. How did you get here?" He laughed. "I don't even know what year it is. It was too dark to see the license plates without being conspicuous -- you know, bending down. And there weren't any newsstands open or I'd have bought a paper." "You don't need a paper," she said. There was a gum machine on a pillar and he stooped a bit to look in its mirror. He was young, all right. About her age, he judged. She laughed. "You're being conspicuous now." "I don't mind -- with you. How old are you?" "Twenty-four." "Then I'd like to be #. I was born in #, so if I'm #, this is #. Is that right?" She shrugged again. "It doesn't matter. Everything is relative in the duoverse." "In the what?" The train rattled in, drowning her reply. They took seats in the nearly empty car. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Now? South Ferry, I guess. That's where the train goes, it said on the sign." "There's a paper over there." She nodded toward it across the aisle. "You could check the date." "I don't really want to now," he said. "I -- I wouldn't want to push it too far." "No such thing. But suit yourself. I can understand it." "Can you really? I was listening to the radio -- it's an old one -- because I was mad at the television -- " He stopped. "You know what television is?" "Yes." "Of course. You know about Roosevelt dimes and Jefferson nickels." She nodded. "You were telling me about the radio -- steeping yourself in the past." "I didn't say that." He turned to look at her. She was dark and pretty. He wondered what her name was. "No, but that's the way it happens." "It happened to you, too?" "Not exactly," she said. "I planned it. I'd guess that you didn't." "No. It just happened. What's your name?" "April." He laughed. "Funny?" she asked. "Yes. Not your name -- the coincidence. Your name is April and mine is Summers. Harry Summers." "I see. Hello, Harry." She shook his hand gravely. "Hello, April." He looked into her brown eyes as the train banged along through the past. "Where are you going, April?" "I'll go with you while you do your sightseeing. Then I'll go home with you." "Oh?" He seemed surprised and embarrassed. She dropped her eyes. "It's all right," she said. "It's -- " "Of course it is. I'd like you to." But he didn't want to go home -- home where the TV was -- home where he was #. Home where the TV was, would she be #? "Don't worry about anything, Harry." She seemed to be reassuring him. "Enjoy yourself. That's what you came back for. You're happier here, aren't you?" "Yes," he said, looking at her. "Yes, I am." Their hands were still clasped. the rail of the Staten Island ferry (two more buffalo nickels), they watched the phosphorescent water. Something was nagging him. "I'm really here?" he urged. "I mean really here?" She squeezed his arm. "What do you think?" "I don't know. Here -- now. Could I meet myself? If I went looking, could I find the other Harry Summers -- the one who's living through # the first time?" "No," she said. A freighter hooted mournfully at the ferryboat. "You're the only Harry Summers in this #." "This #? Is that what you meant by -- what did you call it -- the duoverse?" "Yes. But you mustn't think I understand everthing I can name. I do know that you couldn't be here -- nor could I -- unless there were something controlling the paradoxes. That's the duoverse -- a twin universe to keep time travelers from running into themselves. It's actually just a theory, but it seems to work." They were silent for a while, watching the wake of the freighter moving up the harbor. The air was fresh but not cold and her closeness made him wish the ride would never end. "I'm so glad I found you," he whispered. "I'm glad I found you. I'd been looking for so long." His heart thumped at her words. He drew her head down to his shoulder and she let it rest there. He touched her cheek gently. "Let's not lose what we've found. Let's keep it forever." She didn't move. She said, as if to the dark sky, "And thou beside me under the branches of the time-tree... Something like that? Oh, Harry!" She turned and was in his arms. They kissed and her tears trickled to their lips. Then she was her separate self again, gripping the rail with both hands. "It's impossible, Harry. I'm going the other way."There were signs of dawn through the steel latticework of the El above them. "We haven't done much sightseeing in your beloved past," April said. "We haven't seen the Hippodrome, or the streetcars on Broadway -- " "You're all the past I want." She smiled sadly. "Let's go up. I said I'd go home with you." "I don't want it to be that way," he said. "Not only that way." "That's the way it has to be. There's no other." "But up there, I'm -- I'm #. And you -- " "Not till you turn on the TV, Harry. Not till then. Let's go up, Harry." He put the key in the lock. He took her fox and she made coffee in the kitchenette. "I might have known you'd have real coffee," she said. "No you, eh, Old-timer?" "I don't have the room," he said, smiling at his little joke. They sat and drank their coffee formally, she in his morris chair, he next to her in a straight chair, neither facing the blank square eye of the television set. He started to say something once, but an El train roared past, just outside his drawn shade, and she didn't hear him. Finally she said, "Thank you for the coffee -- and for everything else." She placed the cup carefully in its saucer on the flat arm of the chair and stood up. "You're not going! You can't! Please!" "I must. I've a long way to go. Turn on the TV, please." "No!" He stood to face her. "I won't do that to you. I won't make you old." "You don't understand." She moved toward the television set, but he moved in front of her. "Please," he said desperately. "Wait. It's too early. There's nothing on." "I have waited, Harry. You don't know how long." There was the rumble of another El train approaching, and as his eyes went to the window, she darted past him. She flicked the knob and turned the volume button high. The rumble grew louder. The train was less than a block away. The room-rattling din drowned the hum of the warming tubes. He stood as if in a trance, looking from her to the window and back again. "April..." The voice of the television was heard before there was a picture: "And now, kiddies, it's time for your Uncle Jack to tell you about a wonderful surprise you can have the next time your mommy takes you to the grocery store..." And with the coming of the voice, the sound of the El died. knew without going to raise the shade, was the wide, oneway, truck-choked, El-less Ninth Avenue of #. And he, in #, was #. He knew it without a mirror to tell him. He felt it in his sagging muscles and aching feet. And April was #. He turned from the window, but not easily. She was unchanged. She was fresh and lovely, untouched by the years which, flowing back in an instant, had plunged back at him in a tidal wave. April turned off the set just as Uncle Jack began to take shape holding a breakfast food box and pointing to it with his right index finger. "Kiddies..." "You're the same," Harry said. "It is # and I'm # and you're still #. Why?" "I told you we were going different ways. Your way was back. Mine was forward. Oh, my dear, I'm sorry. But I had to -- to use you. I had no choice." He straightened his shoulders, tried to pull in his stomach. "You've come back from the past," he said, trying to understand. "But you should have been a child in # -- a three-year-old child." "I wish -- " she began, had to stop. "Oh, how I wish I didn't have to hurt you. But I'm not from your past, or even your present. I'm from the future." "The future -- " He had to sit down. His finger accidentally pushed the button in the arm of the morris chair and it sprang up and hit him in the back. "Then," he said, pain in his eyes, "I'm just a stop on your journey. Where you're going, I'm -- dead." "No, Harry." She went to kneel at his feet. "Oh, no. It's all relative. You must see that. It's what you are now that matters. Not what will be, or what was." He looked at her, then looked away. "Don't try to be kind. I know I hoped for too much. I wanted my youth and I wanted you -- and I couldn't have both." His gaze came to rest on the television set. "I can't have either."  have been so simple, so scientific. I was to go back -- they have machines -- and make notes and saturate myself in the atmosphere of the past -- Oh, it doesn't matter! You're what counts. I've hurt you and I didn't mean to -- " He took the hand that had touched his. "I don't matter," he said. "Not a bit. I'm just a phantom in your life -- in your real present. Where you belong, I'm just a corpse in a graveyard and you're too young to think about such things." She shook her head and started to cry. "No," he said, "let me finish. We have to be realistic. I'm just a complicating factor who's got in your way. I mustn't let myself do that. And you mustn't concern yourself with someone who doesn't exist any more in your time. I'll be happy if you'll think of me occasionally up there in twentyhundred and whatever it is." She had pressed the back of his hand, holding hers, to her wet cheek. He managed a wry smile. "It would be a personal kind of thought that no other corpse could boast of." "Harry!" she cried. "Harry -- please stop it. Don't kill yourself in your own lifetime. I'll stay with you, my dear. I will. I don't care. I can't do this to you." He shook his head. "No, I won't let you. I'm a sentimental man who's been privileged to know his youth again. And, knowing that youth, I know yours. I won't let you sacrifice yourself for a phantom who died before you were even born." She was sobbing on his knee. "Get up, child," he commanded. "Up! Go into the bathroom and wash your face. Off with that lipstick -- cupid's bows are passe. We'll make you up # style," She wiped her eyes and got to her feet, sniffling. "Scoot!" he said, feeling paternal all at once and not minding his age at all. "You've got to get fixed up and find somebody who needs change for a Truman quarter or maybe an Eisenhower half." He touched one of her new tears with a fingertip. "You'll forgive my vanity if I hope that this time it's a woman who wants change." She sobbed again, then kissed him on the cheek and went in and washed her face. IV: He dow as she went out of his life, blowing him a kiss from the corner. She had slept in his bed as he dozed in the morris chair (back down, footrest out; quite comfortable, really) and now, regretting nothing, he changed into pajamas and snuggled into the sheets still fragrant from her perfume. He slept, dreaming not of the past, which was dead, nor of the present, which was dying, but of the future, her future, which would live when he was dust. V: She spent that she was tired of her journey back through time. The world of # was no improvement, except mechanistically. She had never found love there. She turned into Ninth Avenue at dusk and in her mind she heard the phantom clatter and rattle of the El. She knew what she would do. She would wait at the vestibule till someone came out Then she would go up the stairs to his door and knock. "Hello, my dearest," she would say. "Hello, my darling Harry. I love you." And if they only watched television for all the years of their lives, that would be all right as long as he held her hand. But one night they might turn on the old Atwater Kent and hear the Street Singer or Jones and Hare (The Happiness Boys) and find the program being drowned out by the roar of the Ninth Avenue El banging and rattling its way through the time when he was # and she was #.      Next monlh's issue brings along a name new to this field and returns at least one established favorite... Remember "The Hated" by Paul Flehr, one of the grimmest little to visit and decidedly worse to live in. Certainly the inhabitants are criminals -- they are in a Martian penal colony. But what were their crimes -- and how much time do they have to serve? Of all forms of punishment, the direst is to keep such knowledge from inmates, forcing them into tormented selfexamination and frantic guesswork. But something even more sinister is added... What happened to the years between their unremembered crimes and the moment they found themselves in this camp of the damned? has a nerve asking for nothing more than his own little cubicle and a bit to eat... he'll take the whole world or else! Along with probably another novelet and definitely several short stories perhaps the most unexpected bulletin you might think to discover in this level-headed journal. Yes, there's News of Atlantis... and, being sober and authenticated, it's far more exciting than the hottest flash from the most inventive cultist! Finney. Rinehart  Co., Inc., N. Y., # first collection of short stories, can stand up proudly to the best of the recent crop. Although timetravel is the theme of most of these yarns from the pages of Colliers, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, his treatment gamuts from the sinister to the hilarious. The other works include offbeat love stories, ghost tales and unclassifiable zanies. The wonderfully titled "Quit Zoomin' Those Hands Through the Air" is the mad story of the world's first pilot and how he almost won the Civil War -- for the enemy. A lovely shorty, "Cousin Len's Wonderful Adjective Cellar," is a pure delight and a lesson to overflowery authors. Don't miss this book. Finney is one slick writer who is more than a slick trickster. Duncan. Ballantine Books, N. Y.,  # that was hot news in SF a quarter century ago, that of parallel universes, and by the mere addition of refreshing originality of concept has woven an absorbing yarn. His locus is Santa Felicia Island in the Caribbean, taken over by the Navy for a top-secret project, Lunar One, based on the "Homing Pigeon," a guided missile. On an earlier test, one passed close to the Moon, indicated mineral deposits, and led to the thought of homing on such deposits with supply drones, followed eventually by men. During the course of a lecture on minimals given to the younger officers by the lanky, maladjusted civilian scientist, Staghorn, demonstrative soap films created by the wire-test forms develop an impossibility. Supposedly two-dimensional Moebius surfaces, they should be dispelled by only two pin pricks. However, one effort requires three, causing Staghorn to consult with the base psychiatrist concerning his sanity. Later, largescale experiments by Staghorn in his laboratory result in a dimensional breakthrough that introduces a beguiling couple into the story and a universal time-lapse that sets the world on the verge of war. Duncan's portrayal of the frustrating ability of Security to fit square pegs into round holes rings too unhappily true. ril. Gnome Press, N. Y., # lyiSS Merril's second annual anthology follows unerringly the path set by her first It ranges from excellence to mediocrity -- from Sturgeon's "The Other Man" and Knight's "Stranger Station" to "The Damnedest Thing" by Garson Kanin, of interest solely because of its author. "Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster" by the editor of Playboy, Ray Russell, is a biting spoof of Hollywood's conception of SF. And see if you don't cock an askance eye at our presentday haphazards after reading Robert Nathan's "Digging the Weans," a learned archeological paper of the future theorizing on the meanings of our remains. Remembering that "Best" is at best a superlative comparative, let's just agree that the average is "Good." Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson. Gnome Press, N. Y., # cient time lapses, "The Tiddlywink Warriors," "In Hoka Signo Vinces" and "Adventure of the Misplaced Hound" are all reasonably amusing. Under one cover and in company with minor works, though, the cumulative effect is less rewarding. The Hokans of planet Toka are lovable, teddy-bearish creatures with overdeveloped imaginations and underdeveloped discrimination. They are being groomed for planetary autonomy but, still Neolithic culturally, they love to ape fictional environments and characters. Plenipotentiary Alex Jones has his hands full each time a batch of novels is landed. In rapid succession, the American West, Victorian England, the Spanish Main, to name a few, are the locales of anachronistic action. Hoka, like pickles, is a tasty appetizer in moderation, but leaves a characteristic taste if overindulged. millan Co., N. Y., # year-old ScientistInventor, has a penchant for inventing fast-moving things like rockets, jet-propelled wagons, etc. However, his talents remain unappreciated until W. H. Lankersham, Esq., comes to town in a remarkable car that opens into a five-room apartment and announces his contemplated construction of a Mysterious Machine. Jerry is of considerable help, particularly in supplying the speed of sound. Dines' imagination runs amusingly riot and his own illustrations help sustain the fun. Evelyn Sibley Lampman. Doubleday and Co., N. Y., #L'-venile is an account of the efforts of a fantastically inept extraterrestrial messenger to return an errant flying saucer to his ruler. Rusty Adams came across it, a circular plate of metal, in the dump, and found that it would just cover the nose of his egg-crate, orangebox spaceship. Though successfully resisting the efforts of the three-foot-high, toothless reptilian messenger, Tiphia, to remove the saucer, Rusty and his friends nonetheless fall victim to candy-from-a-stranger. Before they can suspect, Tiphia has activated the saucer and they are Moonward bound. The candies have the extraordinary power to immunize them to space environment. Unfortunately, Tiphia's poor memory can't recall his home satellite's location, necessitating a Systemwide search. Mrs. Lampman writes like Lewis Carroll brought up to date, and Bernard Krigstein is a wistfully humorous TennieL An irresistible combination. John Rowland. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # Study of the Limitations of the Scientific Method." You can see without half looking that he is a skeptic. He takes to task those in any of the sciences who run to dogma in their explanations of phenomena, particularly the theoretical physicists and the superDarwinian biologists. His tenet is that we do not destroy mysteries by denying them existence. The book has five subdivisions covering unsolved mysteries of Physics; Biology; Psychology; Sociology; and The Unclassifiable, and is certain to massage the gray matter into cerebration. A. Coblentz. Avalon Books, N. Y. Wade Wellman. Avalon Books, N. Y., # each SF publishing field, but the above titles are familiar to the old-time aficionado. Hidden World, a lead-fisted satire, first saw light in #. It concerns two geologists, trapped in a mine cave-in, burrowing into a hidden world of two rival trogloditic nations, Wu and Zu, scientific marvels but with social systems strictly from Coblentz. Its takeoffs on sitdown strikes, Roosevelt's fishing trips and technocracy date it almost to the hour. On the other hand, Wellman's yam, though published only five years later, stands the test of time remarkably well. It is the equal of any science-adventure yarn of today, though his time reflector is a bit thick. But, once back in Renaissance Italy, his yarn spins along in sprightly style, even though the sock ending has been telegraphed since page twenty. Golden Bell Press, Denver, # S F has inspired many poetic efforts, but most writers have incorporated their rhymes into the story's body. Few have, like Fleming, issued a volume of poetry alone. The title poem is one of the shortest of a number of arresting works on SF themes. There are mundane poems also, but Fleming makes an imposing bid for the vacant title of Poet Laureate of SF in this oftentimes inspiring volume. Family longs to lose weight, can't control appetite? Simply trade in the old robocook, put the whole problem in the firm hands of Iron Chancellor T HE Carmichaels were a pretty plump family, to begin with. Not one of the four of them couldn't stand to shed quite a few pounds. And there happened to be a super-special on roboservitors at one of the Miracle Mile roboshops -- # off on the #I model, with adjustable caloric-intake monitors. Sam Carmichael liked the idea of having his food prepared and served by a robot who would keep one beady solenoid eye on the collective family waistline. He squinted speculatively at the glossy display model, absent-mindedly slipped his thumbs beneath his elastobelt to knead his paunch, and said, "How much?" and probably synthetic grin. "Only #, sir. That includes free service contract for the first five years. Only # credits down and up to # months to pay." Carmichael frowned, thinking of his bank balance. Then he thought of his wife's figure, and of his daughter's endless yammering about her need to diet. Besides, Jemima, their old robocook, was shabby and gear-stripped, and made a miserable showing when other company executives visited them for dinner. "I'll take it," he said. "Care to trade in your old robocook, sir? Liberal trade-in allowances -- " "I have a '# Madison." Carmichael wondered if he should mention its bad arm-libration and serious fuel-feed overflow, but decided that would be carrying candidness too far. "Well -- ah -- I guess we could allow you fifty credits on a '#, sir. Seventy-five, maybe, if the recipe bank is still in good condition." "Excellent condition." That part was honest -- the family had never let even one recipe wear out. "You could send a man down to look her over." "Oh, no need to do that, sir. We'll take your word. Seventy-five, then? And delivery of the new model by this evening?" "Done," Carmichael said. He was glad to get the pathetic old '# out of the house at any cost. #JE signed the purchase order cheerfully, pocketed the facsim and handed over ten crisp twenty-credit vouchers. He could almost feel the roll of fat melting from him now, as he eyed the magnificent '#I roboservitor that would shortly be his. The time was only # hours when he left the shop, got into his car and punched out the coordinates for home. The whole transaction had taken less than ten minutes. Carmichael, a secondlevel executive at Normandy Trust, prided himself both on his good business sense and his ability to come quickly to a firm decision. Fifteen minutes later, his car deposited him at the front entrance of their totally detached self-powered suburban home in the fashionable Westley subdivision. The car obediently took itself around back to the garage, while Carmichael stood in the scanner-field until the door opened. Clyde, the robutler, came scuttling hastily up, took his hat and cloak, and handed him a Martini. Carmichael beamed appreciatively. "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!" He took a healthy sip and headed toward the living room to greet his wife, son and daughter. Pleasant gin-induced warmth filtered through him. The robutler was ancient and due for replacement as soon as the budget could stand the charge, but Carmichael realized he would miss the clanking old heap. "You're late, dear," Ethel Carmichael said as he appeared. "Dinner's been ready for ten minutes. Jemima's so annoyed, her cathodes are clicking." "Jemima's cathodes fail to interest me," Carmichael said evenly. "Good evening, dear. Myra. Joey. I'm late because I stopped off at Marhew's on my way home." His son blinked. "The robot place, Dad?" "Precisely. I brought a '#I roboservitor to replace old Jemima and her sputtering cathodes. The new model has," Carmichael added, eying his son's adolescent bulkiness and the rather-more-than-ample figures of his wife and daughter, "some very special attachments." I Jemima's favorite Tuesday dinner menu -- shrimp cocktail, fumet of gumbo chervil, breast of chicken with creamed potatoes and asparagus, delicious plum tarts for dessert, and coffee. Carmichael felt pleasantly bloated when he had finished, and gestured to Clyde for a snifter of his favorite afterCognac. He leaned back, warm, replete, able easily to ignore the blustery November winds outside. A pleasing electroluminescence suffused the dining room with pink -- this year, the experts thought pink improved digestion -- and the heating filaments embedded in the wall glowed cozily as they delivfor relaxation in the Carmichael household. "Dad," Joey began hesitantly, "about that canoe trip next weekend -- " Carmichael folded his hands across his stomach and nodded. "You can go, I suppose. Only be careful. If I find out you didn't use the equilibriator this time -- " The doorchime sounded. Carmichael lifted an eyebrow and swiveled in his chair. "Who is it, Clyde?" "He gives his name as Robinson, sir. Of Robinson Robotics, he said. He has a bulky package to deliver." "It must be that new robocook, Father!" Myra Carmichael exclaimed. "I guess it is. Show him in, Clyde." Robinson turned out to be a red-faced, efficient-looking little man in greasy green overalls and a plaid pullovercoat, who looked disapprovingly at the robutler and strode into the Carmichael living room. He was followed by a lumbering object about seven feet high, mounted on a pair of rolltreads and swathed completely in quilted rags. "Got him all wrapped up against the cold, Mr. Carmichael. Lot of delicate circuitry in that job. You ought to be proud of him." "Clyde, help Mr. Robinson unpack the new robocook," Carmichael said. "That's okay -- I can manage it. And it's not a robocook, by the way. It's called a roboservitor now. Fancy price, fancy name." ' J mutter, "Sam, how much -- " He scowled at her. "Very reasonable, Ethel. Don't worry so much." He stepped back to admire the roboservitor as it emerged from the quilted swaddling. It was big, all right, with a massive barrel of a chest -- robotic controls are always housed in the chest, not in the relatively tiny head -- and a gleaming mirror-keen finish that accented its sleekness and newness. Carmichael felt the satisfying glow of pride in ownership. Somehow it seemed to him that he had done something noble and lordly in buying this magnificent robot. Robinson finished the unpacking job and, standing on tiptoes, opened the robot's chest panel. He unclipped a thick instruction manual and handed it to Carmichael, who stared at the tome uneasily. "Don't fret about that, Mr. Carmichael. This robot's no trouble to handle. The book's just part of the trimming. Come here a minute." Carmichael peered into the robot's innards. Pointing, Robinson said, "Here's the recipe bank -- biggest and best ever designed. Of course it's possible to tape in any of your favorite family recipes, if they're not already there. Just hook up your old robocook to the integrator circuit and feed 'em in. I'll take care of that before I leave." "And what about the -- ah -- special features?" "The reducing monitors, you mean? Right over here. See? You just tape in the names of the members of the family and their present and desired weights, and the roboservitor takes care of the rest. Computes caloric intake, adjusts menus, and everything else." Carmichael grinned at his wife. "Told you I was going to do something about our weight, Ethel. No more dieting for you, Myra -- the robot does all the work." Catching a sour look on his son's face, he added, "And you're not so lean yourself, Buster." "I don't think there'll be any trouble," Robinson said buoyantly. "But if there is, just buzz for me. I handle service and delivery for Marhew Stores in this area." "Right." "Now if you'll get me your obsolete robocook, I'll transfer the family recipes before I cart it away on the trade-in deal." of nostalgia and regret when Robinson left, half an hour later, taking old Jemima with him. Carmichael had almost come to think of the battered '# Madison as a member of the family. After all, he had bought her sixteen years before, only a couple of years after his marriage. But she -- it, he corrected in annoyance -- was only a robot, and robots became obsolete. Besides, Jemima probably suffered all the aches and pains of a robot's old age and would be happier dismantled. Carmichael blotted Jemima from his mind. The four of them spent most of the rest of that evening discovering things about their new roboservitor. Carmichael drew up a table of their weights (himself, #; Ethel, #; Myra, #; Joey, #) and the amount they proposed to weigh in three months' time (himself, #; Ethel, #; Myra, #; Joey, #). Carmichael then let his son, who prided himself on his knowledge of practical robotics, integrate the figures and feed them to the robot's programming bank. "You wish this schedule to take effect immediately?" the roboservitor queried in a deep, mellow bass. Startled, Carmichael said, "Ttomorrow morning, at breakfast We might as well start right away." "He speaks well, doesn't he?" Ethel asked. "He sure does," Joey said. "Jemima always stammered and squeaked, and all she could say was, 'Dinner is serrved' and 'Be careful, sirr, the soup plate is verry warrm'." Carmichael smiled. He noticed his daughter admiring the robot's bulky frame and sleek bronze limbs, and thought resignedly that a seventeen-year-old girl could find the strangest sorts of love objects. But he was happy to see that they were all evidently pleased with the robot. Even with the discount and the trade-in, it had been a little on the costly side. But it would be worth it.  and woke early, anticipating the first breakfast under the new regime. He still felt pleased with himself. Dieting had always been such a nuisance, he thought -- but, on the other hand, he had never enjoyed the sensation of an annoying roll of fat pushing outward against his elastobelt. He exercised sporadically, but it did little good, and he never had the initiative to keep a rigorous dieting campaign going for long. Now, though, with the mathematics of reducing done effortlessly for him, all the calculating and cooking being handled by the new robot -- now, for the first time since he had been Joey's age, he could look forward to being slim and trim once again. He dressed, showered and hastily depilated. It was #. Breakfast was ready. Ethel and the children were already at the table when he arrived. Ethel and Myra were munching toast; Joey was peering at a bowl of milkless dry cereal, next to which stood a full glass of milk. Carmichael sat down. "Your toast, sir," the roboservitor murmured. Carmichael stared at the single slice. It had already been buttered for him, and the butter had evidently been measured out with a micrometer. The robot proceeded to hand him a cup of black coffee. He groped for the cream and sugar. They weren't anywhere on ,he table. The other members of his family were regarding him strangely, and they were curiously, suspiciously silent. "I like cream and sugar in my coffee," he said to the hovering roboservitor. "Didn't you find that in Jemima's old recipe bank?" "Of course, sir. But you must learn to drink your coffee without such things, if you wish to lose weight." Carmichael chuckled. Somehow he had not expected the regimen to be quite like this -- quite so, well, Spartan. "Oh, yes. Of course. Ah -- are the eggs ready yet?" He considered a day incomplete unless he began it with soft-boiled eggs. "Sorry, no, sir. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, breakfast is to consist of toast and black coffee only, except for Master Joey, who gets cereal, fruit juice and milk." "I see." Well, he had asked for it. He shrugged and took a bite of the toast. He sipped the coffee; it tasted like river mud, but he tried not to make a face. Joey seemed to be going about the business of eating his cereal rather oddly, Carmichael noticed next. "Why don't you pour that 'glass of milk into the cereal?" he asked. "Won't it taste better that way?" "Sure it will. But Bismarck says I won't get another glass if I do, so I'm eating it this way." "Bismarck?" a famous #th-century German dictator. They called him the Iron Chancellor." He jerked his head toward the kitchen, to which the roboservitor had silently retreated. "Pretty good name for him, eh?" "No," said Carmichael. "It's silly." "It has a certain ring of truth, though," Ethel remarked. Carmichael did not reply. He finished his toast and coffee somewhat glumly and signaled Clyde to get the car out of the garage. He felt depressed -- dieting didn't seem to be so effortless after all, even with the new robot. As he walked toward the door, the robot glided around him and handed him a small printed slip of paper. Carmichael stared at it. It said: "What's this thing?" "You are the only member of this family group who will not be eating three meals a day under my personal supervision. This is your luncheon menu. Please adhere to it," the robot said smoothly. Repressing a sputter, Carmichael said, "Yes -- yes. Of course." He pocketed the menu and made his way uncertainly to the waiting car. He was faithful to the robot's orders at lunchtime that day; even though he was beginning to develop resistance to the idea that had seemed so appealing only the least, to give it a try. But something prompted him to stay away from the restaurant where Normandy Trust employees usually lunched, and where there were human waiters to smirk at him and fellow executives to ask prying questions. He ate instead at a cheap robocafeteria two blocks to the north. He slipped in surreptitiously with his collar turned up, punched out his order (it cost him less than a credit altogether) and wolfed it down. He still felt hungry when he was finished, but he compelled himself to return loyally to the office. He wondered how long he was going to be able to keep up this iron self-control. Not very long, he realized dolefully. And if anyone from the company caught him eating at a robocafeteria, he'd be a laughing-stock. Someone of executive status just didn't eat lunch by himself in mechanized cafeterias. Y the time he had finished his day's work, his stomach felt knotted and pleated. His hand was shaky as he punched out his destination on the car's autopanel, and he was thankful that it took less than an hour to get home from the office. Soon, he thought, he'd be tasting food again. Soon. Soon. He switched on the roof-mounted video, leaned back in the recliner and tried to relax as the car bore him homeward. He was in for a surprise, though, when he stepped through the safety field into his home. Clyde was waiting as always, and, as always, took his hat and cloak. And, as always, Carmichael reached out for the cocktail that Clyde prepared nightly to welcome him home. There was no cocktail. "Are we out of gin, Clyde?" "No, sir." "How come no drink, then?" The robot's rubberized metallic features seemed to droop. "Because, sir, a Martini's caloric content is inordinately high. Gin is rated at a hundred calories per ounce and -- " "Oh, no. You too!" "Pardon, sir. The new roboservitor has altered my responsive circuits to comply with the regulations now in force in this household." Carmichael felt his fingers starting to tremble. "Clyde, you've been my butler for almost twenty years." "Yes, sir." "You always make my drinks for me. You mix the best Martinis in the Western Hemisphere." "Thank you, sir." "And you're going to mix one for me right now! That's a direct order!" "Sir! I -- " The robutler staggered wildly and nearly careened into Carmichael. It seemed to have lost all control over its gyro-balance; it clutched agonizedly at its chest panel and started to sag. "Order countermanded! Clyde -- are you all right?" Slowly, and with a creak, the robot straightened up. It looked dangerously close to an overload. "Your direct order set up a firstlevel conflict in me, sir," Clyde whispered faintly. "I -- came close to burning out just then, sir. Maymay I be excused?" "Of course. Sorry, Clyde." Carmichael balled his fists. There was such a thing as going too far! The roboservitor -- Bismarck -- had obviously placed on Clyde a flat prohibition against serving liquor to him. Reducing or no reducing, there were limits. Carmichael strode angrily toward the kitchen. His wife met him halfway. "I ' didn't hear you come in, Sam. I want to talk to you about -- " "Later. Where's that robot?" "In the kitchen, I imagine. It's almost dinnertime." He brushed past her and swept on into the kitchen, where Bismarck was moving efficiently from electrostove to magnetic worktable. The robot swiveled as Carmichael entered. "Did you have a good day, sir?" "No! I'm hungry!" "The first days of a diet are always the most difficult, Mr. Carmichael. But your body will adjust to the reduction in food-intake before long." "I'm sure of that. But what's this business of tinkering with Clyde?" "The butler insisted on preparing an alcoholic drink for you. I was forced to adjust his programming. From now on, sir, you may indulge in cocktails on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I beg to be excused from further discussion now, sir. The meal is almost ready." Poor Clyde! Carmichael thought. And poor me! He gnashed his teeth impotently a few times, then gave up and turned away from the glistening, overbearing roboservitor. A light gleamed on the side of the robot's head, indicating that he had shut off his audio circuits and was totally engaged in his task. peas, followed by black coffee. The steak was rare; Carmichael preferred it well done. But Bismarck -- the name was beginning to take hold -- had had all the latest dietetic theories taped into him, and rare meat it was. After the robot had cleared the table and tidied up the kitchen, it retired to its storage place in the basement, which gave the Carmichael family a chance to speak openly to each other for the first time that evening. "Lord!" Ethel snorted. "Sam, I don't object to losing weight, but if we're going to be tyrannized in our own home -- " "Mom's right," Joey put in. "It doesn't seem fair for that thing to feed us whatever it pleases. And I didn't like the way it messed around with Clyde's circuits." Carmichael spread his hands. "I'm not happy about it either. But we have to give it a try. We can always make readjustments in the programming, if it turns out to be necessary." "But how long are we going to keep this up?" Myra wanted to know. "I had three meals in this house today and I'm starved!" "Me, too," Joey said. He elbowed himself from his chair and looked around. "Bismarck's downstairs. I'm going to get a slice of lemon pie while the coast is clear." "No!" Carmichael thundered. "No?" "There's no sense in my spending three thousand credits on a dietary robot if you're going to cheat, Joey. I forbid you to have any pie." "But, Dad, I'm hungry! I'm a growing boy! I'm -- " "You're sixteen years old, and if you grow much more, you won't fit inside the house," Carmichael snapped, looking up at his six-footone son. "Sam, we can't starve the boy," Ethel protested. "If he wants pie, let him have some. You're carrying this reducing fetish too far." Carmichael considered that. Perhaps, he thought, I am being a little oversevere. And the thought of lemon pie was a tempting one. He was pretty hungry himself. "All right," he said with feigned reluctance. "I guess a bit of pie won't wreck the plan. In fact, I suppose I'll have some myself. Joey, why don't you -- " "Begging your pardon," a purring voice said behind him. Carmichael jumped half an inch. It was the robot -- Bismarck. "It would be most unfortunate if you were to have pie now, Mr. Carmichael. My calculations are very precise." Carmichael saw the angry gleam in his son's eye, but the robot seemed extraordinarily big at that moment, and it happened to stand between him and the kitchen. He sighed weakly. "Let's forget the lemon pie, Joey." marckian diet, Carmichael discovered that his inner resources of will power were beginning to crumble. On the third day, he tossed away the printed lunchtime diet and went out irresponsibly with MacDougal and Hennessey for a six-course lunch, complete with cocktails. It seemed to him that he hadn't tasted real food since the robot arrived. That night, he was able to tolerate the seven-hundred-calorie dinner without any inward grumblings, being still well lined with lunch. But Ethel and Myra and Joey were increasingly irritable. It seemed that the robot had usurped Ethel's job of handling the daily marketing and had stocked in nothing but a huge supply of healthy low-calorie foods. The larder now bulged with wheat germ, protein bread, irrigated salmon, and other hitherto unfamiliar items. Myra had taken up biting her nails; Joey's mood was one of black sullen brooding, and Carmichael knew how that could lead to trouble quickly with a sixteen-year-old. After the meager dinner, he ordered Bismarck to go to the basement and stay there until summoned. The robot said, "I must advise you, sir, that I will detect indulgence in any forbidden foods in .my absence and adjust for it in the next meals." "You have my word," Carmichael said, thinking it was indeed queer to have to pledge on your honor to your own robot. He waited until the massive servitor had vanished below; then he turned to Joey and said, "Get the instruction manual, boy." Joey grinned in understanding. Ethel said, "Sam, what are you going to do?" Carmichael patted his shrunken waistline. "I'm going to take a canopener to that creature and adjust his programming. He's overdoing this diet business. Joey, have you found the instructions on how to reprogram the robot?" "Page #. I'll get the tool kit, Dad." "Right." Carmichael turned to the robutler, who was standing by dumbly, in his usual forward-stooping posture of expectancy. "Clyde, go down below and tell Bismarck we want him right away."L'-l bots appeared. Carmichael said to the roboservitor, "I'm afraid it's necessary for us to change your program. We've overestimated our capacity for losing weight." "I beg you to reconsider, sir. Extra weight is harmful to every vital organ in the body. I plead with you to maintain my scheduling unaltered." "I'd rather cut my own throat. Joey, inactivate him and do your stuff." Grinning fiercely, the boy stepped forward and pressed the stud that opened the robot's ribcage. A frightening assortment of gears, cams and translucent cables became visible inside the robot. With a small wrench in one hand and the open instruction book in the other, Joey prepared to make the necessary changes, while Carmichael held his breath and a pall of silence descended on the living room. Even old Clyde leaned forward to have a better view. Joey muttered, "Lever F#, with the yellow indicia, is to be advanced one notch... umm. Now twist Dial B# to the left, thereby opening the taping compartment and -- oops!" Carmichael heard the clang of a wrench and saw the bright flare of sparks; Joey leaped back, cursing with surprisingly mature skill. Ethel and Myra gasped simultaneously. "What happened?" four voices -- Clyde's coming in last -- demanded. "Dropped the damn wrench," Joey said. "I guess I shorted out something in there." The robot's eyes were whirling satanically and its voice-box was emitting an awesome twelve-cycle rumble. The great metal creature stood stiffly in the middle of the ' living room; with brusque gestures of its big hands, it slammed shut the open chest-plates. "We'd better call Mr. Robinson," Ethel said worriedly. "A short-circuited robot is likely to explode, or worse." "We should have called Robinson in the first place," Carmichael murmured bitterly. "It's my fault for letting Joey tinker with an expensive and delicate mechanism like that. Myra, get me the card Mr. Robinson left." "Gee, Dad, this is the first time I've ever had anything like that go wrong," Joey insisted. "I didn't know -- " "You're darned right you didn't know." Carmichael took the card from his daughter and started toward the phone. "I hope we can reach him at this hour. If we can't -- " Suddenly Carmichael felt cold fingers prying the card from his hand. He was so startled, he relinquished it without a struggle. He watched as Bismarck efficiently ripped it into little fragments and shoved them into a wall disposal unit. ' I I HE robot said, "There will be no further meddling with my program-tapes." Its voice was deep and strangely harsh. "What-" "Mr. Carmichael, today you violated the program I set down for you. My perceptors reveal that you consumed an amount far in excess of your daily lunchtime requirement." "Sam, what -- " "Quiet, Ethel. Bismarck, I order you to shut yourself off at once." "My apologies, sir. I cannot serve you if I am shut off." "I don't want you to serve me. You're out of order. I want you to remain still until I can phone the repairman and get him to service you." Then he remembered the card that had gone into the disposal unit. He felt a faint tremor of apprehension. "You took Robinson's card and destroyed it." "Further alteration of my circuits would be detrimental to the Carmichael family," said the robot. "I cannot permit you to summon the repairman." "Don't get him angry, Dad," Joey warned. "I'll call the police. I'll be back in-" "You will remain within this house," the robot said. Moving with impressive speed on its oiled treads, it crossed the room, blocking the door, and reached far above its head to activate the impassable privacy field that protected the house. Carmichael watched, aghast, as the inexorable robotic fingers twisted and manipulated the field controls. "I have now reversed the polarity of the house privacy field," the robot announced. "Since you are obviously not to be trusted to keep to the diet I prescribe, I cannot allow you to leave the premises. You will remain within and continue to obey my beneficial advice." Calmly, he uprooted the telephone. Next, the windows were opaqued and the stud broken off. Finally, the robot seized the instruction book from Joey's numbed hands and shoved it into the disposal unit. "Breakfast will be served at the usual time," Bismarck said mildly. "For optimum purposes of health, you are all to be asleep by # hours. I shall leave you now, until morning. Good night." well that night, nor did he eat well the next day. He awoke late, for one thing -- well past nine. He discovered that someone, obviously Bismarck, had neatly canceled out the impulses from the housebrain that woke him at seven each morning. The breakfast menu was toast and black coffee. Carmichael ate disgruntedly, not speaking, indicating by brusque scowls that he did not want to be spoken to. After the miserable meal had been cleared away, he surreptitiously tiptoed to the front door in his dressing-gown and darted a hand toward the handle. The door refused to budge. He pushed until sweat dribbled down his face. He heard Ethel whisper warningly, "Sam -- " and a moment later cool metallic fingers gently disengaged him from the door. Bismarck said, "I beg your pardon, sir. The door will not open. I explained this last night." Carmichael gazed sourly at the gimmicked control-box of the privacy field. The robot had them utterly hemmed in. The reversed privacy field made it impossible for them to leave the house; it cast a sphere of force around the entire detached dwelling. In theory, the field could be penetrated from outside, but nobody was likely to come calling without an invitation. Not here in Westley. It wasn't one of those neighborly subdivisions where everybody knew everybody else. Carmichael had picked it for that reason. "Damn you," he growled, "you can't hold us prisoners in here!" "My intent is only to help you," said the robot, in a mechanical yet dedicated voice. "My function is to supervise your diet. Since you must be enforced -- for your own good." Carmichael scowled and walked away. The worst part of it was that the roboservitor sounded so sincere! Trapped. The phone connection was severed. The windows were darkened. Somehow, Joey's attempt at repairs had resulted in a short-circuit of the robot's obedience filters, and had also exaggeratedly stimulated its sense of function. Now Bismarck was determined to make them lose weight if it had to kill them to do so. And that seemed very likely. family met in a huddled little group to whisper plans for a counterattack. Clyde stood watch, but the robutler seemed to be in a state of general shock since the demonstration of the servitor-robot's independent capacity for action, and Carmichael now regarded him as undependable. "He's got the kitchen walled off with some kind of electronic-based force-web," Joey said. "He must have built it during the night. I tried to sneak in and scrounge some food, and got nothing but a flat nose for trying." "I know," Carmichael said sadly. "He built the same sort of doohickey around the bar. Three hundred credits of good booze in there and I can't even grab the handle!" "This is no time to worry about drinking," Ethel said morosely. "We'll be skeletons any day." "It isn't that bad, Mom!" Joey said. "Yes, it is!" cried Myra. "I've lost five pounds in four days!" "Is that so terrible?" "I'm wasting away," she sobbed. "My figure -- it's vanishing! And -- " "Quiet," Carmichael whispered. "Bismarck's coming!" The robot emerged from the kitchen, passing through the forcebarrier as if it had been a cobweb. It seemed to have effect on humans only, Carmichael thought. "Lunch will be served in eight minutes," it said obsequiously, and returned to its lair. Carmichael glanced at his watch. The time was # hours. "Probably down at the office they're wondering where I am," he said. "I haven't missed a day's work in years." "They won't care," Ethel said. "An executive isn't required to account for every day off he takes, you know." "But they'll worry after three or four days, won't they?" Myra asked. "Maybe they'll try to phone -- or even send a rescue mission!" From the kitchen, Bismarck said coldly, "There will be no danger of that. While you slept this morning, I notified your place of employment that you were resigning." Carmichael gasped. Then, recovering, he said: "You're lying! The phone's cut off -- and you never would have risked leaving the house, even if we were asleep!" "I communicated with them via a microwave generator I constructed with the aid of your son's reference books last night," Bismarck replied. "Clyde reluctantly supplied me with the number. I also phoned your bank and instructed them to handle for you all such matters as tax payments, investment decisions, etc. To forestall difficulties, let me add that a force-web will prevent access on your part to the electronic equipment in the basement. I will be able to conduct such communication with the outside world as will be necessary for your welfare, Mr. Carmichael. You need have no worries on that score." "No," Carmichael echoed hollowly. "No worries." to get out of here. Are you sure there's no way of disconnecting the privacy field?" "He's got one of his force-fields rigged around the control-box. I can't even get near the thing." "If only we had an iceman, or an oilman, the way the oldtime houses did," Ethel said bitterly. "He'd show up and come inside and probably he'd know how to shut the field off. But not here. Oh, no. We've got a shiny chromeplated cryostat in the basement that dishes out lots of liquid helium to run the fancy cryotronic supercooled power plant that gives us heat and light, and we have enough food in the freezer to last for at least a decade or two, and so we can live like this for years, a neat little self-contained island in the middle of civilization, with nobody bothering us, nobody wondering about us, and Sam Carmichael's pet robot to feed us whenever and as little as it pleases -- " There was a cutting edge to her voice that was dangerously close to hysteria. "Ethel, please," said Carmichael. "Please what? Please keep quiet? Please stay calm? Sam, we're prisoners in here!" "I know. You don't have to raise your voice." "Maybe if I do, someone will hear us and come get us out," she replied more coolly. "It's four hundred feet to the next home, dear. And in the seven years we've lived here, we've had about two visits from our neighbors. We paid a stiff price for seclusion and now we're paying a stiffer one. But please keep under control, Ethel." "Don't worry, Mom. I'll figure a way out of this," Joey said reassuringly. In one corner of the living room, Myra was sobbing quietly to herself, blotching her makeup. Carmichael felt a faintly claustrophobic quiver. The house was big, three levels and twelve rooms, but even so he could get tired of it very quickly. "Luncheon is served," the robotservitor announced in booming tones. And tired of lettuce-and-tomato lunches, too, Carmichael added silently, as he shepherded his family toward the dining room for their meager midday meal. OU have to do something about this, Sam," Ethel Carmichael said on the third day of their imprisonment. He glared at her. "Have to, eh? And just what am I supposed to do?" "Daddy, don't get excited," Myra said. He whirled on her. "Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do!" "She can't help it, dear. We're all a little overwrought. After all, cooped up here -- " "I know. Like lambs in a pen," he finished acidly. "Except that we're not being fattened for slaughter. We're -- we're being thinned, and for our own alleged good!" Carmichael subsided gloomily. Toast-and-black-coffee, lettuce-andtomato, rare-steak-and-peas. Bismarck's channels seemed to have frozen permanently at that daily menu. But what could he do? Contact with the outside world was impossible. The robot had erected a bastion in the basement from which he conducted such little business with the world as the Carmichael family had. Generally, they were self-sufficient. And Bismarck's force-fields insured the impossibility of any attempts to disconnect the outer sheath, break into the basement, or even get at the food supply or the liquor. It was all very neat, and the four of them were fast approaching a state of starvation. "Sam?" He lifted his head wearily. "What is it, Ethel?" "Myra had an idea before. Tell him, Myra." "Oh, it would never work," Myra said demurely. "Tell him!" "Well -- Dad, you could try to turn Bismarck off." "Huh?" Carmichael grunted. "I mean if you or Joey could distract him somehow, then Joey or you could open him up again and -- " "No," Carmichael snapped. "That thing's seven feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds. If you think I'm going to wrestle with it-" "We could let Clyde try," Ethel suggested. Carmichael shook his head vehemently. "The carnage would be frightful." Joey said, "Dad, it may be our only hope." "You too? Carmichael asked. himself speared by two deadly feminine glances, and he knew there was no hope but to try it. Resignedly, he pushed himself to his feet and said, "Okay. Clyde, go call Bismarck. Joey, I'll try to hang onto his arms while you open up his chest. Yank anything you can." "Be careful," Ethel warned. "If there's an explosion -- " "If there's an explosion, we're all free," Carmichael said testily. He turned to see the broad figure of the roboservitor standing at the entrance to the living room. "May I be of service, sir?" "You may," Carmichael said. "We're having a little debate here and we want your evidence. It's a matter of defannising the poozlestan and -- Joey, open him up!" Carmichael grabbed for the robot's arms, trying to hold them without getting hurled across the room, while his son clawed frantically at the stud that opened the robot's innards. Carmichael anticipated immediate destruction -- but, to his surprise, he found himself slipping as he tried to grasp the thick arms. "Dad, it's no use. I -- he -- " Carmichael found himself abruptly four feet off the ground. He heard Ethel and Myra scream and Clyde's "Do be careful, sir." Bismarck was carrying them across the room, gently, cradling him in one giant arm and Joey in the other. It set them down on the couch and stood back. "Such an attempt is highly dangerous," Bismarck said reprovingly. "It puts me in danger of harming you physically. Please avoid any such acts in the future." Carmichael stared broodingly at his son. "Did you have the same trouble I did?" Joey nodded. "I couldn't get within an inch of his skin. It stands to reason, though. He's built one of those damned force-screens around himself, too!" Carmichael groaned. He did not look at his wife and his children. Physical attack on Bismarck was now out of the question. He began to feel as if "he had been condemned to life imprisonment -- and that his stay in durance vile would not be extremely prolonged. T N the upstairs bathroom, six days after the beginning of the blockade, Sam Carmichael stared at his haggard fleshless face in the mirror before wearily climbing on the scale. He weighed #. He had lost twelve pounds in less than two weeks. He was fast becoming a quivering wreck. A thought occurred to him as he stared at the wavering needle on the scale, and sudden elation spread over him. He dashed downstairs. Ethel was doggedly crocheting in the living room; Joey and Myra were playing cards grimly, desperately now, after six solid days of gin rummy and honeymoon bridge. "Where's that robot?" Carmichael roared. "Come out here!" "In the kitchen," Ethel said tonelessly. "Bismarck! Bismarck!" Carmichael roared. "Come out here!" The robot appeared. "How may I serve you, sir?" "Damn you, scan me with your super-power receptors and tell me how much I weigh!" After a pause, the robot said gravely, "One hundred seventynine pounds eleven ounces, Mr. Carmichael." "Yes! Yes! And the original program I had taped into you was supposed to reduce me from # to #," Carmichael crowed triumphantly. "So I'm finished with you, as long as I don't gain any more weight. And so are the rest of us, I'll bet. Ethel! Myra! Joey! Upstairs and weigh yourselves!" But the robot regarded him with a doleful glare and said, "Sir, I find no record within me of any limitation on your reduction of weight." "What?" "I have checked my tapes fully. I have a record of an order causing weight reduction, but that tape does not appear to specify a terminus ad quern." Carmichael exhaled and took three staggering steps backward. His legs wobbled; he felt Joey supporting him. He mumbled, "But I thought -- I'm sure we did -- I know we instructed you -- " Hunger gnawed at his flesh. Joey said softly, "Dad, probably that part of his tape was erased when he short-circuited." "Oh," Carmichael said numbly. H E tottered into the living room and collapsed heavily in what had once been his favorite armchair. It wasn't any more. The entire house had become odious to him. He longed to see the sunlight again, to see trees and grass, even to see that excrescence of an ultra-modern house that the lefthand neighbors had erected. But now that would be impossible. He had hoped, for a few minutes at least, that the robot would release them from dietary bondage when the original goal was shown to be accomplished. Evidently that was to be denied him. He giggled, then began to laugh. "What's so funny, dear?" Ethel asked. She had lost her earlier tendencies to hysteria, and after long days of complex crocheting now regarded the Universe with quiet resignation. "Funny? The fact that I weigh # now. I'm lean, trim, fit as a fiddle. Next month I'll weigh #. Then #. Then finally about # pounds or so. We'll all shrivel up. Bismarck will starve us to death." "Don't worry. Dad. We're going to get out of this." Somehow Joey's brash boyish confidence sounded forced now. Carmichael shook his head. "We won't. We'll never get out. And Bismarck's going to reduce us ad infinitem. He's got no terminus ad quem!" "What's he saying?" Myra asked. "It's Latin," Joey explained. "But listen, Dad -- I have an idea that I think will work." He lowered his voice. "I'm going to try to adjust Clyde, see? If I can get a sort of multiphase vibrating effect in his neural pathway, maybe I can slip him through the reversed privacy field. He can go get help, find someone who can shut the field off. There's an article on multiphase generators in last month's Popular Electromagnetics and it's in my room upstairs. I -- ' His voice died away. Carmichael, who had been listening with the air of a condemned man hearing his reprieve, said impatiently, "Well? Go on. Tell me more." "Didn't you hear that, Dad?" "Hear what?" "The front door. I thought I heard it open just now." "We're all cracking up," Carmichael said dully. He cursed the salesman at Marhew, he cursed the inventor of cryotronic robots, he cursed the day he had first felt ashamed of good old Jemima and resolved to replace her with a new model. "I hope I'm not intruding, Mr. Carmichael," a new voice said apologetically. Carmichael blinked and looked up. A wiry, ruddy-cheeked figure in a heavy pea-jacket had materialized in the middle of the living room. He was clutching a green metal toolbox in one gloved hand. He was Robinson, the robot repairman. ly, "How did you get in?" "Through the front door. I could see a light on inside, but nobody answered the doorbell when I rang, so I stepped in. Your doorbell's out of order. I thought I'd tell you. I know it's rude -- " "Don't apologize," Carmichael muttered. "We're delighted to see you." "I was in the neighborhood, you see, and I figured I'd drop in and see how things were working out with your new robot," Robinson said. Carmichael told him crisply and precisely and quickly. "So we've been prisoners in here for six days," he finished. "And your robot is gradually starving us to death. We can't hold out much longer." The smile abruptly left Robinson's cheery face. "I thought you all looked rather unhealthy. Oh, damn, now there'll be an investigation and all kinds of trouble. But at least I can end your imprisonment." He opened his toolbox and selected a tubular instrument eight inches long, with a glass bulb at one end and a trigger attachment at the other. "Force-field damper," he explained. He pointed it at the control-box of the privacy field and nodded in satisfaction. "There. Great little gadget. That neutralizes the effects of what the robot did and you're no longer blockaded. And now, if you'll produce the robot -- " Carmichael sent Clyde off to get Bismarck. The robutler returned a few moments later, followed by the looming roboservitor. Robinson grinned gaily, pointed the neutralizer at Bismarck and squeezed. The robot froze in mid-glide, emitting a brief squeak. "There. That should immobilize him. Let's have a look in that chassis now." The repairman quickly opened Bismarck's chest and, producing a pocket flash, peered around in the complex interior of the servomechanism, making occasional clucking inaudible comments. ' " Carmichael shakily made his way to a seat. Free! Free at last! His mouth watered at the thought of the meals he was going to have in the next few days. Potatoes and martinis and warm buttered rolls and all the other forbidden foods! "Fascinating," Robinson said, half to himself. "The obedience filters are completely shorted out, and the purpose-nodes were somehow soldered together by the momentary high-voltage arc. I've never seen anything quite like this, you know." "Neither had we," Carmichael said hollowly. "Really, though -- this is an utterly new breakthrough in robotic science! If we can reproduce this effect, it means we can build selfwilled robots -- and think of what that means to science!" "We know already," Ethel said. "I'd love to watch what happens when the power source is operating," Robinson went on. "For instance, is that feedback loop really negative or -- " "No!" five voices shrieked at once -- with Clyde, as usual, coming in last. T T was too late. The entire event had taken no more than a tenth of a second. Robinson had squeezed his neutralizer trigger again, activating Bismarck -- and in one quick swoop the roboservitor seized neutralizer and toolbox from the stunned repairman, activated the privacy field once again, and exultantly crushed the fragile neutralizer between two mighty fingers. Robinson stammered, "But -- but -- " "This attempt at interfering with the well-being of the Carmichael family was ill-advised," Bismarck said severely. He peered into the toolbox, found a second neutralizer and neatly reduced it to junk. He clanged shut his chest-plates. Robinson turned and streaked for the door, forgetting the reactivated privacy field. He bounced back hard, spinning wildly around. Carmichael rose from his seat just in time to catch him. There was a panicky, trapped look on the repairman's face. Carmichael was no longer able to share the emotion; inwardly he was numb, totally resigned, not minded for further struggle. "He -- he moved so fast!" Robin.son burst out. "He did indeed," Carmichael said tranquilly. He patted his hollow stomach and sighed gently. "Luckily, we have an unoccupied guest bedroom for you, Mr. Robinson. Welcome to our happy little home. I hope you like toast and black coffee for breakfast."      (Continued from page #) been intended for some other planet." John Davenport's "Slurvian Self-Taught" indicates that there is an unknown nationality without a country, indentifiable of course by language, and gives these examples: bean, n. A living creature, as in human bean. cactus, n. pi. The people in a play or story. lore, n. The more desirable of the two berths in a Pullman. myrrh, n. A looking glass. plight, adj. Courteous. Davenport notes that these and other instances make good English words, and concludes there are "pure" Slurvians, as opposed to those who, in florist shops, buy flars, or, traveling abroad, visit farn (or forn) countries. Maybe, but this deduction should be checked against those in the abovementioned "Look Now." "I Say It's False!" by Parke Cummings tells how to beat all true and false quizzes -- simply say "False!" to every question: Q. Dogs cannot climb trees. True or false? A. False! All dogs are perfectly capable of climbing trees. The reason they do not do so is because of an element in the bark of trees (sennic acid) which is injurious to their feet. If it were not for that, as tests with trees from which that acid has been removed prove, dogs would climb trees just as eagerly as cats. Q. It is colder in winter than in summer. T rue or false? A. Not on your tintype! The common custom of wearing heavy clothing in wintertime has caused this popular misconception. Heavy clothing impedes the circulation and hence leads to the erroneous belief that one is "cold"... Q. Vienna is the capital of Austria. True or false? A. Oh, let's not go into that again. "H. J. Talking" by R. G. G. Price is the autobiography of a scientist with: A wife who discourages him in his work (psychological physics) and insists the Seven Wonders of the World are chosen annually by the Swedes. A tenant, also a scientist (solar biology). An indeterminate number of children, one of whom is considered odd because he was raised with three owls in an experiment. A Financial Flair worth study -- it includes a plan that would allow him to go tax-free if he brings in ten new taxpayers. No money in my pocket if you get The Family Book of Humor; just that if you do, don't think of it as losing # but rather as gaining # fun-filled pages. -- Continued from Back Cover And if you DO go back, will you ever be able to return to your #st century paradise? In short, can you actually live your life twice ? Read this Whole Amazing Story -- fours for Only # c Science-fiction fans, get set for a real challenge to Hcinlein -- one of today's topnotch science-fiction writers -- is a thriller crammed with new turns and new twists. You'll find your everyday thought processes turned topsy-turvy by it. It's selling everywhere right now for #. But as a new member of the ScienceFiction Book Club, you can get this new book for only one dime ! Read, below why the Club is making this amazing offer -- then rush in the coupon (with only #) at once ! Why We Make This Amazingly Generous Offer W HY DO we offer you this brand-new, fulllength Science-Fiction thriller for only #? Simply to introduce you to the Science-Fiction best of the new science-fiction booksat a mere fraction of their usual cost ! #" Each month the Club brings you only the finest, brand-new, full-length books for charge) -- even though they cost #, # and up in the original publisher's editions. Each month's selection is described in advance in the (Hub's free bulletin. "You take only those books you want as few as # a year. No money in advance. No membership fees. You may cancel membership at any time. Recent selections have included such books as The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. The Isotope Man and Earthman, Come Home. The Club also brings members the best in factual scientific books, such as Satellite!, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects and Exploring Mars. Mail Coupon with only #? Simply mail the coupon with only a dime. Your copy of the poor into summer will be sent at once, together with the current selection, for which you will be billed only #, plus a few cents shipping. If not delighted retu both books, owe nothing, and membership will Dept. GX-#, Garden City, N. Y. selection of the Club for which you may bill me only #.## plus a few cents shipping, and enroll me as a member. Every mouth send the Club's free bulletin, describing coming selections. For each book I accept. I will pay only #. plus shipping. I need take only # hooks during each year I am a member and may resign at any time thereafter. turn them in # days, pay nothing, and membership will be cancelled. Name Address (Please Print Clearly) City Zone State (Offer good only in I. S. A. and Canada. I ImogineYburself Shanghaied Into the zrCentury place. It's the year #. You're a dollar invention. You're sitting pretty -- until your passionate friend. Belle Darkin, upsets your apple cart. First she steals your invention. Then she slips you a hypo; puts you in a new kind of deep freeze called "The Long Sleep." the year # -- and you're still only # years old! But time has passed while you were in "cold storage," and Belle, your eic-sweetheart, is now # years older than you are ! Well, you've lost interest in her anyway, after the way she twotimed and future-timed you. The Fascinating World of # A.D. But there are other attractions in that world of # : its women in "sticktite" clothes they just throw away after wearing...its honeymoon trips to the moon... its remarkable new conveniences...its brand new words of love and ways to live. No more menial labor. Robots take care of all that. Soon you're enjoying life as never before! You're glad to be out of that miserably backward world of the #th century. But unfortunately you must get back to the year #, to take care of one last urgent mission. You only hope that you can come back to the #st century by taking "The Long Sleep" again. The big question is: Can it be done? Yours lO This Spine-Tingling Science-Fiction Novel by Robert Heinlein -- Continued on other side JUNE # # Galaxy BY By  By  By  By Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation. Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way. Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!" A Complete Restyling Of Streamlined pocket-size format -- handsomest in design, handiest for reading and carrying. Outstanding titles by outstanding authors. A gigantic increase of # more pages. Clear, compact type -- more wordage yet greater reading ease. All this at no increase in price -- a hard-headed bet that upgrading pays off in these days of less and less for more and more.  Count me ini Here's my # for six titles, during the year, each different, each full-length -- half a dozen chw choice novels at less than the original cost of any one. H#fl Publisher's Note: If you don't want to mutilate this issue send your order on any sheet of paper. " Bride assembled her Harvest of American Cooking, she couldn't have expected it to be the subject of a science fiction editorial. But there's extrapolative meat and drink in this big book, published by Putnam at a hefty # that's outweighed by its # recipes and even more so by the superlative # pages of regional food history. This New World settlers came to must have been much like the planets we will yet subdue -- or be subdued by. From the glaring southlands to the bitter north, there is a temperature range of nearly # degrees; air that varies from sinus-clogging soup to nosebleed thinness; land from rich black to glacial strewings to dehydrated sand; wood and plain aleap and awave with life, desert and mountain furtive with it; a garishly lavish living to be made -- when men learned how to make it. For in region after region, and whites starving, the one through know-how, the other because of its lack and fear of outlandish foods: The potato and tomato, among many examples, were considered poisonous, took two centuries to be accepted; when potatoes finally were, "they were often served with a sugar frosting, or cooked with dates, lemons, mace, cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg and grape juice!" If they encounter intelligent lifeforms on other planets, colonists would be wise to respect the native botanists. For all our spectacularly soberingly quotes the U.S. Department of Agriculture thus: "The white man has not reduced to cultivation a single important staple during the four hundred years he has dominated the New World." Actually, we've lost many instead. Against our choice of fruits and vegetables, the Indians "ate the berries and fruits of nearly # different plants. They fried the delicate redbud and boiled the buds of at least # other flowers, including marigold, clover and pokeweed. They made jams and relishes from a dozen plants, ate at least # varieties of greens." The awesome total is over # kinds ( Continued on page # ) H CKlBY . C   You see #  There's nothing nebulous about that cluster of science fiction luminaries... and more will be appearing in our future sparkling issues. famous writers. Our rates to authors are the highest in the field, our editorial policy the most challenging. tudes in other fields streaking into science fiction... the giants of the next decade hurling out their first flaming, molten prose. Subscribe now to insure not missing any star-studded issues ience, not ours. Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson St. New York #,. N. Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years # additional Foreign Postage Per Year ( Continued from page # ) of edibles from bushes, trees, plants, ivies, ferns, grasses, mosses and seaweeds. Some of these are not losses at all: "Gone from the menu, and not deplored by anyone, is the bear-meat bacon of frontier days, as well as the ash cakes made of acorns, the substitute coffee made from seeds of wild rice and barley, and the bitter drink brewed from dried dandelion roots, said to be 'of a soporific nature'." Ironically, Indian and pioneer emergency rations sell at luxury prices as, of all things, party treats! of uprooting that must be much like leaving the comforts and conveniences of even an overcrowded Earth of the future for some wild, lonely planet: "Most of the women didn't dream what it would be like in that vast land... They packed old silver and sprigged china... They took onion sets and packets of seeds." In their heads they carried secret recipes and tricks with foods, and, arriving, shivered at tales like that of Bill Jones "about living on grasshoppers for six weeks in the #'s. They were pretty good, he said, but added that he wouldn't want to stay alive long enough to eat them three times a day again." That was Oklahoma, rebellious at first but swiftly wooed to abandoned giving -- and a savage vengeance which should warn our colonists that land must get in return or become a wrathful dust bowl: "When the 'Black Blizzard' descended upon them, farmwomen fought stubbornly -- put milk, butter, water and all other liquids in covered fruit jars, mixed bread and biscuit dough in partly closed bureau drawers, with holes cut in cloth coverings for their hands to do the kneading. A cake made with sour cream and pecans evolved during the horror of dust and drought, to be known as Black Blizzard Cake." If that lesson sticks, outworlders can eat without halt, perhaps besting Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, who came in # to hunt buffalo, was served # dishes, "including sage hen, black bear, curlew, roast opossum with persimmon jelly, coon chops, roast fawn, plover" and numerous odd desserts. Mary Margaret is sure Mrs. McBride would have taken to deep-freeze, blenders, roto-broilers, mixes and instants. I wonder -- it's a hard transition. But I don't doubt the colonist women will learn to cook magnificently in clumsy pots over unearthly fires. Gov. Alfalfa Bill Murray said: "Cooks could write as good a history any day as the sociologists and the militarists." True. And food for science fiction. Also Published in Great Britian, France, Italy, Germany and Finland News of Atlantis moon belt, moving away from the Sun. Distances from planetoid: Jupiter, # miles; lo (Jupiter I), # miles, lo, traveling to the right, will partially eclipse Jupiter. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. I across the street from the Administration Building, opened the hatch and got out, gasping. It was cold midnight, better than che heat of the day, but his breath made a white mist in the thin air. He shivered. Mars -- curse the place! Too hot by day, too cold by night, the air too thin all the time. He looked up. The stars were densely drifted in the sky overCertainly they were criminals -- they were in a Martian penal colony. But what were their crimes -- and how much time would they serve? head. Both moons were out of sight; the stars made a white light, not bright enough to be obtrusive but enough, after he had turned out the lights of the jeep, to pick out details of the street, the curbs, the sidewalks, the low buildings. The little town did not possess street lights and, on nights like this, few persons bothered to turn on the outer lights of their homes; it wasn't necessary. Around the corner there was a glow of red. Hardee took his sack out of the back of the jeep, grunted as he threw it over his shoulder and headed for the welcome glow. It came from a sign that read: Liveliest Night Spot on Mars IN the doorway, Hardee stood blinking. It was only a matter of fifty yards or so from the jeep, but he was sweating like a hog because of the weight of the sack. There was no dampness from the sweat -- sweat was sucked greedily away into the thin dry aid as soon as it was formed. But it was wearing on the muscles and the skin; it was like pounding a treadmill. He was panting, and noise and light beat out at him. "Hardee!" yelled somebody. He nodded and waved, not troubling to identify whoever it was. Squinting, he moved inside and found a table. Bunnie's Place. The Liveliest Night Spot on Mars. That was a flat lie -- probably. There might be other places, but no one in Bunnie's Place had ever seen them; and if there were, they were bound to be livelier. What Bunnie's Place had to offer was: A piano, dried from the desert air and in sad disrepair; on which, at the present moment, someone was trying to play a medley of familiar tunes, handicapped by the fact that all the B-flat keys in the middle octaves were broken. A bar, stocked with ceaselessly replenished cases of blended whiskey, gin and brandy, but with very little else. A dozen tables, surrounding a cleared space suitable for dancing, now in use. A record player with several hundred LP records, mostly rockand-roll, all well worn. Two pool tables, the felts of which were held together with sticking plaster. Two ping-pong tables. A "library." It contained twenty-six books, all novels, dating from the years #-#. Nearly one hundred persons, about a dozen of them women, the youngest of them thirty years old. That was Bunnie's Place. As a night club, it was a failure. As the recreation room for a penal colony, however, it was not so bad; and that was what it was. Old Man Tavares came over to take Hardee's order. "You're late," he wheezed. He claimed to have had lung trouble once, back on Earth, in that former life that each of them talked of endlessly. "The Probation Officer was looking for you." "I'll see him later," said Hardee. "Get me a highball first." Tavares nodded and limped heavily away. The room was crowded. It was the dark of the moon, or nearly -- moonrise would precede the morning sun by only an hour or so -- so that practically all the trappers, like Hardee, tried to concentrate their monthly probation reports into this short period of three or four days. If a trapper made his report on a full-moon night, it meant losing a night's report. A trapper couldn't afford that. He was on his own, despite being a prisoner. He needed every skitterbug he could catch, to pay his bills and provide his stake for the next month. your report during daylight hours. But that was bad, if you had more than ten or fifteen miles to travel -- Hardee had fifty -- because at this time of year the desert by day was just plain too hot. Besides, the Probation Officer didn't like having his day's sleep interrupted. And he was a prissy, querulous old man who had little real power -- he was as much a felon as any of his charges; there was no one in the whole colony who hadn't been sentenced there -- and so he threw his weight around. "Hello, Hardee." Hardee looked up, and for the first time smiled. "Hello, Joan." Joan Bunnell, the "Bunnie" of Bunnie's Place, was short, warmfaced, honey-haired. Hardee was fond of her; they had slept together several times; they had even talked of getting married. But this was not a place for getting married. There was no rule against it -- there were very few rules, everything considered, only the Big Rule against traveling more than a hundred miles from the little town, and a few lesser ones. But how could they talk seriously of getting married when either or both of them might still be married to someone back on Earth? She had two drinks on a tray, his and one for herself. She sat down, fanning herself. It wasn't very hot -- not compared to daylight outside. But it gave the impression, with the room's bright colors and loud voices and the jukebox crashing against the sound of the battered piano, of being a cauldron. "Drink up," said Joan Bunnell, toasting him. "You've got to keep your liquids up." "You gotta keep something up," bawled an ape's voice from behind Hardee. It laughed raucously. Hardee turned, frowning. He recognized the voice. The man's name was Wakulla. There, thought Hardee irritably, was the kind of man this place was made for. You knew just by looking at him that this was no bank embezzler or forger; this was knock-them-dead and loot-theirpockets. There was no finesse or cunning to those sloping shoulders and the curled black body hair that held his thin shirt cushioned an inch from his chest. The man was an ape. He boomed with an ape's bellow: "Hardee, you dumb chump, how many skits did you bring in this time?" the room, but it did create a small oasis of quiet -- an area roughly equal to the reach of his enormous fists. He was not liked. But he was feared; in a little world without law, he was feared very much. Hardee said clearly: "A hundred and fourteen." "In there?" Wakulla kicked the sack beside Hardee's chair. "Only about a dozen. The rest are outside in the jeep." Wakulla nodded, then grinned an ape's grin. "Good for you, Hardee! You won the pool this month. You know what you won?" Hardee waited. "You won the privilege of buying drinks for the house!" Wakulla yelled. "Come on, boys. Line up!" Hardee glanced at Joan Bunnell and pressed his shoulders against the back of his chair. There was a chance, he thought judiciously, that he could take Wakulla. The ape was inches shorter than himself, and that might make a difference. Everything else was going for Wakulla -- reach, weight and the indestructible animal combat urge that made all other considerations unimportant. Still, there was that chance. But it was better to avoid a fight. Hardee took a deep breath and managed a grin. "Fair enough," he said. Wakulla scowled, waiting. "Why not?" said Hardee reasonably. "But if I win that for bringing in a few lousy skitterbugs, what do I win for this?" He hefted the sack to the top of the table and opened the drawstrings. There were a couple of skitterbugs on top. He pulled them out and laid them on the table, where their long jointed legs began to twine feebly under the room lights. Then, beneath them, was what he was looking for. He took it out, stood up and shook it loose. It hung from his hand limply. It was a gray canvas coverall, filthy, sweat-stained, spotted with what looked like blood. Wakulla demanded: "What the hell is that? "What does it look like? It's a coverall. I took it off a man I found out in the desert three days ago. On foot." TT created a sensation. Old man Tavares limped up, pushing his way through the men around Hardee's table, and clutched the filthy garment "The man who was wearing it. He was dead?" "What do you think?" It went without saying. It was possible to walk around the desert for short distances, but not for anything like the distance from one prospector's prefab to another. For that you needed a jeep. "I buried him out in the desert He was a stranger." "A stranger!" Tavares let go of the garment and stared at it. Hardee dropped the skitterbugs back into the sack and closed it; as the light was cut off, the stirring stopped. He downed his drink. "You know that old mine, Wakulla -- out between your place and mine? I was out there at daybreak and I found this fellow. He wasn't dead then." Wakulla growled: "But you just said -- " "He was close enough to it. He was face-down on the sand and not moving. I stopped and went over." Nearly everybody inthe room was clustered around now, listening. The penal colony had been in existence for five years now -- Hardee himself had been there for nearly three -- and this was the first time a stranger had ever appeared. It was an event of the first magnitude, almost as though someone had finally completed his term, or as though, somehow, radio contact had been established with Earth. Hardee's hand closed over the girl's. "I tried to lift him up," he said. "He was still breathing, but not too well -- you know, gasping. Panting. You know how it was when you first got here? Only it seemed even worse with him. He was on his way out. And then he opened his eyes and looked at me." Hardee paused, remembering the dry, opaque eyes in the tortured face. "It wasn't just thirst and exposure," he said, "because the man was pretty well scarred up. One of his arms was broken. I think. And -- well, look at the coverall. You can see the blood. That's how he was. He raised his head and he said something. I could hardly understand him. And then he sat up and began to choke. And he died. He was pretty far gone, as I say." Joan Bunnell demanded: "Hardee! What did he say?" Hardee put down his glass and touched the coverall thoughtfully. "He said: "Thank God. A man!'" II driving up to the shelter of his own prefab. The moon was peeping over the eastern horizon in a wash of white light that picked out the mountains around them. Hardee opened the door, looking up, gasping -- that was the way it always was when you had been sitting for a while. In this thin air, when you began to lift yourself, the lungs strained for oxygen and found it only with difficulty. Let's see, thought Hardee, staring at the broad white moon. That would be Deimos. Or Phobos. Some said the big one was Deimos, some the little. Nobody knew for sure, or nobody had yet convinced the rest of the colony. Old man Tavares was the only one who was really likely to know, and he only laughed when he was asked. Hardee thought the big one was Deimos. That was the one that was bright and useful, and for weeks on end you didn't see it at all. The other one -- what was the use of it? It was a rapid little comet, steel-blue and brighter than a star, yes, but not bright enough. It moved fast, fast; every night it soared across the sky two or three times. But it was no good for hunting. He got out of the jeep, wheezing. He left it with its motor going -- he would be right back -- and twisted the combination that unlocked the door of his home, his and the boy's. Not everyone bothered locking the doors when they went out, but it was habit with Hardee. That was the way he was; and, besides, he had something more precious than most to protect Inside, he dumped his supplies on the floor and quickly looked into the boy's room. That was all quiet. He closed the door gently and returned to the larger room, stowed the perishables in the freezer, left everything else where it lay. He pulled out of his pocket the little sheaf of vouchers that represented the surplus skitterbugs -- those whose profits had not been used up in paying for the supplies, for the installments on the jeep, the prefab itself and all of its furnishings. and rode out into the desert. There was still an hour of moonlight before the rising of the sun. It didn't do to waste hours; there were just so many hours in the month when the skitterbugs could be caught. Old man Tavares said that the skitterbugs weren't animals -- they were machines. Tavares might know. He had been in the colony longer than most, and although his mind was wandering and he sometimes thought there was a war going on and all of them were in a concentratiort camp, he had once been an electronics engineer. Or so he claimed. Tavares rambled about mussels filtering iodine out of sea water and plants splitting oxygen out of C# # . Maybe it made sense and maybe not, but what he said was that the skitterbugs all came from one master skitterbug that had been made in a laboratory, back on old Earth. There was iron in the sand, said old Tavares, and other elements, and so somebody had invented a sort of basic reproducible pattern of a machine, one which was simple and operated by sunlight, and could extract from sand and rock the ingredients necessary to produce other machines just like itself. Maybe so. Maybe not. It was true that the skitterbugs looked like machines; they were metal. And yet they grew. Maybe so. The theory was simple. Even Hardee could see that, and he had been only a traffic policeman in the old days on Earth. Or thought he had. It didn't matter much, one way or the other, to Hardee. What mattered to him was that during the hours of moonlight it was possible to capture the skits; and that if you captured a hundred of them, you kept even with the necessary payments for supplies and installments to the Probation Officer; and if you captured more than that, you could even afford luxuries. And that mattered. Not so much for Hardee -- he had too much self-punishment yet to inflict on himself for that -- but for the boy. The boy deserved a few luxuries. For he had nothing else. unit. The radio antenna that sprouted from the tail end of the jeep began to circle slowly, feeling for broadcast radio energy. That was the important thing about moonlit nights. The skitterbugs, whatever they were, operated on light energy. When light hit their domed absorbent carapaces, the tiny circuits inside them busily converted the light into heat and kinetic energy. But not quite all of it. There was a certain amount of waste in the form of free radio was designed to locate. Come to think of it, Hardee pondered, maybe that certain amount of waste was no waste at all. If it was true that the skitterbugs were artificial, it might perfectly well be that the waste was designed into them, for exactly the purpose for which it was used -- to locate and harvest them. But there had to be light to make them radiate and thus be found. By day, the blinding sunlight made them radiate like mad, of course, but that was no good. In daylight, the skitterbugs could outrun a man, even a jeep; they produced strong signals, but what was the use of that when you couldn't catch them? Starlight wasn't very satisfactory either. On a particularly bright night, you might, if you were very, very lucky, pick up a few stray wisps of signal, but only provided you happened to blunder within fifty yards or so of a skit. And then the impulses were too weak to be much help for direction finding. No, it had to be moonlight -- the big moon -- energy enough to make them radiate, not so much that they could get away. Hardee checked the little blips of light on his cathode screen and marked a concentration of a dozen or more. Undoubtedly half of them would be under the legal limit. Half a kilogram was the minimum; you could be fined the vouchers for a dozen full-sized skits for bringing in one under the limit. But with any luck at all, he should be able to bag one or two of the full-grown ones before the others succeeded in tunneling into the sand and out of sight. Hardee hunted until the broad red rising sun began to heat the desert, and then raced back toward the prefab, with four skitterbugs in the shielded locker. He circled the area where a long-abandoned shack marked the old mine, then took his foot off the gas, paused and looked back. Under the faded board sign that said almost illegibly "Joe's Last Hope Shaft No. #" was the shallow grave Hardee had dug out for the stranger. There had been no name, no papers, nothing in the pockets that told him anything, and accordingly there was no inscription on the little wooden headboard Hardee had hacked out in the growing heat of the morning sun. Hardee sat there for a moment, his mind vacant, vaguely wondering about the man he had found. But it was growing hot. He put the jeep in gear and headed again for home. ing for him at the door. "Daddy, Daddy!" he chanted, looking grave and sleepy. "Did you get it?" "Hi," said Hardee inadequately. He bent over to pick the child up. Chuck was small for his age, a serious-faced, brown-eyed, darkhaired little five-year-old. He said immediately, throwing his arms around Hardee's neck: "Daddy, did you get the tractor? I've been thinking about it! I woke up three times all night while you were gone." "I'll bet you did," said Hardee. He tousled the boy's hair, yearning. "Well, I got it. It's in the sack." "Oh, Daddy!" crowed the child. He wriggled frantically to be put down. As soon as he was on his feet, he raced into the house, through the little foyer where the footscrapers waited to get sand off the feet of visitors, and the hooks lined the wall for their clothes. He made a beeline for the pile of supplies. By the time Hardee had got rid of his sand boots and sweatjacket, the boy was making a horrible scraping sound, tugging crates of canned goods out of his way; by the time Hardee reached the door of the room, Chuck had already opened the sack and was feeling inside. "Oh, Daddy!" he cried again, taking the tractor out. It was an exact model of a jeep with a bulldozer blade mounted before it for sand moving, battery operated; it was controlled through a little hand-plate connected to the tractor with a long, thin wire. "I've only got one battery," Hardee warned. "Make it last. I don't know when I can get another one." "Oh, that's all right, Daddy. I don't mind that." Experimentally, the boy turned on the power. The tractor lurched, whined, began pushing its blade across the linoleum floor. The boy chortled: "Wait till I get outside! I'll stay near the house, Daddy, I promise. I'm going to make a fort and a castle! I'm going to dig a long canal all the way from the house to the trash burner! I'm going to get the soldiers and my red truck and I'm going to make an Army camp that -- " "Sure you are," said Hardee, patting the boy on the head. "But first you're going to have breakfast. Right?" himself awake while the child and he had breakfast. He even managed to stay awake for nearly an hour afterward, but that was the limit. He stripped off his clothes, hung them neatly and fell into his bed. Outside, the boy was whooping at his new tractor. It wasn't, Hardee admitted to himself, the best possible arrangement for him and the boy. But it was important that he be awake nights. And the boy was still too young to be trusted to roam around by himself while Hardee was out hunting. This way, they didn't see as much of each other as Hardee would have liked -- and, heaven knew, it was tough on Chuck to have to find his amusement for eight hours every day, to take his own meals at least twice a day, even to put himself in for a nap when the big hand and the little hand on the clock met at #. Children are most marvelously adaptable organisms, and Chuck did all those things; but it was too bad, all the same. But what else was there to do? This way, the child was completely alone only at night -- when Hardee was out hunting, and Chuck himself was asleep. True, that wasn't entirely safe. Something could happen -- a fire, a sudden sickness, even a fall out of bed. But it was better. And by day, when the child was up and about and thus more likely to run into trouble, at least Hardee was close at hand -- even if asleep. Chuck could be trusted to wake him up. Hardee sighed and turned over. Overhead, he heard the engines of a transport plane, and, outside, excited shouts from Chuck. Hardee could imagine him cavorting and waving at the plane. No, thought Hardee, covering himself lightly and closing his eyes, it wasn't a perfect existence for either of them; but what else could you expect in a penal colony? Ill T N the light of the morning, Joan Bunnell closed the door of her room and began to take off her clothes. She put on light sleeping shorts and a short-sleeved top, patched and faded but the best she had been able to buy, and stood at the window, looking out on the desert She was facing west, away from the sunrise. She could see the black shadows streaming away from the sun-touched tops of the buttes and dunes. It was going to be a hot day. This time of year, you could say that it was going to be a hot day every morning and never be wrong. Funny, she thought, she'd never had any idea that Mars was as hot as this. Back in the old days. Before. She hadn't, in fact, thought about Mars much at all. There was a lot of talk, she remembered cloudily, about rockets and satellites, and even some dreamers who ventured the hope that men would someday touch the surface of the Moon. But Mars? That was for the Sunday comics. She'd paid no attention to that sort of nonsense. She most especially never had dreamed that someday she herself would be a prisoner on Mars, stripped of her freedom and her memories. Neither had any of the others -- no freedom, no memories. She cranked down the filter panels that would keep out nearly all of the heat, and went over to her little dressing table to complete her going-to-bed ritual. Cleansing cream. Skin cream. Fifty strokes of the brush on each side of her scalp. Carefully rubbing in the cream below the eyes, behind the jaws, along the line of the throat -- the places where wrinkles and sagging would start first No, she told herself brutally, had started. This hot, dry air was devastating on a girl's skin and hair; it was impossible to let things go for a single day.  She was sleepy, but she sat on the edge of the bed before lying down. It was impossible for her to go to bed without performing, once again, another and different sort of daily ritual. She looked across the room at her reflection in the mirror, wondering. Then, hopelessly, automatically, she pushed back the short sleeves of her jacket and examined the skin of her inner arm, pulled back the hem of her shorts and examined the flesh of the thigh. There were no needle marks. "Dear God," whispered Joan wretchedly. She had looked a thousand times before and there had been none. Well, maybe she ought to accept the evidence of her eyes as definite; whatever it was that she had been sentenced to this place for, narcotics addiction was not the answer. It was the most severe portion of the punishment, that not one of the prisoners knew what they were being punished for. head of her brass bedstead, was an excerpt from Martian Penal Colony Rules and General Information. She had never seen the manual itself, though it was generally understood that the Probation Officer had a copy. But the excerpt she knew by heart Everyone did. Nearly every room in the colony had it framed and hung: You are here because you have been tried, convicted and sentenced for a felony. In former times, felonies were punished by prison sentences. This ordinarily failed of its purpose, in that it did not act as a deterrent to repetitions of the same offense. In recent years, a technique has been developed of erasing memories after a certain date -- usually, for technical reasons, # October #. By virtue of the the use of this technique has been incorporated in the Uniform Penal Code of the United States, and under it you have been sentenced to rehabilitation and to transportation to the Martian Penal Colony for an indefinite period. You will be observed from time to time, and the degree of your rehabilitation evaluated. When you are ready to return to normal life, you will be paroled. It is not in the interests of your best efforts toward rehabilitation that you be advised of the crime of which you were convicted. However, the categories covered by the Uniform Penal Code include: Murder, first degree. Murder, second degree. Manslaughter, in connection with a felony. Grand larceny, grand fraud and embezzlement -- but only after the third offense in each case. Habitual use of drugs, without voluntary rehabilitation. Habitual prostitution. That was the list. Joan knew it well. It was a choice selection, and it had to be one of them that she was guilty of. But which one? Joan Bunnell stared long at her own face, wondering if those eyes were the eyes of a murderess. Had she killed a husband, a lover? Perhaps a parent, seeking to inherit their wealth? Perhaps even a child -- had she had a child? Could she have given birth to a baby, perhaps a boy small and grave-faced like Hardee's youngster -- and could she, in madness or in hate, have killed the child? It was not fair to carve out a piece of her mind and cast it away. her closed eyes cushioned against her forearm by her own long hair. It was the cruelest of all punishments, this mind-washing they called rehabilitation. The Arabs chopped off a hand, the old English lopped off a finger or an ear, the Indians gouged out an eye... and those were kinder things, much kinder; for at least the victim knew exactly what he had lost. But here was Joan Bunnell, thirty-one years old, according to the records in the Probation Office. She remembered her childhood very well, in a monotonous brownstone two-family house on a monotonously uniform block in Philadelphia. She remembered going to school and she remembered her first job; she remembered a birthday party, and, closing her eyes, was able to count the candles and so know that she had turned twenty-one. She remembered years after that, loves and partings. She remembered yearning after the man she worked for, and that he married someone else. (Had she killed him?) She remembered that life had coursed, full and complete, with days compact with trivia and detail, for all the days of her life, up until a certain day -- yes, the sixteenth day of October, in that year of # -- when she had got up in the morning, dressed herself, eaten breakfast at a corner drugstore, got into a subway train to go to work -- And woke up in a place where she had never been. What had happened? There was no clue, except the framed excerpt over her bed, and the gossip of the other prisoners. Like her, they had awakened; like her, they had been questioned endlessly; like her, they had been confined. And, like her, they had been put, blindfold, into an airplane, flown for some hours -- and released here. They knew that they had committed a crime. Of course. That was why they were here. But what crime? How many years had been lopped off their minds? Joan lay against the pillow, too tired to weep, wept out. After a while, and just as she might have slept, she heard a distant roar of engines growing closer. She got up and looked out the window, pulling back the screens that cut down the light and heat. A silvery plane was limping in low over the sand hills, from the west. It didn't circle or seek a traffic pattern; it came in and down, dumped its landing flaps, along the level sand that was kept bulldozed flat for it. Joan, no longer sleepy, got up and began getting dressed again. The plane meant supplies -- perhaps new clothes, and she could use them; perhaps some toys that she might be able to get for Hardee's son. Most of all, the plane might mean a few new inmates for the colony. In slacks, blouse and a broadbrimmed sun hat, she hurried out after the growing crowd around the rickety old plane. not even the son of Polish miners wakes up and crosses the desert after drinking a bottle and a half of rye. "I got to see these guys," he said thickly, grinning painfully. "I got to see what a free man looks like, in case they ever let me out of here." "They never will," muttered someone, and Joan edged away as Wakulla lifted his squat head and looked around to see who it was. She wasn't looking for trouble. The Probation Officer came hastily up, panting eagerly for the big moment of his being. "Out of the way!" he quavered. "Here there, please! Out of the way, Saunders! Here, let me through, Tavares! Come on. Please!" "Let the keeper through!" bawled Wakulla, forgetting about the man who had muttered. "Hurry up, Tavares, you old bag of bones!" The three sputtering propellers of the aircraft coughed and choked, and then stopped. Tavares and two other men hurried to push a metal ladder on wheels -- with great difficulty -- through the clinging sand up to the side of the plane, as the door jerked and then flew open. Even Joan Bunnell, who was far from a mechanic, had not grown accustomed to the sight of a Ford tri-motor lumbering around in the thin air of Mars. That washboard fuselage, those ancient woodbladed props, they were period accessories from an old movie, not anything you ever expected to see in the air -- anywhere. True, some of the men talked wisely about how the old Ford was a great plane for its time and a record-breaker; and they maintained that in all sorts of out-of-the-way places little out-of-the-way airlines had for decades kept up a sort of service using the Fords... but on Mars? But there it was, as it had always been for all of them -- it was the ship each of them had arrived in. And by and by the wonder had grown duller, submerged in the greater, special wonderment that each of them had, that went incessantly: What was it that I did that got me sent here? r l I HE door of the plane swung rasping on its hinges, catching the bright hour-high sun and sending blinding rays into the faces of the colonists. Behind the glare, a man poked his head out -- an old, haggard head. "Hello, Mr. Griswold!" cried the Probation Officer in a thin high voice, greeting him. He waved violently. "Here I am, Mr. Griswold!" This was the Probation Officer's time. Barring this time, he was nobody -- not even in the penal colony of brain-blotted felons, not anywhere. All his days and nights at the penal colony were alike; they were partly bookkeeper's routine and partly file-clerk's duties, and partly they were without any shape at all. They deserved little respect from anyone and they got none -- all those days. But on the few, the very occasional, days when the Ford transport waddled in -- then he, the Probation Officer, he was the one that Mr. Griswold spoke to. Mr. Griswold came with the plane, always. Mr. Griswold was the only man they ever saw who went back to freedom. And the Probation Officer was the link between the colony and Mr. Griswold -- and, through him, the rest of Mars, and more remotely, that unimaginably most distant of dreams, Earth and home. "Hello," murmured Griswold in a faded, wispy sort of voice. He stood there, haggard and blinking in the sunlight, nodding to the Probation Officer. "I've got some new mouths to feed," said Griswold, and grinned a ruin of a grin, as though he had meant it for a joke but could never laugh again. Joan Bunnell pressed closer, though she disliked Griswold and usually, instinctively, stayed well clear of him. Each time Joan saw him, he appeared decades older, degrees more demon-haunted than the time before. She knew his age well enough, because she remembered him from her own trip to the colony, three years before. He had been about fifty then, could be hardly fifty-five now. But he looked seventy at the least, perhaps some remote and meaningless age past a hundred. His hands shook, his voice shook, his face was a working collision of jumpy muscles and fast-blinking eyes. Drugs? Drink? A terminal disease? It could hardly be any of those things, Joan thought; but if it was his job that made him so decrepit and so weak, then working conditions on the outside of the penal colony must be even worse than within it And there was one other thing about Mr. Griswold. He never left the old plane. In the three years of Joan's experience, he had yet to climb down that metal ladder to stand on the ground.  come down the ladder, the Probation Officer eagerly and importantly puffed up it. There was a moment while he and Griswold talked to each other, low-voiced, at the door to the cabin of the old tri-motor plane. Then the Probation Officer stepped aside. "Let 'em out, please," he ordered. "Let the new fish come down the ladder!" Five men and women began to file out of the plane, squinting in dazed unbelief at the sunwashed scene around them. Wakulla caught sight of one of the women and yelled an animal's cry of glee. "That's for me!" He meant it for a playful aside, but that voice was not meant for stage whispers. He grinned at the woman; then his expression changed to astonishment. He wasn't alone. There was a gasp. "She's got a kid with her!" cried one of the women beside Joan Bunnell. Joan caught her breath. That was very odd -- and very rare, and very precious. There were four babies in the colony, born there, three of them in wedlock and one in doubt. But this was a girl of five or six, not a newborn. That was almost without precedent -- the only other child who had been brought to the colony was Hardee's boy. A dozen hands helped the woman with the child down the ladder. They led her, with the others, across the hot sands toward the shelter. Joan cast one glance at the plane. Already Tavares's crew was beginning to unload crates of supplies. Already the tied sacks of skitterbugs, feebly stirring in the light that filtered through the burlap, were being trundled out on wheelbarrows to be loaded into the plane for return to -- where? No one had ever said. Back to Earth, perhaps. Perhaps not. The glass windscreens of the tri-motor's battered old nose glittered opaquely. Joan glanced at them and then away -- there was nothing there; she never could see inside the cockpit; no one ever had. Behind those glittering windshields were, undoubtedly, the pilot and co-pilot -- for surely Griswold was no aviator, not with that tic and those eyes. But she had never seen the pilots, not even when she herself was part of the plane's cargo, coming here. And she didn't expect to see them now. But something was nagging at her. She looked again, and her eye was caught by old Dom Tavares, who should have been helping to load the plane, and who instead was standing in a queerly tense attitude, staring at the open door. Joan tried to peer past the door, but it was hard to see from the bright sun outside into the black shadows within. There was Griswold, and there was the Probation Officer, surely -- at least there were two shadows. And the taller, fatter shadow was handing something to the lean, bent one -- something that looked like a rag, or an old garment; they were talking about it Joan hesitated, wondered if it was worth thinking about But there were the newcomers -- new faces, when all the old faces were worn so familiar. And Tavares was, it was perfectly true, getting a little odd in his ways anyhow. Everyone knew that She turned, dismissing whatever it was that disturbed Tavares, and hurried after the newcomers as they were shepherded into the recreation room. Y day, the "Liveliest Night Spot on Mars" was even less attractive than by night The night before had been a big one; the signs of it were all over the room, overturned chairs, spilled drinks, the grime of a couple of dozen men in town. No one had taken the time to tidy up -- that was done later, usually in the waning heat of the afternoon -- and the new arrivals stared around them with revulsion in their eyes. "They're very young," someone whispered to Joan. She nodded. One of the women was middleaged, but the one with the child was just into her twenties. And of the men, one was little more than a boy. He was a blond-haired youngster, his eyes violet and innocent, his face far from the time of shaving. What, Joan wondered, had brought him here? For that matter, what was the crime of the dowdylooking, plump little woman who was staring around in such panic? The colonists were all over the new women -- particularly Wakulla, gallant with an ape's clumsy politeness. "A chair!" he bawled. "A chair for the lady!" And he wrenched one from Joan's hand. "I'll take the calf to get the heifer," he whispered hoarsely, with an exaggerated wink, and slid the chair clattering to the girl with the child. The girl only stared at him fearfully. Joan tried to stay back and give the newcomers room. She had a vivid sense of what they must be feeling; she remembered; she could read the writing in their eyes, and know what they must be thinking: The strangeness of their surroundings. The sudden shock. (For it was always a shock, everyone agreed on it; one minute you were going about your business, a minute later you woke up somewhere else. A strange somewhere, and removed in time -- in a white-walled room, with a couple of tense and worried-looking doctors and nurses around you, with television scanner lenses in the walls... and, very quickly, a tense and worried-looking man in uniform coming in to talk to you, to tell you that you had become a criminal, in a life that was now wiped out of your mind, and that you were on Mars, headed for a penal colony. Shock? It was a wonder that it didn't prove fatal. And perhaps for some it had; they had no way of knowing.) But more than these things -- after that first shock wore off and you had become reconciled to the fact that your whole life had somehow been perverted into that of a criminal -- after you had been bundled, blindfold, into that rattling old three-motored plane and flown for windowless hours across the unseen Martian deserts -- then you arrived. And that was bad. For there was always the uneasy, shamefaced question in the crowd: Does this one know who I am? And that other one -- why is he grinning like that? Does he know what I did? And what did he himself do, to be in this place? Nobody ever got over it But the early days were worst of all, before the pain became an accustomed one. HP HE heat was beating in on them. The woman with the child, half afraid, half contemptuous of Wakulla's gallantry, leaned white-faced against the back of her chair, the little girl with a thumb in her mouth and the other hand clutching her mother's skirt beside her, watching silently. The boy was talking -- his name was Tommy and he had told them he was seventeen years old. "That's what they tell me, he said, with a painful effort to be adult and sure of himself. His voice was a soft high mumble, hardly the voice even of a seventeen-year-old. "But -- I don't remember that. Really, I don't. The last thing I remember, I was twelve!" Twelve! Joan made a faint sound; almost she patted him on the head, though he was taller than she. Twelve! What sort of criminal could have hatched at twelve? Even at seventeen, the thing was ridiculous! But somewhere, this child had lost five years. She tried to explain it to him: "You must have done something, Tommy. Maybe you got involved with the wrong bunch at school -- who knows? But somehow, you went wrong. That's why they send people here, you know. It's the new law. Instead of putting someone in jail and keeping them there -- that would be a waste, you see, and cruel -- they wipe out the part of the minds that has the criminal pattern in it. They go back erasing memory, until they come to a part that is clean and unaffected, not only before the crime was committed but before, even, the first seed of the crime was planted. That's why none of us know what it was we did. It's been taken away from us. We've been given a second chance. We should be grateful." But should they? It was the old question; she cast it off. "Then," she said, "after they've cleaned out our memories and taken us back to the right path, they send us up here. To Mars. This is a colony where we can try to get reoriented and -- " She hesitated. And what? "And go back to normal life," she finished strongly, though there was still the relentless reminder of her memory that no one had ever gone back. "It isn't so bad, Tommy," she promised. He didn't look convinced. name: "Joan! Joan, come here, please!" It was old man Tavares. He was standing in the door, his face blenched a muddy mottled color in spite of the dark the sun had given it. She turned and hurried to him. Heat-stroke, she thought at once. It was far from uncommon, especially when a man as old as Tavares had to work in the blinding sun helping to lift boxes and bales. But he caught her feverishly by the hand and drew her outside into the sunwashed street. "Joan," he whispered raggedly, terror peeping out of his eyes. "Joan, can you borrow a jeep?" "Why -- I suppose so. But -- " "Take me to Hardee," he begged. His lined old face was quivering with senile worry and fear; his dry, hot hand was crushing hers. "Quickly! It will take hours for us to drive there. And we may not have hours, because they can fly in the plane! Quickly, for his sake and your own!" Joan said reasonably: "Now hold on, Dom. You're excited. Sit down for a minute." She tried to lead him back into the recreation room. She'd seen the signs coming on, she reproached herself, when he behaved so queerly at the plane; she should have done something about it at the time. Poor old man! "Come on, Dom," she coaxed. "I'll get you a nice cool drink of water and -- " "Quickly!" He planted his feet firmly, .surprisingly strong, and halted her. His eyes were terrified; they flicked past her, out toward the plane. "You don't understand, Joan! The Probation Officer, he has told Griswold about the stranger Hardee found. It is a terrible thing, do you not realize?" "Stranger?" she repeated. "The dead man, Joan! I saw them with the coverall, and then I knew. So I came close and listened and, yes, he was telling Griswold. And Griswold was frantic! Of course. Hurry, Joan!" Doubtfully, she said: "Well, let's see. You want to go out to Hardee's place? Wakulla's not far from there. I suppose I can persuade him to take us out, though he's got that new woman on his mind. It's a bad time of day, but -- " "Hurry!" The panic in his voice finally reached her. All right, she thought, why not? She could handle Wakulla -- even in the face of the constant threat of a boiled-out motor and trouble, the natural risk you took in driving across the sand by summer daylight. But Tavares gave her no choice. Still she protested, half-resisting: "Can't it wait until night, Dom? Surely it can't be as serious as all that. After all, what's so dangerous about a stranger? I suppose he's merely a man who got lost in the desert -- at most, perhaps he escaped from another prison camp, somewhere else on Mars, but certainly that doesn't -- " "Mars!" Tavares hissed in a terrible whisper. Convulsively he squeezed her arm. "Joan, do you not understand? All these years -- and you still think that this is Mars?" IV sound of the boy's voice calling: "Daddy! Somebody's coming!" It was only about noon. Hardee swung himself out of bed, half asleep, his eyes aching. He stumbled over to the window and pushed back the shutters. Fierce light beat in. He blinked, dazzled. The sun was directly overhead. The boy had been right; there was a jeep coming, still a long way off, but he could hear the faint whine and echo of its motor as the driver shifted gears, coaxing it around the worst of the bumps, trying to keep it from overheating. Someone driving at this time of day! It must be an urgent errand, he thought, and began to clamber into his clothes. He couldn't make out who was in it, in the blinding light; but by the time he was into his shirt and pants and ready to come downstairs, he could hear voices. Tavares and Joan Bunnell -- and his son, crying out to greet them. "Aunt Joan!" Chuck was babbling excitedly -- it was a great day for him when there were visitors. "Look at what Daddy got me, Aunt Joan! A tractor. And see, I can make a farm with Alice and Alfie -- see? This is my tractor, and Alice and Alfie are the cows!" Alice and Alfie were his pet skitterbugs. Hardee had captured them with the regular bag; but they were undersized, not of legal limit to bring in, so he had given them to the boy to play with for lack of a kitten or a pup. Hardee nodded without speaking and started down the stairs. The child was pushing the quiescent skitterbugs around on the floor with the tractor, whooping with joy. In the filtered, screened-down light that came inside the prefab, they had just enough energy to try to creep out of its way. Joan stared up at Hardee, began to speak, then caught herself. She took the boy's arm lightly. "Chuck," she said, "listen to me. We have to talk to your father. Go outside and play, please." He stood up, his eyes wide and disturbed. "Oh, let me stay, Aunt Joan! My tractor's -- " "Please, Chuck." He looked up at his father, hesitated, and started toward the door. Then he paused, looking at Wakulla and Tavares; even in his child's mind, he knew that it was not usual to see them there. With a child's response, an incantation against evil, he summoned up politeness: "Hello, Mr. Tavares. Hello, Mr. Wakulla." He hesitated, then remembered one more cantrip. "Don't worry, Daddy," he piped. "I'll be carefully to stay in the shade." "There isn't any shade. I tell you what." She glanced at Wakulla. "You'd better play in Mr. Wakulla's jeep. Make believe you're driving it all by yourself." "Wheel" The boy shouted gleefully. He dropped tractor and skitterbugs, flung the door open and leaped out into the sand. Sunlight flared in. One of the bugs -- it was impossible to tell which; only the boy could tell them apart -- lay squarely in the path of the sun's rays. There was a sudden crinkling snap of sparking energy as the light it fed on struck it; like a released spring, the little spidery metal thing spun around, leaped out the door and was gone. It was like a meteorite flung up into space, so quick and glittering. Hardee closed the door behind it and turned to face the others. 'What's the matter?" he demanded. Old man Tavares sank into a chair. "That stranger," he croaked. "The Probation Officer told Griswold about him, and now there will be trouble. For there is a lie here, Hardee. This is not the sort of place we are told it is. It is not on Mars; we are not criminals. And there must be a reason for this lie. What reason? I do not know, but whoever is telling the lie will protect it." He leaned forward. "It may cost your life to protect it, Hardee! Others have died, and I think for the same reason -- you are in danger, and, with you, all of us because of the fact that you told us!" Hardee shook his head. He was still more than half drowsy. The world had not yet come into focus; he was drugged from heat and sleep and none of this was making sense. He said thickly: "What the hell are you talking about, Tavares?" "I am talking about death!" said the old man. And then he stopped, and there was sudden fear on his face. "Listen!" Outside, a noise. An engine. No -- more than one. "Someone coming?" guessed Hardee. "A jeep?" "It is death that is coming," sobbed Tavares. "That's no jeep, Hardee. It is the plane, coming for you!" it open. It came from the east, like a faint angry snarl of bees, the sound of the Ford tri-motor's three laboring engines. "There it is!" cried the girl. "Look, over the dunes!" Sunlight glinted off a wing. It was the plane, all right, hardly five hundred feet up. It was heading off to one side, more in the direction of Wakulla's hut than Hardee's; clearly, whoever was flying it was unfamiliar with the exact locations of the prefabs. But clearly also, it would not take long to straighten them out "Come on!" said Hardee, and flung out the door. Whatever it was that Tavares was talking about, something of the old man's panic and desperation had reached him. "We'll have to hide! Wakulla, you know the old mining shack? Let's go!" Hardee caught his son up and raced for his own jeep, leaving the others to follow in Wakulla's. The heat was murderous. Before they had gone a hundred yards, the radiator needle was climbing; in a hundred more, it was pressing perilously against the backstop. But Hardee couldn't wait to baby the motor now, not when the plane had begun to wheel around toward them. Already it might be too late; it was quite possible that the plane had spotted them. But it was at least a chance that the plane had not. A desert drenched in a vertical sun is not easy to scan, and there was a lot of it. Next to him, on the seat, the little boy looked up wonderingly at his father, and was silent. "It's all right, Chucky," Hardee said, the automatic lie coming to his lips. It wasn't all right. There was nothing all right about it. But it satisfied the boy. He squirmed around and knelt backward on the seat, peering out the rear mirror. "They're catching up, Daddy!" he yelped cheerfully. "Step on it! We'll beat them!" Even through heat and worry and overpowering weariness, Hardee had enough left to feel fondness and pride for his child. At the abandoned old mine site, Hardee spun the jeep in toward the shed. He parked it under the overhang of the dangling board sign marked Joe's Last Chance No. #, crowding over as far as he could to make room for the other. In a moment, Wakulla drove up beside him and squeezed in. the hostile bright sky. "Stay under the shed!" Hardee said. "If they've seen us -- " But apparently the plane had not. They could see it clearly, dropping down over the dunes. It picked out Hardee's prefab, banked and swung around it twice; then leveled off, headed out across the desert, banked again, came in and landed bruisingly on the uneven sand. It was a rotten landing, but as good as could be expected for drifted sand. A tire might have blown or a wheel collapsed, but did not; the plane was lucky and the hidden fugitives were not; they would not be saved by a crash that would destroy their pursuers. The plane stopped, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the prefab but well out of their sight The motors died. They waited. "Now what?" demanded Wakulla angrily. He had been dragged away from a woman, and made to drive bouncingly across the hot sand with a hangover, and there was talk he hardly understood of danger that was never quite clear, and he was irritable. Hardee climbed to the top of the old shed wordlessly. He stretched tall and peered toward his home. "Can't see," he called down to the others. "I can't even see the house. I wonder what they're doing." "Come down," said old man Tavares in a tired voice. He sat on the sand with his back against the weathered boards, his eyes half closing, but not with drowsiness. The heat was very great, especially for a man near seventy, and especially for a man who had lived with outrageous fear for four years and now found his fears exploding in his face. "Doing?" Tavares repeated wearily. "I shall tell you what they are doing.They are searching." His voice was hardly louder than a whisper, in the perfect quiet of the hot desert air. "They see that your jeep is not there, but they search your house. They observe that you are not in it. It takes very little time to do this; there is not much to search." "Right," said Hardee roughly, dropping to the sand beside him. "Then what will they do next?" Old man Tavares opened his eyes. He looked out across the sand. "Then I think they will take off again in the plane and look all through the desert for you. They will figure to find you easily from the air. But -- " He paused, thinking. "Yes," he said. "It is not a good plane for the purpose and in any case they will want more, for they do not wish to miss you. So more will be summoned." "More planes?" repeated Joan. "I never saw any other planes." "You will," said Tavares sadly. "In an hour, perhaps, or two hours, there will be many planes flying overhead. But in much less time than that, this one that is by Hardee's home will search for us." O UT behind the shed was the blank headboard and the shallow grave where Hardee had buried the stranger. Tavares looked at it longingly. "If he were alive," he whispered, "then perhaps we could learn something." "We could dig him up," Wakulla rumbled. The girl made a faint sound. "In this heat? After nearly a week?" Hardee shook his head. "No, we won't dig him up. Not because of the heat -- if s dry, Joan; he'll be half a mummy by now. But I put him there and I know what I buried. There's nothing on him but ragged shorts and a pair of shoes. Nothing that would tell us anything." He gestured back toward the ringing hills. "That's where his trail came from. I didn't follow it, and now the wind has wiped it out, but that's where it was." "No matter," said Tavares with the calm of resignation. "It is too late for any of those things." He nodded toward where the plane had landed. "You think they mean trouble?" Wakulla demanded. "Think?" Tavares glanced at him opaquely, then once again out across the hot, dry sand. "I do not think. I know. Look." A flare of flame, almost invisible against the bright sky, fringed with bits of metal and sand and unidentifiable debris, leaped up over the dunes. Smoke followed. "They are taking no chances," said Tavares slowly. "They looked for you, and when you were not to be found, they destroyed your home -- perhaps you had hidden, you see. But now they will look some more." In a moment, the sound of the explosion reached them. The boy began to cry. V r T , HE sky was full of aircraft, high-winged light planes that chopped the desert into sector strips and patrolled them, seeking, seeking; helicopters that darted from place to place. "I never saw so many planes," breathed Joan Bunnell, one arm around the boy. He was thrilled, so excited that he forgot to be afraid; he had never seen so many planes either, had hardly believed that so many planes existed. All through the afternoon, they lay there in the waning heat, while the searching planes crisscrossed the sky. Wakulla looked angry, then puzzled, then contemptuous. He said: "Stupid! Why don't they follow our tracks? If it was me up there, I'd find the jeeps in ten minutes!" Tavares shrugged. He was very silent; he didn't want to talk, it seemed. Hardee and the others kept probing at him with questions, but he only shook his head. The heat was wearing. Even under the strain of the time, it lulled them, drugged them... Hardee woke up, and it was a cold, bright night. The sun had set. Overhead, the stars washed across the sky. While he watched, one larger star -- no, not a star; the second moon -- soared in a great wide arc down toward the eastern horizon, steel-blue and familiar. Hardee squinted up wonderingly. If this was not Mars, then what was this lesser moon in the sky? He woke the others. The planes were gone and the desert was silent. They crept out and got into their jeeps and headed back toward the demolished prefab. They stopped a couple of hundred yards away. Still in the night, a faint red glow and ruddy smoke showed where part of the destroyed house still smoldered. Hardee caught his breath and touched Tavares on the shoulder. "Look," he whispered. In the starlight, metal glinted. It was a wing of the old Ford trimotor. The plane was still there! For an instant, panic filled them all. But there was no sound, only their own breathing and the metallic pinging from the smoldering ruin of the house. The boy, silent and sleepy, stirred restlessly next to his father. "My tractor," he mumbled, and was silent. There was no toy tractor any more. There was no house. Only the smoldering metal and plastic were left. Tavares said quaveringly: "I think perhaps they could not get the plane off the ground. There were helicopters, and it may be that they took the crew off with them. It is bad sand here for a plane." "And maybe it's a trap!" rumbled Wakulla. Tavares said softly: "Yes. Maybe it is." Hardee said: "We don't have any choice. Let's take a look."  with the jeeps. Hardee backed his near the open door in the washboard fuselage; Wakulla rolled to a stop a dozen yards away and turned his headlights on the plane. They climbed onto the hood of Hardee's jeep and peered inside. Tinkling crystal bells whispered in their ears. Under the lights from Wakulla's jeep, a metallic scurry of wavy jointed legs and of sliding, clicking bodies: the hold of the plane was full of skitterbugs. Hardee took a deep breath. "Come on," he said. "Let's look around." They clambered into the plane. The skitterbugs clicked and pinged protestingly underfoot Chuck dove for a pair of them and came up with them proudly. "Daddy, can I keep them? I mean now that Alfie and Alice are gone?" "Sure," said Hardee gently, and set the boy out of the way. To Wakulla, he said: "You come with me. If there's anybody left in the plane, they'll probably be up front, by the controls -- " Screech of metal, and a tinny crash. The door slammed shut. Lights blazed on inside the plane. The elliptical door at the forward end of the ship opened and Griswold, his haunted eyes staring, peered out. "There is," he said. "Welcome aboard, all of you." Hardee tensed to jump him, and felt Wakulla gathering his muscles beside him -- but it was too late, too late! There was a choking, sputtering roar from outside -- another, and a third; the three engines were spinning, warming up. Griswold stepped back a second before their leap and the door slammed in their faces. As Hardee and Wakulla piled up against the elliptical door that led to the pilot's cabin, the engines shrilled louder and louder. The vibrations evened, smoothed, were synchronized. Then -- crash, crash! Two thundering blows smote them. The plane was a croquet ball, and a mallet huger than Thor's slammed it forward -- bump and bump -- across the uneven sands. Through the one small window left unblocked, they could see the trail of exhaust flame from the engines; and then, beside that flame and below it, a huger, brighter torch old transport up and out and into the thin air. ty yards of heaving flame; and then they were dark, but by then their work was completely done. The plane sagged for a second. Waddling in the thin cold air, it began lumpishly to climb and gain altitude. They were trapped. door opened again briefly -- long enough for Griswold, carrying a gun, to come back to join them. He said heavily: "I was afraid we would catch you." He stood regarding them. Queerly, he seemed more afraid than they. "Don't try anything," he told them, shouting over the racket of the motors. "It's a waste of time. You see?" And he held open the elliptical door for them to look. Through it they saw the bucket seats for pilot and co-pilot, and what was in those seats. And then the door was closed again, and Griswold was gone. Hardee felt a sudden sharp convulsion in his stomach. He heard Wakulla swear and the girl cry out and knew that they had seen what he had seen: In the seats, clinging to a metal grid, a pair of skitterbugs. And riding on them, like a jockey on a horse: Bright bronze death's heads with beady black eyes. Wakulla rumbled: "What -- what the hell was that?" "Martians?" whispered the girl. "But, Dom, you said we weren't on Mars!" Tavares shrugged. His face was quiet and resigned now; he had given up. "I didn't say where we were," he pointed out. "Nor did I say what manner of creature might be with us." Hardee shook his head to clear it. His arm was tight around the shoulders of the boy. Having him there was a help; it made it necessary for Hardee to think. He couldn't merely give up, for the boy's life was dependent on what he did now. He tried to reason it out. "We are not on Mars," he said, testing the truth of the statement. "You're sure of that, Dom?" "Sure?" Tavares laughed. "Can you lift three hundred pounds?" he asked queerly, his eyes watering. "Do you see two tiny moons in the sky? No, not the big moon. That is too big, too bright; that might be Earth's moon, but not one of those of Mars!" "There are two moons," Joan said reasonably. "No." Tavares shook his head. "A moon and a satellite. An orbiting spaceship, I believe. It is a hoax. We were never on Mars." UT what's the purpose of " it?" demanded Hardee. Tavares shook his head. "Don't you think I've wondered, for five years? But I haven't been able to guess. All that I know is that they told us this was Mars, but it is not. Mars is a red star in the sky. I have seen it myself. This I know. I know nothing else." "And all these years you haven't said anything?" asked Hardee roughly. "I have not. Why? For the reason that I did not dare, Hardee. Yes, I, Tavares, who was once a fighter in France, in the war that happened before you were born -- I did not dare. You recall when you woke up, eh?" "Woke up? You mean the first time, before I came to the colony?" Hardee nodded. "I remember. I was in a room -- " "Yes," said Tavares. "That room. And you were asked many questions, were you not, like the rest of us?" "I was. Crazy ones." "No, Hardee! Not crazy. They were for a purpose. Consider. You were asked what you knew about Mars -- they said it was because you were being sent there, eh? And you told them, very truly, that you knew nothing. I do not know what would have happened if, by chance, you had been an astronomer, or perhaps a journalist, and had answered that question differently. But I know that you would never have come to the colony." Hardee, frowning, ground out: "Go on!" "And then they began to describe the planet Mars to you -- to get you ready for your experience, they said. Right? They described it just as it turned outin fine, not like Mars itself! And they watched you. And you showed no signs of doubting them. "I know that this is so. For, at the time when I awoke, there was another with me, also awakened; and this one doubted, and let them see that he doubted. 'Mars has a light gravity,' he told them. 'And almost no air! And -- ' Oh, he went on and on. "It was a mistake. "They took him away." Hardee said reasonably: "But that doesn't prove anything, Tavares. There could have been some perfectly simple reason." "I heard him scream!" Tavares plunged his face into his hands, rocking slowly. "And so all these years, I have said nothing, I have questioned nothing, for I did not dare. But now it is too late to be afraid. For that stranger you found, Hardee, he proved that all of this is a lie. "And now the liars must come out into the open -- at least for us here, who know of the lie. And the liars -- we have seen them." He flung his arm out, pointing toward the elliptical door to the pilot's chamber -- where they had seen the skitterbugs poised calmly on their metallic webs, with the bronze death's-head riders perched on their shining carapaces. The flying antique thumped and pounded in strong air currents. But it was not airsickness that made them feel sick and faint. r I , HE elliptical door opened. Griswold came back, carrying the gun. Behind him they caught another glimpse of the skitterbugs and their bronze inhuman riders. Griswold closed the door and called: "Sit down, all of you! We're coming down!" "Thanks," said Hardee shortly. "I didn't expect this much consideration." Griswold measured him with the eyes of a man who knew demons. "You blame me," he said. "Of course you do. What can I do about it?" He motioned Hardee to the tiny window. "Look down there," he ordered. "See that city? It's full of skitterbugs -- hundreds of thousands of them! There's hardly a human being alive in it, though it used to be full of them. The skitterbugs have taken over!" "Taken over?" Hardee echoed, puzzled. "Then -- are we -- " "On Earth, yes." Griswold nodded. "But it doesn't belong to the human race any more. You'll find out." He stared at Hardee with pity and fright. "You could have lived out your life in the colony," he said somberly, "but you had to find that man. Now God knows what the bugs will do to you. But you'll never see the colony again." "And neither will you!" bawled an enormous voice behind them. Griswold spun, trying to bring the gun up, but there was no time, and the shifting footing of crawling bugs beneath them tripped him, caught him off balance. Wakulla, grinning like a maddened gorilla, caught the old man with one square hand. The gun fell one way and Griswold fell the other -- out cold. "Come on!" shouted Wakulla, and dived for the gun. He stumbled knee-deep through the crawling little monsters up toward the elliptical door. Hardee followed, almost without thought. They burst through the doorTwin bronze creatures turned to regard them out of black and hollow eyes. They were small by human standards, built like huge metallic frogs, golden bronze, with tiny limbs and huge faces. They rode the skitterbugs, but they were not joined to them. One of them made a harsh metallic whistling sound and flopped off its mount, toward something that glittered on the floor -- a weapon, perhaps. bronze creature never reached it. Wakulla, bellowing madly, lunged into the cabin and brought his heavy foot down on the creature. There was a screech and a thin crackling sound; and that was the end of that one. The other was getting into motion by now. But it never had a chance. Wakulla steadied himself, took aim and fired -- again and again, pumping bullets at the thing, and though his aim was none too good, enough of them connected to splatter the creature against the control panels. The ancient plane wobbled and began to fall off on one wing. "Hold on!" bawled Wakulla, and grabbed for the control wheel. Hardee, panting, fought his way into the seat beside him. "Can you fly one of these things?" "I can try!" said Wakulla, grinning. Straight ahead of them, through the glass, Hardee could see a patchwork of trees and houses, roads and open land. "I'll land it there!" Wakulla yelled, horsing the stick back. They hit the ground hard at more than a hundred miles an hour, bounced, came down on one wheel, blew a tire and slid crabwise across an open meadow. If there were brakes, Wakulla didn't know where to find them; if there was a way to stop the plane before it reached the fence at the edge of the field, he didn't know it. They hit the brush fence, still going fast Hardee felt the windshield fly up and smack him in the face. The last thought he had was: Fire. VI TT was full morning; he had been unconscious for at least an hour. Over against the trees, an enormous smoke plume showed where the tri-motor was giving up the ghost. Joan Bunnell was leaning over him, her cheek bloody, her clothing torn. "Hardee, you're all right?" she breathed. He pushed himself up. "I guess so." He looked around. "Wakulla-?" "His neck was broken." The girl rocked back on her heels. Tavares was sitting on the damp grass nearby, cradling the boy in his lap. Beside him, Griswold lay face-down, unmoving. "The rest of us are all right," Joan said. "Griswold has a bad arm. That's all." Hardee shook his head and began to rub his ears. It felt like golf-tees driven into his eardrums; the old crate had come down fast and the change in pressure was bad. He could hardly hear what Joan was saying. "Poor Wakulla," she murmured. "Maybe he saved our lives." "And maybe he killed us all," said Griswold, painfully turning on one side to face them. His face was perspiring, and he clutched one arm with the other hand. "They'll never let this go by," he warned. Hardee got up dizzily and strode over to the old man. "Talk!" he said. "What are the bugs? Where are they from?" Griswold said wretchedly: "I don't know. The bugs don't matter -- it's the skulls that are important. They're smart. And they aren't from Earth." He sat up, holding his twisted arm. In the hot sunlight, the field they were in was alive with skitterbugs, flashing and leaping, loosed from the wrecked plane. Griswold said: "The bugs are only brainless machines. They are seeded and they grow, and when they are large enough, the skulls harvest them. Sometimes they use human beings for the job of harvesting -- like you." burning plane. The heat kept him yards away. Wakulla was in there, probably hardly more thana cinder by now, but he couldn't be seen. Just as well, thought Hardee. A few skitterbugs, damaged in the crash, limped brokenly around on the grass, excited by the floods of radiant energy from the sun and the fire, but unable to move very fast. And something else metallic lay in the grass. Hardee bent for it; his head thundered, but he kept his balance and picked it up. It was the gun Wakulla had taken from Griswold. Hardee opened it, looked inside and swore. Only one bullet left. But it was better than nothing. Back where the others were waiting, Tavares was relentlessly questioning Griswold. "These creatures, you say they came from space, in that great ship that now orbits around the Earth?' "Five years ago," said Griswold, nodding. "They have a ray -- I don't know how it works. But they sprayed the world with it, and every living thing went to sleep. Some are sleeping yet -- those that haven't starved to death, though metabolism is slowed considerably." Hardee looked at Joan Bunnell and put his arm protectingly around the boy. "Would that be October, #?" he asked. "It would," said Griswold heavily. "You begin to understand, I see. That's what happened to all of you at the colony. You weren't criminals -- except that, in the eyes of the skulls, it's a crime to be human at all." Not criminals! No forgotten crime to expiate! Hardee could scarcely believe it. But Griswold was still talking: "They want our planet," he explained. "One shipload came, to get things ready, an advance party. I don't know when the rest of them will be here -- but they're on their way. Perhaps a year or two. And they need to have the human race under control by then." He rubbed his arm and stared up at the sky. "So some of us are helping them," he said flatly. "Call us traitors -- we are! But what else is there to do? The skulls gave us a very simple alternative. Either we help them study us so that they can learn to rule the human race... or they go back out into their ship and spray the Earth with another ray. Not a sleep ray, but one that will wipe out all life entirely." "It's a choice that isn't any choice," he said. "What else was there? So when they woke me -- I was one of the first few hundred; now there must be tens of thousands -- they learned, after we established communication, that I was a psychologist. It was exactly what they needed. They set me the problem of contriving an experimental colony -- a test farm, if you like, where the human animal could be kept in conditions as close to natural as possible. "It was their ship, orbiting out there, that made me think of Mars -- it does look like a second moon. Luna was no real problem. A simple post-hypnotic command and none of you could focus on it enough to recognize the features. But I couldn't erase knowledge of Mars, if it existed in any of you. There is no invention, of course, that causes partial -- and selective -- amnesia in criminals. That was a lie to make you accept this plateau as a penal colony on Mars." "But what in hell for?" Hardee asked angrily. "So nobody would try to escape. Thinking you were on Mars, you wouldn't hope to get to Earth. Knowing you were on Earth, you'd do anything to reach civilization -- not realizing there wasn't any left. Skitterbugs wouldn't get harvested. Skulls would be killed. The colony would be trouble instead of useful -- and it would then be wiped out "I wanted to keep as many people alive for as long as I could," said Griswold. "There was no other chance for humanity." "What do we do now?" Hardee grimly demanded. Griswold hesitated. "There are a few free humans," he said reluctantly. "Not many. They live in the woods, in hiding, some of them in the cities themselves. Mostly they are ignored by the skulls -- because there are so few. If there weren't, the skulls would take the easy way out. The Earth is their new home, you see, and they regard it as you would your house. You might tolerate a few vermin -- but if there are too many, you'll call in the exterminators. But there are these few, and if we can somehow make our way to them, we might have a chance to -- " "Hush!" breathed Joan Bunnell. She caught the boy to her, pointing. Out of the woods at the side of the field raced a posse of skitterbugs, each with its bronze death's-head rider. Hardee tried to fight, though there were hundreds of the creatures. If Wakulla had not been so profligate with his bullets -- But he had been; and the single bullet in the gun was more frustrating than none at all. "Too late," groaned Griswold, his tortured face sagging with fear. "Give up, Hardee! Otherwise they'll kill us right here!" road and into the environs of a city, the skitterbugs with their bright bronze riders a disorderly rabble around them. None of them recognized the city; it might have been anywhere. It was a silent city, a city of death. Even from the streets, they could see men and women who had been struck down in the middle of life. A mother with three children around her, sprawled in a Laocoon down porch steps; a postman with his two-wheeled cart beside him, his letters long since blown away. And there were living, waking humans too. Chuck shivered and caught his father's arm as they rounded a corner and saw a work gang -- ten or twelve men, in rags of clothing, clearing rubble from a tumbled house that lay across a side street; they looked up as Hardee and the rest passed, but there was no emotion in their eyes, only weariness. "Those others," whispered Joan. "Are they dead?" "No," said Tavares heavily, "not if what Griswold tells us is true. But they might as well be. Unless -- " "Don't even think it!" begged Griswold. "Some of the skulls can understand English!" "Let them understand!" cried Hardee. He stopped and faced them. "We'll fight you!" he shouted. "You can't have our planet -- not now or ever! The human race isn't going to be taken over by a bunch of bugs from another planet!" Incuriously, the blank-eyed bronze skulls stared at him; almost as incuriously, the ragged men looked on. The skulls prodded Hardee on, and the ragged men went back to their work. The prisoners were taken to a big building that bore on it a sign, Hotel Winchester. Once it had been a commercial hotel; now it seemed to be headquarters for the skitterbugs and the skulls that rode them. Without a word, they were put in a room on a gallery that overlooked the lobby. The floor of the lobby was a seething mass of skitterbugs with their riders -- and some skulls which had found a different sort of mount, for they perched on the shoulders of ragged men. The door was closed, and they were left alone. I T was a partly glass door; Hardee peered out. "They must have come from a light-gravity planet," he guessed. "They move badly without the skitterbugs. They can't be very strong." "They don't need to be," said Griswold somberly. "Not with their weapons." "What about at night?" asked Hardee. "Surely the skitterbugs can't operate very well without light. Can't we -- " But Griswold was shaking his head. "They keep all the areas of the city where they move about well lighted. No, Hardee. The skulls are way ahead of you." He sat down and sighed. "I think they'll kill us," he said without emotion. "It's either that or the labor gangs." Old man Tavares said something incandescent in Spanish. "You may die, Griswold, but I'll fight Look, why can we not get away? Soon it will be dark, as Hardee says, and it is then only a matter of getting away from the lighted areas. Why not?" "Wait," Hardee interrupted, staring out the glass of the door. "Someone's coming." They crowded around. Down the long gallery that surrounded the lobby, a tall man with angry eyes approached. Hope surged -- a human, and free! But then they saw that on his shoulder rode one of the bronze skulls, motionless, the hollow eyes emptily staring. "He is probably our executioner," said Griswold, as though announcing the time of day. "Not without a fight," said Hardee tensely. "Tavares, you stand over here. I'll wait on the other side. Joan, you take Chuck to the far side of the room. See if you can make the skull look at you! And Griswold -- " "It won't work," said Griswold stubbornly, but he went with Joan and the boy. The door opened. As soon as the man and his rider were inside, Hardee lunged against the door, slammed it shut. "Now!" he shouted, and leaped toward the pair. The angry eyes of the man opened wide in astonishment. Hastily he stepped back. "Wait!" he cried, stumbling -- And the bronze skull toppled from his shoulder. It rolled across the room and lay motionless on the floor. though it were a hand grenade, fallen back into his own rifle pit; but the new man with the angry eyes yelled: "Don't waste your time! That one's dead -- I killed it myself!" Hardee brought up short, gaping. The man grinned tightly. "It keeps the others from bothering me," he explained. "Don't mess it up -- we'll need it to get out of here. Come on!" "Where?" asked Hardee, trying to take it in. It was hope, it was rescue -- when they had expected it least. "Down the end of the gallery," said the man, "there's a linen closet. In it is a laundry chute. It goes down to the cellar. The skulls don't go there much -- the lights are bad; we keep them that way. And there are sewers and passages. If we reach the chute, we're safe." He opened the door, peered out "You go ahead, all of you. I'll follow, as though I'm taking you somewhere." He closed the door and bent down to recover his skull. "Mustn't forget Oscar," he said. "He's our passport." He opened a leather strap that passed around his neck and shoulder, bound it around the dead skull, buckled it again. Experimentally he bowed slightly from the waist. The skull wobbled but stayed on. "Don't jar me," he said, and crossed his fingers. He opened the door a crack, looked down the corridor and nodded. "Let's go!" he said, and flung it wide. The procession moved down the gallery. Dust was thick on the leather settees that lined it; the skulls had no need for them, and no human without a skull possessing it had passed that way in five years. There were skitterbugs with skulls upon them at the end of the gallery, but they didn't seem to notice anything. Down in the lobby, a few of the men with skull riders glanced up, but no one challenged. It was twenty yards to the door of the linen closet. Fifteen yards were easy. Then, out of a ballroom that was now a pen for the human slaves of the skulls, two skitterbugs with skulls upon them came out They paused and then one of them opened its queerly articulated transverse mouth and made a sound, a chanting metallic whine -- speaking to the skull on the shoulder of their rescuer. Hardee caught Joan's arm, took a tighter grip on the hand of the boy by his side, lengthening his stride. So near! And then -- terbug with the skull on it leaped forward and clutched at the legs of the man who was shepherding them. He kicked it away. "Rim!" he yelled. The skull on his shoulder fell free and bumped lifelessly away. Three more skulls, riding skitterbugs, popped out of the ballroom. Down on the lobby floor there was a stirring and a whining commotion. "Run!" he yelled again, and shoved them powerfully forward to the linen closet. They made the door, just in time. It was the size of a small room, and they all crammed inside. Hardee slammed the door and held it "Jump! I'll stay here and keep them out." The boy cried out once, then was silent. He glanced at his father as Tavares and the other man lifted him into the chute; but he didn't say a word when they let go and he slid out of sight "Go ahead, Joan!" barked Hardee. Restless scratchings outside told him the skitterbugs were there. Then he could feel the door pressing against him. He cursed the clever, economical designers of the building, who had known better than to put a lock on the inside of a linen closet. If there had been one, they could all escape. But since there was not -- Griswold glanced at the chute, looked at Hardee, and nervously tongued his dry lips. Tavares was in the chute now; he waved, and dropped out of sight. Griswold turned his back on the chute. He walked over to Hardee. "I've got a broken arm," he said, "and, you know, I'm not sure the free humans would welcome me. You go, Hardee." "But-" "Go ahead!" Griswold thrust him away. There was more strength than Hardee had expected in the worn, injured body. "I doubt I could make it anyway, with this arm -- but I can hold them for a minute!" Already the other man was gone; it was only Griswold and Hardee there, and the scratching and shoving were growing more insistent "All right," said Hardee at last "Griswold -- " But he didn't know what it was, exactly, that he wanted to say; and besides, there was no time. Griswold, sweat pouring into his eyes, chuckled faintly for the first time since Hardee had known him. "Hurry!" he said, and looked embarrassed as he held up two fingers in a shaky V. But he looked embarrassed only for an instant The fingers firmed into a spiky, humanly stubborn, defiant sign of victory. "Save the children," Griswold said. "I couldn't get the skulls to let many into the colony -- a waste, they told me, because kids can't work. Save the children!" Hardee turned away -- toward the laundry chute, and toward a new life. Who or what was the scoundrel that kept these couriers from the swift completion of their handsomely appointed rondos? O N Tenthmonth #, # A.D., at exactly # A.M. Planetary Federation Time -- but with a permissible erway -- in the fifth sublevel of NewNew York Robot Postal Station #, Black Sorter gulped down ten thousand pieces of first-class mail. This breakfast tidbit did not agree with the mail-sorting machine. It was as if a robust dog had been fed a large chunk of good red meat with a strychnine pill in it. Black Sorter's innards went whirr-klunk, a blue electric glow enveloped him, and he began to shake as if he might break loose from the concrete. He desperately spat back over his shoulder a single envelope, gave a great huff and blew out toward the sorting tubes a mediumsize snowstorm consisting of the other nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces of first-class mail chewed to confetti. Then, still convulsed, he snapped up a fresh ten thousand and proceeded to chomp and grind on them. Black Sorter was rugged. The rejected envelope was tongued up by Red Subsorter, who growled deep in his throat, said a very bad word, and passed it to Yellow Rerouter, who passed it to Green Rerouter, who passed it to Brown Study, who passed it to Pink Wastebasket. Unlike Black Sorter, Pink Wastebasket was very delicate, though highly intuitive -- the machine equivalent of a White Russian countess. She was designed to scan in # codes, route special-delivery spacemail to interplanetary liners by messenger rocket, and distinguish #s from upside-down #s. Pink Wastebasket haughtily inhaled the offending envelope and almost instantly turned a bright crimson and began to tremble. After a few minutes, small atomic flames started to flicker from her mid-section. White Nursemaid Seven and Greasy Joe both received Pink Wastebasket's distress signal and got there as fast as their wheels would roll them, but the high-born machine's malady was beyond their simple skills of oilcan and electroshock. chine-tending-and-repairing machines, ones far more expert than themselves, but all were baffled. It was clear that Pink Wastebasket, who continued to tremble and flicker uncontrollably, was suffering from the equivalent of a major psychosis with severe psychosomatic symptoms. She spat a stream of filthy ions at Gray Psychiatrist, not recognizing her old friend. Meanwhile, the paper blizzard from Black Sorter was piling up in great drifts between the dark pillars of the sublevel, and flurries had reached Pink Wastebasket's aristocratic area. An expedition of sturdy machines, headed by two hastily summoned snowplows, was dispatched to immobilize Black Sorter at all costs. Pink Wastebasket, quivering like a demented hula dancer, was clearly approaching a crisis. Finally Gray Psychiatrist -- after consulting with Green Surgeon, and even then with an irritated reluctance, as if he were calling in a witch-doctor -- summoned a human being. The human being walked respectfully around Pink Wastebasket several times and then gave her a nervous little poke with a rubber-handled probe. Pink Wastebasket gently regurgitated her last snack, turned dead white, gave a last flicker and shake, and expired. Black Coroner recorded the immediate cause of death as tinkering by a human being. The human being, a bald and scrawny one named Potshelter, picked up the envelope responsible for all the trouble, stared at it incredulously, opened it with trembling fingers, scanned the contents briefly, gave a great shriek and ran off at top speed, forgetting to hop on his perambulator, which followed him making anxious clucking noises. The nearest human representative of the Solar Bureau of Investigation, a rather wooden-looking man named Krumbine, also bald, recognized Potshelter as soon as the latter burst gasping into his office, squeezing through the door while it was still dilating. The human beings whose work took them among the Top Brass, as the upper-echelon machines were sometimes referred to, formed a kind of human elite, just one big nervous family. Man said. "Hold still a second so the chair can grab you. Hitch onto the hookah and choose a tranquilizer from the tray at your elbow. Whatever deviation you've uncovered can't be that much of a danger to the planets. I imagine that when you leave this office, the Solar Battle Fleet will still be orbiting peacefully around Luna." "I seriously doubt that" lavender pill and took a deep breath. "Krumbine, a letter turned up in the first-class mail this morning." "Great Scott!" "It is a letter from one person to another person." "Good Lord!" "The flow of advertising has been seriously interfered with. At a modest estimate, three hundred class advertising have already been chewed to rags and I'm not sure the Steel Helms -- God bless 'em! -- have the trouble in hand yet." "Judas Priest!" "Naturally the poor machines weren't able to cope with the letter. It was utterly outside their experience, beyond the furthest reach of their programming. It threw them into a terrible spasm. Pink Wastebasket is dead and at this very instant, if we're lucky, three police machines of the toughest blued steel are holding down Black Sorter and putting a muzzle on him." "Great Scott! It's incredible, Potshelter. And Pink Wastebasket dead? Take another tranquilizer, Potshelter, and hand over the tray." Krumbine received it with trembling fingers, started to pick up a big pink pill but drew back his hand from it in sudden revulsion at its color and swallowed two blue oval ones instead. The man was obviously fighting to control himself. He said unsteadily, "I almost never take doubles, but this news you bring -- Good Lord! I seem to recall a case where someone tried to send a sound-tape through the mails, but that was before my time. Incidentally, is there any possibility that this is a letter sent by one group of persons to another group? A hive or a therapy group or a social club? That would be bad enough, of course, but -- " "No, just one single person sending to another." Potshelter's expression set in grimly solicitous lines. "I can see you don't quite understand, Krumbine. This is not a sound-tape, but a letter written in letters. You know, letters, characters -- like books." "Don't mention books in this office!" Krumbine drew himself up angrily and then slumped back. "Excuse me, Potshelter, but I find this very difficult to face squarely. Do I understand you to say that one person has tried to use the mails to send a printed sheet of some sort to another?" "Worse than that. A written letter." "Written? I don't recognize the word." "It's a way of making characters, of forming visual equivalents of sound, without using electricity. The writer, as he's called, employs a black liquid and a pointed stick called a pen. I know about this because one hobby of mine is ancient means of communication." -his head. "Communication is a dangerous business, Potshelter, especially at the personal level. With you and me, it's all right, because we know what we're doing." He picked up a third blue tranquilizer. "But with most of the hive-folk, person-to-person communication is only a morbid form of advertising, a dangerous travesty of normal newscasting -- catharsis without the analyst, recitation without the teacher -- a perversion of promotion employed in betraying and subverting." The frown deepened as he put the blue pill in his mouth and chewed it. "But about this pendo you mean the fellow glues the pointed stick to his tongue and then speaks, and the black liquid traces the vibrations on the paper? A primitive non-electrical oscilloscope? Sloppy but conceivable, and producing a record of sorts of the spoken word." "No, no, Krumbine." Potshelter nervously popped a square orange tablet into his mouth. "It's a handwritten letter." Krumbine watched him. "I never mix tranquilizers," he boasted absently. "Hand-written, eh? You mean that the message was imprinted on a hand? And the skin or the entire hand afterward detached and sent through the mails in the fashion of a Martian reproach? A grisly find indeed, Potshelter." "You still don't quite grasp it, Krumbine. The fingers of the hand move the stick that applies the ink, producing a crude imitation of the printed word." "Diabolical!" Krumbine smashed his fist down on the desk so that the four phones and two-score microphones rattled. "I tell you, cope with the subtlest modern deceptions, but when fiends search out and revive tricks from the preAtomic Cave Era, it's almost too much. But, Great Scott, I dally while the planets are in danger. What's the sender's code on this hellish letter?" "No code," Potshelter said darkly, preferring the envelope. "The return address is -- hand-written." Krumbine blanched as his eyes slowly traced the uneven lines in the upper left-hand comer: from Richard Rowe # West #th St (horizontal) # Rocket Court (vertical) Hive #, NewNew York #, N. Y. Columbia, Terra "Ugh!" Krumbine said, shivering. "Those crawling characters, those letters, as you call them, those things barely enough like print to be readable -- they seem to be on the verge of awakening all sorts of horrid racial memories. I find myself thinking of fur-clad witch-doctors dipping long pointed sticks in bubbling black cauldrons. No wonder Pink Wastebasket couldn't take it, brave girl." desk, he pushed a number of buttons and spoke long numbers and meaningful alphabetical syllables into several microphones. Banks of colored lights around the desk began to blink like a theatre marquee sending Morse Code, while phosphorescent arrows crawled purposefully across maps and space-charts and through threedimensional street diagrams. "There!" he said at last. "The sender of the letter is being apprehended and will be brought directly here. We'll see what sort of man this Richard Rowe is -- if we can assume he's human. Seven precautionary cordons are being drawn around his population station: three composed of machines, sisting of human and mechanical medical-combat teams. Same goes for the intended recipient of the letter. Meanwhile, a destroyer squadron of the Solar Fleet has been detached to orbit over NewNew York." "In case it becomes necessary to Z-Bomb?" Potshelter asked grimly. Krumbine nodded. "With all those villains lurking just outside the Solar System in their invisible black ships, with planeticide in their hearts, we can't be too careful. One word transmitted from one spy to another and anything may happen. And we must bomb before they do, so as to contain our losses. Better one city destroyed than a traitor on the loose who may destroy many cities. One hundred years ago, three personto-person postcards went through the mails -- just three postcards, Potshelter! -- and pit went Schenectady, Hoboken, Cicero, and Walla Walla. Here, as long as you're mixing them, try one of these oval blues -- I find them best for steady swallowing." Bells jangled. Krumbine grabbed up two phones, holding one to each ear. Potshelter automatically picked up a third. The ringing continued. Krumbine started to wedge one of his phones under his chin, nodded sharply at Potshelter and then toward a cluster of microphones at the end of the table. Potshelter picked up a fourth phone from behind them. The ringing stopped. The two men listened, looking doped, Krumbine with an eye fixed on the sweep second hand of the large wall clock. When it had made one revolution, he cradled his phones. Potshelter followed suit. "I do like the simplicity of the new on-the-hour Puffyloaf phonocommercial," the latter remarked thoughtfully. "The Bread That's Lighter Than Air. Nice." Krumbine nodded. "I hear they've had to add mass to the leadfoil wrapping to keep the loaves from floating off the shelves. Fact." we can't listen to more phonocommercials, but even when there isn't a crisis on the agenda, I find I have to budget my listening time. One minute per hour strikes a reasonable balance between duty and self-indulgence." The nearest wall began to sing: Mister J. Augustus Krumbine, We all think you're fine, fine, fine, fine. Now out of the skyey blue Come some telegrams for you. The wall opend to a small heart shape toward the center and a sheaf of pale yellow envelopes arced out and plopped on the middle of the desk. Krumbine started to leaf through them, scanning the little transparent windows. "Hm, Electronic Soap... Better Homes and Landing Platforms... Psycho-Blinkers... Your Girl Next Door... PoppyW oppiet... Poopsy-Woopsies... He started to open an envelope, then, after a quick look around and an apologetic smile at Potshelter, dumped them all on the disposal hopper, which gargled briefly. "After all, there is a crisis this morning," he said in a defensive voice. Potshelter nodded absently. "I can remember back before personalized delivery and rhyming robots," he observed. "But how I'd miss them now -- so much more distingue than the hives with their non-personalized radio, TV and stereo advertising. For that matter, I believe there are some backward areas on Terra where the great advertising potential of telephones and telegrams hasn't been fully realized and they are still used in part for personal communication. Now me, I've never in my life sent or received a message except on my walky-talky." He patted his breast pocket. Krumbine nodded, but he was a trifle shocked and inclined to revise his estimate of Potshelter's social status. Krumbine conducted his own social correspondence solely by telepathy. He shared private telepath -- a charming albino girl named Agnes. "Yes, and it's a very handsome walky-talky," he assured Potshelter a little falsely. "Suits you. I like the upswept antenna." He drummed on the desk and swallowed another blue tranquilizer. "Dammit, what's happened to those machines? They ought to have the two spies here by now. Did you notice that the second -- the intended recipient of the letter, I mean -- seems to be female? Another good Terran name, too, Jane Dough. Hive in Upper Manhattan." He began to tap the envelope sharply against the desk. "Dammit, where are they?" "Excuse me," Potshelter said hesitantly, "but I'm wondering why you haven't read the message inside the envelope." K rumbine looked at him blankly. "Great Scott, I assumed that at least it was in some secret code, of course. Normally I'd have asked you to have Pink Wastebasket try her skill on it, but..." His eyes widened and his voice sank. "You don't mean to tell me that it's -- " Potshelter nodded grimly. "Hand-written, too. Yes." Krumbine winced. "I keep trying to forget that aspect of the case." He dug out the message with shaking fingers, fumbled it open and read: Dear Jane, It must surprise you that I know your name, for our hives are widely separated. Do you recall day before yesterday when your guided tour of Grand Central Spaceport got stalled because the guide blew a fuse? I was the young man with hair in the tour behind yours. You were a little frightened and a groupmistress was reassuring you. The machine spoke your name. Since then I have been unable to forget you. When I go to sleep, I dream of your face looking up sadly at the mistress's kindly photocells. I don't know how to get in touch with you, but my grandfather has told me stories his grandfather told him that his grandfather told him about young men writing what he calls love-letters to young ladies. So I am writing you a love-letter. I work in a first-class advertising house and I will slip this love-letter into an outgoing ten-thousand-pack and hope. Do not be frightened of me, Jane. I am no caveman except for my hair. I am not insane. I am emotionally disturbed, but in a way that no machine has ever described to me.  want only your happiness. Sincerely, Richard Rowe Krumbine slumped back in his chair, which braced itself manfully against him, and looked long and thoughtfully at Potshelter. "Well, if that's a code, it's certainly a fiendishly subtle one. You'd think he was talking to his Girl Next Door." Potshelter nodded wonderingly. "I only read as far as where they were planning to blow up Grand Central Spaceport and all the guides in it." "Judas Priest, I think I have it!" Krumbine shot up. "It's a pilot advertisement -- Boy Next Door or -- that kind of thing -- printed to look like hand-writtening, which would make all the difference. And the pilot copy got mailed by accident -- which would mean there is no real Richard Rowe." At that instant, the door dilated and two blue detective engines hustled a struggling young man into the office. He was slim, rather handsome, had a bushy head of hair that had somehow survived evolution and radioactive fallout, and across the chest and back of his paper singlet was neatly stamped: "Richard Rowe." When he saw the two men, he stopped struggling and straightened up. "Excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "but these police machines must have made a mistake. I've committed no crime." Then his gaze fell on the handaddressed envelope on Krumbine's desk and he turned pale. XV "N # crime! No, not at all. Merely using the mails to communicate. Ha!" The young man shrank back. "I'm sorry, sir." "Sorry, he says! Do you realize that your insane prank has resulted in the destruction of perclass advertising? -- in the strangulation of a postal station and the paralysis of Lower Manhattan? -- serves, the de-mothballing of two divisions of G. I. machines and the redeployment of the Solar Battle Fleet? Good Lord, boy, why did you do it?" Richard Rowe continued to shrink but he squared his shoulders. "I'm sorry, sir, but I just had to. I just had to get in touch with Jane Dough." "A girl from another hive? A girl you'd merely gazed at because a guide happened to blow a fuse?" Krumbine stood up, shaking an angry finger. "Great Scott, boy, where was Your Girl Next Door?" Richard Rowe stared bravely at the finger, which made him look a trifle cross-eyed. "She died, sir, both of them." "But there should be at least six." "I know, sir, but of the other four, two have been shipped to the Adirondacks on vacation and two recently got married and haven't been replaced." Potshelter, a faraway look in his eyes, said softly, "I think I'm beginning to understand -- " But Krumbine thundered on at Richard Rowe with, "Good Lord, I can see you've had your troubles, boy. It isn't often we have these shortages of Girls Next Door, so that temporarily a boy can't marry the Girl Next Door, as he always should. But, Judas Priest, why didn't you take your troubles to your psychiatrist, your groupmaster, your socializer, your Queen Mother?" "My psychiatrist is being overhauled, sir, and his replacement short-circuits every time he hears the word 'trouble.' My groupmaster and socializer are on vacation duty in the Adirondacks. My Queen Mother is busy replacing Girls Next Door." "Yes, it all fits," Potshelter proclaimed excitedly. "Don't you see, Krumbine? Except for a set of mischances that would only occur letter would never have been conceived or sent" "You may have something there," Krumbine concurred. "But in any case, boy, why did you -- er -- written this letter to this particular girl? What is there about Jane Dough that made you do it?" "Well, you see, sir, she's -- " and a blue matron machine conducted a young woman into the office. She was slim and she had a head of hair that would have graced a museum beauty, while across the back and -- well, "chest" is an inadequate word -- of her paper chemise, "Jane Dough" was silk-screened in the palest pink. Krumbine did not repeat his last question. He had to admit to himself that it had been answered fully. Potshelter whistled respectfully. The blue detective engines gave hard-boiled grunts. Even the blue matron machine seemed awed by the girl's beauty. But she had eyes only for Richard Rowe. "My Grand Central man," she breathed in amazement. "The man I've dreamed of ever since. My man with hair." She noticed the way he was looking at her and she breathed harder. "Oh, darling, what have you done?" "I tried to send you a letter." "A letter? For me? Oh, darling!" -"Potshelter, I'm going to wind this up fast. Miss Dough, could you transfer to this young man's hive?" "Oh, yes, sir! Mine has an overplus of Girls Next Door." "Good. Mr. Rowe, there's a skypilot two levels up -- look for the usual white collar just below the photocells. Marry this girl and take her home to your hive. If your Queen Mother objects refer her to -- er -- Potshelter here." He cut short the young people's thanks. "Just one thing," he said, wagging a finger at Rowe. "Don't written any more letters." "Why ever would I?" Richard answered. "Already my action is beginning to seem like a mad dream." "Not to me, dear," Jane corrected him. "Oh, sir, could I have the letter he sent me? Not to do anything with. Not to show anyone. Just to keep." "Well, I don't know -- " Krumbine began. "Oh, please, sir!" "Well, I don't know why not, I was going to say. Here you are, miss. Just see that this husband of yours never writtens another." He turned back as the contracting door shut the young couple from view. "You were right, Potshelter," he said briskly. "It was one of those combinations of mischances that have to issue recommendations for new procedures and safeguards that will reduce the possibilities to undoubtedly up the Terran income tax a healthy percentage, but we can't have something like this happening again. Every boy must marry the Girl Next Door! And the first-class mails must not be interfered with! The advertising must go through!"  "I'd almost like to see it happen again," Potshelter murmured dreamily, "if there were another Jane Dough in it."  had halted to allow a small cortege of machines to pass. First came a squad of police machines with Black Sorter in their midst, unmuzzled and docile enough, though still gnashing his teeth softly. Then -- stretched out horizontally and borne on the shoulders of Gray Psychiatrist, Black Coroner, White Nursemaid Seven and Greasy Joe -- there passed the slim form of Pink Wastebasket, snow-white in death. The machines were keening softly, mournfully. Round about the black pillars, little mecho-mops were scurrying like mice, cleaning up the last of the first-class-mail bits of confetti. Richard winced at this evidence of his aberration, but Jane squeezed his hand comfortingly, which produced in him a truly amazing sensation that changed his whole appearance. "I know how you feel, darling," she told him. "But don't worry about it. Just think, dear, I'll always be able to tell your friends' wives something no other woman in the world can boast of: that my husband once wrote me a letter!"      The lineup for next month is indeed something to write home about. There's a three-stage power plant of novelets: into the stratosphere of science fiction with a white-hot personal challenge. Before passing judgment, just ask yourself one question: Would you like answering for humanity any better than Ernie Meeker does? female traveler who goes from life to death and back again like a commuter on the #:#... except that each trip brings her nearer the beginning of the line! Martian among big-planet slickers, where, of course, he is bound to get into trouble. But that's nothing compared to the trouble he will be in if he does not get into trouble! Short stories -- no less than three and probably more. Our usual Roundup" details the findings to date of the International Geophysical Year and radars the blips of discoveries still to come. snva for your information I T is only to be expected that anybody who has read, say, more than a dozen books about Atlantis will show a pronounced tendency to be rather bored when he sees another title on the same theme. The probability is overwhelming that whatever it is the author of the new book has written, it has been written before. It does not matter much which twelve books on Atlantis you have read -- at least eight of the twelve must have told you that a complete list of all the books on Atlantis in all languages would comprise more than # titles, plus an estimated # papers and articles, not counting, of course, popularizations of such books and papers. A new book on Atlantis, then, rehashing the old ideas, is highly unlikely to cause any excitement. If I am going to discuss one here, it is because it contains a number of new ideas. It increases the "newsworthiness," if that is the proper term to use under the circumstances, that the book does not yet exist in English translation. There is a personal note to the story. Several years ago, at a science fiction convention, somebody asked my opinion about the claim of a North German pastor that he, or rather a diver whom he had hired, had found the ruins of Atlantis on the bottom of the North Sea. I replied at the time that I doubted very much that he had found Atlantis, but that I would not hesitate for a moment to accept the statement that he had found ruins of buildings. The shoreline of the eastern end of the North Sea, where it is bounded by Denmark and portions of Germany, had shifted considerably in what we would call early historical times if we were talking about the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The local inhabitants always were full of stories of sunken cities in the area, and by "always" I do not mean my father's or my grandfather's time but the time, more than # years ago, when early local chroniclers put these stories on paper. However, I decided to find out more about it. The first trouble was that the man who told me about the claim did not recall the pastor's name. More by chance than by anything else, I found out that the name is Jurgen Spanuth -- which should be pronounced easy to establish the title of the book. Then I wrote to Germany for a copy. My correspondent "regretted exceedingly," but the book was out of print. a telephone call from a publishing house in New York. They had been sent a new German book on Atlantis and would I care to read it for them? Charming coincidence, I thought, and said yes. The book came. Its author's name was Otto H. Muck and it turned out to be a hair-raising manipulation of scientific facts, very nearly as bad as Velikovsky. Then, frankly, I forgot about Pastor Spanuth. But last year his book was reprinted, which fact came to my attention via a book review. Now, armed with a copy, I can tell about his ideas. But, knowing that not every one of my readers will have read a dozen books on Atlantis, I must sketch in the background first The sole source of the whole Atlantis story is a Greek philosopher who died in # B.C. and is believed to have been born in # B.C. His name was Aristokles, but he was nicknamed Platon (with reference to his broad shoulders) and used Platon as his name in later life. For reasons not known to me, the final "n" dropped out in most languages (though Russian and French retain it), so that he is now known as Plato. The Atlantis story appeared in his works in two places, in the socalled "dialogues" -- the term "discussions" would be far more correct-named Timaios and Kritias. The first of the two does not contain much more than the statement that there once was a country called Atlantis and that the Atlanteans invaded the eastern Mediterranean. They were, the story says, very successful at first, but were finally beaten by the Athenians. In the second "dialogue," the one called Kritias, the Atlantis theme reappears with a detailed description of the main city, the king's castle and so forth. The Kritias is an unfinished work, but it is not a case of a fragment having been lost. We have what Plato wrote, but at a crucial point he stopped writing. Later writers -- writers of the twentieth century, that is -- have made a sentimental tale of this. They have made it appear as if the aged philosopher, using his last strength, tried to pass on a great secret to his followers, but that death overtook him in the middle of the work. " over this tragedy, let me assure you that the unfinished Kritias is not Plato's last work. A careful reading of the piece makes it perfectly clear what happened. The logic of the development calls for chastising the Atlanteans, even though it is not clear why they should be chastised, since their "crimes" are hardly worse than anybody else's. But while Plato built up toward the chastisement, he must have realized that, according to his own earlier statement, they had not just been chastised but had been wiped out, destroyed utterly. There was simply no way out of this dilemma, so Plato put the unfinished manuscript aside and wrote (and finished) the Laws. As has been mentioned, Plato is the sole source of the Atlantis story. Nobody before him used Fig. #: Map of Atlantis as shown in Mundus subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher, published #. North is at bottom of map the name; nobody at his time did; nobody after him did without reference to Plato. Plato's own pupil Aristotle did not take it literally and later classical writers, as, for example, Pliny the Elder, put the whole burden of the proof on Plato's broad shoulders. Now the first of the two "dialogues" is actually a discussion on Pythagorean philosophy. The people taking part in it are Socrates and three of his friends, named Timaios, Kritias and Hermokrates. The discussion is laid at about the time when Plato was born, presumably as a device so that he could keep himself out of it. After some preliminaries, one of the speakers tells that Solon traveled to Egypt at the time when a king whom the Greeks call Amasis (meaning Aahmes II) ruled the country. In reality, Aahmes II did not rule when the (historical) Solon traveled to Egypt. The trip must have been some time between # B.C. and # B.C, while Aahmes II became king more than a dozen years later, in # B.C. However, this is a minor detail. The Egyptian priests tell Solon that "she" -- the goddess Isis of the Egyptians, who is taken to be the same as the goddess Athena of the Greeks -- founded "this city" (Sa'is) # years ago and "your city" (Athens) a thousand years earlier. Of course, neither city was founded at such an early date. This discrepancy, which Plato's readers would have spotted at once, is explained away with a tale of recurring catastrophes that destroyed the original cities. The story, still relating what the Egyptian priests are supposed to have said, goes on to tell about a large island in the Atlantic Ocean. Strangely enough, this statement about the ocean is accompanied by a remark that it "was then navigable." The name of that island, at any event, was Atlantis and on it there was "a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over parts of the continent..." After having spread to lands bordering the Mediterranean, "vast power thus gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at one blow our country and yours..." One by one, the cities or nations were subdued, except for the Athenians who "defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjected." Then a catastrophe wiped out the Athenian army and, simultaneously, the entire island of Atlantis. This is as far as the Timaios goes about Atlantis. IN the later Kritias, there is a detailed description of the genealogy of the kings of Atlantis -- descended from the gods, of course -- and of the royal city and the palace. I am not going to waste any space repeating this description here. It is sufficient to say that the whole tenor of it is to show that the Atlanteans were mighty and rich. Especially the abundance of metal is stressed, gold and silver and bronze and orichalcum (we don't know what was meant by this word, but it is clearly stated that only gold was more valuable). After Plato had given all the details of the land and the palace, he obviously found himself at a loss. The "dialogue" goes on for roughly another printed page and stops at the instant when Zeus is ready to pronounce sentence. After reading all this, you had the following choices: The first one was to consider the whole an allegory for purposes of philosophical discussion. This is what most, if not all, people did until a few hundred years ago. The second choice was to take every word at face value, which meant assuming a major catastrophe that destroyed a large island, almost a small continent, in the past. But if you wanted to take the second choice, you quickly ran into a few difficulties, of which the very first was the dating. According to the Timaios, the Fig. #: Warriors of "Sea Peoples" pictured at temple of Medinet Habu, Egypt goddess founded the original Athens # years before Solon's visit to Egypt, which would be about # b.c. in our method of dating. But in the Kritias, Atlantis was destroyed # years ago, leaving no time for the Atlanteans to be defeated by the warriors of the newly founded city. Or else the other way round: leaving no time for the newly founded city to grow and to produce an army which could defeat such a mighty invader. Also, if you wanted to take the second choice, you still did not know where to put Atlantis, for the story only says that it was in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Nothing is actually said about direction. Fig. #: Warrior of "Sea People" with round shield, also from Medinet Habu Father Athanasius Kircher, in #, drew a map which has become standard (Fig. #) for generations of Atlantomanes, but although the legend on the map says that it followed Plato's description, this happens to be somewhat Fig. #: Outline of ship of "Sea Peoples" from Medinet Habu (top) Outline of ship from Brandskogen, Sweden, same period (bottom) exaggerated. There just is not that much description. Now if you did not want to take the first choice because this was much too simple, and found that you could not actually follow the second one, there remained a third choice, namely to try to find out what Plato "really" meant. "Obviously" he had slipped some place, either as far as directions or as far as chronology are concerned. The third choice is what produced about # books in not quite # years. I must have read at least thirty of them and each one required a rather drastic "suspension of disbelief' to follow the reasoning of the author. However, there still remained what might be called choice numero I B. It runs about as follows: Granted that Plato wrote an allegory for philosophical purposes, we might look for actual facts which he utilized. Writers hardly ever invent something out of their imagination only. If they describe a person, they have a real person in mind, one they know, have heard or read about. If they describe a train crash, they have a real one in mind or at the very least the fact that there are train crashes. Calling such direct or indirect memories "sources," one could legitimately ask what "sources" Plato had used. This particular line of questioning was caused by one fact that was noticed early. His description of the royal palace of Atlantis Fig. #: Map of Helgoland drawn # by Johannes Meyer, based on local tradition. Black area in lower left is # area of island. Circle "off shore" is location of Steingrund bears a most striking resemblance to Scheria, the city of the Phaiakians in Homer's Odyssey. Scholars have established as many as thirty points of agreement between the two cities. And the Odyssey had its present form long before Plato was born. That Homer, in turn, is assumed to have had a "source," namely an actual city, probably Tartessos in Spain, is not too important at this point. At least this item of Plato's story had a definite source. One could even go farther and say that if Homer did have Tartessos, the Tarshish of the Bible, in mind for his city of Scheria and if Plato knew this, then the idea of the destruction came from the same source. For, in the Odyssey, Scheria is an existing city in the far west. In Plato's time, the actual city no longer existed. Other such "sources" could be found quickly. The idea of recurring catastrophes was Babylonian. That there were earthquakes, Plato knew from personal experience. One which happened in Greece too early for his personal memory -- he must have been in the crawling stage at the timeinundated and partly destroyed a small Greek island. The name of that island was Atalante. In short, among his direct and indirect memories there was the fabulous city, the catastrophe and even the name! Everything else was an exposition of his own philosophy. Well, where does Pastor Spanuth come in? Pastor Spanuth, in my opinion, has succeeded in discovering another very important "source" for Plato. In the first place, he revised the chronology. Those # or # years which Plato was throwing around made no sense historically. But the Egyptians, even quite recently, went by #-day periods of calendar determination, based on the phases of the Moon. They counted # such periods as the year of their neighbors. Now if the figure of # refers to # such #-day periods -- of which a visiting Greek may not be aware -- we get an actual figure of # years. Since Solon's visit was around # B.C., the time of the invasion comes out to about # B.C., with a leeway of a number of years, since the # was clearly rounded off in one direction or the other. HP HE invasion would fall in the reign of Rameses II "the Great," who died in # B.C., after a #-year rule, at the age of about #. There is no such event in his lifetime. But only about # years later, under the rule of invasion of Egypt and nearby countries. The invaders were the Libyans, assisted by the "sea peoples." "documents" about which Solon spoke. They can still be seen on the walls of the temple at Medinet Habu. No doubt there was a major invasion at that time and largescale battles. The "sea peoples" (Fig. #, # and #) do look rather familiar. Their tribes, in the inscriptions, are named Pherest, Saskar and Denen. Pastor Spanuth thinks that this is the way an Egyptian scribe would have expressed the tribal names which, in English, read Frisians, Saxons and Danes. If large groups of North Europeans started moving southward, the result could well be what Plato said in a highly condensed form. They would move comparatively slowly, over many years, if possible making friends with the people they met -- the Libyans of the Egyptian records -- and finally attack the rich lands, Egypt and the neighboring Hittite Empire. The historical facts are that the Hittite Empire broke up at just that time and Egypt was severely threatened but managed to survive. The attackers, as later history had demonstrated repeatedly, would probably win for a long time but weaken themselves in the process until a final battle, which might be comparatively minor, breaks their back. It may have been Athens that broke it A small side issue is what happened to the "sea peoples" after their final defeat. Pastor Spanuth makes an interesting suggestion. The Hebrew version of the Pherest is phelestim. Philistines. I have to mention that Pastor Spanuth does not claim the credit for having thought of all this first. The revised dating was first suggested by the Swedish polyhistor Olaus Rudbeck in #. The idea that the invasion experienced by "source" of the invasion told by Plato was suggested first by the German philologist Prof. W. Christ in # and immediately afterward (and independently) by the English historian K. T. Frost. Well, the Egyptian pictures are pretty convincing -- these pictures, incidentally, were originally published by James Henry Breasted in a book Ancient Records ot Egypt, Chicago #. Plato's "sources" now begin to take on a well-rounded look. CO far, I find myself in whole hearted agreement with the material collected by Pastor Spanuth. But he goes farther. Since the "sea peoples" were a Danish-Frisian army, bringing horned helmets, round shields, a special kind of sword and amber (Spanuth takes Plato's orichalcum to mean amber, which is very likely correct) to the eastern Mediterranean, then the place Plato named Atlantis must have been in the Danish-Frisian area. His idea is that in, say, # b.c. and earlier, there was an empire in the north, comprising present-day Denmark and southern Sweden with the islands in between. Its capital, with the king's castle, was in the western part of this empire, near the sea, which in this case would be the North Sea. The present island of Helgoland is taken to be the western headland of this section. The king's castle was inland from there. There are quite a number of single facts which he can quote. This area was the original amber country; the larger amber deposits of East Prussia were not discovered until much later, at the time of Emperor Nero of Rome. Helgoland once was much bigger. In #, one Johannes Meyer drew a map based on local legends (Fig. #). It may be somewhat exaggerated in size, but it does give an idea of how much dry land there was in the eastern North Sea in times still dimly remembered several hundred years ago. The coastline did fluctuate and, at one time, one might have been able to walk from present Helgoland to present Denmark. king's castle was located to the east of the present-day Helgoland, in an area labeled Steingrund (stony bottom) on current nautical charts. Indubitably there are ruins of buildings and walls in the Steingrund. But that they were a king's castle still remains to be proved, if it can be proved. As regards the catastrophe, Pastor Spanuth can, of course, say that the Steingrund now is at the bottom of a sea, though the water is not very deep. He does make the interesting statement that the great exaggeration that crept into Plato's story could be due to a simple linguistic confusion. Supposing, Pastor Spanuth said, as in the case of Rome, the name of the empire and of its capital had been the same? If the city of Rome had been destroyed, say by a volcanic eruption, somebody with a taste for bigness could understand that the whole Roman Empire had been burned in a super-colossal catastrophe if somebody said "Rome is destroyed." Pastor Spanuth does think that the king's castle, "in one bad night and one day," as Plato has it, sank beneath the waves and he assumes that the castle and capital gave its original name, whatever it was, to the whole empire. On principle, I am in favor of a very thorough investigation of the Steingrund with modern means of underwater salvage. The results would be rewarding in any case. I don't think that Pastor Spanuth's thesis that this was the old Danish-Frisian empire's capital, which Plato named Atlantis, will be borne out. If it should be, however, I shall bow before a brilliant piece of reasoning with some luck thrown in, as has happened in the case of Schliemann's discovery of Troy. In the meantime, I am satisfied that Spanuth's diligent reading has turned up the identity of the warriors from "Atlantis" who invaded Egypt in # B.C. The Gentlest Unpeople Unswervingly considerate and ever so polite, they were helpful to a fault... even if the fault happened to be a monster out of spacel Slide stopped at the seventh square and rested under a tinkleberry tree. They were near' ly equal in points, but Popagator's time was already several seconds faster than The Slide's. Popagator flung himself gleefully on a hummock of damp green sand and cried: "Concede the game, friend, concede it! I've as good as won. And I will now lead you in our lifetime series by eight hundred and six games to seven fifty-nine!" He spoke in English; it was all the fashion that year. The Slide snarled: "Shut up and throw." Popagator merely smiled -- well, no. He didn't smile. He couldn't; he had no lips to smile with, being only a Venusian and a scrawny, shrunken one at that. But he in' '  m wwii # M mt i  W : s. fa dicated polite amusement. He toyed idly with the gem-encrusted hilt of his whirlarang and made a courteous observation. "I see," he said, diplomatically changing the subject, "that the monster has been this way." He sat up and sniffed. That was not necessary; both of them had long ago detected the rancid reek of the monster. The Slide said moodily: "I wish that fellow ahead of us would play through so we could get on with our game." The fruit of the tree overhead tinkled merrily in the soggy wind. Popagator stood up and made a couple of practice tosses, whishing air noisily through his bony mouth-cavity. It was the equivalent of a nonchalant whistle. The whirlarang spun up into the cloudy air, hovered, sailed high, dipped and returned to his hands. He caught The Slide's eye and said apologetically: "A little sloppy on the back-spin, I'm afraid." ly: "No, it would have been a tenpointer at least. You're at the top of your form today, Popagator. I wish we could get this game over with." I I "HE Venusian ahead of them, it was true, was taking an ungodly length of time to play the eighth square. He was slumped against a dike that held a water trap, in the middle of the looped grove of twiny trees that made the eighth square such a tricky over-and-under shot. His head was down, as though he were asleep, and his whirlarang was not in his hand. "Inconsiderate," growled The Slide. In truth, it was. No doubt the fellow was taking a little rest, too, just as they were, but, all the same, it was very far from being sportsmanlike. Popagator frowned -- well, no. He couldn't frown any more than he could smile, for much the same reasons. It takes loose folds of flesh either to smile or to frown. There are no loose folds on a Venusian's face; in fact, there is no external flesh at all, or none to speak of, since they are arthropods. Popagator caught another whiff of the sour monster odor and coughed chokingly. To take his mind off it, he clattered his whirlarang noisily from "hand" to "hand," admiring the play of light from the sparkling facets set into the hilt. Venusians are all great admirers of point sources of light, since the clouds of their atmosphere make such common objects as sun and stars completely unknown to them. And Popagator's whirlarang, gemmed like a Pharaoh, was a particularly noble instrument. It had been in his family for one hundred and nine generations. Popagator stroked the worn hilt reminiscently, thinking of the splendid comeback he had made on square five when, trailing by a point and a half, he had thrown a perfect triple reverse to catch up in points and lead in time. All Venusians are skilled in the use of the whirlarang; Popagator could not remember a day, since his first dim memories as a tiny imago, when it had not been an obsession with him -- first as a matter of theory, then, as he passed the larval and soft-bodied stages and developed the hard limbs that came with adult life, as a matter of hourly, daily and incessant practice. It was a major fact in the life of every Venusian. They had very little else to do. The whirlarang itself was basically the same instrument that miles away, had themselves developed in the dawn of their crude culture. But where loinclothed savages had found only a hunting instrument and a weapon of war, Popagator's enormously cultured race had refined it, had redesigned and rebuilt it out of a complex assortment of materials far beyond the resources of a savage, and had surrounded it with a code of behavior and rules that turned a whirlarang round into a contest as complicated and as absorbing as chess or contract bridge, with the added requirements of strength and enormous physical skill. # T AM tired," rasped The Slide, "of waiting for that fellow to play through! They shouldn't allow singles anyway." Popagator soothed: "Let us walk forward to the next square. That is polite, not ill-mannered. And perhaps it will remind him that we are waiting." He moved forward over the sandy, spongy ground with a clickety-click of his bony members, The Slide click-scratching moodily along behind. The closer they got to the silent Venusian on square eight, the stronger the fetid, repulsive monster stench became. "Whew," choked The Slide. "If I had known it was going to be this bad, I never would have -- " He stopped. Both stopped, not only speech but movement. There was a reason why the idle Venusian on square eight was not playing through, and the reason was this: He was dead. His hand-member was split open, and so was his lolling head. Bluish tricklings of brain and nervous tissue leaked nastily out. His whirlarang was missing. Dead. Murdered. Popagator looked at The Slide, and The Slide stared with all of his eyes at Popagator. "Murder," said Popagator at last. "It's a case for the Justice Machines." The Slide nodded -- well, no. But he gave assent, in the way customary to Venusians. "It is murder," he echoed. "We must report this with all possible haste." "Right," Popagator agreed. "Well, play, friend! We've got fourteen squares to go and we must hurry. We must notify the Justice Machines the very moment we finish!" II r T , HE monster sat on the tail strut of his rocket, whistling. He turned over the whirlarang he had taken from the Venusian, admiring the play of light on the rubies and diamonds set into its handle. "Son of a gun," he said aloud, hiccoughing. "This sure beats working for a living!" He tilted a stainless steel flask to his lips and belched happily. The monster's name was David T. Jiminez, and he was a certified space explorer in the employ of the I.G.Y. He tossed the whirlarang into the air and clumsily caught it. He was forty-nine years old, and for the first time in his life he was sublimely happy. Jiminez emptied the flask and tossed it away. "Hi-diddle-de-dee," he sang. "The spaceman's life for me!" He banged the whirlarang against the side of his rocket, hiccoughed, frowned and thought for a second. That wasn't such a good idea. Jiminez had no very good idea of just how fragile the hull of a rocketship was -- "I don't dig that science jazz," he had told the I.G.Y. personnel office disarmingly -- but, you never know, maybe he might knock a hole in it. Why take a chance? There was plenty of junk around. He prowled through a heap of parts, tools and instruments that were tossed rusting on the seagreen moss. There was a black box, forearm length, with a hinged lid; on it was stenciled: Contents Fragile. Stow in padded locker. Protect against jolts and jars. He opened the lid, hefted the silvery tube inside thoughtfully, nodded and began to bang it against the whirlarang, trying to loosen the gems from their setting. A clicking, rasping voice from behind him said inquiringly: "O Monster?" Jiminez turned around belligerently. It was one of the damned bugs -- naturally; there weren't any other human beings in this part of Venus. That was what made it so nice. Jiminez disliked people, but he couldn't stand the bugs. It wasn't so bad that they were more or less the shape of a human being, or even that they lived in houses like human beings, used tools like human beings, even operated machinery like human beings -- and kinds of machinery that, in some cases, humans couldn't quite match, or even understand. What was really bad was that they talked like human beings. That, in Dirty Davey Jiminez's opinion, was pretty gaw-dam uppity of them, giving themselves airs. He had no idea that the Venusians did it from motives of purest politeness, since humans had shown themselves unable to grasp the barest fundamentals of the Venusian tongue. He snarled, "Beat it, you." from Jiminez's breath, the Venusian said apologetically, "O Monster, I am Popagator. Isn't that the whirlarang of Wnotagashti the Drum?" "You bugs gimme a pain," Jiminez said impatiently. "How'm I supposed to know?" "Wnotagashti the Drum has been killed," the Venusian explained helpfully. "His head was split open. You were in the area just before it happened." Jiminez thought for a moment, weaving slightly. "Oh, yeah, that. I tell you what happened, buster. I took it off him and he give me an argument. Well, I lost my temper. I mean it was a gaw-dam case of deliberate and insupportable rudeness, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a lot of gaw-dam rudeness. You know how it is. So I bashed him." The Venusian moved inconspicuously to windward. He said compassionately: "A terrible ordeal, O Monster. Wnotagashti the Drum must have been deranged." "That's what I thought," Jiminez agreed. "Now why don't you beat it so I can get a little work done around here?" "Certainly. But -- O Monster, there is one thing." "Now what? Ain't you got any consideration? I got plenty on my mind already, you know." "The Justice Machines," said Popagator apologetically. "My whirlarang companion, The Slide, has notified them of the accident to Wnotagashti the Drum. They will surely investigate you, O Monster." Jiminez straightened up with faint alarm. "What the devil you talking about?" he demanded. Popagator whished air noisily through his mouth-cavity for a second in a disarming way. He said: "It is their function, O Monster. They are devices, like those which you call 'harness bulls.' One will come to interview you in this matter, perhaps quite soon." "But the little rat gimme a hard time!" Jiminez protested, his stomach moving queasily. What was wrong here? Had he made a mistake of some sort? He said: "Dint you hear me? I only took the stinking thing away from him. And right away he argues with me! Talk about bad manners, bub, I tell you this was the worst." "I understand," Popagator sympathized. "It is very clear, O Monster. You need only tell this to the Justice Machine, that is all. But I wished to notify you that it was coming, as an act of courtesy." "Sure," said Jiminez, ungraciously, but feeling slightly more relaxed. "All right now, would you do me a favor and get lost? I got things to do, Charley. I can't spend the whole day talking to every lousy bug that comes along, understand?" "I understand, O Monster," Popagator said in grave apology. "Good-by." junk on the ground until he found another flask and took a long pull on it. Confidence flowed back into him. He wiped his lips and sat down for a moment to rest -- well, no. He sat down to finish the jug. Jiminez had not always been a paid space-traveler for the International Geophysical Year (as it was still quaintly called). For thirty-five years of his life, in fact, he had been a jockey. That was all behind him now -- mostly because of the trouble the State Board gave him in New York over the # running of the Belmont 'Cap. The nag involved was named Heuristic Harry, and when he beat the finest three-year-olds of his day by six lengths, naturally there were questions. The benzedrine sulfate they found in Heuristic Harry's saliva provided some of the answers, and that was the end of the line for Jiminez's career as a jockey, at least in that part of the world. A setdown jockey pushing fifty doesn't have many chances to make a living. And even somebody like Jiminez doesn't like to resign himself to starving to death. He tried Mexico for a while, but there were all too many setdown jocks fighting for mounts there, and not much money anyway. Jiminez had got used to a lot of money. And then, when he saw the ad, he had drifted toward the I.G.Y. district office. It seemed that fewer than one man in ten thousand had the peculiar genetic constitution that made it possible for him to endure the cosmic radiation that killed off most humans. It seemed further that small menex-jocks, for example -- were particularly useful for space travel, since they didn't take as much room. Jiminez still laughed out loud when he remembered the personnel officer's face. The man had stared silently at a blank wall for nearly five minutes, his mouth working soundlessly, with Jiminez's completed test forms in front of him. But finally he had signed them, stamped them "Approved" and turned his back until Jiminez was out of the room. It looked, thought Jiminez, as though they were having real trouble finding the kind of men they needed. So -- well, first he had tried to hold them up for double the usual pay, and failed; he had listened to an appeal to his sense of altruism and dedication to human progress from another I.G.Y. man, laughed in the man's face and drifted away. But there wasn't much else to do, and that was a fact. And then he had been stuck in a hotel room, wondering how to get out without paying the rent. And there had been a magazine. Jiminez wasn't much of a reader, but it was a long wait until the night desk clerk would sneak out for a quick beer, so he painfully spelled out the article on the first Venusian exploration parties. And then Jiminez realized just what opportunities were open to him under the auspices of the I.G.Y.'s space-exploration program. flask away, Jiminez stood up, wobbling. He picked up the whirlarang from the ground and, still carrying it, lurched over to the vats he had scrabbled out of the soggy Venusian soil. It was a ritual with him; nearly every time he finished a flask, he inspected the progress of his mash, to make sure that there would be more when that was gone. The mash had stopped bubbling. Nearly all the fermentation was over; it was almost time to dip out the sour juice and distill it. There would be, he calculated with difficulty, somewhere upward of fifty gallons of what you could call either beer or wine, as you chose, for him to push through the still. It was a good little still. It had been designed by some very highpriced talent to meet the needs of explorers for safe, potable water, and it worked just as well for Jiminez's purposes. It would give a high, powerful yield. Call it ten gallons of approximately hundred-proof brandy -- if you wanted to call it brandy. Sometimes he thought of it as whiskey, sometimes as gin; it didn't really resemble anything on Earth. But it would be ten gallons of something. At a quart a day -- and he could make do with that -- it would carry him through another month and leave a two-week supply, or nearly, for the return flight to Earth. That was very good. In another month, it would be just about time to take off for Earth again, according to the pre-set flight patterns built into the rocket's controls. And by then he would be ready. Grinning happily, Jiminez lurched back to the ship and tossed the whirlarang into the open hatch. It landed with a splintering crash -- some metal-and-glass object had been in the way and was now a thousand fragments -- and one of the sparkling jewels was dislodged. It rolled away under the sturdy legs of the tripod that held the silent pressure-temperature-humidity recorder. But that didn't matter; he would find the jewel before he took off. Because then he would take out that recorder -- along with a lot of other junk the I.G.Y. people had installed -- and leave it to rust on the soil of Venus. He had already tossed out about half the stuff; there was plenty of time to get rid of the rest. Those things weighed plenty. What Jiminez wanted was to get rid of them. In the first place, all those clever and expensive little devices would be of no use at all to the I.G.Y. -- because Jiminez's landing plan did not involve a return to the Yuma, Arizona, base where he was expected. It was his notion to land in either New Zealand or the Belgian Congo. And in the second place, he needed all the weight he could save. The glittering facets of the whirlarang were diamonds and rubies. The whirlarang itself was hollow platinum. He had already acquired nearly six hundred pounds of assorted gems and precious metals, and it was necessary to balance that weight, now tossed carelessly into the ship, by an equal weight of unnecessary junk removed. TT was all easy, amazingly easy. These funny-looking bugs that were the dominant race on Venus were just too polite to refuse anything. They never said no. They never stopped him, no matter what he did. Jiminez began ladling fermentation liquor into the pot of the still. He was sweating profusely in the warm, wet air, but he didn't mind, not at all. The bugs lived in a sort of tinplate Utopia; all their major needs were cared for by machines, running soundlessly out of sight and providing food, power, clothes, homes. According to the magazine article, they had lived that way for a thousand generations, since the time they nearly destroyed their planet in a war and substituted a code of politeness and a driving interest in games for more dangerous ways of life. It worked out very nicely, whatever the reason. He walked into their houses and took away their very cooking utensils, and they didn't do a thing. The cook-pots were spun platinum. He shinnied up the side of the largest structure in their town -- a triangular tower four stories high; embedded zircons and topaz were his footholds and grips, and at the top were fourteen diamonds of a hundred carats and up. He pried them from their settings and the bugs didn't do a thing. He pulled two hundred meters of silver wire out of the municipal power plant -- that was before he caught onto the fact that silver was a waste of time -- and for five days the town was without electricity, until the automatic machines were able to replace it. And the Venusians still didn't do a thing. Only the bug this morning, the one he'd taken the whirlarang away from, he had acted up. Jiminez rested from his labors. He poured himself a shot of his last batch of brew, held his nose, threw it down, retched briefly and felt it take hold. He pondered cloudily: Would there be any trouble about that? Probably not, he thought. Let the Justice Machine come. As the other bug had said, he had an iron-clad case. Anyway, he thought belligerently, let them try! It was plain selfdefense, because how did he know what the bug was trying to do? Those whirlarang gadgets could kill somebody, couldn't they? And the bugs were pretty good with them. And -- Well, anyway. If the Justice Machine did come -- and he was pretty sure it never would; it was just a bug bluff -- he would outline the situation in a few simple words and it would go away again. That was all there was to it. The bug had, surprisingly, refused to yield the whirlarang -- apparently it was only in the games that they acted normally selfish, greedy and competitive. So naturally he had hit the bug. He had to admit that maybe he wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for a certain hangover. But he hadn't realized that the bugs could be killed quite so easily. It was a plain accident, of course. Besides, it was self-defense. Furthermore, they wouldn't do anything about it. He was very sure of that, right up to the moment when he heard the clattering and clanking of something big and mechanical coming out of the charred second-growth vines that were already springing up around his rocket, and an enormous metallic creation on ing arms and limbs, rolled dangerously up to him. And, wham, zowie, the limbs were all around him. Dirty Davey Jiminez whooped and screamed and fought, but it didn't do a bit of good. The Justice Machine wasn't listening. It carried him away. He was caught, fair and square. Ill T HE monster named Jiminez howled to the unfeeling machine: "You can't do this to me! I demand a mouthpiece. I'm practically an ambassador, don't you know that? I work for the gawdam International Geofistical Year! Ever hear of it, damn you? Sure you have! That's an official government thing in the United Nations, buster, and they got lots of moxie back on Earth. They'll have a fleet of warships down here so fast, it'll make your head spin! I mean -- " He stopped, confused. The machine had no head. Jiminez sat down and tried to think. He had a hangover that was getting worse with every minute, but it was time to do some thinking. The machine had carried him, hollering and wriggling as much as he could, but whatever he did, it was no use; the machine was built to handle adult Venusians, and it managed a mere monster without effort or strain. It had taken him to the triangular tower. A door he had never suspected had opened and he had found himself in jail. Anyway, he thought it was a jail because he was locked in, and because the machine stayed with him as a warden. There was a whole world under the gay, gemstudded homes of the Venusians that appeared on the surface, so Jiminez discovered. The Justice Machine bore him through corridors, past a dreadfully odorous place where filth-stained walls hinted at unpleasant events, into a narrow cell. There was a constant thrumming in the walls and floor. Machines were nearby, the machines, no doubt, on which the Venusians depended for all their goods. The Justice Machine set him down and retreated to a post by the door. back of his hand, glowered at the silent machine and considered his position. He admitted to himself through a pounding headache that it was a rough spot. He had been in rougher, perhaps, but he couldn't think when. There was a sound from the door and a clicking, rasping voice inquired: "O Monster?" It was the bug named -- named -- Jiminez managed to recall it: Popagator. "Hah!" cried Jiminez, at once again enraged. "You, Popagator! I thought you told me the Justice Machine wouldn't bother me!" "An error, O Monster," Popagator apologized. "Error, hah? You bet it was an error. Popagator, I'm telling you, you better get me out of here! You hear me? Don't you know I got the whole United Nations behind me? You know what that means, don't you? One bleat from me and, wham, zowie, the great white fathers from far off in space will come blazing and shooting down with their devil birds. Man, I'm warning you!" Popagator stepped nimbly out of range of the monster's breath. He said ruefully: "The thing is, Monster, the deed is a terrible one. You killed one of our people-" "But he gimme a rough time!" " -- while he was playing the whirlarang game. It is not the the game. Wnotagashti the Drum may have been deranged, but he was entitled to throw his whirlarang." #(T T was a accident!" roared Jiminez. "Self-defense, see? I only touched the gaw-dam bug, that's all. He split wide open. How was I supposed to know he was so -- " "Peace, O Monster," Popagator said with warm sympathy. "Now I understand your position. It was an accident?" "Gaw-dam right!" "Then," said Popagator with great assurance, "you need not worry. The Justice Machine will shortly examine you, when witnesses are found." "Witnesses? What kind of witnesses?" "Those who may know something to your benefit, Monster. For be assured, all of our people love you monsters very much. We wish to help you." "The best way to help me," Jiminez snarled, "is to get me out of this stinking joint." "Of course, Monster. It is only necessary to go through the formality before the Justice Machine." He shrugged -- well, no. But he achieved the same effect. Jiminez took a deep breath and sat down, grumbling. The crime, he began to understand, was not so much murder, or insecticide, but interfering with someone playing a game. That was a definite breach of regulations. "But I didn't know!" Jiminez cried hoarsely. "Our customs are all different, and besides he gave me a hard time." "Of course, O Monster," soothed Popagator. "I understand. Believe me, I shall see that the Justice Machine takes that into account at the hearing. And surely you will be released. Have no doubt of it." "That's better," grunted Jimi r nez, slightly appeased. "Of course," said the Venusian delicately, "if by any unforeseen chance -- " "Hey, wait!" squawked Jiminez. "What chance?" "O Monster," said Popagator gravely, "there is always the theoretical and hardly to be considered possibility that the Justice Machine will make a mistake." "Now you tell me! Listen, buster, I'm practically an ambassador, get that through your thick head! If anything hap -- " "But in that event," the Venusian interrupted quickly, "there remains the Appeals Panel. You see? Our machines are arranged so that even the hardly possible chance of error can still be corrected." "It damn better be," said Jiminez in a surly tone. He slumped back against the wall. "Jeez," he groaned, "what a head. Say, listen. It looks like I'm going to be here for a while. I want you to do something for me." "Command me, O Monster." "You take a hike down by my ship, okay? There's a rack of steel bottles marked 'Emergency Water Supply.' Some of them are sealed tight. Don't pay any attention to those -- they've got water in them -- but bring me one of the others." "Certainly, O Monster." Popagator turned to go. He was halted by the Earthman. "Wait a minute! Come to think of it, better bring me two!" The Justice Machine waved its ropy steel tentacles and cascades of flickering lights flashed up and down its sides as it weighed the evidence of the eight Venusians. Nobody asked Jiminez to testify, but that was just as well. He wasn't paying much attention anyway. He caroled: "The wind blew through the old man's whiskers. His heart was filled with joy and song." The Justice Machine squatted on its metal wheels, its innards clicking. No sound came out of the Justice Machine -- it only received information; it did not broadcast any. The Witnesses were brief and explicit. There was a lot of talk about the lifetime Total Aggregate Whirlarang Weighted Score of the deceased Wnotagashti the Drum. Jiminez couldn't make much sense of it and didn't much try. "He never had to wear pajamas -- " The Justice Machine's lights flickered incandescently and then, suddenly, all went out at once. Three of the Machine's tentacles made a gesture toward Jiminez. The Venusians chattered excitedly among themselves. "Because his whiskers were so long!" Jiminez, heedless, sang drunkenly on, waving the stainless steel flask of home-stilled popskull in time with the clicking of the machine. At last he noticed that the small-bodied Venusian named Popagator was standing before him, humbly waiting his attention. "O Monster?" said Popagator. "Well, now what?" Jiminez demanded belligerently, hiccoughing. "The trial is over, O Monster. The Justice Machine has reached its decision." "It has, has it?" panted Jiminez, standing up with some difficulty. "Aha. Oho. And just about bloody time, if you ask me. Well, I guess I'm about ready to shake the dust of this crummy planet off my feet anyhow. So long, bugs! So long, suckers! Here goes Jiminez for the Belgian Congo and a lifetime of luxury!" He laughed raucously, disregarding the fact that he could not take off for another three and a half weeks, and started for the door. But he didn't make it The Justice Machine flared in blinding colors and spun swiftly to come between him and the door. "Hey!" cried Jiminez, more surprised than angry. "What's matter?" Popagator came up behind him and coughed apologetically -- well, no. What he did was to contract his dorsal chitin with a faint popping sound, but it was the equivalent of a cough. He said regretfully: "O Monster, don't worry, but there has been some mistake. The Justice Machine found you guilty." IV r I "HE Slide spun around three times, and on the third turn released the hilt of his whirlarang with that slippy-slidy motion that was the hallmark of his entire family. The whirlarang shot out straight and true for the grove of tinkleberry trees that indicated the target area of the eighth square. It circled the grove twice, flipflopped, described a lazy S and returned to its owner. He caught it triumphantly. "A six-pointer!" he crowed. "Top that, Popagator!" "I don't know if I can," Popagator confessed moodily. 'Tm off my form today." "You certainly are," jeered the larger Venusian. "It isn't often I take three straight games from you. What's bothering you? The Monster?" Popagator nodded -- well, no. The Slide said sympathetically: "I know how you feel. It presses on your mind, thinking of him sitting in that cell and waiting for the Justice Machine to report on the decision of the Appeals Panel. I feel it myself." "We've got to help him!" "Of course, Popagator. It's cruel to worry another being -- and Earth monsters are considered to be beings in spite of everything." "I hate to think of him worrying, as he must be." "Me, too." Popagator said seriously: "I want to do something about it right away. I propose that we both visit him to cheer him up -- the sooner, the better." "Agreed!" cried The Slide. "Come, let's hurry! We'll finish this game and then -- no more than two more, eh? And then we'll race to his side!" # UT it was a long time for Dave Jiminez. With a full flask by his side, he was cold sober. That had never happened before in his life. The Justice Machine was silent and motionless by the door; it never moved, never made a sound except once when, driven by desperation, he approached it. And then it was all sudden movement and threatening lashings of the arms, and he retreated and never approached it again. But now it moved. It rolled aside. The door opened and two Venusians clattered in -- that Popagator and another one who had testified at the crazy mockery they called a trial. The Slide, his name was. "This is a friend, O Monster," said Popagator. "He is on your side, just as I am. You mustn't worry. We'll see that you get out of here." "Damn better," snarled Jiminez. "What's holding things up?" "The Appeals Panel," said The Slide. "It is considering your case. Naturally, it will reverse the Justice Machine's decision." "Naturally," growled Jiminez. "How long does that take?"- looked at each other. "It doesn't take long, O Monster," said Popagator at last. "Better not." Jiminez looked at his visitors and made a repelled face. Still, even cockroach-shaped visitors were better than no visitors at all. Anyway, he felt slightly better. He felt good enough, in fact, to bend down for the ignored stainless steel flask. He took a long pull, moaned as his throat constricted, stood rigid for a moment and then relaxed. "Zowie," he said hoarsely. "Say, just out of curiosity -- what would happen if the Appeals Panel ruled against me?" "Why," said Popagator, "the penalty for interference with the game is death, of course." "D -- " Jiminez paused, the flask half-tilted in his hand, his sallow face turning a dirty gray. "D -- " "Death," the Venusian finished for him. But he added, in a warmly sympathetic tone: "There's nothing to worry about, O Monster. We are on your side. We'll see that no harm comes to you." "You will? How will you? What happens if you don't?" "O Monster," said Popagator apologetically, "then the Justice Machine will exterminate you. But don't worry. It is nearly certain that the Appeals Panel will correct the error." Jiminez slowly set the flask down and began loosening his collar. He stared at the Justice Machine. Like all the Venusian gadgets, it seemed to be built to last He could just imagine those ropy metal limbs wrapping around a Venusian and cracking the shell, wrenching the limbs off, ending life in a matter of seconds. With a mammalian Earthman, all flesh and fat and fluids surrounding a frame of bone, it would be squishier. But no less final. He swallowed, and found his throat was dry. "That room -- " He coughed. "That room I passed on the way in." "The Room of Reckoning, O Monster?" "If that's what you call the one that looks like a slaughterhouse, yeah. Is that the place where -- " "That is the place, O Monster," said Popagator gravely. Justice Machine and lights flashed up and down its sides. Jiminez jumped, kicking the flask at his feet clattering against the wall. He hesitated, torn between basic urges; he glanced frantically at the Justice Machine, then dropped to his knees, scrabbling for the flask and stopper. He heard a sorrowful voice say: "Oh, my. This is very strange." He looked up, apprehensive. Popagator and The Slide were clacking at each other in a low tone. "What happened?" Jiminez bleated in fright Popagator looked at the other Venusian, and then spoke. "The Appeals Panel, O Monster. It has acted in your case." "And?" The Venusian's embarrassment was almost human. "Don't worry, O Monster. But they, too, found you guilty." Jiminez fell back against the wall. Then he surged forward, furious. "Now wait!" he bawled. "I took enough from you guys! I demand you get me out of this place right now. This damn thing has gone far enough and it isn't going any further, you hear? I'm warning you. Do you want the great white godlings from the sky coming down here shooting and stomping and -- " "Oh, no, O Monster," interrupted The Slide. "Of course not." "Well, then! Then you damn better smarten up. I tell you there's going to be one terrible mess here on Venus if I don't get back. The I.G.Y. don't like it when us emissaries get knocked off, you know! And what the I.G.Y. says goes." "That is true, O Monster," The Slide admitted. "It is known to all of us. The I.G.Y. is in charge of Venus." "So you better get me out of here!" The Venusians whispered fleetingly to one another. "Speak up!" Jiminez cried. "Talk English!" "We were only discussing how we could best help you," apologized Popagator. Then, in a voice as warm as toast, he added: "O Monster, there is a way. It is clear that our machines are not equipped to deal with Earth persons. We must act against the machines." "Meaning what?" "Meaning, O Monster, that Venusians such as we cannot permit you to suffer unjustly. It is against our code of behavior." Popagator looked gravely at Jiminez with all of his eyes and said: "We are going to help you escape!" waited, drinking heavily. It was a searing torment to him, to think that he was trusting the word of the lousy bugs. Bugs were to be stepped on or sprayed with D.D.T. Bugs were to furnish him with the good things of life, such as jewels and gold, that would finance a happy and dissolute old age back on Earth. Bugs were not to be trusted. But he had no choice. And then, at last, there was a scratching at the door. It was Popagator, The Slide and four other Venusians. Jiminez froze, watching. Two of the Venusians stepped up to the quietly menacing Justice Machine and did something he couldn't follow to the arrays of lights and glittering projections on its sides. There was a series of clicks and a flash of muted lights. And then the Justice Machine rolled quietly out into the corridor and away. "We relieved it of duty, O Monster," said Popagator proudly. "It is a thing which is seldom done." "Is it a thing that'll get me out of here?" Jiminez demanded. "Oh, beyond doubt Monster," Popagator added politely, "permit me to introduce you to our colleagues in this venture of rescuing you. Reading from left to right these are Xxil the Predestinarian, Klamagog, Small Wnotagashti and Sustemong. The Slide you already know." "Pleased to meet you," Jiminez said absently. "Now let's get the -- Hey. Small who?" "Small Wnotagashti, O Monster." "Any relation to -- " "Oh, yes. His son, O Monster." Jiminez swallowed. "You mean this character's the son of the bug to help me get out of this place?" "We Venusians are extremely helpful and polite," Popagator explained. "Now we must go. We have to walk down this corridor, past the machine areas, into the Room of Reckoning. There -- " "Oh, no, you don't!" Jiminez cried. "I'm not going in that place! What is this, a doublecross?" "It is necessary, O Monster," Popagator said patiently. "There is a chute in the Room of Reckoning which is used for removing the -- " he hesitated -- "which leads to a way out" "There isn't any other way, O Monster." Jiminez, carrying the last few drops of precious numbwit in the stainless steel flask, shambled after the little posse of Venusians. They went down the long corridor past the shuddering chambers of the machines, and no one was to be seen. "We are here, O Monster," said one of them. "Where?" asked Jiminez suspiciously. "The Room of Reckoning, the avenue of your escape," Popagator said in a voice as sweet as honey and as warm as toast. "Open that door, O Monster, and walk in." Jiminez, his hand on the door, turned, suddenly afraid, but they were crowding in on him, all six of them. The door was borne open and he was thrust inside. And there was the Justice Machine, its ropy arms a-swing, in the room with the moldering spatters of green and blue, that now added a new range of colors to its scheme. ing air, the Venusians congratulated each other on the tact and delicacy with which they had handled the matter. "It would have been cruel to let him suffer," said Small Wnotagashti solemnly. "My father would have wanted it this way." "We have done well," agreed Popagator, and the others went about their errands, leaving him with The Slide. The Slide stretched and yawned -- well, no. But he relaxed. "We Venusians," he commented, "are polite and thoughtful to a fault. Tell me, do you think we can get another game in before dark?" "If not," twinkled Popagator, "we can always play under the lights. I don't have any trouble with nighttime rules!" The Slide excused himself: "This has been a strain, you know." "Of course. It is well known that monsters require even more politeness and patience than our own race. It is the least we can do for them." They started off toward the first square. After a moment, Popagator added absently: "You know, in one way we have failed the monsters even yet." "Failed them? What are you talking about, Popagator?" "The ship," Popagator explained. "They expect it to be returned. Perhaps we should return it as a matter of common politeness, with a few of us aboard?" He hefted his whirlarang and tossed it in a slow curve, following it with his eye. "I am sure," he said thoughtfully, "that there would be many acts of politeness we could perform on their own planet" the gun without a bang Making the ultimate anything takes the ultimate thought -- and how ultimate is ultimate? D ID a twig snap? Dixon looked back and thought he saw a dark shape melt into the underbrush. Instantly he froze, staring back through the green-boled trees. There was a complete and expectant silence. Far overhead, a carrion bird balanced on an updraft, surveying the sunburned landscape, waiting, hoping. Then Dixon heard a low, impatient cough from the underbrush. Now he knew he was being followed. Before, it had only been an assumption. But those vague, halfseen shapes had been real. They had left him alone on his trek to the signal station, watching, deciding. Now they were ready to try something. He removed the Weapon from its holster, checked the safeties, reholstered it and continued walking. He heard another cough. Something was patiently trailing him, probably waiting until he left the bush and entered the forest Dixon grinned to himself. Nothing could hurt him. He had the Weapon. Without it, he would never have ventured so far from his spaceship. One simply didn't wander around on an alien planet. But Dixon could. On his hip was the weapon to end all weapons, absolute insurance against anything that walked or crawled or flew or swam. It was the last word in handguns, the ultimate in personal armament It was the Weapon. He looked back again. There were three beasts, less than fifty yards behind him. From that distance, they resembled dogs or hyenas. They coughed at him and moved slowly forward. He touched the Weapon, but decided against using it immediately. There would be plenty of time when they came closer. man, very broad in the chest and shoulders. His hair was streaky blond, and he had a blond mustache which curled up at the ends. This mustache gave his tanned face a frank, ferocious appearance. His natural habitat was Terra's bars and taverns. There, dressed in stained khakis, he could order drinks in a loud, belligerent voice, and pierce his fellow-drinkers with narrow gunmetal-blue eyes. He enjoyed explaining to the drinkers, in a somewhat contemptuous tone, the difference between a Sykes needier and a Colt threepoint, between the Martian horned adleper and the Venusian scorn, and just what to do when a Rannarean horntank is charging you in thick brush, and how to beat off an attack of winged glitterflits. Some men considered Dixon all bluff, but they were careful not to call it. Others thought he was a good man in spite of his inflated opinion of himself. He was just overconfident, they explained. Death or mutilation would correct this flaw. Dixon was a great believer in personal armament. To his way of thinking, the winning of the American West was simply a contest between bow and arrow and Colt .#. Africa? The spear against the rifle. Mars? The Colt three-point against the spinknife. H-bombs smeared cities, but individual men with small arms took the territory. Why look for fuzzy economic, philosophical or political reasons when everything was so simple? He had, of course, utter confidence in the Weapon. Glancing back, he saw that half a dozen doglike creatures had joined the original three. They were walking in the open now, tongues lolling out, slowly closing the distance. Dixon decided to hold fire just a little longer. The shock effect would be that much greater. He had held many jobs in his time -- explorer, hunter, prospector, asteroider. Fortune seemed to elude him. The other man always stumbled across the lost city, shot the rare beast, found the ore-bearing stream. He accepted his fate cheerfully. Damned poor luck, but what can you do? Now he was a radioman, checking the automatic signal stations on a dozen unoccupied worlds. But more important, he was giving the ultimate handgun its first test in the field. The gun's inventors hoped the Weapon would become standard. Dixon hoped he would become standard with it rain forest. His ship lay about two miles ahead in a little clearing. As he entered the forest's gloomy shade, he heard the excited squeaking of arboreals. They were colored orange and blue, and they watched him intently from the treetops. It was definitely an African sort of place, Dixon decided. He hoped he would encounter some big game, get a decent trophy head or two. Behind him, the wild dogs had approached to twenty yards. They were gray and brown, the size of terriers, with a hyena's jaws. Some of them had moved into the underbrush, racing ahead to cut him off. It was time to show the Weapon. Dixon unholstered it. The Weapon was pistol-shaped and quite heavy. It also balanced poorly. The inventors had promised to reduce the weight and improve the heft in subsequent models. But Dixon liked it just the way it was. He admired it for a moment, then clicked off the safeties and adjusted for single shot. The pack came loping toward him, coughing and snarling. Dixon took casual aim and fired. The Weapon hummed faintly. Ahead, for a distance of a hundred yards, a section of forest simply vanished. Dixon had fired the first disintegrator. From a muzzle aperture of less than an inch, the beam had fanned out to a maximum diameter of twelve feet. A conic section, waisthigh and a hundred yards long, appeared in the forest. Within it, nothing remained. Trees, insects, plants, shrubs, wild dogs, butterflies, all were gone. Overhanging boughs caught in the blast area looked as though they had been sheared by a giant razor. Dixon estimated he had caught at least seven of the wild dogs in the blast Seven beasts with a half-second burst! No problems of deflection or trajectory, as with a missile gun. No need to reload, for the Weapon had a power span of eighteen duty-hours. The perfect weapon! He turned and walked on, reholstering the heavy gun. There was silence. The forest creatures were considering the new experience. In a few moments, they recovered from their surprise. Blue and orange arboreals swung through the trees above him. Overhead, the carrion bird soared low, and other black-winged birds came out of the distant sky to join it And the wild dogs coughed in the underbrush. They hadn't given up yet. Dixon could hear them in the deep foliage on either side of him, moving rapidly, staying out of sight. He drew the Weapon, wondering if they would dare try again. They dared. from a shrub just behind him. The gun hummed. The dog vanished in mid-leap, and the trees shivered slightly as air clapped into the sudden vacuum. Another dog charged and Dixon disintegrated it frowning slightly. These beasts couldn't be considered stupid. Why didn't they learn the obvious lesson -- that it was impossible to come against him and his Weapon? Creatures all over the Galaxy had quickly learned to be wary of an armed man. Why not these? Without warning, three dogs leaped from different directions. Dixon clicked to automatic and mowedthem down like a man swinging a scythe. Dust whirled He listened intently. The forest seemed filled with low coughing sounds. Other packs were coming to join in the kill. Why didn't they learn? It suddenly burst upon him. They didrtt learn, he thought, because the lesson was too subtle! The Weapon -- disintegrating silently, quickly, cleanly. Most of the dogs he hit simply vanished. There were no yelps of agony, no roars or howls or screams. And above all, there was no loud boom to startle them, no smell of cordite, no click of a new shell levered in... Dixon thought. Maybe they aren't smart enough to know this haven't figured out whafs going on. Maybe they think Tm defenseless. He walked more rapidly through the dim forest He was in no danger, he reminded himself. Just because they couldn't realize it was fact that it was. Still, he would insist on a noise-maker in the new models. It shouldn't be difficult. And the sound would be reassuring. The arboreals were gaining confidence now, swinging down almost to the level of his head, their fangs bared. Probably carnivorous, Dixon decided. With the Weapon on automatic, he slashed great cuts in the treetops. The arboreals fled, screaming at him. Leaves and small branches rained down. Even the dogs were momentarily cowed, edging away from the falling debris. Dixon grinned to himself -- just before he was flattened. A big bough, severed from its tree, had caught him across the left shoulder as it fell. The Weapon was knocked from his hand. It landed ten feet away, still on automatic, disintegrating shrubs a few yards from him. He dragged himself from under the bough and dived for the Weapon. An arboreal got to it first. " down on the ground. The arboreal, screaming in triumph, whirled the disintegrator around its head. Giant trees, cut through, went crashing to the forest floor. The air was dark with falling twigs and leaves, and the ground was cut into trenches. A sweep of the disintegrator knifed through the tree next to Dixon, and chopped the ground a few inches from his feet He jumped away, and the next sweep narrowly missed his head. He had given up hope. But then the arboreal became curious. Chattering gaily, it turned the Weapon around and tried to look into the muzzle. The animal's head vanished -- silently. Dixon saw his chance. He ran forward, leaping a trench, and recovering the disintegrator before another arboreal could play with it He turned it off automatic. Several dogs had returned. They were watching him closely. Dixon didn't dare fire yet His hands were shaking so badly, there was more risk to himself than to the dogs. He turned and stumbled in the direction of the ship. The dogs followed. Dixon quickly recovered his nerve. He looked at the glittering Weapon in his hand. He had considerably more respect for it now, and more than a little fear. Much more fear than the dogs had. Apparently they didn't associate the forest damage with the disintegrator. It must have seemed like a sudden, violent storm to them. But the storm was over. It was hunting time again. He was in thick brush now, firing ahead to clear a path. The dogs were on either side, keeping pace. He fired continually into the foliage, occasionally getting a dog. There were several dozen of them, pressing him closely. Damn it, Dixon thought, aren't they counting their losses? Then he realized they probably didn't know how to count He struggled on, not far from the spaceship. A heavy log lay in his path. He stepped over it. The log came angrily to life and opened enormous jaws directly under his legs. trigger down for three seconds and narrowly missing his own feet. The creature vanished. Dixon gulped, swayed, and slid feet-first into the pit he had just dug. He landed heavily, wrenching his left ankle. The dogs ringed the prt, snapping and snarling at him. Steady, Dixon told himself. He cleared the beasts from the pit's rim with two bursts, and tried to climb out. The sides of the pit were too steep and had been fused into glass. Frantically he tried again and again, recklessly expending his strength. Then he stopped and forced himself to think. The Weapon had got him into this hole; the Weapon could get him out. This time he cut a shallow ramp out of the pit, and limped painfully out. His left ankle could hardly bear weight. Even worse was the pain in his shoulder. That bough must have broken it, he decided. Using a branch as a crutch, Dixon limped on. Several times the dogs attacked. He disintegrated them, and the gun grew increasingly heavy in his right hand. The carrion birds came down to pick at the neatly slashed carcases. Dixon felt darkness crawl around the edges of his vision. He fought it back. He must not faint now, while the dogs were around him. The ship was in sight. He broke into a clumsy run, and fell immediately. Some of the dogs were on him. He fired, cutting them in two and removing half an inch from his right boot, almost down to the toe. He struggled to his feet and went on. Quite a weapon, he thought Dangerous to anyone, including the wielder. He wished he had the inventor in his sights. Imagine inventing a gun without a bang! He reached the ship. The dogs ringed him as he fumbled with the airlock. Dixon disintegrated the closest two, and stumbled inside. Darkness was crawling around his vision again and he could feel nausea rising thickly in his throat. With his last strength, he swung the airlock shut and sat down. Safe at last! Then he heard the low cough. He had shut one of the dogs inside with him. His arm felt too weak to lift the heavy Weapon, but slowly he swung it up. The dog, barely visible in the dimly lighted ship, leaped at him. For a terrifying instant, Dixon thought he couldn't squeeze the trigger. The dog was at his throat. Reflex must have clenched his hand. The dog yelped once and was silent Dixon blacked out. ness, he lay for a long time, just savoring the glorious sensation of being alive. He was going to rest for a few minutes. Then he was getting out of here, away from alien planets, back to a Terran bar. He was going to get roaring drunk. Then he was going to find that inventor and ram the Weapon down the man's throat, crossways. Only a homicidal maniac would invent a gun without a bang. But that would come later. Right now it was a pleasure just to be alive, to lie in the sunlight, enjoying the... Sunlight? Inside a spaceship? He sat up. At his feet lay the tail and one leg of the dog. Beyond it there was an interesting zigzag slashed through the side of the spaceship. It was about three inches wide and four feet long. Sunlight filtered through it. Outside, four dogs were sitting on their haunches, peering in. He had cut through his spaceThen he saw other slashes in the ship. Where had they come from? Oh, yes, when he was fighting his way back to the ship. That last hundred yards. A few shots must have touched the spaceship. He stood up and examined the cuts. A neat job, he thought, with the calm that sometimes accompanies hysteria. Yes, sir, very neat indeed. Here were the severed control cables. That was where the radio had been. Over there he had managed to nick the oxygen and water tanks in a single burst, which was good shooting by anybody's standards. And here -- yes, he'd done it, all right A really clever hook shot had cut the fuel lines. And the fuel had all run out in obedience to the law of gravity and formed a pool around the ship and sunk into the ground. Not bad for a guy who wasn't even trying, Dixon thought crazily. Couldn't have done better with a blowtorch. As a matter of fact, he couldn't have done it with a blowtorch. Spaceship hulls were too tough. But not too tough for the good old little old sure-fire never-miss Weapon... still hadn't repotted, a ship was sent out. They were to give him decent burial, if any remains could be found, and bring back the prototype disintegrator, if that could be found. The recovery ship touched down near Dixon's ship, and the crew examined the slashed and gutted hull with interest. "Some guys," said the engineer, "don't know how to handle a gun." "I'll say," said the chief pilot. They heard a banging noise from the direction of the rain forest. They hurried over and found that Dixon was not dead. He was very much alive, and singing as he worked. He had constructed a wooden shack and planted a vegetable garden around it Surrounding the garden was a palisade. Dixon was hammering in a new sapling to replace a rotten one when the men came up. Quite predictably, one of the men cried, "You're alive!" "Damned right," Dixon said. "Touch and go for a while before I got the palisade built. Nasty brutes, those dogs. But I taught them a little respect." Dixon grinned and touched a bow that leaned against the palisade within easy reach. It had been cut from a piece of seasoned, springy wood, and beside it was a quiver-full of arrows. "They learned respect," Dixon said, "after they saw a few of their pals running around with a shaft thtough their flanks." "But the Weapon -- " the chief pilot asked. "Ah, the Weapon!" exclaimed Dixon, with a mad, merry light in his eyes. "Couldn't have survived without it" He turned back to his work. He was hammering the sapling into place with the heavy, flat butt of the Weapon.  dd ss post office    by Isaac Asimov. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # our atmosphere at all in this collection, as you can gather from the title, in order to give his reader an enjoyable yam. There are seventeen items, including some gag poems and short-shorts. The longest work is "The Dead Past," an ingenious rework of the antique theme of the time reviewing gadget. "Satisfaction Guaranteed," a U.S. Robot story, gives the reader pause. A suave, handsome, worldly robot? Heaven forbid! And "Kid Stuff' underscores the problems of elves in our crass, materialistic world. Asimov mishmashes broad humor, pure fantasy, sensitive social studies in this volume, but finds room enough to suit most tastes. nitz. The Free Press and Falcon's Wing Press, #., # right of any Homo Sap. But Universal Speculation is the domain of the so-called Egghead and carries the impressive title of Cosmology. Munitz has collected the writings of an impressive group of savants from Plato and Aristotle to the moderns, Einsteins and Eddington, and to the ultra-moderns, Bondi and Hoyle. The ancient concepts of the Universe seem quaint today, but could we have done better with limited observational equipment and figuratively on our knees instead of standing on the shoulders of giants? C. L. Moore. Doubleday  Co, Inc, N. Y., #.  pay to be C. L. Moore. For almost anyone else, this rating would be "Excellent" For Mrs. Kuttner, however, it's something less than that Like Heinlein in Double Star, Miss Moore has chosen an actor to be principal protagonist. A hasbeen while still young, he has been shattered in spirit and career by the shock of his wife's desertion and violent death. He has sunk to the level of Cropper, itinerant laborer. Unexpectedly, he is summoned by the Secretary of which, under President Raleigh, rules America and has become a benevolent dictatorship. The Secretary informs Rohan, the actor, that he is to take over direction of a traveling troupe in California, a rebellious state from withdraw control. The Californians reportedly have something called Anti-Corn, a weapon capable role in the counter-insurrection doesn't make sense, even to himself. Evidently his troupe is gimway he can figure. In addition, he has been hypnotized by an unknown party, and post-hypnotic compulsions add to his confusion. In further addition, his mental and physical processes are on the brutal side, unlike Heinlein's sensitive ham. As I said -- under another author's byline, the yam would have rung gongs, but the incomparable Moore could have done better. Macmillan Co, N. Y., # the first time in Italy some twenty years ago, this third revision marks its first appearance in English. Since that time, it has been considered the authoritative treatment of this vital subject for professional and amateur alike. The present edition has incorporated all the latest theories, observational techniques and refinements of equipment into a volume that is surprisingly intelligible to the layman. No small credit in this respect is due the translator, J. B. Sidgwick. LY by Kathleen Norris. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y, # pages, the reknowned K. Norris has penned a disturbing fantasy. Her book is in two parts; the first takes place in Foxcrossing, a town in the United States of another plane of existence. Although not a Utopia, it is considerably nearer being one than ours. Death liberates a haphazard portion of us into that plane. Hunger and war have been abolished. A land-rent law insures that all people have the right to use the land, which remains government property. War is averted by a form of appeasement or a turning of cheek. Physical science is at approximately our stage of development. Miss Norris nowhere makes any attempt at rationale; it is merely understood that they are a bit higher in the scale of goodness. But in spite of their wonderful world, they remain human and tragedies can likewise mar their lives. Crossers-over arrive the same age as at their death, and local inhabitants somehow know of their coming. Dr. Gil Saunders bewilderedly crosses over and is taken in tow by his new immediate superior at the atomic plant hospital, Dr. Trevelyan, and his exceptional wife and family. Miss Norris weaves a dreamlike spell in the first half of her book that is downright hypnotic. However, in the after half, the account of the reverse reincarnation in our plane of Saunders' fiancee, Cherry Trevelyan, degenerates into a meaningless puddle of tears. That first half, though, is truly memorable. by J. B. Sidgwick. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., # Introducing Astronomy a snap after the job of translation he had to do on The Sun by Abetti. In any case, this was a book that he had written during the war to help air raid wardens and observers pass dreary hours. It was a popular success then and should prove so again, particularly since the author has added new material and widened its scope. It contains much information concerning the Solar System, Luna and the Constellations, to which alone half the book is devoted. A natural for beginners. Jeffery Lloyd Castle. Dodd, Mead  Co., N. Y., # TT isn't my function to say how a book should have been written. There is nothing amiss, though, in saying that the manuscript would not have suffered if Castle had been forced to do a drastic revision. His premise is that ancient Egypt achieved space flight' and colonized Venus. Since then, they have secretly revisited Earth periodically to keep abreast of progress. Our first Venus flight is being organized and the objective of a striking couple from an Egypto-Venusian flying saucer is to attempt to prevent its takeoff. Unfortunately for the story, they are remarkably inept and ill-informed. There is a profusion of good characterization and background detail, but motivations and plot development take place literally and literately in a vacuum. Castle has accomplished the difficult feat of writing an unconvincingly convincing yam. Matthewson. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # viewed How to Make and Use a Telescope by Wilkins and Moore. I repeat the same caution as then -- if you are not equipped materially and psychologically for precision work, you had better forget about undertaking the project. Lens grinding involves exactitude and patience, so much so, in fact, that neglected wives are referred to as "glass widows." It is immensely rewarding, however, and, as Matthewson asserts, makes a wonderful hobby for the meticulous. But so does observation, and sufficient energy should be reserved for the enjoyment of the fruits of toil. I'm afraid I cannot offer a choice between the two books. They both cover the ground like a tight lawn. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. Getting there may be half the fun... but it is also all of a society's chance of survivall A S one god to another --  let's go home," Jack Z. A. Bates said. Bill Famum raised a spacegloved hand in negligent acknowledgment to a hastily kneeling native, and shook his head at Bates. "Let's try Deneb -- it's almost in line on the way back -- and then we can call it quits." "But I want to get back and start making some profit out of this. The Galaxy is full of Homo sapiens. We've hit the jackpot first trip out. Let's hurry on home and cash in." "We need more information. This is too much of a good thing -- it doesn't make sense. I know there isn't much chance of finding anything out by stopping at one more solar system. But it won't delay us more than a few weeks, and it won't hurt to try." "Yeah," said Bates. "But what's in it for us? And what if we find an inhabited planet? You know the chances are about two to one that we will. That'll make thirteen we've found on this trip. Why risk bad luck?" "You're no more superstitious than I am," said Farnum. "You just want to get back Earthside. I'll tell you what. We'll toss a coin for it" Bates gestured futilely toward his coverall pocket, and then remembered he was wearing a spacesuit as a precaution against possible contamination from the natives. "And we'll use one of my coins this time," said Farnum, noticing the automatic motion. "I want to have a chance." The coin dropped in Farnum's favor, and their two-man scout ship hurled itself into space. pact computer, aligning the ship's velocity vector precisely while the stars could still be seen. Bates controlled the engines, metering their ravenous demand for power just this side of destructive detonation, while the ship sucked energy from space -- from the adjacent universe on the other side of Limbo. Finally the computer chimed, relays snicked, and the ship slid into the emptiness of Limbo as the stars winked out. With two trained men working as a team with the computer and the elaborate engine room controls, and with a certain amount of luck, the ship would drop back into normal space a couple of weeks later, close beside their target. "Well, that's that," said Farnum, relaxing and wiping the perspiration off his forehead. "We're back once again in the nothingness of nowhere. As I recall, it's your week for K.P. Where's the coffee?" "Coming right up," said Bates. "But you won't like it. It's the last of the 'God-food' the Korite priests made for us." Farnum shuddered. "Pour it out and make some fresh. With a skillet, you stink, but you're a thousand times better than Korites." "Thanks," Bates said, getting busy. "It was the third place we stopped that they were such good cooks, wasn't it?" "Nope. Our third stop was the Porandians. They tried to kill us -- called us 'Devil spawn from the stars.' You're thinking of the fourth stop; the Balanites." Bates shrugged. "It's kind of hard to keep them all straight. Either they fall on their knees and worship us, or they try to kill us without even asking questions. Maybe it's lucky they're all so primitive." "It may be lucky, but it doesn't add up. More than half the stars we visit have planets that can support human life. And every one that can does. Once there must have been an interstellar empire. So why are all their civilizations so backward? They aren't primitive -- they're decadent. And why do they all have such strong feelings -- one way or the exact opposite -- about people from the stars?" "Isn't that why you want to try one more system?" asked Bates. "To give us another chance to get some answers? Here's your coffee. Try to drink it quietly. I'm going to get some shuteye."   'HE trip through the Limbo between adjacent universes passed uneventfully, as always. The computer chimed again on schedule, and a quick check by Farnum showed the blazing sun that suddenly appeared was Deneb, as advertised. Seventeen planets could be counted, and the fifth seemed to be Earth type. They approached it with the easy skill of long practice and swung into orbit about it. "This is what we've been looking for!" exclaimed Farnum, examining the planet through a telescope. "They've got big cities and dams and bridges -- they're civilized. Let's put the ship down." "Wait up," said Bates. "What if they've got starman-phobia? Remember, they're people, just like us; and with people, civilization and weapons go together." "I think you've got it backwards. If they hate us, we can probably get away before they bring up their big artillery. But what if they love us? They might want to keep us beside them forever." Bates nodded. "I'm glad you agree with me. Let's get out of here. Nobody but us knows of the beautiful, profitable planets we've found, all ready to become part of a Terr an Empire. And if we don't get back safe and sound, nobody will know. The information we've got is worth a fortune to us, and I want to be alive to collect it." "Sure. But we've got the job of trying to find out why all those planets reverted to barbarism. This one hasn't; maybe the answer's here. There's no use setting up an empire if it won't last." "It'll last long enough to keep you and me on top of the heap." "That's not good enough. I want my kids -- when I have them -- to have their chances at the top of the heap too." "Oh, all right. We'll flip a coin, then." 'We already did. You may be a sharp dealer, but you'd never welch on a bet. We're going down." Bates shrugged. "You win. Let's put her down beside that big city over there -- the biggest one, by the seashore." As they approached the city, they noticed at its outskirts a large flat plain, dotted with gantries. "Like a spaceport," suggested Bill. "That's our target" They landed neatly on the tarmac and then sat there quietly, waiting to see what would happen. two men sat tensely at their controls, but the throng clustering about the base of the ship showed no hostility. They also showed no reverence but, rather, a carefree interest and joyful welcome. "Well," said Farnum at last, "looks like we might as well go outside and ask them to take us to their leader." "I'm with you as usual," said Bates, starting to climb into his spacesuit. "Weapons?" "I don't think so. We can't stop them if they get mad at us, and they look friendly enough. We'll start off with the 'let's be pals' routine." Bates nodded. "After we learn the language. I always hate this part -- it moves so slowly. You'd think there'd be some similarity among the tongues on different planets, wouldn't you? But each one's entirely different. I guess they've all been isolated too long." The two men stepped out on the smooth plain, to be instantly surrounded by a laughing, chattering crowd. Farnum stared around in bewilderment at the variety of dress the crowd displayed. There were men and women in togas, in tunics, in draped dresses and kilts, in trousers and coats. Others considered a light cloak thrown over the shoulders to be adequate. There was no uniformity of style or custom. "You pick me a boss-man out of this bunch," he muttered to Bates. Finally a couple of young men, glowing with health and energy, came bustling through the crowd with an oblong box which they set down in front of the Earthmen. They pointed to the box and then back at Farnum and Bates, laughing and talking as they did so. "What do you suppose they want us to do?" Farnum asked. One of the young men clapped his hands happily and reached down to touch the box. "What do you suppose they want us to do?" asked the box distinctly. "Oh. A recording machine. Probably to help with language lessons. Might as well help them out." talking at the box for half an hour. Then the young man nodded, laughed, clapped his hands again, and the two men carried it away. The crowd went with them, waving merrily as they departed. Bates shrugged his shoulders and went back into the ship, with Farnum close behind. A few hours after sunrise the following morning, the crowd returned, as gay and carefree as before, led by the two young men who had carried the box. Each of these two now had a small case, about the size of a camera, slung by a strap across one brawny shoulder. As the terrestrials climbed out to meet them, the two men raised their hands and the crowd discontinued its chatter, falling silent except for an occasional tinkle of surprised laughter. "Welcome," said the first young man clearly. "It is a great pleasure for us to have our spaceport in use again. It has been many generations since any ships have landed on it." Farnum noticed that the voice came from the box. "Thank you for your very kind welcome," he said. "I hope that your traffic will soon increase. May we congratulate you, by the way, on the efficiency of your translators?" "Thanks," laughed the young man. "But there was nothing to it We just asked the Oracle and he told us what we had to do to make them." "May we meet your -- Oracle?" "Oh, sure, if you want to. But later on. Now it's time for a party. Why don't you take off those clumsy suits and come along?" "We don't dare remove our spacesuits. They protect us from any disease germs you may have, and you from any we may have. We probably have no resistance to each others' ailments." "The Oracle says we have nothing that will hurt you. And we're going to spray you with this as soon as you get out of your suits. Then you won't hurt any of us." He held up a small atomizer. Farnum glanced at Bates, who shrugged and nodded. They uneasily unfastened their spacesuits and stepped out of them, wearing only their light one-piece coveralls, and got sprayed with a pleasant-smelling mist. The party was a great success. The food was varied and delicious. The liquors were sparkling and stimulating, without unpleasant after-effects. The women were uninhibited. When a native got tired, he just dropped down onto the soft grass, or onto an even softer couch, and went to sleep. The Earthmen finally did the same. morning within minutes of each other, feeling comfortable and relaxed. Bates shook his head experimentally. "No hangover," he muttered in surprise. "No one ever feels bad after a party," said one of their guides, who had slept nearby. "The Oracle told us what to do, when we asked him." "Quite a fellow, your Oracle," commented Bates. "Does he answer you in riddles, like most Oracles?" The guide was shocked. "The Oracle answers any questions promptly and completely. He never talks in riddles." "Can we go to see him now?" asked Farnum. "Certainly. Come along. I'll take you to the Hall of the Oracle." The Oracle appeared to live in a building of modest size, in the center of a tremendous courtyard. The structure that surrounded the courtyard, in contrast, was enormous and elaborate, dominating the wildly architectured city. It was, however, empty. "Scholars used to live in this building, they tell me," said one of their guides, gesturing casually. "They used to come here to learn from the Oracle. But there's no sense in learning a lot of stuff when the Oracle has always got all the answers anyway. So now the building is empty. The big palace was built back in the days when we used to travel among the stars, as you do now." "How long ago was that?" asked Farnum. "Oh, I don't know. A few thousand years -- a few hundred years -- the Oracle can tell you if you really want to know." Bates raised an eyebrow. "And how do you know you'll always be given the straight dope?" The guide looked indignant. "The Oracle always tells the truth." "Yes," Bates persisted, "but how do you know?" "The Oracle told us so, of course. Now why don't you go in and find out for yourselves? We'll wait out here. We don't have anything to ask him." the building and found themselves in a small, pleasant room furnished with comfortable chairs and sofas. "Good morning," said a wellmodulated voice. "I have been expecting you." "You are the Oracle?" asked Farnum, looking around curiously. "The name that the people of this planet have given me translates most accurately as 'Oracle'," said the voice. "But are you actually an Oracle?" "My principal function, insofar as human beings -- that is, Homo sapiens -- are concerned, is to give accurate answers to all questions propounded me. Therefore, insofar as humans are concerned, I am actually an Oracle." "Then you have another function?" "My principal function, insofar as the race that made me is concerned, is to act as a weapon." "Oh, said Bates. "Then you are a machine?" "I am a machine," agreed the voice. "The people who brought us here said that you always tell them the truth. I suppose that applies when you are acting as an Oracle, instead of as a weapon?" "On the contrary," said the voice blandly. "I function as a weapon by telling the truth." "That doesn't make sense," protested Bates. The machine paused for a moment before replying. "This will take a little time, gentlemen," it said, "but I am sure that I can convince you. Why don't you sit down and be comfortable? If you want refreshments, just ask for them." "Might as well," said Bates, sitting down in an easy chair. "How about giving us some Korite Godfood?" "If you really want that bad a brew of coffee, I can make it for you, of course," said the voice, "but I am sure you would prefer some of better quality." Farnum laughed. "Yes, please. Some good coffee, if you don't mind." iyr OW," said the Oracle, after ' excellent coffee had been produced, "it is necessary for me to go back into history a few hundred thousand of your years. At that time, the people who made me entered this galaxy on one of their periodic visits of routine exploration, and contacted your ancestors. The race that constructed me populates now, as it did then, the Greater Magellanic Cloud. "Frankly, the Magellanic race was appalled at what they found. In the time since their preceding visit, your race had risen from the slime of your mother planet and was on its way toward stars. The speed of your development was of history. By their standards, your race was incredibly energetic, incredibly fecund, incredibly intelligent, unbelievably warlike, and almost completely depraved. "Extrapolation revealed that within another fifty thousand of your years, you would complete the population of this galaxy and would be totally unstoppable. "Something had to be done, fast. There were two obvious solutions but both were unacceptable to my Makers. The first was to assume direct control over your race and to maintain that rule indefinitely, until such time as you changed your natures sufficiently to become civilizable. The expenditure of energy would be enormous and the results probably catastrophic to your race. No truly civilized people could long contemplate such a solution. "The second obvious answer was to attempt to extirpate you from this universe as if you were a disease -- as, in a sense, you are. Because your depravity was not total or necessarily permanent, this solution was also abhorrent to my Makers and was rejected. "What was needed was a weapon that would keep operating without direct control by my People, which would not result in any greater destruction or harm to humans than was absolutely necessary; and one which would cease entirely to operate against you if you changed sufficiently to become civilizable -- to become good neighbors to my Makers. "The final solution of the Magellanic race was, to construct several thousand spaceships, each containing an elaborate computer, constructed so as to give accurate answers throughout your galaxy. I am one of those ships. We have performed our function in a satisfactory manner and will continue to do so as long as we are needed." "And that makes you a weapon?" asked Bates incredulously. "I don't get. it." through him. "I see it. The concept is completely diabolical." "It's not diabolical at all," answered the Oracle. "When you become capable of civilization, we can do you no further harm at all. We will cease to be a weapon at that time." "You mean you'll stop telling the truth at that time?" asked Bates. "We will continue to function in accordance with our design," answered the voice, "but it will no longer do you harm. Incidentally, your phrase 'telling the truth' is almost meaningless. We answer all questions in the manner most completely understandable to you, within the framework of your language and your understanding, and of the understanding and knowledge of our Makers. In the objective sense, what we answer is not necessarily the Truth; it is merely the truest form of the answer that we can state in a manner that you can understand." "And you'll answer any question at all?" asked Bates in some excitement. "With one or two exceptions. We will not, for example, tell you how we may be destroyed." Bates stood up and began pacing the floor. "Then whoever possesses you can be the most powerful man in the Universe!" "No. Only in this galaxy." "That's good enough for me!" "Jack," said Farnum urgently, "let's get out of here. I want to talk to you." "In a minute, in a minute," said Bates impatiently. "I've got one more question." He turned to face the wall from which the disembodied voice appeared to emanate. "Is it possible to arrange it so that you would answer only one man's questions -- mine, for example?" "I can tell you how to arrange it so that I will respond to only your questions -- for so long as you are alive." "Come on," pleaded Farnum. "I've got to talk to you right now." "Okay," said Bates, smiling. "Let's go." ship, Farnum turned desperately to Bates. "Can't you see what a deadly danger that machine is to us all? We've got to warn Earth as fast as we can and get them to quarantine this planet -- and any other planets we find that have Oracles." "Oh, no, you don't," said Bates. "You aren't getting the chance to have the Oracle all to yourself. With that machine, we can rule the whole galaxy. We'll be the most powerful people who ever lived! It's sure lucky for us that you won the toss of the coin and we stopped here." "But don't you see that the Oracle will destroy Earth?" "Bushwah. You heard it say it can only destroy people who aren't civilized. It said that it's a spaceship, so I'll bet we can get it to come back to Earth with us, and tell us how we can be the only ones who can use it." "We've got to leave here right away -- without asking it any more questions." Bates shook his head. "Quit clowning." "I never meant anything more in my life. Once we start using that machine -- if we ask it even one question to gain advantage for ourselves -- Earth's civilization is doomed. Can't you see that's what happened to those other planets we visited? Can't you see what is happening to this planet we're on now?" "No, I can't," answered Bates stubbornly. "The Oracle said there are only a few thousand like him. You could travel through space for hundreds of years and never be lucky enough to find one. There can't be an Oracle on every planet we visited." "There wouldn't have to be," said Farnum. "There must be hundreds of possible patterns -- all of them destructive in the presence of greed and laziness and lust for power. For example, a planet -- maybe this one -- gets space travel. It sets up colonies on several worlds. It's expanding and dynamic. Then it finds an Oracle and takes it back to its own world. With all questions answered for it, the civilization stops being dynamic and starts to stagnate. It stops visiting its colonies and they drift toward barbarism. "Later," Farnum went on urgently, "somebody else reaches the stars, finds the planet with the Oracle -- and takes the thing back home. Can you imagine what will happen to these people on this world if they lose their Oracle? Their own learning and traditions and way of life have been destroyed -- just take a look at their anarchic clothing and architecture. The Oracle is the only thing that keeps them going -- downhill -- and makes sure they don't start back again." "It won't happen that way to us," Bates argued. "We won't let the Oracle get into general use, so Earth won't ever learn to depend on it. I'm going to find out from it how to make it work for the two of us alone. You can come along and share the gravy or not, as you choose. I don't care. But you aren't going to stop me." Bates turned and strode out of the ship. his palm in despair, and then ran to a locker. Taking out a highpower express rifle, he loaded it carefully and stepped out through the airlock. Bates showed clearly in his telescopic sights, still walking toward the Hall of the Oracle. Famum fired at the legs, but he wasn't that good a shot; the bullet went through the back. Famum jittered between bringing Bates back and taking off as fast as the ship could go. The body still lay there, motionless; there was nothing he could do for the Oracle's first Earth victim -- the first and the last, he swore grimly. He had to speed home and make them understand the danger before they found another planet with an Oracle, so that they could keep clear of its deadly temptatoins. The Magellanic race could be outwitted yet, in spite of their lethal cleverness. Then he felt a sudden icy chill along his spine. Alone, he could never operate the spaceship -- and Bates was dead. He was trapped on the planet. For hours, he tried to think of some way of warning Earth. It was imperative that he get back. There had to be a way. He realized finally that there was only one solution to his problem. He sighed shudderingly and walked slowly from the spaceship toward the Hall of the Oracle, past Bates' body. "One question, though," he muttered to himself. "Only one."      Perceveral had a nerve asking for nothing more than his own small cubicle and a bit to eatl He'd take the whole world or elsel E verybody has his song, thought Anton Perceveral. A pretty girl is like a melody, and a brave spaceman like a flurry of trumpets. Wise old men on the Interplanetary Council make one think of richly blended woodwinds. There are geniuses whose lives are an intricate counterpoint endlessly embellished, and scum of the planets whose existence seems nothing more than the wail of an oboe against the inexorable pounding of a brass drum. Perceval thought about this, loosely gripping a razor blade and contemplating the faint blue veins in his wrist. For if everybody has his song, his could be likened to a poorly conceived and miserably executed symphony of errors. There had been muted horns of gladness at his birth. Bravely, to the sound of muffled drums, young Perceval had ventured into school. He had excelled and been promoted to a small workshop class of five hundred pupils, where he could receive a measure of individual attention. The future had looked promising. But he was congenitally unlucky. There was a constant series of small accidents with overturned inkwells, lost books and misplaced papers. Things had a damnable propensity for breaking under his fingers; or sometimes his fingers broke under things. To make matters worse, he caught every possible childhood disease, including proto-Measles, Algerian Mumps, Impetigo, Foxpox, Green Fever and Orange Fever. These things in no way reflected upon Perceval's native ability; but one needs more than ability in a crowded and competitive world. One needs considerable luck, and Perceval had none. He was transferred to an ordinary class of ten thousand students, where his problems were intensified and his opportunities for catching disease expanded. tacled, good-hearted, hardworking young man whom the doctors early diagnosed as accident-prone, for reasons which defied their analysis. But whatever the reasons, the facts remained. Perceveral was one of those unhappy people for whom life is difficult to the point of impossibility. Most people slip through the jungle of human existence with the facility of prowling panthers. But, for the Perceverals, the jungle is continually beset with traps, snares and devices, sudden precipices and unfordable streams, deadly fungus and deadlier beasts. No way is safe. All roads lead to disaster. Young Perceveral won his way through college in spite of his remarkable talent for breaking his leg on winding staircases, twisting his ankle on curbstones, fracturing his elbow in revolving doors, smashing his glasses against plateglass windows, and all the rest of the sad, ludicrous, painful events which beset the accident-prone. Manfully he resisted the solace of hypochondria and kept trying. Upon graduation from college, Perceveral took himself firmly in hand and tried to reassert the early clear theme of hope set by his stalwart father and gentle mother. With a ruffle of drums and a thrilling of chords, Perceveral entered the island of Manhattan, to forge his destiny. He worked hard to conquer his unhappy predisposition, and to stay cheerful and optimistic in spite of everything. But his predisposition caught up with him. The noble chords dissolved into vague mutterings, and the symphony of his life degenerated to the level of opera-bouffe. Perceveral lost job after job in a snarl of broken voxwriters and smeared contracts, forgotten file cards and misplaced data sheets; in a mounting crescendo of ribs wrenched in the subway rush, ankles sprained on gratings, glasses smashed against unseen projections, and in a bout of illnesses which included Hepatitis Type J, Martian Flu, Venusian Flu, Waking Sickness and Giggling Fever. Perceveral still resisted the lure of hypochondria. He dreamed of space, of the iron-jawed adventurers advancing Man's frontier, of the new settlements on distant planets, of vast expanses of open land where, far from the hectic plastic jungles of Earth, a man could really find himself. He applied to the Planetary Exploration  Settlement Board, and was turned down. Reluctantly he pushed the dream aside and tried a variety of jobs. He underwent Analysis, Hypnotic Suggestion, Hypnotic Hypersuggestion and Countersuggestion Removal -- all to no avail. Every man has his limits and every symphony has its end. Perceveral gave up hope at the age of thirty-four when he was fired, after three days, from a job he had sought for two months. That, as far as he was concerned, provided the final humorous off-key cymbal clash to something which probably shouldn't have been started in the first place. 'J paycheck, accepted a last wary handshake from his former employer, and rode the elevator to the lobby. Already vague thoughts of suicide were crossing his mind in the form of truck wheels, gas pipes, tall buildings and swift rivers. The elevator reached the great marble lobby with its uniformed riot policemen and its crowds waiting admittance to the midtown streets. Perceveral waited on line, idly watching the Population Density Meter fluctuate below the panic line, until his turn came. Outside, he joined a compact body of people moving westward in the direction of his housing project. Suicidal thoughts continued to flow through his mind, more slowly now, taking more definite forms. He considered methods and means until he reached home. There he. disengaged himself from the crowd and slipped in through an entry port. He struggled against a flood of children pouring through corridors, and reached his city-provided cubicle. He entered, closed and locked the door, and took a razor blade from his shaving kit. He lay down on the bed, propping his feet against the opposite wall, and contemplated the faint blue veins of his wrist. Could he do it? Could he do it cleanly and quickly, without error and without regret? Or would he bungle this job, too, and be dragged screaming to a hospital, a ludicrous sight for the interns to snicker about? As he was thinking, a yellow envelope was slipped under his door. It was a telegram, arriving pat on the hour of decision, with a melodramatic suddenness which Perceveral considered quite suspect. Still, he put down the razor blade and picked up the envelope. It was from the Planetary Exploration  Settlement Board, the great organization that controlled every Earthman's movements in space. With trembling fingers, Perceveral opened the envelope and read: Mr. Anton Perceveral Temporary Housing Project # District #, Manhattan #, N.Y. Dear Mr. Perceveral: Three years ago you applied to us for a position in any off-Earth capacity. Regretfully we had to turn you down at that time. Your records have been kept on file, however, and have recently been brought up to date. I am happy to inform you that a position is immediately available for you, one which I consider well suited to your particular talents and qualifications. I believe this job will meet with your approval, carrying, as it does, a salary of # a year, all government fringe benefits, and an unexcelled opportunity for advancement Could you come in and discuss it with me? Sincerely, Asst Placement Director WHibm#dc Perceveral folded the telegram carefully and put it back in its envelope. His first feeling of intense joy vanished, to be replaced by a sense of apprehension. What talents and qualifications did he have for a job commanding twenty thousand a year and benefits? Could they be confusing him with a different Anton Perceveral? It seemed unlikely. The Board just didn't do that sort of thing. And presuming that they knew him and his ill-starred past -- what could they possibly want from him? What could he do that practically any man, woman or child couldn't do better? Perceveral put the telegram in his pocket and replaced the razor blade in his shaving kit. Suicide seemed a little premature now. First he would find out what Haskell wanted. A T the headquarters of the Planetary Exploration  Settlement Board, Perceveral was kell's private office. The Assistant Placement Director was a large, blunt-featured, white-haired man who radiated a geniality which Perceveral found suspicious. "Sit down, sit down, Mr. Perceveral," Haskell said. "Cigarette? Care for a drink? Awfully glad you could make it" "Are you sure you have the right man?" Perceveral asked. Haskell glanced through a dossier on his desk. "Let's see. Anton Perceveral; age thirty-four; parents, Gregory James Perceveral and Anita Swaans Perceveral, Laketown, New Jersey. Is that right?" "Yes," Perceveral said. "And you have a job for me?" "We have indeed." "Paying twenty thousand a year and benefits?" "Perfectly correct." "Could you tell me what the job is?" "That's what we're here for," Haskell said cheerfully. "The job I have in mind for you, Mr. Perceveral, is listed in our catalogue as Extraterrestrial Explorer." "I beg your pardon?" "Extraterrestrial or alien-planet explorer," Haskell said. "The explorers, you know, are the men who make the first contacts on alien planets, the primary settlers who gather our essential data. I think of them as the Drakes and Magellans of this century. It is, I think you'll agree, an excellent opportunity." Perceveral stood up, his face a dull red. "If you're finished with the joke. I'll leave." "Eh?" "Me an extraterrestrial explorer?" Perceveral said with a bitter laugh. "Don't try to kid me. I read the papers. I know what the explorers are like." "What are they like?" "They're Earth's finest," Perceveral said. "The very best brains in the very best bodies. Men with trigger-quick reactions, able to tackle any problems, cope with any situation, adjust to any environment. Isn't that true?" "Well," Haskell said, "it was true back in the early days of planetary exploration. And we have allowed that stereotype to remain in the public eye, to instill confidence. But that type of explorer is now obsolete. There are plenty of other jobs for men such as you describe. But not planetary exploration." make the grade?" Perceveral asked with a faint sneer. "Of course they could," Haskell said. "No paradox is involved here. The record of our early explorers is unsurpassed. Those men managed to survive on every planet where human survival was even remotely possible, against overwhelming odds, by sheer grit and tenacity. The planets called for their every resource and they rose to meet the challenge. They stand as an eternal monument to the toughness and adaptability of Homo sapiens." "Then why did you stop using them?" "Because our problems on Earth changed," Haskell told him. "In the early days, the exploration of space was an adventure, a scientific achievement, a defense measure, a symbol. But that passed. Earth's overpopulation trend conspilled into relatively empty lands like Brazil, New Guinea and Australia. But the population explosion quickly filled them. In major cities, the population-panic-point was reached and produced the Weekend Riots. And the population, bolstered by geriatrics and a further sharp decrease in infant mortality, continued to grow." Haskell rubbed his forehead. "It was a mess. But the ethics of population increase aren't my business. All we at the Board knew was, we had to have new land fast We needed planets which -- unlike Mars and Venus -- would be rapidly self-supporting. Places while the scientists and politicians on Earth tried to straighten things out. We had to open these planets to colonization as rapidly as possible. And that meant speeding up the initial exploratory process." "I know all that," Perceveral said. "But I still don't see why you stopped using the optimum explorer type." "Isn't it obvious? We were looking for places where ordinary people could settle and survive. Our optimum explorer type was not ordinary. Quite the contrary, he almost approximated a new species. And he was no judge of ordinary survival conditions. For example, there are bleak, dreary, rain-swept little planets that the average colonist finds depressing to the point of insanity; but our optimum explorer is too sound to be disturbed by climatic monotony. Germs which devastate thousands give him, at most, a bad time for a while. Dangers which can push a colony to the brink of disaster, our optimum explorer simply evades. He can't assess these things in everyday terms. They simply don't touch him." "I'm beginning to see," Perceveral said. "Now the best way," Haskell said, "would have been to attack these planets in stages. First an explorer, then a basic research team, then a trial colony composed largely of psychologists and sociologists, then a research group to interpret the findings of the other groups, and so forth. But there's never enough time or money for all that. We need those colonies right now, not in fifty years." #f R. Haskell paused and looked hard at Perceveral. "So, you see, we must have immediate knowledge as to whether a group of ordinary people could live and thrive on any new planet. That's why we changed our qualifications for explorers." Perceveral nodded. "Ordinary explorers for ordinary people. There's just one thing, however." "Yes?" "I don't know how well you know my background..." "Quite well," Haskell assured him. "Then you might have noticed that I have certain tendencies toward -- well, a certain accidentproneness. To tell you the honest truth, I have a hard time surviving right here on Earth." "I know," Mr. Haskell said pleasantly. "Then how would I make out on an alien planet? And why would you want me?" Mr. Haskell looked slightly ill at ease. "Well, you stated our position wrongly when you said 'ordinary explorers for ordinary people.' It isn't that simple. A colony is composed of thousands, often siderably in their survival potentialities. Humanity and the law state that all of them must have a fighting chance. The people themselves must be reassured before they'll leave Earth. We must convince them -- and the law -- and ourselves -- that even the weakest will have a chance for survival." "Go on," Perceveral said. "Therefore," Haskell said quickly, "some years ago we stopped using the optimum-survival explorer, and began using the minimum-survival explorer." Perceveral sat for a while digesting this information. "So you want me because any place I can live in, anyone can live in." "That more or less sums up our thinking on the problem," Haskell said, smiling genially. "But what would my chances be?" "Some of our minimum-survival explorers have done very well." "And others?" "There are hazards, of course," Haskell admitted. "And aside from the potential dangers of the planet itself, there are other risks involved in the very nature of the , experiment I can't even tell you what they are, since that would destroy our only control element on the minimum-survival test. I simply tell you that they are present." "Not a very good outlook," Perceveral said. "Perhaps not. But think of the rewards if you won through! You would, in effect, be the founding father of a colony! Your value as an expert would be immeasurable. You would have a permanent place in the life of the community. And equally important, you might be able to dispel certain insidious self-doubts concerning your place in the scheme of things." Perceveral nodded reluctantly. "Tell me one thing. Your telegram arrived today at a particularly crucial moment. It seemed almost -- " "Yes, it was planned," Haskell said. "We've found that the people we want are most receptive when they've reached a certain psychological state. We keep close watch over the few who fit our requirements, waiting for the right moment to make our presentation." "It might have been embarrassing if you'd been an hour later," Perceveral said. "Or unfruitful if we'd been a day earlier." Haskell arose from behind his desk. "Would you join me for lunch, Mr. Perceveral? We can discuss final details over a bottle of wine." "All right," Perceveral said. "But I'm not making any promises yet" "Of course not," Haskell said, opening the door for him. some hard thinking. The explorer's job appealed to him strongly in spite of the risks. It was, after all, no more dangerous than suicide, and much better paying. The rewards were great if he won; the penalty for failure was no more than the price he had been about to pay for failure on Earth. He hadn't done well in thirtyfour years on Earth. The best he had shown were flashes of ability marred by a strong affinity for illness, accident and blunder. But Earth was crowded, cluttered and confused. Perhaps his accidentproneness had been not some structural flaw in him but the product of intolerable conditions. Exploration Would give him a new environment. He would be alone, dependent only on himself, answerable only to himself. It would be tremendously dangerous -- but what could be more dangerous than a glittering razor blade held in his own hand? This would be the supreme effort of his life, the ultimate test He would fight as he had never fought before to conquer his fatal tendencies. And this time he would throw every ounce of strength and determination into the struggle. He accepted the job. In the next weeks of preparation, he ate and drank and slept determination, hammered it into his brain and wove it between his nerves, mumbled it to himself like a Buddhist prayer, dreamed about it, brushed his teeth and washed his hands with it, meditated upon it until the monotonous refrain buzzed in his head waking and sleeping, and began slowly to act as a check and restraint upon action. The day arrived when he was assigned a year's tour of duty upon a promising planet in the East Star Ridge. Haskell wished him luck and promised to stay in touch by L-phase radio. Perceveral and his equipment were put aboard the picket ship Queen of Glasgow, and the adventure was begun. During the months in space, Perceveral continued to think obsessively of his resolve. He handled himself carefully in no-weight, watched his every movement and cross-checked his every motive. This continuous inspection slowed him down considerably; but gradually it became habitual. A set of new reflexes began to form, struggling to conquer the old reflex system. But progress was spasmodic. In spite of his efforts, Perceveral caught a minor skin irritation from the ship's purification system, broke one of his ten pairs of glasses against a bulkhead, and suffered numerous headaches, backaches, skinned knuckles and stubbed toes. Still, he felt he had made progress, and his resolution hardened accordingly. And at last his planet came into view. r  "HE planet was named Theta. Perceveral and his equipment were set down on a grassy, forested upland near a mountain range. The area had been pre-selected by air survey for its promising qualities. Water, wood, local fruits and mineral-bearing ores were all nearby. The area could make an excellent colony site. The ship's officers wished him luck, and departed. Perceveral watched until the ship vanished into a bank of clouds. Then he went to work. First he activated his robot. It was a tall, gleaming, black multipurpose machine, standard equipment for explorers and settlers. It couldn't talk, sing, recite or play cards like the more expensive models. Its only response was a headshake or a nod; dull companionship for the year ahead. But it was programmed to handle verbal work-commands of a considerable degree of complexity, to perform the heaviest labor, and to show a degree of foresight in problem situations. With the robot's help, Perceveral set up his camp on the plain, keeping a careful check on the horizon for signs of trouble. The air survey had detected no signs of an alien culture, but you could never tell. And the nature of Theta's animal life was still uninvestigated. He worked slowly and carefully, and the silent robot worked beside him. By evening, he had set up a temporary camp. He activated the radar alarm and went to bed. He awoke just after dawn to the He dressed and hurried outside. There was an angry humming in the air, like the sound of a locust horde. "Get two beamers," he told the robot, "and hurry back. Bring the binoculars, too." The robot nodded and lurched off. Perceveral turned slowly, shivering in the gray dawn, trying to locate the direction of the sound. He scanned the damp plain, the green edge of forest, the cliffs beyond. Nothing moved. Then he saw, outlined against the sunrise, something that looked like a low dark cloud. The cloud was flying toward his camp, moving very quickly against the wind. The robot returned with the beamers. Perceveral took one and directed the robot to hold the other, awaiting orders to fire. The robot nodded, his eyecells gleaming dully as he turned toward the sunrise. it resolved into a gigantic flock of birds. Perceveral studied them through his binoculars. They were about the size of Terran hawks, but their darting, erratic flight resembled the flight of bats. They were heavily taloned and their long beaks were edged with sharp teeth. With all that lethal armament, they had to be carnivorous. The flock circled them, humming loudly. Then, from all directions, with wings swept back and talons spread, they began to dive. Perceveral directed the robot to begin firing. He and the robot stood back to back, blasting into the onslaught of birds. There was a whirling confusion of blood and feathers as battalions of birds were scythed out of the sky. Perceveral and the robot were holding their own, keeping the aerial wolf pack at a distance, even beating it back. Then Perceveral's beamer failed. The beamers were supposed to be fully charged and guaranteed for seventy-five hours at full automatic. A beamer couldn't fail! He stood for a moment, stupidly clicking the trigger. Then he flung down the weapon and hurried to the supplies tent, leaving the robot to continue the fight alone. He located his two spares and came out. When he rejoined the battle, he saw that the robot's beamer had stopped functioning. The robot stood erect, beating off the swarm of birds with his arms. Drops of oil sprayed from his joints as he flailed at the dense flock. He swayed, dangerously close to losing his balance, and Perceveral saw that some birds had evaded his swinging arms and were perched on his shoulders, pecking at his eyecells and kinesthetic antenna. Perceveral swung up both beamers and began to cut into the swarm. One weapon failed almost immediately. He continued chopping with the last, praying it would retain its charge. The flock, finally alarmed by its losses, rose and wheeled away, screaming and hooting. Miraculously unhurt, Perceveral and the robot stood knee-deep in scattered feathers and charred bodies. Perceveral looked at the four beamers, three of which had failed him entirely. Then he marched angrily to the communications tent. him about the attack of the birds and the failure of three beamers out of four. Red-faced with outrage, he denounced the men who were supposed to check an explorer's equipment. Then, out of breath, he waited for Haskell's apology and explanation. "That," Haskell said, "was one of the control elements." "Huh?" "I explained it to you months ago," Haskell said. "We are testing for minimum-survival conditions. Minimum, remember? We have to know what will happen to a colony composed of people of varying degrees of proficiency. Therefore, we look for the lowest denominator." "I know all that. But the beamers -- " "Mr. Perceveral, setting up a colony, even on an absolute minimum basis, is a fantastically expensive operation. We supply our colonists with the newest and best in guns and equipment, but we can't replace things that stop functioning or are used up. The colonists have to use irreplaceable ammunition, equipment that breaks and wears out, food stores that become exhausted or spoiled -- " "And that's what you've given me?" Perceveral asked. "Of course. As a control, we have equipped you with the minimum of survival equipment. That's the only way we'll be able to predict how the colonists will make out on Theta." "But it isn't fair! Explorers always get the best equipment!" "No," Haskell said. "The oldstyle optimum-survival explorers did, of course. But we're testing for least potential, which must extend to equipment as well as to personality. I told you there would be risks." "Yes, you did," Perceveral said. "But... All right. Do you have any other little secrets in store for me?" "Not really," Haskell said, after a momentary pause. "Both you and your equipment are of minimum-survival quality. That about sums it up." Perceveral detected something evasive in this answer, but Haskell refused to be more specfiic. They signed off and Perceveral returned to the chaos of his camp. moved their camp to the shelter of the forest for protection against further assaults by the birds. In setting up again, Perceveral noted that fully half of his ropes were badly worn, his electrical fixtures were beginning to burn out, and the canvas of his tents showed mildew. Laboriously he repaired everything, bruising his knuckles and skinning his palms. Then his generator broke down. He sweated over it for three days, trying to figure out the trouble from the badly printed instruction book, written in German, that had been sent with the machine. Nothing seemed to be set up right in the generator and nothing worked. At last he discovered, by pure accident, that the book was meant for an entirely different model. He lost his temper at this and kicked the generator, almost breaking the little toe of his right foot. Then he took himself firmly in hand and worked for another four days, figuring out the differences between his model and the model described, until he had the generator working again. The birds found that they could plummet through the trees into Perceveral's camp, snatch food and be gone before the beamer could be leveled at them. Their attacks cost Perceveral a pair of glasses and a nasty wound on the neck. Laboriously he wove nets, and, with the robot's help, strung them in the branches above his camp. The birds were baffled. Perceveral finally had time to check his food stores, and to discover that many of his dehydrated staples had been poorly processed, and others had become a host to an ugly airborne fungus. Either way, it added up to spoilage. Unless he took measures now, he would be short of food during the Thetan winter. He ran a series of tests on local fruits, grains, berries and vegetables. They showed several varieties to be safe and nourishing. He ate these, and broke into a spectacular allergy rash. Painstaking work with his medical kit gave him a cure for the allergy, and he set up a test to discover the guilty plant. But just as he was checking final results, the robot stamped in, upsetting test tubes and spilling irreplaceable chemicals. Perceveral had to continue the allergy tests on himself, and to exclude one berry and two vegetables as unfit for his consumption. But the fruits were excellent and the local grains made a fine bread. Perceveral collected seed, and, late in the Thetan spring, directed the robot to the tasks of plowing and planting. r I "'HE robot worked tirelessly in the new fields, while Perceveral did some exploring. He found pieces of smooth rock upon which characters had been scratched, and what looked like numbers, and even little stick-pictures of trees and clouds and mountains. Intelligent beings must have lived on Theta, he decided. Quite probably they still inhabited some parts of the planet. But he had no time to search for them. When Perceveral checked his fields, he found that the robot had planted the seed inches too deep, in spite of his programmed instructions. That crop was lost, and Perceveral planted the next by himself. He built a wooden shack and replaced the rotting tents with storage sheds. Slowly he made his preparations for survival through the winter. And slowly he began to suspect that his robot was wearing out. The great black all-purpose machine performed its tasks as before. But the robot's movements were growing increasingly jerky and his use of strength was indiscriminate. Heavy jars splintered in his grip and farming implements broke when he used them. Perceveral programmed him for weeding the fields, but the robot's broad splay feet trampled the grain sprouts as his fingers plucked the weeds. When the robot went out to chop firewood, he usually succeeded in breaking the axe handle. The cabin shook when the robot entered, and the door sometimes left its hinges. Perceveral wondered and worried about the robot's deterioration. There was no way he could repair it, for the robot was a factory-sealed unit, meant to be repaired only by factory technicians with special tools, parts and knowledge. All Perceveral could do was retire the robot from service. But that would leave him completely alone. simple tasks into the robot and took more work upon himself. Still the robot continued to deteriorate. Then one evening, when Perceveral was eating his dinner, the robot lurched against the stove and sent a pot of boiling rice flying. With his new-found survival talents, Perceveral flung himself out of the way and the boiling mess landed on his left shoulder instead of his face. That was too much. The robot was dangerous to have around. After dressing his burn, Perceveral decided to turn the robot off and continue the work of survival alone. In a firm voice, he gave the Dormancy Command. The robot simply glared at him and moved restlessly around the cabin, not responding to a robot's most basic command. Perceveral gave the order again. The robot shook his head and began to stack firewood. Something had gone wrong. He would have to turn the robot off manually. But there was no sign of the usual cut-out switch anywhere on the machine's gleaming black surface. Nevertheless, Perceveral took out his tool kit and approached the robot. Amazingly, the robot backed away from him, arms raised defensively. "Stand still!" Perceveral shouted. The robot moved away until his back was against the wall. Perceveral hesitated, wondering what was going wrong. Machines weren't permitted to disobey orup life had been carefully structured into all robotic devices. He advanced on the robot, determined to turn him off somehow. The robot waited until he was close, then swung an armored fist at him. Perceveral dodged out of the way and flung a wrench at the robot's kinesthetic antenna. The robot quickly retracted it and swung again. This time his armored fist caught Perceveral in the ribs. Perceveral fell to the floor and the robot stood over him, his eyecells flaring red and his iron fingers opening and closing. Perceveral shut his eyes and waited for the coup de grace. But the machine turned and left the shack, smashing the lock as he went. In a few minutes, Perceveral heard the sound of firewood being cut and stacked -- as usual. With the aid of his medical kit, Perceveral taped up his side. The robot finished work and came back for further instructions. Shakily, Perceveral ordered him to a distant spring for water. The robot left, showing no further signs of aggression. Perceveral dragged himself to the radio shack.  V#" OU shouldn't have tried to turn him off," Haskell said, when he heard what had happened. "He isn't designed to be turned off. Wasn't that apparent? For your own safety, don't try it again." "But what's the reason?" "Because -- as you've probably guessed by now -- the robot acts as our quality-control over you." "I don't understand," Perceveral said. "Why do you need a qualitycontrol?" "Must I go through it all again?" Haskell asked wearily. "You were hired as a minimum-survival explorer. Not average. Not superior. Minimum." "Yes, but ET me continue. Do you re" call how you were during your thirty-four years on Earth? You were continually beset by accident, disease and general misfortune. That is what we wanted on Theta. But you've changed, Mr. Perceveral." "I've certainly tried to change." "Of course," Haskell said. "We expected it. Most of our minimumsurvival explorers change. Faced with a new environment and a fresh start, they get a grip on themselves such as they've never had before. But it's not what we're testing for, so we have to compensate for the change. Colonists, you see, don't always come to a planet in a spirit of self-improvement. And any colony has its careless ones, to say nothing of the aged, the infirm, the feeble-minded, the foolhardy, the inexperienced children, and so forth. Our minimumsurvival standards are a guarantee that all of them will have a chance. Now are you beginning to understand?" "I think so," Perceveral said. "That's why we need a qualitycontrol over you -- to keep you from acquiring the average or superior survival qualities which we are not testing for." "Therefore the robot," Perceveral said bleakly. "Correct. The robot has been programmed to act as a check, a final control over your survival tendencies. He reacts to you, Perceveral. As long as you stay within a pre-selected range of general incompetence, the robot operates at par. But when you improve, become more skillful at survival, less accident-prone, the robot's behavior deteriorates. He begins to break the things that you should be breaking, to form the wrong decisions you should be forming -- " "That isn't fair!" "Perceveral, you seem to feel that we're running some kind of sanitarium or self-aid program for your benefit. Well, we're not. We're interested only in getting the job that we bought and paid for. The job, let me add, which you chose as an alternative to suicide." "All right!" Perceveral shouted. "I'm doing the job. But is there any rule that says I can't dismantle that damned robot?" "No rule at all," Haskell said in a quieter voice, "if you can do it. But I earnestly advise you not to try. It's too dangerous. The robot will not allow himself to be deactivated." "That's for me to decide, not him," Perceveral said, and signed off.  Perceveral learned how to live with his robot. He ordered him to scout a distant mountain range, but the robot refused to leave him. He tried giving him no orders, but the black monster wouldn't stay idle. If no work was assigned, the robot assigned work to himself, suddenly bursting into action and creating havoc in Perceveral's field and sheds. In self-defense, Perceveral gave him the most harmless task he could think of. He ordered the robot to dig a well, hoping he would bury himself in it. But, grimy and triumphant, the robot emerged every evening and entered the cabin, showering dirt into Perceveral's food, transmitting allergies, and breaking dishware and windows. Grimly, Perceveral accepted the status quo. The robot now seemed the embodiment of that other, darker side of himself, the inept and accident-prone Perceveral. Watching the robot on his destructive rounds, he felt as though he were watching a misshapen portion of himself, a sickness cast into solid, living form. He tried to shake free of this fantasy. But more and more the robot came to represent his own destructive urges cut loose from the life impulse and allowed to run rampant. Perceveral worked, and his neurosis stalked . behind him, eternally destructive, yet -- in the manner of neuroses -- protective of itself. His self-perpetuating malady lived with him, watched him while he ate and stayed close while he slept. Perceveral did his work and became increasingly competent at it. He took what enjoyment he could from the days, regretted the setting of the sun, and lived through the horror of the nights when the robot stood beside his bed and seemed to wonder if now were the time for a summing-up. And in the morning, still alive, Perceveral tried to think of ways of disposing of his staggering, lurching, destructive neurosis. But the deadlock remained until a new factor appeared to complicate matters. I T had rained heavily for several days. When the weather cleared, Perceveral walked out to his fields. The robot lumbered behind him, carrying the farming tools. Suddenly a crack appeared in the moist ground under his feet. It widened, and the whole section he was standing on collapsed. Perceveral leaped for firm ground. He made it to the slope, and the robot pulled him up the rest of the way, almost yanking his arm from his socket. When he examined the collapsed section of field, he saw that a tunnel had run under it. Digging marks were still visible. One side was blocked by the fall. On the other side, the tunnel continued deep into the ground. Perceveral went back for his beamer and his flashlight. He climbed down one side of the hole and flashed his light into the tunnel. He saw a great furry shape retreat hastily around a bend. It looked like a giant mole. At last he had met another species of life on Theta. For the next few days, he cautiously probed the tunnels. Several times he glimpsed gray molelike shapes, but they fled from him into a labyrinth of passageways. He changed his tactics. He went only a few hundred feet into the main tunnel and left a gift of fruit. When he returned the next day, the fruit was gone. In its place were two lumps of lead. The exchange of gifts continued for a week. Then, one day when Perceveral was bringing more fruit and berries, a giant mole appeared, approaching slowly and with evident nervousness. He motioned at Perceveral's flashlight, and Perceveral covered the lens so that it wouldn't hurt the mole's eyes. He waited. The mole advanced slowly on two legs, his nose wrinkling, his small wrinkled hands clasped to his chest. He stopped and looked at Perceveral with bulging eyes. Then he bent down and scratched a symbol in the dirt of the passageway. Perceveral had no idea what the symbol meant. But the act itself implied language, intelligence and a grasp of abstractions. He scratched a symbol beside the mole's, to imply the same things. An act of communication between alien races had begun. The robot stood behind Perceveral, his eyecells glowing, watching while the man and the mole searched for something in common.  for Perceveral. The fields and gardens still had to be tended, the repairs on equipment made and the robot watched; in his spare time, Perceveral worked hard to learn the mole's language. And the moles worked equally hard to teach him. Perceveral and the moles slowly grew to understand each other, to enjoy each other's company, to become friends. Perceveral learned about their daily lives, their abhorrence of the light, their journeys through the underground caverns, their quest for knowledge and enlightenment. And he taught them what he could about Man. "But what is the metal thing?" the moles wanted to know. "A servant of Man," Perceveral told them. "But it stands behind you and glares. It hates you, the metal thing. Do all metal things hate men?" "Certainly not," Perceveral said. "This is a special case." "It frightens us. Do all metal things frighten?" "Some do. Not all." "And it is hard to think when the metal thing stares at us, hard to understand you. Is it always like that with metal things?" "Sometimes they do interfere," Perceveral admitted. "But don't worry, the robot won't hurt you." r I "HE mole people weren't so sure. Perceveral made what excuses he could for the heavy, lurching, boorish machine, spoke of machinery's service to Man and the graciousness of life that it made possible. But the mole people weren't convinced and shrank from the robot's dismaying presence. Nevertheless, after lengthy negotiations, Perceveral made a treaty with the mole people. In return for supplies of fresh fruits and berries, which the moles coveted but could rarely obtain, they agreed to locate metals for future colonists and find sources of water and oil. Furthermore, the colonists were granted possession of all the surface land of Theta and the moles were confirmed in their lordship of the underground. This seemed an equitable distribution to both parties, and Perceveral and the mole chief signed the stone document with as much of a flourish as an incising tool would allow. To seal the treaty, Perceveral gave a feast. He and the robot brought a great gift of assorted fruits and berries to the mole people. The gray-furred, soft-eyed moles clustered around, squeaking eagerly to each other. The robot set down his baskets of fruit and stepped back. He slipped on a patch of smooth rock, flailed for balance, and came crashing down across one of the moles. Immediately he regained his balance and tried, with his clumsy iron hands, to help the mole up. But he had broken the creature's back. The rest of the moles fled, carrying their dead companion with them. And Perceveral and the robot were left alone in the tunnel, surrounded by great piles of fruit That night Perceveral thought long and hard. He was able to see the damnable logic of the event. Minimum-survival contacts with aliens should have an element of uncertainty, distrust, misunderstanding, and even a few deaths. His dealings with the mole people had gone altogether too smoothly for minimum requirements. The robot had simply corrected the situation and had performed the errors which Perceveral should have made on his own. But although he understood the logic of the event, he couldn't accept it. The mole people were his friends and he had betrayed them. There could be no more trust between them, no hope of cooperation for future colonists. Not while the robot clumped and stumbled down the tunnels. Perceveral decided that the robot must be destroyed. Once and for all, he determined to test his painfully acquired skill against the destructive neurosis that walked continually beside him. And if it cost his life -- well, Perceveral reminded himself, he had been willing to lose it less than a year ago, for much poorer reasons. the moles and discussed the problem with them. They agreed to help him, for even these gentle people had the concept of vengeance. They supplied some ideas which were surprisingly human, since the moles also possessed a form of warfare. They explained it to Perceveral and he agreed to try their way. In a week, the moles were ready. Perceveral loaded the robot with baskets of fruit and led him into the tunnels, as though he were attempting another treaty. The mole people weren't to be found. Perceveral and the robot journeyed deeper into the passageways, their flashlights probing ahead into the darkness. The robot's eyecells glowed red and he towered close behind Perceveral, almost at his back. They came to an underground cavern. There was a faint whistle and Perceveral sprinted out of the way. The robot sensed danger and tried to follow. But he stumbled, thwarted by his own programmed ineptness, and fruit scattered across the cavern floor. Then ropes dropped from the blackness of the cavern's roof and settled around the robot's head and shoulders. He ripped at the tough fiber. More ropes settled around him, hissing in swift flight down from the roof. The robot's eyecells flared as he ripped the cords from his arms. Mole people emerged from the passageways by the dozens. More lines snaked around the robot, whose joints spurted oil as he strained to break the strands. For minutes, the only sounds in the cavern were the hiss of flying ropes, the creak of the robot's joints, and the dry crack of breaking line. join the fight They bound the robot closer and closer until his limbs had no room to gain a purchase. And still the ropes hissed through the air until the robot toppled over, bound in a great cocoon of rope with only his head and feet showing. Then the mole people squeaked in triumph and tried to gouge out the robot's eyes with their blunt digging claws. But steel shutters slid over the robot's eyes. So they poured sand into his joints until Perceveral pushed them aside and attempted to melt the robot with his last beamer. The beamer failed before the metal even grew hot. They fastened ropes to the robot's feet and dragged him down a passageway that ended in a deep chasm. They levered him over the side and listened while he bounced off the granite sides of the precipice, and cheered when he struck bottom. The mole people held a celebration. But Perceveral felt sick. He returned to his shack and lay in bed for two days, telling himself over and over that he had not killed a man, or even a thinking being. He had simply destroyed a dangerous machine. But he couldn't help remembering the silent companion who had stood with him against the birds, and had weeded his fields and gathered wood for him. Even though the robot had been clumsy and destructive, he had been clumsy and destructive in Perceveral's own personal way -- a way that he, above all people, could understand and sympathize with. For a while, he felt as though a part of himself had died. But the mole people came to him in the evenings and consoled him, and there was work to be done in the fields and sheds. TT was autumn, time for harvesting and storing his crops. Perceveral went to work. With the robot's removal, his own chronic propensity for accident returned briefly. He fought it back with fresh confidence. By the first snows, his work of storage and food preservation was done. And his year on Theta was coming to an end. He radioed a full report to Haskell on the planet's risks, promises and potentialities, reported his treaty with the mole people, and recommended the planet for colonization. In two weeks, Haskell radioed back. "Good work," he told Perceveral. "The Board detided that Theta definitely fits our minimumsurvival requirements. We're sending out a colony ship at once." "Then the test is over?" Perceveral asked. "Right. The ship should be there in about three months. I'll probably take this batch out. My congratulations, Mr. Perceveral. You're going to be the founding father of a brand-new colony!" Perceveral said, "Mr. Haskell, I don't know how to thank you -- " "Nothing to thank me for," Haskell said. "Quite the contrary. By the way, how did you make out with the robot?" "I destroyed him," Perceveral the mole and the subsequent events. "Hmm," Haskell said. "You told me there was no rule against it." "There isn't. The robot was part of your equipment, just like the beamers and tents and food supplies. Like them, he was also part of your survival problems. You had a right to do anything you could about him." "Then what's wrong?" "Well, I just hope you really destroyed him. Those quality-control models are built to last, you know. They've got self-repair units and a strong sense of self-preservation. It's damned hard to really knock one out." "I think I succeeded," Perceveral said. "I hope so. It would be embarrassing if the robot survived." "Why? Would it come back for revenge?" "Certainly not. A robot has no emotions." "Well?" "The trouble is this. The robot's purpose was to cancel out any gains you made in survival-quality. It did, in various destructive ways." "Sure. So, if it comes back, I'll have to go through the whole business again." "More. You've been separated from the robot for a few months now. If it's still functioning, it's been accumulating a backlog of accidents for you. All the destructive duties that it should have performed during those months -- they'll all have to be discharged before the robot can return to normal duties. See what I mean?" throat nervously. "And of course he would discharge them as quickly as possible in order to get back to regular operation." "Of course. Now look, the ship will be there in about three months. That's the quickest we can make it. I suggest you make sure that robot is immobilized. We wouldn't want to lose you now." "No, we wouldn't," Perceveral said. "I'll take care of it at once." He equipped himself and hurried to the tunnels. The mole people guided him to the chasm after he explained the problem. Armed with blow torch, hacksaw, sledge hammer and cold chisel, Perceveral began a slow descent down the side of the precipice. At the bottom, he quickly located the spot where the robot had landed. There, wedged between two boulders, was a complete robotic arm, wrenched loose from the shoulder. Further on, he found fragments of a shattered eyecell. And he came across an empty cocoon of ripped and shredded rope. But the robot wasn't there. Perceveral climbed back up the precipice, warned the moles and began to make what preparations he could. Nothing happened for twelve days. Then news was brought to him in the evening by a frightened mole. The robot had appeared again in the tunnels, stalking the dark passageways with a single eyecell glowing, expertly threading the maze into the main branch. The moles had prepared for his coming with ropes. But the robot had learned. He had avoided the silent dropping nooses and charged into the mole forces. He had killed six moles and sent the rest into flight. Perceveral nodded briefly at the news, dismissed the mole and continued working. He had set up his defenses in the tunnels. Now he had his four dead beamers disassembled on the table in front of him. Working without a manual, he was trying to interchange parts to produce one usable weapon. He worked late into the night, testing each component carefully before fitting it back into the casing. The tiny parts seemed to float before his eyes and his fingers felt like sausages. Very carefully, working with tweezers and a magnifying glass, he began reassembling the weapon. T HE radio suddenly blared into life. "Anton?" Haskell asked. "What about the robot?" "He's coming," said Perceveral. "I was afraid so. Now listen, I rushed through a priority call to the robot's manufacturers. I had a hell of a fight with them, but I got their permission for you to deactivate the robot, and full instructions on how to do it." "Thanks," Perceveral said. "Hurry up, how's it done?" "You'll need the following equipment. A power source of two hundred volts delivered at twenty-five amps. Can your generator handle that?" "Yes. Go on." "You'll need a bar of copper, some silver wire and a probe made of some non-conductor such as wood. You set the stuff up in the following -- " "I'll never have time," Perceveral said, "but tell me quickly." His radio hummed loudly. "Haskell!" Perceveral cried. His radio went dead. Perceveral heard the sounds of breakage coming from the radio shack. Then the robot appeared in the doorway. The robot's left arm and right eyecell were missing, but his selfrepair units had sealed the damaged spots. He was colored a dull black now, with rust-streaks down his chest and flanks. Perceveral glanced down at the almost-completed beamer. He began fitting the final pieces into place. The robot walked toward him. "Go cut firewood," Perceveral said, in as normal a tone as he could manage. The robot stopped, turned, picked up the axe, hesitated, and started out the door. Perceveral fitted in the final component, slid the cover into place and began screwing it down. The robot dropped the axe and turned again, struggling with contradictory commands. Perceveral hoped he might fuse some circuits in the conflict. But the robot made his decision and launched himself at Perceveral. Perceveral raised the beamer and pressed the trigger. The blast stopped the robot in mid-stride. His metallic skin began to glow a faint red. Then the beamer failed again. Perceveral cursed, hefted the heavy weapon and threw it at the robot's remaining eyecell. It just missed, bouncing off his forehead. Dazed, the robot groped for him. Perceveral dodged his arm and fled from the cabin, toward the black mouth of the tunnel. As he entered, he looked back and saw the robot following. yards down the tunnel. Then he turned on a flashlight and waited for the robot. He had thought the problem out carefully when he'd discovered that the robot had not been destroyed. His first idea naturally was flight. But the robot, traveling night and day, would easily overtake him. Nor could he dodge aimlessly in and out of the maze of tunnels. He would have to stop and eat, drink and sleep. The robot wouldn't have to stop for anything. Therefore he had arranged a series of traps in the tunnels and had staked everything on them. One of them was bound to work. He was sure of it. But even as he told himself this, Perceveral shivered, thinking of the accumulation of accidents that the robot had for him -- the months of broken arms and fractured ribs, wrenched ankles, slashes, cuts, bites, infections and diseases. All of which the robot would hound him into as rapidly as possible, in order to get back to normal routine. He would never survive the robot's backlog. His traps had to work! Soon he heard the robot's thundering footsteps. Then the robot appeared, saw him, and lumbered forward. Perceveral sprinted down a tunnel, then turned into a smaller tunnel. The robot followed, gaining slightly. When Perceveral reached a distinctive outcropping of rock, he looked back to gauge the robot's position. Then he tugged a cord he had concealed behind the rock. The roof of the tunnel collapsed, releasing tons of dirt and rock over the robot. If the robot had continued for another step, he would have been buried. But appraising the situation instantly, he whirled and leaped back. Dirt showered him, and small rocks bounced off his head and shoulders. But the main fall missed him. When the last pebble had fallen, the robot climbed over the mound of debris and continued the pursuit. Perceveral was growing short of wind. He was disappointed at the failure of the trap. But, he reminded himself, he had a better one ahead. The next would surely finish off the implacable machine. nel lit only by occasional flashes from Perceveral's flashlight. The robot began gaining again. Perceveral reached a straight stretch and put on a burst of speed. He crossed a patch of ground that looked exactly like any other patch. But as the robot thundered over it, the ground gave way. Perceveral had calculated it carefully. The trap, which held under his weight, yielded at once under the robot's bulk. The robot thrashed for a handhold. Dirt trickled through his fingers and he slid into the trap that Perceveral had dug -- a pit with sloping sides that came together like a great funnel, designed to keep the robot immovably wedged at the bottom. The robot, however, flung both his legs wide, almost at. right angles to his body. His joints creaked as his heels bit into the sloping sides; they sagged under his weight, but held. He was able to stop himself before reaching the bottom, with both legs stiffly outspread and pressed into the soft dirt. The robot's hand gouged deep handholds in the dirt. One leg retracted and found a foothold; then the other. Slowly the robot extricated himself, and Perceveral started running again. His breath came short and hard now and he was getting a stitch in his side. The robot gained more easily, and Perceveral had to strain to stay ahead. He had counted on those two traps. Now there was just one more left. A very good one, but risky to use. Perceveral forced himself to concentrate in spite of a growing dizziness. The last trap had to be calculated carefully. He passed a stone marked in white and switched off his flashlight He began counting strides, slowing until the robot was directly behind him, his fingers inches from his neck. Eighteen -- nineteen -- twenty! On the twentieth step, Perceveral flung himself head-first into the darkness. For seconds, he seemed to be floating in the air. Then he struck water in a flat, shallow dive, surfaced and waited. The robot had been too close behind to stop. There was a tremendous splash as he hit the surface of the underground lake; a sound of furious splashing; and, finally, the sound of bubbles as the heavy robot sank beneath the surface. When he heard that, Perceveral struck out for the opposite shore. He made it and pulled himself out of the icy water. For minutes, he lay shuddering on the slimy rocks. Then he forced himself to climb further ashore on hands and knees, to a cache where he had stored firewood, matches, whiskey, blankets and clothes. ceveral dried himself, changed clothes and built a small fire. He ate and drank and watched the still surface of the underground lake. Days ago, he had tested with a hundred-foot line and had found no bottom. Perhaps the lake was bottomless. More likely it fed into a swift-flowing underwater river that would pull the robot along for weeks and months. Perhaps... He heard a faint sound in the water and trained his flashlight in its direction. The robot's head appeared, and then his shoulders and torso emerged. The lake was very evidently not bottomless. The robot must have walked across the bottom and climbed the steep slope on the opposite side. The robot began to climb the slimy rocks near shore. Perceveral wearily pulled himself to his feet and broke into a run. His last trap had failed him and his neurosis was closing in for the kill. Perceveral headed toward a tunnel exit. He wanted the end to come in sunlight At a jolting dog-trot, Perceveral led the robot out of the tunnels toward a steep mountain slope. His breath felt like fire in his throat and his stomach muscles were knotted painfully. He ran with his eyes half-closed, dizzy from fatigue. His traps had failed. Why hadn't he realized the certainty of their failure earlier? The robot was part of himself, his own neurosis moving to destroy him. And how can a man trick the trickiest part of himself? The right hand always finds out what the left hand is doing, and the cleverest of devices never fools the supreme fooler for long. He had gone about the thing in the wrong way, Perceveral thought, as he began to climb the mountain slope. The way to freedom is not through deception. It is... The robot clutched at his heel, reminding Perceveral of the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. He pulled himself out of the way and bombarded the robot with stones. The robot brushed them aside and continued climbing. across the steep rock face. The way to freedom, he told himself, is not through deception. That was bound to fail. The way out is through change! The way out is through conquest, not of the robot, but of what the robot represented. Himself! He was feeling light-headed and his thoughts poured on unchecked. If, he insisted to himself, he could conquer his sense of kinship with the robot -- then obviously the robot would no longer be his neurosis! It would simply be a neurosis, with no power over him. All he had to do was lose his neurosis -- even for ten minutes -- and the robot couldn't harm him! All sense of fatigue left him and he was flooded with a supreme and intoxicating confidence. Boldly, he ran across a mass of jumbled rocks, a perfect place for a twisted ankle or a broken leg. A year ago, even a month ago, he would infallibly have had an accident. But the changed Perceveral, striding like a demigod, traversed the rocks without error. The robot, one-armed and oneeyed, doggedly took the accident upon himself. He tripped and sprawled at full length across the sharp rocks. When he picked himself up and resumed the chase, he was limping. Completely intoxicated but minutely watchful, Perceveral came to a granite wall, and leaped for a fingerhold that was no more than a gray shadow above him. For a heart-stopping second, he dangled in the air. Then, as his fingers began to slip, his foot found a hold. Without hesitation, he pulled himself up. The robot followed, his dry joints creaking loudly. He bent a finger out of commission making the climb that Perceveral should have failed. Perceveral leaped from boulder to boulder. The robot came after him, slipping and straining, drawing near. Perceveral didn't care. The thought struck him that all his years of accident-proneness had gone into the making of this moment. The tide had turned now. He was at last what nature had intended him to be all along -- an accident-proof man! The robot crawled after him up a dazzling surface of white rock. Perceveral, drunk with supreme confidence, pushed boulders into motion and shouted to create an avalanche. The rocks began to slide, and above him he heard a deep rumble. He dodged around a boulder, evaded the robot's outflung arm and came to a dead end. He was in a small, shallow cave. The robot loomed in front of him, blocking the entrance, his iron fist pulled back. Perceveral burst into laughter at the sight of the poor, clumsy, accident-prone robot. Then the robot's fist, driven by the full force of his body, shot out. Perceveral ducked, but it wasn't necessary. The clumsy robot missed him anyhow, by at least half an inch. It was just the sort of mistake Perceveral had expected of the ridiculous accidentprone creature. The force of the swing carried the robot outward. He fought hard to regain his balance, poised on the lip of the cliff. Any normal man or robot would have regained it But not the accident-prone robot. He fell on his face, smashing his last eyecell, and began to roll. Perceveral leaned out to accelerate the roll, then quickly crouched back inside the shallow cave. The avalanche completed the job for him, rolling a diminishing black dot down the dusty white mountainside and burying it under tons of stone. Perceveral watched it all, chuckling to himself. Then he began to ask himself what, exactly, he had been doing. And that was when he started to shake.L" stood by the gangplank of the colony ship Cuchulain, watching the colonists step down into Theta's midwinter sunshine. There were all types and kinds. They had all come to Theta for a chance at a new life. Each of them was vitally important at least to himself, and each deserved a fighting chance at survival, no matter what his potentialities. And he, Anton Perceveral, had scouted the minimum-survival requirements on Theta for these people; and had, in some measure, given hope and promise to the least capable among them -- the incompetents who also wanted to live. He turned away from the stream of pioneers and entered the ship by a rear ladder. He walked down a corridor and entered Haskell's cabin. "Well, Anton," Haskell said, "how do they look to you?" "They seem like a nice group," Perceveral said. "They are. Those people consider you their founding father, Anton. They want you here. Will you stay?" Perceveral said, "I consider Theta my home." "Then it's settled. I'll just-" "Wait," Perceveral said. "I'm not finished. I consider Theta my home. I want to settle here, marry, raise kids. But not yet." "Eh?" "I've grown pretty fond of exploring," Perceveral said. "I'd like to do some more of it. Maybe one or two more planets. Then I'll settle down on Theta." "I was afraid you might want that," Haskell said unhappily. "What's wrong with it?" "Nothing. But I'm afraid we can't use you again as an explorer, Anton." "Why not?" "You know what we need. Minimum-survival personalities for staking out future colonies. You cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a minimumsurvival personality any longer." "But I'm the same man I always was!" Perceveral said. "Oh, sure, I improved on the planet But you expected that and had the robot to compensate for it And at the end -- " "Yes, what about that?" "Well, at the end I just got carried away. I think I was drunk or something. I can't imagine how I acted that way." "Still, that's how you did act" "Yes. But look! Even with that, I barely survived the experience -- the total experience on Theta! Barely! Doesn't that prove I'm still a minimum-survival personality?" looked thoughtful. "Anton, you almost convince me. But I'm afraid you're indulging in a bit of word-juggling. In all honesty, I can't view you as minimum any longer. I'm afraid you'll just have to put up with your lot on Theta." Perceveral's shoulders slumped. He nodded wearily, shook hands with Haskell and turned to go. As he turned, the edge of his sleeve caught Haskell's inkstand, brushing it off the table. Perceveral lunged to catch it and banged his hand against the desk. Ink splattered over him. He fumbled again, tripped over a chair, fell. "Anton," Haskell asked, "was that an act?" "No," Perceveral said. "It wasn't, damn it" "Hmm. Interesting. Now, Anton, don't raise your hopes too high, but maybe -- I say just maybe -- " Haskell stared hard at Perceveral's flushed face, then burst into laughter. "What a devil you are, Anton! You almost had me fooled. Now will you kindly get the hell out of here and join the colonists? They're dedicating a statue to you and I think they'd like to have you present." Shamefaced, but grinning in spite of it, Anton Perceveral walked out to meet his new destiny. , Then hurry out and get a copy of magazine, a fascinating collection of' I photos  features on Hollywood's most famous fiends. Horrific and hilarious! Frankenstein himself  t recommends  ; #c at newsstands, or mail #c to ' Monsters, # E. Upsal St. Phila. #, Pa. Sent prepaid. Miafifti -- the science-fiction anthology you've been waiting for. Order now to get your copy of the first edition specially inscribed for you alone! Edited by H. L. 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The crystal ball went cockeyed, however, when it squinted at the entertainment; its swirling draperies and heavenly music would net a .#I Trendex in this Year of the Horse: horse opera, horse laughs, horse play, and other equine attributes. Pinpointing any device is the easier part of extrapolation. Anticipating effects is a lot harder, and still more so for the Utopians who mainly wrote our early science fiction; they had the most innocent notions of how things were to be manufactured and distributed, and especially why. Whirling draperies and heavenly music may be fine for a first viewing of TV or movies -- anything would be -- just as Times Square struck G. K. Chesterton as an awesome sight for someone who can't read, which is much like the "sense of wonder" sought by paleolithic fans who got trapped in the lowest strata of science fiction. For people eventually learn to read, to grow selective, to pay less attention to a wondrous gizmo than what it's meant for. And so the reality behind each change is a sort of reversal : "Good greshams drive out the bad," a gresham in this instance being a handy unit of desirability based on how severely what's new clobbers what's old -- and how smartly and trickily what's old fights back. Once radio showed how shows could be financed, the shape of TV was cast, or at least extruded. Add the stuff that movies are made on and you have form and content. With one free and the other not, the sound of war was inevitable to anybody with a good ear for greshams, even if the actual tactics and weapons stayed invisible. At this short distance, those and the principal battlefields show up on the picture of the future: Unless its heads display sudden and unlikely braininess, pay TV is no challenger. Its ad-free programs are not recoilless when the viewer faces the charge at month's end. As long as it's free, commercial TV doesn't have to get better. Even if it gets worse, a "What if -- ?" that dismays the sturdiest extrapolative mind, its prisoners can't break out of the living room stockade without spending money. This particular skirmish is won by the entertainment generals with the biggest greshams: the movies. There are two hows of it, as dia( Continued on page #) A Complete Restyling Of Streamlined pocket-size format -- handsomest in design, handiest for reading and carrying. Outstanding titles by outstanding authors. A gigantic increase of # more pages. Clear, compact type -- more wordage yet greater reading ease. All this at no increase in price -- a hard-headed bet that upgrading pays off in these days of less and less for more and more.  Count me in! Here's my # for six titles, during the year, each different, each full-length -- half a dozen check choice novels at less than the original cost of any one. Publisher's Note: If you don't want to mutilate this issue send your order on any sheet of paper. ( Continued from page #) metric as guerrilla and pentomic warfare. Time wrote up one hero of the guerrilla attack: Kansas City's Elmer C. Rhoden, Jr., #, president of Commonwealth Theaters, a chain of # film houses. Rhoden says TV is for the older folks; teen-agers on a date don't want to stay home. He pulls in the youngsters with rock-'n'-roll-'ems like The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy, made last year for #. Rhoden will produce Daddy-O and Sideburns and Sympathy this year. The opposite of these snipers are the wraparound CosmicScopic, StentorPhonic gigantacles, the cost of each greater than any single theater -- The Ten Commandments, for instance, at a megabuck per Commandment. Like Niagara Falls, they can't be invited to the home; they have to be traveled to, which is the how-come rather than know-how behind their vast budgets. It is inevitable that Generalissimo of all the Cinemarmies should be Cecil B. de Mille, whose fifty years of geophysical biblicalumnies put him half a century ahead of his film foes -- and ever out of the ken of TV's creepie-peepie cameras. When the current pictures are released to television, can you imagine the Flight from Egypt on your home screen? Marching cigarettes, it will seem, one opened carton pursuing another through a cloven bowl of Jell-o. TV screens can get larger, of course, can even become theatersin-the-round like today's movie houses, an entire room bowed out and windowless -- but is that a gresham to bet on with homes and apartments growing smaller? No, the fields and forces are in focus now: TV, bigger but limited in size, with color to come, manned by the kids and old folks. The dim caves of dragstrip riots and mug monsters, hidden out in by teen-agers on dates. The Grand Canyon palaces, featuring worlds in collision, nations on the move, skyscraper (as opposed to mug) monsters, visual tons of flesh loving or hating each other -- pincering families on outings. It's the particular misfortune of science fiction to have become cinematic vogue just when the chips came down. Only its most primitive themes, dripping horrors and astronomical catastrophes, fit the cave and canyon screens. TV could do the good modem stories; there's even a chance it may. That great big Asteroid Belt up there -- was it caused by a longago Mike Todd's attempt to outdo a de Mille? galaxy Also Published In Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany And Finland by Stephen Barr by Fritz Leiber by Poul and Karen Anderson by Paul Flehr by L. J. Stecher, Jr. by Arthur Sellings by Willy Ley by H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale controls. Radar viewer in center gives continuous visual information to spacemen surrounded by recording instrumentation and equipment in blind vehicle; the window-like openings are solar-power units. Small jets power return to Earth, braking by ribbon chute on reentering atmosphere. Final stage of rocket following satellite in background. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. the She traveled from life to death and back again like a commuter on the #:#... except each trip brought her nearer the beginning of the line! I N reading this report, it must be borne in mind that when the word "they" is used, it does not refer necessarily to separate entities as individuals. It is possible that a closer analogy would be the cells of an organism -- which, in a sense, we ourselves become when we are in a pack or forming a mob. On the other hand, that particular cell or entity which this report deals with exhibited at all times marked individuality -- even eccentricity -- and will hereinafter be referred to as "she." This is because "she" invariably assumed a female form when visiting us, and because she furthermore gave every indication of that type of mind and point of view which is generally met with in the more noticeable, effective or contentious members of that sex. As she put it herself during the hearing, she was always in hot water.    three boys -- weren't allowed in the bar, so they went down the street to a joint where there were a soda fountain, booths and a jukebox. They sat in a booth and a waitress came to take the orders: three hot dogs and three cokes. "What about you, dear?" "Just a glass of water." The waitress started to leave. "No, wait -- gimme a white on rye, too." The waitress left, then came back again. "What was that you wanted, dear? Some kind of ryebread sandwich?" "Changed my mind. Make it a buttered pecan, but tell 'em to go easy on the butter. And I don't want no French dressing. Make it on whole wheat." r I 'HE waitress looked uncertain. "You mean a nut sandwich?" "Yeah, only malted. With lettuce and chocolate sprinkles." "Who you kiddin'?" the waitress said, and turned to go. "No, hold it. Tell Joe to please scramble them on both sides." "What you talkin' about?" the waitress said. "We ain't got no one here called Joe." "So okay, Joseph, then. Tell him just a boiled egg sunny side up." The waitress left, frowning. "Our Miss Framis," one of the boys said, meaning the girl, and the others smiled. They looked as though they were sneering at the same time and hoped they would be taken for juvenile delinquents. There were two very odd-looking men in the booth opposite and they were listening to the conversation. Their oddness lay in an atmosphere rather than in any physical abnormality. The girl noticed them and nudged one of the boys. The three boys looked at the men resentfully and one of them said something under his breath, but the girl said, "Button it." Then she asked the men opposite, "Lookin' for someone, mister?" The two men looked away, and this made the boys feel brave. One of them said, "Let's give 'em the works." "No, leave it to me." The girl got up and went across to the two men. "Me and my friends was wondering. Maybe you gentlemen would like to come to a trake in the gort later?" The three boys snickered and the men looked up at the girl and waited with blank faces. "Or maybe you'd rather we put on a hanse for you?" she said. "No, sit down," one of the men -- the bigger one -- said, and moved back to make room for her. She glanced at him with surprise for a moment and sat down next to him. One of the boys started to get up when he saw this, but the others pulled him down again. "What did you say to us just now?" the big man asked. "It was too small in here." She shook her head and frowned. "Why, that was just... I said did you want for us to put on a hanse, is all." She had a rather feeble grin. "Yes," the big man said. "We do." She glanced back at her friends nervously, and then at the man again. "I don't get you," she said. "Neither do we," the smaller man said. The boys across the room were listening quietly and then one of them said, "Go on, tell 'em, Miss Framis." "We just want you to quint," the big man said, "and won't thursday on it." She stared at him without expression and got up slowly. She went over to her friends. "Let's get out of here," she said. She was shivering. Q You say you object to this line of questioning? A. (She) No, I just don't like being spied on. And it made the kids... mad. They wrecked the car and that meant starting all over again. Q. The car? A. Yes, their hot-rod. When we got outside, they acted the way teen-agers do and went too fast. They were sore at those spies -- they took it out on the car, so it went off the road. It turned over three times and we were all killed. Q. They were not spies. They were acting on their own. A. I didn't know that. I just knew something was funny. Anyway, how can you say that? They're a waste. And it would have been part of you, just as I am. It was more of a waste if I hadn't been split. The other part was only about eleven years old and I had to wait another six years to -- Q. It is your own fault if you were split. You cannot blame us. This has happened before -- you have aimed badly and arrived wrong. Don't forget about the help. A. Well, in this case it's a lucky thing I did; otherwise the whole thing would have been wasted. And the kelp -- that was dreadfully dull. I wanted to try a really primitive form, but not that primitive. Then I got washed up and it led to the cat. After they got the iodine out of the kelp, I was suddenly a cat. Q. This has not been reported. A. I'm reporting it now. It wasn't dull in the least, but they were very superstitious about cats in those days, and they decided I was possessed. Q. They saw through you? A. Oh, yes. People usually do. Q. You couldn't have been very successful if they saw through you. A. It doesn't make any difference if they see through you. The important thing is to see through them. Q. But you were a cat. A. Cats are in a very good position to see through people. I think they sensed that. Anyway, I was... done away with. Q. Burned again? A. Yes. Q. Seems to be a habit of yours. What happens? How does it feel? A. I cannot explain it to you, but I know what to do. It's not my habit -- it's one of theirs, but it's dying out in most places now. And there was a time when it would never have occurred to them. They were too frightened of it. Q. Frightened of what? A. Of fire. It was very new then... T HE hunters came back to the cave at dusk, and one of them went to the fire that was kept going constantly in front of the opening. He took a dry branch and held it in the fire until the end caught. Then he held it up. "If we take this, we can hunt in the dark," he said. "And when it is nearly eaten by the fire, we can take another branch and start it again. That way we do not need the moon." "That way we can hunt until we are tired," said the other. "That way we can kill twice as much game," said the first "There is so much game in the cave now," a young woman said, "that it is beginning to smell." The older hunter glanced at her apprehensively; she made him feel foolish, always finding fault with his plans. "Perhaps so," he said. "But at other times we starve." "Besides," she said, "if you take the fire with you to see where you are going and to see the game, the game will see you." The hunters looked at one another and shrugged. The woman went into the cave and returned with an earthenware pot. There were pieces of raw meat and some water in it, and she put it on the fire, propping it in position with three stones. The second hunter looked at the pot curiously. He was a younger brother from the other side of the valley, where he lived with his mates. He pointed at the pot and looked inquiringly at the older brother. "She made it out of mud," the older brother said. "Why doesn't it fall apart with the water in it?" "I put it into the fire first, for a long time," the young woman said. "A very big fire. The mud gets red -- and then it gets hard so it won't melt when the water is in it" The younger man looked surprised. "Magic?" "Yes," said the other man. "Nonsense," said the woman. She went back to the cave and the young man put the end of his spear into the fire and tried to scrape the side of the pot with the flint head, but the flint was cold and it cracked. He pulled it back and was looking angrily at it when she came out again and sat on the ground. She had an armful of roots which she began to scrape with a sharp stone. "The spearhead is made of the wrong sort of stone," she said, without looking up. "That is why it broke in the fire." "It's made of the right kind!" the young man shouted. "All spearheads are made of that kind! They always have been and they always will be! How did you know it broke in the fire? You weren't looking." "I heard it make the sound it makes when the fire breaks it" The young man glowered and pushed his under lip out. "This kind of stone was put in the cave for us to make knives and spears. And it makes a very sharp edge when you know how to form it." "No sharper than this knife," she said, holding up the stone in her hand. "This doesn't break so easily." The young man took it and examined it carefully. "How do you strike it to make it this shape?" he said, and then, grudgingly, "It is very smooth -- a very good shape." "You don't strike it," she said, taking it back and going on scraping the roots. "You rub it on another stone -- first on the kind that has the bright sparkles in it, and then under water on the flat gray kind. It's much better than your knives and the fire doesn't break it so easily."  put them in the pot with the meat. "Where do you find such big roots?" the young man asked his brother. "Over there," the brother said, pointing to a patch of earth nearby. "She finds them there." "I don't find them," she said. "I put them there in the first place." "You mean you store them in the earth?" the young man said. "No. I put the tops in the ground -- the blue and yellow flowers -- and next warm season I dig and there are the new roots. You have to put water on the earth when it gets dry. Also you have to pull up all the small plants that grow there among them. It's very hard work." "More magic," said the young man. "It's not magic!" she said. "You are stupid. Haven't you noticed that when you leave an acorn on the ground, it breaks open and a finger goes down into the earth? And then, after the next rains, it makes little leaves -- and if you leave it alone, it grows and in time becomes a young tree?" "Everyone knows that," the young man said disdainfully. "Well, this is the same." "Yes, but what makes the roots so big? I never saw any like these." "That's because I only take the flowers from the plants that have the biggest roots. And if any of the new roots are little, I throw away the flowers from them. Far away." "What do you do with the little roots?" "Eat them." "I don't understand. If you eat the little roots, why don't you get little roots?" "You are being foolish again!" the young woman said. "A tall man has tall sons." "If he eats the meat of a tall animal," said the young man. "That has nothing to do with it." "My friend's father, who lives near the river, always eats the fat of the game they kill, and he is fat. So you see!" "That has nothing to do with it," she said, and went into the cave. The young man walked up and down angrily. "Why does she talk that way? Is she one of our sisters? I don't remember her." "No," said the other. "She was with the people we fought with three seasons ago. She is my new mate and she is very good at magic, only I advise you not to pay any attention to what she says." The other picked up the scraping-stone she had left and looked at it with grudging envy. "The very tall man who killed the aurochs by himself has a son," he said, "and the son is short." The other shrugged. "Don't pay any attention to her." The woman came out again and looked at the sky, then went to the fire and stirred the pot with a stick. "I wish you would try to get the young animals," she said. "You always bring home the biggest ones ' and they are hard to chew unless I cook the meat all day." "My father said that if you wish to be brave, powerful and swift, you must eat only the animals that are brave, powerful and swift," said the young man obstinately. "Didn't he eat roots, too?" "Yes." "Well, then." The young man threw the scraping-stone hard against the side of the cave opening and split it in two. "Roots are not animals!" r "HE young woman picked up the pieces and said, "I think I can make a small scraper out of the big piece and a throwing tip out of the little one, but this is a foolish way to get little stones. There are more little ones than big ones." "Show him your bent stick with the animal sinew," said her mate. "She has a way of throwing very stnall spears with a bent stick," he said to his brother. He had a dim feeling that there should be peace between the other two, since they were near his cave, but he was scarcely aware of the feeling. The young woman looked pleased and went into the cave and brought back a stick of springy wood with a thong attached to one end, and a few dried reeds. "See," she said, and took a dried reed which had a small sharp stone stuck in the end of it Then she bent the stick and strung the sinew from end to end. The younger man had his first view of a bow and arrow. "This was the way my mother showed me to throw little spears." She fitted the arrow into the bow and, pulling it back, shot it at a pine tree on the other side of the fire. The bowstring twanged and the arrow wobbled, having no fletching, but it stuck into the tree trunk. The young man jumped back in alarm and blinked his eyes. Then he went to the tree and pulled at the arrow. It came loose, leaving the tip stuck in the bark. "What good is it?" he said derisively, to conceal his astonishment "It is a child's plaything!" He tried to pry out the arrowhead with his thumb, and broke his nail. "If any child of mine played with this," said the young woman, "I should beat him." She put a larger arrow into the bow -- one that had a heavier tip -- and shot it into the same tree. Owing to its superior balance, this arrow did not wobble; it swished through the air and sank its tip deep into the soft wood. "You have no child," said her mate, "so how can you beat it?" The young woman said nothing, but she looked angry. "My other women have children," he went on tauntingly. "They laugh at you." "You have no child younger than ten seasons!" she said, and stamped her foot. "That is why I have no child! You are an old man!" He started toward her with a look of furious intention. He had no spear in his hand, but he held a club with flint splinters stuck in the heavy head. She ran back to the cave mouth and put another arrow in her bow and aimed it at him. They both stood silently staring at one another. Then he threw down his club and turned away. "Peace," he said. "Peace," she replied, and dropped her bow. She went to the pot over the fire and sniffed it, poking at the meat with a sharp stick. "The food is ready," she said. "Will you take the pot off the fire? You have braver hands than I." How are we to find out anything about them, when you are so slow? A. What are we supposed to find out? Q. That is what you are supposed to find out. A. I am to find out what I am to find out? You sound like them -- like men. Q. Like Man? A. No, men. The women aren't quite the same. That's why I always choose to be one, but I wish you would send somebody else -- another part of our Organism. I'm tired. Q. Absurd. Besides, you are the best; you cannot be tired. A. The best! How am I the best? You do nothing but criticize. You send me because I understand the intentions -- the leanings -- of live things. You say I understand understanding. I suppose that makes me some kind of epistemologist: the father confessor of the inscrutable. Q. Wouldn't it be mother confessor? A. Not with them; they don't like women to be priests. They can be holy, but they don't like women to tell them what to do. It's called nagging. They get especially angry if the woman is right. Q. Hmm. Now you say that we criticize you. You surely are not going to claim to be above criticism here, are you? A. Oh, no. I'm beneath it. Q. Then why do you resent it? A. Because it doesn't apply. If a mother is not a fool, she will correct her child, but she won't blame it. You can't go looking for good and evil motives in everything that happens. Does a stone have a motive when it falls to the ground? Q. If this is the way you always talked, I'm not surprised you angered them. A. I am sorry. Q. You turn everything around that's said to you. A. I will try not to. It's like the bishop -- he complained about the same thing, and I was only trying to -- Q. What bishop? A. I forgot his name. He was the thin one; he was much cleverer than the others. He gave me an impossible choice, so I chose to make another start. Q. You mean you got yourself burned again? A. Yes! They did it to all their best people. Both sides did. I would have looked a precious fool if I'd backed down. Q. Can't you bear to admit you are wrong? A. But I wasn't wrong. Anyway, they'd have made me out in the wrong either way. Q. Did they only burn the women, when they thought the women were wrong? A. No, of course not. And it was usually when they suspected the women were right Then there were the women who were thought to be possessed by what they thought were evil spirits. Q. They didn't suspect they were right, surely? A. No, but they were afraid they might be. They were very unsure of themselves and their beliefs. That's when they burned people. Q. It sounds very wasteful. They must be very careless of their possessions. A. No, not in the least I'll explain -- Q. I wish you wouldn't. A. There, you see? They were just like you -- they kept asking me questions and getting more and more enraged when I answered them. So, to shut me up, they tied me to a stake. Q. You are too interested in your own reactions to things. Tell us about something more constructive -- about what you found in other guises. I understand you led an insurrection? A. If you call throwing an armed robber out of your house an insurrection. The trouble was that on that occasion a lot of my friends thought I was right. That's called conspiracy...   "HE captain led a small group of foot-soldiers into the village at what, to the Romans, was the Twelfth Hour, which is sunset. The soldiers had light armor and carried only the small shields -- not the enormous testudines -- but they had been warned to keep their eyes open as the British were tricky, even treacherous. The captain greatly disliked to take such raw troops so far north, where the treaties were uncertain and the Pax Romana was held lightly, if at all. An ancestor of his, also a captain, had been killed near here in one of Hadrian's marches, and no one was quite sure what had happened. The earth wall that Hadrian's men subsequently built across the British island was intended to keep out the more unruly natives of the North, and later the emperor Severus built another one of stone, but it was by now in a state of disrepair and only a few of the guard towers were manned. Even the Great North Road made an attenuated and unreliable line of supply, and the captain could expect neither reinforcements nor food from the camps further south, like Eboracum or Lancastrium. Live off the land, he was told, and that meant quartering his troops -- a risky thing because it separated them -- or sending foraging parties to the surly farmers for "contributions." Since he was here to collect back-taxes, the inhabitants would not take kindly to feeding the collectors. The village had a stockade of undressed logs and wide gates at either end. These were surmounted by arched wooden structures that were supposed to serve as watchtowers, but beyond spears and knives for hunting and the necessary farming implements, the villagers were not allowed to carry weapons of any kind. The stockade was not big enough to enclose all the houses, and the majority of these were on the outside and huddled against the walls. The small body of Roman troops -- barely a manipulus -- were not surprised to notice that all the windows and booths had been shuttered, and in the exact center of the village, the local chieftain and heads of families were gathered in a respectful and anxious group. It annoyed the captain that it was impossible to make an unexpected arrival anywhere in Britain; news traveled faster than Roman foot-soldiers. "Hail Caesar!" said the captain, putting his arm up, the palm of his hand facing forward. "Hail Caesar!" said the villagers. "We come for the taxes which were not paid last year." The villagers shook their heads and made regretful sounds. "Nor the year before, nor the year before that Which is your headman? I shall require food for my men at once -- they are tired after a day's march." A gray-bearded, very tall man stood forward. "The food will be ready at once, noble decemvir, and I hope you will honor me with your presence for dinner." "Thank you very much," said the captain, "but I prefer to stay with my men until I see them taken care of. And I am not a decemvir. My rank is captain -- Caesar's captain." The bearded man bowed and said, "Then, after the arrangements have been made, Captain, will you not take a cup of wine?" "Don't press him, Grandfather," a voice said from above them, and, looking up, the captain saw a girl's face at a second-story window. She had very dark skin, red hair and blue eyes. "If he's been walking all day, I expect he wants to go to bed early. You'll only keep him up all night talking about boar hunts." "Silence!" the headman shouted. "Get back, girl! You insult our... our guest!" "No, let her stay," the captain said with an amused smile. "Better still, have her come down. I think I shall accept your offer about the wine later." TN the evening, the captain came to the headman's house with his two lieutenants as guard. They were received with deference and given wolf-hides to sit on. The wine was brought by the granddaughter and served in horn cups. "What is your name, young lady?" asked the captain politely. "This is excellent wine, by the way." "Thank you, Captain," she said. "We have had a cask taken to your men. I made it myself, three years ago. My name is Boadicea." "Boadicea?" said the captain in astonishment. "No, no, Captain!" the headman said hurriedly. "She's joking -- her name is Flavia; the other is the name she takes for herself. I appologize for her." "It is not a joke," she said. "Boadicea is my heroine and I have taken her name. I don't like the name Flavia -- it's Roman. Do I look like a Roman to you, Captain?" "You look very beautiful," the captain said, laughing, "and there is no need for apology. I admire Boadicea myself; she very nearly drove Caesar's men into the sea. It was a long time ago." He drained his wine cup. "A long, long time ago." "But we have not forgotten her, cup again. "You insult our honored guest, girl!" her grandfather said. "Go to bed!" "No, I beg you -- please don't send her to bed," said the captain. "I'm not in the least insulted. After all, it's ancient history now. I don't think people think of us as conquerors any more. We are protectors. While we are here, the Piets stay where they belong, and the Scots, too." "The Piets say they used to live hereabouts," said the girl. "The Piets say, the Piets say! What do you know of what they say?" asked her grandfather. "The cook's mother is a Piet," she replied. "Well, she'd better not come here!" said the headman. "We want no Celts!" "But, Grandfather, we are Celts!" "No, girl, we are Romans," he answered, looking sideways at the captain. The captain nodded. "That is true. All members of the Empire are Romans. Not citizens, perhaps, but Romans just the same, and all live by Caesar's law." "But suppose people don't want to live by his law?" said the girl. The two lieutenants looked shocked, but the captain smiled. "That would be most foolish and uncivilized of them. Don't you think it's better for the whole world to live as members of one community and cease all this useless warfare?" "It seems to me," the girl said, "that warfare is the result of somebody trying to take somebody else's land and subject him to a law that is alien to him." T HE captain raised his eyebrows and put his head to one side quizzically. The headman coughed and attempted to change the subject. "The taxes, Captain," he said, "are very much on my mind... "And on mine," the captain said. The two lieutenants tried to look businesslike, but they looked more as if they were falling asleep. "And I hope I may say that this time we will have them ready for you," said the headman. "I hope so, too," said the captain. "But there are other levies that have not been made, which we had rather expected to be made... "Other levies?" The captain held out his cup and the girl poured more wine into it. "I refer to troops, Captain," the headman said. "You levy no troops from us up here." "You put me in rather an embarrassing position," the captain said. "You must realize that while I make no comparison to yourself, there are some people living at the outer boundaries of the Empire, people not yet wholly reconciled to Caesar's dominion, people who -- to give another example -- think of themselves as, say, Helvetiae first and Romans second. It is the Imperial policy in such cases not to levy troops because -- " "In other words," the girl interrupted, "you think we are not to be trusted. It quite passes my understanding why anyone should expect loyalty unless it is freely offered." "But, my dear young lady, you are not slaves! You are given the civilizing benefits of Roman rule, and you are taxed very much less than people living in Rome itself, I can assure you of that." He felt terribly sleepy -- the wine was stornger than he had thought and he found it difficult to think of the right words. He was beginning to sound to himself like a senator, a race of men he secretly despised. "Let me put it this way," he went on. "A child does not offer loyalty to his parents -- it comes by nature." "Perhaps grown people do not like to be treated as children," she said. "I don't." "You behave like one, Granddaughter!" the headman said. "Go to your room!" Rather unexpectedly, she got up and walked to the door. "Good night, Captain," she said, but he did not answer. He was asleep and so were his lieutenants, and, since there were poppyheads in the wine, they did not wake up even when, an hour later, the shouting began outside. of the Roman troops was killed, and the captain and his lieutenants were being held hostage by the Pictish Decaledonae who had swarmed over the broken Wall -- the break having been enlarged by the headman's granddaughter and her friends during the previous night. The headman and his companions were horrified; they pleaded with the Pictish leaders to spare the Roman officers. "Caesar will send a legion," the headman said, "many legions to avenge this! Leave them unharmed and go back to the North, and the Roman captain will soften the blow that will fall on us all..." The Piets told him to shut up and called for wine. The headman and his companions took advantage of the carousing to slip out the back way and, taking some of the villagers, including Flavia, they hid themselves in a cottage in the forest. Except for the girl, they were shaking with terror. She was triumphant. "Now Caesar will withdraw again," she said. "He no longer moves north -- but slowly southward. The next Imperial rampart will be below us, and we shall be free!" "You are mad," her grandfather said. "Under Roman rule, we are safe. What can we expect from these Pictish barbarians?" He looked at her as though she were some new kind of snake. "I should rather be occasionally robbed by my cousins than taxed to death by strangers," she said, her dark face flushed. "But the Romans are civilized!" said her grandfather. "Their civilization stands on slavery," she replied. "I'd rather be a free barbarian. The Romans are doomed." "This is revolt!" the headman said. "In the name of freedom, you deliver us into the hands of the Piets -- you are a traitor to your own people!" "The Piets won't stay," she said. "They never do; they hate farming. What does it matter if they burn the village and steal some of the farm animals? It will come to less than what you would have to pay in taxes to Caesar." "Caesar's men will return," said her grandfather, "and we shall have to pay ten times over. And if the Piets kill the captain, the Romans will have my life for it! You are a traitor! Who was with you in this infernal plot?" Q Why didn't you tell them? Why are you always so stubborn? You might have stayed on and found out many useful things. A. There would have been nothing useful to find out. Men who submit to autocracy cease to be a living, growing organism. Look at Egypt -- it stayed that way almost uninterruptedly for four thousand years. However, I did find out one very surprising thing. Q. I'm glad to hear it. What was that? A. My grandfather was a Druid! I thought all that was dead and gone with the Roman occupation -- but there was a secret sect and he was their high priest! So all the time he was in a conspiracy, too! I couldn't help laughing. Q. How did you learn this? A. They took me to an oak tree, put a wreath of mistletoe on my head, and he executed me with a stone sickle. Also all my friends who didn't have the sense to escape north over the Wall of Severus. But it made no difference in the end. The next emperor withdrew the army to the southeast part of the island and the next -- or the one after; I forget which -- took them all back to Rome. This was after we invited the Saxons in -- they made it hot for Caesar's men, I can tell you! They also made things rather hot for us, but everything calmed down in time. G. It doesn't sound like much of an improvement A. Well, the Saxons may have been pretty bloodthirsty, but they hated slavery. They had sort of half-slaves -- housekarls -- but their heart wasn't in it. Also, although they were extremely rough, they didn't go in for official torture. Q. But surely the civilized Romans didn't either? A. I think you are being quite funny. Q. I don't know what you mean. A. I know you don't. That's the one really appealing thing about men : they sometimes have a sense of humor -- when the joke is not on them. I think I must have caught it from them. Q. Keep in mind that you are not an irreplaceable part of this organism! A. How can I forget it? Q. One gets the impression that Man felt that you were not irreplaceable either. When they want war, you are against it, and when they want peace -- like your North Britons -- you are all for war. How did you hear about Caesar withdrawing from Britain? A. I was supposed to go back a little later, but I missed again, and that time I was in real trouble -- with both sides at once. It was just about a thousand years later, when the French and English were fighting each other. Q. You seem to have made a rather dismaying number of mistakes. A. I would never have learned anything if I had been afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, the bishops were the ones I had to fear the most, and when they started questioning me, I -- Q. Was it they who told you about the Saxons being invited to come in? A. No, indeed. By that time, scarcely anyone knew anything any more, except prayers, recipes and how to supposedly cure warts. Later on, there was a revival and everyone became very clever, but I was in Italy at the time and I never got to hear about the Saxons until long afterward -- my last trip but two, in fact. I was at a school in England... HP HE headmistress of St Agatha's prided herself on being fair. Her way of being fair was to avoid favoritism by being equally unfair to all the girls and to those of the assistant teachers who would stand for it. Some of them didn't, and they usually left after their first term, as the headmistress didn't believe in contracts. Besides, at the beginning of the twentieth century, contracts for teachers were a novelty. The result of this policy was a rapid turnover in the young and intelligent teachers, and a small permanent staff of compliant sheep. That St. Agatha's had any scholastic standing was due to the fact that Miss Wakefield had taken honors at Girton, and the school's social standing was due to her being the cousin of a Peer of the Realm. The girls were fed almost enough, the school uniform was expensive, and nobody had much free time. French was well taught -- by Miss Wakefield herself -- and so was Latin, but games were also stressed. The school was run on what Miss Wakefield called the Honor System, which had the effect of dividing the pupils into tale-bearers and secret rebels. On a raw November afternoon, Miss Wakefield sent a prefect for Sarah Stone, who was one of the new girls. "Tell her to come straight to my office. She can have her shower later," she said, and Sarah arrived in the jersey and serge skirt she had been wearing on the hockey field. Her bare knees were blue and her nose was running. She stood waiting while the headmistress looked with prominent eyes at some papers on her desk. Sarah could see that they were examination papers and one of them was in her own handwriting. Without looking up, Miss Wakefield said, "I hear that your mother is in trouble with the police." "But she-" "Do not interrupt. I asked you no question and no answer is called for. It is a fact, which I have just read in the Morning Post, that your mother is in trouble with the police. Again -- is that not true?" "No." The headmistress looked up in amazement. "Do you mean to stand there and tell me the newspaper is lying? Do you tell me to my face that your mother is not involved with the... the authorities?" Miss Wakefield also taught English Composition and woe betide the girl who used the same word twice in the same context. "We are blessed with the richest of all languages," she would say, "so let us explore it -- let us make use of it -- for to do otherwise would be tautology." She never made clear what tautology meant, but the girls got her drift. "I don't know whether the newspapers are lying or merely mistaken, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said, "although my mother says that it's hard to tell the difference with most journalists. At any rate, she is not in trouble with the police. They are the ones that are in trouble." The headmistress stared hard at Sarah; she was rather good at this with small girls of thirteen. (You and I might find it difficult to stare down a child, and impossible in the case of a kitten, but Miss Wakefield was, after all is said, the cousin of a Peer of the Realm.) "I believe I can understand that," she said. "In fact, I pity the arresting officer. Here is a woman who breaks shop windows for the sake of attracting attention to her political clique, and he is no doubt subjected to scratching and biting. Votes for women, indeed! Does breaking shop windows prove that people like her should have the... the franchise?" "She didn't break the window," Sarah said. "She was pushed against it by the policeman. And she never scratches unless a mosquito happens to -- " "You were not there, Stone," said the headmistress, "so how can you say that?" "I know my mother. And she doesn't bite, either," Sarah said, looking at Miss Wakefield's neck. "Unless it's a tough old hen!" sense to refuse the bait, but she flushed. "I do not feel that it is at all suitable for the mother of one of our irls to be a Militant Suffragette! The reputation of the School..." The sentence was left unfinished. She picked up the sheets of paper. "I have here two of the mid-term examination papers in arithmetic, yours and Angela Harvey's. There is a curious, a very curious similarity between them. All the answers are correct except for problems five, seven and twelve, and they have precisely the same mistakes in both papers!" She paused and stared hard at Sarah, who blinked but refused to lower her eyes. "You and Harvey sit next to one another," Miss Wakefield said meaningly. Sarah said nothing. She sniffed because her nose was running and there was no pocket in her games uniform for a handkerchief. "Well?" said Miss Wakefield. "Have you nothing to say?" "No, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said, "except I didn't copy from Angela, if that's what you mean." "Then it would appear that she copied from you." "That's a beastly thing to say! It was a coincidence! She's not a cheat!" The headmistress felt on secure ground: the child was losing her temper. It was Miss Wakefield's favorite strategem to make people lose their tempers -- that is, if they were children or underlings. "Blow your nose, Stone," she said, and then, seeing that Sarah had no handkerchief, she gave her her own, with a look of distaste. "I think perhaps you might do better at some other school." "So do I, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said. "Mother wanted to get me into Mr. Russell's school, but it was full up." "Bertrand Russell?" Sarah nodded, blowing her nose again. She was shivering. "Well!" said Miss Wakefield. "I never heard the like! He's an Atheist! Why, he believes in Free Love!" "I don't know what he believes," Sarah said. "I know he was awfully nice when he came to tea. He said I had some kind of a guiding somebody standing over me. He said he would like awfully to have me at his school, but it was full up. I know one of the boys there and he says it's simply ripping." "Well! Of course, if your mother thinks of us as Second Best... Perhaps Mr. Russell believes it is all right to cheat in examinations, but we have a Tradition at St. Agatha's." She rang a bell on her desk and a scrawny little housemaid came in. "Send one of the girls for Angela Harvey," Miss Wakefield said. "Tell her to come here directly." The little housemaid bobbed respectfully and went out "Now we shall see what she has to say," the headmistress said. "She'll only be frightened and cry," Sarah said, "and she'll say anything you want her to. She wouldn't dare cheat in an examination." "Then you admit that you copied from her?" "I do not!" Sarah said, her teeth chattering. "I tell you it was a fluke! Miss Somerville jolly well knows I wouldn't do it!" Miss Somerville was the new and still enthusiastic math teacher, but her enthusiasm would be gone by the end of the term, and so would Miss Somerville. "That will do!" said the headmistress. "Impertinence will not improve matters." the door and a girl of Sarah's age, but smaller, came in. She had changed into the school uniform and wore steel-rimmed spectacles. "Stand beside Stone, Harvey," the headmistress said. "Now I want you to think very carefully before you answer what I'm going to ask you." Angela Harvey looked terrified and began to cry. "There, you see?" Sarah said. "You're only doing this because you don't like my mother! You want me to leave school, and it's the only excuse you can find!" "Be quiet," Miss Wakefield said with an unpleasant smile. She never lost her temper. "Did you, or did you not," she went on to the damp Angela, "copy the answers in your arithmetic from Stone?" "Oh, no! Oh, I wouldn't, Miss Wakefield!" "Then how is it you have seventeen right answers? You never do as well as that, and you got the same three wrong that Stone did." "I don't know, Miss Wakefield! I don't know!" Angela sobbed loudly and became smaller than ever. "I'm afraid," said Miss Wakefield, who looked quite otherwise, "that unless your friend here can explain this curious -- this odd coincidence by admitting she copied your answers, .I shall have to ask your parents to remove you from St. Agatha's at once." Sarah's face was bright red, but it had the look of fever. "How simply rotten of you! You're just trying to get me to confess to something I didn't do, to save Angela!" The headmistress felt her heart beat with excitement and pleasure. Why, the child was positively crimson with temper! "You are not helping her by behaving like a common guttersnipe. At this school, we try to behave like ladies. Perhaps at Mr. Russell's -- " "At Mr. Russell's school," Sarah interrupted, "I'm sure nobody would think it was worthwhile to cheat." "Then you admit you cheated?" Sarah looked at Angela, and back at the headmistress. "Yes!" Miss Wakefield smiled. "Well, then, I think there is nothing more to be said. You may go, Harvey." "You," Sarah said, looking at Miss Wakefield with blazing fury, "are a coward and a -- a blackmailer!" Tiny cracks seemed to appear in the headmistress's porcelain composure. Angela had not yet left the room and heard Sarah's outburst. She stopped at the door and turned around with wide eyes. "Go at once!" cried the headmistress to her, and waited until the door closed. "You are to be expelled publicly from the school!" she said to Sarah in a low, unsteady voice. "And first you will be publicly thrashed!" Sarah's face was patchy now, red on white, and her skin looked dry as paper. "If you touch me, I will kill you. I'm not afraid of anyone like you. I didn't cheat in the exam. I said it to keep you from expelling Angela, and you knew it all the time. Everything you say is a lie. You just want to get rid of me because of my mother. You are against votes for women because you are a liar. You told us in history class about government by consent, but how can it be when half the population have nothing to say in the matter? I'm going to pack and leave, and if you try and stop me, I'll..." She went fiery red, and then white, and fainted. The headmistress was breathing hard, and later, when Sarah was taken to the san, she was frightened. Sarah's temperature was # and she had the most virulent kind of pneumonia the school doctor had yet come across. He was almost more curious in watching the course of the disease than he was concerned with the patient, but he did not have very long to watch it, for Sarah died shortly before sunrise. Q As far as one can follow your line of reasoning, you claim that the head woman of your school was untruthful, but was against untruth. A. Yes. Quite a lot of them are. Q. They sound mad. A. Well, they are and they aren't. They lie to themselves, mainly; that's what causes most of the trouble. They have a saying: Know Thyself, but nobody ever -- Q. They have? Who said it? A. All sorts of people are said to be the ones who said it first, but actually I think I was. I was living on an island in the Aegean Sea, and the mainland Greeks thought women shouldn't be writing poetry, so there was a row about it. They said I invented hexameters -- which was nonsense -- and that made them angry for some reason. So, later on, they decided I was a myth. Q. Is this the Sappho you mentioned earlier in this hearing? A. No, no. She was later and she didn't become a myth. My name was Phemonoe. I meant to tell you about that trip. My father was -- Q. Never mind. We've heard enough of the early trips. What we should like to hear about is your last. A decision must be made about these people -- we've waited long enough. While it must be admitted that you are the best we have for the task, you not only take a long time and make error after error, but in the very process of examining them, you alter the subject of examination. A. Yes, I know. They have a new phrase for that. They call it the Uncertainty Principle. For example, you can't determine the mass and velocity of a particle and at the same time its position. If you measure the one, you alter the other. Q. We are quite aware of that. A. I just thought I'd remind you. Q. Unnecessary. A. That's what men usually say; they dislike being reminded. Am I to stop making trips? Q. That will be decided in the light of the rest of your report. I may tell you now that there will probably be no further trips. You will be reabsorbed into the Unity. A. I see. I remember you said the same thing after I reported on the time they hanged Haman. You seemed to side with him. Anyway, if I get reabsorbed, it won't be a Unity any more -- not the way things are going. Q. You overrate yourself. Contact with Mankind has changed you. A. Oh, it has! I've changed them a bit, but it's the principle of uncertainty again: it changes me, too. Q. The Unity is greater than its parts. A. Not if it's infinite, the way you say it is. You know, it's a funny thing, but I've never been quite clear just what's behind all this decision you talk about. What is our purpose? Q. Does a stone have a purpose when it falls? A. I'm not talking about values. What are the alternatives you imply in the decision? Q. There are three. We destroy them; we absorb them; we ignore them. A. I'm afraid they can't be ignored. Q. Why not? A. It's too late. The Unity should have started ignoring them right at the beginning -- we are already changed. And if  they are absorbed, we shall be still more changed. Q. They will be changed. The Unity is eternal and -- A. You ought to talk to a man called Heisenberg. He called it the inexactitude principle, but it's the same thing. For example, men are always going around asking each other questions; they call it taking a poll, only when you try to find out that way what people are thinking, you change them. Or anthropology -- when you study a tribe, you alter its way of life. Furthermore, it alters yours. Q. It would appear that you have lost your sense of objectivity. A. That's the way my last husband talks. There is no such thing. It's a strange fact, but it seems that the mathematicians are the only ones who have a glimmering of the truth -- they and the physicists. I was beginning to think that mankind as a whole was progressing quite nicely. Q. I thought you said they were. It seems you're never satisfied. A. Well, some things improve, but their point of view keeps changing with regard to what should and what should not improve. It's hard to say whether the Greeks really believed in progress: they thought there had been a golden age and that the world had degenerated from it. Some of them may have wanted to return to it, but I always suspected their motives -- by their own showing, they were decadent. During the Middle Ages, it was felt that art was on the way up -- part of an evolutionary process -- whereas science was not. Aristotle and the Thomists had science all cut and dried. Nowadays it's fashionable to say the art was as "good" in primitive times as it is now, while science on the other hand is evolving to a higher state of truth. The latter happens to be true, but they still have war. Q. Perhaps it's inevitable. A. If it is, we are wasting our time. Q. That is for the Unity to decide. You set yourself up as Mankind's conscience. A. Not conscience. I plead for self-examination -- for a reappraisal of ideas. Q. Yet you only succeed in irritating them. A. That may be the best way. And you confuse conscience with consciousness. If there's one thing I've found out, it's that Man differs from the animals in having more consciousness, just as animals have more than plants. I don't suppose that hydrogen has any at all. Q. But you have turned what was intended to be a field-trip for examination and analysis into a crusade. With all your nagging and irritating them, there have been no results -- no real advances. A. I thought you were complaining that I was altering what I was sent to examine. You talk about unification -- or absorption -- as if it were a catchword. That's the trouble with generalities: they're not necessarily true in all cases. Q. You mean they are too general? A. I mean that they are not general enough. I agree that men progress too slowly toward unification, but we mustn't confuse it with domination. We cannot impose it on them. That would lead to a world divided into the ruled and the rulers -- not a unity. Q. Then you are for absorption? A. You know, you twist things around much worse than I do. Q. The Unity is incapable of -- A. Furthermore, I think you have been altered more than I have. Q. You are part of the Unity. A. And the least altered part. You won't be able to absorb them the way you can reabsorb me without destroying them as entities. Q. You set yourself up as the only one to know this. Why? A. Because I have been the one to make the trips. I have been your eye. Q. But the others -- the ones you called the spies? A. They weren't there to look at Man, only to watch me. They weren't even sightseeing -- they were slumming. However, I think I am ceasing to be the only one. I think you are coming to know these things, too. Q. Very gratifying. Now, as to the latest trip? A. There seems to have been a slip-up... Q. Another one? A. Different. The ones I made were errors in time; this one is not mine, and it's in hypertime. I was trying to explain it to a friend, but he already knew all about it and that led to the slip-up. It caused it, yet it came afterward. Q. How annoying for you. How did you explain hyper-time? A. I said that when an object moves or changes, time is needed as one of the coordinates to describe that change. I said that consciousness moves through time -- from Monday to Tuesday -- otherwise we would be merely aware of differences without experiencing them as change. I said that to describe this motion of consciousness along the dimension of time, another coordinate is needed: hyper-time. Q. And the slip-up -- which you claim is not yours? A. Is in hyper-time. It is the result of the Unity and Mankind affecting one another. You have, through my efforts, examined them -- and thus changed them. Now they begin to examine you -- with the result that you change. Q. They begin to examine us? You must mean they have examined you. A. There is a man -- a young physicist -- and he has found out something. I think that without quite knowing it, he has detected you. At all events, he has found out where you are, and I think that perhaps you are aware. Q. What makes you say that? A. Obviously these things work both ways. Heisenberg's principle says -- Q. We want to hear no more of Heisenberg's principle! There's enough confusion as it is, without that! A. I admit it. That's why I decided to -- to close my eyes to everything but essentials on this trip. Q. It is gratifying to hear you admit something for a change. What are you "closing your eyes to" in this case? A. Appearances. Q. Why? A. Appearances are deceitful. That is, they are now; they weren't before, when the Unity was the Unity and Mankind was Mankind, not something of each. You ask me to keep my objectivity and you don't tell me how. You can't, of course -- your own is too lost for you even to know it's gone. So I have to work out my way alone and the best method seems to be to work with as few senses as possible. That won't give me real objectivity, but it will mean somewhat less involvement. Q. The less you see, the more you can observe? Does that make sense? A. Nothing does any more. Oh, if you had only stopped in time -- no, that wasn't possible. Q. Why not? A. Because, being in hyper-time, the slip-up is both in the past and the future in simple time. The last trip is going on now... the lab sofa with her hands behind her head. The sofa was shabby and was alleged to have belonged at one time to a psychoanalyst. Its present function was to offer temporary rest to anyone working late in the lab. Today was Sunday and no undergraduates were there. "What are you fiddling around with, Phil?" Katherine asked. "The electron microscope," he said. Phil Kaufman was an assistant physics professor, short, bony and intense-looking, and at the moment he was engaged in extracurricular research. "You know, I bet this old chaiselongue could many a tale unfold," the said. "Well, according to rumor, many have been unfolded on it." "Professor, your mind wanders. I'm thinking of its previous condition of servitude. Think of the dreams it used to hear." Phil Kaufman didn't answer. There was a pause and she said, "This afternoon you're working with the microscope, and last night it was the telescope. You were in the observatory until dawn." "How did you find that out?" "I have my methods, Watson. I don't see how you expect to keep going on no sleep at all. Russ is worried about you." "Pro or con?" "Pro, of course. He likes you very much. In fact, he thinks you are the best brain on the faculty." "Coming from the president, that's praise indeed." Phil got up and went to a desk, where he looked at some notes. "Speaking as my boss's wife, would you say he was pro or con about this work I'm doing?" "I would say he can't make it out. Alternating between the Microcosm and the Macrocosm. Incidentally, why don't they call that thing in the observatory a macroscope? I don't think Russ is very good at understanding the unfamiliar. I was telling him about the concept of hyper-time the other day, and his reaction was one of solicitude -- he got me a drink." Katherine stretched her arms. "What are you doing now?" "Checking some figures. You know, that was odd, your bringing up the business of hyper-time. This thing I'm working on seems to involve it." "Oh?" Katherine put her arms behind her head again. "Tell me something, Phil -- what does he look like?" "Doctor Russell Farley?" "Yes. I suppose it's a funny sort of question to ask about one's husband. How does he look to you?" "Like the youngest college president in America, I guess. Brawny but brainy. You make what they call a handsome couple." "Yes, I was going to ask you what I looked like, only it's a waste of time. People never tell you." "I can," Phil said, "but I won't, for fear of giving you a swelled head." W A S a matter of fact, it's silly of me to ask," she went on. "I wouldn't understand. I don't even know what 'pretty' means, although I have a dim idea what 'ugly' does. Color is another enigma to me. Somebody once told me it's like a smell, but when I get a bad cold, I can't remember what smells are like. It's like not being able to think of the word 'bubble' when your mouth is wide open -- you think of 'Ah-uh.' " "I'll tell you one thing about yourself," Phil said. "You don't look as though..." "As though I was blind?" "Correct. And it's incredible the way you get around. You never bump into anything, and you look people right in the eye when they talk to you." "They say it's hearing faint echoes from an obstacle -- like a bat. Personally, I feel the wall in front of me. I admit when my ears are stopped up I can't hear the wall, but I'm not so sure that's a convincing proof. It's the same with pit vipers -- some smart investigator discovered that when you plug up their little heat-detecting organs -- I guess those are the pits -- they can't locate warm prey in the dark. Conversely, in the dark and not plugged up, they will strike at a hot-water bottle." "Sounds pretty convincing to me," Phil said, and went back to the electron microscope. "Tush," Katherine said. "How about people not wanting to smoke in the dark? Does that prove that the sense of taste depends on sight? I smoke. In fact, you might bring me a cigarette and an ashtray. The only reason most blind people don't smoke is they're afraid of fire." She took the cigarette Phil brought her. "Thanks." "Aren't you afraid of fire?" he asked. "Of course not. I can detect a match flame at fifteen feet." "You ought to go to Duke University sometime and have Rhine take a look at you." "I did. All he said was 'Hmm,' and I joined the other statistics." There was silence for a while, interrupted at one point by a muffled "Damn!" from Phil peering into the electron microscope, and the warm sun lay across Katherine's lap. Finally he straightened up and switched off the current. "Well, it's there, all right," he said, and got up and went to the couch and sat at her feet. "What is?" "The red shift." "Aren't you confusing things?" she said. "You're not in the observatory now, Buster; this is the lab. I thought the red shift was the recession of the distant galaxies... whatever 'red' is." "Quite right, Holmes. However, in this case, it's the recession of the not-so-distant atoms. They are small-sized solar systems, too, in a way, and when I say 'red' I mean something I can only infer mathematically, because I'mnot dealing with light in the ordinary sense." "You mean they're receding?" "Only in this context," he said. "Motion is length over time; in this case, it's length over hypertime, so they're still here in the lab." "I'm relieved to hear it," she said. "However, I should think they'd be receding into tomorrow." "They are, but into yesterday, and new ones from tomorrow are continually coming in to take their place. It's like Fred Hoyle's theory of the continuous birth of hydrogen." "You're making me feel like my poor husband," Katherine said. "I understand the necessity of hyper-time to describe the motion of consciousness along time, but what's this got to do with the atoms?" door and Phil stood up, just as Doctor Russell Chalmers Farley came in without waiting for an answer. Phil and Katherine felt faintly embarrassed -- there was scarcely any need to knock on the door to the physics lab; it somehow suggested that the door should be kept open when entertaining callers. Doctor Farley was a handsome man of thirty-eight with a blond mustache that gave him the look of a Kipling colonial officer. "Ah, there you are, Katherine," he said cheerfully. "Hello, Kaufman. How's the Research Magnificent?" "It's begining to show signs of life," Phil said. "I think I can detect a sort of fetal pulse." Doctor Farley blinked his pale eyelashes and smiled. He sat down at the end of the couch where Phil had been sitting and looked up at him. Part of his charm was that, when he talked to a man shorter than himself, he got below him and looked up. At his evening "sherries" at home, he had a way of deferring to the newest and least important visitor, who was thus raised to the temporary rank of philosopher, while Russell Chalmers Farley was reduced to the position of listener. The role of humble servitor of the Truth was his most useful one -- it had worked rather well with Katherine, and he had an adroit and imaginative way of expressing his ideas, which usually disguised the fact that they were generally borrowed. They had met at a street corner in New York City where she was waiting for the sound of traffic to abate so that she could cross. He was on the opposite side, and with his extraordinary eyesight and intuition instantly recognized that the beautiful, odd-looking girl facing him on the other side of the street was blind. He was at her side before the light -- and the sound of traffic -- had changed, and said, "I hope you don't think I'm being forward, but let me offer you my arm. Taxis have a way of making illegal turns sometimes..." "You are very kind," she replied, pulling him back from the path of a taxi making an illegal turn. "You have a very nice voice," she said as they got to the other side. "I guess being blind makes one... forward!" She laughed and started to walk on. "No, please wait!" he said, and caught up with her. "I wish you hadn't said that. It can be taken in another way: that I am forward because you are blind. I should like to say that you have a very nice voice." She stopped and laughed again. "That's one of the nicest things I've ever had said to me!" "Do let's... I mean would you let me..." He floundered, and laughed, too. "Can't we have a drink together? Now?" "I think it would be lovely," she said. Later on, he said to her, "You may think this impertinent of me, but you make me envy you. If I were braver, I should wish that I were blind. You actually see more than I do." She had been told this before, but always with mystical and pseudo-religious implications. This man, with the attractive voice and smell, had no trace of the mystic. "Let me tell you a fable to illustrate what I mean," he went on. "There was a man who was born blind, and he went to work as a coal miner because the darkness was no hindrance to him. One day while he was working alone in an unlighted gallery, his sight was miraculously given to him... He shouted out in amazement and awe, and the other miners came stumbling to him in the total darkness. " 'What is it?' they cried. 'What's the matter?' "'I can see!' he told them. But they were puzzled, for they had brought no lights. " 'What can you see?' they asked. 'There is nothing to be seen here in the dark.' " 'I see black!' he said. 'In front of my face is blackness -- however, at the back of my head, I'm still blind and I see nothing.' " Katherine was delighted. "I'm not quite sure I understand." "Why, to the blind there are no shadows," Farley said. "Another drink?" "I think it would be lovely," she had said, and since she could see no shadows, she had begun to fall in love. Doctor Russell Chalmers Farley looked up at Phil and smiled. It was a charming smile and it was as genuine as a guaranteed, ten-carat, real, honest-to-goodness zircon. "As Katherine has probably told you," he said, "what you are doing is completely over my bowed head. I am enormously impressed and at the same time unable to comprehend." "I find it hard to comprehend, too," Phil Kaufman said. "And I suppose that's what leads me on." "Well, the thing is," Farley continued, "Washington seems to have gotten wind of it, and you know how they are. They don't like things to be over their heads." Phil Kaufman looked at him in astonishment and sat on a lab stool. "I don't understand. How can they possibly be interested in what I'm doing? It's purely theoretical research." "Surely you don't deny that Lisa Meitner's researches began by being theoretical? And look what they led to. The point is, Kaufman, that I have been informed that we are about to receive a visit from a man from the A.E.C. He's arriving here sometime this afternoon." "But that's absurd! I'm not doing anything to atoms. I'm merely examining them!" Katherine frowned when he said this. Phil knew better. Worse yet, so did she. "When the A.E.C. hears of somebody working in atomic research," Farley said, "they want to know what's cooking. I hate you to be subjected to this, but it won't do any harm to be polite to the fellow and let him, as it were, look over your shoulder." "I'm damned if I see why I should!" Phil said. "What does he expect to do? Classify me?" know it seems high-handed, but I think we all ought to remember there is such a thing as Security." "Security, my foot!" Phil said. "It was that kind of demented thinking that caused Germany to lose Lisa Meitner! And Einstein." "What strikes me as rather odd," Katherine said, "is their sending someone here on a Sunday. When did you hear about it, Russ?" "A little while ago. On the phone." "Curiouser and curiouser." "He was very polite and apologetic." "Quite typical," Phil said. "It's the velvet-glove touch." Farley looked at his wristwatch. "He won't be here for a while, so I wish you could brief me about the inwardness of what you are doing, Phil." He'd never used his first name before, and Phil became a little wary. "I know you can't give me a ten-year course in advanced physics this afternoon, but -- well, I'd like to know what kind of stand to take. I'll be representing the university, after all." Phil Kaufman looked down from his perch on the stool at the earnest, kindly face and wondered what really lay behind it. So far as he could see, Doctor Farley had no reason to take any stand on the question at all, except to tell the A.E.C. man to go sit on a tack. If he wanted to represent the university, let him do it in the name of Academic Freedom. Phil glanced at Katherine. She was sitting very still and he had the impression that she was thinking about something else. "All right, I'll give it a try," he said. "There's an idea that's been around for quite a while that there is an analogy between the stars and the atoms." Doctor Farley's face lighted. "I believe I've heard of it. Back in the 'twenties, by a man called Dunn, wasn't it?" Phil shook his head. "Twenty years earlier by a man called Fournier-d'Albe. He wrote a book called Two New Worlds, in which he suggested that the solar systems are actually atoms in some vast cloud of super-gas. Of course, this notion ignores the celestial absence of molecular structure -- unless you count double stars as molecules -- but it might be accounted for by assuming a high temperature. Then he said that the newly hypothesized Rutherford model of the atom was a submicroscopic solar system, but he didn't stop there. "The atoms and their electrons, he said, were in turn made up of sub-atoms and were perhaps populated by sentient beings who looked through their telescopes and counted the atoms in their vicinity, no doubt arranging them into constellations. You can carry this imaginary process in both directions and as far as you like, but are we to decide arbitrarily that it goes on infinitely? Or is it like Einsteinian space, finite but unbounded? "I have asked myself this question and I believe the latter statement to be in a sense correct, but what does it mean? Well, it means that if you move further and further into larger universes, you eventually get to where you started. Not that Big is the same thing as Small, but that from wherever you happen to be, the ones in the direction -- outward -- look successively bigger, while the ones in the other direction -- inward -- look successively smaller. Now if there were some kind of super-telescope that could look beyond our universe of super-atoms, and beyond the next and so on indefinitely, you would find yourself staring up through a supermicroscope at your own eye." "Get along with you!" Katherine said. "This is the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams. Tell us more." " extent," said Phil. "It wouldn't be your eye that you'd see, any more than you'd see your own face if you looked far enough across ordinary intergalactic space. You'd see the back of your head -- or, rather, the other side of the Earth -- provided there was nothing in the way." "And in this case it would be what?" she asked. "I don't know," Phil said, looking worried. "What is the equivalent of the back of your head -- looked at along the direction of hyper-time? Could it be that what you saw would not be from behind, but from... inside?" Katherine's beautiful sightless eyes seemed to be turned inward, and she sat very still. Then she said, "You evoke something in my mind like the echo of a picture I once knew, and will know again." Farley looked at her sharply. "You mean something in your subconscious?" Phil asked. "Perhaps that's what it is, and yet they say that you try to escape knowledge of your subconscious -- that it frightens you. I am not frightened, Phil. I feel... expectant." "I'd feel more expectant," he said, "if I were quite sure of what I was doing. The trouble is that while ordinary light could in theory show you the super-astronomy of the stars and planets that are made up of atoms consisting of our stars and planets, it won't work the other way." "Why not?" Farley wanted to know. "Wave length. As it is, we have to use an electron microscope to see the larger molecules; the wave length of visible light is too coarsegrained to show anything that small. So just try to imagine how impossible it would be to see the sub-atoms -- infra-atoms -- that I'm talking about if one had to rely on ordinary light! The electron microscope wouldn't help, either. It would be exactly as though some gigantic, super-researcher were trying to look at one of our molecules by bombarding it with a shower of planets." "Then how can you see this 'red shift'?" Katherine asked. "I can't," he said. "I detect it by a kind of mathematical diagnosis. It's an inferential process -- as most forms of observation are, in modern physics." Farley was looking as intelligent as he possibly could, but it was plain that he was out of his depth. He had heard of the red shift, but he decided he had better not have it explained. "There's another thing," Phil said. "The time it would take light to make the round trip of our Einsteinian finite universe would be so great -- in the order of #ttx# # years -- that not only would you not see your not-yet born self, but the Earth wouldn't have been formed either. The light you saw would be that many years out of date. However, in this case the elapsed time would be hyper-time, and you'd be there in ordinary time." walked to one of the windows and stood looking out at the observatory across the campus. "Am I to understand then," he said, "that you are trying to formulate a new atomic theory?" "Not in the sense of in any way modifying the accepted one," Phil said. "If I'm right, it will merely be a new way of looking at the Universe as a whole, and it won't have the slightest effect on anything." "I should have thought," Katherine said, "that being able to see inside one's own head would have all sorts of interesting effects." She got up. "I've got to get back to the house. We've got people coming to dinner, Russ, and I'd better get things organized. Are you coming?" "I'll be along in a little while, Katherine," he said. "I want to hear more of what Kaufman has to say." He refrained from guiding his wife to the door because of long habit, and again sat down on the couch. After the door closed, he and Phil listened to her sure footsteps going down the corridor. They looked at one another a little guardedly. "You know I'm on your side," Farley said when they could no longer hear Katherine's footsteps. "Surely you know I don't like this any more than you do, Phil." "I suppose you don't." "You won't mind very much if I ask you a favor, will you?" Farley said. Having asked a rhetorical question, he seemed to be illogically waiting for an answer. Phil was unaware of the chess game, but wondered uneasily what was coming. "Will you please leave her alone?" Farley said. "I -- " Phil started to say, but Farley held his hand up, palm forward. "My dear chap, you are one of the most sensitive and kind people I know. But you are a little thoughtless. You imagine that, because Katherine is blind, you are doing her a favor by -- by giving her companionship. You feel that her interest in the world can be furthered by your interest in her. This is not the case. I ask you please to leave us alone." "Us?" "Yes. You put me in the embarrassing position of having to say that we are very well as we are. I know that Katherine is impressed by your -- your mind, and I know that your sympathy is well-intended, .but it is misplaced. She needs no sympathy." "Why not?" Doctor Farley spread his hands, a gesture usually meant to substitute for words. "Do the strong need sympathy?" "I think so," Phil said. Doctor Farley smiled. "Well, then, think of me as the strong one -- the one who needs sympathy as the guardian of something precious. Will you give me your sympathy?" He smiled still. Phil realized that when the A.E.C. man came -- when any pretext presented itself -- Doctor Farley would throw him to the wolves. "Katherine is not in love with me," Phil said. "But are you with her?" "No. At least... I don't know." "Then you are." "Aren't you being a bit oldfashioned?" Phil said. usual pose of sitting and looking up. He looked down at Phil -- in fact, he looked down his nose and past his blond mustache. "I mean," Phil went on, "I think Katherine ought to be the one to decide whether she wants to go on seeing me." "And I disagree." "And I," Phil said, "shall stop seeing her when -- and only when -- she wants me to! I refuse to be ordered around like this. We're not doing anything wrong!" "I think you're forgetting -- " "I'm forgetting nothing!" Phil interrupted. "You're acting as though I were having an affair with your wife, and you're trying to pull rank on me! I don't intend to be browbeaten and threatened!" "I'm not threatening you, my dear man," Farley said, his eyebrows raised. "I ask you as a favor, that's all. I think I know my wife's -- mind better than perhaps she does herself. And certainly better than an outsider can." "And you regard me as an outsider?" Phil's voice was loud. "You know perfectly well what I mean!" Farley replied angrily. "You are not her husband and consequently do not know -- " "I know her a damn sight better than you do, you stuffed shirt!" Like most blond men, Farley became red very easily. At the moment, he resembled a tomato with yellow hair. "Why, you little -- " "Really!" At the sound of Katherine's voice, they both swung around. They had been making too much noise to hear her return, and she stood at the open door. "Isn't this a bit undignified?" she said. "I could hear you outside." Farley was breathing heavily. "What brought you back, Katherine?" he asked, finally. She walked past them to the psychiatrical sofa and sat on it without answering the question. She looked as though her mind was on something else -- and then, suddenly, startled and intent. Yes! I am here... Neither Phil Kaufman nor Russell Farley heard her -- they were intent on avoiding one another's eyes, but they would not have heard her anyway. Q. You were right. He knows where the Unity is -- if not what it is, yet. A. Oh, he will. Q. Are you so sure? And will you at last admit that we are right? Unification -- it's the only way... now. A. (she has her face toward the electron microscope; her blind eyes seem to probe it) One cannot impose it on them. What kind of unity can come from imposition? Q. And are things to go on as they are? A. No, it's too late. Things have already changed... Q. The history of Man has been the history of his integration -- from families to tribes, to communities, to city states, to nations, to hemispheres, to -- what next? Is it to stop here, and the hemispheres to beat each other down to the tribal or family level? A. You will be destroyed in the process. Q. We? In the process of unification? A. Of course. Q. And you? A. I'm always being destroyed. Q. Ridiculous. Unification can scarcely destroy the Unity. A. If you unite with Disunity? Q. The decision has been made: Absorption. A. By whom? Of whom? Q. The joining of the collective subconscious to the mutually antagonistic egos of all men. Freud of Vienna had this as a goal -- you told us that yourself and I quote it back to you. A. Or the reverse -- men's mutually antagonistic egos in combat with the Unity? Q. We will take that chance. Now watch -- look at the world around you and you will see a dominion of universal brotherhood, the moment Unification is imposed! A. I will look, but is that what I'll see? Q. Now! Look! at her husband, who looked back at her questioningly. "You were going to say something?" he asked. She shook her head, and he shrugged his shoulders. "This business I'm working on -- " Phil began, and hesitated. "Oh, yes. That reminds me," Farley said. "How's the Research Magnificent?" "It's beginning to show signs of life," Phil said. "I think I can detect a sort of fetal pulse." Dr. Farley blinked his pale eyelashes and nodded. He sat down at the end of the couch where Phil had been sitting and looked up at him. "Well," he said, "I just thought I'd drop by and see how you were doing. I'll never be able to understand it, though." "I was going to say, do you think the A.E.C. might conceivably be interested?" Phil said. "After all, it is sort of vaguely connected with atomic stuff." "I can't imagine why they would be," Farley said, and glanced at Katherine. She had gotten up and was standing at the window. "The sun's going in," she said, "and it looks as though it may rain. I've got to get back to the house." She turned around with a smile. "How about having dinner with us tonight, Phil? We've got some people coming who'd like to meet you. Don't you think that would be nice, Russ?" Dr. Farley didn't look as though he thought it would be nice at all, but he said nothing, and neither did Phil Kaufman. "If you're coming, you'd better straighten your tie," Katherine said. "It's under your ear, as usual." Phil reached up absently and pulled at it with one hand. "Sorry." "You put me in an embarrassing position," Farley said. "I think I had better say what I have to say now. Better to have it out, before things go any further." "Before what things go any further?" Phil asked, with a trace of belligerence. "Of course, if you don't want me for dinner -- " "Wait!" Katherine said in distress. "This isn't... But it should be..." She looked from one to the other and smiled a tentative, hopeful little smile. "We don't have to go on with this, do we... now?" "What do you mean, 'now?" Farley said, his face becoming red. "I think it's high time I got this off my chest. Katherine, I don't believe in letting things drift. I want this out in the open!" (Oh, but this wasn't the way things were to be! This is all wrong -- what can have happened? -- There was no answer.) started for the door. "I guess I'd better leave you two alone." "No!" Farley said abruptly. "I want you here! I want you to hear this. Well, Katherine?" He turned to her again. "I... I can't answer you," she said miserably. "You mean you are in love with him, don't you?" Farley said, with a kind of angry triumph. "All the time, behind my back, you -- " "Dry up, Farley!" Phil said, coming back from the door. "And stop acting like a bully!" "Why, you The telephone rang, and Katherine picked it up. "It's for you, Russ," she said, and handed it to him. "Yes?" Farley snapped into it. "Put him on." He listened for a few moments and his eyes traveled to Phil. "All right," he said. "When do you want to come? -- I see. Well, I'll arrange to have him here. Three o'clock tomorrow, then. Right. Good-by." He hung up. "You were right in one respect," he said to Phil. "That was a man from the Atomic Energy Commission and he wants to-JraVe a look at what you're doing. He'll be here tomorrow and I shall expect your full cooperation. Sorry, but it can't be helped." Phil looked at him steadily for a moment. "So that's your way of getting back at me," he said. "Academic freedom means a lot to you! Of all the cowardly, spineless, rotten -- " Farley's face was now dark red and he held up his hand. "That's enough from you!" "What the hell does he want to come nosing around here for?" Phil said. "My research is purely theoretical -- " "You yourself suggested they might," Farley reminded him. "And don't forget Lise Meitner's work was theoretical, and look where it led!" "Very cute!" Phil said. "In fact, Jesuitical! What I'm objecting to is having you dump me in their laps! I know your real motive -- it stands out a mile!" Farley's neck veins became noticeable, but he kept himself in control. "You tend to overrate your position here." "Ha!" Phil said. "You can't bear me in my position of the man your wife loves!" Farley's control went and he rushed at Phil and grabbed him by the collar. "Stop it!" Katherine cried. "Stop it at once! Are you going to act like a pair of apemen? Fm not in love with Phil -- I like him very, very much, but it's you I love, you ox!" She pushed and pulled, and they came apart like a bread sandwich, and she got between them. "For heaven's sake!" "Fm sorry," Farley muttered, and looked ashamed of himself. "I wasn't dumping you into their laps, Kaufman -- I had no choice. If I'd objected, they'd have got just that much tougher." "It's okay," Phil said dispiritedly. "I guess." "Oh, forget the whole thing, you two," Katherine said. "Come on, well be late for dinner." Taking their arms, she led them out onto the campus. It was only right that he should love his country -- but did he have to try to marry the whole place? brought the man home to meet her brother. It was uncomfortable for everyone. Mary Lynne's brother Alden looked up from his chair. He snapped his fingers and the sound on the trivision obediently diminished to a merely obtrusive level. He held out his hand. "Pleased to meet you," he said, but it was obviously a lie. Mary Lynne got that expression on her face. "Al," she said dangerously. Her brother shrugged and snapped his fingers twice more. The set shut itself off. Mary Lynne's expression cleared. She was not a pretty girl, but she was a pleasant-looking one. The no-midriff fashion was kind to her; she still had a nice figure. "Al," she said, but smiling now, "Al, guess what! Jimmy and I want to get married!" "Oh-ho," said her brother, and he stood up in order to take a better look. Even standing, he had to look up at this man James Croy. Croy was big. Six feet ten or eleven at the least, and his hair was snow white. Still, thought Alden Edkin, the man's face didn't look old. Maybe he was platinum blond. Al snorted, for he didn't hold with men dyeing their hair, common though the practice was. He asked accusingly, "How come I never met him before?" "Now, Al "How come?" Mary Lynne blushed. "Well, Al, there hasn't been much chance for you to meet." "Oh-ho," said her brother again. "You just met him yourself." "But I love him, Al!" cried Mary Lynne, clutching at the tall man's arm. "He's -- he -- oh, I can't explain it. But I love him!" "Sure you do," said her brother. "You love him. But what do you know about him?" "I know enough!" Mary Lynne! Marriage isn't just between two people. We come of good stock and we can't marry just anybody. Think of the children you may have! Our family-" "Our family!" echoed his sister. "What's so special about our family? How many times have you said that Aunt Nora -- " "Mary Lynne!" Alden warned. She paused. He said, "No offense, Mr. Croy. But what do we know? You may be after her money, for all we can tell." The large man cleared his throat and straightened the crease in his Bermudas. He said modestly, "I assure you, Mr. Edkin, I am not interested in money." "But you'd say that anyhow. Wouldn't you? Not that there's much cash. But there's this big house -- Mary Lynne's and mine. And, Mary, you have to think of what Mother and Dad would want. They didn't leave you this big house -- it will be yours when Fm gone -- so that some adventurer could come along and -- " "Alden!" Mary Lynne was furious. She turned to the man she loved apologetically, but he was merely looking politely concerned. She whirled on her brother. "Apologize to Jimmy!" There was a marked silence. "Well," said her brother at last, talking to the wall, "there's one good thing. Being that she's under age, she can't -- " He stopped and waited. They all waited. The big house that Mother and Dad had left them happened to be on the lip of the takeoff pits for the Moon rocket The screeching howl of the night rocket's takeoff rattled the windows and made the trivision set moan shrilly in resonance. But it only lasted for a few seconds. " -- can't get married without my consent" Alden Edkin finished. "Alden!" cried his sister again, but it was more a sob than a protest. Alden Edkin merely looked obstinate. He was good at it. "Sir," he said, "I know that what you say is true. We cannot marry without your consent. I hope that you'll give it." "Don't hold your breath." Edkin sat down and glanced longingly at the trivision set. "As I say, we don't know anything about you." "That's easily taken care of, Mr. Edkin," said Croy, smiling. "I'm an orphan. No ties, no family. Until recently, I was a draftsman for Amalgamated Luna, in the rocket engine department." "Until recently? You don't even have a job?" "Not exactly, sir. But I was fortunate enough to design a rather good firing chamber. They've adopted it for the Mars rocket." Edkin nodded thoughtfully. "You sold them the design?" Croy shook his head. "Not outright. But the royalties are -- well, ample. I assure you that I can support Mary Lynne in adequate style. And I should mention that the royalty contract rims for thirty years, with cost-of-living increases." "Um." Alden Edkin found that he was beginning to relax slightly. This Croy was, in his way, not without a certain charm. Edkin said in a warmer tone, "Well, money isn't the only consideration. Still... Say, what about making some coffee, Mary Lynne? I'm sure our guest would enjoy it." She looked at him in some surprise, shrugged, patted her proposed fiance's arm and left the room. Edkin said, "I hope you won't pay any attention to what Mary Lynne said about Aunt Nora." "Of course not," said Croy and smiled. He had a very nice smile. His eyes were deep-set, somber and serious, and the smile beneath them was like sunlight bursting out from under a cloud. Edkin was momentarily dazzled. He shook his head to clear it; for a second, he had almost thought he could see through the man. But that was nonsense. Croy was saying, "I don't drink coffee, Mr. Edkin, but I'm glad Mary Lynne's out of the room. I hope we can get better acquainted." "Sure," said Edkin testily. "Well, sit down and tell me something about yourself. Where was your family when you had one?" "We're originally from Portland, Mr. Edkin." "Portland, Maine? Say, I was stationed near Presq'Isle when I was in the Army." "No," said Croy regretfully, "Portland, Oregon. After my parents passed away, I attended several schools, graduating from the University of California." "Oh, we know lots of people there!" exclaimed Edkin. "Our cousins on my mother's side have some friends who teach at Berkeley. Perhaps you know them -- Harold Sizeland and -- " "Sorry," Croy apologized. "I was at the Los Angeles campus. But let's not talk about me, Mr. Edkin. Mary Lynne tells me you're in credit maintenance." "That's right." Actually he was a loan collector; it was close enough. closer. "You can help me, Mr. Edkin. I'm planning a sort of surprise for Mary Lynne." "Surprise?" "Here," said Croy, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out several sheets of legal cap, stapled into a blue folder. "Since you're in the financial line," he said, "you'll know if this is all right. What it is, it's a kind of trust agreement for Mary Lynne." Edkin scowled. "You're taking a lot for granted, Croy. I haven't agreed to anything." "Of course not. But won't you look this over for me? You see, it puts all the royalties from my firing chamber in her name. Irrevocably. So that if anything happened to me, or there was, well, anything serious -- " he didn't say the word "divorce," but he shrugged it -- " she'll be well provided for. I'd appreciate your opinion of the contract." Edkin glanced at the papers suspiciously. He was ready to stand up and order from the house this brash young giant who interrupted his trivision programs and proposed to carry off his sister. But something hit him in the eye. And what that something happened to be was a neatly typed line specifying Mary Lynne's guaranteed minimum annual income from the trust agreement. Thirty-five thousand dollars a year. Edkin swallowed. Attached to the certificate of agreement was a notarized copy of the Amalgamated Luna royalty contract. Unless it was a fake, the thirty-five-thousand-dollar figure was exactly right. Mary Lynne came back into the room, and nearly dropped the coffee tray. "Hi there, Mary Lynne!" greeted her brother, looking up from where he was patting Croy on the shoulder. "Coffee, eh? Good!" She stared at him unbelievingly. He bobbed his head, winked conspiratorially at Croy, jammed the papers in his pocket and stood up. "Coffee, eh?" he repeated, carrying chairs toward the table. "Your young man won't drink it, Mary Lynne. But surely he'll have some cake, eh? Or a drink? Some tea? Perhaps a glass of chocolate milk -- Mary Lynne will be glad to warm it. No?" He shrugged and sat down, smiling. "No matter," he observed. "Now tell me. When would you two lovebirds like the happy event to take place?" was performed. It was the minimum legal waiting period. Alden Edkin, as it happened, was a bachelor who believed that every man who glanced at his sister was a prospective rapist -- and that those who proposed marriage were after her money besides. Still, he was not an idiot. He had taken certain precautions. First, he took a copy of the trust agreement to Mr. Senutovitch in his company's legal department. Mr. Senutovitch read the papers over with real enjoyment. "Ah, bully stuff, Edkin," he said sentimentally. He leaned back and gazed at the ceiling while the arms of his reclining chair sighed faintly and adjusted to his position. "It's a pleasure to read the work of a master." "You think it's all legal, Mr. Senutovitch?" "Legal?" Mr. Senutovitch coughed gently. "Did you notice the classic language of the operative clause? That's Paragraph Three: 'Does hereby devise, grant, give, bestow and convey, without let or distraint, absolutely.' Oh, it's a grand piece of work." "And irrevocable?" Mr. Senutovitch smiled. "Quite irrevocable." "You're sure, Mr. Senutovitch?" The lawyer said mildly, "Edkin, I wrote this company's Chattel Lien Form. I'm sure." The other precaution Edkin took was to drop into his company's Credit Reference Library and put through the name of Croy, James T., for a report. It would take a few days for the credit report to come through, and meanwhile the ceremony would be performed and the couple off on their honeymoon. But at least, Edkin consoled himself, when it did come through, it would be a comprehensive document. The company took an expansive view of what a credit report should cover. The company, moreover, was not to be deceived by any such paltry devices as a change of name -- or, for that matter, of fingerprints, retinal patterns or blood type. If a man could change his basic genetic construction, he might fool the company, but not with anything less; the Credit Reference Library was hooked in by direct wire with the F.B.I. office in Washington -- for the convenience of the F.B.I., not of the company. There would be no secrets left to Mr. Croy. And therefore no secret worries for Alden Edkin. And then Edkin stood by, fighting a manly urge to weep, as his sweet young sister gave herself in wedlock to this white-haired giant with the deep, penetrating eyes. The ceremony was performed before Father Hanover at Trinity Episcopal Church. There were few witnesses, though Mr. Senutovitch showed up, wrung the bridegroom's hand warmly and left without a word. TN the empty house, Alden Edkin took a deep breath, let it out, and put through a phone call to their only surviving relative. It was the least he could do. A plump face over the fur collar of a lounging robe peered out of the phone's screen at him. "Aunt Nora?" said Edkin tentatively. "My, you're looking well." "You lie," she said shrilly. "I look old. What do you want? If it's money, I won't give you a -- " "No, nothing like that, Aunt Nora." "Then what? You sorry you threw me out of the house twenty years ago? Is that what you called up to say?" "Aunt Nora," said Edkin boldly, "I say let bygones be bygones. I called you up to tell you the news about Mary Lynne -- my sister -- your niece." "Well? Well? What about her?" "She just got married, Aunt Nora," said Edkin, beaming. "What about it? People do, you know. There's nothing strange." Edkin was shocked. Such a lack of family feeling! And from her, who should feel herself Tucky beyond imagining that anyone in the family called her up at all. He was angry enough to say what he had vowed he would never refer to. "At least," he said icily, "she got married." Pause. Thinly: "What do you mean by that?" "You know perfectly well, Aunt Nora." In the tiny screen, her face was a doll's face, an angry doll; it flushed red. She must have been shaking the phone, Edkin thought distractedly; rings of color haloed the edge of the screen. She cried, "You're a sanctimonious jerk, Alden Edkin! You forbade me to associate with your sister -- my own niece! -- so I wouldn't corrupt her... when she was three months old and the good Lord Himself couldn't corrupt her, because she didn't so much as know which end was up! And now, just because she's getting married, you call me up. Hoping, no doubt, that because I'm getting old and absent-minded, I'll send along a little check for ten thousand dollars or so as a wedding present. Well, you're wrong! If Mary Lynne wants to call me up, I'll talk to her -- but not to you! Understand?" And the little screen flashed red and orange as she hung up. Edkin pushed down the off button and shrugged. Aunt Nora! Who could account for her moods? A product of her sordid past, of course, but -- It had been a mistake to call her up. Definitely. Virtuously, Alden Edkin went to bed. The following morning, he got the report from the Credit Reference Library. It had received special priority. The paper it was typed on flamed with warning red. the airfield when the honeymooners returned from their Grand Tour. He had been champing at the bit for six weeks -- sue long weeks and not a word from them, six weeks when they were out of touch with the world. Because they wanted it that way! It was Alden Edkin's conviction that he knew why James Croy wanted it that way. He stood there by the customs gate, grinding his teeth, a plump angry man with a face that was rapidly turning purple. He saw them coming down the wheeled steps from the plane and he bawled, "Mary Lynne! Mary Lynne, come down here this minute! Get away from that monster Croy!" Mary Lynne, her arm adoringly on the arm of her husband, shuddered. "Oh-oh," she muttered. "Storm clouds rising. Batten down all hatches." Croy tsked solicitously. "Poor man, he's upset, isn't he? But you mustn't worry." "I'm not worried, darling." "Of course not, of course not. Trust me." Croy nodded approvingly. "I've got to stop off for a second. A little errand -- But I'll be right back and then I'm sure we can straighten out whatever's troubling your brother." Gently he kissed her ear. "My darling," he whispered, soft as a moth's wing. And then that perfect gentleman, James Croy, bowed to the brother-in-law who was raging impotently across the customs gate, turned on his heel and disappeared into the men's room. The men's room had a North Entrance, a South Entrance, a Mezzanine Entrance and a Service Entrance to the floor below. It is not a matter of record which door Croy used to come out, but it was not the one by which he had gone in. T HE policemen finally went away. "Sorry," said the sergeant, curt and somewhat bored -- he had been with Missing Persons for a good long time. "Probably he'll turn up." But it wasn't true, and both he and Alden Edkin knew it And when he had left, Edkin told his sister what the red-bordered credit report had shown. Across the top was printed in bold letters Zero Credit Rating Zero. "You can't fool Consolidated Credit," snapped Edkin. "They know. And this man Croy -- why, he's a monster, Mary Lynne! He preys on women." "Oh, no," wept his sister. But she was already in her heart convinced. "Oh, yes! He is! Listen to this! Four years ago, in Miami, he married a girl named Doris L. Cockingham. There's no record of a divorce! He just married her -- set up a trust for her with the royalties from an electric underwater lung, left her pregnant and disappeared. Eh?" "I don't believe you," sobbed his sister. "Then listen to this! Eleven months later, in Troy, New York, he married Marsha Gutknecht. Revolting! Can you understand a man like that? Loose morals, bigamy -- why, he'd never get credit with a record like that" "There must be some perfectly simple explanation," whimpered Mary Lynne. "When Jim comes back -- " "He won't be back!" said her brother brutally. "Get used to that idea, Mary Lynne! The Gutknecht woman never saw him again, and she was pregnant too. He meant to run away! He used false names. Told different stories to each of them. But he couldn't fool Consolidated Credit. He put four hundred thousand dollars in trust for this woman and took off and never gave her another thought. How do you like that, Mary Lynne?" "Jim wouldn't-" "Jim did! And again the following year. Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin -- a girl named Deloris Bennyhoff. Then in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania -- " He crumpled the paper in rage. "Ah, what's the use? Five women! He married them, runs off, leaves them pregnant. And what do you have to say to that, Mary Lynne?" Mary Lynne looked at her brother through blurred eyes. In a faint, faint voice, she said, "Well, at least he runs true to form, Alden." they looked for him. But they couldn't find him. The police couldn't find him, private detectives couldn't find him, even Consolidated Credit couldn't find him. Jim Croy was gone -- probably forever, at least under that name. And while they were looking, events took their natural course, and Mary Lynne made reservations at the hospital and began to pack a little bag. And Aunt Nora phoned. Her plump face peered somberly out of the phone screen. "I'm coming east," she announced. "You're not!" croaked Alden, wincing already. "I mean -- " "Thursday," she said. "On the six o'clock plane." "But, Aunt Nora -- " It was the last thing he wanted! So many years of cutting her out of the family circle because of the indiscretion of her youth, and now -- "Meet me," she said, and hung up. There was nothing to be done about it. Aunt Nora showed up at the house her sister had left the children just as Mary Lynne gasped, checked her wristwatch, gasped again and reached for her ready-packed bag. "Hello, Aunt Nora," said Alden distractedly. "Mary Lynne, aren't you ready yet? Good-by, Aunt Nora. Make yourself at home." "Wait!" cried Aunt Nora, but she was talking to a closed door. She sighed, shook her head irritably and took off her coat. Men were so foolish about babies! There would be plenty of time; she would unpack her bag, get settled in, and then, with full leisure, proceed to the hospital. And she be there well before the baby arrived. She was right -- though what she found in the upper bureau drawer of her room made her hurry to the hospital sooner than she'd planned. "Alden!" she gasped. "The picture! I saw the picture -- " "Hello, Aunt Nora," said Edkin gloomily. "Lord, but this takes a long time!" "It just seems long," snapped Nora and waved a picture under his nose. It was inscribed in white ink: For Mary Lynne, from Jimmy, with love. "Who's this?" Edkin said guiltily, "Mary's -- ah -- husband. He's away just now." "I bet he is! That's not any Jimmy! That's Sam!" "Sam?" "My Sam. The one who left me in a delicate condition years ago! And the only difference is, now he marries them!" Alden, hardly listening, said soothingly, "That was a long time ago, Aunt Nora. We don't worry about it now. Besides, you gave the baby up for adoption, didn't you? I never even saw him -- or her? What was it, a boy?" She said shortly, "No." "A girl, then." "Guess again," said Aunt Nora in a more peculiar tone. "And it wasn't exactly adoption." Her tone was peculiar enough to attract his full attention. He looked at her queerly, but she didn't seem to be joking. Funny. He didn't have the faintest idea of what she meant -- Until an endless twenty minutes later. Until the white-faced nurse came out of the delivery room wheeling a bassinet; until, without a word, the nurse pointed a shaking finger, and Edkin saw what it was that his sister had -- with the help of what called itself James Croy -- brought into an unsuspecting world.      way its author, Theodore Sturgeon, does: a pursestring plot that snaps shut at the end. But Sturgeon is a modest man and his is a too modest descripvoltage wires with a shock at each connection -- and a solar flare when the master switch is pulled. It has perhaps the most appallingly unlikely and reasons on the wrongest possible side -- to the problem that the human race is complex, it applies the absolutely literal answer: put the problem in a nutshell -- and this is just the organization to do exactly that! Since this is an outsize novella, only one novelet can be scheduled for certain, though another may fit in somehow. In his novelet, Paul Flehr is forced to grant that every frontier in history was raw with violence, and that there is no basis for supposing interplanetary frontiers will be otherwise -- but with fares so high and colonists so scarce, he refuses to concede Planets." Some types of locomotion that have long gone unquestioned are given a very thorough questioning -- and end up on the junkpile before they have a chance to do same to their crews. But Ley doesn't let his explorers walk back across alien landscapes; he provides transportation that may be somewhat startling but makes better sense. for your Information meant to be entitled "Half something to that effect. The fact that the actual writing was delayed to the fourth of February makes a title change mandatory. It has to be "The First Seven Explorer out As regards Explorer, I have to confess that the day of Friday, the #st of January #, made me feel somewhat like Phileas Fogg after his return to England, before he realizes, the useful mistake he made. Through the months of December # and January #, I was subjected to more than the customary number of radio, television and newspaper interviews, not to mention countless private questions. They all dealt with Vanguard, which had just suffered the most publicized failure of any rocket. What people wanted to know was: ( I ) What happened to Vanguard? (#) Why was it publicized so much? (#) How many failures did the Russians have before they got Sputnik I into an orbit? (#) What were the chances of Jupiter? own opinions and not those of the network or of the managing editor. And they ran as follows: Question No. #. After having watched the films taken of the takeoff that miscarried, I felt my first impression on hearing the reports more or less confirmed. The films showed clearly that the rocket motor of the first stage burned well and that the rocket lifted. Just after lift-off, when it was roughly one yard above the launching table, something shot out of the tail and accompanied by flame; simultaneously, the exhaust blast of the motor seemed to weaken. It was not longer strong enough to carry the rocket, so the rocket settled back on its tail. Naturally it did not settle back to fit the launching table precisely. It split open, fell over and the fuel exploded. My first impression had been that the fuel pump was stuck and that this ruptured a fuel line. (This happened to several V-#s in Germany and to at least one V-# at White Sands, but at a high altitude.) It has been stated officially since then that the cause of the mechanical failure is now known, but it has not been said officially what it was. At any event, it was a loss of power, just at the most critical moment, due to a mishap in the motor compartment. Question No. #. The reason why Vanguard was publicized so much was paradoxically due to secrecy. As everyone knows, the Defense Department, during the years when Charles Wilson made all the many decisions stamped "I am twice as bright as anybody else," suffered a very acute attack of juvenile super-secrecy. Nothing was to be published about missiles. Not even their names were to be made known -- of course, you could always read British aviation publications and find out what you wanted to know -- and, in general, the taxpayer was not to be informed what was done with his money. Or whether anything was done with his money. But it had also been decided that firing an artificial satellite by means of a military missile would "make a bad impression." For this reason, Dr. Wemher von Braun's original Project Orbiter was scrapped and "the peaceful rocket" of Project Vanguard was substituted. This put the first American satellite into space roughly two years later than would have been the case if Project Orbiter had gone ahead. But the other side of the coin was -- hurray, hurray -- that Vanguard was not a msisile. In fact, the Navy always referred to it very carefully as a "vehicle" and the Navy Public Relations officers then found out that most citizens considered a "vehicle" something in which a man rides. Hence they wanted to know what sort of man would ride the Vanguard. They wanted to know whether somebody had already been picked. And the Navy's public relations men had to explain over and over again that the "passenger" was to be a ball of instruments weighing # IV # pounds. r I "O return to the theme: Vanguard was not a missile, so it was not classified. It could be talked about. Some technical detail was not revealed, but a newsman of any kind -- radio, television or newspaper -- who wanted to know something about rockets, since he had to fill time or space, would be waved into a chair and told: "Now you realize, of course, that missiles are under wraps. Missiles But the satellite project -- Vanguard, that is -- is not classified in that sense. So ask me anything you want about Vanguard and I'll tell you." Thus Vanguard, for about two years, got all the publicity that would normally have been spread over a dozen different projects. And since everybody had been whipped into expecting wonders of Vanguard, the disappointment was obviously severe. Under normal conditions, the failure would have been just a plain failure. Such things will happen; on to the next test. But only Vanguard had been talked about -- and there were two Russian sputniki (that's the correct plural) overhead. Which brings me to: Question No. #. Of course the Russians, having an enormous land area, a political dictatorship and a secret police, could have hidden any number of failures. But when asked directly whether the shot that put Sputnik I in orbit had been the first attempt, they said that it had been. I may say here first that the scientists of all nations had been furnished with a date for the firing in about May #. The Russian rocket experts had started hinting very broadly that the year # was not only the beginning of the International Geophysical Year but also the centenary of the birth of the great Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Eduardovitch Ziolkovsky. Furthermore, they were planning a celebration worthy of the memory of a rocket pioneer. The date was September #, # -- when Ziolkovsky was born, the registrar noted his birthday down as September #, #. But that was old style, the Julian calendar, and the Soviets have switched to the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of the world. So, to many people, the surprise was not that it happened at all, but that it did not happen on September #. I wondered for several months whether they had tried on September # and failed, or whether they simply did not get ready until October #, the date of the actual shot. course I don't know. But the Russians said that their first shot succeeded. Offhand, there is no reason why one should not believe this statement. They used a production missile, the one they call the T-#, which is a two-stage liquid-fuel job. They put a third stage, almost certainly solid fuel, on top. In a production missile, the bugs which once inhabited it have been frozen or burned out before it became a production missile. Hence, if it is in production, a failure would be a surprise rather than the other way round. It was this reasoning which caused me to be very optimistic about: Question No. #. The Jupiter-C missile is a production missile too. At least its components are. The first stage of the Jupiter-C is a Redstone liquid-fuel rocket. The second stage is a ring-shaped cluster of a well-tested solid-fuel rocket, called Recruit (because it is a scaled-down Sergeant). The third stage is a smaller cluster of Recruit rockets placed inside the ring-shaped cluster which is the second stage. The fourth stage, finally, is a single such rocket, sitting more or less on top of the third stage. So I assured everybody who asked me that Jupiter would jump into space in January. Naturally I felt like Phileas Fogg on January #st. Then I was rescued like Phileas Fogg. Jupiter did jump into space, still in January. The takeoff time was #:# P.M. A wire service rang me up at a few minutes after midnight to tell me about it. And on the following day, I sent a wire to Wehrner von Braun, congratulating him and thanking him for having kept me an honest man by the margin of one hour and twelve minutes. Of course, during the time that goes by between the writing of this column and its appearance on the newsstands, you must have read about all the things that Explorer did find out. I just want to point at one early item, its internal temperature. The space travel men had said for years that the temperature in the cabin of a spaceship near Earth would be about # degrees Fahrenheit. This figure was based on heat received from the Sun only and did not take into account how much additional heat would be generated internally by hot filaments in instruments and bv the people. It also did not take into account the heat the ship would receive by reflection from the Earth when it was above the dayside of the Earth -- between Earth and Sun, that is. Calculated in, this was expected to add between twelve and fifteen degrees. Explorer has reported that its internal temperature varies from # degrees to # degrees Fahrenheit. Accurate predicting, eh? activities now. And this time we really talk about the first six months because no later reports are in. It must be said that Nature cooperated beautifully. July #, #. On June #, #, there was an exceptionally large solar flare. The disturbance caused by that flare reached the Earth on the first of July. Light from a solar flare needs only eight minutes to reach the Earth. Astronomers of Krasnaya Pakhra Observatory in Russia saw the flare first and reported it to "alert" one day before the official turbance caused by a solar flare shows mostly as a disruption of long-range radio communications. Normally there are several ionized layers in the ionosphere (above # miles from the ground) which are used as "mirrors" to reflect radio waves of different wave lengths from the point of origin to the target. After a solar flare, this does not work for a while. The radio waves do not come back. Were they simply let out into space or were they absorbed? The latter was more likely by far, but one could not be absolutely certain. On July #, #, a research rocket was fired through the ionized layers to find out. The rocket reported that there was an additional ionized layer, extending to twelve miles below the lowest normal layer. The rocket also reported that there were no changes in the distribution of the ionized layers otherwise. The disruption of communications was due to the temporary formation of this extra' layer, below all the others. At a later solar flare -- to the eye, a solar flare is just an exceptionally bright spot on the face of the Sun -- another rocket could establish that the extra layer was caused by X-rays coming from the Sun. One of the things which scientists had never been able to answer was whether there was a "bipolarity of the auroras." Everybody has seen pictures of an aurora. If they occur near the magnetic pole in the north, they are called aurora borealis; if they occur near the opposite pole, they are called aurora australis. Now the auroras, all available evidence said, were also caused by solar activities. But if it was the Sun that caused an aurora, it should take place simultaneously at both poles -- it should be "bipolar." All very logical, but was it? The difficulty was that one pole has daylight when it is night at the other pole. You probably could not see an aurora in bright sunlight, increased by the glare from the snow on the ground, even if one took place. Moreover, you never had observers both in the far north and in the far south at the same moment. have observers all over. And they were aided by new instrumentation which would have sounded like magic in the days of Nansen. Now proven: the aurorae are bipolar. to something that few people even knew existed, the so-called "whistlers." The whistler can be heard only with radio equipment; it is one more radio disturbance, this time of the low frequencies. The origin of a whistler seems to be a stroke of lightning. The Earth is large enough for about a thousand thunderstorms to go on at any given moment, so there is no shortage of lightning strokes. But obviously not every stroke produces a whistler. Only occasionally is the wave which is originated by the lightning capable of penetrating the reflecting ionized layers of the upper atmosphere. When one does, the resulting and rather faint disturbance travels back and forth between the northern and the southern hemisphere. It travels in space, outside the ionosphere, and it does go very far out, judging by the time that elapses. The whistlers must travel along the so-called magnetic lines; more precisely speaking, they travel through an arc along which the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field remains the same. Could the "whistler effect" be used for communications at times when solar flares produce this extra layer which ruins the customary method of radio communication? There is no answer to this question yet, but by the end of Still staying at the fringes of the atmosphere, another phenomenon has to be discussed. The two principal gases of our atmosphere are nitrogen, not quite # per cent, and oxygen, around #I per cent. The little difference indicated by the words "not quite" is argon, neon, krypton, xenon, helium and hydrogen, all together amounting to roughly one per cent. On occasion, you can read somewhat different figures; for some purposes, it is more convenient to list the weight rather than the volume. Here is a comparison of both: volume weight percent percent Nitrogen # # Oxygen # # Argon, etc .# # co # .# .# Hydrogen .#I .#I The point this table makes is that the various gases have different specific gravities. A cubic yard of oxygen does not weigh quite the same as a cubic yard of nitrogen. A cubic yard of hydrogen would be much lighter than either, and a cubic yard of carbon dioxide much heavier than anything else that exists in the atmosphere. If the atmosphere were, or could be, completely at rest, the various gases could be expected to separate into layers. Of course the atmosphere is not at rest; it is warmed by the Sun on one side and radiates its heat into space on the other. It circulates, mixes and travels about. arate layers just did not exist. But some sixty years ago, when more about the higher levels of the atmosphere became known by way of balloon flights, it suddenly looked as if all the turbulence was confined to the first six miles or so. The French scientist Leon P. Teisserenc de Bort even coined the name stratosphere for the "upper air" because up there the air seemed to be stratified. Some years later, between # and #, you could find neat diagrams of the atmosphere, all based on the idea that the gases should separate according to their specific gravity. No layer would be perfectly pure, but as you went up the percentage of helium should increase, for example, and the percentage of hydrogen with it. In fact, there probably was one pure layer, namely an outer hydrogen layer. Here we had a case of logical reasoning which did not seem to hold true in reality, for the first V-# rockets thoroughly ruined the whole concept. Eighty miles up, the composition of the atmosphere was still the same as near the ground. Naturally the density had dropped to almost nothing, but the composition of the little there was corresponded with what you could measure one mile up. No layering. This dictum was firm and definite as of January #, #. On January #, #, it was not so firm fired from Fort Churchill in Canada in late summer #, carried a device for analyzing the composition of the air. The still somewhat tentative result is that the air is completely mixed up to sixty miles. But above sixty miles there were faint indications of separation according to the specific gravity of the gases involved. The attempt to measure this brought up the question of what is "normal" density at high altitudes. A series of Aerobee and Nike-Cajun rockets was fired from Fort Churchill for just this purpose. The rockets, going as high as # miles, reported all kinds of effects which could not be detected on the ground. It seems that one cannot ask about the "normal" density a hundred miles up without specifying quite a number of things. This density is not the same during the day and the night. It is not the same on the first of August and the first of December. And it is not the same, on the same day, under # degrees of northern latitude and under # degrees of northern latitude. Density of the atmosphere at very high altitudes, then, is influenced by the geographical latitude, the season of the year and, most especially, the time of the day. L ET'S come out of the atmosphere now and put our feet on the ground. Or rather on the ice, because we have to talk about Antarctica next. Even though Antstations (I count # on my checkmap, run by, in alphabetical order, Argentina, Australia, Chile, England, France, Japan, New Zealand, results must be spotty, for the Antarctic ice sheet measures six A number of soundings have shown that the ice extends to below sea level where "land" was expected. Still, the experts are careful not to conclude that Antarctica is really an archipelago which is tied together by ice. The hit a frozen fjord. The geography of Antarctica is still quite uncertain, but we are making progress. But the end of ably good map. Or at least one that is good enough to serve as a guide to further studies. Something quite unexpected has shown up at the other end of the globe, the polar sea. Several stations in the western hemisphere are involved, most of them Canadian, one or two Norwegian, one American. The stations on the other side of the Arctic Ocean are Russian, of course. One day, one of the Canadians noticed a sea level rise of about four inches which could not be accounted for by tides or anything known. He first checked with his colleagues in the western hemisphere. Yes, they had observed it too. Then they checked with the Russians, who had looked at the same thing with amazement. But there was a difference in time. The sea level rise on the Russian side did not take place at the same time as it did on the American side. The phenomenon may be compared with the motion of the water in a round washtub that has been shaken. The water first laps up on one side and then travels to the opposite side. Then it comes back. Naturally it takes many hours for a basin as large as the Arctic Ocean. Nobody has any idea of how this can be explained. The main problem is that it is a newly observed phenomenon. We don't know whether it existed in the past. We don't know whether it was stronger in the past or weaker. If we knew when it started, it might tie up with a major volcanic catastrophe. But we don't know. It is something to be watched for a long time to come. Another surprise that turned up in the oceans -- in the Atlantic Ocean, in this case -- is something that might be called a Counter Gulf Stream. The work was done by two oceangoing laboratories, the Atlantis (U. S. A.) and the Discovery II (Great Britain). They investigated the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream which flows in a general northeasterly direction. They found that, at a depth of # feet below the Gulf Stream's eastern edge, the water either shows no movement at all or else that the movement is very erratic, the equivalent of a turbulent zone in the air. But at # feet there is a current flowing opposite to the Gulf Stream on top, at the rate of eight miles per hour, which is rather fast for an ocean current. " yet been reported from the southern Atlantic Ocean, which is under investigation by the Verna (U. S. A.) and the Bahia Blanca (Argentina). But the Verna could report something new in the biological field. They recovered -- alive -- a small shellfish and a worm one-quarter of an inch in length from depths of # and # feet, respectively. This is believed to be the greatest depth from which living organisms have been brought up so far, alive or dead. themselves with measuring sea level and tides. It is possible that, with the change of the seasons, very large amounts of sea water shift from the northern to the southern hemisphere. But, so far, only one change of seasons has been observed and that incompletely. Which is, incidentally, the eighteen months -- all observations can be made through overlapping seasons. Well, this is about what is now will not even be known at the end years to correlate all the information gathered and to interpret it correctly. It is quite possible that important discoveries have already been made, needing only time and study to be found and confirmed. Both in the Arctic and in Antarctica, long "cores" -- samplings of ice from great depths -- have been taken. The forty-odd research vessels engaged in the program have taken large quantities of samples of bottom mud from all the oceans. Observatories, stations, ships, rockets, balloons, instruments and human watchers are amassing mountains of data that must be broken down, analyzed, tested, compared, checked and rechecked. And some, like the photographs of Pluto made years ago, will have to wait for theory to point the way to their true significance. There is no way of prophesying how many scientific papers and books in the future will begin with the words: "It was first noticed certain that the number will not be small. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. If you were in my -- well, shoes, if you don't mind stretching a point -- what would you do about this? I have a problem. In spite of rumors to the contrary, my parents were properly married, and were perfectly normal people at the time I was born. And so was I -- normal, I mean. But that all contributed to the creation of my problem. I do not know if you can help me resolve it, but you have helped try you. I enjoin you not to answer this letter in your column; write me privately, please. You know all about me, of course. Who doesn't? But most of what you know about me is bound to be almost entirely wrong. So I will have to clarify my background before I present my problem. Know, then, that I am Alfred the Magnificent. It surprises you, I imagine, that I would be writing a letter to Miss Dix VI. After all, in spite of the tax rate, I am one of the richest -- I will say it! -- one of the richest men in the world. Every word of that last statement is true. My parents were enormously wealthy, but I have accumulated even more of the world's goods than they ever did. And if they had not been loaded with loot, I would not be here now to be writing this letter to you. Please excuse any lack of smoothness in the style and execution of this letter. I'm doing this all myself. Usually I dictate to a secretary -- a live secretary -- but you understand that that would not be advisable for a letter of this kind, I'm sure. S O. My background. I was born in # and, having passed my infantile I.Q. test with flying colors, was admitted to the Harvard Creche for Superior Children at the usual age of three months. The name of Alfred Vanderform naturally had been entered on the rolls much earlier. Ten years earlier, in point of fact My parents had been fortunate enough to be selected to have three children and I was to be their first. They chose to begin with a son. They had known that they would be chosen, and that I would be a superior child, and had taken the wise precaution of signing me up for Harvard Creche as soon as the planners had finished drawing up their preliminary charts. In spite of what you may have heard, there was absolutely no chance of falsifying the initial I.Q. examination; in those days, at least. I was a physically normal, mentally superior child. My progress at the creche was entirely satisfactory. I was an ordinarily above-average genius in every way. At age six, I left the creche for my sabbatical year at home with my parents, and it was there that my first disaster occurred. My mother and father moved into the same house while I was there, which was the custom then (and may still be, for all I know) in order to provide a proper homelike atmosphere for me. Through some carelessness in original planning, this was also the year that had been selected for the birth of their second child, which was to be a girl. Both parents were to be the same for all three of their children. Under usual circumstances, they would have paid enough attention to me so that the disaster would never have been allowed to take place, but plans for their second child must have made them a trifle careless. At any rate, in spite of my early age, an embolism somehow developed and major damage to my heart resulted. It was here that the great wealth of my parents proved invaluable. Prognosis was entirely unfavorable for me. The routine procedure for a three-offspring couple would have been to cancel the unsuccessful quota and reissue it for immediate production. However, it was too late to arrange for twins in their second quota and my parents decided to attempt to' salvage me. An artificial heart was prepared and substituted for the original. It had a built-in atomic battery which would require renovation no oftener than every twenty years. Voluntary control was provided through connection with certain muscles in my neck, and I soon learned to operate it as least as efficiently as a normal heart with the normal involuntary controls. T HE mechanism was considerably bigger than the natural organ, but the salvage operation was a complete success. The bulge between my shoulder blades for the battery and the one in front of my chest for the pump were not excessively unsightly. I entered the Princeton Second Stage Creche for Greatly Superior Children on time, being accepted without objection in spite of my pseudo-deformity. It cannot be proved that any special emolument was offered to or accepted by the creche managers in order to secure my acceptance. My personal belief is that nobody had to cough up. Three years at Princeton passed relatively uneventfully for me. In spite of the best efforts and assurances of the creche psychologists, there was naturally a certain lack of initial acceptance of me by some of my creche mates. However, they soon became accustomed to my fore-and-aft bulges, and since I had greater endurance than they, with voluntary control over my artificial heart, I eventually gained acceptance, and even a considerable measure of leadership -- insofar as leadership by an individual is possible in a creche. Shortly after the beginning of my fourth year at the Princeton Creche, the second great personal disaster struck. Somehow or other -- the cause has not been determined to this day -- my artificial heart went on the blink. I did not quite die immediately, but the prognosis was once again entirely unfavorable. Considerable damage had somehow eventuated to my lungs, my liver and my kidneys. I was a mess. By this time, my parents had made such a huge investment in me, and my progress reports had been so uniformly excellent, that in spite of all the advice from the doctors, they determined to attempt salvage again. was decided upon. Blood was to be received, aerated, purified and pumped back to the arterial system through a single mechanism which would weigh only about thirty-five pounds. Of course, this made portability an important factor. Remember that I was only ten years old. I could probably have carried such a weight around on my back, but I could never have engaged in the proper development of my whole body and thus could never have been accepted back again by Princeton. It was therefore determined to put the machinery into a sort of cart, which I would tow around behind me. Wheels were quickly rejected as being entirely unsatisfactory. They would excessively inhibit jumping, climbing and many other boyish activities. The manufacturers finally decided to provide the cart with a pair of legs. This necessitated additional machinery and added about twenty-five pounds to the weight of the finished product. They solved the problem of how I would handle the thing with great ingenuity by making the primary control involuntary. They provided a connection with my spinal cord so that the posterior pair of legs, unless I consciously ordered otherwise, always followed in the footsteps of the anterior pair. If I ran, they ran. If I jumped, they jumped. In order to make the connection to my body, the manufacturers removed my coccyx and plugged in at and around the end of my spinal column. In other words, I had a very long and rather flexible tail, at the end of which was a smoothly streamlined flesh-colored box that followed me around on its own two legs. A human has certain normally atrophied muscles for control of his usually non-existent tail. Through surgery and training, those muscles became my voluntary controllers for my tail and the cart. That is, I could go around waggin' my tail while draggin' my wagon. Pardon me, Miss Dix VI. That just slipped out worked. You should have seen me in a high hurdle race -- me running along and jumping over the hurdles, with that contraption galloping along right behind me, clearing every hurdle I cleared. I kept enough slack in my tail so I wouldn't get pulled up short, and then just forgot about it. Going off a diving board was a little bit different. I learned to do things like that with my back legs under voluntary control. Speaking of diving boards, maybe you wonder how I could swim while towing a trailer. No trouble at all. I would just put my tail #in O W... ' . im   WT to Ph between my legs and have my cart grab me around the waist with a kind of body scissors. The cart's flexible air sac was on its top when it was in normal position, so this held it away from my body, where it would not get squeezed. I would take in just enough air so that it was neutrally buoyant, and with its streamlined shape, it didn't slow me down enough to notice. I usually "breathed" -- or took in my air -- through the intakes of the cart, and they stayed under water, but there was an air connection through my tail up to the lung cavity anyway, allowing me to talk. So I just breathed through my mouth in the old-fashioned way. Backing up was rather a problem, with my posterior legs leading the way, and dancing was nearly impossible until I got the idea of having my trailer climb up out of the way onto my shoulders while I danced. That got me by Princeton's requirements, but I must confess that I was never very much in demand as a dancing partner. At any rate, that system got me through to my sixth and last year at PrincetoiI sometimes believe that I may be considered to be what is occasionally called an "accident-prone." I seem to have had more than my share of tough luck. During my last year at Princeton, I got my throat cut. It was an accident, of course. No Princeton man would ever dream of doing away with someone he had taken a dislike to quite so crudely. Or messily. T Y voluntary control of my heart, I slowed the action down to the point where I managed to keep from bleeding to death, but my larynx was destroyed beyond repair. That was when I got my Voder installation. It fitted neatly where my lungs used to be, and because it used the same resonant cavities, I soon learned to imitate my own voice well enough so that nobody could tell the difference, "before" or "after." Actually, it was a minor accident, but I thought I'd mention it because of what the news media sometimes call my "inhuman voice." It even enables me to sing, something I never was much good at before that accident. Also, I could imitate a banjo and sing at the same time, a talent that made me popular at picnics. That was the last real accident I had for quite a while. I got through my second (and last) home sabbatical, my Upper School, my First College and my Second College. I was chosen for, and got through, Advanced College with highest honors. Counting sabbaticals, that took a total of twentynine years, plus the last of my time at Princeton. And then, an eager youth of forty-two, I was on my own -- ready to make my way in the world. I was smart to avoid the government service that catches so many of us so-called super-geniuses. It's very satisfying work and all that, I suppose, but there's no money in it, and I was rich enough to want to get richer. The cart containing my organs didn't get in my way too much. With my athletic days behind me, I taught it to come to heel instead of striding along behind me. It was less efficient, but it was a lot less conspicuous. I had a second involuntary control system built in so it would stay at heel without conscious thought on my part, once I put it there. In my office, I would have it curl up at my feet like a sleeping dog. People told me it was hardly noticeable -- even people who didn't work for me. It certainly didn't bother me or hold me back. I started to make money as though I had my own printing press and managed to hang onto most of it. TN spite of what the doom criers say, as long as there is an element of freedom in this country -- and I think there always will be -- there will be ways, and I mean legal ways, of coming into large hunks of cash. Within ten years, I was not only Big Rich; I was one of the most important people in the world. A Policy Maker. A Power. It was about that time that I drank the bottle of acid. Nobody was trying to poison me. I wasn't trying to kill myself, either. Not even subconsciously. I was just thirsty. All I can say is I did a first rate job with what was left of my insides. Well, they salvaged me again, and what I ended up with was a pair of carts, one trotting along beside each heel. The leash for the second one was plugged into me in front instead of in the back, naturally, but with my clothes on, nobody could tell, just by looking, that they were attached to me at all. The doctors offered to get me by without the second trailer. They figured they could prepare pre-digested food and introduce it into my bloodstream through the mechanism of my original wagon. I refused to let them; I had gotten too used to eating. So whatever I ate was ground up and pumped into my new trailer -- or should it be "preceder"? There it would be processed and the nutriments passed into my bloodstream as required. I couldn't overeat if I tried. It was all automatic, not even hooked into my nervous system. Unusable products were compressed and neatly packaged for disposal at any convenient time. In cellophane. There was, of course, interconnection inside of me between the two carts. I'm told I started quite a fad for walking dogs in pairs. It didn't affect me at all. I never got very good at voluntary control of my second trailer, but by that time my habit patterns were such that I hardly noticed it. Oh, yes -- about swimming. I still enjoyed swimming and I worked it out this way: Wagon number two replaced number one in straddling me, and wagon number one hung onto number two. It slowed me down, but it still let me swim. I quit diving. I couldn't spare the time to figure out how to manage it. five years. I kept on getting richer. I was a happy man. Then came the crowning blow. What was left of me developed cancer. It attacked my brain, among other things. And it was inoperable. It looked as if I had only a couple of years before deterioration of my mental powers set in, and then it would be the scrap heap for me. But I didn't give up. By that time, I had gotten used to the parts-replacement program. And I was very rich. So I told them to get busy and build me an artificial brain as good as my own. They didn't have time to make a neat package job this time. They took over three big buildings in the center of town and filled them with electronics. You should see the cable conduits connecting those buildings together! Then they bought the Broadway Power Plant and used most of its output. They ran in new water mains to provide the coolant. They used most of my money, and it took all of my influence to speed things up, but they got the job done in time. It won't do you any good to ask me how they transferred my memories and my personality to that mass of tubes and wires and tapes and transistors. I don't know. They tell me that it was the easiest part of the job, and I know that they did it perfectly. My brain power and my personality came through unchanged. I used them to get rich again in mighty short order. I had to, to pay my water and power bills. I came out of it "Alfred the Magnificent" and still I'm just as human as you are, even if a lot I guess -- won't believe it. Granted, there isn't much of the Original Me left, but there's an old saying that Glands Make the Man. Underneath it all, I'm the same Alfred Vanderform, the same old ordinary super-genius that I have always been. I have almost finished with the background material, Miss Dix VI, and am nearly ready to present you my problem. I am now approaching the age of sixty -- and have therefore reached the time of Selection for Fatherhood. I have, in fact, been fortunate enough to be one of the few selected to father three children. IF you have chanced to hear rumors that money changed hands in getting me selected, let me tell you that they are entirely true. The only thing wrong about the rumors is that none of them has named a big enough amount -- not nearly big enough. It isn't that I don't qualify by any honest evaluation. I do. But there has been a good deal of prejudice against me as a Father, and even some skepticism about my capability. But that doesn't matter; what does is that I have been selected. What is more, a single superior female was chosen to be Mother of all three of my children. By what is not at all a coincidence, this woman happens to be my private secretary. She is, I may add, very beautiful. I am just old-fashioned enough to want my children to have all of the advantages that I had myself, including parents who are fully married, in the same way that my own mother nad father were. Legal ceremony -- religious service -- everything! So I have asked the chosen mother of my children-to-be to marry me, and Gloria -- that's her name -- has been gracious enough to accept. We are to be married week after next. Now, Miss Dix VI, we come to my problem. How can I tell if Gloria is in love with me, or is just marrying me for my money? Perplexed, Alfred Vanderform (The Magnificent) society!! Bullet With His Name T HE Invisible Being shifted his anchorage a bit in Earth's gravitational field, which felt like a push rather than a pull to him, and said, "This featherless biped seems to satisfy Galaxy Center's requirements. I'd say he's a suitable recipient for the Gifts." His Coadjutor, equally invisible and negatively massed, chewed that over. "Mature by his length and mass. Artificial plumage neither overly gaudy nor utterly drab -- indicating median social level, which is confirmed by the size of his bachelor nest. Inward maps of his environment not fanBefore passing judgment, just ask yourself one question: Would you like answering for humanity any better than Ernie Meeker did? tastically inaccurate. Feelings reasonably meshed -- at least neither volcanic nor frozen. Thoughts and values in reasonable order. Yes, I agree, a satisfactory test subject. Except..." "Except what?" "Except we can never be sure of that 'reasonable' part." "Of course not! Thank' your stars that's beyond the reach of Galaxy Center's keenest telepathy, or even ours on the spot. Otherwise you and I'd be out of a job." "And have to scheme up some other excuse for free-touring the Cosmos with backtracking permitted." "Exactly!" The Being and his Coadjutor understood each other very well and were the best of friends. "Well, how many Gifts would you suggest for the test?" "How about two Little and one Big?" the Coadjutor ventured. "Umm... statistically adequate but spiritually unsatisfying. Remember, the fate of his race hangs on his reactions to them. I'd be inclined to increase your suggestion by one each and add a Great" "No -- at least I question the last. After all, the Great Gifts aren't as important, really, as the Big Gifts. Besides..." "Besides what? Come on, spit it out!" The Invisible Being was the bluff, blunt type. "Well," said his less hearty but unswervingly honest companion, "I'm always afraid that you'll use the granting of a Great Gift as an excuse for some sardonic trick -- that you'll put a sting in its tail." "And why shouldn't I, if I want to? Snakes have stings in their tails (or do they on this planet?) and I'm a sort of snake. If he fails the test, he fails. And aren't both of us malicious, plaguing spirits, eager to knock holes in the inward armor of provincial entities? It's in the nature of our job. But we can argue about that in due course. What Little Gifts would you suggest?" "That's something I want to talk about. Many of the Little Gifts are already well within his race's reach, if not his. After all, they've already got atomic power." "Which as you very well know scores them nothing one way or the other on a Galaxy Center test. We're agreed on the nature and the number of our Gifts -- three Little, two Big, and one Great?" "Yes," his Coadjutor responded resignedly. "And we're agreed on our subject?" "Yes to that too." "All right, then, let's get started. This isn't the only solar system we have to visit on this circuit." Terra, Sol, Starswarm #, Rim Sector, Milky Way Galaxy -- rubbed his chin and slanted across the street to a drugstore. "Package of blades. Double edge. Five. Cheapest." At one point during the transaction, the clerk lost sight of the tiny packet he'd placed on the coin-whitened glass between them. He gave a suspicious look, as if the customer had palmed them. Ernie blinked. After a moment, he pointed toward the center of the counter. "There they are," he said, dropping a coin beside them. The clerk's face didn't get any less suspicious. Customer who could sneak something without your seeing could sneak it back the same way. He rang up the sale and closed the register fast. Ernie Meeker went home and shaved. Five days -- and shaves -- later, he pushed the first blade, uncomfortably dull now, through the tiny slot beside the bathroom mirror. He unwrapped the second blade from the packet. Five shaves later, he cut himself under the chin with the second blade, although he was drawing it as gently through his soaped beard as if it were only his second shave with it, or at most his third. He looked at it sourly and checked the packet. Wouldn't have been the first time he'd absentmindedly changed blades ahead of schedule. But there were still three blades in their waxed wrappings. Maybe, he thought, he'd still had one of the blades from the last packet and shuffled it into this series. Or maybe -- although the manufacturers undoubtedly had inspectors to prevent it from happening -- he'd got a decent blade for once. Two or three shaves later, it still seemed as sharp as ever, or almost so. "Funny thing," he remarked to Bill at lunch, "sometimes you get a blade that shaves a lot better. Looks exactly like the others, but shaves better. Or worse sometimes, of course." "And sometimes," his office mate said, "you wear out a blade fast by not soaking your beard enough. For me, one shave with a stiff beard and the blade's through. On the other hand, if you're careful to soak your beard real goodfour, five minutes at least -- have the water steaming hot, get the soap really into it, one blade can last a long time." "That's true, all right," Ernie agreed, trying to remember how well he had been soaking his beard lately. Shaving was a good topic for light conversation, warm and agreeable, like most bathroom and kitchen topics. TUT next morning in the bathroom, looking at the reflection of his unremarkable face, there was something chilly in his feelings that he couldn't quite analyze. He flipped his razor open and suspiciously studied the bright metal wafer, then flipped it closed with an irritated shrug. As he shaved, it occurred to him that a good detective-story murder method would be to substitute a very sharp razor blade for one the victim knew was extremely dull. He'd whip it across his throat, putting a lot of muscle into the stroke to get through the tangle, and -- urrk! Ridiculous, of course. Wouldn't work except with a straight razor. Wouldn't even work with a straight razor, unless... oh, well. He told himself the blade was noticeably duller today. Next morning, he was still using the freak blade, but with a persistent though very slight uneasiness. Things should behave as you expected them to, in accordance with their flimsy souls, he told himself at the barely conscious level. Men should die, hearts should break, girls should tell, nations perish, curtains get dirty, milk sour... and razor blades grow dull. It was the comfortable, expected, reassuring way. He told himself the blade was duller still. Just a bit. The third morning, face lathered, he flipped open the razor and lifted it out. "You're through," he said to it silently. "I've had the experience before of getting bum shaves by trying to save a penny by pretending to myself that a wornout blade was still sharp enough, when it obviously couldn't be. Or maybe -- " he grinned a little wryly -- "maybe I'd almost get one more shave out of you and then you'd fall to pieces like the Wonderful One Horse Shay and leave me with a chin full of steel porcupine quills. No, thanks." So Ernie Meeker pushed through the little slot beside the mirror and heard tinkle faintly down and away the first of the Little Gifts, the Everlasting Razor Blade. One hundred and fifty thousand years later, it turned up, bright and shining, in the midst of a small knob of red iron oxide excavated by an archeological expedition of multibrachs from Antares Gamma. Those wise history-mad beings handed it about wonderingly, from tentacle to impatient tentacle. sick, somehow. After dinner, he decided it was the Thuringer sausage he'd eaten at lunch. He hurried up to the bathroom with a spoon, but as he clutched the box of bicarbonate of soda, preparatory to plunging the spoon into it, it seemed to him that the box said distinctly, in a small inward-outward voice: "No, no, no!" Ernie sat down suddenly on the toilet seat. The spoon rattled against the porcelain finish of the washbowl as he laid it down. He held the box firmly in both hands and studied it. Size, shape, materials, blue color, closure, etc., were exactly as they should be. But the white lettering on the blue background read: Dissociates H# into hemiquasi-stable H and O, furnishing a serviceable fuel-and-oxydizer mix for most motorcycles, automobiles, trucks, motorboats, airplanes, stationary motors, torquetwisters, translators, and rockets (exhaust velocity up to # meters per second). Operates safely within and outside of all normal atmospheres. No special adaptor needed on oxygenizer-atmosphere motors. Directions: Place one pinch in fuel tank, fill with water. Add water as needed. A-F Catalyst should generally be renewed when objective tests show fuel quality has deteriorated # per cent. U.S. and Foreign Patents Pending After reading that several times, with suitable mind-checking and eye-testing in between, Ernie took up a little of the white powder on the end of a nailfile. He had thought of tasting it, but had instantly abandoned the notion and even refrained from sniffing the stuff -- after all, the human body is mostly water. After reducing the quantity several times, he gingerly dumped at most four or five grains on the flat edge of the washbowl and then used the broad end of the nailfile to maneuver a large bead of water over to the almost invisible white deposit. He closed the box, put it and the nailfile carefully on the window ledge, lit a match and touched it to the drop, at the last moment ducking his head a little below the level of the washbowl. Nothing happened. After a moment, he slowly withdrew the match, shaking it out, and looked. There was nothing to see. He reached out to touch the stupid squashed ovoid of water. Ouch! He withdrew his fingers much faster than the match, shook them more sharply. Something was there, all right. Heat. Heat enough to hurt. boundaries of the heat. It became noticeable about eighteen inches above the drop and almost an inch to each side -- an invisible slim vertical cylinder. Crouching close, eyes level with the top of the washbowl, he could make out the flame -- a thin finger of crinkled light. He noticed that a comer of the drop was seething -- but only a corner, as if the heat were sharply bounded in that direction and perhaps as if the catalyst were only transforming the water to fuel a bit at a time. He reached up and tugged off the light. Now he could see the flame -- ghostly, about four inches high, hardly thicker than a string, and colored not blue but pale green. A spectral green needle. He blew at it softly. It shimmied gracefully, but not, he thought, as much as the flame of a match or candle. It had character. He switched on the light. The drop was more than half gone now; the part that was left was all seeth ing. And the bathroom was markedly warmer. "Ernie! Are you going to be much longer?" The knock hadn't been loud and his widowed sister's voice was more apologetic than peremptory, but he jumped, of course. "I am testing something," he started to say and changed it midway. It came out, "I am be out in a minute." He turned off the light again. The flame was a little shorter now and it shrank as he watched, about a quarter inch a second. As soon as it died, he switched on the light. The drop was gone. He scrubbed off the spot with a dry washrag, on second thought put a dab of vaseline on the washrag, scrubbed the spot again with that -- he didn't like to think of even a grain of the powder getting in the drains or touching any water. He folded the washrag, tucked it in his pocket, put the blue boxafter a final check of the lettering -- in his other coat pocket, and opened the door. "I was taking some bicarb," he told his sister. "Thuringer sausage at lunch." She nodded absently.  Ernie, his mind was full of so many things, especially calculations involving the distance between his car and the house and the length of the garden hose. In desperation, as the white hours accumulated and his thoughts began to squirm, he grabbed up the detective story he'd bought at the corner newsstand. He had read thirty pages before he realized that he was turning them as rapidly as he could focus just once on each facing page. He jumped out of bed. My God, he thought, at that rate he'd finish the book under three minutes and here it wasn't even two o'clock yet! He selected the thickest book on the shelf, an overpoweringly dull historical treatise in small print. He turned two pages, three, then closed it with a clap and looked at the wall with frightened eyes. Ernie Meeker had discovered, inside the birthday box that was himself, the first of the Big Gifts. The trouble was that in that wee-hour, lonely bedroom, it didn't seem like a gift at all. How would he ever keep himself in books, he wondered, if he read them so fast? And think how full to bursting his mind would get -- right now, the seven pages of fine-print history were churning in it, vividly clear, along with the first chapters of the new detective story. If he kept on absorbing information that fast, he'd have to be revising all his opinions and beliefs every couple of days at least -- maybe every couple of hours. It seemed a dreadful, literally maddening prospect -- his mind would ultimately become a universe of squirming macaroni. Even the wallpaper he was staring at, which imitated the grain of wood, had in an instant become so fully part of his consciousness that he felt he could turn his back on it right now and draw a picture of it correct to the tiniest detail. But who would ever want to do such a thing, or want to be able to? It was an abnormal, dangerous, temporary sensitivity, he told himself, generated by the excitement of the crazy discovery he'd made in the bathroom. Like the thoughts of a drowning man, riffling an infinity-paneled adventure-comic of his life as he bolts his last rough ration of air. Or like the feeling a psychotic must have that he's on the verge of visualizing the whole universe, having its ultimate secrets patter down into the palm of his outstretched hand -- just before the walls close in. Ernie Meeker was not a drinking man, then. A pint had stood a week on his closet shelf and only been diminished three shots. But now he did a good job on the sturdy remainder. Pretty soon the unbearable, edge-of-doom clarity in his mind faded, the universe macaroni cooked down to a thick white soup uniform as fog, and the words of the detective story were sliding into his mind individually, or at most in strings of three and four. Which, if it wasn't as it ideally should be in an ambitious man's mind, was at least darn comfortable. He had not rejected the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading. Not quite. But he had dislocated for tonight at least the imposed nervous field on which it depended. "C I OR want of a better place, Ernie dropped the rubber tube from the bathtub spray into the scrub bucket half full of odorous pink fluid and stared doubtfully at the uncapped gas tank. The tank had been almost empty when he'd last driven his car, he knew, because he'd been waiting until payday to gas up. Now he had used the tube to siphon out what he could of the remainder (he still could taste the stuff!) and he'd emptied the fuel line and carburator, more or less. Further than that, in the way of engine hygiene, Ernie's strictly kitchen mechanics did not go, but he felt that a catalyst used in pinches shouldn't be too particular about contaminants. Besides, the directions on the box hadn't said anything about cleaning the fuel tank, had they? He hesitated. At his feet, the garden hose gurgled noisily over the curb into the gutter; it had vindicated his midnight estimate, proving just long enough. He looked uneasily up and down the dawning street and was relieved to find it still empty. He wished fervently, not for the first time this Saturday morning, that he had a garage. Then he sighed, squared his shoulders a little, and lifted the box out of his pocket. Making to check the directions the umpteenth time, he received a body blow. The white lettering on the box had disappeared. The box didn't proclaim itself sodium bicarbonate again -- there was just no lettering at all, only blue background. He turned it over several times. Right there died his tentative plan of eventually sharing his secret with some friend who knew more than himself about motors (he hadn't decided anyway who that would be). It would be just too silly to approach anyone he knew with a more-than-wild story and featureless blue box. For a moment, he came very close to dropping the box between the wide-set bars of the street drain and pouring the pink gas back in the tank. It had hit him, in a way for the first time, just how crazy this all was, how jarringly implausible even on such hypotheses as practical jokes, secret product perhaps military, or mad inventor (except himself). For how the devil should the stuff get into his bathroom disguised as bicarb? That circumstance seemed beyond imagination. Green flames... vanishing letters... "torque-twisters, translators"... a box that talked... # T that point, simple faith came to Ernie's rescue : in the same bathroom, he had seen the green flame; it had burned his fingers. Quickly he dipped up a little of the white powder on the edge of a fifty-cent piece, dumped it in the gas tank without quibbling as to quantity, rapped the coin on the edge of the opening, closed and pocketed the blue box, and picked up the spurting hose and jabbed it into the round hole. His heart was pounding and his breath was coming fast. That had taken real effort. So he was slow in hearing the footsteps behind him. His neighbor's gate was open and Mr. Jones stood open-mouthed a few feet behind him, all ready for his day's work as streetcar motorman and wearing the dark blue uniform that always made him look for a moment unpleasantly like a policeman. Ernie swung the hose around, flipping his thumb over the end to make a spray, and nonchalantly began to water the little rectangle of lawn between sidewalk and curb. The first things he watered were the bottoms of Mr. Jones's pants legs. Mr. Jones voiced no complaint. He backed off several steps, stared intently at Ernie, rather palely, it seemed to the latter. Then he turned and made off for the streetcar tracks at a very fast shuffle, shaking his feet a little now and then and glancing back several times over his shoulder without slowing down. Ernie felt light-headed. He decided there was enough water in the gas tank, capped it, and momentarily continued to water the lawn. "Ernie! Come on in and have breakfast!" He heeded his sister's call, telling himself it would be a good idea "to give the stuff time to mix" before testing the engine. He had divined her question and was ready with an answer. "I've just found out that we're supposed to water our lawns only before seven in the morning or after seven in the evenings. It's the law." I T was the day for their monthly drive out to Wheaton to visit Uncle Fabius. On the whole, Ernie was glad his sister was in the car when he turned the key in the starter -- it forced him to be calm and collected, though he didn't feel exactly right about exposing her to the danger of being blown up without first explaining to her the risk. But the motor started right up and began purring powerfully. Ernie's sister commented on it favorably. Then she went on to ask, "Did you remember to buy gas yesterday?" "No," he said without thinking; then, realizing his mistake, quickly added, "I'll buy some in Wheaton. There's enough to get us there." "You didn't think so yesterday," she objected. "You said the tank was nearly empty." "I was wrong. Look, the gauge shows it's half full." "But then how... Ernie, didn't you once tell me the gauge doesn't work?" "Did I?" "Yes. Look, there's a station. Why don't you buy gas now?" "No, I'll wait for Wheaton -- I know a place there I can get it cheaper," he insisted, rather lamely, he feared. His sister looked at him steadily. He settled his head between his shoulders and concentrated on driving. His feeling of excitement was spoiled, but a few minutes of silence brought it back. He thought of the blur of green flashes inside the purring motor. If the passing drivers only knew! Uncle Fabius, retired perhaps a few years too early and opinionated, was a trial, but he did know something about the automobile industry. Ernie chose a moment when his sister was out of the room to ask if he'd ever heard of a white powder that would turn water into gasoline or some usable fuel. "Who's been getting at you?" Uncle Fabius demanded sharply, to Ernie's surprise and embarrassment. "That's one of the oldest swindles. They always tell this story about how this man had a white powder or something and demonstrated it once with a pail of water and then disappeared. You're supposed to believe that Detroit or the big oil companies got rid of him. It's just another of those malicious legends, concocted -- by Russia, I imagine -- to weaken your faith in American Industry, like the everlasting battery or the razor blade that never gets dull. You're looking pale, Ernie -- don't tell me you've already put money in this white powder? I suppose someone's approached you with a proposition, though?" " Ernie convinced his uncle that he had "just heard the story from a friend." "In that case," Uncle Fabius opined, "you can be sure some fuelpowder swindler has been getting at him. When you see him -- and be sure to make that soon -- tell him from me that -- " and Uncle Fabius began an impassioned ninety-minute defense of big business, small business, prosperity, America, money, know-how, and a number of other institutions that defended pretty easily, so that the situation was wholly normal when Ernie's sister returned. As soon as the car pulled away from the curb on their way back to Chicago, she reminded him about the gas. "Oh, I've already done that," he assured her. "Made a special trip so I wouldn't forget It was while you were out of the room. Didn't you hear me?" "No," she said, "I didn't," and she looked at him steadily, as she had that morning. He similarly retreated to driving. Stopping for a railroad crossing, he braked too hard and the car stalled. His sister grabbed his arm. "I knew that was going to happen," she said. "I knew that for some reason you lied to me when -- " The motor, starting readily again, cut short her remark and Ernie didn't press his small triumph by asking her what she was about to say. To tell the truth, Ernie wasn't feeling as elated about today's fifty-mile drive as he'd imagined he would. Now he thought he could put his finger on the reason : It was the completely... well, arbitrary way in which the white powder had come into his possession. If he'd concocted it himself, or been given it by a shady promoter, or even seen the box fall out of the pocket of a suspicious-looking man in a trenchcoat, then he'd have felt more able to do something about it, whether in the general line of starting a fuel-powder company or of going to the F.B.I. But just having the stuff drop into his hands from the sky, so to speak, as if in a crazy dream, and for that same reason not feeling able to talk about it and assure himself he wasn't going crazy... oh, it is rough when you can't share things, really rough; not being able to share depressing news corrodes the spirit, but not being able to share exciting news can sometimes be even more corroding. Maybe, he told himself, he could figure out someone to tell. But who? And how? His mind shied away from the problem, rather decisively. " box that night, the original sodium bicarbonate lettering had returned with all its humdrum paragraphs. Not one word about exhaust velocities. From that moment, the fuelpowder became a trial to Ernie rather than a secret glory. He'd wake in the middle of the night doubting that he had ever really read the mind-dizzying lettering, ever really tested the stuff -- perhaps he'd bring from sleep the ness and excitement of Saturday morning he'd put the water in some other car's gas tank, perhaps Mr. Jones's. He could usually argue such ideas away, but they kept coming back. And yet he did no more bathroom testing. Of course the car still ran. He even fueled it once again with the garden hose, sniffing the nozzle to make sure it hadn't somehow got connected to the basement furnace oil-tank. He picked three o'clock in the morning for the act, but nevertheless as he was returning indoors he heard a window in Mr. Jones's house slam loudly. It unsettled him. Coming home the next day, he caught his sister and Mr. Jones consulting about something on the latter's doorsteps, which unsettled him further. He couldn't decide on a safe place to keep the box and took to carrying it around with him day and night. Bill spotted it once down at the office and by an unhappy coincidence needed some bicarb just then for a troubled stomach. Ernie explained on the spur of the moment that he was using the box to carry plaster of Paris, which involved him in further lies that he felt were quite unconvincing as well as making him appear decidedly eccentric, even butter-brained. Bill took to calling him "the sculptor." Meanwhile, besides the problem of the white powder, Ernie was having other unsettling experiences, stemming (though of course he didn't know that) from the other Gifts -- and not just the Big Gift of Page-at-a-Glance Reading, though that still returned from time to time to shock his consciousness and send him hurrying for a few quick shots. commuter, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems a bit too much for comfort and so used the fast electric train to carry him five times a week to the heart of the city. During those brief, swift, crowded trips Ernie, generally looking steadily out the window at the brown buildings and black stanchions whipping past, enjoyed a kind of anonymity and privacy more refreshing to his spirit than he realized. But now all that had been suddenly changed. People had started to talk to him; total strangers struck up conversations almost every morning and afternoon. Ernie couldn't figure out the reason and wasn't at all sure he liked it -- except for Vivian. She was the sort of girl Ernie dreamed about, improperly. Tall, blonde and knowing, excitedly curved but armored in a black suit, friendly and funny but given to making almost cruelly deflating remarks, as if the neatly furled short umbrella dangling from her wrist might better be a black dog whip. She worked in an office too, a fancier one than Ernie's, as he found out from their morning conversations. He hadn't got to the point of asking her to lunch, but he was prodding himself. Why such a girl should ever have asked him for a match in the first place and then put up with his clumsy babblings on subsequent mornings was a mystery to him. He finally asked her about it in what he hoped was a joking way, though she seemed to know a lot more about joking than he did. "Don't you know?" she countered. "I mean what makes you attractive to people?" "Me attractive? No." "Well, I'll tell you then, Ernie, and I've got to admit it's something quite out of the ordinary. I've never noticed it in anyone else. Ernie, I'm sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it's clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones -- not in style now -- the hero is described as tall, manly, broadshouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there's one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. Flashing eyes." "Flashing eyes? Me?" She nodded solemnly. He thought her long straight lips trembled on the verge of a grin, but he couldn't be sure. "How do you mean, flashing eyes?" he protested. "How can eyes flash, except by reflecting light? In that case, I guess they'd seem to 'flash' more if a person opened them wide but kept blinking them a lot. Is that what I do?" "No, Ernie, though you're doing it now," she told him, shaking her head. "No, Ernie, your eyes just give a tiny flash of their own about every five seconds, like a lighthouse, but barely, barely bright enough for another person to notice. It makes you irresistible. Of course I've never seen you in the dark; maybe they wouldn't flash in the dark." "You're joking." Vivian frowned a little at that remark, as if she were puzzled herself. "Well, maybe I am and maybe I'm not," she said. "In any case, don't get conceited about your Flashing Eyes, because I'm sure you'll never know how to take advantage of them." When he parted from her downtown, pausing a moment to watch her walk away with feline majesty, he muttered "Flashing Eyes!" with a shrug of the shoulders and a skeptical growl. Just the same, he ducked his head as he moved off and he pulled the brim of his hat down sharply. A fternoons, hurtling home in the five o'clock rush, it was not Vivian but Verna who frequently occupied the seat beside him, taking up rather more space in it than the Panther Princess. Verna was another of his newly acquired and not altogether welcome conversation-pals, along with Jacob and Herman the health-food manufacturer, inventor of Soybean Mush -- conquests of his Flashing Eyes or whatever it was. Verna was stocky, pasty-faced, voluble (with him), coy, and had bad breath -- he could see the tiny triangles of pale food between her incisors and canines whenever her conversations became particularly vehement and confidential, which was often. She always had a stack of books hugged to her stomach. She worked in a fur-storage vault, she said, and could snatch quite a bit of time for reading -- rather heavy reading, it seemed. It wasn't very long before Verna was head-over-heels (fearful picture!) infatuated with him. Somehow his friendliness had touched a hidden spring in this ugly, friendless, clumsy girl and for once she had lost her fear of the world's ridicule and opened her hulking heart to another human being. It was touching but rather overpowering, especially since she always opened her mouth too. He learned a great deal about herself, her invalid father, Elizabethan and Restoration poetry, paleontology, an organization known as the Working Girls' Front, Mr. Abrusian, and a brassy Miss Minkin who sounded like a fiendish caricature of Vivian. He felt that deliberately avoiding Verna would be a dirtier trick than he liked to think himself capable of. Nevertheless there were times when he seriously wished he'd never acquired whatever power it was -- except for Vivian, of course. What the devil, he asked himself for the nth time, could that power be? That night, in the bathroom, the question came back to him and he impulsively switched off the light and looked into the mirror. He gasped and seemed on the point of shrieking out something, but he only grasped the washbowl more tightly and stared into the mirror more intently. After about a minute, he tugged on the light again. He was pale. He had convinced himself of the actual existence of the phenomenon that was in reality the third of the Little Gifts: Flashing Eyes. He couldn't notice anything in the light, but in the dark his eyes gave off a faint blue flash about every five seconds, just as Vivian had said, lighting up his cheeks and eyebrows like some comicbook vampire! It might be attractive by day, when it just registered as an impalpable hint, but it was damn sinister in the dark! It wasn't much, but it was there -- unless the flashes were inside his head and he was projecting them... blue... something called the Purkinje effect?... but then Vivian had actually seen... oh, damn!  around, a little like a trapped animal. Why did it always have to happen in the bathroom, he asked himself -- the bicarb, the flame, the blade (if that counted), and now this? Could there be something wrong about the bathroom, something either in the room itself or in his childhood associations? But neither the bathroom walls nor his minutely searched memory returned an answer. It was dark in the hall outside and he almost bumped into his sister. He recoiled, stared at her a moment, then threw his hand over his eyes, darted into his bedroom and shut the door. "Is there something wrong, Ernie?" she called after him. "Wrong?" The door muffled his voice. "How do you mean?" "I mean about your eyes." "My eyes?" It was almost a scream. "What about my eyes?" "Don't shout, Ernie. I mean are they painful?" "Painful? Why should they be painful?" "I really don't know, Ernie." She was being very patient and calm. "I mean did you notice anything about them?" He was trying to be the same without much success. "Just that you put your hand up to them as if they hurt." "Oh." Great relief. "Yes, they do smart a little. I guess I've been using them too much. I'm putting some eye-drops in them now." "Can I help you, Ernie? And shouldn't you see an opto... ocu... optha... I mean an eye doctor?" Ernie answered "No" to both those questions, but of course it took a lot more lying and improvising and general smoothing out before his sister would even pretend to be satisfied and stop her general nagging for the evening. She was getting uncomfortably cagy and curious lately, addicted to asking such questions out of a blue sky as: "Ernie, when we were visiting Uncle Fabius, did you actually believe that you went out and bought gas?" That one momentarily brought Ernie's stammer back, something which hadn't troubled him for years. And when she wasn't asking questions, her quiet studying of him for long minutes was even more upsetting.L ' the electric train, Ernie made a purchase at the drugstore. When he sat down beside Vivian, she took one look at him and gave a very deliberate-sounding hollow laugh. "Black glasses!" she said. "I tell him he's attractive because he has Flashing Eyes and within two days he's wearing black glasses. I suppose I should have guessed it." "But my eyes hurt," Ernie protested. "Sensitive to sunlight, I think." He wished he could explain to her that he'd bought the glasses not only in case he got caught out at night, but also to convince his sister he hadn't been lying about sore eyes. He hadn't intended to wear them by day and hardly knew why he'd put them on before joining Vivian. "Spare me your rationalizations," she said. "Your motives are clear to me, Ernie, and they happen to be very commonplace." She leaned toward him and her voice, little more than a whisper, took on an unexpectedly gloomy, "See these people all around us, Ernie? They're suicides, every one of them. Day by day, in every People love them, admire them, and it only makes them uneasy. They have abilities and charms by the bushel -- yes, they do, even that man with the wen on his neck -- and they only try to hide them. The spotlight turns their way and they goof. They think they're running away from failure, but actually they're running away from success." Ernie looked at them, he couldn't help it, her voice made him, and the ability of Page-at-aGlance Reading chose that moment to come back to him, only applied to faces instead of letters, and there seemed to be another ability along with it, unclear as yet but frightening. He felt like a very old detective scanning the lineup for the thousandth time. The black glasses didn't interfere a bit -- the dozens of faces in this speeding electric car were suddenly as familiar as the court cards in a deck -- and he had the feeling that, like a bunch of pink pasteboards, they were about to be hurled in his face. My God, he asked himself, flinching, how could you go on living with so many faces so close to you, so completely known? -- each street you turned into, each store you entered, each gathering you joined, another deluge of unique features. Ugly, pretty, strong, weak -- those words didn't mean anything any more in this drenching of individuality he was getting, and that showed no signs of stopping. So he hardly heard Vivian saying, "And it's true of you, Ernie -- in spades, for your black glasses," and he hardly remembered parting from her, and when he found himself alone he did something unprecedented for him at that time of day -- he went to a bar and drank two double whiskies. '  "HE drinks brought the downtown landscape back to normal and stopped the faces printing themselves on his mind, but they left him very disturbed, and the suspiciousness with which he was treated at the office didn't improve that, and Ernie began to wish for ordinariness and commonplaceness in himself more than anything in the whole world. If only, he silently implored, there were some way of junking everything that had happened to him in the past few weeks -- except maybe Vivian. Verna on the train home positively terrified him. She was unusually talkative and engulfing this evening and he thought that if the faces-forever feeling came to him just as she was baring her foodtriangles and all, he wouldn't be able to stand it. Somehow, it didn't Yet the very intensity of his distaste frightened him. Not for the first time, the word "insanity" appeared in his mind, pulsing in pale yellowish-green. Half a block from home, passing his parked car (with an unconscious little veer of avoidance), he spotted three figures in close conference in front of his house: his sister, a man in dark blue -- yes, Mr. Jones, and... a man in a white coat. Almost before he knew it, he was in his car and driving away. He truly didn't know what he was going to do, only that he was going to do it, and found a trivial interest in trying to guess what it was going to be. Whatever it was, it was going to dim that yellowishgreen word, decrease its type-size, make him a little more able to face the crisis waiting him at home... or somewhere. He had a picture of himself getting on an airplane, another of renting a room in a slum, another of stopping the car on a lonely, treeless country road and getting out and looking up to the coldly glimmering Milky Way -- why? That last picture was the most vivid, and when he realized he had actually stopped his car, it was a moment before it would go away. Then he saw he was parked in front of a demolished old apartment building a few blocks from his home. Only yesterday he'd watched the last wall going down. Now, just across the littered sidewalk from him, the old cellar gaped, flimsily guarded in front by a makeshift rail and surrounded on the other three sides by great hillocks of battered bricks. Tomorrow probably (and in fact that was the way it happened) a bulldozer would tumble them forward, and brick-dust, leveling the lot.L ' ing to do. He unlatched the top over the windshield and pushed the button. Slowly the top folded back over his head, showing the smoke-dark sky, almost night. He hitched up a little in the seat, reached inside his coat, pulled out the blue box he always carried and pitched it into the dark pit across the sidewalk. He was driving away almost before it landed. Yet through the hum of the motor he thought he heard something call faintly, "Good-by." The material of the filled-in cellar stayed fairly dry for many years and the atom-bombing, when it finally came, created a partial surface-seal of fused stone over that area. However, the bicarb box fell apart in time; water reached it in little seepings and was accumulated as a non-evaporating fueland-oxydizer mix. The amount of this strange fluid grew and grew, now-blind section of the city's old sewer system. Many tens of thousands of years after that, the buried pool was sensed by the fuel-finders of a spaceship from up Polaris way, which had made an emergency landing on the ruined planet. A well was drilled and the mix pumped up and the centipedal Polarians, scuttling about the bleak landscape, had a fine time trying to explain how such a sophisticated fluid should occur in a seeming state of nature. However, they were grateful to the Cosmic AllFather. Long before that, Ernie had arrived home in something of a daze. He told himself that he had cast off the most tangible element of his "insanity," but he didn't feel any the better for it. In fact, he felt distinctly apathetic when his sister confronted him and only with an effort did he manage to brace himself for the trial he knew she had in store for him. "Ernie," she said hesitatingly, "I've come to a decision about something -- about a change in our arrangements here, to tell you the truth -- and I've gone ahead with it without consulting you. I do hope you won't mind." "No," he said heavily, "I guess I won't mind." "I'm doing it partly on Mr. Jones's advice," she added slowly. "As a matter of fact he suggested it." Ernie nodded. "Yes, I've noticed the two of you conferring together." "You have? Then maybe you know what I'm talking about." "Oh, yes." Ernie nodded again and smiled grimly. "The man in white?" She laughed. "Exactly, the man in white. For a long time, I've thought it was just too much bother for either of us to carry the milk home, and the eggs and my yogurt too. So I decided to have the milkman that Mr. Jones uses make deliveries. Mr. Jones brought him over half an hour ago and it's all arranged. Four quarts a week, one dozen eggs, and yogurt Tuesdays and Fridays." HP HE Invisible Being and his Coadjutor, backtracking for a checkup, summarized the situation. The latter said, "So he's already thrown away the Everlasting Cosmetic Knife and the Water Splitter; he seems to be trying to reject the third Little Gift and the first Big One, while he still isn't even conscious of the other two Gifts." "Cheer up," said the Invisible Being. "It's his life and he's doing what he thinks best." "Yes," the Coadjutor said, "but he doesn't know he's making these decisions for his race as well as himself. Sometimes I think Galaxy Center makes it too hard for chaps like him. For instance, that trick of having the images on the box fade back to the old ones." "Nonsense! We have to take all reasonable precautions that our activities remain secret He knew that the powder worked. He should have had faith." "Sometimes it takes a lot of faith." "You're right it does." The Invisible Being smiled his Cheshire smile. "You feel a lot for these test subjects, don't you? That's fine, but you've got' to remember you can't accept the Gifts for them; that's one thing they have to do themselves, however long they take about it. Which reminds me, I think we ought to set up a recorder here to report the final outcome of the test to Galaxy Center." "Good idea." "And cheer up, I say. This test isn't over yet and our featherless biped isn't necessarily licked. If he thinks to link up the third Little Gift with the two Big Ones, he has a pretty sweet setup for making psychic progress -- and his race will be Galactic Citizens in a jiffy." "You're right." "Moreover, it stands to reason he's soon going to become aware of the Great Gift, and that generally gives a person a jolt and makes him think seriously about other things." "True enough -- though I still have the feeling you intend some sardonic trick in conjunction with the Great Gift. Are you sure you're not planning to leave some other setup here along with the recorder? I notice you've got a spare Juxtaposer in the ship and it bothers me." "That, dear Coadjutor, is my business. Whatever I do, it won't interfere in any way with the fairness of the tests." "Sometimes I think the tests are too fair," the Coadjutor observed. "I'd like to be able to ease them up a bit in special cases." "Confidentially, my friend, so would I." r I ' HE Great Gift announced itself to Ernie next morning at #:# sharp, when the Special slowed to forty miles an hour to swing past the platform on which he was waiting for the Express. One moment he was standing morning-weary on the thick wooden planks, looking down through the quarter-inch gaps between them at the cinders five feet below, vaguely conscious of a woman's white-polka-dotted black skirt on one side of his field of vision and a man's brown shoes and briefcase to the other. Next moment he was in a small cab under which steel rails were vanishing at an alarming speed, and way ahead he could just make out the platform on which he was standing, and something was hurting his head and he was slumping forward and everything was darkening and the cab was leaping forward more swiftly still. The third moment he was back on the platform, running furiously to get off it He didn't care who yelled at him or whom he bumped, so long as it didn't slow him down. The people were just blurs anyway and soon he was beyond them. He took in two strides the short flight of wooden  steps leading down off the platform proper and spurted the last sixty feet to the stairs leading down to street level. There he stumbled, recovered himself, and chanced a hasty backward look. There was a tall man at his heels, hugging a briefcase and panting hard. Then, beyond the tall man, he saw the platform rear up people against the bright gray morning sky. There was a cosmic crunch and the battered Special, still coming strong, burst through the upreared platform in a blossoming broken-matchstick crown of planks and beams -- and big blue sparks where a writhing power wire, snagged by the uprearing platform, was grounding against the first car. Ernie ducked his head and plunged down the steps ahead. (That was how I came to meet Ernie Meeker. I was the tall man. As you can imagine, it's quite strange to be standing in a huddle of fresh-washed morning commuters and have the one beside you close his eyes and slump a little and then take off like a bat out of hell -- without a word spoken or a thing happened to explain it. I started to laugh, but then I got the funniest feeling of curiosity and terror and I took off after him. It saved my life. (Afterward, Ernie and I went back to help with the ghastliness, but pretty soon there were more than enough trainmen, firemen, police, and what not, and we got chased off. We had a couple of drinks together and met a few times after and that's how I got some of this story. But my chief sources of information I am not permitted to disclose.) A S the Invisible Being had predieted, Ernie's first brush with the Great Gift gave him a considerable jolt, though he didn't suspect at first that it was a permanent gift. He analyzed what had happened, quite reasonably, I believe, as a case of second sight. Somehow his mind had been projected into the brain of the motorman of the Special just at the moment the latter had his stroke (the final official explanation too) and blindly put on more speed instead of reducing it for the approaching curve and station. His second sight saved his life by getting him off the platform before the Special jumped the tracks and ploughed through it. It certainly gave a jolt to Ernie's habit patterns, as it temporarily did of a great many other people. He started driving his car to work, for one thing, and he took to drinking regularly in the evenings, though not excessively as yet. He also had the feeling, which he did not try to analyze, that his miraculous escape marked the end of the "strange weeks" in his life, when he'd had such odd illusions or been the victim of such odd circumstances; and, true enough, that first week or so there were no reexperiences. TUT jolts have their infallible - Law of Diminishing Effects. After a few days, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems as nervous and wearisome as ever and he grew envious of the snug commuters meditating luxuriously in their electric coaches. Come the first morning of the third week and he was standing on the rebuilt platform, studying the new planks, ties and rails with a pleasantly morbid interest. Vivian was not in her accustomed seat nor on the train, as far as he could tell, which did not surprise him, though it disappointed him sharply; the Panther Princess had a stronger hold on his feelings, or at least on his imagination, than he'd realized. But Verna was on the train home all right; in fact, she gave a small whoop of pleasure when she spotted him. And he had barely sat down beside her when who should come prowling smoothly along but Vivian in a charcoal version of her tailored black armor. Ernie jumped up and blurted out introductions. Vivian accepted his seat with a certain deliberateness and with a smile that seemed to Ernie to say, "So I'm his morning light-badinage girl, but this is the girl Mr. Meeker goes home with. It's another instance of 'black-glasses' behavior, don't you think? He puts her on whenever he gets afraid he's getting atractive." ' I ' HE two women started to chat easily enough, however, and shortly Ernie got over his confusion and, smiling down at them from where he swayed in his aisle with his hand lightly touching the back of the seat ahead, was even thinking quite smugly that here in one seat, by gosh, were the woman he wanted and the woman who wanted him. Very interesting to be the man in the middle. Just at that moment, the power came back to him that made everything feverishly real, expanding his center of attention to his visual horizons, and this time it was only a prelude, for a second gateway opened behind the first -- a window into all human hearts and minds, the power of human insight fantastically sharpened and enlarged. He could "read minds," or at least he knew the motives -- the core of values and consciousness -- of any person he cared to look at Most especially, he knew the motives of Verna and Vivian almost as if he were them. The big thing about Vivian was her fear -- no, her conviction, that she wasn't attractive. Every glance her way knocked a hole in the armor of artificial attractiveness she built around herself, and all the hours she devoted to perfecting it, even the desperate worship she lavished on her body, were all utterly lost. A simple relationship with another human being was unthinkable; her armor got in the way and under her armor she knew she was worthless. A man was sometimes attracted to her armor -- never to herself! -- but as soon as he started to scrutinize it, it began to tarnish and crumple. She hoped that other people, men especially, had a trace of her own weaknesses, and she sniped away at them constantly to get under the armor to find out. Ernie was one in a long series of such men. She was actually in love with him, but only as one loves a dream, not the really Ernie at all. Physically he was disgusting to her, like most men.  absolute confidence that she was sufficiently attractive for all practical purposes. She wasn't in love with Ernie at all. She wanted to make an intellectual conquest of him, add him to her private Brain Trust, her cultured entourage that won Mr. Abrusian's seldom-tendered admiration and broke Miss Minkin's heart, and finally get Ernie to join the Working Boys' Front. He was one of her projects. If it became tactically necessary during her campaign, she knew that Ernie would be only too happy to jump in bed with her, food-triangles and all. Now in other circumstances (who really knows?), Ernie might have found the courage to accept Vivian and Verna as they really were and work on from there, ruthlessly discarding his false pictures of them -- and of himself. He might conceivably have found the strength to accept all people not as shadowy projections of himself, fabricated targets of his desires and aversions, puppets in his private chess games and circuses, but as complete persons with inexhaustible surprises and contradictions, each a microcosm, a universe-in-little with his or her own earth and stars, spaceflight and crawling, heaven and hell. But under the present circumstances, Ernie was confused. His knowledge of the real Vivian spoiled completely the titillating picture of the Panther Princess, who might submit to him contemptuously in the end -- he needed that sex idol more than he needed truth. As for Verna, her stalwart self-reliance and her accurate appraisal of his own motives and possible future behavior were both unbearably humiliating to him. And the delight of really knowing people was completely outweighed, in his tired spirit, by the thought of the lifetime of work that would be involved in adjusting himself to this new knowledge. It was so much more comfortable to work with stereotypes. The Express was slowing for his station. Both girls were looking at him puzzledly. "Good-by, Verna. Good-by, Vivian," he said in a set sort of voice. "This is where I get off." He moved stiffly toward the door. They watched him go, and turned to each other with a frown. ginning of Ernie's serious drinking. He never saw either of the Vgirls again. He took his car or the bus to work; then, for a short period, he took taxicabs, then he lost his job and was working in another part of the city. He became mixed up with a number of other women and crowds, but they are not part of this or any story. Among other things, his drinking eventually completely confused his memories of abnormal personal powers with his entirely normal illusions of alcoholic ones. And it also seemed to be blotting out the former. Once, at a party, he bet twenty dollars that his eyes glowed in the dark. Next morning he was relieved to discover, after making several anxious phone calls, that he'd lost his bet. When he finally pulled out of it, some five years later, because of a growing aversion to liquor that he only understood later, the two Big Gifts of Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were gone forever. The Great Gift had a more durable lodgment in him. From his alcoholic years, he brought hazy memories of accidents avoided because of sudden wrongended visions of onrushing cars, alley rollings missed because he'd seen himself reeling along a block away through the eyes of lounging hoodlums. Now, sober again, he had a clear confirmation of it when he left a banquet on a trumpedup excuse because of a disturbing vision of inexplicable rodlike shapes -- and read the next day that a hundred of the guests, of whom four finally died, had come down with bacterial food poisoning. Another time, hiking in dry woods, he'd smelled smoke that his companions couldn't -- and persuaded them to turn back, avoiding a disastrous flash fire that broke out soon afterward. He had to admit to himself that he certainly seemed to have the gift of second sight, warning him against threats to his life. "All right," he told himself, "so forget it. Gifts are upsetting. Even as a kid, you sweated more about your birthday presents than you ever got fun out of them." Our story has already jumped five years; now it must jump twenty. Ernie is living with his sister again; while he was drinking, they pulled apart, and now they've once more pulled together. They're having dinner, have arrived at dessert, a big piece of chocolate cake each with satiny thick creamy frosting Ernie looks at his piece -- and sees himself climbing stairs and clutching at his heart. He thinks of warning his sister, but she's already halfway through her piece. Then she goes on and eats Ernie's. poisoning, she only got fat, but the incident of the chocolate cake was for Ernie the beginning of a series of peculiar food revulsions and diet experiments that eventually made Ernie instead of his sister the family yogurt-fiend and a regular customer of his old acquaintance, Herman, the healthfood manufacturer. Herman had to admit that Ernie had cooked himself up a pretty good longevity diet for an amateur, though there were some items in it that made the old man shake his head -- and he always asserted that Ernie was passing up a good thing in Soybean Mush. Ernie got his diet tailored to fit his tastes and stuck to it. He had a strong suspicion of what had happened, though he tried not to think about it too often: that his gift of second sight had taken to warning him of the longer-range dangers to his existence; after all, chocolate cake can be as deadly as atomic bombs in the long run. More years passed. Friends and relatives began to remark quietly to each other that his sister was aging faster. Ernie, they had to admit, was a remarkably well-preserved old gent. Ironic, considering what a drunk he'd been and what strange junk he insisted on eating now. One day Ernie's self-styled health diet began to pall on him. It didn't revolt him; it merely left him unsatisfied, yet with no yearning for any particular food he could think of. He lived with this yearning for some weeks, meditating on it and trying to guess its nature. Finally he had an inspiradrugstore. The bent, silvery-haired man greeted him eagerly; somehow there was a special warmth about the friendships Ernie had made during the "strange weeks" (Verna and Vivian excepted) that put them in a different class from any other of his human relationships. "Anything in the place within reason." "I'll tell you, Bert. I'd like to go back in your dispensary -- you with me, if you want -- and just shop around." "That's a sort of screwy idea, Ernie. I couldn't sell you any narcotics or sleeping pills, of course -- well, maybe a few sleeping pills." "I wouldn't want any." "What's the idea, Ernie? Getting interested in chemistry in your old... You know, Ernie, you just don't look your years." "Secret of mine. Yes, in a way I've got interested in chemistry." "Won't talk, eh? I remember, when I first met you, I tagged you for an evening inventor. Well, come on back and shop around. Just don't ask me for elixer vitae, aurum potabile, or ground philosophers' stone." "Not unless I see 'em." say it was one of the most mystifying experiences of his life. For a good half a day, Ernie Meeker studied the rows of jars, cannisters and glass-stoppered bottles, sometimes lifting two down together and contemplating them, one in each hand, as if he could weigh the difference. Often he'd take out a stopper and sniff, and maybe, asking permission of Bert with a glance, take up a dab of some powder and taste it "You know that game," Bert would say, "where someone goes out of the room and you all decide on an object, or hide one, and he comes back and tries to find it by telepathy or muscle-reading or something? That was exactly the way Ernie was acting. Dog on a difficult scent." A couple of times, especially when the customers came in, Bert wanted to chase him out, except that Ernie was such a special friend and Bert was so darn curious about it all himself. In the end, Ernie made a good twenty purchases, including a mortar and pestle and two poisons for which Bert made him sign, though the amounts were less than a lethal dose. "Actually none of the chemicals he bought were very dangerous," Bert would say. "And none of them were terribly unusual. The thing about them was that, put together, they just didn't make sense -- as a medicine or anything else. Let me see, there was sulphur, bismuth, a bit of mercury, one of the sulfa drugs, a tiny packet of auric chloride, and... I had 'em all on a list once, but I've lost it." After that, Ernie always mixed a little grayish paste in his cup of yogurt at suppertime. Ernie stopped aging altogether. lowered past the margins of green matting into the ground, Ernie shook hands with the minisman Schover to their car and told them he thought he'd better drive home with some relatives who'd turned up. Actually he just wanted to stay behind a while. It was a beautiful blue-and-white summer day; the tidy suburban cemetery had caught his fancy, and now he felt like a quiet stroll. Ernie followed his little impulses these days. As he sometimes said, "I figure I've got plenty of time. I just don't feel the pressure like I used to." The last car chugged away. Ernie stretched and started to stroll, slowly, but not like an old man, now that he was alone. His hair had grown whiter in the last few years and his face a little wrinkled, but that was due to the very judicious use of silvering and theatrical liner -- people's comments about his youthfulness had gotten wearisome and would, he knew, eventually become suspicious. Keeping himself oriented by a white tower at the cemetery gate, he arrived at an area that had no graves as yet, no trees either, just lawn. He made his way to the center of it, where there was a gently swelling hummock, and sat down in the warm crinkly grass, resting his back against the slope. The sky was lovely, enough clouds to be interesting, but a great oval of pure blue just overhead -- a pearshaped gateway to space. He felt no grief at his sister's death, only the desire to think a bit, have a quiet look at his past and another at the great future. Alone like this, he dared to face his fate for a moment and admit to himself that, all wishful thinking aside, it really began to look as if he were going to live forever, or at least for a very long time. Live forever! That was a phrase to give you a chill, he told himself. And what to do, he asked himself, with all that time? Back in the "strange weeks," he'd have had little trouble in answering that question -- if only he'd known then what he did now and realized what was being offered him. For, during his sober decades, Ernie had gradually come to a shrewdly accurate estimate of what had happened to him then. He thought of it in terms of having been offered six Gifts and turned down five of them. and armed with the five rejected Gifts (Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were the only ones that counted, though), he could easily have said, "Live forever by all means! Increase your knowledge and understanding until your mind bursts or is transfigured. Plunge forever into the unending variety of the Cosmos. Open yourself to everything." But now, equipped to travel only as a snail... Still, even snails get somewhere. With forever to work with, even four-words-at-a-glance gets you through many, many books. Patient love and dispassionate thought give you human insight in the end, can finally open the tightest shutter on the darkest human heart. But that would take so very long and Ernie felt tired. Not old, just tired, tired. Best simply to watch the soft clouds -- the pear-shaped gateway had become almost circular. To do anything but drift through life, a stereotype among stereotypes, was simply... too... much... work... At that very moment, as if his thought had summoned the experience into being, another scene filmed over the blue sky and white clouds above him. The sudden humming in his ears -- a kind of "audible silence" -- informed him that his second sight was at work, warning him of some deadly danger. But this was a more gentle instance of it, for not all his consciousness jumped somewhere else. All through the experience, he was still aware of himself leaning against the grassy hummock, of the restful melancholy of the scene around him, and of the sky overhead. The second scene only superimposed itself on the first. He was poised many hundreds of miles above the Earth, a ghostErnie immune to the airlessness and the Sun's untempered beams. At his back was black night filled with stars. Below him stretched the granulated dry brown of Earth's surface, tinged here and there with green, clumped with white cloud, and everywhere faintly hazed with blue. T # P there in space with him, right at his elbow, so close that he could reach out and touch it, was a tiny silver cylinder about as big as a hazelnut, domed at one end, reflecting sunlight from one point in a way that would have been blinding enough except that Ernie's ghost eyes were immune to brightness. As he reached out to examine it, the thing darted away from him as if at some imperious summons. like a bit of iron jumping through a magnetic field. But in spite of its enormous acceleration, Ernie's ghost was able to follow it in its downward plunge. It kept just ahead of his outstretched fingertips. The brown granules that were Earth's surface grew in size. The tiny metal cylinder began to glow with more than reflected sunlight. It turned red, orange, yellow and then blazing white as atmospheric friction transformed it into a meteor. Ernie's ghost, immune to friction and incandescence alike, followed it as it dove toward its target -- for even though Ernie had never heard of a Juxtaposer and how it brought objects together, he had the feeling, from the dizzy speed of the meteor's plunge, that it yearned for something. He knew most meteors vaporized or exploded, but this did not, even when Earth's brown surface grew rivers and roads. Suddenly there was a cloudbank ahead; then, in the white, there appeared an almost circular hole toward the very center of which the meteorite plunged. Everything was happening very fast now, but his ghost senses were able to keep pace. As they plunged through the cloud-ring and the green landscape below grew explosively, he saw the white tower, the trees, the curving drives, and the clearing which was now the target. There was still time to escape. Lying on the warm grass, with death lancing down from the sky at miles a second, he had merely to roll over. But it was simply... too... much... work... corder sped toward Galaxy Center a message which ended, "Six Gifts tendered, all finally refused. I will now sign off and await pickup with one Juxtaposer." A little later, a Receiver in Galaxy Center passed the message to a Central Recorder, which filed it in the Starswarm # section with this addition: "Spiritual immaturity of Terran bipeds indicated. Advise against enlightenment and admission to Galactic citizenship. Test subject humanely released." under Ernie's shattered head two days later found the bright bullet, cold now, of course, and untarnished. "Looks like silver!" one cop said, scratching his head. "Haven't I heard somewhere that the Mafia use silver bullets? So bright, though." Lieutenant Padilla, later on, lifting the bullet in his forceps to re-examine it for rifling marks, had the same thought about its brightness. By now, however, he knew it was not silver. (What alloy was never satisfactorily determined. Actually it was made of the same substance as the Everlasting Razor Blade.) This time, although he still found no rifling marks, a tiny dull stretch on the flat end of the cylinder caught his attention. He took up a magnifier and examined it carefully. A moment later, he put down the magnifier, snatched up the pocketbook found on the dead man and rechecked some cards in it The bullet dropped from the forceps, rolled a few inches. The lieutenant sat back in his chair, breathing a little hard. "This is one for the books, all right!" he told himself. "I've heard a lot of people, soldiers especially, talk about such bullets, but I never expected to see one!" For under the magnifying glass, finely engraved in very tiny letters, he had read the words : aajazine Is your collection of CtlctXXj complete? If not, here is your chance to fill in missing copies. are available from May, #, on. Inventories are running low. Don't miss your chance to complete your collection. For  # #I Hudon Stre#t  Now York #, N. Y. or #c each Enclose check, osh er money ordei We pay postage Name Address City State # Star Shelf tantine Books, N. Y. # son's successful Girls from Planet Five with this collection of ten assorted short stories. The yarns are of varying length and likewise of varying quality. The title story, evidently written for the collection in the whacky mood of Girls, is the account of the attempted invasion of Earth by super-computers. Only the most cockeyed Multivac conceivable sits between them and conquest. "The Hoaxters" and "The Inhabited" you've seen in this magazine. "Lonely Road" is a mood piece of exceptional impact. The remaining tales taper off, but not too far, from these quite lofty high points. Lissner. G. P. Putnam's Sons, N.Y., # and most books are skimmable. Crafty Lissner, realizing this literary fact of life, has therefore studded almost every page with attention rivets. It is easy to see why it was received with rave reviews by the European press and why German, Italian, French and Dutch editions have been best sellers. The range is enormous: each region of the world worthy of note gets its due. Lissner amazes in his ability to telescope living, human detail into limited space, and he is at his best in dealing with the most enigmatic of ancient civilizations: Crete, Mohenjo-Daro, Etruria, Tiahuanacu. This is a truly remarkable job that does just what the title claims to do. Rudolph Thiel. Alfred A. Knopf, N. Y., # Discovery of the Universe," is a beautifully organized work. It takes up where last month's Theories of the Universe by Munitz left off. But, where that work concerned itself solely with Cosmology on the grand scale, Thiel brings many of the individuals who formulated the grandiose theories into human focus. The reader is led through the developmental stages of astronomy -- the orientation tool and seasonal clock of antiquity, the dark age of astrology and the present age of reality. Skillfully written and translated, and with excellent reproductions of old engravings and modern illustrations, it is digestible for layman and professional alike. by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. Gnome Press, N. Y., # ' I I HE four years since magazine publication of this novel haven't resolved my doubts about the credibility of the authors' concept. The hero and "heroine" are a young but incredibly mature telepath and a super-servomechanism, nicknamed Bossy, with the extraordinary capability of reteaching and rebuilding humans whose thought processes haven't frozen into false patterns. Joe Carter, the telepath, and who built Bossy via unsuspected control by Carter, have had to go underground to avoid being seized by the oppressive opinion-control government. While in hiding, they reconstruct Bossy who, in turn, knocks out a gorgeous telepathic helpmeet for Joe from an old Skid Row slattern. Although a passably workmanlike job, loose ends outnumber neat knits in this yarn. Loren Eisely. Random House, N.Y., # head at the U. of Penn., is that rare bird, the thoroughgoing technician blessed with superior imagination. Accordingly, his nonfiction journey into time is a wonderful blend of erudition and whimsy. For example, the opening chapter describes his descent into an eroded slit and his confrontation with an ancient mammalian skull. "The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?" "I have long been an admirer of the octopus but I have always felt it to be just as well for us that they never came ashore, but -- there are things down there that are still coming ashore." "The profound shock of the leap from animal to human status is echoing still in the depths of our subconscious." These quotes barely illustrate the delight of this admixture of scientific lore and pure fantasy. An anthropological gotta, unreservedly recommended. World Publishing Co., Cleveland, # kF all the sciences, anthropology ultimately is the basic. Who and what are we? Why and how are we? Answer these questions and the divine puzzle falls into place. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against our solving these problems. Additionally, there is violent disagreement among anthropologists. Montagu holds that a jump of # cc cranial capacity is "inconceivable." Therefore, the australopithecines, apelike men of South Africa, are very low in the chain of humanity. Loren Eisely believes that Ice Age chronology requires drastic revision and that the "Million Years" are in truth closer to three hundred thousand but, more important, that cranial capacity suddenly expanded, that modem man is a very recent product. Montagu's ever-recurrent theme is that "human beings can learn to do the things that men have anywhere done." In his study of past and present cultures, he finds universal similarities and believes that mankind is moving toward unity without uniformity. Sprague de Camp. Avalon Books, N.Y. # T? OR many years, I have been a de Camp follower. While not quite making me an official deserter from his ranks, the above opus does succeed in removing some of the gilt from an idol. stranded on the astral plane during an experiment in sorcery by an unwittingly summoned demon. The astral level is crammed with idealized versions of his work-a-day friends. He himself is a French cavalier in a world of knights, emperors, western heroes and a horde of Aryan Wotans. He outwits them all, of course, few humorous encounters. But de Camp has done better in the past with less. R. Taton. Philosophical Library, N.Y., # sophical was John Rowland's study of the limitations of the scientific method. The present work, though obviously not designed for the purpose, has restored my faith in said method. Part One lists Mathematics, the Theoretical Sciences and Observational and Experimental Sciences as realms of discovery. Part Two contrasts systematic discovery, chance, error and flashes of thought as factors. Part Three covers various aspects of discoveries. The book is well documented with personal notations by famed scientists that give a considerable insight into the creative workings of the mind of genius. feld. Harcourt, Brace, N. Y., # uncommon book. A visitor from space, a pretty young girl, has fallen into a Bavarian forest from her father's flying saucer. Unable to land, he cautions her to return to the clearing in the woods the following night. She is found by a group of youngsters and their efforts to protect her make the story. They must adopt frantic measures to keep her from the hands of the adults who don't believe her origin and want to put her away. All this is not unusual, but Winterfeld's depiction of both young and adult thoughtlessness and cruelty certainly is. Also, his ET is # years old and wears a necklace of huge diamond beads. She is not a case of arrested development, though the town constable would like to make it so. Exciting enough and different enough to satisfy jaded juvenile tastes.      They knew there was an answer somewhere... now all they had to do was find the questionl T HE car came, finally, to a shuddering halt, slewed violently across the road. Fletcher gave himself a moment to recover. He had never run a man down before. But it needed no prior experience to know that if it happened at seventy-five -- and if the man stepped straight in front of your headlights -- what was left of the victim was beyond urgency. He backed the car to the side of the road and got out on trembling legs. He peered back along the highway. The moon was up, but the scrawling skid marks were still as black where they stemmed from the shadows of night a hundred yards away. The sight snapped into focus the reality of what had just happened. Fletcher broke into a run, retracing the black lines, the darkness stumbling back before him. He stopped abruptly. The lines came to an end, luridly wide and black, where he had slammed on the brakes. And -- there was nothing else. No body, no trace of anything he had told himself to be prepared to find. No blood or tattered flesh, no mangled shoe horribly alone. He wondered if his car had carried the body along in front of it. He turned to go back before he realized that in that case he would surely have seen some trace on the road between. The thought came that he hadn't actually felt the impact. You probably didn't at that speed, he told himself, and peered into the tree-lined darkness of the roadside. The collision must have hurled the man clear. His eye caught a stir in the scrub then. Something moved into a patch of moonlight before it slithered behind the trunk of a big tree. Fora frantic moment, Fletcher tried to tell himself that he had been mistaken; the victim had somehow survived, dragged himself clear -- and that was what he had seen. But the explanation withered. He had seen it too clearly -- a snake, a big one. Pythonsize. Snakes that huge weren't native for several thousands of miles around. His defensive reaction was to forget it and resume his search for the victim's body. If a python had escaped from a local zoo, it wasn't his affair -- certainly not right now. But a stronger impulse guided his feet toward the tree. He was a psychiatrist. Either he had seen a snake or he was having traumatic delusions. He had to know which. He skirted the tree warily. "Good evening." A man stepped out from the tree's shadow. you?" he blurted inanely. "My name's Lewis," the stranger said. "I live in Sanderville, three miles on." "What are you doing here?" Fletcher's voice was shaky. He had killed a man -- and hadn't found a trace of him yet. He had seen a big snake in country where there weren't such things. And now, silently and unconcernedly, as if from his own front door, stepped this stranger. "Just an evening walk." The man half-smiled. "A habit of mine." He frowned, as slightly as he had smiled. "Why?" "Didn't you hear anything? I ran someone down in my car a minute ago." The man shrugged. "The main line's just beyond the woods. A freight train just went through." True enough, Fletcher could hear the noise of a train rumbling into the distance. "But didn't you see a -- " He stopped, suddenly alerted to the danger of appearing crazy. But this one could be nailed. He leaped behind the tree. Behind it was a clear tract of turf. No room to conceal anything, let alone a snake of the size he had seen... or thought he had seen. And the stranger obviously hadn't seen it, or he would surely have mentioned it. Then Fletcher must have imagined it. Strangely, the certainty didn't disturb him. Nobody needed to remind him the mind could do odd things as a result of shock. And he still had to find the body of his victim. He turned back to the stranger, who was looking at him curiously. "Help me, will you?" Fletcher asked. He went back to the highway. The stranger accompanied the roadside for yards around the scene of the accident, but without success. They straightened simultaneously"Are you sure there was an accident?" the stranger said. Fletcher looked at him coldly. "You can see the skid marks." The man nodded. "But that doesn't prove there was a victim. You can get things wrong. An unlit road, moonlight, tree shadows." "Maybe," Fletcher growled. But the startled image that had sprung up in the road had been no accidental pattern of moonlight and shade. That was one certainty, even if he couldn't find the body. "Anyway, I'm reporting the accident at Sanderville. I -- " He broke off as something registered. The stranger had said he lived at Sanderville, three miles on. Not back or up the road. On. That meant the stranger knew which way Fletcher had been traveling. Or did it? Was his disturbed brain putting unnecessary stress on an innocent enough phrase? Fletcher didn't care. stranger's eyes. "I'll want you to come along as witness." The next moment, he cursed himself. He should have merely offered a lift. The man looked indignant. "But I wasn't a witness. I told you I -- " "All the same -- " Fletcher took a grip on the other's arm -- "if you don't mind -- " The man squirmed in his grasp, which tightened warily. The stranger was not tall, but seemed wiry. Fletcher was bigger, though, and -- he felt -- stronger. But suddenly there wasn't a man in his grasp any more. The arm seemed to waver -- then, for a moment so brief that Fletcher couldn't be sure that it actually happened, melt into formlessness. Instantly there was another creature -- a stag, already poised for flight. Reason promptly abdicated. It was something much more primitive, fear, that hurled Fletcher onto the stag, grappling blindly with it. The shape became man again and lashed out at Fletcher. He half-turned his head. The blow hit his ear. It hurt, but didn't stun. His own right plunged into the other's solar plexus. The man's eyes popped foolishly as his breath stopped. Fletcher didn't give him a chance to change into any other shape. He slammed a cross to the jaw. Panting, Fletcher looked down at the senseless body. Somewhere an owl hooted, and Fletcher was aware of the craziness of what he was doing -- rtanding over an unconscious man, on guard against him changing his shape! But he -- it -- didn't. Whatever strange power this man had evidently didn't work when he was unconscious. What power was it? Hypnosis? Fletcher didn't know. He did know now that his own senses hadn't been playing him tricks. At least, not without outside influence. He bent down and slung the man over his shoulder. Getting back to the car, he bundled the body into the trunk and locked it. On his way to the driving seat, he took a belated look at the front of the car. There wasn't a mark on it. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then climbed in and drove off. And he drove straight through Sanderville. There was no reason to believe that the police were competent to deal with creatures that seemed able to change their shape at will. There was no reason to believe he was, either -- but he intended to try. r f' , HE stranger groaned and stirred on the couch. Fletcher, seated rather more distantly from him than if he had been a patient, craned forward. Eyes blinked open, stared blankly up at the lamp angled above, then moved to Fletcher. "You're safe here," Fletcher said quickly but softly. In a firmer tone, he added, "The door's locked and the windows are shuttered." The alarm in the stranger's eyes died to a smoldering resignation. He sat up, rubbing his jaw. "Where is this?" he asked finally. "The police?" "No, it's my office. I'm a psychiatrist. You gave me an almighty fright tonight, walking under my car the way you did -- apart from what happened afterward. I brought you here to hear your explanation." "You worked that one out then?" "Does it take much working out? I run a man down, can't find the body,, do see a snake, then don't see it, but find a man. When the man changes into a stag and back again, there's something going on. Something so irrational that it's not irrational to figure that the man was also the snake. That he changed shape to escape sudden death the way an ordinary man might duck. Right?" The man nodded dumbly. Fletcher waited for him to say something. When he didn't, he added levelly: "The question is -- what kind of man are you?" The man was sitting with shoulders bowed, his gaze downcast. Now he raised melancholy eyes to look straight into Fletcher's. "I don't know." Fletcher, returning his gaze, felt a twinge of sympathy -- and a conviction that the other was speaking the truth. "Do you mind if I try to help?" The man smiled bitterly. "I don't think anyone could. But you've got me backed into a corner." "Hell, I don't want you in a corner. It may take time and I can't keep you locked up here. You've got to be convinced of my good will, otherwise that power of yours might panic." "It might. Especially if it got suspicious of your motives. If, for instance, you tried to publicize my case." Fletcher laughed. "Would anyone believe it?" The other laughed, too, briefly, as if despite himself. "I guess not." He was suddenly dead serious. "If you knew what it was like to be... the way I am, you -- " "We're all odd in some respect," Fletcher murmured, then, seeing the look in the other's face, "I'm sorry. Stock response. You can trust me." "All right. I haven't been able to find the answer myself. But it's your risk." 'Til take that chance." Fletcher poised his pen. "Full name?" "John Lewis." The man smiled wryly. "Or Bill Smith or Fred Jones. I chose John Lewis." "I see. Will all the rest be made up, too?" much to make up. They don't ask many questions, the circles I've been moving in. On forms, I say I'm twenty-eight, born in Alaska -- that's far enough away to put people off checking." "Amnesia, then. But for the rest of this, let me have it straight. Just when and where did you find yourself without a name and a past?" "Up in Oregon. There was a big project going on up there, a new town being built. One of the men found me in the woods." "What kind of shape were you in? Damn, I mean -- " Lewis gave a flicker of a smile. "That's all right. To answer the question I don't believe you meant, I was this shape. And I was in fair condition. But I was pretty helpless. I couldn't even speak English." Fletcher's eyebrows rose. "When did that come back?" "It -- didn't come back." "You mean you learned it all over again?" "That's right. Only I don't think it was again." "How long ago was this?" "Not quite three years ago." "Hm-mm." Fletcher made a note, a single word, Intelligent. For the other had perfect command of the language now. "What happened then? How did you get by?" "It wasn't hard. All they wanted up there was a strong arm and a broad back. And there was an acute labor shortage. After a couple of years, I'd stacked up a good roll, so I came down here to find out about myself if I could." "You think you came from these parts, then?" "Nothing so easy. It was just that there weren't so many books up there. I had to read to find out the answer, if there was one. I read books on psychiatry, medicine, folklore, myth, the occult, heaven knows what else." He looked up at Fletcher, as the latter made two lines under the word Intelligent. "But I drew a blank." "Then your other -- ah -- talent had already shown itself by then." The other looked at him warily, so he added, "If yours had been an ordinary amnesia case, you would already have gone to see somebody like me, wouldn't you?" Lewis relaxed, suspicion yielding to a respect for Fletcher's understanding. "Yes, this talent, as you call it -- it first happened when I'd been on the job about six months. The iron-fighters botched setting a girder. They'd got one end bolted, and the other end came free. It's quite a sight to see a solid-steel flange bend like cardboard. The girder came swinging down, crashed through a platform and headed for me. "The next thing I clearly remember was finding myself in the woods nearby, trembling. I seemed to have fallen down, my head was so near the ground. But I was still standing on my feet -- all four of them. They were yellow, and I had a tail. I felt it thrashing as I looked out from cover at the confusion of the accident. I had changed into a mountain lion. Just like that. I realized I was safe -- and I suddenly changed back. I returned to the job. "Nobody had noticed. There had been too much going on. Three men had been injured. Someone did start to say that it was funny but he could have sworn he'd seen -- then he stopped and shook his head. "There was only one other time. I was swimming in a lake up there. I went out further than I should and got into difficulties. I changed into a fish." tion. "These changes have happened in an emergency, just like this evening. But have you ever tried to change?" "It doesn't work," Lewis said. "It seems to work only like a reflex." "As I thought." Fletcher pondered. "You said you've read folklore, myth, the occult. There are accounts there, of course, of men changing into other creatures." "I know. But not the way I change. Anyway, I don't feel bewitched, if that doesn't sound like a stupid thing to say." "No. Besides, if it were witchcraft, I wouldn't be qualified to help at all. So let's examine other possibilities. You've lived with this for three years. Do you have any theory at all?" Lewis framed his lips to speak, stopped, framed his lips again. Fletcher waited. Lewis seemed finally to make up his mind. "I think I came from another world." He looked at Fletcher almost defiantly, but Fletcher said only, "Yes?" "Yes. I believe that I crashed, that I lost not only my memory but my shape. Heaven knows what I was originally, but I must have been of some species that could change its shape at need, which would be an asset on the different worlds it visited. Does that make sense?" "More sense than anything I can think up on the spur of the moment. Whatever the truth, the only way to discover it is to get beyond the traumatic block that is sealing off your previous existence." He looked deliberately at Lewis. "That might be dangerous." "How?" "Because a traumatic block is set up in the mind in self-defense. Penetrate it -- there's no knowing how the mind may react. And, in your case, another danger occurs to me. If your makeup is nonhuman, the treatment itself might have a totally unexpected effect on you." Lewis considered that. "I'm game, if you are. But I think you face two dangers, too. First, my peculiar talent might not take kindly to my being treated and might run amok. It hasn't been entirely fear for my own safety that's stopped me visiting a psychiatrist before. What treatment do you have in mind?" "Narco-analysis. I put you under narcosis and, by asking you questions, try to dig your past out of your subconscious. I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that your talent will keep quiet. But what's the other danger?" "Well, if I did come from another world, I must have been on some kind of mission. What if the mission... was a hostile one?" G lancing up suddenly at him, Fletcher smiled. "There you sit, decent enough to be concerned about my welfare, and you're trying to convince me that you might be a monster!" "I'm serious," Lewis insisted. "Then I'm ready to take both chances. You may have suffered a loss of memory, and a loss of shape, but I think that if you had had a hostile intent, at least a trace of that attitude would have remained." He looked at his wrist. "It's midnight. My apartment's in this building. Unless you've got other commitments, how about staying with me while you're under treatment? It would make it easier to fit you in with my other patients." "All right." Lewis looked at Fletcher quizzically. "You're going to a lot of trouble for me. I don't quite get it." Fletcher laughed. "Scratch a psychiatrist and you'll find a repressed Sherlock Holmes. You chose the wrong man to get run down by." Lewis smiled. "You know, I'm beginning to hope I chose the right one." Y noon the next day, Fletcher knew narco-analysis wasn't going to be the answer. To all questions relating to Lewis's existence before his discovery in the Oregon woods, his mind, freed from conscious control, made no answer at all. Even to suggestions of a crash, response was negative. Fletcher was beginning to weigh the possibilities of more drastic methods, like shock treatment, when a fresh idea hit him. "Change into a St. Bernard dog," he said, feeling for a wild moment the ludicrousness of the command. Lewis promptly changed into a St. Bernard. "Now back again." Lewis's subconscious dutifully re-formed its owner. "Mm-mm," Fletcher said to himself. A glimmer of light was dawning. When Lewis came to, he told him what had happened. "Your talent is a true reflex. It's automatic. It responds to suggestion when your conscious control is relaxed. If we could get your memory back, you'd naturally remember what your original shape was. But your memory is obviously not going to yield easily. So, say we reverse the process. Say we experiment on finding your shape. It might take a hell of a while, but if we hit on it, it should trigger the rest of your memory." For the first time, something like elation came into Lewis's eyes. "Yes. I thought of that myself -- that if I could only get back my original shape -- but I gave up the thought as hopeless when I found I couldn't will it. But if you can do it-" Fletcher cut across his excitement. "Don't be too optimistic. There's no guarantee we'll hit on it, for one thing. Another is that amnesia may be proof against that, too. But if I do hit it, if I do give your subconscious the right command, it should create quite a stir in your psyche." His smile was rather grim. Fletcher did a drastic streamlining of his appointments book, putting off all but the most urgent and persistent cases. It was the most fantastic fortnight he had ever spent. He kept his consulting room locked and shuttered whenever Lewis was in there. And he was there most of the time. He was tough, physically and mentally, and kept coming back for more, in between demanding to be told all the shapes that Fletcher successively dictated to his subconscious. Fletcher set up every possible permutation and combination imaginable -- but without a single response, except that Lewis's subconscious went through the motions as docilely as a trained seal. He did become a seal once -- and every other creature in the world's catalogue, except for an occasional gap. The first time that happened, Fletcher thought he had hit on the right shape. Then he found, to his disgust, that it was due to the simple fact that Lewis just didn't have that particular creature in his stock of acquired knowledge. So when that happened, Fletcher described the creature, and Lewis took it from there. The same routine was followed with all the fantastic imaginary shapes that Fletcher thought up. For, in the second week, the Earth was left behind. Local magazine stores did an unusual trade in science fiction magazines, and hundreds of illustrations took fleeting shape on Fletcher's couch. Once, on Fletcher's instruction to assume some particularly fangave a groan, and Fletcher tensed. That was the kind of reaction he'd been praying for. But his hopes immediately evaporated, for, with a contented sigh, Lewis made it. It had been only a temporary constructional difficulty. At the end of the fortnight, Fletcher was ready to give in. He told Lewis so. Lewis looked dismayed. "Well, can you think of anything else?" Fletcher challenged him, for Lewis had taken over the task of indexing. "No. Perhaps you can only get a response by an exact prompt -- every detail, color and all." "I know. That would put it on a par with the monkeys on the typewriters -- a job for eternity. Before I tackle that, I think I'll take a look up in Oregon. I might get a clue there." "I didn't." "Maybe you were too close to it" "But -- you won't rouse any suspicion about me? I mean -- " "Yes?" Lewis bit his lip. "I'm sorry." "That's all right. I'll just say I'm a doctor handling your case. Strictly amnesia. I won't mention the rest." Lewis beamed. "Right. And while you're away, I'll really analyze those shapes, just in case we overlooked or forgot one." bus from the airport took him to the construction job. The township was nearly finished now, and most of the workers had been paid off. But he was lucky enough to contact the man who had found Lewis -- a towering Irish foreman called Brannigan. "He was stark naked and lost," Brannigan told him over a beer. "But he wasn't any trouble. Doc checked him and passed him as okay. Apart from his loss of memory or whatever it was. But he was a good worker, one of the best I ever had. Some of these good-fornothing loafers, they -- " Fletcher waited patiently through a long complaint about the presentday worker -- it was obvious that Brannigan had been reared in tougher days -- then said: "Did you ever find anything round about?" "Like what?" "Well, did your workmen ever turn up anything like -- well, documents, scraps of metal, anything? I'm trying to get a lead on Lewis's real identity." Brannigan scratched his head. "I didn't hear of anything. We found a lot of Indian remains -- pots, weapons, but nothing else. If anybody had, I'd have heard about it. And we cleared several miles around this project." Fletcher sighed. "Okay, thanks." On the plane back, he tried to add it up. But nothing plus nothing wasn't a very profitable sum. He might be a moderately successful psychiatrist -- on ordinary cases, anyway -- but as a Sherlock Holmes he was definitely deficient, he thought with disgust. Then something clicked. Sherlock Holmes... the dog in the night... the dog that didn't bark. The spaceship that wasn't there. That didn't have to mean a thing, of course. If you could accept the fact of a man who could change shape and the conjecture of a spaceship, then you could accept a matter-transmitter, or whatever else writers employed to move their heroes between worlds... But if there had been a spaceship, and there were no remains, that meant there hadn't been a crash. That, in turn, meant that -- By the time the plane touched down, Fletcher had explored a long avenue of conjecture. It had kept branching off into realms of possibility that it would have been hopeless to follow. But, keeping to a path he could follow, he had tracked it out to the end, and at the end was one last possibility. Lewis was waiting for him glumly in his office. "I've analyzed all the shapes." "Well?" Lewis shook his head sadly. "You covered the ground one hundred per cent." "Only ninety-nine point nine nine nine," Fletcher told him. "Ready for one more try?" Lewis nodded, a light of hope re-awakening in his eyes. "Mind you, it's only a try," Fletcher warned. "One try -- after the thousands we've made already. So don't expect too much." Fletcher gave him a minimum dose, waited, then said the word. It worked. the figure on the couch, accompanied by a great writhing of features and of form. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Then the figure sighed and changed. Eyes looked sightlessly up at Fletcher; strange words broke from a newly shaped mouth. Fletcher waited tensely. The drug was thrown off. The body straightened up. The eyes gained focus. They also changed color -- to violet -- and the rest of the shape altered slightly as if changing from the general outline that had just been triggered to the particular, the original. "How do you feel?" Fletcher asked. "All right. It's all so confusing, having it come back to me. But how did you guess?" The voice had changed, which wasn't surprising, but still spoke English perfectly. "I'll tell you. You just correct me if I'm wrong. All right? Oh... what do I call you now?" "Ruvil." "Is that first name or last?" "Both." "Right. Now -- no trace of any spaceship was found near where you thought you had crashed. So I started figuring on what that meant. It could only mean that you were landed here by a ship that took off again. That, in turn, meant that you were already amnesiac. That could have meant that you were just dumped here because you were no longer any use as a member of the crew or whatever. "But somehow I couldn't conceive of a race with a culture that could build spaceships abandoning one of its members as callously as that. But a race that could build spaceships could conceivably introduce an artificial amnesia into a subject. Artificial and permanent. Endangered by only one thing -- the talent that your species has for changing shape. "Now I tried to place myself in the skin of a creature of another world that I didn't know a thing about. And I reasoned like this: "First, for some reason, powers on your world wanted you out of the way. But they were too humane to kill you. Why didn't they just dump you on another world? Because you had some knowledge that they feared you could use. So -- without at this stage going into what that knowledge might be -- they gave you this artificial memory block before they dumped you. "But there was always the danger that you might get into a spot that would cause you to change to your original shape -- and trigger your memory. Now the really tough part came. Why did they choose this planet? Because they had never visited it before? But perhaps they had -- incognito. Perhaps they're incognito on every world they visit, having the power they have. Obviously I couldn't get far on that tack. "So then I pondered on just where on Earth they had dumped you. And then it clicked. They had left you with this artificial memory block -- and probably in some neutral state, physically. You were just a blank, in mind and shape, when you saw a man approach, as they figured was bound to happen before long. "Your reflex acted. You became a man -- the one shape you would never have reason to change from into your original. At least, not foreseeably. I wondered whether the difference was such as to matter. It obviously was." me, it is. Didn't you know that?" "On Earth, yes. Some men have said that your species is the most widely divergent from Man imaginable. But one or two things still have me puzzled. Just what did you know that was so dangerous to your own kind?" Ruvil laughed again. "You know, that's one thing that hasn't come back yet. Anyway, I'm not worried. Oh, the intrigues back on Varn -- that's the name of my world. They're extremely intelligent -- and humane, as you correctly diagnosed -- but also slightly cockeyed. It seems that the more developed a culture you get, the bigger the neuroses." "But why have they never visited Earth? Openly, I mean." "Because they never contact a world that's already well on the way to space travel itself. When a race is at that point, it's likely to go off the handle, before it gets its sights adjusted. There have been one or two unhappy incidents in the past. Yes, of course -- that's the knowledge they were frightened I'd use or pass on. Not the reason they banished me. That was some dreadful palace conspiracy. I am -- was -- a member of one of the dynastic families back on Varn." "But why didn't they dump you on a more primitive world where your knowledge would be of no use to you?" asked Fletcher. "Because -- well, because Vam ships are in regular contact with them, I suppose. They had to choose a world like Earth -- and any other developed culture is always humanoid. Yes, it was really clever of them to banish me here and to dump me in a practically all-man area. And -- " Ruvil's violet eyes shone admiringly -- "it was very clever of you to work it all out." Fletcher coughed nervously and leaned back. "Yes, well... what are your plans now? To show us how to build spaceships and lead a fleet back to Vam?" Ruvil laughed tinklingly. "Of course not. They overestimated the attention I paid to my lessons at school. I wouldn't know how to start. Besides, what would  want with spaceships?" Ruvil stretched luxuriously, and Fletcher had to admit that, in with such other obvious endowments, a knowledge of spaceship construction would have been rather redundant. "No." Ruvil smoothed her long golden hair with delicate fingers. "There's lots of other Varnian lore that's much more worth knowing." She got up from the couch in one lithe movement, far too quickly for Fletcher to have moved, even if he had wanted to. "For instance..." We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptlyl It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have itl Dept. #-GX-#, Garden City, N. Y. Isaac Asimov. For description. please see other side. (Pub. ed. #). lected from Fantasy and ScienceFiction Magazine. Adventure in other worlds... mystery, intrigue, suspense! (Pub. ed. #). ies by top authors. Wonders of Earth and Mon. Amazing inventions. Space Travel and Visitors from Outer Space. Adventures in Dimension. Worlds of Tomorrow. 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I enclose  check  cash  money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. Problem: the human race is complex; answer: put the problem in a nutshell -- and this was the organization that could do exactly that! 'LL bus # your face, Al," said Gurlick. "I gon' break your back. I gon' blow up your place, an # you with it, an' all your rotgut licker, who wants it? You hear me, Al?" Al didn't hear him. Al was back of the bar in his place three blocks away, probably still indignantly red, still twitching his long bald head at the empty doorway through which Gurlick had fled, still repeating what all his customers had just witnessed : Gurlick cringing in from the slick raw night, fawning at Al, stretching his stubble in a ragged brown grin, tilting his head, half-closing his sick-green, muddy-whited eyes. "Walkin' in here," Al would be reporting for the fourth time in nine minutes, "all full of good-ol'AI this an' hiya-buddy that, an' you-know-me-Al, and how's about a little you-know; an' all I says is I know you all right, Gurlick, shuck on out o' here, I wouldn't give you sand if I met you on the beach; an' him spittin' like that, right on the bar, an' runnin' out, an' stickin' his head back in an' callin' me a -- " Sanctimoniously, Al would not sully his lips with the word. And the rye-and-bitters by the door would be nodding wisely and saying, "Man shouldn't mention a feller's mother, whatever," while the long-term beer would be clasping his glass, warm as pablum and headless as Ann Boleyn, and intoning, "You was right, Al, dead right." Gurlick, four blocks away now, glanced back over his shoulder and saw no pursuit. He slowed his scamper to a trot and then a soggy shuffle, hunching his shoulders against the blowing mist. He kept on cursing Al, and the beer, and the rye-and-bitters, announcing that he could take 'em one at a time or all together one-handed. He could do nothing of the kind, of course. It wasn't in him. It would have been success of a sort, and it was too late in life for Gurlick, unassisted, to start anything as new and different as success. His very first breath had been illtimed and poorly done, and from then on he had done nothing right. He begged badly and stole when it was absolutely safe, which was seldom, and he rolled drunks providing they were totally blacked out, alone, and concealed. He slept in warehouses, boxcars, parked trucks. He worked only in the most extreme circumstances and had yet to last through the second week. "I'll cut 'em," he muttered. "Smash their face for them..." along the wall to a garbage can he knew about. It was a restaurant garbage can and sometimes... He lifted the lid and, as he did so, saw something pale slide away and fall to the ground. It looked like a bun, and he snatched at it and missed. He stooped for it, and part of the misted wall beside him seemed to detach itself and become solid and hairy; it scrabbled past his legs. He gasped and kicked out, a vicious, ratlike spasm. His foot connected solidly and the creature rose in the air and fell heavily at the base of the fence, in the dim wet light from the street. It was a small white dog, three-quarters starved. It yipped twice, faintly, tried to rise and could not. When Gurlick saw it was helpless, he laughed aloud and kicked it and stamped on it until it was dead, and with each blow his vengeance became more mighty. There went Al, and there the two barflies, and one for the cops, and one for all judges and jailers, and a good one for everyone in the world who owned anything, and to top it, one for the rain. He was a pretty big man by the time he was finished. Out of breath, he wheezed back to the garbage can and felt around until he found the bun. It was sodden and slippery, but it was half a hamburger which some profligate had left unfinished, and that was all that mattered. He wiped it on his sleeve, which made no appreciable difference to sleeve or bun, and crammed it into his mouth. He stepped out into the light and looked up through the mist at the square shoulders of the buildings that stood around to watch him. He was a man who had fought and killed for what was rightfully his. "Don't mess with me," he growled at the city. A kind of intoxication flooded him. He felt the way he did at the beginning of that dream he was always having, where he would walk down a dirt path beside a lake, feeling good, feeling strong and expectant, knowing he was about to come to the pile of clothes on the bank. He wasn't having the dream just then, he knew; he was too cold and too wet, but he squared his shoulders anyway. He began to walk, looking up. He told the world to look out. He said he was going to shake it up and dump it and stamp on its fat face. "You gon' to know Dan Gurlick passed this way," he said. He was perfectly right this time, because it was in him now. TT had been in the hamburger and before that in the horse from which most of the hamburger had been made, and before that in two birds, one after the other, which had mistaken it for a berry. Before that... it's hard to say. When the first bird ate it, it sensed it was in the wrong place, and did nothing, and the same thing with the second. When the horse's blunt club of a tongue scooped it up with a clutch of meadow-grass, it had hopes for a while. It straightened itself out after the horse's teeth flattened it, and left the digestive tract early, to shoulder its way between cells and fibers until it rested in a ganglion. There it sensed another disappointment, and high time too -- once it penetrated into the neurone-chains, its nature would be irreversibly changed, and it would have been with the horse for the rest of his life. As, in fact, it was, but after the butcher's blade missed it, and the meat-grinder wrung it, pinched it, stretched it (but in no way separated any part of it from any other), it could still go on about its job when the time came. Eight months in the deep-freeze affected it not at all, nor did hot fat. The boy who bit into the resulting hamburger was the only human being who ever saw it. It looked like a boiled raisin, or worse. The boy said so and got another free and it was dumped atop the garbage can, to be found and fought for by Gurlick. The rain came down hard. Gurlick's exaltation faded, his shoulders hunched, his head went down. He slogged through the wet and soon sank to his usual level of feral misery. And there he stayed for a while. Dunsay and she worked in Accounting. She was open and sunny and she was a dish. She had rich brown hair with ruby lights in it, and the kind of topaz eyes that usually belong to a special kind of blonde. She had a figure that Paul Sanders, who was in Pharmaceuticals, considered a waste when viewed in the light of the information that her husband was a Merchant Marine officer on the Australia run. It was a matter of hours after she caught the attention of the entire plant (which was a matter of minutes after she got there) that news went around of her cheerful but unshakable "Thanks, but no, thanks." Paul took this as an outright challenge, but he kept his distance and bided his time. When the water-cooler reported that her husband's ship had come off second best in a bout with the Great Barrier Reef and had limped to Hobart, Tasmania, for repairs, Paul decided that the day was upon him. He stated as much in the locker room and got good odds -- #I to # -- and somebody to hold the money -- one of the suckers who gave him the cue for the single strategic detail which so far had escaped him. He had the time (Saturday night), the place (obviously her apartment, since she wouldn't go out), and the girl. All he had to figure out was how to put himself on the scene, and when one of the suckers said, "Nobody gets into that place but a for-real husband or a sick kitten," he had the answer. This girl had cried when one of the boss's tropical fish was found belly-up one morning. She had rescued a praying mantis from an accountant who was flailing it against the window with the morning Times, and after she let the little green monster out, she had rescued the accountant's opinion of himself with a comforting word and a smile that put dazzle-spots all over his work for the rest of the afternoon. So on Saturday night, late enough so he would meet few people in the halls, but early enough so she wouldn't be in bed yet, Paul Sanders stopped for a moment by a mirror in the hallway of her apartment house, regarded his rather startling appearance approvingly, winked at it, and then went to her door and began rapping softly and excitedly. He heard soft hurrying footsteps behind the door and began to breathe noisily, like someone trying not to sob. "Who is it? What's the matter?" "Please," he moaned against the panel, "please, please, Mrs. Dunsay, help me!" She immediately opened the door a peering inch. "Oh, thank God," he breathed and pushed hard. She sprang back with her hands on her mouth and he slid in and closed the door with his back. She was ready for bed, as he had hardly dared to hope. The robe was a little on the sensible side, but what he could see of the gown was fine, just fine. He said hoarsely, "Don't let them get me!" "Mr. Sanders!" Then she came closer, comforting, cheering. "No one's going to get you. You come on in and sit down until it's safe for you. Oh!" she gasped as he let his coat fall open, to reveal the shaggy rip and the bloodstain. "You're hurt!" He gazed dully at the scarlet stain. Then he flung up his head and set his features in an approximation of those of the Spartan boy who denied all knowledge of a stolen fox while the fox, hidden under his toga, ate his entrails. He pulled his coat straight and buttoned it and smiled and said, "Just a scratch." Then he sagged, caught the doorknob behind him, straightened up, and again smiled. It was devastating. "Oh -- oh, come and sit down," she cried. kept his hands decent, and she got him to the sofa. She helped him off with his coat and his shirt. It was indeed only a scratch, and she didn't seem to find the amount of blood too remarkable. A couple of cc swiped from the plasma lab goes a long way on a white sport shirt. He lay back limp and breathing shallowly while she flew to get scissors and bandages and warm water in a bowl, and averted his face from the light until she considerately turned it out in favor of a dim end-table lamp, and then he started the routine of not telling her his story because he was not fit to be here... she shouldn't know about such things... he'd been such a fool... and so on until she insisted that he could tell her anything, anything at all if it made him feel better. So he asked her to drink with him before he told her because she surely wouldn't afterward, and she didn't have anything but some sherry, and he said that was fine. He emptied a vial from his pocket into his drink and managed to switch glasses with her, and when she tasted it, she frowned slightly and looked down into the glass, but by then he was talking a subdued, dark blue, convoluted streak that she must strain to hear and puzzle to follow. In twenty minutes, he let it dwindle away to silence. She said nothing, but sat with slightly glazed eyes on her glass, which she held with both hands like a child from her and set it on the end table and took her pulse. It was slower than normal and a good deal stronger. He looked at the glass. It wasn't empty, but she'd had enough. He moved over close to her. "How do you feel?" She took seconds to answer, and then said slowly, "I feel... Her lips opened and closed twice, and she shook her head slightly and was silent, staring out at him from topaz eyes gone all black. "Charlotte... Lottie... lonely little Lottie. You're lonesome. You've been so alone. You need me, li'l Lottie," he crooned, watching her carefully. When she did not move or speak, he took the sleeve of her robe in one hand and, moving steadily and slowly, tugged at it until her hand slipped inside. He untied the sash with his free hand and took her arm and drew it out of the robe. "You don't need this now," he murmured. "You are warm, so warm..." He dropped the robe behind her and freed her other hand. She seemed not to understand what he was doing. The gown was nylon tricot. He drew her slowly into his arms. She raised her hands to his chest as if to push him away but there seemed to be no strength in them. Her head came forward until her cheek rested softly against his. She spoke into his ear quietly, without any particular force or expression. "I mustn't do this with you, Paul. Don't let me. Harry is the... there's never been anyone but him. There never must be. I'm... something's happened to me. Help me, Paul. Help me. If I do it with you, I can't live any more. I'm going to have to die if you don't help me now." She didn't accuse him in any way. Not once. stood forgotten in the never visited back edge of a junkyard. Gurlick didn't visit it; he lived in it, more often than not. Sometimes the weather was too bitterly cold for it to serve him, and in the hottest part of the summer he stayed away from it for weeks at a time. But most of the time it served him well. It broke the wind and it kept out most of the rain; it was dirty and dark and cost-free, which three items made it pure Gurlick. It was in this truck, two days after his encounter with the dog and the hamburger, that he was awakened from a deep sleep by... call it the Medusa. He had not been having his dream of the pile of clothes by the bank of the pool, and of how he would sit by them and wait, and then of how she would appear out there in the water, splashing and humming and not knowing he was there. Yet. This morning there seemed not to be room in his head for the dream nor for anything else, including its usual contents. He made some grunts and a moan, and ground his stubby yellow teeth together, and rolled up to a sitting position and tried to squeeze his pressured head back into shape from the outside. It didn't help. He bent double and used his knees against his temples to squeeze even harder, and that didn't help either. The head didn't hurt, exactly. And it wasn't what Gurlick occasionally called a "crazy" head. On the contrary, it seemed to contain a spacious, frigid and meticulous balance, a thing lying like a metrical lesion on the inner surface of his mind. He felt himself almost capable of looking at the thing, but, for all that it was in his head, it existed in a frightening direction, and at first he couldn't bring himself to look that way. T UT then the thing began to spread and grow, and in a few rocking, groaning moments there wasn't anything in his head but the new illumination, this opening casement which looked out upon two galaxies and part of a third, through the eyes and minds of cultures, hives, gaggles, prides, bevies, braces, herds, races, flocks and other kinds and quantities of sets and groupings, complexes, systems and pairings for which the language has as yet no terms; living in states liquid, solid, gaseous and a good many others with combinations and permutations among and between; swimming, flying, crawling, burrowing, pelagic, rooted, awash; and variously belegged, ciliated and bewinged; with consciousness which could be called the skulk-mind, the crash-mind, the paddle -- , exaltation -- , spring -- , or murmuration-mind, and othe' minds too numerous, too difficult, or too outrageous to mention. And, over all, the central consciousness of the creature itself (though 'central' is misleading; the hive-mind is permeative) -- the Medusa, the galactic man o' war, able beast, of which the people of a planet were here a nerve and there an organ, where entire cultures were specialized ganglia; the creature of which Gurlick was now a member and a part, for all that he was a minor atom in a simple molecule of a primitive cell -- this mighty consciousness became aware of Gurlick and he of it. long enough to know it was there, and then blanked tenelevenths of his mind away from the very idea. If you set before Gurlick a page of the writings of Immanuel Kant, he would see it; he might even be able to read a number of the words. But he wouldn't spend any time or effort over it. He would see it and discard it from his attention, and if you left it in front of him, or held it there, he would see without looking and wait for it to go away. Now, in its seedings, the Medusa had dropped its wrinkled milt into many a fantastic fossa. And if one of those scattered spores survived at all, it survived in, and linked with, the person and the species in which it found itself. If the host-integer was a fish, then a fish it would remain, acting as a fish, thinking as a fish; and when it became a "person" (which is what biologists call the individual polyps which make up the incredible colonies we call hydromedusae), it would not put away fishly things. On the contrary; it was to the interest of the Medusa that it keep its manifold parts specialized in the media in which they had evolved; the fish not only remained a fish, but in many cases might become much more so. Therefore, in inducting Gurlick into itself, in the unequal interflow of itself into Gurlick and Gurlick into itself, he remained -- just Gurlick. What Gurlick saw of the Medusa's environment(s), he would not look at. What the Medusa sensed was only what Gurlick could sense, and (regrettably for our pride of species) Gurlick himself. It could not, as might be supposed, snatch out every particle of Gurlick's information and experience, nor could it observe Gurlick's world in any other way than through the man's own eye and mind. Answers there might be, in that rotted repository, to the questions the Medusa asked, but they were unavailable until Gurlick himself formulated them. This had always been a slow process with him. He thought verbally, and his constructions were put together at approximately oral speed. The end effect was extraordinary; the irresistible demands came arrowing into him from immensity, crossing light-years with considerably less difficulty than it found in traversing Gurlick's thin, tough layer of subjective soft-focus, of not-caring, not-understandingnor wanting to understand. But reach him they did, the mighty unison of voice with which the super-creature conveyed ideas... and were answered in Gurlick's own time, in his own way, and aloud in his own words. And so it was that this scrubby, ate in the filthy clothes raised his face to the dim light, and responded to the demand-for-audience of the most majestic, complex, resourceful and potent intellect in all the known universe: "Okay, okay. So whaddaya want?" credible as this might seem, it must be realized that he was now a member, a person of the creature; part of it. He no more thought to fear it than a finger might fear a rib. But at the same time his essential Gurlickness was intact -- or, as has been pointed out, possibly more so. So he knew that something he could not comprehend wanted to do something through him of which he was incapable, and would unquestionably berate him because it had not been done... But this was Gurlick! This kind of thing could hold no fears and no surprises for Gurlick. Bosses, cops, young drunks and barkeeps had done just this to Gurlick all his life! And "Okay, okay! So whaddaya want?" was his invariable response, not only to a simple call, but also, and infuriatingly, to detailed orders. They had then to repeat their orders, or perhaps they would throw up their hands and walk away, or kick him and walk away. More often than not, the demand was disposed of, whatever it was, at this point, and that was worth a kick any time. The Medusa would not give up. Gurlick would not listen, and would not listen, and... had to listen, and took the easiest way out, and subsided to resentful seething -- as always, as ever for him. It is doubtful that anyone else on Earth could have found himself so quickly at home with the invader. In this very moment of initial contact, he was aware of the old familiar response of anyone to a first encounter with him -- a disgusted astonishment, a surge of unbelief, annoyance, and dawning frustration. "So whaddaya want?" The Medusa told him what it wanted, incredulously, as one explaining the utter and absolute obvious, and drew a blank from Gurlick. There was a moment of disbelief and then a forceful repetition of the demand. And Gurlick still did not understand. Few humans would, for not many have made the effort to comprehend the nature of the hivemind -- what it must be like to have such a mind, and further, to be totally ignorant of the fact that any other kind of mind could exist. For in all its eons of being, across and back and through and through the immensities of space it occupied, the Medusa had never encountered intelligence except as a phenomenon of the group. It was aware of the almost infinite variations in kind and quality of the gestalt psyche, but so fused in its experience and comprehension were the concepts "intelligence" and "group" that it was genuinely incapable of regarding them as separable things. That a single entity of any species was capable of so much as lucid thought without the operation of group mechanisms was outside its experience and beyond its otherwise near-omniscience. To contact any individual of a species was -- or had been until now -- to contact the entire species. VT OW it pressed against Gurlick, ' changed its angle and pressed again, paused to ponder, came back again and, puzzling, yet again to do the exploratory, bewildered things a man might do, faced with the opening of and penetration through some artifact he did not understand. There were tappings and listenings, and (analogously) pressures this way and that, as if to find a left-hand thread. There were scrapings as for samples to analyze, proddings and pricks as for hardness tests, polarized rayings as if to determine lattice structures. And in the end there was a -- call it a pressure test, the procedure one applies to clogged tubing or to oxideshorts on shielded wire: blow it out. Take what's supposed to be going through and cram an excess down it Gurlick sat on the floor of the abandoned truck, disinterestedly aware of the distant cerebration, computation, discussion and conjecture. A lot of gabble by someone who knew more than he did about things he didn't understand. Like always. Uh! It had been a thing without sight or sound or touch, but it struck like all three, suffused him for a moment with some unbearable tension, and then receded and left him limp and shaken. Some mighty generator somewhere had shunted in and poured its product to him, and it did a great many things inside him somehow; and all of them hurt, and none was what was wanted. He was simply not the right conduit for such a force. He was a solid bar fitted into a plumbing system, a jet of air tied into an electrical circuit; he was the wrong material in the wrong place and the output end wasn't hooked up to anything at all. Spectacular, the degree of mystification which now suffused the Medusa. For ages untold, there had always been some segment somewhere which could come up with an answer to anything; now there was not. That particular jolt of that particular force ought to have exploded into the psyche of every rational being on Earth, forming a network of intangible, unbreakable threads leading to Gurlick and through him to Medusa itself. It had always happened that way -- not almost always, but always. This was how the creature expanded. Not by campaign, attack, siege, consolidation, conquest, but by contact and influx. Its "spores," if they encountered any life-form which the Medusa could not control, simply did not function. If they functioned, the Medusa flowed in. Always. From methane swamp to airless rock, from sun to sun through two galaxies and part of a third flickered the messages, sorting, combining, test-hypothesizing, calculating, extrapolating. And these flickerings began to take on the hue of fear. The Medusa had never known fear before. '  'O be thus checked meant that the irresistible force was resisted, the indefensible was guarded. Earth had a shield, and a shield is the very next thing to a weapon. It was a weapon, in the Medusa's lexicon; for expansion was a factor as basic to its existence as Deity to the religious, as breath or heartbeat to a single animal; such a factor may not, must not be checked. Earth suddenly became a good deal more than just another berry for the mammoth to sweep in. Humanity now had to be absorbed, by every measure of principle, of gross ethic, of life. And it must be done through Gurlick, for the action of the "spore" within him was irreversible, and no other human could be affected by it. The chances of another being in the same sector at the same time were too remote to justify waiting, and Earth was physically too remote from the nearest Medusa-dominated planet to allow for an attack in force or even an exploratory expedition, whereby expert mind might put expert hands (or palps or claws or tentacles or cilia or mandibles) to work in the field. No, it had to be done through Gurlick, who might be -- must be -- manipulated by thought emanations, which are non-physical and thereby exempt from physical laws, capable of skipping across a galaxy and back before a light-ray can travel a hundred yards. Even while, after that blast of force, Gurlick slumped and scrabbled dazedly after his staggering consciousness, and as he slowly rolled over and got to his knees, grunting and pressing his head, the Medusa was making a thousand simultaneous computations and setting up ten thousand more. From the considerations of a space-traveling culture deep in the Coalsack Nebula came a thought in the form of a speculative analogy: As a defense against thick concentrations of cosmic dust, these creatures had designed spaceships which, on approaching a cloud, broke up into hundreds of small streamlined parts which would come together and reunite when the danger was past. Could that be what humanity had done? Had they a built-in mechanism, like the chipmunk's tail, the sea-cucumber's ejectible intestines, which would fragment the hive-mind on contact from outside, break it up into two this Gurlick? It seemed reasonable. In its isolation as the only logical hypothesis conceivable by the Medusa, it seemed so reasonable as to be a certainty. How could it be undone then and humanity's total mind restored? Therein lay the Medusa's answer. Unify humanity (it thought: re-unify humanity) and the only problem left would be that of influx. If that influx could not be done through Gurlick directly, other ways might be found; it had never met a hive-mind yet that it couldn't enter. Gasping, Gurlick grated, "Try that again, you gon' kill me, you hear?"  could of the mists of his mind, the Medusa weighed that statement and doubted it. On the other hand, Gurlick was, at the moment, infinitely valuable. It now knew that he could be hurt, and organisms which can be hurt can be driven. It realized also that Gurlick might be more useful, however, if he could be enlisted. To enlist an organism, you find out what it wants and give it a little in a way that indicates promise of more. It asked Gurlick then what he wanted. "Lea'me alone," Gurlick said. The response to that was a flat negative, with a faint stirring of that wrenching, explosive force it had already used. Gurlick whimpered, and the Medusa asked him again. "What do I want?" whispered Gurlick. He ceased, for the moment, to use words, but the concepts were there. They were hate and smashed faces, and the taste of liquor, and a pile of clothes by the bank of a pond: she saw him sitting there and was startled; then she smiled and said, Hello, Handsome. What did he want?... The Medusa at this point had some considerable trouble interrupting. Gurlick, on the subject of what Gurlick wanted, could go on with surprising force for a very long time. The Medusa found it possible to understand this resentment, surely the tropistic flailing of something amputated, something denied full function, robbed, deprived. And, of course, insane. Deftly, the Medusa began making promises. The rewards were described vividly indeed, and in detail that enchanted Gurlick. They were subtly implanted feedback circuits from his own imaginings and they dazzled him. And from time to time there was a faint prod from that which had hurt him, just to remind him that it was still there. At last, "Oh, sure, sure," Gurlick said. TU find out about that, about how people can get put together again. An' then, boy, I gon' step on their face." So it was, chuckling, that Daniel Gurlick went forth from his wrecked truck to conquer the world. and smiled at the weeping girl. "Sex," she told Caroline, "is, after all, so unnecessary." Caroline knelt on the rug with her face hidden in the couch cushion, her nape bright red from weeping, the end strands of her hair wet with tears. She had come unexpectedly, in mid-afternoon, and Dimity Carmichael had opened the door and almost screamed. She had caught the girl before she could fall, led her to the couch. When Caroline could speak, she muttered about a dentist, about how it had hurt, how she had been so sure she could make it home but was just too sick, and, finding herself here, had hoped Dimity would let her lie down for a few minutes... Dimity had made her comfortable and then, with a few sharp unanswerable questions ("What dentist? What is his name? Why couldn't you lie down in his office? He wanted you out of there as soon as he'd finished, didn't he? In fact, he wasn't a dentist and he didn't do the kind of operations dentists do, isn't that so?") she had reduced the pale girl to this sodden, sobbing thing huddled against the couch. "I've known for a long time how you were carrying on. And you finally got caught." It was at that point, after thinking it out in grim, self-satisfied silence, that Dimity Carmichael said sex was, after all, so unnecessary. "It certainly has done you no good. Why did you give in, Caroline? You didn't have to." "I did, I did... " "Nonsense. Say you wanted to and we'd be closer to the truth. No one has to." Caroline said something -- "I love (or loved) him so," or some such. Dimity sniffed. "Love, Caroline, isn't that. Love is everything else there can be between a man and a woman, without that." Caroline sobbed. "That's your test, you see," explained Dimity Carmichael. "We are human beings because there are communions between us which are not experienced by -- by rabto make some great sacrifice for a woman, it might be a proof of love. Considerateness, chivalry, kindness, patience, the sharing of great books and fine music -- these are the things that prove a man. It is hardly a demonstration of manhood for a man to prove himself merely as capable as a rabbit" Caroline shuddered. Dimity Carmichael smiled tightly. Caroline spoke. "What? What's that?" Caroline turned her cheek to rest it in her clenching hand. Her eyes were squeezed closed. "I said... I just can't see it the way you do. I can't." "You'd be a lot happier if you did." "I know, I know..." Caroline sobbed. Dimity Carmichael leaned forward. "You can, if you like. Even after the kind of life you've lived -- oh, I know how you were playing with the boys from the time you were twelve years old -- but that can all be wiped away, and this will never bother you again. If you'll let me help you."  haustedly. It was not a refusal, but instead doubt, despair. "Of course I can," said Dimity, as if Caroline had spoken her doubts aloud. "You just do as I say." She waited until the girl's shoulders were still, until she lifted her head away from the couch, turned to sit on her calves, looked sidewise up at Dimity from the corners of her long eyes. "Do what?" Caroline asked forlornly. "Tell me what happened -- everything." "You know what happened." "You don't understand. I don't mean this afternoon -- that was a consequence and we needn't dwell on it. I want the cause. I want to know exactly what happened to get you into this." "I won't tell you his name." "His name," said Dimity Carmichael, "is legion. I don't care about that. What I want you to do is to describe to me exactly what happened, in every last detail, to bring you to this," and she waved a hand at the girl, and her "dentist," and all the parts of her predicament. "Oh," said Caroline faintly. Suddenly she blushed. "I -- I can't be sure just wh-which time it was." "That doesn't matter either," said Dimity flatly. "Pick your own. For example, the first time with this latest one. All right? Now tell me what happened -- every last little detail, from second to second." Caroline turned her face into the upholstery again. "Oh... why?" "You'll see." She waited for a time, and then said, "Well?" and again, "Look, Caroline, we'll peel away the sentiment, the bad judgment, the illusions and delusions, and leave you free. As I am free. You will see for yourself what it is to be that free." Caroline closed her eyes, making two red welts where the lids met. "I don't know where to begin..." "At the beginning. You had been somewhere -- a dance, a club?" "A... a drive-in." "And then he took you -- " "Home. His house." "Go on." "We got there and had another drink and -- it happened, that's all." "What happened?" "Oh, I can't, I can't talk about it! Don't you see?" "I don't see. This is an emergency, Caroline. You do as I tell you. Just talk." She paused and then said quietly, "You got to his house." I I "HE girl looked up at her with one searching, pleading look, and, staring down at her hands, began speaking rapidly. Dimity Carmichael bent close to listen, and let her go on for a minute, then stopped her. "You have to say exactly how it was. Now -- this was in the parlor." "L-living room." "Living room. You have to see it all again -- drapes, pictures, everything. The sofa was in front of the fireplace, is that right?" Caroline haltingly described the room, with Dimity repeating, expanding, insisting. Sofa here, fireplace there, table with drinks, window, door, easy chair. How warm, how large, what do you mean red, what red were the drapes? "Begin again so I can see it." More swift, soft speech, more interruption. "You wore what?" "The black faille with the velvet trim and that neckline, you know -- " "Which has the zipper -- " "In the back." "Go on." After a time, Dimity stopped her with a hand on her back. "Get up off the floor. I can't hear you. Get up, girl." Caroline rose and sat on the couch. "No, no; lie down. Lie down," Dimity whispered. Caroline lay down and put her forearms across her eyes. It took a while to get started again, but at last she did. Dimity drew up an ottoman and sat on it, close, watching the girl's mouth. "Don't say it," she said at one point. "There are names for these things. Use them." "Oh, I -- just couldn't." "Use them." Caroline used them. "But what were you feeling all this time?" "F-feeling?" "Exactly." Caroline tried. "And did you say anything while this was going on?" "No, nothing. Except -- " "Well?" "Just at first," whispered the girl. She moved and was still again, and her concealing arms clamped visibly tighter against her eyes. "I think I went... and her teeth met, her lips curled back, her breath hissed in sharply. U curled back and she clenched her teeth and sharply drew in her breath. "Like that?" "Yes." "Go on. Did he say anything?" "No. Yes. Yes, he said, 'Caroline, Caroline, Caroline,'" she crooned. "Go on." She went on. Dimity listened, watching. She saw the girl smiling and the tears that pressed out through the juncture of forearm and cheek. She watched the faint flickering of white-edged nostrils. She watched the breast in its rapid motion, not quite like that which would result from running up stairs, because of the shallow shiver each long inhalation carried, the second's catch and hold, the gasping release. "Ah-h-h-h-h!" Caroline screamed suddenly, softly. "Ahh... I thought he loved me! I did think he loved me!" She wept. "That's all... "No, it isn't. You had to leave, get ready to leave. Hm? What did he say? What did you say?" Finally, when Caroline said,... and that's all," there were no questions to ask. Dimity Carmichael rose and picked up the ottoman and placed it carefully where it belonged by the easy chair, and sat down. The girl had not moved. "Now how do you feel?" Slowly the girl took down her arms and lay looking at the ceiling. She wet her lips and let her head fall to the side so she could look at Dimity Carmichael, composed in the easy chair -- a chair not too easy, but comfortable for one who liked a flat seat and a straight back. The girl searched Dimity Carmichael's face, looking apparently for shock, confusion, anger, disgust. She found none of these, nothing but thin lips, dry skin, cool eyes. Answering at last, she said, "I feel... awful." She waited, but Dimity Carmichael had nothing to say. She sat up painfully and covered her face with her hands. She said, "Telling it was making it happen all over again, almost real. But-" Again a silence. " -- but it was like... doing it in front of somebody else. In front of-" "In front of me?" "Yes, but not exactly." "You did do it in front of someone -- yourself. You will never be in such a situation again," Dimity Carmichael intoned, her voice returning and returning to the same note like some soft insistent buzzer, "without hearing yourself tell it, every detail, every sight and sound of it, to someone else. Except that the happening and the telling won't be weeks apart, like this time. They'll be simultaneous." "But the telling makes it all so... cheap, almost... funny!" "It isn't the telling that makes it that way. The act is itself ridiculous, ungraceful, altogether too trivial for the terrible price one pays for it Now you can see it as I see it; now you will be unable to see it any other way. Go wash your face." S HE did, and came back looking much better, with her hair combed and the furrows gone from her brows and the comers of her long eyes. With the last of her makeup gone, she looked even younger than usual; to think she was actually two years older than Dimity Carmichael was incredible, incredible... She slipped on her jacket and took up her topcoat and handbag. "I'm going. I -- feel a lot better. I mean about... things." "It's just that you're beginning to feel as I do about... things." "Oh!" Caroline cried from the door, from the depths of her troubles, her physical and mental agonies, the hopeless complexity of simply trying to live through what life presented. "Oh, I wish I was like you! I wish I'd always been like you!" And she went out. Dimity Carmichael sat for a long time in the not-quite-easy chair with her eyes closed. Then she rose and went into the bedroom and began to take off her clothes. She needed a bath; she felt proud. She had a sudden recollection of her father's face showing a pride like this. He had gone down into the cesspool to remove a blockage when nobody else would do it. It had made him quite sick, but when he came up, unspeakably filthy and every nerve screaming for a scalding bath, it had been with that kind of pride. Mama had not understood that nor liked it She would have borne the unmentionable discomforts of the blocked sewer indefinitely rather than have it known even within the family that Daddy had been so soiled. Well, that's the way Daddy was. That's the way Mama was. The episode somehow crystallized the great difference between them, and why Mama had been so glad when he died, and how it was that Dimity's given name -- given by him -- was one which reflected all the luminance of wickedness and sin, and why Salome Carmichael came to be known as Dimity from the day he died. No cesspools for her. Clean, crisp was little Dimity, decent, pleated, skirted and cozy all her life. To get from her bedroom into the adjoining bath -- seven steps -- she bundled up in the long robe. Once the shower was adjusted to her liking, she hung up the robe and stepped under the cleansing flood. She kept her gaze, like her thoughts, directed upward as she soaped. T HE detailed revelation she had extracted from Caroline flashed through her mind, all of it, in a second, but with no detail missing. She smiled at the whole disgusting affair with a cool detachment. In the glass door of the shower stall, scattering of hairs, the strong square clean yellow teeth, she saw the ghost-reflection of her face, the coarse-fleshed, broad nose, the heavy chin with its random I wish I was like you! I wish I'd always been like you! Caroline had said that, slim-waisted, fullbreasted Caroline, Caroline with the mouth which, in relaxation, pouted to kiss me, Caroline with the skin of a peach, whose eyes were long jewels of a rare cut, whose hair was fine and glossy and inwardly ember-radiant. I wish I was like you... Could Caroline have known that Dimity Carmichael had yearned all her life for those words spoken that way by Caroline's kind of woman? For were they not the words Dimity herself repressed as she turned the pages of magazines, watched the phantoms on the stereophonic, technicolored, wide deep unbearable screen? It was time now for the best part of the shower, the part Dimity looked forward to most. She put her hand on the control and let it rest there, ecstatically delaying the transcendant moment... be like you... perhaps Caroline would, one day, with luck. How good not to need all that, how fine and clear everything was without it! How laughingly revolting, to have a man prove the power of a rabbit's preoccupations with his animal stragglings and his breathy croonings of one's name, "Salome, Salome, Salome..." (I mean, she corrected herself suddenly and with a shade of panic, Caroline, Caroline, Caroline.) In part because it was time, and part because of a swift suspicion that her thoughts were gaining a momentum beyond her control and a direction past her choice, she threw the control hard over to Cold, and braced her whole mind and body for that clean (surely sexless) moment of total sensation by which she punctuated her entire existence. As the liquid fire of cold enveloped her, the lips of Dimity Carmichael turned back, the teeth met, the breath was drawn in with a sharp, explosive hiss. his collarbones, hunched his shoulders, and shuffled. "I'll find out," he promised, muttering. "You jus' let me know what you want, I'll find out fya. Then, boy, look out." At the corner, sprawled out on the steps of an abandoned candy store, he encountered what at first glance seemed to be an odorous bundle of rags. He was about to pass it when he stopped. Or was stopped. "It's on'y Freddy," he said disgustedly. "He don't know nothin' hardly." "Gah dime bo?" asked the bundle, stirring feebly, and extending a filthy hand which flowered on the stem of an impossibly thin wrist. "Well, sure I said somebody oughta know," growled Gurlick, "but not him, f'godsakes." "Gha dime bo? Oh... It's Danny. Got a dime on ya, Danny?" "All right, all right, I'll ast 'im!" said Gurlick angrily, and at last turned to Freddy. "Shut up, Freddy. You know I ain't got no dime. Listen, I wanna ast you somethin.' How could we get all put together again?" Freddy made an effort which he had apparently not considered worth while until now: he focused his eyes. "Who -- you and me? What you mean, put together?" "I tole you!" said Gurlick, not speaking to Freddy; then, at the mingled presssure of threat and promise, he whimpered in exasperation and said, "Just tell me can we do it or not, Freddy." "What's the matter with you, Danny?" "You gon' tell me or aincha?" Freddy blinked palely and seemed on the verge of making a mental effort. Finally he said, "I'm cold. I been cold for three years. You got a drink on you, Danny?" There wasn't anybody around, so Gurlick kicked him. "Jerk," he said, tucked his chin down, and shuffled away. Freddy watched him for a while, until his gritty lids got too heavy to hold up. Two blocks further, Gurlick saw somebody else and tried to cross the street. He was not permitted to. "No!" he begged. "No, no, no! You can't ast every single one you see." Whatever he was told, it was said in no uncertain terms, because he whined, "You gon' get me in big trouble, jus' you wait." Ask he must; ask he did. The plumber's wife, who stood a head taller than he and weighed twice as much, stopped sweeping her stone steps as he shuffled toward her, head still down but eyes up, and obviously not going to scuttle past as his kind usually did. He stopped before her, looking up. She would tower over him if he stood on a box; as it was, he was on the sidewalk and she on the second step. He regarded her like a country cousin examining a monument. She looked down at him with the nauseated avidity of a witness to an automobile accident. He put a hand on the side of his head and screwed up his eyes. The hand fell away; he gazed at her and croaked, "How can we get put together again?" It seemed a long noisy while before the immense capacity of her lungs was exhausted by her first great ring of laughter, but when it was over, it brought her face down again, which served only to grant her another glimpse of Gurlick's anxious filthy face, and caused another paroxysm. TE left her laughing and headed for the park. Numbly he cursed the woman and all women, and all their husbands, and all their forebears and descendants. Into the park the young spring had brought slim grass, treebuds, dogs, children, old people and a hopeful ice-cream vendor. The peace of these beings was leavened by a scattering of adolescents who had found the park on such a day more attractive than school, and it was three of these who swarmed into Gurlick's irresolution as he stood just inside the park, trying to find an easy way to still the demand inside his head. "Dig the creep," said the one with heroes on the back of his jacket, and another: "Orbit!" and the three began to circle Gurlick, capering like stage Indians, holding fingers out from their heads satellite signals. Gurlick turned back and forth for a moment like a weathervane out. "Giddada year," he growled. "Bee-beep!" screamed one of the satellites. "Stand by fer r e-yentry!" The capering became a gallop as the orbits closed, swirled around him in a shouting blur, and at the signal "Burnout!" they stopped abruptly and the one behind Gurlick dropped to his hands and knees while the other two pushed. Gurlick hit the ground with a whoosh, flat on his back with his arms and legs in the air. Around the scene, one woman cried out indignantly, one old man's mouth popped open with shock, and everyone else, everyone else, laughed and laughed. "Giddada year," gasped Gurlick, trying to roll over and get his knees under him. One of the boys solicitously helped him to his feet, saying to another, "Now, Rocky, ya shoonta. Ya shoonta." When the trembling Gurlick was upright and the second of the trio -- the "Hero" -- down on hands and knees behind him again, the solicitous one gave another push and down went Gurlick again. Gurlick, now dropping his muffled pretenses of threat and counterattack, lay whimpering without trying to rise. Everybody laughed and laughed, all but two, and they didn't do anything. Except move closer, which attracted more laughers. "Space Patrol! Space Patrol," yelled Rocky, pointing at the approaching blue uniform. "Four o'clock high!" "Ess-cape velocity!" one of them barked; and with their antennafingers clamped to their heads and a chorus of shrill bee-beeps, they snaked through the crowd and were gone. "Bastits. Lousy bastits. I'll killurn, the lousy bastits," Gurlick wept. "Ah right. Ah right! Break it up. Move along. Ah right," said the policeman. The crowd broke it up immediately ahead of him and moved along sufficiently to close the gap behind, craning in gapmouthed anticipation of another laugh... laughter makes folks feel good. The policeman found Gurlick on all fours and jerked him to his feet, a good deal more roughly than Rocky had done. "Ah right, you, what's the matter with you?" The indignant lady pushed through and said something about hoodlums. "Oh," said the policeman, "hoodlum, are ye?" "Lousy bastits," Gurlick sobbed. The policeman quelled the indignant lady in mid-protest with a bland, "Ah right, don't get excited, lady; I'll handle this. What you got to say about it?" he demanded of Gurlick. the policeman's hard fist, whimpered and put his hands to his head. Suddenly nothing around him, no sound, no face, pressed upon him more than that insistence inside. "I don't care there is lotsa people, don't make me ast now!" "What'd you say?" demanded the policeman truculently. "Okay, okay!" Gurlick cried to the Medusa, and to the policeman: "All I want is, tell me how we c'n get put together again." "What?" "All of us," said Gurlick. "Everybody in the world." "He's talking about world peace," said the indignant woman. There was laughter. Someone explained to someone else that the bum was afraid of the Communists. Someone else heard that and explained to the man behind him that Gurlick was a Communist. The policeman heard part of that and shook Gurlick. "Don't you go shootin' your mouth off around here, or it's the cooler for you." Gurlick sniveled and mumbled, "Yessir, yessir," and sidled cringing away. "Ah right. Move along. Show's over. Ah right, there..." Gurlick ran. He was out of breath before he began to run, so his wind lasted him only to the edge of the park, where he reeled against the railing and clung there to whimper his breath back again. He stood with his hands over his face, his fingers trying to press back at that thing inside him, his mouth open and noisy with selfpity and anoxia. A hand fell on his shoulder and he jumped wildly. "It's all right," said the indignant woman. "I just wanted to let you know everybody in the whole world isn't cruel and mean." Gurlick looked at her, working his mouth. She was in her fifties, round-shouldered, bespectacled and most earnest. She said, "You go right on thinking about world peace. Talking about it, too." He was not yet capable of speaking. He gulped air. "You poor man." She fumbled in an edge-flaked patent leather pocketbook and found a quarter. She held it and sighed as if it were an heirloom, and handed it to him. He took it unnoticing and put it away. He did not thank her. He asked, "Do you know?" He pressed his temples in that newly developed compulsive gesture. "I got to find out, see? I got to." "Find out what?" "How people can get put back together again." "Oh," she said. "Oh, dear." She mulled it over. "I'm afraid I don't know just what you mean." "Y'see?" he informed his inner tormentor, agonized. "Ain't nobody knows -- nobody!" "Please explain it a little," the woman begged. "Maybe there's some one who can help you, if I can't." Gurlick said hopelessly, "It's about people's brains, see what I mean, how to make all the brains go together again." "Oh, you poor man..." She looked at him pityingly, clearly certain that his brains indeed needed putting together again, and Well, at least he realizes it, which is a sight more than most of us do. "I know! Dr. Langley's the man for you. I clean for him once a week, and believe me, if you want to know somebody who knows about the brain, he's the one. He has a machine that draws wiggly lines and he can read them and tell what you're thinking." Gurlick's vague visualization of such a device flashed out to the stars, where it had an electrifying effect. "Where's it at?" "The machine? Right there in his office. He'll tell you all about it; he's such a dear, kind man. He told me all about it, though I'm afraid I didn't quite -- " "Where's it at?" 'Why, in his office. Oh, you mean where. Well, it's # Deak Street, on the second floor. Look, you can almost see it from here. Right there where the house with the-" Without another word, Gurlick put down his chin and hunched his shoulders and scuttled off. "Oh, dear," murmured the woman worriedly, "I do hope he doesn't bother Dr. Langley too much. But then he wouldn't; he does believe in peace." She turned away from her good deed and started home. Gurlick did not bother Dr. Langley for long, and he did indeed bring him peace. Rome, and an angry warrior in Africa whose yams were being stolen at night, and there was the thief who stole them. All over the world people, with all their hearts, did the difficult things they must do to be human beings, and learned what they had to learn, paying what it cost them. Two and planets, some circling close to each other and to light, and others far out and cold in the lonely dark; but all separate, isolated, discrete. Commissar, peasant, potentate, the children, the old ones, the insane, the underprivileged -- each basically alone. Guido, the boy in Rome, had been born during the fighting at Anzio, and was found by an unrra team a year and a half later, living with some wild children, maggoting the bones of the ruined town. He was full of music, to a degree notable even in a country full of music. Before he could talk, he could whistle, and he would whistle any music he heard after one hearing. In the shuffle of souls that followed, he was taken in by a Corfu shepherd who, in the next ten years, kicked the music out of the boy, or perhaps he kicked it down. The shepherd was a smuggler, and though he needed the boy's strong back and hard hands, he wanted nothing near him which might attract attention. Guido dared not utter a phrase of music, not a note. The shepherd developed a high skill in detection; he could be aware of music welling up in the boy before Guido himself knew of it, and would knock him down and kick him and his unborn melodies. And when the association between music and punishment was strong enough, there was no more music from the boy -- and too much unkillably, unquellably inside him. After the shepherd died, Guido turned into something not quite human. He committed a series of ingenious nuisances which for a long time were lost in the seeth of the city, unconnected as they seemed to be with each other. He smashed some stained-glass windows, and he broke the leg of a beggar over a curbstone; he took a toy from a child and threw it into the river; he vandalized a print shop. And at last a detective with rather more sight, more insight than most found the thread upon which was strung these episodes; for the stained glass was one of the windows of the Chapel of the Annunciation, and choir practice was in session; the beggar was one who sang for his supper; the child's toy was a harmonica; the print shop was printing sheet music. The detective contrived to give Guido a violin, and there was, for Guido, a burst of light, and would be, in time, a very explosion of music from him... A ND the warrior, Mbala, began to guard his yam patch at night, which was by custom the duty of his dead father, as Mbala would one day die and then guard the yam patch of his sons. But Mbala's faith in this old belief was shaken, for all he could agree that his father was supposed to guard against devils, not against men, and it was manifestly a man who was stealing the yams. The thief, Nuyu, had once had faith in such beliefs too, but he no longer believed in anything at all but his own clever hands. They were, in their own theology, Mbala and Nuyu, backslider and atheist respectively. And one night, while Mbala watched and Nuyu hid, waiting him out, there came from the sky a floating, glowing sphere. It sank to the edge of the yam patch and, not quite touching the ground, slowly circled the field; and where it had passed, the thick tangle of bush which surrounded the cultivated land was cleared away, and in its place a thin drift of white, cold material which changed to water in a minute or two. Now it happened that the sphere was an untenanted and automatic machine, and that the weed it harvested and processed was astralagous vetch, which has a high affinity for selenium, and the builders of the machine needed all the selenium they could get. But to Nuyu the thief, who was hiding in the vetch at the time, this was retribution not only for his current sins, but all his past ones, cast as it was in the strange figure of a spirit guarding the yams -- shades of his childhood legends, so long laughed away! And to Mbala, this was his father, not only discovering the thief (who came howling and gibbering to huddle in contrite terror against Mbala) but at the same time clearing more land for him. After the sphere was gone, falling upward and away to the north (where it had detected another stand of vetch), Mbala did not, as he had earlier intended, kill his thief. Instead, they returned to the village, companions in revelation, each at the peak of a species of that rare ecstasy, the religious experience : one confirmed, the other converted. are anecdotes dwelt upon for their element of the extraordinary. But each man alive has such a story, unique unto himself, of what is in him and of its molding by the forces around him, and of his interpretations of those forces. Here a man sees a machine as a god, and there a man sees a god as a mere kind of angry argument; and another uses the angry argument of others quite as if it were a machine. Yet for all his ability to work in concert with his fellows, and to induce some sympathy in their vibrations, he remains isolated; no one knows exactly how another feels. At the very climax of sensation, Man approaches unconsciousness... unconsciousness of what? Why, of all around him; never of himself. W V#" OU Doctor Langley?" The doctor said, "Good God." Dear, kind man he might be to his cleaning lady, but to Gurlick he was just another clean man full of knowledges and affairs which Gurlick wouldn't understand, plus the usual, foreseeable anger, disgust and intolerance Gurlick stimulated wherever he went. In short, just another one of the bastits to hate. Gurlick said, "You know about brains." The doctor said, "Who sent you here?" "You know what to do to put people's brains together again." "What? Who are you? What do you want anyway?" "Look," said Gurlick, "I got to find this out, see. You know how to do it or not?" "I'm afraid," said the doctor icily, "that I can't answer a question I don't understand." "So ya don't know anything about brains." The doctor sat tall behind a wide desk. His face was tall and narrow, and in repose fell naturally into an expression of arrogance. No better example in all the world could have been found of the epitome of everything Gurlick hated in his fellow-man. The doctor was archetype, coda, essence; and, in his presence, Gurlick was so unreasonably angry as almost to forget how to cringe. "I didn't say that," said Langley. He looked at Gurlick steadily for a moment, openly selecting a course of action: Throw him out? Humor him? Or study him? He observed the glaring eyes, the trembling mouth, the posture of fear-driven aggressiveness. He said, "Let's get something straight. I'm not a psychiatrist." Aware that this creature didn't know a psychiatrist from an accountant, he explained, "I mean I don't treat people who have problems. I'm a physiologist, specializing on the brain. I'm just interested in how brains do what they do. If the brain was a motor, you might say I am the man who writes the manual that the mechanic studies before he goes to work. That's all I am, so before you waste your own time and mine, get that straight. If you want me to recommend somebody who can help you with whatev -- " "You tell me," Gurlick barked, "you just tell me that one thing and that's all you got to do." "What one thing?" Exasperated, adding his impatience with all his previous failures to his intense dislike of this new enemy, Gurlick growled, "I tole ya." When this got no response, and when he understood from the doctor's expression that it would get none, he blew angrily from his nostrils and explained, "Once everybody in the world had just the one brain, see what I mean? Now they all took apart. All you got to tell me is how to stick 'em together again." "You seem to be pretty sure that everybody -- how's that again? -- had the same brain once." thing inside him. Then. "Had to be like that," he said. "Why did it have to be?" Gurlick waved a vague hand. "All this. Buildin's, cars, tools, 'lectric, all like that. This don't git done without the people all think with like one head." "It did get done that way, though. People can work together without -- thinking together. That is what you mean, isn't it -- all thinking at once, like a f hive of bees?" "Bees, yeah." "It didn't happen that way with people. What made you think it did?" A startled computation was made among the stars, and, given the axioms which had proved unalterably and invariably true heretofore, namely, that a species did not reach this high a level of technology without the hive-mind to organize it, there was only one way to account for the doctor's incredible statement -- providing he did not lie -- and Gurlick, informed of this conclusion, did his best to phrase it. "I guess what happened was everybody broke all apart, they on their own now, they just don't remember no more. I don't remember it, you don't remember it, that one time you and me and everybody was part of one great big brain." "I wouldn't believe that," said the doctor, "even if it was true." "Sure not," Gurlick agreed, obviously and irritatingly taking the doctor's statement as a proof of his own. "Well, I still got to find out how to stick 'em all together again." "You won't find it out from me. I don't know. So why don't you just go and -- " "You got a machine, it knows what you're thinkin'," said Gurlick suddenly. "I have a machine which does nothing of the kind. Who told you about me, anyway?" "You show me that machine." "Certainly not. Look, this has been very interesting, but I'm busy and I can't talk to you any more. Now be a good -- " "You got to show it to me," said Gurlick in a terrifying whisper, for through his fogbound mind had shot his visions (she's in the water up to her neck, saying, Hello, Handsome, and he just grins, and she says, I'm coming out, and he says, Come on then, and slowly she starts up toward him, the water down to her collarbones, to her chest, to -- ) and a smoky curl of his new agony. He had to get this information. He must. r  'HE doctor pressed himself away from his desk a few inches in alarm. "That's the machine over there. It won't make the slightest sense to you. I'm not trying to hide anything from you -- it's just that you wouldn't understand it." Gurlick sidled over to the equipment the doctor had pointed to. He stood looking at it for a time, flashing a cautious ratlike glance toward the doctor from time to time, and pulling at his mouth. "What you call this thing?" "An electroencephalograph. Are you satisfied?" "How's it know what you're thinkin'?" "It doesn't. It picks up electrical impulses from a brain and turns them into wavy lines on a strip of paper." Watching Gurlick, the doctor saw clearly that in some strange way, his visitor was not thinking of the next question; he was waiting for it. He could see it arrive. "Open it up," said Gurlick. "What?" "Open it. I got to look at the stuff inside it." "Now look here! I -- " Again that frightening hiss: "I got to see it." The doctor sighed in exasperation and pulled open the file drawer of his desk. He located a manual, slapped it down on the desk, leafed through and opened it. "There's a picture of the machine. This is a wiring diagram. If it makes any sense to you, it'll tell you more than a look inside would tell you. I hope it tells you that the thing's far too complicated for a man without train -- " Gurlick snatched up the manual and stared at it. His eyes glazed and cleared. He put the manual down and pointed. "These here lines is wires?" "Yes..." "This here?" "A rectifier. It's a tube. You know what a tube is." "Like radio tubes. Electric is in these here wires?" "This can't mean anyth -- " "What's this here?" "Those little lines? Ground. Here, and here, and over here, the current goes to ground." Gurlick placed a grimy fingertip on the transformer symbol. "This changes the electric. Right?" Dumfounded, Langley nodded. Gurlick said, "Regular electric comes in here. Some other kind comes in here. What comes in here, huh?" "That's the detector. The input. The electrodes. I mean whatever brain the machine is hooked up to feeds current in there." "It ain't very much." "It ain't," mimicked the doctor weakly, "very much." "You got one of those strips with the wavy lines?" opened a drawer, found a trace and tossed it on top of the diagram. Gurlick pored over it for a long moment, referring twice to the wiring diagram, then threw it down. "Okay. Now I found out." "You found out what?" "What I wanted." "Will you be kind enough to tell me just what you found?" "God," said Gurlick disgustedly, "how sh'd # know?" Langley shook his head, ready to laugh at this mystifying and irritating visitation. "Well, if you've found it, you don't have to stick around." "Shut up," said Gurlick, cocking his head, closing his eyes. Langley waited. It was like hearing one side of a phone conversation, but there was no phone. "How the hell I'm supposed to do that?" Gurlick complained at one point, and, later, "I gon' need money for anything like that. No, I can't. I can't, I tell ya; you just gon' git me in th' clink... what you think he gon' be doin' while I take it?" "Who are you talking to?" Langley demanded. "I dunno," said Gurlick. "Shut up now." He fixed his gaze on the doctor's face, and for seconds it was unseeing. Then, suddenly, it was not, and Gurlick spoke to him: "I got to have money." "I'm not giving any handouts this season. Now get out of here." Gurlick, showing all the signs of an unwelcome internal goading, came around the desk and repeated his demand. As he did so, he saw for the very first time that Doctor Langley sat in a wheelchair. That made all the difference in the world to Gurlick. and had a surprisingly adult face, which made him all the more ridiculous as he sat through school day after day, weeping. He did not cry piteously nor with bellows of rage and outrage, but almost silently, with a series of widely spaced, soft, difficult sniffs. He did what he was told (get in line... move your chairs, it's story time... fetch the puzzles... put away the paints), but he did not speak and would not play or dance or sing or laugh. He would only sit, stiff as a spike, and sniff. Henry was five and kindergarten was tough for him. Life was tough for him. "Life is tough," his father was fond of saying, "and the little coward might as well learn." Henry's mother disagreed, but deviously. She lied to everyone concerned -- to her husband, to Henry's teacher, to the school psychologist and the principal and to Henry himself. She told her husband she was shopping in the mornings, but instead she was sitting in the corner of the kindergarten room watching Henry crying. After two weeks of this, the psychologist and the principal corralled her and explained to her that the reality of home involved having her at home, the reality of school involved not having her at school, and Henry was not going to face the reality of school until he could experience it without her. She agreed immediately, because she always agreed with anyone who had a clear opinion about anything, went back to the room, told the stricken Henry that she would be waiting just outside, and marched out. She completely overlooked the fact that Henry could see her from the window, see her walk down the path and get into her car and drive away. If he had any composure left after that, it was destroyed a few minutes later when, having circled the block and concealed her car, she crept back past the Keep off the Grass sign and spent the rest of the morning peeping in the window. Henry saw her right away, but the teacher and the principal didn't catch onto it for weeks. Henry continued to sit stiffly and hiss out his occasional sobs, wondering numbly what there was about school so terrifying as to make his mother go to such lengths to protect him, and, whatever it was, feeling silent horror of it. Henry's father did what he could about Henry's cowardice. It pained him because, though he was certain it didn't come from his side, other people might not know that. He told Henry ghost stories about sheeted phantasms which ate little boys, and then sent him up to bed in the dark, in a room where there was a hot-air register opening directly into the ceiling of the room below. The father had troubled to spread a sheet over the register, and when he heard the boy's door open and close, he shoved a stick up through the register and moaned. The white form rising up out of the floor elicited no sound or movement from Henry, so the father went upstairs laughing, to see the effect he had not heard. A S stiff as ever, straight and tall, Henry stood motionless in the dark, so his father turned on the light and looked him over, and then gave him a good whaling. "Five years old," he told the mother when he got back downstairs, "and he wets his pants yet." He jumped out shouting at Henry from around comers and hid in closets and made animal noises and he gave him ruthless orders to go out and punch eightand tenyear-olds in the nose and warmed his seat for him when he refused, but he just couldn't seem to make the little sissy into anything else. "Blood will tell," he used to say knowingly to the mother who had never stood up to anyone in her life and had manifestly tainted the boy. But he clung to the hope that he could do something about it, and he kept trying. Henry was afraid when his parents quarreled, because the father shouted and the mother wept; but he was afraid when they did not quarrel too. This was a special fear, raised to its peak on the occasions when the father spoke to him pleasantly, smiling. Undoubtedly the father himself did not realize it, but his pattern for punishing the boy was invariably a soft-voiced, smiling approach and a sudden burst of brutality, and Henry had become incapable of discriminating between a genuine pleasantry and one of these cheerful precursors to punishment. Meanwhile, his mother coddled and cuddled him secretly and unsystematically, secretly violated his father's deprivations by contrabanding to him too much cookies and candy, yet all the while turned a cold and unresponsive back to any real or tacit plea for help in the father's presence. Henry's natural curiosity, along with his normal rebelliousness, had been thoroughly excised when they first showed themselves in his second and third years, and at five he was so trained that he would take nothing not actually handed to him by a recognized authority, go nowhere and do nothing unless and until clearly instructed to do so. Children should be seen and not heard. Do not speak unless spoken to. "Why didn't you poke that kid right in the nose? Why? Why?" "Daddy, I -- " "Shaddup, you little yellow-belly. I don't want to hear excuses." So tall little, sad little Henry sat sniffing in kindergarten, and was numbly silent everywhere else. with the floor-lamp, Gurlick rummaged around as ordered, and, bearing a bundle, went shopping. The Medusa permitted him to to concede that he knew the subtleties of his own matrix better than it did. He got a second-hand suit from a hockshop in the tenderloin district, and a shave and a trim at the barber college. Esthetically, the improvement was negligible; socially, it was enormous. He was able to get what he wanted, though none of it was easy, since he personally knew the names of none of the things he was compelled to buy. Probably the metal samples were hardest of all to acquire; he had to go into an endless succession of glassy-eyed silences before a bewildered lab-supply clerk undertook to show him a periodic table of the elements. Once he had that, things moved more rapidly. By pointing and mumbling and asking and trancing, he acquired lab demonstration samples of nickel, aluminum, iron, copper, selenium, carbon and certain others. He asked for but could not afford deuterium, four-nines pure tantalum, and six-nines silver. The electrical-supply houses frustrated him deeply on the matter of smallgauge wire with a square crosssection, but someone directed him to a jewelry-findings store and he finally had what he wanted. By now he was burdened with a wooden crate rigged, by an accommodating clerk, into something approximating a foot-locker in size and shape, with a rope handle to carry it by. His destination was decided after a painful prodding session by the Medusa, which dug memory that Gurlick himself had long ago let vanish -- a brief and unprofitable stab at prospecting, or rather at carrying the pack for a friend who was stabbing at it, years ago. The important facet of the memory was an abandoned shack miles from anywhere, together with a rough idea of how to get there. So Gurlick took a bus and another bus, and stole a jeep and abandoned it, and at last, cursing his tormentors, slavering for his dream, and wailing his discomfort, he walked. Heavy woods, an upland of scrub pine and dwarf maple, then a jagged rock ridge -- that was it; and the roofless remnant of the shack like a patch of decay between and against the stained tooth-roots of the snaggly ridge. More than water, more than food or to be left alone, Gurlick wanted rest, but he was not allowed it. Panting and sniffling, he fell to his knees and began to fumble with the ropes on his burden. He took out the mercury cells and the metal slugs and the wire and tube-sockets, and began to jumble them together. He didn't know what he was doing and he didn't have to. The work was being done by an aggregate of computing wills scattered across the heavens, partly by direct orders, partly by a semidirect control, brain to neurone, bypassing that foggy swamp which comprised Gurlick's consciousness. Gurlick disliked the whole thing mightily, but except for a lachrymose grumble, no protest was possible. So he blubbered and slaved, and did not, could not, let up until it was finished. " was released. He stumbled away from it, as if a rope under tension had tied him and was suddenly cut. He dropped heavily, reared up on his elbows to blink at the thing, and then exhaustion overcame him and he slumped and slept. When he fell asleep, the thing was a tangle of components, possessing (to any trained terrestrial eye) a certain compelling symmetry and an elaborate uselessness (but how useless would seem a variable frequency oscillator to a wise Bushman or a savage from Madison Avenue?); but when he awoke, the picture was different. Very different. What Gurlick had built was not, in actuality, a matter receiver, although it acted as if such a thing were a possibility. It was, rather, a receiver and amplifier for a certain "band" in the "thought" "spectrum" -- each of these terms being analogous and general. The first receiver, and its beGurlicked attachments, turned information into manipulation, and constructed, from the elemental samples Gurlick had supplied it, a second and much more efficient machine of far greater capacity. This in turn received and manipulated yet a third receiver and manipulator; and this one was a heavy-duty device. The process was, in essence, precisely that of the sailor who takes a heavingline to draw in a rope which brings him a hawser. In a brief span of hours, machines were making machines to use available matter to make machines which would scout out and procure locally unavailable matter, which was returned to the site and used by other machines to make yet others, all specialized, and certain of these in immense numbers. Gurlick came unbidden out of that dream, where, as he sat on the bank on the pile of clothes, shiny black and red and an edge of lacy white, he was greeted (Hello, Handsome ) by her who so boldly (after he refused to go away) began to come up out of the water, slowly and gleaming in the sunlight, the water now down to her waist, and she was beginning to smile -- He awoke in the midst of an incredible clanking city. Around him were row upon row of huge blind machines, spewing forth more machines by the moment : Tanklike things with long snake necks and heads surrounded by a circlet of trumpets; silver balls ten feet in diameter, which now and then would flick silently into the air, too fast to be believed, too silent; low, wide, massive devices their own making, snouted with a projector which put out a strange beam which would have been like light if it were not cut off at the far end as if by an invisible wall; and with these, sniffing along the rocks, some of which trembled and slumped; and then there would be a movement up the beam to the machine, and from behind the machine, silvery ingots were laid like eggs while fine cold dust gouted off to the side. by this, blinking and staring stupidly. It was some minutes later that he realized where he was -- atop a column of earth, ten feet in diameter and perhaps thirty feet high. All around, for hundreds of yards, the ground had been excavated and... used. At the edge of his little plateau was a small domed box which, when his eye fell on it, popped open and slid a flat bowl of hot, mushlike substance toward him. He picked it up and smelled it. He tasted it, shrugged, grunted, raised the bowl to his lips and dozed its contents into his mouth with the heel of his hand. Its warmth in his belly was soothing, then puzzling, then frightening, the way it grew. He put his hands to his beltline and abruptly sat down, staring at his numb and disobedient legs. Dazed, he looked out across the busy scape, and saw approaching him a stilted device with endless treads for feet and a turtlelike housing, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, approaching. It straddled his imprisoning column of earth, achieving a sort of mechanical tip toe, and the carapace began to descend over him and all his perch, like a great slow candle-snuffer. He now could not speak, nor could he sit up any longer; he fell back and lay helpless, staring up and silently screaming... But as the device, its underside alive with more wriggling tooltipped limbs than has a horseshoe crab, slowly covered him, he was flooded with reassurance and promise, a special strength (its specialty : to make him feel strong but in no wise be strong) and the nearest thing to peace that he had ever known. He was informed that he was to undergo a simple operation, and that it was good, oh, good. He was informed why: The spore, the "raisin," had been life or its surrogate. It had traversed space physically, bodily, and it had finished its function and its capabilities with its invasion of Gurlick. But the transfer of the life-essence of all the Medusa into all of humanity was something that Earth-built machines -- even if Earth-built machines -- even if not accomplish. Only life can transmit life. A very slight alteration indeed -- an adjustment of isotopes in certain ionized elements in Gurlick's ductless glands -- would make the membership of humanity in the corpus of the Medusa a certainty. The machines now abuilding would effectively restore (the Medusa still unswervingly operated from a conviction that this was a restoration) the unity of the human species, its hive-mind, so that each "person" could reach, and be reached by, all persons; but the fusion with the Medusa would be Gurlick's special chore and would take place on the instant that his seed married with the ovum of a human female, much like -- he received two pictures: a pair of bees in nuptial flight, then a huge, busy, buzzing hive -- with, of course, himself in the all-powerful tended center. But with the difference, he was given to understand without understanding, that it would somehow be simultaneous. As the machine slowly closed over him, its deft limbs already performing the first of a hundred delicate manipulations, it caught up his dream and congratulated him on it, and gave it detail and depth his creative poverty had never made possible to him before, so that he lived it realer than real, from the instant of approach (and a degree of anticipation which might have destroyed him had he felt it earlier) to the moments of consummation, so violent they shook the Earth and sent the sky itself acrinkle with ripples of delighted color. And more: for in these tactile inventions there was no human limitation, and it was given to him to proceed again, and yet again, without exhaustion or dulling familiarity, either through the entire episode or through any smallest part of it, whether it be the thrill of seeing the clothes (shiny black and scarlet, and the tumbled frosting of lace-edged white) or the pounding, fainting climax. Always, too, was the laughing offhand promise that any conquest of Gurlick's would be such a peak, or a higher one; let him wallow in his dream because he loved it, but let him understand also that it was only one of many, the symbol of any, the quality of all. So, while it built its machines to fuse ("again") the scattered psyche of humanity, it got Gurlick -- good -- and -- ready. TF it isn't now, boy, Paul Sanders told himself, it never will be. Keeping one hand between the girl's gossamer-clad shoulderblades, he slid gently off the sofa, stood, stooped, and lifted Charlotte Dunsay in his arms. Dimity (nee Salome) Carmichael had put in a long day. Full of her thoughts of it, she put her thoughts by; standing in her showerstall, she slipped into a delicious suspension, her hand resting on the chrome handle marked Hot Cold. In Rome, a mad boy walked, incapable of hate, no longer hunted, his pressured rebellions having been caught at the kindling point and flung into a violin case. There was nothing left in Guido, no room for anything in Guido, but a heady joy and a fierce passion for this hard-gleaming, carven miracle under his arm, waiting as sensitive as a naked nerve the hungry reach of his unshackled talent. No lover, no miser, no acolyte on Earth loved woman or money or Master more than Guido loved this violin; no whelping wolverine, no wounded water buffalo was quite so watchful for an enemy. Henry, five years old, slept as usual flat on his back and face straight up, arms rigid, fists clenched under and pinned down by his buttocks, and his ankles together. He was having a nightmare, soundlessly, of being surrounded by gentle smiling fathers, some of whom wore the masks of the other kids in his class, and storekeepers, and passing puppydogs, but who were really just smiling fathers, dressed up and being gentle at the very verge of exploding in his face. And between him and all the fathers was a loving goddess with soft hands full of forbidden lollipops and peanut-butter sandwiches to be passed to little boys in the dark when they had been sent to bed without their suppers because they were little cowards; this goddess was there to care for him and protect him, but when the explosion came, with this breath or the next or the one after, the puppies and children and grocers and fathers would whisk through to him as if the goddess weren't there at all; and while they did what they would do to him, she would still be there smiling and ready with guilty lollipops, not knowing what the fathers were doing to him... And under this nightmare was the color of hopelessness, the absolute certainty that to awake from it would be to emerge into it; the dream and the world were one now, fused and identical. They left the kraal, all of them, the infants carried dangling from headbands or piggyback, the toddlers awed and huddling together, the adults hushed and wondering; and, leading them, Mbala who had regained his faith and Nuyu who had found his. The village had not far to go, kraal to yam patch; and yet it was a pilgrimage of sorts, the devout fired by the transfigured, coming to witness the miracle of the cleared field. These are motes among the millions, remarked upon for that about them which is remarkable, yet different only insofar as each is different from, or has a difference of, some quality, and pattern of qualities, repeated two and three-quarsun. There is a place in this narrative for all those close enough to each of us to be called You, and for that far more limited and select company (for many can call a man You), the privileged who are entitled to call themselves "I" (so few may do this, no two the same). Peon, peasant, fellahin, jibaro, mass-men with their hard hands: matador, mariner, apothecary, salesman, tilt-tongued with their special cants, canted each one to a special askew; this is their tale too. aware, passive under the submicroscopic manipulations of the machine which brought his special membership in the Medusa to his seed. So he did not observe the change in the mighty operations around him, when the egg-laying snail-gaited miners drew in and darkened the snouts of light, and fell neatly apart to have their substance incorporated in other, more needed machines; and these in turn complete their special tasks and segment and disperse to others which still needed them, until at last there remained only the longnecked, tank-treaded, trumpetheaded ones, and enough silver spheres to carry them, in their multi-thousands, to their precisely mapped destinations. There was no provision for failure, for there would be no failure. The nature of the electroencephalograph, and of its traces, clearly showed to the transcendant science of the Medusa exactly what was lacking in the average mind which kept it from being a common mind. The net would be comparatively simple to cast and draw shut, for it found the potent base of the hive mentality alive and awaiting it, showing itself wherever humans blindly moved in the paths of other humans, purely because other humans so moved; wherever friends apart impulsively sat down to write one another simultaneous letters, wherever men in groups (cartels, committees, mobs, and nations) divided their intelligence by their numbers and let that incredible quotient chart their course. The possible or probable nature of a human hive, once (re) established, was a question hardly explored, because it was hardly important. Once united, humanity would join the Medusa, because the Medusa always (not almost, not "in virtually every case," but always ) infused the hives it touched. So the factory area rumbled to silence, and the noiseless spheres swept over the storage yard and scooped up their clusters of longnecked projectors, fell away up with them, flashed away to all the comers of Earth, ready to place the projectors wherever their emanations (part sound, part something else) would reach masses of humans. They could not reach all humans, but they would reach most, and the established hive would then draw in the rest. No human would escape; none could; none would want to. Then, somewhere in this flawless, undivided, multi-skilled entity, Gurlick would plant a tiny fleck of himself, and at the instant of fusion between it and a living ovum, the Medusa would spread through it like crystallization through a supersaturated solution. sightings, thought the few observers, and recipients of their observations, in the brief minutes left to them to think as they had always thought. Some of the military had, in these minutes, a harrowing perplexity. Anything tracked at such speeds as the radars reported must, with small variations, appear somewhere along an extrapolated path; the higher the speed, the finer the extrapolation. The few recordings made of the flick and flash of these objects yielded flight-paths on which the objects simply did not appear. It was manifestly impossible for them to check and drop straight to their destinations at such velocities; they did, however, and before the theoreticians could finish their redefinition of "impossible," they and all their co-workers, colleagues, acquaintances, cohabitants, heirs and assigns were relieved of the necessity to calculate. It happened so quickly, one minute a heterogenous mass of seething non-communicants, the next, the end of Babel. tTE stood motionless with the girl in his arms, ready to put her down on the sofa; and then, without a start, without a word of .wonderment, Paul Sanders set her on her feet and stood supporting her with a firm arm around her shoulders until her head cleared and she could stand alone. There was nothing said, because there was in that moment nothing to be said. In a split second there was orientation of a transcendant nature -- nothing as crude as mutual mind-reading, but an instant and permeating acknowledgment of relationships, I to you, we to the rest of the world; the nature of a final and overriding decision, and the clear necessity of instant and specific action. Together, Paul Sanders and Charlotte Dunsay left her apartment. The hallway was full of people in all stages of dress -- all moving wordlessly, purposefully. No one paid Charlotte, in her nylon nightgown, the slightest attention. They walked to the elevator bank. She paused before it with a half-dozen other people, and he opened the door of the fire stairs and sprang up them two at a time. Emerging on the roof, he went to the kiosk which sheltered the elevator motor and cables, twisted off the light padlock with one easy motion, opened the door and entered. He had never been here before in his life; yet without hesitation he reached to the left and scooped up a five-foot slice bar which lay across the grating, and ran with it down the fire stairs. Without glancing at floor numbers, he left the fire stairs on the fourth floor, turned left and ran down the hall. The last door on the right opened as he reached it; he did not glance at the old lady who held it for him, nor did she speak. He sped through a foyer, a living room, and a bedroom, opened the window at the far right and climbed out. There was a narrow ledge on which he could barely keep his balance and carry the heavy bar as well, yet he managed it. The chief enemy of a balancing man is the poison of fear which permeates him: Fit fall! I'll fall! but Paul felt no fear at all. He made a rapid succession of two-inch sidewise shuffles until he reached the big eyebolt from which there hung, out and down, the huge chain supporting one end of a massive theater marquee. Here he turned sidewise and squatted, brought his bar up over his shoulder and, reaching down, thrust the tip through the fourth link of the chain. Then he waited. The street below -- what he could see of it -- seemed at first glance to be normally tenanted, with about as many people about as one might expect at this hour of a Saturday night. But then it could be seen that nobody strolled -- everyone walked briskly and with purpose; one or two people ran, the way they ran indicating running to, not from anything. He saw Charlotte Dunsay cross the street, swinging along on her bare feet, and enter a showroom where computing machines were on display. Though the place had been closed since noon, it was now open and lighted, and full of people silently and rapidly working. There came a sound, and more than a sound, a deep pervasive ululation which seemed at first to be born in all the air and under the Earth, sourceless. But as it grew louder, Paul heard it more from his left, and finally altogether from the corner of the building. Whatever was making that sound was crawling slowly up the street to take its place at the intersection, a major one where three avenues crossed. Patiently, Paul Sanders waited. Henry soundlessly awoke. He slid out of bed and trotted out of his room, past his parents' open door -- they were awake, but he said nothing, and if they saw him, they said nothing either. Henry padded down the stairs and out into the warm night. He turned downtown at a dog-trot and ran for three blocks south, one west, and two south. He may or may not have noticed that while the traffic lights still operated, they were no longer obeyed by anyone, including himself. Uncannily, cars and pedestrians set their courses and their speeds and held them, regardless of blind corners, passing and repassing each other without incident and with no perceptible added effort. Henry had been aware for some time of the all but subsonic hooting and of its rapid increase in volume as he ran. When he reached the big intersection, he saw the source of the sound on the same street he ran on, but past the corner where the theater stood. It was a heavy tanklike machine, surmounted by a long flexible neck, on top of which four horns, like square megaphones or speakers, emitted the sound. The neck weaved back and forth, tilting the horns and changing their direction in an elaborate repetitive motion, which had the effect of adding a slow and disturbing vibrato to the sound. Henry dashed across the street and under the side-street marquee. He came abreast of the thing just as it was about to enter the intersection. Without once breaking stride, Henry turned and dived straight into the small space between the drive-spindle of the machine's tread and its carrier rollers. His blood spouted, and on it the spindle spun for a moment; the other track, still driving, caused the machine to swerve suddenly and bump up on the sidewalk under the marquee. Paul Sanders, at the very instant the child had leaped, and before the small head and hands entered the machine's drive, leaned out and down and jammed the chisel point of his slice-bar hard through the fourth link of the chain. Plunging outward, his momentum carried the bar around the chain and, as his weight came upon it, gave the chain a prodigious twist. The eyebolt pulled out of the building wall with a screech, and the corner of the marquee sagged and then, as the weight of the chain came upon it, and Paul Sander's muscular body with it, the marquee let go altogether and came hammering down on the machine. In a welter of loose bricks, sheettin, movie-sign lettering and girders, the machine heaved mightily, its slipping treads grating and shrieking on the pavement. But it could not free itself. Its long neck and four-horned head twitched and slammed against the street for a moment, and then the deep howl faded and was gone, and the head slumped down and lay still. Four men ran to the wreckage, two of them pushing a dolly on which rode an oxy-acetylene outfit. One man went instantly to work taking measurements with scale, micrometer and calipers. Two others had the torch going in seconds and fell to work testing for a portion of the machine which might be cut away. The fourth man, with abrasive rasps and a cold chisel, began investigating the dismantling of the thing. And meanwhile, in unearthly silence and with steady determination, people passed and repassed, on foot, in cars, and went about their business. No crowd collected. Why should it? Everybody knew. 'T'HE entire village population, with Mbala and Nuyu at their head and the witch-doctor following, were within two hundred yards of Mbala's yam patch when the thing came down from the sky. It was broad daylight here, so the ghostly luminous moonlet effect was missing; but the shape of the projector as it dangled by invisible bands from the sphere was outre enough, unprecedented enough, to bring a gasp of astonishment and fear from the villagers. Mbala stopped and bowed down and called his father's name, and all the people followed suit. The sphere dropped rapidly to the yam patch, which happened to be in a spot known locally as Giant's Voice -- a flat area surrounded by four great ship's prow monoliths, the result of some ancient cataclysm which cleft the hill north and south, and again northwest by southeast. It was said that a man could shout here and be heard around the world. Exaggeration or no, it was, judging by the photograph taken by the selenium miner, an ideal position for a projector, and here it was. The sphere set down its burden and started up again without pause, swift as a bouncing ball. The projector began its wavering bass hooting, which swept out through the echoing clefts of the Giant's Voice, rolled down upon the villagers, and silenced their chant as if it had blotted it up. There was a moment -- mere seconds -- of frozen inaction, and then half the warriors turned as one man and plunged away through the jungle. The rest, and all the women and children, drew together, over four hundred of them, and poured swiftly up the slope toward the yam patch. No one said a word or made a sound, yet when they choked the space between two of the stone steeples, half the people ran into the clearing, skirting its edge, while half squatted where they were, blocking their avenue from side to side. The runners reach the north opening, filled it, and also squatted, wordless and waiting. Directly across from the first group, in the westward opening, there was movement, as one, two, a dozen, a hundred heads appeared, steadily and quietly approaching. It was the Ngubwe, neighboring villagers with whom there was a tradition, now quiescent, of wife-stealing and warfare going back to the most ancient days. Mbala's people and the Ngubwe, though aware of each other at all times, were content to respect each other's privacy and each cultivate his own garden, and for the past thirty years or so, there had been room enough for everybody.  rimmed plateau were filled with squatting, patient natives. Even the babies were silent. For nearly an hour there was no sound but the penetrating, disturbing howl of the projector, no motion but its complex, hypnotic pattern of weavings and turnings. And then there was a new sound. Blast after shrill blast, the angry sound approached, and the waiting people rose to their feet. The women tore their clothes to get bright rags, the men filled their lungs and emptied them, and filled them again, getting ready. Through the open southern gateway, four warriors erupted, howling and capering. Hard on their heels came a herd of furious elephants, three, four, seven -- nine in all, one old bull, two young ones, four cows and two calves, distraught, angry, goaded beyond bearing. The fleeing warriors separated, two to the right, two to the left, sprinted to and disappeared in the crowds waiting there. The big bull trumpeted shrilly, wheeled, and charged to the right, only to face nearly two hundred shrieking, capering people. He swerved away, his momentum carrying him along the rock wall and to the second opening, where he met the same startling cacophony. The other elephants, all but one young bull and one of the calves, thundered along behind him, and when he drew up as if to wheel and attack the second group, he was pounded and pressed from behind by his fellows. By now quite out of his great fearless placid mind, he put up his trunk, turned his mighty shoulders against those who pressed him, and found himself glaring at this noisy, shining thing in the center of the clearing. He shrieked and made for it, followed by the bellowing herd. The noisy, shining thing moved on its endless treads, but not swiftly enough, nor far enough, nor in enough places at once to avoid the tons of hysteria which struck it. The elephants tore off its howling head and its neck, in three successive broken bits, and shouldered it over on its side and then on its back. The howling stopped with deafening suddenness when the head came off, but the tracks kept treading air for minutes. " lin, too, on the machine which landed in the park near the famous zoo, though this was a more disciplined performance by trained animals who did exactly as they were told. In China, a projector squatted in a cleft in the mountains, under a railroad trestle, and began hooting into the wind. An old nomad with arthritis hobbled out of the rocks and pulled two spikes, shifted one rail. A half-mile down the track, the engineer and fireman of a locomotive pulling a combination passenger-freight train with over four hundred people aboard wordlessly left their posts, climbed back over the tender and uncoupled the locomotive from the first car. There was, on the instant, a man at every handwheel on the train. It coasted to a stop, while far ahead the locomotive thundered over the edge of the trestle and was crushing the projector before the alien machine could move a foot. In Baffin Land, a group of Eskimo hunters stood transfixed, watching a projector squatting comfortably on mounded and impassable pack ice and, in the crisp air, blaring its message across the wastes to the ears of four and possibly five widely scattered settlements. The hunters had not long to wait; high above the atmosphere, a mighty Atlas missile approached, and, while still well below their horizon, released a comparatively tiny sliver, the redoubtable Hawk. The little Hawk came shrieking out of the upper, air, made a wide half-circle to kill some of its excess velocity, and then zeroed in on the projector with the kind of accuracy the old-time Navy bombardiers would brag about: "I dropped it right down his stack." From then on, missiles got most of the projectors, though, in crowded areas, other means were found. In Bombay, a projector took its greatest toll -- one hundred and thirty-six, when a mob simply overran one of the machines and tore it to pieces with their bare hands. And, in Rome, one man dispatched four of them and came out of it unscathed. One man? Unscathed? A boy, rather, walking along the elevated section of the new highway over the hills just north of Rome, who paused for not more than three seconds in his steady walk, then wordlessly turned and entered the Lagonda which drifted up to the curb just then. It was driven by a bright-eyed young woman, not excessively pretty, but of that unusual pure Italian type with pale red hair and green eyes. She had nothing to say, but drove the overpowered, scalded-cat Lagonda with a light touch and a sure hand. As if on some unseen cue, the boy opened the door, slipped out on the running board, and inched forward to lodge himself firmly between the hood and the flaring fender, his knee hooked over the bracket which supports the great moon of a headlight. speed, he unclamped his arm from the violin case he had been clutching all this while, opened it and took out the violin, letting the case flap away like a misshapen bat. Stolidly he broke the violin in two, separating neck from soundbox, and with his teeth pulled the four pegs, freeing the strings. He let the soundbox flutter off and splinter on the steel-bound curb, and with the fingerboard of the violin in his hand, its curled scroll uppermost, he unhooked his knee from the headlight brace and got his free hand on it instead. There he crouched, slit-eyed. As the elevated road swept in a broad curve to the left, the girl tooled the car as far as she could into the left lane, then put on a burst of speed which made the boy Guido's muscles crack, and shot diagonally across the road and up on the sidewalk at the right. At the last possible instant, she wrenched the wheel and swerved away from the hard teeth of the railings, and Guido sprang up and out, soaring high over the sidehill, hurtling through the air at nearly eighty kilometers per hour. For her velocity to the microsecond, for his altitude and trajectory to seven decimal places, the best computing minds on Earth had done their utmost, matching these factors to all the others: his height and weight and the strength of his legs, the fact that of all pedestrians in the area at the time, he alone should possess such an object as the neck and carven scroll of a violin, which, it happened, was precisely the right size and curvature capable of disabling a vital membrane in the throat of the projectors at one blow; all matched with the observed trajectory of a descending sphere which carried, not one, but four projectors, obviously to a place in the City of Seven Hills where, by landing at the same place and moving apart a minimal distance, they could blanket a maximum area and number of people. At the very peak of his parabola, and past it into the sharp descending curve, his free arm and both legs snapped like a trap around the intertwined necks of the four projectors. They were bound so that their heads were one atop the other. Guido shinnied upward far enough to reach the topmost, and crammed his shaped and hardened club into its horn. He silenced it and, with three quick blows, the other three, striking the last just as the whole package touched Earth. The sphere began its bounce skyward angrily, but fouled in the coils of a giant steel-cored rope mat, one of those used to muffle blasting in built-up areas. The mat had been hung like a great curtain under the viaduct, and arranged to fall out and down as the sphere dipped low. A cluster of silent, sweating people waiting there caught the comer ropes and instantly anchored the mat to girders and concrete piers, and the sphere lunged and lunged upward until suddenly it began to grow hot and then fell leadenly to the ground. Guido helped take it apart to find out how it worked. beading her bright body her head to one side the water sparkling off her hair, she smiles, says All Right Handsome What Are You Going to Do About It? A soft rumble and a glare of light: sky. Crash! A brighter, unbearable flash of light on light, a sharp smell of burning chemicals, a choking cloud of dust and smoke and the patter-patter of falling debris. Confusion, bewilderment, disorientation and growing anger at the deprivation of a dream. The sharp command to every sentience, mechanical or not, on the entire hilltop: Get Gurlick out of here! A flash of silver overhead, then a strange overall sticky, pore-choking sensation, like being coated with warm oil, and, underneath, the tom hill dwindles away. There are still hundreds of projectors left, row on row of them, but from the size of the terraces where they are parked, there must have been hundreds of thousands more. Crash! A half-dozen of the projectors bulge skyward and fall back in shatters and shards. Look there, a flight of jets. See, two silver spheres, dodging, dancing; then the long curve of a seeking missile points one out, and the trail and the burst make a bright ball on a smoky string, painted across the sky. Crash! Crash! Even as the scarred hill disappears in swift distance, the parked projectors can be seen bursting skyward, a dozen and a dozen and a score of them, pressing upward through the rain of pieces from those blasted a breath or a blink ago; and Cra -- No, not crash this time, but a point, a porthole, a bay-window looking in to the core of hell, all the colors and all too bright, growing, growing, too, too big to be growing so fast, taking the hilltop, the hillside, the whole hill And for minutes afterward, hanging stickily by something invisible, frighteningly in midair under the silver sphere, but not feeling wind or acceleration or any of the impossible turns as the sphere whizzes along low, hedge-hopping, ground-hugging, back-tracking and hovering to hide; for minutes and minutes afterward, through the drifting speckles of overdazzled eyeballs, the pastel column can be seen rising and rising flatheaded over the land, thousands and thousands of feet, building a roof with eaves, the eaves curling and curling out, or are they the grasping fingers of rows and rows of what devils who have climbed up the inside of the spout, about to put up what hellish faces? "Bastits," Gurlick whimpered, "tryin' to atom-bomb me. You tell 'em who I am?" No response. The Medusa was calculating to capacity -- to its immense, infinitely varied capacity. It had expected to succeed in unifying the mind of humanity. It had correctly predicted its certainty of success and the impossibility of failure. But success like this? utes, humanity destroyed seventy-one per cent of the projectors and forty-three per cent of the spheres. To do this, it used everything and anything that came to hand, regardless of the cost in lives or materiel: It put out its fire by smothering it with its mink coat. It killed its rattlesnake by hitting it with the baby. It moved, reactive and accurate and almost in reflex, like a man holding a burning stick, and as the heat increases near one finger, it will release and withdraw and find another purchase while he thinks of other things. It threw a child into the drive of a projector because he fit, and because he contained the right amount of the right grade of lubricant for just that purpose at just that time. It could understand in microseconds that the nearest thing to the exact necessary tool for tearing the throat out of a projector would be the neck and scroll of a violin. And like this: Beginning in the forty-first minute, humanity launched the first precision weapon against the projectors, having devised and produced a seeking mechanism which would infallibly find and destroy projectors (though they did not radiate in the electromagnetic spectrum, not even infrared) and then made it compact enough to cram into the warhead of a Hawk, and, further, applied the Hawk to the powerful Atlas. And this was only the first. In the fifty-second minute -- that is, less than an hour after the Medusa pushed the button to unify the mind of Man -- humanity was using hasty makeshifts of apalling efficiency, devices which reversed the steering commands of the projectors (like the one which, under its own power, walked off the Hell Gate Bridge into eighty feet of water) and others that rebroadcast the projectors' signals # out of phase, nullifying them. At the ninety-minute mark, humanity was knocking out two of every three flying spheres it saw, not by accurate aiming (because as yet humanity couldn't tool up to countermeasure inertialess turns at six miles per second) but by an ingenious application of the theory of random numbers, by which they placed proximity missiles where the sphere wasn't but almost certainly would be -- and all too often was. The Medusa had anticipated success. But to sum up: success like this? For hadn't humanity stamped out every operable instrument of the Medusa's invasion (save Gurlick, about whom they couldn't know) in just two hours and eight minutes? This incredible species, uniquely possessed of a defense against the Medusa (the Medusa still stubbornly insisted) in its instant, total fragmentation at the invader's first touch, seemed uniquely to possess other qualities as well. It would be wise -- more: it was imperative -- that Earth be brought into the fold where it would have to take orders. Hence -- Gurlick. TT swept Gurlick back into its confidence, told him that in spite of the abruptness of his awakening, he was now ready to go out on his own. It described to him his assignment, which made Gurlick snicker like an eight-year-old behind the barn, and assured him that it would set up for him the most perfect opportunity its mighty computers could devise. Speed, however, was of the essence -- which was all right with Gurlick, who spat on his hands and made cluck-cluck noises from his back teeth and wrinkled up half his face with an obscene wink, and snickered again to show his willingness. The sphere hovered now at treetop level over heavily wooded ground, keeping out of sight while awaiting the alien computation of the best conceivable circumstances for Gurlick's project This might well have proved lengthy, based as it was Gurlick's partial, mistaken, romantic, deluded and downright pornographic information, and might even have supplied some highly amusing conclusions, since they would have been based on logic, and Gurlick's most certainly were not. These diverting computations were lost, however, and lost forever when the sphere dropped dizzyingly, released Gurlick so abruptly that he tumbled, and informed him that he was on his own -- the sphere had been detected. Growling and grumbling, Gurlick sprawled under the trees and watched the sphere bullet upward and away, and a moment later, the appearance of a Hawk, or rather its trail, scoring the sky in a swift reach like the spread of a strain-crack in window glass. He did not see the inevitable, but heard it in due course, the faint distant thump against the roof of the world which marked the end of the sphere's existence -- and very probably the end of all the Medusa's artifacts on Earth. He said an unprintable syllable, rolled over and eyed the woodlands with disfavor. This wasn't going to be like flying over it like a bug over a carpet, with some bigbrain doing all your thinking for you. On the other hand... this was the payoff. This was where Gurlick got his -- where at long last he could strike back at a whole world full of bastits. He got to his feet and began walking. hive contemplated itself and its works, its gains, its losses and its new nature. First, there was the intercommunication -- a thing so huge, so different, that few minds could previously have imagined it. No analogy could suffice; no concepts of infinite telephone exchanges, or multi-sideband receivers, could hint at the quality of that gigantic cognizance. To describe it in terms of its complexity would be as impossible -- and as purblind -- as an attempt to describe fine lace by a description of each of its threads. It had, rather, texture. Your memory, and his and his, and hers over the horizon's shoulderall your memories are mine. More: your personal orientation in the framework of your own experiences, your I-in-the-past, is also mine. More: your skills remain your own (is great music made less for being shared?) but your sensitivity to your special subject is mine now, and your pride in your excellence is mine now. More: though bound to the organism, mankind, as never before, I am I as never before. When Man has demands on me, I am totally dedicated to Man's purpose. Otherwise, within the wide, wide limits of mankind's best interests, I am as never before a free agent; I am I to a greater degree, and with less obstruction from within and without, than ever before possible. For gone, gone altogether, are individual man's hosts of pests and devils, which in strange combinations have plagued us all in the past : the They don't want me devil, the Suppose-they-find-out devil, the twin imps of They-arelying-to-me and They-are-tryingto-cheat-me; gone, gone is I'mafraid-to-try, and They-won't-letme, and I-couldn't-be-loved-if-theyknew. Along with the imps and devils, other things disappeared -- things regarded throughout human history as basic, thematic, keys to the structures of lives and cultures. Now if a real thing should disappear, a rock or a tree or a handful of water, there will be thunder and a wind and other violence, depending upon what form the vanished mass owned. Or if a great man disappears, there is almighty confusion in the rush to fill the vacuum of his functions. But the things which disappeared now proved their unreality by the unruffled silence in which they disappeared. Tariffs, taxes, boundaries and frontiers, hatred and suspicion of humans by humans, and language itself (except as part of an art) with all the difficulties of communication between languages and within them. In short, removed now was mankind's cess-gland, the secretions of which had poisoned its body since it was born, distorting decencies like survival and love into greed and lust, turning Achievement ("I have built") into Position ("I have power"). QO much for humanity's new  state-of-being. As to its abilities, they were simply based, straightforward. There are always many ways to accomplish anything, but only one of them is really best. Which of them is best -- that is the source of all argument on the production of anything, the creator of factions among the designers, and the first enemy of speed and efficiency. But when humanity became a hive and needed something -- as, for example, the adaptation of the swift hunting missile Hawk to the giant carrier Atlas -- the device was produced without considerations of pride or profit, without waste motion, and without interpersonal friction of any kind. The decision was made, the job was done. In those heady first moments, anything and everything available was used -- but with precision. Later (by minutes) fewer ingenious stopgaps were used, more perfect tools were shaped from the materials at hand. And still later (by hours) there was full production of new designs. Mankind now used exactly the right tool for the jobs it had to do... And within it, each individual flowered, finding freedoms to be, to act, to take enrichment and pleasure as never before. What were the things that Dimity (Salome?) Carmichael had always needed, wanted to do? She could do them now. An Italian boy, Guido, packed taut with talent, awaited the arrival of the greatest living violinist from behind a now-collapsed Iron Curtain; they would hereafter spend their lives and do their work together. The parents of a small stiff boy named Henry contemplated, as all the world contemplated, what had happened to him and why, and how totally impossible it would be for such a thing ever to happen again. Sacrifice there must be from time to time, even now; but never again a useless one. Everyone now knew, as if in personal memory, how fiercely Henry had wanted to live in that flash of agony which had eclipsed him. All Earth shared the two kinds of religious experience discovered by the Africans Mbala and Nuyu, wherein one had become confirmed in his faith and the other had found it. What, specifically, had brought to them it was of no significance; the fact of their devotion was the important thing to be shared, for it is in the finest nature of humanity to worship, fight it as he sometimes may. The Universe being what it is, there is always plus ultra, plus ultra -- powers and patterns beyond understanding, and more beyond these when these are understood. Out there is the call to which faith is the natural response and worship the natural approach. Such was humanity when it became a hive -- a beautiful entity, balanced and fine; self-sufficient and wondrously alive. A pity, in a way, that such a work of art was to exist in this form for so brief a time... sulated from the human hive, member of another, sensed none of this. Driven, hungry through a whole spectrum of appetites, full of resentment, he shuffled through the woods. He had been vaguely aware of the outskirts of a town not far from where the silver sphere had set him down. He would, he supposed, find what he wanted there, though wanting it was the only thing quite clear to him. How he was to get it was uncertain; but get it he must. He was aware of the presence within him of the Medusa, observing, computing, but -- not directing, cognizant as it was of the fact that the fine details of such an operation must be left to the species itself. Had it had its spheres and other machines available, there might have been a great deal it could do to assist Gurlick. But now -- he was on his own. He was in virgin forest, the interlocked foliage overhead dimming the mid-morning sunshine to an underwater green, and the footing was good, there being little underbrush and a gentle downslope. Gurlick gravitated downhill, knowing he would encounter a path or a road sooner or later, and monotonously cursed his empty stomach, his aching feet, and his enemies. He heard voices. He stopped, shrank back against a treetrunk, and peered. For a moment, he could detect nothing, and then, off to the right, he heard a sudden musical laugh. He looked toward the sound and saw a brief motion of something blue. He came out of hiding and, scuttling clumsily from tree to tree, went to investigate. There were three of them, girls in their mid-teens, dressed in halters and shorts, giggling over the chore of building a fire in a small clearing. They had a string of fish, pike and lake trout, and a frying pan, and seemed completely and hilariously preoccupied. Gurlick, from a vantage point above them, chewed on his lower lip and wondered what to do. He had no delusions about approaching openly and sweet-talking his way into their circle. It would be far wiser, he knew, to slip away and go looking elsewhere, for something surer, safer. On the other hand... He heard the crackle of bacon fat as one of the girls dropped the tender slivers into the frying pan. He looked at the three lithe young bodies, and at the waiting string of fish, half of which were scaled and beheaded, and quietly moaned. There was too much of what was wanted down there for him to turn his back. Then a curl of fragrance from the bacon reached him and toppled his reason. He rose from his crouch and in three bounds was down the slope and in their midst, moaning and slavering. One of the youngsters bounded away to the right, one to the left. The third fell under his hands, shrieking. "Now you jus' be still," he panted, trying to hold his victim, trying to protect himself against her hysterical slappings, writhings, clawings. "I ain't goin' to hurt you if you jus' -- uh!" feet by one of the escapees, who had returned at a dead run and crashed him with a hard shoulder. He rolled over and found himself staring up at the second girl who had run away, as she stood over him with a stone the size of a grapefruit raised in both hands. She brought it down; it hit Gurlick on the left cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, and filled the ters of pain. He fell back, wagging his head, pawing at his face, trying to get some vision back and kick away the sick dizziness, and when at last he could see again, he was alone with the campfire, the frying pan, the string of fish. "Li'l bastits," he growled, holding his face. He looked at his hands, on which were flecks of his own blood, swore, turned in a circle as if to find and pursue them, and then squatted before the fire, reached for two cleaned fish and dropped them hissing into the pan. Well, he'd got that much out of it, anyway. He had eaten four of the fish and had two more cooking when he heard voices again, a man's deep "Which way now? Over here?" and a girl's answer, "Yes, where the smoke's coming from." Jailbait... of course, of course they'd have gone for help! Gurlick cursed them all and lumbered downslope, away from the sound of voices. Boy, he'd messed up, but good. The whole hillside would be crawling with people hunting him. He had to get out of here. He moved as cautiously as he could, quite sure he was being watched by hundreds of eyes, yet seeing no one until he glimpsed two men off to his left and below him. One had binoculars on a strap around his neck, the other a shotgun. Gurlick, faint with terror, slumped down between a treetrunk and a rock, and cowered there until he could hear their voices, and while he heard them, and after he heard them, with their curt certain syllables and their cold lack of mercy. When all was quite quiet again, he rose, and at that moment became aware of an aircraft sound. It approached rapidly, and he dropped back into his hiding place, trembling, and peeped up at the glittering patches of blue in the leafy roof. The machine flew directly overhead, low, too slowly -- a helicopter. He heard it thrashing the air off to the north, downhill from him, and for a while he could not judge if it was going or coming or simply circling down there. In his pride, he was convinced that its business was Gurlick and only Gurlick, and in his ignorance he was certain it had seen him through the thick cover. IT went away at last and the forest returned to its murmuring silence. He heard a faint shout behind and above him, and scuttled from cover and away from the sound. Pausing for breath, he caught another glimpse of the man with the shotgun off to his left, and escaped to the right and down. And, thus pursued and herded, he came to the water's edge. There was a dirt path there and no one in sight; and it was warm and sunny and peaceful. Slowly, Gurlick's panic subsided and, as he walked along the path, there was a deep throb of anticipation within him. He'd gotten away clean; and had outdistanced his enemies and now, enemies, beware! The path curved closer to the bank of the lake. Alders stood thick here, and there was the smell of moss. The path turned and the shade was briefly darker here, at the verge of the floods of gold over the water. And there by the path it lay, the little pile of fabric, bright red, shiny black, filmy white with edges iced with lace... Gurlick stopped walking, stopped breathing until his chest hint. Then he moved slowly past this incredible, impossible consolidation of his dream, and went to the bushes at the water's edge. She was out there -- she. He made a sharp wordless sound and stood forward, away from the bushes. She turned in the water and stared at him, her eyes round. Emancipated now, free to be what she had always wished to be, and to do what she needed to do without fear or hesitation; swimming naked in the sun, sure and fearless, shameless; utterly oriented within herself and herself within the matrix of humanity and all its known data, Salome Carmichael stood up in the water, under the sun, and said, "Hello, Handsome." S O ended humanity within its planetary limits; so ended the self-contained, self-aware specieshive which had for such a brief time been able to feel, to the ends of its world, its multifarious self. The end came some hours after the helicopter -- the same one which had set her down by the pond -- had come for Salome Carmichael, which it had the instant Gurlick quit the scene. Gurlick had seen it, from where he crouched guiltily in the bushes. After it had gone away, he slowly climbed to his feet and made his way back to the pond. He hunkered down with his back to a tree and regarded the scene unwinkingly. It had been right there, on the moss. Over there had lain the pretty little heap of clothes, so clean, so soft, so very red, shiny black, the white so pretty. The strangest thing that had ever happened to him in his whole life had happened here, stranger than the coming of the Medusa, stranger than the unpeopled factory back there in the mountains, stranger even than the overwhelming fact of this place, of her being here, of the unbelievable coincidence of it all with his dream. And that strangest thing of all was that once, when she was here, she had cried out, and he had then been gentle. He had been gentle with all his heart and mind and body, for a brief while flooded, melted, swept away by gentleness. No wrinkled raisin from out of space, no concept like the existence of a single living thing so large it permeated two galaxies and part of a third, could be so shockingly alien to him, everything he was and had ever been, as this rush of gentleness. Its microscopic seed must have lain encysted within him all his life, never encountering a single thing, large or small, which could warm it to germination. Now it had burst open, burst him open, and he was shocked, shaken, macerated as never before in his bruised existence. He crouched against the tree and regarded the moss, and the lake, and the place where the red and the black and the lace had lain, and wondered why he had run away. He wondered how he could have let her go. The gentleness was consuming him even now... he had to find somewhere to put it down, but there wouldn't be anyone else, anyone or anything, for him to be gentle to, anywhere in the world. He began to cry. Gurlick had always wept easily, his facile tears his only outlet for fear, and anger, and humiliation, and spite. This, however, was different. This was very difficult to do, painful in the extreme, and impossible to stop until he was racked, wrung out, exhausted. It tumbled him over and left him groveling on the moss. Then he slept, abruptly, his whipped consciousness fleeing away to the dark. light? Stand here by me, friend, on this hillside, under the black and freckled sky. Which stars do you know -- Polaris? Good. And the bright one yonder, that's Sirius. Look at them now: at Polaris, at Sirius. Quickly now: Polaris, Sirius. And again: Sirius, Polaris. How far apart are they? It says in the book, thousands of lightyears. How many? Too many: never mind. But how long does it take you to flick your gaze from one to the other and back? A second? A half-second next time, then a tenth? You can't say that nothing, absolutely nothing, has traveled between the two. Your vision has: your attention has. You now understand, you have the rudiments of understanding what it is to flick a part of yourself from star to star, just as (given the skill) you may shift from soul to soul. With such a shift, down such a path, came the Medusa at the instant of its marriage to humanity. In all the history of humanity, the one instant (save death) of most significance is the instant of syngamy, the moment of penetration by the sperm of the ovum. Yet almost never is there a heralding of this instant, nor a sign: it comes to pass in silence and darkness, and no one ever knows but the mindless flecks of complex jelly directly involved. Not so now; and never before, and never again would marriage occur with such explosion. A microsecond after that melding, Gurlick's altered seed to the welcoming ovum of a human, the Medusa of space shot down its contacting thread, an unerring harpoon carrying a line to itself, and all of its Self following in the line, ready to reach and fill humanity, make of it a pseudopod, the newest member of its sprawling corpus. But if the Medusa's bolt can be likened to a harpoon, then it can be said that the uprushing flood it met was like a volcano. The Medusa had not a micromicrosecond in which to realize what had happened to it. It did not die; it was not killed any more than humanity would have been killed had the Medusa's plan been realized. Humanity would have able creature. But now... sciousness, blocked as it was by the thought-lines of the Medusa. These lines, however, were open still, and when humanity became Medusa, it flooded down to Gurlick and made him welcome. Come! it called, and whirled him up and outward, showing and sharing its joy and strength and pride, showering him with wonders of a thousand elsewheres and a hundred heres; it showed him how to laugh at the most rarefied technician's joke and how to feel the structure of sestinae and sonnets, of bridges and Bach. It spoke to him saying We and granting him the right to regard it all and say I. And more: he had been promised a kingship, and now he had it, for all this sentient immensity acknowledged to him its debt, and let him but make the phantom of a wish of a thought, and his desires would be fulfilled. And it was at this that humanity swirled and steadied, perplexed. For Gurlick, numb and passive as he tossed like a chip on their ocean of wonders, had a wish, and had it, and had it. True, none of this could have come about without him. This result could not have been with anyone else in his place, so -- true -- enough -- he was owed a debt. Pay it then. Pay the debt; you do not reward a catalyst by changing it, the unchanging, into something else. So -- take away hunger and poverty (of body and soul), deprivation and discomfort gnd humiliation, and you take away the very core of his being -- his sole claim to superiority. Don't ask him to look out among the stars and join in the revelries of giants. Don't thank him, don't treat him, and above all, do not take away from him his reasons to hate: they have become his life. So they paid him, meticulously to the specifications he himself (though all unknowing) set up. And as long as he lived, there would be a city comer holding drab streets and fumes, suddenly sullen pedestrians and careless, dangerous aimers of trucks and cabs; obligingly moist unbearable heat and bitter cold; and bars where Gurlick could go and put in his head, whining for a drink, and bartenders would obediently send him out into the wet with his hatred, back to a wrecked truck in a junkyard where he might lie in the dark and dream that dream of his. "Bastits," Gurlick would mutter in the dark, hating... happy. "Lousy bastits." ' the creature; flooded it, filled it to its furthermost crannies, drenched its most remote cells with the Self of humankind. Die? Never that; the Medusa was alive as never before, with a new and different kind of life, in which its slaves were freed but its motivations unified; where the individual was courted and honored and brought special nutrients, body and mind, and where, freely, "want to" forever replaced "must." And all for want of a datum: that intelligence might exist in individuals, and that dissociated individuals might cooperate and yet not be a hive. For there is no structure on Earth which could not have been built by rats, were the rats centrally directed and properly motivated. How could the Medusa have known? Thousands upon thousands of species and cultures throughout the galaxies have technological progress as advanced as that of Earth, and are yet composed of individuals no more highly evolved than termites, lemurs or shrews. What slightest hint was there for the Medusa that a hivehumanity would be a different thing than a super-rat? Humanity had passed the barriers of language and of individual isolation on its planet. It passed the barriers of species now, and of isolation in its cosmos. As available to Guido as the faith of Mbala now became the crystal symphonies of the black planets past Ophiuchus. Charlotte Dunsay, reaching across the world to her husband in Hobart, Tasmania, might share with him a triple sunrise in the hub of Orion's great Nebula. As one man could share the being of another here on Earth, so both, and perhaps a small child with them, could fuse their inner selves with some ancient contemplative mind leeched to the rocks in some roaring methane cataract, or soar with some insubstantial life-forms adrift where they were born in the high layers of some dense planet's atmosphere. So ended mankind, to be born again as hive-humanity; so ended the hive of Earth to become starman, the immeasurable, the limitless, the growing; maker of music beyond music, poetry beyond words, and full of wonder, full of worship. CO too ended Gurlick, the isolated, alone among humankind denied membership in the fusion of humans, full of a steaming fog, aglow with his flickerings of hate and the soft shine of corruption, member of something other than humankind. For, while humanity had been able to read him (and his dream) and herd him through the forest to its fulfillment, it had never been able to reach his conIs this why history is so untidy... it is being used as a social sewage system? O NE minute Roykin was in the Web and it was beginning to vibrate and get hot. And then red lightnings flashed and crashed, and then he was naked, on dusty ground, under a pale winter sun. The wind was knifely cold. Roykin stood up and looked angrily around. A hoarse voice shouted at him, a voice like Grillard's voice, in a language he didn't understand. Grillard had all of stuffy male wrath in his voice when he talked to Roykin, and so had this voice. But it was not Grillard. It was sobering. Roykin's anger chilled as quickly as his body, for this was no place for anger. He looked around him and what he saw made him momentarily afraid. Bare dirt was underfoot. A frozen sky was overhead. Low wooden barracks surrounded him. Nearby was a clot of naked men with doomed and opaque faces. They were looking at him. An irregular crescent of men in brown uniforms, splashed jagged black-andwhite at the shoulders, surrounded them all. The uniformed men were looking at him too. Roykin thought anxiously: Curse Grillard, what sort of place is this? It was a cold place that stank with a thick, pungent stink of sweat and sickness. It was a lot worse than the galleys, Roykin admitted, and at the. time he had thought that there would never be anything worse. But that had been his first offense. Naturally this would be worse; Roykin could trust Grillard to see to that... A man in a brown uniform stepped forward and struck him on the head with an eighteen-inch club. The blow floored Roykin. XT E climbed to his feet with the merely tiresome sensation of breath swelling a balloon. The man was standing over him still. There was no passion in his face, Roykin noticed. He looked at Roykin as a carpenter might look at a nailhead. Perhaps the nailhead would need another blow and perhaps not, but he wasn't angry at the nail. Hurriedly, Roykin scrambled over to the knot of naked men. They marched off in the shivering cold. The man with the club looked emptily after. The line of bareskinned men passed a sign, with lettering on it that was hooked curlicues and straggling lines. Roykin couldn't read it very well, partly because it wasn't in his own language and partly because, although the letters were more ornate than he was used to. But underneath the more complicated words was one simple one. He read it: Roykin slept that night on a board floor, with cold air coming up between the cracks. The smell was appalling. It was a fetid slaughterhouse stench, like the hot steamy gusts from a rendering plant, but it wasn't hot -- it was cold as old ice. It was very difficult for Roykin to get to sleep, particularly because a baby was crying annoyingly near his ear. The baby wept and wept. Curse Grillard, Roykin thought in fatigue. His head still hurt badly and that was an inconvenience. Still... it wasn't so bad. Roykin had always been able to adjust himself to whatever came along; it was the thing he prided himself on. At least he wasn't pushing an eighteenfoot oar, as in the galleys; that was bad, but he had adjusted to that well enough, though it was work. Roykin didn't like work. And they didn't seem to care if the prisoners worked or not in this place, whatever this place was, and that in itself was an improvement. Roykin curled up and set his mind to trying to go to sleep; but the crying baby bothered him. Roykin propped himself up and looked around. There was no baby. It was a man, ancient as Methuselah's father, with arms like pipestems and a face hacked out of dirty bone -- no flesh, no softness, stretched rock-tight. And his eyes were closed and he was crying, crying. Roykin could think of nothing that he could do or wanted to do about it, and accordingly returned to the effort to go to sleep. But he remembered things drowsily : things from another place and time. Grillard, furiously angry, hissing into the microphone: "You don't deserve another chance, Roykin. You've had chance after chance, and what do you make of them?" "I don't like your chances," said Roykin. "The world doesn't like you, Roykin! You're antisocial. You've stolen. You've hurt people. What are we to do? Corrective school?" "I don't like your school." "All right. That leaves only one thing." Bang came the gavel, and the microphone enlarged the sound flatly. "Second offense, thirty days. Take him away." And the greasy-feelered police, sparkling blue from the ends of their sensors, wrapped themselves around Roykin and rolled him away to the Web. Roykin, remembering, fell asleep to dream of Grillard and -- with fond contempt -- of Zenomia, who had watched at the Web as he went and would be waiting at the Web as he returned. Joke on her. Joke on Grillard -- great joke! For this to Grillard was punishment, designed to correct, this Webborne transference to a place of punishment and pain. But Roykin had never been afraid of pain; and to Roykin pain had never been punishment. around naked, though the filth that was in the clothing Roykin received was worse than bare skin. Roykin needed someone to talk to, and in time found someone -- no, not one of his own people, but what was called a Spaniard. The language he spoke was not the inflected loan-worded Spanish Roykin was used to, but an earlier version; still, Roykin could make himself understood and could understand, though some of the words of the jailers were more familiar than the Spanish. And he had found out where he was. Belsen? A concentration camp, explained his informant. For criminals, Jews, homosexuals, aliens and the politically suspect. For what? Haltingly, the Spaniard tried to explain each of the terms, but Roykin lacked patience for instruction in the mores of this time. Where? he asked. Germany. Where was Germany? His informant began to look worried, particularly as one of the men in brown uniforms was wandering near. Silently the man crept away. But Roykin at last remembered; yes, Germany -- he had heard of it. Things fell into place. He discovered that the gauntlet he had run, naked, was called "medical inspection" and, for a while, Roykin thought wonderingly of the spectrum-readers of his own time, that diagnosed physical state by electronic measurement. But Roykin understood these matters: this was a place where things were not called by proper names; it was a place where things were concealed in part for purposes of security and in part so that those who were here should lack even the assurance of knowing what was in store for them... and should therefore suspect and fear everything. Roykin determined to remember that principle; it would be helpful when the thirty days were up. The men in brown uniforms put Roykin to work. He was taken to an open ditch where blank-faced men in filthy rags like his own were up-ending wheelbarrows of ash into the trough and others were striking the ash with great hammers. Roykin looked closer and saw what the hammers were for. Mixed in the ash were pieces of calcined bone; it was the task of the hammers to shatter them out of shape, perhaps so that the ash itself could be added anonymously to some farmer's soil, perhaps out of an instinct for neatness. Roykin rebelled. No, not at the cremated remains, for that was to be expected in a punishment time, but: "Work!" he cried, in the halting German he had begun to pick up. "I shall not work! I am not here for work!" "Halfs mahl," said one of the men in brown uniforms standing by, and moved passionlessly to hit him in the face. Roykin felt his teeth crumble. He reeled to where he was ordered to go and stood for a moment, tasting the pain. It was an inconvenience again, he thought, appraising it; but not too bad, not too bad at all. Pain had never been punishment for Roykin, as has been said. Pain is only a tingle in the nerve endings, not different from touch or taste or chill; it is only the connotations of pain that make it feared. The pain of a knife rending through the flesh is only in part the message that the cut nerves send. In part it is also fear, and that the greater part -- fear of death; fear of long slow healing aches; fear that it will never heal, that an arm or a leg may be lost or an eye go blind. Pain itself is not always feared -- even by others than Roykin; the grueling pain of childbirth is more sought than evaded. From such fears as make pain insupportable, Roykin, for good reason, was immune. To that degree, he was immune from pain; and this was what Grillard had not been able to learn. All the same, Roykin picked up his hammer and began to punish the calcined bone. was danger here. Thirty days is not long, but it was up to him to survive the thirty days; it would be no court's fault if he were killed first. And perhaps, he mused, it had even been Grillard's wish that he should die here in this place, and thus the problem of Roykin should once and for all be solved. The thought amusing him, he laughed. He determined, then, to avoid the worst of the punishments these men offered. Of such punishments there were many. Around him was more than pain, pain multiplied to a pitch that raised it to another magnitude entirely. Roykin discovered that every person in this place was here because it was desired that he die. Some were killed outright by blow or knife or gun. Some were starved. Some were placed in enormous gas chambers, stripped and extinguished, and their corpses ransacked Roykin thought, by the twentieth day, almost wistfully of the galleys. This was not the galleys. This was something different. Here the imprisoned were not commanded to work until they died. Here they were commanded to die. Roykin had to admit that it made a pattern and even that it had a certain elegance. This was Early Machine Age. There was no real need for human slaves, which inevitably made a difference in attitude toward the preservation of human life; the impulse to preserve life rested only on ethical considerations, not on the solid basis of conservation of usable property. There were, however, no ethical considerations in Belsen. It was a long stride from his tenthcentury galleys, where his first offense had brought him, but it was not a stride upward. Still, he survived, though he grew quite thin. Twenty days. Thirty. And he felt the invisible Web wrapped, tight and burning, around him. The dying prisoner whom he had been robbing of a moldy piece of bread looked apathetically up at him, then wonderingly, then disappeared. Roykin dropped a few inches onto a padded couch. Bright lights blazed around him. He was home.  him -- of course. "Pfiu," she said, wrinkling her nose. "Darling Roykin, I am here but -- pfiu." Roykin felt strong as a tiger. He fought his way free of the Web and kicked against the protecting bars. "I stink!" he exulted. "Ah, we all did, Zenomia, but I lived and the others didn't You, there! Let me out of here." Behind his glass panel, the Web operator silently disapproved, but he moved a hand and the bars that kept visitors from tangling with the Web dropped away. Roykin bounded out and clutched the girl. "We'll get married again," he planned. "I need a woman tonight. Now! You'll do." "Roykin," she said, straining away, "please bathe. I'll wait." Roykin laughed and, walking lightly, stripped off his clothes and threw them at the Web operator. They struck the glass and left a mark. Roykin laughed again. He went surely to the dressing rooms on the other side of the door, for he remembered the way. Naked and laughing to himself, he passed unremembered faces, men and women who perhaps worked there, perhaps had business elsewhere in the building, perhaps had come to see what it was like -- everyone knew about the Web, though only a few like Roykin would ever experience it themselves. Or perhaps they had come to see Roykin! Some of the faces seemed to know him, for they whispered to each other. He laughed louder. Roykin! Roykin knew Roykin, too -- it was a name that everyone should know! He was still laughing as the bath sprayed him, soaped him, rinsed him and dried him. "Love?" whispered the bath recording, its perfume sprays and powder jets cocked. "Sport? Sleep? What is your pleasure?" Roykin frowned. The mood for Zenomia had passed him. "Nothing," he decided. "Just get me out of here." Warm gusts of air wrapped themselves obediently around him and the curtain slipped away. He stepped out and clothed himself, while Zenomia waited lovingly. But he said grandly, "Not now. I will see you later, perhaps. Now I intend to visit with Grillard." on stilts in six feet of water. "Hoy!" cried Roykin, waving at the house. "Come get me!" Obediently, the house unrolled a floating streamer from the door to the grassy bank where Roykin stood. He stepped on it and stood regally as it retracted to deposit him on the doorstep. A silvery voice recognized him and chimed, "Roykin, Roykin," though he had never been there before. Trust Grillard, he thought -- he hasn't neglected to tell the house that I might appear. Roykin waited, tapping his foot. Grillard himself appeared. The handsome face, white-haloed, was dignified but uneasy. "What do you want, Roykin?" "I'm back, Grillard." "I know you're back. I signed the order for the Web." Roykin pushed by him. "You signed the order that sent me there, too." "I had no choice. What do you want?" Roykin walked on in and sat down, fingering little knickknacks on a table before him. "Chinese, Grillard?" he guessed, picking up a little figurine. It was quite heavy and dangerous. "It looks Chinese." "Get out of here, Roykin." Roykin considered. "No," he decided, "I don't want to do that. I thought I wanted Zenomia, but I didn't want her either. I'm not sure what I do want. Is that amusing, Grillard?" Grillard peered fretfully out from the white whiskers that framed his face. He said uneasily: "I'm warning you, Roykin. The next time will be your third offense, and that isn't a matter of thirty days." "What is?" asked Roykin dreamily. "No, it wasn't Zenomia I wanted, though she has taut breasts. It wasn't a woman at all. I wanted to frighten someone." "Get out of here!" "I may steal your Chinese figurine," said Roykin, "or I may hit you with it. Perhaps I will pull out your whiskers. Have you a wife, Grillard? I don't know, maybe I could violate her. I have learned these things, in thirty days with your help as well as elsewhere. I am grateful, I think." "Roykin," Grillard cried shrilly, "the third offense is -- " "Shut up, old man, and come here," said Roykin, moving toward him, and he couldn't afterward remember what had come next. TUT he remembered what hap-- pened the next morning, oh, yes. Grillard, with a bit of surgeon's plaster across his forehead, stood over him on the dais, scowling, and said into the microphone : "The diagnosis is total dissociation, schizoid. Third offense. One week." And then it was the Web again. Roykin leaped to his feet where the Web dropped him, very angry, for not even Zenomia had been there to see him go. (He thought, though he couldn't remember for sure, that he had been to see her after striking Grillard. Also there had been something about a fire. Perhaps he had made her dislike him.) But he looked about him, and he was not so angry. This time they had let him keep his clothes, and besides it was not cold. Oh, it was hot. Fools, he cried silently, very pleased. Only one week? But it might be an unpleasant week. Foul stenches smote his nose. He was standing calf-deep in thick black mud, and two sorry horses were straining to draw a wheeled wagon past him. The heat was appalling; the smell was awful; there were clouds of insects. (But only one week! he sang to himself.) "Hi!" he cried. "Hoy!" The man on the wagon shouted at him and whipped his horses. This angered Roykin and he leaped to the wagon -- leaped and missed and came down half sprawling in the ugly mud. But he caught himself up again, laughing (only one week!), and climbed aboard. "Where am I, man?" he demanded. "When is this?" The man snarled at him. "Man, tell me!" cried Roykin, and finally made himself understood. "Philadelphia?" repeated Roykin, trying to remember where that was. "And the year is seventeen hundred and ninety-three?" It made no sense, no sense at all. He swung off the wagon and let the carter flog his feeble beasts away. There were many like him; the road was packed. Overhead, a cloudfogged sun steamed the earth gently, evoking every smell that the smeared soil was capable of. Seventeen-ninety-three, thought Roykin, frowning. But what was #, that it should be a punishment? And for only one week? "Ware!" cried a voice strongly. 'Ware for the dead wagon!" And another wagon sloshed and slithered by; and it held a cargo of stickfigures in rags. There had been bodies like that in Belsen when Roykin took the task of cleaning out the gas rooms after a busy day's extermination; but he had never thought to see them here. "Ware!" cried the dead-cart driver's voice, passing away. "Ware for the victims of the yellow fever!" And Roykin stopped and looked around. It was a city in flight and he was in the middle of it. Half of Philadelphia was on these roads, striving for the safety that lay outside the city -- striving in vain for wherever they went they could not escape themselves, and it was in themselves that the plague lay. Yellow fever! and falling, to a house and thundered at the door. A curtain quivered at an upper window, but the door remained barred. "Prophylaxis!" shouted Roykin. "An ampoule of antibiotic, quickly!" The window curtain quivered again to mock him, and then not even that. "I beg you!" shouted Roykin, but no answer. And how could there be? he sobbed to himself. Seventeen hundred and ninety-three! Antibiotics were nearly two centuries away, as far from reach as the Moon! He looked around him again, and the smell no longer mattered. It was filth that bred the fever, but the fever was grown now; the filth no longer mattered. Yellow fever. With horror, Roykin brushed the stinging insects from his skin. But they returned again, bringing their itch of death. There were wagons, there were roads, there were many ways of getting out of the city. But not in time. Roykin stood with the whining mosquitoes swarming around his head, staring up at the uncaring sky. Third offense. One week. Treasure Coeated In moving from one warehouse to another, we happened upon (an important reason for moving in the first place) an all-but-buried cache of complete sets of Beyond. If, as the rest of the country seemed to be, you were out of town at the time and missed it on the newsstands. Beyond was a princely experiment to determine whether there were enough readers to support a truly handsome, fantastically high-quality fantasy fiction magazine. There weren't, and so Beyond reluctantly had to cease publication, after ten (#) hang-the-expense issues. The minute it did, those ten (#) issues became collectors' items and we were cleaned out completely, right down to file copies. Now if there had only been enough collectors... Well, we unexpectedly have two hundred and fifty (#) sets on hand now. Not being ones to capitalize on scarcity, we are offering them at face value, in complete sets only, ten (#) fine issues for # (three dollars and fifty cents) -- and we pay the postage. If you dawdled the first time around, don't do it now ; we may not be able to repeat this offer. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York #, N.Y. Send me Sets of Beyond at # per set. I enclose check for  (Add # for Foreign Postage). Name Address City P.O. Zone State for your information T HE year will be around # A.D. Captain Sixtus E. Boyle, assisted by Navigator Roderich Meerschaum, has just put his ship down at latitude # #' S. on Mars. What do they do next? Before landing, they had orbited Mars for several days in order to take detailed pictures of the surface in the equatorial regions so that they could decide on a suitable spot for landing. The general instructions which they carried both on perma-paper and in their heads had been somewhat vague about the landing itself. They merely stated that the landing should be made near the Martian equator for reasons of temperatures. Near the equator, one could expect reasonable temperatures during the day. The nights would be extremely cold, but that could not be helped. Far from the equator, it would be cold around the clock. In addition to the order to land near the equator, the instructions merely said that, "of course," the landing place should be "in the proximity of interesting formations." Captain Boyle finally found a spot on the photographs which looked like smooth desert with a ridge of fairly high hills (rare on Mars) not too far away. There is also a "canal" nearby. On the pictures taken from the orbit around Mars, the formation did not look like a "canal," nor like anything else for which there was an established name. But the charts drawn from a long distance -- Earth, that is -- insisted that it was a canal. Hence it was something to be investigated. Now the ship sits on the desert sand, undamaged. The ridge of hills is to the north, clearly visible, and it looks as if it were about five miles away. And the "canal," whatever it really is, must be to the east. It is not visible from the ship, but if they hit anywhere near the intended spot, it would be about twenty miles away. The captain decides that one does not explore well on an empty stomach, so the crew eats first There is a rest period of several hours, mostly for the purpose of getting used to gravity again. Then the captains assign watches and two men break out the ground car. T ET'S come back from the future and think about that ground car for Mars. How would you design ground transportation for such different conditions? But the first question might well be whether you really need a ground car. What's wrong with walking? Of course one could walk on Mars. As has been mentioned, the daytime temperatures near the Martian equator are bearable, even if highly extreme. In the morning, say, one hour after sunrise, it is still about forty below zero. An hour after noon, it is around seventy above zero. The tropics of Mars might better be called its "intemperate zone," but they do not represent an impossible situation. Our own highland of Tibet is very nearly as bad; the temperature does not go so low there during the night, but it climbs to around a hundred in daytime when the season is right. Air pressure is a somewhat different story. The Martian atmosphere, near the ground, has roughly the same pressure as our own atmosphere eleven miles up. This calls for a pressure suit, especially since the oxygen content seems to be near zero. Even if it were all oxygen, a man could not breathe at such a low pressure. The inconvenience of the pressure suit is more than compensated by the low gravity -- a man will weigh precisely # per cent of what he weighs on Earth. Which means that even a heavy suit, with oxygen bottles on the back and all kinds of hand tools dangling from the belt, will not produce full Earth weight for the explorer. So one could walk and the men will do it for short distances. But, for exploration, ground transportation of some kind is needed. Specimens will have to be carried to the ship. Even if they are not heavy, they might be awkward to handle. The design of any kind of ground transportation is chiefly influenced by the nature of the ground. On Mars, there may be rocky ground in many places, rather rough. Much of it must be sandy desert. And in those areas which look dark when seen from Earth, there are likely to be salty marshes. For all these types of ground, wheels are not practical. HP HE first alternative that always occurs to everybody, when wheels won't do, is the caterpillar tread. But it has its limitations too, and for Mars the best bet is indubitably the so-called "rolligon" -- the barrel-shaped inflated pillows developed for similar conditions on Earth. Rolligons produce fine traction on sand and do not sink in. They can tolerate very rough rocky ground and don't shake up the driver in the process. They do well in marshes, and if the water should be too deep, they will float. They could be inflated on the spot with Martian atmosphere. It would take some time because the atmosphere is so thin, but it can be compressed. The question of engine power is somewhat more complicated. It must not need air, for we have to go on the assumption that Martian air will not sustain combustion, even when compressed to what we consider normal density. Right now we know three types of non-air-breathing engines. They are (#) the rocket, (#) the electric motor and (#) the atomic reactor. Rocket power is useless for the conditions in question, because the ground vehicles must be able to Fig. #: Rolligon Mars car, driven by hydrogen peroxide turbine move very slowly, which is the one thing the rocket cannot do, at least not efficiently. The electric motor could provide almost any speed range desired, but it needs electric current. Of course, one might say that between # and # somebody may invent an incredibly efficient kind of storage battery. This is possible, but nobody can promise that somebody else will. As regards atomic reactors, we can't really tell. Maybe it can be built small enough and light enough in time, but it would be hard to say when, and impossible to tell what other complications might go with a small reactor. It was pointed out several years ago -- by Wemher von Braun -- that a ground car for an airless planet or a planet with oxygenless atmosphere could be turbinepowered, provided you pick the right fuel for the turbine. The right fuel would be hydrogen peroxide, H # # # . At ordinary temperatures, hydrogen peroxide is a liquid and it is quite safe if pure, or rather if it does not contain any other impurities than water. When hydrogen peroxide is decomposed, the reaction proceeds according to the formula # H # # #  # H # #  # # Fig. #: Diagram of two-stags hydrogen peroxide turbine It produces water and free oxygen. It also produces, which the equations fails to show, a large amount of heat. Hence the water appears in the form of steam, so that the product is a mixture of steam and hot oxygen. If there was water present in the hydrogen peroxide, this water is naturally heated into steam too. t'OR # per cent hydrogen peroxide (the other # per cent being water), all the water, both the # per cent present and the water formed by the decomposition, will appear as steam with a temperature of # degrees Fahrenheit. This steam can turn a turbine wheel. After it has passed through the turbine wheel, the steam will be too cool and too weak to do additional work. But the free oxygen that was formed by the decomposition and which is mixed with the steam has not done any work worth mentioning. So far, it has only increased the bulk somewhat. So, when it emerges from the turbine wheel, the steam-oxygen mixture enters a combustion chamber where some ordinary fuel like gasoline is injected. After it has burned, there is now a mixture of hot carbon dioxide from the combustion and reheated steam. This can drive a second turbine wheel. You have here what is known as a two-stage turbine which is not air-breathing, hence the ideal power plant for ground vehicles on airless or oxygenless planets. But by the time an expedition sets out for Mars, there will be an establishment of some sort on the Moon. Conditions on the surface of the Moon are like those on Mars, with much exaggeration. Where Mars has a thin atmosphere, the Moon has just traces of gases, argon and so forth. (When I say traces, I mean traces, not just a highly attenuated gas.) Where Mars cools off to an estimated seventy degrees below zero during the night, the Moon cools to an estimated one hundred degrees below zero during its night -- if a night lasts two weeks, Earth time, the surface obviously has a better chance to radiate what heat it has into space. Likewise, the twoweek day produces higher temperatures as it wears on slowly. Near the Moon's equator, the temperature of the surface rock Fig. #: Moon car climbs to beyond the boiling point of water after a week of sunshine. As for condition of the lunar surface, one can only say that it is not Earthlike. The old ideas about the rock cracking into splinters because of the large temperature span between day and night have been abandoned. Laboratory experiments have shown that rock will not crack if heated and cooled as slowly as in the course of a full lunar day. But the rock is being pounded by meteorites of all sizes. Meteorites of a size that form craters visible from Earth are naturally rare. But cosmic dust grains are very frequent. Each dust grain hitting lunar rock will produce several other dust grains. The cosmic rays join in this work; they can, and in time will, break up the crystalline structure of the rock. HP HE overall result of these forces, acting over several million years of time, must be sharp rocks on the one hand and a layer of dust on the other. On an exposed vertical or very steep rock surface, the action of dust formation must be continuous, since the rock flakes and dust produced will simply fall off and settle on the ground. On a flat area, however, the process must be self-limiting, because the dust formed will protect the rock underneath against further meteorite and cosmic ray impacts. The question is how far the dustforming process can be carried before the dust becomes a protection. In the case of tiny metorites, roughly speaking of the size of sand grains, half an inch of dust will obviously be enough; the force of a new impact will not be carried through such a layer, but will be dissipated by throwing some of the existing dust around. Cosmic rays could easily penetrate a half-inch layer of dust, however, and continue the process of the destruction of the rock. But this process must be self-limiting too, except that the required dust layer would have to be thicker. The general consensus right now is that the average depth of a dust layer might be about an inch, but that in some places a much deeper accumulation is easily possible. If dust is fine enough, it will behave more or less like water, and the English astronomer Thomas Gold -- now in the United States -- has suggested that the smoothness of the Moon's maria is due to such a dust accumulation; the maria might be just large depressions filled with dust. The lunar surface, then, must be rocky with a dust layer on top, with possible accumulations of dust of great depth. The two-stage hydrogen peroxide turbine would work on the Fig. #: Flywheel of Oerlikon Gyrobus Fig. #: Prototype of Gyrobus under construction Moon too; the problem is what shape to give to the car. Most people who had to think about this problem -- the first probably were illustrators of science fiction magazines -- have simply settled for a tank as the most likely shape. Caterpillar treads can negotiate any kind of ground except ground that is very soft. They do not slip easily on gravel and can take considerable inclines. But so can rolligons, and if there are such dust-filled depressions, the rolligons would be safer. If a tank shape is picked, it might be practical to have a tank push an ordinary heavy wheel ahead of itself on a boom. This would show where the ground is treacherous. Another likely shape for a Moon car would be a vehicle which simply has four wheels, but very large wheels, at least fifteen feet in diameter, with spiked rims. Such a vehicle could make much better speed on flat ground, and because of the large size of the wheels, there would be a high clearance between the body of the car and the ground, which would permit the passing of obstacles where a tank would have to lurch and clamber. T T is very likely that every Moon car would have to carry a sheet metal "shield" on vertical booms above its body. This shield would, in the first place, be a protection against too much sunlight. Since the Moon lacks anything that could reasonably be called an atmosphere, the sunlight beating down on the lunar plains will be about three times as powerful as the tropical Sun on a clear day on Earth. In the second place, the shield would protect the body of the car against the fairly frequent dust particles coming from space with an average velocity of forty miles per second. They would cover the shield with nearly microscopic pits in the course of time, but they would not penetrate. But if there is a permanent base of some kind on the Moon, electricity would be a possible source of power for the Moon cars in the vicinity of the vase. The base would have an atomic reactor, a stationary power plant, for its own needs. Ground cars staying close to the base could run on rechargeable batteries. The problem is that rechargeable batteries must not be exposed to a vacuum; they have to be pressurized -- that is, they must be located in the interior of the Moon car. This might be inconvenient, to say the least, and the designers therefore are likely to fall back on a trick used in Switzerland a few years ago. Engineers of the Swiss "firm of Oerlikon, at Oerlikon, near Zurich, built an experimental bus with a capacity of two dozen passengers. The wheels of this bus were driven by an ordinary three-phase electric motor, but the current for the motor was not supplied by either overhead wire or by batteries. The energy was stored in a one-ton flywheel, measuring six feet in diameter and mounted in a horizontal position under the floor of the bus. To reduce friction, the Swiss engineers ran the flywheel in a sealed casing in a hydrogen atmosphere, but this is a minor point. A second three-phase motor was Fig. #: Flywheel locomotive for yard duty and shunting Figs. #, # and #, Courtesy Oerlikon Engineering Co., Oerlikon, Switzerland. mounted on the flywheel shaft, and at the terminal, this motor brought the flywheel up to # revolutions per minute, drawing current from the net When disconnected from the net, this motor became the generator, drawing mechanical energy from the flywheel and supplying electric current to the drive motor. After six miles of stop-and-go driving with a full passenger load, the flywheel had run down to # revolutions per minute. It then needed recharging, which could be done by means of power outlets near passenger stops. The recharging took two minutes. Then the bus was ready for another sixmile run, With a stationary power plant for the Moon base, such flywheeldriven vehicles would be very practical for routine runs on the lunar surface. If there are a number of routine stops -- say, lunar base, space port, astronomical observatory and so forth -- cables could be laid to those points from the power plant, with intermediate recharging points where necessary. The problem of getting around on other planets bears much resemblance to quite a number of other detail problems in space travel. Engineers have very definite ideas of how these problems could be solved. They could even build their solutions right now. But these solutions are not needed here on Earth. They are needed at the other end of the trip. And the first problem is to get to the other end of the trip. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. Said trouble being that Elmo had to live by his wits -- and the one man who could outwit him couldn't do it wittingly! (ffTjHE trouble with Elmo," shouted Senator Ferdus, m as Private Busby helped him up into the copter, "is that he thinks he's in business for himself. He's got to be made to understand once and for all, Busby, that he's only a computing machine." The thin, weary-looking private, haggard from lack of sleep, checked his controls and then peered through the early morning mist at the Washington Control Tower. Over the roar of the spinning rotors, he could hear the Senator still talking. " -- Our government won't tolerate it, Busby. Elmo has been pulling this for years just to excuse his staying alive. It won't do, Busby. It's blackmail. And I'm warning you that it's your job to -- " The Senator paused as he looked around him. "Busby! Why aren't we off the ground?" Private Busby pointed to the flickering red light on the control panel. "Waiting for an automatic beam to the other side of the Potomac." "Busby, this is an emergency! For all I know, that mechanical monster is creating a new crisis at this very moment. Forget about the automatic. You can fly this thing without -- " Busby took a deep breath and flicked the manual control switch, lifting the copter so quickly that the Senator lost the rest of his sentence. He glared suspiciously, waggled a fat but threatening finger. "Busby, I suspect you're on Elmo's side." All the way to Computer Base, the Senator hammered away. "Mark my words, Busby. The people will not stand for the idea of to service an Electronic Monitor that served its purpose more than fifteen years ago. You'd better come through with a demolition job this time. Not in twenty or thirty years, when Elmo decides he's ready, but now, Busby, now! Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll have to recommend and insist upon your demotion." down at the stitch marks that formed a chevron-shaped scar on his sleeve. "Senator," he said, "fifteen years ago, when they assigned me to the Computer Demolition Squad, I was a master sergeant with a good record. And then the President issues the order to dismantle Elmo. The Secretary of Cybernetics hands it to the General of the Army, and down it comes through the old chain of command. Generals, colonels, majors, until -- where does it end up? Right here in the lap of Jake Busby. "And since then, Senator, I've had my ratings taken away from me, stripe by stripe, by every officer who blames me for not getting his promotion. Senator -- " Busby settled back and lit one of his favorite cigars, calmer now -- "I'm sorry, but I've got no more stripes to give." "What did you do before you volunteered to serve your country?" "I didn't volunteer, Senator. I was drafted. Before that, I ran a little business of my own. Busby's Fixit Shop. And I used to go from house to house to find out if people needed anything fixed or -- " "How old are you, Busby?" "Forty-six, Senator. And I had this shop of mine all fitted out with lathes and -- " "Then will you tell me," snapped the Senator, "why the Army's best computer technician, after twentytwo years in uniform and fifteen years of study and preparation, can't get Elmo dismantled? My boy, don't you see what you're doing to your military career?" "Senator, I go through this every few years, but I'll say it again: Elmo was built to solve the world's major problems, and he can't let himself be dismantled until he's finished the job. Now you've got to admit that this cobalt radiation in the atmosphere was a threat to human survival." "You know as well as I do, Busby -- as well as any sixth-grade child knows by now -- that Elmo caused the cobalt radiation in the first place." Busby hunched angrily over the controls and stared ahead as he chewed his cigar. "The cobalt radiation was a byproduct of the solution to the world-famine threat. If not for Elmo -- " "If not for your Elmo," shouted the Senator, "there would have been no famine in the first place! It was a result of his solution to the storm cycle that he created to solve the problem of the five-year drought. Your Elmo solves one problem by creating a new one, just to keep us from putting him out of business. Well, you'd better make certain that this new solution to the cobalt radiation hasn't created any new problems. Otherwise, Busby, if they can't break you any lower than a private, I'll see that you're court-martialed." "But that's not fair! Is it my Computer? Why do I have to be the goat? For crying out loud, I didn't build him!" Senator Ferdus shrugged his shoulders and clasped his hands across his huge stomach. It was a final movement, like the passing of judgment. "Busby, the people are crying for blood. If it's necessary, yours will have to do." Busby stared at his cigar, chewed to shreds the way it always was when he became upset. As they approached Computer Base, the dreadful question pounded into his mind as it had during all these months of waiting. Elmo had solved the radiation problem. What would the new problem be? housing Elmo at its center looked like a flat oval -- the outline shape of an egg. There, two hundred feet below ground level, the Electronic Monitor (known as Elmo for short) worked away at solving the problems of mankind. Busby lowered the copter gently -- like a giant spider at the end of an invisible thread -- to the roofport cradle. He wouldn't be in this mess now, thought Busby, if they had let him out of the Army when his hitch was up. When it was discovered he had been trained for the special job of dismantling Elmo, someone declared him essential to the national defense. His discharge was pigeonholed and he was assigned to demolition duty at Computer Base. He remembered his first years as an aide to the scientists who built Elmo. Under their instruction, he got to know Elmo and became more interested in learning how an Electronic Monitor worked. He serviced Elmo's parts with the loving care that a boy bestows on his first jalopy. He polished and oiled and tightened. And by the time the last of the scientists died, Busby knew more about Elmo than any man alive. And of course there were the feelings of guilt as he waited for Elmo to outlive his usefulness, waited for the final problem to be solved so he could perform his duty -- as executioner. Thinking about that now, he caught himself up short. As much as he loved Elmo, he couldn't deny the peculiar problems that were so unexpected and suspicious. If Elmo was really creating them, as some people said, to stay alive, then Elmo was a menace. Inside the central vault, the Senator strode up and down with his hands clasped behind his back while he surveyed his electronic nemesis. "All right, Busby, let's get to it. I want to know exactly how Elmo has solved this problem. And then I want you to get right to work on the demolition job. Unless he's pulled another fast one. And if he has, by gad -- " "Oh, shut up!" It came out without Busby realizing it, but suddenly he was glad he said it. Senator Ferdus' mouth dropped open and he stared with bulging eyes beneath his thick white eyebrows. "I -- I -- how dare -- " Busby swallowed and decided that, for once in his life, he would go all the way. "Now listen, Senator. Outside this control room, you may be a big shot as the duly elected representative of suckers from Idaho, but down here you're just my guest. I'm the only person who has unlimited clearance -- even the President accepts that. If you keep your mouth shut, you can stay. If not, I'll have to see that you're escorted off Computer Base. As I mentioned before, Senator," he added, pointing to the stitch marks on his sleeve, "I have nothing to lose." opened and closed his mouth, finally shut it without saying anything. The transformation in Busby's behavior was unmistakable; here he was undisputed authority. The Senator nodded a bright red face and seated himself in a nearby chair. "Good, Senator. We understand each other. Now let's find out what this is all about." Busby reached over and threw the kinescope tape-key that would present Elmo's verbal and visual report. In the midst of the semi-circular arc of computer banks, a video screen flashed into blinding whiteness. On both sides of this screen, oscilloscopes traced the electrical waves of sound. The voice boomed out, deep, hollow, clear. Elmo's bass was slightly metallic, but to Busby it had the familiar tone of a friend. in answer to your move, Knight to Queen four, I move Bishop to Bishop five, check -- " The video, now in focus, showed a closeup of Busby straining, deep in thought, over a chessboard. Busby fumbled with the tapekey. He had gone too far bapk on the kinescope recording. From the accusing look on the Senator's face, Busby knew he would have a hard time explaining to a Senate investigating committee why he tronic Monitor as a chess companion. Silently cursing himself, he found the position on the tapes that indicated the exact time he left the control room to pick up the Senator. Why hadn't he remembered to erase the chess-playing tapes as he always did? It was too late now. The Senator was making notes in his memo book. "Here we are," said Busby, trying to appear lighthearted. "Now we'll find out what's going on." At first there was no sound, and the video showed only the usual scanning of the various parts of the world. Then the picture halted and closed in on the scene of an open meadow just half a mile south of Computer Base. There appeared a circle of shimmering orange light, like a spotlight, against the background of the uncut grass. The Senator leaned forward. "What's that?" Before Busby could say he had no idea, they were confronted with the materialization of an enormous silver object that resembled an early twentieth-century gas-fuel tank. Peculiarly, this was crated with glowing yellow bands of undulating ribbonlike substance tied into a giant bow. Then a second appeared alongside the first. "Seems to be a tank of some kind," suggested Busby. "Let's cut Elmo in and ask him directly... Elmo, what's going on? What are those things?" Q-V-Z-S. Electronic Monitor reports solution to problem six, two-nine, eight Contact made with intelligent life on Proxima Centauri." The Senator dropped his notebook as he jumped to his feet. "A matter-transmitter field has been established at Computer Base and surrounding neighborhood to serve as a receiving center for the shipment of gleep from the second planet of Proxima Centauri. This liquid ore, when released in the form of gases, will counteract the cobalt radiation in Terran atmosphere. All that remains is the payment for the twentrade agreement." r T , HE Senator screeched. "Trade agreement? Busby, what is this?" "Elmo," chided Busby, "you can't make a trade agreement. That's against the law. Only Congress can -- " Elmo interrupted. "That would be the case, Private Busby, if it were a matter of trade here on Earth. The people of the planet Kdoolit are not from Earth -- or even our own Solar System. The Senator himself would have to agree that the law does not apply." "We'll pass a law!" shouted the Senator. "That might prevent a recurrence," said Elmo, "but it would hardly affect anything done before the passage of such a law. That is fortunate, since gleep is essential for the preservation of life on Earth. I have solved the problem. The rest is up to you." "To me?" said Busby. "Why always me?" "To the governments of Earth," amended Elmo. "This time," roared the Senator, "you've gone too far! You've overstepped your authority -- " "I suggest," continued Elmo, "that Congress make arrangements with the people of Asia as to payment. The shipment of gleep will be completed within forty-eight hours. I have been informed that the Kdoolans will require C.O.D. payment in full, since Earth has not yet established a galactic credit rating." Busby was almost afraid to ask the obvious question. "Elmo, tell me. What's the payment for this gleep?" "The best terms I could get for livered, via interstellar matterportation, was the exchange of the ore for the continent of Asia. We're getting a bargain." "Busby, you heard him! You heard what he said! Asia -- he for Asia!" "Gleep," corrected Elmo, "not greep. Yes, it was difficult to find something the Kdoolans actually needed. There was nothing else to make it worthwhile for them to matterport the molten ore over the distance of four and one-third lightyears." "He's sold one of Earth's continents... moaned the Senator. "Only after exploring every other possibility," said Elmo. Busby tried another angle. "You can't do that, Elmo. It's against all your restrictive tapes. All those "Oh, no, not the people," said Elmo, "just the land. Though it may create problems of relocation and reorganization, that is not insoluble." The Senator staggered around in circles as if trying to tag someone in a game of blind man's buff. "He's crazy! He's out of his mind! How can he sell a chunk of Earth?" not yet learned the complete story. "Elmo, what do they want with Asia?" "The Kdoolans live on a planet whose land mass rests on a highly unstable molten core. It is this lava from which they are able to pump out gleep -- somewhat as we pump out oil. But they are desperately in need of land. Most of what they have keeps sinking below sea level or getting upended as mountain ranges." "Well, they can't have Asia!" shouted the Senator. "That's final. Get in touch with 'em and tell 'em we'll give anything else we can spare, but not Asia -- " "The Kdoolans," said Elmo, "have already begun delivery. Their sales representative, Kzar, informs me that as soon as the shipment is delivered in full, they will insist on payment If we don't give them Asia, they'll just take it." "We'll fight! Asia or no Asia, it's a part of Earth and we're not letting any aliens get a foothold -- " Elmo's voice sounded almost weary. "The Kdoolans have a culture far beyond ours. We would have no way of stopping them fron taking Asia. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a new problem to work out." Busby avoided the Senator's stare. "N-new problem?" "The problem of relocating the entire population of Asia." Senator Ferdus' voice turned frantic. "You can't do that! That's half the population of Earth to spread over the other half!" "The alternative, Senator, is having an irate party of Kdoolans take over Earth for themselves. Now, if you don't mind, I'm faced with the serious problem of transrefugees during the next few days. Since the Computer Base is set up as a teleport station, I will use this as a port of entry." The Senator was trying to direct Busby's attention to the screen. "Look! Look! Make him stop it, Busby! Make him stop!" Busby saw them. There in the shimmering, widening ball of orange light in the meadow, framed against the background of hundreds of giant tanks, were a dozen strange creatures -- serpentine things that had never walked the Earth before. The Senator grabbed the phone on Busby's desk, and when he finally found the right end, he shouted into it. "Get me the White House. The President. Emergency. Invasion from outer space! Hello! No, I'm not crazy! Tell him to call an emergency meeting!" Slamming the phone into its cradle, he shook his fist at Busby. "It's all your fault. You'd better do something about it -- and damned quick!" Before Busby could answer, the Senator was out of the room. A T the secret meeting of the cabinet and the leaders of Congress, it was agreed that some other payment should be made to the aliens for the gleep. "What if they refuse?" asked the Senator from Missouri. "Then," declared the Secretary of State, "we go to the brink of war!" Busby, forgetting that he was merely an invited guest, spoke up. "Mr. Secretary, Elmo won't permit war." The Secretary glowered at Busby and thoughtfully pulled his lip. "You misquote me, sir. I didn't say war." "But you said -- " "I know exactly what I said, sir. I said the brink of war. Your Electronic Monitor has no right to prevent us from going to the brink of war as often as we like. It is absolutely necessary as a diplomatic technique for preserving the peace. And this is a time, above all, for diplomacy." It was motioned, seconded and passed unanimously (Busby not being permitted to vote) that all dealings with the aliens should be conducted through Elmo, and since everyone was certain that Elmo would not permit the Kdoolans to attack, it was established that absolutely no concessions were to be made. Elmo had to find another way to make payment, and Busby was responsible for seeing it done. Several of the Senators had ideas. The Senator from Wisconsin said that if the government would assure a subsidy, his state would be glad to provide cheese for payment of the gleep. At this suggestion, the Senator from Kansas leaped to his feet and said that wheat was the staff of life, and that the government should consider buying it from the farmers of his state to use as payment. The Senator from Texas just wanted to point out that if gleep had oil in it, it was subject to tariff, and he had to insist that his state be protected. Busby was confused until he remembered it was an election year. This was, obviously, the beginning of a series of speeches for the people -- speeches that would be recalled on the floor of the Senate for inclusion into the Congressional Record. Nobody noticed Busby leave the meeting. like creature with red scales, long tentacle-arms, and two faces, was waiting when Busby entered Elmo's control room. Elmo introduced them. Kzar bowed graciously. His head appeared to be supported on a swivel base, and one of his faces smiled while the other one frowned. "I turn the face of peace in your direction. We have come in peaceful trade, and now we ask payment for our services." "But we can't give you Asia." Busby frowned as he replied. Kzar immediately stirred in alarm. His glistening scales stood on end and he swiveled his head around, displaying an angry countenance. "You dare to make war?" "No! No!" gasped Busby, trying to smile through his chattering teeth. "Of course not. I forgot about the facial expression -- " Elmo soothed his visitor, explaining the difference in facial mobility on Earth. Earthlings, he pointed out, could frown when they were really happy, pretending they had nothing to be happy about. "This," said Elmo, "prevents the envy of a neighbor or a friend. A necessary protective device. On the other hand, humans can smile when they are actually angry and even preparing for war. Very different from your people, Kzar. You must make allowances." Kzar looked doubtful, but he finally relaxed and listened to Busby. However, argue as he might, Busby could not convince Kzar that it was impractical to take Asia. How would the United States explain to the people of Asia that their land had been confiscated as payment in a business deal with another planet? "It won't do any good," said Busby, "to tell them we're doing it to save mankind. We've used that excuse too often before." "I see no alternative," thought Kzar, telepathing impatiently. "I assure you that neither Wisconsin cheese nor your Idaho potatoes nor Kansas wheat will serve us in the place of land. Now, if you'll excuse us, I have details to work out with your great problem solver, Elmo, about converting our gleep into gases to release into your atmosphere." " White House, Busby learned that Senator Ferdus had reported to his commanding officer about the chess games with Elmo. It was generally agreed that Busby's misuse of Elmo had resulted in the crisis at hand. Furthermore, the Senator suggested to the Army that Busby had the power to solve this whole mess if he really wanted to, and it was obviously his lack of patriotism that prevented him from doing so. He even hinted that Busby might be a Kdoolit agent in disguise, planted here on Earth years ago to work out this diabolical plot. When they finally let Busby go, it was with the ultimatum to find a way of preventing the loss of Asia and at the same time getting rid of the Kdoolan threat to the peace. As the General of the Army put it: "Private Busby, that's an order! See that you do it or -- " Outside, Busby sat down on the steps of the Capitol. For half an hour, he sat there feeding the pigeons while he wept. "Whatever I do, I'm going to get it in the neck. I feel like telling them to take this uniform and do whatever they damn well please with it." He sat there daydreaming about what it would be like to go home to Allenville, back to his little repair shop, where he could make his daily rounds from door to door and do little odd jobs for his friends and neighbors. If there was one thing he knew, it was that he had no business being in the Army. He was the kind of guy who just had to be his own boss, and he had discovered to his sorrow, after so many years, that being your own boss was something they tended not to encourage in the Army. That, of course, was what gave him the idea. All the way back to Computer Base in the copter, he went over and over the details in his mind. There was no doubt about it, it would work. If only he was not too late. When he arrived, Kzar was still there, and Busby -- remembering to smile broadly -- communicated his proposition. Kzar listened quietly, thought about it, and finally agreed to leave Asia exactly where it was. He praised Busby for a most superior solution to the entire problem. Busby smiled and let his hand rest contentedly on the metal shell that covered Elmo's master keys. From now on, things were going to be mighty different around here. admitted Senator Ferdus to the Vault and informed him that the crisis was over. The Senator looked suspicious. "What crisis?" "Well, the Kdoolans are gone and Asia is still where it always was. That's why I called you." The Senator shook his head. "Busby, I don't believe a word of it. What are you trying to pull now?" Busby flipped the dials on the televiewer to focus on the meadow where the Kdoolans first landed on Earth. They were gone and so were their empty gleep tanks. Once again the meadow was green. The Senator stared. "And you say Asia is still where it belongs?" Busby nodded. "All right, Busby, what have you done? If you've betrayed our government in any way -- given away any military secrets -- " Busby waved these comments aside. "The only thing I gave away was our problem." He flipped the dial to show the area where the Electronic Computer had once stood. "The Kdoolans were crazy about Elmo. They have tremendous problems to solve. We've been wanting to get rid of Elmo for the last fifteen years. So -- the most logical thing in the world -- I gave them Elmo instead of Asia." Senator Ferdus blinked vacantly. "You gave them what?" "All your worries are over. The Kdoolans transported Elmo to Proxima Centauri during the night. As far as Earth is concerned, he's completely dismantled, decommissioned, demolished. Elmo is gone." As the words took effect, the Senator began to burble. "You -- you gave Elmo away? equipment? All the computer secrets that we've guarded all these years? You gave them away? This is treason, Busby! Treason! You can be executed for this! And I promise you, Busby, I promise you -- " Busby backed away. He had known this was going to happen, that Senator Ferdus would be on his back no matter what he did. "Wait a minute, Busby. You're lying." The Senator paused and looked at the screen again. "You know as well as I do that Elmo was built to solve problems for human beings. Elmo just won't work up there on Kdoolit And besides, there's no one who knows how to service him but you, Busby -- and you're here. Come clean, Busby. Let's have the truth. What have you done with Elmo? Where'd you hide him? You ought to know you can't swipe a multiand get away with it. What have you done with the blasted -- " The Senator stopped. His eyes opened wide; his thick white eyebrows arched into question marks; his red face drained of all its color. He looked frantically around the chamber. The door hadn't opened, and there was no place where Busby could possibly have hidden. "Busby?" he whispered. 'Where are you, Busby?" He looked under the desk, behind the chairs, between the rows of empty shells where Elmo's electronic computing units had, until yesterday, pulsed with thought. "It's all just a bad dream," he reassured himself. "He couldn't just vanish into thin air. He was never here..." Yet there, in the ashtray, chewed to shreds as it always was when Busby was upset, the Senator saw Busby's still-lit cigar. "Busby!" he roared, pounding the desk with his fist. "Busby, come back!" TN a hastily erected Computer Base on Kdoolit, the second planet in the system of Proxima Centauri, Mr. Jake Busby relaxed over the chess board with a tall, frosty glass of Kdoolan beer. He smiled as he recalled his last glimpse of Senator Harry Ferdus' face. As Ferdus had said, Elmo would solve problems only for humans. But Jake Busby was the one man who could service Elmo, and Jake Busby was a human, wasn't he? And then, thought Busby, when all the problems on Kdoolit were solved, there would be no need for Elmo to manufacture new ones. the Cosmos with intelligent life and problems to be solved. Now Elmo had a reason to exist, and, for that matter, so did Busby. They were partners in the Universal Fixit Company. "Anyway," he said aloud, finishing the glass of beer, "it's a living -- and I'm my own boss." "Your move," said Elmo. With fares so high and colonists so scarce, something had to be done to prevent frontier Seven Deadly Virtues I please listen to me? I'm hungry. Couldn't you at least give me something to eat?" We paid no attention, of course. "Oliver," Diane said. "I love you." I stopped and kissed her. Nobody sobbed and drifted away in the mist. All of Grendoon was down by the Wallow. Torches inflamed the fog like living lips of fire, kissing each other as they blended. The noise of the big jungle machines boomed in the background, but it was almost drowned out by the crowd, a constant bull's bellow of noise. "Listen to them, Diane," I said. "They're happy." "And so am I," she whispered. "You don't miss the plantation?" "No." "Nor-" "Nor Albert," she said emphatically. "Especially not Albert." I felt her shiver in spite of the fact that the temperature was a hundred and ten. Nobody clutched at my arm, looming out of the mist, but I shook him off and he flinched muttering away. I stopped, looking at Diane. Suddenly she was tense. "What's the matter?" She asked in a small voice: "Did you recognize that one?" It was embarrassing. I shook my head. She said: "I did, Oliver. He used to work for Albert too. And he crossed him, and now -- " The joy froze in me. I said roughly: "Snub Albert! Let's get down to the Wallow. This is our night, Diane -- don't let anything spoil it." But behind us, in the fog, nobody was sniffling wretchedly. IT was sundown, you see. Not that we ever see the sun on Venus. But it makes a difference. During "day," we stay indoors as much as we can, and when we go out, we wear not only thermosuits and hoods, but portable air -- at least at "noon." Toward twilight, we can breathe the ambient air; at dusk, we can leave off the hoods. At "night," sometimes, you can go out without even a thermosuit, but this was a long way from night. The other thing that happens at night is that the fog begins to condense. For about two months right around "midnight," the ceiling climbs, sometimes, to a thousand feet; but all that water has to go somewhere, and it does. It makes a nice celebration. Grendoon has nearly eighteen hundred people living in it, and I don't think a hundred were left minding the store. Everybody else was laughing and joking and wandering around, carrying the torches, waiting for the water. The kids get an enormous kick out of it, but so do most of the grownups. "It's coming," whispered Diane. "I see." Already the bottom of the Wallow was sticky red mud, like the blood that runs out of a prime roast of beef. We were at the town end of the Wallow now, following the tapewalks toward the deep part, toward the hills. "Here you are, buddy!" shouted a vendor, grinning, and thrust a pair of torches at me. I paid him, handed one to Diane and walked on. There's a reason for the torches, too. The English knew about it; in the old wars, before aircraft bothered much with radar, the English were plagued by fog. They dug trenches around their landing strips and filled them with oil; the planes came in, and maybe the fog was too thick; so they touched off the trenches of oil, and the curtain of flame burned off the fog. That's what the torches did. First we could see outlines, then bright beads of light from the torches themselves, and by the time a thousand torches were all aburn, we could see for more than fifty yards. We didn't need tapewalks then; we hurried down the bank toward the cheering, jostling throng. There was a roar from the north end of the Wallow, where the sludgy creek drained thick juices from the hills. "It's coming!" Diane took her hand off my forearm. I released her hand. We both pressed forward, looking. In the licking light of the torches, the first thin trickle of water was coming down into the Wallow. It happens every few months, every time slow Venus makes a complete spin around its axis relative to the sun; but it was like a miracle. It always was. Even inside my thermosuit, I felt cooler, more comfortable. It was like Iowa in October; it was like the first freeze-up on the stream that went by everybody's home, long ago. The water was coming down! I whispered: "It's a wonderful time to be in love." But Diane wasn't beside me. I bawled. And then I saw her. She had been separated in the crowd, but she was only a couple of yards away, stumbling back toward me. I couldn't see her face, only the hooded neck and line of her jaw, obscured by the transparent mantle of the thermosuit. But it was enough. Diane was terrified. A huge hulking cow of a man, a face like a footprint in mud, an expression like a stepped-on lizard, was bellowing angrily at her: "Wassamatta thew? Whyntcha watchwatcha doing?" Diane turned to me, white-faced. "Darling," she sobbed, "this gentleman says I jostled him." "What?" "I -- I didn't, dear! You believe me, don't you?" "Of course." But it was like a knell tolling. "You've got to believe me!" "I believe you." But it didn't matter; nothing mattered; we both knew the score then. I said to the bellowing man: "Sir, my fiancee is deeply apologetic. The crowd -- the excitement -- all the confusion -- " He stared at me, lowering. He glanced around, under shaggy eyebrows, gauging the mood of the crowd around us. It didn't satisfy him. He shrugged and moved off. "Come on, dear," I said, and urgently hurried her along. She said: "Oliver. They won't give up. They'll try again." "It won't do them any good!" "But it will, Oliver," she said reasonably. "You know Albert. He never gives up. That was just one of his bullies. He'll have others." I took her by the elbows and turned her around to face me. In the red and shuddering light from the torches, her eyes were dark but luminous; her face was sad and calm. Her beauty wrung my heart. "We can take care of ourselves, Diane," I promised. But it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. Albert Quayle hadn't given up, not that easily. He wasn't going to let me have his wife without a fight He was out to get her -- with hired assassins, no doubt And when she was gone, he would be coming after me. I remembered how nobody had whimpered in the fog. "Will we whimper, do you think?" Diane asked suddenly. It was no more than I was asking myself. I caught her arm and turned her again toward the Wallow. Our torches were getting low. I threw them into the first few inches of silted water and we watched, without words, as they choked and died. II THE world had begun for me six months before. I came down on the ship from Earth like a newborn baby, all pink and squally, tied into my deceleration-proof bassinet, crushed with the parturition pains of landing by rocket on an alien planet. What did I know? The ads said, "Venus, the New Frontier." They said, "Venus, the planet where every man can start over," and, "Own # Acres! Be Your Own Boss on Venus!" It wasn't any lie. It was all there. I got out of the ship at Grendoon and got on the line at Customs. It wasn't a long line. "Immigrant?" they asked. And I said: "Sure. I'm going to spend the rest of my life here." It was true. But I didn't know why they laughed. I didn't know that there wasn't any choice. I didn't know that, once you're conditioned for Venus, you can't ever live on Earth again. They let you wear the brassard for two weeks -- everybody knows what it means; everybody gives you plenty of leeway. That's so you can find your way around. You get a place to live. You get a job. You make your plans. You make up your mind. Then -- if you want to stay -- you get conditioned. If not, there's the return rocket waiting. Before I was conditioned, they sold me a thermosuit and pinned a brassard on it, with the sparkling word Visitor brightly picked out in diamond ink. They gave me a card with Quayle's name and address on it, and turned me loose to hit him up for a job. Then I stepped out into the hot, penetrating fog. Albert Quayle's address was on Breezy Point, overlooking the Wallow. I struggled along the tapewalks, and even inside the thermosuit I was wringing wet It was a hot day. The fog was whitely bright, a flour of soggy pearls that I stirred as I walked. I sucked a tube of suit air, but my face was exposed to the steam; I felt as if I were being gently boiled. Voices spoke to me out of the fog, begging; but I couldn't help them and so I ignored them as might any citizen of Grendoon. Then I came to Albert Quayle's house. Enormous blowers ripped the fog to tendrils around it. I could see it through a wavering haze. A big place, pink aluminum, with picture windows -- to look out on fog. A big place for a big shot, and that was Albert Quayle. I walked up the cinderblock path. It was like a Japanese garden back on Earth. Out of the condensation sumps in the walls, a stream of hot water pulsed. It flowed through cementwalled troughs across a cactus garden; the path went over one of the brooks, gently steaming, on a little arched bridge. It was expensive; spending that much on his house, you couldn't blame him for spending enough on blowers to give it a chance to be seen. The water, of course, came out of the sluice from the air-conditioning. It had to go somewhere. But the garden, the little stream, the bridge -- that took money. That was what Quayle had. He had money, and he had something more than money. He had Diane. There she was. I glanced at the card in my gauntleted fingers. "Mrs. Quayle?" I inquired formally. "I am Mrs. Quayle," she acknowledged just as formally. Tm looking for a job," I mumbled. A figure like a nightclub moaner. Eyes like the sad pits of Hell. Lips that tragically invited. I tore my eyes off her and dashed them against the card again. "Your husband -- they said at the office that he could help me." "Help you?" Her voice was like a bitter lullaby. "He'll help himself. But he'll give you a job, if that's what you want." And then I knew I was in love. And I knew what it meant. Because even then, not twenty-four hours on Venus, I knew who Albert Quayle was. I knew that he wasn't a man to tangle with, not in Grendoon, not if you wanted to stay alive. But I had tangled with him after all. I had taken from him the one possession he did not care to lose. Diane caught my hand now. She was shaking. "Oliver, Oliver. It's him." "I know." "That fat man -- he was working for Albert." "I know." "He's out to get us. Both of us! Oliver, I shouldn't have let you do this. It's the end." "I know." "Quit saying 'I know'!" she screamed. I patted her hand, through the gauntlet, to show that I understood. Gently I led her along the banks of the Wallow, down to where the crowd was thickest. "I'm sorry, Oliver," she whispered suddenly. "I'd like to kill him." "You can't." "I know I can't, but I'd like to. If only we weren't conditioned -- " I said: "Forget it. We're through with him. As soon as your divorce is final, we get married. That's that." I glanced at my watch, under the transparent gauntlet of the thermosuit. "Only another hour," I told her. "Oh, Oliver!" pression on her face was a candy bride's, beaming from the top of a white frosted wedding cake. Only another hour and then the statutory waiting period would be over. It was hard to believe that already eleven hours had passed since we confronted Quayle with our love. Almost gaily, we moved among the rejoicing throng. It was festival; the Grendoonians were laughing, singing, like happy children. It was like Iowa when I was a boy. There, when the creeks froze over, the whole town would come down to the lake -- the grownups to watch, the teen-agers to skate, the old ones and the babies to walk stiff-legged across the ice, everyone enjoying what the weather had done. Here it was fog into water, water enough to fill the Wallow and make a pond of it for a few months of each year. There it had been water into ice, but the principle was the same; it was carnival time. Nobody came sniffling up to us. Abjectly he asked: "Mister, please. I'm hungry! Couldn't you help me out?" Diane shivered and clutched my arm. For an instant, I was tempted to speak, but the instant passed. And then there was a confused clamor, and the nobody suddenly turned. "An Earthie!" he gasped, joyful, and darted away from us. Diane stood on tiptoe, peering. "It is," she said. "Look, darling!" And there he was, an Earthman, tall and dark-faced with the UV tan of a sunny planet; but his face was crimson with anger now. He was backed against the margin of the Wallow, surrounded by a dozen nobodies, imploring, clamoring, begging unashamed for food, lodging, for help -- for everything. His gold brassard shone clear, with the word Visitor glittering in diamond ink. It was an invitation to every shunned nobody in Grendoon, for only an Earthie was low enough to talk to them. Short of grubbing for roots and making treehouses in the jungle and taking their chances with swamp, disease and saposaurs, it was the only way nobodies could live, by finding a Terrestrial to help them. But this Terrestrial was making hard work of it. He was offering them money, which was foolish -- what good was money to them? And he was striking at them in annoyance, which was even worse. It was bringing him down to the level of the nobodies, almost. "I'll have to help him," I told Dianne. She nodded. I walked sternly over to him. The nobodies scattered like mist before me. gan to talk to him. He said angrily: "Thanks. What kind of a place is this?" "I'm sorry you were bothered. Don't pay any attention to them. They'll go away." "But why?" "It's the way we do things here," I said. "Humph." He looked at me irritably. In a high, shrill voice, his face pouting like a fish out of water, he complained: "I don't think much of Venus. What a gyp! I spent twenty-five hundred bucks on this trip. I might as well have gone to the Moon." "You're a tourist?" "That's what they said when they sold me the ticket," he answered disagreeably. "I'm sorry." "It isn't your fault," he admitted. Then he tried to be a little more friendly. "Look," he said confidentially, "is this all there is to it? I mean the Coming of the Water, and the spirit of Mardi Gras that rims through the town and all, like they said in the travel agency?" "This is all." "Man!" He shook his head ruefully. "But isn't there, well, some place where I can find a little more miles. I've been saving up for this vacation for years." "Not the kind of excitement you want, mister," I told him, and turned to look for Diane. But she wasn't there. "Darling!" I shouted, and heard my voice drowned out in the multitudinous cries of the crowd around the Wallow. "Darling, where are you?" No answer. "Something wrong, buddy?" asked the Earthie. I didn't have any answer for him. Yes, something was wrongplenty was wrong; but there wasn't anything he could do about it. She was gone. Search as I did, I couldn't find her. Quayle. It had to be Quayle. Somehow, in the minutes when I let her out of my sight, he had begun his revenge. Ill hotel. Where else was there to go? The room clerk looked at me funny. I don't know how else to put it. It was the kind of look I got from everybody when I first came to Venus, but I hadn't seen it since I got conditioned to live here and took off the brassard. I went up in the elevator, and the room clerk's look went out of my mind like a nobody vanishing into the fog. There wasn't room for it. The only thing I had space for in my mind was Diane, Diane gone. I hurried down the corridor and unlocked the door, my fingers shaking. "Darling!" I cried. But there was no answer. She wasn't there. The room was empty -- our room. We had checked into it that morning, gone out to file for her divorce, eaten, wasted a little time, then decided to visit the Wallow since we were in a holiday mood. But that mood was gone. It had been the slimmest of hopes that she might have come back to the hotel, but now even that hope was gone... And then I took a longer look at the room. It was as if someone -- incredibly, impossibly -- had struck me. The cigarette butts were still in the ashtrays. A soggy towel hung sloppily across a rack. Across the back of a chair, Diane's afternoon thermosuit lay slackly, its efnpty arms reaching out to the wastebasket. The room had not been cleaned! I turned slowly and looked at the back of the door, but I knew before I looked what I would see. There was a pink slip taped to the door -- pink, the color of the complaint forms of the Maids, Butlers and Domestics. I read it with cold attention, though I knew what it would say. Re: Room #, Mr. and Oliver Sawyer. From: Joyce Trulove, #th Floor Chambermaid. As of this date, above persons spoke rudely to the undersigned on the phone, demanding service. Said: "This room is a disgusting mess." Also: "Get the hell up here and clean it up." The undersigned intends to prefer charges before the Grievance Committee, pending which time undersigned refuses to deal with said persons again. Signed : J. Trulove, MBD ## racing back down to the lobby. The desk clerk was all smiles, with a sneer folded into the middle of every one of them. "Yes, Mr. Sawyer. The room? Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Sawyer. That Grievance Report -- some sort of mistake, I'm sure. But the chambermaid -- " I said tightly: "What about the chambermaid?" "Oh, you know, Mr. Sawyer. They don't like to be ordered around. You can't blame them." I got a grip on myself. "Look. We didn't even call the chambermaid. Don't you understand? We were getting married. We came in, dropped the suitcases, grabbed something to eat down here in the dining hall, and that's it. Outside of that, we weren't even in the hotel." "Oh. The dining hall, yes." I stopped short. 'What about the dining hall?" He shrugged faintly. "You know, Mr. Sawyer. I'm sorry to have to tell you, but there's been a complaint in the dining room too." "It isn't possible!" ly: "Mr. Sawyer, are you telling me that I lie?" I said, fast: "It's just a mistake, I mean. I remember everything that happened in the dining room. The waitress was downright wonderful. Why, we talked to her! And I left her a big tip! And -- " "Excuse me, Mr. Sawyer. I'm rather busy." I took the warning. There seemed to be only one thing to do. I walked across the lobby of the hotel; it was like walking through a mushy daiquiri. Ice floated on all sides of me. The atmosphere was congealed. The bellboys looked but saw me not; the elevator men glanced through me at the room clerk, but never realized I was alive; at the entrance to the dining room, the hostess sucked a tooth and stared at the wall and hummed quietly to herself. I walked past her. She didn't blink. I found a table and sat down. In about fifteen minutes, a waitress came up to my table. "Miss," I said eagerly, "I -- " But she checked the setting with a practiced eye and walked away again. I stared after her. More minutes passed. I cleared my throat. 'Miss," I said again to the waitress as she came to the table next to mine to take an order. "Miss!" But she didn't respond and, after one quick, curious glance, neither did the customers at the table. It was the deep-freeze, all right; they were cutting me dead. And I turned back to the table, and just caught a glimpse of the back of another waitress. For a moment, I had the crazy notion that she had been about to serve me. But that notion was wrong. She had been to my table, all right; the proof was on the table before me, a sheet of bright green paper. I read it. It was bad. f I "HE pink slip from the chambermaid had been bad enough. It meant that no member of the local would ever clean a room for me in a hotel while the Grievance Report was outstanding. But all that meant was that I couldn't live in a hotel, and there were, after all, other places to live if I worked at finding them. That complaint wasn't fatal. But the green one was more serious. It was on the stationery of the Cooks, Waiters and Restaurant Workers: Re : Oliver Sawyer Offense: Deliberate undertipping Miss Gina Sortini of this restaurant served the abovementioned Customer luncheon. Customer seemed well satisfied with the service and made no complaint. Nor, according to affidavit of headwaiter, hostess and cashier, had Customer any just cause for complaint After Customer had left, Waitress found two pennies under plate. It was not absentmindedness. Waitress distinctly remembers seeing Customer put money under plate, whereupon Customer's Guest, a young woman, commented upon said gratuity and both Customer and Guest laughed and made several joking remarks. Matter referred to Grievance Adjuster this date. And that meant that eat I could or starve I might, but I would do neither of them in any public restaurant in Grendoon. I remembered Diane's comment and how we had laughed -- that part was true. But it had been because the tip was large; I was extravagant, she said. There was no mistake here. It was deliberate. There was no longer any possible doubt. I got up and walked slowly away from the table. I was the Invisible Man. I went out into the lobby, hesitated, crossed it to the door. I was still carrying my thermosuit; I hadn't stayed in my room long enough to take it off. I walked hopelessly out of the door and into the hot gray night. There was a pile of luggage on the broad steps outside the doublepaned door. I tripped over it, started to walk on, went back and looked more closely. It was my luggage. IV raced out to the spaceport. Thank heaven it was only the hotels and restaurants so far! But it would be more, for Quayle would never stop. I would have to face it some day and find an answer, or live through the total extinction of my personality that came with being shunned like any other nobody. But I wouldn't face it now, not until I had found Diane. It was only desperation that drove me to the spaceport. Cryptic roarings from the side of the taped road told us of the giant machines that were at work in the Ag fields. I turned at an intersection and eased cautiously into the right-hand transverse road, the sonic feeler sending out beeps into the fog to search for oncoming cars. Abruptly there was a sodden flare of white and the giant blast of an industrial explosive behind it It was like that everywhere, outside of Grendoon and the other little cities. You don't remake a planet without using power, a lot of power, in all quantities and forms. And, of course, power can be dangerous... wherefore the conditioning. I drove into the spaceport through a flaming fence of naturalgas jets. A rocket was coming in. The buildings loomed queerly tall in the faint residual mist -- it was strange to see the top of a twostory building. But though I could see much, I could not see Diane. Nobody came weeping up to me on the walk outside the parking lot. I took a closer look. It was Vince Borton. I knew him -- had known him, when he was alive; but the time was coming when I would no longer be able to make that distinction. He was typical of the kind that hangs around the docks, begging handouts from the tourist. He had been a farmer before. In fact, he farmed with me. In fact, he had come in from Earth on the rocket with me. And went to work with Quayle for me; and it was because he had been caught stealing money from Quayle's pension fund that he was shunned. He sobbed: "Mister, please! If I don't get something to eat, # -- " "I can't help you, Vince," I said. I left him staring after me, a shabby nobody with a flat-footed stance and an expression of horror and surprise. People didn't talk to nobodies. But when somebody did, it wasn't to refuse help. And the only explanation of behavior like mine was the true one: I was in process of becoming a nobody myself. A high, confidential voice behind me said: "What's the matter, buddy? You don't look as happy as you did last time I saw you." I turned. I saw a bright gold brassard with the word Visitor picked out in diamond ink. It was the Earthie I had seen down by the Wallow. "Hello," I said shortly. A N enormous roaring seeped out of the overhead mist. Tubes bellowing, the Earth rocket settled in on the landing pad, pointing a finger of flame at Venus to destroy it and then embracing it. And then it started again. There was a crowd, as there always is when a rocket's coming in. A tall, lean fellow in a thermosuit of Agricultural yellow almost bumped into me. He nodded politely and started to turn away. "HeTshoo!" I sneezed. And so did the Earthie, two mighty, thundering sneezes. The Aggie whirled on us. His face was mottled and raging -- much more so than the offense justified! He demanded: ! Whafs the matter with you?" I said quickly: "I'm sorry. Very sorry. Excuse me. Us," I added, though the Earthie hadn't much to lose. I pulled the Earthie away after me. He looked at me with eyes like question marks. "Sneeze powder," I explained to him in a low voice. "What?" "To make me sneeze on him." "What?" "I'm sorry I got you into it, but the brassard will keep you out of trouble. Now you'd better leave me alone." He stared at me with doubting eyes and pouty lips. "Look, I'm just a stranger here, but I don't get it. Why the sneeze powder?" "To make trouble." "Trouble." He thought, and then admitted: "I heard about this kind of thing. You Venusians have your own system. Not like Earth." "Not the least damned little bit like Earth." "No violence, eh?" "We can't afford it." He nodded. "I know. They explained it to me back at the travel agency. Something about conditioning. Venus is a frontier planet, and all frontiers are the same. Everybody is likely to kill everybody else. Especially because weapons are so powerful nowadays." "They have to be here, because of the saposaurs. But not just weapons." "No, I know about that. Explosives. Big machines that could shred a man into confetti. So they condition you against violence, eh? No matter what happens, once you're through with the conditioning you can't kill anybody. And if somebody is really out to get somebody else -- " "He cuts him dead." I nodded. "You have the picture. That's what's happening to me now. Now you better stay away from me -- " "Dunlap." "Whatever your name is -- we haven't been formally introduced. I don't want to get you into trouble." I turned and left him. The world was hot and empty without Diane; I didn't want to share it with him. But I didn't have much of a world to share. Even less than I'd thought. parking lot and there was the Aggie again. He was on the taped path; the jets were off and the fog beginning to settle in again. I thought of swinging around him, but the path was narrow. I nodded politely. "Sorry," I said formally. He looked at me with recognition, then with annoyance. And then his eyes opened wide, and the expression became utter rage -- contempt -- hatred. "What -- what's the matter?" I faltered. He turned away without a word, as icy as the waitress in the hotel, as completely as an anybody had ever cut a nobody. Even if he was one of Quayle's men, there was no reason for this. I watched, incredulous. In the haze of five yards of thickening fog, I saw him stop to talk to one of the field police. The Aggie walked on and the policeman came slowly toward me. I nodded politely. The policeman looked through me. He saw my face and memorized it; but he also didn't see it, not at all. He looked at my chest for a thoughtful second. And then he turned and moved back toward the parking lot. I followed. He went to my car, produced an official electroseal, locked it. On the entrance door, he slapped a sticker with the glowing scarlet word: Impounded. "Hey!" I yelled. "What's the matter?" There was no reason for that! It was the sort of treatment reserved for the gravest offenders -- thieves, like Vince; accidental murderers; those who used the shunning services without good and sufficient reason... And one other category. I touched my chest. A sharp metal star point scraped my finger. Pinned to my thermosuit was a badge -- no, a brassard. The brassard. In diamond ink, the word Visitor flared. I was wearing the brassard without right. It was the lowest crime in this world. I had been framed. V walks like a ghost put to flight with bell, book and candle, I looked for help. The only help in all the world for me just then was the Earthie. Vince Borton clutched at me out of the fog as I passed. "Oliver! You too?" "Me too." "But why?" I said grimly, too full of hate and fear to answer: "Albert Quayle, that's all. Good-by." But he followed. I found Dunlap saying angrily to another new Earthie just pinning on his brassard: "Lousy place, not worth the plutonium to blow it to hell! Take my advice, Mac. Turn around. Get right back on that rocket and -- " I stopped and said formally: "I beg your pardon." He turned and looked at me. "Oh. You." "Can you help me?" Suspiciously: "What do you mean? All I want is out, buddy. I don't want to get in any trouble here." "You can't. You're wearing the brassard." "Maybe." "There's no risk involved! Remember? We Venusians can't use violence. That's the first thing we do, before we take off the brassard. We get conditioned against it. And you're immune to anything else. That's what the brassard's for." "Well? You didn't tell me what you want." "I want you to come see how the other half lives. The Terra Club." "What's at the Terra Club?" "A man named Albert Quayle," I said.  to town -- in Dunlap's car, of course; I couldn't use mine. I let him, provided he sat in the back seat. He grinned at me wryly. But I couldn't apologize, because the fission-blasts were going off again and the noise drowned everything out for a moment. Dunlap demanded aggressively: "What is all that?" "That's the reason." "Blasting? The reason for what?" "The reason for the conditioning. Every man a Zeus, with real thunderbolts, not mythical or magical. You've heard of the saposaurs?" "Saposaurs?" He nodded. "Sort of intelligent lizards, eh? But they don't like people. They stay in the back lands." "Most of the time. Not always. Look." I pointed to ithe built-in machine guns on the car. "They're needed, mister. It isn't safe to travel on Venus without plenty of weapons. And the tools! Plutonium built the Wallow. All of Venus was marsh. Most of it still is. Without the atomic explosives to shove out the water, we'd be living in jellied mud." He said hoarsely: "There isn't any danger from the saposaurs in the car, is there?" "Not unless one shows up." He said, "Oh." Vince Borton volunteered eagerly from the back seat -- it must have been a joy for him to talk again -- "There are plenty of them out in the fields. Not so much at night. They come in the daylight months, when there's plenty of fog." "Why?" "They like knives," Vince told him. "They're not really smart -- sort of a gorilla plus twenty-five per cent. But they're smart enough to know that steel will outlast their teeth and claws. They never had fire and don't much want it. Steel is something else. They'll break up a car, if they can, just to take the jagged metal for weapons." Dunlap said slowly: "But -- all right, granted you have to have strong safeguards against violence, with all that plutonium around, and guns to protect against the saposaurs. What about this business of ignoring people to death?" "Shunning them," I corrected him. "Cutting them dead. There has to be some way, mister. The community can't tolerate anti-social behavior. Why, if somebody insults my wife, I can't hit him -- I don't know how any more. The community has to have protection against -- against -- " "Against you and me," said Vince mournfully from the back seat. T#E dropped Vince at the edge  of the city and followed the tapewalks to the Terra Club. Dunlap complained: "It's hot. I don't like it this hot." "You weren't forced to come to Venus." "But I can't stand this heat!" He was fretful and irritable -- because he didn't like what he was getting into, I was sure. "Watch the tape," I ordered. Lights were ahead, bobbing like pastel ghosts in the fog. A man loomed up. He glanced at me, then through me; he nodded to Dunlap. "Already," I said. "What?" "Forget it" But it was a blow. The police weren't like the locals of the unions; they didn't content themselves with filing a protest and letting it get around to their own members. Now I was shunned by everyone; everyone in Grendoon would have seen my picture on the tri-V. "Turn in here, mister," I told him, with my heart solid lead inside me. The sign hanging from the tape wheeped faintly as we came close and its scanners picked us up, then blazed with the orange letters: We went in the door. The maitre-de greeted us affably, glad-to-see-you-tonight and all that. And then I moved into the light where he could get a better look at me and I was suddenly a ghost. He couldn't see me at all. I skinned out of my thermosuit, and Dunlap from his -- but the check girl took his and there was nothing to do with mine but sling it over my shoulder. "Ask for a table for two, mister," I said tightly. "I'd like a table. For two." "The gentleman is expecting someone?" the maitre-de inquired politely. "Say yes, mister." "Yes." "Very well, sir." The maitre-de led Dunlap down to a table right at the side of the dance floor. That was for me, that table, not for Dunlap. But Dunlap didn't know that The maitre-de wanted it that way. He wanted me to be seen. I mean -- no, not seen, but not-seen by everybody. So that everybody who was not-seeing me could get a good look. Good enough so that they would know enough never to see me again. r I ' HE table was for two, all right, but it was only one chair that the maitre-de pulled out. I had to pull out my own. And when the waiter came, he only turned one glass right-side up, spread one napkin, offered one menu. I said: "Thank God for your brassard. Order me some scotch, mister. And a sandwich." "Two scotches and a sandwich." Dunlap looked at me. "Ham?" "Anything." "Ham, or whatever you've got." The waiter looked at him, then shrugged. He brought the two scotches and the sandwich and lined them all up in front of Dunlap. I didn't mind leaning across the table to get mine. I wolfed the sandwich; already I was hungry. Later it would be worse, but I wasn't looking far ahead. I lifted my glass. "Confusion to our enemies." Dunlap was acting more and more nervous. He said sullenly: "But I don't know. I mean it's more your enemy, isn't it? I wonder if I really should get involved in a private disagreement." "A private murder." "All right, damn it! But this isn't much fun and it's costing me money." "Money?" I reached in my pocket and tossed my wallet in front of him. He stared at me. "Keep it. It's no good to me. Literally. There isn't a man in Grendoon with something to sell who'll sell it to me." He looked thoughtful. He opened the wallet and whistled. "There's a lot of dough here, buddy." "What? Well, why not?" I swallowed the drink. "I worked for Quayle nearly six months. Out in the boondocks. Hard work, fighting off saposaurs, handling the plutonium. Ask Vince Borton -- he was there working with me. Then -- " "What then?" "I got to talking to Quayle's wife. You saw her. Down at the Wallow." Dunlap looked at me with a certain expression on his face. "All right," I said. "She was his wife. But you don't know him, mister! A rat. Made life hell for her. Rough to work for -- you wouldn't think he was conditioned, the language he uses. In town, he'd be shunned himself -- but out on the fields customs are a little different about giving offense. Especially when the man giving offense is the boss." He grumbled edgily: "But I don't even know this Quayle!" "Now you do," I told him, and pointed. "He's just coming in." toad's face and features. Three men were with him -- overseers from the farms, big men, rough and mean men, the kind that seemed to seek him out. And there was a woman, a woman in a scarlet dress. That would be Diane's successor. Trust Quayle! He wouldn't go long without a woman, and always a beauty. Diane had been far from the first -- only three of them he'd been married to, and she one of them; the other two had died out on the boondocks. Not in-quotation-marks "died" -- one got in the way of a saposaur, the other disappeared in the swamps. That was how Quayle had got where he was, in fact -- both of them had been rich, and he inherited. His filmed toad's eyes went mildly around the room. He didn't see me. It was very clear that he didn't see me. After he was through not seeing me, he whispered something to one of the men, and the man snapped a finger for a waiter, and whispered to the waiter, and the waiter whispered back. And then Albert Quayle smiled a toadish smile. Oh, live a minute, that smile said. Live a minute longer; let yourself be sheltered by an Earthman's brassard. But he won't stay forever. And then you're dead. And Quayle was right, unless I found a way to handle it. The first thing was to get Dunlap on my side. I had to show him what I was up against. "Order two more scotches," I told him. While the waiter was gone, I whispered: "Listen close. You don't believe that this shunning business can kill, do you? You think that simply ignoring a man can't be fatal? Watch what happens." He scowled, almost as toadish a face as Quayle's own. "Hold on, buddy! What are you up to? If you kill this guy Quayle or something -- " "If I only could!" But then the waiter was back. I took one of the glasses out of the waiter's hand. He just blinked once at the remaining glass, then calmly set it in front of Dunlap. "Sorry, sir," he apologized. "You wanted two scotches, didn't you? Ill get another." "Now watch what happens." I took the full glass and walked straight across the dance floor. No one bumped into me, though the band was playing and the floor was full. No one noticed that I was there. They danced neatly around a moving vacuum named me. I got to Quayle's table and stood staring at him for a second. The woman moved nervously, but no one else gave any sign that a man was standing within a yard of them all. I shouted loudly: "Quayle!" There was no response, none at all. Only the woman blinked. "Quayle," I cried, "you're a rotten, stinking murderer! You're snubbing me to death because I took your wife away from you!" And I threw the liquor in his face. He made sure to turn his head in time -- raw alcohol bums -- but that was all I could see. I fell writhing to the floor. That's the conditioning, you see. The muscles are there, and the brain can think murder; but once the thought becomes action, even if it is less than murder, if it is violence in any form -- then the conditioned reflex snaps shut. Think of an iron maiden from Nuremberg, white-hot, the spikes closing in on you. Think of an epileptic fit. Think of being boiled alive. Combine them. Unfortunately, I did not lose consciousness, though the room spun madly around me and I couldn't see anything but a tortured giant Quayle's face mottled and furious, with the liquor sloshing down his ugly cheek. painfully. The dancers had been all around me, but no foot had touched me; every person in the room must have seen and heard, but there was no sign. The music was playing. The Terra Club was gay and laughing. I walked shakily back to our table. Vince Borton was standing there, pleading with Dunlap for something; but his eyes were on me. "You damned fool! What do you think you were trying to prove?" "More scotch," I said hoarsely. Dunlap pushed one of his glasses over. He looked shaken. "That was the conditioning?" I nodded. ' Vince said, "You're crazy! Come out of here! I came to tell you something, but -- " I cut in; "Imagine what it would have been if I'd tried to kill him." "I can't," Dunlap admitted. "It would have killed me." "It should have killed you!" Vince blazed. (And while we were shouting, all around us the Terra Club was having a party.) I said; "Vince. Please. Leave me alone." Suddenly he calmed. "All right." Then he said thoughtfully, "Listen. Funny thing. You know when you threw the liquor in Quayle's face?" "Yes. I know." "But do you know what he did?" He nodded, satisfied at my expression. "He started to go for you." "But that's not so strange," Dimlap protested. "Buddy here went for Quayle first." "And then neither of them could follow through." "Mmm. I see," Dunlap said after a moment; but then he shrugged. "All right," he said. "You've convinced me. You deliberately let yourself in for that to prove a point, so I guess I have to say you've proved it. Now what?" "Help me, mister." "How?" "First I want to find my fiancee. I've got to. But I can't talk to anyone, so you'll have to -- " "No, he won't," Borton interrupted. "That's what I came to tell you." "Tell me what?" "Where Diane is." Borton fingered his ragged cap. "I heard from one of the other nobodies. You know how it is -- misery loves company. When somebody new gets shunned, we all know it right away." "And my fiancee?" He nodded. "Shunned. She's over at the Wallow, on an island. And the water's coming in and she can't get anybody to help her." VI said: "Now I've got him! Quayle's in the palm of my hand!" The hot fog closed in on all of us like a barber's steamy towel. It seemed to make it difficult for Dunlap to breathe. He wheezed nervously: "What are you talking about?" The doorman glanced at him curiously, then away. Borton was almost treading on the man's shoes, but the doorman didn't know he was alive. "I'm talking about Quayle! This is the end of the road for him, I promise you. I didn't want to do this, but he doesn't leave me any choice. Now that I know where Diane is, I'm going to blow the lid off. We'll go get her and then it's the end for Quayle." Dunlap clutched at his chest, knocking the brassard off his thermosuit. He bent and fumbled for it. When he stood up, he seemed a little steadier. "How?" he asked. "With a little help from the police, that's how! Do you know what he's been doing? He's been smuggling steel knives to the saposaurs. I can prove it -- with my fiancee's help! It's our ace in the hole." "But, look. What does that have to do with you?" "Everything! Why do you think we were shunned, Dunlap? He's behind it. He's afraid. My fiancee knew all about it. She had to. But she wouldn't have talked. And neither would I, because that was the way she wanted it. But now -- " "I know. Now you're going to blow the lid off," he said, jittering. "You bet we are. Once we let the truth out, he's discredited -- done. He'll be a nobody then, not us. And then we can appeal our cases. The courts will listen. We'll get the verdict reversed; they'll believe me when I say I didn't put the brassard on. The locals will let us off." I grinned, as confidently as I could, although I was sweating more than hot fog could justify. "And the pity of it," I said, "is that Quayle didn't have to have buy him off if necessary." like saposaur chicks fresh out of the egg -- puzzled, surprised, ready for a fight. "What the hell are you talking about?" Vince Borton asked me. "You don't have anything Quayle wants, except Diane -- and he won't want her back. He just wants to get even with the two of you." "That's where you're wrong, Vince. I told you. He bribes the saposaurs with steel knives, to go after the other plantations and leave his alone. But it takes a lot of knives. There are lots of saposaurs. And it's against the law, of course." "So?" "So he can't get all the knives he wants," I explained patiently. "But I can get them for him. Plenty! We talked about it, my fiancee and I; that was what we were going to offer him. But now -- no. Now it's war." Dunlap said tenaciously: "Explain that a little, will you? Where were you going to get them?" "I know where there's a shipload! Did you ever hear of the Formidable? Old Earth ship -- oh, twenty-five years back. It crashed. They did that in those days. It missed Glendoon by twenty miles, smashed itself up and sank in forty feet of mud. But I know where it is." I let that sink in, the way the old rocket had sunk into the greasy mud. "I found it while I was working for Quayle, digging his own drainage ditches, blasting with his own plutonium. I thought of telling him about it. But I told my fiancee first and then the two of us -- Well. Anyway, we didn't tell him. And it's loaded with knives. That was twenty-five years ago, you see. They used to try to trade with the saposaurs then." Dunlap cleared his throat. "I, uh, I think I left my wallet at the table. Wait a minute, will you? I'll be right back." Vince Borton stared after him. Then, lowering his voice so that the unhearing doorman would really not hear, he blazed : "Oliver, you idiot! What's the use of telling him all those lies?" "No, Vince. Don't get me wrong. They're only part lies. I do know where the Formidable crashed -- but it isn't forty feet of mud, it's four hundred; and Quayle's own thousand-acre drainage lake is right on top of it now. He'll never recover it. But he'll want those knives, as long as he thinks they can be had." "So? Then why did you tell the Earthie about it? Why not tell Quayle?" I stepped back to the entrance of the Terra Club. The noise of revelry was loud inside it, loud enough to drown out most of the distant dull roll of blasting. But I could see clearly through the double glass door. Even through the doors, across the crowded dance floor, I could see someone bending to talk to Albert Quayle. I could see Quayle's look of worry, then the change of expression. Avarice gleamed out of his eyes, like golden glints from a pawnbroker's sign. "Don't worry, Vince," I said softly. "Quayle knows." TT wasn't far to the Wallow. Vince Barton led us by the taped path to the water's edge. We were quiet, especially Dunlap. The torches were gone. Most of the people were gone. Only scattered couples and groups were left, often drunk, all invisible in the clotted fog. The thick water in the Wallow had risen to the very edge of the tapewalk. "Under here." Vince held the tape for us. We stepped off into sucking mud. The distant rumble of explosions was still drumming at the horizons. Venus is an enormous planet, no oceans, just swamps, so it's bigger in land area than four Earths; there is much blasting to be done, and the sound of plutonium carries. But above the distant boom, in a moment I heard something else. A thin, distant voice cut like piano wire at my heart. Out in the middle of the Wallow Diane, invisible, was moaning. "Help me! Please -- please -- the water's getting higher!" And there were people within the sound of her voice -- a good many, though most had left -- and they had boats if they chose to use them. But she wasn't there for them. She was nobody. A ghost. If anyone knew she was alive, there was no sign shown. "Mister. Get a boat." He looked at me. "Go ahead, man. Ask someone -- anybody. They'll lend it to you, because you're wearing the brassard. But they won't talk to Borton or me." He trudged off, muttering his worried disapproval. As soon as he had disappeared into the fog, I said: "All right, Vince. You remember what I told you in front of the Club. Now do it!" "Aw, Oliver! You're crazy! Do you know what you're getting into?" "Do you want to be shunned all the little rest of your life?" He grunted once and walked away. But I knew 'he didn't approve. That didn't matter. What mattered was Diane and life. So now I was all alone in the hot slimy fog, with Diane's distant sobs tearing at me. I wanted to call to her, only there was a reason for not doing it. But time was passing. now with the run-off from the hills. The air was twenty degrees colder. Still hot -- terribly hot, by Earth standards; but as our portion of Venus rolled into shadow, water was wrung out of the sodden air, and it had to go somewhere. Now the Wallow was a hundred acres of steaming muddy water. All that was left of the red mud of six hours before was a few islands poking up. Diane was on one of them. But in a while, maybe a very short while, all of the islands would disappear. By full flood time, the shallowest point in the Wallow would be sixty feet deep. And it was not merely drowning y that endangered her. That water was hot. Time was passing -- Then I heard Dunlap's wheezing breath, and a moment later the thunk of his oars moving blindly toward me in the fog. "Here!" I yelled. He found me. I scrambled aboard, and we rowed clumsily out on the soupy lake, following the sound of Diane's sobbing voice. S HE cried unbelievingly: "Darling!" I clutched at her in the mist. It was like Leander embracing Hero, still wet from the raging Hellespont; it was the meaning and purpose of all my life. Then I felt her go suddenly tense. She strained to see through the hot fog. In a voice that cracked a little, she said: "It's -- if s the Earthie." I looked around politely. Dunlap was standing there in an awkward, embarrassed stance. His face was half turned away. He cleared his throat. "I can explain," he apologized. "Explain what, mister?" He felt his throat. "I mean I was afraid she'd take this attitude. I knew she wouldn't understand about what happened. Here I am trying to help you and -- "What did happen, mister?" Diane said furiously: "He's the one! He got you away on purpose! And then the fog closed in, remember? And somebody grabbed me. Grabbed me!" "I know, dear." "But it was physical! Only an Earthie could have done it and he was the only Earthie in sight. He grabbed me and brought me out here on a boat. And left me. And then somebody came by and I called to them and -- they shunned me, darling! He did it!" "But it wasn't me, I swear. Ask your friend here! I was with him, wasn't I?" "You were with me for about three minutes." I patted his arm with my free hand. "But you didn't do it," I reassured him. "I know that. It wasn't him, darling." "Then who-" I stopped her: "Be patient, dear. Just for a few moments." We stood there. fog. A boat's oars. And then a familiar whining voice, droning the nobody's familiar whimpering cry. "Mister? Please, mister. I haven't eaten in three days -- " "Vince!" I shouted. "Here we are." He came up out of the fog, looked us over and nodded. Behind him there were other figures in the fog. "Who the devil are they?" Dunlap demanded, fingering his brassard. "Nobody," I told him. "Nobody at all." There were four of them, ghostly in the mist. In the fog, they had no faces, only vague mottled shapes, and faint voices that agreed: "Nobody, mister. Just nobody." "But maybe," I said steadily, "they won't be nobodies forever. Maybe soon they'll be somebodies again." don't know what you're trying to pull, Oliver, but I don't like it I'm getting out of here!" I stood in front of him. "How did you know my name was Oliver?" He rocked back, staring. "What?" "I never told you my name. We weren't properly introduced." "A visitor wouldn't know that -- " "And he wouldn't know my name either. Other people wouldn't use it in front of him without proper introductions. That would be cause for offense." "But "Never mind." I raised my voice. "Quayle! Come on out here. I know you're on the island. You wouldn't miss a chance to get knives -- besides, I heard your canoe." A moment, while Dunlap's face turned to melting butter. Then there was a soft, sludgy sound of footsteps in the mud. Albert Quayle walked steadily up to us, his fat toad's face a mask. He glanced at Dunlap, and even in the drenching heat of that little island in the Wallow, Dunlap shuddered. Then Quayle turned to me. He waited. I said cheerfully: "We're ready, I think. Quayle, here. Dunlap, here. Diane and myself, here. Borton and the witnesses -- " "Witnesses?" Quayle's lips didn't move; only the word popped out of the fog and hung there between us. "To a murder, Quayle. Yours. You're going to die." "Ha!" He was contemptuous. "You can't kill me. I'm an important man here, Oliver. Who's going to shun me on your say-so?" I paused. "There are other ways He didn't move a muscle. I let him think for a second. Then I said: "Vince, have you got what I asked for?" He passed me something cold and sharp. It was hard to make out in the fog but I knew what it was; and then I held it up and they all knew. "A knife, Quayle!" I said. "It's what you want, isn't it? A knife to bribe a saposaur to wreck somebody else's plantation. That's what brought you here, and now you can have this one, at least!" He stood frozen. I took a second to turn to Diane. "Good-by," I whispered. She didn't know what I meant by that, but it was all right. If it turned out that she had to know, she would know. And then I said loudly to Quayle: "I'm going to give you the knife -- where it belongs. You put too much trust in conditioning, thinking I can't use this. But maybe you're wrong." He licked his lips. "Did you ever hear of a bribe?" I demanded. "Ever hear of a man who was supposed to be conditioned -- but wasn't? Well, you're looking at one and now, Quayle, here's your knife." And I tensed, and fought my own body to do it, and I jumped for him, the knife raised to plunge into his breast. And that was the last I saw. I fell senseless to the ground, because, you see, what I had just told him had been an utter lie.- with much pain. A long time had passed. I hurt in places where I'd never known there was a nerve. I was weaker than any living man has a right to be. But I was alive. That was all I needed to know. If I was alive, everything was all right; that was the gamble I had taken. The conditioning doesn't prevent, not quite. It only punishes. I had sought out that punishment as a bluff; but it was a bluff that could easily have killed me. Diane was leaning over me. Blearily I focused on her face. Her scent was musky, her expression calm and passionate. "Oliver," she murmured. "You're all right. Don't worry." "I know," I whispered. "At least I lived through it. That was the hard part -- but worth it all." I rubbed my face. There was heavy stubble on it; I had been unconscious at least a full day. I was in a hospital room. "You didn't kill Quayle with the knife." "No. The attempt was bad enough. If I'd succeeded, there would have been no chances at all; the conditioning would have killed me." She looked at me with a glance of wonder and loving admiration. "You knew exactly what was going to happen, didn't you? When you said all that about a man bribing the immigration people to get in without being conditioned, it was Quayle you were talking about, wasn't it?" I nodded. "You were right. He wasn't conditioned. He -- " She shivered. "He killed his first two wives, Oliver. Did you know that? But I guess you did. For their inheritance. And he killed others to get them out of the way. He confessed it all, once it was too late and they'd begun to shun him. And he was the one who grabbed me in the fog -- from behind, so I couldn't see his face. And then when you went at him with the knife -- " "I know." I nodded again, beginning to feel better. "He hit me, proving that he wasn't conditioned." "That's right. And with Vince Borton and the others to see it, there was no doubt. The police listened to them. Vince was framed -- Albert admitted it." "I know." "And Dunlap? Did you know about him? He wasn't an Earthie; he was from one of the South Pole cities, working for Quayle, running in knives for trade with the saposaurs." "I know. When he called me Oliver, I knew for sure, but I'd wondered since that scene in the Club. He didn't tell me what Quayle had done when I threw the drink in his face -- tried to hit me then, too, and didn't pass out. Vince Borton had to tell me about it. Then there was the brassard -- Dunlap must have done it, if the cop didn't, and it had to be one or the other." Diane leaned forward. "It's all right now," she said huskily. "We can forget. Oliver, you're wonderful!" I said, reaching out to her: "I know."     i    i          i          We asked last year how communities were doing for supplies of Galaxy -- adequate or inadequate numbers of copies, regular or irregular distribution? Readers wrote in. A lot of them. The result was remarkably like a revised battle plan. Reserve copies were sped into lightly held towns. Fortified positions that had held out against science fiction were breeched. Copies were liberated from under-the-counter concealment and put in the front lines. Everybody benefited, and our thanks to those reader-scouts who did a terrain-mapping job that we could never have done on our own. But that was a year ago. How are things now? For swift, resourceful action, write directly to headquarters: Circulation Department. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York #, N.Y. ' Star Shelf by Robert A. Heinlein, Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y., # A T first, it appeared that Heinlein had fallen over the same fallacy that afflicted the van Vogt post-atomic series: extreme technological skill in a primitive society. Starting his story in a slave market, Heinlein soon makes his point that even in so-called enlightened eras in history, frontiers always brought slavery into being. In Sargon, capital of the Nine Worlds, sedan chairs toted by slaves are a mark of elegance. Thorby, a young, fiercely rebellious boy, is auctioned to an old one-legged beggar who refuses to be his master. In actuality, he has rescued the boy from slavery. He teaches Thorby languages, concentration and retention. Although their sole income is from alms, it is soon evident to Thorby that Baslim is far from being solely a beggar. This is proved forcefully one day when Baslim disappears and Thorby is hounded into hiding by the police. In accord with the old man's instructions, he manages to locate the skipper of a spaceship of the Free Traders and to repeat a hypnotically memorized message from the old beggar. As foster son of Baslim, to whom the Traders owe a debt of honor, Thorby is accepted as one of the People, subject to their codes and taboos. Here, Heinlein gives an accurate and detailed anthropological picture of a small isolated culture, practicing both exogamy and endogamy as well as being a patrilocal matriarchy. Sounds frightening, but it's a humanities course in one easy lesson. Thorby's actual identity is a bit startling, but Heinlein is invariably logical. And invariably entertaining, I might add, even when engaged in a crusade against future slavery. Matheson. J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila., #Maine's Isotope Man preceded Matheson's in Lippincott's "Novel of Menace" series. Like Power, Stir of Echoes qualifies in full. Matheson expertly builds a mood of horror and terror that only on one occasion exceeds credulity. After a jocose opening, which nevertheless fits the spirit of the parlor-game hypnosis stunt that precipitates the action, the story becomes taut and gripping. Tom Wallace is the scoffing subject of his college-student brother-in-law at one of neighbor Elsie's deadly dull parties. Incredibly, he goes under. The repercussions begin later, however, as a result of the hypnotist freeing and uninhibiting his mind. That night, he sees a ghostly woman in black. He later finds that he possesses either clairvoyance or low telepathy. He is aware of imminent or impending death. He cannot read thoughts, but is susceptible to and overwhelmed by raw emotion. His life becomes a complete nightmare because his newfound gift is completely uncontrollable and unpredictable. Matheson rides the nightmare to the finish line in a lather of cold sweat. N. Y., # A T this moment of intense general interest in matters of satellites, missiles and space conquest, this first true encyclopedia comes as a godsend. It covers words and phrases of all branches of astronomy, upper-atmosphere research and guided missiles, and is literally loaded with diagrams and illustrations. It contains a special supplement covering the first of the satellites. A necessity in the modern reference library. Avalon Books, N. Y., # sleeper here. He draws on his wartime experience in the British Army and the almost incredible feats of British Intelligence in the darkest days of WW II when Britain could only sting its enemy. The Sirian Combine and Terra are at war and, although inferior technologically, Sirius has an overwhelming numerical advantage -- so much so that Terra is forced to adopt the Wasp technique. James Mowry, Wasp, was born and spent his first seventeen years on Sirian Diracta. Special training, pigmentation and surgery enable him to pass as Sirian on planet Jaimec where he is to sting the planetary officials by one-man sabotage, rumor-mongering and assassination into crediting existence of a widespread underground antiwar organization. Russell has invested this hardboiled yarn with plenty of action and authenticity. A fine light opera. Ronald Fraser. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., # plicated enterprise, and Dr. Fraser as Administrative Secretary of the International Council of Scientific Unions, worldwide sponsor on information about it. The title is a misnomer -- the spot activity, a period of eighteen months. A glance at the contents page alone sets the head spinning with the ramifications of the program. Part I "On the Boundaries of the Known World" subheads the Earth's size and shape, magnetic fields, wandering poles, atmospheric jet streams, ocean current, the night airglow and chemistry of the atmosphere, the atmospheric heat engine and multiple etcs. Part II, "Toward New Horizons," categorizes the areas of cooperation among the nations for the purpose of extending knowledge of Part I. Jampacked with data and exedited by Leo Margulies. Fawcett Publications, Conn., # TF names alone sell a collection of novellas, #X M is a lead-pipe cinch: four topnotchers to three yarns is a good deal better than par. However... "Lorelei of the Red Mist" by Bradbury and Brackett is the operatic result of a barely post-war collaboration, when neither of these talents had jelled into present solidity. It is a pleasant superfantasy-adventure on Venus in a more-so mood of Burroughs and Kline. "The Golden Helix" by Sturgeon is an account of the establishment of a star colony by three couples who awaken from suspended animation to find themselves either the pawns or the gods of a mysterious race. The story has the moments of poetry to be found in any Sturgeon work but doesn't rank as real Sturgeon. "Destination Moon" by Heinlein more than makes up for the minor shortcomings of the other yarns. This masterpiece of film and print still has immense emotional impact and credibility and is of redoubled interest now that the Age of Space has truly dawned. written by Julian May, Popular Mechanics Press, Chicago, # each  spotlight the inadequacies of American education. To supplement formal study, I will present monthly reviews of noteworthy items. The three books above are excellently done popularizations in narrative form, full of palatable information, experiments and illustrations. Randy Morrow, brother Sam and their science-writer father carry the thread of story continuity in each volume. In Chemistry, the boy's carbide lamp fails at a spelunking outing. A recommended local chemist is a teen-aged girl who teaches Randy chemical fundamentals. In Electronics, Randy overcomes the animosity of a maladjusted young ham operator. Atomic Energy sees the boys visit Argonne National Laboratory. My only quibble is the emphasis on these being boys' books. By actual test, I have found them to be of equal interest to teen-age girls. If Popular Mechanics intends, as I hope, to make this a series, they have set a genuinely high and meritorious standard for themselves.      By j. t. McIntosh To poke loopholes in galactic law, never advertise what you are selling... so you can sell what you are not advertising! shuddered. My lovely wife Rogan was turning into something I couldn't look at for long without getting sick. I decided not to risk looking in there again. Ped was in the control sphere playing with a black and white board and a lot of little disks. I'd seen him at it before. "What's this?" I inquired. "Game I picked up on Earth. Checkers." "It isn't in the spools," I accused. "Is. You haven't digested them all," he accused back. "I still have two to go," I admitted. "Is the game any good?" He showed me. It was very simple. I said so, wondering what he saw in it. "Try," he said, indicating the white discs. I made a move. He made one. I made another. "See?" he said. I had to take a piece. He took two. I had to take another. He moved. I took another. He moved again. I took one more. Having got me exactly where he wanted me, he wiped me off the board. "I see," I said. "The rule about capture makes it. Think it'll go in the Twenty Worlds?" "Can try," said Ped. He pushed the board away. "What are you trying to sell on this planet?" "Nothing much," I said. Ped spat I winced. He was an old man with a lot of nasty habits he'd picked up on the umpteen worlds on which he'd been the first Vigintan. But I had to put up with him, nasty habits and all, because I knew of nobody with one-tenth his talent in his own valuable line. How many people could land on an alien world about which nobody knew anything and leave it six months later with complete knowledge of the language, customs and physical structure of the principal race? And no unsolved crime left on the planet, either, or suspicion among the highest creatures of the world concerned that an alien had been among them. "You know the law," I said virtuously. "We can't exploit this or any other unaffiliated world." "I know it," he said skeptically. business. He was retained simply to teach us enough for us to pass as natives. Rogan and I wouldn't have had a hope landing on our own, without Ped's expert preliminary work. "What do you sell, usually?" he asked. "Ergeron," I said, knowing he could find out, anyway. "What's that?" "It powers this ship." "Oh," he said. "Well, they're a long way from that Two centuries at least. They'll go to their moon any day, and the planets the following week. But deep space... they won't be buying ergeron for three centuries at least." "Well, I guess my company will still be around in three centuries," I said. "And they'll still have to use ergeron. It's the only way, theoretically." He spat again. I decided to terminate this conversation pretty quickly. I didn't like the turn it was taking. "What are you selling now?" he asked. "I don't know." Before he spat again, which seemed to be his unhygienic way of saying "I don't believe you," I went on hastily: "That is, I don't know what we're going to call it. What we're going to say it will do, I guess." "You mean it won't do it?" "No, it'll do what we say." I turned away. "If I digest the other two spools now, can you get the metabolism change started?" "Right away. Your wife should be pretty well along." I shuddered again. "She is. I looked." "Wait," he said. "One thing you'd better know. It's not on the spools. It's no more than a hunch about these people." "Think I'd better hear it, if it's only a hunch?" "Obviously. You're going to do something good? Bad?" "Good, I'd say." "Naturally you'd say." He spat. But this time I was a long way away. "Remember this. These people see things in black and white. No grays. You're a friend, everything you do is fine. You're an enemy, nothing you ever do can be right They like you, you're in. They hate you, you're outside for good." "Thanks," I said. "That may be useful. We should convince them at all costs that what we're doing is good?" "You'd better," said Ped.L ' were different. I was one of the things that were different, and that made a big difference in the way she looked to me. Now it was Ped who made us both sick. We didn't have to look at him, but we had to smell him. It was a pity that the two species, Terran human and Vigintan, could use the same atmosphere and temperature range. Being Terran and being in the same room with a Vigintan was an experience we could have done without. Like and dislike are a lot more physical than you know until you've made a body-change. I'd seen Rogan as a Terran and I'd been sick -- but that was when I was Vigintan. Now that we were both Terran, she was wonderful, far more beautiful than when we were both Vigintan. That meant sex was a stronger impulse on Earth than on the Twenty Worlds. Rogan was thinking the same thing. She murmured: "This is going to be interesting. On some worlds, sex is nice; on other worlds, it's nasty; but on any world there's nothing quite like it." "Where there is sex, that is," I remarked. "Where there isn't, I don't go. I have better things to do than be a neuter." "When do you want me to come back for you?" Ped interrupted. We spoke English, he Vigintan -- it was easier that way. I reflected. "How much local currency did you say you'd collected for us?" "Ten thousand dollars." I checked that against what I'd learned from the spools. "Which isn't exactly a fortune." "Best I could do." "Well have to start in a small way. I guess well need six weeks." I wanted so much to get away from the Vigintan smell that I could hardly think straight. We should have fixed all this before making the body-changes -- or made Ped resume his Terr an shape. "Think six weeks will be enough?" Ped asked. "Yes. Let's go, Rogan." "Haven't you forgotten something?" Ped asked mildly. "I don't think so." "They wear clothes on this planet." T groaned. "We'll put them on in the landing car," I said. "It couldn't be that you don't like my company?" Ped inquired. "I hate to say this," I said, "but you stink." "So do you," said Ped, unruffled. "Both of you. Also, you look -- " "I know," I said hastily. "Vigintans and humans are different. Let's leave it at that" I shut the door behind us. Almost at once, the landing car's air refiner swirled away the last traces of Vigintan scent -- though to call it that is to flatter it -- and we breathed delicious clean air. "We don't know how to wear these things," Rogan objected, stirring the little pile of clothes with her foot. 'We should have let him show us." "I know," I said, "but I couldn't stand it any longer." "I know what you mean," she said feelingly. The little car was falling away from the parent ship. It was time to make ourselves into civilized Terrans. We knew a lot about Earth from the spools we'd digested, but that was all theoretical, and putting clothes on is practical. Though Rogan knew what the little wisps of white nylon were meant to be, it needed quite a lot of experimentation to get them on right. Imagine putting on a brassiere for the first time, when you haven't seen anybody putting one on, or wearing one. We kept putting things on back to front, and telling each other doubtfully: "I'm sure that can't be right." However, when Rogan looked at last as if her dress had been painted on her, we were sure that might be right Funny how backward peoples can think of things that escape far more advanced races -- zip-fasteners are wonderful, and when we sell the idea in the Twenty Worlds, it'll pay for the trip twice over. That's if Ped hasn't sold it first. My clothes gave me less trouble, once I had figured one thing out Rogan's fastenings were all at the back, which gave us the idea all mine must be too, only they weren't. My clothes were pretty crumpled by the time I'd established that. By then, we had landed in the spot Ped had picked -- soft soil four hundred yards from a highway two miles outside a small town called Gelland. We got out and set the landing car to dig itself in. Half an hour later, there was only a big patch of darker soil to show where it was, and that wouldn't last long under a hot sun. We took careful bearings, picked our way to the road and started to walk to Gelland. "You're not supposed to say that," I reminded her. "Am I just supposed to fry in silence?" "Not that. Women don't say 'Jesus'." "But it's part of the local religion. Aren't women supposed to be religious?" "You didn't digest spool eight," I said accusingly. "I did too. I know women aren't supposed to say 'Jesus,' and -- and -- but the spool didn't say why not. I don't think it's fair that men should be able to use some words and women shouldn't. Most of them are very useful words. Anyway, I'm going to take this dress off." "You can't. Didn't you digest spool three?" Rogan sulked. Those references to digesting data may be misleading because it is also a Terran idiom. That, however, is only a metaphor; we really digest information -- we eat it. Some long-ago genius -- I don't know if he was Vigintan or there was a Vigintan middleman involved -- couldn't see why it had to be a metaphor and experimented till he came up with an edible neuron tape onto which information could be -- well, fed -- and the tape -- how else can I express it? -- fed directly into the brain. Easy, cheap, permanent. We saw a tall, yellow-haired youth ambling along the highway in our direction and braced ourselves for our first effort to convince a human that we were human. "Excuse me, sir," I said. He stopped, but looked surprised. "Why? You ain't done nothin'," he said. Hastily I checked back, and there it was. On accosting a stranger, say, "Excuse me, sir or madam, as the case may be." Damn Ped. He'd got it wrong. "How do you know?" demanded Rogan, unable to leave well enough alone. Curiously enough, this seemed to be the right thing to say. The yellow-haired youth grinned, and it seemed we were all right "Does this road go anywhere?" I asked. Now I knew as I said it that that wasn't quite right. I should have said something like "How far to the next town?" But there was no need for this character to say: "Naw. I been watching it all day and it ain't moved yet." VWE had been unlucky enough " to meet a humorist. We possess a sense of humor too, but there was no telling if it was the same. As a matter of fact, it is, more or less, but we didn't know that then. "How far to the next town?" I asked warily. "Three miles," he said. "Maybe four." Rogan turned to me resentfully. "Ped said it was only -- " I dug her in the ribs. "Thanks," I said to the youth. "Think nothin' of it." "I won't," I assured him courteously. He stared at us and moved slowly on. "I wonder what we did wrong," I mused when I was sure he couldn't hear me. "I know what we did wrong," Rogan complained. "Trusting that Ped! Three miles -- that's about six thousand five hundred of these steps... Jesus!" "I told you not to say that." She said a coarser word. "If it's actually that far, I am not going to carry this ridiculous extra weight," she declared. She took off her dress. Almost immediately a car, the first we'd seen -- naturally Ped had picked a very quiet roadway -- came up behind us, went past us swerving all over the road with three faces goggling at us and came to a halt about two hundred yards further on. Before we reached it, however, a woman got out of the back seat, pushed over the man in the driving seat and drove off.  "Well, what do you know about that?" said Rogan. "If you don't put your dress back on," I said grimly, "I will." "Idiot," she retorted. "You'd never get into it." "Refer to spool seven," I said. "When to wear which clothes." "I was half asleep when I digested that," she admitted. "Oh, well, I guess you're right. Zip me up the back." takes we made, but a couple of days later we were past the worst. We knew that if people looked old-fashioned at us, we just had to pretend it was all a joke, and we knew that almost anything Rogan said was regarded as a joke anyway. We knew that the yellow-haired youth had stared because people don't walk along a highway dressed as we were and not carrying anything. We knew that if we'd said our car was out of gas, he'd have been satisfied -- only that might have landed us in trouble too, when we failed to produce a car, so perhaps it was just as well that we hadn't made any explanations. We took a hotel room -- not the first we tried; the second. It was a pity about that first hotel. Ped had told us about wedding rings, and made one when he made the clothes, but Rogan had forgotten to put it on. It was probably still on the floor of the landing car.  A T the second hotel, there was no trouble. The first thing was to make some of the stuff I'd developed on the ship and find a name for it. We wanted to call it Elixir of Life, but found that had been used. Every name we thought of had already been used. Then Rogan read a wonderful book called Alice in Wonderland and we decided to call it simply Drink Me. There were difficulties in making Drink Me, and not the ones I'd expected. It wasn't in the least difficult to get chemicals and drugs; the trouble was that they weren't quite what I expected when I got them. Standards were different, but I'd anticipated that. What I had not considered were the impurities. Seems obvious, but I hadn't realized that what a chemist calls impurities are quite arbitrary, and different in every culture. Iodine is an impurity in salt if you don't want it. So are air, water, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, in anything. I kept finding that human chemists had gone to enormous trouble to remove from this or that something that I wanted left in, and hadn't bothered about something else that I wanted left out. Water was worst of all. On my home planet, we seldom bother to distill water; consequently, our standard is undistilled water. Shocking chemistry on Earth, I know. Trouble was, neither fresh water nor distilled water reacted quite the way I wanted, and I had to go to a lot of trouble to introduce the proper impurities. "Call yourself a chemist," said Roger derisively, while I sweated blood. Despite the difficulties, I had a couple of dozen bottles of Drink Me ready in a day or two. Then we saw a lawyer and fixed up the legal side. That was easy, because we didn't care much about exclusive rights. That puzzled him a lot. I couldn't very well explain that after a week or two we weren't going to be around to collect the cash, so we didn't care who got it. I had a few thousand labels printed. They said: for Coughs Colds Catarrh Bronchitis Asthma Headaches etc. In small type, the formula was given, but there was a warning that the manner of preparation was important. If an ordinary Earth chemist made it up according to the given formula, the result would be harmless but wouldn't work. On the Twenty Worlds, we're not geniuses and we don't know everything. In biology, however, we have practically all the answers. Making ourselves Terran bodies was just one of our party tricks. The elixir was another. With the information Ped had brought back, it had been child's play for me to throw Drink Me together. Getting it on the market wasn't nearly so easy. After buying clothes and things, and living expenses, we only had seven thousand dollars left. "A real Elixir of Life and we can't sell it," Rogan sneered. "We haven't tried yet. You're the saleswoman." She perked up at that. She'd had nothing to do so far. "What do I do?" she asked. "How do you sell things here?" Unfortunately, we didn't quite know. We could have hired somebody to sell the stuff for us, if only we'd known whom to hire. But things are awkward when you're in a  strange land, no matter how much theoretical knowledge you have about it. What we eventually did was this. Rogan made the rounds of the various drugstores in town, buying aspirin or bromides or paperback books, until she found an owner who had a heavy asthmatic wheeze. It had to be an owner, of course.Then she told him brightly there was no need to wheeze like that. She was traveling for a firm which had made asthma prehistoric. "Just try this," she said, producing the bottle. "I'll be back in a couple of hours." "Hey, wait a minute," wheezed E. Levitski, Prop. But Rogan was gone. When she went back, his asthma had completely gone. "It was too easy," she told me later. "He fell over himself to buy a couple of gross. What's a gross?" I explained as I made up the couple of gross. We delivered them. "Now what do we do?" Rogan asked. "We take a holiday," I said. "This job is finished, honey." #E spent a couple of weeks " having fun in our part of Earth. There were forests, lakes and rivers, and we liked it all. We weren't much interested in the people everywhere. Every town in the Galaxy is full of people. But we liked the fishing and we liked bathing. Bathing -- now there's something. Nobody on the Twenty Worlds self or herself in water. Maybe that's one reason we smell. Another reason we don't do it is we'd never come out. It's all very well for Terrans -- they float. How we came to learn to swim was, Rogan was moaning as usual about the heat when we happened to see a couple of girls in bathing suits. Nobody had told us about that. Ped had been too busy otherwise to find out about bathing suits -- and, as I said, he was an old man, anyway. Naturally, Rogan had to get into a suit. Then she found what they were for. We were horrified. Rationally, we knew it was quite likely that human bodies would float. Emotionally, we knew too well that if we went into the water, we'd sink like stones. T UT Rogan was still hot and the water of the lake looked beautifully cool. She waded in, waving good-by. Five minutes later, she could float. It was amazingly easy. And after that we spent a lot of our time in the water. At the end of a couple of weeks, we went back to Levitski's to see what had happened. Nothing had happened. I couldn't believe it. He had sold a couple of dozen bottles of Drink Me, but that was all. And he'd only been able to do that because he'd been telling everybody with obvious sincerity how wonderful the stuff was. Could it be that everybody who had bought the stuff had been # per cent healthy and sane? Two days later, however, we had the first nibble. Levitski rang up to ask for more. Somebody had come in and bought his entire stock. I made more. And more. And more. Soon I couldn't make it fast enough. It was a shock to learn, however, that people were simply buying it as an asthma cure. We set up a small factory to make the stuff -- it was simple enough, so long as I supervised operations. And then orders started coming in from all over the place -- one from as far as Philadelphia, nearly a thousand miles away. Then one day, when I arrived back at our hotel, Rogan was looking excited and secretive. "There's a man to see you," she said. "Dr. Byron. Do you think he suspects what we are?" I went in to see him and find out. TR. James Byron was a youngish man, very energetic and excitable. "Mr. Smith?" he said. I admitted it, then also cautiously admitted that I had developed Drink Me. Dr. Byron produced two large plates which I recognized as chest X-rays. "You're not a doctor?" I shook my head. "Just a chemist." "Nevertheless, you might find these interesting." The first X-ray showed three tubercular cavities. In the second, the cavities were much less distinct. "You see?" said Byron excitedly. "Regeneration. Do you know anything about this, Mr. Smith?" "Only what you've told me," I said. "This is unusual, isn't it?" "There was precisely one week between these X-rays," said Byron. "And the only thing I can find to account for this astonishing change is that my patient took some of your product. Against my advice, I may say. I repeat, Mr. Smith -- do you know anything about this?" "We never claimed that Drink Me was a cure for tuberculosis," I stated. He stared at me. "Why not? In my experience, drugs of this sort are supposed to do anything. I sometimes wonder why anybody ever dies." Sarcasm. Obviously this was a case for Rogan. I brought her in. "This is the sales representative," I said. "My wife Rogan." Byron fixed her with his rather wild gaze. "Mrs. Smith, what is this product for?" "Coughs and colds," said Rogan brightly. "It positively won't make hair grow." "Will it cure tuberculosis?" "Well," said Rogan judicially, "it won't do it any harm." "Bronchitis, asthma, silicosis, pneumonia?" "I can only suggest," Rogan said, "that you try it and see." "I will," said Byron. A ND he did. He was back three days later, dazed. "This stuff seems to cure any respiratory ailment. "Oh, that's good," Rogan said. "I was sure it would be good for something. My husband's very clever." "I'm beginning to wonder if you are, too," said Byron thoughtfully. Curiously enough, now that he had found something to excite him, he seemed much less excited and much more thoughtful. "In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I'm beginning to get ideas about you two." We couldn't help exchanging startled glances. "I'm just wondering," said Byron, "when you're going to stop charging a dollar a bottle and start charging, say, fifty dollars." "Oh," said Rogan, relieved that that was all he was wondering. "You think we should?" Byron stared hard at her. "What else won't this thing do besides not making hair grow?" "Well," said Rogan, "we never said it would cure cancer." Byron jumped in the air and scuttled out. "Six weeks was a good guess," I said complacently. Once you start a huge ball rolling, you can't stop it if you try. As it happened, we didn't want to stop it. We were gradually becoming famous. So was Drink Me. Our pictures appeared in the papers. We were on newsreels. We sold a bottle of Drink Me in Washington. The President had had a cough. Rogan was asked to sponsor a brand of stockings. Somebody had noticed her legs. A famous male film star rang us up and asked plaintively if it was quite true that Drink Me wouldn't make hair grow. We said sorry, yes. Rogan was asked to sponsor a shampoo. Somebody had noticed her hair. A Kentucky farmer claimed to have got drunk on Drink Me. He didn't sue; he was delighted. We couldn't account for the incident. It turned out that his wife had put the medicinal brandy in an empty Drink Me bottle. Rogan was asked to sponsor a new girdle. People were noticing too damned much about Rogan. Indeed, it was high time we disappeared. The next time Dr. Byron called to see us, he had a fat German doctor with him, a Dr. Hans Austerlitz. "It is not possible," Austerlitz declared, "to cure cancer in a week with a drug orally administered." We agreed. "Besides," said Rogan, "it's against the law to claim to be able to cure cancer at all. You know that, Doctor." "Nevertheless -- " began the Herr Doktor. Rogan stopped him. "Dr. Austerlitz, we make a cough mixture. Please don't embarrass us." "But -- " Austerlitz tried to continue. "Please," said Rogan.  ing. I'd never forgotten what Ped had said about these people. We were public benefactors. So long as we were careful to stay public benefactors, everything we did was fine. Everybody loved us, except people who couldn't get Drink 'Me. There had inevitably been a rush of imitators. One of them was called Drink This, another Try Me. They looked and tasted exactly like our product. But they didn't do anything, of course. People bought them only when supplies of Drink Me failed, which was often. We only had one small factory trying to supply the whole of the United States, and after that the rest of the world. We'd been careful to ensure that samples reached every part of Earth. The last time Byron called on us, he had a positively glassy look in his eye. "Another thing you didn't claim," he said weakly, "was that Drink Me would cure insanity." "That's right," Rogan assented. "We didn't claim it, I mean." "Well, I've tried it," said Byron. "And in all cases there is a distinct improvement. Ordinary people who take it seem to have their minor neuroses cleared up for them." He stopped and looked at us pleadingly. "What is this stuff?" "A cough mixture," said Rogan brightly. "I'm beginning to get ideas again," he said. "I tried to duplicate your product. I couldn't." "You didn't do it right," I said. "I wonder. Once people have had a thing like this, they've got to go on having it. You could hold the world for ransom, you know that?" "He wouldn't do a thing like that," said Rogan, very shocked. "I wonder. Can anybody make it but you?" We saw no reason to tell him. Just two days before we were due to leave, a very awkward situation arose. The President wanted to see us. His cough was better. Besides, new legislation was to be passed to buy up the Drink Me formula, plant, equipment and process for the benefit of all humanity. Apparently any time anything important happens, human beings have to pass laws about it. We managed to fix an appointment for the day after we'd be gone. Our last morning we spent swimming. As we lay in the sun afterward, Regan sighed: "I'm going to miss this, Jac." "Me too," I said. I looked at her, slim, tanned, provocative in a white sharkskin two-piece. "There's a lot of things I'm going to miss." "I'm almost sorry about what we're doing to them," she said. "Only almost?" "Yes, only almost. It's a good idea for a sales team to be two people in love with each other. If I'd been single, I'd have fallen in love with some human male and would probably have stayed here. And if you'd been single -- " "I never saw a girl half as pretty as you." "You didn't look," she said complacently, flexing sundry muscles and making my hair stand on end. Soon we had to go. We had left everything; the people at the factory, the reporters, Byron and the others could have no clue that we'd been planning to disappear. All we had with us as we walked out that same road were the shoes, shirt and pants I wore, and the shoes, shorts and blouse Rogan wore. We were picked up without a bit of trouble by Ped. V#" ES, we did miss Earth. I didn't know how much until we were back in our own bodies and I found that even my Vigintan mind remembered Rogan wistfully as a human female. I saw to my disgust that, while we'd been gone, Ped had been perfecting a form of zip-fastener which he obviously intended to sell on the Twenty Worlds. There was nothing we could do about it; he was first. I took my revenge by beating him at checkers. On Earth, I'd played quite a few games. "Well," he said, "have you murdered them?" "What do you mean?" I asked. "Wrecked the place, so that we can move in? Given them something they can use to kill themselves with? Or what?" "You know the law," I said. Ped spat. "He's ill," said Rogan solicitously. "Let's put him to tank, Jac." "I'm not ill," Ped retorted, surprised. "You must be. You're spitting. You take his leg, Jac, and I'll take his heads." I should have thought of that. I only saw Ped spit once more after that "What did you do to them?" he demanded. "You couldn't sell them ergeron, so what did you do?" We saw we'd have to tell him. "We made an investment," I said. "We cured them," said Rogan. "You did what?" "Cured them. Left them a drug which mops up practically all their diseases. Lung infections, malignant growths, most heart diseases, paralysis, brain disorders." "And just what do you hope to gain by that?" I sighed. "Well, with the drop in neurosis, they don't fight wars. Won't be able to now. The stuff also makes both sexes universally war are out, so they'll breed like flies." "So?" I sneered. "I thought you could play checkers. A few years and their world's full. Before that, they've gone to the Moon. They find how to make homes on Mars and Venus, because they have to. Then on Mercury, the asteroids and Jupiter's moons, because they have to. Then Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto -- even Jupiter, because they have to." Ped grunted. "Then they buy ergeron, because they have to. I might have known. Did know. And I bet it'll cost them plenty." "Naturally. And it won't be so very long either." "Poor little Earthmen. They should have shot you both." "I've got an idea," Rogan remarked, "that they're erecting statues of us right now. They're nice people." "Who see things in black and white," I supplemented. "And if anyone was ever white as snow, we are." Ped spat. -- j. t. McIntosh      Ah, one may well say, there is indeed good news next month: two established favorites return like brighter-than-ever comets, and an unfamiliar name blazes forth for the first time on the sky map of science fiction luminaries -- unfamiliar now, but not for long. taut in suspense, wonderfully warm and tender: Scientific experiment or not, the. patient is the nurse's responsibility... and all the more so for having died endless centuries ago! laden with all the good things of Earth: Here is the gizmo that can put Gordon Fish in the chips -- or land him right in the soup -- and he can't possibly know which he is ordering! George Brown, the new name that should soon be as familiar as any in the field; a Southern gentlewoman, Mrs. Brown has a muscular inventiveness and a hearty, ingenious humor, as for example: You can't beat Uncle Isadore -- he's quick and he's dead -- but that is exactly what he is daring his bewildered nephew to do! lievable appearance would suggest, victim of a tragedy that should never have happened, bone (literally) of contention between scientific factions that recent developments are forcing into the same encampment -- and least likely suspect of a discovery that may yet be made. -- Continued from flacfc Cover And if you DO go back, will you ever be able to return to your #st century paradise? In short, can you actually live your life twice ? Read this Whole Amaiinq Story -- yours for Only #c Science-fiction fans, sret set for a real challenge to Heinlein -- one of today's topnotch science-fiction writers -- is a thriller crammed with new turns and new twists. 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Your copy of the book into summer will be sent at once, together with the current selection, for which you will be billet! only (Offer good only in t'. S. A. ami Canada.) Imagine Yourself Shanghaied Into the zrCenfury place. It's the year #. You're a dollar invention. You're sitting pretty -- until your passionate friend. Belle Darkin, upsets your apple cart. First she steals your invention. Then she slips you a hypo; puts you in a new kind of deep freeze called "The Long Sleep." the year # -- and you're still only # years old! But time has passed while you were in "cold storage," and Belle, your ex-sweetheart, is now # years older than you are ! Well, you've lost interest in her anyway, after the way she twotimed and future-timed you. The Fascinating World of # A.D. 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I enclose  check  cash  money order in the amount of  Note: coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. cluded, say something can't be done, they generally mean it can't be done with existing methods or orthodox approaches. They may go on to insist that it will never be done but the statement is not valid as an opinion, and even less so as a prediction. Thinkers can be divided into two highly unequal groups: innovators and improvers. The inequality is more than numerical: innovators are usually scorned and seldom make money; improvers  have honors forced on them, along with great power and unthinkable wealth. And a still sadder inequality: innovators fully recognize the importance of improvers, but improvers often add their expert jeering to public scorn, like Charles E. Wilson's definition of basic research as 'Svhen you don't know what you're looking for," a jaunty dismissal of the fact that every auto essential was once a profitless theory. No question that improvers are necessary. To stay with the auto industry another moment, I think foreign and domestic manufacturers are both culpable, one for making machining substitute for engineering, the other for substituting engineering for machining. But either is better than leaving carmaking to the innovators. Improvers need no defense. When they do, they can buy all the advertising and psychiatry required to defend them. But their attitude toward visionary innovators is the best defense -- if they believed that improvement is the easier part of invention, which it is, LfOrd knows the harm that might be done to their confidence and our comfort and convenience, not to mention our economy. Better this way, and no irony intended. The rewards of improvement, being tangible and marketable, must be bankable; if they are not, this is the proof of failure. But the success of innovation is the innovation itself; it may eventually have cash value, but putting it into production and making it work better at lower cost should be left to the improvers. Improvers are the best guardians of budget all the distance from prototype to the ultimate in perfection -- and then they risk being spendthrifts so prodigal that, in comparison, the most drunken of sailors is like unto the soberest of judges. For perfection, or something minutely short of it, can be attained, and often is, and the effort to improve perfection is both ungodly costly and doomed. The airplane is a handy exam( Continued on page #) A Complete Restyling Of Streamlined pocket-size format -- handsomest in design, handiest for reading and carrying. Outstanding titles by outstanding authors. A gigantic increase of # more pages. Clear, compact type -- more wordage yet greater reading ease. All this at no increase in price -- a hard-headed bet that upgrading pays off in these days of less and less for more and more.  Count me ini Here's my # for six titles, during the year, each different, each full-length -- half a dozen Kk choice novels at less than the original cost of any one. Publisher's Note-. If you don't want to mutilate this issue send your order on any sheet of paper. (Continued from page #) pie. It was improved so remorselessly that in only a few decades it was held back by the very thing that made it fly -- the propeller. There's a logical solution. Any good innovator would think of it instantly. A breech is needed, a breakthrough -- scrap the propeller, use something else instead. Luckily, the something else was there waiting. Or was it just happenstance? Doesn't it give one to think when, every time a something else instead is called for, it appears to be right there? Quite tidily, too: the research about completed, working model or production methods or dosages on hand, the single final necessity being the order to commence manufacturing. Well, that command is an agonizingly difficult one to give. Breakthroughs are never comfortable and neat. They destroy theories, outmode skills, junk machinery, stockpiles, inventories and know-hows. But none of that is as expensive as trying to save the investment. Anyone who doesn't understand that the order can't -- and should not -- be given until the last possible moment is a visionary. Except innovators, who have no business thinking at all in such terms. Same for any improver who gives the command too soon -- what's he doing in the ranks of the innovators? TF you've read this far in the hope that it might start getting interesting, let me confess that I was watching something else -- the way the atttitude shifted from the title on; because this is exactly how science fiction gets itself written, the process alone is interesting to me. Well, now we can sweep off the shavings and see what's left. The title -- calling for breakthroughs is unnecessary. They needn't be called -- they'll come. The bias in favor of innovators -- reasonable enough; we are innovators ourselves. As tests by independent laboratories prove, these are times that try men's souls: line after line has reached the end, either of perfectability or market saturation, and the only way out is right through the wall. But the timing -- too soon is as disastrous as too late; the Pierce Arrow people produced a teardrop car in #, were out of business the same year. Rewards may be huge for improvers, but so are the punishments, and these are even more automatic when the timing is wrong; stereoscopic film companies went bankrupt a generation ago. It's no wonder I've known so many happy innovators, so few ulcerless improvers.  Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden by Isaac Asimov # by Lloyd Biggie, Jr. # by Arthur C. Clarke #I byH.L.Gold # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold # by Floyd C. Gale #I The Last of the Moas #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per .copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. E dith Fellowes smcx)thed her working smock as she always did before opening the elaborately locked door and stepping across the invisible dividing line between the is and the is not. She carried her notebook and her pen, although she no longer took notes except when she felt the absolute need for some report. This time she also carried a suitcase. ("Games for the boy,' she had said, smiling, to the guard -- who had long since stopped even thinking of questioning her and who waved her on.) And, as always, the ugly little boy knew that she had entered and came running to her, crying, "Miss Fellowes -- Miss Fellowes -- ' in his soft, slurring way. "Timmie," she said, and passed her hand over the shaggy brown hair on his misshapen little head. "What's wrong?" He said, "Will Jerry be back to play again? I'm sorry about what happened." "Never mind that now, Timmie. A scientific experiment or not, the patient was her responsibility    and all the more so for having died so many centuries ago! Is that why you've been crying?" He looked away. "Not just about that, Miss Fellowes. I dreamed again." "The same dream?" Miss Fellowes' lips set. Of course, the Jerry affair would bring back the dream. He nodded. His too-large teeth showed as he tried to smile and the lips of his forward-thrusting mouth stretched wide. 'When will I be big enough to go out there. Miss Fellowes?" "Soon," she said softly, feeling her heart break. "Soon." Miss Fellowes let him take her hand and enjoyed the warm touch of the thick dry skin of his palm. He led her through the three rooms that made up the whole of Stasis Section One -- comfortable enough, yes, but an eternal prison for the ugly little boy for nearly half of the seven (was it seven?) years of his life. He led her to the one window, looking out onto a scrubby woodland section of the world of is (now hidden by night) where a fence and painted instructions allowed no men to wander without permission. He pressed his nose against the window. "Out there. Miss Fellowes?" "Better places, nicer places," she said sadly as she looked at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. The forehead retreated flatly and his hair lay down in tufts upon it The back of his skull bulged and seemed to make the head overheavy, so that it sagged and bent forward, forcing the whole body into a stoop. Already, bony ridges were beginning to bulge the skin above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominently than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of, only a jaw-bone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years and his stumpy legs were bowed. He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him dearly. Her own face was behind his line of vision, so she allowed her chin the luxury of a tremor. They would not kill him. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. She opened the suitcase and began taking out the clothes it contained. threshold of Stasis, Inc., for the first time just a little over three years before. She hadn't the slightest idea of what Stasis meant or what the place did. No one did then, except those who worked there. In fact, it was only the day after she arrived that the news broke upon the world. At the time, it was just that they had advertised for a woman with knowledge of physiology, experience with clinical chemistry and a love for children. Ekiith Fellowes had been a nurse in a maternity ward and believed she fulfilled those qualifications. Gerald Hoskins, whose nameplate on the desk included a Ph.D. after the name, scratched his cheek with his thumb arid looked at her steadily. Miss Fellowes automatically stiffened and felt her face (with its slightly asymmetric nose and its a-trifle-too-heavy eyebrows) twitch. He's no dreamboat himself, she thought resentfully. He's getting thick in the middle and thin on top and he's got a sullen mouth. But the salary mentioned had been considerably higher than she had expected, so she waited. Hoskins said, "Now do you really love children?" "I wouldn't say I did if I didn't." "Or do you just love pretty children?" Miss Fellowes said, "Children are children. Dr. Hoskins, and the ones that aren't pretty are just the ones who may happen to need help most." "Then suppose we take you on -- " "You mean you're offering me the job now?" He smiled briefly, and for a moment, his broad face had an absent-minded charm about it. He said, "I make quick decisions. So far, the offer is tentative, however. I may make as quick a decision to let you go. Are you ready to take the chance?" Miss Fellowes clutched at her purse and calculated just as swiftly as she could, then ignored calculations and followed impulse. "All right." "Fine. We're going to form the Stasis tonight and I think you had better be there to take over at once. That will be at # p.m. and I'd appreciate it if you could be here at #:#." "But what -- " "Fine. Fine. That will be all now." On signal, a smiling secretary came in to usher her out. Miss Fellowes stared back at Dr. Hoskins closed door for a moment. What was Stasis? What had this large barn of a building -- with its badged employees, its makeshift corridors, and its unmistakable air of engineering -- to do with children? She wondered if she should go back that evening or stay away and teach that arrogant man a lesson. But she knew she would be back if only out of sheer frustration. She would have to find out about the children. S HE came back at #:# and did not have to announce herself. One after another, men and women seemed to know her and to know her function. She found herself all but placed on skids as she was moved inward. Dr. Hoskins was there, but he only looked at her distantly and murmured, "Miss Fellowes." He did not even suggest that she take a seat, but she drew one calmly up to the railing and sat down. , They were on a balcony, looking down into a large pit, filled with instruments that resembled a cross between the control panel of a spaceship and the working face of a computer. On one side were partitions that seemed to make up an unceilinged apartment, a giant dollhouse into the rooms of which she could look from above. She could see an electronic cooker and a freeze-space unit in one room and a washroom arrangement off another. And surely the object she made out in another room could only be part of a bed, a small bed. Hoskins was speaking to another man and, with Miss Fellowes, they made up the total occupancy of the balcony. Hoskins did not offer to introduce the other man, and Miss Fellowes eyed him surreptitiously. He was thin and quite fine-looking in a middle-aged way. He had a small mustache and keen eyes that seemed to busy themselves with everything. He was saying, "I won't pretend for one moment that I understand all this, Dr. Hoskins; I mean except as a layman, a reasonably intelligent layman, may be expected to understand it. Still, if there's one part I understand less than another, it's this matter of selectivity. You can only reach out so far; that seems sensible -- things get dimmer the further you go; it takes more energy. But then you can only reach out so near. That's the puzzling part." "I can make it seem less paradoxical, Deveney, if you will allow me to use an analogy." Miss Fellowes placed the new man the moment she heard his name, and despite herself was impressed. This was obviously Candide Deveney, the science writer of the Telenews, who was notori. ously at the scene of every mjor scientific breakthrough. She even recognized his face as one she saw on , the newsplate when the landing on Mars had been announced. So Dr. Hoskins must have something important here. "By all means, use an analogy," said Deveney ruefully, "if you think it will help." "Well, then, you can't read a book with ordinary-size print if it is held six feet from your eyes, but you can read it if you hold it one foot from your eyes. So far, the closer the better. If you bring the book to within one inch of your eyes, however, you've lost it again. There is such a thing as being too close, you see." "Hmm," said Deveney. "Or take another example. Your right shoulder is about thirty inches from the tip of your right forefinger and you can place your right forefinger on your right shoulder. Your right elbow is only half the distance from the tip of your right forefinger; it should by all ordinary logic be easier to reach, and yet you cannot place your right finger on your right elbow. Again, there is such a thing as being too close." Deveney said, "May I use these analogies in my story?" "Well, of course. Only too glad. I've been waiting long enough for someone like you to have a story. ##I give you anything else you want. It is time, finally, that we want the world looking over our shoulder. They'll see something." Miss Fellowes found herself admiring his calm certainty despite herself. There was strength there. Deveney said, "How far out will you reach?" "Forty thousand years." Miss Fellowes drew in her breath sharply. Years? The men at the controls scarcely moved. One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes. Deveney, leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, said, "Will we see anything. Dr. Hoskins?" "What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. Mesons reach backward under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we must analyze the reflections." "That sounds difficult." Hoskins smiled again, briefly as always. "It is the end-product of fifty years of research; forty years of it before I entered the field. Yes, it's difficult." The man at the microphone raised one hand. Hoskins said, "We've had the fix on one particular moment in time for weeks; breaking it, remaking it after calculating our own movements in time; making certain that we could handle timeflow with sufficient precision. This must work now." But his forehead glistened. Ekiith Fellowes found herself out of her seat and at the balcony railing, but there was nothing to see. The man at the microphone said quietly, "Now." There was a space of silence sufficient for one breath and then the sound of a terrified little-child scream from the dollhouse rooms. Terror! Piercing terror! Miss Fellowes' head twisted in the direction of the cry. A child was involved. She had forgotten. And Hoskins' fist pounded on the railing and he said in a tight voice, trembling with triumph, "Did it!" the short spiral flight of stairs by the hard press of Hoskins palm between her shoulder blades. He did not speak to her. The men who had been at the controls were standing about now, smiling, smoking, watching the three as they entered on the main floor. A very soft buzz sounded from the direction of the dollhouse. Hoskins said to Deveney, "Its perfectly safe to enter Stasis. IVe done it a thousand times. There's a queer sensation, but it's momentary and entirely harmless." He stepped through an open door in mute demonstration and Deveney, smiling stiffly and drawing an audibly deep breath, followed him. Hoskins said, "Miss Fellowes! Please!" He crooked his forefinger impatiently. Miss Fellowes nodded and stepped stiffly through. It was as though a ripple went through her, an internal tickle. But, once inside, all seemed normal. There was the smell of the fresh wood of the dollhouse and of -- of soil, somehow. There was silence now, no voice at least, but there was the dry shuffling of feet, a scrabbling as of a hand over wood -- then a low moan. "Where is it?" asked Miss Fellowes, in distress. Didn't these fool men careF It was in the bedroom; at least in the room with the bed in it. It was standing naked, with its small, dirt-smeared chest heaving raggedly. A bushel of dirt and coarse grass spread over the floor at its bare brown feet The smell of soil came from it and a touch of something fetid. Hoskins followed her horrified glance and said with annoyance, "You can't pluck a child cleanly out of time. Miss Fellowes. We had to take some of the surroundings with it for safety. Or would you have preferred to have it arrive here minus a leg or with only half a head?" "Pease.'" said Miss Fellowes, in an agony of revulsion. "Are we just to stand here? The poor child is frightened. And it's filthy T She was quite correct. It was smeared with encrusted dirt and grease and had a scratch on its thigh that looked red and sore. As. Hoskins approached, the boy, who seemed to be about three or four years of age, hunched low and backed away rapidly. He lifted his upper lip and snarled in a hissing fashion like a cat. With a rapid gesture, Hoskins seized both the child's arms and lifted him, writhing and screaming, from the floor. Miss Fellowes said, "Hold him now. He needs a warm bath first. ' Have you the equipment? If so, have it brought here, and I'll need to have help in handling him just at first. Then, too, for heaven's sake, have all this trash and filth removed." She was giving the orders now and she felt perfectly good about that. And because now she was an efficient nurse, rather than a confused spectator, she looked at the child with a clinical eye -- and hesitated for one shocked moment. She saw past the dirt and shrieking, past the thrashing of limbs and useless twisting. She saw the boy himself. It was the ugliest little boy she had ever seen. He was horribly ugly from misshapen head to bandy legs. She got him cleaned with three men helping her and with others clean the room. She worked in silence and with a sense of outrage, annoyed by the continued strugglings and outcries of the boy and by the undignified drenchings of soapy water to which she was subjected. Dr. Hoskins had hinted that the child would not be pretty, but that was far from stating that it would be repulsively deformed. And there was a stench that soap and water was alleviating only little by little. She had the strong desire to thrust the boy, soaped as he was, into Hoskins' arms and walk out; but there was the pride of profession. She had accepted an assignment, after all. And there would be the look in Hoskins' eyes. A cold look that would read: Only pretty children, Miss Fellowes? He was standing apart from them, watching coolly from a distance with a half-smile on his face when he caught her eyes, as though amused at her outrage. She decided she would wait a while before quitting. To do so now would only demean her. pink and smelled only of soap, she felt better anyway. His cries changed to whimpers of exhaustion as he watched warily, eyes moving in quick frightened suspicion from one to another of those in the room. His cleanness accentuated his thin nakedness as he shivered with cold after his bath: Miss Fellowes said sharply, "Bring me a nightgown for him!" A nightgown appeared at once. It was as though everything were ready and yet nothing at hand unless she gave orders; as though they were deliberately leaving this in her charge without help, to test her. The newsman, Deveney, approached and said, "#I hold him, miss. You won't get it on by yourself." "Thank you," said Miss Fellowes. And it was a battle indeed, but the nightgown went on, and when the boy made as though to rip it off, she slapped his hand. The boy reddened, but did not cry. He stared at her and the splayed fingers of one hand moved slowly across the flannel of the nightgown, feeling the strangeness of it. Miss Fellowes thought desperately: Well, what next? Everyone seemed in suspended animation waiting for her, even the ugly little boy. Miss Fellowes said, "Have you provided food? Milk?" A mobile unit was wheeled in, with its refrigeration compartment containing three quarts of milk, with a warming unit and a supply of fortifications in the form of vitamin drops, copper-cobalt-iron syrup and others she had no time to be concerned with. There was a variety of canned self-farming junior foods. She used milk, simply milk, to begin with. The radar unit heated the milk to a set temperature in a matter of ten seconds and clicked off, and she put some in a saucer. She had a certainty that the boy wouldn't know how to handle a cup. Miss Fellowes nodded and said to the boy, "Drink. Drink." She made a gesture as though to raise the milk to her mouth. The boy's eyes followed, but he made no move. Suddenly, the nurse seized the boy's upper arm in one hand and dipped the other in the milk. She dashed the milk across his lips, so that it dripped down cheeks and receding chin. For a moment, the child uttered a high-pitched cry; then his tongue moved over his wetted lips. Miss Fellowes stepped back. The boy approached the saucer, bent toward it, then looked up and behind sharply as though expecting a crouching enemy; bent again and licked at the milk eagerly, like a cat. He did not lift the saucer. Miss Fellowes allowed a bit of the revulsion she felt show on her face. She couldn't help it Deveney caught that, perhaps. He said, "Does the nurse know. Dr. Hoskins?" "Know what?" demanded Miss Fellowes. Deveney hesitated, but Hoskins (again that look of detached amusement on his face) said, "Well, tell her." Deveney addressed Miss Fellowes. "You may not suspect it miss, but you happen to be the first civilized woman in history ever to be taking care of a Neanderthal youngster." S HE turned on Hoskins with a kind of controlled ferocity. "You might have told me, Doctor." "Why? What difference does it make?" "You said a child." "Isn't that a child? Have you ever had a puppy or a kitten, Miss Fellowes? Are those closer to the human? If that were a baby chimpanzee, would you be repelled? You're a nurse. Miss Fellowes. Your record states you worked in a maternity ward for three years. Have you ever refused to take care of a deformed infant?" Miss Fellowes felt her case slipping away. She said, with much less decision, "You might have told me." "And you would have refused the position? Well, do you refuse it now?" He gazed at her coolly, while Deveney watched from the other side of the room, and the Neanderthal child, having finished the milk and licked the plate, looked up at her with a wet face and wide, longing eyes. The boy pointed to the milk and suddenly burst out in a short series of sounds repeated over and over; sounds made up of gutturals and elaborate tongue-clickings. Miss Fellowes said, in surprise, "Why, he talks." "Of course," said Hoskins. "Homo neanderthalensis is not a truly separate species, but rather a sub-species of Homo sapiens. Why shouldn't he talk? He's probably asking for more milk." Automatically, Miss Fellowes reached for the bottle of milk, but Hoskins seized her wrist. "Now, Miss Fellowes, before we go any further, are you staying on the job?" Miss Fellowes shook free in annoyance. "Won't you feed him if I don't? I'll stay with him -- for a while." She poured the milk. Hoskins said, "We are going to leave you with the boy. Miss Fellowes. This is the only door to Stasis Section One and it is elaborately locked and guarded. I'll want you to learn the details of the lock which will, of course, be keyed to your fingerprints as they are already keyed to mine. The space overhead -- " he looked upward to the open ceilings of the dollhouse -- "is also guarded and we will be warned if anything untoward takes place in here." Miss Fellowes said indignantly, "You mean I'll be under view." She thought suddenly of her own survey of the room interiors from the balcony. "No, no," said Hoskins seriously, "your privacy will be respected completely. The view will consist of electronic symbolism, which only a computer will deal with. Now you will stay with him tonight, Miss Fellowes, and every night until further notice. You will be relieved during the day according to some schedule you will find convenient. We will allow you to arrange that." Miss Fellowes looked about the dollhouse with a puzzled expression. "But why all this, Dr. Hoskins? Is the boy dangerous?" "It's a matter of energy, Miss Fellowes. He must never be allowed to leave these rooms. Never. Not for an instant. Not for any reason. Is that clear?" Miss Fellowes raised her chin. "I understand the orders. Dr. Hoskins, and the nursing profession is accustomed to placing its duties ahead of self-preservation." "Good. You can always signal if you need anyone." And the two men left. boy. He was watching her and there was still milk in the saucer. Laboriously, she tried to show him how to lift the saucer and place it to his lips. He resisted, but let her touch him without crying out. Always, his frightened eyes were on her, watching, watching for the one false move. She found herself soothing him, trying to move her hand very slowly toward his hair, letting him see it every inch of the way, see there was no harm in it. And she succeeded in stroking his hair for an instant. She said, "Fm going to have to show you how to use the bathroom. Do you think you can learn?" She spoke quietly, kindly, knowing he would not understand the words but hoping he would respond   to the calmness of the tone. The boy launched into a clicking phrase again. She said, "May I take your hand?" She held out hers and the boy looked at it. She left it outstretched and waited. The boys own hand crept forward toward hers. "That's right," she said. It approached within an inch of hers and then the boy's courage failed him. He snatched it back. "Well," said Miss Fellowes calmly, "we'll try again lter. Would you like to sit down here?" She patted the mattress of the bed. The hours passed slowly and progress was minute. She did not succeed with either bathroom or with the bed. In fact, after the child had given unmistakable signs of sleepiness, he lay down on the bare floor and then, with a quick movement, rolled beneath the bed. She bent to look at him and his eyes gleam out at her as he tongue-clicked at her. "All right," she said, "if you feel safer there, you sleep there." She closed the door to the bedroom and retired to the cot that had been placed for her use in the largest room. At her instance, a makeshift canopy had been stretched over it. She thought: Those stupid men will have to place a mirror in this room and a larger chest of drawers and a separate washroom if they expect me to spend nights here. TT was difficult to sleep. She found herself straining to hear possible sounds in the next room. He couldn't get out, could he? The walls were sheer and impossibly high, but suppose the child could climb and leap like a monkey? Well, Hoskins said there were observational devices watching through the ceiling. She thought: Can he be dangerous? Physically dangerous? Surely, Hoskins couldn't have meant that. Surely, he would not have left her here alone, if -- She tried to laugh at herself. He was only a threeor four-yearold child. Still, she had not succeeded in cutting his nails. If he should attack her with nails and teeth while she slept -- Her breath came quickly. Oh, ridiculous, and yet -- She listened with painful attentiveness, and this time she heard the sound. The boy was crying. Not shrieking in fear or anger; not yelling or screaming. He was crying softly, and the sound was the heartbroken sobbing of a lonely, lonely child. For the first time. Miss Fellowes thought with a pang: Poor thing! Of course, it was a child; what did the shape of its head matter? It was a child that had been orphaned before. Not only its mother and father were gone, but all its species. Snatched callously out of time, it was now the only creature of its kind in the world. The last. The only. She felt pity for it strengthen and with it shame at her own callousness. Tucking her own nightgown carefully about her calves (incongruously, she thought: Tomorrow I'll have to bring in a bathrobe), she got out of bed and went into the boy's room. "Little boy," she called in a whisper. "Little boy." She was about to reach under the bed, but she thought of a possible bite and did not. Instead, she turned on the night light and moved the bed. He was huddled in the corner, knees up against his chin, looking up at her with blurred and apprehensive eyes. In the dim light, she was less aware of his repulsiveness. "Poor boy," she said, "poor boy." She felt him stiffen as she stroked his hair, then relax. "Poor boy. May I hold you?" She sat down on the floor next to him and slowly and rhythmically stroked his hair, his cheek, his arm. Softly, she began to sing a slow and gentle song. He lifted his head at that, staring at her mouth in the dimness, as though wondering at the sound. She maneuvered him closer while he listened to her. Slowly, she pressed gently against the side of his head, until it rested on her shoulder. She put her arm under his thighs and with a smooth and imhurried motion lifted him into her lap. She continued singing, the same simple verse over and over, while she rocked back and forth, back and forth. He stopped crying and after a while the smooth burr of his breathing showed he was asleep. With infinite care, she pushed his bed back against the wall and laid him down on it. She covered him and stared down. His face looked so peaceful and little-boy as he slept. It didn't matter so much that it was so ugly. Really. She began to tiptoe out, then thought: What if he wakes up? She came back, battled irresolutely with herself, then sighed and slowly got into bed with the child. It was too small for her. She was cramped and made uneasy by the open ceiling, but the child's hand crept into hers and, somehow, she fell asleep in that position. Che awoke with a start and a  wild impulse to scream. The latter she just managed to suppress into a gurgle. The boy was looking at her, wide-eyed. It took her a long moment to remember getting into bed with him and now, slowly, without unfixing her eyes from his, she stretched out one leg carefully and let it touch the floor, then the other one. She cast a quick, imcomfortable glance toward the open ceiling, then tensed her muscles for quick, disengagement. But at that moment, the boy's stubby fingers reached out and touched her lips. He said something. She shrank at the touch. He was terribly ugly in the light of day. The boy spoke again. He opened his own mouth and gestured with his hand as though something were coming out. Miss Fellowes guessed at the meaning and said tremulously, "Do you want me to sing?" The boy said nothing but stared at her mouth. In a voice slightly off-key with tension. Miss Fellowes began the little song she had sung the night before. The ugly little boy smiled. He swayed clumsily in rough time to the music and made a little gurgly sound that might have been the beginnings of a laugh. Miss Fellowes sighed inwardly. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. It might help -- She said, "You wait. Let me get myself fixed up. It will just take a minute. Then #I make breakfast for you." She worked rapidly, conscious of the lack of ceiling at all times. The boy remained in bed, watching her when she was in view. She smiled at him at those times and waved. At the end, he waved back, and she was charmed by that. Finally, she said, "Would you like oatmeal with milk?" It took a moment to prepare, and then she beckoned to him. Whether he imderstood the gesture or followed the aroma. Miss Fellowes did not know, but he got out of bed. She tried to show him how to use a spoon, but he shrank away from it in fright. (Time enough, she thought.) She compromised on insisting that he lift the bowl in his hands. He did it clumsily enough and it was incredibly messy, but most of the food did get into him. She tried the drinking milk in a glass this time, and the little boy whined when he found the opening too small for him to get his face into. She held his hand, forcing it around the glass, making him tip it, forcing his mouth to the rim. Again a mess but again most went into him, and she was used to messes. The washroom, to her surprise and relief, was a less frustrating matter. He understood what it was she expected him to do. She found herself patting his head, saying, "Good boy. Smart boy." And to Miss Fellowes' exceeding pleasure, the boy smiled at that. She thought: When he smiles, he's quite bearable. Really. L ater in the day, the gentle' men of the Telepress arrived. She held the boy in her arms and he climg to her wildly while, across the open door, they set cameras to work. The commotion frightened the boy and he began to cry, but it was ten minutes before Miss Fellowes was allowed to retreat and put him in the next room. She emerged again, flushed with indignation, walked out of the apartment (for the first time in eighteen hours) and closed the door behind her. "I think you've had enough. It will take me a while to quiet him. Go away." "Sure, sure," said the gentleman from the Times-Herald. "But is that really a Neanderthal or is this some kind of gag?" "I assure you," said Hoskins' voice suddenly, from the background, "that this no gag. The child is authentic Homo neanderthalensis." "Is it a boy or a girl?" "Boy," said Miss Fellowes briefly. "Apeboy," said the gentleman from the News, "That's what weVe got here. Apeboy. How does he act, Nurse?" "He acts exactly like a little boy," snapped Miss Fellowes, annoyed into the defensive, "and he is not an apeboy. His name is -- is Timothy, Timmie -- and he is perfectly normal in his behavior." She had chosen the name Timothy at angry random. It was the first time a name for him had occurred to her. "Timmie the Apeboy," said the gentleman from the News and, as it turned out, Timmie the Apeboy was the name under which the child became known to the world. The gentleman from the Globe turned to Hoskins and said, "Doc, what do you expect to do with the apeboy?" Hoskins shrugged. "My original plan was completed when I proved it possible to bring him here. However, the anthropologists will be very interested, I imagine, and the physiologists. We have here, after all, a creature which is at the edge of being human. We should learn a great deal about ourselves and our ancestry from him." "How long will you keep him?" "Until such time as we need the space more than we need him. A fairly long while, perhaps." The gentleman from the News said, "Can you bring it out into the open so we can set up subetheric equipment and put on a real show?" "I'm sorry, but the child cannot be removed from Stasis." "Exactly what is Stasis?" "Ah." Hoskins permitted himself one of his short smiles. "That would take a great deal of explanation, gentlemen. In Stasis, time as we know it doesn't exist. Those rooms are inside an invisible bubble that is not exactly part of our universe. That is why the child could be plucked out of time as it was." "Well, wait now," said the gentleman from the News discontentedly, "what are you giving us? The nurse goes into the room and out of it." "And so can any of you," said Hoskins, matter-of-factly. "You would be moving parallel to the lines of temporal force and no great energy gain or loss would be involved. The child, however, was taken from the far past. It moved across the lines and gained temporal potential. To move it into the Universe and into our own time would absorb enough energy to burn out every line in the place and probably blank out all power in the city of Washington." The newsmen were writing down sentences busily as Hoskins spoke them. They did not understand and they were sure their readers would not, but it sounded scientific and that was what counted. The gentleman from the TimesHerald said, "Would you be available for an all-circuit interview tonight?" "I think so," said Hoskins at once, and they all moved off. Miss Fellowes stared after them. She understood all this about Stasis and temporal force as little as the newsmen, but she managed to get this much: Timmie's imprisonment (she found herself thinking of the little boy as Timmie) was a real one, and not one imposed by the arbitrary fiat of Hoskins. Apparently it was impossible to let him out of Stasis at all, ever. She was suddenly aware of his crying and she hastened in to console him. chance to see Hoskins on the all-circuit hookup, and though his interview was beamed to every part of the world and even to the outpost on the Moon, it did not penetrate the apartment in which Miss Fellowes and the ugly little boy lived. But he was down the next morning, radiant and joyful. Miss Fellowes said, "Did the interview go well?" "Extremely. And how is -- Timmie?" Miss Fellowes found herself pleased at his use of the name. "Doing very well. Now come out here, Timmie. The nice gentleman will not hurt you." But Timmie stayed in the other room, with a lock of his matted hair showing behind the barrier of the door and, occasionally, the corner of an eye. "Actually," said Miss Fellowes, "he is settling down amazingly. He is quite intelligent." "Are you surprised?" She hesitated just a moment, then said, "Yes, I am. I suppose I thought he was an apeboy." "Well, apeboy or not, he's done a great deal for us. He's put Stasis, Inc., on the map. We're in. Miss Fellowes -- we're in." It was as though he had to express his triumph to someone, even if only to Miss Fellowes. "Oh?" She let him talk. He put his hands in his pockets and said, "We've been working on a shoestring for ten years, scrounging funds a penny at a time wherever we could. We had to shoot the works on one big show. It was everything or nothing. And when I say the works, I mean it. This attempt to bring in a Neanderthal took every cent we could borrow or steal, and some of it was stolen -- funds for other projects, used for this one without permission. If that experiment hadn't succeeded, I'd have been through." Miss Fellowes said abruptly, "Is that why there are no ceilings?" "Eh?" Hoskins looked up. "Was there no money for ceilings?" "Oh. Well, that wasn't the only reason. We didn't know in advance exactly how old the Neanderthal might prove to be, except that it was a child. We can detect only dimly in time, and it was possible we might have had to deal with him from a distance, like a caged animal." "But since that hasn't turned out to be so, I suppose you can build a ceiling now." "Now, yes. We have plenty of money now. Funds have been promised from every source. This is all wonderful. Miss Fellowes." His broad face gleamed with a smile that lasted, and when he left, even the back of his head seemed to be smiling. Miss Fellowes thought: He's quite a nice man when he's offguard and forgets about being scientific. She wondered for an idle moment if he was married, then dismissed the thought in self-embarrassment. "Timmie," she called. "Time to eat, Timmie." TN the months that passed. Miss Fellowes felt herself grow to be an integral part of Stasis, Inc. She was given a small office of her own with her name on the door, an office close to the dollhouse (as she never stopped calling Timmie's Stasis bubble). She was given a substantial raise. The dollhouse was covered by a ceiling; its furnishings were elaborated and improved; a second washroom was added -- and, even so, she gained an apartment of her own on the institute grounds and, on occasion, did not stay with Timmie during the night. An intercom was set up between the dollhouse and her apartment and Timmie learned how to use it. Miss Fellowes got used to Timmie. She even grew less conscious of his ugliness. One day she found herself staring at an ordinary boy in the street and finding something bulgy and unattractive in his high domed forehead and jutting chin. She had to shake herself to break the spell. It was more pleasant to grow used to Hoskins' occasional visits. It was obvious he welcomed escape from his increasingly harried role as head of Stasis, Inc., and that he took a sentimental interest in the child who had started it all, but it seemed to Miss Fellowes that he also enjoyed talking to her. (She had learned some facts about Hoskins, too. He had invented the method of analyzing the reflection of the past-penetrating mesonic beam; he had invented the method of establishing Stasis; his coldness was only an effort to hide a kindly nature; and, oh yes, he was married.) What Miss Fellowes could not get used to was the fact that she was engaged in a scientific experiment. Despite all she could do, she found herself getting personally involved to the point of quarreling with the physiologists. On one occasion, Hoskins came down and found her in the midst of a hot urge to kill. They had no right; they had no right -- even if he was a Neanderthal, he still wasn't an animal! She was glaring after them in a blind fury; glaring out the open door and listening to Timmie's sobbing, when she noticed Hoskins standing before her. He might have been there for minutes. He said, "May I come in?" She nodded curtly, then hurried to Timmie, who clung to her, curling his little bandy legs -- still thin, so thin -- about her. Hoskins watched, then said gravely, "He seems quite unhappy." Miss Fellowes said, "I don't blame him. They're at him every day now with their blood samples and their probings. They keep him on synthetic diets that I wouldn't feed a pig." "It's the sort of thing they can't try on a human, you know." "And they can't try it on Timmie, either. Dr. Hoskins, I insist! You told me it was Timmie's coming that put Stasis, Inc., on the map. If you have any gratitude for that at all, you've got to keep them away from the poor thing at least until he's old enough to understand a little more. After he's had a bad session with them, he has nightmares; he can't sleep. Now I warn you -- " she reached a sudden peak of rage -- "I'm not letting them in here any more!" She realized that she had screamed that, but she couldn't help it. She said, more quietly, "I know he's a Neanderthal, but there's a great deal we don't appreciate about Neanderthals. I've read up on them. They had a culture of their own. Some of the greatest human inventions arose in Neanderthal times. The domestication of animals, for instance; the wheel; various techniques in grinding stone. They even had spiritual yearnings -- they buried their dead and buried possessions with the body, showing they believed in a life after death. It amounts to the fact that they invented religion. Doesn't that mean Timmie has a right to human treatment?" H patted the little boy gently  on his bottom and sent him off into his playroom. As the door was opened, Hoskins smiled briefly at the display of toys. Miss Fellowes said defensively, "The poor child deserves his toys. It's all he has and he earns them with what he goes through." "No, no. No objections, I assure you. I was just thinking how you've changed since the first day, when you were so angry because I had foisted a Neanderthal on you." Miss Fellowes said in a low voice, "I suppose I didn't -- " and faded off. Hoskins changed the subject. "How old would you say he is. Miss Fellowes?" "I can't say, since we don't know how Neanderthals develop. In size, he'd be about three, but Neanderthals are smaller generally, and with all the tampering that's done to him, he probably isn't growing. The way he's learning English, though, I'd say he was well over four." "Really? I haven't noticed anything about learning English in the reports." "He won't speak to anyone but m. For now, anyway. He's terribly afraid of others, and no wonder. But he can ask for any article of food; he can indicate any need, practically; and he understands almost anything I say. Of course -- " she watched him shrewdly, trying to estimate if this were the time -- "his development may not continue." "Why not?" "Any child needs stimulation and this one lives a life of solitary confinement. I do what I can, but I'm not with him all the time and I'm not all he needs. What I mean. Dr. Hoskins, is that he needs another boy to play with." Hoskins nodded slowly. "Unfortunately, there's only one of him, isn't there? Poor child." Miss Fellowes warmed to him at once. "You do like Timmie, don't you?" It was so nice to have someone else feel like that. "Oh, yes," said Hoskins, and with his guard down, she could see the weariness in his eyes. Miss Fellowes dropped her plans to push the matter at once. She said, with real concern, "You look worn out. Dr. Hoskins." "Do I, Miss Fellowes? I'll have to practice looking more lifelike then." "I suppose Stasis, Inc., is very busy and that that keeps you on the go." Hoskins shrugged. "You suppose right. It's a matter of animal, vegetable and mineral in equal parts. Miss Fellowes. But then I suppose you haven't ever seen our displays." "Actually, I haven't. But it's not because I'm not interested. It's just that I've been so busy myself." "Well, you're not all that busy right now," he said with impulsive decision. "I'll call for you tomorrow at eleven and give you a personal tour. How's that?" She smiled happily. "I'd love it" He nodded and smiled in his turn and left Miss Fellowes hummed at intervals for the rest of the day. Really -- to think so was ridiculous, of course -- but really, it was almost like -- like making a date. was right on time the next day, smiling and pleasant. She had replaced her nurse's imiform with a dress. One of conservative cut, to be sure, but she hadn't felt so feminine in years. He complimented her on her appearance with staid formality and she accepted with equally formal grace. It was really a perfect prelude, she thought. And then the additional thought came: Prelude to what? She shut that off by hastening to say good-by to Timmie and to assure him she would be back soon. She made sure he knew all about what was for lunch and where it was. Hoskins took her into the new wing, into which she had never yet gone. It still had the odor of newness about it and the sound of construction, softly heard, was indication enough that it was still being extended. "Animal, vegetable and mineral," said Hoskins, as he had the day before. "Animal right there; our most spectacular exhibits." The space was divided into many rooms, each a separate Stasis bubble. Hoskins brought her to the viewglass of one and she looked in. What she saw impressed her first as a scaled, tailed chicken. Skittering on two thin legs, it ran from wall to wall, with its delicate birdlike head, surmounted by a bony keel like the comb of a rooster, looking this way and that. The paws on its small forelimbs clenched and unclenched constantly. Hoskins said, "It's our dinosaur. We've had it for months. I don't know when we'll be able to let go of it." "Dinosaur?" "Did you expect a giant?" "One does, I suppose, though I know some of them are small." "A small one is all we aimed for, believe me. Generally, it's under investigation, but this seems to be an open hour. Some interesting things have been discovered. For instance, it is not entirely coldblooded. It has an imperfect method of maintaining internal temperatures higher than that of its environment. Unfortunately, it's a male. Ever since we brought it in, we'Ve been trying to get a fix on another that may be female, but we've had no luck yet." "Why female?" He looked at her quizzically. "So that we might have .a fighting chance to obtain fertile eggs, and baby dinosaurs." "Of course " He led her to the trilobite section. "That's Professor Dwayne of Washington University," he said. "He's a nuclear chemist. If I recall correctly, he's taking an isotope ratio on the oxygen of the water." "Why?" "It's primeval water; at least tope ratio gives the temperature of the ocean at that time. He himself happens to ignore the trilobites, but others are chiefly concerned in dissecting them. They're the lucky ones, because all they need are scalpels and microscopes. Dwayne has to set up a mass spectrograph each time he conducts an experiment." "Why's that? Can't he-" "No, he can't. He can't take anything out of the room." mordial plant life, too, and chunks of rock formations. Those were the vegetable and mineral. And every specimen had its investigator. It was like a museum; a museum brought to life and serving as a super-active center of research. "And you have to supervise all of this, Dr. Hoskins?" "Only indirectly. Miss Fellowes. I have subordinates, thank heaven. My own interest is entirely in the theoretical aspects of the matter: the nature of time, the technique of mesonic intertemporal detection and so on. I would exchange all this for a method of detecting objects closer in time than ten thousand years ago. If we could get into historical times -- " He was interrupted by a commotion at one of the distant booths, a thin voice raised querulously. He frowned, muttered hastily, "Excuse me," and hastened off. Miss Fellowes followed as best she could without actually running. An elderly man, thinly bearded and red-faced, was saying, "I had vital aspects of my investigations to complete. Don't you understand that?" A uniformed technician with the interwoven SI monogram (for Stasis, Inc.) on his lab coat said, "Dr. Hoskins, it was arranged with Professor Ademewski at the beginning that the specimen could remain here only two weeks." "I did not know then how long my investigations would take. I'm not a prophet," said Ademewski heatedly. Dr. Hoskins said, "You understand, Professor, that we have limited space; we must keep specimens rotating. That piece of chalcopyrite must go back; there are men waiting for the next specimen." "Why can't I have it for myself then? Let me take it out of there. "You know you can't have it." "A piece of chalcopyrite; a miserable five-kilogram piece? Why not?" "We can't afford the energy expense!" said Hoskins bluntly. "You know that." "I know it's what you say would happen," Ademewski retorted. "Meaning we haven't tested with anything this large? Microtests have given us more than enough evidence -- " The technician interrupted. "The point is, Dr. Hoskins, that he tried to remove the rock against the rules and I almost punctured Stasis while he was in there, not knowing he was inside." There was a short silence and Dr. Hoskins turned on the investigator wit ha cold formality. "Is that so. Professor?" Professor Ademewski coughed. "I saw no harm -- " Hoskins reached up to a handpull dangling just within reach, outside the specimen room in question. He pulled it. Miss Fellowes, who had been peering in, looking at the totally undistinguished sample of rock that had caused the dispute, drew in her breath sharply as its existence flickered out. The room was empty. Hoskins said, "Professor, your permit to investigate matters in Stasis is permanently voided." "But wait -- " "I am sorry. You have violated one of the stringent rules." "I will appeal to the International Association -- " "Appeal away. In a case like this, you will find I can't be overruled." He turned away deliberately, leaving the professor still protesting, and said to Miss Fellowes, his face still white with anger, "Would you care to have lunch with me. Miss Fellowes?" TE took her into the small administration alcove of the cafeteria. He greeted others and introduced Miss Fellowes with complete ease, although she herself felt painfully self-conscious. What must they think, she thought, and tried desperately to appear businesslike. She said, "Do you have that kind of trouble often, Dr. Hoskins? I mean like that you just had with the professor?" She took her fork in hand and began eating. "No," said Hoskins forcefully. "That was the first time. Of course I'm always having to argue men out of removing specimens, but this is the first time one actually tried to do it." "I remember you once talked about the energy it would consume." "That's right. Of course, we've tried to take it into account. Accidents will happen and so weVe got sFecial power sources designed to stand the drain of accidental removal from Stasis, but that doesn't mean we want to see a year's supply of energy gone in half a second -- or can afford to, without having our plans of expansion delayed for years. Besides, imagine the professor's being in the room while Stasis was about to be punctured!" "What would have happened to him?" "We've experimented with inanimate objects and with mice and they've all disappeared. Presumably, they've traveled back in time; carried along, so to speak, by the pull of the object simultaneously snapping back into its natural time. For that reason, we have to anchor objects within Stasis that we don't want to move, and that's a complicated procedure. The professor would not have been anchored and he would have gone back to the Pliocene at the moment when we abstracted the rock -- plus, of course, the two weeks it had remained here in the present." Miss Fellowes said, "Couldn't you get him back? The way you got the rock in the first place?" "No, because once an object is returned, the original fix is lost unless we deliberately plan to retain it, and there was no reason to do that in this case. There never is. Finding the professor again would mean relocating a specific fix, which would be like dropping a line into the ocean for the purpose of catching a particular fish. My God, when I think of the precautions we take to prevent accidents, it makes me mad!" "Precautions?" Miss Fellowes repeated. "Like what?" "We have every individual Stasis unit set up with its own puncturing device. We have to, since each unit has its separate fix and must be collapsible independently. The point is, though, none of the puncturing devices is ever activated until the last minute. And then we deliberately make activation impossible except by the pull of a rope carefully led outside the Stasis. The pull is a gross mechanical motion that requires a strong effort -- not something that could be done accidentally." doesn't it -- change history to move something in and out of time?" Hoskins shrugged. "Theoretically, yes; actually, except in unusual cases, no. We move objects out of Stasis all the time. Air molecules. Bacteria. Dust. About ten per cent of our energy consumption goes to make up microlosses of that nature. But moving even large objects in time sets up changes that damp out. Take  # that chalcopyrite from the Pliocene. Because of its absence for two weeks, some insect didn't find the shelter it might have found and is killed. That could initiate a whole series of changes, but the mathematics of Stasis indicates that this is a converging series. The amount of change diminishes with time and then things are as before." "You mean reality heals itself?" "In a manner of speaking. Abstract a human from time or send one back, and you make a larger wound. If the individual is an ordinary one, that wound still heals itself. Of course, there are a great many people who write to us each day and want to bring Abraham Lincoln into the present, or Mohammed, or Lenin. That can't be done, of course. Even if we could find them, the change in reality in moving one of the history-molders would be too great to be healed. There are ways of calculating when a change is likely to be too great and we avoid even approaching that limit." Miss Fellowes said, "Then Timmie -- " "No, he presents no problem in that direction. Reality is safe. But -- " He gave her a quick, sharp glance, then went on, "But never mind. Yesterday, you said Timmie needed companionship." "Yes." Miss Fellowes smiled her delight. "I didn't think you paid that any attention." "Of course I did. I'm fond of the child. I appreciate your feelings for him and I was concerned enough to want to explain to you. Now I have; you've seen what we do; you've gotten some insight into the difficulties involved; so you know why, with the best will in the world, we can't supply companionship for Timmie." "You can't?" said Miss Fellowes, with sudden dismay. "But I've just explained. We couldn't possibly expect to find another Neanderthal his age without incredible luck, and if we could, we wouldn't. We're learning all we need to know about Neanderthals from the study of Timmie. There's no way to justify the expense of bringing -- " Miss Fellowes put down her spoon and said energetically, "But Dr. Hoskins, that is not at all what I meant. I don't want you to bring another Neanderthal into the present. I know that's an impossible request. But it isn't impossible to bring another child to play with Timmie." Hoskins stared at her in concern. "A human child?" Another child," said Miss Fellowes, completely hostile now. "I couldn't dream of such a thing." 'Why couldn't you? What is wrong with the notion? You pulled that child out of time and made him a lonely little prisoner. Don't you owe him something? Dr. Hoskins, if there is any man who, in this world, is that child's father in every sense but the biological, it is you. Why can't you do this little thing for him?" Hoskins said, "His father? He rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. "Miss Fellowes, I think I'll take you back now." They returned to the dollhouse in a freezing silence that neither broke. T was a long time after that before she saw Hoskins again, except for an occasional glimpse in passing. She was sorry about that at times; then, at other times, when Timmie was more than usually woebegone or when he spent silent hours at the window with its prospect of little more than nothing, she thought fiercely: Stupid man. Timmie's speech grew better and more precise each day. It never entirely lost a certain soft slurriness that Miss Fellowes found rather endearing. In times of excitement, he fell back into tongue-clicking, but those times were becoming fewer. He must be forgetting the days before he came into the present -- except for dreams. As he grew older, the physiologists grew less interested and the psychologists more so. Miss Fellowes was not sure that she did not like the new group even less than the first. The needles were gone, the injections and withdrawals of fluid, the special diets. But now Timmie was made to overcome barriers to reach food and water. He had to lift panels, move bars, reach for cords. And the mild electric shocks made him cry and drove Miss Fellowes into outraged protests. She did not wish to appeal to Hoskins; she did not wish to have to go to him, for whatever she thought of him, she thought of his face over the luncheon table that last time. Her eyes moistened and she thought : Stupid, stupid man. And then one day Hoskins' voice sounded unexpectedly, calling into the dollhouse, "Miss Fellowes." She came out coldly, smoothing her nurse's uniform, then stopped in confusion at finding herself in the presence of a pale woman, slender and of middle height. The woman's fair hair and complexion gave her an appearance of fragility. Standing behind her and clutching at her skirt was a round-faced, large-eyed child of four. Hoskins said, "Dear, this is Miss Fellowes, the nurse in charge of the boy. Miss Fellowes, this is my wife." (Was this his wife? She was not as Miss Fellowes had imagined her to be. But then, why not? A man like Hoskins would choose a weak thing to be his foil. If that was what he wanted -- ) She forced a matter-of-fact greeting. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Hoskins. Is this your -- your little boy?" That was a surprise. She had thought of Hoskins as a husband, but not as a father, except, of course -- She suddenly caught Hoskins' grave eyes and flushed.) Hoskins said, "Yes, this is my boy Jerry. Say hello to Miss Fellowes, Jerry." (Had he stressed the word "this" just a bit? Was he saying this was his son and not -- ) Jerry receded a bit further into the folds of the maternal skirt and muttered his hello. Mrs. Hoskins' eyes were searching over Miss Fellowes' shoulders, peering into the room. Hoskins said, "Well, let's go in. Come, dear. There's a trifling discomfort at the threshold, but it passes." Miss Fellowes said, "Do you want Jerry to come in, too?" "Of course. He is to be Timmie's playmate. You said Timmie needed a playmate. Or have you forgotten?" "But -- " She looked at him with a colossal, surprised wonder. "Your boy?" He said peevishly, "Well, whose boy, then? Isn't this what you want? Come in, dear. Come on in." M rs. Hoskins lifted Jerry into her arms with a distinct effort and hesitantly stepped over the threshold. Jerry squirmed as she did so, disliking the sensation. Mrs. Hoskins said in a thin voice, "Is the creature here? I don't see him." Miss Fellowes called, "Timmie. Come out." Timmie peered around the edge of the door, staring up at the little boy who was visiting him. The muscles in Mrs. HosI t kins' arms tensed visibly. She said to her husband, "Gerald, are you sure it's safe?" Miss Fellowes said at once, "If you mean is Timmie safe, why, of course he is. He's a gentle little boy." "But he's a sa -- savage." (The apeboy stories in the newspapers!) Miss Fellowes said emphatically, "He is not a savage. He is just as quiet and reasonable as you can possibly expect a five-and-a-half-year-old to be. It is very generous of you, Mrs. Hoskins, to agree to allow your boy to play with Timmie, but please have no fears about it." Mrs. Hoskins said with mild heat, "I'm not sure that I agree." "WeVe had it out, dear," aid Hoskins. "Let's not bring up the matter for new argument. Put Jerry down." Mrs. Hoskins did so and the boy backed against her, staring at the pair of eyes which were staring back at him from the next room. "Come here, Timmie," said Miss Fellowes. 'T)on't be afraid." Slowly, Timmie stepped into the room. Hoskins bent to disengage Jerry's fingers from his mother's skirt. "Step back, dear. Give the children a chance." The youngsters faced one another. If they were the same age, Jerry was nevertheless half a head taller, and in the presence of his straightness and his high-held, well-proportioned head, Timmie's grotesqueries were suddenly almost as pronounced as they had been in the first days. Miss Fellowes' lips quivered. It was the little Neanderthal who spoke first, in childish treble. "What's your name?" And Timmie thrust his face suddenly forward as though to inspect the other's features more closely. Startled, Jerry responded with a vigorous shove that sent Timmie tumbling. Both began crying loudly and Mrs. Hoskins snatched up her child, while Miss Fellowes, flushed with silent anger, lifted Timmie and comforted him. Mrs. Hoskins said, "They just instinctively dislike each other." "No more instinctively," said her husband wearily, "than any two children dislike each other. Now put Jerry down and let him get used to the situation. In fact, we had better leave. Miss Fellowes can bring Jerry to my office after a while and I'll have him taken home."  I HE two children spent the next hour very aware of each other. Jerry cried for his mother, struck out at Miss Fellowes, and finally allowed himself to be comforted with a lollipop. Timmie sucked at another, and at the end of an hour. Miss Fellowes had them playing with the same set of blocks, though at opposite ends of the room. She found herself almost maudlinly grateful to Hoskins when she brought Jerry to hm. She searched for ways to thank him, but his very formality was a rebuff. Perhaps he could not forgive her for making him feel like a cruel father. Perhaps the bringing of his own child was an attempt, after all, to prove himself both a kind father to Timmie and, also, no father at all. Both at the same time! So all she could say was, "Thank you. Thank you very much."   And all he could say was, "It's all right. Don't mention it." It became a settled routine. Twice a week, Jerry was brought in for an hour's play, later extended to two hours' play. The children learned each other's names and ways and played together. And yet, after the first rush of gratitude. Miss Fellowes found herself disliking Jerry. He was larger and heavier and in all things dominant, forcing Timmie into a completely secondary role. All that reconciled her to the situation was the fact that, despite difficulties, Timmie looked forward with more and more delight to the periodic appearances of his playmate. It was all he had, she mourned to herself. And once, as she watched them, she thought: Hoskins' two children, one by his wife and one by Stasis. While she herself -- Heavens, she thought, putting her fists to her temples and feeling ashamed: I'm jealous!  mie (carefully, she had never allowed him to call her anything else), "when will I go to school?" She looked down at those eager brown eyes turned up to hers and passed her hand softly through his thick, curly hair. It was the most disheveled portion of his appearance, for she cut his hair herself while he sat restlessly under the scissors. She did not ask for professional help, for the very clumsiness of the cut served to mask the retreating forepart of the skull and the bulging hinder part. She said, "Where did you hear about school?" "Jerry goes to school. Kin-dergar-ten. There are lots of places he goes. Outside. When can I go outside. Miss Fellowes?" A small pain centered in Miss Fellowes' heart. Of course, she saw, there would be no way of avoiding the inevitability of Timmie's hearing more and more of the outer world he could never enter. She said, with an attempt at gaiety, "Why, whatever would you do in kindergarten, Timmie?" "Jerry says they play games; they have picture tapes. He says there are lots of children. He says A thought, then a triumphant upholding of both small hands with the fingers splayed apart. "He says this many." Miss Fellowes said, "Would you like picture tapes? I can get you picture tapes. Very nice ones. And music tapes, too." So Timmie was temporarily comforted. He pored over the picture tapes in Jerrys absence and Miss Fellowes read to him out of ordinary books by the hours. There was so much to explain in even the simplest story, so much that was outside the perspective of his three rooms. Timmie took to having his dreams more often, now that the outside was being introduced to him. They were always the same, about the outside. He tried haltingly to describe them to Miss Fellowes. In his dreams, he was outside, an empty outside, but very large, with children and queer indescribable objects halfdigested in his thoughts out of bookish descriptions half-imderstood, or out of distant Neanderthal memories half-recalled. But the children and objects ignored him, and though he was in the world, he was never part of it, but was as alone as though he were in his own room -- and he would wake up crying. Miss Fellowes tried to laugh at the dreams, but there were nights in her own apartment when she cried, too. NE day, as Miss Fellowes read, Timmie put his hand under her chin and lifted gently so that her eyes left the book and met his. He said, "How do you know what to say. Miss Fellowes?" "You see these marks? They tell me what to say. These marks make words." He stared at them long and curiously, taking the book out of her hands. "Some of these marks are the same." She laughed with pleasure at this sign of his shrewdness and said, "So they are. Would you like to have me show you how to make the marks?" "All right. That would be a nice game." It had not occurred to her that he could learn to read -- up to the very moment that he read a book to her. Then the enormity of what had been done struck her. Timmie sat in her lap, following word by word the printing in a child's book, reading to her. He was reading to her! She struggled to her feet in amazement and said, "Now, Timmie, I'll be back later. I want to see Dr. Hoskins." Excited nearly to frenzy, it seemed to her she might have an answer to Timmie's unhappiness. If Timmie could not leave to enter the world, the world must be brought into those three rooms to Timmie -- the whole world in books and film and sound. He must be educated to his full capacity. That much the world owed him. HE found Hoskins in a mood  that was oddly analogous to her own, a kind of triumph and glory. His offices were unusually busy and, for a moment, she thought she would not get to see him, as she stood abashed in the anteroom. But he saw her and a smile spread over his broad face. "Miss Fellowes, come here." He spoke rapidly into the intercom, then shut it off. "Have you heard? No, of course, you couldn't have. WeVe done it. WeVe actually done it. We have intertemporal detection at close range!" "You mean -- " she tried to detach her thought from her own good news for a moment -- "that you can get a person from historical times into the present?" "That's just what I mean! We have a fix on a #th-century individual right now. Imagine. Imagine! If you could only know how glad I'll be to shift from the eternal concentration on the Mesozoic, replace the paleontologists with the historians -- But there's something you wish to say to me, eh? Well, go ahead; go ahead. You find me in a good mood. Anything you want, you can have." Miss Fellowes smiled. "I'm glad. Because I wonder if we might not establish a system of instruction for Timmie." "Instruction? In what?" "Well, in everything. A school. So that he might learn." "But can he learn?" "Certainly, he is learning. He can read. I've taught him how myself." Hoskins sat there, seeming suddenly depressed. "I don't know. Miss Fellowes." "You just said that anything I wanted -- " "I know and I should not have. You see. Miss Fellowes, I'm sure you must realize that we cannot maintain the Timmie experiment forever." She stared at him with sudden horror, not really imderstanding what he had said. How did he mean "cannot maintain"? With an agonizing flash of recollection, she recalled Professor Adamewski and his mineral specimen that was taken away after two weeks. She said, "But you're talking about a boy. Not about a rock -- " Hoskins said uneasily, "Even a boy can't be given undue importance, Miss Fellowes. Now that we expect individuals out of historical time, we will need Stasis space, all we can get." She still didn't grasp it. "But you can't. Timmie -- " "Now, Miss Fellowes, please don't upset yourself. Timmie won't go right away; perhaps not for months. Meanwhile, we'll do what we can." She was still staring at him. "Let me get you something. Miss Fellowes." "No," she whispered. "I don't need anjrthing." She arose in a kind of nightmare and left. Timmie, she thought, you will not die. You will not die. TT was all very well to hold tensely to the thought that Timmie must not die, but how was that to be arranged? In the first weeks, Miss Fellowes clung only to the hope that the attempt to bring forward a man from the #th century would fail completely. Hoskins' theories might be wrong or his practice defective. Then things could go on as before. Certainly, that was not the hope of the rest of the world and, irrationally, Miss Fellowes hated the world for it. "Project Middle Ages" reached a climax of white-hot publicity. The press and the public had hungered for something like this. Stasis, Inc., had lacked the necessary sensation for a long time now. A new rock or another ancient fish failed to stir them. But this did. A historical human, an adult speaking a known language, someone who could open a new page of history to the scholar. Zero hour was coming and now it was not a question of three onlookers from a balcony. This time there would be a worldwide audience. This time the technicians of Stasis, Inc., would play their role before nearly all of mankind. Miss Fellowes was herself all but savage with waiting. When young Jerry Hoskins showed up for his scheduled playtime with Timmie, she scarcely recognized him. He was not the one she was waiting for. (The secretary who brought him left hurriedly after the barest nod for Miss Fellowes. She was rushing for a good place from which to watch the climax of Project Middle Ages. And so ought Miss Fellowes with far better reason, she thought bitterly, if only that stupid girl would arrive.) Jerry Hoskins sidled toward her, embarrassed. "Miss Fellowes?" He took the reproduction of a news strip out of his pocket. "Yes? What is it, Jerry?" "Is this a picture of Timmie?" Miss Fellowes stared at him, then snatched the strip from Jerry's hand. The excitement of Project Middle Ages had brought about a pale revival of interest in Timmie on the part of the press. Jerry watched her narrowly, then said, "It says Timmie is an apeboy. What does that mean?" Miss Fellowes caught the youngster's wrist and repressed the impulse to shake him. "Never say that, Jerry. Never, do you understand? It is a nasty word and you mustn't use it." Jerry struggled out of her grip, frightened. Miss Fellowes tore up the news strip with a vicious twist of the wrist. "Now go inside and play with Timmie. He's got a new book to show you." And then, at last, the girl appeared. Miss Fellowes did not know her. None of the usual standins she had used when business took her elsewhere was available now, not with Project Middle Ages at climax, but Hoskins' secretary had promised to find someone and this must be the girl. Miss Fellowes tried to keep querulousness out of her voice. "Are you the girl assigned to Stasis Section One?" "Yes, I'm Mandy Terris. You're Miss Fellowes, aren't you?" "Thafs right." "I'm sorry I'm late. There's so much excitement" "I know. Now I want you -- " Mandy said, "You'll be watching, I suppose." Her vacuously pretty face filled with envy. "Never mind that. Now I want you to come inside and meet Timmie and Jerry. They will be playing for the next two hours, so they'll be giving you no trouble. They've got milk handy and plenty of toys. In fact, it will be better if you leave them alone as much as possible. Now I'll show you where everything is located and -- " "Is it Timmie that's the ape -- " "Timmie is the Stasis subject." "I mean he's the one who's not supposed to get out, is that right?" "Yes. Now come in. There isn't much time." And when she finally left, Mandy Terris called after her shrilly, hope you get a good seat and, golly, I sure hope it works." Miss Fellowes did not trust herself to make a reasonable response. She hurried on without looking back. not get a good seat She got no nearer than the wall viewing-plate in the assembly hall. Bitterly, she regretted that. If she could have been on the spot, if she could somehow have reached out for some sensitive portion of the instrumentation, if she were in some way able to wreck the experiment -- She found the strength to beat down her madness. Simple destruction would have done no good. They would have rebuilt and made the effort again. And she would never be allowed to return to Timmie. Nothing would help. Nothing but that the experiment itself fail, that it break down irretrievably. So she waited through the countdown, watching every move on the giant screen, scanning the faces of the technicians as the focus shifted from one to the other, watching for the look of worry and uncertainty that would mark something going unexpectedly wrong; watching, watching -- The count reached zero and very quietly, very unassumingly, the experiment succeeded. In the new Stasis that had been established, there stood a bearded, stoop-shouldered peasant of indeterminate age, in ragged, dirty clothing and wooden shoes, storing in dull horror at the sudden mad change that had flung itself over him. And while the world went wild with jubilation. Miss Fellowes stood frozen in sorrow, jostled and pushed, all but trampled; surrounded by triumph while bowed down with defeat. And when the loudspeaker called her name with strident force, it sounded it three times before she responded. "Miss Fellowes, Miss Fellowes. You are wanted in Stasis Section One immediately. Miss Fellowes. Miss Fell " "Let me through!" she cried breathlessly, while the loudspeaker continued its repetitions without pause. She forced her way through the crowd with fierce energy, beating at it, striking out with closed fists, flailing, moving toward the door in a nightmare slowness. "I don't know how it happened. I just went down to the edge of the corridor to watch a pocket viewing-plate they had put up. Just for a minute, and then, before I could move or do anything -- " She cried out in sudden accusation, "You said they would make no trouble; you said to leave them alone -- " Miss Fellowes, disheveled and trembling uncontrollably, glared at her. "Where's Timmie?" A nurse was swabbing the arm of a wailing Jerry with disinfectant and another was preparing an anti-tetanus shot. There was blood on Jerry's clothes. "He bit me. Miss Fellowes," Jerry cried. "He bit me." But Miss Fellowes didn't even see him. "What did you do with Timmie?" she rapped out. "I locked him in the bathroom," said Mandy. "I just threw the little monster in there and locked him in." Miss Fellowes ran into the dollhouse. She fumbled at the bathroom door. It took an eternity to get it open and to find the ugly little boy cowering in the corner. "Don't whip me. Miss Fellowes," he whispered. His eyes were red. His lips were quivering. "I didn't mean to do it." "Oh, Timmie, who told you about whips?" She caught him to her, hugging him wildly. "She said with a long rope. She said you would hit me and hit me." "She was wicked to say so. But what happened? What happened?" "He called me an apeboy. He said I wasn't a real boy. He said I was an animal." Timmie dissolved in a flood of tears. "He said he wasn't going to play with a monkey any more. I said I wasn't a monkey! I wasnt a monkey. He said I was all funny-looking. He said I was horrible ugly. He kept saying and saying and I bit him." They were both crying now. Miss Fellowes sobbed, "But it isn't true. You know that, Timmie. You're a real boy. You're a dear, real boy and the best boy in the world. And no one -- no one will ever take you away from me."  T was easy to make up her mind now, easy to know what to do. Only it had to be done quickly. Hoskins wouldn't wait much longer, with his own son mangled -- No, it would have to be done tonight, this night; with the place four-fifths asleep and the remaining fifth intellectually drunk over Project Middle Ages. It would be an unusual time for her to return, but not an unheardof one. The guard knew her well and would not dream of questioning her. He would think nothing of her carrying a suitcase. She rehearsed the noncommital phrase: "Games for the boy," and the calm smile. Why shouldn't he believe that? When she entered the dollhouse again, Timmie woke and ran to her and she maintained a desperate normality to avoid frightening him. She talked about his dreams with him and listened to him ask wistfully after Jerry. There would be few to see her afterward, none to question the bundle she would be carrying. Timmie would be very quiet and then it would be done and what would be the use of trying to undo it? They would let her be. They would let them both be. She opened the suitcase, took out the overcoat, the woolen cap with the earflaps and the rest. Timmie said, with the beginning of alarm, 'Why are you putting all these clothes on me. Miss Fellowes?" She said, "I am going to take you outside, Timmie. To where your dreams are." "My dreams?" His face twisted in sudden yearning, yet fear was there, too. "You won't be afraid. You'll be with me. You won't be afraid if you're with me, will you, Timmie?" "No, Miss Fellowes." He buried his little misshapen head against her side, and under her enclosing arm she could feel his small heart thud. It was midnight and she lifted him into her arms. She disconnected the alarm and opened the door softly. And she screamed, for facing her across the open door was Hoskins. and he stared at her, as astonished as she. Miss Fellowes recovered first by a second and make a quick attempt to push past him; but even with the second's delay, he had time. He caught her roughly and hurled her back against a chest of drawers. He waved the men in and confronted her, blocking the door. "I didn't expect this. Are you completely insane?" She had managed to interpose her shoulder so that it, rather than Timmie, had struck the chest. She said pleadingly, "What harm can it do if I take him. Dr. Hoskins? You can't put energy loss ahead of a human life!" Firmly, Dr. Hoskins took Timmie out of her arms. "An energy of dollars lost out of the pockets of investors. It would mean a terrible setback for Stasis, Inc. It would mean eventual publicity about a sentimental nurse destroying all that for the sake of an apeboy." "Apeboy.'" said Miss Fellowes, in helpless fury. "That's what the reporters would call him," said Hoskins. One of the men emerged now, looping a nylon rope through eyelets along the upper portion of the wall. Miss Fellowes remembered the rope that Hoskins had pulled outside the room containing Professor Ademewski's rock specimen so long ago. She cried out, "No!" But Hoskins put Timmie down and gently removed the overcoat he was wearing. "You stay here, Timmie. Nothing will happen to you. We're just going outside for a moment. All right?" Timmie, white and wordless, managed to nod. Hoskins steered Miss Fellowes out the dollhouse ahead of himself. For the moment. Miss Fellowes was beyond resistance. Dully, she noticed the hand-pull being adjusted outside the dollhouse. "I'm sorry. Miss Fellowes," said Hoskins. "I would have spared you this. I planned it for the night so that you would know only when it was over." She said in a weary whisper, "Because your son was hurt. Because he tormented this child into striking out at him." "No. Believe me. I understand about the incident today and I know it was Jerrys fault. But the story has leaked out. It would have to, with the press surroimding us on this day of all days. I can't risk having a distorted story about negligence and savage Neanderthalers, so-called, distract from the success of Project Middle Ages. Timmie has to go soon anyway; he might as well go now and give the sensationalists as small a peg as possible on which to hang their trash." "It's not like sending a rock being!" sation. He'll be simply a Neanderthal boy in a Neanderthal world. He will no longer be a prisoner and alien. He will have a chance at a free life." "What chance? He's only seven years old, used to being taken care of, fed, clothed, sheltered. He will be alone. His tribe may not be anywhere near where you snatched him from , -- that was over three years ago! And even if they were, they would never recognize him! He will have to take care of himself. How will he know how?" Hoskins shook his head in hopeless negative. "Miss Fellowes, do you think we haven't thought of that? Do you think we would have brought in a child if it weren't that it was the first successful fix ofa human or near-human we made, and that we did not dare to take the chance of unfixing him and finding another fix as good? Why do you suppose we kept Timmie as long as we did, if it were not for our reluctance to send a child back into the past?" His voice took on a desperate urgency. "It's just that we can wait no longer. Timmie stands in the way of expansion; Timmie is a source of possible bad publicity; we are on the threshold of great things and I'm sorry, Miss Fellowes, but we can't let Timmie block us." "Well, then," said Miss Fellowes sadly, "let me say good-by. Spare me that much. Only five minutes to say good-by.' Hoskins hesitated. "All right. Go ahead." F or the last time, Timmie ran to her, and for the last time. Miss Fellowes clasped him in her arms. She hugged him blindly. She caught at a chair with the toe of one foot, moved it against the wall and sat down. "Don't be afraid, Timmie." "I'm not afraid if you're here. Miss Fellowes. Is that man mad at me, the man out there?" "No, he isn't. He just doesn't understand about us. Timmie, do you know what a mother is?" "Like Jerry's mother?" "Did he tell you about his mother?" "Sometimes. I think maybe a mother is a lady who takes care of you and who's very nice to you and who does good things." "That's right. Have you ever wanted a mother of your very own, Timmie?" Timmie pulled his head away from her so that he could look into her face. Slowly, he put his hand to her cheek and hair and stroked her, as long, long ago she had stroked him. He said, "Aren't you my mother?" "Oh, Timmie!" "Are you angry because I asked?" "No. Of course not." "Because I know your name is Miss Fellowes; but -- but sometimes I call you mother inside. Is that all right?" "Yes, yes. It's all right. And I won't leave you any more and nothing will hurt you. I'll be with you, to care for you always. Call me mother so I can hear you." "Mother," said Timmie contentedly, leaning his cheek against hers. She rose and, still holding him, stepped up on the chair. The sudden beginning of a shout from outside went unheard; with her free hand, she hauled with all her weight at the stout nylon cord where it hung suspended between two eyelets. And Stasis was punctured and the room was empty. Failure was impossible -- they had the one true formula: the victor belongs to the spoils! G roup Leader Mivar stood rigidly at attention and tried not to think of the maddening itch in the scar tissue at the base of his spine. The unfamiliar, sweltering clothing constricted his limbs and gave him an alarming sensation of impending suffocation. In that moment of exr treme discomfort, he allowed himself a treasonable thought. He did not want to be a hero. He could not recall the precise steps by which he had blundered into this mess, but he wanted out. General Zort paced back and forth in front of Mivar, flourishing his tail as he pivoted. It was a magnificent tail, long and sturdy, stylishly trimmed. There were rumors that the general dyed his tail, but Mivar couldn't detect any irregularity of color in its glimmering blackness. He allowed his eyes to follow it enviously. The general noticed this, or perhaps Mivar inadvertently allowed a thought to escape. The general halted. "Too bad about your tail, Mivar," he said, affectionately caressing his own. "But it had to be done. You understand that. A tail just can't be hidden under those silly clothes." "I understand, sir," Mivar said. The itch had become a throbbing torment. He shouldn't have let them do it, he thought He should have defended his tail with his life. To lose a tail in combat would be bad enough, but to have it sliced off by a doctor, under local anesthesia, was utterly humiliating. There were not enough honors in the Empire to compensate for it. Females would ridicule him. He would lose his coveted position in the Palace Guard. How could he parade his men without a tail? # HE general was scrutinizing him carefully. "The face is excellent. It is an amazing likeness." The royal surgeon stepped forward and bowed. "The hearing flaps must be done again," he said. "They are not large enough." "Not large enough!" Mivar exclaimed. "Come, now," the general said. "You can have them removed when you return." Mivar jerked back to attention. "Vril?" the general said. The general's chief scientist stepped forward. "What do you think?" "It's developing nicely," Vril said. "The preparation will have to be intensive, but I am certain we shall succeed." He whirled on Mivar and spoke in harsh, alien tones. "Who are you?" Mivar's tongue struggled awkwardly to form the strange words. "I am Major Jeffery Holder, Commander of the First Venus Expedition." Vril moved to the side of the room and touched a button. Soimds boomed at them. Alien soimds. The voice of an Earthman. "I am Major Jeffery Holder, Commander of the First Venus Expedition." "Not bad," the general said. "Certainly it is not bad," Vril said. "It is also not good, and it must be perfect. But we shall work at it. It will be done." "And you are certain of success?" Vril bowed. "As positive as one can be amidst life's many complicated imcertainties." "Carry on," the general said. He walked majestically away, flourishing his tail. His entourage filed out after him, also with tails '  waving. As soon as their backs were turned, Mivar's hand leaped to the base of his spine and scratched energetically. "Now then -- " Vril began. Mivar sat down wearily. Standing was a difficult process, without the aid of a tail. "More?' he said. "More. Who can tell what situations you must face, what emergencies? Reciting a few statements will not be enough. You must speak the language, and speak it perfectly. You must study this Major Jeffery Holder -- study him in his cell, and study the films we have taken. You must talk like him, and walk like him, and act like him. You must even think like him. They did a very good job on your face, and your form is similar to his. But appearance is only the first step. The gods have generously presented us with this opportunity and we dare not blunder. Now then, listen, and repeat the words. Imitate the voice." He touched the button and the alien voice filled the room. "I am Major Jeffery Holder, Commander of the First Venus Expedition." A ND so it went. For half a lightcycle, Mivar slaved under the sharp eyes of Vril. Hidden, he observed Vril's interviews with the captured Earthman. He watched films. He learned to mimic the Earthman's walk, and his gestures. and even his facial expressions. The Earthman's recorded conversation was played to him as he slept. And in time, even Vril had to admit that he was becoming proficient. Somewhere nearby, another officer was studying the other Earthman, Lieutenant Roger Anderson -- studying him under the sharp tutelage of Vril's assistants, and making, Vril informed Mivar, excellent progress. "The first surgery didn't turn out as well as yours," Vril said. "But they have that corrected now. It's too bad that stupid patrol had to kill the other three. The odds would be more in our favor if we could send back a full crew of five." "Why not?" Mivar asked. "We know what they looked like." "But we don't know what they talked like, or how they acted. There's no point in training an officer and sending him along if he's going to give the entire project away the first time he opens his mouth. No, we'll send back the two of you, and you can regretfully explain that the others were killed in an accident, which is true. Better make it wild animals. They expected wild animals. Now then." He switched to the alien language."Tell me. Major, what did you find on this planet Venus?" Mivar delivered a brief lecture, based entirely upon carefully planned misinformation. General Zort held a meeting at his headquarters to review progress, and as Mivar stood waiting, an Earthman entered the room and approached him. He halted in front of Mivar, snapped to attention, and delivered an Earth salute with his hand. "Lieutenant Anderson reporting, sir," he said. "At ease, Lieutenant," Mivar said. The onlookers applauded, and the lieutenant flashed a thought at Mivar; "Group Leader Hezzit." "Group Leader Mivar," Mivar flashed back. "Wonder why they kept us apart all this time." "They didn't want us to get the Earthmen confused." "But now," Vril said, "you know your subjects well. Next you must learn how they behave with each other. We are placing them in the same cell, for observation purposes." General Zort interrupted. "It is time we did some serious planning." Vril said, "but in my opinion, it needs only proper planning." "I am in complete agreement," the general said. "What you have accomplished is astonishing. Do we show Mivar and Hezzit to the Earthmen? I would like to see their reactions." "Definitely not," Vril said. "We must not let them suspect our plans. Without being aware of it, they are giving us valuable information, and if they become suspicious, they will certainly create difficulties." "You are entirely correct, as usual," the general said hastily. "Let us discuss these obstacles." "First," Vril said, "they must learn to operate the ship." "Obviously." "This can be done. They will return it to the planet Earth, and a short time before they reach their destination, they will communicate with Earth. They will say their communication device had broken down and they had just succeeded in repairing it. They will place the ship in an orbit near the space station which the Earthmen have circling their planet. This is according to plan, because the Earthmen feared there would not be sufficient fuel remaining for a landing on Earth. Our own calculations confirm this. "No doubt they will receive a hero's welcome when they arrive on Earth. We confidently expect that they will receive every honor and consideration. So -- when they complain of extreme fatigue after their long and trying expedition, it is to be expected that they will be placed in seclusion for the rest which their heroic efforts have earned. We hope this will be done with a minimum of contacts with Earthmen. The fewer the contacts. the less likely it is that their real identities will be discovered. "At the first opportunity after they are placed in seclusion, they will escape. Disappear.' "Won't that arouse suspicion?" the general asked. "It will arouse concern, but not suspicion. The Earthmen will believe that the hardship of the expedition has unbalanced them mentally. There will be an intensive search, of course, but it will not be a search for alien spies. It will be a search for two mentally ill Earthmen. "As soon as Mivar and Hezzlit have escaped, they will alter their appearances according to a plan which they will practice. We have studied the captured Earthmen and all reproductions of Earthmen which were found in the ship, and we have devised composite identities which will serve as a satisfactory disguise. There are dif ficulties that must be worked out, but it can be done. They will disappear. If they have been separated, they can easily arrange to meet, because telepathic communication is known to the Earthmen only as a theory. They will meet, and then they will be able to collect the information we must have."  to have them land on the planet in secret?" asked General Zort. "The Earthmen have detection devices and an attempt at a secret landing would be highly suspicious," Vril replied. "It might alarm the Earthmen. That is one thing we must avoid." "Very well," the general said. "And how do they bring the information back to us?" "A very critical question. We are developing a more compact fuel for the ship. We can arrange secret compartments for it. They will be able to return once they get back to the ship. This will be difficult, whether the ship is left in orbit or whether the Earthmen refuel it and return it to Earth. But Mivar and Hezzit are resourceful and ingenious, as we well know. They will find a way. Their return does not worry me. The most critical stage of the operation will occur when they land on Earth. I would like to show you some dream-strips. This one is Major Holder's." Vril signaled and the screen at the far end of the room flashed to life. The spaceship had landed. It stood surrounded by a throng of wildly cheering Earthmen. Major Holder appeared in the airlock and clasped his hands above his head. As he started down the ramp, a figure broke loose from the crowd, dashed up the ramp and hurled itself into his arms. The scene shifted abruptly. An interior scene. A large sleeping cushion in the background, mounted ridiculously above the floor. The strange figure clung to the major, who stooped, lifted it and turned. Vril raised his hand and the screen went blank. "What follows is disgusting," Vril said. "What is it?" the general wanted to know. "An Earth female. That one is Major Holder's mate." "Ah!" "You see the problem. The Earthmen have a single mate and they spend their lives in close association. It is likely that their mates know them more familiarly than any of their other associates. The mates will certainly be present to greet them when they return. In my opinion, this is the most dangerous obstacle they will face. If they pass it successfully, our plan must succeed. Here is a dream-strip of Lieutenant Anderson." In the company of a group of obviously important personages, the lieutenant made his way through a crowd. Guards pushed the cheering spectators aside to make way for them. Suddenly the lieutenant turned, battled his way into the crowd, and clasped a female in his arms.  a wave of his hand. "There are exaggerations and inaccuracies in a dream-strip, of course, but by comparing enough strips we can obtain an excellent idea of how to surmount this obstacle. The females alter their appearance in subtle ways, but Mivar and Hezzit must be able to recognize these mates of Major Holder and Lieutenant Anderson under any circumstances. If the mates do not come to them on the landing, they must seek them out. The greeting can be brief and undemonstrative, but there must be a greeting, and the mates must be convinced." "What about afterward?" Mivar said, squirming nervously on his cushion. The sight of the room with the sleeping cushion had incited an apprehensive itching in his scar tissue. "You are tired. You need rest. Even the presence of your mate would be disturbing to you. You might even be ill. There shouldn't be any problem about afterward. But you must greet the mates properly, according to Earth custom. Not to do so would be fatal." Hezzit said uneasily, "We must -- " "It is called a kiss," Vril said. "The mouths meet. The Earthmen have no tails, as you well know. They use the kiss as a substitute. Come -- certainly you will not allow a mere Earth female to stand in the way of our glorious conquest." "Does the Earthman say anything to his mate?" Mivar asked. "As you might expect from a species that does not have thought contact, the Earthman says much. You will be well rehearsed on that point. I have compiled all of the dream-strips in which the mates appear. And there are many of them. We will add others as we record them. It is unfortunate that the Earthmen lost all of their personal possessions in the river crossing when they were attempting to escape our patrol. I understand that they had life photos of their mates, and there is always a danger that the appearance of these Earth females may be exaggerated or modified in the dreamstrips. "But we can make the dreamstrips serve our purpose. You will watch now, Mivar, and remember that you must be able to recognize Major Holder's mate, and you must know how to manage the greeting." They ran the dream-strips. Major Holder's and Lieutenant Anderson's. Mivar had the major's mate so thoroughly impressed into his conscious and subconscious mind that even he dreamed of her. The major called her Sally. He dreamed of her in a variety of odd settings, both public and private. The dream-strips showed them going through the pointless motions which were called dancing, striking a ball with a stick in some absurd test of skill, swimming, dressing or undressing, usually with each other's assistance. Hezzit was suffering the same familiarity with Lieutenant Anderson's mate, who was called Klathy. The ultimate indignity occurred when Vril made them practice the Earthman greeting, the kiss. He made them practice it on each other. men's ship, suffering near-disaster on the takeoff, but successfully placed it in an orbit around their planet They gazed in awe at their cloud-shrouded home and apprehensively at the distant light in the sky that was Earth. For the first time, they saw the stars. Vril, who accompanied them, made observations and films. Hezzit, a mathematical genius, amused himself by laying out courses for Earth and sarcastically commenting on the inefficiency of the Earthmen's computer. "Our people have lived in blindness," Vril said. "The ship operates on a simple principle. We could have built one centuries ago, if we had known what lay beyond our sky. We speculated, but we did nothing because there seemed to be no purpose. And now -- look! Worlds to conquer! Thousands of worlds!" They were badly shaken up on landing, but suffered no serious damage. They continued to practice, using the fuel that Vril developed. They traveled long distances in toward the sun, and turned back to explore space on the Earthward side. They used the ship to put a space station in orbit above the clouds of their own planet. They saw the completion of the first of the giant warships Vril had planned, and they tested it, and started the training of the crew that would operate it They could reasonably call themselves experts. They were ready. There was an audience with the emperor. His Majesty descended from his throne and presented both group leaders with the Order of the Tail, and as the sparkling insignia was pinned to his Earth clothing, Mivar felt compensated, at least to a degree, for his own lost tail. More honors -- greater honors -- would be theirs after they successfully completed their mission, His Majesty informed them. There would be an entire world to divide, and honor enough for all. "When you return," Vril told them, "the invasion fleet will be ready. Our success depends upon yours." They left for Earth. the end of their journey, Mivar broke radio silence. "Morning Star calling Earth," he announced. There was a blank, nerve-wracking silence, and then the response exploded at him. "Good God, man! Wed given you up. What happened?" "Transmitter broke down," Mivar said. "We just got it fixed." "How are you?" Mivar said laconically, "Three men lost. Holder and Anderson returning. Expect to orbit in seven days." "How are you holding up?" "It's been a rough trip, with just the two of us. We're pretty tired. Reserve a couple of rooms for us at the bottom of a coal mine." "Will do. This is great, just great. Tough about the others, of course, but -- what sort of place is Venus?" "Damp," Mivar said, and signed off. From the pilofs seat, Hezzit asked, "Ever#rthing all right?" "Seems to be," said Mivar. "This will be a great triumph for Vril. And he deserves it." "He certainly gave us a thorough preparation," Mivar said. He remembered one interview with Major Holder, when Vril had asked, "How do you feel after a trip through space?" And the major had replied, "You feel like reserving a room at the bottom of a coal mine." Mivar had memorized and absorbed the major's habits of speech until they were his own. He had memorized the major's own responses to himdreds of situations. Had it not been for the necessity of greeting the major's mate, he would have looked forward eagerly to his visit to the planet Earth. Hezzit was imdergoing similar apprehensions. "This distinctive odor the Earthmen have," he said. "Do you remember it?" "How could I forget it?" "Will the Erth females have the same odor?" "I don't know. I suppose they might. We can try to make it a short greeting." "I wasn't thinking about that. I can always -- what's the Earth expression?" "Hold your nose.", "Right. I can always hold my nose -- mentally, of course. But I was wondering if we have an odor that would be distinctive to the Earthmen." Mivar caught his breath. "I hadn't thought about that. Vril didn't think of it." "It's a possibility. One never knows how one might smell to another species. And then -- supposing they notice the lack of an Earthmah odor?" "There should be other things to keep their attention away from odors when we land." "There'd better be." O NE hour later. Earth time. General Rysdale, the commander of the Venus Project, called them. Mivar delivered his first report of a nonexistent Venus, and the general absorbed it intently. "The place sounds like a roaring hell," he announced. "It certainly is that, sir," Mivar said. "And you found nothing but those dismal swamps from pole to pole?" "There are a few low hills in the south-temperate zone, and what might be the remains of a mountain range around the north pole. Nothing much at either place but some rocks sticking up. And the place is hotter than the proverbial underworld." "Then I guess we won't be sending colonists to Venus." "I should hope not, sir. If you do, don't ask me to volunteer." "What did you do for oxygen? You didn't have enough for all this time. It's more than two years since you left." "There's plenty of oxygen there, sir. It comes mixed with some gases that made the guinea pigs drop dead after one whiff. We didn't try it ourselves, but we extracted the oxygen." "You're sounding good, Holder. How do you feel?" "Tired," Mivar said. "Very tired. I won't feel like much of anything until I get some rest." "We'll see that you get it -- all you want. How's your health?" "All right, as far as we know. We're just tired." The general signed off. The following day, Mivar was asked to dictate an official report on his experiences. He was prepared. He already had it memorized. After that, they reported their position twice daily, and shrugged off Earth's solicitous interest in their welfare. They orbited on schedule and a small space tug towed them to the space station. They moved down a connecting tube to the station and their first contact with Earthmen. A colonel met them. Mivar came to attention, saluted snappily and began, "Colonel -- " "Nuts!" the colonel said, slapping him heartily on the back. "You never called me colonel before. Jim is good enough now. Besides, you're a colonel yourself now. Mean to say they didn't tell you?" Mivar accepted the hand the colonel thrust at him and said, "No. They didn't tell us." "Maybe the general's keeping it for a surprise. Be sure and let it surprise you, or he might skin me." H e stepped back and scrutinized Mivar. "You don't look bad, fellow, considering what you've been through. I thought you'd be a stretcher case. You look just the same, except you've lost some weight." "I feel different," Mivar admitted. "Well, no wonder! You'll get over that. All you need is some rest and some good cooking. But you've accomplished something, fellow. We've been wondering for centuries just what was behind those Venus clouds. Now we know. Nothing but swamp, eh?" "Not much more than swamp." "And those big lizards -- holy terrors, eh?" "I suppose you'd call them holy terrors. I don't know that they were lizards. They just looked that way. Jones was our biologist, you know, and we never had a chance to discuss them with him." "Tough. Poisonous, you say?" "One swipe of the claws and that was it" call them lizards. It's natural to try to compare extraterrestrial life with Earth life, but it's probably wrong. What did you call them?" "Nothing for publication," Mivar said. The colonel slapped his back again and said, "Well, the rocket is ready to go. How are you, Anderson? Didn't mean to neglect you. It's Captain Anderson now, you know. I guess we'd better not keep the general waiting -- espewaiting with him." They took seats in the rocket ship and strapped themselves down. Hezzit flashed a thought at Mivar. "They don't seem suspicious." "No reason why they should," Mivar flashed back. They had passed the first obstacle. Mivar had time for careful reflection as they dropped Earthward. He remembered the colonel from one of Major Holder's dreamstrips, but the major had not given his name. In spite of this, no embarrassment had resulted. The Earthmen had accepted him naturally. It came to him as a momentous revelation that what they were doing was such a fabulous thing, such an inconceivable thing, that the Earthmen could not possibly suspect. The Earthmen had no reason to believe there was intelligent life on Venus. Even if there were, the Earthmen had no reason to believe it resembled themselves in any way. And if it did -- who among them would expect inhabitants of Venus to return in the Morning Star, looking, talking, acting like members of the ill-fated crew, even knowing their innermost thoughts? If Mivar were to confess his deception now, they would think him mentally unbalanced. A medical examination would prove otherwise, of course, but Mivar and Hezzit would disappear before they became the subjects of examinations. He flashed a thought at Hezzit. "It's going to be all right. They can't possibly suspect anything." Hezzit flashed back nervously, "I think we should have spent more time practicing that kiss." "You didn't have to remind me," Mivar grumbled. T here were crowds at the landing field. It was much like the tumultuous welcome the returning Earthmen had been accorded in the dream-strips. Mivar, however, had the impression that the onlookers were curious radier than joyful. He walked down the landing ramp, waited for Hezzit, and the two of them moved off side by side. "How do you feel?" Mivar flashed. "Like I'll be glad when it's over." The official welcoming party stood some distance away. The crowd was held back by a rope -- Mivar had seen the same arrangement in several dream-strips. There were the photographers, the newsmen, and after looking at so many dream-strips, the whole seemed so familiar to Mivar that he had the impression of having been there before. When they approached the official party, he saw that there were several females among it. He searched their faces anxiously for one, and only one, and failed to find it. As he slowed his steps, one of the females broke away and raced toward them. She threw herself into Hezzifs arms, and Mivar saw with a thrill of satisfaction that Hezzit was handling himself with masterful correctness. "Everything all right?" Mivar flashed. Hezzit flashed back, "The thing reeks." Mivar turned again to the little group that stood waiting. The familiar face, the hauntingly familiar face, was not there. He hesitated with a growing feeling of panic, running his eyes over the crowd that stood watching quietly. Suddenly he saw it. There could be no doubt. The female stood in the front line, hands on the rope. It was Holder's mate. He hurried toward it. The face was smiling and weeping as he reached it. He stood with the rope between them and took the female into his arms. Its arms tightened around his neck. Its words came to him clearly above the noise of the crowd. "Jeff! Oh, Jeff. But -- you shouldn't have -- " The face brushed his. The lips moved toward his. He knew then that everything was all right. The deception was complete. No one would ever know. The next moment, pain exploded in his brain. G eneral Rysdale said, "One dead. What about the other?" "He just wouldn't be taken alive, sir. Whatever they are, they're some fighters. He took on an entire squad and flattened every one of them. Then he took their guns and started shooting. I didn't think the casualties were worth it, and there was always the chance he'd turn a gun on himself the last minute." "You're probably right. I doubt that we could have made him talk, even if we'd taken him. If it had to be, it had to be." "Did you get the report on Holder -- I mean the one that looked like Holder?" "I got it. Extraterrestrial life, highly intelligent and damned cunning. The thing could have fooled Holder's own mother. Colonel Meyers has known Holder all his life and he didn't suspect a thing. Those two were equipped to do a more thorough spying job on this planet than could be imagined. How they were going to get the information back to Venus, I don't know. We'll have to take a careful look at the Morning Star, "That's being worked on now, sir." "As for their procedure -- I've been wondering about that insistence on a secluded rest. It didn't sound unusual at the time, but now I'm beginning to wonder. They had something planned. They were going to collect information and get it back to Venus. What next? An invasion?" "I suppose it's possible." "You're darned right it's possible. They have an incredibly high technology. The miniature photographic equipment this phony Holder was carrying is beyond anything we can make. People with that ability can copy a spaceship, and we know darned well they can fly one. They got the Morning Star back here, and they put it on the station's orbit about as slickly as the boys up there had ever seen it done. Well, we're forewarned now. We'll have a few surprises ready for any invaders." "Since they won't be getting the information, they might not invade." "That's possible, but we won't count on it. We might even plan a little invading ourselves. We'll throw out that tripe they fed us about Venus, too. Since it has a high civilization, it might even be a nice place to live. Did you talk to the girl?" "Yes, sir. She says she never knew Holder." "That was a rather warm greeting for a man she never knew. Check it out. Holder had a reputation as a ladies' man, and I think you'll find she was number one on his list at the time he left Earth." "I'll check it all the way through, sir." "It was a good plan they had. We shouldn't underestimate them. It scares me to think how close they came to bringing it off. But -- " he grinned and tilted back in his chair -- 'Sve had two good breaks. I don't pretend to understand how they happened, but here they are. The first was that Holder had a jealous wife. The second was that this double of Holder's greeted another woman so warmly right under Mrs. Holder's nose. It horrified me at the time, but when I think back on it, it was nothing short of marvelous the way Mrs. Holder grabbed that guard's gun and shot the Venusian dead."      irAl iiAL wIKm the word "moa" would be far less known than it is if it were not such a useful word for crossword-puzzle purposes. No statistics are available -- as so often happens in the case of cultural items of probably undisputed value -- but I would guess that a diligent researcher could turn up a different crossword puzzle for every day in the year which shows three spaces to be filled in with something defined as "extinct bird." To the naturalist, the three letters M-O-A spell something else again -- it might as well be D. O. A. Exploring and literate men got to New Zealand too late to see the moas, just as they have been too late in quite a number of other places. To make the whole story more lamentable, exploring seamen occasionally did get to such interesting places in time. But they did not know what to look for, from our point of view. Maybe they simply missed what we would consider interesting. In some cases, one may suspect that they merely failed to write down what they saw. At any event, a modern naturalist, transported back to earlier but still historical times by time machine, could seize on various lost opportunities. He would have joined the Phoenician sailors, for example, who set out in # b.c. to round Africa at the request of Pharaoh Nekho (or Niku) and who actually succeeded in doing it during the two years that followed. We don't know whether they passed through the channel separating Madagascar from the African mainland or whether they sailed "outside" of Madagascar. We do know that they made numerous landings; one of them may have been on Madagascar. If a modern naturalist had been along, he would have made sure of such a landing in order to look for the near-fabulous Aepyornis, the enormous ostrichlike extinct bird of that island. We don't really know how it looked. Of course we can reconstruct its skeleton; in fact, we have. But we have no idea of its plumage. All we know is that it has not been extinct for very long. The Phoenicians of that trip would surely have found it; even the Crusaders might still have been in time. also accompany the Arabs who at a reasonably early time sailed the Indian Ocean and did go as far east as Sumatra and Borneo. The modern naturalist would have talked the shipmaster into turning due south there to get to the Australian shore. Presumably he would have been in time to see the now extinct giant marsupials of Australia, colossi as large as the strongest bull. They were no longer among those present when Australia was actually discovered. Such a naturalist might even have seen the Megalania, indubitably preferring a safe shelter if this occasion came up. The Megalarda was a monitor lizard of which the following things are certain: it was enormous in size and did not become extinct until fairly recent times. As to its size, learned opinions differ -- some scientists felt that the animal might have been more than thirty feet long; others gave it only twenty feet. The date of its extinction is equally uncertain. Anthropologists have concluded from native legends (which may or may not refer to this monitor) that the Megalarda was still alive less than a thousand years ago. But the remains actually found by naturalists look older than that. The last item in this condensed list of missed opportunities is that our naturalist should have been aboard the good ship Heemskirk when its captain, Abel Janszoon Tasman, saw high mountains rise from the sea on December #, #. This date marks the discovery of New Zealand. The modern naturalist would have made Tasman land instead of just sailing on. He then would certainly have been able to show Tasman a few moas. Like the Aepyomis of Madagascar, the moas were ostrichlike birds, many of them very large. But there were also smaller varieties. They were distributed over the three islands which comprise New Zealand, the two large ones which are now called North Island and South Island, and small Stewart Island to the south of South Island. The qualifying statement "now called" was necessary because on some old maps you can find the present Stewart Island labeled as South Island. On these maps, the present South Island logically appears under the name of Middle Island.  We know the moas mostly from their bones that have been found in all three islands. In addition to the bones, a few feathers are known and quite a large number of eggshells that could be restored. Naturally we cannot tell which eggs belonged to which bird, for comparative size is no guide. The still living New Zealand kiwi, though probably not a direct relative of the moas, is at least of the same general type, and it throws any guesswork into the wastepaper basket. The kiwi, a smallish bird, lays an egg which is far larger, by comparison, than that of the African ostrich. On the other hand, the eggs of the cassowary are smaller than one would expect. of both the larger and the smaller species. 'The small ones show a stride of not quite # inches, while the large ones show a stride of over # inches. The large ones look surprisingly like some dinosaur footprints of much greater age. In the case of the footprints as well as of the length of the stride, there is a definite correlation between size of print and length of stride and the size of the bird. For this reason, at least some of the footprints can be tentatively ascribed to a species. The moas of the past are now subdivided into five different genera, each with several species. It should be said at the outset that some of the species are doubtful, since they are based on only a few remains. It is quite possible that we have a few more species in our catalogues than existed in reality; it has happened with other extinct animals that male and female were classified as two different species if they differed considerably. However, the following is the tentative list of the moas, by genera: Dinornis, The moas belonging to this genus were the tallest of the lot, their heads towering more than # feet above the ground. Largest of the six species was Dinornis maximus. All species were rather light-boned. Euryapteryx. The moas of this genus were squat and heavy but not very tall, their heads being five to six feet above the ground. They must have been very numerous at certain times. There are five recognized species; a sixth is uncertain. Megalapteryx. Two species from the South Island only. These were large for birds but small for moas, being not much over three feet tall. As the name of the genus indicates (from Greek megas, meaning large, and apteryx, the scienFig. #: Reconstructed skeleton of a moo Fig. #: The Kiwi, living bird of some type os moas but not closely related to them tific name of the kiwi), they might also be taken for giant kiwis. Emeus, Three recognized species with a fourth one uncertain, standing about four feet tall. Anomalapteryx, Five species, most of them very early and rather small, of about the size of the Megalapteryx moas. One of these five species grew seven feet tall; it is also the most recent of this genus. This list of genera, comprising just short of two dozen species, must not be misunderstood. At no time could one have found all twenty-two species alive on the islands. The best one could have expected would have been ten or eleven species alive simultaneously. Unfortunately, we cannot say what time that would have been. The era of the Homeric heroes -- # B.C. -- seems like a good guess. TlY now, I have told what is really known about the moas; ever # Tthing else is either unknown, or uncertain, or at least disputed. Even the story of how the moas became known to science is rather complicated. The first explorer to Fig. #: Dinornis and eariy Maori, group in a New Zealand museum All photographs: Courtesy New Zealand Government, Tourist Department land on New Zealand and to talk to the Maori living there was Captain James Cook, during his visit in November #. With the aid of interpreters who seem to have been of doubtful value, Captain Cook spoke to the Maori chieftain Tawaihura and asked him, among other things, about the animals occurring on the island. Chief Tawaihura told the captain about a large and dangerous lizard -- which must have been purely mythological, since no really large lizard does or did exist on New Zealand -- but did not say a word about large birds. We can be rather certain now that there were no moas in the area where Tawaihura lived, even though they may still have existed elsewhere. With great fire and lack of logic, some scientists have made much of this omission, taking the negative evidence of Captain Cook's journals as positive proof that the moas became extinct at a much earlier date. Beginning about the year #, people began to visit New Zealand and write books about their travels. Strangely enough, none of the first six books written on New Zealand (or about New Zealand) even mentions the moas. The first book to mention them does not use the name; it is a narrative that was published in LfOndon in #. Its writer was a trader by the name of Joel S. Polack and it is merely one more kink in the story that a missionary who knew Polack swore that Polack could not write. Well, the book with Polack's name on it exists; the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and # nd Street has a copy of it and I have read it myself. I cannot imagine that a trader can pursue his business and presumably make a profit without being able to write, but it might easily be that trader Polack did not write English and that the printed book is a translation of a manuscript in another language. At any event, trader Polack relates that he was shown very large bones and adds that the animals these bones came from were alive on the South Island. But he did not make clear what made him say so. Did the Maori tell him? Or did he draw this conclusion himself? At about the time trader Polack Colenso began hearing stories about gigantic birds from natives, and another missionary, the Reverend ing moa bones.  "HE first moa relic to be placed into scientific hands was a large leg bone with both ends broken off. The year was # and the hands which received this bone were very competent indeed, belonging to Professor Richard Owen, of London. They also happened to be reluctant hands -- Professor Owen actually took it to be a soup bone at first glance. Even the simple fact that Owen received this bone has been embroidered nearly out of recognition. A story the bone for Owen when the professor was not at home. Well, the man who took it there, and Owen was at home, was a . sailor all right, but far from illiterate. He was the surgeon Dr. John Rule who had specifically traveled to England with the bone to see Professor Owen. When Owen was imiihpressed. Rule persuaded him to devote more time to it Owen first "tried" the bone in the museum by holding it against the skeleton of a cow. It did not "fit" Owen tried the skeleton of a horse next. Finally, having run out of large mammals, he held it next to the leg of an ostrich skeleton. This was it! The bone matched that of the ostrich, except for size. Once Owen was convinced, nothing could hold him back. His colleagues, though admitting that it seemed to belong to a bird, suggested that he wait imtil more and undamaged bones became available. But Owen would have none of it. He knew that this was a bird bone, having belonged to a bird of the general build of an ostrich, but bigger and more massive by far. And since the bone was not fossil, the bird could not be dead for very long. Thus Owen prepared a scientific report. It could not be very long, but what there was of it was very positive. Moreover, Owen reasoned, a layman does not know what to look for unless a scientist tells him. So he ordered the printing of # extra copies of his short report, to be distributed in New Zealand among missionaries, shipping agents and settlers. The # copies were crated for shipment to New Zealand to serve as a call for more evidence. But before the crate with the pamphlets had even crossed the equator, another crate arrived in London. It was full of moa bones, the bones collected by the Reverend There was, it is reported, some ludicrous trouble with the Royal customs inspectors who found some kind of rule against the importing of bones. Fighting, so to speak, the British Museum and the Royal Society, not to mention Owen himself, the ones who lost were the customs inspectors. The final outcome of it all was a magnificent report by Professor Richard Owen. ing story came from New Zealand. Governor FitzRoy had met an old Maori chieftain by the name of Haumatangi. The year was # and Haumatangi was about # years old. The old man told the governor proudly that he remembered seeing Captain Cook. Since the visit referred to was the one of November #, Haumatangi must have been about # at the time, so the claim sounded credible. Haumatangi added that the last moa in his province had been seen two years before Captain Cook's visit This statement, of course, had to be taken on face value. Another story which was circulated a little later had it that another chieftain, Kawana Paipai, said he had taken part in a moa hunt when he was a boy. The date figured out to be # or #. Two or three other Maori, questioned around the middle of the last century about moas, declared that their grandfathers had told them about moa hunts. These dates all worked out to about #. It looked, therefore, as if the last moas were hunted to death around #. In New Zealand itself, scientific opinions began to be sharply divided, the battle cry being, strangely enough, "the men of The Fleet" who did, or did not, find islands populated with moas. It has to be explained here that the Maori had come from islands near Tahiti in several waves of immigration. The main (and latest) wave is called The Fleet and the generally accepted date is "around # aj)..." One school of thought -- which became the minority party -- had it that the Maori of The Fleet began to kill the moas for food and that the process of extermination was complete in Captain Cook's time. Another school of thought, however, claimed that the men of The Fleet arrived just about in time to see the last of the moas die. It has to be said that everything written and printed about the moas in New Zealand for several decades was not written to establish facts, but to defend either the one or the other school of thought The ones who said the moas had died out very early had quite a number of ingenious arguments. So-and-so-many Maori (say during the period from # to #) did not know that moa bones had belonged to birds when they were shown them. The word "moa" itself was used to mean "stone" or a raised small piece of land, like a flower bed. There were only a very few proverbs and sayings in which the moas figured; they were usually figures of speech like "gone like the moa." These proverbs seemed to be centuries old. As regards the statement that "my grandfather said that he hunted moas," it was pointed out that the words "grandfather" and "ancestor" are the same in the Maori language. As for old Haumatangi, he had probably just embellished on his memories of long ago hearing folk legends. And Kawana Paipai was disposed of in two ways. One was that he also told about battles which were obviously invented. The other was that he had never made his statement about the moa hunt; the point being that there were at least three white witnesses to the statement and only one of them repeated it later. TN the meantime, places where moas had been slaughtered and cooked were foimd. There could be absolutely no doubt that humans and moas had lived together at one time. The problem was to say when. Some scientists assumed a different native population, not only pre-Fleet but pre-Maori, which must have been the moa hunters. Other scientists said that the moahunter period did not have to be any other culture than Maori; they had been Maori of an earlier cultural level. This idea was contradicted mostly by the Maori themselves, who refused to believe that their ancestors should ever have changed, and who imagined the sailors of The Fleet to have been precisely like their fathers and grandfathers of about #. This, of course, just wasn't so -- the Maori, like all peoples, changed considerably through the centuries. Actually, everybody seems to be right depending on where you look. A number of moa-hunter campsites are indubitably Maori Some others are almost certainly not Maori -- of any cultural level There seem to have been earlier castaways who settled on New Zealand and who did not come as organized immigrants like the Maori of The Fleet. A fairly new scientific tool has been brought into play with some hopes of deciding the endless battle about the time of the moa hunters and, if possible, of the last of the moas. This tool is radio-carbon dating, or the C-# method, which can tell the age of many things by their amount of carbon#. There are just two requirements. The first is that whatever it is that must be dated must once have been alive, bone or wood or even charcoal, for non-living things do not take up carbon# from the atmosphere. The second is that the object must not be older than # years or thereabouts; after that time, the carbon# is gone and the age becomes uncertain, except that it clearly is more than # years. Another aspect of the C-# method is, unfortunately, that the object to be dated is destroyed in the process, so that scientists are rather handicapped when it comes to valuable specimens. One Dinomis specimen was found in a freshwater deposit with its crop reasonably intact. And the crop was still full of food (plants) which could be sacrificed for dating. The result -- these plants were eaten by the bird about # years ago or about # a.d. To some, this was a surprisingly late date for Dinomis, because they had assumed that even the pre-Fleet Maori only knew the heavy Euryapteryx type. T he argument of whether the moa hunters were pre-Maori people, pre-Fleet Maori or just Maori after The Fleet must not be taken to mean that the extinction of the moas is placed squarely on the shoulders of the moa hunters, whoever they were. Even if nobody had ever come to New Zealand prior to Captain Cook, the moas would probably be rare birds by now. They were completely flightless, they probably bred slowly, and they were most exceptionally stupid, for the brain of a six-foot moa was the same size I as that of a turkey. Many moas died in swamps, indicating they probably could not swim. On the North Island, many perished at one time because of forest fires set by volcanic eruptions. There is some evidence of disease among the moas. But the main reason their numbers declined seems to have been a fairly small climatic change which diminished the open plains and increased the forest and swamp areas. The moas were obviously on the downgrade for natural reasons. The moa hunters merely helped along and may have provided the final touch in the demise of the moa. But when was that? Nobody will commit himself. The proof that even the tall Dinomis type was still active and alive at the time of The Fleet has been rather a blow to some of the archeologists of New Zealand. In the course of time, the party which had proclaimed a very early date for the last of the moas had succeeded in attaining the position of "the voice of science. What they said was "science and what the others had said was either amateurish, or just the spirit of the nineteenth century, or else a wrong conclusion due to lack of evidence that has become known since -- the phrasing depended to some extent on whose opinion was being demolished. In one point, however, even the most conservative wing of the New Zealand scientists was rather lenient. It was admitted that small moas of the Megalapteryx type may have survived imtil quite recent times on the South Island. Roger Duff, the Director of the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand (and one of those "shocked by the outcome of the carbon# dating), dates two Maori-made artifacts using moa skin and moa feathers as from the seventeenth and eighteenth century respectively. Roger DufFs dating, incidentally, is based entirely on archeological and ethnological evidence. Zoologists seem to feel that something must be wrong, even though they can't say what or why. The simple fact is that some of the moa remains do not look as old as the archeologists say they must be. And New Zealand is not a place with a dry climate which tends to preserve animal remains indefinitely. T is interesting that the most recent story of a moa hunt came from the South Island, in fact from the southwestern end of the South Island where the Takahe -- scientific name Notornis -- was finally discovered alive after having been thought extinct. That stoiy takes up just one part of one paragraph in vol. II of Sir Walter Lawry Buller's History of the Birds of New Zealand, published in London in #. The sentence reads: "Sir George Grey tells me that in # he was at Preservation Inlet and saw a party of natives there who gave him a circumstantial account of the rescribing with much spirit its cap. ture out of a drove of six or seven." That's all, but it might be prudent to say that Sir George Grey had been, in succession, Governor of South Australia, twice Governor of New Zealand and then Governor of the Cape Colony -- in short, not somebody you would expect to make up tales. It is true that there has been no report since then, at least not one that could be called definite. But there still are virtually unknown areas on the South Island. Maybe the last of the moas, even if a small type, is still somewhere around. I don't assert that this must be the case. But there is also no reason for stating categorically .that the final chapter has been written. The Big News Next Month... by Robert Sheckley It stands to reason that the last thing a man can bungle is his own death. But not Blaine! See why in this first book-length Sheckley story! The massive planet, Mesklin, was tauntingly just out of reach of Earth's scientists. Marooned deep at its south pole was a specially designed rocket filled with measuring instruments and vital facts about the strangely shaped planet and its fantastic force of gravity. But no man could land and recover the rocket; no man could sustain that force of gravity. The small Mesklinites were earth's only hope. One of Earth's young scientists made a deal with a Mesklin sea captain who agreed to make the long, arduous journey to the south pole and recover the rocket. It was a strange deal, and the daring and resourceful little captain never made quite clear just what he would expect in return. Thus the Bree and her crew started on their odyssey into the unknown across the wastes of Mesklin, over seas and lands bristling with barbarians. Overhead, the scientists directed them from their hovering space ship, little suspecting the devious plans of the captain, or the possibility that all the science on Earth might not be able to meet the demands of the sturdy Mesklinites. the stroke of the sun "Kill the umpire!" the audience cried -- and why shouldn't they? He was on the ball, wasn't he? telling this story -- someone who understands the funny kind of football they play down in South America. Back in Moscow, Idaho, we grab the ball and run with it. In the small but prosperous republic which I'll call Perivia, they kick it aroimd with their feet. And that is nothing to what they do to the umpire. One of the first things I learned when I got to Perivia, after various distressing adventures in the less democratic parts of South America, was that last year's match had been lost owing to the knavish dishonesty of the referee. He had, it seemed, penalized most of the players on the team, disallowing a goal, and generally made sure that the best side wouldn't win. This diatribe made me quite homesick, but remembering where I was, I merely commented, "You should have paid him more money." "We did," was the bitter reply, "but the Panagurans got at him later." "Too bad," I answered. "It's hard nowadays to find an honest man who stays bought" The customs inspector who'd just taken my last hundred-dollar bill had the grace to blush beneath his stubble as he waved me across the border. The next few weeks were tough, but presently I was back in what I prefer to call the agricultural machinery business. The last thing I had time to bother about was football; I knew that my expensive imports were going to be used at any moment, and wanted to make sure that this time my profits went with me when I left the country. Even so, I could hardly ignore the excitement as the day for the return match drew nearer. For one thing, it interfered with business. I'd go to a conference, arranged with great difficulty and expense at a safe hotel, and half of the time everyone would be talking about football. "Gentlemen!" Fd protest "Our next consignment of rotary drills is being unloaded tomorrow, and imless we get that permit from the Minister of Agriculture, some busybody may open the cases and then..." "Don't worry, my boy," General Sierra or Colonel Pedro would answer airily, "that's already taken care of. Leave it to the Army." "Which army?" and for the next ten minutes Fd have to listen to arguments about football tactics and the best way of dealing with recalcitrant referees. It was then that Don Hernando Dias' name came up foi the first time. I knew of him as one of the country's leading industrialists, but he had an equal reputation as playboy, racing-car driver and scientific dilettante. It surprised me to learn that he was one of us, for he was also a favorite of President Ruiz. Naturally Fd never met him; he had to be very particular about his friends, and there were few people who cared to meet me unless they had to. I suspected that something was happening when I took my place in the football stadium on that memorable day. If you think I had no wish to be there, you are quite correct. But Colenel Pedro had given me a ticket and it was unhealthy to hurt his feelings by not using it There had been a slight delay in admitting the spectators; the police had done their best, but it takes time to search a hundred thousand people for concealed firearms. The visiting team had insisted on this, to the great indignation of the locals. The protests faded swiftly enough, however, as the artillery accumulated at the checkpoints. Then a sweating band played the two national anthems, the teams were presented to El Presidente and his lady, and the Cardinal blessed everybody. While we were waiting, I examined the program, a beautifully produced affair that had been given to me by the lieutenant. It was tabloid-sized, printed on art paper, and bound in metal foil that gleamed like silver. You could see your face in it, and I noticed a number of ladies using it to make lastminute repairs and adjustments. I also noticed that this "Special Victory Souvenir Issue" had been paid for by an impressive list of subscribers, headed by Don Hernando, who had himself, it seemed, presented fifty thousand free copies to our gallant fighting men. If this was a bid for popularity, it seemed a rather naive one. And surely President Ruiz wouldn't let half his army be bottled up in this stadium for the best part of an afternoon... These reflections were interrupted by the roar of the enormous crowd as play started. For the first ten minutes, it was a pretty open game and I don't think there were more than three fights. The Perivians just missed one goal; the ball was headed out so neatly that the frantic applause from the Panaguran supporters (who had a special police guard and a fortified section of the stadium all to themselves) went quite unbooed. I began to feel disappointed. Why, if you changed the shape of the ball, this might be a good-natured Idaho game. the Red Cross until nearly half-time, when three Perivians and two Panagurans (or it may have been the other way round) fused together in a magnificent melee from which only one survivor emerged under his own power. The casualties were carted off amid much pandemonium and there was a short break while replacements were brought up. This started the first major incident: the Perivians complained that the other side's wounded were shamming so that fresh reserves could be poured in. But the referee was adamant, the new men came on, andthe background noise dropped to just below the threshold of pain as the game resumed. The Panagurans promptly scored, and though none of my neighbors actually committed suicide, several seemed close to it. The transfusion of new blood had apparently pepped up the visitors, and things looked bad for the home team. Their opponents were passing the ball with such skill that the Perivian defenses were as porous as a sieve. At this rate, I told myself, the ref can afford to be honest; his side will win anyway. And to give him his due, I'd seen no sign of any obvious bias so far. I didn't have long to wait. A last-minute rally by the home team blocked a threatened attack on their goal, and a mighty kick by one of the defenders sent the ball rocketing toward the other end of the field. Before it had reached the apex of its flight, the piercing shriek of the referee's whistle brought the game to a halt. There was a brief consultation between ref and captains; the crowd was roaring its disapproval. "Whafs happening now?" I asked plaintively. "The ref says our man was offside." "But how can he be? He's on top of his own goal!" "Shush!" said the lieutenant, obenlightening my ignorance. I don't shush easily, but this time I let it go and tried to work things out for myself. It seemed that the ref had awarded the Panagurans a free kick at our goal, and I could imderstand the way everybody felt about it. The ball soared through the air in a beautiful parabola, nicked the post -- and cannoned in. A mighty roar of anguish rose from the crowd, then died abruptly to a silence that was even more impressive. It was as if a great animal had been wounded  -- and was biding the time for its revenge. Despite the heat pouring down from the not-far-from-vertical sun, I felt a sudden chill as if a cold wind had swept past me. Not for all the wealth of the Incas would I have changed places with the man sweating out there on the field in his bulletproof vest. W E were two down, but there was still hope -- a lot could happen before the end of the game. The Perivians were on their mettle now, playing with almost demonic intensity, like men who had accepted a challenge and were going to show that they could beat it. The new spirit paid off promptly. The home team scored one impeccable goal within a couple of minutes and the crowd went wild with joy. By this time, I was shouting like everyone else and telling that referee things I didn't know I could say in Spanish. It was I -- # now, and a hundred thousand people were pra # ong and cursing for the goal that would bring us level again. It came just after half-time. The ball had been passed to one of our forwards; he ran about fifty feet with it, evaded a couple of the defenders with some neat footwork, and kicked it cleanly into the goal. It had scarcely dropped down from the net when that whistle blew again. Now what? I wondered. He can't disallow that. But he did. The ball, it seemed, had been handled. I've got pretty good eyes and I never saw it. So I cannot honestly say that I blame anyone for what happened next. The police managed to keep the crowd off the field, though it was touch and go for a minute. The two teams drew apart, leaving the center of the pitch bare except for the stubbornly defiant figure of the referee. He was probably wondering how he could make his escape from the stadium, and was consoling himself with the thought that when this game was over, he could retire for good. The thin, high bugle call took everyone completely by surprise -- everyone, that is, except the fifty thousand well-trained men who had been waiting for it with mounting impatience. The whole arena became instantly silent, so silent that I could hear the noise of the traffic outside the stadium. A second time that bugle sounded -- and all the vast acreage of faces opposite me vanished in a blinding sea of fire. I cried out and covered my eyes; for one horrified moment, I thought of atomic bombs and braced myself uselessly for the blast. But there was no concussion -- only that flickering veil of flame that beat even through my closed eyelids for long seconds, then vanished as swiftly as it had come when the bugle blared out for the third and last time. Everything was just as it had been before, except for one minor item. Where the referee had been standing, there was a small, smoldering heap, from which a thin column of smoke curled up into the still air. What in heaven's name had happened? I turned to my companion, who was as shaken as I was. Madre de Dios," I heard him mutter. "I never knew it would do that He was staring, not at the small funeral down there on the field, but at the handsome souvenir program spread across his knees. And then, in a flash of incredulous comprehension, I understood. how much energy there is in sunlight. I've since looked it up, and the experts say that more than a horsepower hits every square yard of the Earth. Those fifty thousand well-trained fans with their tin-foil reflectors had intercepted most of the heat falling on one side of that enormous stadium and aimed it all in one direction. Even allowing for the programs that weren't tilted accurately, the late ref must have absorbed the heat of about a thousand electric fires. He couldn't have felt much; it was as if he had been dropped into a blast furnace... I doubt if even the ingenious Don Hernando realized exactly what would happen when he had talked his trusting friend, President Riaz, into lending him the necessary manpower. The welldrilled fans had been told that the ref would merely be dazzled out of action for the game. But I'm sure that no one had any regrets; they play football for keeps in Perivia. Likewise politics. While the game was continuing to its now predictable end, beneath the benign gaze of a new and understandably docile referee, my friends were hard at work. When our victorious team had marched off the field (the final score was # -- #), everything had been settled, There had been practically no shooting, and as the President emerged from the stadium, he was politely informed that a seat had been reserved for him on the morning flight to Mexico City. A S General Sierra remarked to me, when I boarded the same plane as his late chief, "We let the Army win the football match, and while it was busy, we won the country. So everybody's happy." Though I was too polite to voice any doubts, I could not help thinking that this was a rather shortPanagurans were very unhappy indeed, and sooner or later there would be a day of reckoning. I suspect that it's not far away. Last week a friend of mine, who is one of the world's top experts in our specialized field, indiscreetly blurted out one of his problems to me. "Joe," he said, "why the devil should anyone want me to build a guided missile that can fit inside a football?"      You can't beat my Unde Isadore -- he's dead but he's quick -- yet that is just what he was daring me to try and do! in bad shape, at first glance. But a second look showed the combustion chamber was crumpled to pieces and the jets were fused into the rocks, making a smooth depression. The ship had tilted into a horizontal position, nestling in the hollow its last blasts had made. Dust had sifted in around it, piling over the almost invisible seam of the port and filming the whole ship. We circled around the ship. It was all closed and sealed, blind as a bullet. "Okay," Rene said. "He's dead. My regrets." He coughed the word out as though it were something he had swallowed by accident. "But how do you know?" I asked. "He might be in there." "That port hasn't been opened for months. Maybe , years. I told you the converter wouldn't last more than a month in dock. He couldn't live locked up in there without air and water. Lrefs go." My guide had no further interest in the ship. He hadn't even looked to see what the planet was like. I stood shivering in my warm clothes. The ship seemed to radiate a chill. I looked around at the lumpy, unimaginative landscape of Alvarla. There was nothing in sight but a scraggly, dun heather sprouting here and there in the rocks and dust, and making hirsute patches on the low hills. I had some wild idea, I think, that Uncle Izzy might come sauntering nonchalantly over the hills, one hand in the pocket of a grilchdown jacket and the other holding a Martian cigarene. And he would have on his face that look which makes everything he says seem cynical and slightly clever even if it isn't. "The scenery is dull," he might say, ut it makes a nice backdrop for you." Something like that, leaving the impression he'd illuminated a side of your character for you to figure out later on. pened, of course. I just got colder standing there. "All right," Rene said. "We've had a moment of silence. Now let's go." "I -- there's something wrong," I told him. "Let's go in and see the -- the body." "We can't go in. That diip's sealed from the inside. You think they make those things so any painted alien can open the door and shoot in poisoned arrows? Believe me, he has to be inside if those outside ports are sealed. And he has to be dead because that port hasn't been opened in months. Look at the dust! It's a fourth of the way up the port" Rene lumbered over to it and blew away some of the lighter dust higher up. "See that?" he asked. "No." He groaned. "Well, you'll have to takp my word for it It's a raindrop. Almost four months old. A very light rain. You could see the faint, crusted outline of the drop if you knew how to look." "I believe you," I said. "I hired you because you know which side of the trees the moss grows on and things like that. Still..." Rene was beginning to stomp around impatiently. "Still what? "It just isn't like Uncle Isadore." I was trying to search out, myself, what it was that struck me as incongruous. "It's out of character." "It's out of character for anybody to die," Rene said. "But I've seen a lot of them dead." "I mean at least he would have died outside." "Oh, for Pete's sake! Why outside? You think he took rat poison?" N ot until five years later did I find out what happened to the rest of good old Uncle Algernon's fortune. I was stretched out on a gently undulating force-field in my interior patio, a huge, scarlet fanflower tree sifting in the sunshine. Leda, her pink hair flowing down to her knees, was just emerging from the pool of grilch milk. She bent to an Aphrodite of Cnidos position. "Perfect!" I said, and threw away my cigarene. "Depart!" I told the robot, who came rolling in. "But, master, it's the Cha'n of Betelgeuse, Lord of the Seven Planets and the Four Hundred Moons." "Get dressed, Leda," I said regretfully. "We have company." I'd never met him, but I knew he was one of Uncle Isadore's best friends and I felt obliged to see him. The Cha'n had several meals and four cigarenes, maintaining a courteous silence all the while. Then he loosened his belt, reached into his furry pouch and handed me a piece of copper scroll. dollars. "You won," he told me. "Or lost, as the case may be." I just looked at him. "I was holding it in trust for you," the Cha'n explained, "in accordance with your Uncle Isadore's last wishes." I blew a perfect smoke ring, let it float before my face for a perfect moment, and then asked, "And suppose I had lost? Or won, as the case may be?" "I was to save it to try on your son, the gods permitting you have one." "If necessary," I told him, "I'll try it on him myself, O Cha'n of the Seven Planets and the Four Hundred Moons." "Call me Charlie," he said. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. But that dream of the African estate kept irritating the back of my mind. And the large, free sky of Alvarla was soothing to the eye, when compared to the little squares of blue I noted occasionally when riding the slidewalks of Brooklyn. What did I want out of life, anyway? Damn Uncle Isadore. I'd never test #:# on job adjustment again. I was still thinking when evening swept in fast,as it does in dry climates, and the birds began to wake up and climb out of the crater, presumably to forage for food. 'Wait!" I cried. "Isadore!" and spread it to attract him. It attracted all of them. I pulled out "The Dodo." " "Tell me what thy lordly name is  On the Night's Plutonian shore.' " "Isadore," he volunteered, swallowing fast while I climbed aboard him. "Take me back." ; Then I realized I had made a mistake with the food. "Gro!" I cried. "Spaceship! More food!" He just stood there, his beak poking around the groimd for crumbs. But I had to get that skin spray washed off before twenty-four hours were up. "Nepenthe!" I shouted desperately. The dodo was off like a flash and didn't stop till we were back at the ship. "You were gone quite a while," Rene said nonchalantly. "Find an#ing?" "Enough to pay you off," I said. "And we'll make it five thousand because I found it. Stow this somewhere. It's perfume." He did. "Find anything else?" "Nothing that would interest you. ni be ready to blast off as soon as I've had a shower." Rene shrugged. The perfume, when we returned to Earth, proved to be worth what he'd said it would be. A lot of people wanted to know where I'd gotten it. "The crops on Odoria," they said, "are entirely sewed up by Odoria, Inc." "They certainly are," I always replied agreeably. It took all I cleared from the perfume to put a down payment on a ship and hire an expert on fertilizing perfume flowers. But this time I wanted to run the show. Mr, Picks shook his head sadly when I told him to replace me permanently. "You have a great future ahead of you in studs and neck clasps," he said. "Why not take a little time and reconsider your decision? Or-" "Nevermore," I answered. dream Fd had since the one about succeeding Mr. Picks. Only very different. I'd made a fortxme cultivating perfume trees. My dream was full of perfume. Some of it came from the exotic plants of my African estate. Some of it was from a longlegged, pink-haired girl, the kind It was the sort of dream, I mused, unable to keep it in mood any longer, as large-minded men have. Men like -- Uncle Isadore! I sat up suddenly. Uncle Isadore -- large-minded? Why hadn't he had the avuncular decency to leave me his fortune the usual way? Why? B ecause then he wouldn't be able to play penny-ante psychology and get me dreaming about wild schemes with perfume trees and African estates. That's why. Or maybe there wasn't any fortune! Suddenly I understood why people smoke. It gives them something to do when they feel helpless. If there wasn't any fortune, then I was hopelessly tied to the perfume trees. If Uncle Izzy had lost his last cent, it would be very like him to borrow enough from friends to finance a perfume tree scheme. And if he didn't make it to the planet he had in mind -- why, he'd make the planet he'd crashed on do. Anyone else would have shot the birds for fresh meat. Anyone else would have seen immediately that Alvarla was the last planet in the Galaxy where perfume trees would grow. Anyone else would have seen immediately that I was one of the minor, comfortable people in the world who likes the happy regularities of a little job and an assured, if limited, future. Anyone else would have seen I had the sort of personality that could not be changed. But Uncle Izzy wasn't anyone else. Why did I keep smelling the perfume from my dream? I followed my nose out of the crater and found the snow melting around a water tank about four feet long and two feet in diameter  part of the ruined fuel system from Uncle Izzys ship. I dislodged it from the ice beneath and shook it. The perfume was so strong, as it unfroze, that it made me dizzy. And all that smell was coming from a pinhole. There seemed to be half a gallon in it. Enough to pay off Mother's bonds and whatever I owed Rene, with a handsome sum left over for me. I could go home and forget about perfume trees and Alvarla and Uncle Isadore. was almost dawn and the last dodo had tucked his head into his feathers. Daylight showed me four little trees, nothing like the usual scraggy vegetation of Alvarla. They must be perfume trees, I thought. But they were too young to have blossoms or pods. I didn't go too near them, remembering what Rene had said. And, remembering that, I began to figure out how they grew here. No, a crater. Several feet deeper than my height, with sloping sides. The birds apparently kept it warm with their body heat, plus the heat the rocky sides would store. Since it was a crater, the winds wouldn't reach it. The crater made a basin to catch the snow which I could see beginning to melt at the edges and ooze down the slope. The birds provided more than ample fertilizer and Uncle Izzy had apparently trained at least one of them to cultivate the soil under the trees. I climbed out of the crater to see that I was indeed in the regions of snow. To the north were huge drifts, and far off loomed towering glaciers. To the south, the hills tapered off from white to spotted brown. That was the reason for Uncle Izzy's crazy setup. Rene and I would never have come across this crater in an ordinary search. Of course, the setup needn't have been quite so crazy. That was the personal equation of which Uncle Izzy was so fond. The trees would, I assumed, poke their heads up over the crater as they grew, reaching toward the cold, and finally getting the frostbite to fill their pods properly. At two thousand dollars an ounce. I had neglected to ask Rene how many pods a tree could be expected to produce or how big the pods were. But, say, half an ounce in each pod and a conservative fifty pods on each tree. A hundred thousand dollars. I slid back into the crater, sat leaning against a somnolent dodo and ate a lunch package with a cupful of melted snow. All sorts of thoughts were jostling my brain. But I was bone-weary. I hadn't slept since we hit Alvarla and the ride last night had been a tremendous strain, because I wasn't in the habit of getting any exercise at all. Therefore, I fell asleep in midthought. It was the noon sun that woke me. I wasn't just warm. I was hot And I was very reluctant to let go of my dream; I kept grabbing at the tag ends of it with both hands. It was the most exciting  Picks, was reassuringly assured. Then, out of nowhere, into the picture galloped a yellow-skinned monster astride a huge, white bird. It turned out to be me and I tumbled off the bird, crying, "Mr. Picks! I don't know what came over me!" t But I was answered only by a multitude of squawks, rustles and scratchings. The bird was home. forms. The darkness was beginning to give a little. I was warm, itchy and uncomfortable under whatever it was that Rene had sprayed on me. Warm? Perfume trees? All I could smell were bird roosts. I stood up, finding my limbs weak, trembling and painful. First, I glanced at my watch. Five hours terran time since we left the ship. At fifty miles per hour, we'd have gone two hundred and fifty miles. If we'd gone due north, as the bird started out, we must be in the snow zone. And I was warm! I switched my flash around. All I could see were birds. There seemed to be hundreds of them. I couldn't tell which one was my bearer. "Where is the perfume?" I bawled. All I got was squawks. Some of the birds were, in fact, standing on one foot and tucking their heads away. It was growing lighter. The birds were going to bed. Feverishly, I pulled out Uncle Izzy's old volume of poetry. Brushing from my mind a vision of Mr. Picks in a state of shock and another picture of Uncle Isadore snickering triumphantly, I stood on that desert land enchanted -- on that home by horror haunted, and solemnly read "The Dodo" to a colony of wingless birds. My dodo identified himself at the proper place, but I kept on, waiting for something to show me my inheritance. "Then methought the air grew denser," I read. "Perfume from an unseen censor!" a bird croaked from the back row. "Where?" I cried, pushing my way through the birds crowding around me in various stages of roost and curiosity. "Then," I repeated, "the air grew denser." "Perfume," the bird now in front of me said, "from an imseen censor." He began to scratch at the groxmd assiduously under one of four dim shapes about the level of my eyes. Then he yawned gapingly, gave up and went to sleep. I sat down to wait, because it "Don't be stupid," Rene said. "He can't carry both of us and you'd be a fool either to go alone or stay here alone." "As a tribute to my deceased uncle, I'm going to be a fool." I stuck my flashlight into one of my many pockets and climbed onto the huge bird's back. The down beneath his outer feathers was as soft and strong as heavy fur. I dug in with my hands and feet, my head braced against the thickened part of his neck. He started off with a lurch that brought my stomach out of hiding. I kept my eyes squeezed closed. I couldn't have seen anything, anyway. Not even the impossible creature that was rushing through the darkness carrying me, for all I knew, straight to damnation. The night rushed past my ears in a wild keening and it crossed my mind to wonder what Mr. Picks, my supervisor, would say if he saw me now. I had a sudden vision of Mr. Picks, even more neatly dressed than I always was, with middlecost neck clasp and stud discreetly shining from a plain, square-edged bag shirt and dun suit. I pictured him opening a refined little box and holding it two feet under the customer's eyes with a gesture of faint, unconscious supplication. A comfortable, warm, happy picture in which my place, one counter behind Mr. they could get plenty of frost" "That's all they'd get. Where's the warm, moist climate to germinate in? Where's the parasitical Rhns to cultivate their soil? The Rhns couldn't exist without their Gleees and the Gleees can't exist without -- never mind. The only place perfume trees can grow is on Odoria and that's why the perfume is worth two thousand dollars an ounce." "I have never heard of anything," I informed him, "that spelled TTncle Isadore' so exactly. He always said, 'If it can't be done, I can do it' Well, there's only one way to find out. Surely there's something on the ship I can wear." "You mean you're going out into that frozen inkpot after that idiotic bird?" "That's exactly what I mean." "For Pete's sake! You're as brainless as the bird is!" But I think, for all his attitude, he was curious, too. something. "Close your eyes and mouth. If you don't wash this off with soap and water in twentyfour hours, you'll die. But it sure keeps in the body heat." I stuck the book in my pocket for good luck, and Rene handed me a gun, some lunch packages, an antibiotic kit and a water purification kit. "All right," I said, pocketing them, "but it can't be far. Uncle Izzy wouldn't have gone more than a day's journey." "Then why haven't we smelled the perfume? And why would he have gone through all this rigmarole when he must have known you'd search that far?" I didn't know why. I pushed the door open. The bird hopped out and I realized how easy it would be to lose him from the small, round glow of my fiash. He looked curiously at me, as though expecting something further. I looked curiously at him, wondering where he would lead to. Then he was off. There was no question of following him. That big, awkward bird ran so fast that in a few minutes we could no lohger hear the beat of his huge claws on the rocks, even in the perfectly still, dry air. "How fast do you figure he's going?" I asked Rene. "How the hell would I know?" "Roughly." "Roughly? Maybe fifty miles an hour." "But that's incredible!" "The big point-tails on Aldebaran kappa can do eighty with a native on their backs." "Ah!" I said. "So thafs it! Maybe tomorrow night..." But we could hear the drumming of the returning dodo. pages until I found "The Dodo " Maybe there'd be something in that "Listen to this, Rene," I said, "and see if you catch anything I might have missed." Rene looked discomfited, but he didn't stop up his ears. When I came to the part, " 'Tell me what thy lordly name is On the Night's Plutonian shore... the dodo looked up and said, "Isadora." Clearly, this was it, although I couldn't recall that any of the questions in the poem were to the point. I got to, " 'On the morrow he will leave me As my hopes have flown before.' Then the bird said..." "Ask me more," said the dodo without missing a beat. I read on, getting excited. "'Quaff, oh, quaff this kind nepenthe, And forget this lost Lenore.'  Quoth the Dodo..." "Give me more," he supplied, pointing his beak at the alcohol tap. I gave him another cup and continued, sure that he must be going to say something relevant to Uncle Izzy's fortune. "'Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- Tell me, tell me, I implore!' Quoth the Dodo..." "Probably not," the dodo said, breaking the Grilch Hop rh#m at last, "but there are perfume trees on Alvarla." "Perfume trees!" Rene shouted. "That bird's lying. It's impossible." "Shut up!" I yelled at him. "The poem's not over."-of having to say such inhospitable words to a dodo who had been, after all, cooperating with me. "'Take thy beak from out my heart, And take thy form from off my door!' Quoth the Dodo..." "I was just leaving," the bird said, and struggled to his feet and went and stood by the door expectantly. I got up. "Wait!" I commanded the bird, who couldn't do much . else because the door was closed. "Do you know what perfume trees are, Rene?" "Yeah, I know what they are, and they don't grow on this planet. You can take my word for it. They need a warm, moist soil to germinate in. They need to have their soil cultivated every day for a year. They die fast on contact with any sort of industrial fumes. They die in captivity, like some wild animals. They die if you sweat on them. They die if you breathe on them. They need to start off warm and get colder every month until they form their flowers. Then they need a frost for the pods to fill with the perfume, along with the seeds." "There aren't any industrial fumes here," I pointed out, "and I addressed the bird. 'Sir, I began, and caught myself, "or perhaps madam, can you say anything else?" "Nepenthe," the bird said firmly. I shrugged and drew a cup. The dodo lifted the cup and drained it in one smooth gesture. This, as it turned out, was the only thing it seemed to do smoothly. It began a wild attempt to scratch its head with one claw and remain upright. Then, abandoning all dignity, it rolled to its side and scratched furiously to satisfaction. After that, it began what looked like a hopeless attempt to right its awkward body, legs struggling in the air and back bumping around the ship. I couldn't help remembering Uncle Izzy after a meal, slim and suave, lighting up a tapered, perfectly packed cigarene and blowing out one round, shapely smoke ring that hovered before his light, sardonic grin like a comment on his thoughts. An uncomfortable comparison. I shook myself to life. I righted the bird, no small problem, for he weighed almost two hundred pounds. "Well," Rene finally said, coming out of his mood, "now that you have this bird, what are you going to do with it?" "I had thought it might lead us to Uncle Izzy's fortime," I explained. bird obviously had no such intention. It was getting ready to take a nap. "A night bird," I told it reprovingly, "shouldn't take a nap in the middle of the night." "All you're proving is that he has no self-respect," Rene pointed out. "Why don't you look to see if he's got a note tagged to his leg or something?" I did. He didn't. "I think this whole thing is crazy," Rene said, "but since he's a talking bird, you might ask him a few questions. Maybe he's trained to say something else." "Where is Uncle Izzs fortune?" I asked, when I had tugged at the dodo's feathers until he opened one eye. He closed it. "Do you have a message for me?" He drew away from me irritably and closed the eye again, ruffling down into his feathers. "He may be keyed to respond to certain phrases. Try your uncle's name -- he obviously knows that," Rene suggested coldly, wanting no part of this but unable to hold down the suggestion. "My name," I screamed at the somnolent dodo, "is Isadore Summers." He reared back and pecked the hell out of me. I picked the book up off the floor and flipped through the bent soon as we had eaten and fed the converter. I hydrated a package of crackers so that they were fullsized but not soggy, broke them into pieces and tossed them out. I admit I felt a little embarrassed. I sat there in the chill quiet, on this ugly, alien world, reading "The Dodo" by the light of a miniature flash, so as not to disturb Rene. Pretty soon I began to feel creepy. "The Dodo" is a ghastly poem. There's an insidious morbidity about it. It had sounded merely funny the first time I read it. Now, the more I read it, the more I began to hear strange, impossible creakings and sighs, which might or might not be due to temperature changes. The night outside was a deep, cold cup of darkness where no human thing moved. There was a knock at the door. I dropped the book and flashlight. Rene was up like a cat He didn't turn on the light. "Who's there?" he shouted. There was a scratching noise at the door. Then a voice croaked, "My name is Isadore Summers." for the door. "Wait, you fool!" Rene cried. He picked up the flash and got his gun. "Stand behind me and keep your hands off your gun. I know when to shoot and when not to shoot. You don't." "If it's Uncle Isadore..." "I tell you you've got to leave it up to me, if you want to get off this planet alive. Now stand back and keep your mouth shut, no matter what happens." He kicked the door open and stood back and to one side of it "Come in with your arms up!" There was a sort of rustling sound and in walked a huge, white, wingless bird. "My name," the dodo repeated, somewhat plaintively this time, with a glance toward the limch compartment, "is Isadore Summers." I couldn't help it. I rolled all over the ship with laughter. Rene looked a little shamefaced, tossed his gun onto the rack and punched the lighting on. Obviously the dodo recognized our lunch compartment from familiarity with Uncle Izzs ship. Then he looked at the alcohol tap that led from the fuel conversion. "Nepenthe?" he begged. I hesitated. "Isn't there something," I asked Rene, "about corrupting the natives of a primitive planet?" But Rene was sitting on his bunk, his jaw slack. "This is the first time I've ever been made a fool of by an alcoholic bird." "If it's just a bird, of course. Like a parrot..." "Some people crack on alien planets," he said. "I have a padded room in my ship. You'd be surprised how often I have to use it." I told him about the poem I found in Uncle Izzy's book. "We look for a white bird," I said. "Or perfume." "You're nuts," he pointed out with some justice, because he hadn't known Uncle Isadore. "How do you know these changes weren't made by somebody else a long time ago? Maybe this ancient printer printed it wrong and had to change it afterward." "I don't think they were that primitive back then." But I didn't know what "back then" meant or how primitive ancient printing was. All I knew for sure was that, as the poem stood, it sounded as if somebody had loused up a perfect Grilch Hop rhyme. And Uncle Izzy knew I was a Grilch Hop expert in Middle School and this was the only real Grilch Hop rhythm in the book. What's more. Uncle Izzy could depend on me to go over that book in painstaking detail because a studs and neck clasp man has to be good on details. # A LL right," I said. "You look your way and I'll look my way." "We're not looking any more any way today," Rene said, emerging from Uncle Isadore's ship loaded down with removings. "It'll be night and below freezing in half an hour." "What do you think," I asked, "a dodo would like to eat?" "A what? "The birds. I want to put something out to attract them. Crackers or something?" "I think you're crazy. If you have any idea of sitting outside to wait for them, you'll freeze to death. Not only that, there's no moon. You wouldn't be able to see your hand in front of your face." "How do the birds see?" "Maybe they aren't night birds. Maybe they migrated somewhere else." "And if I use a light, it might scare them away," I mused. "Well, maybe I'm not supposed to wait outside, anyway." Rene went in and switched on the heat and lights. "Leave the outside port open," I said. "Why?" "So the birds can knock." "Can what? "Well, it's possible," I said defensively. "It won't hurt anything to leave it open." "All right," he consented, curving his mouth around unpleasantly, "just to show you what a jackass you are." Rene had the heat turned low, for sleeping, and the lights off, as and "raven" with "Dodo'# Furthermore, it had not struck me the first time I read the poem quickly that there was anything odd about a bird being named "Isadore."' People who keep pet grilches frequently name them after famous Reed players and Isadore is a common name. On the other hand, it was my Uncle's name. And the word "Dodo" didn't rhyme as it should. I got out a magnifying glass to examine the ancient print. Sure enough, it had been tampered with. The print looked so odd to me, anyway, I hadn't noticed the part that had been changed. But it was obvious under the glass that "Dodo" had been substituted for a word of almost equal length. The same with "Isadore." I went over the whole poem now, carefully, to see which words had been changed. There weren't many. "White" in a couple of places. "Dodo" and "Isadore" wherever they occurred. An "o" in the line "Perfume from an unseen censor." "S" in the line " Wretch,' I cried, 'Isadore hath sent thee..."'  what I had read. It made no sense at all. Was I to look for a white bird, "grim, ungainly, ghastly"? And what if I found him? Why was he like a raven? What was this perfume from an unseen censor? I could picture the ghost of Uncle Isadore, knowing his financial imagination, as the "unseen censor" because he always criticized me. Was I to look for perfume? Did he have a fortune in perfume stowed somewhere? It seemed to me it would take an awful lot of even the most expensive perfume to comprise a fortune. I decided to start with the bird. I went outside Rene's ship and looked around. No birds. "Rene!" I called. He was still looking through Uncle Izzy's ship. "Have you seen an ungainly white bird around?" "What!" he snapped, sticking an indignant face out of the door. "I guess you haven't. Can your woodsy lore tell if there are birds on this planet?" "Obviously," Rene said. "I don't know why you can't find your own spoor. I noticed the droppings immediately." "Where are the birds?" "How the hell would I know?" But he couldn't contain his special knowledge. "They're probably night birds," he said. "Oh, yes." It checked. "Wandering from the Night's Plutonian shore." He looked at me suspiciously. "You ever had a nervous breakdown?" "I have not, I test #:# on job adjustment and #:# on life adjustment." bending over. And the pages keep flipping and make you lose your place. Still, I read it all the way through. It wasn't too bad. Not like Edgar Guest, of course, who was the only ancient author I liked in General Studies. But I found there was a sort of Grilch Hop beat to it that reminded me of the Footlooses I ud to go to in Middle School. I grinned. It was funny to think of now. I found no clues in the book. The only thing to do was read it again, more carefully. poem with a real Grilch Hop beat. I thought suddenly of Sally, my regular partner at the Footlooses. She was very blonde and she affected a green crestwave in her hair, pulled over her forehead with a diamond clip. She was a beauty, all right. But she was a little silly. And she had that tendency to overdress. No, I sighed, she wouldn't have done for a studs and neck clasp man. But I couldn't help wondering where she was now and what she was like now. Did she remember me, and did she think about me when she heard that song we used to dance to, because it was about a girl named Sally? Once I knew a girl named Sally Met her at a Footloose rally I began humming the Grilch Hop tune to the ancient poem in Uncle Algy's book. It was fantastic how closely it fitted, though, of course, the words in the poem were plain silly. But imagine finding a poem with a perfect Grilch Hop beat before anybody even knew what a grilch was! Before Venus was even discovered. Jump on both feet. Hop three times on the left foot. Jump. Hop three times on the right foot. The rhythm was correct, right down to the breakaway and four-step at the end of each run. It was while I was singing this poem to a Grilch Hop tune that I noticed the clue. The poem was named "The Dodo." And the rhyming was very smooth until I came to the lines: "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, Thou," I said, 'art like a Raven Ghastly, grim, and ancient Dodo, Wandering from the Nightly shore; Tell me what thy lordly name is On the Nighfs Plutonian shore" Quoth the Dodo, Tsadore" Now the author had gone to a lot of trouble in the previous verse not to break the Grilch Hop rhyme scheme. He made 'thereat is" rhyme with "lattice" and "that is." Why did he follow "shaven" In that case, we look for a key. Or he might have a block of Eretrevium buried somewhere. Your guess is as good as mine.' "If he's dug up the ground," Rene said, "I'll recognize the spot But that'll mean walking over every inch of ground for a day's journey around. Or more, if he did any overnight traveling." "Not Uncle Izzy," I said. "He wouldn't be at all likely to spend a freezing night out on Alvarla, even for a good joke." "Radar equipment's in perfect shape," Rene said, shifting his activities to another segment of the ship's equipment. "I wonder why he didn't leave it on so we could locate him easier. Not that we had any trouble. Or why he didn't continue broadcasting for help until he died... Mind if I take some of the equipment?" "You haven't been exactly generous with me." "I intend to subtract its value from the cost of supplies and milage on my ship. I never said I was generous, but, by God, I'm honest." of lunch packages, dumped them on the floor. "All unopened," he was saying disgustedly. Then he picked up a heavy, square object with sharp corners, open on three sides. "What the hell is this?" "A book," I informed him. Rene opened it. "Hey! A real, antique book! Must be worth at least a thousand! Look at the size of that print! You can read it with the naked eye, like an instrument panel! Well, here's a little piece of your fortune." He tossed it to me and went on examining the lunch packages. He didn't trust me to help him because I wouldn't be able to tell if they'd been opened and something inserted. I hung the book by the covers and let the pages flip open. Nothing fell out I sighed. I'd have to go through the whole damn thing. "I'm going back to your ship and read in comfort," I told Rene. "You're no help here anyway," . he said, putting the lunch packages in a large plastic bag he'd found somewhere. "No use letting these go to waste." I didn't tell him I had the clue to Uncle Isadore's fortune in my hand. He didn't know Uncle Isadore, so he wouldn't have believed me. Nothing is more uncomfortable than reading an antique book. There is no way to lie back and flash it on a screen or run the tape over your reading glasses while you lie prone and relax. You have to hold it. If you try to hold it lying down, your arms get tired. If you put it down on a table to read, your neck gets tired from He shrugged and shouldered the inside door open. He came out, his face a study in perplexity. "Not here!" he said. "This is the first time IVe been wrong in fifteen years!" "That's because ifs the first time you've been up against Uncle Izzy. He must have closed the port behind him the same way I opened it." I climbed through the door, feeling immensely relieved. I realized then what had really been worrying me. If the gods had abandoned Isadore at the last, what did they have in mind for the rest of us mere mortals? I kicked at my mind irritably, knowing these were young thoughts. But then I am young, I explained to myself. T he inside of the ship was neat and empty. Stuck on the instrument panel with a vaccup was a note, in Uncle Izzy's flowery script My hoy, I have died of boredom, Do not look for the remains, I have hidden my body to avoid the banality of a decent burial, I bequeath you my entire fortune. Find it, Rene groaned. "I suppose now you want to look for the body." "No. If he says it's hidden, it's hidden. But it would be a little silly to go off without finding his fortune, wouldn't it?" "Looking for buried treasure wasn't in the contract," Rene pointed out "You'll have to make it worth my while." "Another five thousand," I said. "Make it ten. Payable if I find it" "Suppose I find it?" "Don't be ridiculous. You'd be a fool to take two steps on this planet without me." He was right, of course. And if we left, I wouldn't get anything. I thought of Mother living by the bells at a Comfort Park. "All right," I said. "What form was his fortune in?" Rene asked. "Money? Bonds? Polarian droplets? It would help to know what I'm looking for." "I have no idea," I confessed. "Ordinarily it would take a computer to figure out Uncle Isadore's financial affairs. But he'd have been perfectly capable of selling out everything and taking his entire fortune along with him for some new project" Rene had skillfully imscrewed the instrument panel and he lifted it off and began poking inside and removing mysterious bits of machinery. "That makes it harder. You don't know whether he sold out or not?" "I have no idea. He might have all his money piled in the locker of the Whist Club of Sirius beta. advertised -- that keeps them a luxury item, you know. "So your Uncle Isadore pasted one of them on the port button." "He didn't have to paste. All he had to do was stick it on. All I had to do was line up the mate to it and the attractive force pushed the button." That's very neat," Rene said. "But why the hell didn't he just leave the port open? He'd hardly do this sort of thing with his dying gasp." "I'm not sure," I admitted. "As a matter of fact, I wonder why he radared me if he really wanted to be rescued. He had plenty of friends who could rescue him more reliably." been on Uncle Isadore's mind. Although Uncle Izzy had had three -- or was it four? -- wives, he'd very carefully had no children. And it had occurred to him at an advanced age to take an interest in me. He'd sent me through two years of general studies and reluctantly let me specialize in studs and neck clasps. "You were a grilch hop expert in Middle School," he had told me. "How come you're getting so stuffy?" "Because I can't be an adolescent all my life. Uncle Isadore," I had replied stiffly. "I would like to get into some solid line of work and be a good citizen." "Phooey!" he'd said. But he had let me do what I'd wanted. It was because of this that I had felt duty bound to answer his call for help. I'd not felt duty bound to take all the opportunities he'd tried to force on me when I got out of school. Mining the semi-solid seas of Alphard kappa. Fur trading on Procyon beta. And a hundred others, all obviously doomed to failure imless there was one lucky chance. "But I'm happy here with my little room and my little job," I kept telling Uncle Isadore. "You only think you're happy because you don't know any better," he kept telling me. Only, now that he was dead, he seemed to have me where he wanted me. Now that nothing could matter to him any longer. "Maybe he was getting senile," Rene suggested. "Uncle Izzy always said he'd rather die than -- he did die," I replied, suddenly recalling myself to the present and the open outside port of the ship. I realized how reluctant I was to go in. It was one thing to admit Uncle Izzy was dead -- I cherished no great affection for him -- but it was something else to have to face his dead body. "Would you mind going in first?" I asked Rene. Now I don't like adventure. I don't like strange planets. All Fve ever asked of life was my little four-by-six cubby in the Brooklyn Bloc and my job. A job I know inside out. It's a comfortable, happy, harmless way to live and I test #:# on job adjustment All the same, it was a thrill to discover a clue that Rene would have thrown away if he'd been the one looking. I tossed it casually in the air and showed it to Rene. "Know what that is?" I asked. "Slug for a halfdec slot machine?" "Nope. Know what I can do with it?" He didn't say. "I'm going to open Uncle Izzy's ship from the inside." R ene lighted a fresh cigarette from the old one and let the smoke out of his nose. It gave rather the impression of a bull resting between picadors. "Can you show me, on the outside, approximately where the button is that you push on the inside to unseal the ship?" I inquired casually. "I can show you exactly." He pointed to a spot next to the entrance port I wet my finger and made a mark in the dust so I could get it just right Then I found a sharp stone and cut aroimd the edges of the lead. As I slipped off the back half of the coinlike affair, I clapped it over the finger mark. The entrance ixwrt swung open. If I'd had a feather, I would have taken great pleasure in knocking Rene over with it he breathed, "to know how you did that" "Oh, a lot less than that," I said airily. "Well? Explain!" "Uncle Isadore had it set up," I told him, using the same patiently impatient tone he used on me. "He knew I'd recognize that lead coin. There was a cuff link in it" "A cuff link!" "A studs and neck clasp man has to know about cuff links, too. This happens to be an expensive cuff link, but worth only about a lars. They're held together by a jazzed-up electromagnetic force rather than by a clasp. This force is so strong it would take a derrick to pull them apart. The idea is to keep you from losing one. If you drop it to the floor, you just wave the mate around a little and it pops up through the air." "How do you get them apart?" "Just slip them sideways, like a magnet. You can sheathe them in lead, like the one I found, to cut down the attraction. This is how they're packaged. You don't know about them because they're not staying a week," I told Rene as authoritatively as I could manage. "You haven't actually showed me Uncle Izzy's -- er -- corpus delicti, so I have you on a legal technicality." I didn't know whether or not this was true, but it sounded good. "All right, we'll stay." Rene spat the sentence out onto the ground. "But if you think I'm going to do any more looking, take another guess." He tramped back into his own ship, leaving the outside port and the pressure chamber open. If only Uncle Izzy had done that! I went over his ship inch by inch, feeling with my hands, to be sure there was no extra door that might be opened. Rene would have laughed, but I was beginning to build up antibodies against Rene's laughter. I got the bottom part of the ship dusted off and found nothing. I pushed open the door of Rene's ship and asked him for a ladder. "You'll have to pay for it," he warned. "Once it's open, I can't carry it in my ship and I'll have to get another." "Okay, okay! I'll pay for it." H e handed me a synthetic affair that looked like a meshed rope, wound tight, about the size of a Venusian cigar. "This is a ladder?" I asked incredulously, but he had shut the door in my face. I slipped the cellophane off and unrolled it. It seemed to unroll endlessly. When it was ten feet long and four feet wide, I stopped unrolling. Sure enough, it hardened into a ladder in about ten minutes. It was so strong I couldn't begin to bend it over my knee. I set it against the side of the ship and began to investigate the view ports. The first two were sealed tight as a drum. The third slipped off in my hands and clattered over the side of the ship onto the rocks. I was almost afraid to look through the "glass" beneath. I needn't have been. I could see absolutely nothing. It was spaceblack inside. I went back to Rene's ship for a flashlight. He was unimpressed by my discovery. "Even if you could break the glass, which you can't," he said, "you still couldn't get through that little porthole. Here's the flash. You won't be able to see anything." He came with me this time. Not because he was interested, but because he wanted another cigarette and never smoked in the ship. He was right. I couldn't see a darned thing in the ship with the flashlight. But I foimd something -- a little lead object that looked like a coin. It had rolled into a comer of the port. I went around to the other side of the spaceship, mostly to get away from Rene for a moment. Im only a studs and neck clasp man and Rene had twenty years experience on alien planets. So he was right, of course, about the evidence. There was no getting around it. Still... I circled back around to where Rene was smoking his first cigarette since we left Earth. His face was a mask of sunbaked wrinkles pointing down to the cigarette smack in the middle of his mouth. "Uncle Izzy wouldn't die like an ordinary mortal," I said. "He'd have a brass band. Or we'd find his body lying in a bed of roses with a big lily in his' hand. Or he might even disappear into thin air. But not fus." I waved a hand toward the dead ship. "Look," Rene said. "My job was to find your Uncle Isadore. I've found him. We can't get inside that ship with anything short of a matter reducer, which I don'f happen to have along since they weigh several tons. You'll have to take my word for it that his body's in there. Now let's go home." He managed to talk without moving the cigarette at all. # OU said a week," I reminded Rene. "I said if I didn't find him in a week, then he wasn't there. I've found him. I'm sorry if he was your favorite imcle or something." "As a matter of fact, I never liked him. He was frivolous. He never had a job. He thought life was a big game." "Then how come he got so rich?" "He always won." "Not this time, brother! But if he's not your favorite uncle, why all this concern? You can take my word for it he's dead and you've done your duty." "Theye are two things that bother me. One is curiosity. I just don't believe Uncle Izzy died in an ordinary fashion locked up in a spaceship. You don't know him, so you wouldn't understand. The other thing I'm concerned about is -- well, his will." Rene barked a couple of times. I had learned this indicated laughter. "I figured what you were really after was his money." Under my yellow over skin, I could feel myself coloring. That wasn't at all the point. I'd mortgaged Mother's bonds to finance this trip, confident that Uncle Izzy would make it good when we found him. If I couldn't get Mother's bonds out of hock, she'd have to live out her life in a Comfort Park. I shuddered at the thought. Uncle Isadore must have known that when he radared for help. He must have provided some way... "You said a week and we're # Star Shelf Vogt, Simon  Schuster, N, Y,,  # an Vogt, master of the tortuous  plot, goes through torture here to prove it. Or, as one of his present characters mutters confusedly, "Wheels within wheels within wheels." More interior wheels might have been mentioned without overstating the case. tator over most of Earth known as the Great Judge. He is alienated from his military leader. Group Master David Marin, by the latter's defense of a seditious scientist who advocated changes in the weird group-free-enterpwrise social setup. Trask, the scientist, has been sentenced to death, but custom permits him complete freedom for one week prior to execution. Having secretly perfected a technique for tranposing personalities from one body to another, he springs it on Marin the day after being sentenced. Marin awakens to find himself in the other's body. From there mosphere soupens. To lead the scheduled invasion of a minor country, he has to disguise his Trask body as himself, a nice touch. Then he has to find Trask with his own body and retransfer or be executed within the week. Meanwhile, an intelligent super-computer, the Brain, purportedly destroyed during the war, is secretly engaged in throwing its weight around. What follows is less clear -- I wouldn't attempt to summarize it. Van Vogt, though, still is high-, ly imaginative and his patented jig-saw puzzles are good fun, even though pieces persistently remain missing. University of Michigan, #  Solomon, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard: consider her ways and be wise," or Mark Twain, "Ants are the dumbest of all animals"? There's something to be said on both sides. It's a fact that no test of ants has ever determined true reasoning power of understanding of cause and effect. However, ants possess memory and can, to a limited extent, put that memory to use. Goetsch explodes certain myths, notably the cozy notion that ants domesticate aphids and other insects. They do not carry their cows to and from pasture but exploit them at their grazing grounds and carry in dying "cattle" for meat. As reluctant host to a bustling colony of marauders, I am glad to have proof that ants are our competitor and possible successor among social creatures. I thought it was just me they were against ed by Anthony Boucher. Doubleday and Co,, Inc,, N, Y,, # gy from FSF is more restrained than hitherto in the use of slapstick, so the more sober products show up to better advantage. Possibly the best of the book is Chad Oliver's "Between the Thunder and the Sun." A civilization is dying on a backward world because of ecological imbalance. Altruistic individuals must give unwanted and thankless help in defiance of a UN decree forbidding contact for any reason with lowerscale civilizations. Other good efforts are contributed by Ward Moore, Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson. Mildred Clingerman, particularly, offers a gem of a horror chiller. Press, N, Y,, # Daniel Fry and Truman Bethurum. "We" are those who haven't and are looking to "Them" for proof. Gibbons is an Englishman who, himself convinced, is putting their experiences into print. Fry, a mechanical engineer, once worker for Aerojet General at White Sands. The first half of the book chronicles his alleged meetings with an ET. The level of interest and credibility is far higher than in the latter half, dealing with Bethurum's meetings with a tiny female skipper of a space scow. Unfortunately, Gibbons' sole evidence of verity is the ridicule to which Fry and Bethurum have subjected themselves in defense of their stories. A pretty frail support from which to hang a strong belief, it would seem. O. Smith. Avalon Books, N. Y., #  ation as his premise in this A Galactic Survey Team has goofed by reporting our system devoid of intelligent life. As a result, Sol is to be made variable to serve as a marker beacon on a new galactic star route. Fortunately, one of the road gang discovers our thought emanations through the use of a menslatoT and finds that the most popular leader on Earth is TV's Dusty Britton of the Space Patrol. Obviously, this is the man to kidnap and acquaint with the Galactic Plan for old Sol so that he can prepare our people for their enforced thousand-year sleep, during which Earth is to be moved into orbit around another star. But before this. Dusty had chickened out on an actual exploratory flight to Venus. This fact comes to public light when he is picked up on a yacht in midocean the Galactic Team. If his chances of influencing people were small before, now he can't even make friends. Smith eventually gets Dusty and Earth out of the mess, even though his hero does occasionally step out of character by acting intelligent French. Doubleday and Co., Inc., N. Y., # IHE prolific Isaac Asimov, and  his alter ego, Paul French, have come up with the best of the Lucky Starr juvenile series. The action is taut, the mystery sustained, the science credible. Councilman Starr and his sidekick Bigman are sent to Jupiter IX to investigate leakage to the Sirians of secret information concerning Earth's experimental antigravity ship. Of course, we know they'll succeed in their mission, but it's a pretty tight squeak nonetheless, and Isaac French milks the situation for all its thrills, while painlessly imparting scientific lore and a code of ethics. by Nora Benjamin Kubie. by . B, Icenhower, Capt, U.S.N, Franklin Watts, N. Y,, # each above three books are excellent follow-ups to last month's Popular Science There s Adventure series that inaugurated the monthly "Junior Education Corner." Whereas those were experimental do-it-yourself books devoted to the physical sciences, these are informative volumes that will satisfy a knowledge hunger concerning more abstruse subjects. The most striking common denominator is the straightforward presentation. There is no talking down. Mammals first answers, "What is a mammal?" and then proceeds to populate every area of the world with the incredible variations in size, shape and structure of this great animal group. Archaeology supplies the young neophyte with information concerning the ancient civilizations and digging lore of the modern archeologist. The science in its modern form is only a hundred years old, but the reader will stand amazed at the deductive techniques employed. Not even Sherlock Holmes could deduce more from water stains, bone fragments and shards. Capt. Icenhower's book brings underwater routine to life and, in a short history, he notes the curious fact that many successful submarines existed before their incorporation into naval fleets. ben. Doubleday  Co., N.Y., #  the interest of the young, but it's quite a trick to sustain it. The text of Hogben's book is rather advanced; fourteen-year level up. The profusion of excellent demonstrative and provocative illustrations, though, qualifies it for use with a much younger age group, one that can appreciate the text in increasing degree. In fact, so well is the book designed,words and pictures can be mutually exclusive or intimately complementary. Ning engnr wanted: duties It, gravity ditto, unitd opptnty advcmt -- as anythg but engnr! D owd caught hold of a stanchion and braced himself -- it was easier to be forceful when you didn't float off the ground with every word. He said persuasively: "You can still change your mind, Eggleston. Where are you going to get another job like this? Look, you've been getting ten shares -- how about if we make it twelve? The committee will go along. That's eighty thousand dollars a year, man!" "No," said Eggleston. "Be reasonable! Ceres isn't as bad as all that As asteroids go, it's in a class by itself. Maybe we're a little cramped, but we're still getting organized -- why, next year we'll have it fixed up so you can get annual leave on Earth and -- " "No!" said Eggleston, even more positively than before. Dowd blew through his nostrils, once, hard, a snort of anger and exasperation. Being general manager of the miners' co-op that had the Ceres franchise was an unrelieved headache. Here he was promising this nincompoop Eggleston twelve shares -- he himself had only three, and an able-bodied vacuum-miner, risking his life and his health every day, got only one. And all because Eggleston had an engineering degree! "It isn't the money," Eggleston said. "You know what it is." "No," said Dowd grimly. "I don't know." E ggleston looked longingly at the open port of the ship. He hesitated and set down his bag -- eight hundred and fifty pounds of personal belongings and equipment. It would weigh that much on Earth; here it was only a feather-light balloon. He said tiredly: "I've told you dozens of times. I don't see why I'm bothering to tell you again. You didn't understand it before and you won't understand it now." "Try me!" said Dowd. "Maybe I'll finally get it!" "All right. There's no work for me here, Dowd. And who wants to live inside a chunk of rock?" "Two thousand of us do!" "Then do it!" snapped Eggleston. "Not me! I'm tired of never seeing the sun -- except through filters, after I put on a spacesuit. I'm tired of breathing last year's air. I'm tired of living with two thousand miners and their squalling brats, all cooped up in an oversized mine shaft. And when it comes right down to it, Dowd, I'm tired of you! That's why I'm leaving -- right now, at fourteen twenty-two hours on June third, mean solar time, and you can take your twelve shares and -- " "Okay, okay," Dowd broke in; "So long." He slipped his shoes back into the magnetic galoshes that held him to the floor and clumped, teetering, away. Behind him, he heard the shrill mechanical whine of the lock motors, sealing off the chamber where the rocket ship lay, and then the pumps that sucked the air out of the giant lock. When the lock was empty, the outer panels whined open, the noise coming shrilly through the rock; there was a sharp, shattering jar as the rockets started -- then silence. Dowd didn't even look around. It wasn't very interesting any more. Eggleston wasn't the first engineer to depart in a huff. He was the seventeenth, and the whole process was becoming impleasantly familiar. Dowd took the elevator down and reported failure to the rest of the managing committee. They accepted the news without comment; they were getting used to it too. Manson, the gray-haired supply manager, was the nearest to cheerful of the lot -- it wasn't his problem. Except that, of course, production was everybody's problem; if there wasn't enough production, there wasn't enough pay. Still, he was able to say: "Well, that's that. What do we do now?" Dowd said glumly: "Call a general meeting. We'll have to put it up to the whole membership." Traffic Manager Pickett scowled. "Put what up? We haven't got an engineer and we're not likely to get one. What's to discuss?" Dowd shrugged, wishing he had the guts to call the ship back and join Eggleston in leaving this place. "The only thing we can do, as I see it, is try to get along without an engineer for a while. But that's a matter of Policy." Manson nodded. Policy required a general meeting; everybody knew that. He reached over, picked up the P.A. microphone, flipped it on and spoke into it: "Attention, everyone. Attention, everyone. General meeting in the Common at -- " he glanced at his watch -- "fifteen hundred hours exactly." THE committee was down at the mouth, but the miners didn't seem perturbed. It was a kind of holiday for them. There wasn't much doing inside the #mile diameter of Ceres, and even a general meeting, that invariable precursor of trouble, was better than nothing. The miners and their families came up out of the rock-built "houses" -- really cubicles. Really, said the more disgnmtled inhabitants, caves. They were laid out in geometrically straight streets in the great, high-ceilinged chamber under the surface of the asteroid. They were not notably pretty or comfortable, but they would do. Enormous sun lamps hung, violetglowing, on spindly cables from the ceiling; giant street ventilators sucked out the old air and pumped in -- well, the same ak, but dried, cooled, de-carboned and re-oxidated. It sounded like the noise of wind in trees -- or, anyway, that's what Dowd was in the habit of saying in his wheedling letters to prospective members of the co-op. Actually, what it sounded like was ventilators. As general manager, Dowd led the committee toward the Common at the center of town. It was the commimity's showplace -- synthetic grass, imitation trees, even a small pool that used to have the unpleasant habit of creeping up over its margins and drenching everything around. This was due to a combination of the high surface-tension of water and the low gravity in the interior of Ceres; and the only thing that could be done about it was to roof the thing over with glass, which more or less spoiled the effect. From a distance, though, it didn't look bad, particularly when you observed the surrounding shops, the theater, the restaurant Dowd couldn't see any grass at all this time, not even the glassedover pool. Every square foot of the Common was covered with people. Dowd climbed to the bandstand -- once there really had been a band there, and dancing on the green; but that hadn't worked too well either, because the low gravity made even the best dancers prone to fall all over their partners. He picked up the loud-hailer and addressed the crowd. In a few brief words, he told the miners what they already knew, and outlined the problem they had already faced: "We don't have an engineer. We aren't likely to get one. We have to try to get along without one; and that's the size of it. Now," Dowd went on, "I'll entertain a motion that we proceed on our own power." He got his motion and it was passed unanimously -- if you could call it that. At least, there weren't any "nay" votes, but there were also only a scattering of "ayes;" and if the expressions on the faces of the two thousand miners and their families had been ballots, the whole Ceres Mining Co-operative would have faced a veto that afternoon. The committee went back to its work. The miners returned to their homes. The whole community kept its fingers crossed, fearing the worst -- And, two days later, an oversize blast went off and one-nineteenth of the asteroid of Ceres was blown away into space. F irst concern was casualties. Dowd raced into a pressure suit and headed a party that grappled and clung its way around the mottled rock surface of the asteroid to where the accident had occurred. They foimd the miners -- sheepish enough, pinioned under what, on Earth, would have been tons of rock, some of them; but unhurt. The second concern was the airtightness of the living quarters -- and that, thank heaven, thought Dowd, was still all right The blast had occurred seventy miles from the town-cavern. The third concern was -- the Solar System Conservation Society. Dowd returned to the main operations area and boarded a scout rocket with Manson and Simon Brodsky, the accountant. They jetted a few miles out into space, arrested their relative motion and took a good long look. Asteroid Ceres looked like a cake with a big chunk hacked out of it. "Oh, my God," groaned Brodsky. "Now weVe in for it." Dowd said shortly: "I know." Manson said: "What happened? Did you find out?" Dowd shrugged. "They had the charge all figured, and then they got worried it wasn't enough, so they added more. They were so busy arguing, they tied in with the stored explosive and the whole business went up. Lucky they weren't all killed -- maybe all of the rest of us, too." "You can say lucky if you want to," Brodsky complained. "Fm not so sure. This is going to cost us our franchise, you know." Manson said: "You mean the Solar System Conservationists?" "What else? Our contract said we couldn't do anything that would affect the external appearance or the orbit of Ceres. Believe me, this does both. Look at it!" They looked, in an atmosphere of gloom. "Curse them," Dowd said angrily. "It's a bloody big slice, all right." It was. The raw cut was as deep and wide as a sea, and the undiffused sunlight cast a spaceblack shadow that made it seem even deeper and more naked among the jagged asteroidal peaks. "There's no doubt about it," Dowd added. "Palomar will spot that next time they look this way -- if a liner from one of the outer planets doesn't beat them to it." "Wait a minute," said Brodsky thoughtfully. "There aren't any liners this time of year -- none of the big planets are in opposition." "Well?" "And Palomar isn't going to bother with us till it has to. Listen," Brodsky went on, growing excited, 'Svhat if we get that piece and stick it back?" Dowd stared. "Do what?" "You heard me," Brodsky insisted. "Why not?" Dowd looked at him in astonishment. He began to laugh -- until he realized that Brodsky was serious, and then he got annoyed. "That's crazy. We're miners, Brodsky. We dig out; we don't put back." Manson interrupted: "No, listen to him. Why shouldn't we?" Dowd rubbed his square jaw, squinting down at the asteroid. "Well -- I don't know, maybe it's an idea. Certainly we couldn't be any worse off -- " "Let's try it," Brodsky urged eagerly. "What can we lose?" It was a very good question and they all knew the answer. "All by ourselves," Dowd mused. "No engineer to tell us what to do; no no experience in this sort of thing... Well, you're right, Brodsky. We don't have any choice, do we?"  was this: A wedge of rock had flown off into space, like an axehead hurled off the handle; it was getting farther away every second, and it had picked up a fair amount of spin. Moreover, the remaining eighteen-nineteenths of Ceres had acquired, by natural law, an equal and opposite thrust, seriously disturbing its own orbit. The ore freighter department head checked in. "Yeah, we've got the ships," he said. "We've got eight that we can use for towing, which is enough. We can kill the spin, sure. Don't worry about that. We'll get the chunk back to Ceres, right over the cavity. Then it's up to the ground crews to take over. Of course," he added, "we'll need an engineer to check our acceleration and bearings and all that, you know. Say, when is the new engineer going to -- " "Thanks," Dowd said bitterly. "Thanks a lot. Just stand by. I'll let you know." The loading section foreman was less confident, but he grudgingly agreed that the problem of getting the chunk back down in place wasn't impossible. He dragged Dowd to his drafting office and showed him the plans his section had made. They all gathered around his desk, arguing over a ' diagram. "See," the foreman said, "I guess we could winch it down, like. From the bottom and sides, you understand? It might mean losing a few winches underneath, but I guess it's cheaper than losing the francfiise." "Hold on," Dowd said sharply. "You guess you can winch it down? It might mean losing a couple of winches?" "Well, what do you expect me to say?" the foreman demanded righteously. "I'm no engineer." "Damn it," exploded Dowd, "you've been doing this kind of work for twenty years! All Eggleston would have done is check over your own diagram. Why can't you do that?" The foreman said stubbornly: "Stress factors, things like that -- what do I know about them, Dowd? It looks all right, but how can I say for sure?" Dowd pulled his lips over his teeth and sought out the head blaster. The blaster pointed out: "I ain't an engineer, but the way it looks to me, we can fuse the wedge in place once the loading section gets it down. See, like we did when we put in the cargo lock for the rockets, remember?" Dowd asked : "And do you think fusing it would hold it in ' place permanently, allowing for orbital spin and gravitational -- " The blaster spread his hands. "How do I know? Now if I were an engineer -- " "Thafs what I thought," said Dowd. "I'll let you know." Committee meeting to order in the board room. He locked the door and started the tape recorder; for several minutes, it recorded only his profane remarks about lack of guts and self-confidence. "Hold it, Dowd," Manson said at last. "We've most of us dug all our lives -- all but Brodsky. That's why he doesn't know the problems in a job like this. There are all kinds of tricky things involved." "Like what?" Dowd savagely wanted to know. Manson snapped: "If I could tell you that, I'd be an engineer." Dowd drummed his fist on the desk. "Ah, what's the use? Sometimes I wish this wasn't a co-op. If I was a real boss, I'd just give the orders -- and they'd damn well do what they were told, engineer or no engineer." Pickett glanced up at him thoughtfully, and then returned to what he was doing -- paring his cuticles with a little knife. He said : "You can't, Dowd. I'd quit. I don't blame the men; I wouldn't work on anything as ticklish as that hunk of rock without an engineer. That's the way it is. On routine operations, maybe we could get along -- but this isn't routine." "Oh, the hell with it," Dowd said in disgust. "Here, let me tell you something. You know why we can't keep an engineer? Because we dortt need one. Our boys have done everything that can be done with our equipment so often that they can do it in their sleep -- yes, even like dragging a hunk of Ceres back to where it belongs! It's only the same things they've been doing, on a slightly larger scale. They only want an engineer to yes them because they don't have confidence. That's why we've lost seventeen engineers, one after another -- they want work, not just a soft berth." "So?" "So -- I don't know." Dowd  spread his hands, baffled. "I don't blame the engineers. When a man gets a degree, he wants to use it. Not just look at radar soundings -- which are read for him -- and approve charge formulas -- which are all worked out for him -- and read loading schedules and shoring diagrams and -- hell, the entire job! That's why we can't keep them. And that's why we don't need them, even now." Pickett didn't look up. "No engineer, no job," he said softly, and the rest of the room murmured agreement. Dowd sat down heavily and stared at the ceiling. It was an impasse. "You know," he said, "my sister Molly has a boy, David. He wanted to be a violinist, but she made him go to mining callege." Manson lifted his head questioningly. "He's probably got some nice job in a nice place," he grumbled. "You don't think he'd quit some other place just to -- " "Oh, he doesn't have a job yet," said Brodsky. He counted on his fingers, nodding. "Yes, he's just getting out of school now. I remember because my niece Leah got married when he was in his sophomore year and -- " "All right! All right! What are you getting at, Brodsky? You think you can get the kid before somebody else signs him up?" . Brodsky looked surprised. "Yes." Manson looked interested. "What do you think, Dowd?" Dowd banged the table. "Brodsky," he roared, "why didn't you say something about this before? Qet to it, man! If he's a relative, maybe there's a chance he'll stick -- anyway, even if he only stays long enough to get the damned asteroid stuck together again, that's something! Look -- " he figured rapidly -- " we'll get one of the oreboats to haul you to where you can pick up a liner. Pickett, you get on the radio and find out who's in port Manson, you get the freight section ready to take Brodsky in. JVove!" "Right!" Manson smiled. "Then we've got a chance. With a mining engineer, we can do the job." "Yeah." Suddenly Dowd sat back again. "But only the job," he said wearily. "Then we're on our own. Relative or not, he'll never stay." "Oh, he'll stay," Brodsky promised. "I guarantee he'll stay." A S usual in imusual situations, the membership of the Ceres Mining Cooperative was in the community square when Brodsky brought his nephew, David Bookbinder, down from the landing area. David was a tall boy, not entirely filled out yet, with light hair that had four great waves in it -- a feature that the miners' wives and daughters approved -- and a long, sensitive face. He wore strong contact lenses -- a feature that the minors approved; it was evidence of studiousness. Brodsky proudly introduced him first to the managing committee and then to the foremen of the various crews, who took him around to meet the members and their families. David held a violin case in his left hand and shook with his right, smiling gently and looking a little overwhelmed. He had to show his handsome diploma over and over to the awed and respectful miners. Dowd, Brodsky, Pickett and Manson stood near the bandstand and watched the lad answer questions, moving shyly from one group to another. "They like him," said Down. Brodsky nodded, pleased. "He was worried about that. I told him once in a while, say a couple of times a month, he could give a violin concert here. That would keep him happy. And who knows, people might enjoy it." "They'll enjoy anything he does," Dowd said enthusiastically. "Speaking of keeping him happy, we ought to work that out in detail." Brodsky waved his hand. "Later, later. First we put Ceres back together. Then we worry about that." "Oh, that's no problem now," Dowd assured him. "We're all set. The wedge is being towed back -- the crews began that the minute we got your spacegram, saying you and David were on the way. Now he's got the data from the other sections to go over -- but that won't take long." "No, that's true," Brodsky agreed. "He'll be glad to look it over." "And then what?" asked Manson. "Do we lose him like the others? I'll tell you what. I'm for voting him fifteen shares, Dowd. Why not? We could build him a big rock house down in some nice section of town -- put in a bar, a ballroom, whatever he wants. And we can get him a little electrocar -- maybe even a chauffeur, if he wants -- " "Sure!" added Pickett. "Listen, why not get a little private rocket? It could be his -- let him go to Mars once in a while. You know? Maybe the rest of us could use it when he didn't mind -- but it would be his all the same. And we can put through that leave plan right away -- what the devil, why not give the guy a couple months a year on Earth or Mars? With pay, naturally. And the town looks a little drab -- we could spray-paint it. And a mist machine up at the ceiling to give us a blue sky and white drifting clouds -- " "You're crazy!" cried Dowd, outraged. "He's just an engineer, you idiots! No engineer is worth it!" Manson scowled blackly. "You say that?" he demanded. "After we've messed ourselves up trying to get along without one?" Brodsky was polishing his glasses. "Gentlemen," he begged, looking distressed. "Please, we don't have to go to all that trouble. He's just a boy. The place is fine -- maybe we could dress it up a little, like you say. But for us, not for David. David will stay, I assure you, and he'll be happy with the usual ten shares and our old engineer's quarters." Wonderingly, Pickett said: "You've got more influence with your relatives than me with mine." "Sure," said Brodsky. "Say, Dowd, can I talk to you for a minute?" Dowd shrugged. The others nodded and walked off toward the group around the colony's new engineer. D owd said suspiciously : 'Well?" Brodsky cleared his throat. "The #'act is," he said, "David wanted to te a violinist, as I told you. But he went to mining college to please liis mother -- " "As you told me. I know. What about it?" "Well," Brodsky said hesitantly, "there was just a little trouble about his grades." He took a petty (rash voucher out of his pocket. "I have here -- " "Wait a minute! What are you tring to tell me, Brodsky? He's an (jngineer, isn't he? I saw his diploma with my own eyes!" "Oh, yes," Brodsky assured him. 'Of course you did. Everybody did -- a beautiful diploma, right? I'Tice sheepskin. Nice lettering. 'iPhafs what this bill I have here is -- five dollars for parchment, forty dollars hand lettering. I also," he iidded, "invested quite a lot for losin and violin strings and things like that, but I want to pay for for those myself. Call it a present for my nephew." "A graduation present?" Dowd asked, more than a bit baffled. "Well -- " Brodsky was a little embarrassed -- "not exactly. You see, there was the thing with his grades. So I promised him that here things would be all right -- he could practice his fiddle as much as he wanted; all we'd want from him is that once in a while he had to look over whatever the foremen brought him and say yes. Easy? He thought so. But it's worth it to us." Dowd swallowed hard. "You mean -- " he started, and had to pause to swallow again. "You mean he isn't really -- " Brodsky shrugged. "A technicality. He's been to school? He's got a degree? What more does he need?" "But -- but suppose the data's wrong! Suppose the foremen make a mistake and -- " Brodsky was shaking his head. "Never!" he said positively. "Besides, David isn't entirely ignorant. He may not be an engineer to other engineers, but to a miner, believe me, he's an engineer."      Tiling off Beauty There was the gizmo that could put Gordon Fish in the chips -- or right in the soup -- and he didn't know which he was ordering! T here was a time slip in Southern California at about one in the afternoon. Mr. Gordon Fish thought it was an earthquake. He woke up confused and sullen from his midday nap, blinking fiercely, pink as a spanked baby's behind, with his sandy-yellow beard and eyebrows bristling. He got off the sofa and listened. No screams, no rumble of falling buildings, so probably it was all right. He heard a knock. 'f I Squinting uneasily, Fish went to the door. He had left his glasses on the table, but never mind; it might be a client, or even an investigator from the city, in which case -- He opened the door. A slender man in purple was standing there. He was small, hardly an inch taller than Gordon Fish. He said, "Three twenty-two and a half Platt Terrace?" His face was an oval blur; he seemed to be wearing some kind of tight uniform, like a bellboy's -- but purple? "That's right, three twenty-two and a half, this is it," said Fish, straining to make out the fellow's salmon-colored face. He caught sight of some other people standing behind him, and a shadowy bulk, like a big box of some kind. "I don't know if you -- " "All right, fezh, bring it in," said the man, turning to speak over his shoulder. "Bung, did we have a time finding you!" he said to Fish, and pushed his way into the living room. Behind him, other men in tight purple clothing came staggering under the weight of boxes, first a big one, then two smaller ones, then a really big one, then a clutter of smaller boxes. "Listen, wait, there must be some mistake," said Fish, dancing out of the way. "I didn't order -- " The first man in purple looked at some papers in his hand. "Three twenty-two and a half Platt Terrace? he said. His voice sounded slurred and angry, as if he were half drunk or had just waked up, like Fish himself. tated. "I tell you I didn't order anything! I don't care if -- You walk in here, into a man's home, just -- Listen! You! You get that out of there!" Infuriated, he rushed at two of the men who were setting down one of the smaller boxes on the sofa. "This is the address," said the first man in a bored voice. He shoved some papers into Fish's hand. "You don't want 'em, send 'em back. We just deliver 'em." The purple men began to move, toward the door. The spokesman went out last. "Bung, are you a dvich!" he said, and closed the door. Raging, Fish fumbled for his glasses -- they ought to be right there, but the movers had upset everything. He went to the door anyway, twitching with anger -- dammit, if he could just find his glasses, he'd report them, but -- He opened the door. The purple-uniformed men, a little knot of them, were standing in the courtyard looking bewildered. One of them turned a salmon-colored dot of a face. "Hey, which way is -- " It sounded like "enchmire." There was a tremor, and Fish lurched against the door-frame. It felt like an earth-shock, a heavy one, but when he looked up, the palm trees in the street were not swaying, and the buildings were solid and firm. But the purple men were gone. Swearing frantically to himself, I'ish went back into the living room and slammed the door behind him. The biggest box was in his way. He kicked it and a slat hdl out. He kicked it again, grunting with angry satisfaction. The vhole side fell down with a clatter, revealing a black-enameled panel. Fish kicked that and bruised his toe. "Hm," said Fish, looking at the s eek black finish of whatever it vas. "Hah." It looked like money. Peering, he ran his finger along tlie metal. Cool and smooth. Why, iI might be almost an # Tthing. Industrial machinery, worth thousands of dollars to the right party. Vith rising excitement. Fish ran to the table, found his glasses pushed into some magazines, and r.an back, fitting the glasses over his little eyes. He pulled some more slats aside. The box fell away, disclosing an oddly shaped hunk of metal v'ith buttons, dials and pointers in tlie top. An engraved white plate read: "teckning maskin," and tlien some numbers. It sounded ominous and important. Heart beating. Fish rubbed his fingers over the smooth buttons and the gleaming dial faces. There was a faint click. He had accidentally moved a switch, he saw, from "Av" to "Pa." The 'dials were lighting up and a set of long hooked arms, like claws, were slowly drifting out over the flat empty space in the middle. Hastily, Fish turned the switch back to "Av." The lights went out; the arms, looking disappointed, he thought, drifted back into their enclosures. was, which was funny, because, come to think of it, he hadn't plugged it in anywhere. Fish stared at the machine uneasily, rubbing his pudgy hands together. Batteries? In a machine that size? And those funny dials, the peculiar expression the whole thing had -- and "Teckning Maskin," not even English. There it sat, all eight or ing room -- one crate, he saw with annoyance, blocked off his view of the TV. Suppose it was all some kind of joke? The instant he thought of it, he saw the whole thing in a flash. The crates sitting here, and then in a few days the bill would come in the mail -- maybe they wouldn't even take the things away until he'd paid the shipping -- and all the time the joker would be laughing himself sick, laughing, whoever it was that had ordered the machines in Fish's name -- some old enemy, or it could even be someone he thought of as a friend -- With tears of rage in his eyes, he rushed to the door again, flung it open and stood panting, staring around the courtyard. But there was nobody there. He slammed the door and stood looking helplessly at the crates. If they would fight fair -- How was he going to watch Dragnet, and, good heaven, where was he going to talk to clients, in the kitchen? "Oh!" said Fish, and he kicked another crate hard. Slats gave and something fell out, a little yellow booklet. Fish glimpsed more blackenameled machinery inside. He bent wildly to pick up the booklet and tried to tear it across, but it hurt his hands. He threw it across the room, shouting, "Well, then!" He danced from one crate to another, kicking. Slats littered the floor. Gleaming machines stood up from the mess, some with dials, some without. Fish stopped, out of breath, and stared at them with a new bewilderment A trick, no, it couldn't be; big industrial machines like that, it wasn't like ordering something from a department store. But then what? A mistake. Fish sat down on the arm of a chair and frowned, scrubbing his beard with his fingers. In the first place, now, he hadn't signed anything. Even if they came back tomorrow, if he could manage to get rid of say one piece, he could always claim there had been seven instead of eight. Or suppose he even got rid of all of it, discreetly, of course, then when they came back he could simply deny the whole thing. Say he never heard of any machinery. Fish's nerves began to twitch. He jumped up, looked around, sat down. Speed, speed, that was the thing. Get it over with. But what kind of machinery was it? Fish frowned, squirmed, got up and sat down again. Finally he went to the phone, looked up a number and dialed. He smoothed down his vest, cleared his throat musically. "Ben? This is Gordon Fish, Ben... Just fine. Now, Ben -- " his voice dropped confidentially -- "I happen to have a client who wants to dispose of a Teckning Maskin. Eight -- What? Teckning Maskin. It's machinery, Ben. T,E,C,K,N,I,N,G-No? Well, that's the name they gave me; I have it written down right here. You never -- ? Well, that's funny. Probably some mistake. I tell you, Ben, I'll check back and see -- Yes, thanks a lot. Thanks, Ben, bye-bye." ers in vexation. If Ben Abrams had never heard of it, then there couldn't be any market for it, not in this part of the country anyhow . , . Something funny. He was beginning to have a hunch about this thing now. Something -- He prowled around the machines, looking at them this way and that. Here was another en; graved white plate; it said "teckof numbers and words... "# Folk, # Djur, # Byggnader," and so on,' lot more. Crazy words, it didn't :ven look like any language he'd ever heard of and then those rianiacs in the purple uniforms. Vait a minute -- Fish snapped his fingers, sOpped, and stood in a pose of tliought. Now what was it that having? It had made him mad. Fish remembered-something like, "#oy, are you a dvich." Made him' nr. ad as a hornet, it sounded insulting, but what did it mean? And then that kind of earthquake just before they got here -- WDke him up out of a sound sleep, left him feeling all funny -- and then another one after they left, orily not an earthquake, because he remembered distinctly that the palm trees didn't even tremble. Fish ran his finger delicately over the shining curved edge of th # nearest machine. His heart was thumping; his tongue came out to lick his lips. He had a feeling -- no, really he knew -- nobody would be coming back for the machines. They were his. Yes, and there was money in them somewhere; he could smell it. But how? What did they do? He opened all the crates carefully. In one of them, instead of a machine, there was a metal box full of creamy-thick sheets of paper. They were big rectangular sheets, and they looked as if one would just about fit onto the flat center space on the biggest machine. Fish tried one, and it did. Well, what could go wrong? Fish rubbed his fingers nervously, then turned the switch on. The dials lighted and the hooked arms drifted out, as before, but nothing else happened. Fish leaned nearer again and looked at the other controls. There was a pointer and a series of marks labeled "Av," Bank #, Bank #," and so on down to Bank #." He moved the pointer cautiously to "Bank #.' The arms moved a little, slowly, and stopped. What else? Three red buttons marked "Utplana," "Torka," and "Avsla." He pushed one, but nothing happened. Then a series of white buttons, like on an adding machine, all numbered. He pressed one down at random, then another, and was about to press a third when he leaped back in alarm. The hooked arms were moving, rapidly and purposefully. Where they passed over the paper, thin dark-gray lines were growing. Fish leaned closer with his mouth open and his eyes bulging. The little points undei the ends of the arms were riding smoothly over the paper, leaving graceful lines behind them. The arms moved, contracted on their little pivots and springs, swept this way and that; lifted slightly, dropped again and moved on. Why, the machine was drawing -- drawing a picture while he watched! T here was a face forming under the arm over on the right, then a neck and shoulder -- kind of a sappy-looking man, it was, like a Greek statue. Then over here on the left, at the same time, another arm was drawing a bull's head, with some kind of flowers between the horns. Now the man's body -- he was wearing one of those Greek togas or whatever you call them -- and the back of the bull curving around up on top -- and now the man's arm, and the bull's tail, and now the other arm, and the bull's hind legsThere it was. A picture of a man throwing flowers at this bull, who was kind of leaping and looking at the man over his shoulder. The arms of the machine stopped moving and then pulled back out of sight. The lights went out and the switch clicked by itself back to "Av." Fish took the paper and looked it over, excited but a little disappointed. He didn't know anything about art, of course, but he knew this was no good all flatlooking and kind of simple, like a kid would draw. And that bull, who ever saw a bull dancing like that? With flowers between its horns? Still, if the machine would draw this, maybe it would draw something better; he couldn't quite see the angle -- where would you sell drawings, even good ones? -- but it was there somewhere. Exhibit the machine, like in a fair of science and industry? No, his mind hurriedly buried the thought -- too exposed, too many questions. If Vera found out he was still alive, or if the police in Scranton -- Drawings. A machine that made drawings. Fish looked at it, all eight lumpy black-enameled massive pieces of it scattered around his living room. It seemed like a lot of machinery just to make drawings. He admitted it, he was disappointed; he had expected -- well, metal stampings or something like that, something real. Crash, bang, the big metal jaw comes down, and tink, the bright shaped piece falls out into the basket. There was machinery for you; but this -- Fish sat back and pondered, twitching the paper disapprovingly between his fingers. Things were always letting him down like this. Really, his best line was marriage -- he had been married five times and always made a little profit out of it -- he smoothed the vest down over his suety front; between times, he turned to whatever was handy. Marital Counselling some years, or gave Life Readings if he could get enough clients; or Naturopathy, it all depended, but somehow every time it looked as if he had a real gold mine, it slipped out from under his hand. He reddened with discomfort as he thought of the one winter he had been forced to go to work in a shoe store. Having this house had softened him up, too. He had been getting lazy, just a client or two a week for Life Readings. He ought to be getting busy, working up new contacts before his money ran out. The thought of poverty, as it always did, made him ravenously hungry. He kneaded his stomach. Time for lunch. He got his jacket hurriedly, and as an afterthought rolled up the drawing -- it would not fold -- and tucked it under his arm. three blocks down the boulevard where he had been eating a lot of his meals lately, to save funds. The counterman was a young fellow named Dave, lean and pale, with a lock of straight dark hair falling over his forehead. Fish had got into friendly conversation with him and knew he was going to art school nights, over in Pasadena. Fish had tried to get him over for a Life Reading, but the youngster had said frankly that he "didnt believe in it," in such an honest and friendly way that Fish bore him no ill will. "Bowl of chile, Dave," he said cheerfully, hoisting himself up on a stool with the rolled drawing precariously on his lap. His feet dangled; the paper was squeezed tight between vest and counter. "Hello, Doc. Coming up." Fish hunched forward over the bowl, loosening his collar. The one other customer paid and left. "Say, Dave,"' said Fish indistinctly, munching, "like to get your opinion of something. Unh." He managed to get the rolled paper free and opened it on the counter. "What do you think -- is it any good?" "Say," said Dave, coming nearer. "Where'd you get that? "Mm. Nephew of mine," Fish answered readily. "He wants me to advise him, you know, if he should go on with it, because -- " Go on with it! Well, say -- Whereas he been studying, anyhow?" "Oh, just by himself, you know back home." Fish took another mouthful. "Ver' bright boy, you understand, but -- " Well -- gee, if he learned to draw like that by himself -- why, he must be a world-beater." Fish forgot to chew. "You really mean it?" j  "Why, sure. Listen, are you sure he drew this himself. Doc?" "Oh, certainly." Fish waved the imputation of dishonesty away. "Ver' honest boy, I know'm well. No, 'f he tells me he drew it, why -- " he swallowed -- "he drew it. But now don't fool me, is it -- do you really think it's as ood -- " "Well, I tell you the truth, when I first saw it, I thought Picasso. You know, his classical period. Of course I see now it's different, but, my gosh, it's good. I mean, if you want my opinion, why -- " Fish was nodding to indicate that this only confirmed his own diagnosis. "M-hm. M-hm. Well, I'm glad to hear you say it, son. You know, being a relative of the boy, I thought Of course, I'm very impressed. Very impressed. I thought of Picasso, too, same as you. Of course, now from the money end of it -- " he wagged his head dolefully "you know and I know -- " D ave scratched his head under the white cap. "Oh -- well -- he ought to be able to get commissions, all right. I mean, if I had a line like that-" He traced in air the strong outline of the man's lifted arm. "Now when you say commith sions-" Fish said, squirming with eagerness. "Oh, well, for portraits, or industrial designs, or you know, whatever he wants to go in for." Dave shook his head in admiration, staring at the drawing. If this was only in color -- " "How's that, Dave?" "Why, I was just thinking -- see, there's a competition up in San Gabriel for a civic center mural. Ten-thousand-dollar prize. Now I don't know, it might not win, but why don't you have him render this in color and send it in?" "Color," said Fish blankly. The machine wouldn't color anvthing, he was sure. He could get a box of water color paints, but -- "Well, now, the fact is," he said, hastily revolving ideas, "you know, the boy is laid up. Hurt his hand -- oh, not serious," he said reassuringly (Dave's mouth had fallen into a circle of sympathy), "but won't be able to draw any more pictures for a while. It's a shame, he could use the money, you know, for doctor bills -- " He chewed and swallowed. "Tell you, this is just a wild idea now, but -- why couldn't you color it up and send it in, Dave? Course, if it doesn't win, I couldn't pay you, but -- " "Well, gee, I don't know how he'd like that. Doc. I mean, suppose he'd have something else in mind, like, some other color scheme altogether. You know, I wouldn't like to -- " "I'll take full responsibility," said Fish firmly. "Don't you worry about that, and -- if we win, why, I'll see that you're paid handsomely, Dave. Now, there, how's that?" "Well, sure, then. Doc. I mean sure," said Dave, nodding and blushing. "I'll do it tonight and tomorrow, and get it right off in the mail, okay? Then -- oh, uh, one thing, what's your nephew's name?" "George Wilmington," said Fish at random. He pushed the cleaned chile bowl away. "And, uh, Dave, I believe I'll have an order of ribs, with french fries on the side." Fish went home with a vastly increased respect for the machine. The mural competition, he was positive, was in the bag. Ten thousand dollars! For one drawing! He closed and locked the front door carefully behind him, and pulled down the Venetian blinds to darken the gloomy little living room still further. He turned on the lights. There the machine still was, all eight gleaming pieces of of it, scattered around on the floor, the furniture, everywhere. He moved excitedly from one piece to another, caressing the slick black surfaces with his palm. All that expensive machinery -- all his! Might as well put it through its paces again, just to see. Fish got another sheet of creamy paper from the stack, put it in position, and turned the switch to "Pa." He watched with pleasure as the dials lighted, the hooked arms drifted out and began to move. Lines grew on the paper : first some wavy ones at the top, could be anything. And farther down, a pair of long up-curved lines, kind of handlebar-shaped. It was like a puzzle, trying to figure out what it was going to be.  Fish now perceived to be hair, the pointer drew eyes and a nose. Meanwhile, the other one was gliding around the outline of what, it became clear in a moment, was a bull's head. Now here came the rest of the girl's face, and her arm and one leg -- not bad, but kind of beefy -- and now the bull's legs, sticking out all different ways, and then, whoops, it wasn't a bull: there was the whatyoumaycallum -- a cow. So, a girl riding on a cow, with flowers between the horns like before. Fish looked at the drawing in disappointment. People and cows -- was that all the thing could do? He scrubbed his beard in vexation. Why, for heaven's sake, suppose somebody wanted a picture of something besides cows and people? It was ridiculous -- eight big pieces of machinery -- Wait a minute. "Don't go off half-cocked, Gordon," he told himself aloud. That was what Florence, his second, always used to say; except she always called him "Fishy." He winced with discomfort at the memory. Well, anyway, he noticed now that the same buttons he had pressed down before were still down. That must have something to do with it. Struck by another thought, he trotted over and looked at the machine marked "Bank #." Now this list here, number # was "Folk," and number # was "Djur." Those were the numbers he had pressed on the big machine, so -- maybe "folk" meant people, and "djur," why, that might be some crazy word for cattle. Then if he pressed a different set of buttons, why, the machine would have to draw something else. In fifteen minutes, he verified that this was the case. Pressing down the first two buttons, "Land" and "Planta," gave him drawings of outdoors scenes, just hills and trees. "Folk" was people and "Djur" seemed to be animals; now he got goats or dogs instead of cows. "Byggnader" was buildings. Then it got more complicated. A button marked "Arbete" gave him pictures of people at work; one labeled "Karlek" produced scenes of couples kissing -- all in the same kind of Greek-looking clothes, and the landscapes and buildings were sort of vague and dreamy. Then there was a whole row of buttons under the heading "Plats," and another headed "Tid," that seemed to control where and when the pictures were about. For instance, when he pressed "Egyptisk" and "Gammal," along with "Folk," "Byggnader," and on a hunch, "Religion," he got a picture of some priests in Egyptian headdresses, bowing in front of a big statue. Now there was something! T he next day he nailed up the crates again, leaving the tops loose so that he could remove them whenever he wanted to use the machines. In the process, he came across the little yellow booklet he had thrown away. There were diagrams in it, some of which made sense and some didn't, but the printing was all in the same unfamiliar language. Fish put the booklet away in a bureau drawer, under an untidy heap of clothes, and forgot about it. Gnmting and sweating, he managed to push the smaller crates into corners, and rearranged the furniture so there was room to put the big one against the wall. It still looked terrible, but at least he could get around, and have clients in, and he could see the TV again. Every day he ate lunch at the barbecue place, or at least stopped in, and every day, when Dave saw him come in, he shook his head. Then all afternoon he would sit with a glass of beer, or maybe a plate of nuts or fudge, watching the machine draw. He used up all the papers in the stack and started turning them over to use the other sides. But where was the money to come from? After some thought. Fish built a simple magic-writing box and used it with his Egyptian drawings  he had a dozen, all of different gods, but after the first one the machine didn't draw any priests to show clients what they had been up to in previous incarnations. He began to get a little more business, and once or twice his instinct told him he could raise the fee on account of the drawiugs, but that was only pocket money. He knew there was millions in it, he could almost taste it, but where? Once it occurred to him that maybe he could take out a patent on the machine and sell it. Trouble with that was he didn't have any idea how the thing worked. It seemed like the little machines must have pictures inside, or pieces of pictures, and the big maue put them together -- how? Fuming with impatience, Fish took the big crate apart again, moved furniture out of the way, and fumbled at the smooth black side of the machine to see if there was any way of opening it up. After a moment, his fingers found two shallow depressions in the metal; he pushed experimentally, then pressed upwardand the side plate of the machine came off in his hands. It weighed almost nothing. Fish put it aside, staring doubtfully into the interior of the machine. It was all dark in there, nothing but a few very tiny specks of light, like mica dust hanging motionless. No wires, nothing. Fish got a sheet of paper and put it in position, and turned the machine on. Then he squatted down. The tiny specks of light seemed to be moving, circling slowly around one another in time to the motion of the drawing arms. It was darker in there, and looked farther away somehow, than it had any right to. Holding the front of the machine, Fish touched another shallow depression, and without really meaning to, he pushed upward. The whole front of the machine fell off, and the other side with it. He sprawled backward frantically to get out of the way: but the top of the machine didn't fall. It stayed there, rock-steady, alough there was nothing holding it up but the back panel. And underneath, nothing. No framework, just the thick darkness, with the little stars going slowly around as the machine drew. Fidi hastily picked up the front and side panels and put them back. They slid easily and perfectly into place, and fitted so closely that he couldn't see any line between them. After that, he put the crate back together and never tried to look inside the machines again, D ave hurried around thcj end of the counter to him. "Doc! Where have you been?" He was drying his hands on his apron and grinning nervously, with a sort of pole-axed expression around his eyes. A customer around the other side of the counter looked up, then went on chewing with his I mouth open. i "Well, I had quite a lot of things to do," Fish began automatically. Then he began to feel "Say! You don't mean-" y Dave fished a long white envelops out of his back pocket. "Came yesterday! Look here!" The envelope crackled in his nervous fingers. He pulled out a folded letter and Fish seized it Dave looked over his shoulder, breathing .heavily, as he read. Dear Mr. Wilmington:  It is my very great pleasure to inform you that your design has been awarded the First Prize in the San Gabriel Civic Center Mural Competition. In the opinion of the judges, the class'c simplicity of your entry, together with its technical mastery, made it far superior to anything else submitted. Enclosed please find our check for three thousand dollars ( # , # . # )... "Where?" cried Fish, looking up. "Right here," said Dave, with a grin that looked painful. He held up a salmon-colored strip of paper. The red-printed lettering read: lars." Fish hugged Dave, who hugged him back, and then looked at the letter again. the remainder to be paid when the design is executed to the satisfaction of the Committee. "Executed?" said Fish, with a sinking feeling. "What's that mean? Dave, what's it mean here, where it says -- " "When he paints the mural on the wall. Gee, Doc, I just can t tell you -- " "Who?" "Your nephew. George Wilmington. See, when he paints the mural -- " "Oh," said Fish. "Oh. Well, you see, Dave, the fact is -- " Dave's long face grew solemn. "Oh, gosh, I never thought. You mean he's not well enough to draw yet?" Fish shook his head, mournfully. No, sir. It's a terrible shame, Dave, but-" He folded the check absently and slipped it into his pocket. "I thought. you said, I mean, it wasn't serious or an#dhing -- " Fish continued to shake his head. Turned out there was more to it than they thought. It looks like now they just don't know when he'll ever be able to draw again." Dh, Doc," said Dave, stricken. "That's the way it is. These things -- the doctors don't know as much about 'em as they'd like you to think, Dave the letter, barely listening to the sound of his own voice. To he paid when the design is executed... Look here," he said, interrupting Daves murmurs of commisertion. It don't say who has to execute it, now does it? Notice right there? Says when the design is executed' -- " How about a glassa water over here?" called the customer. "Coming right up, sir. Look, Doc, I think you got an idea." Dave retired sidewise toward the counter, still talking. "You know, anybody could scale that up and tbe actual painting -- any competent artist, I mean. Gee, I'd do it myself, I mean if George didn't mind. And if it was all right with the committee, why, you know, it would be an opportunity for me." He gave the customer his water, mopped the counter blindly and came back. Fish leaned over the counter, beard in hand, frowning. "Wilmington" was just a name -- Dave could take the part just as well as not, and it would be a lot better in one way, because then Fish himself could stay out of sight But, whoops, if they did that then Dave would be Wilmington, and he might want to take off on his own... Well, Dave," he said, "are you a good artist?" Dave looked embarrassed. "Gee, Doc, you put me on the spot, but -- well, anyway, they liked how I rendered the design, didn't they? See, I used a color scheme of deep aqua and a kind of buff, with accents of rose -- you know, to make it cheerful? And, gee, if I did it on. the paper, I could do it on a wall -- " "Sold!" said Fish heartily, and clapped Dave on the shoulder. "George don't know it yet, but he just got himself an assistant!" up at him suddenly from beside a potted palm. "Mr. Wilmington? If I could just have a moment -- "  Fish paused, one hand going to his chin in the old gesture, although he had shaved off the beard over a year ago. He felt exposed without it and his features tended to twitch when he was startled like this. "Why, yes, uh. Miss-" "My name is Norma Johnson. You don't know me, but I have some drawings here -- " She was carrying a big black portfolio, fastened with tapes. Fish sat down beside her and looked at the drawings. They looked all right to him, but skimpy, like the kind of thing he turned out mostly himself. What he liked was pictures with some meat to them, like Norman Rockwell, but the one time he had set the machine to draw something like that, his agent-the first one, Connolly, that crook! --  had told him there was no market for "genre stuff." I The girl's fingers were trembling. She was very neat and pale, with black hair and big expressive eyes. She turned over the last drawing. "Are they any good?" she asked. 'Well, now, there's a good deal of spirit there," said Fish ' comfortably. "And a very fine sense of design."   "Could I ever be successful at it?" j , "Well-"  : "See, the thing is," she ' said rapidly, "my Aunt Marie .wants me to stay here in San Francisco and come out next season. But I don't want to. So she agreed, if you said I had real talent, that she would send me abroad to study. But if you didn't, I'd give up." Fish looked at her intently. Her fingernails were short but looked cared for. She was wearii a simple white blouse and a little blue jacket and skirt; there was a whiff of woodsy perfume. Fish smelled money. He said, "Well, my dear, let me put it this way. Now you could go to Europe and spend a lot of money -- ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars -- " She watched him without blinking. "Fifty thousand-" said Fish delicately. "But what would be the point of it? Those fellows over there don't know as much as they'd like you to think." She fumbled blindly for her purse and gloves. "I see. She started to get up. Fish put a pudgy hand on her arm. "Now what I would suggest," he said, "why don't you come and study with me for a year instead? Her pale face lengthened. "Oh, Mr. Wilmington -- would you?" "Well, anybody with as much talent as these drawings -- " Fish patted the portfolio on her knee -- "why, we have to do something, because -- " She stood up excitedly. 'Will you come tell diat to Aunt Marie?" Fish smoothed down the front of his pink shirt. "Why, gladly, my dear, gladly " "Shes right here in the lounge." Marie, who was a handsome woman of about fifty, plump but beautifully tailored in brown linen. They agreed that Norma would take a studio near Mr. Wilmington's home in Santa Monica, and that Mr. Wilmington would look in several times a week and give her the full benefit of his great experience, in return for ten thousand dollars per annum. It was, as Fish pointed out to them, less than half the amount he usually got now for major commissions; but never mind, every little bit helped. lMurals, institutional advertising, textile designs, private sales to collectors -- God, how it was rolling in! The only thing that really worried him was the machine itself. He kept it now in a locked inner room of the house he was renting-twenty rooms, furnished, terrific view of the Pacific Ocean, lots of room for parties-and up to a point he could work it like a kiddy-car. One time or another, he had figured out and memorized every one of the dozens of labeled buttons on the "Bank" machines, and just by combining the right ones, he could get any kind of a drawing he wanted. For instance, that commission for stained glass for a church "Religion," "People," "Palestine," "Ancient," and there you were. The trouble was the machine wouldn't draw the same thing twice in a row. On that church window job, he got one picture of Christ and then couldn't get another, no matter how long he tried, so he had to fill out with saints and martyrs. The church put up a beef, too. Then sometimes at night, for his own amusement, he used to put the machine through its paces -- such as setting it for "Historical figures" and "Romantisk," which seemed to be the machine's name for the present era, and then push the button marked "Overdriva," and watch the famous faces come out with big cartoony noses, and teeth like picket fences. Or he would set it for "Love," and then various interesting times and places -- ancient Rome gave him some spicy ones, and Samoa was even better. But every time he did this, the machine turned out fewer drawings; and finally it wouldn't do any more like that at all. Was there some kind of censor built into the thing? Did it disapprove of him? He kept thinking of the funny way those men in purple uniforms had delivered the thing. They had the right address, but the wrong -- time? Whatever it was, he knew the machine wasn't intended for him. But whom was it meant for? What was a "dvich"? T here were eight pieces six banks, the master machine, and one which he had discovered would enlarge any detail of a drawing to almost full size. He could handle all that. He could manage the controls that governed the complexity or simplicity of a drawing, gave it more or less depth, changed its style and mood. The only buttons he wasn't sure of were the three red ones marked "Utplana," "Tdrka," and "Avsla." None of them seemed to do anything. He had tried all three both ways, and they didn t seem to make any difference. In the end, he left them the way they had been, "Torka" down, the other two up, for lack of any better idea. But, big and red like that, they must be important. He found them mentioned in the booklet, too: 'Utplana en teckning, press knappen 'Utplana' Avlagsna ett monster Iran en hank efter anvandning, press knappen 'Torka! Avsla en teckning innan slutsatsen, press knappen 'Avsla!" Press knappen, press knappen, that must be "push button " But when? And that business about "monster," that made him a little nervous. He had been pretty lucky so far, figuring out how to work the whole machine without any accidents. Supposing there was still something that could go wrong -- suppose the booklet was a warning? ' He prowled restlessly around the empty house -- empty, and untidy, because he wouldn't have any servants in the place. You never knew who was going to spy on you. A woman came in two days a week to clean the place up, all but the locked room, and once in a while he'd bring a couple of girls up for a party, but he always threw them out the next morning. He was busy all right, seeing a lot of people, traveling around, but he'd had to drop all his' old friends when he decided to become Wilmington, and he didn't dare make any new ones for fear of giving himself away. Besides, everybody was out for something. The fact was, dammit, he wasn't happy. What good was all the money he was making, all the things he'd bought, if they didn't make him happy? Anyhow, pretty soon now, that oil stock would start paying off -- the salesman had assured him that the drillers were down within a few hundred feet of oil right now -- and then he'd move to Florida or someplace He paused in front of his desk in the library. The booklet was still there, lying open. The thing was, even suppose that was some  TtV language anybody had ever heard of, whom would he dare show it to? Whom could he trust? An idea occurred to him and he leaned over, staring at the yellow pages with their incomprehensible text. After all, he could already figure out some of the words; he didn't have to show anybody the whole boolc, or even a whole sentence. Then there was that information business that came with his deluxe set of the Encyclopaedia Bntanmca -- he ought to have it right here somewhere -- Fish hunted in the file drawers and finally came up with a folder and a sheet of gummed yellow stamps. Ji Grunting, he sat down at the desk, and after much cigar-chewing, scribbling and crossing out. he typed the following: Jr; I Dear sirs: Kindly inform me as to what language the enclosed words are, and also what they mean. Kindly give this matter your best attention, as I am in a hurry. Then he addressed an envelope, stuck one of the yellow stamps to his letter, and mailed the thing off before he could regret it. On a separate sheet, he wrote all the doubtful words from the paragraph about the red buttons, cannily mixing them up so no one could guess what orihey came in. Feeling a little foolish, he carefully drew in all the tiny strange dots.  f f Hl Y rhetorical question is," said Fish craftily to the young physicist, shouting over the hum of cocktail-party conversation, "purely in interests of science, could you make a machine that would draw?" He beamed over his glasses at the horn-rimmed blur of the young man's face. He had had three martinis, and whew! he was floating. But fully in command of senses, of course. "Well, draw what? If you mean charts and graphs, sure, or something like a pantograph, to enlarge -- " "No, no. Draw beatiful pictures." The last word sprayed a little. Fish rocked forward and back again. "Purely rhetorical question." He put his glass down with precision on a passing tray and took another one which spilled icy liquid down his wrist. He gulped to save it. "Oh. Well, in that case, no. I would say not. I assume you mean it would originate the drawings, not just put out what was programmed into it. Well, that would mean, in the first place, you'd have to have an incredibly big memory bank. Say if you wanted the machine to draw a horse, it would have to know what a horse looks fk I like from every angle and in every position. Then it would have to select the best one for the purpose out of say ten or twenty portion with whatever else is in the drawing, 'and so on. Then, for God's sake, if you wanted beauty too, I suppose it would have to consider the relation of every part to every other part, on some kind of esthetic principle. I wouldn't know how to go about it." Fish, thick-fingered, probed for his olive. "Say it's impossible, hey?" he asked. "Well, with present techniques, anyhow. I guess we'll be staying out of the art business for another century or two." The blur smiled and lifted its highball glass. "Ah," said Fish, putting a hand on the young man's lapel to support himself and keep the other from moving out of the corner. "Now suppose you had machine like that. Now -- suppose that machine kept forgetting things. What would be reason for that?" "Forgetting things?" "What I said." With a disastrous sense that he was talking too much. Fish was about to go on, but a sudden hand on his arm forestalled him. It was one of the bright young men, beautiful suit, beautiful teeth, beautiful handkerchief in pocket. "Mr. Wilmington, I just wanted to say what an absolutely marvelous piece of work that new mural is. One enormous foot. I don't know what the significance is, but the draughtsmanship is marvelous. We must get you on File Seven some afternoon and have you explain it." "Never go on television," said Fish, frowning. He had been fending off invitations like this one for almost a year. Too bad. Nice to have met you. Oh, by the way, somebody asked me to tell you there's a phone call for you over there." He waved his arm and drifted away. jpiSH excused himself and set an adventurous course across the room. The phone was lying on one of the side tables, giving him a black look. He picked it up jauntily. "Hello-o." "Dr. Fish?" Fish's heart began to knock. He put the martini glass down. "Who's that?" he demanded blankly. "This is Dave Finney, Doc." Fish felt a wave of relief. "Oh, Dave. I thought you were in Boston. Or I suppose you are, but the connection -- " "I'm right here in Santa Monica. Look, Doc, something's come up that -- " "What? What're you doing here? Now I hope you haven't quit school, because -- " "This is summer vacation. Doc. Look, the fact is Fm here in Norma Johnson's studio." Fish stood with the sweaty black phone in his hand and said nothing. Silence hummed in the ydres. "Doc? Mrs. Prentice is here too. Ve've been kind of talking things over and we think you ought to come over and explain a few things." Fish swallowed, with difficulty. "Doc, you hear me? I think you ought to come over. They're talking about calling the police, but I wanted to give you a chance first, so -- " "I'll be right over," said Fish hoarsely.  B He hung up the phone and stood bemused, with his hand to his flushed forehead. Oh, Lord, three, no four martinis and this had to happen! He felt dizzy. Everybody seemed to be standing at a slight angle on the kelly-green carpet, all the bright young men in glossy summer jackets and the pastel women in cocktail dresses with bright phony smiles on their faces. What did they care if all he could get out of the machine any; more was parts of bodies? His last one a big clenched fist, and now a foot, and don't you think the committee didn't beef, they beefed plenty but they had to take it, because they already announced the commission. Now this morning his agent called up, some church group in Indiana, they wanted sample sketches. So it was all going down the drain while he watched, and now this. Dave, good God, you'd think at least he would stay stuck off in Boston, and how the hell had he ever run into Norma? One of the newspaper reporters turned away from the free lunch and planted himself in Fish's path as he lurched toward the door. "Mr. Wilmington, what would you say was the real significance of that foot?" "Gow my way," said Fish, staggering around him. H e took a cab home, told the driver to wait, ducked in for a quick shower and a cup of black coffee, and came out again, shaky but not as drunk as before. Those damn cocktails... He used to never get like this when he just drank beer. Things were better back on Platt Terrace. How did he ever get mixed up in this crazy art game? His stomach felt hollow. He hadn't eaten any lunch, he remembered. Well, too late now. He braced himself together and rang the bell. Dave opened the door. Fish greeted him with cries of pleasure, shaking his limp hand. "Dave, boy! Good to see you! How long has it been, an#rway?" Without waiting for a reply, he bustled on into the room. It was a gray windowlcss plac# that always made him feel trapped. Instead of a roof, there was one big slanting skylight, high overhead; the light filtered down cool and colorless through the translucent panes. There was an easel in one corner, and some drawings pinned up on the otherwise bare walls. Down at the far end, Norma and her aunt were sitting on the red-padded bench. "Norma, how are you, honey? And Mrs. Prentice -- now this is a real pleasure!" That wasnt hard to say -- she really did look good in that new dark-blue suit -- he could tell he was projecting the old charm, and he thought he saw her eyes glint with pleasure. But it was only for an instant, and then her expression hardened. "What's this I hear about your not even coming to see Norma?" she demanded. Fish registered deep surprise. "Why why, Norma, didn't you explain to your aunt? Excuse me a minute." He darted over to the drawings on the wall. "Well. Now these are really excellent, Norma. There's a good deal of improvement here. The symmetry, dont you see, and the dynamic flow -- " Norrria said, "Those are three months old." She was wearing a man s shirt and dungarees, and looked as if she might have been crying recently, but her face was carefully made up. "Well, honey, I wanted to come back, even after what you said. I did come around, twice, you know, but you didn't answer your bell." "That's not so." "Well, I suppose you might have been out," said Fish cheerfully. He turned to Mrs. Prentice. Norma was upset." His voice dropped. "About a month after we started, she told me to get out and not come back." Dave had drifted back across the room. He sat down beside Norma, without comment. "The idea of taking the poor child's money for nothing" said Mrs. Prentice vehemently. 'Why didn't you give it back?" and sat down close to her. "Mrs. Prentice," he said quietly, "I didn't want Norma to make a mistake. I told her, now, if you'll live up to your agreement and study with me for a year, I said, and then if you're not satisfied, why. I'll gladly refund every cent." "You weren't doing me any good" said Norma, with a hysterical note in her voice. Fish gave here a look of sorrowful patience. "He'd just come in and look at my work and say something like, 'This has a good feeling,' or 'The symmetry is good,' or some meanthing of beauty inless thing like that. I was getting so nervous, I couldn't even draw. That's when I wrote you, Aunt Marie, but you were in Europe. My golly, I had to do something, didn't I?" Her hands were clenched white in her lap. "There, dear," Mrs. Prentice murmured, and gave her arm a little squeeze. "I've been going to day classes at the Art Center," Norma said between her teeth. "It was all I could afford." Mrs. Prentice's eyes sparkled with indignation. "Mr. Wilniibgton, I don't think we have to discuss this much longer. I want you to return the money I paid you. I think it's disgraceful, a well-known artist like you stooping -- " "Mrs. Prentice," said Fish, pitching his voice lower again, "if it wasn't for my faith in Norma's great future as an artist, why, I would hand you over ev-ry cent. But, as it is, she would be making a great mistake, so Ij suggest again -- " "Doc," said Dave rudely,' "you give her back that money now, and pretty damn quick." He leaned forward to speak to the . older woman. "You want to know what his real name is? It's Fish Anyhow, it was when I met him. This whole thing is just a joke. Why, he's no artist. The real George Wilmington is his nephew; he's an invalid out in Wisconsin -- and Doc here has just been fronting for him, because he's too sick to stand the publicity and all. Now that's the truth. Or as much of it as I know." Fish said sorrowfully, "Dave, is this the thanks I get for putting you through art school?" "You got me the scholarship, but it didn't cost you anything. I found that out from the director. I guess you just wanted to put me out of the way, so I wouldn't talk too much. Well, gee. Doc, that was all right. But when I met Norma over at your place yesterday -- "What? When was that?" "About ten o'clock." Fish winced; he had been in bed with a bad head and hadn't answered the bell. If he'd only known! "You weren't home, so we got to talking and -- well, pretending to be your nephew, that's one thing, but when you promise to teach somebody -- when you can't even draw a line yourself!" G ordon fish raised a hand. "Now, Dave, there's a thing or two you don't know. You say my real name is Fish. Now did you ever see my birth certificate, or did you know anybody that knew me as a child? How do you know my name is Fish?" "Well, you told me." "That's right, Dave, I did. And you say the real George Wilmington is an invalid out in Wisconsin. You ever see him, Dave? You ever been in Wisconsin?" "Well, no, but -- " "Neither have I. No, Dave he lowered his voice solemnly"every single thing I told you about tliat was just a lie. And I admit it. Now here was the place for a tear. Fish turned his mind to the creditors, the trouble with the machine, the oil stock salesman who had gone south with his money, the lawyers who were robbing him blind trying to get it back, the ungratefulness of everybody. A warm trickle crept out onto his cheek, and lowering his head, he knuckled it away. Well, what -- said Dave, bewildered. Fish said with an effort, "I had reasons. Certain reasons. You know it's -- it's hard for me to talk about 'em. Mrs. Prentice -- I wonder if I could see you alone." She was leaning forward a little, looking at him with concern. It never failed -- a woman like that couldn't stand to see a man cry. "Well, it's certainly all right with me," said Norma, getting up. She walked awajr and Dave followed her. After a moment, the door closed behind them. Fish blew his nose, dabbed unobtrusively at his eyes, straightened up bravely and put his handkerchief away. "Mrs. Prentice, I don't s'pose you know that I'm a widower." Her eyes widened a little. It's true I losst my dear wife -- I don't usually talk about it, as a matter of fact, but somehow -- I don t know if you've been bereaved yourself, Mrs. Prentice -- " She said nervously, "Didn't Norma tell you? I'm a widow, Mr. Wilmington." "No!" said Fish. "Isn't that strange? I felt something -- you know, a vibration. Well, Mrs. Prentice can I call you Marie? you know, after my loss -- " time for another tear now; once started, they came easily -- "I just went to pieces. I couldn't touch a pencil for a year. And even to this day, I can t draw a line if there's anybody watching me. Now -- there's the reason for this whole mixup. That business about my nephew and all, that was just a story I made up to make things a little easier. That's what I thought. I dont know, I'm so clumsy where it takes a little tact, I'm just like a bull in a china closet, Marie. And that's the whole story." He sat back, blew his nose vigorously again. were moist, but her handsome face had a wary expression. "I honestly don't know what to think, Mr. Wilmington. You say you can't draw in public -- " "Call me George. You see, it's what psychologists call a truma -- " "Well, how would this be? I'll step outside for a few minutes and you draw a picture. Now I think that would be -- " Fish was shaking his head sadly. "Ifs worse than I told you. I can't draw anywhere except in one room in my house IVe got it fixed up with her picture, and some mementoes -- " He gulped hard, but decided against a third tear. "I'm sorry, I'd do it for you if I could, but -- " She sat quietly in thought for a moment "Then let's sa. ' this. You SO Mr. Wilmington, and something a sketch of me, "Iny face, from memory. I believe any competent artist could do that?" Fish hesitated, not liking to say yes or no. "Now, you see, that will settle it You couldn't get a snapshot of me and send it off to Wisconsin -- there wouldn't be time. I'll give you, oh, half an hour." "Half an " "That should be enough, shouldn't it? So that when I come to call on you, in half an hour from now, if you have a sketch of mea likeness -- why, then. I'll know that you're telling the truth. If not -- " Boxed in, Fish made the best of it. He got to his feet with a confident smile. "Well, now, that's fair enough. One thing, I know I could never forget your face. And I want to b tell you how relieved I am that we had this little talk, incidentally, and -- Well, I better go and get that drawing started. Til expect you in half an hour, Marie!' He paused at the door. "I'll be there -- George," she said. G runting and twitching. Fish stormed into the house, banging doors behind him. Place was a mess -- sofa cushions and newspapers all over the living room -- but never mind, she might marry him to clean up his house. Thing was -- he unlocked the private room, feverishly swept the cover off the big machine, and began pushing buttons on one of the banks -- thing was, get that sketch made. One chance in -- how many? But better than no chance at all. He switched on the machine, watched in helpless impatience while the arms drifted out and hung motionless. A face -- and a likeness! Only hope he had was to put it together from bits and pieces. Nothing left now that would work in the whole machine but some useless items, mechanical drawings and architecture, and a few scraps of anatomy. Let there be enough for one more face -- and let it be something like Marie's face! The machine clicked suddenly and began to trace a line. Fish stood over it in hand-wringing anxiety, watching how the combined motion of the two revolving pivots translated the straight push of the arm into a subtle line. Pretty thing to watch, even if he never could like what it made. Now here it came curving around -- now the arm was lifting, going back -- A nose! It was drawing a nose! It was a kind of Greek statue nose, shapely but thick, not much like Marie's fine curved nose, but never mind, he could talk her into it -- give him the raw material, he could always sell -- let there be any kind of female face, so long as it wasn't ugly -- Come on now, an eye! But the arms stopped and hung motionless again. The machine hummed quietly; the dials were lit; nothing happened. Eaten by impatience. Fish looked at his watch, clapped his palm over it, swore, wandered rapidly out of the room. Sometimes, lately, the machine would just sit like that for minutes at a time, as if it were trying and trying to work, but somehow not succeeding, and then click, away it would go again. He hurried back, looked -- still nothing -- and went off, pacing the empty rooms, looking for something to do. There was some mail in the basket under the letter drop, he noticed for the first time. Mostly bills -- he threw them behind the sofa -- but one was a long, bulky brown envelope with "Encyclopaedia Britannica Library Research Service in the corner. It had been so long ago, it took him a moment to remember. A couple of weeks after he sent in his letter, there had been a polite printed postcard acknowledging it, then nothing for months. Somewhere along the line he had decided he wasn't going to get an answer; there wasn't any such language... Well, let's see. He picked the end of the envelope open. His restless eye was caught by the dining room clock. Look at the timel Clutching the envelope forgetfully, he rushed into the private room again. The machine was still sitting motionless, humming, lit. ' There was nothing on the paper but a nose. Fish pounded on the side of the big machine, with no result except to his fist, and then on the bank that was in use. Nothing. He turned away, noticed he was still holding the envelope, and irritably plucked out the papers inside. folder, stapled at the top. When he lifted the cover, there was a single sheet of paper inside. At the top, the Britannica letterhead, and "V. A. Sternback, Director." Then, in the middle, His eyes ran down the list, startled. There were all the words he had copied off, and, opposite each one, a word in English. Teckning... drawing. Monster... pattern. Utplana... to erase. Anvandning... application, use. Fish looked up. Then that was why nothing had happened when he pressed the "Utplana" button -- he'd always tried it before the machine made a drawing, never while there was a finished one on the board. Now why hadn't he thought of that? Yes, and here was Avsla... to reject. And slutsatsen... completion. "To reject a drawing before completion, press..." He'd never done that, either. What about the middle button? Torka... to wipe. To wipe? Let's see, there was another word -- Avlagsna, that was it -- sometimes the p irase Avlagsna ett monster woula be running through his head when he was half awake, like a whispered warning. Here it was. Avlagsna... to remove. His hands were shaking. "To remove a pattern from bank after use, press button 'Wipe.' " He let the foider fall. All this time, not knowing, he'd been systematically using up the precious patterns in the machine, throwing them away one by one, until now there was nothing left -- just eight big hunks of useless machinery, made for somebody somewhere who spoke Swedish... The machine clicked softly and the other arm began to move. It traced a graceful upright line, some distance in front of the nose. It looped over and came back down again, then up... Somewhere distant, the doorbell rang imperiously. Fish stared mesmerized at the paper. The moving point traced another graceful open loop, then another, like a squeezed-together roller coaster. Then another one, moving inexorably and without hurry: now there were four. Without pausing, it extended the last line downward and then brought it across. The line met the tip of the nose and curved back. The four open loops were fingers. The fifth one was a thumb. The machine, humming quietly, withdrew its arms into their re- cesses. After a moment, the lights went dark and the hum stopped. Outside, the doorbell rang again, and went on ringing.      Next month's is the #th anniversary issue of Galaxy, a large event indeed, and one to be properly celebrated with a suitably impressive present for our readers. Said present is at hand -- a monumental successor to the mighty serials length story, and a heroic saga it is, as you have every reason to expect from this splendidly imaginative, resourceful writer. upon trick, and you really wouldn't want a brief summary of it in advance; that would ground the very first shock. Let's say instead: It stands to reason that the last thing a man can bungle is his own death. But not Blaine. He has some finished business left to unfinish! Novelets and short stories and our regular features, of course, with a neighborly suggestion not to miss Willy Ley's discussion of "X-Rays in Space." There's more to cosmic radiation than meets the Earth, as our orbiting instrumentation far, far above the atmosphere constantly warns the experts -- and Ley points out the mysteries fhat have unexpectedly appeared, as well as those that were anticipated in theory -- and if you don't know how well along we are in solving those mysteries, you may find some of your strongest convictions as outdated as antiphlogiston. We wouldn't want that to happen, would we? Why We Make This Amazingly Generous Offer "-Continued from Back Cover And if you DO go back, will you ever be able to return to your #st century paradise? In short, can you actually live your life twice? Bead this Whole Amazing Story -- Yours for Only #( Science-fiction fans, get set for a real challenge to Heinlein -- one of today's topnotch science-fiction writGrs is a thriller crammed with new turns and new twists. You'll find your everyday thought processes turned topsy-turvy by it. It's selling everywhere right now for #. But as a new member of the ScienceFiction Book Club, you caniget this new book for only one dime! Read, below why the Club is making this amazing offer -- then rush in the coupon (with only #) at once ! lHY DO we offer you this brand-new, fully  length Science-Fiction thriller for only # ? Simply to introduce you to the Science-Fiction Book Club, a wonderful idea in bringing you the best of the new sciencfiction books -- at a mere fraction of their usual cost! Each month the Club brings you only the finest, brand-new, full-length books fok charge) -- even though they cost #, # and up in the original publisher's editions.  Each month's selection is described in advance in the Club's free bulletin. You take only those books you want -- as few as # a year. No money in advance. No membership fees. You may cancel nriembership at any time. Recent selections have included such books as The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, The Isotove Man and Earthman, Come Home. 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You're a dollar invention. You're sitting pretty -- until your passionate' friend Belle Darkin, upsets your apple rt. First she steals your invention.Th she slips you a hypo; puts you in a nekind of deep freeze called "The Long Slteep.:'. the year # -- and you're stilLoUly # years old! But time has passedV while you were in 'coJd storage,"  and Belle, your ea;-setheart, is  now # years older than you are ! ' Well, you've lost interest in her anyway, after the way she twotimed and future-timed you. The Fascinating World of # A.D. But there are other attractions in that world of # : its women in "sticktite" clothes they just throw away after wearing... its honeymoon trips to the" moon... its remarkable new conveniences...its brand new words of love and ways to live. Nomore menial labor. Robots take care of all that. Soon you're enjoying life as never before! You're glad to be out of that miserably backward world of the #th century. But unfortunately you must get back to the year #, to take care of one last urgent mission. You only hope that you can come back to the #st century by taking "The Long Sleep" again. The big question is: Can it be done? Vburt -Continued on other side io This Spine-Tingling Science-Fiction Novel by Robert Heinlein X galaxy # IN By Looking For Us, Professor? Science Fiction's phenomenal growth in popularity." "And that needs an explanation. Professor?" "From a socio-psychological viewpoint, most definitely. To what do you attribute the constant increase of interest?" "Well... let's try it this way. Professor. Suppose we ask the questions and you answer them." "So? A bit unusual, but go right ahead." "Do you think atomic doom is the only future for mankind?" "Not exactly, but the newspapers and the commentators -- " believe we will be able to leave the Earth?" "Eventually, perhaps. But not in our lifetime." "We don't agree. Assuming you're right, though, isn't that all the more reason to want to know what we'll find on other planets. Professor?" "I think I see what you mean." "Can we achieve immortality?" "Ah. Hum. I've often wondered." "And travel to different eras in time?" "That would be exciting." so popular? Every idea we've mentioned -- and a lot more, belive them!" "Umm. How do I subscribe? After all, one shouldn't resist a trend, should one? Heh, heh!" "Just fill out the coupon -- or make out your own order and send it in. The coupon's for your convenience, not ours. And now you'll be one of us!" Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden satellite in the Solar System, Titan is the only one definitely known to retain an atmosphere, making mining of its rich ores easy and profitable. In accordance with U.N. policy, Titan, (ike Eorth's own Antarctica, has been divided into notional zones in advance of landing, and this section is being officially claimed for the U.S.A. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright. New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. X-Rays in Space by H. L. Gold # by Floyd C. Gale I # TT was the New York Times Magazine that reported: "In case of obligatory metamorphosis into an animal, # per cent of adult male Britons would prefer to become horses and # per cent of female Britons would prefer to become cats. -- Oxford University" to poll American preferences, Galaxy undertook this vital task. Our Interviewer #I (we number them like checks in a new checkbook) was assigned to get the Inner Meaning from any passing psychiatrist (the object was no money). His notes follow: "Cornered Dr. Ashley Pantagruel at a party. Read clipping. Dr. Pantagruel cornered me. 'The sexual symbolism of horse and cat is too well known to bear repeating,' he said, and has been proving it for hours. Scotch and bourbon ran out; hate gin, but not that much. Something re toilet training : horses anywhere, cats in catbox. Wish I could ask that chartreuse girl in the very brainy-looking sweater, have to knock him down to get by..." The fine for disturbing the peace equaling an office visit, we dispatched Interviewer # to query Dr. Liebfraumilch. His # minutes expired before he could get past # #'s findings. However, both expert opinions coincide: the preferences of the adult male and female Britons were no surprise at all to psychiatry. Considerably in conflict with this definitive analysis are the answers of the American public. Since the Times neglected to state how large and representative the Oxford sampling was, we settled upon # interviews as optimum. To hold down expenses, all were interviewed within subway distance. As with Drs. Pantagruel and Liebfraumilch, we revealed the Oxford statistics to a control group to see whether their preferences would be affected. Cats # Horses # This, of course, is in direct contrast with the Oxford findings. Questioned about this (by telephone), Drs. Pantagruel and Liebfraumilch stated that it was equally predictable in terms of parental fixations. We then queried the control group, which disagreed in varying degrees of emotionalism and literacy approximately as follows: "Who wants to be a horse (cat) when all the dames (guys) are cats (horses)?" Dr. Pantagruel : "That's what they think." Dr. Liebfraumilch: "That's what they think." We showed the control group its first ballot (we kept nothing from them) and obtained a different response: Horses # Cats # Dr. Pantagruel: "What better proof do you need? As I was saying when we were cut off last time, insecurity and guilt as to sex -- " Dr. Liebfraumilch: "Of course. Sexual guilt and insecurity -- " We would have gone back to the control group, but our accountant (cat-horse) objected on the grounds that he could not keep on interminably working out table revisions, a view shared by our office manager (horse-cat) who was furnishing subway tokens and coins for telephones. We had to be satisfied with the statistical prediction that, as the horse goes, so goes the cat, or vice versa, whether for their reasons or the doctors' being left for future researchers to determine. This decision freed Interviewers #I and # to aid #, who had been having rather a rough time all by herself with the uncontrolled group, and we obtained these conclusions in pretty short order: Horses (draft) # Horses (race) # Bulls # Eagles # Undecided # Cats (alley) # Cats (pedigree) # Mink # Swans # Undecided # In females (raw), the seeming error of # is caused by all insisting on being both cats and furbearing animals; the latter is listed as a single item, since the furs are about equal, statistically speaking, in retail value. Another false deduction (birdbreeding) may be made from the fact that male preference was # eagles and female # swans. Actually, it is as insoluble as the English dilemma -- eagles and swans have as little in common romantically as horses and cats. The "Undecided" sub-groups showed some anomalous reactions that are worthy of note: Daisy Rose Dahlia, housewife: "Can't one be a flower?" B.B.D. Osborne, tycoon: "You pick it -- anything at all -- I'm late for an appointment." Hathaway Peterson, biology instructor: "Procreation aside, it's scientifically untenable. How would it be done?" John Dole, retired: "Congress'll never pass it!" Alonzo Lophauser, swami: "Go through all those incarnations again?" Time Killer Beginning A #-Part Serial If stands to reason that the last thing a man can bungle is his own death... but not Blaine; he had some finished business yet to unfinishi I A fterward, Thomas Blaine thought about the manner of his dying and wished it had been more interesting. Why couldn't his death have come while he was battling a typhoon, meeting a tiger's charge, or climbing a windswept mountain? Why had his death been so tame, so commonplace, so ordinary? But an enterprising death, he realized, would have been out of character for him. Undoubtedly he was meant to die in just the quick, common, messy, painless way he did. And all his life must have gone into the forming and shaping of that death -- a vague indication in childhood, a fair promise in his college years, an implacable certainty at the age of thirty-two. Still, no matter how commonplace, one's death is the most climactic event of one's life. Blaine thought about his with intense curiosity. He had to know about those last precious moments when his own particular death lay waiting for him on a dark New Jersey highway. Had there been some warning sign, some portent? What had he done, or not done? What had he been thinking? Those final seconds were crucial to him. How, exactly, had he died? straight, empty white highway, his headlights probing ahead, the darkness receding endlessly before him. His speedometer read seventy-five. It felt like forty. Far down the road, he saw headlights approaching, the first in hours. Blaine was returning to New York after a week's vacation at his cabin on Chesapeake Bay. He had fished and swum and dozed in the sun on the rough planks of his dock. One day he sailed his sloop to Oxford and attended a dance at the yacht club that night. He met a silly, pert-nosed girl in a blue dress who told him he looked like a South Seas adventurer, so tanned and tall in his khakis. He sailed back to his cabin the next day, to doze in the sun and dream of giving up everything, loading his sailboat with canned goods and heading for Tahiti. Ah, Raiatea, the mountains of Moqrea, the fresh trade wind... But a continent and an ocean lay between him and Tahiti, and other obstacles besides. The thought was only for an hour's dreaming and definitely not to be acted upon. Now he was returning to New York, to his job as a junior yacht designer for the famous old firm of Mattison  Peters. The other car's headlights were drawing near. Blaine slowed to sixty. In spite of his title, there were few yachts for Blaine to design. Old Tom Mattison took care of the conventional cruising boats. His brother Rolf, known as the Wizard of Mystic, had an international reputation for his ocean-racing sailboats and fast one-designs. So what was there for a junior yacht designer to do? Blaine drew layouts and deck plans, and handled promotion, advertising and publicity. It was responsible work and not without its satisfactions. But it was not yacht designing. He knew he should strike out on his own. But there were so many yacht designers, so few customers. As he had told Laura, it was rather like designing arbalests, catapults and matchlocks. Interesting creative work, but who would buy your products? "You could find a market for your sailboats," she had told him, distressingly direct. He had grinned. "Action isn't my forte. I'm an expert on contemplation and mild regret." "You mean you're lazy." "Not at all. That's like saying that a hawk doesn't gallop well, or a horse has poor soaring ability. You can't compare different species. I'm just not the go-getter type of human. For me, dreams, reveries, visions, and plans meant only for contemplation, never for execution." "I hate to hear you talk like that," she said snappishly. " a bit thick, of course. But there was a lot of truth in it. He had a pleasant job, an adequate salary, a secure position. He had an apartment in Greenwich Village, a hi-h, a car, a small cabin on Chesapeake Bay, a fine sloop, and the affection of Laura and several other girls. Perhaps, as Laura somewhat tritely expressed it, he was caught in an eddy on the current of life... But so what? You could observe the scenery better from a gently revolving eddy. The other car's headlights were very near. Blaine noticed, with a sense of shock, that he had increased speed to eighty miles an hour. He let up on the accelerator. His car swerved freakishly, violently, toward the oncoming headlights. Blowout? Steering failure? He twisted hard on the steering wheel. It wouldn't turn. His car struck the low concrete separation between north and south lanes, and bounded high into the air. The steering wheel spun in his hands and the engine wailed like a lost soul. The other car was trying to swerve, too late. They were going to meet nearly head-on. And Blaine thought. Yes, I'm one of them. I'm one of those silly asses you read about whose cars go out of control and kill innocent people. Modem cars and modem roads and higher speeds and the same old sloppy reflexes... Suddenly, unaccountably, the steering wheel was working again, a razor's edge reprieve. Blaine ignored it. As the other car's headlights glared across his windshield, his mood suddenly changed from regret to exultance. For a moment, he welcomed the smash, lusted for it, and for pain, destmction, cmelty and death. Then the cars came together. The feeling of exultance faded as quickly as it had come. Blaine felt a profound regret for all he had left imdone, the waters unsailed, movies unseen, books unread, girls untouched. He was thrown forward. The steering wheel broke off in his hands. The steering column speared him through the chest and broke his spine as his head drove through the thick safety glass. An instant later, he was quickly, commonly, messily, painlessly dead. II white room. "He's alive now," someone said. Blaine opened his eyes. Two men were standing over him. One was an ugly, red-faced man dressed in white, who appeared to be a doctor. The other was a tiny, bald, spiderlike old man with a peering, animated monkeylike face. "How do you feel?" the doctor asked. "All right, I guess," Blaine said. "Do you see?" the doctor said, turning to the spiderlike old man. "He's perfectly sane, Mr. Reilly." "Hmm," said Reilly. "Yes, sir," the doctor said. "The death trauma has been overrated. Grossly overrated, as my forthcoming book will prove." Reilly nodded impatiently. "Well, let's get started with the recording." He and the doctor walked away. Blaine watched them go, wondering what they had been talking about. A fat and motherly nurse came to his bedside. "How do you feel?" she asked. "Fine," said Blaine. "But I'd like to know -- " "Sorry," the nurse said, "no questions yet; doctor's orders. Drink this, it'll pep you up. That's a good boy. Don't worry, everything's going to be all right." She left. Her reassuring words frightened him. What did she mean, everything's going to be all right? That meant something was wrong! What was it, what was wrong? What was he doing here, what had happened? The doctor and Mr. Reilly returned, accompanied by a young woman. "Is he all right. Doctor?" the young woman asked. "Perfectly sane," the red-faced doctor said. "I'd call it a good fit." "Then I can begin the recording?" "Certainly, Miss Thorne, though I cannot guarantee his behavior. The death trauma, though grossly overrated, is still capable of -- " "All right, Marie -- begin," Reilly said, in a voice that showed who was boss. "Yes, sir," the girl said. and bent over him. She was a very pretty girl, Blaine noticed. Her features were clean-cut, her skin fresh and glowing. She had long, gleaming brown hair pulled too tightly back over her small ears, and there was a faint hint of perfume about her. She should have been beautiful, but she was marred by the immobility of her features, the controlled tenseness of her slender body. It was hard to imagine her laughing or crying. It was impossible to imagine her in bed. There was something of the fanatic about her, something of the dedicated revolutionary; but he suspected that her cause was herself. "Where do you think you are?" she asked. "Looks like a hospital. I suppose -- " He stopped. He had just noticed a small microphone in her hand. "Yes, what do you suppose?" She made a small gesture. Men came forward and wheeled heavy equipment around his bed. "Go right ahead," Marie Thorne said. "Tell us." "To hell with that," Blaine said moodily, watching the men set up their machines around him. "What is this? What's going on?" "We're trying to help you," said Marie Thorne. "Won't you cooperate?" Blaine nodded, wishing she would smile. He felt suddenly very unsure of himself. Had something happened to him? "Do you remember the accident?" she asked. "What accident?" "Do you remember being hurt?" Blaine shuddered as his memory returned in a rush of spinning lights, wailing engine, impact and breakage. "Yes. The steering wheel broke. I got it through the chest. Then my head hit." "Look at your chest," she said. Blaine looked. His chest, beneath white pajamas, was unmarked. "Impossible!" he cried. His own voice sounded hollow, distant, unreal. He was aware of the men around his bed talking as they bent over their machines, but they seemed like shadows, flat and without substance. Their thin, unimportant voices were like flies buzzing against a window. The red-faced doctor smiled dully, and spiderlike old Reilly tapped his foot and looked impatient. "Nice first reaction." "Very nice indeed." Marie Thorne said to him, "You are unhurt." aged body and remembered the accident. "I can't believe it!" "He's coming on perfectly." "Fine mixture of belief and incredulity." Marie Thorne said, "Quiet, please. Go ahead." "I remember the accident," Blaine said. "I remember the smashing. I remember -- dying." "Get that?" "Hell, yes. It really plays!" "Perfectly spontaneous scene." "Marvelous! They'll go wild over it!" She said, "A little less noise, please. Then you remember dying?" "Yes, yes, I died!" "His face!" "That ludicrous expression heightens the reality." She said, "Look carefully at your body. Here's a mirror. Examine your face." Blaine looked, and shivered like a man in fever. He touched the mirror, then ran shaking fingers over his face. "It isn't my face! Where's my face? Where did you put my body and face?" He was in a nightmare from which he could never awaken. Reilly and the ugly doctor watched him. The flat shadow men surrounded him, their voices buzzing like flies against a window, tending their cardboard machines, filled with vague menace, yet strangely indifferent, almost unaware of him. Marie Thorne bent low over him with her tight, pretty face, and from her small red mouth came gentle nightmare words. "Your body is dead, killed in an automobile accident. You can remember its dying. But we managed to save the part of you that really counts. We saved your mind and have given you a new body for it here, in what you would call the future." Blaine opjened his mouth to scream, and closed it again. "It's unbelievable," he said instead. And the flies buzzed. "Understatement." "Well, of course. One can't be frenetic forever!' "I expected a little more scenery-chewing." "Wrongly. Understatement rather accentuates his dilemma." "Perhaps, in pure stage terms. But consider the thing realistically. This poor guy has just discovered that he died in an automobile accident and is now reborn in a new body. So what does he say about it? He says, 'Ifs unbelievable! Damn it, he's not really reacting to the shock!" "He is! Yotre projecting!" Blaine, deep in his nightmare, was hardly aware of the soft, buzzing voices. He asked, "Did I really die?" She nodded. "And am I really born again in a different body?" She nodded again, waiting. Blaine looked at her, and at the shadow men tending their cardboard machines. Why were they bothering him? Why couldn't they go pick on some other dead man? Corpses shouldn't be forced to answer questions. Death was Man's ancient privilege, his immemorial pact with life, granted to the slave as well as the noble. Death was Man's solace and his right. But perhaps they had revoked that right and now you couldn't evade your responsibilities simply by being dead. speak. And Blaine wondered if insanity still retained its hereditary privileges. With ease, he could slip over and find out. But insanity is not granted to everyone. Blaine's self-control returned. He looked up at Marie Thome. "My feelings," he said slowly, "are difficult to describe. I've died, and now I'm contemplating the fact. I don't suppose any man fully believes -- " "Lets cut it right here. He's getting analytical." "I think you're right," Marie Thorne said. She bent low over Blaine. "Tell me your name." "Thomas Blaine." "What?" All noise in the room stopped. The men tending the recording machines were deathly silent. Mr. Reilly stepped forward, and the doctor watched him anxiously. "What did you say your name was?" Reilly asked. "Blaine. Thomas Blaine." "Age?" "Thirty-two." "Marital status?" "Single." "Are you sure?" Reilly insisted. "Are you sure that your name is Blaine?" "Absolutely certain," Blaine answered. "What is -- " Reilly's mouth twisted. He controlled himself with an effort and asked, "What do you remember about the Threshold?" "The what?" "The Threshold!" Reilly roared. "Tell me about it!" "I don't remember an # dhing," Blaine said. "You must! You were in the Threshold for # years, until we pulled you into this body! You must remember! Tell me what it was like!" "I don't know what you're talking about," Blaine said firmly. The spidery old man stared at him. He asked again, "What is your name?" "Blaine." "He's the wrong man!" Reilly screamed. "Don't you fools see it? Wrong, all wrong, everything wrong!" The doctor moved to Reill # r's side, trying to calm him. But the old man thrust him aside and glared down at Blaine. "You're the wrong man!" Reilly shouted. "And you don't remember the Threshold! Why, damn you, you've no right in that body, no right at all! It wasn't meant for you, you useless interloper! The whole experiment's a failure and you've stolen a good, exfensive body. Thief! I'll rip the life out of you with my two hands!" anger. His thin, long-nailed hands reached for Blaine's throat. Marie Thorne and the doctor pulled him back. In a moment, Reilly recovered and began to tremble violently. "Sir," the doctor said to him, "your body is not functioning properly. At best, it is not allowing you to think well. At worst, it can't withstand shocks like these. Under the circumstances, I must insist that you take an immediate reincarnation." "No... Reilly said feebly. "Yes," the doctor said. "You must reincarnate, sir, while you're still able. But first, some rest." He led the old man away. The technicians, solid and mundane now, their vague menace disappeared, began rolling away their equipment. "Darn good while it lasted." "A collector's item." "Shame it'll never be released." "Wait!" Blaine cried. "I don't understand. Where am I? What happened? How -- " "I'll explain everything later," Marie Thorne said. "I'm terribly sorry, things have gone wrong. I have to help arrange Mr. Reilly's reincarnation." The men and equipment were gone. Marie Thorne smiled reassuringly and hurried away. Blaine felt ridiculously close to tears. He blinked rapidly when the fat and motherly nurse came back. "Drink this," said the nurse. "It'll make you sleep. That's it, take it all down like a good boy. Just relax, you had a big day, what with dying and being reborn and all." Two big tears rolled down Blaine's cheeks. "Dear me," said the nurse, "the cameras should be here now. Those are genuine spontaneous tears if I ever saw any. Many a tragic and spontaneous scene I've witnessed in this infirmary, believe me, and I could tell those snooty recording boys something about genuine emotion if I wanted to, and they thinking they know all the secrets of the human heart." "Where am I?" Blaine asked drowsily. "Where is this?" "This is the Rex Corporation," the nurse said. "We're in the lifeafter-death business." "Oh," said Blaine. Then he was asleep. Ill calm and rested. He looked at the white bed and white room, and remembered. He had been killed in an accident and reborn in the future. There had been a doctor who considered the death trauma overrated, and men who recorded his spontaneous reaction and declared them a collector's item, and a pretty girl whose features showed a lamentable lack of emotion, and a nurse who spoke of the life-after-death business. Blaine yawned and stretched. Dead. Dead at thirty-two. A pity, he thought, that this young life was snuffed in its prime. He'd been a good sort, really, and quite promising... But that was no way to feel. Yesterday, he reminded himself firmly, he was a yacht designer driving back from Maryland. Today he was a man reborn into the future. The future! Reborn! The words lacked impact. He had already grown used to the idea. One grows used to anything, he thought, even to one's death. Especially to one's death. If you chopped off a man's head three times a day for twenty years, he'd grow used to it, and probably cry like a baby if you stopped... He didn't care to pursue that train of thought any further. He thought about Laura. Would she weep for him? Would she get drunk? Or would she just feel mildly depressed at the news, and take a tranquilizer for it? What about Jane and Miriam? Would they even hear about his death? Probably not. Months later, they might wonder why he never called any more. past. Now he was in the future. He remembered magazine articles and stories he had read. Today there might be free atomic power, undersea farming, world peace, universal birth regulation, interplanetary travel, free love, brotherhood of mankind, a cure for all diseases, and a planned society in which men breathed deep the air of freedom. That's what there should be. Blaine thought. But there were less pleasant possibilities. Perhaps a grim-faced Oligarch had Earth in his iron grasp, while a dedicated underground struggled toward freedom. Or small, gelatinous alien creatures with outlandish names might have enslaved the human race. Perhaps a new and horrible disease marched unchecked across the land, or p)ossibly the Earth, swept of all culture by hydrogen warfare, fought painfully back to technological civilization while human wolfpacks roamed the baddismal things could have happened. And yet, Blaine thought, mankind showed a historic ability to avoid the extremes of doom as well as the extremes of bliss. Chaos was forever predicted and utopia was continually seen just ahead. And neither came to pass. Accordingly, Blaine expected that this future would show certain definite improvements over the past, but he expected some deteriorations as well; some old problems would be gone, but certain others would have taken their places. "In short," Blaine said to himself, "I expect that this future will be like all futures in comparison with their pasts. That's not very specific, but then I'm not in the predicting or the prophesying business." by Marie Thorne walking briskly into the room. "Good morning," she said. "How do you feel?" "Like a new man." "Good. Would you sign this, please?" She held out a pen and a typed paper. "You're very damned efficient," said Blaine. "What am I signing?" "Read it," she said. "It's a release absolving us from any legal responsibility in saving your life." "Eh?" "We saved you. But it's against the law to save lives without the potential victim's written consent. There wasn't opportunity for the Rex Corporation lawyers to obtain your consent beforehand. So we'd like to protect ourselves now." "What is the Rex Corporation?" "We're affiliated with the Hereafter Corporation," she said. "Our outfit is as well known today as Flyier-Thiess was in your time." "Who's Flyier-Thiess?" "No? Ford, then?" "Yeah, Ford. So the Rex Corporation is as well known as Ford. What does it do?" "It manufactures Rex Power Systems," she said, "which are used to Fower spaceships, reincarnation machines, hereafter drivers, and the like. It was a development of the Rex Power Systems that snatched you from your car at the moment after death and brought you into the future. The trouble is, you aren't the man we were trying to save." "Who were you trying to save?" "A religious leader of your time. We wanted him to endorse our product." Blaine looked puzzled. "We're in the scientific afterlife business," she told him. 'We can guarantee a life after death. But the organized religions don't like our form of salvation. They boycott us. Their adherents form a large potential market for our product. If we could get the endorsement of a progressive religious leader, it would help break down the sales resistance." "What happened to the man you tried to save?" Blaine asked. "That's what we'd like to know," Marie said. "You appeared in his place. It was very startling." "I can imagine," said Blaine. "But what is this scientific hereafter? How does it work?" "Would you mind signing the release?" The paper stated that he, Thomas Blaine, agreed not to bring suit against the Rex Corporation for their unauthorized saving of his life in the year # and the subsequent transporting of that life to a host body in New York in the year #. Blaine signed. "Now," he said. IV "about this scientific hereafter -- " "There isn't time," Marie told him. "It works. Just take my word for it. You'll see a part of the process almost immediately." "I will?" "Yes. Mr. Reilly is going to undertake an immediate reincarnation. He's been putting it off, trying to find a really suitable body. But his own body is deteriorating fast. His doctor advises reincarnation at once, and his grandfather is insisting on it." "Reilly's grandfather? How old is he?" "He was eighty-one when he died." "What?" "Yes, he died about sixty years ago. Reilly's father is dead, too, but he didn't stay in the Threshold, which is a pity because he had excellent business sense. An extra advisory ghost is always useful. Why are you staring at me, Blaine? Oh, I forgot, you don't know the setup. It's very simple, really. You'll pick it up as you go along." "I hope so," Blaine said. "Of course you will. The nurse will bring you some clothes. Please dress at once. Mr. Reilly wants to make you a business offer before he undertakes his reincarnation." "What kind of an offer?" "I'd better let him tell you himself," Marie Thome said, and briskly left the room.  I HE nurse brought him lunch on a tray. The bearded doctor came in, examined him and declared him perfectly fit There was not the slightest trace of rebirth depression, he declared, and the death trauma was obviously overrated. No reason why Blaine shouldn't be up and about The nurse came back with clothing, a blue shirt, brown slacks, and soft, bulbous gray shoes. The outfit, she assured him, was quite conservative. Blaine ate with good appetite. But before dressing, he examined his new body in the full-length bathroom mirror. It was the first chance he'd had for a careful appraisal. His former body had been tall and lean, with straight black hair and a good-humored boyish face. In thirty-two years, he had grown used to that quick, deft, easymoving body. With good grace, he had accepted its constitutional flaws, its occasional illnesses, and had glorified them into virtues, into unique properties of the personality that resided within them. For his body's limitations, far more than its capabilities, seemed to express his own particular essence. He had been fond of that body. His new body was a shock. It was heavily muscled, barrelchested, broad-shouldered. It felt top-heavy, for the legs were a little short in proportion to the herculean torso. His hands were large and calloused. Blaine made a fist and gazed at it respectfully. He could probably fell an ox with a single blow, if an ox were procurable. His face was square and bold, with a prominent jaw, wide cheekbones and a Roman nose. His hair was blond and curly. His eyes were a steely blue. It was a somewhat handsome, slightly brutal face. "I don't like it," Blaine said emphatically. "And I hate curly blond hair." His new body had considerable physical strength, but he had always disliked sheer physical strength. The body looked clumsy, graceless, difficult to manage. It was the kind of body that bumped into chairs and stepped on people's toes, shook hands too vigorously, talked too loudly and sweated profusely. Clothes would always bulge and constrict this body. It would need continual hard exercise to keep in shape, and Blaine detested exercise. Perhaps he would even have to diet; the body looked as though it had a slight tendency toward fat. physical strength is all very well," Blaine told himself, "if one has a purpose for it. Otherwise it's just a nuisance and a distraction, like trawling equipment on a racing yacht." The body was bad enough, but the face was worse. Blaine had never liked strong, harsh, roughhewn faces. They were fine for sandhogs, army sergeants, jungle explorers and the like, but not for a man who enjoyed cultured society. Such a face was obviously incapable of subtlety of expression. All nuance, the delicate interplay of line and plane, would be lost. With this face, you could grin or frown; only gross emotions would show. Experimentally, he smiled boyishly at the mirror. The result was a satyr's leer. "I've been gypped," Blaine said bitterly. It was apparent to him that the qualities of his present mind and his new body were opposed. Cooperation between them seemed impossible. Of course, his personality might reshape his body; on the other hand, his body might have some demands to make on his personality. "We'll see," Blaine told his formidable body, "who's boss." On his left shoulder was a long, jagged scar. He wondered how the body had received so grievous a wound. Then he began wondering where the body's real owner was. Could he still be lodged in the brain, lying doggo, waiting a chance to take over? Speculation was useless. Later, perhaps, Blaine would find out. He took a final look at himself in the mirror. He didn't like what he saw. He was afraid he never would. "Well," Blaine said at last, "dead men can't be choosers." He turned from the mirror and began dressing. Later, Marie Thorne came and took him to Mr. Reilly's tower apartment. lYl" R. Reilly sat erect and almost lost in a great, soft, thronelike chair. His wrinkled translucent skin was stretched tight across his skull and clawed hands, and bone and tendon showed clearly through the leathery, shrunken flesh. Blaine had the impression of blood coursing sluggishly through the brittle, purple varicosed veins, threatening momentarily to stop. Yet Reilly's posture was firm and his eyes were lucid in his humorous monkey face. "Please be seated, sir," Mr. Reilly said. "You too. Miss Thorne. I was just discussing you with my grandfather, Mr. Blaine." Blaine glanced around, almost expecting to see the sixty-yearsdead grandfather looming spectrally over him. But there was no sign of him in the ornate, highceilinged room. "He's gone now," Mr. Reilly explained. "Poor Grandfather can maintain an ectoplasmic state for only a brief time. But even so, he's better off than most ghosts. He tells me I must begin my reincarnation immediately." "And are you?" Blaine asked. "Of course. Ghosts generally have the power of viewing the future, you know. I could hardly go against his advice." Blaine's expression must have changed, for Reilly asked, "Don't you believe in ghosts, Mr. Blaine?" "I'm afraid I don't." "Of course not. I suppose the word has unfortunate connotations for your twentieth-century mind. Clanking chains, skeletons, all that nonsense. But words change their meaning, and even reality is altered as mankind alters and manipulates nature." "I see," Blaine said politely. "You consider that doubletalk," Mr. Reilly said good-naturedly. "It wasn't meant to be. Consider the manner in which words change their meaning. In the twentieth century, 'atoms' became a catchall word for imaginative writers with their 'atom guns' and 'atompowered ships.' An absurd word, which any level-headed man would do well to ignore, just as you level-headedly ignore 'ghosts.' Yet a few years later, 'atoms' conjured a picture of very real and imminent doom. No level-headed man could continue to ignore the word!" R eilly smiled reminiscently. " 'Radiation' changed from a dull textbook term to a source of cancerous ulcers. 'Space-sickness' was an abstract and unloaded term in your time. But in fifty years it meant hospitals filled with twisted bodies. Words tend to change, Mr. Blaine, from an abstract, fanciful, or academic use to a functional, realistic, everyday use. It happens when manipulation catches up with theory." "And ghosts?" "The process has been similar. Mr. Blaine, you'll simply have to change your concept of the word." "It'll be difficult," Blaine said. "But necessary. Remember, there was always a lot of evidence in their favor. The prognosis for their existence, you might say, was favorable. And when life after death became fact instead of wishful thinking, ghosts became fact." "I think I'll have to see one first," Blaine said. "Undoubtedly you will. But let's get down to business. Frankly, Mr. Blaine, your presence here is something of an embarrassment to us." "I regret that." "It wasn't your fault, of course. But look at the position we're in. We set up an expensive experiment and buy a costly host body. We expect to snatch a progressive cleric from your time to use in our campaign to sell the organized religions." "I guess I won't be much help there," Blaine said. "No. And what's worse, you bring us no information about the Threshold." "What's the Threshold?" "It is the interface region between Earth and the hereafter, through which you passed on your way here. We expected valuable data about the Threshold. But you have no recollection of it. None at all! The religions could use that fact against us, Blaine, if it ever leaked out" "Look," Blaine said, "I'm grateful to you people for saving my life, even if you did it accidentally. You certainly don't think Fm going to spill your secrets, do you?" "Mistakes can happen," Reilly pointed out. "Accidents can occur. You might change your mind. No, Mr. Blaine, you should not be here in #, a walking proof of bad judgment. Therefore, sir, I'd like to make a proposition." "I'm listening," Blaine said. "Suppose Rex buys you hereafter insurance, thus ensuring your life after death -- would you consent to suicide?" Blaine blinked rapidly, stunned. "No. Certainly not" "Why not?" Reilly asked. OR a moment the reason seemed self-evident. What creature consents to take its own life? Unhappily, Man does. So Blaine had to stop and sort his thoughts. "First of all," he said, "I'm not fully convinced about this hereafter." "Suppose we convince you," Mr. Reilly said. "Would you commit suicide then?" "No!" "But how shortsighted! Mr. Blaine, consider your position. This age is alien to you, inimical, unsatisfactory. What kind of work can you do? Who can you talk with, and about what? You can't even walk the streets without being in deadly peril of your life." 'LL find out how things work  here," Blaine said. "But you can never really know, never understand! You're in the same position a caveman would be, thrown haphazardly into your own #. He'd think himself capable enough, I suppose, on the basis of his experience with sabertooth tigers and hairy mastodons. Perhaps some kind soul would even warn him about gangsters. But what good would it do? Would it save him from being run over by a car, electrocuted on a subway track, asphyxiated by a gas stove, falling through an elevator shaft, cut to pieces on a power saw, or breaking his neck in the bathtub." "You have to be born to those things in order to walk unscathed among them, Mr. Blaine. And even so, these things happened to people in your age when they relaxed their attention for a moment! How much more likely would our caveman be to stumble?" "You're exaggerating the situation," Blaine said, feeling a light perspiration form on his forehead. "Am I? The dangers of the forest are as nothing to the dangers of the city. And when the city becomes a super-city -- " "I won't commit suicide," Blaine declared. "I'll take my chances. Let's drop the subject." "Why can't you be reasonable?" Mr. Reilly demanded in annoyance. "Kill yourself now and save us all a lot of trouble. I can outline your future for you if you don't. Perhaps, by sheer nerve and animal cunning, you'll survive for a year. Even two. It won't matter, in the end it's suicide anyhow. You're a suicide type. Suicide is written all over you -- you were born for it, Blaine! You'll kill yourself wretchedly in a year or two, slip out of your maimed flesh with relief -- but with no hereafter to welcome your tired mind." "You're crazy!" Blaine protested. "I'm never wrong about suicide types," Mr. Reilly said obstinately. "I can always spot them. Grandfather agrees with me, and he's never wrong. So if you'll only -- " "No," Blaine said. "I won't kill myself. I'm afraid you'll have to hire it done." "That's not my way," said Mr. Reilly. "I won't coerce you. But come to my reincarnation today. Get a glimpse of the hereafter. Perhaps you'll change your mind." Blaine hesitated, and the old man grinned at him. "No danger, I promise you, and no tricks! Did you fear I might steal your body? I selected a better host months ago from the open market. Frankly, I wouldn't have your body. You see, I wouldn't be comfortable in anything so gross." The interview was over. Marie Thorne led Blaine out. V HE reincarnation room was arranged like a small theater. It was often used, Blaine learned, for company lectures and educational programs on an executive level. Today the audience had been kept small and select. The Rex board of directors was present, five middle-aged men sitting in the back row and talking quietly among themselves. Near them was a recording secretary. A government observer was present as required by law, and there was a gaunt man with a hat pulled low over his face. This man, Marie explained, was a zombie representative. Blaine and Marie sat in front, as far from the directors as possible. On the raised stage, under white floodlights, the reincarnation apparatus was already in place. There were two sturdy armchairs equipped with straps and wires. Between the chairs was a large glossy black machine. Thick wires connected the machine to the chair, and gave Blaine the uneasy feeling that he was going to witness an execution. Several technicians were bent over the machine, making final adjustments. Standing near them was the redfaced doctor. Mr. Reilly came on the stage, nodded to the audience and sat down in one of the chairs. He was followed by a man in his forties with a frightened, pale, determined face. This was the host, the present possessor of the body that Mr. Reilly had contracted for. The host sat down in the other chair, glanced quickly at the audience and looked down at his hands. He seemed embarrassed. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and the armpits of his jacket were stained black. He didn't look at Reilly, nor did Reilly look at him. Another man came on the stage, bald and earnest-looking, wearing a dark suit with a cleric's collar and carrying a little black book. He began a whispered conversation with the two seated men. "Brother James," Marie Thorne said. "He's a clergyman of the Brotherhood of the Afterlife." "What's that?" "It's a new religion, outgrowth of the Crazy Years. During that time, there was a great religious controversy..." The burning question of the #s was the spiritual status of the hereafter. It became even worse after Hereafter, Inc., announced the advent of the scientific hereafter. The corporation tried desperately hard to avoid any religious involvement, but involvement couldn't very well be avoided. Most churchmen felt that science was unfairly pre-empting their territory. Hereafter, Inc., whether it liked or not, was considered the spokesman for a new scientific religious position: That salvation lay, not through religious, moral or ethical considerations, but through an applied, impersonal, invariant scientific principle. Convocations, meetings and congresses were held to decide the burning question. Some groups adopted the view that the newly revealed scientific hereafter was obviously not heaven, salvation, nirvana or paradise, because the soul was not involved. Mind, they held, is not synonymous with soul, nor is the soul contained in or a part of the mind. Granted, science had found a means of extending the existence of one portion of the mind-body entity. That was fine, but it didn't affect the soul at all, and certainly didn't mean immortality or heaven or nirvana or anything like that. The soul could not be affected by scientific manipulation. And the soul's disposition after the eventual and inevitable death of the mind in its scientific hereafter would be in accordance with traditional moral, ethical and religious practices. VOW!" Blaine said. "I think " I get what you mean. They were trying to achieve a coexistence between science and religion. But wasn't their reasoning a little subtle for some people?" "Yes," Marie Thorne said, "even though they explained it much better than I've done, and backed it up with all sorts of analogies. But that was only one position. Others didn't attemprt: coexistence. The standard religions held firm. They simply declared that the scientific hereafter was sinful. And one group solved the problem by joining the scientific position and declaring that the soul is contained in the mind." "I suppose that would be the Brotherhood of the Afterlife?" "Yes. They splintered off from other religions. According to them, the mind contains the soul, and the hereafter is the soul's rebirth after death, with no spiritual ifs and buts." "That's keeping up with the times," Blaine said. "But morality -- " "In their view, this didn't dispense with morality. The Afterlifers say that you can't impose morals and ethics on p)eople by a system of spiritual rewards and punishments; and if you could, you shouldn't. They say that morality must be good in its own right, first in terms of the social organism, second in terms of the individual man's best good." To Blaine, this seemed a lot to ask of morality. "I suppose it's a popular religion?" he asked. "Very popular," Marie Thorne answered. Blaine wanted to ask more, but Brother James had begun speaking. clergyman said to the host, "you have come to this place of your own free will, for the purpose of discontinuing your existence upon the earthly plane and resuming it upon the spiritual plane?" "Yes, Brother," the pale host whispered. "And the proper scientific instrumentality has been performed so that you may continue your existence upon the spiritual plane?" "Yes, Brother." B rother James turned to Reilly. "Kenneth Reilly, you have come to this place of your own free will for the purpose of continuing your existence upon Fitzsimmons?" "Yes, Brother," Reilly said, small and hard-faced. "And you have made possible trance into the hereafter; and have paid a sum of money to Fitzsimmons' heirs; and have paid the government tax involved in transactions of this kind?" "Yes, Brother," Reilly said. "All these things being so," Brother James said, "no crime is involved, civic or religious. Here there is no taking of life, for the Fitzsimmons continue vmabated in the hereafter, and the life and personality of Kenneth Reilly continue unabated upon Earth. Therefore, let the reincarnation proceed!" To Blaine, it seemed a hideous mixture of wedding ceremony and execution. The smiling clergyman withdrew. Technicians secured the men to their chairs and attached electrodes to their arms, legs and foreheads. The theater grew very still and the Rex directors leaned forward expectantly in their seats. "Go ahead," Reilly said, looking at Blaine and smiling slightly. The chief technician turned a dial on the black machine. It hummed loudly and the floodlights dimmed. Both men jerked convulsively against the straps, then slumped back. Blaine whispered, "They're murdering that poor Fitzsimmons sucker." "That poor sucker," Marie Thorne told him, "knew exactly what he was doing. He's thirtyseven years old and he's been a failure all his life. He's never been able to hold a job for long and had no previous chance for survival after death. This was a marvelous opportunity for him. Furthermore, he has a wife and five children for whom he has not been able to provide. The sum Mr. Reilly paid will enable the wife to support the children and give them a decent education." "Hurray for them," said Blaine. "For sale, one father with slightly used body in excellent condition. Must sell! Sacrifice!" "You're being ridiculous," she said. "Nothing yet!" the doctor called. Blaine could sense apprehension in the room, and a hint of fear. The seconds dragged by while the doctors and technicians clustered around the host. "Still nothing!" the doctor called, his voice going shrill. "What's happening?" Blaine asked Marie Thorne. "As I told you, reincarnation is tricky and dangerous. Reilly's mind hasn't been able to possess the host body yet. He doesn't have much longer." "Why not?" "Because a body starts dying the moment it's untenanted. Irreversible death processes start if a mind isn't at least dormant in the body. The mind is essential. Even an unconscious mind controls the automatic processes. But with no mind at all -- " "Still nothing!" the doctor shouted. denly writhed against the straps. His back arched until they could hear the dry cracking of his spine. His hands wrenched at the arms of the chair and blood spouted from his nose, eyes and ears. Then his body sagged back. "Reverse the process!" the doctor screamed. "Put Mr. Reilly back in his own body!" The technicians turned to their dials, and the doctor, his face fiery red, bent over Reilly. "I think it's too late now," Marie Thorne whispered. "A tremor!" the doctor said. "I felt a tremor." There was a long silence. "I think he's back in!" the doctor exclaimed. "Now, oxygen, adrenalin!" A mask was fitted over Reilly's face. A hypodermic was slipped into his arm. He stirred, shivered, slumped back, stirred again. "He's made it!" the doctor cried, removing the oxygen mask. The directors, as though on cue, hurried out of their chairs and went up on the stage. They surrounded Reilly, who was now blinking his eyes and retching. "We'll try another host, Mr. Reilly." "Welcome back, sir!" "Had us worried, Mr. Reilly!" Reilly stared at them. He wiped his mouth and said, "My name is not Reilly." The red-faced doctor pushed his way through the directors and bent down beside him. "Not Reilly?" he said. "Are you Fitzsimmons?" "No. I'm not Fitzsimmons, that poor damned fool! And I'm not Reilly. Reilly and I both tried to enter Fitzsimmons' body, and we ruined it. Then Reilly tried to get back into his own body, but I was too quick. I got into the body first. It's my body now." "Who are you?" the doctor snapped. The man stood up. The directors stepped away from him, and one man quickly crossed himself. "It was dead too long," Marie Thorne said. The face now bore only the faintest and most stylized resemblance to the pale, frightened monkey face of Reilly. There was nothing of his determination, petulance and good humor in that face. It resembled nothing but itself. TT was a dead-white face except for black dots of stubble on its cheeks and jaw. The lips were bloodless. A strand of wispy hair was plastered against its cold white forehead. When Reilly had been in residence, the features had blended pleasantly, harmoniously. But now the individual features had coarsened and grown separate. The unharmonious white face had a thick and unfinished look, like iron before tempering or clay before firing. It had a slack, sullen, relaxed look because of the lack of muscle tone and tension in the face. The calm, flaccid, unharmonious features simply existed, revealing nothing of the personality behind them. The face seemed no longer completely human. All humanity now resided in the great, patient, unblinking Buddha's eyes.  "It's gone zombie," Marie Thorne whispered, clinging to Blaine's shoulder. "Who are you?" the doctor asked. "I don't remember," it said. "I don't remember at all." Slowly it turned and started walking down the stage. Two directors moved to bar its path. "Leave him alone," the governmerit man said. "Don't touch him." "But someone is in Mr. Reilly's body!" a director objected. "We must find out who." "You know the law," said the government man. "The piossessor of a body is the sole arbiter of its movements. Stand aside." "Leave the poor zombie alone," the doctor said wearily. The directors moved out of its way. The zombie walked to the end of the stage, descended the steps, turned, and walked over to Blaine. "I know you!" it said. "What? What do you want?" Blaine stammered nervously. "I don't remember," the zombie said, staring hard at him. "What's your name?" "Tom Blaine." ' I 'HE zombie shook its head. "Doesn't mean anything to me. But I'll remember. It's you, all right. Something... My body's dying, isn't it? Too bad. I'll remember before it gives out. You and me, you know, together. Blaine, don't you remember me?" "No!" Blaine shouted, shrinking from the suggested relationship, the idea of some vital link between him and this dying thing. It couldn't be! What shared secret was this thief of corpses, this unclean usurper hinting at, what black intimacy, what sniggering knowledge to be shared like a dirty crust of bread for just Blaine and himself? Nothing, Blaine told himself. He knew himself, knew what he was, knew what he had been. Nothing like this could arise legitimately to confront him. The creature had to be crazy, or mistaken. "Who are you?" Blaine asked. "I don't know!" The zombie flung his hands into the air, like a man caught in a net. Blaine sensed how his mind must feel, confused, disoriented, nameless, wanting to live and caught in the fleshy dying embrace of a zombie body. "I'll see you again," the zombie said to Blaine. "You're important to me. I'll see you again and I'll remember about you and me." The zombie representative came forward, took the new zombie's hand and led him down the aisle and out of the theater. Blaine stared after them until he felt a sudden weight on his shoulder. Marie Thorne had fainted. It was the most feminine thing she had done so far. VI  I 'HE head technician and the bearded doctor were arguing near the reincarnation machine, with their assistants ranged respectfully behind them. The battle was quite technical, but Blaine gathered that they were trying to determine the cause of the reincarnation failure. Each seemed to feel that the fault lay in the other's province. The old doctor insisted that the machine settings must have been faulty, or an uncompensated power drop had occurred. The head technician swore the machine was perfect. He felt certain that Reilly hadn't been physically fit for the strenuous attempt. Neither would yield an inch. But, being reasonable men, they soon reached a compromise solution. The fault; they decided, lay in the nameless spirit who had fought Reilly for possession of his body, and had supplanted him. "But who was it?" the head technician asked. "A ghost, do you think?" "Possibly," the doctor said, "though it's damned rare for a ghost to possess a living body. Still, he talked crazy enough to be a ghost." "Whoever he was," said the head technician, "he took over too late. The body was definitely zombie. Anyhow, no one could be blamed for it." "Right," the doctor agreed. "I'll certify to the apparent soundness of the equipment." "Fair enough," said the head technician. "And I'll testify to the apparent soundness of the patient." They exchanged looks of perfect understanding. The directors were holding an immediate conference of their own, trying to determine what the short-range effects would be upon the Rex corporate structure, and how the announcement should be made to the public, and whether all Rex personnel should be given a day off to visit the Reilly Family Palace of Death. Then they noticed Blaine. Lowering their voices, they began to whisper together, glancing at him covertly. Fitzsimmons' body lay back in its chair, beginning to stiffen, wearing a detached, derisive smile. Marie Thorne recovered consciousness and promptly took in the situation. "Come on," she said, leading Blaine out of the theater. They hurried down long gray corridors to a street door. Outside, she hailed a helicab and gave the driver an address. "Where are we going?" Blaine asked, as the helicab climbed. "I'm not sure. Rex is going to be a madhouse for a while." She began fussing with her hair. "I don't know what the directors wanted to do with you, but it's lucky the government man was there. Let me think a moment." the cushions and looked down on the glittering city. From that height, it looked like an exquisite miniature, a multi-colored mosaic from the Thousand and One Nights. But somewhere down there, walking the streets and levels, was the zombie, trying to remember -- him. "But why me?" Blaine asked out loud. Marie Thorne glanced at him. "Why you and the zombie? Well, why not? Haven't you ever made any mistakes?" "I suppose I have. But they're finished and done with." She shook her head. "Maybe .mistakes ended for good in your time. Today nothing ever dies for certain. That's one of the great disadvantages of a life after death, you know. One's mistakes sometimes refuse to lie decently dead and buried. Sometimes they follow you around." "So I see," Blaine said. "But I've never done anything that would bring up that!" She shrugged indifferently. "In that case, you're better than most of us." Never had she seemed more alien to him. The helicab began a slow descent. And Blaine brooded over the disadvantages inherent in all advantages. In his own time, he had seen the control of disease in the world's backward areas result in an exploding birth rate, famine, misery. He had seen nuclear power breed nuclear war. Every advantage generated its own spiecific disadvantages. Why should it be different today? A certified scientific hereafter was undoubtedly an advantage to the race. Manipulation had again caught up with theory. But the disadvantages... There was a certain inevitable weakening of the , protective barrier around mundane life, some rips in the curtain, a few holes in the dike. The dead refused to lie decently still; they insisted upon mingling with the quick. To whose advantage? Ghosts, too -- undoubtedly logical, operating within the boundaries of known natural laws. But that might be cold comfort to a haunted man. Today, Blaine thought, whole new strata of existence impinged upon Man's existence on Earth. Just as the zombie impinged uncomfortably upon his existence. Marie Thorne had been thinking hard. She said, "You should stay out of sight a while, until Rex quiets down. I'm going to introduce you to a man. I don't know him very well, but I've been told he's reliable." Blaine silently wondered if she was reliable. Perhaps not. Perhaps this was a Rex scheme to get rid of him without the knowledge of the government man. But he had no friends in this world, no money, no knowledge. He would have to play along. But that didn't mean he had to trust anyone. The helicab landed on a busy street corner. Marie Thorne paid and hurried him into the crowds. A T first glance, the city looked like a surrealistic Bagdad. He saw squat palaces of white and blue tile, and slender red minarets, and irregularly shaped buildings with flaring Chinese roofs and spired onion domes. It looked as though an Oriental fad in architecture had swept the city. Blaine could hardly believe he was in New York. Bombay perhaps, Moscow, or even Los Angeles. But not New York. With relief, he saw skyscrapers, simple and direct against the curved Asiatic structures. They seemed like lonely sentinels of the New York he had known. The streets were filled with miniature traffic. Blaine saw motorcycles and scooters, cars no bigger than Porsches, trucks the size of Buicks, and nothing larger. He wondered if this was New York's answer to congestion and air pollution. If so, it hadn't helped. Most of the traffic was overhead. There were vaneand jetoperated vehicles, aerial produce trucks and one-man speedsters, helicopter taxis and floating buses labeled "Sky port #nd Level" or "Express to Montauk." Glittering dots marked the vertical and horizontal lanes within which the traffic glided, banked, turned, ascended and descended. Flashing red, green, yellow and blue lights seemed to regulate the flow. There were rules and conventions; but to Blaine's inexperienced eye, it was a vast fluttering confusion. Fifty feet overhead there was another shopping level. How did people get up there? For that matter, how did anyone live and retain his sanity in this noisy, bright, congested machine? The human density was overpowering. He felt as though he were being drowned in a sea of flesh. What was the population of this super-city? Fifmade the New York of # look like a country village. He stared around him, his head pounding dully and his eyes beginning to unfocus. In a few moments, he was in control of himself again, and slightly more respectful of his strong, phlegmatic body. Perhaps a man from the past needed just that sort of fleshy envelope if he wanted to view the future with equanimity. A low-order nervous system had its advantages. He noticed a group of people standing in a line. The men and women on it were poorly dressed, unkempt, unwashed. They shared a common look of sullen despair. Was it a breadline? He asked Marie where the line was going. "To the suicide booths," she told him, hurrying him past it. It was, Blaine decided, a hell of an inauspicious thing to see on his first real day in the future. Suicide booths! Well, he would be absolutely sure of that. Things surely couldn't get that bad. But what kind of world had suicide booths? And free ones, to judge by the clientele... He would have to be careful about accepting free gifts in this world. gawking at the sights and slowly growing accustomed to the bright, hectic, boisterous, overcrowded city. They came to an enormous building shaped like a Gothic castle, with pennants flying from its upper battlements. On its highlight fully visible against the fading afternoon sun. It looked like an important landmark. A man was leaning against the building, lighting a thin cigar. He seemed to be the only man in New York not in a tearing hurry. Marie walked over to him. "Mr. Ore?" "Yes, Miss Thorne." "This is Tom Blaine. I'd like you to take care of him." "Sure," Ore said. "I'll make further arrangements with you later. Now I must get back. Good luck," she said to Blaine, and hurried away. Blaine and Ore faced each other in mutual embarrassment. To break the silence, Blaine asked, "What is this building?" "This," Ore said, "is the headquarters of Hereafter, Incorporated." He was a tall man, very thin, with a long, mournful, weatherbeaten face. His eyes were narrow and direct. His clothes hung awkwardly on him, as though he were more used to levis than tailored slacks. Blaine thought he looked like a Westerner. "Impressive," Blaine said, gazing up at the Gothic castle. "Gaudy," said Ore. "You aren't from the city, are you?" Blaine shook his head. "Me neither. But frankly, Blaine, I thought everybody on Earth and all the planets knew about the Hereafter building. Do you mind my asking where you're from?" "Not at all," Blaine said, his mind racing. He wondered if he should announce himself a man from the past. No, it was hardly the thing to tell a possibly untrustworthy stranger, particularly in view of the situation at Rex. He'd better be from somewhere else. Blaine said, "I'm from -- Brazil." "Oh?" "Yes. Upper Amazon Valley. My folks went there when I was a kid. Rubber plantation. Dad just died, so I thought I'd have a look at New York." "I hear it's still pretty wild down there," Ore said. Blaine nodded, relieved that his story wasn't being questioned. But maybe it wasn't a very strange story for this day and age. In any event, he had found a home for himself. O RC said, "I'm from Mexican Hat, Arizona. Carl Ore's the name. I came here to cast a look around this New York and find out what they're always boasting about. It's interesting enough, but these folks are just a little too up and roaring for me, if you catch my meaning. I don't mean to say we're poky back home. We're not. But these jeople bounce around like an ape with a stick in his line." "I know just what you mean," Blaine said. For a few minutes, they discussed the jittery, frantic, compulsive habits of New Yorkers, comparing them with the sane, calm, pastoral life in Mexican Hat and the Upper Amazon Valley. These people, they agreed, just didn't know how to live. "Blaine," said Ore, "business and pleasure can mix. What say we get ourselves a drink?" Blaine hesitated, wondering how he would talk with Ore; then he remembered that he could plead Brazil and inadequate schooling to excuse his lack of present-day knowledge. "Fine," he said. "Then let us proceed," said Ore somberly, "to inspect the internal nocturnal movements of this edgy little old town." It was, Blaine decided, as good a way as any other of finding out about the future. After all, nothing could be more revealing than what people did for pleasure. Through games and drunkenness, Man exhibits his essential attitudes toward his environment, and shows his disposition toward the questions of life, death, fate and free will. What better symbol of Rome than the circus? What better crystallization of the American West than the rodeo? Spain had its bullfights and Norway its ski-jumps. What sport, recreation or pastime would similarly reveal the New York of #? He would find out. And, surely, to experience this in all its immediacy was better than reading about it in some dusty library, and infinitely more entertaining. "Suppose we have a look at the Martian Quarter?" Carl Ore suggested. "Lead away," Blaine said, well pleased at the chance to combine pleasure with stern necessity. maze of streets and levels, through underground arcades and overhead ramps, by foot, escalator, subway and helicab. The interlocking complexity of streets and levels didn't impress the lean Westerner. Phoenix was laid out in the same way, he said, although admittedly on a smaller scale. They went to a small restaurant that called itself the Red Mars and advertised a genuine South Martian cuisine. Blaine had to confess he had never eaten Martian food. Ore had sampled it several times in Phoenix. "It's pretty good," he told Blaine, "but you're hungry an hour later." The menu was written entirely in Martian, and no English translation was included. Blaine recklessly ordered the Number One Combination, as did Ore. It came, a strange-looking mess of shredded vegetables and bits of meat. Blaine tasted, and nearly dropped his fork in surprise. "It's exactly like Chinese food!" "Well, of course," Ore said. "The Chinese were the first on Mars -- in '#, I think. So anything they eat up there is Martian food. Right?" "I suppose so," Blaine said. "Besides, this stuff is made with genuine Martian-grown vegetables and mutated herbs and spices. Or so they claim." Blaine didn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved. With good appetite, he ate the C'kyoOurher, which tasted just like shrimp chow mein, and the Trrdxat, or egg roll. "Why do they give it such weird names?" Blaine asked, ordering the Hggshrt for dessert. "Man, you're really out of touch!" Ore said, laughing. "Those Martian Chinese went all the way. They translated the Martian rockcarvings and suchlike, and started to talk Martian -- with a strong Cantonese accent, I reckon -- but there wasn't no one around to tell them different. They talk Martian, dress Martian, think Martian. You call one of them a ' Chinese now, he'd up and hit you. He's a Martian, boy!" The Hggshrt came, and turned out to be an almond cookie. Ore paid the check. As they left, Blaine asked, "Are there many Martian laundries?" "Hell, yes. Country's filled with them." "I thought so," Blaine said, and paid a silent tribute to the Martian Chinese and their firm grip on traditional institutions. Greens Club, a place that Ore's Phoenix friends had told him not to miss. This small, exjensive, intimate little club was worldfamous, an absolute must for any visitor to New York. For the Greens Club was unique in presenting an all-vegetable floor show. They were given seats on a little balcony, not far from the glass-fenced center of the club. Three levels of tables surrounded played upon it. Behind the glass fence was what looked like a few square yards of jungle, growing in a nutrient solution. An artificial breeze stirred the plants, which were packed tight together, and varied widely in size, shape and hue. They behaved like no plants Blaine had ever seen. They grew rapidly, fantastically, from tiny seeds and root tendrils to great shrubs and rough-barked trees, squat ferns, monstrous flowers, dripping green fungus and speckled vines; grew and quickly completed their life-cycle and fell into decay, casting forth their seeds to begin again. But no species seemed able to reproduce itself. Sports and mutants sprang from the seeds and swollen fruit, altered and adapted to the fierce environment, battled for root space below and air space above, and struggled toward the artificial suns that glowed above them. Unsuccessful shrubs quickly molded themselves into parasites, clung to the choked trees, and discovered new adaptations clinging to them in turn. Sometimes, in a burst of creative ambition, a plant would surmount all obstacles, put down the growths around it, strangle the opposition, conquer all. But new species already grew from its body, pulled it down and squabbled over the corpse. Sometimes a blight, itself vegetable, would attack the jungle and carry everything before it in a grand crescendo of mold. But a courageous sport would at last take root in it, then another, and on went the fight. The plants changed, grew larger or smaller, transcended themselves in the struggle for survival. But no amount of determination, no cunning, no transcendence helfed. No species could prevail, and every endeavor led to death. Blaine found the spectacle disturbing. Could this fatalistic pageant of the world be the significant characteristic of #? "It's really something," Ore told him, "what these New York labs can do with quick-growing mutants. It's a freak show, of course. They just speed up the growing rate, force a contra-survival situation, throw in some radiation, and let the best plant try to win. I hear these plants use up their growth potential in about twenty hours and have to be replaced." "So that's where it ends," Blaine said, watching the tortured but ever-optimistic jungle. "In replacements." "Sure," said Ore, blandly avoiding all philosophical complications. "They can afford it, the prices they charge here. But it's freak stuff. Let me tell you about the sandplants we grow in Arizona." and watched the jungle growing, dying and renewing itself. Ore was saying, "Right on the burning face of the desert. Fact. We've finally adapted fruit and vegetablebearing plants to real desert conditions, without increasing their bulk water supply, and at a price which allows us to compete with the fertile areas. I tell you, boy, in another fifty years the entire concept of fertile is going to change. Take Mars, for example..." They left the Greens Club and worked their way from bar to bar, toward Times Square. Ore was showing a certain difficulty in focusing, but his voice was steady as he talked about the lost Martian secret of growing on sand. "Someday," he promised Blaine, "we'll figure out how they produced the sandplants without the added nutrients and moisture-fixatives." Blaine had drunk enough to put his former body into a coma twice over. But his bulky new body seemed to have an inexhaustible capacity for whiskey. It was a pleasant change to have a body that could hold its liquor. Not, he added hastily, that such a rudimentary ability could offset the body's disadvantages. They crossed Times Square's garish confusion and entered a bar on #th Street. As their drinks were served, a furtive-eyed little man in a raincoat stepped up to them. "Hey, boys," he said tentatively. "Whatcha want, podner?" Ore asked. "You boys out looking for a little fun?" "You might say so," Ore said expansively. "And we can find it ourselves, thank you kindly." The little man smiled nervously. "You can't find what I'm offering," he said. "Not if you walked these streets all night. You can find plenty of bars and shag joints and dog kennels and rundowns, and there's a couple of greasy mirandas on the corner, if you want that. But you can't find what I'm offering." "Speak up, little friend," Ore said. "What exactly are you offering?" "Well, boys, it's hold it! Flathats!" Two blue-uniformed policemen entered the bar, looked around and left. "Okay," Blaine said. "What is it?" "Call me Joe," said the little man with an ingratiating grin. "I'm a steerer for a Transplant game, friends. The best game and highest jump in town!" "What in hell is Transplant?" Blaine asked. O RC and Joe both looked at him. Joe said, "Wow, friend, no insult but you must really be from down on the farm. Never heard of Transplant? Well, I'll be griped!" "All right, so I'm a farmboy," Blaine growled, thrusting his fierce, square, hard-planed face close to Joe's. 'What is Transplant?" "Not so loud!" Joe whispered, shrinking back. "Take it easy, farmer, I'll explain. Transplant is the new switch game, buddy. Are you tired of living? Think you've had all the kicks? Wait till you try Transplant. You see, farmer, folks in the know say that straight sex is pretty moldy potatoes. Don't get me wrong, it's fine for the birds and the bees and the beasts and the brutes. It still brings a thrill to their simple animal hearts, and who are we to say they're wrong? As a means of propagating the spjecies, old nature's little sex gimmick is still the first and the best. But for real kicks, sophisticated people are turning to Transplant. "Transplant is democratic, friends. It gives you the big chance to switch over into someone else and feel how the other ninetynine per cent feels. It's educational, you might say, and it takes up where straight sex leaves off. Ever get the urge to be a highstrung Latin, pal? You can, with Transplant. Ever wonder what a genuine sadist feels? Tune in with Transplant. And there's more, more, so much more! For example, why be a man all your life? You've proved your point by now; why belabor it?" "Voyeurism," Blaine spat. "I know them big words," Joe said, "and it ain't true. This is no Peeping Tom's game. With Transplant, you are there, right in the old corpus, moving those exotic muscles, experiencing those sensations. Ever get the urge to be a tiger, farmboy, and go loping after a lady tiger in the old mating season? We ot a tiger, friend, and a lady tiger too. Ever ask yourself what thrill a man could possibly find in flagellation, shoe-fetichism, necrophilia, or the like? Find out with Transplant. Our catalogue of bodies reads like an encyclopedia. You can't go wrong at Transplant, friends, and our prices are set ridiculously -- " "Get out," Blaine said. "What, buddy?" Blaine's big hand shot out and grabbed Joe by the raincoat front. He lifted the little pusher to eye level and glared at him. "You take your perverted little notions out of here," Blaine said. "Guys like you have been selling off-beat kicks since the days of Babylon, and guys like me haven't been buying. Get out, before I break your neck for a quick sadistic thrill." He released him. J OE smoothed his raincoat and smiled shakily. "No offense, buddy. I'm going. Don't feel like it tonight? There's always another night. Transplant's in your future, farmboy. Why fight it?" Blaine started to move forward, but Ore held him back. The little pusher scuttled out the door. "He isn't worth dropping," Ore said. "The flathats would just take you in. It's a sad, sick, dirty world, friend. Drink up." Blaine threw down his whiskey, still seething. Transplant! If that was the characteristic amusement of #, he wanted no part of it. Ore was right, it was a sad, sick, dirty world. Even the whiskey was beginning to taste funny. He grabbed at the bar for support. The whiskey tasted very funny. What was wrong with him? The stuff seemed to be going to his head. Ore's arm was around his shoulder. He was saying, "Well, well, my old buddy's taken himself that one too many. Guess I'd better cart him back to his hotel." But Ore didn't know where his hotel was. He didn't even have a hotel to be taken to. Ore -- that damned quick-talking straighteyed Ore must have put something in his drink while he was talking to Joe. In order to roll him? But Ore knew he had no money. Why then? He tried to shake the arm off his shoulders. It was clamped in place like an iron bar. "Don't worry," Ore was saying, "I'll take care of you, old buddy." The barroom revolved lazily around Blaine's head. He had a sudden realization that he was going to find out a great deal about # by the dubious method of direct experience. Too much, he suspected. Perhaps a dusty library would have been better, after all. The barroom began to revolve more rapidly. He passed out. ness in a small, dimly lighted room with no furniture, no doors or windows, and only a single screened ventilation outlet in the ceiling. The floors and walls were thickly padded, but the padding hadn't been washed in a long time. It stank. Blaine sat up, and two red-hot needles stabbed him through the eyes. He lay down again. "Relax," a voice said. "These knock drops take a while to wear off." He was not alone in the padded room. There was a man sitting in a corner, watching him. The man was wearing only shorts. Glancing at himself, Blaine saw that he was similarly dressed. He sat up slowly and propped himself against a wall. For a moment, he was afraid his head would explode. Then, as the needles drove viciously in, he was afraid it wouldn't. "What is this?" he asked. "End of the line," the man said cheerfully. "They boxed you, just like me. They boxed you and brought you in like fabrit. Now all they got to do is crate you and label you." Blaine couldn't understand what the man was saying. He was in no mood to decipher # slang. Clutching his head, he said, "I don't have any money. Why did they box me?" "Come off it," the man said. "Why would they box you? They want your body, man!" "My body?" "Right. For a host." A host body, Blaine thought, such as he was now occupying. Well, of course. Naturally. It was obvious when you came to think about it. This age needed a supply of host bodies for various and sundry purposes. But how do you get a host body? They don't grow on trees, nor can you dig for them. You get them from people. Most people wouldn't take kindly to selling their own bodies; life is so meaningless without one. Then how to fill the supply? Easy. You pick out a sucker, dope him, hide him away, extract his mind, then take his body. It was an interesting line of speculation, but Blaine couldn't continue it any longer. It seemed as though his head had finally decided to explode. Blaine sat up and found a sandwich in front of him on a paper plate, and a cup of some dark beverage. "It's safe to eat," the man told him. "They take good care of us. I hear the going black market price for a body is close to four thousand dollars." "Black market?" "Man, what's wrong with you? Wake up! You know there's a black market in bodies just like there's an open market in bodies." Blaine sipped the dark beverage, which turned out to be coffee. The man introduced himself as Ray Melhill, a flow-control man off the spaceship Bremen. He was about Blaine's age, a compact, redheaded, snub-nosed man with slightly protruding teeth. Even in his present predicament, he carried himself with a certain jaunty assurance, the unquenchable confidence of a man for whom something always turns up. His freckled skin was very white except for a small red blotch on his neck, the result of an old radiation burn. "I should have known better," Melhill said. "But we'd been transiting for three months on the asteroid run and I wanted a spree. I would have been fine if I'd stuck with the boys, but we got separated. So I wound up in a dog kennel with a greasy miranda. She knocked my drink and I wound up here." Melhill leaned back, his hands locked behind his head. "Me, of all people! I was always telling the boys to watch out. Stick with the gang, I was always telling them. You know, I don't mind the thought of dying so much. I just hate the idea of those bastards giving my body to some dirty fat decrepit old slob so he can play around for another fifty years. That's what kills me, the thought of some slob wearing my body!" Blaine nodded somberly. "So that's my tale of woe," Melhill said, growing cheerful again. "What's yours?" "Mine's a pretty long one," Blaine said, "and a trifle wild in spots. Do you want to hear it all?" "Sure. Plenty of time. I hope." "Okay. It starts in the year #. Wait, don't interrupt me. I was driving my car..." he had finished, Blaine " leaned back against the padded wall and took a deep breath. "Do you believe me?" "Why not? Nothing so new about time travel. It's just illegal and expensive. And those Rex boys would pull anything." "The Rex girls, too," Blaine said, and Melhill grinned. They sat in companionable silence for a while. Then Blaine asked, "So they're going to use us for host bodies?" "That's the score." "When?" "When a customer totters in. I've been here a week, close as I can figure. Either of us might be taken any second. Or it might not come for another week or two." "And they just wipe our minds out?" Melhill nodded. "But that's murder!" "It sure is," Melhill agreed. "Hasn't happened yet, though. Maybe the flathats will pull a raid." "I doubt it." "Me too. Have you got hereafter insurance? Maybe you'll survive after death." "I don't believe in that stuff." "You don't? But life after death is a fact." "Get off it," Blaine said sourly. "It is! Scientific fact!" Blaine stared hard at the young spaceman. "Ray," he said, "how what's happened since #." "That's a big order," Melhill said, "and I'm not what you'd call an educated guy." "Just give me a rough sketch. What's this hereafter stuff? And reincarnation and host bodies? What's happening?" Melhill leaned back and pursed his lips, squinting. "Well, let's see. They put a ship on the Moon somewhere around #, and landed on Mars about ten years later. Then we had that quickie war with Russia over the asteroids -- strictly a deep-space affair. Or was it with China?" "Never mind," Blaine said. "What about reincarnation and life after death?" "I'll try to give it to you like they gave it to me in high school. I had a course called Survey of Psychic Survival, but that was a long time ago. Let's see." concentration. "Quote. 'Since earliest times, Man has sensed the presence of an invisible spirit world, and has suspected that he himself will participate in that world after the death of his body.' Unquote. I guess you know all about that early stuff. The Egyjtians and Chinese and the European alchemists and those. So I'll skip to Rhine. He lived in your time. He was investigating psychic phenomena at Duke. Ever hear of him?" "Sure," Blaine said. "What did he discover?" "Nothing, as a matter of fact. But he got the ball rolling. Then Kralski took over the work at Vilna and shoved it ahead some. That was #, the year the Pirates won their first World Series. Around #, there was Von Leddner at the University of California. Very important figure. Von Leddner. Outlined the general theory of the hereafter, but didn't have any proofs. And finally we come to Professor Michael Vanning. "Professor Vanning is the boy who pinned it all down. He proved that people survive after death. Contacted them, talked with them, recorded them, all that stuff. Offered absolute sure-enough concrete scientific proof of life after death. So of course there were big arguments about it, a lot of religious talk. Controversy. Headlines. A big-time professor from Harvard named James Archer Flynn set out to prove the whole thing was a hoax. He and Vanning argued back and forth for years. "By this time. Vanning was an old man and he decided to take the plunge. He sealed a lot of stuff in a safe, hid things here and there, scattered some code words and promised to come back, like Houdini said but didn't. Then -- " "Pardon me," Blaine interrupted, "if there is life after death, why didn't Houdini come back?" "It's very simple, but please, one thing at a time. Anyhow, Vanning killed himself, leaving a long suicide note about Man's immortal spirit and the indomitable progress of the human race. It's reprinted in a lot of anthologies. Later they found out it was ghost-written, but that's another story. Where was I?" "He killed himself." "Right. And damned if he didn't contact Professor James Archer Flynn after dying, and tell him where to find all that hidden stuff, the code words, and so forth. That clinched it, buddy. Life after death was in." "O AY Melhill stood up, stretched, and sat down again. "The Vanning Institute," he said, "warned everybody against hysteria. But hysteria there was. The next fifteen years are known as the Crazy Forties." Melhill grinned and licked his lips. "Wish I'd been around then. Everybody just sort of let go. 'Doesn't matter what you do,' the jingle ran, 'pie in the sky is waitin' for you.' Saint or sinner, bad or good, everybody gets a slice. The murderer walks into the hereafter just like the archbishop. So live it up, boys and girls, enjoy the flesh on Earth while you're here, 'cause you'll get plenty of spirit after death. Yep, and they really lived it up. Anarchy. "A new religion popped up calling itself Realization. It started telling people that they owed it to themselves to experience everything, good or bad, fair and foul, because the hereafter was just a long remembrance of what you did on Earth. So do it, they said, that's what you're put on Earth for, do it, or you'll be short-changed in the afterlife. Gratify every desire, satisfy every lust, explore your blackest depths. Live high, die high. "It was wacky. The real fanatics formed torture clubs, and wrote encyclopedias on pain, and collected tortures like a housewife would collect recipes. At each meeting, a member would voluntarily present himself as a victim and they'd kill him in the most excruciating damned ways they could find. They wanted to experience the absolute most in pleasure and pain. And I guess they did." Melhill wiped his forehead and said more sedately, "I've done a little reading on the Crazy Years." "So I see," Blaine said. "It's sort of interesting stuff. But then came the crusher. The Vanning Institute had been experimenting all this time. Around #, when the Crazy Years were in full swing, they announced that there was a hereafter, sure enough; but not for everyone." Blaine blinked, but made no comment. "A real crusher. The Vanning Institute said they had certain proof that only about one per.son when they died. Pouf! No more. No afterlife. Nothing." "Why?" Blaine wanted to know. "Well, Tom, I'm none too clear on that part myself," Melhill told him. "If you asked me something about flow-mechanics, I could really tell you something; but psychic theory isn't my field. So try to stick with me while I struggle through it. It goes something like this." ously. "What survives or doesn't survive after death is the mind. People have been arguing for thousands of years about what a mind is, and where and how it interacts with the body, and so forth. We haven't got all the answers, but we do have some working definitions. Nowadays, the mind is considered a high-tension energy web that emanates from the body, is modified by the body, and itself modifies the body. Got that?" "I think so. Go on." "So, the way I got it, the mind and body interact and intermodify. But the mind can also exist independently of the body. According to a lot of scientists, the independent mind is the next, stage of say, we won't even need a body except maybe for a brief incubation period. Personally, I don't think this lousy race will survive well doesn't deserve to." "At the moment, I agree with you, though subject to change without notice," Blaine said. "But get back to the hereafter." "We've got this high-tension energy web. When the body dies, that web should be able to go on existing, like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Death is simply the process that hatches the mind from the body. But it doesn't work that way because of the death trauma. Some scientists think the death trauma is nature's ejecting mechanism, to get the mind free of the body. But it works too hard and louses up everything. Dying is a tremendous psychic shock, and most of the time the energy web gets disrupted, ripped all to hell. It can't pull itself together, it dissipates, and you're completely dead." Blaine said, "So that's why Houdini didn't come back." "I wouldn't say for sure in any individual case, just statistically. A lot of people did some heavy thinking and that ended the Crazy Years. The Vanning Institute went on working. They studied Yoga and stuff like that, but on a scientific basis. Some of those Eastern religions had the right idea, you know. Strengthen the mind. That's what the Institute wanted: a way to strengthen the energy web so it would survive the death process." "And they found it?" "In spades. Along about that time, they changed their name to Hereafter, Inc." Blaine nodded. "I passed their building today. Hey, wait a minute! You say they solved the mindstrengthening problem? Then no one dies! Everyone survives after death!" ly. "Don't be a farmer, Tom. You think they give it away free? Not a chance. It's a complex electro-chemical treatment, pal, and they charge for it. They charge plenty." "So only the rich go to heaven," Blaine said. "Can't have just anyone crashing in." "Sure, sure," Blaine said. "But aren't there other ways, other mindstrengthening disciplines? What about Yoga? What about Zen?" "They work," Melhill said. "There are at least a dozen government tested and approved home-survival courses. Trouble is, it takes about twenty years of really hard work to become an adept. That's not for the ordinary guy. Nojje, without the machines to help you, you're dead." "And only Hereafter, Inc., has the machines?" "There are two others, the Afterlife Academy and Heaven, Ltd., but the price stays about the same. The government's getting to work on some death-survival insurance, but it won't help us." "I guess not," Blaine said. The dream, for a moment, had been dazzling: a relief from mortal fears; the rational certainty of a continuance and existence after the body's death; the knowledge of an uninterrupted process of growth and fulfillment for his personality to its own limits -- not the constricting limits of the frail fleshy envelope that heredity and chance had imposed on him. But that was not to be. His mind's desire to expand was to be checked, rudely, finally. Tomorrow's promises were forever not for today. "What about reincarnation and host bodies?" Blaine asked. "You should know," Melhill told him. "They reincarnated you and put you in a host. There's nothing complicated about mindswitching, as the Transplant operators will gladly tell you. Transplant is only temporary occupancy, however, and doesn't involve full dislodgement of the original mind. Hosting is for keeps. First, the original mind must be wiped out. Second, it's a dangerous game for the mind attempting to enter the host body. Sometimes, you see, that mind can't penetrate the host and breaks itself up trying. Hereafter conditioning often won't stand up under a reincarnation attempt. If the mind doesn't make it into the host -- blooey!" "Why would any man with hereafter insurance still make the attempt at reincarnation?" "Because some old guys are afraid of dying," Melhill said. "They're afraid of the hereafter, scared of that spirit stuff. They want to stay right here on Earth where they know what's what. So they buy a body legally on the open market, if they can find a good one. If not, they buy one on the black market. One of our bodies, pal." "The bodies on the open market are offered for sale voluntarily?" "That's right." "But who would sell his body?" "A very poor guy, obviously. By law, he's supposed to receive compensation in addition to hereafter insurance for his body. In actual fact, he takes what he can get." "A man would have to be crazy!" "You think so?" Melhill retorted. "Today, like always, the world is filled with unskilled, sick, disease-ridden and starving people. And, like always, they all got families. Suppose a guy wants to buy food for his kids. His body is the only thing of value he has to sell. Back in your time, he didn't have anything at all to sell." "Perhaps so," Blaine said. "But no matter how bad things got, I'd never sell my body." Melhill laughed with easy good humor. "Stout fellow! But, Tom, they're taking it for nothing!" Blaine could think of no answer for that. padded cell. Blaine and Melhill were given books and magazines. They were fed often and well, out of paper cups and plates. They were closely watched, for no harm must come to their highly marketable bodies. Blaine began to experience an exceeding fondness for the sturdy, thickset, well-muscled body he had acquired so recently, and from which he would be parted so soon. It was really an excellent body, he decided, a body to be proud of. True, it had no particular grace; but grace could be overestimated. On the whole, all considerations of mortality aside, it was not a body to be given up lightly. One day, after they had eaten, a padded section of wall swung away. Looking in, protected by steel bars, was Carl Ore. "Howdy," said Ore, tall, lean, direct-eyed, angular in his city clothes, "how's my Brazilian buddy?" "You louse," Blaine said, with a deep sense of the inadequacy of words. "Them's the breaks," said Ore. "You boys gettin' enough to eat?" "You and your ranch in Arizona!" "I've got one under option," Ore said. "Mean to retire there some day and raise sandplants. I reckon I know more about Arizona than many a native-born son. But ranches cost money, and hereafter insurance costs money. A man does what he can." "And a vulture does what he can," Blaine snapped. Ore sighed deeply. "Well, it's a business and I guess ifs worse than some others I could think of, if I set my mind to it kinda hard. I'll probably regret all this sometime when I'm sitting on the front porch of my little desert ranch." "You'll never get there," Blaine assured him. "I won't?" "No. One night a mark is going to catch you spiking his drink. You're going to end in the gutter, Ore, with your head caved in. And that'll be the end of you." "Only the end of my body," Ore corrected. "My soul will march on to that sweet life in the by and by. I've paid my money, boy, and heaven's my next home!" "You don't deserve it!" grinned, and even Melhill couldn't conceal a smile. Ore said, "My poor Brazilian friend, there's no question of deserving. You should know better than that. Life after death just isn't for the meek and humble little people, no matter how worthy they are. It's the bright lad with the dollar in his pocket and his eyes open for number one whose soulmarches on after death." "I can't believe it," Blaine said. "It isn't fair. It isn't just." "You're an idealist," said Ore interestedly, as though he were studying the world's last specimen of the breed. "Call it what you like. Maybe you'll get your hereafter. Ore. But I think there's a tiny corner of it where you'll burn forever!" Ore said, "There's no scientific evidence of hell-fire. On the other hand, there's a lot we don't know about the hereafter. Maybe I'll burn. And maybe there's even a factory up there in the blue where they'll reassemble your shattered mind... But let's not argue. I'm sorry, I'm afraid the time's come." Ore walked quickly away. The steel-barred door swung open and five men marched into the room. "No!" Melhill screamed. They closed in on the spaceman. Expertly they avoided his swinging fists and pinioned his arms. One of them pushed a gag in his mouth. They started to drag him out of the room. Ore appeared again in the doorway, frowning. "Let go of him," he said. The men released Melhill. "You idiots got the wrong man," Ore told them. "It's that one." He pointed at Blaine. Blaine had been trying to prepare himself for the loss of his friend. The abrupt reversal of fortune caught him open-mouthed and unready. The men seized him before he had time to react. Blaine suddenly came to life and tried to wrench free. "I'll kill you!" he shouted at Ore. "I swear it. I'll kill you!" "Don't damage him," Ore said to the men, wooden-faced. A rag was pushed over Blaine's mouth and nose, and he smelled something sickeningly sweet that fogged his mind. His last recollection was of Melhill, his face ashen, standing at the barred door. Paramount Ulj We were being tested, no doubt of it -- but for what -- and would it be a promotion if we passed? I T was the Russians' own fault that they had picked that particular week to stage another walkout from the U.N. And, of course, all the Delegates of all the Peoples' Democracies had trotted obediently out behind them. Later on, the Outer Mongolians were to claim that Things Would Have Been Different If -- But that is very doubtful. The vessel was spotted first from a fire observation tower in Yosemite, but by the time the United States government had begun to act, the visitors had made a second landing -- in Central Park. For a while, it was believed that there were two ships, but gradually it came to be realized that there was only one, that it had shown up in New York City as near instantaneously after vanishing from California as made no difference. Prince Prhajhadiphong of Thai, his country's Permanent Delegate, was enjoying his usual morning stroll when he rounded a corner in the path and saw the two visitors emerging from the charcoalcolored oval. "Sunshine," said one of them to the Prince, who could never afterward recall which, an understandable lapse, since they were identical twins. H.H. the P.D. was always rather a wag, and it was only with a strong effort that he restrained himself from saying, "Moonshine," in reply to the uncommon greeting. "And Sunshine to you," he said, bowing. The two men had kumquat-colored complexions, their Lifebuoy-pink hair was worn in a double loop over the right ear, and their clothes glittered and tinkled. "Are you a person of consequence?" asked one, speaking as if he had (so the Prince thought to himself) a mouthful of hot rice. "Oh, of very small consequence," the Prince murmured. The second one observed, in what seemed an approving manner, "You are evidently using the Modest Opposite. If you were indeed what you say, then you would use the Assertive OpfXDsite to aggrandize yourself." He turned to his twin. "Very early evidence of oviirb-tav, eh, Smottleb?" But Smottleb demurred. "Perhaps, Cumpaw, although he uses the Modest Opposite, it may be that he does so only to confuse us into thinking that he is really only of a small consequence. Which would be no evidence at all of ovUrb-tav, would it?" Smottleb considered this. Then he said, "Well, we must find out." They turned to the patient Thai and said in unison, "Take us to your Paramount Ulj." "Certainly," said Prince Prhadjhadiphong. As he led the way to a taxi, he reminded himself that, as one who had spent a year in Bangkok's best Buddhist monastery, he should ever reflect that all is Maya, or illusion; and that Maya can take any form at all.  I 'HE hastily created U.N. Committee to Welcome Interstellar Visitors consisted of American Ambassador Stuyvesant Lowell Lee, Dr. Mithra Parseebhoee of India, and -- of course -- the Prince himself. "Which one of you is Paramount Ulj?" asked Cumpaw (or perhaps it was Smottleb). "Hm," said the Prince, coughing delicately. "We three are temporarily exercising the functions of the Paramount Uljency. You may confide in us." "Ah, you have not yet held Ordeal and Combat to select the late Paramount's successor, I assume. Well, well... I share your darkness. Was the deceased a man of good taste?" Smottleb asked (unless it was Cumpaw). "Very," said the Prince, as his colleagues hesitated. "Good. Then let us recline and talk," one visitor said, "of our Purpose here." Their devotion to the cause of ovlirb-tav can be gauged by the fact that Earth was the sixty-first planet the twins had visited -- and of the other sixty, only two had shown a sufficient grasp of this principle, which alone separates Man from the beasts. "How to define this term?" one of them wondered aloud. "Politeness? Decency? Know-how? Civilization?" "If you have it," the other said, "we share with you. Ever#rthing. We will have but one placenta, your people and ours -- if you show ovlirb-tav. And if not, pusht! You may continue to cook in your own -- " Ambassador Lee asked, perhaps incautiously, "And how is this quality shown?" He was informed that this would be learned soon enough. Pandit Parseebhoee suggested that Earth, too, might have something of value to share. "Only if you have ovlirb-tav," said Smottleb or Cumpaw. "If not -- smersh!" Prince P. inquired where their home planet was, and they loftily told him that it was so far away that even its sun was not known to him. "Ah, then you must have the Galactic Drive!" the Prince exclaimed. They raised polite eyebrows. He said, "A means of traveling infinitely faster than the speed of light." "Ho, this primitive device!" one of them said merrily. "No wonder you have not even reached your moon yet. Yop, yop, yop!" he chuckled. The Indian Delegate whispered to his American colleague, "For Heaven's sake, do not let them see a newspaper or they will know at once that we have neither piety, politeness, nor civilization!" T UT the ears of the aliens were sharp. "Newspaper?" one inquired. "By all means, let us see one of your newspapers. It may help us." The three committee members sat in a moody silence while Smottleb and Cumpaw looked through the morning paper. '"Teen-ager Slays Six With Pogo Stix'-" Stuyvesant Lowell Lee sweated, slumped. "Ah, this shows mettle and fettle, eh, Cumpaw?" Lee wiped his face on his sleeve, sat up. " 'Caste Riots in Bombay,' " the visitor continued. His tone this time was not pleased. The Pandit hid his eyes in his hand. "You see, Smottleb: even here. I tell you it is the fault of the uterine aunts; they neglect their duties to the septs. I warned them at home after the last caste riots -- " the Pandit dropped his hand, and, for a moment, was tempted to buff his fingernails -- "but no, they wouldn't listen. Make the uterine aunts responsible for all property damage and you will see a change. Pusht, yes!" They took up the paper again. " 'Coup in Thailand. Pibbulphumphit ousts Pibbulpharphel' " Prince P.'s bright face went impassive. "Ordeal and Combat for some territorial Ulj," the visitor said indifferently, turning to another story. The Prince smiled, though a bit wanly. And suddenly there birds. "Smottleb here," said Smottleb, putting his finger in one ear and seeming to listen. A startled look came over his face. "We shall return at once," he said. The two rose, spxke briefly in an alien tongue. "Bad news?" inquired one of the U.N. Delegates solicitously. "Our Paramount Ulj is dead." The Thai said that he shared their darkness. "And well you may; he was our father," Smottleb said. The three murmured condolences. "Will you be back after the funeral?" Ambassador Lee asked. The twins said they hopjed to. The Prince asked, "Do you practice cremation or burial?" As neither answered. Pandit Parseebhoee inquired, "Or perhaps you expx)se your, ah, loved ones?" Smottleb and Cumpaw looked at each other. "Pusht!" said one. "Smersh!" said the other. They folded their arms and vanished. By the time the car arrived in Central Park, there was no trace of the alien ship except a large their necks at an empty sky, and several pxslicemen who repeated over and over again, "Cmahn, cmahn, keep awfadagrass..." The American and Indian Delegates moaned simultaneously, "But what did we say?" Not even the usually cheerful Thai had anything to suggest. '"HE New Paramount Ulj greeted the twins on their return. "Sunshine... Nice of you to come back and all that." "It was nothing. We congratulate you," said the brothers. The Paramount shrugged deprecatingly. "It was a lucky thrust through the spleen." The brothers clappjed their hands admiringly. "We could not have wished a better death for our father," they said in ritual. Arm in arm with his successor, they went in for dinner. As they took seats, he said, "Well, and how was this mission? Any luck? Any signs of ovlirb-tav?" "Signs, yes," said Smottleb, "but little more. Do you know, some of them expose their dead?" There was a general shaking of heads around the high table at this revelation. "And what is more," Cumpaw confided, "others practice cremation." The new Paramount said a trifle stiffly, "We can discuss that after dinner, if you don't mind." But his predecessor's son continued, as if eager to unburden himself, "And the rest of them, if you'll credit me, actually bury their beloved dead!" There was a stifled shriek and the Dowager Concubine-Uljess was led away by two slave-girls, her napkin pressed tightly to her mouth. Just then, the Gentlemenin-Waiting arrived with the food. All the guests fell to with good appetite. The late Paramount Ulj had been an old man, but he had always kept himself in good condition and -- as everyone assured his proud sons -- he was in excellent taste. I for your information umn based entirely on questions from the readers. And the readers, this time, have forced me to deviate from a private policy. That policy has been to avoid what might be called topics of the day. Topics of the day are for the daily newspapers and the weekly news magazines; a monthly magazine simply cannot keep pace. There are two reasons for making an exception. The topic itself -- space travel -- is dear to the heart and mind of every science fiction reader. And I also know from experience that a scientific event will receive big play in the newspapers when it is "news," but while it is "news," it is rarely complete. The final outcome, the sober and technical scientific report, will be published months or even years later and the average reader almost never gets to see it. The news event which prompted quite a number of people to write to me (sending me newspapser clippings, headlines and editorials) and which prompts me to write these lines is the discovery of the so-called "radiation belt" around the Earth. I must caution everybody right now to accept the term "radiation belt" merely as a label. When more about it is known, it might be necessary to invent a different term for it. The beginning of the story was almost expressed in the title of a book and movie of several decades ago. It could have been called "Explorer I Doesn't Answer." Explorer I (or "# Alpha") was neatly in orbit, transmitting data, and stopped transmitting. Then it started up again. Then it stopped. Somebody in Europe claimed to know that Sputnik II had done the same thing. From what we now know about the natural phenomenon involved, it probably did. By the time Explorer II went into orbit, scientists already had a suspicion. Vanguard I did not produce the same result, even though it is on a much larger orbit, simply because it is not instrumented. Vanguard's transmitter merely sings out that it is there. ' I ' HE reason why Explorer I stopped reporting from time to time was that its instruments were overloaded with radiation. And this happened from a certain distance on outward, the distance being tentatively given as # miles from the ground. Now when the public hears that above # miles there is so much radiation that the instruments cannot handle it any more, it concludes that there must be danger. And when a scientist. Dr. James Van Allen, says that the amount of radiation was such that, in an hour or two, a man would get a radiation dose which is considered the weekly safe limit, the public must conclude that humanity is planet-bound. Dr. Van Allen was the first to say that it isn't so, but everybody seems to be sufficiently jittery about radiation to disregard the latter portion of the sentence. In reality, things are never as bad as some people always say. But mostly they are much more complicated than most people think. To clarify the picture, we have to enumerate quickly what t # T)es of radiation we are bound to encounter in space -- let's say just above the atmosphere. There are, of course, all kinds of radiation from the Sun, radio waves, heat, visible light and even X-rays. These X-rays coming from the Sun are comparatively weak and are swallowed up by our atmosphere; before the development of high-altitude research rockets, their existence was only suspected but not proved. Then there are the cosmic rays, which are just fast-moving nuclei of atoms. In most cases, they are protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, simply because there are more hydrogen atoms in interplanetary space than any other kind. Explorer I, incidentally, proved that the number of cosmic rays is smaller than expected. Well, what about this "radiation belt"? I am going to say something now that will sound like an unrelated theme to any but a physicist. In order to make X-rays, you first produce a vacuum which, on the ground, naturally has to be enclosed in a bulb or tube or else it won't stay a vacuum. Through this vacuum, you shoot a stream of electrons. When these electrons hit a target, they produce X-rays. In the actual vacuum tube, the target is metal for various practical reasons. But you would also get X-rays with, for instance, a graphite target. All that matters is that the electrons have a material target to hit. Now back to space, where you have a vacuum. There is no doubt that electrons are flying around through space. Now you put a metal satellite there. What you have done is to make the X-ray tube complete -- there is now a target! The point is that space is not "full of X-rays" as one headline put it. As long as there is no target, there are no X-rays, except those coming from the Sun directly. It is the satellite that makes the X-rays. have been concluded on theoretical grounds beforehand. It just so happened that everybody was preoccupied with specific problems, such as orbital velocities or the proper frequencies for telemetering transmission and so fortii. If anybody said, in advance of the event, that an artificial satellite would act like the target in an X-ray tube, I did not see the statement. But why does this happen only above # miles, or whatever the correct figure may be? The present concept runs like this: These electrons in space come from the Sun. Every solar outburst probably throws a shipload of them into space. If the Earth did not have a magnetic field, these electrons -- or rather those that happen to hit the Earth -- would simply enter the atmosphere and become a part of it, possibly unnoticed. But the Earth's magnetic field keeps them at a distance and they somehow accumulate into what may be called clouds of electrons. Whether they assume a specific shape -- say something that would look like the rings of Saturn if it were visible -- is not yet known. Other things still to be found out are the diameter of this area of high electron density, the thickness of this layer and its variations. The thickness of the layer is likely to vary with geographical latitude. And since the Sun is sometimes more active than at other times, there is likely to be a variation in density. One closely related side issue is the relationship with the aurorae. It sounds probable now that a year of frequent and spectacular aurorae is also a year of maximum density of this electron layer, or area, or stream. How does this discovery influence space travel plans? It looks now as if a space station in a circular orbit more or less over the magnetic equator and not more than # miles above sea level would be safely below this electron aggregation. On the other hand, a spaceship boring through it on its way to the Moon or to Mars would pass it so quickly that the X-rays produced during passage could be neglected. Besides, even if it was too much for the instruments to handle, it is comparatively little if you have a "hot" atom laboratory in mind for comparison. The intensity could be cut to one-tenth of its meter thick. A ship could carry this if it were absolutely necessary. Just what will be necessary is something we don't know yet. The main thing this discovery may do is change the choice for the best orbit for a manned permanent space station.  I 'HE article about Atlantis and the theories of Pastor Spanuth in the June issue brought quite a lot of letters. Several people corrected an oversight of mine: there is an English edition of the book. Well, even though it is at my expense, I am happy to announce that an English edition exists, so that any of my readers who feel like it can check all the details. That the article was read carefully is evidenced by the fact that one part of one sentence brought me a detailed linguistic discussion from Basil Davenport of the Book-of-the-Month Club. You may remember that I mentioned in passing that Plato's name is (A) a nickname, since his real name was Aristokles, and (B) that the nickname was actually Platon, but that the final "n" has been lost in English, while French and Russian retain it. Well, the Maltster in Artibus Basil Davenport had something to say about it which I find interesting. The final "n" has been lost in English because we got this from the Latin. The point is that the Romans had names ending in "o," like Cicero, but one of the grammatical forms derived from such a name would be Ciceronis. Now the Greeks had names like Platon with a corresponding form like Platonos. When the Romans dealt with a Greek name of this type, they always dropped the "n." In Plato's dialogues, Menon, Kriton and Phaidon thus became Meno, Crito and Phaedo. It was an attempt to assimilate these names, making them sound like Roman names of the type of Cicero, Scipio and Nero. Some people, I am forced to conclude, were "writing down" even then. Well, this explains why the "n" disappeared in Latin and, consequently and subsequently, in those languages that derived their learning from the Romans, like English and German. What struck me in Basil Davenport's discussion is that the French, though they write "Platon," did not really retain the "n." They also got their Greek names via Latin, but tacked on an "n" almost everywhere -- from the Latin accusative, Mr. Davenport believes. Yes, they do write Platon, which happens to look like the original Greek; but they also write Neron, Ciceron and Junon, adding an "n" where it certainly does not belong. As for the Russians, they probably really retained the "n" since their early learning was strongly influenced by the Greeks directly -- no Russian, to this day, has any trouble learning the Greek alphabet. His own alphabet is only an adaptation of the Greek. The correspondence about Atlantis ranged far and wide, one letter being concerned mainly with a geographical problem. The correspondent stated his problem quite tersely in one sentence by asking: did I agree with Spanuth's interpretation of Kalypso's sailing instructions? My answer was "No!" but I had better explain what this is about. "V" OU remember that Odysseus, after all kinds of hair-raising adventures, finally gets to a beautiful wooded island, the island of Kalypso. (Mustn't annoy Mr. Davenport by using the Roman spelling, Calypso; moreover, I like the spelling with a K better myself.) There he sits at the shore for years and years, waiting to return to his home. Finally Kalypso, also prodded by a message which Hermes has brought, permits him to build a raft, telling him how to sail to reach the nearest land. The instructions are lines # in the fifth book of the Odyssey. Odysseus is to steer by the Pleiades "and the autumn-setting Bootes" until, after seventeen days of sailing, he would see mountainous land. Following the "autumn-setting Bootes," it was clear to every sailor, meant an easterly course, which also made sense because it had been told that Odysseus had sailed to the west before. It also became clear, the more the study of the Homeric poems progressed, that the poet had almost never made things up. Homer used traditions, legends and actual (though probably oral ) reports and instructions, just fitting them into his story line. This, of course, had the result that listeners recognized things and would nod their heads and think, "That's correct." In short, "Kalypso's sailing instructions" were suspected of being somebody's actual sailing instructions. The question was: from where to where? The goal, the Odyssey stated through many lines, was the city of Scheria, inhabited by the Phaiakians. Scheria, many archeologists agreed, was likely to be Tartessos, located at the western shore of the Iberian peninsula. This idea was strengthened by the statements of the inhabitants as woven into the Odyssey, namely that they were "the farthest of mortals," and similar references to their isolated location. What remained to be done was to go over the islands within a little over two weeks' sail and see which one would fit the description. The answer was Madeira. Finally, Doctors Hennig and Erpelt in Germany reset a planetarium for the latitude of Madeira and the year # B.C., the most probable time of the writing of the Odyssey. The Pleiades and Bootes were seen to rise from very nearly the same point in the east-northeast; Kalypwo's sailing instructions fitted a voyage from Madeira to the corner of the Iberian mainland. Everybody was quite happy, but Pastor Spanuth explains this as a voyage from Madeira to his Atlantis, in the North Sea. He does have a reason, though it is one I consider weak. All through the portions of the poem where Odysseus is in the company of the Phaiakians, a physical difference is subtly stressed. Odysseus is instantly recognized as a foreigner. Several times it is said that the Phaiakians look "different," but unfortunately it is never said in what way they looked different. (My personal suspicion is that Homer himself did not know, that he just knew from conversations with sailors that visitors to this far western city were always instantly recognized because they were of a different type.) Since Odysseus had to be taken as a dark-haired Greek, presumably of the medium-tall lean type, there are really just two choices, since we can't very well expect that Tartessos was a Chinese settlement. The Phaiakians must either have been much darker or much lighter than their Greek visitor. They could conceivably have been dark-skinned settlers from Africa. Or they could have been blond Europeans from the north. The latter seems more likely. There have been Negro cultures in the past, but they were not in the habit of spreading, whereas the North Europeans seem unable to sit still, even now. Pastor Spanuth also thinks that the Phaiakians of the Odyssey are meant to be light-skinned and light-haired Northerners, but instead of just supposing that they established a distant settlement, he tries to bring the hero of the Odyssey into their homeland. Well, as I already said, my answer was "No." daily papers myself, I could, quite often, deduce what stories have been published from the questions I get in my mail. Recently anti-matter and anti-gravity have been taking up some of the volume. The questions ranged from the simple question "What is antimatter?" through the more involved question "Would anti-matter be anti-gravitational?" to a request for instructions for building an anti-gravity device. Anti-matter, which has been around in the newspapers lately, is what astronomers and science fiction readers have been knowing for years under the name of contra-terrene matter or c-t. The theoretical existence of contra-terrene matter could be deduced almost at once after the positron had been discovered. Here was a "counter particle"; logically there should be other counter particles. The reasoning was actually quite simple; a hydrogen atom, for example, consists of a positively charged proton as the nucleus with a negatively charged electron going around it. The charges of the two are equal, if opposite, but their masses are quite different, about # to #, with the electron at the small end. Then the positron was found, with a mass like that of the electron, but positively charged. Now if there was a negatively charged proton (variously called "negatron" or "anti-proton"), you could have a hydrogen atom with the charges reversed. That would be contra-terrene matter, and it was also easy to postulate that if normal matter and contra-terrene matter came together, they had to annihilate each other. But if you had the two kinds of matter safely isolated from each other by a large expanse of empty space, you would not be able, just by looking at them, to tell which kind they were. For example, contra-terrene copper probably would look like copper and conduct an electric current nicely. Contra-terrene iron would most likely be magnetic and subject to rusting when exposed to contra-terrene oxygen. The news -- and it isn't so very new -- is that anti-protons have now been produced in the laboratory. They did not last long in their normal-matter environment, of course, but they lasted long enough to prove that they have real existence. So this is one part of the problem. ' I HE next one is whether a piece of normal matter and a piece' of contra-terrene matter would attract each other gravitationally. Or to give the question a more modern flavor: could a contra-terrene meteorite take up an orbit around the Earth? In my opinion: yes. Matter is matter, and just as a piece of contra-terrene iron would display inertia, would have its momentum (when in motion) calculated by the same formula and would be subject to centrifugal force under the proper conditions, it should also be subject to gravitational attraction. We do not know what gravity really is, but it can be taken for granted that the mass of a body is somehow involved. Since contra-terrene matter must have mass, it must be within the law of gravity. This does not get us a single step closer to the riddle of gravity itself, which we cannot yet solve. The reason we can't solve it right now is probably that we don't have a valid theory about the nature of gravity. I know that there has been a lot of talk about anti-gravity research. But I also know that most of it is just that: talk. I know of one or two hoaxes. But I don't know of any successes -- provided anybody had any success, which I doubt. The reason I am bringing this up is that I have found a deep confusion about the issues involved. Just what do the people who hopefully talk about antigravity mean when they talk about it? Do they mean a body not subject to gravity -- in short, a body which does not have any weight at all and which, if it really existed, would be squeezed out of the atmosphere by the weight of the air around it? Or do they mean a body which is actually repelled? Now let us make these two cases equal in assuming that the body is such a long distance from the Earth and also from the Sun that any gravitational influence of the normal kind would be negligible. At a distance of one light-year from the Sun, the behavior of a body which just does not weigh anything, and of one which is repelled, would be pretty much the same. Now you want to do something with this body; it is, in fact, a spaceship and you want to go somewhere with it. So the co-pilot adjusts the fuel pumps and the captain pushes the firing button. And the rocket motor begins to work. Against what? Against the inertia of the ship. I can almost hear the anguished screams at this point. Yes, the body not subject to gravity would still have mass, and mass has inertia. Much of the anti-gravity talk is due to the convenient confusion betweeen weight and mass. So if somebody wants to aim for something really useful, he should not aim for "anti-gravity" but for an inertialess drive. Which is something entirely different. ence that the part of the lecture which the public likes best is the question and answer period, when everybody can get his pet problem off his chest. Well, we can do the same in Galaxy. But just as a lecture hall question and answer period has to be cut off at some point, so that not every question can be answered, we will have to have certain restrictions in Galaxy. In the first place, I do not -- by mail. Fire your question at the editorial office, and if it is judged as being of sufficient public interest, it will be answered in the magazine. As far as feasible, I'll send printed acknowledgments to show that the question has arrived. In the second place, please don't ask unnecessary questions of the type I've gotten so frequently in the past, such as: "Why is our sun not the biggest star in the Universe?" and "How does an airplane fly?" and believe it or not "Which is heavier, gold or lead?" The answers to these questions should have been (and maybe were, I don't remember) No. #: "Because it isn't." No. #: "Go to your public library." No. #: "How about looking it up if you don't know?" TN conclusion, there are two stories I was told, both of which no doubt have a moral, though I am too busy right now to figure it out. The first story was told to me during an airplane ride by a wellknown rocket engineer who works in California. His company maintains a large rocket-motor test area not too far from Los Angeles; in fact, outraged Angelenos have accused them on occasion of shaking the foundations of their buildings. Well, they had Redstone motors on the test stands. The fuel of the Redstone is no secret; like that of the V-#, it is watered alcohol on one side of the injection system, while liquid oxygen goes in the other side of the injection system. One motor, when on the test stand, showed strange fluctuations. One instant it roared to shake the mountains, the next instant it burned rather feebly. No rocket motor behaves that way because of something wrong in the motor itself. The blame lies somewhere in the system -- and that is just the trouble, for the system is large and complicated. It could be a valve which does not stay open, although this is very unlikely. At any event, all the valves were checked first. Nothing wrong, which was what everybody had been afraid of. It meant that the flaw was somewhere in the fuel line. Strong men with large pipe wrenches went into action. No, the fuel line was clear. It must be the oxygen line. It was. At one knee in the oxygen line, the culprit was discovered. A field mouse, frozen stiff and very dead. That field mice might be a hazard to rocket testing was new in everybody's book. But what really bothers the men is the question of how that field mouse managed to get into the oxygen line. It is bothersome, because if one mouse can do that, another one might. And they don't like to take the pipes apart to fish dead mice out of the oxygen flow. IHE other story came to me from an Englishman -- also during an airplane ride -- even though Americans are concerned. The Americans in question are American airmen, stationed somewhere in eastern France. Their planes are rather modern singleseater jet fighters. Naturally the planes were constantly kept in an operable condition, but they are not flown all the time. It has to be explained here that such an airplane has several airintake pipes. One is for cabin air; others are for the purpose of activating various flight instruments. One morning, a man servicing a plane found one of these air intakes carefully plugged up with what looked to him like dried clay. He reported this to his superior officer. The officer passed it on to his superior, who reported it to Intelligence. Intelligence took the customary dim view of things, especially since only a week earlier another maintenance team had found a few instrument tubes plugged up with dry clay. Intelligence concluded that this might be sabotage by French Communists and went to work. Maintenance, in the meantime, went to work too. Intelligence would probably have wanted Maintenance to save the plugged tubes for evidence, but Maintenance was single-minded and considered it their job to keep those planes in fine condition. Maintenance squirted water into the plugged tubes and then attached a high-pressure air hose and opened the valve wide. A stream of wet mud came out of the plugged holes. The officer in charge looked at it curiously and saw things wiggle and squirm in the mud. The saboteurs had been caught: mud wasps! the wizards off Rung's Hovf high the toll if this community remains a stubborn and unprofitable island unto itself? Send quick to know for whom the ball bounces! Corners I T his is the way it happened in the old days. Pay attention now. I'm not going to repeat myself. There was this old man. A wicked one. Coglan was his name, and he came into Pung's Corners in a solid-lead car. He was six feet seven inches tall. He attracted a lot of attention. Why? Why, because nobody had ever seen a solid-lead car before. Nobody much had ever seen a stranger. It wasn't usual. That was how Pung's Corners was in the old days, a little pocket in the middle of the desert, and nobody came there. There weren't even' planes overhead, or not for a long time; but there had been planes just before old man Coglan showed up. It made people nervous. Old man Coglan had snapping black eyes and a loose and limber step. He got out of his car and slammed the door closed. It didn't go tchik like a Volkswagen or per-clack like a Buick. It went woomp. It was heavy, since, as I mentioned, it was solid lead. "Boy!" he bellowed, standing in front of Pung's Inn. "Come get my bags!" Charley Frink was the bellboy at that time -- yes, the Senator. Of course, he was only fifteen years old then. He came out for Coglan's bags and he had to make four trips. There was a lot of space in the back of that car, with its truck tires and double-thick glass, and all of it was full of baggage. While Charley was hustling the bags in, Coglan was parading back and forth on Front Street. He winked at Mrs. Churchwood and ogled young Kathy Flint. He nodded to the boys in front of the barber shop. He was a character, making himself at home like that. In front of Andy Grammis's grocery store, Andy tipped his chair back. Considerately, he moved his feet so his yellow dog could get out the door. "He seems like a nice feller," he said to Jack Tighe. (Yes, that Jack Tighe.) Jack Tighe stood in the shelter of the door and he was frowning. He knew more than any of the rest of them, though it wasn't time to say anything yet. But he said: "We don't get any strangers." Andy shrugged. He leaned back in his chair. It was warm in the sun. "Pshaw, Jack," he said. "Maybe we ought to get a few more. Town's going to sleep." He yawned drowsily. And Jack Tighe left him there, left him and started down the street for home, because he knew what he knew. them. If he had heard, he wouldn't have cared. It was old man Coglan's great talent that he didn't care what people had to say about him, and the others like him. He couldn't have been what he was if that hadn't been so. So he checked in at Pung's Inn. "A suite, boy!" he boomed. "The best. A place where I can be comfortable, real comfortable." "Yes, sir, Mister -- " "Coglan, boy! Edsel T. Coglan. A proud name at both ends, and I'm proud to wear it!" "Yes, sir, Mr. Coglan. Right away. Now let's see." He pored over his room ledgers, although, except for the Willmans and Mr. Carpenter when his wife got mad at him, there weren't any guests, as he certainly knew. He pursed his lips. He said: "Ah, good! The bridal suite's vacant, Mr. Coglan. I'm sure you'll be very comfortable there. Of course, it's eightfifty a day." "The bridal suite it is, boy!" Coglan chucked the pen into its holder with a fencer's thrust. He grinned like a fine old Bengal tiger with white crewcut hair. And there was something to grin about, in a way, wasn't there? The bridal suite. That was funny. Hardly anybody ever took the bridal suite at Pung's Inn, unlesss they had a bride. You only had to look at Coglan to know that he was a long way from taking a bride -- a long way, and in the wrong direction. Tall as he was, snapping-eyed and straight-backed as he was, he was clearly on the far side of marrying. He was at least eighty. You could see it in his crepy skin and his gnarled hands. The room clerk whistled for Charley Frink. "Glad to have you with us, Mr. Coglan," he said. "Charley'll have your bags up in a jiffy. Will you be staying with us long?" Coglan laughed out loud. It was the laugh of a relaxed and confident man. "Yes," he said. "Quite long." Now what did Coglan do when he was all alone in the bridal suite? Well, first he paid off the bellboy with a ten-dollar bill. That surprised Charley Frink, all right. He wasn't used to that kind of tipping. He went out and Coglan closed the door behind him in a very great good humor. Coglan was happy. S O he peered around, grinning a wolfs grin. He looked at the bathroom, with its stall shower and bright white porcelain. "Quaint," he murmured. He amused himself with the electric lights, switching them on and off. "Delicious," he said. "So manual." In the living room of the suite, the main light was from an overhead six-point chandelier, best Grand Rapids glass. Two of the pendants were missing. "Ridiculous," chuckled old Mr. Coglan, "but very, very sweet." Of course, you know what he was thinking. He was thinking of the big caverns and the big machines. He was thinking of the design wobblators and the bombII shielded power sources, the selfcontained raw material lodes and the unitized distribution pipelines. But I'm getting ahead of the story. It isn't time to talk about those things yet. So don't ask. Anyway, after old man Coglan had a good look around, he opened one of his bags. He sat down in front of the desk. He took a Kleenex out of his pocket and with a fastidious expression picked up the blotter with it, and dumped it on the floor. He lifted the bag onto the bare desk top and propped it, open, against the wall. You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear. Its back was a panel of pastel lucite with sparks embedded in it. It glittered. There was a cathode screen. There was a scanner, a microphone, a speaker. All those things and lots more. How do I know this? Why, it's all written down in a book called My Eighteen Years at Fung's Hall, by Senator C. T. Frink. Because Charley was in the room next door and there was a keyhole. So then what happened was that a little tinkly chime sounded distantly within the speaker, and the cathode screen flickered and lit up. "Coglan," boomed the tall old man. "Reporting in. Let me speak to V. P. Maffity."  ' Pung's Corners was like in those days. Everybody knows what it is now, but then it was small. Very small. It sat on the bank of the Delaware River like a fat old lady on the edge of a spindly chair. General "Retreating Johnnie" Estabrook wintered there before the Battle of Monmouth and wrote pettishly to General Washington: "I can obtain no Provision here, as the inhabitants are so averse to our Cause, that I cannot get a Man to come near me." During the Civil War, a small draft riot took place in its main square, in which a recruiting colonel of the IXth Volunteer Pennsylvania Zouaves was chased out of town and the son of the town's leading banker suffered superficial scalp wounds. (He fell off his horse. He was drunk.) These were only little wars, you know. They had left only little scars. Pung's Corners missed all the big ones. For instance, when the biggest of all got going, why, Pung's Corners had a ticket on the fifty-yard line but never had to carry the ball. The cobalt bomb that annihilated New Jersey stopped short at the bank of the Delaware, checked by a persistent easterly wind. The radio-dust that demolished Philadelphia went forty-some miles up the river. Then the drone that was spreading it was rammed down by a suicide pilot in a shaky jet. (Pung's Corners was one mile farther on.) The H-bombs that scattered around the New York megalopolis bracketed Pung's Corners, but it lay unscathed between. You see how it was? They never laid a glove on us. But after the war, we were marooned. Now that wasn't a bad way to be, you know? Read some of the old books, you'll see. The way Pung's Corners felt, there was a lot to be said for being marooned. People in Pung's Corners were genuinely sorry about the war, with so many people getting killed and all. (Although we won it. It was worse for the other side.) But every cloud has its silver lining and so on, and being surrounded at every point of the compass by badlands that no one could cross had a few compensating features. There was a Nike battalion in Pung's Corners, and they say they shot down the first couple of helicopters that tried to land because they thought they were the enemy. Maybe they did. But along about the fifth copter, they didn't think that any more, I guarantee. And then the planes stopped coming. Outside, they had plenty to think about, I suppose. They stopped bothering with Pung's Corners. Until Mr. Coglan came in. communication opened up -- because that was what the big suitcase was, a TV communications set -- he talked for a little while. Charley had a red dent on his forehead for two days, he pressed against the doorknob so hard, trying to see. "Mr. Maffity?" boomed Coglan, and a pretty girl's face lighted up on the screen. "This is Vice President Maffity's secretary," she said sweetly. "I see you arrived safely. One moment, please, for Mr. Maffity." And then the set flickered and another face showed up, the blood brother to Coglan's own. It was the face of an elderly and successful man who recognized no obstacles, the face of a man who knew what he wanted and got it. "Coglan, boy! Good to see you got there!" "No sweat, L.S.," said Coglan. "I'm just about to secure my logistics. Money. This is going to take money." "No trouble?" "No trouble. Chief. I can promise you that. There isn't going to be any trouble." He grinned and picked up a nested set of little metallic boxes out of a pouch in the suitcase. He ofiened one, shook out a small disk-shaped object, silver and scarlet plastic. "I'm using this right away." "And the reservoir?" "I haven't checked yet, Chief. But the pilots said they dumped the stuff in. No opposition from the ground either, did you notice that? Tljese people used to shoot down every plane that came near. They're softening. They're ripe." "Good enough," said L. S. Maffity from the little cathode screen. "Make it so, Coglan. Make it so." TV OW, at the Shawanganunk Na' tional Bank, Mr. LaFarge saw Coglan come in and knew right away something was up. How do I know that? Why, that's in a book too. The Federal Budget and How I Balanced It: A Study in Surplus Dynamics, by Treasury Secretary (Retired) Wilbur Otis LaFarge. Most everything is in a book, if you know where to look for it. That's something you young people have got to learn. Anyway, Mr. LaFarge, who was then only an Assistant Vice President, greeted old man Coglan effusively. It was his way. "Morning, sir!" he said. "Morning! In what way can we serve you here at the bank?" "We'll find a way," promised Mr. Coglan. "Of course, sir. Of course!" Mr. LaFarge rubbed his hands. "You'll want a checking account Certainly! And a savings account? And a safety deposit box? Absolutely! Christmas Club, I suppose. Perhaps a short-term auto loan, or a chattel loan on your household effects for the purpose of consolidating debts and reducing -- " "Don't have any debts," said Coglan. "Look,what's-your-name -- " "LaFarge, sir! Wilbur LaFarge. Call me Will." credit references." And he spilled a manila envelope out on the desk in front of LaFarge. The banker looked at the papers and frowned. He picked one up. "Letter of credit," he said. "Some time since I saw one of those. From Danbury, Connecticut, eh?" He shook his head and pouted. "All from outside, sir." "I'm from outside." "I see." LaFarge sighed heavily after a second. "Well, sir, I don't know. What is it you wanted?" "What I want is a quarter of And make it snappy, will you?" Mr. LaFarge blinked. You don't know him, of course. He was before your time. You don't know what a request like that would do to him. When I say he blinked, I mean, man, he blinked. Then he blinked again and it seemed to calm him. For a moment, the veins had begun to stand out in his temples; for a moment, his mouth was open to speak. But he closed his mouth and the veins receded. Coglan took that silvery, scarlet thing out of his pocket. It glittered. He gave it a twist and he gave it a certain kind of squeeze, and it hummed, a deep and throbbing note. But it didn't satisfy Mr. Coglan. "Wait a minute," he said, offhandedly, and he adjusted it and squeezed it again. "That's better," he said. The note was deeper, but still not quite deep enough to suit Coglan. He twisted the top a fraction more, until the pulsing note was too deep to be heard, and then he nodded. There was silence for a second. Then: "Large bills?" cried Mr. LaFarge. "Or small?" He leaped up and waved to a cashier. "Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! You there, Tom Fairleigh! Hurry it up now. What? No, I don't care where you get it. Go out to the vault, if there isn't enough in the cages. But bring me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" He sank down at his desk again, panting. "I am really sorry, sir," he apologized to Mr. Coglan. "The clerks you get these days! I almost wish that old times would come back." "Perhaps they will, friend," said Coglan, grinning widely to himself. "Now," he said, not unkindly, "shut up." He waited, tapping the desk top, humming to himself, staring at the blank wall. He completely ignored Mr. LaFarge until Tom Fairleigh and another teller brought four canvas sacks of bills. They began to dump them on the desk to count them. "No, don't bother," said Coglan cheerfully, his black eyes snapping with good humor. "I trust you." He picked up the sacks, nodded courteously to Mr. LaFarge, and walked out. Ten seconds later, Mr. LaFarge suddenly shook his head, rubbed his eyes and stared at the two tellers. "What-" "You just gave him a quarter of leigh. "You made me get it out of the vault." "I did?" "You did." They looked at each other. Mr. LaFarge said at last: "It's been a long time since we had any of that in Pung's Corners." Ill IOW I have to tell a part that " isn't so nice. It's about a girl named Marlene Groshawl;. I positively will not explain any part of it. I probably shouldn't mention it at all, but it's part of the history of our country. StillWell, this is what happened. Yes, it's in a book too -- On Call, by One Who Knows. (And we know who "One Who Knows" is, don't we?) She wasn't a bad girl. Not a bit of it. Or, an # Tway, she didn't mean to be. She was too pretty for her own good and not very smart. What she wanted out of life was to be a television star. Well, that was out of the question, of course. We didn't use live television at all in Pung's Corners those days, only a few old tapes. They left the commercials in, although the goods the old, dead announcers were trying to sell were not on the market an # rwhere, much less in Pung's Corners. And Marlene's idol was a TV saleslady named Betty Furness. Marlene had pictures of her, dubbed off the tapes, pasted all over the walls of her room. At the time I'm talking about, Marlene called herself a public stenographer. There wasn't too much demand for her services. (And later on, after things opened up, she gave up that part of her business entirely.) But if anybody needed a little extra help in Pung's Corners, like writing some letters or getting caught up on the back filing and such, they'd call on Marlene. She'd never worked for a stranger before. She was rather pleased when the desk clerk told her that there was this new Mr. Coglan in town, and that he needed an assistant to help him run some new project he was up to. She didn't know what the project was, but I have to tell you that if she knew, she would have helped anyhow. Any budding TV star would, of course. She stopped in the lobby of Pung's Inn to adjust her makeup. Charley Frink looked at her with that kind of a look, in spite of being only fifteen. She sniffed at him, tossed her head and proudly went upstairs. She tapped on the carved oak door of Suite #I -- that was the bridal suite; she knew it well -- and smiled prettily for the tall old man with snapping eyes who swung it open. "Mr. Coglan? I'm Miss Groshawk, the public stenographer. I understand you sent for me." The old man looked at her piercingly for a moment. "Yes," he said, "I did. Come in." He turned his back on her and let her come in and close the door by herself. Coglan was busy. He had the suite's television set in pieces all over the floor. He was trying to fix it some way or another, Marlene judged. And that was odd, mused Marlene in her cloudy young way, because even if she wasn't really brainy, she knew that he was no television repairman, or anything like that. She knew exactly what he was. It said so on his card, and Mr. LaFarge had shown the card around town. He was a research and development counselor. Whatever that was. and she knew that a good public stenographer took her temporary employer's work to heart. She said: "Something wrong, Mr. Coglan?" He looked up, irritable. "I can't get Danbury on this thing." "Danbury, Connecticut? Outside? No, sir. It isn't supposed to get Danbury." He straightened up and looked at her. "It isn't supposed to get Danbury." He nodded thoughtfully. "This forty-eight-inch twentyseven tube full-color suppressed tric wall model with static suppressors and self-compensating tuning strips, it isn't supposed to get Danbury, Connecticut." "That's right, sir." "Well," he said, "that's going to be a big laugh on the cavern in Schenectady." Marlene said helpfully; "It hasn't got any antenna." Coglan frowned and corrected her. "No, that's impossible. It's got to have an antenna. These leads go somewhere." Marlene shrugged attractively. He said: "Right after the war, of course, you couldn't get Danbury at all. I agree. Not with all those fission products, eh? But that's down to a negligible count now. Danbury should come in loud and clear." Marlene said: "No, it was after that. I used to, uh, date a fellow named Timmy Horan, and he was in that line of business, making television repairs, I mean. A couple years after the war, I was just a kid, they began to get pictures once in a while. Well, they passed a law, Mr. Coglan." "A law?" His face looked suddenly harsh. "Well, I think they did. Anyway, Timmy had to go around taking the antennas off all the sets. He really did. Then they hooked them up with TV tape recorders, like." She thought hard for a second. "He didn't tell me why," she volunteered. "I know why," he said flatly. "So it only plays records, Mr. Coglan. But if there's an#dhing you want, the desk clerk'll get it for you. He's got lots. Dinah Shores and Jackie Gleasons and Medic. Oh, and Westerns. You tell him what you want." "I see." Coglan stood there for a second, thinking. Not to her but to himself, he said: "No wonder we weren't getting through. Well, we'll see about that." "What, Mr. Coglan?" "Never mind, Miss Groshawk. I see the picture now. And it isn't a very pretty one." He went back to the television set. He wasn't a TV mechanic, no, but he knew a little something about what he was doing for sure, because he had it all back together in a minute. Oh, less than that. And not just the way it was. He had it improved. Even Marlene could see that. Maybe not improved, but different; he'd done something to it. "Better?" he demanded, looking at her. "I beg your pardon?" "I mean does looking at the picture do anything to you?" "I'm sorry, Mr. Coglan, but I honestly don't care for Studio One. It makes me think too hard, you know?" But she obediently watched the set. corded wire signal that went out to all of Pung's Corners TV sets. I don't suppose you know how we did it then, but there was a central station where they ran off a show all the time, for people who didn't want to bother with tapes. It was all old stuff, of course. And everybody had seen all of them already. But Marlene watched, and funnily, in a moment she began to giggle. "Why, Mr. Coglan," she said, though he hadn't done an#rthing at all. "Better," he said, and he was satisfied. He had every reason to be. "However," said Mr. Coglan, "first things come first. I need your help." "All right, Mr. Coglan," Marlene said in a silky voice. "I mean in a business way. I want to hire some people. I want you to help me locate them, and to keep the records straight. Then I shall need to buy certain materials. And I'll need an office, perhaps a few buildings for light industrial purposes, and so on." "That will take a lot of money, won't it?" Coglan chuckled. "Well, then," said Marlene, satisfied, "I'm your girl, Mr. Coglan. I mean in a business way. Would you mind telling me what the business is?" "I intend to put Pung's Corners back on its feet." "Oh, sure, Mr. Coglan. But how, I mean?" "Advertising," said old man Coglan, with a devil's smile and a demon's voice. Silence. There was a moment of silence. Marlene said faintly: "I don't think they're going to like it." "Who?" "The bigwigs. They aren't going to like that. Not advertising, you know. I mean I'm for you. I'm in favor of advertising. I like it. But -- " "There's no question of liking it!" Coglan said in a terrible voice. "It's what has made our coimtry great! It tooled us up to fight in a great war, and when that war was over, it put us back together again!" Coglan," she said. "But -- " "I don't want to hear that word from you. Miss Groshawk," he snapped. "There is no question. Consider America after the war, ah? You don't remember, perhaps. They kept it from you. But the cities all were demolished. The buildings were ruins. It was only advertising that built them up again -- advertising, and the power of research! For I remind you of what a great man once said: 'Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has.'" Coglan paused, visibly affected. "That was Charles F. Kettering of General Motors," he said, "and the beauty of it. Miss Groshawk, is that he said this in the Twenties! Imagine! So clear a perception of what Science means to all of us. So comprehensive a grasp of the meaning of American Inventiveness!" Marlene said brokenly: "That's beautiful." Coglan nodded. "Of course. So, you see, there is nothing at all that your bigwigs can do, like it or not. We Americans -- we real Americans -- know that without advertising there is no industry; and accordingly we have shaped advertising into a tool that serves us well. Why, here, look at that television set!" Marlene did, and in a moment began again to giggle. Archly she whispered: "Mr. Coglan!" "You see? And if that doesn't suffice, well, there's always the law. Let's see what the bigwigs of Pung's Corners can do against the massed might of the United States Army!" "I do hope there won't be any fighting, Mr. Coglan." "I doubt there will," he said sincerely. "And now to work, eh? Or -- " he glanced at his watch and nodded -- "after all, there's no real hurry this afternoon. Suppose we order some dinner, just for the two of us. And some wine? And -- " "Of course, Mr. Coglan." Marlene started to go to the telephone, but Mr. Coglan stopped her. "On second thought. Miss Groshawk," he said, beginning to breathe a little hard, "I'll do the ordering. You just sit there and rest for a minute. Watch the television set, eh?" IV N ow I have to tell you about Jack Tighe. Yes, indeed. Jack Tighe. The Father of the Second Republic. Sit tight and listen and don't interrupt, because what I have to tell you isn't exactly what you learned in school. The apple tree? No, that's only a story. It couldn't have happened, you see, because apple trees don't grow on upper Madison Avenue, and that's where Jack Tighe spent his youth. Because Jack Tighe wasn't the President of the Second Republic. For a long time, he was something else, something called V.P. in charge of S.L. division, of the advertising firm of Yust and Ruminant. That's right. Advertising. Don't cry. It's all right. He'd given it up, you see, long before -- oh, long before, even before the big war; given it up and come to Pung's Corners, to retire. Jack Tighe had his place out on the marshland down at the bend of the Delaware River. It wasn't particularly healthy there. All the highlands around Pung's Corners drained into the creeks of that part of the area, and a lot of radioactivity had come down. But it didn't bother Jack Tighe, because he was too old. He was as old as old man Coglan, in fact. And what's more, they had known each other, back at the agency. Jack Tighe was also big, not as big as Coglan but well over six feet. And in a way he looked like Coglan. You've seen his pictures. Same eyes, same devil-may-care bounce to his walk and snap to his voice. He could have been a big man in Pung's Corners. They would have made him mayor any time. But he said he'd come there to retire, and retire he would; it would take a major upheaval to make him come out of retirement, he said. And he got one. HE first thing was Andy Grammis, white as a sheet. "Jack!" he whispered, out of breath at the porch steps, for he'd run almost all the way from his store. Jack Tighe took his feet down off the porch rail. "Sit down, Andy," he said kindly. "I suppose I know why you're here." "You do. Jack?" "I think so." Jack Tighe nodded. Oh, he was a handsome man. He said : "Aircraft dumping neoscopalamine in the reservoir, a stranger turning up in a car with a sheetlead body. And we all know what's outside, don't we? Yes, it has to be that." "It's him, all right," babbled Andy Grammis, plopping himself down on the steps, his face chalk. "It's him and there's nothing we can do! He came into the store this morning. Brought Marlene with him. We should have done something about that girl. Jack. I knew she'd come to no good -- " "What did he want?" "Want? Jack, he had a pad and a pencil like he wanted to take down orders, and he kept asking for -- asking for -- 'Breakfast foods,' he says, 'whafve you got in the way of breakfast foods?' So I told him. Oatmeal and corn flakes. Jack, he flew at me! 'You don't stock Coco-Wheet?' he says. 'Or Treats, Elets, Neets or ElixoWheets? How about Hunny-Yummies, or Prune-Bran Whippets, The Cereal with the Zip-Gun in Every Box?' 'No, sir,' I tell him. "But he's mad by then. 'Potatoes?' he hollers. 'What about potatoes?' Well, we've got plenty of potatoes, a whole cellar full. But I tell him and that doesn't satisfy him. 'Raw, you mean?' he yells. 'Not Tatar Fluff, Pre Skortch Mickies or Uncle Everett's Converted Spuds?' And then he shows me his card." "I know," said Jack Tighe kindly, for Grammis seemed to find it hard to go on. "You don't have to say it, if you don't want to." "Oh, I can say it all right, Jack," said Andy Grammis bravely. 'This Mr. Coglan, he's an adver -- " "No," said Jack Tighe, standing up, "don't make yourself do it. It's bad enough as it is. But it had to come. Yes, count it that it had to come, Andy. We've had a few good years, but we couldn't expect them to last forever." "But what are we going to do?" "Get up, Andy," said Jack Tighe strongly. "Come inside! Sit down and rest yourself. And I'll send for the others." "You're going to fight him? But he has the whole United States Army behind him." Old Jack Tighe nodded. "So he has, Andy," he said, but he seemed wonderfully cheerful. of ranch house, with fixings. He was a great individual man. Jack Tighe was. All of you know that, because you were taught it in school; and maybe some of you have been to the house. But it's different now; I don't care what they say. The furniture isn't just the same. And the grounds -- Well, during the big war, of course, that was where the radiodust drained down from the hills, so nothing grew. They've prettied it up with grass and trees and flowers. Flowers! I'll tell you what's wrong with that. In his young days. Jack Tighe was an account executive on the National Floral account. Why, he wouldn't have a flower in the house, much less plant and tend them. But it was a nice house, all the same. He fixed Andy Grammis a drink and sat him down. He phoned downtown and invited half a dozen people to come in to see them. He didn't say what it was about, naturally. No sense in starting a panic. But everyone pretty much knew. The first to arrive was Timmy Horan, the fellow from the television service, and he'd given Charley Frink a ride on the back of his bike. He said, breathless: "Mr. Tighe, they're on our lines. I don't know how he's done it, but Coglan is transmitting on our wire TV circuit. And the stuff he's transmitting, Mr. Tighe!" "Sure," said Tighe soothingly. "Don't worry about it, Timothy. I imagine I know what sort of stuff it is, eh?" He got up, humming pleasantly, and snapped on the television set. "Time for the afternoon movie, isn't it? I suppose you left the tapes running." "Of course, but he's interfering with it!" Tighe nodded. "Let's see." The picture on the TV screen quavered, twisted into slanting lines of pale dark and snapped into shape. "I remember that one!" Charley Frink exclaimed. "It's one of my favorites, Timmy!" On the screen. Number Two Son, a gun in his hand, was backing away from a hooded killer. Number Two Son tripped over a loose board and fell into a vat. He came up grotesquely comic, covered with plaster and mud. Tighe stepped back a few paces. He spread the fingers of one hand and moved them rapidly up and down before his eyes. "Ah," he said, "yes. See for yourself, gentlemen." Andy Grammis hesitatingly copied the older man. He spread his fingers and, clumsily at first, moved them before his eyes, as though shielding his vision from the cathode tube. Up and down he moved his hand, making a sort of stroboscope that stopped the invisible flicker of the racing electronic pencil. And, yes, there it was! the screen showed blandfaced Charlie Chan in his white Panama hat. But the stroboscope showed something else. Between the consecutive images of the old movie there was another image -- flashed for only a tiny fraction of a second, too quick for the conscious brain to comprehend, but, oh, how it struck into the subconscious! Andy blushed. "That -- that girl," he stammered, shocked. "She hasn't got any -- " "Of course she hasn't," said Tighe pleasantly. "Subliminal compulsion, eh? The basic sex drive; you don't know you're seeing it, but the submerged mind doesn't miss it. No. And notice the box of Prune-Bran Whippets in her hand." Charley Frink coughed. "Now that you mention it, Mr. Tighe," he said, "I notice that I've just been thinking how tasty a dish of Prune-Bran Whippets would be right now." "Naturally," agreed Jack Tighe. Then he frowned. "Naked women, yes. But the female audience should be appealed to also. I wonder." He was silent for a couple of minutes, and held the others silent with him, while tirelessly he moved the spread hand before his eyes. Then he blushed. "Well," he said amiably, "that's for the female audience. It's all there. Subliminal advertising. A product, and a key to the basic drives, and all flashed so quickly that the brain can't organize its defenses. So when you think of Prune-Bran WhipFets, you think of sex. Or more important, when you think of sex, you think of Prune-Bran Whippets." "Gee, Mr. Tighe. I think about sex a lot." "Everybody does," said Jack Tighe comfortingly, and he nodded. sound from outside then and Wilbur LaFarge from the Shawanganunk National came trotting in. He was all out of breath and scared. "He's done it again, he's done it again, Mr. Tighe, sir! That Mr. Coglan, he came and demanded more money! Said he's going to build a real TV network slave station here in Pung's Corners. Said he's opening up a branch agency for Yust and Ruminant, whoever they are. Said he was about to put Pung's Corners back on the map and needed money to do it." "And you gave it to him?" "I couldn't help it." Jack Tighe nodded wisely. "No, you couldn't. Even in my day, you couldn't much help it, not when the agency had you in its sights and the finger squeezing down on the trigger. Neo-scop in the drinking water, to make every living soul in Ihing's Corners a little more suggestible, a little less stiff-backed. Even me, I suppose, though perhaps I don't drink as much water as most. And subliminal advertising on the wired TV, and subsonic compulsives when it comes to man-to-man talk. Tell me, LaFarge, did you hapjjen to hear a faint droning sound? I thought so; yes. They don't miss a trick. Well," he said, looking somehow pleased, "there's no help for it. We'll have to fight." "Fight?" whispered Wilbur LaFarge, for he was no brave man, no, not even though he later became the Secretary of the Treasury. "Fight!" boomed Jack Tighe. Everybody looked at everybody else. "There are hundreds of us," said Jack Tighe, "and there's only one of him. Yes, we'll fight! We'll distill the drinking water. We'll rip Coglan's little transmitter out of our TV circuit. Timmy can work up electronic sniffers to see what else he's using; we'll find all his gadgets, and we'll destroy them. The subsonics? Why, he has to carry that gear with him. We'll just take it away from him. It's either that or we give up our heritage as free men!" Wilbur LaFarge cleared  his throat. "And then -- " "Well you may say 'and then,"' agreed Jack Tighe. "And then the United States Cavalry comes charging over the hill to rescue him. Yes. But you must have realized by now, gentlemen, that this means war." And so they had, though you couldn't have said that any of them seemed very happy about it. V OW I have to tell you what it  ' was like outside in those days. The face of the Moon is no more remote. Oh, you can't imagine it, you really can't. I don't know if I can explain it to you. either, but it's all in a book and you can read it if you want to... a book that was written by somebody important, a major, who later on became a general (but that was much later and in another army) and whose name was T. Wallace Commaigne. The book? Why, that was called The End of the Beginning, and it is Volume One of his twelve-volume set of memoirs entitled: I Served with Tighe: The Struggle to Win the World. War had been coming, war that threatened more, until it threatened everything, as the horrors in its supersonic pouches grew beyond even the dreads of hysteria. But there was time to guesstimate, as Time Magazine used to call it. The dispersal plan came first. Break up cities, spread them apart, diffuse population and industry to provide the smallest possible target for even the largest possible bomb. But dispersal increased another vulnerability -- more freight trains, more cargo ships, more boxcar planes carrying raw materials to and finished products from an infinity of production points. Harder, yes, to hit and destroy, easier to choke off coming and going. Then dig in, the planners said. Not dispersal but bomb shelter. But more than bomb shelter -- make the factories mine for their ores, drill for their fuels, pump for their coolants and steams -- and make them independent of supplies that may never be delivered, of workers who could not live belowground for however long the unpredictable war may last, seconds or forever -- even of brains that might not reach the drawing boards and research labs and directors' boards, brains that might either be dead or concussed into something other than brains. So the sub-surface factories even designed for themselves, always on a rising curve: Against an enemy presupposed to grow smarter and slicker and quicker with each advance, just as we and our machines do. Against our having fewer and fewer fighting men; pure logic that, as war continues, more and more are killed, fewer and fewer left to operate the killer engines. Against the destruction or capture of even the impregnable undergroimd factories, guarded as no dragon of legend ever was -- by all that Man could devise at first in the way of traps and cages, blast and ray -- and then by the slipleashed invention of machines ordered always to speed up -- more and more, deadlier and deadlier. And the next stage -- the fortress factories hooked to each other, so that the unthinkably defended plants, should they inconceivably fall, would in the dying message pass their responsibilities to the next of kin -- survivor factories to split up their work, increase output, step up the lethal pace of invention and perfection, still more murderous weapons to be operated by still fewer defenders. And another, final plan -- gear the machines to feed and house and clothe and transport a nation, a hemisphere, a world recovering from no one could know in advance what bombs and germs and poisons and -- name it and it probably would happen if the war lasted long enough. With a built-in signal of peace, of course: the air itself. Pure once more, the atmosphere, routinely tested moment by moment, would switch production from war to peace. And so it did. But who could have known beforehand that the machines might not know war from peace? thousand rat-inhabited manless acres, blind windows and shattered walls. From the air, it is dead. But underneath it -- ah, the rapid pulse of life! The hammering systole and diastole of raw-material conduits sucking in fuel and ore, pumping out finished autos. Spidery passages stretched out to the taconite beds under the Lakes. Fleets of barges issued from concrete pens to match the U-boat nests at Lorient and, unmanned, swam the Lakes and the canals to their distribution points, bearing shiny new Buicks and Plymouths. What made them new? Why, industrial design! For the model years changed. The Dynaflow '#I gave place to the SuperDynaflow Mark Eight of #; twin beam headlights became triple; white-wall tires turned to pastel and back to solid ebony black. It was a matter of design efficiency. What the Founding Fathers learned about production was essentially this: It don't much matter what you build, it only matters that people should want to buy it. What they learned was: Never mind the judgmatical faculties of the human race. They are a frail breed. They move no merchandise. They boost no sales. Rely, instead, on the monkey trait of curiosity. And curiosity, of course, feeds on secrecy. So generations of automotivators created new cosmetic gimmicks for their cars in secret laboratories staffed by sworn mutes. No atomic device was half so classified! And all Detroit echoed their security measures; fleets of canvas-swathed mysteries swarmed the highways at new-model time each year; people talked. Oh, yes -- they laughed; it was comic; but though they were amused, they were piqued; it was good to make a joke of the mystery, but the capper to the joke was to own one of the new models oneself. The appliance manufacturers pricked up their ears. Ah, so. Curiosity, eh? So they leased concealed space to design new ice-tray compartments and brought them out with a flourish of trumpets. Their refrigerators sold like mad. Yes, like mad. there was the vinylite record, unbreakable, colorful, new. They designed it under wraps and then, the crowning touch, they leaked the secret; it was the trick that Manhattan Project hadn't learned -- a secret that concealed the real secret. For all the vinylite program was only a facade; it was security in its highest manifestation; the vinylite program was a mere cover for the submerged LP. It moved goods. But there was a limit. The human race is a blabbermouth. Very well, said some great unknown, eliminate the human race! Let a machine design the new models! Add a design unit. Set it, by means of wobblators and random-choice circuits, to make its changes in an unforeseeable way. Automate the factories; conceal them underground; program the machine to program itself. After all, why not? As Coglan had quoted Charles F. Kettering, "Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has," and proper machines can do that as well as any man. Better, if you really want to know. And so the world was full of drusy caverns from which wonders constantly poured. The war had given industry its start by starting the dispersal pattern; bomb shelter had embedded the factories in rock; now industrial security made the factories independent. Goods flowed out in a variegated torrent. But they couldn't stop. And nobody could get inside to shut them off or even slow them down. And that torrent of goods, made for so many people who didn't exist, had to be 'moved. The advertising men had to do the moving, and they were excellent at the job. S O that was the outside, a very, very busy place and a very, very big one. In spite of what happened in the big war. I can't begin to tell you how busy it was or how big; I can only tell you about a little bit of it. There was a building called the Pentagon and it covered acres of ground. It had five sides, of course; one for the Army, one for the Navy, one for the Air Force, one for the Marines, and one for the offices of Yust #s Ruminant. So here's the Pentagon, this great big building, the nerve center of the United States in every way that mattered. (There was also a "Capitol," as they called it, but that doesn't matter much. Didn't then, in fact.) And here's Major Commaigne, in his scarlet dress uniform with his epaulettes and his little gilt sword. He's waiting in the anteroom of the Director's Office of Yust  Ruminant, nervously watching television. He's been waiting there for an hour, and then at last they send for him. He goes in. Don't try to imagine his emotions as he walks into that pigskinpaneled suite. You can't. But understand that he believes that the key to all of his future lies in this room; he believes that with all his heart and in a way, as it develop, he is right. "Major," snaps an old man, a man very like Coglan and very like Jack Tighe, for they were all pretty much of a breed, those IvyLeague charcoal-grays, "Major, he's coming through. It's just as we feared. There has been trouble." "Yes, sir!" Major Commaigne is very erect and military in his bearing, because he has been an Army officer for fifteen years now and this is his first chance at combat. He missed the big war -- well, the whole Army missed the big war; it was over too fast for moving troops -- and fighting has pretty much stoppsed since then. It isn't safe to fight, except under certain conditions. But maybe the conditions are right now, he thinks. And it can mean a lot to a major's career, these days, if he gets an expeditionary force to lead and acquits himself well with it! So he stands erect, alert, sharpeyed. His braided cap is tucked in the corner of one arm, and his other hand rests on the hilt of his sword, and he looks fierce. Why, that's natural enough, too. What comes in over the TV communicator in that pigskin-paneled office would make any honest Army officer look fierce. The authority of the United States has been flouted! "L.S.," gasp the image of a tall, dark old man in the picture tube, "they've turned against me! They've seized my transmitter, neutralized my drugs, confiscated my subsonic gear. All I have left is this transmitter!" And he isn't urbane any more, this man Coglan whose picture is being received in this room; he looks excited and he looks mad. "Funny," comments Mr. Maffity, called "L.S." by his intimate staff, "that they didn't take the transmitter away too. They must have known you'd contact us and that there would be reprisals." "But they wanted me to contact you!" cries the voice from the picture tube. "I told them what it would mean. L.S., they're going crazy. They're spoiling for a fight." And after a little more talk, L.S. Maffity turns off the set. "We'll give it to them, eh. Major?" he says, as stern and straight as a ramrod himself. "We will, sir!" says the major, and he salutes, spins around and leaves. Already he can feel the eagles on his shoulders -- who knows, maybe even stars! And that is how the punitive expedition came to be launched; and it was exactly what Pung's Corners could have expected as a result of their actions -- could have, and did. TVroW I already told you that   fighting had been out of fashion for some time, though getting ready to fight was a number-one preoccupation of a great many people. You must understand that there appeared to be no contradiction in these two contradictory facts, outside. The big war had pretty much discouraged anybody from doing anything very violent. Fighting in the old-fashioned way -- that is, with missiles and radio-dust and atomic cannon -- had turned out to be expensive and for other reasons impractical. It was only the greatest of luck then that stopped things before the planet was wiped off, nice and clean, of everything more advanced than the notochord, ready for the onecelled beasts of the sea to start over again. Now things were different. First place, all atomic explosives were under rigid interdiction. There were a couple of dozen countries in the world that owned A-bombs or better, and every one of them had men on duty, twentyfour hours a day, with their fingers held ready over buttons that would wipe out for once and all whichever one of them might first use an atomic weapon again. So that was out. And aircraft, by the same token, lost a major part of their usefulness. The satellites with their beady little TV eyes scanned every place every second, so that you didn't dare drop even an ordinary HE bomb as long as some nearsighted chap watching through a satellite relay might mistake it for something nuclear -- and give the order to push one of those buttons. This left, generally speaking, the infantry. But what infantry it was! A platoon of riflemen was twentythree men and it owned roughly the firepower of all of Napoleon's legions. A company comprised some twelve hundred and fifty, and it could singlehanded have won World War One. Hand weapons spat out literally sheets of metal, projectiles firing so rapidly one after another that you didn't so much try to shoot a target as to slice it in half. As far as the eye could see, a rifle bullet could fly. And where the eye was blocked by darkness, by fog or by hills, the sniperscope, the radarscreen and the pulse-beam interferometer sights could locate the target as though it were ten yards away at broad noon. They were, that is to say, very modern weapxDns. In fact, the weapons that this infantry carried were so modem that half of each company was in process of learning to operate weapons that the other half had already discarded as obsolete. Who wanted a MagicEye Self-Aiming All-Weather Gunings, was available? For it was one of the triumphs of the age that at last the planned obsolescence and high turnover of, say, a TV set or a Detroit car had been extended to carbines and bazookas. It was wonderful and frightening to see. TT was these heroes, then, who went off to war, or to whatever might come. Major Commaigne (so he says in his book) took a full company of men, twelve hundred and fifty strong, and started out for Pung's Comers. Air brought them to the plains of Lehigh County, burned black from radiation but no longer dangerous. From there, they journeyed by wheeled vehicles. Major Commaigne was coldly confident. The radioactivity of the sands surrounding Pung's Corners was no problem. Not with the massive and perfect equipment he had for his force. What old Mr. Coglan could do, the United States Army could do better; Coglan drove inside sheet lead, but the expeditionary force cmised in solid iridium steel, with gammaray baffles fixed in place. Each platoon had its own halftrack personnel carrier. Not only did the men have their hand weapons, but each vehicle mounted a #-mm explosive cannon, with Zip-Fire Auto-Load and Wizardtrol Safety Interlock. Fluid mountings sustained the gimbals of the cannon. Radar picked out its target. Automatic digital computers predicted and outguessed the flight of its prey. In the lead personnel carrier. Major Commaigne barked a last word to his troops: "This is it, men! The chips are down! You have trained for this a long time and now you're in the middle of it. I don't know how we're going to make out in there -- " and he swung an arm in the direction of Pung's Comers, a gesture faithfully reproduced in living three-dimensional color on the intercoms of each personnel carrier in his fleet -- "but win or lose, and I know we're going to win, I want every one of you to know that you belong to the best Company in the best Regiment of the best Combat Infantry Team of the best Division of -- " Crump went the #-mm piece on the lead personnel carrier as radar range automatically sighted in and fired upon a moving object outside, thus drowning out the tributes he had intended to pay to Corps, to Army, to Group and to Command. The battle for Pung's Comers had begun. VI IOW that first target, it wasn't  ' any body. It was only a milch cow, and one in need of freshening at that. She shouldn't have been on the baseball field at all, but there she was, and since that was the direction from which the invader descended on the town, she made the supreme sacrifice. Without even knowing she'd done it, of course. Major Commaigne snapped at his adjutant: "Lefferts! Have the ordnance sections put the one-ohfives on safety. Can't have this sort of thing." It had been a disagreeable sight, to see that pxjor old cow become hamburger, well ketchuped, so rapidly. Better chain the big guns until one saw, at any rate, whether Pung's Comers was going to put up a fight. So Major Commaigne stopped the personnel carriers and ordered everybody out. They were past the dangerous radioactive area anyway. The troops fell out in a handsome line of skirmish; it was very, very fast and very, very good. From the top of the Presbyterian Church steeple in Pung's Corners, Jack Tighe and Andy Grammis watched through field glasses, and I can tell you that Grammis was pretty near hysterics. But Jack Tighe only hummed and nodded. Major Commaigne gave an order and every man in the line of skirmish instantly dug in. Some were in marsh and some in mud; some had to tunnel into solid rock and some -- nearest where that first target had been -- through a thin film of beef. It didn't much matter, because they didn't use the entrenching spades of World War II; thov had Powr-Pakt Diggers that clawed into an # dhing in seconds, and, what's more, lined the pits with a fine ceramic glaze. It was magnificent. And yet, on the other hand -- Well, look. It was this way. Twenty-six personnel carriers had brought them here. Each carrier had its driver, its relief driver, its emergency alternate driver and its mechanic. It had its radar and electronics repairman, and its radar-and-electronics repairman's assistant. It had its ordnance staff of four, and its liaison communications officer to man the intercom and keep in touch with the P.C. commander. Well, they needed all those people, of course. Couldn't get along without them. and eighty-two men. Then there was the field kitchen, with its staff of forty-seven, plus administrative detachment and dietetic staff; the headquarters detachment, with paymaster's corps and military police platoon; the meteorological section, a proud sight as they began setting up their field teletypes and fax receivers and launching their weather balloons; the field hospital with eighty-one medics and nurses, nine medical officers and attached medical administrative staff; the special services detachment, prompt to begin setting up a three-D motion-picture screen in the lee of the parked personnel carriers and to commence organizing a handball tournament among the offduty men; the four chaplains and chaplains' assistants, plus the Wisdom Counselor for Ethical Culturists, agnostics and waverers; the Historical Officer and his eight trained clerks, already going from foxhole to foxhole bravely carrying tape recorders, to take down history as it was being made in the form of first-hand impressions of the battle that had yet to be fought; military observers from Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, the Scandinavian Confederation and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Inner Mongolia, with their orderlies and attaches; and, of course, field correspondents from Stars # Stripes, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Scripps-Howard chain, five wire services, eight television networks, an indep)endent documentary motion-picture producer, and one hundred and twenty-seven other newspapers and allied public information outlets. It was a stripped-down combat command, naturally. Therefore, there was only one Public Information Officer per reporter. Still... Well, it left exactly forty-six riflemen in line of skirmish. U P IN the Presbyterian belfry, Andy Grammis wailed : "Look at them. Jack! I don't know, maybe letting advertising back into Pong's Corners wouldn't be so bad. All right, it's a rat race, but -- " "Wait," said Jack Tighe quietly, and hummed. They couldn't see it very well, but the line of skirmish was in some confusion. The word had been passed down that all the field pieces had been put on safety and that the entire firepower of the company rested in their forty-six rifles. Well, that wasn't so bad; but after all, they had been equipped with E-Z-Fyre Revolv-a-Clip Carbines until ten days before the expeditionary force had been mounted. Some of the troops hadn't been fully able to familiarize themselves with the new weapons. It went like this; "Sam," called one private to the man in the next foxhole. "Sam, listen, I can't figure this something rifle out. When the something green light goes on, does that mean that the something safety is off?" "Beats the something hell out of me," rejoined Sam, his brow furrowed as he pored over the full-color, glossy-paper operating manual, alluringly entitled. The Five-Step Magic-Eye Way to New Combat Comfort and Security. "Did you see what it says here? It says, 'Magic-Eye in Off position is provided with positive Fayl-Sayf action, thus assuring Evr-Kleen Cartridge of dynamic ejection and release, when used in combination with Shoulder-Eez Anti-Recoil Pads.'" "What did you say, Sam?" "I said it beats the something hell out of me," said Sam, and pitched the manual out into noman's-land before him. But he was sorry and immediately crept out to retrieve it, for although the directions seemed intended for a world that had no relation to the rock-and-mud terra firma around Pung's Corners, all of the step-by-step instructions in the manual were illustrated by mockup photographs of starlets in Bikinis -- for the cavern factories produced instruction manuals as well as weapons. They had to, obviously, and they were good at it; the more complicated the directions, the more photographs they used. The vehicular ones were downright shocking. don't seem to be doing anything," ventured Andy Grammis, watching from the steeple. "No, they don't, Andy. Well, we can't sit up here forever. Come along and we'll see what's what." Now Andy Grammis didn't want to do that, but Jack Tighe was a man you didn't resist very well, and so they climbed down the winding steel stairs and picked up the rest of the Pung's Corners Independence Volunteers, all fourteen of them, and they started down Front Street and out across the baseball diamond. Twenty-six personnel carriers electronically went ping, and the turrets of their one-oh-fives swiveled to zero in on the Independence Volunteers. Forty-six riflemen, swearing, attempted to make Akur-A-C Greenline Sighting Strip cross Horizon Blue True-Site Band in the UpClose radar screens of their rifles. And Major Commaigne, howling mad, waved a sheet of paper under the nose of his adjutant. "What kind of something nonsense is this?" he demanded, for a soldier is a soldier regardless of his rank. "I can't take those men out of line with the enemy advancing on us!" "Army orders, sir," said the adjutant impenetrably. He had got his doctorate in Military Jurisprudence at Harvard Law and he knew whose orders meant what to whom. "The rotation plan isn't my idea, sir. Why not take it up with the Pentagon?" "But, Lefferts, you idiot, I can't get through to the Pentagon! Those something newspapermen have the channels sewed up solid! And now you want me to take every front-line rifleman out and send him to a rest camp for three weeks -- " "No, sir," corrected the adjutant, pointing to a line in the order. "Only for twenty days, sir, including travel time. But you'd best do it right away, sir, I expect. The order's marked 'priority.'" Well, Major Commaigne was no fool. Never mind what they said later. He had studied the catastrophe of Von Paulus at Stalingrad and Lee's heaven-sent escape from Gettysburg, and he knew what could happen to an expeditionary force in trouble in enemy territory. Even a big one. And his, you must remember, was very small.  your own, eveiything becomes your enemy; frost and diarrhea destroyed more of the Nazi Sixth Army than the Russians did; the jolting wagons of Lee's retreat put more of his woimded and sick out of the way than Meade's cannon. So he did what he had to do. "Sound the retreat!" he bawled. "We're going back to the bam." Retire and regroup; why not? But it wasn't as simple as that. The personnel carriers backed and turned like a fleet in maneuvers. Their drivers were trained for that But one PC got caught in Special Service's movie screen and blundered into another, and a flotilla of three of them found themselves stymied by the spreading pre-fabs of the field hospital. Five of them, doing extra duty in running electric generators from the X)wer takeoffs at their rear axles, were immobilized for fifteen minutes and then boxed in. What it came down to was that four of the twenty-six were in shape to move right then. And obviously that wasn't enough, so it wasn't a retreat at all; it was a disaster. "There's only one thing to do," brooded Major Commaigne amid the turmoil, with manly tears streaming down his face, "but how I wish I'd never tried to make lieutenant colonel!" S O Jack Tighe received Commaigne's surrender. Jack Tighe didn't act surprised. I can't say the same for the rest of the Independence Volunteers. "No, Major, you may keep your sword," said Jack Tighe kindly. "And all of the officers may keep their Pinpoint Levl-Site No-Jolt sidearms." "Thank you, sir," wept the major, and blundered back into the officer's club which the Headquarters Detachment had never stopped building. Jack Tighe looked after him with a peculiar and thoughtful expression. thirty-inch hickory stick -- it was all he'd been able to pick up as a weapon -- babbled: "It's a great victory! Now they'll leave us alone, I bet!" Jack Tighe didn't say a single word. "Don't you think so. Jack? Won't they stay away now?" Jack Tighe looked at him blankly, seemed about to answer and then turned to Charley Frink. "Charley. Listen. Don't you have a shotgun put away somewhere?" "Yes, Mr. Tighe. And a .#. Want me to get them?" "Why, yes, I think I do." Jack Tighe watched the youth run off. His eyes were hooded. And then he said; "Andy, do something for us. Ask the major to give us a P.O.W. driver who knows the way to the Pentagon." And a few minutes later, Charley came back with the shotgun and the .#; and ffie rest, of course, is history. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. Lisbon Cubed -- don't check into a hotel under the name of Smith -- especially if that's your namel T he telephone rang. Alfred Smith, who had been hauling clothes out of his valise and stuffing them into the typical hotel room bureau, looked up, startled. "Now who -- " he began, and shook his head. Obviously it must be a wrong number. Nobody knew he was in New York, and nobody -- this for a certainty -- knew he had checked into this particular hotel. Or, come to think of it, somebody did. The room clerk at the desk where he had just registered. Must be some hotel business. Something like don't use the lamp on the end table -- it tends to shortcircuit The telephone rang again. He dropped the valise and circled the bed. He picked up the phone. "Yes?" he said. "Mr. Smith?" came a thick voice from the other end. "Speaking." "This is Mr. Jones. Mr. Cohen and Mr. Kelly are with me in the lobby. So is Jane Doe. Do you want us to come up or shall we wait for you?" "Huh?" "Well, then, well come up. Room #, isn't it?" "Yes, but wait a minute! Who did you say?" He realized the man had hung up. telephone and ran his fingers through his crew-cut. He was a moderately tall, moderately athletic, moderately handsome young man with only the faintest hint at jowl and belly of recent prosperity. "Mr. Jones? Cohen? Kelly? And, for suffering sake, Jane Doe?" It must be a joke. Any Smith was used to jokes on his name. What was your name before it was Smith? Alfred Smith? Whatever happened to good old Johimie? Then he remembered that his caller had just asked for Mr. Smith. Smith was a common name, like it or not He picked up the phone again. "Desk," he told the operator. "Desk," a smooth voice said. "This is Mr. Smith in Room #. Was there another Smith registered here before me?" A long pause. "Are you having any trouble, sir?" Alfred Smith grimaced. "That's not what I'm asking. Was there or wasn't there?" "Well, sir, if you could tell me if it is causing you inconvenience in any way..." He got exasperated. "I asked you a simple question. Was there a Smith in this room before me? What's the matter, did he kill himself?" "We have no right to believe he committed suicide, sir!" the desk clerk said emphatically. "There are many, many circumstances imder which a guest might disappear after registering for a room!" There was a peremptory knock on the door. Alfred Smith grunted, "Okay, that's all I wanted to know," and hung up. He opened the door, and before he could say anything, four people came in. Three were men, the last was a mildly attractive woman. "Now look -- " he started to protest. "Hello, Gar-Pitha," one of the men said. "I'm Jones. This is Cohen and this is Kelly. And, of course, this is Jane Doe." "There's been a mistake," Alfred told him. "And how there's been a mistake!" said Cohen, locking the door behind him carefully. "Jones, you called Smith by his right name -- when the corridor door was open! That's unpardonable stupidity." Jane Doe nodded. "Door open or door closed, we must remember that we are on Earth. We will use only Elarth names. Operating ProAlfred took a long, slow look at her. "On Earth?" She smiled shamefacedly. "There I go myself, doing practically the same thing. You're right In America. Or rather, to put it more exactly and less suspiciously, in New York City." Mr. Kelly had been walking aroimd Alfred, staring at him. "You're perfect," he said at last. "Better than any of us. That disguise took a lot of hard, patient work. Don't tell me, I know. You're perfect. Smith, perfect" " Alfred wondered frantically -- limatics? No, spies! Should he say something, should he give the mistake away, or should he start yelling his head off for help? But maybe they weren't spies -- maybe they were detectives on the trail of spies. He was in New York, after all. New York wasn't the hinterAnd that suggested another possibility. New York, the home of the sharpie, the smart aleck. It could be a simple practical joke being played by some city slickers on a new hayseed. If it was... His visitors had found seats for themselves. Mr. Kelly opened the briefcase he was carrying and grubbed around in it with his fingers. A low hum filled the room. "Not enough power," Mr. Kelly apologized. "This is a small sun, you know. But give the rig a few minutes; it'll build up." Mr. Jones leaned forward. "Listen, do you folks mind if I slip out of my disguise? I'm hot" "You're not supposed to," Jane Doe reminded him. "The uniform is to be worn at all times when we're on duty." "I know, I know, but StenDurok -- oops, I mean Cohen -- locked the door. Nobody comes in through windows in this particular place, and we don't have to worry about materialization. So how about I relax for a second or two?" Alfred had perched on the edge of the dresser. He looked Mr. Jones over with great amusement The pudgy little man was wearing a cheap gray sharkskin suit He was bald, he wore no eyeglasses, he had no beard. He didn't even have a mustache. Disguise, eh? "I say let him," Alfred suggested with an anticipatory chuckle. "We're all alone -- he might as well be comfortable. Go ahead, Jones, take off your disguise." "Thanks," Jones said with feeling. "I'm suffocating in this outfit" Alfred chuckled again. He'd show these New Yorkers. "Take it off. Be comfortable. Make yourself at home." Jones nodded and unbuttoned the jacket of his gray sharkskin suit. Then he unbuttoned the white shirt under it Then he put his two forefingers into his chest all the way in, and pulled his chest apart. He kept pulling until there was a great dark hole about ten inches wide. of the opening. Its round little body was about the size of a man's fist its legs about the size and length of pipe stems. It crouched on Jones chest while the body from which it had emerged maintained its position in a kind of paralysis, the fingers still holding the chest apart, the back and legs still resting comfortably in the chair. "Whew!" said the spider. "That feels good." Alfred foimd he couldn't stop chuckling. He finally managed to halt the noise from his mouth, but it kept on going in his head. He stared at the spider, at the stiff body from which it had come. Then, near panic, he stared at the others in the room, at Cohen, at Kelly, at Jane Doe. They couldn't have looked less interested. The hum from the briefcase on Kelly's knees abruptly resolved itself into words. Alfred's visitors stopped acting bored and leaned forward attentively, looking at the small lens that rose on a slender periscopic rod and revolved slowly, pausing briefly at each person. "Greetings, Special Emissaries," said the voice. "This is Command Central speaking. Robinson, to you. Are there any reports of significance?" "None from me," Jane Doe said. "Nor me," from Kelly. "Nothing new yet," said Cohen. The spider stretched itself luxuriously. "Same here. Nothing to report" "Jones!" ordered the voice from the briefcase. "Get back into your uniform!" "It's hot, Chief. And we're all alone in here, sitting behind what they call a locked door. We don't have anything to worry about" "I'll tell you what and what not to worry about You get into that uniform, Jones! Or maybe you're tired of being a Special Emissary? Maybe you'd like to be demoted to General Emissary status?" The spider stretched its legs and performed what could only be described as a shrug. Then it backed carefully into the hole in the chest. The hole closed behind it The body of Jones came to life and buttoned his shirt and jacket "That's better," said the voice from the briefcase on Kelly's knee. "Don't ever do that again while you're on duty." "Okay, Chief, okay. But couldn't we cool down this planet? You know start a new ice age? It would make it a lot easier to work." "And a lot easier to be detected, stupid. You worry about the big things like conventions and beauty contests. Well worry about the little things here, in Command Central, like arbitrarily starting new ice ages. All right. Smith, how about you? Whafs your report?"  shook the thick gathered wool out of his head, slid off the dresser and onto his feet. He looked around wildly. "Re-ieport?" A breath. "Why, nothing -- nothing to report." "Took you a long time to make up your mind about it You're not holding anything back, are you? Remember, it's our job to evaluate information, not yours." Alfred wet his lips. "N-no. I'm not holding anything back." "You'd better not. One beauty contest you forget to tell us about and you're through. Smith. We still haven't forgotten that boner you pulled in Zagreb." "Now, Chief," Jane Doe intervened, "that was only a local stunt to discover who was the tallest card-carrying Commtmist in Croatia. You can't blame Smith for missing that" "We certainly can blame Smith for that. It was a beauty contest, within the definition of the term you were given. If Cohen hadn't stumbled across a mention of it in the Kiev Pravda, all hell could have broken loose. Remember that. Smith. And stop calling me Chief, all of you. The name is Robinson. Remember that, too." They all nodded, Alfred with them. He shot a mixed look of uncertainty and gratitude at Jane Doe. "All right," the voice went on, somewhat mollified. "And to show you that I can hand out the boosts as well as the knocks, I want to commend Smith on his disguise. It's a little off-beat, but it rings true -- and that's the main thing. If the rest of you only spent as much time and care on your uniforms, we'd be in the home stretch -- " the voice paused and took on an oily, heavily whimsical quality -- "before you could say 'Jack Robinson.'" They all laughed dutifully at that one, even Alfred. "You think Smith did a good job on his disguise, don't you. Chief -- I mean, Mr. Robinson?" Jane Doe asked eagerly, as if she wanted to underline the fact for everyone. "I certainly do. Look at that suit. It's not just any old suit, but a tweed jacket and flannel pants. Now that's what I call using your imagination. His chin isn't just a chin, it's a cleft chin. Very good. The color of his hair -- first-rate. The only thing I might possibly object to is the bow tie. I'd say a good solid rep tie, regular length, would be a little less chancy, a little less likely to attract attention. But it feels right, and that's the main thing -- the feel of the disguise. In this business, you either have an instinct for merging with the population of the planet, or you don't I think Smith has it Good work. Smith." "Thank you," Alfred mumbled. "All right Ch -- er -- Robinson," Mr. Jones said impatiently. "It's a good uniform-disguise. But it's not that important Our work is more important than how we look." "Your work is how you look. If you look right, you work right Take yourself, for example, Jones. A more nondescript carelessly assembled human being, I don't think I've ever come across before. What are you suppposed to be -- Mr. American-Man-in-the-Street?" #' R. Jones looked deeply hurt. iT im supposed to be a Brooklyn druggist. And believe me, the uniform is plenty good enough. I know. You should see some of these druggists." "Some, Jones, but not most. And that's my point" There was a throat-clearing sound from Mr. Cohen. "Don't want to interrupt you, Robinson, but this isn't supposed to be a long visit we're having with Smith. We just dropped up, kind of." "Right, Cohen, right on the old button. Everybody ready for instructions?" "Ready," they all chorused, Alfred coming in raggedly on the last syllable. "Here we go then. Cohen, you're back on your old assignment, keeping careful check on any new beauty contests scheduled anywhere in the country, with special attention to be paid to New York, of course. Kelly, you're to do the same with conventions. Jane Doe and John Smith will continue to look into anything that might be a camouflaged attempt" "Anything particular in mind?" Jane Doe asked. "Not for you at the moment You just keep making the rounds of beauty parlors and see if you stumble across something. Smith, we have a special item we'd like you to look into. There's a fancy dress ball of the plumbers of the New York City area. Drop down there and see what you can see. And let us know if you hit it Fast." Alfred kept his voice determinedly casual. "What do you want me to look out for?" "Well, if you don't know by this time -- " The voice from the briefcase rose impatiently. "Door prizes, an award for the best costume, even a contest for Miss Pipe Wrench of # I or whatever year Earth is in right now. I don't think we have to worry about that last, though. It would be too damn obvious, and we haven't hit anything obvious yet" "How about me?" Jones wanted to know. "We'll have special instructions for you pretty soon. There may be a new angle." They all looked interested at that but the voice from the briefcase did not seem disposed to elucidate further. "That will be all," it said imequivocally. "You can start leaving now." Mr. Kelly zipped the briefcase shut, nodded at everyone, and left. A few moments later, Mr. Cohen followed him. Then Jones yawned and said, "Well, good-by now." He closed the door behind him. go toward the door. She came over to where Alfred Smith was standing with a punched expression in his eyes. "Well, John?" she said softly. Alfred Smith couldn't think of an#ing to say to that except, "Well, Jane?" "We're together again. Working on an assignment again, together. Isn't it wonderful?" He nodded slowly, carefully. "Yes. Wonderful." "And if we can only close it up this time, finish the whole nasty business once and for all, we'll be going back together." "And then?" Her eyes glistened. "You know, darling. A quiet little web somewhere, just for two. You and I alone. And piles and piles of eggs." Alfred gulped, and, in spite of himself, turned away. "Oh, I'm sorry, darling," she cried, taking his hand. "I've upset you. I was talking out of uniform. Well, then, put it this way. A cottage small by a waterfall. And baby makes three. You and I, down the golden years together. When your hair has turned to silver. There! Is that better?" "Lots," he managed to get out, goggling appalledly at her. "Lots better." She threw her arms around him. He realized he was expected to respond, and squeezed back. "Oh, I don't care," she whispered into his ear. "I don't care about discipline or an#rthing when I'm close to you. And I'll say it, even if Command Central is listening. Darling, do you know what I'd like right now?" Alfred sighed. He was more than half afraid of what was coming. "No, what? What would you like right now?" "I'd like for us to be out of uniform, scuttling about and over each other in some damp, dark place. I'd like to feel your claws upon me, your antennae caressing me -- me -- instead of this clumsy, emotionless disguise I'm wearing." He gulped. "It -- it'll come. Be patient, darling." S HE straightened up and became businesslike again. "Yes, and I'd better be going. Here's a list of all our telephone numbers, in case you want to get in touch with any of us. Don't forget, this operation is to be conducted strictly according to regulations. And that means no phmpfiing, no phmpfiing at all, except in the greatest emergency. For everything else, we use telephones." "Telephones?" he foimd himself echoing. "Yes." She gestured to the black instrument on its stand near the bed. "Those things." "Oh, those things," he repeated, fighting the impulse to shake his head hard in a cloud-clearing gesture. "Yes. Those things. But no -- no -- what did you say?" "No phmptfing" "None at all?" Surely, if he continued to ask questions, something would become clear. And sane! Jane Doe looked extremely concerned. "Of course not! This is a maximum operation." "Yes, that's right," he agreed. "A maximum operation. I'd forgotten it was maximum." "Well, don't," she advised him earnestly. "Don't do any forgetting. As Mr. Robinson warned you, one more boner like the one you pulled in Zagreb, darling, and you're through. You'll be kicked out of the Service. And then what do you think will happen to our plans together?" "We'll be finished, huh?" Alfred studied her. Under all that girlflesh, he reminded himself, there was a large, black spider working at controls like an operator in a steam shovel. "Right. I'd never marry outside the Service. We'd be finished. So do take care of yourself, darling, and give it all you've got. Stay on the ball. Fly right Get with it Rise and shine. Stick to the straight and narrow. Go in there and pitch. Don't let George do it. Work hard and save your money. Early to bed and early to rise. Don't be half safe." "I'll do my best," he promised, his voice rattling "My little crawler," she whispered intimately, and kissed him on the ear. She closed the door behind her. bed. After a while, he noticed that he was imcomfortable. He was sitting on a valise. Absent-mindedly, he shoved it to the floor. What had he wandered into? Or, to put it more accurately, what had wandered into him? Spies. Yes, they were obviously spies. But such spies... spies from another planet. What were they spying on -- beauty contests, conventions, plumbers' fancy dress balls? What were they looking for? What in the world -- or, rather, the Galaxy -- could they be looking for? One thing was perfectly clear. They were up to no good. That omnipresent contempt whenever they mentioned Earth or the things of Earth. An advance wave of invaders? Scouts preparing the way for the main body? They could be that. But why beauty contests? Why fancy dress balls? What was there of value that they could possibly learn from sweaty clambakes like these? You'd expect to find them at nuclear research labs, at rocket proving grounds, skulking about the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Alfred decided there was no point in trying to follow their thought processes. They were completely alien creatures; who knew what kind of information they might consider valuable, what might be important to them? But they were undoubtedly spies sizing up Earth for an invasion to come. "Filthy little spiders," he growled. And one of them was in love with him. One intended to marry him. What was it she had said -- piles and piles of eggs? A pretty thought! He shuddered from his neck to his knees. But they believed he was this other Smith, John Smith. Earth still had a chance. Pure luck had given Earth a counter-spy. Him. He felt frightened, but a little proud. A counter-spy. Alfred Smith reached for the telephone. "Desk!" There was precious little information from the clerk to supplement what he had been given before. John Smith had registered here two weeks ago. He had left one afternoon and not come back. After the usual interval, it was assumed he had skipped, since he owed a few days on the bill at the time. His belongings were in the hotel storeroom. "No, sir, I'm sorry, sir, but hotel regulations do not permit us to let you go through his belongings. Unless you wish to claim a relationship." "And if I did?" Alfred asked eagerly. "If I did wish to claim a relationship?" "Then it would be necessary for you to establish proof, sir." "I see. Well, thank you very much." He hung up. " Smith had registered here, evidently under a previous agreement, as his room was to provide the meeting place for the entire group. Then he had walked out one day and had not returned. Since the disguises were subject to frequent change, when another Smith had registerd in the same room, the spies assumed it was their man. They may not even have known of the lapse of time between the two Smiths. What had happened to John Smith? Had he defected to the United States government? To the United Nations? Hardly. There would be an F.B.I. man, a small Army unit staked out in the room in that case when John Smith's friends showed up. No, he had just disappeared. But was he dead, killed in some accident, or was he only temporarily away, working bn some newly discovered angle for his interplanetary organization? And what would happen to Alfred when he returned? The young man on the bed shivered. Espionage groups, he recalled from the novels he had read, tended to a sort of hatchetman justice. They would not let an Earthman with knowledge of their operations go on living. He had to get help. But from where? The police? The F.B.I.? He shivered again at the picture evoked: himself, somewhat embarrassed, stammering a bit, not quite remembering all the details, telling this story to a hard-faced interrogator. Mr. Smith? From Mars? Oh, not from Mars -- from where then? Oh, you don't quite know, Mr. Smith? All you're sure of is that it's an interplanetary invasion? I see. And how did you happen to hear of this on your first day in New York? Oh, four people came up to your hotel room and told you about it? Very interesting. Very, very interesting. And their names were Mr. Cohen, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Jones and Jane Doe? And your name is Smith, isn't it? And all we have to do to prove your story is locate the address of one of these telephone numbers, cut open the person in whose name the phone is registered and find a big black spider inside... "No!" Alfred groaned aloud. He'd be a full-fledged matriculant at a laughing academy in no time flat. He needed proof -- tangible proof. And facts. Mostly he needed facts. Who were these spiders, what was their home planet, when were they planning to invade, what kind of weapons did they have at their disposal -- information like that. And lots and lots of data about their organization here on Earth, especially in America. How did you get such data? You couldn't ask -- that would be the surest way to expose yourself as a bona fide human with nothing more interesting inside you than the girders, tubing, pumps and vats common to your race and no other. But they'd given him an assignment. Something about a plumbers' fancy dress ball. Now, obviously, an assignment like that concerned their plans, their organization. Obviously. He grabbed for the phone. "Desk? This is Mr. Smith in #. Yes, Mr. Smith again. Listen, how do I find out where the plumbers are in New York?" "If the plumbing in your room is out of order, sir," the smooth, patient voice explained, "the hotel will send up a -- " "No, no, no! I don't want a plumber, I want plumbers, all of them! The New York plumbers, how do I find them?" He distinctly heard lips being licked at the other end as this question was digested and then, aside, a whispered comment, "Yeah, it's # again. We got a real pip in that room this time. I don't envy the night man tonight!" Loudly and clearly, if just a shade less smoothly, the voice replied: "You will find a classified telephone directory on the desk near your bed, sir. You can look up plumbers under P. Most of the plumbers in Manhattan are listed there. For plumbers in Brooklyn, the Brotix, Queens and Staten Island, I would suggest -- " "I don't want plumbers in Brooklyn or the Bronx! I don't even want plumbers in -- " Alfred Smith drew a deep breath. He had to get a grip on himself! The fate of the entire planet, of the entire human race depended on his keeping his head. inch by inch, off the plateau of hysteria it had moimted. He waited until his voice was calm. "This is the problem," he said, slowly and carefully. "There is a fancy dress ball of the plumbers of the New York area. It's being held somewhere in the city tonight and I'm supposed to be there. Unfortunately, I've lost my invitation and it contained the address. Now how do you think I could go about finding where the ball is going to be?" He congratulated himself on the swiftness of his thinking. This was really being a counter-spy! Pause. "I could make some inquiries, sir, through the usual channels, and call you back." And aside: "Now he says he's a plumber and he wants to go to a fancy dress ball. Can you beat that? I tell you... in this business..." And to him: "Would that be satisfactory, sir?" "Fine," Alfred Smith replied enthusiastically. "That would be fine." He himg up. Well, he was getting the hang of this espionage business. Nothing like a sales background for practice in quick thinking and even quicker talking. He didn't have to report to the office until tomorrow. That gave him this afternoon and this evening to save the human race. Who would have thought when he was offered a job in New York with the BlakSeme Company ("Men Notice BlakSemes -- They're so Shockingly Stocking!") what tremendous stakes he'd be playing for on the very day of his arrival? Of course, BlakSeme knew what kind of man he was; they knew he was executive timber or they'd never have hired him right out from under PuzzleKnit, their biggest competitor. He'd made quite a name for himself, Alfred Smith increases for three years running, steadiest rejeat orders for five. But to PuzzleKnit Nylons ("PuzzleKnit Attracts Their Attention and Keeps Them Guessing"), he had just been a top-notch salesman; it had taken BlakSeme, with their "upper-bracket, Madison Avenue orientation, to see him as a possible district sales manager. BlakSeme alone had seen he was big league material. But even they had not guessed how big a league it was in which he was destined to play. The desk clerk called back. "I find, sir, that there is a fancy dress ball of the boss plumbers and steamfitters of the Metropolitan New York area. It's at Menshevik Hall on Tenth Avenue at eight o'clock tonight. The theme of the ball is the ancien regime in France, and only people in pre-French Revolution costumes will be admitted. Would you like the name of a place near the hotel where you can rent the right costume for the occasion?" "Yes," Alfred Smith babbled. "Yes, yes, yes!" Things were beginning to click! He was on the trail of the aliens' organization! and hurriedly selected a Due de Richelieu outfit. Since some small alterations were necessary, he had time to eat dinner before the costume would be delivered at his hotel. He ate carefully and nutritiously: this was going to be a big night. His reading matter throughout the meal was a booklet he'd picked up in the outfitting place, a booklet giving the descriptions and background of all the costumes available for this period -- sixteenth to eighteenth century France. Any fact might be the vital clue... Back in his room, he tore off his clothes and pulled on the rented apparel. He was a little disappointed at the result He did not quite look like a Gray Eminence. More like a young executive in Cardinal's clothing. But then he found the scrap of gray beard in the box that belonged with the costume and fitted it on. It made all the difference. Talk about your disguises! Here his whole body was supposed to be a disguise, a disguise which was the uniform of the aliens' Special Agents Division, of their terrestrial spy service. And now he was disguising that supposed disguise with a real one -- just as, by being a supposed spy, he he was laying a trap for all the real secret operatives. Alfred Smith -- one lone man against the aliens! "So that," he whispered reverently, "government of humans, by humans and for humans shall not perish from the Earth." The telephone. It was Jones. "Just got word from Robinson, Smith. That special mission of mine. It looks like tonight's the night." "Tonight, eh?" Alfred Smith felt the lace tighten around his throat. "Yes, they're going to try to contact tonight. We still don't know where -- just that it's in New York City. I'm to be on reserve; I'll rush around to whoever finds the contact. You know, reinforce, lend a helping hand, be a staunch alley, give an assist to, help out in a pinch, stand back to back till hell freezes over. You'll be at the plumbers' ball, .won't you? Where is it?" Alfred shook his head violently to clear it of the fog of cliches thrown out by Jones. "Menshevik Hall. Tenth Avenue. What do I do if I -- if I discover the contact?" "You phmpff, guy, phmpff like mad. And I'll come a-running. Forget about telephones if you discover the contact. Also forget about special delivery mail, passenger pigeon, pony express rider, wireless telegraphy and couriers from His Majesty. Discovering the contact comes under the heading of 'emergency' under Operating Procedure sive. So phmpff your foolish head off." "Right! Only thing, Jones -- " There was a click at the other end as Jones hung up. Tonight, Alfred Smith thought grimly, staring into the mirror. Tonight's the night! For what? two-story building on the draftiest section of Tenth Avenue. The lower floor was a saloon through whose greasy windows a neon sign proclaimed: Alexei Ivanovich Anphimov, Prop. The second floor was brightly lit Music oozed out of its windows. There was a hand-printed sign on a doorway to one side of the bar: You Must Be in Costume to Be Admitted Tonight ( you haven't paid your associaBushke at the bar before going upstairs -- Bushke's wearing a Man in the Iron Mask costume and he's drinking rum and Seven-Up) Alfred Smith climbed the creaky wooden stairs apprenhensively, his eyes on the burly General Montcalm guarding the entrance at the top. To his relief, however, no invitation or ticket was demanded: his costume was sufficient validation. The red-faced general barely gave him a glance from under the plushly decorated cocked hat before waving him through. It was crowded inside. Scores Annes of Austria and Marie Antoinettes to the strains of rumba and cha-cha. Overhead, two colored chandeliers rotated slowly, unwinding the spectrum upon the glittering waxed floor. Where did he begin? He glanced at the platform where the musicians sat; they alone were not in costume. Lettering on the bass drum told the world that "Ole Olsen and His Latin Five" were providing the rhythms, but that did not seem like much to go on. No one here looked like an interstellar spy. On the other hand, neither did Jones, Cohen, Kelly or Jane Doe. They looked almost spectacularly ordinary. That was it: you had to find these people in the unlikeliest, most prosaic places. Pleased by the inspiration, he went into the men's room. At first, he thought he had hit it exactly right The place was crowded. Sixteen or so Musketeers stood around the wash-basin, munching enormous cigars and conversing in low voices. them and' listened closely. Their talk was eclectic, ranging freely from the wholesale price of pastel-colored water closets to the problems of installing plumbing in a new housing development on Long Island that was surrounded by unsewered streets. "I told the contractor to his face," said a somewhat sallow, undersized Musketeer, knocking his cigar ash off against the pommel of his sword, "'Joe,' I told him, 'how can you expect me to lay pijie when you don't even know the capacity, let alone the type -- look, we won't even talk about the type -- of the sewer system they're going to have installed out here? Joe,' I said to him, 'you're a bright guy: I ask you, Joe, is that fair, does that make sense? You want me to maybe install plumbing that's going to be a lot weaker than the sewer system in the streets so that the first time the new customers flush the toilets, everything backs up all over the bathroom floor -- you want that, Joe?' 'No,' he says, 'I don't want that.' 'All right, then,' I say, 'you want me to maybe install plumbing that's a lot better than necessary, a lot stronger than the sewer system will require, and that'll add extra cost to the houses that doesn't have to be added -- you want that, Joe?' 'No,' he says, 'I don't want that.' 'So, look, Joe,' I say, 'you're willing to admit this is a dumb proposition from top to bottom? Suppose someone asked you to build a house, Joe, and couldn't tell you whether the foundation under it is concrete or steel or sand or cinderblock. That's just exactly what you're asking me to do, Joe, that's just exactly what.'" There was a rustle of approbation. A tall, weedy, mournful-looking Musketeer blew his nose and carefully replaced the handkerchief in his doublet before commenting: "That's the trouble with everybody. They think plumbers are miracle men. They got to learn that plumbers are only human." "I don't know about that," said a stout Huguenot who had come up in the last few moments. "I take the attitude that plumbers are miracle men. What we got to use is our American imagination, our American know-how, our American thinking straight to the point. You show me a sewer system in a new community that hasn't been installed yet, that nobody knows what its capacity is going to be, and I'll figure out a plumbing system for the development that'll fit it no matter what. And I'll save on cost, too." "How?" demanded the sallow, undersized Musketeer. "Tell me how." "I'll tell you how," retorted the Huguenot "By using my American imagination, my American know-how, my American thinking straight to the point. Thafs how." "Pardon me," Alfred Smith broke in hurriedly as he saw the sallow, undersized Musketeer take a deep breath in preparation for a stinging rebuttal. "Do any of you gentlemen know of any prizes that will be given for the best costume, any door prizes, anything like that?"  chewed their cigars at him appraisingly. Then the Huguenot (Coligny? Conde? de Rohan?) leaned forward and tapped him on the chest. "When you got a question, sonny, the thing to do is find the right man to ask the question of. That's half the battle. Now who's the right man to ask questions about door prizes? The no doorman. You go out to the doorman -- he's wearing a General Montcalm -- and you tell him Larry sent you. You tell him Larry said he should tell you all about door prizes, and, sonny, he'll tell you just what you want to know." He turned back to his smoldering adversary. "Now before you say anything, I know just what you're going to say. And I'll tell you why you're wrong." Alfred squeezed his way out of the mobful of rising tempers. At the outskirts, a Cardinal's Guard who had just come up remarked broodingly to a black-hooded executioner: "That Larry. Big man! What I wouldn't give to be around when he take's a pratfall." The executioner nodded and transferred his axe thoughtfully to the other shoulder. The rubber blade boimced once and came to rest. "One day there'll be an anonymous phone call to the Board of Health about Larry and they'll send out an inspector who can't be bought off and that'll be that. Any guy who'll buy up junk pipe and chromium-plate it and then sell it to his friends as new stuff that he's overstocked in..." "Don't know nothing about prizes," the doorman told Alfred, rocking his folding chair back and forth in front of the ballroom entrance. "Anything important, they don't tell me." He tilted his cocked hat forward over his eyes and stared bitterly into space, as if reflecting that with just a little more advance information from Paris the day might indeed have gone quite differently on the Plains of Abraham. "Why'n't you ask around down in the bar? All the big wheels are down in the bar." There must be a good many big wheels, Alfred reflected as he apologized his way through the crowded room downstairs. The hoop-skirts and rearing extravagant hair-dos, the knobby-kneed hose, swinging swords and powdered wigs jam-packed The February Revolution Was the Only Real Revolution Bar  Grill so that the half-dozen or so regular customers in shabby suits and worn windbreakers seemed to be the ones actually in costume, povertystricken, resentful anachronisms from the futvure who had stumbled somehow into imperial Versailles and the intrigue of the Tuileries. At the bar. Bill Bushke, his iron mask wide open despite the sternest decrees of King and Cardinal, accepted dues money, dispensed opinions on the future of standpipes and stall showers to the mob in heavy brocade and shot silk around him, and periodically threw a handful of largesse to the bartender, a chunky, angrylooking man with a spade beard and a white apron, along with the injunction to "set 'em up again." There was no way to get through to him, Alfred reali#ed. He asked several times about "prizes," was ignored and gave up. He had to find a wheel of somewhat smaller diameter. cal gown. He stared down at the rather thinnish Mme. DuBarry sitting in the empty booth. She gave him a smile from imdemeath her black vizard. "Drinkie?" she suggested. Then, seeing his blank look, she amplified: "Yousie and mesie. Just us twosie." Alfred shook his head. "Nosie -- I mean no, thank you. I -- uh -- some business. Maybe later." He started to walk away and found that his sleeve failed to accompany him. Mme DuBarry continued to hold it between two fingers; she held it winsomely, delicately, archly, but the hold was absolutely unequivocal. "Aw," she pouted. "Look at the whizzy-busy businessman. No time for drinkie, no time for mesie, just busy, busy, busy, all the livelong day." Despite his irritation, Alfred shrugged. He wasn't doing himself much good any other way. He came back and sat across the table from her in the booth. Then, and only then, was his sleeve released by the dainty fingers. The angry-looking man in the spade beard and white apron appeared at their booth. "Nyehh?" he grunted, meaning, quite obviously, "Whafll you have?" "I'll have scotch on the rocks," she told Alfred. "Scotch on the rocks is absolutely the only ever drink for me." "Two scotch on the rocks," Alfred told the bartender, who replied, "Nyehh," signifying, "You order the stuff, I bring it It's your funeral." "I heard you asking about contests. I won a contest once. Does that make you like me a little better?" "What kind of contest did you win?" Alfred asked absent-mindedly, studying her. Under that mask, she was probably somewhat pretty in a rather bony, highly ordinary sort of way. There was nothing here. "I was voted The Girl the Jimior Plumbers of Cleveland Would Most Like to Wipe a Joint With. It was supposed to be The Girl Whose Joint the Jimior Plumbers Would Most Like to Wipe, but some nasty people made a fuss and the judges had to change the title. It was three years ago, but I still have the award certificate. Now does that help me at all?" "I'm afraid not But congratulations anyway on winning the title. It's not everybody who can win an honor like that" T he angry-looking man in the spade beard came back and set glasses and coasters in front of them. "Nyehh!" he aimounced, meaning, "You pay me now. That's the way we do business in this place." He took the money, glowered at it, at them, and clumped back to the becustomered bar. "Well, what kind of contest are you looking for? If you tell me, I might be able to help. I know lots of little things about lots and lots of little things." "Oh, contests, prizes, nothing particular." Alfred glanced at the rear of the booth. There was a framed photograph on the wall of Plekhanov shaking hands with Kerensky. A much younger version of the chunky, angry-looking man in the spade beard was standing on tiptoe behind Plekhanov, straining hard to get his face into the picture. Alfred realized he was wasting time and swallowed his drink unceremoniously. "I'll have to be going." She cooed dismay. "So soon? When we've just met? And when I like you so much?" "What do you mean you like me so much?" he asked her irritatedly. "When, to quote you, we've just met?" "But I do like you, I do. You're the cream in my coffee. You're the top. You do things to me. You're what makes the world go round. I'm nuts about you. I go for you in a big way, big boy. I'm wild, simply wild over you. I'd climb the highest mountain, swim the deepest river. Body and soul. Roses are red, violets are blue. Drink to me only with thine eyes. Oh, Johnny, oh-h-h! You're in my heart and my heart's on my sleeve." She stopped and drew breath. "Gah!" Alfred commented, his eyes almost popping. He started to get up. "Thanks, lady, for the pretty talk, but -- " Then he sat down again, his eyes reverting to their previous, poplike state. The way she'd expressed herself when she'd wanted to make certain she was understood! Like Jane Doe, like Mr. Jones. He'd established rendezvous! "So that's how much you like me?" he queried, fighting for time, trying to think out his next step. "Oh, yes!" she assured him. "I'm carrying the torch, all right. I idolize you. I fancy you. I dote on you. I hold dear, make much of, cherish, prize, cling to -- " "Good!" he almost yelled in the desperation of his attempt to break in on the language of love. "Goodgood, good-good. Now I'd like to go some place where we can have some privacy and discuss your feelings in more detail." He worked his face for a moment or two, composing it into an enormous leer. "My hotel room, say, or your apartment?" Mme DuBarry nodded enthusiastically. "My apartment It's right near by." A S she tripped out of the bar beside him, Alfred had to keep reminding himself that this was no human wench, despite the tremulous pressure of her arm around his or the affectionate bump of her hip. This was an intelligent spider operating machinery, no more, no less. But it was also his first key to the puzzle of what the aliens wanted on Earth, his entry into the larger spy organization -- and, if he kept his head and enjoyed just a bit of luck, it might well be the means to the saving of his world. A cab rolled up. They got in, and she called out an address to the driver. Then she turned to Alfred. "Let's kiss passionately," she said. They kissed passionately. "Now let's snuggle," she said. They snuggled. "Now let's snuggle a lot harder," she said. They snuggled a lot harder. "That's enough," she said. "For now." They stopped in front of a large, old apartment house that dozed fitfully high above the street, dreaming of its past as it stared down at a flock of rundown brownstones. Alfred paid the driver and accompanied Mme DuBarry to the entrance. As he held the elevator door open for her, she batted her eys at him excitedly and breathed fast in his ear a couple of times. In the elevator, she pressed the button marked "B." "Why the basement?" he asked. "Is your apartment in the basement?" For answer, she pointed a tiny red cylinder at his stomach. He noticed there was a minute catch on top of the cylinder. Her thumb was poised over the catch. "Never you mind what's in the basement, you lousy Vaklittian sneak. You just stand very still and do exactly what I tell you. And for your information, I know where you are and where your control cubicle is, so don't entertain any hopes of getting away with nothing more than a damaged uniform." Alfred glanced down at the region covered by her weapon and swallowed hard. She was wrong about the location of his control cubicle, of course, but still, face it, how much living would he be able to do without a belly? "Don't worry," he begged her. "I won't do anything foolish." "You'd better not And no phmpffs out of you either, if you know what's good for you. One solitary phmpff and I fill you full of holes. I ventilate you, mister. I plug you where you stand. I let daylight through you, I spray your -- " "I get the idea," Alfred broke in. "No phmpffs. Absolutely. I give you my word of honor." "Your word of honor!" she sneered. I'HE elevator stopped and she backed out, gesturing him to follow. He stared at her masked face and resplendent costume, remembering that when duBarry had been dragged to the guillotine in #, she had screamed to the crowds about her tumbril: "Mercy! Mercy for repentance!" Neither the crowds nor the Revolutionary Tribunal had taken her up on the honest offer. Was that a good or a bad omen for him? Not exactly to Alfred's surprise, there was a man waiting for them in the clammy,., whitewashed basement The Huguenot He of the American thinking straight-to-thepoint. "Any trouble?" "No, it was easy," she told him. "I pulled him in with the Clevelandcontestthreeyearsago routine. He was smooth about it. I'll say that for him: pretended not to be interested, you know, but he must have bitten hard. I found that out a few seconds later when I told him I loved him and he asked me right off to come up to his apartment." She chuckled. "The poor, pathetic incompetent! As if any normal American human male would react like that -- without so much as a remark about my beautiful eyes and how different I am and how about another drink, baby." The Huguenot pulled at his lip dubiously. "And yet the uniformdisguise is a fine one," he pointed out. "That shows a high degree of competence." "So what?" The woman shrugged. "He can design a good uniform, he can think up a splendid disguise, but what good is that if he's slipshod about his performance? This one's barely learned anything about human methods and human manners. Even if I hadn't known about him before, I'd have spotted him on the basis of his love-making in the cab." "Bad, eh?" "Bad?" She rolled her eyes for maximum emphasis. "Oh, brother! I pity him if he ever pulled that clumsy counterfeit on a real human female. Bad isn't the word. A cheap fake. A second-rate ad-lib, but from hunger. No conviction, no feeling of reality, nothing!" Alfred glared at her through the wide-open wounds of his ego. There were holes in her performance, he thought savagely, that would have closed any show the first night. But he decided against giving this critical appraisal aloud. After all, she had the weapon -- and he had no idea how ugly a mess that little red cylinder might make. "All right," said the Huguenot, "let's put him in with the other one." With the red cylinder prodding into his backbone, Alfred marched up the main basement corridor, turned right at their command, turned right again and halted before a blank wall. The Huguenot came up beside him and rubbed his hand across the surface several times. A part of the wall swung open as on hinges, and they stepped inside.  thinking morosely. Secret panels, a female siren, a Huguenot mastermind -- all the equipment. The only thing that was missing was a reason for the whole damn bsuiness. His captors had not discovered that he was a human counter-spy, or they would have destroyed him out of hand. They thought he was a -- what was it? -- a Vaklittian. A Vaklittian sneak, no less. So there were two sets of spies -- the Huguenot had said something about putting him in with the other one. But what were these two sets of spies after? Were they both grappling for pre-invasion control of Earth? That would make his mission much more complicated. To say nothing about trying to tell the police, if he ever managed to get to the police, about two interplanetary invasions! And look who'd thought he was the counter-spy in the picture... The room was large and windowless. It was almost empty. In one corner, there was a transparent cube about eight feet on each side. A middle-aged man in a singlebreasted brown business suit sat on the floor of the cube watching them curiously and a little hopelessly. The Huguenot paused as he reached the cube. "You've searched him, of course?" Mme. du Barry got flustered. "Well -- no, not exactly. I intended to, but you were waiting when we got out of the elevator -- I hadn't expected you for a while yet, you know -- and then we got into conversation and I just didn't -- " Her superior shook his head angrily. "You talk about competence! Oh, well, if I want anything done right, I just have to do it myself!" He ran his hands over Alfred. He took out Alfred's fountain pen and cigarette lighter and examined them very closely. Then he replaced them and looked puzzled. "He's not carrying a weapon. Does that make sense?" "It certainly does! I wouldn't put anything dangerous in the hands of anyone so ridiculously inexperienced!" U# The Huguenot thought about it for a while. "No. He wouldn't be running around by himself then. He'd be under supervision." "Maybe he is. Maybe that's the answer. In that case -- " "In that case, you both might have been followed here. Yes, that could be it. Well, we'll fool them. Contact or no contact, we'll close the operation There as of tonight. Don't go out again -- in an hour or so, we'll leave the planet and take off with our prisoners for Headquarters." He rubbed his hand against the cube as he had on the wall outside. An opening appeared in the transparency and widened rapidly. With the cylinder at his back, Alfred was pushed inside. "Give him a small blast," he heard the Huguenot whisper. "Not too much -- I don't want him killed before he's questioned. Just enough to stun him and keep him from talking to the other one." There was a tiny click behind Alfred. A rosy glow lit up the cube and the basement room. He felt a bubble of gas form in his belly and rise upward slowly. After a while, he belched. " opening in the transparency had closed and the Huguenot had whirled angrily on Mme. du Barry. The lady was examing her weapon with great puzzlement "I told you I wanted him stunned, not tickled! Is there anything I can depend on you to do right?" "I was trying to be careful -- I didn't want to kill him, like you said! I aimed right at the control cubicle and I used the medium-low Vaklittian index. I don't understand how he -- how he -- " The Huguenot flapped both hands at her disgustedly. "Oh, let's get out of here and start packing! When we get back tonight, I intend to ask Headquarters to assign me a new female assistant for the next Earth operation. One without so exact a knowledge of human males, perhaps, but who can be counted on to disarm a newly captured prisoner and to tell a Vaklittian index from a hole in her cylinder!" Mme. du Barry hung her head and followed him out of the room. The door-wall shut behind them. Alfred touched the transparent wall of the cube gingerly. There was no longer any hint of the opening he had been pushed through. The stuff, while as transparent as glass, was rubbery and slightly sticky, something like newly melted plastic. But a plastic, he found out, incredibly strong. And it gave off a whitish glow which enabled him to see through it, dimly, the featureless walls of the secret basement room. He turned and surveyed his coprisoner, a few feet away, on the other side of the cube. The man was looking at him suspiciously and yet uncertainly, as if he did not quite know what to make of the situation. There was a perculiarly nondescript, uninteresting and ordinary quality to his features which made them somehow extraordinarly familiar. Of course! He looked every bit as average as Jones, as Cohen, as Kelly and -- in her own submerged feminine way -- as Jane Doe. And then, with complete certainty, Alfred knew who the man had to be. "John Smith?" he inquired. "I mean," he added, as he recollected one of Jones' earlier remarks, "Gar-Pitha?" The middle-aged man rose to his feet and smiled relief. "I couldn't figure out who you were, but you had to be one of us. Unless you were a decoy they were planting here to make me talk. But if you know my real name... What's yours, by the way?" Alfred shook his head coyly. "Command Central -- Robinson, I mean -- has me on a special mission. I'm not allowed to give my name." John Smith nodded heavily. "Then you don't give it -- and that's that. Robinson knows what he's doing. You can't go wrong by following Robinson's orders to the letter. Special mission, eh? Well, you won't complete it -- now. She trapped me the same way. We're both in the soup and good." "The soup?" "Sure. Those filthy Lidsgallians -- you heard them? They're leaving tonight and taking us with them. Once they've got us on their home planet, they'll be able to work us over at their leisure. They won't get anything out of me, and I hope, for the honor of the Academy, they won't get anything out of you, no matter what they do to us, but we won't be good for very much by the time they're through. Oh, those Lidsgallians know their way around a torture chamber, yessiree, Bob!" "Torture chamber?" Alfred felt sick and knew he looked it T he older man reached out and squeezed his shoulder. "Steady on, lad," he said. "Don't show the white feather before the natives. Keep a stiff upper lip. Bite the bullet. Fight on for Notre Dame. Never say die. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Let's keep the old flag flying." As Alfred said nothing, John Smith took his silence for agreement with these high principles and went on: "You can't get out of this cell -- it's a spun web of pure chrok, practically unbreakable. But the worst of it is its insulating quality: you can't phmpff through chrok to save your life. I've tried to phmpff for help until I almost fractured an antenna -- couldn't raise a whisper. That's why they don't have to split up their force to guard us. And that's why I haven't bothered to come out of my uniform to talk to you: if we can't phmpff, we'll make more sense to each other with the jaw attachments of our uniforms." Grateful for this small mercy, Alfred began to look around at the enclosing walls of chrok. "How about using these -- these jaw attachments to get help?" he suggested. "Sound seems to go through. We could try yelling together." , "And who would hear you? Humans. What could they do?" Alfred spread his hands. "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes even humans can be -- " "No, forget about it. Things are bad, but they're not that bad. Besides, these walls are especially thick and there are no cracks in them. If those Lidsgallians hadn't come down a couple of times a day to change the air, I'd have suffocated by now. As it was, I was in a bad way a couple of times and had to fall back on the reserve air supply in the chest -- you know, the compartment right over the control cubicle? But Fll tell you this, if I ever get back to Vaklitt in one piece. I'll really try to talk Command Central into drastically revising our uniform. "I thought of it while I was watching them search you. Do away with the air reserve in the chest. I'll tell Robinson -- how often, when you come right down to it, does one of our Special Emissaries ever find himself drowning or in the middle of a poisongas war? -- and find some way an agent can take a weapon, a real, honest, claw-operated weapon, into his uniform-disguise with him. Although, come to think of it, you'd need some sort of turret arrangement coming out of the human flesh to fire it, and those Lidsgallians, once they found out about it, would -- " He rambled on. Alfred, watching him, realized how hungry he'd been for companionship. And this talkative mood might be put to use. They both might be in a Lidsgallian torture chamber somewhere out in the Galaxy in a couple of hours, but there was a very slender chance that they might not. And, besides, facts were always useful; he could cop)e with whatever lay ahead a bit more easily if he only had some coherent facts on which to base his plans. This was the time, if ever, to find out who was the greater menace to Earth, the Vaklittians or the Lidsgallians -- and who was more likely to accept the proffer of friendship from a badly frightened human. Only -- he had to be careful how he phrased the questions. He had to be prepared to cover up any blunders quickly. a YIHY do you think," he asked " carelessly, "the Lidsgallians hate us so much? Oh, I know the usual answers, but I'm interested in hearing your opinion. You seem to have a very refreshing slant." John Smith grunted appreciatively, thought for a moment, then shrugged. "The usual answers are the only answers in this case. It's the war. Naturally." "Just the war? That's all, you think?" "Just the war? What do you mean, just the war? How can an interstellar war, going on across two-thirds of the Galaxy for almost three centuries, be just the war? uals killed, dozens upon dozens of fertile planets smashed into space dust -- you call that just the war? You youngsters must really be growing up pretty cynical these days!" "I -- I didn't mean it quite like that," Aflred said rapidly, placatingly. "Of course, the war -- it's a terrible business and all that. Awful. Positively horrible. Sickening, sickening. And our enemy, those vicious Lidsgallians -- " John Smith looked sandbagged. "What? The Lidsgallians aren't our enemies -- they're our allies!" It was Alfred's turn under the sandbag. "Our allies?" he repeated weakly, wondering how he was ever going to get out of this one. "Our allies?" he said again, trying a different intonation on for size and the bare possibility of sense. "I don't know what the Academy's coming to any more," John Smith muttered to himself. "In my day, you got a good general education there, with just enough lab work in espionage to warrant giving you a commission in the Service if you filled all the other requirements. You came out of the Academy a wide-awake, cultured interstellar citizen, with a good background in history, economics, art, science and total terroristic warfare. On top of that, you had, whenever you wanted to use it, a decent and honorable trade -- spying -- under your belt. "Of course, if you wanted to specialize, you could always go back, after graduation, for intensive study in elementary and advanced ciphers, creative disguise design, plain and fancy lying, physical and mental torture, narrow fields of scholarship like that. But that used to be strictly post-graduate work. "Now -- now everything is sp)ecialization. They turn out dewy youngsters who can crack any code in space, but can't tell a simple espionage lie to save their heads; they graduate kids who can knock out a masterpiece of a uniformdisguise, but don't even know the difference between a Lidsgallian and a Pharseddic! Mark my words, this overspecialization will be the death of the Academy yet!" "I agree with you," Alfred told him with ringing sincerity. He thought for a moment and decided to underline his endorsement "Shoemaker, stick to your last. A place for everything and everything in its place. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Look to the ant, thou sluggard!" He found he was going off the track and stopped himself. "But you see, the way the Academy feels today, its graduates will go into active service and meet older, more experiencd men like yourself who can give them this general political orientation right on the spot. Now, in a way, I really knew all the time that the actual enemy, in the deeper sense of the word, so to speak, were the Pharseddics, but -- " "The Pharseddics? Our enemy? But the Pharseddics are the neutrals -- the only neutrals! Look here, youngster, and try to get it straight in your mind for once. You absolutely can't do a first-class job of espionage on Earth unless you know the general principles and the background data from which they're derived. To begin with, the Lidsgallians were attacked -- with provocation -- by the Garoonish, right?" tive shake off his head. "Right! Any schoolchild knows that." "All right, then. We had to go to war with the Garoonish, not because we had anything particular against them, or liked the Lidsgallians, but because if the Garoonish won, they would then be in a position to conquer the Mairunians, who were our only possible allies againt the growing power of the Ishpolians." "Naturally," Alfred murmured. "Under the circumstances, there was no alternative." "Well, that forced the Garoonish to make common cause with the Ossfollians. The Ossfollians activated their mutual assistance pact with the Kenziash of the Nigel region, and, out of fear of the Kenziash, the Ishpolians joined forces with us and pushed the Mairunians into the Garoonish camp. Then came the Battle of the Ninth Sector in which the Ossfollians switched sides four times and which resulted in the involvement of the Menyemians, the Kazkafians, the Doksads, and even the Kenziash of the Procyon and Canopus regions. After that, of course, the war began to get complicated." Alfred wet his lips. "Yes, of course. Began to get complicated." He decided, for the sake of sanity, to bring matters much closer to present time and place. "Meanwhile, here on Earth, there are the spies of -- the spies of -- Pardon me, but in your opinion just how many of these belligerents operate espionage networks on Earth? Regularly, I mean." "All of them! Every single one of them! Including the Pharseddics, who have to know what's going on if they're to maintain their neutrality. Earth, as I hope you remember from your first-year course in Elementary Secrecy, is ideally situated just outside the usual battle zones, but within easy access of almost all the belligerents. It's the only place left where information can be transmitted across the combat lines and deals can be made back and forth -- and, as such, it's zealously respected by everyone. "After all, it was on Earth that we sold out the Doksads, and where the annihilation of the Menyemians was arranged by their allies, the Mairunians and the Kazkafians. Just as now we have to watch our own oldest allies, the Lidsgallians, who have been trying to make contact with Garoonish for the purpose of concluding a separate peace! "I got the proof -- I even found out the specific time and place the contact was to be made and what the arrangements were to be! But then I ran afoul of that female with her yacker of Cleveland contests she won three years ago. And I got caught." "The contact was to be made through a beauty contest of some sort, wasn't it?" T he middle-aged man looked impatient. "Naturally a beauty contest. Of course a beauty contest. How else would anyone go about contacting the Garoonish?" "I couldn't imagine," Alfred laughed weakly. "The Garoonish, after all!" He sat in silence, absolutely unable to close mentally with the picture John Smith had evoked. The nearest he could come to it was a memory of something he had read about Lisbon during the Second World War. But this was Lisbon cubed, Lisbon raised to some incredible exponential power. All Earth was a vast labyrinth of spy-threaded Lisbon. Spies, counter-spies, counter-counter spies... Just what, he suddenly wondered, was the correct human population of Earth? Were there so many disguised interstellar agents that they outnumbered the host race? Would the world census show the truth -- more humans if the agents hadn't been counted, less if they had? Life had been a lot simpler with Puzzleknit Nylons, he decided, and that was his only real conclusion. John Smith nudged him. "Here they come. It's off to Lidsgall for us." They rose to their feet as the wall opened. Two men and a women came in, dressed in street clothing. They each carried in one hand a small suitcase that looked heavy, and, in the other, the small, red cylindrical weapon. Alfred eyed the cylinders and found himself getting tense with a dangerous idea. The weapon hadn't bothered him much before and it had supposedly been set to stun him. Well, perhaps the woman had a mistake in her setting -- and perhaps the metabolisms of Man and Vaklittian were so different that a charge thatwould knock out the one would merely give the other only an upset stomach. Then again, if Earth were so carefully maintained in her ignorance as John Smith had indicated, there might be no setting on the weapon that would damage a native terrestrial at all: in the normal course of their intrigues with and against and around each other, these people might be enjoined by their own laws and by mutual agreement from carrying weapons that could damage humans. But if he were wrong? It still might take them quite a bit of time to realize that the Vaklittian frequencies were having no important effect on him, and he might manage a lot of action in that time. The alternative, at any rate, was to be snatched from Earth in just a few minutes and deposited, some time in the near future, in an extraterrestrial torture chamber. Even if he were able to prove his humanity to their satisfaction, they would have to dispose of him in some way -- and the various devices of the torture chamber would be so handy. No question about it: people who go in for torture chambers do not make good hosts. O NE of the men fiddled with his suitcase, and the transparent cube dissolved around Alfred and John Smith. In response to the gestures made with the weapons, they walked gingerly across the floor. They were motioned through the open wall. Alfred found it difficult to recognize Mme. du Barry and the Huguenot without their masks and costumes. They both looked much like the new man with them, not bad, not good, just faces-in-acrowd. Which, of course, was exactly how they wanted it He reached his decision as the five of them began walking through the opening in the wall. For the moment they were closely bunched together, even bumping against each other. He grabbed the woman by the arm and swimg her violently against the Huguenot who staggered confusedly. Then, knowing that John Smith was between him and the new man in the rear, he hitched up his cassock and started to run. He turned left, and again left -- and found himself in the main basement corridor. Ahead, at the far end, was a flight of stone stairs leading up to the street Behind him, there was the noise of struggle, then the sound of feet running in pursuit He heard John Smith distantly yell: "Go it, laddie! Over the hill! Ride him, cowboy! It's the last lap -- full speed ahead! Shake a leg! Hit the road! Go, man, go!" Then the Valklittian's shout abruptly ended in a breathless grunt. After the sound of a wallop. A pinkish glow hit Alfred, moved back and over to light up his mid-section. He belched. The glow turned light red, deep red, dark, vicious red. He belched more frequently. He reached the stairs and was clambering up them as the glow became a throbbing, nightlike purple. Ten minutes later, he was on Sixth Avenue, getting into a cab. He had a mildly unpleasant bellyache. It rapidly subsided. He looked behind him as they drove to his hotel. No pursuit. Good. The Lidsgallians would have no idea where he lived. Did they look like the Viklattian spiders? Hardly, he decided. All these different racial names and these titanic interstellar animosities suggested many, many separate forms. They'd have to be small enough to fit into a normal creatures, possibly, and wormlike ones. Crablike ones and squidlike ones. Perhaps even ratlike ones? On the whole, a dreadfully unpleasant subject. He needed a good night's sleep, for tomorrow would be his first day at BlakSemes'. And then, after a bit, when he'd had a chance to think it all out, he'd decide what to do. The police, the F.B.I., or whatever. Maybe even take .the whole story to one of the New' York newspapers -- or some top television commentator might be more sympathetic and reach a bigger audience. His story would have to be coherent and convincing, though. He'd have little proof: the Lidsgallians were probably on their way back to their home planet this very moment. But there was his own gang -- the 'Vaklittians. Cohen and Kelly and Jones. And Jane Doe. He'd kid them along for a couple of days and then use them for proof. It was time Earth knew what was going on. him in his hotel room. Cohen and Kelly and Jones. And Jane Doe. They looked as if they'd been waiting for a long time. Jane Doe looked as if she'd been crying. Mr. Kelly was sitting on the bed with his open briefcase on his knees. The eye on the telescopic rod swiveled as Alfred came in. "So there you are," said Robinson's voice from the briefcase. "I hope you have an explanation, Smith. I only hope you have an explanation." "For what?" Alfred asked irritably. He'd been looking forward to getting out of his costume, taking a hot shower, and then bed. This late performance of "I spy" was very annoying. Repetitious, too. "For what?" Robinson roared. "For what? Kelly, tell him for what!" "Look here. Smith," Kelly demanded. "Did you or didn't you ask the desk clerk to find out about a plumbers' fancy dress ball?" "I did. Of course, I did. He got all the information I needed." There was a howl from the briefcase. "He ot all the information I needed! Six years of general studies in espionage at the Academy, a year of post-graduate work in Intensive Secrecy, six months at the Special Service School in Data-Sifting and Location-Tracing -- and you have the nerve to stand there with your carapace in your claws and tell me that the only way of tracking down this fancy dress ball you could think of was to ask the desk clerk -- an ordinary, everyday human desk clerk -- to find out about it for you!" Alfred noticed that the faces around him were all extremely grave. Despite his weariness and strong feelings of indifference, he made an effort to conciliate. "Well, if he was only an ordinary, everyday human, I fail to see the harm that " "He could have been the Garoonish Minister of War, for all you knew!" the briefcase blasted. "Not that it made any difference. By the time he'd questioned his various sources and mentioned the matter to his various friends, acquaintances and business associates, every spy organization in the Galaxy had been alerted. They knew what we were worrying about, what we were looking for, and where and when we hoped to find it. You accomplished one of the best jobs of interstellar communication ever. Sixty-five years of patient espionage planning gone down the drain. Now what have you to say for yourself?" Alfred stood up straight and manfully pulled back his shoulders. "Just this. I'm sorry." He considered for a moment, then added: "Deeply and truly sorry." Some kind of storm seemed to explode in the briefcase. It almost rolled off Kelly's knees. "I just can't stand this any more," Jane Doe said suddenly. "I'll wait outside." She walked past Alfred to the door, her eyes swimming in reproachfulness. "Darling, darling, how could you?" she whispered bitterly.  I "HE briefcase crackled down to some semblance of control. "I'll give you one last chance. Smith. Not that I think any conceivable defense you might have would be valid, but I hate to demote a Special Emissary, to push him forever out of the Service, without giving him every chance to be heard. So. Is there any defense you wish to have registered before sentence of demotion is passed upon you?" Alfred considered. This was evidently a serious business in their eyes, but it was beginning to be slightly meaningless to him. There was too much of it and it was too complicated. He was tired. And he was Alfred Smith, not John Smith. He could tell them about the events of the night, about the Lidsgallians and the information he'd received from the captive Smith. It might be valuable and it might throw a weight in the scales in his favor. The trouble was that then the question of John Smith's real identity would arise -- and that might become very embarrassing. Besides, he was over the fear he'd felt earlier about these creatures; they could do little more to him than a dose of sodium bicarbonate, he'd found out. Their super-weapons were to be discounted, at least on Earth. And when it came to that point, he was not all all sure that he wanted to give them helpful information. Who knew just where Earth's best interests lay? He shook his head, feeling the fatigue in his neck muscles. "No defense. I said I'm sorry." From the briefcase, Robinson sighed. "Smith, this hurts me more than it hurts you. It's the principle of the thing, you see. The punishment fit the crime. More in sorrow than in anger. You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. All right, Kelly. The sentence." Kelly put the briefcase on the bed and got to his feet. Cohen and Jones came to attention. There was evidently to be a ceremony. "By virtue of the authority vested in me as acting chief of this field group," Kelly intoned, "and pursuant to Operating Procedure grade you, Gar-Pitha of Vaklitt, from the rank of Special Emissary, Second Class, to the rank of General Emissary or such other lower rank as Command Central may find fitting and necessary in the best interests of the Service. "I further direct that your disgrace be published throughout every arm and echelon of the Service and that your name be stricken from the roster of graduates of the Academy which you have shamed. And, finally, in the name of this field group and every individual within it, I disown you now and forevermore as a colleague and a comrade in arms and a friend." It was, Alfred decided, a kind of strong-medicine ritual. Must be pretty affecting to someone who was involved in it personally. Then, from either side, Cohen and Jones moved in swiftly to complete the last, dramatic part of the ceremony. They were very formal, but very thorough, as they stripped the culprit of his uniform.      After a racing start in this issue, Robert Sheckley's swift, sleek, enorlight barrier in the tradition of Galaxy's truly great serials, with each installment a cargo hold packed with glitteringly new ideas and backgrounds never before offered for sale and enough Most Unforgettable Characters to fill issues of the Reader's Digest for years to come -- all bound into as twisty and taut a plot as ever appeared in print. Readers who scan synopses in the belief that these are all one needs to know of a serial (and we were appalled to learn there actually are such self-cheaters) will get no more out of them than this slender teaser; Keeping his head is the least of Blaine's worries in this deadiest of skin games... which is aimed to fleece him of his borrowed body! For those, however, who save installments to be read all at once, there is fun aplenty in the waiting period with : to the stars are in no danger; it's those who stay behind to guard Man's heritage that challenge deadly unknown perils I the interstellar # is no problem. They battle for the honor. But here is a zoo collector who has to fight like a wildcat to keep a display from making a monkey of him I our regular features. Quite an issue. Watch for it. John Wyndham. Ballantine Books, N. y, #  that cuckoos lay their eggs in alien nests for their brood to be raised by the unsus)ecting fostermothers as their own. Wyndham employs this sneaky stratagem as the basis for a most off-trail and well-written invasion yam. The tired town of Midwich, England, is the beachhead. An unknown, inexplicable and traceless visitation anesthetizes the town's entire population for one day. Weeks later, every able female is obviously pregnant, regardless of marital status. Since there is no clue whatever to the nature or identity of the marauders, the Armed Forces can take no action other than a complete news blackout. Due to the delicate nature of the affliction, little word-of-mouth information leaves the environs, anyhow. Seemingly, the only governmental interest in the affair is the strictly imofficial appointment of a yoimg local couple by an Army colonel as informants and pulse-takers. To them, their role is "As intriguing as the idea of an Obstetrics Division of Military Intelligence." Eventually the women give birth. Their infants are goldeneyed, almost identical, and equally divided as to sex. In addition, they possess an unholy power of compulsion. Wyndham does, too, as the reader discovers after being swept along to the conclusion. In the enjoyable confusion and suspense, a couple of key questions go unanswered. The book has been sold to Hollywood. Let's hope they don't come up with their usual godawful stock answers. lantine Books, N. # "PI EL Rey has a soft spot in his heart for the unhuman, and who can deny him the right? As one of the elders among SF authors, he was influential in the formative thirties in humanizing the story form as well. Remember "Helen O'Loy"? A couple of the eleven short stories date back two decades, most of the remainder only a handful of years, but all have the stamp of his compassion, whether for a fallen god in "The Pipes of Pan," an xmemployed elf in "The Coppersmith" or a pair of sexed robots of "Into Thy Hands." "No Strings Attached," a horrible little yarn, and "Stability," an inverted rework of the theme of Campbell's "Who Goes There?" rescue the volume from sentimentality. W. Dieckvoss. U. oi Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, #  I 'HE Palomar giant is actually discovering new island universes at a fantastic pace, whereas it only appears that books on astronomy are appearing at an equal rate. In any case, the immensity of the subject leaves room and to spare for all volumes published and forthcoming. The Hamburg Observatorys Drs. Kruse and Dieckvoss have collaborated on an exceedingly intelligently programmed text for the curious. They have started with a quick, easy explanation of optical principles and applications to show how we seek, where we seek, what we find and how we can analyze our results. Lastly, they show how, as a result of the arduous labors of many specialists, a few great intellects can correlate the masses of information into theories and explanations of the nature of the Universe. Robert Randedl. Gnome Press, N.Y., # Robert and Randall respectively, claim that future Earth, thoroughly civilized, with internal conflict abolished and no competitors among the stars, must generate conflict to escape stagnation. Unfortunately, the closest thing to a rival is Nidor, a backward humanoid theocracy steeped in peace and Scripture. An Earthsponsored theological seminary is to do the trick by gradual psychological alteration. Several generations are chronicled, each resulting in more independence of thought and dissatisfaction with rule by the Council of Elders. SF is full of stories of the uplifting of backward cultures by the Good Earth, but few depict her as the sponsor of a heartless program that replaces happiness with its pursuit An essential program, possibly though arguably, but is it necessary? court, Brace  Co., N.Y., # " Clarke's short stories, the author himself is satisfied that all worthy of reprinting are now anthologized. So am I, particularly since, for lack of alternates, too many of his O. Henryish crack-ofdoom startlers had to be used. This is no slam: Clarke bows to no one's trick ending. But too many are more than enough. However, there are several suof short-shorts first seen in the London Evening Standard under "The Other Side of the Sky" and "Venture to the Moon" headings, each six shorts long, alone are guidebook material to show, what a master can do with fifteen hundred words. Asimov. Abelard-Schuman, N.Y., # Isaac lives funny but writes serious. If that's true, here is the rule-proving exception. Almost certainly he had enormous fun writing this collection of articles. He staggers, frightens, amazes and, in two, fiendishly misleads his reader. The title conveys the spirit of the book precisely. Asimov goes far beyond mere figures to immeasurables and imponderables. He rocks one with the frightening fact that # atoms of potassium-# are exploding in yoxir body -- each second! He expresses a number utterly beyond comprehension as the mathematical expression of the chances against nature coming up with just the right combination of amino-acids to form hemoglobin. He treats other subjects in equally brainbusting but enjoyable fashion. As a bonus, his famous, utterly logical, utterly whacky "The Marvellous Properties of Thiotimoline" and Pate de Foie Gras" are appended. lion seconds ago, mastodons roamed North America! Murray Leinster. Avalon Books, N.Y., #  his science fiction writing career back when most of his present audience was either unborn or just barely. His basic training was in the gadget school of SF, although perhaps no other author in the field has shown his adaptability. That he still loves to gadgeteer is demonstrated in last year's Colonial Survey and the present rampant spoof. In the old days, our scientist hero would whip up an Eiarthsaver from his well-equipped lab, but Leinster's hillbilly works with just plain junk and, when finished, his super whatzit still looks like junk. So does he, and he's a lazy slob besides. It takes a heap of doing for Leinster's narrator to prod him into activity against various foes and forces. Leinster was cautious, staying just this side of slapstick. Nevertheless, it emerges more heavyhanded than most of his lighter works. Inc., N. Y., Toronto, # pedic reference work does not fit into the scope of a column like this. But, since the Junior Education Corner's purpwse is to supplement curricular deficiencies, this ten-volume set is just what the educator ordered. It contains # words; # pages; # illustrations and # index entries. The fifteen basic divisions ensure coverage of all the sciences: physical, theoretical, natural and human. The list of contributors reads like a page of Who's Who: Willy Ley on Space Travel; Dr. Lee De Forest, the father of the triode; R. Marlin Perkins of TV's Zoo Parade fame; Dr. Willard Libby The set is large, attractive and eminently useful, and contains a bonus of a twenty-five-page bibliography of extra study for the serious student. An outstanding reference library of the sciences for youngsters and fine for all adults except specialists. Block That Metaphor In dealing with Meehs, "'Guard your tongue" was the worst advice -- they would obligingly guard it for youl I T was to be a formal affairwhite shorts and tails -- and Lane Borden wondered just how well Vorm would fit in. The servants and attaches here at the Embassy were used to the presence of visiting extraterrestials, but even they seemed disturbed by Vorm. If he had been a mere robot, there wouldn't be any problem, but the idea of a sentient intelligence housed in a wholly synthetic body was difficult to accept. The body itself was not repulsive; it was largely metallic, but humanoid in its general contours. There were some rather disturbing differences, though. An engineer would probably grant the advantage of having six visual perceptors, or "eyes," situated equidistantly around the entire cranial compartment. Still, the knowledge that Vorm really had "eyes in the back of his head" and could observe everything in a room simultaneously created an unnerving effect. Then, too, Vorm's "mouth" was just a speaking-tube, and as for his "nose" -- Lane Borden remembered what had happened earlier in the afternoon, when he'd conducted Vorm into his own apartments at the Embassy for a little informal chat That was when Borden's fiancee had made an unexpected appearance. Borden was justly proud of Margaret Zurich. She was a strikingly beautiful woman and an intergalactically famous pianist -- one of the few who still excelled in the ancient art of non-electronic musicianship. Borden really envied her talent But when she abruptly entered the room where he sat with Vorm, he felt neither pride nor envy, merely a frantic fear. "Excuse me a moment" he said, nodding to Vorm as he rose and crossed over to Margaret Zurich. Before she could object he took her arm and led her out into the anteroom. Even so, he wasn't at all certain that he'd managed to act in time to prevent a crisis. ter?" Margaret asked. She stared at Borden's throat "And what's that thing you're wearing around your neck?" "It's a jammer," Borden told her, opening a desk drawer and producing a duplicate of the contrivance. "Just take this one for yourself. Here, I'll show you how to put it on." "But whatever for?" "You've heard of jammers, haven't you?" "Oh. Of course. I've just never seen one." She frowned. "You mean that creature in there is a telepath?" "No, not in the ordinary sense. This instrument doesn't scramble thought patterns. You'll notice it's worn aroimd the neck, at the larynx. It scrambles subvocalizations." "The thoughts one put into words but doesn't speak aloud?" "Close enough. The point is he has unusual hearing ability which extends to detecting subvocalizations. That's why we wear jammers -- to scramble the unspoken sounds." "But I don't-" "Please, we'll discuss it later. I don't want to keep my guest waiting." Throat masked, pulse obscured by electronic impulse, Margaret reentered the room and met the visitor. She seemed startled by Vorm's appearance, and even more startled when he acknowledged her introduction by abruptly reaching up and unscrewing the flaring spout above his speaking-tube. He reached into the diplomatic pouch strapped to his waist and drew out a blunt nozzle which he inserted in the gaping hole. Margaret Zurich pretended not to notice, but Borden could see she was unsettled. Later on, he must take her aside and explain that nose-changing was a token of polite greeting in Vorm's world. Vorm's race did not need noses. Once, perhaps, millenia ago, they had been creatures of flesh and blood. Then, like hermit crabs, they had retreated into their synthetic shells; created the shells, in fact, to shield themselves from mortal frailties. They had substituted mechanical evolution for physical evolution and now only the intelligence remained, encased in fabricated bodies that were wholly fimctional. In a completely prostheticized body, the nose was only a special tool. The diplomatic pouch Vorm carried must contain a dozen different nasal attachments, each one designed for use in a given situation. Borden knew of one which served as a drill, another which was a sort of acetylene torch, still another which was merely a great razor-sharp cutting instrument These were all useful to Vorm's race in the mines of their planet. ES, Borden would have to make Margaret understand Vorm's alienness, his super-sensitive faculties, his freedom from the physiological demands of eating, voiding, sleeping. Margaret was not like those in the street mobs who yelled, "Down with the dirty Mechs!" Mechs. Mechanical monsters, without regard for human feelings or human lives. Borden would set Margaret straight on that point, too. It had been an accident when the Mechs killed some of the humans in the first contact crew to reach their planet The crew hadn't known that the Mechs could detect subvocalizations, nor had they realized another important psychological difference. The Mechs interpreted everything literally. There were no similes, no figures of speech, no abstractions or hyperbole in their concepts. So when a crew member, exhausted by the rigors of the long journey and discouraged by his first glimpse of the barren planet, had subvocalized to himself, "Volunteering for an expedition like this -- I ought to have my head examined!" the Mechs had taken him obligingly but lethally at his unspoken word. whole series of tragic incidents, until someone had been astute enough to ask the Mechs the reason for their actions. And the Mechs explained. Apparently they told the truth about everything -- just as they accepted every statement of others as the truth. When it was learned that they detected subvocalizations, "heard" them, in fact, like humanly audible speech, the remedy became obvious. From then on, crew members wore quickly improvised jammers. And as an added precaution, they tried to avoid even thinking in exaggerated terms. Borden and his people had set up the invitation which brought Vorm to Earth, and he'd studied the problems connected with this first visit very thoroughly. The Mechs could be indispensable allies. If the proFer treaties and agreements could be made, the Mechs might solve many vital problems. For example, a Mech could work where humans couldn't -- in the mines of hot planets, on the peaks of cold planets, and amidst poisonous atmospheres or none at all. Borden was determined to see that emissary Vorm enjoyed his stay here, but he had to admit that this business of taking everything literally was awkward at times. For example, before Margaret left the room after her brief visit, she and Borden embraced. Worm didn't comprehend the gesture, and after she departed he indicated his curiosity. Borden tried to tell him something about physical contact, but the whole concept of tactile, functioning flesh was strange to the prosthetic being. "No love," Borden mused. 'I know you speak the truth, but it's hard for me to accept. I just can't seem to get it through my head." Vorm reached into the diplomatic pouch and pulled out a gleaming nasal attachment. "I could drill an opening," he suggested. don't understand," aware that he'd made a slip despite his conscientious effort to avoid one. "I was merely using a figure of speech." "Speech is formless." Borden nodded. "True. Yours is a realistic race." "Very," Vorm acknowledged. "Perhaps that is why we do not comprehend your emotions." "But you do have feelings of your own. You know what I mean when I speak of fear, greed, pride. And you have esthetic appreciation. You have told me that you enjoy music, for example." "Yes," Vorm replied, resonating in amplified excitement. "You promised to play something for me, did you not?" "Gladly," Borden told him. And he was glad of the reminder. It would be easier to play than to continue the discussion on an abstract plane, trying to avoid lingual pitfalls. Besides, the music might help drown out the disconcerting sound which was faintly audible from outside the Embassy. All afternoon long, the crowds had been parading back and forth, carrying their stupid placards, don't mix monsters! were the mildest inscriptions. And the fools kept shouting, "We know you've got a Mech in there! Will you bring him out or do you want us to come in and get him?" Well, they wouldn't come in. Borden had the gates locked and guards posted. But it was embarrassing under the circumstances. He wished he could go out and explain the truth about those unfortunate first clashes between Vorm's race and the early contact crews. But it would take time to register, even with a person of Margaret's intelligence. In order to make a mob comprehend clearly, a whole campaign of indoctrination and education must be mounted. Such a campaign was in the works, but it hadn't been launched as yet. Vorm's visit had been premature and unexpected; the best Borden could hope to do was shield him from the hostility of the uninformed masses. So much depended on the success of this meeting -- and it was up to Borden, meanwhile, to establish and maintain cordial relations. Borden knew how to play the role of a charmer. He had a collection of antique tapes, and he put on a few for his visitor. Vorm seemed to enjoy the mild dissonances -- the finale of ProkofiefPs Chout, the rhythms of Villa-Lobos' Urapmi, Respighi's Fountains of Rome, and other primitive examples of olden "symphonic" musical compositions. Noting Vorm's reaction, Borden excused himself and went off to dress, leaving his guest happily twiddling with his stereophonic and binaural ear-vents. ' ued long enough for Borden to get down into the dining hall and check on dinner arrangements; long enough for him to admit and greet the guests who arrived -- awkwardly but sensibly -- through a rear entrance. It just wasn't safe to use the front entry, with the mob outside. As it grew dark, the crowd increased. They were going to make a big demonstration, Borden knew, but there was no help for it. He was just thankful that most of the invited guests actually showed up, despite the impleasant situation. Most of them were government people and all of them had been briefed about their conduct. They wore jammers as a matter of course. When the group had assembled, Borden brought Vorm into the hall and introduced him around. For the most part, the humans managed to conceal whatever strain or agitation his presence inspired, but there was a noticeable increase in the consumption of before-dinner cocktails. Lawrence, the butler (it was a part of Embassy tradition to employ live servitors), circulated with his tray for a good half-hour or more before dinner was announced. Vorm went in with Margaret Zurich on his arm. She displayed admirable composure. Again, Borden was proud of her, and he had no reason to be ashamed of his guests. They ate and drank quite naturally and pretended not to notice that Vorm merely sat there and employed his oral orifice for speaking purposes only. If he felt awkward -- or experienced actual repugnance -- at the spectacle of human beings ingesting nourishment, he did not betray his reaction. His speaking-tube was in constant use and he seemed pleased to meet so many officials and dignitaries. Borden noticed that he had inserted a different nasal attachment in honor of the occasion. It was a star-shaped instrument, obviously ornamental, for it was studded with diamonds. Several of the ladies openly admired it. Borden wondered what they would have said if Vorm had chosen instead to wear his drill, or perhaps the long razorlike knife. Surely the ladies would have remembered the "murdering monster" stories and reacted unpleasantly. For that matter, Vorm probably regarded the throat-jammers as ceremonial decoration. If he was aware of the absence of subvocalizations, he gave no sign. All was well. There were no untoward incidents during the course of the dinner and Borden was quite relieved at its successful conclusion. He led his guests into the drawing room and there announced that Margaret would play a few selections in honor of the distinguished visitor. Some of the guests had never actually seen an old-fashioned "piano" before, but all of them were aware of Margaret's reputation as an artist. They settled down to enjoy the impromptu musicale. Borden and Vorm sat together, directly before the instrument. Vorm seemed fascinated with the spectacle of a "live" performance. classical, of course. She specialized in the three Bs -- Bartok, Brubeck and Bernstein -- and Borden sat back, beaming in pride as she played. "Do you play?" Vorm asked softly. "A very little," Borden admitted. "But I lack the touch." He hesitated. "Sometimes I think I wasn't cut out for diplomacy. I should have been a -- " There was a sudden crash, and Borden jumped to his feet. Everyone started at the sound, then stared at the pavement block which had landed on the tesselated floor. Through the broken window came the clamor of the mob outside. Lawrence hurried over to Borden's side and whispered. Borden faced his guests with a set smile. "Please don't be alarmed," he said. "There has been a slight accident downstairs. I'll attend to it. Margaret, if you'll be good enough to continue -- " And she did continue, while Borden raced down the hall, then took the stairway steps two at a time. Lawrence followed him with a force-gun such as the guards were holding in the foyer below. "Nasty," Lawrence said. "They got through the gates somehow. It's all the men can do to keep them from breaking down the door. Captain Rollins is afraid they'll have to open fire soon unless something is done to disperse the crowd. He wants your orders -- " Borden nodded and brushed past him. "Wait, sir!" the butler quavered. "You aren't going out there, are you? Here, you forgot the gun -- " Borden kept going. At the door. Captain Rollins stepped up to intercept him. Borden walked past without a word and opened the door. The roar of the mob struck him like a great blow. "Give us the Mech! We know he's in there!" Borden raised his hands, palms outward, to show he was unarmed. The gesture had its inevitable, immemorial quieting effect. Afterward, he couldn't quite remember just what it was he had to, say. But words come easily to the trained diplomat, and Borden had risen to his present position due to superior qualifications. He started out by telling the crowd they had nothing to fear. Yes, there was a Mech inside, but couldn't they see guards had been posted all around the building for the protection of the public? The Mech couldn't possibly escape to harm anyone. Besides, he didn't want to do any harm. Right now he was listening to music. Yes, the Mech was a music-lover! And if they didn't believe it, they could hear for themselves, through the window. So there was absolutely no danger. The Mech was guarded, would be guarded until tomorrow, when he'd return to his own planet. He had come here under government invitation, to conclude a treaty. The government needed Mechs to mine metals for the Galaxy. plaining about the death of the crewmen during the first contacts. He went into a simplified description of subvocalization, using his own jammer by way of illustration. As he lifted it back from his neck, there was a single frightening moment of realization which he forced himself to suppress. Smiling, he went on with his talk. There was nothing to be alarmed about, he repeated. In fact, the Mech thought the guards were here to protect him -- he was afraid of people! If it hadn't been for the music, he'd probably be hiding under his bed right now! This got a laugh from the mob, and after that the rest was routine. In five minutes, Borden managed to break up the assemblage. In ten minutes, the street in front of the Embassy was almost cleared. Borden was able to turn matters over to Captain Rollins. "You did a wonderful job, sir," Rollins told him. He paused. "Why, what's the matter?" "Look at this." Borden held up the jammer. "When I took it off to show the crowd just now, I noticed the input feeder was broken. It isn't working." "Think it came loose when you removed it?" "I hope so." Borden's voice was tense. "I'd hate to think I'd been sitting upstairs with our guest without the protection of a jammer." He spied Vorm coming down the stairs, and turned, quickly detaching the jammer from Captain Rollins' throat. "I'll need this," he said. He barely managed to adjust it when Vorm arrived at the foot of the stairway. "I'm sorry, but I had to come," Vorm said. "I know I caused you this trouble." "It was all a mistake," Borden answered. "A misunderstanding." "Gracious of you to say so," Vorm droned, his cranium bobbing. "But I understand what happened. They came to destroy me and you turned them away. You saved me." "Do not be offended. They just didn't understand." "I am not offended. I admire you. You see, I do possess certain of your emotions after all. While our race does not comprehend love, it knows admiration. And it knows gratitude. I am grateful to you, Mr. Borden. I must reward you." "No need, I assure you." "I shall see to it that we conclude the treaty of which you spoke." "I am overwhelmed." "But that is not enough. I must think of something suitable for you, personally." "Forget it, please." "I never forget anything." "Shall we join the others?" concluded. Margaret made no attempt to resume playing, and in a short while the guests departed. Although reasonably sure that there was no longer any danger from the crowd, Borden insisted that they again use the rear exit. As for Margaret, he persuaded her to stay over for the night. "I'll feel safer if you do," he told her. "Very well, if you insist." She said good night to Vorm, and Lawrence escorted her down the hall to one of the guest apartments at the end of the corridor. Borden was left alone with Vorm, but not for long. He was embarrassed by the Mech's protestations of gratitude. "Isn't there something you want?" he kept repeating. "Not a thing." Borden shook his head emphatically. "Now if I may be excused -- " "That is right You must rest, is it not so? There is much I do not understand about the human structure." "Good night." "It is, isn't it?" Vorm agreed. Borden retired to his own quarters. It had been an eventful evening. The affair was successfully concluded, the mob had dispersed, Vorm was favorably inclined toward a treaty. There was nothing to worry about -- except, perhaps, the matter of the defective jammer. Quite probably it had failed when he took it from his throat out there before the mob. But if it had failed earlier -- Frantically, he attempted to recall any subvocalizations he might have made earlier in the course of the evening. It was an almost hopeless effort; one is scarcely aware of the constant and habitual phenomenon. Borden could only hope that his conscious efforts to think and speak only in literal terms had been successful; that he had not inadvertently emitted some perfectly normal idiom which might be capable of disturbing interpretation. He could not fall into deep slumber until near dawn, and he must have overslept as a consequence, because when he awoke, Lawrence was shaking him and saying something to the effect that Vorm had gone. "Gone?" Borden sat upright in bed. "But I was to take him to the launching-site myself." "Captain Rollins did so, sir. And knowing you were tired -- " "But I meant to say good-by." "It wasn't really necessary. Vorm told me to express his gratitude." "That again!" Tm afraid so, sir. You seem to have made a lasting impression on him because of your conduct last night. A diplomatic triumph, if I may say so." He cotighed. "In fact, he left you a little farewell gift" white box and Borden fumbled with the wrappings. "What for? More gratitude, I presume?" "Exactly." Lawrence smiled. "He said he'd spent hours trying to think of something for a man who claimed he had everything. Fortunately, he told me, he forgets nothing. And he happened to remember that you expressed a certain wish last night, which he was happy to be able to fulfill." Borden halted in his efforts to untie the package. "A wish?" he muttered. "I don't recall -- " "He said that now you would be able to play the piano well." Borden put down the package, very slowly. He stood up, thinking about Vorm. Vorm, who didn't understand love, but who knew gratitude. Vorm, who didn't comprehend human flesh and its frailty, but who knew that he could change parts of his own body at will, by simply unscrewing one instrument and replacing it with another. Vorm, who took everything absolutely literally. Vorm, who could install a nasal appendage which was like a great razor. "What's the matter, sir?" Lawrence murmured. "Aren't you even going to look at your gift?" But Borden was already running down the hall toward Margaret's room. He knew it was too late, just as he knew what must be in the package. Because now it came to him -- he could remember how he and Vorm had sat there watching Margaret play the piano. "Do you play?" Vorm had asked. "A very little. But I lack the touch," Borden had replied. And he'd paused, and the subvocalization must have come then. Yes, it must have come then, and the jammer was already broken, and Vorm had heard the unspoken wish -- the wish he'd just granted, literally. Borden raced down the hall, the subvocalization thundering in his ears. Yes, he remembered the words now. "I wish I had those fingers -- "      perts on the most remarkable achievement of modern science. "Satellite!" country's first steps into space -- describes, in non-technical language, what has taken place above us that will bring about the greatest changes in the history of the world. Tells how satellites work. Describes U. 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The tin can came to America in # when another Englisha successful business by canning such Eastern delicacies as lobster and cranberries for the homesick pioneers who were settling the West. Underwood's clerks quickly ( Continued on page #) Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden The First Spaceship #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. F or some time, Stanley Paxton had been hearing the sound of muffled explosions from the west. But he had kept on, for there might be a man behind him, trailing him, and he could not change his course. For if he was not befuddled, the homestead of Nelson Moore lay somewhere in the hills ahead. There he would find shelter for the night and perhaps even transportation. Communication, he knew, must be ruled out for the moment; the Hunter people would be monitoring, alert for any news of him. One Easter vacation, many years ago, he had spent a few days at the Moore homestead, and all through this afternoon he had been haunted by a sense of recognition for certain landmarks he had sighted. But his visit to these hills had been so long ago that his memory hazed and there was no certainty. As the afternoon had lengthened toward an early evening, his fear of the trailing man began to taper off. Perhaps, he told himself, there was no one, after all. Once, atop a hill, he had crouched The ones who went to the stars were in no danger... it was those who stayed behind to guard Alan's heritage that challenged deadly unknown perils! in a thicket for almost half an hour and had seen no sign of any follower. Long since, of course, they would have found the wreckage of his flier, but they might have arrived too late and so, consequently, have no idea in which direction he had gone. Through the day, he'd kept close watch of the cloudy sky and was satisfied that no scouting flier had passed overhead to spot him. Now, with the setting of the sun behind an angry cloud bank, he felt momentarily safe. ley and began to climb a wooded hill. The strange boomings and concussions seemed fairly close at hand and he could see the flashes of explosions lighting up the sky. He reached the hilltop and stopped short, crouching down against the ground. Below him, over a square mile or more of ground, spread the rippling flashes, and in the pauses between the louder noises, he heard faint chatterings that sent shivers up his spine. He crouched, watching the flashes ripple back and forth in zigzag patterning and occasionally a small holocaust of explosions would suddenly break out and then subside as quickly. Slowly he stood up and wrapped his cloak about him and raised the hood to protect his neck and ears. On the near side of the flashing area, at the bottom of the hill, was some sort of foursquare structure looming darkly in the dusk. And it seemed as well that a massive hazy bowl lay inverted above the entire area, although it was too dark to make out what it was. Paxton grunted softly to himself and went quickly down the hill until he reached the building. It was, he saw, a sort of observation platform, solidly constructed and raised well above the ground, with the top half of it made of heavy glass that ran all the way around. A ladder went up one side to the glassed-in platform. "What's going on up there?" he shouted, but his voice could be scarcely heard above the crashing and thundering that came from out in front. So he climbed the ladder. When his head reached the level of the glassed-in platform area, he halted. A boy, not more than fourteen years of age, stood at the front of the platform, staring out into a noisy sea of fire. A pair of binoculars was slung about his neck and to one side of him stood a massive bank of instruments. Paxton clambered up the rest of the way and stepped inside the platform. "Hello, young man!" he shouted. The youngster turned around. He seemed an engaging fellow, with a cowlick down his forehead. "I'm sorry, sir," he said. "I'm afraid I didn't hear you." "What is going on here?" "A war," said the boy. "Pertwee just launched his big attack. I'm hard-pressed to hold him off." this is most unusual!" he protested. The boy wrinkled up his forehead. "I don't understand." "You are Nelson Moore's son?" "Yes, sir, I am Graham Moore." "I knew your father many years ago. We went to school together." "He will be glad to see you, sir," the boy said brightly, sensing an opportunity to rid himself of this uninvited kibitzer. "You take the path just north of west. It will lead you to the house." "Perhaps," suggested Paxton, "you could come along and show me." "I can't leave just yet," said Graham. "I must blunt Pertwee's attack. He caught me off my balance and has been saving up his firepower and there were some maneuvers that escaped me until it was too late. Believe me, sir, I'm in an unenviable position." "This Pertwee?" "He's the enemy. We've fought for two years now." "I see," said Paxton solemnly and retreated down the ladder. He found the path and followed it and found the house, set in a swale between two hillocks. It was an old and rambling affair among great clumps of trees. The path ended on a patio and a woman's voice asked; "Is that you, Nels?" She sat in a rocking chair on the smooth stone flags and was little more than a blur of whiteness -- a white face haloed by white hair. "Not Nels," he said. "An old friend of your son's." From here, he noticed, through some trick of acoustics in the hills, one could barely hear the sound of battle, although the sky to the east was lighted by an occasional flash of heavy rockets or artillery fire. "We are glad to have you, sir," the old lady said, still rocking gently back and forth. "Although I do wish Nelson would come home. I don't like him wandering around after it gets dark." "My name is Stanley Paxton. I'm with Politics." "Why, yes," she said, "I remember now. You spent an Easter with us, twenty years ago. I'm Cornelia Moore, but you may call me Grandma, like all the rest of them." "I remember you quite well," said Paxton. "I hope I'm not intruding." "Heavens, no. We have few visitors. We're always glad to see one. Theodore especially will be pleased. You'd better call him Granther." "Granther?" "Grandfather. That's the way Graham said it when he was a tyke." "I met Graham. He seemed to be quite busy. He said Pertwee had caught him off his balance." "That Pertwee plays too rough," said Grandma, a little angrily. the patio. "Dinner is ready, madam," it said. "We'll wait for Nelson," Grandma told it. "Yes, madam. He should be in quite soon. We shouldn't wait too long. Granther has already started on his second brandy." "We have a guest, Elijah. Please show him to his room. He is a friend of Nelson's." "Good evening, sir," Elijah said. "If you will follow me. And your luggage. Perhaps I can carry it." "Of course you can," said Grandma drily. "I wish, Elijah, you'd stop putting on airs when there's company." "I have no luggage," Paxton said,, embarrassed. He followed the robot across the patio and into the house, going down the central hall and up the very handsome winding staircase. The room was large and filled with old-fashioned furniture. A sedate fireplace stood against one wall. "I'll light a fire," Elijah said. "It gets chilly in the autumn, once the sun goes down. And damp. It looks like rain." Paxton stood in the center of the room, trying to remember. Grandma was a painter and Nelson was a naturalist, but what about old Granther? "The old gentleman," said the robot, stooping at the fireplace, "will send you up a drink. He'll insist on brandy, but if you wish it, sir, I could get you something else." "No, thank you. Brandy will be fine." "The old gentleman's in great fettle. He'll have a lot to tell you. He's just finished his sonata, sir, after working at it for almost seven years, and he's very proud of it. There were times, I don't mind telling you, when it was going badly, that he wasn't fit to live with. If you'd just look here at my bottom, sir, you can see a dent..." "So I see," said Paxton uncomfortably. The robot rose from before the fireplace and the flames began to crackle, crawling up the wood. "I'll go for your drink," Elijah said. "If it takes a little longer than seems necessary, do not become alarmed. The old gentleman undoubtedly will take this opportunity to lecture me about hewing to civility, now that we have a guest." Paxton walked to the bed, took off his cloak and hung it on a bedpost. He walked back to the fire and sat down in a chair, stretching out his legs toward the warming blaze. It had been wrong of him to come here, he thought. These people should not be involved in his problems and his danger. Theirs was the quiet world, the easygoing, thoughtful world, while his world of Politics was all clamor and excitement and sometimes agony and fear. He'd not tell them, he decided. And he'd stay just the night and be off before the dawn. Somehow or other he would work out a way to get in contact with his party. Somewhere else he'd find people who would help him. door. Apparently it had not taken Elijah as long as it had thought. "Come in," Paxton called. It was not Elijah; it was Nelson Moore. He still wore a rough walking jacket and his boots had mud upon them and there was a streak of dirt across his face where he'd brushed back his hair with a grimy hand. "Grandma told me you were here," he said, shaking Paxton by the hand. "I had two weeks off," said Paxton, lying Tike a gentleman. "We just finished with an exercise. It might interest you to know that I was elected President." "Why, that is fine," said Nelson enthusiastically. "Yes, I suppose it is." "Let's sit down." "I'm afraid I may be holding up the dinner. The robot said -- " Nelson laughed. "Elijah always rushes us to eat. He wants to get the day all done and buttoned up. We've come to expect it of him and we pay him no attention." "I'm looking forward to meeting Anastasia," Paxton said. "I remember that you wrote of her often and -- " "She's not here," said Nelson. "She -- well, she' left me. Almost five years ago. She missed Outside too much. None of us should marry outside Continuation." "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have -- " "It's all right, Stan. It's all done with now. There are some who simply do not fit into the project. I've wondered many, times, since Anastasia left, what kind of folks We are. I've wondered if it all is worth it." "All of us think that way at times," said Paxton. "There have been times when I've been forced to fall back on history to find some shred of justification for what we're doing here. There's a parallel in the monks of the so-called Middle Ages. They managed to preserve at least part of the knowledge of the Hellenic world. For their own selfish reasons, of course, as Continuation has its selfish reasons, but the human race was the real beneficiary." "I go back to history, too," said Nelson. "The one that I come up with is a Stone Age savage, hidden off in some dark corner, busily flaking arrows while the first spaceships are being launched. It all seems so useless, Stan..." "On the face of it, I suppose it is. It doesn't matter in the least that I was elected President in our just-finished exercise. But there may be a day when that knowledge and technique of politics may come in very handy. And when it does, all the human race will have to do is come back here to Earth and they have the living art. This campaign that I waged was a dirty one. Nelson. I'm not proud of it." "There's a good deal of dirty things in the human culture," Nelson said, "but if we commit ourselves at all, it must be all the way -- the vicious with the noble, the dirty with the splendid." The door opened quietly and Elijah glided in. It had two glasses on. a tray. "I heard you come in," it said to Nelson, "so I brought you something, too." "Thank you," Nelson said. "That was kind of you." Elijah shuffled in some embarrassment. "If you don't mind, could you hurry just a little? The old gentleman has almost killed the bottle. I'm afraid of what might happen to him if I don't get him to the table." II young Graham hustled off to bed. Granther unearthed, with great solemnity, another bottle of good brandy. "That boy is a caution," he declared. "I don't know what's to become of him. Imagine him out there all day long, fighting those fool battles. If he was going to take up something, I should think he'd want it to be useful. There's nothing more useless than a general when there are no wars." Grandma clacked her teeth together with impatience. "It isn't as if we hadn't tried. We gave him every chance there was. But he wasn't interested in anything until he took up warring." "He's got guts," said Granther proudly. "That much I'll say for him. He up and asked me the other day would I write him some battle music. Me!" yelled Granther, thumping his chest. "Me write battle music!" "He's got the seeds of destruction in him," declared Grandma righteously. "He doesn't want to build. He just wants to bust." "Don't look at me," Nelson said to Paxton. "I gave up long ago. Granther and Grandma took him over from me right after Anastasia left. To hear them talk, you'd think they hated him. But let me lift a finger to him and the both of them -- " "We did the best we could," said Grandma. "We gave him every chance. We bought him all the testing kits. You remember?" "Sure," said Granther, busy with the bottle. "I remember well. We bought him that ecology kit and you should have seen the planet he turned out. It was the most pitiful, down-at-heels, hungover planet you ever saw. And then we tried robotry -- " "He did right well at that," said Grandma tartly. "Sure, he built them. He enjoyed building them. Recall the time he geared the two of them to hate each other and they fought until they were just two piles of scrap? I never saw anyone have such a splendid time as Graham during the seven days they fought." "We could scarcely get him in to meals," said Grandma. Granther handed out the brandy. "But the worst of all," he decided, "was the time we tried religion. He dreamed up a cult that was positively gummy. We made short work of that..." "And the hospital," said Grandma. "That was your idea, Nels..." "Let's not talk about," pleaded Nelson grimly. "I am sure Stanley isn't interested." Nelson was offering him. "I was going to ask you. Grandma, what kind of painting you are doing. I don't recall that Nelson ever told me." "Landscapes," the sweet-faced old lady said. "I've been doing some experimenting." "And I tell her she is wrong," protested Granther. "To experiment is wrong. Our job is to maintain tradition, not to let our work go wandering off in whatever direction it might choose." "Our job," said Grandma bitterly, "is to guard the techniques. Which is not to say we cannot strive at progress, if it still is human progress. Young man," she appealed to Paxton, "isn't that the way you see it?" "Well, in part," evaded Paxton, caught between two fires. "In Politics, we allow evolvement, naturally, but we make sure by periodic tests that we are developing logically and in the human manner. And we make very sure we do not drop any of the old techniques, no matter how outmoded they may seem. And the same is true in Diplomacy. I happen to know a bit about Diplomacy, because the two sections work very close together and -- " "There!" Grandma said. "You know what I think?" said Nelson quietly. "We are a frightened race. For the first time in our history, the human race is a minority and it scares us half to death. We are afraid of losing our identity in the great galactic matrix. We're afraid of assimilation." "That's wrong, son," Granther disagreed. "We are not afraid, my boy. We're just awful smart, that's all. We had a great culture at one time and why should we give it up? Sure, most humans nowadays have adopted the galactic way of life, but that is not to say that it is for the best. Some day we may want to turn back to the human culture or we may find that later on we can use parts of it. And this way, if we keep it alive here in Project Continuation, it will be available, all of it or any part, any time we need it. And I'm not speaking, mind you, from the human view alone, because some facet of our culture might sometime be badly needed, not by the human race as such, but by the Galaxy itself." "Then why keep the project secret?" "I don't think it's really secret," Granther said. "It's just that no one pays much attention to the human race and none at all to Earth. The human race is pretty small potatoes against all the rest of them and Earth is just a wornout planet that doesn't amount to shucks." He asked Paxton: "You ever hear it was secret, boy?" "Why, I guess not," said Paxton. "All I ever understood was that we didn't go around shooting off our mouths about it. I've thought of Continuation as a sort of sacred trust. We're the guardians who watch over the tribal medicine bag while the rest of humanity is out among the stars getting civilized." T he old man chortled. "That's about the size of it. We're just a bunch of bushmen, but mark me well, intelligent and even dangerous bushmen." "Dangerous?" asked Paxton. "He means Graham," Nelson told him quietly. "No, I don't," said Granther. "Not him especially. I mean the whole kit and caboodle of us. Because, don't you see, everybody who joins in this galactic culture that they are stewing up out there must contribute something and must likewise give up something -- things that don't fit in with the new ideas. And the human race has done just like the rest of them, except we haven't given up a thing. Oh, on the surface, certainly. But everything we've given up is still back here, being kept alive by a bunch of subsidized barbarians on an old and gutted planet that a member of this fine galactic culture wouldn't give a second look." "He's horrible," said Grandma. "Don't pay attention to him. He's got a mean and ornery soul inside that withered carcass." "And what is Man?" yelled Granther. "He's mean and ornery, too, when he has to be. How could we have gone so far if we weren't mean and ornery?" And there was some truth in that, thought Paxton. For what humanity was doing here was deliberate doublecrossing. Although, come to think of it, he wondered, how many other races might be doing the very selfsame thing or its equivalent? And if you were going to do it, you had to do it right. You couldn't take the human culture and enshrine it prettily within a museum, for then it would become no more than a shiny showpiece. A fine display of arrow heads was a pretty thing to look at, but a man would never learn to chip a flint into an arrow head by merely looking at a bunch of them laid out on a velvet-covered board. To retain the technique of chipping arrows. you'd have to keep on chipping arrows, generation after generation, long after the need of them was gone. Fail by one generation and the art was lost.  And the same necessarily must be true of other human techniques and other human arts. And not the purely human arts alone, but the unique human flavor of other techniques which in themselves were common to many other races. Elijah brought in an armload of wood and dumped it down upon the hearth, heaped an extra log or two upon the fire, then brushed itself off carefully. "You're wet," said Grandma. "It's raining, madam," said Elijah, going out the door. # ND so, thought Paxton, Project Continuation kept on practicing the old arts, retaining within a living body of the race the knowledge of their manipulation and their use... So the section on politics practiced politics and the section on diplomacy set up seemingly impossible problems in diplomacy and wrestled with those problems. And in the project factories, teams of industrialists carried on in the old tradition and fought a neverending feud with the trade unionism teams. And, scattered throughout the land, quiet men and women painted and composed and wrote and sculped so that the culture that had been wholly human would not perish in the face of the new and wonderful galactic culture that was evolving from the fusion of many intelligences out in the farther stars. And against what day, wondered Paxton, do we carry on thisi work? Is it pure and simple, and perhaps even silly, pride? Is it no more than a further expression of human skepticism and human arrogance? Or does it make the solid sense that old Granther thinks it does? "You're in Politics, you say," Granther said to Paxton. "Now that is what I'd call a worthwhile thing to save. From what I hear, this new culture doesn't pay too much attention to what we call politics. There's administration, naturally, and a sense of civic duty and all that sort of nonsense -- but no real politics. Politics can be a powerful thing when you need to win a point." "Politics is a dirty business far too often," Paxton answered. "It's a fight for power, an effort to override and overrule the principles and policies of an opposing body. In even its best phase, it brought about the fiction of the minority, with the connotation that the mere fact of being a minority carries with it the penalty of being to a large extent ignored." "Still, it could be fun. I suppose it is exciting." "Yes, you could call it that," said Paxton. "This last exercise we carried out was one with no holds barred. We had it planned that way. It was described somewhat delicately as a vicious battle." "And you were elected President," said Nelson. "That I was, but you didn't hear me say I was proud of it." "But you should be," Grandma insisted. "In the ancient days, it was a proud thing to be elected President." "Perhaps," Paxton admitted, "but not the way my party did it." TT would be so easy, he thought, to go ahead and tell them, for they would understand. To say: I carried it too far. I blackened my opponent's name and character beyond any urgent need. I used all the dirty tricks. I bribed and lied and compromised and traded. And I did it all so well that I even fooled the logic that was the referee, which stood in lieu of populace and voter. And now my opponent has dug up another trick and is using it on me. For assassination was political, even as diplomacy and war were political. After all, politics was little more than the short-circuiting of violence; an election was held rather than a revolution. But at all times the partition between politics and violence was a thin and flimsy thing. He finished off his brandy and put the glass down on the table. Granther picked up the bottle, but Paxton shook his head. "Thank you," he said. "If you don't mind, I shall go to bed soon. I must get an early start." He never should have stopped here. It would be unforgivable to embroil these people in the aftermath of the exercise. Although, he told himself, it probably was unfair to call it the aftermath -- what was happening would have to be a part and parcel of the exercise itself. The doorbell tinkled faintly and they could hear Elijah stirring in the hall. "Sakes alive," said Grandma, "who can it be this time of night? And raining outdoors, too!" It was a churchman. He stood in the hall, brushing water from his cloak. He took off his broad-brimmed hat and swished it to shake off the raindrops. He came into the room with a slow and stately tread. All of them arose. "Good evening. Bishop," said old Granther. "You were fortunate to find the house in this kind of weather and we're glad to have Your Worship." The bishop beamed in fine, fast fellowship. "Not of the church," he said. "Of the project merely. But you may use the proper terms, if you have a mind. It helps me stay in character." Elijah, trailing in his wake, took his cloak and hat. The bishop was arrayed in rich and handsome garments. Granther introduced them all around and found a glass and filled it from the bottle. The bishop took it and smacked his lips. He sat down in a chair next to the fire. "You have not' dined, I take it," Grandma said. "Of course you haven't -- there's no place out therei to dine. Elijah, get the bishop a plate of food, and hurry." "I thank you, madam," said the bishop. "I've had a long, hard day. I appreciate all you're doing for me. I appreciate it more than you can ever know." "This is our day," Granther said the umpteenth time. "It is seldom that we have any guests at all and now, all of an evening, we have two of them." "Two guests," said the bishop, looking straight at Paxton. "Now that is fine, indeed." He smacked his lips again and emptied the glass. Ill TN his room, Paxton closed the door and shot the bolt full home. The fire had burned down to embers and cast a dull glow along the floor. The rain drummed faintly, half-heartedly, on the window pane. And the question and the fear raced within his brain. There was no question of it: The bishop was the assassin who had been set upon his trail. No man without a purpose, and a deadly purpose, walked these hills at night, in an autumn rain. And what was more, the bishop had been scarcely wet. He'd shaken his hat and the drops had fallen off, and he'd brushed at his cloak and after that both the hat and cloak were dry. The bishop had been brought here, more than likely, in a hovering flier and let down, as other assassins probably likewise had been let down this very night in all of half a dozen places where a fleeing man might have taken shelter. The bishop had been taken to the room just across the hall and under other circumstances, Paxton told himself, he might have sought conclusions with him there. He walked over to the fireplace and picked up the heavy poker and weighed it in his hand. One stroke of that and it would be all over. But he couldn't do it. Not in this house. He put the poker back and walked over to the bed and picked up his cloak. Slowly he slid it on as he stood there, thinking, going over in his mind the happenings of the morning. He had been at home, alone, and the phone had rung and Sullivan's face had filled the visor -- a face all puffed up with fright. "Hunter's out to get you," Sullivan had said. "He's sent men to get you." "But he can't do that!" Paxton remembered protesting. "Certainly he can," said Sullivan. "It comes within the framework of the exercise. Assassination has always been a possibility..." "But the exercise is finished!" "Not so far as Hunter is concerned. You went a little far. You should have stayed within the hypothesis of the problem; there was no need to go back into Hunter's personal affairs. You dug up things he thought no one ever knew. How did you do it, man?" "I have my ways," said Paxton. "And in a deal like this, everything was fair. He didn't handle me exactly as if I were innocent." "You better get going," Sullivan advised. "They must be almost there. I can't get anyone there soon enough to help you." # ND it would have been all right, Paxton thought, if the flier had only held together. He wondered momentarily if it had been sabotaged. But be that as it may, he had flown it down and had been able to walk away from it and now, finally, here he was. He stood irresolutely in the center of the room. It went against his pride to flee for a second time, but there was nothing else to do. He couldn't let this house become involved in the tag-end rough and tumble of his exercise. And despite the poker, he was weaponless, for weapons on this now-peaceful planet were very few indeed -- no longer household items such as once had been the case. He went to the window and opened it and saw that the rain had stopped and that a ragged moon was showing through a scud of racing clouds. 'roof of the porch beneath the window and he let his eye follow down the roof line. Not too hard, he thought, if a man were barefoot, and once he reached the edge there'd be a drop of not much more than seven feet. He took off his sandals and stuffed them in the pocket of his cloak and started out the window. But, halfway out, he climbed back in again and walked to the door. Quietly he slid back the bolt. It wasn't exactly cricket to go running off and leave a room locked up. The roof was slippery with the rain, but he managed it without any trouble, inching his way carefully down the incline. He dropped into a shrub that scratched him up a bit, but that, he told himself, was a minor matter. He put on his sandals and straightened up and walked rapidly away. At the edge of the woods, he stopped and looked back at the house. It stood dark and silent. Once he got back home and this affair was finished, he promised himself, he'd write Nelson a long apologetic letter and explain it all. His feet found the path and he followed it through the sickly half-light of the cloudy moon. "Sir," said a voice close beside him, "I see that you are out for a little stroll..." Paxton jumped in fright. "It's a nice night for it, sir," the voice went on quietly. "After a rain, everything seems so clean and copl." "Who is there?" asked Paxton, with his hair standing quite on edge. "Why, it's Pertwee, sir. Pertwee, the robot, sir." Paxton laughed a little nervously. "Oh, yes, I remember now. You're Graham's enemy." IHE robot stepped out of the woods into the path beside him. "It's too much, I suppose," Pertwee said, "to imagine that you might be coming out to look at the battlefield." "Why, no," said Paxton, grasping at a straw. "I don't know how you guessed it, but that's exactly what I'm doing. I've never heard of an#dhing quite like it and I'm considerably intrigued." "Sir," said the robot eagerly, "I'm entirely at your service. There is no one, I can assure you, who is better equipped to explain it to you. I've been in it from tie very first with Master Ghaham, and if you have any questions, I shall try to answer them." "Yes, I think there is one question. What is the purpose of it all?" "Why, at first, of course," said Pertwee, "it was simply an attempt to amuse a growing boy. But now, with your permission, sir, I would venture the opinion that it is a good deal more." "You mean a part of Continuation?" "Certainly, sir. I know there is a natural reluctance among humankind to admit the fact, or to even think about it, but for a great part of Man's history war played an important and many-sided role. Of all the arts that Man developed, there probably was none to which he devoted so much time and thought and money as he did to war." The path sloped down and there before them in the pale and mottled moonlight lay the battle bowl. "That bowl," asked Paxton, "or whatever it might be that you have tipped over it? Sometimes you can just make it out and other times you miss it..." "I suppose," said Pertwee, "you'd call it a force shield, sir. A couple of the other robots worked it out. As I understand it, sir, it is nothing new -- just an adaptation. There's a time factor worked into it as an additional protection." "But that sort of protection..." 'We use TC bombs, sir -- total conversion bombs. Each side gets so many of them and uses his best judgment and..." "But you couldn't use nuclear stuff in there!" "As safe as a toy, sir," said Pertwee gaily. "They are very small, sir. Not much larger than a pea. Critical mass, as you well understand, no longer is much of a consideration. And the yield in radiation, while it is fairly high, is extremely short-lived, so that within an hour or so..." "You gentlemen," said Paxton grimly, "certainly try to be entirely realistic." "Why, yes, of course we do. Although the operators are entirely safe. We're in the same sort of position, you might say, as the general staff. And that is all right, of course, because the purpose of the entire business is to keep alive the art of waging war." "But the art... Paxton started to argue, then stopped.  race persisted in its purpose of keeping the old culture workable and intact in Continuation, then it must perforce accept that culture in its entirety. War, one must admit, was as much a part of the human culture as were all the other more or less uniquely human things that the race was conserving here as a sort of racial cushion against a future need or use. "There is," confessed Pertwee, "a certain cruelty, but perhaps a cruelty that I, as a robot, am more alive to than would be the case with a human, sif. The rate of casualties among the robot troops is unbelievable. In a restricted space and with extremely high firepower, that would be the natural consequence." "You mean that you use troops -- that you send robots in there?" "Why, yes. Who else would operate the weapons? And it would be just a little silly, don't you think, to work out a battle and then..." "But robots... "They are very small ones, sir. They would have to be, to gain an illusion of the space which is normally covered by a full-scale battle. And the weapons likewise are scaled down, and that sort of evens things out. And the troops are very single-minded, completely obedient and dedicated to victory. We turn them out in mass production in our shops and there's little chance to give them varying individualities and anyhow..." "Yes, I see," said Paxton, a little stunned. "But now I think that I..." "But, sir, I have only got a start at telling you and I've not shown you anything at all. There are so many considerations and there were so many problems." They were close to the towering, fully shimmering force field now and Pertwee pointed to a stairway that led from ground level down toward its base. "I'd like to show you, sir," said Pertwee, ducking down the stairs. It stopped before a door. "This," it said, "is the only entrance to the battlefield. We use it to send new troops and munitions during periods of truce, and at other times we use it to police up the place a bit." Its thumb stabbed out and hit a button to one side of the door and the door moved upward silently. "After several weeks of battle," the robot explained, "the terrain is bound to become a little cluttered." T hrough the door, Paxton could see the churned-up ground and the evidence of dying, and it was as if someone had pushed him in the belly. He gulped in a stricken breath and couldn't let it out and he suddenly was giddy and nearly sick. He put out a hand to hold himself upright against the trenchlike wall beside him. Pertwee pushed another button and the door slid down. "It hits you hard the first time you see it," Pertwee apologized, "but given time, one gets used to it." Paxton let his breath out slowly and looked around. The trench with the stairway came down to the door, and the door, he saw, was wider than the trench, so that at the foot of the steps the area had been widened into a sort of letter T, with narrow embrasures scooped out to face the door. "You all right, sir?" asked Pertwee. "Perfectly all right," Paxton told the robot stiffly. "And now," said Pertwee happily, "I'll explain the fire and tactical control." It trotted up the steps and Paxton trailed behind it. "I'm afraid that would take too long," said Paxton. But the robot brushed the words aside. "You must see it, sir," it pleaded plaintively. "Now that you are out here, you must not miss seeing it." He'd have to get away somehow, Paxton told himself. He couldn't afford to waste much time. As soon as the house had settled down to sleep, the bishop would come hunting him, and by that time he must be gone. Pertwee led the way around the curving base of the battle bowl to the observation tower which Paxton had come upon that evening. The robot halted at the base of the ladder. "After you," it said. Paxton hesitated, then went swiftly up the ladder. Maybe this wouldn't take too long, he thought, and then he could be off. It would be better, he realized, if he could get rid of Pertwee without being too abrupt about it. The robot brushed past him in the darkness and bent above the bank of controls. There was a snick and lights came on in the panels. "This, you see," it said, "is the groundglass -- a representation of the battlefield. It is dead now, of course, because there is nothing going on, but when there is some action certain symbols are imposed upon the field so that one can see at all times just how things are going. And this is the fire control panel and this is the troop command panel and this... Pertwee went on and on with his explanations. Finally it turned in triumph from the instruments. "What do you think of it?" the robot asked, very clearly expecting praise. "Why, it's wonderful," said Paxmake an end of his visit. "If you are going to be around tomorrow," Pertwee said, "you may want to watch us." And it was then that Paxton got his inspiration. IV A S a matter of fact," Paxton said, "I'd like to try it out. In my youth, I did a bit of reading on military mattets, and if you'll excuse my saying so, I have often fancied myself somewhat of an expert." Pertwee brightened almost visibly. "You mean, sir, that you'd like to go one round with me?" "If you'd be so kind." "You are sure you understand how to operate the board?" "I watched you very closely." "Give me fifteen minutes to reach my tower," said Pertwee. 'When I arrive, I'll press the ready button. After that, either of us can start hostilities any time we widi." "Fifteen minutes?" "It may not take me that long, sir. I'll be quick about it." "And I'm not imposing on you?" "Sir," Pertwee said feelingly, "it will be a pleasure. I've fought against young Master Graham until the novelty has worn off. We know one another's tactics so well that there's little chance for surprise. As you can understand, sir, that makes for a rather humdrum war." "Yes," said Paxton, "I suppose it would." He watched Pertwee go down the ladder and listened to its footsteps hurrying away. Then he went down the ladder and stood for a moment at the foot of it. The clouds had thinned considerably and the moonlight was brighter now and it would be easier traveling, although it still would be dark in the denser forest. He swung away from the tower and headed for the path, and, as he did so, he caught a flicker of motion in a patch of brush just off the trail. Paxton slid into the denser shadow of a clump of trees and watched the patch of brush. He crouched and waited. There was another cautious movement in the brush and he saw it was the bishop. Now suddenly it seemed that there was a chance to get the bishop off his neck for good -- if his inspiration would only pay off. The bishop had been let down by the flier in the dark of night, with the rain still pouring down and no moonlight at all. So it was unlikely that he knew about the battle bowl, although more than likely he must see it now, glittering faintly in the moonlight. But even if he saw it, there was a chance he'd not know what it was. Paxton thought back along the conversation there had been after the bishop had arrived and no one, so far as he remembered, had mentioned a word of young Graham or the war project. There was, Paxton thought, nothing lost by trying. Even if it didn't work, all he'd lose would be a little time. He darted from the clump of trees to reach the base of the battle bowl. He crouched against the ground and watched, and the bishop came sliding out of his clump of brush and worked his way along, closing in upon him. And that was fine, thought Paxton. It was working just the way he'd planned. solutely sure his trailer would know exactly where he was and then he dived down the stairs that led to the door. He reached it and thumbed the button and the door slid slowly upward without a single sound. Paxton crowded back into the embrasure and waited. It took a little longer than he had thought it would and he was getting slightly nervous when he heard the step upon the stairs. The bishop came down slowly, apparently very watchful, and then he reached the door and stood there for a moment, staring out into the churned-up battlefield. And in his hand he held an ugly gun. Paxton held his breath and pressed his shoulders tight against the wall of earth, but the bishop didn't even look around. His eyes were busy taking in the ground that lay beyond the door. Then finally he moved, quickly, like a leopard. His silken garments made a swishing noise as he stepped through the door and out into the battle area. Paxton held himself motionless, watching the bishop advance cautiously out into the field, and when he was far enough, he reached out a finger and pressed the second button and the door came down, smoothly, silently. Paxton leaned against the door and let out in a gasp the breath he had been holding. It was over now, he thought. Hunter hadn't been as clever as he had thought he was. Paxton turned from the door and went slowly up the stairs. Now he needn't run away. He could stay right here and Nelson would fly him, or arrange to have him flown, to some place of safety. For Hunter wouldn't know that this particular assassin had hunted down his quarry. The bishop had had no chance to communicate and probably wouldn't have dared to even if he could. On the top step, Paxton stubbed his toe and went down without a chance to catch himself, and there was a vast explosion that shook the universe and artillery fire was bursting in his brain. Dazed, he got to his hands and knees and crawled painfully, hurling himself desperately down the stairs -- and through the crashing uproar that filled the entire world ran an urgent thought and purpose: I've got to get him out before it is too late! I can't let him die in there! I can't kill a man! until his body jammed in the narrowness and stuck. And there was no artillery fire, there was no crash of shells, no wicked little chitterings. The dome glittered softly in the moonlight and was as quiet as death. Except, he thought, a little weirdly, death's not quiet in there. It is an inferno of destruction and a maddening place of sound and brightness and the quietness doesn't come until afterward. He'd fallen and hit his head, he knew, and all he'd seen and heard had been within his brain. But Pertwee would be opening up any minute now and the quietness would be gone, and with it the opportunity to undo what he had so swiftly planned. And somewhere in the shadow of the dome another self stood off and argued with him, jeering at his softness, quoting logic at him. It was either he or you, said that other self. You fought for your life the best way you knew, the only way you knew, and whatever you may have done, no matter what you did, you were entirely justified. "I can't do it!" yelled the Paxton on the stairs and yet even as he yelled he knew that he was wrong, that by logic he was wrong, that the jeering self who stood off in the shadows made more sense than he. He staggered to his feet. Without his conscious mind made up, he went down the stairs. Driven by some as yet unrealized and undefined instinctive prompting that was past all understanding, he stumbled down the stairs, with the throb still in his head and a choking guilt and fear rising in his throat. He reached the door and stabbed the button and the door slid up and he went out into the cluttered place of dying and stopped in horror at the awful loneliness and the vindictive desolation of this square mile of Earth that was shut off from all the other Earth as if it were a place of final judgment. And perhaps it was, he thought -- the final judgment of Man. Of all of us, he thought, young Graham may be the only honest one; he's the true barbarian that old Granther thinks he is; he is the throwback who looks out upon Man's past and sees it as it is and lives it as it was. Paxton took a quick look back and he saw the door was closed and out ahead of him, in the plowed and jumbled sea of tortured, battered earth, he saw a moving figure that could be no one but the bishop. Paxton ran forward, shouting, and the bishop turned around and stood there, waiting, with the gun half lifted. Paxton stopped and waved his arms in frantic signaling. The bishop's gun came up and there was a stinging slash across the side of Paxton's neck and a sudden, gushing wetness. A small, blue puff of smoke hung on the muzzle of the distant gun. and dived for the ground. He hit and skidded on his belly and tumbled most ingloriously into a dusty crater. He lay there, at the bottom of the crater, huddled against the fear of a bullet's impact while the rage and fury built up into white heat. He had come here to save a man and the man had tried to kill him! I should have, left him here, he thought. I should have let him die. I'd kill him if I could. And the fact of the matter now was that he had to kill the bishop. There was no choice but to kill him or be killed himself. Not only did he have to kill the bishop, but he had to kill him soon. Pertwee's fifteen minutes must be almost at an end and the bishop had to be killed and he had to be out the door before Pertwee opened fire. Out the door, he thought -- did he have a chance? If he ran low and dodged, perhaps, would he have a chance to escape the bishop's bullets? That was it, he thought. Waste Just get out of here himself. He put his hand up to his neck, and when he lifted it, his fingers were covered with a sticky wetness. It was funny, he thought, that it didn't hurt, although the hurt, no doubt, would come later. He crawled up the crater's side and rolled across its lip and found himself lying in a small, massed junkyard of smashed and broken robots, sprawled grotesquely where the barrage had caught them. And lying there in front of him, without a scratch upon it, where it had fallen from a dying robot's grasp, was a rifle that shone dully in the moonlight. He snatched it up and rose into a crouch and as he did he saw the bishop, almost on top of him; the bishop coming in to make sure that he was finished! There was no time to run, as he had planned to -- and, curiously, no desire to run. Paxton had never known actual hate before, never had a chance to know it, but now it came and filled him full of rage and a wild and exultant will and capacity to kill without pity or remorse. He tilted up the rifle and his finger closed upon the trigger and the weapon danced and flashed and made a deadly chatter. TUT the bishop still came on, not rushing now, but plodding ahead with a deadly stride, leaning forward as if his body were absorbing the murderous rifle fire, absorbing it and keeping on by will power alone, holding off death until that moment when it might snuff out the thing that was The bishop's gun came up and something smashed into Paxton's chest, and smashed again and yet agai'n, and there was a flood of wetness and a spattering and the edge of Paxton's brain caught at the hint of something wrong. For two men do not -- could not -- stand a dozen feet apart and pour at one another a deadly blast and both stay on their feet. No matter how poor might be their aim, it simply couldn't happen. He rose out of his crouch and stood at his full height and let the gun hang uselessly in his hand. Six feet away, the bishop stopped as well and flung his gun away. They stood looking at one another in the pale moonlight and the anger melted and ran out of them and Paxton wished that he were almost anywhere but there. "Paxton," asked the bishop plaintively, "who did this to us?" And it was a funny thing to say, almost as if he'd said: "Who other?" For a fleeting moment, it almost seemed to Paxton as though it might have been a kinder thing if they had been allowed to kill. the annals of the race, an art of strength and a certain proof of manhood -- perhaps of humanhood. A kinder thing to be allowed to kill. And that was it, exactly. They had not been allowed to kill. For you couldn't kill with a pop-gun that shot out plastic pellets of liquid that burst on contact, with the liquid running down like blood for the sake of realism. And you couldn't kill with a gun that went most admirably through all the motions of chattering and smoking and flashing out red fire, but with nothing lethal in it. And was this entire battle bowl no more than a toy set with robots that came apart at the right and most dramatic moments and then could be put back together at a later time? Were the artillery and the total-conversion bombs toy things as well, with a lot of flash and noise and perhaps a few wellplaced items to plow up the battlefield, but without the power to really hurt a robot? THE bishop said, "Paxton, I feel like an utter fool." And he added other words which a real bishop could never bring himself to say, making very clear just what kind of obscene fool he was. "Let's get out of here," said Paxton shortly, feeling like that same kind of fool himself. "I wonder..." said the bishop. "Forget about it," Paxton growled. "Let's just get out of here. Pertwee will be opening up..." But he didn't finish what he was about to say, for he realized that even if Pertwee did open up, there'd be little danger. And there wasn't any chance that Pertwee would open up, for it would know that they were here. Like a metal monitor watching over a group of rebellious children -- rebellious because they weren't adult yet. Watching them and letting them go ahead and play so long as they were in no danger of drowning or of falling off a roof or some other reckless thing. And then interfering only just enough to save their silly necks. Perhaps even encouraging them to play so they'd work off their rebelliousness -- joining in the game in the typically human tradition of let's pretend. Like monitors watching over children, letting them develop, alf lowing them to express their foolish little selves, not standing in the way of whatever childish importance they could muster up, encouraging them to think they were sufficient to themselves. plodding along, the bishop in his bedraggled robes stumbling along behind him. When they were a hundred feet away, the door started sliding up and Pertwee stood there, waiting for them, not looking any different than it had before, but somehow seeming to have a new measure of importance. They reached the door and sheepishly trailed through it, not looking right or left, casually and elaborately pretending that Pertwee was not there. "Gentlemen," said Pertwee, "don't you want to play?" "No," Paxton said. "No, thank you. I can't speak for both of us -- " "Yes, you can, friend," the bishop put in. "Go right ahead." "My friend and I have done all the playing we care to do," said Paxton. "It was good of you to make sure we didn't get hurt." Pertwee managed to look puzzled. "But why should anybody be allowed to get hurt? It was only a game." "So we've discovered. Which way is out?" "Why," said the robot, "any way but back." We're understandably proud of the fact that our subscribers get their copies of Galaxy at least a week before the newsstands do... but we can't maintain that enviable record unless, if you're moving, we get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our records, you know, so send in the data as soon as you have it! When you took pot luck with this kitchen scientist, not even the poor pot was lucky! school and found her brother in the kitchen, doing something important at the sink. She knew it was important because he was making a mess and talking to himself. The sink drain was loaded down with open soda bottles, a sack of flour, corn meal, dog biscuits, molasses, BromoSeltzer, a tin of sardines and a box of soap chips. The floor was covered with drippings and every cupboard in the kitchen was open. At the moment, Bonnie's brother was putting all his energy into shaking a plastic juicer that was half-filled with an ominous-looking, frothy mixture. Bonnie waited for a moment, keeping well out of range, and then said, "Hi, Bob." "Lo," he answered, without looking up. "Where's Mom?" "Shopping." Bonnie inched a little closer. "What are you doing, Bob?" she asked. "Nothing." "Can I watch?" "No." Bonnie took this as a cue to advance two cautious steps. She knew from experience how close she could approach her brother when he was being creative and still maintain a peaceful neutrality. Bob slopped a cupful of ketchup into the juicer, added a can of powdered mustard, a drop of milk, six aspirin and a piece of chewing gum, being careful to spill a part of each package used. Bonnie moved in a bit closer. "Are you making another experiment?" she asked. "Who wants to know?" Bob answered, in his mad-scientist voice, as he swaggered over to the refrigerator and took out an egg, some old bacon fat, a capsuled vitamin pill, yesterday's Jello and a bottle of clam juice. "Me wants to know," said Bonnie, picking up an apple that had rolled out of the refrigerator and fallen on the floor. "Why should I tell you?" "I have a quarter." "Where'd you get it?" "Mom gave it to me." "If you give it to me. I'll tell you what I'm doing." "It's not worth it." "I'll let you be my assistant, too." "Still not worth it." "For ten cents?" "Okay, ten cents."  her brother and put on an apron. "What should I do now. Bob?" "Get the salt," Bob instructed. He poured sardine oil from the can into the juicer, being very careful not to let the sardines fall in. When he had squeezed the last drop of oil out of the can, he ate all the sardines and tossed the can into the sink. Bonnie went after the salt and, when she lifted out the box, she found a package containing two chocolate graham crackers. "Mom has a new hiding place. Bob," she announced. Bob looked up. "Where is it?" "Behind the salt." "What did you find there?" "Two chocolate grahams." Bobby held out his hand, accepted one of the crackers without thanks and proceeded to crumble the whole thing into his concoction, not even stopping to lick the chocolate off his hands. Bonnie frowned in disbelief. She had never seen such self-sacrifice. The act made her aware, for the first time, of the immense significance of the experiment. She dropped her quarrel completely and walked over to the sink to get a good look at what was being done. All she saw in the sink was a wadded, wet Corn Flake box, the empty sardine tin by this time was beginning to take on a distinctive and unpleasant odor. Bob gave Bonnie the job of adding seven pinches of salt and some cocoa to the concoction. "What's it going to be, Bob?" she asked, blending the cocoa on her hands into her yellow corduroy skirt. "Stuff," Bob answered, unbending a little. "Government stuff?" "Nope." "Spaceship stuff?" "Nope." "Medicine?" "Nope." "I give up." "It's animal serum," Bob said, sliced his thumb on the sardine can, glanced unemotionally at the cut, ignored it. "What's animal serum. Bob?" "It's certain properties without which the universe in eternity regards for human beings." "Oh," Bonnie said. She took off her apron and sat down at the other end of the kitchen. The smell from the juicer was beginning to reach her stomach. Bobby combed the kitchen for something else to throw into his concoction and came up with some oregano and liquid garlic. "I guess this is about it," he said. He poured the garlic and oregano into his juicer, put the lid on, shook it furiously for a minute and then emptied the contents into a deep pot. "What are you doing now. Bob?" Bonnie asked. "You have to cook it for seven minutes." cover on the pot, set the timer for ten minutes and left the room. Bonnie tagged after him and the two of them got involved in a rough game of basketball in the living room. Bob dropped the basketball on Bonnie's head and ran back into the kitchen. "It's all done," he said, and took the cover off the pot. Only his dedication to his work kept him from showing the discomfort he felt with the smell that the pot gave forth. "Fyew!" said Bonnie. "What do we do with it now? Throw it out?" "No, stupid. We have to stir it till it cools and then drink it." "Drink it?" Bonnie wrinkled her nose. "How come we have to drink it?" Bobby said, "Because that's what you do with experiments, stupid." "But, Bob, it smells like garbage." "Medicine smells worse and it makes you healthy," Bob said, while stirring the pot with an old wooden spoon. Bonnie held her nose, stood on tiptoe and looked in at the cooking solution. "Will this make us healthy?" "Maybe." Bob kept stirring. "What will it do?" "You'll see." Bob took two clean dish towels, draped them around the pot and carried it over to the formica kitchen table. In the process, he managed to dip both towels in the mixture and burn his already sliced thumb. One plastic handle of the pot was still smoldering, from being too near the fire, but none of these things seemed to have the slightest effect on him. He put the pot down in the middle of the table and stared at it, chin in hand. Bonnie plopped down opposite him, put her chin in her hands and asked, "We have to drink that stuff?" "Yup." "Who has to drink it first?" Bob made no sign of having heard. "I thought so," said Bonnie. Still no comment. "What if it kills me?" Bobby spoke by raising his whole head and keeping his jaw stationary in his hands. "How can it hurt you? There's nothing but pure food in there." Bonnie also sat and stared. "How much of that stuff do I have to drink?" "Just a litle bit. Stick one finger in it and lick it off." Bonnie pointed a cautious finger at the tarry-looking brew and slowly immersed it, until it barely covered the nail. "Is that enough?" "Plenty," said Bob in a judicious tone. Bonnie took her finger out of the pot and stared at it for a moment. "What if I get sick?" "You can't get sick. There's aspirin and vitamins in it, too." Bonnie sighed and wrinkled her nose. 'Well, here goes," she said. She licked off a little bit. Bob watched her with his television version of a scientific look. "How do you feel?" he inquired. Bonnie answered, "It's not so bad, once it goes down. You can taste the chocolate graham cracker." Bonnie was really enjoying the attention. "Hey," she said, "I'm starting to get a funny feeling in my -- " and, before she could finish the sentence, there was a loud pop. Bob's face registered extreme disappointment. She sat quite still for a moment and then said, "What happened?" "You've turned into a chicken." little bird lifted its wings and looked down at itself. "How come I'm a chicken, Bob?" it said, cocking its head to one side and staring at him with its left eye. "Ah, nuts," he explained. "I expected you to be more of a pigeon thing." Bob mulled over the ingredients of his stew to see what went wrong. The chicken hopped around the chair on one leg, flapped its wings experimentally and found itself on the kitchen table. It walked to the far corner and peered into a small mirror that hung on the side of the sink cabinet. "I'm a pretty ugly chicken, boy," it said. It inspected itself with its other eye and, finding no improvement, walked back to Bobby. "I don't like to be a chicken. Bob," it said. "Why not? What does it feel like?" "It feels skinny and I can't see so good." "How else does it feel?" "That's all how it feels. Make me stop being it." "First tell me better what it's like." "I told you already. Make me stop being it." "What are you afraid of? Why don't you see what it's like first, before you change back? This is a valuable experience." The chicken tried to put its hands on its hips, but could find neither hips nor hands. "You better change me back, boy," it said, and gave Bob the left-eye glare. "Will you stop being stupid and just see what it's, like first?" Bob was finding it difficult to understand her lack of curiosity. "Wait till Mom sees what an ugly mess I am, boy. Will you ever get it!" Bonnie was trying very hard to see Bob with both eyes at once, which was impossible. "You're a sissy, Bonnie. You ruined the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm disgusted with you." Bob dipped his forefinger in the serum and held it toward the chicken. It pecked what it could from the finger and tilted its head back. In an instant, the chicken was gone and Bonnie was back. She climbed down from the table, wiped her eyes and said, "It's a good thing you fixed me, boy. Would you ever have got it." "Ah, you're nothing but a sissy," Bob said, and licked off a whole fingerful of his formula. "If I change into a horse, I won't let you ride me, and if I change into a leopard. I'll bite your head off." Once again, the loud pop was heard. "Oh, Bob," she said, "you're beautiful!" "What am I?" Bob asked. "You're a bee-yoo-tee-full St. Bernard, Bob! Let's go show Melissa and Chuck." "A St. Bernard?" The animal looked disgusted. "I don't want to be no dog. I want to be a leopard." "But you're beautiful, Bob! Go look in the mirror." "Naah." The dog paddled over to the table. "What are you going to do, Bob?" "I'm going to try it again." The dog put its front paws on the table, knocked over the serum and lapped up some as it dripped on the floor. Pop went the serum, taking effect. Bobby remained on all fours and kept on lapping. Pop went the serum again. "What am I now?" he asked. "You're still a St. Bernard," said Bonnie. "The devil with it then," said the dog. "Let's forget all about it." The dog took one last lap of serum. Pop! Bobby got up from the floor and dejectedly started out the back door. Bonnie skipped after him. "What'll we do now. Bob?" she asked. "We'll go down to Thrifty's and get some ice cream." They walked down the hill silently, Bobby brooding over not having been a leopard and Bonnie wishing he had stayed a St. Bernard. As they approached the main street of the small town, Bonnie turned to her brother. "You want to make some more of that stuff tomorrow?" "Not the same stuff," said Bob. "What'll we make instead?" "I ain't decided yet." "You want to make an atomic bomb?" "Maybe." "Can we do it in the juicer?" "Sure," Bob said, "only we'll have to get a couple of onions." Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, The Original EditionComplete I Not A Low Coft Reprint -- Ye! Yours For Only #! Name Address City I Enclose .State for your information The First Spaceship L ike last month's column, this one also deals exclusively with questions that were directed at me recently, either by mail or in person, the latter usually after lectures and other public appearances. They all deal with space travel and artificial satellites. I did not select them that way; that's the way they came. As a book publisher "confided" to me over lunch: "Interest in space travel seems to be high." It is. The first question, not the first that came to me but the first I am going to answer, concerned the first spaceship. The wording used was "Who designed the first spaceship?" and that took me a little by surprise since there aren't any yet. Fortunately the meaning of the question was explained quickly. There have been quite a number of space travel stories, some a good deal more than fifty years old, the correspondent continued. But these were all stories; their authors did not have to defend the scientific validity of their descriptions. But who was the first man to design a spaceship and to say that he thought space travel possible and believed that his design could do it? The answer to that question is that I knew the man who did. He was a German inventor by the name of Hermann Ganswindt, who was a rather aged gentleman at the time I met him -- he had been born on June #, #, and our first meeting took place in early summer of #.  time is not supposed to produce the impression that I met a frail old man, troubled by bad health and too many memories. Hermann Ganswindt may have been sick occasionally during his life, as happens to everybody, but his health was fine. He was around six feet one inch or two inches tall and must have weighed more than # pounds. He moved energetically and thought nothing of staying up until two A.M. His eyes were coal black and so was what was left of his hair and his beard. Just one year before I met him, he had become a father for the twenty-third time (two marriages) and boasted that his youngest son was younger than his youngest grandchild. He had a voice that one would expect of a man his size. And though he was full of memories, they did not trouble him a bit. Why I met him is also characteristic. At that time there were, in Germany, two theoretical works on space travel. One was by Professor Hermann Oberth (now in Huntsville, Alabama) and the other was by the late Dr. Walter Hohmann (victim of a bombing raid in World War II). Professor Robert H. Goddard's book, it may be mentioned in passing, was known to exist but was not in the libraries and could not be bought -- I tried it twice, once directly and once through a bookstore. In addition to these two highly technical works, there were three popularizations, one by Max Valier, by Willy Ley. One day Oberth, Valier and Gail received letters from Hermann Ganswindt, couched in legal language and requesting that he be mentioned as a forerunner when these books should be reprinted. Dr. Hohmann and myself did not receive such letters; I don't know why. One of the results of these letters was that Otto went to see Ganswindt, interviewed him at length and wrote six syndicated newspaper columns about him. After they had appeared, he suggested to me that I do the same. Before I got around to it, I received an invitation from Fritz Lang to have lunch with him at the Ufa studios and to see the moon landscape he had built for the filming of his Girl in the Moon. Professor Oberth was there and so was Hermann Ganswindt. Ganswindt, walking around in the scenery, told me and whoever else invented the following items: the dirigible, the helicopter, the horseless carriage, the motorboat, the free-wheeling mechanism of the bicycle, and the spaceship. This was not just boasting; he had had early concepts of all these things. Naturally he was not the first to think of a dirigible, but he claimed that he had been the first to think of one that would have worked, if built. (Possibly true.) He did believe that he was the first to think of a helicopter and said that it had failed to work merely because he had been xmable to buy a sufficiently powerful engine. In this he was wrong. Others had thought of helicopters before him and his would not havei worked, even with a powerful engine. Hopelessly unstable, it probably would have crashed by sideslipping before it reached # feet altitude. Ganswindt also said that he had been the first to speak about a spaceship seriously, and in this he was right. I later found among his papers a printed lecture program with a date from the year #; Ganswindt said that this was one of his later lectures, which could easily be correct. might have hqrbored against me originally, for not mentioning him in my first book, evaporated quickly and thoroughly when I explained that, while I knew his name (which was true), I had never heard that he had tried to invent a spaceship. I later realized that I had read about that at one time in a kind of boy's annual that used to be (and now is again) published in Germany every year at about Christmas. Ganswindt invited me to his home. The picture hanging over the upright Hermann Ganswindt's spaceship piano (reproduced here) was that of his spaceship. I examined it carefully, hoping to find a date. There was none, but the aging of the picture and its style both dated it as about #. The idea was this: the passenger cabin was supported (on springs) from the bell-shaped combustion chamber. The fuel supply was stored in two drums to the right and left of the combustion chamber. The fuel was to consist of steel capsules; at any rate, this term comes closest to what Ganswindt had in mind. He explained it to me in more detail. but of course I can't vouch that he had explained it the same way in #. Imagine a sandwich made of two silver dollars with a thin slice of dynamite between them. For "silver dollars" read "steel disks" of considerable thickness, but about the size of a dollar piece. (Ganswindt did not say "silver dollars" -- he said five-mark pieces, but the Imperial German fivemark piece and the silver dollar are very nearly the same size and weight. ) These metal-plus-highexplosive sandwiches were to be fed into the chamber one by one. to be exploded there. The lower disk would drop through a well in the passenger cabin immediately; the upper disk would hit the inside of the bell-shaped chamber and transmit its energy to it before dropping out. When the ship was under way, the combustion feeding would be stopped. Then the passenger cabin would begin rotating around its center well, so that the two flat ends would become the two floors. Ganswindt knew that weightlessness would take place as soon as the acceleration stopped, and he had figured out that centrifugal force could replace gravity. That is as far as Ganswindt went. He had other plans and other worries too. But he was right to insist on being mentioned in the books as a forerunner. He was one. After spending several evenings with Ganswindt, I did write up his life story. It was to be one of those full-page newspaper features which are customary in Europe. I took it to a newspaper editor who often printed my pieces. He called me up a few days later and said that he had read it and liked it, but that he was not going to print it. There was no reason to print it at the time. Then he continued by saying: "Look, I have nothing against the old gentleman and I wish him well. But he is old, and if you want me to. I'll keep the piece and pay you now and publish it as an obituary." Well, no, this is not how it happened, even though I said yes with some hesitation. Hermann Ganswindt did die about three years after this conversation (on October #, #), but my fullpage feature article about him was not published. In the meantime. Hitler had come to power and all non-Nazi papers had been banned. I don't know if the unpublished manuscripts were simply destroyed or whether they were neatly filed somewhere to be used as evidence if and when necessary. I still have the carbon copy. in assuming that many of my readers have saved a few newspaper clippings about the artificial satellites, especially the tabulations giving their weights and dimensions. In case you did, get one of these tabulations out and check the column which gives their velocity in orbit. You'll see that each and every one of them bears the label # miles per hour. There are three statements one can make about that figure. Statement number one is that it is wrong. Statement number two is that it is impossible. And statement number three is that this figure has, by now, achieved the status of an unliterary convention, like the saying about the fifty million Frenchmen who cannot be wrong, which is wrong on three counts too. In the first place, there France; in the second, they rarely agree on anything; thirdly, mere numbers are not proof of correctness. Of course everybody hearing that this famous figure of # miles per hour is wrong has a perfect right -- in fact almost an obligation -- to ask about the correct figure. And that is where the trouble starts. There is not one correct figure. There are hundreds, even thousands, of them. It all depends on the case. To begin somewhere, let us see where this figure of # miles per hour comes from. Does it hold true in any specific case? The answer is no, and the most one can say for this figure is that it is the result of multiplying # by #. The reason for these two figures is that # is the number of seconds in one hour while the "#" is supposed to be the velocity of the satellite in miles per second. Now everybody knows, or at least should know, that an artificial satellite has to move the faster the nearer it is to the ground. The highest velocity, then, would be required of a satellite which races around the Earth at sea level. Let us assume that no continents, mountains or buildings are in the way and that air resistance has been removed by magic. How fast would it have to move then?" The answer is # meters per second, which is precisely #,# miles per second or # miles per hour. Since you cannot have a sealevel satellite in reality, every satellite which is actually possible would have to move more slowly than that, or else it would not stay in orbit. The next question is obviously how low a real satellite can be placed and how fast it would be in that fastest possible orbit. I was confronted with that question a fair number of years ago for a rather unlikely reason. The year in question happened to be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days and a magazine editor wanted an article about this. There were a number of things to be investigated for the purpose of this article. How fast could you get around the Earth nowadays, using any means of transportation except flying? How fast could you get around the Earth using commercial airliners only, no special flights, please? How fast could you do it with special flights? The idea was: could it be done in eight days, instead of eighty days? (The answer was yes, using commercial airliners only.) Could it be done in eighty hours? (Not when the article was written, but it might be possible now.) could a rocket do it in eighty minutes? Strangely enough, it did not occur to me at the time just to calculate the sea-level satellite first, in which case I would have found out quickly that even at sea level it takes more than eighty minutes. I calculated two other orbits first, coming closer and closer, and did not hit on the sea-level orbit until I had convinced myself that an orbit # miles up would need just about # minutes. The satellite at sea level would take about two minutes less. Although the question of whether it could be done in eighty minutes was not asked for scientific reasons, it is nevertheless true that scientific calculations also start out with the question of the orbital period. There is a very good practical reason for this. If you establish a satellite in a permanent orbit, an orbit that does not touch the atmosphere at any point, you want to check on it. This checking can be most easily accomplished if the satellite passes over a given point at a given time. This, in turn, means that the orbital period of the satellite must be a definite fraction of the # hours which the Earth needs to turn on its axis. In other words, you want a satellite which will make a certain number of complete revolutions around the Earth in # hours. The research satellites which we now have don't do that, and it might be worth emphasizing that there is no need for this. For research purposes, any orbit will do; you want to learn something and you can learn something from any orbit, provided it is observed carefully. But for a satellite which has a purpose other than research -- say one for navigational purposes -- you want a nearly circular orbit with a period which results in complete revolutions. It does not matter much whether that satellite makes # or # or # or only # revolutions per day. It does matter that they are complete revolutions, with no fractions left over. It is for this reason that the question about the orbital period comes first. A period of I hour # minutes and # seconds would be awkward to handle. But an orbital period of # minutes would give you # complete revolutions, a period of # minutes would give you # complete revolutions, a period of # hours and # minutes would produce # complete revolutions, a #-hour period # revolutions, a #-hour period # revolutions, and so forth. The first of the ones just mentioned would have to be at an altitude of # miles. That would produce an orbital period of # minutes, and # complete revolutions, with an orbital velocity of # miles per second. Only one year ago, the question of whether # miles is high enough to avoid even residual air resistance would have been answered in the affirmative without any hesitation. Now, after the first half-dozen artificial satellites have been in various orbits, this answer would be a little less positive. It is still likely that a #-minute orbit would be stable, but nobody would be too surprised if somebody were to prove that it is not. ' her von Braun's two-hour orbit, is still considered safe. There you would have # miles between you and the ground (the slight disagreement in such figures that you can find are ultimately based on the diameter assigned to the Earth, and they are of little practical importance) and an orbital velocity of # miles per second. To make ten complete revolutions around the Earth, you would have to be just a mile or so less than # miles from the ground, which would produce an orbital period of # hours # minutes with an orbital velocity of # miles per second. For the three-hour orbit, you would have to be # miles from the ground and would have to move at the rate of #I miles per second to stay in that orbit. Finally, for the four-hour orbit, the distance would have to be very nearly # miles away (the precise figure, as now calculated, is # miles) and the orbital velocity would be # miles per second. You can see how far we have removed ourselves from those standard # miles per hour or # miles per second. Since we are going more and more slowly, one might ask just how slow a satellite might go and still be a satellite. At a distance of # miles from the Earth's surface, the orbital velocity would be down to # miles per second and the satellite would need # days and almost # hours for one complete revolution. At twice the distance, the orbital velocity would be down to # miles per second (or # feet per second) while the orbital period would be up to # days and nearly # hours. Again doubling the distance reduces the orbital velocity to # miles per second (# feet per second) and increases the orbital period to #I days. Of course we can't go on doubling the distance as we have been doing, for there must come a point where the Earth's gravitational field i no longer powerful enough to hold the satellite. That maximum distance, according to Dr. Robert S. Richardson, is # miles from the Earth's surface, resulting in an orbital period of # days. The orbital velocity would be # feet per second. Beyond this distance, you can't have a satellite of Earth. If you tried to put one farther out, say at a distance of # miles, it would not stay a satellite of Earth. It would be snatched by the Sun and orbit as a very minor planet. T he question I get most frequently is the one asked in the sub-head. No matter how often I explain it, in writing, in person or on television, I can be sure that on the very next day somebody will write or telephone or buttonhole me and ask: "The one thing I can't understand is why those orbits are ellipses." I never give the answer I really want to give. What I want to say is "Because they are." Or else "Because Kepler said so." Instead of speaking my mind, I sigh (sometimes audibly) and reach for a pencil or a piece of chalk and say: "This circle is meant to represent the Earth. This dotted line around it is meant to represent the orbit of a satellite. Never mind how sloppily it is drawn, it is supposed to be a mathematical circle. Now, in a circular orbit, the velocity is the same for every point of the orbit. If that satellite were at a distance of # miles, the velocity has to be # miles per second. If it is less, the satellite will approach the Earth; if it is more, the satellite will recede from the Earth. "If it recedes, it will climb against the Earth's gravitational pull. That will reduce its velocity. So it will come to a point where its actual velocity is less than it would have to have to go into an orbit at that distance. This means that gravity will win and it will approach the Earth again. But in approaching the Earth, the satellite gains velocity. So it will grow to be too fast to go into an orbit at the distance at which it now finds itself. Hence it will recede again and this will go on and on until an external force, such as air resistance, intervenes and changes the picture." In repeating this standard explanation, I have omitted the blank looks which interrupt it at random points, and I have also omitted the repetitions I put in because of these blank looks. After all, the advantage of the printed word is that every reader can go over a printed sentence as often as he wants. The point where I sometimes was tripped came when the person said brightly: "Yes, now I see why this would come out as an ellipse and why the satellite would be slowest when it is farthest from the Earth and fastest when it is nearest to the Earth. Can you tell me a few figures?" No, I couldn't. I knew a number of figures applying to circular orbits, but every elliptical orbit is different and would have to be calculated separately. Which is something one can't do standing on a lecture platform or sitting in front of a television camera. However, now I can give figures for at least some cases. Professor Dr. Karl Schiitte of the German Society for Rocket and Space Research has published a table in his recent book Die Weltraumfahrt hat begonnen ("Space Travel Has Begun") which will be most helpful for such occasions. TUT before you look at the table, read these explanations. The assumption is that you have an artificial satellite in an orbit around the Earth, a circular orbit which is as far down as air resistance will permit. Its velocity in orbit will be less than # miles per second; how much less would depend on the altitude. Now it is assumed that the velocity of this satellite is increased by rocket power, producing a new and higher velocity which is given in the first column. This new velocity sends the satellite into an elliptical orbit. In the elliptical orbit, this new velocity becomes the perigee velocity which the satellite will have every time it goes through its perigee near the original circular orbit. The second column then shows where the apogee of the new orbit will be, meaning how far it will go away in its new orbit. The third column gives the velocity in miles per second at the apogee, where the satellite is slowest. The last column, finally, gives the orbital period. The last line on Table I represents a case where just about # miles per second have been added to the orbital velocity which the satellite had to begin with, and this addition of just about onethird of the orbital velocity produces an ellipse that' will go nearly # miles out. One other thing which is worth pointing out is the increasing discrepancy between perigee and apogee velocities (first and third columns) as the ellipse lengthens. But what is really amazing is what follows after the velocity has gone to the level of # miles at perigee. (See Table II.) If you look at the first column of figures carefully, you'll also note that the Velocity at Perigee (miles p. sec.) Distance of Apogee from Surface (miles) Velocity at Apogee (miles p. sec.) d. Orbital Period h. m. #I # # #. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # #I # # #.I # # # # # # # # # # II Velocity at Distance of Velocity Orbital Perigee Apogee from at Apogee Period (miles p. sec. ) Surface (miles p. sec.) d. h. m. (miles) #I # # # # # # # #I # #.I # # # # '# # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #I # # # # # # #.I # # # # velocity increases from case to case are less than they were before. The last line, you may have noticed, is one where just two miles per second have been added to the original orbital velocity, but the result of this addition is an apogee far beyond the distance of the Moon. The low apogee velocities for the longest orbits are also amazing. This may show more strongly if they are expressed in feet per second. At the apogee of the orbit that extends to # miles, the velocity is a mere # feet per second; at the apogee of the orbit that goes to # miles, the velocity is # feet per second; and at the apogee of the last example in the table, it is # feet per second, less than the cruising speed of an airliner. One of the reasons I have quoted Professor Schiitte's table is that some of these orbits will be used in the near future. There are various reasons why it would be practical (though not theoretically superior) to put a so-called probe into an orbit first, an ordinary satellite orbit near the Earth, before radioing the firing command to the top stage of the rocket assembly. Likewise, at a later date, the first manned trips into deeper space are also likely to follow such orbits because they, too, are going to start with normal orbiting. And, finally, an # rthing that will be sent out from a space station would follow such an orbit because the space station will be in a circular orbit, so that every probe from the station will just add to the orbital velocity it has. land, Oregon, where, among a few dozen other things, I also spent an evening with the local moonwatch team. They told me something that I had not known before. Around the middle of September, #, radio hams in the Portland area learned from their opposite numbers in Japan that the Soviet government had informed the Japanese radio hams and moonwatchers that their first satellite would broadcast on such and such a wave length so that they could check their receiving equipment and tune in properly. While the younger and more active citizens could tell me stories like this, their elders still expressed astonishment about the surprising appearance of Sputnik No. #. Knowing that the word "surprise" can have several shades of meaning, I was careful to find out just what they meant. Did they mean they were surprised that an artificial satellite was possible at all? Well, yes, that too, but they meant they were surprised because nobody had ever said anything about a forthcoming Russian artificial satellite. All I could say at the moment was that I had known about a Russian satellite program for quite some time. It had been mentioned long as the American Vanguard program. I decided to check on the obscurity of the Russian satellite program and I restricted my checking to such sources that anybody could and most likely would see. In other words, I ruled out foreign publications and all printed matter that could not be bought at a newsstand, as for example newsletters and circulars of professional societies of one type or another. To be even more rigid, I also ruled out any publication, of whatever type, which had appeared prior to the announcement of the Vanguard Project. The reason for this was that I expected eyes to have been sharpened for satellite news after the Vanguard announcement, no matter how dull said eyes may have been before. Here is what I found: Exhibit A. The October #, #, issue of Aviation Week contained a report which was nearly one full page, dealing with an article by Professor Kyrill Stanyukovitch, reporting on Project Vanguard to the Russians, ending with the words "Russian engineers believe that it is possible to build larger satellites than those being discussed now in the Western Press." Exhibit B. The October #, #, issue of the same magazine with a report on an article in the Moscow News by Professor Georgi Pokrovsky which stated that the Russian satellite would have a diameter of # inches, a weight of about # pounds, and that the perigee of its orbit would be at # miles and the apogee at # miles. (Actual figures for Sputnik No. #: diameter # inches, weight # pounds, orbit # to # miles.) Exhibit C. The New York Times, issue of June #, #. Contained report on an article in Pravda by Professor Alexander Nesmenyanov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, stating "We have created the rockets and all the equipment and instruments necessary to solve the problem of the artificial earth satellite." Exhibit D. The June #, #, issue of the same newspaper, containing an article about an article in the Literaturnaya Gazyeta which told about the Russian "space dogs," trained from puppyhood for rocket and satellite flight. Exhibit E. The New York Times, issue of June #, #, containing an interview with several Russian scientists, all predicting "several" Exhibit F. The July #, #, issue of Aviation Week with an account of a three-day symposium of the Royal Aeronautical Society where Milton Rosen reported on the Vanguard Program and Professor Boris Petrov stated that the Russian Earth satellites would be launched at a considerable angle to the equator, as close to a meridian (pole to pole) shot as possible. Professor Petrov's speech was news only because it was in the form of a lecture; he repeated what had been said in an official Russian quarters in Uccle (Belgium) in June. Excerpts from this document had been carried by the major newspaper of all the # Exhibit G. Reuter's Wire Service, August #, #, distributed worldwide a dispatch stating that Professor Evgenii Fyedorov had been officially named head of the Russian satellite program. Professor Fyedorov was quoted as saying that the satellites would be shot at dawn (which was done), that a three-stage rocket would be used (which was done), and that they wanted a #-minute orbit (turned out to be # minutes). A week or so prior to this dispatch, a Russian radio magazine carried full information about the transmitters and wave lengths to be used. I ho doubt missed a few items, but this should have been enough information for anybody. If somebody tells me that he has the rockets to shoot -- which we knew from other sources, anyway -- and tells me what he will shoot, how he will shoot it, and in general says virtually everything except for the precise date -- well, what should I feel like if I'm surprised vhen the man shoots? really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Judith Merril. Of course you know how reasonable the rates are -- only # per book, or # for #, # for # and # for #. Pick-A-Book's big, new plan. Have you heard that you can get these great new books, in the regular editions, for only # each, if you buy only four books a year? You'll be advised ahead of time the titles that will be published, you simply write a note to Pick-A-Book stating which books you want sent to you as soon as they're published, and which books you don't want. But you can hardly go wrong at a low, low #. And best of all, Pick-A-Book pays ah the postage and handling charges. P. O. Box #  Hicksville, N. Y. At times it's cold and dark. Make sure you're not left out -- travel with the master on these extraordinary voyages... "belongs on the shelves of every scholar in s. f... welcome to the general reader should be (the) Fitzroy edition of Verne... which brings bock into -- Anthony Boucher, F.  S. F. This series is priced at # per title, but if you act now ond agree to purchase the whole series your price is only # per volume. Many of these books have never been translated into English! Now back in print and available, one of the rorest classics: ready in December for that special Christmas gift, only #. P. O. Box #I  Hicksville, N. Y. Birds of a Getting specimens for the interstellar zoo was no problem -- they battled for the honor -- but now I had to fight like a wildcat to keep a display from making a monkey of me! Feather I T was our first day of recruiting on the planet, and the alien life-forms had lined up for hundreds of feet back from my rented office. As I came down the block from the hotel, I could hear and see and smell them with ease. My three staff men, Auchinleck, Stebbins and Ludlow, walked shieldwise in front of me. I peered between them to size the crop up. The aliens came in every shape and form, in all colors and textures -- and all of them eager for a Corrigan contract. The Galaxy is full of bizarre beings, but there's barely a species anywhere that can resist the old exhibitionist urge. "Send them in one at a time," I told Stebbins. I ducked into the office, took my place back of the desk and waited for the procession to begin. The name of the planet was MacTavish IV (if you went by the official Terran listing) or Ghryne (if you called it by what its people were accustomed to calling it). I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. I believe in keeping the locals happy wherever I go. Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim sign plastered to a facing trials! We had saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding arrival. Stuff like this: Want to visit Earth -- see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial, there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science. No freaks wanted -- normal beings only. J. F. Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until #, so don't miss your chance! Hurry! A life of wonder and riches can be yours! tributed wholesale in half a thousand languages, always bring them running. And the Corrigan Institute really packs in the crowds back on Earth. Why not? It's the best of its kind, the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the other species of the universe. The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, "The first applicant is ready to see you, sir." "Send him, her or it in." The door opened and a timidlooking life-form advanced toward me on nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a big basketball, yellowishgreen, with two spindly doublekneed legs and five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body. There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones, one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth. His voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. "You are Mr. Corrigan?" "That's right." I reached for a data blank. "Before we begin. I'll need certain information about -- " "I am a being of Regulus II," came the grave, booming reply, even before I had picked up the blank. "I need no special care and I am not a fugitive from the law of any world." "Your name?" "Lawrence R. Fitzgerald." I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick cough. "Let me have that again, please?" "Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The 'R' stands for Raymond." "Of course, that's not the name you were born with." The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a #-degree rotation, remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of an apologetic smile. "My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see." npHE little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained. "You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?" "I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to remain on exhibit no more than onethird of each Terran sidereal day." "And the pay will be -- ah -- # Galactic a week, plus expenses and transportation." The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping on one side, two on the other. "Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I accept the terms!" I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into the other office to sign him up. I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show; the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get to Earth. My conscience won't let me really exploit a being, but I don't believe in throwing money away, either. The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was followed by a roly-poly blueskinned humanoid from Donovan's' Planet, four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at anything short of top rate. Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real oversupply of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging. The flora of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right. I'T was the isolationism of the late #th century that turned me into the successful proprietor of Corrigan's Institute, after some years as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in #, the World Congress declared Terra off-bounds for nonterrestrial beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement. Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down, a non-terrestrial could only a scientific collection -- in short, as an exhibit in a zoo. That's what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is, of course. A zoo. But we don't go out and hunt for our specimens; we advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth once in his lifetime, and there's only one way he can do it. We don't keep too big an inventory. At last count, we had # specimens before this trip, representing # different intelligent life-forms. My goal is at least one member of at least # different races. When I reach that. I'll sit back and let the competition catch up -- if it can. After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed eleven new specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids, fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks. It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some # feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan. "One more specimen before lunch," I told Stebbins, "to make it an even dozen." He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman. He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirtyblond hair, and though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look about him. He said, in level Terran accents, "I'm looking for a job with your outfit, Corrigan." "There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only." "I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazlic from time to time, but I draw the line at getting bilked myself. "Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known for my sense of humor. Or my generosity," "I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job." "Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as Earthborn as I am." "I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth," he said smoothly. "I happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists anywhere in the Galaxy but a small and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your circus?" "No. And it's not a circus. If s -- " "A scientific institute. I stand corrected." There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on his ear without another word. Instead I played along. "If you're from such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?" "I'm not speaking. I'm a telepath -- not the kind that reads minds, just the kind that projects. I communicate in symbols that you translate back to colloquial speech." "Very clever, Mr. Gorb." I grinned at him and shook my head. "You spin a good yarn -- but for my money, you're really Sam Jones or Phil Smith ffom Earth, stranded here and out of cash. You want a free trip back to Earth. No deal. The demand for beings from these days. Zero, in. fact. Good-by, Mr. Gorb." He pointed a finger squarely at me and said, "You're making a big mistake. I'm just what your outfit needs. A representative of a hitherto utterly unknown race identical to humanity in every respect! Look here, examine my teeth. Absolutely like human teeth! And -- " I pulled away from his yawning mouth. "Good-by, Mr. Gorb," I repeated. "All I ask is a contract, Corrigan. It isn't much. I'll be a big attraction. I'll " "Good-by, Mr. Gorb!" He glowered at me reproachfully for a moment, stood up and sauntered to the door. "I thought you were a man of acumen, Corrigan. Well, think it over. Maybe you'll regret your hastiness. I'll be back to give you another chance." He slammed the door and I let my grim expression relax into a smile. This was the best con switch yet -- an Earthman posing as an alien to get a job! But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness intellectually. There's no such there's only one human race in the Galaxy -- on Earth. I was going to need some real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket home. I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.  I 'HE first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan, and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds. Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office  when the Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him officially. He was big even for his kind -- in the neighborhood of nine feet high, and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture, and growled, "I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me immediately to a contract." "Sit down. Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks." "You will grant me a contract!" "Will you please sit down?" He said sulkily, "I will remain standing." "As you prefer." My desk has a few concealed features which are sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed lifeforms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of trouble. The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They're hairy creatures, and this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle and ceremonial blaster of his warlike race. I said, "You'll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it's not our policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our Institute. And we're not currently in need of any Kallerian males, because -- " "You will hire me or trouble I will make!" I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty. The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in hte fur. "Yes, you have four representatives -- of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn! For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to the noble Clan Gursdrinn!" At the key-word avenge, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he didn't move. He bellowed, "I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!" T'M a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and one of the most important of those principles is that I never let myself be bullied by anyone. "I deeply regret having unintentionally insulted your clan. Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?" He glared at me in silence. I went on, "Please be assured that I'll undo the insult at the earliest possible opportunity. It's not feasible for us to hire another Kallerian now, but I'll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon as a vacancy -- " "No. You will hire me now." "It can't be done. Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to it." "You will rue! I will take drastic measures!" "Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I'll get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting -- " You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting all the others. I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left. They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweettalkingly led him away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw, but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was out in the hall. I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins. "Come here, you!" "Stebbins?" I said gently. "I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he came running in -- " "Please, please," squeaked the little alien pitifully. "I must see you, honored sir!" "It isn't his turn in line," Stebbins protested. "There are at least fifty ahead of him." "All right," I said tiredly. "As long as he's in here already, I might as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins." Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out. "HE alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at full volume. "Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important having sold my last few possessions to travel to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with yourself." I said, "I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a female now and -- " "This is known to me. The female -- is her name perchance Tiress?" I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian entry. "Yes, that's her name." The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. "It is she! It is she!" "I'm afraid we don't have room for any more -- " "You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress, she is -- was -- my own Firesent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life and my love." "Funny," I said. "When we signed her three years ago, she said she was single. It's right here on the chart." "She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry, languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You must take me to Earth!" "But " "I must see her -- her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner flame? I must bring her back!" My face was expressionless. "You don't really intend to join our organization at all -- you just want free passage to Earth?" "Yes, yes!" wailed the Stortulian. "Find some other member of my race, if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead lump of stone?" TT isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel happy -- not to mention footing the transportation. I said, "I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance,, that your purpose in coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience lie for you, can I?" "Well " "Of course not." I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right along. "Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up, I might conceivably have done it. But no -- you had to go unburden your heart to me." "I thought the truth would move you." "It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to me," I said piously. "Then you will refuse me?" "My heart melts to nothingness for you. But I can't take you to Earth." "Perhaps you will send my wife to me here?" There's a clause in every contract that allows me to jettison an unwanted specimen. All I have to do is declare it no longer of scientific interest, and the World Government will deport the undesirable alien back to its home world. But I wouldn't pull a low trick like that on our female Stortulian. I said, "I'll ask her about coming home. But I won't ship her back against her will. And maybe she's happier where she is." The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed halfway to mask his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, "There is no hope then. All is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman." He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping. I watched him shuffle out. I do have some conscience, and I had the uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to commit suicide on my account. were processed without a hitch. Then life started to get complicated again. Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract. I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of "How did you get in here?" I demanded. "Your man happened to be looking the wrong way," he said cheerily. "Change your mind about me yet?" "Get out before I have you thrown out." Gorb shrugged. "I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz Earthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your staff." "I don't care what your story is! Get out or -- " " -- you'll have me thrown out. Okay, okay. Just give me half a second. Corrigan, you're no fool, and neither am I -- but that fellow of yours outside is. He doesn't know how to handle alien beings. How many times today has a lifeform come in here unexpectedly?" I scowled at him. "Too damn many." "You see? He's incompetent. Suppose you fire him, take me on instead. I've been living in the outworlds half my life; I know all there is to know about alien lifeforms. You can use me, Corrigan." I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of the office before I spoke. "Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is, I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me. I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to claiming you're an unknown life-form from WazI'm not looking for any of those either. Now will you scram or -- " The office door crashed open at that point and Heraal, the Kallerian, came thundering in. He was dressed from head to toe in glittering metalfoil, and instead of his ceremonial blaster, he was wielding a sword the length of a human being. Stebbins and Auchinleck came dragging helplessly along in his wake, hanging desperately to his belt. "Sorry, Chief," Stebbins gasped. "I tried to keep him out, but -- " Heraal, who had planted himself in front of my desk, drowned him out with a roar. "Earthman, you have mortally insulted the Clan Gursdrinn!"  near the meshgun trigger, I was ready to let him have it at the first sight of actual violence. Heraal boomed, "You are responsible for what is to happen now. I have notified the authorities and you prosecuted will be for causing the death of a lifeform! Suffer, Earthborn ape! Suffer!" "Watch it, Chief," Stebbins yelled. "He's going to -- " An instant before my numb fingers could tighten on the meshgun trigger, Heraal swung that huge sword through the air and plunged it savagely through his body. He toppled forward onto the carpet with the sword projecting a couple of feet out of his back. A few driblets of bluish-purple blood spread from beneath him. Before I could react to the big life-form's hara-kiri, the office door flew open again and three sleek reptilian beings entered, garbed in the green sashes of the local police force. Their golden eyes goggled down at the figure on the floor, then came to rest on me. "You are J. F. Corrigan?" the leader asked. "Y-yes." "We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint being -- " " -- that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the untimely death of an intelligent life-form," filled in the second of the Ghrynian policemen. "The evidence lies before us," intoned the leader, "in the cadaver of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several minutes ago." "And therefore," said the third lizard, "it is our duty to arrest you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than # Galactic or two years in prison." "Hold on!" I stormed. "You mean that any being from anywhere in the Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and I'm responsible?" "This is the law. Do you deny that your stubborn refusal to yield to this late life-form's request lies at the root of his sad demise?" "Well, no, but " "Failure to deny is admission of guilt. You are guilty, Earthman." tried to wish the whole babbling lot of them away. If I had to, I could pony up the hundred-grand fine, but it was going to put an awful dent in this year's take. And I shuddered when I remembered that any minute that scrawny little Stortulian was likely to come bursting in here to kill himself too. Was it a fine of # per suicide? At that rate, I could be out of business by nightfall. I was spared further such morbid thoughts by yet another unannounced arrival. The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a moment and turned to eye the newcomer. I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again -- or, if I did come, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against crackpHDts. In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, "Life is no longer worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me to do." I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers going down the drain. "Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself! He's " Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on.' Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting himself off. He helped me up. "Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get you." I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh. "Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian psychology, Corrigan," Gorb said lightly. "Suicide is completely abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who caused their trouble. In this case, you." tension-relieving snicker than a full-bodied laugh. "Funny," I said. "What is?" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian. "These aliens. Big blustery Heraal came in with murder in his eye and killed himself, and the pint-sized Stortulian who looked so meek and pathetic damn near blew my head off." I shuddered. "Thanks for the tackle job." "Don't mention it," Gorb said. I glared at the Ghrynian police. "Well? What are you waiting for? Take that murderous little beast out of here! Or isn't murder against the local laws?" "The Stortulian will be duly punished," replied the leader of the Ghrynian cops calmly. "But there is the matter of the dead Kallerian and the fine of -- " " -- one himdred thousand dollars. I know." I groaned and turned to Stebbins. "Get the Terran Consulate on the phone, Stebbins. Have them send down a legal adviser. Find out if there's any way we can get out of this mess with our skins intact." "Right, Chief." Stebbins moved toward the visiphone. Gorb stepped forward and put a hand on his chest. "Hold it," the Wazzenazzian said crisply. "The Consulate can't help you. I can." "You?" I said. "I can get you out of this cheap." "How cheap?" Gorb grinned rakishly. "Five thousand in cash plus a contract as a specimen with your outfit. In advance, of course. That's a heck of a lot better than forking over a hundred grand, isn't it?" I eyed Gorb uncertainly. The Terran Consulate people probably wouldn't be much help; they tried to keep out of local squabbles unless they were really serious, and I knew from past experiences that no officials ever worried much about the state of my pocketbook. On the other hand, giving this slyster a contract might be a risky proposition. "Tell you what," I said finally. "You've got yoxu-self a deal -- but on a contingency basis. Get me out of this and you'll have five grand and the contract. Otherwise, nothing." Gorb shrugged. "What have I to lose?" terfere, Gorb trotted over to the hulking corpse of the Kallerian and fetched it a mighty kick. "Wake up, you faker! Stop playing possum and stand up! You aren't fooling anyone!" The Ghrynians got off the huddled little assassin and tried to stop Gorb. "Your pardon, but the dead require your respect," began one of the lizards mildly. Gorb whirled angrily. "Maybe the dead do -- but this character isn't dead!" He knelt and said loudly in the Kallerian's dishlike ear, "You might as well quit it, Heraal. Listen to this, you shamming mountain of meat -- your mother knits doilies for the Clan Verdrokh!" The supposedly dead Kallerian eniitted a twenty-cycle rumble that shook the floor, and clambered to his feet, pulling the sword out of his body and waving it in the air. Gorb leaped back nimbly, snatched up the Stortulian's fallen blaster, and trained it neatly on the big alien's throat before he could do any damage. The Kallerian grumbled and lowered his sword. I felt groggy. I thought I knew plenty about non-terrestrial lifeforms, but I was learning a few things today. "I don't understand. How " The police were blue with chagrin. "A thousand pardons, Earthman. There seems to have been some error." "There seems to have been a cute little con game," Gorb remarked quietly. I recovered my balance. "Try to milk me of a hundred grand when there's been no crime?" I snapped. "I'll say there's been an error! If I weren't a forgiving man, I'd clap the bunch of you in jail for attempting to defraud an Earthmanl Get out of here! And take that would-be murderer with you!" They got, and they got fast, burbling apologies as they went. They had tried to fox an Earthman, and that's a dangerous sport. They dragged the cocooned form of the Stortulian with them. The air seemed to clear, and peace was restored. I signaled to Auchinleck and he slammed the door. "All right." I looked at Gorb and jerked a thumb at the Kallerian. "That's a nice trick. How does it work?" was enjoying this, I could see. "Kallerians of the Clan Gursdrinn specialize in a kind of mental discipline, Corrigan. It isn't too widely known in this area of the Galaxy, but men of that clan have unusual mental control over their bodies. They can cut off circulation and nervous-system response in large chunks of their bodies for hours at a stretch -- an absolutely perfect imitation of death. And, of course, when Heraal put the sword through himself, it was a simple matter to avoid hitting any vital organs en route." The Kallerian, still at gunpoint, hung his head in shame. I turned on him. "So -- try to swindle me, eh? You cooked this whole fake suicide up in collusion with those cops." He looked quite a sight, with that gaping slash running clear through his body. But the wound had begun to heal already. "I regret the incident, Earthman. I am mortified. Be good enough to destroy this unworthy person." It was a tempting idea, but a notion was forming in my showman's mind. "No, I won't destroy you. Tell me -- how often can you do that trick?" "The tissues will regenerate in a few hours." "Would you mind having to kill yourself every day, Heraal? And twice on Sundays?" Heraal looked doubtful. "Well, for the honor of my Clan, perhaps -- " Stebbins said, "Boss, you mean -- " "Shut up. Heraal, you're hired -- # a week plus expenses. Stebbins, get me a contract form -- and type in a clause requiring Heraal to perform his suicide stunt at least five but no more than eight times a week." I felt a satisfied glow. There's nothing more pleasing than to turn a swindle into a sure-fire crowdpuller. "Aren't you forgetting something, Corrigan?" asked Ildwar Gorb in a quietly menacing voice. "We had a little agreement, you know." "Oh. Yes." I moistened my lips and glanced shiftily around the office. There had been too many witnesses. I couldn't back down. I had no choice but to write out a check for five grand and give Gorb a standard alien-specimen contract. Unless... "Just a second," I said. "To enter Earth as an alien exhibit, you need proof of alien origin." He grinned, pulled out a batch of documents. "Nothing to it. Ever#dhing's stamjjed and in order -- and anybody who wants to prove these papers are fraudulent first!" We signed and I filed the contracts away. But only then did it occur to me that the events of the past hour might have been even more complicated than they looked. Suppose, I wondered, Gorb had conspired with Heraal to stage the fake suicide, and rung in the cops as well -- with contracts for both of them the price of my getting off the hook? It could very well be. And if it was, it meant I had been taken as neatly as any chump I'd ever conned. Carefully keeping a poker face, I did a silent burn. Gorb, or whatever his real name was, was going to find himself living up to that contract he'd signed -- every damn word and letter of it! YIE left Ghryne later that week, having interviewed some eleven hundred alien lifeforms and having hired fifty-two. It brought the register of ouf zoo -- pardon me, the Institute -- to a nice pleasant # specimens representing # intelligent lifeforms. Ildwar Gorb, the Wazzenazzian -- who admitted that his real name was Mike Higgins, of St. Louis -- turned out to be a tower of strength on the return voyage. It developed that he really did know all there was to know about alien life-forms. When he found out I had turned down the #-foot-long Vegan because the upkeep would be too big, Gorb-Higgins rushed off to the Vegan's agent and concluded a deal whereby we acquired a fertilized Vegan ovum, weighing hardly more than an ounce. Transporting that was a lot cheaper than lugging a full-grown adult Vegan, besides which, he assured me that the infant beast could be adapted to a diet of vegetables without any difficulty. He made life a lot easier for me during the six-week voyage to Earth in our specially constructed ship. With fifty-two alien lifeforms aboard, all sorts of dietary problems arose, not to mention the headaches that popped up over pride of place and the like. The Kallerian simply refused to be quartered anywhere but on the left-hand side of the ship, for example -- but that was the side we had reserved for low-gravity creatures, and there was no room for him there. "We'll be traveling in hyperspace all the way to Earth," GorbHiggins assured the stubborn Kallerian. "Our cosmostatic polarity will be reversed, you see." "Hah?" asked Heraal in confusion. "The cosmostatic polarity. If you take a bunk on the left-hand side of the ship, you'll be traveling on the right-hand side all the way there!" "Oh," said the big Kallerian. "I didn't know that. Thank you for explaining." He gratefully took the stateroom we assigned him. Higgins really had a way with the creatures, all right. He made us look like fumbling amateurs, and I had been operating in this business more than fifteen years. Somehow Higgins managed to be on the spot whenever trouble broke out. A highly strung Norvennith started a feud with a pair of Vanoinans over an alleged moral impropriety; Norvennithi can be very stuffy sometimes. But Gorb convinced the outraged being that what the Vanoinans were doing in the washrooni was perfectly proper. Well, it was, but I'd never have thought of using that particular analogy. I could list half a dozen other incidents in which Gorb-Higgins' special knowledge of outworld beings saved us from annoying hassles on that trip back. It was the first time I had ever had another man with brains in the organization and I was getting worried. When I first set up the Institute back in the early #s, it was with my own capital, scraped together while running a comparative biology show on Betelgeuse IX. I saw to it that I was the sole owner. And I took care to hire competent but unspectacular men as my staffers -- men like Stebbins, Auchinleck and Ludlow. Only now I had a viper in my bosom, in the person of this Ildwar Gorb-Mike Higgins. He could think for himself. He knew a good racket when he saw one. We were birds of a feather, Higgins and I. I doubted if there was room for both of us in this outfit. were about to make Earthfall, offered him a few slugs of brandy before I got to the point. "Mike, I've watched the way you handled the exhibits on the way back here." "The other exhibits," he pointed out. "I'm one of them, not a staff man." "Your Wazzenazzian status is just a fiction cooked up to get you past the immigration authorities, Mike. But I've got a proposition for you." "Propose away." "I'm getting a little too rid for this starcombing routine," I said. "Up to now, I've been doing my own recruiting, but only because I couldn't trust anyone else to do the job. I think you could handle it, though." I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. "Tell you what, Mike -- I'll rip up your contract as an exhibit, and I'll give you another one as a staffman, paying twice as much. Your job will be to roam the planets finding new material for us. How about it?" I had the new contract all drawn up. I pushed it toward him, but he put his hand down over mine and smiled amiably as he said, "No go." "No? Not even for twice the pay?" "I've done my own share of roaming," he said. "Don't offer me more money. I just want to settle down on Earth, Jim. I don't care about the cash. Honest." It was very touching, and also very phony, but there was nothing I could do. I coudn't get rid of him that way. I had to bring him to Earth. The immigration officials argued about his papers, but he'd had the things so cleverly faked that there was no way of proving he wasn't up in a key spot of the building. The Kallerian, Heraal, is one of our top attractions now. Every day at two in the afternoon, he commits ritual suicide, and soon afterward rises from death to the accompaniment of a trumpet fanfare. The four other Kallerians we had before are wildly jealous of the crowds he draws, but they're just not trained to do his act. But the unquestioned number one attraction here is confidence man Mike Higgins. He's billed as the only absolutely human lifeform from an extraterrestrial planet, and though we've had our share of debunking, it has only increased business. Funny that the biggest draw at a zoo like ours shopld be a homegrown Earthman, but that's show business. got back, Mike added a new wrinkle to the act. He turned up with a blonde showgirl named Marie, and now we have a Woman from Wazzenazz too. It's more fun for Mike that way. And downright clever. He's too clever, in fact. Like I said, I appreciate a good confidence man, the way some people appreciate fine wine. But I wish I had left Ildwar Gorb back on Ghryne, instead of signing him up with us. Yesterday he stopped by at my office after we had closed down for the day. He was wearing that pleasant smile he always wears when he's up to something. He accepted a drink, as usual, and then he said, "Jim, I was talking to Lawrence R. Fitzgerald yesterday." "The little Regulan? The green basketball?" "That's the one. He tells me he's only getting # a week. And a lot of the other boys here are drawing pretty low pay too." My stomach gave a warning twinge. "Mike, if you're looking for a raise, I've told you time and again you're worth it to me. How about twenty a week?" He held up one hand. "I'm not angling for a raise for me, Jim." "What then?" He smiled beatifically. "The boys and I held a little meeting yesterday evening, and we ah -- formed a union, with me as leader. I'd like to discuss the idea of a general wage increase for every one of the exhibits here." "Higgins, you blackmailer, how can I afford -- " "Easy," he said. "You'd hate to lose a few weeks' gross, wouldn't you?" "You mean you'd call a strike?" He shrugged. "If you leave me no choice, how else can I protect my members' interests?" After about half an hour of haggling, he sweated me into an across-the-board increase for the entire mob, with a distinct hint of further raises to come. But he also casually let me know the price he's asking to call off the hounds. He wants a partnership in the Institute; a share in the receipts. If he gets that, it makes him a member of management, and he'll have to quit as union leader. That way I won't have him to contend with as a negotiator. But I will have him firmly embedded in the organization, and once he gets his foot in the door, he won't be satisfied until he's on top -- which means when I'm out. T)UT I'm not licked yet! Not after a full lifetime of conniving and swindling! I've been over and over the angles and there's one thing you can always count on -- a trickster will always outsmart himself if you give him the chance. I did it with Higgins. Now he's done it with me. He'll be back here in half an hour to find out whether he gets his partnership or not. Well, he'll get his answer. I'm going to affirm, as per the escape clause in the standard exhibit contract he signed, that he is no longer of scientific value, and the Feds will pick him up and deport him to his home world. That leaves him two equally nasty choices. Those fake documents of his were good enough to get him admitted to Earth as a legitimate alien. How the World Police get him back there is their headache -- and his. If he admits the papers were phony, the only way he'll get out of prison will be when it collapses of old age. So I'll give him a third choice: He can sign an undated confession, which I will keep in my safe, as guarantee against future finagling. I don't expect to be around forever, you see, though, with that little secret I picked up on Rimbaud II, it'll be a good long time, not even barring accidents, and I've been wondering whom to leave the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science to. Higgins will make a fine successor. Oh, one more thing he will have to sign. It remains the Corrigan Institute as long as the place is in business. Try to outcon me, will he? Clarke. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # native thinking transports the reader to Luna via some of the most inspired descriptive writing in or out of science fiction. Tack all this onto a most plausible and subtle plot of agent and counteragent and the result is a thoroughgoing delight. The weary theme of conflict between Mother Earth and rawmaterial-hungry colonies is given a fresh rework and the counteragent is as believable in his role as your neighbor's in his. A supposed auditor of the lunar observatory, he is baffled in his search among the professional staff for the spy, and for good reason. Also, the war of rebellion is as credible in motivation as that of # was. Worth reading and rereading. win. Gnome Press, N. Y., # TF history teaches us anything, it's (to paraphrase) "Don't sell the human people short." Our race, despite its apparent frailty, has managed to survive and thrive, witness the Bindibu and Eskimo, in the most barren and impossible environments. Godwin developes this theme in a tough novel of the fight for  survival and vengeance of a shipload of settlers, set upon and cast away on a desert planet by a race of dastards. As if having to fight the miserably fluctuating climate, the # gravity and the complete lack of workable materials weren't enough, there are two murderously alien life-forms. The story chronicles the successive problems of several generations while they laboriously survive. Early in their career, they figuratively burn their bridges by transmitting a weak radioed challenge to their malefactors that they know will result in reprisal when the messages are received two hundred years in the future. I read this yarn with the same glow of pride in the indestructibility of the human race that I once received from van Vogt's early The Alien. But will we let us live? edited by T. E. Dikty. Advent, Chicago, # any field "The Best" has always been an arrogant practice, but in science fiction it's plain malpractice -- most of the best stories of any year are committed to magazine anthologies and authors' collections, so "The Best," no matter who the anthologist, merely means the best of whatever is left over that the claimant can beat the opposition to. For example, of the fourteen stories, eight are from two magazines -- Galaxy has its Readers, remember -- and, of the fourteen, two might legitimately contend for top honors, four are just good, which isn't enough for a "Best" accolade, four are fair, four fill space. The two lonely contenders are Eric Frank Russell's "Into Your Tent I'll Creep," a nastily convincing indictment of Man's best friend, and Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe," a fresh look at an oftdone theme, man-made adaptations to alien environments. Charles Eric Maine. Avalon Books, N. Y., # I N writing as in anything else, improvement results from application and hard work. Maine is a prime example of this parental proverb; through sheer output, his standards have risen. Though not the equal of his recent excellent High Vacuum, Satellite nevertheless shows to better advantage than his earlier works. Of obvious topical interest, it also employs a provocative gimmick, the Corpus Delicti legal dodge carried skyhigh. The story concerns the building of Satellite Rocket One in Nevada, designed to orbit at greater heights than Vanguards or Sputniks. The nominal hero, Conway, is Security Officer and his chief concern is to defuse an explosive marital tangle. Unfortunately, Maine is somewhat uninformed concerning governmental supervision of vital projects, and here, as in other works of his, situations develop by default and key characters possess unbelievable naivete. But the story makes no pretensions of being in a class with the late Cyril Kornbluth's unforgettable Takeoff or Clarke's Prelude to Space and affords a pleasant interlude. rys. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # tale from simple cloth. What will a man do with his life if given, not only a fresh start, but a spanking new identity and physiognomy? Th consensus of authors who have previously tried this tack is: not much. Budrys disagrees. He feels that certain characteristics can be acquired with a different physique. His protagonist, a soft, cowardly market manipulator, is about avoid personal punishment, he permits the misleadingly named Doncaster Industrial Linens to exchange his plump softness and hard cash for tall musculature and limp pocket. Additionally, Doncaster dumps him on Pluto with no way to buy his return from the bankrupt colony. However, the locals are organizing a crack, brutally disciplined army and his lack of other qualifications and his newfound brawn make him a natural GI. This is where you can agree or otherwise with Budrys. Is it reasonable for Sibley to harden outside from mind of steal to man of steel? One of Budrys' other main characters is a person only in the legal sense with surprising motives. Steve Eisner. University of Detroit presents, I always examine the dentures of gratis equines. Result here: I recommend that you send for your free copy to U. of D., #I McNichols Rd., Detroit. #st come, #st srvd. years ago, younger readers will have had little chance to become acquainted with the life of this fantastic person who lived as strangely as he wrote. Almost legendary, he has been called many things, including the Sage of Providence and the modern successor to E. A. Poe. To many his works are the utmost pinnacle of supernatural horror; to others, overpurpled, adjectival drivel. Of certain interest, regardless of your opinion, are the savage article by the late Dr. David H. Keller dissecting the psychological ticking of the Lovecraft mental mechanism, and the equally savage rebuttal by Dr. Kenneth Sterling. Fritz Leiber and August Derleth contribute, and a famous short of Lovecraft's "The Music of Erich Zann," is a surprise bonus. Whittlesey House, N. Y., Toronto, #  I 'O my eye, nobody ever looked more the personification of professorship than the Piccard twins; tall and spare, with Roger Price hairdos. Neither did anyone more exemplify the spirit of adventure in science. Their joint and separate balloon ventures in the thirties were imagination clutchers and the development of Auguste's bathyscaphe along the principles of the stratosphere balloons has brought the undersea abyss within Man's range. Honour's book does considerably more honor to the men than Auguste's own Earth, Sky and Sea which almost succeeded in convincing the reader that, shucks, 'twarn't nuthin'. Recommended as inspirational reading for the budding scientist as proof that adventure still holds a place in science. by Lester del Rey. John C. Winston Co., Phila., # TN this beautiful book, del Rey the storyteller sticks strictly to facts. While he is admittedly merely correlating known knowledge, he does so with the added advantage of the professional fictional fictioneer to the added enjoyment of the reader. Even though the text is pre-Sputnik, there is the basic background material necessary for proper imderstahding of theory, fact and problems. The author calls himself to task, a decade and a half belatedly, for having gravity affect his characters in a story while  the ship is in free fall. A common error then, but something that could never pass a schoolboy nowadays. James Heugh has contributed strikingly beautiful color plates and line drawings that would do credit to Bonestell himself. If it was happening to him, all right, he could take that... but what if he was happening to it? ly to sleep is really a depressing job. It keeps me awake at night thinking of all those bodies I have sent to the vaults, and it interferes to a marked extent with my digestion. I thought before Councilman Coleman came to see me that there wasn't much that could bother me worse. Coleman came in the morning before I was really ready to face the day. My nerves were fairly well shot from the kind of work I did as superintendent of Dreamland. I chewed up my pill to calm me down, the one to pep me up, the capsule to strengthen my qualities as a relentless perfectionist. I washed them down with gin and orange juice and sat back, building up my fortitude to do business over the pxDlished deck of my desk. But instead of the usual morning run of hysterical relatives and masochistic mystics, I had to face one of my superiors from the Committee itself. Councilman Coleman was an impressive figure in a tailored black tunic. His olive features were set off by bristling black eyes and a mobile mustache. He probably scared most people, but not me. Authority doesn't frighten me any more. I've put to sleep too many megalomaniacs, dictators, and civil servants. "Warden Walker, I've been following your career with considerable interest," Coleman said. "My career hasn't been very long, sir," I said modestly. I didn't mention that nobody could last that long in my job. At least, none had yet. "I've followed it from the first. I know every step you've made." I didn't know whether to be flattered or apprehensive. "That's fine," I said. It didn't sound right. "Tell me," Coleman said, crossing his legs, "what do you think of Dreamland in principle?" "Why, it's the logical step forward in penal servitude. Man has been heading toward this since he first started civilizing himself. After all, some criminals can't be helped psychiatrically. We can't execute them or turn them free; we have to imprison them." I waited for Coleman's reaction. He merely nodded. "Of course, it's barbaric to think of a prison as a place of pimishment," I continued. "A prison is a place to keep a criminal away from society for a specific time so he can't harm that society for that time. Punishment, rehabilitation, all of it is secondary to that. The purpose of confinement is confinement." IHE councilman edged forward an inch. "And you really think Dreamland is the most humane confinement possible?" "Well," I hedged, "it's the most humane we've found yet. I suppose living through a -- uh -- movie with full sensory participation for year after year can get boring." "I should think so," Coleman said emphatically. 'Warden, don't you sometimes feel the old system where the prisoners had the diversions of riots, solitary confinement, television, and jailbreaks may have made time easier to serve? Do these men ever think they are actually living these vicarious adventures?" That was a question that made all of us in the Dreamland service uneasy. "No, Councilman, they don't. They know they aren't really Alexander of Macedonia, Tarzan, Casanova, or Buffalo Bill. They are conscious of all the time that is being spent out of their real lives; they know they have relatives and friends outside the dream. They know, unless -- " Coleman lifted a dark eyebrow above a black iris. "Unless?" I cleared my throat. "Unless they go mad and really believe the dream they are living. But as you know, sir, the rate of madness among Dreamland inmates is only slightly above the norm for the population as a whole." "How do prisoners like that adjust to reality?" Was he deliberately trying to ask tough questions? "They don't. They think they are having some kind of delusion. Many of them become schizoid and pretend to go along with reality while secretly 'knowing' it to be a lie." Coleman removed a pocket secretary and broke it open. "About these new free-choice models -- do you think they genuinely are an improvement over the old fixedimage machines?" "Yes, sir," I replied. "By letting the prisoner project his own imagination onto the sense tapes and giving him a limited amount of alternatives to a situation, we can observe whether he is conforming to society to a larger extent." "I'm glad you said that. Walker," Councilman Coleman told me warmly. "As I said, I've been following your career closely. and if you get through the next twenty-four-hour period as you have through the foregoing part of your Dream, you will be awakened at this time tomorrow. Congratulations!" I sat there and took it. He was telling me, the superintendent of Dreamland, that my own life here was only a Dream such as I fed to my own prisoners. It was unbelievably absurd, a queasy little joke of some kind. But I didn't deny it. I F it were true, if I had forgotten that eversrthing that happened was only a Dream, and if I admitted it, the councilman would know I was mad. It couldn't be true. Yet -- Hadn't I thought about it ever since I had been appointed warden and transferred from my personnel job at the plant? Whenever I had come upon two people talking, and it seemed as if I had come upon those same two people talking the same talk before, hadn't I wondered for an instant if it couldn't be a Dream, not reality at all? Once I had experienced a Dream for five or ten minutes. I was driving a ground car down a spidery road made into a dismal tunnel by weeping trees, a dank, lavender maze. I had known at the time it was a Dream, but still, as the moments passed, I became more intent on the difficult road before me, my blocky hands on the steering wheel, thick fingers typing out the pattern of motion on the drive buttons. I could remember that. Maybe I couldn't remember being shoved into the prison vault for so many years for such and such a crime. I didn't really believe this, not then, but I couldn't afford to make a mistake, even if it were only some sort of intemperate test -- as I was confident it was, with a sweet, throbbing fury against the man who would employ such a jagged broadsword for prying in his bureaucratic majesty. "I've always thought," I said, "that it would be a good idea to show a prisoner what the modern penal system was all about by giving him a Dream in which he dreamed about Dreamland itself." "Yes, indeed," Coleman concurred. Just that and no more. I leaned intimately across my beautiful oak desk. "I've thought that projecting officials into the Dream and letting them talk with the prisoners might be a more effective form of investigation than mere observation." "I should say so," Coleman remarked, and got up. I had to get more out of him, some proof, some clue beyond the prepo.sterous announcement he had made. "I'll see you tomorrow at this time then, Walker." The councilman nodded curtly and turned to leave my office. I held onto the sides of my desk to keep from diving over and teaching him to change his concept of humor. The day was starting. If I got through it, giving a good show, I would be released from my Dream, he had said smugly. But if this was a dream, did I want probation to reality? man whose business tunic was the same rodent color as his hair. He had a pronounced tic in his left cheek. "I have to get back," he told me with compelling earnestness. "Mr. Horbit Eddie I said, glancing at his file projected on my desk pad, "I can't put you back into a Dream. You served your full time for your crime. The maximum." "But I haven't adjusted to society!" "Eddie, I can shorten sentences, but I can't expand them beyond the limit set by the courts." A tfear of frustration spilled out of his left eye with the next twitch. "But Warden, sir, my psychiatrist said that I was unable to cope with reality. Come on now. Warden, you don't want a guy who can't cope with reality running around loose." He paused, puzzled. "Hell, I don't know why I can't express myself like I used to." He could express himself much better in his Dream. He had been Abraham Lincoln in his Dream, I saw. He had lived the life right up to the night when he was taking in An American Cousin at the Ford Theater. Horbit couldn't accept history that he had no more life to live. He only knew that if in his delirium he could gaiii Dreamland once more, he could get back to the hard realities of dealing with the problems of Reconstruction. "Please," he begged. I looked up from the file. "I'm sorry, Eddie." His eyes narrowed, both of them, on the next twitch. "Warden, I can always go out and commit another anti-social act." "I'm afraid not, Eddie. The file shows you are capable of only one crime. And you don't have a wife any more, and she doesn't have a lover." Horbit laughed. "Your files aren't infallible. Warden." With one gesture, he ripped open his tunic and tore into his own flesh. No, not his own flesh. Pseudo-flesh. He took out the gun that was underneath. "The beamer is made of X-raytransparent plastic. Warden, but it works as well as one made of steel and lead." "Now that you've got it in here," I said in time with the pulse in my throat, "what are you going to do with it?" "I'm going to make you go down to the vaults and put me back to sleep. Warden." I nodded. "I suppose you can do that. But what's to prevent me from waking you up as soon as I've taken away your gun?" "This!" He tossed a sheet of paper onto my desk. "What's this?" I asked unnecessarily. I could read it. "A confession that you accepted a bribe to put me back to sleep," Horbit said, his tic beating out a feverish tempo. "As soon as you've signed it. I'll use your phone to have it telefaxed to the Registrar of Private Documents." I had to admire the thought behind the idea. Horbit was convinced that I was only a figment of his unfocused imagination, but he was playing the game with uncompromising logic, trusting that even madness had hard and tight rules behind it. There was also something else I admired about the plan. It could work. Once he fed that document to the archives, I would be obligated to help him even without the gun. My word would probably be taken that I had been forced to do it at gunpoint, but there would always be doubts, enough to wreck my career when it came time for promotion. Nothing like this had ever happened in my years as warden. hit me in the back of the neck. If I got through the next twentyfour hours. This had to be some kind of test. But a test for what? Had I been deliberately told that I was living only a Dream to see if my ethics would hold up even when I thought I Wasn't dealing with reality? Or if this was only a Dream, was it a test to see if I was morally ready tO return to the real, the earnest world? But if it was a test to see if I was ready for reality, did I want to pass it? My life was nerve-racking and mind-wrecking, but I liked the challenge -- it was the only life I knew or could believe in. What was I going to do? The only thing I knew was that I couldn't tune in tomorrow and find out. The time was now. Horbit motioned the gun to my desk set. "Sign that paper." I reached out and took hold of his wrist. I squeezed. Horbit's screams brought in the guards. I picked up the gun from where he had dropped it and handed it to Captain Keller, my head guard. a tough old bird who wore his uniform like armor. "Trying to force his way back to the sleep tanks," I told Keller. He nodded. "Happened before. Back when old man Preston lost his grip." Preston had been my predecessor. He had lost his hold on reality like all the others before him who had served long as warden of Dreamland. A few had quit while they were still ahead and spent the rest of their lives recuperating. Our society didn't produce individuals tough enough to stand the strain of putting their fellow human beings to sleep for long. One of Keller's men had stabbed Horbit's arm with a hypospray to blanket the pain from his broken wrist, and the man was quieter. "I couldn't have done it. Warden," Horbit mumbled drowsily. "I couldn't kill anybody. Unless it was like that other time." "Of course, Eddie," I said. I had banked on that, hadn't I, when I made my move? Or did I? Wasn't it perhaps a matter of knowing that all of it wasn't real and that the safety cutoffs in even a free-choice model of a Dream Machine couldn't let me come to any real harm? I had been suspiciously brave, disarming a dedicated maniac. With only an hour to spare for gym a day, I could barely press # pounds. I was hardly in shape for personal combat. On the other hand, maybe I actually wanted something to go wrong so my sleep sentence would be extended. Or was it that, in some sane part of my mind, I wanted release from unreality badly enough to take any risk to prove that I was morally capable of returning to the real world? It was  carrousel and I couldn't catch the brass ring no matter how many turns I went spinning through. I hardly heard Horbit when he half-shouted at me as my men led him from the room. Glancing up sharply, I saw him straining purposefully against the bonds of muscle and narcotic that held him. "You have to send me back "You have to! I tried to coerce you with a gun. That's a crime. Warden -- you know that's a crime! I have to be put to sleep!" Keller flicked his mustache with a thick thumbnail. "How about that? You won't let a guy back into the sleepy-bye pads, so he pulls a gun on you to make you, and that makes him eligible. He couldn't lose. Warden. No, sir, he had it made." My answer to Keller was forming, building up in my jaw muscles, but I took a pill and it went away. "Hold him in the detention quarters," I said finally. "I'm going to make a study of this." Keller winked knowingly and sauntered out of the office, his left hand swinging the blackjack the Committee had taken away from him a decade before. The problem of what to do with Keller wasn't particularly atypical of the ones I had to solve daily and I wasn't going to let that worry me. Much. I pressed my button to let Mrs. Engle know I was ready for the next interview. hysterical relatives, the wives and mothers and brothers who demanded that their kin be Awakened because they were special cases, not really guilty, or needed at home, or possessed of such awesome talents and qualities as to be exempt from the laws of lesser men. Once in a while I granted a parole for a prisoner to see a dying mother or if some important project was falling apart without his help, but most of the time I just sat with my eyes propped open, letting a sea of vindictive screeching and beseeching wailings wash around me. The relatives and legal talent were spaced with hungry-eyed mystics who were convinced they could contemplate God and their navels both conscientiously as an incarnation of Gautama. To risk sounding religiously intolerant, I usually kicked these out pretty swiftly. The onetime inmate who wanted back in after a reprieve was fairly rare. Few of them ever got that crazy. But it was my luck to get another the same day, the day for me, as Horbit. Paulson was a tall, lean man with sad eyes. The clock above his sharp shoulder bone said five till noon. I didn't expect him to take much out of my limch hour. "Warden," Paulson said, "I've decided to give myself up. I murdered a blind beggar the other night." "For his pencils?" I asked. Paulson shifted uneasily. "No, sir. For his money. I needed some extra cash and I was stronger than he was, so why shouldn't I take it?" I examined the projection of his file. He was an embezzler, not a violent man. He had served his time and been released. Conceivably he might embezzle again, but the Committee saw to it that temptation was never again placed in his path. He would not commit a crime of violence. "Look, Paulson," I said, a trifle testily, "if you have so little conscience as to kill a blind old man for a few dollars, where do you suddenly get enough guilt feelings to cause you to give yourself up?" Paulson tried his insufficient best to smile evilly. "It wasn't conscience. Warden. I never lie awake a minute whenever I kill anybody. It's just -- well, Dreaming isn't so bad. Last time I was Allen Pinkerton, the detective. It was exciting. A lot more exciting than the kind of life I lead." I nodded solemnly. "Yes, no doubt strangling old men in the streets can be pretty dull for a red-blooded man of action." "Yes," Paulson said earnestly, "it does get to be a humdrum routine. I've been experimenting with all sorts of murders, but I just don't seem to get much of a kick out of them now. I'd like to try it from the other end as Pinkerton again. Of course, if you can't arrange it, I guess I'll have to go out and see what I can do with, say, an ax." His eye glittered almost convincingly. "Paulson, you know I could have you watched night and day if I thought you really were a murderer. But I can't send you back to the sleep vaults without proof and conviction for a crime." "That doesn't sound very reasonable," Paulson objected. "Turning loose a homicidal maniac who is offering to go back to the vaults of his own free will just because you lack a little trifling proof of his guilt." "Sure," I told him, "but I don't want to share the same noose with you. My job is to keep the innocent out and the convicted in. And I do my job, Paulson." "But you have to! If you don't, I'll have to go out and establish my guilt with another crime. Do you want a crime on your hands, Warden?" I studied his record. There was a chance, just a chance... "Do you want to wait voluntarily in the detention quarters?" I asked him. He agreed readily enough. I watched him out of the office and rang for lunch. The news on the wall video was dull as usual. A man got tired of hearing peace, safety, prosperity and brotherly love all the time. I dug into my strained spinach, raw hamburger, and chewed up my white pill, my red pill, my ebony pill, and my second white pill. The gin and tomato juice took the taste away. I was ready for the afternoon session. messy job of dragging a hysterical woman out of the office when Keller came back. He had a stubborn look on his flattened, red face. "New prisoner asking to see you personal," Keller reported. "Told him no. Okay?" "No," I said. "He can see me. That's the law and you know it. He isn't violent, is he?" I asked in some concern. The room was still in disarray. "Naw, he ain't violent. Warden. He just thinks he's somebody important." "Sounds like a case for therapy, not Dreamland. Who does he think he is?" "One of the Committee -- Councilman Coleman." "Mm-hmm. And who is he really, Captain?" "Councilman Coleman." I whistled. "What did they nail him on?" "Misuse of authority." "And he didn't get a suspended for that?" "Wasn't his first offense. Still want to see him?" I gave a lateral wave of my hand. "Of course." My pattern of living -- call it my office routine -- had been reestablished through the day. I hadn't had a chance to brood much over the bombshell Coleman had tossed in my lap in the morning, but now I could think. Coleman entered wearing the same black tunic, the same superior attitude. His black eyes fastened on me. "Sit down. Councilman," I directed. He deigned to comply.' I studied the files flashed before me. Several times before, Coleman had been guilty of slight misuses of his authority; helping his friends, harming his enemies. Not enough to make him be impeached from the Committee. His job was so hypersensitive that, if every transgression earned dismissal, no one could hold the position more than a day. Even with the best intentions, mistakes can be taken for deliberate errors. Not to mention the converse. For his earlier errors, Coleman had first received a suspended sentence, then two terminal sentences to be fixed by the warden. My predecessors had given him first a few weeks, then a few months of sleep in Dreamland. en me; I focused right on the pupils. "That was a pretty foul trick. Councilman. Did you hope to somehow frighten me out of executing this sentence by what you told me this morning?" I couldn't follow his reasoning. Just how making me think my life was only a Dream such as I imposed on my own prisoners could help him, I couldn't see. "Warden Walker," Coleman intoned in his magnificent voice, "I'm shocked. # am not personally monitoring your Dream. The Committee as a whole will decide whether you are capable of returning to the real world. Moreover, please don't get carried away. I'm not concerned with what you do to this sensory projection of myself, beyond how it helps to establish your moral capabilities." "I suppose," I said heavily, "that I could best establish my high moral character by excusing you from this penal sentence?" "Not at all," Councilman Coleman asserted. "According to the facts as you know them, I am 'guilty' and must be confined." I was stymied for an instant. I had expected him to say that I must know that he was incapable of committing such an error and I must pardon him despite the misguided rulings of the courts. Then I thought of something else. "You show symptoms of being a habitual criminal, Coleman. I think you deserve life." Coleman cocked his head thoughtfully, concerned. "That seems rather extreme. Warden." "You would suggest a shorter sentence?" "If it were my place to choose, yes. A few years, perhaps. But life -- no, I think not." I threw up my hands. You don't often see somebody do that, but I did. I couldn't figure him. Coleman had wealth and power as a councilman in the real world, but I had thought somehow he wanted to escape to a Dream world. Yet he didn't want to be in for life, the way Paulson and Horbit did. There seemed to be no point or profit in what he had told me that morning, nothing in it for him. Unless -- Unless what he said was literally true. I stood up. My knees wanted to quit halfway up, but I made it. "This," I said, "is a difficult decision for me, sir. Would you make yourself comfortable here for a time. Councilman?" Coleman smiled benignly. "Certainly, Warden." I walked out of my office, slowly and carefully. tention quarters idly flicking through a book tape on the Civil War when I found him. The tic in his cheek marked time with every new page. "President Lincoln," I said reverently. Horbit looked up, his eyes set in a clever new way. "You call me that. Does it mean I am recovering? You don't mean now that I'm getting back my right senses?" "Mr. President, the situation you find yourself in now is something stranger and more evil than any madness. I am not a phantom of your mind -- I am a real man. This wild, distorted place is a real place." "Do you think you can pull the wool over my eyes, you scamp? Mine eyes have seen the glory." "Yes, sir." I sat down beside him and looked earnestly into his twitching face. "But I know you have always believed in the occult." He nodded slowly. "I have often suspected this was hell." "Not quite, sir. The occult has its own rigid laws. It is perfectly scientific. This world is in another dimension -- one that is not length, breadth or thickness -- but a real one nevertheless." "An interesting theory. Go ahead." "This world is more scientifically advanced than the one you come from -- and this advanced science has fallen into the hands of a well-meaning despot." Horbit nodded again. "The Jefferson Davis type." He didn't understand Lincoln's beliefs very well, but I pretended to go along with him. "Yes, sir. He -- our leader -- doubts your abilities as President. He is not above meddling in the affairs of an alien world if he believes he is doing good. He has convicted you to this world in that belief." He chuckled. "Many of my countrymen share his convictions." "Maybe," I said. "But many here do not. I don't. I know you must return to guide the Reconstruction. But first you must convince our leader of your worth." "How am I going to accomplish that?" Horbit asked worriedly. "You are going to have a companion from now on, an agent of the leader, who will pretend to be something he isn't. You must pretend to believe in what he claims to be, and convince him of your high intelligence, moral responsibilities, and qualities of leadership." "Yes," Horbit said thoughtfully, "yes. I must try to curb my tendency for telling off-color jokes. My wife is always nagging me about that." doors away from Horbit. I found him with his long, thin legs stretched out in front of him, staring dismally into the gloom of the room. No wonder he found reality so boring and depressing with so downbeat a mood cycle. I wondered why they hadn't been able to do something about adjusting his metabolism. "Paulson," I said gently, "I want to speak with you." He bolted upright in his chair. "You're going to put me back to sleep." "I came to talk to you about that," I admitted. I pulled up a seat and adjusted the lighting so only his face and mine seemed to float bodiless in a sea of night, two moons of flesh. "Paulson -- or should I call you Pinkerton? -- this will come as a shock, a shock I know only a fine analytical mind like yours could stand. You think your life as the great detective was only a Dream induced by some miraculous machine. But, sir, believe me: that life was real." Paulson's eyes rolled slightly back into his head and changed their luster. "Then this is the Dream. I've thought -- " "No!" I snapped. "This world is also real." I went through the same Fourth Dimension waltz as I had auditioned for Horbit. At the end of it, Paulson was nodding just as eagerly. "I could be destroyed for telling you this, but our leader is planning the most gigantic conquest known to any intelligent race in the Universe. He is going to conquer Earth in all its possible futures and all its possible pasts. After that, there are other planets." "He must be stopped!" Paulson shouted. I laid my palm on his arm. "Armies can't stop him, nor can fantastic secret weapons. Only one thing can stop him: the greatest detective who ever lived. Pinkerton!" "Yes," Paulson said. "I suppose I could." "He knows that. But he's a fiend. He wants a battle of wits with you, his only possible foe, for the satisfaction of making a fool of you." "Easier said than done, my friend," Paulson said crisply. "True," I agreed, "but he is devious, the devil! He plans to convince you that he also has been removed to this world from his own, even as you have. He will, claim to be Abraham Lincoln." "No!" "Yes, and he will pretend to find you accidentally and get you to help him find a way back to his own world, glorying in making a fool of you. But you can use every moment to learn his every weakness." "But wait. I know President Lincoln well. I guarded him on his first inauguration trip. How could this leader of yours fool me? Does he look like the President?" "Not at all. But remember, the dimensional shift changes physical appearance. You've noticed that in yourself." "Yes, of course," Paulson muttered. "But he couldn't hoax me. My keen powers of deduction would have seen through him in an instant!" pily off in each other's company. Paulson was no longer bored by a reality in which he was matching wits with the first master criminal of the paratime universe, and Horbit was no longer hopeless in his quest to gain another reality because he knew he was not merely insane now. It was a pair of fantastic stories that no man in his right mind would believe -- but that didn't make them invalid to a brace of ex-Sleepers. They wanted to believe them. The stories gave them what they were after -- without me having to break the law and put them to sleep for crimes they hadn't committed. They would find out some day that I had lied to them, but maybe by that time they would have realized this world wasn't so bad. Fortunately, I was confident from their psych records that they were both incapable of ending their little game by homicide, no matter how justified they might think it was. "Hey, Warden," Captain Keller bellowed as I approached my office door, "when are you going to let me throw that stiff Coleman into the sleepy-bye vaults? He's still sitting in there on your furniture as smug as you please." "You don't sound as if you like our distinguished visitor very well," I remarked. "It's not that. I just don't think he deserves any special privileges. Besides, it was guys like him that took away our nightsticks. My boys didn't like that. Look at me -- I'm defenseless!" I looked at his square figure. "Not quite. Captain, not quite." Now was the time. I stretched out my wet palm toward the door. Was or was not Coleman telling the truth when he said this life of mine was itself only a Dream? If it was, did I want to finish my last day with the right decision so I could return to some alien reality? Or did I deliberately want to make a mistake so I could continue living the opiate of my Dream? Then, as I touched the door, I knew the only decision that could have any meaning for me. Councilman Coleman didn't look as if he had moved since I had left him. He was unwrinkled, unperspiring, his eyes and mustache crisp as ever. He smiled at me briefly in supreme confidence. I changed my decision then, in that moment. And, in the next, changed it back to my original choice. "Coleman," I said, "you can get out of here. As warden. I'm granting you a five-year probation." The councilman stood up swiftly, his eyes catching little sparks of yellow light. "I don't approve of your decision. Warden. Not at all. Unless you alter it. I'll be forced to convince the rest of the Committee that your decisions are becoming faulty, that you are losing your grip just as all your predecessors did." My muscles relaxed in a spasm and it took the fresh flow of adrenalin to get me to the chair behind my desk. I took a pill. I took two pills. "Tell me, Councilman, what happened to the offer to release me from this phony Dream? Now you are talking as if this world was the real one." Coleman parted his lips, but then the planes of his face shifted into another pattern. "You never believed me." "Almost, but not quite. You knew I was on the narrow edge in this kind of job, but I'm not as far out as you seemed to have thought." "I can still wreck yom career, you know." "I don't think so. That would constitute a misuse of authority, and the next time you turn up before me, I'm going to give you life in. Dreamland." Coleman sat back down suddenly. "You don't want life as a Sleeper, do you?" I pursued. "You did want a relatively short sentence of a few months or a few years. I can think of two reasons why. The answer is probably a combination of both. In the first place, you are a joy-popper with Dreams -- you don't want to live out your life in one, but you like a brief Dream "very few years like an occasional dose of a narcotic. In the second place, you probably have political reasons for wanting to hide out somewhere in safety for the next few years. The world isn't as placid as the newscasts sometimes make it seem." think he had to. "You wanted to make sure I made a painfully scrupulous decision in your case," I went on. "You didn't want me to pardon you completely because of your high position, but at the same time you didn't want too long a sentence. But I'm doing you no favors. You get no time from me, Coleman." "How did you decide to do this?" he asked. "Don't tell me you never doubted. We've all doubted since we found out about the machines: which was real and which was the Dream? How did you decide to risk this?" "I acted the only way I could act," I said. "I decided I had to act as if my life was real and that you were lying. I decided that because, if all this were false, if I could have no more confidence in my own mind and my own senses than that, I didn't give a damn if it were all a Dream." Coleman stood up and walked out of my office. The clock told me it was after five. I began clearing my desk. Captain Keller stuck his head in, unannounced. "Hey, Warden, there's an active one out here. He claims that Dreamland compromises His plan for the Free Will of the Universe." "Well, escort him inside. Captain," I said. I put away my pills. Solving simple problems such as the new visitor presented always helped me to relax. Second of Four Farts T homas blaine, a young yacht designer, is driving back to New York when his car goes out oi control and crashes into a passing car. Blaine is killed. He comes to life # years in the future, in a completely different body. Technicians are recording his reactions. He is being questioned by man, president of the Rex Corporation, which, has snatched Blaine's mind into the future and set it into a host-body. When Reilly learns Blaine's name, he is almost uncontrollably angry. The wrong man has been saved from # and a perfectly good body wasted! The situation is explained further by beautiful young woman, employed by Reilly, and in charge of the project that saved Blaine. From her, Blaine learns about Rex is a subsidiary. This corporation guarantees, for a very high fee, the absolute certainty of life after death. Blaine learns that some people survive naturally and pass on to the hereafter. But for the majority, the mind disintegrates with the death of the body -- unless strengthened by Hereafter Inc.'s treatment. Blaine finds out more about the life after death. The most understandable part of it is face region between Earth and the hereafter. Friendly spirits -- such as Reilly's dead grandfather -- inhabit this region and advise the living; and in the Threshold there Keeping his head was the least of Blaine's worries in this deadliest of skin games ,... aimed to fleece him of his borrowed body! are minds which have gone insane during the death trauma, and which sometimes appear on Earth as ghosts. But even with proofs, the organized religions do not accept the scientific hereafter. Reilly hoped to crack this large potential market by bringing a religious leader from # to #. This man's mind would pass through the Threshold, then be pulled into a host body. He would have seen the hereafter for himself and be able to endorse the product. TT the experiment failed. Instead they have Blaine -- who remembers nothing about the Threshold. Blaine is, therefore, an embarrassment to Rex. Reilly offers him the expensive hereafter treatment tree if Blaine will consent to commit suicide. Blaine refuses. Reilly hopes Blaine will change his mind when he witnesses a reincarnation. By reincarnating, Reilly plans to be reborn in a younger man's body. Reincarnation is dangerous, but Reilly fears going to the hereafter even more. Reilly is going to take over, has sold himself on the open market, in return for the precious hereafter treatment. The reincarnation begins, but there is interference from a spirit who fights Reilly for possession of Fitzsimmons' body, and wins. The new possessor of the host body can't remember who he is. He is barely able to control the corpselike host, which has been dead too long for a successful in# . tegration of mind and body. A person in this state is referred to as a zombie. The zombie is led away. As he passes Blaine, he seems to recognize him. He promises -- or threatens -- to see Blaine again, once he manages to recover his memory. Marie Thorne takes Blaine away from Rex for his safety, and turns him over to This tall, amiable Westerner takes Blaine on a round of New York's notorious pleasure spots. In a bar, they meet This is an illegal sex game which employs a technique whereby one can temporarily inhabit the body of another man, woman, or animal. Blaine refuses. When he finishes his drink, he realizes too late that Ore has slipped him a knockout drop. Blaine recovers consciousness in a guarded room. There is another prisoner there named that they have been captured by Ore's gang of body-snatchers. Although there is an open market in host bodies, the supply is always scarce and costly. The bodysnatchers sell to rich men who wish to attempt reincarnation. When Ore and his men come for him, Blaine tries to resist. But he is seized, chloroformed, and carried away. consciousness was to find out whether he was still Thomas Blaine and still occupying his own body. The proof was there, apparent in the asking. They hadn't wiped his mind out yet. He was lying on a divan, fully dressed. He sat up and heard the sound of footsteps outside, coming toward the door. They must have overestimated the strength of the anesthetic. He still had a chance! He moved quickly behind the door. It opened, and someone walked through. Blaine stepped out and swung. He managed to check the blow, but there was still plenty of force left when his big fist struck Marie Thorne on the side of her shapely chin. He carried her to the divan. It took a while before she recovered and looked fuzzily at him. "Blaine," she said, "you're an idiot." "I didn't know who it was," said Blaine. Even as he said it, he realized it wasn't true. He had recognized Marie Thorne a fractional second before the blow was launched; and his well-machined, responsive body could have recalled the punch even then. But an unperceived, uncontrollable fury had acted beneath his sane. conscious, morally aware level; fury had cunningly used urgency to avoid responsibility, had seized the deceiving instant to smash down the cold and uncaring Miss Thorne. The act hinted at something Blaine didn't care to know about himself. He said, "Miss Thorne, what in hell is going on?" "I'm sorry, Blaine. Ore apparently didn't understand why I was turning you over to him. He thought I wanted you disposedwell, I got you back from him as soon as I found out." "Thanks," Blaine said. "Why are you doing this, anyhow?" "For one thing, I knew the former owner of your body. For another -- no, skip that." She fingered her jaw, which was discolored and slightly swollen. "Well, shall we consider Ourselves even? Or do you want another clout at me?" "One was enough, thank you," Blaine said. S HE stood up, somewhat unsteadily. Blaine put an arm around her to steady her and was momentarily disconcerted. He had visualized that trim body as whipcord and steel, but in fact it was flesh, firm, resilient, surprisingly soft. So close, he could see stray hairs escaping her tight coiffure, and a tiny mole on her forehead near the hairline. At that moment. Marie Thorne ceased as an abstraction for him and took shape as a human being. "I can stand by myself," she said. "Of course," said Blaine, but it took a long moment to release her. "Under the circumstances," she said, looking at him steadily, "I think our relationship should remain on a strictly business level." Wonder after wonder! She had suddenly begun viewing him as a human being, too; she was aware of him as a man, and disturbed by it. The thought gave him great pleasure. It was not, he told himself, that he liked Marie Thorne, or even desired her particularly. But he wanted very much to throw her off balance, scratch enamel off the facade, jar that damnable poise. He said, "Why, certainly. Miss Thorne." "I'm glad you feel that way," she told him. "Because, frankly, you're not my type." "What is your type?" "I like tall, lean men," she said. "Men with a certain grace, ease and sophistication." "But-" "Shall we have lunch?" she asked easily. He followed her out of the room, raging inwardly. Had she been making fun of him? Tall, lean, graceful, sophisticated men? That's what he had been! And under this blond beefy wrestler's body, he still was, if only she had eyes to see it! And who was jarring whose poise? "Melhill!" "What?" "Ray Melhill, the man I was locked up with! Look, Miss Thorne, could you possibly get him out? I'll pay for it as soon as I can. He's a damned nice guy." She looked at him curiously. "I'll see what I can do." She left the room. Blaine waited, rubbing his hands together, wishing he had Carl Ore's neck between them. Marie Thorne returned in a few minutes. "I'm very sorry," she said. "I contacted Ore. Mr. Melhill was sold an hour after you were removed. I really am sorry. I didn't know." "I was afraid we wouldn't make it in time," said Blaine sickly. "I think I'd like a drink." "You need it," she agreed. "I'll take you to my place." Marie's apartment was large, airy, pleasingly feminine, and furnished with a certain dramatic flair. There was more bright color than Blaine would have thought compatible with Miss Thorne's somber personality, but perhaps the vivid yellows and sharp reds expressed a wish of some sort, a compensation for the restraint of her business life. Or perhaps it was just the prevailing style. The apartment contained the sort of gadgetry that Blaine associated with the future: self-adjusting lighting and air-conditioning, selfconforming armchairs, and a pushbutton bar that produced a very adequate martini. Marie Thorne went into one of the bedrooms. She returned in a high-collared lounging dress and sat down on a couch opposite him. "Well, Blaine, what are your plans?" "I thought I'd ask you for a loan." "Certainly. Glad to help out." "In that case, my plan is to find a hotel room and start looking for a job." "It won't be easy," she said, "but I know some people who might-" "I hope this doesn't sound too silly, but I'd rather find a job on my own." "No, it doesn't sound silly. I just hope it's possible. How about some dinner?" "Fine. Do you cook, too?" "I set dials," she replied. "Let's see. How would you like a genuine Martian meal?" "No, thanks," Blaine said. "Martian food is tasty, but you're hungry an hour later. Would you happen to have a steak around the place?" M arie set the dials and her auto-chef did the rest, selecting the foods from pantry and freezer, peeling, unwrapping, washing and cooking them, sniffing and tasting them, seasoning and serving them, and ordering new items to replace those used. The meal was perfect, but Marie seemed oddly embarrassed about it. She apologized to Blaine for the completely mechanical operation. After all, he came from an age in which women had opened their own cans and done their own tasting; but they'd probably had more leisure time too. The sun had set by the time they finished their coffee. Blaine said, "Thank you very much. Miss Thorne. Now if you could lend me that money. I'll get started." She looked surprised. "At nig'ht?" "I'll find a hotel room. You've been very kind, but I wouldn't want to presume any further -- " "You're not presuming. You can start on your own tomorrow." "All right," Blaine said. His mouth was suddenly dry and his heart was pounding with suspicious rapidity. He knew there was nothing personal in her invitation, but his body didn't seem to understand. It insisted upon reacting hopefully, expectantly even, to the controlled and antiseptic Miss Thorne. She gave him a bedroom and a pair of green pajamas. Blaine closed the door when she left, undressed and got into bed. The light went out when he told it to. In a little while, just as his body had counted on, Miss Thorne came in wearing something white and gossamer. They lay side by side in silence. Marie Thorne moved closer to him. He said, "I thought you weren't attracted to my type." "Not exactly. I said I preferred tall, lean men." "I was once a tall, lean man." "I suspected it," she said. They were both silent. Blaine began to grow uncomfortable and apprehensive. What did this mean? Had she some fondness for him? Or was this simply a custom of the age, a sort of Eskimo hospitality? "Miss Thorne," he said, "I wonder if -- " "Oh, be quiet!" she said, suddenly turning toward him, her eyes enormous in the shadowy room. "Do you have to question everything, Tom?" Later, she said dreamily, "Under the circumstances, I think you can call me Marie." TN the morning, Blaine showered, shaved and dressed. Marie dialed a breakfast for them. After they had eaten, she gave him a small envelope. "I can lend you more when you need it," she said. "Now about finding a job -- " "You've helped me very much," said Blaine. "The rest I'd like to do on my own." "If possible. My address and telephone number are on the envelope. Please call me as soon as you have a hotel." "I will," Blaine promised, watching her closely. There was no hint of the Marie of last night. It might have been a different person entirely. But her studied self-possession was reaction enough for Blaine. Enough, at least, for the moment. At the door, she touched his arm. "Tom, please be careful. And call me." "I will, Marie," Blaine said. He went down into the city happy and refreshed, intent upon conquering the world. # . to make a round of the yachtdesign offices. But he decided against it simply by picturing a yacht designer from # walking into an office in #. The quaint gentleman might be very talented, but how would that help him when he was asked what he knew about metacentric shelf analysis, flow diagrams, centers of effort, and the best locations for would pay him while he learned the facts about reduction gears, exfoliating paints, tank testing, propeller pitch, heat exchange systems, synthetic sailcloth and all the rest of the advances made in a century and a half of scientific progress? Not a chance, Blaine decided. He couldn't walk into a design office # years behind the times and ask for a job. A job as what? Perhaps he could study and catch up to # technology. But he'd have to do it on his own time. Right now, he'd take anything he could get. He went to a newsstand and purchased a microfilm Times and a viewer. He walked until he found a bench, sat down and turned to the classified ads. Quickly he skipped past the skilled categories, where he couldn't hope to qualify, and came to unskilled labor. He read: "Set-up man wanted in autocafeteria. Requires only basic knowledge of robotics." "Hull wiper "yvanted, Mar-Coling liner. Must be Rh positive and fortified anticlaustrophobiac." "List man needed for hi-tensile bearing decay work. Needs simple jsnkling knowledge. Meals included." It was apparent to Blaine that even the unskilled labor of # was beyond his present capacity. Turning the page to Employment for Boys, he read: "Wanted, young man interested in slic-trug machinery. Good future. Must know basic calculus and have working knowledge Hootean Equations." "Young Men wanted, salesmen's jobs on Venus. Salary plus Commission. Knowledge basic French, German, Russian and Ourescz." "Delivery, Magazine, Newspaper boys wanted by Eth-Col agency. Must be able to drive a Sprening. Good knowledge of City required." So he couldn't even qualify as a newsboy! It was a depressing thought. Finding a job was going to be more difficult than he had imagined. Didn't anyone dig ditches or carry packages in this city? Did robots do all the menial work, or did you need a Ph.D even to lug a wheelbarrow? What sort of world was this? the Times for an answer, adjusted his viewer and read the niws of the day: A new spacefield was under construction at Oxa. New South Mars. A poltergeist was believed responsible for several industrial fires in the Chicago area. Exorcism proceedings were under way. Rich copper deposits had been discovered in the Sigma-G sector of the Asteroid Belt. Doppelganger activities had increased in Berlin. A new survey was being made of octopi villages in the Mindanao Deep. A mob in Spenser, Alabama, lynched and burned the town's two local zombies. Legal action was being taken against the mob leaders. A noted anthropologist declared the Tuamoto Archipelago in Oceania to be the last stronghold of #th century simplicity. The Atlantic Fish Herders' Association was holding its annual convention at the Waldorf. A werewolf was unsuccessfully tracked in the Austrian Tyrol. Local villages were warned to keep a twenty-four-hour watch for the beast. A bill was introduced into the House of Representatives to outlaw all hunts and gladiatorial events. It was defeated. A berserker took four lives in downtown San Diego. Helicopter fatalities reached the Blaine put the newspaper aside, more depressed than ever. Ghosts, doppelgangers, werewolves, poltergeists... He didn't like the sound of those vague, grim ancient words which today seemed to represent actual phenomena. He had already met a zombie. He didn't want to encounter any more of the dangerous side-effects of the hereafter. He started walking again. He went through the theater district, past glittering marquees, posters advertising the gladiatorial events at Madison Square Garden, billboards heralding solidovision programs and sensory shows, flashing signs proclaiming overtone concerts and Venusian pantomime. Sadly, Blaine remembered that he might have been part of this dazzling fairyland if only Reilly hadn't changed his mind. He might be appearing at one of those theaters now, billed as the Man from the Past... Of course! A Man from the Past, Blaine suddenly realized, had a unique and indisputable novelty value, an inherent talent. The Rex Corporation had saved his life in # solely in order to use that talent. But they had changed their minds. Then what was to prevent him from using his novelty value for himself? And, for that matter, what else could he do? Show business looked like the only possible business for him. office building and found six theatrical agents listed on the board. He picked Barnex, Scofield  Styles, and took the elevator to their offices on the #th floor. He entered a luxurious waiting room paneled with gigantic solidographs of smiling actresses. At the far end of the room, a pretty receptionist raised an inquiring eyebrow at him. Blaine went up to her desk. "I'd like to see someone about my act." "I'm so sorry," she said. "We're all filled." "This is a very special act." "I'm really terribly sorry. Perhaps next week." "Look," Blaine said, "my act is really unique. You see, I'm a man from the past." "I don't care if you're the ghost of Scott Merrivale," she said sweetly. "We're filled. Try us next week." Blaine turned to go. A short, stocky man breezed past him, nodding to the receptionist. "Morning, Miss Thatcher." "Morning, Mr. Barnex." Barnex! One of the agents! Blaine hurried after him and grabbed his sleeve. "Mr. Barnex," he said, "I have an act -- " "Everybody has an act," said Barnex. "But this act is unique!" "Everybody's act is unique. Let go my sleeve, friend. Try us next week." "I'm from the past!" Blaine cried, suddenly feeling foolish. Barnex turned and stared at him. He looked as though he might be on the verge of calling the police, or Bellevue. But Blaine plunged recklessly on. "I really am! he said. "I have absolute proof. The Rex Corporation snatched me out of the past. Ask them!" "Rex?" Barnex said. "Yeah, I heard something about that snatch over at Lindy's... Hmmm. Come into my office. Mister -- " "Blaine, Tom Blaine." He followed Barnex into a tiny, cluttered cubicle. "Do you think you can use me?" "Maybe," Barnex said, motioning Blaine to a chair. "It depends. Tell me, Mr. Blaine, what period of the past are you from?" "I have an intimate knowledge of the nineteen thirties, forties and fifties. By way of stage experience, I did some acting in college, and a professional actress friend of mine once told me I had a natural way of -- " "That's #th century?" "Yes, that's right."  I  HE agent shook his head. "Too bad. Now if you'd been a sixth century Swede or a seventh century Jap, I could have found work for you. I've had no difficulty booking appearances for our first century Roman or our fourth century Saxon, and I could use a couple more like them. But it's damned hard finding anyone from those early centuries, now that time travel is illegal. And B.C. is completely out." "But what about the #th century?" Blaine asked. "It's filled." "Filled?" "Sure. Ben Therler from # gets all the available stage appearances." "I see," Blaine said, getting slowly to his feet. "Thanks anyhow, Mr. Barnex." "Not at all," said Barnex. "Wish I could help. If you'd been from any time or place before the #th century, I could probably book you. But there's not much interest in recent stuff like the #th and #th centuries... Say, why don't you go see Therler? It isn't likely, but maybe he can use an understudy or something." He scrawled an address on a piece of paper and handed it to Blaine. Blaine took it, thanked him again, and left. In the street, he stood for a moment, cursing his luck. His one unique and indisputable talent, his novelty value, had been usurped by Ben Therler of #! Really, he thought, time travel should be kept more exclusive. It just wasn't fair to drop a man here and then ignore him. He wondered what sort of man Therler was. Well, he'd find out. Even if Therler didn't need an understudy, it would be a pleasure and relief to talk to someone from home. And Therler, who had lived here longer, might have some ideas on what a #th century man could do in #. Blaine flagged a helicab and gave the address. In fifteen minutes, he was in Therler's apartment building, pressing the doorbell. looking man opened the door. He was wearing a pork-pie hat, a tweed jacket with heavily padded shoulders, a narrow regimental-stripe tie, pegged gray flannel slacks and orange suede shoes. "You the photographer?" he asked. "You're too early." Blaine shook his head. "Mr. Therler, you've never met me before. I'm from your own century. I'm from #." "Is that so?" said Therler, with obvious suspicion. "It's the truth," Blaine said. "I was snatched by the Rex Corporation. You can check my story with them." Therler shrugged his shoulders. "Well, what is it you want?" "I was hoping you might be able to use an understudy or something -- " "No, no, I never use an understudy," Therler said, starting to close the door. "I didn't think you did. The real reason I came was just to talk to you. It gets pretty lonely being out of one's century. I wanted to talk to someone from my own age. I thought maybe you'd feel that way, too." "Me? Oh!" Therler said, smiling with sudden stage warmth. "Oh, you mean about the good old twentieth century! I'd love to talk to you about it sometime, pal. Little old New York! The Dodgers and Yankees, the hansoms in the park, the roller-skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza. I sure miss it all! But I'm afraid I'm a little busy now." "Certainly," Blaine said. "Some other time." "Fine! I'd really love to!" said Therler, smiling even more brilliantly. "Call my secretary, will you, old man? Schedules, you know. We'll have a really great old gab some one of these days. I suppose you could use a spare dollar or two -- " Blaine shook his head. "Then 'bye," Therler said heartily. "And do call soon." Blaine hurried out of the building. It was bad enough being robbed of your novelty value; it was worse being robbed by an outand-out phony, a temporal fraud who'd never been within a hundred years of #. The Rockefeller roer-skating rink! And those clothes! Ever # Tthing about the man screamed counterfeit. But Blaine was probably the only man in # who could detect the impostor. chased a change of clothing and a shaving kit. He found a room in a cheap hotel on Ninth Avenue. For the next week, he continued looking for work. He tried the restaurants, but found that human dishwashers were a thing of the past. At the docks and spaceports, robots were doing most of the heavy work. One day he was tentatively approved for a position as package-wrapping inspector at Gimbel-Macy's. But the personnel department, after carefully studying his personality profile, irritability index and suggestibility rating, vetoed him in favor of a dull-eyed little man from Queens who held a master's degree in packaging. Blaine was wearily returning to his hotel one evening when he recognized a face in the dense crowd. It was a man he would have known instantly, anywhere. He was about Blaine's age, a compact, red-headed, snub-nosed man with slightly protruding teeth and a small red blotch on his neck. He carried himself with a certain jaunty assurance, the unquenchable confidence of a man for whom something always turns up. "Ray!" Blaine shouted. "Ray Melhill!" He pushed through the crowd and seized him by the arm. "Ray! How'd you get out?" The man pulled his arm away and smoothed the sleeve of his jacket. "My name is not Melhill." "It's not? Are you sure?" "Of course I am sure," the man said, starting to move away. Blaine stepped in front of him. "Wait a minute. You look exactly like him, even down to the radiation scar. Are you sure you aren't Ray Melhill, a flow-control man off the spaceship Bremen?" "Quite certain," the man said coldly. "You have confused me with someone else, young man." Blaine stared hard as the man started to walk away. Then he reached out, caught the man by a shoulder and swung him around. "You dirty body-thieving swine!" Blaine shouted, his big right fist shooting out. The man who so exactly resembled Melhill was knocked back against a building and slid groggily to the pavement. Blaine started for him, and people moved quickly out of his way. "Berserker!" a woman screamed. Someone else took up the cry. Blaine caught sight of a blue uniform shoving through the crowd toward him. A flathat! Blaine ducked into the crowd. He turned a corner quickly, then another, slowed to a walk and looked back. The policeman was not in sight. Blaine started walking again to his hotel. It had been Melhill's body, but Ray no longer occupied it. There had been no last-minute reprieve for him, no final chance. His body had been taken from him and sold to the old man whose querulous mind wore the jaunty body like a suit of ill-fitting, too-youthful clothes. Now Blaine knew his friend was really dead. He drank silently to him in a neighborhood bar before returning to the hotel. " clerk as he passed the desk. "Blaine? Got a message for you. Just a minute." Blaine waited, wondering whom it could be from. Marie? But he hadn't called Marie yet, and wasn't planning to until he found work. The clerk came back and handed him a slip of paper. The message read : "There is a Communication awaiting Thomas Blaine at the Spiritual Switchboard, #rd Street Branch. Hours, nine to five." "I wonder how anybody knew where I was," Blaine said. "Spirits got their ways," the clerk told him. "Man I know, his dead mother-in-law tracked him down through three aliases, a Transplant and a complete skin job. He was hiding from her in Ethiopia." "I don't have any dead motherin-law," said Blaine. "No? Who you figure's trying to reach you?" the clerk asked. "I'll find out tomorrow and let you know," Blaine said. But his sarcasm was wasted. The clerk had already turned back to his correspondence course on Atomic Engine Maintainence. #I . ' I 'HE #rd Street Branch of the Spiritual Switchboard was a large graystone building near Third Avenue. Engraved above the door was the statement: "Dedicated to Free Communication Between Those on Earth and Those Beyond." Blaine entered the building and studied the directory. It gave floor and room numbers for Messages Incoming, Messages Outgoing, Translations, Abjurations, Exorcisms, Offerings, Pleas, and Exhortations. He wasn't sure which classification he fell under, or what the classifications signified, or even the purpose of the Spiritual Switchboard. He took his slip of paper to the information booth. "That's Messages Incoming," a pleasant, gray-haired receptionist told him. "Straight down the hall to Room #A." "Thank you." Blaine hesitated, then asked, "Could you explain something to me?" "Certainly," the woman said. "What do you wish to know?" "Well -- I hope this doesn't sound too foolish -- what is all this?" The gray-haired woman smiled. "That's a difficult question to answer. In a philosophical sense, I suppose you might call the Spiritual Switchboard a move toward a greater oneness, an attempt to discard the dualism of mind and body, and to substitute -- " "No," Blaine said. "I mean literally." "Literally? Why, the Spiritual Switchboard is a privately endowed, tax-free organization, chartered to act as a clearing house and center for communications to and from the Threshold Plane of the Hereafter. In some cases, of course, people don't need our aid and can communicate directly with their departed ones. But more often, there is a need for amplification. This center possesses the proper equipment to make the deceased audible to our ears. And we perform other services, such as abjurations, exorcisms, exhortations and the like, which become necessary from time to time when flesh interacts with spirit." She smiled warmly at him. "Does that make it any clearer?" "Oh, it does -- yes, indeed," Blaine said faintly, "and thank you very much," and went down the hall to Room #A. TT was a small gray room with several armchairs and a loudspeaker set in the wall. Blaine sat down, wondering what was going to happen. "Tom Blaine!" bawled a disembodied voice from the loudspeaker. "Huh? What?" Blaine asked, jumping to his feet and moving toward the door. "Tom! How are you, boy?" Blaine, his hand on the doorknob, suddenly recognized the voice. "Ray Melhill?" "Right! I'm up there where the rich folks go when they die! Pretty good, huh?" "I guess it is, if you say so," Blaine answered uncertainly. "But, Ray, how? I thought you didn't have any hereafter insurance." "I didn't. Let me tell you the whole story. They came for me maybe an hour after they took you. I was so damned angry, I thought I'd go out of my mind. I stayed angry right through the anesthetic, right through the wiping. I was still angry when I died." "What was dying like?" Blaine asked. "It was like exploding. I could feel myself scattering all over the place, growing big as the Galaxy, bursting into fragments, and the fragments bursting into smaller fragments, and all of them were me, "And what happened?" "I don't know. Maybe being so angry helped. I was stretched as far as I could go -- any further and it wouldn't be me -- and then I just simply came back together again. Some people do. Like I told have always survived without hereafter training. I was one of the lucky ones." "Lucky," Blaine repeated bitterly. "I tried to do something for you, but you'd already been sold." "I know," Melhill said. "Thanks anyhow, Tom. And say, thanks for popping that slob. The one wearing my body." "You saw that?" "I've been keeping my eyes open," Melhill said. "By the way, I like that Marie. Nice-looking kid." "Thanks. Ray, what's the hereafter like?" "I don't know." "You don't?" "I'm not in the hereafter yet, Tom. I'm in the Threshold. It's a preparatory stage, a sort of bridge between Earth and the hereafter. I wish I could explain. On Earth, I always wondered what the Threshold was like. No one could ever describe it. I suppose it bothers you." "I'd like to know." "Well, let me try. It's a sort of grayness, with Earth on one side and the hereafter on the other. Only it's not like that, because there aren't any directions. I mean both Earth and the hereafter are on the same side, sort of, only -- " "Superimposed?" "No, not all all! Look, the hereafter is a sort of grayness, but it's all color, too. That's the secret, really. I mean once you understand that color is direction and form is position -- no. Let me put it this way. Sounds and colors are the same, we'll start there. That's why the form part is so important for understanding direction, which is actually position. Are you getting any of this?" "I'm afraid not," Blaine said. "It sounds all mixed up." #T T'S perfectly clear to me," Melhill said, "but explaining is like talking about the Taj Mahal to a man who's been blind from birth. Only more so. Anyhow, let's just say that Earth is on one side and the hereafter on the other, and drop it there." "Why don't you cross over?" Blaine asked. "Not yet," Melhill said. "It's a one-way street into the hereafter. Once you cross over, you can't come back. There's no more contact with Earth." Blaine thought about that for a moment. "Then when are you going to cross over, Ray?" "I don't rightly know. I thought I'd stay in Threshold for a while and keep an eye on things." "Keep an eye on me, you mean." "Well... "Thanks a lot, Ray, but don't  do it. Go into the hereafter. I can take care of myself." "Sure you can," Melhill said. "But I think I'll stick around for a while anyhow. You'd do it for me, wouldn't you? So don't argue. Now look, I suppose you know you're in trouble?" Blaine nodded. "You mean the zombie?" "For one, yes. I dop't know who he is or what he wants from you, Tom, but it can't be good. You'd better be a long way off when he finds out. But that wasn't the trouble I meant." "You mean I have more?" "Afraid so. You're going to be haunted, Tom." In spite of himself, Blaine laughed. "What's so funny?" Melhill demanded indignantly. "You think it's a joke to be haunted?" "I suppose not. But is it really SO serious?" "Lord, you're ignorant," Melhill s.'iid. "Do you know anything about gliosts? How they're made and wli.-it they want?" "Tell me." "Well, there are three possibilities when a man dies. First, his mind can just explode, scatter, dissip.'ite; and that's the end of him. Second, his mind can hold together through the death trauma; and he finds himself in the Threshold, a spirit. I guess you know about those two." "Go on," said Blaine. "The third possibility is this: His mind breaks during the death trauma, but not enough to cause dissipation. He pulls through into the Threshold. But the strain has been permanently disabling. He's insane. And that, my friend, is how a ghost is born." "Hmm," Blaine said. "So a ghost is a mind that went insane during the death trauma?" "Right. He's insane, and he haimts." "But why?" "Ghosts haunt," Melhill said, "because they're filled with twisted hatred, anger, fear and pain. They won't go into the hereafter. They want to spend as much time as they can on Earth, where their attention is still fixed. They want to frighten people, hurt them, drive them insane. Haunting is the most asocial thing they can do; it's their madness. Look, Tom, since the beginning of mankind..." kind, there have been ghosts, but their numbers have always been small. Only a few out of survive after death; and only a tiny percentage of those survivors went insane during the transition, and became ghosts. But the impact of those few was colossal upon a mankind fascinated by death, awed by the cold uncaring immobility of the corpse so recently quick and vital, shocked at the ghastly inapropos humor of the skeleton. Death's elaborate, mysterious figure seemed infinitely meaningful, its warning finger pointed toward the spirit-laden skies. So for every genuine ghost, rumor and fear produced a thousand. Every gibbering bat became a ghost. Marsh-fires, flapping curtains and swaying trees became ghosts, and St. Elmo's fire, greateyed owls, rats in the walls, foxes in the bush, all became ghostly evidence. Folklore grew and produced witch and warlock, evil little familiars, demons and devils, succubi and incubi, werewolf and vampire. For every ghost, a thousand were suspected; and for every assumed. ICarly scientific invesigators enteied this maze, trying to discover tile truth about supernatural pheiKimena. They uncovered countless frauds, liallucinations and errors of jiKh'.inent. And they found a few geuuiiioly inexplicable events, whi( li, though interesting, were statistically insignificant. The whole tradition of folklore came tumbling down. Statistically, there were no ghosts. But continually there was a sly, elusive something which refused to stand still and be classified. It was ignored for centuries, the occasional something which gave a basis and a reality to tales of incubi and succubi. Until at last scientific theory caught up with folklore, made a place for it in the realm of indisputable phenomena. scientific hereafter, the irrational ghost became understandable as a demented mind inhabiting the misty interface between Earth and the hereafter. The forms of ghostly madness could be categorized like madness on Earth. There were the melancholics, drifting disconsolately through the scenes of their great passion; the whispering hebephrenics, chattering gay and random nonsense; the idiots and imbeciles who returned in the guise of little children; the schizophrenics who imagined themselves to be animals, prototypes of vampire and Abominable Snowman, werewolf, weretiger, werefox, weredog. There were the destructive stonethrowing and fire-setting ghosts, the poltergeists, and the grandiloquent paranoids who imagined themselves to be Lucifer or Beelzebub, Israfel or Azazael, the Spirit of Christmas Past, the Furies, Divine Justice, or even Death itself. Haunting was madness. They wept by the old watch tower, these few ghosts upon whose gossamer shoulders rested the entire great structure of folklore, mingled with the mists around the gibbet, jabbered their nonsense at the seance. They talked, cried, danced and sang for the delectation of the credulous, until scientific observers came with their sober cold questions. Then they fled back to the Threshold, terrified of this onslaught of reason, protective of their delusions, fearful of being cured. "So that's how it was," Melhill said. "You can figure out the rest. Since Hereafter, Inc., a hell of a lot more people are surviving after death. But, of course, a lot more are going insane on the way!" "Thus producing a lot more ghosts," said Blaine. "Right, and one of them is after you," Melhill said, his voice growing faint. "So watch your step. Tom, I gotta go now." "What kind of ghost is it?" Blaine asked. "Whose ghost? And why do you have to go?" "It takes energy to stay on Earth," Melhill whispered. "I'm just about used up. Have to recharge. Can you still hear me?" "Yes, go on." "I don't know when the ghost will show himself, Tom. And I don't know who he is. I asked, but he wouldn't tell me. Just watch out for him." "I'll watch out," Blaine said, his ear pressed to the loudspeaker. "Ray! Will I speak to you again?" "I thipk so," said Melhill, his voice barely audible. "Tom, I know you're looking for a job. Try Ed Franchel, # West #th Street. It's rough stuff, but it pays. And watch yourself." "Ray!" Blaine shouted. There was no answer. The loudspeaker was silent, and he was alone in the gray room. # . address Ray Melhill had given him was a small, dilapidated brownstone near the docks. Blaine climbed the steps and pressed the ground-floor buzzer marked Edward J. Franchel Enterprises. The door was opened by a large, balding man in shirtsleeves. "Mr. Franchel?" Blaine inquired. "That's me," the balding man said, with a resolutely cheerful smile. "Right this way, sir." He led Blaine into an apartment pungent with the odor of boiled cabbage. The front half of the apartment was arranged as an office, with a paper-cluttered desk, a dusty filing cabinet and several stiff-backed chairs. Past it, Blaine could see a gloomy living room. From the inner recesses of the apartment, a solido was blaring out a daytime show. "Please excuse the appearance," Franchel said, motioning Blaine to a chair. "I'm moving into a regular office uptown just as soon as I lind time. The orders have been coming in so fast and furious... Now, sir, what can I do for you?" "I'm looking for a job," said Blaine. "Hell," .said Franchel, "I thought you were a customer." He turned in the direction of the blaring solido and shouted, "Alice, will you turn that goddam thing down?" He waited until the volume had lowered somewhat, then turned back to Blaine. "Brother, if business doesn't pick up soon, I'm going back to running a suicide booth at Coney. A job, huh?" "That's right. Ray Melhill told me to try you." Franchel's expression brightened. "How's Ray doing?" "He's dead." "Shame," Franchel said. "He was a good lad, though always a bit wild. He worked for me a couple times when the space pilots were on strike. Want a drink?" Blaine nodded. Franchel went to the filing cabinet and removed a bottle of rye whisky labeled "Moonjuice." He found two shot glasses and filled them with a practiced flourish. "Here's to old Ray," Franchel toasted. "I suppose he got himself boxed?" "Boxed and crated," Blaine said. "I just spoke to him at the Spiritual Switchboard." "Then he made Threshold!" Franchel exclaimed admiringly. "Friend, we should only have his luck. So you want a job? Well, maybe I can fix it. Stand up." touched his biceps and ran a hand over his ridged shoulder muscles. He stood in front of Blaine, nodding to himself with downcast eyes, then feinted a quick blow at his face. Blaine's right hand came up instantly, in time to block the punch. "Good build, good reflexes," said Franchel. "I think you'll do. Know anything about weapons?" "Not much," Blaine said, wondering what kind of job he was getting into. "Just -- ah -- antiques. Garands, Winchesters, Colts." "No kidding! You know, I always wanted to collect antique recoil arms. But no projectile or beam weapons are allowed on this hunt. What else you got?" "I can handle a rifle with bayonet," Blaine said, thinking how his basic-training sergeant would have roared at that overstatement. "You can? Lunges and parries and all? Well, I'll be damned. I thought bayonetry was a lost art. You're the first I've seen in fifteen years. Friend, you're hired." Franchel went to his desk, scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to Blaine. "You go to that address tomorrow for your briefing. You'll be paid standard hunter's salary, two hundred dollars plus fifty a day for every working day. Have you got your own weapons and equipment? Well, I'll pick the stuff up for you, but it's deducted from your pay. And I take ten per cent off the top. Agreeable?" "Sure," Blaine said. "Could you explain a little more about the hunt?" "It's just a standard hunt. But don't go around talking about it. I'm not sure if hunts are still legal. I wish Congress would straighten out the Suicide and Permitted Murder Acts once and for all. A man doesn't know where he's at any more." "Yeah," Blaine agreed in some confusion. "They'll probably discuss the legal aspects at the briefing," Franchel said. "The other hunters will be there and the Quarry will tell you all you need to know. Say hello to Ray for me if you speak to him again. Tell him I'm sorry he got killed, but glad he made Threshold." "I'll tell him," Blaine said. He decided not to ask any more questions for fear his ignorance might cost him the job. Whatever hunting involved, he and his body could surely handle it. And a job, any job, was as necessary now for his self-respect as for his dwindling wallet. He thanked Franchel and left. That evening, he ate dinner in an inexpensive diner and bought several magazines. He was elated at the knowledge of having found work, and sure that he was going to make a place for himself in this age. His high spirits were dampened slightly when he glimpsed, on the way back to his hotel, a man standing in an alley watching him. The man had a white face and placid Buddha eyes, and his rough clothes hung on him like rags on a scarecrow. It was the zombie. Blaine hurried on to his hotel, refusing to anticipate trouble. After all, if a cat can look at a king, a zombie can look at a man, and where's the harm? This reasoning didn't prevent him from having nightmares until dawn.  walked to #nd Street and Park Avenue to catch a bus to the briefing. While waiting, he noticed a disturbance on the other side of #nd Street. A man had stopped short in the middle of the busy pavement. He was laughing to himself and people were beginning to edge away from him. He was in his fifties, Blaine judged, dressed in quiet tweeds, bespectacled, a little overweight. He carried a small briefcase and looked undistinguishable from other businessmen. Abruptly he stopped laughing. He unzipped his briefcase and removed from it two long, slightly curved daggers. He flung the briefcase away and followed it with his glasses. "Berserker!" someone yelled. The man plunged into the crowd, both daggers flashing. People started screaming and the crowd scattered before him. "Berserker, berserker!" "Call the flathats!" "Watch out! Berserker!" One man was down, clutching his torn shoulder and swearing. The berserker's face was fiery red now and spittle drooled from his mouth. He waded deeper into the dense crowd; people knocked each other down in their efforts to escape. A woman shrieked as she was pushed off balance and her armload of parcels scattered across the pavement. The berserker swiped at her left-handed, missed, and plunged deeper into the crowd. Blue-uniformed police appeared, six or eight of them, sidearms out. "Everybody down!" they shouted. "Flatten! Everybody down!" All traffic had stopped. The people in the berserker's path flung themselves to the pavement. On Blaine's side of the street, people were also flattening against the pavement. A freckled girl of perhaps twelve tugged at Blaine's arm. "Come on, mister, get down! You wanna get beamed?" Blaine lay down beside her. The berserker had turned and was running back toward the policemen, screaming wordlessly and waving his knives. Three of the policemen fired at once, their weapons throwing a pale yellowish beam which flared red when it struck the berserker. He screamed as his clothing began to smolder, turned, and tried to escape. back. He flung both knives at the policemen and collapsed. An ambulance dropped down with whirring blades and quickly loaded the berserker and his victims. The policemen began breaking up the crowd that had gathered around them. "All right, folks, it's all over now. Move along!" The crowd began to disperse. Blaine stood up and brushed himself off. "What was that?" he asked. "It was a berserker, silly," the freckled girl said. "Couldn't you see?" "I saw. Do you have many?" She nodded proudly. "New York has more berserkers than any other city in the world except Manila, where they're called amokers. But it's all the same thing. We have maybe fifty a year." "More," a man said. "Maybe seventy, eighty a year. But this one didn't do so good." A small group had gathered near Blaine and the girl. They were discussing the berserker much as Blaine had heard strangers in his own time talk at the scene of an automobile accident. "How many did he get?" "Only five, and I don't think he killed any of them." "His heart wasn't in it," an old woman said. "Wlien I was a girl, you couldn't stop them so easily." "Well, he picked a bad spot," commented the freckled girl. "This corner is crawling with flathats. A berserker can hardly get started before he's beamed." A big policeman came over. "All right, folks, break it up. The fun's over, move along now." The group dispersed. Blaine caught his bus, wondering why fifty or more people chose to berserk in New York every year. Sheer nervous tension? A demented form of individualism? Adult delinquency? It was one more of the things he would have to find out about the world of #. #. THE address was a penthouse high above Park Avenue in the Seventies. A butler admitted him to a spacious room where chairs had been set up in a long row. The dozen men occupying the chairs were a loud, tough, weatherbeaten bunch, carelessly dressed and ill at ease in such rarefied surroundings. Most of them knew each other. "Hey, Otto! Back in the hunting game?" "Yah. No money." "Knew you'd come back, old boy. Hi, Tim!" "Hi, Bjorn. This is my last hunt." "Sure it is. Last till next time." "No, I mean it. I'm buying a seed-pressure farm in the North Atlantic Abyss. I just need a stake." "You'll drink up your stake." "Not this time." "Hey, Theseus! How's the throwing arm?" "Good enough, Chico. Que tal?" "Not too bad, kid." "There's Sammy Jones, always last in." "I'm on time, ain't I?" "Ten minutes late. Where's your sidekick?" "Sligo? Dead. That Asturias hunt." "Tough. Hereafter?" "Don't know. Haven't heard from him." A man entered the room and called out, "Gentlemen, your attention, please!" He advanced to the center of the room and stood, hands on his hips, facing the row of hunters. He was a slender, sinewy man of medium height, dressed in riding breeches and an open-necked shirt. He had a small, carefully tended mustache and startling blue eyes in a thin, tanned face. For a few seconds, he looked the hunters over, while they coughed and shifted their feet uncomfortably. At last he said, "Good morning, gentlemen. I am Charles Hull, your employer and Quarry." He gave them a smile of no warmth. "First, gentlemen, a word concerning the legality of our proceedings. There has been some recent confusion about this. My lawyer has looked into the matter fully and will explain. Mr. Jensen." came into the room, pressed his spectacles firmly against his nose and cleared his throat. "Yes, Mr. Hull. Gentlemen, as to the present legality of the hunt: In accordance with the revised statutes to the Suicide Act of # #, any man protected by Hereafter insurance has the right to select any death for himself, at any time and place, and by any means, as long as those means do not constitute cruel and unnatural abuse. The reason for this fundamental 'right to die' is obvious : The courts do not recognize physical death as death per se, if said death does not involve the destruction of the mind. Providing the mind survive, the death of the body is of no more moment, legally, than the sloughing of a fingernail. The body, by the latest Supreme Court decision, is considered an appendage of the mind, its creature, to be disposed of as the mind directs." During this explanation, Hull had been pacing the room with quick, catlike steps. He stopped now and said, "Thank you, Mr. Jensen. So there is no questioning my right to choose my time and way of dying. Nor is there any illegality in my selecting one or more persons such as yourselves to perform the act for me. And your own actions are considered legal under the Permitted Murder section of the Suicide Act. All well and good. The only legal question arises in a recent appendage to the Suicide Act." He nodded to Mr. Jensen. "The appendage states," Jensen said, "that a man can select any death for himself, at any time and place, by any means, etcetera, so long as that death is not physically injurious to others." "That," said Hull, "is the troublesome clause. Now a hunt is a legal form of suicide. A time and place are arranged. You, the hunters, chase me. I, the Quarry, flee. You catch me, kill me. Fine! Except for one thing." He turned to the lawyer. "Mr. Jensen, you may leave the room. I do not wish to implicate you." After the lawyer had left, Hull said, "The one problem remaining is, of course, the fact that I will be armed and trying my very best to kill you. Any of you. All of you. And that is illegal." Hull sank gracefully into a chair. "The crime, however, is mine, not yours. I have employed you to kill me. You have no idea that I plan to protect myself, to retaliate. That is a legal fiction, but one which will save you from becoming possible accesories to the fact. If I am caught trying to kill one of you, the penalty will be severe. But I will not be caught. One of you will kill me, thus putting me beyond the reach of human justice. If I should be so unfortunate as to kill all of you, I shall complete my suicide in the old-fashioned manner, with poison. But that would be a disappointment to me. I trust you will not be so clumsy Ss to let that happen. Any questions?" ' I HE hunters were murmuring among themselves: "Slick fancy-talking bastard." "Forget it. All Quarries talk like that." "Thinks he's better than us, him and his classy legal talk." "We'll see how good he talks with a bit of steel through him." Hull smiled coldly. "Excellent. I believe the situation is clear. Now, if you please, tell me what your weapons are." One by one, the hunters answered : "Mace." "Net and trident." "Spear." "Morning-star." "Bola." "Scimitar." "Bayonet rifle," Blaine said when his turn came. "Broadsword." "Battle-axe." "Saber." "Thank you, gentlemen," Hull said. "I will be armed with a rapier, naturally, and no armor. Our meeting will take place Sunday, at dawn, on my estate. The butler will give each of you a paper containing full instructions on how to get there. Let the bayonet man remain. Good morning to the rest of you." The hunters left. Hull said, "Bayonetry is an unusual art. Where did you learn it?" Blaine hesitated, then said, "In the Army, # to #." "You're from the past?" Blaine nodded. "Interesting," Hull said, with no particular sign of interest. "Then this, I daresay, is your first hunt?" "It is." "You appear a person of some intelligence. I suppose you have your reasons for choosing so hazardous and disreputable an employment?" "I'm low on funds," Blaine said, "and I can't find anything else to do." "Of course," said Hull, as though he had known it all along. "So you turned to hunting. Yet hunting is not a thing merely to turn to; and hunting the beast Man is not for everyone. The trade calls for certain special abilities, not the least of which is the ability to kill. Do you think you have that innate talent?" "I believe so," Blaine said, though he hadn't considered the question until now. "I wonder," Hull mused. "In spite of your bellicose appearance, you don't seem the type. What if you find yourself incapable of killing me? What if you hesitate at the crucial moment when steel grates on steel?" "I'll chance it," Blaine said. so will I. Perhaps, hidden deep within you, a spark of murder burns. Perhaps not. This doubt will add spice to the game -- though you may not have time to savor it." "That's my worry," Blaine said, feeling an intense dislike for his elegant and rhetorical employer. "Might I ask you a question?" "Consider me at your service." "Thank you. Why do you wish to die?" Hull stared at him, then burst into laughter. "Now I know you're from the past! What a question!" "Can you answer it?" "Of course," Hull said. He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes took on the distant look of a man dictating his memoirs. "I am forty-three years old and weary of nights and days. I am a wealthy man and an uninhibited one. I have experimented, contrived, laughed, wept, loved, hated, tasted and drunk -- my fill. I have sampled all that Earth and elsewhere have to offer me, and I choose not to tediopsly repeat the experience. When I was young, I pictured this excellent green planet revolving mysteriously around its flamboyant yellow luminary as a treasure trove, a brass box of delights inexhaustible in content and immeasurable in their effect upon my ever-eager desires. "But now, sadly, I have lived longer and have witnessed sensation's end. And now I see with what obese complacency our fat round Earth circles, at servile distance and unvarying pace, its gaudy, dreaded star. And the imagined treasure chest of the Earth seems now a child's painted toy box, shallow in its contents and mediocre in its effect upon nerves too quickly deadened to all delight." Hull glanced at Blaine to note the effect of his words, and then went on. "Boredom stretches before me now like a vast, arid plain -- and I choose not to be bored. I choose, instead, to move on, move forward, move out, to sample Earth's last and greatest adventure -- the adventure of Death, gateway to the afterlife. Can you understand that?" "Certainly," Blaine said, irritated yet impressed by Hull's theatricals. "But what's the hurry? Life might have some good things still in store for you. And death is inevitable. Why rush it?" "Spoken like a true #th century optimist," said Hull, laughing. " 'Life is real, life is earnest...' In your day, one had to believe that life was real and earnest. What alternative was there? How many of you really believed in a life after death?" "That doesn't alter the validity of my point," Blaine argued, hating the stodgy, cautious, reasonable position he was forced to assume. "But it does! The perspective on life and death has changed now. Instead of Longfellow's prosy advice, we follow Nietzsche's dictum -- to die at the right time! Intelligent people don't clutch at the last shreds of life like drowning men clinging to a bit of board. They know tht the body's life is only an infinitesimal portion of Man's total existence. Why shouldn't they speed the body's passing by a few years, if they so desire? Why shouldn't those bright pupils skip a grade or two of school? Only the frightened, the stupid, the uneducated grasp at every possible monotonous second on Earth." "The frightened, stupid and uneducated," Blaine repeated. "And the unfortunates who can't afford Hereafter insurance." ' ' their privileges," Hull said, smiling faintly, "and their obligations as well. One of those obligations is the necessity of dying at the right time, before one becomes a bore to one's peers and a horror to oneself. But the deed of dying transcends class and breeding. It is every man's patent of nobility, his summons from the king, his knightly adventure, the greatest deed of his life. And how he acquits himself in that lonely and perilous enterprise is his true measure as a man." Hull's blue eyes were fierce and glittering. He said, "I do not choose to experience this crucial event in bed. I do not wish a dull, tame, commonplace death to sneak over me disguised as sleep. I choose to die fighting!" Blaine nodded in spite of himself and felt regret at his own prosaic death. A car accident! How dull, tame, commonplace! And how strange, dark, atavistic and noble seemed Hull's lordly selection of death. Pretentious, of course, but then life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter. Hull was like an ancient Japanese nobleman calmly kneeling to perform the ceremonial act of hara-kiri, and emphasizing the importance of life in the very selection of death. But hara-kiri was a passive Eastern avowal, while Hull's manner of dying was a Western death, fierce, violent, exultant. It was admirable. But intensely irritating to a man not yet prepared to die. Blaine said, "I have nothing against you or any other man choosing his own death. But what about the hunters you plan to kill? They haven't chosen to die and they have no assurance they'll survive in the hereafter." Hull shrugged his shoulders. "They choose to live dangerously. In Nietzsche's phrase, they prefer to run risk and danger, and play dice with death. Blaine, have you changed your mind?" "No." Then we will meet Sunday." Blaine went to the door and took his paper of instructions from the butler. As he was leaving, he said, "I wonder if you've considered one last thing." "What is that?" Hull asked. "You must have thought of it," Blaine said. "The possibility that this whole elaborate setup -- the scientific hereafter, voices of the dead, ghosts -- is merely a gigantic hoax, a money-making fraud perpetrated by Hereafter, Inc." Hull stood perfectly still. When he spoke, there was a hint of anger in his voice. "That is quite impossible. Only a very uneducated man could think such a thing." "Maybe," Blaine said. "But wouldn't you look silly if it were a hoax! Good morning, Mr. Hull." He left, glad to have shaken up that smooth, fancy, rhetorical smugness even for a moment -- and sad that his own death had been so dull, tame and commonplace. # . ' I 'HE following day, Saturday, Blaine went to Franchel's apartment for his rifle, bayonet, hunter's uniform and pack. He was given half his salary in advance, less ten per cent and the cost of the equipment. The money was very welcome, for he had been down to three dollars and change. He went to the Spiritual Switchboard, but Melhill had left no further messages for him. He returned to his hotel room and spent the afternoon practicing lunges and parries. That evening, Blaine found himself tense and despondent, nervous at the thought of the hunt beginning in the morning. He went to a small West Side cocktail lounge that had been designed to resemble a #th century bar, with a dark gleaming bar, wooden stools, booths, a brass rail, and sawdust on the floor. He slid into a booth and ordered beer. The classic neon lights glowed softly and a genuine antique jukebox played the sentimental tunes of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. Blaine sat hunched over his glass of beer, drearily asking himself who and what he was. Was it truly he taking casual employment as a hunter and killer of men? Then what happened to Tom Blaine, the former designer of sailboats, former listener to high-fidelity music, former reader of choice books, former viewer of good plays? What happened to that quiet, sardonic, non-aggressive man? Surely that man, housed in his slender, nervous, unassuming body, would never choose to kill! Would he? Was that familiar and mourned Blaine defeated and smothered by the large, square-muscled, quickreflexed fighter's body he had acquired? And was that body, with its own peculiar glandular secretions dripping into the dark bloodstream, its own distinct and configurated brain, its own system of nerves and signals and responses -- was that domineering body responsible for everything, dragging its helpless owner into murderous violence? Blaine rubbed his eyes and told himself that he was dreaming nonsense. The truth was simply this: He had died through circumstances beyond his control, been reborn in the future, and found himself unemployable except as a hunter. Q.E.D. But that rational explanation didn't satisfy him and he had no time to search out the slippery and elusive truth. He was no longer a detached observer of #. He had become a biased participant, an actor instead of an onlooker, with all of an actor's thoughtless sweep and rush. Action was irresistible; it generated its own momentary truth. The brakes were off and the engine Blaine was rolling down the steep hill Life, gathering momentum but no moss. Perhaps this, now, was his last chance for a look, a summing up, a measured choice... But it was already too late, for a man slid into the booth opposite him like a shadow across the world. And Blaine was looking into the white and impassive face of the zombie. zombie. "Good evening," Blaine said steadily. "Would you care for a drink?" "No, thank you. My system doesn't respond to stimulation." "Sorry to hear it," said Blaine. The zombie shrugged his shoulders. "I have a name now," he said. "I decided to call myself Smith, until I remember my real name. Smith. Do you like it?" "It's a fine name." "Thank you. I went to a doctor," Smith said. "He told me my body's no good. No stamina, no recuperative powers." "Can't you be helped?" Smith shook his head. "The body's definitely zombie. I occupied it much too late. The doctor gives me another few months at most." "Too bad," said Blaine, feeling nausea rise in his throat at the sight of that thick-featured, leadenskinned face with its unharmonious features and patient Buddha's eyes. Smith sat slack and unnatural in rough workman's clothes, his black-dotted white face closeshaven and smelling of strong lotion. But he had changed. Already Blaine could see a certain leathery dryness in the once-pliant skin, certain striations in the flesh around the eyes, nose and mouth, minute creases in the forehead like toolmarks in old leather. And, mingled with the heavy after-shaving lotion, Blaine thought he could sense the first faint odor of dissolution. "What do you want with me?" Blaine asked. "I don't know." "Then leave me alone." "I can't do that," Smith said apologetically. "Do you want to kill me?" Blaine persisted, his throat dry. "I don't know! I can't remember! Kill you, protect you, maim you, love you -- I don't know yet! But I'll remember soon, Blaine, I promise!" "Leave me alone," warned Blaine, his muscles tensing. "I can't," Smith said. "Don't you understand? I know nothing except you. Literally nothing! I don't know this world or any other, no person, face, mind or memory. You're my only landmark, the center of my existence, my only reason for living." "Stop it!" "But it's true! Do you think I enjoy dragging this tattered flesh through the streets? What good is life with no hope before me and no memory behind me? Death is better! Life means filthy decaying flesh, and death is pure spirit! I've thought about it, dreamed about it, beautiful fleshless death! But one thing stops me. I have you, Blaine, to keep me going!" "Get out of here," Blaine said, nausea bitter in his mouth. "You, my sun and moon, my stars, my Earth, my total universe, my life, my reason, my friend, enemy, lover, murderer, wife, father, child, husband -- " Blaine's fist shot out, striking Smith high on the cheekbone. The zombie was flung back in the booth. His expression did not change, but a great purple bruise appeared on his lead-colored cheekbone. "Your mark!" Smith said. Blaine's fist, poised for another blow, dropped. Smith stood up. "I'm going. Take care of yourself, Blaine. Don't die yet! I need you. Soon I'll remember, and I'll come to you." Smith, his slack, bruised face impassive, left the bar. Blaine ordered a double whisky and sat for a long time over it, trying to still the shaking in his hands. # . tate by rural jetbus, an hour before dawn. He was dressed in a traditional hunter's uniform -- khaki shirt and slacks, rubbersoled shoes and wide-brimmed hat. Slung over one shoulder was his field pack; over the other, he carried his rifle and bayonet in a plastic bag. A servant met him at the outer gate and led him to the low, rambling mansion. Blaine learned that the Hull estate consisted of ninety wooded acres in the Adirondack Mountains between Keene and Elizabethtown. Here, the servant told him, Hull's father had died at the age of fifty-one, taking the lives of six hunters with him before a saber man slashed his head off. Glorious death! Hull's uncle, on the other hand, had chosen to berserk in San Francisco, a city he had always loved. The police had to beam him twelve times before he dropped, and he took seven bystanders with him. The newspapers made much of the exploit and accounts of it were preserved in the family scrapbook. It just went to show, the garrulous old retainer pointed out, the difference in temperaments. Some, like the uncle, were friendly, fun-loving men who wanted to die in a crowd, attracting an enviable amount of attention. Others, like the present Mr. Hull, were more given to the love of solitude and nature. Blaine nodded politely to all this and was taken to a large rustic room where the hunters were assembled, drinking coffee and honing a last razor edge to their weapons. Light flashed from the blued-steel broadsword and silvery battle-axe, wavered along the polished spearhead and glinted frostily from the diamond points of the mace and morning-star. At first glance, Blaine thought it looked like a scene from medieval times. But on second thought he decided it was more like a movie set. "Pull up a chair, pal," the axeman called. "Welcome to the Benevolent Protective Society of Butchers, Slaughterhouse Men, and Killers-at-Large. I'm Sammy Jones, finest axeman in the Americas and probably Europe, too." Blaine sat down and was 'introduced to the other hunters. They represented half a dozen nationalities, although English was their common tongue. black-haired, bull-shouldered man, dressed in patched and faded khakis, with several old hunting scars across his craggy, thickbrowed face. "First hunt?" he asked, glancing at Blaine's neat pressed khakis. Blaine nodded, removed his rifle from its plastic bag and fitted the bayonet to its end. He tested the locking mechanism, tightened the rifle's strap, and removed the bayonet again. "Can you really use that thing?" Jones queried interestedly. "Sure," Blaine said, more confidently than he felt. "Hope so. Guys like Hull have a nose for the weak sisters. They try to cut 'em out of the pack early." "How long does a hunt usually last?" Blaine asked. "Well," Jones said, "longest I was ever on took eight days. That was Asturias, where my partner Sligo got his. Generally a good pack can pin down a Quarry in a day or two. Depends on how he wants to die. Some try to hang on as long as they can. They run to cover. They hide in caves and ravines, the dirty treacherous dogs, and you have to go in for them and chance a thrust from the dark. That's how Sligo got it. But I don't think Hull's that way. He wants to die like a great big fireeating he-man hero. So he'll stalk around and take chances, looking to see how many of us he can knock off with his pigsticker." "You sound as if you don't approve," Blaine said. Sammy Jones raised his bushy eyebrows. "I don't hold with making a big fuss about dying. Here comes the hero himself." Hull entered the room, lean and elegant in khaki-colored silk, with a white silk bandanna knotted loosely around his neck. He carried a light pack, and strapped to one shoulder was a thin, wickedlooking rapier. "Good morning, gentlemen," he said. "Weapons all sharpened, packs on straight, shoelaces firmly tied? Excellent!" Hull walked to a window and drew the curtains aside. "Behold the first crack of dawn, a glorious streak in our eastern skies, harbinger of our fierce Lord Sun who rules the chase. I shall leave now. A servant will inform you when my half-hour grace is done. Then you may pursue and kill me upon sight -- if you are able! The estate is fenced. I will remain within its confines and so shall you." Hull bowed, then walked quickly and gracefully out of the room. "God, I hate these fancy birds!" Sammy Jones raved, after the door was closed. "They're all alike, every one of them. Acting so cool and casual, so goddam heroic. If they only knew how bloody silly I think they are -- me that's been on hunts for twenty-eight lousy years." "Why do you hunt? Blaine asked. was an axeman and he taught me the business. It's the only one I know." "You could learn a different trade," Blaine said. "I suppose I could. The fact is tlemen. I hate every rich snob among them with their country club hereafter that a poor man can't afford. I take pleasure in I'd pay for the privilege." men like you," Blaine said. "It's a sad world." "No, just an honest one," Sammy Jones told him. "Stand up. I'll fasten your pack on right." When that was done, Sammy Jones said, "Look, Tom, why don't you and me stick together on this hunt? Mutual protection, like?" "My protection, you mean," Blaine said. "Nothing to be ashamed of. Every skilled trade must be learned before it can be practiced. And what better man to learn from than myself, the finest of the fine?" "Thanks," said Blaine gratefully. "I'll try to hold up my end, Sammy." "You'll do great. Now Hull's a fencer, be sure of it, and fencers have their little tricks which I'll explain as we go along. When he-" At that moment, a servant entered, carrying an old, ornate chronometer. When the second hand passed twelve, he looked sharply at the hunters. "Gentlemen," he said, "the time of grace is passed. The chase may begin." The hunters trooped outside into the gray, misty dawn. Theseus the tracker, balancing his trident across his shoulders, picked up the trail at once. It led upward, toward a mist-wreathed mountain. Spread out in a long single file, the hunters started up the mountain's side. Soon the early morning sun had burned away the mists. Theseus lost the trail when it crossed bare granite. The hunters spread out in a broken line across the face of the mountain and continued advancing slowly and warily upward. At noon, the broadsword man picked a fragment of khaki-colored silk from a thornbush. A few minutes later, Theseus found footprints on moss. They led down Into a narrow, thickly wooded valley. Eagerly the hunters pressed forward. "Here he is!" a man shouted. Blaine whirled and saw, fifty yards to his right, the man with the morning-star running forward. He was the youngest of the hunters, a brawny, self-confident Sicilian. His weapon consisted of a stout handle of ash, fixed to which was a foot of chain. At the end of the chain was a heavy spiked ball, the morning-star. He was whirling this weapon over his head and singing at the top of his lungs. toward him. They saw Hull break from the bushes, rapier in hand. The Sicilian leaped forward and swung a blow that could have felled a tree. Hull dodged lightly out of the way and lunged. The morning-star man gurgled and went down, pierced through the throat. Hull planted a foot on his chest, yanked the rapier free, and vanisl;ied again into the underbrush. "I never could understand why a man'd use a morning-star," Sammy Jones said. "Too clumsy. If you don't hit your man the first lick, you never recover in time." The Sicilian was dead. Hull's passage through the underbrush was clearly visible. They plunged in after him, followed by most of the hunters, with flankers ranged on either side. Soon they encountered rock again and the trail was lost. All afternoon they searched, with no luck. At sundown, they pitched camp on the mountainside, posted guards, and discussed the day's hunting over a small campfire. "Where do you suppose he is?" Blaine asked. "He could be anywhere on the damned estate," Jones said. "Remember, he knows every foot of ground here. We're seeing it for the first time." "Then he could hide from us indefinitely." "If he wanted to. But he wants to be killed, remember? In a big, flashy, heroic way. So he'll keep on trying to cut us down until we get him." Blaine looked over his shoulder at the dark woods. "He could be standing there now, listening." "No doubt he is," Jones said. "I hope the guards stay awake." Conversation droned on in the little camp and the fire burned low. Blaine wished morning would come. Darkness reversed the roles. The hunters were the hunted now, stalked by a cruel and amoral suicide intent upon taking as many lives with him as possible. With that thought, Blaine uneasily dozed off. Sometime before dawn, he was awakened by a scream. Grabbing his rifle, he sprang to his feet and peered into the darkness. There was another scream, closer this time, and the sound of hurried movement through the woods. Then someone threw a handful of leaves on the dying fire. In the sudden yellow glow, Blaine saw a man staggering back to the camp. It was one of the guards, trailing his spear behind him. He was bleeding in two places, but his wounds didn't appear fatal. "That bastard," the spearman sobbed, "that sneaky bastard." "Take it easy, Chico," one of the men said, ripping open the spearman's shirt to clean and bandage the wound. "Did you get him?" "He was too quick," the spearman moaned. "I missed." That was the end of sleeping for the night. The hunters began moving again at the first light of dawn, widely scattered, looking for a trace of the Quarry. Theseus found a broken button and then a halferased footprint. The hunt veered, winding up a narrow-faced mountain. At the head of the pack, Otto gave a sudden yell. "Hey! Here! I got him!" Theseus rushed toward him, followed by Blaine and Jones. They saw Hull backing away, watching intently as Otto advanced, swinging the bola around his cropped head. The Argentinian lasso hissed in the air, its three iron balls blurring. Then Otto released it. Instantly Hull flung himself to the ground. The bola snaked through the air inches above his head, wrapped itself around a tree limb and snapped it off. Hull, grinning broadly, ran toward the weaponless man. Before he could reach him, Theseus had arrived, flourishing his trident. They exchanged thrusts. Then Hull whirled and ran. Theseus lunged. The Quarry howled with pain but continued running. "Did you get him?" Jones asked. "A flesh wound in the rump," Theseus said. "Probably just painful to his pride." The hunters ran on, panting heavily, up the mountain's side. But they had lost the Quarry again. They spread out, surrounding the narrowing mountain, and slowly began working their way toward the peak. Occasional noises and footprints told them the Quarry was still before them, retreating upward. As the peak narrowed, they were able to close their ranks more, lessening any chance of Hull slipping through. "IJ Y late afternoon, the pine and spruce trees had become sparse. Above them was a confused labyrinth of granite boulders, and past that the final peak itself. "Careful now!" Jones called to the hunters. As he said it, Hull launched an attack. Springing from behind a rack pinnacle, he came at old Bjorn the mace man, his rapier hissing, trying to cut the man down quickly and escape the throttling noose of hunters. But Bjorn gave ground only slowly, cautiously parrying the rapier thrusts, both hands on his mace as though it were a quarterstaff. Hull swore angrily at the phlegmatic man, attacked furiously, and threw himself aside just in time to avoid a blow of the mace. Old Bjorn closed -- too rapidly. The rapier darted in and out of his chest like a snake's flickering tongue. Bjorn's mace dropped and his body began rolling down the mountainside. But the hunters had closed the circle again. Hull retreated upward, into a maze of boulders. The hunters pressed forward. Blaine noticed that the sun was almost down; already there was a twilight hue to the air, and long shadows stretched across the gray rocks. "Getting toward evening," he panted to Jones. "Maybe half an hour more light," Jones said, squinting at the sky. "We better get him soon. After dark, he could pick every man of us off from this rock." ' They moved more quickly now, searching among the high boulders. "He could roll rocks down on us," Blaine said nervously. "Not him," Jones grunted. "He's too damn proud." And then Hull stepped from behind a high rock near Blaine. "All right, rifleman," he challenged. Blaine, his rifle at high port, just managed to parry the thrust. The blade of the rapier rasped along the gun barrel, past his neck. Automatically he deflected it. Something drove him to roar as he lunged, to follow the lunge with an eager disemboweling slash and then a hopeful butt stroke intended to scatter his enemy's brains across the rocks. For that moment, Blaine was no longer a civilized man operating under a painful necessity; he was a preying creature joyously pursuing his true vocation of murder. The Quarry avoided his blows with quick sullen grace. Blaine stumbled after him, anger sapping his skill. Suddenly he was shoved aside by Sammy Jones. "Mine," Jones said. "All mine. I'm your boy, Hull. Try me with the pigsticker." H ull, his face expressionless, advanced, his rapier flashing. Jones stood firm on slightly bowed legs, the battle-axe turning lightly in his hands. Hull feinted and lunged. Jones parried so hard that sparks flew, and the rapier bent like a green stick. The other hunters had come up now. They chose seats on nearby rocks and caught their wind, commenting on the duel and shouting advice. "Pin him against the cliff, Sammy!" "No, over the edge with him!" "Want some help?" "Hell, no!" Jones shouted back. "Watch out he don't nip a finger. Sammy." "Don't worry," Jones said. Blaine watched, his rage ebbing as quickly as it had come. He had assumed that a battle-axe would be a clumsy weapon requiring a full backswing for each stroke. But Sammy Jones handled the short, heavy axe as though it were a baton. He took no backswing but let drive from any position, recovering instantly, his implacable weight and drive forcing Hull toward the cliffs sheer edge. There was no real comparison between the two men, Blaine realized. Hull was a gifted amateur, a dilettante murderer; Jones was a seasoned killer. It was like matching a ferocious house dog against a jungle tiger. The end came quickly in the blue twilight of the mountaintop. Sammy Jones parried a thrust and stamped forward, swinging his axe backhanded. The blade bit deep into Hull's left side. Hull fell screaming down the mountain's side. For seconds afterward, they heard his body crash and turn. "Mark where he lies," Sammy Jones said. "He's gotta be dead," said the saber man. "He probably is. But it isn't a workmanlike job unless we make sure." On the way down, they found Hull's mangled and lifeless body. They marked the location for the burial party and walked on to the estate. #.  I HE hunters returned to the city in a group and threw a wild celebration. During the evening, Sammy Jones asked Blaine if he would join him on the next job. "I've got a nice deal lined up in Omsk," Jones said. "A Russian nobleman wants to hold a couple of gladiatorial games. You'd have to use a spear, but it's the same as a rifle. I'd train you on the way. After Omsk, there's a really big hunt being organized in Manila. Five brothers aim to shove off together. They want fifty hunters to cut them down. What do you say?" Blaine thought carefully before answering. The hunter's life was the most compatible he had found so far in this world. He liked the rough companionship of men like Sammy Jones, the straight, simple thinking, the life outdoors, the action that erased all doubts. On the other hand, there was something terribly pointless about wandering around the world as a paid killer, a modern and approved version of the bully, the bravo, the thug. There was something futile about action just for action's sake, with no genuine intent or purpose behind it, no resolution or discovery. These considerations might not arise if he were truly what his body seemed; but he was not. The hiatus existed and had to be faced. And, finally, there were other problems that this world presented, other challenges more fitting to his personality. And those had to be met. "Sorry, Sammy," he said. Jones shook his head. "You're making a mistake, Tom. You're a natural-born killer. There's nothing else for you." "Perhaps not," Blaine admitted. "I have to find out for sure, though." "Well, good luck," Sammy Jones said. "And take care of that body of yours. You picked a good one." Blaine blinked involuntarily. "Is it so obvious?" Jones grinned. "I been around, Tom. I can tell when a man is wearing a host. If your mind had been born in that body, you'd be away and hunting with me. And if your mind had been born in a different body -- " "Yes?" "You wouldn't have gone hunting in the first place. It's a tricky splice, Tom. You'd better figure out which way you're going." "Thanks," Blaine said. They shook hands and Blaine left for his hotel. himself, fully dressed, upon the bed. When he awoke, he would call Marie. But first he had to sleep. All plans, thoughts, problems, decisions, even dreams, would have to wait. He was tired down to the very bone. He snapped off the lights. Within seconds, he was asleep. Several hours later, he awoke with a sensation of something wrong. The room was dark. Everything was still, more silent and expectant than New York had any right to be. He sat upright in bed and heard a faint movement on the other side of the room, near the washbasin. Blaine reached out and snapped on the light. There was no one in the room. But as he watched, his enameled washbasin rose in the air. Slowly it lifted, hovering impossibly without support. And at the same time he heard a thin shattering laugh. He knew at once that he was being haunted, and by a poltergeist. Carefully he eased out of bed and moved toward the door. The suspended basin dipped suddenly and plunged toward his head. He ducked and the basin shattered against the wall. His water pitcher levitated now, followed by two heavy tumblers. Twisting and turning erratically, they edged toward him. Blaine picked up a pillow as a shield and rushed to the door. He turned the lock as a tumbler shattered above his head. The door wouldn't open. The poltergeist was holding it shut. The pitcher struck him violently in the ribs. The remaining tumbler swung in an ominous circle around his head and he was forced to retreat from the door. He remembered the fire escape outside his window. But the poltergeist thought of it as he started to move. The curtains suddenly burst into flame. At the same instant, the pillow he was holding caught fire, and Blaine threw if from him. "Help!" he shouted. "Help!" He was being forced into a corner of the room. With a rumble, the bed slid forward, blocking his retreat. A chair rose into the air and poised itself for a blow at his head. And continually there was a thin and shattering laughter that Blaine unnervingly could almost recogni#e.      Sheckley has appeared, yet so vigorously fresh is its basic concept and so daringly imaginative its future society and written with such ingenuity and power that the story is already being ranked with The Demolished Man, Gravy Planet, The Puppet Masters and other great Galaxy serials. As you can see from the second installment, the story does not pause to catch its breath; it gains momentum with each chapter until -- well, next month, hunted by the living and haunted by the dead, Blaine has to do a lot better than merely look alive to stay alive in this fantastic world where life after death is a scientific reality -- for those who can take it with them! Scheduling a novella with an installment of a serial is generally just not done; it means packing too much into an issue. But you know us by now, not satisfied with anything less than shooting the works, going for broke, and other such expressions of editorial daredeviltry. So you'll be reading is that Crompton has made the most chancy possible mind bet -- winning it means he literally has to collect himself on two crazy worlds! A novelet if there's room, short stories for sure... The immense wealth they are finding can make the dire predictions of Malthusians hang fire for still more centuries, perhaps millenia. A.nd as for its incredible natives -- many of them just have no business being alive! As you can see, it's not on issue to miss. ihMOi I Fig. #: Canned salmon -- # years old (' Continued horn page # ) shortened "tin canister" to "tin can" -- and the battle rages on between English "tin" and American "can." Both are equally right or equally wrong, for a can is a barbarized canister and a tin is # steel, with only a molecular protective coating of tin -- now, of course, deposited by electrolysis instead of the medieval dip -- or no tin at all. Not horsepower but muscle made the early #th century tin cans. Tin-plated sheet iron was cut into can bodies by handor footFig. #: Petticoat and streamlined cans; the "U.S. Army Emergency Ration" in the key can dates back to #, forerunner of famous C-rations of World War II operated shears and bent around a cylindrical mold by a brawny tinsmith. More muscles and shears cut out round tops and bottom and forced the pieces together.Then the tinsmith's assistant applied hot solder along the side seams and end sections. A cap hole was left in the top through which food to be canned could be forced, and a small plug was soldered into place. Sixty canisters a day was the maximum output for even an expert smith. Later in the century, a hand press was used to shape the can bodies, boosting production to # cans per day per man. But the rest of the process remained the same. Today, high-speed machinery, which produces up to # cans a minute, has made canned food inexpensive and the supermarket possible. Ninety-five per cent of our salmon, # per cent of our total tomato crop, and # per cent of such fruits and pears and peaches are canned by # canneries, who get their containers from # can manufacturers. Fig. #; Can making half a century ago and now -- # a day by hand versus # a minute by machine, adhesive crimps versus unreliable solder seams Fig. #: Yesterday and today in shopping the whole world's produce tastily, freshly, sanitarily packaged, while cutting shopping and cooking time to a fraction can was forced to maturity by wars. Both Blue and Gray were fed from cans in the field during the Civil War, but that was only a token of what was to come; the American GI of World War II ate out of cans, fought with ammunition from hermetically sealed cans, was nursed with canned blood plasma, produced dense smoke screens from a can, repaired his jeep with canned monkey wrenches, and drove canned motorcycles dropped from the sky by parachute. At sea, meanwhile, the U.S. Navy urgently needed canned water for its life rafts, for men survived storms and sea battles only to be destroyed by thirst and salt-water sickness. It was a tricky technical problem for the can manufacturers; trace minerals made canned water undrinkable, and a heat-resistant germ in water disabling dysentery. Canned water also had a metallic taste, and in freezing weather, the expanding ice broke open the strongest can made. Researchers solved the problem by using distilled water completely free of minerals and bacteria, then putting it in a metal can lined with a temperature-resistant wax that kept the water potable both in the steaming Pacific and fro # en Arctic. The cans were constructed with extra strong seams and with a small vacuum at the top into which any ice could safely expand. Distilled water, however, while drinkable, is hardly tasty stuff, and the war-born can has been improved until it can be filled with ordinary tap water. It is now stockpiled by many Civil Defense units throughout the country. That bit of ingeiious problemsolving is a direct descendant of the research into raw materials and techniques that is the real story of the tin can. One such researcher, Gail Borden, for whom one of the largest dairy firms in the world is named, produced a canned product that has saved the lives of countless thousands of infants in the past century. In the early #s, Borden was returning to the U.S. from England, where he had been awarded the London World's Fair Gold Medal for his canned "meat bisquit," which he had supplied to California Gold Rush pioneers, to Arctic explorers such as Sir Edward Belcher, and later to Florence Nightingale, to help feed her wounded soldiers in the Crimea. Noticing that babies of seasick immigrants in steerage were suffering from lack of milk, he realized the plight of mothers who could not nurse their own children. Borden spent all his money and time for over a year in a Brooklyn cellar lab, much of the while penniless. His boiled-off milk concentrate tasted terrible and looked worse. "Something in the air contaminates it," he noted in his careful records. But he found the secret one day while watching members of a Shaker community preserving fruit by first boiling it in a "vacuum pan." His condensed milk is still used for infants where pasteurized milk is not available, and evaporated milk is yet another outgrowth of his findings. M any products need similar scientific coaxing to fit them comfortably into tin cans. The beer can, for instance, now holds # per cent of industry production, but it almost didn't come about at all Beer is so allergic to tin that even infinitesimal amounts of it turn the clearest beer cloudy. The answer was a protective enamel, but beer stayed in bottles a good many years until researchers found the right one. Now "tin" cans is even more of a misnomer, for those enamels and others are coating ever more of the new cans, making them wholly tinless. Size, shape, construction, contents, function -- the tin can is ceaselessly changing these attributes in a revolutionary evolutionary rush. Lithography on metal -- impossible, but not any more; it's as bright and colorful as anything printed on paper. Aluminum cans -- can't be done, but it is, shiny and rustproof and much lighter than steel, with a future as promis' ing as Durand's "tin canister" Ife, ; proved to be a century and a half ago. Of all the innovations, the most intriguing is the pushbutton aerosol can, which sprays out everything from whipped cream to a golfball refinisher. "People love president of the Can Manufacturers Association. "By #, we'll be using them at the rate of a billion a year." Still another war-baby can development, aerosols came about when the U.S. Army asked the Department of Agriculture to develop an insecticide dispenser that GIs could use against the malariacarrying mosquito in the Pacific Theater during World War II. The result was the famed "bug bomb," a heavy welded steel container holding the insecticide and a propellant -- Freon gas liquified under pressure -- which forced out the mosquito killer at the touch of a button. For all their popularity among the troops, aerosols were nothing to bet on after the war; a container able to hold the # pounds of pressure required has to be more of a grenade than a tin can. Back to the lab went the bug bomb, and there it stayed until the answer was foimd -- a mixture of Freon-# and Freon-#. The new propellant needed only half the pressure, which meant that lightweight containers were possible, in turn making possible all manner of mistified products, with more and more on the way. A ND now comes Freon C-# from Du Pont, at present imder test. If successful, C-# #, along with compressed hydrogen, will create a whole new sub-section in food stores -- aerosoldispensed sandwich spreads, syrups, sauces and frostings, just as a modest beginning. It's literally true that people will buy anything in a pushbutton can, even air -- Liquid Glaze, Inc., sells cans of compressed gas called Spair that can inflate a tire of # pounds in six seconds. With the U. S. Government owning the aerosol patent and licensing all comers either free or the next thing to it, small businessmen are crowding into the aerosol game right alongside industrial giants. Making a good thing of it, too, for we're just skimming the froth off a deep lake of products that can be aerosold. In medicine -- burn ointments, disinfectants, decontaminants, exact dosages in a hurry during an angina attack, when speed counts: the patient simply puts the tube in his mouth and pushes the button. Home, farm and factory -- there now are area deodorants, fire extinguishers, run stoppers for stockings, beehive smoke, dye for marking animals that have been vaccinated, which can also no doubt be used for crates and cases. If there is any limit to what can be put into an aerosol can, we're not even remotely in sight of it. Like many of our modern frontiers, this one is not rawly, blatantly visible, but it's a Gold Rush all the same. Like the aerosol, which couldn't have been foreseen even weeks before it happened, the more startling future developments remain either unguessable or laboratory secrets, not to be announced until they are perfected. But some are on the horizon. Another wartime innovation, the hotcan, will soon be ready for marketing. Merely puncture the hotcan, actually one can within another, and add water, and you've started a chemical reaction that speedily heats the contents. Tinless now, but opaque, cans can be made of transparent plastics to display their wares as attractively as glass jars do now, and without fragility. Aluminum and magnesium cans are lighter, but a pound of merchandise still weighs a pound -- a fact that researchers are bound to challenge, if they aren't already doing so. And the self-propagating canone can to spray out another around all the ungainly or scattersome, perishable or storageable -- tables and diamond dust, electric bulbs and tropic-fresh bananas, tanks and cadavers, archeological finds and the air of other worlds. Cans within cans, cans atop cans, cans that look like cans, cans that look like nothing under the sun, cans to enclose anything except service and even that may somehow come about some day. What the film industry says of a movie when the last scene is shot, we may say of the future: "It's in the can." A figure of speech, of course, but hyperbolically true. The breakthroughs in packaging make no headlines. They merely make civilization a fact.      t ' '-y ' .V .IV" A' '  fm i;I A we don't promise that reading I # issues of theory of gravitation. No, you don't have to use the coupon below. It's for your convenience, not ours. Yes, send in your subscription today. we do promise that a year's subscription to... and you'll get your copies at least a week before the newsstands do. Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson St. New Y ork #, N, Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years # additional Foreign Postage Per Year GALAXY  DECEMBER # # gauxy M A G A Z I N E By A OF  By page Galaxy Give the Gift You'd Like to Receive See next page  To give Santa an outsize helping hand, we will -- for # days only -- fulfill your new and renewal and gift subsciptions to the giant new #-page Galaxy at the old rate of # for I # issues. This offer will not be repeated, so send in your order today. Galaxy Magazine # per sub. #I # different during the year -- # Additional subscriptions # ## Both for # Additional subscriptions # ## We admit it -- we're pushovers for the Xmas spirit. "Don't do it," our accountant pleads. "We can't afford to sell subscriptions at those prices!" 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Bfelow that fighting slogan appeared a declaration that had never been made before -- and is now being made again: "Most new magazines, especially in the science fiction field, assure their readers that they are the readers' magazines and that suggestions are welcome and will be followed. The assurance, however, is hedged with unspoken reservations. "Galaxy offers the same assurance... but there are no reservations of any kind whatever. This is, literally and completely, your magazine. Your suggestions will be followed. Makeup, art, editorial content, everything from cover to cover, including the cover, you will decide for us. "There is, in other words, nothing inflexible about Galaxy. Repeat, nothing. Not a single thing. A year from now, it may look entirely different, and every change will be the result of alert study of readers'wishes into concrete form." New magazine? Galaxy? After eight years that have made it the most widely read science fiction magazine in the world, with editions in the U.S., Canada, England, Germany, Italy, France (which includes Belgium and Switzerland), Finland, Sweden, with more being negotiated? A new magazine? Yes, Galaxy, a new magazine! How new? New how?  First, size. Our daredevil experiment with the Galaxy Novels -- a hard-headed bet that upgrading would pay off in these days of less and less for more and more -- is paying off resoundingly. Readers know a lavish reading bargain when they see one. All right, we resolved, we'll give them a Galaxy magazine even more generous -- # pages -- a walloping # more pages than just about all our competitors are offering!  Next, quality. Not only will we not sacrifice quality -- we'll intensify our campaign to improve it. Hold on a moment and we will tell you just how you can help in that improvement.  Next, frequency. We kid you not at all -- really good science fiction is, from the editorial side of the desk, harder to come by than perfect diamonds. It has to be mined out of authors with patience and care and tact -- and blasting ( Continued on page #) exceptional ideas about the world to come...  interplanetary colonization  relative immortality fivexceptional s-f writers... if F. L. Wallace if Damon Knight if James E. Gunn if J. T. McIntosh if Theodore Sturgeon... Now collected in one exceptional volume lor the permanent library of every reader of Galaxy Magazine short mm Edited by Published Oct. # Price # ( coupon to order your copy. Use  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies as soon as copies come off the press. I enclose # check, # cash, # money order in the amount of . Join Now Crompton had made the most chancy possible mind bet -- for winning it meant he literally had to collect himself on two crazy worlds! into trouble during his first hour in Port Newton. On a lonely side street, two ragged men crowded him against a wall. One of them carried a little penknife, and the other had a strip of hardened tape across his knuckles. They seemed to be vagrants and they weren't quite sober. The taller ragged man put his thick hand on Crompton's chest. "This is one of 'em, huh, Charlie?" "Yeah," Charlie said. "He's a Splitter. Let's bust him up." Crompton knew they must have recognized him from his distinctly shaped briefcase, which contained his Mikkleton Projector. Perhaps he should have put it into a regular suitcase. But he hadn't expected any trouble. He still hadn't recovered from the long journey between Earth and Mars. He'd had cramps on the high-gravity climb to Station Three, and vertigo on the free-fall to Exchange Point. He had barely pulled himself together by the time Mars Station One was reached. There he had gone through the tedious routine of customs, immigration and health, and learned how to use the auxiliary stomach-lung. Still spacesick, he had been given his visa and shuttled down to Port Newton. against him. "Lousy damned Splitter," Charlie said. "Robbing real men of work." "Mars be better off if we take care of him right now." "All the planets be better off." There it was, that fanatical hatred that some men had for the few with the courage and stability to Split. Crompton, trying to keep his voice steady, pointed out that Splitters took work from no one. On the contrary, they did work that regular men didn't want. "Then how come we're out of work?" Charlie challenged. Crompton resisted the urge to tell them they were obviously unemployable. Instead, he smiled stiffly and said he had come to Mars to reintegrate. That would leave a job open... But the derelicts didn't want to hear anything reasgnable. They wanted a fight, and perhaps a murder. "Come on," Charlie said. "Fight me. I'll even put away the knife. Or fight Ed here." "Yeah," Ed said, rubbing the tape across his knuckles. Five years ago, Crompton would have taken on the men, together or singly, and to hell with the consequences. But that was before he had Split. Now his fear was almost uncontrollable. The leering faces swam in front of him and he could feel his knees trembling. "Come on, fight," Charlie said, hitting him on the shoulder. Crompton wanted desperately to strike back, but he couldn't. The fighting part of himself was gone, Split away, working on Venus. "He's not going to fight," Charlie said. "Okay, let's bust up his briefcase." Crompton hugged it to his chest. Without the Projector, he couldn't reintegrate. And without reintegration, he might as well not have risked leaving Earth. "Please," Crompton said, "I'm Ed pulled back his fist. "Officer!" Crompton shouted. "Over here!" The vagrants looked around. Crompton shook free and sprinted away. He had used the oldest trick in the books; but perhaps it was new on Mars. Safe in a populated section of Port Newton, but trembling with reaction, he boarded the transplanet rapido. It would take him to Elderberg, near the Martian South Pole. At that notorious city, Crompton hoped to find a man named Edgar Loomis. He had to find him; Loomis was crucial to him. For Loomis was one of the segments into which Crompton had Split. r I "HE Splitting technique had been devised originally to aid in the conquest of Venus. The planet held great riches for an Earth almost depleted of essential metals, fossil fuels and uranium ores. But above all, Venus had room, lots of room for an overcrowded humanity. Mars could support only a small population, and the planet-bearing stars were too far away. Venus was the unlimited hope. But before the planet could be utilized, it had to be conquered. And this took men. Venus swallowed men and never gave them back. The mortality rate among the first pioneers was close to ninety per cent. When the news got back to Earth, the stream of recruits dried to a trickle. But the frontier had to be opened. Experiments were made with growth-androids. The most successful of these, the Durier chassis, looked, heard, tasted, smelled and felt like a human. Its sponge-connection brain was more than adequate. It should have worked perfectly. It didn't. The Durier chassis could be programmed like any other machine. But it could not think. It was incapable of foresight, reflection or initiative. It did not possess intelligence. Without these qualities, the Duriers were worthless on Venus. They were tried anyhow, and they died in the swamps and jungles. When the thousandth Durier tripped, fell into three inches of mud and was drowned, their inadequacy was accepted. Further experiments were run, but there was no way to induce human capabilities in the Duriers. That could only be supplied by humans. The chassis had to be operated by a human mind -- or even a portion of a human mind. The ancient phenomenon of schizophrenia was re-examined. In the past, all attention had been devoted toward healing splits in a human mind, synthesizing the two or more personalities that sometimes appeared in a single body. Now, experimenting on volunteers, scientists tried to deepen latent splits, harden the schisms, evoke the id, super-ego and libido components of the mind. Separation was easier than synthesis. The scientists were able to develop separate personality tendencies in a mind, along the distinct lines of the furious and aggressive id, the conscientious, hard-working super-ego, and the pleasure-seeking libido. The groundwork was prepared. There were potential mind-segments to run the Durier chassis, without loss of the original personality. But the development of Venus still had to wait until Andrew Mikkleton developed his projector. could be attached between Man and Durier chassis, linking the active human brain to the passive sponge-connection receptacle. The Projector imposed its own electrical similarity patterns between brain and brain, allowing them to become a temporary unity. With the Projector, a man could send his id or libido -- but not his super-ego -- into the Durier chassis. When Projector contact was broken, the Durier lived, its brain occupied by a personality separate and different from the original. Out of one man could come three. The government set up a volunteer program for the extreme-stability types needed for such a Split. The id-personalities -- dominant, aggressive types -- were badly needed on Venus. Earth, with its overpopulation stresses, wanted to retain the calm, conscientious super-ego types. And sterile Mars, developed by private corporations into a dozen great pleasure resorts, could use the insatiable pleasureprinciple? Duriers as escorts always eager for a new sensation. Alistair Crompton passed the stability tests. He decided to Split with full knowledge of the consequences. Five-year Splitting contracts sold for good prices. Crompton negotiated his with care, and used the proceeds to buy a plantation in the New York suburb of Antarctica. He was set for life. But there were certain dangers. His embodied id or libido, now two separate people, might not want to reintegrate with him; and there was no law to make them. One or both might be dead. In either case, Crompton would have to live out his life wtih a big chunk of his personality missing. And this would be highly unsatisfactory. Those were the risks. But the reward was great. Before Splitting, Alistair Crompton had been a pleasant, normal man of thirty. After Splitting, with two-thirds of himself missing, with the super-ego rigid within him, he changed. He became petty, punctilious, cautious, nervous, puritanical, resentful, driven, circumspect and repressed. Crompton didn't like the changes in himself. For five years, he lived, made his plans, waited, and wondered what the other portions of himself were like, what they were doing on Mars and Venus. Now the contract time was up. Crompton, with his plantation waiting for him, could reintegrate, take back the missing parts of himself through the Mikkleton Projector, return to Earth, live in peace and prosperity... If he was able. JMartian plains, the rapido crawled past low gray shrubs struggling for existence in the cold, thin air, through swampy regions of dull green tundra. Crompton kept occupied with a book of crossword puzzles. When the conductor announced they were crossing the Grand Canal, he looked up in momentary interest. But it was merely a shallowly sloping bed left by a vanished river. The vegetation in its muddy bottom was dark green, almost black. Crompton returned to his puzzle. They went through the Orange Desert, and stopped at little stations where bearded, wide-hatted immigrants jeeped in for their vitamin concentrates and the microfilm Sunday Times. And finally they reached the outskirts of Elderberg. This town was the focus for all South Polar mining and farming operations. But primarily it was a resort for the rich, who came to wallow in its Longevity Baths, and for the sheer novelty of the trip. The region, warmed to # degrees Fahrenheit by volcanic action, was the warmest place on Mars. Inhabitants usually referred to it as the Tropics. It was here that Edgar Loomis, Crompton's pleasure-principle, lived and worked. Crompton checked into a small motel, then joined the crowds of brightly dressed men and women who promenaded on Elderberg's quaint immovable sidewalks. He was able to recognize the male and female Durier chassis at once. The primary models in both sexes had been designed according to a very thorough survey of tourist preferences, and so, of course, were even more stereotyped than the tourists themselves. Crompton peered into the gambling palaces, gawked at the shops selling Genuine Artifacts of the Missing Martian Race, peered into the novelty cocktail lounges and the glittering restaurants. He jumped with alarm when accosted by a painted young woman who invited him to Mama Tele's House, where low gravity made everything that was good better. He brushed off her and a dozen like her, and sat down in a little park to collect his thoughts. Elderberg lay around him, replete in its pleasures, gaudy in its vices, a painted Jezebel whom Crompton rejected with a curl of his now puritanical lips. And yet, for all his curled lips, averted eyes and nostrils indrawn in revulsion, he longed for the humanity of vice as an alternative to his present bleak and sterile existence. But, sadly, Elderberg could not corrupt him. Perhaps Edgar Loomis would supply the missing ingredient. 'y# in the hotels, taking them in alphabetic order. Clerks at the first three said they had no idea where Loomis was; and if he should be found, there was a little matter of unpaid bills. The fourth thought that Loomis might have joined the big prospecting rush at Saddle Mountain. The fifth hotel, a recent establishment, had only heard of Loomis. At the sixth, a brightly overdressed young woman laughed with a slight hysteric edge when she heard Loomis' name; but she refused to give any information. At the seventh hotel, the clerk told him that Edgar Loomis occupied Suite #. He was not in at present, but could probably be found in the Red Planet Saloon. Crompton asked directions. Then, his heart beating rapidly, he made his way into the older section of Elderberg. Here the hotels were stained and weathered, the paints worn, the plastics pitted by the seasonal dust storms. Here the gambling halls were crowded close together, and the dance halls blared their mirth at midday and midnight. Here the budget tourists clustered with their cameras and recorders, in search of local color, hoping to encounter at a safe yet photographable distance the wicked glamor that led zealous promoters to call Elderberg the Ninevah of Three Planets. And here were the safari shops, outfitting parties for the famed descent into Xanadu Caverns or the long sandcar drive to Devil's Twist. Here also was the infamous Dream Shop, selling every narcotic known to Man, still in business despite legislative efforts to shut it down. And here the sidewalk hawkers sold bits of alleged Martian drystone carving, or anything else you might desire. Crompton found the Red Planet Saloon, entered, and waited until he could see through the dense clouds of tobacco and kif. He looked at the tourists in their gaily colored shirts standing at the long bar, stared at the quick-talking guides and the dour rock miners. He looked at the gambling tables with their chattering women, and their men with the prized faint orange Martian tan that takes, it is said, a month to acquire. Then, unmistakably, he saw Loomis. Loomis was at the faro table, in company with a buxom blonde tourist woman who, at a first glance, looked thirty, at a second glance forty, and after a long careful look perhaps forty-five. She was gambling ardently, and Loomis was watching her with an amused smile. He was tall and slender, and elegant with his hairline moustache. His manner of dress was best expressed by the crossword puzzle word nappy. He had mouse-brown hair sleeked back on a narrow skull. A woman not too choosy might possibly have called him handsome. He didn't resemble Crompton; but there was an affinity, a pull, an instant sense of rapport that all Split members possess. Mind called to mind, the parts calling for the whole, with an almost telepathic intensity. And Loomis, sensing it, raised his head and looked full at Crompton. Crompton began walking toward him. Loomis whispered to the blonde, left the faro table and met Crompton in the middle of the floor. "Who are you?" Loomis asked. "Alistair Crompton. You're Loomis? I have the original body and -- do you know what I'm talking about?" "Yes, of course," Loomis said. "I'd been wondering if you'd show up. Hmm." He looked Crompton up and down, and didn't seem too pleased with what he saw. "All right," Loomis said, "we'll go up to my suite and have a talk. Might as well get that over with now." He looked at Crompton again, with undisguised distaste, and led him out of the saloon. and a revelation. Crompton almost stumbled as his feet sank into the deep-piled oriental rug. The light in the room was dim and golden, and a constant succession of faint and disturbing shadows writhed and twisted across the walls, taking on human shapes, coiling and closing with each other, transmuting into animals and the blotchy forms of children's nightmares, and disappearing into the mosaic ceiling. Crompton had heard of shadow songs, but had never before witnessed one. Loomis said, "It's playing a rather fragile little piece called 'Descent to Kartherum.' How do you like it?" "It's -- impressive," said Crompton. "It must be expensive." "I daresay," Loomis said carelessly. "It was a gift. Won't you sit down?" Crompton settled into a deep armchair that conformed to his contours. The chair began, very gently, to massage his back. "Something to drink?" Loomis asked. Crompton nodded dumbly. Now he noticed the perfumes in the air, a complex and shifting mixture of spice and sweetness, with the barest hint of putrefaction. "That smell -- " "It takes getting used to," Loomis said. "It's an olfactory sonata composed as an accompaniment to the shadow song. But I'll turn it off -- it's the kind of thing one must become educated to." He did so, and turned on something else. Crompton heard a melody that seemed to originate in his own head. The tune was slow and sensuous and unbearably poignant, and it seemed to Crompton that he had heard it somewhere before, in another time and place. "It's called 'Deja Vu,"' Loomis said. "Direct aural transmission technique. Pleasant little thing, isn't it?" Crompton knew that Loomis was trying to impress him. And he was impressed. As Loomis poured drinks, Crompton looked around the room, at the sculptures, drapes, furniture and gadgets; he made an estimate of costs, added transportation charges and taxes from Terra, and totaled the result. Loomis had done dismayingly well as a gigilo. Loomis handed Crompton a glass. "It's mead," he said. "Quite the vogue in Elderberg this sesaon. Tell me what you think of it." Crompton sipped the honeyed beverage. "Delicious," he said. "Costly, I suppose." "Quite. But then the best c is only barely sufficient, don't you think?" He looked hard at Loomis and saw the signs of a decaying Durier chassis. Carefully he observed the neat, handsome features, the Martian tan, the smooth, mousy brown hair, the careless elegance of the clothes, the faint crows' feet in the corners of the eyes, the sunken cheeks on which was a trace of cosmetics. He observed Loomis' habitual self-indulgent smile, the disdainful twist to his lips, the way his nervous fingers stroked a piece of brocade, the complacent slump of his body against the exquisite furniture. In Loomis resided all Crompton's' potentialities for pleasure, taken from him and set up as an entity in itself. Loomis, the pure pleasure-principle, vitally necessary to the Crompton mind-body. "You've done very nicely," Crompton said. "As I suppose you know, I've come to Mars to reintegrate you." "Not interested," Loomis said. "You mean you won't?" "Exactly," Loomis said. "You don't seem to realize that I'm performing an extremely valuable service here. You see, today everything is biased toward the poor, as though there were some special virtue in improvidence. Yet the rich have their needs and necessities, too. These needs are unlike the needs of the poor, but no less urgent. The poor require food, shelter, medical attention. The government provides these admirably. "But what about the needs of the rich? People laugh at the idea of a rich man having problems, but does mere possession of credit exempt him from having problems? It does not! Quite the contrary, wealth increases need and sharpens necessity, often leaving a rich man in a more truly necessitous condition than his poor brother." Crompton had to remind himself that this was a pure pleasureprinciple speaking. He asked, "In that case, why doesn't the rich man give up his wealth?" "Why doesn't a poor man give up his poverty?" Loomis asked in return. "No, it can't be done; we must accept the conditions that life has imposed upon us. The burden of the rich is heavy; still, they must bear it, and seek aid where they can. The rich need sympathy; and I am very sympathetic. The rich need people around them who can truly enjoy luxury, and teach them how to enjoy it; and few, I think, enjoy and appreciate the luxuries of the rich as well as I do. And their women, Crompton! They have their needs -- urgent, pressing needs, which their husbands frequently cannot fulfill due to the tensions under which they live. "These women cannot entrust themselves to any lout off the streets. They are nervous, highly bred, suspicious, these women, and very suggestible. They need nuance and subtlety. They need the attentions of a man of soaring imagination, yet possessed of an exquisite sensibility and an inexhaustible appetite. Such men are all too rare. My talents happen to lie in that particular direction. Therefore, I plan to go on exercising them." smile. Crompton gazed at him with a certain horror. He found it difficult to believe that this corrupt, self-satisfied seducer, this creature with the morals of a mink was part of himself. But he was, and necessary to the fusion. "You don't seem to realize," Crompton said, "that you are incomplete, unfinished. You must have the same drive toward selfrealization that I have. And it's possible only through reintegration." "Perfectly true," Loomis agreed. "Then-" "No," said Loomis. "I have an urge toward self-completion. But I, have a much stronger urge to go on living exactly as I am living, in a manner I find eminently satisfactory. Luxury has its compensations, you know." "Perhaps you've forgotten," Crompton said, "that you are living in a Durier chassis which has an estimated competence of twelve years. Five of them are gone. If you don't reintegrate, you have a maximum of seven more years of life. A maximum, mind you. Durier chassis have been known to break down in less." mitted, frowning slightly. "Reintegration won't be so bad," Crompton said, in what he hoped was a winning manner. "Your pleasure impulse won't be lost. It'll merely be put into better proportion." Loomis thought hard, drawing on his pale ivory cigarette. Then he looked Crompton full in the face and said, "No." "But your future -- " "I'm simply not the sort of person who can worry about the future," Loomis said, with a smug smile. "It's enough for me to live through each day, savoring it to the fullest. Seven years from now -- why, who knows what will happen seven years from now? Seven years is an eternity! Something will probably turn up." Crompton resisted a strong desire to throttle some sense into Loomis. Of course the pleasureprinciple lived only in the everpresent now, giving no thought to a distant and uncertain future. Seven years' time was unthinkable to the now-centered Loomis. He should have thought of that. Keeping his voice calm, Crompton said, "Nothing will turn up. In seven years -- seven short years -- you will die." Loomis shrugged. "It's my policy never to worry past Thursday. Tell you what, old man. I'll look you up in three or four years and we'll discuss it then." "It'll never work," Crompton told him. "You'll be on Mars, I'll be on Earth, and our other component will be on Venus. We'll never get together in time. Besides, you won't even remember." "We'll see, we'll see," Loomis said, glancing at his watch. "And now, if you don't mind, I'm expecting a visitor soon -- " Crompton arose. "If you change your mind, I'm staying at the Blue Moon Motel. I'll just be here for another day or two." "Have a pleasant stay," Loomis said. "Be sure to see the Xanadu Caverns. Fabulous sight!" Thoroughly numbed, Crompton left Loomis' ornate suite and returned to his motel. at a snack counter, consuming a Marsburger and a Red Malted. At a newsstand, he found a book of acrostics. He returned to his room, filled in three puzzles, and went to sleep. The next day, he tried to decide what to do. There seemed to be no way of convincing Loomis. Should he go to Venus and find Dan Stack, the other missing portion of his personality? No, that would be worse than usereintegrate, they would still be missing a vital third of themselves -- Loomis, the all-important pleasure-principle. Two-thirds would crave completion more passionately than one-third, and be in more desperate straits without it. And Loomis would not be convinced. Under the circumstances, Crompton's only course was to return to Earth un-reintegrated, and make whatever adjustments he could. There was, after all, a humorless joy in hard, dedicated work, a grim pleasure in steadiness, circumspection, dependability. The frugal virtues of the superego were not to be overlooked. But he found it difficult to convince himself. And with a heavy heart he telephoned Elderberg Depot and made a reservation on the evening rapido to Port Newton. As he was packing, an hour before the rapido left, his door was suddenly flung open. Edgar Loomis stepped in, looked quickly around, shut the door behind him and locked it. "I've changed my mind," Loomis said. "I've decided to reintegrate." Crompton's first feeling of joy was stifled in a wave of suspicion. "What made you change your mind?" he asked. "Does it really matter?" Loomis said. "Can't we -- " "I want to know why." "Well, it's a little difficult to explain. You see, I had just -- " There was a heavy rapping on the door. Loomis turned pale under his orange tan. "Please!" "Tell me," Crompton implacably insisted. Beads of sweat appeared on Loomis' forehead. "Just one of those things," he said quickly. "Sometimes husbands don't appreciate one's little attentions to their wives. Even the rich can be shockingly bourgeois at times. So, once or twice a year, I find it expedient to take a little vacation in a cave I've furnished at All Diamond Mountain. It's really very comfortable, though the food is necessarily plain. In a few weeks, the whole thing blows over." A S the knocking at the door grew louder, a bass voice shouted, "I know you're in there, Loomis! Come out or I'll break down this damned door and wrap it around your slimy neck!" Loomis' hands were trembling uncontrollably. "I have a dread of physical violence. Couldn't we simply reintegrate and then I'll explain -- " "I want to know why you didn't go to your cave this time," Crompton said. They heard the sound of a body slamming heavily against the door. Loomis said shrilly, "It was all your fault, Crompton! Your coming here unsettled me. Me, caught in the act! I barely escaped, with that fantastic muscular neanderthal idiot of a husband following me around town, searching the saloons and hotels, threatening to break my limbs. I didn't have enough ready cash to hire a sandcar and there was no time to pawn my jewelry. And the police just grinned and refused to protect me! Crompton, please!" The door bulged under repeated blows, and the lock began to give. Crompton turned to his personality component, grateful that Loomis' essential inadequacy had shown up in time. Quickly, he unzipped his briefcase and removed the Mikkleton Projector. He fastened the main electrodes to his forehead, while Loomis plugged his own connections into the tiny holes behind each ear which had been left for that purpose. Crompton adjusted the similarity-patterns on the control board until they were in phase. "Ready?" he asked. Loomis nbdded. Loomis gasped and his Durier chassis collapsed, folding in on itself. At the same moment, Crompton's knees buckled as though a weight had landed on his shoulders. The lock gave way and the door slammed open. A short, red-eyed, thickly constructed, black-haired man came into the room. "Where is he?" the man shouted. "Reintegrated," said Crompton, letting him see the projector before it was packed into its briefcase. "Oh," said the black-haired man, caught between rage and shock. He goggled dpwn at the body stretched on the floor. "Pretty hard to realize it's just a deactivated chassis..." Crompton zipped the briefcase. "That's all it is." "But reintegration..." said the man. He shuddered, looked at Crompton with concern. "You all right?" "As well as can be expected. One down, one to go." "Then you must be damned uncomfortable. Anything I can do?" Using Crompton's lips, Loomis unexpectedly spoke up. "Well, yes, if you'd be so good." Crompton tried to shut him up, but Loomis pushed right on. "I understand your wife liked to come here because of the decor." "So what?" demanded the man, starting to bristle again. "It made him look good," Loomis said, nodding Crompton's head at the inert chassis. "A handsome setting like this would make any man look good." The man glanced around. "I guess it would. What have you got in mind?" "I have no use for these furnishings and jewelry, and you -- well, let's say you might benefit by them. Sure to, as a matter of fact. If you could see your way toward taking them off my hands..." Crompton stayed out of the bargaining, which, after the chassis' cremation and payment of Loomis' bills, provided him with nearly three thousand badly needed dollars. Instead of having to hang around straightening out the financial mess Loomis had left, Crompton, with the help of his wily pleasure-principle, was able to catch the evening rapido. r I "HE long ride across the Martian plains came as a much needed breathing spell. It gave Crompton and Loomis a chance to make a true acquaintance, and to settle basic problems which two minds in one body are bound to encounter. There was no question of ascendency. Crompton was the basic personality; under normal circumstances, Loomis could not take over, and had no desire to do so. Loomis accepted his passive role and resigned himself, with typical ease, to the status of commentator, adviser and general well-wisher. But there was no reintegration. Crompton and Loomis existed in the one mind like planet and moon, independent, but closely related entities, cautiously testing each relinquish personal autonomy. A certain amount of seepage was taking place, of course; but the fusion of a single stable personality out of its discrete elements could not take place until Dan Stack, the third component, had entered. The rapido reached Port Newton, and Crompton shuttled to Mars Station One. He went through customs, immigration and health, and caught the hopover to Exchange Point. There he had to wait fifteen days for a Venusbound ship to depart. The brisk young ticket clerk spoke about the problems of "opposition" and "economical orbits," but neither Crompton nor Loomis understood what he was talking about. At last the Venus ship lifted. Crompton set to work learning Basic Yggdra, root language of the Venusian aboriginals. Loomis, for the first time in his life, tried to work too, tackling the complexities of Yggdra. He quickly became bored with its elaborate conjugations and declensions, but persisted to the best of his ability, and marveled at the studious, hard-working Crompton. In return, Crompton made a few tentative advances into the appreciation of beauty. Aided and instructed by Loomis, he attended the ship's concerts, looked at the paintings in the main salon, and stared long and earnestly at the ship's observation port. It all seemed a considerable waste of time, but he persevered. the tenth day out, their cooperation was threatened by the wife of a second-generation Venusian planter whom Crompton met in the observation port. She had been on Mars for a tuberculosis cure and now was going home. She was small, bright-eyed and vivacious, with a slender figure and glisteningblack hair. She was bored by the long passage through space. They went to the ship's lounge. After four martinis, Crompton was able to relax and let Loomis come to the fore, which he did with a will. Loomis danced with her to the ship's phonograph, then generously receded, leaving Crompton in command, nervous, flushed, tanglefooted and enormously pleased. And it was Crompton who led her back to the table, Crompton who made small talk with her, and Crompton who touched her hand, while the complacent Loomis looked on. At nearly two A.M., ship's time, the girl left, after pointedly mentioning her room number. Crompton reeled deliriously back to his own room on B deck, and collapsed happily on the bed. "Well?" Loomis asked. "Well what?" "Let's go. The invitation was clear enough." "There was no invitation," Crompton said, puzzled. "She mentioned hey room number," Loomis pointed out. "That, together with the other events of the evening, constitutes almost a command." "I can't believe it!" "Take my word," Loomis told him. "The invitation is clear, the course is open. Onward!" "No, no," Crompton said, flooded with his own super-ego. "I wouldn't -- I mean I don't -- I couldn't -- " "Lack of experience is no excuse," declared Loomis. "Nature is exceedingly generous in helping one to discover her ways. Consider also the fact that creatures without a hundredth of your intelligence manage to perform in exemplary fashion what you find so baffling. Surely you won't let a mouse outdo you!" Crompton got to his feet, wiped his glowing forehead, and took two tentative steps toward the door. Then he wheeled and sat down on the bed. "Absolutely not," he said firmly. "But why?" "It would be unethical. The young lady is married." "Marriage," Loomis said patiently, "is a man-made institution. But before marriage there were men and women, and certain modes between them. Natural laws always take precedence over human legislation." "It's immoral," Crompton said, without much vigor. criyroT at all," Loomis assured " him. "You are unmarried, so no possible blame can attach to you for your actions. The young lady is married. That's her responsibility, perhaps also her problem. But remember, she is a human being capable of making her own decisions, not some mere chattel of her husband. Her decision has been made and we must respect her integrity in the matter; to do otherwise would be insulting. Finally, there is the husband. He will know nothing of this and therefore will not be injured by it. In fact, he will gain. For his wife, in recompense, will be unusually pleasant to him. He will assume that this is because of his appealing qualities and his ego will be bolstered thereby. So you see, Crompton, everyone will gain and no one will lose." "Sheer sophistry," Crompton said, standing up again and moving toward the door. "Atta boy," Loomis cheered him on. Crompton grinned idiotically and opened the door. Then a thought struck him and he slammed the door shut and lay down on the bed. "Absolutely not," Crompton said. "What's the matter now?" asked Loomis in dismay. "The reasons you gave me may or may not be sound. At the present time, I can't judge. But one thing I do know. I will not engage in anything of this sort while you're watching!" "But -- damn it, I'm you! You're me! We're two parts of one personality!" "Not yet, we aren't," Crompton said. "We exist now as schizoid parts, two people in one body. Later, after reintegration has taken place... But under the present circumstances, my sense of decency forbids me from doing what you suggest. It's unthinkable! I don't wish to discuss the matter any further." At that, Loomis lost his temper. The pleasure-principle, thwarted from the fundamental expression of himself, raved and shouted and called Crompton many hard names, the least of which was "yellow-livered coward." His anger set up reverberations in Crompton's mind and echoed throughout their entire shared organism. The schism lines between the two personalities deepened; new fissures appeared, and the break threatened to isolate the two minds in true Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion.  sonality carried him past that. But, in a furious rage at Loomis, his mind began to produce antidols. Those still not fully understood little entities, like leucocytes in the bloodstream, had the task of expunging pain and walling off the sore spot in the mind. Loomis shied back in fright as the antidols began building their cordon sanitaire around him, crowding him, folding him back on himself, walling him off. "Crompton! Please!" Loomis was in danger of being completely and irrevocably sealed off, lost forever in a black corner of the Crompton mind. And lost with him would be any chance for reintegration. But Crompton managed to regain his stability in time. The flow of antidols stopped; the wall dissolved, and Loomis shakily regained his position. For a while, however, they weren't on speaking terms. Loomis sulked and brooded for an entire day, and swore he would never forgive Crompton's brutality. But above all he was a sensualist, living forever in fhe moment, forgetful of the past, incapable of worry about the future. His resentments passed quickly, leaving him serene and amused as alvtfhys. Crompton was not so forgetful, but he recognized his responsibilities as the dominant part of the personality. He worked to maintain the cooperation, and the two personalities were soon operating at their fullest potential sympathy. By mutual consent, they avoided the company of the young lady. The rest of the trip passed quickly, and at last Venus was reached. lite Three, where they passed through customs, immigration and health. They received shots for Creeping Fever, Venus Plague, Knight's Disease, and Big Itch. They were given powders in case of Swamp Decay and pills to ward off Bluefoot. Finally they were permitted to take the shuttle down to the mainland embarkation depot of Port New Haarlem. This city, on the western shore of the sluggish Inland Zee, was situated in Venus' temperate zone. Still they were uncomfortably warm after the chill, invigorating climate of Mars. Here they saw their first Venusian aboriginals outside a circus; saw hundreds of them, in fact. The natives averaged five feet in height, and their scaly armored hides showed their remote lizard ancestry. Along the sidewalks they walked erect; but often, to avoid crowds, they moved across the vertical sides of buildings, clinging with the sucker disks on their hands, feet, knees and forearms. Many buildings had barbed wire to protect their windows, for these detribalized natives were reputed to be thieves, and their only sport was assassination. Crompton spent a day in the city, then took a helicopter to East Marsh, the last known address of Dan Stack. The ride was a monotonous whirring and flapping through dense cloud banks which blocked all view of the surface. The search-radar pinged sharply, hunting for the shifting inversion zones where the dreaded Venusian tornado, the zicre, sometimes burst into violent life. But the winds were gentle on this trip, and Crompton slept most of the way. East Marsh was a busy shipping port on a tributary of the Inland Zee. Crompton found the boarding house where Stack had lived, run by a couple now in their eighties and showing signs of senility. They had been very fond of Stack. Dan always meant well, though he was a bit hasty sometimes. They assured Crompton that the affair of the Morrison girl wasn't true. Dan must have been falsely accused. Dan would never do such a thing to a poor defenseless girl. Crompton asked. "Ah," said the old man, blinking his watery eyes, "didn't you know Dan left here? Three years ago, it was." "East Marsh was too dull for him," the old lady said, with a touch of venom. "So he borrowed our little nest egg and left in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping." "Didn't want to bother us," the old man quickly explained. "Wanted to seek his fortune, Dan did. And I wouldn't be surprised but what he found it. Had the stuff of a real man, Dan did." "Where did he go?" "Couldn't rightly say," the old man said. "He never wrote us. Never much of a hand with words, Dan. But Billy Davis saw him in Ou-Barkar that time he drove his semi there with a load of potatoes." "When was that?" "Maybe two years ago," the old lady said. "That's the last we ever heard of Dan. Venus is a big place, mister." Crompton thanked the old couple. He tried to locate Billy Davis for further information, but found that he was working as third mate of a pocket freighter. The ship had sailed a month ago and was making stops at all the nasty little ports on the Southern Inland Zee. "Well," Crompton said, "there's only one thing to do. We'll have to go to Ou-Barkar." "I suppose so," Loomis said. "But frankly, old man, I'm beginning to wonder about this Stack fellow." "I am too," Crompton admitted. "But he's part of us and we need him in the reintegration." "I guess we do," Loomis said. "Lead on, oh, Elder Brother." Crompton led on. He caught a helicopter to Depotsville and a bus to St. Denis. Here he was able to hitch a ride in a semi bound across the marshes to OuBarkar with a load of insecticides. The driver was glad of company across the desolate Wetlands. During that fourteen-hour trip, Crompton learned much about Venus. To this raw new planet came the pioneering types, spiritual and sometimes actual descendants of the American frontiersmen, Boer farmers, Israeli kibbutzniks and Australian ranchers. Whole men and Splitters fought side by side for a foothold on the fertile steppes, the ore-rich mountains, and by the shores of the warm seas. They fought with the Stone Age aboriginals, the lizard-evolved Ais. Their great victories at Satan's Pass.'Squareface, Albertsville and Double Tongue, and their defeats at Slow River and Blue Falls were already a part of human history, fit to stand beside Chancellorsville, the Little Big Horn, and Dienbienphu. And the wars were not over yet. On Venus, the driver told them, a world was still to be won. Crompton listened, thought he might like to be a part of all this. Loomis was frankly bored by the whole matter and disgusted with the rank swamp odors. plantations deep in the interior of White Cloud Continent. Twenty Whole men supervised the work of five hundred Splitters and two thousand aboriginals, who planted, tended and harvested the li-trees that grew only in that sector. The li fruit, gathered twice a year, was the basis of elispice, a condiment now considered indispensable in Terran cooking. Crompton met the foreman, a huge, red-faced man named Haaris, who wore a revolver on his hip and a blacksnake whip coiled neatly around his waist. "Dan Stack?" the foreman said. "Sure, Stack worked here. He left with a boot in the rear to help him on his way." "Do you mind telling me why?" Crompton asked. "Don't mind at all," the foreman said. "But let's do it over a drink." He led Crompton to Ou-Barkar's single saloon. There, over a glass of local cactus whiskey, Haaris talked about Dan Stack. "He came up here from East Marsh. I believe he'd had some trouble with a girl down there -- kicked in her teeth or something. But that's no concern of mine. Most of us here are Splitters, and we aren't exactly gentle types. I guess the cities are damned well rid of us. I put Stack to work overseeing fifty Ais on a hundred-acre li field. He did damned well at first." The foreman downed his drink. Crompton ordered another and paid for it. "I told him," Haaris said, "that he'd have to drive his boys to get anything out of them. We use mostly Chipetzi tribesmen, and they're a sullen, treacherous bunch, though husky. Their chief rents us workers on a twenty-year contract, in exchange for guns. Then they try to pick us off with the guns, but that's another matter. We handle one thing at a time." "A twenty year contract?" Crompton echoed. "Then the Ais are practically slave laborers?" "Right," the foreman said decisively. "Some of the owners try to pretty it up, call it temporary indenture or feudal-transition economy. But it's slavery, and why not call it that? It's the only way we'll ever civilize these creatures. Stack understood that. Big hefty fellow he was, and handy with a whip. I thought he'd do all right." drink for the foreman. "And?" he prompted. "At first he was fine," Haaris said. "Laid on with the blacksnake, got out his quota and then some. But he hadn't any sense of tives with the whip, and replacements cost money. I told him to take it a little easier. He didn't. One day his Chipetzis ganged up on him and he had to gun down about eight before they backed off. I had a heart-to-heart talk with him. Told him the idea was to get work out, not kill Ais. We expect to lose a certain percentage, of course. But Stack was pushing it too far and cutting down the profit." The foreman spat and lighted a cigarette. "Stack just liked using that whip too much. Lots of the idboys do, but Stack had no sense of moderation. His Chipetzis ganged up again and he had to kill about a dozen of them. But he lost a hand in the fight. His whip hand. I think a Chipetzi chewed it off. "I put him to work in the drying sheds, but he got into another fight and killed four Ais. Well, that was just too much. Those workers cost money and we can't have off every time he gets sore. I gave Stack his pay and told him to get the hell out." "Did he say where he was going?" Crompton asked. "He said we didn't realize that the Ais had to be wiped out to make room for Terrans. Said he was going to join the Vigilantes. They're a sort of roving army that keeps the unpacified tribes in check." Crompton thanked the foreman and inquired for the location of the Vigilantes' headquarters. "Right now they're encamped on the left bank of the Rainmaker River," Haaris said. "They're trying to make terms with the Seriid. You want to find Stack pretty bad, huh?" "I have to find him," Crompton said. Haaris looked at the briefcase in Crompton's hand and shrugged fatalistically. "It's a long trek to Rainmaker River. I can sell you pack mules and provisions, and I'll rent you a native youngster for a guide. You'll be going through pacified territory, so you should reach the Vigilantes all right. I think the territory's still pacified."  Crompton to abandon the search. Stack was obviously a thief and murderer. What was the sense of taking him into the combination? Crompton felt that the case wasn't as simple as that. For one thing, the stories about Stack might have been exaggerated. But even if they were true, it simply meant that Stack was an inadequate monolithic personality extended past all normal bounds, as were Crompton and Loomis. Within the combination, in fusion, the id would be modified. Stack would supply the necessary measure of aggression, the toughness and survival fitness that both Crompton and Loomis lacked. Loomis didn't think so, but agreed to suspend judgment until they actually met their missing component. In the morning, Crompton purchased equipment and mules at an exorbitant price, and the following day he set out at dawn, led by a Chipetzi youngster named Rekki. Crompton jogged after the guide through virgin forest into the Thompson Mountains, up razorback ridges, across cloudcovered peaks into narrow granite passes where the wind screamed like the tormented dead, then down into the dense and steamy jungle on the other side. Loomis, appalled by the hardships of the march, retreated into a corner of the mind and emerged only in the evenings when the campfire was lit and the hammock slung. Crompton, with set jaw and bloodshot eyes, stumbled through the burning days, bearing the full sensory impact of the journey and wondering how long his strength would last. On the eighteenth day, they reached the banks of a shallow muddy stream. This, Rekki said, was the Rainmaker River. Two miles farther on, they found the Vigilante camp. The Vigilante commander, Colonel Prentice, was a tall, spare, gray-eyed man who showed the marks of a recent wasting fever. He remembered Stack very well. "Yes, he was with us for a while. I was uncertain about accepting him. His reputation, for one thing. And a one-handed man... But he'd trained his left hand to fire a gun better than most do with their right, and he had a bronze fitting over his right stump. Made it himself and it was grooved to hold a machete. No lack of guts, I'll tell you that. But I had to cashier him." "Why?" Crompton asked. r  'HE commander sighed unhappily. "Contrary to popular belief, we Vigilantes are not a freebooting army of conquest. We are not here to decimate and destroy the natives. Nor are we here to annex new territories upon the slightest pretext. We are here to enforce treaties entered into in good faith by Ais and settlers, to prevent raiding by Ais and Terrans alike, and, in general, to keep the peace. Stack had difficulty getting that through his thick skull." Some expression must have passed across Crompton's face, for the commander nodded sympathetically. "You know what a really rampant id is like, eh? Then you can imagine what happened. I didn't want to lose him. He was a tough and able soldier, skilled in forest and mountain lore, perfectly at home in the jungle. The Border Patrol is thinly spread and we need every man we can get, Whole or Split. Stack was valuable. I told the sergeants to keep him in line and allow no brutalizing of the natives. For a while, it' worked. Stack was trying hard. He was learning our rules, our code, our way of doing things. His record was unimpeachable. Then came the Shadow Peak incident, which I suppose you've heard about." "I'm afraid I haven't," Crompton said. "Really? I thought everyone on Venus had. Well, the situation was this. Stack's patrol had rounded up nearly a hundred Ais of an outlaw tribe that had been causing us some trouble. They were being conducted to the special reservation at Shadow Peak. On the march, there was a little trouble, a scuffle. One of the Ais had a knife and he slashed Stack across the right wrist. "I suppose losing one hand made Stack especially sensitive to the possible loss of another. The wound was superficial, but he berserked. He killed the native with a riot gun, then turned it on the rest of them. A lieutenant had to bludgeon him into unconsciousness before he could be stopped. The damage to Terran-Ais relations was immeasurable. I couldn't have a man like that in my outfit, so, as I said, I cashiered him." 'Where is he now?" asked Crompton. "I heard he drifted to Port New Haarlem and worked for a while on the docks. He teamed up with a chap named Barton Finch. Both were jailed for drunk and disorderly conduct, got out and drifted back to the White Cloud frontier. Now he and Finch own a little trading store up near Blood Delta." Crompton rubbed his forehead wearily and said, "How do I get there?" "By canoe," the commander said. "You go down the Rainmaker River to where it forks. The left-hand stream is Blood River. It's navigable all the way to Blood Delta. But I would not advise the trip. For one thing, it's extremely hazardous. For another, it would be useless. You want to reintegrate him? Don't try. He's a bred-in-the-bone killer. He's better off alone on the frontier, where he can't do much damage." "I must reintegrate," Crompton said, his throat suddenly dry. "There's no law against it," said the commander, with the air of a man who has done his duty. Delta was Man's farthest frontier on Venus. It lay in the midst of hostile Grel and Tengtzi tribesmen, with whom a precarious peace was maintained, and an incessant guerrilla war was ignored. There was great wealth to be gained in the Delta country. The natives brought in fist-sized diamonds and rubies, sacks of the rarest spices, and an occasional flute or carving from the lost city of Alteirne. They traded these things for guns and ammunition, which they used enthusiastically on the traders and on each other. There was wealth to be found in the Delta, and sudden death, and slow, painful, lingering death as well. The Blood River, which wound slowly into the heart of the Delta country, had its own special hazards, which usually took a fifty per cent toll of travelers upon it. Crompton resolutely shut his mind to all common sense. His component, Stack, lay just ahead of him. The end was in sight and Crompton was determined to reach it. So he bought a canoe and hired four native paddlers, purchased supplies, guns, ammunition, and arranged for a dawn departure. But the night before he planned to go, Loomis revolted. They were in a small tent which the commander had put aside for Crompton's use. By a smoking kerosene lamp, Crompton was stuffing cartridges into a bandolier, his attention fixed on the immeelsewhere. Loomis said, "Now listen to me. I've recognized you as the dominant personality. I've made no attempt to take over the body. I've been in good spirits and I've kept you in good spirits while we tramped halfway around Venus. Isn't that true?" "Yes, it is," Crompton said, reluctantly putting down the bandolier. "I've done the best I could, but this isn't fun any longer. I want reintegration, but not with a homicidal maniac. Don't talk to me about monolithic personalities. Stack's homicidal and I want nothing to do with him." "He's a part of us," said Crompton. yourself, Crompton! You're supposed to be the component most in touch with reality. And you're completely obsessed, planning on sending us into sure death." "We'll get through all right," Crompton said, with more certainty than he felt. "Will we?" Loomis asked. "Have you listened to the stories about Blood River? And even if we do make it, what will we find at the Delta? A homicidal maniac! He'll shatter us, Crompton!" Crompton was unable to find an adequate answer. As their search had progressed, he had grown more and more horrified at the unfolding personality of Stack, and more and more obsessed with the need to find him. Loomis had never lived with the driving need for reintegration; he had come in because of external problems, not internal needs. But Crompton had been compelled by the passion for humanness, completion, roundedness. Without Stack, fusion was impossible. With him, there was a chance. "We're going on," Crompton said. "Alistair, please! You and I get along all right. We can do fine without Stack. Let's go back to Mars or Earth." Crompton shook his head. He had already felt the deep and irreconcilable rifts occurring between him and Loomis. He could sense the time when those rifts would extend to all areas, and, without reintegration, they would have to go their separate ways -- in one body. Which would be madness. "You won't go back?" Loomis persisted. "No." "Then I'm taking over!" Loomis' personality surged in a surprise attack and seized partial control of the body's motor functions. Crompton was stunned for a moment. Then, as he felt control slipping away from him, he grimly closed with Loomis, and the battle was begun. It was a silent war, fought by the light of a smoking kerosene lamp that grew gradually dimmer toward dawn. The battleground was the Crompton mind. The prize was the Crompton body, which lay shivering on a canvas cot, perspiration pouring from its forehead, eyes staring blankly at the light, a nerve in its forehead twitching steadily. Crompton was the dominant personality, but he was weakened by conflict and guilt, and hampered by his own scruples. Loomis, weaker but single-minded, certain of his course, totally committed to the struggle, managed to hold the vital motor functions and block the flow of antidols. T? OR hours, the two personalities were locked in combat, while the feverish Crompton body moaned and writhed on the cot. At last, in the gray hours of the morning, Loomis began to gain ground. Crompton gathered himself for a final effort, but couldn't bring himself to make it. The Crompton body was already dangerously overheated by the fight; a little more, and neither personality would have a corpus to inhabit. Loomis, with no scruples to hold him back, continued to press forward, seized vital synapses and took over all motor functions. By sunrise, he had won a total victory. Shakily, Loomis got to his feet. He touched the stubble on his chin, rubbed his numbed fingertips, and looked around. It was his body now. For the first time since Mars, he was seeing and feeling directly, instead of having all sensory information filtered and relayed to him through the Crompton personality. It felt good to breathe the stagnant air, to feel cloth against his body, to be hungry, to be alive! He had emerged from a gray shadow world into derful! He wanted to keep it just like this. Poor Crompton... "Don't worry, old man," Loomis said. "You know, I'm doing this for your good also." There was no answer from Crompton. "We'll go back to Mars," Loomis informed him. "Back to Elderberg. Things will work out." Crompton did not, or could not, answer. Loomis became mildly alarmed. "Are you there, Crompton? Are you all right?" No answer. Loomis frowned, then hurried outside to the commander's tent. T'VE changed my mind about finding Dan Stack," Loomis told the commander. "He really sounds too far gone." "I think you've made a wise decision," the commander said. "So I should like to return to Mars immediately." The commander nodded. "All spaceships leave from Port New Haarlem, where you came in." "How do I get back there?" "Well, that's a little difficult," the commander replied. "I suppose I could lend you a native guide. You'll have to trek back across the Thompson Mountains to Ou-Barkar. I suggest you take the Desset Valley route this time, since the Kmikti Horde is migrating across the central rain-forest, and you can never tell about those devils. You'll reach Ou-Barkar in the rainy season, so the semis won't be going through to Depotsville. You might be able to join the salt caravan traveling the short way through Knife Pass, if you get there' in time. If you don't, the trail is relatively easy to follow by compass, if you compensate for the variation zones. "Once you've reached Depotsville, the rains will be in full career. Quite a sight, too. Perhaps you can catch a heli to New St. Denis and another to East Marsh, but I doubt it because of the zicre. Winds like that can mess up aircraft rather badly. So perhaps you could take the paddleboat to East Marsh, then a freighter down the Inland Zee to Port New Haarlem. I believe there are several good hurricane ports along the southern shore, in case the weather grows extreme. I personally prefer to travel by land or air. The final decision of route, of course, rests with you." "Thank you," said Loomis faintly. "Let me know what you decide," the commander said. Loomis thanked him and returned to his tent in a state of nerves. He thought about the trip back across mountains and swamps, through primitive settlements, past migrating hordes. He visualized the complications added by the rains and the zicre. Never had his free-wheeling imagination performed any better than it did now, conjuring up the horrors of that trip back. It had been hard getting here; it would be much harder returning. And this time, his sensitive and pleasure-seeking soul would not be sheltered by the patient, long-suffering Crompton. He would have to bear the full sensory impact of wind, rain, hunger, thirst, exhaustion and fear. He would have to eat the coarse foods and drink the foul water. And he would have to perform the complicated routines of the trail, which Crompton had painfully learned and which he had ignored. r T' HE total responsibility would be his. He would have to choose the route and make the critical decisions, for Crompton's life and for his own. But could he? He was a man of the cities, a creature of society. His problems had been the quirks and twists of people, not the moods and passions of nature. He had avoided the raw and lumpy world of sun and sky, living entirely in mankind's elaborate burrows and intricate anthills. Protected by sidewalks, doors, windows and ceilings, he had come to doubt the strength of nature about which the older authors wrote so engagingly, and which furnished such excellent conceits for poems and songs. Nature, it had seemed to Loomis, sun-bathing on a placid Martian summer day or drowsily listening to the whistle of wind against his window on a stormy night, had -- in the interest of art, to be sure -- been exaggerated into a gigantic and wholly imaginary grinding machine. But now, shatteringly, he had to ride the wheels of the grindstone. Loomis thought about it and suddenly pictured his own end. He saw the time when his energies would be exhausted and he would be lying in some windswept pass or sitting with bowed head in the driving rain of the marshlands. He would try to go on, searching for the strength that is said to lie beyond exhaustion. And he would not find it. A sense of utter futility would pass over him, alone and lost in the immensity of all outdoors. At that point, life would seem too much effort, too much strain. He, like many before him, would then admit defeat, give up, lie down, and wait for death... Loomis whispered, "Crompton?" No answer. "Crompton! Can't you hear me? I'll put you back in command. Just get us out of this overgrown greenhouse. Get us back to Earth or Mars! Crompton, I don't want to die!" Still no answer. "All right, Crompton," Loomis jrfV said in a husky whisper. "You win. Take over! Do anything you want. I surrender -- it's all yours. Just please take over!" "Thank you," Crompton said icily, and took control of the Crompton body. In ten minutes, he was back in the commander's tent, saying that he had changed his mind again. The commander nodded wearily, deciding that he would never understand people.  the center of a large dugout canoe, with trade goods piled around him. The paddlers set up a lusty chant and pushed onto the river. Crompton turned and watched until the Vigilantes' tents were lost around a bend. To Crompton, that trip down the Blood River was like a passage to the beginning of time. The six natives dipped their paddles in silent unison and the canoe glided like a water-spider over the broad, slow-moving stream. Gigantic ferns hung over the river's bank, and quivered when the canoe came near, and stretched longingly toward them on long stalks. Then the paddlers would raise the warning shout and the canoe would be steered back to midstream, and the ferns would droop again in the noonday heat. They came to places where the trees had interlaced overhead, forming a dark, leafy tunnel. Then Crompton and the paddlers would crouch under the canvas of the tent, letting the boat drift through on the current, hearing the lethal splatter of corrosive sap dropping around them. They would emerge again to the glaring white sky, and the natives would man their paddles. "Ominous," Loomis said nervously. "Yes, quite ominous," Crompton agreed, awed by his surroundings. The Blood River carried them deep into the interior of the continent. At night, moored to a midstream boulder, they could hear the war-hums of hostile Ais. One day, two canoes of Ais pulled into the stream behind them. Crompton's men leaned into their paddles and the canoe sprinted forward. The hostiles clung doggedly to them, and Crompton took out a rifle and waited. But his paddlers, inspired by fear, increased their lead, and soon the raiders were lost at a fork in the river. They breathed more easily after that. But at a narrow stretch they were greeted by a shower of arrows from both banks. One of the paddlers slumped across the gunwhale, pierced four times. The rest leaned to their paddles and soon were out of range. They dropped the dead Ais overboard, and the hungry creatures of the river squabbled over his disposition. After that, a great armored creature with crablike arms swam behind the canoe, his round head raised above the water, waiting doggedly for more food. Even rifle bullets wouldn't drive him away, and his presence gave Crompton nightmares. f I HE creature received another meal when two paddlers died of a grayish mold that crept up their paddles. The crablike creature accepted them and waited for more. But this river god protected his own -- a raiding party of hostiles, seeing him, raised a great shout and fled back into the jungle. He clung behind the canoe for the final hundred miles of the journey. And, when they came at last to a moss-covered wharf on the bank, he stopped, watched disconsolately for a while, then turned back upstream. The paddlers pulled to the ruined dock. Crompton climbed onto it and saw a piece of wood daubed with red paint. Turning it over he saw written on it, "Blood Delta. Population #." Nothing but jungle lay beyond. They had reached Dan Stack's final retreat. A narrow, overgrown path led from the wharf to a clearing in the jungle. Within the clearing was what looked like a ghost town. Not a person walked on its single dusty street and no faces peered out of the low, unpainted buildings. The little town baked silently under the white noonday glare, and Crompton could hear no sound but the scuffle of his own footsteps in the dirt. "I don't like this," Loomis said. Crompton walked slowly down the street. He passed a row of storage sheds with their owners' names crudely printed across the walls. He passed an empty saloon, its door hanging by one hinge, its mosquito-netting windows ripped. He went by three deserted stores and came to a fourth which had a sign saying, "Stack  Finch. Supplies." Crompton entered. Trade goods were in neat piles on the floor, and more goods hung from the ceiling rafters. There was no one inside. "Anyone here?" Crompton called. He got no answer. At the end of the town, he came to a sturdy, barnlike building. Sitting on a stool in front of it was a tanned and mustached man of perhaps fifty. He had a revolver thrust into his belt. His stool was tilted back against the wall and he appeared to be half asleep. "Dan Stack?" Crompton asked. "Inside," the man grunted. Crompton walked to the  door. The mustached man stirred and the revolver was suddenly in his hand. "Move back away from that door," he ordered, "Why? What's wrong?" "You mean you don't know?" asked the mustached man. "No! Who are you?" "I'm Ed Tyler, peace officer appointed by the citizens of Blood Delta and confirmed in office by the commander of the Vigilantes. Stack's in jail. This here place is the jail, for the time being." "How long is he in for?" "Just a couple hours," said Tyler. "Can I speak to him?" "Nope." "Can I speak to him when he gets out?" "Sure," Tyler said, "but I doubt he'll answer you." "Why?" The peace officer grinned wryly. "Stack will just be in jail a couple hours on account of this afternoon we're taking him out of the jail and hanging him by the neck until he's dead. After we've performed that little chore, you're welcome to all the talking you want with him. But like I said, I doubt he'll answer you." Crompton was too tired to feel much shock. He asked, "What did Stack do?" "Murder." "A native?" "Hell, no," Tyler said in disgust. "Who gives a damn about natives? Stack killed a man name of Barton Finch. His own partner. Finch isn't dead yet, but he's going fast. Old Doc says he won't last out the day, and that makes it murder. Stack was tried by a jury of his Barton Finch, breaking Billy Redburn's leg, busting two of Eli Talbot's ribs, wrecking Moriarty's saloon, and generally disturbing the peace. The judge -- that's me -- prescribed hanging by the neck as soon as possible. That means this afternoon, when the boys are back from working on the new dam." "When did the trial take place?" Crompton asked. "This morning." "And the murder?" "About three hours before the trial." "Quick work," Crompton said. "We don't waste no time here in Blood Delta," said Tyler proudly. "I guess you don't. You even hang a man before his victim's dead." "I told you Finch is going fast," Tyler said, his eyes narrowing. "Watch yourself, stranger. Don't go around maligning the justice of Blood Delta, or you'll find yourself in plenty trouble. We don't need no fancy lawyer's tricks to tell us right from wrong." Crompton, "Leave it alone. Let's get out of here." Crompton ignored him. He said to the sheriff, "Mr. Tyler, I'd really appreciate seeing him. Just for five minutes. Just to give him a last message." "Not a chance," the sheriff said. Crompton dug into his pocket and took out a grimy wad of bills. "Just two minutes." "Well. Maybe I could -- damn!" Following Tyler's gaze, Crompton saw a large group of men coming down the dusty street. "Here come the boys," Tyler said. "Not a chance now, even if I wanted to. I guess you can watch the hanging, though." Crompton moved back out of the way. There were at least fifty men in the group, and more coming. For the most part, they were lean, leathery, hard-bitten, no-nonsense types, and most of them carried sidearms. They conferred briefly with the sheriff. "Don't do anything stupid," Loomis warned. "There's nothing I can do," Crompton said. Sheriff Tyler opened the barn door. A group of men entered and came out dragging a man. Crompton was unable to see what he looked like, for the crowd closed around him. He followed as they hustled the man to the far edge of town, where a rope had been thrown across one limb of a sturdy tree. "Up with him!" the crowd shouted. "Boys!" came the muffled voice of Dan Stack. "Let me speak!" "To hell with that," a man yelled. "Up with him!" "My last words!" Stack shrieked. The sheriff called out, "Let him say his piece, boys. It's a dying man's right. Go ahead, Stack, but don't take too long about it." wagon, the noose around his neck, the free end held by a dozen hands. At last Crompton was able to see him. He stared, fascinated by this long-sought-for segment of himself. Dan Stack was a large, solidly built man. His thick, deeply lined features showed the marks of passion and hatred, fear and sudden violence. He had wide, flaring nostrils, a thick-lipped mouth set with strong teeth, and narrow, treacherous eyes. Coarse black hair hung over his inflamed forehead, and there was a dark stubble on his fiery cheeks. Stack was staring overhead at the glowing white sky. Slowly he lowered his head, and the bronze fixture on his right hand flashed red in the steady glare. "Boys," Stack said, "I've done a lot of bad things in my time." "You telling us?" someone shouted. "I've been a liar and a cheat. I've struck the girl I loved and struck her hard, wanting to hurt. I've stolen from my own dear parents. I've brought red murder to the unhappy natives of this planet. Boys, I've not lived a good life!" The crowd laughed at his maudlin speech. "But I want you to know," Stack bellowed, "I want you to know that I've struggled with my sinful nature and tried to conquer it. I've wrestled with the old devil in my soul and fought him the best fight I knew how. I joined the Vigilantes and for a while I was as straight a man as you'll find. Then the madness came over me again and I killed." "You through now?" the sheriff asked. "But I want you all to understand one thing," Stack bawled, his eyeballs rolling in his red face. "I admit the bad things I've done. I admit them freely and fully. But, boys, I did not kill Barton Finch!" "All right," the sheriff said. "If you're through now, we'll get on with it." "Listen to me! Finch was my friend, my only friend on this world! I was trying to help him and I shook him a little to bring him to his senses. And when he didn't, I guess I lost my head and busted up Moriarty's Saloon and fractured a couple of the boys. But I swear I didn't harm Finch!" "Are you finished?" the sheriff patiently wanted to know. Stack opened his mouth, closed it again, and nodded. "All right, boys," the sheriff said. "Let's go." agreement, no one stepped forward to move the wagon upon which Stack was standing. They were hard men, skilled in native warfare, always ready for a fight. But hanging a man in cold blood was something else again. "Well?" the sheriff asked. "How about it?" No one moved. "Okay," said Sheriff Tyler mournfully. "Guess I'll have to do it myself, though I wish -- " "Wait!" Crompton shouted. "I've got a score to settle with Stack! I'll do it myself!" No one stopped him as he jumped on the wagon. Standing close to Stack, concealing his movements from the crowd, Crompton pulled the projector out of its case. Stack knew at once who he was. Quickly they slapped on the electrodes. "Hey!" yelled a man in the crowd. "What's he doing?" And Loomis was speaking very quickly. "Watch out, take it easy, don't do it, don't believe him, remember his history, he'll ruin us, smash us, he's powerful, he's homicidal, he's evil." But Stack was part of Crompton, couldn't be completely evil. But had Stack told the- truth? Or had that impassioned speech been a last-minute bid to the audience in hope of a reprieve? Crompton had no time to think. Hastily he set up a similarity-pattern and shoved the switch. Then he yanked the projector free and stuffed it inside his shirt.  "Get him away from there!" the sheriff shouted. Crompton was yanked from the wagon and a dozen men gave it a push. The crowd roared as Stack's body plunged from the edge, contorted horribly for a moment, then hung lifeless from the taut rope. And Crompton caved in under the impact of Stack's mind in his.  J himself lying on a cot in a small, dimly lighted room. "You all right?" a voice asked. After a moment, Crompton recognized Sheriff Tyler bending over him. "Yes, fine now," Crompton said automatically. "I guess a hanging's something of a shock to a civilized man like yourself. Think you'll be okay if I leave you alone?" "Certainly," Crompton answered dully. "Good. Got some work to do. I'll look in on you in a couple hours." Tyler left. Crompton tried to take stock of himself. Integration... Fusion... Completion... Had he achieved it during the healing time of unconsciousness? Tentatively he searched his mind. He found Loomis wailing disconsolately, terribly frightened, babbling about the Orange Desert, camping trips at All Diamond Mountain, the pleasures of women, luxury, sensation, beauty. And Stack was there, solid and immovable, unfused. Crompton spoke to him, mind to mind, and knew that Stack had been absolutely and completely sincere in his last speech. Stack honestly wished for reform, selfcontrol, moderation. And Crompton also knew that Stack was completely and absolutely unable to reform, to exercise self-control, to practice moderation. Even now, in spite of his efforts, Stack was filled with a passionate desire for revenge. His mind rumbled furiously, a deep counterpoint to Loomis' shrill babbling. Great dreams of revenge swam in his mind, gaudy plans to conquer all Venus. Do something about the damned natives, wipe them out, make room for Terrans. Rip that damned Tyler limb from limb. Machine-gun the whole town, pretend the natives had done it. Build up a body of dedicated men, a private army of worshipers of cipline, ncf weakness, no hesitation. Cut down the Vigilantes and no one would stand in the way of conquest, murder, revenge, fury, terror! Struck from both sides, Crompton tried to maintain balance, to extend his control over libido and id. He fought to fuse the components into a single entity, a stable whole. But the minds struck back, refusing to yield their autonomy. The lines of cleavage deepened, new and irreconcilable schisms appeared, and Crompton felt his own stability undermined and his sanity threatened. T'fcAN Stack, with his baffled and unworkable reforming urge, had a moment of lucidity. "I'm sorry," he said. "Can't help. You need the other." "What other?" asked Crompton in bewilderment. "I tried to reform! But there was too much of me, too much conflict, hot and cold, on and off. Thought I could cure it myself. So I Split." "You what?" "Can't you hear me?" Stack moaned. "Me, I Split. When I went back to Port New Haarlem, I got another Durier chassis, stole a projector and Split. I thought everything would be easier. But I was wrong!" "There's another of us?" Crompton cried. "That's why we can't reintegrate! Who is it? Where is he?" "We were like brothers, him and me! I thought I could learn from him, he was so quiet and good and patient and calm! I was learning! Then he started to give up." "Who was it?" Crompton pursued. "So I tried to help him, tried to shake him out of it. But he was failing fast; he just didn't care to live. My last chance was gone and I went a little crazy and shook him and broke up Moriarty's Saloon. But I didn't kill Barton Finch! He just didn't want to live!" "Finch is the last component?" "Yes! You must go to Finch before he lets himself die, and you must reintegrate him. He's in the little room in back of the store. You'll have to hurry..." Stack fell back into his dreams of red murder, while Loomis babbled about the blue Xanadu Caverns. Crompton lifted the Crompton body from the cot and dragged it to the door. Down the street, he could see Stack's store. Reach the store, he told himself, and staggered out into the street. crawled for a thousand years, up mountains, across rivers, past deserts, through swamps, down caverns that led to the center of the world and out again to immeasurable oceans, which he swam to their farthest shore. And at the long journey's end, he came to Stack's store. In the back room, lying on a couch with a blanket pulled up to his chin, was Finch, the last hope for reintegration. Looking at him, Crompton knew the final hopelessness of his search. Finch lay very quietly, his eyes open and unfocused and unreachable, staring at nothing. His face was the great, white, expressionless face of an idiot. Those placid Buddha features showed an inhuman calm, expecting nothing and wanting nothing. Crompton crawled to the bedside. With infinite weariness, he took the projector from his shirt and fastened the electrodes to Finch's head and to his own. He set the controls and threw the switch. Nothing happened. Finch was too far gone to respond. Crompton felt his tired, overstrained body slump by the idiot's bedside. Finch was bound to die; reintegration would never be achieved. There was nothing Crompton could do about it. Then Stack, with his despairing reformer's zeal, emerged from his dream of revenge. Together with Crompton, he willed the idiot to look and see. And Loomis searched for and found the strength, beyond exhaustion, and joined them in the effort. Three together, they stared at the idiot. And Finch, evoked by three-quarters of himself, parts #I calling irresistibly for the whole, made a rally. A brief expression flickered in his eyes. He recognized. Crompton closed the switch again. And Finch entered. Reintegration at last! But what was this? What was happening? What force was taking over now, driving everything remorselessly before it? Crompton shrieked, tried to rip his throat open with his fingernails, nearly succeeded, and collapsed on the floor near the dead chassis of Finch. eyes again, it yawned and stretched copiously, enjoying the sensation of air and light and color, content with itself and thinking that there was work for it to do, and love to be found, and a whole life to be lived. The body, former possession of Alistair Crompton, Edgar Loomis, Dan Stack and Barton Finch, stood up. The amalgam of separately evolved super-ego, libido and split id had, under extreme stress, produced a new ego -- and therefore a new man. He walked to the door, realizing that he would have to think up a new name for himself. If you've read the editorial this month, you know the next issue -- dated Februmost lavish reading bargain in science fiction today. More stories, more pages, more features, what a lineup! a flare of scintillating action. Far from clearing the slate, dying has only doubled Blaine's troubles -- and now these people want him to die again to square himself! crew better equipped than any to skin cats in ingenious ways -- on a planet better equipped than any to give them a merciless hiding! by Willy Ley, who dives miles straight down to the bottom of the ocean to show you the inconceivable monstrousnesses that share this world with you! Look for the new great giant #-page Galaxy on sale the #st week in December! Oddest thing happened to me on my way through darkest Africa: I saw clearly beyond this... T HE Zeppelin dirigible balloons bombed London again last night and I got little sleep what with the fire brigades clanging down the street and the anti-aircraft guns banging away. Bad news in the morning post. A plain card from Emmie to let me know that Sam's gone, fast and without much pain. She didn't say, but I suppose it was the flu, which makes him at least the fifth of the old lib-lab boys taken off this winter. And why not? We're in our seventies and eighties. It's high time. Shaw said as much the other day when I met him on the steps of the Museum reading room, he striding in, I doddering out. In that brutal, flippant way of his, he was rather funny about how old Harry Lewes was standing in the way of youngsters like himself, but I can't bring myself to put his remarks down; they would be a little too painful to contemplate. Well, he's quite recovered from that business with his foot that gave us all such a fright. Barring the 'flu, he may live to my age, and about # bright youngsters now unborn will be watching him like hawks for the smallest sign of rigidity, of eccentricity, and saying complacently: "Grand old boy, G.B.S. Such a pity he's going the least bit soft upstairs." And I shall by then be watching from Olympus, and chuckling. Enough of him. He has the most extraordinary way of getting into everybody's conversation, though it is true that my own conversation does wander, these bad days. I did not think that the second decade of the twentieth century would be like this, though, as I have excellent reason to be, I am glad it is not worse. T AM really quite unhappy and uncomfortable as I sit here at the old desk. Though all the world knows I don't hold with personal service for the young and healthy, I am no longer a member of either of those classes. I do miss the ministrations of Bagley, who at this moment is probably lying in a frozen trench and even more uncomfortable than I. I can't seem to build as warm a fire as he used to. The coals won't go right. Luckily, I know what to do when I am unhappy and uncomfortable: work. Anyway, Wells is back from France. He has been talking, he says, to some people at the Cavendish Laboratory, wherever that is. He told me we must make a "radium bomb." I wanted to ask: "Must we, Wells? Must we, really?" He says the great virtue of a radium bomb is that it explodes and keeps on exploding -- for hours, days, weeks. The italics are Wells's -- one could hear them in his rather high-pitched voice -- and he is welcome' to them. I once saw an explosion which would have interested Wells and, although it did not keep on exploding, it was as much of an explosion as I ever care to see. I thought of telling him so. But, if he believed me, there would be a hue and a cry -- I wonder, was I ever once as consecrated as he? -- and if he did not, he might all the same use it for the subject of one of his "scientific" romances. After I am gone, of course, but surely that event cannot be long delayed, and in any case that would spoil it. And I want the work. I do not think I have another book remaining -- forty-one fat volumes will have to do -- but this can hardly be a book. A short essay; it must be short if it is not to become an autobiography and, though I have resisted few temptations in my life, I mean to fight that one off to the end. That was another jeer of Shaw's. Well, he scored off me, for I confess that some such thought had stirred in my mind. #VT Y lifelong struggle with voice and pen against social injustice had barely begun in #, and yet I had played a part in three major work stoppages, published perhaps a dozen pamphlets and was the editor and principal contributor of the still-remembered Labour's Voice. I write with what must look like immodesty only to explain how it was that I came to the attention of Miss Carlotta Cox. I was working with the furious energy of a very young man who has discovered his vocation, and no doubt Miss Cox mistook my daemon -- now long gone, alas! -- for me. Miss Cox was a member of that considerable group of ruling-class Englishmen and women who devote time, thought and money to improving the lot of the workingman. Everybody knows of good Morris, Miss Nightingale; they were the great ones. Perhaps I alone today remember Miss Cox, but there were hundreds like her and pray God there will always be. She was then a spinster in her sixties and had spent most of her life giving away her fortune. She had gone once in her youth to the cotton mills whence that fortune had come, and knew after her first horrified look what her course must be. She instructed her man of business to sell all her shares in that Inferno of sweated labour and for the next forty years, as she always put it, attempted to make restitution. She summoned me, in short, to her then-celebrated stationer's shop and, between waiting on purchasers of nibs and foolscap, told me her plan. I was to go to Africa. was at war within herself. The rebellious South was holding on, not with any hope of subduing the North, but in the expectation of support from England. England herself was divided. Though England had abolished slavery on her own soil almost a century earlier, still the detestable practise had its apologists, and there were those who held the rude blacks incapable of assuming the dignities of freedom. I was to seek out the Dahomeys and the Congolese on their own grounds and give the lie to those who thought them less than men. "Tell England," said Miss Cox, "that the so-called primitive Negroes possessed great empires when our fathers lived in wattle huts. Tell England that the black lawgivers of Solomon's time are true representatives of their people, and that the monstrous caricature of the plantation black is a venal creation of an ignoble class!" She spoke like that, but she also handed me a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds to defray my expenses of travel and to subsidize a wide distribution of the numbers of Labour's Voice which would contain my correspondence. Despite her sometimes grotesque manner, Miss Cox's project was not an unwise one. Whatever enlightenment could be bought at a price of two hundred and fifty pounds was a blow at human slavery. Nor, being barely twenty, was I much distressed by the thought of a voyage to strange lands. In no time at all, I had turned the direction of Labour's Voice over to my tested friends and contributors Mr. Samuel Blackett and Miss Emma Chatto (they married a month later) and in a week I was aboard a French "composite ship," iron of frame and wooden of skin, bound for a port on the Dark Continent, the home of mystery and enchantment. So we thought of it in those days and so, in almost as great degree, do we think of it today, though I venture to suppose that, once this great war is over, those same creations of Count Zeppelin which bombed me last night may dispel some of the mystery, exorcise the enchantment and bring light into the darkness. May it be so, though I trust that whatever discoveries these aeronauts of tomorrow may bring will not repeat the discovery Herr Faesch made known to me in #. r I "HE squalor of ocean travel in those days is no part of my story. It existed and I endured it for what seemed like an eternity, but at last I bade farewell to Le Flamant and all her roaches, rats and stench. Nor does it become this memoir to discuss the tragic failure of the mission Miss Cox had given me. (Those few who remember my Peoples ot the Earth will perhaps also remember the account given in the chapter I entitled "Afric Journeyings." Those, still fewer, whose perception revealed to them an unaccountable gap between the putrid sore throat with which I was afflicted at the headwaters of the Congo and my leave taking on the Gold Coast will find herewith the chronicle of the missing days). It is enough to say that I found no empires in #. If they had existed, and I believe they had, they were vanished with Sheba's Queen. I did, however, find Herr Faesch. Or he found me. How shall I describe Herr Faesch for you? I shan't, Shaw notwithstanding, permit myself so hackneyed a term as "hardy Swiss"; I am not so far removed from the youthful spring of creation as that. Yet Swiss he was, and surely hardy as well, for he discovered me (or his natives did) a thousand miles from a community of Europeans, deserted by my own bearers, nearer to death than ever I have been since. He told me that I tried thrice to kill him, in my delirium; but he nursed me well and I lived. As you see. He was a scientific man, a student of Nature's ways, and a healer, though one cure was beyond him. For, sick though I was, he was more ravaged by destructive illness than I. I woke in a firelit hut with a rank poultice at my throat and a naked savage daubing at my brow, and I was terrified; no, not of the native, but of the awful cadaverous face, ghost-white, that frowned down at me from the shadows. That was my first sight of Herr Faesch. When, a day later, I came able to sit up and to talk, I found him a gentle and brave man, whose English was every bit as good as my own, whose knowledge surpassed that of any human I met before or since. But the mark of death was on him. In that equatorial jungle, his complexion was alabaster. Ruling the reckless black warriors who served him, his strength yet was less than a child's. In those steaming afternoons when I hardly dared stir from my cot for fear of stroke, he wore gloves and a woollen scarf at his neck. We had, in all, three days together. As I regained my health, his health dwindled. He introduced himself to me as a native of Geneva, that colorful city on the finest lake of the Alps. He listened courteously while I told him of my own errand and did me, and the absent Miss Cox, the courtesy of admiring the spirit which prompted it -- though he was not sanguine of my prospects of finding the empires. He said nothing of what had brought him to this remote wilderness, but I thought I knew. Surely gold. Perhaps diamonds or some other gem, but I thought not; gold was much more plausible. I had picked up enough of the native dialect to catch perhaps one word in twenty of what he said to his natives and they to him -- enough, at any rate, to know that when he left me in their charge for some hours, that first day, he was going to a hole in the ground. It could only be a mine, and what, I asked myself, would a European trouble to mine in the heart of unexplored Africa but gold? I was wrong, of course. It was Hot gold at all. " ing astonishing things at the Cavendish Laboratory, but I do think that Herr Faesch might have astonished even Wells. Certainly he astonished me. On the second day of my convalescence, I found myself strong enough to be up and walking about. Say that I was prying. Perhaps I was. It was oppressively hot -- I dared not venture outside -- and yet I was too restless to lie abed waiting for Herr Faesch's return. I found myself examining the objects on his camp table and there were, indeed, nuggets. But the nuggets were not gold. They were a silvery metal, blackened and discolored, but surely without gold's yellow hue; they were rather small, like irregular lark's eggs, and yet they were queerly heavy. Perhaps there were a score of them, aggregating about a pound or two. I rattled them thoughtfully in my hand, and then observed that across the tent, in a laboratory jar with a glass stopper, there were perhaps a dozen more -- yes, and in yet another place in that tent, in a pottery dish, another clutch of the things. I thought to bring them close together so that I might compare them. I fetched the jar and set it on the table; I went after the pellets in the pottery dish. Herr Faesch's voice, shaking with emotion, halted me. #Mr. Lewes!" he whispered harshly. "Stop, sir!" I turned, and there was the man, his eyes wide with horror, standing at the flap of the tent. I made my apologies, but he waved them aside. "No, no," he croaked, "I know you meant no harm. But I tell you, Mr. Lewes, you were very near to death a moment ago." I glanced at the pellets. "From these, Herr Faesch?" "Yes, Mr. Lewes. From those." He tottered into the tent and retrieved the pottery dish from my hands. Back to its corner it went; then the jar, back across the tent again. "They must not come together. No, sir," he said, nodding thoughtfully, though I had said nothing with which he might have been agreeing, "they must not come together." He sat down. "Mr Lewes," he whispered, "have you ever heard of uranium?" I had not. "Or of pitchblende? No? Well," he said earnestly, "I assure you that you will. These ingots, Mr. Lewes, are uranium, but not the standard metal of commerce. No, sir. They are a rare variant form, indistinguishable by the most delicate of chemical tests from the ordinary metal, but possessed of characteristics which are -- I shall merely say 'wonderful,' Mr. Lewes, for I dare not use the term which comes first to mind." "Remarkable," said I, feeling that some such response was wanted. my dear Mr. Lewes! You really cannot imagine how remarkable. Suppose I should tell you that the mere act of placing those few nuggets you discovered in close juxtaposition to each other would liberate an immense amount of energy. Suppose I should tell you that if a certain critical quantity of this metal should be joined together, an explosion would result. Eh, Mr. Lewes? What of that?" I could only say again, "Remarkable, Herr Faesch." I knew nothing else to say. I was not yet one-and-twenty, I had had no interest in making chemists' stinks, and much of what he said was Greek to me -- or was science to me, which was worse, for I should have understood the Greek tolerably well. Also a certain apprehension lingered in my mind. That terrible white face, those fired eyes, his agitated speech -- I could not be blamed, I think. I believed he might be mad. And though I listened, I heard not, as he went on to tell me of what his discovery might mean. The next morning he thrust a sheaf of manuscript at me. "Read, Mr. Lewes!" he commanded me and went off to his mine; but something went wrong. I drowsed through a few pages and made nothing of them except that he thought in some way his nuggets had affected his health. There was a radiant glow in the mine, and the natives believed that glow meant sickness and in time death, and Herr Faesch had come to agree with the natives. A pity, I thought absently, turning in for a nap. A monstrous smashing sound awakened me. No one was about. I ran out, thrusting aside the tent flap and there, over a hill, through the interstices of the trees, I saw a huge and angry cloud. I don't know how to describe it; I have never since seen its like, and pray God the world never shall again until the end of time. Five miles away it must have been, but there was heat from it; the tent itself was charred. Tall it was -- I don't know how tall, stretching straight and thin from the ground to a toadstool crown shot with lightnings. The natives came after a time, and though they were desperately afraid, I managed to get from them that it was Herr Faesch's mine that had blown up, along with Herr Faesch and a dozen of themselves. More than that, they would not say. And I never saw one of them again. In a few days, when I was strong enough, I made my way back to the river and there I was found and helped -- I have never known by whom. Half dazed, my fever recurring, I remember only endless journeying, until I found myself near a port. "V" ES, there was explosion enough for any man. That whippersnapper Wells! Suppose, I put it to you, that some such "radium bomb" should be made. Conceive the captains of Kaiser Will's dirigible fleet possessed of a few nuggets apiece such as those Herr Faesch owned half a century ago. Imagine them cruising above the city of London, sowing their dragon's-teeth pellets in certain predetermined places, until in time a sufficient accumulation was reached to set the whole thing off. Can you think what horror it might set free upon the world? And so I have never told this story, nor ever would if it were not for those same Zeppelin dirigible balloons. Even now I think it best to withhold it until this war is over, a year or two perhaps. (And that will probably make it posthumous -- if only to accommodate Shaw -- but no matter.) I have seen a great deal. I know what I know, and I feel what I feel; and I tell you, this marvelous decade that stretches ahead of us after this present war will open new windows on freedom for the human race. Can it be doubted? Poor Bagley's letters from the trenches tell me that the very poilus and Tommies are determined to build a new world on the ruins of the old. Well, perhaps Herr Faesch's nuggets will help them, these wiser, nobler children of the dawn who are to follow us. They will know what to make of them. One thing is sure: Count Zeppelin has made it impossible for Herr Faesch's metal ever to be used for war. Fighting on the ground itself was terrible enough; this new dimension of warfare will end it. Imagine sending dirigibles across the skies to sow such horrors! Imagine what monstrous brains might plan such an assault! Merciful heaven. They wouldn't dare.      Look for the new great giant #-page Galaxy on sale the #st week in December! for your information of which only a little is known so far. No explorer has yet succeeded in putting his foot on its surface while still alive; much less has anybody been able to do so and return to report on his experiences. However, this world has been remotely explored by probes. Researchers have succeeded in capturing outlandish life-forms adapted to the impossible environment. Fig. #: Rhizocrinus lofotensis, living crinoid discovered in # at depth of # fathoms. Illustration copied from Pastor Sars's original report. The animal is about # inches tall Fig. #: Polystomella strigillata, a foraminifer. Magnified # times The facts known about it so far are as follows: The pressure at the surface is several hundred times the pressure which humans consider normal; in some places, it goes up to a thousand times normal. The temperature is to all intents and purposes the same, regardless of latitude, time of day or season. What variations there are are minor, amounting to two or three degrees, with the average hovering some five degrees above the freezing point of water. Likewise there are no changes in illumination, regardless of time of day or season. Surprisingly, the abundance of life-forms is simply fantastic, both in number of individuals and in the number of different life-forms. At unknown intervals -- seasonally? -- longlasting and very dense mud winds are blowing, presumably changing local topography to a very large extent. This description of a strange planet could have been invented, it seems to me, by Stanley G. Weinbaum in the dim past of science fiction. And it does sound a bit like Dr. E. E. Smith's description of the planet Trenco. Actually it is a description of a real and otherwise rather well-known planet, at least of about half of it. It is the planet next door to us -- the bottom of the ocean. young science, not quite as young, of course, as nuclear physics or space medicine, but young just the same. This may sound surprising in view of the fact that people have been sailing the seas for thousands of years, that tribes and nations made their living by catching fish and that for many centuries trade and sailing were virtually synonymous terms. Fact is, however, that until about a century ago the study of the seas was literally superficial. What happened below about twenty fathoms, the greatest depth to which fishing nets were lowered, was of no interest to anybody. The currents the sailors were interested in were surface currents. The swarming of fish which interested the fisherman was surface swarming. People still speak of the abyss when they refer to the ocean beyond the sight of land. The word itself means "bottomless" and is Low Latin of Greek derivation. No modern man would believe it to be strictly true, but for a long time sailors thought that the high seas were actually bottomless. We know this mostly because a seventeenth-century geographer, Bernard Varenius of Hanover, devoted several pages of type to a refutation of this belief. In this refutation, he unearthed an opinion from classical antiquity which stated that the world was symmetrical, which meant that the greatest deeps of the ocean should be equal to the highest mountains on land. I may remark in passing that this old guess is very nearly correct. After Varenius, everybody was convinced that there had to be an ocean bottom somewhere. Beginning about a hundred and fifty years ago, some scientists went to work on a few problems. One of the first was to measure temperature. The results looked curiously alike. In the arcFig. #: Five radiolarians discovered by Ernst Haeckel. Drawn from Haeckel's original report by late Professor Gustav Wolf tic oceans, the surface water was near freezing and stayed that way as far as the thermometers of that time could go down. In the tropical seas, it was nice and warm for the first score of feet or so. Then it got cooler, and as soon as the thermometer went below a hundred fathoms (# feet to landlubbers), there didn't seem to be much difference between arctic and tropical measurements. Fig. #: Willemoesia leptodactyla, one of "extinct" eryonids discovered by Challenger expedition. Copied by Olga Ley from colored lithograph A Frenchman by the name of Peron drew what looked like a logical conclusion : if you went still deeper, the temperature would, at one still-to-be-determined level, drop to below freezing point. The bottoms of the oceans were, without any doubt whatsoever, covered with ice. Naturally there would be no life on these ice-covered bottoms, partly because it was too cold, partly because there was nothing to eat. Logically, too, the ice was likely to begin at a shallower level in the Arctic, although this would still have to be determined. It was not really encouraging to this theory that Sir John Ross, one day in #, accidentally caught a brittle star at a probable depth of # feet -- in Baffin Bay in the arctic. The brittle star received the scientific name of Gorgonocephalus and was then quickly forgotten. If somebody had brought the case up again, he probably would have been told that the fact that Sir John Ross had found a depth of # feet at that spot, coupled with the fact that the creature had become entangled in the line, still did not prove that it came from the bottom. It could have become entangled at any depth. nineteenth century, an Englishman, Edward Forbes, did very diligent work on life in the seas, at first in the North Sea and the English Channel, later in the Mediterranean. He pointed out that marine plants needed sunlight, like any other plants. Up to a depth of about # fathoms, plant life was abundant, but then quickly became rare as the light began to fail. (Later researchers put the lower limit of active plant life at # fathoms.) But where there was no plant life, there could be no animal life; below the level of # feet, or # fathoms, there had to be a zone that was not populated, could not be populated. This was Edward Forbes' Abyssus Theory, advanced in # and based on his own very careful and very thorough researches in an "abysmal region" of the Mediterranean Sea. Very few scientific theories had such a short and unhappy life as Forbes' Abyssus Theory. A Norwegian zoologist, Pastor Michael Sars, who as a young man and while candidatus theologiae had made important discoveries about the sex life and the metamorphosis of marine mollusks, started fishing near the Lofoten Islands in the summer of #, assisted by his #-year-old son Johan Ernst. Pastor Sars not only obtained living things from a depth of # fathoms, he obtained living things that were supposed to be tropical. Or else extinct. They were a crinoid, Rhizocrinus loiotensis (Fig. #), a representative of one of the four main groups of the echinoderms. Everybody knows some echinoderms, even if he has never heard the name. The common sea star is the typical representative of one of the main groups. The wellknown sea urchin is a representative of the second one, and the sea cucumber represents the third. crinoids, were thought to be extinct. But then, in #, a naturalist received something that had been dredged from the sea not far from Martinique. It was called Pentacrinus caput Medusae (if you insist on a translation, it would come out as "the Medusa-headed fivesectioned something"), but it took a quarter of a century until the anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proved that it was an echinoderm. For many years, it was considered the only surviving species of the type. For many more years, it was considered incredibly rare; as late as #, a naturalist had to part with eleven golden "sovereigns" for a specimen. The history of Pentacrinus at least enabled Pastor Sars to tell at once what it was he had caught. Pastor Sars had started something. A whole swarm of Scandinavian marine biologists with names like Loven, Asbjornsen, Torell, Nordenskjold, Lindahl and Theel went after marine life along the shorelines of Norway, Sweden, Svalbard, and even Novaya Semlya, and were unanimous in reporting that there was no lowet limit for marine life. The limit was the bottom, wherever it might be, and even that was not the whole truth, for there were forms in the bottom mud. A T about the same time, English and American scientists came across deep-sea life without, at first, meaning to. What they were actually doing was determining the depth of the ocean bottom and its contours along a specific line for a specific reason. The first transatlantic cable was to be laid along that line. To measure the distance from the surface to the bottom, a new device was employed. It consisted of a heavy metal pipe, weighed down even more by a large iron cannon ball that had been pierced like a bead. When the pipe touched bottom, a powerful spring was released which did two things: it scooped up a small amount of bottom mud, and it released the catch which had held the cannon ball in place so that it would slip off. Well, the bottom mud contained animal remains, regardless of place and depth. The first transatlantic cable was laid in #, but it worked for only three months. The next one, laid in #, broke when about two-thirds finished. The one of # was successful. Then the broken end of the # cable was fished up and the laying completed after repair. The important thing was that the broken end of the # cable brought animal life with it to the surface. By one of these coincidences that happen more often than one should suppose, the cable across the Mediterranean (from Sardinia to Algiers) broke at about the same time. It was fished up too, and at a portion which had been at nearly # feet for only three years, fifteen different kinds of animal life were found -- right in the sea for which Forbes had originally evolved his Abyssus Theory. The man responsible, either directly or by his example, for everything that was to follow was Professor ( later Sir ) Wyville Thomson of Edinburgh. Pastor Michael Sars had not only proved that there was abundant animal life in the "abyss" of the northern seas, he had even found animals best known from the geological past. Wasn't it time for Her Majesty's Government to do something about it? The Royal Society, represented by its vice president Professor Carpenter, chimed in and Her Majesty's Government finally put two small vessels of the Royal Navy, the Lightning and the Porcupine, at Wyville Thomson's disposal. They investigated the sea bottom around England, off the Spanish coast and in the Mediterranean. It might be remarked here that the hopes of some of the scientists were off on a wrong track for a number of years to come, largely due to the accident that the first major discovery made by Pastor Sars had been a crinoid. Crinoids were regarded as virtually a signature of the geologic past (right now, a monograph on The Living Crinoids is being published; it has so many volumes that I have lost track) and it seemed quite possible that "the abyssal life" was a "Lost World" -- the bottom of the Atlantic might be the bottom of a Jurassic ocean. We now know that it isn't so, and it is still slightly surprising that it isn't, but that wrong hope was a strong spur. the Porcupine and the Lightning, Wyville Thomson asked for more help and got it. On December #, #, the corvette Challenger left England for a trip which covered all the oceans except the Arctic Ocean. When the Challenger berthed in Portsmouth again on May #, #, she had spent # days at sea, traveled a total of # nautical miles, measured the depth of the ocean, beyond those areas already on nautical charts, in # points, measured bottom temperatures in # places, collected # crates of speciments (among them a bottom-mud sample from a depth of # # feet from the Pacific Ocean near the Philippines) and used up the original budget of # pounds. Another # pounds had to be spent just for the publication of the results. Like naturally begets like. If the Queen of England could send Sir Wyville Thomson and his as- sistant Sir John Murray to explore the bottom of the seas, the United States could do the same. Professor Alexander Agassiz got the Blake to investigate, in successive trips, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Coast of the United States. Later, the United States sent the Albatross into the Pacific. And if Her Majesty's Government could spend # pounds on such an idealistic cause, His Majesty's Government (that of the Kaiser of Germany, that is) could do the same. On July #, #, the steamer Valdivia left the harbor of Hamburg as the official German deep-sea expedition, commanded by Captain Adalbert Krech, under the scientific leadership of Professor Carl Chun, and sent off in person by the then Secretary of the Interior Count von Posadowsky. The successor to Sir Wyville Thomson, Sir John Murray, was on board for the first leg of the trip, from Germany to England. With that noted, let's go back to the Challenger expedition. Soon after the Challenger's return to England, the scientific world began to scatter references to foraminifers and radiolarians in interviews and popular articles so that they very nearly became household worlds. I suspect that in many households, nobody had too clear an idea of just what foraminifers and radiolarians really were, but the terms were popular. Both refer to single-celled animals much like the better-known ameba. But while the ameba is naked, the others grow armor. The shell of the foraminifers is calcareous (chalky) and most of the time resembles a tiny snail shell. Considering that they are singlecelled, the foraminifers are quite large (Fig. #). Single specimens of all of them are just visible to the naked eye if put on a contrasting background. One living form has a shell l#th of an inch in diameter. A few fossil forms grew to a size of nearly an inch. The radiolarians are also singlecelled and much smaller than the foraminifers, and their shells (also called "skeletons," which I find slightly misleading) are of silica. In shape, they do not follow a specific pattern, though lacy spheres of various types are frequent, but they are all beautiful. ' I I HE reason why the Challenger expedition popularized these names is that their many samples of deep-sea bottom mud fell into three general classifications, namely "globigerina ooze" ( globigerina is the most common of the foraminifers), "radiolarian ooze" and "red ooze." Each was typical for a certain depth. Near the shores, the bottom sediments for a few hundred miles out consist mostly of dry-land stuff, sand and clay and soil washed into the sea by the rivers. Then away from the land and farther down comes the gray bottom mud consisting of globigerina shells; we now know that # per cent of the ocean floor miles) is covered with globigerina ooze. In samples from more than # feet in depth, the Challenger scientists found that globigerina shells became rare and soon were lacking altogether. A theory for this was thought up at once. The Challenger experts assumed that the foraminifers did not live at the bottom but floated freely at shallow depths. This assumption was correct. When the individual died, the shell sank to the bottom, but below the #-foot level, the sea water, being under enormous pressure, contained enough carbon dioxide to dissolve the calcareous shells. But this chemical action would not attack the silica shells of the radiolarians, so there you got radiolarian ooze. (We of radiolarian ooze in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.) And the extreme deep sea also yielded "red ooze" which, it could be determined quickly, was mostly volcanic dust, often containing tiny spheres, on the order of #I #th of an inch or less in diameter, micro-meteorites. Of all this, the radiolarians most strongly took the public fancy, no doubt because of the appearance of their skeletons. And it so happened that these radiolarians had a special scientific history which not only made interesting reading but was full of the most famous names in contemporary science. During the whole interval from Forbes' Abyssus Theory to the Challenger expedition, there was one scientist who was the authority on microscopic animals. He was Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg in Berlin. He was born in # and died at the age of #I in the year that the Challenger expedition returned home. Ehrenberg probed endlessly into stagnant water, into dust, mud and ground-up rock and the whole world helped him. An American sent him the first deep-sea mud samples ever taken. That American was Matthew Fontaine Maury, at one time Superintendent of the Naval Observatory and later called the Father of Oceanography. It was Maury who had helped in the survey prior to laying the first transatlantic cable. In Maury's samples, Ehrenberg discovered the radiolarians, though he did not give them that name. Then Ehrenberg received rock samples from the island of Barbados, packed masses of radiolarian skeletons. He concluded that the radiolarians probably lived at the bottom of the deep sea, and he never expected to see a live one. He didn't, but this was largely his fault.  accused of keeping their noses buried in books and journals and neglecting nature. Ehrenberg had the opposite fault: he kept his eye glued to his microscope and did not keep up with professional literature. It must be admitted that it would have needed a kind of literary detective at first. An obscure ship's doctor on the run from England to Australia (on H.M.S. Rattlesnake ) fished little lumps of a jellylike substance from the ocean in #. His microscope told him that these lumps were colonies of single-celled animals, each one having a most beautiful skeleton. The ship's doctor was the later very famous Thomas Huxley, Darwin's friend. He also had failed to follow the literature (understandable for a ship's doctor of his time) and did not know about Ehrenberg's finds in Maury's mud samples. The next famous name in the story was that of Professor Johannes Muller. He had seen such tiny strands of jelly in # but paid no attention until he read Huxley's report in #. Then, really going to work on them, he almost drowned off the coast of Norway in pursuit of radiolarians. But he invented the name, and he influenced one of his pupils who had exceptional artistic talent to continue these studies. The name of his pupil was Ernst Haeckel, who began his researches near Messina in #. In #, the first book devoted to the radiolarians was published, a folio volume of # pages of print with # plates of copper engravings (Fig. #). Other zoologists felt that Ernst Haeckel had exhausted the theme with this volume. This probably was more or less true at the moment. But then the Challenger expedition came home. While still en route, the men of the Challenger had made microscope slides and decided that all mud containing more than # per cent radiolarian skeletons should be labeled radiolarian ooze. Of course somebody had to work this material. The aging and ailing Sir Wyville Thomson discussed this with his friend Sir John Murray. Their opinion was unanimous : Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was invited to England; he accepted the offer, saying that it would take him three years, possibly as long as five years. It took ten. It also took three volumes, totaling # pages with # plates, to describe just the radiolarians. (These three volumes were labeled port.) Haeckel's teacher Muller had known # different species. In Haeckel's monograph of #, another # species were added. The Challenger discovered # additional new species. Haeckel later said that his enthusiasm never abated, but that it strained his imagination to invent # new scientific names! T'fcUE to a number of circumstances, not the least of which was the accidental cluttering of many famous names, mention of the Challenger expedition always made one think of radiolarians. Actually they were just one of many interesting and important results. The Challenger expedition made many discoveries and, almost more important, confirmed many reasonable if still unproven theories. The crinoids, for one, were still a rather flourishing branch of the echinoderms, though the living forms are not very large and not conspicuous. The Challenger was the first to show that the bottom temperature was within a very few degrees the same everywhere. The idea of mud "storms" (later confirmed) was very . tentatively mentioned. A number of deep-sea animals of not quite credible shapes were taken for the first time. One of the early Scandinavian scientists who followed in the footsteps of Pastor Sars compared general sea life to general land life by saying that the worms did the same in both habitats, namely living on or in the ground. Otherwise the fish were for the seas what the mammals were for the land, while the roles of the insect life on land were filled in the seas by the crabs in their multitudes. The Challenger results could say "yes" to this idea and add "anywhere and at any depth." But this nice comparison omitted something very typical for the sea. On land, the only thing that does not move around are the plants. The plants of the seas do not move either, but in the ocean there are very many animals which also don't move: oysters and all their relatives, sponges, corals, sea anemones and so forth. Originally, the rather natural tendency had been to sort ocean life according to the depth where it lived; after the Challenger returned, another sorting method triumphed, the sorting into the three categories called Benthos, Nekton and Plankton. Benthos is everything that does not move (except in juvenile stages) and it includes the true plants (algae) as well as corals, barnacles, sea anemones, sponges, plus those which, while able to move, do not normally do so, like sea stars, sea urchins, many worms. The Nekton comprises everything that moves actively: almost all fishes, whales, the larger octopi. The Plankton comprises the passively moving forms which drift with the currents. Most of the lifeforms of the Plankton happen to be tiny, while those of the Nekton are usually large. This division according to habits, if they may be called that, sounds at first hearing like the subdivisions of primitive zoology of the sixteenth century, where everything living was divided into "animals with feet," "animals with fins" and "animals with wings." But in the seas there is not just one but a variety of reasons for sorting first into habits, then into habitats and finally into a proper zoological classification. Well, what happened to the charming idea that the abysmal zone might harbor a "lost world"? It happens not to be true. Of course there are so-called living fossils in the ocean. One can make the sweeping and, to a layman, rather surprising statement that all the sharks could be considered as living fossils, since they are a very old group of the vertebrates. But most sharks are pelagic surface swimmers, though deep-sea forms are known. And one of the very oldest living fossils is Limulus, the horseshoe crab, a rather familiar creature to The oft-used term "pelagic" just means "of the (open) sea" as distinct from "littoral," which means "near the shore," specifically the area uncovered at low tide. "Pelagic" then comprises both Nekton and Plankton, provided it is far from the shore. Americans along the Atlantic coast, but a much-admired survivor from the dim geologic past to people elsewhere. Far from being a deep-sea form, it is an animal of the littoral zone.  Only one group of crabs, the socalled eryonids, fits the idea of living fossils from the abyss. These eryonids were known fossils from Jurassic sediments -- about # then definitely inhabitants of the littoral zone. Naturally they were believed to be extinct, until the Challenger expedition fished some from the deep sea off Africa. They do not differ much from their Jurassic ancestors except that they have lost their eyes in the meantime. Of course we can't tell how the Jurassic eryonids were colored; the living forms have bright red claws, feelers, legs and tail, while the body is the color of light pink chalk. Maybe Latimeria, the coelacanth fish from the area of the Comores Islands (see my article in Galaxy, May #), also fits the idea of a living fossil from the abyssal zone. We know that it is a living fossil of great age and an importance commensurate with this age. But we are not too certain yet whether it should be labeled a deep-sea fish. Within a single century, scientific opinion about the deep sea had to change fundamentally three times. At first, the bottom was thought to be ice-covered; that was disproved. Then it was "proved" to be lifeless; this was disproved even more thoroughly. Then it was thought to be a "lost world," but as it turned out, the seas harbor fewer living fossils than the land areas of our planet. But, though it is not a "lost world," it certainly is a very strange world, strange enough to qualify for a planet thousands of light-years This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. Ullward's Retreat A big man in every way , Ullward just wasn't satisfied to be an island unto himself... it had to be either a whole planet or nothing! vited three friends to lunch at his ranch: Ted and Ravelin Seehoe, and their adolescent daughter Iugenae. After an eye-bulging feast, Ullward offered around a tray of the digestive pastilles which had won him his wealth. "A wonderful meal," said Ted Seehoe reverently. "Too much, really. I'll need one of these. The algae was absolutely marvelous." Ullward made a smiling easy gesture. "It's the genuine stuff." Ravelin Seehoe, a fresh-faced, rather positive young woman of eighty or ninety, reached for a pastille. "A shame there's not more of it. The synthetic we get is hardly recognizable as algae." "It's a problem," Ullward admitted. "I clubbed up with some friends; we bought a little mat in the Ross Sea and grow all our own." "Think of that," exclaimed Ravelin. "Isn't it frightfully expensive?" Ullward pursed his lips whimsically. "The good things in life come high. Luckily, I'm able to afford a bit extra." "What I keep telling Ted-" began Ravelin, then stopped as Ted turned her a keen warning glance. Ullward bridged the rift. "Money isn't everything. I have a flat of algae, my ranch; you have your daughter -- and I'm sure you wouldn't trade." Ravelin regarded Iugenae critically. "I'm not so sure." TED patted Iugenae's hand. "When do you have your own child, Lamster Ullward?" (Lamster: contraction of Landmaster -- the polite form of address in current use.) "Still some time yet. I'm thirty"A pity," said Ravelin Seehoe brightly, "when you could give a child so many advantages." "Some day, some day, before I'm too old." "A shame," said Ravelin, "but people and we'd have no privacy whatever!" She looked admiringly around the room, which was used for the sole purpose of preparing food and dining. Ullward put his hands on the arms of his chair, hitched forward a little. "Perhaps you'd like to look around the ranch?" He spoke in a casual voice, glancing from one to the other. Iugenae clapped her hands; Ravelin beamed. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble!" "Oh, we'd love to, Lamster Ullward!" cried Iugenae. "I've always wanted to see your ranch," said Ted. "I've heard so much about it." "It's an opportunity for Iugenae I wouldn't want her to miss," said Ravelin. She shook her finger at Iugenae. "Remember, Miss Puss, notice everything very carefully -- and don't touch!" "May I take pictures, Mother?" "You'll have to ask Lamster Ullward." "Of course, of course," said Ullward. "Why in the world not?" He rose to his feet -- a man of more than middle stature, more than middle pudginess, with straight sandy hair, round blue eyes, a prominent beak of a nose. Almost three hundred years old, he guarded his health with great zeal, and looked little more than two hundred. He stepped to the door, checked the time, touched a dial on the wall. "Are you ready?" "Yes, we're quite ready," said Ravelin. Ullward snapped back the wall, to reveal a view over a sylvan glade. A fine oak tree shaded a pond growing with rushes. A path led through a field toward a wooded valley a mile in the distance. "Magnificent," said Ted. "Simply magnificent!" They stepped outdoors into the sunlight. Iugenae flung her arms out, twirled, danced in a circle. "Look! I'm all alone! I'm out here all by myself!" "Iugenae!" called Ravelin sharply. "Be careful! Stay on the path! That's real grass and you mustn't damage it." Iugenae ran ahead to the pond. "Mother!" she called back. "Look at these funny little jumpy things! And look at the flowers!" "The animals are frogs," said Ullward. "They have a very interesting life-history. You see the little fishlike things in the water?" "Aren't they funny! Mother, do come here!" "Those are called tadpoles and they will presently become frogs, indistinguishable from the ones you see." with more dignity, but were as interested as Iugenae in the frogs. "Smell the fresh air," Ted told Ravelin. "You'd think you were back in the early times." "It's absolutely exquisite," said Ravelin. She looked around her. "One has the feeling of being able to wander on and on and on." "Come around over here," called Ullward from beyond the pool. "This is the rock garden." In awe, the guests stared at the ledge of rock, stained with red and yellow lichen, tufted with green moss. Ferns grew from a crevice; there were several fragile clusters of white flowers. "Smell the flowers, if you wish," Ullward told Iugenae. "But please don't touch them; they stain rather easily." Iugenae sniffed. "Mmmm!" "Are they real?" asked Ted. "The moss, yes. That clump of ferns and these little succulents are real. The flowers were designed for me by a horticulturist and are exact replicas of certain ancient species. We've actually improved on the odor." "Wonderful, wonderful," said Ted. "Now come this way -- no, don't look back; I want you to get the total effect..." An expression of vexation crossed his face. "What's the trouble?" asked Ted. "It's a damned nuisance," said Ullward. "Hear that sound?" Ted became aware of a faint rolling rumble, deep and almost unheard. "Yes. Sounds like some sort of factory." "It is. On the floor below. A rug-works. One of the looms creates this terrible row. I've complained, but they pay no attention... Oh, well, ignore it. Now stand over here -- and look around!" His friends gasped in rapture. The view from this angle was a rustic bungalow in an Alpine valley, the door being the opening into Ullward's dining room. "What an illusion of distance!" exclaimed Ravelin. "A person would almost think he was alone." "A beautiful piece of work," said Ted. "I'd swear I was looking into ten miles -- at least five miles -- of distance." "I've got a lot of space here," said Ullward proudly. "Almost three-quarters of an acre. Would you like to see it by moonlight?" "Oh, could we?" switch-panel; the sun seemed to race across the sky. A fervent glow of sunset lit the valley; the sky burned peacock blue, gold, green, then came twilight -- and the rising full moon came up behind the hill. "This is absolutely marvelous," said Ravelin softly. "How can you bring yourself to leave it?" "It's hard," admitted Ullward. "But I've got to look after business too. More money, more space." He turned a knob; the moon floated across the sky, sank. Stars appeared, forming the age-old patterns. Ullward pointed out the constellations and the first-magnitude stars by name, using a penciltorch for a pointer. Then the sky flushed with lavender and lemon yellow and the sun appeared once more. Unseen ducts sent a current of cool air through the glade. "Right now I'm negotiating for an area behind this wall here." He tapped at the depicted mountainside, an illusion given reality and three-dimensionality by laminations inside the pane. "It's quite a large area -- over a hundred square feet. The owner wants a fortune, naturally." "I'm surprised he wants to sell," said Ted. "A hundred square feet means real privacy." "There's been a death in the family," explained Ullward. "The owner's four-great-grandfather passed on and the space is temporarily surplus." Ted nodded. "I hope you're able to get it." "I hope so too. I've got rather flamboyant ambitions -- eventually I hope to own the entire quarterblock -- but it takes time. People don't like to sell their space and everyone is anxious to buy." "Not we," said Ravelin cheerfully. "We have our little home. We're snug and cozy and we're putting money aside for investment." "Wise," agreed Ullward. "A great many people are space-poor. Then when a chance to make real money comes up, they're undercapitalized. Until I scored with the digestive pastilles, I lived in a single rented locker. I was cramped -- but I don't regret it today." They returned through the glade toward Ullward's house, stopping at the oak tree. "This is my special pride," said Ullward. "A genuine oak tree!" "Genuine?" asked Ted in astonishment. "I assumed it was simulation." "So many people do," said Ullward. "No, it's genuine." "Take a pictureof the tree, Iugenae, please. But don't touch it. You might damage the bark." "Perfectly all right to touch the bark," assured Ullward. TT E looked up into the branches, then scanned the ground. He stooped, picked up a fallen leaf. "This grew on the tree," he said. "Now, Iugenae, I want you to come with me." He went to the rock garden, pulled a simulated rock aside, to reveal a cabinet with washbasin. "Watch carefully." He showed her the leaf. "Notice? It's dry and brittle and brown." "Yes, Lamster Ullward." Iugenae craned her neck. "First I dip it in this solution." He took a beaker full of dark liquid from a shelf. "So. That restores the green color. We wash off the excess, then dry it. Now we rub this next fluid carefully into the surface. Notice, it's flexible and strong now. One more solution -- a plastic coating -- and there we are, a true oak leaf, perfectly genuine. It's yours." "Oh, Lamster Ullward! Thank you ever so much!" She ran off to show her father and mother, who were standing by the pool, luxuriating in the feeling of space, watching the frogs. "See what Lamster Ullward gave me!" "You be very careful with it," said Ravelin. "When we get home, we'll find a nice little frame and you can hang it in your locker." The simulated sun hung in the western sky. Ullward led the group to a sundial. "An antique, countless years old. Pure marble, carved by hand. It works too -- entirely functional. Notice. Three-fifteen by the shadow on the dial..." He peered at his beltwatch, squinted at the sun. "Excuse me one moment." He ran to the control board, made an adjustment. The sun lurched ten degrees across the sky. Ullward returned, checked the sundial. "That's better. Notice. Three-fifty by the sundial, three-fifty by my watch. Isn't that something now?" "It's wonderful," said Ravelin earnestly. "It's the loveliest thing I've ever seen," chirped Iugenae. Ravelin looked around the ranch, sighed wistfully. "We hate to leave, but I think we must be returning home." "It's been a wonderful day, Lamster Ullward," said Ted. "A wonderful lunch, and we enjoyed seeing your ranch." "You'll have to come out again," invited Ullward. "I always enjoy company." He led them into the dining room, through the living room-bedroom to the door. The Seehoe family took a last look across the spacious interior, pulled on their mantles, stepped into their runshoes, made their farewells. Ullward slid back the door. The Seehoes looked out, waited till a gap appeared in the traffic. They waved good-by, pulled the hoods over their heads, stepped out into the corridor. r I 'HE run-shoes spun them toward their home, selecting the appropriate turnings, sliding automatically into the correct liftand drop-pits. Deflection fields twisted them through the throngs. Like the Seehoes, everyone wore mantle and hood of filmy reflective stuff to safeguard privacy. The illusion-pane along the ceiling of the corridor presented a view of towers dwindling up into a cheerful blue sky, as if the pedestrian were moving along one of the windy upper passages. The Seehoes approached their home. Two hundred yards away, they angled over to the wall. If the flow of traffic carried them past, they would be forced to circle the block and make another attempt to enter. Their door slid open as they spun near; they ducked into the opening, swinging around on a metal grab-bar. They removed their mantles and run-shoes, sliding skillfully past each other. Iugenae pivoted into the bathroom and there was room for both Ted and Ravelin to sit down. The house was rather small for the three of them; they could well have used another twelve square feet, but rather than pay exorbitant rent, they preferred to save the money with an eye toward Iugenae's future. Ted sighed in satisfaction, stretching his legs luxuriously under Ravelin's chair. "Ullward's ranch notwithstanding, it's nice to be home." Iugenae backed out of the bathroom. Ravelin looked up. "It's time for your pill, dear." Iugenae screwed up her face. "Oh, Mama! Why do I have to take pills? I feel perfectly well." "They're good for you, dear." Iugenae sullenly took a pill from the dispenser. "Runy says you make us take pills to keep us from growing up." Ted and Ravelin exchanged glances. "Just take your pill," said Ravelin, "and never mind what Runy says." "But how is it that I'm # and Ermara Burk's only # and she's got a figure and I'm like a slat?" "No arguments, dear. Take your pill." Ted jumped to his feet. "Here, Babykin, sit down." Iugenae protested, but Ted held up his hand. "I'll sit in the niche. I've got a few calls that I have to make." He sidled past Ravelin, seated himself in the niche in front of the communication screen. The illusion-pane behind him was custom-built -- Ravelin, in fact, had designed it herself. It simulated a merry little bandit's den, the walls draped in red and yellow silk, a bowl of fruit on the rustic table, a guitar on the bench, a copper teakettle simmering on the countertop stove. The pane had been rather expensive, but when anyone communicated with the Seehoes, it was the first thing they saw, and here the house-proud Ravelin had refused to stint. Before Ted could make his call, the signal light flashed. He answered; the screen opened to display his friend Loren Aigle, apparently sitting in an airy arched rotunda, against a background of fleecy clouds -- an illusion which Ravelin had instantly recognized as an inexpensive stock effect. Loren and Elme, his wife, were anxious to hear of the Seehoes' visit to the Ullward ranch. Ted described the afternoon in detail. "Space, space and more space! Isolation pure and simple! Absolute privacy! You can hardly imagine it! A fortune in illusion-panes." "Nice," said Loren Aigle. "I'll tell you one you'll find hard to believe. Today I registered a whole planet to a man." Loren worked in the Certification Bureau of the Extraterrestrial Properties Agency. Ted was puzzled and uncomprehending. "A whole planet? How so?" Loren explained. "He's a freelance spaceman. Still a few left." "But what's he planning to do with an entire planet?" "Live there, he claims." "Alone?" Loren nodded. "I had quite a chat with him. Earth is all very well, he says, but he prefers the privacy of his own planet. Can you imagine that?" "Frankly, no! I can't imagine the fourth dimension either. What a marvel, though!" The conversation ended and the screen faded. Ted swung around to his wife. "Did you hear that?" heard but not heeded. She was reading the menu supplied by the catering firm to which they subscribed. "We won't want anything heavy after that lunch. They've got simulated synthetic algae again." Ted grunted. "It's never as good as the genuine synthetic." "But it's cheaper and we've all had an enormous lunch." "Don't worry about me, Mom!" sang Iugenae. "I'm going out with Runy." "Oh, you are, are you? And where are you going, may I ask?" "A ride around the world. We're catching the seven o'clock shuttle, so I've got to hurry." "Come right home afterward," said Ravelin severely. "Don't go anywhere else." "For heaven's sake, Mother, you'd think I was going to elope or something." "Mind what I say, Miss Puss. I was a girl once myself. Have you taken your pill?" "Yes, I've taken my pill." Iugenae departed; Ted slipped back into the niche. "Who are you calling now?" asked Ravelin. "Lamster Ullward. I want to thank him for going to so much trouble for us." Ravelin agreed that an algaeand-magarine call was no more than polite. Ted called, expressed his thanks, then -- almost as an afterthought -- chanced to mention the man who owned a planet. "An entire planet?" inquired Ullward. "It must be inhabited." "No, I understand not, Lamster Ullward. Think of it! Think of the privacy!" "Privacy!" exclaimed Ullward bluffly. "My dear fellow, what do you call this?" "Oh, naturally, Lamster Ullward -- you have a real showplace." "The planet must be very primitive," Ullward reflected. "An engaging idea, of course -- if you like that kind of thing. Who is this man?" "I don't know, Lamster Ullward. I could find out, if you like." "No, no, don't bother. I'm not particularly interested. Just an idle thought." Ullward laughed his hearty laugh. "Poor man. Probably lives in a dome." "That's possible, of course, Lamster Ullward. Well, thanks again, and good night." T HE spaceman's name was Kennes Mail. He was short and thin, tough as synthetic herring, brown as toasted yeast. He had a close-cropped pad of gray hair, a keen, if ingenuous, blue gaze. He showed a courteous interest in Ullward's ranch, but Ullward thought his recurrent use of the word "clever" rather tactless. As they returned to the house, Ullward paused to admire his oak tree. "It's absolutely genuine, Lamster Mail! A living tree, survival of past ages! Do you have trees as fine as that on your planet?" Kennes Mail smiled. "Lamster Ullward, that's just a shrub. Let's sit somewhere and I'll show you photographs." Ullward had already mentioned his interest in acquiring extraterrestrial property; Mail, admitting that he needed money, had given to understand that some sort of deal might be arranged. They sat at a table; Mail opened his case. Ullward switched on the wallscreen. "First I'll show you a map," said Mail. He selected a rod, dropped it into the table socket. On the wall appeared a world projection: oceans, an enormous equatorial land-mass named Gaea; the smaller sub-continents Atalanta, Persephone, Alcyone. A box of descriptive information read: Claim registered and endorsed at Extraterrestrial Properties Agency Surface area: .# Earth normal Gravity:# Earth normal Diurnal rotation: # Earth hours Annual revolution: # Earth years Atmosphere: Invigorating Climate: Salubrious Noxious conditions and influences: None Population : I Mail pointed to a spot on the eastern shore of Gaea. "I live here. Just got a rough camp at present. I need money to do a bit lease off one of the smaller continents, or, if you prefer, a section of Gaea, say from Murky Mountains west to the ocean." Ullward, with a cheerful smile, shook his head. "No sections for me, Lamster Mail. I want to buy the world outright. You set your price; if it's within reason, I'll write a check." Mail glanced at him sidewise. "You haven't even seen the photographs." "True." In a businesslike voice, Ullward said, "By all means, the photographs." Mail touched the projection button. Landscapes of an unfamiliar wild beauty appeared on the screen. There were mountain crags and roaring rivers, snow-powdered forests, ocean dawns and prairie sunsets, green hillsides, meadows spattered with blossoms, beaches white as milk. "Very pleasant," said Ullward. "Quite nice." He pulled out his checkbook. "What's your price?" Mail chuckled and shook his lease off a section -- providing my price is met and my rules are agreed to."  pressed lips. He gave his head a quick little jerk. Mail started to rise to his feet. "No, no," said Ullward hastily. "I was merely thinking... Let's look at the map again." Mail returned the map to the screen. Ullward made careful inspection of the various continents, inquired as to physiography, climate, flora and fauna. Finally he made his decision. "I'll lease Gaea." "No, Lamster Ullward!" declared Mail. "I'm reserving this entire area -- from Murky Mountains and the Calliope River east. This western section is open. It's maybe a little smaller than Atalanta or Persephone, but the climate is warmer." "There aren't any mountains on the western section," Ullward protested. "Only these insignificant Rock Castle Crags." "They're not so insignificant," said Mail. "You've also got the Purple Bird Hills, and down here in the south is Mount Cairasco -- a live volcano. What more do you need?" Ullward glanced across his ranch. "I'm in the habit of thinking big." "West Gaea is a pretty big chunk of property." "Very well," said Ullward. "What are your terms?" "So far as money goes, I'm not greedy," Mail said. "For a twentyyear lease: two hundred thousand a year, the first five years in advance." Ullward made a startled protest. "Great guns, Lamster Mail! That's almost half my income!" Mail shrugged. "I'm not trying to get rich. I want to build a lodge for myself. It costs money. If you can't afford it, I'll have to speak to someone who can." Ullward said in a nettled voice, "I can afford it, certainly -- but my entire ranch here cost less "Well, either you want it p or you don't," said Mail. "I'll tell you my rules, then you can make up your mind." "What rules?" demanded Ullward, his face growing red. "They're simple and their only purpose is to maintain privacy for both of us. First, you have to stay on your own property. No excursions hither and yon on my property. Second, no sub-leasing. Third, no residents except yourself, your family and your servants. I don't want any artists' colony springing up, nor any wild noisy resort atmosphere. Naturally you're entitled to bring out your guests, but they've got to keep to your property just like yourself." He looked sidewise at Ullward's glum face. "I'm not trying to be tough, Lamster Ullward. Good fences make good neighbors, and it's better that we have the understanding now than hard words and beamgun evictions later." "Let me see the photographs again," said Ullward. "Show me West Gaea." He looked, heaved a deep sigh. "Very well. I agree." HP HE construction crew had departed. Ullward was alone on West Gaea. He walked around the new lodge, taking deep breaths of. lute solitude and privacy. The lodge had cost a fortune, but how many other people of Earth owned -- leased, rather -- anything to compare with this? He walked out on the front terrace, gazed proudly across miles --  -- genuine unsimulated miles -- of landscape. For his home site, he had selected a shelf in the foothills of the Ullward Range (as he had renamed the Purple Bird Hills). In front spread a great golden savannah dotted with bluegreen trees; behind rose a tall gray cliff. A stream rushed down a cleft in the rock, leaping, splashing, cooling the air, finally flowing into a beautiful clear pool, beside which Ullward had erected a cabana of red, green and brown plastic. At the base of the cliff and in crevices grew clumps of spiky blue cactus, lush green bushes covered with red trumpet-flowers, a thick-leafed white plant holding up a stalk clustered with white bubbles. thumping of factories, no roar of traffic two feet from one's bed. One arm outstretched, the other pressed to his chest, Ullward performed a stately little jig of triumph on the terrace. Had he been able, he might have turned a cartwheel. When a person has complete privacy, absolutely nothing is forbidden! Ullward took a final turn up and down the terrace, made a last appreciative survey of the horizon. The sun was sinking through banks of fire-fringed clouds. Marvelous to be matched only in the very best illusion-panes! He entered the lodge, made a selection from the nutrition locker. After a leisurely meal, he returned to the lounge. He stood thinking for a moment, then went out upon the terrace, strolled up and down. Wonderful! The night was full of stars, hanging like blurred white lamps, almost as he had always imagined them. After ten minutes of admiring the stars, he returned into the lodge. Now what? The wall-screen, with its assortment of recorded programs. Snug and comfortable, Ullward watched the performance of a recent musical comedy. Real luxury, he told himself. Pity he couldn't invite his friends out to spend the evening. Unfortunately impossible, considering the inconvenient duration of the trip between Mail's Planet and Earth. However -- only three days until the arrival of his first guest. She was Elf Intry, a young woman who had been more than friendly with Ullward on Earth. When Elf arrived, Ullward would broach a subject which he had been mulling over for several months -- indeed, .ever since he had first learned of Mail's Planet. E LF Intry arrived early in the afternoon, coming down to Mail's Planet in a capsule discharged from the weekly Outer Ring Express packet. A woman of normally good disposition, she greeted Ullward in a seethe of indignation. "Just who is that brute around the other side of the planet? I thought you had absolute privacy here!" "That's just old Mail," said Ullward evasively. "What's wrong?" "The fool on the packet set me the wrong coordinates and the capsule came down on a beach. I noticed a house and then I saw a naked man jumping rope behind some bushes. I thought it was you, of course. I went over and said 'Boo!' You should have heard the language he used!" She shook her head. "I don't see why you allow such a boor on your planet." The buzzer on the communication screen sounded. "That's Mail now," said Ullward. "You wait here. I'll tell him how to speak to my guests!" He presently returned to the terrace. Elf came over to him, kissed his nose. "Ully, you're pale with rage! I hope you didn't lose your temper." "No," said Ullward. "We merely -- well, we had an understanding. Come along, look over the property." He took Elf around to the back, pointing out the swimming pool, the waterfall, the mass of rock above. "You won't see that effect on any illusion-pane! That's genuine rock!" "Lovely, Ully. Very nice. The color might be just a trifle darker, though. Rock doesn't look like that." "No?" Ullward inspected the cliff more critically. "Well, I can't do anything about it. How about the privacy?" "Wonderful! It's so quiet, it's almost eerie!" "Eerie?" Ullward looked around the landscape. "It hadn't occurred to me." "You're not sensitive to these things, Ully. Still, it's very nice, if you can tolerate that unpleasant creature Mail so close." "Close?" protested Ullward. "He's on the other side of the continent!" "True," said Elf. "It's all relative, I suppose. How long do you expect to stay out here?" "That depends. Come along inside. I want to talk with you." He seated her in a comfortable chair, brought her a globe of Gluco-Fructoid Nectar. For himself, he mixed ethyl alcohol, water, a few drops of Haig's Oldtime Esters. "Elf, where do you stand in the reproduction list?" She raised her fine eyebrows, shook her head. "So far down, I've It's one reason I bought this place. Waiting list, piffle! Nobody stops Bruham Ullward's breeding on his own planet!" Elf pursed her lips, shook her head sadly. "It won't work, Ully." "And why not?" "You can't take the children back to Earth. The list would keep them out." "True, but think of living here, surrounded by children. All the children you wanted! And utter privacy to boot! What more could you ask for?" Elf sighed. "You fabricate a beautiful illusion-pane, Ully. But I think not. I love the privacy and solitude -- but I thought there'd be more people to be private from." r I "HE Outer Ring Express packet came past four days later. Elf kissed Ullward good-by. "It's simply exquisite here, Ully. The solitude is so magnificent, it gives me gooseflesh. I've had a wonderful visit." She climbed into the capsule. "See you on Earth." "Just a minute," said Ullward suddenly. "I want you to post a letter or two for me." "Hurry. I've only got twenty minutes." Ullward was back in ten minutes. "Invitations," he told her breathlessly. "Friends." "Right." She kissed his nose. "Good-by, Ully." She slammed the port; the capsule rushed away, whirling up to meet the packet. The new guests arrived three weeks later: Frobisher Worbeck, Liornetta Stobart, Harris and Hyla Cabe, Ted and Ravelin and Iugenae Seehoe, Juvenal Aquister and his son Runy. Ullward, brown from long days of lazing in the sun, greeted them with great enthusiasm. "Welcome to my little retreat! Wonderful to see you all! Frobisher, you pinkcheeked rascal! And Iugenae! Prettier than ever! Be careful, Ravelin -- I've got my eye on your daughter! But Runy's here, guess I'm out of the picture! Liornetta, damned glad you could make it! And Ted! Great to see you, old chap! This is all your doing, you know! Harris, Hyla, Juvenal -- come on up! We'll have a drink, a drink, a drink!" Running from one to the other, patting arms, herding the slowmoving Frobisher Worbeck, he conducted his guests up the slope to the terrace. Here they turned to survey the panorama. Ullward listened to their remarks, mouth pursed against a grin of gratification. "Magnificent!" "Grand!" "Absolutely genuine!" "The sky is so far away, it frightens me!" "The sunlight's so pure!" "The genuine thing's always best, isn't it?" Runy said a trifle wistfully, "I thought you were on a beach, Lamster Ullward." "Beach? This is mountain country, Runy. Land of the wide open spaces! Look out over that plain!" Liornetta Stobart patted Runy's shoulder. "Not every planet has beaches, Runy. The secret of happiness is to be content with what one has." I've got beaches, never fear for that! There's a fine beach -- ha, ha -- five hundred miles due west. Every step Ullward domain!" "Can we go?" asked Iugenae excitedly. "Can we go, Lamster Ullward?" "We certainly can! That shed down the slope is headquarters for the Ullward Airlines. We'll fly to the beach, swim in Ullward Ocean! But now refreshment! After that crowded capsule, your throats must be like paper!" "It wasn't too crowded," said Ravelin Seehoe. "There were only nine of us." She looked critically up at the cliff. "If that were an illusion-pane, I'd consider it grotesque." "My dear Ravelin!" cried Ullward. "It's impressive! Magnificent!" "All of that," agreed Frobisher Worbeck, a tall sturdy man, whitehaired, red-jowled, with a blue benevolent gaze. "And now, Bruham, what about those drinks?" "Of course! Ted, I know you of old. Will you tend bar? Here's the alcohol, here's water, here are the esters. Now, you two," Ullward called to Runy and Iugenae. "How about some nice cold soda pop?" "What kind is there?" asked Runy. "All kinds, all flavors. This is Ullward's Retreat! We've got methylamyl glutamine, cycloprodacterol phosphate, metathiobromine-#-glycocitrose..." Runy and Iugenae expressed their preferences; Ullward brought the globes, then hurried to arrange tables and chairs for the adults. Presently everyone was comfortable and relaxed. Iugenae whispered to Ravelin, who smiled and nodded indulgently. "Lamster Ullward, you remember the beautiful oak leaf you gave Iugenae?" "Of course I do." "It's still as fresh and green as ever. I wonder if Iugenae might have a leaf or two from some of these other trees?" "My dear Ravelin!" Ullward roared with laughter. "She can have an entire tree!" "Oh, Mother! Can-" "Iugenae, don't be ridiculous!" snapped Ted. "How could we get it home? Where would we plant the thing? In the bathroom?" Ravelin said, "You and Runy find some nice leaves, but don't wander too far." "No, Mother." She beckoned to Runy. "Come along, dope. Bring a basket." r I 'HE others of the party gazed out over the plain. "A beautiful view, Ullward," said Frobisher Worbeck. "How far does your property extend?" "Five hundred miles west to the ocean, six hundred miles east to the mountains, eleven hundred miles north and two hundred miles south." Worbeck shook his head solemnly. "Nice. A pity you couldn't get the whole planet. Then you'd have real privacy!" "I tried, of course," said Ullward. "The owner refused to consider the idea." "A pity." Ullward brought out a map. "However, as you see, I have a fine volcano, a number of excellent rivers, a mountain range, and down here on the delta of Cinnamon River an absolutely miasmic swamp." Ravelin pointed to the ocean. "Why, it's Lonesome Ocean! I thought the name was Ullward Ocean." Ullward laughed uncomfortably. "Just a figure of speech -- so to speak. My rights extend ten miles. More than enough for swimming purposes." "No freedom of the seas here, eh, Lamster Ullward?" laughed Harris Cabe. "Not exactly," confessed Ullward. "A pity," said Frobisher Worbeck. Hyla Cabe pointed to the map. "Look at these wonderful mountain ranges! The Magnificent Mountains! And over here -- the Elysian Gardens! I'd love to see them, Lamster Ullward." Ullward shook his head in embarrassment. "Impossible, I'm afraid. They're not on my property. I haven't even seen them myself." His guests stared at him in astonishment. "But surely -- " "It's an atom-welded contract with Lamster Mail," Ullward explained. "He stays on his property, I stay on mine. In this way, our privacy is secure." "Look," Hyla Cabe said aside to Ravelin. "The Unimaginable Caverns! Doesn't it make you simply wild not to be able to see them?" Aquister said hurriedly, "It's a pleasure to sit here and just breathe this wonderful fresh air. No noise, no crowds, no bustle or hurry..." The party drank and chatted and basked in the sunshine until late afternoon. Enlisting the aid of Ravelin Seehoe and Hyla Cabe, Ullward set out a simple meal of yeast pellets, processed protein, thick slices of algae crunch. "No animal flesh, cooked vegetation?" questioned Worbeck curiously. "Tried them the first day," said Ullward. "Revolting. Sick for a week." After dinner, the guests watched a comic melodrama on the wallscreen. Then Ullward showed them to their various cubicles, and after a few minutes of badinage and calling back and forth, the lodge became quiet.L ' guests into their bathing suits. "We're off to the beach, we'll gambol on the sand, we'll frolic in the surf of Lonesome Ullward Ocean!" The guests piled happily into the air-car. Ullward counted heads. "All aboard! We're off!" They rose and flew west, first low over the plain, then high into the air, to obtain a panoramic view of the Rock Castle Crags. "The tallest peak -- there to the north -- is almost ten thousand feet high. Notice how it juts up, just imagine the mass! Solid rock! How'd you like that dropped on your toe, Runy? Not so good, eh? In a moment, we'll see a precipice over a thousand feet straight up and down. There -- now! Isn't that remarkable?" "Certainly impressive," agreed  Ted. "What those Magnificent Mountains must be like!" said Harris Cabe with a wry laugh. "How tall are they, Lamster Ullward?" inquired Liornetta Stobart. "What? Which?" "The Magnificent Mountains." "I don't know for sure. Thirty or forty thousand feet, I suppose." "What a marvelous sight they must be!" said Frobisher Worbeck. "Probably make these look like foothills." "These are beautiful too," Hyla Cabe put in hastily. "Oh, naturally," said Frobisher Worbeck. "A damned fine sight! You're a lucky man, Bruham!" Ullward laughed shortly, turned the air-car west. They flew across a rolling forested plain and presently Lonesome Ocean gleamed in the distance. Ullward slanted down, landed the air-car on the beach, and the party alighted. The day was warm, the sun hot. A fresh wind blew in from the ocean. The surf broke upon the sand in massive roaring billows. The party stood appraising the scene. Ullward swung his arms. "Well, who's for it? Don't wait to be invited! We've got the whole ocean to ourselves!" Ravelin said, "It's so rough! Look how that water crashes down!" Liornetta Stobart turned away with a shake of her head. "Illusionpane surf is always so gentle. This could lift you right up and give you a good shaking!" "I expected nothing quite so vehement," Harris Cabe admitted. Ravelin beckoned to Iugenae. "You keep well away, Miss Puss. I don't want you swept out to sea. You'd find it Lonesome Ocean indeed!" Runy approached the water, waded gingerly into a sheet of retreating foam. A comber thrashed down at him and he danced quickly back up the shore. "The water's cold," he reported. "Well, here goes! I'll show you how it's done!" He trotted forward, stopped short, then flung himself into the face of a great white comber. The party on the beach watched. "Where is he?" asked Hyla Cabe. Iugenae pointed. "I saw part of him out there. A leg, or an arm." "There he is!" cried Ted. "Woof! Another one's caught him. I suppose some people might consider it sport..." Ullward staggered to his feet, lurched through the retreating wash to shore. "Hah! Great! Invigorating! Ted! Harris! Juvenal! Take a go at it!" Harris shook his head. "I don't think I'll try it today, Bruham." "The next time for me too," said Juvenal Aquister. "Perhaps it won't be so rough." "But don't let us stop you!" urged Ted. "You swim as long as you like. We'll wait here for you." "Oh, I've had enough for now," said Ullward. "Excuse me while I change." When Ullward returned, he found his guests seated in the aircar. "Hello! Everyone ready to go?" "It's hot in the sun," explained Liornetta, "and we thought we'd enjoy the view better from inside." "When you look through the glass, it's almost like an illusionpane," said Iugenae. "Oh, I see. Well, perhaps you're ready to visit other parts of the Ullward domain?" The proposal met with approval; Ullward took the air-car into the air. "We can fly north over the pine woods, south over Mount Cairasco, which unfortunately isn't erupting just now." "Anywhere you like, Lamster Ullward," said Frobisher Worbeck. "No doubt it's all beautiful." Ullward considered the varied attractions of his leasehold. "Well, first to the Cinnamon Swamp." For two hours they flew, over the swamp, across the smoking crater of Mount Cairasco, east to the edge of Murky Mountains, along Calliope River to its source in Goldenleaf Lake. Ullward pointed out noteworthy views, interesting aspects. Behind him, the murmurs of admiration dwindled and finally died. "Had enough?" Ullward called back gayly. "Can't see half a continent in one day! Shall we save some for tomorrow?" ness. Then Liornetta Stobart said, "Lamster Ullward, we're simply dying for a peek at the Magnificent Mountains. I wonder -- do you think we could slip over for a quick look? I'm sure Lamster Mail wouldn't really mind." Ullward shook his head with a rather stiff smile. "He's made me agree to a very definite set of rules. I've already had one brush with him." "How could he possibly find out?" asked Juvenal Aquister. "He probably wouldn't find out," said Ullward, "but -- " "It's a damned shame for him to lock you off into this drab little peninsula!" Frobisher Worbeck said indignantly. "Please, Lamster Ullward," Iugenae wheedled. "Oh, very well," Ullward said recklessly. He turned the air-car east. The Murky Mountains passed below. The party peered from the windows, exclaiming at the marvels of the forbidden landscape. "How far are the Magnificent Mountains?" asked Ted. "Not far. Another thousand miles." "Why are you hugging the ground?" asked Frobisher Worbeck. "Up in the air, man! Let's see the countryside!" Ullward hesitated. Mail was probably asleep. And, in the last analysis, he really had no right to forbid an innocent little -- "Lamster Ullward," called Runy, "there's an air-car right behind us." The air-car drew up level. Kennes Mail's blue eyes met Ullward's across the gap. He motioned Ullward down. Ullward compressed his mouth, swung the air-car down. From behind him came murmurs of sympathy and outrage. Below was a dark pine forest; Ullward set down in, a pretty little glade. Mail landed nearby, jumped to the ground, signaled to Ullward. The two men walked to the side. The guests murmured together and shook their heads. Ullward presently returned to the air-car. "Everybody please get in," he said crisply. They rose into the air and flew west. "What did the chap have to say for himself?" queried Worbeck. Ullward chewed at his lips. "Not too much. Wanted to know if I'd lost the way. I told him one or two things. Reached an understanding..." His voice dwindled, then rose in a burst of cheerfulness. "We'll have a party back at the lodge. What do we care for Mail and his confounded mountains?" "That's the spirit, Bruham!" cried Frobisher Worbeck. - bar during the evening. Either one or the other mingled rather more alcohol to rather less esters into the drinks than standard practice recommended. As a result, the party became quite loud and gay. Ullward damned Mail's interfering habits; Worbeck explored six thousand years of common law in an effort to prove Mail a domineering tyrant; the women giggled; Iugenae and Runy watched cynically, then presently went off to attend to their own affairs. In the morning, the group slept late. Ullward finally tottered out on the terrace, to be joined one at a time by the others. Runy and Iugenae were missing. "Young rascals," groaned Worbeck. "If they're lost, they'll have to find their own way back. No search parties for me." At noon, Runy and Iugenae returned in Ullward's air-car. "Good heavens," shrieked Ravelin. "Iugenae, come here this instant! Where have you been?" Juvenal Aquister surveyed Runy sternly. "Have you lost your mind, taking Lamster Ullward's air-car without his permission?" "I asked him last night," Runy declared indignantly. "He said yes, take anything except the volcano because that's where he slept when his feet got cold, and the swamp because that's where he dropped his empty containers." "Regardless," said Juvenal in disgust, "you should have had better sense. Where have you been?" Runy fidgeted. Iugenae said, "Well, we went south for a while, then turned and went east -- I think it was east. We thought if we flew low, Lamster Mail wouldn't see us. So we flew low, through the mountains, and pretty soon we came to an ocean. We went along the beach and came to a house. We landed to see who lived there, but nobody was home." Ullward stifled a groan. "What would anyone want with a pen of birds?" asked Runy. "Birds? What birds? Where?" "At the house. There was a pen with a lot of big birds, but they kind of got loose while we were looking at them and all flew away." "Anyway," Iugenae continued briskly, "we decided it was Lamster Mail's house, so we wrote a note, telling what everybody thinks of him and pinned it to his door." Ullward rubbed his forehead. "Is that all?" "Well, practically all." Iugenae became diffident. She looked at Runy and the two of them giggled nervously. "There's more?" yelled Ullward. "What, in heaven's name?" "Nothing very much," said Iugenae, following a crack in the terrace with her toe. "We put a booby-trap over the door -- just a bucket of water. Then we came home." The screen buzzer sounded from inside the lodge. Everybody looked at Ullward. Ullward heaved a deep sigh, rose to his feet, went inside. Ring Express packet was due to pass the junction point. Frobisher Worbeck felt sudden and acute qualms of conscience for the neglect his business suffered while he dawdled away hours in idle enjoyment. "But my dear old chap!" exclaimed Ullward. "Relaxation is good for you!" True, agreed Frobisher Worbeck, if one could make himself oblivious to the possibility of fiasco through the carelessness of underlings. Much as he deplored the necessity, in spite of his inclination to loiter for weeks, he felt impelled to leave -- and not a minute later than that very afternoon. Others of the group likewise remembered important business which they had to see to, and those remaining felt it would be a shame and an imposition to send up the capsule half-empty and likewise decided to return. Ullward's arguments met unyielding walls of obstinacy. Rather glumly, he went down to the capsule to bid his guests farewell. As they climbed through the port, they expressed their parting thanks : "Bruham, it's been absolutely marvelous!" "You'll never know how we've enjoyed this outing, Lamster Ullward!" "The air, the space, the privacy -- I'll never forget!" "It was the most, to say the least." The port thumped into its socket. Ullward stood back, waving rather uncertainly. Ted Seehoe reached to press the Active button. Ullward sprang forward, pounded on the port. "Wait!" he bellowed. "A few things I've got to attend to! I'm coming with you!" ward heartily, opening the door to three of his friends: Coble and his wife Heulia Sansom, and Coble's young, pretty cousin Landine. "Glad to see you!" "And we're glad to come! We've heard so much of your wonderful ranch, we've been on pins and needles all day!" "Oh, come now! It's not so marvelous as all that!" "Not to you, perhaps -- you live here!" Ullward smiled. "Well, I must say I live here and still like it. Would you like to have lunch, or perhaps you'd prefer to walk around for a few minutes? I've just finished making a few changes, but I'm happy to say everything is in order." "Can we just take a look?" "Of course. Come over here. Stand just so. Now -- are you ready? "Ready." Ullward snapped the wall back. "Ooh!" breathed Landine. "Isn't it beautiful!" "The space, the open feeling!" "Look, a tree! What a wonderful simulation!" "That's no simulation," said Ullward. "That's a genuine tree!" "Lamster Ullward, are you telling the truth?" "I certainly am. I never tell lies to a lovely young lady. Come along, over this way." "Lamster Ullward, that cliff is so convincing, it frightens me." Ullward grinned. "It's a good job." He signaled a halt. "Nowturn around." The group turned. They looked out across a great golden savannah, dotted with groves of bluegreen trees. A rustic lodge commanded the view, the door being the opening into Ullward's living room. The group stood in silent admiration. Then Heulia sighed. "Space. Pure space." "I'd swear I was looking miles," said Coble. Ullward smiled, a trifle wistfully. "Glad you like my little retreat. Now what about lunch? Genuine algae!" The Number off the Beast He had to get the criminal's number -- but the wrong number meant his own number was up!  Captain, police chief of  High Chicago, the turbulent satellite that hangs over the meridian of the midwestern groundside city, "I wish that sometimes the telepathic races of the Galaxy weren't such consistent truth-tellers and silence-keepers." "Your four suspects are all telepaths?" the Old Lieutenant asked. "Yes. I also wish I had more than half an hour to decide which one to accuse. But Earthside has muscled into the case and the pressure is on. If I can't reason it out, I must make a guess. A bare half-hour they give me." "Then perhaps you shouldn't waste it with a pensioned-off old louey." The Young Captain shook his head decisively. "No. You think. You have time to now." The Old Lieutenant smiled. "Sometimes I wish I hadn't. And I doubt if I can give you any special angles on telepaths, Jim. It's true I've lately been whiling away the time on informal study of alien thought systems with Khla-Khla the Martian, but -- " "I didn't come to you looking for a specialist on telepathy," the Young Captain asserted sharply. "Very well then, Jim. You know what you're doing. Let's hear your case. And give me background. I don't keep up with the news." THE Young Captain looked skeptical. "Everyone in High Chicago has heard about the murder -- not two furlongs from here -- of the representative of the Arcturian peace party." "I haven't," the Old Lieutenant said. "Who are the Arcturians? I tell you, for an oldster like me, the Now is just one more historical period. Better consult someone else, Jim." "No. The Arcturians are the first non-related humanoid race to turn up in the Galaxy. Non-related to Earth humans, that is. True, they have three eyes, and six fingers on each hand, but they are hairless mammalian bipeds just the same. One of their females is the current burlesque sensation of the Star and Garter." "The police found that a good spot to keep their eyes on in my day too," the Old Lieutenant recalled, nodding. "Are the Arcturians telepaths?" "No. I'll come to the telepathy angle later. The Arcturians are split into two parties: those who want to enter the Commerce Union and open their planets to alien starships, including Earth's -- the peace party, in short -- and those who favor a policy of strict nonintercourse which, as far as we know, always ultimately leads to war. The war party is rather the stronger of the two. Any event may tip the balance." "Such as a representative of the peace party coming quietly to Earth and getting himself bumped before he even gets down from High Chicago?" "Exactly. It looks bad, Sean. It looks as if we wanted war. The other member peoples of the Commerce Union are skeptical enough already about the ultimate peacefulness of Earth's intentions toward the whole Galaxy. They look on the Arcturian situation as a test. They say that we accepted the Polarians and Antareans and all the rest as equals simply because they are so different from us in form and culture -- it's easy to admit theoretical equality with a bumblebee, say, and then perhaps do him dirt afterward. "But, our galactic critics ask, will to admit equality with a humanoid race? It's sometimes harder, you know, to agree that your own brother is a human being than to grant the title to an anonymous peasant on the others side of the globe. They say -- I continue to speak for our galactic critics -- that Earthmen will openly work for peace with Arcturus while secretly sabotaging it." "Including murder." "Right, Sean. So unless we can pin this crime on aliens -- best of all on extremists in the Arcturian war party (something I believe but can in no way prove) -- the rumor will go through the Union that Earth wants war, while the Arcturian Earth-haters will have everything their own way." "Leave off the background, Jim. How was the murder done?" smile, the Young Captain said wistfully, "With the whole Galaxy for a poison cabinet and a weapon shop, with almost every means available of subtle disguise, of sudden approach and instantaneous getaway -- everything but time machine, and some crook will come along with that any day now -- the murder had to be done with a blunt instrument and by one of four aliens domiciled in the same caravansary as the Arcturian peace-party man. "There's something very ugly, don't you think, in the vision of a blackjack gripped by the tentacle of an octopoid or in the pinchers of a black Martian? To be frank, Sean, I'd rather the killer had been fancier in his modus operandi. It would have let me dump the heavy end of the case in the laps of the science boys." "I was always grateful myself when I could invoke the physicists," the Old Lieutenant agreed. "It's marvelous what colored lights and the crackle of Geiger counters do to take the pressure off a plain policeman. These four aliens you mention are the telepaths?" "Right, Sean. Shady characters, too, all four of them, criminals for hire, which makes it harder. And each of them takes the typical telepath point of view -- Almighty, how it exasperates me! -- that we ought to know which one of them is guilty without asking questions! They know well enough that Earthmen aren't telepathic, but still they hide behind the lofty pretense that every intelligent inhabitant of the Cosmos must be telepathic. "If you come right out and tell them that your mind is absolutely deaf-dumb-and-blind to the thoughts of others, they act as if you'd made a dreadful social blunder and they cover up for you by pretending not to have heard you. Talk about patronizing -- ! Why, they're like a woman who is forever expecting you to know what it is she's angry about without ever giving you a hint what it is. They're like-" "Now, now, I've dealt with a few telepaths in my time, Jim. I take it that the other prong of your dilemma is that if you officially accuse one of them, and you hit it right, then he will up and confess like a good little animal, using the ritual of speech to tell you who commissioned the murder and all the rest of it, and everything will be rosy. "But if you hit it wrong, it will be a mortal insult to his whole race -- to all telepaths, for that matter -- and there will be whole solar systems moving to resign from the Union and all manner of other devils to pay. Because, continuing the telepath's fiction that you are a telepath yourself, you must have known he was innocent and yet you accused him."L"-Young Captain admitted ruefully. "As I said at the beginning, truth-tellers and silence-keepers -- intellectual prigs, all of them! Refusing to betray each others' thoughts to a non-telepath, I can understand that -- though just one telepathic stoolpigeon would make police work ten mountains easier. But all these other lofty idealistic fictions do get my goat! If I were running the Union -- " "Jim, your time is running short. I take it you want help in deciding which one to accuse. That is, if you do decide to chance it rather than shut your mouth, lose face and play for time." "I've got to chance it, Sean -- Earthside demands it. But as things stand, I'll be backing no better than a three-to-one shot. For you see, Sean, every single suspect of the four is just as suspect as the others. In my book, they're four equally bad boys." "Sketch me your suspects then, quickly." The Old Lieutenant closed his eyes. "There's Tlik-Tcha the Martian," the Young Captain began, ticking them off on his fingers. "A nasty black beetle, that one. Held his breath for twenty minutes and then belched it in my face. Kept printing 'No Comment' white-onblack on his chest to whatever I asked him. In Garamond type!" "Cheer up, Jim. It might have been Rustic Capitals. Next." "Hlilav the Antarean multibrach. Kept gently waving his tentacles all through the interrogation -- I thought he was trying to hypnotize me! Then it occurred to me he might be talking in code, but the interpreter said no. At the end, he gives a long insulting whistle, like some shameless swish. Whistle didn't signify anything either, the interpreter said, beyond a polite wish for my serenity. "Third customer was Fa the Rigelian composite. Took off a limb -- real, of course, not artificial -- and kept fiddling with it while I shot questions at him. I could hardly keep my mind on what I was saying -- expected him to take his head off next! He did that too, just as he started back to his cell." exasperating," the Old Lieutenant agreed. "I always had great trouble in keeping in mind what a boring business a vocal interview must be to them -- very much as if a man, quite capable of speech, should insist on using pencil and paper to conduct a conversation with you, with perhaps the further proviso that you print your remarks stylishly. Your fourth suspect, Jim?" "Hrohrakak the Polarian centipedal. He reared up in a great question-mark bend when I addressed him -- looked very much like a giant cobra covered with thick black fur. Kept chattering to himself too, very low -- interpreter said he was saying over and over again, 'Oh, All-father, when will this burden be lifted from me?' Halfway through, he reaches out a little black limb to Donovan to give him what looks like a pret"Oh, naughty, naughty," the Old Lieutenant observed, shaking his head while he smiled. "So these are your four suspects, Jim? The four rather gaudy racehorses of whom you must back one?" "They are. Each of them had opportunity. Each of them has a criminal reputation and might well have been hired to do the murder -- either by extremists in the Arcturian war party or by some other alien organization hostile to Earth -- such as the League of the Beasts with its pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo." "I don't agree with you about the League, but don't forget our own bloody-minded extremists," the Old Lieutenant reminded him. "There are devils among us too, Jim." "True, Sean. But whoever paid for this crime, any one of the four might have been his agent. For to complete the problem and tie it up in a Gordian knot a yard thick, each one of my suspects has recently and untraceably received a large sum of money -- enough so that, in each case, it might well have paid for murder." Lieutenant said, "So? Tell me about that, Jim." "Well, you know the saying that the price of a being's life anywhere in the Galaxy is one thousand of whatever happens to be the going unit of big money. And, as you know, it's not too bad a rule of thumb. In this case, the unit is gold martians, which are neither gold nor backed by Mars's bitter little bureaucracy, but -- " "I know! You've only minutes left, Jim. What were the exact amounts?" "Hlilav the Antarean multibrach had received # gold martians, Hrohrakak the Polarian centipedal # gold martians, Fa the Rigelian composite # gold martians, Tlik-Tcha the Martian coleopteroid # gold martians." "Ah -- " the Old Lieutenant said very softly. "The number of the beast." "Come again, Sean?" "'Here is wisdom,'" quoted the Old Lieutenant, still speaking very softly. '"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man'; Revelation chapter thirteen, verse eighteen. Revelation, Jim, the last book in the Bible." "I know that," the Young Captain burst out excitedly. "I also know the next words, if only because they're a favorite with numerology crackpots -- of whom I see quite a few at the station. The next words are: 'and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.' Almighty, that's Tlik-Tcha's -- that's the number of his gold martians! And we've always known that the League of the Beasts got some of its mumbo-jumbo from Earth, so why not from its Bible? Sean, you clever old devil, I'm going to play your hunch." The Young Captain sprang up. "I'm going back to the station and have the four of them in and accuse Tlik-Tcha to his face." The Old Lieutenant lifted a hand. "One moment, Jim," he said sharply. "You're to go back to the station, to be sure, and have the four of them in, yes -- but you're to accuse Fa the Rigelian." The Young Captain almost sat down again, involuntarily. "But that doesn't make sense, Sean," he protested. "Fa's number is #. That doesn't fit your clue. It's not the number of the beast." "Beasts have all sorts of numbers, Jim," the Old Lieutenant said. "The one you want is #." "But your reason, Sean? Give me your reason." "No. There's no time and you mightn't believe me if I did. You asked for my advice and I've given it to you. Accuse Fa the Rigelian." "But-" "That's all, Jim." Captain was still feeling the slow burn of his exasperation, though he was back at the station and the moment of decision weighed sickeningly upon him. What a fool he'd been, he told himself savagely, to waste his time on such an old dodderer! The nerve of the man, giving out with advice -- orders, practically! -- that he refused to justify, behaving with the whimsicality, the stubbornness -- yes, the insolence! -- that only the retired man can afford. He scanned the four alien faces confronting him across the station desk -- Tlik-Tcha's like a section of ebon bowling ball down to the three deeply recessed perceptors, Hrohrakak's a large black floormop faintly quivering, Fa's pale and humanoid, but oversize, like an emperor's death mask, Hlilav's a cluster of serially blinking eyes and greenish jowls. He wished he could toss them all in a bag and reach in -- wearing an armorplated glove -- and pick one. The room stank of disinfectants and unwashed alienity -- the familiar reek of the oldtime police station greatly diversified. The Young Captain felt the sweat trickling down his flushed forehead. He opened wide the louvre behind him and the hum of the satellite's central concourse poured in. It didn't help the atmosphere, but for a moment he felt less constricted. Then he scanned the four faces once more and the deadline desperation was back upon him. Pick a number, he thought, any number from one to two thousand. Grab a face. Trust to luck. Sean's a stubborn old fool, but the boys always said he had the damnedest luck... His finger stabbed out. "In the nexus of these assembled minds," he said loudly, "I publish the truth I share with yours, Fa -- " That was all he had time to get out. At his first movement, the Rigelian sprang up, whipped off his head and hurled it straight toward the center of the open louvre. But if the Young Captain had been unready for thought, he was more than keyed up for action. He snagged the head as it shot past, though he fell off his chair in doing it. The teeth snapped once, futilely. Then a tiny voice from the head spoke the words he'd been praying for: "Let the truth that our minds share be published forth. But first, please, take me back to my breath source..." ' and the Young Captain talked it all over. "So you didn't nab Fa's accomplices in the concourse?" the Old Lieutenant asked. "No, Sean, they got clean away -- as they very likely would have, with Fa's head, if they'd managed to lay their hands on it. Fa wouldn't rat on them." "But otherwise our fancy-boy killer confessed in full? Told the whole story, named his employers, and provided the necessary evidence to nail them and himself once and for all?" "He did indeed. When one of those telepath characters does talk, it's a positive pleasure to hear him. He makes it artistic, like an oration from Shakespeare. But now, sir, I want to ask the question you said you didn't have time to answer yesterday -- though I'll admit I'm asking it with a little different meaning than when I asked it first. You gave me a big shock then and I'll admit that I'd never have gone along and followed your advice blind the way I did, except that I had nothing else to go on, and I was impressed with that Bible quotation you had so pat -- until you told me it didn't mean what it seemed to! "But I did follow your advice, and it got me out of one of the worst jams I've ever been in -- with a pat on the back from Earthside to boot! So now let me ask you, Sean, in the name of all that's holy, how did you know so surely which one of the four it was?" "I didn't know, Jim. It's more accurate to say I guessed." C ?'V#' OU old four-flusher! Do you mean to say you just played a lucky hunch?" "Not quite, Jim. It was a guess, all right, but an educated guess. It all lay in the numbers, of course, the numbers of gold martians, the numbers of our four beasts. Tlik-Tcha's # did strongly indicate that he was in the employ of the League of the Beasts, for I understand they are great ones on symbolic actions and like to ring in the number # whenever they can. But that gets us just nowhere -- the League, though highly critical of most Earthmen, has never shown itself desirous of fomenting interstellar war. "Hrohrakak's # would indicate that he was receiving money from some organization of Earthmen, or from some alien source that happens also to use the decimal system. Anyone operating around Sol would be apt to use the decimal system. Hrohrakak's # points in no one direction. "Now as to Hlilav's # -- that number is the tenth power of two. As far as I know, no natural species of being uses the binary system. However, it is the rule with robots. The indications are that Hlilav is working for the Interstellar Brotherhood of Free Business Machines or some like organization, and, as we both know, the robots are not ones to pound the war drums or touch off the war fuses, for they are always the chief sufferers. "That leaves Fa's #. Jim, the first thing you told me about the Arcturians was that they were hexadactylic bipeds. Six fingers on one hand means # on two -- and almost a mortal certainty that the beings so equipped by nature will be using the duodecimal system, in many ways the most convenient of all. In the duodecimal system, 'one thousand' is not # times # times #, but # times # times # -- which comes out as # exactly in our decimal system. "As you said, 'one thousand' of the going unit is the price of a being's life. Someone paid 'one thousand' gold martians by an Arcturian would have # in his pocket according to our count. "The size of Fa's purse seemed to me an odds-on indication that he was in the pay of the Arcturian war party. Incidentally, he must have felt very smart getting that extra # -- a more principled beast-criminal would have scorned to profit from a mere difference in numerical systems." r I "HE Young Captain took some time before he answered. He smiled incredulously more than once, and once he shook his head. Finally he said, "And you asked me to go ahead, Sean, and make my accusation, with no more indication than that?" "It worked for you, didn't it?" the Old Lieutenant countered briskly. "And as soon as Fa started to confess, you must have known I was right beyond any possibility of doubt. Telepaths are always truth-tellers." The Young Captain shot him a very strange look. "It couldn't be, Sean -- ?" he said softly. "It couldn't be that you're a telepath yourself? That that's the alien thought system you've been studying with your Martian witch doctor?" "If it were," the Old Lieutenant replied, "I'd tell -- " He stopped. He twinkled. "Or would I?" # Star Shelf Hoyle. Harper  Bros., N.Y. # " write science-fiction than the celebrated Fred Hoyle? I, for one, never suspected a fictional bent in the makeup of such a noted cosmological theorettician. But the high quality of the narrative itself is even more astonishing. To be sure, it contains plenty of Hoyle's pet theories, but to him the story's the thing. Though his theories may be overwhelming, he never attempts to bludgeon his reader with them. In fact, there is such an abundance of spry, dry good humor that one is forced to re-evaluate his concept of this sober scientist. With the utmost of apparent ease, Hoyle writes a brand of humor that eludes the pens of pros. He has taken one of SF's hoariest chestnuts: the engulfment of Earth by cosmic catastrophe in the form of a giant cloud of gas. However, he has fresh-roasted it into a most palatable product. His story is so honest that his scientists don't come up with even a single small-scale miracle to lick the cloud, but they do outsmart the pants off their natural enemy, the professional politicians.Let's hope that Hoyle can tear himself away from cosmic contemplation long enough to write more superior fictional ventures like this. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., # r I HE ability to capture interest while giving instruction is a gift possessed by too few teachers. Clason, member in good standing of the Astronomical Society, is also a fictioneer, having penned the diverting Ark of Venus a couple of seasons back. Now he combines his talents as storyteller and lecturer in this glowing volume on self-luminous bodies. Although the publishers claim this to be a book for the layman without specialized knowledge, their statement stands amending: the reader's understanding is not hurt by a speaking acquaintance with trigonometry and logarithms. Mathematical computations and formulae abound and are sure to be a pure delight to the wellgrounded reader. However, there is so much other rewarding material, presented at times in a downright charming manner, that the lack of special education is no deterrent to enjoyment and learning. For example, in comparing the tidal theory of planetary birth with the condensation theory: "Copulation between stars is no longer necessary. Virgin births are the prevailing rule." But Clason isn't just being cute. His object is education and his reader learns and likes it. J. B. Lippincott, Phila., #L ' have salted away countless humans in dreamland ever since Lawrence Manning came up with the escape formula back in the old days. In Maine's second "menacing" novel for Lippincott (#I being Isotope Man), his insomniac inventor, "Dr." Maxwell, discovers Psychotape while searching for the surcease of sleep. Unfortunate ly, like XP in Shepherd Mead's Big Ball of Wax, Psychotape plays back the emotions of whoever made the recording. And as every meddling author has discovered since Manning, emotional reproductions constitute both Big Business and a Menace, (justification of nomenclature). Since Isotope Man is Hollywood bound, how could the equally dismal The Man Who Couldn't Sleep be left behind? MacMillan Co., N. Y., # ish Interplanetary Society." Say that to a man-in-the-street and he will picture a wild-eyed visionary with head in the sky and feet solidly planted on the clouds. This image would be rapidly dispelled by Burgess's jaundiced look in sober fashion at the possibilities and probabilities of space flight based on our present technology. He finds that, von Braun aside, our massive manned assaults on space must await technological advances requiring at least a couple of decades. Of course, scientific breakthroughs are occurring that can lessen the interval, but world political tensions preclude enormous expenditures, according to Burgess. Since his material was assembled before October '#, he reckoned without the impact on American efforts of the Soviet successes. And who knows what the Russian sleeve is hiding? In any case, although an excellent study of the space problem, it undoubtedly errs on the side of caution. IT by Jules Verne. J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila., N. Y ., # T T would be capricious to attempt a review of a world-famous classic. I had intended writing, "Following his enormous recent successes ( Twenty Thousand Leagues and Around the World), Verne has captivated the imagination of the world with his prophetic account of a pre-Sputnik moon shot." However, sober consideration has humbled my approach to the quaintly written and frequently error-ridden book. Although Verne never laid hand to experimental object, no single person can claim as much credit for Man's present efforts to escape the confines of Earth. Lippincott be praised for this re-issue. by Kenneth W. Gatland and Derek D. Dempster. David McKay Co. Inc., N. Y., # A T first glance, it may appear that Gatland leaps wildly in all directions since he attempts to reconcile the microwith the macro-cosmic; the material with the spiritual; the fumbling beginnings of life with psi powers. He admittedly "Casts his net wide and deep," but he has come up with, not something fishy, but real brain food. The existence of anti-matter nas been speculation matter since Jack but in # the anti-proton was discovered and the anti-neuron in '#. The possible became actual. And did you know that in '# no less than # electronic and astronautical firms were' working on anti-gravities? That's a brainstopper but by no means the topper in this always interesting book. Press, N. Y # reviewer encounters a volume that engenders wonder -- pure wonder, not the "sense of" that elderly fans wonder about having lost. This is such a book. It is an account of a space trip to Phobos, circumference # miles, diameter # miles. This is the same satellite of Mars that you and I know? The narrative abounds in other new and equally unsuspected information and absolutely yawns and creaks with narrative tension. hero, after suffering with the reader through the boredom of a long voyage, finally returns from Phobos with a concordat between Mars and the U.S., the "superior race" on Earth. The dust jacket is a truly beautiful job which, once again, goes to prove that one just can't judge a book. tlesey House, N.Y., Toronto, # van's definitive work on the Antarctic, provides the source material for this volume slanted for a more youthful audience. In his own words, though, it "is no watered-down account but shorter, easier reading than the highly deMy observation, in fact, is that there is some material, particularly in the poignant episode of the doomed Scott expedition, that did not appear anywhere at all in the longer book. Sullivan has done well by the story of this huge, challenging deepfreeze continent. Whittlesey House, N. Y., Toronto, # jVI" RS. Hyde's book is an expertly executed resume of at about junior high school level. The various areas of investigation receive careful documentation. The net result is a coverage that is as authoritative as and more assimilable than its predecessors. Time Killer Hunted by the living and haunted by the dead... Blaine had to do a lot better than merely look alive to stay alive in this grim world! T homas blaine, a young yacht designer, is killed in a car crash while driving home to New York. He comes to life # years in the future, in a different body. He is questioned by man, president of the Rex Corporation, which has snatched Blaine's mind into the future. Reilly learns that Blaine is not the man that Rex was trying to save. Blaine is saved from Reilly's wrath by beautiful young woman employed by Reilly, who tells Blaine about subsidiary. This corporation guarantees, for a high fee, the certainty of life after death. Blaine also learns about between Earth and the hereafter, inhabited by advisory spirits not yet ready for full transition to the hereafter, and by minds which have gone insane during the trauma of death. The Hereafter Corporation has been trying to sell their life-afterdeath insurance to the organized religions, which do not accept the scientific hereafter. Reilly hoped to open this large potential market by bringing a religious leader from # to #. Instead, he got Blaine -- who remembers nothing about the Threshold through which he passed. Blaine is asked to commit suicide in exchange for the precious hereafter insurance. He refuses. Reilly thinks he will change his mind, and allows Blaine to witness his reincarnation into a younger body which he has bought on the open market. The reincarnation is begun, but a spirit fights Reilly for possession of the host body, and wins. comes to be called, can remember nothing. He is barely able to control the corpselike host body, which had remained dead too long for successful integration. Smith has, therefore, a disease of the times, known as Zombieism. Although he remembers nothing else, the zombie Smith thinks he knows Blaine -- and plans to see him again. Marie Thorne takes Blaine away from Rex for his safety, and turns him over to But Ore, with the aid of a Transplant steerer named Joe, drugs Blaine. Ore is leader of a gang of body snatchers. Blaine learns this from oner. Legal bodies are scarce, so there is a thriving black market in them for reincarnation purposes. Blaine is chloroformed and comes to consciousness in Marie Thorne's apartment. She didn't know that Ore was a body snatcher. When she found out, she bought Blaine back. Blaine asks her to rescue his friend Ray Melhill, but ifs too latte. Melhill is already dead and his body inhabited by another man. Blaine goes out in search of work, but finds no jobs he can perform in the complex world of #. Even the position of 'man from the pasf is filled -- by a fraud named Ben Therler. Blaine keeps looking, and learns something about life in this world where some have the assurance of life after death. He sees the public suicide booths, and watches a Berserker slash through a crowd until the police kill him. And Blaine receives a call from maintains contact with the minds in the Threshold. At the Switchboard, Blaine speaks with Ray Melhill, who has survived the death trauma. Melhill, with a spirit's clairvoyant powers, warns Blaine that he is in danger of being haunted. This is a serious matter, for ghosts, werewolves, vampires are minds that have survived the death trauma, but have gone insane during it. From Melhill, Blaine gets a job lead. He is employed by ning a Hunt. In #, rich men frequently arrange suicides when boredom becomes oppressive, and one of their gaudier methods is to employ men to hunt them down with antique weapons such as swords and spears. Hull is also armed, with a rapier, and plans to fight to the death. hunter, befriends Blaine. Jones  kills Hull on the third day of the Hunt. Blaine returns to his room. There he discovers what haunting is like. A poltergeist blocks his retreat and prepares to kill him with a levitated chair. #. A S the chair moved through the air toward him, Blaine shouted for help in a voice that made the window rattle. His only answer was the poltergeist's highpitched laugh. Were they all deaf in the hotel? Why didn't someone answer? Then he realized why no one would even consider helping him. Violence was a commonplace in this world and a man's death was entirely his own business. There would be no inquiry. The janitor would simply clean up the mess in the morning and the room would be marked vacant. The door was impassable. The only chance Blaine could see was to jump over the bed and through the closed window. If he made the leap properly, he would fall against the waist-high fire escape railing outside. If he jumped too hard, he would go right over the railing and fall three stories to the street. The chair beat him across the shoulders, and the bed rumbled forward to pin him against the wall. Blaine made a quick calculation of angles and distances, drew himself together and flung himself at the window. He hit squarely -- but he had reckoned without the advances of modern science. The window bent outward like a sheet of rubber, then snapped back into place. He was thrown against a wall and fell dazed to the floor. Looking up, he saw a heavy bureau wobble toward him and slowly tilt. As the poltergeist threw its lunatic strength against the bureau, the unwatched door swung open. Smith entered the room, his thick-featured zombie face impassive, and deflected the falling bureau with his shoulder. "Come with me," he said. Blaine asked no questions. He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the edge of the closing door. With Smith's help, he pulled it open again and the two men slipped out. From within the room, he heard a shriek of baffled rage. Smith hurried down the hall, one cold hand clasped around Blaine's wrist. They went downstairs, through the hotel lobby .and into the street. The zombie's face was leaden white except for the purple bruise where Blaine had once struck him. The bruise had spread across nearly half his face, piebalding it into a Harlequin's grotesque mask. "Where are we going?" Blaine asked. "To a safe place," said Smith. They reached an ancient unused subway entrance, and descended. One flight down, they came to a small iron door set in the cracked concrete wall. Smith opened the door and beckoned Blaine to follow him. Blaine hesitated, caught the hint of high-pitched laughter. The poltergeist was pursuing him, as the Eumenides had once pursued their victims through the streets of ancient Athens. He could stay in the lighted upper world if he wished, hag-ridden by an insane spirit. Or he could descend with Smith, through the iron door and into the darkness beyond it, to some uncertain destiny in the underworld. The shrill laughter increased. Blaine hesitated no longer. He followed Smith through the iron door and closed it behind him. OR the moment, the poltergeist had not chosen to pursue. They walked down a tunnel lighted by an occasional naked light bulb, past cracked masonry pipes and the looming gray corpse of a subway train, past rusted iron cables lying in giant serpent coils. The air was moist and rank, and a thin slime underfoot made walking treacherous. "Where are we going?" Blaine asked. "To where I can protect you from ghost attacks," Smith said. "Can you?" "Spirits aren't invulnerable. Exorcism is possible if the true identity of the ghost is known." "Then you know who is haunting me?" "I think so. There's only one person it logically could be." "Who?" Smith shook his head. "I'd rather not mention his name yet. No sense calling him if he's not here." They descended a series of crumbling shale steps into a wider chamber, and circled the edge of a small black pond whose surface looked as hard and still as jet. On the other side of the pond was a passageway. A man stood in front of it, blocking the way. He was a tall, husky Negro, dressed in rags, armed with a length of iron pipe. From his look, Blaine knew he was a zombie. "This is my friend," Smith said. "May I bring him through?" "You sure he's no inspector?" "Absolutely sure." "Wait here," the Negro said. He disappeared into the passageway. "Where are we?" asked Blaine. "Underneath New York, in a series of unused subway tunnels, old sewer conduits, and some passageways we've fashioned for ourselves." "But why did we come here?" "Where else would we go?" Smith asked, surprised. "This is my home. Didn't you know? You're in New York's zombie colony." bie colony much improvement over a ghost; but he didn't have time to think about it. The Negro returned. With him was a very old man who walked with the aid of a stick. The old man's face was broken into a network of a thousand lines and wrinkles. His eyes barely showed through the fine scrollwork of sagging flesh and even his lips were wrinkled. "This is the man you told me about?" he inquired reedily. "Yes, sir," said Smith. "This is the man. Blaine, let me introduce you to Mr. Kean, the leader of our colony. May I take him through, sir?" "You may," the old man said. "And I will accompany you for a while." They started down the passageway, Mr. Kean supporting himself heavily on the Negro's arm. "In the usual course of events," said Mr. Kean, "only zombies are allowed in the colony. All others are barred. But it has been years since I spoke with a normal and I thought the experience might be valuable. Therefore, at Smith's earnest request, I made an exception in your case." "I'm very grateful," Blaine said, hoping he had reason to be. "Don't misunderstand me. I am not averse to helping you. But first and foremost I am responsible for the safety of the eleven hundred zombies living beneath New York. For their sake, normals must be kept out. Isolation is our only hope in an ignorant world." Mr. Kean paused. "But perhaps you can help us, Blaine." "How?" "By listening and understanding, and passing on what you have learned. Education alone can combat ignorance. Tell me, what do you know about the problems of a zombie?" "Very little." "I will instruct you. Zombieism, Mr. Blaine, is a disease which has long had a powerful aura of superstition surrounding it, comparable to the aura generated by such diseases as epilepsy, leprosy, or St. Vitus' Dance. The spiritualizing tendency is a common one. Schizophrenia, you know, was once thought to mean possession by devils, and hydrocephalic idiots were considered peculiarly blessed. Similar fantasies attach to zombieism." few moments. Mr. Kean said, "The superstition of the zombie is essentially Haitian; the disease of the zombie is worldwide, although rare. But the superstition and the disease have become hopelessly confused in the public mind. The zombie of superstition is an element of the Haitian vodun cult, a human being whose soul has been stolen by magic. The zombie's body could be used as the magician wished, could even be slaughtered and sold for meat in the marketplace. If the zombie ate salt or beheld the sea, he realized that he was dead and returned to his grave. For all this, of course, there is no basis in fact. "The superstition arose from the descriptively similar disease. Once it was exceedingly rare. But today, with the increase in mind-switching and reincarnation techniques, zombieism has become more common. The disease of the zombie occurs when a mind occupies a body that has been untenanted too long. Mind and body are not then one, as yours are, Mr. Blaine. They exist, instead, as quasi-independent entities engaged in an uneasy cooperation. "Take our friend Smith as typical. He can control his body's gross physical actions, but fine coordination is impossible for him. His voice is incapable of discrete modulation and his ears do not receive subtle differences in tone. His face is expressionless, for he has little or no control over surface musculature. He drives his body, but is not truly a part of it." "And can't anything be done?" Blaine asked. "At the present time, nothing," said Kean. "I'm very sorry," Blaine said uncomfortably. "This is not a plea for your sympathy," Kean told him. "It is a request only for the most elementary understanding. I simply want you and everyone to know that zombieism is not a visitation of sins, but a disease, like mumps or cancer, and nothing more." Mr. Kean leaned against the wall of the passageway to catch his breath. "To be sure, the zombie's appearance is unpleasant. He shambles, his wounds never heal, he mumbles like an idiot, staggers like a drunk, stares like a pervert. But is this any reason to make him the repository of all guilt and shame upon Earth, the leper of the #nd century? They say that zombies attack people; yet his body is fragile in the extreme, and the average zombie couldn't resist even a very young child's determined assault. "They believe the disease is communicable and this is obviously not so. They say that zombies are sexual monsters, whereas the truth is that a zombie experiences no sexual feeling whatsoever. But people refuse to learn, and zombies are outcasts fit only for the hangman's noose or the lyncher's burning stake." "What about the authorities?" asked Blaine. M R. Kean smiled bitterly. "They used to lock us up, as a kindness, in mental institutions. You see, they didn't want us hurt. Yet zombies are . rarely insane and the authorities knew it! So now, with their tacit approval, we occupy these abandoned subway tunnels and sewer lines." "Couldn't you find a better place?" Blaine asked. "Frankly, the underground suits us. Sunlight is bad for unregenerative skins." They began walking again. Blaine said, "What can I do?" "You can tell what you learned here. Write about it, perhaps. Widening ripples..." "I'll do what I can." "Thank you," Mr. Kean said gravely. "Education is our one hope. Education and the future. Surely people will be more enlightened in the future." The future? Blaine felt suddenly dizzy. For this was the future, to which he had traveled from the idealistic and hopeful #th century. Now was the future! But the promised enlightenment still had not come and people were much the same as ever. He felt disoriented and old, older than Kean, older than the human race -- a creature in a borrowed body standing in a place it did not know. "And now," Mr. Kean said, "we have reached your destination." Blaine blinked rapidly and life came back into focus. The dim passageway had ended. In front of him was a rusted iron ladder fastened to the tunnel wall, leading upward into darkness. "Good luck," said Mr. Kean. He left, supporting himself heavily on the Negro's arm. Blaine watched the old man go, then turned to Smith. "Where are we going?" "Up the ladder." "But where does it lead?" Smith had already begun climbing. He stopped and looked down, his lead-colored lips drawn back into a grin. "We're going to visit a friend of yours, Blaine. We're going into his tomb, up to his coffin, and ask him to stop haunting you. Force him, maybe." "A friend of mine?" Blaine repeated worriedly. "Who is he?" Smith only grinned and continued climbing. Blaine mounted the ladder behind him. # . ventilation shaft, which led to another passageway. They came at last to a door and went in. ly lighted room. Upon the arched ceiling was a mural depicting a handsome, clear-eyed man entering a gauzy blue heaven in the company of angels. Blaine knew at once who had sat for the painting. "Reilly!" Smith nodded. "We're inside his Palace of Death." "How did you know Reilly was haunting me?" "Only two people connected with you have died recently. The ghost certainly was not Ray Melhill. It had to be Reilly." "But why?" "I don't know," Smith said. "Perhaps Reilly will tell you himself." Blaine looked at the walls. They were inlaid with crosses, crescent moons, stars and swastikas, as well as Indian, African, Arabian, Chinese and Polynesian good-luck signs. On pedestals around the room were statues of ancient deities. Among the dozens, Blaine recognized Zeus, Apollo, Damballa, Odin and Astarte. In front of each pedestal was an altar, and on each altar was a cut and polished jewel. "What's that for?" Blaine asked. "Propitiation." "But life after death is a scientific fact." "Mr. Kean maintains that science has little effect upon superstition," Smith said. "Reilly was fairly sure he'd survive after death, but he saw no reason to take chances. Also, Mr. Kean says that the very rich, like the very religious, wouldn't enjoy a hereafter filled with just anybody. They think that, by suitable rites and symbols, they can get into a more exclusive part of the hereafter." "Is there a more exclusive part?" "No one knows. As I said, Reilly was taking no chances." Smith led him across the room to an ornate door covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideographs. "Reilly's body is inside here," Smith said. "And we're going in?" "We have to." Blaine saw a vast marble-pillared room. In its very center was a bronze and gold coffin inlaid with jewels. Surrounding the coffin was a great and bewildering quantity of goods -- paintings and sculptures, musical instruments, carvings, objects like washing machines, stoves, refrigerators, even a complete helicopter. There were clothing and books, and a lavish banquet had been laid out. "What's all this stuff for?" Blaine asked. "The essence of these goods is intended to accompany the owner into the hereafter. It's an old belief." "And that?" Blaine pointed to a high marble altar in a corner of the room. Upon the altar's broad surface was a mound of gray ashes and a few charred bones. "That's where the Rex Corporation officials make the weekly burnt offerings to Reilly." "Why do they bother?" "It's the only way they can pay Reilly's ghost for looking into the future and advising the corporation on business matters. The burnt offerings are supposed to confer special maria -- power -- on the spirit and help free him from the Wheel of Things. With no sacrifices, Reilly would fear being pulled back into a descending order of reincarnation and being reborn as a toad, perhaps, or a pig. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls is firmly believed among the rich." Blaine's first reaction was one of pity. The scientific hereafter hadn't freed men from the fear of death, as it should have done v On the contrary, it had intensified their uncertainties and stimulated their competitive drive. Given the surety of an afterlife, man wanted to improve upon it, to enjoy a better heaven than anyone else. Equality was all very well, but individual initiative came first. A perfect and passionless leveling was no more palatable an idea in the hereafter than it was on Earth. The desire to surpass caused a man like Reilly to build a tomb like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, to brood all his life about death, to live continually trying to find ways of preserving his property and status in the gray uncertainties ahead. A shame. And yet, Blaine thought, wasn't his pity based upon a lack of belief in the efficacy of Reilly's measures? Suppose you could improve your situation in the hereafter? In that case, what better way to spend one's time on Earth than working for a better eternity? The proposition seemed reasonable, but Blaine refused to believe it. That couldn't be the only reason for existence on Earth! Good or bad, fair or foul, the thing had to be lived for its own sake. A S Smith walked slowly into the coffin room, Blaine stopped his speculations. The zombie stood contemplating a small table covered with ornaments. Dispassionately, he kicked the table over. Then slowly, one by one, he ground the delicate ornaments into the polished marble floor. "What are you doing?" Blaine gasped. "You want the poltergeist to leave you alone, don't you?" "Of course." "Then he must have some reason for leaving you alone," Smith said, kicking over an elaborate ebony sculpture. It seemed reasonable enough to Blaine. Even a ghost must know he will eventually leave the Threshold and enter the hereafter. When he does, he wants his goods waiting for him, intact. Therefore fight fire with fire, persecution with persecution. Still, he felt like a vandal when he picked up an oil painting and prepared to shove his fist through it. "Don't!" ordered a voice above his head. Above them there seemed to be a faint silvery mist. From the mist, an attenuated voice said, "Please put down the painting." Blaine held onto it, his fist poised. "Are you Reilly?" "Yes." "Why are you haunting me?" "Because you're responsible! Everything's your fault! You killed me with your evil murdering mind! Yes, you, you hideous thing from the past, you damned monster!" "I didn't!" Blaine cried. "You did! You aren't human! You aren't natural! Everything shuns you except your friend the dead man! Why aren't you dead, murderer!" Blaine's fist moved toward the painting. The thin voice screamed, "Don't!" "Will you leave me alone?" Blaine persisted. "Put down the painting," Reilly begged. Blaine put it carefully down. "I'll leave you alone," Reilly promised. "Why shouldn't I? There are things you can't see, Blaine, but I see them. Your time on Earth will be short, very short, painfully short. Those you trust will betray you; those you hate will conquer you. You will die, Blaine, not in years but sooner than you could believe. You'll be betrayed and you'll die by your own hand." "You're crazy!" Blaine frightenedly shouted. "Am I?" Reilly cackled. "Am I? Am I?" The .silvery mist vanished. Reilly was gone. Smith led him back through narrow winding passageways to the street level. Outside, the air was chilly and dawn had touched the tall buildings with red and gray. Blaine started to thank him, but Smith shook his head. "No reason for thanks. After all, I need you, Blaine. Where would I be if the poltergeist killed you? Take care of yourself, be careful. Nothing is possible for me without you." The zombie gazed anxiously at him for a moment, then hurried away. Blaine watched him go, wondering if it wouldn't be better to have a dozen enemies than Smith for a friend. # . at Marie Thorne's apartment. Marie, without makeup, dressed in a housecoat, blinked sleepily and led him to the kitchen, where she dialed coffee, toast and scrambled eggs. "I wish," she said, "you'd make your dramatic appearances at a decent hour. It's six-thirty in the morning." "I'll try to do better in the future," Blaine replied cheerfully. "You said you'd call. What happened to you?" "Did you worry?" "Not in the least. What happened?" Between bites of toast, Blaine told her about the hunt, the haunting, and the exorcism. She listened to it all, then said, "So you're obviously very proud of yourself, and I guess you should be. But you still don't know what Smith wants from you, or even who he is." "Haven't the slightest idea," Blaine said. "Smith doesn't, either. Frankly, I couldn't care less." "What happens when he finds out?" "I'll worry about that when it happens." Marie raised both eyebrows but made no comment. "Tom, what are your plans now?" "I'm going to get a job." "As a hunter?" "No. Logical or not, I'm going to try the yacht design agencies. Then I'm going to come around here and bother you at reasonable hours. How does that sound?" "Impractical. Do you want some good advice?" "No." "I'm giving it to you anyhow. Tom, get out of New York. Go as far away as you can. Go to Fiji or Samoa." "Why should I?" Marie began to walk restlessly around the kitchen. "You simply don't understand this world." "I think I do." "No! You've had a few typical experiences, Tom -- that's all. But that doesn't mean you've assimilated our culture. You've been snatched, haunted, and you've gone on a hunt. But it adds up to not much more than a guided tour. Reilly was right -- you're as lost and helpless as a caveman would be in your own #." "That's ridiculous and I object to the comparison." "All right, let's make it a #thcentury Chinese. Suppose this hypothetical Chinese had met a gangster, gone on a bus ride and seen Coney Island. Would you say he understood #th-century America?" "Of course not. But what's the point?" "The point," she said, "is that you aren't safe here, and you can't even sense what or where or how urgent the dangers are. For one, that damned Smith is after you. Next, Reilly's heirs might not take kindly to you desecrating his tomb; they might find it necessary to do something about it. And the directors at Rex are still arguing about what they should do about you. You've altered things, changed things, disrupted things. Can't you feel it?" "I can handle Smith," Blaine said confidently. "To hell with Reilly's heirs. As for the directors, what can they do to me?" "Tom," she told him earnestly, "any man born here who found himself in your shoes would run as fast as he could!" ings. He had survived the dangers of the hunt, had passed through the iron door into the underworld and won through again to the light. Now, sitting in Marie's sunny kitchen, he felt elated and at peace with the world. Danger seemed an academic problem not worthy of discussion at the moment, and the idea of running away from New York was absurd. "Tell me," Blaine said lightly, "among the things I've disrupted -- is one of them you?" "I'm probably going to lose my job, if that's what you mean." "That's not what I mean." "Then let's not discuss it. Will you get out of New York?" "No. And please stop sounding so panicky." "Oh, Lord," she sighed, "we talk the same language, but I'm not getting through. You don't understand. Let me try an example." She thought for a moment. "Suppose a man owned a sailboat -- " "Do you sail? Blaine asked. "Yes, I love sailing. Tom, listen to me! Suppose a man owned a sailboat in which he was planning an ocean voyage -- " "Across the sea of life," Blaine filled in. "You're not funny," she said, looking very pretty and serious. "This man doesn't know anything about boats. He sees it floating, nicely painted, everything in place. He can't imagine any danger. Then you look the boat over. You see that the frames are cracked, teredos have gotten into the rudder post, there's dry rot in the mast, the sails are mildewed, the keel bolts are rusted, and the fastenings are ready to let go." "Where'd you learn so much about boats?" "I've been sailing since I was a kid. Will you please pay attention? You tell that man his boat is not seaworthy; the first gale is likely to sink him." "We'll have to go sailing sometime," Blaine said. "But this man," Marie continued doggedly, "doesn't know anything about boats. The thing looks all right. And the worst of it is you can't tell him exactly what is going to happen, or when. Maybe the boat will hold together for a month, or a year, of maybe only a week. Maybe the keel bolts will go first, or perhaps it'll be the mast. You just don't know. And that's the situation here. I can't tell you what's going to happen or when. I just know you're unseaworthy. You must get out of here!" She looked at him hopefully. Blaine nodded and said, "You'll make one hell of a crew." "So you're not going?" "No. I've been up all night. The only place I'm going now is to bed. Would you care to join me?" "Go to hell!" "Darling, please! Where's your pity for a homeless wanderer from the past?" "I'm going out," she said. "Help yourself to the bedroom. But you'd better think about what I told you." "Sure," said Blaine. "But why should I worry when I have you looking out for me?" "Smith's looking out for you, too," she said, and left the kitchen. and turned in. He awoke in the early afternoon. Marie still hadn't returned, so before leaving he wrote her a cheerful note with the address of his hotel. During the next few days, he visited most of the yacht design agencies in New York, without success. His old firm, Mattison  Peters, was long defunct. The other firms weren't interested. Finally, at Jaakobsen Yachts, Ltd., the head designer questioned him closely about the now-extinct Chesapeake Bay and Bahamas work boats. Blaine demonstrated his considerable knowledge of the types, as well as his out-of-date draftsmanship. "We get some calls for antique and exotic boats," the head designer said. "There are always people who want to sail something different from what their neighbor's got. We've turned out luggers, proas, sailing barges, junks, dhows, brigs, barks, and so forth. Some Chesapeake skipjacks and bugeyes might go very well right now, and some of those #th-century Bahamas jobs with the baggy sails. Hm. Tell you what. We'll hire you as office boy. You can do #th-century hulls on a commission basis and study up on your designing, which, frankly, is oldfashioned. When you're ready, we'll upgrade you. What do you say?" It was an inferior position, but it was a job, a legitimate job, with a fine chance for advancement. It meant that at least he had a real place in the world of #. "I'll take it," Blaine said, "with thanks." That evening, by way of celebration, he went to a Sensory Shop to buy a player and a few recordings. He was entitled, he thought, to a little basic luxury. The sensories were an inescapable part of #, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine's day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were, to date, the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone. But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and, in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision. In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life. Such an impression could not be allowed, even if it were true. Sensories were vicious, dangerous! To be sure, some valid artistic work was done in the sensory form. (One could not discount Verreho, Johnston or Telkin, and Blue Fox showed promise). But there was not much good work. And weighed against the damaging psychic effects, the lowering of popular taste, the drift toward complete passivity... In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting! It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his # years of perspective, remembered the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure literature. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive, and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age -- to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation. The sensories, good or bad, were here. Blaine entered the store to partake of them. models, he bought a mediumpriced Bendix player. Then, with the clerk's aid, he chose three popular recordings and took them into a booth to play. Fastening the electrodes to his forehead, he turned the first one on. It was a popular historical, a highly romantic rendition of the Chanson de Roland, done in a lowintensity non-identification technique that allowed large battle effects and massed movements. The dream began... and Blaine was in the pass of Roncesvalles on that hot and fateful August morning in #, standing with Roland's rear guard, watching the main body of Charlemagne's army wind slowly on toward Frankland. The tired veterans slumped in their high-cantied saddles; leather creaked, spurs jingled against bronze stirrupguards. There was a smell of pine and sweat in the air, a hint of smoke from razed Pampelona, a taste of oiled steel and dry summer grass... Blaine decided to buy it. The next was a high-intensity chase on Venus, in which the viewer identified fully with the hunted but innocent man. The last was a variable-intensity recording of War and Peace, with occasional identification sections. As he paid for his purchases, the clerk winked at him and said, "Interested in the real stuff?" "Maybe," Blaine said. "I got some great party records," the clerk told him. "Full identification, with switches yet. No? Got a genuine horror piece -- man dying in quicksand. The murderers recorded his death for the specialty trade." "Perhaps some other time." "And also," the clerk rushed on, "I got a special recording, legitimately made but withheld from the public. A few copies are being bootlegged around. Man reborn from the past. Absolutely genuine." "Really?" "Yes, it's perfectly unique. The emotions come through clear as a bell, sharp as a knife. A collector's item. I predict it'll become a classic." "That I'd like to hear," Blaine said grimly. He took the unlabeled record back to the booth. In ten minutes, he came out again, somewhat shaken, and purchased it for an exorbitant price. It was like buying a piece of himself. The clerk and the Rex technicians were right. It was a real collector's item and would probably become a classic. Unfortunately, all names had been carefully erased to prevent the police from tracing its source. He was famous -- but in a completely anonymous fashion. # . day, swept the floor, emptied the wastepaper baskets, addressed After a while, he was given a few small assignments writing publicity releases. He proved talented at this and was soon promoted to the position of junior yacht designer. envelopes and did a few antique hulls on commission. In the evenings, he studied the complex science of advanced #nd-century yacht design. He began handling much of the liaison between Jaakobsen Yachts, Ltd., and the various yards building to their designs. He continued to study, but there were few requests for classic hulls. The Jaakobsen brothers handled most of the stock boats, while old Ed Richter, known as the Marvel of Salem, drew up the unusual racers and multi-hulls. Blaine took over publicity and advertising and had no time for anything else. It was responsible, necessary work. But it was not yacht designing. Irrevocably, his life in # was falling into much the same pattern it had assumed in #. Blaine pondered this carefully. On the one hand, he was happy about it. It seemed to settle, once and for all, the conflict between his mind and his borrowed body. Obviously his mind was boss. On the other hand, the situation didn't speak too well for the quality of that mind. Here was a man who had traveled # years into the future, had passed through wonders and horrors, and was working again, with a weary and terrible inevitability, as a junior yacht designer who did everything but design yachts. Was there some fatal flaw in his character, some hidden defect which doomed him to inferiority no matter what his environment? Moodily, he pictured himself to a caveman era. Doubtless, after a period of initial adjustment, he would become a junior designer of dugouts. Only not really a designer. His job would be to count the wampum, check the quality of the tree trunks and contract for outriggers, while some other fellow (probably a Neanderthal genius) did the actual designing. It was disheartening. But fortunately it was not the only way of viewing the matter. His inevitable return could also be taken as a fine example of personal solidarity, of internal steadfastness. He was a man who knew what he was. No matter how his environment changed, he remained true to his function. Viewed this way, he could be very proud of being eternally and forever a junior yacht designer. He continued working, fluctuating between these two basic views of himself. Once or twice he saw Marie, but she was usually busy in the high councils of the Rex Corporation. He moved out of his hotel and into a small, tastefully furnished apartment. New York was beginning to feel like home to him. And, he remined himself, if he had gained nothing else, he had at least settled his mind-body problem. But his body was not to be disregarded so lightly. Blaine had overlooked one of the problems likely to exist with the ownership of a strong, handsome and highly idiosyncratic body such as his. One day the conflict flared again, more aggravated than ever. time and was waiting at a corner for his helibus. He noticed a woman staring intently at him. She was perhaps twenty-five years old, a buxom, attractive redhead. She was commonly dressed. Her features were bold, yet they had a certain wistful quality. Blaine realized that he had seen her before but never really noticed her. Now that he thought about it, she had once ridden a bus with him. Once she had entered a store nearly on his heels. And several times she had been passing his building when he left work. She had been watching him, probably for weeks. But why? The woman hesitated a moment, then said, "Could I talk to you a moment?" Her voice was husky, pleasant, but very nervous. "Please, Mr. Blaine, it's terribly important." So she knew his name. "Sure," Blaine said. "What is it?" "Not here. Could we -- uh -- go somewhere?" Blaine grinned and shook his head. She seemed harmless enough, but so had Carl Ore. Trusting strangers in this world was a good way of losing your mind, your body, or both. "I don't know you," Blaine said, "and I don't know where you learned my name. Whatever you want, you'd better tell me here." "I really shouldn't be bothering you," the woman said in a discouraged voice. "But I couldn't stop myself; I had to talk to you. I get so lonely sometimes. You know how it is?" "Lonely? Sure, but why do you want to talk to me?" She looked at him sadly. "That's right, you don't know." "No, I don't," Blaine said patiently. "Why?" "Can't we go somewhere? I don't like to say it in public like this." "You'll have to," said Blaine, beginning to think that this was a very complicated game indeed. "Oh, all right," the woman said, visibly embarrased. "I've been following you around for a long time, Mr. Blaine. I found out your name and where you worked. I had to talk to you. It's all on account of that body of yours." "What?" "If our body," she repeated, not looking at him. "You see, it used to be my husband's body before he sold it to the Rex Corporation." Blaine's mouth opened, but he could find no adequate words. #I . that his body had lived its own life in the world before it had been given to him. It had acted, decided, loved, hated, made its own individual imprint upon society and woven its own complex and lasting web of relationships. He could even have assumed that it had been married; most host bodies were. But he had preferred not thinking about it. He had let himself believe that everything concerning the previous owner had conveniently disappeared. His own meeting with Ray Melhill's snatched body should have shown him how naive that attitude was. Now, like it or not, he had to think about it. They went to Blaine's apartment. The woman, Alice Kranch, sat dejectedly on one side of his couch and accepted a cigarette. "The way it was," she said, "Frank -- that was my husband's name, Frank Kranch -- he was never satisfied with things, you know? He had a good job as a hunter, but he was never satisfied." "A hunter?" "Yes, he was a spearman in the China game." "Mmm," Blaine said, wondering again what had induced him to go on his own hunt, his needs or Kranch's dormant reflexes? It was annoying to have this mind-body problem come up again just when it had seemed so nicely settled. "But he wasn't ever satisfied," Alice Kranch said. "And it used to make him sore, those fancy rich guys getting themselves killed and going to the hereafter. He always hated the idea of dying like a dog." "I don't blame him," Blaine said. She shrugged her shoulders. "What can you do? Frank didn't have a chance of making enough money for hereafter insurance. It bothered him. And then he got that big wound on the shoulder that nearly put him under. I suppose you still got the scar?" Blaine nodded. "Well, he wasn't ever the same after that. Hunters usually don't think much about death, but Frank started to. He started thinking about it all the time. And then he met this dame from Rex." "Marie Thorne?" "That's the one," Alice said. "She was a skinny dame, hard as nails and cold as a fish. I couldn't understand what Frank saw in her. Oh, he played around some; most hunters do. It's on account of the danger. But there's playing around and there's playing around. Him and this fancy Rex dame were thick as thieves. I just couldn't see what Frank saw in her. I mean she was so skinny, and so tight-faced. She was pretty in a pinched sort of way, but she looked like she'd wear her clothes to bed, if you know what I mean." Blaine nodded again, this time a little painfully. "Go on." "Well, there's no accounting for some tastes, but I thought I knew Frank's. And I guess I did because it turned out he wasn't going with her. It was strictly business. It even turned out they'd known each other when they were kids at school and she was trying to do him a favor." H E blinked rapidly when he heard this. He wondered how much Marie had helped him for himself and how much out of a lingering loyalty to Kranch's body. Probably a little of both, he decided. "So anyway," Alice went on, "Frank turned up one day and said to me, 'Baby, I'm leaving you. I'm taking that big, long trip into the hereafter. There's a nice piece of change in it for you, too.' " She sighed and wiped her eyes. "That big idiot had sold his body! Rex had given him hereafter insurance and an annuity for me, and he was so damned proud of himself! Well, I talked myself blue in the face trying to get him to change his mind. No chance, he was going to eat pie in the sky. To his way of thinking, his number was up anyhow, and the next hunt would do him. So off he went. He talked to me once from the Threshold." "Is he still there?" Blaine asked, with a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. "I haven't heard from him in over a year," Alice said, "so I guess he's gone on to the hereafter. The bastard!" She cried for a few moments, then wiped her eyes with a small handkerchief and looked mournfully at Blaine. "I wasn't going to bother you. After all, it was Frank's body to sell and it's yours now. I don't have any claims on it or you. But I get so blue, so lonely." "I can imagine," Blaine murmured, thinking that she was definitely not his type. Objectively speaking, she was pretty enough. Comely but overblown. Her features were well-formed, bold, vividly colored. Her hair, although obviously not a natural red, was shoulder length and of a smooth texture. She was the sort of woman he could picture, hands on hips, arguing with a policeman, hauling in a fishnet, dancing to a flamenco guitar, or herding goats on a mountain path with a full skirt swishing around ample hips and peasant blouse distended. But she was not to his taste. However, he reminded himself, Frank Kranch had found her very much to his taste. And he was wearing Kranch's body. "Most of our friends," Alice was saying, "were hunters in the China game. Oh, they dropped around sometimes after Frank left. But you know hunters; they've got just one thing on their minds." "Is that a fact?" said Blaine uneasily. "Yes. And so I moved out of Peking and came back to New York, where I was born. And then one day I saw Frank -- I mean you. I could have fainted on the spot. I mean I might have expected it and all, but still it gives you a turn to see your husband's body walking around." "I should think so," Blaine agreed. "So I followed you. I wasn't ever going to bother you or anything, but it just kept bothering me all the time. And I sort of got to wondering what kind of a man was... I mean Frank was so -- well, he and I got along very well, if you know what I mean." "Certainly," Blaine said. "I'll bet you think I'm terrible!" "Not at all!" said Blaine. She looked him full in the face, her expression mournful and coquettish. Blaine felt Kranch's old scar throb. But remember, he told himself, Kranch is gone. Everything is Blaine now, Blaine's will, Blaine's way, Blaine's taste... Isn't it? This problem must be settled, Alice and kissing her with an unBlainelike fervor. TN the morning, Alice made breakfast. Blaine sat staring out his window, thinking dismal thoughts. Last night had proven to him conclusively that Kranch was still king of the Kranch-Blaine bodymind. For last night he had been completely unlike himself. He had been fierce, violent, rough, angry and exultant. He had been all the things he had always deplored, had acted with an abandon that unnerved him to remember. That was not Blaine. That was Kranch, the Body Triumphant. Blaine had always prized delicacy, subtlety, the grasp of nuance. Too much, perhaps. Yet those had been his virtues, the expressions of his own individual personality. With them, he was Thomas Blaine. Without them, he was less than nothing -- a shadow cast by the eternally triumphant Kranch. Gloomily, he contemplated the future. He would give up the struggle, become what his body demanded -- a fighter, a brawler, a lusty vagabond. Perhaps, in time, he would grow used to it, even enjoy it... "Breakfast's ready," Alice announced. They ate in silence and Alice moodily fingered a bruise on her forearm. At last Blaine could stand it no longer. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry." "What for?" "Everything." She smiled wanly. "That's all right. It was my fault, really." "I doubt that. Pass the butter, please." She passed the butter. They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Alice said, "I was very, very stupid." "Why?" "I guess I was chasing a dream," she said. "I thought I could find Frank all over again. I'm not really that way, Mr. Blaine. But I thought it would be like with Frank." "And wasn't it?" She shook her head. "No, of course not." Blaine put down his coffee cup carefully. He said, "I suppose Kranch was rougher. I suppose he batted you from wall to wall. I suppose -- " "Oh, no!" she cried. "Never! Mr. Blaine, Frank was a hunter and he lived a hard life. But with me he was always a perfect gentleman. He had manners, Frank had." "He had?" "He certainly had! Frank was always gentle with me, Mr. Blaine. He was -- delicate, if you know what I mean. Nice. Gentle. He was never, never rough. To tell the truth, he was the very opposite from you, Mr. Blaine." "Uh," said Blaine. "Not that there's anything wrong with you," she said with hasty kindness. "You are a little rough, but I guess it takes all kinds." "I guess it does," Blaine said. "Yes, I guess it sure does." They finished their breakfast in embarrassed silence. Alice, freed of her obsessive dream, left for her own apartment immediately afterward, with no suggestion that they meet again. Blaine sat in his big chair, staring out the window, thinking. So he wasn't like Kranch! The sad truth was, he told himself, he had acted as he imagined Kranch would have acted in similar circumstances. He had convinced himself that a strong, ac tive, hearty outdoors man would necessarily treat a woman like a wrestling bear. He had acted out a stereotype. weren't so relieved at regaining his threatened Blaineism. He frowned as he remembered Alice's description of Marie: Skinny, hard as nails, cold as a fish. More stereotyping. But, under the circumstances, he could hardly blame Alice. # . received word that a communication was waiting for him at the Spiritual Switchboard. He went there after work and was sent to the booth he had used previously. Melhill's amplified voice said, "Hello, Tom." "Hello, Ray. I was wondering where you were." "I'm still in the Threshold," Melhill told him, "but I won't be much longer. I gotta go on and see what the hereafter is like. It pulls at me. But I wanted to talk to you again, Tom. I think you should watch out for Marie Thorne." "Now, Ray-" "I mean it. She's been spending all her time at Rex. I don't know what's going on there; they got the conference rooms shielded against psychic invasion. But something's brewing over you and she's in the middle of it." "I'll keep my eyes open," Blaine said. "Tom, please take my advice. Get out of New York. Get out fast, while you still have a body, and a mind to run it with." "I'm staying," said Blaine. "You stubborn ape," Melhill said, with deep feeling. "What's the use of having a guardian spirit if you don't even once take his advice?" "I appreciate your help," Blaine assured him. "I really do. But tell me truthfully, how much better off would I be if I ran?" "You might be able to stay alive a little longer." "Only a little? Is it really that bad?" "Bad enough. Tom, remember not to trust anybody. I gotta go now." "Will I speak to you again, Ray?" "Maybe," Melhill said. "Maybe not. Good luck, kid." The interview was ended. Blaine returned to his apartment. r T , HE next day was Saturday. Blaine lounged in bed late, made himself breakfast and called Marie. She was out. He decided to spend the day relaxing and playing his sensory recordings. That afternoon, he had two callers. The first was a gentle, hunchbacked old woman dressed in a dark, severe uniform. Across her army-style cap were the words "Sir," she said in a slightly wheezy voice, "I am soliciting contributions for the Old Church, an organization which seeks to promote faith in these dissolute and Godless times." "Sorry," said Blaine, and started to close the door. But the old woman must have had many doors closed on her. She wedged her foot between door and jamb and passionately continued talking. "This, young sir, is the age of the Babylonian Beast and the time of the soul's destruction. This is Satan's age and the time of his seeming triumph. But be not deceived! The Lord Almighty has allowed this to come about for a trial and a testing, and a winnowing of grain from chaff. Beware the temptation! Beware the path of evil which lies wickedly and alluringly before you!" Blaine gave her a dollar just to shut her up. The old woman thanked him but continued talking. "Beware, young sir, that ultimate lure of Satan -- the false heaven which men call the hereafter! For what better snare could Satan the Deceiver devise for the world of men than this, his greatest illusion! The illusion that hell is heaven! And men are deceived ly go down into it!" "Thank you," Blaine said, trying to shut the door. "Remember my words!" the old woman shrilled, fixing him with a glassy blue eye. "The hereafter is evil! Beware the prophets of the hellish afterlife!" "Thank you!" Blaine yelled, and managed to close the door. He relaxed in his armchair again and turned on the player. For nearly an hour, he was absorbed in Flight on Venus. Then there was a knock on his door. Blaine opened it and saw a short, well-dressed, chubby-faced, earnest-looking young man. "Mr. Thomas Blaine?" the man asked. "That's me." "Mr. Blaine, I am Charles Farrell, from the Hereafter Corporation. Might I speak to you? If it is inconvenient now, perhaps we could make an appointment for some other -- " "Come in," Blaine said, opening the door wide for the prophet of the hellish afterlife. nesslike, soft-spoken prophet. His first move was to give Blaine a letter written on Hereafter, Inc., stationery, stating that Charles Farrell was a fully authorized representative of the Hereafter Corporation. Included in the letter was a meticulous description of Farrell, his signature, three stamped photographs and a set of fingerprints. "And here are my identity proofs," Farrell said, opening his wallet and showing his heli license, library card, voter's registration certificate and government clearance card. On a separate piece of treated paper, Farrell impressed the fingerprints of his right hand and gave them to Blaine for comparison with those on the letter. "Is all this necessary?" Blaine inquired. "Absolutely," Farrell told him. "We've had some unhappy occurrences in the past. Unscrupulous operators will try to pass themselves as Hereafter representatives among the gullible and the poor. They offer salvation at a cut rate, take what they can get and skip town. Too many people have been cheated out of everything they own and gotten nothing in return. For the illegal operators, even when they represent some little fly-by-night salvation company, have none of the expensive equipment and trained technicians that are needed." "I didn't know," Blaine said. "Won't you sit down?" Farrell took a chair. "The Better Business Bureaus are trying to do something about it. But the fly-by-nights move too fast to be easily caught. Only Hereafter, Inc., and two other companies with government-approved techniques are able to deliver what they promise -- life after death." "What about the various mental disciplines?" asked Blaine. "I was purposely excluding them," Farrell said. "They're a completely difffferent category. If you have the patience and determination necessary for twenty years or so of concentrated study, more power to you. If you don't, then you need scientific aid and implementation. And that's where we come in." "I'd like to hear about it," Blaine said. Mr. Farrell settled himself more comfortably in his chair. "If you're like most people, you probably want to know what is life? What is death? What is a mind? Where is the interaction point between mind and body? Is the mind also soul? Is the soul also mind? Are they independent of each other, or interdependent, or intermixed? Or is there any such thing as a soul?" Farrell smiled. "Are those some of the questions you want me to answer?" Blaine nodded. We simply don't know, haven't the slightest idea. As far as we're concerned, those are religio-philosophical questions which Hereafter, Inc., has no intention of even trying to answer. We're interested in results, not speculation. Our orientation is medical. Our approach is pragmatic. We don't care how or why we get our results or how strange they seem. Do they work? That's the only question we ask, and that's our basic position." "I think you've made it clear," Blaine said. "It's important for me to do so at the start. So let me make one more thing clear. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we are offering heaven." "No?" "Not at all! Heaven is a religious concept and we have nothing to do with religion. Our hereafter is a survival of the mind after the body's death. That's all. We don't claim the hereafter is heaven any more than early scientists claimed that the bones of the first cavemen were the remains of Adam and Eve." "An old woman called here earlier," Blaine said. "She told me that the hereafter is hell." "She's a fanatic," Farrell replied, grinning. "She follows me around. And for all I know, she's right." "What do you know about the hereafter?" "Not very much," Farrell told him. "All we know for sure is this: After the body's death, the mind moves to a region we call the Threshold, which exists between Earth and the hereafter. It is, we believe, a sort of preparatory state to the hereafter itself. Once the mind is there, it can move at will into the hereafter." "But what is the hereafter like?" "We don't know. We're fairly sure it's non-physical. Beyond that, everything is conjecture. Some think that the mind is the essence of the body and therefore the essences, so to speak, of a man's worldly goods can be brought into the hereafter with him. It could be so. Others disagree. Some feel that the hereafter is a place where souls await their turn for rebirth on other planets as part of a vast reincarnation cycle. Perhaps that's true, too. Some feel that the hereafter is only the first stage of postEarth existence and that there are six others, increasingly difficult to attain, culminating in a sort of nirvana. Could be. "It's been said that the hereafter is a vast, misty region where you wander alone, forever searching, never finding. I've read theories that say people must be grouped in the hereafter according to family; others state you're grouped there according to race, or religion, or skin coloration, or social position. Some people, as you've observed, say if s hell itself you're entering. There are advocates of a theory of illusion, who claim that the mind vanishes completely when it leaves the Threshold. And there are people who accuse us at the corporation of faking all our effects. "A recent learned work states that you'll find whatever you want in the hereafter -- heaven, paradise, valhalla, green pastures, take your choice. A claim is made that the old gods rule in the hereafter -- the gods of Haiti, Scandinavia or the Belgian Congo, depending on whose theory you're following. Naturally a counter-theory shows that there can't be any gods at all. I've seen an English book declaring that English spirits rule the hereafter, and a Russian book claiming that the Russians rule, and several American books that say the Americans rule. "A book came out last year stating that the government of the hereafter is anarchy. A leading philosopher insists that competition is a law of nature and must be so in the hereafter, too. And so on. You can take your pick of any of those theories, Mr. Blaine, or you can make up one of your own."  Blaine asked. "Me? I'm keeping an open mind," Farrell said. "When the time comes, I'll go there and find out." "That's good enough for me," said Blaine. "Unfortunately, I won't have a chance. I don't have the kind of money you people charge." "I know," Farrell said. "I checked into your finances before I called." "Then why -- " "Every year," said Farrell, "a number of free hereafter grants are made, some by philanthropists, some by corporations and trusts, a few on a lottery basis. I am happy to say, Mr. Blaine, that you have been selected for one of these grants." "Me?" "Let me offer my congratulations," Farrell said. "You're a very lucky man." "But who gave me the grant?" "The Main-Farbenger Textile Corporation." "I never heard of them." "Well, they heard of you. The grant is in recognition of your trip here from the year #. Do you accept it?" Blaine stared hard at the Hereafter representative. Farrell seemed genuine enough; anyhow, his story could be checked at the Hereafter Building. Blaine had his suspicions of the splendid gift thrust so unexpectedly into his hands. But the thought of an assured life after death outweighed any possible doubts, pushed aside any possible fears. Caution was all very well, but not when the gates of the hereafter were being opened for you. "What do I have to do?" he asked. "Simply accompany me to the Hereafter Building," Farrell said. "We can have the necessary work done in a few hours." Survival! Life after death! "All right," Blaine said. "I accept the grant. Let's go!" They left Blaine's apartment at once. #. rectly to the Hereafter Building. Farrell led the way to the Admissions Office and gave a photo copy of Blaine's grant to the woman in charge. Blaine made a set of fingerprints and produced his hunter's license for further identity. The woman checked all the data carefully against her master list of acceptances. Finally she was satisfied with its validity and signed the admission papers. Farrell then took Blaine to the Testing Room, wished him luck, and left him. In the Testing Room, a squad of young technicians ran Blaine through a gamut of examinations. Banks of calculators clicked and rattled and spewed forth yards of paper and showers of punched cards. Ominous machines bubbled and squeaked at him, glared with giant red eyes, winked and turned amber. Automatic pens squiggled across pieces of graph paper. And through it all, the technicians kept up a lively shop talk. "Interesting beta reaction. Think we can fair that curve?" "Sure, sure, just lower his drive coefficient." "Hate to do that. It weakens the web." "You don't have to weaken it that much. He'll still take the trauma." "Maybe. What about this Henlinger factor? It's off." "That's because he's in a host body. It'll come around." "That one didn't last week. The guy went up like a rocket." "He was too damned unstable to begin with." Blaine said, "Hey! Is there any chance of this not working?" The technicians turned as though seeing him for the first time. "Every case is different, pal," a technician told him. "Each one has to be worked out on an individual basis." "It's just problems, problems all the time." treatment was all worked out. I heard it was infallible." "Sure, that's what they tell the customers," one of the technicians said scornfully. "Things go wrong here every so often. We still got a long way to go." Blaine said, "But can you tell if the treatment takes?" "Of course. If it takes, you're still alive." "If it doesn't, you never walk out of here." "It usually takes," a technician said consolingly. "On everybody but a K#." "It's that lousy K# factor that throws us. Come on, Jamiesen, is he a K# or not?" "I'm not sure," Jamiesen said, hunched over a flashing instrument. "The testing machine is all bitched up again." Blaine said, "What is a K#?" "I wish we knew," Jamiesen said moodily. "All we know for certain, guys with a K# factor can't survive after death." "Not under any circumstances." "Old Fitzroy thinks it's a builtin limiting factor that nature included so the species wouldn't run wild." "But K#s don't transmit the factor to their children." "There's still a chance it lies dormant and skips a few generations." "Am I a K#?" Blaine asked, trying to keep his voice steady. "Probably not," Jamiesen said warily. "It's not particularly common. Let me check." Blaine waited while the technicians went over their data, and Jamiesen tried to determine from his faulty machine whether or not Blaine had a K# factor. After a while, Jamiesen looked up. "Well, I guess he's not K#. Though who knows, really? Anyhow, let's get on with it." "What comes next?" asked Blaine. A hypodermic bit deeply into his arm. "Don't worry," a technician told him, "everything's going to be just fine." "Are you sure I'm not K#?" Blaine insisted. The technician nodded in a perfunctory manner. Blaine wanted to ask more questions, but a wave of dizziness overcame him. The technicians were lifting him, putting him on a white operating table. " ness, he was lying on a comfortable couch listening to soothing music. A nurse handed him a glass of sherry, and Mr. Farrell was standing by, beaming. "Feel okay?" Farrell asked. "You should. Everything went off perfectly." "It did?" "No possibility of error. Mr. Blaine, the hereafter is yours." Blaine finished his sherry and stood up, a little shakily. "Life after death is mine? Whenever I die? Whatever I die of?" "That's right. No matter how or when you die, your mind will survive after death. How do you feel?" "I don't know," Blaine said. It was only half an hour later, as he was returning to his apartment, that he began to react. The hereafter was his! He was filled with a sudden wild elation. Nothing mattered now, nothing whatsoever! He was immortal! He could be killed on the spot and yet live on! He felt superbly drunk. Gaily, he contemplated throwing himself under the wheels of a passing truck. What did it matter? Nothing could really hurt him! He could berserk now, slash merrily through the crowds. Why not? The only thing the flathats could kill was his body! The feeling was indescribable. Now, for the first time, Blaine realized what men had lived with before the discovery of the scientific hereafter. He remembered the heavy, sodden, constant, unconscious fear of death that subtly weighted every action and permeated every movement. The ancient enemy death, the shadow that crept down the corridors of a man's mind like some grisly tapeworm, the ghost that haunted nights and days, the croucher behind corners, the shape behind doors, the unseen guest at every banquet, the unidentified figure in every landscape, always present, always waiting -- No more. For now a tremendous weight had been lifted from his mind. The fear of death was gone, intoxicatingly gone, and he felt light as air. Death, that ancient enemy, was defeated! a state of high euphoria. The telephone was ringing as he unlocked the door. "Blaine speaking!" "Tom!" It was Marie Thorne. "Where have you been? I've been trying to reach you all afternoon." "I've been out, darling," Blaine said. "Where in hell have you been?" "I've been trying to find out what Rex is up to. Now listen carefully. I have some important news for you." "I've got some news for you, sweetheart," Blaine said. "Listen to me! A man will call at your apartment today. He'll be a salesman from Hereafter, Inc., and he will offer you free hereafter insurance. Don't take it." "Why not? Is he a fake?" "No, he's perfectly genuine, and so is the offer. But you mustn't take it." "I already did," Blaine said. "You what?" "He was here a few hours ago. I accepted it." "Have they treated you yet?" "Yes. Was that a fake?" "No," Marie said, "of course it wasn't. Oh, Tom, when will you learn not to accept gifts from strangers? There was time for hereafter insurance later. Oh, you fool, you complete and absolute fool!" "What's wrong?" Blaine asked. "It was a grant from the MainFarbenger Textile Corporation." "They are owned completely by the Rex Corporation," Marie told him. "Oh... But so what?" "The directors of Rex gave you that grant! They used Main-Farbenger as a front, but Rex gave you the grant! Can't you see what it means?" "No. Will you please stop screaming and explain?" "Tom, it's the Permitted Murder section of the Suicide Act. They're going to invoke it." "What are you talking about?" "I'm talking about the section of the Suicide Act that makes host-taking legal. Rex has guaranteed the survival of your mind after death and you've accepted it. Now they can legally take your body for any purpose they desire. They own it. They can kill your body, Tom! And they're going to." "Kill me? Why?" "It's that recording you made when you first came to #. It's been bootlegged all over the city and the organized religions have gotten hold of it. You say on the recording that you don't remember anything about the Threshold, even though you were in it before being reborn. Right?" "Sure. So?" "So the religions are planning to use that against Rex, to disprove the validity of the scientific hereafter. They want you to testify to the authenticity of the recording. And Rex will do anything to stop you from testifying. If the religions scored their point, Rex would lose any chance at the religious market. They'd probably lose a lot of other customers, too." won't testify. Won't that satisfy them?" "They don't trust you. They can't afford to. Rex has already gone into action to prove that your recording is a forgery. They've bribed that phony from the past, that Ben Therler, to come forward and say he's you, and to admit that he's not from the past. Therler is saying he faked the whole thing for publicity reasons. And of course he is a fake, so it's easy to prove." "So that leaves me -- " "It leaves you a potential danger that Rex wants to get rid of as quickly as possible, before the religions find you and check your authenticity against Therler's. The quickest and surest way of getting "Can't you convince them I won't talk?" Blaine asked. "I'm afraid they won't listen to anything I tell them. I'm in trouble myself." "Why?" "Because they found I smuggled out your recording." " You did?" "I've been an agent of the religions for a long time," Marie told him. "I'm not particularly religious, but I felt that Rex and the Hereafter Corporation were getting too much of a stranglehold on the world. I don't like to see anybody doing that. But there's no time to talk about it now. Tom, you must get out of New York, then out of the country. Maybe theyfll leave you alone then. I'll help all I can. I think that you should -- " The telephone went dead. Blaine clicked the receiver several times, but got no dial tone. Apparently the line had been cut. The elation he had been filled with a few minutes ago drained out of him. The intoxicating sense of freedom from death vanished. How could he have contemplated berserking? He wanted to live. He wanted to live in the flesh, upon the Earth he knew and loved. Spiritual existence was fine, but he didn't want it yet. Not for a long time. He wanted to live among tangible objects, breathe air, eat solids and drink liquids, feel flesh surrounding him, touch other flesh. When would they try to kill him? Any time at all. His apartment was like a trap. Blaine scooped all his money into a pocket and hurried to the door. He opened it and looked up and down the hall. It was empty. He ran down the corridor, and stopped. A man had just come around the corner. The man was standing in the center of the hall. He was carrying a large projector, which was aimed at Blaine's stomach. The man was Sammy Jones. Tom, I'm damned sorry it's you. But business is business." Blaine stood, frozen, as the projector lifted to level on his chest. "Why you?" Blaine managed to ask. "Who else?" Sammy Jones said. "Ain't I the best hunter in the Western Hemisphere, and probably Europe, too? Rex hired every one of us in the New York area. But with beam and projectile weapons this time. I'm sorry it's you, Tom." "But I'm a hunter, too," Blaine objected. # . "You won't be the first hunter that got gunned. It's the breaks of the game, lad. Don't flinch. I'll make it quick and clean." "I don't want to die!" "Why not?" Jones asked. "You've got your hereafter insurance." "I was tricked! I want to live! Sammy, don't do it!" Sammy Jones' face hardened. He took careful aim, then lowered the gun. "All right, Tom, start moving. Every Quarry should have a little head start, a sporting chance. Now get going. You're not entitled to as much of a lead in the city as the countryside, so don't waste any time." "Thanks, Sammy," Blaine said, and hurried down the hall. "But, Tom, watch your step if you really want to live. I'm telling you, New York is full of hunters right now, all of them after you. And every means of transportation is guarded." "Thanks," Blaine called, as he hurried down the stairs. He was in the street, but he didn't know where to go. Still, he had no time for indecision. It was late afternoon, hours before darkness could help him. He picked a direction in great haste and began walking. Almost instinctively, his steps were leading him toward the slums of the city. tenements and ancient apartment houses, past the cheap saloons and nightclubs, hands thrust in his pockets, trying to think. He had to flee New York. Jones had told him that the transportation services were being watched. What hope had he then? He was unarmed, defenseless -- Well, perhaps he could change that. With a gun in his hand, things would be a little different. In fact, things might be very different indeed. As Hull had pointed out, a hunter could legally shoot a Quarry, but if a Quarry shot a hunter, he was subject to arrest and severe penalties. If he did shoot a hunter, the police would have to arrest him! It would all get very involved, but it would save him from the immediate danger. He walked until he came to a pawnshop. In the window was a glittering array of projectile and beam weapons, hunting rifles, knives and machetes. Blaine went in. "I want a gun," he said to the mustached man behind the counter. "A gun. So. And what kind of a gun?" the man asked. "Have you got any beamers?" The man nodded and went to a drawer. He took out a gleaming handgun with a bright copper finish. "Now this," he said, "is a special buy. It's a genuine Sailes-Byrn needlebeam, used for hunting big Venusian game. At five hundred yards, you can cut through anything that walks, crawls or flies. On the side is the aperture selector. You can fan wide for closerange work, or extend to a needle point for distance shooting." "Fine, fine," Blaine said, pulling bills from his pocket. "This button here," the pawnbroker went on, "controls length of blast. Set as is, you get a standard fractional jolt. One click extends time to a quarter second. Put it on automatic and it'll cut like a scythe. It has a power supply of over four hours, and there's more than three hours still left in the original pack. What's more, you can use this weapon in your home workshop. With a special mounting and a baffle to cut down the power, you can slice plastic with this better than with a saw. A different baffle converts it into a blowtorch. The baffles can be purchased -- " "I'll buy it," Blaine broke in. The pawnbroker nodded. "May I see your permit, please?" license and showed it to the man. The pawnbroker nodded, and, with maddening slowness, filled out a receipt for the gun. The pawnbroker said, "That'll be seventy-five dollars." As Blaine pushed the money across the counter, the pawnbroker consulted a list on the wall behind him. "I can't sell you that weapon." "Why not?" Blaine demanded. "You saw my hunter's license." "But you didn't tell me you were a registered Quarry. You know a Quarry can't legally have weapons. Your name was flashed here half an hour ago. You can't buy a legal weapon anywhere in New York, Mr. Blaine." The pawnbroker pushed the bills back across the counter. Blaine grabbed for the needle.beam. The pawnbroker scooped it up first and leveled it at him. "I ought to save them the trouble," he said. "You've got your damned hereafter. What else do you want?" Blaine stood perfectly still. The pawnbroker lowered the gun. "But that's not my job," he said. "The hunters will get you soon enough." He reached under the counter and pressed a button. Blaine turned and ran out of the store. It was growing dark. But his location had been revealed. The hunters would be closing in now. He thought he heard someone calling his name. He pushed through the crowds, not daring to look back, trying to think of something to do. He couldn't have come # years through time to be shot fair! He noticed a man following close behind him, grinning. It was Theseus, gun out, waiting for a clear shot. Blaine put on a burst of speed, dodged through the crowds and turned quickly into a side street. He sprinted down it, then came to a sudden stop. At the far end of the street, silhouetted against the light, a man was standing. The man had one hand on his hip, the other raised in a shooting position. Blaine hesitated and glanced back at Theseus. The little hunter fired, scorching Blaine's sleeve. Blaine ran toward an open door, which was suddenly slammed in his face. A second shot charred his coat. VVdTH dreamlike clarity, he watched the hunters advance, Theseus close behind him, the other hunter in the distance, blocking the way out. Blaine ran on leaden feet toward the more distant man, over manhole covers and subway gratings, past shuttered stores and locked buildings. "Back off, Theseus!" the hunter called. "I got him!" "Take him, Hendrick!" Theseus called back, and flattened himself against a wall, out of the way of the blast. The gunman, fifty feet away, took aim and fired. Blaine fell flat and the beam missed him. He rolled, trying to make the inadequate shelter of a doorway. The beam probed after him, scoring the concrete and turning the puddles of sewer water into steam. Then a subway grating gave way beneath him. As he fell, he knew that the grating must have been weakened by the lancing beam. Bljnd luck! But he had to land on his feet. He had to stay conscious, drag himself away from the opening, or his body would be lying in full view of the opening, an easy target for hunters standing on the edge. He tried to twist in mid-air, too late. He landed heavily on his shoulders and his head slammed against an iron stanchion. But the need to stay conscious was so great that he pulled himself to his feet. He had to drag himself out of the way, deep into the subway passage, far enough so they couldn't find him. But even the first step was too much. Sickeningly, his legs buckled under him. He fell on his face, rolled over and stared at the gaping hole above him. (Continued from page # ) powder, when nothing else will work. We can fill # pages every other month with really good science fiction. We can't do it on a monthly schedule. Nobody can. Transposed western and detective stories cosmetically disguised as science fiction, oversexed Playboy rejections, witless space wars, extraterrestrial spies, post-atomic societies, biblical greats who turn out to be aliens or visitors from the future, cave-dweller Ugh who discovers how to chip flint or make fire or meets the gods with six arms or gray-flannel buckskins, the road or valley that proves to be a time fault into the future or past, good guy and bad guy marooned on an asteroid, psionics that have long psickened us with their psenseless psamenesses -- there are enough of these literary cinders to fill any number of slagpile magazines. But Galaxy quality? Enough for # packed pages every two months is all we dare hope for, all we can safely promise.  By actual page count, the gigantic new Galaxy will be giving you from # to # more pages than any of its rivals. That means more stories, more art, more printing, more paper, costlier binding, added shipping charges -- when Galaxy all along has been the most expensively produced magazine in this field. The mathematics of publishing are as straight as in any other business: improve and enlarge your package and your costs go up, so you have to charge more. And the economies are the same: keep price increase to a minimum by keeping production high. And the savings to the customer are identical: a lot more magazine for only a little more money. Almost all our competitors offer # pages  #(L The new Galaxy offers # pages  #. That's half again as much for only #' more. As mentioned before, we are betting that readers know a lavish bargain when they see one -- as if a bet that people bright enough to read science fiction also know elementary arithmetic is any sort of gamble. Now add the factor of quality Galaxy quality, proved over eight years -- and the equation is complete: the most of the best for the least. S O much for size and cost. Now let's do a really thorough job of restyling! It is the better part of a decade since we asked you to help shape all our policies -- which you did so magnificently that you gave Galaxy the greatest science fiction following on Earth. But you haven't had the opportunity of changing your vote, or reaffirming it, and many of you came in after the balloting was closed. Well, Galaxy is again your magazine. Your suggestions will be followed. Let's detail that statement and see just how inclusive it is:  To begin with, the heart of the magazine -- stories. With all those extra pages, there are lots of combinations we can use for editorial balance. Magazines generally strive for very long contents pages by using very short stories and only a few medium-length novelets -- a policy that makes sense only if readers prefer short stories to long ones. Well, do you? Or would you rather have the short stories held down, even if they make the contents page look synthetically hefty, and more novelets and novellas? Or do you have other ideas on content and balance?  How about serials? The best solution -- running them complete -- can't be done; they'd squeeze out everything else in the issue. Worse yet, that would also kill book, paperbound reprint and club sales for the authors -- book publishers won't touch novels that have appeared complete in single issues. With # pages, we can run them in two equal installments and still have plenty of room for other material. There's a two-month wait, true, but isn't that better than three or four monthly installments? Before you decide, think if reading The Demolished Man, Gravy Planet, The Puppet Masters, The Stars My Destination -- and now Time Killer. It's a tough decision. That's why we ask you to help make it.  What do you think of articles? Is our science department a good solution? If so, why -- and how can it be made better? If not, what would you prefer?  Do you like our editor's page? Should it be lighter? Heavier? Not at all?  You voted against a letter column back in #, a big surprise because we like them in newspapers and magazines, and had planned to have one. Is it that you fear a letter column must be juvenile or pedantic? It needn't be, if it's shut down when no interesting mail comes in. What's your vote now, eight years later?  How about our book reviews?  Any thoughts on our cover and inside art, layouts, typography?  In short, if you had a magazine of your own, what would it be like? Tell us and we'll do our honest best to make Galaxy as close as possible to your idea of an ideal magazine. a revolution every few years. This one has put back the roses in our cheeks, a spring in our walk, a joyous glint in our eyes. Crusade, everyone? Despite price increase, we agreed that old subscriptions will be fulfdled issue for issue. But then we wondered how non-subscribers would feel if they could not take advantage of this deal. Frustrated, we decided, and so here is the last decision of all: For # days only, your new and renewal and gift subscriptions will be honored at the old rate of # for I # sisues. Two necessary exceptions. First, the offer applies only to the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South and Central America, and U.S. possessions. Second, the cover, as always, was printed before this issue came off the press. The # for I year, offer is intended to mean # for # issues and the two-year offer must be rescinded; economics just won't stretch that far. You can subscribe to more than # issues if you wish, but at the # rate only. Just # days, remember. And remember too that this offer will not be repeated. Enter my subscription for the New Giant # page Galaxy for: I # Issues  # # Issues  # (I .# additional per I # issues for foreign) Name Address. City Zone. State Ackley  . cv v #,  You see o # tAO  I aS om   ight Ot CA P Bi 'Sh There's nothing nebulous about that duster of science fiction luminaries... and more will be appearing in our future sparkling issues. famous writers. Our rates to authors are the highest in the field, our editorial policy the most challenging. tudes in other fields streaking into science fiction... the giants of the next decade hurling out their first flaming, molten prose. Subscribe now to insure not missing any star-studded issues ience, not ours. Galaxy Publishing Corp, # I Hudson St. New York #,. N. Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years -- # additional Foreign Postage Per Year  Galaxy M A e A Z I N E by by by by ond Stories by In expanding to the giant #-page size, we decided first to honor all our subscriptions at the old rate of # for # issues, despite the increase in cost. Then we concluded that this would frustrate readers who also wished to get in on a good thing, and we invited them to subscribe at the old rate, and limited the offer to # days. Now. however, we find that we have attracted new readers who resent being discriminated against. To give everyone an absolutely final fair chance, here is your savings coupon. Use it to buy a new subscription, to extend an old one, to give as gifts. And do it now -- big, generous bargain will not be repeated, no matter who howls ! Enter my subscription for the New Giant # page Galaxy for: # Issues (a) # # Issues (a # (# additional per # issues for foreign) Name-... Address City Zone... State issue of the giant new #page Galaxy. Well, thanks, but we'd much rather view it as just what it is -- one arbitrary solution out of a good many possibles. What are the alternatives? Look at it this way. Having # pages to move around in is like your home suddenly becoming # bigger -- along with half again as much money to make it what you want it to be. Translate magazine divisions into household terms and the choices are nearly identical: all bedrooms; or one extra bedroom, another bathroom and a den; or a spare living room and a pantry; or enlarge all the rooms you now have, or break down the walls and redesign the whole house? We are prepared to do any of that to make Galaxy exactly what you want it to be, just as we did back in #. We asked then for this sort of advice, and our readers told us, and the advice made Galaxy the most widely read science fiction magazine in the world. If that sounds mystical, it's the reverse that really is -- editors can only make more or less shrewd divinations, whereas readers know what they want. But it is nearly a decade since we invited votes. That's long enough for any number of new factors to enter: tastes change; what once was fresh and daring may now be too familiar; and, most important of all, turnover of readership -- a point we'll get to in a moment -- means that many readers never had a say. For those who missed or mislaid it, we'll list again the points up for referendum :  To begin with, the heart of the magazine -- stories. With all these added pages, we could pull a too prevalent flimflam: bloating up an artificial table of contents by running lots of very little stories and buckshot filler -- but with # pages to do it in, our table of contents would be several times longer than most of the runty items listed. That policy makes sense only if readers prefer batches of squibs to fewer but much heftier stories. Well, do you? This issue, for example, holds down the short stories for the sake of a pair of tall novelets and a really wide-shouldered novella. If that's overstressing long stories, in your opinion, there could have been, say, three or four novelets and at least as many short stories. ( Continued on page # ) Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden Monsters of the Deep #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #tf per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. ( Continued from page # ) Or should it be still fewer long lengths and more shorts? The combinations are no problem. The only question is which lengths you like most  How about serials? The best solution -- running them complete -- can't be done; they'd squeeze out everything else. Worse yet, that would also kill book, paperbound reprint and club sales for the authors -- book publishers won't touch novels that have appeared uncut in single issues. With # pages, we can run them in two equal installments and have plenty of room for other material. There's a two-month wait, true, but isn't that better than three or four monthly installments? Before you decide, think if you'd have been molished Man, Gravy Planet, The Puppet Masters, The Stars My Destination -- and now Time Killer. It's a tough decision. That's why we ask you to help make it.  What do you think of articles? Is our science department a good solution? If so, why -- and how can it be made better? If not, what would you prefer?  Do you like our editor's page? Should it be lighter? Heavier? Not at all?  Readers voted against a letter column back in #, a big surprise because we like them in newspapers and magazines, and had planned to have one. Is it that readers feared a letter column must be juvenile or pedantic? It needn't be, if it's shut down when no interesting mail comes in. Whafs your vote now, eight years later?  How about our book reviews?  Any thoughts on our cover and inside art, layouts, typography?  In short, if you had a magazine of your own, what would it be like? Tell us and we'll do our honest best to make Galaxy as close as possible to your idea of an ideal magazine. asked in the Nov. # and Dec. # issues. Now the turnover of readership mentioned before: All surveys show that all magazines have an all but complete change of audience every five years. We have constant evidence of that in the letters piteously begging us to reprint early Galaxy stories. We've resisted. But those fine tales are not to be found anywhere any more. If we ran just one per issue, wouldn't it be at little cost to the elite minority that owns files? On all these matters, your opinion counts. Your suggestions will be followed. Galaxy really is your magazine. No crew was ever equipped to skin cats in more ingenious ways -- and no planet better equipped to give them a merciless hidingl I T HE mishap came at dusk, as the last floater was settling down above the cargo dump, the eight small motors flickering bluely in the twilight. One instant it was floating level, a thousand feet above the ground, descending gently, with its cargo stacked upon it and the riding robots perched atop the cargo. The next instant it tilted as first one motor failed and then a second one. The load of cargo spilled and the riding robots with it. The floater, unbalanced, became a screaming wheel, spinning crazily, that whipped in a tightening, raging spiral down upon the base. Turn ' #as #TL ?L ' r V ' #  ' W IShP  --  Steve Sheridan tumbled from the pile of crates stacked outside his tent. A hundred yards away, the cargo hit with a thundering crash that could be heard and felt above the screaming of the floater. The crates and boxes came apart and the crushed and twisted merchandise spread into a broken mound. Sheridan dived for the open tent flaps and, as he did, the floater hit, slicing into the radio shack, which had been set up less than an hour before. It tore a massive hole into the ground, half burying itself, throwing up a barrage of sand and gravel that bulleted across the area, drumming like a storm of sleet against the tent. A pebble grazed Sheridan's forehead and he felt the blast of sand against his cheek. Then he was inside the tent and scrambling for the transmog chest that stood beside the desk. "Hezekiah!" he bawled. "Hezekiah, where are you!" He fumbled his ring of keys and found the right one and got it in the lock. He twisted and the lid of the chest snapped open. Outside, he could hear the pounding of running robot feet. He thrust back the cover of the chest and began lifting out the compartments in which the transmogs were racked. "Hezekiah!" he shouted. For Hezekiah was the one who knew where all the transmogs were; he could lay his hands upon any one of them that might be needed without having to hunt for it. rustled and Hezekiah came in with a rush. He brushed Sheridan to one side. "Here, let me, sir," he said. "We'll need some roboticists," said Sheridan. "Those boys must be smashed up fairly bad." "Here they are. You better handle them, sir. You do it better than any one of us." Sheridan took the three transmogs and dropped them in the pocket of his jacket. "I'm sorry there are no more, sir," Hezekiah said. "That is all we have." "These will have to do," said Sheridan. "How about the radio shack? Was anyone in there?" "I understand that it was quite empty. Silas had just stepped out of it. He was very lucky, sir" "Yes, indeed," agreed Sheridan. He ducked out of the tent and ran toward the mound of broken crates and boxes. Robots were swarming over it, digging frantically. As he ran, he saw them stoop and lift free a mass of tangled metal. They hauled it from the pile and carried it out and laid it on the ground and stood there looking at it. Sheridan came up to the group that stood around the mass of metal. "Abe," he panted, "did you get out both of them?" Abraham turned around. "Not yet, Steve. Max is still in there." Sheridan pushed his way through the crowd and dropped on his knees beside the mangled robot The midsection, he saw, was so deeply dented that the front almost touched the back. The legs were limp and the arms were canted and locked at a crazy angle. The head was twisted and the crystal eyes were vacant. "Lem," he whispered. "Lemuel, can you hear me?" "No, he can't," said Abraham. "He's really busted up." "I have roboticists in my pocket." Sheridan got to his feet. "Three of them. Who wants a go at it? It'll have to be fast work." "Count me in," Abraham said, "and Ebenezer there and... "Me, too," volunteered Joshua. "We'll need tools," said Abraham. "We can't do a thing unless we have some tools." "Here are the tools," Hezekiah called out, coming on the trot. "I knew you would need them." "And light," said Joshua. "It's getting pretty dark, and from the looks of it, we'll be tinkering with his brain." "We'll have to get him up someplace," declared Abraham, "so we can work on him. We can't with him lying on the ground." "You can use the conference table," Sheridan suggested. "Hey, some of you guys," yelled Abraham, "get Lem over there on the conference table." "We're digging here for Max," Gideon yelled back. "Do it yourself" "We can't," bawled Abraham. "Steve is fixing to get our transmogs changed..." "Sit down," ordered Sheridan. "I can't reach you standing up. And has someone got a light?" "I have one, sir," said Hezekiah, at his elbow. He held out a flash. "Turn it on those guys so I can get the transmogs in," over and picked up the damaged Lemuel. They lugged him off toward the conference table. In the light of the flash, Sheridan got out his keys, shuffled swiftly through them and found the one he wanted. "Hold that light steady. I can't do this in the dark." "Once you did," said Ebenezer. "Don't you remember, Steve? Out on Galanova. Except you couldn't see the labels and you got a missionary one into Ulysses when you thought you had a woodsman and he started preaching. Boy, was that a night!" "Shut up," said Sheridan, "and hold still. How do you expect me to get these into you if you keep wiggling?" He opened the almost invisible plate in the back of Ebenezer's skull and slid it quickly down, reached inside and found the spacehand transmog. With a quick twist, he jerked it out and dropped it in his pocket, then popped in the roboticist transmog, clicked it into place and drove it home. Then he shoved up the brain plate and heard it lock with a tiny click. Swiftly he moved along. He had switched the transmogs in the other two almost as soon as Ebenezer had regained his feet and picked up the kit of tools. "Come on, men," said Ebenezer. "We have work to do on Lem" The three went striding off. Sheridan looked around. Hezekiah and his light had disappeared, galloping off somewhere, more than likely, to see to something else. The robots still were digging into the heap of merchandise. He ran around the pile to help them. He began pulling stuff from the pile and throwing it aside. Beside him, Gideon asked: "What did you run into, Steve?" "Huh?" "Your face is bloody." Sheridan put up his hand. His face was wet and sticky. "A piece of gravel must have hit me." "Better have Hezekiah fix it." "After Max is out," said Sheridan, going back to work. They found Maximilian fifteen minutes later, at the bottom of the heap. His body was a total wreck, but he still could talk. "It sure took you guys long enough," he said. "Ah, dry up," Reuben said. "I think you engineered this so you could get a new body." They hauled him out and skidded him along the ground. Bits of broken arms and legs kept dropping off him. They plunked him on the ground and ran toward the radio shack. Maximilian squalled after them : "Hey, come back! You can't just dump me here!"  side him. "Take it easy, Max. The floater hit the radio shack and there's trouble over there," "Lemuel? How is Lemuel?" "Not too good. The boys are working on him." "I don't know what happened, Steve. We were going all right and all at once the floater bucked us off." "Two of the motors failed," said Sheridan. "Just why, we'll probably never know, now that the floater's smashed. You sure you feel all right?" "Positive. But don't let the fellows fool around. It would be just like them to hold out on a body. Just for laughs. Don't let them." "You'll have one as soon as we can manage. I imagine Hezekiah is out running down spare bodies." "It does beat all," said Maximilian. "Here we had all the cargo cargo and we hadn't broken -- " "That's the way it is, Max. You can't beat the averages." Maximilian chuckled. "You human guys" he said. "You always figure averages and have hunches and..." Gideon came running out of the darkness. "Steve, we got to get those floater motors stopped. They're running wild. One of them might blow." "But I thought you fellows -- " "Steve, it's more than a spacehand job. It needs a nuclear technician." "Come with me." "Hey!" yelled Maximilian. "I'll be back," said Sheridan. At the tent, there was no sign of Hezekiah. Sheridan dug wildly through the transmog chest. He finally located a nuclear technician transmog. "I guess you're elected," he said to Gideon. "Okay," the robot said. "But make it fast. One of those motors can blow and soak the entire area with radiation. It wouldn't bother us much, but it would be tough on you." Sheridan clicked out the spacehand transmog, shoved the other in. "Be seeing you," said Gideon, dashing from the tent. Sheridan stood staring at the scattered transmogs. Hezekiah will give me hell, he thought.  tent. He had his white apron tucked into the belt. His white cook's hat was canted on his head. "Steve," he asked, "how would you like a cold supper for tonight?" "I guess it would be all right." "That floater didn't only hit the shack. It also flattened the stove." "A cold supper is fine. Will you do something for me?" "What is it?" "Max is out there, scared and busted up and lonely. He'll feel better in the tent." Napoleon went out, grumbling: "Me, a chef, lugging a guy... Sheridan began picking up the transmogs, trying to get them racked back in order once again. Hezekiah returned. He helped pick up the transmogs, began rearranging them. "Lemuel will be all right, sir," he assured Sheridan. "His nervous system was all tangled up and short-circuiting. They had to cut out great hunks of wiring. About all they have at the moment, sir, is a naked brain. It will take a while to get him back into a body and all hooked up correctly. "We came out lucky, Hezekiah " "I suppose you are right, sir. I imagine Napoleon told you about the stove " Napoleon came in, dragging the wreckage that was Maximilian, and propped it against the desk. "Anything else?" he asked with withering sarcasm. "No, thank you, Nappy. That is all." "Well," demanded Maximilian, "how about my body?" "It will take a while," Sheridan told him. "The boys have their hands full with Lemuel. But he's going to be all right." "That's fine," said Maximilian. "Lem is a damn good robot. It would be a shame to lose him." "We don't lose many of you," Sheridan observed. "No," said Maximilian. "We're plenty tough. It takes a lot to destroy us." "Sir," Hezekiah said, "you seem to be somewhat injured. Perhaps I should call in someone and put a medic transmog in him... "It's all right," said Sheridan. "Just a scratch. If you could find some water, so I could wash my face?" "Certainly, sir. If it is only minor damage, perhaps I can patch you up." He went to find the water. "That Hezekiah is a good guy, too," said Maximilian, in an expansive mood. "Some of the boys think at times that he's a sort of sissy, but he comes through in an emergency." "I couldn't get along without Hezekiah," Sheridan answered evenly. "We humans aren't rough and tough like you. We need someone to look after us. Hezekiah's job is in the very best tradition." "Well, what's eating you?" asked Maximilian. "I said he was a good guy." can of water and a towel. "Here's the water, sir. Gideon said to tell you the motors are okay. They have them all shut off." "I guess that just about buttons it all up -- if they're sure of Lemuel," Sheridan said. "Sir, they seemed very sure." "Well, fine," said Maximilian, with robotic confidence. "Tomorrow morning we can start on the selling job." "I imagine so," Sheridan said, standing over the can of water and taking off his jacket. "This will be an easy one. We'll be all cleaned up and out of here in ninety days or less." Sheridan shook his head. "No, Max. There's no such thing as an easy one." He bent above the can and sloshed water on his face and head. And that was true, he insisted to himself. An alien planet was an alien planet, no matter how you approached it. No matter how thorough the preliminary survey, no matter how astute the planning, there still would always be that lurking factor one could not foresee. Maybe if a crew could stick to just one sort of job, he thought, it eventually might be possible to work out what amounted to a foolproof routine. But that was not the way it went when one worked for Central Trading. Central Trading's interests ran to many different things. Garson IV was sales. Next time it could just as well be a diplomatic mission or a health-engineering job. A man never knew what he and his crew of robots might be in for until he was handed his assignment. He reached for the towel. he asked Maximilian. "Sure, Steve. But that was just hard luck. It wasn't Ebenezer's fault he made that small mistake." "Moving the wrong mountain is not a small mistake," Sheridan observed with pointed patience. "That one goes right back to Central," Maximilian declared, with a show of outrage. "They had the blueprints labeled wrong... "Now let's hold it down," Sheridan advised. "It is past and done with. There's no sense in getting all riled up." "Maybe so," said Maximilian, "but it burns me. Here we go and make ourselves a record no other team can touch. Then Central pulls this boner and pins the blame on us. I tell you, Central's got too big and clumsy." And smug as well, thought Sheridan, but he didn't say it. rpOO big and too complacent in a lot of ways. Take this very planet, for example. Central should have sent a trading team out here many years ago, but instead had fumed and fussed around, had connived and schemed; they had appointed committees to delve into the situation and there had been occasional mention of it at the meetings of the board, but there had been nothing done until the matter had ground its way through the full and awesome maze of very proper channels. A little competition, Sheridan told himself, was the very thing that Central needed most. Maybe, if there were another outfit out to get the business, Central Trading might finally rouse itself off its big, fat dignity, he was thinking when Napoleon came clumping in and banged a plate and glass and bottle down upon the table. The plate was piled with cold cuts and sliced vegetables; the bottle contained beer. Sheridan looked surprised. "I didn't know we had beer." "Neither did I," said Napoleon, "but I looked and there it was. Steve, it's getting so you never know what is going on " Sheridan tossed away the towel and sat down at the desk. He poured a glass of beer. Td offer you some of this," he told Maximilian, "except I know it would rust your guts." Napoleon guffawed. "Right as of this moment," Maximilian said, "I haven't any guts to speak of. Most of them's dropped out." Abraham came tramping briskly in. "I hear you have Max hidden out some place." "Right here, Abe," called Maximilian eagerly. "You certainly are a mess," said Abraham. "Here we were going fine until you two clowns gummed up the works." "How is Lemuel?" asked Sheridan. "He's all right," said Abraham. "The other two are working on him and they don't really need me. So I came hunting Max." He said to Napoleon, "Here, grab hold and help me get him to the table. We have good light out there." Grumbling, Napoleon lent a hand. "I've lugged him around half the night," he complained. "Let's not bother with him. Let's just toss him on the scrap heap " "It would serve him right," Abraham agreed, with pretended wrath. The two went out, carrying Maximilian between them. He still was dropping parts. transmog chest, arranging all the transmogs neatly in their place. He closed the lid with some satisfaction. "Now that we're alone," he said, "let me see your face." Sheridan grunted at him through a mouth stuffed full of food. Hezekiah looked him over. "Just a scratch on the forehead, but the left side of your face, sir, looks as if someone had sandpapered it You are sure you don't want to transmog someone? A doctor should have a look at it." "Just leave it as it is," said Sheridan. "It will be all right." Gideon stuck his head between the tent flaps. "Hezekiah, Abe is raising hell about the body you found for Max. He says it's an old, rebuilt job. Have you got another one?" "I can look and see," said Hezekiah. "It was sort of dark. There are several more. We can look them over " He left with Gideon, and Sheridan was alone. He went on eating, mentally checking through the happenings of the evening. It had been hard luck, of course, but it could have been far worse. One had to expect accidents and headaches every now and then. After all, they had been downright lucky. Except for some lost time and a floater load of cargo, they had come out unscathed. All in all, he assured himself, they'd made a good beginning. The cargo sled and ship were swinging in tight orbits, the cargo had been ferried down and on this small peninsula, jutting out into the lake, they had as much security as one might reasonably expect on any alien planet. The Garsonians, of course, were not belligerent, but even so one could never afford to skip security. He finished eating and pushed the plate aside. He pulled a portfolio out of a stack of maps and paper work lying on the desk. Slowly he untied the tapes and slid the contents out. For the hundredth time, at least, he started going through the summary of reports brought back to Central Trading by the first two expeditions. T M AN first had come to theL"-planet more than twenty years ago to make a preliminary check, bringing back field notes, photographs and samples. It had been mere routine; there had been no thorough or extensive survey. There had been no great hope nor expectation; it had been simply another job to do. Many planets were similarly spot-checked, and in nineteen out of twenty of them, nothing ever came of it But something very definite had come of it in the case of Garson IV. The something was a tuber that appeared quite ordinary, pretty much, in fact, like an undersize, shriveled-up potato. Brought back by the survey among other odds and ends picked up on the planet, it had in its own good time been given routine examination and analysis by the products laboratory -- with startling results. From the podar, the tuber's native designation, had been derived a drug which had been given a long and agonizing name and had turned out to be the almost perfect tranquilizer. It appeared to have no untoward side-effects; it was not lethal if taken in too enthusiastic dosage; it was slightly habitforming, a most attractive feature for all who might be concerned with the sale of it. To a race vitally concerned with an increasing array of disorders traceable to tension, such a drug was a boon, indeed. For years, a search for such a tranquilizer had been carried on in the laboratories and here it suddenly was, a gift from a new-found planet. Within an astonishingly short time, considering the deliberation with which Central Trading usually operated, a second expedition had been sent out to Garson IV, with the robotic team heavily transmogged as trade experts, psychologists and diplomatic functionaries. For two years the team had worked, with generally satisfactory results. When they had blasted off for Earth, they carried a cargo of the podars, a mass of meticulously gathered data and a trade agreement under which the Garsonians agreed to produce and store the podars against the day when another team should arrive to barter for them. And that, thought Sheridan, is us. And it was all right, of course, except that they were late by fifteen years. For Central Trading, after many conferences, had decided to grow the podars on the Earth. This, the economists had pointed out, would be far cheaper than making the long and expensive trips that would be necessrry to import them from a distant planet. That it might leave the Garsonians holding the bag insofar as the trade agreement was concerned seemed not to have occurred to anyone at all. Although, considering the nature of the Garsonians, they probably had not been put out too greatly. For the Garsonians were a shiftless tribe at best and it had been with some initial difficulty that the second team had been able to explain to them the mechanics and desirability of interstellar trade. Although, in fairness, it might be said of them that, once they understood it, they had been able to develop a creditable amount of eagerness to do business. of Earth with commendable adaptiveness. They had grown bigger and better than they'd ever grown on their native planet. This was not surprising when one took into account the slap-dash brand of agriculture practiced by the Garsonians. Using the tubers brought back by the second expedition for the initial crop, it required several years of growing before a sufficient supply of seed podars were harvested to justify commercial growing. But finally that had come about and the first limited supply of the wonder drug had been processed and put on sale with wide advertising fanfare and an accompanying high price. And all seemed well, indeed. Once again the farmers of the Earth had gained a new cash crop from an alien planet. Finally Man had the tranquilizer which he'd sought for years. But as the years went by, some of the enthusiasm dimmed. For the drug made from the podars appeared to lose its potency. Either it had not been as good as first believed or there was some factor lacking in its cultivation on Earth. The laboratories worked feverishly on the problem. The podars were planted in experimental plots on other planets in the hope that the soil or air or general characteristics there might supply the needed element -- if missing element it were. And Central Trading, in its ponderous, bureaucratic fashion, began preliminary plans for importation of the tubers, remembering belatedly, perhaps, the trade agreement signed many years before. But the plans were not pushed too rapidly, for any day, it was believed, the answer might be found that would save the crop for Earth. But when the answer came, it ruled out Earth entirely; it ruled out, in fact, every place but the podax's native planet. For, the laboratories found, the continued potency of the drug relied to a large extent upon the chemical reaction of a protozoan which the podar plants nourished in their roots. And the protozoan flourished, apparently, on Garson IV alone. So finally, after more than fifteen years, the third expedition had started out for Garson IV. And had landed and brought the cargo down and now was ready, in the morning, to start trading for the podars. Sheridan flipped idly through the sheets from the portfolio. There was, he thought, actually no need to look at all the data once again. He knew it all by heart  I 'HE canvas rustled and Hezekiah stepped into the tent. Sheridan looked up. "Good " he said, "you're back. Did you get Max fixed up?" "We found a body, sir, that proved acceptable." Sheridan pushed the pile of reports aside. "Hezekiah, what are your impressions?" "Of the planet, sir?" "Precisely." "Well, it's those barns, sir. You saw them, sir, when we were coming down. I believe I mentioned them to you." Sheridan nodded. "The second expedition taught the natives how to build them. To store the podars in." "All of them painted red," the robot said. "Just like the barns we have on Christmas cards." "And what's wrong with that?" "They look a little weird, sir." Sheridan laughed. "Weird or not, those barns will be the making of us. They must be crammed with podars. For fifteen years, the natives have been piling up their podars, more than likely wondering when we'd come to trade..." "There were all those tiny villages," Hezekiah said, "and those big red barns in the village square.  # It looked, if you will pardon the observation, sir, like a combination of New England and Lower Slobbovia." "Well, not quite Lower Slobbovia. Our Garsonian friends are not as bad as that. They may be somewhat shiftless and considerably scatterbrained, but they keep their villages neat and their houses spic and span." He pulled a photograph from a pile of data records. "Here, take a look at this." The photograph showed a village street, neat and orderly and quiet, with its rows of well-kept houses huddled underneath the shade trees. There were rows of gay flowers running along the roadway and there were people -- little, happy, gnomelike people -- walking in the road. Hezekiah picked it up. "I will admit, sir, that they look fairly happy. Although, perhaps, not very smart." Sheridan got to his feet. "I think I'll go out and check around and see how things are going." "Everything is all right, sir," said Hezekiah. "The boys have the wreckage cleared up. I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that not much of the cargo could be saved." "From the looks of it, I'm surprised we could salvage any of it." "Don't stay out too long," Hezekiah warned him, "You'll need a good night's sleep. Tomorrow will be a busy day and you'll be out at the crack of dawn." "I'll be right back," Sheridan promised and ducked out of the tent. U been erected and now held back the blackness of the night The sound of hammering came from the chewed-up area where the floater had come down. There was no sign of the floater now and a gang of spacehand robots were busily going about the building of another radio shack. Another gang was erecting a pavilion tent above the conference table, where Abraham and his fellow roboticists still worked on Lemuel and Maximilian. And in front of the cook shack, Napoleon and Gideon were squatted down, busily shooting craps. Sheridan saw that Napoleon had set up his outdoors stove again. He walked over to them and they turned their heads and greeted him, then went back to their game. Sheridan watched them for a while and then walked slowly on. He shook his head in some bewilderment -- a continuing bewilderment over this robotic fascination with all the games of chance. It was, he supposed, just one of the many things that a human being -- any human being -- would never understand. For gambling seemed entirely pointless from a robotic point of view. They had no property, no money, no possessions. They had no need of any and they had no wish for any -- and yet they gambled madly. It might be, he told himself, no more than an aping of their fellow humans. By his very nature, a robot was barred effectively from participating in most of the human vices. But gambling was something that he could do as easily and perhaps more efficiently than any human could. But what in the world, he wondered, did they get out of it? No gain, no profit, for there were no such things as gain or profit so far as a robot was concerned. Excitement, perhaps? An outlet for aggressiveness? Or did they keep a phantom score within their mind -- mentally chalking up their gains and loss -- and did a heavy winner at a game of chance win a certain prestige that was not visible to Man, that might, in fact, be carefully hidden from a man? A man, he thought, could never know his robots in their entirety and that might be as well -- it would be an unfair act to strip the final shreds of individuality from a robot. For if the robots owed much to Man -- their conception and their manufacture and their life -- by the same token Man owed as much, or even more, to robots. Without the robots, Man could not have gone as far or fast, or as effectively, out into the Galaxy. Sheer lack of transportation for skilled manpower alone would have held his progress to a crawl. But with the robots there was no shipping problem. And with the transmogs there was likewise no shortage of the kind of brains and skills and techniques -- as there would otherwise have been -- necessary to cope with the many problems found on the far-flung planets. A-icamp area and stood, with the lights . behind him, facing out into the dark from which came the sound of running waves and the faint moaning of the wind. He tilted back his head and stared up at the sky and marveled once again, as he had marveled many other times on many other planets, at the sheer, devastating loneliness and alienness of unfamiliar stars. Man pinned his orientation to such fragile things, he thought -- to the way the stars were grouped, to how a flower might smell, to the color of a sunset. But this, of course, was not entirely unfamiliar ground. Two human expeditions already had touched down. And now the third had come, bringing with it a cargo sled piled high with merchandise. He swung around, away from the lake, and squinted at the area just beyond the camp and there the cargo was, piled in heaps and snugged down with tough plastic covers from which the starlight glinted. It lay upon the alien soil like a herd of hump-backed monsters bedded for the night There was no ship built that could handle that much cargo -- no ship that could carry more than a dribble of the merchandise needed for interstellar trade. For that purpose, there was the cargo sled. The sled, set in an orbit around the planet of its origin, was loaded by a fleet of floaters, shuttling back and forth. Loaded, the sled was manned by robots and given the start on its long journey by the expedition ship. By the dint of the engines on the sled itself and the power of the expedition ship, the speed built up and up. There was a tricky point when one reached the speed of light, but after that it became somewhat easier -- although, for interstellar travel, there was need of speed many times in excess of the speed of light. And so the sled sped on, following close behind the expedition ship, which served as a pilot craft through that strange gray area where space and time were twisted into something other than normal space and time. Without robots, the cargo sleds would have been impossible; no human crew could ride a cargo ship and maintain the continuous routine of inspection that was necessary. Sheridan swung back toward the lake again and wondered if he could actually see the curling whiteness of the waves or if it were sheer imagination. The wind was moaning softly and the stranger stars were there, and out beyond the waters the natives huddled in their villages with the big red barns looming in the starlit village squares. II TN the morning, the robots gathered around the conference table beneath the gay pavilion tent and Sheridan and Hezekiah lugged out the metal transmog boxes labeled special -- garson IV. "Now I think," said Sheridan, "that we can get down to business, if you gentlemen will pay attention to me." He opened one of the transmog boxes. "In here, we have some transmogs tailormade for the job that we're to do. Because we had prior knowledge of this planet, it was possible to fabricate this special set. So on this job we won't start from scratch, as we are often forced to do...  "Cut out the speeches, Steve," yelled Reuben, "and let's get started with this business." "Let him talk," said Abraham. "He certainly has the right to, just like any one of us" "Thank you, Abe," Sheridan said. "Go ahead," said Gideon. "Rube's just discharging excess voltage." "These transmogs are basically sales transmogs, of course. They will provide you with the personality and all the techniques of a salesman. But, in addition to that, they contain as well all the data pertaining to the situation here and the language of the natives, plus a mass of planetary facts." He unlocked another of the boxes and flipped back the lid. "Shall we get on with it?" he asked. "Let's get going," demanded Reuben. "I'm tired of this spacehand transmog." Sheridan made the rounds, with Hezekiah carrying the boxes for him. Back at his starting point, he shoved aside the boxes, filled now with spacehand and other assorted transmogs. He faced the crew of salesmen. "How do they feel?" he asked. "They feel okay," said Lemuel. "You know, Steve, I never realized until now how dumb a spacehand is." "Pay no attention to him," Abraham said, disgusted. "He always makes that crack " Maximilian said soberly: "It shouldn't be too bad. These people have been acclimated to the idea of doing business with us. There should be no initial sales resistance. In fact, they may be anxious to start trading." "Another thing," Douglas pointed out. "We have the kind of merchandise they've evinced interest in. We won't have to waste our time in extensive surveys to find out what they want." "The market pattern seems to be a simple one," said Abraham judiciously. "There should be no complications. The principal thing, it would appear, is the setting of a proper rate of exchange -- how many podars they must expect to pay for a shovel or a hoe or other items that we have." "That will have to come," said Sheridan, "by a process of trial and error." "We'll have to bargain hard," Lemuel said, "in order to establish a fictitious retail price, then let them have it wholesale. There are many times when that works effectively." Abraham rose from his chair. "Let's get on with it. I suppose, Steve, that you will stay in camp." Sheridan nodded. "I'll stay by the radio. I'll expect reports as soon as you can send them." r T , HE robots got on with it They scrubbed and polished one another until they fairly glittered. They brought out fancy dress hardware and secured it to themselves with magnetic clamps. There were colorful sashes and glistening rows of metals and large chunks of jewelry not entirely in the best of taste, but designed to impress the natives. They got out their floaters and loaded up with samples from the cargo dump. Sheridan spread out a map and assigned each one a village. They checked their radios. They made sure they had their order boards. By noon, they all were off. Sheridan went back to the tent and sat down in his camp chair. He stared down the shelving beach to the lake, sparkling in the light of the noon-high sun. Napoleon brought his lunch and hunkered down to talk, gathering his white cook's apron carefully in his lap so it would not touch the ground. He pushed his tall white cap to a rakish angle. "How you got it figured, Steve?" "You can never figure one beforehand," Sheridan told him. "The boys are all set for an easy time and I hope they have it. But this is an alien planet and I never bet on aliens." "You look for any trouble?" "I don't look for anything. I just sit and wait and hope feebly for the best. Once the reports start coming in... " "If you worry so much, why not go out yourself?" Sheridan shook his head. "Look at it this way, Nappy. I am not a salesman and this crew is. There'd be no sense in my going out. I'm not trained for it" And, he thought, the fact of the matter was that he was not trained for anything. He was not a salesman and he was not a spacehand; he was not any of the things that the robots were or could be. He was just a human, period, a necessary cog in a team of robots. There was a law that said no robot or no group of robots could be assigned a task without human supervision, but that was not the whole of it. It was, rather, something innate in the robot makeup, not built into them, but something that was there and always might be there -- the ever-present link between the robot and his human. Sent out alone, a robot team would blunder and bog down, would in the end become unstuck entirely -- would wind up worse than useless. With a human accompanying them, there was almost no end to their initiative and their capability. It might, he thought, be their need of leadership, although in very truth the human member of the team sometimes showed little of that. It might be the necessity G A L A X Y for some symbol of authority and yet, aside from their respect and consideration for their human, the robots actually bowed to no authority. It was something deeper, Sheridan told himself, than mere leadership or mere authority. It was comparable to the affection and rapport which existed as an undying bond between a man and dog and yet it had no tinge of the god-worship associated with the dog. about yourself? Don't you ever hanker to go out? If you'd ' just say the word, you could." "I like to cook," Napoleon stated. He dug at the ground with a metal finger. "I guess, Steve, you could say I'm pretty much an old retainer." "A transmog would take care of that in a hurry." "And then who'd cook for you? You know you're a lousy cook." Sheridan ate his lunch and sat in his chair, staring at the lake, Waiting for the first reports on the radio. The job at last was started. All that had gone before -- the loading of the cargo, the long haul out through space, the establishing of the orbits and the unshipping of the cargo -- had been no more than preliminary to this very moment. The job was finally started, but it was far from done. There would be months of work. There would be many problems and a thousand headaches. But they'd get it done, he told himself with a sure pride. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could stump this gang of his. Late in the afternoon, Hezekiah came with the word: "Abraham is calling, sir. It seems that there is trouble." Sheridan leaped to his feet and ran to the shack. He pulled up a chair and reached for the headset. "That you, Abe? How is it going, boy?" "Badly, Steve," said Abraham. "They aren't interested in doing business. They want the stuff, all right. You can see the way they look at it. But they aren't buying. You know what I think? I don't believe they have anything to trade." "That's ridiculous, Abe! They've been growing podars all these years. The bams are crammed with them." "Their barn is all nailed up," said Abraham. "They have bars across the doors and the windows boarded. When I tried to walk up to it, they acted sort of ugly." "I'll be right out," decided Sheridan. "I want to look this over." He stood up and walked out of the shack. "Hezekiah, get the flier started. We're going out and have a talk with Abe. Nappy, you mind the radio. Call me at Abe's village if anything goes wrong." "I'll stay right here beside it," Napoleon promised him. Hezekiah brought the flier down in the village square, landing it beside the floater, still loaded with its merchandise. Abraham strode over to them as soon as they were down. "I'm glad you came, Steve. They want me out of here. They don't want us around." flier and stood stiffly in the square. There was a sense of wrongness -- a wrongness with the village and the people something wrong and different. There were a lot of natives standing around the square, lounging in the doorways and leaning against the trees. There was a group of them before the barred door of the massive barn that stood in the center of the square, as if they might be a guard assigned to protect the barn. "When I first came down," said Abraham, "they crowded around the floater and stood looking at the stuff and you could see they could hardly keep their hands off it. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn't talk too much, except to say that they were poor. Now all they do is just stand off and glare." The bam was a monumental structure when gauged against the tiny houses of the village. It stood up foursquare and solid and entirely without ornament and it was an alien thing -- alien of Earth. For, Sheridan realized, it was the same kind of barn that he had seen on the backwoods farms of Earth -- the great hip-roof, the huge bam door, the ramp up to the door, and even the louvered cupola that rode astride the ridge-pole. The man and the two robots stood in a pool of hostile silence and the lounging natives kept on staring at them and there was something decidedly wrong. Sheridan turned slowly and glanced around the square and suddenly he knew what the wrongness was. The place was shabby; it approached the downright squalid. The houses were neglected and no longer neat and the streets were littered. And the people were a piece with all the rest of it. "Sir," said Hezekiah, "they are a sorry lot." And they were all of that There was something in their faces that had a look of haunting and their shoulders stooped and there was fatigue upon them. "I can't uhderstand it," said the puzzled Abraham. "The data says they were a happy-go-lucky bunch, but look at them out there. Could the data have been wrong?" "No, Abe. It's the people who have changed." For there was no chance that the data could be wrong. It had been compiled by a competent team, one of the very best, and headed by a human who had long years of experience on many alien planets. The team had spent two years on Garson IV and had made it very much its business to know this race inside out. Something had happened to the .people. They had somehow lost their gaiety and pride. They had let the houses go uncared for. They had allowed themselves to become a race of ragamuffins. "You guys stay here," Sheridan said. "You can't do it, sir," said Hezekiah in alarm. "Watch yourself," warned Abraham. Sheridan walked toward the barn. The group before it did not stir. He stopped six feet away.  gnomelike than they had appeared in the pictures brought back by the survey team. Little wizened gnomes, they were, but not happy gnomes at all. They were seedy-looking and there was resentment in them and perhaps a dash of hatred. They had a hangdog look and there were some among them who shuffled in discomfiture. "I see you don't remember us," said Sheridan conversationally. "We were away too long, much longer than we had thought to be." He was having, he feared, some trouble with the language. It was, in fact, not the easiest language in the Galaxy to handle. For a fleeting moment, he wished that there were some sort of transmog that could be slipped into the human brain. It would make moments like this so much easier. "We remember you," said one of them in a sullen voice. "That's wonderful," said Sheridan with forced enthusiasm. "Are you speaker for this village?" Speaker because there was no leader, no chief -- no government at all beyond a loose, haphazard talking over what daily problems they had, around the local equivalent of the general store, and occasional formless town meetings to decide what to do in their rare crises, but no officials to enforce the decisions. "I can speak for them," the native said somewhat evasively. He shuffled slowly forward. "There were others like you who came many years ago." "You were friends to them." "We are friends to all." "But special friends to them. To them you made the promise that you would keep the podais." "Too long to keep the podars. The podars rot away." "You had the bam to store them in." "One podar rots. Soon there are two podars rotten. And then a hundred podars rotten. The barn is no good to keep them. No place is any good to keep them." "But we -- those others showed you what to do. You go through the podars and throw away the rotten ones. That way you keep the other podars good." The native shrugged. "Too hard to do. Takes too long." "But not all the podars rotted. Surely you have some left." The creature spread its hands. "We have bad seasons, friend. Too little rain, too much. It never comes out right. Our crop is always bad." "But we have brought things to trade you for the podars. Many things you need. We had great trouble bringing them. We came from far away. It took us long to come." "Too bad," the native said. "No podars. As you can see, we are very poor." "But where have all the podars gone?" "We," the man said stubbornly, "don't grow podars any more. We changed the podars into another crop. Too much bad luck with podars ." "But those plants out in the fields?" "We do not call them podars ." "It doesn't matter what you call them. Are they podars or are they not?" "We do not grow the podars." and walked back to the robots. "No soap," he said. "Something's happened here. They gave me a poor-mouth story and finally, as a clincher, said they don't grow podars any more." "But there are fields of podars declared Abraham. "If the data's right, they've actually increased their acreage. I checked as I was coming in. They're growing more right now than they ever grew before." "I know," said Sheridan. "It makes no sense at all. Hezekiah, maybe you should give base a call and find what's going on." "One thing," Abraham pointed out. "What about this trade agreement that we have with them? Has it any force?" Sheridan shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe we can wave it in their faces, just to see what happens. It might serve as a sort of psychological wedge a little later on, once we get them softened up a bit." " we get them softened up." "This is our first day and this is only one village." "You don't think we could use the agreement as a club?" "Look, Abe, I'm not a lawyer, and we don't have a lawyer transmog along with us for a damned good reason -- there isn't any legal setup whatever on this planet. But let's say we could haul them into a galactic court. Who signed for the planet? Some natives we picked as its representatives, not the natives themselves; their signing couldn't bind anything or anybody. The whole business of drawing up a contract was nothing but an impressive ceremony without any legal basis -- it was just meant to awe the natives into doing business with us." "But the second expedition must have figured it would work." "Well, sure. The Garsonians have a considerable sense of morality -- individually and as families. Can we make that sense of morality extend to bigger groups? That's our problem." "That means we have to figure out an angle," said Abraham. "At least for this one village." "If ifs just this village," declared Sheridan, "we can let them sit and wait. We can get along without it." But it wasn't just one village. It was all the rest of them, as well. Hezekiah brought the news. "Napoleon says everyone is having trouble," he announced. "No one sold a thing. From what he said, it's just like this all over." "We better call in all the boys," said Sheridan. "This is a situation that needs some talking over. We'll have to plan a course of action. We can't go flying off at a dozen different angles." "And we'd better pull up a hill of podars," Abraham suggested, "and see if they are podars or something else." Ill  transmog into Ebenezer's brain case and Ebenezer ran off an analysis. He reported to the sales conference seated around the table. "There's just one difference," he said. "The podars that I analyzed ran a higher percentage of calenthropodensia -- that's the drug used as a tranquilizer -- than the podars that were brought in by the first and second expeditions. The factor is roughly ten per cent, although that might vary from one field to another, depending upon weather and soil conditions -- I would suspect especially soil conditions." "Then they lied," said Abraham, "when they said they weren't growing podars ." "By their own standards," observed Silas, "they might not have lied to us. You can't always spell out alien ethics -- satisfactorily, that is -- from the purely human viewpoint. Ebenezer says that the composition of the tuber has changed to some extent. Perhaps due to better cultivation, perhaps to better seed or to an abundance of rainfall or a heavier concentration of the protozoan in the soil -- or maybe because of something the natives did deliberately to make it shift... " "Si," said Gideon, "I don't see what you are getting at." "Simply this. If they knew of the shift or change, it might have given them an excuse to change the podar name. Or their language or their rules of grammar might have demanded that they change it. Or they may have applied some verbal mumbo-pumbo so they would have an out. And it might even have been a matter of superstition. The native told Steve at the village that they'd had bad luck with podars. So perhaps they operated under the premise that if they changed the name, they likewise changed the luck." "And this is ethical?" "To them, it might be. You fellows have been around enough to know that the rest of the Galaxy seldom operates on what we view as logic or ethics." "But I don't see," said Gideon, "why they'd want to change the name unless it was for the specific purpose of not trading with us -- so they could tell us they weren't growing podars ." "I think that is exactly why they changed the name," Maximilian said. "It's all a piece with those nailed-up barns. They knew we had arrived. They could hardly have escaped knowing. We had clouds of floaters going up and down and they must have seen them." "Back at that village," said Sheridan, "I had the distinct impression that they had some reluctance telling us they weren't growing podars. They had left it to the last, as if it were a final clincher they'd hoped they wouldn't have to use, a desperate, last-ditch argument when all the other excuses failed to do the trick and -- " "They're just trying to jack up the price," Lemuel interrupted in a flat tone. IT-I don't think so. There was no price set to start with. How can you jack it up when you don't know what it is?" "Whether there was a price or not," said Lemuel testily, "they still could create a situation where they could hold us up." "There is another factor that might be to our advantage," Maximilian said. "If they changed the name so they'd have an excuse not to trade with us, that argues that the whole village feels a moral obligation and has to justify its refusal." "You mean by that," said Sheridan, "that we can reason with them. Well, perhaps we can. I think at least we'll try." "There's too much wrong," Douglas put in. "Too many things have changed. The new name for the podars and the nailed-up barns and the shabbiness of the villages and the people. The whole planet's gone to pot. It seems to me our job -- the first job we do -- is to find what happened here. Once we find that out, maybe we'd have a chance of selling." ff'D like to see the inside of those barns," said Joshua. "What have they got in there? Do you think there's any chance we might somehow get a look?" "Nothing short of force," Abraham told him. "I have a hunch that While we're around, they'll guard them night and day." "Force is out," said Sheridan. "All of you know what would happen to us if we used force short of self-defense against an alien people. The entire team would have its license taken away. You guys would spend the rest of your lives scrubbing out headquarters." "Maybe we could just sneak around. Do some slick detective work." "That's an idea, Josh," Sheridan said. "Hezekiah, do you know if we have some detective transmogs?" "Not that I know of, sir. I have never heard of any team using them." "Just as well," Abraham observed. "We'd have a hard time disguising ourselves." "If we had a volunteer," Lemuel said with some enthusiasm, "we could redesign him... " "It would seem to me," said Silas, "that what we have to do is figure out all the different approaches that are possible. Then we can try each approach on a separate village till we latch onto one that works." "Which presupposes," Maximilian pointed out, "that each village will react the same." Silas said: "I would assume they would. After all, the culture is the same and their communications must be primitive. No village would know what was happening in another village until some little time had passed, which makes each village a perfectly isolated guinea pig for our little tests." "Si, I think you're right," said Sheridan. "Somehow or other we have to find a way to break their sales resistance. I don't care what kind of prices we have to pay for the podars at the moment. I'd be start with. Once we have them buying, we can squeeze down the price and come out even in the end. After all, the main thing is to get that cargo sled of ours loaded down with all the podars it can carry." "All right," said Abraham. "Let's get to work."  the whole day at it They mapped out the various sales approaches. They picked the villages where each one would be tried. Sheridan divided the robots into teams and assigned a team to each project They worked out every detail. They left not a thing to chance. Sheridan sat down to his supper table with the feeling that they had it made -- if one of the approaches didn't work, another surely would. The trouble was that, as he saw it, they had done no planning. They had been so sure that this was an easy one that they had plunged ahead into straight selling without any thought upon the matter. In the morning, the robots went out, full of confidence. Abraham's crew had been assigned to a house-to-house campaign and they worked hard and conscientiously. They didn't miss a single house in the entire village. At every house, the answer had been no. Sometimes it was a firm but simple no; sometimes it was a door slammed in the face; at other times, it was a plea of poverty. One thing was plain: Individual Garsonians could be cracked no more readily than Garsonians en masse. Gideon and his crew tried the sample racket -- handing out gift samples door to door with the understanding they would be back again to display their wares. The Garsonian householders weren't having any. They refused to take the samples. Lemuel headed up the lottery project. A lottery, its proponents argued, appealed to basic greed. And this lottery had been rigged to carry maximum appeal. The price was as low as it could be set -- one podar for a ticket. The list of prizes offered was just this side of fabulous. But the Garsonians, as it appeared, were not a greedy people. Not a ticket , was sold. And the funny thing about it -- the unreasonable, maddening, impossible thing about it -- was that the Garsonians seemed tempted. "You could see them fighting it," Abraham reported at the conference that night "You could see they wanted something we had for sale, but they'd steel themselves against it and they never weakened." "We may have them on the very edge," said Lemuel. "Maybe just a little push is all it will take. Do you suppose we could start a whispering campaign? Maybe we could get it rumored that some other villages are buying right and left. That should weaken the resistance." But Ebenezer was doubtful. "We have to dig down to causes. We have to find out what is behind this buyers' strike. It may be a very simple thing. If we only knew... " a distant village. They hauled along with them a pre-fabricated supermarket, which they set up in the village square. They racked their wares attractively. They loaded the place with glamor and excitement. They installed loudspeakers all over town to bellow out their bargains. Abraham and Gideon headed up two talking-billboard crews. They ranged far and wide, setting up their billboards, splashed with attractive color, and installing propaganda tapes. Sheridan had transmogged Oliver and Silas into semantics experts and they had engineered the tapes -- a careful, skillful job. They did not bear down too blatantly on the commercial angle, although it certainly was there. The tapes were cuddly in spots and candid in others. At all times, they rang with deep sincerity. They sang the praises of the Garsonians for the decent, upstanding folks they were; they preached pithy homilies on honesty and fairness and the keeping of contracts; they presented the visitors as a sort of cross between public benefactors and addle-pated nitwits who could easily be outsmarted. The tapes ran day and night They pelted the defenseless Garsonians with a smooth, sleek advertising -- and the effects should have been devastating, since the Garsonians were entirely unfamiliar with any kind of advertising. Lemuel stayed behind at base and tramped up and down the beach, with his hands clenched behind his back, thinking furiously. At times he stopped his pacing long enough to scribble frantic notes, jotting down ideas. Lemuel was trying to arrive at some adaptation of an old sales gag that he felt sure would work if he could only get it figured out -- the ancient I-am-working-myway-through-college wheeze. Joshua and Thaddeus came to Sheridan for a pair of playwright transmogs. Sheridan said they had none, but Hezekiah, forever optimistic, ferreted into the bottom of the transmog chest He came up with one transmog labeled auctioneer and another public speaker. They were the closest he could find. Disgusted, the two rejected them and retired into seclusion, working desperately and as best they could on a medicine show routine. For example, how did one write jokes for an alien people? What would they regard as funny? The off-color joke -- oh, very fine, except that one would have to know in some detail the sexual life of the people it was aimed at The mother-in-law joke -- once again one would have to know; there were a lot of places where mothersin-law were held in high regard, and other places where it was bad taste to even mention them. The dialect routine, of course, was strictly out, as it well deserved to be. Also, so far as the Garsonians were concerned, was the business slicker joke. The Garsonians were no commercial people; such a joke would sail clear above their heads. all of that, were relatively undaunted. They requisitioned the files of data from Sheridan and spent hours poring over them, analyzing the various aspects of Garsonian life that might be safely written into their material. They made piles of notes. They drafted intricate charts showing relationships of Garsonian words and the maze of native social life. They wrote and rewrote and revised and polished. Eventually, they hammered out their script "There's nothing like a show," Joshua told Sheridan with conviction, "to loosen up a people. You get them feeling good and they lose their inhibitions. Besides, you have made them become somewhat indebted to you. You have entertained them and naturally they must feel the need to reciprocate." "I hope it works," said Sheridan, somewhat doubtful and discouraged. For nothing else was working. In the distant village, the Garsonians had unbent sufficiently to visit the supermarket -- to visit, not to buy. It almost seemed as if to them the market was some great museum or showplace. They would file down the aisles and goggle at the merchandise and at times reach out and touch it, but they didn't buy. They were, in fact, insulted if one suggested perhaps they'd like to buy. In the other villages, the billboards had at first attracted wide attention. Crowds had gathered around them and had listened by the hour. But the novelty had worn off by now and they paid the tapes very little attention. And they still continued to ignore the robots. Even more pointedly, they ignored or rebuffed all attempts to sell. It was disheartening. Lemuel gave up his pacing and threw away his notes. He admitted he was licked. There was no way, on Garson IV, to adapt the idea of the college salesman. Baldwin headed up a team that tried to get the whisper campaign started. The natives flatly disbelieved that any other village would go out and buy. There remained the medicine show and Joshua and Thaddeus had a troupe rehearsing. The project was somewhat hampered by the fact that even Hezekiah could not dig up any actor transmogs, but, even so, they were doing well. Despite the failure of everything they had tried, the robots kept going out to the villages, kept plugging away, kept on trying to sell, hoping that one day they would get a clue, a hint, an indication that might help them break the shell of reserve and obstinacy set up by the natives. One day Gideon, out alone, radioed to base. "There's something out here underneath a tree that you should take a look at," he told Sheridan. "Something?" "A different kind of being. It looks intelligent" "A Garsonian?" "Humanoid, all right, but it's no Garsonian " "I'll be right out," said Sheridan. "You stay there so you can point it out to me." "It has probably seen me," Gideon said, "but I did not approach it I thought you might like first whack at it yourself." A S Gideon had said, the creature was sitting underneath a tree. It had a glittering cloth spread out and an ornate jug set out and was taking things out of a receptacle that probably was a hamper. It was more attractively humanoid than the Garsonians. Its features were finely chiseled and its body had a look of lithe ranginess. It was dressed in the richest fabrics and was all decked out with jewels. It had a decided social air about it "Hello, friend," Sheridan said in Garsonian. The creature seemed to understand him, but it smiled in a superior manner and seemed not to be too happy at Sheridan's intrusion. "Perhaps," it finally said, "you have the time to sit down for a while." Which, the way that was put, was a plain and simple invitation for Sheridan to say no, he was sorry, but he hadn't and he must be getting on. "Why, certainly," said Sheridan. "Thank you very much." He sat down and watched the creature continue to extract things from the hamper. "It's slightly difficult," the creature told him, "for us to communicate in this barbaric language. But I suppose it's the best we can do. You do not happen to know Bailie, do you?" "I'm sorry," said Sheridan. T've never heard of it." "I had thought you might It is widely used." "We can get along," said Sheridan quietly, "with the language native to this planet" "Oh, certainly ," agreed the creature. "I presume I'm not trespassing. If I am, of course -- " "Not at all. I'm glad to find you here." "I would offer you some food, but I hesitate to do so. Your metabolism undoubtedly is not the same as mine. It should pain me to poison you." Sheridan nodded to indicate his gratitude. The food indeed was tempting. All of it was packaged attractively and some of it looked so delectable that it set the mouth to watering. "I often come here for..." The creature hunted for the Garsonian word and there wasn't any. Sheridan tried to help him out. "I think in my language I would call it picnic." "An eating-out-of-doors," the stranger said. "That is the nearest I can come in the language of our host." "We have the same idea." The creature brightened up considerably at this evidence of mutual understanding. "I think, my friend, that we have much in common. Perhaps I could leave some of this food with you and you could analyze it. Then the next time I come, you could join me."  doubt I'll stay much longer." "Oh," the stranger said, and he seemed pleased at it. "So you're a transitory being, too. Wings passing in the night. One hears a rustle and then the sound is gone forever." "A most poetic thought," said Sheridan, "and a most descriptive one." "Although," the creature said, "I come here fairly often. I've grown to love this planet It is such a fine spot for an eating-out-of-doors. So restful and simple and unhurried. It is not cluttered up with activity and the people are so genuine, albeit somewhat dirty and very, very stupid. But I find it in my heart to love them for their lack of sophistication and their closeness to the soil and the cleareyed view of life and their uncomplicated living of that life." He halted his talk and cocked an eye at Sheridan. "Don't you find it so, my friend?" "Yes, of course I do," agreed Sheridan, rather hurriedly. "There are so few places in the Galaxy," mourned the stranger, "where one can be alone in comfort. Oh, I do not mean alone entirely, or even physically. But an aloneness in the sense that there is space to live, that one is not pushed about by boundless, blind ambitions or smothered by the impact of other personalities. There are, of course, the lonely planets which are lonely only by the virtue of their being impossible for one to exist upon. These we must rule out." He ate a little, daintily, and in a mincing manner. But he took a healthy snort from the ornate jug. "This is excellent," said the creature, holding out the jug. "You are sure you do not want to chance it?" "I think I'd better not" "I suppose it's wise of you," the stranger admitted. "Life is not a thing that a person parts from without due consideration ." He had another drink, then put the jug down in his lap and sat there fondling it. "Not that I am one," he said, "to extoll the virtue of living above all other things. Surely there must be other facets of the universal pattern that have as much to offer..." They spent a pleasant afternoon together. When Sheridan went back to the flier, the creature had finished off the jug and was sprawled, happily pickled, among the litter of the picnic. IV tried to fit the picnicking alien into the pattern, but there was no place where he'd fit. Perhaps, after all, he was no more than what he seemed -- a flitting dilettante with a passion for a lonely eating-out-of-doors and an addiction to the bottle. Yet he knew the native language and he had said he came here often and that in itself was more than merely strange. With apparently the entire Galaxy in which to flit around, why should he gravitate to Garson IV, which, to the human eye, at least, was a most unprepossessing planet? And another thing -- how had he gotten here? "Gideon," asked Sheridan, "did you see, by any chance, any sort of conveyance parked nearby that our friend could have traveled in?" Gideon shook his head. "Now that you mention it, I am sure there wasn't. I would have noticed it." "Has it occurred to you, sir," inquired Hezekiah, "that he may have mastered the ability of teleportation? It is not impossible. There was that race out on Pilico... "That's right," said Sheridan, "but the Pilicoans were good for no more than a mile or so at a time. You remember how they went popping along, like a jack rabbit making mile-long jumps, but making them so fast that you couldn't see him jump. This gent must have covered light-years. He asked me about a language that I never heard of. Indicated that it is widely spoken in at least some parts of the Galaxy." "You are worrying yourself unduly, sir, cautioned Hezekiah. "We have more important things than this galivanting alien to trouble ourselves about" "You're right," said Sheridan. "If we don't get this cargo moving, it will be my neck." But he couldn't shake entirely the memory of the afternoon. He went back, in his mind, through the long and idle chatter and found, to his amazement, that it had been completely idle. So far as he could recall, the creature had told him nothing of itself. For three solid hours or more, it had talked almost continuously and in all that time had somehow managed to say exactly nothing. That evening, when he brought the supper, Napoleon squatted down beside the chair, gathering his spotless apron neatly in his lap. "We are in a bad way, aren't we?" he asked. "Yes, I suppose you could say we are." "What will we do, Steve, if we can't move the stuff at all -- if we can't get any podars?" "Nappy," said Sheridan, "I've been trying very hard not to think of it" But now that Napoleon had brought it up, he could well imagine the reaction of Central Trading if dollar cargo back intact He could imagine, a bit more vividly, what might be said to him if he simply left it here and went back home without it No matter how he did it, he had to sell the cargo! If he didn't, his career was in a sling. Although there was more, he realized, than just his career at stake. The whole human race was involved. need for the tranquilizer made from podar tubers. A search for such a drug had started centuries before and the need of it was underlined by the fact that through all those centuries the search had never faltered. It was something that Man needed badly -- that Man, in fact, had needed badly since the very moment he'd become something more than animal. And here, on this very planet, was the answer to that terrible human need -- an answer denied and blocked by the stubbornness of a shiftless, dirty, backward people. "If we only had this planet," he said, speaking more to himself than to Napoleon, "if we could only take it over, we could grow all the podars that we needed. We'd make it one big field and we'd grow a thousand times more podars than these natives ever grew." "But we can't," Napoleon said "It is against the law." "Yes, Nappy, you are right. Very much against the law." For the Garsonians were intelligent -- not startingly so, but intelligent, at least, within the meaning of the law. And you could do nothing that even hinted of force against an intelligent race. You couldn't even buy or lease their land, for the law would rule that in buying one would be dispossessing them of the inalienable rights of all alien intelligences. You could work with them and teach them -- that was very laudable. But the Garsonians were almost unteachable. You could barter with them if you were very careful that you did not cheat them too outrageously. But the Garsonians refused to barter. "I don't know what we'll do," Sheridan told Napoleon. "How are we going to find a way?" "I have a sort of suggestion. If we could introduce these natives to the intricacies of dice, we might finally get somewhere. We robots, as you probably know, are very good at it." Sheridan choked on his coffee. He slowly and with great care set the cup down. "Ordinarily," he told Napoleon solemnly, "I would frown upon such tactics. But with the situation as it stands, why don't you get some of the boys together and have a try at it?" "Glad to do it, Steve." "And... uh, Nappy..." "Yes, Steve?" "I presume you'd pick the best crap-shooters in the bunch." "Naturally," said Napoleon, getting up and smoothing his apron. their troupe to a distant village in entirely virgin territory, untouched by any of the earlier selling efforts, and put on the medicine show. It was an unparalleled success. The natives rolled upon the ground, clutching at their bellies, helpless with laughter. They howled and gasped and wiped their streaming eyes. They pounded one another on the back in appreciation of the jokes. They'd never seen anything like it in all their lives -- there had never been anything like it on all of Garson IV. And while they were weak with merriment, while they were still well-pleased, at the exact psychological moment when all their inhibitions should be down and all stubbornness and hostility be stilled, Joshua made the sales pitch. The laughter stopped. The merriment went away. The audience simply stood and stared. The troupe packed up and came trailing home, deep in despondency. Sheridan sat in his tent and faced the bleak prospect Outside the tent, the base was still as death. There was no happy talk or singing and no passing laughter. There was no neighborly tramping back and forth. "Six weeks," Sheridan said bitterly to Hezekiah. "Six weeks and not a sale. We've done everything we can and we've not come even close." He clenched his fist and hit the desk. "If we could only find what the trouble is! They want our merchandise and still they refuse to buy. What is the holdup, Hezekiah? Can you think of anything?" Hezekiah shook his head. "Nothing, sir. I'm stumped. We all are." "They'll crucify me back at Central," Sheridan declared. "They'll nail me up and keep me as a horrible example for the next ten thousand years. There've been failures before, but none like this." "I hesitate to say this, sir," said Hezekiah, "but we could take it on the lam. Maybe that's the answer. The boys would go along. Theoretically they're loyal to Central, but deep down at the bottom of it, it's you they're really loyal to. We could load up the cargo and that would give us capital and we'd have a good head start... "No," Sheridan said firmly. "We'll try a little longer and we may solve the situation. If not, I face the music." He scraped his hand across his jaw. "Maybe," he said, "Nappy and his crap-shooters can turn the trick for us. It's fantastic, sure, but stranger things have happened."  back, sheepish and depressed. "They beat the pants off us," the cook told Sheridan in awe. "Those boys are really naturals. But when we tried to pay our bets, they wouldn't take our stuff!" "We have to try to arrange a powwow," said Sheridan, "and talk it out with them, although I hold little hope for it Do you think, Napoleon, if we came clean and told them what a spot we're in, it would make a difference?" "No, I don't," Napoleon said. "If they only had a government," observed Ebenezer, who had been a member of Napoleon's gambling team, "we might get somewhere with a powwow. Then you could talk with someone who represented the entire population. But this way you'll have to talk with each village separately and that will take forever." "We can't help it, Eb," said Sheridan. "It's all we have left." But before any powwow could be arranged, the podar harvest started. The natives toiled like beavers in the fields, digging up the tubers, stacking them to dry, packing them in carts and hauling them to the bams by sheer manpower, for the Garsonians had no draft animals. They dug them up and hauled them to the barns, the very bams where they'd sworn that they had no podars. But that was not to wonder at when one stopped to think of it, for the natives had also sworn that they grew no podars. They did not open the big bam doors, as one would have normally expected them to do. They simply opened a tiny, man-size door set into the bigger door and took the podars in that way. And when any of the Earth party hove in sight, they quickly stationed a heavy guard around the entire square. "We'd better let them be," Abraham advised Sheridan. "If we try to push them, we may have trouble in our lap." So the robots pulled back to the base and waited for the harvest to end. Finally it was finished and Sheridan counseled lying low for a few days more to give the Garsonians a chance to settle back to their normal routine. Then they went out again and this time Sheridan rode along, on one of the floaters with Abraham and Gideon. The first village they came to lay quiet and lazy in the sun. There was not a creature stirring. Abraham brought the floater down into the square and the three stepped off. The square was empty and the place was silent -- a deep and deathly silence.  ing up his back, for there was a stealthy, unnatural menace in the noiseless emptiness. "They may be laying for us," suggested Gideon. "I don't think so," said Abraham. "Basically they are peaceful." They moved cautiously across the square and walked slowly down a street that opened from the square. And still there was no living thing in sight And stranger still -- the doors of some of the houses stood open to the weather and the windows seemed to watch them out of blind eyes, with the colorful crude curtains gone. "Perhaps," Gideon suggested, "they may have gone away to some harvest festival or something of that nature." "They wouldn't leave their doors wide open, even for a day," declared Abraham. "I've lived with them for weeks and I've studied them. I know what they would do. They'd have closed the doors very carefully and tried them to be sure that they were closed." "But maybe the wind... "Not a chance," insisted Abraham. "One door, possibly. But I see four of them from here." "Someone has to take a look," said Sheridan. "It might as well be me." He turned in at a gate where one of the doors stood open and went slowly up the path. He halted at the threshold and peered in. The room beyond was empty. He stepped into the house and went from room to room and all the rooms were empty -- not simply of the natives, but of everything. There was no furniture and the utensils and the tools were gone from hooks and racks. There was no scrap of clothing. There was nothing left behind. The house was dead and bare and empty, a shabby and abandoned thing discarded by its people. He felt a sense of guilt creep into his soul. What if we drove them off? What if we hounded them until they'd rather flee than face us? But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There must be some other reason for this incredibly complete mass exodus. He went back down the walk. Abraham and Gideon went into other houses. All of them were empty. "It may be this village only," suggested Gideon. "The rest may be quite normal." But Gideon was wrong. in touch with base. "I can't understand it," said Hezekiah. "I've had the same report from four other teams. I was about to call you, sir." "You'd better get out every floater that you can," said Sheridan. "Check all the villages around. And keep a lookout for the people. They may be somewhere in the country. There's a possibility they're at a harvest festival." "If they're at a festival, sir," asked Hezekiah, "why did they take their belongings? You don't take along your furniture when you attend a festival." "I know," said Sheridan. "You put your finger on it Get the boys out, will you?" "There's just the possibility," Gideon offered, "that they are changing villages. Maybe there's a tribal law that says they have to build a new village every so often. It might have its roots in an ancient sanitation law that the camp must be moved at stated intervals." "It could be that," Sheridan said wearily. "We'll have to wait and see." Abraham thumbed a fist toward the barn. Sheridan hesitated, then threw caution to the winds. "Go ahead," he said. Gideon stalked up the ramp and reached the door. He put out a hand and grasped one of the planks nailed across the door. He wrenched and there was an anguished shriek of tortured nails ripping from the wood and the board came free. Another plank came off and then another one and Gideon put his shoulder to the door and half of it swung open. Inside, in the dimness of the bam, was the dull, massive shine of metal -- a vast machine sitting on the driveway floor. Sheridan stiffened with a cold, hollow sense of terror. It was wrong, he thought. There could be no machine. The Garsonians had no business having a machine. Their culture was entirely non-mechanical. The best they had achieved so far had been the hoe and wheel, and even yet they had not been able to put the hoe and wheel together to make themselves a plow. They had had no machine when the second expedition left some fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years they could not have spanned the gap. In those fifteen years, from all surface indications, they had not advanced an inch. And yet the machine stood in the driveway of the barn. It was a fair-sized cylinder, set on end and with a door in one side of it. The upper end of it terminated in a dome-shaped cap. Except for the door, it resembled very much a huge and snub-nosed bullet. Interference, thought Sheridan. There had been someone here between the time the second expedition left and the third one had arrived. "Gideon," he said. "What is it, Steve?" "Go back to base and bring the transmog chest. Tell Hezekiah to get my tent and all the other stjiff over here as soon as he is able. Call some of the boys off reconnaissance. We have work to do." There had been someone here, he thought -- and most certainly there had. A very urbane creature who sat beneath a tree beside a spread-out picnic cloth, swigging at his jug and talking for three solid hours without saying anything at all! V T HE messenger from Central Trading brought his small ship down to one side of the village square, not far from where Sheridan's tent was pitched. He slid back the visi-dome and climbed out of his seat He stood for a moment, shining in the sun, during which he straightened his special courier badge, which had become askew upon his metal chest Then he walked deliberately toward the barn, heading for Sheridan, who sat upon the ramp. "You are Sheridan?" he asked. Sheridan nodded, looking him over. He was a splendid thing. "I had trouble finding you. Your base seems to be deserted." "We ran into some difficulty," Sheridan said quietly. "Not too serious, I trust I see your cargo is untouched." "Let me put it this way -- we haven't been bored." "I see," the robot said, disappointed that an explanation was not immediately forthcoming. "My name is Tobias and I have a message for you." "I'm listening." himself, these headquarters robots needed taking down a peg or two. "It is a verbal message. I can assure you that I am thoroughly briefed. I can answer any questions you may wish to ask." "Please," said Sheridan. "The message first" "Central Trading wishes to inform you that they have been offered the drug calenthropodensia in virtually unlimited supply by' a firm which describes itself as Galactic Enterprises. We would like to know if you can shed any light upon the matter." "Galactic Enterprises," said Sheridan. "I've never heard of them." "Neither has Central Trading. I don't mind telling you that we're considerably upset." "I should imagine you would be." Tobias squared his shoulders. "I have been instructed to point out to you that you were sent to Garson IV to obtain a cargo of podara, from which this drug is made, and that the assignment, in view of the preliminary work already done upon the planet, should not have been so difficult that -- " "Now, now," cautioned Sheridan, "Let us keep our shirts on. If it will quiet your conscience any, you may consider for the record that I have accepted the bawling out you're supposed to give me." "But you -- " "I assume," said Sheridan, "that Galactic Enterprises is quoting a good stiff price on this drug of theirs." "It's highway robbery. What Central Trading has sent me to find out -- " "Is whether I am going to bring in a cargo of podars. At the moment, I can't tell you." "But I must take back my report!" "Not right now, you aren't I won't be able to make a report to you for several days at least You'll have to wait." "But my instructions are -- " "Suit yourself," Sheridan said sharply. "Wait for it or go back without it. I don't give a damn which you do." got up from the ramp and walked into the bam. The robots, he saw, had finally pried or otherwise dislodged the cap from the big machine and had it on the side on the driveway floor, tilted to reveal the innards of it "Steve," said Abraham bitterly, "take a look at it" Sheridan took a look. The inside of the cap was a mass of fused metal. "There were some working parts in there," said Gideon, "but they have been destroyed" Sheridan scratched his head. "Deliberately? A self-destruction relay?" Abraham nodded. "They apparently were all finished with it If we hadn't been here, I suppose they would have carted this machine and the rest of them back home, wherever that may be. But they couldn't take a chance of one of them falling in our hands. So they pressed the button or whatever they had to do and the entire works went pouf." "But there are other machines. Apparently one in every bam." "Probably just the same as this," said Lemuel, rising from his knees beside the cap. "What's your guess?" asked Sheridan. "A matter transference machine, a teleporter, whatever you want to call it," Abraham told him. "Not deduced, of course, from anything in the machine itself, but from the circumstances. Look at this bam. There's not a podar in it. Those podars went somewhere. This picnicking friend of yours -- " "They call themselves," said Sheridan, "Galactic Enterprises. A messenger just arrived. He says they offered Central Trading a deal on the podar drug." "And now Central Trading," Abraham supplied, "enormously embarrassed and financially outraged, will pin the blame on us because we've delivered not a podar ." "I have no doubt of it," said Sheridan. "It all depends upon whether or not we can locate these native friends of ours." "I would think that most unlikely," Gideon said. "Our reconnaissance showed all the villages empty throughout the entire planet Do you suppose they might have left in these machines? If they'd transport podars, they'd probably transport people." "Perhaps," said Lemuel, making a feeble joke, "everything that begins with the letter p." "What are the chances of finding how they work?" asked Sheridan. "This is something that Central could make a lot of use of." can't tell you, Steve. Out of all these machines on the planet, which amounts to one in every barn, there is a certain mathematical chance that we might find one that was not destroyed" "But even if we did," said Gideon, "there is an excellent chance that it would immediately destroy itself if we tried to tamper with it." "And if we don't find one that is not destroyed?" "There is a chance," Lemuel admitted. "All of them would not destroy themselves to the same degree, of course. Nor would the pattern of destruction always be the same. From, say, a thousand of them, you might be able to work out a good idea of what kind of machinery there was in the cone." "And say we could find out what kind of machinery was there?" "That's a hard one to answer, Steve," Abraham said. "Even if we had one complete andfunctioning, I honestly don't know if we could ferret out the principle to the point where we could duplicate it. You must remember that at no time has the human race come even close to something of this nature." It made a withering sort of sense to Sheridan. Seeing a totally unfamiliar device work, even having it blueprinted in exact detail, would convey nothing whatever if the theoretical basis was missing. It was, completely, and there was a great deal less available here than a blueprint or even working model. "They used those machines to transport the podars," he said, "and possibly to transport the people. And if that is true, it must be the people went voluntarily -- we'd have known if there was force involved. Abe, can you tell me: Why would the people go?" "I wouldn't know," said Abraham. "All I have now is a physicist transmog. Give me one on sociology and I'll wrestle with the problem." There was a shout outside the barn and they whirled toward the door. Ebenezer was coming up the ramp and in his arms he carried a tiny, dangling form. "It's one of them," gasped Gideon. "It's a native, sure enough!" Ebenezer knelt and placed the little native tenderly on the floor. "I found him in the field. He was lying in a ditch. I'm afraid he's done for." Sheridan stepped forward and bent above the native. It was an old man -- any one of the thousands of old men he'd seen in the villages. The same leathery old face with the wind and weather wrinkles in it, the same shaggy brows shielding deep-sunk eyes, the same scraggly crop of whiskers, the same sense of forgotten shiftlessness and driven stubbornness. "Left behind," said Ebenezer. "Left behind when all the others went. He must have fallen sick out in the field..." "Get my canteen," Sheridan said. "It's hanging by the door." TP HE oldster opened his eyes and glanced around the circle of faces that stared down at him. He rubbed a hand across his face, leaving streaks of dirt. "I fell he mumbled. "I remember falling. I fell into a ditch." "Here's the water, Steve," said Abraham. Sheridan took it, lifted the old man and held him half upright against his chest. He tilted the canteen to the native's lips. The oldster drank unneatly, gulping at the water. Some of it spilled, splashing down his whiskers to drip onto his belly. Sheridan took the canteen away. "Thank you," the native said and, Sheridan reflected, that was the first civil word to come their way from any of the natives. The native rubbed his face again with a dirty claw. "The people all are gone?" "All gone," said Sheridan. "Too late," the old man said. "I would have made it if I hadn't fallen down. Perhaps they hunted for me..." His voice trailed off into nothingness. "If you don't mind, sir," suggested Hezekiah, "I'll get a medic transmog." "Perhaps you should" said Sheridan. "Although I doubt it'll do much good. He should have died days ago out there in the field." "Steve," said Gideon, speaking softly, "a human doctor isn't too much use treating alien people. In time, if we had the time, we could find out about this fellow -- something about his body chemistry and his metabolism. Then we could doctor him." "That's right, Steve," Abraham said. Sheridan shrugged. "All right then, Hezekiah. Forget about the transmog." He laid the old man back on the floor again and got up off his knees. He sat on his heels and rocked slowly back and forth. "Perhaps," he said to the native, "you'll answer one question. Where did all your people go?" "In there," the native said, raising a feeble arm to point at the machine. "In there, and then they went away just as the harvest we gathered did." Sheridan stayed squatting on the floor beside the stricken native. Reuben brought in an armload of grass and wadded it beneath the native's head as a sort of pillow. S O the Garsonians had really gone away, Sheridan told himself, had up and left the planet. Had left it, using the machines that had been used to make delivery of the podars. And if Galactic Enterprises had machines like that, then they (whoever, wherever they might be) had a tremendous edge on Central Trading. For Central Trading's lumbering cargo sleds, snaking their laborious way across th light-years, could offer only feeble competition to machines like those. He had thought, he remembered, the first day they had landed, that a little competition was exactly what Central Trading needed. And here was that coftipetition -- a competition that had not a hint of ethics. A competition that sneaked in behind Central Trading's back and grabbed the market that Central Trading needed -- the market that Central could have cinched if it had not fooled around, if it had not been so sly and cynical about adapting the podar crop to Earth. Just where and how, he wondered, had Galactic Enterprise found out about the podars and the importance of the drug? Under what circumstances had they learned the exact time limit during which they could operate in the podar market without Central interference? And had they, perhaps, been slightly optimistic in regard to that time limit and gotten caught in a situation where they had been forced to destroy all those beautiful machines? Sheridan chuckled quietly to himself. That destruction must have hurt them! It wasn't hard, however, to imagine a 'hundred or a thousand ways in which they might have learned about the podar situation, for they were a charming people and really quite disarming. He would not be surprised if some of them might be operating secretly inside of Central Trading. The native stirred. He reached out a skinny hand and tugged at the sleeve of Sheridan's jacket. "Yes, what is it, friend?" "You will stay with me?" the native begged. "These others here, they are not the same as you and L" "I will stay with you," Sheridan promised. "I think we'd better go," said Gideon. "Maybe we disturb him." The robots walked quietly from the barn and left the two alone. a hand on the native's brow. The flesh was clammy cold. "Old friend," he said, "I think perhaps you owe me something." The old man shook his head, rolling it slowly back and forth upon the pillow. And the fierce light of stubbornness and a certain slyness came into his eyes. "We don't owe you," he said. "We owed the other ones." And that, of course, hadn't been what Sheridan had meant. But there they lay -- the words that told the story, the solution to the puzzle that was Garson IV. "That was why you wouldn't trade with us," said Sheridan, talking to himself rather than to the old native on the floor. "You were so deep in debt to these other people that you needed all the podar s to pay off what you owed them?" And that must have been the way it was. Now that he thought back on it, that supplied the onq logical explanation for everything that happened. The reaction of the natives, the almost desperate sales resistance was exactly the kind of thing one would expect from people in debt up to their ears. That was the reason, too, the houses had been so neglected and the clothes had been in rags. It accounted for the change from the happy-go-lucky shiftlessness to thq beaten and defeated and driven attitude. So pushed, so hounded, so fearful that they could not meet the payments on the debt that they strained their every resource, drove themselves to ever harder work, squezing from the soil every podar they could grow. "That was it?" he demanded sharply. "That was the way it was?" The native nodded with reluctance. "They came along and offered such a bargain that you could not turn it down. For the machines, perhaps? For the machines to send you to other places?" The native shook his head. "No, not the machines. We put the podars in the machines and the podars went away. That' was how we paid." "You were paying all these years?" "That is right," the native said. Then he added, with a flash of pride : "But now we're all paid up." "That is fine," said Sheridan. "It is good for a man to pay his debts." "They took three years off the payments," said the native eagerly. "Was that not good of them?" "I'm sure it was," said Sheridan, with some bitterness. He squatted patiently on the floor, listening to the faint whispeif of a wind blowing in the loft and the rasping breath of the dying native. "But then your people used the machines to go away. Can't you tell me why?" A racking cough shook the old man and his breath came in gasping sobs. Sheridan felt a sense of shame in what he had to do. I should let him die in peace, he thought. I should not badger him. I should let him go in whatever dignity he can -- not pushed and questioned to the final breath he draws. But there was that last answer -- the one Sheridan had to have. tell me, friend, what did you bargain for? What was it that you bought?" He wondered if the native heard. There was no indication that he had. "What did you buy?" Sheridan insisted. "A planet," said the native. "But you had a planet!" "This one was different," the native told him in a feeble whisper. "This was a planet of immortality. Anyone who went there would never, never die." Sheridan squatted stiffly in shocked and outraged silence. And from the silence came a whisper -- a whisper still of faith and belief and pity that would haunt the human all his life. "That was what I lost," the whisper said. "That was what I lost..." Sheridan opened his hands and closed them, strangling the perfect throat and the winning smile, shutting off the cultured flow of words. If I had him now, he thought, if I only had him now! He remembered the spead-out picnic cloth and the ornate jug and the appetizing food, the smooth, slick gab and the assurance of the creature. And even the methodical business of getting very drunk so that their meeting could end without unpleasant questions or undue suspicion. And the superior way in which he'd asked if the human might know Bailie, all the time, more than likely, being able to speak English himself. So Central Trading finally had its competition. From this moment, Central Trading would be fighting with its back against the wall. For these jokers in Galactic Enterprises played dirty and for keeps. The Garsonians had been naive fools, of course, but that was no true measure of Galactic Enterprises. They undoubtedly would select different kinds of bait for different kinds of fish, but the old never-never business of immortality might be deadly bait for even the most sophisticated if appropriately presented. An utter lack of ethics and the transference machines were the trumps Galactic held. " wondered, to all the people who had lived on this planet? Where had they really gone when they followed the podars into those machines? Could the Galactic boys, by chance, have ferreted out a place where there would be a market for Or had they simply planned to get the Garsonians out of the way as an effective means of cutting off the podar supply for Central Trading, thus insuring a ready and profitable sale for their supply of drugs? Or had they lured the Garsonians away so they themselves could take over the planet? And if that was the case -- perhaps in any case -- Galactic Enterprises defintely had lost this first encounter. Maybe, Sheridan told himself, they are really not so hot They gave us exactly what we need, he realized with a pleased jolt. They did us a favor! Old blundering, pompous Central Trading had won the first round, after all. He got to his feet and headed for the door. He hesitated and turned back to the native. "Maybe, friend," he said, "you were the lucky one." The native did not hear him. Gideon was waiting at the door. "How is he?" he asked. "'He's dead," Sheridan said. "I wonder if you'd arrange for burial." "Of course," said Gideon. "You'll let me see the data. I'll have to bone up on the proper rites." "But first do something else for me." "Name it, Steve." "You know this Tobias, the messenger that Central Trading sent? Find him and see that he doesn't leave." Gideon grinned. "You may rest assured." "Thank you," said Sheridan. On his way to the tent, he passed the courier's ship. It was, he noted, a job that was built for speed -- little more than an instrument board and seat tacked onto a powerful engine. In a ship like that, he thought, a pilot could really make some time. Almost to the tent, he met Hezekiah. "Come along with me," he said. "I have a job for you."  his chair and reached for a sheet of paper. "Hezekiah," he said, "dig into that chest. Find the finest diplomatic transmog that we have." "I know just where it is, sir," said Hezekiah, pawing through the chest He came out with the transmog and laid it on the desk. "Hezekiah," said Sheridan, "listen to me carefully. Remember every word I say." "Sir," replied Hezekiah, a little huffily, "I always listen carefully." "I know you do. I have perfect faith and trust in you. That is why Fm sending you to Central." "To Central, sir! You must be joking, surely. You know I cannot go. Sir, who would look after you? Who would see that you -- " "I can get along all right. You'll be coming back. And I'll still have Napoleon." "But I don't want to go, sir!" "Hezekiah, I must have someone I can trust We'll put that transmog in you and -- " "But it will take me weeks, sir!" "Not with the courier ship. You're going back instead of the courier. I'll write an authorization for you to represent me. It'll be as if I were there myself." "But there is Abraham. Or Gideon. Or you could send any of the others... " "It's you, Hezekiah. You are my oldest friend." "Sir," said Hezekiah, straightening to attention, "what do you wish me to do?" "You're to tell Central that Garson IV is now uninhabited. You're to say that such being the case, I'm possessing it formally in the name of Central Trading. Tell them Fll need reinforcements immediately because there is a possibility that Galactic Enterprises may try to take it from us. They're to send out one sled loaded with robots as an initial occupying and colonizing force, and another sledload of agricultural implements so we can start our farming. And every last podar that they have, for seed. And, Hezekiah... "Yes, sir?" "That sledload of robots. They'd better be deactivated and knocked down. That way they can pile on more of them. We can assemble them here." Hezekiah repressed a shudder. "I will tell them, sir." "I am sorry, Hezekiah." "It is quite all right, sir." Sheridan finished writing out the authorization. "Tell Central Trading," he said, "that in time we'll turn this entire planet into one vast podar field. But they must not waste a minute. No committee sessions, no meetings of the board, no dawdling around. Keep right on their tail every blessed second." "I will not let them rest, sir," Hezekiah assured him. VI HP HE courier ship had disappeared from sight. Try as he might, Sheridan could catch no further glimpse of it. Good old Hezekiah, he thought, hell do the job. Central Trading will be wondering for weeks exactly what it was that hit them. He tilted his head forward and nibbed his aching neck. He said to Gideon and Ebenezer: "You can get up off him now" The two arose, grinning, from the prostrate form of Tobias. Tobias got up, outraged. "You'll hear of this," he said to Sheridan. "Yes, I know," said Sheridan. "You hate my guts." Abraham stepped forward, "What is next?" he asked. "Well," Sheridan said, "I think we should all turn gleaners." "Gleaners?" "There are bound to be some podars that the natives missed. We'll need every one we can find for seed." "But we're all physicists and mechanical engineers and chemists and other things like that. Surely you would not expect such distinguished specialists -- " "I think I can remedy that," said Sheridan. "I imagine we still can find those spacehand transmogs. They should serve until Central sends us some farmer units." Tobias stepped forward and ranged himself alongside of Abraham. "As long as I must remain here, I demand to be of use. It's not in a robot's nature just to loaf around." Sheridan slapped his hand against his jacket pocket, felt the bulge of the transmog he'd taken out of Hezekiah. "I think," he told Tobias, "I have just the thing for you."      Pastoral Affair No wonder StefcrnHc meant to tight to the last -- lie wasn't going to turn his kids over to an old goat like Glinka l T HE seaplane cast its silhouette from aloft upon the blue Arabian Sea, left its white wake across the shallows, and taxied alongside the ancient stone jetty, clawing into the sandy bottom with its small fore and after anchors. Colonel Glinka stepped out upon the wing, carefully measured the distance to the jetty, and sprang for it, wetting himself up to the seat of his voluminous khaki shorts. This lonely sandspit, these barren slopes and frowning, ocher cliffs, the oceanic silence around him, broken by the plaintive cries of wheeling Caspian terns that were badly in need of laundering, were not, he thought as he clambered ashore, exactly as one pictures a tropical paradise. And it helped the desolation of his mood not at all that upon these same arid ridges scores of silent, bumoosed figures watched him as he stood there, allowing the water to drain from his perforated white oxfords and all unaware that his vast pith helmet, curiously heavy malacca cane and formidable fundament cast a centaur's shadow upon the rocks in the later afternoon sun. Colonel Glinka took a pair of green sun goggles from his pocket and put them on, resolutely hitched up his shorts, assumed the stem yet conciliatory expression of a hedgehog in mating season, and set off up the rocky path. Ahead of him, the bumoosed ones scrambled nimbly up the slope, looking over their shoulders, intent upon not missing a thing, yet endeavoring to keep their distance. But two there had been who either had not seen him arrive, or did not give a damn, for they suddenly appeared upon the rise before him, racing down toward the sea with very little regard for life or limb. T N the lead, a brown young man in flying green turban and white duck trousers appeared to be losing steadily to his pursuer, who, though swathed from head to food in that featureless native garb of the others, might yet be identified by subtle conformations as a female. Both of them stopped at once upon sighting Colonel Glinka in the pathway, the female hurriedly retreating to what might be deemed a safer distance, the young man standing as if petrified, with one foot upraised and a sun-snarl upon his mottled face, quivering at point "Oh, Effendi ," he cried at last "if you are looking for Aden, then you are lost for Aden is five hundred miles that way. And if you are looking for Cairo -- " "I am hardly ever lost" Colonel Glinka said, and, eying the young female, added, Tell me, what is the name of that rather tasteless game that you are playing?" "No game, Effendi," the brown young man said. "That one chases me every time I go outside. They are worse than Tuaregs, these people." "Are you not a native, then?" "I?" The young man placed a hand of scorn upon his breast. "Hadji Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar? I am Saudi, and a Hadj besides. Say, Joe, have you got an American cigarette?" "A great deal better than that," Colonel Glinka said, proffering an ornate golden cigarette case. "Try one of these, my boy." Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar took two, sniffing them suspiciously. "They are very brown," he said. Less critically, Colonel Glinka lighted one for himself. "You know," he said, "I was rather hoping that you might direct me to the house of a very old friend of mine." "What handle?" "I cannot tell you what name he is presently affecting, but he is a small, crooked man with a heavy black beard -- or, at any rate, he once had such a beard. I know that he is somewhere on this island; therefore it will be useless for you to lie to me" "Ah, that is the Sidi Doctor Stephens," Abdul said, puffing not too happily upon his cigarette. "His is the only house upon this island; also, I am his flunky and so I ought to know." " 'Stephens' will do," said Colonel Glinka, thwacking him smartly with the Malacca cane. "Lead on. And you may dispense with the gutter American dialect. I am not American, and besides I speak Arabic fluently." "But I not so well," Abdul said, "for I was raised in the Kuwait oilfields." "By whom? A camel breeder?" "Socony Vacuum," Abdul said. They toiled up the face of the cliff. At once, half a dozen of the white-robed gallery fell in behind them. When Colonel Glinka stopped and looked back, they stopped. When he continued upon his way, they continued. "Have they no homes to which to go?" he complained. "Have they nothing to do?" "They are a very backward people, who live in the open," Abdul said. "They do not work." "How, then, do the wretches live? Wall Street charity, I presume." "Oh, no, when they are not able to forage, the Sidi Doctor Stephens feeds them." "The reactionary old fool! But you may be sure that they knew how to work in the old days, before he came." "I do not think so." "And why, in your ageless wisdom, not?" "Because the Sidi Doctor made them," Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar said.  for they had reached the summit of the path by this time and were looking down upon a small, white villa that nestled in a green microcosm between the naked chines of the dark, interior hills. A miniature Eden indeed, thought Colonel Glinka, of figs and cinnamons, of date palms and patchouli, all enclosed within a high wire fence. They descended, and Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar, with a flourish, produced a great bronze key and unlocked the iron gate. "The Sidi Doctor," he said, "will doubtless be in his conservatory, making flowers." "A godlike pastime," said Colonel Glinka with heavy irony. "And where may this hotbed of new life be found?" "Over there," Abdul said, pointing toward a narrow, screened, quonsetlike annex which protruded from the rear of the villa. "Come with me and I will show you" "You will not," Colonel Glinka said, smiting him upon the thigh once again with the heavy cane. "You will remain here and keep silent" "Ouchdammit!" Abdul exclaimed. "You be careful with that thing, Joe, okay?" " You be careful, my boy," Colonel Glinka said and marched swiftly around the comer of the house, opened the screen door of the conservatory, and entered. Here, amid long, terraced rows of tropical plants, a bearded dwarf in a green coat crouched before an tranquilly puffing up a massive, tobacco-stained meerschaum. He did not look up at the sound of the intruder, for he was engaged in a delicate business, the transfer of pollen from corolla to corolla with a toothpick. "So you, are, after all, only a minor god," Colonel Glinka said. "I heard your plane and I watched you come up the path," the black bearded little man said. "Glinka, is it not?" "You remembered me!" Colonel Glinka, quite affectedly, removed his goggles and dabbed at his eye with a perfumed handkerchief. "A humble policeman, a fat little nobody, to be remembered by the great Dr. Stefanik who was once our greatest scientist -- yes, our shake your head. Let me see, was it Ankara where last we met? Yes, eight years ago in Ankara. You got away from me in Ankara. I was so ashamed, Comrade, that I cried " "Nine years," the other corrected. "For one remembers a mad dog. And do not call me 'comrade,' Comrade. You know that I was never anything other than a simple Cossack." "And, as such, invariably troublesome to us," Colonel Glinka said. "Yet you were our white hope, Comrade Stefanik. We might have led the world, I am told, in organics as we now lead in physics. I have read all of your books upon the fascinating subject of chromosomic change and the morphology of rats. It was required reading for those of us who were assigned to you. Most interesting, though I confess I did not understand all of it." his feet. His back was now revealed to be so cruelly deformed that his black beard curled against his smock, and he walked with a shuffling, crablike motion as he limped over to pick up a small rubber irrigation hose. "Why did you leave us, Comrade Stefanik?" asked Colonel Glinka. "Why shame us, discredit your government, by running away?" "I did not like it there," Dr. Stefanik said. "We knew, of course, that you were on the verge of some great discovery, some new process, perhaps, of controlling human development. A genetical means, our biologists tell me, which might have made us immune to disease. A race of Pavlovs and Stakhanovs. Do you deny this?" Dr. Stefanik merely sucked upon his pipe calmly, twisted a valve half hidden in the greenery. A spray of the nozzle of the hose, bathing the plants in a gentle emerald mist. "It is true," he said at last, "that I had experimented in those days with a new process of alloploidy." "And what is that?" "Alloploidy is the manipulation of chromosomic patterns which allows us to superimpose the character of our most perfect specimens upon those of less fortunate hereditary traits within the species." "I see," said Colonel Glinka, who had not really quite seen. "Exactly. A super-race, to rule the world. Imagine, Comrade!" "Only super-rats and the like," Dr. Stefanik told him calmly, "for you may go home and tell them that I have never seen fit to experiment with human beings, Glinka, and I never will." "# tell them that?" Colonel Glinka cried. "Would I dare? Oh, no, you must tell them yourself. That is why you will have to return with me." "Never!" Colonel Glinka sighed prodigiously. "I am afraid that our country is going to be dogs-in-themanger in this matter," he said. "You see, we are a jealous people by nature, and if we cannot have you, no one shall." And, deliberately, he laid the Malacca cane across his left arm, so that its tip was pointed squarely at Dr. Stefanik and the sinister round hole there clearly revealed to him. "How melodramatic that is," Dr. Stefanik said. "I know it," said Colonel Glinka, "but you must remember that the customs officials in this part of the world are exceedingly tiresome about firearms. This little gem, now, is quite discreet, and very accurate, and it will shoot you three times before you can say 'Never? Will you not change your mind?" "No." "I did so want to become tall and gretfully, and he started to press the handle of the cane. "We are as tall as we stand," said Dr. Stefanik, and, swiftly focusing the nozzle of the irrigation hose to a thin stream, squirted the stinging green fluid in Colonel Glinka's right and left eye. # T know that you are in here somewhere!" Colonel Glinka yelped. "Be assured that I shall find you, Comrade, and when I do, it will not be pleasant for you! Oh, my -- no, indeed!" His eyes were red and streaming. He wiped them with the lavenderscented handkerchief, got down upon his hands and knees and started to crawl along the terraced rows of tropical plants, looking under each bench as he came to it. When he had reached the end, he turned and crawled up the other side. At the far end of the conservatory, he stood up with a baffled grunt. "I know that you are in here," he said. Something tickled the back of his neck. He whirled like a Dervish, but found only a drooping, bloodred plant like nothing ever created by nature confronting him. "I am getting jumpy," Colonel Glinka growled. "A little jumpy in my business is good, but too much is bad for the health." And he went, straightway, and closed the back door of the conservatory and dragged a heavy rack of trailing orchids in front of it, humming a furious little march from The Guardsman as he worked. "You must know," he said loudly, "that I do not altogether believe you, Stefanik, when you imply that you have abandoned this research. Nor will they. For who, then, are these degenerate wretches who stand upon the hills and gawk at us, and why must you feed them? I know that they were not created by you, but it is possible that they are paid to be your guinea pigs. Perhaps you are all in the pay of the British. Am I right?" He listened. There was no answer. Completing his examination of the conservatory, he entered the main villa and searched it thoroughly, as he had been trained to do, looking in every cupboard and closet and under the beds. When he had exhausted these hiding places, he left by the front door and closed it after him, with a narrow, jamming wedge that he had made of half a lead pencil. There were many places to hide in the garden, but Colonel Glinka took them one by one, glancing behind him from time to time in order to make certain that he was not being followed around and around the house in a grim sort of Maypole dance. "I know that you are out here, Comrade," he said. Presently he had arrived back where he had started, sweating profusely, and was about to retrace the entire circuit when he caught a glimpse of something moving in the undergrowth of patchouli near the gate. He aimed the Malacca cane and pressed a part of its handle with his thumb. A bullet whined off the steel gatepost. "Stop there, my friend!" he commanded. Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar slowly rose from the bushes with his hands high above his head. "You got me, Joe," he said. 'X'HE gate was wide open; Ste fanik's route of escape now painfully obvious. Colonel Glinka stared thoughtfully up at the darkening ridges where the sun set in that sanguinary glory observable only in these latitudes, and the dusk crept swiftly up from the seaward-reaching ravines. "So," Colonel Glinka said. "That is where he has gone, thinking to elude me forever. But you -- " he waggled the cane at Abdul, who was already shaking his head in the negative -- "will lead me to him. You know his habits, and, what is more, you are almost certainly familiar with every hiding place on this island, since it is your whim to be chased all over it by the females." "Too dark, Effendi Abdul said. "If we go out now, they will not only chase us; they will catch us, for they are able to see very well in the dark." " Who will catch us?" "These people. They are worse than Tuaregs. For all I know, they may be descended from the Tuaregs, and everyone knows that a Tuareg would as soon cut a man's throat as kiss the hem of his burnoose." "So now they are Tuaregs." Colonel Glinka nodded, with a slow, ferocious smile. "Yet you have hinted that they are the spawn of Comrade Stefanik's genius, the children of genetical science, stamped with 'Made in the Seychelles' upon their bottoms. Perhaps they were grown in the conservatory, from Tuareg seed." Abdul grimaced. "I do not remember saying that, though sometimes I say things that I don't remember later. Perhaps they are not Tuaregs, then. To tell the truth, they were already living here when I came to work for the Sidi Doctor Stephens, and so naturally I thought that he had made them, for there were no. people upon this island in the old days. Only the seabirds and a few wild goats, perhaps." Colonel Glinka clasped his hand to his forehead. "Stop, stop, or I shall go mad!" Abdul Hakkim obediently sat down and crossed his legs, starting to light the second of the very bad cigarettes that he had cadged. "What are you doing?" Colonel Glinka said softly. "Nothing, Effendi." "Get up! Get up and get moving, my boy, or make your peace with Allah! Did you suppose for one moment that I had forgotten what we were talking about?" TT was quite dark by the time they had reached the summit of the ridge, but Colonel Glinka still marched along behind Abdul, high good humor restored, prodding him from time to time with the Malacca cane and lecturing him upon social equalities and other Party doctrine. "Are we nearly there?" he would interrupt himself to ask from time to time. "I do not know ." "Call out, then " "I am afraid." A savage poke with the cane, a war whoop from Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar. No answer. "We'll get him," Colonel Glinka would say. "Oh, my, yes." But an hour had passed and still they had encountered no living thing upon the path. At last Abdul stopped abruptly. They were in a little, narrow ravine, high above the sea, with looming red cliffs all about them, and the booming of the surf upon the distant, windward shore of the island plainly audible. "Why have we stopped here?" Colonel Glinka said, bumping into him. "Look there, Effendi!" Abdul whispered, gesturing toward a ledge not ten yards above their heads, where a burnoosed figure stood looking down upon them. "And there -- and there -- and there!" Abdul pointed at other little ledges where similar ghostly sentries stood, barely visible in the gloom. Colonel Glinka looked behind him and saw that there were others that they had passed within a very few feet of, standing upon every shelf and ledge that afforded a foothold above the trail. Dozens and dozens of them. "Maybe we had better scram out of here, Joe," Abdul suggested. "I perceive that you are trying to frighten me," Colonel Glinka said. "It won't work " A stone rattled behind them. "What was that?" Colonel Glinka demanded, turning around quickly. "Who's there?"  shadows, edging into the deeper shadows of the rocks. It was the pursuing female of earlier that afternoon. Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar, in deep, abdominal disgust, groaned, "Come here, you!" Colonel Glinka commanded. "Come on over here. Don't be afraid, my little one -- I won't hurt you." She advanced ever so little, a shapeless white wraith attracted by the syrup in his voice. He took one step forward. Carefully she retreated a step. "Come now," Colonel Glinka said. "Surely it is time that we met. For you may as well know that I am now the master of this island. Now and forevermore, so far as you are concerned, my child. Perhaps I may let you help me clear up a little of its mystery." She kept a maddening five.or six feet between them, somehow. He could not lessen the distance without alarming her. And so he balanced himself upon the balls of his feet and lunged. She gave a little cry, stumbled and fell, rolling over and over into a dark little depression beside the path as he clutched at her robe. The garment, still in his hand, unwound easily, peeling her very much like an apple. "I beg your pardon," Colonel Glinka said, scrambling after her upon his hands and knees, groping for her with outstretched arms. "I beg -- " His hand touched something which might have been her ankle. He seized it, held it for a moment, and then, shuddering, let it go, drawing back his hand as if it had been stabbed. By now the night was quite dark. Colonel Glinka scrambled to his feet, half instinctively raised the deadly Malacca cane. "Don't do it, Joe!" cried Abdul, coming up from behind him and shoving him hard. The shot went wild, but the sound of it, echoing up and down the ravine, started an ominous, new sound, the growing, staccato murmur of many voices, a rattling of stones, a hundred different movements in the blackness. Colonel Glinka fired the last bullet more wildly still, hurled the Malacca cane at them, and ran. who had been many leaps ahead of him, arrived breathless at the front gate of the villa, opened it, dived through, locked it behind him, and threw himself upon the grass to catch his breath. There was a cheerful glow in the. darkness. The slight, grotesque figure of Dr. Stefanik and his pipe emerged from the shadows. "Ah," Abdul breathed, "where were you, Sidi, when I was out there dying for you?" "Hiding up the tallest cinnamon tree, like a monkey," Dr. Stefanik said. They sat there upon the grass for a long while in companionable silence, heeding the sounds of the night, which was balmy and infinitely peaceful. There came a high-pitched, longdrawn-out scream from somewhere on the ridge. "They got him," Abdul said. "And now they will pluck him, I suppose," said Dr. Stefanik. "There, by the way, is a thing that even I have never completely understood about them. Their insatiable curiosity, of course, is a vestigial trait that will pass, but this other drive, I fear, this rather alarming passion that they have shown for the upbreeding of the species may be some universal of life itself that no man may touch or alter." Down the path from the ridge, a small, white-robed figure came running, far ahead of the others, bent upon her own schemes of evolution. Abdul crouched lower in the shadows. "That one makes even the heart of a man swell within his breast," he whispered, "for she does not ever give up." "That no man may touch," Dr. Stefanik repeated, and nodded his shaggy head wisely. "As an idealist, I may have given them shoes and enlightenment, but I did not give them this, and so they are not altogether mine. His kind still professes to believe in the common denominator and the common level, seeking to drag down the few from their gilt palaces and haul up the masses from the muck. Tell me, as a Hadj who is, at the same time, undoubtedly vermin-ridden, do you believe in the equality of men -- or can you honestly wish it?" "All of us to be Effendis?" "Something like that." Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar thought about it for a time with furrowed brow. "No, Sidi," he said at last, "for then there would be no one to chase us." The female stopped, knelt in the path. "What is she doing now?" Dr. Stefanik asked. "She is taking off her shoes, in order to run faster than me." " ... And cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind'! And yet you told Glinka I made them!" "Ah, but not out of what, Sidi," Abdul said. The female, with a hopeful little bleat, arose and tucked her shoes under her arm, for youth is hope and kids will be kids, and off she went, clip-clop, clip-clop, down the rocky path to the sea. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. By Manly Wade Wellman Ironic destiny of a visitor from the future trying to take advantage of things to come. By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony. That rare event: a science fiction novel based on a new idea. By Hal Clement All the science on earth might not be able to meet the demands of this alien race. By F. L Wallace Earth was too perfect for these extraordinary exiles -- to belong to it, they had to flee it. New pocket size # more pages selected by the editors of Galaxy Magazine. If you have missed these four terrific Science Fiction Novels, check your newsstand or send # for each (all four #; we pay postage). or # each  Twice In Time  Address: Centauri  The Forever Machine  Mission of Gravity Check items wanted Galaxy Publishing Corporation #I Hudson Street, N. Y. I #, N. Y. Name Address City State Enclosed The coupon is for your convenience -- orders on a separate sheet are O.K, I PlinglotIVo You ? I L ET me see, I said, this is a time for urbane. Say little. Suggest much. So I smiled and nodded wisely without words, though the flash bulbs were fierce. The committee room was not big enough. They had had to move the hearings. Oh, it was hot. Senator Schnell came leaping down the aisle, sweating, his forehead glistening, his gold tooth shining, and took my arm like a trap. "Capital, Mr. Smith," he cried, nodding and grinning. "I am so glad you got here on time! One moment" And he planted his feet and stopped me. And he turned me about to face the photographers, and he threw an arm around my shoulder as they flashed many bulbs. "Capital!" said the Senator with a happy voice. "Thanks, fellows! Come along, Mr. Smith!" They found me a first-class seat, near a window, with the air-conditioning making such a clatter that I could scarcely hear, but what was there to hear until I myself spoke? Never mind to answer who you -- I Plinglof ask only out of polite -- you are two-eyes and you will soon be joining three-eyes! Outside, the Washington Monument cast aluminum rays from the sun. "We'll get started in a minute," whispered Mr. Hagsworth in my ear. He was young and working for the committee. "As soon as the networks give us the go-ahead." He patted my shoulder in a friendly way, with pride. They were always doing something with shoulders. He had brought me to the committee and thus I was, he thought, a sort of possession of his, a gift for Senator Schnell, though we know how wrong he was in that, of course. But he was proud. It was very hot and I had in me many headlines. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Will you state your name, sir? A. Robert Smith. Q. Is that your real name? A. No. "H, that excited them all! They rustled and coughed and whispered, those in the many seats. Senator Schnell flashed his gold tooth. Senator Loveless, who was his enemy or his adjutant, as it were, a second commander of the, committee but of opposite party, he frowned under stiff silvery hair. But he knew I would say that. He had heard it all in executive session the night before. Mr. Hagsworth did not waste the moment. He went right ahead over the coughs and the rustles. Q. Sir, have you adopted the identity of "Robert Smith" in order to further your investigations on behalf of this committee? A. I have. Q. And can you -- Q. (Senator Loveess) Excuse me. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Certainly, Senator. Q. ( Senator Loveless ) Thank you, Mr. Hagsworth. Sir -- that is, Mr. Smith -- do I understand that it would not be proper, or advisable, for you to reveal -- that is, to make public -- your true or correct identity at this time? Or in these circumstances? A. Yes. Q. ( Senator Loveless ) Thank you very much, Mr. Smith. I just wanted to get that point cleared up. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth) Then tell us, Mr. Smith -- Q. ( Senator Loveless ) It's clear now. Q. (The Chairman) Thank you for helping us clarify the matter, Senator. Mr. Hagsworth, you may proceed. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth) Thank you, Senator Schnell. Thank you, Senator Loveless. Then, Mr. Smith, will you tell us the nature of the investigations you have just concluded for this committee? A. Certainly. I was investigating the question of interstellar space travel. Q. That is, travel between the planets of different stars? A. That's right. Q. And have you reached any conclusions as to the possibility of such a thing? A. Oh, yes. Not just conclusions. I have definite evidence that one foreign power is in direct contact with creatures living on the planet of another star, and expects to receive a visit from them shortly. Q. Will you tell us the name of that foreign power? A. Russia. Oh, it went very well. Pandemonium became widespread, much noise, much hammering by Senator Schnell, and at the recess all the networks said it was a big Neilsen. And Mr. Hagsworth was so pleased that he hardly asked me about the file again, which I enjoyed as it was a hard answer to give. "Good theater, ah, Mr. Smith," he winked. I only smiled. THE afternoon also was splendidly hot, especially as Senator Schnell kept coming beside me and the bulbs flashed. It was excellent, excellent Q. (Mr. Hagsworth) Mr. Smith, this morning you told us that a foreign power was in contact with a race of beings living on a planet of the star Aldebaran. Is that right? It is correct? A. Yes. Q. Can you describe that race for us? I mean the ones you have referred to as "Aldebaranians"? A. Certainly, although their own name for themselves is -- is a word in their language which you might here render as "Triops." They average about eleven inches tall. They have two legs, like yourself. They have three eyes and they live in crystal cities under the water, although they are air-breathers. Q. Why is that, Mr. Smith? A. The surface of their planet is ravaged by enormous beasts against which they are defenseless. Q. But they have powerful weapons? A. Oh, very powerful, Mr. Hagsworth. And then it was time for me to take it out and show it to them, the Aldebaranian hand-weapon. It was small and soft and I had to fire it with a bent pin, but it made a hole through three floors and the cement of the basement, and they were very interested. Oh, yes! So I talked all that afternoon about the Aldebaranians, though what did they matter? Mr. Hagsworth did not ask me about other races, on which I could have said something of greater interest. Afterward we came to my suite at the Mayflower Hotel and Mr. Hqgsworth said with admiration: "You handled yourself beautifully, Mr. Smith. When this is over, I wonder if you would consider some sort of post here in Washington." "When this is over?" "Oh," he said, "I've been around for some years, Mr. Smith. I've seen them come and I've seen them go. Every newspaper in the country is full of Aldebaranians tonight, but next year? They'll be shouting about something new." "They will not," I said surely. said agreeably. "At any rate, it's a great sensation now. Senator Schnell is tasting the headlines. He's up for re-election next year, you know, and just between the two of us, he was afraid he might be defeated." "Impossible, Mr. Hagsworth," I said out of certain knowledge, but could not convey this to him. He thought I only was being polite. It did not matter. "He'll be gratified to hear that," said Mr. Hagsworth and he stood up and winked, he was a great human for winking. "But think about what I said about a job, Mr. Smith... Or would you care to tell me your real name?" Why not? Sporting! "Plinglot," I said. He said with a puzzled face, "Plinglot? Plinglot? That's an odd name." I didn't say anything. Why should I? "But you're an odd man," he sighed. "I don't mind telling you that there are a lot of questions I'd like to ask. For instance, the file folder of correspondence between you and Senator Heffeman. I don't suppose you'd care to tell me how come no employee of the committee remembers anything about it, although the folder turned up in our files just as you said it would?" Senator Heffeman was dead; that was why the correspondence had been with him. But I know tricks for awkward questions -- you give only another question instead of answer. "Don't you trust me, Mr. Hagsworth?" He looked at me queerly and left without speaking. No matter. It was time. I had very much to do. "No calls," I told the switchboard person, "and no visitors. I must rest." Also there would be a guard, Hagsworth had promised. I wondered how he would have arranged the same if I had not requested it, but that also did not matter. I sat quickly in what looked, for usual purposes, like a large armchair, purple embroidery on the headrest. It was my spaceship, with cosmetic upholstery. Z-z-z-z-zit, quick like that, that's all there was to it and I was there. II O LD days I could not have timed it so well, for the old one slept all the day and worked, drinking, all the night. But now they kept capitalist hours. "Good morning, gospodin," cried the man in the black tunic, leaping up alertly as I opened the tall double doors. "I trust you slept well." I had changed quickly into pajamas and a bathrobe. Stretching, yawning, I grumbled in flawless Russian in a sleepy way: "All right, all right. What time is it?" "Eight in the morning, Gospodin Arakelian. I shall order your breakfast." "Have we time?" "There is time, gospodin, especially as you have already shaved." I looked at him with more care, but he had a broad open Russian face. There was no trickery on it or suspicion. I drank some tea and changed into street clothing again, a smaller size as I was now smaller. The Hotel Metropole doorman was holding open the door of the black Zis, and we bumped, bumped over cobblestones to the white marble building with no name. Here in Moscow it was also hot, though only early morning. This morning their expressions were all different in the dim, cool room. Worried. There were three of them: Blue eyes; Kvetchnikov. The tall one, with eyes so very blue, he looked at the wall and the ceiling but not at me, and though sometimes he smiled, there was nothing behind it. Red beard; Muzhnets. He tapped with a pencil softly, on thin sheets of paper. And the old one. He sat like a squat fat Buddha. His name was Tadjensevitch. Yesterday they were reserved, suspicious, but they could not help themselves; they would do whatever I asked. There was no choice for them; they reported to the chief himself, and how could they let such a thing as I had told them go untaken? No, they must swallow bait. But today there was worry on their faces. The worry was not about me; they knew me. Or so they thought. "Hello, hello, Arakelian," said Blue Eyes to me, though his gaze examined the rug in front of my chair. "Have you more to tell us today?" I asked without alarm: "What more could I have?" "Oh," said Blue-Eye Kvetchnikov, looking at the old man, "perhaps you can explain what happened in Washington last night." "In Washington?" "In Washington, yes. A man appeared before one of the committees of their Senate. He spoke of the Aldebaratniki, and he spoke also of the Soviet Union. Arakelian, tell us how this is possible." The old man whispered softly: "Show him the dispatch."  ED Beard jumped. He stopped tapping on the thin paper and handed it to me. "Read!" he ordered in a voice of danger, though I was not afraid. I read. It was a diplomatic telegram, from their embassy in Washington, and what it said was what every newspaper said, it was no diplomatic secret, it was headlines. One Robert Smith, a fictitious name, real identity unknown, had appeared before the Schnell Committee. He had told them of Soviet penetration of the stars. Considering limitations, excellent, it was an admirably accurate account. I creased the paper and handed back to Muzhnets. "I have read it." Old One: "You have nothing to say?" "Only this." I leaped up on two legs and pointed at him. "I did not think you would bungle this! How dared you allow this information to become public?" "How -- " "How did that weapon get out of your country?" "Weap -- " "Is this Soviet efficiency?" I cried loudly. "Is it proletarian discipline?" Red-Beard Muzhnets intervened. "Softly, Comrade," he cried. "Please! We must not lose tempers!" I made a sound of disgust. I did it very well. "I warned you," I said, low, and made my face sad and stern. "I told you that there was a danger that the bourgeois-capitalists would interfere. Why did you not listen? Why did you permit their spies to steal the weapon I gave you?" Tadjensevitch whispered agedly : "That weapon is still here." "But this report -- " "There must be another weapon, Arakelian. And do you see? That means the Americans are also in contact with the Aldebaratniki." It was time for chagrin. I admitted: "You are right." He sighed. "Comrades, the Marshal will be here in a moment. Let us settle this." I composed my face . and looked at him. "Arakelian, answer this question straight out. Do you know how this American could have got in touch with the Aldebaratniki now?" "How could I, gospodin?" "That," he said thoughtfully, "is not a straight answer but it is answer enough. How could you? You have not left the Metropole. And in any case the Marshal is now coming. I hear his guard." W E all stood up, very formal, it was a question of socialist discipline. In came this man, the Marshal, mans, smoking a cigarette in a paper holder, with small pig's eyes looking here and there and at me. Five very large men were with him, but they never said anything at all. He sat down grunting. It was not necessary for him to speak loud or to speak clear, it was necessary that those around him should hear anyhow. It was not deafness that caused Tadjensevitch to wear a hearing aid. The old man jumped up. "Comrade Party Secretary," he said, not now whispering, no, "this man is P.P. Arakelian." Grunt from the Marshal. "Yes, Comrade Party Secretary, he has come to us with the suggestion that we sign a treaty with a race of creatures inhabiting a planet of the star Aldebaran. Our astronomers say they cannot dispute any part of his story. And the M.V.D. has assuredly verified his reliability in certain documents signed by the late -- " cough -- "Comrade Beria." That too had not been easy and would have been less so if Beria had not been dead. Grunt from the Marshal. Old Tadjensevitch looked expectant at me. "I beg your pardon?" I said. Old Tadjensevitch said without patience : "The Marshal asked about terms " "Oh," I bowed, "there are no terms. These are unworldly creatures, excellent comrade." I thought to mention it was a joke, but none laughed. "Unworldly," you see, "They wish only to be friends. With you, with the Americans, they do not know the difference, it is all in whom they first see." Grunt "Will they sign a treaty?" Tadjensevitch translated. "Of course." Grunt. Translation: "Have they enemies? There is talk in the American document of creatures that destroy them. We must know what enemies our new friends may have." "Only animals, excellent comrade. Like your wolves of Siberia, but huge as the great blue whale." Grunt. Tadjensevitch said: "The Marshal asks if you can guarantee that the creatures will come first to us." "No. I can only suggest. I cannot guarantee there will be no error." "But if -- " "If!" I cried loudly. "If there is error, you have Red Army to correct it!" They did not expect that. But they did not understand. I gave them no time. I said quickly: "Now, Excellency, one thing more. I have a present for you" Grunt. I hastily said : "I saved it, Comrade. Excuse me. In my pocket" I reached, most gently; those five men all looked at me now with much care. For the first demonstration, I had produced an Aldebaranian hand-weapon, three inches long, capable of destroying a bull at five hundred yards, but now for this Russian I had more. "See," I said, and took it out to hand him, a small glittering thing, carved of a single solid diamond, an esthetic statue four inches long. Oh, I did not like to think of it wasted! But it was important that this man should be off guard, and so I handed it to one of the tall silent men, who thumbed it over and then passed it on, scowling, to the Marshal. I was sorry, yes. It was a favorite thing, a clever carving that they had made in the water under Aldebaran's rays; it was almost greater than I could have made myself. No, I will not begrudge it them, it was greater, I could not have done so well! Unfortunate that so great a race should have needed attention; unfortunate that I must now give this memento away; but I needed to make an effect and, yes, I did! Oh, diamond is great to humans; the Marshal looked surprised, and grunted, and one of the silent tall five reached in his pocket, and took out something that glittered on silken ribbon. He looped it around my neck. "Hero of Soviet Labor," he said, "First Class. With emeralds." "Thank you, Marshal," I said. Grunt "The Marshal," said Tadjensevitch in a thin, thin voice, "thanks you. Certain investigations must be made. He will see you again tomorrow morning." This was wrong, but I did not wish to make him right; I said again: "Thank you." A grunt from the Marshal; he stopped and looked at me, and then he spoke loud so that, though he grunted, I understood. "Tell," he said, "the Aldebaratniki, tell them they must come to us. If their ship should land in the wrong country... He stopped at the door and looked at me powerfully. "I hope," he said, "that it will not," and he left, and they escorted me back in the Zis sedan to the room at the Hotel Metropole. Ill S O that was that and z-z-z-z-zit, I was gone again, leaving an empty and heavily guarded room in the old hotel. In Paris it was midday, I had spent a long time in Moscow. In Paris it was also hot, and as the gray-haired small man with the rosette of the Legion in his buttonhole escorted me along the Champs Elysees, slim-legged girls in bright short skirts smiled at us. No matter. I did not care one pin for all those bright slim girls. But it was necessary to look, the man expected it of me, and he was the man I had chosen. In America I worked through a committee of their Senate, in Russia the Comrade Party Secretary, here my man was a M. Duplessin, a small straw but the one to wreck a dromedary. He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, elected as a Christian Socialist Radical Democrat, a party which stood between the Non-Clerical Catholic Workers' Movement on one side and the F.C.M., or Movement for Christian Brotherhood, on the other. His party had three deputies in the Chamber, and the other two hated each other. Thus M. Duplessin held the balance of power in his party, which held the balance of power in the Right Centrist Coalition, which held the balance through the entire Anti-Communist Democratic Front which supported the premier. Yes. M. Duplessin was the man I needed. I had slipped a folder into the locked files of a Senate committee and forged credentials into the records of Russia's M.V.D., but both together were easier than the finding of this right man. But I had him now, and he was taking me to see certain persons who also knew his importance, persons who would do as he told them. "Monsieur," he said gravely, "it lacks a small half-hour of the appointed time. Might one not enjoy an aperitif?" "One might," I said fluently, and permitted him to find us a table under the trees, for I knew that he was unsure of me, it was necessary to cause him to become sure. "Ah," said Duplessin, sighing, and placed hat, cane and gloves on a filigree metal chair. He ordered drinks and when they came sipped slightly, looking away. "My friend," he said at last, '"tell me of les aldebaragnard s. We French have traditions -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- we made Arabs into citizens of the Republic -- always has France been mankind's spiritual home. But, monsieur. Nevertheless. Three eyes?" "They are really very nice," I told him with great sincerity, though it was probably no longer true. "Hum." "And," I said, "they know of love." TE said mistily, sighing again, "Love. Tell me, monsieur. Tell me of love on Aldebaran." "They live on a planet," I misstated somewhat, "Aldebaran is the star itself. But I will tell you what you ask, M. Duplessin. It is thus: When a young Triop, for so they call themselves, comes of age, he swims far out into the wide sea. Far from his crystal city, out into the pellucid water, where giant fan-tailed fish of rainbow colors swim endlessly above, tinting the pale sunlight that filters through the water and their ' scales. Tiny bright fish give off starlike flashes from patterned luminescent spots on their scales." "It sounds most beautiful, monsieur," Duplessin said with polite. "It is most beautiful. And the young Triop swims until he sees -- Her" "Ah, monsieur." He was more than polite, I considered, he was interested. "They speak not a word," I added, "for the water is all around and they wear masks, otherwise they could not breathe. They cannot speak, no, and one cannot see the other's eyes. They approach in silence and in mystery." He sighed and sipped his cassis. "Then," I said, "they know, though there is no way that they can know. But they do. They swim about each other searchingly, tenderly, sadly. Yes, sadly -- is beauty not always in some way sad? A moment And then they are one." "They do not speak?" I shook my head. "Ever?" "Never until all is over and they meet elsewhere again." "Ah, monsieur!" He stared into his small glass of tincture. "Monsieur," he said, "may one hope -- that is, is it possible -- oh, monsieur! Might one go there, soon?" I said with all my cunning: "All the things are possible, M. Duplessin, if the Triops can be saved from destruction. Consider for yourself, if you please, that to turn such a people over to the brutes with the Red Stai -- or these with the forty-nine white stars, what difference? -- is to destroy them." "Never, my friend, never!" he cried strongly. "Let them come! Let them entrust themselves to France! France will protect them, my friend, or France will die!"  T was all very simple after that, I was free within an hour after lunch and, certainly, z-z-z-z-zit. My spaceship deposited me in this desert, Mojave, I think. Or almost Mojave, in its essential Americanness. Yes. It was in America, for what other place would do? I had accomplished much, but there was yet a cosmetic touch or two before I could say I had accomplished all. I scanned the scene, everything was well, there was no one. Distantly planes howled, but of no importance : stratosphere j ets, what would they know of one man on the sand four miles below? I worked. Five round trips, carrying what was needed, between this desert place and my bigger ship. And where was that? Ah. Safe. It hurled swinging around Mars, yes, quite safe. Astronomers might one day map it, but on that day it would not matter, no. Oh, it would not matter at all. Since there was time, on my first trip I reassumed my shape and ate, it was greatly restful. Nine useful arms and ample feet, it became easy; quickly I carried one ton of materials, two thousand pounds, from my armchair ferry to the small shelter in which I constructed my cosmetic appliance. Shelter? Why a shelter, you ask? Oh, I say, for artistic reasons, and in the remote chance that some low-flying plane might blundersomely pass, though it would not. But it might. Lefs see, I said, let me think, uranium and steel, strontium and cobalt, a touch of sodium for yellow, have I everything? Yes. I have everything, I said, and I assembled the cosmetic bomb and set the fuse. Good-by, bomb, I said with affection and, z-z-zz-zit, armchair and Plinglot were back aboard my ship circling Mars. Nearly done, nearly done! There quickly I assembled the necessary data for the Aldebaranian rocket, my penultimate -- or Next to Closing -- task. Now. This penultimate task, it was not a difficult one, no, but it demanded some concentration. I had a ship. No fake, no crude imitation! It was an authentic rocket ship of the Aldebaranians, designed to travel to their six moons, with vent baffles for underwater takeoff due to certain exigencies (e., inimical animals ashore) of their culture. Yes. It was real. I had brought it on purpose all the way. Now, I say once more, now; I did what I had necessarily to do, which was to make a course for this small ship. There was no crew. (Not anywhere.) The course was easy to compute, I did it rather well, but there was setting of instruments, automation of controls -- oh, it took time, took time -- but I did it It was my way, I am workmanlike and reliable, ask Mother. The human race would not know an authentic Aldebaranian rocket from a lenticular Cetan shrimp, but they might, hey? The Aldebaranians had kindly developed rockets and it was no great trouble to bring, as well as more authentic. I brought. And having completed all this, and somewhat pleased, I stood to look around. But I was not alone. it meant trouble. I at once realized what my companion, however unseen, must be, since it could not be human. I stood absolutely motionless and looked, looked. As you have in almost certain probability never observed the interior of an Aldebaranian rocket, I shall describe: Green metal in cruciform shapes ("chairs"), sparkling mosaics of colored light ("maps"), ferrous alloys in tortured cuprous-glassy conjunction ("instruments"). All motionless. But something moved. I saw! An Aldebaranian! One of the Triops, a foot-high mannikin, looking up at me out of three terrified blue eyes. Yes, I had brought the ship, but I had not brought it empty. One of the creatures had stowed away aboard. And there it was. I lunged toward it savagely. It looked up at me and squeaked like a bell: "Why? Why, Plinglot, why did you kill my people?" It is so annoying to be held to account for every little thing. But I said in moderate cunning: "Stand quiet, small creature, and let me get hold of you. Why are you not dead?" It squeaked pathetically -- not in English, to be sure! but I make allowances -- it squeaked: "Plinglot, you came to our planet as a friend from outer space, one who wished to help our people join forces to beasts." "That seemed appropriate," I conceded. "We believed you, Plinglot! All our nations believed you. But you caused dissension. You pitted us one against the other, so that one nation no longer trusted another. We had abandoned war, Plinglot, for more than a hundred years, for we dared not wage war." "That is true," I agreed. "But you tricked us! War came, Plinglot! And at your hands. As this ship was plucked from its berth with only myself aboard, I received radio messages that a great war was breaking out and that fhe seas were to be boiled. It is the ultimate weapon, Plinglot! By now my planet is dry and dead. Why did you do it?" "Small Triop," I lectured, "listen to this. You are male, one supposes, and you must know that no female Aldebaranian survives. Very well. You are the last of your race. There is no future. You might as well be dead." "I know," he wept. "And therefore you should kill yourself. Check," I invited, "my logic with the aid of your computing machine, if you wish. But please do not disturb the course computations I have set up on it." "It is not necessary to check your logic, Plinglot," he said with sad. "You are right." "So kill yourself!" I bellowed. The small creature, how foolish, would not do this. No, he said: "I do not want to, Plinglot," apologetically. "But I will not disturb your course."  of him, in a figure of speech, I believed, for that course was most important to me. On it depended the suceess of my present mission, for it was to demolish Earth as I had his own planet I attempted to explain, in way of thanks, but he would not understand, no. "Earth?" he squeaked feebly. I attempted to make him see, yes, Earth, that planet so far away, it too had a population which was growing large and fierce and smart, it too was hovering on the fringe of space travel. Oh, it was dangerous, but he would not see, though I explained and I am Plinglot I can allow no rivals in space, it is my assigned task, given in hand by the great Mother. Well. I terrified him, it was all I could do. Having locked him in a helpless compartment of his own ship, I consulted my time. It was fleeing. I flopped onto my armchair; z-z-z-z-zit; once again in the room in the Hotel Mayflower, Washington, U.SA. Things progressed, all was ready. I opened the door, affecting having just awaked. A chambermaid turned from dusting pictures on the wall, said, "Good morning, sir," looked at me and -- oh! screamed. Screamed in a terrible tone. Careless Plinglot! I had forgot to return to human form. Most fortunately, she fainted. I quickly turned human and found a rope. It took very much time, and time was passing, while the rocket hastened to cover forty million miles; it would arrive soon where I had sent it. I hurried. Hardly, hardly, I made myself do it, though as anyone on Tau Ceti knows, it was difficult for me. I tied her. I forced a pillowcase, or one corner of it, into her mouth so that she might not cry out; and even locked her in a closet Oh, it was hard. Questions? Difficulty? Danger? Yes. They were all there to be considered, too, but I had no time to consider them. Time was passing, I have said, and time passed for me. It was only a temporary expedient. In time she would be found. Of course. This did not matter. In time there would be no time, you see, for time would come to an end for chambermaid, Duplessin, Senators and the M.VX., and then what? Then Plinglot would have completed this, his mission, and twoeyes would join three-eyes, goodby. IV was waiting for me at the curb, in a hollow square of newsmen. "Mr. Smith," he cried, "how good to see you. Now, please, fellows! Mr. Smith is a busy man. Oh, all right, just one picture" And he made to shoo the photographers off while wrapping himself securely to my side. "Terrible men," he whispered out of the golden comer of his mouth, smiling, smiling, "how they pester me!" "I am sorry, Senator," I said politely and permitted him to lead me through the flash barrage to the large room for the hearings. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Mr. Smith, in yesterday's testimony you gave us to understand that Russia was making overtures to the alien creatures from Aldebaran. Now I'd like to call your attention to something. Have you seen this morning's papers? A. No. Q. Then let me read you an extract from Pierce Truman's column which has just come to my attention. It starts, "After yesterday's sensational rev -- " Q. (Senator Loveless ) Excuse me. Mr. Hagsworth. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) elations." Q. (Senator Loveless ) I only want to know, or to ask, if that document -- that is, the newspaper which you hold in your hand -- is a matter of evidence. By this I mean an exhibit. If so, I raise the question, or rather suggestion, that it should be properly marked and entered. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Well, Senator, I -- Q. (Senator Loveless ) As an exhibit, I mean. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Yes, as an exhibit I -- Q. (Senator Loveless ) Excuse me for interrupting. It seemed an important matter -- important procedural matter, that is. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Certainly, Senator. Well, Senator, I intended to read it only in order to have Mr. Smith give us his views. Q. (Senator Loveless ) Thank you for that explanation, Mr. Hagsworth. Still it seems to me, or at the moment it appears to me, that it ought to be marked and entered. Q. (The Chairman) Senator, in my view -- Q. (Senator Loveless) As an exhibit, that is. Q. (The Chairman) Thank you for that clarification, Senator. In my view, however, since as Mr. Hagsworth has said it is only Mr. Smith's views that he is seeking to get out, then the article itself is not evidence but merely an adjunct to questioning. Anyway, frankly, Senator, that's the way I see it But I don't want to impose my will on the Committee. I hope you understand that, all of you. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth) Certainly, sir. Q. (Senator Loveless) Oh, none of us has any idea, or suspicion, Senator Schnell, that you have any such design, or purpose. Q. (Senator Duffy) Of course not Q. (Senator Fly) No, not here... i"iH, time, time! I looked at the clock on the wall and time was going, I did not wish to be here when it started. Of course. Ten o'clock. Ten-thirty. Five minutes approaching eleven. Then this Mr. Pierce Truman's column at last was marked and entered and recorded after civil objection and polite concession from Senator Schnell and in thus wise made an immutable, permanent, indestructible part of the files of this mutable, transient, soon to be destrpyed committee. Oh, comedy! But it would not be for laughing if I dawdled here too late. Somehow, somehow, Mr. Hagsworth was entitled at last to read his column and it said as follows. After yesterday's sensational revelations before the Schnell Committee, backstage Washington was offering bet# that nothing could top the mysterious Mr. Smith's weird story of creatures from outer space. But the toppers may already be on hand. Here are two questions for you, Senator Schnell: What were three Soviet U.N. military attaches doing at a special showing at the Hayden Planetarium last night? And what's the truth beyond the reports that are filtering into C.I.A. from sources in Bulgaria, concerning a special parade scheduled for Moscow's Red Square tomorrow to welcome "unusual and very special" V.I.P.#, names unknown? Exhausted from this effort, the committee declared a twenty-minute recess. I glowered at the clock, time, time! Mr. Hagsworth had plenty of time, he thought, he was not worried. He cornered me in the cloakroom. "Smoke?" he said graciously, offering a package of cigarettes. I said thank you, I do not smoke. "Care for a drink?" I do not drink, I told him. "Or -- ?" He nodded toward the tiled room with the chromium pipes; I do not do that either, but I could not tell him so, only I shook my head. "Well, Mr. Smith," he said again, "you make a good witness. I'm sorry," he added, "to spring that column on you like that. But I couldn't help it." "No matter," I said. "You're a good sport, Smith. You see, one of the reporters handed it to me as we walked into the hearing room." "All right," I said, wishing to be thought generous. "Well, I had to get it into the record. What's it about, eh?" I said painfully (time, time!), "Mr. Hagsworth, I have testified the Russians also wish the ship from Aldebaran. And it is coming close. Soon it will land." "Good," he said, smiling and rubbing his hands, "very good! And you will bring them to us?" "I will do," I said, "the best I can," ambiguously, but that was enough to satisfy him, and recess was over. Q. (Mr. Hagsworth ) Mr. Smith, do I understand that you have some knowledge of the proposed movements of the voyagers from Aldebaran? A. Yes. Q. Can you tell us what you know? A. I can. Certainly. Even now an Aldebaranian rocket ship is approaching the Earth. Through certain media of communication which I cannot discuss in open hearing, as you understand, certain proposals have been made to them on behalf of this country. Q. And their reaction to these proposals, Mr. Smith? A. They have agreed to land in the United' States for discussions. The flash bulbs went like mad. Only the clock was going, going, and I commenced to worry, where was the ship? Was forty lousy million miles so much? But no, it was not so much; and when the messenger came racing in the door, I knew it was time. One messenger, first. He ran wildly down among the seats, searching, then stopping at the seat on the aisle where Pierce Truman sat regarding me with an ophidian eye, stopped and whispered. Then a couple more, strangers, hatless and hair flying, also messengers, came hurrying in -- and more -- to the committee, to the newsmen -- the word had got out. "Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!" It was Senator Loveless, he was shouting, some person had whispered in his ear and he could not wait to tell his news. But everyone had that news, you see, it was no news to the chairman, he already had a slip of paper in his hand. He stood up and stared blindly into the television cameras, without smile now, the gold tooth not flashing. He said : "Gentlemen, I -- " And he stopped, for a moment, to catch his breath and to shake his head. "Gentlemen," he said, "gentlemen, I have here a report," staring incredulous at the scrawled slip of paper. In the room was quickly silence, even Senator Loveless, and Pierce Truman stopped at the door on his way out to listen. "This report," he said, "comes from the Arlington Naval Observatory -- in, gentlemen, my own home state, the Old Dominion, Virginia -- " He paused and shook himself, yes, and made himself look again at the paper. "From the Arlington Naval Observatory, where the radio-telescope experts inform us that an object of unidentified origin and remarkable speed has entered the atmosphere of the Earth from outer space!" Cries. Sighs. Shouts. But he stopped them, yes, with a hand. "But, gentlemen, that is not all! Arlington has tracked this object and it has landed. Not in our country, gentlemen! Not even in Russia! But -- " he shook the paper rattlingly before him -- "in North Africa, gentlemen! In the desert of Algeria!" Oh, much commotion then, but not joyous. "Doublecross!" shouted someone, and I made an expression of astonish. Adjourned, banged the gavel of the chairman, and only just in time; the clock said nearly twelve and my cosmetic bomb was set for onefifteen. Oh, I had timed it close. But now was danger and I had to leave, which I did hardly. But I could not evade Mr. Hagsworth, who rode with me in taxi to hotel, chattering, chattering. I did not listen. V " gory or parable. Make a chemical preparation, you see? Take hydrogen and take oxygen -- very pure in both cases -- blend them and strike a spark. Nothing happens. They do not burn! It is true, though you may not believe me. But with something added, yes, they burn. For instance, let the spark be a common match, with so tiny you can hardly detect it a quarter-droplet of water bonded into its substance. Yes, with the water they will burn -- more than burn -- kerblam, the hydrogen and oxygen fiercely unite. Water, it is the catalyst which makes it go. Similarly, I reflected (unhearing the chatter of Mr. Hags worth), it is a catalyst which is needed on Earth, and this catalyst I have made, my cosmetic appliance, my bomb. The chemicals were stewing together nicely. There was a ferment of suspicion in Russia, of fear in America, of jealousy in the African colony of France where I had made the ship land. Oh, they were jumpy now! I could feel forces building around me, even the driver of the cab, half watching the crowded streets, half listening to the hysterical cries of his little radio. To the Mayflower, hurrying. All the while, the city was getting excited around us. That was the ferment, and by my watch the catalyst was quite near. "Wait," said Mr. Hagsworth, pleading, in the lobby, "come have a drink, Smith." "I don't drink." "I forgot," he apologized. "Well, would you care to sit for a moment in the bar with me? I'd like to talk to you. This is all happening too fast." "Come along to my room," I said, not wanting him, no, but what harm could he do? And I did not want to be away from my purple armchair, not at all. So up we go and there is still time, I am glad. Enough time. The elevator could have stuck, my door could have somehow been locked against me, by error I could have gone to the wrong floor -- no, everything was right. We were there and there was time. I excused myself a moment (though it could have been forever) and walked into the inner room of this suite. Yes, it was there, ready. It squatted purple, and no human would think, to look at it, that it was anything but an armchair but it was much more and if I went and sat in it, z-z-zz-zit, and I would be gone. A man spoke. iH, how I turned with startle, " looking. I did not wish a man to be there. But there a man was, looking at me also, out of the door to the tiled room, red-faced, in blue coveralls, and he spoke. Well. For a moment, I felt alarm. (I remember, e.g., the human woman whom I had left bound in closet, and pondered that she might have been discovered. But it was not this, no, for on this man's face was only smile.) And he said with apology: "Oh, hello, sir. Sorry. But we had a complaint from the floor below, leak in the plumbing, dripping through their ceiling, I've got it nearly fixed now, sir " Oh, all right I shrugged for him and -- and -- Oh, and went back to Mr. Hagsworth. It was mistake, the mistake of a true artist, of course. In my mind had been something other than going back to Mr. Hagsworth. I could, exemplarily, have made a further checking expedition. That is, z-z-z-z-zit, to the George V Hotel in Paris, and to telephone there M. Duplessin, to insure that he would not allow Russians or Americans near the ship which had landed in that part of Metropolitan France which lies in Africa, Algeria... no, not if the Russian ambassadors and the Americans made of his life a living hell. And then I could also, z-z-z-z-zit, to Metropole in Moscow. There to phone Tadjensevitch (not the Marshal, he would not speak on telephone to me) to urge him also on. To say to him: These Americans are about to steal your Aldebaranians, and besides I just have learned about oil deposits, enormous, under the Aldebaranian seas. Or I could have gone farther. Much farther. Now this you must know of me -- not only of me, but of all Mother's children -- if we can go from such danger, such risk, we go. Always. It can be counted upon. But I did not go. It was the true artist, but also I confess one thing more: I was afraid of the man in the blue coveralls. And also, as true artist, there was this other consideration prevailing, that maybe something would go wrong. Oh, I did not wish this. JO I went back to Mr. Hagsworth.  It was not needed, really it was not. It was only insurance in the event that somehow my careful plans went wrong -- that perhaps the French in Algeria should make contact (how? ridiculous! they could not have done it!) with the little male Aldebaranian in the ship I had made to land there, or that the Americans should somehow make contact with the Soviets and compare notes. Foolishness. But I went back, I wished to be there until the very end. Or nearly. And also there was that big, frightening man with the red face. Z-z-zz-zit and I could have been away. But as things turned, I went back, and Mr. Hagsworth was on telephone, his eyes bright and angry. I thought I knew what he was hearing. I listened to hear if there were, perhaps, sounds from the closet, but there were none; good. Difficult as it was, I had tied well. And then Mr. Hagsworth looked up. He said, bleak: "I have news, Smith. It's started." "Started?" "Oh," he said without patience, "you know what I'm talking about, Smith. The trouble's started. These Aldebaranians of yours, they've stirred up a hornet's nest, and now the stinging has begun. I just talked to the White House. There's a definite report of a nuclear explosion in the Mojave Desert." "No!" "Yes," he said, nodding, "there is no doubt. It can't be anything but a Russian missile, though their aim is amazingly bad. Can it?" "What else possibly?" I asked with logic. "How terrible! And I suppose you have retaliated, hey? Sent a flight of missiles to Moscow?" "Of course. What else could we do?" He had put his finger on it, yes, he was right, I had computed it myself. "Nothing," I said and wrung his hand, "and may the best country win." "Or planet," he said, nodding. "Planet?" I let go his hand. I looked. I waited. It was a time for astonish. I did not speak. Mr. Hagsworth said, speaking very slow: "Smith, that's what I wanted to talk to you about." "Talk," I invited. Outside, there was sudden shouting. "They've heard about the bomb," conjectured Mr. Hagsworth, but he paid no more attention. He said: "In school, I knew a Fat Boy." He said: "He always got his way. Everybody was afraid of him. But he never fought, he only divided others, do you see, and got them to fight each other." I stood tall -- yes, and brave! I dare use that word "brave," it applies. One would think that it would be like a human to say he is brave before a blinded fluttering moth, "brave" where there is no danger to be brave against; but though this was a human only, in that room I felt danger. Incredible, but it was so and I did not wish it. I said: "What are you talking about, Mr. Hagsworth?" "An idea I had," he said softly with a face like death. "About a murderer. Maybe he comes from another planet and, for reasons of his own, wants to destroy our planet Maybe this isn't the first one -- he might have stopped, for example, at Aldebaran." "I do not want to hear this," I said, with true. "We human beings have faults and an outsider with brains and a lot of special knowledge -- say, the kind of knowledge that could get a file folder into our records, in spite of all our security precautions -- such an outsider might use our faults to destroy us. Senate Committee hearings -- why, some of them have been a joke for years, and not a very funny one. Characters have been destroyed, policies have been wrecked -- why shouldn't a war be started? Because politicians can be relied on to act in a certain way. And maybe this outsider, having watched and studied us, knew something about Russian weaknesses too, and played on them in the same way. Do you see how easy it would be?" "Easy?" I cried, offended. "For someone with very special talents and ability," he assured me. "For a Fat Boy. Especially for a Fat Boy who can go, faster than any human can follow, from here to Moscow, Moscow to Paris, Paris to the Mojave, Mojave to -- where? Somewhere near Mars, let's say at a guess. For such a person, wouldn't it be easy?" I reeled, I reeled; but these monkey tricks, they could not matter. I had planned too carefully for that, only how did they know? "Excuse me," I said softly, "one moment," and turned again to the room with the armchair. I felt I had made a mistake. But what mistake could matter, I thought, when there was the armchair and, of course, z-z-z-z-zit? But that was a mistake also. The man in blue coveralls, he stood in the door but not smilingly. He held in his hand what I knew instantly was a gun. The armchair was there, yes, but in it was of all strange unaccountable people this chambermaid, who should have been bound in closet, and she too had a gun. "Miss Gonzalez," introduced Hagsworth politely, "and Mr. Hechtmeyer. They are -- well, G-men, though, as you can see, Miss Gonzalez is not a man. But she had something remarkable to tell us about you, when Mr. Hechtmeyer released her. She said that you seemed to have another shape when she saw you last. The shape of a sort of green-skinned octopus with bright red eyes. Ridiculous, isn't it? Or is it?" Ruses were past. It was a time for candid. I said, "Like this?" terribly, and I went quick to natural form. "H, what white faces! Oh, what v horror! It was remarkable that they did not turn and run. For that is Secret Weapon No. #, for us of Tau Ceti on sanitation work; for our working clothes we assume the shape of those about us, certainly, but in case of danger we have merely to resume our own. In all Galaxy (I do not know about Andromeda), there is no shape so fierce. Nine terrible arms. Fourteen piercing scarlet eyes. Teeth like Hessian bayonets. I ask you, would you not run? But they did not. Outside, a siren began with great frighteningness to scream. VI fearful, the siren warned of atomic warheads on their way and this human woman, this Gonzalez, sat in my chair with pointing gun. "Go away," I cried, "get out," and rushed upon her, but she did not move. "Phaser I said thickly among my long teeth, but what was the use? She would not do it! They paled, they trembled, but they stayed. Well, I would have paled and trembled myself if it had been a Tau Cetan trait Instead, I merely went limp. Terror was not only on one side in that room, I confess it. "Please," I begged, "I must go. It is the end of life on this planet and I do not wish to be here!" "You don't have a choice," said Mr. Hagsworth, his face like steel. "Gentlemen!" he called, "come in!" And through the door came several persons, some soldiers and some who were not. I looked with all my eyes; I could not have been more astonished. For there was -- yes, Senator Schnell, gold tooth covered, face without smile; Senator Loveless, white hair waving; and -- oh, there was more. I could scarcely believe. Feeble, slow humans! They had mere atmosphere craft mostly, but here, eight thousand miles from where he had been eighteen hours before, yes, Comrade Tadjensevitch, the old man, and M. Duplessin, sadly meeting my eyes. It could not be. Almost I forgot the scream' ing siren and the fear. "These gentlemen," said Hagsworth with polite, "also would like to talk to you, Mr. Smith." "Arakelian," grunted the old man. 'Monsieur Laplant," corrected Duplessin. "Or," said Hagsworth, "should we all call you by your right name?" Outside, the siren screamed. I could not move. "Please let me go!" I cried. "Where?" demanded old Tadjensevitch. "To Mars, Hero of Soviet Labor? Or farther this time?" "The bombs!" I cried. "Let me go! What about Hero of Soviet Labor?" The old man sighed. "The decoration Comrade Party Secretary gave you, it contains a micro-wave transmitter, very good. One of our sputniki now needs new parts." "You suspected me?" I cried out of fear and astonish. "Of course the Russians suspected you, Plinglot," Hagsworth scolded piildly. "We all did, even we Americans -- and we are not, you know, a suspicious race. No," he added thoughtfully, as though there were no bombs to fall, "our national characteristics are... what? The conventional caricatures -- the publicity hound, the pork-barrel Senator, the cut-throat businessman? Would you say that was a fair picture, Mr. Smith?" "I Plinglot!" "Yes, of course. Sorry. But that must be what you thought, because those are the stereotypes you acted on, and maybe they're true enough -- most of the time. Too much of the time. But not all the time, Plinglot!" "lyr OW I fell to floor, perspiring a terrible smell. It is how we faint, so to speak. It was death, it was the end, and this man was bullying me without fear. "The Fat Boy," said Mr. Hagsworth softly, "was strong. He could have whipped most of us. But in my last term he got licked. Guile and bluff; when at last the bluff was called, he gave up. He was a coward." "I give up, Mr. Hagsworth," I wailed, "only let me go away from the bombs!" "I know you do," he nodded. "What else? And -- what, the bombs? There are no bombs. Look out the window." In seconds I pulled myself together, no one spoke. I went to window. Cruising up and down outside, a white truck, red cross, painted wtih word Ambulance, siren going. Only that. No air raid warning. Only one ambulance. "Did you think," scolded Hagsworth with voice angry now, "that we would let you bluff us? There's an old maxim -- 'Give a fool enough rope'  we gave it to you, and we added a little. You see, we didn't know you came from a race of cowards." "I Plinglot!" I sobbed through all my teeth. "I am not a coward. I even tied this human woman here, ask her! It was brave, even Mother could not have done more! Why, I am the sector warden of this whole quadrant of Galaxy, indeed, to keep the peace!" "That much we know -- and we know why," nodded Hagsworth, "because you're afraid; but we needed to know more. Well, now we do, and once M. Duplessin's associates get a better means of communication with the little Aldebaranian, I expect we'll know still more. It will be very helpful knowledge," he added in thought. It was all, it was the end. I said sadly: "If only Great Mother could know Plinglot did his best! If only she could learn what strange people live here, whom I cannot understand." "Oh," said Mr. Hagsworth, gentle, "we'll tell her for you, Plinglot," he said. "Very soon, I think."      on down, were covered with ice. Some temperature measurements had indicated that the temperature dropped as you went down in the ocean; logically, then, at one point it had to grow cold enough for the water to turn into ice. This theory was superseded around # by the Abyssal Theory of Edward Forbes who thought, as a result of studies he had made in the Mediterranean Sea, that life could not possibly exist below a depth of # fathoms. Of course the seas were deeper, but at # fathoms there began the "azoic zone," the lifeless area. This idea was very swiftly and very thoroughly disproved. In #, Pastor Michael Sars, a Norwegian, found thriving life near the Lofoten Islands at # fathoms, and, soon after, life-forms from much greater depths were recovered for wholly practical reasons -- a broken transatlantic cable was fished up in the Atlantic and another broken cable was fished up from the Mediterranean, both showing life-forms. Then Sir Wyville Thomas talked the British government into sending out expeditions for the purpose of exploring the bottom of the seas. At first he was given two small Navy vessels, the Lightning and the Porcupine, for work around the British Isles and in the Mediterranean; then the corvette Challenger went around the world on Illustrations drawn by Olga Ley, the first seven after the report of the Valdivia expedition, the other four from the book The G alathea Deep Sea Expedition, with kind permission of its publisher, the Macmillan Company, New York. the same errand. It became a great scientific success and as a result Alexander Agassiz started exploring the seas off the United States, first the Gulf of Mexico, then the Caribbean Sea, then the nearby Atlantic, and finally the Pacific. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans sent the S.S. Valdivia on a Challengerlike expedition. Now this is about as far as I got last month, so we can pick up the narrative with the Valdivia expedition. entists, who, under the leadership of Professor Carl Chun, manned the Valdivia, had read all fifty quarto volumes which reported on the work of the Challenger. They knew what had been done wrong or awkwardly on that first try. New and better nets and other equipment had been designed and constructed in the meantime. Consequently the Valdivia expedition did as well as the Challenger expedition in a shorter time. There was another improvement too. The Challenger expedition had lost over, a dozen men, fig. #: Melanocetus johnsoni (left) and Melanocetus krechi (right) not due to accidents but to heat due south for the Canary Islands prostration, tropical diseases and and more or less followed the Afriexhaustion. The Valdivia lost only can coast. From Capetown, course ship's doctor. ing Bouvet Island if they could Leaving Hamburg on July #, (they did), then east to Enderby #, the Valdivia first sailed to Land on the coast of Antarctica, England -- or, more precisely, Scotfrom there up to Sumatra, then land, since they went to Edinacross the Indian Ocean to Dar-esburgh; then she sailed around Salaam in East Africa, then north Scotland and Ireland, took course along the African coast to the Red fig. #: Gigantura, fish with telescope eyes Fig. #: Amphitretus, octopus with telescope eyes Fig. #: Deop-sea prawn Nematocarcinus Sea. Then the Valdivia sailed the whole length of the Mediterranean Sea and around Spain back to Hamburg, which was reached on April #, #. A member of the expedition recalled later that one of the first questions asked of him by a newspaper reporter was: "Did you catch any monsters of the deep?" The scientist replied that they had caught monsters all right, but that the reporter would not agree, so let's call them bathypelagic fishes. To understand this exchange, it must be explained that the German word for monster is Ungeheuer, but the adjective ungeheuerlich mostly means "gigantic." Fig. #: Mega to pharynx, actually larva of pelican eel They were "monsters," yes, but they were little. One of my childhood memories is myself standing in front of the displays in the Museum of Natural History in Berlin and marveling at the monsters. Why, they were all of so small a size that one could easily keep them in a fish tank at home! Building a fish tank which could actually do that would be a major engineering task. It would cost, I guess, around # and would still have the considerable disadvantage of not letting you see what's going on inside. misshapen fishes, each about three inches long (Fig. #). Your first impression was that this was mainly a mouth. The teeth, though tiny, still looked both vicious and, strange to say, luminous. These two fishes, one taken in the Atlantic at a depth of # feet, the other in the Indian Ocean at a similar depth, had come up still alive and had lived on board the Valdivia for about an hour. They had been photographed in a dark room, and the teeth had been luminous, as had been the tip of the appendage growing out from between the eyes. Less frightening and more impressive in many respects was Gigantura (Fig. #) which was labeled as a large representative of the fish fauna of the deep sea. Its eellike body was AVa inches long and it had been taken from a depth of # feet. The whole body was the most beautiful mother-of-pearl color on a pink background; the long trailing tail (six inches of it) looked like silver threads. And the eyes were of a shape that had never been seen before; they were like built-in opera glasses. The scientific designation, logically, was "telescope eyes." Nor were these telescope eyes just an accomplishment of the fishes. Octopi had them too. There was a #-inch octopus called Amphitretus which also had telescope eyes (Fig. #). It was colorless and looked somewhat translucent I can't tell whether this was its natural appearance or whether being preserved in alcohol had robbed it of what color it originally had. By the time I saw it, it had been in alcohol for some sixteen years and that, unfortunately, does cause bleaching, The men of the Valdivia seem to have been generally somewhat more lucky than the men of the Challenger because they quite often could still have a quick look at the living deep-sea animals. True, the creatures died soon thereafter, but they were still seen alive. It must have been a difference of faster winches and general technical improvement in the catching equipment A T any event, the men expressed their surprise at how colorful deep-sea life turned out to be. They probably had reasoned consciously that color did not matter in a permanently dark environment, and then had drawn the subconscious conclusion that the denizens of the extreme deep would therefore be black. Well, the conclusion had been wrong; the reasoning should have stopped with the statement that color does not matter in a permanently dark environment So the animals had color, only it did not matter. The fishes were mother-of-pearl color, or pink, or dark blue and sometimes black. The crabs, to everybody's surprise, were usually pink or red. This again was one of the cases where reasoning, in this case the surprise, was based on previous experience. Even a zoologist, unless he happens to be working on marine crustaceans right at the time, is likely to think of edible crabs, of lobsters and crayfish, when the word "crustacean" is mentioned. All these are dark-colored when alive and it is just the fact that they have turned red that announces that they are ready to eat. If you ask a zoologist why, he will readily explain that the color of the living lobster or crayfish is due to two pigments in the shell. One is blue, the other red. It so happens that the blue pigment is destroyed by heat (it does not dissolve in the cooking water, as you can sometimes read; if it did, the water would turn blue) so that only the heat-resistant red pigment is left. Hence the boiled crayfish and the broiled lobster are red. After finishing this explanation, the same zoologist will even point out that one can occasionally find crayfish in which one or both pigments are missing. If both are missing, the crayfish looks dirty white, of course. If the red pigment is missing, it looks a rather beautiful light steel blue, and if the blue pigment is missing, the crayfish is pinkish red. Well, yes, that is what the man knows. The occasional reddish living crayfish is an unusual case. So, when he sees a netful of red crabs and prawns break the surface of the ocean, he is still surprised because they are all red. He did not expect them to have the red pigment only. But they do. It must be said that the zoologist, if he could spend some time at the bottom of the ocean, would not get used to red crabs and prawns either. If he were at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where it is about # feet deep, and sat perfectly still, he might see a red deep-sea prawn ( Nematocarcinus ) approach him. The picture would be something like Fig. #. These crustaceans eject a luminous liquid, presumably to blind their enemies Rg. #; Styracaitftr, abyssal saastar of wW distribution when attacked, and it is reported that this liquid clings to their own bodies for a while. But in the light beam of a lamp, the crab would look red. taken me away from the showcase at the Natural History Museum in Berlin where I spent much time in wonder when I was about twelve. There were two especially weird things in it Again they proved that, in the deep sea, color does not matter, for one was dead black and the other mother of pearl. The black one was Megalopharynx longicaudatus, which translates as the "long-tailed big-gullet" (Fig. #); the name isn't very sophisticated, but you can't deny that it is descriptive. In size, the longtailed big-gullet was considerable for its habitat, measuring # Vz inches in length. The scientists of the Valdivia were convinced that this was just the larval form of another fish and later discoveries proved them right. The adult is called the "pelican eel" (Eurypharynx pelecanoides) and is now known. to occur in all oceans below the #-foot level. The last monster in that showcase was tiny, just a shade longer than one inch. It bore the name of Stylophthalmus Brauer and had been caught in the Indian Ocean at a depth of # feet (Fig. #). It also was a larval form. Why its eyes are on such long stalks is not Fig. #: A clasp-sea hotothurian, Scotoplanes, probably an inactive type known; larval forms do not always make sense even though one wishes they would. It has just been mentioned that the pelican eel occurs in all oceans. Successive expeditions have tended to show that the fauna of the deep sea seems to be rather uniform, which, since the environment is rather uniform, is not really surprising. A fish caught in one ocean by one expedition at # feet was caught by another expedition at # feet in another ocean and by a third expedition at # feet in still another ocean. The ValFig. #: Deep-sea holothurian Psychropotes, probably a very active type Fig. I I : Deep-tea cruttacean Eurythenes gryU lus, probably active type too divia itself provided different examples. Nor is this uniformity restricted to what the German scientist called, in self-defense, the bathypelagic fishes. Nothing cuts an interview short like such a term, especially if you add that it cannot be translated into what reporters call "words of one syllable." (Incidentally, they are not consistent; one of them once said to me that he wanted my "reply in interesting words of one syllable, not those linguistic monstrosities you scientists always use"; please note that be used only eight one-syllable words in fifteen.) Actually any scientific term -- with the possible exception of a few mathematical concepts -- can be either translated or at least explained. " biology, the first concept is that of the "littoral zone." Originally this term was defined as the zone between high and low tide, but in the course of time this has been liberalized to mean shallow water near the shore, generally. The opposite of littoral is pelagic (from Greek pelagos, meaning "of the sea") which means everything far from the shore, beyond the horizon as seen by a man at the seashore. Pelagic then is subdivided into Nekton, which is everything that actively swims around, whether shark, porpoise or herring, and Plankton, which is everything that drifts around. If it swims or drifts above # feet of depth, it is "epipelagic ." If it swims or drifts deep down, it is "bathypelagic." If it either cannot or does not move, it is "benthal" or "benthic." That the bathypelagic fauna is rather uniform is not too surprising, but the Valdivia found a similar uniformity of the benthal forms. Figure # shows the deep-sea seastar Styracaster. The one pictured was # # A inches across and was dredged up from the Atlantic from about # feet Another one just like it, but # inches across, was dredged from # feet in the Indian Ocean. Likewise crinoids (the Valdivia discovered several new species) were the same in widely separated areas. The same went for sponges. There are, it should be explained, three main types of sponges. The best known of iiiein, the bath sponge, is a representative of the "Homy Sponges." Its structure consists of spongin fibers. The second group are the calcareous sponges, and the third the glass sponges with a silica skeleton. The glass sponges are often very beautiful and have shapes that remind the observer of artifacts -- many look like intricate vases or bottles. Some of these glass sponges which had come on the market via Japan had actually been thought to be artificial and had been much admired as the product of Japanese glass blowers. To the best of my knowledge, the Japanese never had any special reputation as glass blowers, nor do I know where the Japanese got them. The Valdivia found these types, which had been thought artificial, in many places, always deep down, always alike, no matter how far apart they grew. Naturally the Valdivia expedition was not the last of its kind. It was follpwed one year later by the Dutch Siboga expedition under Professor Max Weber. Then followed a Norwegian deep-sea expedition on a vessel which was named -- what else? -- the Michael Sars. There were American expeditions ( Albatross ), Danish expeditions on the ships Dana  and Dana II (these paid special attention to the life history of the common eel, still completely unknown as late as #), and finally the Danish Gafafhea expedition. I N the meantime, the problem was attacked from an entirely different angle. Most of what the Valdivia had found was, by definition, benthic. It was either grown to the bottom, like those glass sponges, or else it was not likely to move far, like the seastars and even most of the fishes. Just how much bathypelagic life there actually was remained to be investigated, and the best way of doing it was to put a man in a position where he could observe it directly. I am, of course, speaking of ants were the first men to actually see bathypelagic fishes in their natural habitat and they were surprised at how much of it there was. All I can do is to urge you Down which was reprinted in #I and is still available. Since I am recommending books, I'll go on and recommend equally strongly that you spend two or three hours with The Galathea Deep Sea Expedition (published last year by the Macmillan Company) which produced results every bit as interesting as those of the Challenger and the Valdivia. The Galathea expedition (it took place during the years #) confirmed the earlier impression that the bathypelagic fauna was of worldwide distribution. The fish Bathymicrops is an insignificant-looking small and blind fish, but it is widely distributed. It was caught in the North Atlantic # feet down by the Michael Sars, three times in the Atlantic by the Albatross (at # feet off Northwest Africa, at # feet in mid-Atlantic near the equator and at # feet near the North Coast of South America), and three times by the Galathea (at about # feet near the southern tip of Africa, at about # feet off the African East Coast near the equator, and at # feet just north of the North Island of New Zealand). The route of the Galathea was similar to that of the Valdivia: from Copenhagen through the English Channel, down the West Coast of Africa, up the East Coast to the Seychelles Islands, across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, then through the Sunda Sea to Australia, around New Zealand, up to Hawaii, then to San Francisco, from there to the Panama Canal and, cutting across the Atlantic, back to Copenhagen. The Galathea secured a number of specimens of the invertebrate life of the abyssal regions which do not seem to belong to Earth. A deep-sea cucumber ( Scotoplanes ) measuring about # # A inches in length was found off the Philippines at # and at # feet. Probably it spends its life buried in the mud (Fig. #). An even more unusual-looking holothurian (sea cucumber, that is) was taken from about # feet from the bottom between the northern end of Madagascar and the African mainland. Eight specimens of Psychropotes (Fig. #) were taken in one haul, the largest being a foot in length, the smallest eight inches. They probably plow through the ooze, hunting worms. Fig. #I shows a rather large crustacean (one of the so-called amphipods) taken by the Galathea in the Indian Ocean from depths up to # feet. This crustacean seems to be swimming some distance above the bottom as well as moving around on the bottom. It grows to a length of about four inches.  tions after Michael Sars' first probing of the deep sea, we can make a few generalizations. To begin with, no place in the deep sea, which, after all, covers about # per cent of the Earth's surface, is completely lifeless. In general, it seems that the life-forms are smaller the deeper you go, but some surprises in that respect are easily possible. So far, the areas which the Challenger men entered as "red ooze" on their charts seem to have the smallest number of inhabitants per square mile. The fauna of the deepest deep sea seems to be essentially benthic; apparently food is so scarce that obtaining it is largely accidental, so that it makes little difference whether the organism moves around actively searching for food or just lies in wait. The absolutely sessile forms are too far down in the scale of evolution to have developed luminous organs, especially since a number of them, the sponges, are eyeless under any circumstances. Crustaceans can, as has been mentioned, eject a luminous liquid. Luminous orgarts have been found, to the best of my knowledge, only on fishes and on octopi. In both cases, the animal seems to be able to control these organs, to be able to switch them on or off. Crustaceans and fishes, as well as octopi, have gone to both extremes as regards eyes. They either are completely blind or they have developed the largest eyes for their body size known to naturalists. It appears that none of the forms inhabiting the deep sea originated there. They, or rather their ancestors, all seem to have migrated from higher layers. The research work was determined at the beginning by the desire to find out how far life extended into the depth. It was only natural to investigate the sea bottom first, after it had been learned that there was something to investigate. The deep sea which is not near the bottom has been somewhat neglected by comparison. But we already know that it is richer in life than the bottom itself. One is naturally tempted, at this point in history, to compare the deep sea to space. The comparison is easy. In both cases, we know it is there. In both cases, we know it is immense in extent. In both cases, we know there is something to investigate. And, in both cases, we have to start any discussion with the words: "We have only just begun" February # at New York. N. Y., for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Editor H. L. Gold, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Managing Editor None; Business manager None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stockholder). #I Hudson St... New York #, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none t so None. #. 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(My commission expires March #, #) Insidekick Johnson had two secrets -- one he knew and would die rather than reveal -- and oqe he didn't know that meant to save him over his own dead body I around the room. Satisfied that it was empty except for Fred Kemmer and himself, he sidled up to the Earthman's desk and hissed conspiratorially in his ear, "Sir, this Johnson is a spy! Is it permitted to slay him?" "It is permitted," Kemmer said in a tone suitable to the gravity of the occasion. He watched humorlessly as the Antarian slithered out of the office with a flutter of colorful ceremonial robes. Both Kemmer and Shifax had known for weeks that John #rr Sm Bp#' , '   mrP: I J Mi x ssr VI : son was a spy, but the native had to go through this insane rigmarole before the rules on Antar would allow him to act At any rate, the formalities were over at last and the affair should be satisfactorily ended before nightfall. Natives moved quickly enough, once the preliminaries were concludedKemmer leaned back in his chair and sighed. Being the Interworld Corporation's local manager had more compensations than headaches, despite the rigid ritualism of native society. Since most of the local population was under his thumb, counter-espionage was miraculously effective. This fellow Johnson, for instance, had been in Vaornia less than three weeks, and despite the fact that he was an efficient and effective snoop, he had been fingered less than forty-eight hours after his arrival in the city. Kemmer closed his eyes and let a smile cross his keen features. Under his administration, there would be a sharp rise in the mortality curve for spies detected in the Vaornia-Lagash-Timargh triangle. With the native judiciary firmly under IC control, the Corporation literally had a free hand, providing it kept its nose superficially clean. And as for spies, they knew the chances they took and what the penalty could be for interfering with the normal operations of corporate business. Kemmer yawned, stretched, turned his attention to more important matters. hopefully in the empty food container before tossing it aside. A plump, prosaic man of middle height, with a round ingenuous face, Albert was as undistinguished as his name, a fact that made him an excellent investigator. But he was neither undistinguished nor unnoticed in his present position, although he had tried to carry it off by photographing the actions of the local Sanitary Processional like any tourist. He had been waiting near the Vaornia Arm on the road that led to Lagash since early afternoon, and now it was nearly evening. He cursed mildly at the fact that the natives had no conception of time, a trait not exclusively Antarian, but one which was developed to a high degree on this benighted planet. And the fact that he was hungry didn't add to his good temper. Natives might be able to fast for a week without ill effects, but his chunky body demanded quantities of nourishment at regular intervals, and his stomach was protesting audibly at being empty. He looked around him, at the rutted road, and at the darkening Vaornia Arm of the Devan Forest that bordered the roadway. The Sanitary Processional had cornpleted the daily ritual of waste disposal and the cart drivers and censer bearers were goading their patient daks into a faster gait. It wasn't healthy to be too near the forest after the sun went down. The night beasts weren't particular about what, or whom, they ate. The Vaomese used the Vaornia Arm as a dump for the refuse of the city, a purpose admirably apt, for the ever-hungry forest life seldom left anything uneaten by morning. And since Antarian towns had elaborate rituals concerning the disposal of waste, together with a nonexistent sewage system, the native atttiude of fatalistic indifference to an occasional tourist or Antarian being gobbled up by some nightmare denizen of. the forest was understandable. The fact that the Arm was also an excellent place to dispose of an inconvenient body didn't occur to Albert until the three natives with knives detached themselves from the rear of the Sanitary Processional and advanced upon him. They came from three directions, effectively boxing him in, and Albert realized with a sick certainty that he had been doublecrossed, that Shifaz, instead of being an informant for him, was working for the IC. Albert turned to face the nearest native, tensing his muscles for battle. Then he saw the Zark. It stepped out of the gathering darkness of the forest, and with its appearance everything stopped. For perhaps a micro-second, the three Vaomese stood frozen. Then, with a simultaneous wheep of terror, they turned and ran for the city. They might have stayed and finished their work if they had known it was a Zark, but at the moment the Zark was energizing a toothy horror that Earthmen called a Bandersnatch -- an insane combination of talons, teeth and snakelike neck mounted on a crocodilian body that exuded an odor of putrefaction from the carrion upon which it normally fed. The Bandersnatch had been dead for several hours, but neither the natives nor Albert knew that TT was a tribute to the Zark's ability to maintain pseudo-life in a Bandersnatch carcass that the knifemen fled and a similar panic seized the late travelers on the road. Albert stared with horrified fascination at the monstrosity for several seconds before he, too, fled. Any number of natives with knives were preferable to a Bandersnatch. He had hesitated only because he didn't possess the conditioned reflexes arising from generations of exposure to Antarian wildlife. He was some twenty yards behind the rearmost native, and, though not designed for speed, was actually gaining upon the fellow, when his foot struck a loose cobblestone in the road. Arms flailing, legs pumping desperately to balance his toppling mass, Albert fought manfully against the forces of gravity and inertia. He lost. His head struck another upturned cobble. His body twitched once and then relaxed limply and unconscious upon the dusty road. The Zark winced a little at the sight, certain that this curious creature had damaged itself seriously. Filled with compassion, it started forward on the Bandersnatch's four walking legs, the grasping talons crossed on the breast in an attitude of prayer. The Zark wasn't certain what it could do, but perhaps it could help. Albert was mercifully unconscious as it bent over him to inspect his prone body with a purple-lidded pineal eye that was blue with concern. The Zark noted the bruise upon his forehead and marked his regular breathing, and came to the correct conclusion that, whatever had happened, the biped was relatively undamaged. But the Zark didn't go away. It had never seen a human in its thousand-odd years of existence, which was not surprising since Earthmen had been on Antar less than a decade and Zarks seldom left the forest Albert began to stir before the Zark remembered its present condition. Not being a carnivore, it saw nothing appetizing about Albert, but it was energizing a Bandersnatch, and, like all Zarks, it was a purist. A living Bandersnatch would undoubtedly drool happily at the sight of such a tempting tidbit, so the Zark opened the three-foot jaws and drooled. Albert chose this precise time to return to consciousness. He turned his head groggily and looked up into a double row of saw-edged teeth surmounted by a leering triangle of eyes. A drop of viscid drool splattered moistly on his forehead, and as the awful face above him bent closer to his own, he fainted. The Zark snapped its jaws disapprovingly. This was not the proper attitude to take in the presence of a ferocious monster. One simply didn't go to sleep. One should attempt to run. The biped's act was utterly illogical. It needed investigation.  a pseudopod of its substance through the open mouth of its disguise. The faintly glittering thread oozed downward and struck Albert's head beside his right eye. Without pausing, the thread sank through skin and connective tissue, circled the eyeball and located the optic nerve. It raced inward along the nerve trunk, split at the optic chiasma, and entered the corpora quadrigemina where it branched into innumerable microscopic filaments that followed the main neural paths of the man's brain, probing the major areas of thought and reflex. The Zark quivered with pleasure. The creature was beautifully complex, and, more important, untenanted. He would make an interesting host. The Zark didn't hesitate. It needed a host; giving its present mass of organic matter pseudo-life took too much energy. The Bandersnatch collapsed with a faint slurping sound. A blob of iridescent jelly flowed from the mouth and spread itself evenly over Albert's body in a thin layer. The jelly shimmered, glowed, disappeared inward through Albert's clothing and skin, diffusing through the subcutaneous tissues, sending hairlike threads along nerve trunks and blood vessels until the threads met other threads and joined, and the Zark became a network of protoplasmic tendrils that ramified through Albert's body. Immediately the Zark turned its attention to the task of adapting itself to its new host. Long ago it had learned that this had to be done quickly or the host did not survive. And since the tissues of this new host were considerably different from those of the Bandersnatch, a great number of structural and chemical changes had to be made quickly. With some dismay, the Zark realized that its own stores of energy would be insufficient for the task. It would have to borrow energy from the host -- which was a poor way to start a symbiotic relationship. Ordinarily, one gave before taking. Fortunately, Albert possessed considerable excess fat, an excellent source of energy whose removal would do no harm. There was plenty here for both Albert and itself. The man's body twitched and jerked as the Zark's protean cells passed through the adaptive process, and as the last leukocyte recoiled from tissue that had suddenly become normal, his consciousness returned. Less than ten minutes had passed, but they were enough. The Zark was safely in harmony with its new host. Albert opened his eyes and looked wildly around. The landscape was empty of animate life except for the odorous carcass of the Bandersnatch lying beside him. Albert shivered, rose unsteadily to his feet and began walking toward Vaomia. That he didn't run was only because he couldn't. He found it hard to believe that he was still alive. Yet a hurried inspection convinced him that there wasn't a tooth mark on him. It was a miracle that left him feeling vaguely uneasy. He wished he knew what had killed that grinning horror so opportunely. But then, on second thought, maybe it was better that he didn't know. There might be things in the Devan Forest worse than a Bandersnatch. struck a three-pronged blow at Albert's senses. Sight, hearing and smell were assaulted simultaneously. Natives slithered past, garbed in long robes of garish color. Sibilant voices cut through the evening air like thin-edged knives clashing against the grating screech of the ungreased wooden wheels of dak carts. Odors of smoke, cooking, spices, perfume and corruption mingled with the all-pervasive musky stench of unwashed Vaornese bodies. It was old to Albert, but new and exciting to the Zark. Its taps on Albert's sense organs brought a flood of new sensation the Zark had never experienced. It marveled at the crowded buildings studded with jutting balconies and ornamental carvings. It stared at the dak caravans maneuvering with ponderous delicacy through the swarming crowds. It reveled in the colorful banners and awnings of the tiny shops lining the streets, and the fluttering robes of the natives. Color was something new to the Zark. Its previous hosts had been color blind, and the symbiont wallowed in an orgy of bright sensation. If Albert could have tuned in on his fellow traveler's emotions, he probably would have laughed. For the Zark was behaving precisely like the rubbernecking tourist he himself was pretending to be. But Albert wasn't interested in the sights, sounds or smells, nor did the natives intrigue him. There was only one of them he cared to meet -- that slimy doublecrosser called Shifaz who had nearly conned him into a one-way ticket. Albert plowed heedlessly through the crowd, using his superior mass to remove natives from his path. By completely disregarding the code of conduct outlined by the IC travel bureau, he managed to make respectable progress toward the enormous covered area in the center of town that housed the Kazlak, or native marketplace. Shifaz had a stand there where he was employed as a tourist guide. The Zark, meanwhile, was not idle despite the outside interests. The majority of its structure was busily engaged in checking and cataloguing the body of its host, an automatic process that didn't interfere with the purely intellectual one of enjoying the new sensations. Albert's body wasn't in too bad shape. A certain amount of repair work would have to be done, but despite the heavy padding of fat, the organs were in good working condition. The Zark ruminated briefly over what actions it should take cholesterol out of Albert's aorta and strengthened the weak spot in the blood vessel with a few cells of its own substance until Albert's tissues could fill the gap. Its knowledge of human physiology was incomplete, but it instinctively recognized abnormality. As a result, it could help the host's physical condition, which was a distinct satisfaction, for a Zark must be helpful.  practicing his normal profession of guide. As Albert approached, he was in the midst of describing the attractions of the number two tour to a small knot of fascinated tourists. 'And then, in the center of the Kazlak, we will come to the Hall of the Brides -- Antar's greatest marriage market It has been arranged for you to actually see a mating auction in progress, but we must hurry or -- " Shifaz looked up to see Albert shouldering the tourists aside. His yellow eyes widened and his hand darted to his girdle and came up with a knife. The nearest tourists fell back in alarm as he hissed malevolently at Albert, "Stand back, Earthman, or I'll let the life out of your scaleless carcass!" "Doublecrosser," Albert said, moving in. One meaty hand closed over the knife hand and wrenched while the other caught Shifaz alongside the head with a smack that sounded loud in the sudden quiet. Shifaz did a neat backflip and lay prostrate, the tip of his tail twitching reflexively. One of the tourists screamed. "No show today, folks," Albert said. "Shifaz has another engagement." He picked the Antarian up by a fold of his robe and shook him like a dirty dustcloth. A number of items cascaded out of hidden pockets, among which was an oiled-silk pouch. Albert dropped the native and picked up the pouch, opened it, sniffed, and nodded. It fitted. Things were clearer now. He was still nodding when two Earthmen in IC uniform stepped out of the crowd. "Sorry, sir," the bigger of the pair said, "but you have just committed a violation of the IC-Antar Compact I'm afraid we'll have to take you in." "This lizard tried to have me killed," Albert protested. "I wouldn't know about that," the IC man said. "You've assaulted a native, and that's a crime. You'd better come peaceably with us -- local justice is rather primitive and unpleasant." "I'm an Earth citizen -- " Albert began. "This world is on a commercial treaty." The guard produced a blackjack and tapped the shotfilled leather in his palm. "It's our business to protect people like you from the natives, and if you insist, we'll use force." "I don't insist, but I think you're being pretty high-handed." "Your objection has been noted," the IC man said, "and will be included in the official report Now come along or we'll be in the middle of a jurisdictional hassle when the native cops arrive. The corporation doesn't like hassles. They're bad for business." T HE two IC men herded him into a waiting ground car and drove away. It was all done very smoothly, quietly and efficiently. The guards were good. And so was the local detention room. It was clean, modern and -- Albert noted wryly -- virtually escape-proof. Albert was something of an expert on jails, and the thick steel bars, the force lock, and the spy cell in the ceiling won his grudging respect. He sighed and sat down on the cot which was the room's sole article of furniture. He had been a fool to let his anger get the better of him. IC would probably use this brush with Shifaz as an excuse to send him back to Earth as an undesirable tourist -- which would be the end of his mission here, and a black mark on a singularly unspotted record. Of course, they might not be so gentle with him if they knew that he knew they were growing tobacco. But he didn't think that they would know -- and if they had checked his background, they would find that he was an investigator for the Revenue Service. Technically, criminal operations were not his affair. His field was tax evasion. He didn't worry too much about the fact that Shifaz had tried to kill him. On primitive worlds like this, that was a standard procedure -- it was less expensive to kill an agent than bribe him or pay honest taxes. He was angry with himself for allowing the native to trick him. He shrugged. By all rules of the game, IC would now admit about a two per cent profit on their Antar operation rather than the four per cent loss they had claimed, and pay up like gentlemen -- and he would get skinned by the Chief back at Earth Central for allowing IC to unmask him. His report on tobacco growing would be investigated, but with the sketchy information he possessed, his charges would be impossible to prove -- and IC would have plenty of time to bury the evidence. If Earth Central hadn't figured that the corporation owed it some he wouldn't be here. He had been dragged from his job in the General Accounting Office, for every field man and ex-field man was needed to conduct the sweeping investigation. Every facet of the sprawling IC operation was being checked. Even minor and out-ofthe-way spots like Antar were on the list -- spots that normally demanded a cursory once-over by a second-class business technician. the dull unimportance of an early penetration. There were the usual trading posts, pilot plants, wholesale and retail trade, and tourist and recreation centers -- all designed to accustom the native inhabitants to the presence of Earthmen and their works -- and set them up for the commercial kill, after they had acquired a taste for the products of civilization. But although the total manpower and physical plant for a world of this size was right, its distribution was wrong. A technician probably wouldn't see it, but to an agent who had dealt with corporate operations for nearly a quarter of a century, the setup felt wrong. It was not designed for maximum return. The VaorniaLagash-Timargh triangle held even more men and material then Prime Base. That didn't make sense. It was inefficient, and IC was not noted for inefficiency. Not being oriented criminally, Albert found out IC's real reason for concentration in this area only by absent-mindedly lighting a cigarette one day in Vaornia. He had realized almost instantly that this was a gross breach of outworld ethics and had thrown the cigarette away. It landed between a pair of Vaornese walking by. The two goggled at the cigarette, sniffed the smoke rising from it, and with simultaneous whistles of surprise bent over to pick it up. Their heads collided with some force. The cigarette tore in their greedy grasp as they hissed hatefully at each other for a moment, before turning hostile glares in his direction. From their expressions, they thought this was a low Earthie trick to rob them of their dignity. Then they stalked off, their neck scales ruffled in anger, shreds of the cigarette still clutched in their hands. Even Albert couldn't miss the implications. His tossing the butt away had produced the same reaction as a deck of morphine on a group of human addicts. Since IC wouldn't corrupt a susceptible race with tobacco when there were much cheaper legal ways, the logical answer was that it wasn't expensive on this planet -- which argued that Antar was being set up for plantation operations -- in which case tobacco addiction was a necessary prerequisite and the concentration of IC population made sense. Now tobacco, as any Earthman knew, was the only monopoly in the Confederation, and Earth had maintained that monopoly by treaty and by force, despite numerous efforts to break it There were some good reasons for the policy, ranging all the way from vice control to taxable income, but the latter was by far the most important. The revenue supported a considerable section of Earth Central as well as the huge battle fleet that maintained peace and order along the spacelanes and between the worlds. But a light-weight, high-profit item like tobacco was a constant temptation to any sharp operator who cared more for money than for law, and IC filled that definition perfectly. In the Tax Section's book, the Interworld Corporation was a corner-cutting, profit-grabbing chiseler. Its basic character had been the same for three centuries, despite all the complete turnovers in staff. Albert grinned wryly. The old-timers were right when they made corporations legal persons. Cigarettes which cost five credits to produce and sold for as high as two hundred would always interest a crook, and, as a consequence, Earth Central was always investigating reports of illegal plantations. They were found and destroyed eventually, and the owners punished. But the catch lay in the word "eventually." And if the operator was a corporation, no regulatory agency in its right mind would dare apply the full punitive power of the law. In that direction lay political suicide, for nearly half the population of Earth got dividends or salaries from them. That, of course, was the trouble with corporations. They invariably grew too big and too powerful. But to break them up as the Ancients did was to destroy their efficiency. What was really needed was a corporate conscience. Albert chuckled. That was a nice unproductive thought news that Albert had been taken to detention with a philosophic calm that lasted for nearly half an hour. By morning, the man would be turned over to the Patrol in Prime Base. The Patrol would support the charge that Albert was an undesirable tourist and send him home to Earth. But the philosophic calm departed with a frantic leap when Shifaz reported Johnson's inspection of the oiled-silk pouch. Raw tobacco was something that shouldn't be within a thousand parsects of Antar; its inference would be obvious even to an investigator interested only in tax revenues. Kemmer swore at the native. The entire operation would have to be aborted now and his dreams of promotion would vanish. "It wasn't my supply," Shifaz protested. "I was carrying it down to Karas at the mating market. He demands a pack every time he puts a show on for your silly Earth ie tourists." "You should have concealed it better." "How was I to know that chubby slob was coming back alive? And who'd have figured that he could handle me?" "I've told you time and again that Earthmen are tough customers when they get mad, but you had to learn it the hard way. Now we're all in the soup. The Patrol doesn't like responsible for their pay " "But he's still in your hands and he couldn't have had time to transmit his information " Shifaz said. "You can still kill him." Kemmer's face cleared. Sure, that was it. Delay informing the Patrol and knock the snoop off. The operation and Kemmer's future were still safe. But it irked him that he had panicked instead of thinking. It just went to show how being involved in major crime ruined the judgment. He'd have Johnson fixed up with a nice hearty meal -- and he'd see that it was delivered personally. At this late date, he couldn't afford the risk of trusting a subordinate. Kemmer's glower became a smile. The snoop's dossier indicated that he liked to eat. He should die happy. tray passed through a slot in the rear wall of Albert Johnson's cell. The sight and smell of Earthly cooking reminded him that he hadn't anything to eat for hours. His mouth watered as he lifted the tray and carried it to the cot. At least IC wasn't going to let him starve to death, and if this was any indication of the way they treated prisoners, an IC jail was the best place to be on this whole planet. Since it takes a little time for substances to diffuse across the intestinal epithelium and enter the circulation, the Zark had some warning of what was about to happen from the behavior of the epithelial cells lining Albert's gut. As a result, a considerable amount of the alkaloid was stopped before it entered Albert's body -- but some did pass through, for the Zark was not omnipotent. For nearly five minutes after finishing the meal, Albert felt normally full and comfortable. Then hell broke loose. Most of the food came back with explosive violence and cramps bent him double. The Zark turned to the neutralization and elimination of the poison. Absorptive surfaces were sealed off, body fluids poured into the intestinal tract, and anti-substances formed out of Albert's energy reserve to neutralize whatever alkaloid remained. None of the Zark's protective measures were normal to Albert's body, and with the abrupt depletion of blood glucose to supply the energy the Zark required, Albert passed into hypoglycemic shock. The Zark regretted that, but it had no time to utilize his other less readily available energy sources. In fact, there was no time for anything except the most elemental protective measures. Consequently the convulsions, tachycardia, and coma had to be ignored. Albert's spasms were mercifully short, but when the Zark was finished, he lay unconscious on the floor, his body twitching with incoordinate spasms, while a frightened guard called in an alarm to the medics. The Zark quivered with its own particular brand of nausea. It had not been hurt by the. alkaloid, but the pain of its host left it sick with self-loathing. That it had established itself in a life-form that casually ingested deadly poisons was no excuse. It should have been more alert, more sensitive to the host's deficiencies. It had saved his life, which was some compensation, and there was much that could be done in the way of restorative and corrective measures that would prevent such a thing from occurring again -- but the Zark was unhappy as it set about helping Albert's liver metabolize fat to glucose and restore blood sugar levels. T HE medic was puzzled. She had seen some peculiar conditions at this station, but hypoglycemic shock was something new. And, being unsure of herself, she ordered Albert into the infirmary for observation. The guard, of course, didn't object, and Kemmer, when he heard of it, could only grind his teeth in frustration. He was on delicate enough ground without making it worse by not taking adequate precautions to preguest. Somehow that infernal snoop had escaped again... Albert moved his head with infinite labor and looked at the intravenous apparatus dripping a colorless solution into the vein in the elbow joint of his extended left arm. He felt no pain, but his physical weakness was appalling. He could move only with the greatest effort, and the slightest exertion left him dizzy and breathless. It was obvious that he had been poisoned, and that it was a miracle of providence that he had survived. It was equally obvious that a reappraisal of his position was in order. Someone far higher up the ladder than Shifaz was responsible for this latest attempt on his life. The native couldn't possibly have reached him in the safety of IC's jail. The implications were unpleasant. Someone important feared him enough to want him dead, which tobacco was not as secret as he thought It would be suicide to stay in the hands of the IC any longer. Somehow he had to get out and inform the Patrol. He looked at the intravenous drip despondently. If the solution was poisoned, there was no help for him. It was already half gone. But he didn't feel too bad, outside of being weak. It probably was all right. In any event, he would have to take it. The condition of his body wouldn't permit anything else. He sighed and relaxed on the bed, aware of the drowsiness that was creeping over him. When he awoke, he would do something about this situation, but he was sleepy now. freshed. He was as hungry as he always was before breakfast. Whatever was in that solution, it had certainly worked miracles. As far as he could judge, he was completely normal. The medic was surprised to find him sitting up when she made her morning rounds. It was amazing, but this case was amazing in more ways than one. Last night he had been in a state of complete collapse, and now he was well on the road to recovery. Albert looked at her curiously. "What was in that stuff you gave me?" "Just dextrose and saline," she said. "I couldn't find anything wrong with you except hypoglycemia and dehydration, so I treated that." She paused and eyed him with a curiosity equal to his own. "Just what do you think happened?" she asked. "I think I was poisoned." "That's impossible " "Possibly," Albert conceded, "but it might be an idea to check that food I left all over the cell." "That was cleaned up hours ago" "Convenient, isn't it?" "I don't know what you mean by that," she said. "Someone in the kitchens might have made a mistake. Yet you were the only case " She looked thoughtful. "I think I will do a little checking in the Central Kitchen, just to be on the safe side." She smiled a bright professional smile. "Anyway, I'm glad to see that you have recovered so well. I'm sure you can go back tomorrow." She vanished through the door with a rustle of white dacron. Albert, after listening a moment to make sure that she was gone, rose to his feet and began an inspection of his room. It wasn't a jail cell. Not quite. But it wasn't designed for easy escape, either. It was on the top floor of the IC building, a good hundred feet down to the street below. The window was covered with a steel grating and the door was locked. But both window and door were designed to hold a sick man rather than a healthy and desperate one. Albert looked out of the window. The building was constructed to harmonize with native structures surrounding it, so the outer walls were studded with protuberances and bosses that would give adequate handholds to a man strong enough to brave the terrors of the descent. Looking down the wall, Albert wavered. Thinking back, he made up his mind. turbed. By all the rules, Albert Johnson should be dead. But Shifaz had failed, and that fool guard had to call in the medics. It was going to be harder to get at Johnson, now that he was in the infirmary, but he had to be reached. One might buy off an agent who was merely checking on tax evasion, but tobacco was another matter entirely. Kemmer wished he hadn't agreed to boss Operation Weed. The glowing dreams of promotion and fortune were beginning to yellow around the edges. Visions of the Penal Colony bothered him, for if the operation went sour, he would do the paying. He had known that when he took the job, but the possibility seemed remote then. He shook his head. It wasn't that bad yet. As long as Johnson hadn't communicated with anyone else and as long as he was still in company hands, something could be done. Kemmer thought a while, trying to put himself in Johnson's place. Undoubtedly the spy was frightened, and undoubtedly he would try to escape. And since it would be far easier to escape from the infirmary than it would be from detention, he would try as soon as possible. Kemmer's face cleared. If Johnson tried it, he would find it wasn't as easy as he thought. With characteristic swiftness, Kemmer outlined his plans and made the necessary arrangements. A guard was posted in the hall with orders to shoot if Johnson tried the door of his room, and Kemmer himself took a stand in the building across the street, facing the hospital, where he could watch the window of Albert's room. As he figured it, the window was the best bet. He stroked the long-barreled blaster lying beside him. Johnson still hadn't a chance, but these delays in disposing of him were becoming an annoyance. Cautiously, Albert tried the grating that covered the window. The Antarean climate had rusted the heavy screws that fastened it to the casing. One of the bars was loose. If it could be removed, it would serve as a lever to pry out the entire grating. Albert twisted at the bar. It groaned and squealed. He nervously applied more pressure, and the bar moved slowly out of its fastenings. r pHE Zark observed his actions curiously. Now why was its host twisting that rod of metal out of the woodwork? It didn't know, and it was consumed with curiosity. It had found no way to communicate with its host so that some of the man's queer actions could be understood; in the portions of the brain it had explored, there were no portals of communication. However, there still was a large dormant portion, and perhaps here lay the thing it sought. The Zark inserted a number of tendrils into the blank areas, probing, connecting synapses, opening unused pathways, looking for what it hoped existed. The results of this action were completely unforeseen by the Zark, for it was essentially just a subordinate ego with all the lacks which that implied -- and it had never before inhabited a body that possessed a potentially first-class brain. With no prior experience to draw upon, the Zark couldn't possibly guess that its actions would result in a peculiar relationship between the man and the world around him. And if the Zark had known, it probably wouldn't have cared. Albert removed the bar and pried out the grating. With only a momentary hesitation, he lowered himself over the sill until his feet struck an ornamental knob on the wall. He glanced quickly down. There was another protuberance about two feet below the one on which he was standing. Pressing against the wall, he inched one foot downward until it found the foothold. With relief, he shifted his weight to the lower foot, and as he did a wave of heat enveloped his legs. The protuberance came loose from the wall with a grating noise mixed with the crackling hiss of a blaster bolt, and Albert plunged toward the street below. As the pavement rushed at him, he had time for a brief, fervent wish that he were someplace else. Then the thought was swallowed in an icy blackness. blaster with a grin of satisfaction. He had figured his man correctly, and now the spy would be nothing to worry about. He watched the plummeting body -- and gasped with consternation, for less than ten feet above the pavement, Albert abruptly vanished! There is such a thing as too much surprise, too much shock, too much amazement. And that precisely was what affected Albert when he found himself standing on the street where the IC guards had picked him up. By rights, he should have been a pulpy smear against the pavement beneath the infirmary window. But he was not. He didn't question why he was here, or consider how he had managed to avoid the certain death that waited for him. The fact was that he had done it, somehow. And that was enough. It was almost like history repeating itself. Shifaz was at his usual stand haranguing another group of tourists. It was the same spiel as before, and almost at the same point of the pitch. But his actions upon seeing Albert were entirely different. His eyes widened, but this time he slid quietly from his perch on the cornerstone of the building and disappeared into the Albert followed. The fact that Shifaz was somewhere in that crowd was enough to start him moving, and, once started, stubbornness kept him going, plowing irresistibly through the thick swarm of Vaornese. Reason told him that no Earthman could expect to find a native hidden among hundreds of his own kind. Their bipedal dinosaurlike figures seemed to be cast out of one mold. A chase through this crowd was futile, but he went on deeper into the Kazlak, drawn along an invisible trail by some unearthly sense that told him he was right. He was as certain of it as that his name was Albert Johnson. And when he finally cornered Shifaz in a deserted alley, he was the one who was not surprised. Shifaz squawked and darted toward Albert, a knife glittering in his hand. Albert felt a stinging pain across the muscles of his left arm as he blocked the thrust aimed at his belly, wrenched the knife from the native's grasp, and slammed him to the pavement. Shifaz bounced like a rubber ball, but he had no chance against the bigger and stronger Earthman. Albert knocked him down again. This time the native didn't rjse. He lay in the street, a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his lipless mouth, hate radiating from him in palpable waves. Albert stood over him, panting a little from the brief but violent scuffle. "Now, Shifaz, you're going to tell me things," he said heavily. "You can go to your Place of Punishment," Shifaz snarled. "I shall say nothing." "I can beat the answers out of you," Albert mused aloud, "but I won't. I'll just ask you questions, and every time I don't like your answer, I'll kick one of your teeth out. If you don't answer, I guarantee that you'll look like an old grandmother." To lose one's teeth was a punishment reserved only for females. He would be a thing of mockery and laughter -- but there were worse things than losing teeth or face. There was such a thing as losing one's life, and he knew what would happen if he betrayed IC. Then he brightened. He could always lie, and this hulking brute of an Earthman wouldn't know -- couldn't possibly know. So he nodded with a touch of artistic reluctance. "All right," he said, "#I talk." He injected a note of fear into his voice. It wasn't hard to do. "Where did you get that tobacco?" Albert asked. "From a farm," Shifaz said. That was the truth. The Earthman probably knew about tobacco and there was no need to lie, yet. "Where is it?" Shifaz thought quickly of the clearing in the forest south of Lagash where the green broadleaved plants were grown, and said, "It's just outside of Timargh, along the road which runs south." He waited tensely for Albert's reaction, wincing as the Earthman drew his foot back. Timargh was a good fifty miles from Lagash, and if this lie went over, he felt that he could proceed with confidence. It went over. Albert replaced his foot on the ground. "You telling the truth?" "As Murgh is my witness," Shifaz said with sincerity. Albert nodded and Shifaz relaxed with hidden relief. Apparently the man knew that Murgh was the most sacred and respected deity in the pantheon of Antar, and that oaths based upon his name were inviolable. But what the scaleless oaf didn't know was that this applied to Antarians only. As far as these strangers from another world were concerned, anything went. So Albert continued questioning, and Shifaz answered, sometimes readily, sometimes reluctantly, telling the truth when it wasn't harmful, lying when necessary. The native's brain was fertile and the tissue of lies and truth hung together well, and Albert seemed satisfied. At any rate, he finally went away, leaving behind a softly whistling Vaornese who congratulated himself on the fact that he had once more imposed upon this outlander's credulity. He was so easy to fool that it was almost a crime to do it. But he wouldn't have been so pleased with himself if he could have seen the inside of Albert's mind. For Albert knew the truth about the four-hundred-acre farm south of Lagash. He knew about the hidden curing sheds and processing plant. He knew that both Vaornese and Lagashites were deeply involved in something they called Operation Weed, and approved of it thoroughly either from sheer cussedness or addiction. He had quietly read the native's mind while the half-truths and lies had fallen from his forked tongue. And, catching Shifaz's last thought, Albert couldn't help chuckling. At one of the larger intersections, Albert stopped under a flaming cresset and looked at his arm. There was a wide red stain that looked black against the whiteness of his pajamas. That much blood meant more than a scratch, even though there was no pain -- and cuts on this world could be deadly if they weren't attended to promptlyHe suddenly felt alone and helpless, wishing desperately for a quiet place where he could dress his wound and be safe from the eyes he knew were inspecting him. He was too conspicuous. The pajamas were out of place on the street. Undoubtedly natives were hurrying to report him to the IC. His mind turned to his room in the hostel with its well-fitted wardrobe and its first-aid kit -- and again came that instant of utter darkness -- and then he was standing in the middle of his room facing the wardrobe that held his clothing. TE felt no surprise this time. -He knew what had happened. Something within his body was acting like a tiny Distorter, transporting him through hyperspace in the same manner that a starship's engine room warped it through the folds of the normal space-time continuum. There was nothing really strange about it It was a power which he should have -- which any normal man should have. The fact that he didn't have it before was of no consequence, and the fact that other men didn't have it now merely made them abnormal. He smiled as he considered the possibilities which these new powers gave him. They were enormous. At the very least they tripled his value as an agent. Nothing was safe from his investigation. The most secret hiding places were open to his probings. Nothing could stop him, for command of hyperspace made a mockery of material barriers. He chuckled happily as he removed his pajama jacket and reached for the first-aid kit. From the gash in his sleeve, there should be a nasty cut underneath, and it startled him a little that there was no greater amount of hemorrhage. He cleaned off the dried blood -- and found nothing underneath except a thin red bloodless line that ran halfway around his arm. It wasn't even a scratch. Yet he had felt Shifaz' blade slice into his flesh. He knew there was more damage than this. The blood and the slashed sleeve could tell him that, even if he didn't have the messages of his nerves. Yet now there was no pain, and the closed scratch certainly wasn't the major wound he had expected. And this was queer, a fact for which he had no explanation. Albert frowned. Maybe this was another facet of the psi factors that had suddenly become his. He wondered where they had come from. Without warning, he had become able to read minds with accuracy and do ah effective job of teleportation. About the only things he lacked to be a wellrounded psi were telekinetic powers and precognition. His frown froze on his face as he became conscious of a sense of unease. They were coming down the hall -- two IC guardsmen. He caught the doubt and certainty in their minds -- doubt that he would be in his room, certainty that he would be ultimately caught, for on Antar there was no place for an Earthman to hide. Albert slipped into the first suit that came to hand, blessing the seam tabs that made dressing a moment's work. As the guards opened the door, he visualized the spot on the Lagash road where he had encountered the Bandersnatch. It was easier than before. He was standing in the middle of the road, the center of the surprised attention of a few travelers, when the guards entered his room. HP HE bright light of Antar's golden day came down from a cloudless yellow sky. In the forest strip ahead, Albert could hear a faint medley of coughs, grunts and snarls as the lesser beasts fed upon the remains of yesterday's garbage. Albert moved down the road, ignoring the startled natives. This time he wasn't afraid of meeting a Bandersnatch or anything else, for he had a method of escape that was foolproof. Lagash was some thirty miles ahead, but in the lighter gravity of Antar, the walk would be stimulating rather than exhausting. He went at a steady pace, occasionally turning his glance to the road, impressing sections of it upon his memory so that he could return to them via teleport if necessary. He found that he could memorize with perfect ease. Even the positions of clumps of grass and twigs were remembered with perfect clarity and in minute detail. The perfection of his memory astonished and delighted him. The Zark felt pleased with itself. Although it had never dreamed of the potential contained in the host's mind, it realized that it was responsible for the release of these weird powers, and it enjoyed the new sensations and was eager for more. If partial probing could achieve so much, what was the ultimate power of this remarkable mind? The Zark didn't know, but, like a true experimenter, it was determined to find out -- so it probed deeper, opening still more pathways and connecting more synapses with the conscious brain. It was routine work that could be performed automatically while the rest of the Zark enjoyed the colorful beauty of the Antarian scenery. With the forest quickly left behind him, Albert walked through gently rolling grassland dotted with small farms and homesteads. It was a peaceful scene, similar to many he had seen on Earth, and the familiarity brought a sense of nostalgic longing to be home again. But the feeling was not too strong, more intellectual than physical, for the memories of Earth were oddly blurred. Time passed and the road unreeled behind him. Once he took to the underbrush to let a humming IC ground car pass, and twice more he hid as airboats swept by overhead, but the annoyances were minor and unimportant When hiding from the second airboat, he disturbed a kelit in the thick brush growing beside the road. The little insect-eater chittered in alarm and dashed off to safety across the highway. And Albert, looking at it, was conscious not only of the external shape but the internal as well! He could see its little heart pounding in its chest, and the pumping bellows of the pink lungs that surrounded it. He was aware of the muscles pulling and relaxing as the kelit ran, and the long bones sliding in their lubricated joints. He saw the tenseness of the abdominal organs, felt the blind fear in the creature's mind. The totality of his impressions washed through him with a clear wave of icy shock. pected it -- it was the next logical step. He scrambled back to the road and walked onward a little faster, until the battlements of Lagash came in sight The Lagash Arm was farther from the city than was that of Vaomia, and as he came to the strip of jungle, he turned his eyes upon the empty parklike arcades between the trees. The last edible garbage had long since been consumed and the greater and lesser beasts had departed for the cooler depths of the forest, but Albert was conscious of life. It was all around him, in the trees with the ringed layers of their trunks and the sap flowing slowly upward through the cambium layer beneath their scaly bark, in the insects feeding upon the nectar of the aerial vine blossoms, in the rapid photosynthetic reactions of the leaves. His gaze, turning aloft, was conscious of the birds and the tiny arboreal mammals. He saw the whole forest with eyes filled with wonder at its life and beauty. It was the only right way to see. At the proper distance from Lagash, he plunged off boldly across country and entered the main area of the forest, reflecting wryly as he did so that he was probably the first human in the short history of Antarian exploration who had gone into one of the great forests with absolute knowledge that he would come out of it alive. And, as so often happens to men who have no fear, trouble avoided him. He followed the directions he had obtained from Shifaz and found the plantation without trouble. He could hardly miss it, because its size was far from accurately expressed in the native's memory. Skillfully concealed beneath an overhanging network of aerial vines whose camouflage made it invisible from the air, concealing the tobacco plants from casual detector search, the plantation extended in row upon narrow row, the irregular strips of fields separated by rows of trees from which the camouflage was hung. A fragile electric fence encircled the area, a seemingly weak defense, but one through which even the greatest Antarian beast would not attempt to pass. Albert whistled softly under his breath at what he saw, recorded it in his memory. Then, having finished the eyewitness part of his task, he recalled a section of road over which he had passed, and pushed. The return journey to Vaomia was experimental in nature, as Albert tried the range of his powers. His best was just short of twenty miles and the journey which had taken him eight hours was made back in somewhat less than twenty minutes, counting half a dozen delays and backtracks. where Albert would go next. He had to get evidence, and that evidence lay in only one place -- in the local office of the Interworld Corporation in Vaomia. A moment later, he stood in the reception room looking across the empty desks at the bright square of light shining through the glassite paneled door of Fred Kemmer's office. It was past closing hours, but Kemmer had a right to be working late. Right now, he was probably sweating blood at the thought of what would happen if Albert had finally managed to escape him. The Corporation would virtuously disown him and leave him to face a ten-year rap in Penal Colony. Albert almost felt sorry for him. Albert let his perception sense travel through the wall and into Kemmer's room. His guess was right -- the local boss was sweating. He checked Kemmer's office swiftly, but the only thing that interested him was the big vault beside the desk. He visualized the interior of the vault and pushed himself inside. Separated from Kemmer by six inches of the hardest metal known to Man, he quietly leafed through the files of confidential correspondence until he found what he wanted. He didn't need a light. His perception worked as well in the dark as in the daylight There was enough documentary evidence in the big vault to indict quite a few more IC officials than Kemmer -- and perhaps investigation of their files would provide more leads to even higher officials. Wherever Kemmer was going, Albert had the idea that he wouldn't be going alone. Albert selected all the incriminating letters and documents he could find and packed the microfiles in his jacket Finally, bulging with documentary information, he pushed back into the streets. It was late enough for few natives to be on the streets, and his appearance caused no comment Apparently unnoticed, he moved rapidly into the Kazlak, searching for a place to hide the papers he had stolen. What he had learned of Vaomia made him cautious. He checked constantly for spies, but there wasn't a native in sensing range. He ducked into the alleyway where he had caught Shifaz. His memory of it had been right. There was a small hole in one of the building walls, partly covered with cracked plaster, and barely visible in the darkness. The gloom of the Kazlak scarcely varied with night or day, as the enormous labyrinth of covered passages and building walls was pierced with only a few ventilation holes. Cressets at the main intersections burned constantly, their smokeless flames lighting the streets poorly. He wondered idly how he had managed to remember the way to this place, let alone the little hole in the wall, as he stuffed the micro-files into its dark interior. He finished, turned to leave, and was out on the main tunnel before he became aware of the IC ground cars closing in upon him. The Corporation was really on the beam, their spies everywhere. But they didn't know his abilities. He visualized and pushed. They were going to be surprised when he vanished -- but he didn't vanish. The expression of shocked surprise was still on his face as the stat gun blast took him squarely in the chest TE was tied to a chair in Fred Kemmer's office. He recognized it easily, although physically he had never been inside the room. His head hurt as a polygraph recorder was strapped to his left arm, and behind him, beyond his range of vision, he could sense another man and several machines. In front of him stood Fred Kemmer with an expression of satisfaction on his face. "Don't start thinking you're smart," Kemmer said. "You're in no position for it." "You've tried to kill me three times," Albert reminded him. "There's always a fourth time." "I don't think so. Too many people know." "Precisely my own conclusion," Kemmer said, "but there are other ways. Brainwashing's a good one." "That's illegal!" Albert protested. "Besides -- " "So what?" Kemmer cut him off. "It's an illegal universe." Albert probed urgently at the IC man's mind, hoping to find something he could turn to his advantage, but all he found were surface thoughts -- satisfaction at having gotten the spy where he could do no harm, plans for turning Albert into a mindless idiot, thoughts of extracting information -- all of which had an air of certainty that was unnerving. Albert had badly underestimated him. It was high time to leave here, if he could. Albert visualized an area outside Vaornia, and, as he tried to push, a machine hummed loudly behind him. He didn't move. Mistake, Albert thought worriedly, Fm not going anywhere -- and he knows I'm scared "It won't do you any good," Kemmer said. "It didn't take too much brains to figure you were using hyperspace in those disappearing acts. There's an insulating field around that' chair thafd stop a space yacht." He leaned forward. "Now -- what are your contacts, and who gave you the information on where to look?" Albert saw no reason to hide it, but there was no sense in revealing anything. The Patrol had word of his arrest by now and should be here any moment It was as though Kemmer had read his mind. "Don't count on being rescued. I stopped the Patrol report." Kemmer paused, obviously enjoying the expression on Albert's face. "You know," he went on, "there's a peculiar fact about nerves that maybe you don't know. A stimulus sets up a brief neural volley lasting about a hundredth of a second. Following that comes a period of refractivity lasting perhaps a tenth of that time while the nerve repolarizes, and then, immediately after repolarization, there is an extremely short period of hypersensitivity." "What's that to do with me?" Albert asked. "You'll find out if you don't answer promptly and truthfully. That gadget on your arm is connected to a polygraph. Now do you want to make a statement?" Albert shook his head. He was conscious of a brief pain in one finger, and the next instant someone tore the finger out of his hand with red hot pincers. He screamed. He couldn't help it. This punishment was beyond agony. "Nice, isn't it?" Kemmer asked as Albert looked down at his amputated finger that still was remarkably attached to his hand. "And the beauty of it is that it doesn't even leave a mark. Of course, if it's repeated enough, it will end up as a permanent paralysis of the part stimulated. Now once again -- who gave you that information?" to try to deceive a polygraph and he wanted no more of that nerve treatment -- and then he looked into Kemmer's mind again and discovered what went into brainwashing. The shock was like ice water. Hypersensitive stimulation, Kemmer was thinking gleefully, would reduce this fat slob in the chair to a screaming mindless lump that could be molded like wet putty. Albert felt helpless. He couldn't run and he couldn't fight. But he wasn't ready to give up. His perception passed over and through Kemmer with microscopic care, looking for some weakness, something that could be exploited to advantage. Kemmer had to have a vulnerable point. He did. There was a spot on the inner lining of the radial vein in Kemmer's left arm. He had recently received an inoculation, one of the constant immunizing injections that were necessary on Antar, for there was a small thrombus clinging to the needle puncture on the inner wall of the vessel. Normally it was unimportant and would pass away in time and be absorbed, but there were considerable possibilities for trouble in that little blob of red cells and fibrin if they could be loosened from their attachment to the wall. Hopefully, Albert reached out. If he couldn't move himself, perhaps he could move the clot. The thrombus stirred and came free, rushing toward Kemmer's heart. Albert followed it, watching as it passed into the pulmonary artery, tracing it out through the smaller vessels until it stopped squarely across a junction of two arterioles. Kemmer coughed, his face whitening with pain as he clutched at his chest. The pain was a mild repayment for his recent agony, Albert thought grimly. A pulmonary embolism shouldn't kill him, but the effects were disproportionate to the cause and would last a while. He grinned mercilessly as Kemmer collapsed. G A man darted from behind the chair and bent over Kemmer. Fumbling in his haste, he produced a pocket communicator, stabbed frantically at the dial and spoke urgently into it "Medic! Boss's office -- hurry!" For a second, Albert didn't realize that the hum of machinery behind him had stopped, but when he did, both Albert and the chair vanished. The Zark realized that its host had been hurt again. It was infuriating to be so helpless. Things kept happening to Albert which it couldn't correct until too late. There were forces involved that it didn't know how to handle; they were entirely outside the Zark's experience. It only felt relief when Albert managed to regain his ability to move -- and, as it looked out upon the familiar green Antarian countryside, it felt almost happy. Of course Albert was probably still in trouble, but it wasn't so bad now. At least the man was away from the cause of his pain. I T was a hell of a note, Albert reflected, sitting beside the road that led to Lagash and working upon the bonds that tied him to the chair. He had managed to get out of Kemmer's hands, but it appeared probable that he would get no farther. As things stood, he couldn't transmit the information he had gained -- and by this time probably every IC office on the planet was alerted to the fact that Earth Central had a psi-type agent on Antar -- one who whs not inherently unstable, like those poor devils in the par a psychological laboratories on Earth. They would be ready for him with everything from Distorter screens to Kellys. He didn't underestimate IC now. Whatever its morals might be, its personnel was neither stupid nor slow to act. He was trapped in this sector of the planet. Prime Base was over a thousand miles away, and even if he did manage to make his way back to it along the trade routes, it was a virtual certainly that he would never be able to get near a class I communicator or the Patrol office. IC would have ample time to get ready for him, and no matter what powers he possessed, a single man would have no chance against the massed technology of the corporation. However, he could play tag with IC in this area for some time with the reasonable possibility that he wouldn't get caught If nothing else, it would have nuisance value. He pulled one hand free of the tape that held it to the chair arm and swiftly removed the rest of the tape that bound him. He had his freedom again. Now what would he do with it? He left the chair behind and started down the road toward Lagash. There was no good reason to head in that particular direction, but at the moment one direction was as good as another until he could plan a course of action. His brain felt oddly fuzzy. He didn't realize that he had reached the end of his strength until he dropped in the roadway. To compensate for the miserable job it had done in protecting him from poison and neural torture,. the Zark had successfully managed to block hunger and fatigue pains until Albert's overtaxed body could stand no more. It realized its error after Albert collapsed. Sensibly, it did nothing. Its host had burned a tremendous amount of energy without replenishment, and he needed time to rest and draw upon less available reserves, and to detoxify and eliminate the metabolic poisons in his body. It was late that afternoon before Albert recovered enough to take more than a passing interest in his surroundings. He had a vague memory of hiring a dak cart driver to take him down the road. The memory was apparently correct, because he was lying in the back of a cargo cart piled high with short pieces of cane. The cart was moving at a brisk pace despite the apparently leisurely movements of the dak between the shafts. The ponderous ten-foot strides ate up distance. He was conscious of a hunger that was beyond discomfort, and a thirst that left his mouth dry and cottony. It was as though he hadn't eaten or drunk for days. He felt utterly spent, drained beyond exhaustion. He was in no shape to do anything, and unless he managed to find food and drink pretty soon, he would be easy pickings for IC.#-there was nothing except the canes on which he lay. There wasn't even any of the foul porridgelike mess that the natives called food, since native workers didn't bother about eating during working hours. He turned over slowly, feeling the hard canes grind into his body as he moved. He kept thinking about food -- about meals aboard ship, about dinners, about Earth restaurants, about steak, potatoes, bread -- solid heartening foods filled with proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Carbohydrates -- the thought stuck in his mind for some reason. And then he realized why. The canes he was lying on in in the cart were sugar cane! He had never seen them on Earth, but he should have expected to find them out here -- one of Earth's greatest exports was the seeds from which beet and cane sugar were obtained. He pulled a length of cane from the pile and bit into one end. His depleted body reached eagerly for the sweet energy that filled his mouth. With the restoration of his energy balance came clearer and more logical thought. It might be well enough to make IC spend valuable time looking for him, but such delaying actions had no positive value. Ultimately he would be caught, and his usefulness would disappear with his death. But if he could get word to the Patrol, this whole business could be smashed. Now if he made a big enough disturbance -- it might possibly even reach the noses of the Patrol. Perhaps by working through the hundred or so tourists in Vaornia and Lagash, he could -- That was it, the only possible solution. The IC might be able to get rid of one man, but it couldn't possibly get rid of a hundred -- and somewhere in that group of tourists there would be one who'd talk, someone who would pass the word. IC couldn't keep this quiet without brainwashing the lot of them, and that in itself would be enough to bring a Patrol ship here at maximum blast. He chuckled happily. The native driver, startled at the strange sound, turned his head just in time to see his passenger vanish, together with a bundle of cane. The native shook his head in an oddly human gesture. These foreigners were strange creatures indeed. sat at a table in one of the smaller cafeterias in Earth Center, talking to the Chief over a second helping of dessert. The fearful energy drain of esper activity, combined with the constant dodging to avoid IC hunting parties, had made him a gaunt shadow -- but he had managed to survive until a Patrol ship arrived to investigate the strange stories told by tourists, of a man who haunted the towns of Lagash and Vaornia, and the road between. "That's all there was to it, sir," Albert concluded. "Once I figured it out that not even IC could get away with mass murder, it was easy. I just kept popping up in odd places and telling my story, and then, to make it impressive, I'd disappear. I had nearly two days before IC caught on, and by then you knew. The only trouble was getting enough to eat. I damn near starved before the Patrol arrived. I expect that we owe quite a few farmers and shopkeepers reparations for the food I stole." "They'll be paid, providing they present a claim," the Chief said. "But there's one thing about all this that bothers me. I know you had no psi powers when you left Earth on this mission, just where did you acquire them?" Albert shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "Unless they were latent and developed in Antar's peculiar climatic and physical conditions. Or maybe it was the shock of that meeting with the Bandersnatch. All I'm sure of is that I didn't have any until after that meeting with Shifaz." "Well, you certainly have them now. The Parapsych boys are hot on your tail, but we've stalled them off." "Thanks. I don't want to imitate a guinea pig." "We owe you' at least that for getting us a case against IC. Even their shysters won't be able to wiggle out of this one." The Chief smiled. "It's nice to have those lads where they can be handled for a change." "They do need a dose of applied conscience," Albert agreed. "The government also owes you a bonus and a vote of thanks." "I'll appreciate the bonus," Albert said as he signaled for the waitress. "Recently, I can't afford my appetite." "It's understandable. After all, you've lost nearly eighty pounds." "Wonder if I'll ever get them back," Albert muttered as he bit into the third dessert. The Chief watched enviously. "I wouldn't worry about that," he said. "Just get your strength back. There's another assignment for you, one that will need your peculiar talents." He stood up. "I'll be seeing you. My ulcer can't take your appetite any more." He walked away. Inside Albert, the Zark alerted. A new assignment! That meant another world and new sensations. Truly, this host was magnificent! It had been a lucky day when he had fallen in running from the Bandersnatch. The Zark quivered with delightAnd Albert felt it. Turning his perception inward to see what might be wrong, he saw the Zark for the first time. T? OR a second, a wave of repulsion swept through his body, but as he comprehended the extent of that protoplasmic mass so inextricably intertwined with his own, he realized that this thing within him was the reason for his new powers. There could be no other explanation. And as he searched farther, he marveled. The Zark was unspecialized in a way he had never imagined -- an amorphous aggregation of highly evolved cells that could imitate normal tissues in a manner that would defy ordinary detection. It was something at once higher yet lower than his own flesh, something more primitive yet infinitely more evolved. The Zark had succeeded at last. It had established communication with its host "Answer me, parasite," Albert muttered subvocally. "I know you're there -- and I know you can answer!" The Zark gave the protean equivalent of a shrug. If Albert only knew how it had tried to communicate -- no, there was no communication between them. Their methods of thought were so different that there was no possible rapport. It twitched -- and Albert jumped. And for the first time in its long life, the Zark had an original idea. substance to Albert's throat region, and after a premonitory glottal spasm, Albert said very distinctly and quite involuntarily, "All right. I am here." Albert froze with surprise, but when the shock passed, he laughed. "Well, I asked for it," he said. "But it's like the story about the man who talked to himself -- and got answers. Not exactly a comforting sensation." "I'm sorry," the Zark apologized. "I do not wish to cause discomfort." "You pick a poor way to keep from doing it." "It was the only way I could figure to make contact with your conscious mind -- and you desired that I communicate." "I suppose you're right. But while it is nice to know that I really have a guardian angel, I'd have felt better about it if you had white robes and wings and were hovering over my shoulder.' "I don't understand," the Zark said. "I was trying to be funny. You know," Albert continued after a moment, "I never thought of trying to perceive myself. I wonder why. I guess because none of the medical examinations showed anything different from normal." "I was always afraid that you might suspect before I could tell you," the Zark replied. "It was an obvious line of reasoning, and you are an intelligent entity -- the most intelligent I have ever inhabited. It is too bad that I shall have to leave. I have enjoyed being with you." "Who said anything about leaving?" Albert asked. "You did. I could feel your revulsion when you became aware of me. It wasn't nice, but I suppose you can't help it. Yours is an independent race, one that doesn't tated as though searching for the proper word -- "fellow travelers," it finished. Albert grinned. "There are historical precedents for that statement, but your interpretation isn't quite right. I was surprised. You startled me." He fell silent, and the Zark, respecting the activity of his mind, forbore to interrupt. thinking about the Zark. Certainly it had protected him on Antar, and with equal certainty it must have been responsible for the psi owners he possessed. He owed it a lot, for without its help he wouldn't have survived. There was only one thing wrong. Sexless though it was, the Zark must possess the characteristics of life, since it was obviously alive. And those characteristics were unchanging throughout the known universe. The four vital criteria defined centuries ago were still as good today as they were then -- growth, metabolism, irritability -- and reproduction. Despite its lack of sex, the Zark must be capable of producing others of its kind, and while he didn't mind supporting one fellow traveler, he was damned if he'd support a whole family of them.  "That need never pother you," the Zark interrupted. "As an individual, I am very long-lived and seldom reproduce. I can, of course, but the process is quite involved -- actually it involves making a twin out of myself -- and it is not necessary. Besides, there cannot be two Zarks in one host. My offspring would have to seek another." "And do they have your powers?" "Of course. They would know all I know, for a Zark's memory is not concentrated in specialized tissue like your brain A light began to dawn in Albert's mind. Maybe this was the answer to the corporate conscience he had been wishing for so wistfully on Antar. "Does it bother you to reproduce?" he asked. "It is annoying, but not painful -- nor would it be too difficult after a pattern was set in my cells. But why do you ask this?" "The thought just occurred to me that there are quite a few people who could use a Zark. A few of the more honest folks would improve this Confederation's moral tone if they had the power -- and certainly psi powers in law enforcement would be unbeatable." "Then you would want me to reproduce?" "It might be a good idea if we can find men who are worthy of Zarks. I could check them with my telepathy and perhaps we might -- " "Let me warn you," the Zark interjected. "While this all sounds very fine, there are difficulties, even with a host as large as yourself. I shall need more energy than your body has available in order to duplicate myself. It will be hard for you to do what must be done." "And what is that?" "Eat," the Zark said, "great quantities of high energy foods." It shuddered at the thought of Albert overloading his digestive tract any more than he had been doing the past week. But Albert's reaction went to prove that while their relationship was physically close, mentally they were still far apart. Albert, the Zark noted in astonishment, didn't regard it as an ordeal at all. We would love to tell you what to expect in the next issue -- dated April, on sale the first week in February -- but we're waiting till the last possible moment to see how you want Galaxy. to be shaped. Once we know that, fitting together issues to your specifications will be a happy task. The material is on hand, a lot of it. In all lengths, true Galaxy quality, and in case that statement worries writers, they might consider how awesomely much it takes to fill # pages; every time we close an issue, a carload of stories has to come in to replace the one that just left. Novellas? Novelets? Short stories? Serials? Articles? Features? Letters? We have them all. Now which do you want, in what proportions? Send us a note with your vote now -- make Galaxy the magazine you want it to be! # Star Shelf edited by Cliiton Fadiman. Simon  Schuster, N,Y. t # A nthologies, though composed of the creations of others, are creatures of the editor. Gestalted in the usual way, the whole is greater than its parts. And this whole book, assembled by Clifton Fadiman, has some impressive list of parts: Aldous Huxley, Branch Cabell, Wells, Koestler, Plato, Heinlein, Clarke, Ley, Lewis Carroll, and many equally distinguished others. Fadiman apologizes for the abundant use of the Moebius Strip as plot motivator, but he needn't. There must still be plenty of fun and paradox yet to be found in that simple bit of complexity. Witness Cyril Kombluth's delightful limerick about a burlycue queen who does a Moebius Strip. The overall quality of the stories is so high that the reviewer is hard pressed to select the special few worthy of separate mention. So, with back to wall, I submit "Jurgen Proves It by Mathematics" by Cabell, "A Subway Named Moebius" by A. J. Deutsch, "Young Archimedes" by Huxley and "Superiority" by Clarke as high peaks of this lofty imaginative range. Hadley. The Viking Press, N.Y., S# viled as candidates of a machine? So many that even Hadley's true machine candidate rings too close to the truth for comfort. "Mike" Microvac, an endearing #-tube electronic calculator with a war record of Pentagon service, is calculating enough to foresee incalculable benefit for itself and its species if elected to the Presidency. It cleverly hoodwinks "Big Mac" McGowan, a political boss, into proposing candidacy and supervising "Mike's" campaign. John G. Schneider's Golden Kazoo was an account of an election run on a strict advertising basis by the Madison Ave. boys. However, they appear as amateurs against this Big Sell. What other candidate ever possessed two right hands? (McGowan had to draw the line at more. Wholesale handshaking would look weird, proving that in certain ways Mike was naive.) What other candidate could talk out of both sides of his mouth simultaneously and still make sense? What other candidate had electronic circuits built into his appendages to soothe squalling infants? Additionally, Mike understands the value of human frailty. He bowls for relaxation and can be beaten. At slack moments of the day, he relaxes at the piano. The leading screen femme fatale refers to him as "that sexy box of wires." All in all, Microvac the candidate is at least as interesting and possibly more human than some we've seen in recent years. We're beholden to Hadley for a rib-tickCooper. Ballantine Books, N.Y., # up a paradise in which Man, served by robots, was freed at last of drudgery and economic insecurity. He showed, to the best of his ability, that such a heaven is but a step from hell. Cooper has raised the entire theme one level, populating his world with androids and humans. This change alone has altered the impact completely. For some psychological reason, it is easy to imagine a robot world dedicated to service, however restrictive, to mankind. But androids, particularly articulate and adaptable ones, somehow strike the reader as a race apart, one that can conceivably compete with Man on a survival basis. Cooper has seen the future in just that light. His oddly and aptly named atomic war, the "Nine Days Tranquilizer " has depopulated England to the extent that science perforce has had to develop artificial workers. From unskilled laborer to competent craftsman is merely a problem in time and evolution. Eventually, the androids become the backbone of society, administrating as well as serving. Work and constructive activity are forbidden to humans. John Markham, government refrigeration supervisor, is the unthe atomic age, deep-frozen at the cataclysmic moment. Revived and thrust unprepared into a leisurely paradise, all responsibility gone and all wants served by his own personal android, he still asks himself, with androids capable of all the physical and mental accomplishments of mankind, who needs Man? Judged by this excellent first novel, Cooper is another fine new English talent to join the lengthening list of Ballantine discoveries. vid Osborne. Avalon Books, N.Y., # G eorge Orwell's world of # was divided by mutual consent into three nations, so that a never-ending war of attrition would consume surplus capital goods. Osborne doesn't have as good an excuse for chopping his world into four parts. He postulates a super-isolationism, America First carried to the Nth, that turtlenecks the four major spheres into ignoring the existence of their neighbors. Presumably, this is a solution to the threat of atomic warfare. But what if someone peeks through the curtains? Within his flimsy framework, Osborne has built a soundly plotted and written invasion yarn. His apportioned world lends itself without conflict to the classic Roman "Divide and Conquer." With less than a year to unite Earth against the coming invasion and against super-McCarthyism that brands subversive the mere mention of foreign nations, the problem is re-education of the public mind to internationalism. As agent of unity, Osborne has a reluctant big-time TV director who is a setup, like you and me, for a bigtime non-telegraphed shocker at the end. N.Y., # f T , HE above mouthful of title signifies reprinting of a full year's information from the English magazine edited by le Poer Trench. A huge segment of our flying saucer literature emanates from Britain, and by simple numerical calculation, England leads the rest of the world in sightings per sq. mile. The assorted sizes, shapes and colors of the craft involved space vehicles, is Earth the proving ground for all late-model saucers? edited by Groff Conklin, Ballantine Books, N.Y., #  fore, in addition to his SF anthologies, but he has outdone himself with this collection. Of the twelve yarns, only Lovecrafts "The Outsider" might be overly familiar to the reader, but this ror-evocative best can easily bear repetition. Of the others, "The Graveyard Rats," Henry Kuttner's first published story, and "Dirt" by Charles Beaumont are from the same curdled-blood school. Bradbury's "Screaming Woman," Bierce's irreverent howl, "A Bottomless Grave," John Collier's pathetic "Special Delivery" are also top examples of their genre. And Theodore Sturgeon has written a new yam, punning on the title, that is different from any other cemetery story you've ever read. cemetery story you've ever read. If you enjoy bathing in sweat, wade into this biery brew. Lynn Poole. Whittlesey House, N.Y., # is the most difficult decision for a youngster to make, once he passes idolatry of firemen and garbage collectors. Lynn Poole, producer of TV's excellent and award-winning Johns Hopkins Review, offers a slew of choices on the perimeters of scientific knowledge that capture the imagination as these childhood heroes never did. Poole quotes a German scientist who, in #, after viewing an X-ray photo by Roentgen, said, "Today we have reached the peak of scientific discovery. There is little still yet to be found." Even today, standing as we are on so many thresholds, one hears much the same guff. At the other extreme, Poole draws so many eye-opening pictures of the problems to be solved in chemurgy, atomics, cybernetics, etc., that he just might cause an imaginative youngster to wish wildly for a good, old-fashioned da Vinci-type universal mind. Of all the Irksome, frustrating, maddening discoveries -- was there no way of keeping it discovered? Charles Dennison should A touch of paranoia would have not have been careless, served Dennison well; but he was An inventor cannot afford carelacking in that vital characteristic lessness, particularly when his inof inventors. And he didn't even vention is extremely valuable and realize the full extent of his careobviously patentable. There are lessness until a bullet, fired from too many grasping hands ready to a silenced weapon, chipped a seize what belongs to someone granite wall not three inches from else, too many men who feast upon his head. Then he knew. But by then it was too late. Charles Dennison had been left a more than adequate income by his father. He had gone to Harvard, served a hitch in the Navy, then continued his education at M.I.T. Since the age of thirtytwo, he had been engaged in private research, working in his own small laboratory in Riverdale, New York. Plant biology was his field. He published several noteworthy papers, and sold a new insecticide to a development corporation. The royalties helped him to expand his facilities. Dennison enjoyed working alone. It suited his temperament, which was austere but not unfriendly. Two or three times a year, he would come to New York, see some plays and movies, and do a little serious drinking. He would then return gratefully to his seclusion. He was a bachelor and seemed destined to remain that way. Not long after his fortieth birthday, Dennison stumbled across an intriguing clue which led him into a different branch of biology. He pursued his clue, developed it, extended it slowly into a hypo thesis. After three more years, a lucky accident put the final proofs into his hands. He had invented a most effective longevity drug. It was not proof against violence; aside from that, however, it could fairly be called an immortality serum.L ' But years of seclusion had made Dennison unwary of people and their motives. He was more or less heedless of the world around him; it never occurted to him that the world was not equally heedless of him. He thought only about his serum. It was valuable and patentable. But was it the sort of thing that should be revealed? Was the world ready for an immortality drug? He had never enjoyed speculation of this sort. But since the atom bomb, many scientists had been forced to look at the ethics of their profession, Dennison looked at his and decided that immortality was inevitable. Mankind had, throughout its existence, poked and probed into the recesses of nature, trying to figure out how things worked. If one man didn't discover fire, or the use of the lever, or gunpowder, or the atom bomb, or immortality, another would. Man willed to know all nature's secrets, and there was no way of keeping them hidden. Armed with this bleak but comforting philosophy, Dennison packed his formulas and proofs into a briefcase, slipped a twoounce bottle of the product into a jacket pocket, and left his Riverdale laboratory. It was already evening. He planned to spend the night in a good midtown hotel, see a movie, and proceed to the Patent Office in Washington the following day. On the subway, Dennison was absorbed in a newspaper. He was barely conscious of the men sitting on either side of him. He became aware of them only when the man on his right poked him firmly in the ribs. Dennison glanced over and saw the snub nose of a small automatic, concealed from the rest of the car by a newspaper, resting against his side. "What is this?" Dennison asked. "Hand it over," the man said. Dennison was stunned. How could anyone have known about his discovery? And how could they dare try to rob him in a public subway car? Then he realized that they were probably just after his money. "I don't have much on me," Dennison said hoarsely, reaching for his wallet. The man on his left leaned over and slapped the briefcase. "Not money," he said. "The immortality stuff." N some unaccountable fashion, they knew. What if he refused to give up his briefcase? Would they dare fire the automatic in the subway? It was a very small caliber weapon. Its noise might not even be heard above the subway's roar. And probably they felt justified in taking the risk for a prize as great as the one Dennison carried. He looked at them quickly. They were mild-looking men, quietly, almost somberly dressed. Something about their clothing jogged Dennison's memory unpleasantly, but he didn't have time to place the recollection. The automatic was digging painfully into his ribs. The subway was coming to a station. Dennison glanced at the man on his left and caught the glint of light on a tiny hypodermic. Many inventors, involved only in their own thoughts, are slow of reaction. But Dennison had been a gunnery officer in the Navy and had seen his share of action. He was damned if he was going to give up his invention so easily. He jumped from his seat and the hypo passed through the sleeve of his coat, just missing his arm. He swung the briefcase at the man with the automatic, catching him across the forehead with the metal edge. As the doors opened, he ran past a popeyed subway guard, up the stairs and into the street. The two men followed, one of them streaming blood from his forehead. Dennison ran, looking wildly around for a policeman. The men behind him were screaming, "Stop, thief! Police! Police! Stop that man!" Apparently they were also prepared to face the police and to claim the briefcase and bottle as their own. Ridiculous! Yet the complete and indignant confidence in their shrill voices unnerved Dennison. He hated a scene. Still, a policeman would be best. The briefcase was filled with proof of who he was. Even his name was initialed on the outside of the briefcase. One glance would tell anyone... He caught a flash of metal from his briefcase, and, still running, looked at it. He was shocked to see a metal plate fixed to the cowhide, over the place where his initials had been. The man on his left must have done that when he slapped the briefcase. Dennison dug at the plate with his fingertips, but it would not come off. It read, Property of Edward James Flaherty, Smithheld Institute. Perhaps a policeman wouldn't be so much help, after all. But the problem was academic, for Dennison saw no policeman along the crowded Bronx street. People stood aside as he ran past, staring open-mouthed, offering neither assistance nor interference. But the men behind him were still screaming, "Stop the thief! Stop the thief!" The entire long block was alerted. The people, like some sluggish beast goaded reluctantly into action, began to make tentative movements toward Dennison, impelled by the outraged cries of his pursuers.  of public opinion, some dogooder was going to interfere soon. Dennison conquered his shyness and pride, and called out, "Help me! They're trying to rob me! Stop them!" But his voice lacked the moral indignation, the absolute conviction of his two shrill-voiced pursuers. A burly young man stepped forward to block Dennison's way, but at the last moment a women pulled him back. "Don't get into trouble, Charley." 'Why don't someone call a cop?" "Yeah, where are the cops?" "Over at a big fire on #th Street, I hear." "We oughta stop that guy." Dennison's way was suddenly blocked by four grinning youths, teen-agers in black motorcycle jackets and boots, excited by the chance for a little action, delighted at the opportunity to hit someone in the name of law and order. Dennison saw them, swerved suddenly and sprinted across the street A bus loomed in front of him. He hurled himself out of its way, fell, got up again and ran on. His pursuers were delayed by the dense flow of traffic. Their high-pitched cries faded as Dennison turned into a side street, ran down its length, then down another. He was in a section of massive apartment buildings. His lungs felt like a blast furnace and his left side seemed to be sewed together with red-hot wire. There was no help for it, he had to rest. It was then that the first bullet, fired from a silenced weapon, chipped a granite wall not three inches from his head. That was when Dennison realized the full extent of his carelessness. He pulled the bottle out of his pocket. He had hoped to carry out more experiments on the serum before trying it on human beings. Now there was no choice. Dennison yanked out the stopper and drained the contents. Immediately he was running again, as a second bullet scored the granite wall. The great blocks of apartments loomed endlessly ahead of him, silent and alien. There were no walkers upon the streets. There was only Dennison, running more slowly now past the immense, blank-faced apartments. behind him, its searchlight probing into doors and alleys. Was it the police? "That's him!" cried the shrill, unnerving voice of one of Dennison's pursuers. Dennison ducked into a narrow alley between buildings, raced down it and into the next street There were two cars on that street, at either end of the block, their headlights shining toward each other, moving slowly to trap him in the middle. The alley gleamed with light now, from the first car's headlights shining down it. He was surrounded. Dennison raced to the nearest apartment building and yanked at the door. It was locked. The two cars were almost even with him. And, looking at them, Dennison re membered the unpleasant jog his memory had given him earlier. The two cars were hearses. The men in the subway, with their solemn faces, solemn clothing, subdued neckties, shrill, indignant voices -- they had reminded him of undertakers. They had been undertakers! Of course! Of course! Oil companies might want to block the invention of a cheap new fuel which could put them out of business; steel corporations might try to stop the development of an inexpensive, stronger than steel plastic... And the production of an immortality serum would put the undertakers out of business. His progress, and the progress of thousands of other researchers in biology, must have been watched. And when he made his discovery, they had been ready. The hearses stopped, and somber-faced, respectable-looking men in black suits and pearl-gray neckties poured out and seized him. The briefcase was yanked out of his hand. He felt the prick of a needle in his shoulder. Then, with no transitional dizziness, he passed out. chair. There were armed men on either side of him. In front of him stood a small, plump, undistinguished-looking man in sedate clothing. "My name is Mr. Bennet," the plump man said. "I wish to beg your forgiveness, Mr. Dennison, for the violence to which you were subjected. We found out about your invention only at the last moment and therefore had to improvise. The bullets were meant only to frighten and delay you. Murder was not our intention." "You merely wanted to steal my discovery," Dennison said. "Not at all," Mr. Bennet told him. "The secret of immortality has been in our possession for quite some time." "I see. Then you want to keep immortality from the public in order to safeguard your damned undertaking business!" "Isn't that rather a naive view?" Mr. Bennet asked, smiling. "As it happens, my associates and I are not undertakers. We took on the disguise in order to present an understandable motive if our plan to capture you had misfired. In that event, others would have believed exactly -- and only -- what you thought: that our purpose was to safeguard our business." Dennison frowned and watchfully waited. "Disguises come easily to us," Mr. Bennet said, still smiling. "Perhaps you have heard rumors about a new carburetor suppressed by the gasoline companies, or a new food source concealed by the great food suppliers, or a new synthetic hastily destroyed by the cottonowning interests. That was us. And the inventions ended up here." "You're trying to impress me," Dennison said. "Certainly." "Why did you stop me from patenting my immortality serum?" "The world is not ready for it yet," said Mr. Bennet "It isn't ready for a lot of things," Dennison said. "Why didn't you block the atom bomb?" 'We tried, disguised as mercenary coal and oil interests. But we failed. However, we have succeeded with a surprising number of things." "But what's the purpose behind it all?" "Earth's welfare," Mr. Bennet said promptly. "Consider what would happen if the people were given your veritable immortality serum. The problems of birth rate, food production, living space all would be aggravated. Tensions would mount, war would be imminent -- " "So what?" Dennison challenged. "That's how things are right now, without immortality. Besides, there have been cries of doom about every new invention or discovery. Gunpowder, the printing press, nitroglycerine, the atom bomb, they were all supposed to destroy the race. But mankind has learned how to handle them. It had to! You can't turn back the clock, and you can't un-discover something. If it's there, mankind must deal with it!" "Yes, in a bumbling, bloody, inefficient fashion," said Mr. Bennet, with an expression of distaste. "Well, that's how Man is." "Not if he's properly led," Mr. Bennet said. "No?" Bennet. "You see, the immortality serum provides a solution to the problem of political power. Rule by a permanent and enlightened elite is by far the best form of government; infinitely better than the blundering inefficiencies of democratic rule. But throughout history, this elite, whether monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship or junta, has been unable to perpetuate itself. Leaders die, the followers squabble for power, and chaos is close behind. With immortality, this last flaw would be corrected. There would be no discontinuity of leadership, for the leaders would always be there." "A permanent dictatorship," Dennison said. "Yes. A permanent, benevolent rule by small, carefully chosen elite corps, based upon the sole and exclusive possession of immortality. It's historically inevitable. The only question is, who is going to get control first?" "And you think you are?" Dennison demanded. "Of course. Our organization is still small, but absolutely solid. It is bolstered by every new invention that comes into our hands and by every scientist who joins our ranks. Our time will come, Dennison! We'd like to have you with us, among the elite." "You want me to join you?" Dennison asked, bewildered. "We do. Our organization needs creative scientific minds to help us in our work, to help us save mankind from itself." "Count me out " Dennison said, his heart beating fast "You won't join us?" "I'd like to see you all hanged." Mr. Bennet nodded thoughtfully and pursed his small lips. "You have taken your own serum, have you not?" Dennison nodded. "I suppose that means you kill me now?" "We don't kill," Mr. Bennet said. "We merely wait. I think you  are a reasonable man, and I think you'll come to see things our way. We'll be around a long time. So will you. Take him away." Dennison was led to an elevator that dropped deep into the Earth. He was marched down a long passageway lined with armed men. They went through four massive doors. At the fifth, Dennison was pushed inside alone, and the door was locked behind him. He was in a large, well-furnished apartment. There were perhaps twenty people in the room, and they came forward to meet him. One of them, a stocky, bearded man, was an old college acquaintance of Dennison's. "Jim Ferris?" "That's right," Ferris said. "Welcome to the Immortality Club, Dennison." "I read you were killed in an air crash last year." "I merely-disappeared," Ferris said, with a rueful smile, "after inventing the immortality serum. Just like the others." "All of them?" "Fifteen of the men here invented the serum independently. The rest are successful inventors in other fields. Our oldest member is Doctor Li, a serum discoverer, who disappeared from San Francisco in #. You are our latest acquisition. Our clubhouse is probably the most carefully guarded place on Earth." eleven!" Despair flooded him and he sat down heavily in a chair. "Then there's no possibility of rescue?" "None. There are only four choices available to us," Ferris said. "Some have left us and joined the Undertakers. Others have suicided. A few have gone insane. The rest of us have formed the Immortality Club." "What for?" Dennison bewilderedly asked. "To get out of this place!" said Ferris. "To escape and give our discoveries to the world. To stop those hopeful little dictators upstairs." "They must know what you're planning." "Of course. But they let us live because, every so often, one of us gives up and joins them. And they don't think we can ever break out. They're much too smug. It's the basic defect of all power-elites, and their eventual undoing" "You said this was the most closely guarded place on Earth?" "It is," Ferris said. "And some of you have been trying to break out for fifty years? Why, it'll take forever to escape!" "Forever is exactly how long we have," said Ferris. "But we hope it won't take quite that long. Every new man brings new ideas, plans. One of them is bound to work." "Forever," Dennison said, his face buried in his hands. "You can go back upstairs and join them," Ferris said, with a hard note to his voice, "or you can suicide, or just sit in a corner and go quietly mad. Take your pick." Dennison looked up. "I must be honest with you and with myself. I don't think we can escape. Furthermore, I don't think any of you really believe we can." Ferris shrugged his shoulders. "Aside from that," Dennison said, "I think it's a damned good idea. If you'll bring me up to date, I'll contribute whatever I can to the Forever Project. And let's hope their complacency lasts." "It will," Ferris said. r T , HE escape did not take forever, of course. In one hundred and thirty-seven years, Dennison and his colleagues made their successful breakout and revealed the Undertakers' Plot The Undertakers were tried before the High Court on charges of kidnapping, conspiracy to overthrow the government, and illegal possession of immortality. They were found guilty on all counts and summarily executed. Dennison and his colleagues were also in illegal possession of immortality, which is the privilege only of our governmental elite. But the death penalty was waived in view of the Immortality Club's service to the State. This mercy was premature, however. After some months the members of the Immortality Club went into hiding, with the avowed purpose of overthrowing the Elite Rule and disseminating immortality among the masses. Project Forever, as they termed it, has received some support from dissidents, who have not yet been apprehended. It cannot be considered a serious threat. But this deviationist action in no way detracts from the glory of the Club's escape from the Undertakers. The ingenious way in which Dennison and his colleagues broke out of their seemingly impregnable prison, using only a steel belt buckle, a tungsten filament, three hens' eggs, and twelve chemicals that can be readily obtained from the human body, is too well known to be repeated here. effoNo erro SF YGtifD awwo ecYOrtO Treasure Located in moving from one warehouse to another, we happened upon an allbut-buried cache of complete sets of Beyond. Beyond was a princely experiment to determine whether there were enough readers to support a truly handsome, fantastically highquality fantasy fiction magazine. There weren't, and so Beyond reluctantly had to cease publication, after ten (#) issues. The minute it did, those ten (#) issues became collectors' items and we were cleaned out completely, right down to file copies. Well, we unexpectedly have tnuMfrud a n d fift y (B fisets on hand now. We are offering them at face value, in complete sets only, ten (#) fine issues for # (three dollars and fifty cents) -- and we pay the postage. If you dawdled the first time around, don't do it now; we may not be able to repeat this offer. Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Send me Sets of Beyond at # per set. I enclose check for  (Add # for Foreign Postage). Address Time Killer Conclusion of Four Parts Far from clearing the slate , dying had only doubled Blaine's troubles -- and fiese people wanted him to die again to square himself! T homas blaine, a young yacht designer, is killed in an auto accident He comes to life # years in the future , in a different body. He is questioned by man, president of Rex Corporation, which has snatched Blaine's mind into the future. But Blaine is not the man they were trying to save. beautiful young woman employed by Reilly, tells Blaine about the ary. This corporation guarantees, for a high fee, a life after death. Blaine also learns about interface region between Earth and the hereafter, a temporary stopping-off place for spirits before they go on to whatever is their ultimate destination. Hereafter, Inc., has been trying to sell its version of life after death to the organized religions, without success. Reilly intended to bring a religious leader from # to #, to endorse the scientific hereafter. Instead he got Blaine, who remembers nothing of his time in Threshold. Reilly attempts a reincarnation into a host body, but a spirit fights him for possession, and wins. comes to be called, entered the body after it had been dead too long. He is therefore afflicted with a loathsome disease known as Zombieism. Smith has lost his memory, but thinks he knows Blaine from somewhere. Marie Thome takes Blaine away from the Rex Building for his safety and turns him over to But Ore is head of a gang of body snatchers. Blaine is made prisoner with that their bodies will be used for illegal reincarnation attempts. Blaine is rescued by Marie Thorne, who didn't know Ore's occupation. When they try to rescue Melhill, it is too late. Melhill is already dead, and his body inhabited by another man. work, but finds no jobs he can perform in the complex world of #. He receives a call from maintains contact with spirits in the Threshold. He speaks with Ray, who has survived the death trauma. Melhill, now a clairvoyant spirit, warns Blaine that he will be haunted. This is a serious matter, for ghosts are destructive minds that have gone insane during the death trauma. Blaine finds temporary employment on a hunt, a form of suicide paid for by a wealthy man named Hull. Blaine is aided through its dangers by the veteran hunter Sammy Jones. When Blaine returns to his room, he meets his ghost, a poltergeist who tries to kill him with a levitated chair. He is rescued by the zombie Smith, who feels that his destiny is involved with Blaine's. Smith leads him xmderground, where the outcast zombies live. After performing an exorcism on the spirit, they find it was Reilly, blaming Blaine tor the failure of his reincarnation, who was haunting him. Blaine finds a job, and hears the sensory recording which was made when he first came into around the city. He meets band formerly occupied Blaine's body, before he sold it to Rex in exchange for Hereafter insurance. But Blaine's biggest moment is when he is offered the greatest prize of the age -- free Hereafter insurance, given as a grant from a textile organization. Blaine accepts and is given the treatment which guarantees him a life after death. Marie tells him he accepted too hastily. The textile company is owned by the Rex Corporation. Now they can kill Blaine legally. They are planning to do so because of the recording, now being sold illegally all over. This recording shows that Blaine remembers nothing of the Threshold, in which he lived between # and #. The organized religions can use this evidence against Hereafter, Inc.'s claims. The corporation is calling the record a fraud and must get rid of Blaine before he can be questioned. Blaine leaves his apartment, but the veteran hunter Sammy Jones has already found him. For old times f sake, Jones gives him a half-hour start. Blaine is unable to buy a weapon. By nightfall, he is hemmed in by hired killers. A subway grate gives way under him and he falls heavily. He knows he must drag himself away from the opening, to safety -- but he can't. He passes out. #. cided that he didn't like the hereafter. It was dark, lumpy, and smelled of oil and slime. Also, his head ached, and his back felt as though it had been broken in three places. Could a spirit ache? Blaine moved, and discovered that he still had a body. As a matter of fact, he felt all body. Apparently he wasn't in the hereafter. "Just rest a minute," a voice said "Who is it?" Blaine asked into the impenetrable darkness. "Smith." "Oh. You." Blaine sat up and held his throbbing head. "How did you do it, Smith?" "I nearly didn't," the zombie told him. "As soon as you were declared Quarry, I came for you. Some of my friends down here volunteered to help, but you were moving too fast. I shouted to you when you came out of the pawnshop." "I thought I heard a voice," Blaine said. "If you'd turned around, we could have taken you in there and then. But you didn't, so we followed. A few times we opened subway grates and manhole covers for you, but it was hard to gauge it right. We were a little late each time." "But not the last time," Blaine said. "Only because I opened a grate right under you. I'm sorry you hit your head." "Where am I?" "I pulled you out of the main line," Smith said. "You're in a side passage. The hunters can't find you here." Blaine once again could find no adequate words for thanking Smith. And Smith once again wanted no thanks. "I'm not doing it for you, Blaine. It's for me. I need you." "Have you found out why yet?" "Not yet," Smith said. Blaine's eyes, adjusting to the gloom, could make out the outline of the zombie's head and shoulders. 'What now?" he asked. "Now you're safe. We can bring you underground as far as New Jersey. From there you're on your own. But I don't think you should have much trouble then." "What are we waiting for now?" "Mr. Kean. I need his permission to take you through the passageways." They waited. In a few minutes,, Blaine was able to make out Mr. Kean's thin shape, leaning on the big Negro's arm, coming toward him. "I'm sorry about your troubles," Kean said, sitting down beside Blaine with overwhelming weariness. 'It's a great pity." "Mr. Kean," Smith said, "if I could just be allowed to take him through the old Holland Tunnel, into New Jersey -- " "I'm truly sorry," said Kean, "but I can't allow it." Blaine looked around and saw that he was surrounded by a dozen ragged zombies. "I've spoken to the hunters," Kean went on, "and I have given them my guarantee that you will be back on the surface streets within half an hour. You must leave now, Blaine." "But why?" "We simply can't afford to help you. I was taking an unusual risk the first time, allowing you to defile Reilly's tomb. But I did it for Smith, because his destiny seems linked with yours in some way, and Smith is one of my people. But this is too much. You know we are allowed to live underground upon sufferance only." "I know," Blaine said.  ered the consequences," Kean continued. "When he opened that grating for you, the hunters poured in. They didn't find you, but they knew you were down here somewhere. So they searched, Blaine, they searched! Dozens of them, exploring our passageways, pushing our people around, threatening, shouting, talking on their little radios. Reporters came, too, and even idle spectators. Some of the younger hunters got nervous and started shooting at the zombies." "I'm very sorry about that," Blaine said. "It wasn't your fault. But Smith should have known better. The world of the underground is not a sovereign kingdom. We exist only on a toleration which might be wiped out at any time. So I spoke to the hunters and the reporters." "What did you tell them?" Blaine asked. "I told them that a faulty grate had given way beneath you. I said you had fallen in by accident and had crawled into hiding. I assured them that no zombie had been involved in this, that we found you and would place you back on the surface streets within half an hour. They accepted my word and left. I wish I could have done otherwise." "I don't blame you," said Blaine, getting slowly to his feet "I didn't specify where you would emerge," Kean said. "At the very least, you'll have a better chance than before. I wish I could do more, but X cannot allow the underground to become a stage for hunts. We must stay neutral, annoy no one, frighten no one. Only in that way will we survive until an age of understanding is reached." "Where am I going to come out?" "I have chosen an unused subway exit at West #th Street," Mr. Kean said. "You should have a good chance from there. And I have done one more thing which I probably shouldn't have done." "What's that?" "I have contacted a friend of yours, who will be waiting at the exit. But please don't tell anyone about it. let's hurry now!" Mr. Kean led the procession through the winding underground maze, and Blaine brought up the rear, his headache slowly subsiding. Soon they stopped beside a concrete staircase. "Here is the exit," Kean said. "Good luck, Blaine." "Thanks," said Blaine. "And, Smith -- thanks." "I've tried my best for you," Smith said. "If you die, I'll probably die. If you live, I'll keep on trying to remember." "And if you do remember?" "Then I'll come and visit you," Smith said. Blaine nodded and walked up the staircase. It was full night outside and #th Street seemed deserted. Blaine stood beside the exit, looking around, wondering what to do. "Blaine!" Someone was calling him. But it was not Marie, as he had expected. It was a man's voice, someone he knew -- Sammy Jones, perhaps, or Theseus. He turned quickly back to the subway exit It was closed and fastened securely. #. a thin voice, with great effort "Ray?" called Blaine, astonished. "Of course! Keep your voice down. There are hunters not far away. Wait now." Blaine waited, crouched beside the barred subway exit, peering around. He could see no sign of Melhill. There was no ectoplasmic vapor, nothing except a whispering voice. "Okay," Melhill said. "Walk west now. Move along quickly." Blaine walked, sensing Melhill's invisible presence hovering near him. He said, "Ray, how come?" "It's about time I was some help," said Melhill. "That old Kean contacted your girl friend and she got in touch with me through the Spiritual Switchboard. Hold it! Stop right here." Blaine ducked back against the corner of a building. A heli cruised slowly by at housetop level. "Hunters," Melhill said. "There's a field day on you, kid. Reward posted. Even a reward for information leading to. Tom, I told Marie I'd try to help. Don't know how long I can. Drains me. It's hereafter for me after this." "Ray, I don't know how -- " "Cut it out Look, Tom, I can't talk much. Marie has fixed a deal with some friends of hers. They?ve got a plan, if I can get you to them. Stop!" Blaine stopped and found shelter behind a mailbox. Long seconds passed. Then three hunters hurried by, sidearms ready. After they turned a comer, Blaine was able to start walking again. "Some eyes you have," he said to Melhill. "The vision's pretty good up here," said Melhill. "Cross this street fast." Blaine sprinted across. For the next fifteen minutes, at Melhill's instructions, he wound in and out of streets, advancing and retreating across the battleground of the city. "This is it," Melhill said at last "That door over there, number #. You made it! I'll see you, Tom. Watch -- " At that moment, two men rounded a comer, stopped, and stared hard at Blaine. One said, "Hey, that's the guy!" "What guy?" "The guy they got the reward out for. Hey, youF' They ran forward. Blaine, his fists swinging, quickly chopped the first man into unconsciousness. He whirled, looking for the second, but Melhill had the situation well in control. The second man had his hands over his head, trying to guard himself. A garbage can cover, levitating mysteriously, was clanging angrily around his ears. Blaine stepped forward and finished the job. "Damn good," Melhill said, his voice very weak. "Always wanted to try ghosting. But it drains... Luck, Tom!" "Ray!" Blaine strained his ears, but there was no answer, and the sense of Melhill's presence was gone. Blaine waited no longer. He went to number #, opened the door and stepped in. He was in a narrow hallway. At the end of it was a door. Blaine knocked. "Come in," he was told. He opened the door and walked into a small, dingy, heavily curtained room. Blaine had thought himself proof against any further surprises. But it gave him a start all the same to see, grinning at him, Carl Ore, the body snatcher. And sitting beside him, also grinning, was Joe, the little Transplant peddler. #. move back toward the door, but Ore beckoned him in. The body snatcher was unchanged, still very tall and thin, his tanned face long and mournful, his eyes narrow, direct and honest. His clothes still hung awkwardly on him, as though he were more used to levis than to tailored slacks. "We were expecting you," Ore said. "You remember Joe ." Blaine nodded, remembering very well the furtive-eyed little man who had distracted his attention so that Ore could drug his drink. "Happy to see you again," Joe said. "I'll bet," said Blaine, not moving from the door. "Come in and sit down," Ore said. "We ain't planning to harm you, Tom. Fact. Let's let bygones be bygones." "You tried to kill me." "That was business," Ore said in his straightforward fashion. "We're on the same side now." "How can I be sure of that?" "No man," Ore stated, "has ever questioned my honesty. When I'm bought, I stay bought Miss Thome hired us to get yon safe out of the country, and we intend to do same. Sit down and let's discuss it Are you hungry?" Reluctantly, Blaine sat down. There were sandwiches on a table, and a bottle of red wine. He realized that he hadn't eaten all day. He started wolfing down sandwiches while Ore lighted a thin brown cigar. "You know," Ore said, exhaling blue smoke, "I very nearly didn't take this job. Not that the money wasn't right; I think Miss Thome was more than generous. But, Tom, this is one of the biggest manhunts our fair city's seen for quite a while. Ever see anything like it, Joe?" "Never," said Joe, shaking his head rapidly. "Town's covered like flypaper." "Rex really wants you," Ore went on. "They've set their little hearts on nailing your corpus where they can see it. Makes a man nervous, bucking an organization that size. But it's a challenge, a really man-sized challenge." "Carl likes a big challenge," Joe said. "I admit that," said Ore. "Where there's a big challenge, there's a big profit to be made from it." # UT where can I go?" Blaine asked. "Where won't Rex find me?" "Just about nowhere," Ore said sadly. "Off the Earth? Mars? Venus?" "Even worse than Earth. The planets have just a few towns and small cities. Everybody knows everybody else. The news would be all over in a week. Also, you wouldn't fit in. Aside from the Chinese on Mars, the planets are still populated mostly with scientific types and their families, and a few youth-training programs. You wouldn't like it." "Where then?" "That's what I asked Miss Thome," Ore said. "We discussed several possibilities. First, there's a zombie-making operation. I could perform it. Rex would never search for you underground." "I'd rather die," said Blaine. "I would too," Ore agreed. "So we ruled it out. We thought about finding you a little farm in the Atlantic Abyss. Pretty lonely territory out there. But it takes a special mentality to live undersea and like it, and we didn't figure you had it. You'd probably crack up. So, after due consideration, we decided the best place for you was in the Marquesas." "The what?" asked Blaine, trying to place the name. "The Marquesas. They're a scattered group of small islands, originally Polynesian, out toward the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They're not too far from Tahiti." "The South Seas," Blaine said. "Right We figured you should feel more at home there than anywhere else on Earth. It's just like the #th century, I'm told. And even more important, Rex might leave you alone." "Why would they?" "For obvious reasons, Tom. Why do they want to kill you in the first place? Because they snatched you illegally from the past and they're worried about what the government's going to do about it. But your going to the Marquesas removes you from the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Without you, there's no case. And your going so far is a sign to Rex of your good faith. It certainly isn't the action of a man who's going to blab to Uncle Sam. "Also," Ore added, "the Marquesas are an independent little nation since the French gave them up, so Rex would have to get special permission to hunt you there. On the whole, it should be just too much trouble for everyone concerned. The U.S. government will undoubtedly drop the matter, and I think Rex will leave you alone." "Is that for certain?" "Of course not It's conjecture. But its reasonable." "Couldn't we make a deal with Rex beforehand?" Ore shook his head. "In order to bargain, Tom, you have to have something to bargain with. As long as you're in New York, its easier and safer for them to kill you." "I guess you're right," Blaine said. "How are you going to get me out?" kRC and Joe looked at each " other uncomfortably. Ore said, "Well, that was our big problem. There just didn't seem to be any way of getting you out alive." "Heli or jet?" "They have to stop at the air tolls, and hunters are waiting at all of them. Surface vehicle is equally out of the question." "Disguise?" "Maybe it would have worked during the first hour of the hunt Now it's impossible, even if we could get you a complete plastic surgery job. By now the hunters are equipped with identity scanners. They'd see through you in a moment." "Then there's no way out?" Ore and Joe exchanged another uneasy glance. "There is," Ore said. "Just one way. But you probably won't like it" "I like to stay alive. What is it?" Ore paused and lighted another cigar. "We plan to quick-freeze you, like for spaceship travel. Then we'll ship your carcass out in a crate of frozen beef. Your body will be in the center of the load, so most likely it won't be detected." "Sounds risky," Blaine said. "Not too risky " Blaine frowned, sensing something wrong. "I'll be unconscious through it, won't I?" After a long pause, Ore said, "No." "I won't?" "It can't be done that way," Ore said. "The fact is, you and your body will have to separate. That's the part I'm afraid you won't like." "What in hell are you talking about?" Blaine demanded in alarm, getting to his feet. "Take it easy," Ore said. "Sit down, smoke a cigarette, have some more wine. It's like this, Tom. We can't ship out a quickfrozen body with a mind in it The hunters are waiting for something like that. Can you imagine what happens when they run a quick scan over that shipment of beef and detect a dormant mind in it? Up goes the kite! Adieu la mu siquel I'm not trying to con you, Tom. It just can't be done like that. Fact." "Then what happens to my mind?" asked Blaine, sitting down again. "That," Ore said, "is where Joe comes in. Tell him, Joe." J OE nodded rapidly. "Transplant, my friend, is the answer." "Transplant?" Blaine repeated blankly. "I told you about it," Joe said, "on that inauspicious evening when we first met. Remember? Transplant, the great pastime, the game any number can play, the jolt for jaded minds, the tonic for tired bodies. WeVe got a worldwide network of Transplanters, Mr. Blaine. Dedicated people like me who know the future lies in Transplant and work to advance the cause. We're going to key you into the organization." "You're going to ship my mind across the country?" Blaine asked. "That's it -- from body to body!" Joe told him. "Believe me, it's instructive as well as entertaining." Blaine got to his feet so quickly that he knocked over his chair. "Like hell!" he said. "I told you then and I'm telling you now, I'm not playing your lousy little game. I'll take my chances on the street." He started toward the door. Joe said, "I know it's a little frightening, but -- " "No!" Ore shouted, "Damn it, Blaine, will you at least let the man speak?" "All right," Blaine said. "Speak." Joe poured himself half a glass of wine and threw it down. He said, "Mr. Blaine, it's going to be difficult explaining this to you, a guy from the past. But try to understand what I'm saying." Blaine nodded warily. "Now then. Transplant is used as a sex game these days, and that's how I peddle it. Why? Because people are ignorant of its better uses, and because ignorant people in the government insist on banning it. But Transplant is a lot more than a game. It's an entire new way of life! And like it or not, Transplant represents the world of the future." The little pusher's eyes glowed. Blaine sat down again. "There are two basic elements in human affairs," Joe said sententiously. "One of them is Man's eternal struggle for freedom: freedom of worship, freedom of press and assembly, freedom to select government -- freedom! And the other basic element in human affairs is the effort of any form of government to withhold one form of freedom or another from the people." somewhat simplified view of human affairs. But he continued listening. "Government," Joe said, "withholds freedom, for many reasons. For security, for personal profit, for power, or because they feel the people are unready for it But whatever the reason, the basic facts remain: Man strives for freedom, and government strives to withhold freedom. Transplant is simply one more in a long series of the freedoms that Man has aspired to, and that his government feels is not good for him." "Sexual freedom?" asked Blaine. "No!" Joe cried. "Not that there's anything wrong with sexual freedom. But Transplant isn't primarily that. Sure, that's hov we're pushing it -- for propaganda purposes. Because people don't want abstract ideas, Mr. Blaine, and they don't go for cold theory. They want to know what a freedom will do for them. We show them a small part of it, and they learn a lot more themselves." "What will Transplant do?" "Transplant," Joe said fervently, "gives Man the ability to transcend the limits imposed by his heredity and his environment!" "Which means exactly what?" "Transplant lets you exchange knowledge, bodies, talents and skills with anyone who wishes to exchange with you. And plenty do. Most men don't want to perform a single set of skills all their life, no matter how satisfying those skills are. Man is too restless a creature. Musicians want to be engineers, advertising men want to be hunters, sailors want to be writers. But there usually isn't time to acquire and exploit more than one set of skills in a lifetime. And even if there were time, the blind factor of talent is an insurmountable stumblingblock. With Transplant, you can get the inborn talents, the skills, the knowledge that you want. "Think about it, Mr. Blaine. Why should a man be forced to live out his lifetime in a body he had no part in selecting? It's like telling him he must live with the diseases he's inherited, and mustn't try to cure them. Man must have the freedom to choose the body and talents best suited to his personality needs." "If your plan went through," Blaine said, "you'd simply have a bunch of neurotics changing bodies every day." "The same general argument was raised against the passage of every freedom," Joe said, his eyes glittering. "Throughout history it was argued that Man didn't have the sense to choose his own religion, or that women didn't have the intelligence to use the vote, or that people couldn't be allowed to elect their own representatives because of the stupid choices they'd make. And of course there are plenty of neurotics around, people who'd louse up heaven itself. But you have a greater number -- a much greater number -- of people who use their freedoms well." J OE lowered his voice to a persuasive whisper. "You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced less by heredity than by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. "A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total. He has the power to change his environment, cure his diseases, advance his skills -- and, at last, to choose his body and talents! That is the next freedom, Mr. Blaine! It's historically inevitable, whether you or I or the government like it or not. For Man must have every possible freedom!" Joe finished his fierce and somewhat incoherent oration red-faced and out of breath. Blaine stared at the little man with new surprise. He was looking, he realized, at a genuine revolutionary of the year # . Ore said, "He's got a point, Tom. Transplant is legal in Sweden and Ceylon and it doesn't seem to have hurt the moral fiber much." "In time," said Joe, pouring himself a glass of wine, "the whole world will go Transplant. It's inevitable." "Maybe," Ore said. "Or maybe they'll invent some new freedom to take its place. Anyhow, Tom, you can see that Transplant has some moral justification. And it's the only way of saying that body of yours. What do you say?" "Are you a revolutionary, too?" Blaine asked. Ore grinned. "In a way. I guess I'm like the blockade runners during the American Civil War, or the guys who sold guns to the South Seas natives. They worked for a profit, but they weren't against social change." "Well, well," said Blaine sardonically. "And up to now I thought you were just a common criminal." "Skip it," Ore said pleasantly. "Certainly. I'm overwhelmed. I never thought I'd find myself in the advance guard of a social revolution." Ore smiled and said, "Good. Hope it works out for you, Tom. Roll up your sleeve. We'd better get started." Blaine rolled up his left sleeve, Ore took a hypodermic from a drawer. "This is just to knock you out," Ore explained. "All the apparatus is in the next room. When you come to, you'll be a guest in someone else's mind and your body will be traveling cross-country in deep-freeze. They'll be brought together as soon as it's safe." "How many minds will I occupy?" Blaine asked. "And for how long?" "I don't know how many we'll have to use. As for how long in each, a few seconds, a few minutes, maybe half an hour. We'll move you along as fast as we can. This isn't a full Transplant, you know. You won't be taking over the body. You'll just be occupying a small portion of its consciousness as an observer. So stay quiet and act natural. Got that?" Blaine nodded. "What are the Marquesas like?" "Beautiful," Ore said, sliding the needle into Blaine's arm. "You'll like it there." Blaine drifted slowly into unconsciousness, thinking of palm trees, of white surf breaking against a coral reef, and of dark-eyed maidens worshipping a god of stone. The god looked strangely like himself. # . awakening, no feeling of trancolored slide projected upon a white screen, he was conscious. Suddenly, like a marionette jerked into violent life, he was acting and moving. He was not completely Thomas Blaine. He was Edgar Dyersen as well. Or he was Blaine within Dyersen, an integral part of Dyersen's body, a segment of Dyersen's mind, viewing the world through Dyersen's rheumy eyes, thinking Dyersen's thoughts, experiencing all the shadowy half-conscious fragments of Dyersen's memories, hopes, fears and desires. And yet he was still Blaine. Dyersen-Blaine came out of the ploughed field and rested against his wooden fence. He was a farmer, an old-fashioned South Jersey truck farmer, with a minimum of machines, which he distrusted anyhow. He was close to seventy and in good health. There was still a touch of arthritis in his joints, which the smart young medico in the village had mostly fixed, and his back sometimes gave him trouble before rain. But he considered himself healthy, healthier than most, and good for another twenty years. Dyersen-Blaine started toward his cottage. His gray workshirt was drenched in acrid sweat, and sweat stained his shapeless coveralls. In the distance he heard a dog barking and saw, blurrily, a yellow and brown shape come bounding toward him. (Eyeglasses? No, thank you. Doing pretty well with what I got.) "Hey, Champ! Hey, there, boy!" The dog ran a circle around him, then trotted along beside him. He had something gray in his jaws, a rat or perhaps a piece of meat. Dyersen-Blaine couldn't quite make it out. He bent down to pat Champ's head... transition or of the passage of time. A new slide was simply projected onto the screen and a new marionette was jerked into life. Now he was Thompson-Blaine, nineteen years old, lying on his back half dozing on the rough planks of a sailing skiff, the mainsheet and tiller held loosely in one brown hand. To starboard lay the low Eastern shore, and to his port he could see a bit of Baltimore Harbor. The skiff moved easily on the light summer breeze and water gurgled merrily beneath the forefoot. Thompson-Blaine rearranged his lanky, tanned body on the planks, squirming around until he had succeeded in propping his feet against the mast. He had been home just a week, after a twoyear work and study program on Mars. It had sure been interesting, especially the archeology and speleology. The sand-farming had gotten dull sometimes, but he had enjoyed driving the harvesting machines. Now he was home for a twoyear accelerated college course. Then he was supposed to return to Mars as a farm manager. That's the way his scholarship read. But they couldn't make him go bade if he didn't want to. Maybe he would. And maybe not The girls on Mars were such dedicated types. Tough, capable, always a little bossy. When he went back -- if he went back -- he'd bring his own wife, not look for one there. Of course there had been Marcia. She'd really been something. But her whole kibbutz had moved to the South Polar Gap and she hadn't answered his last three letters. Maybe she hadn't been so much. "Hey, Sandy!" Thompson-Blaine looked up and saw Eddie Duelitle, sailing his Thistle, waving at him. Languidly, Thompson-Blaine waved back. Eddie was only seventeen, had never been off Earth, and wanted to be a spaceliner captain. Huh! Fat chance! The sun was dipping toward the horizon and Thompson-Blaine was glad to see it go down. He had a date tonight with Jennifer Rollins. They were going dancing at Starsling in Baltimore and Dad was letting him use the heli. Man, how Jennifer had grown in two years! And she had a way of looking at a guy, sort of coy and bold at the same time. No telling what might happen after the dance, in the back seat of the heli. Maybe nothing. But maybe plenty. Thompson-Blaine sat up and put the tiller over. The skiff came into the wind and tacked over. It was time to return to the yacht basin, then home for dinner, then... across his back. "Get working there, you!" Piggot-Blaine redoubled his efforts, lifting the heavy pick high in the air and swinging it down into the dusty roadbed. The guard stood nearby, shotgun under his left arm, whip in his right, its lash trailing in the dust. Piggot-Blaine knew every line and pore of that guard's thin, stupid face, knew the downward twist of the tight little mouth, knew the squint of the faded eyes even better than he knew his own face. Just wait, buzzard meat, he silently told the guard. Your time's a-comirig. Just wait, wait just a bit The guard moved away, walking slowly up and down the line of prisoners laboring under the white Mississippi sun. PiggotBlaine tried to spit, but couldn't work up enough saliva. He thought, you talk about your fine modern world? Talk about your big old spaceships, your automatic farms, your big fine fat old hereafter? Think that's how it is? Then ask 'em how they build the roads in Quilleg County, Northern Mississippi. They won't tell you, so you better look for yourself and find out 'Cause that's the kind of world it really is! Arnie, working in front of him, whispered, "You ready, Otis? You ready for it?" "I'm a-ready," Piggot-Blaine whispered, his broad fingers clenching and unclenching on the pick's plastic handle. "I'm past ready, Arnie." "In a second, then. Watch Jeff." Piggot-Blaine's hairy chest swelled expectantly. He brushed lank brown hair from his eyes and watched Je'ff, five men ahead on the chain. Piggot-Blaine waited, his shoulders aching from sunburn. There were calloused scars on his ankles from the hoofcuffs, and old seams on his back from earlier whippings. He had a raging thirst in his gut. But no dipperful of water could ever cut that thirst, nothing could, that crazy thirst that brought him in here after he'd dismembered Gainesville's single saloon and killed that stinking old Indian. Jeffs hand moved. The chained line of prisoners sprang forward. Piggot-Blaine jumped toward the thin-faced guard, his pick swung high, as the guard dropped his whip and fumbled to bring up the shotgun. "Buzzard meat!" Piggot-Blaine screamed, and brought the pick down fair in the guard's forehead. "Get the keys!" Piggot-Blaine grabbed the keys from the dead guard's belt He heard a shotgun go off, heard a high scream of agony. Anxiously he looked up... his heli above the flat Texas plains, heading for El Paso. He was a serious young man and he paid strict attention to his work, coaxing the last knot of speed out of the old heli so he could reach El Paso before Johnson's Hardware Store closed. He handled the balky rattletrap with care, and only an occasional thought came through his concentration, quick thoughts about the altitude and compass readings, a dance in Guanajuato next week, the price of hides in Ciudad Juarez. The plain was mottled green and yellow below him. He glanced at his watch, then at the airspeed indicator. Yes, Ramirez-Blaine thought, he would make El Paso before the store closed! He might even have time for a little... on his sleeve and sopped up the last of the greasy gravy on a piece of corn bread. He belched, pushed his chair back from the kitchen table and stood up. With elaborate unconcern, he took a cracked bowl from the pantry and filled it with scraps of pork, a greens and a big piece of corn bread. "Ed," his wife said, "what you doing?" He glanced at her. She was gaunt, tangle-haired, faded past her years. He looked away, not answering. "Ed! Tell me, Ed!" Tyler-Blaine looked at her in annoyance, feeling his ulcer wince at the stab of that sharp, worried voice. Sharpest voice in all California, he told himself, and he'd married it. Sharp voice, sharp nose, sharp elbows and knees, breastless and barren to boot. Legs to support a body, but not for a secnot for touching. Of all the girls in California, he'd doubtless picked the sorriest, just like the damn fool his Uncle Rafe always said he was. "Where you taking that bowl of food?" she asked. "Out to feed the dog," TylerBlaine said, moving toward the door. "We ain't got a dog! Oh, Ed, don't do it, not tonight!" "I'm doin' it," he said, glad of her discomfort. "Please, not tonight. Let him shift for himself somewhere else. Ed, listen to me! What if the town found out?" "It's past sundown," TylerBlaine replied, standing beside the door with his bowl of food. "People spy" she said. "Ed, if they find out, they'll lynch us. You know they will." "You'd look mighty spry from the end of a rope," Tyler-Blaine remarked, opening the door. "You do it just to spite me!" she cried. He closed the door behind him. Outside, it was deep twilight. Tyler-Blaine stood in his yard near the unused chicken coop, looking around. The only house near his was the Flannagans', a hundred yards away. But they minded their own business. He waited to make sure none of the town kids were snooping around. Then he walked forward, carefully holding the bowl of food. scraggly woods and set the bowl down. "It's all right," he called softly. "Come out, Uncle Rafe." A man crawled out of the woods on all fours. His face was leadenwhite, his lips bloodless, his eyes blank and staring, his features coarse and unfinished, like iron before tempering or clay before firing. A long cut across his neck had festered, and his right leg, where the townsfolk had broken it, hung limp and useless. "Thanks, boy," said Rafe, TylerBlaine's zombie uncle. The zombie quickly gulped down the contents of the bowl. When he had finished, TylerBlaine asked, "How you feeling, Uncle Rafe?" "Ain't feeling nothing. This old body's about through. Another couple days, maybe a week, and I'll be off your hands." "I'll take care of you," TylerBlaine promised, "just as long as you can stay alive, Uncle Rafe. I wish I could bring you into the house." "No," the zombie said. "They'd find out. This is risky enough... Boy, how's that skinny wife of yours?" "Just as shrill as ever," TylerBlaine sighed. The zombie made a sound like laughter. "I warned you, boy, ten years ago I warned you not to marry that gal. Didn't I?" "You sure did, Uncle Rafe. You were the only one had sense. Sure wish I'd listened to you." "Better if you had, boy. Well, I'm going back to my shelter." "You feel confident, Uncle?" Tyler-Blaine asked anxiously. "That I do." "And you'll try to die confident?" "I will, boy. And I'll get me into that Threshold, never you fear. And when I do, I'll keep my word. I truly will." "Thank you, Uncle Rafe." "I'll haunt her, boy, if the good Lord grants me Threshold. First comes that fat doctor that made me this. But then comes her turn. I'll haunt her crazy. I'll haunt her till she runs the length of the state of California away from you!" "Thanks, Uncle Rafe." The zombie made a sound like laughter again and crawled back into the scraggly woods. TylerBlaine shivered uncontrollably for a moment, then picked up the empty bowl and walked back to the sagging washboard house... the strap of her bathing suit so that it clung more snugly to her slim, supple young body. She slipped the air tank over her back, picked up her respirator and walked toward the pressure lock. "Janice!" "Yes, Mother?" she said, turning, her face smooth and expressionless. "Where are you going, dear?" "Just out for a swim, Mom. I thought maybe I'd look at the gardens on Level #." "You aren't by any chance planning to see Hal Leuwin, are you?" Had her mother guessed? Mariner-Blaine smoothed her black hair and said, "Certainly not." "All right," her mother said, half smiling and obviously not believing her. "Try to be home early, dear. You know how worried your father gets." Mariner-Blaine stooped and gave her mother a quick Ids, then hurried into the pressure lock. Mother knew she was sure of it! And wasn't stopping her! But then why should she be stopped? After all, she was seventeen, plenty old enough to do anything she wanted. Kids grew up faster these days than they did in Mom's time, though parents didn't seem to realize it. Parents didn't realize very much. They just wanted to sit around and plan out new acres for the farm. Their idea of fun was to listen to some old classic recording, a bop piece or a rock 'n' roll, and follow the music with scores and talk about how free and expressionistic their youth had been. And sometimes they'd go through big, glossy art books filled with reproductions of #th-century comic strips and talk about the lost art of satire. Their idea of a really Big Night was to go down to the gallery and stare reverently at the collection of Saturday Evening Post covers from the Great Period. But all that longhair stuff bored her. Nuts to art -- she liked the sensories. and respirator, Mariner-Blaine put on her flippers and turned the valve. In a few seconds, the lock was filled with water. Impatiently she waited until the pressure had equalized with the water outside. Then the lock opened automatically and she shot out Her dad's pressure farm was at the hundred-foot level, not far from the mammoth underwater bulk of Hawaii. She turned downward, descending into the green gloom with quick, powerful strokes. Hal would be waiting for her at the coral caves. The darkness grew as MarinerBlaine descended. She switched on her headlamp and took a firmer bite on her respirator. Was it true, she wondered, that soon the undersea farmers would be able to grow their own gills? That's what her science teacher said, and maybe it would happen in her own lifetime. How would she look with gills? Mysterious, probably, sleek and strange, a latter-day mermaid. Besides, she could always cover the gills with her hair if they weren't becoming. In the yellow glow of her lamp, she saw the coral caves ahead, a red and pink branched labyrinth with cozy, air-locked places deep within, where you could be sure of privacy. And she saw Hal. Uncertainty flooded her. Gosh, what if she had a baby? Hal had assured her it would be all right, but he was only nineteen. Was she right in doing this? They had talked about it often enough and she had shocked him with her frankness. But talking and doing were very different things. What would Hal think of her if she said no? Could she make a joke out of it, pretend she'd just been teasing him? Long and golden, Hal swam beside her toward the caves. He flashed hello in finger talk. A trigger-fish swam by, and then a small shark. What was she going to do? The caves were very near, looming dark and suggestive before them. Hal looked at her and she could feel her heart melting...  alizing that he must have dozed off. He was aboard a small motor vessel, sitting in a deck chair with blankets tucked around him. The little ship rolled and pitched in the cross-sea, but overtrade wind carried the diesel smoke away in a wide dark plume. "You feeling better, Mr. Elgin?" Elgin-Blaine looked up at a small, bearded man wearing a captain's cap. "Fine, just fine," he said. "We're almost there," said the captain. Elgin-Blaine nodded, disoriented, trying to take stock of himself. He thought hard and remembered that he was shorter than average, heavily muscled, barrelchested, broad-shouldered, with legs a little short for such a herculean torso, with large and calFgL.i. #L HH k  loused hands. There was an old, jagged scar on his shoulder, souvenir of a hunting accident... Elgin and Blaine merged. Then he realized that he was back at last in his own body. Blaine was his name, and Elgin was the pseudonym under which Carl Ore and Joe must have shipped him. The long flight was over! His mind and his body were together again! "We were told you weren't well, sir," the captain said. "But you've been in this coma for so long --  "I'm fine now," Blaine assured him. "Are we anywhere near the Marquesas?" "Not far. The island of Nuku Hiva is just a few hours away." The captain returned to his wheelhouse. And Blaine thought about the many personalities he had met and mingled with. He respected the staunch and independent old Dyersen walking slowly back to his cottage, hoped young Sandy Thompson would return to Mars, felt alarm for the warped and murderous Piggot, enjoyed his meeting with the serious and upright Juan Ramirez, felt mingled sorrow and amusement for the sly and ineffectual Ed Tyler, wished for the best for pretty Janice Mariner. They were with him still. Good or bad, he wished them all well. They were his family now. Distant relatives, cousins and uncles he would never meet again, nieces and nephews upon whose destiny he would brood. Like all families, they were a mixed lot; but they were his, and he could never forget them. "Nuku Hiva in sight!" the captain called out. Blaine saw, on the edge of the horizon, a tiny black dot capped by a white cumulus cloud. He rubbed his forehead vigorously, determined to think no more about his adopted family. There were present realities to deal with. Soon he would be coming to his new home, and that required a little serious thinking. # . T HE ship steamed slowly into Taio Hae Bay. The captain, a proud native son, volunteered to Blaine the principal facts about his new home. The Marquesas Islands, he explained, were composed of two fairly distinct island groups, all of them rugged and mountainous. Once the group had been called the Cannibal Islands, and the Marquesas had been noted for their ability at cutting out a trading ship or massacring a blackbirding schooner. The French had acquired the islands in # and granted them autonomy in #. Nuku Hiva was the main island and capital for the group. Its highest peak, Temetiu, was nearly four thousand feet high. Its port city, Taiohae, boasted a population of almost five thousand. It was a quiet, easygoing place, the captain said, and it was considered a sort of shrine all over the hurried, bustling South Seas. For here was the last refuge of unspoiled #th-century Polynesia. Blaine nodded, absorbing little of the captain's lecture, more impressed by the sight of the great dark mountain ahead laced with silver waterfalls, and by the sound of the ocean pounding against the island's granite face. He decided he was going to like it here. Soon the ship was docked at the town wharf and Blaine stepped off to view the town of Taiohae. He saw a supermarket and three movie theaters, rows of ranchstyle houses, many palm trees, some low white stores with plate-glass windows, numerous cocktail lounges, dozens of automobiles, a gas station and a traffic light The sidewalks were filled with people wearing colorful shirts and pressed slacks. All had on sunglasses. So this was the last refuge of unspoiled #th-century Polynesia, Blaine thought -- a Florida town set in the South Seas! Still, what more could he expect in the year #? Ancient Polynesia was as dead as Merrie England or Bourbon France. And #th-century Florida, he remembered, could be pleasant indeed. He walked down Main Street and saw a notice on a building stating that Postmaster Alfred Gray had been appointed Hereafter, Inc., representative for the Marquesas group. And, farther on, he came to a small black building with a sign on it that said Public Suicide Booth. Ah, Blaine thought sardonically, modern civilization is encroaching even here! Next thing you know, they'll be setting up a Spiritual Switchboard. And where will we be then? town. As he started back, a stout, red-faced man hurried up to him. "Mr. Elgin? Mr. Thomas Elgin?" "That's me," Blaine said, with a start of apprehension. "Terribly sorry I missed you at the dock," said the red-faced man, mopping his wide and gleaming forehead with a bandanna. "No excuse, of course. Sheer oversight on my part. The languor of the islands. Inevitable after a while. I'm Davis, owner of the Point Boatyard. Welcome to Taiohae, Mr. Elgin." "Thank you, Mr. Davis," Blaine said. "On the contrary, I want to thank you again for answering my advertisement," Davis replied. "I've been needing a master boatwright for months. You have no idea! And frankly, I didn't expect to attract a man of your qualifications." "Ummm," said Blaine, surprised and pleased at the thoroughness of Carl Ore's preparations. "Not many men around with a grounding in #th-century boatbuilding methods," Davis said sadly. "Lost art. Have you had a look around the island?" "Just very briefly," said Blaine. "Think you'll want to stay?" Davis asked anxiously. "You have no idea how hard it is getting a good boatwright to settle down in a quiet little backwater like this. No sooner do they get here than they want to go charging off to the big booming cities like Papeete or Apia. I know wages are higher in places like that, and there's more amusements and society and things, but Taiohae has a charm of its own." "I've had my fill of the cities," Blaine said, smiling. "I'm not likely to go charging off, Mr. Davis." "Good, good! Don't bother coming to work for a few days, Mr. Elgin. Rest, take it easy, look around our island. It's the last refuge of primitive Polynesia, you know. Here are the keys to your house. Number one Temetiu Road, straight up the mountain there. Shall I show you the way?" "I'll find it," Blaine said. "Thanks very much, Mr. Davis." "Thank you, Mr. Elgin. I'll drop in on you tomorrow, after you're a bit more settled. Then you can meet some of our townfolk. In fact, the mayor's wife is giving a party Thursday. Or is it Friday? Anyhow, I'll find out and let you know." They shook hands and Blaine started up Temetiu Road, to his new home. It was a small, freshly painted bungalow with a spectacular view of Nuku Hiva's three southern bays. Blaine admired the sight for a few minutes, then tried the door. It was unlocked and he walked in. "It's about time you got here." Blaine just stared, not able to believe what he saw. "Marie!"  and cool as ever. But she was nervous. She talked swiftly and avoided meeting his eyes. "I thought it would be best if I made the final arrangements on the spot," she said. "I've been here for two days, waiting for you. You've met Mr. Davis, haven't you? He seems like a very nice little man." "Marie -- " "I told him I was your fiancee," she continued hurriedly. "I hope you don't mind, Tom. I had to have some excuse for being here. I said I had come out early to surprise you. Mr. Davis was delighted, of course -- he wants so badly to have his master boatwright settle here permanently. Do you mind, Tom? We can always say we broke off the engagement and -- " Blaine took her in his arms and said, "I don't want to break off the engagement. I love you, Marie." She clung to him fiercely for a moment, abruptly stepped back. "Then we'd better arrange for a marriage ceremony soon, if you don't mind. They're  very stuffy and small-townish here -- very #th-century, if you know what I mean." "I think I know what you mean," Blaine said. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. #. at the South Seas Motel until a wedding could be arranged. Blaine suggested a quiet ceremony before a justice of the peace, but Marie surprised him by wanting as large a wedding as Taiohae could produce. It was held on Sunday at the mayor's house. Mr. Davis loaned them a little cutter from the boatyard. They set sail at sunrise for a honeymoon cruise to Tahiti. For Blaine, it had the sensation of a delicious and fleeting dream. They sailed across a sea carved of green jade and saw the moon, yellow and swollen, quartered by the cutter's shrouds and tangled in its stays. The sun rose out of a long black cloud, reached its zenith and declined, scouring the sea into a gleaming bowl' of brass. They anchored in the lagoon at Papeete and saw the mountains of Moorea flaming in the sunset, more fantastic than the Lunar mountains. And Blaine remembered a day on the Chesapeake when he had dreamed, Ah, Raiatea, the Mountains of Moorea, the fresh trade wind... A continent and an ocean had separated him from Tahiti, and other obstacles besides. But that had been in another century. They would have spent more time in Papeete, but as they walked down the waterfront, they saw three zombies crouching in the shade with begging bowls. The zombies stared as they passed, then followed them. Blaine gave them alms, but the zombies still followed, mute and reproachful. Finally Blaine stopped, turned and said, "All right. What do you want?" The zombies didn't answer. They simply shook their heads and stared at his strong wrestler's body, "Is it because of Smith?" Blaine shouted at them. Their eyes glowed when they heard the name, but they refused to reply. "Let's get out of here," Marie said. "The damned zombies have a worldwide organization. They probably know all about you and Smith." Blaine and Marie went to Moorea, rode horses up the slopes and picked the white tiare Tahiti. But they came across a single frail and withered old zombie who watched them intently with reproachful eyes. And when Blaine asked him about Smith, the zombie nodded briefly. They returned to their boat anchored in the bay below and set sail for the Tuamotos. But there was no escaping from the silent, passive persecution of the zombies. On Atua, ten zombies came to the dockside and stood in a long line by the boat. Blaine walked out with a machinist's hammer in his hand, looking for trouble, hoping the zombies would attack him. He wanted something solid to fight against. But the zombies simply stared. They appeared as fragile as withered leaves, ten dry husks that a child could scatter, as helpless as scarecrows. But they were invulnerable in their helplessness, as strong as death. Blaine put the hammer back in his pocket and returned to the boat. The zombie network had spread word of Blaine even to the tiniest atolls. Sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, the zombies gathered wherever Blaine landed. The silent chorus watched his movements with great, dying, reproachful eyes; the powerless, invulnerable furies waited with a terrible, soul-destroying patience. And Blaine knew what they were waiting for. Blaine and Marie sailed back to Taiohae. Marie started housekeeping. Blaine began to work at the boatyard, and waited.   was interesting and varied. The island cutters and ketches limped in with bent shafts or nicked propellers, with planks that had been splintered against a hidden coral head, with sails blown out by a sudden gale. There were underwater craft to be serviced, boats belonging to the nearby undersea pressure farms that used Taiohae as a supply base. And there were dinghies to build, and an occasional schooner. Blaine handled all practical details with skill and dispatch. As time went by, he started to write a few publicity releases about the yard for the South Seas Courier. This brought in more business, which involved more paperwork and a greater need for liaison between the Point Boatyard and the small yards to which it farmed out work. Blaine handled this, and took over advertising as well. His job as master boatwright came to bear an uncanny resemblance to his past jobs as junior yacht designer. But this no longer bothered him. It seemed obvious to him now that nature had intended him to be a junior yacht designer, nothing more nor less. This was his destiny and he accepted it. His life fell into a pleasant routine built around the boatyard and the white bungalow, filled with Saturday night movies and the microfilm Sunday Times, quick visits to the undersea farms and to other islands in the Marquesas Group, parties at the mayor's house and poker at the yacht club, brisk sails across Comptroller Bay and moonlight swimming on Temuoa Beach. And, through it all, the zombies of Taiohae stayed close, and watched him, and waited. One morning at the boatyard, Mr. Davis came over with a worried frown. "Say, Tom, there was a fellow around here just a little while ago looking for you." "Who was it?" asked Blaine. "A mainlander," Davis said. "Just off the steamer this morning. I told him you weren't here yet and he said he'd see you at your house." "What did he look like?" Blaine asked, feeling his stomach muscles tighten. Davis frowned more deeply. 'Well, that's the funny part of it. He was about your height, thin, very tanned. He wore some kind of surgical mask, but the skin didn't look right And he stank of chlorophyll " "Sounds peculiar," Blaine said. "Very peculiar. And he limped pretty bad." "Did he leave a name?" "Said his name was Smith. Tom, where are you going?" "I have to go home right now," Blaine said. "I'll try to explain later." He hurried away. Smith must have found out his own identity and what the connection was between himself and Blaine. And, exactly as he had promised, the zombie had come visiting. #. " ' at once to a closet and took down their suitcases. She carried them into the bedroom and began flinging clothes into them. "What are you doing?" Blaine asked. "Packing." "So I see. But why?" "Because we're getting out of here." "What are you talking about? We live here!" "Not any more," she said. "Not with that damned Smith around. Tom, he means trouble." "I'm sure he does," said Blaine. "But that's no reason to run. Stop packing a minute and listen! What do you think he can do to me?" "We're not going to stay and find out," she said. She continued to shove clothes into the suitcase until Blaine grabbed her wrists. "Calm down," he told her. "I'm not going to run from Smith." "But it's the only sensible thing to do," Marie said. "He's trouble, but he can't live much longer. Just a few more months, weeks maybe, and he'll be dead. He should have died long before now, that horrible zombie! Tom, let's go!" "Have you gone crazy or something?" Blaine demanded. "Whatever he wants, I can handle it." "I've heard you say that before," Marie said. "Things were different then." "They're different now! Tom, we could borrow the cutter again -- Mr. Davis would understand -- and we could go to -- " "No! I'm damned if I'll run from him! Maybe you've forgotten, Marie, Smith saved my life." "But what did he save it for?" she wailed. "Tom, I'm warning you! You mustn't see him, not u he remembers!" "Wait a minute," Blaine said slowly. "Is there something you know? Something I don't?" She immediately grew calm. "Of course not." "Marie, are you telling me the truth?" "Yes, darling. But I'm frightened of Smith. Please, Tom, humor me this once -- let's go away." "I won't run another step from anyone," Blaine said. "I live here. And that's the end of it." Marie sat down, looking suddenly exhausted. "All right, dear. Do what you think is best." "That's better," said Blaine. "It'll turn out all right." "Of course it will," Marie said. Blaine put the suitcases back and hung up the clothes. Then he sat down to wait. He was physically calm. But in memory he had returned to the underground, had passed again through the ornate door covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideographs, into the vast marble-pillared Palace of Death with its gold and bronze coffin. And he heard again Reilly's screaming voice speak through a silvery mist: "There are things you can't see, Blaine, but I see them. Your time on Earth will be short, very short, painfully short. Those you trust will betray you. Those you hate will conquer you. You will die, Blaine, not in years but sooi. sooner than you could believe. You'll be betrayed, and you'll die by your own hand." That mad old man! Blaine shivered slightly and looked at Marie. She sat with downcast eyes, waiting. So he waited, too. After a while there was a soft knock at the door. "Come in," Blaine said to whoever was outside. #. mediately, even with the tan surgical mask. The zombie came in, limping, bringing with him a faint odor of decay imperfectly masked by a powerful chlorophyll deodorant. "Excuse the disguise," Smith said. "It isn't intended to deceive you or anyone else. I wear it because my face is no longer presentable." "You've come a long way," said Blaine. "Yes, quite far," Smith agreed, "and through difficulties I won't bore you by relating. But I got here. That's the important thing." "Why did you come?" "Because I know who I am," Smith answered. "And you think it concerns me?" "Yes." "I can't imagine how," Blaine said grimly. "But let's hear it" Marie said, "Wait a minute. Smith, you've been after him since he came into this world. He's never had a moment's peace. Can't you accept things as they are? Can't you just go and die quietly somewhere?" "Not without telling him first," Smith said. "Come on, let's hear it," said Blaine. Smith said, "My name is James Olin Robinson." "Never heard of you," Blaine replied after a moment's thought. "Of course not." "Have we ever met before that time in the Rex Building?" "Not formally." "But we met?" "Briefly." "All right, James Olin Robinson, tell me about it. When did we meet?" "It was quite brief," Robinson said. "We glimpsed each other for a fraction of a second, then saw no more. It happened late one night in #, on a lonely highway, you in your car and me in mine." "You were driving the car I had the accident with?" "Yes. If you can call it an accident." "But it was! It was completely accidental!" "If that's true, I have no further business here," Robinson said. "But, Blaine, I know it was not an accident. It was murder. Ask your wife." a comer of the couch. Marie's face was waxen. Her gaze seemed to turn inward and not enjoy what it saw there. Blaine wondered if she was staring at the ghost of some ancient guilt, long buried, long quickening, now come to term with the appearance of the zombie Robinson. Watching her, he slowly began piecing things together. "Marie," he said, "what about that night in #? How did you know that Robinson and I were going to have an accident? She said, "There are statistical prediction methods we use, valence factors... Her voice trailed away. "Or did you make us have the accident?" Blaine asked. Marie didn't answer. And Blaine thought hard about the manner of his dying. He had been driving over a straight, empty highway, his headlights probing ahead, the darkness receding endlessly before him... His car swerved freakishly, violently, toward the oncoming headlights... He twisted hard on the steering wheel. It wouldn't turn... The steering wheel came free and spun in his hands, and the engine wailed... "By God, you made us have that accident!" Blaine shouted at his wife. "You and Rex Power Systems -- you forced my car into a swerve! Look at me and answer! Isn't it true?" "All right!" she said. "But I didn't mean to kill you. It was Robinson we were after. He's the man your present body was intended for, Tom. In # he was a liberal religious leader. Rex decided to snatch him, show him the scientific hereafter, the Threshold, reincarnation. We thought he'd endorse Rex. We could make a breach in the organized religions by using Robinson. But the calibration was off and we got you instead. And Robinson took over Reilly's body." Blaine said, "You've known all along who he was." "I've suspected." "And never told me." "I couldn't, Tom, I just couldn't All right, it was wrong. I tried to make it up. I smuggled your recording to the religions. I helped you, watched out for you -- " "But you didn't help me," Robinson said.  and looked at him. "I'm afraid I was responsible for your death, Mr. Robinson. When the cars came together, your body must have died at the same time as Tom's. The Rex Power System that snatched him into # pulled you along, too. Then you took over Reilly's body. It's worked out horribly, but we had no idea that all this would happen. We thought you'd appreciate being brought into the future and receiving actual assurance of a life after death. If the experiment had turned out right -- " "But it didn't," Robinson broke in. "And you have given me a very poor exchange for my former body and my former life." "I know. But what can I do? The hereafter -- " "I don't want it yet," Robinson said. "I was a married man with children when you killed me. I had a mission in life. That mission must be fulfilled, my life lived out as it was meant to." "But how?" she asked desperately. Robinson hesitated a moment, then said, "I want a body. I want a man's good body that I can live in, not this decaying thing that I drag about. Blaine, your wife killed my former body." Blaine said, "And now you want mine?" "If you think it's fair," Robinson said. "Now wait just a minute!" Marie cried. Color had returned to her face. With her confession, she seemed to have freed herself from the grip of the guilt in her mind. "Robinson," she said, "you can't ask that from him. He didn't have anything to do with your death. What's done is done! Get out of here!" Robinson ignored her and looked at Blaine. "I always knew it was you, Blaine. When I knew nothing else, I knew it was you. I watched over you, Blaine. I saved your life." "Yes, you did," Blaine said quietly. "So what?" Marie screamed. "So he saved your life. That doesn't mean he owns it! One doesn't save a life and expect it to be forfeited upon request. Tom, don't listen to him!" Robinson said, "I have no means or intention of forcing you, Blaine. You will decide what you think is right and I will abide by it. And you will remember everything ." Blaine looked at the zombie almost with affection. "So there's more to it. Much more. Isn't there, Robinson?" Robinson nodded, his eyes fixed on Blaine's face. "But how did you know?" Blaine asked. "How could you possibly know?" "My life has revolved around you. I've thought about nothing but you. And the better I knew you, Blaine, the more certain I was about this." "Perhaps," Blaine admitted. Marie said, "What on Earth are you talking about? What more? What more could there be?" "I have to think about this," said Blaine, his gaze distant. "I have to remember. Robinson, please wait outside for a little while." "Certainly," the zombie said, and left immediately. Without even glancing at Marie, Blaine sat down and held his head in his hands. Now he had to remember something he would rather not think about. Now, once and for all, he had to trace it back and understand it Etched sharp and raw in his mind still were the words Reilly had screamed at him in the Palace of Death: "You're responsible! You killed me with your evil murdering mind! Yes, you, you hideous thing from the past, you damned monster! Everything shuns you except your friend the dead man! Why aren't you dead, you murderer?" Had Reilly known? Blaine remembered Sammy Jones saying to him after the hunt : "Tom, you're a natural-born killer. There's nothing else for you." Had Sammy guessed? And now the most important thing of all, that most significant moment of his life -- the time of his death on a night in #. Vividly he remembered: The steering wheel was working again, but Blaine ignored it, filled with a sudden fierce exultancy, a lightning switch of mood that welcomed the smash, lusted for it, and lor pain and cruelty and death... Blaine shuddered convulsively as he relived the moment he had wanted to forget -- the moment when he might have avoided catastrophe, but had preferred to kill. He lifted his head and looked at his wife. He said, "I killed him. That's what Robinson knew. And now I know it, too." #. all to Marie. She refused at first to believe him. "It was so far back, Tom! How can you be sure of what happened?" "I'm sure," Blaine said. "I don't think any person could forget the way he died. I remember every detail of my death. That was how I died." "Still, you can't call yourself a murderer because of one instant, one fraction of a second -- " "How long does it take to shoot a bullet or to drive in a knife?" Blaine asked. "A fraction of a second! That's how long it takes to become a murderer." "But, Tom, you had no motive!" Blaine shook his head. "It's true that I didn't kill for gain or revenge. But then I'm not that kind of murderer. I'm the grass-roots variety, the ordinary average guy with a little of everything in his makeup, including murder. I killed because, in that moment, I had the opportunity. My special opportunity, a unique interlocking of events, moods, train of thought, humidity, temperature, and Lord knows what else." "But you're not to blame!" Marie said. "It would never have happened if Rex Power Systems and I hadn't created that special opportunity for you." "Yes, but I seized the opportunity," said Blaine, "seized it and performed a cold-blooded murder just for fun, because I knew I could never be caught at it. My murder." "Our murder," she said. "Yes." "All right, we're murderers," Marie said calmly. "Accept it, Tom. Don't get mushy-minded about it We've killed once. We can kill again." "Never," said Blaine. "He's almost finished! I swear to you, Tom, there's not a month of life in him. One blow and he's done for. One push." "I'm not that kind of murderer." "Will you let me do it?" "I'm not that kind, either." "You idiot! Then just do nothing! Wait. A month, no more than that, and he's finished. You can wait a month, Tom -- " "More murder," Blaine said wearily. "Tom! You're not going to give him your body! What about our life together?" "Do you think we could go on after this?" Blaine asked. "I couldn't. Now stop arguing with me.I don't know whether I'd do this if there weren't a hereafter. Quite probably I wouldn't But there is a hereafter. I'd like to go there with my accounts as straight as possible, all bills paid in full, all restitutions made. If this were my only existence, I'd cling to it with everything I've got. But it isn't! Can you understand that?" "Yes, of course," Marie said unhappily. "Frankly, I'm getting pretty curious about this afterlife. I want to see it. And there's one thing more." "What's that?" lTJ. bling, so Blaine put his arm around her. He was thinking back to the conversation he had had with Hull, the elegant and aristocratic Quarry. Hull had said: "We follow Nietzsche's dictum -- to die at the right time! Intelligent people don't clutch at the last shreds of life like drowning men clinging to a bit of board. They know that the body's life is only an infinitesimal portion of Man's total existence. Why shouldn't those bright pupils skip a grade or two of school?" Blaine remembered how strange, dark, atavistic and noble Hull's lordly selection of death had seemed. Pretentious, of course, but then life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter. Hull had seemed like an ancient Japanese nobleman kneeling to perform the ceremonial act of hara-kiri, and emphasizing the importance of life in the very selection of death. And Hull had said: "The deed of dying transcends class and breeding. It is every man's patent of nobility, his summons from the king, his knightly adventure. And how he acquits himself in that lonely and perilous enterprise is his true measure as a man." Marie broke into his reverie, asking, "What was that one thing more?" "Oh." Blaine thought for a moment "I just wanted to say that I guess some of the attitudes of the #nd century have rubbed off on me. Especially the aristocratic ones." He grinned and kissed her. "But, of course, I always did have good taste." #. cottage. "Robinson," he said, "come with me to the Suicide Booth. I'm giving you my body." "I expected no less of you, Tom," the zombie said. Together they went slowly down the mountainside. Marie watched them from a window for a few seconds, then started down after them. They stopped at the door to the Suicide Booth. Blaine said, "Do you think you can take over all right?" "I'm sure of it," said Robinson. "Tom, I'm grateful for this. I'll use your body well." "It's not mine, really," Blaine said. "Belonged to a fellow named Kranch. But I've grown fond of it. You'll get used to its habits. Just remind it once in a while who's boss. Sometimes it wants to go hunting." Marie came up and kissed Blaine good-by with cold lips. Blaine said, "What will you do?" She shrugged her shoulders. "Go back to New York, I suppose." "That's probably best," Blaine agreed. He looked around once more at the palm trees whispering under the sun, the blue expanse of the sea, and the great dark mountain above him cut with silver waterfalls. Then he turned and entered the Suicide Booth and closed the door behind him. There were no windows, no furniture except a single chair. The instructions posted on one wall were very simple. You just sat down and, at your leisure, closed the switch upon the right arm. You would then die, quickly and painlessly, and your body would be left intact. He thought again about the first time he died and wished it had been more interesting. By rights he should have rectified the error this time and gone down like Hull, hunted fiercely 'across a mountain ledge at sundown. Why couldn't it have been like that? Why couldn't death have come while he was battling a typhoon, meeting a tiger's charge, or climbing Mount Everest? Why, for the second time, would his death be so tame, so commonplace, so ordinary? But then why had he never really designed yachts? A N enterprising death, he realized again, would be out of character for him. Undoubtedly he was meant to die in just this quick, commonplace, painless way. And all his life in the future must have gone into the forming and shaping of this death -- a vague indication when Reilly died, a fair certainty in the Palace of Death, an implacable destiny when he settled in Taiohae. Still, no matter how ordinary, one's death is the most interesting event of one's life. Blaine looked forward eagerly to his. He had no complaint to make. Although he had lived in the future little over a year, he had gained its greatest prize -- the hereafter. He felt again what he had experienced after leaving the Hereafter Building -- release from the heavy, sodden, constant, unconscious fear of death that subtly weighed every action and permeated every movement. No man of his own century could live without the shadow that crept down the corridors of his mind like some grisly tapeworm, the ghost that haunted nights and days, the croucher behind comers, the shape behind doors, the unseen guest at every banquet, the unidentified figure in every landscape, always present, always waiting -- No more! For now the ancient enemy was defeated. And men no longer died; they moved on! But he had gained even more than an afterlife. He had managed to squeeze and compress an entire lifetime into that year. He had been bom in a white room with dazzling lights and a doctor's bearded face above him, and a motherly nurse to feed him while he listened, alarmed, to the babble of strange tongues. He had ventured early into the world, raw and uneducated, and had stared at the oriental marvel of New York, and allowed a straighteyed fast-talking stranger to make a fool and nearly a corpse of him, until wiser heads rescued him from his folly and soothed his pain. Clothed in his fine, strong, hearty body, he had ventured out again, wiser this time, and had moved as an equal among men equipped with glittering weapons in the pursuit of danger and honor. And he had lived through that folly too, and, still older, had chosen an honorable occupation. But certain dark omens present at his birth finally reached fruition, and he had to flee his homeland and run to the farthest comer of the Earth. Yet he still managed to acquire a family on the way, a family with certain skeletons in the closet, but his all the same. In the fullness of manhood, he had come to a land he loved, taken a wife, and, on his honeymoon, seen the mountains of Moorea flaming in the sunset. He had settled down to spend his declining months in peace and useful labor, and in fond recollection of the wonders he had seen. And so he had spent them, honored and respected by all. It was sufficient. Blaine turned the switch. # . ' tery and a high wind howled down the avenues. Marie walked to a large graystone building near Third Avenue. Engraved above the door was the statement: "Dedicated to Free Communication Between Those on Earth and Those Beyond." She entered the Spiritual Switchboard, walked to the information booth and showed a slip of paper. "Thafs Messages Incoming," Said the pleasant, gray-haired receptionist "Straight down the hall to Room #B." Marie walked down the hall and entered a small gray room with several armchairs and a loudspeaker set in the wall. She waited. "Marie!" said a voice from the loudspeaker. "Tom!" "Ifs very good to see you, Marie." "But why have you waited so long to contact me?" she asked. "I thought -- I was afraid you hadn't made it." "I reached the Threshold all right," Blaine said. "But I took a little while getting oriented." "What is it like?" "That's hard to explain. Ray Melhill tried to tell me and I didn't understand what he was talking about But I see now. He was perfectly right -- color really is direction, and they're both practically the same as sound. Position is what counts, because it's all a question of wholenesses. You see, in Threshold you can experience a framework and perceive it also. But there's no real dissociation. Do you understand?" "No," said Marie sadly. "Well, you'll see it yourself some day. Tell me, how is Robinson?" "He's fine," Marie said. "He married Alice Kranch, you know." "Oh, I know that. I mean has he started getting the religions together?" "He hasn't thought about it." "He will." "Tom," Marie said, "what about us? Will we meet again?" "Yes. Definitely." "But when? Can I -- can I come now?" "No. You'll know when the time is right" "But, Tom, what if we're separated? What will it be like in the hereafter? I don't think I'm going to like it. Fm afraid it's going to be terribly strange and ghostly and horrible." "You're wrong," Blaine told her. "I can't explain it to you, but there's nothing ghostly about it We'll be together, only I can't explain when." "Oh, Tom!" "Marie, don't worry. Fve been a junior yacht designer three times in two lifetimes. It's my destiny! Surely you don't think it ends here! There's more, much more!" "All right, Tom," she promised. "I'll wait" Handyman Finishing Basements Finishing Attics Essential Repairs Built-ins Painting Refinishing Landscaping Patios and Terraces Barbecues Don't put off those vital home repairs and improvements another day! tells you "how" in language you can understand! Imagine changing that drab kitchen, converting the basement to a game room, glamourizing your outdoor patio -- or any other luxurious improvement... all are now possible at very little cost to you! clear drawings show every detail of construction. Easy-to-follow, steparticles give you valuable pointers on how to save work, buy and save on proper materials and get a professionly-perfect job! of your workshop library! # by by J. T. McIntosh by by by and And Other Stories Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden The Atlantic Missile Range by Joseph Farrell # by Frederik Pohl # by Avram Davidson and  Laura Goforth I I # by Finn O'Do nnevan I # by Co rdwainer Smith I # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #(f per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions b sewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, includl ing translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the Msklews (overlay) way Trade Mark your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-ALens, #x# inch Art Board, # tubes Oil Paint, Oil, Turpentine, # Brushes, # page Instruction Book. only .# Vis-a-lens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: exceptional ideas about the world to come...  intcrplonctory colonization if relative immortality Exceptional s-f writers... if F. #. Wallace if Damon Knight if James E. Gunn if J. T. McIntosh if Theodore Sturgeon... Now collected in one exceptional volume for the permanent library of every reader of Galaxy Magazine #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies as soon as copies come off the Q money order in the amount of  Edited by Published Oct. # Price # Use coupon to order your copy. OR those who somehow managed to miss the past couple of issues, here is a brief recap: In going to a big, roomy # pages, we have, as we did back in #, turned over to our readers every single policy concerning everything that fits between the covers, and the covers themselves -- with the assurance, same as just short of a decade ago, that every vote would be counted and that only they would set our policies. Why? Well, there's a monstrous lot of mystic nonsense written and orated about democracy, but nearly all of it misses the real point: people in general generally know what's good for them. Like a few politicians, a few editors can be spooky in their divining of reader wishes. But why guess when it's only necessary to ask? So we did, in #, and by listening hard and obeying honestly, Galaxy in perhaps the shortest time on record took command of its field -- and then crossed oceans into the British Empire, France (including Belgium and Switzerland), Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, with other countries now negotiating for editions in their own languages -- to become, beyond challenge, the most widely read science fiction magazine on Earth. What's mystical about results like those? By doing just what we did, but calling it survey in depth, smart manufacturers put the same phenomenon to work: their customers know what they want. If that's so with impersonal goods, think how much truer it is with anything so personal as one's favorite kind of reading. Nine years is long enough for tastes to change, new readers to come in, policies to need overhauling. Expanding to a giant new size is the best possible opportunity for updating our poll. The response resembles a board meeting of thousands all talking excitedly and at once. Spotting the trends is not easy; the figures bounce and jiggle because letters are still -- no, by blue, this is no time for modesty -- letters are still pouring in, fully as many and as passionately helpful as the # flood -- and practically every letter has one or more subscriptions enclosed! Remarkably few readers join Norman Schwarz of Camden, N. J., in wondering "just what effect a letter to the editor has on actual policies. I hope for the best and fear the worst." Most feel as does Mrs. Weston Baker of Clayton, N. M.: "I appreciate the chance to tell you how to run a magazine," which may sound cheeky to non-believers, but is exactly what we are asking. Whether a Mr. Schwarz or a Mrs. Baker, however, not much less than # are warm in their friendship, keenly intelligent in their preferences and dislikes, so realistic about publishing that one would think they had been in it all their lives -- until it's realized they know that the facts of life, economic and otherwise, apply as inexorably to a magazine as a home, a lab or a business. There are crabs among us, of course, but statistically insignificant. This discovery is a shock every time it happens. More about it later on. ' curves as well as incomplete returns will allow.  To begin with, the heart of the magazine -- stories. As we said, all sorts of combinations are possible with # pages to move around in. Many magazines strive for very long contents pages by using very short stories -- often no more than one-page anecdotes -- and a medium-length novelet or two. This policy, we added, makes sense only if readers prefer clumps of dwarf items to fewer but very much sturdier stories. Well, we asked, do you? Or would you rather have the short stories held down, even if they make the contents page look synthetically hefty, and more novelets and novellas? Or do you have other ideas on content and balance? Even at this midpoint, with so many counties still unheard from, the trend appears clear: contentspadding fillers are not wanted; full-scale treatments are. Some amplification is needed here. A number of readers felt we ought to be told to buy material on the basis of quality instead of length. We do, of course, as nearly always as human fallibility will allow. But quality and length are often the same thing: a good story idea appropriately developed, free both of padding and excessive compression. For story ideas are more compressible and expandable than you might imagine, and arbitrary length limitations are often imposed on stories -- how long they must be, rather than how long they should be. By not bloating our contents page, we can give stories their head. True enough, writers tend to inflate more than compress, but a good many memorable items have been made so by our asking for fuller treatment -- and one of our most famous serials was formed of two intended short stories which, combined, swiftly reached critical mass! So the question of length vs. quality is really settled only by ( Continued on page #) Its streets paved not with gold but raw energy -- sudden murder lurking everywhere -- and it was here that a country cousin meant to conquer... The City  # off T HE City of Force was a huge expanse of radiant beauty that dominated the plain like a thousand curtains of vivid flame. Staring at it, Bruno pulled his robe more tightly about him and clutched his staff. The bold suggestion of dawn reflected lividly against his thin face. But it was the glare of the City's great sheets of energy -- its ribbons and spires of force, its magnificent auras and beams and sparkling discharges -- that cast his shadow back into the forest from which he had come. Resolutely, he shifted his pack to a more comfortable position and continued toward the holocaust of light. "Where do you think you're going, son?" The voice, magnified by its unexpectedness, had come like a clap of thunder from the trees behind him. "Nothing to be afraid of, boy." There was a dry laugh. "I'm just a harmless old codger." Bruno turned and watched the man approach. He had a small, wry face and a fringe of hair that encircled his almost bald head like a wreath. The full folds of his robe only gave emphasis to his pot-belly and failed to hide a pair of dusty, sandaled feet. "What are you doing here?" Bruno demanded. "Getting away from the bright lights." "You live in the City?" "Always did. It's a pretty easy life, but kind of tiring once in a while. Name's Everard." The old man drew up before him and stood staring into his face. "New around here, eh?" "I'm Bruno, from one of the forest clans." Everard laughed, his hands outstretched over his paunch as though to hold it steady. "Come for some lush City life?" "I've come to contact the Spheres," Bruno said stiffly. The aged face displayed a sequence of expressions that ended in a broad, almost toothless grin and another burst of laughter. "Contact the Spheres? Boy, you got a lot to learn!" "I know nobody's ever been able to get through to them. But it's got to be done someday." "So you're taking it upon yourself to learn their lingo, eh?" There was a kindly cynicism in the old man's voice now. "Us fellows who live in the Cities with 'em -- almost under their feet -- can't even do it. And you're going to step in, fresh from the haystack, and show us how!" strode off toward the shimmering masses of pure force. Everard shuffled to keep up with him. "Determined, eh? That's the spirit, son," he taunted. "Beat it, Pops." Bruno put a hand against the other's chest and shoved him off. "I know what I'm doing." The ol dmat stood scratching his head. "You are serious. Ever been in one of the Cities?" Bruno shook his head. ' They got all kinds of force fields and energy areas. Some of 'em are deadly. If you just touch the wrong glob of light or the wrong wall of ray stuff, you're a goner." "You live there, don't you?" Bruno asked challengingly. "Yup. But -- don't you see? -- I had a ma and pa to show me the ropes right from infancy." Bruno propped his hands on his hips and stared once more at the City of Force. His eyes swept I over to another corner of the plain and, in the rising sun, sought out the once-great city of men. Overgrown with trees and smothering in its own dust, it was hardly more than a centuries-old rubbish heap now. The words the old man had spoken in derisive jest were wise ones, Bruno conceded. He was a fool to think he could contact the Spheres. Even the great intellects who ran the world of men hundreds of years ago had failed to communicate with the aliens. Otherwise they might have saved their own cities. "I'm going ahead anyway," he said. "I can't stop you?" "Try it." "Then I'll go along. Least I can do is see you don't get yourself killed right off." They headed for the City. "Know anybody by the name of Hulen?" Bruno asked. "Used to belong to the Spruce clan? Tall, dark fellow who came here about five years ago?" "That's him. He's my cousin." "I know him." "Can you take me to him?" "Glad to. Leastwise, he's someone I can turn you over to so's I won't have the responsibility." A N hour later, with the sun beating down against their faces, Everard drew up and tossed his staff indifferently on the ground. "We wait here," he announced. Bruno glanced at the coruscating curtains and auras and shields of the immaterial City, still miles away. "What for?" "There's an easier way than walking there." "I suppose one of the Spheres is going to come out and carry us piggyback," Bruno said facetiously. His eyes, however, remained on the City as he tried to pick out at least one material object in the concentration of visible forces -- the fountains and hills of radiant energy, the sparkling geometrical nimbuses, the sheets of lazy light that floated from tenuous spire to tenuous spire. But there was none. And yet it didn't seem odd that there should be nothing solid in the City. For the inhabitants, the shining Spheres, were said to be but creatures of pure force themselves. And even as he stared at the wondrous edifice the aliens had built, a filament of pale green energy arched swiftly outward from one of the lesser structures. Losing its perspective smallness as it approached, the end of the huge tubular projection speared back down to the ground only yards from where Bruno stood. He turned to flee. But the old man seemed unconcerned as he surveyed the transparent chute of restless, raw energy. Finally Everard backed off. "Get ready, son. We're going to have to keep on our toes in a minute." "Why?" Bruno demanded apprehensively. "What is it?" There was an almost inaudible whine as a swiftly moving form came streaking down the length of the force tube, drew to a halt and drifted out the end of the shaft. The enormous Sphere, towering higher than four men, hovered a few inches off the ground, its featureless yellow surface seething like the disc of the setting sun. Bruno had the sickening feeling that, even though the alien possessed no eyes, it was somehow looking at him. "Hop!" Everard shouted, seizing his arm. And even as Bruno was jerked to one side, the play of forces over the surface of the Sphere coalesced into a fierce shaft of jagged light that streaked out to sear the ground where the two men had stood. "Keep on the go!" the old man instructed. "The stuff he throws is fast as hell. But his reactions ain't. If you move quick enough, he'll always hit where you just been." Bruno took three steps forward and five to the left. And another bolt slammed down against the ground behind him. "But -- I thought they couldn't even notice us!" he stammered. Everard, a few feet away now, shuffled to his left, spun around and trotted off agilely in a new direction. He easily escaped the third blast. "Not notice us! Ha! That's ridiculous. How do you suppose they destroyed all the cities? They see us, all right. But they think we're just dumb life-forms -- pests." Bruno slowed his evasive tactics and almost took a searing bolt broadside. "Random movement!" Everard urged, panting. "And don't repeat any moves or you'll get it for sure. Still want to go on to the City?" "I'll make out all right," Bruno said doggedly. Then he noticed that the Sphere's surface had lost its veneer of boiling energy. Everard said. "It's lost interest." The old man darted into the shadow of the Sphere, ran around it once and, for a fraction of a second, stood there with his tongue out, thumbs in his ears and his fingers wiggling at the alien. He managed to coax one final burst of lightning from the creature before it drifted disinterestedly away. "What next?" Bruno asked, collecting his pack and staff. "It's happening now." Everard light that was shimmering in midair about a hundred yards to the south. The point began expanding and Bruno watched it grow into a many-faceted geometrical figure. Through the transparent planes of its surface were visible ten or twelve bright yellow Spheres. The gemlike force structure expanded until its top towered scores of feet above the ground. The lone alien drifted over and joined the other Spheres as they floated out through the side. Bruno backed away misgivingly"Nothing to be afraid of now, boy," Everard assured him. "They'll be too busy to notice us." "Where did they come from?" "Another world, most likely. One that's maybe not even in this universe." "But how did they get here?" "You just saw it for yourself -- from some kind of new direction. My grandpa said they're probably coming from another world in this new direction and using Earth as a sort of way station." "How did he know?" "Either figured it out himself or passed it down from somebody else up the line." Everard took his wrist and began leading him toward the tunnel of green light that extended like a bridge into the City. "Come on. This is how we're going the rest of the way." "In there?" Bruno shied away from the seemingly solid shaft of radiant energy while he tried to keep the yellow Spheres in the periphery of his vision. "Beats walking," the old man said. "You want me to take you to Hulen, don't you?" Bruno gestured nervously at the aliens. "But they're going in the tube too!" "Won't notice us if we keep down at the bottom. Anyway, we'll be ahead of 'em. Use the green chutes all the time myself -- whenever I can find one." Everard stepped in through the glowing end of the tube and pulled Bruno along. "Just relax now, son, and think of wanting to go on into the City and see your cousin." The tenuous shaft of force closed in pleasantly around Bruno like a blanket of warm, green sunshine. Then suddenly the entire beam of energy seemed vibrantly alive, as though a thousand hands were materializing out of the mistlike substance to push him in the direction of the City. It was like sliding down an endless tunnel and eventually he relaxed and let the forces move him along. The plain below slipped by at an unbelievable speed. Somewhere along the way, he started tumbling buoyantly in his passage through the green nimbus. During his less forceful gyrations, he glanced over at Everard. The other seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the jostling he was receiving from the docile power. They swept past the outer force structures of the City past dense walls of lambent light and fiercely glowing pseudo-architectural forms that Bruno imagined might have vaguely resembled some of the buildings of the long-dead human cities. The chute curved past a great cataract of pure red energy that where and then it arched down to what appeared to be the ground level a gently glowing carpet of pale pink stardust. An occasional Sphere drifted along below, either emerging from or disappearing into a wall of shimmering azure nothingness. II energy curved right between two massive monoliths of pure white effulgence and weaved above a progression of huge, dazzling blue mounds of force stuff. "We get off up ahead." Everard spread both arms to arrest his tumbling motion. "Start thinking about slowing down." Like pellets in a blowgun, the Spheres from the plain were rapidly overtaking them. The foremost discharged a lance of crackling light that set up a quivering vibration all along the chute but fell short of its mark. "They've seen us!" Bruno warned, pulling to a halt beside the old man. "That's all right." "But they'll have the whole City out looking for us!" Everard laughed scornfully. "You must think we're somebody. Back in your village, would you call out the whole clan to help you look for a couple of cockroaches you saw scurrying down the street?" "You mean we don't even matter?" "Oh, we're a nuisance, all right," the old man said almost boastfully. "They set traps now and then. And every once in a while they have an extermination. But we ain't so dumb. We know what to do. They end up wiping out only a few of us at most." Another bolt discharged along the chute, reaching closer to the pair before it played itself out in a splattering of weak sparks that were quickly swallowed up in the green nimbus of the tube. "This way," Everard said, diving out through the side of the shaft. His easily relaxed body fell perhaps a hundred feet before crashing into the sloping wall of one of the dazzling blue mounds. He bounced twice, almost disappearing into the feathery energy formation each time, before sliding fifty feet down to the surface. Gingerly, Bruno extended an arm through the side of the chute. Another bolt from the advancing Spheres, however, ended his hesitancy and he dived out, plunging toward the same huge mound on which Everard had dropped. He was aware of his own voice shouting hoarsely throughout the vertiginous fall. Then there was the soft impact of his body against the force structure's cushioning wall of radiance and he slid down the slope. It was as though a thousand solicitous hands materialized to clutch him by his arms and legs and pass him down, one to the other, until he reached the ground level. feet. He stood staring uncertainly at the undulant pink force stuff of the surface that seemed to be rippling around his ankles. Glancing about, he surveyed the somehow not-quite-orderly arrangement of huge but squat mounds of energy that stretched away in all directions, like muskrat hills in a swamp. "Morning, Everard," a muffled voice called out. "Back already?" Bruno's self-appointed guardian turned and addressed the tenuous blue wall behind them. "Morning, Matt. How's the missus? Hope we didn't jar you when we dropped down." Bruno could make out the shape of the man who smiled out at them. It was as though he were encased in the semi-transparent substance of the wall. But he didn't seem to mind his imprisonment. "Didn't touch us," laughed the man called Matt. "But you probably shook hell out of old Blubber Ball's nerves, if he has any." More faintly, Bruno could see the huge Sphere moving around beyond the man in what appeared to be one of several energy-free spaces within the immaterial mound. The compartment seemed to be furnished with a fantastic assortment of odd-shaped and oddsized force of objects. Everard chuckled. "Wouldn't be surprised to see old Blubber Ball setting more traps from now on. This here's Bruno of the Spruce clan. Brought him in from the forest." "Spruce? Spruce?" Matt mulled over the name. "Sure. Hulen's cousin. You know Hulen." Grinning, the other poked his head out through the glimmering blue material of the wall. "Know him well enough to say you should have brought him a wife instead of a cousin. Needs one to tame him down. Hi, Bruno." "Hi, Matt," Bruno returned weakly. "You -- you live in there -- with that Sphere?" "Where else?" "Bruno still has to learn the ropes." Everard effected a theatrical sneer. "Then he's going to show us how to communicate with the Spheres." Matt snickered. "Aren't they all? Give my regards to Hulen." Everard said, "Let's go. It ain't far from here." Bruno tried to stride off, but fell on his face when he couldn't lift his feet out of the radiant pink carpet of rubbery force. "Don't walk -- just think," Everard explained patiently. "The force stuff'll take care of the rest." Dismayed, Bruno watched the old man glide forward without moving his feet as the carpet piled up at his heels and smoothed out in a steady incline before the toes of his sandals. Then, even before he realized it, he also was gliding along. "A couple or three more houses down is all we have to go," Everard offered encouragingly. "These are -- houses?" "You see the Blubber Balls in 'em, don't you?" Bruno was aware now that he could make out several of the spherical forms through the transparent walls of the mounds. "And people live right there too?" Everard grimaced disdainfully at his bumpkinlike ignorance. "You sure got a lot to learn, boy." "How many people live in the City?" "Thousands. Place is crawling with 'em. I expect they'll have some kind of general extermination pretty soon now and -- watch out, boy!" Everard planted his hands against Bruno's back and gave him a shove. Bruno fell forward, skidding across the surface and gaining impetus from the accommodating wave of the carpet. It wasn't until after the bolt of fierce energy had discharged that he realized the purpose behind the old man's rude action. As he coasted around behind the closest mound, with Everard skimming along beside him, he looked back and saw the Sphere that had come drifting out of one of the structures. The bolt had melted the energy where it struck, laying bare the coarse ground of the plain. Safe behind the mound, Everard again helped him up. "You got to keep your eyes peeled, son, if you aim to stay alive around here." Trembling, Bruno started to lean back against the wall. "No! No!" the old man shouted, jerking him away by the arm. "Look!" With the end of his staff, he prodded the section of force material against which Bruno had almost propped his shoulder. Contrasting the even blue radiance of the rest of the mound, the small, roughly circular section was a sparkling red. On touching it, the final six inches of the staff's length disintegrated in a shower of hissing sparks. "Lesson Number One for survival," Everard said grimly. "Don't mess around with no red force stuff." The old man moved ten feet farther along the wall and stepped through, disappearing into the soft blue radiance like a figure being swallowed by a dense fog. Bruno followed. the force stuff pressed tenderly against his face and arms and set up a myriad tingling, soothing sensation all along his skin. As though expecting that the coalesced energy might impede his movements, he went forward, perhaps ten feet, with arms outstretched and groping. Suddenly he was out of the wall again and in one of the inner compartments, standing practically face-to-face with a Blubber Ball. The Sphere's surface promptly assumed the angry appearance of a boiling yellow sun. Before the discharge came, though, Everard's arm reached out and jerked Bruno back into the force structure of the wall. "Damned if you ain't a problem, son!" The old man shook his head worriedly. "Now, dammit, stick close to my heels!" As they continued along inside the wall, Bruno watched the play of ominous light along the Sphere's surface subside. Apparently the force material of the building was solid to the Blubber Balls, but completely immaterial to the humans who resided in the mounds with them. But even that observation, he decided, was not altogether correct. "Why is it," he asked, "that we can move around in this blue stuff as though it wasn't here, yet it was solid enough to break our fall from the tube?" "This force matter does what you want it to -- within certain limits, anyhow." Bruno nodded pensively. "We think about it being hard enough to stop our fall and it is? We decide we want to walk around in it and, to us, it becomes as thin as air? Is that it?" "Right." "Does it do what the Spheres want it to, too?" Everard continued on around inside the curving wall. "Yup. Some of it, at least. Never seen 'em do nothing with the blue stuff. But they can make the pink and green stuff move 'em around too, just like we can." "Don't you see what that means?" Bruno reached forward, caught the old man's arm and turned him around. "Nope." "The way we think can't be too different from the way they think! We think of different things, of course, but -- " "Look, son," Everard said irritably. "For hundreds of years we been trying to figure out how they think so's we can get in contact. I guess everybody except you knows it can't be done." "All this force stuff -- what keeps it up? Where does it come from?" The old man made dismayed gestures with his hands. "How should I know? Ever hear of an airyplane?" Bruno was acquainted with the legend. "Machines that were supposed to fly." "Right. Now you figure those cockroaches in your village could understand what made them machines stay up? For that matter, think you could understand it?" Bruno assumed was the rear outer wall of the mound. They had come upon an area of impenetrable blackness in the force stuff, but Everard had waved his hand in annoyance and the blue glow had extended instantly into the murky region. Directly ahead was a hill of force substance that seemed to be a projection of the pink surface. There was a cradlelike depression in the crest of the elevation and in it lay a sleeping form. Bruno recognized his cousin and went gliding forward eagerly on the undulant carpet. "Hulen!" The slumbering man, stout and with a thick cast of contentment on his florid face, stirred lightly and mumbled, "Go 'way." Blackness swallowed them. But the light returned as Everard coasted up to the base of the delicately soft elevation. "Wake up, Hulen!" The man turned over, opened his eyes without seeing anything and was instantly blotted out by returning darkness. This time it was Bruno who thought Hulen's artificial night away. "I'll fix him," vowed Everard, staring at the comfortable hill on which the man slept. Then the elevation began melting down, flowing back into the pink carpet. Bruno's cousin was deposited on his ear. Hulen awakened finally, yawned, saw Everard and asked, "You got my new robe?" "Wasn't ready yet I'll pick it up next time I go out." Hulen sat up scratching his head. "What're you trying to pull off, old man? I give you two force-food balls to trade off with the forest folks for a new robe and you come back -- " "Brought you a visitor," Everard cut him short, gesturing toward Bruno, who had been standing out of his cousin's field of vision. Hulen looked around, frowning momentarily. Then his face broke out in a grin of recognition as he leaped up and seized Bruno's shoulders. "I didn't figure you'd ever make it here, fellow! Welcome to the easy life!" Bruno returned the special embrace of the Spruce clan. "Didn't come here for the easy life," he said soberly. "Oh, no! Not another one!" Hulen glanced in distress at Everard. "Yup. Wants to get chummy with the Blubber Balls. Tried to talk him out of it, but..." Everard completed the sentence with a futile gesture. Hulen cuffed Bruno on the arm. "We'll soon get you off it. Just wait till you see how swell life can be. I know a couple of classy babes -- Elm clan. You've run across that brand before, haven't you?" Bruno smiled noncommittally as Hulen's elbow dug into his ribs. "Gotta be going," Everard said. "Keep a close eye on him, Hulen. He's a natural-born stumbler. He almost got it half a dozen times since I picked him up this morning." The old man glided off through the wall and headed for another force structure across the way. And Bruno realized, watching the robed figure depart, that he was seeing outside the mound for the first time since he had entered it. The wall's outer surface, like its inner one, evidently was opaque as long as he felt no desire to look beyond it. Ill comfortably for a while, trying to find something in common to talk about. "How're all the folks?" Hulen asked at last. "Fine," said Bruno, and thought what else he might add. "Just fine." "Old Chief Cedric still in charge?" "Well -- more or less, I guess you'd say. He's been quiet since a Sphere came along a couple of years ago and tamed him down." "What happened?" "Found an old -- I believe he called it a generator, with instructions on how to get it to work. There were these two glass things that were supposed to light up." "Yes?" Hulen coaxed, laughter waiting in his eyes. "Well, he got the thing going with a hand crank and for a whole night it was just like day in his hut." "And then?" "This Sphere came along in one of those green air tunnels and boom! up went the whole hut! Cedric was outside at the time, but close enough to get his hair singed!" Hulen laughed until his eyes ran. "They'll do it, all right! They just can't stand anything that makes that electricity stuff. That's why they blew hell out of all the old cities. The human cities were full of electrical things." "Now Cedric has fits whenever anybody tries to dig something out of one of the ruins." "I can't say I blame him." Hulen glanced tentatively behind him and a section of the pink carpet flowed upward like a growing toadstool. When it attained a convenient height and sufficient rigidity, he seated himself comfortably upon it. Then he indicated a spot behind Bruno where a second mound of force stuff was rising. The improvised seat, Bruno found, was even softer than it appeared. "You have to learn to do these things for yourself," Hulen said. Then, "Seriously, about contacting the Blubber Balls -- I had the same idea at first. That's why I left the clan and came here. I was going to say, 'Look here, Spheres, we're dignified, intelligent people. You can't simply step in and take over as though there wasn't an ounce of brains anywhere on Earth'." "And you gave up when you found out you couldn't get through to them?" Hulen smiled. "I got wise, Cousin. What could be better than this?" He spread a hand to include all the wonderful effects of the City of Force. And everywhere the hand swept, the outer surface of the wall beyond it became transparent, laying bare the splendid panorama of the City's magnificent edifices. Bruno sprang up. "What's that?" he asked anxiously, pointing outside. Thousands of fluttering ribbons of silver were extending upward from each immaterial structure, reaching eagerly toward the noonday sun. Hulen laughed at his country cousin's alarm. "Nothing to be afraid of. Watch." ' ' I ' HE ribbons seemed to be drawing something out of the sunlight -- tiny beads of pure yellow energy that formed along the length of the streamers and rolled slowly down until they embedded themselves in the force substance of the buildings. Gradually the beads rolled together, forming balls of increasing size as they sank farther into the walls. Bruno constricted his vision and cut out the exterior scene. Now he was watching the orbs course through the material of their own mound. Still collecting into bigger balls, they continued moving inward until they came to rest embedded in the inner surface of the walls, protruding into the alien's compartments. One floated close by Bruno's head 'and he ducked. But Hulen only laughed and snatched it out of the air. He handed it to his cousin and trapped another for himself. Bruno cautiously handled the glowing yellow orb, acutely aware of intense sensation in the palms of his hands, in his fingers. It was a soothing, comfortable feeling of fullness and satisfaction that spread up his arms and into his shoulders as the grapefruit-sized ball began shrinking. Dumfounded, he held the thing in one hand and raised the other incredulously to his face. And where his fingers brushed against his lips, there was the composite taste of all the good food he had ever eaten, of the best of the Grape clan's wine he had ever drunk. explained, vigorously rolling the rapidly dwindling orb between his hands and plopping what was left of it into his mouth. "Y ou don't have to eat them, but they taste even better this way." Bruno realized that until then he had been both thirsty and hungry, and now there was only a feeling of very comfortably satisfied well-being. "Blubber Ball really goes for them too." Hulen gestured with a casual thumb. When Bruno looked, the inner surface of the wall was transparent and, in the compartment beyond, the twenty-foot Sphere was drifting along, absorbing each forcefood ball with which it came into contact. The sight of the alien reminded him of his resolve and he rode the wavering pink carpet toward the compartment But his cousin Hulen darted around in front of him. "Where do you think you're going?" "I came here to communicate with them. This one's as good as any for a start." Hulen put an arm around his shoulder. "You've come a long way and had a lot of new experiences. Why don't you get a little rest first?" A hill of pink fluffiness reared up from the floor and formed an inviting depression in its crest. It was, Bruno admitted, a good suggestion. He did feel tired. Even before he fully decided, however, a wave of radiant force billowed behind him, rolled him up the soft ramp and deposited him on the cloudlike bed. of amused voices, Bruno elevated himself on an elbow. Glancing downhill, he saw Hulen sitting at a mushroom-shaped table which had sprouted from the glistening floor. Across from him were two girls whose uninhibited laughter filled the inner-wall cavity. Hulen stared down and a section of the lambent carpet rolled back, bearing a small subsurface compartment in which were stored several force-food balls. He handed one to each of the girls. Then he raised a third above his upturned face and squeezed it like a grapefruit. A maroon liquid flowed into his waiting mouth. He saw his cousin and rose. "Come on down," he invited. "We got company." When Bruno hesitated, the mound deflated under him and he pawed the air frenziedly on his way down to the floor. The girls' high-pitched laughter italicized Hulen's guffaws. He tossed one of the force-food balls into Bruno's lap. "Some of the best stuff you ever drank. I spent all afternoon thinking up a storm -- impressing the taste of claret on it." Bruno raised the ball, squeezed it and drank. It was delicious. Hulen came over and slapped him on rthe back. "See what I mean about the lush life?" He winked at the girls. They were blondes -- a general trait of the Elm clan, Bruno remembered. Both were attractive and rather well put together, their figures being allowed some freedom of expression by virtue of sleeveless, low-cut robes and broad, constricting belts. A little plump, perhaps, but not so much so that a couple of months in a forest village wouldn't harden them up and slim them down. "Bruno, meet Lea and Sal. Girls, my cousin Bruno. He'll be a regular cosmopolitan as soon as he shakes the hayseed out of his hair." Both girls gave out with delightful laughter. Sal's, however, was more restrained, somewhat less derisive and a bit more sympathetic than Lea's. Moreover, Sal regarded him with interested concern rather than pure amusement. He decided he liked her better and went and sat beside her. Hulen, too, seemed satisfied with the arrangement. It was clear that he preferred someone high-spirited, as Lea seemed to be. "Hulen says you're going to contact the Blubbers," said Lea, a tinge of mockery in her voice. But Bruno only nodded. "It won't be easy," Sal said quite seriously. Hulen smote him again on the shoulder. "We'll get it out of his system, won't we, girls? A few days of the easy life is all it'll take." L EA leaned forward on the table. "You never had it so good, Bus -- " Obviously she had started to call him Buster, but had stopped to grope for a more practical word as she regarded his lean, sinewy arms. "You never had it so good, kid." Bruno realized that Buster would probably be an appropriate name for anyone living in the City of Force. The easy life, with its complete absence of effort, must indeed be conducive to chubbiness. "Just take it easy, Bruno." Sal laid a hand on his forearm. "Keep your eyes open and watch. Learn all you can before you try to glide off on your own. After a few weeks, you'll know what you want to do." She was quite young, too, he decided -- a good deal younger than the other Elmite. Somehow he had the notion she hadn't been in the City too long. There wasn't the same casualness that he'd found in the others he'd encountered. "We'll change your mind, Cuz," Hulen promised jovially. "After we get through showing you how rich life can be, you'll start praying that nobody ever succeeds in contacting the Spheres and getting them to go back where they came from." Sal fastened her eyes on the surface of the pink table and a projection of force stuff shot upward, shaping itself into a goblet. She squeezed the food ball over the container and filled it to the brim. Hulen tilted his head back again and compressed what was left of his globe into a final trickle of wine. He rolled back the carpet with a brief glance and grimaced when he saw that the cache was already empty, the last of the balls having gone to his cousin. "Have to round up some more," he said disappointedly. Bruno, however, was just then looking at several of the bright golden orbs. He had extended his vision curiously into the Blubber thing's inner compartment and had spotted the cluster embedded in the wall. "I'll take care of it," he said confidently, letting the wavering floor carry him through the inner surface of the wall and into the huge room. He stood on his toes and reached for the food balls. But a hurtling form came diving through the wall and he looked down in time to see Sal's shoulder ramming into his stomach. The breath knocked out of him, he flailed backward across the compartment and collapsed, a billow of the carpet surging up to break his fall. Sal, off balance, plunged down on top of him. "It's a trap, Bruno!" she shouted. "Don't touch it!" IV Hulen and Lea were in the compartment by now. "Boy, is he ever a rube," she said disparagingly. "Watch, Cousin," Hulen instructed, "and you'll learn Lesson Number Two for survival." He fashioned a pellet of pink stuff from the material of the floor and hurled it at the cluster of food balls. As it sailed toward the target, Bruno noticed the tiny spot of red radiance, almost completely hidden by the orbs. The pellet struck the lowest ball and the concealed crimson globule exploded into a blinding flame that surged through half the room before it extinguished itself. "Bruno," Sal said patiently, letting a ground swell of the floor form under her back and lift her to her feet, "you've got to be more careful. You can't go bungling around and expect to live very long in the City." She said it, Bruno imagined, as though she were more than casually interested in his survival. Yet the fact that he had to take criticism from a girl was an embarrassment. He started to get off the floor and two projections of force stuff reared up, each wedging itself crutchlike under one of his arms and providing assistance as they continued to rise. Angrily, though, he batted the props away and got up under his own power. r I I HE near disaster not only broke up the party, but also brought about postponement of a nocturnal tour of the City which, in Sal's words, would have "brought out the wonderful beauty of the force lights." Although the experience had shaken Bruno's determination and confidence, by the next morning he nevertheless felt somewhat rededicated to his purpose of communicating with the Spheres. He was about to enlist his cousin Hulen's advice on the matter when Everard came gliding in through the outer wall. "Morning, fellows." The old man straightened the folds of his robe and scowled at Bruno. "Just heard about your close shave. Ain't you learned nothing yet?" Hulen laughed. "He learned a lot last night, didn't you, Cuz?" Bruno looked away uncomfortably. "Don't feel bad," Hulen reassured him. "I had as much trouble myself when I first came here." "They all do," Everard admitted grudgingly. "But the easy life is well worth it." Hulen ordered up three stools from the force material of the floor and sat facing his relative. "Lopk, here are some thumb rules: The pink and green and blue stuff -- they're all okay. Anything bright red is deadly. Purple'll knock hell out of you, but it's usually not fatal." "Orange is rough too," the old man added, digging with one hand inside his robe. "It'll reach out after you and..." He drew a finger demonstrably across his neck. Continuing the search of his clothes, he produced three food balls from an inner pouch and shared them with the other two men. "Figured you'd be out of provisions, so I brought along some breakfast." Bruno munched avidly on the glowing yellow orb, determined this time not to have it melt in his hands. The taste was curiously like that of bacon and eggs, hot buttered biscuits and rich milk, all rolled into each mouthful. And he could actually feel the composite flavor spreading through his body. There was no doubt about it, he uneasily conceded -- this was the ideal life in many respects. The temperature was always perfect (he wondered to what extent mental control governed that comfort) and one's clothes seemed never to get soiled. Only a halfhour earlier, Hulen had shown him how proper concentration could make the entire outer surface of the mound ice cold, and how the water that condensed on it could be channeled into a tublike depression in the wall's interior. Indeed, it was the easy life, requiring no exertion except defensive maneuvers whenever an alien happened along. And he could see that one would rarely be caught in a perilous situation with just a little more caution than he had learned in the forest. tending his vision beyond the inner surface of the wall. One of the Spheres was in the nearest compartment. He watched it glide over to a cube of orange force. The color of the object seemed to flow into the Sphere. When only a gray form was left, the alien deserted the cube and coasted to the center of the compartment, where it drew up beside a fountain of splashing white sparks. The orange hue which had once belonged to the cube drained from the surface of the Sphere and became part of the fountain. The purpose of the function -- or ritual? -- escaped Bruno completely. He saw there would be no point in even attempting to understand what he had witnessed. "Eat up," Hulen said, gesturing toward what was left of the food ball in Bruno's hand. "I got a program mapped out. We're going to pick up the girls and show you some of the sights." Everard sighed. "Let's me out." "Why?" Bruno wanted to know. He was becoming fond of the little man, despite his cynical criticism. "We never take the chance of letting 'em find more'n four of us together at one time, else they might get the idea we're running away with the place. That'd mean another extermination." Bruno glanced back at the Sphere in the adjacent compartment. "You go along with them, Everard. I'm staying." Hulen and the old man exchanged uncertain looks. "Why?" they both asked. "I'm going to be busy. I don't feel I'm accomplishing anything." "You're not supposed to accomplish anything!" Hulen pointed out. "This is the easy life. There's nothing to do, nothing to worry about -- if you watch your step. Just relax and enjoy things." "Don't have to put out no effort here," Everard said, further defining this strange new philosophy of existence. "Nobody in all history never had a better deal. Talk about that the welfare state of the Budding Ages -- " "You fellows go ahead," Bruno insisted. "I have something to do." "But Sal's expecting you!" Hulen said. "She's the one who planned the tour!" The setup became even clearer, as far as Bruno was concerned. Apparently it was all a conspiracy to get his mind off communicating with the Spheres. It was all for his benefit, of course. But he didn't need them to look out for him. "Tell Sal I'll see her later," he said firmly. intense with suspicion. "What are you going to do?" "I came here to reach the Spheres. I may as well get along with the job. And here's as good a place as any to start." Bruno indicated the alien in the nearest compartment. Everard lifted an eyebrow. "Just what have you got in mind?" "Finding some way to talk with them -- telling them we're intelligent too." "Don't you suppose that if we were intelligent by their standards, they would have found it out by now?" "Maybe they already know we're intelligent," Hulen suggested. "They can't," Bruno said, "or they'd have respect for other thinking things." "How do we know that they think?" Everard asked. It had developed into a rapidfire question-and-answer session, and Bruno wondered whether it might not be intended solely to confuse him. He ignored the old man's last question and said, "I don't think they'd treat us like pests if they knew we were a civilized race. They'd -- " "Ain't every creature civilized by its own standards?" Everard interrupted. "They destroyed all our cities," Bruno went on, "because our cities were nests of forces that clashed in some way with their own setup, or with the Spheres themselves. It's just like when we kill mosquitoes because they interfere with us." Everard frowned. "I don't get it" "Don't you see that if we ever found intelligent mosquitoes -- talking mosquitoes -- we wouldn't destroy them? Instead, we'd tell them we don't like to be buzzed and bitten. We'd lay down the law -- give them a list of terms they'd have to meet if they wanted us to stop swatting them. We might even help them after that." "But we can't contact the Spheres!" Hulen sputtered. "Would we notice a particular ant on the ground if it tried to communicate with us?" "Maybe, if it tried hard enough. Since it would be the one trying to establish contact, it would have to discover the symbols that would do the trick." Everard laughed jeeringly. "And you're going to look for symbols that'll let us talk with the Blubber Balls?" "I think maybe some of the geometrical forms they're familiar with might work." "So," Hulen said, with a disdainful grin, "Old Blubber Ball's going to see you making with some geometrical lingo and he's going to sit down respectfully and watch. Let me ask you this: Do you think a parrot's intelligent just because it can imitate human speech?" Bruno rose impatiently. "Just the same, I'm going to give it a try." He let the now wavering floor push him along swiftly toward the inner wall. His cousin glided ahead to block his path before he could pass through into the inner compartment. But Everard shot forward and a projection of force material sprang up to seize Hulen's arm. "Let him go. If he wants to be a dumb hick, let him find out for himself -- if he lives that long." huge alien, but only for a second. When he saw its surface cloud over with a threatening play of sparkling yellow force, he hopped sideways and let the radiant carpet carry him several feet to the rear. The maneuver was executed just in time to escape the Sphere's first searing blast of lancelike force, which curled back the material of the floor where it struck. Still taking evasive action, both under his own power and with the help of the motile carpet of force, he concentrated on piling up a heap of energy material in the center of the room next to the Sphere. Another bolt barely missed him before he could manage sufficient concentration to mold the force stuff in a four-foot tube. Stalking him, the alien drifted ominously forward. But Bruno, bobbing and weaving, prevented the Sphere from getting set for an effective shot. And all the while he kept his eyes on the other objects in the room, making certain he wasn't blundering into any of the red, purple or orange force things. Another streak of jagged energy leaped from the Sphere but missed by a considerable margin. Following the discharge, Bruno realized, it would be at least several seconds before the alien could generate sufficient energy for the next searing blast. So he returned to his task of constructing symbols of communication. Glancing back toward the cube he had formed, he concentrated on a nearby section of the pink flooring. Like a geyser in slow motion, the pastel carpet flowed upward, assuming the shape of a lumpy ball. He smoothed out its surface and snipped off the thin stem. To his surprise, the weightless mass remained suspended. As the alien paused before the two objects, Bruno glided around the room, making the undulating surface carry him left, forward, back, right in as random a pattern as he could manage to make it The Sphere loosed another ineffectual bolt that tore the top off the fountain of silver sparks and sent the coruscating material spraying against the far wall. It trickled down the blue surface like stars flowing across the velvet of space. Bruno maneuvered skillfully toward the center of the room, carefully avoiding a miniature waterfall of intense red radiance that gushed forth from nowhere, j The cataract changed color as it spilled down upon and became part of the pink carpet, flowing outward in concentric wavelets. At the point where the red force materialized from nothing were a large ring of yellow energy and a smaller halo of glittering green substance. He returned his attention to the two geometrical forms he had constructed and began molding a third -- a pyramid. With this creation, though, he tried another inj novation. While he fashioned it, he concentrated on a different ; color. And as the pink hue faded from the form, it was replaced by i a golden yellow cast. This object, too, he left suspended while he mentally detached the cube from the floor and elevated it to the height of the first form. Apparently, he summed up, not only could the force substance be changed from one kind of energy, or one color, to another, but it could also be shaped into any form and moved about in any direction or at any speed. Bruno glanced back through the wall and saw Hulen shaking his head while Everard watched with a disdaining interest. The stalking Sphere had, by now, generated almost enough power for another discharge. Its surface was ablaze with restless energy that crackled and threw off a myriad scintillating sparks. Only this time the alien hurled not one but two bolts of destructive force. Bruno easily managed to escape the first. But the second released its full fury on the three geometrical forms he had constructed. They disintegrated, scattering bits of the yellow pyramid and the pink cube and ball about the room. Again the Sphere began its stealthy advance and Bruno gave way warily. He didn't see the orange cylinder until he had almost backed into it. By then it was too late, for already it was spewing out a spray of solid light. As the meshlike substance ensnared him, searing pain stabbed deep into his consciousness, bringing down a curtain of blackness.  en's voice, booming in his ear, jarred him back to wakefulness. He lay on an elevation in his cousin's quarters. "You okay?" Everard asked. Bruno groaned and rolled over. He was aware of a slight blistering sensation along his left arm, the one that had been next to the cylinder of orange force. His robe was charred and there was the biting smell of burned hair about his head. The force substance beneath his back reared up slowly, elevating him to a sitting position. A solicitous hand materialized from the pastel matter of the mound and tenderly explored his aching arm. "I -- I -- Damn! What happened?" "You stumbled into some of that orange stuff," Everard explained. "Told you to watch out for it." "Ol' Blubber took another whack at you after you passed out," added Hulen. "But we pulled you put in time." Bruno looked into the inner compartment The Sphere having gone, it was now dominated by the red cataract that flowed out of the air between the yellow and green rings. Fragments of his pyramid, cube and ball were still plastered against the wall. Everard laughed, derisively. "Now that you've -- ah -- contacted the Sphere, what did he tell you?" Hulen roared in raucous amusement. Bruno managed a weak grin. "Guess it wasn't such a good idea. But did you notice the three forms I used to get his attention?" "What about them?" Hulen asked. "I made them float. I even changed the color of the pyramid. "So?" Everard raised a patiently inquiring eyebrow. "I haven't seen anybody do anything like that with the force substance." Hulen shrugged. "So you did something different. So what?" "Hasn't anybody thought of studying the stuff -- seeing just what can be done with it?" Everard said irritably. "Look, son. We know what we got here. It suits us fine. None of us plan to go around experimenting to get something better. Might mess things up." Nodding severely, Hulen said, "Everard's right. Keep away from that experimental nonsense. Leave things like they are. We got it perfect here. Understand?" Bruno's thoughtful silence was apparently interpreted as acquiescence and the other two resumed their chuckling. Regarding his cousin's singed robe, Hulen peeled back a section of the flooring and dug out another garment. "This'll keep you covered till we make a food-ball trade with the forest folks." Bruno rose beside the mound on which he had been lying. More pink arms than were needed sprouted out of the elevation to help him change into the new robe. "Still want to talk with the Spheres?" asked Everard. "I see where I made my mistake." "Yeah?" Hulen prompted. "It was foolish to try to contact just any Sphere." "How do you figure that?" Everard wanted to know. "What makes you think you wouldn't get the same treatment from all of them?" "Let's go back to the example of the make-believe ant. Its chances would be pretty slim if it tried to communicate with just any human." "Why?" Hulen leaned forward interestedly. "Because it might accidentally select, say, a fussy old woman, or a two-year-old kid, maybe even a drunk or a psycho. What chance would it have then? But if it found somebody in authority -- " "Oh, hell!" Everard broke in. "Let's forget about the Spheres." V the possibilities of force material that reacted to individual thought, becoming opaque or transparent as one wished. Nevertheless, he turned his back on the huge mound and modestly regarded, instead, the clear night sky that shrank before the brilliant display of lambent energy emanating from all immaterial objects of the City. Hulen, less patient and certainly less inhibited, continued to stare into the mound as he called out boisterously for Lea and Sal to hurry it up for their night out on the City. An elderly man poked his head through the wall of the adjacent structure. "Knock it off! We're trying to get some sleep!" Another pair of shoulders and head popped out the side of a second mound. "Quiet! What's all the commotion out there?" Hulen lowered his voice and cupped his hands. But before he could call out again, the two girls came gliding through the radiant wall. "Now," Sal said consolingly, "that didn't take too long, did it?" Her hair was swept up into a double braid that wound around her head like a garland. It gave a classic appearance to her smooth face and Bruno eagerly extended his arm. He realized now that she had seemed a bit plump only in comparison with the inordinately thin girls of his own clan. And for a moment he wistfully wondered how it would be living permanently in the City of Force and enjoying all the luxuries and adventures -- sharing them all with Sal. "What'll it be tonight, boys?" Lea asked, her brassy voice cutting off his line of thought. Grinning, Hulen faced Bruno. "Ever hear of an automobile?" Bruno dredged up the information from his school days: "Fourwheeled contraption that went under its own power. Saw the ruins of one once." "Well, we're going to get around tonight in the next best thing." Hulen rubbed his hands together expectantly. "As a matter of fact, it might even be better than an automobile. Who knows?" "Oh, that'll be fun," said Lea flatly, conveying the impression that this wouldn't be their first experience with such a device. Hulen waved his arms and a section of the radiant surface began reacting to the matrixlike influence of his thoughts. Two broad benches formed, one in front of the other, and they both developed wide, slanting backs. Hulen extended a hand invitingly and ushered Bruno and Sal into the rear seat. He and Lea took the one in front. "I'll drive," he said, and gave Bruno a wink. A parapet, shoulder high, reared up all around them and Sal squealed, "Away we go!"  the force stuff ahead of the vehicle flow up into the forward parapet, work its way down onto the floor of the automobile, up and over the front seat, up and over the back seat and out over the rear parapet. And all the while the shape of the wheelless vehicle  not the car itself moved forward, carrying the occupants along with it as it gained speed. The automobile, Bruno realized, was like a wave spreading across the surface of a pond. The water itself didn't move forward; its configuration did. He and Hulen and the girls were part of the wave and were being swept along with it, wholly undisturbed by the completely frictionless flow of force stuff beneath their bodies. The car, under Hulen's direction, went streaking past row after row of gigantic force mounds, swerving between pylons and spires and sparkling fountains, darting under tunnels of glimmering green-light stuff, curving around ponderous and magnificent edifices of unfamiliar geometrical design and altogether new concepts of color. Occasionally, they zipped past a Sphere or a group of them moving along the broad, level ways between the force buildings. Twice Hulen sent the automobile in looping circles around one of the aliens and zipping in between the ranks of several of them. He drew a bolt of destructive energy from a particularly irate Sphere, but it missed by no less than a hundred feet. "No danger here," he reassured his passengers. "They couldn't begin to keep up with our speed." Lea, acting frightened and enjoying every fninute of it, moved closer to Hulen and clung to his neck while he laughed like a youngster bedeviling grownups. Sal held a firm grip on Bruno's arm and kept her face close against his shoulders to avoid swaying with the motions of the careening car. To Bruno, the novel experience was an utter delight as the wind whipped his robe about him and sportively mussed his hair. The speed was incredible -- easily two or three times as fast as he had ever gone before, even on the back of the Spruce clan's swiftest horse. "How about it, Cuz?" Hulen shouted boastfully above the roar of the wind. "Won't find anything like this in the clan areas, eh?" he could manage in the face of the wind was an expressionless gulp. "This is only one of the things we do for fun," Hulen went on effusively. "Of course it takes a lot of practice to do this stunt, but you'll learn." He produced a food ball for each and passed them around. "I decided on brandy for tonight. Take a taste and tell me what you think." As Bruno expected, it was excellent. But he retreated guardedly into his thoughts. It was clear enough that an intensive campaign was under way to win him over to their way of life, and for the moment he couldn't blame them. In many respects, for those lucky enough to be living in Cities of Force, it was Utopia. Sal set her liquor ball on the seat beside her and retrieved her grip on his arm. "What did you do in the Spruce village, Bruno?" "Farmed. Had a place on the outskirts, not too far from the market area." "It's fun doing things with the soil, isn't it?" "I enjoyed it." He wondered why he had put the verb in the past tense. "You don't ever see any soil around here, unless you peel back all the pink stuff underfoot. Then you find nothing but rocks." "Don't you like it here?" He minated by the intense light radiating from the force edifices all around them. Her eyes, however, were focused on something remote. "Of course I do. It's the soft life, isn't it? What could be better?" Yet she didn't sound too convinced. "I've plenty of friends here now," she went on. "It shouldn't be too long before I decide to set up moundkeeping on my own and get on with my job of raising a family." "With one of those friends?" "Not necessarily." HP HE car tilted backward sharply and Bruno's gangly legs came up from the floor as though defying gravity. He reached forward frantically and seized the front seat to keep from tumbling out the rear. Sal gasped and struggled through a busy few seconds, clinging more frenziedly to him and trying to pull her robe down over her legs at the same time. Then Bruno noticed that the color of the force stuff flowing up from the surface ahead to take the shape of the speeding car was no longer the pastel pink that it had been. Now it was a light blue. After he had steadied himself with one hand and secured a protective grip around the girl's shoulder with the other, he glanced around. They were climbing the steep face of a huge pylon that dwarfed all the other force edifices of the City. It reared so high above the other structures that it would have lost itself in the blackness of night, had it not carried its own soft effulgence along with it. They swept past a towering fountain of inchoate green energy that gushed out the side of the structure and sent its flowing liquid force splattering down the f slope, emitting coruscating emerald sparks all the way to the surface. Hulen turned around, grinning at his cousin's dismay. "Over the top we go," he shouted gleefully. " -- And here we are!" The car leveled off abruptly and jerked to a halt on a small, flat surface that capped the crest of the pylon. Bruno, relaxing his grip too soon, went flying past the front seat and shot through the air, plunging over the brink ahead. But an alert arm of blue force stuff shot out the side of the structure and wrapped itself around his yaist as he started the terrifying sjlide down the slope. It lifted him gently back to the top and set him down beside Hulen and the girls. Like rapidly melting lumps of ice, the form of the automobile shrank and lost itself in the level t op of the pylon. In its place, Huln ordered up a table and chairs and spread several liquor balls out before them. The small orbs glowed like golden apples and their radiance blended elegantly with the pastel-blue luster of their setting. A cool breeze drifted out of the star-filled sky and spilled over the brink of the pylon, to go cascading down on all the lesser force Structures of the iridescent City T the city of force of light. And Bruno let his eyes rove over the smaller, irregular hills and mounds, the cubes and fountains, the serpentine tunnels, the pyramids and truncated cylinders of coruscating energy. Beyond -- beyond the magnificent pattern of metropolitan lights -- stretched the dark, dismal plain. Out there it seemed like another world. "Still think the clan life has anything to offer?" Hulen prodded. "Nothing like this," Bruno admitted. "I nevei thought anything could be so -- luxurious." stood, had arrogantly presented blazing shields of light to the night sky. But underneath those lights had been the solid matter that produced them. Underneath these was only more light -- and uncanny force matter that became almost anything you wanted it to be. "This is just a small town," Lea said casually. "I know someone who went through a green tunnel to one of the other Force Cities. It's ten times bigger than this one." "Where is it?" Sal asked, interested. "Know the Mississippi?" "I studied about it." "Well, it's not too far from the mouth of the river and it's got..." Bruno, whose eyes were becoming accustomed to the splendid display of illumination, lost interest in the conversation and stared down on the rest of the City. Now he could see some of the humans. There was another party of four atop a truncated pyramid a short distance to the south. Closer, off to his left, two men and a girl had constructed a table upon a bulky silver cube. Three parties of four, spaced at intervals of about a block, went shooting down the shaft of an otherwise deserted chute that spiraled around the base of a shining gray obelisk. Below, next to the bottom of their own towering pylon, a huge cloud of pink stuff went drifting by. Comfortably seated on its softness were a man and woman and two children. There were only a few alien Spheres here and there. For the most part, their movements were confined to the surface below or to the curving chutes of green light. And they seemed never to notice the humans. "This building we're on," Bruno asked, "what is it?" Hulen grinned. "Could be their city hall -- that's what you might call it, I mean." He looked away, then snapped his eyes suspiciously back on Bruno. "Say, you're not still thinking about that damned-fool plan of contacting the chief Sphere, are you?" As a matter of fact, Bruno wasn't. He had been, until a moment earlier, but now his gaze was fastened on a great waterfall of radiant energy that dominated the City south of the central pylon. C ascading down from the blackness of night, the crimson cataract seemed to be replenishing the immaterial substance of the force structures, flowing into and assuming the color of the green chutes and the pink surface, the blue mounds, the silver cubes and the orange cylinders. It was as though the very essence of the alien City were poursome unguessable source in another world, another universe. And its point of entry was the mouth of a large yellow ring and a smaller green one that hung, one within the other, above the apex of the cataract. It was the same arrangement he had seen in the mound's inner compartment when he had tried tc  communicate with the Sphere. And now, as he scanned the City, he noticed the lesser crimson water- falls, each surmounted by its pair of yellow and green rings that were suspended motionlessly. "I said," Hulen repeated, "you're not still thinking about contacting the Spheres, are you?" Sal, too, seemed to be awaiting Bruno's answer, her eyes fixed on his lips. Absently, Bruno said, "That's what I came here for." But all the while he was staring beyond the table, concentrating on the force material of the pylon's surface. He mentally ordered up a slender projection of the pale blue substance, detached it and formed it into a ring, changing its color to a soft yellow. "He's certainly obstinate," Lea observed, peevishly lowering her chin onto a handlike projection of blue force stuff that rose obligingly from the table top. "A real crusader," Hulen agreed, with no small amount of scorn. "Why don't you forget it, Cuz?" Bruno maneuvered the yellow ring into a horizontal position, stabilizing it several feet above the pylon and away from the table. Next, he raised another projection from the flat surface and fashioned a smaller, light green circle. "Trying to communicate with them might still be a good idea," he offered, keeping the talk alive so they wouldn't notice what he was doing. "I said forget it!" Hulen snapped. Bruno sent the smaller ring floating up toward the larger one. "If this building we're on is their center of government, we could make an impressive show out of tt. We could get together a whole bunch of people and march -- " "Four's the limit," Sal reminded jevenly, as though she might premm fer that it weren't and that Bruno could go ahead with his plan. " the larger one, he paused, abruptly apprehensive over the results the experiment might produce. He glanced at the others. None of them was aware that he was up to anything. "We could break the rule of four for something as important as contacting the Spheres," he said, to divert their attention. Hulen's teeth showed in a look of exasperation. A blunt hand of force stuff reached out from the surface of the table, seized Bruno's robe and jerked him roughly forward. "Didn't I already tell you," Hulen shouted, "that thousands of people have tried all the schemes -- for hundreds of years?" And a dozen tiny mouths had formed on the surface of the table, each pair of blue lips soundlessly echoing the rebuke. Lea folded her arms disgustedly. "Man, is he ever a creep!" "I wouldn't say that exactly," Sal retorted. "Go ahead, side with him!" Lea shot back. "I guess you still got a lot of hayseed to shake out of your hair too!" Hulen rose to assume the role of conciliator, and the hand of force substance that had gripped Bruno's robe sank back into the V table. "Look, kids, this is no way to enjoy a night out." Exempt from the conversation for the moment, Bruno returned his attention to the rings of frozen energy. Once more he moved the smaller toward the larger. Lea stood there arrogantly, her hands thrust on her hips, as she glowered at Hulen. "I don't expect to enjoy a night on the City with this drip! What's he trying to do, anyway?" "Whatever it is," Sal said, "at least he thinks it's right." "Yeah. And you probably do too." "What if I do?" Sal returned defiantly. "Well, you can have the lunkhead! We got the best deal anybody ever had. And he wants to yank it out from under us!" Just then Bruno finally got the small green ring centered directly above the large yellow one. He lowered it carefully into place, until the x one was perfectly enclosed within the other. There was a great'flare of crimmouth of the double halo. Lea and Sal screamed and sprang aside, riding a crest of blue pylon material to the far edge of the truncated surface. Hulen lunged up, seized Bruno's arm and dragged him to safety. "It's all right," Bruno assured r them. "I did it. I made the rings! and -- " Hulen and Lea were gawking at him as though he were crazy. "You did it?" Lea asked, her voice skeptical and vehement. "Experimenting again, eh?" Hulen said. Bruno separated the rings and the cataract was snipped off. "That settles it!" said Lea. "I'm going home. Hulen, either you're going to see that I get there safely or you're going to stay here with -- with that!" Scores of slender fingers sprang up from the blue pylon substance to point incriminatingly at Bruno. Then Lea cast herself over the edge of the mesa and went skidding down the incline. Hulen caught his robe up between his legs and leaped over after her. "See you later," he threw back. "Keep him out of trouble, Sal." Bruno watched the pair slide down the slope. As they neared the bottom, a ripple of force stuff built up before them and grew into a restraining wave that checked their speed. VI S AL walked to the edge and stood gazing thoughtfully out over the City. "Why did you have to spoil everything and start ex-j perimenting with that red stuff?' she asked him reproachfully. Reminded of the pair of rings, he glanced back and, with a brief volition, sent them hurtling away -- over the city, past the outer wall of force, through the dismal night air above the plain. He watched the faint, luminous specks disappear over the horizon. "I thought you were with me, Sal. I got the impression you wanted to see me contact the Spheres, that maybe you'd like to find out how this force stuff works." "But don't you see that's not the point?" She turned abruptly toward him. "The fact is that the Spheres can't be contacted." He pretended to concede the argument. "All right. But why not find out all we can about this force stuff?" She raised her knuckles troubledly to her lips. "I don't know. I'm confused. Maybe we ought to be satisfied with what we have and not expect more out of a perfect setup." "But things aren't perfect," he pointed out. "Not as long as people like you and me are looked on as pests. Not as long as there are Hulens and Leas who are satisfied with that role." She hid her uncertainty in silence. "That red energy is interesting," he said, thinking aloud. "All it takes to get as much of it as you want is a pair of rings -- rings that can be formed from any of the force substance." "But why would anyone want that deadly stuff?" "Because it's obviously the basic force material of the City. From it come all the other kinds of energy matter." Sal was showing a more direct interest now. "But where does it come from?" "Everard said the Spheres probably came from another universe. Maybe the red force stuff is what separates our universe from theirs -- a sort of sandwiched-in layer. And when you put the two rings together, it opens a door for the energy to gush through." "What do the two rings have to do with it?" He laughed. "How would I know? But the important thing is that we don't have to know! Suppose a super-intelligent mouse learns he can produce fire by rubbing two sticks together? He could do it without knowing why, couldn't he?" A N alarm sounded in the depths of Bruno's consciousness. Then he noticed the pale blue cast suffusing the girl's features had taken on a subtle yellow tinge. Instinctively, he flung her to the floor and hurled himself down beside her. And the pylon sprouted a pair of solicitous arms that reared up to grasp them protectively, like a mother clutching her children to her bosom. The bolt of destructive energy crackled inches over their heads and spent itself in the empty night air. They both then saw the Sphere that had emerged through an opening in the structure. Its yellow surface clouded over with a faint purple-white hue as it generated energy for another blast. Bruno shoved the girl over the brink and leaped after her. They went tumbling down the incline together. Near the bottom, he gradually piled up a wave of force stuff in front of them to slow their descent. He enlarged the obstruction and brought them to a complete stop just as they reached the surface. "You all right?" he asked. She rose unevenly. Three props reared up out of the energy material to steady her. "Nothing broken." She smiled shakingly. "Say, you are learning! And thanks. We could have both been -- " Her composure snapped and she was caught up in a helpless reaction to the narrow escape. She fell against him and sobbed with her face buried in his robe. An excessively solicitous arm of force stuff sprang up to offer her the support he was already providing. Angrily, he slapped it away. "It's horrible here, Bruno!" she said bitterly. "It looks soft and luxurious. But death can come at almost any instant!"  "I know, I know. Come, let's get away from here." Bruno found he had no aptitude for duplicating Hulen's wave-form automobile. So, instead, he saw Sal home on a simple tobagganlike contraption. It served almost as well, except that when they neared their destination, he failed to maintain control over the upturned edge. Losing its identity as part of the mobile wave configuration, the forward curve had suddenly swept back, swiping him and the girl from the pseudo-sled. After he watched her go into her mound, he turned reluctantly and headed back for Hulen's place. Before he could take a second step, though, the inevitable wave of pink force built up behind his heels and began moving him effortlessly forward. Without resisting, he let the undulating carpet carry him along while he concerned himself with a nagging indecision. Of course he intended to contact the Spheres! Wasn't that his only motive for coming to the City? But somehow he suspected he might ultimately be diverted from his purpose. Or maybe his'j uncertainty was simply a reaction to the unreasonable and unexpected opposition he was meeting. He, Bruno of the Spruce clan, was going to come blustering into  the City and merely announce his i intention of setting up Man's first contact with the Spheres. Thousands were going to strew rose petals in his path and cheer him on like a conquering liberator. Then, when it was all over, they were going to hoist him to their shoulders in a triumphant march back to the clean area, joyously proclaiming freedom from the the aliens. Nuts! He sneered at his own naivete -- at his failure even to suspect the City dwellers might resent his interference. mering mounds and towering force structures that were limned Bruno felt suddenly depressed. As though in response to his vague thoughts of fatigue and disillusionment, the wave that had been pushing him along washed to a halt and the omnipresent carpet rolled upward in front of him. Swiftly, it burgeoned into the shape of a reclining chair with a stout arm rest that bore an ornately curved pitcher and tumbler. Within seconds, the surface of the pitcher frosted over, inviting attention to the icy water that was condensing both within and without the container. The other arm rest grew a slender hand that I reached out and took him enticingly by the elbow to draw him forward. He thrust the congenial hand aside and lashed out in a vicious kick. The entire complex of com fort shrank away, flowing regretfully back into the amorphous pink carpeting. That was his trouble, he decided abruptly. The entire City must be luring him with its luxuries and pleasures, captivating him as it had bewitched Hulen and Everard and Lea. But then, as his surge of emotional resentment abated, he realized, after all, that the City itself was not a living thing -- that whatever it did to accommodate him was but an impersonal manifestation, a peculiar reaction of the force stuff to the pressure of either conscious or wishful thought. And if Hulen and the others had been captivated, it wasn't as much by the City as it was by their own insatiable desire for the easy way. He was determined it wouldn't happen to him. He started forward again and once more the energy layer came alive to form an impelling wave. Rejecting the offering, he stamped vehemently on the rippling carpet. And, for as far as he could see, the ground thrust up a thousand ill-shaped legs, each ending in a hobnailed boot that struck down vengefully in a sympathetic gesture of self-punishment. Bruno, suddenly struck with the humor of the incident, bent backward, laughing aloud. And all the extended legs retracted into the parent mass while scores of faces, featureless except for full lips and bulging jowls, materialized in their places. They shared his amusement, roaring in soundless mirth. Striding resolutely forward under his own power now, he turned sharply around the projecting wall of a mound and almost collided with a Sphere which was just emerging from the blue structure. Even before he could get set, the alien loosed a searing bolt that struck close enough to singe his robe. He lunged aside, berating himself for having been caught off guard. As he continued maneuvering defensively, his resentment grew and, almost unconsciously, he found himself swiftly fashioning a yellow and green ring out of the force substance. While he escaped another discharge, he sent one circlet hurtling to its proper position within the other. When the stream of red energy rushed through, he mentally molded it into a lance of lightninglike force and hurled it at the Sphere. The alien had been generating another discharge. But the impact of the crimson force rocked him visibly and the flush of yellow energy along his surface was dissipated in a shower of useless sparks. The Sphere lurched backward, j collided with the mound from which he had emerged, bounced off and went scurrying away. Bruno awakened to a vague awareness that he was being studiously watched. He raised himself on an elbow and discovered that the crude sleeping mound he had constructed the night before had metamorphosed into a duplicate of his four-poster back home. The spruce headboard was authentically colored and even its grain looked real. The pink force material on which he lay had taken on the soft white color of a sheet. Everard and Hulen stood beside the bed, looking soberly down at him. The old man ran a stiff, speculative finger over his chin. "Hulen says you're still thinking about messing around chummylike with the Blubber Balls." Actually, Bruno was still uncertain whether he should go through with his intention of contacting the Spheres. Would the aliens recognize human intelligence and withdraw, leaving the people free to i develop their iwn world as they j had once befc ;? Would there be i cooperation a I help from the Spheres? Or would the result be something awful -- something he hadn't even considered? But the men's attitude decided him. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. "I think I'll give it another try. Maybe this round I'll pick the right place and time." Two servile arms of the floor groped for his sandals, found them and slipped them on his feet. Hulen and Everard watched the interlude with impatient misgiving. "You're not going to communicate with the Spheres," Hulen said finally, his words heavy with determination. "What the hell, son!" Everard exclaimed. "You want to bring on another extermination?" "You ever been in on one of them?" Hulen persisted. "Women grabbing up kids and running for their lives. Old folks like Everard here scurrying for safety and not making it. Everybody pouring out of the City." Bruno rose and one of the bedposts extended a hand that began smoothing his robe about him. "We help. Once they learn -- " "Like hell!" Hulen shot back. , "The only thing they're interested in about us is stamping us out!" "They might change their mind if they knew we weren't just dumb pests. Anyway, for every one of us taking it easy in the City, there are thousands having a rough time in the forests. Why should we be entitled to the easy life?" Hulen drew indignantly erect. our chances with the Spheres and the force stuff!" "That may be so, but the main point is that things are tough in the clan areas because the Spheres own the world. And I don't think the Spheres even realize we're at all put out. So I figure we might as well try to get through to them. What can we lose?" Everard shook his head distraughtly. "What can we lose? By agitating 'em, you'll make 'em aware of our presence. Then there'll be an extermination. Plenty of us'll get killed -- we ain't had that kind of big-scale workout in years. And it'll be months before those who are left can get back in the City." hand on his cousin Bruno's shoulder. "We got unwritten laws, Cuz. They say don't do anything to advertise our presence; keep under cover; if you gotta go out of your hole, don't congregate; don't go in the open any oftener than you have to." Uncertainly, Bruno looked down at his palms. Another pair of hands shot up from the floor to present themselves eagerly for his inspection. "Changed your mind?" Everard asked anxiously. If he had, it wouldn't have been as a result of their arguments. Anyway, the goal of contacting the Spheres had been with him for as long as he could remember. Still waiting for an answer, Hulen said, "We don't have any courts here, but the boys have their own brand of kangaroo justice. How about it?" "No." Everard and Hulen exchanged grim looks. "We watched you last night," Hulen said. "Know something? You're developing a rare sort of control over this force stuff. Take this bed here, for instance -- " "It's a form of subconscious control," Everard added. "Pretty damned dangerous." "How so?" "Why, your emotions can run away with you when you get excited. You might make the energy material do things to hurt others." "Fifteen, twenty years ago, we had another fellow with the same kind of control," Hulen offered. knowing it. His subconscious ran away with him. They found two guys strangled by hands of force stuff." Everard winced reminiscently. "Even before that, he gave us hell with his nightmares. The monsters he dreamed up became real -- force stuff, sure, but you shoulda seen 'em!" "What are you getting at?" "We had a meeting last nightafter we watched you put on that show outside the girls' mound," Hulen explained. "We decided it would be too dangerous for you to stay on in the City." "And," Everard concluded, "the boys said to tell you that you got till tonight to get out." A S far as Bruno was concerned, that practically settled it. He was just obstinate enough to react the wrong way to their threats. And if the great pylon they had visited the night before was the City's seat of government, he would have plenty of time, before the day was over, to attempt another contact. The determined manner in which he went gliding through the wall of the mound must have left Hulen and Everard with no doubt as to his purpose. Fortified by the brightness of a warm summer's sun overhead, tures cast an intense glare and he shaded his eyes with a hand as he struck out for Sal's quarters. But when he rounded the next mound, he saw the girl gliding anxiously in his direction. "Bruno!" She reached him and caught his arm. "They had a meeting last night and -- " I "Yes, I know. They decided to run me out of town." "That's not all. A delegation from the other side of town attended. On the way home, the whole bunch of them were seen by a group of Spheres!" He glanced at the broiling sun and wiped a film of perspiration from his forehead. "I suppose that means -- " But Sal drew in a dismayed breath and backed away, staring apprehensively over his shoulder. At the same time, he was conscious of a dark shadow moving over them. He whirled around. The thing that had seized her attention was a tree. Rising out of the omnipresent pink carpet, it grew swiftly, expanding its trunk, sending out a branch here, a twig there, covering itself with a luxuriant dome of green foliage. Then he recognized it. It was a replica of the shade tree behind his house. "It's all right," he said, turning back toward Sal. The shadow of the tree brought a delightful coolness. Its branches swayed gently, sending down soft currents of refreshing air. She dismissed the phenomenon with a shrug. "About those men ; being seen by the Spheres -- everyI body's afraid there'll be an exterI mination! Some of the people on j the South Side are already packing up and heading toward the plain." "They figure it's going to be that bad?" She nodded. "Maybe we ought to get out too, Bruno." He ran a hand uncertainly through his hair. It seemed that everything was lining up against him, trying to keep him from communicating with the aliens. surface. But even as he seated himself and drew his knees up reflectively under his chin, the force stuff smoothed out and sprouted a neatly clipped carpet of artificial grass. "Are you still going to try to contact the Spheres?" she asked, down on her knees beside him. "I want to. I think it's the right thing to do. But I'm afraid of what might happen. I don't know what to expect -- how the Spheres will react." "Well, they'll realize we're worthy of their help and respect, won't they?" she asked hopefully. He didn't answer. Instead, he absently watched all the energy structures around him send glistening streamers toward the sun to collect droplets of food stuff from its rays. Then, as he remembered that he hadn't had breakfast yet, thin ribbons of silver also began growing out of the foliage of the tree. The food energy that condensed on them rolled into clusters and drifted through the leaves to attach themselves to the lowest branches, hanging there like golden grapes. He picked a cluster for himself and handed one to the girl. "They've got to accept us!" he said. "I don't see how they could react any other way. But the others have made me doubt my own judgment." "You've planned on contacting them for a long time, haven't you?" "All my life. It's been like a goal." She grasped his arm. "Maybe it's not so important anyway. Maybe you're seeing it all out of proportion." "But doesn't the world belong to us?" he protested. "I don't mean that. I mean about feeling you had to contact the aliens. Don't you see that's a dream everybody has, to a degree? It's like wanting to hunt treasure on a desert island, or become chief of the superclan, or -- like they used to say before the Spheres -- nothing more than an idle childhood fancy that you've viewed out of proportion. But even if you don't contact the Spheres, you've been luckier than most. You've come to the City. You've had a chance at your goal." "Sal -- " He placed a hand over hers, not quite sure what he wanted to say. "Would you go back to the Spruce clan with me -- now?" She fixed her eyes on an iridescent spire and said, "Yes, if you want me to." He glanced at her hair, gold like the color of a food ball filled with energy and sustenance from the sun, and at her eyes, more deeply blue than the most vivid mound in the radiant City. "Thanks," he said, rising resolutely. "That's what I want too. But I'm going through with what I came here for." ing its foliage to develop a hand, reached down and tugged urgently on his robe. Another grew a half-balled fist with a long, curving finger that tapped him insistently on the shoulder and pointed behind him. Only then did he realize that what he had mistaken for the sibilant swish of leaves over the past few seconds had actually been whispered voices. He whirled around. On the other side of the tree Hulen, Everard and a score other robed figures were advancing furtively. Knowing they had been discovered, the crowd of men drew erect with determination. "Don't try to pull anything fancy with the force stuff," Everard warned gruffly.  Hulen gestured with a fist. "We  brought along enough help to override your control, no matter how good you are." Several hostile arms of force material sprang up all around Bruno and jockeyed for vantage points. He gave Sal a shove and sent her coasting away on a hastily devised sled. The tree, which he had been maintaining with a practically subliminal intent, collapsed and was quickly reabsorbed by the radiant carpet. "So you're going to go through with it anyway?" Everard laughed challengingly. "Look, Cuz," Hulen said. "You already got us in enough trouble, but maybe it ain't too late. How about clearing out without raising any more stink?" "You said I had till tonight." 'We changed our minds. Out you go now!" One of the arms of force darted forward, seized his robe and spun him around. Another changed instantly into a booted foot and aimed a kick that only grazed his thigh. Bruno sent the pink stuff billowing up in a great wave which swept down on the others. But a second enormous swell formed in i front of the first and met it in j a head-on clash that shot a geyser of radiance skyward along the entire front. The nearest menacing arm developed a gigantic hand which thrust forward and caught Bruno in its grip, pinning his elbows to his side. Before the breath could be squeezed out of him, though, he went on the defensive -- half a dozen smaller arms materialized beside him to grapple with the attacking hand, prying it loose and forcing it back down into the parent mass. But the force carpet convulsed suddenly beneath him and he lost his balance, falling over forward. With the speed of striking snakes, tendril after tendril lashed out of the sea of pink substance, ensnaring his arms and fastening him against the surface. A gigantic fist came crashing against his temple and drew back for another blow. He shook his head to clear it, glanced at the others. They were still compactly assembled, faces tense with the mental effort behind their assault. green force material hovering several feet above them. It wasn't until he watched the yellow circlet rise like a smoke ring from the surface, however, that he realized his own unconscious direction was behind the preparation to send a stream of deadly red energy pouring down on his attackers. He halted the meeting of the rings. Hulen and Everard were, after all, only following their convictions. And even though they were fanatically resisting the threat to their easy life, they weren't out to kill him. He summoned the rings forward to a point halfway between himself and the others. Then he moved one decisively within the other. The coruscating flow of crimson energy gushed forth, cascading down to the surface. There was instant defeat in the terrified expressions of the others as they retreated before the cataract. Everard bolted first, scurrying for the closest mound. The tendrils that had held Bruno captive relaxed their grip and slipped off. And, all around him, the other threatening projections of force stuff melted away as Hulen and the rest of the group followed Everard in full flight. Bruno swiftly regained his feet and, with a casual hand gesture, separated the rings. The energy flow ceased and he turned to look for Sal. But suddenly she went streaking past, frenziedly gliding away on an erratic wave of propelling force. She was headed for the same mound into which the others had disappeared. Even before he turned to see what had frightened the girl, he knew what he would find there. The huge Sphere, faint ripples of quiescent energy coursing languidly across its surface, confronted him. It was as thought somewhere deep within the alien form there was a pair of hidden eyes that held him in a speculative stare. But there was no violent display of coalescing energy across the thing's surface. And it wasn't advancing. Instead, it drifted slowly -- curiously? -- over to the pair of rings Bruno had molded. The impulse to follow the others in flight abated and was quickly replaced by the triumphant awareness that here, at last, was the opportunity to reach his goal. Here, finally, was a Sphere whose first reaction to the presence of a human wasn't a vengeful, impulsive lance of lethal energy -- a Sphere whose inquisitiveness invited trial of Bruno's plan to contact the aliens. He felt both humble and proud as he realized that within his reach was the goal of a lifetime -- that now he might accomplish the purpose which had drawn him through miles of forest and across stretches of plain to the City of Force. And when he returned to his clan, he might well be bringing the news that the period of Man's humiliation upon his own world was at an end. The Sphere drew up before Bruno's hovering rings and remained motionless for perhaps two minutes. Then, obviously in compliance with the alien's direction, i the circlets came together sudden" ly and released a spurt of fiery energy. They separated again and drifted to a new position near Bruno. discernible features on the Sphere's surface, Brnno imagined the creature had turned to "face" him expectantly and observe what he, in turn, would do with the pair of force objects. He ordered one halo inside the other, producing another brief gusher of crimson force. The alien conjured up two new rings from the glimmering material of the surface and used them to create a waterfall of radiant energy. Bruno duplicated the feat without hesitation. And, as the Sphere drifted animatedly around in an expression of excitement, Bruno was even more exultant in the conviction that at last his efforts were meeting with full success. Now he could almost sense the sudden respect the alien creature must feel toward him. He drew haughtily erect with newfound self-assurance and dignity. But wait -- there was more! As the Sphere towered over him, he was aware of a curious sensation at the back of his eyes. Or maybe it was deep within his inner ears. The vague "feeling," however, wasn't restricted to his sight and hearing. It was something he could even taste and smell. Frightened by the incomprehensible assault on all his senses at the same time, he gave ground. But a calm sensation of satisfaction and reassurance swept over him and he was at once certain there was no immediate danger. He closed his eyes and his perception of things that had no apparent existence became stronger, more vivid. It was as though he could still "see" the Sphere and as though the alien had extended a gossamer web of light and sound, feeling, taste and smell toward him. In his hyperphysical perception, Bruno eagerly watched himself put forth a similar bridge of communicative thought toward the Sphere a web that might have been woven of imperceptible force threads. There was an abrupt meeting of the two projections and instantly Bruno's mind seemed to be caught up in a vortex of ideas and symbols -- words that weren't words at all but more like fierce, raw units of basic meaning, stripped of all linguistic character. It was as if he were encountering the symbols for the first time and indelibly learning their meaning simultaneously. If he had been called upon to translate the impressions, the closest he could have come to transposing them into language would have been: "What the hell, little vermin! What gives?" # UT there was no threat behind the communication, only amused excitement and intense curiosity. Bruno pressed his success and quickly sent back picture images of men -- proud men -- and the knowledge at their disposal. In one great outburst of emotion, he presented the case of humanity surrounded by its once-huge cities and vast and intricate machines, of Man the thinker, dealing in abstract thought, of Man the experimenter, traveling in his land, air and underwater contraptions. He conjured up idea pictures of people in their compact and efficient settlements, and he even threw in the concept of destructive and annoying insects and rodents and small winged creatures that always followed humans wherever they went. These, he proposed with great dignity, were the pests -- the real pests. Not Man himself. In his next series of picture symbols, he likened humanity to the Spheres and offered the suggestion that there should be intellectual kinship between the two species. To demonstrate his point, he transmitted the formula for the circumference of a circle, the recipe for making corn pone, the number of feet in a mile, how to find the height of a tree by triangulation, the method of determining the volume of a sphere. Bruno felt reasonably certain that the last bit of knowledge he had offered in evidence, hitting close to home as it did, was bound to gain a special degree of respect from the alien. And he knew he was succeeding! He was convinced the Sphere was tremendously impressed by his mental qualifications, by the intelligence of humanity as a whole. Moreover, he suspected that the alien must now be regretting its race's arrogance and disdain over the centuries for the creatures they had regarded only as vermin nuisances. This last thought, too, he sent over the web of communication -- in the form of a mildly chiding question. The gossamer bridge of empathy quivered with the surprised incredulity of the Sphere. And a swell of conceptual impulses flooded Bruno's senses and arranged themselves into a meaningful sequence: "Is true, ugly little pest?" Bruno began a discourse on the cultural achievements of mankind. But the alien cut him short with another avalanche of picture images and symbols that somehow managed to seem like words: "Collector ring trick -- each pest can tap all-powerful force?" Bruno responded with a convincing surge of affirmation. No sense in letting the Sphere find out the others were too content with their roles as parasites even to think of experimenting with the force substance. "Do it again, the collector ring feat," the Sphere urged against a background of persistent skepticism. Breaking contact with the creature, Bruno directed the formation of another pair of halos from the sparkling carpet. He tinted them yellow and green and willed their mid-air meeting. He let the crimson force pour through momentarily, then separated the circlets. "Is enough," the alien conceded, beginning to move about excitedly once more. IX derous surge of thought from the Sphere. Only this time it wasn't directed at Bruno. Rather, it seemed to spread out over the immediate area and toward the center of the City. He recognized; the purpose behind this flow of; pure meaning that required noj medium of language for trans- mission. It was an anxious sumI moning of other nearby aliens, of'. those of authority who were elsewhere in the City. And the response was almost instantaneous. Spheres came drifting out of their mounds, discharging paraphysical emanations of curiosity and surprise. Bruno glanced back at the strucin which Sal and the others were hiding. Most of them were now staring puzzledly out at him and the aliens. They couldn't know what was going on, but it wouldn't be long before they would find out. There were more than a score of Spheres collected around him and the other alien now, all directing eager questions at the latter. And as Bruno acquired more experience with direct psychic communication, it was even easier for him to understand the exchange of meaning among the creatures. He gathered eventually from their conversation that the alien with which he had established contact was #. gM. A huge tube of green radiance came hurtling over the nearby force structures and arched down to the surface. Two Spheres zipped down the shaft and drifted out its end. They hurried over to #. gM. Bruno only stood there, waiting patiently. The next move,, after alll, was up to them. i "Is this the super-pest?" one of the newcomers asked skeptically, the direct flow of meaning seeming to come through to Bruno not quite as crudely as before. "This is the one, Excellency," #. gM replied respectfully. "You will observe it is not scurrying away." "You probably tried to stomp it and only scored a near miss." "Oh, no, Excellency! It converses rationally. It knows how to manipulate the collector rings." Evidently they weren't aware that, by virtue of the psychic bridge #. gM had helped him construct, Bruno was attuned to their exchange. Or, if they were, they were ignoring it. "Are you sure you haven't taken on too much of a charge?" asked the other tube-traveling Sphere. "Of course not, Eminence. Test it for yourself and you'll see." Bruno shifted uneasily before the creatures, realizing only now the compromising position he was in. If anything should go wrong, he was virtually hemmed in by an entire assembly of Spheres. But, of course, nothing could go wrong. Still, Excellency and Eminence were emitting disconcerting emanations, as were all the other aliens in the circle. Nor was there anything markedly friendly about their paraphysical background hum. "We shall see that it's properly tested," Excellency promised disdainfully. "But first, just in case it should check out as intelligent, we'll prepare an immediate extermination and nip this thing before it starts." lously. Extermination! What did the Sphere mean by that? "Even if it's not true that they're growing intelligent," Eminence stated, "an extermination is long overdue. I'm glad this happened, if that's what it takes to get some action." Eminence went streaking back to the green tube. Excellency drifted over toward Bruno and #. gM followed close behind. "I do hope you're wrong," said Excellency, badly upset. "We've been plagued enough by these creatures, considering that they're mere vermin. Great Energy! Think how awful it would be if it turned out that they were smart enough to manipulate our own basic forces!" So that was it! Horrified, Bruno shrank away from the pair of Spheres. He felt the vivid bridge of direct communication spread out from Excellency to engulf him. Desperately, he fought to avoid contact. He forced his attention away from the creatures surrounding him, away from the City itself. And he dwelled, instead, on the simple thought of an idle stroll through the forest -- a mental preoccupation that would betray nothing of the intellectual complexity of Man. Maybe he could discredit #. gM's credibility. At least he had the caustic skepticism of Excellency on his side. And all the while he could sense the alien's examining, questioning probe. After the pressure finally let up, Bruno gingerly extended an imperceptible web of psychic perception toward the others. "I see nothing intelligent in this creature," Excellency told #. gM quite angrily. "But that's impossible! It has orderly thoughts! It can -- Pest thing!" #. gM's attention was suddenly directed full on Bruno. "Form the rings! Collect the basic force! Show Excellency!" There was a burst of peevish amusement from Excellency, then a facetious taunt: "Yes, creature, form the rings and tap the energy!" Bruno inched away from the pair of Spheres and glanced hopelessly around for a breach in the circle of aliens. A projection of force material rose obligingly from the surface and started to form a hand to point the way. But he stomped it down deliberately, determined not to betray his facility with the energy stuff. "Intelligent indeed!" said Excels lency scornfully, jeering at Bruno's! action. "But," #. gM began, "I tel you it did -- " ! "Enough! First X# reports being attacked by one of these creatures. And now this!" "But that proves it, doesn't it?" "It proves nothing! X# has already submitted himself for shock rebalancing. After this demonstration of hysteria, I suggest you do the same." The concept translated as "suggest," but actually was much more severe. Bruno was aware of the intense emanation of confused fear that poured from #. gM. The Sphere lunged backward, bolted through the circle of aliens and lumbered off between two mounds. "After him!" Excellency ordered. Bruno barely escaped being trampled in the rush of alien forms past him. He conjured up an immense wave of propelling force and let himself be washed off toward the mound where Sal was hiding. Grim-faced, Hulen and Everard came out to meet him. The frenzied cry came from the direction of the next mound. The wave form dissipated beneath Bruno, lowering him back to the surface, as he turned his attention to the new distraction. Sal and the others came out of the mound and stared off into the distance. "Ex-term-e-nashun! Ex-term-enhshun!" I A robed figure came into sight, I gliding forward, occasionally losing control over his propelling wave, tripping and falling. "They're coming from the south!" he shouted at the group. "Spread the warning!" Hulen and the others exchanged frightened glances, then turned and shot away in various directions. Sal glided over and seized Bruno's hand. "We've got to get out of the City! They're coming with the red stuff! It goes through everything -- nothing can stop it!" People were pouring out of the mounds now, stumbling over themselves in a frantic rush for the outer force walls. And yet Bruno resisted the girl's insistent tug, his eyes focused sickly on infinity. "I was wrong, Sal," he said. "To Hulen and Everard, I was nothing more than a pest that they had to put up with. Oh, they figured all along they might have to get tough to keep me from going through with my plan. But when they found out I had a special control over the force stuff, I was no longer a simple inconvenience. I became an intolerable nuisance." "There's no time to discuss it, Bruno! We've got to get out!" With her words, several decidedly feminine arms reached up from the radiant carpet to pull urgently on his robe. "It would be the same thing if we contacted the Spheres and proved we're intelligent creatures," he continued soberly. "As long as they think we're just dumb pests, they won't mind us hanging around, if we don't disturb them too much. But if they learn we have brains too, then they'd really go to work on us -- in the City, in the forests, everywhere!" He moved forward slowly, his preoccupation creating a resistance that made it harder for Sal to manipulate her wave of propulsion. "It would be the same thing," he concluded, "if we suddenly found out mice were many times more intelligent than we supposed. We wouldn't greet them with open arms. We'd be all the more determined to stamp them out, because we'd know that smart mice would be much more of a menace than dumb ones." line of Spheres, then turned and fled with the girl. He would have liked to stay behind for a while and see how they would react to a few really searing blasts of crimson energy from the double rings. But then he realized that the point was not to let them know what formidable foes the humans would someday make -- given enough time to build their own cities of force and learn more about manipulating the energy. Sal tightened her grip on his hand. "Those rings -- they're following us, Bruno!" He looked back. Only a few feet behind and above them, the yellow and green circlets that had hovered over the heads of Hulen's group came drifting along like trained birds. Bruno smiled appreciatively. It was as though the rings, which were actually reacting to his unconscious directives, were well ahead of him in foreseeing the need he would soon have for them. In a moment, they were through the glistening white outer wall. Their smooth glide stopped as the propelling wave form ran out of the pink radiance and came to an end. He stood briefly at the foot of the wall and watched the exodus of humans, stumbling across the rock-strewn plain and filtering into the forest. With an expression of patient sympathy, Sal gazed after them. "It'll be months before they can get back into the City." "If we can round them up," he said, "I don't think they'll ever want to go back." She looked puzzedly at him. He sent his two force rings drifting ahead and positioned the smaller within the larger. As the cataract of raw red energy poured forth, he changed it into pink radiance. Then he sent the rinffis floating toward the forest, letting them lay down a narrow carpet of pastel stardust. The bulky proportions of a river barge took shape before them, centered on the glistening strip, and several courtly hands stretched out to help him and the girl aboard. Smoothly, the craft moved off, maintaining a distance of several feet behind the radiant waterfall that provided the substance for its form. As they drifted along, the river of light dissipated into nothingness behind them, leaving once again only the bare plain. And, in their wake, scores of hands reared above the surface of the pseudo-stream to wave farewell.      Putting the next issue together is an exciting guessing game, and as you can probably sense in this one, we're having fun with it. We intend to go right on seeing how many different combinations can be found. In this issue, for instance, are one novella and two novelets that are regulation length; they'd have fitted fine, no trouble at all, into the old Galaxy. But the five short stories, without a skinny little vignette or squib with a title among them? And the expanded editorial? Not a chance! They'd have exploded the works! Well, let's start the next issue with another challenge: There's a big -- but big -- novella on hand by Frederik Pohl that would have jammed all else against the walls like a circus giant in a subway train at rush hour. Too huge to be a novella, not long enough to be a serial, it frustratingly stood around in Pohl's workshop with absolutely no place to go. Instead of asking you to be surprised how many stories are not being written because they can't be housed in any ordinary magazine, we'd rather have you rejoice with us that now we can invite the authors to go right ahead and write them. Pohl's burly -- novella? Short novel? We'll call it novella, but you know what we mean. In his novella, there are the most sinister aliens you've ever met, sinister not because they are hostile, but because they are not! They merely have to know all about us -- whatever makes us go, whatever makes And with that towering, powerful Pohl story to build an issue around, the supporting cast of stories and features can't, we assure you, be anything but interesting! security plan I had something better than investing for the future... the future investing in me! wi JW Y mother warned me," I Marilyn said again, X T B "to think twice before I married a child prodigy. Look for somebody good and solid, she said, like Dad -- somebody who will put something away for your old age." I tapped a transistor, put a screwdriver across a pair of wires and watched the spark. Marilyn was just talking to pass the time. She really loves me and doesn't mind too much that I spend my spare time and money building a time machine. Sometimes she even believes that it might work. She kept talking. "I've been thinking -- we're past thirty now and what do we have? A lease on a restaurant where nobody eats, and a time machine that doesn't work." She sighed. "And a drawerful of pawn tickets we'll never be able to redeem. My silver, my camera, my typewriter..." I added a growl to her sigh. "My microscope, my other equipment... "Uncle Johnson will have them for his old age," she said sadly. "And we'll be lucky if we have anything." I felt a pang of resentment. Uncle Johnson! It seemed that every time I acquired something, Uncle Johnson soon came into possession of it. We'd been kids together, although he was quite a few years older, a hulking lout in the sixth grade while I was in the first, and I graduated from grammar school a term ahead of him. Of course I went on to high school and had a college degree at fifteen, being a prodigy. Johnson went to work in his uncle's pawn shop, sweeping the floor and so on, and that's when we started calling him Uncle. This wasn't much of a job because Johnson's uncle got him to work for almost nothing by promising he would leave him the pawn shop when he died. And it didn't look as if much would come of this, because the uncle was not very old and he was always telling people a man couldn't afford to die these days, what with the prices undertakers were charging. shave, I had a dozen papers published in scientific journals, all having to do with the nature of time. Time travel became my ambition and I was sure I saw a way to build a time machine. But it took years to work out the details, and nobody seemed interested in my work, so I had to do it all myself. Somehow I stopped working long enough to get a wife, and we had to eat. So we ran this little hash house and lived in the back room, and at least we got our food wholesale. And Johnson's uncle, fell down the cellar stairs and split his skull open. So Johnson became the owner of a thriving business after giving his uncle a simple funeral, because he knew his uncle wouldn't have wanted him to waste any more money on that than he had to. "But we have a time machine," Marilyn said fondly. "That's something Johnson would give us a lot on -- if it worked." "We almost have a time machine," I said, looking around at my life's work. Our kitchen was the time machine, with a great winding of wires around it to create the field I had devised. The doors had been a problem that I solved by making them into switches, so that when they were closed the coils made the complete circuit of the room. "Almost," I repeated. "After twenty years of work, I am through except for a few small items -- " I looked at her pleadingly...  v '... u' "It will run about twenty dollars. Do you think -- ?" She didn't care much for the idea, but finally she slid off the wedding ring. "You'll redeem this first thing, Ted? Before any of the rest of the stuff?" I promised and took off at a dead run. Johnson didn't have to inspect the ring; he'd seen it before, and he counted out twenty dollars. That was the only item he'd give me a decent price on. He knew I'd be back for it. "How's the time machine coming along, Ted?" He had a little smirk, the way some people do when they hear I'm building a time machine. "Get in touch with Mars yet?" "I have no interest in Mars," I told him. "I plan to make contact with the future -- about thirty years from now. And for your information, the time machine is practically finished. The first test will be tonight." He wasn't smirking now, because he never forgot the way I passed him in school and he had a good respect for my brain. He looked a little thoughtful -- only a little, because that's all he was capable of. "You get to the future, Ted, suppose you bring me a newspaper. I'll make it worth your while. I've always treated you fair and square, Ted, now haven't I?" I looked over his shelves. Too many of those dust-covered items were mine. And I didn't have to be a telepath to know what he was thinking. "Maybe you'd like a paper with the stock market quotations, Uncle? From about thirty years from now, say?" The smirk was completely gone now. "You get something like that, Ted, I'll pay you! Wouldn't help you out any, because you have nothing to invest. Me now, I could buy something that will keep me in my old age. I'd give you a -- hundred bucks for something like that." I laughed at him. A hundred dollars! Uncle always had his nerve. He was scowling when I left, still trying to figure how he could get in on the gravy, because outside of Marilyn he was the only person who ever thought I might succeed. us while I was putting the final touches on the time machine. "Tonight we celebrate," she said. "Steak." It smelled wonderful, but the occasional whiff of ozone from my equipment was more exciting. I'd told Marilyn we had about an hour before I could make the test, but with my working faster than I had expected and her getting behind with the meal, she was just putting the steaks on the table when I was done with the machine. "Oh, but let's eat first, Ted!" she said. "I couldn't eat! After so much work -- " I stared in fascination at the master switch -- the door. "This is it, Marilyn! What I've been working toward all these years!" She saw the way I felt and maybe she was a little excited herself. "Go ahead, Ted," she told me. I closed the door. There was more ozone and a blurring in the middle of the room. We stepped away from the thickest of the blurring, where something seemed to be gathering substance. The something, we soon saw, was a man sitting in a chair surrounded by strange apparatus, most of which I couldn't guess the purpose of. It was a very young man, when I could see him better, probably nineteen, wearing bright clothes in what I figured must be the style of #. "Man-o!" he said. "This time machine is low Fahrenheit, o-daddy! Right to the bottom! It's the deepest!" I blinked. "Parlez vous Francais?" Marilyn said, "I think he means he likes it. But who is he and just where did he come from?" The gaily dressed youth got out of the chair and smiled at us. Each of his shoulders had padding the size of a football. His coat tapered from four feet wide at the shoulders to a tightly bound waist, the lapels from a foot at the top to zero. The trousers widened out to wide stiff hoops that ended six inches above his shoes. And the shoes! But at least they weren't really alive, as I had thought at first. "How is it," asked Marilyn, "that a cool cat from the future comes to visit us in a time machine? I would expect a more scholarly type." "Not so, doll-o. The angleheads don't reach the real science. The scientist pros believe that all knowledge is known. They delve not into the sub-zero regions of thought. That is done by us amateurs." H E did a short bit of syncopated tap and introduced himself. "I am Solid Chuck Richards, ambassador to the past, courtesy of the Friday Night Bull Session and Experimentation Society." "Are they all like you?" I asked. "No, o-daddy-man. Some are deep, some are high on the scale, but all of them reach together on one thing -- they all feel that the pro-scientists have grown angular and lost the sense of wonder. So we gather together on Friday nights to work on the off-beat side of science. We read your books -- if you are Ted Langer -- ?" I admitted it. He danced a rhythmic circle around me, staring in what was evidently adoration, and kept murmuring, "Reach that deep man! Ted Langer -- the father of time travel! O-man-o! Deep! Real deep!" "Now see here," I finally broke in. "Don't they talk English where you come from? And just how do you come to be here anyway? I built a time machine to travel into the future, and instead I get you telling me how deep I am. Are you here or am I there?" "You are here, o-daddy-boy, and I also am here. But, to explain this, I may have to use some angle talk, which is what you mean by English. We read your books -- which are collectors' items, by the way -- and we decided you were way under the zero mark, especially when we saw that the angleheads wouldn't touch any of your ideas. So we got together and made our time machine. But I am sad to report, doctor-o, that your theory was a bit less than twohundred-per-cent correct. There were a few errors, which we found." It was something of a shock to hear this future rock-and-roller tell me thefe were mistakes in my work, and I started to argue with him about it. But his attention wasn't on the conversation. He was sniffing thoughtfully, the thing he'd called sense of wonder shining in his eyes. He was looking at the steaks Marilyn had set on the table. "Reach that!" he said, awed. "Gen-you-wine solid flesh! Man-o! I haven't seen a steak like that in all my off-beat life!" So naturally we invited him to sit down at the table and he didn't have to be asked more than once. It seemed that food was pretty expensive in #, which is the year he came from, and what there was of it mostly came from factories where they shoveled soy beans and yeast into a machine and it came out meat at the other end, if you didn't make too much fuss about what you called meat. But with so much of the good farm land ruined by atomic dust, and so much more turned into building lots on account of the growing population, it was the best they could do. pushed the second steak in front of him and he showed he was a growing boy by finishing every scrap, along with a double order of French frieds and half a dozen ears of corn on the cob. But he had to give up after two pieces of pie. He sat back in the chair, patted his stomach and looked as if he had just won the Irish sweepstakes. He looked at the big refrigerator. When Marilyn opened it to put things away, his eyes almost popped out at the sight of the meat stored there. "Man-o!" he said. "You must be rich!" Marilyn laughed. "No, not rich -- far from it. We operate a restaurant and that's our stock you see." "Oh, doll-o! I should not have eaten so much. What do you charge for a meal like that?" "We would get three and a half for each order," I said, diplomatically not mentioning all his side orders, "although we don't get much carriage trade here. But don't let it worry you. Nothing's too good for a guest from the future." "Three and a half?" He looked amazed. "Why, such a feed would bring twenty-five or thirty where I come from -- if you could find it! Let me pay, o-daddy-friend, at least your price." And he pulled out some bills. I started to push them back, for of course I wasn't going to spoil this great moment in my life by asking a traveler from the future to pay for a meal. But then I saw what he was trying to give me. I picked up the bills and stared. Marilyn's head was over my shoulder and she was staring just as hard. She took one out of my hand. "It's not real," she said. "There's not that much money in the world." She had the five. I had the ones. The five-thousand and the onethousand-dollar bills, that is. I looked up at Solid Chuck Richards. "When you said that meal would cost twenty-five or thirty, did you mean twenty-five or thirty thousand?" "You reach me, man. Inflation, you know. It's terrible. I remember when a gee would keep the beat rocking in a juke palace for an hour. Now you pay half a gee a number. It's terrible." that the inflation was even worse than that, he decided it was something more than terrible. It seems he hadn't paid much attention to money in his younger .days, though he did recall now that when he was very small he'd been able to get a good nickel candy bar for twenty dollars, but he hadn't seen anything smaller than a hundred in some time now. "There should be a law against this sort of thing," he said indignantly. "It's enough to turn a man into an anglehead, the way they keep pushing up the price of fumes. And what they charge for Bulgy Sanders records -- " He picked up the bills and looked at them. "But I think maybe we can find a way to profit on this, daddy-boy! I have a deep thought -- we members of the Friday Night Bull Session and Experimentation Society will come to your restaurant and pay you five gees for a steak dinner, which is a fine price for you but very little for us. In that way, we will eat good food and you will gather a good bundle of the stuff of life." There was a thudding noise at the window. I looked over quick. Somebody was hanging on outside, off balance, as if he had been standing on a ladder outside and had fallen against the window. I ran for the door, forgetting it was a switch. But Solid Chuck Richards realized it. He dived back into his chair and called, "Reach you later, o-daddy!" He disappeared as I pulled the door open. The sudden flash as the time machine stopped operating reminded me about those switches on the door, but it was too late now. I ran out and around the side just in time to see a figure disappearing up the alley. Sure enough, there was a ladder against the window. I didn't bother chasing the man very far, because, after a fast look at him, I had a pretty good idea who it was. I'd speak to him later. L" looking at the big bills. They were the size of present-day currency, and were beautifully made, and would have passed easily except for a few things. Such as that "Series #" inscribed alongside the signature of Irving P. Walcourt, Secretary of the Treasury. And the Treasurer of the United States in # would be Kuru Hamonoto. From the State of Hawaii, I wondered, or -- ? "They're no use to us at all," said Marilyn. "Unless we hold them until #. I was talking about security for our old age. Do you suppose -- ?" "You forget," I said, "that steak will run you twenty-five or thirty thousand in #. This is going to be a great disappointment to the members of the Friday Night Bull Session and Experimentation Society, but I fear we must explain to Solid Chuck Richards that we just cannot afford to do much business of this type." I pushed aside the money and began thinking about some of the things the youth from #I had told me. There were holes in my theories -- a lot of holes. True, I had succeeded in building a time machine, but I could never go anyplace in it. Because time travel was possible only by traveling from one time machine to another. The amateurs of #, knowing from my books (I must remember to write them) that I had built a time machine in #, were able to make contact. Solid Chuck Richards was selected by lot from several volunteers to try the machine. I met the other members of the Society later and learned that and a number of other things from them. The reason Solid Chuck came back instead of my going forward made solid sense. I could see it now. My time machine had never existed in #. His had existed in #, or at least its parts had. I could overcome that problem -- if I had the full power of the Sun for several minutes to work with, and a way to handle it. Then I could change things so that my time machine would have existed in the future... Even the verb tenses were going wrong on me. These amateur experimenters, it seemed, were considered a bit on the crackpot side, taking such pseudo-science as mine seriously. Not knowing enough science to realize that the ideas I wrote about were impossible, as any professional scientist would have, they followed them through. They tried to get in touch with me in their time, but I wasn't available, which saved me another paradox. Suppose I had joined the Society and come back as a volunteer? But it was encouraging to know the reason I was going to be unavailable in #. Marilyn and I had gone on a second honeymoon -- on the first commercial passenger liner to Mars. "And so," I told her, "you don't have to worry about security in your old age. Tickets to Mars We won't be poor." Marilyn was still looking at the currency of the future. "We will be," she said, "if we keep selling steak for the price of soy-bean hamburger. By the way, Ted, I wonder who that was at the window?" The answer came to me then. I put the bills into my pocket and kissed her. "We will not have to eat soybean hamburger, o-doll. And I will take you to Mars for your second honeymoon -- as soon as they start passenger service. I am going out to make a down payment on the tickets right now."  from his eye. He looked very tense, like a fisherman with a prize catch on a very thin line. "It's good," he said, and his voice trembled a little. "I -- suppose your time machine worked?" "Surprised, are you, Uncle?" "Yes, yes. But I see your situation, Ted. You, of course, can't afford to hold these for thirty years. Now -- ah -- I can. And Fll be glad to help you out by' taking S I ' Please rush me my exclusive giant painting, suitable for framing of the moon's surface. I understand it will be mailed in its own special container. I enclose #t for each copy. Here is my name and address: them off your hands. Naturally I have to hold them a long time, so -- let's say twenty dollars a thousand?" "Let's not say that." I took the bill from his hand. "I figure fifty is a fair price. There'll be lots more, Uncle. And, as you say, I am always broke and cannot afford to put them away for my old age. But running the time machine is expensive and I can't afford to take less than fifty." He looked as if he were going to snatch the bill right out of my hand, he was so eager. "All right, Ted, I realize there are expenses. Thirty-five." We compromised on forty. "But I want a promise," he said emphatically. "I'm to be the only one you sell these bills to!" "You reach me, o-uncle." I handed him the bills. "You're deep, man. Real deep!" Real deep in the hole, that is -- he mortgaged his house and his regular inventory to buy up all the money I began taking in. Once we redeemed the wedding ring and all the other articles, I got to feeling mellow and even a bit grateful. He'd started me in business, so to speak. I couldn't stick him with about buy him a helicab ride to the poorhouse in #. So when Marilyn and I got just as deep in the black, because the Society members gave us some books on stock-market statistics, I started giving Uncle tips every now and then. Not free, of course -- I asked for half and we settled on seventy-thirty. With that plus the ones I bought, both for now and the long pull, I guess we're the only people living today who can be sure of having a second honeymoon on Mars, although Solid Chuck Richards tells me he hears Mars is overrated, there not being a juke on the whole planet, and even if there were you couldn't jump to any decent kind of beat in that low gravity. I wouldn't say so to Solid Chuck Richards, but that sounds like absolute zero to me. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. I N the fall of #, a commission of U. S. Army officers, from the Office of the Chief of Ordnance and from the Chief of Engineers, received orders to look for an area which was suitable for the test firing of large missiles. The reason why this happened in the fall of # is simple. During the middle of June of that year, the German V-l buzz bombs had been streaking across the Fig. #: Sketch map of Atlantic Missile Range. Firing range goes all the v'ay to Ascension Island, # miles from Florida Channel from France to England. Early in September, the first V-# rockets followed. The missile age was on. The United States needed a missile proving ground, but no longer for a war that happened to be still going on. The commission studied maps, read annual weather summaries and then made a few trips. As the outcome of their studies and inspection trips, they recommended an area north of El Paso, Texas. The Secretary of Defense approved the choice on February #, # -- the war in Europe had only some weeks yet to run -- and the area became established and later famous as the White Sands Proving Ground. It begins at the TexasNew Mexico state line to the north of El Paso and runs due north from there for # miles. Its greatest width, from Alamagordo on to the north, is #I miles. "An immense area for the ballistics of the future has been staked out," said the editor of a New Mexico newspaper as soon as the facts could be released. die new proving ground was Fig. #: First rocket fired from Cape Canaveral, Bumper No. #, on July #, # # of the same year. It went to a height of # miles in a vertical shot. Anybody who knew something about ballistics could calculate in his head that that meant a maximum range of about # miles a missile and not a research rocket, that is. On April #, #, the first V-# rocket was fired. It misbehaved and its flight had to be terminated by radio command. The next V-# was ready on May # and rose, as programmed, to about # miles, hitting the desert #I miles to the north of the firing site. Counting from the date of the Secretary's approval, the White Sands Proving Ground was one year, two months and three weeks old. And it was too small! The Germans had fired their V-#s for range, reaching between # and # miles; the lower value being the operational average, the upper value the operational record. At White Sands, you could fire V-# rockets for altitude, but not for range. It took a few months until the facts of life were courageously faced, but in October #, another committee was established. It was to look for a longrange proving ground. I don't know whether some of the members of the new commission had also been members of the first commission, but the new commission surely could read the report made by the first and retrace its reasoning. The reasoning then had been that the missile should be recovered for inspection and study after impact. Logically, then, the impact area had to be a desert. Inhabited land was out and a swamp would not do. And naturally the impact area had to Fig. #: Redstone rockets ready for shipment to Cape Canaveral be in the continental United States, not some other country. Fortunately, we don't have deserts much larger than the one that was picked. For longer ranges than # miles -- and those German engineers cheerfully wrote equations proving a range of at least # miles with a single stage and any range at all with three stages -- only the ocean would do. Now, of course, we do have two long shorelines and the firing site could be just about wherever it was convenient. Impact would have to be in the ocean in a sector where ships did not normally sail. These two points were easy. But what about in between? In between, there should be a place, or places, where somebody had the necessary instruments to track the flight of the missiles. The Pacific coastline has hardly any nearby islands. In the northern portion of the Atlantic shore, you could, on a map, draw a flight path which first skirted Long Island for its whole length and continued over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. But these are waters which are not only well traveled but virtually congested. A place in the southern portion of the Atlantic shore remained the only choice. There was an island Fig. #: Snark intercontinental cruising missile taking off from extreme corner of Cape chain that could be used, the Bahamas. Beyond that island chain there was Puerto Rico. The Bahamas are British, but maybe we could come to terms with the British government. Now, supposing the Bahamas could be used for tracking stations, what should one pick for the launching area? r T , HE commission looked at a map of Florida. There was one place that jutted out into the ocean; on the map, it measured a little over # miles from the mainland. The geographical situation is this: Between the mainland and the land farther to the east, you first have the Indian River. Then comes Merritt Island. Then the Banana River, and then the next strip of land which terminates to the east in a sandy cape: Cape Canaveral. The Cape is sandy. So is Merritt Island and so is the mainland. Where the land is not cultivated, you have mostly scrubby undergrowth, interspersed with palmettos; as soon as you cross the Indian River, these begin to look undernourished. In short, the Cape does Ml .' I Fig. #: (Left) Jupiter-C, carrying Explorer satellite in its nose, taking off Fig. #: (Above) Atlas missile taking off, Pad #, Atlantic Missile Range not look "tropical." The temperature is tropical, however -- at least in August, where it is rarely less than # degrees during the day with the humidity being about the same figure. It is typical of people that, when asked about animal life in their area, they mention the unpleasant types first. The answer I got was: "Well, we have coral snakes, and cottonmouth and plenty of rattlesnakes. And, of course, alligators." I am sure that other things must live there too, but they were not mentioned in conversation. As for signs of civilized activity, Cape Canaveral had, for years, a lighthouse. The lighthouse is still there among the missile pads, but for a long time it was all by itself. At some time, the Navy had picked out a few square miles of land and designated it the Banana River Naval Air Station. On June #, #, the commission recommended Cape Canaveral as the most logical available long-range missile-launching site and suggested the Naval Air Station as the headquarters area. This recommendation was approved three weeks later, and with that the wheels could be set in motion. Quite a large number of wheels were involved. First the area had to be transferred from the Navy to the Air Force. I'm not sure that this was a simple step, but it certainly was the simplest of all the steps that had to be taken. The next was to start negotiations with Great Britain about the establishment of tracking stations on the Bahamas. These negotiations were actually concluded in February, #, but at that moment they were still useless. First Congress had to pass legislation which made the long-range missileproving ground possible at all. Congress, naturally, would not pass any legislation involving a foreign power if it was not certain that said foreign power would play along. Then things happened with reasonable speed. Congress passed the necessary legislation which President Truman signed on May #, #. On October #st of the same year, the proving ground was activated. The signing of the agreement with Great Britain was, for reasons unknown to me, delayed until July #, #. TT was high time that those signatures were put on paper -- Cape Canaveral fired its first rocket only three days later! It was a Bumper rocket, consisting of a V-# as first stage and a W ACCorporal as the second stage. Three days later, another Bumper was fired. Well, Cape Canaveral may have been in legal existence and also activated as a military establishment I ; but one could not say that it was "ready." Robert P. Haviland, who was in charge of these two Bumper shots, reminisced later that at White Sands there had been ten feet of concrete between him and the missile; at the Cape, it was a pine board one inch thick! He lacked confidence in the strength of a pine wall. Luckily, that strength did not have to stand a test All this has changed since then. I remember the blockhouse near one of the Atlas launching pads. Its shape is best described as that of the carapace of a marine turtle. I don't know its size in feet, yards or meters. But it is large. As for position, imagine that the giant marine turtle points to the launching pad with its tail. Where the hole for the neck would be in the carapace is where you enter. There is a steel door that looks like the door to a bank vault. Everybody, no matter what secrecy may prevail in other matters, will assure you that the people in the blockhouse might be trapped for a while if a missile fell on top of it, but that they would be safe. The arrangement of the various launching pads follows a simple plan. The extreme corner of the Cape is reserved for the Snark and the Bomarc. As you look north (more or less) from that corner, you have four launching pads for the Atlas. Beyond that are the Fig. #: Thor-Able rochet taking off from Pad #B launching pads for the Titan. Beyond that there is room for things still to come. Look the other way (more or less southwest) and you first have the area for the Navaho. Then comes the launching pad for the Vanguard, then three pads for the Thor (one of them for lunar probes), then the Army's launching pads for Jupiter, Redstone and satellite-throwing Jupiter-C rockets, and finally the "ship's motion simulator" for the Polaris rocket. Then comes a canal for a harbor which is called the turn-around basin. Farther inland are three buildings I recall for personal reasons. Let me mention the cafeteria first, because my personal reason is so simple: it is beautifully airconditioned, which, after riding around in #-degree heat, is a major point. The second building I remember especially is Central Control, about which more later. And the third is officially called Telemetry #. It is fairly in the center of the whole complex. I haven't been inside, but for three nights in a span of five days I was on top of it, seeing (in that order) a Jupiter-C rocket, carrying Explorer V, a Jupiter missile and a three-engine Atlas fired. I I "O the south of the Cape area, you have twelve miles of civilian territory. It is full of motels, called Sea Missile Motel, Vanguard Motel, Satellite Motel and Starlite Motel, all efficiently airconditioned, all temporarily filled with service brass and missile men and all also inhabited by tourists who stare at the generals and the missile men. For reasons which are probably historical, the Starlite is considered the center. Convair Astronautics has its office there. There is also a press room with Western Union in evidence -- if only during daylight hours. (What do you do when they fire at night? But let's not go into the problems of the press.) I derived a small amount of private amusement from the fact that the manager of the Starlite bears the name of Landwirth. This German word has two meanings; the one that flashed into my mind is its meaning of "Country Inn Keeper." Country? Well, yes, you can say so, since it isn't a city. But inn? With neon signs, hot and cold water, long lines of Cadillacs and air-conditioning? Just to finish up the geography: to the south of the civilian area is Patrick Air Force Base. There doesn't seem to be much secret there. Airplane hangars, an Air Force Weather Station and office buildings. And -- oh, yes, an officers' club with a room named T.G.I.F., which stands for Thank God It's Friday. Unimaginative outsiders might think it is just a bar. Having made clear, I hope, that Patrick Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral are not the same thing (everybody seems to make that mistake; I myself did before I got there), it remains to give Cape Canaveral's official name. For years it was known as A.F.M.T.C. or Air Force Missile Test Center. But it is not all Air Force as far as the missile pads are concerned. The Navy is there and so is the Army. More recently the N.A.C.A. (National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics) has moved in with a number of high-altitude research rockets, and when the new National Space Agency gets going, they'll no doubt send a representative to see General Yates, asking for a corner of the Cape to put up their things. So the new official name is Atlantic Missile Range. Now we come to what is called "down range," those island stations which are the real reason why Cape Canaveral became the Atlantic Missile Range. The first of the down-range stations is still in Florida, near Palm Beach. Its name is Jupiter Inlet. The first island tracking station is on Grand Bahama Island, # miles away. The next one is on Eleuthera, # miles from the Cape. Then comes the one on San Salvador, # miles away. The next one, Mayaguana, is # miles away. Station No. # (Patrick is counted as Station No. #) is on Grand Turk Island, # miles away. Station No. # is on a bigger island, in the territory of the Dominican Republic. And Station No. # is on the west coast of Puerto Rico. It is named Mayaguez Air Force Base, after a city on Puerto Rico which is about # miles from the tracking station. A T first, this thousand-mile range from Florida to Puerto Rico was thought to be long enough. Then "down range" had to be extended to the tiny island of Santa Lucia, all of # miles long and # miles wide. This made "down range" # miles long. The next logical checkpoint would have been the extreme eastern tip of South America. But it was not necessary to go to the mainland; there was another small island available which one Count de Noronha had discovered in #. Logically, the island is named Fernando de Noronha. This one is really small, like the tropical isles of the story books. It is # miles long by # A of a mile wide. The Brazilian government maintains a military base there, manned by # soldiers. The non-military population is about #. It is an ichthyophagous -- all right: "fish-eating" -- community and probably not by choice. The distance from the Cape to Fernando de Noronha is # miles and the island is some distance to one side of the missile flight path. This does not harm the tracking; after all, these missiles do not skim the surface of the ocean. (Having written this, I feel a premonition that some day somebody will build one that does.) The current last link in the chain, or Station No. #, is Ascension Island in the middle of the South Atlantic, about four times as large as Fernando de Noronha in area. It is # miles from the Cape. Beyond it is mostly open sea, but the simple facts of physics are that if you shoot a rocket much faster than you need for this range, it will go into orbit. Now there is a #-mile gap between Puerto Rico and Fernando de Noronha, and another #mile gap between the latter and Ascension. To fill these gaps, there are sea-going tracking stations, trim ships full of instrumentation. They are of two types and their total number was thirteen in September #. It seems hard for the outsider to grasp that all this, the area of the Cape with its buildings and equipment worth #, its # people and all the downrange stations over thousands of miles, should just be considered a laboratory. As a matter of fact, the term should be even more curtailed; it is just a testing laboratory. They don't "invent" missiles at the Cape. They don't even build missiles. All they do is test them. Testing means to find out (A) whether something goes wrong and (B) what did go wrong if something did. Since testing means finding out, you have the paradox that what looks like a spectacular failure can be rather successful as a test. T HE favorite example told around the Cape is the failure of the first Atlas. The rocket started gyrating, tumbling and in general misbehaving. Finally it had to be deliberately destroyed in midair. But when all the test results were in, it was discovered that these amounted to about # per cent of what the engineers had wanted to find out. The press labeled it a failure, plain and simple, and one newspaper even wrote an editorial that the whole program ought to be scrapped since the missile was so obviously unworkable. Now if that rocket had made a flight which the spectators had thought perfect, it would have been only five per cent better than the "failure" that actually happened. That does not apply to every shot that goes wrong. Testing is one thing, but if you shoot for a mission, the story is different. A lunar probe that does not go to the Moon, a Jupiter-C that does not throw its top stage into an orbit, these are near-failures. I use this term because something is learned even in such a case. But if a rocket is fired just for testing, there cannot be a failure. Now what happens to a missile when it gets to the Cape? It arrives from the manufacturer often by air lift, some, such as the Atlas, by trailer truck. The first job is what is called a hangar check. Was anything damaged in transit? Do all the electrical connections work? Did sand or dust get into the missile? After the hangar check is completed, the missile goes to its launching pad. In its Gantry crane, the checking begins all over. This time other things are added. More instrumentation, for instance. In general, all the missiles are weighed down with instrumentation which nobody in his right mind would put into the finished product. They are testing, remember, not firing rockets for amusement. A test fueling is part of the testing procedure on the pad, during a dress rehearsal count-down. Such a count-down will be interrupted for all kinds of reasons. The strangest such "hold" on record occurred when the contractor's testing crew suddenly discovered an alligator in their block house. One of the officers tried to console them by saying that the alligator's presence was not authorized, but the engineers were in no mood for legal points -- they rarely are -- and called a hold until somebody removed the visitor. In time, everybody is satisfied that things should go well. The event itself is called a "shoot" -- except by the people who do it They prefer the term "launch," which inevitably gave rise to the telephone reply: "No, you can't talk to Dr. Soandso now; he's out to launch." The time for the launch is set, Incidentally, it depends on the test phase a missile is in whether the launch is during the day or during the night. When the missile is new, visual observation is obviously important, hence firing takes place in daylight. Later on, when all the information still to be gathered has to come from the instruments, the firing might just as well be scheduled after sunset, when it is cooler. to count on something going wrong, in which case the missile must not be permitted to fall where it could do harm. To insure safety for outsiders, lines must be established on a map. In the center is the line which indicates the desired flight path. At some distance to the right and left of this line, two lines are drawn which are called the impact lines. If the missile has to fall, it must fall inside these impact lines. But how? Let us assume that missile runs off course in the direltion of one of the impact lines. Then it has to be destroyed and its pieces must still fall inside the impact lines. Naturally there is a point which marks the last possible moment for destruction. All these points form the two "destruct" lines inside the impact lines. If a missile crosses a "destruct" line, it must be destroyed. The width of the band between the destruct lines and the bands between destruct and impact lines vary for every type of missile; of course, no actual figures are handed out. The Range Safety Officer in the Central Control building cannot see anything directly, just like the people in the blockhouse. They don't look through windows -- they look at TV screens. And the Range Safety Officer has another device to aid him, the impact computer. The impact computer gets its information from the radars and from instruments in the rocket and goes through a continuous process of calculation. The results of its labor appear on a map with two pointers. One pointer shows where the missile is at this instant. The other pointer shows where it would hit the water if its propulsion failed at that instant. The Range Safety Officer's means of interfering consist of two toggle switches. One is labeled "fuel cut-off," and when thrown, the result is what the label says. The other switch is labeled "destruct" and it also does what the label says. They must be used in succession -- the "destruct" switch will do absolutely nothing if the cut-off switch has not been used. So time has been set for #. At T-# (minutes), all downrange stations are ready. All radars are in fine tune and no tracking camera is jammed. The devout hope is that they'll stay that way and at T -- # two airplanes take off. One is radar-equipped and sees to it that there are no ships between the impact lines. The other monitors all the radio frequencies to be used to see that there is no interference. The damnedest things can happen. Once a radio-equipped laundry delivery van in a town many hundreds of miles away caused interference! Another safety measure is to divert all scheduled airliners. If no shoot is planned, the New York to Miami non-stop flight goes straight through the missile track, though probably at a different altitude. A T T-#, there is still not an ounce of fuel in the missile, unless it is a solid-fuel job. Fueling comes last, after the probability that anything else may go wrong has dwindled to virtually nothing. Visitors usually assemble at T-# in the office building at Patrick Air Force Base and are brought to the Cape by Air Force bus. The bus stops at Telemetry No. #. (Usually a coffee and sandwich wagon arrives at the same time.) When the visitors emerge from their bus, a message waits for them. It says "T-# and counting." Fifty minutes to go and no problems. By the time everybody is on top of the building, where there are a dozen phone booths for the use of the press, and by the time the newsmen have set up their cameras, a loudspeaker has been connected. "T minus # and counting," it will say suddenly. On the evening I have in mind, the sky was clear, with all the stars out. Fairly high up, there was a nearly full Moon, and lower in the sky a red star was conspicuous: Mars. Things looked as if they had been arranged by Chesley Bonestell. Near the missile being made ready, a bright red light kept flashing. It is the customary signal that a missile is being readied. Expressed in words, it just means "Stay Away." As the loudspeaker said "T minus #," a battery of floodlights was switched on. The big rocket -- it was an Atlas -- was clearly visible. "T minus #." To anybody who did not know what was going on and who looked at the rocket through binoculars, it must have seemed as if something had gone badly wrong. The rocket just spouted white vapor, top and bottom. The white vapor -- actually atmospheric moisture condensing because of the cold oxygen gas that came from the tank vents -- looked luminous and quite dense under the floodlight And the flashing red warning light made it appear as if a flame were developing any moment. "T minus #." "She's still loxing," said somebody who had just looked through the viewfinder of a powerful telephoto camera. That strange term is derived from the unpretty abbreviation for liquid oxygen: lox. "T minus #." The white vapor thinned. The valves must have been closed, or at least some of them. "T minus # seconds." Close now, last and probably unnecessary camera adjustments. "T minus #," and then, apparently without pause, "#... #... #... #... #..." At "T minus #," the two small vernier rocket engines began spouting their thin flames. Immediately afterward, the whole launching pad lit up as if from an explosion. All three major engines spouted fire. The rocket lifted. After two seconds or so, it had lifted itself out of the area illuminated by the floodlights. The rocket became invisible; only the bright flames from the exhaust nozzles were there against the dark sky. All this was apparently without the faintest whisper of a sound. But at about the instant the rocket itself became nearly invisible, the sound had traveled the distance from launching pad to Telemetry No. #. The thunder hit us and the roar seemed to get even stronger as the triple flame lifted upward. matically that the exhaust flames looked "good" and that the roar was "normal," but these were side thoughts. I followed the flames as they lifted up. Higher, going faster, up, up. The rocket now seemed to be overhead and the flames were foreshortened. They changed into dled in size but did not seem to Meanwhile, the loudspeaker continued counting, the so-called plus count, sounding unemotional and impersonal. "Plus #." At that instant, the star got much smaller. The two boosters had used up their fuel and only the main rocket motor kept going. I kept it in my glasses. The star was quite small now but still brilliant. At "Plus #," it suddenly disappeared. Brennschluss -- burnout. The missile was on its way. And we went on ours. By Manly Wade Wellman Ironic destiny of a visitor from the future trying to take advantage of things to come. By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony. That rare event: a science fiction novel based on a new idea. By Hal Clement All the science on earth might not be able to meet the demands of this alien race. New pocket size # more pages selected by the editors of Galaxy Magazine. If you have missed these four terrific Science Fiction Novels, check your newsstand or send # for each (all four #; we pay postage). or # each  Twice In Time  Address: Centauri  The Forever Machine  Mission of Gravity Check items wanted Galaxy Publishing Corporation #I Hudson Street, N. Y. #, N,Y. By F. L. Wallace Earth was too perfect for these extraordinary exiles -- to belong to it, they had to flee it. Name Address City State Enclosed The coupon is for your convenience -- orders on a separate sheet are O.K. Honestly, I was content to be the richest man in Levittown... if not for McGhee, I'd have happily left something for all the rest of you! M argery tried putting the phone back on the hook, but it immediately rang again. She kicked the stand, picked up the phone and said : "Hang up, will you? We don't want any!" She slammed the phone down to break the connection and took it off the hook again. The doorbell rang. "My turn," I said and put down the paper -- it looked as though I never would find out what the National League standings were. It was Patrolman Gamelsfelder. "Man to see you, Mr. Binns. Says it's important." He was sweating -- you could see the black patches on his blue shirt. I knew what he was thinking: We had air conditioning and money, and he was risking his life day after day for a lousy policeman's pay, and what kind of a country was this anyhow? He'd said as much that afternoon. "It might be important to him, but I don't want to see anybody. Sorry, officer." I closed the door. Margery said: "Are you or are you not going to help me change the baby?" I said cheerfully: "I'll be glad to, dear." And it was true -- besides being good policy to say that, because she was pretty close to exploding. It was true because I wanted something to do myself. I wanted some nice simple demanding task, like holding a one-yearold down with my knee in the middle of his chest, while one hand held his feet and the other one pinned the diaper. I mean it was nice of Uncle Otto to leave me the money, but did they have to put it in the paper? r # HE doorbell rang again as I was finishing. Margery was upstairs with Gwennie, who took a lot of calming down because she always does, so I stood the baby on his fat little feet and answered the door myself. It was the policeman again. "Some telegrams for you, Mr. Binns. I wooden let the boy deliver them." "Thanks." I tossed them in the drawer of the telephone stand. What was the use of opening them? They were from people who had heard about Uncle Otto and the money, and they wanted to beg, borrow or sell me something. "That fellow's still here," Patrolman Gamelsfelder said sourly. "I think he's sick." "Too bad." I tried to close the door. "Anyway, he says to tell Cuddles that Tinker is here." I grabbed the door. "Tell Cud-" "That's what he said." Gamelsfelder saw that that hit me and it pleased him. For the first time, he smiled. "What -- what's his name?" "Winston McNeely McGhee," said Officer Gamelsfelder happily, "or anyway that's what he told me, Mr. Binns." "Send the son of a -- Send the fellow in," I said, and jumped to get the baby away from the ashtray where Margery had left a cigarette burning. Winnie McGhee. It was all I needed to finish off my day. He came in holding his head as though it weighed a thousand pounds. He was never what you'd call healthy-looking, even when Margery stood me up at the altar in order to elope with him. It was his frail, poetic charm, and maybe he still had that and maybe he didn't, but the way he looked to me, he was sick, all right. He looked as if he weighed a fast hundred pounds, not counting the head; and the head looked like a balloon. He moaned, "Hello, Harlan, age thirty-one, five-eleven, one seventythree. You got an acetysalicylic acid tablet?" I said: "What?" But he didn't get a chance to answer right away because there was a flutter and a scurry from the expansion attic and Margery appeared at the head of the stairs. "I thought -- " she began wildly, and then she saw that her wildest thought was true. "You!" She betrayed pure panic -- she began fussing with her hair with one hand and smoothing her Bermuda shorts with the other, while she was simultaneously trying to wiggle, no hands, out of the sloppy old kitchen apron that had been good enough for me. Please, don't you have an acetylsalicylic acid tablet?" "I don't know what it is," I told him. Margery chuckled ruefully. "Ah, Harlan, Harlan," she said with fond tolerance, beaming lovingly at me as she came down the stairs. It was enough to turn the stomach of a cat. "You forget, Winnie -- Harlan doesn't know much chemistry. Won't you find him an aspirin, Harlan? That's all he wants." "Thanks," said Winnie with a grateful sigh, massaging his temples. I went and got him an aspirin. I thought of adding a little mixer to the glass of water that went with it, but there wasn't anything in the medicine chest that looked right, and besides it's against the law. I don't mind admitting it, I never liked Winnie McGhee, and it isn't just because he swiped my bride away from me. Sure, she got smart after six months, and then when she turned up with an annulment and sincere repentance -- well, I've never regretted marrying her. Or anyway, not much. But you can't expect me to like McGhee. Hell, if I'd never seen the man before, I'd have hated his little purple guts at first sight, because he looked like a poet and talked like a scientist and acted like a jerk. I started back to the living room and yelled: "The baby!" Margery turned away from simpering at her former husband and sprang for the puppy's dish. She got it away from the baby, but not quite intact. There was a good baby-sized mouthful of mixed milk and dog-biscuit that she had to excavate for, and naturally the baby had his way of counter-attacking for that. "No bite!" she yelled, pulling her finger out of his mouth and putting it in hers. Then she smiled sweetly. "Isn't he a darling, Winnie? He's got his daddy's nose, of course. But don't you think he has my eyes?" "He'll have your fingers, too, if you don't keep them out of his mouth," I told her. Winnie said: "That's normal. After all, with twenty-four paired chromosomes to form the gamete, it is perfectly obvious that the probability of inheriting none of his traits from one parent -- that is, being exactly like the other -- is one chance in #. Ooh, my head." Margery gave him a small frown. "What?" He was like a wound-up phonograph. "That's without allowance for spontaneous mutation," he added. "Or induced. And considering the environmental factors in utero -- that is, broad-spectrum antibiotics, tripling of the background radiation count due to nuclear weapons, dietary influences, et cetera -- yes, I should put the probability of induced mutation rather high. Perhaps of the order of -- " I interrupted. "Here's your aspirin. Now what do you want?" "Harlan!" Margery said warningly. "I mean -- well, what do you want?" He leaned his head on his hands. "I want you to help me conquer the world," he said. Crash-splash. "Go get a mop!" Margery ordered; the baby had just spilled the puppy's water. She glared at me, then smiled at Winnie. "Go ahead," she coaxed. "Take your nice aspirin and we'll talk about your trip around the world later." B UT that hadn't been what he had said. Conquer the world. I heard it plain as day. I went to fetch the mop, because that was as good a way as any to think over what to do about Winston McNeely McGhee. I mean what did I want with the world? Uncle Otto had already bequeathed me the world, or anyway more of it than I had ever hoped to own. When I came back, Winnie was tottering around the room, followed at a respectful distance by my wife, holding the baby. She was saying to the prospective conqueror of all the world: "How did you hear about Harlan's good lu -- about the tragic loss of his dear uncle, I mean?" He groaned: "I read it in the paper." He fiddled aimlessly with the phone. "It's all for the best, I say," said Margery in" a philosophic tone, fishing damp graham-cracker crumbs out of the baby's ear. "Dear Uncle Otto lived a rich and full life. Think of all those years in Yemen! And the enormous satisfaction it must have given him to be personally responsible for the installation of the largest petroleumcracking still west of the Suez!" "East, my dear. East. The Mutawakelite Kingdom lies just south of Saudi Arabia." She looked at him thoughtfully, but all she said was: "Winnie, you've changed." And so he had; but, for that matter, so had she. It was not like Margery to be a hypocrite. Simpering over her ex-husband I could understand -- it wasn't so bad; she was merely showing the poor guy how very much better off she was than she ever would have been with him. But the tragic loss of my dear uncle had never occasioned a moment's regret in her -- or in me; because the plain fact of the matter is that until the man from the Associated Press called up, she didn't even know I had an Uncle Otto. And I had pretty nearly forgotten it myself. Otto was the brother that my mother's family didn't talk about. How were they to know that he was laying up treasures of oil and gold on the Arabian Peninsula? The phone rang; Winnie had thoughtlessly put it back on the hook. "No!" Margery cried into it, hardly listening. "We don't want any uranium stock! We've got closets full of it!" I said, taking advantage of the fact that her attention was diverted: "Winnie, I'm a busy man. How about if you tell me what you want?" He sat down with his head in his hands and made a great effort. "It's -- difficult," he said, speaking very slowly. Each word came out by itself, as though he had to choose and sort painfully among all the words that were rushing to his mouth. "I -- invented something. You understand? And when I heard about you inheriting money -- " "You thought you could get some of it away from me." "No!" He sat up sharply -- and winced and clutched his head. "I want to make money for you." "We've got closets full," I quoted Margery. He said in a desperate tone : "But I can give you the world, Harlan. Trust me!" "I never have -- " "Trust me now! We can own the world, the two of us, if you'll just give me a little financial help. I've invented a drug that gives me total recall." "How nice for you," I said, reaching for the knob of the door. recall?" I asked. He said, sputtering with eagerness: "The upwelling of the unconscious -- the ability to remember everything -- the eidetic memory of an idiot savant and the indexing system of a quiz winner! You want to know the first six kings of England? Egbert, Ethelwulf, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, Ethelred and Alfred. You want to know the mating call of a ruff-necked grouse?" He demonstrated the call of the ruff-necked grouse. "Oh," said Margery, coming back into the room with the freshly diapered baby. "Bird imitations." "And more!" cried Winnie. "Do you know about the time the United States had two presidents?" "No, but-" "March the third," he said, "eighteen seventy-seven. Rutherford B. Hayes -- I'd better say Rutherford Birchard Hayes -- was about to succeed Grant and he was sworn in a day early. I ought to explain that -- " "No," I cut in. "Don't explain." "Well, how about this? Want me to name the A.B.C. bowling champions from #I to date? Clack, Nitschke, Hewitt, Vidro, Brokaw, Gagliardi, Anderson -- oh, wait a minute. I forgot #. That's Warren. Then Gagliardi, Anderson, Danek -- " "Winnie," I said, "quit it." "But this is the key to conquering the world!" "Hah," I said. "Being boring from within by naming bowling champions?" "Knowledge is power, Harlan." He rested his head on his palms briefly. "But it does make my head ache." I took my hand off the knob of the door. I said grudgingly: "Sit down, Winnie. I admit you've got me interested. I can't wait to hear what the swindle is." "Harlan!" warned Margery. Winnie said: "There's no swindle, I promise you. To repeat, knowledge is power, Harlan. Why, with my super-brain we can outwit the rulers of any country anywhere. We can own the world! And -- money, you say? Knowledge is money, too. For instance -- " he winked -- "worried about taxes? I can tell you the minority opinion in U. S. Govt, versus Oosterhagen, # Alabama #. There's a loophole there you could drive an armored truck through and come out with it loaded!"L" cigarette in the long, long holder I'd bought her to square a beef the year after we were married. She looked at me and then at the cigarette; it penetrated and I raced over with a match. "Thank you, darling," she said throatily. She had changed herself as well as the baby. She now wore something more suitable for the coheiress of a big fat hunk of money to wear while entertaining an exhusband. It was a gold lame housecoat; she had bought it within an hour of the time the AP man had called, on a charge account we'd never owned until the early editions of the papers hit the stores around Levittown. And that reminded me. Money. Who needed money? What was the use of inheriting all that loot from Uncle Otto if I couldn't throw Winnie out on his ear? Politeness made me temporize: "All this is very interesting, Winnie, but -- " "Harlan, the baby!" Margery yelled. "Get him out of the pretzels!" I did, while Winnie said faintly behind me: "The shape of a pretzel represents children's arms folded in prayer -- or so it was thought in the seventh century. A good pretzel bender can bend more than thirty-five a minute. Of course, machines are faster." I said: "Winnie -- " "Like to know the etymology of the word 'navvy # ? Most people think it has something to do with sailors." "Winnie, listen to me -- " "It doesn't, though. It comes from the laborers on the Inland N avigation Canals -- eighteenth-century England, you know. Well, the laborers -- " I said firmly: "Winnie, beat it." "Harlan!" "You stay out of this, Margery," I ordered her. "Winnie's after my dough, that's all. Well, I haven't had it long enough to want to throw it away. Besides, who wants to rule the world?" "Well -- " Margery said thoughtfully. "With all our money?" I demanded. "Who needs it?" "Oh," he moaned. "Wait, Harlan. All I need is a stake. I've got the long-term cycles of every stock on the Exchange down in my head -- splits and dividends and earnings records since nineteen ought four! I know the private brokers' hand signals on the Curb -- wave up for buy, wave down for sell; look, see how my fingers are bent? That means the spread between bid and asked is three-eighths of a point. "No." can spare it! And I'll double it in a week, quadruple it in a monthI shook my head. "The taxes -- " "Remember U. S. Govt, versus Oosterhagen! And that's a bare bedollars could do in the hands of a super-genius? Here!" he yelled, grabbing at his temple with one hand, pulling something out of his pocket with the other. "Look at this, Harlan! It's yours for a hundred thousand. Yes, a hundred thousand dollars and you can have it! I'll sell it for that and then I won't split with you -- we'll both be super-geniuses. Eh? Fair enough?" I was trapped by my own curiosity. "What is it?" I asked. He waved it at me -- a squat little bottle, half filled with pale capsules. "Mine," he said proudly. "My hormone. It's a synapse relaxer. One of these and the blocks between cell and cell in your brain are weakened for an hour. Three of them, for every twenty pounds of body weight, and you're a super-genius for life. You'll remember things you think have passed out of your recollection years ago! You'll recall the post-partum slap that started you breathing. You'll remember the name of the nurse who carried you to the door of your father's Maxwell. Harlan, there is simply no limit to -- " "Beat it, Winnie," I said, and pushed him. appeared like a genie from a lamp. "Thought so," he said somberly, advancing on Winnie McGhee. "Extortion's your game, is it? Can't say I blame you, brother, but it's a trip to the station house and a talk with the sergeant for you." "Just get rid of him," I said, and closed the door as Winnie was challenging the cop to name an opera by Krenek, other than Johnny Spielt Aui. Margery put the baby down, breathing hard. She said: "Scuffling and pushing people around and bad manners. You weren't like this when we were married, Harlan. Something's come over you since you inherited that money!" I said: "Help me pick these things up, will you?" I hadn't pushed him hard, but all the same, those pills had gone flying. Margery stamped her foot and burst into tears. "I know how you feel' about poor Winnie," she sobbed, "but it's just that I'm sorry for him. Couldn't you at least be polite? Couldn't you at least have given him a couple of lousy hundred thousand dollars?" "Watch the baby," I warned her. At the head of the stairs, Gwennie appeared, attracted by the noise, rubbing her eyes with her fists and beginning to cry. Margery glared at me, started to speak, was speechless, turned her back and hurried up to comfort Gwennie. I began to feel a little bit ashamed of myself. I stood up, patting the baby absent-mindedly on the head, looking up the stairs at the female half of our household. I had been, when you stopped to think of it, something of a clunk. Item, I had been rough on poor old Winnie. Suppose it had been I who discovered the hormone and needed a few lousy hundred thousand, as Margery put it so well, as a stake in order to grasp undreamed-of wealth and power? And, item, Margery did have a tough time with the kids and all, and on this day of all days, she was likely excited. And, item -- I had just inherited a bloody mint! nr HE thought came to me with sudden appalling clarity -- why wasn't I using some of Uncle Otto's money to make like easier? I galloped up the steps two at a time. "Margery! I'm sorry!" "I think you should -- " she began, and then looked up from Gwennie and saw my face. I said: "Look, honey. Let's start over. I'm sorry about poor Winnie, but forget him, huh? We're rich. Let's start living the way rich people do. Let's go out, just the two of us -- it's early yet! We'll grab a cab and go into New York -- all the way by cab -- why not? We'll eat at the Colony and see My Fair Lady from the fifth row on the aisle -- " Margery looked up at me and suddenly smiled. "But -- " She patted Gwennie's head. "The kids. What about them?" "Get a baby sitter. Mrs. Schroop'll be glad of the work." "But it's such short notice -- " "Margery," I said, "we don't inherit a fortune every night. Call her up." Margery stood up, holding Gwennie, beginning to smile. "Why, that sounds like fun, Harlan! Why not, as you say? Only -- do you remember Mrs. Schroop's number?" "It's written down," I told her. "No, that was on the cover of the old directory." She frowned. "It isn't listed in her own name -- it's her son-in-law. Oh, what is that number -- " A thin voice from down the stairs said: "Ovington Eight Zero Zero Fourteen. It's listed under Sturgis, Arthur R., Forty-one Universe Avenue." I said sharply: "Who the devil said that?" "I did, Daddy," said the owner of the voice, all of eighteen inches tall, appearing at the foot of the steps. He had to use one hand to steady himself, because he didn't walk so very well. But in the other hand, he held the squat glass bottle that Winnie McGhee had dropped. The bottle was empty. town any more -- of course. Marjorie and Gwennie and I have tried everything -- changing our name, dyeing our hair, even plastic surgery once. It didn't work, so we had the same surgeon change us back. People kept recognizing us. What we mostly do now is cruise up and down the coast of the U.S.J.I. in our yacht, inside the twelve-mile limit. When we need supplies, we send some of the crew in with the motor launch. That's risky, yes. But it isn't as risky as landing in any other country would be and we just don't want to go back to J.I. -- as they've taken to calling it these days. You can't blame us. How would you like it? The way it goes, we just cruise up and down, and every once in a while he remembers us and calls up on the ship-to-shore. He called yesterday, matter of fact. He said: "You can't stay out there forever, Daddy. Your main engines are due for a refit after eleven months seven days of running and you've been gone ten months six. What are you using for dairy products? The load you shipped in Jacksonville must have run out last Thursday week. There isn't any point in your starving yourself. Besides, it's not fair to Gwennie and Mom. Come home. We'll make a place for you in the government." "Thanks," I said. "But no, thanks." "You'll be sorry," he cautioned, pleasantly enough. And he hung up. Well, we should have kept him out of those pills. I guess it was my fault. I should have listened when old Winnie -- heaven rest his soul, wherever he is -- said that the lifetime dose was three tablets for every twenty pounds of body weight. The baby only weighed thirty-one pounds then, last time we'd taken him to the pediatrician; naturally, we couldn't take him again after he. swallowed the pills.  And he must've swallowed at least a dozen. B UT I guess Winnie was right. At the very least, the world is well on its way to being conquered now. The United States fell to Juvens Imperator, as he calls himself (and I blame Margery for that -- I never used Latin in front of the kids) in eighteen months, after his sensational coup on the # Question and his later success in cornering soybean futures, the common stock of United States Steel, other shares and commodities, then just about all of them. The rest of the world is just a matter of time. And not very much time at that. And don't they just know it, though; that's why we daren't land abroad. But who would have thought it? I mean I watched his inauguration last October on television. The country has had some pretty peculiar people running it, no doubt. But did you ever think you'd live to see the oath of office administered to a little boy with one hand upraised and the thumb of the other in his mouth? jPiloting one routine sightseeing space jaunt was all he had done... and it landed him in a one-man peep show billed as the notorious... By j. t. McIntosh T HE Spurcans behind Allan Simber in the control cabin of the little ship were whistling excitedly. Shaped rather like .balloons shaped like human beings, they had no backbone and virtually no bones, and the sibilant way they spoke showed they had no teeth either. The members of the royal party were happy. They were delighted and relieved that this brief trip into outer space, just to be able to say they'd been, had gone so smoothly. It was one of the least queer charters Allan had ever taken, for a private charter space pilot gets a lot of queer jobs. Except for the passengers, it was completely routine. On landing at Spurc with a oneshot cargo from Rigel, he had been asked if his ship was absolutely safe and if he was fully competent to handle it alone. He said yes, of course, was asked if he would so state in an affidavit, replied he would, signed the aforesaid affidavit -- and was given a contract to take King Phunk and several members of the royal retinue out into the void to see what it was like. One of the King's titles was King of Heaven, so it was only natural that he should want to take a close look at his own property. Now, having flown around Spurc's two small satellites, the King and his retinue were not at all sorry to see the surface of their own world in the screens, gently coming up to meet them. This they understood. Though the Spurcans had never developed space travel, they had been using flying machines of one kind or another for centuries. the royal party who could speak English, lollupped up to Allan and asked in a whispered whistle if he was going to be able to land anywhere near the palace at Pluc. "Sure," Allan said. "I mean yes. In the courtyard, if you like." "Take no risks," warned the Spurcan. "Do it gentle, please, and agitate not the King." "This landing," Allan said reassuringly, "will be as gentle as -- " He didn't get a chance to complete the simile. The ship lurched abruptly and began to spin violently. Checking his controls, Allan found that a braking jet had failed, and the compensator which was supposed to fix such a situation had failed too. It took five minutes' desperate work that demanded all his considerable skill to get any sort of order into the story his dials told him, and by that time he knew that the landing wasn't going to be gentle at all, but exceedingly hard. Also there was no longer any guarantee where they would land. He'd settle for any kind of landing, anywhere, that left the ship in one piece. He glanced over his shoulder. The bulbous little Spurcans had clustered protectively round their King and there was no more whistling. They didn't have to be told there was something wrong. Well, there was nothing he could tell them that would make any difference. They'd just have to take their chances, like him and the ship. He still couldn't understand the the ship? Potin and the other Engfailure. Could some political enemy of the King have sabotaged lish-speaking Spurcans had poohpoohed any suggestion of putting a guard on the ship in which the King was to travel. The idea that a Spurcan should wish to harm King Phunk was unthinkable, and Potin refused to consider it. Allan wasn't so sure. And he wished cordially that any disgruntled Spurcan subject who felt a pressing need to liquidate his monarch could have arranged it without involving Allan Simber and his ship. An instant before contact, Allan shouted: "Now!" and curled himself into shock position. The long slim ship landed on hard rock on a single fin. The fin crumpled, but its resilience had been enough to bounce the ship back in the air, where she fell over like a leaping salmon and crashed back on her belly. This time, as she bounced again, she turned nose-down and plunged at the rock, piling up on a broadening base of crumpled metal. Deafened and bruised, but still conscious, Allan looked around the mangled cabin. The King and his retinue were smears of various sizes, shapes and colors on the floor, walls and ceiling. HT HE conditions of imprisonment on Spurc varied with the crime and the degree of guilt. A Spurcan decidedly guilty of a small crime was kept in an exceedingly confined space. Anyone only potentially guilty of a large crime was kept in an exceedingly large space. Allan Simber, accused of the murder of King Phunk, was potentially guilty of so vast a crime that the only fit place for his incarceration was the palace at Pluc. It was duly emptied of all its occupants and sentried by all ten thousand members of the Royal Guard. He wasn't badly treated, and, having the entire palace to roam, he didn't feel too restricted. True, the largest couches or beds were less than four feet square, and the whole place had an overpowering scent of Spurcans, but men who spend their working lives in small spaceships, ferrying every conceivable cargo under the suns, get used to cramped bunks and sour air and learn to bear them philosophically. He knew he could expect no help from Earth. It always took the attitude that Terrans who insisted on going to other worlds would just have to take pot-luck with the local laws and the local legal system. But Allan still wasn't worried about the outcome. No doubt it was inevitable that any pilot under whose care the King came to an unpleasant end should be formally charged with negligence. Allan's case was clear -- anyone who had evil designs on the King logically wouldn't risk chance that he'd escape and King Phunk wouldn't. Besides, these little Spurcans were reasonable enough creatures, though they had some queer ideas -- housing a major defendant in a vast prison, for example. Yet even that made sense of a sort. The reasoning was that it was an insult to accuse any man of any crime, and the bigger the crime, the bigger the insult. Consequently, though someone suspected of a mammoth crime couldn't be allowed to roam around loose, he was given as much freedom as possible and treated with respect and consideration. The only disturbing feature was that nobody told him anything and nobody came to see him. He was left alone in a palace which could house twelve thousand people. The first day he amused himat strategic points on the walls all over the palace, the arrows pointing to the suite he had reserved for himself. After all, if the Spurcans didn't want their palace desecrated, they shouldn't have left any paint about. On the outer door of the suite he painted: The second day he was wondering what to do when he heard footsteps -- human footsteps -- ringing in the corridors far away. They paused, presumably while the visitor looked for another arrow. Then they restarted again, presumably when he had found one. Presently there was a knock and John Carruthers entered. eroids and minscods lived in the cosmopolitan quarter of Pluc, trading or studying the customs, law, psychology, history, topography or botany of Spurc. Allan had seen Carruthers at the spaceport, but had no idea what exactly he was or did. Anyway, he was glad to see him now. Carruthers was unbelievably British. He wore riding breeches, though there had never been a horse on Spurc, and spoke with an accent which would have made most people think of Oxford or Cambridge, except possibly graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. "Well, old boy," said Carruthers genially, "you do seem to have got yourself into a spot of bother." "I do," Allan admitted. "What are you -- counsel for the defense?" "No," said Carruthers apologetically. "There's no defense, you see. Actually, I'm your American ambassador." "American?" Allan automatically echoed, though it was what Carruthers had said first which was occupying his mind to the exclusion of all else. x-t' gala; "American -- also British, French, Chinese, Italian, German, Norwegian and Dutch. The other countries have made no arrangements to be represented." Allan went back to the main point. "What do you mean, there's no defense? You mean they're not proceeding with the charge?" "No, my dear fellow. I mean you're guilty. You are, you know. Incidentally, before you start unburdening your soul, perhaps I'd better point out that the whole palace is probably wired." Allan shut his mouth abruptly. Was that a warning that Carruthers himself couldn't say what he liked, that he had said Allan was guilty simply because the Spurcans might be listening? No, that was ridiculous. "I'm guilty?" Allan said incredulously. "Oh, indubitably! You must have been out of your mind when you signed that affidavit, old chap. You did nothing less than make yourself personally responsible for the safety of the King and his party." Allan remembered the affidavit with misgivings. "But surely -- " "These people have no spaceships of their own, you know -- just whatever old barges we can fob off on them. All they know about space is what we've chosen to tell them. We, of course, are the experts. When you said your ship was sound and an accident was practically impossible -- naturally, if the King was killed, you murdered him."  full import of what Carruthers was saying. "You mean they're not even going to try me?" "Oh, there'll be a trial tomorrow. You won't be there. It'll be formal, with a verdict of guilty. I came to talk to you about your punishment. Thought you'd better know what to expect." Allan sank weakly on one of the four-foot-square couches. Surely if all this was true, Carruthers would hardly be so breezily cheerful about it all. "Is this some kind of a joke?" he asked. "No joke at all, old boy. I must say you asked for it. Everybody knew for days that you were going to take the rajah up. That you'd promised it was safe. That there was no guard on the ship. Anybody who had any reason to want the old gentleman out of the way had only to -- " "But that's exactly it!" Allan exclaimed. "That's precisely what must have happened! When the ship cracked up I -- well, I was ninety-five per cent certain there had been sabotage. Surely I can bring this up in court and..." He stopped. Carruthers was shaking his head. "Apart from the fact that that's not legally relevant, it just isn't so. Take it from me, old boy, I've been here ten years and if anybody knows the Spurcans I do. Some murders are relatively unimportant. I expect Phunk had quite a few characters knocked off in his time, so I daresay he only got what was coming to him. But no Spurcan -- absolutely none -- would kill his King, any more lars into space. The King is valuable, you see. You'll be punished not because these people felt great affection for King Phunk, but because you destroyed a valuable property." "But..." "Anyway," Carruthers went on cheerfully, "even if you don't take my word for it, the fact remains that the line of defense you planned holds no water, so to speak. You made yourself responsible for the King. He's dead. That's all that matters in Spurcan law. Now about your punishment. There will be three penalties -- " "Is that all fixed too?" Allan asked dazedly. "More or less. The first punishment is starvation. For five hours." "That's inflexible -- you know the Spurcans have to eat or drink something every half-hour or so. You're lucky. After five hours' starvation, a Spurcan is three-quarters dead." "And they won't modify this for a human? Are you sure?" "Quite sure, for all of us here run foul of their laws at one time or another and are sentenced to the first two penalties. No nonnative has ever been sentenced to your particular third penalty so far. You'll be making history, my dear fellow. The three penalties -- " "Look," said Allan, making up his mind. "You may be right about all this, but I'd rather wait for the verdict." Carruthers was surprised and pained. "You don't want me to tell you any more?" "Not now." "But don't you want to know about -- " "Is there anything I can do to get out of this? Anything I personally can do?" " 'Fraid not, old chap." "All right then, I've got to leave it to you. You'll do what you can?" "Naturally, but... This is most embarrassing. You see, there's absolutely nothing I can do." Allan's brain raced. "Just a moment. There are humans here, and some gaberoids from Deneb and Merkat, and a few minscods from Mars, Sirius and Cephis. Right? What if one of them wanted to murder the King? They might have sabotaged the ship." For the first time, a hint of mild irritation crossed Carruthers' face. "Can't you get it into your head," he said, "that it wouldn't do you any damn good even if you could prove that somebody tinkered your ship? Suppose I went into court tomorrow and said I burned half your braking fin off. They might put me on trial too, but that wouldn't do you the slightest good. You still would be guilty of regicide." "I see," said Allan. "Oh, well. Can you come tomorrow and tell me what's been decided?" "Of course. You don't want me to tell you about...? No, I see you don't. Still, there's one thing I must tell you -- " "If you don't mind," said Allan, "I'd rather wait." "But this is -- " "Look," said Allan, "I learned a long time ago to take things as they come. I'd have terrified myself to death a dozen times if I'd assumed the worst, and the worst after that, and the worst after that. Right at this moment, nobody's slapping me on the belly with a wet fish. Let's leave it at that -- okay?" Carruthers shrugged, hurt. OR now, at least, the Spur- cans certainly weren't starving him. Every third or fourth room had tables covered with fruit, sweetmeats, salads, cold meat, drinks of all kinds, and Allan let as little of it as possible go to waste. Long ago he had found out that one man's meat was very seldom another man's poison, at any rate on worlds of similar metabolism. The Spurcans were warm-blooded, carbon based oxygen breathers. Most of their food suited humans. The rare exceptions looked, smelled or tasted unpleasant. Eating with considerable enjoyment, Allan reflected that there was a lot to be said for Spurc. The climate was excellent and the food was wonderful. The little Spurcans, though definitely non-human, were by no means repulsive and they were pretty reasonable. He had found no difficulty in getting along with them. The present situation was awkward but unlikely to be fatal. True, it was pretty silly of him to have signed that affidavit. Somebody should have told him. He admitted fairly, however, that he could easily have sought out the ambassador for advice, and hadn't. Every pilot who takes a small ship around the Galaxy alone must be an optimist. And every pilot who has done it reasonably successfully for five years must have good reason for his optimism. At least twenty times in the past five years, Allan Simber had been in situations from which the only person who expected him to emerge alive had been Allan Simber. And if 'a thing goes on happening long enough, one develops skill in waiting it out. For something to do, he searched for the concealed microphones and wires against which Carruthers had warned him. He found no sign of any such thing. Apparently he was under no direct supervision. Ten thousand Spurcans guarded the entrances, exits and walls. Within the generous boundaries of his prison, he was free. The only thing that irked him was the silence. Poor little King Phunk had liked silence, apparently. Every room was sound-deadened; there were no windows in the palace and every ventilator seemed to have a sound-trap fitted. If Allan wanted to hear a sound, he had to make it himself. It was because of the blank stillness that he heard something he would normally have missed. Someone or something was moving in the corridor outside. Not boldly, openly, like Carruthers, but stealthily, so silently that a breath of wind or even a ticking clock might have covered the soft padding. Maybe they were guarding him closely after all. Yet the furtive sound didn't suggest Spurcans to Allan. They made a kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk on their short, heavy legs, no more capable of tiptoeing than bipedal pigmy elephants. Whoever or whatever was trying to conceal its presence must be trying to conceal it from Allan. So he stood behind the door and waited for a while to surprise his visitor if it elected to come in. Allan wasn't excited, merely interested. As he waited, he wondered whether to throw himself on the visitor the instant the door opened, if it did open. Might as well, he thought. If it was something he couldn't handle, at least he'd probably manage to bowl it off its feet -- providing it had any feet. Whatever it was, it could hardly be friendly. Seconds passed and there was no sound. Allan was sure that the visitor was on the other side of the door, also listening. Well, in any contest of patience, Allan would win. Space pilots are unbeatable at waiting for nothing to happen. The door opened a crack, then opened wider. Allan sprang. Under him was something wet, slippery, but not repulsive. It was a completely female feminine human mammal. He could see that with both eyes. AS he helped her up apologetically, Allan began to wonder who was crazy. The girl was a tall, well-stacked blonde with curves about which her two-piece swim suit was not reticent. Despite the swim suit and the water glistening on her skin, she was anything but an Amazon. She was definitely the crinoline, powder-and-patch type, the type whose bathing suit seldom gets wet. In fact, she looked like an actress making an improbable appearance in a not very good movie. "Don't tell me," he said. "You've come to rescue me." She was still gasping and rubbing her diaphragm, with which Allan's knee had made violent contact "As a matter of fact, I did," she said in an injured tone. "Did what?" "Come to rescue you. I know a way out." "You think you can get me out of here?" said Allan incredulously. "I know I can, but not now. Follow me." "Who are you?" he asked. "Dawn Clifford. As if it matters." "I think it matters." She was almost running through the corridors. Once Allan steadied her as her bare foot slipped on the polished floor. Right in the center of the palace, they came to a fountain in the floor. "Ah," he said softly. "I came this way," said Dawn, "and I'm going back the same way. Can you swim?" "Yes." "Under water?" "Yes." "Then you're okay. Only you can't come now -- we'd have to come up in the middle of a public pool. It'll have to be at night, and not tonight either. I'm busy. I'll come for you tomorrow night." "Can't I make it myself?" "Not without a guide. Don't try. You'd drown." She slipped into the fountain and began to lower herself toward a grating in the clear, cool water. "Wait," Allan protested. "Why are you doing this? What -- " "I haven't time," she said nervously, not looking at him. "I've got to get back to the pool before I'm missed. See you tomorrow night." Drawing a deep breath, she dropped under the surface to the grating. It was hinged. Once she had pushed herself through the aperture, the grating closed firmly behind her. ond appearance the next day. "Well, old boy," he said apologetically, "it was just as I told you." "You mean the trial's over?" "Such as it was. You were guilty. All that was needed was a verdict. It's the three penalties, of course. The first one will begin immediately I leave. You get no food for five hours." "You mean that really is the same for me as for them?" "Yes. They like to regard themselves as a very just race, and all aliens on Spurc are subject to exactly the same law and exactly the same penalties as a native. The second penalty is three in one. It's the Three Unwishes." "The which?" "That's a literal translation. The Three Opposites-of-Wishes. The third penalty is -- " "Hold on. Let's stick to the Three Unwishes. What are they?" "They'll find out the three things you most desire, reverse them and do them." "How would they learn things like that about me?" "By asking you, by truth drugs and other methods, they'll find out the three things you want most. You won't be able to stop them. Then they do the opposite." He shrugged. "There are certain semantic difficulties, but I'm afraid a prisoner isn't allowed to argue his case. You have to accept their version of what's opposite. Suppose, for example, you wanted to be able to play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. Some people might say that the opposite was not being able to play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto and that consequently they wouldn't have to do anything about it. I'm afraid that in such a case, however, the Spurcans would probably take the view that to prevent you ever being able to play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, they'd have to break your fingers or cut off your hands." Allan shuddered. "It may not be so bad," said Carruthers encouragingly. "I had to undergo the Three Unwishes once and nothing happened to me. Depends if you can get them to accept comparatively harmless desires or not. Obviously if what you most want is to live forever, the Three Unwishes could be pretty serious." "I thought you said I wouldn't be able to stop them finding out the things I most want." "You won't, but you might be able to finagle a little, knowing what's going to happen. I did." "When does this start?" "After your five hours' starvation are over. They'll find out your three main desires tonight and begin to punish you tomorrow." Tomorrow. That meant that if Dawn Clifford succeeded in helping him to escape, he had nothing to worry about. "They won't take me away from here?" "Certainly not." Carruthers' gaze became quite keen. "Has anything happened since I saw you last?" "What could happen?" "There might have been some spurious attempt to rescue you, for example. Probably by a girl of about your own age or a little less." Allan stared at him in open dislike. "I wanted to tell you," said Carruthers virtuously, "but you wouldn't let me. Traditions count for a lot on Spurc. Just as we see to it that people are defended in court whether they deserve it or not, Spurcans have attempts to escape. It doesn't seem decent to them that while a man is awaiting sentence, his friends and relatives, and particularly his wife or girl friend, shouldn't make any attempt to have him released. So they see to it that jailbreak attempts are made." "But in the case of a human, how could they get another human to cooperate?" "Easily enough. For money. If there was any such attempt -- and I can't imagine there not being one -- I think I can guess who you saw. Dawn Clifford." Allan felt himself growing hot under the collar. He didn't necessarily trust Carruthers and he had no intention of betraying anything to him. Nevertheless, he couldn't help saying bitterly: "How could any human collaborate with those inhuman little balloons to torture another human?" "If you mean how could Dawn do it. I'll tell you. She's an actress. Came here two years ago with a touring company. Fell foul of Spurcan law and isn't allowed to leave. Q.E.D." "Why does any human ever come here?" Allan exploded. "I don't know. Why did you come here?" Carruthers inquired politely. chologists and scientists arrived at the Simber suite. None of them could speak English except the interpreter, whose job was simply to interpret anything the Spurcans wanted translated, not to enable Allan to say all he felt inclined to say. They fastened plates against his skin, measured his blood pressure, checked his brain patterns. Technologically, they were several hundred years out of date, but that merely meant the methods were crude, not the results. Allan could be sure that since they were dealing with an alien, comparatively unfamiliar life-form, they had consulted the official intergalactic organism standards and consequently would be able to interpret his reactions only a little less accurately than human psychologists. The first thing they established was that he particularly wanted to get out of Spurc. They didn't say anything, or at least the interpreter didn't translate anything. But it needed very little imagination to see that that would mean he was to be kept a prisoner for life on Spurc. Now Allan remembered what Carruthers had said about Dawn Clifford. She had fallen foul of Spurcan law too, had been sentenced to starvation and the Three Unwishes -- and naturally one of the things she most wanted had been to get away from Spurc. It must be a not uncommon circumstance among visitors to Spurc who happened to get into legal trouble. The second thing Allan desired was the most beautiful girl in the dollars. Three simple, straightforward desires. He wondered what they would make of the last two. Make him a present of the ugliest woman in the Galaxy? Claim that he The interpreter was speaking. Would he accept Dawn Clifford as the most beautiful girl in the Galaxy? His thoughts raced. They knew he knew her. Therefore Carruthers was right -- she had been hired to act a part. There had never been any real prospect of escape. The Spurcans had fixed the whole thing. He felt sick. How could a girl like that do a thing like that? The interpreter repeated his question. Would he accept Dawn Clifford as the most beautiful girl in the Galaxy? Obviously it was in his best interests to say no. Then they'd have to find somebody else, somebody he would accept. There couldn't be many human girls in Spurc, and it would be a long time before any girl elsewhere could be persuaded to work for them in whatever way they planned. Maybe he could stall them for years over this. But what would he gain by stalling? In a sudden spurt of impatience, he said, "Yes." Let them get on with it. Whatever happened, the sooner the better. After that, they left him. And that night Dawn Clifford didn't come. He climbed into the fountain into which she had disappeared, and found all the gratings as solidly latched as the back and side doors of the palace.  visit, not from Carruthers this time but from Verin, the public prosecutor. He looked exactly like all Spurcans except that he had the brownness of extreme age. There were about thirty members of the Guard with him to protect him against the dangerous alien creature who had murdered King Phunk. The Spurcans arranged themselves in V formation, with Verin at the apex of the V, farthest from Allan. Then he passed sentence in a musical whistle, and the interpreter interpreted. "Allan Simber, human, regicide, this is your punishment. Having already been starved near to death -- " "Near death?" Allan exclaimed. The interpreter wasn't allowed to do anything but interpret "Having already been starved near to death-" "When?" Allan asked. He didn't remember any five-hour fasting period. Then he realized that he'd slept most of the previous afternoon. They must have counted that. Well, if that was typical of the way they were going to punish him for his terrible crime, it was a good thing he hadn't lost any sleep worrying about it. "Okay," he said. "I follow you. Go ahead." "Having already been starved near to death," the interpreter continued, "you are now sentenced to the following Unwishes: One, you will remain on this world forever. Two, you will spend this night with the most beautiful girl in the Galaxy and will not possess her. Three, you will not be given a didn't want to live the rest of his life on Spurc. But though they'd been able to keep Dawn Clifford a prisoner for a couple of years, the y"d find it harder to watch over a competent space pilot. He had no particular objection to spending a night with Dawn Clifford, even if that was all he was allowed to do. And the idea lars didn't terrify him. It didn't even disappoint him. He hadn't ever counted on getting those million dollars. "The third penalty," said the interpreter, "is death according to the manner of the crime." Allan stopped laughing. "Huh?" he said. "The third penalty is death according to the manner of the crime," the interpreter repeated obediently. "Wait a minute," said Allan. "What's this all about?" The Spurcans turned and trooped out, Verin in the lead now. This time, when he'd have liked Carruthers to come and explain things to him, Carruthers didn't come. The first penalty he hadn't even noticed. The second, the Three Unwishes, didn't seem to amount to anything except that he was never to leave Spurc -- and he had his own ideas about that. But a sentence of death -- that was no joke. Semantic differences didn't stretch far enough to make it anything else but capital punishment. him. She entered wearing a long black cloak and stood across the room from him. No Spurcans came with her. "I hope you're pleased with yourself," said Allan bitterly. She didn't give the impression of acting a part now. "I'm sorry," she said, not sounding very sorry, "but I had no choice. Just as I have no choice now. You have my sympathy, but I have much more sympathy for myself. Frankly, I'd sacrifice you without uncurling a hair if I could get off this world." He liked her better for that. When people were honest, at least you knew how you stood with them. He looked around. "Where are the Spurcans?" She shrugged indifferently. "Behind the walls. You've been under closer watch than you knew all the time you've been here." "And what happens now?" "Nothing unless you touch me." "Then what?" "I don't know. But something will. You'll have to try it to find out." "I will. Later. Mean to say we just stay here all night, and as long as I don't touch you, nothing happens? That it?" She shrugged again. "I guess so." He saw now that for all her lovely face and figure, she was a beautiful monomaniac with one ambition, one interest in life -- to get away from Spurc. She really would sacrifice him or anybody or anything to do so. "I like the Spurcans," Allan observed. "They really are fair, according to their lights. Carruthers gave me the idea they'd be pretty tough in their interpretation of the three Unwishes, but they seem to have been honest enough. They-" "Don't talk to me about them!" said Dawn with suppressed passion. "Why not? We're on their world." "I hate them! I loathe them! My skin crawls when I'm near them!" "Why, what have they done?" "They didn't have to do anything! I just hate them!" She shuddered, and Allan saw with interest that she could barely control her physical loathing of the Spurcans. It must be like some people's dread of spiders, or rats, or snakes. in his turn, imagining what it must be like to be imprisoned on Spurc with so strong an aversion to the bulbous little Spurcans. "Why did you come here then?" he asked. "How could I know? I'd never seen any of them on Earth. Look, I said let's not talk about them." "Tell me one thing. After the Three Unwishes, they say I'm to die according to the manner of my crime. What does that mean?" "I don't know. For Pete's sake, don't get the idea I'm in their confidence. I just do what I'm told. All I want is to get back to Earth." "And if you work for them long enough, they let you go -- is that it?" "The hell it is! When they sentence you to stay here forever, they mean it. I do as I'm told because I've got to, that's all. I don't get anything out of it but my food and shelter. Now shut up about the Spurcans, will you? Talk about Earth if you must talk." With a casual movement, she undid the strings about her throat. The black cloak fell from her. "Do you have to do that?" Allan exclaimed. She nodded composedly. "Sure. You're supposed to be driven mad with desire, rush to embrace me, and thep they do whatever it is they're going to do." She started to walk about the room with slow, voluptuous steps. "Do you have to do that too?" Allan asked in a strangled voice. "Of course. You don't have to look." Allan bore it for a few seconds. Then he stood up. "I'm going to find out," he said. "Do you mind?" She shrugged her shoulders. She was always doing that. "Doesn't make any difference whether I mind or not. I hope they remember it's you who's supposed to be getting punished, not me." Allan leaped at her and took her slight but curvy body in his arms. Instantly everything went black. When he came to, he was on one couch and Dawn was on another, about two feet away, so that when he opened his eyes he was staring at her. She opened her eyes a few seconds after he did, looked around and shuddered. "If you have no objections," she said, "I'd rather you didn't do that again. After they knocked us out with the beam, they must have come in and lifted us here. I don't mind you touching me, but the Spurcans..." She shivered. "Let's just accept the situation, shall we?" "Okay," Allan sighed. "It's accepted." They weren't allowed to sleep. Bells rang when their heads drooped, and once, to Dawn's visible horror, a dozen Spurcans came in to shake her awake. She showed no desire to sleep after that. They spent the night talking about Earth. A S he took off, Allan was reasonably happy. If he had to die, he'd rather have it this way than any other. The old, patched ship they had given him in place of his own handled like a tranquilized cow, but nevertheless he'd have enough control when the time came to make the end as neat and instantaneous as anyone could wish. The Spurcans had told him that he had enough fuel to get into space, no more. They hadn't told him what was wrong, how they had ensured that when the old ship fell back into Spurc's atmosphere, he wouldn't be able to land her. It wasn't difficult to guess, however. The braking fins would go, same as before. That was what they'd meant by "according to the manner of the crime." He hadn't seen either Carruthers or Dawn Clifford again. He had no particular desire to see them. It was more than possible that on any other planet, even in space, Dawn Clifford might be worth knowing. On Spurc, however, she was nothing but a cold, beautiful phonograph record which played nothing except : Let me away from here! God, how I hate them! He'd been glad to see the last of the palace, glad to get out into the city of Pluc, where at least there were sounds, happiest of all to get into a ship -- even this antiquated derelict. If he could manage it, he proposed to blow up right in the middle of the palace -- to spit his life, at least symbolically, in the Spurcans' face. The annoying thing was that he didn't think they would mind particularly. They were more concerned that their version of justice should be done than over any damage he might succeed in doing. The ship climbed. The drive had been set so that he could not cut it in less than ten minutes. Now, however, he found he could control it. He reached out to cut the drive, wanting to preserve as much fuel as he could. "Don't," said a voice behind him. He turned and saw Carruthers and Dawn Clifford. Dawn was smiling, happy. He hardly recognized her. "Let it rip, old boy," said Carruthers. "I don't know how good a pilot you are, but if you're good enough, you may be able to get us to somewhere civilized." "But... "We took care of the fuel. There's plenty. Also we patched up the damage they'd done before giving you this ship. Not very well, perhaps, but well enough to give you a chance." Dawn was still smiling at him. "Hello," she said, offering her hand. "I'm Dawn Clifford." "I know," he said, a little dazed. She looked like another person, with clothes on, and he found he liked this one better. She was bubbling over with happiness now, a warm, vital creature he had never seen before. "No, you don't know me," she said. "We never met, did we?" "I guess you're right at that," confessed Allan. "Pleased to meet you. And to my surprise, I mean it." She laughed. "I'll go make some coffee," she said. "Spurcan coffee, I'm afraid. I don't mind any more. Ohj it's wonderful to be clear of that place!" turned to Carruthers. "What is all this? Are you telling me this ship is all right?" "Anything but, my dear fellow," said Carruthers genially, "but there's no need to crash on Spurc. I knew the Spurcans wouldn't guard this ship any more than they guarded your own. Why should anyone tamper with a ship that's already been damaged so that it must blow up?" "I guess I've a lot to thank you for," said Allan. "And if it can be done, I'll get you both away safely. But what are you doing here, Carruthers? I know how much Dawn wanted to get away, but how about you?" "I told you," Carruthers replied, "that I'd fallen foul of the Three Unwishes as well as you. Sooner or later, every visitor does. And naturally one of the wishes is always to get away from Spurc." "I see," said Allan. "This was the only way we could all get away. You were pretty smart, Carruthers." Carrurthers nodded. "I was," he agreed. "When did you get this idea?" "Not long before you took the King up," said Carruthers blandly. OR a moment, Allan didn't understand. Then anger spread through him as he realized what Carruthers meant. "So you " "Well, after all, I've been a prisoner on Spurc for ten years. I didn't come here to be ambassador... I took the job because I had to eat. Every time a ship has blasted off, they've searched her to make sure that people like Dawn and me haven't managed to stow away. It seemed to me the only ship that wouldn't be searched was a ship that was meant to crash. So I had to fix myself up with a pilot and a ship that was meant to crash. That meant... but I won't insult your intelligence by explaining the obvious." "You sabotaged my ship so the King would be killed?" "Of course. I knew you'd make some sort of landing and would probably get out unhurt. But these puffy little Spurcans wouldn't have a chance in a rough landing. With your affidavit and a little finagling in court by me, that meant the three penalties for you culminating in this. I had to get Miss Clifford's cooperation, but if you want to whitewash her, it's easy enough -- I didn't tell her about the plan until after King Phunk was dead. By that time, there was nothing for her to do but play along with me." Allan found himself relieved that Dawn hadn't been a party to the plan from the beginning. But his rage against Carruthers didn't lessen. Carruthers had murdered poor little King Phunk and all his retinue and landed Allan in deadly trouble just to get himself off Spurc. And now he was gleefully proud of himself. "I feel like smashing this ship on the nearest lump of rock," Allan said viciously. "But you won't," said Carruthers, unperturbed. "Not with yourself and Miss Clifford aboard. Particularly Miss Clifford. Her presence makes a difference, doesn't it?" "Yes," Allan admitted. "I can't wring your neck without upsetting and maybe alienating her. Was that why you fitted her into your plan?" Carruthers looked hurt. "Naturally," he said. "You don't suppose I'd leave a thing like that to chance, do you?" He was shocked, horrified and still more hurt when Allan hit him. -- j. t. McIntosh Written by Foremost Sportswriters! Widest Area Coverage! Latest Ski Techniques! Editorial Direction by World Champion Ernie McCulloch! For Novice, Intermediate and Expert Skiers! For instance, nowhere else will you find Ernie McCulloch himself taking you out on the slopes and showing how he teaches wedeln. Top-notch sportswriters range far and wide to bring back exciting, on-the-spot descriptions of favorite areas the world over. Leading ski instructors give you their own favorite pointers toward better skiing. You'll find close-up views of the colorful personalities on the slopes. Where to go... what to take... latest can save up to # ## by using the handy coupon below to start your subscription today. Just fill it out... send it along with your payment, or, if you prefer, we will bill you later. Dept. G # issues (newsstand value #) for #. You save # I # # East #st Street New York #, New York Check Enclosed  Money Order  Bill Me Later It was all over and done with between him and eternity... so he had to come down to Earth! N AN Peter Baker Four This Is Nan Peter Baker How do You Receive Me Over and now a word irom Our Sponsor interviewed in his office the Commissioner said but Ruth I can explain everything there is nothing to explain David its all too obvious I'm Bert Peel Officer and this is my brother Harry a cold front coming down from Canada and we've got to get word to the Fort colon congestion is absolutely unnecessary in men and women over forty at any one of the ninetyone offices of the Clinton National Bank and Trust... "Embarasse de richesse," the French count had said when he looked at all the pretty girls on the high school swim team, and explained what it meant in English. Penny wasn't really in love with him; she only thought she was, after pretending she was, to make David jealous, which she certainly did. But after the count gently explained to her, she and David made up just in time for the Spring Prom, which made the distant observer very happy. At least he thought it did. "What is happy?" he often asked himself. Maybe just pretend. You never really loved me Rick it was just a pretense wasn't it? Like the distant observer thinking of himself as "him" when, really, he knew now -- had known long -- he was only an "it" It's about time we faced up to reality, Alison. Yes. It was about time. We can't go on like this. No, certainly not. It was time. In the beginning, there was no time. There was sight -- here dark, there bright. He did not know then, of course -- and how long had "then" lasted? Memory did not tell that the bright was stars. And there was sound -- whispering, mean, Professor, when you say that outer space is not a place of silence? And then (he knew now that this "then" was about fifty years ago) there had begun a new kind of sound. Not steady, but interrupted, and interrupted according to patterns. Awareness had stirred, gradually, and wonder. He knew later that this was "wireless." And then the other kinds of sounds, oh, very different. These were voices. This was "radio." And music. It was too different; the distant observer knew distress without even knowing that it was distress. But he grew used to it -- that is, distress ceased: but not wonder. Urgency came with the voices. What? What? He groped for meaning, not even knowing what meaning was. kind of sight, not just the dark and the stars any longer, but pictures -- flickering, fading, dancing, clear, pictures upon pictures. Gradually he learned selectivity -- how to concentrate upon one, how to not-see, not-hear the others. Still later: how to see and hear all without confusion. How to match sound and sight. That things had names. What people were, who made the voices and the music. What meaning was. About himself, he learned nothing directly. For a while, he had tried to speak to them, but it was apparent that nothing of him reached Earth. He had learned Earth, yes. And knew what this place was, where he was. An asteroid. How had he come to be there? This was in space. There were spaceships -- he saw the scenes on television. Meteors were dangerous to spaceships. He knew meteors. Sometimes spaceships crashed. He scanned all his little world, but there was no spaceship, crashed or otherwise. You've got to help me -- I don't know who I am! But that was more easy, oh, so much more so -- that one was a man, and there were many men. The sponsors (in this case, Muls, the creamy-smooth deodorant) were men, too. Everybody was very kind to this man. He had amnesia. What was odor? This the observer could not unstand. But to have no memory, this he understood very well. This he shared with men. Gradually he had come to share many things with men. They spoke different languages, but the one which came with the first pictures was English. English from America. Later on, there was English from England, there was French, Russian, Spanish, Japanese -- but American was first and best. So much more interesting than the Red Army and the hydroelectric dams, these stories of real life. Of love and sadness and of happiness. Kid, there ain't no problem in all this world you can't lick if you really try. Very well, the observer would try. You never know what you can do till you try. His first attempt at taking shape wasn't good. It didn't look much like a man. So he tried again and again. Each time he grew better at it. It was true, what the people said. It was all true, every word and picture of it. There ain't no problem -- And so when it came time for his favorite Wednesday evening program, the distant observer was ready. Summoning all his effort, husbanding all his energy, he passed along the wave length as a man walks down a street. There was a slight jar, a click. He realized that he could never undo what had just been done. There was a new body now, a new metabolism. The past is dead, David. We have to live lor the future. "And what is your name -- my, you got up here but quick!" burbled Keith Kane, the M.C. of Cash or Credit. "I've never known a volunteer from our happy studio audience to manage it quite so suddenly. This is just the warmup, sir, so you needn't be nervous. Not that you need the reassurance -- cool as a cucumber, isn't he, folks? Say, did you folks ever hear the story about the little Sunday School boy who said that King Solomon had three hundred wives and six hundred cucumbers? Wow! I'm really naughty! You other folks who volunteered just take seats right there -- " old and pretty. Well, maybe not so old. But maybe like Mary Clay who realized that she was too old for young David Webster and after she cried she accepted the fact and sent him back to Madge Barkley whom he really loved all the while, only they had this silly quarrel. The lady smiled at him. He " -- So that's the way the rules work, and now, folks, in just five seconds we'll be on the air! Fivefour -- three -- two -- one -- Good evening, all you lovely people out there in TV Land! This is Keith Kane, bringing you the great -- quiz program ever: Cash or Credit?" Now he felt his heart beating very fast. So that was what it was like! And now he knew what was odor. But the lovely lady volunteer next to him smelled, yes, that was sweet. But if it was Muls or Van Art Number Three, this he would learn later. " -- just rinse and dry, folks, that's all there is to it: Clear-o, the allpurpose vegetable detergent. And now whom have we here? What is your name, sir?" Here it was. And how terrible if he should break down and press his hands to his head and sob, "I -- I -- don't -- know!" But he did know; he had it all ready. "David. My name is David Taylor." All the ones named David were good. Oh, they had their troubles, but in the end everyone loved them. And see: nice Keith Kane beaming. The lady, too. "Well, David, what'll it be? Cash -- or -- Credit? You know the rules: If you pick Cash, we spin this little wheel. If it comes up with a number, you go on to answer -- if you can, hah-ha -- a question worth however many thousand dollars follow that number. If it comes up blank -- you're out. Whereas, if you pick Credit, you take your place among the volunteers and if any contestant makes a boo-boo, why, you step into his shoes and he is out. Soooo -- ?" "Take the cash and let the credit go," said David. Grinning from lobe to lobe, Keith Kane asked the same questions of the lady, whose name was Mrs. Conar, Mrs. Ethel-Mae Conar, a widow; and received the same answer. The audience applauded, the wheel was spun, and it came up #. screamed Keith Kane. "That's what your first question is worth and here it is: What former President of the United States is associated with this tune, and what is the name of the tune, which refers to his State? Remember, you have thirty seconds to think it over..." David and Mrs. Conar won two hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in cash before the program was over, as well as a year's supply of Clear-o, and fifty shares of stock in a mink ranch; and the band played "The Stars and Stripes Forever" as Keith Kane counted out the money. Mrs. Conar had kissed him and kissed David and was now clasping his hands and sobbing that she didn't believe it. "Oh, it's true," David assured her. "It's all true; that's the funny part of it." (David Mackay said that, in Matinee, when he admitted his wife was an alcoholic.) Sight and sound and touch (kissing was pleasant; no wonder it was so much done) and smell and -- and -- what was the other? Taste. Keith Kane bawled at him the question of what he was going to do with all his money. David deliberated. What was it that Clem Clooten, on Saddle-Galled, had said, the time he broke the faro bank in Dogie City? Taste... yes: "Fm goin' out 'n buy m'self a cup o' java..." The audience went wild. citing as the other four sensations. And sitting next to him on the counter-stool was Mrs. EthelMae Conar, gazing at his distinguished profile. It was clean-cut; all Davids were clean-cut. He gazed down at her. He was tall, of course. He searched for the right words. It turned out to be singular. "Happy?" he asked. She sighed, nodded. Then -- "You're a rather strange young man," she said. "Do you know that?" Certainly he knew it. He leaned closer. "This is bigger than both of us," he said huskily. "Let me take you away from all this..." "I certainly will," she said briskly, "right over to my place in the Surrey-Regis on Park Avenue -- " That meant she was unhappy despite her money! -- "where we can have a decent cup of coffee." The counterman scowled at the bill David offered him. "Whatsis? Play-money? A five-hunnerd-dolla bill? Whuddya, wise guy?" David arose slowly, buttoning his jacket, and leaned over. "If you're looking for trouble, buddy..." he said. But the guy chickened out. Anyway, Ethel-Mae had some change in her purse. "Taxi!" David called happily. He helped her in, sank back in the seat, and when the driver asked Where To, David said crisply, "Follow that cab!" The driver (Herman Bogancz, the license read) half-turned, halfgrowled. Ethel-Mae laughed. "Oh, if you aren't -- never mind, driver: the Surry-Regis, on Park near -- " But H. Bogancz muttered that he knew where the place was. David gazed out the window excitedly. Everywhere, men and lights and women and automobiles. "Little old New York," he murmured. Suddenly she yelped, dug her fingers into his arm. "Darling!" he exclaimed. "Are you all right? Is anything wrong?" "No," she said. "Oh, no-" "Something must be wrong," he insisted. "You can tell me, dear. I trust you. No matter what you've done -- " "What I've done?" she screamed. "I've just won a half-share in # is what -- " He seized her, turned her facing him. "Are you out of your mind?" he gritted. And then, memory returning, he released her. "Yeah... Gee... that's right. Yeah... how about that? Do you know what this means? Ethel-Mae, we're rich! we're rich!" The driver twisted his chin slightly to the right. "Do y' mind, mister? Not so loud with the decibels. I gotta near condition." David said, shocked, "If there's anything I can do -- anything at all -- if you need money -- we'll get the best surgeon there is -- " Herman Bogancz shrugged. "My cousin Sidney is the best surgeon there is, and he says an operation wouldn't help." "Then," said David, "there's nothing more that any of us can do -- except wait -- and pray -- " " -- and wash it out three times a day with a boric acid solution," said Herman Bogancz.   why Mrs. Coran made him apply for a room at the SurreyRegis by himself while she went up to her room through the side entrance. In fact, he didn't understand at all. The clerk looked at him rather oddly when he explained this to him and asked for a room near hers. He looked even odder when he saw the # bill. Once again David buttoned his jacket (it had been necessary to unbutton it first) and leaned over. "I hope," he said, "that I'm not going to have any trouble with you." "Oh, dear me, no," said the clerk. "Not at all... my goodness, Mr. Taylor, but you really are tall, aren't you? Suite #. Mrs. Coran's is Suite #I -- that's the best I can do right just this very minute, and -- " Another gentleman materialized at David's elbow. "Good evening, sir," he said suavely. "I am Mr. Feltz, the manager. Is everything all right?" "The boy's not to blame," David said, gesturing toward the clerk. "Society is to blame -- we're all to blame. It's these crazy, mixed-up times we live in." Behind David's back, the clerk spread open the # bill for Mr. Feltz's inspection. "How right you are, sir," said Mr. Feltz. "About the gentleman's -- Mr. Taylor's change, Mr. Feltz -- ?" David turned, put his hand on the clerk's shoulder. The man flushed, sucked in his lower lip. "That's for you, sonny. There is no such thing as a bad boy. I never met a man I didn't like." "Front!" said the clerk, his voice tremulous. Mr. Feltz handed the keys to # to the bellboy himself, urged Mr. Taylor to make his wants known immediately. As David walked toward the elevator, the manager turned to his subordinate. "The Rich," he said simply. The clerk nodded solemnly. "We know their ways," said Mr. Feltz. "Eh? Well, that's very generous of you, Robert -- but, no, sixty-forty is good enough. He seems to have taken a liking to you. Send up flowers, the morning papers, a split of champagne. And include my card, Robert." As soon as the bellboy had gone (rather like a satisfied customer on his way out of a high-class opium den, with a # bill clutched in his hot hand), David went down the corridor and knocked on the door of Suite #. "Ethel-Mae?" he asked, his face close to the door. "Dearest? This is David. Please open. I can explain everything." And, sure enough, her words as she opened the door and fell into his arms were, "There is nothing to explain!" Then she said, "It's just that you're so sweet -- and naive. But that nasty little nance down at the desk wouldn't understand." Since David didn't understand either, he made no comment, but covered her face with kisses. "Darling, I love you," he said. "Please believe me." And she said, But she did -- she did. "Do you know what it's like to be alone -- always alone -- never to know love? Do you? Do you? No. Of course you don't-" Her answer was exactly correct. "Hush, darling," she said. "Everything's going to be all right." He sighed, kissed her again. Then -- "Ethel-Mae? Ethel-Mae? Mrs. Coran? What -- ? Why are you -- " But she didn't seem to hear him. Nothing he had ever heard on radio or seen on television prepared him for what was happening now. But -- he decided after a moment or so -- what was happening now was -- though strange -- not unpleasant. "This is wrong," he groaned happily. "It's all wrong. But I -- I don't care. Do you hear, I don't care!" T T was two in the morning before  he stumbled back to his own room, and bed. At half-past two, he was awakened by the bellboy's father and mother (smuggled up on the service elevator) who had come all the way from Mulberry Street to kiss his hands. At three, he was half-awakened by a scratching noise at his door. After a few minutes, he got up and -- after approaching it as cautiously as the Sheriff of Hangtown on the program of the same name -- threw it suddenly open. A pretty girl with her red hair in a pony-tail uttered a little scream. Pencil and notebook fell to the floor. "Why -- you -- you're only a child!" he said, in a hushed voice. "Mr. T-Taylor -- " she began very nervously. "I saw you at the studio and I fol -- followed you -- " she gulped -- "over here. But it took till now for me to get up nerve -- " "Why, you're frightened," he said, looking down at her. "Don't be frightened. Y ou don't ever have to be frightened of me. Come in," he urged. "Please come in." She picked up her notebook and followed him in obediently. Then, taking the seat he gestured to, she said, "And I'm not such a child, either. I'm a senior at Barnard. Journalism major. And I want a story from you, Mr. Taylor, before all the other reporters get here. Please, Mr. Taylor, please." He looked at her admiringly. "That took guts," he said. "Where I come from, the men get separated from the boys mighty young. But -- don't call me 'Mr. Taylor' -- Mr. Taylor has gray hair at the temples. Call me 'David'." She called him David. And she told him that her name was Pamela Novack. And he said that Pamela was a lovely name. She told him that she'd hated it as a child, but that lately -- in fact, just this very minute -- she'd gotten to like it a whole lot more. And they laughed. They laughed a whole lot. Before they knew it, it was getting light. "Oh, golly," Pamela sighed. "Oh, gee, have I got a story! In a way, it's so sad, you having such an unhappy childhood, I mean; your mother dying from the brain tumor and your father being an alcoholic -- " He said that was all in the past. He said they had to start looking toward the future. She nodded soberly. Then she stretched and said she was hungry. "Hey, how about that!" David laughed, catching sight of his face in the mirror. It was a nice face. He had done well in making it; it looked like all the Davids he had ever seen. "You know something? I'm hungry, too! I haven't had a bite to eat since that cup of coffee after the show. Would you like to have some breakfast? You would? Hot diggety!... Hello? I want Room Service, please." The narcoleptic tones of the operator said. Not till ha'pas'six. And then suddenly were clear and alert and saying, "Oh, Mr. Taylor? Pardon me -- of course, Mr. Taylor -- what would you like? Scrambled eggs and coffee and toast and gallons of orange juice. Yes, sir, Mr. Taylor." Then, suddenly, the smile was gone from David's face. Anxiously, Pamela asked what the matter was. Scowling, he mimicked, " 'Yes, Mr. Taylor, certainly, Mr. Taylor' -- it isn't me they like -- nobody likes me -- it's the money. Once you been in reform school, nobody has any use for you, the cops are always watching you, the nice girls don't want to have anything to do with you -- " Pamela was troubled. "Oh, you mustn't say that. I -- I -- well, I think I'm a nice girl -- " she blushed suddenly, looked down -- "and I -- like you -- David." and forth, rubbing his left arm with his right hand. He swung around and faced her. "You!" he jeered. "Whadda you know? You're just a fresh young kid -- " "I am not!" she snapped. "A senior at Barnard! Whadda you know about life? You -- " He stopped. He had been enjoying the experience of emoting so much that the significance of the scene had escaped him. They were quarreling! That meant they were in love! Of course -- Davids always quarreled with the girls they were really in love with. He dropped down on one knee beside her and looked into her flushed, pretty face. "Darling," he said brokenly, taking her hands. "Trust me -- I can't explain now -- but just trust me -- " There was a sound from the door. They looked up. Ethel-Mae Conar stood there, holding her throat with both hands. After a moment, she said, "I must have hurt you very much, David, for you to have done -- this -- to me -- to have forgotten. So quickly." Exquisitely miserable, he shouted, "Leave me alone! Can't you leave me alone? Can't you understand that it's all over between us?" And then, his voice dropping, "Oh, Ethel-Mae, forgive me. I didn't mean to say that. I didn't mean it. I -- I can explain." Letting her hands drop resignedly, she said, "There's nothing to explain, David. I understand. It could never have worked out. I'm -- I'm just -- too old for you, David." She walked over, lifted his head (he had hung it, of course), placed her palms on his cheeks and kissed him gently on the forehead. Then she turned to Pamela and said softly, "Be good to him, my dear. And give him lots of love." She went out, her head high, a wistful smile on her lips, and the awareness that she had half of the #, the year's supply of Clear-o (the vegetable detergent), and the fifty shares of stock in a mink ranch. There was a moment's silence. Then, "Gosh," said Pamela. "Golly," she said. David turned to her. "Darling, don't cry any more," he begged. "Everything's going to be all right from now on." "I'm not crying," she said. Her eyes were shining. "The hell with the story and the journalism course and the hell with Barnard, too. With all your money," she said, falling into his welcoming arms, "we can get married and start a family right away. Kiss me," she said, "hold me tight, don't ever leave me!" live in a fifteen-room house in Westport with two picture windows, three boxers, and three cars. They have two children and a third is on the way. They are as happy as any couple in Westport has a right to be in these crazy, mixed-up days. David is a highly successful writer of television scripts, with an unerring nose for what the public wants. It is perhaps unfortunate that his work brings him into contact with so many clever and attractive women. He is, of course, unfaithful to his wife with one of them at least twice a year (or at least once a year with two of them). There used to be a time when a David would never do a thing like this to his wife. He would almost do it -- and then, at the last moment, not. But TV is maturing. The Davids do it all the time. All the damned time. "But how could you?" Pam Taylor weeps. "David, how could you?" And young David Taylor, his face twisted with anguish, cries, "Don't you understand? Won't you even try to understand? I'm sick! I need help!" Well. Naturally Pam is very sad that her husband is sick, sick, sick-but, after all, it's the thing to be, isn't it? And so she's happy she can help him and happily she drives the two of them down to Dr. Naumbourg. David is very sad that he's made his lovely wife unhappy, but he's happy that he's Dr. Naumbourg always insists on both husbands and wives Going Into Therapy at the same time. Pamela's case is a common enough one, merely a routine phallic envy. Naumbourg gets them every day. But in all the years since Vienna, Dr. N. has never had another patient whose womb-fantasy takes the form of being a Thing on an asteroid. And so, while all three of them are very happy, Dr. Naumbourg is perhaps the happiest of all. You wish a universal panacea? A simple boon to grant -- first decide what part of you it is that you wish to have survive!  sible," declared Pro  fessor Carver. "But I saw it," said Fred, his companion and bodyguard. "Late last night, I saw it! They carried in this hunter -- he had his head half ripped off -- and they -- " "Wait," Professor Carver said, leaning forward expectantly. They had left their spaceship before dawn, in order to witness the sunrise ceremonies in the village of Loray, upon the planet of the same name. Sunrise ceremonies, viewed from a proper distance, are often colorful and can provide a whole chapter for an anthropologist's book; but Loray, as usual, proved a disappointment. Without fanfare, the sun rose, in answers to prayers made to it the preceding night. Slowly it hoisted its dull red expanse above the horizon, warming the topmost branches of the great rain-forest that surrounded the village. And the natives slept on... Not all the natives. Already the Sweeper was out, cleaning the debris between huts with his twig broom. He slowly shuffled along, human-shaped but unutterably alien. The Sweeper's face was a stylized blank, as though nature had drawn there a preliminary sketch of intelligent life. His head was strangely knobbed and his skin was pigmented a dirty gray. The Sweeper sang to himself as he swept, in a thick, guttural voice. In only one way was the Sweeper distinguishable from his fellow Lorayans : painted across his face was a broad black band. This was his mark of station, the lowest possible station in that primitive society. "Now then," Professor Carver said, after the sun had arisen without incident, "a phenomenon such as you describe could not exist. And it most especially could not exist upon a debased, scrubby little planet like this." "I saw what I saw," Fred maintained. "I don't know from impossible, Professor. I saw it. You want to pass it up, that's up to you." XT E leaned against the gnarly bole of a stabicus tree, folded his arms across his meager chest and glowered at the thatch-roofed village. They had been on Loray for nearly two months and Fred detested the village more each day. He was an underweight, unlovely young man and he wore his hair in a bristling crewcut which accentuated the narrowness of his brow. He had accompanied the professor for close to ten years, had journeyed with him to dozens of planets, and had seen many strange and wonderful things. Everything he saw, however, only increased his contempt for the Galaxy at large. He desired only to return, wealthy and famous, or wealthy and unknown, to his home in Bayonne, New Jersey. "This thing could make us rich," Fred accused. "And you want to pass it up." Professor Carver pursed his lips thoughtfully. Wealth was a pleasant thought, of course. But the professor didn't want to interrupt his important scientific work to engage in a wild goose chase. He was now completing his great book, the book that would fully amplify and document the thesis that he had put forth in his first paper, Color Blindness Among the Thang Peoples. He had expanded the thesis in his book, Lack of Coordination in the Drang Race. He had generalized it in his monumental Intelligence ifwU Deficiencies Around the Galaxy, in which he proved conclusively that intelligence among Non-Terrans decreases arithmetically as their planet's distance from Terra increases geometrically. Now the thesis had come to full flower in Carver's most recent work, his unifying effort, which was to be titled Underlying Causes of the Implicit Inferiority of Non-Terran Peoples. "If you're right -- " Carver said. "Look!" Fred cried. "They're bringing in another! See for yourself!" Professor Carver hesitated. He was a portly, impressive, redjowled man, given to slow and deliberate movement. He was dressed in a tropical explorer's uniform, although Loray was in a temperate zone. He carried a leather swagger stick, and strapped to his waist was a large revolver, a twin to the one Fred wore. "If you're right," Carver said slowly, "it would indeed be, so to speak, a feather in the cap." "Come on!" said Fred. ing a wounded companion to the medicine hut, and Carver and Fred fell in beside them. The hunters were visibly exhausted; they must have trekked for days to bring their friend to the village, for the srag hunts ranged deep into the rain-forest. "Looks done for, huh?" Fred whispered. Professor Carver nodded. Last month he had photographed a srag, from a vantage point very high in a very tall, stout tree. He knew it for a large, ill-tempered, quick-moving beast, with a dismaying array of claws, teeth and horns. It was also the only non-taboo meat-bearing animal on the planet. The natives had to kill srags or starve. But the wounded man had not been quick enough with spear and shield, and the srag had opened him from throat to pelvis. The hunter had bled copiously, even though the wound had been hastily bound with dried grasses. Mercifully, he was unconscious. "That chap hasn't a chance," Carver remarked. "It's a miracle he's stayed alive this long. Shock alone, to say nothing of the depth and extent of the wound -- " "You'll see," Fred said. The village had suddenly come awake. Men and women, grayskinned, knobby-headed, looked silently as the hunters marched toward the medicine hut. The Sweeper paused to watch. The village's only child stood before his parents' hut, and, thumb in mouth, stared at the procession. Deg, the medicine man, came out to meet the hunters, already wearing his ceremonial mask. The healing dancers assembled, quickly putting on their makeup. "Think you can fix him, Doc?" Fred asked. "One may hope," Deg replied piously. They entered the dimly lighted medicine hut. The wounded Lorayan was laid tenderly upon a pallet of grasses and the dancers began to perform before him. Deg started a solemn chant. "That'll never do it," Professor Carver pointed out to Fred, with the interested air of a man watching a steam shovel in operation. "Too late for faith healing. Listen to his breathing. Shallower, don't you think?" "Absolutely," Fred said. Deg finished his chant and bent over the wounded hunter. The Lorayan's breathing was labored. It slowed, hesitated... "It is time!" cried the medicine man. He took a small wooden tube cut of his pouch, uncorked it, and held it to the dying man's lips. The hunter drank. And then -- Carver blinked, and Fred grinned triumphantly. The hunter's breathing was becoming stronger. As they watched, the great gash became a line of scar tissue, then a thin pink mark, then an almost invisible white line. The hunter sat up, scratched his head, grinned foolishly and asked for something to drink, preferably intoxicating. Deg declared a festival on the spot.  the edge of the rain-forest for a conference. The professor walked like a man in a dream. His pendulous lower lip was thrust out and occasionally he shook his head. "How about it?" Fred asked. "It shouldn't be possible," said Carver dazedly. "No substance in nature should react like that. And you saw it work last night also?" "Damned well right," Fred said. "They brought in this hunter -- he had his head pulled half off. He swallowed some of that stuff and healed right before my eyes." "Man's age-old dream," Carver mused. "A universal panacea!" "We could get any price for stuff like that," Fred said. "Yes, we could -- as well as performing a duty to science," Professor Carver reminded him sternly. "Yes, Fred, I think we should obtain some of that substance." They turned and, with firm strides, marched back to the village. Dances were in progress, given by various members of the beast cults. At the moment, the Sathgohani, a cult representing a mediumsized deerlike animal, were performing. They could be recognized by the three red dots on their foreheads. Waiting their turn were the men of the Dresfeyxi and the Taganyes, cults representing other forest animals. The beasts adopted by the cults were taboo and there was an absolute injunction against their slaughter. Carver had been unable to discover the rationale behind this rule. The Lorayans refused to speak of it. Deg, the medicine man, had removed his ceremonial mask. He was seated in front of his hut, watching the dancing. He arose when the Earthmen approached him. "Peace!" he said. "Sure," said Fred. "Nice job you did this morning." Deg smiled modestly. "The gods answered our prayers." "The gods?" said Carver. "It looked as though the serum did most of the work." "Serum? Oh, the sersee juice!" Deg made a ceremonial gesture as he mentioned the name. "Yes, the sersee juice is the mother of the Lorayan people." "We'd like to buy some," Fred said bluntly, ignoring Professor Carver's disapproving frown. "What would you take for a gallon?" "I am sorry," Deg said. "How about some nice beads? Mirrors? Or maybe a couple of steel knives?" "It cannot be done," the medicine man asserted. "The sersee juice is sacred. It must be used only for holy healing." "Don't hand me that," Fred said, a flush mounting his sallow cheek. "You gooks think you can -- " "We quite understand," Carver broke in smoothly. "We know about sacred things. Sacred things are sacred. They are not to be touched by profane hands." "Are you crazy?" Fred whispered in English. "You are a wise man," Deg said gravely. "You understand why I must refuse you." "Of course. But it happens. Deg, I am a medicine man in my own country." "Ah? I did not know this!" "It is so. As a matter of fact, in my particular line, I am the highest medicine man." "Then you must be a very holy man," Deg said, bowing his head. "Man, he's holy!" Fred put in emphatically. "Holiest man you'll ever see around here." "Please, Fred," Carver said, blinking modestly. He said to the medicine man, "It's true, although I don't like to hear about it. Under the circumstances, however, you can see that it would not be wrong to give me some sersee juice. On the contrary, it is your priestly duty to give me some." The medicine man pondered for a long time while contrary emotions passed just barely perceptibly over his almost blank face. At last he said, "It may be so. Unfortunately, I cannot do what you require." "Why not?" "Because there is so little sersee juice, so terribly little. There is hardly enough for the village." Deg smiled sadly and walked away. simple, invariant way. The Sweeper moved slowly along, cleaning with his twig broom. The hunters trekked out in search of srags. The women of the village prepared food and looked after the village's one child. The priests and dancers prayed nightly for the sun to rise in the morning. Everyone was satisfied, in a humble, submissive fashion. Everyone except the Earthmen. They had more talks with Deg and slowly learned the complete story of the sersee juice and the troubles surrounding it. The sersee bush was a small and sickly affair. It did not flourish in a state of nature. Yet it resisted cultivation and positively defied transplantation. The best one could do was to weed thoroughly around it and hope it would blossom. But most sersee bushes struggled for a year or two, then gave up the ghost. A few blossomed, and a few out of the few lived long enough to produce their characteristic red berries. From the berry of the sersee bush was squeezed the elixir that meant life to the people of Loray. "And you must remember," Deg pointed out, "how sparsely the sersee grows and how widely scattered it is. We must search for months, sometimes, to find a single bush with berries. And those berries will save the life of only a single Lorayan, or perhaps two at the most." "Sad, very sad," Carver said. "But surely some form of intensive fertilization -- " "Everything has been tried." "I realize," Carver said earnestly, "how important the sersee juice is to you. But if you could give us a little -- even a pint or two -- we could take it to Earth, have it examined, synthesized, perhaps. Then you could have all you need." "But we dare not give any. Have you noticed how few children we have?" Carver nodded. "There are very few births. Our life is a constant struggle against the obliteration of our race. Every man's life must be preserved until there is a child to replace him. And this can be done only by our constant and never-ending search for the sersee berries. And there are never enough," the medicine man sighed. "Never enough." "Does the juice cure everything?" Fred asked. "It does more than that. Those who have tasted sersee add fifty of our years to their lives." Carver opened his eyes wide. Fifty years on Loray was roughly the equivalent of sixty-three on Earth. The sersee was more than a healing agent, more than a regenerator. It was a longevity drug as well. He paused to consider the prospect of adding another sixty years to his lifetime. Then he asked, "What happens if a man takes sersee again after the fifty years?" "We do not know," Deg told him. "No man would take it a second time while there is not enough." Carver and Fred exchanged glances. "Now listen to me carefully, Deg," Professor Carver said. He spoke of the sacred duties of science. Science, he told the medicine man, was above race, above creed, above religion. The advancement of science was above life itself. What did it matter, after all, if a few more Lorayans died? They would die eventually anyhow. The important thing was for Terran science to have a sample of sersee. "It may be as you say," Deg said. "But my choice is clear. As a priest of the Sunniheriat religion, I have a sacred trust to preserve the lives of my people. I cannot go against this trust." He turned and walked off. The Earthmen frustratedly returned to their spaceship. opened a drawer and took out the manuscript of Underlying Causes for the Implicit Inferiority of Non-Terran Races. Lovingly he read over the last chapter, the chapter that dealt with the specialized inferiorities of the Lorayan people. Then he put the manuscript away. "Almost finished, Fred," he told his assistant. "Another week's work, two weeks at the most!" "Um," Fred replied, staring at the village through a porthole. "This will do it," Carver said. "This book will prove, once and for all, the natural superiority of Terrans. We have proven it by force of arms, Fred, and we have proven it by our technology. Now it is proven by the impersonal processes of logic." Fred nodded. He knew the professor was quoting from the book's introduction. "Nothing must interfere with the great work," Carver said. "You agree with that, don't you?" "Sure," Fred said absent-mindedly. "The book comes first. Put the gooks in their place." "Well, I didn't exactly mean that. But you know what I mean. Under the circumstances, perhaps we should forget about sersee. Perhaps we should just finish the job we started." Fred turned and faced his employer. "Professor, how much do you expect to make out of this book?" "Hm? Well, the last did quite well, you will remember. This book should do even better. Ten, perhaps twenty thousand dollars!" He permited himself a small smile. "I am fortunate, you see, in my subject matter. The general public of Earth seems to be rather interested in it, which is gratifying for a scientist." Say you even make fifty thousand. Chicken feed! Do you know what we could make on a test tube of sersee?" "A hundred thousand?" Carver said vaguely. "Are you kidding? Suppose a rich guy was dying and we had the only thing to cure him. He'd give every"I believe you're right," Carver agreed. "And it would be a valuable scientific advancement... But the medicine man unfortunately won't give us any." "Buying isn't the only way." Fred unholstered his revolver and checked the chambers. "I see, I see," Carver said, his red face turning slightly pale. "But have we the right?" "What do you think?" "Well, they are inferior. I believe I have proven that conclusively. You might indeed say that their lives don't weigh heavily in the scheme of things. Hm, yes -- yes, Fred, we could save Terran lives with this!" "We could save our own lives," Fred said. "Who wants to punk out ahead of time?" Carver stood up and determinedly loosened his gun in its holster. "Remember," he told Fred, "we are doing this in the name of science, and for Earth." "Absolutely, Professor," Fred said, moving toward the port, grinning. cine hut. Carver said, without preamble, "We must have some sersee." "But I explained to you," said the medicine man. "I told you why it was impossible." "We gotta have it," Fred said. He pulled his revolver from its holster and looked ferociously at Deg. "No." "You think I'm kidding?" Fred asked. "You know what this weapon can do?" "I have seen you use it." "Maybe you think I won't use it on you." "I do not care. You can have no sersee." "I'll shoot," Fred warned, his voice rising angrily. "I swear to you, I'll shoot." The villagers of Loray slowly gathered behind their medicine man. Gray-skinned, knobby-headed, they moved silently into position, the hunters carrying their spears, other villagers armed with knives and stones. "You cannot have the sersee," Deg said. Fred slowly leveled the revolver. "Now, Fred," said Carver, "there's an awful lot of them. Do you really think -- " Fred's thin body tightened and his finger grew taut and white on the trigger. Carver closed his eyes. There was a moment of dead silence. Then the revolver exploded. Carver warily opened his eyes. The medicine man was still erect, although his knees were shaking. Fred was pulling back the hammer of the revolver. The villagers had made no sound. It was a moment before Carver could figure out what had happened. At last he saw the Sweeper. The Sweeper lay on his face, his outstretched left hand still clutching his twig broom, his legs twitching feebly. Blood welled from the hole Fred had neatly drilled through his forehead. Deg bent over the Sweeper, then straightened. "He is dead," the medicine man said. "That's just the first," Fred warned, taking aim at a hunter. "No!" cried Deg. Fred looked at him with raised eyebrows. "I will give it to you," Deg said. "I will give you all our sersee juice. Then you must go!" He ran into the medicine hut and reappeared a moment later with three wooden tubes, which he thrust into Fred's hands. "We're in business, Professor," Fred said. "Let's get moving!" They walked past the silent villagers, toward their spaceship. Something bright flashed in the sunlight. Fred yipped and dropped his revolver. Professor Carver hastily scooped it up. "One of those gooks cut me," Fred said. "Give me the revolver!" A spear arced high and buried itself at their feet. "Too many of them," said Carver. "Let's run for it!" They sprinted to their ship with spears and knives singing around them, reached it safely and bolted the port. "Too close," Carver said, panting for breath, leaning against the dogged port. "Have you got the serum?" "I got it," said Fred, rubbing his arm. "Damn!" "What'swrong?" "My arm. It feels numb."  pursed his lips thoughtfully, but made no comment. "It's numb," Fred said. "I wonder if they poison those spears." "It's quite possible," Professor Carver admitted. "They did!" Fred shouted." Look, the cut is changing color already!" The edges of the wound had a blackened, septic look. too. I wouldn't worry much about it, Fred. Modern Terran drugs -- " might not even touch this stuff. Open one of those tubes!" "But, Fred," Carver objected, "we have so little of it. Besides -- " "To hell with that," Fred said. He took one of the tubes and uncorked it with his teeth. "Wait, Fred!" "Wait, nothing!" Fred drained the contents of the tube and flung it down. Carver said testily, "I was merely going to point out that the serum should be tested before an Earthman uses it. We don't know how it'll react on a human. It was for your own good." "Sure it was," Fred said mockingly. "Just look at how the stuff is reacting." The blackened wound had turned flesh-colored again and was sealing. Soon there was a line of white scar tissue. Then even that was gone, leaving firm pink flesh beneath. "Pretty good, huh?" Fred gloated, with a slight touch of hysteria. "It works, Professor, it works! Drink one yourself, pal, live another sixty years. Do you suppose we can synAnd if we can't, there's always good old Loray. We can drop back every fifty years or so for a refill. The stuff even tastes good, Professor. Tastes like -- what's wrong?" Professor Carver was staring at Fred, his eyes wide with astonishment. "What's the matter?" Fred asked, grinning. "Ain't my seams straight? What you staring at?" Carver didn't answer. His mouth trembled. Slowly he backed away. "What the hell is wrong!" Fred glared at Carver. Then he ran to the spaceship's head and looked in the mirror. "What's happened to me?" Carver tried to speak, but no words came. He watched as Fred's features slowly altered, smoothed, became blank, rudimentary, as though nature had drawn there a preliminary sketch of intelligent life. Strange knobs were coming out on Fred's head. His complexion was changing slowly from pink to gray. iiT told you to wait," Carver sighed. "What's happening?" asked Fred in a frightened whimper. "Well," Carver said, "it must all be residual in the sersee. The Lorayan birth-rate is practically nonexistent, you know. Even with the sersee's healing powers, the race should have died out long ago. Unless the serum had another purpose as well -- the ability to change lower animal forms into the Lorayan form." "That's a wild guess!" "A working hypothesis based upon Deg's statement that sersee is the mother of the Lorayan people. I'm afraid that is the true meaning of the beast cults and the reason they are taboo. The various beasts must be the origins of certain portions of the Lorayan people, perhaps all the Lorayan people. Even the topic is taboo; there clearly is a deep-seated sense of inferiority about their recent step up from bestiality." Carver rubbed his forehead wearily. "The sersee juice has," he continued, "we may hazard, a rolesharing in terms of the life of the race. We may theorize -- " "To hell with theory," Fred said, and was horrified to find that his voice had grown thick and guttural, like a Lorayan voice. "Professor, do something!" "There's nothing I can do." "Maybe Terran science -- " "No, Fred," Carver said quietly. "What?" "Fred, please try to understand. I can't bring you back to Earth." "What do you mean? You must be crazy!" "Not at all. How can I bring you back with such a fantastic story? They would consider the whole thing a gigantic hoax." "But "Listen to me. No one would believe! They would consider, rather, that you were an unusually intelligent Lorayan. Your very presence, Fred, would undermine the whole thesis of my book!" "You can't leave me," Fred said. "You just can't do that." Professor Carver still had both revolvers. He stuck one in his belt and leveled the other. "I am not going to endanger the work of a lifetime. Get out, Fred." "No!" "I mean it. Get out, Fred." "I won't! You'll have to shoot me!" "I will if I must," Carver assured him. "I'll shoot you and throw you out." He took aim. Fred backed to the port, undogged it, opened it The villagers were waiting quietly outside. "What will they do to me?" "I'm really sorry, Fred," Carver said. "I won't go!" Fred shrieked, gripping the edges of the port with both hands. Carver shoved him into the waiting hands of the crowd and threw the remaining tubes of sersee after him. Then, quickly, not wishing to see what was going to happen, he sealed the port. Within an hour, he was leaving the planet's atmospheric limits. ' ' book, Underlying Causes of the Implicit Inferiority of NonTerran Peoples, was hailed as a milestone in comparative anthropology. But he ran into some difficulty almost at once. A space captain named Jones returned to Earth and maintained that, on the planet Loray, he had discovered a native who was in every significant way the equal of a Terran. And he had tape recordings and motion pictures to prove it Carver's thesis seemed in doubt for some time, until Carver examined the evidence for himself. Then he pointed out, with merciless logic, that the so-called super-Lorayan, this paragon of Loray, this supposed equal of Terran humanity, occupied the lowest position in the Lorayan hierarchy, the position of Sweeper, clearly shown by the broad black stripe across his face. The space captain admitted that this was true. Why then, Carver thundered, was this Lorayan Superior not able, in spite of his so-called abilities, to reach any higher position in the debased society in which he dwelt? The question silenced the space captain and his supporters, demolished the entire school, as a matter of fact. And the Carverian Doctrine of the Implicit Inferiority of Non-Terrans is now accepted by reasoning Terrans everywhere in the Galaxy. A  We asked last year how communities were doing for supplies of  J Galaxy -- adequate or inadequate numbers of copies, regular or  J irregular distribution?  J Readers wrote in. A lot of them.   The result was remarkably like a revised battle plan. Reserve   copies were sped into lightly held towns. Fortified positions that  J had held out against science fiction were breeched. Copies were t J liberated from under-the-counter concealment and put in the front   lines.S Everybody benefited, and our thanks to those reader-scouts who did a terrain-mapping job that we could never have done on our own. But that was a year ago. How are things now? For swift, resourceful action, write directly to headquarters: Circulation Department. Galaxy Publishing Corp. Hudson Street New York #, N.Y. in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put on the inside front cover of each with your name printed on it. Bookplate No. GF-# The umteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives states: "No books are lost by loaning except the ones you particularly want to keep." with owner's name: I#-S#, #-S# #-# (Add State Sales Tax, if any) Actual Size #" x # " #I Hudson Street, New York #. N. Y. T W: n L.  L-... T I w BPk  James Blish. Ballantine Books, N.Y., # clear of religious themes with greater reason than mainstream authors. It's a ticklish task even for the latter. In our specialized field, such necks stuck out usually mean heads lopped off. Very few successful examples pop into mind. Miller's "Canticle for Liebowitz" and certain shorts of Boucher's are most easily recalled. However, religion is a most valid theme. That it is difficult to handle acceptably does not disqualify it. The reverse, rather -- a challenge of this magnitude demands talent and skill equal to it. Given that, the result is bound to be a significant one. Blish's choice of a Jesuit as a member of a Planetary Commission is logical: Jesuits have long been explorers and scientists and doubtless will continue even beyond the Earth's atmosphere. His concepts and precepts are particularly controversial, as they must be in so foreign an environment. Although the book tends to extreme unevenness, this profound story of an alien moralistic paradise, its inhumanly good code of ethics and the unintended threat to Earth's equanimity that it represents, is a provocative, serious, commendable work. Such trailblazers are exceedingly hard to come by. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # A S indicated by the title, all five novellas appeared in this magazine: "Tangle Hold" by F. L. Wallace, "World Without Children" by Damon Knight, "Wherever You May Be" by James E. Gunn, "Mind Alone" by J. T. McIntosh and "Granny Won't Knit" by Theodore Sturgeon. With introduction by Gold. James S. Pickering. Dodd, Mead  Co, N.Y., # swers in quantities sufficient to satisfy the most persistent astronomical pest. Pickering, assistant astronomer and lecturer at the N.Y. Hayden Planetarium, has supervised their program of special performances for school children, business groups and conventions. Random questions: #. Why is twilight shorter in the tropics? #. What was the Star of Bethlehem? #. What is the solar phenomenon known as Bailey's Beads? Incidentally, the title is too modest. There are # questions by actual count. Kersh. Ballantine Books, N. Y., # rel with the Ballantine squibs. However, to describe as science fiction this Kersh collection is considerable point-stretching. A handful of stories touch the outer perimeter of fantasy-science: "The Eye," a transplant story such as underwent multiple jeopardy during Hollywood's "Karloff Period," but in Kersh's treatment head, shoulders, knees and ankles above its ilk; "Frozen Beauty," concerning a resuscitated Siberian Ice Age female; the time-warp effect of the Hiroshima bomb in "The Brighton Monster" -- these qualify, but the remaining ten do not. Good fiction, yes. Science fiction, no. Kersh is a phrase-turner of prime distinction: "To die, that's nothing. It's easier to die than to live, once you get the hang of it." If off-trail, well-written fantasy is your dish, here's a tureen of it. C. S. Lewis. Avon Publications, Inc., N.Y., # dr a, Out oi the Silent Planet ) this book is another of Lewis's allegorical treatments of the conflict between biblical Good and Evil. Though less known than its famous predecessors, it bears the authentic stamp of its creator's awesome imagination -- awesome in the archaic sense. A tiny English college town is the apex of conflict; a stuffy young Fellow of Sociology and his clairvoyant wife are the axis around which the story revolves, the husband an unthinking tool of the evil N.I.C.E. -- National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, and the wife the seer of the # th Pendragon of Logres in direct line of succession from King Arthur. However, both earthly rival groups are merely tools of infinitely superior supra-normal forces. From calm beginnings, Lewis's Apocalyptic warning is soon in full shriek, aided by such grisly shockers as the living Pavlovian head of a guillotined French murderer, the body of Merlin the Druid dug living from its age-old tomb, and a viciously sadistic female boss of secret police known as "Fairy" Hardcastle. This is the kind of yarn over which oldtime Fen shake grizzled locks and disclaim sadly that "They don't hardly write them like this no more." by Commander David C. Holmes. Funk and W agnails Co., N.Y., # the Armed Services have added yet another to their group of exceedingly articulate spokesmen. His breezily titled book is informative, authoritative and jamfilled and chockpacked with quotable bromides. "The only way we could tell old time test pilots apart (sole interests: women and planes) was by the altitude at which we found them." Following his conquest of space, "man as we know him today may become a period piece in the vast furniture of life." with H-bomb warheads could create new moon craters with unique opportunities for perpetuating the names of presidents, prime ministers and party secretaries." Additionally, this is the best treatment to date of the first two Sputniks, three Explorers and first Vanguard. And, basing his guess on some sound information, Holmes is convinced that a successful moon shot by # is a certainty. Maybe he and I are already too late with this bit of inside outfo. Stanton A. Coblentz. Avalon Books N.Y., # hew to the formula laid down in Dean Swift's Gulliver. But where Swift is still highly readable centuries afterward, in only a quarter century the field has so far outdistanced Coblentz that his books seem older -- and ever so much slower -- than Swift's. However, technical faults aside, Coblentz frequently gets across a telling blow at our sociopolitical setup. Twenty-seven years, one universal war and countless police actions later, some of his observations are as valid as most of Swift's are. In fact, now that we have the comic opera posturings and moralistic blatherings in the United Nations while conflict abounds at large, his picture of a ridiculous culture on Venus, highly industrialized yet socially nonsensical, has parallels that hurt. So, although Pohl and Kornbluth, among others, have done far superior satirical jobs, Coblentz does retain a certain historical value. Jr. Whittlesey House, N.Y., # T HE period since Sputnik I has seen scores of space books published and I find arresting the fact that so many authors are part of the space program in one way or another. This is a far departure from the close-mouthed attitude of our Armed Services pre-Oct. '#. For instance, Newell has such unusual qualifications that I find it even more edifying to review the author than his lucid little book. Three years teacher of mathematics at U. of Wise., four at U. of Maryland; joined Naval Research Lab #; #, named head of Rocket Sonde Branch in charge of rocket upper-air research program; #, Acting Superintendent of Atmosphere and Astrophysics Division which includes Rocket Sonde, Radio Astronomy, Atmospheric Electricity and Aerology. Also Science Program Coordinator for Project Vanguard. There's still more, but best of all -- it's a good book, written by one with knowledge to impart and the knowledge of how best to impart it. When the People Fell The biggest news story in all history had happened centuries ago -- but he was an eyewitness! AN you imagine a rain of fl people through an acid  J fog? Can you imagine thousands and thousands of human bodies, without weapons, overwhelming the unconquerable monsters? Can you -- " "Look, sir," interrupted the reporter. "Don't interrupt me! You ask me silly questions. I tell you I saw the Goonhogo itself. I saw it take Venus. Now ask me about that!" The reporter had called to get an old man's reminiscences about bygone ages. He did not expect Dobyns Bennett to flare up at him. Dobyns Bennett thrust home the psychological advantage he had gotten by taking the initiative. "Can you imagine showhices in their parachutes, a lot of them dead, floating out of a green sky? Can you imagine mothers crying as they fell? Can you imagine people pouring down on the poor helpless monsters?" Mildly, the reporter asked what showhices were. "That's old Chinesian for children," said Dobyns Bennett. "I saw the last of the nations burst and die, and you want to ask me about fashionable clothes and things. Real history never gets into the books. It's too shocking. I suppose you were going to ask me what I thought of the new striped pantaloons for women!" "No," said the reporter, but he blushed. The question was in his notebook and he hated blushing. "Do you know what the Goonhogo did?" f What?" asked the reporter, struggling to remember just what a Goonhogo might be. "It took Venus," said the old man, somewhat more calmly. Very mildly, the reporter murmured, "It did?" "You bet it did!" said Dobyns Bennett belligerently. "Were you there?" asked the reporter. "You bet I was there when the Goonhogo took Venus," said the old man. "I was there and it's the damnedest thing I've ever seen. You know who I am. I've seen more worlds than you can count, boy, and yet when the nondies and the needies and the showhices came pouring out of the sky, that was the worst thing that any man could ever see. Down on the ground, there were the loudies the way they'd always been -- " The reporter interrupted, very gently. Bennett might as well have been speaking a foreign language. All of this had happened three hundred years before. The reporter's job was to get a feature from him and to put it into a language which people of the present time could understand.- "Can't you start at the beginning of the story?" "You bet. That's when I married Terza. Terza was the prettiest girl you ever saw. She was one of the Vomacts, a great family of scanners, and her father was a very important man. You see, I was thirty-two, and when a man is thirty-two, he thinks he is pretty old, but I wasn't really old, I just thought so, and he wanted Terza to marry me because she was such a complicated girl that she needed a man's help. The Court back home had found her unstable and the Instrumentality had ordered her left in her father's care until she married a man who then could take on proper custodial authority. I suppose those are old customs to you, boy -- " The reporter interrupted again. "I am sorry, old man," said he. "I know you are over four hundred years old and you're the only person who remembers the time the Goonhogo took Venus. Now the Goonhogo was a government, wasn't it?" "Anyone knows that," snapped the old man. "The Goonhogo was a sort of separate Chinesian govthem all crowded in one small part of Earth. Most of them spoke English the way you and I do, but they spoke their own language, too, with all those funny words that have come on down to us. They hadn't mixed in with anybody else yet. Then, you see, the Waywanjong himself gave the order and that is when the people started raining. They just fell right out of the sky. You never saw anything like it -- " The reporter had to interrupt him again and again to get the story bit by bit. The old man kept using terms that he couldn't seem to realize were lost in history and that had to be explained to be intelligible to anyone of this era. But his memory was excellent and his descriptive powers as sharp and alert as ever... not been at Experimental Area A very long, before he realized that the most beautiful female he had ever seen was Terza Vomact. At the age of fourteen, she was fully mature. Some of the Vomacts diti mature that way. It may have had something to do with their being descended from unregistered, illegal people centuries back in the past. They were even said to have mysterious connections with the lost world back in the age of nations when people could still put numbers on the years. He fell in love with her and felt like a fool for doing it. She was so beautiful, it was hard to realize that she was the daughter of Scanner Vomact himself. The scanner was a powerful man. Sometimes romance moves too fast and it did with Dobyns Bennett because Scanner Vomact himself called in the young man and said, "I'd like to have you marry my daughter Terza, but I'm not sure she'll approve of you. If you can get her, boy, you have my blessing." Dobyns was suspicious. He wanted to know why a senior junior technician. All that the scanner did was to smile. He said, "I'm a lot older than you, and with this new santaclara drug coming in that may give people hundreds of years, you may think that I died in my prime if I die at a hundred and twenty. You may live to four or five hundred. But I know my time's coming up. My wife has been dead for a long time and we have no other children and I know that Terza needs a father in a very special kind of way. The psychologist found her to be unstable. Why don't you take her outside the area? You can get a pass through the dome anytime. You can go out and play with the loudies." Dobyns Bennett was almost as insulted as if someone had given him a pail and told him to go play in the sandpile. And yet he realized that the elements of play in courtship were fitted together and that the old man meant well. The day that it all happened, he and Terza were outside the dome. They had been pushing loudies around. Loudies were not dangerous unless you killed them. You could knock them down, push them out of the way, or tie them up; after a while, they slipped away and went about their business. It took a very special kind of ecologist to figure out what their business was. They floated two meters high, ninety centimeters in diameter, gently just above the land of Venus, eating microscopically. For a long time, people thought there was radiation on which they subsisted. They simply multiplied in tremendous numbers. In a silly sort of way, it was fun to push them around, but that was about all there was to do. They never responded with intelligence. Once, long before, a loudie taken into the laboratory for experimental purposes had typed a perfectly clear message on the typewriter. The message had read, "Why don't you Earth people go back to Earth and leave us alone? We are getting along all -- " And that was all the message that anybody had ever got out of them in three hundred years. The best laboratory conclusions was that they had very high intelligence if they ever chose to use it, but that their volitional mechanism was so profoundly different from the psychology of human beings that it was impossible to force a loudie to respond to stress as people did on Earth. f I I HE name loudie was some kind of word in the old Chinesian language. It meant the "ancient ones." Since it was the Chinesians who had set up the first outposts on Venus, under the orders of their supreme boss the Waywonjong, their term lingered on. Dobyns and Terza pushed loudies, climbed over the hills and looked down into the valleys where it was impossible to tell a river from a swamp. They got thoroughly wet, their air converters stuck, and perspiration itched and tickled along their cheeks. Since they could not eat or drink while outside -- at least not with any reasonable degree of safety -- the excursion could not be called a picnic. There was something mildly refreshing about playing child with a very pretty girl-child -- but Dobyns wearied of the whole thing. Terza sensed his rejection of her. Quick as a sensitive animal, she became angry and petulant. "You didn't have to come out with me!" "I wanted to," he said, "but now I'm tired and want to go home." "You treat me like a child. All right, play with me. Or you treat me like a woman. All right, be a gentleman. But don't seesaw all the time yourself. I just got to be a little bit happy and you have to get middle-aged and condescending. I won't take it." "Your father -- " he said, realizing the moment he said it that it was a mistake. "My father this, my father that. If you're thinking about marrying me, do it yourself." She glared at him, stuck her tongue out, ran over a dune, and disappeared. Dobyns Bennett was baffled. He did not know what to do. She was safe enough. The loudies never hurt anyone. He decided to teach her a lesson and to go on back himself, letting her find her way home when she pleased. The Area Search Team could find her easily if she really got lost. He walked back to the gate. When he saw the gates locked and the emergency lights on, he realized that he had made the worst mistake of his life. he ran the last few meters of the way, and beat the ceramic gate with his bare hands until it opened only just enough to let him in. "What's wrong?" he asked the doortender. The doortender muttered something which Dobyns could not understand. "Speak up, man!" shouted Dobyns. "What's wrong?" "The Goonhogo is coming back and they're taking over." "That's impossible," said Dobyns. "They couldn't -- " He checked himself. Could they? "The Goonhogo's taken over," the gatekeeper insisted. "They've been given the whole thing. The Earth Authority has voted it to them. The Waywonjong has decided to send people right away. They're sending them." "What do the Chinesians want with Venus? You can't kill a loudie without contaminating a thousand acres of land. You can't push them away without them drifting back. You can't scoop them up. Nobody can live here until we solve the problem of these things. We're a long way from having solved it," said Dobyns in angry bewilderment. The gatekeeper shook his head. "Don't ask me. That's all I hear on the radio. Everybody else is excited too." Within an hour, the rain of people began. Dobyns went up to the radar room, saw the skies above. The radar man himself was drumming his fingers against the desk. He said, "Nothing like this has been seen for a thousand years or more. You know what there is up there? Those are warships, the warships left over from the last of the old dirty wars. I knew the Chinesians were inside them. Everybody knew about it. It was sort of like a museum. Now they don't have any weapons in them. But do you people hanging up there over Venus and I don't know what they are going to do!" He stopped and pointed at one of the screens. "Look, you can see them running in patches. They're behind each other, so they cluster up solid. We've never had a screen look like that." Dobyns looked at the screen. It was, as the operator said, full of blips. As they watched, one of the men exclaimed, 'What's that milky stuff down there in the lower left? See, it's -- it's pouring," he said, "it's pouring somehow out of those dots. How can you pour things into a radar? It doesn't really show, does it?" The radar man looked at his screen. He said, "Search me. I don't know what it is, either. You'll have to find out. Let's just see what happens." Scanner Vomact came into the the room. He said, once he had taken a quick, experienced glance at the screens, "This may be the strangest thing we'll ever see, but I have a feeling they're dropping people. Lots of them. Dropping them by the thousands, or by the hundreds of thousands, or even coming down there. Come along with me, you two. We'll go out and see it. There may be somebody that we can help." "D Y this time, Dobyns' conscience was hurting him badly. He wanted to tell Vomact that he had left Terza out there, but he had hesitated -- not only because he was ashamed of leaving her, but because he did not want to tattle on the child to her father. Now he spoke. "Your daughter's still outside." Vomact turned on him solemnly. The immense eyes looked very tranquil and very threatening, but the silky voice was controlled. "You may find her." The scanner added, in a tone which sent the thrill of menace up Dobyns' back, "And everything will be well if you bring her back." Dobyns nodded as though receiving an order. "I shall," said Vomact, "go out myself, to see what I can do, but I leave the finding of my daughter to you." They went down, put on the extra-long-period converters, carried their miniaturized survey equipment so that they could find their way back through the fog, and went out Just as they were at the gate, the gatekeeper said, "Wait a moment, sir and excellency. I have a message for you here on the phone. Please call Control." Scanner Vomact was not to be called lightly and he knew it. He picked up the connection unit and spoke harshly. The radar man came on the phone screen in the gatekeeper's wall. "They're overhead now, sir." "Who's overhead?" "The Chinesians are. They're coming down. I don't know how many there are. There must be two thousand warships over our heads right here and there are more thousands over the rest of Venus. They're down now. If you want to see them hit ground, you'd better get outside quick." Vomact and Dobyns went out. Down came the Chinesians. People's bodies were raining right out of the milk-cloudy sky. Thousands upon thousands of them with plastic parachutes that looked like bubbles. Down they came. Dobyns and Vomact saw a headless man drift down. The parachute cords had decapitated him. A woman fell near them. The drop had torn her breathing tube loose from her crudely bandaged throat and she was choking in her own blood. She staggered toward them, tried to babble but only drooled blood with mute choking sounds, and then fell face forward into the mud. Two babies dropped. The adult accompanying them had been blown off course. Vomact ran, picked them up and handed them to a Chinesian man who had just landed. The man looked at the babies in his arms, sent Vomact a look of contemptuous inquiry, put the weeping children down in the cold slush of Venus, gave them a last impersonal glance and ran . off on some mysterious errand of his own. Vomact kept Bennett from picking up the children. "Come on, let's keep looking. We can't take care of all of them." r T , HE world had known that the Chinesians had a lot of unpredictable public habits, but they never suspected that the nondies and the needies and the showhices could pour down out of a poisoned sky. Only the Goonhogo itself would make such a reckless use of human life. Nondies were men and needies were women and showhices were the little children. And the Goonhogo was a name left over from the old days of nations. It meant something like republic or state or government. Whatever it was, it was the organization that ran the Chinesians in the Chinesian manner, under the Earth Authority. And the ruler of the Goonhogo was the Waywonjong. The Waywonjong didn't come to Venus. He just sent his people. He sent them floating down into Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the only weapons which could make a settlement of that planet possible -- people themselves. Human arms could tackle the loudies, the loudies who had been called "old ones" by the first Chinesian scouts to cover Venus. The loudies had to be gathered together so gently that they would not die and, in dying, each contaminate a thousand acres. They had to be kept together by human bodies and arms in a gigantic living corral. Scanner Vomact rushed forward. A wounded Chinesian man hit the ground and his parachute collapsed behind him. He was clad in a pair of shorts, had a knife at his belt, canteen at his waist. He had an air converter attached next to his ear, with a tube running into his throat. He shouted something unintelligible at them and limped rapidly away. People kept on hitting the ground all around Vomact and Dobyns. The self-disposing parachutes were bursting like bubbles in the misty air, a moment or two after they touched the ground. Someone had done a tricky, efficient job with the chemical consequences of static electricity. And as the two watched, the air was heavy with people. One time, Vomact was knocked down by a person. He found that it was two Chinesian children tied together. Dobyns asked, "What are you doing? Where are you going? Do you have any leaders?" He got cries and shouts in an unintelligible language. Here and there someone shouted in English "This way!" or "Leave us alone!" or "Keep going..." but that was all. The experiment worked. dropped in that one day. seemed barely short of endless, Dobyns found Terza in a corner of the cold hell. Though Venus was warm, the suffering of the almost-naked Chinesians had chilled his blood. Terza ran toward him. She could not speak. She put her head on his chest and sobbed. Finally she managed to say, "I've -- I've -- I've tried to help, but they're too many, too many, too many!" And the sentence ended as shrill as a scream. Dobyns led her back to the experimental area. They did not have to talk. Her whole body told him that she wanted his love and the comfort of his presence, and that she had chosen that course of life which would keep them together. As they left the drop area, which seemed to cover all of Venus so far as they could tell, a pattern was beginning to form. The Chinesians were beginning to round up the loudies. Terza kissed him mutely after the gatekeeper had let them through. She did not need to speak. Then she fled to her room. The next day, the people from Experimental Area A tried to see if they could go out and lend a hand to the settlers. It wasn't possible to lend a hand; there were too many settlers. People by the hills and valleys of Venus, sludging through the mud and water with their human toes, crushing the alien mud, crushing the strange plants. They didn't know what to eat. They didn't know where to go. They had no leaders. All they had were orders to gather the loudies together in large herds and hold them there with human arms. The loudies didn't resist. After a time-lapse of several Earth days, the Goonhogo sent small scout cars. They brought a very different kind of Chinesian -- these late arrivals were uniformed, educated, cruel, smug men. They knew what they were pay any sacrifice of their own people to get it done.  They brought instructions. They put the people together in gangs. It did not matter where the nondies and needies had come from on Earth; it didn't matter whether they found their own showhices or somebody else's. They were shown the jobs to do and they got to work. Human bodies accomplished what machines could not have done -- they kept the loudies firmly but gently encircled until every last one of the creatures was starved into nothingness. Rice fields began to appear miraculously. Scanner Vomact couldn't believe it. The Goonhogo biochemists had managed to adapt rice to the soil of Venus. And yet the seedlings came out of boxes in the scout cars and weeping people walked over the bodies of their own dead to keep the crop moving toward the planting. Venusian bacteria could not kill human beings, nor could they dispose of human bodies after death. A problem arose and was solved. Immense sleds carried dead men, women and children -- those who had fallen wrong, or drowned as they fell, or had been trampled by others -- to an undisclosed destination. Dobyns suspected the material was to be used to add Earthtype organic waste to the soil of Venus, but he did not tell Terza. The work went on. The nondies and needies kept working in shifts. When they could not see in the darkness, they proceeded without seeing -- keeping in line by touch or by shout. Foremen, newly trained, screeched commands. Workers lined up, touching fingertips. The job of building the fields kept on. people dropped in a single day. And later I heard that the Waywonjong said it wouldn't have survivors would have been enough to make a spacehead for the Goonhogo. The Chinesians got Venus, all of it. "But I'll never forget the nondies and the needies and the showhices falling out of the sky, men and women and children with their poor scared Chinesian faces. That funny Venusian air made them look green instead of tan. There they were, falling all around. "You know something, young man?" said Dobyns Bennett approaching his fifth century of age. "What?" said the reporter. "There won't be things like that happening on any world again. Because now, after all, there isn't any separate Goonhogo left. There's only one Instrumentality and they don't care what a man's race may have been in the ancient years. Those were the rough old days, the ones I lived in. Those were the days men still tried to do things." Dobyns almost seemed to doze off, but he roused himself sharply and said, "I tell you, the sky was full of people. They fell like water. They fell like rain. I've seen the awful ants in Africa, and there's not a thing among the stars to beat them for prowling horror. Mind you, they're worse than anything the stars contain. I've seen the crazy worlds near Alpha Centauri, but I never saw anything like the time the people fell on Venus. More than eighty-two million in one day and my own little Terza lost among them. "But the rice did sprout. And the loudies died as the walls of people held them in with human arms. Walls of people, I tell you, with volunteers jumping in to take the places of the falling ones. "They were people still, even when they shouted in the darkness. They tried to help each other even while they fought a fight that had to be fought without violence. They were people still. And they did so win. It was crazy and impossible, but they won. Mere human beings did what machines and science would have taken another thousand years to do... "The funniest thing of all was the first house that I saw a nondie put up, there in the rain of Venus. I was out there with Vomact and with a pale sad Terza. It wasn't much of a house, shaped out of twisted Venusian wood. There it was. He built it, the smiling half-naked Chinesian nondie. We went to the door and said to him in English, "What are you building here, a shelter or a hospital?' "The Chinesian grinned at us. 'No,' he said, 'gambling.' "Vomact wouldn't believe it: 'Gambling?' "'Sure,' said the nondie. 'Gambling is the first thing a man needs in a strange place. It can take the worry out of his soul." "Is that all?" said the reporter. the personal part did not count. He added, "Some of my great-great-great-great-great-grandsons may come along. You count those greats. Their faces will show you easily enough that I married into the Vomact line. Terza saw what happened. She saw how people build worlds. This was the hard way to build them. She never forgot the night with the dead Chinesian babies lying in the half-illuminated mud, or the parachute ropes dissolving slowly. She heard the needies weeping and the helpless nondies comforting them and leading them off to nowhere. She remembered the cruel, neat officers coming out of the scout cars. She got home and saw the rice come up, and saw how the Goonhogo made Venus a Chinesian place." "What happened to you personally?" asked the reporter. "Nothing much. There wasn't any more work for us, so we closed down Experimental Area A. I married Terza. "Any time later, when I said to her, 'You're not such a bad girl!' she was able to admit the truth and tell me she was not. That night in the rain of people would test anybody's soul and it tested hers. She had met a big test and passed it. She used to say to me, 'I saw it once. I saw the people fell, and I never want to see another person suffer again. Keep me with you, Dobyns, keep me with you forever.' "And," said Dobyns Bennet, "it wasn't forever, but it was a happy and sweet three hundred years. She died after our fourth diamond anniversary. Wasn't that a wonderful thing, young man?" The reporter said it was. And yet, when he took the story back to his editor, he was told to put it into the archives. It wasn't the right kind of story for entertainment and the public would not appreciate it any more. By Manly Wade Wellman Ironic destiny of a visitor from the future trying to take advantage of things to come. By F. L. Wallace Earth was too perfect for these extraordinary exiles -- to belong to it, they had to flee it. By Hal Clement All the science on earth might not be able to meet the demands of this alien race. By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony. That rare event; a science fiction novel based on a new idea. We mean are you missing the fine line of Galaxy Novels simply because you don't want to go hunting through today's crowded newsstands? No need to. We'll send them to you -- mailed flat, their handsome covers and neat pages well protected -- mailed as soon as each title comes off the presses. Best of all... Besides saving you trouble and time, we save you money! At # titles (all different) for only #, that comes to #tf a book -- a saving of # over the newsstand price! Send in your subscription today. Don't use the coupon if you prefer not to cut it out; it's for your convenience, only. Enter my subscription for # books (full length, all different) at # (# additional for Foreign). Name Address City. lone. State... The Man in the Mailbag Traveling inside an official pouch gave Tardy no immunity whatever, diplomatic or otherwise -- his destination was the dead-letter office ! T HE Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, was smoking tobacco in a pipe. The fumes from it made John Tardy cough and strangle -- or, at least, so it seemed. "Sir?" wheezed John Tardy. "Sorry," said Joshua, knocking the pipe out in an ashtray where the coals continued to smolder only slightly less villainously than before. "Thought you heard me the first time. I said that naturally as soon as we knew you were being assigned to the job, we let out word that you were deeply attached to the girl." "To -- " John gulped air. Both men were talking Dilbian, to exercise the command of the language John had had hypnoed into him on his way here from the Belt Stars, and the Dilbian nickname for the missing Earthian female sociologist came from his lips automatically -- "this Greasy Face?" "Miss Ty Lamorc," nodded Joshua, smoothly slipping into Basic and then out again. "Greasy Face, if you prefer. By the by, you mustn't go taking all these Dilbian names at face value. The two old gentlemen you're going to meetDaddy Shaking Knees and Two Answers -- aren't what they might sound like. Daddy Shaking Knees got his name from holding up one end of a timber one day in an emergency -- after about forty-five minutes, someone noticed his knees beginning to tremble. And Two Answers is a tribute to the Dilbian who can come up with more than one answer to a problem." own Dilbian nickname of Little Bite, John Tardy shifted to safer ground. "What about this Schlaff fellow who -- " "Heiner Schlaff," interrupted Joshua Guy, frowning, "made a mistake. You'd think anyone would know better than to lose his head when a Dilbian picks him up. After the first time one picked up Heinie, he wasn't able to step out onto the street without some Dilbian lifting him up to hear him yell for help. The Squeaking Squirt, they called him -- very bad for Earth-Dilbian relations." He looked severely at John. "I don't expect anything like that from you." The ambassador's eye seemed to weigh John's chunky body and red hair. No, no," said John hastily. "Decathalon winner in the Olympics four years back, weren't you?" Yes," said John. "But what I really want is to get on an Exploration team to one of the new planets. I'm a fully qualified biochemist and -- " I read your file. Well," Joshua Guy said, "do a good job here and who knows?" He glanced out the window beside him at the sprawling log buildings of the local Dilbian town of Humrog, framed against the native conifers and the mountain peaks beyond. "But it's your physical condition that'll count. You understand why you have to go it alone, don't you?" "They told me back on Earth. But if you can add anything -- " "Headquarters never understands the fine points of these situations," said Joshua, almost cheerfully. "To put it tersely -- we want to make friends with these Dilbians. They're the race nearest to ours in intelligence that we've run across so far. They'd make fine partners. Unfortunately we don't seem to be able to impress them very much." "Size?" asked John Tardy. r "Well, yes -- size is probably the biggest stumbling block. The fact that we're about lap-dog proportions in relation to them. But it shows up even more sharply in a cultural dissimilarity. They don't give a hang for our mechanical gimmicks and they're all for personal honor and a healthy outdoors life." He looked at John. "You'll say, of course, why not a show of force?" "I should think -- " began John. "But we don't want to fight them -- we want to make friends with them. Let me give you an Earth-type analogy. For centuries, humans have been able to more or less tame most of the smaller wild animals. The large ones, however, being unused to knuckling under to anyone -- " Beep! signaled the annunciator on Joshua's desk. "Ah, they're here now." Joshua Guy rose. "We'll go into the reception room. Now remember that Boy-Is-She-Built is old Shaking Knees' daughter. It was the fact that the Streamside Terror wanted her that caused all this ruckus and ended up with the Terror's kidnapping Ty Lamorc." TT E led the way through the door into the next room. John Tardy followed, his head, in spite of the hypno training, still spinning a little with the odd Dilbian names -- in particular Boy-IsShe-Built, the Basic translation of which was only a pale shadow of its Dilbian original. While not by any means a shy person, John rather hesitated to look a father in the eye and refer to the female child of his old age as -- further reflections were cut short as he entered the room. "Ah, there, Little Bite!" boomed the larger of the two black-furred monsters awaiting them. The one who spoke stood well over two and a half meters in height -- at least eight feet tall. "This the new one? Two Answers and I came right over to meet him. Kind of brightcolored on top, isn't he?" John Tardy blinked. But Joshua Guy answered equably enough. "Some of us have that color hair back home," he said. "This is John Tardy -- John, meet Shaking Knees. And the quiet one is Two Answers." "Quiet!" roared the other Dilbian, bursting into gargantuan roars of laughter. "Me quiet! That's good!" He bellowed his merriment. John stared. In spite of the hypno training, he could not help comparing these two to a couple of very large bears who had stood up on their hind legs and gone on a diet. They were leaner than bears -- though leanness is relative when you weigh upward of a thousand pounds -- and longerlegged. Their noses were more pug, their lower jaws more humanlike than ursinoid in the way of chin. But their complete coat of thick black hair and their bearishness of language and actions made the comparison almost inevitable -- though in fact their true biological resemblance was closer to the humans themselves. "Haven't laughed like that since old Souse Nose fell in the beer vat!" snorted Two Answers, gradually getting himself under control. "All right, Bright Top, what've you got to say for yourself? Think you can take the Streamside Terror with one hand tied behind your back?" "I'm here," said John Tardy, "to bring back -- er -- Greasy Face, and -- " "Streamside won't just hand her over. Will he, Knees?" Two Answers jogged his companion with a massively humorous elbow. "Not that boy!" Shaking Knees shook his head. "Little Bite, I ought never have let you talk me out of a son-in-law like that. Tough? Rough? Tricky? My little girl'd do all right with a buck like that." "I merely," demurred Joshua, "suggested you make them wait a bit. Boy-Is-She-Built is still rather young -- " "And, boy, is she built!" said Shaking Knees in a tone of fond, fatherly pride. "Still, it's hard to see how she could do much better." He peered suddenly at Joshua. "You wouldn't have something hidden between your paws on this?" in a wounded manner. "Would I risk one of my own people? Maybe two? All to start something that would make the Terror mad onough to steal Greasy to pay me back?" "Guess not," admitted Shaking Knees. "But you Shorties are shrewd little characters." His words rang with honest admiration. "Thanks. The same to you," said Joshua. "Now about the Terror -- " "He headed west through the Cold Mountains," replied Two Answers. "He was spotted yesterday a half-day's hike north, pointed toward Sour Ford and the Hollows. He probably nighted at Brittle Rock Inn there." "Good," said Joshua. "We'll have to find a guide for my friend here." "Guide? Ho!" chortled Shaking Knees. Wait'll you see what we got for you." He shouldered past Two Answers, opened the door and bellowed, "Bluffer! Come on in!" There was a moment's pause, and then a Dilbian even leaner and taller than Shaking Knees shoved his way into the room, which, with this new Dilbian addition, became decidedly crowded. "There you are," said Shaking Knees, waving a prideful paw. "What more could you want? Walk all day, climb all night, and start out fresh next morning after breakfast. Little Bite, meet the Hill Bluffer!" "That's me!" boomed the newcomer, rattling the walls. "Anything on two feet walk away from me? Not over solid ground or living rock! When I look at a hill, it knows it's beat, and it lays out flat for my trampling feet!" "Very good," said Joshua dryly. "But I don't know about my friend here keeping up if you can travel like that." "Keep up? Hah!" guffawed Shaking Knees. "No, no, Little Bite -- don't you recognize the Bluffer here? He's the postman. We're going to mail this half-pint friend of yours to the Terror. Only way. Cost you five kilos of nails." "Nobody stops the mail," put in the Hill Bluffer. "Hmm," said Joshua. He glanced at John Tardy. "Not a bad suggestion. The only thing is how you plan to carry him -- " "Who? Him?" boomed the Bluffer, focusing on John. "Why, I'll handle him like he was a weekold pup. I'll wrap him in some real soft straw and tuck him in the bottom of my mailbag and -- " "Hold it," interrupted Joshua. "That's just what I was afraid of. If you're going to carry him, you'll have to do it humanely." Bluffer was still roaring, two hours later. The cause of his upset, a system of straps and pads arranged into a rough saddlebag that would ride between his shoulders and bear John, lay on the crushed rock of Humrog's main street. A few Dilbian bystanders had gathered to watch and their bass-voiced comments were not of the sort to bring the Hill Bluffer to a more reasonable frame of mind. "Listen, you tad!" Shaking Knees was beginning to get a little hot under the neck-fur himself. "This is your mother's uncle's first cousin speaking. You want me to speak to the great-grandfathers of your clan -- " "Arright -- arright -- arright!" snarled the Hill Bluffer. "Buckle me up in the obscenity thing!" "That's better!" growled Shaking Knees, simmering down as John Tardy and Joshua Guy went to work to put the saddle on. "Not that I blame you, but -- " "Don't feel so bad at that," said the Hill Bluffer sulkily, wriggling his shoulders under the straps in experimental fashion. "You'll find it," grunted Joshua, tugging on a strap, "easier to carry than your regular bag." "That's not the point," groused the Hill Bluffer. "A postman's got dignity. He just don't wear -- " He exploded suddenly at a snickering onlooker. "Whafs so funny, you? Want to make something out of it? Just say the -- " "I'll take care of him!" roared Shaking Knees, rolling forward. "What's wrong with you, Split Nose?" The Dilbian addressed as Split Nose swallowed his grin rather hastily as the Humrog village chief took a hand in the conversation. "Just passing by," he growled defensively, backing out of the crowd. "Well, just pass on, friend, pass on!" boomed Shaking Knees. He was rewarded by a hearty laugh from the crowd, and Split Nose rolled off down the street with every indication his hairy ears were burning. John had taken advantage of this little by-play to mount into the saddlebag. The Hill Bluffer grunted in surprise and looked back at him. "You're light enough," he said. "How is it? All right back there?" "Feels fine," said John, unsuspecting. "Then so long, everybody!" boomed the Hill Bluffer, and, without further warning, barreled off down the main street in the direction of the North Trail, the Cold Mountains and the elusive but dangerous Streamside Terror. A-training, John Tardy would not have been able to recognize this fast and unexpected start for the Dilbian trick it was. He realized instantly, however, that the Hill Bluffer, having lost his enthusiasm for the job at first sight of the harness which was to carry John, was attempting a little strategy to get out of it. Outright refusal to carry John was out of the question, but if John should object to the unceremoniousness of his departure, the Bluffer would be perfectly justified -- by Dilbian standards -- if he threw up his hands and refused to deliver a piece of mail that insisted on imposing conditions on him. John shut his mouth and hung on. All the same, it was awkward. John had intended to work out a plan of action with Joshua Guy before he left. Well, there was always the wrist-phone. He would call Joshua at the first convenient opportunity. Meanwhile, it was developing that the Hill Bluffer had not exaggerated his ability to cover ground. One moment they were on the main street of Humrog, and the next upon a mountain trail, green pinelike branches whipping by as John Tardy plunged and swayed to the Hill Bluffer's motion like a man on the back of an elephant. It was no time for abstract thought. John clung to the straps before him, meditating rather bitterly on that natural talent of his for athletics which had got him into this, when by all rights he should be on an exploration team on one of the frontier planets right now. He was perfectly qualified, but just because of that decathalon win... He continued to nurse his grievances for something better than an hour, when he was suddenly interrupted by the Hill Bluffer's grunting and slowing down. Peering forward over the postman's shoulder, John discovered another Dilbian who had just stepped out of the woods before them. The newcomer was on the shaggy side. He carried an enormous triangularheaded axe and had some native herbivore roughly the size and shape of a musk-ox slung casually over one shoulder. "Hello, woodsman," said the Hill Bluffer, halting. "Hello, postman." The other displayed a gap-toothed array of fangs in a grin. "Got some mail for me?" "You!" the Hill Bluffer snorted. "Not so funny. I could get mail," growled the other. He peered around at John. "So that's the Half Pint Posted." "Oh?" said the Hill Bluffer. "Who told you?" "The Cobblv Queen, that's who!" retorted the other, curling the right side of his upper lip in the native equivalent of a wink. John Tardy, recalling the Cobblies were the Dilbian equivalent of fairies, brownies, or what-haveyou, peered at the woodsman to see if he was serious. John decided he wasn't. Which still left the problem of how he had recognized John.- bian manners were made of sheer brass, John Tardy horned in on the conversation. "Who're you?" he demanded of the woodsman. "So it talks, does it?" The woodsman grinned. "They call me Tree Weeper, Half Pint. Because I chop them down, you see." "Who told you about me?" "Oh, that'd be telling," grinned Tree-Weeper. "Say, you know why they call him the Streamside Terror, Half Pint? It's on account of he likes to fight alongside a stream, pull the other feller in and drown him." "I know," said John shortly. "Do you now?" said the other. "Well, it ought to be something to watch. Good going to you, Half Pint, and you too, postman. Me for home." He turned away into the brush alongside the trail and it swallowed him up. The Hill Bluffer took up his route again without a word. "Friend of yours?" inquired John, when it became apparent the Hill Bluffer was not going to comment on the meeting. "Friend?" the Hill Bluffer snorted angrily. "I'm a public official!" "I just thought -- " said John. "He seemed to know things." "That hill hopper! Somebody ahead of us told him!" growled the Bluffer. But he fell unaccountably silent after that and said no more for the next three hours, until -- the two of them having left Humrog a couple of hours past noon -- they pulled up in the waning sunlight before the roadside inn at Brittle Rock, where they would spend the night. The first thing John Tardy did, after working some life back into his legs, was to stroll off to the limits of the. narrow, rocky ledge on which the Inn stood -- Brittle Rock was hardly more than a wide spot in the narrow mountain gorge up which their road ran -- and put in a call to Joshua Guy with the phone on his wrist. As soon as Joshua got on the beam, John relievedly explained the reason behind his call. It did not go over, apparently, very well. "Instructions?" floated the faintly astonished voice of the ambassador out of the receiver. "What instructions?" "The ones you were going to give me. Before I took off so suddenly -- " "But there's absolutely nothing I can tell you," interrupted Joshua. "You've had your hypno training. It's up to you. Find the Terror and get the girl back. You'll have to figure out your own means, my dear fellow." "But -- " John stopped, staring helpless at the phone. "Well, good luck, then. Call me tomorrow. Call me anytime." "Thanks," said John. "Not at all. Luck. Good-by." "Good-by." phone and walked somberly back to the Inn. Inside its big front door, he found a wide common room filled with tables and benches. The Hill Bluffer, to the amusement of a host of other travelers, was arguing with a femalfe Dilbian wearing an apron. "How the unmentionable should  know what to feed him?" the Hill Bluffer was bellowing. "Give him some meat, some beer -- anything!" "But you haven't had the children dragging in pets like I have. Feed one the wrong thing and it dies. And then they cry their little hearts -- " "Talking about me?" John Tardy broke in. "Oh!" gasped the female, glancing down and retreating half a step. "It talks!" "Didn't I say he did?" demanded the Bluffer. "Half Pint, what kind of stuff do you eat?" John fingered the four-inch tubes of food concentrate at his waist. Dilbian food would not poison him, though he could expect little nourishment from it, and a fair chance of an allergic reaction from certain fruits and vegetables. Bulk was all he needed to supplement the concentrates. "Just give me a little beer," he said. The room buzzed approval. This little critter, they seemed to feel, could not be too alien if he liked to drink. The female brought him a wastebasket-sized wooden mug that had no handles and smelled like the most decayed of back-lot breweries. John took a cautious sip and held the bitter, sour, flattasting liquid in his mouth for an indecisive moment. He swallowed manfully. The assembled company gave vent to rough-voiced approval, then abruptly turned their attention elsewhere. Looking around, he saw that the Hill Bluffer had gone off somewhere. John climbed up on a nearby bench and got to work on his food concentrates. After finishing these, he continued to sit where he was for the better part of an hour, but the Hill Bluffer did not return. Struck by a sudden thought, John Tardy climbed down and went back toward the kitchen of the Inn. Pushing his way through a hide curtain, he found himself in it -- a long room with a stone fire-trough down the center, carcasses hanging from overhead beams, and a dozen or so Dilbians of both sexes equally immersed in argument and the preparation of food and drink. Among them was the female who had brought John the beer. He stepped into her path as she headed for the front room with a double handful of full mugs. "Eeeeek!" she exclaimed, or the Dilbian equivalent, stopping so hastily she spilled some of the beer. "There's a good little Shorty," she said in a quavering, coaxing tone. "Good Shorty. Go back now." "Was the Terror really here last night?" John asked. "He stopped to pick up some meat and beer, but I didn't see him," she said. "I've no time for hill-and-alley brawlers. Now shoo!" John Tardy shooed. A S he was heading back to his bench, however, he felt himself scooped up from behind. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw he was being carried by a large male Dilbian with a pouch hanging from one shoulder. This individual carried him to a table where three other Dilbians sat and dropped him on it. John Tardy instinctively got to his feet. "There he be," said the one who had picked him up. "A genuine Shorty." "Give him some beer," suggested one with a scar on his face, who was seated at the table. They did. John prudently drank some. "Don't hold much," commented one of the others at the table, examining the mug John had set down after what had been actually a very healthy draft for a human. "I wonder if he -- " "Couldn't. Not at that size," replied the one with the pouch. "He's chasing that female Shorty, though. You reckon -- ?" Scarface regretted that they did not have the Shorty female there at the moment. Her presence, in his opinion, would have provided the opportunity for interesting and educative experimentation. "Go to hell!" said John in Basic. He then made the most forceful translation he could manage in Dilbian. "Tough character!" said the pouched one, and they all laughed. "Better not get tough with me, though." He made a few humorous swipes at John's red head that would have split it on contact. They laughed again. "I wonder," said Scarface, "can he do tricks?" "Sure," John answered promptly. He hefted his still-full mug of beer. "Watch. I take a firm grip, rock back, and -- " He spun suddenly on one heel, sloshing a wave' of beer into their staring faces. Then he was off the table and dodging among Dilbian and table legs toward the front entrance. The rest of the guests, roaring with laughter, made no attempt to halt him. He ducked into the outer darkness. Fumbling in the gloom, he made his way around the side of the Inn and dropped down on a broken keg he found there. He was just making up his mind to stay there until the Hill Bluffer came and found him, when the back kitchen door opened and closed very softly, off to his left. He slipped off the keg into deeper shadow. He had caught just a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, but he had received the impression of a Dilbian female in the doorway. There was no sound now. He began to creep backward. Dilbia's one moon was not showing over these latitudes at this season of the year, and the starlight gave only a faint illumination. He stumbled suddenly over the edge of an unseen slope and froze, remembering the cliff edge overhanging the gorge below. A faint reek of the Dilbian odor came to his nostrils -- and a sound of sniffing. Dilbians were no better than humans when it came to a sense of smell, but each had a perceptible odor to the nostrils of the other -- an odor partly depend-t ent on diet, partly on a differing physiological makeup. The odor John Tardy smelled was part-piny, part-musk. The sniffing ceased. John held his breath, waiting for it to start again. The pressure built up in his chest, and finally he was forced to exhale. He turned his head slowly from side to side. Silence. Only the inner creak of his tense neck muscles turning. There! Was that something? John began to creep back along the edge beside him. There was a sudden rush, a rearing up of some huge dark shape in the darkness before him. He dodged, felt himself slipping on the edge, and something smashed like a falling wall against the side of his head, and he went whirling down and away into star-shot darkness. sunlight. The sun, just above the mountain peaks, was shining right in his eyes. He blinked and started to roll over, out of its glare, into --  -- And grabbed in a sudden cold sweat for the stubby trunk of a dwarf tree growing right out of the cliffside. For a second then, he hung there, sweating and looking down. He lay on a narrow ledge and the gorge was deep below. How deep, he did not stop to figure. It was deep enough. He twisted around and looked up the distance of a couple of meters to the ledge on which the Inn was built. It was not far. He could climb it. After a little while, with his heart in his throat, John Tardy did. When he came back around the front of the Inn, in the morning sunlight, it was to find the Bluffer orating at a sort of open-air meeting, with the four who had harried John standing hangdog between two axemen and before an elderly Dilbian judgelike on a bench. " -- the mail!" the Hill Bluffer was roaring. "The mail is sacred! Anyone daring to lay fist upon the mail in transit -- " John, tottering forward, put an end to the trial in progress. Later on, after washing his slight scalp-wound and having taken on some more food concentrates and flat beer for breakfast, John Tardy climbed back up on the Bluffer's back and they were under way once more. Their route today led from Brittle Rock through the mountains to Sour Ford and the Hollows. The Hollows, John had learned, was clan-country for the Terror, and their hope was to catch him before he reached it. The trail now led across swinging rope suspension bridges and along narrow cuts in the rock -- all of which the Hill Bluffer took not only with the ease of one well accustomed to them, but with the abstraction of one lost in deep thought. "Hey!" said John, at last. "Huh? What?" grunted the Hill Bluffer, coming to suddenly. "Tell me something," said John, reaching out for anything to keep his carrier awake. "How'd the ambassador get the name Little Bite?" "You don't know that?" exclaimed the Hill Bluffer. "I thought you Shorties all knew. Well, it was old Hammertoes down at Humrog." The Bluffer chuckled. "Got drunk and all worked up about Shorties. 'Gimme the good old days,' he said, and went down to just make an example of Little Bite -- Shorty One, we called him then. He pushes the door open far as it'll go, but Little Bite's got it fixed to only open part way. So there's Hammertoes, with only one arm through the door, feeling around and hollering, 'All right, Shorty! You can't get away! I'll get you -- ' when Little Bite picks up something sharp and cuts him a couple times across the knuckles. Old Hammertoes yells bloody murder and yanks his hand back. Slam goes the door." The Hill Bluffer chortled to himself. "Then old Hammertoes comes back uptown, sucking his knuckles. 'What happened?' says everybody. 'Nothing,' says Hammertoes. 'Something must've happened -- look at your hand,' everybody says. 'I tell you nothing happened!' yells Hammertoes. 'He wouldn't let me in where I could grab hold of him, so I come away. And as for my hand, that's got nothing to do with it. He didn't hurt my hand hardly at all. He just give it a little bite!'" The Hill Bluffer's laughter rolled like thunder between the mountain walls. "Old Hammertoes never did live that down. Every time since, whenever he goes to give somebody a hard time, they all tell him, 'Look out, Hammertoes, or I'm liable to give you a little bite!'" laughing. Possibly it was the time and place of the telling, possibly the story, but he could see the situation in his mind's eye and it was funny. "You know," said the Bluffer over one furry shoulder when John stopped laughing, "you're not bad for a Shorty." He fell silent, appeared to wrestle with himself for a moment, then came to a stop and sat down in a convenient wide spot on the trail. "Get off," he said. "Come around where I can talk to you." John complied. He found himself facing the seated Dilbian, their t heads about on a level. Behind the large, black-furred skull, a few white clouds floated in the high blue sky. "You know," the Bluffer said, "the Streamside Terror's mug's been spilled." "Spilled?" echoed John -- then remembered this as a Dilbian phrase expressing loss of honor. "By me? He's never even seen me." "By Little Bite," the Bluffer said. "But Little Bite's a Guest in Humrog and the North Country. The Terror couldn't call him to account personally for speaking against Shaking Knees giving the Terror Boy-Is-She-Built. He had to do something, though, so he took Greasy Face." "Oh," said John. "So you got to fight the Terror if you want Greasy back." "Fight?" John blurted. "Man's got his pride," said the Bluffer. "That's why I can't figure you out. I mean you aren't bad for a Shorty. You got guts -- like with those drunks last night. But you fighting the Terror -- I mean hell!" said the Bluffer, in deeply moved tones. himself in full agreement with the postman. "So what're you going to do when you meet Streamside?" "Well," said John, rather inadequately, "I don't exactly know -- " "Well," growled the Bluffer in his turn, "not my problem. Get on." John went around behind his furry back. "Oh, by the way, know who it was tried to pitch you over the cliff?" "Who?" asked John. "The Cobbly Queen -- Boy-IsShe-Built!" translated the Bluffer as John looked blank. "She heard about you and got ahead of us somehow..." The Bluffer's voice trailed off into a mutter. "If they're thinking of monkeying with the mail..." John paid no attention. He had his own fish to fry, and very fishy indeed they smelled just at the moment. Swaying on top of the enormous back as they took off again, he found himself scowling over the situation. Headquarters had said nothing about his being expected to fight some monstrous free-style scrapper of an alien race -- a sort of gargantuan Billy the Kid with a number of kills to his credit. Joshua Guy had not mentioned it. Just what was going on here, anyway? Abruptly casting aside the security regulation that recommended a "discreet" use of the instrument, John lifted the wrist that bore his wrist-phone to his lips. "Josh -- " he began, and suddenly checked. A fine trickle of sweat ran coldly down his spine. The phone was gone. ponder this new development in the situation, and a good portion of the afternoon. He might have continued indefinitely if it had not been for a sudden interruption in their journey. They had crossed a number of spidery suspension bridges during the course of the day, and now they had come to another one, somewhat longer than any met so far. If this had been the only difference, John might have been left to his thoughts. But this bridge was different. Somebody had fixed it so they couldn't get across. It happened that their end of the bridge had its anchors sunk in a rock face a little back and some seven or eight meters above their heads. All that had been done, simply enough, was to tighten the two main support cables at the far end. The sag of the span had straightened out, lifting the near end up above them, out of reach. The Hill Bluffer bellowed obscenely across the gap. There was no response from the windlass on the far side, or the small hut beyond. "What's happened?" John Tardy asked.  "I don't know," said the Bluffer, suddenly thoughtful. "It isn't supposed to be rucked up except at night, to keep people from sneaking over and not paying toll." He reached as high as he could, but his fingertips fell far short. "Lift me up," suggested John. They tried it, but even upheld by the ankles, at the full stretch of the Bluffer's arms, John was rewarded only by a throat-squeezing view of the Knobby River below. "It'll take five days to go around by Slide Pass," growled the Bluffer, putting John down. John went over to examine the rock face. What he discovered about it did not make him happy, though perhaps it should have. It was climbable. Heart tucked in throat, he began to go up it. "Hey! Where're you going?" bellowed the Hill Bluffer. John did not answer. He needed his breath; anyway, his destination was obvious. The climb up the rock was not bad for someone who had had some mountain experience, but a reaction set in when he wrapped his arms around the rough six-inch cable. He inched his way upward and got on top, both arms and both legs wrapped around the cable, and began a worm-creep toward the bridge end, floating on nothingness at a rather remarkable distance -- seen from this angle -- ahead of him. It occurred to him, after he had slowly covered about a third of the cable-distance in this fashion, that a real hero in a place like this should stand up and tightropewalk to the bridge proper. This, in addition to impressing the Bluffer, would shorten the suspense considerably. John Tardy concluded he must be a conservative and went on crawling. Eventually he reached the bridge, crawled out on it and lay panting for a while, then got up and crossed the gorge. At the far end, he knocked loose the lock on the windlass with a heavy rock, and the bridge banged down into position, raising a cloud of dust. Through this same cloud of dust, the Hill Bluffer was shortly to be seen advancing with a look of grim purpose. He stalked past John and entered the hut -- from which subsequently erupted thunderous crashes, thuds and roars. John Tardy looked about for a place of safety. He had never seen two Dilbians fight, but it was only too apparent now what was going on inside. He was still looking around, however, when the sound ceased abruptly and the Hill Bluffer emerged, dabbing at a torn ear. "Old slaver-tongue," he growled. "She got at him." "Who?" asked John. "Boy Is-She-Built. Well, mount up, Half Pint. Oh, by the way, that was pretty good." "Good? What was?" "Climbing across the bridge that way. Took guts. Well, let's go." John climbed back up into his saddlebag and thought heavily. "You didn't kill him?" he asked, as they started out once more. "Who? Old Winch Rope? Just knocked a little sense into him. Hell, there's got to be somebody work the bridge. Hang on now. It's all downhill from here and it'll be twilight before we hit the Ford." IT was indeed twilight before they reached their stopping place at Sour Ford. John Tardy, who had been dozing, awoke with a jerk and sat up in his saddle, blinking. In the fading light, they stood in a large, grassy clearing semicircled by forest. Directly before them was a long low log building, and behind it a smooth-flowing river with its farther shore shrouded in tree shadow and the approaching dusk. "Get down," said the Bluffer. Stiffly, John Tardy descended, stamped about to restore his circulation, and followed the Bluffer's huge bulk through the hide-curtain of the doorway to the building's oil-lamplit interior. John discovered a large room like that at the Brittle Rock Inn -- but one that was cleaner, airier, and filled with travelers a good deal less noisy and drunken. Gazing around for the explanation behind this difference, John caught sight of a truly enormous Dilbian, grizzled with age and heavy with fat, seated like a patriarch in a huge chair behind a table at the room's far end. John and the Bluffer found a table and set about eating. But as soon as they were through, the postman led John up to the patriarch. "One Man," said the Bluffer in a respectful voice, "this here's the Half Pint Posted." John Tardy blinked. Up close, One Man had turned out to be even more awe-inspiring than he had seemed from a distance. He overflowed the carved chair he sat in, and the graying fur on top of his head all but brushed against a polished staff of hardwood laid crosswise on pegs driven into the wall two meters above the floor. His massive forearms and great pawlike hands were laid out on the table before him like swollen clubs of bone and muscle. But his face was almost biblically serene. "Sit down," he rumbled in a voice so deep it sounded like a great drum sounding far off somewhere in a woods. "I've wanted to see a Shorty. You're my Guest, Half Pint, for as long as you wish. Anyone tell you about me?" "I'm sorry -- " began John. "Never mind." The enormous head nodded mildly. "They call me One Man, Half Pint, because I once held blood feud all by myself -- being an orphan -- with a whole clan. And won." He looked calmly at John. "What you might call an impossible undertaking." "Some of them caught him on a trail once," put in the Hill Bluffer. "He killed all three.'? "That was possible," murmured One Man. His eyes were still on John. "Tell me, Half Pint, what are you Shorties doing here, anyhow?" "Well-" John blinked. "I'm looking for Greasy Face -- " "I mean the entire lot of you," One Man said. "There must be some plan behind it. Nobody asked you all here, you know." "Well -- " said John again, rather lamely, and proceeded to try an explanation. It did not seem to go over very well, a technological civilization being hard to picture with the Dilbian vocabulary. O NE Man nodded when John Tardy was through. "I see. If that' s the case, what makes you think we ought to like you Shorties?" "Ought to?" said John, jolted into a reactive answer, for he did not have red hair for nothing. "You don't ought to! It's up to you." One Man nodded. "Pass me my stick," he said. One of the Dilbians standing around took down the staff from its pegs and passed it to him. He la'id it on the table before him -- a young post ten centimeters in thickness -- grasping it with fists held over two meters apart. "No one's ever been able to do this but me," he said. Without lifting his fists from contact with the table, he rotated them to the outside. The staff sprang upward in the center like a bow, and snapped. "Souvenir for you," said One Man, handing the pieces to John. "Good night." He closed his eyes and sat as if dozing. The Bluffer tapped John on a shoulder and led him away, off to their sleeping quarters. Once in the Inn dormitory, however, John found himself totally unable to sleep. He had passed from utter bone-weariness into a sort of feverish wide-awakedness, through which the little episode with One Man buzzed and circled like a persistently annoying fly. What had been the point of all that talk and wood-breaking? Suddenly and quietly, John sat up. Beside him, on his heap of soft branches, the Bluffer slept without stirring, as did the rest of the dormitory inhabitants. A single lamp burned high above, hanging from the rooftree. By its light, John got out and examined the broken pieces of wood. There was a little node or knot visible just at the point of breakage. A small thing, but -- John frowned. He seemed surrounded by mysteries. The more he thought of it, the more certain he was that One Man had been attempting to convey some message to him. What was it? For that matter, what was going on between humans and Dilbians, and what had his mission to rescue Greasy Face to do with the business of persuading the recalcitrant Dilbians into a partnership? If that was indeed the aim, as Joshua Guy had said. John swung out of the pile of boughs and to his feet. One Man, he decided, owed him a few more -- and plainer -- answers. He went softly down the length of the dormitory and through the door into the common room of the Inn. There were few Dilbians about -- they went early to bed. And One Man was also nowhere to be seen. He had not come into the dormitory, John knew. So either he had separate quarters, or else he had stepped outside for some reason... John Tardy crossed the room and slipped out through the Inn entrance. He paused to accustom his eyes to the darkness and moved off from the building to get away from the window light. Slowly the night took shape around him, the wide face of the river running silver-dark in the faint light of the stars, and the clearing pooled in gloom. He circled cautiously around f the Inn to its back. Unlike Brittle Rock, the back yard here was clear of rubbish, sloping gradually to the river. It was given over to smaller huts and outbuildings. Among these the darkness was more profound and he felt his way cautiously. Groping about in this fashion, quietly, but with some small, unavoidable noise, he saw a thin blade of yellow light. It cut through the parting of two leather curtains in the window of a hut close by him. He stepped eagerly toward it, about to peer through the crack, when, from deep wall shadow, a hand reached out and took his arm. "Do you want to get yourself killed?" hissed a voice. And, of course, it was human. And, of course, it spoke in Basic. ' ' drew him deeper into the shadow and away from the building where they stood. They came to another hut whose door stood ajar on an interior blackness, and John was led into this darkness. The hand let go of his arm. The door closed softly. There was a scratch, a sputter, and an animaloil lamp burst into light within the place. John squinted against the sudden illumination. When he could see again, he found himself looking into the face of one of the bestlooking young women he had ever seen. She was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than he, but at first glance looked taller by reason of her slim outline in the tailored coveralls she wore. To John Tardy, after two days of Dilbians, she looked tiny -- fragile. Her chestnut hair swept back in two wide wings on each side of her head. Her eyes were green above sharply marked cheekbones that gave her face a sculptured look. Her nose was thin, her lips firm rather than full, and her small chin was determined. John blinked. "Who-?" "I'm Ty Lamorc," she whispered fiercely. "Keep your voice down!" "Ty Lamorc? You?" "Yes, yes!" she said impatiently. "Now-" "Are y-you sure?" stammered John. "I mean -- " "Who were you expecting to run into way out here in -- oh, I see!" She glared at him. "It's that Greasy Face name the Dilbians gave me. You were expecting some horror." "Certainly not," said John stoutly. "Well, for your information, they just happened to see me putting on makeup one day. That's where the name came from." "Well, naturally. I didn't think it was because -- " "I'll bet! Anyway, never mind that now. The point is, what are you doing out here? Do you want to get knocked on the head?" "Who'd knock -- " John Tardy stiffened. "The Terror's here!" "No, no!" She sounded annoyed. "Boy Is-She-Built is." "Oh." John frowned. "You know, I still don't get it -- her angle on all this, I mean." "She loves him, of course," said Ty Lamorc. "Actually, they make an ideal couple, by Dilbian standards. Now let's get you back to the Inn before she catches you. She won't follow you in there. You're a Guest." "Now wait -- " John took a deep breath. "This is silly. I came out here to find you. I've found you. Let's head back right now. Not to Humrog -- " "You don't," interrupted Ty with feeling, "understand a blasted thing about these people, Half Pint -- I mean, Tardy." "John." "John, you don't understand the situation. The Streamside Terror left me here with Boy-Is-SheBuilt because I was slowing him down. That Hill Bluffer of yours is too fast for him, and he wanted to be sure to be in his own clancountry before you caught up with him, in case there would be -- " her voice faltered a little -- "repercussions to what happens when you meet. It's all a matter of honor, and that's the point. You're a piece of mail, John. Don't you understand? The Hill Bluffer's honor is involved, too." "Oh," said John. He was silent for a while. "You mean he'd insist on delivering me?" "What do you think?" "I see." John was silent again. "Well, to blazes with it," he said at last. "Maybe we can make it across a bridge and cut the ropes and get away from it all. We can't leave you here." Ty Lamorc did not reply at once. When she did, it was with a pat on his arm. "You're nice," she said softly. "I'll remember that. Now get back to the Inn." And then she had blown out the lamp and he could hear her go.  ' still nowhere to be seen. Nor, in the half hour that elapsed before they got going, did John Tardy catch any glimpse of Ty, or a female Dilbian who might be Boy Is-She-Built. He mounted into the Hill Bluffer's mailbag with his mind still engrossed by the happenings of the night before, and it continued to be engrossed as they began their third day of journey. They were descending now into a country of lower altitudes, though they were still in hill country. The ground was more gently hollowed and crested, and several new varieties of trees appeared. But John had no time to consider this. He rode through the cool hours of the morning and into noon's heat still trying to find a common solution to the riddles that occupied his mind -- about One Man, about the abduction of Ty Lamorc, and about his own peculiar lack of briefing. "Tell me," said John finally to the Hill Bluffer, "is it a fact no other Dilbian could break that stick of One Man's that same way?" "Nobody ever can," replied the Bluffer, as they rounded a small hill and plunged through a thin belt of trees. "Nobody ever will." "Well, you know," said John, "back where I come from, we have a trick with something called a phone directory -- " He stopped. For the Hill Bluffer himself had stopped, with a jolt that almost pitched John from the mailbag. John sat up, looked around the Dilbian's head -- and stared. They had passed through the woods. They had emerged into a small valley in which a cluster of buildings stood in the brown color of their peeled and weathered logs, haphazardly about a stream that ran the valley's length. Beyond these houses there was a sort of natural amphitheater made by a curved indentation of the far rock wall of the valley. Past this the path went when it emerged from between the buildings and plunged into the trees again. However, none of this claimed John's attention after the first second. He blinked, instead, at a living wall of five large Dilbians with axes. "Who do you think you're stopping?" bellowed the Hill Bluffer. "Clan Hollow's in full meeting," responded the central axeman. "The Great-Grandfathers want to see you both. You come with us." The axemen formed around the Bluffer and John. They led off down and through the village and beyond to the amphitheater that was swarming with Dilbians of all ages. Several hundred of them were there, and more accumulating, below a ledge of rock where six ancient Dilbians sat. "This is the mail!" stormed the Hill Bluffer as soon as they were close. "Listen, you Clan Hollows -- " "Be quiet, postman!" snapped the old Dilbian at the extreme right of the line as it faced John and the Bluffer. "Your honor will be guarded. Call the meeting." "Great-Grandfathers of Clan Hollows, sitting in judgment upon a point of honor!" chanted a young Dilbian standing just below the ledge. He repeated the cry six times. Looking around, John saw Ty Lamorc. With her was a plump young female that was most likely Boy-Is-She-Built. Boy-Is-SheBuilt was currently engaged in herding Ty to the foot of the ledge. She accomplished this and immediately began talking. "I'm Boy Is She-Built," she announced. "We know you," said the GreatGrandfather on the right end. "I'm speaking here for the Streamside Terror, who's waiting over at Glenn Hollow for the Shorty known as the Half Pint Posted. That Shorty over there. His mug has been spilled -- the Terror's, I mean. This Shorty belongs to him -- the male over there, I mean. Not that this female Shorty here with me doesn't belong to him, too. He took her fair and square, and it serves those Shorties right. After all, nobody has more honor than the Terror -- " "That's enough," said the judge. "We will decide -- " "I should think you wouldn't even have to call a meeting over it. After all, it's perfectly plain -- " "I said that's enough! Be quiet, female!" roared the end judge. "Well?" interjected one of the other judges testily. "We've heard the arguments. The Shorties are both here. What's left to say?" "Can I speak?" boomed a new voice, and the crowd parted to let One Man come up before the ledge of rock. The Great-Grandfathers thawed visibly as only great men can in the company of their peers. "One Man is always welcome to speak," piped an ancient who had not spoken before, and whose voice, with age, had risen almost to the pitch of a human baritone. "Thank you," said One Man. He raised his head and his voice rose with it, carrying easily out over the assembled Dilbians. "Just think this over. That's what I've got to say. Think deep about it -- because it may be Clan Hollows' decision here is going to be binding on just about everybody -- us and Shorties alike." He waved to the judges and went back into the crowd. "Thanks, One Man," said the right-end judge. "Now, having heard from everybody important who had something to say, here's our opinion. This is a matter concerning the honor of the Streamside Terror -- " "How about me?" roared the Hill Bluffer. "The mail must -- " "Hold your jaw about the mail!" snapped the right-end judge. "As I was saying, Terror's mug was spilled by the Guest in Humrog. Quite properly, the Terror then spilled the mug of the Guest by stealing off one of the Guest's househqld. This by itself is a dispute between individuals not touching Clan Hollows. But now here comes along a Shorty who wants to fight Terror for the stolen Shorty. And the question is, can Clan Hollows honorably allow the Terror to do so?" to let the point sink in on the crowd. "For us to do this in honor," he continued, "the combat mentioned must be a matter of honor. And this point arises -- is honor possible between a man and a Shorty? We Great-Grandfathers have sat up a full night finding an answer, and to do so we have had to ask ourselves, 'What is a Shorty?' That is, is it the same thing as us, a being capable of having honor and suffering its loss?" He paused again. The crowd muttered its interest. "A knotty question," said the spokesman, with a touch of complacency in his voice. "But your Great-Grandfathers have settled it." The crowd murmured this time in admiration. "What makes honor?" demanded the spokesman rhetorically. "Honor is a matter of rights -- rights violated and rights protected. Have the Shorties among us had any rights? Guest-rights, only. Failing Guest-rights, can one imagine a Shorty defending and maintaining its rights in our world?" A chortle broke out in the crowd and spread through its listening ranks at the picture conjured up. "Silence!" snapped another of the judges. "This is not a houseraising." The crowd went silent. "Your display of bad manners," said the right-end judge severely, "has pointed up the same conclusion we came to -- by orderly process of discussion. It is ridiculous to suppose a Shorty existing as an honor-bound equal in our world. Accordingly, the rules of honor are not binding. Both Shorties here will be returned unharmed to the Guest in Humrog. The Terror has lost no honor. The matter is closed." He stood up. So did the other five Great-Grandfathers. "This meeting," he said, "is ended." "Not yet it isn't!" bellowed the Hill Bluffer. He plunged forward to the edge of the rock bench, hauling John Tardy along by the slack in John's jacket. "What do you all know about Shorties?" he demanded. "I've seen this one in action. When a bunch of drunks at Brittle Rock tried to make him do tricks like a performing animal, he fooled them all and got away. How's that for defending his honor? On our way here, the Knobby Gorge Bridge was cranked up out of our reach. He risked his neck climbing up to get it down again, so's not to be slowed in getting his paws on the Terror. How's that rights? I say this Shorty here's as good as some of us any day. Maybe he isn't any bigger'n a two-year-old baby," roared the Hill Bluffer, "but I'm here today to tell you he's all guts!" He spun on John. "How about it, Shorty? You want Greasy Face handed back to you like scraps from a plate -- " John's long cogitations at last I paid off. These and something just witnessed in the Clan Meeting had thrown the switch he had been hunting for. "Show me that skulking Terror!" he shouted. r T , HE words had barely passed his lips when he felt himself snatched up. The free air whistled past his face. The Hill Bluffer had grabbed him in two huge hands and was now running toward the far woods with him, like a football player with a ball. A roar of voices followed them; looking back, John saw the whole of Clan Hollows in pursuit. John blinked. He was being jolted along at something like fifty kilometers an hour, and the crowd was coming along behind at the same rate. Or were they? For a long second, John hesitated, then allowed himself to recognize the inescapable fact All praise to the postman -- the Bluffer was outrunning them! John felt the thrill of competition in his own soul. He and the Hill Bluffer might be worlds apart biologically, but, by heaven, when it came to real competition... Abruptly, the shadow of the further forest closed about them. The Hill Bluffer ran on dropped needles from the conifers, easing to a lope. John Tardy climbed over his shoulder into the mailbag and hung on. The forest muffled the roar of pursuit. They descended one side of a small hollow and, coming up the other, the Bluffer dropped to his usual ground-eating walk. On the next downslope, he ran again. And so he continued, alternating his pace as the ground shifted. "How far to the Terror?" asked John. "Glen Hollow," puffed the Hill Bluffer. He gave the answer in Dilbian units that worked out to just under eight kilometers. About ten minutes later, they broke through a small fringe of trees to emerge over the lip of a small cuplike valley containing a meadow split by a stream which, in the meadow's center, spread into a pool. The pool was a good fifty meters across and showed the sort of color that indicates a fair depth. By the poolside, a male Dilbian was just looking up at the sound of their approach.  John leaned forward and said quietly to the Hill Bluffer, "Put me down by the deepest part of the water." Reaching to his waist, he loosened the buckle of the belt threaded through the loops on his pants. The Hill Bluffer grunted and continued his descent. At the water's margin, some dozen meters from the waiting Dilbian, he stopped. "Hello, postman," said the Dilbian. "Hello, Terror," answered the Bluffer. "Mail." The Terror looked curiously past the Bluffer's head at John. "So thafs the Half Pint Posted, is it?" he said. "They let you come?" "No, we just came," said the Bluffer. While the Terror stared at John Tardy, John had been examining the Terror. The other Dilbian did not, at first glance, seem to live up to his reputation. He was big, but nowhere near the height of the Hill Bluffer, nor the awe-inspiring massiveness of One Man. John noted, however, with an eye which had judged physical capabilities among his own race, the unusually heavy boning of the other's body, the short, full neck, and, more revealing than any of these, the particularly poised balance exhibited by the Terror's thick body. glance at the water alongside and slid down from the Bluffer's back. The Bluffer moved off and, with no attempt at the amenities, the Streamside Terror charged. John turned and dived deep into the pool. He expected the Terror to follow him immediately, reasoning the other was too much the professional fighter to take chances, even with a Shorty. And, indeed, the water-shock of the big body plunging in after John made him imagine the Terror's great clawed hands all but scratching at his heels. John stroked desperately for depth and distance. He did have a strategy of battle, but it all depended on time and elbow room. He changed direction underwater, angled up to the surface, and, flinging the water from his eyes with a jerk of his head, looked around him. The Terror, looking the other way, had just broken water four meters off. John dived again and proceeded to get rid of boots, pants and jacket. He came up again practically under the nose of the Terror and was forced to dive once more. But this time, as he went down, he trailed from one fist the belt he had taken from his trousers, waving in the water like a dark stem of weed. Coming up the third time at a F fairly safe distance, John discovered the Terror had spotted him and was coming after him. John grinned to himself and dived, as if to hide again. But under the water he changed direction and swam directly at his opponent. He saw the heavy legs and arms churning toward him overhead. They moved massively but relatively slowly through the water, and in this he saw the final proof he needed. He had guessed that, effective as the Terror might be against other Dilbians, in the water his very size made him slow and clumsy in comparison to a human -- in possibly all but straightaway swimming. Now John let his opponent pass him overhead. Then, as it went by, he grabbed the foot. And pulled.  The Terror instinctively checked and dived. John, flung surfaceward, let go and dived -- this time behind and above the Dilbian. He saw the great back, the churning arms, and then, as the Terror turned once more toward the surface, John closed in, passing the belt around the thick neck and twisting its leather length tight. At this the Terror, choking, should have headed toward the surface, giving John a chance to breathe. The Dilbian did, John got his breath -- and there the battle departed from John's plan entirely. John had simply failed to give his imagination full rein. He had, in spite of himself, been thinking of the Dilbian in human terms -- as a very big man, a man with vast but not inconceivable strength. It is not inconceivable to strangle a giant man with a belt. But how conceivable is it to strangle a grizzly? John was all but out of reach, stretched at arm's-length by his grip on the belt, trailing like a lamprey attached to a lake trout. But now and then the Terror's huge hand, beating back at him through the water, brushed against him. Only brushed -- but each impact slammed John about like a chip in the water. His head rang. The water roared about him. His shoulder numbed to a blow and his ribs gave to another. His senses began to fog; and he tightened his grip on the belt -- for it was, in the end, kill or be killed. If he did not do for the Terror, there was no doubt the Terror would... do for... him... found his hands no longer on the belt, but clawing at the grassy edge of the pond. Hands were helping him. He pulled himself up on the slippery margin. His knees found solid ground. He coughed water and was suddenly, ungracefully sick. Then he blacked out. He came around after an indeterminate time to find his head in someone's lap. He blinked upward and a blur of color slowly turned into the face of Ty Lamorc, very white and taut -- and crying. "What?" he croaked. "Oh, shut up!" she said. She was wiping his damp face with a rag of cloth that was nearly as wet as he was. "No -- " he managed. "I mean -- what're you doing here?" He tried to sit up. "Lie down!" "I'm all right I think." He struggled into sitting position. The whole area of Glen Hollow, he saw, was aswarm with Dilbians. A short way off, a knot of them were gathered on the pool-bank around something. "What-?" he began. "The Terror, Half Pint," said a familiar voice, and he looked up at the looming figure of the Hill Bluffer, mountainous from this angle. "He's still out. It's your fight, all right." He went off, and they could hear him informing the other group down the bank that the Shorty was up and talking. John Tardy looked at Ty. "What happened?" he asked. "They had to pull him out. You made it to shore by yourself." She found a handkerchief somewhere, wiped her eyes and blew her nose vigorously. "You were wonderful." "Wonderful?" said John, still too groggy for subtlety. "I was out of my head to even think of it!" He felt his ribs gingerly. "I better get back to Humrog and have an Xray of this side." "Oh, are your ribs broken?" "Maybe just bruised. Wow!" said John, coming on an especially tender spot. "Oh!" wept Ty. "You might have been killed! And it's all my fault!" "Your fault?" said John. He spotted the massive figure of One Man breaking away from the group around the fallen Terror and hissed quickly at her. "Hurry. Help me up." She assisted him clumsily to his feet. "Tell me, did they find anything around the Terror's neck when they pulled him out?" S HE stared at him and wiped her eyes. "Why, no. What should they find around his neck?" "Nothing," whispered John. "Well!" he said as One Man rolled up to a halt before them. "What do you think of the situation?" "I think, Half Pint," said One Man, "that it's all very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I think you Shorties may be getting a few takers now on this business of going off into the sky and learning things." "You do, eh? How about you, for one?" "No-o," said One Man slowly. "No, I don't think me. I'm a little too old to jump at new things that quick. Some of the young ones'll be ready, though. The Terror, for one, possibly. He's quite a bright lad, you know. Of course, now that you've done the preliminary spadework, I may put in a good word for you people here and there." "Mighty nice of you -- now," said John, a little bitterly. "Nothing wins like a winner, Half Pint," rumbled One Man. "You Shorties should have known that. Matter of fact, I'm surprised it took you so long to show some common sense. You just don't come in and sit down at a man's table and expect him to take your word for it that you're one of the family. As I said to you once before, who asked you Shorties to come here, anyway, in the first place? And what made you think we had to like you? What if, when you were a lad, some new kid moved into your village? He was half your size, but he had a whole lot of shiny new playthings you didn't have, and he came up and tapped you on the shoulder and said, 'C'mon, from now on we'll play my sort of game!' How'd you think you'd have felt?" He eyed John shrewdly out of his hairy face. "I see," said John, after a moment. "Then why'd you help me?" "Me? Help you? I was as neutral as they come. What're you talking about?" "We've got something back home called a phone directory -- a book like those manuals Little Bite has down at Humrog. It's about this thick -- " he measured with thumb and forefinger. "And r for one of us Shorties, you'd say it was a physical impossibility to pick it up and tear it in two. But some of us can do it." He eyed One Man. "Of course, there's a trick to it." "Well, now," said One Man judiciously, "I can believe it. Directories, thick sticks, or first-class hill-and-alley scrappers -- there's a trick to handle almost any of them. Not that I'd ever favor a Shorty over any of us in the long run -- don't get that idea." He looked around them. The Streamside Terror was being helped out of the Glen and most of the crowd was already gone. "We'll have to get together for a chat one of these days, Half Pint. Well, see you in the near future, Shorties." with the back of his hand and stared after One Man. Then he turned to Ty Lamorc. "Now," he said, "what'd you mean -- it was all your fault?" "It was," she said miserably. "It was all my idea. Earth knew we weren't getting through to the Dilbians, so they sent me out. And I -- " she gulped -- "I recommended they send out a man who conformed as nearly as possible to the Dilbian psychological profile and we'd get him mixed up in a Dilbian emotional situation -- to convince them we weren't the utter little aliens we seemed to be. They've got a very unusual culture here. They really have. I never thought Boy-Is-She-Built would catch up with you and nearly kill you and take your wristphone away. You were supposed to be able to stay in contact with Joshua Guy so he could always rescue you from the other end." "I see. And why," queried John, very slowly and patiently, "did you decide not to let me in on what was going on?" "Because," she wailed, "I thought it would be better for you to react like the Dilbians in a natural, extroverted, uncerebral way!" "I see," said John again. They were still standing beside the pool. He picked her up -- she was quite light and slender -- and threw her in. There was a shriek and a satisfying splash. John turned and walked off. After half a dozen steps, he slowed down, turned and went back. She was clinging to the bank. "Here," he said gruffly, extending his hand. "Thag you," she said humbly, with her nose full of water, as he hauled her out. Quantity -- the biggest magazine in all science fiction. Quality -- the highest rates in all science fiction mean the top names and stories in the field. Prestige -- with its U.S., Canadian, British Empire, French (including Belgian and Swiss), German, Italian, Finnish and Swedish editions, Galaxy is beyond challenge the most widely read science fiction magazine on Earth. All these bonuses -- and the only small thing about Galaxy is its price -- # for # giant #-page issues! Send in your subscription today; no need to cut out the coupon if you don't want to -- it's for your convenience, not ours. Just Look At Well, sure -- value was what we aimed to give you -- and value is what we deliver. Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy for: # Issues  # # Issues  # (# additional per # issues for foreign) Name Address... City Zone State (Continued from page #) you. If you had voted for many little stories at the cost of large ones, we'd have had no choice but to demand terse -- even if painfully terse -- handlings. We're grateful that many of you pointed out the time factor in reading. A. H. Feldman of Los Angeles, Cal., speaks for a sizable and hurried group: "Please leave in the short stories as I can easily scan one in a break or lunch hour," and Dorothy B. Sommers of Mayville, N. Y., explains harrowingly just why a mother of three boys had better have a passion for short stories or give up reading altogether. VW'E had no intention of not  using short stories; they're too important for editorial balance, a word that, thanks to those who bothered to say why, now has temporal as well as length and theme meaning.  How, we asked, about serials? The best solution -- running them complete in one issue -- we showed to be financially impossible for authors: books, reprint and club publishers won't touch novels that have appeared uncut in single issues. That applies whether we are discussing Galaxy or Galaxy Novels, which some readers suggested as a way out of the problem. If we're going to have booklengths, they must be serialized -- and we asked our readers to consider, before voting, whether they would have wanted to miss the book-lengths we have run. And consider they did, for the really immense majority wants serials. We are all unhappy about the wait, but it's either that or no book-lengths. Well, no, not none at all; there are always seconds and factory rejects that can be had for the whistling, but not the top-notchers. Magazine earnings, especially from Galaxy, enable writers to turn good-enough books into the best they can produce. We'll hold the serials down to two installments, as promised. It means a two-month wait -- but isn't that a gain over the third of a year needed for four-parters?  What, we asked, do you think of articles? Is our science department a good solution? Here again the choice is unmistakable: Willy Ley's "For Your Information" gets a mandate. The suggestions made for improving it still further will be heeded: more speculation, return of the "Any Questions?" section, and wider range of subjects. "Any Questions?" became a real problem -- the scientifically literate and semi-literate, after a first burst of enthusiasm, left it entirely to the untutored, and how many times could Ley explain that rockets do not push against air, and the like? If you want a department that depends on you for support, it seems logical that you should support it, no? Keep queries coming and it will flourish. Relinquish it and it'll wither and die, same as before.  Your editor baffledly admits that his editorials seem liked and consents to go on writing them. His reluctance was neither laziness nor modesty. Being a devout entertainer, he lives in horror of lecturing and talking through his hat, the two greatest pitfalls of editorializing. His attempts to scrabble out of said pitfalls do not always succeed, and they feel less often than that -- but you ought to see him chucking away ideas that lead to these temptations, and whacking out the incipient borely creep into all editorials. TUT if the editorials are liked, he asks, how come writing them feels like trying to hold a spirited conversation with a dead phone? Why, he persists, doesn't somebody answer? So, when you hear an editorial ringing, pick it up. It's for you.  The vote on the letter column couldn't have been clearer in #. It couldn't be more deadlocked than now -- almost exactly half against and half for. The deciding factor is actually the same as the one that will make "Any Questions?" prosper or fall -- your support, if you are among the many who want a letter column, or leaving it by default to the -- Well, here is the place to comment on the crabs among us mentioned earlier, and the shock received each time we find them statistically so insignificant. At any given time, there are no more than # or so active, in the volcanic sense, letter writers. Some are loves -- a few, like H. M. Sycamore, nothing short of living snookies. But the steaming, fuming, roaring most of them won't get off people's ears, editors' least of all. They take over letter columns only if nobody else is around, for no editor prefers their livid lava -- they're always mad: mad for, mad at, or just plain mad -- to sensible mail from reasonable human beings whom everyone is glad to hear from. We intended at this point to include some samples, decided not to; why quease stomachs unnecessarily? Besides, you've seen enough in their occupied columns. What you can't really realize is how strenuously they have been prettied up for you in editing. Worse than unprintable, they are unspeakable. No, we had no intention ever of letting these quarrelsome oafs dominate any letter department in Galaxy. Nor is the alternative no letter department. Not with so many intelligent readers to chat, bull or fun around with. Agree? Apparently # of you do. Now let's hear from you -- and keep hearing, for the column can exist only as long as you write to it  How, we inquired, about our book reviews? Another clear majority, including endorsement of the tone that was deliberately set in advance -- one early voter's letter, put aside for quote, got quickly drifted over and buried and would need a rescue expedition to be uncovered, so our apologies for a nameless citation from memory: "It's not easy to locate science fiction and related books in my town and Mr. Gale's reviews make a very useful shopping list." Shopping list, not public execution block, is what we intended the department to be; now, as many readers request, we are reinstating coverage of paperbound books to extend its usefulness. Since these are all but completely reprints, they will be reviewed briefly -- no sense in discussing titles twice and sometimes more. Speaking for a hungry little crowd is Bruce Pelz, Tampa, Fla., who says: "Put more teeth in the reviews!" Sorry, Mr. P., this field has an exportable surplus of fanged critics, bunnies in company, sabertooth rabbits in print. We feel that as long as an author is writing, even if badly, there's a chance he'll improve, none at all if he is nipped and nagged into stopping. Gale will evaluate books as buys, not their authors' taste in shirts, or in relation to James Joyce, or in terms of Gypsy Dreambook symbology.  Many readers want covers tied to stories, but many like our oddball ones, so we'll try to please both factions. And we aim to dress up layouts and art still more.  Reprinting some of our early stories, available nowhere else, got a mixed vote. We'll see if we can't come up with a solution favorable to all. the really big policies, we have just about enough to go on, and we mean to go on it, at least until we hear otherwise, for the voting continues. There was some confusion about our math -- half again as much magazine for only #f more. We meant # as much again as our #-page competitors. But the whole thing is in process of change even as this is written, with some titles going out of business, others increasing price, and the rest watching us very closely before deciding what to do. They will have to watch us even more narrowly than they are doing, though. For the plans we have in mind will cause them -- and you -- the utmost damned astonishment! v l Galaxy goes to # pages New York, New York -- Publisher announces change to bigger and better magazine. Subscriptions pouring in. Low rate of # per six issues (one year) ; # # issues (two years) ; # # issues (three years; # # issues (four years) ; # # issues (five years). Clip coupon or send order to: Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Check your choice and enclose check, cash or money order One YearQ Two Years  Three Years  Four Years  Five Years  Name .--? . -- Address -- : CityState --  --  QMdxy A e A Z I N by J.T.     And Other Stories #c Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden Music Around the Universe Any Questions? #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. ## per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. I'.lscwhcre #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the Yi'Arlcn# Trade Mark (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-ALens, #x# inch Art Board, # tubes Oil Paint, Oil, Turpentine, # Brushes, # page Instruction Book. only .# Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Vi-a-len, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. Resdij fow! The S-F anthology with the "fresh and literate toueh"#K Oalaxy Edited by H. L. Gold Another great collection for every S-F bookshelf -- fifteen choice stories among the best published in Galaxy in the past few years. Humor, new worlds, fantastic ideas, and clever writing combine to give you many hours of excitement and pleasure. Stories by Pohl, Sheckley, Leiber, McIntosh, Davidson and others. Order today .# #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of hot off the press. I enclose  check O cash  money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. W E make many more adjustments to civilization than psywith. Few of us, for example, pause long enough to be dismayed by this dismaying fact -- mail : incoming always exceeds mail ; outgoing. That's so even in mailing houses, two of my correspondents (more incoming) inform me, unless the mailing houses bring in new business. If they let it slack a moment, the mailman delivers circulars, promotion letters, begging letters, coupons, free samples and other foreign matter from rival concerns. Mailing houses and mail-order houses are not to be confused with each other, as if, having adjusted so well, you needed to be told. Mail-order houses sell merchandise by direct mail from their own mailing departments. Nobody has to do a thing for them. Mailing houses mail mail for firms that do not have all the frightening equipment needed to fold, stuff, address, lick envelopes, stick on stamps and push into mailof persuasion that the clients of mailing houses hire mailing houses to mail for them. Nobody does anything for mailing houses except pay them. Mail is mentioned frequently in science fiction. Whether fast or slow, it generally resembles today's postal systems, with only an occasional extrapolation based on WW II's microfilmed V-mail. V-mail never was popular, was avoided whenever possible during the war -- who wants his mail open to inspection, even when it isn't inspected? Judging by mail's negligible evolution, there may be as close a similarity between present and future fwstal practices as writers suggest. The single big difference is in means of transportation. Air mail from England to Italy f takes only a day or two. But surface mail can wander around for a month or more before arriving -- K whereas two letters that Julius ' Caesar wrote to Cicero from England reached Rome in # and # days respectively. Not bad, eh? At that time, courier mail was for the government only. But it was no more than a couple of hundred years later, in the third century, that Emperor Dibcletian set up a postal system for citizens. Pohl and Kornbluth, in their brilliant Galaxy serial Gravy Planet, had everything from the armed services to the post office run by free enterprise. This struck a number of people as satire. Either they forgot or never knew of mercenaries, both on an individual and army scale, and the privately operated postal systems of the past. Not only did the free-enterprise mails exist all over Europe but in Boston, in #, Richard Fairbanks' house was the collection point for all inbound and outgoing sea mail, on which he was allowed a penny per letter. Things were very much otherwise in Virginia, where a postal service was established in # -- with all planters required by law to send mail on to the next plantations, at their own expense -- and a fine of a hogshead of tobacco for failure to comply. Science fiction writers see outworld mail as unprecedentedly expensive. But in the #th century, both in England and the Colonies, letters cost eight cents for # miles or less, and up to # cents for up to # miles -- equal, in purchasing power, to a lot of meals. As with all enterprises, deterioration of mail service is easier to achieve than improvement. From seven deliveries a day to the business districts and four to homes, which is really too many, the rate has been slashed to two and one, which is really too few. On the other hand. New York City recently revolutionized its postal system, no doubt at the usual cost of revolutions -- heads rolling, blood flowing, the mighty toppling from their thrones. Whatever secret plotting and split-second execution were required, the gain was worth it: For generations, letters addressed across the street (a common urban practice in paying bills) had to travel clear to the central post office in the middle of the city and then be sent back again, which, according to a signed confession by the postmaster, sometimes took as long as four days. New interception points, or some such term, have been established midway, so that mail now has only half as far to go to get back where it started from. Progress of this sort is much harder to make than you might imagine. Those of us who have never collected stamps, a minority that must be protected by law if it is not to become extinct, are mildly amused to find that postage stamps are not much over a century old. The first stamp was issued in England in #, and five years later in the U.S. -- but by the postmasters of New York, Baltimore, St. Louis, Providence and New Haven. They proved popular, so Washington went into the business, though on a modest twodenomination scale; only since one or another administration of F.D.R., a notorious stamp-hoarder, has the government expanded operations to compete with small countries which get much of their revenue from philatelists. Dedicated non-philatelists have been known to shop from one post office to another, hunting for familiar old stamps. New issues confuse and upset them as much as constantly changed shapes and colors and designs of paper money would bother philatelists. Maybe that's an unwise comment -- a future numismatic President may be reading these words, and the country will be using sampler and pinup and commemorative bills in rustic and shocking and mourning hues. Lucky thing mail-order and mailing houses weren't around in # with high-pressure lobbies. That was the year all mail was ordered prepaid; before that, prepayment was optional. If the bill had been defeated, we would now be handing out cash -- which was how postage was collected until stamps came into being -- for our share of the several pounds of promotional material per annum dumped on each capita in every modern country. Civilization could not exist without postal services, it should not have to be stated here. Obvious reasons aside, I am thankful for the mails because it brought Fig. I from D. W. Blakeslee of Oakland, Calif. Colton Broadcloth # Were # in Midsummer Sale Book. Unusual value. Nylon lace cups or Acetate Satin trim. White. Stale bust size. #ND# I B-Lace: A v.flCup; #,# in. #ND#-Piafn.-Av.B;#in. #ND#-Ptoin; FulIC: #in. Ship. wt. each # oz. # # for # Mr. Blakeslee writes; "Not only are they (extraterrestrials) among us, but in sufficient number to encourage Montgomery Ward to seek their patronage. The enclosed clipping (from page #I of their catalog) is proof positive." Mr. B invites us to find four straps, and adds: "If true, wouldn't the entire anatomical picture be interesting?" What Strange Cosmic Power Influences Humans ? of the universe and that the earth alone shapes his existence? In the infinite spaces above, tenanted by vast and magnificent worlds, are Cosmic forces which influence the life of every mortal. As iron filings respond to the attraction of a magnet, so too, your acts are the result of an impelling influence upon your will. Just as the unseen Cosmic rays give the earth form and substance, so too from the infinite reaches, an invisible subtle energy affects the thought processes of every human. Life itself bows to this strange universal force -- why, then, pendulum either to be swung forward to happiness and the fulfillment of your dreams, or backward into discouragement and disillusionment. Why remain poised in a state of anxiety, uncertainty, and anticipation? Learn to draw to yourself these Cosmic forces which will give your mind the creative impetus that will assure the end in life you seek. For You -- A Gift Copy of th Sealed Book Not for the curious nor the skeptical, but for the modern man and woman the Rosicrucians, a progressive movement of thinking persons, offer a free. Sealed Book, telling how you may acquire the truth about these phenomenal Cosmic powers little understood today and which make for freedom and attainment in life. This is the Day and Ace of Mastery. Throw off the age-old custom of "let life be as it may' -- and learn to create it as you wish it. Scribe E.J.A, Rorierveian Park. San Jose, Califorma. Please send me vithout obligation the free. Sealed Book, which tcllt how I may obtain the unusual facts about the Cosmic forces which affect my life. Name Address City State They were not even hostile; they merely had to know all about us -- whatever makes us go, whatever makes us stop, but particularly... Whatever I T here were fifty-eight of them on the trailer. Fiftyeight of them, and they had been together for a long time. But fifty-five didn't count. Only three counted, three who stood at the center of it. Hibsen was one of the ones that counted, Hibsen with the diamond epaulettes and the rope of matched rubies. And Brabant counted, Brabant and his blots of ink. And there was Rae Wensley. She may have counted the most. But the others didn't count, however much they suffered. It was only those three. One of the ones who didn't count was screaming. He was the littlest of them, very small and very new. Off at the outer shell of the trailer, where the scout rocket was getting ready to go, Brabant could hear him scream. Hibsen, hauling himself along a corridor with squidlike boimds, could hear him very well, and Rae could hear him even better, being closer. The littlest of them screamed because he was in agony. It was a very great pain -- the greatest he had ever experienced in his life -- except, perhaps, the great pain that had begun it, in the act of being born five weeks and three days before. Rae Wensley hooked a toe under his bassinet, now standing Counts sterile and empty because there was no need for bassinets where they were, and slapped at a wall switch. "Mary!" she called urgently. In a moment, there was a sleepy "M-m-m?" from the grille over the switch. "Better come and help me, Mary," said Rae Wensley, and left the switch open while she went back to tending the baby. Mary was the baby's mother; the baby's screams would bring her faster than anything Rae could say over the intercom. They had been going on for nearly an hour. Rae, her hair net brushed askew and her golden hair beginning to creep out, found herself pleading with the baby as she slapped it, patted it, squeezed its back. "Come on, honey. Please! Get the bubble up for Rachel." She held the child away from her searchingly; the senseless little face screwed up its eyes the tighter, and the long, hairless little head wobbled the more wildly on its gelatine neck. If they hadn't been in free-fall, she couldn't have done that, for the tiny new muscles could not have held the head. But if they hadn't been in free-fall, the little swallowing apparatus could have rid itself of the bubble of gas that brought the pain -- if gravity had been there to help it. But there wasn't any gravity, not with the trailer in orbit. It was a perfectly normal baby -- and a perfectly normal bubble of gas; it was only the situation that wasn't normal. That was Rae Wensley. She was nineteen years old and had been in space for seven years. A ND then there was Computerman Hibsen. Hibsen was no colonist -- no, not he! Hibsen shut his ears to the screams from the nursery, though it was getting closer and the screams were getting louder. Computerman Hibsen was all gold and gems: fine gold traceries festooned his blue silk jacket; his buttons were great pink pearls; blue diamonds winked from his fingers. He flashed and glowed in the light from the tubelamps recessed in the corridor walls as he propelled himself by handholds; and he also sang: "Three little spacemen Lived on Aleph Four -- Along came the Gormen, And they were seen no more!" It was not a popular song with the rest of the crew and the colonists, but Hibsen himself was not popular. He didn't think that was odd. He was used to it. He had applied for crew status on Explorer II out of defiance and anger, because a girl had told him he could never pass. Interstellar flight demanded more than technical skill. Hibsen had that, of course. But it also demanded -- well, it demanded the qualities that were required of each person in a group of some fifty-odd who would be confined for more than seven years in a space about the size of a three-story apartment house. Nobody would have guessed that Hibsen would pass, least of all Hibsen. It was a shock to him when Brabant, the psychologist, accepted him. Hibsen reacted, as most of the fifty-odd candidates had, by drawing his salary for the eighteen-year voyage in advance, and spending it. For Hibsen, the money went into gold and gems, and every last bit of that went into all of the uniforms he took along. He flaunted the jewel-studded uniforms for every day of those seven years, until the joke would have worn thin even to him -- if it had been a joke. It wasn't. It was what he had always wanted, and now that he had it, he was satisfied: the tangible proof that he was a success. HE baby was now purple. It was the free-fall, beyond doubt. Colic? On Earth it would have been called colic, so perhaps that was the right name. There's an old prescription for colicky babies: Take one thick, soundproof door; close it upon the child. That was a pretty good joke, Rae thought distractedly. There weren't enough walls in the whole trailer to shut out the soimd of one screaming child. And where was Mary? She forced herself to put the baby down. To do that, she attached dog-leash snaps to the little harness that held the baby's diaper; the leashes were fastened to the walls, and they would keep him from drifting helplessly into something. She left him hanging like Mohammed between earth and sky, and kicked herself to the corridor. And there was Mary coming -- and far behind her, just turning in from a lateral traverse, Hibsen. "Mary, thank heaven!" Rae stopped the other woman with one hand and the two of them clung at the door of the nursery, looking inside. Rae's heart was wrung by every gasping cry. "The poor thing! He's been like this for an hour!" "I know." Mary Marne stared in at her baby, writhing and kicking his lean, ruddy little legs. She said rebelliously: "If the baby and I could go along, this wouldn't happen any more. It isn't fair, Rae! I had everything all set up. There was plenty of room for us in the rocket until Dr. Brabant pushed in. We could all go together down to Four, and the baby would have decent gravity, and -- " She stopped short, because the screams stopped short. There was a strangling noise from the baby. He kicked and jerked with all his arms and legs at once. A blob of whitish-yellow frothy liquid appeared at his mouth; it broke into globules and clung to his face as he tried to inhale. "He's spitting up!" Rachel Wensley was a few inches the closer. She leaped in first, caught at the harness straps and unsnapped the child. Mary was beside her at once, trying to help. This was, again, a perfectly normal phenomenon. Babies with bubbles of gas in their digestive tracts need to get rid of the gas, because it's painful. Eventually they manage to expel it. Sometimes the gas comes up alone, sometimes it brings an ounce or so of milk with it. This is perfectly normal -- in a normal environment. But without gravity to clutch the milk down and away from the untutored little mouth, it becomes abnormal, and unless the breathing passages are promptly cleared, it becomes, in fact, fatal. T N the corridor outside, Hibsen, a few yards away, heard the screams change to odd choking and bubbling noises. He caught himself by a handhold and listened, swinging like a helium balloon on a string. Then he scrambled down the lateral corridor and gaped in at the nursery door. There was Rachel Wensley, her blonde hair floating about her head like weeds under water, braced with both legs and one arm against a changing table. Her free hand had a grip on Mary Marne's belt, and she appeared to be trying to swing the other woman around her head. Mary in turn was holding the baby with both hands, one clutching his middle, the other supporting his forehead. The baby himself, flailing around like the tip of a whip, was choking and gasping -- and, in a moment, screaming again. Centrifugal force had flung the choking fluids out of his little mouth and cleared the breathing passages, which had been the idea. Mary gasped, triumphant and relieved: "That does it, Rae! Let go!" The acrobatic group broke up, and the two women consulted over the baby. His screams dwindled and became grunts, then something resembling small snores. His mother held him at her shoulder, patting him gently. Rae automatically took a spare hair net out of her pocket and began to fix her hair. "Hi," she said breathlessly as she noticed Hibsen staring in. He came cautiously in, trying to shield his pearly-gold finery from the small floating drops of spit-up formula. "What a mess. Everything all right?" "It is now." Rae helped the baby's mother snap him back into the floating harness arrangement again. He was sound asleep. "Well, he got it up. But I hate this." "You asked for it," chortled Computerman Hibsen, and he added: "Colonist!" And colonist was what Rachel Wensley was. So were the Marnes. So were forty-one of the trailer's complement, and they were the whole reason for the trip. For seven years, the round steel ball that was Explorer II's tractor had spat faint quick streams of electrons backward from its magnetic throats, and for all of those years it had looked like a child's tinker-toy, jammed together anyold-fashion. It was an ugly spectacle of a ship. There was the tractor sphere itself, with its flaring blunderbuss exhausts. There were the long parallel strands of steel cable that linked tractor to trailer. Finally there was the trailer, shaped more or less like a can of soup, but with lumps and cobwebby masses of wire projecting from it at odd angles in odd places. There were, for example, the two shuttle rockets. In flight, they were a part of the trailer's living space, though they were attached to it in the ungainly fashion of a child's doll carried by one heel. There were the forty-three separate radar, radio and radiationsensing antennae, plus the periscopes that worked with visual light. There was the grappling unit that stuck out precariously from the cylinder's forward end. It was impossible to believe that so clumsy and square-cornered a construction could fly. It would break to pieces, obviously. If by some fantastic mischance it didn't fall apart at the first surge of power, the protruding sections would be snatched off by the rush of air. But this was not so. Explorer II from the moment of its first assembly had never felt air, and it never would. It was never, from first to last, meant to accelerate fast enough to cause any strain. It was never to operate so close to any astronomical object that gravity would have an effect. It could afford to look clumsy and to be clumsy. For clumsiness carried no penalties in interstellar space. At its peak velocity, just before turnaround, Explorer II shot through the void at more than half the speed of light itself, so fast that mass increased minutely and the equation MV  no longer quite held good, but the force that accelerated it on its way was like the pat from a loving hand. E xplorer II had a captain, a good man named Serrell, though he didn't much matter. He had taken tractor and trailer to the place they had aimed for, a planet that had been located nineteen years before. The name of the planet -- the satellite, rather, for it circled an object that was itself a planet as huge as Jupiter -- was Aleph Four. There was a stand-by party somewhere on its surface, or so they believed. At least there had been three men left by the first expedition, awaiting the relief that this present voyage was planned to supply. So the captain's job was done. It was now only a matter of keeping the cables unsnarled and Explorer II in orbit, and waiting for the scout rocket to report back, and seeing that the colonists with all their goods were shuttled down to the surface that lay hidden, imder heavy cloud cover and a punishingly thick ionosphere that blanketed radio waves, a himdred thousand miles below. That was all there was to it. Captain Serrell (though what he did now didn't matter) stayed by his conn room and cranked the periscope to try to see what he couldn't see. There should have been some signal from the scout rocket. Voice would be unrecognizable and even code would garble rmless you were very lucky. and they hadn't been lucky. But why wasn't there some sort of signal, however faint or garbled? Captain Serrell hooked one toe under the corner of his desk and lit a cigarette. The blowers were going, but he automatically waved the cigarette back and forth, back and forth, in the old spaceman's gesture -- a habit that climg from the days when free-fall meant that an unwaved cigarette would go out, drowned in its own C# -- the days when every man's bimk had a little fan blowing day and night on his face. Those were the days before first contact with the Gormen and its consequent rapid advances in spaceship design, when Captain Serrell was no captain but a young pilot-officer and fresh to space. Now things were better arranged, with a free flow of air impelled by a hundred precisely located fans; but problems remained. There was, for example, the problem of the Gormen. It was foolish to imagine that they could have had anything to do with the failure of the shuttle rocket to report -- so Captain Serrell argued to himself. The first contact had occurred in quite another volume of space; so had the second, and so had the bloody third and fourth. But five men had gone down in the rocket and there wasn't any response, not even a corrupt radio signal, not even the return of the rocket itself. It was foolish to imagine that Gormen might be there. The first expedition would have found them if they were. But when you believed that it was just barely possible that Gormen miht, it made it hard to order the second rocket to go down. II there was Dr. Brabant. Howard Brabant was thirtyeight years old, not very tall, not very good-looking. He was crew, not colonist; he was a psychologist by profession, and what would the colony need psychology for? But he had been thinking, all the same, of changing over. Now -- maybe nobody would change over. Maybe there would be no colony. Because Explorer had come a little late. Brabant, sweating more than his patient, said sharply: "I don't care how much it hurts, Marne -- smile! If you can't smile, at least keep your mouth shut!" The lieutenant stared blankly up at him. Brabant braced himself and tugged quickly on Lieutenant Marne's fractured arm. The lieutenant gnmted once, sighed and went unconscious. Brabant wiped his forehead. All right, let him be imconscious; it was better that way. At least that way he wouldn't yell -- and that might be helpful. (Or might not.) But Brabant didn't have time to follow the thought through, because he had a compound fracture to set, and not much skill at it. He tugged again, and saw the jagged white end of bone slip out of sight. Good. So much for that. As delicately as he could, he poked and palpated the flesh of the arm where the fracture had occurred. As far as he could tell, the bone ends were lined up. There was no chance of getting an X-ray, of course, but it felt all right. Bones had been set without X-rays, for endless centuries before Roentgen. It would have to do. He found an antibiotic powder, shook it on the wound and began the tedious task of splinting and bandaging. It was too bad about Marne's arm, but the lieutenant was not the worst off of any of the first rocket's crew. There was Crescenzi, who was dead; and there were de Jouvenel and himself, who were -- temporarily -- alive, and perhaps that was the worst of all, because they hadn't the comfort of unconsciousness. Because they were not alone in the tiny, ancient room. There was an audience observing every move, taking what looked to be notes; an audience of one, but looming large in Brabant's mind. He glanced at it under his eyebrows, then looked away. It was a hideous thing. It wasn't tall -- not more than four feet -- but it was chunky. Flesh hung from it in folds, like the hide of a rhinoceros. It had a head, and it had two eyes, and probably the horny structure at the base of its "chin" was a breathing apparatus. It fitted the scale of the tiny chamber they were in a lot better than the humans did. But that was accident. Aliens had built this city, but not these aliens. The observer that silently noted every move of Brabant and de Jouvenal was in no way related to the race that had constructed their jail. That race was dead -- gone without a hope of revival, leaving a planet of vacant cities. But the race to which the rhinoceroid creature belonged was very much alive, as the human race had cause to know. It was a Gorman.  I "HE other survivor of the five men who had come down in the landing party was de Jouvenel, a dark, tiny man who kept to himself. He was watching Brabant with a face like a little monkey, absolutely blank, waiting. When Brabant looked up, de Jouvenel said: "Finished? Tell me something -- why do you want Marne to smile? Matter of principle, show the aliens how brave us Earthmen are?" Brabant said regretfully: "I don't know. It was just a thought. But the less the Gormen know about us, the better chance we have to surprise them later on." De Jouvenel looked doubtful. "What about Marne's arm?" "I haven't set a bone in a long time, but it looks all right." De Jouvenel nodded and, before Brabant could stop him, took out a cigarette and lit it. Brabant scowled, but it was too late to say anything and, ansrway, it was still just an idea. But Brabant observed that as the match flared, the Gorman at the door made a quick motion of some sort. Maybe he was making a note of some kind; it stood to reason that anything as curious as inhaling smoke would be worth noting. So probably it was, though the creature carried nothing that looked like pencil, paper, or any other kind of note-taking equipment. Brabant sighed and rubbed his head. The trouble was you couldn't understand them in terms of human referents. They were aliens, the only living, intelligent race of aliens that the human race had ever discovered -- to its cost -- and he had to try to school his mind to think of them that way. "Cigarette, Doc?" Brabant shook his head, surprised. Why, de Jouvenel was getting positively chummy. Let the alien make another note about that: Subject ## ,does not display smoke-tropism of Subject #i. Maybe it would confuse them, however minutely, and confusing them was probably the only chance the colonizing party had. "How does it feel. Doc?" Brabant looked up. De Jouvenel grinned wolfishly. "I mean how does it feel to be the bug this time, instead of the eye in the microscope? You spent enough time watching us. I wondered if you liked it the other way around." "That's my job, de Jouvenel!" "Oh, sure. Doc. And you just love your work." Brabant said harshly : "Evidently I'm not good at it. What did I do to bring out hostility at a time like this?" "You didn't have to do a thing," de Jouvenel said seriously. "Not a thing. You think we like having somebody like you poke into our heads once a week for seven years? No offense, but a man could be a lot more charming than you. Doc, and we still wouldn't like him. Oh," he said, holding up his hand, "sure, we have to have somebody like you to keep us from blowing up. But we don't have to like it." He came over closer, lowering his voice. "Forget it. Talk about something more important. That fellow over there, he's built pretty funny, but he can only look one way at a time, right? Well, how about if we work over close to him? You keep his eye on you and maybe I'll get a chance to kick hell out of him from behind." "No." De Jouvenel nodded. "That's what I thought. Doc, that's what I thought." He looked at Brabant for a moment, his little ape face perfectly serious, and then he strolled away. "O UT it was foolish -- they  wouldn't have a chance! Brabant forced himself to take his mind off it. It didn't matter what de Jouvenel thought of him, at least it didn't right at this moment; what was important was that they were in trouble -- not just the three of them, but the whole ship, and perhaps more than the ship. He checked Marne's pulse and respiration, guessed they were all right, and sat back against a wall. Here was a planet that had been perfectly empty not fifteen years before. The first expedition had checked it carefully, had found thousands of cities and villages, and not a sign of life on any of them. The first expedition had taken a long conscientious year at its job, with  cameras and tape recorders and every known recording and observing device to help them out. Nothing. There were the cities, but not even an animal to prowl their streets. There were forests, with a few insects, and there were fish in the sea. But the cities had been built by neither fish nor bugs, but by warm-blooded bipeds who had known engineering and electronics, who had sailed its seas and mined its ores. Of them there was no survivor. The planet was clean. Brabant looked around the little room. It was a dollhouse, by human standards, but the people who built it hadn't been dolls; dolls can't be murdered, as they had been. There was no doubt of that now. Even when the first expedition returned to Earth, the theory had been put forth that it was the Gormen who had done it, and the only reason to doubt it was that the Gormen didn't seem to have visited that section of space. But here they were, and there was no possibility that they were here by accident. They had known. The scout rocket, navigating by computer-directed charts, had come down exactly where the permanent party was supposed to meet them -- the permanent party, those three volunteers who had remained on Aleph Four to await Explorer's return. But the permanent party wasn't there. Then -- wham-bam, the scout rocket landed, the Gormen came pouring out of the buildings. It hadn't been a fight. It had hardly been an ambush. They were simply overpowered. One moment they were walking toward an empty building in a deserted city and the next moment scores of fast, fast creatures with thick skins and small pig eyes had been all over them. Resistance had been futile. But they had tried all the same, of course. It cost Lieutenant Marne a broken femur, compounded. It had cost Crescenzi and elites, the other two men in the landing party, a great deal more than that. Brabant roused himself and went over to de Jouvenel. At the door, the Gorman turned his head alertly to follow. "Look," said Brabant, "I don't want you to think I'm being arbitrary." "Sure not. Doc," de Jouvenal grunted. Brabant tried to be persuasive. "Maybe we'll come to a physical attack sooner or later. I don't know. But right now, no. For one thing, I'm not sure the two of us together could do him any damage." "Oh, cut it out. Doc!" The little ape face was scowling now. "No, I mean it. What do we know about them? How do we know what to go for? They move quick and they take a lot of punishment. Remember when we landed? Marne shot one. He shot the leg right off it, bht the thing hobbled away without making a sound. It's conceivable they don't feel pain. And if they don't, their nervous system must be -- Well. What I'm trying to say is, what makes you think a Gorman can be knocked out?" De Jouvenel said mildly: "I bet they can be killed." "Friend, I don't think you could even kill me with your bare hands." De Jouvenel shrugged and lit another cigarette. Brabant persisted: "Anyway, there's a chance that the captain won't send the other rocket down, since we didn't signal an all-clear. And that means we're in trouble. But if Explorer opts to turn around and head for Earth, at least the rest of the ship is safe. And-" He stopped. Both of them stood up straight. The Gorman had moved. in its movement, but it was a sort of threat merely to see the thing move at last. For hours it had been standing there, its stubby little hands gripping silvery objects that might have been weapons and might have been recording devices, but were certainly unfamiliar to the men. And then, without warning, blur and it was halfway across the room, looking out a window, and blur again and it was back, opening the door. "Steady," Brabant warned. De Jouvenel glanced at him without expression. The Gorman held the door, and in a moment another alien came in. And behind the second Gorman, something else -- a figure, bent and shambling... A human figure. "Good merciful God," whispered Brabant, and even de Jouvenel beside him said something sharp and prayerful. It was a human being, all right -- but just barely. The man in the he had been dying for all of those years, and it had been at least half that long since he was fed or watered, or had been allowed rest. It was impossible that he could walk, although he was walking; it was unbelievable that he could speak. A slim fringe of filthy hair surrounded a red and crusted scalp. There was a beard, ragged and stained. He was nearly naked. The man shambled forward, within arm's-length of Brabant and de Jouvenel, and looked blearily at them out of eyes that were red-rimmed with weeping. He opened his mouth and tried to speak. Ill "Ka-ka-ka-ka -- " It was a stuttering babble, fighting to break through the hateful, opaque curtain that lay between himself and the sane. "Ka-ka-ka -- " De Jouvenel whispered urgently: "Doc, do you think he might be one of the guys that were left from the first trip?" Brabant shook his head, not to say no but to say: I can't believe it. True, it had been fifteen years since the first ship left. True, captivity in Gorman hands would probably be no rest cure. But this decrepit, destroyed hulk? "Ka ka ka -- " choked the stranger, weeping in rage and fear. And then he reeled closer, the wrecked eyes on them with a watery stare. He wiped his wet beard and tooka deep, sobbing breath, and forced himself to speak. "Captain Fa-Farragut?" he croaked. Carefully, Brabant put out a hand to support the scarecrow. He said, forming huge round words with his lips as one who speaks to a retarded child: "Captain Farragut is not here. He is back on Earth. This is the second expedition, not the first." The old man stared and began to sway. "Too late!" he screamed appallingly, and fell like an ancient brittle doll to the floor in front of Brabant. R ocket Number Two ripped into the air of Aleph Four with eleven persons aboard, three of them children. Computerman Hibsen, strapped in the padded bucket before the controls, shouted and sang along with the enormous racket of the splitting air. He was enjoying himself. He had very little else to do. Piloting a rocket under power is a job for machines, not for men. The speeds were too fast; the decisions had to come too quickly. A machine could react fast enough to make the minute adjustments that meant the difference between landing and catastrophe, but not the burdened, cogitative human mind. "Sailor, beware!" sang Hibsen; "Sailor, take care! Many brave hearts Lie asleep in the deep." He didn't have the voice for it, either -- he was a flat and nasal baritone at best -- but the rockets covered all. And, as mentioned, there wasn't much else to do. There was very little to see, even, though as the rocket sliced out through the bottom of the cloud cover at the end of its thousandmile curve, he, and he alone, caught kaleidoscope glimpses of brown and green and dirty blue. But that wasn't enough to pilot by. In the rocket's plastic nose the only eyes that mattered, the spinning radar plates, felt the landscape below for bumps and ridges, and compared them with its builtin pattern of course and destination, constructed from the first expedition's maps. Digital relays took the signal from the radar eyes, counted briskly on their winking electronic fingers, and selected the exact increments of course and speed that would poise them, butt down, over the selected landing area. The jets flared, flared again; the jolt set all the spring cocoons bouncing, bouncing. "Everybody up!" brayed Hibsen, clawing at the buckles that held him in. The eight adults began to do the same. Rae Wensley, strapped in an acceleration cocoon next to the Marne baby, reached for the little thing crying feebly. "That's a good fellow," she crooned, unbuckling straps. "Good little fellow. Oh, nothing to cry about." She never stopped talking to the child, though probably he couldn't hear -- and wouldn't care if he could -- and she never looked up, until she had found the sterile squeeze bottle, prepared at castoff time and still warm enough. She uncapped it, popped up the nipple with one quick squeeze, and cradled the baby. It stopped crying in order to feed. Then she leaned forward to look out of the opening port, to see just where they were. Hibsen was outside already, skipping and swearing on the smoking ground. "Retty!" he yelled, and the redhaired crewman dropped gingerly out of the port, yowled and jumped off the area the jets had charred. "Retty, you climb a hill or a tree and look around. Colaner, stay in the ship. Try to contact Captain Serrell and report safe landing. Leeks! You and Cannon start unloading. And you girls get the kids out of the way, will you?" Oh, it was a good time for Computerman Hibsen, with orders to give and ten persons to obey them. Carefully, Rae Wensley handed the baby down to Mary Marne, dancing impatiently on the hot sand; and then she followed, and, for the first time in her nineteen years, she stood on soil that had never circled Sol. It washot. She hurried off it. They were on a beach, a gray and grimy one, with water raising a small pattern of surf twenty yards away. It was hot, not just the burned sand but the air. Aleph Four's primary radiated largely at the red end; there was heat enough, and perhaps more than enough, but the light was hardly more than a twilight sky. They should be very near to one of the deserted cities, Rae knew, but there wasn't any sign of it, only a wood of greasy, pendulous trees that came down to the sand itself. TT was Rae who counted, and Hibsen, joyously bellowing orders, and Brabant crouched over the waking, feverish husband of Mary Marne hardly a mile away, but some of the others counted a little too. Mary Marne herself was one. Time was when Mary Marne had been Mary Davison, twentynine years old, a typist for the United Nations Exploration Commission and engaged to a hero of interstellar flight. The engagement was very real to her, although it had been entered into when she was only sixteen. A girl who chose to get engaged to a member of an interstellar exploration party had surely a decade of waiting to look forward to, perhaps several. It was an unrewarding prospect, but that is not an argument persuasive to sixteenyear-old minds. So young Mary kissed her Florian good-by at the spaceport and returned to school. Time passed. School ended. Mary reached the age of twenty-two. She attended the bridal showers of her classmates, caught the bouquet at her sister's reception, practiced babysitting on her first two nephews. Florian's ship was then halfway through its deceleration period, on the outward leg of its trip. Mary went to work for the Commission. It helped her to remember Florian. She became a typist and remained one; it was not her intention to make a career, only to mark time for her fiance's return. Other girls in the secretarial pool dated and married, one by one, but not Mary. What had started as a teen-ager's fierce attempt to mark out a claim on a grown-up way of life became a matter of obstinate pride, then of habit. Other girls had been engaged to spacemen and, in the long years, forgot their engagements. Not Mary. Some went through an entire marriage -- engagement, wedding, childbirth, divorce. Some went through more than one. But not Mary. She had promised. It did not become easier. It became harder, for as the thirteen years dragged by, toward the end a new disturbance began to be felt; besides the mating thrust of her glands and the pressure of her fellows, there came fear. Who was this Florian whose photograph on her desk was a yellowing lie? Who was this man of thirty-one who must by now have replaced the eighteen-year-old she had pledged to marry? The thirteen years ended. Radar sweeps from the satellites of the methane giants hunted ceaselessly for the returning ship, and they found it, a decelerating blip that took shape as the familiar tractor-trailer. Chemical rockets leaped out from them and touched it. Radio carried the message back to Earth. Mary Marne, eight years later, cradling her baby on a stranger planet than ever Florian had seen, remembered how they had brought her the news. Before they said a word, she knew, though no one had heard of the Gormen then. That was the first brush, orbiting around a star a dozen light-years from where she stood; the exploring rocket had been destroyed, and Florian was on that rocket. The eighteen-year-old had never reached thirty-one at all. Young Mary was hardly heartbroken -- thirteen years is a long time -- but she wept. She cried for nearly a month, while every TV station carried the tapes that the shattered survivors had managed to bring back, tapes of the Gorman rockets -- great, squat, hideous things -- tapes of Gorman the tapes that showed the Gormen themselves. Gormen -- where had the name originated? It was as familiar throughout Earth as though that race had always been known, needing only the fact of meeting to bring the word leaping to the tongue. There was a David Gorman on that poor, dead ship -- had he named them, or had they been named for him, perhaps their first victim? Had the Gormen communicated with a crew and given their own name for themselves? There were other guesses, but none of them mattered now, even the possibly right ones. Man and Gorman had met, and met again, and each encounter was a bloody clash, and then Explorer II was ready to receive its crew, and she passed the test. It wasn't, for Mary, an attempt to strike back at those who had killed her lover, for Explorer II was going in the opposite direction. It wasn't a desire for adventure. It was flight. Mary fled, lightyears away. It was ironical, what there was for her at the end of the fleeing. TAE Wensley finished helping to offload supplies. Colaner was still trying to reach the mother ship by radio, but without success. Retty had returned from his hill to report that he had spotted the city, but nothing else, and had gone back again. Hibsen, his gemstudded tunic dark with sweat, was blowing heavily, leaning against a tree. Rae came to help Mary with the baby. Already Gia Crescenzi, whose two children were the rest of the complement of the rocket, had found something to feed them and had brought them to join Mary and the baby. The three women watched the child, concerned. The baby was not aware that he was on a strange planet, he only knew that something was squeezing and pressing him, in a way that had never happened before, and he didn't like it. He cried fretfully and forever, now that he had finished his bottle. He slept briefly, and waked to try to lift his tiny arms, to turn his wobbly head. Rae said sympathetically: "He isn't used to gravity, poor kid." "Poor kid," echoed Gia Crescenzi, but she was looking at her own two. The girl was five, the boy a year younger; in spite of the sternly enforced hours each day with the exercising machines, they were making heavy going of trying to walk and run and jump on a planet. It didn't matter to them that the gravity that had pulled down Alexander and Napoleon alike had never touched them, that the sun that Joshua had stopped had become a dwindled and unyond the cloud cover. It mattered to them, as to the baby, that they had unwelcome weight It was troublesome for a mother, but Gia Crescenzi was troubled enough already; her husband had gone with the first rocket, like Mary Marne's, the rocket that had not been heard from. Rae thought rebelliously : At least they have a right to worry about their men. Brabant won't even give me that right. He thinks I'm just a child. She corralled the two older children and started teaching them the fine points of walking. Then -- "What was that?" cried Gia, her voice thin with fear. It had been a sound from the hanging trees. Hibsen jumped up. Colaner's face appeared at the rocket's port. Rae, a child at each arm, swept them close to her protectively; it had been a frightening sound. And frightening in fact. Mary Marne screamed.  of the greasy forest -- a good many somethings, elephantine and gray. They came down on the party with incredible speed, a score of them in the first bunch and many more thrusting through the trees behind. "Gormen!" bellowed Hibsen, scrabbling for a stick, a knife, anything that would be a weapon. But there was no weapon. The tractor-trailer had had few, and all of them had gone with the first rocket. Hibsen lunged at the Gormen barehanded, checked himself. whirled. "Colaner!" he shouted. "Blast off!" It was a triumph of reason over instinct. Instinct said Fight! but there was no hope in a fight. The only hope was that miraculously the rocket might get safely off. But it wasn't a day for miracles. The Gormen were all around now, not brutal, not cruel, merely invincible; there was a knot of them around every human, even the children. Colaner had heard, and he did his best. Red fire roared from the rocket. But no man could balance that ship, only the computer, and that had not been programmed for the return trip. Whatever Colaner did, it was not enough. The rocket danced and wobbled, painfully climbing. It hung crookedly overhead, singeing them all; it was like a shower of acid. The smell of crisping hair -- and flesh -- filled their nostrils. And the Gormen had them all. All but two. Not Colaner, who somehow got the rocket slashing waveringly out to sea. And not Leeks, who had been closest to the rocket and would never need to fear capture again. His cindered body flopped to the gray sand, scratched against it, lay still. Half a mile out to sea, the rocket plunged into the water with a plume of steam and, moments later, a wild roar, as the children began to shriek. IV resilient street between empty buildings, in darkness. She ached and she was frightened, but it was queerly exciting, all the same, to be walking through a city that had been built by a dead race. Beside her, Hibsen stalked angrily along, carrying one of Gia Crescenzi's children. The boy was whimpering softly. The sound caught at Rae's heart, for the child was fretfully repeating, "Mommy! Mommy!" And his mother had made the mistake of attacking one of the Gormen. Mary Marne panted from behind: "Look! Isn't that the other rocket?" It was something, certainly enough, something that was tall enough to loom over the rather low buildings and metallic enough to catch a few glints of light from somewhere. "That's it," snapped Hibsen, straining to see. They rounded a corner and there it was -- the rocket, all right, squatting silently on its skids in a broad plaza. From one of the buildings, light streamed out, but the Gormen hurried them past it, not even pausing, though one of the Gormen that had captured them shouted something in their high-pitched quacking and was answered from inside. Another building, this one smaller and isolated from those around it, showed fainter, bluer light as they approached. They were hustled inside. Rae stumbled past a motionless Gorman at the door, blinked and cried: "It's them! Mary, your husband's here!" It was a little room, with a flaring blue light dangling from the ceiling, and Marne lay propped on one elbow, blinking up at them, in a corner of it. De Jouvenel squatted beside him, his dark face comically surprised. No one else. Rae said to Lieutenant Marne urgently: "Where's Dr. Brabant?" But Marne had no patience for that sort of question, not just then. He pushed himself up, and Rae saw. that one arm was in a sling. "Mary!" he shouted and rushed toward them, half-crouched; he was not a tall man, but his head brushed the ceiling of that room. His wife ran to him. The baby was in one arm, but the other arm was free and she wrapped it around him in a great soundless passion of relief. Rae, watching, felt something inside her move oddly. She caught de Jouvenel's arm. "Where's Brabant?" He looked at her and his face went all stiff and opaque. "Please!" she begged. "He's alive," de Jouvenel said ago." "Then where-" The man's voice was hostile. "I don't know," he snapped, and brushed past her to join the others. HE wandered through the  house that the Gormen had turned into a prison for them. She had seen photographs of the desecrated buildings on Aleph Four; all of the colonists had. But the photographs didn't show scale, didn't show the finicky smallness of the rooms, didn't show the delicate daintiness of the furnishings. There was nothing left of the builders of the houses but a few pictures, pictures of frail bipedal creatures with lemur's eyes. But they had not been gone long. Even in this damp climate, wood and paperlike objects had not had time to decay. The house they were in was three stories high, each story less than six feet from floor to ceiling, except for a few larger rooms at the back of the ground floor. All the rooms were free to the captured humans, but nothing outside. The Gorman at the door by which they had entered was only one guard; there were others, outside and on the tough but yielding roof. But, in all truth, that was not the major preoccupation of Rae Wensley's mind. She was beginning to form a most peculiar notion of the previous inhabitants of Aleph Four. Plumbing was not a feature of their architecture. The marks of gracious living were in the rooms, but grace for them consisted in things that looked beautiful and served beautiful functions. There was statuary -- it might have been statuary, an#rway. There were musical instruments -- one a sort of tuned drum, with a molded head that produced a diatonic scale around the rim. There were pictures, some representational, some perhaps not -- it was hard to tell. But there was very little else that, to Rae Wensley, marked the difference between civilization and animal existence. It was, she thought, torn between discomfort and giggling, not one of the more easily accepted hardships of space flight that nowhere in sight was there a door marked "Powder Room." It Wasn't until Mary Marne found her wandering, listened, laughed, and showed her the astonishingly convenient vegetative arrangements in the cellar that Rae's spirits improved enough to let her worry about Brabant. main room, where the silent Gorman guard still stood, there was a stranger. "Rae!" cried Hibsen. "Where've you been? Never mind! This is Sam Jaroff, Rhe -- from the first expedition!" They pushed her forward. Obviously, this man needed help, and she was the nearest thing left to a doctor, having had the practice of caring for babies in the trailer. Rae poked around in the emergency kit while the old man did his choking best to answer a thousand questions. He was frightening, she thought, frightening! He had eaten poorly for a long time. Massive diet deficiencies were obvious in his sparse hair, his dry and crusted skin, even the weeping old eyes. The only cure for that was rest and food, Rae thought worriedly, reading labels, but probably some vitamin concentrates would help. While she was working, the Marne baby woke long enough to scream. Mary hurried to feed it; the Gorman at the door looked silently and, blur, he was standing over them to peer down at the little red face. It was like a carved thing, watching; then, without a sign, it went blur to the door again and stood waiting. Sam Jaroff twisted restlessly under Rae's hands, saw the Gorman and screamed thinly. It paid no attention. He gasped: "Sorry, miss!" Hibsen looked at the girl and shook his head. "He's had it rough," he said without humor. But the old man heard. "Rough?" He sat up. "Every day I wished I was dead. Skinner was the lucky one." "Ssh," soothed Rae, pressing him down, but the man shook her off; he wanted to talk. Hibsen and de Jouvenel helped him to lean against a wall. He said: "There were the three of us, Chapman, Skinner and me. We were here a year and a half. Then we saw the ship." He breathed hard for a moment, the rheumy old eyes blinking. "Skinner saw it," he said. "He was the radioman and he picked something up that he couldn't read. Well, he said so -- but we didn't believe him, you know, not at first. We never heard of Gormen. I never heard the name until Dr. Brabant said it. We didn't know there was anything alive in space except people, and -- "Well, we learned." He coughed hoarsely, looked up into Rae's eyes and quickly covered his mouth. "Sorry," he mumbled. "An#Tway, after Skinner claimed he got these signals, we kept a watch and maybe we saw the ship. I guess we did. There was something, and we thought it might be a meteorite, but it must have been a Gorman rocket. But we didn't know for sure, and then nothing happened. For a long time. It's all in the log, in case you want to read it. I guess it's still around someplace. Not in this building, of course. But the Gormen have that log now, and -- "Well, anyway. Nothing happened, like I say, for a long time. Two years. We put crops in, down by the creek, but they didn't do well. Root vegetables died. Carrots, potatoes, turnips -- the carrots would grow down about an inch and a half, and then nothing. By the time they were big enough to eat, they were all knotted up, not worth eating. It was like the topsoil was too thin, you know? Like somebody living in a development house where the builder just put in enough to make the first spring's lawn and -- But it wasn't that, though. There's plenty of topsoil, but below the surface, nothing lived. I thought about it for years," he said earnestly, "and, you know, I'm damned if I understand it. At first I thought it was too much moisture, but -- "Sorry," he said, coughing and wiping his face. "I kind of forgot how to talk. Anyway, the crops didn't work out so well. Well, then. The aliens came back. That thing we saw, it must've been a ship, and they must've spotted us. Where were they those two years? I don't know. They've got a kind of a camp on Bes. That's where I was for a couple years. Maybe they were there all the time, even when Captain Farragut was here. But we didn't see them, until -- " Jaroff stopped and wept silently. you don't have to tell us all this right now! There's plenty of time!" "I want to," said Jaroff, rubbing his watery eyes. "And are you sure about plenty of time? I'm not. There might not be any time at all." He twisted uncomfortably against the wall, his eyes on the silent Gorman at the door. He said: "They came at night. We were all asleep. No guards, nothing like that. Well, who would think we needed them? But the noise should have woke us up. It didn't, though. What woke me was -- was Chapman screaming. "He wasn't in the house with Skinner and me," Jaroff explained carefully. "We'd had a kind of -- not a fight, but we weren't getting along so well. He'd lost one of Skinner's books, see, and so Skinner wouldn't lend him the ukele and Chapman -- "It doesn't matter. But Chapman moved out and set up his own place in one of the buildings across the street. The red one. We called it the House of Morgan. There was a little inlaid thing on the ceiling and it was gold, and Skinner called it that, and -- "The Gormen went there first. We woke up, hearing him screaming, and we came running -- "Chapman was still alive," Jaroff said slowly. "Oh, he lived about two years after that. He even went to Bes with me. I didn't see him much, but after he died I saw him. They used him for dissection. I guess they wanted to -- to -- " Jaroff stopped and looked at the floor for a moment. Then, "They hurt me a lot," he said, very softly, "testing my reflexes and like that. But they didn't kill me, although I asked them. I begged them. "Skinner they killed, right there in the House of Morgan. He had a gun, and he shot six of them first. "So then I was on Bes for -- Dr. Brabant figured it out for me. About ten years, after Chapman died. Eating mush, and all the time they were watching me. Sometimes they wouldn't bother me for a couple of weeks, and sometimes the mush tasted funny and I got sick. They were trying things, you see. They tried a lot of things. Sometimes they hurt me." He rubbed the fine lacework of white scar tissue on his arm. "And then they brought me back here. It was about a month ago, and I didn't know why, but maybe I know why now. I guess they saw Explorer II on their radar, if they have radar. Or perhaps you sent a message and they got it. I don't know. "But I'm pretty sure they knew you were coming, and that's why they brought me right back here. I think they were going to use me for bait, maybe. Put me out in the open, with a lot of them all around, hiding. But they didn't have to. They-" He began to sob. Hibsen stood ui. That's enough," he growled. "Let him alone." He turned to the Gorman guard. But de Jouvenel's hand was on his arm and, after a moment, Hibsen looked down at the little dark man and nodded. "All right," Hibsen said. "I'm not going to do anything." T AE was half asleep on the floor, the baby snoring in quick light breaths beside her, when she felt Hibsen's hand on her shoulder. "Council of war," he said. "Come on, Rae, wake up. The Gorman's gone." She looked at the door; it was true. The room was almost completely dark, but enough light flickered in from the Gorman buildings across the square to show shadowy figures, the walls, the scant furnishings. The Gorman wasn't there. "Wake up," said Hibsen more loudly, stirring Mary Marne and her husband with his toe as they lay side by side nearby. "De Jouvenel, you awake? Retty?" They all came awake at once. Hibsen said : "Retty, stay by the door. We don't know how long that thing's going to be away. Keep an eye open." He turned to Marne. "Lieutenant, you rank me. Do you want to take charge?" Marne shook his head. "I'm not much use with this arm. Anyway, it doesn't matter right now, does it?" "It might," said Hibsen. "There's our ship out there and we're not guarded. Well? What about it?" Rae caught her breath. "But it can't carry all of us!" "It can carry some of us," Hibsen corrected. Sam Jaroff, propped on his elbow at the fringe of the group, moaned softly. "That's right," Hibsen brutally clarified. "Some of us would have to stay behind." Rae Wensley said sharply: "That's not fair! What about the children?" Hibsen shook his head. "And Sam Jaroff? And what about Dr. Brabant? He isn't even here -- how can we go off and leave him?" "He left us." "Now that's a -- " "Shut up, Rae!" Hibsen's voice snapped like a mule-skinner's whip. "Don't talk about what's fair. This is a matter of survival." He moved quickly to the window, nodded and returned. "The rocket's right there. There's no Gorman in sight, though I can hear them across the square. I can get into that rocket without being seen, I promise. Five minutes and I'll have a course set on the computers that will take us close enough to Explorer's orbit. But it won't be accurate, so I'll need reserve power for maneuvering. That means -- " he hesitated -- "not more than three people." "Three-" "Three people alive," he cut in grimly, "is better than all of us right here dead! And Captain Serrell hanging up there, fat and happy -- until the Gormen get around to locating him and knocking the whole ship off!" "No," said Rae Wensley positively. "Not without Brabant." "The devil with Brabant! He went off with the Gormen. If he likes them so well, he can stay!" S HE shook her head. Her mind was closed; she wasn't prepared to listen. She said: "Don't you see? When he comes back, he'll have more information for us. What right have you to think he had anything to say about whether he went with them or not? And certainly he'll use every chance he gets to find out their weak spots. They -- " "They haven't got any," said Sam Jaroff's hoarse, thin voice, and he caught her arm. "Listen to him, girl! I'm scared, but it doesn't matter how scared I am -- he's right. Let him get away! We're all dead here anyway." "Right," said Hibsen. "Now let's get down to it. Rae, you're overruled. De Jouvenel, stand by while I try to make it to the scout rocket. Once I'm inside, if any Gormen wander along, you'll have to-" "Hibsen!" hissed Retty piercingly from the door. "Come here and take a look!" All of them came crowding around the windows and the open door, looking out onto the little square. Gormen were out there. There were at least a dozen of them, and they were moving around the first scout rocket, crouched cold and silent on its skids. "We'll have to wait," said Hibsen, his eyes fixed on the aliens. "Maybe they'll go away." "They're not going to go away," whispered Rae. "Look, Hibsen! What are they doing?" The squat quick things were in and out of the rocket's port. Like ponderous jack rabbits, they hopped up into the belly of the little ship and those inside began handing things out to those on the ground. And the things they were handing out -- Glittering metal instrumentation. Black slabs of panel mounting. Copper entrails of wire. "They're taking out the computers!" cried Lieutenant Marne, holding his splinted arm. "Hibsen, do you know what that means? We wouldn't be able to fly the rocket now, even if we could get to it!" "That's right," snarled Hibsen. "Pretty clever, eh? And what do you suppose gave them that idea?" He turned a face of fury on Rae Wensley. She couldn't help it; she recoiled from the rage he showed. "Thafs pretty smart," he said. "They know a lot about us, don't they? And there's only one place they could have learned it -- from your pet headshrinker, Brabant!" V A LL through the night, sputtering electric flares illuminated the square outside the building where the humans were captive. Under the flickering light, the gray Gormen worked to pile fragments of control mechanism onto a high-wheeled cart. It was a maddening sight for Hibsen; he knelt by the window as long as he could, feeling every hammer blow on his own flesh. But not even rage can sustain wakefulness forever, and in time he slept. Rae Wensley woke him in the morning. She had got up to the baby's crying, fed him, changed him and put him in a corner, a tilted table protecting him from being stepped on. Hibsen heard and came instantly awake. He sat up, looked around once and scowled. Outside, the square was empty of life. Cold damp air rolled in the open door. Gray light was coming up. "I see they're through," Hibsen whispered bitterly, nodding toward the square. But Rae was more preoccupied with other problems. She had discovered there were only three more sterile bottles of formula for the baby, plus what little was in his mother's breasts. Mary Marne's intentions were good, but she had not been able to nurse the child. It was absolutely essential to find a substitute. She said as much to Hibsen. He shrugged. "Three bottles is a whole day, isn't it? We'll see." "And we're out of diapers." He got up and walked away. "Ask your friend Brabant," he said over his shoulder. "He's on good terms with the local authorities." He left the girl angry, but that was the way he wanted her to be, angry. Anger is too powerful a force to be confined; it bursts out and drenches whatever object is convenient. If he left her angry enough, perhaps some of it would erupt at the headshrinker. And that was fair and just, Hibsen considered, because he was at least half sincere in saying that he believed Brabant had sold out to the Gormen. What's more, it served his ends. There was still the chance of escape -- somehow. And it was going to be a long, lonely voyage back to Earth, and it would be much less lonely if Rae Wensley came along. Without the headshrinker. THE Gorman was back inside  the door again, watching, watching. De Jouvenel, dunking a cake of compressed cereal into cold black coffee, said dourly: "I wanted to jump that thing. Brabant wouldn't let me. What do you think, Hibsen?" Hibsen grinned tightly. "I think -- " He glanced at Rae Wensley and winked. "I think you better hurry up with that cup, Joe. Others are waiting." Rae was trembling. "Stop it! I know you don't like Dr. Brabant, but this is no way to talk! You've got no right to assume he's doing anything wrong. You weren't even here when the Gormen took him away!" "He didn't struggle very hard," de Jouvenel observed. Hibsen shook his head. "No, Joe, that's no way to talk. We've got no right to assume anything wrong." And he winked again. He got up and drifted over to the window, well pleased. Out there was scout rocket one, squatting patiently. Maybe, thought Hibsen, maybe yet -- But it was out of the question. They couldn't possibly fly that one. Not without the built-in computing autopilots. But there was the chance -- maybe, possibly -- that they could find and re-install the computing mechanisms. Or something. Anyway -- "Hey," said Hibsen, "come here a minute, Marne. What's that?" He pointed across the square. There was a building, more or less like the others, but light glinted from something inside it. "Looks like gold," de Jouvenel ventured. "Jar off, is that the place you call the House of Morgan?" The old man limped over. "That?" he said, squinting. "No. The one with the pink roof, that's the House of Morgan. That's where they got Skinner, you know. When they first landed." "Well, then, what the devil is it?" "That's their ship," Jaroff said wearily, and dragged himself back. Hibsen caught his breath. "Their ship." Then, he stood straight, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. "All right!" he said in a harsh tone. "That's the answer! They've messed up our rocket -- we'll use theirs!" He looked around at the circle of doubting faces. "What's the matter now? Don't you believe I can fly it?" "No," said a voice from the door, "I don't believe you can." They all turned. There was Brabant, two Gormen behind him, standing in the door. Silence for a second. Then, "Come in, Doc," said Hibsen, "come right in. We've been wanting to talk to you. Bring your friends, if you like. They're just as welcome as you are." at Rae, but his face was impassive. Hibsen breathed on the star sapphire in his left lapel and burnished it on his other sleeve. It was a habit of his; it made him feel a little more comfortable in situations of strain. He said politely: "Did you have a nice time. Doc?" "Not very." "That's too bad," said Hibsen, shaking his head in regret. "I guess they just don't know how to treat a guest. Right, Jaroff?" The old man looked dimly away. "Well, when you came in, you had some comments to make on my idea, didn't you. Doc? You said I couldn't fly the Gorman ship." "And you can't." "Mind telling me why?" "Because," Brabant said, "you're not a Gorman. You ought to know that much, Hibsen, being a computerman! Why do you think they pulled the course-computers out of the scout rocket?" "As a matter of fact," Hibsen said, "we were wondering about that. Dr. Brabant." "Because they don't need them. that's why! We do, but they don't -- that's the way Gormen are built." Hibsen said angrily, knowing it was untrue, unable to keep from saying it: "I can do anything they can do! Whose side are you on?" Brabant blazed: "You odl! Do you think you can fly a rocket without computers? You can't! No man can as much as balance a rocket on its tail -- it takes a machine to do that. And the machines aren't there. The Gormen never had them in their own ship, so naturally they've taken them out of ours! Curiosity? I don't know. It's as good an explanation as anv." He fcOt up and pointed out the window. The three impassive aliens watched him with their eyes, but didn't move. "Look out there! See those buildings down the square? They're full of Gormen! I guarantee you can't take a single step out this building without one of them being right on your back. They're fast. But even if you could, then what? It doesn't matter which ship you go for, our scout or theirs; it needs a machine to fly it. You've all been in rockets at takeoff. You know what happens. A couple of seconds of full blast, and they haven't even moved yet. "Then they begin to lift -- oh, maybe a couple of inches in the next second. In the fifth second. they can gain perhaps 'a foot or two. But they have to get upward of fifty or sixty miles an hour to become aerodynamically stable -- and that takes fifteen seconds. And in those fifteen seconds, friend, you can be dead a dozen times. Anything -- anything -- can tip the ship, just a fraction of a second of arc, but when it begins to tip, it has to be corrected -- not when you get around to it, but right now. Are you fast enough for that, Hibsen? You're not. I'm not. No human being is." He turned from the window. "As far as we're concerned, those ships might as well not be there." after Brabant as the psychologist walked away, over to the wall where their scant rations lay heaped, and selected a biscuit. Absently Hibsen rubbed his sapphire, unable to take his eyes off Brabant. No one spoke, and that annoyed Hibsen; what right did the headshrinker have to come in and demolish their plans? All right, he thought irritably, maybe it wasn't going to be easy. But surely there was a way. There had to be a way. Otherwise that star sapphire would wind up in some rhinoceros-skinned alien's pocket, a toy for the kiddies, maybe, instead of a couple of decades of happy living for Robert Hibsen, Esq. De Jouvenel said across the room: "What's the matter. Doc? Didn't your friends feed you?" Brabant, chewing, said stolidly: "No." But his expression was strained. Hibsen noticed and was maliciously amused. Why, Doc's worried too, he thought. Brabant looked at the half biscuit, uneaten, in his hand, stopped chewing and put it down. "Well, we'll have to do better than this. I've arranged for supplies to be brought out of the scout rocket." "What?" Rae Wensley demanded. "How -- " Brabant's expression changed slightly, queerly, almost to a look of embarrassment. "I've made some arrangements with them," he said, his voice not very loud. "I -- I'll need your cooperation -- all of you -- to help carry them out." De Jouvenel laughed without humor. Rae asked sharply: "What arrangements?" "The only kind that are open to me," Brabant said steadily. "Please, Rae. Don't act as if I had any choice or -- " "What arrangements?" Hibsen saw, with more pleasure than he had expected to find in anything that day, in that place, that Rae's face was filled with apprehension and the faint foreboding of anger. Well, he thought, well! Maybe the kid was getting smart! Brabant said shortly: "I made an even trade. Information for our lives. They want to study us -- we let them. In exchange, they let us feed ourselves and they promise not to -- to -- " He faltered, looking at Sam Jaroff. "They promise!" Rae Wensley cried. "Whafs the matter with you?" "There's no choice," Brabant protested. "How do you know, maybe with our cooperation they'll learn enough so that they can find a way to get along with the human race! After all, we're as much freaks to them as they to us -- they didn't expect to find creatures with the power of star flight any more than we did! Psychologically, we're a complete mystery to them -- as much as they are to us -- and that's my department, of course. So I've agreed to -- " De Jouvenel snapped: "To help them conquer Earth." "No! To-" "Don't lie, Brabant!" shouted Marne, his splinted arm forgotten, shouldering his way forward. "Giving aid and comfort to the enemy is treason! You louse, your skin is worth a lot to you, isn't it? But it's worth less to us! You know what treason means?" "Shut up!" said Brabant. "You don't have a choice. The Gormen -- " "Oh, but we do, headshrinker," interrupted Hibsen at last. He pushed Marne and de Jouvenel aside to face Brabant. "Our choice is cooperation or death -- your death, Brabant! And don't think we can't kill you!" Brabant stood quietly looking at him for a second, then nodded, his expression bleak. "Yes," he said, "I thought you'd get around to that. But you're wrong there too, Hibsen. You can't kill me. The Gormen won't let you." "They'll never know! Some day when you're not expecting it -- " "They already know," Brabant said, not raising his voice. "Didn't Jaroff tell you? Every last one of them speaks English." VI man companions had gone, taking Sam Jaroff with them. It had not been a pleasant departure; the old man had screamed terribly, waking the baby, upsetting the orphaned Crescenzi children. But will he, nill he -- he had gone, hardly reassured even in part by Brabant's sworn promise that he wouldn't be hurt. Just as Rae got the two children calm enough to consider a nap, a party of Gormen came rapidly, silently in. Speak English or not, their purpose was not conversation. They fanned out and swiftly, without pause or consultation, began going through every single article of food, clothing or equipment in the room. "Hibsen!" cried Rae at the inner door. "All of you, come here! They're up to something!" The men came hurrying down and clotted at the doorway, indecisive, but there was nothing for them to do. The aliens didn't touch any person; it was only the inanimate possessions of the party that interested them. And those they went through with the meticulous care of monkeys preening their mates for salt. "They're searching us," Hibsen said. "Looking for weapons, I guess. Well, that's a laugh! I wish we had some for them to find." But the Gormen drew a broader line than his. A steel rule that could conceivably be filed to a point, the single glass nursing bottle that Mary had somehow acquired among the one-use plastics (it could be shattered, perhaps), everything that might have an edge or produce a bang was found and confiscated. "They're thorough enough," Hibsen said bitterly. "All right, let them go ahead. There's nothing we can do about it anyway -- now." But they weren't waiting for his permission; they finished their job and stood briefly at the door. For the first time, Rae Wensley heard one of them speak. It was a thin rabbity squeal, too faint to make much of an impression, but it was clearly a language. There was question and answer, and then half the party left, carrying their few trophies... And the other three came purposefully toward Rae. She screamed. She couldn't help it; it was too sudden -- so sudden that she couldn't stop the scream and barely had time to start it; so sudden that she couldn't hear the sudden shouts from the men, or see how two of the Gormen interposed themselves -- fast, fast! -- between her and the men, while the other picked her up, as quick, as brisk, as carelessly as a merrygo-round rider snatching the brass ring. Half a second, it seemed, and she had barely caught her breath to scream again and she was already outside, the other Gormen a solid barrier at the door behind her. HE was lugged across the  square and into a building. Squeaking Gormen were all over the building, more than a score of them, surely, but she didn't have a chance to count or to conjecture on what they were doing, she was carried so swiftly and carelessly up a flight of stairs. The alien who carried her made no sound. However rapidly one foot descended on the tread above the other, it was placed just there, with just the right force; it didn't stamp, it didn't stumble. She could hear. from the floor above, a human voice, droning a long steady stream, growing louder as she approached. The Gorman dumped her upright on the floor and vanished, as silent descending the stairs as he had been coming up. Brabant was in the room. So was Sam Jaroff -- it was his voice. He sat half-reclining on an improvised chair,' his eyes closed, talking endlessly. Rae opened her mouth, but Brabant, frowning, shook his head, held a finger to his lips. He seemed mildly surprised to see her, but not very; he didn't, in fact, seem interested in her, only in Jaroff. " -- the one that had a green thing on his shoulder," Jaroff was saying. "A kind of an emblem with three leaves -- only not leaves, but sort of swirly things. Like the way fire is drawn coming out of a pinwheel, spinning back. And he was heavier than the other one -- about ten per cent, I'd say, or almost; and when they cut my arm, he used both hands, but the other only used his left. The little one in the green room, though, used his right when he put the electrodes around my arm. The thing about him was the little box he carried, gold, with eleven white dots and two red ones on the outside, four white in a line, then -- " Jaroff droned on. It was very queer of Dr. Brabant, Rae thought. catching her breath, to be practicing deep recall on the old man in front of the Gormen. She looked around the room. It was larger than any of those in the house the Gormen had given them for a prison, and it contained things she couldn't recognize but that looked out of place -- black metallic things, gold things; Gorman things, most likely. This building was obviously their headquarters, or a part of it. It had a sour reek that, she realized, had been in her nostrils for a long time. She'd thought of it as the smell of Aleph Four, but now she began to wonder. Perhaps it was a Gorman smell. Then she saw something that was not Gorman. It was black, but its insides were glass, steel and copper; it had come from the scout rocket. The parts were here! Joy swelled inside her. They were here. Brabant had saved them. No doubt he had a plan. And -- She looked more carefully, and all that washere was a tape recorder, part of the radio equipment, and a few cells from the power pack. Something Brabant was using, no doubt, in whatever it was he was doing. But it wasn't what they needed to make that ship fly. " -- after Skinner died," Jaroff was continuing. "Then I was sick for a long time, because of the greenish lumps in the mush, I guess. There were more of them than there were of the purple later ,on, and they were a little bigger. While I was feverish, the rhino from the green room came eight times and -- " There was a murmur from one of the Gormen and Brabant said, cheerfully enough: "All right, Jaroff. Snap out of it." The old man woke, blinked, saw the Gormen, and quailed. "Don't worry," Brabant reassured him. "That's all for today. You can go back to the others now." Jaroff, trembling, walked hesitantly to the door of the room and paused. "Down the stairs. Go ahead. One of the Gormen down there will convoy you to the others. Nothing to be afraid of." Brabant watched him out of sight, then turned to Rae. "Well," he said, "I asked them to get Mary Marne, but I suppose one human female looks like another to them. Or maybe my description wasn't so good." "Sorry." "Oh, that's all right," said Brabant. He beckoned to her. "Over here. You're next." T wasn't the most attractive invitation Rae Wensley had ever had, but there wasn't any choice. She sat where he ordered her. "Let's see," he said thoughtfully, glancing at the six silent aliens. "I guess we'll start you off with knee jerks. Put these on, Rae." He handed her a set of earphones and bent to tie something with a wire attached to her knee. "Easy," he protested as she jerked away. "This is science." Self-consciously, Rae put the earphones on. He was bright and cheerful enough, she thought angrily. How could he? An hour before, he was being called the worst name in the vocabulary of the human race -- a traitor to humanity itself -- and now he might have been back on Explorer II, lightyears from the nearest solid body, giving her the regular psychological check. "I thought," he said chattily, "that we were going to have to hear Jaroff's entire life history among the Gormen, second by second. Thank heaven they got tired." He nodded toward the silent watchers. "What do you want me to do?" she asked coldly. "Why," he said, "suit yourself. It doesn't much matter; this is learning time, Rae." He hesitated. "Come to think of it, yes, there is something I want you to do on the conscious level. The subconscious will take care of itself." He slipped a reel onto the tape recorder. "Here," he said, "is a reading of letters of the alphabet, read by me. They aren't in A-B-C order but random, or as random as I could make them. What I intend to do with you is conditioning." "How?" "The key sentence,"" he said, "is, 'Mary had a little lamb.' I want you to respond to the letters in that sentence with a knee-jerk, not to any others. Simple? You'll listen to my voice on the recorder, and every time I say one of the letters in that sentence, you'll get a little patellar shock. Not much, but enough to make you twitch. It's elementary enough -- Pavlov was doing much more complicated things with dogs a long time ago. And what I want you to do is to repeat the letter you hear, out loud." "I don't like it." Brabant grinned tightly. "This is orders from headquarters," he said, and nodded at the six Gormen. "But it won't be painful. Now-" He turned the switch. The tape recorder obediently began to whisper the garbled alphabet in her ear. "K... "Z... "R." Brabant, listening on another set, pressed a switch. It was only a little tickling tingle. It startled the girl, but she had to admit that Brabant was right -- it didn't hurt It was, if anything, even less painful than the tap of a doctor's rubber mallet; but it served the same purpose. The toe of her crossed leg involuntarily twitched an inch and a half. "Good girl," Brabant applauded quickly, as the tape continued to spin. "D," she heard in the earphones. Shock. Again the quick involuntary twitch. "S... "U... "M." Shock. It went on like that for a good many minutes. Then there was a quick squealing sound from one of the Gormen. Brabant snapped the switch. "All right," he said, suddenly morose, "the peanut gallery is getting tired of this particular entertainment. We'll do more of this some other time. Right now -- " he hesitated again. "Right now, I think we'd better put you under. Lean back, Rae." "Hypnosis?" She was startled and fearful. "But -- wait a minute! I don't like-" "Easy," he soothed. "I give you my word, nothing's going to happen. It's just the same sort of thing Jaroff was doing, that's all. So relax, Rae. Relax and rest. Your eyes are getting heavy..." TAE Wensley swam up out of a confused dream. "All right, girl," Brabant was saying, "time to wake up. It's all over." She sat up quickly, staring around, her mind chaotic. Five of the Gormen were gone; the sixth, or perhaps it was a totally new one, stood idly near them, patiently waiting. "Let's go," said Brabant. "You're through for the day. I want to get back to the others." Rae pulled herself together and went out of the room with Brabant, stooping slightly to avoid the lintel of the door. She was confused, full of puzzlement, and oddly tired. Hypnosis was nothing new to her; it was one of the tools of Brabant's trade. But she wondered what the purpose of the demonstration had been... what the silent watching Gormen had made of it... and, most of all, what was going on in Brabant's mind. "All right, we're ready," said Brabant to one of the Gormen below, and the creature glided silently close to them, dogging them out of the building and across the square toward the human jail... or cage. It was a gray day, damp and hot. Brabant said, glancing at the girl: "Thanks. You did fine." "What did I do?" He grinned. "Well," he said, guiding her across the threshold of the Gorman headquarters, "you are helping me prove a point. You see, the Gormen don't have any subconscious." Rae asked stiffly: "So?" "So they're a very different breed indeed, Rae. There isn't anything that sinks down into the Gorman almost-forgotten, and then turns up as a neurosis, or tic, or deja vu. A Gorman doesn't say: 'It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite get it out.' It's always there for him." "Is that why you told Hibsen they were better than we are?" "In that sense, yes, they are. Without a subconscious, they don't have most of the other trappings that go with a multi-layered mind. They respond fast because there's nothing to get in their way. They don't have a psychic censor. There isn't an#Tthing in their minds that interrupts the thought-and-action sequence. They don't question, they don't doubt, they aren't built to do an#dhing like that. If they knew a thing, they know it; if they don't, they just find it out. Oh, they're curious -- that, my dear, is why we're still alive." "Thank heaven for that much," said the girl, and frowned. "Then does that have something to do with the way their ships are built?" Brabant nodded. 'We need computers for rocket piloting -- we aren't fast enough to make the split-second, always-right little decisions that mean the difference between a routine landing and a gory explosion. Computers are fast enough to handle the load. And so are these boys. I'd say," he went on earnestly, "that if our friend here -- " he nodded at the silent gray alien pacing them -- "wanted to hop in that rocket right now and take off, he could do it, given about a minute to figure out the controls. Of course, someone would have to make sure the tanks were filled and so on -- and if anything went wrong with the automatic mixers and the other stuff in the combustion system, he wouldn't be any better at fixing themthan you or I. He isn't smarter than we. "But he is faster," said Brabant, and checked himself.  were rapidly shuffling across the deserted square. Rae turned, and Brabant caught her hand. "Careful," he warned, and she could see that he was worried. It was surprising, but almost pleasurable; at least he wasn't on totally easy terms with the Gormen! But Rae was worried too, at the same time; six Gormen were coming toward them at a sort of highspeed waddle, the shambling, distance-devouring gait of the elephant in a hurry. The aliens passed Rae and Brabant by without a glance and disappeared into the jail. "Come on," said Brabant urgently, and hurried after them. Their own Gorman guard easily kept pace with them, without the appearance of hurry and without a sound. They reached the door and looked inside... Mary Marne knelt bent over her baby, asleep in a crude plaited cradle de Jouvenel had made. She looked up, sprang to her feet. Twittering faintly to each other, two of the Gormen grabbed her. Mary gasped with fear. "Please!" she moaned, but they held her fast, and another Gorman's squat hands reached out for her. Snap, snap; it opened the fasteners of her blouse; skillfully, almost cruelly, it slid the zipper of her shorts. It was assault; it was like a crude and perverted rape; the three of them, nothing like human, disrobing the blonde Earth girl -- it was a tradition of literature; and, for Mary Marne, it was terror and shame. They stripped her naked as a newborn in less time than Rae, standing helplessly by, could believe; and they poked her, palpated her, prodded her and scrutinized every pore. The Crescenzi children began to scream, and Mary's husband heard. He came running from the back room. "Sweet heaven!" he yelled and, hardly pausing at the door, threw himself on the Gormen. But fast as he was, the Gormen were sufficiently faster -- more than sufficiently; he didn't have a chance. They were between him and his writhing wife before he was through the door; there were six of them, and though three were busy with Mary, the other three were more than enough to handle Marne, and Rae Wensley, and the others who came racing into the room. Marne shouted frantic oaths; they had as much effect as his fists and teeth. Rae felt Brabant grab her, draw her back. "Marne!" he yelled. "Get a grip on yourself, man! They're not hurting Mary!" Marne screamed incoherently. He kicked futilely at the alien who had him, sobbed, and glared at Brabant. "You rat! What the devil do you mean, they're not -- " And then he stopped, panting for breath. He saw it was true, or true enough. Shame her, discomfort her, strip her naked for everyone to see -- yes, all of those things; but that was the extent of the menace in what the Gormen did. They were like children with a kitten. They poked and felt and flexed, but if they gave pain, it was not for the sake of the pain, but an accident of curiosity. M arne bellowed: "Mary, are you all right?" The girl suddenly relaxed. "I -- I think so. It's kind of -- ouch, they pinch -- embarrassing. But I don't think they're going to -- to kill me or ansdhing." Marne howled without words. But it was only his husbandly pride and anger now; it was clear that the Gormen's purpose, for the moment at least, was limited to examination. Brabant said: "Thafs better, Marne. I rather thought that sooner or later they would want a good look at the comparative anatomy of the female of the species. Though I didn't think it would be quite so public." Marne cried hoarsely: "Damn you, Brabant! Which side are you on?" Brabant only nodded, his expression opaque and suddenly absent-minded, like a man not bothering to hear something that doesn't really matter. "I only came around to pick out another subject for my own little studies. Let's  see," he said, looking casually around the room. "I think I'd better take -- " But he didn't get to say, just then, who it was he had selected. The Gormen finished with the person of Mary Marne. They set her down on her feet -- not roughly, not gently, merely quickly -- and returned her clothes. Then, ignoring her, they twittered briefly at each other and started without pause for her baby. It was the first time a human had ever caught a Gorman off guard. The little knot of men, already on edge, didn't stop to think or argue. They jumped, without warning. And the first Gorman was bowled over before he could raise his stubby hands to protect himself. There was a loud, shrill twittering from all the aliens, the most noise Rae had ever heard them make, and roars of sudden rage and triumph from the men. The other Gormen, the ones not immediately involved, reached quickly into pouches in their thick skins -- for what, Rae could only guess, but the guess was frightening. It might have been death and devastation right then, if those stubby hands had come out with guns -- B rabant shouted frantically: "Wait, you fools! Hold it! They won't hurt the baby! They only want to examine it!" Maybe it wouldn't have stopped the men, but it slowed them down. The Gormen needed no more. The alien that had been hurled to the floor bounced up again like a ball; the others knotted together, poised. The men drew back. The brief rebellion was over. But all the humans stood there, eyes burning with anger, while the Gormen picked the child up. stripped it as quickly and efficiently as they had its mother. The baby screamed. Well, babies do scream when they are awakened suddenly; it doesn't mean pain, only surprise. And indeed the aliens were oddly gentle with him. Where they had left purplish bruises on Mary's pale skin, they were tender with the infant. Aliens, monsters, call them whatever you like, Rae Wensley thought, it was clear that they knew the difference between an adult and a newborn. It took very little time; then he was back in his plaited crib, still naked but no longer crying very much, and the Gormen, with a few twitters among themselves, were gone. The atmosphere around Dr. Brabant had turned ugly. He didn't seem to notice. He was staring thoughtfully at a blank wall, as though all of this were really not happening, as though he were pondering ink-blots in a study back on Earth. He seemed preoccupied, Rae thought, and somehow faintly pleased. But all he said at last was: "Well, so much for that. Meanwhile, I've got work to do for our friends. Oh, one thing. You aren't restricted to this place any more. You can wander around outside if you like -- though you'll have company, of course." and getting farther all the time. Captain Serrell hung at the conn-room periscope, watching the tangled cocoon of steel cable that linked the trailer to its tractor. Steel is elastic. In free-fall, the stretched cables had a tendency to snap back, not much, but enough to start the nine-hundredfoot tractor and the larger, lighter trailer moving slowly back toward each other, kinking the cables, bringing the radioactive reactor nozzles dangerously close. "Take it easy, Lanny!" the captain ordered impatiently. "You're getting too damned close to the hot zone!" Young Lanny, aggrieved, said over the radio: "Sorry, Captain." But he had known perfectly well what he was doing. Captain Serrell, through the periscope, watched the spacesuited boy swing his pusher around and ease the ponderous mass out again, toward the limit of its tether. His very posture showed annoyed dignity. Captain Serrell sighed and cranked the periscope around again to look at Aleph Four. His nerves were on edge. Lanny Davis was a good boy -- man, the captain corrected himself; Lanny was twenty-one now. He had been only twelve when Explorer II began to swim slowly away from its orbit around the orbiting Earth, untangling its nearly Ptolemaic web of cycles and epicycles by craft and immaculate navigation as it set course for the star system that included the habitable satellite, Aleph Four. But now he was a man, and Explorer II circled Aleph's primary itself. It was a singularly helpless feeling, Captain Serrell told himself, scanning the featureless clouds, to be drawing farther and farther away from his two scout rockets down there. It couldn't be helped. Explorer didn't have the massive thrust it would have needed to risk an orbit around the satellite itself, or even around Aleph, the Jupiter-sized planet that was first out from its primary. Too crowded, too many bodies clutching at the weak tractor-trailer combination. If incautiously they had blundered too close to one of them, that might have been the end for the whole ship. And therefore, doubtless, of the colony, for without the vast stores aboard the mother ship, yet to be ferried down, the colonists would have terribly rough going. And what, Serrell asked himself, do they have now? pulled himself into his seat, made a mark on his calendar with a tethered pencil. Four days. No word. No radio. No returning rocket. And Explorer spinning hourly farther away. What in the name of heaven was going on? The microphone on his desk buzzed. "Captain Serrell, navigation room." He snapped a switch. "What is it?" The voice from the navigation room said doubtfully: "Captain, we hooked up a photo-cell trigger system with the scanning scopes, to look for rocket exhausts, just like you said. And it went off a couple of seconds ago. Andy's tracking down the tapes now." Serrell's heart gave an enormous leap. Rocket exhausts! If the alarm had spotted rocket exhausts, it would mean -- it had to mean! -- that at least one of the scouts was on its way back! "Hurry up!" he yelled, past caring that he was giving superfluous orders; the news was too good to wait. "How long's it going to take? I've got Aleph Four in the periscope now -- think I can see them?" "Well," said the voice, puzzlingly worried, and faded away. Then it came back, stronger and -- more worried. "No, Captain," apologized the voice from the navigation room, "I'm afraid you can't. Andy's got the tapes now. The rockets -- well, they aren't coming from Aleph Four, Captain. They're coming from the other planet, Bes." his freedom. He nodded to de Jouvenel, who got up and followed him out the door. "Let's see how far we can go. Suppose we take a look aroundsthe rocket, for a starter." "All right." But that was a little more than they were allowed. Two Gormen swooped silently after them, and though Hibsen and de Jouvenel walked rapidly enough, the Gormen were at the rocket before them, solid chunks of gray flesh barring the port. Hibsen said: "Okay, we'll try something else. Let's wander off. Maybe only one of them will follow. Then we can split up and -- " But both Gormen followed. The two men walked over the softly bouncing paving, turned a corner, walked a few squares, turned again. The rocket was out of sight: the sound of the Gormen moving about, their voices, their machines, had all faded. Apart from their own muted footsteps and a faint whisper of motion from the trailing Gormen, the world was empty of sound. "Split," whispered Hibsen harshly, and obediently the little dark man chose a street at random and disappeared into it. The Gormen split too, one after de Jouvenel, one trailing Hibsen. Hibsen rubbed his star sapphire angrily. The confounded things, if only they'd get rough, shout, show anger, act human. But they weren't human, and perhaps they showed it most in the utter dispassionate coolness of their surveillance. They didn't seem to care how far their charges led them. They didn't object to what must obviously be an attempt to lose them. They only followed. "Then follow, damn you!" Hibsen whispered, and lengthened his stride. When Hibsen strolled, the Gorman strolled. When Hibsen moved faster, the Gorman, tied to an invisible, inelastic string, moved exactly as fast, stayed exactly as close. Hibsen, anger seething in him, began to rim. The Gorman -- no, not ran -- but shuffled faster, as fast as Hibsen, an even five yards behind, no matter how Hibsen forced his wearying legs and struggled for every burning breath. He broke into a dead gallop and kept it up for two hundred yards -- and the Gorman stayed that same five yards behind. And when Hibsen flung himself, heart pounding, lungs agonized, to the ground, the Gorman stood stock-still above him. And, without pausing to catch a breath, made notes. Hibsen lay there, sobbing. It was infuriating and humiliating, but he made himself do it. He lay there at the alien's feet, face to the ground, only one eye open just enough to gauge the creature's mood and stance. Then, without warning, he flung himself up and at the gray shape. No warning -- or none that Hibsen himself could measure, but there must have been some, for the Gorman was ready. Some insignificant tightening of a muscle, something hardly noticeable, but enough. Before Hibsen was fully on his feet, the Gorman had put his metallic "notebook" in the fleshy pouch that might have been skin and might have been a garment, and before Hibsen had quite turned to face him, the Gorman's arms were cocked like a boxer's. Too late, too late, Hibsen sobbed silently, but he flung himself on the alien anyway -- and was knocked across the sidewalk. It was as easy as that. All the way back to their common jail, Hibsen clutched his aching face and swore to himself. He didn't look around. He didn't have to. He knew what was there. He knew it was always going to be there, as long as they were on this planet, and maybe Brabant was right: maybe -- in some ways, at least -- the Gormen were better men than the humans were. "O AE Wensley sat restive in Brabanfs laboratory, waiting for Brabant to get to her. At the moment, he was busily conferring with one of the Gormen -- the old one, the one that seemed to be in charge of Keeping an Eye on Brabant. She was glad for the chance to sit and watch Brabant, for there were many questions in her mind about him. But she couldn't sit still all the same. Too much was happening. Brabant had deliberately cut himself off from contact with the rest of the humans. There was no other explanation. She had tried to talk to him and he wouldn't talk. She had tried to defend him, but Devil's Advocate is a thankless job when the Dev -- when Brabant wouldn't lift a finger in his own defense. She had no reason to defend him, no reason at all to care. But how worn and haggard he looked! He came over to her at last and said shortly: "All right, Rae, let's get going. Same as before. Put on the earphones." "Again? We've done this fifty times -- " "And we'll do it fifty more if I say so! Hurry up, Rae." Stiffly she sat down, not looking at him. It was a wearisome, nonsensical business! How childish of him to carry on with it -- and how childish of the Gormen to continue to be interested. Or amused. Or whatever it was they were that made them go on watching and taking their interminable notes. True, Brabant did have the wit to vary the procedure from day to day, so that sometimes she was asked to repeat the letters she heard aloud, sometimes to write them, sometimes merely to sit and listen, and suffer the mild electric tingle of the band on her knee. But it had been some days since he had bothered to give her shocks. "Today," he said, "I've got a treat for you." She looked at him warily. "I want you to repeat every letter you hear, and I'll let you watch your foot." Rae looked away hotly. "You understand?" he demanded. "Certainly I understand." She had, after all, a higher I.Q. than a rhesus monkey, and those had been given similar tests, she knew; Brabant had told her that. "Right," he beamed. "You hear an A, you say A. That's all." He seemed almost happy. Happy! Everything he did, she thought miserably, was an affront. Perhaps it was only the detached attitude of the scientist, she told herself, but without conviction. And in any case, as Brabant had not failed to remind her -- often -- there wasn't any choice. If the trained seals wanted fish, they would have to snort out Yankee Doodle on the pipes. Rae sat somnolently in her chair, watching her own toe, as the tape began to whisper in her ear. "A," it said, and "A," she repeated obediently, while the toe danced ah inch. "Good enough," said Brabant, nodding. "Now we lower the volume. Keep going, Rae." "All right." I'HE little voice in her ear whispered fainter and fainter. It began to be hard to hear. She forgot her toe, staring into space, straining to get it right. "R... L... D -- no. T, I think." "Just say the first letter that comes to you!" he ordered impatiently. "But-" "Do as I say! If you aren't sme, guess!" "All right." She was angry now. "Y... A... P oh! Thafs funny!" Quickly her mind scanned the sentence: Mary had a little lamb. There was no P in the sentence. i But her foot had twitched. "I told you," Brabant crowed. She stared. He was looking, not at her, but at the Gorman, which made rapid notes. "What -- what's going on? Did the conditioning blow a gasket?" He told her with self-satisfaction: "Not at all." "But that last letter was a P and-" "It was a B. You were sure. but you were wrong! Consciously you heard P; that's what you said. But your subconscious -- it was sure, too, only it was right. Your subconscious hears better than the front of your mind, Rae." She said worriedly: "I don't know what that proves." "It proves," said Brabant, "the existence of the subconscious -- which hears with its own ear, sees with its own eye -- and is not disturbed by the errors of the conscious mind." "Proves it to me, to you, or to the Gormen?" she asked. "Why, to all of us," he answered enthusiastically. "Can't you realize what a challenge it is to have to demonstrate the existence and functions of a subconscious to a race that doesn't have any? The concept doesn't mean a thing to them. All they can understand is proof, concrete proof, as tangible as it can possibly be. And with them checking me every inch of the way -- Lord, what an opportunity! Don't you see?" She stared at him. Weeks and weeks of this -- not merely the tape-recorder chanting the alphabet, but hypnosis, deep recall, heaven knew what; not only for her, but for nearly every member of the human party. And for what? She said tightly, furiously: "What do you think you're doing?" Her own voice surprised her. It rasped with harsh emotion. It surprised Brabant, too. "But I've already told you." She said: "Look at that thing! Ifs taking everything in, everything you can give it -- more than they could hope to learn in a dozen years, starting from scratch! Brabant, don't you know what the Gormen are going to do with the knowledge you give them?" The alien made a slight movement. Brabant looked at it and shook his head. Then he turned back to the girl. "Why, yes," he said, "I suppose I do." "They want it to-" "You don't have to tell me. They want to use it to conquer Earth." He grinned self-consciously. "As the old psychiatry joke put it -- that's their problem." HE couldn't help herself; the instant she was back with the others she told them, every word. It was like trying to vomit up a poison, cast it out, get rid of it, but merely saying it didn't get it out of her system; it continued to stay inside her and burn. "Council of war," said Hibsen dangerously. "Mary, you and the kids stay here." They trooped into one of the back rooms, the silent Gorman at the door remaining uncaring behind. Hibsen, grim-faced, laid the proposition before the house: "He has no right to live." Hibsen muted his voice with a powerful effort. His jaw was still painful, but he was past caring about that, though it hurt him especially much to talk. "Brabant's gone over to the Gormen -- he admits it! Treason is a capital crime. Brabant's got to die." Rae listened through a fog of weariness. She had been up with the children that morning; she had gone through a grueling hour with a demanding Brabant and a stolid, worrisome Gorman; and she had felt terror inside her when Brabant admitted he knew what the Gormen planned. It had been a wearing day, but, more than that, there was a pain and anger inside her more than she could bear. This was Brabant they were talking about. Brabant, whom she loved -- or had once loved -- or wished to love, if only things could be smoothed out so that it was just the two of them. Love is many things; it is a biological call and also a gestalt of social attitudes and standings; and whatever the biology between them might have been, however fine and good, or crushing and destroying, it was the certain fact that every person in that room but her wanted to see Brabant dead. Every person but her? But she was the one who had brought them the one bit of evidence they needed. And what did she want? Rae looked around the room at the others, hotly arguing in undertones. They were a queer lot, she thought regretfully; it was mankind on the rich and teeming Earth should depend for their future security on what action this handful of people here might take to muzzle one person across the square. In spite of the Qualifying Tests, in spite of Brabant's care, those who voyaged between the stars were likely to develop strange cancers of the personality. Half the people in the room, she counted, had been up and down like yoyos during the voyage -- manic, and then tranquilized; depressive, and then stimulated. Chemistry did it -- part of it; Brabant, with his tests and his therapy, did the rest. But now they were going to kill Brabant, weren't they? And maybe, she thought wearily, there was something to think about there. Brabant had kept them all in one piece... But who had kept Brabant from chaos? TV OT herself, she thought, ach' ing, though she had been had explained that to her, tenderly enough. He couldn't. Alone among the ship, he couldn't become emotionally involved. He couldn't make close friends, even, not until the trip was over; to do so would destroy his usefulness.) And now it was too late, of course, because they had already passed sentence. The decision was to execute. The problem was only one of ways and means. "Not a chance," Hibsen was saying. "You can't get him alone to do it, de Jouvenel. He wouldn't trust you or me. Marne?" The lieutenant rubbed his splinted arm. "All right." "Do you think you can manage it?" Marne grunted. "Good enough," said Hibsen, satisfied. "Then all we need is a weapon. Who's got anything we can use?" Silence for a moment. Then, slowly, Rae Wensley felt herself raising hr hand. Hibsen started. "You, Rae?" "It's sewing scissors, really," .she said faintly. "But sharp." Hibsen grinned with lean approval. Almost she saw tufts of hair at the tips of his ears and needle teeth dripping saliva. Undoubtedly it was giving Hibsen a lot of pleasure to hear her volunteer to help remove the man she had turned him down for. But de Jouvenel said abruptly: "Never mind, Rae. I've got the real thing." They looked at him. The little dark man said without emphasis: "I was here before most of you. I had an idea something like this would come up. So... Anyway, it's my own knife, and right at the moment it's under the Marne baby's mattress." Rae stared. She had wondered why the little man had been so solicitous of the child. The plaited cradle was his; many times he had helped her change the bedding, pet the baby to sleep, and for what warped and lethal reasons, she was just now able to know. But at least, she thought with gratitude, it would not be her weapon that killed Brabant. Fine. Now how do we work it? Rae, it never occurred to me that you'd help, because -- Never be you can help get him alone with Marne. Got any ideas on how we can arrange that?" She stood numbly, trying to think. Ideas? Oh, she was full of ideas, but not the sort Hibsen had in mind. Her ideas were pictures and memories and dreams, and she had to leaf them over in her mind -- now -- because soon they would be gone, or spoiled. Marne said, scratching his jaw: "How about this? I'll wait upstairs. Rae tells him she wants to talk to him or something -- maybe acts a little affectionate, you know? And then I'll be waiting. We can tell the Gormen we were fighting over her. Maybe that will confuse them a little. We owe it to Earth to try to mix them up as much as we can." He was discussing the thing quite reasonably, she thought in frozen distress, like a man planning an evening of bridge rather than a prospective murder. No, execution. That was the word, since they had calmly and reasonably passed sentence. It was all very reasonable, she thought drearily; there wasn't any point at which a person could stop and cry out: This is all wrong! You're proposing to destroy a human life! Hibsen was saying: "The Gormen will take it hard, of course, so maybe Marne's idea is a good one. But let's not kid ourselves. They won't be easy to fool. But we'll have to face that when we come to it. I don't think they'll do anything about hostages or reprisals -- they don't seem to think along those lines. Still, Brabant is the only person who has established real contact with them, and we ought to consider what they're likely to -- " From the other room, Mary Marne warned: "Watch it! They're coming!" N came a party of Gormen, six of them, armed, moving along like iceskaters, without fuss or noise. And with them was Dr. Brabant. Rae stepped back involuntarily. Brabant had been harried and worn, on the edge of desperation, that afternoon; now he had passed the edge. His face was sallow. His hands twitched. His eyes were the eyes of crucified Christ; but what he said could have come only from the lips of Judas. In a voice of torment, he said: "You'll have to give your plan up. Sorry, but the Gormen and I know what you're up to, and they won't let you." Silently, the aliens fanned out, surrounding the humans, forcing them toward the front room. Brabant said: "Those of you who have managed to keep weapons, you'll have to turn them over now." And he knew where to look. They went into the room where the children were sleeping and turned back the thin soggy mattress under the baby, and there was de Jouvenel's knife. "Rae," said Brabant commandingly, and two of the Gormen advanced toward her. "Never mind," she said hastily, and fumbled in her clothes for the sewing scissors. Brabant accepted them and passed them to one of the aliens. He looked around. "That's it," he said at last, still in that torn and inwardly raging tone. He didn't look at Rae, but he met the eyes of the others easily enough. "From now on," he said, "there won't be any more chances for any of you -- either to kill me or to escape. Sorry," he added politely, "but that's the way it is. We're leaving here." "What the devil are you talking about?" Hibsen demanded, his voice cracking. "We're leaving in two days," said Brabant, nodding slightly, like a professor glad a student has asked a question that helps him to move a discussion along. "The Gormen have been waiting for a big ship that will hold all of us. It's on its way. They're going to take us -- I don't know where, ultimately. Maybe Bes. Maybe farther. But the first stop, I think, is Explorer II." He paused, in the sudden absolute stillness. "Yes," he said thoughtfully, "thafs what they're going to do... Rae." She jumped. "Will you come outside with me for a moment?" She glanced instinctively at Hibsen for orders -- then quickly away. That was cruel. Conspiring to execute Brabant was one thing, but asking another man's permission to walk with him was, somehow, worse. For reasons she couldn't have elucidated and didn't stop to think out, she said: "All right." she and Brabant and the Gormen. Brabant said, oddly diffident: "Let's go for a walk." "A walk?" He nodded, avoiding her eyes. They were never allowed to walk outside at night. "With one of them for a chaperon?" Brabant shook his head, and, true enough, all of the Gormen were moving away, swiftly and without a backward glance. "Ah," she said, suddenly enraged, "I see! You betray your companions, and your payoff is a longer leash to your collar. I suppose it's worth it!" "Rae." His voice was dull, not begging, hardly even protesting, but she wouldn't listen. She shrugged and walked slowly down the street. The darkness was nearly absolute. It was impossible to see even the outlines of the buildings ahead, but she could see lights behind them from the human quarters. When she could no longer make out Brabant's face, she said: "All right, we're walking. What do you want?" "A fair break," Brabant said immediately. "You tool!" "No, wait! I -- " But the time had passed, if ever there had been a time. Rae couldn't stand it. No, she told herself, agonized, this is wrong. And she turned and ran headlong back through the dark streets. Out of nowhere, a Gorman materialized to follow her. Brabant hesitated. He glanced at the vague silhouette of the remaining Gorman -- out of earshot but, he had always known, not out of sight. No, they didn't trust him that much. He squared his shoulders and returned -- not to the house where the others were quartered, of course; not even to his laboratory, where he had been permitted to sleep for a while, but to a thin pad on an upper floor of the Gorman barracks. He had been sleeping there for three nights now, on orders, and he didn't like it. It represented a deterioration in his relationship with the Gormen. If things went on this way, he thought wildly, he wouldn't have a friend in either camp. A ND time passed, and time passed. Rae went through the hours without seeing faces or hearing words. Brabant came and went, more tired every time, more remote, selecting his guinea pigs with a jerk of a thumb, and the Gormen who were with him always now obligingly formed guard and marched his chosen subjects away. Rae found it impossible to sleep. Merely to try was punishment, for the moment the head went down and the eyes closed, then tears started. But time passed. "You, Rae," said Brabant's voice, and she looked up, startled; she had been sitting staring at the Marne baby and had somehow managed to attain that total emptiness called Nirvana. "You come along. And Hibsen and de Jouvenel, I have a special treat for all of you." Hibsen said six words, one a preposition and the other five obscene. "Yes, I know," said Brabant remotely. "Come along." He marched off, not looking back. He didn't have to see if they were following; the Gormen were there for that. He marched his subjects across the square and to the base of the hidden Gorman rocket. "I want," he said, "to show you what you're up against. In you go." He glanced at them. Their expressions were amusingly surprised, though no one on all that planet, just then, was amused. "It's all right," said Brabant. "I've got permission from the Gormen. We'll have company, never fear. But they don't really need to watch us. That's what I want you to see." De Jouvenel trailed him, and the girl and Hibsen followed. Hibsen said flatly: "I'd kill you if I could. You know that." Brabant nodded. It wasn't worth an answer, it was so obviously true. "Here," he said, "this is the control roorn. Sit down, Hibsen." "In that?" Hibsen was honestlyshocked. "Or stand if you like. But look around." Hibsen forgot to be murderous. His eyes were wide open for the first time in days; his curiosity had mastered him. He looked about him like a child in storyland. Hibsen was a pilot of spaceships, and not even the blinding hatred he bore for Brabant could keep him from being interested in a strange ship built by a strange race. A spaceship is the simplest of machines. You push something out of one end, the ship squirts away in the opposite direction, that's all. No moving parts (in schematic design), no complications, no possible variations of construction, no matter by whom designed or where. How can there be, as an analogy, more than one way to go Up? That's the theory. The practice... him. He found himself caressing the star sapphire, rubbing an unsure finger over the gold braid. This was the ship he and de Jouvenel had thought to steal. What Brabant had said was all too true. It was no more possible for a human to walk in and operate a ship like this than for a monkey to punch out a Shakespeare sonnet by random thumping of a typewriter. De Jouvenel said faintly behind him, "Sweet heaven. There's nothing here." It was plain fact. There were, for example, no such things as: triple gyro attitude indicator, linked through selsyn motors to a homeostatic negative-feedback course corrector; self-compensating thrust control, capable of measuring the minute variations of squirt of each component in each mixing chamber and increasing or decreasing the flow of fuel appropriately; feedback aligned course plotter, able to read a tape which dictated the parameters of all possible orbits which would take one from here to there, to select the best of them, to put the ship on it and keep it there and to discard that orbit and select another, without pause or faltering, if for any reason of failure of parts, motion of objective, interposition of obstacle (i.e., meteorite, astronomical body, other vessel) the chosen orbit became unsuitable and it was necessary to change. There was, in other words, no smoothly humming Black Box. There was no compensator that could measure all of these things and balance them one against another. There was no standby cirIX cuit to compensate for the ultimate failure of all, the failure of the compensator. There was, instead, only -- Item: An artificial horizon. (It was a thin jet of mercury, impinging on a spider's orb-web of wires marked in circles and radians, the whole reflected in a ninety-degree mirror into the pilot's eyes.) Item: A porthole. Yes, a porthole. A glassed-in nose cone to look out of. Radar, periscopes, photocell detectors? No. Nothing like that. And, item: Eight little rings, one to fit each of the eight fingers of a Gorman's two hands, each one of which controlled the flow of fuel to one jet. There were those and there was nothing else. "You see?" demanded Brabant irritably. "I see," said Hibsen after a pause, his hand clinging to the star sapphire. "I -- " He stopped. There was nothing to say. "You want us to go now, Brabant?" "Not you," said Brabant shortly. "Rae, de Jouvenel, you can go back. Hibsen I want to stay here. You've had your treat. Now I need you for a little more guineapigging. And," he said over his shoulder, turning his back on all of them, "maybe now you'll see the wisdom of my advice. Give up. It's all over." really. There was one more act on the program, that program which Brabant had carefully contrived in the silent hours watching over the injured Lt Marne, just after the first landing. Brabant squatted on his thin, sour-smelling pad in the pre-dawn darkness, looking at a window that showed only the faintest difference in shade from the wall around it. In the past few days, the Gormen had made it adequately clear that his work for them was just about at an end. What they wanted to know, they knew. The mine had been worked; the tailings were decreasingly valuable and soon they would decide to terminate the operation. At that point -- There were other things the Gormen wanted to know about Earthmen than how their minds worked, and though they'd learned some of them from Jar off and the late Chapman, they would proceed as rapidly as possible to learn the rest. The psyche digested, the soma would be next to be studied. Equally thoroughly. And with a great deal more carelessly distributed pain. Dr. Brabant felt sick and empty inside. It wasn't only the reasonable prospect of laboratory-animal dissection that worried him. It was something more. It was the knowledge that if all the humans died, all but one of them would die hating him. Brabant did not enjoy being hated. In his profession, the position was not imfamiliar. Brabant's job was to keep the mind in balance, and in the process of adjustment, a great deal of free-floating hatred clung to the psychologist in charge. (So did love.) He had made himself apart and -- more or less -- independent of the temporary emotional states of those around him; that was the way the job was done. But now he was utterly, utterly, completely alone. On all this planet, there was not one soul who loved, respected or trusted him, not even the orphaned Crescenzi children, who had taken to running and hiding from him when he came near. Brabant sighed, and then, abruptly, sat tensely erect. There was a subdued twittering and motion on the floor below. Brabant frowned. What he knew of the Gormen more than anything else was that they were reliably creatures of habit; it was not their habit to arise before full light. He listened carefully, but there was nothing to hear that did him any good, only the fact that, for some reason, the barracks was early awake. Gradually he relaxed, but without ceasing to frown... he seldom ceased to frown anyhow, these days. He thought wistfully of the rest of the party, huddled together in the building across the square, hardly a hundred yards away. At least they had each other. Though it was his job to keep them stable, and though in the course of it he learned more about their weaknesses, faults and subdued internal evils than most of them knew themselves, Brabant liked -- loved -- no, needed them; needed their regard and their warmth. They were his friends. They were all he had. at the job, had dreamed with regret of the possible high-stability, non-neurotic personnel an interstellar flight might -- should -- enlist. But you had to take what you could get; that was the law. Brabant hadn't made that law. Actually, the law had been made by herbalists, ratified by surgery, and confirmed by Alexander Fleming and the pharmaceutical houses. Modern medicine, over a good many generations, had saved so many lives that it had enforced a general lowering of psychological standards in favor of some rather special physical ones. An Rh baby in a modern hospital was a trivial happenstance in a dull morning's routine; on an alien planet, without endless blood of every conceivable type (not to mention accessories) the same happenstance was -- a dead baby. Colonists could not afford, simply could not afford, to carry in their genes and chromosomes the risk of an Rh-negative response -- or of sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia, agammaglobulinemia -- you name it. Hardly a child was born on Earth that did not receive at least one tender flick of a scalpel -- to correct a squint, tighten a ventricle, ease a pyloric stenosis or whatever -- in its first months of life. On Aleph Four, that scalpel might not be there. Sure, a doctor or two went with each party, but if something happened to the doctor? The risk could not be borne. And so Part One of the Qualifying Tests was a rigorous genetic study, and the passing grade was #. And that eliminated very to apply. The ones that were left had to be combed for -- no, not the utterly stable; the utterly stable organism, being satisfied, stays where its roots are dug in -- but for those nearest stable, or those who could be kept stable for the purposes of their job. Like Hibsen. Given the security he wore on his jacket and a job that he knew he could do, Hibsen was hard, bright, aggressive and able. Take those things away and Hibsen was something else again; but those things weren't meant to be taken from him -- wouldn't have been, except for the Gormen... And Brabant liked Hibsen. He liked them all -- needed them -- and, yes, loved them. Neurotic or not. Stable or not. With warmth toward Brabant himself or not; and at that moment, he wryly knew, it most decidedly was not. made him look up. It was daylight now, and the noise was coming from outside and up. Brabant jumped to his feet and pressed against the window, trying to see what was outside his field of view. Something was coming. The scream grew louder and louder; it thundered and blared. Light -- flame -- thrust down out of the clouds. "It's here," whispered Brabant, held to the window, staring; and he watched as the hugest of all imaginable ships dropped, flametailed, out of the clouds. It settled into the square outside, next to the dismantled Terrestrial scout, with a wash of fire that made Brabant avert his eyes and scorched the rock walls. It was a towering brute of a ship, more than two hundred feet tall -- bigger than the trailer of Explorer II, silently orbiting out in space -- bigger than any vessel the human race had yet been able to transport from Sol to another star. In the Solar System itself, big ships were by no means xmcommon, but even there this one would have been a monster. It was all one piece, and that piece towered higher than a twenty-story building. Brabant took his hands away from his eyes and squinted out at the giant. Gormen already were hurrying out to its base; that explained, at least, why the barracks had arisen so early that morning. It was the ship they had been waiting for, the one big enough to carry all the humans to -- wherever the Gormen proposed to take them. "All right," Brabant whisfered crazily, dizzy with fatigue and shaking with nerves, "you've come. I hope I'm ready for you." And before noon of that day, they were embarked. Brabant, for his services to the captors, had the job of straw boss. "Come on, come on," he said tightly, looking at no one, "move along, get aboard." And the humans moved toward the ship, carrying what they could. Hibsen and de Jouvenel, glowering, mumbled loud enough for Brabant to hear, but he wouldn't look at them. Mary Marne and her husband came, carrying the child, Mary near to tears and the child already howling. Petty and the two Crescenzi children, tearstreaked and clinging; Sam Jaroff, his eyes wide with horror like a man floating on a wide sea, who sees the rescuing vessel steam carelessly away. And last of all Rae Wensley, and if Brabant didn't meet her eyes, neither did she look at Dr. Howard Brabant. "Inside," grumbled Brabant, following along. One Gorman was with them, silent, motionless and armed. He was enough. The Gorman hand weapon was a rapid-fire flame ejector. In that confined space, he could easily kill every one of them before the first could quite make up his mind to move. The rest of the Gormen were busy with more important things -- looting the scout rocket, carrying what probably were records and equipment from their headquarters to the square. "Judas!" hissed de Jouvenel as he went by. Brabant did not turn. He was staring into space. ley leaned against a cold brassy bulkhead, half closing her eyes. The Gorman reek soured the air around her. They were in a bare chamber; whatever the Gormen themselves liked in the way of creature comforts, they had provided nothing at all for their captives. It looked like a long, imcomfortable trip. And the destination would be the worst part of it. Brabant glanced at the girl. She might have been speaking aloud; every thought she had was written on her face. All right, Howard, he said to himself, what are you waiting for? Everybody was aboard. One Gorman stood there and no others; if there was ever going to be a moment, the moment was now. But he couldn't help waiting a second, just another second, like a gambler with the rent money standing hypnotized before the parimutuel window; the risk was great, and it was hard, hard to make himself go ahead... But something took over for him. Brabant found himself standing next to the Gorman. He reached into his frayed blouse and took out the knife the Gormen had commandeered from Hibsen, that Brabant himself had commandeered from the Gormen. "Here," he said. The alien looked at him and twittered, but accepted the knife. "And -- oh, yes," said Brabant, licking his lips, "I think they've got another. In the same place." Twitter, twitter. Gorman-accented English was hard to follow at best. "Yes," nodded Brabant, "in the its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus #(p for postage and handling. # Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York Q copies of #, Name Add ress City State. I Enclose The Original Edition -- Complete ! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # same place, under the baby." He closed his eyes for a second. When he looked up, the Gorman was moving rapidly toward the baby, the knife in one hand, the other outstretched for the child. "Dear God," cried Brabant, the words a prayer, "he's going to kill the baby!" Kill the baby -- kill the baby. The words rolled aroimd the metal chamber. Everything stopped. The Gorman half-turned, the expression almost humanly surprised, but it didn't matter. There wasn't a second's hesitation; there was no time for thought. Marne leaped at the alien as quickly as any Gorman. It was reflex that moved him, not thinking. He was on top of the rhino before even that super-fast creature could whirl, and half a dozen of the others were right behind. The Gorman was out cold, under a himdred blows, before he could lift the knife; he never even started for the gun; that massive skull could endure pounding, but the brain beneath was subject to syncope like any human's; he was unconscious. It was the second time the humans had surprised a Gorman, and the first when it had mattered. The fighters jumped back, triumphant and amazed. "We -- we got him!" gasped Hibsen, unbelieving. Brabant, weary but ready, dug into his worn pockets for the other essential ingredient of his plan. "Here!" he said, holding out a thin wire coil. "Tie him up, Hibsen! De Jouvenel -- close that port!" X HE bound Gorman lay on the floor, its eyes open; it had not stayed unconscious long. Outside scrabblings against the port said that the other Gormen were suspicious. And Rae Wensley cried out: "Brabant! I thought you told me they wouldn't hurt the baby!" Brabant was breathing raggedly; he looked utterly spent. But the hangdog expression was gone from his eyes, the crucified look from his face; he was almost triumphant. He said: "Thafs right, Rae. He was only searching for another knife." "But-" "But I lied to you, yes! We need this ship. We couldn't plan to jump him -- nothing could make us do it fast enough; the second's lag in our thinking would give him plenty of warning. So I had to make you attack him -- without thinking -- as fast as a Gorman, and the only way I could make you do that was to see that you were pushed by reflex. Protecting the young -- that doesn't have to filter through the conscious; that makes you move; we saw that already. So -- " "So now," said Hibsen, raging, "we've won a battle and lost a war. What's the use of all this, Brabant? We've got a ship, but we can't fly it. You said so yourself -- you proved it to us!" "No," corrected Brabant, "I proved it to the Gormen. Wait. Listen." Outside, there was a muffled clattering. The Crescenzi children began to whimper; they hadn't had time to before. Brabant nodded absently. "The Gormen are getting ready to break in. This is an important ship, you see. It's their biggest in this system, and the only one that's armed." "You -- want us to destroy it?" Hibsen guessed. "I want to fly it up to Explorer." "Without computers? But -- " "But we have computers, Hibsen," said Brabant. "Three of them. You, and de Jouvenel, and Rae." He had them, Brabant exulted wearily. A month of hatred could not be wiped out in a second, but he had managed a suspension of emotion. They were all waiting. They would give his plan a try. "Come along," he said, nodding to the three of them, and climbed the rounded spikes that took them to the bare pilot's room. The muffled outside clattering stopped and was replaced by a persistent, purposeful rasp, rasp. Time was flying. But there would be time; and either they would succeed or, as a bare minimum, there would be a good many dead Gormen around the base of a destroyed ship. "Sit down, Hibsen," he ordered. The pilot looked at him, licked his lips, sat in the webwork chair. The straps and spring metal fitted themselves easily around his lean body; they were planned for a Gorman, but they would have fitted a skeleton as easily, for they were designed to fit whatever they were given to hold. "Rae, you and de Jouvenel lie down. Anywhere. These ships have plenty of power, according to Jaroff, so we won't have to pile on too much G at first -- but it won't be comfortable." bare floor near Hibsen and glanced around. The remote rasp, rasp was louder, but that menace would be at an end in a second. "Hibsen," said Brabant conversationally, "you know how to operate this ship. All right, take it off." With a tranced expression, Hibsen put his fingers into the Gorman controls. He glanced at Brabant for reassurance, sighed, licked his lips again, closed his eyes -- Gently, his fingers moved in the rings. Red roaring flame leaped out below them. Brabant found himself letting go, slumping, his rigid self-control no longer needed. It was all up to Hibsen now. If the thing worked, fine. If not, they were all dead. There were no other alternatives. The ship shook. It leaped a fraction of an inch and settled, leaped again, hesitated, and at last stood free of the soil of Aleph Four. Faintly, over the roar of the power plant, Brabant could hear Hibsen sobbing. Brabant glanced at him. Hibsen's face was the face of a man in mortal terror; his mouth twisted and his eyes blinked with a rapid tic. But he was flying the ship. It did not crash. It hardly faltered. Every faint motion was translated instantly into a quick, gentle and sure manipulation of the rings. Hibsen's eyes, open now, were fixed absently on the attitude jet of mercury, but it was his body as much as his eyes that told him what he needed to know; the forces that might tug the ship off its center of gravity tugged also at the tiny otoliths in his ear and he felt a change of attitude as soon as it happened, before it mattered. There was no loss of control, not even for a fraction of a second. The ship gained all its ponderous power and began to climb. (Down below, thirty Gormen lay dead and a score more dying. It no longer mattered -- their ship was gone; whatever might happen, that ship had got away.) Grinding heels of acceleration crushed Brabant and all of them. Even so, Hibsen's control did not waver. The others sat or lay while the floor and the webwork chairs heaved against them, but Hibsen kept the ship secure -- up -- up and out, up and out -- In three minutes, they were clear of the atmosphere. The great primary burned at them. Stars flamed in a black sky. There were no more clouds and no more air. And Hibsen, shaking himself like a man coming out of a dream, cut the power by withdrawing his fingers from the rings. "We -- did it," he whispered, staring at his hands. "Brabant. How?" floor and floated free. All the weight was gone from him -- not merely the hundred and seventy pounds of his flesh and bone, but the greater weight that had been on his mind. He was free! Almost, like Hibsen, he sang. Instead, he said: "Take a look below, de Jouvenel. See how the others made out." The little dark man, looking horribly confused, propelled himself to the rounded spikes and down. Hibsen and the girl were looking at Brabant and their eyes were large with questions, but just at this moment Brabant couldn't answer questions. He didn't trust his voice. All the weeks of painfully demonstrating the simple truths of psychology before the impassive Gormen, and the carefully planned conditioning that underlay those weeks as a secret message lies under a printed page -- they had paid off. What the subconscious mind could always do -- act! without delay! -- he had made them do then. The days in the Gorman building, the scant hours he had had for the finishing touches, yesterday, in the Gorman ship -- these had been enough. They were free. He tried to tell them. "But," said Hibsen, "but..." And he paused. He said fretfully: "But you betrayed us!" "No," said Brabant, "I only kept you out of trouble. You didn't have a chance with your plans of catching the Gormen off guard and I couldn't afford to let you fail. One failure was too many and -- " "But you could have told me, Howard," the girl objected, hurt. Brabant looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said after a moment. "Oh, no! You don't have to apologize! But -- we wronged you. I more than anyone else, I suppose, because I should have known." Brabant said: "I couldn't tell you. That building was bugged; there was no word that any of you said, ever, that they didn't hear. But even if they hadn't, how could I risk getting you overconfident? My plan wasn't that sure of working, believe me." De Jouvenel floated up out of the hatch, asprawl, catching at a spike and missing. "They're all all right, Brabant," he said, upside down. "Then let's get out of here! I want to get back to Explorer II right away -- before anything goes wrong." De Jouvenel said patiently: "But we don't have its coordinates." "You do," said Brabant. "You're the navigator. You put it in orbit." "But -- good Lord, Brabant! I can't remember -- " "Trance state, please. Now." The little man tensed slightly. No glassy look to his eyes, no melodramatic flopping to the floor -- nor would there have been even if they had not been in free-fall. rE Jouvenel frowned. He caught absently at a corner of Hibsen's webwork seat as he floated past and moored himself. He was thinking. The question had been asked: What were the coordinates of Explorer II's present position? To answer it involved knowing its exact speed and distance from the primary at the time of entering free-fall, the perturbations of Aleph and its satellites, the smaller, more remote perturbations of every other astronomical body within a certain mass-over-distance parameter. It was not a question that de Jouvenel could answer. Certainly not. But the mind that slept under the skin of de Jouvenel woke to answer for him, the mind that received all and forgot nothing, the sleeping subconscious mind that is in every human. That mind remembered every digit of every number it had conceived -- it counted pulse-beats when it had to, measured the intervals between sunset and sunset, though its owner took no notice. It was, in a word, a computer. De Jouvenel writhed and strained, and -- abruptly -- spouted a string of course coordinates. It was an amazing experience for him. He found his own mouth, in his own voice, answering Brabant's question. It was the queerest of all sensations for him; it was like nothing that had ever happened to him before. The numbers meant nothing to him. He would have sworn, and believed it to be true, that he had forgotten every datum and that the numbers were random, wrong. But something inside him had never forgotten, and the numbers were not wrong. With Hibsen's help, they became a course and gently, surely, the captured rocket swung into orbit after the mother ship. Less than two hours later, they were decelerating gently, and the long swinging bolo that was Explorer II's tractor and trailer lay waiting in the emptiness before them. Brabant clung to Rae, soft and silent next to him, and his thoughts were all triumph. The questions that had yet to be answered were beyond counting. What were the Gormen doing on Aleph Four? Was it rockets alone that carried them on interstellar flight? What were their objectives in attacking the human race? Was peace possible, or an armed truce? But all those questions had an answer, somewhere, sometime, and by their bringing to Earth a Gorman ship, armed with Gorman arms, surely someone would be able to deduce the answers they needed. It was only a matter of going now. Give them a chance to build Up speed, and no vessel, Gorman or other, could catch them, and they had that chance. The little Gorman craft on Aleph Four could do them no harm, and Bes was too far away. "D AE Wensley stirred contentedly in his arm, then straightened. "Howard, what are they doing?" She was looking at Explorer II. Before their eyes, the long kinked tow line began to straighten; a thin violet haze was spraying back from the tractor. "Why -- " Brabant laughed. "They're trying to get away!" They could see the periscopes on their side of the trailer, fixed rigidly on the Gorman rocket. Almost they could see Captain Serrell's anxious face as he watched this strange craft floating in on him. Brabant said with a gentle grin: "Hibsen, better stick your ugly mug out in that port and wave to him. Put yourself in the captain's place -- he waits and waits, and when somebody finally shows up, it's a Gorman ship. He's going to need some reassurance!"      With readers' instructions in, and our overwhelmed thanks to the literally thousands who gave them to us, we have as clear a battle strategy as ever a magazine rode into the circulation war with. Two-part book-length serials are wanted; they will be coming off the drawing boards before long, and into crash-priority production. Until they do, the sizable minority against them can enjoy the succession of complete issues -- and we hope they won't desert when the majority wish is fulfilled ! Novellas and novelets -- no change ordered. Short stories -- now that we know more are desired, because they can be read in a break at office or lab or factory or home, we'll sent out patrols and scouting parties to bring them in alive, very much alive. Science department -- more variety wanted, will do; more speculation, will do; readers' questions reinstated, will do if, and only if, you write in. Book review department -- only change clearly ordered by the majority is greater coverage; paperbacks, as you'll note in this issue, are now being briefly reviewed. We have another innovation in mind for the next issue that may make the "shopping list," as one reader put it and very many others later agreed, still more helpful. Let us know then if it is, please. Editorials -- will do, but lighter, heavier, "only when you have something to say," or "confined to doings about the magazine" -- conflicting orders, as you can see, but we'll turn ourselves inside out trying to comply. How's the one in this issue? If you have anything to add or argue about, come on, chum, share it with us ! for the next guy to write in. Well, who'll be first? Better cover stock -- will do, but we had to use up the supply on hand. Thanks for the enormous turnout. Write soon and often, will you? Incliahs D own from the streets (morning air already gray and bitter with motor exhaust and industrial fumes), into the jampacked subway he passed. His clothes, though mildly incongruous in that unhappy throng, brought him no special measure of attention. Weary, wary, cynical, grim, displeasured indifference lying on each countenance like an oily film, the folk stared not so much at him as over and through him. He fought to keep his feet, struggled to maintain his balance. This, merely the antechamber to everyday existence, was difficult enough. Add to it the need to be constantly on the lookout for the Wooden Indian Society and he felt he had reason to be tense and jumpy. "Benedict, a leading modern freeform sculptor in wood -- " Ha! Twice he had been aware that they had tailed him as far as Times Square. Twice he had lost them. A third time -- The man in the faintly funnylooking clothes (his name was Don Benedict, but some called him "Dusty") paused for a minute under one of the red-lettered wooden signs, took a quick look at the paper in his hand (more, it almost seemed, to reassure himself that it was still there than to scan the contents), did an about-face and started back the way he had come. By and by he came to a stairway which he ascended for five steps, then turned around and went down. At the bottom -- At the bottom of it all was Elwell, and Elwell was dead: not from the cough which had been tearing him apart for years, but dead of a slippery little patch of ice no bigger than a man's hand. Elwell, dying, with blood in the corners of his mouth, holding Don's hand in a grip which the yoimger man could feel the heat going out of. had protested. And Elwell: "No, Don, no -- it belongs to me. I formed it. I proved it." "They'll never allow -- " With a desperate, slow intensity, shaking his head, Elwell had explained. Reluctantly, Don agreed. It seemed to him that he was agreeing to no more than the first risk. But then, with Elwell dead, and -- first with coldness, then with clamor, then with a silent tenacity more disturbing than either -- Don Benedict came to see that it was not only the beginning which was his, but that it was all his. Forevermore. A t the bottom of the stairs, he saw the man out of the corner of his eye, eye intent upon feet, feet pacing out the pattern. He stopped for a moment, intending only to turn. And stayed stopped. The man (it was Anders) took hold of his arm as if to urge him on. "I'm coming with you, Benedict." Eyes burning, voice iron-hard. "I'm going alone." "You've betrayed the trust, used what belongs to all of us, used it As always, so now, the Wooden Indian Society undoing themselves: Anders, trembling with fury, unawarely released his grip. Don placed the cushion of his palm under Ander's chin, thrust forward and upward with all his strength. And at once, swift -- but not forgetting himself, not breaking into a run -- he finished what he had to do. Anders staggered back, arms flailing, feet failing at purchase; then Don, turning his head at the last, saw him fall, the electric lights glaring on the white-tiled walls. His foot jarred, as always, missing the familiar flooring by an inch. He adjusted his gait to the flagstone pave of the alley. It stretched before him and behind him for twenty feet in either direction. There was no one in sight. About halfway along, there was a deep recess, a bricked-up door, and here Don hid until he was quite sure that Anders was not coming through. There was never pieced it together, spying -- somehow -- pieced it together, bit by bit. There was always that tension. even here -- though less, much less. After all, if they did get through, it would no longer be him that they were primarily after. It would be Demuth's. And Demuth's could look out for themselves. Waiting, ears alert, he recalled dared attend. Mac Donald, eyes blazing deep in their sockets, had broken into Derwentwater's measured phrases, thrust a shaking finger into Don's face. "Do you call yourself a Preservationist? Yes or no? Stand up and be counted!" Staunchly, he had faced him, had answered. "I consider myself a philosophical Preservationist. I do not believe in violent -- " Face convulsed, fists clenched in the air, "Traitor! Traitor!" Mac Donald had screamed. Not yielding, Don started to speak, got no further than Elwell's name, when Mac Donald -- and Anders, Gumpert, De Giovanetti, almost all of them, in fact -- had drowned him out with their outcry, their threats. How much had Demuth's paid him? How much had he sold out for? Demuth's! Don mouthed the name scornfully. As if he would touch their tainted money. He had learned, the hard way, that Elwell were fanatics who would shrink from nothing. Well, he wasn't doing any shrinking, either. pkON Benedict came out of the niche -- Anders wasn't going to get through this time, that was clear -- and walked on down the alley. In less than a minute, he came out into a courtyard where heaps of chips and sawdust lay on one side and heaps of hay on the other. A man in dung-smeared boots came out of the building to the left with a bucket of milk in his hand. He paused, squinted, tugged his tobacco-stained beard and put down the bucket. "Hey, Dusty! Glad to see you," he greeted the newcomer. "You yust get into town?" "Ee-yup," said Don Dusty. "How you. Swan?" Swan said he was fine, and inquired about things up in Sairacuse. "Capital," said Dusty. "Hay's bringing a fine price -- " Swan groaned, spat into the sawdust. "Good for dem, maybe. Not for me. I tink you been at de bottle, hey. Dusty? You look yumpy, like always, ven you yust come in." "Bottle? I get little enough out of any bottle I buy. My damned brother-in-law" (it was true -- he had forgotten about Walter; it would be nice if he never had to remember) "drinks my liquor, smokes my cigars, wears my shirts, and spends my money." Swan groaned sympathetically, picked up the bucket. "Vy don't you kick him de hell out?" Nice advice, would be a pleasure to take it. Of course, Mary wouldn't be able to stand it. Poor rabbity Mary. "All I need is to get back to work. That'll fix me up." Don Dusty waved, continued on his way across the yard and went into the doorway of the tall brick building to the right. Inside, it was cool and dark and smelled of wood and paint. Dusty took a deep breath and began to smile. He started up the stairs, ignoring the painted hand with outstretched finger and word Office on the first floor. By the time he reached the second floor, his smile was very broad. Softly, he began to sing "Aura Lee" and went in through the open door. The big loft was dark; little light came in through the small and dirty windows, but at regular intervals a gas-jet flared. Dusty paused to greet his friends. Silently they stared down at him, peering from underneath the hands shading their eyes, stretching out their arms in wordless welcome, plumage blazing in a frenzy of colors. "Hello, there, Tecumseh! How, Princess Redwing! Osceola, Pocahontas -- " A red-faced little man in a long striped apron trotted out into view, two tufts of snowy hair decorating his cheeks, a hat of folded newsprint on his head. "Dusty, Dusty, I'm darned glad to see you!" he exclaimed. "Hello, Charley Voles. How's everything at C. P. Hennaberry's?" "Good and bad," he said. "Good and bad. Oscar snagged his hand on a nail moving some plunder at heme and it festered up something terrible. We was feared it was going to mortify at first, but I guess he's on the mend at last. Can't work, though, no-o-o-o, can't work. And Hennery was too numerous with the drink, fell off the wagon again and I think he must still be in the Bridewell, unless'n maybe his sentence is up today. Meanwhile, the work is piling high. Thunderation, yes -- fly-figures, rosebuds, pompeys, two Turks under orders -- " "Two?" Dusty paused with his arms half out of his coat sleeves, whistled. Charley nodded proudly. "Gent in Chicago opening up a big emporium, two Turks and two Sir Walters. Only thing is -- " his ruddy little face clouded -- "gent is clamoring for delivery, says if he don't get 'em soon he'll order from Detroit. And you know what that means. Dusty: Let trade get away and it never comes back. Why, the poor Major is pulling his whiskers out worrying. 'Course, with you back in town -- " Dusty, tying his apron, pursed his lips. "Well, now, Charley -- now you know, I never did fancy my work much on the special figures. I want to help Major Hennaberry all I can, but -- " He shook his head doubtfully and started to lay out his tools. Charley Voles tut-tutted. "Oscar and Hennery was working on the Turks when they was took sick or drunk. I had the top three of a Sir Walter done, but I had to leave off to handle a couple of prior orders on sachems. Now if you'll take on the sachems, I can finish the specials. How's that strike you?" Dusty said it struck him fine. He strode over to the hydraulic elevator shaft and gave two piercing whistles. "Boy!" he shouted. "Boy! Benny?" A treble from the office floor inquired if that was him, Mr. Dusty, and said it would be right up. A noise of gasping and stomping from below indicated that someone else would be right up, too. "I want some breakfast, Benny," Dusty said, tossing him a coin. "Here's a quarter of a dollar. Get me the usual -- eggs, pancakes, sausages, toast, coffee and crullers. Get some beer for Mr. Voles. And you can keep the change. Hello, Major Hennaberry!" The elevator cage surged slowly into view. First came Major Hennaberry's bald spot, then his custard-colored eyes, magenta nose and cheeks, pepper-and-salt whiskers, and, gradually, the Major himself, breathing noisily. In his hand he held a booklet of some sort.  Major moved forward, shook Dusty's hand. "Don't know what's come over the American mechanic nowadays," he said at last, asthmatically. "Can't seem to keep himself safe, sober, or in the city limits, and acts as if Hell has let out for noon... Got some lovely white pine for you, my boy, fresh up from the spar yards. Don't waste a minute -- soon's you get outside of your victuals, commence work. Draw on the cashier if you want anything in advance of wages: a dollar, two dollars, even a half-eagle. "Never had so many orders nor so few men to execute them since starting in business," the Major wheezed on. "Even had Rat Nolan on picket duty for me, combing South Street and the Bowery -- offered him three dollars apiece for any carvers he could find. Nothing, couldn't find a one. It's the catalog that's done the boom, my lad. The power of advertising. Here -- read it whilst you eat; be pleased to have your opinion." Hissing and panting, he made his way back to the elevator, jerked the rope twice, slowly sank from sight. Dusty turned to the old artisan. "Charley," he said, slowly, as if he hadn't quite determined his words, "hear anything about Demuth's?" Charley made a face. "What would you want to hear about that ugly, pushy outfit?" Changing, somewhat, his point of inquiry. Dusty asked, "Well, now, have you ever thought about the significance of the wooden Indian in American history?" The old man scratched the left fluff of whisker. "By crimus, that's a high-toned sentence," he said, rather dubiously. "Hmm. Well, all's I can tell you -- history, hey? -- the steam engine was the makings of the show-figure trade, tobacco shop or otherwise. Certainly. All us oldtimers got our start down on South Street, carving figureheads for sailing craft. That was about the time old Hennaberry got his major's commission in the Mercantile Zouaves -- you know, guarding New York City from the Mexicans. Yes, sir. But when steam come in, figureheads went out. Well, 'twasn't the end of the world." And he described how he and his fellow-artists had put their talents at the disposal of the show-figure trade, up to then a rather haphazard commerce. "History, hey? Well, I have had the idea it's sort of odd that as the live Indian gets scarcer, the wooden ones gets numerouser. But how come you to ask, Dusty?" Carefully choosing his words, Dusty asked Charley to imagine a time in the far-off future when wooden Indians -- show figures of any sort -- were no longer being carved. Had, in fact, suffered for so long a universal neglect that they had become quite rare. That gradually interest in the sachems revived, that men began to collect them as if they had been ancient marble statues, began to study all that could be learned about them. That some of these collectors, calling themselves the Wooden Indian Society, had been consumed with grief at the thought of the debacle which overtook the figures they had grown to love. Had claimed to see in the decline and death of this native art a dividing line in American history. f?T was like, Charley, it was Hke-this was the end of the old times altogether," Don went on, "the end of the Good Old Days, the final defeat of native crafts and native integrity by the new, evil forces of industrialism. And they thought about this and it turned them bitter and they began to brood. Until finally they began to plan how they could undo what had been done. They believed that if they could travel from their time to -- to our time, like traveling from here to, say, Brooklyn -- " How much of this could Charley grasp? Perhaps better not to have tried. DonDusty spoke more rapidly. "That if they could reach this time period, they could preserve the wooden Indian from destruction. And then the great change for the worse would never occur. The old days and the old ways would remain xmchanged, or at least change slowly." "You mean they got this idea that if they could change what happened to the wooden Indians, they could maybe change the course of American history?" Dusty nodded. Charley laughed. "Well, they were really crazy -- I mean they would be, if there was to be such people, wouldn't they? Because there ain't no way -- " Dusty blinked. Then his face cleared. "No, of course there isn't. It was just a moody dark thought... Ah, here comes Ben with my breakfast." Charley lifted his beer off the laden tray, gestured his thanks, drank, put down the glass with a loud "Hah" of satisfaction. Then a sudden thought creased his face. "Now leave me ask you this. Dusty. Just what could ever happen to destroy such a well-established and necessary business as the showfigure business? Hmm?" Dusty said that these people from the Wooden Indian Society, in this sort of dark thought he'd had, had looked into matters real thoroughly. And they came to believe very deeply, very strongly, that the thing which killed the wooden Indian, and in so doing had changed American history so terribly for the worst, had been the invention and marketing of an Indian made of cast-iron or zinc. An Indian which would have no life, no soul, no heart, no grace -- but which would never wear out or need to be replaced. And so it would sell -- sell well enough to destroy the carvers' craft -- but would destroy the people's love for the newer show figures at the same time. Charley looked shocked. "Why, that'd be a terrible thing. Dusty -- a thing which it'd cut a man to the heart! Cast-iron! Zinc! But I tell you what -- if there ever was to be an outfit which'd do a thing like that, there'd be only one outfit that would. Demuth's. That's who. Ain't I right?" Dusty lowered his head. In a low, choked voice, he said, "You're right." against a short piece of pine, read as he ate. "I don't know what it is," he said to old Charley, "but I have such an appetite here. I never eat breakfast at all when I'm -- " He stopped, put a piece of sausage in his mouth, intently began to read. We would respectfully solicit from the Public generally an inspection of our Large Bnd Varied Assortment of woodare constantly manufacturing for all classes of business, such ures are both carved and painted in a manner which cannot he excelled, are durable and designed and executed in a highly artistic manner; and are furnished at non-competitive low prices. We are constantly receiving orders for statues and emblematic signs, and can furnish same of any required design with promptness. The sausage was fresh and savory; so was the coffee. Dusty chewed and swallowed with relish, slowly turned the pages of the catalog. figure, male # ft. high, bundle of # in outstretched hand (r.), usual colors. A nice staple type Show Figure no moderatesized bus. need feel ashamed to display. At rival establishments, UP TO #. C. P. Hennaberrys Price: # even ( with war-bonnet, # ). Note: Absolutely impos. to cite trade-in values via mails, as this depends on age, size, condition of hg., also state of market  time. as above, with musket instead of tomahawk. male # ft. high, for shops which sell the fragrant Ottoman weed, polychrome T urk holding long leaf betw. both hands, choice of any two colors on ( with beard  long pipe, # extra ). had finished his breakfast, pausing on the third (or secondhand figures) floor, to greet Otto and Larry. Young Larry was still considered a learner and was not yet allowed to go beyond replacing arms, hands, noses, and other extra parts. Otto, to be sure, was a master carver, but Otto had several strikes against him. In his youth, in his native Tyrol, Otto had studied sacred iconography; in his maturity, in America, Otto had studied drinking. As a result, when he was mellow, unless he was carefully supervised, his Indians had a certain saintly quality to them, which made purchasers feel somehow guilty. And when, on the other hand, Otto was sobering up, a definite measure of apocalyptic horror invariably appeared in his sachems which frightened buyers away. As a result, Otto was kept at doing extras -- bundles of cigars, boxes of cigars, bundles of tobacco leaf, coils of tobacco leaf, twists of the same, knives, tomahawks, all to be held in the figures' hands -- and at equally safe tasks like stripping off old paint, sanding, repainting, finishing. He nodded sadly, eyes bloodshot, to Dusty and Charley, as he war bonnet. "Ho, Chesus," he groaned softly. Up in the woodloft, they made an inspection of the spars. "Now you needn't pick the ones I started, of course," Charley said. "Take fresh ones, if you like. 'Course, all's I did was I drawn the outlines and just kind of chiseled 'em in. And put the holes in on top for the bolts." Dusty stood back and squinted. "Oh, I guess they'll be all right, Charley," he said. "Well, let's get 'em downstairs." This done, Charley went back to work on the Sir Walter, carefully chiseling Virginia Tobacco in basrelief on the cloak. Dusty took up his axe and blocked out approximate spaces for the head, the body down to the waist, roughly indicated the division of the legs and feet. Then he inserted the iron bolt into the fiveinch hole prepared for it, and tilted back the spar so that the projecting part of the bolt rested on a support. When he had finished head and trunk, he would elevate the lower part of the figure in the same way. Finally, finished with the blocking out, he picked up mallet and chisel. "I now strike a blow for liberty," he said. Smiling happily, he began to chip away. The song he sang was "Aura Lee." TONDusty Benedict let himself into his studio quietly -- but not quietly enough. The sharp sound of a chair grating on the floor told him that his brother-in-law was upstairs. In another second, Walter told him so himself in an accent more richly Southern, probably, than when he had come North as a young boy. "We're upstairs, Don." "Thank you for the information," Don muttered. "We're upstairs, Don." "Yes, Walter. All right. I'm coming." Walter welcomed him with a snort. "Why the hell do you always wear those damn cotton-pickin' clothes when you go away? Not that it matters. I only wish I could just take up and go whenever the spirit moves me. Where was it you went this time?" "Syracuse," Don mumbled. "Syracuse. America's new vacation land." Walter laughed, not pleasantly. "Don, you really expect me to believe you? Syracuse! Why not just say to me, frankly, 'I've got a woman'? That's all. I wouldn't say another word." He poured himself several drams of Don's Scotch. Not much you wouldn't, Don thought. Aloud, "How are you, Mary?" His sister said that she was just fine, sighed, broke off the sigh almost at once, at her husband's sour look. Walter said, "Roger Towns was up. Another sale for you, another commission for me. Believe me, I earned it -- gave him a big talk on how the Museum of Modern Art was after your latest. So he asked me to use my influence. He'll be back -- he'll take it. This rate, the Modern Art will be after you before long." Don privately thought this unlikely, though anything was possible in this world of no values. He wasn't a "modern, free-form" artist, or, for that matter, any kind of artist at all. He was a craftsman -- in a world which had no need for craftsmen. "But only -- " another one of the many qualities which made Walter highly easy to get along without: Walter was a finger-jabber -- "but only if you finish the damned thing. About time, isn't it? I mean vacations are fine, but the bills..." Don said, "Well, my affairs are in good hands -- namely, yours." Walter reared back. "If that's meant as a dig -- ! Listen, I can get something else to do any time I want. In fact, I'm looking into something else now that's damned promising. Firm sells Canadian stocks. Went down to see them yesterday. 'You're just the kind of man we're interested in, Mr. Swift,' they told me. 'With your vast experience and your knowledge of human nature... ' " law's face, defying him to show signs of the complete disbelief he must have known Don felt. Don had long since stopped pretending to respond to these lies. He only ignored them -- only put up with Walt at all -- for his sister's sake. It was for her and the kids only that he ever came back. "I'd like a drink," Don said, when Walt paused. Dinner was as dinner always was. Walt talked almost constantly, mostly about Walt. Don found his mind wandering again to the Wooden Indian Society. Derwentwater, ending every speech with "Delendo est Demuth's!" Gumpert and his eternal "Just one stick of dynamite, Don, just one!" De Giovanetti growling, "Give us the Equation and we'll do it ourselves!" Fools! They'd have to learn every name of those who had the hideous metal Indian in mind, conduct a massacre in Canal Street. Impossible. Absurd. No, Elwell had been right. Not knowing just how the Preservationist work was to be done, he had nonetheless toiled for years to perfect a means to do it. Only when his work was done did he learn the full And, after learning, had turned to Don. "Take up the torch," he pleaded. "Make each sachem such a labor of love that posterity cannot help but preserve it." And Don had tried. The craft had been in him and struggling to get out all the time, and he'd never realized it! Slowly the sound of Walter's voice grew more impossible to ignore. "... and you'll need a new car, too. I can't drive that heap much longer. It's two years old, damn it!" "I'd like a drink," Don said. By the time Edgar Feld arrived, unexpectedly, Don had had quite a few drinks. "I took the liberty not only of calling unheralded, but of bringing a friend, Mr. White," the art dealer said. He was a well-kept little man. Mr. White was thin and mild. "Any friend of Edgar's is someone to be wary of," Don said. "Getchu a drink?" Walt said he was sure they'd like to see the studio. There was plenty of time for drinks. "Time?" Don muttered. "Whaddayu know about time?" "Just step this way," Walt said loudly, giving his brother-in-law a deadly look. "We think, we rather think," he said, taking the wraps off the huge piece, "of calling this the Gemini -- " Don said genially that they had to call it something and that Gemini (he supposed) sounded better than Diseased Kidney. Mr. White laughed. though not very heartily. "Mr. Benedict has the most modest, most deprecatory attitude toward his work of any modern artist -- working in wood or in any other medium." Mr. White said that was very commendable. He asked Don if he'd like a cigar. "I would, indeed!" the modest artist assented. "Between cigarette smoke, gasoline and diesel fumes, the air is getting unfit to breathe nowadays... So Edgar is conning you into modern art, hey, Whitey?" "Ho, ho!" Edgar Feld chuckled hollowly. "Nothing better than a good cigar." Don puffed his contentment. White said, with diffidence, that he was only just beginning to learn about modern art. "I used to collect Americana," he explained. Edgar Feld declared that Mr. White had formerly had a collection of wooden Indians. His tone indicated that, while this was not to be taken seriously, Open mockery was uncalled for. Don set down the glass he had brought along with him. No, White safe. "Did you really? Any of Tom Millards, by any chance? Tom carved some pf the sweetest flyfigures ever made." Mr. White's face lit up. "Are you a wooden Indian buff, too?" he cried. "Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I had two of Millard's flyfigures, and one of his pompeys -- " Walt guffawed. "What are flyfigures and pompeys?" "A fly-figure is a sachem with an outstretched arm," Don said. "A pompey is a black boy." "A rosebud," Mr. White happily took up the theme, "is a squaw figure. A scout is one who's shading his eyes with one hand. Tom Millard, oh, yes! And I had some by John Cromwell, Nick Collins, Thomas V. Brooks, and Tom White -- my namesake. Listen! Maybe you can tell me. Was Leopold Schwager a manufacturer or an artist?" Don Benedict laughed scornfully. "Leopold Schwager was a junk-dealer! Bought old figures for five, ten dollars, puttied and painted 'em, sold 'em for twenty-five. Cobb!" he exclaimed suddenly. "You have any Cobbs, Mr. White?" "Cobb of Canal Street? No, I always wanted one, but -- " Edgar Feld looked at Walter Swift, cleared his throat. "Now, Don-" "Cobb of Canal Street," Don said loudly, "never used a mallet. No, sir. Drove the chisel with the palm of his hand. And then there was Charley Voles -- " Feld raised his voice above Don's. "Yes, we must talk about this fascinating though obsolete art sometime. Don't you want to step a little closer to the Gemini, Mr. White?" "Yes, White, damn it, buy the damned Gemini so they'll quit bothering us and we can get back to real art," said Don. And forget about Walter, Dehimself. ' member what had happened after that. White had taken the shapeless mass of wood Walt called Gemini. (What would he tell Roger Down, the private collector? Some good, whopping lie, depend on it.) He was sure he remembered White with his checkbook out. And then? A confused picture of White examining the polished surface, pointing at something -- Don Benedict badly wanted a cup of coffee. His room was just off the studio, and once there had been a hot-plate there, but Walt had ordered it removed on the grounds of danger. So now Don had to go up to Walt's apartment when he wanted a cup of coffee. That was how Walt liked everything to be: little brother coming to big brother. Well, there was no help for it. Don went upstairs, anticipating cold looks, curt remarks, at every step. However, Walt was sweetness itself this morning. The coffee was ready; Walt had poured it even before Don entered the kitchen. After he finished his cup (made from unboiled water, powdered coffee, ice-cold milk) Walt urged another on him. Rather than speak, he took it. Don knew, by the falsely jovial note of Walter's voice, that Something Was Up. He gulped the tepid slop and rose. "Thanks. See you later, Walter -- " But Walter reached out his hand and took him by the arm. "Let's talk about the Lost Dutchman Mine. ("The what?") The Spanish Treasure. ("I don't -- ") Spelled E-l-w-e-#-#," said Walter, with an air at once sly and triumphant. Don sat down heavily. "Don't know what I mean by those figures of speech? Odd. You did last night. Matter of fact, they were yours," said Walter, mouth pursed with mean amusement. He would refresh Don's memory. Last night, Mr. White had asked Don how he had come to have so much contemporary knowledge about the making of wooden Indians. Don had laughed. "An old prospector I befriended left me the map to the Lost Dutchman Mine," he had said, waving his glass. "To the Spanish Treasure." When Mr. White, puzzed, asked what he meant, Don had said, "It's easy. You just walk around the horses." Now what, just exactly, had Don meant by that? "I must have been drunk, Walter." "Oh, yes, you were drunk, all right. But in vino veritas... Now I've been thinking it out very carefully, Don. It seems to me that 'the old desert rat' you spoke of must have been that fellow Elwell, who slipped on the ice two winters ago. The one you got to the hospital and visited regularly till he died. Am I right, Don? Am I?" rON nodded miserably. "Damn liquor," he added. "Now we're making progress," said Walt. "Okay. Now about this map to the mine. I know he left you that damn notebook. I know that. But I looked it over very carefully and it was just a lot of figures scribbled -- equations, or what ever th' hell you call 'em. But it had something else in it, didn't it? Something you took out. We'll get to just what by and by. So -- and it was right after that that you started going on these vacations of yours. Made me curious. Those funny clothes you wore." Stiff and tight, Don sat in the bright, neat kitchen and watched the waters rise. There was nothing for him here and now, except for Mary and the children, and his love for them had been no more selfish than theirs for him. He had been glad when Walt first appeared, happy when they married, unhappy when Walt's real nature appeared, very pleased when the chance occurred to offer "a position" to his brother-in-law. The misgivings felt when a few people actually offered to buy the shapeless wooden things he had created almost aimlessly (he knowing that he was not a sculptor but a craftsman) vanished when he saw it was the perfect setup for keeping Mary and the kids supported. Of course, after a while Don had been able to arrange the majority of the "sales." The waste of time involved in hacking out the wooden horrors which "private collectors" bought was deplorable. The whole system was dreadfully clumsy, but its sole purpose -- to create a world in which Walter would be satisfied and Mary happy -- was being fulfilled, at any rate. Or had been. What would happen now, with Walter on the verge of finding out everything? "And Syracuse -- what a cottonpickin' alibi! I figured you had a woman hid away for sure, wasting your time when you should have been working, so -- well, I wanted to find out who she was, where she lived. That's why I always went through your pockets when you came back from these 'vacations' -- " "Walter, you didn't!" B ut of course he knew damned well that Walter did. Had known for some time that Walter was doing it. Had acted accordingly. Instead of hiding the evidence, he had deliberately planted it, and in such a way that it couldn't possibly fail to add up to exactly one conclusion. "What a lot of junk!" Walter jeered. "Like somebody swept the floor of an antique shop and dumped it all in your pocket. Ticket stubs with funny old printing, clippings from newspapers of years back -- and all like that. However -- " he jabbed a thick, triumphant finger at Don -- "money is money, no matter how old it is. Right? Damned right! Old dollar bills, old gold pieces. Time after time. You weren't very cautious, old buddy. So now -- just what is this 'Spanish Treasure' that you've been tapping? Let's have the details, son, or else I'll be mighty unhappy. And when I'm unhappy, Mary is, too..." That was very true, Don had realized for some time now. And if Mary couldn't protect herself, how could the youngsters escape? "I'm tired of scraping along on ten per cent, you see, Don. I got that great old American ambition; I want to be in business for myself. And you are going to provide the capital. So -- again, and for the last time -- let's have the details." Was this the time to tell him? And, hard upon the thought, the answer came: Yes, the time was now, time to tell the truth. At once his heart felt light, joyous; the heavy weight (long so terribly, constantly familiar) was removed from him. "Mr. Elwell -- the old gentleman who slipped on the ice; you were right about that, Walter -- " Walter's face slipped into its familiar, smug smile. "Mr. Elwell was a math teacher at the high school down the block. Imagine it -- a genius like him, pounding algebra into the heads of sullen children! But he didn't let it get him down, because that was just his living. What he mainly lived for were his spacetime theorems. 'Elwell's Equations,' we called them -- " Walter snorted. "Don't tell me the old gimp was a time traveler and left you his time machine?" "It wasn't a machine. It was only a -- well, I guess it was a sort of map, after all. He tried to explain his theories to me, but I just couldn't understand them. It was kind of like chess problems -- I never could understand them, either. So when we arranged that I was going to visit #, he wrote it all down for me. It's like a pattern. You go back and forth and up and down and after a while -- " "After a while you're in #?" "That's right." Walter's face had settled in odd lines. "I thought you were going to try not telling me what I'd figured out for myself," he said in the cutting exaggeration of his normally exaggerated Southern drawl. This was the first time he had used it on Don, though Don had heard it used often enough on Mary and the kids. "The map, and all those clues you were stupid enough to leave in your pockets, and the stupidest of allcarving your own squiggle signature into all those dozens of old wooden Indians. Think I can't add?" "But that was Canal Street, #, and this is now," said Don in a carefully dismal-sounding voice. "I thought it was safe." Walter looked at him. Walter -- who had never earned an ethical dollar in his life, and had scarcely bothered to make a pretense of supporting his wife since Don's work had started to sell -- asked, "All right, why # -- and why wooden Indians?" TON explained to him how he felt at ease there, how the air was fresher, the food tastier, how the Russians were a menace only to other Russians, how -- and the sachems! What real, sincere pleasure and pride he got out of carving them. They were used! Not like the silly modern stuff he . turned out now, stuff whose value rested only on the fact that self-seekers like Edgar Feld were able to con critics and public into believing it was valuable. Walt scarcely heard him. "But how much money can you make carving wooden Indians?" "Not very much in modern terms. But you see, Walt -- I invest." And that was the bait in the trap he'd set and Walt rose to it and struck. "The market! Damn it to hell, of course!" The prospect of the (for once in his whole shoddy career) Absolutely Sure Thing, the Plunge which was certain to could know without doubt what the next move would be, almost deprived Walter of breath. "A tycoon," he gasped. "You could have been a tycoon and all you could think of was -- " Don said that he didn't want to be a tycoon. He just wanted to carve wooden -- "Why, I could make us better than tycoons! Kings! Emperors! One airplane -- " He subsided after Don convinced him that Elwell's Equation could transport only the individual and what he had on or was carrying. "Lugers," he muttered. "Tommy-guns. If I'm a millionaire, I'll need bodyguards. Gould, Fisk, Morgan -- they better watch out, that's all." He slowly refocused on Don. "And I'll carry the map," he said. if with infinite misgivings, Don handed over to him the paper with Elwell's # Equation. Walter looked at it, lips moving, brows twisting, and Don recalled his own mystification when the old man had showed it to him. "... where X is one pace and Y is five-sixth of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle of which both arms are x in length..." "Well," said Walter, "now let's get down to business." He rose, went off toward the living room, returned in a minute. Following him was a man with the tense, set face of a fanatic. He looked at Don with burning eyes. "Anders!" cried Don. "Where is the Equation?" Anders demanded. "Oh, I got that," Walter said. He took it out, showed a glimpse, thrust it in his pocket. He stepped back, put a chair between him and "Not so fast," he said. "I got it and I'm keeping it. At least for now. So let's talk business. Where's the cash?" A S Anders, breathing heavily, brought out the roll of bills, "Oh, Walter, what have you done?" Don moaned. "Don't throw me in the bramble-bush. Brer Wolf!" "Here is the first part of it," said associate. "For this you agree to return to Canal Street, #, and destroy -- by whatever means are available -- the infamous firm of Demuth's. In the unlikely case of their continuing in the business after the destruction -- " "They won't. Best goon job money can buy; leave it to me." Anders hesitated. Walter promptly said, "No, you can't come along. Don't ask again. Just him and me. I'll need him for bird-dogging. I'll get in touch when we come back. As agreed, I bring back copies of the New York papers showing that Demuth's was blown up or burned down. On your way." With one single hate-filled glance, not unmixed with triumph, at Don, Anders withdrew. The door closed. Walter laughed. "You aren't -- " Don began. "Not a chance. Think I'm crazy? Let him and his crackpot buddies whistle for their money. No doubt you are wondering how I put two and two in a vertical column and added, hey, Donny boy? Well, once I figured out that the 'Prospector' bership card in your pocket, I remembered that he and you used to and I got in touch with them. They practically told me the whole story, but I wanted confirmation from you. All right, on your feet. We've got a pea patch to tear up." While Walt was shaving, Don and Mary had a few minutes together. "Why don't you just go, Don?" she begged. "I mean for good -- away where he can't find you -- and stay there. Never mind about me or the children. We'll make out." "But wouldn't he take it out on you and them?" "I said don't worry about us and I mean it. He's not all bad, you know. Oh, he might be, for a while, but that's just because he never really adjusted to living up North. Maybe if we went back to his home town -- he always talks about it -- I mean he'd be different there -- " He listened unhappily to her losing her way between wanting him out of her misery and hoping that the unchangeable might change. "Mary," he broke in, "you don't have to worry any moe. I'm taking Walt along and setting him up -- really setting him up. And listen -- " he wrote a name and address on the back of her shopping list -- "go see this man. I've been investing money with his firm and there's plenty to take care of you and the kids -- even if things go wrong with Walt and me. This man will handle all your expenses." She nodded, not speaking. They smiled, squeezed hands. There was no need for embrace or kiss-thechildren. Whistling "Dixie," Walter returned. "Let's go," he said. "Good-by, Don," said Mary. "Good-by, Mary," said Don. and Walter Swift, after visits to a theatrical costumer and a numismatist, entered the Canal Street subway station. Those who have had commerce with that crossroads of lower Manhattan know how vast, how labyrinthine, it is. Only a few glances, less than idly curious, were given them as they paced through the late Mr. Elwell's mathematical map. No one was present when they passed beneath a red-lettered sign reading "Canarsie Line" and vanished away. As soon as he felt the flagstones beneath his feet, Walter whirled around and looked back. Instead of the white-tiled corridor, he saw a wet stone wall. For a moment, he swore feebly. Then he laughed. "A pocketful of long green and another of gold eagles!" he exclaimed. "What shall we try for first? Erie or New York Central Common? No -- first I want to see this place where you work. Oh, yes, I do. Obstinacy will get you nowhere. Lead on." Wishing eventually to introduce Walt into Hennaberry's, Don had first taken him out to Canal Street. Leopold Schwager's second-hand establishment was opposite, the sidewalk lined with superannuated sachems. Other establishments of the show-figure trade were within stonethrow, their signs, flags and figures making a brave display. Horsecars, cabs, drays, private carriages went clattering by. Walter watched the passing scene with relish, leering at the women in what he evidently thought was the best # masher's manner. Then he wrinkled his nose. "Damn it all," he said, "I hadn't realized that the Hayes Administration smelled so powerfully of the horse. But I suppose you like it?. Yes," he sneered, "you would. Well, enjoy it while you can. As soon as I manage to dig up some old plans, I propose to patent the internal combustion engine." Don felt his skin go cold. "John D. Rockefeller ought to be very, ver-ry interested," Walt said exultantly. "Why, five years from now, you won't know it's the same street... Whafre you pointing at?" Don gestured to a scout-figure in full plumage outside a store whose awning was painted with the words, "August Schwartz Segar Mfger Also Snuff, Plug, Cut Plug and Twist." "One of mine," he said, pride mixed with growing resolve. Walter grunted. "You won't have any time for that sort of thing any more; I'll need you myself. Besides -- yes, why not? Introduce cigarette machinery. Start a great big advertising campaign, put a weed in the mouth of every American over the age of sixteen." down the street singing "Sweet Ida Jane from Portland, Maine." Automatically, Don stepped aside to let him pass. "But if you do that," he said, no longer doubting that Walter would if he could, "then there won't be any more -- nobody will need -- I mean my work -- " Walter said irritably, "I told you, you won't have the time to be piddling around with a mallet and chisel. And now let's see your wooden-Injun mine." Acting as if he felt that nothing mattered any more, Don turned and led the way toward the brick building where C. E. Hennaberry, Show Figures And Emblematic Signs, did business. Ben the boy paused in his never-ending work of dusting the stock models to give a word and a wave in greeting. He stared at Walt. In the back was the office, old Van Wart the clerk-cashier and old Considine the clerk-bookkeeper, on their high stools, bending over their books as usual. On the wall was a dirty photograph in a black-draped frame, with the legend "Hon. Wm. Marcy Tweed, Grand Sachem of the Columbian Order of St. Tammany" and underneath the portrait was the Major himself. "So this is the place!" Walter declared, exaggerated Southern accent rolling richly. Major Hennaberry's friend. Col. Cox, sitting on the edge of the desk cutting himself a slice of twist, jumped as if stung by a minie-ball. His rather greasy sealskin cap slid over one eye. "Get all kinds of people in here, don't you, Cephas?" he growled. "All's I got to say is: I was at Fredericksburg, I was at Shilo, and all's I got to say is: the only good Rebel is a dead Rebel!" The Major, as Don well knew, hated Rebels himself, with a fervor possible only to a Tammany Democrat whose profitable speculations in cotton futures had been interrupted for four long, lean years. Don also knew that the Major had a short way of dealing with partisans of the Lost Cause, or with anyone else who had cost or threatened to cost him money -- if he could just be brought to the point. The Major looked up now, his eye lighting coldly on Walter, who gazed around the not overly clean room with a curious stare. "Yes, sir, might I serve you, sir? Nice fly-figure, maybe? Can supply you with a Highlander holding simulated snuff-mill at a tear-down price; no extra charge for tam-oshanter. Oh, Dusty. Glad to see you -- " "Dusty" mumbled an introduction. How quickly things had changed -- though not in any way for the better -- and how paradoxically: because he had refused the by violence so that modernism would be held off indefinitely, he was now condemned to see modernism arrive almost at once. Unless, of course... said Major Hennaberry, beginning to wheeze. "Dusty's done some speaking about you. Mmph." He turned abruptly to DonDusty. "What's all this, my boy, that Charley Voles was telling me -- Demuth's coming up with some devilish scheme to introduce castiron show figures?" Dusty started, a movement noted by the keen though bloodshot eyes of his sometime employer. "Then it is true? Terrible' thing, unconscionable. Gave me the liver complaint afresh, directly I heard of it. Been on medicated wine ever since." Walt turned angrily on his brother-in-law. "Who told you to open your damn cotton-pickin' mouth?" The Major's purplish lips parted, moved in something doubtless intended for a smile. "Now, gents," he said, "let's not quarrel. What must be must be, eh?" "Now you're talking," said Walt, and evidently not realizing that he and Hennaberry had quite separate things in mind, he added: "Things will be different, but you'll get used to them." Watching the Major start to wheeze in an unreasoning attack of rage. Dusty knew catal # dic action was needed. "How about a drink. Major?" he suggested. "A Rat Nolan special?" Unpurpling quickly, now merely nodding and hissing, the Major called for Ben. He took a coin out of his change purse and said: "Run over to Cooney's barrelhouse and bring back some glasses and a pitcher of rum cocktail. And ask Cooney does he know where Nolan is. I got some business with him." The boy left on the lope, and there was a short, tight silence. Then Col. Cox spoke, an anticipatory trickle already turning the corners of his mouth a wet brown. "I was at Island Number Ten, and I was at Kenisaw Moimtain, and what I say is: the only good Rebel is a dead Rebel." Walt grinned and said nothing until Ben came back with the drinks. "Well, Scotch on the rocks it isn't," he said then, taking a brief sip, "but it's not bad." He gave a brief indifferent glance at the shifty little man with Burnside whiskers who had come back with Ben, carrying the glasses. "To science and invention!" cried Walt. "To progress!" He drained half his glass. His face turned green, then white. He started to slide sidewise and was caught by the little man in Burnsides. "Easy does it, cully," said Mr. Rat Nolan, for it was he. "Dear, dear! I hope it's not a touch of this cholera morbus what's been so prevalent. Expect we'd better get him to a doctor, don't you, gents?" Major Hennaberry said that there was not a doubt about it. He walked painfully over to the elevator shaft, whistled shrilly. "Charley?" he called. "Larry? Oscar? Otto? Hennery? Get down here directly!" Dusty emerged from his surprise at how neatly it had happened. He reached into Walter's coat pocket and took out the paper with Elwell's Equation on it. Now he was safe, and so was Canal Street, #. As for what would happen when Walter recovered from his strange attack -- well, they would see. HE staff came out of the elevator cage with interest written large and plain upon their faces. Ben had evidently found time from his errand to drop a few words. Major Hennaberry gestured toward Walter, reclining, gray-faced, against the solicitous Mr. Rat Nolan, who held him in a firm grip. "Gent is took bad," the Major explained. "Couple of you go out and see if you can find a cab -- Snow Ferguson or Blinky Poole or one of those shunsoaps -- and tell them to drive up by the alley. No sense in lugging this poor gent out the front." Franz, Larry and Charley nodded and went out Otto stared. "No more vooden Indians, if he gets his vay," he said dismally at last "Ho, Chesus," he moaned. Dusty began, "Major, this is all so -- " "Now don't be woritting about your brother-in-law," said Rat Nolan soothingly. "For Dr. Coyle is a sovereign hand at curing what ails all pasty-faced, consumptive types like this one." Dusty said that he was sure of it. "Where is Dr. Coyle's office these days?" he asked. Mr. Rat Nolan coughed lightly, gazed at a cobweb in a corner of the ceiling. "The southwest passage to Amoy by way of the Straights is what the Doc is recommending for his patients -- and he insists on accompanying them to see they follows doctor's orders, such being the degree of his merciful and tenderloving care..." Dusty nodded approvingly. "Ah, he's a rare one," said R. Nolan with enthusiasm, "is Bully Coyle, master of the Beriah Jaspers of the Black Star Line! A rare one and a rum one, and the Shanghaiing would be a half-dead trade without 'm, for it does use up men. And they leave on the morning tide." clomp and metal harness-pieces jingled in the alley. Charley, Larry and Hennery came in, followed by a furtive-looking cabman with a great red hooked nose -- Snow Ferguson, presumably, or Blinky Poole, or one of those shimsoaps. "Ah, commerce, commerce," Rat Nolan sighed. "It waits upon no man's pleasure." He went through unconscious Walter's pockets with dispatch and divided the money into equal piles. From his own, he took a half-eagle which had been slightly scalloped and handed it to Dusty. "Share and share alike, and here's the regular fee. That's the spirit what made America great. Leave all them foreign monarchs beware... Give us a lift with the gent here, cullies..." Charley took the head, Hennery and Otto the arms, while Larry and Ben held the feet. Holding the door open, the cabman observed, "Damfino-looking shoes this coffee-cooler's got on." "Them's mine," said Rat Nolan instantly. "He'll climb the rigging better without 'em. Mind the door, cullies -- don't damage the merchandise!" cession went, past the flyfigures, scout-figures, rosebuds, pompeys, Highlandmen, and Turks. The gas-jets flared, the shadows danced, the sachems scowled. "If he comes to and shows fight," Major Hennaberry called, "give him a tap with the mallet, one of you!" He turned to Dusty, put a hand on his shoulder. "While I realize, my boy, that no man can be called to account for the actions of his brother-in-law in this Great Republic of ours, still I expect this will prove a lesson to you. From your silence, I perceive that you agree. Your sister now -- hate to see a lady's tears -- " Dusty took a deep breath. The air smelled deliciously of fresh wood and paint. "She'll adjust," he said. Mary would be quite well off with the money from his investments. So there was no need, none tried to follow him, to make more trouble, why -- there was always Rat Nolan. "Major Hennaberry, sir," he said vigorously, "we'll beat Demuth's yet. You remember what you said when the catalog came out, about the power of advertising? We'll run their metal monsters into the ground and put a wooden fly-figure on every street block in America!" And they did. in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put on the inside front cover of each with your name printed on it. Bookplate No. GF-# The umteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives states: "No books are lost by loaning except the ones you particularly want to keep." with owner's name; I#-S#, #-S# #-S# (Add State Sales Tax, if any) Actual Size #" x #" Order from No. GF-# #I Hudson Street, New York #. N.Y. for your information E lsewhere in this issue, the editor reports on the poll of reader's opinions as to how they want the big new Galaxy to look. At the moment of writing my own piece, I only know what has been passed on to me by way of an inter-office memo, which states that two main points were made by the readers with regard to this column. One is that the readers want "more speculation." The other is that they want the "Any Questions?" section restored. As regards the first point, I thought of a story I once read or heard: namely, that a genuinely wise man (in France, I believe) advised the professional wise men who deal with horoscopes and related devices to put all their prophecies so far into the future that the customer cannot possibly live long enough to check on whether they will come true. The reason I remember this story in connection with the request for "more speculation" is Galaxy's new schedule on the one hand and National Aeronautics and Space Administration), promised schedule of one artificial satellite per month. And there are, in addition. Army and Air Force programs which are more closely tied to military needs, but which can and will result in things going into orbits: around the Earth, around the Moon and around the Sun. And the Russian Academy of Science must have a program, too. TN the past, I have occasionally risked predicting an event in the space and satellite field. This is a risk I can no longer take, for space programs nowadays move so fast that even daily newspapers have trouble keeping up with them. Speculation, therefore, can be applied only to fields where an informed guess isn't likely to be proved or disproved before it even appears in print. In other fields, though, the wish for speculation will be treated as an order. As for the request for the return of the "Any Questions?" section, I am able to oblige -- glad to, in fact. That section quietly disappeared only for the reason that the readers did not feed it properly. I'm not saying that I did not get a fair number of questions every month. But most of them were so narrow in interest that I felt that they did not have enough appeal for most readers. Sometimes I got a question, or several, with stamped return envelope enclosed and the request: please reply at once; I can't wait for publication. On the assumption that these letters came from people who had exams coming up or were eager to collect a bet, I complied when I could. But while I am still short of written questions, I am abundantly supplied with oral ones. I spent most of the fall and winter traveling through the United States for the ments. After every lecture there is an official question-and-answer period, but I do not refer to these sessions which are part of the program. By now I know which questions are going to be asked. Just to see whether I myself caused such a predictable set of questions in some manner peculiar only to me, I spent one evening attending a lecture by Dr. Wernher von Braun to find out what the audience might throw at him. If I had had a list of the questions asked of me two days earlier in Detroit, and had made another list of the questions asked of Wernher von Braun that night, they would have shown an overlap of better than eighty per cent. The questions I have in mind for this column are the ones which came up after the official questionand-answer periods. Somebody (and he or she was usually a science fiction reader) would come up with something that could not be answered immediately. Sometimes the arithmetic involved was such that it could not be done without pencil and paper (especially not after nearly two hours of public speaking and while being driven to the airport). Sometimes I did not know the answer, but merely knew where it can be looked up. I can't credit any names. After many weeks of traveling and speaking, I simply do not remember them. But each one of the questions in the following actually was asked. I  HE spaceship with the steady acceleration came up three times: once from a newspaperman at Cape Canaveral, once from a teacher (female) in Fayetteville, N. C., and once from an airplane pilot in Lubbock, Texas. In all three cases, the figures were the same too : namely, the obvious one of a steady acceleration of one "g." If we could build a ship which would travel with one "g" of steady acceleration, the people inside would feel as if they were on the ground. But how fast would they be going how soon? There is a complication here. If such a ship took off from the ground, the people inside would naturally feel an acceleration of two "g," one "g" being due to the acceleration of the ship and the other due to the gravitational acceleration caused by the gravitational field of the Earth. So we agreed that we would first let the ship climb very gently to a distance of # miles, where the Earth's gravitational field is still present, of course, but can be called negligible. From that point on, we decided to travel at one "g" acceleration for precisely one day, or # hours, or # seconds. Now the velocity at the end of the day would be V  at. The value for "t" is #; the value of the acceleration, expressed in meters per second, is #. Now you just multiply, getting # meters per second as your final velocity at the end of that day. This is the equivalent of # miles per second. Pretty fast, but how far did they get? The formula for the distance "s" traveled is s  ta#; you square the time and multiply it by half of the acceleration used. The result is # kilometers or # million miles. This would be halfway to the orbit of Mars. Such a ship could effect a landing on Mars about two days after takeoff -- if it could be built and if enough energy were somehow available. I feel rather sure that I won't live to see such a ship, but even under such steady acceleration, it would take some time until the speed of light was approached. Which remark inevitably produces the question of whether the speed of light can be passed or not. When that question comes up now, I always repeat the answer I gave to my elder daughter when she asked this at the breakfast table half a year ago. She was then, which is of some importance to the story, only a few weeks older than # years. After she asked that question, I looked at her seriously and said: "Sandra, this is for your son to worry about, not us." iNE frequent oral question, which also came in by mail several times, is what Dr. Einstein, if he were still alive, would say to the following problem. A spaceship. Dr. Einstein maintained, coud not reach the speed of light. But he probably would have admitted that a spaceship might move with # per cent of the speed of light. Now if two ships each move with # per cent of the speed of light, but move away from each other, they would move with more than the speed of light relative to each other, wouldn't they? Or in another version: let's say, a spaceship moves at half the speed of light. Then its captain switches on the ship's nose searchlight, which shines forward. Since the light from the searchlight moves with the speed of light, but the ship carrying it already moves with half the speed of light, what would Dr. Einstein say? My offhand guess is that he would groan. But I can tell how he explained such things to his students. Let us first assume a tank moving forward at a fair clip on a road. We'll call its speed V. Now the tank man fires his gun forward without stopping. The velocity of the shell relative to the tank shall be called "v." The velocity of the shell relative to the road is then obviously V  v. This simple formula is the one everybody uses and Dr. Einstein would have admitted that it works for practical purposes. But he would have insisted that V v is a simplified formula. The correct or complete formula for the speed of the shell relative to the ground would be: V  V vx V namely, tank speed plus shell velocity divided by "#" plus the product of these two velocities divided by the square of the speed of light. Now if V and v are tiny when compared to the speed of light (which they normally are), the formula acquires the shape of : V  v which is the same as V v. Now let us try this for the spaceship and the searchlight beam, but to make it easier, we'll assume that the spaceship is traveling with the speed of light itself. We'll call the ship's velocity V and that of the searchlight beam c (since it is light traveling). Then the formula looks like this: V-fc which can be written more simply as: V-l-c #-f Vc or still simpler: c(V  c) (c  V) but this is just a complicated manner of just writing "c."  You always end up with the speed of light, never more. Yes, it contradicts "common sense," but that is how Einstein's formula reads. What the next generation or the one after that will do with this formula is something I can't even remotely guess at. T ET us return to the ground now for a short while and deal with people who were always thought to be more groundbound than anybody else on this planet -- the Russians. Usually, when I have a public lecture, I tell the story of how Konstantin Eduardovitch Ziolkovsky wrote the first scientific treatise on rocketry in # and submitted it to the editor of the monthly popular scientific journal Na-ootchnoye Obozrayniye ("Science Survey"), who required five years to make up his mind to publish it, so that it was printed in #. I use this story in my lecture to indicate the date of Ziolkovsky's birthday. According to the (old style) Julian calendar in use in Russia when Ziolkovsky was born, his birthday was the # th of September, #. But after the Russian revolution, the Soviets adopted the Gregorian calendar and now refer to events before the revolution with the dates they would have had if the Gregorian calendar had been in use then. This re-dates Ziolkovsky's birthday as the #th of September, #, which is the date that was actually at the head of any daily newspaper on that day across the border in Germany or in nearby Sweden. The reason for making this point is, of course, that Ziolkovsky's hundredth birthday, September #, #, was the intended date for the shooting of Sputnik I. After the lecture, there is always at least one person who wants to know how we know that Ziolkovsky actually wrote such a treatise. The answer to that is simple : I own a copy of it; Ziolkovsky mailed it to me in #. But, somebody else will ask then, did that man make experiments? No, he didn't. Aha, still another person will chortle, they did not experiment until they captured all those Germans! Well, it so happens that the first Russian to experiment with liquidfuel rockets had a German name. But in spite of that name, he was a Russian; moreover, he began experimenting in #. His name was Friedrich Arturovitch Zander and he published a book on rocket theory and on ideas about experiments in #. (I have a copy of that book, too.) Zander's first rocket motor to work (some earlier models may easily have blown up) produced a thrust of # pounds. In his book. Zander proposed a small airplane as test vehicle for his rocket motors. I don't know whether he actually did this. Nor do I know his whereabouts now or even whether he is still alive. The first Russian research rocket we know of was built in # by M. K. Tikhonravov (now often mentioned in connection with Russian artificial satellites) with a motor by L. S. Dushkin. Burning kerosene with nitric acid (a fuel combination still used in Russian research rockets), this rocket rose to a height of about six miles. The last Russian experiment before the Second World War was just what Zander had had in mind: a glider with a rocket motor. This rocket motor was Dushkin's, too. have to talk about their satellites. Pravda, every once in a while, ran a tabulation of satellite weights and orbits, stressing the fact that the biggest of the Russian satellites weighs IVa tons while ours carried an instrument load of not quite # pounds. This discrepancy was, of course, one of the recurrent questions and I won't go into this at this point. But one young man in Orlando, Florida, who identified himself as a science fiction and especially a Galaxy reader, added a new twist. He asked me whether there was an "optimum size" for an artificial satellite. Maybe, he added, ours are too small, but isn't it possible that the Russian satellites are too big? There was not enough time to go into this problem and I did promise to tell him in print, which I am now doing. The problem began with thinking about the weight (and incidentally size) an artificial satellite would have to have. This was not too simple, as I can testify, because I ran into this problem once. During the winter of #-#, I began to wonder what would have to be added to the only then existing rocket, the V-#, to launch a satellite with it. This, in turn, brought up the question whether current rocket fuels were powerful enough for satellite launching. This led to the question of how much payload these fuels would have to carry into an orbit. I hopefully acquired a number of catalogues of instrument-making companies and began to go through them. Well, everything was carefully stated, physical principles, performance, adjustment range, often even the size. Did anybody mention the weight? Usually not! The reason was that these instruments were meant to be used in laboratories. Maybe on shipboard. The designers had taken into consideration that they might be carted around in automobiles and had provided carrying cases and often pointed out that the construction was "rugged, for student use." I finally gave up, assumed that the satellite would have to weigh # pounds, and went ahead with my attempt to find out whether a three-stage rocket for known fuels with satellite capability (as they now say) was possible at all. It was. Some six years later. Dr. S. Fred Singer published the first detailed design of an artificial satellite, without paying attention to what rocket would carry it. The design was manned Satellite of Earth. Note that the first letter stands for Minimum and Dr. Singer said that it would weigh about # pounds. This was in #. Two years or so later, when Vanguard was discussed, the instrument men first talked about a #inch sphere weighing # pounds, which they then reduced to a #inch sphere weighing # pounds. Some, but not all, of this steady scaling down reflected the progress of the instrument makers who, once the challenge existed, were quite successful in making things lighter and smaller. the satellites which are in orbit or which have been in orbit -- it must be kept in mind that only one of them was put there by a rocket designed for satellite launching. This is the little # pound Vanguard test satellite. All the others were put into orbit by rockets in operational use that were adapted for the purpose. The fact that they were in operational use makes their performance more reliable. But the satellite weight then has to be what these rockets which happen to be available can put into orbit. The Jupiter-C rocket could manage up to # pounds, of which # pounds are the empty casing of the top stage. The Jupiter-C could not carry a higher weight into orbit. On the other hand, the big Russian missiles also had to carry the weights they did carry. If they had carried less, the payload would have been shot into space, but it would not have gone into orbit around the Earth. So much for the story of the problem and for the existing facts. Now back to the question of whether there is an optimal weight. It is easy to show that a satellite could be too small. The Vanguard test satellite would be fairly useless if the silicon solar batteries had not come along, so that it could emit a radio signal by which it could be tracked. (It must be mentioned that at least one skilled amateur astronomer on the West Coast managed to see the test satellite with his telescope, knowing when and where it should be in the sky.) Without solar batteries, the test satellite would be too small to be useful. Of course, a # Vi pound plastic and aluminum balloon inflated in orbit would be large enough for visual tracking, but this is another type of satellite again. And that is really the point of the answer. The optimum size of a satellite depends on what it is supposed to do. Let us take a type of satellite which is likely to be large and heavy as an example. If we want a TV camera in orbit for cloud-cover research, we have to carry a TV camera. We have to carry the broadcasting equipment. We have to carry a power source. We also have to provide a mechanism which will steady the satellite and aim the camera. There has to be a power source for this purpose, too. What all this will weigh is impossible for me to estimate. But let's say that one designer can do all this at a weight of # pounds. If another designer can do it at a weight of # pounds and do it with equal reliability and for the same duration, the second satellite is demonstrably superior. OW let us take another ex' ample of lighter weight. We want a bunch of radiation counters in orbit, say a dozen. One of them should be completely unshielded; the others shielded to different degrees with different lead shields. The unshielded counter will report all radiation. The one with the heaviest lead shielding will report only the most energetic sub-atomic particles. The ten counters in between will report different energy levels of the particles that hit them. All this has to be broadcast to the ground, to be sure, so a transmitter is needed. The overall weight of this would probably be on the order of # pounds. If, in the TV satellite, the rocket had originally been built for the #-pound design, but in the meantime the #-pound design had come along, we would now have enough spare payload to add several sets of the radiation counter assembly and get all the measurements we want with the one heavy satellite. Wouldn't we? No, we wouldn't. We'd get measurements, all right, but only from the orbit that is the best for TV cloud-cover measurements, which might be an orbit that is nearly circular and # miles away. But we want such radiation count from many places. We want an orbit that is nearly circular and quite low, say # miles on the average. We also want this orbit to go over both magnetic poles. Then we want an orbit that is also nearly circular, but over the equator, and, on the average, # miles from the ground. Then we want an orbit which is over the equator but quite eccentric, with a perigee at perhaps # miles and an apogee # miles away. In short, we want several different orbits for the same type satellite. Which simply means that we need as many satellites as there are orbits worth investigating. Offhand, I can think of about ten different orbits just for radiation measurements. This figure does not include possible failures (and in this case a satellite that goes into an orbit, but not one of the desired ones, might be counted as a failure ) and repeats. Repeats will be necessary because the measurements should cover a number of years to provide a really complete and reliable picture. Even if these satellites do a few other things in addition to radiation measurements (such as taking their own temperatures and reporting on hits by micro-meteorites), they can still be quite small. For exploratory purposes, and that is the phase at which we are now, several small satellites are infinitely superior to one large one. Large ones will be needed too, if the equipment they have to carry happens to be heavy, but for quite some time to come, they will not replace the small ones.  I  O end all this on a somewhat lighter note, let me recall a luncheon in Chicago with advertising and newspaper people where the so-called Australian shoe size puzzle came up. This does not mean that shoe sizes in Australia are puzzling, at least no more than an # Twhere else, but that it was thought up in Australia. One of the men present had just heard it from an Australian advertising man. It ran as follows: "Miss S.," he said, "don't tell us your shoe size, but think of it and double the number." Miss S. nodded, wondering what would come next "If this is an even number, leave it alone. If it is an odd number, subtract one." "Even," said Miss S. "All right, now add # to this number." Miss S. nodded. "Now multiply this by five." At that point. Miss S. fished a pencil out of her purse and started defacing the back of a menu. "When you have the result, write it down and tack an eight onto it, like another digit. This should be a four-digit figure now." Miss S. indicated that it was. "Now subtract the year in which you were bom from this figure. What's the result?" She read off a figure which sounded as if it made absolutely no sense, after all these op)erations. But the man who had started the whole thing smiled and said: "So you wear a size five, which is about what I guessed, but I didn't know you are thirty." TT so happened that Miss S. did not mind this information being divulged, but by then everybody wanted to see the procedure in detail, so she had to go through the sequence once more. Size # doubled makes #. (If it had been size #, the resulting odd figure, #, would have had to be reduced by one.) Adding # makes #. Multiplied by five makes #. Tack on an # at the end and you get #. Subtract the year of birth (#) makes #, which is size #, age #. Several more menus were then spoiled and it always worked out neatly. This is as far as the proceedings went on that day. I expect that more paper will be spoiled now in a number of homes, so I'll give a hint. The conversation took place in # and an "#" had to be tacked on at the end. Since you'll be doing this in #, you'll have to tack on a "#" or else every victim's age will come out one year younger than it really is. Traveling Companion Wanted To share exps., relieve at wheel -- must be able drive under grt. pressure -- in return transp. doz. mi. or so under ocean bottom! Y ou remember Regan. He's the man who fell overboard in a spacesuit and found that there really is a passage to India. It winds down from the Champion Deep in the Atlantic and comes out somewhere off Bombay. It took Regan a week to pop in one end of that underworld river and emerge at the other. He was delirious when he bobbed to the surface and was picked up by the Chinese motorship. Starved, of course; had to spend a long time in the hospital after he'd been transferred to shore. The newspapers and radio and television made quite a thing of it. Reporters managed to interview Regan while he was still weak and maybe talking a little crazy. They got together afterward and agreed among themselves on what parts to leave out. Then Regan sold the first-person rights to a syndicate. He insisted on writing the installments himself, but a lot was edited out while the staff writer was redoing it. I didn't hear Regan's unpublished story till I met him in the bar at the Palmer House in Chicago. He'd been attending a geophysical meeting that I'd had to cover and we'd both got bored with it about the same time. I thought I recognized him from his pictures and said so. Regan seemed glad to have a nonlonghair to talk to, and he talked. You know why Regan had been wearing a spacesuit in the first place; he'd become something of a hero on the return trip of one of the Earth-Mars hops after a meteor struck. Regan went out through the airlock to make repairs. It was his job as chief of maintenance. Patched up the hole and went back in. Routine, he said. But the skipper messaged a report to Earth, and when the spaceship reached the way station to take on landing fuel, the press was waiting for it. The photographers were along and they wanted Regan to re-enact the repair scene. He didn't want to, but the skipper insisted because it would be good public relations. So Regan climbed into the spacesuit again and took along his mobile repair gear and tinkered away on the hull while the photogs snapped away from a patrol boat. That was when the repair unit went out of whack. T TS mobility factor wasn't supposed to do anything more than move him around on the hull to wherever he had to go. He'd worked with it a hundred times in test sessions and once in reality and it'd always been a lamb. But this time it went all screwy and shoved him off the hull. In some way one of the conduits wrapped itself around his arms like an octopus, pinning them so he couldn't reach the controls. And in some other way the tiny rocket engine zipped over to full power and plunged him down toward Earth. If it had headed him out toward space, it would have been all right. The patrol boat could have overtaken him in a few hours at most and hauled him aboard. But Regan was heading Earthward and soon he was down where the traffic's pretty congested. The patrol boat made some valiant efforts, but after a couple of near misses with transcontinental rockets, it gave up. Better to lose one person than a couple of hundred. Radio messages were sent to lowflying craft and ships at sea. These didn't do any good, except that a trawler was able to spot the position where Regan, in his spacesuit, smacked the water and went under. The trawler didn't have a radio transmitter. It waited a while, and when nothing came up, it put about for land. A day later, the spot where Regan had gone down was alive with would-be rescue ships, submarines and diving equipment. But Regan never came up -- not in that ocean, at any rate. I knew this story pretty well, so Regan didn't elaborate on it. He'd blacked out, anyway, soon after he hit the atmosphere and didn't come to till he was close to smacking the surface. That's when it began to get interesting. You've seen enough undersea movies to know what the ocean is like, so we won't go into that. This is what happened when Regan got down to what should have been the bottom; There was a big crater there, with the bottom stretching away in all directions from the cavity -- but the hole itself kept going down. Funnel-shaped, Regan said. He could see it quite clearly because he was plunging into it head down. The tentacles of the conduit were still wrapped around his arms and the mobility gadget's rocket was naturally working almost as well under water as it had in space. After a while, it got dark, with Regan still zipping along into the depths of the funnel. He'd long since passed the stage of being merely worried; now he was scared. By this time, it was entirely black, but Regan could sense that he was being carried along swiftly. TV OT because he thought it ' would do any good, but because he had to do something, Regan experimented with his feet. He found that after some backstretching calisthenics he was able to bring his right boot up near his waist. Maneuvering it with total disregard for his sacroiliac, Regan managed to hook the boot under one of the coils the conduit had made around him. Gradually he was able to loosen it enough to give his left arm some play and from there it was relatively simple. He switched off the rocket engine, switched on his headlamp and looked around. Regan said it was quite a sight, in a reverse sort of way. Nothing anywhere. With the rocket turned off, he kind of floated around aimlessly, going nowhere in particular. He should have been going up, but that didn't happen. He swirled like a lazy eddy. A school of things that were caricatures of fish -- big, white, revolting things -- swished over and puckered blindly into his faceplate, then went away. Otherwise there was nothing. Regan was pretty discouraged. By this time, he'd been in a slow spin for so long that he had no idea which way was up. He had the equipment for getting up -- there were about two hundred hours of fuel in the rocket engine strapped to his back -- but no way seemed any better than another. He remembered that the funnel had steadily narrowed and so he tried experimental bursts from the engine to see if he could reach one of the sides. Eventually he got to something that wasn't water. It was a sort of mud. Regan studied the markings on it for a possible clue. No go. Regan was a spaceman, not an oceanographer. So, since it was better than doing nothing, Regan got himself into a drift parallel with the mud side and switched on his rocket. He whizzed along at a good rate, staying close to the mud wall, but not knowing whether he was going down, up or around in circles at the same depth. After what he judged to be some hours of this, the mud began to be streaked with a gray substance and, still farther along, it appeared to become rock. Regan didn't know whether this was good or bad. More hours went by, apparently. Regan was wearing a watch, but it was hidden under the heavy sleeve of his spacesuit. He dozed off, he said, and when he snapped back into consciousness he noticed that there was another wall, far off, opposite the one he was rocketing along. It was gray, too, as far as he could make out in the light of his headlamp, which was weak over distances. What woke him up fully was something that went skimming past him at a much greater rate than his own. It was a cask, its wood brown as if from long submersion and its hoops rusted into redness. The cask was turning lazily end over end, but it outdistanced him and disappeared ahead as he watched. It had been traveling out in the middle of the passage. while and then reasoned that there was a swift current, swifter in the middle even than his rocket propulsion at the side of the channel. He worked himself out toward the center, then switched off his rocket, experimentally. By watching the rock side of the passage, he was able to gauge that he was moving much faster. The watching, however, had a hypnotic effect on him and Regan felt himself dozing off. He tried to fight it but reasoned finally that there wasn't much point. So he turned off his headlamp and let himself go to sleep. He felt veird when he woke up. He was hot and sweating. He remembered instantly where he was. It was no comfort to him. He felt entirely hopeless, even more so than if he'd been marooned in space. At least there was traffic out there. Here there was just himself, with a wooden cask up ahead and nightmarish fish somewhere behind. He also felt weak. Spacesuits come equipped with water, of course, if they're the repair variety, and Regan drank sparingly through the tube at the base of his faceplate. But his suit carried no rations, so "he tried to ignore his hunger. He drowsed again and switched off his headlamp. This became a pattern for him -- a semi-conscious nightmare of smooth, eerie motion, punctuated with sips at his water supply and hopeless watching through the faceplate, blinking away the sweat. Regan talked to himself, he said, and sometimes sang, to keep himself sane in the silence and loneliness. It probably helped, although some of his talk was pretty idiotic. It was after one of his dozes -- whose duration he had no way of measuring even by his thirst and hunger, which were constant -- that he awoke to something new. Automatically he switched on his headlamp, then switched it off again, realizing what the newness was. The passage he was being washed through was no longer dark; there was a radiance in the water now. Regan twisted himself around to see what the light came from. Up ahead, apparently. As it got stronger, his eyes began to ache. It was a gorgeous ache, Regan said, and he stared ahead almost hypnotized. He made an effort and focused on the walls of the passageway he was being thrust along. They were white with streaks of black in them -- like marble, but without marble's glossy hardness. He could see all parts of the tunnel now; it was roughly circular and had narrowed to a diameter of about two hundred feet Regan could only suppose that he was nearing the surface -- that he'd been sweeping through some U-shaped fissure -- and he adjusted himself kinesthetically to the theory that he was now traveling up instead of down. This took a lot of doing and occupied his mind. His spirits soared with his imagined ascent and he could visualize himself traveling faster and faster until, with a pop, he would be thrust into the air and fall back to float on the surface. Regan wanted most desperately to be able to look at the sky again. It would be kind to see land, too, but a ship or a plane would do temporarily. TE was half lost in this reverie when he had to make a second adjustment. Remember, he thought he was going up, as from the bottom of a well. Therefore he was puzzled, as the radiance increased to daylight strength, to see one wall of his tubular, water-filled prison darken to deep green while the other turned a sort of bluewhite-pink. He was moving in the same swift rush of current, his body positioned so that he was facing the green half. He twisted as if to face the opposite way in an elevator and then became giddy when the entire concept of his surroundings did a ninety-degree flop. In that split second, Regan realized that he wasn't traveling vertically, but horizontally. The well he had pictured himself in now took on the aspect of a river, with the bright blend of colors the sky, and the deep green the river bed. The banks of the river were above him. Regan gave himself a tiny rocket assist to rise. He wasn't at all prepared for what he saw. Far away beyond the green plain through which the river was racing was a city. Unmistakably it was a metropolis of Man, not towering or turreted, but massive and with a relative newness which spoke of life. And as he had this thought, he could see other, smaller dwellings closer by, one-storied and circular, in a variety of colors. He noted then that the level of the river was higher than that of the land, that the marblelike banks which channeled the racing water had become a transparent, glasslike substance which rose and curved in a seemingly endless archway. The torrent completely filled the half-transparent tube, flowing smoothly so that he almost had the sensation of flying above the ground. Regan maneuvered toward the top and from there he saw the road. It paralleled the river and ran in a straight line as far as he could see. While he watched, a vehicle sped along it from behind, paced beside him and then pulled ahead. The driver was only vaguely visible, but he had a reassuringly human appearance. The man in the car, which was a three-wheeled, looked neither left nor right. Regan yelled instinctively and waved. The cumbersome motion turned him over on his back. Opportunistically, he studied the sky from his new position, but could make nothing of it. There were no clouds, only the blue-white-pink brightness that seemed to extend to infinity.  field of vision. Regan caught only a glimpse of it, then reasoned that it must have been a bridge, spanning the enclosed river. He twisted himself around to a prone position and tried to think constructively. Somewhere there had to be an exit to this land. For his sake, there had to be, although of course this guaranteed nothing. But surely these people made use of this abundant supply of water. It would be fresh and good to drink after its long passage through the Earth, despite its source in the salt ocean. They would use it for irrigation, probably, and perhaps somewhere it was channeled for transportation -- of a more comfortable kind than his own. And they might use it for power. Certainly its rushing strength would be tapped. This thought scared him. He pictured a giant hydroelectric plant into which he would be swept and in the bowels of which his body would be mangled by the blades of a turbine. He had to slow his mad passage. He maneuvered the equipment attached to his spacesuit and pointed the rocket exhaust ahead of him. He flicked on the power and felt his speed being cut. The powerful current pressed from behind him like a live thing, but the rocket thrust was strong, too. His progress slackened to the pace of a canoe. Balancing himself behind the makeshift braking apparatus was difficult, both bepause the torrent threatened constantly to turn him end for end, and because his strength was only a memory of itself. But somehow Regan managed to achieve an equilibrium which allowed him to look about and reassure himself that the city was still there. Its position had shifted on the horizon to a point slightly behind him, but there apparently was no end to the expanse of this underground world. The road was there, too, still parallel to the roofed-over river. A surge of hope went through him as he spotted a man walking along the road. Regan braked himself still further, until his speed matched that of the man. The man's costume was a brief one -- knee-length trousers, a vestlike garment over a white skin, and sandals -- so apparently the climate was tropical. Regan stared hard at the man, mutely begging him to turn. Both Regan's hands gripped the rocket tube; he didn't dare let go to wave. Then, as though he had been reached telepathically, the man looked in Regan's direction. Regan couldn't make out his expression, but apparently it was one of disbelief. The man stopped, took an indecisive step and then ran toward the river. He jogged alongside it and now Regan could see his face clearly. T T was an intelligent face -- round, broad-nosed, the eyes almondshaped and the hair abundant and black. The man's body was stocky and powerful, graceful as he ran beside the tubed-in river. He waved and smiled, and Regan hoped his own answering smile was visible behind the faceplate of his spacesuit. Regan doubted that telepathy had anything to do with making the man notice him originally; nevertheless, he thought furiously: "How do I get out of here?" The response was made more to Regan's obvious predicament than because of thought transference, he was sure; at any rate, the man pointed, then raced ahead. Regan lost sight of him for an agonizingly long minute or two, then saw him again, standing and pointing up. Another bridge was spanning the river. The man gestured to it emphatically, then pointed ahead again and held up two fingers. Alternately he pointed to the bridge and gestured with his fingers. Regan decided that this meant there would be some sort of help for him at the second bridge beyond. He nodded his head vigorously. The man seemed to see the motion. He nodded and smiled. Regan cut the power of the rocket engine and let the current speed his journey. The man outside increased his own pace, and when another bridge swept overhead, he nodded and held up one finger. Regan trembled with relief at this confirmation of the pantomimed message. He fought back the weariness that had begun to creep over him again, and clung doggedly to the rocket whose exhaust regulated his speed to that of the running man. Regan thought the bridge would never be reached. He felt supremely weary. He was sopping wet, his eyes kept going out of focus, his throat ached, and his head was throbbing with jagged pains. It took all his waning strength to cling to consciousness. sight; then overhead. The running man pointed up. Beyond the bridge, the glasslike covering ended. Regan was out of the tunnel. The river widened now and its velocity eased. But the current was still a powerful one. Regan pointed the rocket tube so that it thrust him upward. His rubberand steelclothed head broke the surface. He felt a surge of freedom. In his joy, Regan lost control of the rocket-brake and was twisted crazily about. Instinctively he shut off the power; he was swept ahead. As the river whirled him forward, he saw the man on the bank point ahead to the right, wave him on and gesture that he would catch up later. It was with relief that Regan let himself be carried forward by the strong current. He was traveling out of the mainstream now. In a few minutes, the river was so broad that he seemed to be barely moving, but this was merely an illusion of contrast. Then Regan saw the mesh fence. It was a giant strainer across the river, apparently fashioned to prevent debris from being carried into the structure which straddled the river beyond -- without doubt the hydroelectric plant whose existence he had dreaded. Regan was swept into the fence. It gave, cushioning the shock, and he pulled himself along it toward the bank. He reached it but lacked the strength to pull himself onto land. Nearby, hugging the huge mesh fence, was the cask which had passed him back in the dark of the tunnel. Just as Regan was passing out, he saw the stocky man in the kneelength shorts come into sight, running as fast as he could make his legs pump. found himself being carried on the back of an open truck. He was lying there like a sack of cabbages, being bounced around as the truck sped over a bumpy road. His undersea friend was squatting next to him on the bed of the truck, holding onto the side to keep from being jolted off. He smiled when he saw that Regan had regained consciousness and patted the chest of the spacesuit. He pointed in the direction the truck was going, but Regan was flat on his back and weak and couldn't turn to look. The jolting was making him sick. The road became smoother and soon they entered the city. Regan said it was the damnedest place he ever saw. Everything looked like a beehive. He meant that literally, he said. All the buildings were circular, with doors down at the base and no windows. They were all different sizes and all colors. Some of the bigger ones towered up pretty high, but just how high was hard to say. They weren't built in stories, but in one continuous curving line from bottom to top. The truck would pass through a square or a park now and again and the buildings in the distance looked like a mass of soap bubbles, all pastel colors under that blue-whitepink sky. The truck stopped in front of a big yellow beehive. Now that he was close and not being jolted around, Regan could see that the building was constructed of a kind of oversized bricks, about a foot square. They weren't joined with mortar, as far as he could tell. Apparently their own weight and shape held them together as they rose up and formed a dome. And the color was within the bricks, not painted on. Two men, taller than his friend, came out of the building carrying a plank. They loaded Regan onto it and carried him stretcher-fashion into the building. The friend tagged along behind. There was a sort of anteroom inside, with a man at a desk. The bearers stopped while the man took down a gadget that looked like a chessboard with buttons and pushed down half a dozen of them. Then he held out the board to Regan's friend, who pushed down some of the buttons in a different combination. After that the little friend went away, first patting Regan on the chest and smiling. Regan was carried into a rotunda in the center of the building. The floor rose and took them to the top level. The bearers carried him off to the side and he saw the floor drop down again. They took him to a windowless room which had light radiating from the walls, and dumped him off the plank-stretcher onto a high stone table. Regan climbed down. He supposed they were being as gentle as possible. considering his great weight in the spacesuit. Regan's weight also manifested itself to him. He felt the heaviness of a person who has been buoyed up for a long time in water, but is now on land. A LL this happened, except for the clank as he was set down, in complete silence. He was entirely isolated from outside sound, of course. He lay there, feeling less sick but still hot and dizzy, trying to compose his stomach. After a while, he felt calm enough to drink a little water through the tube inside the faceplate. A rotimd man wearing a kind of white tunic came into his field of vision. Regan could see him only from the waist up. Like the friend he had met at the river, this man had abundant black hair. But his face was fat, with puffy cheeks and sagging jowls. He was much older. His hands were pudgy. He waggled them in what might have been a gesture of delight or greeting; it was hard to say which. His expression was one of pleasure. He stood at Regan's side and smiled at him. His hands felt over the headpiece of the spacesuit, then went thumping down the rest of it. "I'll be out of the damn thing soon," Regan thought. But apparently it was too much for the fellow. Regan tried to gesture to the fastening at the back of his neck to show how it was done, but he was unable to raise his arms. He realized then how exhausted he was. The rotund man in the tunic patted him on the chest -- it seemed to be a universal gesture -- and went away. Regan felt at peace in the room. He felt that now he was going to be taken care of and that everything, somehow, was going to be all right. He went to sleep. He woke up ravenously hungry. He seemed to be alone in the room. His encased body felt as heavy as the whole world. He tried to raise up to bring his mouth to the water tube. He couldn't. He cried out in a voice that was weak even inside the confines of his suit. No one could possibly have heard and no one came. He tried to raise his arm. The muscles strained and quivered. By using all his strength, he was able to lift it a few inches above the table. Then the arm fell back on the stone with the barest tap of sound. The jovial fat one reappeared. He was carrying a metal box with two dials on it and wires coming from it which ended in kinds of suction cups. He stuck one of the cups to Regan's faceplate, fastened another one to his ear and twirled a dial. "Please get me out of this suit," Regan said. The man's face lit up with pleasure. He nodded and patted the chest of the suit. Then he spoke. The language was a guttural, fast-paced one. Regan had never heard anything like it. "Please," he said. "Please get me out." The man continued to smile. He beckoned and two other men appeared. They took turns listening to Regan plead to be released. They smiled, too, though obviously none of them understood a word. Without gestures, it was impossible for Regan to convey his plight. tering in their outlandish tongue. Others joined them. They all had the same look about them. Friendly, smiling faces and hands that patted him on the chest. It became a confused nightmare as still others streamed in, as if he were the main attraction in a fifty-cent tour. But apparently there was They measured him from top to toe, from side to side, in circumference and in depth. They used steel tapes and calipers and jotted down their findings in little books or punched them out on buttonstudded chessboards. They wheeled in a huge contraption which must have been a camera and clicked it at him from every angle. They lifted his arms and legs and chattered with excitement to see how peculiarly he bent at the joints. It was as if Regan were a new kind of animal that had swum into their ken and which they were classifying, or which they would classify at their leisure after they had measured it in all possible ways. They kept it up for an eternity and a half. Regan's vision got hazy, his throat burned and his stomach ached in irregular spasms. He was barely conscious when the two bearers came back in, loaded him on the plank and took him out into the rotunda. The throng of scientists followed. The floor-wide elevator sank to the main level and they all went out into the street. A big, rectangular, doorless, buslike vehicle was standing there. The bearers, with a great deal of effort, propped Regan up in the front seat. His head lolled back inside the suit. The shift in position blacked him cut temporarily. He came out of a period of nausea to hear himself saying over and over: "You open it at the back of the neck. I'd do it myself if I could move my arms. You open it at the back of the neck." The bus was in motion. It rumbled through the streets among the pastel beehives. In Regan's state, they were so many bouncing balloons being pointed out by madmen in white smocks in a caricature of a vehicle under an impossible sky. They eventually reached a kind of park or estate. Shrubs and trees were neatly set out and a big golden beehive stood at the end of a long drive. They took him inside, half fainting, sweating, gibbering to himself. Through half a dozen anterooms they went, to what could only have been a throne room. It was sumptuously hung with tapestries. There were guards standing at post and a thick carpet led to a dais on which were two huge chairs. A tall, slender, dark-haired man sat in one of them. The other was empty. There was a confused kind of ceremony in which everyone got down on one knee before the man on the throne, and a ridiculous struggle began, to get Regan into a semblance of the same position. The king, or whatever he was, gestured, and Regan found himself being dragged up on the dais and sat on the other throne. Then the nightmare took a turn for the worse. From an anteroom came a procession of women bearing gifts. They were the first women Regan had seen in this underground world, but he was less interested in them than in what they carried. Food. Baskets of fruit. Platters of meat. Cups of liquids. The smiling creatures curtsied before the thrones and set out the feast in front of Regan. One of them, dressed in a single pale blue garment belted at the waist, laid a basket of fruit in his lap. Regan began to quiver in a fever of frustration. It got worse when, at a sign from the king, everyone helped himself to some of this or that, raised it to Regan in a kind of toast and began to eat. If any of them noticed that Regan didn't join them, they were polite enough not to take offense.  I  HE feast over, everyone went for an after-dinner ride. The king went, too, riding in a richly draped palanquin on wheels, ahead of the squared-off bus. This was the royal tour. Points of interest were visited. Regan's bleary eyes and uncomprehending brain half observed gardens, factories, schools, a sporting event, a parade, a farm and dozens of examples of the culture of the world of people who were kindly starving him to death. In his semi-delirium, he once reproached himself for being such an unappreciative guest and wondered what they must think of this emissary from outside who was such a cumbersome clod. He had come to them in the strange trappings he apparently preferred, so how could he blame them for respecting his costume and leaving it to him to wear it or remove it as he chose? In his own world, he wouldn't strip a visitor or skin a stray dog. A bump in the road and the shudder it gave the bus jolted his eyes fully open. Ahead was the hydroelectric plant spanning the river. They were going to show the king where Regan had come from. The procession pulled over to the bank next to the mesh fence which screened debris from the water flowing into the plant. On the bank lay his mobility unit, which apparently had been detached before they trucked him into the city originally. The king got out of his palanquin and examined it curiously. Then he got back in and they drove along the bank to the other side of the hydroelectric plant The river continued its swift passage, apparently unslowed by the drain on it. Regan thought the river looked tremendously inviting. In its depths, he could be free of the wellmeaning crowd of sightseeing guides. The river represented peace, an end to being shown around, measured, observed, exhibited and tantalized. In it, he could die calmly, without any frustrating diplomacy. A bridge spanned the river below the plant. By the gestures of the scientists, he gathered that they were going to cross over to see interesting things which lay across the river. The bridge was a narrow wooden one. Parallel to it was the stone framework of an unfinished replacement. They proceeded slowly over the rickety, railless bridge. The approach to it was banked, so that Regan was tilted in his seat, toward the outside. The bus leveled off as it reached the wooden planking and Regan tilted the other way. A loose plank under a wheel sent him swaying back again. With all his remaining strength, he leaned with the tilt. It was just enough to send him off balance. They reached out to pull him back, but it was too late. He was out of the bus and dropping the short distance to the water. The current was so swift that he went only a little way under, then bobbed up and was rushed along, turning over and over. As he revolved, he caught glimpses of consternation on the bridge. He saw the bus back off and race along the road on the bank, hands waving out of it. But it couldn't catch up with him. He was moving too fast. The even motion of the river was soothing. Regan took a swallow from his tube and relaxed. There was a dull ache in his stomach, but no more stabbing spasms. Maybe he was dying. He didn't care. pital even before he opened his eyes. The ether-and-disinfectant smell told him that. It was taking an effort to thrust his eyelids up. He moved his arms and felt them close to his body. He raised one hand to his face and rubbed his closed eyes. Of course they'd have got him out of the spacesuit. He opened his eyes. A brown-faced man was leaning over the bed. He was wearing a white smock and had a fountain pen in the breast pocket. Beyond the man -- the doctor -- there was a window. A perfectly ordinary window, through which Regan could see the sky. A blue sky with white clouds in it. The doctor smiled at Regan and said in English: "How do you feel, son?" Regan tried to speak but couldn't. "This is Bombay," the doctor said. "Bombay, in India. It must be quite a surprise to you, but I'm glad to say you'll be all right." "What?" Regan asked vaguely. "It's strange, of course," said the doctor. "You should be on the other side of the world, by all that's natural. We communicated with the American authorities when we saw your identification. It is extremely odd. Still, here you are, and you will be well. Quite soon, too." "But -- " Regan began. Then he gave up. He said nothing more until after he'd eaten and slept and the doctor asked him if he felt strong enough now to see the reporters. more, sir?" the bartender at the Palmer House asked. I nodded. "Naturally they thought I was delirious," Regan said, "or had been. They had to accept the fact that I'd been through the Earth. Not through the center of it, or an#Twhere near it -- they tell me thafs practically solid nickel, or molten, or whatever. But there was no disputing that I'd gone down in the Atlantic and come up in the Indian Ocean. They'd seen me go down and they'd seen me come up and obviously I'd been somewhere in the interval. I hadn't walked, that was for sure. "They credited my story of the underground river. The Greeks had a word for it, they tell me. The Greeks thought the Alpheus River wandered down under the Adriatic and came up in Sicily. I don't know much about their river, but mine apparently follows the Earth's curve maybe a dozen miles below the surface. "But nobody wanted any part of my story of the city and the king and the beehive houses and the rectangular bus. Delirium, they said. Oh, they were kind about it, but they said it. So did the geophysical boys upstairs, in their eight-syllabled way." The bartender brought fresh highballs, but Regan still held the glass the old drink had been in. He put it on its side on the bar and stared at the open end. I got the image -- a tunnel filled with rushing water, a tunnel under the world. Regan almost echoed my thoughts. "Tunnel under the Antarctic," he said half to himself. "That's where it must have been, that city. Down there, deep under the ice. Used to be tropics, you know." "The Antarctic?" I said. "Before the ice came, before the Earth's axis shifted. Those people -- they didn't evacuate, I guess. They went underground. Funny they should have built themselves houses the same shape as those of the Eskimos who stayed aboveground in the North -- like igloos. But probably that's just coincidence. You don't find igloos in the tropics. I'd guess their beehive houses are naturally influenced by the cavern they live in -- their little universe." and set the empty glass upright on the bar. "I've had a lot of time to think about it. They're awfully nice people, all of them. I could have had a wonderful time if I'd been able to climb out of that damn spacesuit. In time, I could even have communicated with them passably well. Goodlooking women, too." He looked at me speculatively. He opened his mouth as if to speak again, then smiled and shook his head. I said it for him: "You're going back." "Yes," he answered. "Yes, I'm going back. I know the coordinates of the entrance to the passageway and its dimensions and the kind of equipment I'll need. Nothing elaborate. In another year or so, I'll have enough saved up, I think. Get myself a little space launch; one of the smaller ones, lifeboat size. Fit it out with food and water -- and some picture books, of course, to show them what it's like where I come from. I'd take somebody along with me if I could find anyone who wanted to go -- and who believed me." "I believe you," I said. "But -- " "Sure. You'd be crazy to go. Wife and kids. I've got none of that Mostly what I want to do, I guess, is prove those longbeards upstairs are cockeyed." "I hope you do. Maybe ,you'll let me write about it when you get back." "It'll be a good story," Regan assured me. "I'll be waiting for it," I promised. That was five years ago. Four years ago, Regan went, as he said he would. He went alone, in a little space launch. I'm still waiting to write the end of the story. R FAilLY Music Around the Universe Don't take your eye off music... there is going to be a lot more to it than meets the ear! T his first selection deals entirely with the Music Section of the Almanack. Passed over in this anthology, which is intended for general readership, are all references to the four-dimensional doubly extensive parties are referred to "Time in Reverse, or the Musical Granny Knot," by Alfid Carp, Papers of the Rigel Musicological Society) or, for reasons of local censorship, and IX and the racial-sex "music" which is common on those planets. All dates have been made conformable with the Terran Calendar (as in the standard Terran edition of the Almanack) by application of Winstock Benjamin's Least Square Variable Time Scale. the birth date of Freem Freem, of Dubhe IV, perhaps the most celebrated child prodigy in musical history. Though it is, of course, true that he appeared in no concerts after the age of twelve, none who have seen the solidographs of his early performances can ever forget the intent face, the tense, accurate motions of the hands, the utter perfection of Freem's entire performance. His first concert, given at the age of four, was an amazing spectacle. Respected critics refused to believe that Freem was as young as his manager (an octopoid from Fomalhaut) claimed, and were satisfied only by the sworn affidavit of Glerk, the well-known Sirian, who was present at the preliminary interviews. Being a Sirian, Glerk was naturally incapable of dissimulation, and his earnest supersonics soon persuaded the critics of the truth. Freem was, in actuality, only four years old. In the next eight years, Freem concertized throughout the Galaxy. His triumph on Deneb at the age of six, the stellar reception given him by a deputation of composers and critics from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud when he appeared in that sector, and the introduction (as an encore) of his single composition, the beloved Memories of Old Age, are still recalled. And then, at the age of eleven, Freem's concerts ceased. Musiclovers throughout the Galaxy were stunned by the news that their famed prodigy would appear no longer. At the age of twelve, Freem Freem was dead. Terrans have never felt this loss as deeply as other Galactic races, and it is not difficult to see why. The standard "year" of Dubhe IV equals # Earth years; to the short-lived Terrans, Freem Freem had given his first concert at the age of #, and had died at the ripe old age of # years. "Calling a #-year-old being a child prodigy," states the Terran Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rather tartly, "is the kind of misstatement up with which we shall not put." Particularly noteworthy is the parallel attitude expressed by the inhabitants of Terk I, whose "year" is approximately three Terran days, to the alleged "short" life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Delk Shkulma Tik was born on this date in #. Although heshe is renowned both as the creator of as the progenitor of the sole Galactic Censorship Law which remains in effect in this enlightened age, very little is actually known about the history of that law. The full story is, very roughly, as follows: In #, a composition was published by the firm of Scholer and Dichs (Sirius), the Concerto for Wood-Block and Orchestra by Tik. Since this was not only the first appearance of any composition by Tik, but was in fact the first composition of any kind to see publicathe musical world was astonished at the power, control and mastery the piece showed. A review which is still extant stated: "It is not possible that a composition of such a high level of organization should be the first to proceed from a composer -- or from an entire planet. Yet we must recognize the merit and worth of Tik's Concerto, and applaud the force of the composer, in a higher degree than usual." Even more amazing than the foregoing was the speed with which Tik's compositions followed one another. The Concerto was followed by a sonata, Tik's Took, hisher Free-Fall Ballet for Centipedals, Lightsl Action Comrades, a Symphony, an Imbroglio for Unstrung Violin, and fourteen Wolfish Rhapsodies -- all within the year reported once again that there was no musical history on the planet. Success, fame and money were Tik's. Succeeding compositions were received with an amount of enthusiasm that would have done credit to any musician. awaken at hisher touch. Within ten years, there was a school of composition established there, and works of astounding complexity and beauty came pouring forth. The "great flowering," as it was called, seemed to inspire other planets as well -- to name only a Trent II (whose inhabitants, dwelling underwater for the most part, had never had anything like a musical history). Tiks own income began to go down as the process continued. Then the astonishing truth was discovered. Tik was not a composer at all -- merely an electronics technician! Heshe had recorded the sounds of the planet's main downtown business center and slowed the recording to half-speed. Since the inhabibatlike squeals, this slowing resulted in a series of patterns which fell within sonic range, and which had all of the scope and the complexity of music itself. The other planets had copied the trick and soon the Galaxy was glutted with this electronic "music." The climax came when a recording of a court trial over which he presided. During the two weeks of subsonic testimony, speech and bustle, he supervised recording apparatus and, in fact, announced that he had performed the actual "arrangement" involved: speeding up the recordings so that the two-week subsonic trial became a half-hour fantasia. The judge lost the subsequent election and irrationally placed the blame on the recording (which had not been well-received by the critics). Single-handed, he restored the state of pure music by pushing through the Galactic Assembly a censorship rule requiring that all recording companies, musicians, technicians and composers be limited to the normal sonic range of the planet on which they were working. Tik himself, after the passage of this law, eked out a bare living as a translator from the supersonic. He died, alone and friendliness, in #. this date, in #, of Wladislaw Wladislaw's Concertino for Enclosed Harp stirs reflections in musical minds of the inventor and first virtuoso on this instrument, the ingenious Barsak Gh. Therwent of positions for that instrument as common as the chadlas of Gh. Therwent's home planet, we are likely to pass over the startling and almost accidental circumstance that led to his marvelous discovery. As a small boy, Gh. Therwent was enamored of music and musicians; he played the geep-flute before the age of eight and, using his hair-thin minor arms, was an accomplished performer on the Irish (or small open) harp in his fifteenth year. A tendency to confuse the strings of the harp with his own digital extremities, however, seemed serious enough to rule out a concert career for the young Ealk, and when an Earth-made piano was delivered to the home of a neighbor who fancied himself a collector of baroque instruments, young Gh. was among the first to attempt playing on it. Unfortunately, he could not muster pressure sufficient in his secondary arms and digits to depress the keys; more, he kept slipping between them. It was one such slip that led to his discovery of the enclosed strings at the back of the piano (a spinet). The subtle sonorities of plucked strings at the back of a closed chamber excited him, and he continued research into the instrument in a somewhat more organized manner. Soon he was able to give a concert of music which he himself had arranged -- and when Wladislaw Wladislaw dedicated his composition to Gh., the performer's future was assured. The rest of his triumphant story is too well known to repeat here. The single observation on Gh. Therwenfs playing, however, by the composer Ratling, is perhaps worthy of note. "He don't play on the white keys, and he don't play on the black keys," said Ratling, with that cultivated lack of grammar which made him famous as an eccentric. "He plays in the cracks!" Hrrshtk Notes were discovered in These notes are, quite certainly, alone in their originality, and in the force which they have had on the growth of subsequent musicians. To begin at the beginning: it is well established that Ludwig Hrrshtk, perhaps the most widely known Denebian composer, died of overwork in his prime. His compositions, until the famous T# discoveries of G'g Rash, were almost alone in their universal appeal. Races the Galaxy over have thrilled to Hrrshtk's Second Symphony, his Concerto for Old Men, and the inspiring Classic Mambo Suite. It is, as a matter of fact, said that G'g Rash himself was led to his discovery by considering the question : "How can many different races, experiencing totally different emotions in totally different ways, agree on the importance of a single musical composition by Hrrshtk? How can all share a single emotional experience?" His researches delved deeply into the Hrrshtk compositions, and a tentative theory based on the Love Anger Hunger Hate Joy F'rit Prayer Madness Sadness In completed form, the document contains over one hundred and fifty separate listings for race, and over six hundred separate emotional or subject headings. In some places (like the Terra and Sirius listing for Vilb, above), the text is taken to mean No Precise Equivalent. For instance, such a marking appears after the Denebian shhr for both Terra and Mars, although Sirius has the listing rk and Fomalhaut plarat in the desert. Hrrshtk may be hailed, therefore, as the discoverer of the Doctrine of Emotional Equivalency, Most Common Harmonic, now shown to have been totally mistaken, led to the T# discoveries. The Hrrshtk notes, however, found long afterward, provide the real answer. Among a pile of sketches and musical fragments was found a long list -- or, rather, a series of lists. In the form of a Galactic Dictionary, the paper is divided into many columns, each headed with the name of a different planet. Rather than describe this document, we are printing an excerpt from it herewith: Sadness Madness Prayer Love Full Joy later promulgated in a different form by Space Patrol Psychiatrist Rodney Garman. Further, the document alluded to above explains a phrase in Hrrshtk's noted letter to Dibble Young, which has puzzled commentators since its first appearance. Hrrshtk is here alluding to the composition of his Revolutionary Ode, which all Terra knows as the most perfect expression of true love to be found in music : "If s a Revolutionary Ode to me, my friend -- but not to you. As we say here, one man's mood is another man's passion." the year #, Treth Schmaltar died on his home planet of Wellington V. All the Galaxy knows his famous Symphonic Storm Suite; less known, but equally interesting, is the history and development of its solo instrument. The natives of Wellington V feed on airborne plankton, which is carried by the vibrations of sound or speech. This was a littleknown fact for many years, but did account for the joy with which the first explorers on Wellington V were greeted. Their speech created waves that fed the natives. When eating, the natives emit a strange humming noise, due to the action of the peculiar glottis. These facts drove the first settlers, like Treth Schmaltar, to the invention of a new instrument. This was a large drumlike construction with a small hole in its side through which airborne plankton could enter. Inside the drum, a Wellingtonian crouched. When the drum was beaten, the air vibrations drove plankton into the native's mouth, and he ate and hummed. (A mechanical device has since replaced the native. This is, of course, due to the terrific expense of importing both natives and plankton to other planets than Wellington V for concerts.) Thus, a peculiarity of native life led not only to the Symphonic Storm Suite, but to such lovely compositions as Schmaltar's HumDrum Sonata. zation of the swanlike inhabitants pitiful musical scandal of the ages, was begun by Ferd Pill, born on this date in #. Pill, who died penitent in a neuterary of the Benedictine Order, is said to have conceived his idea after perusing some early Terran legends about the swan. He never represented himself as the composer, but always as the agent or representative of a Harsh of three years, he sold over two hundred songs, none of great length but all, as musicians agree to this day, of a startling and almost unHnau-like beauty. When a clerk in the records department of Pill's publishers discovered that Pill, having listed himself as the heir of each of the Harsh ing their money, an investigation begn. That the composers were in fact dead was easily discovered. That Pill was their murderer was the next matter that came to light. In an agony of self-abasement, Pill confessed his crime. "The Harshians don't sing at all," he said. "They don't make a sound. But -- like the legendary swan of old Terra -- they do deliver themselves of one song in dying. I murdered them in order to record these songs, and then sold the recordings." Pill's subsequent escape from the prison in which he was confined, and his trip to the sanctuary of the neuterary, were said to have been arranged by the grateful widow of one of the murdered Harshians, who had been enabled by her mate's death to remarry with a younger and handsomer Harshian. birthday of Timmis Calk, a science teacher of Lavoris II. Calk is almost forgotten today, but his magnificent Student Orchestra created a storm both of approval and protest when it was first seen in #. Critics on both sides of what rapidly became a Galaxywide controversy were forced, however, to acknowledge the magnificent playing of the Student Orchestra and its great technical attainments. Its story begins with Calk himself and his sweetheart, a lovely being named Silla. Though Calk's love for Silla was true and profound, Silla did not return his affectionate feelings. She was an anti-scientist, a musician. The sects were split on Lavoris II to such an extent that marriage between Calk and his beloved would have meant crossing the class lines -- something which Silla, a musicCalk therefore determined to prove to her that a scientist could be just as artistic as any musician. Months of hard work followed, until finally he was ready. He engaged the great Drick Hall for his first concert -- and the program consisted entirely of classical works of great difficulty. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony opened the program, and Fenk's Reversed Ode closed it. Calk had no time for the plaudits of critics and audience; he went searching for Silla. But he was too late. She had heard his concert -- and had immediately accepted the marriage proposal of a childhood sweetheart. Calk nearly committed suicide. But at the last moment, he tossed the spraying-bottle away and went back to Silla. "Why?" he said. 'Why did you reject me, after hearing the marvelous music which I created?" "You are not a musician, but a scientist," Silla said. "Any musician would have refrained from growing his orchestra from seeds." Unable to understand her esthetic revulsion. Calk determined there and then to continue his work with the Student Orchestra (it made a great deal more money than science-teaching). Wrapping his rootlets around his branches, he rolled away from her with crackling dignity. M# # tanks and military vehicles is one of the most exceptional sets of models ever created, in metal from official gov't, blueprints to exact specifications. Every tiny detail is distinctly depicted. American, British, German, Russian and Japanese Tanks, Ships , Planes are included in unusual and unique Model Railroad items ! railroad hobbyist or the man in service! Send for Colorful, Illustrated Catalog only #-#I #nd. St. Richmond Hill N. Y. N. Y. Three pieces plus missile men #. # #C # T#EI Louis Chaibormeau. Doubleday  Co., N. Y., # books of the year, although a first novel, this story contains all the necessary elements -- taut and cumulative suspense, mystery, intrigue, a gripping chase. The action occurs in the hours from #I P.M. to # a.m. as the protagonist lies helpless on an interrogation slab of the Population Control Corps, memory erased by captain, with personal axe to grind. uses counter-drug and electroshock in the hope of restoring memory by # A.M., rendezvous hour of the Underground. Similar to # in background, benevolence is the keynote and Malthusian principled population control coupled with controlled famine are the crutches of the dictatorship. The story is told in a series of flashbacks as the shock treatment restores bits of memory. The method is effective as a plot device and the reader should find it almost impossible, as I did, to stop reading merely for the sake of eating. James Blish. Avon Publications, Inc., N. Y., #c each character, these stories nevertheless were intended as a twopart saga of Man's path to the stars. In Year #! both West and East, steeped in bureaucracy and ultra-security, make research and information exchange almost impossible. A Machiavellian senator from Alaska becomes a futureday Moses who leads Man to the stars but may not cross the gulf himself. This dim picture of the next few decades was valid just a couple of years ago, but Blish never dreamed of satellites so soon. Who did? Discovery of longevity drugs and anti-gravity allows entire cities to abandon Earth for greener pastures in Earthman Come Home, the more familiar story of the "Okies," flying cities of itinerant laborers. Blish's devious plot twists are reminiscent of the Asimov "Foundation" saga in which the shortest distance between two purposes is an indirect line. You'll enjoy matching wits with the mayor of Manhattan and his inverted approach to the hearts of problems. Theodore Sturgeon. Doubleday and Co., Inc., N.Y., # f F a Sturgeon collection is always a ding-dong event, the present volume constitutes an entire carillon. In "A Crime for Llewellyn," "The Girl Had Guts" and "It Opens the Sky," he successfully pulls off story types new to his talents. "The Pod in the Barrier," "The Touch of Your Hand," "Mr. Costello, Hero" and "The Other Celia" must be immodestly termed masterful psychological studies, for they all appeared here. Strenuously recommended. Stewart. Philosophical Library, N.Y., # ace, British government test pilot, commentator at the famous air shows at Farnborough, is exceptionally qualified to assess aviation accidents. His expert study of the causes of aircraft disasters from the earliest days of unpowered gliders to the Comet j#t-liner tragedies is particularly effective just now. The history of fifty years of aviation is eloquently written in this account of its errors and accidents. Unfortunately, the infinitely greater demands on men and machines in the coming space age almost guarantee publication of a similar sad but proud volume soon after # a.d. terbotham. Avalon Books, N. Y., # HE pilot testing a new rocket plane returns from forty miles up with a punctured canopy, torn and bloodied pressure suit, two halves of chinalike eggshell and no plausible reason for being alive. However, his character and actions have altered so much that he is obviously either another man or a double feature with an extra added attraction -- he shakes off wounds like a self-sealing gas tank and displays Samson-with-fullhead-of-hair strength. When a female associate develops the identical characteristics, humanity obviously had better look to its bulwarks. N.Y., # to #  Oct., #, bright scholars are being given the fullest opportunity to develop their potentialities instead of being chained to mediocre level. The sciences have priority status. Extra-curricular research is a must. Resultingly, last October's Junior Education Corner, featuring the ten volume The Book of Popular Science, an excellent referent for scientific information, was very well received. For advanced study, a more advanced reference work obviously is indicated. Cognizant of this fact of life, the editors of Encyclopedia Americana have incorporated articles crammed with the latest information on a galaxy of scientific topics. Additionally, of a total of some # pages, over # have been completely rewritten or revised within the past four years with particular attention to the word level suiting the special needs of junior and senior high school students. The list of contributors is truly monumental : Wernher von Braun, Gen. Otis Benson, George Gamow, S. Fred Singer, Alexander de Seversky, etc., etc. "No one can see the limits of the desirable application of radioactive isotopes in research, science, and industry, whether in medicine, agriculture, or manufacturing." Gen. Leslie R. Groves, Atomic Energy. "Cybernetics includes communication as a statistical problem in which messages not sent play an equal role with messages sent." Herbert Wiener, Cybernetics. "Astronomers are waiting for a telescope outside the earth's atmosphere in order to extend their field of activities. The chances are good that they will get their wish granted before the present century comes to a close." Willy Ley, Space Research. The thirty volumes encompass nearly the total sum and essence of Man's knowledge and place it within anyone's reach, at home or in the library. Gnome Press, N.Y., # on Clifton Fadiman's fine Fantasia Mathematica, that an anthology can be greater than the sum of its parts. Miss Merril's third annual collection proves that the reverse is likewise true. The real trouble is that her literary tastebuds are too few, too far apart, and too overdeveloped, so that sharing an anthologized meal with her causes gagging, about halfway through, to those who don't share her affliction. She serves very much too much of what she likes, and everything else is spinach. This is a disservice to the individual items on the menu. Many of them are good -- though certainly not greatest -- but they are all dessert. Using a large section of the book for Sputnik articles is surely one of the great editorial blunders of our time. Jones. John C. Winston Co., Phila., # rmS latest addition to Win- ston's admirable juvenile SF library is also one of the best to date. A facile writer, Jones also is a credible plotter. For story development, he accomplishes the breakdown of civilization by having Earth capture colloidal particles from a passing comet that have such affinity for metals that all machine parts weld to each other. The ensuing contest pits ignorance vs. knowledge, good vs. evil, with the ultimate survival of mankind as table stakes. The characters are drawn in black and white, but primal conflict does remove most shades except blood-red. Harcourt, Brace  Co., N.Y., # mous for her juvenile fiction, which has -- at its best -- few peers but no betters. Her present effort is not her best. It runs heavily to action, an ingredient always in plentiful supply in her works, but here preventing a full development of an alien picture. The "Star Lords," presumably Earthmen who have bollixed up the lives of Gorth's inhabitants, finally leave after hundreds of years. Spaceships long gone, they resort to dimensional travel via the "Star Gate," winding up on an alternate Gorth where their counterparts have made an even greater mess of the planet. In leaving too much to imagination, Miss Norton has made identification next to impossible for the youngsters. lian Messner, Inc., N.Y., # EW scientific pathfinders find easy acceptance of their theories or inventions; none have had rockier rows to hoe than the pioneer rocketeers. For centuries, rockets were either toys or wildly inaccurate artillery. proved range and accuracy, but for a century longer, almost no experimentation was done despite Verne and his immense impact on public interest. Ziolkovsky, Russian; Oberth, German; Goddard, American, were the architects who made the V-#, Sputnik, Vanguard and Explorer possible. This is the fascinating story of these men and those who followed. Although our efforts have already pierced deep space, most of the rocket pioneers are alive today! Notes: kids will love this realistic LP disk. Blastoff, Space Station, Moon Crash and Mars are highlights. A Verne, # each. The leadoff three in the noted new Fitzroy edition of these former collector's items. More to follow. From Gnome Press, P.O. Box #, Hicksville, N.Y. Correction: Dr. David H. Keller, referred to in this column as "late," is still very much with us. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. By Manly Wade Wellman Ironic destiny of a visitor from the future trying to take advantage of things to come. By F. L. Wallace Earth was too perfect for these extraordinary exiies -- to belong to it, they had to flee it. By Hal Clement All the science on earth might not be able to meet the demands of this alien race. By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony. That rare event: a science fiction novel based on a new idea. We mean are you missing the fine line of Galaxy Novels simply because you don't want to go hunting through today's crowded newsstands? No need to. We'll send them to you -- mailed flat, their handsome covers and neat pages well protected -- mailed as soon as each title comes off the presses. Best of all... Besides saving you trouble and time, we save you money! At # titles (all different) for only #, that comes to less than # a book -- a saving of # over the newsstand price I Send in your subscription today. Don't use the coupon if you prefer not to cut it out; it's for your convenience, only. Enter my subscription for # books (full length, all different) at # (# additional for Foreign). Name. Address City...lone. State Soft Touch quid (kwid), n. (From quiddity -- r. i. quid what, neat, of quis who.) #. Mutant human representing the essence (quiddity) of irreproachable moral conduct and free from all vices. #. Slang. Despicable person . -- Webster's New Interplanetary Dictionary, Second Edition, #. L ike rifle fire, the vehement voices cracked through the quiet morning air. "Quid! Quid!" "It's a quid!" "Lousy, filthy quid!" Wayne Conover's hand whitened What can one do with a pushover except push him over? And if he reacts to it like some blooming saint, here's the way to nail him! on the tiller and he swung the car sharply toward the shoulder of the freeway. "Hey, Joe! We got us a quid!" "Let's fix him up good!" "Grab the dirty louse!" High-pitched voices, the piercing shrieks of children, counterpointed by the deeper hayings of adolescent youths. Conover swallowed his fear. The epithets weren't, after all, being hurled at him. He braked the car to a stop beside the weed-infested tract and let the rush of inbound traffic hiss indifferently by. The lot was overflowing with kids. They came on in an angry, swelling tide. They crushed through the weeds and left eddies of dust and eager spores swirling in their wake. They wielded sticks and cast rocks and flung thick clods of mud. Before them, in panic, fled the quid. He was a middle-aged man, bespattered and torn. Blood coursed down his cheek and there was the frenzied look of a flushed quarry on his face. He ran with a limp. Evidently it wouldn't be the first time the juvenile mob had overtaken him on this otherwise ironically calm morning. Helplessly, Conover stood on the side of the road, imable not to share the quid's hopeless fright. Several times he started forward. But there was nothing he could do. A segment of the merciless avalanche of children broke away and circled wide to cut off the man's escape. At the same time, another stream of screaming kids spilled into the lot from the outlying residential subdivision. The quid went down suddenly, sprawling across a husky youth who had swerved in from a flanking position to dive against his knees. Shrieking triumphantly, the horde closed in.  course there was something he could do! He might at least present the pack with two targets and divert some of the attack! But suddenly there was a great fluttering of air about him and the piercing wail of a siren sounded overhead. He watched children scatter in all directions, like the weeds that were bending before the downdraft from the descending copter's blades. The police vehicle alighted beside the quid and out ran several officers, who made a pretense of giving chase after the juveniles. They laughingly gestured their inadequacy at the edge of the field and, as always, turned back emptyhanded. Slowly the man rose, wiping the grime from his cheeks with a tattered sleeve. A half-hour earlier, he had no doubt been a neatly dressed, respected citizen, his identity as a quid successfully concealed. One of the officers came over to Conover. "You in on this quid hunt?" "No, I-" "Missed out on the fun, eh?" The cop nudged him in the ribs. "Better luck next time -- if some damned quid sympathizer doesn't turn in the complaint too soon." Conover followed him back to the copter. A lieutenant had the quid by the arm. "You! Whafs your name?" Head bowed, the man answered in a soft, unsteady voice. "All right. Mister Holier Than Thou," said the officer through his teeth, "we're taking you in for disturbing the peace and inciting riot." The quid said nothing. One of the patrolmen shoved him roughly forward and sent him sprawling into the copter. Conover, his blond hair flaying his forehead in the downblast, watched the craft lunge skjrward. He set the quid's name in his memory and mentally counted the savings he was bringing to town. The money was to have been used to furnish the nursery. He realized with some regret that giving it up would make Alice unhappy. But, for a normal person, she had almost a quid's amount of sympathy. She would understand that the arrested man needed the cash much more desperately than they. T T was almost noon before Conover, as terrestrial accommodations consultant for the Far-Wide Travel Agency, finished with the line of prospective tourists who had queued up before his desk. He reviewed the morning's run of business: three Atlantic Depths cruises with stopovers at Bubble City; two North Polar Resort bookings; four for Everest Peak Lodge; two U.S. Riviera accommodations, and six for the Carlsbad Subterranean Delight Special at the ten-mile level. It was a sizeable run. It had not been large enough, however, to embarrass the efforts of the other five terrestrial and three celestial consultants. He gathered up the checks and bank notes and went over to deposit them with the cashier. On the way back, he was stopped by Ed Beaumont at the first terrestrial desk. "Wasn't that you I saw parked off the freeway this morning, Wayne?" Conover nodded uncertainly. "Watching the quid hunt, eh?" Beaumont was a bulky, dark man with a seemingly built-in chuckle. "They sure were giving him hell, weren't they?" "It wasn't pleasant," Conover said. Beaumont's brows came together dubiously. "I thought it was great fun." Then, "Oh, you mean it wasn't pleasant for the quid." When Conover contributed nothing to Beaumont's enjoyment, Beaumont stopped laughing. "The way you were standing there," he went on, "it looked like you were itching to get in on the chase. But I never figured you for a quid hunter. Come to think of it, you always impressed me as a pretty placid guy." While Beaumont considered the contradiction, Conover saw that their conversation might plant grave suspicions in the fun-lover's mind. He started to turn away. "You weren't really enjoying the chase, were you, Wasme?" Beaumont demanded, making it a challenge. A simple falsehood would get Conover off the hook. A few wellchosen invectives, scornfully denouncing the quids, would prove he was a normal person. But Conover merely said, "I've got to straighten out some things on my desk." It wasn't a lie. With an amused, speculating look, Beaumont hunched forward. "You're always right there when office collections are taken up, aren't you? And I've seen you volunteer a dozen times to stay on after hours. You make good money, but you don't live very well. I know -- I've been out to your house." Conover squirmed under the teasing but keen scrutiny. "There's a client at my desk, Ed," he said, thankful for the opportunity to get away. He had no doubt now that Beaumont suspected. Beaumont rose, smiling. "I had a hell of a run of bad luck this week, chum. One of the kids got sick; the jalopy broke down; I missed a few payments here and there. Can you let me have about a hundred?" Conover reached for his wallet. But then he hesitated. He was fully aware that Beaumont was merely testing a suspicion, that compliance with the request, under the circumstances, would only expose his identity as a quid. Yet Ed's child had been sick. "You mean you've got it on you?" Eagerly, Beaumont watched Conover's hand emerge with the wallet. "Actually," he added, making his voice sound wistful, "a hundred and fifty would pull me out of all of my troubles." Conover took the sum from the envelope marked "Baby Furniture." "Really, Wayne, I don't know when I'll be able to pay this back." "That's all right." Beaumont laughed. "Or even if I can square it at all." "Forget it." ing room couch that evening. She was a slight brunette, attractive despite the worried expression that hounded her face. There was a neatness about her bearing which stood out in defiance of advanced pregnancy. She looked at last at her husband. "And you gave him the money?" Conover nodded miserably. "But I'll make it up to you, honey. We'll get everything the baby needs." "That's not the point, Wayne! Beaumont knows. There's no telling what'll happen now!" He dropped down on the couch beside her. "I'm sorry, honey." 'Why didn't you, just for this one time, say no?" "I -- well, maybe he really needed the money." "More than us? Don't you see he was just trying to find out if you're a -- if you're different?" Dismally, Conover clasped his hands together. "He'll do one of two things. Either he'll let it out, or he'll prove he's a pretty human guy, after all, and keep it to himself." "Or, more likely," she suggested bitterly, "he'll take advantage of you and bleed you for all he can get." "I don't think Eld's that way. He was simply amused over meeting a quid. He just wanted to see if it was true -- if we were as defenseless as they say. He'll probably return the money tomorrow." "Oh, Wayne!" Alice let out a harassed sigh. "If there's anything more frustrating than the fact that you always do what's right, it's the trust and faith you have in everybody. Can't you ever suspect anybody of anything?" He rose and paced. "I knew I'd let you down," he said in self-reproach. Her face softened immediately. "I'm not angry, Wayne." "Then disappointed." "I knew what I was getting into. You told me what it would be like, being the wife of -- of someone different. I believed you, without reservation. I'm not sorry -- not one bit." She kissed him on the cheek. Still not reassured, he raised his hands uncertainly. "What do we do now? Rim again, the way we did two years ago?" "I doubt it." She looked down at herself and laughed. "I won't be in my best nmning condition for a few weeks yet." It was her pregnancy that made things infinitely worse. He'd known other quids before, like himself. They all had a rough time trying to hide their identity. Whenever they were discovered, they had to flee like frightened animals. But he'd never known one with a child. And he wasn't quite certain what to expect of the future. "Everything's going to be all right, you big dope," Alice promised cheerfully, putting her arms about him. "And being married to you has its compensations -- like never having to worry about another woman, and knowing that when you say I'm pretty, you mean it." "But-" She placed her fingers lightly over his lips. "But nothing. I'm going to fix supper. You try to forget about the whole thing." He watched her disappear through the swinging door, wondering whether he fully realized how wonderful she actually was. She was forgiving. She understood and accepted his mutant quirks. She was even resigned to his unreasonable irresponsibility with their money. Yet it wasn't easy for her. Charity, truthfulness, honesty -- they were traits she had to acquire in a continuing struggle against basic human instinct. It was much more difficult than in the case of a quid, where those virtues were innate and irrevocable. in it again, I see." Alice's father, shaking his almost bald head, stood in the doorway leaning on his stick. He was a rather tall man, lean and compact for his age. And the cane always impressed Conover as being more of a personal affectation than an aid to walking. "You heard, Dad?" he asked, upset. "Everything," the old man shot back. "And I don't aim to apologize for eavesdropping." "No, of course not. Not when it's something that concerns all of us." "Well, whafre you going to do?" Conover slumped dispiritedly. "Not much I can do, except wait and see what Beaumont decides." Dad raised his cane menacingly. "I know how to take care of that scoundrel -- wrap this thing around his neck and dare him to open his mouth. I'll see him if you want me to." "That wouldn't do any good. If it's not Beaumont this month, it'll be somebody else next month. I've been here two years without being discovered. And that must be a record." The old man was quiet for a tense while. Finally he said, "Alice isn't playing it from the shoulder. She's hiding a lot." "Bills?" "Bills. Mounting expenses. She missed a couple of payments on the house. But what else would you expect? You make good money, but not enough to throw it around like a free-wheeling philanthropist. Damn it, son, you got to think of your family!" "I try to. But I always seem to run into somebody who needs help. If only I weren't such a soft touch." "You don't have to be. The word 'no' is still in the dictionary." Conover leaned back and thrust his hands in his pockets. Dad didn't understand. Alice didn't either. It wasn't that they didn't want to or didn't try. God knew they were as sympathetic as any normal person could be. But nobody who wasn't a mutant himself could appreciate the relentless compulsion to do good that drove a quid. Alice's father cleared his throat. "Well, the immediate problem is that you gave half your savings to Beaumont, and the other half to some poor Joe who's in the same shoes you're likely to be in, in a few days. I can see you through part way with my pension check." "You won't have to. There's the bonus." . "Which won't be in hand for another six months. Son, if you'd just take a poke at someone once in a while, or haul off and cuss somebody out!"  helpless he felt and how much of a misfit he and all the others like him were. In an all-quid world, things might be different "What makes a quid. Dad?" he asked in misery. 'We've had them around all the time without knowing it. Some were called saints and burned at the stake. Others found their way into religious organizations. That gave them a sort of sanctuary. By renouncing worldly things, they reassured all the frightened normal people that they weren't in competition with them." "Frightened people?" "Of course. Other people are afraid of you. That's why they hate you. That's why they pass laws that you can't gather in groups. That's why they're trying to fix it so you'll have to register as quids and wear identification marks." "They are afraid of us?" "People can't tolerate others who look the same but are so different. They sense a threat to their way of life -- a threat that's even more dangerous because it's hidden." "But they make us hide!" "That figures. You're also their conscience. You're the spiritual perfection they've been hypocritically talking about for thousands of years. You only serve to make them realize how far they are from spiritual perfection. People hate superior individuals." When he went to bed that night, Conover lay awake a long while listening to Alice's almost inaudible sobbing. He felt even worse when he realized she had held it in until she was certain he was asleep. Throughout the next day, though, Beaumont acted as though nothing out ' of the ordinary had happened. Twice he passed by Conover's desk to discuss schedule changes. On neither occasion did he mention the money or even hint at the fact that Conover was a quid. Then, on his way out at closing time, he came around again. Smiling warmly, he laid several bills on the blotter. "There's the one-fifty," he said. "Decided I didn't need it after all." Absently watching the other personnel file out of the office, Conover felt a gratifying sensation spread over him. That he was retrieving the money wasn't in the least important to him. What counted was that his faith in the man had been justified.  desk and cuffed his back. "And don't worry about your secret. It's safe." "I -- I don't know what to say, Ed." "Don't have to say anshing. Come on out and have a drink and -- Hey, Bob!" he paused to shout at Snyder, the cashier, who was just going out the door. "I haven't checked in my receipts yet. Neither has Conover." "I'm in a hurry," the man called back. "You're chief consultant. You have access to the safe, so do it yourself. But leave the slips on my desk." Beaumont held Conover's deposit box open while Conover filled out his entry slip and placed the cash and credits within. By now the office was otherwise empty. At the first terrestrial desk, Beaumont hastily made entries on his own slip, wedged his deposit box imder his arm and led Conover into the cashier's cage. He dialed open the safe, placed his cash container in with the others and laid Conover's beside it. Then he paused to complete his entries. "I forgot the Barstow credit certificates," he said. "Get them for me while I finish this paper work, will you? They're in my top drawer." Conover couldn't find them there, however. He called back information to that effect and was told to try the side drawers on the right and, when they weren't there either, the ones on the left. "Sorry, Wayne!" Beaumont finally called out apologetically. "They were in my pocket all the while!" When Conover went back into the cashier's cage, Beaumont was making the last entry on his sheet. "Close the safe and give it a twist. Then we'll be on our way." "About that drink," Conover began. "The baby's due any day now and..." "... and you want to get home," Beaumont completed sympathetically. "I understand. Anyway, I didn't stop to ask myself how a quid might feel about taking a drink. See you tomorrow then." In front of the building Conover, still warmed by a gratifying glow over Beaumont's understanding and generosity, stared after him until he was swallowed up by the sidewalk crowd. Then  Conover watched the street lights flash on, buttoned his overcoat and started for the parking lot at the end of the block. "Just a second, Conover. I want to talk with you." He turned to see Bob Snyder coming out of the door and locking it behind him. If the cashier had been in the office after Beaumont and himself, Conover realized puzzledly, then he must have been hiding. But why? "I'm going to offer you a drink too," Snyder said, drawing up beside him. "But the difference is that I don't expect to be refused." The cashier was a meagerly built man who hardly came up to Conover's eye level. His face was intense. 'So you're a quid," he said evenly. "That explains everything." der had ordered a double scotch and Conover a glass of port. The cashier took a long draught, set his glass down heavily on the bar and said, "You're not only a quid -- you're also a prize dupe." "Why did you come back in the office after pretending to leave?" asked Conover in bewiderment. "Beaumont," Snyder began casually, "is usually the last to come in every morning, so I was curious when he was the second one in today. He didn't know I was already there, of course. I was even more curious when I saw him hide something that looked like a flashlight in his desk. Know what it was?" Conover silently shook his head. "A capacitance echo neutralizer," Snyder told him. "It's a device that's popular among the criminal element. Whenever anybody gets near a metal object, like a safe, he leaves an echo of his individual capacitance impressed on its outer molecular structure. These impressions fade away in time. But as long as they're there, they tell which persons, in what order, were in the vicinity." "It doesn't make sense," Conover objected. "To you, it wouldn't. A quid, by nature, isn't suspicious. Anyway, when Beaumont sent you to get the Barstow certificates, he emptied all the deposit boxes into his pockets, wiped his fingerprints off everything and used the electronic gadget to neutralize his capacitance echo on the metal. Since you closed the safe, you're the only one who'll be implicated when the money is missing. Beaumont will probably say you watched him open the safe, memorized the combination, found some excuse to stay in the office after he left, and took the money then." Conover gripped the stem of his wine glass. Beaumont's trickery came as a sobering revelation. He wondered just how desperately in need of money the man was. "We'll go find him," he said urgently. "We'll get him to put everything back." "Turn the other cheek, eh?" Snyder snorted. "You quids are unmitigated suckers." "What are you going to do -- turn him in?" Conover was thinking of Beaumont's wife and children. Snyder finished his drink and thoughtfully repeated the question. "Am I going to turn him in? Let me ask one first: Would a quid really cover up for Beaumont? Would he accept guilt?" eagerness about the man's expression, a savage look. "He wouldn't want to see anybody suffer -- not even Beaumont," Conover offered frankly. "He would probably let it appear that he was a guilty person trying to establish his innocence. That would be one way of keeping his identity hidden and protecting his family. They'd suffer, you see, if it became known he was a quid." Snyder smiled. "That's probably just the way Beaumont figured it. And he knows enough about quids to realize he was on safe ground." Conover studied the other man's expression. It was a twisted smile, as though he were telling a joke and nearing the punch line. "We're going to help Beaumont out of this jam, aren't we?" Conover asked. Snyder tossed down the rest of his drink. "Of course not." "Why not?" "Because I'm sitting pretty. He took a real haul out of that safe. Cash. Negotiable credits. And I'm the only one who could louse it up for him. He'll kick in every last cent and more -- to keep from serving a prison sentence." The stem of the glass snapped in Conover's hand. But his stare remained rigid. "Why are you telling me this? You could have blackmailed him after I was arrested -- without me even knowing about it." The hungry, impatient look clung to Snyder's face. Conover had no idea what it signified. "Why?" Snyder repeated, taking him by the arm and sliding off the stool. "Come on. I'll show you." He led him through a side door behind the bar and out into the alley. In the dim light that stabbed in from the street, the cashier's face was even tenser than it had been at the bar. Conover had seen that expression once before -- on the face of a mentally deficient child who was amusing himself by tormenting a litter of day-old puppies and watching them squirm in agony. He brought up his arms to ward off the blows he suddenly saw aimed at him, but he didn't expect the kick in the groin. home that evening. With one eye half closed, he had to drive slowly. Then, too, he pulled off the freeway several times and used his handkerchief to stop the flow of blood from his cut lip. He tried to think of some way to avoid Alice and her father. But they were in the living room waiting for him. Wavering in the doorway, he heard Dad's muffled oath and his wife's sharply drawn breath as they stared incredulously at his bruised and lacerated face and his torn clothes. Alice hurried over and helped him into a chair. "What happened?" her father demanded. "Was it Beaumont?" "No." "Don't stand there, Dad," Alice pleaded. "Get a towel and some hot water." She didn't say anything until he returned. Then, as she pressed the cloth against her husband's cheek, she asked with restrained terror, "Did someone else find out, Wayne?" "Weren't in a quid hunt, were you?" the old man persisted. "No. I'd rather not talk about it." "Leave him alone. Dad," Alice said. "He'll tell us if he wants to." "Don't have to tell," Dad grunted. "I can imagine what happened. Somebody else found out what he is. Probably some little pipsqueak of a character who couldn't hold up his end of a tiddly-winks match. Somebody tired of playing the role of spineless underdog and deciding to assert his masculinity for once in his miserable life. I just wish to hell I'd been there!" "Is that what happened, darling?" she asked. Conover nodded. "Who was it?" Dad said. "Let's not talk about it now. I'm tired." "Of course you are," said Alice, putting his arm around her shoulder and helping him toward the bedroom. Conover felt thoroughly miserable. He wanted to tell her about his other difficulties -- about the safe burglary and all that had happened since then. But what end would it serve? Certainly neither she nor Dad could help. And he might at least give them another day or two of peace and security before the ceiling fell in. When Alice returned to the bedroom hours later, however, she avoided his gaze while she changed into her nightgown and got into the other bed. She turned her face toward the wall. "I'm leaving you, Wayne," she said at last. He only continued staring at the ceiling. "If you could think harshly of anyone, you'd probably think I was selfish, picking this time to break away," she went on. "But if I can walk out now -- while you're in trouble -- then I know I'll be able to stay away for good." Actually, he realized, it was the only solution. There was but one way out of paying for Beaumont's crime, and that was to let himself be exposed as a quid. He couldn't expect Alice to share either stigma. "Wayne?" Despite her obvious uneasiness over his continued silence, she still avoided looking his way. "You know why I'm leaving, don't you? It isn't because I can't take it. It isn't that I don't love you. And I'm not running out because you're in trouble." "It's for the baby," he said, "That's right. You're the nicest guy and best husband who ever lived. But you're a luxury the baby can't afford. Both of us realize our child deserves more out of life than being the son of -- of someone different." nover went to work two hours late the next morning. As he had expected, there were two police copters on the roof of the building and an official car in front. He had almost reached his desk before the plainclothesman overtook him. "You Conover?" Before answering, he glanced about the room. Beaumont was busy with a client Behind the cashier's window, Snyder had his head bent low over the counter. "Yes, I'm Conover." "Captain wants to see you in Mr. Markey's office." The plainclothesman escorted him without relaxing the grip on his arm. In the private office, Markey looked up severely from his desk and fastened unwavering eyes on Conover. "That him?" asked a police officer standing by the window. "Yes. But I'd like to talk with him alone for a minute. Captain." The captain shrugged. "You're president of the company. It's your money." Markey offered Conover a chair after the others had gone. "Whether it's necessary or not, Conover, I'll fill you in. Fourteen thousand in cash and credits turned up missing from the safe this morning. The police capacitance echo scanner showed Snyder opened the safe at eight-oh-five. That was when he discovered the money was gone. The only other capacitance trace the scanner picked up was yours -- deposited at approximately sixtwenty last night. The police also found your fingerprints on the safe. What do you have to say?" Conover bowed his head. "Nothing." Markey impatiently drummed the desk with stout fingers. "You're a quid, aren't you?" Conover glanced up abruptly. "Who told you? Beaumont? Snyder?" The president smiled. "All right. Captain," he called out, "you can come in now." The officer entered, followed by several other men. "Just as you figured " Markey explained, "he's a quid. Two men in this office know it -- Beaumont and Snyder. I'd say that just about takes care of the inconsistencies." The officer and plainclothesmen and another man who was jotting down notes on a pad stared with naked dislike at Conover. "You want to lodge any charge against him?" The captain thrust an eager thumb toward Conover. "No," Markey said firmly. "I'm no quid hater. Now I'd appreciate the privacy of my office again. Conover, you stay here." The others filed out and Conover asked, "What inconsistencies?" "The police thought it looked like a frameup. Beaumont or Snyder, whoever it was, apparently intended to erase only his own previous echo from the safe. But he used so much juice that he left the metal virgin pure. Your echo leaped out so clearly that you were the last one we could suspect." "How did you know I was a quid?" "Only a quid would be naive enough to let himself be played for a sucker like that." Markey had been smiling amiably for several seconds. But suddenly his expression became quite serious. "Like I told the captain," he continued hesitantly, "I'm no quid hater. I believe in live and let live. If there are people who can't do any wrong and insist on making things easier for the rest of us, I don't mind that either." He came around the desk and laid his hand on Conover's shoulder. "But I'm a practical businessman, Wayne. I'll have to let you go. Having a quid around wouldn't help business any." "But nobody else has to know!" Conover said hopelessly. "You're wrong. You saw the reporter who was here. The whole story is probably already on the newscasts. I wanted to keep him out. But you know how those things go -- whenever somebody tries to sit down on this kind of news, the first shout that goes up is 'quid lover!' " Conover started for the door. "I'm sorry, Wayne," Markey said. And Conover knew he sincerely was. TT E stopped the car more than a block away from his home and sat there appalled at the harsh reality of the scene. There were scores of persons -- many of them neighbors and front lawn, like explosive charges waiting for an insignificant spark to set them off. Someone had festooned the customary banner from pole to pole across the walkway. The words were vivid and cruel: He watched two men, each carrying a pail, break loose from the crowd and dart up the steps. They swung the buckets and splashed steaming tar across the white siding of the house. Dipping sticks into the viscous liquid, they scribbled filthy words on the weatherboards. Then they had to retreat from a hail of stones that went crashing through the glass door and windows. Conover held the tiller in an anguished grip. Alice! God, if she was in that mess! He sent the car spurting forward, but slammed on the brakes again as he saw his father-in-law coming from behind a hedge in front of the next house. His sweater was torn and stretched grotesquely out of shape and his chin was bruised. A broken cane, the upper half of which he still gripped tenaciously, showed he had not been the only one to get hurt. He got in the car. "Well, son, you damned well maneuvered us into it good this time." "Where's Alice?" Conover asked, afraid of the answer he might get. "She's all right. Packed a grip and left an hour before the newscasts came out." Conover sent the car rolling slowly forward and turned at the first intersection. "What can I do, Dad?" "Don't know as how there's very much you can do. Nature just made a mistake with people like you. This isn't the first time she turned out a batch of useless, lethal mutations. It's her idea of a joke, I guess." "I don't suppose there's any use asking where Alice is." Dad leaned back against the cushion and exhaled audibly. "No, there isn't. She made me give my word." Conover swallowed. "But they tell me St. James Infirmary," the old man added casually, "is a pretty good place for a woman to have a baby." nurse ran a finger down the roster of patients. But she paused and glanced up troubledly. "Alice Conover?" she said, frowning. "Conover -- Conover -- Wayne Conover! You're that quid!" "Hurry it up, sister," Dad said irately. "We want to see her." The nurse's features grew set and hard. "Visiting hours are 'at seven. But don't bother coming back. She won't be able to see anybody." An orderly who had overheard stepped forward. "If this quid is giving you any trouble. Miss Davis," he volunteered, "I'll let him have it." "No, Mr. Johnson. We don't want any riot in here. He'll leave." "Alice -- " Conover pleaded -- "has she had the baby yet?" Dad lunged to the desk and grabbed for the roster. But Johnson seized his wrist, jerking him away. "Oh, Dr. Dorfmann." Relieved, the nurse glanced down the hall at a white-smocked man who was just coming out of the nursery. "Please, Doctor. Over here." The elderly physician, grinning genially, came over. His presence seemed to cast a spell that instantly restored the composure of the nurse and orderly. Harsh lines of anger and hate vanished from their faces and were replaced by fond smiles. Dad too, Conover noticed puzzledly, was visibly moved by the man's overwhelming personality, and was staring at him with fascination and intense respect. "Yes, Nurse?" Dorfmann inquired. She seemed lost in an outpouring of inarticulate affection. Her submissive expression of gratitude and respect was like a soft light on her face. Conover drew back, bewildered over the strangeness of the scene. "Oh." Miss Davis abruptly found herself. "This is Mrs. Conover's husband. He's that -- quid." Dorfmann laughed lightly. "Now is that so important?" "I told him he couldn't see her." "But of course he may. However, I think he should meet his son first. Have you seen the baby. Miss Davis? We just finished cleaning him up." She shifted uncertainly. "I -- no, I haven't I'm so busy -- " "I really think you ought to go take a look at the child," the physician insisted gently. She wavered, but only for a moment. He dazzled her with a smile and she went obediently down the hall. "You too, Johnson," Dorfmann said to the orderly. Johnson trotted expectantly after the nurse, as if told that a surprise awaited him. put his arm around Conover's shoulder in a warmhearted gesture. Incredulously, Conover gaped at him. "But -- but I'm a quid!" Dorfmann laughed until his eyes moistened. "So am I, son." Some vast suspicion was beginning to suggest itself to Conover. He pushed it away. It was too impossible to believe. "You can't be! They like you -- and everybody hates quids!" "Original mutants, perhaps," Dorfmann readily agreed. "But not second-generation quids, like your son and me. There's a difference, you know." Miss Davis came eagerly out of the nursery. "Why, Doctor, he's the loveliest baby we've ever had here! There's something about him that simply -- " She hesitated inadequately, as though struggling to find words that had never been needed until this moment She stopped trying and turned instead toward Conover. "I'm sure you'll be awfully proud of him. If there's anything we can do for you or Mrs. Conover, you just let us know." The orderly returned to the hall. "Say, Doc, I'd sure like to bring my wife to see that baby. Will it be all right?" But before Dorfmann could answer, Johnson seized Conover's hand and pumped it vigorously. "Congratulations, Mr. Conover. You're sure lucky to have a kid like that." The physician stopped smiling and nodded his head confidently after the orderly had started striding up the corridor. "You may have had a rough time until now," he told Conover. "But with that baby, you'll do all right from here on out." Johnson paused in the doorway to the nursery. "Don't you two guys forget to vote for Dr. Dorfmann in the next election." "You running for something?" Dad asked the physician. "Congressman from the Sixth District. Maybe I'll be able to do some real good there." He added facetiously, "And I think I have a fair chance of being elected, don't you?" Johnson stuck his head out the nursery for a final word. "Say, Conover, maybe your kid'll run for President some day!"      exceptional ideas about the world to come... if interplanetary colonization if relative immortality meptional s-f writers... if f. L. Wallace if Damon Knight if James E. Gunn if J. T. McIntosh if Theodore Sturgeon ,... Now collected in one exceptional volume for the permanent library of every reader of Galaxy Mogozine Edited by Published Oct. # Price # I coupon to order your copy. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies as soon as copies come off the press. I enclose  check, Q cash, Q money order in the amount of S. Offer a theftproof world and you attract the richest treasures -- and operators out to test the claim that your planet has absolutely... no place for By j. T. McIntosh T he tiny ship let herself down furtively, pretending not to be there. Since she was landing plumb in the middle uninhabitedness, she had every chance of getting away with the pretense. The pilot, George Kimber, looked for a lake, found one, and dropped toward it as if pulled by a cable. A couple of hundred yards from the edge, he landed neatly and looked around him curiously. He had once visited the friendly northern hemisphere of Vokis; it was hard to believe this forbidding landscape was part of the same planet. Three smoking volcanoes were visible from where the ship lay. Half a mile away, a hot spring suddenly hissed and spouted. No grass, no trees, no vegetation of any kind brightened the sullen wasteland of solidified lava, dull red igneous rock and sand that sulked under a metallic gray sky. Looking down, he saw his passenger emerge at the base of the ship, lugging two heavy cases. She was unusually shapeless in a white asbestos suit. He would have gone down to help her, but her instructions had been quite definite -- she was to set foot alone on the surface of Vokis, and she and the ship must be away fifteen minutes at most after landing. She made three rapid journeys, dragging very big black cases to a spur of rock only a hundred yards from the lake. The shape of this rock suited her purpose excellently. A huge flat stone had fallen over on a smaller rock, forming a fair-sized cave closed at one end by hard-packed sand. Although it was only five feet high at its apex, the cave afforded a perfect cache. When she had packed the cases inside, she kicked sand into the entrance to seal the gap, but couldn't fill it. She needn't worry, Kimber thought -- the stuff could stay there undiscovered for a thousand years. One small box she left out of the cache. She buried this in the sand right at the water's edge, stamping the sand hard on top of it. Then she ran well away from it along the shore of the lake and stopped with her back to the box she had buried. Kimber leaned forward in excitement, knowing what was going to happen. No matter how often he saw this, he could never quite believe it. Suddenly the girl was in the water, precisely where she had buried the box. She didn't walk there, run there or jump there. She just was there. And where she had stood an instant before, water splashed and soaked into the sand. Jumping out of the water and shaking herself, she ran toward the ship, waving to Kimber. She was satisfied. In another five minutes, the ship was out of Vokis's atmosphere and heading back to Earth. TN the comparative void of space, another ship sped toward Vokis. But this was months later, and this ship was a hundred times larger, and she wasn't pretending not to be there. She was the Vokian Queen, one of the regular Earth-Vokis liners. McKinlay hesitated before pushing open the door of the cabin, a worried frown on his face. The trouble with complicated plans, no most invariably need assistants to help you carry them out. And that means relying on others for the success of your plan, your liberty and even your life. McKinlay hated having to rely on anybody but himself. However, it was much too late to withdraw now. He pushed open the door and went inside. The girl in front of the mirror waved casually to him in the glass. His eyes widened incredulously as he saw her reflection. In two jumps, he was beside her, roughly jerking her shoulder to spin her round. "Oh, God!" he muttered savagely. "Why am I surrounded by fools?" The girl tore her shoulder free and turned back to the mirror. "They say you know a man by the company he keeps," she said drily. "Suppose anybody saw you like that -- don't you know it would ruin ever#rthing?" Joan said nothing. She was studying the face in the mirror as if it were somebody else's. As a matter of fact, it was -- literally. She was a medium-sized blonde with a figure that was no more than passable, and her white sheath evening gown did nothing to make it look any better than it was. Her breasts were small and hard, her waist thickish and her hips too lean. Incensed almost to violence, McKinlay had to jam his hands in his pockets to prevent himself from wrapping them around her throat. "Are you out of your mind?" he demanded. "If anyone on board this ship saw you like that -- " "I haven't invited anybody to my cabin," she said mildly. "Yes, but suppose somebody -- " "Well, if anybody but you came in, I guess I could always jump up with a shriek and dive into the bathroom." "All the same -- " Joan sighed. "Genius, I'm going to tell you something for your own good. People aren't as dumb as you think. I know I'm not as smart as you. Nobody is. Nevertheless, when I do something, there's quite often some vague, childish, half-formed idea behind it." McKinlay calmed down. "Such as?" "Such as practice." "Practice?" "I may sometimes have to become Opal in a hurry. And then become me again in nothing flat. So it seemed to me that even the frightful risk of somebody bursting into my cabin and seeing another woman there was worth taking to-" McKinlay grunted. "Let's see you become Joan McKinlay in nothing flat." "Okay," Joan said amiably. Q HE stood up and threw off her clothes. Some women don't show themselves in their skins for reasons of modesty. Others shouldn't for reasons of common sense. Joan was one of the latter. At least, at the moment, she was. She picked up the two electrodes of a small machine on the dressing table, put one foot on the seat and applied the electrodes above and below her calf. The muscle jumped in protest. With firm double strokes, she chased it where she wanted it to go. After a few seconds' treatment, she put that leg down and her other leg up. The effect of her treatment was to move the swell of calf about two inches higher. Her thighs received a deft stroke or two, and too-hard muscles relaxed. When she stopped working on them, what had previously been merely a couple of passable feminine legs were in the showgirl class. The two electrodes touched her groin, extended the arc, curved in, and she had the taut abdominal muscular development of a bellydancer. The hard muscles of her breasts were softened; her bosom became full though still firm, and when she laid down the electrodes, She sat at the table again and began to model her face. The electrodes tightened her cheek muscles. An ointment which she handled very carefully with cotton held in forceps enabled her to give her small chin a slight cleft. The same ointment changed the shape of her ears and flattened them to her head. A quick eye rinse brightened her eyes and appeared to darken their blue color. Her nose shrank under the application of another ointment. She took caps off nine teeth, improving them in the process. Having completed her transfiguration, she moved immediately to the washstand, washed her hands and face quickly, and swabbed and dried the areas of her body which had been touched by the damp electrodes. Again without pause, she turned to the bed and picked up another dress, also white, also an evening gown. But when she slipped it on and stepped into high-heeled sandals, the fact that in both cases her hair was the same, her height and weight unchanged and her dress a white evening gown, only served to emphasize the other differences. "Well?" Joan asked. "Four minutes," McKinlay said. "Same time the other way?" "A little longer. This is me. It's easier to get back to being me than to duplicate Opal. Six minutes the other way." ly. "Pretty good," he conceded. "How about it?" she asked. "Was I right to practice? Maybe in my half-baked, fumbling way. I had some excuse for taking such a fearful risk of ruining your master plan?" "Oh, sure." "Thanks for the most gracious apology," said Joan. "One thing, though. You're not wearing anything under that dress." "I know. If seconds count -- " "Now look, Joan. C.O.S. is the cleverest, most efficient, most thorough police force in the Galaxy. One tiny mistake and they're on it like hawks. Any really close observer could see you're not wearing a thing under that dress." "Any really close observer is meant to," she retorted blandly. "Genius, I'll have to tell you again. People aren't as dumb as you think. I especially am not as dumb as you think." "Are you telling me -- " "Listen. On Vokis, I intend to wear clothes that would make Madame Pompadour look like a new girl at a convent. The only thing I'm going to wear under anything is skin. Don't tell me you can't figure out why." "I can't figure out why," he said stiffly. "Seems to me the best thing is not to attract attention, instead of-" "Genius, let's face it. Opal's figure wouldn't excite a sailor marooned for a year. The more I flash mine around, the more preposterous it's going to seem that I could ever be taken for Opal, or vice versa." McKinlay shrugged reluctantly. "Maybe you've got a point." "You never spoil anybody with compliments, do you?" "Hell, I've admitted you could possibly be right. What more do you want?" "Nothing." She looked at him with whimsical exasperation. "I see you're going to play your part all right." "Huh?" "Pretending to be my husband." "What are you talking about?" "There's no risk of anybody thinking you're too attentive to me for me to be your wife." "Hell, no. This is a business partnership." "Obviously." McKinlay frowned. "You told me you wanted it that way." "Oh, yes. So I do. But when a girl surrenders her virtue and maidenly modesty in the interests of a business partnership, she'd still prefer the partner to be at least interested." McKinlay grunted and dropped the unimportant subject. "Are you sure that transmitter you planted will still work? Did you set it up right?" "Do we have to go into that again?" "I just wondered if you were quite sure -- " "Genius, pay attention while I repeat -- people aren't as dumb as you think. Especially, I'm telling you again, me." McKinlay grunted again, unconvinced. not an imitation -- looked exactly as Joan -- made up to resemble Opal -- had looked in the sheath evening dress. She was at the window of a room high in an hotel in Vanna, one of the principal cities of the planet Vokis. "That's the ship landing now," she said. Behind her. Bill Conway dropped his glass. It didn't break, of course; the bourbon soaked into the thick carpet. Opal turned impatiently. "For Pete's sake, take a grip on yourself, Bill." "I hope to God they're not on it," said Bill fervently. "Of course they're on it. Think we've been planning for six months just to give up now?" "I wish I'd never listened to you." Opal shrugged. "And I wish I'd never had to tell you anything about it. But you have to know. You may have to cover up for -- for the other girl." She knew the room wasn't tapped. Nevertheless, it would have been lunacy to mention Joan and McKinlay by name. She knew how often people who are certain they aren't being overheard do happen to be overheard. "Look, honey, we'll never get away with this," said Bill hopelessly. "The Vokis police... the C.O.S..." He shuddered. Opal didn't bother to answer. Bill bit his nails nervously. He was a thin, harassed man, not yet thirty, but already very thin on top. Opal was hard and metallic, the kind of woman who seldom even pretended to care about anything beyond her own interests. She could make love to a man or shoot him with the same uncomplicated efficiency. "Why did it have to be you?" Bill burst out. "You know very well why it had to be me." "Yes. You're a teleport. I wish -- " With quick, angry strides. Opal was before him, and she slapped him stingingly on the cheek. "Didn't I tell you never to mention that word?" "Sure, honey," said Bill, cowering back. "I only -- " "Get this straight. We can't miss so long as the C.O.S. never get the slightest hint of how it's done. Tele -- people like -- the other girl and me are rare as snowstorms on Mars. When we start to operate, it will certainly occur to somebody in the C.O.S. that a -- that one of us might be mbced up in the affair. But never in their wildest dreams will anybody imagine there are two of us. And until they start working on that idea, they'll never figure out how it could be done. So get this, sweetheart If you mention that word once more while we're on Vokis, you'll never get to say it twice." "Sure, honey," said Bill again. It would never be guessed that if Opal cared for anything or anybody apart from herself, it was Bill. But that was the case.  world in the Galaxy. It was also one of the most pleasant to live on, with its mild winters, not too hot summers, and complete absence of native life, with its warm, calm seas and beautifully planned cities. How it came to be such a paradise was largely because it was an unusually young world to be habitable. Its internal heat was high and its sun was gentle and wellbehaved. There had been time for the crust of Vokis to become hard and stable -- except in the southern volcanic region, which was unlikely to be settled for many centuries yet -- but not enough time for indigenous life to develop. So life came to it, as is the way of life. The humans who came to Vokis had learned a lot about colonizing worlds by this time and didn't make the usual mistakes. Given a chance, for once, to set up their own ecology, they seized it gratefully, and any errors they did make canceled each other out after a century or so. The result was a world without insects or birds -- unless you counted imported chickens and ducks. A world without pests of any kind, for only herbivorous animals were brought to it, all large enough to be kept under control. A world where even the bacteria were controlled. All this would have amounted to nothing unless the mineral resources of Vokis made settlement worthwhile. However, the mineral resources of Vokis were more than adequate. Gold, silver, platinum and diamonds were so common that mere export of raw ore soon ceased to be economic. Vokis became the prime manufacturer of small precision goods. Watches, clocks, electronic components, tools, lenses, cameras, stone settings -- anything which was small and light and expensive became virtually the monopoly of Vokis. Because Vokis was rich anyway, it wasn't worth the effort of making and exporting anything but the best. And soon everybody everywhere knew it. A Vokis label meant supreme quality. Vokis found herself in the sublimely comfortable position of never quite being able to catch up with the demand throughout the rest of the Galaxy for her products. Wealth attracts buzzards like carrion. Until nearly half a century ago, Vokis had been rich and lawless. But when Vokis began strictly controlling immigration and formed the Civil Order Service, the best paid, least corruptible and most astute police force in the Galaxy, law and order came to stay. And still more wealth migrated there to enjoy the protection of the C.O.S. Now Vokis was a legend. Everybody wanted to go there; few were admitted. Every crook wanted a share of the loot; none got any. But to do the criminal fraternity justice, there was always somebody ready to try. ' "HE customs inspection was as exhaustive and exhausting as McKinlay had been led to expect. He was glad that he and Joan had made no attempt to sneak in the apparatus they needed. The only way to install it anywhere on the surface of Vokis was the way Joan had already done it. That was also, of course, the only way to get anything away. All Joan's makeup equipment had been consigned to the Vokian Queen's very efficient and carnivorous disposal system. So McKinlay was able to watch the exacting customs examination with the amused tolerance of one who wasn't attempting to smuggle anything. It was warm and sunny as he stepped out on the field. To the west lay the fabulous skyline of Vanna. To the south, the sea. To the east, five broad highways leading to other major cities. To the north, a tall, good-looking man who was exhibiting keen and disturbing interest in Greg McKinlay. ' "Mr. McKinlay?" said the tall man pleasantly. "My name's Glyn Morgan. Welcome to Vokis." ' "I didn't expect to be met," said McKinlay, summoning surprise and pleasure to cloak his uneasiness at seeing so soon the dreaded Civil Order Service badge. "Glad to know you." "I understand you're here to do a book on the C.O.S.," said Morgan affably. "Your publisher asked for cooperation, and naturally we're glad to oblige. Isn't your wife with you?" "That's her coming down now," said McKinlay. Morgan looked up and blew all his fuses. Joan had emerged wearing Bermuda shorts and a suntop which contained an astonishing amount of material considering it managed not to conceal anything. Watching the tall, handsome and very efficient-looking C.O.S. man ' go to pieces at sight of Joan, McKinlay felt much better. He was only a man, after all. "Joan, meet Glyn Morgan of the C.O.S.," he said. Joan walked straight-legged on her high heels up to Morgan and took his hand. "To say this is going to be a pleasure," Morgan croaked hoarsely, "would be to state only one per cent of the truth."  Joan smiled. "Greg," she said over her shoulder, "see about the divorce, will you?" "Mrs. McKinlay," said Morgan earnestly, "don't say things like that unless you mean them." It looked as if Joan's idea was correct, McKinlay had to admit. It would never cross Morgan's mind that Joan could be mistaken for non-whistlebait like Opal Conway. McKinlay had known very well that no ingenious, untrue story would get him into Vokis unsuspected. He really had approached a reputable New York publisher with an outline and specimen chapters of a book on the C.O.S. of Vokis which had made the book editor's eyes glisten. This was not surprising, for McKinlay had paid a top-line crime writer a fat fee to produce the synopsis. Since McKinlay's proposal was to go to Vokis with his wife at his own expense to collect the necessary first-hand material, the pubup a contract for the proposed book and make the approach to Vokis asking for cooperation. Morgan took them on a quick helicar tour of the main landmarks of Vanna, giving them enough important bearings so they wouldn't ever get hopelessly lost. He showed them his own home and traced the route to the McKinlay's hotel. He installed them in their suite and indicated his eagerness to tell or show McKinlay everything he wanted to know, either immediately or at any time he might suggest. "That's very kind of you, Morgan," said McKinlay. His brain raced. Although he liked to work everything out to the last detail, it delighted him to be able to seize any opportunity of improving on an already excellent plan. "How about this evening -- about eight, perhaps?" Joan looked up sharply. "But, Greg-" "Or maybe a little later," said McKinlay quickly. "Eight-thirty?" "Sure," said Morgan. "Nothing else you want now? Don't hesitate to call on me for anything you want. That goes for you too, Mrs. McKinlay." "And if there's anything you can't do for me," said Joan artlessly, "I can always ask your wife." "My wife? I'm not married." "Oh," said Joan, as if that were a very important item of information. Morgan laughed somewhat breathlessly and left them. They knew better than to start talking where they were. McKinlay suggested a stroll before lunch, and Joan made a few harmless remarks about what a nice man Mr. Morgan was. Only when they were out on a broad, handsome boulevard did Joan say: "As you once so politely asked me, are you out of your mind? This evening is the first job." "Exactly," said McKinlay with satisfaction. "Zero hour is #. Morgan will arrive at exactly #. We'll give him a drink. You'll be wearing one of your most sensational outfits. It will play hell with Morgan's concentration. I'll see this after a while and tell you to go and put on something decent. At # you'll laught, tease Morgan, and go into your room to have a bath and change." "I get it," said Joan admiringly. "Genius, sometimes I think you're too smart for your own good. Or mine either." "That gives you seven minutes to turn on the water, make your change, turn off the water, and do the job. You could join us again at #." "Quick bath," Joan commented. "With company in, would anybody take more than a quick dip? If we ever are suspected, Morgan will say he was with me all the time and that you were out of his sight only for ten or twelve minutes -- not long enough to walk to the end of the street." "Genius," said Joan, "I could kiss you." "Save that for Morgan. I must say you're doing a good job on him. He thinks you like him." "I do like him," said Joan warmly. "I think he's cute." "Cute," McKinlay said in disgust. it was really he who was invited, not Opal. McKinlay had arranged his and Joan's research visit to Vokis fairly easily. The Conways had arrived four months earlier, however, and they'd had to give a genuine reason to be there permanently, so they had come in as immigrants. For all four participants, the whole plan had been complete, exact as to dates and times. Neither McKinlay nor Joan had the faintest idea where the Conways were or what they were doing, but that didn't matter. Not the first time. Bill had been readily accepted as an immigrant because he was a top-grade precision tool cutter. There could be no fakery about that. You were good at your job or you weren't, and Bill was. "Now look," said Opal as they dressed for the party, "don't come near me with a cocktail glass. If anybody drops a martini over this dress..." Bill shuddered at the thought. "You'd better not dance either," he said. "Why not?" "Somebody might step on it." Opal looked at him with more favor than usual. "You're right, Bill. Surprising, but you're right. I won't dance till afterward. And remember you've got to cover for Joan. This is the weak part of the scheme, counting on you to take care of emergencies, but there shouldn't be any. Is your watch right?" It was an ordinary party, nothing remarkable about it, no notable people present. For the most part, the men were in the precision tool business. The women were merely their wives. But at such a gathering in Vanna, there was always a display of treasures worth fortunes. The host alone had objets d'art worth place. Given ten seconds, any ordinary thief could pick up a cool And Opal was no ordinary thief. When she and Bill arrived, she couldn't help smiling with satisfaction. The party was in a vast lounge with a softly lit dance floor and dark corners galore. Any of the latter would do for her purpose. She pointed two out to Bill. This was going to be easy. She glanced down at her dress, a long black gown with a full skirt. There was nothing unusual about it except that anything dropped down her bosom would not drop out. Then she glanced at her watch... #. Not nearly time to get busy. She'd begin at #. "And this is my wife, Opal," Bill was saying. She smiled automatically at a fat woman and priced her necklace at four hundred thousand. nnWO hours before Morgan was due to arrive, McKinlay went into the bathroom, locked the door and ran the water. His coldly analytical mind had come up with a possible snag. If the bathroom in the suite was wired for sound, with a C.O.S. man at the other end -- and such things had to be considered -- Joan couldn't use it as she planned. In the first place, the number of baths she was going to have to take would be highly suspicious, and also their timing. In the second place, it would puzzle any listener to hear somebody get into a bath and then listen to a lot of remarkably blank silence. So before he let her proceed, he checked for microphones. In their luggage had been a little gadget which wasn't at all suspicious, since it was used to check for breaks or bad connections in wires. It also, naturally, discovered wires where there weren't supposed to be any. McKinlay switched it on. If there was a microphone and anyone was listening, the listener would get frying noise and might guess that someone was testing for wires. A giveaway, but it couldn't be helped. A weak, limited electrical field sought out line conductors and pointed them out. McKinlay got the light, the mirror demister, a power point and some metal ornamentation. That was all. Encouraged, he adjusted the little instrument and checked for permanent magnets, moving coils, ribbons, crystals. He found nothing. The water flow was silent, by pressure from below. Even if there was a microphone in one of the other rooms, it wouldn't pick up sounds of the bath being filled. Satisfied, McKinlay opened the door silently and beckoned to Joan. He closed the door behind her quietly. The lounge radio was on, turned up loud. "It's all right," he murmured. "You can go ahead." She put on a white bathing cap and started to slip off her wrap. "You staying?" she asked. There's nothing you can do." "I know," he said, but made no move to go. She shrugged, dropped the wrap, stepped out of her shoes and lowered herself into the bath. For a moment she hesitated, concentrating. Then she lowered her head under the water so that she was submerged -- and disappeared. The level of the water changed slightly. Though the human body is largely composed of water, the average specific gravity is slightly different. Joan hadn't been replaced by her own volume of water, but by her own weight. McKinlay stared down at the water in the bath. It had become cooler and slightly cloudy... the scene she had first fixed in her mind some months before. Three volcano peaks. Sand. Lava. Red rock. A leaden sky. She stood up in three feet of water and waded out of the lake. Teleportation was a rare talent, and teleports who could jump half across a planet to a transmitter were rarer still. First-stage teleports like Opal Conway could make the jump easily enough from a transmitter, but there were very few whose talents were highly developed enough to tap the power of a transmitter half a world away and go right to it. Joan herself couldn't have made the teleport if she hadn't fixed every detail of the location firmly in her mind on the one occasion when she was actually there. That was why she, not McKinlay, had had to set up the cache. The things she had hidden in the crack in the rock were undisturbed, which was no surprise. Even reconnaissance flights across this region were rare. The C.O.S. had no smuggling problem and consequently had little interest in possible unauthorized landings in the wasteland. Vokis needed no tariff protection -- consequently, smuggling didn't pay. From one of the cases, Joan took a black dress with a full skirt. Opal would be wearing a dress exactly like that. Joan laid it out ready, complete with accessories. From the same case she took a complete makeup kit. She would have to take it back with her. Usually she would teleport here, make her change to resemble Opal, switch with Opal at the agreed time, switch again soon afterward (Opal supplying the impetus the second time), restore her own face and figure, and teleport back to the hotel. But this time, if McKinlay's alibi plan was to work, she'd have to make both changes in Vanna. It was dangerous only in that for an hour or two the makeup materials would be around in the suite, if anyone cared to look for them. C.O.S. would know all about teleportation, but would assume two things -- that a transmitter on the spot was necessary, and that anyone who made a jump would be replaced instantly with his own mass in stone, soil or water from the place to which he'd gone. In the first assumption, they'd be wrong. In the second, with any luck, they could be deceived. Thieves of all kinds had known for ages that the best way of covering their tracks was to make it appear that nothing was missing. It may have been true that Shakespeare's works weren't written by him, but by another fellow of the same name. Similarly, when C.O.S. considered teleportation, as they inevitably would, it was hardly likely to occur to them that Opal Conway, instead of being replaced by # pounds of sand, had been replaced by # pounds of another girl made up to look like Opal Conway. As for Joan's frequent teleports between the hotel in Vanna and the cache in the volcanic southern hemisphere, the idea of teleporting from a bath to a lake was typical of McKinlay's cunning. There was no suspicious sand or soil or rock to be disposed of somehow -- only water which would drain down the pipe afterward, leaving no evidence whatever. Typical also of McKinlay's plans was the fact that any inconvenience or discomfort they entailed -- in this case, frequent duckings in cold water -- was suffered by somebody else. Another thing occurred to Joan. She laid a big towel beside the black dress. She'd have to allow at least a minute to dry herself before switching with Opal. Fortunately this wasn't one of the occasions when the substitution would be subjected to long and exacting scrutiny. Now everything was ready. She went back to the lake, waded out in it, sat down in it and ducked her head under the water. This time it was gloriously easy, with the power she needed right there beside her. Even Opal Conway would have no trouble. M organ arrived at the hotel, as expected, precisely at #. McKinlay was all set with a small tape recorder and a notebook. Joan was all set with a gown which plunged nearly far enough to make her bare-footed. Drinks were fixed. McKinlay ignored Morgan's distraction and the way his eyes walked around the room with Joan. "For a start, Morgan," he said, "can you tell me in one sentence why the C.O.S. is so good?'" Morgan could talk without his eyes, and proved it. "The public cooperates," he said absently. "That's the whole explanation. Suppose you, or anybody else, wanted to go to any other city on Vokis. You would have to tell us, and why. Otherwise you couldn't go. If you even wanted to spend a night in any other part of this city, you would have to register in the new locality. Did you see any green boxes at the intersections?" "Sure. We wondered what they were." "C.O.S. posts. Tomorrow I'll show you how to use one. If a friend asks you to stay the night, you register at a C.O.S. point. There's a lot of other checks I  won't go into now. Result of all I this is, whenever anything happens, j we can check back and tell who the criminal is before we leave the  office." i "I don't quite see how that works," said McKinlay. The recorder was on. He didn't have to pretend to be interested in this. He was most sincerely interested in it. There are two sides to the law, and people on each side of it are equally interested in how it operates. Joan bent to give Morgan his second drink, and as she bent over him, he not unnaturally choked over the last of his first. "The real point," said Morgan, recovering bravely, "is that Vokians accept it as their civic duty to help the C.O.S. Vannans don't get angry when we ask questions or detain them a while or search them or raid their houses." "Well, that must be a help to  you." "Sure. We get gorgeous help from the public. They show everything. I mean -- " Joan laughed, and McKinlay permitted himself a wintry smile as Morgan went red. "Joan, you're not in on this," said McKinlay firmly. "Go powder your nose. Let Morgan and me talk in peace." "No, please..." Morgan began. "He's just being polite," McKinlay said. "I can take a hint," said Joan with mock dignity. "I go to wrap myself in sackcloth and ashes." "No, don't do that, Mrs. McKinlay. I only -- " Joan smiled. "Get on with your work. I'll take'a bath. But don't be too long." She left the room at # precisely. houldn't have brought her,"  said McKinlay. "Now -- " "Mow'd you come to marry her?" Morgan asked curiously. "I don't know. How does anybody come to marry anybody?" "Wouldn't have thought she was your type, that's all." Morgan shrugged, grinned. "How about reeling back the last thirty seconds or so?" McKinlay did so. From the tape recorder came the words: "Vannans don't get angry when we ask questions or detain them a while or search them or raid their houses." "Back on Earth," Morgan went on, "the police got hamstrtmg when people started screaming about personal privacy." McKinlay nodded. "Can you blame them? People like to have personal privacy." "Well, you can educate them out of it. Make everybody admit that people only shriek about violation of privacy when they have something to hide." "And it works?" "It works so long as you make it clear that you aren't concerned about personal morals. If C.O.S. uncovers any irregularity that isn't a civil crime, we simply forget it. And we're very tough on blackmail. So if Jones is sleeping with Smith's wife, he doesn't holler 'Privacy!' whenever we come near him. He tells us all we want to know, sometimes more than we want to know, and we move on. If Smith ever finds out, he doesn't get it from us." "And you mean to say that explains the phenomenal record of C.O.S.?" "Explains a good part of it, anyway." McKinlay reflected. "I don't think Earth would stand for a situation like that." Morgan shrugged. "We don't say C.O.S. methods would work anywhere. All we know is they work on our planet. Society gets the kind of law it deserves." "Can you give me some illustrations?" "Of course. Last week, a missing diamond turned up. If it had happened on Earth, right at the beginning the police would've been stymied, because the woman, who had claimed insurance, would have said, 'See my lawyer,' and the man who originally gave it to her, who was married to somebody else, would have said, 'I have nothing to say,' and the man who tried to sell it would have said he found it in the street, and so on. As it was -- " Joan's voice sounded plaintively through the bedroom door : "Bring me a drink, Greg." "Come out and get it," said McKinlay, knowing she was now Opal's double. "Stinker!" she said, and her steps receded. It was # " crouched under a flat stone. Opal pulled up her skirt and detached the bag she had worn underneath. She left it where it lay on the sand. Joan would attend to it. With it she placed a note which gave details of the next operation. She was careful to move as little as possible, for later she expected to be searched. Sand in her shoes or in her hair might be hard to explain. However, now that she knew the kind of hideout Joan had picked, she could go to the beach at Vanna every few days and any questions about sand in her hair would be answered before they were asked. Joan weighed several ounces more than Opal did. So now that Opal no longer carried her loot, she had to replace its weight. She did so by drinking deeply from the bottle of water which Joan had left her. After that, she was ready. She didn't bother to fix the location in her mind. She couldn't teleport there an # rway. All the teleporting Opal had to do was the second switch. Joan did all the rest. Opal allowed just enough time for Bill to steer Joan into another dim corner of the lounge. Then she laboriously built up the whole scene in her mind -- location, temperature, sight, sound. Bill... And she was in Bill's arms again. " ders," Morgan said. McKinlay raised his eyebrows. "Though you solve them so easily? I'd have thought Vokis was one place where murder didn't pay." "Seems when a man gets around to murder, it doesn't matter to him whether he's caught or not. Hardly anybody kills somebody really expecting to get away with it. Very damned few murders, statistically, are professional jobs, here or anywhere else. Husband hacks his wife's head off with an axe and then rings us and tells us about it. Man stabs..." He stopped as Joan emerged, glowing from her bath. It was #. "Go right ahead," she said. "I can't be distracting you now, can I?" She was wearing a wrap which revealed nothing but her face, hands and feet. "Mrs. McKinlay," said Morgan frankly, "you'd distract me if you had on a spacesuit" She smiled and sat down. "Glyn," she said, "I like you. And when are you going to get around to calling me Joan?" Morgan took about fifteen minutes to get back on track. And soon after that the phone rang. "It'll be for me," he said. "My department knows I'm here." He listened for a while, saying practically nothing. Then he put the phone down and turned to McKinlay. "Like to see a case?" he asked. "What do you mean?" "Jewel robbery at a party twenty minutes ago. I left orders to call me if anything interesting turned up. You can come and see the C.O.S. at work if you like." "Why, sure," McKinlay said with much more enthusiasm than he felt, for this wasn't part of the plan. "Will I see you catch the thief?" Morgan grinned. "I doubt that. But you'll see us establish the method. Then we'll find who the thief was. Obviously he'll be gone. If he's still there, then you will see us catch him." "Can I come too?" Joan pleaded. They might search the suite, McKinlay thought. Just on general principles. He was glad when Morgan said: "Better not, Mrs. -- Joan. We'll have to rush if we're to see ansrthing, and you're not ready." As they went, McKinlay was hoping Joan realized the importance of having the suite ready for a C.O.S. check at all times. Working against the C.O.S., it was impossible to be too careful. " arrived, C.O.S. men and women were just finishing searching all the guests. Their thoroughness was obvious. "Do you really expect to find anything?" McKinlay asked Morgan. "Very unlikely. But that's not the point. This eliminates one thing. Half the job is finding things to eliminate. Excuse me a minute while I find out the facts." McKinlay was left standing in a corner. When he moved, one of the C.O.S. men came over and asked him politely to stay where he was. McKinlay began to see how meticulous C.O.S. was. Although they had nothing on him, he wasn't to be allowed to wander about. It wasn't likely that he had any part in the robbery, but they saw no sense in taking chances. One of the last of the women to be searched, Opal Conway, came past She knew better than to do anything more than glance at him incuriously. McKinlay could realize it was giving her a fright to see him there. Morgan returned. "Guess I should have waited for more information before I brought you along here," he said ruefully. "We're not going to find anything." "What do you mean?" "Just that. A lot of stuff has been stolen and it's decidedly gone. Nobody has left, nobody left at any time. Must be one of those gimmick cases. You know, a theft that depends on an idea, a new technique, perhaps a new variation of an old one." "You mean you won't solve it?" "Oh, we'll solve it, sure. We never give up, you see." "What sort of gimmick could it be? I thought there was nothing really new in crime." Morgan was quite unconcerned about the affair, not seeming even irritated that when he brought somebody along to show how quickly and efficiently C.O.S. could crack a case, it should happen that C.O.S. wasn't going to crack it after all, certainly not immediately. McKinlay couldn't help being irritated by his confidence. Couldn't they see they were up against something big this time? "Depends who worked it," said Morgan, "and how much trouble he went to. Suppose it was Bryans, the guy who owns the place. He could easily have worked something -- false wall, hiding place in one of the 'armchairs, anything like that. We've had a good look round, but short of tearing everything to bits, we can't be completely sure the stuff isn't still here. But that would be stupid. He'd never get away with it." McKinlay became even more irritated. Morgan treated this as if a horse had bolted, saying in effect: "Don't worry, he'll be back in a couple of hours." Morgan didn't seem to have any conception of the fact that this was the start of the biggest series of robberies in history. "What kind of gimmick?" McKinlay insisted. "Well, we had a similar case at a garden party once. Turned out the stuff had been flown away in a small radio-operated helicopter, no more than a foot long. Couldn't be that here, but that's the kind of thing people try. One obvious thing to investigate is teleportation. Know anything about it?" "Can't say I ever saw it done," said McKinlay cautiously. "It can be done all right, by certain gifted individuals. Only there are three snags. One, you can't send inanimate objects by themselves; somebody has to take them. Two, when something goes, something has to replace it. Three, teleportation needs apparatus. So if it was done here, we can't -- at the moment -- figure out how." Opal reappeared, followed by the two women officers who had been searching the female guests. Morgan looked up and they shook their heads. "Well, that's it," said Morgan cheerfully. "Nothing to see here. We'd better get back. Sorry I brought you out. I thought we'd turn up something." "I'm glad I came. Maybe I'll get an unsolved case for the book. Even C.O.S. can't be perfect." Morgan shook his head. "Never claimed we were. All the same, you won't get an unsolved case, Greg. We've never had one yet." Ir organ's confidence rattled McKinlay as well as irritating him. But days passed and nothing happened that justified Morgan's confidence. The second job went without a hitch, and since it was a theft from an art gallery with a lot of other people in it at the time. Opal's name didn't get on the record again. On the third occasion, she was one of about three hundred women and forty men in a store. On the fourth occasion, she was searched again, and since by this time the C.O.S. could be trusted to be highly suspicious of Mrs. Opal Conway -- all taken into consideration in the plan -- the fifth job was carried through without her. This time Bill and Opal were out of town, at Meshnik, a hundred miles away, and while Joan worked alone. Opal gave herself a cast-iron alibi. Joan got clear with several himdred thousand in cash at a beach house, took it to the distant cache and came back within seconds to join in the lamentations over the theft. On this occasion, the telltale sand which proved somebody had teleported was deposited in a little pile on the beach, which was a good place to hide it. Though McKinlay hated this particular job for several reasons, one of which was its brute simplicity, it did show the C.O.S. very clearly that the series of big thefts which was beginning to worry Vannans, if not the C.O.S., didn't necessarily involve Opal Conway. McKinlay was nearly as smart as he thought he was. He knew to a lot less than an inch the difference between a suspicious circumstance that really looked as if it meant something, and the suspicious circumstance that just happened to the most innocent people. Opal Conway, necessarily, was going to be around when many of the snatches took place. The C.O.S., necessarily, was going to suspect Opal, without being able to prove anything. It must therefore be clearly demonstrated on several occasions that Opal was no more than the young wife of a tool cutter, and that though sometimes she happened to be around when things disappeared, things could disappear when she quite clearly wasn't. Naturally, the Vannan press had found a name for the thief. He was Shortly. Shortly lifts # -- or whatever sum or value -- became quite a common headline. Shortly got his name because the C.O.S., asked about progress in the case, usually said, "We expect an arrest shortly." Morgan's early confidence began to wear thin. He kept McKinlay in touch, sometimes taking him to the scenes of Shortly coups and going over the ground with him. He continued to insist that it was only a matter of time. ever, when he said to McKinlay once : "Greg, about this book of yours. It gave us a kick when we heard about it, and I know from what I've read of it that it's going to be a fine job. But look -- you'll be fair about these Shortly jobs, won't you? I mean -- " "I'll be fair, I hope," said McKinlay, "but that means telling the truth, not hushing it up." "Sure, but what I meant was you'll wait till the case is complete?" "Until you catch Shortly, you mean? Well, you know we're booked to leave in three weeks." "Yes, but... Look, Greg, what I'm trying to say is, just as a favor to us, why not wait till the case is closed before you publish the book?" McKinlay was enjoying this very much. He adopted a judicial air. "We go back in three weeks," he said. "Two months to reach Earth. Probably three months after we arrive before the book comes out. Any time in the next five or six months, I'll be glad to rewrite the Shortly story if you can send me the final details. Is that fair?" "Sure, Greg," Morgan said gratefully. "That's fine. I was a little scared you were going to go back to New York and rush out a book called The Case That Baffled The C.O.S. And we'd look kind of silly, even if we caught this Shortly character the following week." "You've got it all wrong," said McKinlay. "Of course I want the book to sell. And this case -- " "That's what I mean. You could write this thing up so we'd look like-" McKinlay was shaking his head. "Morgan, the selling point of my book is that C.O.S. is good. I'm not praising it extravagantly; peopie get that sort of thing in the commercials and grow tired of it. If C.O.S. was just any ordinary police force, what would be the point in the book? How could I expect a lot of people to read it? It would be far better from my point of view if you caught Shortly." "I see," said Morgan slowly. "Yet sometimes I've got the idea you were laughing at us over this case." McKinlay paused to think of a good answer, knowing it had to be good. "Frankly," he said, "the tougher you find this case, the better it suits me. Only you've got to win in the end. It's got to be The Case That Nearly Baffled C.O.S. See what I mean?" Morgan nodded, satisfied. the situation that when not chasing Shortly and when not being Shortly, Morgan and Joan spent most of their free time together. At first Morgan had been scrupulously correct in inviting McKinlay along too, or asking permission before taking Joan anywhere. But when he found McKinlay really preferred to spend the evenings working on his book -- McKinlay played his part to the ends of his fingers -- and was glad to have Joan out of the way, Morgan fell into the habit of taking her out to places where a man wouldn't normally take another man's wife. They had a lot in common and it was fun finding it all out. Joan found Morgan understood a lot of things she wouldn't have expected a cop to understand. Morto forget she was supposed to be married, except for a few basic reservations, and he liked her not ness but also for the basic reservations. On these occasions, Morgan didn't talk about his work and Joan didn't exhibit any interest in it. They had other things to occupy them. Once, however, they almost collided with the Conways, and though nobody admitted knowing anyone else, Morgan murmured later: "See that girl? She was one of the principal suspects in the Shortly case." "Was?" said Joan. "Yes. We know now she hadn't anything to do with the last affair." Joan was perturbed. If it was true that C.O.S. no longer suspected Opal, fine. But in the first place, she didn't believe it; and in the second, why should Morgan say such a thing to her, anyway, unless to observe her reaction? She made certain she looked completely disinterested in the whole affair. Another thing was worrying her. Although she had decided long ago that there was more in life than romance, she was a woman after all. And she had known for some time that in other circumstances she could go for Morgan. Nothing was going to come of it, of course. She wasn't the kind of sentimental fool who'd confess everything just because she happened to fall in love with a cop. Nevertheless, it was galling to meet somebody who could be the man of her life when she happened to be tied to another man by something stronger than marriage -- self-interest. Joan was beginning to wish she had come to Vokis cast as McKinlay's sister instead of his wife. another job, and then Joan did a second alone. That left only two of the series. McKinlay's plan was that after the next to the last Opal would be strongly suspected, picked up and questioned, preferably by lie detector (Opal being conditioned for any contest with any lie detector). While Opal was in C.O.S. hands, Joan -- on her own -- was to pull the last and greatest of all the Shortly robberies. However, that was in the future. The present affair concerned a tray of watches wonderfully designed, fantastically expensive, which Opal was to lift from one of the leading jewelers in Vanna. It was a straightforward, routine affair, and ever#rthing went according to plan until Joan, who had switched with Opal, found herself face to face with Glyn Morgan just inside the jewelry store. She had too much presence of mind to show by her expression that she knew him. Morgan merely glanced at her indifferently and passed behind her. Seeing the indifference in his eyes, Joan was glad she looked like Opal and not like herself. It was an unpleasant shock to see a man look at you and just not care -- particularly Glyn. Opal, she knew, was at the cache, leaving the watches there, and would switch with her again very soon. Rather than go out into the brightly sunlit street, Joan paused to look at a display inside the store. Suddenly her arm was grasped firmly, and she turned to face Morgan again. She looked at him blankly as if she had never seen him before. "You've got it wrong," said Morgan quietly. "You are supposed to know me." "Of course I know you, Mr. Morgan," said Joan in a good approximation of Opal's voice. The grasp on her arm tightened, and at Morgan's nod, two men closed in on them. "That just about sews it up, Joan," said Morgan, and Joan couldn't help starting. "Joan? What are you talking about?" she demanded. There was nothing she could do but play it out. "Am I supposed to have done something?" "You're supposed to have stolen twenty-one watches." "Is this where I give myself away by saying, 'It's a lie -- there were only seventeen'?" "You've already given yourself away. Opal Conway doesn't know me from Adam." thing, the fact that he had called her Joan, and stuck to the matter of the watches. "What am I supposed to have done with them?" she demanded in Opal's sarcastic tones. "Stuck them in the elastic of my panties?" Morgan looked at her sorrowfully. "Joan, you just wouldn't believe how thorough we are. When we decided to test for a connection between Joan McKinlay and Opal Conway, it didn't seem likely, but that didn't matter -- we never cancel a line of investigation just because it doesn't seem likely. Look." He lifted the hem of her skirt and showed it to her. "Looks all right to me," Joan said. "That's just it. One of our girls cut a little hole in Opal's dress. Yours hasn't got it. The other thing you can't see, but we can. When I kissed you last night, I stuck on the back of your neck a tiny mole that you didn't have before. You've still got it. Joan, you -- " He suddenly stared and cursed. The girl in his grasp had... flickered. And in the hem of the dress he was still holding, there was a small, neat cut. He spun her around. There was no mole on the back of her neck. "Will you kindly tell me what this is all about?" Opal demanded tartly. "But there's no transmitter!" he exclaimed wildly, looking at the two men. "How could -- " It was not until then that the full explanation dawned on him. "Two teleports," he said. "That's it. You can both do it, you and Joan. So you never need a transmitter on the spot, and you never leave any ballast around." "Who is this nut?" Opal asked the two C.O.S. men. "That isn't going to do you any good," said Morgan, and Opal knew he meant it.  cache, she immediately teleported to the hotel in Vanna, knowing she had a few minutes clear before Morgan, not being a teleport, could get there. She took McKinlay into the bathroom, the only room they knew for sure was not tapped. "Morgan knows," she said rapidly. "He knew I wasn't Opal. He'll be here in a couple of minutes." McKinlay didn't curse. He hadn't time. "You switched while he held you?" "Opal did. He didn't know how it was done then, but he must know now. He isn't a fool. Now what. Genius?" McKinlay had only a short time to make up his mind. Bluff it out? Take off? Or what? He didn't need long. "Go to the cache," he said, "and stay there. Kimber will land in five days. The emergency rations will keep you going till then. I'll tell them I don't know anything. Didn't know you were a teleport. Didn't know anything. I may get away with it." "You might," Joan agreed. "And you might not. People aren't as dumb as you think. Genius." She wasted no more time. Once more the bath contained nothing but cloudy water, rapidly gurgling away. And it was only a few minutes later that Morgan arrived. He tried to take a strong line at first, but when McKinlay got,, angry and insisted he didn't im'i derstand a word Morgan was saying, Morgan had to explain, and McKinlay knew that was his first victory. Soon Morgan was tacitly agreeing that McKinlay might not have known an#hing about his wife's implication on the Shortly robberies. Now the beauty of McKinlay's plan emerged. i They had nothing on him, because he hadn't done anything. Joan and Opal between them had done it all. Joan was where they'd never find her, and they'd never break Opal down. Bill, yes, but Bill knew practically nothing. McKinlay was questioned for hours. He never wavered. If Joan had been engaged in anything illegal, he didn't know anything about it. He didn't believe it anyway. And only gradually as the hours passed did he allow himself to become surprised, hurt, and puzzled as Joan didn't appear. When they stopped questioning him, he was exultant. He'd extricate himself yet. The only thing that worried him was the fact that the C.O.S. had Opal. They'd never crack her by ordinary methods, but there were ways in which even Opal could be broken down. Then he relaxed. There were in terplanetary regulations on things like that. C.O.S. could jail them, but it couldn't brainwash them. Ci'VT OU'RE wasting your time," said Opal bluntly. "With McKinlay we are," Morgan admitted. He was confident again, relieved. The Shortly case might not be solved yet, but it was certainly on its way toward solution. Now all he wanted was Joan. In two senses. And he fully expected to get her -- in both senses. He was practically sure now that she'd never been married to McKinlay -- a fact which he found exceedingly cheering. "When are you going to let me go?" Opal demanded. "Never," he said, and even Opal was chilled by the way he said it. "Let me tell you something. Opal Conway." "Go ahead." "You're going to work with us." Opal studied his face, amused. "You really think I will, don't you?" "Everybody does," he told her. "But not me. They've got reason to help you. I don't. And you can't give me any reason to." "That's just it," he said with infuriating certainty. "There's always good reason for people to work with us. All we have to do is find it." "You can't show me good reason." "There is a C.O.S. Fleet," said Morgan thoughtfully. "Not a large navy, but quite large enough to catch any ship that tries to land on any uninhabited region. Do I interest you?" "Not remotely." "I'm only making out a case. There must be a ship. We'll catch it. But that doesn't mean we'll catch Joan there -- she may not be aboard." Opal's hard laugh had real amusement in it. "You'll never catch her." "Ultimately, we must. You know that perfectly well. Whoever she is, she can teleport only from there and back to there. We know now that she can teleport to a transmitter as well as from it. But even she can't teleport from a place where there's no transmitter to another place where there's no transmitter. So we must catch her eventually." "Maybe. What has all this to do with me?" "A lot. You can help us, and I think you will. Because I'm in love with Joan." Opal's hard laugh rang out again. "What's the idea of that "Your only reason for not helping us is loyalty. No, I'm not making jokes. This scheme could only work if you four didn't cross each other. Even now, when we've got you cold, you won't rat on McKinlay or Joan. But what if I could convince you that it really is better for Joan if you do rat on her?" "You can't." "I can try," Morgan said. when he was taken into a room in the C.O.S. headquarters with Glyn Morgan, Opal and Bill Conway, but he didn't show it. "Who are these people?" he asked Morgan. "Look, if all you can do is go on acting that faded old part," said Morgan wearily, "why don't you just clam up? Opal has decided to help us." McKinlay said nothing, knowing how often this tactic worked. He didn't look at Opal. "She's helping us because I've convinced her that it's best for Joan. And even for you. You're not going to write that book after all, McKinlay. Tell me, did you ever really mean to write it?" "Since I only have a faded old part to play," said McKinlay coldly, "I'd better clam up." "Okay," said Morgan agreeably. "Now first of all, just to make you happy, I want to tell you that we captured a small ship in space this morning. The pilot's name was George Kimber. Unfortunately, we couldn't determine exactly where he intended to land." "I can't see what interest that information, if true, can be expected to arouse in me." "Yes, you can, McKinlay. Maybe you can understand now why Opal is going to help us." McKinlay believed the bit about about George Kimber -- it sounded true. Anger and disappointment goaded him to say: "And what can she do, may I ask? No doubt she has been the guiding spirit behind this alleged plan?" "Touches you on the raw, does it? No, you were the planner, McKinlay, and you did a fair job. All the same. Opal was and is more important than you." McKinlay swallowed his resentment. It was quite obvious what Morgan was trying to do -- goad him into making damaging admissions. He said nothing. ern hemisphere," said Morgan, "Joan is waiting, hoping Kimber will land. He won't. By this time, she must be wishing some of the loot she has at her feet was eatable. I guess she'd trade a fortune or two in jewels for a ham sandwich. We don't know within she is, and it would take weeks, maybe months or even years, to find her." He paused and pulled a canvas cover off a cabinet. "But there's an easier way of sewing the whole thing up," he said. "Know what this is, McKinlay?" McKinlay knew. He stared at it balefully. Opal stepped up to the cabinet and checked the settings. She nodded to Morgan. "Okay," she said, and closed her eyes. McKinlay threw himself at her in a blind, murderous rage. He knew that by doing so, he was for the first time admitting his part in the Shortly robberies, knew that to the last he should pretend to know nothing. But the sight of Opal working for the C.O.S. was too much for him. Morgan jumped forward, but it wasn't he who stopped McKinlay. It was Bill. He tripped McKinlay and then stared down at him in horror, terrified of his wrath. Morgan pulled McKinlay to his feet and marched him to the other side of the room. "Stay where you are," he said, and patted his pocket significantly. "Opal?" She closed her eyes again. Suddenly she was Joan. There was no attempt at imperceptible substitution this time. Joan was thin and wan and pale, wearing no makeup, her hair lank and stringy, her dress ragged, her feet bare. She blinked around her incredulously as Morgan snapped off the transmitter and grabbed her arm. He didn't argue with her, not at first. At first he only kissed her. ation, Joan tried to teleport back to the cache. Morgan shook his head. "This time you can't do it," he said. "Opal has switched off the unit." Joan wasn't as cautious as McKinlay had been. She said a few hard things about Opal. "I don't think you're quite fair to her," said Morgan judicially. "She knows more than you do. Once we caught George Kimber, what was the point in leaving you there to starve?" "I could have teleported anywhere on this world," said Joan. "No, you couldn't. Only to places you know, and they're all in Vanna. Opal did no more than put you out of your misery, Joan." McKinlay swore bitterly. Abruptly Joan staggered, and Morgan caught her in his arms again. "What would you do for a sandwich?" he asked temptingly. "This may be a joke to you," said Joan, "but it isn't to me. What's going to happen to us?" "Nothing very terrible. Life imprisonment, that's all." He said it so casually that it took Joan a couple of seconds to understand him. "You can't do that," she breathed. "We can and will. You're going to stay on Vokis, Joan. I hope there'll be compensations." He looked across at McKinlay. "That book of yours could never have been authentic, McKinlay. It would have had to miss out the most important thing, because we keep it secret. You kept asking rne why C.O.S. was so good, and t could never tell you. It's good because it consists of people who'd rather work for it than go to jail. People who know crime inside out. People like you, McKinlay,  and Opal, and you, Joan -- and me. Didn't you once say we had i i a lot in common?"  'C' OR a moment, she didn't understand that either. "After this, C.O.S. will be even better," Morgan said. "Two teleports. We can certainly use you, Joan. I wasn't a teleport, just an ordinary safecracker. Does that answer your question, McKinlay?" Joan laughed at McKinlay's expression. "Genius, I always said you were too smart for your own good. Now look what you've done. You've made yourself a cop." "You're not married to him?" Morgan asked quickly. "Why, what's it to you?" "You know what it is to me." But he didn't pursue the topic right then. "Now I guess we should bring Opal back. McKinlay, you'll be quite useful too. Any time  some other smart operator tries out a new heist gimmick, it'll be up to you to figure it out for us. y You'll like that." -- j. T. McIntosh AUGUST # #c Galax y M A G A Z I N by by  by  by And Other Stories Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden Orbit Around the Sun #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. Ready How! The S-F anthology with the "fresh and literate toueh" Galaxy Edited by H. L. Gold Another great collection for every S-F bookshelf -- fifteen choice stories among the best published in Galaxy in the past few years. Humor, new worlds, fantastic ideas, and clever writing combine to give you many hours of excitement and pleasure. Stories by Pohl, Sheckley, Leiber, McIntosh, Davidson and others. Order today .# #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of hot off the press. I enclose  check  cash  money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the Vte'A'i ens (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-ALens, #x# inch Art Board, # tubes Oil Paint, Oil, Turpentine, # Brushes, # page Instruction Book. only i.# Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Vis-a-lens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. view, humanity has two cardinal sins: excessive pessimism and excessive optimism. These sins are cardinal because, editorially speaking, they are the least original. An easy way of testing that statement -- aside from how to do it -- would be to take a pair of science fiction writers from the late #th century, plunge them into a modern supermarket to simmer for one hour, then return them to their own shells and let come to a boil. One would manufacture a Utopia of ready-made foods; the other would see only a blight of mechanized feeding. Both, of course, would be partly right, demonstrating once more that few things are all advantage or disadvantage. Anything that frees women of # hours a day over cranky wood or coal ranges must be rated an advantage, especially when variety is so immensely increased and packaging is so much more attractive, sanitary and, by law, honest. On the other hand, the mixes and instants and suchlike are pretty much dried cuds from mechanical stomachs, the precooked meals are more industrial engineering than cookery, and the spread between farm and retail price is almost as wide as between farm and restaurant. Given time to visit a bookstore, our ancestral authors would want only to see if their own books were still around, and then perhaps a dazzled skimming of volumes on science and history. Chances are they wouldn't get to the cookbook shelves at all. A shame -- they'd be missing two big gold-stamped tomes, handsomely slipcased, prodigiously illustrated with color photographs of foods and settings and naperies of a beauty no painter has ever matched, and literally thousands of recipes that would tempt a Gandhi off his most passively resistant fast. Few of these very many recipes could have been followed everywhere at any time of the year in the #th century. But the same techniques that give us culinary horrors like vacuum-packed chocolatecovered ants and frozen messtray meals also free us of geography and the seasons. ' ' and fisheries, dairies, groves and gardens to draw upon, one has need of all the world's recipes, and here they are in orderly profusion : Hors-d'oeuvre, smorgasbord, antipasto, Chinese egg rolls, enchiladas -- ah, Turkish beurrecks: Cut Vi pound Gruyere cheese into small pieces and place them in a saucepan with a generous Vi cup very thick white sauce. Stir until the cheese is melted and the sauce thickens. Spread on a platter to cool and then shape into small sausages. Wrap each sausage shape in plain pastry and fry in hot deep oil (# F.) to a light goldenbrown. "Time was," says this overlord of kitchen texts, "when the baker of inferior bread could be publicly whipped, or have his ears nailed to a post, or be pilloried with the offending loaf hung around his neck." Until this worthy practice is revived, here are recipes for splendid bread and rolls. And soups, from every sort of consomme to creams to game soups and broths -- ah, and egg bisque Biarritz : Reduce # quarts fish stock to Vi its volume over a bright flame. Add # egg yolks beaten into I cup sweet cream and stir over a low flame until the mixture thickens. Season with salt, white pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg. When ready to serve, strain the soup through a fine muslin cloth into a heated soup tureen and add a generous Vi cup cooked, flaked crab meat. Sprinkle over the soup I tablespoon finely chopped chervil (or parsley -- chopped tarragon and serve at once with croutons. Eggs? All the standard ways, and stuffed, fried, egg pie, au gratin, and more poaches than one might imagine, like -- ah, eggs Benedict: Split and toast English muffins, allowing two halves for each serving. Cover each muffin half with a slice of broiled or sauteed aged ham or Canadian back bacon and top with a poached egg. Pour over I tablespoon hollandaise sauce and serve hot. ( Anyone who buys hollandaise sauce or fakes it the way mayonnaise makers suggest isn't a criminal on the grand scale of today's perpetrators of pallid breads; one ear nailed to a post should be suffiDairy products, fresh vegetables and fruits, fish and shellfish -- here is where modem techniques repeal distance and the seasons -- only to have cruel and inhuman treatment dished, not to mention meted, out to these rich boons. Here are French and Chinese and Scandinavian and New England and Javanese and other ways of unlocking these treasures, such as -- ah, paella: Cut a plump chicken into serving pieces and saute the pieces in V # cup butter with I crushed clove of garlic until the chicken is golden brown on all sides. Remove and set aside the chicken and in the juices remaining in the pan saute # cups rice until it is golden. Add V # teaspoon saffron and # cups hot chicken stock and cook over a very low flame until the liquid is absorbed. The rice will be only partially cooked. Butter the bottom and sides of a deep casserole or Dutch oven. Put half the pieces of chicken in the casserole, and cover the chicken with I lobster, cut into pieces, I dozen shelled shrimp, I dozen mussels, I chorizo, the highly seasoned Spanish sausage, sliced (or any hot pimentos. Add almost all the rice and top with the remaining pieces of chicken. Cover the chicken exactly as before, with lobster, shrimp, mussels, chorizo, and pimentos. Add the rest of the rice and bake the casserole, uncovered, in a moderate oven (# F.) for # minutes, adding a little chicken stock from time to time if needed... steamed clams may be used in the paella in place of, or in addition to, the mussels. to commercial lather? Try kaymak, the Near Eastern clotted cream which makes even home whipped cream taste like spineless froth: Bring I quart heavy cream to a boil in a large kettle, over very slow heat. Lift a ladleful of the cream out of the kettle and pour it back from a height, to make as many bubbles as possible. Continue this process for # minutes to I hour, until the pan is full of cream bubbles. Put the kettle in a warm place for # hours, then chill the cream well. The cream that sets on top of the liquid is the kaymak; it may be spooned off or cut off with a sharp knife and served in slices. Use it exactly the way you would Only halfway through the first volume, with two brief dips into the second, and no room for any sample recipes of the meat and vegetable dishes, the aspics and preserves and sauces, the souffles and omelets and salads, cakes and puddings and pastries -- dishes by the thousands, menu combinations The title of this gastronomical Fort Knox? It's The Gourmet Cookbook, a record of terrestrial cookery that should be in every micro-library on every world we colonize. The strange foods and seasonings we find there will seem less strange when checked -- and cooked -- against the vast variety listed herein. The # price isn't high for being the best cook in town -- or among the stars. By Manly Wade Wellman Ironic destiny of a visitor from the future trying to take advantage of things to come. By F. L. Wallace Earth was too perfect for these extraordinary exiles -- to belong to it, they had to flee it. By Hal Clement All the science on earth might not be able to meet the demands of this alien race. By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony. That rare event: a science fiction novel based on a new idea. We mean are you missing the fine line of Galaxy Novels simply because you don't want to go hunting through today's crowded newsstands? No need to. We'll send them to you -- mailed flat, their handsome covers and neat pages well protected -- mailed as soon as each title comes off the presses. Best of all... Besides saving you trouble and time, we save you money! At # titles (all different) for only #, that comes to less than # a book -- a saving of # over the newsstand price! Send in your subscription today. Don't use the coupon if you prefer not to cut it out; it's for your convenience, only. Enter my subscription for # books (full length, all different) at # (# additional for Foreign). Name Address City. Zone. State I can't stand the Andy Carter grouches who hate having alien M A and Pa were fighting again, not really mad at one another, but arguing pretty loud. They had been at it, off and on, for weeks. "We just can't up and leave!" said Ma. 'We have to think it out. We can't pull up and leave a place we've lived in all our lives without some thinking on it!" "I have thought on it!" Pa said. "I've thought on it a lot! All these aliens moving in. There was a brood of new ones moved onto the Pierce place just a day or two ago." "How do you know," asked Ma, "that you'll like one of the Homestead Planets once you settle on it? It might be worse than Earth." "We can't be any more unlucky there than we been right here! There ain't anything gone right. I don't mind telling you I am plumb discouraged." And Pa sure-God was right about how unlucky we had been. The tomato crop had failed and two of the cows had died and a bear had robbed the bees and busted up the hives and the tractor had broken down and cost # to get fixed. "Everyone has some bad luck," neighbors -- but just wait till they see their native relatives who actually have... no life of their own Ma argued. "You'd have it no matter where you go." "Andy Carter doesn't have bad luck!" yelled Pa. "I don't know how he does it, but everything he does, it turns out to a hair. He could fall down in a puddle and come up dripping diamonds!" "I don't know," said Ma philosophically. "We got enough to eat and clothes to cover us and a roof above our head. Maybe that's as much as anyone can expect these days." "It ain't enough," Pa said. "A man shouldn't be content to just scrape along. I lay awake at night to figure out how I can manage better. I've laid out plans that should by rights have worked. But they never did. Like the time we tried that new adapted pea from Mars down on the bottom forty. It was sandy soil and they should have grown there. They ain't worth a damn on any land that will grow another thing. And that land was worthless; it should have been just right for those Martian peas. But I ask you, did they grow there?" "No," said Ma, "now that I recollect, they didn't." "And the next year, what happens? Andy Carter plants the same kind of peas just across the fence from where I tried to grow them. Same kind of land and all. And Andy gets bow-legged hauling those peas home." ' ' a better farmer than Andy Carter could ever hope to be. And he was smarter, too. But let Pa try a thing and bad luck would beat him out. Let Andy try the same and it always went right. And it wasn't Pa alone. It was the entire neighborhood. Everybody was just plain unlucky, except Andy Carter. "I tell you," Pa swore, "just one more piece of bad luck and we'll throw in our hand and start over somewhere fresh. And the Homestead Planets seem the best to me. Why, you take..." I didn't wait to hear any more. I knew it would go on the way it always had. So I snuck out without their seeing me and went down the road, and as I walked along, I worried that maybe one of these days they might make up their mind to move to one of the Homestead Planets. There had been an awful lot of our old neighbors who'd done exactly that. It might be all right to emigrate, of course, but whenever I thought about it, I got a funny feeling at the thought of leaving Earth. Those other planets were so awful far away, one wouldn't have much chance of getting back again if he didn't like them. And all my friends were right in the neighborhood, and they were pretty good friends even if they were all aliens. I got a little start when I thought of that. It was the first time it had occurred to me that they all were aliens. I had so much fun with them, I'd never thought of it. It seemed a little queer to me that Ma and Pa should be talking about leaving Earth when all the farms that had been sold in our neighborhood had been bought up by aliens. The Homestead Planets weren't open to the aliens and that might be the reason they came to Earth. If they'd had a choice, maybe they would have gone to one of the Homesteads instead of settling down on Earth. I walked past the Carter place and saw that the trees in the orchard were loaded down with fruit and I figured that some of us could sneak in and steal some of it when it got ripe. But we'd have to be careful, because Andy Carter was a stinker, and his hired man, Ozzie Burns, wasn't one bit better. I remembered the time we had been stealing watermelons and Andy had found us at it and I'd got caught in a barbed-wire fence when we ran away. Andy had walloped me, which was all right. But there'd been no call for him going to Pa and collecting seven dollars for the few melons we had stolen. Pa had paid up and then he'd walloped me again, worse than Andy did. And after it was over, Pa had said bitterly that Andy was no great shakes of a neighbor. And Pa was right. He wasn't. place and Fancy Pants was out in the yard, just floating there and bouncing that old basketball of his. We call him Fancy Pants because we can't pronounce his name. Some of these alien people have very funny names. Fancy Pants was all dressed up as usual. He always is dressed up because he never gets the least bit dirty when he plays. Ma is always asking me why I can't keep neat and clean like Fancy Pants. I tell her it would be easy if I could float along like him and never had to walk, and if I could throw mudballs like him without touching them. This Sunday morning he was dressed up in a sky-blue shirt that looked like silk, and red britches that looked as if they might be velvet, and he had a green bow tied around his yellow curls that floated in the breeze. At first glance, Fancy Pants looked something like a girl -- but you better never say so, because he'd mop up the road with you. He did with me the first time I saw him. He didn't even lay a hand on me while he was doing it, but sat up there, cross-legged, about three feet off the ground, smiling that sweet smile of his on his ugly face, and with his yellow curls floating in the breeze. And the worst of it was that I couldn't get back at him. But that was long ago and we were good friends now. We played catch for a while, but it wasn't too much fun. Then Fancy Pants' Pa came out of the house and he was glad to see me, too. He asked about the folks and wanted to know if the tractor was all right, now that we'd got it fixed. I answered him politely because I'm a little scared of Fancy Pants' Pa. He is sort of spooky -- not the way he looks, the way he does things. From the looks of him, he wasn't meant to be a farmer, but he does all right at it. He doesn't use a plow to plow a field. He just sits cross-legged in the air and floats up and down the field, and when he passes over a strip of ground, that strip of ground is plowed -- and not only plowed, but raked and harrowed until it is as fine as face powder. He does all his work that way. There aren't any weeds in any of his crops, for he just sails up and down the rows and the weeds come out slick and clean, with the roots intact, to lie on the ground and wither. It doesn't take too much imagination to see what a guy like that could do if he ever caught a kid in any sort of mischief, so all of us are thoughtful and polite whenever he's around. So I told him how we'd got the tractor all fixed up and about the bear busting up the bee hives. Then I asked him about his time machine and he shook his head real sad. "I don't know what's the matter, Steve," he said. "I put things into it and they disappear, and I should find them later, but I never have. If I'm moving them in time, I'm perhaps pushing them too far." He would have told me more about his time machine, but there was an interruption. While we had been talking, Fancy Pants' Pa and me, the Fancy Pants dog had run a cat up a maple tree. That is the normal situation for any cat and dog -- unless Fancy Pants is around. TT I OR Fancy Pants wasn't one to leave a situation normal. He reached up into the tree -- well, he didn't reach up with his hands, of course, but with whatever he reaches with -- and he nailed this cat and sort of bundled it up so it couldn't move and brought it down to the ground. Then he held the dog so the dog couldn't do more than twitch and he put that bundled-up cat down in front of the twitching dog, then let them loose with split-second timing. The two of them exploded into a blur of motion, with the weirdest uproar you ever heard. The cat made it to the tree in the fastest time and nearly took off the bark swarming up the trunk. And the dog miscalculated and failed to put on his brakes in time and banged smack into the tree spreadeagled. The cat by this time was up in the highest branches, hanging on and screaming, while the dog walked around in circles, acting kind of stunned. Fancy Pants' Pa broke off what he was saying to me and he looked at Fancy Pants. He didn't do or say a thing, but when he looked at Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants grew terribly pale and sort of wilted down. "Let that teach you," said Fancy Pants' Pa, "to leave those animals alone. You don't see Steve here or Nature Boy mistreating them that way, do you?" "No, sir," mumbled Fancy Pants. "And now get along, the two of you. You have things to do." I got this to say for Fancy Pants' Pa: he gives Fancy Pants his lickings, or whatever they may be, and then he forgets about it. He doesn't keep on harping at it for the rest of the day. CO Fancy Pants and me went  down the road, me shuffling along, kicking up the dust, and Fancy Pants floating along beside me. We got down to Nature Boy's place and he was waiting out in front. I knew he had been hoping someone would come along. There were a couple of sparrows sitting on his shoulder and a rabbit hopping all around him and a chipmunk in the pocket of his pants, looking out at us with bright and beady eyes. Nature Boy and I sat down underneath a tree and Fancy Pants came as close as he ever does to sitting down -- floating about three inches off the ground -- and we talked about what we ought to do. Trouble was, there wasn't really anything that needed any doing. So we sat there and talked and tossed pebbles and pulled stems of grass and put them in our mouths and chewed them, while Nature Boy's pet wild things gamboled all around us and didn't seem to be afraid at all. Except that they were a little leary of Fancy Pants. He is, when you come right down to it, a sort of sneaky rascal. Me they are fast friends with when I'm with Nature Boy, but let me meet them when I am alone and they keep their distance. I can see how wild things might take to Nature Boy. He is fur all over, real sleek, glossy fur, and he wears nothing but that little pair of pants. Turn him loose without those pants and someone would be bound to take a shot at him. S O we sat there wondering what to do. Then I remembered that Pa had said a new family had moved onto the Pierce place and we decided to go down and see if they had any kids. We went down the road to the old Pierce place and it turned out there was one just about our age. He was a sort of runty little kid, with a peaked face and big round eyes and kind of eager look about him, like a stunted hoot owl. He told us his name and it was even worse than Nature Boy's and Fancy Pants' names, so we had a vote on it and decided we would call him Butch. That suited him just fine. Then he called out his family and they stood in a row, like a bunch of solemn, runty owls roosting on a limb, while he introduced them. There was his Ma and Pa and a little brother and a kid sister almost as big as he was. The rest of them went back into the house, but Butch's Pa squatted down and began to talk with us. You could see from the way he talked that he was a little scared of this farming business. He admitted he really was no farmer, but an optical worker, and explained to us that an optical worker designed lenses and ground them. But, he said, there was no future in a job like that back on his old home planet. He told us how glad he was to be on Earth and how he wanted to be a good citizen and a good neighbor, and a lot of other things like that. When he started to run down, we got away from him. There ain't anything more embarrassing than a crazy adult who likes to talk with kids. We decided that maybe we should show Butch around a bit and let him in on some of the things we had been doing. So we struck off down Dark Hollow and we didn't make much time because all of these friends of Nature Boy were popping out to join him. Before very long, we were a sort of traveling menagerie -- rabbits and chipmunks and a gopher or two and a couple of raccoons. I like Nature Boy, of course, and I've had some good times with him, but he has spoiled a lot of fun as well. Before he showed up in the neighborhood, I did a lot of fishing and hunting, but that is all spoiled now. I can't shoot a squirrel or catch a fish without wondering if it is a friend of Nature Boy's. After a while, we got down to the creek bed where we were digging out the lizard. We'd been at it all summer long and we hadn't uncovered very much of him, but we still figured that some day we might get him all dug out. You understand that it wasn't a live lizard we were digging out, but a lizard that had turned to There is a place where the stream runs down a limestone ledge and the limestone lies in layers. The lizard was between two of those layers. We'd got four or five feet of his tail uncovered. But the digging was getting harder, for we were working back into the limestone ledge and there was more of it to move. the limestone ledge and got himself set as solid as he could. Sitting there, he hit that limestone ledge a tremendous whack, being very careful not to crack the lizard. It was one of his better whacks, busting up a lot of stone, and while Fancy Pants rested up to take another one, the three of us piled in and threw out the busted rock. But there was one big piece he had loosened up that we couldn't move. "Hit it just a tap," I told him. "Break it up a little and we can get it out." "I got it loose," he said. "It's up to you to get it out." There was no sense arguing with him. So the three of us wrestled at the rock, but we couldn't budge it and Fancy Pants sat up there, fat and sassy, taking it easy and enjoying himself. "You ought to have a crowbar," he told us. "If you had a crowbar, you could pry that rock out." I was getting sick and tired of Fancy Pants, and so, just to get away from him for a while, I said I'd go and fetch a crowbar. And this new kid, this Butch, said he'd go along with me. So we left Nature Boy and Fancy Pants and climbed up to the road and started out for my place. We didn't hurry any. It would serve Fancy Pants right if he had to wait, and Nature Boy as well, for all his showing off with his animals. We walked along the road and talked. Butch told me about the planet he had come from and it sure was a poor-mouth place, and I told him about the neighborhood, and we were getting to be friends. We reached the Carter place and were walking past the orchard when Butch stopped dead in the middle of the road and went sort of stiff, like ahunting dog will go when he scents a bird. I was walking right behind him and I bumped into him, but he just stood there with those eager eyes agleam and his entire body tense -- so tense it seemed to quiver when it really didn't. "What's going on?" I asked. He kept on looking at something in the orchard. I took a look where he was looking and I couldn't see a thing. Then he turned around like a flash and jumped the fence on the downhill side of the road and went lickety-split down across the field opposite the orchard. I jumped the fence and ran after him and caught him just before he reached the woods. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face me. It wasn't hard to do, he was such a spindly kid. "What's the matter with you?" I hollered. "Where do you think you're going?" "Home to get my gun!" "Your un? What for?" "There's a whole bunch of them up there! We have to clean them out!" He must have seen I didn't understand. "Don't tell me," he said, "that you didn't see them?" I shook my head. "There wasn't anything there." "They're there, all right," he said. "Maybe you can't see them. Maybe you're like old folks." cuse me of a thing like that. I doubled up my fist and poked it underneath his nose. He hurried up to explain. "They're things that only kids can see. And they bring bad luck. You can't leave them around or you'll have bad luck all the time." I didn't believe it right away. But after all the things I'd seen done by Nature Boy and Fancy Pants, you don't ever catch me saying straight out that a thing's impossible. And after I'd thought it over for a minute, it made a silly sort of sense. For the folks certainly had been plagued by hard luck for a long time now and it didn't stand to reason that luck should be all bad and never any good unless there was something making it that way. And it wasn't the folks alone, but all the other neighbors -- all of them, of course, except Andy Carter, and Andy Carter was too mean to be bothered by bad luck. We were, I thought, sure a hardluck neighborhood. "All right," I said to Butch. "Let's go and get that gun." And I was thinking even as I said it that it must be a funny kind of gun that would shoot a thing one couldn't even see. We made it back to the old Pierce place in almost no time at all. Butch's Pa was sitting out underneath a tree, feeling sorry for himself. Butch came up to him and started jabbering and I couldn't understand a word. His Pa listened to him for a while and then broke in. "You should talk this planet's language, son. It is most impolite to do otherwise. And you want to become a good citizen of this great and glorious planet, I am sure, and there's no better way to do it than to talk its language and observe its customs and try to live the way its people do." I'll say this much for him: Butch's Pa sure knew how to fling around the words. "Is it true, mister," I asked him, "that these things can bring bad luck?" "Most assuredly," said Butch's Pa. "Back on our old home planet, we know them well." "Pa," asked Butch, "should I get my gun?" "Now I don't know," said his Pa. "It's something we have to give some study. Back on our home planet, there would be no question of it. But this is a different planet and it may have different ways. It may be that the man who has these creatures would object to your shooting them." "But there isn't anyone really got them," I declared. "How can you have a thing when you can't even see it?" "I was thinking about the gentleman in whose orchard they appeared." "You mean Andy Carter. He doesn't know anything about them." "That does not matter," said Butch's Pa, with a great deal of righteousness. "It becomes, it would seem to me, a quite deep problem in ethics. On our home planet, no man would want these things; he'd be ashamed to have them. But here it might be different. They bring good luck, you see, to the ones that they adopt" "You mean they bring good luck to Andy?" I asked him. "But I thought you said that they brought bad luck." "So they do," said Butch's Pa, "except to the ones that they adopt. To them they bring good luck, but bad luck to all the others. For it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest. That is why we do not let them adopt any of us on our home planet." "You think they have adopted Andy and that's why he has good luck?" "You are most correct," said Butch's Pa. "You have admirably grasped the concept." "Well, gee, why don't we just go in and shoot them?" "This Carter gentleman would not object to your doing so?" "Of course he would, but that's what you would expect of him. He'd probably run us off the place before we got the job half done, but we could sneak back again..." "No," Butch's Pa said flat out. He was an awful stickler for doing the right thing, Butch's Pa was -- bound and determined he wasn't going to get caught off base doing something wrong. "That is not the way to do," he said. "It is most unethical. You think that if this Carter knew he had these things, he would want to keep them?" "I am sure he would. He doesn't care for anybody but himself." Butch's Pa heaved a big sigh and crawled to his feet. "Young man, would your father be at home?" "He most likely would." "We'll go and talk with him," he said. "He is a native of this planet and an honest man and he will tell us what is right." "Mister," I asked him, "what do you call these things?" "We have a name for them, but it does not translate into your tongue with anything like ease. We call them something that is neither here nor there, something that is halfway between. Halfling would be the word for it, if there is such a word." "I don't know if there is or not," I said, "but it sounds right." "Then," decided Butch's Pa, "for sheer convenience we shall call them that." A T first, Pa was as flabbergasted as I was, but the more he listened to Butch's Pa and the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to become convinced there might be something to it. "There sure-God has been something causing all this hard luck of ours," he declared. "A man can't turn his hand to a thing but it goes wrong on him. And I must admit that it makes a man sore to have all these things happen to him and then look at Carter and see all the good luck he has." "I am profoundly sorry," said Butch's Pa, "to discover halflings exist on this planet. There were many on our old home planet and on some of the neighboring worlds, but I had no idea they had spread this far." "What I don't rightly understand," said Pa, lighting up his pipe and settling down to hash the matter over, "is how they can be here and a man not see them." "There is a most precise scientific explanation, but I have not the language to translate it You might say that they are off-phase of this existence, but still not quite into it The child eye is undulled, the mind unclosed, so that they can see somewhat, a fraction, just a little, beyond reality. And that is why they can be seen by children but are invisible to adults. I, in my time, when I was a child, saw and killed my share of them. You understand, sir, that on my planet, it is an accepted childish chore to be eternally on watch for them and vigilantly keep their numbers down." Pa asked me: "You didn't see these things?" "No, Pa," I said, "I didn't." "And you didn't see them, either?" Pa asked Butch's Pa. "I lost my ability to see them many years ago," said Butch's Pa. "So far as your boy is concerned, it may be that only the children of certain races -- " "But they must see us," Pa insisted. "Otherwise, how would they be able to bring good luck or bad?" "They do see us. In that, all are agreed. I assure you that the scientists of my planet have devoted many long and arduous years to the study of these beings." "And another thing. What is their purpose in adopting people? What do they get out of it? Why should they show all this favoritism?" "We are not sure," said Butch's Pa. "There are several theories. One is that they have no life of their own, but must have a pattern in order to live. If they did not have a pattern, they would have no form nor senses and probably no perception. They are, it would seem, like parasites in many ways." But Pa interrupted him. Pa was all wound up and had a lot of thinking that he had to do out loud. "I don't suppose," he said, "that they are doing it just for the hell of it. There must be a solid reason -- there is to everything. It seems reasonable to me that everything is planned, that there's nothing without purpose. There's nothing, when you get right down to it, that basically is bad. Maybe these things, with the bad luck that they bring, are part of a plan to make folks face up to adversity and develop character." I had ever heard Pa sound like a preacher, but he sure did then. "You may be right," said Butch's Pa. "There is no agreement entirely on the reason for their being." "They might," suggested Pa, "be a sort of gypsy tribe, just wandering around. They might up and move away." Butch's Pa sadly shook his head. "It almost never happens, sir, that they move away." "When I was a kid, I once went to the city with my Ma. I don't remember much about it, but I do remember standing in front of a great big window that was filled with toys and knowing that I never could have any one of them, and wishing hard that some day I might have just one of them. Maybe that's the way it is with these folks. Maybe they're just outside the window looking in on us." "Your analogy is exceedingly picturesque," said Butch's Pa with forthright admiration. "But here I am running on," Pa said, "as if I took for gospel every word of it. I don't wish for the world to doubt you or what told us... "But you do and I cannot find it in my breast to blame you. Would you, perhaps, believe more readily if your son could tell you that he saw them?" "Why, yes," Pa said thoughtfully. "I surely would." "Before I came to Earth, I was a worker in the field of optics, and it may be possible that I can grind a set of lenses that would allow your son to see halflings. I am not sure he could, of course, but it is a chance worth taking. He is of the age to have still that ability to peer beyond reality. It may be that all his vision needs is a slight correction." "If you could do that, if Steve here could really see these things, then I would believe you without the slightest question." "I'll get on with it immediately," said Butch's Pa. "Later on, we can discuss the ethics of the situation." ID A sat watching Butch and his Pa going down the road, and he sort of shuddered. "Some of these aliens sure-God come up with queer ideas. A man has got to watch himself or he might swallow some of them." "These ones are all right," I told him. Pa sat there thinking and I could almost see the wheels whirring in his brain. "I don't know too much about it, but the more one thinks about it, the more sense it makes. It seems reasonable to me that there might be just so much good luck and so much bad luck, and ordinarily both the good and the bad would be handed out in somewhat equal parts. But suppose something came along and corralled all the good luck for one particular man, then there ain't anything but bad luck left for the rest." I wished that I could see it as clear as Pa. But the more I thought, the more like Greek it seemed. "Maybe," said Pa, "when you get to the root of it, it's nothing more than simple competition. What is good luck for one man is bad luck for another. Say there is a job that everybody wants. One man gets it and that's good luck for him, but bad luck for the others. And say that this bear back in the woods just had to raid a hive. It would be bad luck for the man whose hive was raided, but good luck -- or at least not bad luck -- for the man whose hive the bear passed up. And say again that someone's tractor had to get busted..." Pa went on like that for quite a while, but I don't think he even fooled himself. Both of us knew, I guess, that there would have to be more to it than that. were sore at me for not coming back with the crowbar. They said I stood them up and I had to explain to them I hadn't and I had to tell them exactly what had happened before they would believe me. I suppose it might have been better if I had kept my mouth shut, but in the end I don't believe it made much difference. Anyhow, we got to be friends again and we all liked Butch, so we had good times together. The other two kidded Butch a lot about the halflings at first, but Butch didn't seem to mind, so they gave it up. We certainly had a good time that summer. There was the lizard and a lot of other things as well, including the family of skunks that fell in love with Nature Boy and followed him around. And there was the time Fancy Pants hauled all of Carter's machinery out into the back forty, with Andy hunting for it like lost cows and madder by the minute. At home, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, there was still bad luck. The day the barn caved in, Pa was ready to admit flat out that there was something to what Butch's Pa had said. It was all Ma could do to keep him from going up the road to see Andy Carter and talk to him by hand. I had another birthday and the folks gave me a live-it set and that was something I had not expected. I had wanted one, of course, but I knew they cost a lot and with all the bad luck they had been having, the folks were short of money. You know what a live-it is, of course. It's something like TV, only better. TV you only watch and with a live-it set you live it. It's a viewer that you clamp onto your head and you look into it and you pick your channel and turn it on, then settle back and live the things you see. It doesn't take any imagination to live it, because it all is there -- the action and the sound and smell and even, to some extent, the actual feel of it. My set was just a kid's set and I could only get the kid channels. But that was all right with me. I wouldn't have wanted to live through all that mushy stuff. All morning I spent with my live-it. There was one thing called "Survey Incident" and it was all about what happened when a human survey team put down on an alien planet. Another one was about a hunting trip on a jungle world and a third was "Robin Hood." I think, of the three of them, I liked "Robin Hood" the best. I was all puffed up with pleasure and pride and I wanted to show the kids what the folks had given me. So I took the live-it and went down to Fancy Pants' place. But I never got a chance to show the live-it to him. I saw Fancy Pants floating along, silent and sneaky -- and floating along beside him, not more than a yard away, was that poor, beat-up, bedraggled cat that Fancy Pants was always pestering. He had the cat all wrapped up in a tight bundle and it couldn't move a muscle, but I could see its eyes were wide with fright. If you ask me, that cat had a right to be afraid. There was scarcely anything in the book Fancy Pants hadn't done to it. "Hi, Fancy Pants!" I yelled. He put a finger to his lips and crooked another finger to let me know I could join him in whatever he was doing. So I jumped the fence and Fancy Pants floated lower until he was about my level. "What's going on?" I asked him. "He went away and forgot to close the padlock," whispered Fancy Pants. "Who went away?" "My Pa. He forgot to lock the door to the old machine shed." "But that's where -- " "Sure," said Fancy Pants. "That's where he's got the time machine." "Fancy Pants, you don't intend to put that cat in there!" "Why not? Pa ain't ever tried a living thing in it and I want to see what happens." I didn't like it and yet I wanted awful bad to see that time machine. I wondered what one looked like. No one had seen the time machine except Fancy Pants' Pa. "What's the matter with you?'" asked Fancy Pants. "Are you going chicken on me?" "But the cat!" "For the love of Mike, it's nothing but a cat." And that was right, of course. It was nothing but a cat. So I went along with him and we sneaked into the shed and pulled the door behind us. And there was the time machine in the middle of the floor. It didn't look like much. It was a kind of hopper, and a bunch of things like coils ran around the throat where the hopper narrowed down, and that was all except for a crude control board that was nailed onto a post and hooked up to the hopper with a lot of wires. The hopper came up to my chest and I put my live-it down on the edge of it and craned my neck to look into the throat to see what I could see. At just that moment, Fancy Pants threw the switch that turned it on. I jerked away. For it was a scary business when you turned that hopper on. have another look, it looked for all the world as if it were a whirlpool of cream, sort of thick and rich and shiny -- and it was alive. You could see the liveness in it. And there was a feeling in it that maybe you should just jump in head first and I had to grip the edges of the hopper hard not to. I might have dived in, if the cat at that very moment hadn't somehow wiggled free from Fancy Pants. I don't know how that cat did it. Fancy Pants had it all rolled into a ball and really buttoned up. Maybe Fancy Pants got careless or maybe the cat had finally figured out an angle. But, anyhow, Fancy Pants had the cat poised above the hopper and was about to let it fall. The cat didn't get loose in part -- it got loose entirely -- and there it was, yowling and screaming, tail fluffed out, clawing at thin air to keep from falling down into the hopper. It managed to throw itself to one side as it fell and the claws of one paw hooked onto the hopper's edge while the other hooked into my live-it set. I let out a yell and made a grab to try to save the live-it, but I was too late. The cat dragged it off balance and it slid down into that creamy whirlpool and was gone. The cat shinnied up a post and up into the rafters and hung there, screaming and wailing. Just then the door came open and there floated Fancy Pants' Pa and we were caught redhanded. I figured Fancy Pants' Pa would give me the works right then and there. But he didn't do a thing. He just floated there for a moment looking at the two of us. Then he looked at me alone and said: "Steve, please leave." I went out that door as fast as I could go, with just a fast glance back over my shoulder at Fancy Pants. He was pale and already beginning to appear a little shriveled. He knew what he had coming to him, and even while I realized that he deserved every bit of it, I still felt sorry for him. But staying wouldn't help him and I was glad enough to get off scot-free. Except that it wasn't scot-free. I don't know what was the matter with me -- just scared stiff, I guess. Anyhow, I went straight home and told Pa right out about it and he took down the strap from behind the door and let me have a few. But it seemed to me that he didn't have his heart in it. He was getting a little uneasy about all these alien goings-on. For several days, I didn't go off the place. To have gone anywhere, I would have had to walk past Fancy Pants' house and I didn't want to see him -- not for a while, at least. Then one day Butch and his Pa showed up and they had the glasses. "I don't know if they'll fit," said Butch's Pa. "I had to guess the fitting." glasses except that the lenses had funny lines running every which way, as if someone had taken the glass and twisted it until it was all crinkled out of shape. I put them on and they were a bit loose and things looked different through them, but not a great deal different. I was looking at the barnyard when I put them on. The barnyard was still there, but it appeared strange and a little weird, although it was hard to put a finger on what was wrong with it. It was a bright, hot August day and the sun was shining hard, but when I put the glasses on, it seemed suddenly to get cloudy and a little cold. And that was some of the difference, but not all of it. There was a feeling of strangeness that sent a shiver through me, and the light was wrong, and worst of all was the sense that I didn't belong. But there was nothing you could say flat out was absolutely wrong. "It is any different, son?" asked Pa. "Some different," I answered. "Let me see." He took the glasses off me and put them on himself. "I can't see a thing," he said. "Just a lot of color." "I told you," said Butch's Pa, "that only the young can see. You and I are too fixed in reality." Pa took the glasses off and let them dangle in his hand. "Did you see any halflings?" he asked me. I shook my head. "There are no halflings here," said Butch. "To see the halflings," Butch's Pa put in, "we must journey to the Carter place." "Well, then," said Pa, "what are we waiting for?" So the four of us went up the road to the Carter place. There didn't seem to be anyone at home and that was rather queer, for either Carter himself or Mrs. Carter or Ozzie Burns, the hired man, always stayed at home if the others had to go to town or anywhere. We stood in the road and Butch had himself a good look. There weren't any halflings around the buildings and there weren't any in the orchard or in any of the fields, so far as Butch could see. Pa was getting impatient. I knew what he was thinking -- that he had been made a fool of by a bunch of aliens. Then Butch said excitedly that he thought he saw a halfling down in one corner of the pasture, just at the edge of the big Dark Hollow woods, where Andy had a hay barn, but it was so far away that he could not be sure. "Give your boy the glasses," said Butch's Pa, "and let him have a look." Pa handed me the glasses and I put them on. I had a hard time getting familiar landmarks sorted out, but finally I did, and sure enough, down in the corner of the pasture, there were things moving around that looked like human beings, but mighty funny human beings. They had a sort of smoky look about them, as if you could blow them away. "Well, what do you see?" asked Pa. he stood there considering, rubbing his hand back and forth across his chin, with the whiskers grating. "There doesn't seem to be a soul around," he said. "I don't suppose it would hurt if we went down there. If the things are there, I want Steve to have a good, hard look at them." "You think it is all right?" asked Butch's Pa, worried. "It's not unethical?" "Well, sure," said Pa, "I suppose it is. But if we are quick about it and get out right away, Andy never need know." So we crawled underneath the fence and went over the pasture and crossed into the woods so we could sneak up on the place where we had seen the halflings. The going was a little rough, for in places the brush was rather heavy, and there were thick blackberry patches with the bushes loaded with black and shiny fruit. But we sneaked along as quietly as we could and we finally reached a point opposite the place where we had seen the halflings. Butch nudged me and whispered fiercely: "There they are!" I put the glasses on and there they were, by golly. Up at the edge of the hayfield, just beyond the woods, stood Andy's hay barn, really just a roof set on poles to cover the hay that Andy didn't have the room to get into his regular barn. It was a rundown, dilapidated thing, and there was Andy standing up there on the roof, and some packs of shingles sat on the roof beside him, while climbing up a ladder with a bunch of shingles on his shoulder was Ozzie Burns, the hired man. Andy was reaching down to get the shingles that Ozzie was carrying up the ladder and at the foot of the ladder, hanging onto it so it wouldn't tip, was Mrs. Burns. And that was the reason none of them had been around -- they were all down here, fixing to patch up the shingles on the barn. And there were the halflings, a good two dozen of them. A bunch of them were up on the roof with Andy and a couple on the ladder with the hired man and a couple more of them helping to hold up the ladder. They looked busy and energetic and efficient, and every single one of them was the spitting image of Andy Carter. Not that they really resembled Andy, for they didn't. They were actually wraithlike things that seemed to have but little substance to them. They were little more than a smoky outline, but those smoky outlines -- every single one of them -- was the squat, bulldog outline of Andy Carter. And they walked like him, with a belligerent swagger, and all their motions were like his, and you could sense the meanness in them. In the time that I was gaping at them, Ozzie Burns had handed the shingles up to Andy and clambered up on the roof beside him and Mrs. Burns had stepped away from the ladder, not needing to hold it any longer, since Ozzie was safe up on the roof. I saw the ladder was standing on uneven ground and that was why she'd had to hold it. Andy had been crouched down to lay the pack of shingles on the roof. Now he straightened up and looked toward the woods and he saw us standing there. "What are you doing here?" he roared at us, and started down the ladder. And now comes the funny part of it. I'll have to take it slow and try to tell it straight. ' I ' O me, it seemed the ladder separated and became two ladders. One was standing there against the hay barn and the other left it, and the top of this second ladder began to slide along the roof and was about to fall and carry Andy with it to the ground, just as sure as shooting. I was about to shout for Andy to look out, although I don't know why I should have. If he fell and broke his neck, it'd have been all right with me. But just as I was about to yell, two halflings moved fast and this second ladder disappeared. It had been sliding along the roof and was about to fall, with a second Andy clinging to it and beginning to look scared -- and then suddenly there was just one ladder and one Andy instead of two. I stood there, shaking, and I knew what I had seen, but at that moment I wouldn't admit it, not even to myself. It was, I told myself, as if I had been looking at two separate times -- at a time when the ladder should have fallen and at another time when it had not fallen because the halflings hadn't let it. I had seen good luck in actual operation. Or the averting of bad luck. Whichever it might be, it all came out the same. And now Andy was almost at the ladder's foot and the halflings were coming down from off the roof in a helter-skelter fashion -- some of them jumping off and others dropping off, and if they had been human instead of what they were, there would have been a flock of broken legs and necks. Pa stepped out of the woods into the field and I stepped along with him. We knew we were walking into trouble, but we weren't ones to run. And trailing along behind us were Butch and his Pa, but both of them looked scared and you could see they had no heart for it. Then Andy was down off the ladder and walking straight toward us and he sure was on the warpath. And walking along beside him, in a line on either side of him, were all those halflings, and they kept in step with him and swung their arms like him and looked as mean as he did. "Now, Andy," said Pa, trying to be conciliatory, "let us be reasonable." But it was quite an effort, I can tell you, for Pa to speak that way. He hated Andy Carter clear up from the ground and he sure-God had his reasons. Andy had been a rotten neighbor for an awful lot of years. "Don't you tell me to be reasonable!" yelled Andy. "I been hearing all this talk about how you are blaming me for what you call hard luck. And I tell you to your face it ain't hard luck at all. It's plain downright shiftlessness and bad management. And if you think you're going to get anywhere with all this talk of yours, you are just plain crazy. You been taken in by a lot of alien nonsense. If I had my way, I'd run all those stinking aliens right the hell off the planet." O A took a quick step forward and I thought he was about to clobber Andy. But Butch's Pa jumped forward and grabbed him by the arm. "No! No!" he shouted. "There's no need to fight him! Let us go away!" Pa stood there with Butch's Pa hanging to his arm, and I wondered for a minute which one he would clobber, Butch's Pa or Andy. "I never liked you," Andy said to Pa, "from the first day I saw you. I had you figured for a bum and that is what you are. And this taking up with aliens is the lowest thing any human ever did. You ain't no better than they are. Now get off this place and don't you ever dare set foot on it again." Pa jerked his arm and sent Butch's Pa staggering to one side. Then he brought it up and back. I saw Andy's head start moving to one side, dropping over toward his shoulder, and for a second it looked like he had the beginning of two heads. And I knew that I was watching another accident beginning to unhappen, although it was no accident, for Pa sure meant to paste him. But they weren't fast enough to get Andy's head tilted out of danger. They weren't dealing this time with a slowly sliding ladder. There was a solid crack like someone had hit a tree with an axe on a frosty morning, and Andy's head jerked back and his feet came off the ground and he went tincup over teakettle, flat on his back. And there were all those silly halflings standing in a row, with shocked looks upon their faces, as if they couldn't quite believe it. You could have bought the lot of them for no more than half a buck. Pa turned around and held out his hand to me and said: "Come on, Steve. Let's go." He said it in a quiet voice that was clear and level, and there was, I thought, a note of pride in it. And we turned around, the two of us, and we walked away from there, not hurrying any and not even looking back. "I swear to God," said Pa, "I've meant to do that ever since I laid eyes on him fifteen years ago." I hadn't noticed what had happened to Butch or to his Pa and I wondered where they might have gone to, for there wasn't hide nor hair of them. But I didn't say anything to Pa about it, for I had a hunch he might not be harboring exactly friendly feelings toward Butch's Pa. # UT I needn't have worried about them, for when we got out to the road they were waiting for us, breathing kind of hard and considerably scratched up. The way they'd gone through that brush and all those blackberry patches must have been a caution. "I am glad to see," said Butch's Pa, "that you got back safely." "Don't mention it," Pa told him coldly, and went on down the road, hanging tight onto my hand so that I had to trot along. We got back home and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Pa said to me, "Steve, have you got those glasses?" I dug them out of my pocket and handed them to him. He put them on the shelf above the washstand. "Leave them there," he said. "Don't touch them again -- not ever. Do you understand me?" "Yes, sir," I replied. To tell the truth, I would have liked it better if he'd gone ranting up and down. I was afraid that what had happened out there in the woods had made him decide to go to one of the Homestead Planets. I told myself he maybe already had made up his mind and didn't need to rant. But he never said a word about the fight with Andy nor about the Homestead Planets and he wasn't sore at me. He kept on being quiet and I knew that he still was mad clean through and I figured that he was mostly sore at Butch and Butch's Pa for their having made a complete fool of him. I did a lot of wondering about what I'd seen down there in Andy's hayfield. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that I had grasped the secret of how the halflings operated. For I must have been seeing in two different times when I'd been looking at the ladder. I must have looked into the future and seen the ladder slip. Except it never slipped, for the halflings, seeing that it would slip, had made one leg of it settle in the ground. And then, with the ladder sitting solid, it never slipped, of course. The halflings had done no more than look ahead a bit and then righted something that was about to happen before it had a chance to happen. A ND that, I told myself, was the basis of good luck and bad. The halflings could spot disaster coming and try to head it off. Except they couldn't always make it. They had tried to protect Andy when Pa took a lick at him and they had failed. So I figured that they weren't infallible and that made me feel some better. For if they could make good luck for Andy, it stood to reason they could make bad luck for the rest of us. All they had to do, if they had a mind to, was to see good luck heading for us and change it into bad. It might even be possible, I told myself, that the halflings lived ahead of us, by a few seconds or so, and that the only thing which separated us from them was this matter of a different time. But there was something else that troubled me a lot. Why had I been able to see two different times? It was clear to me that Butch and his people couldn't, for if they could, they'd have more answers to the halfling situation. They'd been studying it for years, and so far as I could figure, they didn't know for certain about this two-time business. It seemed to me, when I thought about it, that Butch's Pa might have ground better than he knew when he made my glasses. He might have put in something or taken out something or done something he didn't know about at all. Or it might be that the human race had a different kind of vision, or maybe just a little different, and when you added the correction for Butch's kind of vision to our kind of vision, you brought out a thing you couldn't even guess at. I tried and tried to get it clear within my mind, but I couldn't do it. I just went around in circles. I stayed close to home for several days because I had a feeling that I should be ignoring Butch to uphold the family honor and that is how I missed the big hassle between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy. It seems that Nature Boy got sick and tired of how Fancy Pants was mistreating that poor, bedraggled cat. So he took one member of the skunk family that had fallen in love with him and he clipped and dyed that skunk to look exactly like the cat. And one day he sneaked over to Fancy Pants' place and switched the skunk for the cat without anyone seeing him. The skunk didn't want to be Fancy Pants' skunk; he belonged to Nature Boy. So he started beating it back home as fast as he could go, which wasn't very fast. Just then Fancy Pants floated out of the door and he saw the skunk going through the gate. He thought the cat was trying to sneak away from him, so he reached out and grabbed it up and rolled it into a ball and tossed it pretty high into the air, sort of careless like, to teach that cat a lesson. It went up in the air and came down smack-dab on top of Fancy Pants, who was floating out there in the yard a few feet off the ground. The skunk was scared witless. As soon as it got its claws fastened into Fancy Pants and had some leverage, it retaliated with enthusiasm. And for the first time in his life, Fancy Pants thumped down to the ground and, among other things, he got his clothes as dirty as any other kid. have seen it. OR a while, they figured that A they might have to take Fancy Pants out somewhere and bury him for a week or two to make him presentable again. But they finally got him to a point where one could come near him. Fancy Pants' Pa went storming down to talk with Nature Boy's Pa and the two of them put on a ruckus that had the neighborhood chuckling for a week. And now I was really strapped for playmates. I was still coldshouldering Butch and I knew better than to take up again with either Nature Boy or Fancy Pants. They both were mean cusses when they set their mind to it I was sure we hadn't heard the last of this feud of theirs and I didn't want to get tangled up in it by being friends with either one of them. It was plenty tough, let me tell you. Here I was with vacation almost ended and no one to pal around with and my live-it gone. I watched the days slip past and regretted every minute of it. Then one day the sheriff drove up to the house. Pa and I were out in the barnyard trying to tinker up a corn binder that was all tied together with haywire and other makeshift odds and ends. Pa had been threatening to buy one for a long time now, but with all the tough luck we'd been having, there wasn't any money. "Good morning, Henry," the sheriff said to Pa. Pa said good morning back. "I hear you been having a little trouble with your neighbors," said the sheriff. "Not what you would call real trouble," Pa told him. "I busted one in the snoot the other day is all." "Right on his own farm, too." Pa quit working on the binder and squatted back on his heels to look up at the sheriff. "Andy been around complaining?" "He was in the other day. Said you had swallowed some fool story that this new alien family started. About some kind of bad-luck critters he'd been harboring on his farm." "And you talked him out of it?" "Well, now," said the sheriff, "I am a peaceable man and I hate to see two neighbors fighting. Andy wanted to put you under peace bond, but I said I'd come over and have a talk with you." "All right," invited Pa. "Go ahead and talk." "Now look here, Henry. You know the story about them hardluck critters is so much poppycock. I'm surprised you took any stock in it." Pa got up slowly. He had a hard look on his face and I thought for a minute he was about to bust the sheriff. I was scared, I tell you, for that is something no one should ever do -- up and bust a sheriff. done or what he might have said, for at that moment Nature Boy's Pa came tearing down the road in his old jalopy and pulled in behind the sheriff's car, intending to park there. But he miscalculated some and he smacked into the sheriff's car hard enough to skid it ahead six feet or so with the brakes all set. The sheriff broke into a run. "By God!" he said. "It isn't even safe to drive out into this corner of the county!" The two of us ran along behind him. I was running just because there was some excitement, but I figure maybe Pa was running so he could help Nature Boy's Pa if the sheriff should take it into his head to get feisty with him. And the funny thing about it was that Nature Boy's Pa, instead of sitting there and waiting for the sheriff, had jumped out of his car and was running up the slope to meet us. "They told me I'd find you here," he panted to the sheriff. "You found me, all right," said the sheriff, practically breathing fire. "Now I'm going to -- " "My boy is gone!" yelled Nature Boy's Pa. "He wasn't home last night..." The sheriff grabbed him and said to him: "Now let's take this easy. Tell me exactly what happened." "He went off yesterday, early in the morning, and he didn't show up for meals, but we didn't think too much of it -- he often goes off for an entire day. He has a lot of friends out there in the woods." "And he didn't come home last night?" Nature Boy's Pa shook his head. "Along about dusk, we got worried. I went out and hunted for him and I didn't find him. I hunted all night long, but there wasn't any sign of him. I thought maybe he'd just holed up for the night with one of his friends in the woods. I thought maybe he'd show up when it got light, but he never did." "Well, all right," said the sheriff, "you leave it to me. We'll rouse out all the neighbors and organize a hunt. We'll find him." He said to me: "You know the lad? You did some playing with him?" "All the time," I answered. "Lead us to all the places where you played. We'll look there first." Pa said: "I'll start phoning the neighbors. I'll get them here right away." He ran up the hill toward the house. In an hour or less, there were a hundred people gathered and the sheriff took them all in hand. He divided them into posses and appointed captains for each posse and told them where to hunt. It was the most excitement we've ever had in the neighborhood. rp HE sheriff took me with the posse he headed up and we went down Dark Hollow. I took them to the place where we were digging out the lizard and the place where we had started to dig ourselves a cave and the hole in the creek where Nature Boy had made friends with some whopping trout, and some other places, too. We found some old tracks of Nature Boy's, but there was no fresh sign, although we hunted up and down the hollow clear to where it flowed into the river, and we trailed back come night, and I was tuckered out. And a little scared as well. For an awful suspicion had come to me. And no matter how hard I tried to keep from thinking of it, I couldn't help myself, for all the time I was trying to remember if the hopper in that time machine had been big enough to take a kid the size of Nature Boy. Ma fed me and sent me up to bed and later she came up and tucked me in and kissed me. She hadn't done that in years. She knew I was too big to be tucked in and kissed, but she did it anyhow. And then she went downstairs and I lay there listening to some men who still were out there in the yard, talking among themselves. Some of the others still were hunting and I knew that I should be out there hunting with them, but I knew Ma wouldn't let me go and I was glad of it. For I was tired all through and the woods at night can be a scary place. I should by rights have gone straight to sleep. Any other night I would have. But I lay there thinking about that hopper in the time machine and I wondered how long it would take before someone told the sheriff about the ruckus between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy, and I thought perhaps they had already. And if so, the sheriff probably was looking into it right now, for the sheriff was nobody's fool. I wondered if I should tell him myself if no one else had. But that was one fight I didn't have any hankering to get tangled up in. Finally I went to sleep and it seemed to me I hadn't been asleep any time at all when something woke me up. It still was dark, but there was a red glow shining through the window. I sat up quick, with my hair standing half on end. I thought at first it might be our barn or the machine shed, but then I saw it wasn't that close. I skinned out of bed and over to the window. That fire was a big one and it wasn't too far up the road. It looked as if it was on the Carter place, but I knew that must be wrong, for if bad luck like that struck anyone, it wouldn't be Andy Carter. Unless, of course, he was loaded with insurance. I went downstairs in my bare feet and Ma was standing at the door, looking up the road toward the blaze. "What is it, Ma?" I asked. "It's the barn on the Carter place," she said. "They phoned the neighborhood for help, but all the men are out hunting Nature Boy." We stood there, Ma and me, and watched until the blaze almost died out, and then Ma hiked me off to bed. covers, weak with this new excitement. I wondered why we should tag along for months with nothing happening, and then all at once have it busting out all over. I lay there and thought about Andy Carter's barn and there was something wrong about it. Andy had been the luckiest man in seven counties and now, without any warning, he was having bad luck just like the rest of us. I wondered if the halflings might have gone off and left him, and if that was the case, I wondered why they had. Maybe, I told myself, they had gotten plain disgusted with Andy's meanness. It was broad daylight when I woke again and I jumped straight out of bed and climbed into my clothes. I rushed downstairs to see if there was any word of Nature Boy. Ma said there wasn't, that the men were still out hunting. She had breakfast ready for me and insisted I eat it and warned me about wandering off or trying to join one of the searching parties. She said it wasn't safe for me to be out in the woods with so many bears about. And that was funny, for she had never worried about the bears before. But she made me promise I wouldn't. As soon as I got out, I zipped down the road as fast as I could go. I had to see the place where the Carter barn had burned down and I just had to talk with someone. And Butch was the only one left that I could talk to. There wasn't much to see at the Carter place, just burned and blackened timbers that still were smoking some. I stood out in the road a while and then I saw Andy come out of the house and he stood there for a minute looking straight at me. So I got out of there. I went past Fancy Pants' place real fast, hoping I wouldn't see him. At the moment, I didn't want a thing to do with Fancy Pants. When I got to Butch's place, his Ma told me he was sick in bed. She didn't think it was catching, she said, so I went up to see him. Butch sure looked terrible lying there -- more like a runty hoot owl than he ever had before -- but he was glad to see me. I asked him how he was and he said he felt better. He made me promise I wouldn't tell his Ma, then told me that he'd got sick from eating some green apples he'd pinched of? the Carter orchard. He'd heard about Nature Boy and I told him in a whisper the suspicions I had. He lay there looking at me solemnly and finally he said: "Steve, I should have told you this before. That is no time machine." "No time machine? How do you know?" "Because I saw the stuff that Fancy Pants' Pa put through it. It didn't go anywhere. It still is lying there." "You saw..." And then I had it. " Y ou mean it went to where the halflings are?" 'That's what I mean," said Butch. bed, I tried to think it through, but there were so many questions bubbling up in me that I couldn't do it. "Butch," I asked, "where is this place that the halflings are? "I don't know," said Butch. "It's close to us, almost in this world, but not really." And I remembered something Pa had said several weeks before. "You mean it's like a place behind a plate-glass window that's between our world and theirs?" "Something like that." "And if Nature Boy is there, what would happen to him?" Butch shuddered. "I don't know." "Would he be all right? Could he breathe in there?" "I suppose he could," said Butch. "I think the halflings do." I got up from the bed and started for the door. Then I turned back again. "Butch, what are the halflings doing? What are they hanging around for?" "No one's sure," said Butch. "There are a lot of ideas about what they are after. One is that they have to be near something that is living before they can live themselves. They can't live a life themselves; they've got to have a life to -- well, like imitate, only thaf s not the word." "They need a pattern," I said, remembering what Butch's Pa had said that day, before Pa choked him off with his own rambling about what the halflings might be after. "I guess you could call it that," said Butch. And I stood there thinking what a lousy life the halflings must have led, using Andy Carter as their pattern. But that wasn't so, for the halfflings, that time I had seen them, had sure-God been happy. They'd been running around up there on the roof and keeping themselves busy and enjoying themselves. And they had, every one of them, looked like Andy Carter. And of course they would, with Andy as their pattern. Thinking about it, I could see how someone like Andy, with his kind of disposition, might enjoy being mean as dirt and ornery with his neighbors. He'd have a sense of independence and the feel of every hand being raised against him and him standing there like a mighty warrior, defying all of them. And from that he'd get a sense of strength and domination. All in all, I supposed, Andy, for a man like him, might be living a pretty darned satisfactory life. I started for the door, and Butch called after me, "Where are you going, Steve?" "I'm going to find Nature Boy," I said. "I'll go with you." "No, you stay in bed. Your Ma will skin both of us if you don't." I got out of the house and headed fast for home, and as I ran, I kept on thinking about how the halflings had no life of their own, but had to find another life and pattern themselves on it. Sometimes they'd be mighty lucky and fasten onto someone who'd give them a good and exciting life, or maybe a good and contented life, but other times they'd get a mighty poor one. But you had to say this for them -- they gave all the help they could to the one they'd picked out as a pattern, and they kept working at it And I wondered how many persons who had been great successes might have been watched over by the halflings. What an awful letdown it would be if they were to learn that they had not become great or rich or famous through of their own, but by the grace of a bunch of things that helped them from outside. kitchen and over to the sink. "Is that you, Steve?" Ma called from the living room. "I'm getting a drink," I told her. "Where you been?" "Just around." "Now don't you go running off," she warned. "No, ma'am, I won't." And all the time I was talking to her, I was climbing on a chair so I could reach those glasses where Pa had put them on the shelf and told me not to touch them again -- not ever. Then I had them in my pocket and was climbing off the chair. I heard Ma heading for the kitchen and I hurried out as quietly as I could. I didn't put the glasses on until I got to where the Carter farm cornered on the road. I went along the road, watching carefully, and finally I found a bunch of halflings down in a fence comer just beyond the orchard. They were standing there and squabbling over something and they didn't seem to notice me until I got real close. Then they all swung around and stood facing me. They seemed to be talking among themselves and pointed at me. And there on the head of one of them, pushed up on his forehead, was the live-it set I had lost down the time machine. When I saw that, I realized Butch actually had seen the stuff that Fancy Pants' Pa had put through the time machine. At first I don't think they realized that I could see them, but after I stood there for a while, staring at them, they began to move up closer to me. I could feel the hair rearing right up on my head. There was nothing I wanted to do more than turn around and run. But I told myself they couldn't reach me and there was nothing to be scared of, so I stood on my ground. They reminded me of a bunch of crows. They must have seen I didn't have a gun, or maybe this particular bunch didn't know about the guns Butch's people had. And they crowded up real close to me, like a flock of crows is not afraid of an empty-handed man, but will keep their distance when he has a gun. I could see their mouths moving at me, but naturally I couldn't hear a thing, and they kept pointing at the one that had my live-it on his head. ' I I # tell the honest truth, I didn't pay too close attention to what they might have been doing at the start of it. I was too busy looking at them and trying to figure out what might have happened to them. There was one thing certain -- this either was a different bunch than I had seen down in Andy Carter's hay field or they had changed a lot. There was still some of Andy in them, although not as much of him as someone else, as if Andy and someone else had gotten sort of scrambled together. Finally I made out that they were pointing at the one with the live-it on his head and then tapping their own heads, and I figured out that each of them was asking for a live-it, too. I don't know what I would have said to them or how I would have said it, if I had had the chance, only I never had the chance. They suddenly parted, as if someone from behind had pushed them to one side, and there was Nature Boy, standing face to face with me. We stood there and looked at one another for a good long time, not saying anything, not making any motion. Then he stepped forward and I stepped forward until we were almost nose to nose. I was afraid there, for a moment, we'd walk right through each other. What would have happened then? Probably nothing much. "You O.K.?" I asked him, thinking maybe he could read my lips even if he couldn't hear me, but he shook his head. So I asked him once again, talking slowly and forming my words as distinctly as I could. But he shook his head again. Then I thought of something else. I lifted up my hand and stuck out my finger and pretended I was writing on the imaginary window that separated us. slow, because he'd have to read it backwards. He didn't get it right away and I did it once again and this time he understood. "O.K.," he wrote. And then he I stood there looking at him and it was horrible, for there he was and here I was, and so far as I could see, there was no way to get him out. He must have sensed what I was thinking, because all at once his mouth trembled and that was the first time I'd even seen Nature Boy even close to crying. Not even that time when we were digging out the lizard and a big rock fell on his toe. I thought how bad it must have been for him, trapped in that place and able to see out, but knowing that no one could see in. He might even have followed some of the searching parties, hoping that someone might accidentally glimpse him, but knowing they couldn't. Maybe he had trailed along behind his Pa, as close as he could get to him, and his Pa not knowing it. And maybe he'd gone back home and watched his family and been all the lonelier for their not knowing he was there. And undoubtedly he'd hunted around for Butch, who he knew could see him, only Butch had been sick in bed. And while I was thinking all of this, I got a faint idea. I told myself that it probably wouldn't work, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed it might. So I reached up with my finger I" pocketed my glasses and hurried along home. I circled around the house because I didn't want to take the chance of Ma seeing me and not letting me go. I went into the machine shed and found a length of rope and hunted up a hacksaw. Lugging these, I made my way back to Fancy Pants' place. The machine shed was back of the barn, so no one from the house could see me, and anyhow no one seemed to be around. I knew that Fancy Pants' Pa, and maybe Fancy Pants himself, would be out with the searchers, floating around over places where it would be impossible for the men on foot to go. I laid down the rope and hacksaw and put on my glasses and Nature Boy was there, right beside the machine shed door. He had some of the halflings with him, including the one who still had the live-it perched up on his forehead. And scattered all around the place, just like Butch had said, were tea cups and pie plates and children's blocks and a lot of other junk -- the stuff that Fancy Pants' Pa had fed into the time machine. I looked at the halflings again and all at once I knew what was different about them. They were still some of Andy, but they were Nature Boy as well. And then I knew why Andy's barn had burned. These halflings of his had been so busy tagging around Nature Boy that they had not been able to give Andy their attention. It seemed only natural, of course. A halfling would get a lot more good out of a real live human inside that world of theirs than they would someone they could only see from behind a plate-glass window. I took the glasses off and put them in my pocket and got to work. It was no easy job to saw through that padlock. The steel was awfully hard and the blade was dull and I was afraid it might break before I got through the steel. I cussed myself for not thinking to bring along an extra blade or two. The sawing made an awful racket because I had forgotten to bring along some oil to squirt into the cut. But nobody heard the sawing. Finally I got through. I opened the door and stepped into the shed and the time machine was there, just the way I remembered it. I laid down the rope and went over to the control board and studied it, but it wasn't very complicated. I got it turned on and the creamy whirlpool was sliding in the hopper's throat. I picked up the rope and put my glasses on and got an awful fright. The machine shed was built on a gentle slope and the floor I was standing on was four or five feet above the ground and there I was, standing in the air, or so it seemed to me. I had a sense, not of falling, but that by rights I should be falling, that any minute now I would begin to fall. I knew I wouldn't, naturally -- I was standing on a transparent but solid floor. But knowing that didn't help much. That horrible, dreamlike feeling that I was about to tumble to the ground still kept hold of me. And to make it even worse, there was Nature Boy,  standing underneath me, with his head about level with my feet, looking up at me. His face was hopeful and he was motioning me to get busy with the rope. there was no need of caution, I took one end of the rope and tossed it down the hopper and felt the suck and tug of the creamy whirlpool pulling down the rope. Down underneath the hopper, I could see the rope coming out, dangling into that place where Nature Boy was trapped. He moved over quickly and grabbed hold of the rope and I could feel the weight of the pull he put on it. Nature Boy was about my size, perhaps a little smaller, and I knew I'd have to pull as hard as ever I could to get him out of there. I even wound a hitch around my hand to make sure it wouldn't slip. I pulled with all my might. And that rope didn't budge. It felt as if I were pulling against a house. I couldn't gain an inch. So I quit pulling and knelt down, still hanging to the rope, peering at the base of the time machine. It was a funny thing. The rope went to the bottom of the hopper's throat and then it skipped a foot or two. There was a foot or so of sidewise space where there wasn't any rope, and then the rope took up again, dangling down into that other place where Nature Boy had hold of it. It didn't make sense. That rope should have gone into that other world in a straight and simple line. But the fact was that it didn't. It went off somewhere else before it fell into the other world. And that, I figured, was the reason I couldn't pull it out. You could put a thing through the time machine, but you couldn't pull it back. I looked down at Nature Boy and he looked back at me. I knew he'd seen it and knew as well as I did exactly what it meant He looked pretty pitiful and I don't suppose I looked any better. Just then the machine shed door screeched open. I jumped up, still hanging to the rope, and there was Fancy Pants' Pa. He was all burned up and I couldn't blame him. Not after seeing how I had sawed the padlock to break into the place. "Steve," he said, and you could hear him fighting to keep his voice level, "I thought I told you to keep out of here." "Yes, sir," I said, "but Nature Boy's in there." "Nature Boy!" he shouted. Then his voice dropped. "You don't know what you're talking about How could he get in?" "I don't know," I said, though I could have told him. "Those glasses you are wearing," asked Fancy Pants' Pa. "Are those the ones that were made for you by Butch's father?" I nodded. "Then you can see?" "I can see Nature Boy," I said. "Just as plain as day." glasses off and the rope slid down that hopper slicker than a whistle. "It's all right, I guess," I said. "I couldn't pull him out." "Steve," said Fancy Pants' Pa, "I want you to tell me the truth. You're not just thinking up a story? You are not pretending?" He was awful pale and I saw what he was thinking -- if Nature Boy had gone down that hopper, the entire neighborhood would be down on him like a ton of bricks. I crossed my heart. "And hope to die," I added. That seemed good enough for him. He shut off the time machine, then went outdoors. I followed him. "Now," he said, "you stay right here. I'll be back immediately." He floated off in somewhat of a hurry, zooming away above the pasture woods. He was out of sight in no time. I sat down with my back against the machine shed and I was feeling pretty low. I knew I should put on my glasses, but I kept them in my pocket I couldn't have stood the sight of Nature Boy looking out at me. It was done and over with, I knew. There was no way in the world for me or anyone to rescue Nature Boy. He was gone for good and all. He was worse than gone. And sitting there, I thought up some pretty dreadful things to do to Fancy Pants. For there was no doubt in my mind that Fancy Pants had got into the shed and had grabbed Nature Boy, just like he did the cat, and dumped him down the hopper. He was pretty sore, I knew, about the trick that Nature Boy had played on him with that skunk disguised as a cat. There was nothing he would have stopped at to get even. I was sitting there and thinking when Fancy Pants' Pa came floating up the road, and panting along behind him were Pa and the sheriff and Butch's Pa and Nature Boy's Pa and some other neighbors. The sheriff came straight for me and he grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a good, sharp shake. "Now," he bellowed, "what is all this foolishness? I warn you, boy, it will go hard with you if you've been pulling our leg." I tried to break away from him, but he wouldn't let me go. Then Pa stepped up and flung out his arm so that it caught the sheriff straight across the chest and sent him staggering back. "You keep your hands off him," Pa said to the sheriff. "But that story," blustered the sheriff. "You surely don't believe -- " "I do," said Pa. "I believe every word of it. My boy doesn't lie." I'll say this for Pa: He may storm around and yell and he may take the strap to you for a lot of trifling things, but when it comes down to the pinch, he's standing there beside you. "I'll remind you, Henry," said the sheriff, bristling, "that you're not entirely in the clear yourself. There's that business of the breach of peace I talked Andy Carter out of." "Andy Carter," said Pa, speaking more slowly than one would expect him to. "He's the man who lives just down the road, if I recall correctly. Has there been any of you who have seen him lately?" it seemed that no one had. "Last time I talked to Andy," said Pa, "was when I called him on the phone and told him we needed help. He said he was too busy to go hunting any alien whelp. He said it would be good riddance if all of them got lost" He looked around the crowd and no one spoke a word. I don't suppose it was quite polite of Pa to say what he had, with Nature Boy's Pa and Butch's Pa and all the rest of those alien people standing there before us. But it sure-God was the truth, and they needed it right then, and Pa was the one who was not afraid to give it to them right between the eyes. Then someone spoke up from the crowd and there were so many of them I couldn't be sure exactly who it was. But whoever it was said : "I tell you, folks, it was nothing but plain justice when Andy's barn burned down." The sheriff bristled up. "If I thought one of you had a hand in that, I would -- " "You wouldn't do a thing," said Pa. He turned to me. "All right, Steve, tell us what you have to tell. I promise you that everyone will listen and there won't be any interruptions." He looked straight at the sheriff when he was saying it. "Just a second, sir," said Butch's Pa. "I want to voice one important point. I know this boy can see the halflings, for I myself am the one who made the glasses for him. I know it is immodest of me to say a thing like this, but if I am nothing else, I am one fine optician." "Thank you, sir," Pa said. "And now, Steve, go ahead." But I never got a chance to say a single word, for Butch came stumbling around the barn and he had the gun with him. Or at least I took it for the gun, although it didn't look like one. It was a sticklike thing and it glittered in the sunlight from all sorts of prisms and mirrors set into it at all kinds of crazy angles. "Pa," yelled Butch, "I heard about it and I brought the gun. I hope I'm not too late." He ran up to his Pa and his Pa took the gun away from him and held it with everyone looking at him. "Thank you, son," said Butch's Pa. "It was good of you, but we won't need a gun. We aren't shooting anything today." Then Butch cried out: "There he is, Pa! There's Nature Boy!" I am not too sure that all of them believed I had found Nature Boy. Some might have had their reservations, and kept quiet about it because they didn't want to tangle with my Pa. But Butch was a different matter. He could see these things without any silly glasses. And he was an alien, and everyone expected aliens to do these sort of crazy things. "All right," admitted the sheriff, "so I guess he must be there. Now what do we do?" "There doesn't seem to be much to go on," said Pa, "but we can't leave the boy in there." He looked at Nature Boy's Pa. "Don't you worry. We'll figure a way to get him out." But he spoke with so much confidence that I knew he was only talking so that Nature Boy's Pa would know we weren't giving up. hope. If you couldn't get him out the way he had gotten in, there didn't seem to be any other way. There were no doors into that other place. "Gentlemen," said Butch's Pa, "I have a small idea." We all turned and waited. "This gun," he said, "is used to keep down the number of halflings. It ruptures the wall between the two worlds sufficiently to let a bullet through. There might be an adaptation made of it, and we can do that later, or have someone do it for us, if that be necessary. But it seems possible to me we could use the gun itself." "But we don't want to shoot the boy," the sheriff protested. "What we want to do is get him out." "I have no intention, sir, of shooting him. There will be no bullet in the gun. All we'll use is the device to rupture the curtain or whatever it may be that lies between the worlds. And I can -- what is the word? -- tinker, I believe. I can tinker up the gun so that rupture will be greater." He sat down on the ground and began working on the gun, shifting prisms here and there and adjusting tiny mirrors. "There is just one thing," he said. "The rupture will last for but a moment. The boy must be immediate to take advantage of it. He must leap outward instantly the rupture should appear." He turned to me. "Steve, can you communicate with him?" "Communicate?" "Talk to him. With signs, perhaps? Or the reading of the lips? Or some other way?" "Sure, I can do that." "Please, would you do it then?" So I put on my glasses and looked around until I found Nature Boy. I had quite a time making him understand what we planned to do. It wasn't any easier to talk with him with all those crazy halflings standing all around him and making motions at me and pointing at the live-it, then tapping their own heads. I was sweating plenty, for I was afraid that I had not got it all across to him, but I knew that any more of it would do no more than confuse him. So I told Butch's Pa that we were all set, and Butch's Pa handed Butch the gun, and the rest stepped back a ways, and there was Butch with the gun and me standing right behind him. And there was Nature Boy standing in that other place, and a bunch of those silly halflings clustered all about him, and they sure didn't know about the alien gun or they'd not have been standing there. And Nature Boy looked like someone who'd been stood against a wall and was being executed without even any blindfold. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw Fancy Pants floating off to one side of us, and he was the saddest-looking sack you ever saw. Suddenly there was a strange prisms and the mirrors moved on the gun that Butch was holding. He had pulled a trigger, or whatever it was. OR a second, straight in front of us, a funny sort of hole seemed to open up in the place that should not have been there at all -- a jagged, ragged hole that appeared in nothingness. And I caught sight of Nature Boy jumping through the hole the second it stayed open. And there he was, staggering a bit from the jump that he had made -- only he was not alone. He had one of the halflings with him! He had him by the wrist in a good tight grip and it was plain to see that he had jerked him through with him, for the halfling did not seem at all happy about what had happened to him. I saw at once that it was the halfling who had the live-it on his head. Butch pushed the halfling toward me and he said: "Here, Steve. It was the only way I could get your live-it back." I saw that Butch was letting go of the halfling and I grabbed quick by the other wrist and was somewhat surprised to find that he was solid. I would not have been astonished if my hand had gone right through him, for he still had that swirly-smoky look about him, although it seemed to me he might be hardening up a bit and becoming more substantial. Pa moved over close beside me, saying, "You be careful, Steve!" "Aw, he's all right," I said. "He's not even trying to get away from me. Someone raised a shout and I whirled around and stared. A half-dozen of the halflings had grabbed hold of the edges of that door into the other world, and they were tugging for dear life so it would stay open, and pouring out of it was that entire herd of halflings! They were shoving and pushing and scrambling to get through, and there were a lot more of them, it seemed to me, than I had thought there were. We just stood there and watched them until they all were through. We didn't do a thing because there was not a thing we could do. And they stood there in a bunch, packed tight together, staring back at us. The sheriff came alongside Pa. He pushed back his hat until it roosted on his neck. You could see that the sheriff was flabbergasted and I enjoyed it, for it had been apparent from the very first that the sheriff hadn't believed a word he'd heard about the halflings. I don't know, maybe he still was thinking that it might be nothing but some sort of alien joke. You could see, without half trying, that the sheriff didn't cotton to any aliens. "How come," he asked suspiciously, "that this one here has got a live-it on?" So I told him and he blinked at me, dazed and dumfounded, but he said nothing back. I sure had shut him up. Fancy Pants' Pa had floated up while I was telling it and he said I told the truth, for he'd been there and seen it. Everyone began to talk at once, but Fancy Pants' Pa floated up a little higher and held up his hand to command attention. "Just a moment, if you please," he said. "Before we get down to more serious business, I have something you must hear. As you may suspect, knowing the episode of the skunk, my family undoubtedly has a great deal to answer for in this incident" that would sound silly and pompous, but Fancy Pants' Pa could get away with it. "So," said Farley Pants' Pa, "I now announce to you that my malefactor son, for the forthcoming thirty days, must walk upon his feet. He must not float an inch. If the punishment does not seem sufficient -- " "It's enough," Pa cut in. "The boy has to learn his lesson, but there is no use being harsh with him." "Now, sir," said Nature Boy's Pa, being very formal, "it is not necessary -- " "I insist," Fancy Pants' Pa said. "I really must insist. It can be no other way." "Say," bawled the sheriff, "will someone explain to me what this is all about?" "Sheriff," Pa said to him, "your understanding of this matter is of no great importance and it would take too long to explain. We have more important business we should be attending to." He turned around a bit so he faced the crowd. "Well, gentlemen, what do we do next? It appears to me that we have some guests. And remembering that these critters are bearers of good luck, it would seem to me we should treat them as kindly as we can." "Pa," I said, tugging at his coat sleeve, "I know how we can get them over on our side. Every one of them wants a live-it set." "That's right," spoke up Nature Boy. "All the time I was in there, they pestered me and pestered me about how to get the sets. All the time they squabbled over who would get to use Steve's set next." "You mean," the sheriff asked, in a weak voice, "that these things can talk?" "Why, sure they can," said Nature Boy. "They learn a lot more back in that world of theirs than you could ever guess." "Well, now," Pa said with a lot of satisfaction, "if that is all they want, it's not too great a price for us to pay to get us some good luck. We'll just buy a lot of live-it sets. We can probably get them wholesale -- " "But if we get the live-its," objected Butch's Pa, "they'll just lie around and use them and be of no help to us at all. They won't need us any more. They'll have all these patterns they need from the live-it sets." "Well, anyhow," said Pa, "even if that should be true, we'll get them off our necks. They won't pester us with this bad luck they commit." "It won't do us any good however you look at it," declared Butch's Pa, who had a mighty low opinion of the halflings. "They all live together. That's the way it's always been. They never helped an entire neighborhood, but just one man or family in the neighborhood. A whole tribe of them comes in and they give one family all the benefit You couldn't get them to split up and work for all of us." "If you jerks would listen," said the halfling with the live-it on his head, "I can get you straightened out." It was a shock, I tell you, to hear him speak at all. He was the kind of thing you'd figure shouldn't speak at all -- just a sort of dummy. And the way he spoke and the tone he used made it even worse. It was the way Andy Carter always talked -- either wild and blustering, or out of the corner of his mouth, sarcastic. After listening to Andy all these years, that poor halfling didn't know any different. staring at the halfling who had spoken, while all the other halflings were nodding their heads in such mad agreement with him that I thought they'd snap their necks. Pa was the first one to get his feet back under him. "Go ahead," he said to the halfling. "We all are listening." "We'll make a deal with you," said the halfling, using ornery words but speaking most respectful, "but you'll have to level with us, see? We'll work hard for you and guard against mishap, but we got to have the live-its and no mistake about it. One for each of us -- and if I was you, mister, I wouldn't try to chisel." "Well, now," said Pa, "that sounds fair enough. But you mean all of us?" "All of you," the live-it halfling said. "You mean you will split up?" asked Pa. "Each of us will have at least one of you? You won't all live together any more?" "I think, sir," said Fancy Pants' Pa, "that we can depend on that. I believe I understand what this gentleman is thinking. It is something that happened with the human race on Earth." "What happened here on Earth?" asked Pa, sort of flabbergasted. "Why," said Fancy Pants' Pa, "the elimination of the need for social clustering. There was a time when the human race found it necessary to congregate in families and tribes for companionship and entertainment. Then the race got the record player and the radio and TV and there was less need for get-togethers. A man had entertainment of his own in his home. He need not move beyond his living room to be entertained. So the spectator and group sports simply petered out." "And you think," asked Pa, "that the same thing will happen with the halflings if we gave them liveits?" "Certainly," said Fancy Pants' Pa. "We supply them, as it were, entertainment for the home, personal entertainment. There will be no further need for tribal living." "You said it, pal!" the halfling said enthusiastically. All the rest of them were nodding in agreement. Butch's Pa, getting real riled up. "They're in this world now, and how do you get them back? And while they're here, can they do anything for us?" "You can stop shooting off your mouth right now," the halfling said to Butch's Pa with utmost respect. "We can't do anything here for you, that's sure. In this world of yours, we can't see ahead. And to do you any good, we have to see ahead." "You mean that if we give you live-its, you'll go back home again?" asked Pa. "Sure," said the halfling. "Back there is our home. Just try to keep us from it." "We won't even try," Pa said. "We might even push you back. We'll give you the live-its and you get back there and start to work for us." "We'll work for you hard," said the halfling, "but not all the time. We take out some time for looking at the live-it. That all right with you?" "Sure," Pa agreed. "Sure, that's O.K. with us." "All right," said the halfling, "get us back where we belong." I turned around and walked out of the crowd, out to the edge of it. For it was all settled now and I had a belly full of it. It would be all right with me if we never had any more excitement in the neighborhood. Up by the barn, I saw Fancy Pants limping along on the ground. He was having a tough time walking. But I didn't feel the least bit sorry for him. He had it coming. I figured in just a little while I'd go up around the barn and clobber him for that time he mopped up the road with me. It should be an easy job, I told myself, with him grounded by his Pa for thirty days. In The Next Issue Christopher Grimm -- in hideous hyperspace, everything is the nightmare opposite of itself... yet here is where Len Mattern finds his goal! Citizen Jell The problem with working wonders is they must be worked -- even when they're against all common sense I knew Mr. Jell's great problem. None of his neighbors, in truth, knew Mr. Jell at all. He was only an odd old man who lived alone in a little house on the riverbank. He had the usual little mail box, marked "E. Jell," set on a post in front of his house, but he never got any mail, and it was not long before people began wondering where he got the money he lived on. Not that he lived well, certainly; all he ever seemed to do was just fish, or just sit on the riverbank watching the sky, telling tall stories to small children. And none of that took any money to do. But still, he was a little odd; people sensed that. The stories he told all his young friends, for instance -- wild, weird tales about spacemen and other planets -- people hardly expected tales like that from such an old man. Tales about cowboys and Indians they might have understood, but spaceships? So he was definitely an odd old man, but just how odd, of course, no one ever really knew. The stories he told the children, stories about space travel, about weird creatures far off in the Galaxy -- those stories were all true. Mr. Jell was, in fact, a retired spaceman. Now that was part of Mr. Jell's problem, but it was not all of it. He had very good reasons for not telling anybody the truth about himself -- no one except the children -- and he had even more excellent reasons for not letting his own people know where he was. The race from which Mr. Jell had sprung did not allow this sort of thing -- retirement to Earth. They were a fine, tolerant, extremely advanced people, and they had learned long ago to leave undeveloped races, like the one on Earth, alone. Bitter experience had taught them that more harm than good came out of giving scientific advances to backward races, and often just the knowledge of their existence caused trouble among primitive peoples. No, Mr. Jell's race had for a long while quietly avoided contact with planets like Earth, and if they had known Mr. Jell had violated the law, they would have come swiftly and taken him away -- a thing Mr. Jell would have died rather than let happen. R. Jell was unhuman, yes, but other than that he was a very gentle, usual old man. He had been born and raised on a planet so overpopulated that it was one vast city from pole to pole. It was the kind of place where a man could walk under the open sky only on rooftops, where vacant lots were a mark of incredible wealth. Mr. Jell had passed most of his long life under unbelievably cramped and crowded conditions -- either in small spaceships or in the tiny rooms of unending apartment buildings. When Mr. Jell had happened across Earth on a long voyage some years ago, he had recognized it instantly as the place of his dreams. He had had to plan very carefully, but when the time came for his retirement, he was able to slip away. The language of Earth was already on record; he had no trouble learning it, no trouble buying a small cottage on the river in a lovely warm place called Florida. He settled down quietly, a retired old man of one hundred and eighty-five, looking forward to the best days of his life. And Earth turned out to be more wonderful than his dreams. He discovered almost immediately that he had a great natural aptitude for fishing, and though the hunting instinct had been nearly bred out of him and he could no longer summon up the will to kill, still he could walk in the open woods and marvel at the room, the incredible open, wide, and unoccupied room, live animals in a real forest, and the sky above, clouds seen through the trees -- real trees, which Mr. Jell had seldom seen before. And, for a long while, Mr. Jell was certainly the happiest man on Earth. He would arise, very early, to watch the sun rise. After that, he might fish, depending on the weather, or sit home just listening to the lovely rain on the roof, watching the mighty clouds, the lightning. Later in the afternoon, he might go for a walk along the riverbank, waiting for school to be out so he could pass some time with the children. Whatever else he did, he would certainly go looking for the children. A lifetime of too much company had pushed the need for companionship pretty well out of him, but then he had always loved children, and they made his life on the river complete. They believed him; he could tell them his memories in safety, and there was something very special in that, to have secrets with friends. One or two of them, the most trustworthy, he even allowed to see the Box. Now the Box was something extraordinary, even to so advanced a man as Mr. Jell. It was a device which analyzed matter, made a record of it, and then duplicated it. The Box could duplicate anything. What Mr. Jell would do, for example, would be to put a loaf of bread into the Box, and press a button, and presto, there would be two loaves of bread, each perfectly alike, atom for atom. It would be absolutely impossible for anyone to tell them apart. This was the way Mr. Jell made most of his food, and all of his money. Once he had gotten one original dollar bill, the Box went on duplicating it -- and bread, meat, potatoes, anything else Mr. Jell desired was instantly available at the touch of a button. thing, anything, it was no longer necessary to have the original. The Box filed a record in its electronic memory, describing, say, bread, and Mr. Jell had only to dial a number any time he wanted bread. And the Box needed no fuel except dirt, leaves, old pieces of wood, just anything made out of atoms -- most of which it would arrange into bread or meat or whatever Mr. Jell wanted, and the rest of which it would use as a source of power. So the Box made Mr. Jell entirely independent, but it did even more than that; it had one other remarkable feature. It could be used also as a transmitter and receiver. Of matter. It was, in effect, the Sears Roebuck catalogue of Mr. Jell's people, with its own built-in delivery service. If there was an item Mr. Jell needed, any item at all, and that item was available on any of the planets ruled by Mr. Jell's people, Mr. Jell could dial for it, and it would appear in the Box in a matter of seconds. The makers of the Box prided themselves on the speed of their delivery, the ease with which they could transmit matter instantaneously across light-years of space. Mr. Jell admired this property, too, but he could make no use of it. For once he had dialed, he would also be billed. And of course his Box would be traced to Earth. That Mr. Jell could not allow. No, he would make do with whatever was available on Earth. He had to get along without the catalogue. And he really never needed the catalogue, not at least for the first year, which was perhaps the finest year of his life. He lived in perfect freedom, ever-continuing joy, on the riverbank, and made some special friends: one Charlie, aged five, one Linda, aged four, one Sam, aged six. He spent a great deal of his time with these friends, and their parents approved of him happily as a free baby-sitter, and he was well into his second year on Earth when the first temptation arose. Bugs. Try as he might, Mr. Jell could not learn to get along with bugs. His air-conditioned, antiseptic, neat and odorless existence back home had been an irritation, yes, but he had never in his life learned to live with bugs of any kind, and he was too old to start now. But he had picked an unfortunate spot. The state of Florida was a heaven for Mr. Jell, but it was also a heaven for bugs. There is probably nowhere on Earth with a greater variety of insects, large and small, winged and stinging, than Florida, and the natural portion of all kinds found their ways into Mr. Jell's peaceful existence. He was unable even to clear out his own house -- never mind the endless swarms of mosquitoes that haunted the riverbank -- and the bugs gave him some very nasty moments. And the temptation was that he alone, of all people on Earth, could have exterminated the bugs at will. One of the best-selling export gadgets on Mr. Jell's home world was a small, flying, burrowing, electronic device which had been built specifically to destroy bugs on planets they traded with. Mr. Jell was something of a technician, and he might not even have had to order a Destroyer through the catalogue, but there were other problems. #M" R. Jell's people had not beenL" merely capricious when they formed their policy of non-intervention. Mr. Jell's bug-destroyer would kill all the bugs, but it would undoubtedly ruin the biological balance upon which the country's animal life rested. The birds which fed on the bugs would die, and the animals which fed on the birds, and so on, down a course which could only be disastrous. And even one of the little Destroyers would put an extraordinary dent in the bug population of the area; once sent out into the woods, it could not be recalled or turned off, and it would run for years. No, Mr. Jell made the valiant decision to endure little itchy bumps on his arms for the rest of his days. Yet that was only the first temptation. Soon there were others, much bigger and more serious. Mr. Jell had never considered this problem at all, but he began to realize at last that his people had been more right than he knew. He was in the uncomfortable position of a man who can do almost anything, and does not dare do it. A miracle man who must hide his miracles. The second temptation was rain. In the middle of Mr. Jell's second year, a drought began, a drought which covered all of Florida. He sat by helplessly, day after day, while the water level fell in his own beloved river, and fish died gasping breaths, trapped in little pockets upstream. Several months of that produced Mr. Jell's second great temptation. Lakes and wells were dry all over the country, farms and orange groves were dry, there were great fires in the woods, birds and animals died by the thousands. All that while, of course, Mr. Jell could easily have made it rain. Another simple matter, although this time he would have had to send away for the materials, through the Box. But he couldn't do that If he did, they would come for him, and he consoled himself by arguing that he had no right to make it rain. That was not strictly controllable, either. It might rain and rain for several lakes, yes, and robbing water from somewhere else, and then what would happen when the normal rainy season came? Mr. Jell shuddered to think that he might be the cause, for all his good intentions, of vast floods, and he resisted the second temptation. But that was relatively easy. The third temptation turned out to be infinitely harder. Little Charlie, aged five, owned a dog, a grave, sober, studious dog named Oscar. On a morning near the end of Mr. Jell's second year, Oscar was run over by a truck. And Charlie gathered the dog up, all crumpled and bleeding and already dead, and carried him tearfully but faithfully off to Mr. Jell, who could fix anything. And Mr. Jell could certainly have fixed Oscar. Hoping to guard against just such an accident, he had already made a "recording" of Oscar several months before. The Box had scanned Oscar and discovered exactly how he was made -- for the Box, as has been said, could duplicate anything -- and Mr. Jell had only to dial Oscar number to produce a new Oscar. A live Oscar, grave and sober, atom for atom identical with the Oscar that was dead. who had been unable to comfort the boy, came to Mr. Jell's house with him. And Mr. Jell had to stand there, red-faced and very sad, and deny to Charlie that there was anything he could do, and watch the look in Charlie's eyes turn into black betrayal. And when the boy ran off crying, Mr. Jell had the worst temptation of all. He thought so at the time, but he could not know that the dog had not been the worst. The worst was yet to come. He resisted a great many temptations after that, but now for the first time doubt had begun to seep in to his otherwise magnificent existence. He swore to himself that he could never give this life up. Here on the riverbank, dry and buggy as it well was, was still the most wonderful life he had ever known, infinitely preferable to the drab crowds he would face at home. He was an old man, grimly aware of the passage of time. He would consider himself the luckiest of men to be allowed to die and be buried here. But the temptations went on. First there was the Red Tide, sweeps Florida's coast, murdering He could have cured that, but he would have had to send off for the chemicals. Next there was an infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly, a bug which threatened most of Florida's citrus crop and very nearly ruined little Linda's father, a farmer. There was a Destroyer available which could be set to kill just one type of bug, Mr. Jell knew, but he would have had to order it, again, from the catalogue. So he had to let Linda's father lose most of his life's savings. Shortly after that, he found himself tempted by a young, gloomy couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Ridge, whom he visited one day looking for their young son, and found himself in the midst of a morbid quarrel. Mr. Ridge's incredible point of view was that this was too terrible a world to bring children into. Mr. Jell found himself on the verge of saying that he himself had personally visited forty-seven other worlds, and not one could hold a candle to this one. He resisted that, at last, but it was surprising how close he had come to talking, even over such a relatively small thing as that, and he had concluded that he was beginning to wear under the strain, when there came the day of the last temptation. Linda, the four-year-old, came down with a sickness. Mr. Jell learned with a shock that everyone on Earth believed her incurable. knew that from the moment he heard of the illness, and he wondered why he had never until that moment anticipated this. There was, of course, nothing else he could do, much as he loved this Earth, and much as he knew little Linda would certainly have died in the natural order of things. All of that made no difference; it had finally come home to him that if a man is able to help his neighbors and does not, then he ends up something less than a man. He went out on the riverbank and thought about it all that afternoon, but he was only delaying the decision. He knew he could not go on living here or anywhere with the knowledge of the one small grave for which he would be forever responsible. He knew Linda would not begrudge him those few moments, that one afternoon more. He waited, watching the sun go down, and then he went back into the house and looked through the catalogue. He found the number of the serum and dialed for it. The serum appeared within less than a minute. He took it out of the Box and stared at it, the thought of the life it would bring to Linda driving all despair out of his mind. It was a universal serum; it would protect her from all disease for the rest of her life. They would be coming for him soon, but he knew it would take them a while to get here, perhaps even a full day. He did not bother to run. He was much to old to run and hide. He sat for a while thinking of how to get the serum to her, but that was no problem. Her parents would give her anything she asked now, and he made up some candy, injecting the serum microscopically into the chunks of chocolate, and then suddenly had a wondrous idea. He put the chunks into the Box and went on duplicating candy until he had several boxes. When he was finished with that, he went visiting all the houses of all the good people he knew, leaving candy for them and their children. He knew he should not do that, but, he thought, it couldn't really do much harm, could it? Just those few lives altered, out of an entire world? But the idea had started wheels turning in his mind, and toward the end of that night, he began to chuckle with delight. Might as well be flashed for a rogg as a zilb. He ordered out one special little bug Destroyer, from the Box, set to kill just one bug, the medfly, and sent it happily down the road toward Linda's farm. After that, he duplicated Oscar and sent the dog yelping homeward with a note on his collar. When he was done with that, he ordered a batch of chemicals, several tons of it, and ordered a conveyer to carry it down and dump it into the river, where it would be washed out to sea and so end the Red Tide. By the time that was over, he was very tired; he had been up the whole night. He did not know what to do about young Mr. Ridge, the one who did not want children. He decided that if the man was that foolish, nothing could help him. But there was one other thing he could do. Praying silently that once he started this thing, it would not get out of hand, he made it rain. In this way, he deprived himself of the last sunrise. There was nothing but gray sky, misty, blowing, when he went out onto the riverbank that morning. But he did not really mind. The fresh air and the rain on his face were all the good-by he could have asked for. He was sitting on wet grass wondering the last thought -- why in God's name don't more people here realize what a beautiful world this is? -- when he heard a voice behind him. The voice was deep and very firm. "Citizen Jell," it said. The old man sighed. "Coming," he said, "coming." This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. b'alIbaus for your information T HE question that came most frequently to me during January and the early part of February, by mail, by phone and in person after lectures, was one that surprised me very much. It was usually phrased as follows: "How do we know that the Russian rocket which missed the Moon is really in orbit around the Sun?" The answer I gave was more or less that the Russian rocket had to be in orbit around the Sun because it had no choice. February  January I  December   I  July Orbits of Earth (inner solid circle) and of Mars (outer solid circle) as well as those of minor planet #-Eros (dot-dash line) and rocket Metchta (broken line). Dotted lines with names of months on them indicate position of Earth on first day of every month. Most of the time, a blank stare was all I got for this answer, but occasionally somebody wanted to know why the rocket did not melt from the heat if it was in orbit around the Sun. Careful cross-questioning made it clear to me that the people who wondered what would happen to the rocket in orbit around the Sim had something like a tight orbit in mind. Also, some seem to have been honestly convinced, incredible as it may sound, that the Moon and the Sun are both far from the Earth in space, but that they are pretty close to each other. The whole story obviously needs some explanation and clarification. Probably all readers of Galaxy do not need the explanation itself, but they can use this column as ammunition if they have to explain the whole thing to others. The explanation has to begin with a few simple figures about the orbit of the Earth. Most books state that the mean distance of the Earth which is correct, provided the little word "mean" is not overlooked. In reality, the distance varies from Earth goes through perihelion (the point of its orbit closest to the Sun) very early in January, while the aphelion (the point farthest from the Sun) is passed very early in July of each year. The mean orbital velocity of the Earth is # miles per second. #kNE rather important point which is not mentioned at all as a rule is that the "dawn side" of the Earth leads as the Earth goes around the Sun. The point which happens to have dawn at the moment is "in front" while the antipodal point is trailing. This is of major importance when it comes to the movements of things fired from Earth. A rocket taking off vertically at dawn will add its own velocity to the orbital velocity of the Earth. A rocket taking off vertically at dusk will subtract its own velocity from the orbital velocity of the Earth. Now remember that every planet has just the necessary orbital velocity to keep it in its own orbit. If a rocket is fired "ahead" of the planet, it is "too fast" for the planet's orbit around the Sun. Consequently it will start drifting away from the Sun -- in other words, it takes on an orbit which is larger than the orbit of the planet from which it was fired. As the rocket drifts away from the Sun, its velocity diminishes, and after some time the Sun's gravitational field wins out and the rocket will approach the Sun again. During this approach, its velocity increases so that, when it gets back to the orbit of the planet from which it was fired, it is again "too fast" for that particular orbit and it swings outward, away from the Sun, again. If the rocket were fired at dusk, against the orbital movement of its home planet, it would be "too slow" for the planetary orbit. Logically, then, it would drift inward in the Solar System -- it would come closer to the Sun. But while doing so, it would gather speed and become "too fast" to stay that close to the Sun. It would then start going away from the Sun -- not in a straight line, of course -- and reach again the orbit of the planet from which it was fired. To summarize this in more precise language, one might say that the rocket which added velocity to the orbital velocity of its planet will have an aphelion farther from the Sun than that planet, but that its perihelion will be in the orbit of the planet of origin. Conversely, the rocket which subtracted velocity from the orbital velocity of its planet will have its perihelion closer to the Sun than that planet, but its aphelion will be in the orbit of the planet of origin. fundamentals first, we can look at what is known about the Russian rocket. In the American press, it was usually referred to as Lunik and it is even possible that some Russians used the same term. Originally, however, it did not have a name at all, but was simply called Rakyeta na luna, "Rocket to the Moon." After the shot, the Russians did advance an official name, namely Metchta (the accent is on the fa, the second syllable). The main trouble with this name is that it cannot be translated easily. A "simplified dictionary" that I checked was indeed simplified and just said "Dream." Well, to me, a dream is something that occurs when I am asleep. Metchta is not that kind of dream, but another kind. "She's a dream," "the American dream," "Dreamboat" and other expressions in English show that we and the Russians have the same idea in mind -- "Daydream," meaning a flight of fancy or aspiration or something approaching perfection. The rocket Daydream was fired at dawn on January #, #, presumably from the rocket range in the Kyzyl Kum Desert. It was aimed andor guided at the Moon, which looks quite large but, with a diameter of # miles at a distance of # miles, is not a very big target The rocket missed. It is now known that it passed the surface of the Moon at a distance of # miles. The instrument load of # pounds remained attached to the empty casing of the top stage; together, they weighed about # pounds. Now if you aim a rocket at our moon, only three different cases are possible. The first one is the simplest (but also the least likely), namely that you hit. The probability is somewhat better that you miss by a very narrow margin of a few hundred miles. In that case, the Moon's gravitational field would pull the rocket around the Moon in a hyperbola. At any event, that is what a textbook is likely to tell you. Actually, the I exceptional ideas about the world to come...  mtorplanctory colonization  relative immortality Exceptional s-f writers... if F. L. Wallace  Damon Knight if James I. Gunn if J. T. McIntosh if Theodore Sturgeon... Now collected in one exceptional volume for the permanent library of every reader of Galaxy Magazine Edited by Published Oct. # Price # Use coupon to order your copy. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies as soon as copies come off the Q money order in the amount of S. curve described by the rocket will not be a nice mathematical hyperbola. This curve would result only if the Moon were kind enough to stand still while it pulls the rocket around itself. In reality, the Moon keeps moving at the rate of about # miles per second, so the curve will be distorted. Its so-called "escape leg" will point in the general direction of the Earth, but would miss Earth by a very large margin. Then the rocket would go into an orbit around the Sun. The third possibility, and the one with the highest probability, is that the rocket will miss the Moon by a large margin. Large, in this case, means that the distance between rocket and Moon even at closest approach will be so large that the Moon's gravitational field will not influence the orbit of the rocket very much. The rocket, in this case, will go into an orbit around the Sun directly. This is what actually happened -- to Metchta, that is. It is also what is happening to our lunar probes.  the direction of the Earth's movement, it at first raced ahead of the Earth before starting to drift outward in the Solar system. As it receded from the Sun, its velocity was reduced, and by April or May, the Earth, continuing on its own orbit at a reasonably steady rate, will overtake the rocket. The precise date is not known at the moment of writing, but in late spring, the Sun, the Earth and the rocket Daydream will form a straight line momentarily. Astronomically speaking, the rocket will be "in opposition." The aphelion of the rocket is at the moment estimated as being This should be reached late in August. Then the rocket will come closer to the Sun again and should reach its perihelion # days after passing the Moon. The perihelion will be, of course, where the Earth was when the rocket was fired, near the perihelion of the Earth's orbit, I hope you have looked at the diagram in the meantime (Fig. #). It shows the orbits of Earth and Mars, of asteroid #-Eros and of Metchta drawn to scale. It can be seen that the orbit of the rocket crosses neither the orbit of Mars nor the orbit of Eros. It will come considerably closer to both than the Earth does, of course. The closest possible approach between Metchta and Eros can, theoretically, come as close as about eight million miles. Likewise, Metchta could come as close to Mars as "abouts" with reference to the closest approach are due to the fact that the orbit of Metchta is not yet definitely established. Even if the rocket's instruments were still reporting, the orbit into which Metchta was thrown is not particularly good, as regards possible astronomical results. Personally I have the feeling that the Russians counted on hitting the Moon. The reason for this opinion is this : Normally one would expect to miss and it would then be a most interesting experiment to see over what distance signals from the rocket can still be received. Sigmiles are very likely. Beyond that, one would have to see. It would be only logical, therefore, to equip such a rocket with as much battery power as possible, so that the signal will be broadcast for as long as possible. But the batteries of Metchta went dead quite soon after the rocket passed the Moon. This is why I think the Russians counted on a hit. the future of Metchta, I have to make one more remark about the diagram. If the rocket had been somewhat faster, its orbit might extend out far enough to touch the orbit of Mars. How close to Mars could it come in this case? The answer is that there would still be the rocket and the planet, because the rocket travels in the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. This is not the same as the plane of the orbit of Mars -- the two are inclined to each other, and at the distance of Mars, the planes of the two orbits are that far apart from each other. Well, Metchta is now in orbit around the Sun, without the slightest danger of being melted. The orbital period is # days or just about # months. After # months, the rocket will be in Earth's orbit at the point where Earth is in early January. But fifteen months from the firing date, Earth will be three months farther along in its orbit -- it will just have passed the "March I line." In other words, Earth will be farther and farther from the place where Metchta touches Earth's orbit; Earth will have crossed the "June I line" the next time Metchta comes to Earth's orbit, and so forth. Later on, of course, they come closer together again, and during the winter of #-#, something may happen. We don't know yet what it will be. The rocket needs four times # days or # days for four complete revolutions. The Earth needs five times # Vi days or # Vi days to complete five revolutions. The difference is just about # days, which is to say that Earth will reach a specific point in its orbit # days later than the rocket does. But, as the diagram shows, the two orbits lead into each other very gradually. During that winter, the rocket will be rather close to Earth for some time. Naturally Earth's gravity will go to work on it. It is most unlikely that the rocket will be forced to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. But it is likely that it will be forced into a new orbit by the Earth then. Since the Earth will be, so to speak, behind the rocket, the rocket will be slowed down. This should result in another orbit that is smaller than the one traveled by the rocket right now. But this is as much as can be said at the moment Recently, a group of friends and I were discussing the fact that a speed of # m.pK was necessary for a vehicle to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth. As the discussion progressed, I came up with the comment that if we had a propulsion system which could transport a vehicle at a lower speed but for an indefinite period of time, the # m.p.h. would not be necessary... Is it possible for a rocket to take off and travel, say, # m.pJn. for an indefinite period of time and still overcome Earth's gravity? James Sevchik This question conies up at regular intervals and I am answering it in public in the hope of getting it settled for some time. There are several flaws in the reasoning developed. Apparently the impression is that a rocket must reach # m.p.h. and keep going at that rate to escape from the Earth's gravitational pull. This, of course, is not so. The figure of # m.p.h., or better # miles per second, applies to the surface of the Earth. After takeoff, the vehicle, just coasting, will be slowed down by the Earth's gravitational attraction. At first it will lose # feet per second for every second elapsed. Then as it gets farther away from the Earth -- after all, it moves at # miles per second minus a few times # feet per second -- the gravitational attraction grows weaker and the vehicle loses only # feet per second for every second elapsed. At a still greater distance, the loss per second is down to # feet per second, or # feet per second, or # feet # inches per second. The vehicle has been considerably slowed down too, to be sure, but it still has the upper hand. Only in theoretical infinity will it be brought to a standstill, but when at an infinite distance it has, of course, escaped from the Earth. Now this implies that the velocity required would be less if the takeoff took place some distance from the surface This actually is what happens. While a rocket is climbing, it is building up speed, but it is also gaining altitude. If the rocket needs long enough to reach an altitude of, say, # miles to build up the necessary speed, it no longer needs to build up to the full # miles per second. It saves fuel to reach the necessary velocity as soon as possible (in practice: after traversing the atmosphere) for the slower the rocket, the more fuel is wasted. Suppose you have a rocket weighing one ton with a rocket motor developing a thrust of one ton. This rocket would just hover, and begin to rise solely because it would lose weight due to fuel consumption, while the thrust remains one ton. Now imagine that the same rocket burns its fuel twice as fast, so that it will rise from the first moment on, having a thrust of two tons. Naturally the fuel does not last as long, but it can easily be visualized that the rocket would climb much higher than the first one. By rising slowly, you just give the Earth's gravitational attraction more time to do its dirty work. We read almost every day in the newspapers about escape from the Earth. Could we escape from the Solar System? Sven I. Ivarsson Washington, D. C. Yes, we could, provided the ship is fast enough. There is a very simple relationship. Pick the planet from which you want to take off. Check its orbital velocity. Multiply said orbital velocity by the square root of two. That's the velocity you need. This is a feminine question maybe. But I just found out that you know a lot about animals and have written books about animals, living and extinct. Would you mind telling me whether there is an animal about which you would like information? If I can, I'll try to supply it, being a librarian myself. Estelle Landers Oak Park, #. Well, thank you for your kind offer, dear lady. I am only sorry that you won't be able to supply the information I want. It simply seems not to be known, unless somebody published something quite recently that has not yet come to my attention. The animal about which I would like to know more is one of those strange "living fossils." Its scientific name is Galeopithecus ; its English name is "Flying Lemur." Its habitat is southeast Asia. In appearance, Galeopithecus would remind Americans of their own "flying squirrels," though it is larger. But the "flying squirrels" are rodents and there is just no way of saying what Galeopithecus is, beyond the obvious statement that it is # mammal. It has a larger flying skin than the flying squirrel, for the flying skin extends not only between foreand hindlegs on each 'side, there also are two triangles of flying skin from the "wrists" to the sides of the head. Moreover, at the other end, the tail is incorporated into the flying skin. We know that it is # inches long and there must be males and females. But we don't know how the young are brought up. We don't even know what the adults eat. The fact that they are strictly nocturnal does not help the investigation. One word of caution if you really want to check. You may find an old paper by Professor Florentino Ameghino of Argentina about a fossil Galeopithecus. Don't waste time unearthing this paper; it was later proved to be a mistake, for the fossil was not a Galeopithecug. Its ancestors are as unknown as its dietary habits. I would like to suggest an article on the evolution of Man from the monkey. What proof do some scientists have to make them believe this? Dave Shtogryn Thor old, Ontario Well, this would have to be a book rather than an article. But I can rectify what seem to be a few wrong conceptions right now. Nobody has ever suggested that any of the living monkeys, or apes, are ancestors of Man. If you compare the skeletons of the three living apes, gorilla, chimpanzee and orang-utan, with the skeleton of a man, you will notice how similar they are. Every bone of one is matched by a corresponding bone of the other. Only the relative sizes and proportions differ. One especially interesting point was brought out many years ago by the English scientist Huxley. If you compare these skeletons in detail, you'll find, to your surprise, that the differences between the skeleton of the chimpanzee and the orang-utan are greater than the differences between chimpanzee and Man, or orang-utan and Man. All of this indicates relationship. But the apes are not ancestral to Man. What has been stated by scientists for the last hundred years is that Man and the apes must have a common ancestor. Now was the captain's chance to prove he knew less than the crew ing on the video screen. That was why we were looking at it so analytically. "Transphasia, that's what it is," Ordinary Spaceman Quade stated with a definite thrust of his angular jaw in my direction. "You can take my word on that, Captain Gavin." "Can't," I told him. "I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust anyall their lives hung upon it I thing. That's why I'm Captain." "You'll get over feeling like that." "I know. Then I'll become First Officer." "But look at that screen, sir," Quade said with an emphatic swing of his scarred arm. "I've seen blank scanning like that before and you haven't -- it's your first trip. This always means transphasia -- cortex dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect -- call it anything you like, it's still transphasia." "I know what transphasia is," I said moderately. "It means an electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also effects electronic equipment, like radar and television." "Obviously." Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen. "Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives." "You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us they can't even recognize our existence." height -- and noticed in irritation it was still an inch less than Quade's. "I don't understand you men. Look at yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about everything else, even your own life." "Just a minute, Captain. I've never been 'busted.' In the Exploration Service, we regard Ordinary Spaceman as our highest rank. With my hazard pay, I get more hard cash than you do, and I'm closer to retirement." "That's a shallow excuse for complacency." "Complacency! I've seen ten thousand wonders in twenty years But the patterns repeat themselves. We learn to know what to expect, so maybe we can't maintain the reactionary caution the service likes in officers." "I resent the word 'reactionary,' Spaceman! In civilian life, I was a lapidary and I learned the value of deliberation. But I never got too gem, which is more than my contemporaries can say, many of 'em." "Captain Gavin," Quade said patiently, "you must realize that an outsider like you, among a crew of skilled spacemen, can never be more than a figurehead." Was this the way I was to be treated? Why, this man had deliberately insulted me, his captain. I controlled myself, remembering the familiarity that had always existed between members of a crew working under close conditions, from the time of the ancient submarines and the first orbital ships. "Quade," I said, "there's only one way for us to find out which of us is right about the cause of our scanning blackout" "We go out and find the reason." "Exactly. We go. You and me. I hope you can stand my company." "I'm not sure I can," he answered reluctantly. "My hazard pay doesn't cover exploring with rookies. With all due respect, Captain." I clapped him on the shoulder. "But, man, you have just been telling me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such familiar conditions -- right?" "Yes, sir, I suppose I could," Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate. "It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's solid." The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide, so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowishwhite sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink sunlight. "I don't understand it," Quade admitted. "Transphasia hits you a foul as soon as you let it into the airlock." "Apparently, Quade, this thing is going to creep up on us." "Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too." The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply. The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it But what else can you do with a wail but hear it? Quade nodded. "I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's trace it." "I don't like this," I admitted. "It's not at all what I expected from what you said about transphasia. It must be something else." "It couldn't be anything else. I know what to expect You don't. You may begin smelling sensations, tasting sounds, hearing sights, seeing tastes, touching odors -- or any other combination. Don't let it bother you." "Of course not. I'll soothe my nerves by counting little shocks of lanolin jumping over a loud fence." Quade grinned behind his faceplate. "Good idea." "Then you can have it. I'm going to try keeping my eyes open and staying alive." There was no reply. His expression was tart and greasy despite all his light talk, and I knew mine was the same. I tested the security rope between our pressure suits. It was a taut and virile bass. We scaled a staccato of rocks, our suits grinding pepper against our hides. The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under my skin. "Is this transphasia?" I asked in awe. "It always has been before," Quade remarked. "Ready to swallow your words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize, Captain?" "I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste here." "Not a bad taste. They're pretty. Or haven't you noticed?" "Quade, you're right! About the colors anyway. This reminds me of netic translator." "It should. I don't suppose we could understand each other if it wasn't for our morphistudy courses in reading cross-sense translations of Centauri blushtalk and the like." It became difficult to understand him, difficult to try talking in the face of such splendor. You never really appreciate colors until you smell them for the first time. as ever, though. "I can't see irregularities occurring in a gravitational field. We must have compensated for the transphasia while we still had a point of reference, the solid reality of the spaceship. But out here, where all we have to hang onto is each other, our concept of reality goes bang and deflates to a tired joke." Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second. The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I couldn't quite make out. Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain. "Wait a minute, Spaceman!" I bellowed. "Where the devil do you think you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order." He stopped. "Don't you want to find out what that was? This is an exploration party, you know, sir." "I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any further from the ship." "That's important, Captain?" "To the best of my judgment, yes. This -- condition -- didn't begin until we got so far away from the spacer -- in time or distance. I don't want it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up." "Not for an experienced spaceman," Quade griped. "I'm used to free-fall." But he turned back. "Just a minute," I said. "There was something strange up ahead. I want to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational jamming here." I took a sighting. My helmet set projected the pattern on the cornea. Sweetness building up to a stab of pure salt -- those were the blips. Beside me, there was a thin thread of violet. Quade had whistled. He was reading the map too. The slope fell away sharply in front of us, becoming a deep gorge. There was something broken and twisted at the bottom, something we had known for an instant as a streak of spice. "There's one free-fall," I said, "where you wouldn't live long enough to get used to it." He said nothing on the route back to the spacer. thing, Gav," First Officer Nagurski said expansively. He was rubbing the well-worn ears of our beagle mascot, Bruce. A heavy tail thudded on the steel deck from time to time. My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar. I was hot and tired, fresh -- in only the chronological sense -- from a pressure suit. "What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women? Transphasia?" "Yes," he answered casually. "But I had immediate reference to our current psychophysiological phenomenon." I collapsed into the swivel in front of the chart table. "First off, let's hear what you know about -- never mind, make it dogs." "Take Bruce, for example, then -- " "No, thanks. I was wondering why you did." "I didn't." His dark, round face was bland. "Bruce picked me. Followed me home one night in Chicago Port. The dog or the man who picks his own master is the most content." "Bruce is content," I admitted. "He couldn't be any more content and still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd have anarchy if I tried to let these Starbucks pick their own master." "I had no trouble when I was a captain," Nagurski said. "Ease the reins on the men. Just offer them your advice, your guidance. They will soon see why the service selected you as captain; they will pick you themselves." "Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?" "Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews." "Then why are you First Officer under me now?" He blinked, then decided to laugh. "I've been in space a good many years. I really wanted to relax a little bit more. Besides, the increase in hazard pay was actually more than my salary as a captain. I'm a notch nearer retirement too." "Tell me, did you always feel this way about letting the men select their own leader?" pipe. He would have a pipe, I decided. "No, not always. I was like you at first. Fresh from the cosmic energy test lab, suspicious of everything, trying to tell the old hands what to do. But I learned that they are pretty smart boys; they know what they are doing. You can rely on them absolutely." I leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Let me tell you a thing, Nagurski. Your trust of these damnfool spacemen is why you are no longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less human nature. Even I know that much!" He was pained. "If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav." "They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is obey me or, by Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal back home. Listen," I continued earnestly, "these men aren't going to think of me -- of us, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this ship." "He is a good man," Nagurski said. "You mustn't be jealous of his status." The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski. "Never mind that for now," I said wearily. "What was your idea for getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?" "There's only one idea for that," said Quade, ducking his long head and stepping through the connecting hatch. "With the Captain's permission..." "Go ahead, Quade, tell him," Nagurski invited. "There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any reliability," Quade told me. "You keep some kind of physical contact with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were, but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull." "How far can we run it back?" Quade shrugged. "Miles." "How many?" "We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see, smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost." "Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you know." "What else can we do, Captain?" Nagurski asked puzzledly. "You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from transphasia. Is that it?" Quade gave a curt nod. "Then," I told them, "we will have to start tearing apart this ship."  and his team were doing a good job of ripping out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray projectors. "Cannibalizing is dangerous." Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and shook his head disapprovingly. "Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we complete the survey." "You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing." "You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a spaceship." "Not," he persisted, "if too many parts are missing." "Nagurski, if you are looking for a job safer than space exploration, why don't you go back to testing cosmic bomb shelters?" Nagurski flushed. "Look here, Captain, you are being too damned cautious. There is a way one handles the survey of a planet like this, and this isn't the way." "It's my way. You heard what Quade said. You know it yourself. The men have to have something tangible to hang onto out there. One slender cable isn't enough of an edge on sensory anarchy. If the product of their own technological civilization can keep them sane, I say let 'em take a part of that environment with them." "In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust, you are risking more than a few men -- you risk the whole mission in gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!" "I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take stupid chances. I might be doing the wrong thing, but I can see you would be doing it wrong." "You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust us." "That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski," I said sociably. "If you lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I know it has to be wrong." I turned and found Wallace, the personnel man, standing in the hatchway. "Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?" "I would," I answered levelly. "Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone." "The idiot!" I yelped. "Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it." "He didn't hook on a cable, Captain," Wallace said. "I suppose he intended to go beyond the threemile limit as you demanded." "Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what I said as long as I command this spacer." "Cool off, Gav," Nagurski advised me. "It's been done before. Anybody else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him." "I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him." TOR me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw. No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see that space exploration made a man a reckless fool by doing things on one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world. The thought intruded itself: why hadn't I recognized this before I let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment? I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very well be true, but how did that help now? I had to think. I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane reasons -- he was the most important member of the crew. With him around, there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have endless opinions to contend with. But it wouldn't do any good to go out no better equipped than he. There was no time to wait for tractors to be built if we wanted to reach him alive, and we certainly couldn't reach him five or ten miles out with our three miles of safety line. We would have to go in spacesuits. But how would that leave us any better off than Quade? Why was Quade vulnerable in his spacesuit, as I knew from experience he would be? How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable? worry about," Quartermaster Farley said. He patted a space helmet paternally. "You got yourself a selfcontained environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent that hide. You got it made." "You are right," I said, "only transphasia comes right through these air-fast joints." Something strange about the trance, Captain," Farley said darkly. "Any spaceman can tell you that. Things we don't understand." "I'm talking about something we do understand -- sound. These suits perfectly soundproof?" "Well, you can pick up sound by conduction. Like putting two helmets together and talking without using radio. You can't insulate enough to block out all sound and still have a man-shaped suit. You have -- " "I know. Then you have something like a tractor or a miniature spaceship. There isn't time for that We will have to live with the sound." "What do you think he's going to hear out there, Captain? We'd like to find one of those beautiful sirens on some planet believe me, but -- " "I believe you," I said quickly. "Let's leave it at that. I don't know what he will hear; what's worrying me is how he'll hear it in what sensory medium. I hope the sound doesn't blind him. His radar is his only chance." "How do you figure on getting a better edge yourself, sir?" "I have the idea, but not the word for it. Tonal compensation, I suppose. If you can't shut out the noise, we'll have to drown it out." Farley nodded. "Beat like a telephone time signal?" "That would do it." "It would do something else. It would drive you nuts." tracting." "Captain, take my word for it," argued Farley. "Constant sonic feedback inside a spacesuit will set you rocking against the grain." "Devise some regular system of interruptions," I suggested. "Then the pattern will drive you crazy. Maybe in a few months, with luck, I could plan some harmonic scale you could tolerate -- " "We don't have a few months," I said. "How about music? There's a harmonic scale for you, and we can endure it, some of it. Figaro and Asleep in the Cradle of the Deep can compensate for high-pitched outside temperatures, and Flight of the Bumble Bee to block bass notes." Farley nodded. "Might work. I can program the tapes from the library." "Good. There's one more thing -- how are our stores of medicinal liquor?" Farley paled. "Captain, are you implying that I should be running short on alcohol? Where do you get off suggesting a thing like that?" "I'm getting off at the right stop, apparently," I sighed. "Okay, Farley, no evasions. In plain figures, how much drinking alcohol do we have left?" The quartermaster slumped a bit. "Twenty-one liters unbroken. One more about half full." "Half full? How did that ever happen? I mean you had some left? We'll take this up later. I want you to run it through the synthesizer to get some light wine..." "Light wine?" Farley looked in pain. "Not whiskey, brandy, beer?" "Light wine. Then ration it out to some of the men." "Ration it to the men!" "That's an accurate interpretation of my orders." "But, sir," Farley protested, "you don't give alcohol to the crew in the middle of a mission. It's not done. What reason can you have?" "To sharpen their taste and olfactory senses. We can turn up or block out sound. We can use radar to extend our sight, but the Space Service hasn't yet developed anything to make spacemen taste or smell better." "They are going to smell like a herd of winos," Farley said. "I don't like to think how they would taste." "It's an entirely practical idea. Tea-tasters used to drink almondand-barley water to sharpen their senses. I've observed that wine helps you appreciate culinary art more. Considering the mixed-up sensory data under transphasia, wine may help us to see where we are going." "Yes, sir," Farley said obediently. "I'll give spacemen a few quarts of wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only, and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir." I turned to leave, then paused briefly. "You can come along, Farley. I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff." called. "Quade's footsteps again, just beyond that rocky ridge." The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old, mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across the dark, rich taste of the planet. I splashed some wine from my drinking tube against the roof of my mouth to sharpen my taste. It brought out the footsteps sharper. It also made the landscape more of a teen-ager's caloric nightmare. The four of us pulled ourselves closer together by reeling in more of our safety line. Farley and Hoffman, Nagurski and myself, we were cabled together. It gave us a larger hunk of reality to hold onto. Even so, things wavered for me during a wisp of time. We stumbled over the ridge, feeling out the territory. It was a sticky job crawling over a melting, chunkstyle Hershey bar. I was thankful for the invigorating Sousa march blasting inside my helmet. Before the tape had cut in, kicked on by the decibel gauge, I had heard or felt something dark and ominous in the outside air. "Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail," Nagurski said soberly. "This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain. You weren't giggling, sir?" "I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski" "Yes, sir. That's what we all thought." A moment later, Nagurski added, "Anyway, I just noticed it was my shelf -- my, that is, self." The basso profundo performing Figaro on my headset climbed to a girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels. "Take a good look around, boys," I said. "What do you see?" "Quail," Nagurski replied. "That's what I see." "You," I said carefully, "have been in space a long time. Look again." "I see our old buddy, Quail." I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It was Quade. A man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead. Grudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge. A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of Pomp and Circumstance. Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges. The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. "Better get him back to the spaceship fast I've seen this kind of thing before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming wind -- psychosomatic reaction -- and his heating circuits compensated for the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration." Quade back by using the powered joints in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too much for us -- we were too tired, too numb, too drunk. At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with only a chocolate-tasting pink afterimage on my retina. It was now showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it looked good to me, like home. The wailing call sounded through the amber twilight. I realized that I was actually hearing it for the first time. The alien stood between us and the ship. It was a great pot-bellied lizard as tall as a man. Its sound came from a flat, vibrating beaver tail. Others of its kind were coming into view behind it. "Stand your ground," I warned the others thickly. "They may be dangerous." Quade sat up on our crisscross litter of arms. "Aliens can't be hostile. Ethnic impossibility. I'll show you." Quade was delirious and we were drunk. He got away from us and jogged toward the herd. "Let's give him a hand!" Farley shouted. "We'll take us a specimen!" I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea. As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly. "Sssh, men," Nagurski said. "Leave it to me. I'll surround him." The men followed the First Officer's example, and the rope tying them to him. I went along cheerfully myself, until an enormous rump struck me violently in the face. My leaded boots were driven down into fertile soil, and my helmet was ringing like a bell. I got a jerky picture of the beast jumping up and down on top of the others joyously. Only the stiff space armor was holding up our slack frames. "Let's let him escape," Hoffman suggested on the audio circuit. "I'd like to," Nagurski admitted, "but the other beasts won't let us get past their circle." It was true. The aliens formed a ring around us, and each time a bouncing boy hit the line, he only bounced back on top of us. "Flat!" I yelled. "Our seams can't take much more of this beating." I followed my own advice and landed in the dirt beside Quade. The bouncer came to rest and regarded us silently, head on an eighty-degree angle. I was stone sober. The others were lying around me quietly, passed out, knocked out, or taking cover. The ring of aliens drew in about us, closer, tighter, as the bouncer sat on his haunches and waited for us to move. Quade in the infirmary. He punched up his pillow and settled back. "I guess so. But when I think of all the ways I nearly got myself killed out there... How far have you got in the tractors?" "I'm having the tractors tom down and the parts put back into the spaceship where they belong. We shouldn't risk losing them and getting stuck here." "Are you settling for a primary exploration?" "No. I think I had the right idea on your rescue party. You have to meet and fight a planet on its own terms. Fighting confused sounds and tastes with music and wine was crude, but it was on the right track. Out there, we understood language because we were familiar with alien languages changed to other sense mediums by cybernetic translators. Using the translator, we can learn to recognize all confused data as easily. I'm starting indoctrination courses." "I doubt that that is necessary, sir," Quade said. "Experienced spacemen are experienced with transphasia. You don't have to worry. In the future, I'll be able to resist sensations that tell me I'm freezing to death -- if my gauges tell me it's a lie." I examined his bandisprayed hide. "I think my way of gaining experience is less painful and more efficient." Quade squirmed. "Yes, sir. One thing, sir -- I don't understand how you got me away from those aliens." "The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier than they could." "I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all the time." "But they did! First, that call of theirs -- it wasn't to lead us into danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that far up the intelligence scale." "But why should they want to help us?" Quade demanded suspiciously. "I think it's like Nagurski's dog. The dog came to him when it wanted somebody to own it, protect it, feed it, love it. These aliens want Earthmen to colonize the planet We came here, you see, same as the dog came to Nagurski." "Well, I've learned one thing from all of this," Quade said. "I've been a blind, arrogant, cocksure fool, following courses that were good on some worlds, most worlds, but not good on all worlds. I'm never going to be that foolhardy again." "But you're losing confidence, Quade! You aren't sure of yourself any more. Isn't confidence a spaceman's most valuable asset?" "The hell it is," Quade said grimly. "It's his deadliest liability." "In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting Executive Officer." "Huh?" Quade gawked. "But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me! I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!" "That's tough," I sympathized, "but in every service a chap gets broken in rank now and then." "Maybe it's worth it," Quade said heavily. "Now maybe I've learned how to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget." I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of experience aboard. "Quade," I said, "space isn't as dangerous as all that." I clapped him on the shoulder fraternally. "You worry too much!" In The Next Issue Satterfield -- a girl's hand is all he wants of this plantation world -- and it cottons to him no more than if he were a Yankee spy! Send not to know for whom the telephone rings -- it'll send for you if the number you so innocently dial happens to be... Mugwump four A L Miller was only trying to phone the Friendly Finance Corporation to ask about an extension on his loan. It was a Murray Hill number, and he had dialed as far as MU-# when the receiver clicked queerly and a voice said, "Come in, Operator Nine. OperatorNine, do you read me?" AI frowned. "I didn't want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if -- " "Just a minute. Who are you?" "I ought to ask you that," AI said. "What are you doing on the other end, anyway? I hadn't even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-# and -- " "Well? You dialed MUgwump # and you got us. What more do you want?" A suspicious pause. "Say, you aren't Operator Nine!" "No, I'm not Operator Nine, and Fm trying to dial a Murray Hill number, and how about getting off the line?" "Hold it, friend. Are you a Normal?" AI blinked. "Yeah -- yeah, I like to think so." "So how'd you know the number?" "Dammit, I didn't know the number! I was trying to call someone, and all of a sudden the phone cut out and I got you, whoever the blazes you are." "I'm the communications warden at MUgwump #," the other said crisply. "And you're a suspicious individual. We'll have to investigate you." The telephone emitted a sudden burping sound. AI felt as if his feet had grown roots. He could not move at all. It was awkward to be standing there at his own telephone in the privacy of his own room, as unbending as a steel girder. Time still moved, he saw. The hand on the big clock above the phone had just shifted from #:# to #:#. Sweat rivered down his back as he struggled to put down the phone. He fought to lift his left foot. He strained to twitch his right eyelid. No go on all counts; he was frozen, all but his chest muscles -- thank goodness for that. ters became even more awkward when his front door, which had been locked, opened abruptly. Three strangers entered. They looked oddly alike: a trio of Tweedledums, no more than five feet high, wide through the waist, jowly of face and balding of head, each wearing an inadequate singlebreasted blue serge suit. AI discovered he could roll his eyes. He rolled them. He wanted to apologize because his unexpected paralysis kept him from acting the proper part of a host, but his tongue would not obey. And on second thought, it occurred to him that the little bald men might be connected in some way with that paralysis. The reddest-faced of the three little men hung up the telephone and the stasis ended. AI nearly folded up as the tension that gripped him broke. He said, "Just who the deuce -- " "We will ask the questions. You are AI Miller?" AI nodded. "And obviously you are a Normal. So there has been a grave error. Mordecai, examine the telephone." The second little man picked up the phone and calmly disemboweled it with three involved motions of his stubby hands. He frowned over the telephone's innards for a moment; then, humming tunelessly, he produced a wire-clipper and severed the telephone cord. "Hold on here!" AI burst out. "You can't just rip out my phone like that! You aren't from the phone company!" "Quiet," said the spokesman nastily. "Well, Mordecai?" The second little man said, "Probability I to #. The cranch interval overlapped and his telephone matrix slipped. His call was piped into our wire by error, Waldemar." "So he isn't a spy?" Waldemar asked. "Doubtful. As you see, he's of rudimentary intelligence. His dialing our number was a statistical fluke." "But now he knows about us," said the third little man in a surprisingly deep voice. "I vote for demolecularization." The other two whirled on their companion. "Always bloodthirsty, eh, Giovanni?" said Mordecai. "You'd violate the code at the snap of a meson." "There won't be any demolecularization while Vm in charge," added Waldemar. "What do we do with him then?" Giovanni demanded. Mordecai said, "Freeze him and take him down to Headquarters. He's their problem." "I think this has gone about as far as it's going to go," AI exploded at last. "However you three creeps got in here, you'd better get yourselves right out again, or -- " "Enough," Waldemar said. AI felt his jaws stiffen. He realized bewilderedly that he was frozen again. And frozen, this time, with his mouth gaping foolishly open. ' I ' HE trip took about five minutes, and so far as AI was concerned, it was one long blur. At the end of the journey, the blur lifted for an instant, long enough to give AI one good glimpse of his surroundings -- a residential street in what might have been Brooklyn or Queens (or Cincinnati or Detroit, he thought morbidly) -- before he was hustled into the basement of a two-family house. He found himself in a windowless, brightly lit chamber cluttered with complexlooking machinery and with a dozen or so alarmingly identical little bald-headed men. Not until then did his paralysis lift. The chubbiest of the bunch glared sourly at him and asked, "Are you a spy?" "I'm just an innocent bystander," AI said earnestly. "I picked up my phone and started to dial, and all of a sudden some guy asked me if I was Operator Nine. Honest, that's all." "Overlapping of the cranch interval," muttered Mordecai. "Slipped matrix." "Umm. Unfortunate," the chubby one commented. "We'll have to dispose of him." "Demolecularization is the best way," Giovanni put in immediately"Dispose of him humanely, I mean. It's revolting to think of taking the life of an inferior being. But he simply can't remain in this fourspace any longer, not if he knows." "But I don't know!" AI protested. "I couldn't be any more mixed up if I tried! Won't you please tell me -- " "Very well," said the pudgiest one, who seemed to be the leader. "Waldemar, tell him about us." Waldemar said, "You're now in the local headquarters of a secret mutant group working for the overthrow of humanity as you know it. By some accident, you happened to dial our private communication exchange, MUtant # -- " "I thought it was MUgwump #," AI interjected. "The code name, naturally," said Waldemar. "To continue: you channeled into our communication network. You now know too much. Your presence in this space-time nexus jeopardizes the success of our entire movement. Therefore we are forced -- " " -- to demolecularize -- " Giovanni began. " -- to dispose of you," Waldemar continued sternly. "We're humane beings -- most of us -- and we won't do anything that would make you suffer. But you can't stay in this area of space-time, can you?" AI shook his head dimly. These little potbellied men were mutants working for the overthrow of humanity? Well, he had no reason to think they were lying to him. The world was full of little potbellied men. Maybe they were all part of the secret organization. "Look," he said, "I didn't want to dial your number. It was all a silly accident. But I'm a fair guy. Let me get out of here and I'll keep mum about the whole thing. You can go ahead and overthrow humanity, if that's what you want to do. I promise not to interfere in any way. If you're mutants, you ought to be able to look into my mind and see that I'm sincere -- " "We have no telepathic powers," declared the chubby leader curtly. "If we had, there would be no need for a communications network in the first place. In the second place, your sincerity is not the issue. We have enemies. If you were to fall into their hands -- " "I won't say a word! Even if they torture me -- brainwash me -- I swear I'll keep quiet!" "No. At this stage in our campaign, we can take no risks. You'll have to go. Prepare the temporal centrifuge, Mordecai." Mordecai, unveiled a complicated-looking device of the general size and shape of a concrete mixer. Waldemar and Giovanni shoved AI toward the machine. It came rapidly to life: dials glowed, indicator needles teetered, loud buzzes and clicks implied readiness. AI said nervously, "What are you going to do to me?" "This machine will hurl you forward in time," Waldemar explained. "Too bad we have to rip you right out of your temporal matrix, but we've no choice. You'll be well taken care of up ahead, though. No doubt, by the #th century, our kind will have taken over completely. You'll be the last of the Normals. Practically a living fossil. You'll love it. You'll be a walking museum piece." "Assuming the machine works," Giovanni put in maliciously. "We don't really know if it does, you see." AI gaped. They were busily strapping him to a cold copper slab in the heart of the machine. "You don't even know if it works?" "Not really," Waldemar admitted. "Present theory holds that time-travel works only one way -- forward. So we haven't been able to recover any of our test specimens and see how they reacted. Of course, they do vanish when the machine is turned on, so we know they must go somewhere." "Oh," AI said weakly. He was trussed in thoroughly. Experimental wriggling of his right wrist showed him that. But even if he could get loose, these weird little men would only freeze him and put him into the machine again. His shoulders slumped resignedly. He wondered if anyone would miss him. The Friendly Finance Corporation certainly would. But since, in a sense, it was their fault he was in this mess now, he couldn't get very upset about that. They could always sue his estate for the # he owed them, if his estate was worth that much. Nobody else was going to mind the disappearance of Albert Miller from the space-time continuum, he thought dourly. His parents were dead, he hadn't seen his one sister in fifteen years, and the girl he used to know in Topeka was married and at last report had three kids. He wasn't sure how he would take to the # th century -- or the # th century to him. "Ready for temporal discharge," Mordecai sang out. The chubby leader peered up at Al. "We're sorry about all this, you understand. But nothing and nobody can be allowed to stand in the way of the Cause." "Sure," Al said. "I understand." The concrete-mixer part of the machine began to revolve, bearing Al with it as it built up tempokinetic potential. Momentum increased alarmingly. In the background, AI heard an ominous droning sound that grew louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else. His head reeled. The room and its fat little mutants went blurry. He heard a pop! like the sound of a breaking balloon. It was the rupturing of the spacetime continuum. AI Miller went hurtling forward along the fourspace track, head first. He shut his eyes and hoped for the best.  he found himself sitting in the middle of an impeccably clean, faintly yielding roadway, staring up at the wheels of vehicles swishing by overhead at phenomenal speeds. After a moment or two more, he realized they were not airborne, but simply automobiles racing along an elevated roadway made of some practically invisible substance. So the temporal centrifuge had worked! AI glanced around. A crowd was collecting. A couple of hundred people had formed a big circle. They were pointing and muttering. Nobody approached closer than fifty or sixty feet. They weren't potbellied mutants. Without exception, they were all straight-backed six-footers with full heads of hair. The women were tall, too. Men and women alike were dressed in a sort of tuniclike garment made of iridescent material that constantly changed colors. A gong began to ring, rapidly peaking in volume. AI scrambled to his feet and put on a tentative smile. "My name's Miller. I come from #. Would somebody mind telling me what year this is, and -- " He was drowned out by two hundred voices screaming in terror. The crowd stampeded away, dashing madly in every direction, as if he were some ferocious monster. The gong continued to clang loudly. Cars hummed overhead. AI saw a squat, beetle-shaped black vehicle coming toward him on the otherwise empty road. The car pulled up half a block away, the top sprang open, and a figure clad in what might have been a driver's suit -- or a spacesuit -- stepped out and advanced toward Al. "Dozzinon murrifar volan," the armored figure called out. "No speak," Al replied. "I'm a stranger here." To his dismay, he saw the other draw something shaped like a weapon and point it at him. Al's hands shot immediately into the air. A globe of bluish light exuded from the broad nozzle of' the gun, hung suspended for a moment, and drifted toward Al. He dodged uneasily to one side, but the globe of light followed him, descended, and wrapped itself around him. It was like being on the inside of a soap-bubble. He could see out, though distortedly. He touched the curving side of the globe in a cautious way; it was resilient and springy to the touch, but his finger did not go through. He noticed with some misgiving that his bubble-cage was starting to drift off the ground. It trailed a ropelike extension, which the man in the armored suit deftly grabbed and knotted to the rear bumper of his car. He drove quickly away -- with Al, bobbing in his impenetrable bubble of light, tagging helplessly along like a captured Gaul being dragged through the streets of Rome behind a chariot -- but several feet in the air. He got used to the irregular motion after a while and relaxed enough to be able to study his surroundings. He was passing through a remarkably antiseptic-looking city, free from refuse and dust Towering buildings, all bright and spankingly new-looking, shot up everywhere. People goggled at him from the safety of the pedestrian walkways as he jounced past car halted outside an imposing building whose facade bore the men in armored suits appeared from within to flank Al's captor as a kind of honor guard. Al was borne within. He was nudged gently into a small room on the ground floor. The door rolled shut behind him and seemed to join the rest of the wall; no division-line was apparent. A moment later, the balloon popped open, and just in time, too; the air had been getting quite stale inside it. Al glanced around. A square window opened in the wall and three grim-faced men peered intently at him from an adjoining cubicle. A voice from a speaker grid above Al's head said, "Murrifar althrosk?" "Al Miller, from the #th century. And it wasn't my idea to come here, believe me." "Durberal haznik? Quittimar?" Al shrugged. "No parley-voo. Honest, I don't savvy." His three interrogators conferred among themselves -- taking what seemed to Al the needless precaution of switching off the mike to prevent him from overhearing their deliberations. He saw one of the men leave the observation cubicle. When the man returned, some five minutes later, he brought with him a tall, gloomylooking man wearing an impressive spade-shaped beard. The mike was turned on again. Spadebeard said rumblingly, "How be thou hight?" "Eh?" "An thou reck the King's tongue, I conjure thee speak!" AI grinned. No doubt they had fetched an expert in dead languages to talk to him. "Right language, but the wrong time. I'm from the #th century, not the tenth. Come forward a ways." Spadebeard paused to change mental gears. "A thousand pardons -- I mean sorry. Wrong idiom. Dig me now?" "I follow you. What year is this?" "It is #. And from whence be you?" "You don't quite have it straight yet, but I'm from #." "And how came you hither?" "I wish I knew," AI said. "I was just trying to phone the loan company, see? Anyway, I got involved with these little fat guys who wanted to take over the world. Mutants, they said they were. And they decided they had to get rid of me, so they bundled me into their time machine and shot me forward. So I'm here." "A spy of the mutated ones, eh?" "Spy? Who said anything about a spy? Talk about jumping to conclusions! I'm -- " "You have been sent by them to wreak mischief among us. No transparent story of yours will deceive us. You are not the first to come to our era, you know. And you will meet the same fate the others met." A L shook his head foggily. "Look here, you're making a big mistake. I'm not a spy for anybody. And I don't want to get involved in any war between you and the mutants -- " "The war is over. The last of the mutated ones was exterminated # years ago." "Okay, then. What can you fear from me? Honest, I don't want to cause any trouble. If the mutants are wiped out, how could my spying help them?" "No action in time and space is ever absolute. In our fourspace, the mutants are eradicated -- but they lurk elsewhere, waiting for their chance to enter and spread destruction." Al's brain was swimming. "Let's let that pass. I'm not a spy. I just want to be left alone. Let me settle down here somewhere -- put me on probation, show me the ropes, stake me to a few credits, or whatever you use for money here. I won't make any trouble." "Your body teems with microorganisms of diseases long extinct in this world. Only the fact that we were able to confine you in a force-bubble almost as soon as you arrived here saved us from a terrible epidemic of ancient diseases." "A couple of injections, that's all, and you can kill any bacteria on or in me," AI pleaded. "You're advanced people. You ought to be able to do a simple thing like that." "And then there is the matter of your genetic structure," Spadebeard continued inexorably. "You bear genes long since eliminated from humanity as undesirable. Permitting you to remain here, breeding furtively, would introduce unutterable confusion. Perhaps you carry latently the same mutant strain that cost humanity so many centuries of bloodshed!" "No," AI protested. "Look at me. I'm pretty tall, no potbelly, a full head of hair -- " "The gene is recessive. But it crops up unexpectedly." "I solemnly promise to control my breeding," AI declared. "I won't run around scattering my genes all over your shiny new world. That's a promise." "Your appeal is rejected," came the inflexible reply. AI shrugged. He knew when he was beaten. "Okay," he said wearily. "I didn't want to live in your damn century anyway. When's the execution?" "Execution?" Spadebeard looked stunned. "Dove's whiskers, do you think we would -- would actually -- " He couldn't get the word out. AI supplied it: "Put me to death?" Spadebeard's expression was sickly. He looked ready to retch. AI heard him mutter vehemently to his companions in the observation cubicle: "Gonnim deflarrimog! Egfar!" "Murrifar althrosk," suggested one of his companions. Spadebeard, evidently reassured, nodded. He said to Al, "No doubt a barbarian like yourself would expect to be -- to be made dead." Gulping, he went gamely on. "We have no such vindictive intention." "Well, what are you going to do to me?" "Send you across the timeline to a world where your friends, the mutated ones, reign supreme," Spadebeard replied. "If s the least we can do for you, spy." T HE hidden door of his cell puckered open. Another armorsuited figure entered, pointing a gun, and discharged a blob of blue light that drifted toward Al and rapidly englobed him. He was drawn by the trailing end out into a corridor. It hadn't been a very sociable reception here in the #th century, he thought as he was tugged along the hallway. In a way, he couldn't blame them. A time-traveler from the past was bound to be laden down with all sorts of germs. They couldn't risk letting him run around breathing at everybody. No wonder that crowd of onlookers had panicked when he had opened his mouth to speak to them. The other business, though, that of his being a spy for the mutants -- he couldn't figure that out at all. If the mutants had been wiped out fifty years ago, why worry about spies now? At least his species had managed to defeat the underground organization of potbellied little men. That was comforting. He wished he could get back to #, if only to snap his fingers in their jowly faces and tell them that all their sinister scheming was going to come to nothing. Where was he heading now? Spadebeard had said, Across the timeline to a world where the mutated ones reign supreme. Whatever across the timeline meant, AI thought He was ushered into an impressive laboratory room and, bubble and all, was thrust into the waiting clasps of something that looked depressingly like an electric chair. Brisk technicians bustled around, throwing switches and checking connections. AI glanced in appeal at Spadebeard. "Will you tell me what's going on?" "It is very difficult to express in medieval terms," the linguist said. "The device makes use of dollibar force to transmit you through an inverse dormin vector -- do I make myself clear?" "Not very," AI confessed. "Unhelpable. But you understand the concept of parallel continua at least, of course." "No." "Does it mean anything to you if I say that you'll be shunted across the spokes of the time-wheel to a totality that is simultaneously parallel and tangent to our fourspace?" "That isn't much better," AI said resignedly, for all he was really getting was a headache. "You might as well start shunting me, I suppose." Spadebeard nodded and turned to a technician. "Vorstrar althrosk," he commanded. "Murrifar." The technician grabbed an immense toggle switch with both hands and groaningly dragged it shut. AI heard a brief whine of closing relays. Then darkness surrounded him. a city street. But the pavement was cracked and buckled, and grassblades poked up through the neglected concrete. A dry voice said, "All right, you. Don't sprawl there like a ninny. Get up and come along." AI peered doubtfully up into the snout of a fair-sized pistol of enormous caliber. It was held by a short, fat, bald-headed man. Four identical companions stood near him with arms folded. They all looked very much like Mordecai, Waldemar, Giovanni, and the rest, except that these mutants were decked out in futuristic-looking costumes bright with flashy gold trim and rocketship insignia. AI put up his hands. "Where am I?" he asked in confusion. "Earth, of course. You've just come through a dimensional gateway from the continuum of the Normals. Come along, spy. Into the van." "But I'm not a spy," AI mumbled without very much hope as the five little men bundled him into a blue and red car the size of a small yacht. "At least, I'm not spying on you. I mean -- " "Save the explanations for the Overlord," was the curt instruction. AI huddled miserably cramped between two vigilant mutants, while the others sat behind him. The van moved seemingly of its own volition, and at an enormous rate. A mutant power, AI thought. After a while he said, "Could you at least tell me what year this is?" "Yes -- #," snapped the mutant to his left. "But that's the same year it was over there." "Certainly. What else could it be?" The question floored Al. He was silent for perhaps half a mile more. Since the van had no windows, he stared morosely at his feet. Finally he asked, "How come you aren't afraid of catching my germs then? Over back of -- ah -- the dimensional gateway, they kept me cooped up in a force-field all the time so I wouldn't contaminate them. But you go right ahead breathing the same air I do." "Do you think we fear the germs of a Normal, spy?" sneered the mutant at Al's right. "You forget that we're a superior race." Al nodded. "Yes. I forgot about that." The van halted suddenly and the mutant police hustled Al out, past a crowd of peering little fat men and women, and into a colossal dome of a building whose exterior was covered completely with faceted green glass. The effect was one of massive ugliness. They ushered him into a sort of throne room presided over by a mutant fatter than the rest. The policeman gripping Al's right arm hissed, "Bow when you enter the presence of the Overlord." Al wasn't minded to argue. He dropped to his knees along with the others. A booming voice from above rang out. "What have you brought me today?" "A spy, Your Nobility." "Another? Rise, spy." Al rose. "Begging Your Nobility's pardon, I'd like to put in a word or two on my own behalf -- " "Silence!" the Overlord roared. Al closed his mouth. The mutant drew himself up to his full height, about five feet one, and said, "The Normals have sent you across the dimensional gulf to spy on us." "No, Your Nobility. They were afraid I'd spy on them, so they sent me over here. I'm from the year #, you see." Briefly, he explained everything, beginning with the bollixed phone call and ending with his capture by the Overlord's men a short while ago. The Overlord looked skeptical. "It is well known that the Normals plan to cross the dimensional gulf from their phantom world to this, the real one, and invade our civilization. You're but the latest of their advance scouts. Admit it!" "No, Your Nobility, I'm not On the other side, they told me I was a spy from #, and now you say I'm a spy from the other dimension. But I tell you -- " "Enough!" the mutant leader thundered. "Take him away. Place him in custody. We shall decide his fate later!"  pied the cell into which AI was thrust. He was a lanky, sad-faced Normal who slouched forward to shake hands once the door had clanged shut. "Thurizad manifosk," he said. "Sorry, I don't speak that language," said Al. The other grinned. "I understand. All right: greetings. I'm Darren Phelp. Are you a spy too?" "No, dammit!" Al snapped. Then : "Sorry. Didn't mean to take it out on you. My name's Al Miller. Are you a native of this place?" "Me? Dove's whiskers, what a sense of humor! Of course I'm not a native! You know as well as I do that there aren't any Normals left in this fourspace continuum." "None at all?" "Hasn't been one born here in centuries," Phelp said. "But you're just joking, eh? You're from Baileffod's outfit, I suppose." "Who?" "Baileffod. Bailefiod! You mean you aren't? Then you must be from higher up!" Phelp thrust his hands sideways in some kind of gesture of respect "Penguin's paws, Excellency, I apologize. I should have seen at once -- " "No, I'm not from your organization at all," Al said. "I don't know what y ou're talking about. Word of honor." Phelp smiled cunningly. "Of course, Excellency! I understand completely." "Cut that out! Why doesn't anyone ever believe me? I'm not from Baileffod and I'm not from higher up. I come from #. Do you hear me -- #? And that's the truth." Phelp's eyes went wide. "From the past?" Al nodded. "I stumbled into the mutants in # and they shipped me five centuries ahead to get rid of me. Only when I arrived, I wasn't welcome, so I was shipped across the dimensional whatzis to here. Everyone thinks I'm a spy, wherever I go. What are you doing here?" Phelp smiled. 'Why, I am a spy." "From #?" "Naturally. We have to keep tabs on the mutants somehow. I came through the gateway wearing an invisibility shield, but it popped an ultrone and I vizzed out. They jugged me last month and I suppose I'm stuck in this place for keeps." A L rubbed thumbs tiredly against his eyeballs. "Wait a minutehow come you speak my language? On the other side, they had to get hold of a linguistics expert to talk to me." "All spies are trained to talk English," said Phelp. "That's the language the mutants speak here. In the real world, we speak Vorkish, naturally. It's the language developed by Normals for communication during the Mutant Wars. Your 'linguistics expert' was probably one of our top spies." "And over here the mutants have won?" "Completely. Three hundred years ago, in this continuum, the mutants developed a two-way time machine that enabled them to go back and forth, eliminating Normal leaders before they were born. Whereas in our world, the real world, two-way time travel is impossible. That's where the continuum split begins. We Normals fought a grim war of extermination against the mutants in our fourspace and finally wiped them out, despite their superior powers, in #. Clear?" "More or less." Rather less than more, AI added privately. "So there are only mutants in this world, and there are only Normals in your world." "Exactly!" "And you're a spy from the other side." "You've got it now! You see, even though, strictly speaking, this world is only a phantom, it's got some pretty real characteristics. For instance, if the mutants killed you here, you'd be dead. Permanently. So there's a lot of rivalry across the gateway; the mutants are always scheming to invade us, and vice versa. Confidentially, I don't think anything will ever come of all the scheming." "You don't?" "Nah," Phelp said. "The way things stand now, each side has a perfectly good enemy just beyond reach. But actually going to war would be messy, while relaxing our guard and allowing peace to break out would foul up our economy. So we keep sending spies back and forth, and prepare for war. It's a nice system, except when you happen to get yourself caught, like me." "What'll happen to you?" Phelp shrugged. "They may let me rot here for a few decades. Or they might decide to condition me and send me back as a spy for them. Tiger tails, who could know?" "Would you change sides like that?" "I wouldn't have any choice -- not after I was conditioned," Phelp said. "But I don't worry much about it. It's a risk I knew about when I signed on for spy duty." AI shuddered. It was beyond him how someone could voluntarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutantbattling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum, he philosophically decided. tund mutant police came to fetch him. They marched him downstairs and into a bare, ugly little room where a battery of interrogators quizzed him for better than an hour. He stuck to his story, throughout everything, until at last they indicated they were through with him. He spent the next two hours in a drafty cell, by himself, until finally a gaudily robed mutant unlocked the door and said, "The Overlord commands you to present yourself." The Overlord looked worried. He leaned forward on his throne, fist digging into his fleshy chin. In his booming voice -- AI realized at last that it was artificially amplified -- the Overlord rumbled, "Miller, you're a problem." "I'm sorry, Your Nobil -- " "Quiet! I'll do the talking." AI did not reply. The Overlord went on, 'We've checked your story inside and out, and confirmed it with one of our spies on the other side of the gate. You really are from #, or thereabouts. What can we do with you? Generally speaking, when we catch a Normal snooping around here, we psycho-condition him and send him back across the gateway to spy for us. But we can't do that to you, because you don't belong on the other side, and they've already tossed you out once. On the other hand, we can't keep you here, maintaining you forever at state expense. And it wouldn't be civilized to kill you, would it?" "No, Your Nobil-" "Silence!" AI gulped. The Overlord glowered at him and continued thinking out loud. "I suppose we could perform experiments on you, though. You must be a walking laboratory of Normal microorganisms that we could synthesize and fire through the gateway when we invade their fourspace. Yes, by the Grome, then you'd be useful to our cause! Zechariah?" "Yes, Nobility?" A ribbon-bedecked guardsman snapped to attention. "Take this Normal to the biological laboratories for examination. I'll have further instructions as soon as -- " AI heard a peculiar whanging noise from the back of the throne room. The Overlord appeared to freeze on his throne. Turning, AI saw a band of determined-looking Normals come bursting in, led by Darren Phelp. "There you are!" Phelp cried. "I've been looking all over for you!" He was waving a peculiar needlenozzled gun. "What's going on?" AI gasped. Phelp grinned. "The invasion! It came, after all! Our troops are pouring through the gateway armed with these freezer guns. They immobilize any mutant who gets in the way of the field." "When -- when did all this happen?" "It started two hours ago. We've captured the entire city! Come on, will you? Whiskers, there's no time to waste!" "Where in blazes am I supposed to go?" Phelp smiled. "To the nearest dimensional lab, of course. We're going to send you back to your own time." stood in a tense knot around AI in the laboratory. From outside came the sound of jubilant singing. The invasion was a howling success. As Phelp had explained it, the victory was due to the recent invention of a kind of time-barrier projector. The projector had cut off all contact between the mutant world and its own future, preventing time-traveling mutant scouts from getting back to #I with news of the invasion. With two-way travel, the great mutant advantage, thus nullified, the success of the surprise attack was made possible -- and easy. AI listened to this explanation with minimal interest. He barely understood every third word, and, in any event, his main concern was in getting home. He was strapped into a streamlined and much modified version of the temporal centrifuge that had originally hurled him forward into #. Phelps explained things to him. "You see here, we set the machine for #. What day was it when you left? And how close can you get to the moment?" "Ah -- October #. It was exactly #:# in the afternoon." "Make the setting, Frozz." Phelp nodded. "You'll be shunted back along the time-line. Of course, you'll land in this continuum, since in our world there's no such thing as pastward time travel. But once you reach your own time, all you do is activate this small transdimensional generator, and you'll be hurled across safe and sound into the very day you left, in your own fourspace." "You can't know how much I appreciate all this," AI said very warmly. He felt a pleasant glow of love for all mankind, for the first time since his unhappy phone call. At last someone was taking sympathetic interest in his plight. At last he was on his way home, back to the relative sanity of #, where he could start forgetting this entire nightmarish jaunt. Mutants and Normals and spies and time machines... "You'd better get going," Phelp said. "We have to get the occupation under way here." "Sure," AI agreed. "Don't let me hold you up. I can't wait to get going -- no offense intended." "And remember, soon as your surroundings look familiar, jab the activator button on this generator. Otherwise you'll slither into an interspace where we couldn't answer for the consequences." AI nodded tensely. "I won't forget." "I hope not. Ready?" "Ready." Someone threw a switch. AI began to spin. He heard the popping sound that was the rupturing of the temporal matrix. Like a cork shot from a champagne bottle, AI arched out backward through time, heading for #. TT E woke in his own room on #rd Street. His head hurt. His mind was full of phrases like temporal centrifuge and transdimensional generator. He picked himself off the floor and rubbed his head. Wow, he thought. It must have been a sudden fainting spell. And now his head was crowded with nonsense. Going to the sideboard, he pulled out the half-empty bourbon bottle and measured off a few fingers' worth. After the drink, his nerves felt steadier. His mind was still cluttered with inexplicable thoughts and images. Sinister little fat men and complex machines, transparent roadways in the air and men in fancy tunics. A bad dream, he thought. Then he remembered. It wasn't any dream. He had actually taken the round trip into #, returning by way of some other continuum. He had pressed the generator button at the proper time, and now here he was, safe and sound. No longer the football of a bunch of different factions. Home in his own snug little fourspace, or whatever it was. He frowned. He recalled that Mordecai had severed the telephone wire. But the phone looked intact now. Maybe it had been fixed while he was gone. He picked it up. Unless he got that loan extension today, he was cooked. There was no need for him to look up the number of the Friendly Finance Corporation; he knew it all too well. He began to dial. MUrray Hill #The receiver clicked queerly. A voice said, "Come in, Operator Nine. Operator Nine, do you read me?" Al's jaw sagged. This is where I came in, he thought wildly. He struggled to put down the phone. But his muscles would not respond. It would be easier to bend the sun in its orbit than to break the path of the continuum. He heard his own voice say, "I didn't want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if -- " "Just a minute. Who are you?" AI fought to break the contact. But he was hemmed away in a small corner of his mind while his voice went on, "I ought to ask you that. What are you doing on the other end, anyway? I hadn't even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-# and "Well? You dialed MUgwump # and you got us. What more do you want?" A suspicious pause. "Say, you aren't Operator Nine!" Inwardly, AI wanted to scream. No scream would come. In this continuum, the past (his future) was immutable. He was caught on the track, and there was no escape. None whatever. And, he realized in frozen horror, there never would in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put on the inside front cover of each with your name printed on it. Bookplate No. GF-# The umteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives states: "No books are lost by loaning except the ones you particularly want to keep." with owner's name: #-# (Add State Sales Tax, if any) Actual Size #" x #" No. GF-# #I Hudson Street, New York #. N. Y. Ignorance of the law can so be a valid excuse -- and the result is this hilarious but legal... T HE history of man becomes fearfully and wonderfully confusing with the advent of interstellar travel. Of special interest to the legally inclined student is the famous Skrrgck Affair, which began before the Galactic Tribunal with the case of Citizens vs. Skrrgck. The case, and the opinion of the Court, may be summarized as follows: Skrrgck, a native of Sknnbt (Altair IV), where theft is honorable, sanctioned by law and custom, imtheft is contrary to both law and custom. While residing in Chicago, a city in a political subdivision known as United States of America, one of the ancient nation-states of Earth, he overheard his landlady use the phrase "A license to steal," a common colloquialism in the area, which refers to any special privilege. Skrrgck then went to a police station in Chicago and requested a license to steal. The desk sergeant, as a joke, wrote out a document purporting to be a license to steal, and Skrrgck, relying on said document, committed theft, was apprehended, tried and convicted. On direct appeal allowed to the Galactic Tribunal, the Court held: ( I ) All persons are required to know and obey the law of the jurisdiction in which they reside. (#) Public officials must refrain from misrepresenting to strangers the law of the jurisdiction. (#) Where, as here, a public official is guilty of such misrepresentation, the requirement of knowledge no longer applies. (#) Where, as here, it is shown by uncontradicted evidence that a defendant is law-abiding and willing to comply with the standards of his place of residence, misrepresentation of law by public officials may amount to entrapment. (#) The Doctrine of Entrapprosecuting this defendant. ( # ) The magnitude of the crime is unimportant compared with the principle involved, and the fact that the defendant's unusual training on Sknnbt enabled him to steal a large building in Chicago, known as the Merchandise Mart, is of no significance. (#) The defendant, however, was civilly liable for the return of the building, and its occupants, or their value, even if he had to steal to get it, provided, however, that he stole only on and from a planet where theft was legal. TP HE Skrrgck case was by no means concluded by the decision of the Galactic Tribunal, but continued to reverberate down the years, a field day for lawyers, and "a lesson to all in the complexities of modern intergalactic law and society," said Winston, Harold C., Herman Prof, of Legal History, Harvard. Though freed on the criminal charge of theft, Skrrgck still faced some # charges of kidnapping, plus the civil liability imposed upon him by the ruling of the Court. The kidnapping charges were temporarily held in abeyance. Not that the abductions were not considered outrageous, but it was quickly realized by all concerned that if Skrrgck were constantly involved in lengthy and expensive defenses tocriminal prosecutions, there would be no chance at all of obtaining any restitution from him. First things first, and with Terrans that rarely means justice. Skrrgck offered to pay over the money he had received for the building and its occupants, but that was unacceptable to the Terrans, for what they really wanted, with that exaggerated fervor typical of them, provided it agrees with their financial interests, was the return of the original articles. Not only were the people wanted back, but the building itself had a special significance. Its full title was "The New Merchandise Mart" and it had been built in the exact style of the original and on the exact spot on the south side of the Chicago River where the original had stood prior to its destruction in the Sack of Chicago. It was more than just a large commercial structure to the Terrans. It was also a symbol of Terra's unusually quick recovery from its Empire Chaos into its present position of leadership within the Galactic Union. The Terrans wanted that building back. So Skrrgck, an obliging fellow at heart, tried first to get it back, but this proved impossible, for he had sold the building to the Aldebaranian Confederacy for use in its annual "prosperity fiesta." The dominant culture of the Aldebaranian system is a descendant of the "conspicuous destruction" or "potlatch" type, in which articles of value are destroyed to prove the wealth and power of the destroyers. It was customary once every Aldebaranian year -- about six Terran -- for the Aldebaranian government to sponsor a token celebration of this destructive sort, and it had purchased the Merchandise Mart from Skrrgck as part of its special celebration marking the first thousand years of the Confederacy. Consequently, the building, along with everything else, was totally destroyed in the "bonfire" that consumed the entire fourth planet from the main Aldebaranian sun. Nor was Skrrgck able to arrange the return to Terra of the occupants of the building, some # in number, because he had sold them as slaves to the Bootean League. T T is commonly thought slavery is forbidden throughout the Galaxy by the terms of Article # of the Galactic Compact, but such is not the case. What is actually forbidden is "involuntary servitude" and this situation proved the significance of that distinction. In the case of Sol v. Bootes, the Galactic Tribunal held that Terra had no right to force the "slaves" to give up their slavery and return to Terra if they did not wish to. And, quite naturally, none of them wished to. It will be remembered that the Booteans, a singularly handsome and good-natured people, were in imminent danger of racial extinction due to the disastrous effects of a strange nucleonic storm which had passed through their system in #. The physiological details of the "Bootean Effect," as it has been called, was to render every Bootean sterile in relation to every other Bootean, while leaving each Bootean normally capable of reproduction, provided one of the partners in the union had not been subjected to the nucleonic storm. Faced with this situation, the Booteans immediately took steps to encourage widespread immigration by other humanoid races, chiefly Terrans, for it was Terrans who had originally colonized Bootes and it was therefore known that interbreeding was possible. But the Booteans were largely unsuccessful in their immigration policy. Terra was peaceful and prosperous, and the Booteans, being poor advertisers, were unable to convince more than a handful to leave the relative comforts of home for the far-off Bootean system where, almost all were sure, some horrible fate lay behind the Booteans' honeyed words. So when Skrrgck showed up with some # Terrans, the Booteans, in desperation, agreed to purchase them in the hope of avoiding the "involuntary servitude" prohibition of Article # by making them like it In this, they were spectacularly successful. The "slaves" were treated to the utmost luxury and every effort was made to satisfy any reasonable wish. Their "duties" consisted entirely of "keeping company" with the singularly attractive Booteans. Under these circumstances it is, perhaps, hardly surprising that out of the #I occupants, all but # flatly refused to return to Terra. The # who did wish to return, most of whom were borderline psychotics, were shipped home, and Bootes sued Skrrgck for their purchase price, but was turned down by the Galactic Quadrant Court on the theory of, basically, Caveat Emptor -- let the buyer beware. ' I I HE Court in Sol v. Bootes had held that although adults could not be required to return to Terra, minors under the age of #I could be, and an additional # were returned under this ruling, to the vociferous disgust of the post-puberty members of that group. Since there was apparently some question of certain misrepresentations by Skrrgck as to the ages or family affiliations of some members of this minor group, he agreed to an out-of-court settlement of Bootes' claim for their purchase price, thus depriving the legal profession of further clarification of the rights of two "good faith" dealers in this peculiar sort of transaction. The Terran people, of course, were totally unsatisfied with this result. Led by some demagogues and, to a milder degree, by most of the political opposition to the existing Terran government, and reminded of certain actual examples from Terra's own history, many became convinced that some form of nefarious "brainwashing" had been exercised upon the "unfortunate" Terran expatriates. Excitement ran high, and there was even some agitation for withdrawal from the Galactic Union. Confronted with such unrest, the Terran government made efforts to reach some settlement with Bootes despite the decision of the Court in Sol v. Bootes, and was finally able to gain in the Centaurian Agreement a substantial reparation, it being specifically stipulated in the Agreement that the money was to be paid to the dependents who suffered actual financial loss. In a suit against the Terran government by one of the excluded families, to obtain for that family a share of the reparation, the validity of the treaty, as it applied to exclude the suing family and others in like position, was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. The suit was begun before the Agreement had been ratified by the General Assembly, and the Court indicated that the plaintiff would have lost on the strength of a long line of cases giving the World President certain inherent powers over the conduct of foreign affairs. Since, however, the matter came up for decision after ratification, the Court said that the "inherent powers" question was moot, and that the Agreement, having been elevated to the status of a treaty by ratification, must be held valid under the "Supremacy of Treaties" section of Article # of the United Terran Charter. Although this failed to satisfy the Terran people -- and their anger may have contributed to the fall of the Solarian Party administration in the following election -- the Treaty is generally considered by students of the subject as a triumph of Solarian diplomacy, and an outstanding example of intergalactic good faith on the part of Bootes. kF course, neither the demagogy nor the anger could hide forever the true facts about how the Booteans were treating their "slaves," and when the true facts became known, there was a sudden flood of migration from Terra to Bootes, which threatened to depopulate the Solarian Empire and drown Bootes. The flood was quickly dammed by the Treaty of Deneb restricting migration between the two systems. This treaty was held to be a valid police-powers exception to the "Free Migration" principle of Article # of the Galactic Compact in Boleslaw v. Sol and Bootes. All this left Skrrgck with liabiliand practically no assets. Like most Altairians, he was a superb thief but a poor trader. The price he had received for the Merchandise Mart and the "slaves," while amounting to a tidy personal fortune, was less than half the amount of the claims against him, and due to an unfortunate predilection for slow Aedrils and fast Flowezies, he only had about half of that left. Skrrgck, who had by this time apparently developed a love of litigation equal to his love of thievery, used part of what he did have left in a last effort to evade liability by going into bankruptcy, a move which was naturally met with howls of outrage by his creditors and a flood of objections to his petition, a flood which very nearly drowned the Federal District Court in Chicago. It would be difficult to imagine a more complex legal battle than might have taken place, nor one more instructive to the legal profession, had the situation been carried to its logical conclusion. On the one hand was the age-old policy of both Terran and Galactic bankruptcy law. A man becomes unable to pay his debts. He goes into bankruptcy. Whatever he does have is distributed to his creditors, who must be satisfied with what they can get out of his present assets. They cannot require him to go to work to earn additional funds with which to pay them more. It is precisely to escape this form of mortgage on one's future that bankruptcy exists. Yet here were over seven thousand creditors claiming that Skrrgck's debts should not be discharged in bankruptcy, because Skrrgck could be required to steal enough to satisfy them fully. Could the creditors require Skrrgck to exert such personal efforts to satisfy their claims? A lawyer would almost certainly say "no," citing the Bankruptcy Act as sufficient grounds alone, not to mention the anomaly of having Terrans, in a Terran court, ask that Skrrgck, for their benefit, commit an act illegal on Terra and punishable by that Terran court. The idea of a Terran court giving judicial sanction to theft is novel, to say the least. Indeed, Judge Griffin, who was presiding, was overheard to remark to a friend on the gulfe course that he "would throw the whole d -- n thing out" for that reason alone. Y ET, in spite of this undeniable weight of opinion, it is difficult to say just what the final decision would have been had the matter been carried to the Galactic Tribunal, for in the original case of body, it will be remembered, had specifically stated that Skrrgck was liable for the value of the building and its occupants, "even if he must steal to obtain it." Now that hasty and ill-advised phrase was certainly dicta, and was probably intended only as a joke, the opinion having been written by Master Adjudicator Stsssts, a member of that irrepressible race of saurian humorists, the Sirians. But if the case had actually come before Fig. #: Actual scene of license issue (Skrrgck superimposed) them, the Court might have been hoist on its own petard, so to speak, and been forced to rule in accord with its earlier "joke." Unfortunately for the curiosity of the legal profession, the question was never to be answered, for Skrrgck did a remarkable thing which made the whole controversy irrelevant. What his motives were will probably never be known. His character makes it unlikely that he began the bankruptcy proceedings in good faith and was later moved by conscience. It is possible that the bankruptcy was merely an elaborate piece of misdirection. More probably, however, he simply seized on the unusual opportunity the publicity gave him. Whatever the motives, the facts are that Skrrgck used the last of his waning resources to purchase one of the newly developed Terran Motors' "Timebirds" in which he traveled secretly to Altair. Even Fig. #: The moment of decision, case of Citizens vs. Skrrgck this first model of the Timebird, with its primitive meson exchange discoordinator, cut the trip from Sol to Altair from weeks to days, and Skrrgck, landing secretly on his home planet while his bankruptcy action was still in the turmoil stage, was able to accomplish the greatest "coup" in Altarian history. He never could have done it without the publicity of the legal proceedings. In a culture where theft is honorable, the most stringent precautions are taken against its accomplishment, but who could have expected Skrrgck? He was lightyears away, trying to go into bankruptcy. And so, while all eyes on Altair, as well as throughout the rest of the Galaxy, were amusedly fixed on the legal circus shaping up on Terra, Skrrgck was able to steal the Altairian Crown Jewels, and the Altairian Crown Prince as well, and flee with them to Sol. ' I ' HE reaction was violent. The Galaxy was gripped by an almost hysterical amusement Skrrgck's creditors on Terra were overjoyed. The Altairians made one effort to regain their valuables in the courts, but were promptly turned down by the Galactic Tribunal which held, wisely, that a society which made a virtue of theft would have to take the consequences of its own culture. So Skrrgck's creditors were paid in full. The jewels alone were more than sufficient for that, containing as they did no less than seven priceless "Wanderstones," those strange bits of frozen fire found ever so rarely floating in the interstellar voids, utterly impervious to any of the effects of gravitation. Altair paid a fantastic price for the return of the collection, and Skrrgck also demanded, and got, a sizable ransom for the Prince, after threatening to sell him to Bootes, from whence, of course, he would never return. Being a prince in a democratic, constitutional monarchy is not as glamorous as you might think. His creditors satisfied, Skrrgck returned to Sknnbt, dragging with him an angry Crown Prince -- angry at having lost the chance to go to Bootes, that is. At Altair, Skrrgck was received as a popular hero. He had accomplished something of which every Altairian had dreamed, almost from the moment of his birth, and he was widely and joyously acclaimed. Riding on this wave of popular adulation, he entered politics, ran for the office of Premier, and was elected by an overwhelming majority. As soon as he took office, he took steps, in accordance with Altairian custom, to wipe out the "stain" on his honor incurred by allowing the Chicago police sergeant to fool him with the now famous License to Steal. He instituted suit against the sergeant for the expenses of his defense to the original theft charge. The case was carried all the way to the Galactic Tribunal, which by this time was heartily sick of the whole mess. Feeling apparently that the sergeant was the original cause of said mess, the Court overruled his plea that he had merely been joking. The Court cited an ancient case from West Virginia, U.S.A. -- Plate v. Durst, # W. Va. #, # SE #, # L.R.A. #. (Note: The date of this case is invariably given as #, which is most confusing, since the present date is only #. The #, however, refers to the eighteen hundred and ninety-sixth year of the pre-atomic era, which we, of course, style A.A. -- Ante Atomica. Since the present era begins with the first atomic explosion, the case actually occurred in approximately the year # A.A.) The Court quoted the opinion in this ancient case as follows: "Jokes are sometimes taken seriously by... the inexperienced... and if such is the case, and the person thereby deceived is led to (incur expenses) in the full belief and expectation that the joker is in earnest, the law will also take the joker at his word, and give him good reason to smile." was charged with a very large judgment. Although the City of Chicago paid this judgment, the sergeant had become the laughingstock of the planet, so he applied for, and was granted, a hardship exception to the Treaty of Deneb and migrated to Bootes. There, regarded as the real savior of the Bootean race, and a chosen instrument of the God of Bootes, he was received as a saint. He died in #, surrounded by his # children and # grandchildren, having made himself wealthy by becoming the leader of a most excessive fertility cult, which is only now being forcibly suppressed by the Bootean Government. In # P.A., someone on Earth remembered the kidnapping indictments still outstanding against Skrrgck and attempted to prosecute them. By this time, however, Skrrgck was Premier, the chief executive officer of Altair, and all extradition matters were within his sole discretion. In the exercise of this power, he refused to extradite himself, and the prosecutor on Earth, whose constituents were beginning to laugh at him, had the indictments quashed "in the interest of interstellar harmony." The story has an interesting sequel. During Skrrgck's unprecedented six consecutive terms as Premier (no one else had ever served less than seven), he was able, by dint of unremitting political maneuvering, to have theft outlawed in the Altairian system. It was, he said, "a cultural trait that is more trouble than it is worth." In The Next Issue Hesketh alive is a miracle, but an even bigger miracle is needed -- finding out what he knows that will keep them alive! Nothing in the world could be happier and more serene than a man who loves his work -- but what happens when it loves him back? Manners told himself; it's only a job. But nerve has to rest on a sturdier foundation than cash reserves just above zero and eviction if he came away from this interview still unemployed. Clay, at the Association of Professional Engineers, who had set up the appointment, hadn't eased Peter's nervousness by admitting, w Ju  "I don't know what in hell he's looking for. He's turned down every man we've sent him." The interview was at three. Fifteen minutes to go. Coming early would betray overeagerness. Peter stood in front of the Lex Industries plant and studied it to kill time. Plain, featureless concrete walls, not large for a manufacturing plant -- it took a scant minute to exhaust its sightseeing potential. If he walked around the building, he could, if he ambled, come back to the front entrance just before three. He turned the corner, stopped, frowned, wondering what there was about the building that seemed so puzzling. It could not have been plainer, more ordinary. It was in fact, he only gradually realized, so plain and ordinary that it was like no other building he had ever seen. There had been windows at the front. There were none at the side, and none at the rear. Then how were the working areas lit? He looked for the electric service lines and found them at one of the rear corners. They jolted him. The distribution transformers were ten times as large as they should have been for a plant this size. Something else was wrong. Peter looked for minutes before he found out what it was. Factories usually have large side doorways for employees changing shifts. This building had one small office entrance facing the street, and the only other door was at the loading bay -- big enough to handle employee traffic, but four feet above the ground. Without any stairs, it could be used only by trucks backing up to it. Maybe the employees' entrance was on the third side. It wasn't. wall, Peter suddenly remembered the time he had set out to kill. He looked at his watch and gasped. At a run, set to straight-arm the door, he almost fell on his face. The door had opened by itself. He stopped and looked for a photoelectric eye, but a soft voice said through a loudspeaker in the anteroom wall: "Mr. Manners?" "What?" he panted. "Who-?" "You are Mr. Manners?" the voice asked. He nodded, then realized he had to answer aloud if there was a microphone around; but the soft voice said : "Follow the open doors down the hall. Mr. Lexington is expecting you." "Thanks," Peter said, and a door at one side of the anteroom swung open for him. He went through it with his composure slipping still further from his grip. This was no way to go into an interview, but doors kept opening before and shutting after him, until only one was left, and the last of his calm was blasted away by a bellow from within. "Don't stand out there like a jackass! Either come in or go away!" Peter found himself leaping obediently toward the doorway. He stopped just short of it, took a deep breath and huffed it out, took another, all the while thinking, Hold on now; you're in no shape for an interview -- and ifs not your fault -- this whole setup is geared to unnerve you: the kindergarten kid called in to see the principal. He let another bellow bounce off him as he blew out the second breath, straightened his jacket and tie, and walked in as an engineer applying for a position should. "Mr. Lexington?" he said. "I'm Peter Manners. The Association -- " "Sit down," said the man at the desk. "Let's look you over." He was a huge man behind an even huger desk. Peter took a chair in front of the desk and let himself be inspected. It wasn't comfortable. He did some looking over of his own to ease the tension. The room was more than merely large, carpeted throughout with a high-pile, rich, sound-deadening rug. The oversized desk and massive leather chairs, heavy patterned drapes, ornately framed paintings -- by God, even a glass-brick manteled fireplace and bowls with flowers! -- made him feel as if he had walked down a hospital corridor into Hollywood's idea of an office. His eyes eventually had to move to Lexington, and they were daunted for another instant. This was a citadel of a man -- great girders of frame supporting buttresses of muscle -- with a vaulting head and drawbridge chin and a steel gaze that defied any attempt to storm it. But then Peter came out of his momentary flinch, and there was an age to the man, about #, and he saw the muscles had turned to fat, the complexion ashen, the eyes set deep as though retreating from pain, and this was a citadel of a man, yes, but beginning to crumble. "What can you do?" asked Lexington abruptly. mouth to answer, closed it again. He'd been jolted too often in too short a time to be stampeded into blurting a reply that would cost him this job. "Good," said Lexington. "Only a fool would try to answer that. Do you have any knowledge of medicine?" "Not enough to matter," Peter said, stung by the compliment "I don't mean how to bandage a cut or splint a broken arm. I mean things like cell structure, neural communication -- the basics of how we live." "I'm applying for a job as engineer." "I know. Are you interested in the basics of how we live?" Peter looked for a hidden trap, found none. "Of course. Isn't everyone?" "Less than you think," Lexington said. "It's the preconceived notions they're interested in protecting. At least I won't have to beat them out of you." "Thanks," said Peter, and waited for the next fast ball. "How long have you been out of school?" "Only two years. But you knew that from the Association -- " "No practical experience to speak of?" "Some," said Peter, stung again, this time not by a compliment. "After I got my degree, I went East for a post-graduate training program with an electrical manufacturer. I got quite a bit of experience there. The company -- " "Stockpiled you," Lexington said. Peter blinked. "Sir?" "Stockpiled you! How much did they pay you?" "Not very much, but we were getting the training instead of wages." "Did that come out of the pamphlets they gave you?" "Did what come out -- " "That guff about receiving training instead of wages!" said Lexington. "Any company that really wants bright trainees will compete for them with money -- cold, hard cash, not platitudes. Maybe you saw a few of their products being made, maybe you didn't. But you're a lot weaker in calculus than when you left school, and in a dozen other subjects too, aren't you?" "Well, nothing we did on the course involved higher mathematics," Peter admitted cautiously, "and I suppose I could use a refresher course in calculus." "Just as I said -- they stockpiled you, instead of using you as an engineer. They hired you at a cut wage and taught you things that would be useful only in their own company, while in the meantime you were getting weaker in the subjects you'd paid to learn. Or are you one of these birds that had the shot paid for him?" "I worked my way through," said Peter stiffly. "If you'd stayed with them five years, do you think you'd be able to get a job with someone else?" Peter considered his answer carefully. Every man the Association had sent had been turned away. That meant bluffs didn't work Neither, he'd seen for himself, did allowing himself to be intimidated. "I hadn't thought about it," he said. "I suppose it wouldn't have been easy." "Impossible, you mean. You wouldn't know a single thing except their procedures, their catalogue numbers, their way of doing things. And you'd have forgotten so much of your engineering training, you'd be scared to take on an engineer's job, for fear you'd be asked to do something you'd forgotten how to do. At that point, they could take you out of the stockpile, put you in just about any job they wanted, at any wage you'd stand for, and they'd have an indentured worker with a degree -- but not the price tag. You see that now?" TT made Peter feel he had been suckered, but he had decided to play this straight all the way. He nodded. "Why'd you leave?" Lexington pursued, unrelenting. "I finished the course and the increase they offered on a permanent basis wasn't enough, so I went elsewhere -- " "With your head full of this nonsense about a shortage of engineers." Peter swallowed. "I thought it would be easier to get a job than it has been, yes." "They start the talk about a shortage and then they keep it going. Why? So youngsters will take up engineering thinking they'll wind up among a highly paid minority. You did, didn't you?" "Yes, sir." "And so did all the others there with you, at school and in this stockpiling outfit?" "That's right" "Well," said Lexington unexpectedly, "there is a shortage! And the stockpilers are the ones who made it, and who keep it going! And the hell of it is that they can't stop -- when one does it, they all have to, or their costs get out of line and they can't compete. What's the solution?" "I don't know," Peter said. Lexington leaned back. "That's quite a lot of admissions you've made. What makes you think you're qualified for the job I'm offering?" "You said you wanted an engineer." "And I've just proved you're less of an engineer than when you left school. I have, haven't I?" "All right, you have," Peter said angrily. "And now you're wondering why I don't get somebody fresh out of school. Right?" Peter straightened up and met the old man's challenging gaze. "That and whether you're giving me a hard time just for the hell of it." "Well, am I?" Lexington demanded. Looking at him squarely, seeing the intensity of the pain-drawn eyes, Peter had the startling feeling that Lexington was rooting for him! "No, you're not." "Then what am I after?" "Suppose you tell me." So suddenly that it was almost like a collapse, the tension went out of the old man's face and shoulL EX ders. He nodded with inexpressible tiredness. "Good again. The mart I want doesn't exist. He has to be made -- the same as I was. You qualify, so far. You've lost your illusions, but haven't had time yet to replace them with dogma or cynicism or bitterness. You saw immediately that fake humility or cockiness wouldn't get you anywhere here, and you were right. Those were the important things. The background data I got from the Association on you counted, of course, but only if you were teachable. I think you are. Am I right?" "At least I can face knowing how much I don't know," said Peter, "if that answers the question." "It does. Partly. What did you notice about this plant?" In precis form, Peter listed his observations: the absence of windows at sides and rear, the unusual amount of power, the automatic doors, the lack of employees' entrances. "Very good," said Lexington. "Most people only notice the automatic doors. Anything else?" "Yes," Peter said. "You're the only person I've seen in the buildmg. "I'm the only one there is." Peter stared his disbelief. Automated plants were nothing new, but they all had their limitations. Either they dealt with exactly similar products or things that could be handled on a flow basis, like oil or water-soluble chemicals. Even these had no more to do than process the goods. "Come on," said Lexington, getting massively to his feet "I'll show you." r I I HE office door opened, and Peter found himself being led down the antiseptic corridor to another door which had opened, giving access to the manufacturing area. As they moved along, between rows of seemingly disorganized machinery, Peter noticed that the factory lights high overhead followed their progress, turning themselves on in advance of their coming, and going out after they had passed, keeping a pool of illumination only in the immediate area they occupied. Soon they reached a large door which Peter recognized as the inside of the truck loading door he had seen from outside. Lexington paused here. "This is the bay used by the trucks arriving with raw materials," he said. "They back up to this door, and a set of automatic jacks outside lines up the trailer body with the door exactly. Then the door opens and the truck is unloaded by these materials handling machines." Peter didn't see him touch anything, but as he spoke, three glistening machines, apparently selfpowered, rolled noiselessly up to the door in formation and stopped there, apparently waiting to be inspected. They gave Peter the creeps. Simple square boxes, set on casters, with two arms each mounted on the sides might have looked similar. The arms, fashioned much like human arms, hung at the sides, not limply, but in a relaxed position that somehow indicated readiness. Lexington went over to one of them and patted it lovingly. "Really, these machines are only an extension of one large machine. The whole plant, as a matter of fact, is controlled from one point and is really a single unit. These materials handlers, or manipulators, were about the toughest things in the place to design. But they're tremendously useful. You'll see a lot of them around." Lexington was about to leave the side of the machine when abruptly one of the arms rose to the handkerchief in his breast pocket and daintily tugged it into a more attractive position. It took only a split second, and before Lexington could react, all three machines were moving away to attend to mysterious duties of their own. Peter tore his eyes away from them in time to see the look of frustrated embarrassment that crossed Lexington's face, only to be replaced by one of anger. He said nothing, however, and led Peter to a large bay where racks of steel plate, bar forms, nuts, bolts, and other materials were stored. "After unloading a truck, the machines check the shipment, report any shortages or overages, and store the materials here," he said, the trace of anger not yet gone from his voice. "When an order is received, it's translated into the catalogue numbers used internally within the plant, and machines like the ones you just saw withdraw the necessary materials from stock, make the component parts, assemble them, and package the finished goods for shipment Simultaneoussection to bill the customer, and an order is sent to our trucker to come and pick the shipment up. Meanwhile, if the withdrawal of the materials required has depleted our stock, the purchasing section is instructed to order more raw materials. I'll take you through the manufacturing and assembly sections right now, but they're too noisy for me to explain what's going on while we're there." Lexington led him through a maze of machines, each one seemingly intent on cutting, bending, welding, grinding or carrying some bit of metal, or just standing idle, waiting for something to do. The two-armed manipulators Peter had just seen were everywhere, scuttling from machine to machine, apparently with an exact knowledge of what they were doing and the most efficient way of doing it. He wondered what would happen if one of them tried to use the same aisle they were using. He pictured a futile attempt to escape the onrushing wheels, saw himself clambering out of the path of the speeding vehicle just in time to fall into the jaws of the punch press that was laboring beside him at the moment. Nervously, he looked for an exit, but his apprehension was unnecessary. The machines seemed to know where they were and avoided the two men, or stopped to wait for them to go by. Back in the office section of the building, Lexington indicated a small room where a typewriter could be heard clattering away. "Standard business machines, operated by the central control mechanism. In that room," he said, as the door swung open and Peter saw that the typewriter was actually a sort of teletype, with no one before the keyboard, "incoming mail is sorted and inquiries are replied to. In this one over here, purchase orders are prepared, and across the hall there's a very similar rig set up in conjunction with an automatic bookkeeper to keep track of the pennies and to bill the customers." "Then all you do is read the incoming mail and maintain the machinery?" asked Peter, trying to shake off the feeling of open amazement that had engulfed him. "I don't even do those things, except for a few letters that come in every week that -- it doesn't want to deal with by itself." The shock of what he had just seen was showing plainly on Peter's face when they walked back into Lexington's office and sat down. Lexington looked at him for quite a while without saying anything, his face sagging and pale. Peter didn't trust himself to speak, and let the silence remain unbroken. Finally Lexington spoke. "I know it's hard to believe, but there it is." "Hard to believe?" said Peter. "I almost can't. The trade journals run articles about factories like this one, but planned for ten, maybe twenty years in the future." "Damn fools!" exclaimed Lexington, getting part of his breath back. "They could have had it years their idiotic notions about specialization." Lexington mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Apparently the walk through the factory had tired him considerably, although it hadn't been strenuous. began to talk in a low voice completely in contrast with the overbearing manner he had used upon Peter's arrival. "You know what we make, of course." "Yes, sir. Conduit fittings." "And a lot of other electrical products, too. I started out in this business twenty years ago, using orthodox techniques. I never got through university. I took a couple of years of an arts course, and got so interested in biology that I didn't study anything else. They bounced me out of the course, and I re-entered in engineering, determined not to make the same mistake again. But I did. I got too absorbed in those parts of the course that had to do with electrical theory and lost the rest as a result. The same thing happened when I tried commerce, with accounting, so I gave up and started working for one of my competitors. It wasn't too long before I saw that the only way I could get ahead was to open up on my own." Lexington sank deeper in his chair and stared at the ceiling as he spoke. "I put myself in hock to the eyeballs, which wasn't easy, because I had just got married, and started off in a very small way. After three years, I had a fairly decent little business going, and I suppose it would have grown just like any other business, except for a strike that came along and put me right back where I started. My wife, whom I'm afraid I had neglected for the sake of the business, was killed in a car accident about then, and rightly or wrongly, that made me angrier with the union than anything else. If the union hadn't made things so tough for me from the beginning, I'd have had more time to spend with my wife before her death. As things turned out -- well, I remember looking down at her coffin and thinking that I hardly knew the girl. "For the next few years, I concentrated on getting rid of as many employees as I could, by replacing them with automatic machines. I'd design the control circuits myself, in many cases wire the things up myself, always concentrating on replacing men with machines. But it wasn't very successful. I found that the more automatic I made my plant, the lower my costs went The lower my costs went, the more business I got, and the more I had to expand." Lexington scowled. "I got sick of it. I decided to try developing one multi-purpose control circuit that would control everything, from ordering the raw materials to shipping the finished goods. As I told you, I had taken quite an interest in biology when I was in school, and from studies of nerve tissue in particular, plus my electrical knowledge, I had a few ideas on how to do it. It took me three years, but I began to see that I could develop circuitry that could remember, compare, detect similarities, and so on. Not the way they do it today, of course. To do what I wanted to do with these big clumsy magnetic drums, tapes, and what-not, you'd need a building the size of Mount Everest. But I found that I could let organic chemistry do most of the work for me. "By creating the proper compounds, with their molecules arranged in predetermined matrixes, I found I could duplicate electrical circuitry in units so tiny that my biggest problem was getting into and out of the logic units with conventional wiring. I finally beat that the same way they solved the problem of translating a picture on a screen into electrical signals, developed equipment to scan the units cyclically, and once I'd done that, the battle was over. "I built this building and incorporated it as a separate company, to compete with my first outfit. In the beginning, I had it rigged up to do only the manual work that you saw being done a few minutes ago in the back of this place. I figured that the best thing for me to do would be to turn the job of selling my stuff over to jobbers, leaving me free to do nothing except receive orders, punch the catalogue numbers into the control console, money." "What happened to your original company?" Peter asked. automated as it was, it couldn't compete with this plant. It gave me great pleasure, three years after this one started working, to see my old company go belly up. This company bought the old firm's equipment for next to nothing and I wound up with all my assets, but only one employee -- me. "I thought everything would be rosy from that point on, but it wasn't. I found that I couldn't keep up with the mail unless I worked impossible hours. I added a couple of new pieces of equipment to the control section. One was simply a huge memory bank. The other was a comparator circuit. A complicated one, but a comparator circuit nevertheless. Here I was working on instinct more than anything. I figured that if I interconnected these circuits in such a way that they could sense everything that went on in the plant, and compare one action with another, by and by the unit would be able to see patterns. "Then, through the existing command output, I figured these new units would be able to control the plant, continuing the various patterns of activity that I'd already established." Here Lexington frowned. "It didn't work worth a damn! It just sat there and did nothing. I couldn't understand it for the longest time, and then I realized what the trouble was. I put a kicker circuit into it, a sort of voltage-bias network. I reset the equipment so that while it was still under instructions to receive orders and produce goods, its prime purpose was to activate the kicker. The kicker, however, could only be activated by me, manually. Lastly, I set up one of the early TV pickups over the mail slitter and allowed every letter I received, every order, to be fed into the memory banks. That did it." "I -- I don't understand," stammered Peter. "Simple! Whenever I was pleased that things were going smoothly, I pressed the kicker button. The machine had one purpose, so far as its logic circuits were concerned. Its object was to get me to press that button. Every day I'd press it at the same time, unless things weren't going well. If there had been trouble in the shop, I'd press it late, or maybe not at all. If all the orders were out on schedule, or ahead of time, I'd press it ahead of time, or maybe twice in the same day. Pretty soon the machine got the idea. "I'll never forget the day I picked up an incoming order form from one of the western jobbers, and found that the keyboard was locked when I tried to punch it into the control console. It completely baffled me at first. Then, while I was tracing out the circuits to see if I could discover what was holding the keyboard lock in, I noticed that the order was already entered on the in-progress list. I was a long time convincing myself that it had really happened, but there was no other explanation. "The machine had realized that whenever one of those forms came in, I copied the list of goods from it onto the in-progress list through the console keyboard, thus activating the producing mechanisms in the back of the plant. The machine had done it for me this time, then locked the keyboard so I couldn't enter the order twice. I think I held down the kicker button for a full five minutes that day." "This kicker button," Peter said tentatively, "it's like the pleasure center in an animal's brain, isn't it?" " Peter felt a surge of relief. Talking with this man was like walking a tightrope. A word too much or a word too little might mean the difference between getting the job or losing it. "Exactly!" whispered Lexington, in an almost conspiratorial tone. "I had altered the circuitry of the machine so that it tried to give me pleasure -- because by doing so, its own pleasure circuit would be activated. "Things went fast from then on. Once I realized that the machine was learning, I put TV monitors all over the place, so the machine could watch everything that was going on. After a short while I had to increase the memory bank, and later I increased it again, but the rewards were worth it. Soon, by watching what I did, and then by doing it for me next time it had to be done, the machine had learned to do almost everything, and I had time to sit back and count my winnings." At this point the door opened, and a small self-propelled cart wheeled silently into the room. Stopping in front of Peter, it waited until he had taken a small plate laden with two or three cakes off its surface. Then the soft, evenly modulated voice he had heard before asked, "How do you like your coffee? Cream, sugar, both or black?" Peter looked for the speaker in the side of the cart, saw nothing, and replied, feeling slightly silly as he did so, "Black, please." A square hole appeared in the top of the cart, like the elevator hole in an aircraft carrier's deck. When the section of the cart's surface rose again, a fine china cup containing steaming black coffee rested on it. Peter took it and sipped it, as he supposed he was expected to do, while the cart proceeded over to Lexington's desk. Once there, it stopped again, and another cup of coffee rose to its surface. Lexington took the coffee from the top of the car, obviously angry about something. Silently, he waited until the cart had left the office, then snapped, "Look at those bloody cups!" Peter looked at his, which was eggshell thin, fluted with carving and ornately covered with gold leaf. "They look very expensive," he said. "Not only expensive, but stupid and impractical!" exploded Lexington. "They only hold half a cup, they'll break at a touch, every one has to be matched with its own saucer, and if you use them for any length of time, the gold leaf comes off!" Peter searched for a comment, found none that fitted this odd outburst, so he kept silent. without touching it for a long while. Then he continued with his narrative. "I suppose it's all my own fault. I didn't detect the symptoms soon enough. After this plant got working properly, I started living here. It wasn't a question of saving money. I hated to waste two hours a day driving to and from my house, and I also wanted to be on hand in case anything should go wrong that the machine couldn't fix for itself." Handling the cup as if it were going to shatter at any moment, he took a gulp. "I began to see that the machine could understand the written word, and I tried hooking a teletype directly into the logic circuits. It was like uncorking a seltzer bottle. The machine had a funny vocabulary -- all of it gleaned from letters it had seen coming in, and replies it had seen leaving. But it was intelligible. It even displayed some traces of the personality the machine was acquiring. "It had chosen a name for itself, for instance -- 'Lex.' That shook me. You might think Lex Industries was named through an abbreviation of the name Lexington, but it wasn't. My wife's name was Alexis, and it was named after the nickname she always used. I objected, of course, but how can you object on a point like that to a machine? Bear in mind that I had to be careful to behave reasonably at all times, because the machine was still learning from me, and I was afraid that any tantrums I threw might be imitated." "It sounds pretty awkward," Peter put in. "You don't know the half of it! As time went on, I had less and less to do, and business-wise I found that the entire control of the operation was slipping from my grasp. Many times I discovered -- too late -- that the machine had taken the damnedest risks you ever saw on bids and contracts for supply. It was quoting impossible delivery times on some orders, and charging pirate's prices on others, all without any obvious reason. Inexplicably, we always came out on top. It would turn out that on the shortdelivery-time quotations, we'd been up against stiff competition, and cutting the production time was the only way we could get the order. On the high-priced quotes, I'd find that no one else was bidding. We were making more money than I'd ever dreamed of, and to make it still better, I'd find that for months I had virtually nothing to do." "It sounds wonderful, sir," said Peter, feeling dazzled. "It was, in a way. I remember one day I was especially pleased with something, and I went to the control console to give the kicker button a long, hard push. The button, much to my amazement, had been removed, and a blank plate had been installed to cover the opening in the board. I went over to the teletype and punched in the shortest message I had ever sent. "The answer came back in the jargon it had learned from letters it had seen, and I remember it as if it just happened, 'mr. a LexingLexington smiled wryly. "That was my reaction at first, too. But time began to weigh very heavily on my hands, and I was lonely, too. I began to wonder whether or not it would be possible to build a voice circuit into the unit. I increased the memory storage banks again, put audio pickups and loudspeakers all over the place, and began teaching Lex to talk. Each time a letter came in, I'd stop it under a video pickup and read it aloud. Nothing happened. "Then I got a dictionary and instructed one of the materials handlers to turn the pages, so that the machine got a look at every page. I read the pronunciation page aloud, so that Lex would be able to interpret the pronunciation marks, and hoped. Still nothing happened. One day I suddenly realized what the trouble was. I remember standing up in this very office, feeling silly as I did it, and saying, 'Lex, please try to speak to me.' I had never asked the machine to say anything, you see. I had only provided the mechanism whereby it was able to do so." "Did it reply, sir?" Lexington nodded. "Gave me the shock of my life. The voice that came back was the one you heard over the telephone -- a little awkward then, the syllables clumsy and poorly put together. But the voice was the same. I hadn't built in any specific tone range, you see. All I did was equip the machine to record, in exacting detail, the frequencies and modulations it found in normal pronunciation as I used it. Then I provided a tone generator to span the entire audio range, which could be very rapidly controlled by the machine, both in volume and pitch, with auxiliaries to provide just about any combinations of harmonics that were needed. I later found that Lex had added to this without my knowing about it, but that doesn't change things. I thought the only thing -- it had heard was my voice, and I expected to hear my own noises imitated." "Where did the machine get the voice?" asked Peter, still amazed that the voice he had heard on the telephone, in the reception hall, and from the coffee cart had actually been the voice of the computer. "Damned foolishness!" snorted Lexington. "The machine saw what I was trying to do the moment I sketched it out and ordered the parts. Within a week, I found out later, it had pulled some odds and 'ends together and built itself a standard radio receiver. Then it listened in on every radio program that was going, and had most of the vocabulary tied in with the written word by the time I was ready to start. Out of all the voices it could have chosen, it picked the one you've already heard as the one likely to please me most" "It's a very pleasant voice, sir." "Sure, but do you know where it came from? Soap opera! It's Lucy's voice, from The Lite and Loves of Mary Butterworth!" wasn't sure whether he should sympathize with him or congratulate him. After a moment, the anger wore off Lexington's face, and he shifted in his chair, staring at his now empty cup. "That's when I realized the thing was taking on characteristics that were more than I'd bargained for. It had learned that it was my provider and existed to serve me. But it had gone further and wanted to be all that it could be : provider, protector, companion -- wife, if you like. Hence the gradual trend toward characteristics that were as distinctly female as a silk negligee. Worse still, it had learned that when I was pleased, I didn't always admit it, and simply refused to believe that I would have it any other way." "Couldn't you have done something to the circuitry?" asked Peter. "I suppose I could," said Lexington, "but in asking that, you don't realize how far the thing had gone. I had long since passed the point when I could look upon her as a machine. Business was tremendous. I had no complaints on that score. And tinkering with her personality -- well, it was like committing some kind of homicide. I might as well face it, I suppose. She acts like a woman and I think of her as one. "At first, when I recognized this trend for what it was, I tried to stop it. She'd ordered a subscription to Vogue magazine, of all things, in order to find out the latest in silverware, china, and so on. I called up the local distributor and canceled the subscription. I had no sooner hung up the telephone than her voice came over the speaker. Very softly, mind you. And her inflections by this time were superb. 'That was mean,' she said. Three lousy words, and I found myself phoning the guy right back, saying I was sorry, and would he please not cancel. He must have thought I was nuts." Peter smiled, and Lexington made as if to rise from his chair, thought the better of it, and shifted his bulk to one side. "Well, there it is," he said softly. "We reached that stage eight years ago." Peter was thunderstruck. "But -- if this factory is twenty years ahead of the times now, it must have been almost thirty then!" Lexington nodded. "I figured fifty at the time, but things are moving faster nowadays. Lex hasn't stood still, of course. She still reads all the trade journals, from cover to cover, and we keep up with the world. If something new comes up, we're in on it, and fast. We're going to be ahead of the pack for a long time to come." "If you'll excuse me, sir," said Peter, "I don't see where I fit in." Peter didn't realize Lexington was answering his question at first. "A few weeks ago," the old man murmured, "I decided to see a doctor. I'd been feeling low for quite a while, and I thought it was about time I attended to a little personal maintenance." Lexington looked Peter squarely in the face and said, "The report was that I have a heart ailment that's apt to knock me off any second." "Can't anything be done about it?" asked Peter. "Rest is the only prescription he could give me. And he said that would only spin out my life a little. Aside from that -- no hope." "I see," said Peter. "Then you're looking for someone to learn the business and let you retire." "It's not retirement that's the problem," said Lexington. "I wouldn't be able to go away on trips. I've tried that, and I always have to hurry back because something's gone wrong she can't fix for herself. I know the reason, and there's nothing I can do about it. It's the way she's built. If nobody's here, she gets lonely." Lexington studied the desk top silently for a moment, before finishing quietly, "Somebody's got to stay here to look after Lex." A T six o'clock, three hours after he had entered Lexington's plant, Peter left. Lexington did not follow him down the corridor. He seemed exhausted after the afternoon's discussion and indicated that Peter should find his own way out This, of course, presented no difficulty, with Lex opening the doors for him, but it gave Peter an opportunity he had been hoping for. He stopped in the reception room before crossing the threshold of the front door, which stood open for him. He turned and spoke to the apparently empty room. "Lex?" he said. He wanted to say that he was flattered that he was being considered for the job; it was what a jobseeker should say, at that point, to the boss's secretary. But when the soft voice came back -- "Yes, Mr. Manners?" -- saying anything like that to a machine felt suddenly silly. He said: "I wanted you to know that it was a pleasure to meet you." "Thank you," said the voice. If it had said more, he might have, but it didn't. Still feeling a little embarrassed, he went home. At four in the morning, his phone rang. It was Lexington. "Manners!" the old man gasped. The voice was an alarm. Manners sat bolt upright, clutching the phone. "What's the matter, sir?" "My chest," Lexington panted. "I can feel it, like a knife on -- I just wanted to -- Wait a minute." There was a confused scratching noise, interrupted by a few mumbles, in the phone. "What's going on, Mr. Lexington?" Peter cried. But it was several seconds before he got an answer. "That's better," said Lexington, his voice stronger. He apologized: "I'm sorry. Lex must have heard me. She sent in one of the materials handlers with a hypo. It helps." The voice on the phone paused, then said matter-of-factly: "But I doubt that anything can help very much at this point. I'm glad I saw you today. I want you to come around in the morning. If I'm -- not here, Lex will give you some papers to sign." There was another pause, with sounds of harsh breathing. Then, strained again, the old man's voice said: "I guess I won't -- be here. Lex will take care of it. Come early. Good-by." The distant receiver clicked. Peter Manners sat on the edge of his bed in momentary confusion, then made up his mind. In the short hours he had known him, he had come to have a definite fondness for the old man; and there were times when machines weren't enough, when Lexington should have another human being by his side. Clearly this was one such time. Peter dressed in a hurry, miraculously found a cruising cab, sped through empty streets, leaped out in front of Lex Industries' plain concrete walls, ran to the door -- In the waiting room, the soft, distant voice of Lex said: "He wanted you to be here, Mr. Manners. Come." A door opened, and wordlessly he walked through it -- to the main room of the factory. He stopped, staring. Four squat materials handlers were quietly, slowly carrying old Lexington -- no, not the man; the lifeless body that had been Lexington -- carrying the body of the old man down the center aisle between the automatic lathes. get a doctor!" But the massive handling machines didn't respond, and the gentle voice of Lex said: "It's too late for that, Mr. Manners." Slowly and reverently, they placed the body on the work table stood in the exact center of the factory main floor. Elsewhere in the plant, a safety valve in the lubricating oil system was being bolted down. When that was done, the pressure in the system began to rise. Near the loading door, a lubricating oil pipe burst. Another, on the other side of the building, split lengthwise a few seconds later, sending a shower of oil over everything in the vicinity. Near the front office, a stream of it was running across the floor, and at the rear of the building, in the storage area, one of the materials handlers had just finished cutting a pipe that led to the main oil tank. In fifteen minutes there was free oil in every corner of the shop. All the materials handlers were machine, like mourners at a funeral. In a sense, they were. In another sense, they were taking part in something different, a ceremony that originated, and is said to have died, in a land far distant from the Lex Industries plant. One of the machines approached Lexington's body, and placed his hands on his chest. Abruptly Lex said: "You'd better go now." Peter jumped; he had been standing paralyzed for what seemed a long time. There was a movement beside him -- a materials handler, holding out a sheaf of papers. Lex said : "These have to go to Mr. Lexington's lawyer. The name is on them." Clutching the papers for a hold on sanity, Peter cried, "You can't do this! He didn't build you just so you could -- " Two materials handlers picked him up with steely gentleness and carried him out. "Good-by, Mr. Manners," said the sweet, soft voice, and was silent. jets of smoke became a column over the plain building, while the fire engines raced down and strung their hoses -- too late. It was an act of suttee; the widow joining her husband in his pyre -- being his pyre. Only when with a great crash the roof fell in did Peter remember the papers in his hand. "Last Will and Testament," said one, and the name of the beneficiary was Peter's own. "Certificate of Adoption," said another, and it was a legal document making Peter old man Lexington's adopted son. Peter Manners stood watching the hoses of the firemen hiss against what was left of Lex and her husband. He had got the job. # Star Shelf nam's Sons, N.Y., # r T' HE modern master's version of the Arthurian legend. Volume I, The Sword in the Stone, the boyhood of Arthur, blithely comic and entirely delightful, is in utter contrast to the mounting tragedy of the remaining three volumes of the tetralogy. White's skill breathes life into the wooden husks of boyhood Round Table heroes, and his erudition adds all the more to the story's spell. T albot Mundy. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # pound and page for page (# of them! ), of the past several years. Out of print far too long, here is one classic that still reads as if written yesterday. Mundy's adventure-packed yam of the Britain and Rome of Julius Caesar's day is liberally sprinkled with wisdom that should be required reading for our political pundits. An absolute Must Buy at this price. by C. M. Kornbluth. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # ? ? 'T' HE Little Black Bag," Kombluth's most famous short story, leads off the collection of fifteen varied works. Some of the best of his writings are represented; but even his pot-boilers had the same Kornbluth touch. "Two Dooms," one of his last works, should be read -- but so should "The Words of Guru," written during his teens. Sprague de Camp. Avalon Books, N.Y., # with the best His second novel for Avalon, another of his Brazilo-Interplanetarias series, is an inverse success story, or riches to rags on Krishna. His unsavory Earthman hero, dethroned by the Interplanetary Council for importing machine-guns into his island kingdom, goes through amusing anguish trying to regain his crown. Mario Pei. Philosophical Library, N.Y., # ers with the unlikely addition of a gang of modern-day werewolves. The author, like his reluctant hero, is a distinguished linguist and medievalist -- and stylist. If you like fantasy-detective fiction, this should charm you. ned. Avalon Books, N.Y., #  J with the macrocosmic manipulation-of-mankind plot. Grinnell switcheroos by making Man the unwitting creator of microcosmic humans in a tanksize galaxy. The evolutionary story of even a half-pint galaxy must by definition be epic, demanding the slow, sweeping appraisal of an Olaf Stapledon. Grinnell has no time for this, shooting for rapid action. He misses. by Robert A. Heinlein. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # ' lein has become a classic, including this exposition of the agonizing problems that restricted longevity cannot help but provoke. Here's your chance to put it in the front shelf of your SF library. Wm. P. Heyrte. Exposition Press, N.Y., # at the difficult feat of mixing the Bible, angels and modem SF, a theme certain of failure under less than a master's hand. Heyne is not a master. David Osborne. Avalon Books, N.Y., # last for Avalon, Invisible Barriers, was also a smooth job featuring alien invaders. On prominent display here are two sets, violent opposites, with Earth courting destruction whichever side she chooses, though choose she must. The contrived ending provokes skepticism. Still, pleasant reading. Jack Vance. Avalon Books, N.Y., # Shrouded Planet also concerned the jolting of a static civilization out of stagnation by the undermining of old beliefs. Vance applies the One World Doctrine in reverse instead : the introduction of synthetic, dynamic languages into a monolingual world, thereby changing slothful into active mental characteristics. A good idea well handled. Norton. World Publishing Co., Cleveland  N.Y., # Gate, employed an alternatetime-sequence gadget. A time plate serves to heat up her present plot of the U.S. in a race through and against time. The Russians have assumed technological superiority with developments so new in concept that they must have come from an alien culture. The Pentagon-inspired search through ancient time for the fountainhead is clearly a device to enable her to create her usual savage environment for her bloodily unbowed hero. No quibble, though -- Traders gets Miss Norton back solidly and admirably on her track of excellence. Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., # fare, this is possibly the most unabashedly juvenile of Heinlein's long list It concerns a teen-ager who wins an obsolete but serviceable spacesuit in a contest and his adventures with it. Great for kids, chancy for grownups who don't identify readily with adolescent heroes. Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # E arthquake forecasting, a necessity if underwater cities are ever to become realities, is the theme of Number Three in the series. Frankly and honestly a geewhiz yarn, it reaches its target -- youngsters -- with plenty of mystery, action and suspense. kin. Whittlesey House, N.Y., # ' I ' HE authors of D.D. and the Anti-Gravity Paint team up for another funful adventure. Bullfinch, the absent-minded prof, presents the wherewithal by inventing a computer which Danny perverts to this unethical purpose. Of course the situation is resolved and a moral pointed. Scribner's Sons, N.Y., # own reviews of Space Cat Visits Venus in glowing terms back in my very first Galaxy column. The new adventure concerning kittenish problems during the first star voyage is equally ingratiating. by Charles Coombs. Westminster Press, Phila., # r I I HE author's Project Argus, a tremendous cooperative effort by communications companies to put a talking satellite like Atlas into permanent orbit, makes much sense and even more adventure. The young reader will find the accurate background material informative and the action exciting. sey House, N.Y., # Flight to the Misty Planet, was a whomping good story. Her present opus also promises highlevel science-adventure. Unfortunately, soon after the crew of the first Moon rocket becomes marooned on Luna, so does the story. Harper  Brothers, N.Y., # A N utterly fascinating questionand-answer book, mainly about the common, everyday puzzlers we shrug off as not worth the timeout effort to answer. Will become thumb-worn with constant usage. by Robert A. Heinlein, #, also includes Magic, Inc. in this entyyear-old classic of magical doings... Destination Infinity by Henry Kuttner, #S, is his famous Fury, a novel of immortals beneath the oceans of Venus... The Time Dissolver by Jerry Sohl, # if:, an original, about the simultaneous amnesia of a famous neuro-physiologist and his wife is an intriguingly engrossing mystery for the first #. The last tenth is unfortunate...The Triumph of Time by James Blish, #. Another original, completing the Okie trilogy ( Earthman Come Home and Year #!) Conceptually impressive but on too sustained a cerebral and undramatized level. ballantine: Tomorrow's Gift by Edmund Cooper, #!, a collection of his shorts, fulfills the promise predicted by his excellent novel, Deadly Image Star Science Fiction No. #, edited by Frederik Pohl, #!, has an imposing lineup led off by fine posthumous stories of Kuttner and Kornbluth. signet: The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke, #. Whale-boys and Engines in the entirely credible marine future... The Day after Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein, #, is the erstwhile Sixth Column, yet another of the Heinlein classics revived. dell: The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon, #!. An expanded version of "To Marry Medusa" from these pages. Pure Sturgeon. ace:... First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton. According to John W. Campbell, The Moon Is Hell, Gen. Sherman said "War is Hell," and Sutton raises hell with his incredible Russian sabotage of our first manned Moon effort... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of Galaxy to you when they should arrive -- at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: Subscription Dept., Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. # Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately ! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St rush me New York  copies of #, Name Add ress City State. I Enclose The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # the malted his eyes and saw the color of the sky, the shape of the clouds, the incredible topography, Carter Broun knew exactly where he was. He didn't really have to identify the blandly sweet smell which filled his nostrils, nor did he particularly have to investigate further the river of dark mahogany coursing, with the gentlest of roars, bemilk monster tween two small, cone-shaped hills, two hills of exactly the same dimensions and sporting exactly the same vegetation. There was just no doubt about it. Not after Carter had contemplated, for ten or fifteen awe-struck seconds, the sky of absolutely uniblue, that was the color, he decided morosely -- and those oval, pinkwhite clouds spaced so evenly across it. Not to mention those birds flapping into the narrowing distance; from here, each looked like a letter V, the arms of which had been carefully curved outward and down. Only one place in the universe boasted such a landscape, such an atmosphere, such birds. This was The World of The Malted Milk Monster. God help me, Carter thought, now ifs my world, too. That peculiar, ripping flash inside him, like some sort of lightning of the soul! He'd said good-by to Lee at the door of her lawn-enclosed home and started down the neat suburban street to where his MG was parked. He'd been rolling the car keys around in his hand and planning the itinerary of his Friday night date with Lee -- you either got a girl to your apartment by the second date, he had found, or you flunked out forever -- when he'd noticed the Malted Milk Monster watching him unwinkingly from behind a hedge. Probably had followed them all the way from Goldie's Goodie Palace. Then the flash, the mad sensation of being ripped out of his context and being shoved into another, entirely different place. And opening his eyes here. T T all came, and the knowledge was bitter, of taking your date to an ice cream parlor instead of an honest bar. But a bar didn't seem like the right follow-up to a Sunday afternoon movie in Grenville Acres. Besides, you don't take a schoolteacher to a bar on her home grounds. You pour an inoffensive soda into her, walk her home through the autumn streets, being as gentlemanly charming as possible, you decline the invitation to come in and meet the folks by mentioning the MR report you have to prepare for tomorrow's Account Executive conference -- a man has his work to do, and that must come first -- and back you drive to Manhattan with the pleasant knowledge of a seduction intelligently initiated. Unfortunately, you don't plan on other factors -- unseen powers, for example. There was not much point in checking, but he might as well check. Once he was really certain, he could begin worrying. And working out an escape. Carter wandered down to the mahogany river across wellcropped grass and past large tinseltype flowers. He knelt, dipped a finger in the thick liquid and tasted it. Chocolate. Of course. Just on the off-chance, he pinched himself long and hard, squeezingly and painfully. It hurt enough. No, he'd known he hadn't been dreaming to begin with. For one thing, in a dream you rarely realize you're dreaming. This was real. Chocolate syrup to drink. And for food -- The two little hills were covered with dwarf trees bearing lollipops, the cellophane-wrapped fruit varying slightly in color from tree to tree. Here and there on the level ground were bonbon bushes and sharply triangular Christmas-tree affairs from whose twigs dangled small pies, cakes and assorted cookies -- most of them chocolate. The sun beat down rosily, rosily, and none of the chocolate melted. The chocolate river, on the other hand, ran interminably and gurglingly. Whatever its sources, wherever it rose, the river evidently had plenty of reserves. Carter was struck by an especially ugly thought. Suppose, viewing the river's affluence, suppose it rained chocolate! Really, one could not put anything past the Malted Milk Monster. L EE had objected to the name. "She's just a fat little girl. too. And very curious about the strange, distinguished young man who's buying her teacher a soda." "All right, but I've been counting," Carter had insisted. "Five chocolate malteds since we came in. Five! And the way she sits there at the end of the counter, never taking her eyes off us, not even when she unwraps a fresh straw!" "Most of the children in Grenville have more spending money than is good for them. Dorothy's parents are divorced -- mother's a big-time buyer, father's a vice-president of a bank -- and they use their money to fight for her affections. She spends practically all of her time in Goldie's. You know, Carter, that psychological equation: when I was small and my parents loved me, they gave me food; therefore, food equals love?" Carter nodded. He knew all about such psychological equations. As a determined and well-sexed young bachelor, he had studied Freud as intently as a second lieutenant in the First World War might have studied von Clausewitz. "You're so damned feminine," he announced warmly, underlining the points that, with any luck at all, would shortly be at issue. "Only a gal who was woman all the way through would be able to see in that ball of lard, that pimply Malted Milk Monster -- " "She's no such thing, Carter! What a terrible nickname for such a mixed-up little girl! Although," Lee mused, swirling the long spoon about in the residual muddy bubbles of her soda glass, "although it is funny you should think of it That's what -- or something like it -- the other kids in the class call her. They tell stories about her -- that she can make stones and flowerpots disappear just by staring R # hard at them. Kids are just like adults, a little more obvious, that's all. They make a witch out of the unpopular one." He kept trying. "They never made one out of you, that's for sure. Anybody who's the slightest bit sensitive just has to look at you to know that love and loving -- " "It's so pathetic, really," she interrupted without knowing it. "I asked them to write a composition about the happiest day they could remember. Do you know what Dorothy wrote about? A day in her dream world, a day that never ever happened. And yet it was beautifully done, for a child her age. Full of affection-symbols like cake and candy. The world was supposed to smell like an ice cream parlor. Imagine! There was a finely written passage -- you appreciate good writing, Carter, I know -- about two cute little hills all covered with lollipop trees, each tree bearing a different flavor. And between the hills there wound a stream of purest chocolate!" rette and stared over Lee's earnest but nonetheless lovely head. At the grossly heavy little girl whose fat overflowed the last stool in the ice cream parlor, her mouth sucking steadily at the chocolate malted milk, her eyes as steadily sucking at his. He found himself forced to drop his glance first. " -- even when we have a drawing lesson," Lee was still on it. "She never does anything else. It's absolutely real to the poor child -- so lonely, so starved for companionship! I've learned to expect that flat blue sky full of oval pink clouds, those curved-line birds, that chocolate river and all those bushes filled with goodies. Every single time! For a child of her intelligence, she's somewhat retarded graphically. She draws like a child a year or two younger. But that's to be expected : it's almost purely a verbal, a conceptual intelligence, you might say -- " You might also say the topic had created a highly annoying and useless diversion. Carter bit on the cigarette through his lips, looked up again cautiously. The Malted Milk Monster's eyes were as unwavering as ever. Such pulling power -- what was so fascinating about him? Well, her father was a Madison Avenue type: the clothes, probably. Carter was justly proud of his wardrobe. His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste -- they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key. Yes, that was it. He reminded her of her father. Her rich father. Carter caught himself preening and stubbed out the cigarette in abrupt harsh disgust. Damn it! That was the trouble with this Madison Avenue music -- you laughed at it, you kidded others about it, you even read books satirizing it -- and then you found yourself singing to it. He reminded her of her father who was the vice-president of a bank and probably quite well off. Well, so what? Did that say anything good about Carter Broun? Not necessarily at all, at all. Carter Broun was just a welleducated, clever and rather lucky young man who had found his way into a well-paying, clever and extremely luck-flavored business. A young man who had gotten so deeply involved in the superficialities of the business that when a child as obviously and horrifyingly tormented as this little girl came to his attention, all he could gee was a neat gag nickname -- this kind of off to a client at a sales conference. Lee, now. Lee's roots were still wrapped around the compact, squirming mass of the human race. She loved her work but she cared too; she certainly cared. The way she goes on! The way her eyes shine as she talks! " -- the other children were positively stupefied. Or that time I asked them to make up riddles. Do you know what Dorothy asked when her turn came? Just listen to this, Carter. She asked the class: 'Which would you rather -- be eaten tiny little lions?' Now I maintain that a girl with that much imagination-" "That much maladjustment," he corrected. "She sounds like a very sick kid. But I'd give a lot," he mused, "to see how she'd do on a Rorschach. A giant caterpillar, or without even ink-blots to go on! Do you know if she's ever had any psychotherapy?" ly. "Her parents are very well off, I told you. I suspect she's had all the advantages. Up to and including protracted legal battles as to whether she's to go to poppa's doctor or momma's doctor. What that girl really needs, no one can give her: a different set of parents, or, at the least, one parent who really cares for her." Carter had disagreed. "Not so much now, not at her age. I'd say it would be much more helpful at this point to have a couple of kids who like and accept her. If there's one thing that motivational research brings home to you, it's what thoroughgoing social animals we humans are. Without a matrix of companionship, without the interest and approval of at least a handful of our contemporaries, we're worse than mixed up -- we aren't even people. Hermits aren't people; I don't know what they are, exactly, but they're not people. And so long as that kid is a psychological hermit, she's not really a human person. She's something else." Somewhere in the next fifteen minutes, he knew that he had clicked with Lee. But by then he was deep in the problem of how one could help a kid like Dorothy to make friends. It had become an MR problem, dealing with the individual, however, rather than the group; and, like all MR problems, of such obsessing interest to him that nothing else mattered. In the end, it had been Lee who had changed the subject very forcefully; it had been Lee who had to drop hints about their next date. He'd managed to get a grip on himself and began talking about what they'd do when she came into town to meet him next Friday night. All in all, it had worked out quite well. But as they left the soda shop, Carter had thrown just one last glance behind him through the plate-glass window. The Malted Milk Monster had turned on her stool, straw still in her mouth, eyes following him like a pair of starving sharks. And then, of course, shadowing them all the way to Lee's home. What had she done to him? How had she done it? Why? stone, watched it bounce into the river with a thick brown splash. Was this one of the stones Dorothy had abstracted from the real world? Again, how? Not why, though; it could well have been part of a series of controlled experiments to test the range of her powers. Powers? Was that the word? Talent, perhaps, or catalytic capacity -- that might be more descriptive. Given a very remarkable mind, given a very strong personality imbedded in a child's brain, given unhappiness, unpopularity, and general neurosis to sharpen that mind, to add even more punch to the personality -- and what? What would develop? He suddenly recalled his last thoughts before arriving in this lollipop world. Just after he'd left Lee, his head full of happy thoughts about Friday night, just at the very moment he'd seen the kid staring at him, he'd begun thinking about her problems again. The realization that she had followed them all the way from the soda shop out of sheer murderous loneliness had stimulated him into wondering about her mind. There had been a sequence. First: Gee, she's hungry tor people. Then: Not for people in general, lor kids her own age. How would you go about making kids like her? Now there's a motivation problem for you! Then: Well, the first question is what are her motives; what's it like in her mind? Good professional MR unraveling technique. And then that terrible flash, that mental rip, and he'd opened his eyes here. I N other words, he'd had something to do with it It hadn't been all her. He'd been wide open psychologically, trying to visualize the inside of her mind, just as she had -- as she had done something. No, it still required something from her, for all this to have happened. And no matter what you called it -- talent, powers, catalysis -- she had it. And she'd used it on him. Carter shivered suddenly, remembering the riddle she'd made up. He was adrift in the fantasy life of that kind of kid. He wished he had paid attention to Lee's earlier discussion in the ice cream parlor instead of forcing the conversation back into more lucrative channels. To get out safely, to survive, he could use every scrap of information on Dorothy that had ever existed. After all, her most meager wishes were now the fixed and immutable natural laws under which he had to operate. He was no longer alone, he observed. He was surrounded by children. They had seemingly materialized all around him, yelling, playing, scrambling, jumping. And where the yelling was loudest, where the games were thickest, there was Dorothy. The Malted Milk Monster. The children gamboled about her like so many fountains against a central statue. She stood there, still staring at him. And her stare was as uncomfortable as ever. A little more so, for that matter, than he remembered it. She wore the same blue jeans and yellow cashmere sweater with smudges on it. She was taller than life-size, a bit taller than the other children. She was slenderer, too. Now, in all fairness, you could not call her more than plump. And she had no pimples. Carter was irritated at how fast he'd had to drop his eyes. But to keep them open and aimed at her was like looking directly into the beam of an anti-aircraft searchlight. "Looka me, Dorothy!" the kids yelled. "I'm jumping! Looka how high I can jump!" "How about playing tag, Dorothy?" they yelled. "Let's play tag! You choose who should be It!" "Make up a new game, Dorothy! Make up one of the good games you always make up!" "Let's have a picnic, huh, Dorothy?" "Dorothy, let's have a relay race!" "Dorothy, let's play house!" "Dorothy, let's jump rope!" "Dorothy-" "Dorothy -- " "Dorothy-" " every one of the kids shut up. They stopped running, they stopped yelling, they stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at her. "This nice man," she said. "He'll play with us. Won't you, mister?" "No," Carter said. "Fd like to, but I'm afraid I -- " "He'll play a game of ball with us," she went on imperturbably. "Here, mister. Here's the ball. You're a nice man to play with us." When she moved toward him, holding out a large striped ball which had suddenly appeared in her hands, the bulk of the children moved with her. Carter was still searching for words wherewith to explain that while he had no interest at the moment in playing a game of ball, he was much interested in a private conversation with Dorothy herself, an audience, so to speak -- when the ball was thrust into his fingers and he found himself playing. "You see, I don't usually -- " he began as he threw the ball and caught it, threw the ball and caught it. "Very busy right now, but some other ti -- " he continued as he caught the ball and threw it, caught the ball and threw it. No matter in which direction he threw the ball, no matter how many eager pairs of child hands made a grab for it, it was always Dorothy who received it and threw it back to him. "Yay, Dorothy!" the children yelled. "This is fun!" "Be glad to play with you kids as soon as I finish my -- " Carter puffed, finding it fantastically tough exercise. "Yay, Dorothy! This is a real good game!" "Such a nice man!" "So much fun!" Dorothy threw the ball straight up in the air and it disappeared. "Let's play leap-frog," she said. "Would you like to play leap-frog with us, mister?" "Sorry," Carter gasped as he bent, his hands on his knees, so that she could leap over his back from behind. "I haven't played leap-frog in years and I don't intend to st -- " He ran forward, placed his hands in the small of Dorothy's back, sailed across, bent forward again in expectation of her jump. "Leapfrog is one game that I never -- " They played leap-frog until he was wobbling with dizziness, until every breath felt as if it had been clawed out of his chest. Dorothy seated herself gracefully on the ground and gathered the children in an adoring cluster. "Now we'd like to hear a story. Please, mister, tell us a story?" Carter started an agonized protest. It was somehow transformed into the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, told wheezingly and punctuated with heaving gulps for air. Then he told the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Then he told the story of Bluebeard. Somewhere near the end of that particular work, Dorothy disappeared. But the children remained, and Carter continued the story, willy-nilly. The kids began to look frightened. Some shivered, others moaned and cried. T T had been getting darker for the past few minutes, and just as Carter finished the last lines of Bluebeard and, without stopping, launched into "Once upon a time there was a poor but honest woodcutter who had two children named Hansel and Gretel," a huge black cloud slid across the sky and swooped down at them. A terrifying scarlet face with an enormous nose and flashing white teeth came out of the cloud and roared till the ground shook. Then it stopped and began to gnash its teeth. This sounded like an explosion in a crockery warehouse. The children screamed in pure eye-popping terror and ran. "Dorothy!" they shrieked. "Dorothy, save us! The Bad Old Man! Save us, Dorothy, save us! Dorothy, where are you?" Carter sank to the grass, released and utterly exhausted. He was far too tired to run or even look up, far too upset to care what happened to him any more. It seemed like the first time in hours that his body was his again to command; but his body wasn't worth very much at the moment. "Hey, Mac," a voice queried sympathetically over his head. "They givin' you a hard time?" It was the scarlet face from the cloud. It no longer looked terrifying, merely concerned in a friendly fashion. And it was shrinking rapidly in size until it was in correct proportion to the normal human body under it. When it was a rather ordinary red and grizzled face, dirty with a few days' growth of beard around the red and busily veined nose, its owner knelt on the edge of the cloud and leaped to the ground, a distance, by this time, of half a dozen feet. He was an oldish man of middle height, wearing a pair of solid gray pants, a tom brown shirt which hung outside it down to his hips and, on his bare feet, two frayed and filthy canvas shoes, one of which was split at the sole. He looked familiar, as every bum somehow looks like every other bum. He was the very essence of shambling, sodden derelict, a pure example of absolute human junk, but -- He was an adult. Carter sprang up and offered his hand joyfully. It was shaken in a flabby, uncertain, half-cringing way, like a newly paroled prisoner taking his farewell of the warden. "Could you use a drink, Mac?" "I sure as hell could," Carter told him heartily. "Am I glad to see you!" The derelict nodded vaguely, reached up and pulled the black cloud even closer. He fumbled inside and pulled a bottle out. It was about half full, but though the fluid it contained was the proper shade of amber, it was clear glass all the way around. No label. He held out this beggar's choice. "Name's Eddie. What they call me Shirttail. You need a glass to drink from? Ain't no glasses." Carter shrugged. He sterilized the open top of the bottle with the palm of his hand, put it to his mouth and took a broad gulp. "Whouch!" he said. hard that he almost dropped the bottle. Shirttail took it away from him solicitously. "Awful, ain't it?" he asked, then proceeded to belt down a third of the stuff. Awful, Carter decided, was not quite the word for it It tasted like whiskey, all right, somewhere way down at the bottom, but with an overlay consisting of iodine, ammonia, camphor and dilute hydrochloric acid. His tongue squirmed in his mouth like a trapped snake. Shirttail removed the bottle from his mouth, shuddered, grimaced, and licked his lips. "That's what she thinks whiskey tastes like." "Who? Dorothy?" "Atsit. The kid -- whatever she thinks something tastes like, that's what it tastes like. But it's better'n nothing, better'n no booze at all. Wanna come up to the place? We can sit a while." He was pointing to the cloud which hung low over them, a dark and misshapen dirigible. Doubtfully, Carter grabbed some of its tenuous material and pulled himself up. It was like swimming through fog that felt solid only at the places your hands touched it. A soaring black cavern of a room. Off in a corner -- a niche, rather, since there were no corners -- stood an army cot covered with ragged plaid blankets, a table-full of cracked cups and saucers, and three sagging, garbagey-looking easy chairs. An unshaded light bulb hung from a thin wire over the cot and burned tinily, resentfully, in the piles of gloom. Whether or not the area behind the cot could properly be called a wall, it was covered from top to bottom with glossy pictures of naked women. "Not my idea -- hers," Shirttail explained as he clambered up through the floor. "Everything's hers, every idea, everything. What she once saw the inside of a nightwatchman's shack, I figure. What to her I'm the same kinda guy as the night-watchman, so that's the layout I get. But thank God for the bottle. The pictures, far as I'm concerned, you can have, but the bottle -- thank God for the bottle." He offered it to Carter, who shook his head and hand in a no. They sat in two facing easy chairs, each of which immediately settled off to one side in opposite directions. Damn it, Carter thought, I have seen him before. But where? "Take a slug, Mac, go ahead, take a slug. One good thing she's got here, that kid -- the bottle gets full as fast as you kill it. You ain't takin' nothin' from me when you help yourself. And if you don't drink regular, you'll be talkin' to yourself. What you won't talk sense." Carter considered the point and saw it might well be valid. He took another drink. It was fully as bad as the first, but the effects of the alcohol came through more strongly now and tended to insulate against the flavor. He sighed and swallowed some more. No doubt about it, the world -- even Dorothy's world -- looked better. He handed the bottle back and studied his companion. Hardly the right type for this place, when you came right down to it. A bum. A very average old bum. Why him as The Bad Old Man? "How long have you been here?" Carter asked him.  stared loose-lipped over the top of the bottle. "A year, maybe. Two years, maybe. What there's no way to figure. Sometimes winter one day, sometimes summer tomorrow. What even my beard don't grow no more after I came. I feel like years and years and years and years. Worsen stir, worsen anything. The things I been through here, Mac, the things I been through!" "Bad?" Carter asked sympathetically. "Bad?" Shirttail indicated just how bad by rolling his red eyes in an emphatic upward arc. "Bad don't come near. I got to go out and scare those kids whenever she wants me to. What I'm in the sack, what I got other things on my mind, don't make no difference. Dorothy gives out with a think: 'Come arunnin' and start a-scarin'.' I got to drop whatever I'm doin'. I'm in the sack, what the hell, I got other things on my mind, I got to drop it and start a-scarin'. I blow up big like you just saw me, I got to scream and bang my choppers, I got to zoom on down. Then the kids yell: 'Dorothy, save us!' and she starts takin' me apart. What I mean apart. The things she's done to me, biff! bam! pow! pam!, slapped me silly, up, down, around, every which way, for a-scarin' those kids! What it wasn't my idea in the first place. I just do it 'cause she gives out with a think and makes me do it." "Ever try resisting, refusing?" Carter inquired. "I mean what happens if you say no?" "Mac, you don't say no. You just don't. Everything here goes her way. When she itches, you scratch. When she sneezes, you wipe your nose. What I used to call her all kindsa names to myself, just to pass the time -- Mac, I don't remember a single one now. I try to remember one dirty name and I can't, to save my skin. She's just Dorothy. That's all I can call her. You know what I mean? Everything goes her way, even inside your head. The only leeway you get is to stay the kinda guy she sees you as in the first place. But otherwise it's her way, and the longer you stick around, the more her way it is." Carter remembered with dismay how little he had wanted to play ball or leap-frog and how thoroughly he had played. Worse, how he had told stories when he had intended to protest. And worse yet, he hadn't -- even in his own mind -- used the phrase The Malted Milk Monster for some time now! He had thought of her, had referred to her, only as Dorothy. "And the longer you stick around -- " He had to get out of here, had to find some way to smash out of this world -- fast. Shirttail was offering the bottle again. Carter refused it impatiently. Escape, breaking out, that came first. And for that he'd need his mind at its clearest. The alternative was being slowly absorbed, psychologically as well as physically, into Dorothy's dream world, until even his thoughts would be only slightly eccentric versions of her image of him, and he would be caught, like a fly immortalized by amber, in whatever habitation and whatever role she visualized for The Nice Man. T" HE Nice Man! He shivered. What a way to spend the rest of his life! No, now, while he was still more or less himself, Carter Broun, while his brain still glittered with the edge of a bright young motivational research executive in the real world, now was the time to break through. The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion suited him. His credo was simple: anything that is is real. So... Postulate a cosmos sufficiently long in extension and sufficiently broad in possibility, and there has to be room somewhere in all its infinities for every kind of world that Man could imagine. Or a child dream up. And suppose a child, out of overpowering longing and loneliness, out of some incredible innate talent, perhaps, is able to break through the folds of cosmic enormities into the one cranny where its dream world exists as a tangible, everyday truth. Not much of a step from there to switching other individuals, adults even, stones and flowerpots certainly, from one universe to the other. The original supposition, Carter decided, was the difficult one. Once that was accepted, the others were easy. In an unlimited number of parallel worlds, to find the true home of one's mind... Was that what Dorothy had done? And, in that case, which would be the dream world, which the real? You could probably die in either with equal ease -- so that was no criterion. Well, what difference did it make? The real world, for Carter, was the world from which he had been pulled, the world in which he had standing, individuality and personal purpose. The world he liked and intended to return to. And this, this other world, no matter how substantial unto itself in its peculiar space-time matrix, was the dream world -- the world he must flee. The world that he had to prove, against the logic of his very senses, did not exist -- by leaving it, or by destroying it somehow. Destroying... He stared hard at Shirttail. No wonder the derelict had looked so familiar! It had been the briefest glimpse, weeks ago, possibly months, but the word brought back the sententious caption under that unforgettable photograph. A tabloid newspaper on a printwet, newly arrived pile he'd noticed over his shoulder as he'd been passing the newsstand at #rd Street, just off Madison. And he'd had to stop and take another look at the photograph spreading its shock value over a sector of the front page. line. The caption went on to explain, in the most appalled journalese, that this was what you might expect to look like if you spent the rest of your life not working, sleeping in doorways, and drinking, instead of eating, your meals. "Even hardened interns and nurses at the hospital averted their faces from this terrible thing that had once been a man (story on Page #)." "D UT the photograph did show a terrible thing that had once been a man. He was shown in the alley as he'd been found, shown just as the stretcher was being lifted, and you weren't likely to forget him for a long, long time. The worst part of it was that he was alive. The eyes stared into the lens of the camera without any pretense of seeing. There was no mark on the face or body, no blood, nothing but dirt, and yet you had the feeling that this was a man who had fallen out of a window ten stories up or been hit by a car speeding at ninety miles an hour -- and not been killed. Not completely killed, anyway, just partially killed. The body lay and the eyes stared and the man was alive, but nothing more than that could be said. Looking at the picture, you suddenly thought of complex organic compounds that were almost living creatures but had not yet made the grade. The flabby, sheer nonconsciousness of this yet-sentient creature made catatonia seem in comparison a rather jolly, extremely active state. According to the caption, he had been found looking like this in an alley; he had been removed to a large city hospital, and, after ten hours, the doctors had not been able to do a single thing with him. No response at all. Carter remembered the picture well. It had been a picture of Shirttail. Somewhere, at this very moment, possibly in a hospital in Grenville Acres, before the eyes of a terrified, a nauseated Lee, there was another body that bore a physical resemblance to one Carter Broun, but that in every important respect looked exactly like that horrible photograph. A body that was barely alive, that would not respond to any stimuli, that could do no more than exist -- since its consciousness was elsewhere. Here, in Dorothy's private chocolate-candy world. He had to get out of this place. No matter what, he was going to get out of this place. Only he'd need something close to dynamite. Psychological dynamite. " -- even cut my throat," Shirttail was going on heavily. "Oh, I maybe coulda cut my throat at the beginning, if I'da thoughta it. Too late now: I'm stopped cold any time I try. What I tried starving myself, but no go. Only candy to eat ina first place. Anybody can kick candy -- it don't do no good, though. You don't hafta eat here, don't even hafta breathe. You stop breathin', you don't croak. Fact, Mac, fact. I done it Hours and hours you can hold your breath: nothin' happens. Nothin' happens but what she wants to happen. And that's all. That's it." ly trying to drag an elementary idea out of the concept of parallel universes, "How about the two of us getting together here and talking things over, just as we're doing? If we mapped out some workable sort of plan right now, it would be something she wouldn't like to have happen -- but if we did, it would be real -- it would have happened." "Mac, you still don't get it. If you and me are together talkin', then someway or other that's the way she wants it. What she figures we go together, like, and we oughta be talkin' or bein' together. Meanwhile, she's workin' it out. What she's gonna do next. What we ain't gonna like it one damn bit, but so what? -- far's she's concerned." Carter frowned, not at Shirttail's last remarks, but at an unexpected and highly uncomfortable corroboration. He had suddenly felt an enormous tugging sensation in both his mind and body. Something was pulling at him to leave the cloud and descend to the candied surface. Dorothy was coming back. She wanted him on the spot once more. She had a new sequence. Carter fought the tug grimly. He began to perspire. The tug grew stronger. And stronger. He squeezed his hands into tight, painful fists. "The Malted Milk Monster," he forced himself to say between clenched teeth. "Remember -- The Malted Milk Monster." Shirttail looked up, intrigued. "Hey," he said. "Do me a favor, Mac -- cuss her out. It'll do me good, honest, to hear a coupla good, first-class cuss words. Even if I won't remember them worth a damn, I'd still like to hear them again, just for old time's sake. Hey, Mac?" Carter, threshing about in the chair, elbows digging into his sides, immersed in his own private struggle, shook his head. "No," he gasped. "Can't. Not now." "I know. It's tough. What I mean, tough. Like when I first come, I used to battle it out the same way, every time I feel her give out with a think. I battle and I battle, and it's no go. I been moochin' all day, see, up and down the East Fifties, Sutton Place, all like that. I been moochin' for the price of a flop, for the price of a shot, but not a chance. What it's so cold, my back's draggin' the sidewalk, but the whole goddam world's got its pocket buttoned. Comes night, no flop. The whole night, I carry the banner. I stay awake, I keep walkin', what I don't wanna freeze. Five, six o'clock in the mornin', there's this can, there's half a fifth right on top in a bagfulla garbage. I hit it, oh, I hit it good." Against his most determined mental opposition, Carter found himself getting to his feet. He knew his face was turning purple with the effort. He had to stop her now. He had to. It was the only way to invalidate her world. But the Malt -- Dorothy was calling him.  filthy forefinger up and down the neck of the bottle. "And then I see this little alleyway between the buildings, what there's supposed to be a gate locking it off but it's been left open. I go in, it's dark, but there's a grating, hot air coming up from a basement, and I'm outa the wind. Sack time. What I think I'm one lucky old bum, but it's the last time I think about luck. I wake up, it's light, there's this kid, this Dorothy lookin' at me. Lookin', lookin'. She's got a big ball in her hands and she's standin' there lookin' at me. She points to the bottle. " 'That's my daddy's bottle,' she says. 'He threw it out last night, after the party. But it's his bottle.' I don't want no trouble with kids in this neighborhood, and I don't like the way it feels the way she looks. 'Scat, kid,' I say, and I sack out again. What I wake up next, here I am. I got the bottle and that's all I got. Mac, from that time on, it's rough. What I mean, rough. She had things here then, big things, things with legs and all kindsa -- " desirous of doing it, Carter turned his back on The Bad Old Man and began walking down through black fog. Behind him, the words continued to splash out like liquid from a steadily shaken glass. Carter's legs walked in direct contradiction to the nerve impulses they were receiving. He couldn't refuse, couldn't resist. That much was obvious. As well try to refuse, to resist, the Flood of forty days and forty nights, or the sun that Joshua made to stand still. Another way. He must find another way to fight. Meanwhile, he had to come as she demanded. Dorothy was waiting for him on a patch of well-mown grass near a pink and green bonbon bush. As he came down beside her, she glanced away from him for a moment and at the dark cloud. It disappeared. What happened to Shirttail, Carter wondered -- had he been wiped out for good? Or temporarily relegated to some sort of Limbo of reverie? And then he really saw Dorothy -- and the changes she had made. She was still wearing the blue jeans, but the cashmere sweater was clean, perfectly clean. A bright, brand-new yellow. And she was taller. And she was even more slender than she had been before. But that yellow cashmere sweater! It was filled with two impossibly protruding breasts that belonged on a poster in front of a cheap movie house announcing the triumphant attributes of a Hollywood love goddess. The rest of her body was still childlike, seemingly even more so than when he had first seen her, but this was due to the caricature effect of that incredible bosom. Except -- Y es, except for the smear of red across each lip, the lumps of mascara at the tips of the eyelashes, and the clashing, smashing colors on her fingernails. Did this mean -- He shook his head uncertainly, irritably. He hadn't counted on anything like this. Whatever it was. "So," Dorothy simpered at last. "We meet again." "It was meant to be," Carter found himself breathing. "We two have a common destiny. We live under the same strange star." kids! But where did she get the dialogue, he wondered frantically -- movies? Television drama? Books? Or out of her own complexcrammed head? And what did he represent in it? Her role was obvious: she was blatantly competing with Lee. There was a struggling wisp of uncombed thought: Lee and who else? But over and around it was the horrified knowledge that he was saying things he would never say of his own volition. How soon before he'd be thinking such cliches? And there was a memory at the back of his mind -- he had a name for her that was very much his own creation, very hard to remember, but he had to remember it, something like, rather like, let's see now -- Dorothy. The only name for her there was. But that hadn't been it No. He thought in pitiful, despairing wing-flaps, like an ostrich trying to fly. Awful, awful. He had to touch his own real personality somehow. He had to break through. Shatter -- "Is your love then so strong, so truly true?" she demanded. "You have not forgotten me after all this time? Look into my eyes and tell me so. Tell me that your heart still belongs to me alone." No, I won't, he groaned. He looked into her eyes. I can't! Not such absolute baloney. And she's a kid -- a little girl! "Do you doubt me, my darling?" he said softly, the sentences coming out of him in so many punchedout breaths. "Don't ever, ever doubt me. You are the only one for me, forever and always, as long as there is a sky overhead and an earth beneath. You and I, forever and always." He had to stop. She was getting complete control over him. He said whatever she wanted him to say. And he was going to think it, too. But he couldn't prevent the words from flowing out of his mouth, once it was his turn, once she had finished and was waiting -- Dorothy looked off into the distance toward the two hills of equal height. Her eyes were misty, and, in spite of himself, Carter felt a catch in his throat. Ridiculous! And yet how sad... "I almost feared your love," she mused. "I grew lonely and came to believe -- " Now. While she was doing the talking. While the full force of her mind was not turned compellingly upon him. Make it real. That's the way to bust this dream world. Make it real. He reached for her. " -- that you had forgotten and found another. How was I to know -- " He grabbed at her. He made it real. There was an instant when the ground shook under his feet, when there was a ripping sound from one end to another of the solid blue sky. There was just one instant when he exulted. Then Dorothy turned wide, terror-stricken eyes at him. And screamed! tfER scream was the loudest thing in the universe. It went on and on and on, deafeningly. Yet he wasn't deafened, because he heard it all, every bit of it from the beginning, in each and every note of its immense range, all of its skullpowdering volume, all of its volcanic fear. Not ony Dorothy screamed. The candy trees screamed. The cookie bushes screamed. The two hills screamed. The chocolate river stood up between its screaming banks and screamed. The stones, the very air screamed. And the ground fell apart and Carter Brouh dropped into it. He dropped for centuries, he dropped for eons, he dropped for galactic eternities. Then he stopped dropping, stopped screaming himself, took his hands from his ears and looked around. He was inside a dull gray, perfectly spherical, perfectly featureless vault. There were no doors and no windows, no seams and no cracks anywhere in the curving surface all about him. It was absolutely impenetrable and absolutely soundproof. It had to be, he began to realize, as he scuttled dizzily around and around inside it. It had to be impenetrable and soundproof. It had to be at the bottommost bottom of the dream world, so that no sight and no sound from it should ever reach Dorothy's consciousness. It was a total repression, this chamber of her mind, built to hide the deadly dangerous memory that was himself -- built to last as long as Dorothy lasted. Y#URI  -- wEt Ffj wm Shotgun logic to win an impossible war needs only logic and a shotgun... but an impossible peace can't be won the same way... or can it? I quered the country (oh, now, listen. I already told you about that. Don't pester me for the same story over and over again. You remember about the Great March, from Eung's Corners to the Pentagon, and how Honest Jack Tighe, the Father of the Second Republic, overcame the massed might of the greatest nation of the world with a shotgun and a .# rifle. Of course you do.) Anyway. After old man Tighe conquered the country, things went pretty well for a while. Oh, it was a pleasant time and a great one! He changed the world, Jack Tighe did. He took a pot of strong black coffee into his room -- it was the Lincoln Study, as it was called at the time; now, of course, we know it as Tighe's Bedchamber and sat up all one night, writing, and when the servants came wonderingly to him the next morning, there it was: the Bill of Wrongs. See if you can remember them. Everybody learns them by heart. Surely you did too : #. The first wrong that we must abolish is the forced sale of goods. In future, no one shall sell goods. Vendors may only permit their customers to buy. #. The second wrong that we must abolish is Advertising. All billboards are to be ripped down at once. Magazines and newspapers will confine their paid notices to one quarter-inch per page, and these may not have illustrations. #. The third wrong that wc must abolish is the Commercial. Anybody who tries to use God's free air time for pushing commodities offered for sale is an enemy of all the people, and has to be exiled to Antarctica. At least. Why, it was the very prescription for a Golden Age! That's the way it was, and the way the people rejoiced was amazing. Except -- well, there was the matter of the factories in the caverns. OR instance, there was a man named Cossett. His first name was Archibald, but you don't have to bother remembering that part; his wife had a strong stomach, but that was more than she could put up with, and she mostly called him Bill. They had three kids -- boys -- named Chuck, Dan and Tommy, and Mrs. Cossett considered herself well off. One morning she told her husband so : "Bill, I love the way Honest Jack Tighe has fixed everything up for us! Remember how it was, Bill? Remember? And now, why -- well, look. Don't you notice anything?" "Hm?" inquired Cossett. "Your breakfast," said Essie Cossett. "Don't you like it?" Bill Cossett looked palely at his breakfast. Orange juice, toast, coffee. He sighed deeply. "Bill! I asked you if you liked it!" "I'm eating it, aren't I? When did I ever have anything different?" "Never, honey," his wife said gently. "You always have the same thing. But don't you notice that the toast isn't burned?" Cossett chewed a piece of it without emotion. "That's nice," he said. "And the coffee is fit to drink. And so's the orange juice." Cossett said irritably : "Essie, it's great orange juice. It will be remembered." Mrs. Cossett flared: "Bill, I can't say a thing to you in the morning without your flying completely off the-" "Essie," shouted her husband, "I had a bad night!" He glared at her, a good-looking man, still young, fine father and good provider, but at the end of his rope. "I didn't sleep! Not a wink! I was awake all night, tossing and turning, tossing and turning, worrying, worrying, worrying. I'm sorry!" he cried, daring her to accept the apology. "But I only -- " "Essie!" Mrs. Cossett was wounded to the quick. Her lip quivered. Her eyes moistened. Her husband, seeing the signs, accepted defeat. He sank back against his chair as she said meekly: "I only wanted to point out that it isn't ruined. But you're so touchy, Bill, that -- I mean," she said hurriedly, "do you remember what it was like in the old days, before Jack Tighe freed us all? When every month there was a new pop-up toaster, and sometimes you had to dial each slice separately for Perfect Custom Yumminess, and sometimes a red Magic Ruby Reddy-Eye did it for you? When the coffee maker you bought in June used coarse percolator coffee grind and the one you got to replace it in September took drip? "And now," she cried radiantly, her momentary anger forgotten, "and now I've had the same appliances for more than six months! I've had time to learn to use them! I can keep them until they wear out! And when they're gone, if I want I can get the exact same model again! Oh, Bill," she wept, quite overcome, "how did we get along in the old days, before Jack Tighe?" Her husband pushed his chair back from the table and sat regarding her without a word for a long moment. Then he got up, reached for his hat, groaning, "Ah, who can eat?" and rushed out of the house to his place of business. The sign over his store read: Authorized Buick Dealer He sobbed all the way down to the shop. Y OU musn't feel too sorry for old Bill Cossett; there were a lot like him those days. But it was pretty sad, no doubt of it. When he got to the shop, he wanted to sob some more, but how could he, in front of the staff? One little break from him and all of them would have been wailing. As it was, his head salesman, Harry Bull, was in a dither. He was lighting one cigarette after another, taking a single abstracted puff and placing each of them neatly, side by side like spokes, along the rim of his big glass ashtray. He didn't know he was doing it, of course. His eyes were fixed emptily on the ashtray, all right, but what his glazed vision beheld were the smoldering ashes of hellfire. He looked up when his boss came in. "Chief," he burst out tragically, "they've come in! The new models! I had the Springfield office on the phone a dozen times already this morning, I swear. But it's the same answer every time." Cossett took a deep breath. This was a time for manhood. He stuck his chin out proudly and said, his voice perfectly level : "They won't cancel, then." "They say they can't," said Harry Bull, and stared with a corpse's eyes at the crowded showroom. "They say the caverns are raising all the quotas. Sixteen more cars," he whispered dully, "and that's just the Roadmasters, Chief. I didn't tell you that part. Tomorrow we get the Specials and the Estate Wagons, and -- and -- "Mr. Cossett," he wept, "the Estate Wagons are eleven inches longer this month! I can't stand it!" he cried wildly. 'We got eighteen hundred and forty-one cars piled up already! The floor's full. The shop's full. The top two floors are full. The lot's full. We hauled all the trade-ins off to the junkyard yesterday and, even so, now we got them double-parked on both sides of the street for six blocks in every direction! You know, Chief, I couldn't even get to the place this morning? I had to park at the corner of Grand and Sterling and walk the rest of the way, because I couldn't get through!" For the first time, Cossett's expression changed. "Grand and Sterling?" he repeated thoughtfully. "Yeah? I'll have to try coming that way tomorrow." Then he laughed, a bitter laugh. "One thing, Harry. Be glad we're handling Buicks and not, you know, one of the Low-Priced Three. I came by Culex Motors yesterday, and -- "By Godfrey," he shouted suddenly, "I'm going to go down and talk to Manny Culex. Why not? It isn't just our problem, Harry -- it's everybody's. And maybe the whole industry ought to get together, just for once. We never did; nobody would start it. But things are getting to a point where somebody's got to lead the way. Well, it's going to be me! There just isn't any sense letting the caverns turn out all these new cars after Jack Tighe has told the whole blasted country that they don't have to buy them any more. Washington will do something. They'll have to!" But all the way over to Manny Culex's, past the carton-barricaded appliance stores, widely skirting the shambles that surrounded the five and ten, rolling up the windows as he threaded his way past the burst spoiled food cans at the supermarket, Cossett couldn't put one question out of his mind : Suppose they couldn't? II ' Tighe wasn't right on top of this situation. He knew about it. Oh, yes! Because it wasn't just Archibald Cossett and Manny Culex -- it was every car dealer -- and it wasn't just the car dealers, but every merchant in Rantoul who sold goods to the public; and it nois, all of the Middle West, all the country -- and, yes, when you come right down to it, all of the world. (I mean all the inhabited world. Naturally there was no problem in, say, Lower Westchester.) Things were piling up. It was a matter of automation and salesmanship. In the big war, it had seemed like a good idea to automate the factories. Maybe it was -- production was what counted then, all kinds of production. They certainly got the production, sure enough. Then, when the war was over, there was a method for handling the production -- a method named advertising. But what did that mean, when you came to think it over? It meant that people had to be hounded into buying what they didn't really want, with money they hadn't yet earned. It meant pressure. It meant hypertension and social embarrassment and competition and confusion. Well, Jack Tighe took care of that part, him and his famous Bill of Wrongs. Everybody agreed that things had been intolerable before -- before, that is, Tighe and his heroic band had marched on the Pentagon and set us all free. The trouble was that now advertising had been abolished and nobody felt he had to buy the new models as they came out of the big automated plants in the underground caverns... and what were we going to do with the products? Jack Tighe felt that problem as keenly as any vacuum-cleaner salesman hard-selling a suburban neighborhood from door to door. He knew what the people wanted. And if he hadn't, why, he would have found it pretty quickly, because the people, in their delegations and petitions, were taking every conceivable opportunity to let him know. For instance, there was the Midwest Motor Car Association's delegation, led by Bill Cossett, his very own self. Cossett hadn't wanted to be chairman, but he'd been the one to suggest it, and that usually carries a fixed penalty: "You thought it up? Okay. You make it go." Jack Tighe received them in person. He listened with great courtesy and concern to their prepared speech; and that was unusual, because Tighe wasn't the relaxed old man who'd fished the Delaware south of Pung's Corners for so many happy years. No, he was an irritable President now, and delegations were nothing in his life; he faced fifty of them a day. And they all wanted the same thing. Just let us push our product a little, please? Naturally, no other commodity should be privileged to violate the Bill of Wrongs -- nobody wants the Age of Advertising back! -- but, Mr. President, the jewelry findings game (or shoes, or drugs, or business machines, or frozen food, and so forth) is historically, intrinsically, dynamically and pre-eminently different, because... And, you'd be surprised, they all thought up reasons to follow the "because." Some of the reasons were corkers.  UT Jack Tighe didn't let them get quite as far as the reasons. He listened about a sentence and a half past the "nobody wants the Age of Advertising back" movement and into the broad largo that began the threnody of their unique troubles. And then he said, with a sudden impulse: "You there! The young fellow!" "Cossett! Good old Bill Cossett!" cried a dozen eager voices, as they pushed him forward. "I'm impressed," said Jack Tighe thoughtfully, seizing him by the hand. He had had an idea, and maybe it was time to act on it. "I like your looks, Gossop," he said, "and I'm going to do something for you." "You mean you're going to let us ad -- K began the eager voices. "Why, no," said Jack Tighe, surprised. "Of course not. But I'm setting up a Committee of Activity to deal with this situation, gentlemen. Yes, indeed. You mustn't think we've been idle here in Washington. And I'm going to put Artie Gossop -- I mean Hassop -- here on the Committee. There!" he said kindly, but proudly too. "And now," he added, leaving through his private door, "good day to you all." It was a signal honor, Bill Cossett thought, or anyway all the eager voices assured him that it was. But forty-eight hours later, he wasn't so sure. The rest of the delegation had gone home. Why wouldn't they? They had accomplished what they set out to do. The problem was being taken care of. But as for good old Bill Cossett, why, at that moment he was doing the actual taking care. And he didn't like it. It turned out that this Committee of Activity was not merely to study and make recommendations. Oh, no. That wasn't Jack Tighe's way. The Commlittee was to do something. And for that reason, Cossett found himself with a rifle in his hand, in an armored half track. He was part of a task force of heavy assault troops, staring down the inclined ramp that led to the cavern factory under Farmingdale, Long Island. L ET me tell you about Farmingdale. National Electro-Mech had its home office there -- in the good old days, you know. Came the Cold War. The Board of Directors of National Electro-Mechanical Appliances, Inc., took a look at its balance sheet, smiled, thought of taxes, wept, and determined to plow a considerable part of its earnings into a new plant. It was to be not merely a new plant, but a fine plant -- wasn't the government paying for it anyhow, in a way? I mean what didn't come off taxes as capital expansion came back as pay for proximity-fuse contracts. So they dug themselves a great big hole -- a regular underground Levittown of the machine, so to speak -- acres and acres of floor surface, and all of it hidden from the light of day. Okay, chuckled the Board of Directors, rubbing its hands, let them shoot their That was during the Cold War. Well, then the Cold War hotted up, you know. The missiles flew. The Board got its orders from Washington, hurry-up orders: automate, mechanize, make it faster, boost its size. They took a deep breath and gamely sent the engineers back to the drawing boards. The orders were to double production and make it independent of the outside world. The engineers whispered among themselves -- "Are they kidding?" they asked -- but they went to work, and as fast as the designs were approved, the construction machines went back to work to make them real. The digging machines chugged down into the factory bays again, expanding them, making concealed tunnels; and this time they were followed by concrete-and-armorplate layers, booby-trap setters, camoufleurs, counterattack planners. They hid that plant, friend. They concealed it from infra-red, ultraviolet and visual-wave spotting, from radar and sonic echo beams, from everything but the nose of a seeing-eye dog, and maybe even from that. They armored it. They fixed it so you couldn't get near it, at least not alive. They armed it -- with homing missiles, batteries of rapid-fire weappns, everything they could think of -- and they had a lot of people thinking -- that would discourage intruders. They automated it; not only would it make its products, but it would keep on making them as long as the raw materials held out -- yes, and change the designs, too, because it is a basic part of industrial technology that planned obsolescence should be built into every unit. Yes, that was the idea. Without a man anywhere in sight, the cavern factories could build their products, change their designs, retool and bring out new ones. More than that. They set sales quotas, by direct electronic hookup with the master computer of the Bureau of the Census in Washington; they wrote on electric typewriters and printed on staticelectricity presses all the needed leaflets, brochures, instruction manuals and diagrams. Tricky problems were met with clever answers. For instance, argued one RD V.P., "Won't the factory have to have at least a couple of pretty girls to use as models for the leaflet illustrations?" "Nah," said an engineer bluntly. "Look, Boss, here's what we'll do." He drew a quick and complicated schematic. "I see," said the V.P., his eyes glazing. Truthfully, he didn't understand at all, but then they went ahead and built it and he saw that the thing worked. A memory-bank selector, informed of the need for a picture of a pretty girl operating, say, an electric egg-cooker, drew upon taped files of action studies of models for the girl they wanted in the pose the computers decreed. Another tape supplied appropriate clothing -- anything from a parka to a Bikini (mostly it was Bikinis) -- and an electronic patcher dubbed it in. A third file, filmed on the spot, produced the egg-cooker itself, dubbed in as large as life and twice as pretty. It worked. And then there was the problem of writing the manuals. It wasn't so much the actual composition of the how-to-do directions. There was nothing hard about that; after all, the whole idea was that the consumer should be told how to operate the thing without his having to know what was under the chromium-plated shell. But -- well, what about trademarked names? Some brain had to coin the likes of Kleen-Heet AutoTyme Hardboyler, or Shel-Krak Puncherator. computer to think that sort of thing up. The computer gulped, clucked and spewed out an assortment. The engineers looked at each other and scratched their heads. Kleen-Krak Boylerator? Eg-StaTik Clocker? Discouraged, they trailed with their reports to the V.P. "Boss," they said, "maybe we better put this thing back on the drawing boards. These names the machine came up with don't make sense." This time it was the V.P. who said bluntly: "Nah, don't worry. Didn't you ever hear of Hotpoint Refrigerators?" So merrily they went on, and the cavern factories were automated. Then, when the frantically dreaming engineers had them complete, they added one more touch. Electric percolators need steel, chromium, copper, plastics for the extension cord, plastics for the handle, a different sort of plastic yet for the ornamental knobs and embellishments. So they supplied them -- not by stockpiles, no, for stockpiles can be used up, but by telling the vast computers that ran the plant where its raw materials might be found. They supplied National ElectroMech with a robot-armed computer that could sniff out its raw materials and direct diggers to the lodes. They added a fusion powerplant that would run as long as its supply of fuel held out (and its fuel was hydrogen, from the water of Long Island Sound or, if that went dry, from the waters bound in the clay, the silicate sand, the very bedrock underneath). Then they pushed the little red switch to "on," stepped back -- and ducked. Percolators came pouring out by the thousands that first day. Then the machines began to speed up. Percolators flooded out by the tens of thousands. And then the machines settled down to full production. "Ahem," coughed one of the engineers. "Say," he said. "I wonder. That little red button. Suppose we wanted to turn it off. Could we?" Top management frowned. "Don't you know there's a war on?" they asked. "Production -- that's what counts. Then, when the war is won, we can worry about turning the fool thing off. Right now, we can't take the risk that enemy agents might penetrate our defenses and cripple our war effort, so the button only works one way." Then the war was won. And, yes, they could worry. Ill "kN the ramp outside Farmingdale, Major Commaigne rattled into his microphone : "Korowicz! Back me up and watch for missiles. You're air cover for the whole detachment. Bonfils, I want you on the road. Draw fire when the trucks come out, and then retire. Goodpastor, you cover the demolition crews. Gershenow, you're our reserve. Watch it now. They'll be coming out in a minute." He clicked off his microphone switch and stared, sweating, at the ramp. Bill Cossett shifted nervously in his seat and looked at the rifle in his hand. It was a stripped-down rough-duty model, made to Jack Tighe's personal specifications, and the only thing you had to remember was that when you pulled the trigger, it would go off. But rifles weren't much a part of Cossett's life. He caught himself thinking wretchedly how nice it would be to be back in Rantoul. Then he remembered those crowded blocks of unsold Buicks. Behind their halftrack, the four other vehicles of the party rattled into position. This ramp was one of eighteen that led from National Electro-Mech's plant to the outside world. Along it, at carefully randomed intervals, huge armored trailer-trucks rumbled up, past six sets of iridium-steel gates, out into the open air and onto the highways. No driver manned these trucks. Their orders were stamped into their circuits in the underground loading bays. Each had a destination where its load of percolators and waffle irons was to go, and each had the means of getting it there. Bill Cossett coughed. "Major, why couldn't we just shoot them up as they come out?" "They shoot back," said Major Commaigne. "Yes, I know, but maybe we could use the same tactics. Automatic weapons. Let them fight it out -- our robot guns against the trucks. Then -- " "Mr. Cossett," said the major wearily, "I'm glad to see you're thinking. But believe me, we've all had those thoughts." He gestured at the approaches to the ramp. "Look at those roads. You think there hasn't been plenty of fighting there?" Cossett looked at the approaches and felt foolish. There was no doubt of it -- every road for a mile around was tank-trenched, Cadmus-toothed, booby-trapped. Those were the first -- and most obvious -- measures the population had taken, in its early mob panic. But the trailer-trucks had been too smart for anything so simple. They had bridged the trenches, climbed the rows of dragon's teeth, and exploded the land mines harmlessly against the drum-chains that ceaselessly pounded the roads ahead of them. "We had to stop," the major brooded, "because it just wasn't safe to live around here. The factories fight back, of course. The tougher we make it for them, the more ingenious their counterattacks and -- Stations!" he blazed, thumbing down the microphone switch. "Here they come!" The scarred outer gate whined open. A monster peered hesitantly out. I ' least, only a maze of copper, tungsten, glass -- was in it, but the truck was eerily human as it tested the air, searched its surroundings, peered radar-eyed for possible enemies. The trucks learned. They knew. There was no circuit in their electronic intellects for wondering why, but their job was to get the merchandise delivered, and one of the sub-tasks in the job assignment was to clear the way of obstacles. The obstacle named Major Commaigne yelled: "Hold your fire!" Silently, their weapons hunted the vulnerable spots of axles and steering linkages on the trucks as they came out, but in each armored car, the gunners held down the interrupt buttons that kept the guns from going off. The trucks came lumbering out, flailing the roads, turrets wheeling to scan the terrain around. There were eight of them. Then: "Fire!" bawled Major Commaigne, and the battle was on. Bonfils, down the road, darted out of concealment and blasted the first trucks. There was no confusion, no hesitation, as the trucks regrouped and returned fire; but Bonfils had wasted no time either, and he was out of range in a matter of seconds. Korowicz added his fire as the first defensive missiles roared up. Gershenow caught two of the trucks trying to execute a flanking movement. It was a fine little fire fight. But it wasn't the main show. "Demolition teams in!" roared Commaigne, and Goodpastor's halftrack bobbed up out of concealment and landed its mining experts at the lip of the ramp itself. The controlling machines had many circuits for directing simultaneous activities, but the number was not infinite. They had good reason to hope that with the active battle out on the road, the principal guardians of the factory might not be able to repel an attack on the entrance. Commaigne snapped down his gas helmet and said thickly, through the gagging canvas and plastic: "We're next." Bill Cossett nodded, licked his lips and put his own helmet on as their car circled the battle and headed for the ramp. Before they got there, the demolition team had blown off the first of the sets of gates. Thin gray-brown smoke still curled out, and already the demolition men were setting their charges for the second gate, twenty yards farther down. "Now," said Major Commaigne, halting the halftrack and opening the hatch. "Be careful!" he warned, leading the detachment out, but it was hardly necessary. If they were all like himself, Bill Cossett thought, they were going to be careful indeed. They marched on the heels of the demolition team down into the automated factory. T T was noisy, and it was hot It was dark, or nearly, except for the lights of the demolition team and what they carried themselves. The blasted gates were clicking and buzzing petulantly, attempting to close themselves, aware that someone was coming through, and resenting it. Somebody yelled: "Watch it!" and, shwissh-poo, a tongue of liquid butane licked out across the ramp and puffed into flame. Everybody dropped -- just in time. A smell of burning wool and a yowl from Major Commaigne showed how barely in time it had been. One of the enlisted men cried: "It's onto us! Take cover!" But everybody had already, of course -- as much as they could, not knowing just what constituted "cover" in a place that the machinebrain that ran the factory had had a solid decade to study and chart. One of the machine's built-in #the infra-red spectrum for body heat, found it, aimed and fired. "I'm corning, I'm coming," yammered the shells -- Vengo, vengo, vengo -- but there were blind spots around the shattered gates, and the invading party crouched in shelter. Major Commaigne, hardly daring to raise his head, cried: "Everybody all right?" There wasn't any answer, which meant either that everybody was indeed all right... or dead, and thus exempted from the necessity of answering at all. Deafened, sweltering, choking inside his anti-gas helmet, Bill Cossett swallowed hard and wished he'd kept his big mouth shut, back in Rantoul. What a committee to volunteer for! Major Commaigne's combat boots kicked a pit in his kidneys as a .# caliber machine-gun opened up, firing by pattern -- twenty rounds at forty yards elevation and # degrees azimuth, traverse two degrees and fire another burst, traverse again, fire again, endlessly. It was area fire. And it had one good feature. "They've lost us!" Major Commaigne gloated. The winking electronic brain inside the factory had lost sight of them -- perhaps even thought they were disposed of -- and was merely putting the finishing sterilizing touches on its disinfecting operation, in its meticulous machine fashion. But Bill Cossett wasn't able to read that encouraging message out of the machine-gun fire. He didn't have the faintest idea what Major Commaigne was talking about; all he was able to tell was that the ramp was suddenly lit with a flickering light of tracer rounds, and the smell of the ammunition stifled him, and the noise of the guns and the heterodyne squee of the ricochets was enough to deafen. Not to mention the fact that, with all that stuff flying around, a person could get hurt. "D UT Major Commaigne was ready for his sneak punch. He propped himself on an elbow, very cautiously, and peered down the tunnel to where the demolition crews were rigging a larger-thannormal charge. "Ready?" he shouted. One of the figures waved a hand. "Then fire!" he bawled, and the demolition men thrust down a plunger. Waroom. A corner of the wall at the remains of the shattered gate flew out and collapsed. Bill Cossett stared. Down from the surface was clanking a machine -- an enemy? But Major Commaigne was waving it on. One of theirs then, but he had never seen it before; never seen anything like it, in fact. And that was not surprising. Out of heaven knows what incalculable resources, the Pentagon had produced a Winnie's Pet. The story was that back in the old days Winston Churchill -- yes, that long ago! -- was fighting a war against Hitler, and Churchill decided that what he needed was a trench digger of heroic proportions. A big one, he dreamed, big enough so that in Flanders or at Soissons, it could have turned the tide of battle. And so his design staff produced the Winnie's Pet, a tunnel digger, huge in size. Well, maybe it would have turned the tide in #. But what war was ever fought in trenches again after that? The machine was still around, though, and on the spot, because that was Major Commaigne's plan. He waved it on, into the breach in the armor-plating of the tunnel that his demolition crew had made. It was set for lateral tunneling. They gave it its head and followed it into a brand-new and therefore (presumably) unguarded tunnel that would parallel the ramp they were in, clear down to the factory itself. Bill Cossett got up and ran after Major Commaigne and the others, unbelieving. It was all too easy! Behind them, the clatter of gunfire dwindled. There were no guns here -- how could there be? They were safe. Then -- "Ouch!" yelped Major Commaigne, inadvertently touching the wall, for it was hot. Then he grinned at Cossett, his face shadowed in the light from their helmet lamps and the tunneler. "Scared me for a minute," he said. "But it's all right. It must be fused -- from the digging, you know. But -- " He stopped, thinking. And it was only right that he should think, because he was wrong. It couldn't be atomic fusion that heated that wall. Why, Churchill didn't have atomic fusion to play with back in #, when Winnie's Pet was built! "Run!" shouted Major Commaigne. "You, there! Get out of that thing!" The crew hesitated, then spilled out of the digger, and again just in time. Because the heat had been atomic, all right, but the atoms were bursting at the command of the computer that ran the factory. Seismographs had detected the vibration of their tunneling; metal subterrene moles with warheads had been sent after them; as they raced out of the new tunnel at one end, the moles burst through at the other, struck the digger and exploded. They made it up the ramp and to their waiting halftracks, but just barely. And that was the end of Round One. If any referee in the world had been watching, I don't care who or how biased in favor of the human race, he would have given that round to the machines. It was an easy win, no contest; and the detachment brooded about it all the way back to the Pentagon. IV " lickable Jack Tighe for nothing. In fact, they didn't call him Unlickable Jack at all then. That didn't come until later, and that's another story. But already Tighe was demonstrating the qualities which made him great "There's got to be a way," he declared, and pounded the table. "There's got to." The Committee of Activity silently licked its wounds, staring at him. "Look, fellows," Tighe said reasonably, "men built these machines. Men can make them stop!" Bill Cossett waited for somebody else to speak. Nobody did. "How, Mr. Tighe?" he asked, wishing he didn't have to be the one to put the question. Tighe stared fretfully -- and unansweringly -- out of the Pentagon window. "You just tell us how," Cossett went on, "because we don't know. We can't get in -- we've tried that. We can't blow up the goods as they come out -- we've tried that too. We can't cut off the power, because it's completely self-contained. What does that leave? The computer has more resources than we have, that's all." "There's always a way," said obstinate Jack Tighe, and shifted restlessly in his leather chair. It was not that he wasn't used to positions of responsibility, for hadn't he been on the Plans Board of Yust #s Ruminant? But running a whole country was another matter. Marlene Groshawk coughed apologetically. "Mr. Tighe, sir," she said. (You know who Marlene Groshawk is. Everybody does.) Tighe said irritably: "Later, Marlene. Can't you see this thing's got me worried?" "But that's what it's about, Mr. Tighe," she said, "sir. I mean it's about this thing." She put her glasses on her pretty nose and looked at her notes. She, too, had come a long way from her public-stenographer days at Pung's Corners, and it wasn't entirely an upward path. Though no doubt there was honor to being the private secretary of old Jack Tighe. She said: "I've got it all down here, Mr. Tighe, sir. You've tried brute force and you've tried subtlety. Well, what I ask myself is this: What would that wonderful, cute old TV detective Sherlock Holmes do?" She removed her glasses and stared thoughtfully around the room. "We could've been killed. But I don't mind that, Mr. Tighe. What hurts is that we failed." Marlene said : "So what I would suggest is -- " "I can't go home and face my wife," Bill Cossett interrupted miserably. "Or all those Buicks." "What Sher-" Jack Tighe growled: "We'll lick it! Trust me, men. And now, unless somebody else has a suggestion, I suppose we can adjourn this meeting. God knows we've accomplished nothing. But maybe sleeping on it will help. Any objections?" Marlene Groshawk stuck up her hand. "Mr. Tighe, sir?" "Eh? Marlene? Well, what is it?" She removed her glasses and looked at him piercingly. "Sherlock Holmes," she said triumphantly. "He would have got in, because he would have disguised himself. There! Clear as the nose on your face, when you think of it, isn't it?" Tighe took a deep breath. He shook his head and said, with more than ordinary patience: "Marlene, please stick to taking your shorthand. Leave the rest to us." "But really, Mr. Tighe! Sir. I mean raw materials do get in, don't they?" "Well?" "So suppose -- " she said, cocking her head prettily, tapping her small white teeth with a pencil in a judgmatical way -- "suppose you fellows disguised yourselves. As raw materials. And didn't sneak in, but let the factory come and get you, so to speak. How about that?" Jack Tighe was a great and wise man, but he had a lot on his mind. He yelled: "Marlene, what's the matter with you? That's the craziest -- " he hesitated -- "the craziest thing I ever -- " he coughed -- "it's the craziest... What do you mean, disguise themselves?" "I mean disguise themselves," Marlene explained earnestly. "Like disguise. As raw materials." Jack Tighe was silent for a second. Then he pounded his desk. "Love of heaven," he cried, "I think she's got it! Captain Margate! Where's Captain Margate? You, Commaigne! Get out of here on the double and get me Captain Margate!" ters into the slot and waited for his wife in Rantoul to answer her phone. Her image took form in the screen, hair curlers and the baggy quilted robe she liked to slop around in. But she was still an attractive woman. "Bill? That you? But the operator said Farmingdale." "That's where I am, Essie. We, uh, we're going to try something." How did you say a thing like this without sounding heroic? It was hard, a fine line of distinction, for what he wanted was for his wife to think he was a hero, but not to think that he thought so too. "We're going to, well, sneak into the cavern here." "Sneak in?" Her voice became piercing. "Bill Cossett! Those factories are dangerous. You prorrv ised me you wouldn't get in any trouble when I let you go east!" "Now, Essie," he soothed. "Please, Essie. It's going to be all right. I think." "You think? Bill, tell me exactly what you're up to!" "No I can't!" he said, suddenly panicky, staring at the phone as though it were an enemy. "They're all in it together, you see. The machines, I mean. I can't say over the phone -- " "Bill!" "But they are, Essie. We found that out. National Electro-Mech's got a deep tunnel that goes clear to General Motors way out in Detroit, for trucks and so on. They get their computer parts from Philco in Philadelphia. How do I know the phone isn't in on it too? No -- " he interrupted her as she was about to demand the truth -- "please, Essie. Don't ask me. How are the kids? Chuck?" "Skinned knee. But, Bill, you mustn't -- " "And Dan?" "The doctor says it's only a little allergy. But I'm not going to -- " "And Tommy?" She frowned. "I spanked him fifty times yesterday," she said, an exaggeration, certainly, but at least she was diverted from asking questions; she gave a concise catalogue of smashed dishes, spilled milk, unhung jackets and lost shoes; and Bill breathed again. For what he told her had been the truth; he was suddenly deathly afraid that the automatic long-lines dialing apparatus of the phone company might have been infiltrated by its electronic brethren in the factories. There was no sense in telling the enemy what you were about to do! He managed to hang up without revealing his secret, and walked out of the booth to Major Commaigne's command post. Heroes come in many forms, but it had never before occurred to A. Cossett, Authorized Buick Dealer, that a motor-car franchise holder, like a general, must sometimes offer his life in battle. r I  HE command post was busy, but that was natural enough, for this was a project to which the' entire resources of the United States of America could well have been devoted. And the effort was beginning to show results. Bill Cossett came to a scene of excitement. Major Commaigne was listening to an excited Captain Margate, while the rest of the detachment stood by. Margate, as Bill Cossett had come to know, was Jack Tighe's personal expert in raw materials and the like. A good man, Cossett thought. And so was Major Commaigne, a can-do kind of guy. And this Marlene Groshawk who was tagging along -- well, Essie wouldn't like that. But it was in line of duty. And, you know, kind of fun. Hastily, Bill Cossett shifted his thoughts back to the problem of getting into National ElectroMech. "Found it!" Captain Margate was crying, delighted. "We really found it! Geologists thought," he said, shaking his head in wonder, "that there wasn't any coal under Long Island, but trust the machines. They knew. We found it." "Coal?" said Major Commaigne, his brows crinkling. "Why, yes, Major," nodded the captain. "Coal. Raw materials, for your disguise." "Disguise?" repeated Major Commaigne. "That's right, Major." "As lumps of coal?" The captain shrugged cheerfully. "As organic matter," he clarified. "The machine, after all, won't mind. Coal is carbon -- hydrocarbons -- oh, you're close enough. The machine won't mind a few little eccentricities. Why," he went on, warming up, "the machine would still accept you even if you were a lot more impure than any of you really are." Marlene Groshawk stamped her pretty foot. "Captain!" "I mean in a chemical way, Miss Groshawk," the captain said humbly, and began to prepare their disguises. Bill Cossett tugged at his collar. "Captain Margate," he said, "one thing. Suppose the factory catches us." "It will, Mr. Cossett! That's the whole idea." "I mean suppose it finds out we're not coal." Captain Margate looked up thoughtfully from his pot of lampblack and cold cream. "That," he said meditatively, "would be embarrassing. I don't know what would happen exactly, but -- " He shrugged. "Still, it's not the worst thing that could happen," he added without worry. "It might be a whole lot worse if it never does find out you're not raw materials." "You mean -- " gasped Marlene. "We'd be-" Captain Margate nodded. "You'd be processed. And," he added gallantly, "you would make a very nice batch of plastic, Miss Groshawk." V T T was a most trying time for all of them, you may be very sure. But they were brave enough. Major Commaigne let himself be smeared a sooty black without a flicker of his steel-gray eye or a quiver of his iron jaw. Bill Cossett tried desperately to remember how awful things were back in Rantoul -- "Yes, yes," he whispered frantically to himself, "even more awful than this." Marlene Groshawk -- well, you couldn't tell much from her expression. But she wrote later, in her memoirs, that she was really anxious about only one thing: How she would ever get all that stuff off? Sappers had tunneled them a neat little hole into a bed of brownish gassy coal. "Ssh!" hissed Captain Margate, a finger to his lips. "Listen." In the silence, there was a distant chomp, chomp, chomp, like a great far-off inchworm nibbling his way through armor-plate. "The factory," the captain whispered. "We'll leave you now. Keep very still. Oh, and there are sandwiches and drinking water in that hamper. I don't know how long you'll have to wait" And the captain and the sappers withdrew up the shaft. Seconds later, a small explosive blast dumped the ceiling of the tunnel in, blocking it. The captain had warned them he would have to do that -- "Don't want to make the factory suspicious, you know!" -- but it was like that first clod of soil falling on the coffin of the living entombed man, all the same. Time passed. They ate the sandwiches and drank the water. Time passed. They began to get hungry again, but there wasn't anything to do about it, not any more. They couldn't even call the whole thing off now, because there wasn't any way to accomplish it. The distant chomp, chomp was closer, true, but the darkness was closing in on them; the enforced silence was getting on their nerves; and the sulphury smell of the low-grade coal was giving Bill Cossett a splitting headache... And then it happened. Chomp, chomp. And a rattle, bang. And something broke through the coal shell around them with a splash of violet light. Stainless steel teeth, half a yard long, nibbled a neat circle out of the wall, swallowed, hiccoughed and inched forward. "Duck," whispered Major Commaigne in the girl's ear and, "Out of the way!" into Cossetfs, though whispering was hardly needful in the metallic clangor around them. They crouched aside and the teeth gnawed past them, a yard a minute, trenching the floor of their little cavern and spewing the crushed coal onto a wide conveyor belt that followed the questing jaws. "Jump!" murmured Commaigne when the teeth were safely by, and the three of them leaped onto the belt, nestled in shaking beds of coal fragments, borne upward and back toward the factory itself. They lay quiet, hardly breathing, against what unknown spy-eyes or listening devices the factory might employ. But if there were such, they missed their mark, or the strategy worked. At a steady crawling pace, they were drawn upward and into the growing din of National Electro-Mech's main plant It was as easy as that. Getting in was. But that was, of course, only the beginning.  put its factory under the sod Local #, had torn up the old contract and employed its best dreamers to invent a new one. "Year-round temperature of #," said Clause #a. "Not less than # cu. ft. of pure, fresh, filtered air per worker per minute," said Paragraph #. "Lighting to be controlled by individual worker at his It was underground, right enough, but it was very nice indeed. Why, they even had trouble, serious trouble, with one worker in ten refusing to go home even to sleep, especially during the hay-fever season. But that was before automation had set in. Now things were not nice at all, at least by human standards. Machines might have loved it, but -- Well, the lights, to begin with, were hardly the pleasant, glarefree fluorescents that Local # had had in mind. Why should they be? Human eyes relish the visible spectrum, but machines see by photoelectric cells, and photocells see as well by red or even infra-red... which is cheap to generate and produces a satisfactory length of filament life. Consequently National Electro-Mech was now washed with a hideous ochre gloom. The air -- ah, that was a laugh. Whatever air the departing human workers chanced to leave behind was still there, for machines don't breathe. And the temperature was whatever it happened to be. In the remote ends of the galleries, it was chilly cold; in the area around the cookers, it was appalling. And the noise! Cringing, the three invaders gaped deafenedly around as they rode in on the conveyor belt. Bill Cossett stared through the bloodred gloom at a row of enormous stainless-steel spheres. He wondered what they were, and only glanced away in scant time to fling himself off the conveyor belt and yell: "Jump!" The others obeyed just as the lumps of coal they had been traveling with thumped with a roar and suffocating dust into a huge hopper. Beads of sweat broke out over them all. That coal was ultimately to be polymerized in the huge steel cookers Cossett had been staring at. The factory had not, of course, bothered to sweep away the excess heat with blowers. Why should it? But it wasn't only the heat that brought out the sweat; they could hear the coal being powdered and whooshed away. They got out of there, holding hands to keep together, tripping and stumbling in the bloody dusk. "Watch it!" bawled the major in Cossett's ear, and Cossett ducked one horrifying instant before something huge and glittering swooped by his ear. This was, after all, an appliance factory, and Cossett couldn't help thinking that a factory should have certain recognizable features. Aisles, for example, between the machines. But the cavern factory didn't need aisles. Most factory traffic is in the changing of the shifts, the to-and-fro traffic of the coffee break, the casual promenade to the powder room or water cooler. None of these phenomena occurred in the manless caverns. Therefore the machine-mind had ended corridors and abolished aisles. It dumped jigs and bobbins where they were most convenient -- to a machine, not to a man. The movement of fresh parts and the carting away of finished assemblies was done by overhead trolleys. As Cossett blinked after the one that had nearly whacked him, he caught glimpse of another shadow out of the corner of his eyes. "Watch it!" he yelled, and grabbed Marlene slipperily by the neck as a pod of toasters swept by. They all dropped to the littered floor and got up, swearing -- except that Marlene didn't swear. She was much too ladylike; that is, in that IT# way. But she said. "We ought to do our job and get out of here." They looked at each other, a pathetic trio, smeared with grease and soot They were lost in a howling, hammering catacomb. They were unarmed and helpless against a smart and powerful factory of machines and weapons. "This was a dopy idea from the beginning," moaned Cossett. "We'll never get out." "Never," agreed the major, daunted at last. "Never," nodded Marlene, and paused, frowning prettily in the gloom. "Unless we get thrown up," she added. "You mean thrown out," Cossett corrected. Marlene shook her head. "I mean upchucked," she said in a refined manner, "like when you have an upset stomach." ' I I HE two men looked at each other. "The place does eat, in a way," said Cossett. "It's a mistake to be teleological," Commaigne objected. "But it does eat." "Let's think it out," said Major Commaigne authoritatively, hitting the dirt to avoid a passing coil of extension cords. "Suppose," he called up to the others, "we blow up the conveyor belt and those cookers. This will undoubtedly interfere with the logistics of the commandapparatus, right? It will then certainly try to find out what happened, and will, we must assume, discover that certain alien entities -- ourselves, that is -- found their way in through the raw-material receptors. Well, then! What is there for the thing to do but close down its receptors? And when it has done so, it will be cut off from the things it needs to continue manufacturing. Consequently, we may take as provisionally established, it will be unable -- what?" Bill Cossett, bawling at him from under a parts table where he had taken refuge, repeated: "I said, where's Marlene?" The major clambered to his knees. The girl was gone. In the dull, clattering, crashing gloom, strange shapes moved wildly about, but none of them seemed to be Marlene. She was gone and, the major suddenly discovered, something was gone with her -- the bag of explosives. "Marlene!" screamed the two men. And, though it was only chance, she at once appeared. "Where have you been?" the major demanded. "What were you doing?" The girl stood looking down at them for a second. "I think we'd better get out of the way," she said at last. "I took the bombs. I think I've given the thing a tummy-ache." They had gone less than a dozen yards when the first of the little bombs went off, with a sodiumyellow glare and a firecracker bang; but it knocked a hundred yards of conveyor belt off the track. And then the fun really began... Less than an hour later, they were back on the surface, watching plumes of smoke trickle from fifty concealed ventilators scattered across the plain outside Farmingdale. Jack Tighe was delighted. "You clobbered it!" he gloated. "And it let you get out?" "Kicked us out," exulted the major. "We were in the raw-materials area, you know. As far as I can tell, the factory has closed down the raw-materials operation entirely. It swept everything off what was left of the conveyor belt, us included -- believe me, we had to step pretty quick to keep from getting hurt! Then it plugged up the belt tunnel, and as we were getting away, I saw a handling machine beginning to put armor-plate over the plug." Jack Tighe howled: "We've licked it! Tell you what," he said suddenly, "let's give it a real bellyache. Plant a few more bombs in the coal beds to make sure..." And they did but, really, it didn't seem quite necessary; the cavern factory had withdrawn completely within itself. No further attempts were made to get raw materials, then or ever. In the next few days, while Tighe's men tried the same tactic on factory after factory, all across the face of the continent -- and always with the same success -- the armed guards outside National Electro-Mech's plant had very little to do. The factory wasn't quite dead, no. Twice the first day, occasionally in the days that followed, a single furtive truck would come dodging out of the exit ramps. But only one truck, where there had been scores; and that one only partly loaded, and an easy target for the guards. It was victory. There was no doubt about it. Jack Tighe called for a day of national rejoicing. VI  ' celebration! Jack Tighe was glowing with triumph and with joy. He was old and stern and powerful, but his hawk's face was the face of a delighted boy. "Eat, my friends," he boomed, his voice rolling through the amplifiers. "Enjoy yourselves! A new day has dawned for all of us, and here are the glorious three who made it possible!" He swept a generous arm toward those who sat beside him on the dais. Applause thundered. The three heroes were all there. Major Commaigne sat erect, tunic crisp, buttons gleaming, a bright new scarlet ribbon over all the other ribbons on his chest, where Jack Tighe had impulsively created a new decoration on the spot. Marlene Groshawk sat beside him, radiant. Bill Cossett was stiff, grinning uncomfortably as he sat next to his wife (who was staring thoughtfully at Marlene Groshawk). Jack Tighe bawled: "Eat, while the Marine Band plays us a march! And then we will have a few words from the heroes who have saved us all!" It was a glorious picnic. Hail to the Chief bounced brassily off the bright blue sky. Cossett sat miserably, no longer stiff, wondering what the devil he would find to say, when he noticed that the brassy bugles of the Marine Corps Band faded ringingly away. A uniformed officer had dashed breathlessly through the crowd to the rostrum. He was whispering up to Jack Tighe, a look of tense excitement on his face. After a moment, Tighe stood up, hands raised, a smile on his face. "There's nothing to worry about, friends," he called, "nothing at all! But there's a little life in the cavern factory yet. The colonel here tells me that another truck is coming out of the ramp, that's all. So please just stay where you are and watch our boys knock it off!" panic -- why should the crowd have panicked? It was a kind of circus, an extra added attraction, as risk-free as the bear-baiting at a Sussex village fair. Let the obstinate old factory send its trucks out, thought the assembled thousands with a joy of anticipation, it'll be fun to watch our boys smash them up! And it surely can't mean anything. The battle is won. The factories can go on plotting underground as long as they like, but you can't make toasters without copper and steel, and there hasn't been any of that going in for weeks. No, pure fun, that's all it is! And so they took advantage of the spectacle, climbing on chairs to see better, the fathers lifting the youngest to their shoulders. And the truck came whooping out. Rattle, rattle, the machine-guns roared. Wush went the rocket launchers. The truck didn't have a chance. In convoys, in the old days, a few always got through; but here was only one, and it got clobbered for fair. Bill Cossett, hand in hand with his wife, went over to look at the smoldering ruins. The crowd fell back respectfully. Essie Cossett said gladly : "Serves them right! Those darn machines, they think they own us. I just wish I could get down there to watch them starving and suffering, like Mr. Tighe said. What are those things, dear?" Cossett said absently: "What things?" His attention was fixed on what the bazooka charge had done to the truck's armored radiator grill, and he was thinking of how handily a rocket launcher belonging to the factory might have done the same to him. "Those shiny things." "What shiny -- Oh." In the yawning flank of the truck, its steel plates sprung by half a dozen shells, a sort of metallic crate hung its edge over the lip of the hole. It was stenciled: Electro-Mech Appliances IV# Gross Cigarette Lighters And from a dangling flap of the crate, small, shiny globules were oozing out -- dripping out, but it was odd, because the confounded things were dripping up. They squeezed out like water from a leaky tap, bright, striated things, and, plop, they were free and floated away. "Funny," said Bill Cossett to his wife, vaguely apprehensive. "But it can't be anything to worry about. Cigarette lighters! I never saw any like that." Wonderingly he took his own cigarette case-and-lighter combination from his pocket He opened it. He held it in his hand to read the name stamped on the bottom, to see if by chance it was a National Electro-Mech. Pflut. One of the shiny things swooped down on him, danced above the case, came toward his face. He felt a harsh, urgent thrusting at his lips, ducked, coughed, choked, nearly strangled. tore the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, threw it to the ground. "Good God!" he cried. "But how can they? We closed them down!" And all over the enormous crowd, others were making the same discovery, and the same error of deduction. From a smashed crate labeled Perc-o-Matics, #-Cup, a shimmering series of little globes of light was whisking its way out into the air and around the crowd. Coffee makers? Yes, they were coffee makers. "Help!" yelled a woman whose jug of icewater was snatched out of her hands; and "Stop!" shrilled another, attempting to open a can of Maxwell House. Coffee grounds and water swam around in the air, like the jets at Versailles drowning the brown sands of Coney Island. Then the soggy used grounds neatly burrowed into the ground out of sight and the shimmering globe towed a sphere twice larger than itself from cup to cup, dispensing perfect coffee every time. A four-year-old, watching with his mouth agape, absently let his ham sandwich dangle. "Ouch!" he yelled, rubbing suddenly reddened fingers as another little sphere, this one emerald green, took the bread from his hand, toasted it a golden brown, expertly caught the falling ham and restored it to him before the ham had a chance to touch the ground. "Bill!" shrieked Essie Cossett. "What is this? I thought you stopped the factory." "I thought so too," muttered her husband blankly, watching the frightened crowd with eyes bright with horror. "But didn't you cut off their raw materials? Isn't that how you stopped it?" Bill Cossett sighed. "We cut off the raw materials," he admitted. "But evidently that won't stop the factories. They're learning to do without. Force fields, magnetic flux -- I don't know! But that truck was full of appliances that didn't use any raw materials at all!" He licked dry lips. "And that's not the worst part of it," he said, so softly that his wife could hardly hear. "I can face it if the bad old days come back again. I can stand it if every three months a whole new model comes out, and we have to sell, sell, sell and buy, buy, buy. But"But these things," he said sickly, "don't look as though they'll ever wear out. How can they? They aren't made of matter at all! And when the new models keep coming out -- how are we ever going to get rid of the old ones?"      Next issue (dated October, and we'll explain that down below) assembles another great cargo of reading that Galaxy now carries -- "Such a tome!" exclaims Mrs. Howard N. Bowman, Port Alsworth, Alaska, winning the brevity award -- in the following seaworthy fashion: Christopher Grimm, Orientally devious in plot, up-to-tomorrow in ideas and backgrounds. Its hero is uncompromisingly villainous, its villain heroic and with a heart of gold, its heroine a strumpet with a heart of brass, its dross is treasure and its treasure dross, and much of it takes place in anything but a place -- and if you can beat these and other puzzles to the finish line, you have an even wickeder mind than its author's. first is a rousing romp, the second a breath-catching suspense story. Placed strategically for ballast -- and quick reading for brief breaks -- are several short stories, and our regular features, and a four-compartment article by Willy Ley, one compartment being about an accident that would have changed recent history if it had ever happened, another on the only non-animal that has become extinct since prehistoric times. Starting with the next issue, Galaxy will be clad more durably. Sorry it took so long to work off our supply of cover stock, but it's gone now and our armorplate will be much more in keeping with the oversize of the magazine. About the October dateline: Most newsstand dealers check their shelves at the beginning of each month -- and send back all magazines dated that month! To avoid being taken off sale prematurely, we have to date a month ahead of our off-sale date. An annoying trade practice, but we can't buck it. About dropping "Science Fiction" from the title -- we always intended to establish Galaxy as a science fiction magazine, then drop the term because it scares many away from buying -- but not, as you've noted, changing the magazine itself. Handyman Finishing Basements Finishing Attics Essential Repairs Built-ins Painting Refinishing Landscaping Patios and Terraces Barbecues Don't put off those vital home repairs and improvements another day) tells you "how" in language you can understand! Imagine changing that drab kitchen, converting the basement to a game room, glamourizing your outdoor patio -- or any other luxurious improvement , , all are now possible at very little cost to you! clear drawings show every detail of construction. Easy-to-follow, steparticles give you valuable pointers on how to save work, buy and save on proper materials and get a professionly-perfect job! of your workshop libraryl OCTOBER # # by  by  by  by And Other Stories Looking Ahead? You must be, or you wouldn't be reading this magazine. Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and terrestrials and extraterrestrials. But what about looking ahead to:  Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF, the more free issues you get.)  Saving steps? (A subscription brings IF right to your mailbox, irrespective of heat, cold, snow, rain, gloom of night -- and mailed flat, to boot.)  Saving time? (You get your copies at least a week before the newsstands receive theirs.)  Saving your temper? (IF can and often does sell out; with a subscription there's no need to hunt from stand to stand.) fouroN IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my sul)scrition to IK Science Fiction witli tlie issue. I enclose (check one) : O issues... # issues... ,,:t.# Foreign #'ostase (f l.ssues .'#' .l(Iitional .V ame Address City I". O. Zone State Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland andSweden The Accident that Didn't Happen #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States. Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magainc are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. What's In It For You?  Subscribing to IF has so many benefits and conveniences that we often wonder why all our readers aren't subscribers.  Atone in the bank -- just check the rates below and see what you save on the newsstand price; the longer you sign up for, the more free issues you get.  Wear and fear -- just reach into your mailbox and there's your latest copy; no riding, driving, or walking to pick it up -- always, of course, at the risk of finding IF sold out.  Be the first on your block -- you get IF a full week or more before the newsstands do.  And all without having to mutilate this attractive copy if you'd rather send in your order on any sheet of paper instead of cutting out the coupon. Just don't put it off, for tomorrow you're sure to forget, aren't you? I IF Science Ficfien  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York  Start luy subscription to IP Science Fiction with the j issue. I enclose (check one) :  # issues...# # issues...# ! Foreign Postage i issues # additional. j Name I Address j I City P. O. Zone State j Edited by H. L. Gold One look at the contents tells you that this is a 'must have' book for your permanent SF library -- Richard Matheson's One for the Books; Damon Knight's An Eye for What?; Mark Clifton's A Woman's Place; Alan E. Nourse's Brightside Crossing; F. L. Wallace's Mezzerow Loves Company; Evelyn E. Smith's Once a Greech; L. Sprague de Camp's A Gun for Dinosaur; Edgar Pangborn's The Music Man of Babylon; and -- of course -- Clifford D. Simak's The World that Couldn't Be. # m I'l', ':IflXy  nt ' dets St # GaW teceive a ihroos" Ihat CoULoN t  the by he coupon now. #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of  Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. " Point, Ind., speaking for many readers who offered the same suggestion: "I like your editorials and I like letter columns. Why not combine the two, whenever you have enough good letters on hand, so the people who like your editorials but dislike letter columns won't obect? By interpolating your comments in parentheses and italics" (Like this? ) "you still could have a letter column, only in editorial form. But what's eating readers who don't like letter columns?" (Research has given us the answer, but it just isn't true that reading letter columns is like going through someone else's pockets. Mail published here was meant to be read. Mail not meant to be read is simply not published, and "Please do not print this" distinguishes one from the other.) Vic Ryan, Springfield, #., says: "Advertising keeps most magazines and newspapers alive. Can you do it on circulation alone?" (Yes. But we like advertising and our audience, generally a well-heeled bunch, interested in all sorts of products and services, is for it. Advertisers will kindly take note. The income comes in handy, of course, for improvements. ) Frank Schwarz, Levittown, N. Y.: "I have noticed with awe and wonder that the June issue reached me on March #." (We explained in the last issue that dealers send back magazines dated the current month. T o avoid premature returns, we have to date issues the month before they're due to come off sale. It's a trade practice that we like no better than you do, but we can't change it.) "You might do well to date the issues say # or # years in advance and drop the prefix 'Science,' thus coming up with a practically factual magazine, which due to the terrific efficiency of its staff happens to come out a bit early. How about it?" ( If dating issues # or # years ahead became the trade practice, there would be no how-about-it. An amnesiac or time traveler, right now, today, stuck in a small town with no newspaper, would have some job finding out the date from our current magazines. But not enough of our readers are in that predicament -- as tar as we know -- to induce us to buck newsstand custom.) John McGowan, no address: "I am enjoying your experimenting with your new format" ( So are we ) "and hope that you never settle down to a regular format" (Not a chance ) "and just keep experimenting with various layouts." (Like this? ) John Buckelew, Rogers, Ark.: "With your bimonthly schedule I think you have hit a new high in quality and I hope you can mantain it." (We can -- on a bimonthly schedule. There is some argument from individual exceptions to the statistical fact that magazine readership turns over every five years or so -- exceptions that we acknowledge and are thankful for. But can it be disputed that there is also an author and artist turnover -- with, of course, the usual percentage of exceptions and occasional returnees? We miss the ones who are gone for good and wish the others would contribute more often, but the real solution is the same as it's always been in every held: new talent must be brought in. And in it's coming -- enough for a high-quality issue every other month. What would we do if the volume increased? If you owned a magazine what would you do? Right. So would we.) Tascha Lorenz, Beverly Farms, Mass.: "Are you the Herbert Gold that has occasional stories in Playboy Magazine? If so, congratulations -- they're great!" ( Aren't they? But I'm Horace, no relation, and I don't know the man, only his work, which I strenuously admire.) Fritz Leiber, Chicago, #.: "Students! Teachers! Start a science fiction club in your school. Have interesting meetings and meet people who read science fiction. For information on how to start a club, write to Science Through Science Fiction, Box No. #, Chicago #, #." (The purpose behind this needs an entire editorial. Our surveys have shown that nearly every theoretician and researcher was, as the call above says, led into science through science fiction. These same surveys show that science fiction is unknown, or all but, to people in the practical end of science. Contrary experience, however considerable it may seem, is statistically unuseful; job opportunities and military service classification far outweigh science fiction in attracting entrants. But practical science waits on basic research -- every practical advance was once just an idea or a speculative guess. Russia, knowing how the extrapolative technique of science fiction leads to extrapolative work in the lab, is urging writers into science fiction, under orders to "Think, damn you, think!" to win young recruits to basic research. We can't and needn't imitate their bullwhip methods; our science fiction outclasses theirs in every conceivable way. Getting it to responsive young minds is the proplem. When science fiction's role in basic research is officially understood here all youngsters will be systematically exposed to it, and then there will be an upsurge in basic research to dwindle even these past peak decades. Until then, the job must be done by all who see the necessity, and Science Through Science Fiction in the schools is a Class-A answer.) Vincent E. Treacy, Dedham, Mass.: "Will you please put Science Fiction back on your cover and title page? In this field, yours has been the most influential magazine -- bar none -- in the Fifties. Now you seem to want to cut your association with science fiction. Please don't!" (We never intended to. As explained previously, we suspect that potential readers may be attracted to the magazine but put off by the term Science Fiction. Thafs what we're testing right now. Term on or term off, though, this is and will remain a science fiction magazine.) Phyllis Ballin, New York: "As one editor, though a small one, to another, may I congratulate you and your staff... The editorials, in which you go to great lengths to make the reader feel as if" ( As if? ) "he were an actively consulted member of the magazine, made a fine impression. Reading good science fiction has been one of my pleasures for a long while. I thank you for your part in it. I've enclosed a recent copy of the Ladle" ( official publication N.Y. State Assn, of Plumbing Contractors). "Space-fact rather than science fiction, I thought you might enjoy the lead article." (I did. Lead paragraph: "The Pan American Boeing # flashed across the skies at # miles per hour, making airplane headlines, and incidentally, plumbing history. Flying at an altitude of over # miles high, taking only six and a half hours to get from New York to London, the mammoth craft bears in' its belly the first flush toilet ever to get off the ground." Ingeniously done and a great passenger comforter, but space-fact? Not at # miles. My money is on the plumbers, though, to unseat the problems of weightlessness when called in for estimates.) E. D. Schafer, Dickinson, Tex.: "In # my family moved near a fine, well-selected library -- quite a rarity in a small Texas cow town -- containing a full set of Jules Verne. That started me off and I've read all the s-f I could get since then -- Wells, Frank Reade, Jr., etc., even one writer, name forgotten, who dealt with a trip to the ( Continued on page #) -- America's only magazine that "bridges the gap" between the technical journals and your local newspaper reports. "personal stake in all the big missile shots, moon probes, satellite launchings, earth-bound space tests being made today? Weil, you have. The age of space Is exploding all around us. Government and and explorotion so that generations to come will find a nevr kind of life -- in space! Yes, ve have already crossed the threshold of the greatest age in the his tory of ManI And yet -- know or understand what it is all about when a missile or rocket is fired -- when a satellite sends back its mysterious 'Voice" from space when a volunteer enters a space research test chamber -- when a new project is announced -- what it costs... Not because they don't want to know but because they are lost somewhere in that big gap -- informationwise -- between technical publications and local news reports. Now that "gap" has been bridged. And here's how -- zine, shows you -- in plain, non-technical, everyday language and superb illustrations all about -- Man and Science, places and explains clearly and factually, informatively and entertainingly, the conquest of space, Mankind's plunge into a booming new era. anything ever published before -- and you can try it on a money-back guarantee. We'll send your first issue at once. If you don't agree that it is terrific, let us know within # days and your money will be refunded in full! Every issue profusely illustroted. (You sove SO contsi) Mail the coupon below -- now! I I Enclosed find # for which send me the decide I do not wont it (within # days), I I can get my money back. I Address I City Zone State... I Other than keeping informed, my Interest I is (check which): I Student  Hobby Q My Job  someone to wetcli In the awfulness of hyperspace, everything was the nightmare opposite of itself... and here was where Len Mattern found his goal! I L en Mattern paused before the door of the Golden Apple Bar. The elation that had carried him up to this point suddenly wasn't there any more. Lyddy couldn't have changed too much, he'd kept telling himself. After all, it hadn't been so very long since he'd seen her. Now he found himself counting the years... and they added up to a long time. But it was too late to go back now. A familiar thought. The comover me By Christopher grimm mitment was moral only, and to himself, no one else -- the same way it had been that other time, the time that had changed the direction of his whole life, and, possibly, of all other lives in his universe as well. There was only one human being with whom he kept faith -- himself. Therefore, the commitment was a binding one. He pushed open the door and went in. He saw Lyddy at the end of the bar, surrounded by a group of men. Lyddy had always been surrounded by a group of men, he remembered, unless she was up in her room entertaining just one. She half-turned and he saw her face. The sun-pink lips were parted, her eyes still comparable to the heavens of Earth. She stood erect and lithe and slender. She had not changed at all! ' I 'HE tension that had built up inside him snapped with the weight of sudden relief. He lurched against a small hokur-motal table. It rocked crazily. The zhapik who owned the Golden Apple came out from behind the carved screen where he'd been sitting segregated from the customers. Many of the zhapiq, who had been native to Erytheia before the Federation took over, owned businesses catering to humans. It might be degrading, but it paid well. "Maybe you've had enough to drink. Captain?" he suggested. "Maybe you'd like to come back another time?" "I haven't had anything at all to drink," Mattern said curtly. "What's more, I haven't come for a drink." He strode across the room, firmly now, and brushed aside the men who clustered around Lyddy. "I've come for you," he told her. She didn't say anything, just looked him up and down. The beautiful blue eyes skillfully appraised his worth as a man and as a customer. Then she smiled and patted the gilded hair that streamed past her bare shoulders to her narrow waist. "You're not a Far Planets man," she said. "How come you know about me?" Funny he should feel disappointed. Sure, he'd been thinking of her all those years, but he'd never expected her to have been thinking of him. Yet he found himself blurting out, "Don't you remember me, Lyddy?" Then he cursed himself; first because he didn't want her to remember him as he had been; second, because he knew every man who'd ever slept with her -- or a woman like her -- would ask the same question. And, of course, she'd have the standard answer, something like "Why, of course I remember you, honey. I'm just not good at names." But she just looked at him levelly. "No, dear, I'm afraid I don't remember you," she said. Then a tiny frown gathered on her smooth forehead. "Seems to me I would've, though. When did I meet you?" "Oh, years ago! I was just a kid!" She flushed, and he realized he'd been a little tactless. If he was no kid any more, neither would she be. Still, she looked as young as she ever had, and he, he knew, looked younger. He didn't want her to probe further, so he hastily made an appointment with her for an evening later that week. As he left, he could hear her saying, in a bewildered voice, "I could've sworn there was somebody with him when he came in." And he quickened his steps. HE had the same room -- a  warm luxurious chamber, high up in the Golden Apple Hotel. I,,yddy herself was the same, too, just as he remembered her. Afterward, as they lay together in the blackness, she asked, "Can you in the dark, Captain?" He was surprised, and then, thinking about it, not so surprised. "Of course not, no more than you can! Whatever made you ask that?" "I -- feel like somebody's looking at me." He rolled over on his side, so his body was as far away from hers as possible. He didn't want her to feel the sudden rise of tension in him. Something's got to be done about this, he thought. I can't put up with it now. "Why don't you say anything, honey?" her anxious voice came out of the darkness. "Will you marry me, Lyddy?" he said. He could hear the intake of her breath. "Ask me again in the morning," she told him wearily. He knew what she must be thinking: Men who hadn't had a woman for a long time sometimes did strange things. In the morning, she would wake up and he would be gone. Only, when morning came, he was still there. Two weeks later, they were married. II husband-to-be and kept trying to find out all about him. Fortunately, in the code of the Far Planets, a man's past was his own business, so he was able to be evasive without actually lying to her. Not that he had any scruples, about lying; it was simply easier to tell as few stories as possible, rather than worry about keeping them straight. But it was all right to ask about a man's present. "Do you have anybody, Len? Relations, anything like that?" He frowned a little, remennbering the boy on Fairhurst. "No," he said, "I have no relatives. I have nobody." Her face fell. "It would've been kind of nice to have a ready-made family." "Oh, I don't know," he said. "There are times when it's better to have no family." "Yeah, I guess you're right. They might not approve of me." "We'll be everything to each other," he assured her. There was a ghost of a sound then -- a laugh or a sigh. He hoped she didn't hear it. The zhapik insisted on giving Lyddy's wedding, even though he himself could, of course, be present only behind the screen. Most people said the old E-T bastard knew a good piece of publicity when he saw it, but Mattern thought it might be out of genuine sentiment. He was closer to aliens than most men in this sector, any sector. Although he had originally hailed from the Far Planets, he had traveled widely and lost his prejudices. His best friend wasn't human. Every human in Erytheia City was invited to the wedding. Mattern's four crewmen came. Three were middle-aged and had sailed with Mattern for years, but his most recent acquisition was a young man, almost a boy. Something Raines, his name was. He kept staring at Lyddy as if he had never seen a beautiful woman before, though, coming from Earth, he must have seen many. Mattern was gratified at this tribute to his choice. "Only four crewmen!" Lyddy said, looking disappointed. "You must have a small ship." Mattern smiled. "Not too small." He could see she didn't believe him. Lyddy didn't seem to be enjoying her wedding. She kept glancing over her shoulder all through the ceremony and during the reception. Finally Mattern had to ask her what was wrong, although he would rather not have known. "Y'know, hon," she whispered, "I keep having the funniest feeling there's somebody extra here, somebody who doesn't belong. I haven't quite seen him; he always seems to slip by so fast, but I don't even think he's a man." "Don't be silly, Lyddy," he said, almost sharply. "You know no extraterrestrial would dare to crash a human party!" "I guess not." But she still kept looking over her shoulder. 'HE zhapik invited them to remain at the Golden Apple Hotel as his guests for as long as they liked. They stayed two months. Then Mattern told his wife it was time they started planning their future, decided where they were going to live. "You'll want a home of your own," he said. "Otherwise you'll get bored." "I'm never bored," said Lyddy. "But where will we go? I mean what system?" "Well, Erytheia is a pleasure planet, so I thought we might as well stay here. There are some attractive residential neighborhoods on this continent -- or, if you'd prefer, the other one." Her face fell. "You mean we're going to stay here?" He didn't know why he was so anxious to remain on Erytheia. Mainly it was because for no good reason he found himself disliking the idea of making the Jump with her. "If you'd rather, I could build you a city of your own, Lyddy," he tempted her. It was obvious that even if she had taken this seriously, it still wouldn't be what she wanted. "I'd like to go away from here," she told him. "Far away." "Just because you want a change -- is that it?" She hesitated. "That's partly it But there's more. Somehow, ever since we've been married, I keep feeling all the time like -- like I'm being watched." His smile was strained. "Well, naturally, in 'Rytheia City, people will tend to -- watch. Let's go far away from where people are. There's an island on this planet. way off in the western seas. I'll buy you that island, Lyddy. I'll build you a villa there -- a chateau, a castle, whatever you want." But she shook her golden head. "No, nothing like that. I want to go to another system. It's not that I don't want to be where people are. I like crowds. I just want to be where there are different people." He forced another smile. "What's gotten into you, Lyddy? In the old days, you used to be so calm." S HE wriggled her shoulders uncomfortably. "I keep seeing things, shadows that shouldn't be there, reflections of nothing. Only, when I turn, they don't get out of the way fast enough to be nothing." "They?" he repeated. "I only see one at a time, but I don't know if it's always the same one." She shivered again. "It must be your nerves." He went on resolutely, "Maybe you do need a change of scene." Actually it was absurd to feel so apprehensive about the Jump. She'd be safer in hyperspace in his ship than anywhere else in the universe. And a large metropolis might provide distractions to take her mind off -- shadows. "How would you like to go to Burdon?" "That would be real nice!" But she was not as enthusiastic about it as he had expected. Che laid a hesitant hand on his  arm. "Honey," she began tentatively, "you -- you seem to spend so much time all by yourself. Do I bore you?" 'Of course not, dear," he said awkwardly. "It just seems that way to you. Pressure of business..." "But why do you play chess with yourself all the time?" "I've spent so much time in space that I got into the habit of playing alone. Many spacemen do that." She bit her painted lip. "Sometimes -- sometimes when you're alone in your room, I hear your voice. Why do you talk to yourself?" It was an effort for him to meet the beautiful, blank blue eyes. "When you're alone a lot of the time, sweetheart, you have to hear the sound of a voice even if it's your own, or you start hearing voices." "But you have me," she said. "You're not alone. But you still do it." "Old habits are hard to break, dear." She looked up at him, trying to force her way past the wall in his eyes. God help her, he thought, if she ever succeeds. "Would you like me to learn to play chess?" "Would you like to?" "I -- don't know," she murmured doubtfully. "I've never been much good at mind things. But I want to be everything to you." "You are, sweetheart." He stooped and kissed her. "Don't force yourself to do anything you don't want to for my sake. I'm used to playing alone." "But I want you to do things with me!" "I'll do everything else with you," he promised. He went to his room and shut the door behind him. But she had heard him talking there, so sounds must carry through. When they got a place of their own, he would have the walls and doors soundproofed. Meanwhile, it would be safer to go to the ship. As he came out of the hotel door, he collided with a man who looked familiar. It took him a moment to identify the sullen, startled face as belonging to that newest member of his crew, young Something Raines. "Hello there," he said. "Were you coming to see me?" "N-no, sir. I was just coming in for a -- a pack of Earth smokesticks. I can't stand those stinking native brands!" The boy spoke with a viciousness so unsuited to the subject that it was almost funny. He flushed, perhaps realizing this, perhaps remembering that Mattern was reputed to hail from this sector. "It's a question of what you're used to, see?" he mumbled. "Of course," Mattern agreed pleasantly. "This is your first time on Erytheia, is it?" "Yes, my first time here." "Are you enjoying it?" "Well, I dunno exactly."There was doubt in the boy's blue eyes. Something in them seemed familiar, more familiar than just recognizing one of his own crewmen. He had a look of -- who? Of Lyddy? But that was absurd. THE doubt in Raines' face had changed to fear, and Mattern realized that he himself must have been just standing there, staring at him. He laughed. "You're supposed to enjoy Erytheia; it's a pleasure planet." "Well," the boy said, choosing his words with care, "it's a pretty enough place, but it's set up more for people with money. I mean there's nothing here for fellows like me; the pleasure's for the rich people only. Even the smokesticks cost almost twice as much as anywhere else." "We'll probably be leaving soon, so you'll only have to stick it a little while longer." Mattern's hand went to his pocket, then fell to his side as he saw the look on the boy's face. If Raines was proud. Mattern would not offend him by offering him money. "Maybe you'll find Burdon more to your liking." "Oh, yes, sir!" The young spaceman's face was virtually radiant. He must have a girl on Burdon, Mattern thought, amused. As he walked over to the landing field where his ship was moored, he was troubled by the memory of the boy's voice. Not that it was familiar -- but there was the faintest hint of a Far Planets accent. Provincials as a rule didn't go to the terrestrial space schools, but it was, of course, possible. Raines must have had an Earth education, because Mattern followed the rule of the Marine service and never hired a man who didn't have a degree from one of the space schools. He must look at the boy's records as soon as he got a chance. The Hesperian Queen was not a small vessel. She was one of the newest, fastest, most fully automated models. Moreover, she was large and she glittered like a dwarf star. Lyddy would get a surprise when she came to see the ship. Mattern greeted the crew member on watch and went up to his luxuriously appointed cabin -- suite, really. Inside, a chessboard was set up, as its counterpart was set up in his hotel room, one side in the light from a porthole, the other in a corner full of shadows. The pieces were not only in position, but a game had been started. Mattern sat down on the bright side and moved a piece. "Lyddy's aware of you," he told the shadows. "She has no idea of what you are, of course. But she knows you're around, kqyres. She's half seen you and it's beginning to bother her. It's beginning to bother me, too." flowed over the board. When it receded, a knight had changed its place. "Truly, I have tried to be careful," a quiet, rather tired voice said out of a darkness at the heart of the shadows, an area that was tenuously substant. "Is it certain that you yourself have not in some way given her cause for suspicion?" "Quite certain. I've watched myself night and day." Mattern smiled ruefully. "Which is damned hard when you're on your honeymoon." "Is there anyone else who might have spoken of these thing to her?" the kqyres asked. "No one." Then Mattern remembered the young spaceman he had met coming into the hotel, who seemed to have a look of Lyddy. But that was nonsensical. Looking like her didn't mean talk ing to her. In any case, what would Raines know that he could tell her? Silly to be so suspicious. The Golden Apple was one of the few places in Er # rtheia City where one could get Earth smokesticks. "No one," Mattern repeated. "No one at all." The patterns shifted and darkened. "Then I must be getting careless. I am growing old." "Anyone can make a slip," Mattern said reassuringly. "Just try to be a little more careful, that's all." He moved a rook. The grayness crept out over the board, touched a bishop, hesitated, and moved to a pawn. He is getting old, Mattern thought pityingly, as he took the pawn. Once I could never beat bint. Now I win two games out of three. "But you are content with the woman?" his partner asked anxiously. "You are not disappointed with her in any way? She pleases you as much today as she did when first you set eyes on her?" "Of course she does! You'd think it was you who'd been dreaming of her all these years, not me." "I suppose we shared those dreams..." "And you'd never seen her." Mattern stared intently at the shadow. "Are you disappointed, then?" "Of course not. You know that to me a human woman is merely an object of art. And she is very beautiful. But I thought she might not have come up to your expectations. Reality often falls short of dreams." The shadow's voice tautened. "Has she changed much?" "Very little," Mattern said, absorbed once more in the game. "You'd think only a year or two had passed. Surprising how women do it." The shadow sighed. "Surprising," it agreed, its voice relaxing. "But then the female sex is mysterious." lence. The kqyres finally spoke. "You will need a lot of money to provide an establishment fitting for so lovely a lady." "I have a lot of money," Mattern said. "More than enough." The kqyres flickered so violently that Mattern's eyes hurt. "Not enough for the things she deserves to have. Jewels, palaces, planets..." "One thing I know would make it a lot more comfortable for her," Mattern suggested. "If only you didn't have to be close to me all the time, kqyres. If only you could stay on the ship even when I'm not there. Not that I don't enjoy your company," he added quickly, "but she seems to be highly strung." "Do you think I like the situation any better than you? But this is the way the mbretersha has ordered it." "I suppose she knows what she's doing," Mattern sighed. In any case, the mbretersha's orders were absolute and could not be contravened -- otherwise, at least one universe might be destroyed. There were still so many things he didn't understand and was not likely to learn. "Strange," he went on pensively, "that Lyddy should have seen you, when I hardly can, and I know you're here." He knew, too, that the kqyres was deliberately vibrating out of phase, so that the horror of his appearance in this continum would be spared not only those he chanced to meet, but also himself. There was always the danger of passing a mirror. Knowing how the kqyres looked in his own universe, knowing how he himself looked in the kqyres' universe, Mattern didn't doubt that any revelation would be a frightful one. However, he couldn't help being curious. "I still think someone must have told her where to stare," the shadow said, "and what for." "Don't be absurd!" Mattern snapped, outraged at the idea that his carefully kept secret might not be a secret at all. "Just try to be careful when she's around. Vibrate harder, or something." "I shall do my poor best." The shadowy one hesitated. "Do you not think that if perhaps you were to tell her the truth -- " "Lord, no!" Mattern exclaimed. "She'd take a fit!" "Once you would not have spoken of her that way," the kqyres said reproachfully. "I didn't mean it the way it sounded," Mattern tried to explain. "It's just that -- well, by now I hardly remember what the truth is myself." Ill ID that truth go back fifteen years, to the time he had met the kqyres, twenty years to the time he had first seen Lyddy? Or even further back than that? Did it go back, say, twenty-four years, to the time when he was sixteen and had killed his stepfather? He could still see Karl Brodek lying there with his head crushed, could still feel the terror rising in him at what he had done... Then he had turned and fled the small community on Fairhurst -- one of the Clytemnestra planets -- and made for the capital, where he shipped out on one of the small tramp freighters that voyaged among the planets of that system. None of the four other planets was human-inhabitable, but two had mining stations, and one had a native civilization advanced enough to make trading practicable, though not very profitable. TOR the next four years, he drifted from one tenth-rate ship to another, one ill-paid job to another. In all this time, he never left the Clytemnestra System. As soon as he was satisfied that his former neighbors were not going to set the law on his trail, he had no desire to go away. It wasn't placeliking that kept him; it was dread of the Jump. Most spacemen never do quite get over their dread of the hyperspace Jump, but with Len the dread amounted almost to a mania. He was ashamed of the feeling, especially since he suspected he'd picked up that extra dollop of terror from the creatures on the native planet. Self-respecting colonials didn't associate with non-humans, but during those first years of fear that his fellow men were hunting him, he'd felt safe only with the flluska. He learned a little of their language, and he spent such spare time as he had on Liman, their planet. He couldn't breathe the atmosphere, but there were the trading domes; nobody minded if he used them when there was no trade going on. The flluska were a religious people, with gods and demons similar to those of the terrestrial cosmogonies. Only, while their gods lived conventionally in the sky, their demons lived in hyperspace. Len was too unsophisticated himself to wonder how so primitive a people could have evolved such a concept as hyperspace in their theology. He merely grew to share their terror of it. The year Len was twenty, the Perseus, one of the star freighters that made the long haul from Castor to Capella, found itself in Fairhurst Station short one deckhand. The man they'd shipped out with was in jail, waiting to see whether a manslaughter or assault charge was going to be lodged against him. The ship could not afford to wait. The station was scoured for a replacement and Len Mattern was the best man they could find. Normally the starships did not take on untrained hands. Even the lowliest crewman was supposed to have spent a minimum number of years at the space schools, because in theory, all promotions came from the ranks, even in the merchant service. But in spite of his lack of training, they offered him the job. The bigline ships never liked to sail shorthanded; in case of trouble, that could be a basis for legal action. T EN knew the opportunity offered him was a dazzling one -- not only far more money than he'd ever seen before, but the chance of breaking out of the system. He was afraid though, terribly afraid. "I've never made the Jump," he told the second officer in a quavering voice. "You'll never be a real spaceman until you do." The second officer was patient, because he knew Mattern was his only chance of making the crew up to its full complement. "I've heard tell that -- things change their shapes in Hyperspace." "Maybe they do; maybe it's their real shapes you see out there. Who's to tell what the truth is?" Len licked dry lips and tried again. "They say there're peoplebeings, anyway -- living in hyperspace." That tale he had heard from spacemen who had made the Jump. Even if he'd believed in the flluska's demons, he would have had the good sense not to admit such a thing to a starship officer -- a man of sophistication from the Near Planets, perhaps even Earth herself. Still, spacemen were notorious myth-spinners. Perhaps he had made a fool of himself, anyway. But the second officer wasn't laughing. "Federation law says we should have nothing to do with the creatures of hyperspace. If we leave them alone, they don't bother us." It would have been better if the officer had laughed at him and said there was nothing in hyperspace but space. "Will we see them?" "Does a ship going through ordinary space see any of us?" the officer returned. "The creatures of hyperspace live on their own planets, and we give those planets a wide berth. Simple as that." He added, "What are you so afraid of, boy? Not a ship's been lost in hyperspace for over two centuries, and there haven't been any blowups for years." "Blowups?" Len repeated. "Accidents. A technical term. You've taken worse risks shipping out in those tincan tramps." Finally, Len gave in -- to his own common sense more than to the officer's -- and signed up for the voyage. He filled out the necessary forms -- hundreds of them, it seemed like. When it came to each line for next of kin, he left a blank on every one. "Haven't you any relatives at all?" the second officer asked, surprised. "Not a one." Len didn't bother to mention that half-brother back on Fairhurst; a five-year-old kid isn't much kin to speak of. Besides, the boy probably didn't even know he had a brother -- he'd been less than a year old when Len left. One of the barren women must have adopted him and brought him up as her own. CO Len Mattern filled out all the  papers and was inscribed on the ship's rolls. And he made the terrible jump through hyperspace for the first time. People who traveled on spaceships only as passengers never could understand why the Jump was invariably referred to as "terrible." That was because before the ship made the Jump they'd be given drugs, in their cocktails, in their food at dinner, or in their drinking water -- and the next day they'd wake up and find they had slept right through the whole thing, so it couldn't be so awful. Of course those who traveled around the universe a lot were bound to catch on. Someday they'd miss a meal or not drink anything and they'd find themselves awake while the ship was Jumping. But the shipping lines didn't take any chances and the aberrant passengers would also find themselves locked in their cabins with smooth metal shutters where the mirrors used to be. But one thing that couldn't be helped: They couldn't be stopped from looking down at themselves and seeing extra arms and legs; or finding no arms and legs at all, but tentacles instead; or that their skin had turned into shining scales or that there was an extra eye in the back of their head. And when the time came for another Jump, they would ask to be drugged. However, crewmen couldn't be drugged. They had to be awake to tend the ship. The credo of the Space Service was that you couldn't trust a machine to itself any more than you could trust an extraterrestrial, a non-human. If a man wasn't in charge, ultimately everything would go to pot. That was part of the space tradition, like the primitive axes that hung on the bulkheads, so a man could smash his way to the modern firefighting equipment. Except, of course, that if fire really broke out, it would be quicker to press the button that sent the automatic fire-fighting machines into immediate action. But still the axes hung there, because they had always hung there -- and, like all the metal on the ship, they had to be kept polished. Each time a ship made the Jump, the crewmen stayed awake. They saw space and time change before their eyes. They saw their own fellows turn into monsters. It was an awful thing to see, even though they knew it wasn't actually a change, but a shift to another aspect of themselves. Worse than the seeing was the feeling. It was like being turned inside out, organ by organ -- your heart and your liver and your guts and all the rest, each carefully turned inside out, the way a woman takes off her gloves, smoothing each one with great precision. The hellish part was that it didn't hurt. A man felt as if he were being twisted and wrenched apart, and it didn't hurt, and it was the wrongness of that more than anything else that -- well, that was why the pay was so high on the starships. So many of them went mad. A LL this Len Mattem had heard of and had exjjected -- though no amount of expectation could have braced him for that kind of reality. But there was more to it than he had heard, and it was the extra part that the second officer seemed curiously anxious to deny. "You saw nobody -- nothing at the portholes," he told Mattern after that first Jump. "You just imagined it." Mattern had been a spaceman long enough to be able to distinguish imagination from reality. Perhaps the creatures of hyperspace did live on planets, but it seemed they did not breathe the atmosphere of those planets as human beings breathe air, and so they were not confined to them. They could move around freely in the starless dusk of their universe. And, if there was a pact, then they must be intelligent creatures -- though he would have known that anyway, for they spoke to him. He could hear them through the tight walls of the ship -- less in his ears than his mind -- cajoling, entreating, promising. And he shut his ears and his mind, because he was afraid. At the end of the voyage, he was offered a permanent berth on the Perseus. "We don't usually take crewmen from the Far Planets," the second officer said thoughtfully. "They don't have the training needed. But you're a good deckhand." Len waited tensely, not knowing whether he did want the job or not. "The universe is opiening up and sooner or later we're going to have to start diversifying our crews, take untrained men, maybe even -- " the officer hesitated -- "extraterrestrials. Sometimes training can restrict a man to the point where he can't think for himself. Main trouble with untrained men, though, is that often they've got too much imagination. They think things that aren't true, see things that aren't there." "I understand, sir," Mattern said. "I'll keep my imagination stowed away until it's wanted." From then on, he had seen no more at the ports than any of his properly conditioned mates. IV T EN Mattern stayed with the Perseus over three years. Gradually, from things he observed himself, from things his shipmates told him, he learned what little there was to be known about hyperspace. Everything was different there from normspace; even the mechanical properties of things changed. However, Jumping was safe enough, as long as the spaceships didn't stop. As long as they were only passing through that other universe, they were, in a sense, not actually there, so that the elements of whicf they were composed would not change, although, to the senses, they seemed to. Unless, of course, the ship collided with something. Then everything became very real. That was what the pact was for -- to make sure they didn't collide. Every spaceship had, locked in the captain's cabin, charts of that other universe -- charts which gave, in normspace terms, the coordinates of the hyperspace worlds. That way, when a ship made the Jump, there would be no danger of her materializing inside one of the alien planets and destroying both. Even touching one of the hyperworlds could have a disastrous effect. Only the captains were ever permitted to see these charts; they would be far too dangerous in irresponsible hands. Len might have grown old in the Perseus service, if the Hesperia System hadn't been one of her stops, and if he hadn't seen Lyddy there. Hesperia was a small, rose-pink sun surrounded by four planets and the debris of what once was a fifth. Most solar systems in the Galaxy had asteroid belts like that; some time later, Len found out why. Three of Hesperia's four planets were barren rocks. The fourth, Erytheia, was mostly water, calm water, sometimes blue, sometimes -- when the sun was high -- violet-tinged. There was land, a small continent in the north, where it was always spring, a slightly larger continent in the south, where it was always summer, and that large island in the west which was said to have a climate better than spring and summer combined. The atmosphere of Erytheia was what they call Earth type -- that is, Man could breathe on it. A very inadequate description, though, because men could breathe the atmosphere of Ziegler's Planet, too, only sometimes it almost seemed worthwhile to stop living in order to stop having to breathe Ziegler's air. Erytheia's atmosphere was gentler and purer than the air of Earth. The native fruits were edible and the local life-forms were small and amiable. But there wasn't enough land for the establishment of a self-supporting colony; it would have bred itself into poverty within a few generations. What else could be done with a small paradise in a remote sector of space but turn it into a highclass brothel and gambling casino? Only the very rich could afford to travel so far to look at scenery, and by the time they reached their destination, scenery wasn't enough. They wanted some excitement. Naturally, the Perseus would stop at Hesperia. Naturally, Mattern would see Lyddy, who was one of the seven wonders of that system. She wasn't too many years out from Earth then, and he had never dreamed any woman could be that beautiful. HE was long-necked and slender, unlike the women of the Far Planets, who were mostly squat-built and bred for labor. It seemed to him he had seen her before -- in a vision, a dream, who knew where? Certainly never in reality. But he could understand why men would travel light-years for her. The prices she charged were also astronomical. Still, if he put away his money carefully, in a couple of years he ought to be able to save up enough for a night with her. It was a goal, and he'd never had a goal before, even such a small one; ever#dhing had been just aimless drifting. He got a tri-di of her and put it up inside the door of his locker and was happy dreaming of her, even if it meant being kidded about her by his shipmates. When he made the next Jump, he knew for certain that the creatures of hyperspace not only spoke to him through his mind, but could enter it and read it if they chose. He felt very naked and vulnerable. Why couldn't the others on his ship also see the creatures, so that he would not be the sole focus of their attentions? "Do what we ask," the hyperspacers -- the xhindi, they called themselves -- said softly, "and you will have enough from just a single voyage to have her for a week, a month, a year. Do what we ask and you can have her for all eternity." "But all I want is just one night!" he protested. And they had laughed, and one with a honey-sweet mind had said, "Is that all you want, really all?" Then they began naming the things a man could want -- and they certainly seemed to have a full knowledge of humanity and its most secret desires. Afterward, Len had started to think. It would be nice to have Lyddy all to himself -- for a while, anyway. It would be nice to be able to buy her pretty dresses and jewelry. There were other things that would also be nice. Maybe he could have his teeth fixed and his leg straightened. His stepfather had broken it the night his mother died and it had never set properly. With money, he could do a lot of things. He hadn't realized there was so much in the universe to be wanted. Now his wages began to look as picayune as once they had seemed large. He could make more elsewhere, he told himself; he might not be educated, but he had a good mind, plus rapidly dwindling principles. He didn't need the hyperspacers, though. There were plenty of illegal ways of making money within the framework of normspace activities. So he left the secure monotony of the starship to seek an enterprise which would bring in quick and copious profits. rather disreputable acquaintance of his. Captain Ludolf Schiemann. Schiemann was an ancient spaceman from Earth, who owned and commanded a ramshackle craft of prehistoric design, held together with spit and spells. Schiemann operated out of Capella IV with cargoes of whatever he could get. He was able to make a living with the Valkyrie only because he would take on jobs that no sane skipper would touch. Some were dangerous; most were illegal into the bargain. The risks were out of all proportion to the profit, which was why the only helper he'd been able to get was Balas -- a big, powerful man, not old but mad. He'd been a deckhand on one of the big starships and had broken too early to be entitled to a pension. Mattern had met old Schiemann at a bar in Burdon, the capital of Capella IV, and had had a few drinks with him whenever the Perseus and the Valkyrie had happened to hit port at the same time. Schiemann had a favorite joke he kept repeating over and over: "If you ever get sick of the Perseus, Lennie -- sick of good food and hot water and decent quarters -- you can always come to the Valkyrie. I'll take care of you." Now Mattern went to him and said he'd like to take Schiemann up on that offer. The old man's pale green eyes protruded even further from his head. "You want to leave the Perseus for a berth on my ship! You're madder than Balas!" "Not a berth. Pop," Mattern told him. "A share of her -- a half share." Schiemann grinned. "Now you must think I'm crazy, to hand over half my ship just like that. Maybe you'd like me to sign her over to you entirely." And he puffed savagely upon his Venuswood pipe. "Look," Len said, "let's not kid ourselves. You're a crook. Pop, but such a lousy crook that you make it look as if crime really doesn't pay. And I'll tell you what's wrong with the way you operate. You have no organization, no system, no imagination. I have 'em all. You contribute the ship; I'll contribute my know-how. Together, we'll make a fortune." "Modest, aren't you?' the old man jeered. "What kind of knowhow do you get working as a deckhand on a starboat? All right, maybe you're the universe's best metal polisher, but -- " "Look, Pop," Len interrupted, "I'll make a deal with you. We work together for a year. If you don't pull in at least three times the amount you got before, as just your share, my half of the ship reverts to you. What could be fairer than that?" Schiemann still wasn't convinced that he was not being played for a sucker. Being what he was, he could never expose himself to a court battle, no matter how much justice might be on his side in a particular instance. But he didn't think Len could be so rotten as to figure on something like that. Besides, the old captain couldn't help liking the boy. So he agreed, saying as he did so, "I should have my head examined." But before the fourth voyage was out, he realized that he had never done a wiser thing in his life. Under Len's direction, the Valkyrie as a business enterprise was cleaning up. Only in relative terms, of course. It took six months, over a dozen voyages, before Len managed to save enough for that night with Lyddy. And every time he made the Jump in the Valkyrie, the hyperspacers told him, "One night won't be enough," and the honeyminded one had insisted, "You must want more than that. You must. Who could be satisfied with so little?" was wonderful, it was ecstasy, it was ever#Tthing he had dreamed of -- but it was too short. "Goodby, honey," Lyddy said as he left, "come back and see me again." "When you have some more money," she meant. And it was all over. For her, not for him. He found he couldn't get her out of his mind. One night was not enough. The xhindi had been right. Now he wanted her for his own, for the rest of his life if not for all eternity. He had no romantic fancies that with him for the sake of true love and himself alone. He had seen himself too often in the mirror panel on the door of his tiny cabin, and he looked there now, with a chill objectivity. Undersized, crippled, pallid with the unhealthy color that comes from spending too little time in any kind of sunlight, Len Mattern was twentyfour and looked forty. Not even an ordinary woman of the planets could love him, let alone a love goddess. But a love goddess who loved money could be bought. However, in order to win her, he'd need to have really big money. No matter how efficiently he organized the Valkyrie's operations, the ship was just a battered old hulk and, in her sphere, could never be more than small-time. There was only one answer -- hyperspace. He found Schiemann puffing contentedly at his pipe in the Valkyrie's control room. "Look, Pop," he said, "we've been wasting our time on stardust. 'W'e have to aim for something big." Schiemann looked trustfully at the young man. He had no relatives, so he had come to think of Len as his son, and, in fact, had made him his heir. "Whatever you say, Lennie. Figure on breaking out of this sector and moving in closer to Earth, do you?" "Not exactly. We're going into hyperspace." "Sure," Schiemann said, blowing a smoke ring. "Can't leave the sector without passing through hyperspace; that stands to reason. But where are we Jumping to?" Len tried to keep the tautening of his body from becoming apparent. "We're not Jumping anywhere. We're stopping in hyperspace." The pipe dropped from the old man's mouth. He caught it in his hand and gave a muffled exclamation as the heat burned his palm. Then he looked at his partner. "Of course you're joking, Lennie." And he arranged his face for laughter. Len shook his head. "No joke. Pop; I'm dead serious. We're going to take a cargo into hyjjerspace. To the mem -- the mem -- oh, hell, I can't pronounce it -- the queen, I guess, of Ferr. That's one of their planets. She wants Earth stuff, she says, and she promises to do right by us if we bring it to her. Sounds like a good deal." I I 'HE silence thickened as the two' men face each other. At last Schiemann got up. "Look, Lennie, I don't make out I'm a saint. I've smuggled and cheated and stolen. But this I will not do. For the laws of the Federation, I don't give a damn -- men made 'em and men can break 'em -- but to go against the laws of nature, that is a different thing." He turned on his heel and went out of the control room. Len went to his cabin and began to pack his gear. As he had expected, Schiemann interrupted him when he was halfway through. "What do you think you're doing?" "Leaving," Len said. "I'm sick of small-time operations." "Leaving me? Just like that? Does our friendship mean nothing at all to you?" "Sure it does," Len told him. "When I get a chance. I'll write." The old man's face crumpled. "Look, Lennie, if we did move into one of the more important sectors, maybe -- " "You know we wouldn't have a chance there," Len said harshly, to conceal his true emotions. "The sectors closer in to Earth have bigger, faster ships, and bigger, tougher men to run 'em. And they wouldn't like us trying to jet in!" "I'd rather take a chance on that than -- " "We wouldn't have a chance; it'd just be a massacre, with us on the receiving end. The only way we can break into the big time ourselves is through hyperspace. We've got to do what's never been done before." That wasn't quite true, from what the xhindi had told him, but near enough. It had been done before, but not very often, and not very recently. However, it had been done, so it was possible to do. Otherwise he wouldn't think of chancing it... or would he? "Why do you want money so much, Lennie?" Schiemann asked. "What do we need the big-time stuff for? It's nice and quiet and practically secure the way you've got things running for us, almost like we were honest businessmen. So why go looking for trouble?" "If I'd wanted a quiet life," Len said, "I'd have stuck with the Perseus. So don't sing me security." The hand that held the pipe was trembling. "Look, Lennie, at least give me time to think." "Okay," Len said. He was, in his way, fond of the old man, but there were bigger things at stake. He had to have Lyddy; he had to have money; he had to have... something he couldn't put a name to, but desperately important nonetheless. "I'll give you six months." A T the end of half a year, Schie. mann said no, he positively wouldn't do it. Len said "Good-by." Schiemann said, "All right, but you'll be sorry; we'll all be sorry," and gave in. So they took the Valkyrie, the two of them -- and Balas, of course, but naturally nobody would consult a madman -- and headed for hyperspace. Len knew exactly where to go, even though he had no charts. The breakthrough he wanted was in their own sector and it had been carefully marked for him in his mind. Schiemann left all the details to him, even the selection of cargo. Len chose coal. He knew that what the xhindi wanted was normspace materials, but not precisely what materials. Their normspace value did not matter, because normspace matter changed to another form of itself when it got to hyperspace, and that was where the possibility of enormous profit came in. Something cheap in normspace could become something quite rare and expensive in hyperspace, and vice versa. The distribution of elements was different between the two universes; each one essentially complemented the other. There was one hitch: a stable form in normspace could become an unstable one in hyperspace. Without empiric knowledge, it was impossible for anyone going from one universe into the other to tell whether any substance he was carrying or wearing or was would remain stable. If unstable, it could turn into liquid or gas; it could turn into energy and blow up; it could cease to be a solid in any one of a number of ways. As if that weren't bad enough, it could also happen that even a stuff previously proven to be stable in both universes could become unstable, if there was even the trace of a potentially unstable element, or if something that, stable in itself, combined with it in unstable fashion. Such an admixture could be accidental, which was what made the whole business especially tricky, and what made the reason for the inter-universe ban necessary. The reason why that first load of the Valkyrie's had been coal was a simple one. Somewhere, Len had read that coal and diamonds were different forms of the same normspace element, and he'd thought that might carry over into the other continuum. However, even an education wouldn't have helped him know what a right first cargo to take would have been. The xhindi had told him what they did know, but their terminology was not clear. They spoke his language with outward correctness but with imjjerfect conceptualization; he spoke theirs not at all. Much of what they did know, they appeared to have forgotten, or only half-learned. They managed to make him understand that certain stuffs would be definitely unsafe; they could not make it clear which stuffs would be safe, or which they would find most desirable as trade goods. He gathered that they would be satisfied with anjrthing that come through. So he chose coal, hoping to make a splendid initial impression.  I "HE Valkyrie reached hyperspace. It slowed down. The throbbing of its creaky engines ebbed to a hum. And it stopped and hung there in the quiet darkness of utterly alien time and place. Schiemann and Balas, expectedly, changed their appearance, but he had seen them in their monster guises before. The coal changed to something pale and glittering, but not diamonds. Everything remained quiet. The ship's instruments recorded no temperature change, but it seemed to grow colder and colder inside her. Suddenly, Mattern knew the truth. A trap had been laid for him, and he had tumbled neatly into it And the most shameful part was that his own desires and yearnings -- deliberately fostered by the xhindi -- had been the bait. He wanted to turn to the horrible thing that Schiemann' had become to scream, "Let's go back!" But he couldn't. Something held tight grip of his mind. And, looking out the portholes, he saw that the xhindi had begun to swarm. The flickering terror of their appearance became more awesome to him than it had been at the beginning, when he'd been only a transitory shadow in hyierspace. Now. although he had no doubt th-i' they were friendly -- indeed, almost ardent in their welcoming -- horror chilled him all over again. He could almost feel the molecules inside his body slow down as his viscera quivered faintly and then froze into stillness. He looked at Schiemann and Balas. Neither of them could, he knew, see the hyperspacers. Their conditioning back on Eiarth's space schools had ensured this. That was the real reason for the schools; any actual training was incidental. But Schiemann knew the creatures were there, and so he could sense them. And Balas, too, certainly seemed to sense something as he stood there, tense and wary and almost understanding. It must be even worse, Len thought, to know the hyperspacers were out there and not be able to see them. "We -- we can still go back," Schiemann said in a cracked voice; apparently the minds outside had not touched his. "Please, Lennie..." "No, it's too late!" Mattern cried. Once he went back, he would never dare return, and all hope of -- Lyddy would fade into fog. The thought of not being able to have her was unbearable. "We can't go back now!" The hideous mask that was Schiemann's hyperspace visage contorted, and drops of liquid flowed where his withered cheeks would have been in normspace. "Please, Lennie..." "I can't," Len said. "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't. It's too late, now that we've stopped." He forced out the words, against objections that seemed to come from outside him -- not objections to Schiemann's knowing the truth, but to his own admission of it. "They're in control," he said. V f?T#E bid you welcome to our  universe, Mattern," the xhindi said in his mind. "Come, follow us. We will lead you to the port on Ferr that we have made ready for you." "Will the ship be safe there?" Mattern asked, remembering the further danger of touching alien substance. "As safe as she could be anywhere in this space." And then the mellifluous one added, "Remember, whatever risks there are, now we share them with you." A point of livid light that danced so Mattern knew it must be alive led them to the gleaming purpledark ovoid that was Ferr, then to the place that had been set aside for the Valkyrie. The xhindi had been right about the port so far as the ship herself was concerned. Probably they'd had a fair idea of what materials she and her contents were comjxised of from the ships that had passed fleetingly through their space, never pausing to become real. What they could not allow for were the random factors. The ship set down on the "safe" port at Ferr. It made contact with the glossy alien ground. And, as it did so. Captain Schiemann very quietly disintegrated. No explosion, no sound. He simply crumbled into a white powder which slowly drifted away, and then was gone. "Coal into diamonds," Mattern found himself saying as he stared at Schiemann's pipe rolling on the empty corridor floor, "dust unto dust." When the pipe quivered to a stop, he began to laugh hysterically. "So you think it's funny, do you?" a gentle voice said behind him. Mattern turned. Balas stood there. "I'm afraid that I don't agree," Balas went on with that frightening softness. "He was good to me, and to you too, Lennie. He was damned good to the both of us. And this is the way you repay him. It wasn't a nice thing to do, Lennie." Mattern opened his mouth to deny intent, but all that came out was the bubbling laughter. "I know you didn't mean for him to disappear like that," Balas said, almost kindly. "It's just that I guess you don't care what happens to anybody but yourself. No, you don't care for yourself even, just the things you want. You're awful greedy, Lennie  awful greedy." His voice was very reasonable. "If I don't do something to stop you, you'll do the same thing to our whole universe that you did to the captain. It would be wrong for me to let that happen. So, you see, I have to kill you. I'm sorry, Lennie, because I like you, but I know you'll understand." And he lunged for Mattern, reaching out the four monstrous arms that were his in hyperspace, with that hideous sanity. Mattern backed away, still laughing. It Balas has gone sane, he thought, then perhaps  have gone mad. Only I am still conscious of everything that's going on: the danger I am in, the way I am behaving. In fact, I have control over all of myself except my laughter. I know where we are -- Balas and I are locked inside the ship alone together, and only one of us is coming out alive.  could have passed through the hull or opened the airlocks in some way, if they had wanted to. But they made no move to try, merely remained outside, watching. The two humans, in that space and time, were alone in a small private war of their own. Mattern could not tell whether the xhindi outside were enjoying themselves, as a group of humans would have under like circumstances, but he seemed to sense anxiety for the outcome -- not only of that battle but of another, inner one. Why, I'm beginning to read their thoughts, too, he realized, in the middle of his fear and hysteria. I am growing closer to them by the minute. And Balas was getting closer to him. Mattern had a blaster, of course, but he was afraid to use it. A bolt of alien energy might produce a reaction that could rip both universes. Yet, bare-handed, he was no match for the bigger, stronger man. Fortunately, he had never pretended to be a hero, not even to himself in the saneness of normspace, so he was able to turn and run. Balas pursued him through the desolate corridors of the Valkyrie, Mattern's laughter echoing crazily in the emptiness. His only hope was to find a hand weapon -- or something that could be used as a hand weapon. And, as he rounded a bend, Mattern saw the primitive fire axe hanging against a bulkhead, the traditional relic that all spaceships, large and small, carried and kept burnished and ready for a use that would never come. But there was another use it could be put to. Instinct made Mattern seize the axe from its hooks on the wall. Instinct surged up from the handle to fill him with the power and joy and knowledge to use it. He turned to face Balas' onrush, and his laughter no longer sounded insane in his ears; it had the triumphant energy of a primeval war cry. The madman's charge was lightning fast, but Mattern was the younger man by at least a decade. He told himself that he meant only to stun Balas, but he was conscious all the time that, if Balas were merely stunned, the problem would be merely postponed. He lifted the axe and brought it down. And then Mattern was alone, the only human being in an alien space and an alien time, locked in this ship with the drifting white dust that had been his friend, and the bleeding corpse that had been -- no, not his enemy, but his friend also, and who had, only minutes after death, already begun to haunt him. It was then that Mattern remembered the other man he had killed in the same way. Karl Brodek had never haunted him, but that was because Len was retribution, not murder. For Len had seen Brodek kill his mother, not all at once, but little by little. It was her face that stayed with him always, her blue eyes and her sweet voice. She'd been the only one he ever had, really -- the brother had been nothing but a wailing blob of protoplasm -- and then Schiemann, a little. Now he was more alone than he'd been in all of his solitary life. He knew that the eerie creatures outside meant him no harm, but would have liked to comfort him if they could. That made it worse rather than better. If only there were some tangible enemy to attack, to beat his fists against... but the only enemy he could find was the monstrous form reflected in the mirror of his own cabin. He was no longer laughing, he noticed; the fit was over. And so, he sensed, was the anxiety outside. In some way, he had passed a test. TT was then that the xhindi be- gan to speak to him through the hull of the ship, urging him to come out. "You have come so far," they said, "and time is a precious and a dangerous commodity. We cannot afford to waste it, either of us." He did not -- could not -- respond. They could have forced him out, but they were kind -- or perhaps only wise. They simply coaxed and waited. After a while, moving stiffly, as if he had cogs instead of a heart, he opened the airlock and went outside. He set foot on the dark polished surface of Ferr. But there was no thrill of strangeness or of triumph or anticipation. There was... nothing. His physical senses were all operating. He knew there was neither gravity nor lack of it. He knew there was no atmosphere -- and he accepted that, not because he accepted the xhindi's word that he would not need to breathe in this continuum, but because he didn't care whether or not he breathed; he didn't care about anything. "Come," the xhindi said, in audible words now, and their spoken voices were as sweet as their mind voices. He found himself moving as through a nightmare, as he proceeded according to their directions, and the xhindi themselves, with their monstrous grace and musical voices, were a logical part of the black ballet in which he found himself participating. The dignitaries of Ferr, a fantasy procession in the moonlit colors of hell -- smoke and flame and shadow -- came to greet him and to lead him to the mbretersha. She glittered splendidly upon her throne of alien substance -- a monster, of course, in human terms, and yet also a great lady, as a queen should be in any terms. Through the fog of his own immediate perception, she reached out and touched him with her dignity and compassion. "I am very sorry," she said, "that such a thing should have happened. I know you are full of grief for your comrades, and I wish that I could have postponed our interview. However, I must press you, for the longer you stay on this world, the greater the risk is for my people." Somewhere before, it seemed to him, he had heard her voice -- sensed her mind pattern, anyway. If he had not known that she was the mbretersha, he would have fancied that hers had been one of the minds that had spoken to him, the most persuasive of the cajoling creatures that had sung him their siren songs as he flashed transistorily through their universe. But, he thought dully, that was impossible. She was the mbretersha, the queen. She read his thoughts, and the pattern of her appearance altered subtly. It was a warm and kind expression of herself; it was a smile. "You must learn, Mattern, that the concept of a ruler in this universe differs from the concept in yours. Here a ruler is the servant of her people, not their master. It is her obligation to take care of them, protect them, watch over them -- in whatever way seems most fitting to her. She can have no pride in herself, only in them. They are more than her children." TT was funny, Mattern thought, that she should so easily plan to break the rules of her universe. A space rat like him -- that was one thing; it was to be expected. But a queen? Now that he was coming back to life a little, he began to wonder about this again. Deftly, she picked the wonder out of his mind and answered it. "Our Federation, like yours, is an artificial creation. Its laws are no more than arbitrary regulations, devised by the various peoples of each universe with regard to the greatest good of the majority, and thrust upon majority and minority alike." Mattern began to understand, or thought he did. "A queen isn't likely to hold with democracy," he said -- though perhaps not aloud. She was a little impatient. "It's not a question of absolute power or divine right -- simply that my people come first, even before myself; my own world is part of me, and I am part of it by nature and instinct. Its needs are my needs. When my people are hungry, I feel the pangs." Most rulers justify themselves like that, he thought, keeping his lips pressed firmly together. But they all do the same things. But he couldn't keep her out of his mind. "No," she said, "you're wrong. I was not speaking metaphorically. My nervous system is attuned to my people's; it is a hereditary trait bred into my family. So being the ruler is not a pleasant station to occupy." It certainly wouldn't be, he thought, if she was telling the truth -- to suffer every pang that was suffered on the planet, and, if the attuning were psychic also, every sorrow. He expected her to pick the disbelief out of his mind, but she smiled and went on to tell him about her planet. Ferr was not a large world. Moreover, it was essentially a barren one. It had been rich only because it had previously engaged in sub-rosa commerce with Mattern's universe. "And the last traffic was long, long ago," she told Mattern. "In a day much before mine, when my mother ruled." "What happened? What stopped the traffic?" "Our captain died of old age, and we have had trouble finding a successor to him." "Why is it so hard to get somebody else?" Mattern asked bluntlyShe paused. When she spoke again, it was so obliquely that he did not realize immediately that it was an answer. "Time was when we had more contact with your people. There were many who knew of the xhindi, although few had actually encountered us. It was not difficult for us to get humans to work with us then. But the barbarians took over your world and your people lost the knowledge of how to get through to us. And when they regained it, we were not why they wished to get through. Much of the problem is in making people believe that we exist." He nodded. "The ffluska call you demons." "There are still some on Earth who call us demons, Mattern. Your rulers and administrators do not call us demons -- no, they are too learned for that -- but your Space Service, by means of divers spells and conditionings, prevents most of those who pass through hyperspace from seeing and hearing us. And, of those who do, most are too frightened for negotiation." S HE asked with sorrowful archness, "Are we so terrible in your eyes, Mattern?" "I don't know," he said slowly, bewilderedly. "Sometimes you are, and I know you will be again. But right now, to me you look -- almost beautiful." There was silence, and, for a moment, he thought that he had offended her. Then, "Thank you," she said softly. "It is a great compliment." He was anxious to know why they had chosen him as their human representative. "Weren't there any men who did try to get through?" he asked. "A few -- a very few -- reached this space." She added reluctantly, "Some of them proved to lack stability of substance -- " He was angry, at her, and at himself, for not realizing that he had not been chosen. It had merely been a question of survival. "Then you knew what could happen to Schiemann!" "It could have happend to anyone, Mattern. You knew there were risks to be taken. We did not conceal that from you." And that was true. It had not occurred to him that the risks would not be equally shared by all three members of the ship's company. The mbretersha continued : "And others of those who come through go mad. We feared that might happen to you, Mattern." "Others go sane also," he said. "This is the first time that has happened in my experience. But truly, Mattern, a madman would not seek to reach us." "I wonder," Mattern said. "I wonder if anybody but a madman would." This time he had displeased her. There was chill silence, and then: "Time is short. It is best that we return to discussing our business together. Now we will pay you for the merchandise you have brought us with a substance which is stable on Earth -- at least it was in times gone by -- and which used to become a stuff of considerable value. On your next trip -- " "What makes you think there's going to be a next trip? What makes you think I'm going to come back here again?" He would really have to be a madman to go through that all over again. The mbretersha smiled. "You will come, Mattern," she said. "You will come when you see how rewarding it is to deal with us. And you will come because -- " "Because of what?" he demanded, more sharply than one should address a queen. "Because your kqyres will make sure that you do." The tall, splendidly illuminated being who stood close to her throne bowed as she introduced him : "This is Lord Njeri, who served as kqyres with the previous captain. He will serve with you." "Kqyres? What's that?" Apprehension quickened inside Mattern. "And what right have you to -- " "Your partner is dead," the mretersha told him. "Lord Njeri is your new partner." her. No point protesting further, he knew; he was on her world, in her power. For the time being, he would have to obey her. "Come, Captain Mattern," said the kqyres. "It is fitting that we superintend the loading of the ship." So they went back to the port and Mattern watched the xhindi fill the Valkyrie's hold with some queer, spongy-looking substance that couldn't possibly be of value anywhere. And beside him stood the kqyres, as he was to be beside him for the next fifteen years. "If you are disturbed about my effect upon your people when they catch sight of me," the kqyres assured the young man, "you may ease your mind. I shall make myself so that I am barely visible in your universe. Only those who look for me can see me. You need have no fear," he added with a sigh. "I have been through all this before." "Yeah, that's what she told me," said Mattern grimly. "It is disloyal of me, I know," the xhind murmured, "but I had hoped the mbretersha would not find a human representative before I died. I am aware of my obligation to my world -- but it is not a pleasant prospect to spend one's last years in exile, however honorable." "Don't worry, as soon as we get to normspace. I'll send you back. I'm not going on with this." The kqyres seemed to shrug sadly. "You cannot send me back, for I am permanently attached to you. Wherever you go, I go -- until the mbretersha chooses to free us, one from the other." Mattern couldn't believe that. Once he got out of this alien universe, none of its laws could apply to him. "Secondly," the kqyres informed him, "you will want to come back here. When you look at the cargo and see what it is, you will want to come back." He sighed again. "I know your species so well. And I do not fancy they have changed." VI " normspace, her cargo proved to be the traditional reward -- gold. Not the most precious metal in the universe any more, certainly, but still valuable. What there was in her hold would come to perhaps as much money as Mattern might, if his luck had held, have amassed in several decades of operating with Schiemann in normspaCe. "Well," said the kqyres as Mattern stood goggling at the glowing bullion, "is the payment just?" "Yeah," Mattern grunted, "fair enough." His mind was working busily: Captain Schiemann is dead, and so is Balas, so I can't do anything about that. A man's got to have some kind of business. Why shouldn't I go on trading with the xhindi, since I seem to be one of the few people lucky enough to be able to do it? Besides, from what the mbretersha said, I couldn't get out of it even if I wanted to. So why fight? Ethics aside, it's a good deal. I'd make more money that way than any other way. I could see a lot of Lyddy. He caught a flicker in the shifting planes of a grayness that the kqyres had become, according to promise. "I'm thinking the way you want me to think -- right, Lord Njeri?" Mattern asked self-mockingly. "You are thinking the way any reasonable being would think." Left to his own devices, Mattern would have disposed of the gold as quickly as he could, and then gone back to Erytheia to spend it all on a year or so with Lyddy. She came that expensive. "And then what would you do?" the kqyres queried. "Well, then I'd go out to hyperspace and make more, I guess. I know it's a little tough on you," Mattern added aFologetically, "but you know how it is; I'm crazy about that woman." The kqyres evidently did not know, but he made an effort to understand. "And, meanwhile, she will go back to -- doing what she has been doing, with other men?" Mattern frowned. "Yeah, I guess   SO. "This procedure is acceptable in terms of your culture?" "Well," Mattern said, "for women like Lyddy, sure. I mean -- oh, hell -- it's hard to explain." "But it doesn't disturb you?" "All right," Mattern said sullenly, "so it disturbs me. So what can I do about it?" "Would it not be wiser," the kqyres suggested, "for you to wait until you can get enough money so you can have her for yourself alone? After all, how long would it take for you to get together a sufficient sum at that rate?" And the kqyres indicated the gold. "You got a point there." Mattern could see that the xhind was right. It would be a lot more sensible to make a few more trips and get himself a sizable bankroll before going after Lyddy, so he'd never have to share her again. Otherwise it would be back and forth, back and forth, until it sent him off his mental course. S O, as soon as he disposed of the gold, he went back with another cargo, and then another. Waiting for Lyddy wasn't as bad as he thought it would be, because he could talk to the kqyres about her. He'd never had somebody he could really talk to; even Captain Schiemann hadn't really been a companion. The kqyres always seemed interested in what Mattern had to say. He never talked much about himself, but he listened patiently to Mattern's description of Lyddy's talents, and charms, including some which, as a non-human, he could understand only intellectually, if at all. And he didn't only listen, with it going in one ear and out the other -- or whatever the xhindi had instead of ears. He made helpful suggestions, such as maybe Mattern ought to fix himself up a little before going back for Lyddy. "I know she is to be -- bought," he said, as if he still didn't quite understand what that meant, "but would you not derive greater pleasure from your purchase if you knew you were a man whom a woman could like for his own self?" Len was silent. He knew the kqyres couldn't understand human concepts of beauty; he had taken Len's own word that the young man wasn't much of a specimen, that his body and his teeth were crooked and his skin bad, his vision defective and his hair drab. Lyddy deserved something better than that; Len knew it himself. Even if she would go with him for the sake of the money, it wasn't the same thing. "I could get my teeth fixed up in this sector," he said at last, "but I'd need to go to the Near Planets, maybe even Earth, to have my leg fixed. It'd take a long time and passage costs a hell of a lot. People don't go that far just for a junket, you know. For most of 'em, it's a once-in-a-lifetime deal." "Of course," Njeri said. "Your wealth is dearly won; you wouldn't want to squander it. However, wouldn't a considerable economy be effected if you went in your own ship?" "The Valkyrie!" Len was shocked into laughter. "She'd never make it to Earth! She'd crumple up like an old paper bag!" "She will not last much longer, in any case," said Njeri. Len had been thinking that himself for some time -- wondering how soon he would have no ship left at all, and what he would do then. "It would be wise," the kqyres suggested, "for you first to get enough money to pay for a new ship. Only a few more trips should be necessary. Then go to whatever planet you deem most suitable for the necessary improvements, and finally return to Lyddy -- a man worthy not only of her but of any woman." "It'll take so long," Mattern said, tempted, and yet driven wild by the idea of Lyddy, so close to attainment. "At your age, what are a few more trips?" Len gave in. into hyperspace merely to pay for the new vessel, a much larger and more elaborate model than Len had planned on buying. "In the long run," his partner told him, "the best is most economical. A sound, spaceworthy vessel such as this one will last out your lifetime. And you can call her the Hesperian Queen, after Lyddy." "Why?" Len asked. "Is that what Lyddy is short for?" "It is the same as naming it after her," the kqyres said shortly. "Only it's a little more subtle." "Oh." Somehow the kqyres made Len feel stupid, uncouth almost, even though he was the human being and the other nothing but hyperextraterrestrial. The treatments were even costlier than anticipated, and it took many more trips to pay for them. Expenses were increased by the fact that he had to commute back and forth from his sector of space to the planet where he was being treated, since he couldn't afford to neglect his business now that his costs were mounting. He had his leg straightened on Earth. That world was as colorful, as complex, as intoxicating as it was claimed to be. One series of marvels after another presented themselves before his inexperienced eyes like scenes in a vision show -- except that he was actually there, breathing, tasting, feeling a part of this vast sophistication. Earth had many beautiful women, and he enjoyed the favors of those in Lyddy's profession, but only to prove to himself that she was much more wonderful. He decided there was no point bothering with the other planets; he might as well have his teeth and everything else taken care of on Earth, too. "Very wise of you," the kqyres approved. "The best is always the soundest, and, hence, most worth waiting for. Like Lyddy." "Yes," Mattern agreed, "she is the best. And the most beautiful." "Of course," the kqyres said. "Tell me more about her." And Mattern talked, far into the night. What he couldn't remember of her by now, he imagined, so that the picture should be complete, not only for the xhind but for himself. When his leg and his teeth had been fixed, "Why stop at that?" the kqyres asked. "If it had not been for the way that stepfather of yours treated you as a child -- " for Len had found himself telling his companion not only about Lyddy but about everything -- "you would be a fine-looking man today. It would be no difficult task to have you restored to what you should rightfully be." course, do such a thing out of vanity. But the more presentable he made himself, the more he would be offering Lyddy. So it would be worth the extra time, especially since he could spend so much of it on Erth. Lyddy had come from Earth; it would be a bond between them later. Doctors and cosmetologists got to work on him. Each treatment seemed to be lengthier than the preceding one, and more expensive. He could, however, easily afford it -- all he had to do was make more trips. The kqyres not only told him what cargoes to take but advised him on the investments to make with his profits. They did very well together. As far as Mattern was concerned, they did fabulously well, because he had to make enough on his side to counterbalance the entire expenses of a planet on the other. The thought impressed him. I am, in a sense, equal to the mbretersha, he thought, and she is a monarch. As a result, he walked a little more erect than even the operations had rendered him. The dangers of his trade grew less and less frightening as he came to know his way between the universes, even though, at the same time, he began to realize how great those dangers were. He had not conceived of their immensity before. The reason there were asteroid belts in so many of the solar systems, he learned now, was that the xhindi had traded with other intelligent races in earlier eras, and there had been accidents. Those races were now extinct. The xhindi themselves ceased to be monstrous in his eyes. He grew to accept their appearance as perfectly natural in their universe. Toward the kqyres, he came to feel something of what he had felt toward Schiemann, except that where Schiemann had looked up to him and relied on him, he found himself increasingly dependent on Njeri. He told him all his hopes and ambitions, and the kqyres listened attentively. Mattern tried to explain to him how he himself felt about Lyddy, and the kqyres tried to understand. The kqyres taught Mattern how to play chess. "But that's our game!" Mattern said. "I mean we play it in our universe!" "In ours also," the xhind smiled. "Who knows whether it came from our universe to yours, or yours to ours? Nor does it matter. It is an old game and a good one." Mattern became increasingly skillful at it. He was pleased that there was an intellectual activity in which he could engage as an equal with the kqyres, and the kqyres seemed pleased, too.  over, Mattern looked in a mirror. He was straight; he was handsome. His skin was clear, his eyes bright. He looked less than his age. Now he could go back to Lyddy, assured that most women would find his physical appearance more than acceptable. But he found himself hesitating. Only his physical appearance would be truly acceptable. There was something still lacking in him. His body was right, but the way he stood, the way he moved, the way he spoke, all these were wrong. "I'm not finished yet," he said stumblingly to the kqyres, "not quite straightened out. I ought to be more -- well, more smooth." "You do lack polish," the kqyres admitted, "although you are far less awkward, shall we say, than when we first met." "That's because of you, Njeri!" Mattern declared, with genuine gratitude. "You've taught me a lot!" And he looked at his outlandish friend with a great affection. The kqyres seemed quite moved; he flickered like a pinwheel. "You have been an exceedingly apt pupil, Mattern. When first I saw you, I did not think it possible that I should ever consider you a companion. However, I have found myself taking an increasing pleasure in your company. Sometimes I even forget you are a human." Mattern could not speak; he was so overwhelmed by the tribute. "The passage of time disclosed to me that there were sensitivities and perceptions beneath that -- forgive me, but we know how misleading first impressions can be -- boorish exterior. The very fact that you are conscious of your own deficiencies proves that you are more than the mere clod you still, on occasion, seem to be -- " "Can't I improve myself that way, too?" Mattern asked plaintively. "Can't I make myself worthy of Lyddy in every way?" "Of course you can," the kqyres beamed. "Were you to apply yourself specifically to the acquisition of culture, I am sure you could become as polished as any human being can hope to be. But it will take time." "Well," Mattern said, "Lyddy's waited so long, she can wait a little longer. Things worth having are worth waiting for." Under Njeri's tutelage, Mattern cultivated the arts and the amenities. As he used his ship for a permanent residence, it was there that he housed his growing collection of costly rare objects of art, and his library, notable for its first editions -- not only of tapes, but of books. His uniforms were cut by the best terrestrial tailors and he took kinescope courses in the liberal arts and social forms from the outstanding universities of Earth. The provincial twang vanished from his speech; he developed a taste for wine and conversation. Nobody, seeing him, could ever have fancied him once a poor wizened space rat. A S the years went by, he grew to become as much of a ruler in his way as the mbretersha in hers. She ruled one planet, he told himself, but he had a business empire farflung over many planets -- all of which, to some extent, he did rule through his investments. He would have worlds to lay at Lyddy's feet now, he thought complacently. No man could offer any woman more. The first Hesperian Queen didn't have a chance to last out his lifetime; he kept trading her in for another and yet another model, as better, faster, more luxurious starships were developed. Finally, he outbid the Federation Government itself for plans of the latestmodel spacecraft. When the government protested, he graciously gave them copies free of all charge. "I merely wanted to be sure that I had the best ship available," he explained. "I have no objection to your having it also. But I knew that you could not afford to be as generous as I can." He never had more than one ship, because it was too dangerous to run more than one cargo at a time. His crew was always as small in number as possible. He would have preferred none at all; actually, all spaceships could run themselves, for the controls were completely automatic. But regulations said there had to be a crew, both for the sake of "face" -- many extraterrestrials couldn't seem to recognize the authority of machines -- and because a power failure was not inconceivable. So the Hesperian Queen carried four men. And, whenever she made the Jump through hyperspace, even the crew -- though conditioned on Earth -- was drugged. Mattern carried on alone. And if, when the crewmen awakened, they found that a day had passed when only an hour should have gone by, they knew better than to ask questions. So the years went by -- busy, pleasant, profitable years. The image of Lyddy was always before him, inspiring him to further efforts. Someday soon I will go back to her, he would tell himself. On his latest birthday, he looked in the mirror closely. At twenty-four, he had appeared forty; at forty, he could have passed for thirty. Sixteen years had gone by since that night with Lyddy. Now he was worthy of her or anyone. "I think it's time I went back for her," he told the kqyres. "For whom?" the kqyres asked; then added hastily, "Oh, yes, of course, Lyddy. We'll do that right after we come back from the Vega System. There's a little Earth-type planet out there -- " "Before we go to Vega," Mattern interrupted. "Now." "But why the hurry? You'ye waited so long already -- " "I've waited too long. I'm not young any more." "Neither is she," observed the kqyres. "Perhaps she is too old now, Mattern." "She can't be too old," Mattem said. The tridi in his locker was Lyddy, and the picture was young; therefore, Lyddy must still be young. "She may have married someone else. She may have numerous children clustering about her knee." "Then I will take her away from her husband and children," Mattern declared. "Can you imagine that a little thing like that would stop me?" "She may have lost her beauty," the kqyres said. "She may have left Hesperia. She may have suffered a disfiguring accident." Njeri was deliberately trying to keep him from going back to Lyddy. Either he felt that she would interfere with the smooth operation of their business, or he was jealous of a third intruding into their company. "I have done everything I did for the sake of winning Lyddy," Mattern said, biting off the words. "If all hope of her is gone, then my whole reason for working with you is gone. I will never go back to hyperspace." "There are other women -- " "Not for me!" "The business itself means nothing to you?" There was an aggrieved note in the kqyres' voice. "It's just a living," Mattern said, "just a way of getting Lyddy. You know that was why I went into it. I thought you'd been listening to me all these years." "I thought perhaps with the deepening of your interests -- " "They have only made me love her the more profoundly." The kqyres took the equivalent of a deep breath. "You do not have a house or any regular place of residence. You cannot expect a lady to live permanently on a spaceship." "I will build her a house." "Will it not show her how carefully you have prepared for her if, first, you build her a palace worthy -- " "I have no time to build palaces." "There is a tiny planet that circles the dim sun you call Van Maanen's star," the alien persisted. "It is always twilight there. The beings who live on that planet build crystal towers miles high and as fragile as spun glass, in dusk colors the rainbow never dreamed of." "If she wants a crystal tower, I will have one built for her. But first I will ask her." "Very well," the kqyres sighed, "since nothing else will satisfy you, let us return and fetch her." And when they got to Erytheia City, Lyddy was still there, not only unmarried, but -- in spite of all the years -- unchanged. A ND now Mattern had been her husband for several months. He had begun to know her, and he realized that she could never be let known the truth about his life and his work. She would be frightened, and, if there was any emotion left over in her, angry. He told the kqyres: "I've been thinking of taking Lyddy to Burdon. She might find distractions there that will take her mind off -- things it shouldn't be on. What do you think of the idea?" "I cannot tell," the kqyres replied doubtfully. "I have a curious feeling..." "That what?" Mattern prompted him anxiously. It was the first time he had seen the kqyres definitely at a loss, although it had seemed to him of recent months that the xhind's assurance was beginning to ebb. "... that I am getting too old for my work," the kqyres finished. "Nonsense!" Mattern cried. The kqyres was his tower of strength; he would not conceive of any weakness in him. It would mean that he would be forced to rely upon himself. And yet, he thought, I am certainly old and experienced enough by now to begin relying upon myself. In fact, I'm getting a little old and tired, too. "You know," he said to his partner, "maybe we both ought to retire." "What do you mean?" "You've been at thte long enough and I've got all the money I want. We can see each other sometimes; no reason why I couldn't go into hyperspace just to visit." The kqyres paled to pearl. "Now that you have Lyddy, you don't want anything else at all?" "Now that I have Lyddy, what else is there to want?" The kqyres flickered anxiously. "But the mbretersha has commanded -- " Mattern smiled. "Her commands don't hold good in this universe. You know that. When I was a kid, she could fool me into believing she had a hold over me. But the hold is a psychological one; that's the only thing that could carry over from universe to universe. And I'm strong enough to break it now." Although he was not quite serious, it might be, he thought, that the hyperspace trade and the trips to Ferr had spoiled him for everyday life, made him too restless for the mundanities of any world. And it was time for him to settle down now. He let the kqyres win the game, and then he stood up. "I'd better start getting things ready for the trip to Burdon." "You've definitely decided to go?" "Yes," Mattern said, pleased with himself, "definitely." He went to the control room and got out the forms that would need to be filled out before the ship could leave port. Suddenly he remembered his puzzlement about the young spaceman -- what was his name? -- Raines? He pressed a button on the file, and the boy's records flashed up at him. At first they seemed to be in order: Alard Haines, aged twenty-five, educated on Earth, well and good. But born on Earth... Mattern was almost positive that could never have been, not from the way the young man spoke. And one false statement meant that the whole record was false. However, he could not challenge the discrepancy before they left for Capella. If he spoke to Raines, he'd probably have to dismiss him then and there. It would be difficult to find a suitable replacement in Erytheia City. He might have to send for someone from Earth, which would take months, perhaps a year. First he'd take the Queen to Burdon, he decided, and then he would fire Raines. ' before they could leave. Mattern found himself looking forward with some impatience to Burdon. When Lyddy had a house of her own that she could take an interest in, he told himself, things would be different; she would be different. This way she was bored much of the time, and boredom is contagious. "I've 'vised ahead to Capella, dear," he told her as they boarded ship, "and rented a furnished multiplex, so we'll have some place to stay." "Yes, honey," she said, with a strange lack of interest. She didn't even seem surprised at the size of the ship. Underneath her elaborate makeup, she was pale; her body was trembling. She saw that an explanation was necessary. "It's been so long since I made the Jump. Silly of me to be so nervous, but you do hear things about hyperspace..." "You're safer in my ship than anywhere else." "Yes, I know." Was she merely expressing trust in him, or was there more to her words than that? At first he was just vaguely suspicious. Then, the second day out, he noticed that Lyddy and Raines seemed to be together a good deal more of the time than chance would account for, and his suspicions secured a focus. The two had some kind of unspoken understanding, he thought, watching them as much out of curiosity as anger. I have become chilled with the years of alien company, he thought. # am incapable of true pass-on; perhaps that is what she seeks in another. But, though he might find excuses for her, he would not condone her. A bargain was a bargain. At the end of the first week, he said to her one evening, as he sat on the edge of the bed, watching her brush her long, thick gilded hair, "Darling, I'm a little worried about one of my crewmen." Lyddy didn't turn from the jeweled dressing table he'd had' especially installed for her. "Which one?" she asked. "Young Raines. Do you know which he is?" "Yes." She paused. "There's only one young one. Why are you worried about him? Do you think he's sick or something?" But that was the question she should have asked before asking the man's identity. Mattern let a moment elapse, then said, "His papers appear to be forged." He glanced at the reflection of her face, but it held neither relief nor fear, merely its usual sweet emptiness. "Maybe he needed a job real bad," she said. "Maybe," her husband agreed, "but why use forged papers?" "He might of gotten into some kind of trouble -- you know how boys are." "I'd hardly care to employ the kind of spaceman who gets into trouble serious enough for him to lose his papers. You have to do something pretty drastic to get them taken away, you know." She said nothing. ning to suspect is that he isn't really a trained spaceman at all, that he didn't go to any of the Earth space schools." "Do you have to go to an Earth space school to be a spaceman? Can't you study somewhere else?" "Earth's the only place where they give the conditioning." He told the truth' figuring she wouldn't understand. She turned to look at him. "That's so the men shouldn't -- see the things outside when they go through hyperspace, isn't it?" Mattern was somewhat taken aback. "How did you know? It's not public information." She shrugged and turned back to the dressing table. "I've known a lot of spacemen, hon." Her face was pale, but why just now? He wondered just what Raines had told her -- how much the boy actually knew. Naturally there could be only one possible reason he had chosen Lyddy as his confidante. "There's something between you and Raines, isn't there?" he asked. There was a slight delay. Then her laughter shrilled through the cabin. "Don't be silly, hon; I hardly know the man! All I've done was speak to him a couple of times!" She got up and put her soft arms around her husband. "You're jealous, Len," she said, and there was complacency mixed with the fright in her eyes. He felt a pang of disgust, but tried not to let it show. Gently, he put her away from him. "But that's so silly," she murmured. "How could I prefer a dumb pimply kid to you?" In theory, that was quite true, but Len knew women had strange tastes. And possibly "a dumb pimply kid" had more to offer her emotionally and, in reverse, intellectually, than he had. It was not impossible that she was telling the truth, but Mattern could not, of course, believe her. And there was no point in making a further issue of it now. When they reached Burdon, he would fire Raines simply on the basis of the forged papers. No need to bring Lyddy into it at all. So that problem would be easily solved, but what of the others? He went to play chess with the kqyres. "I trust you have got over your whimsical notion to retire," the xhind said hopefully. "No," Len told him maliciously, "I've practically made up my mind to quit. There doesn't seem to be any point to it any more." "The woman has changed! That's the whole trouble, isn't it? Even though it's not apparent, in some way she has changed?" "No," Len said again, "she hasn't changed at all. In fact, I think that's what the trouble is. She hasn't changed, but I have." "I never thought of that," the kqyres confessed.  I 'HE night of the Jump, Mattern turned in at the kqyres' suggestion. "For once, your men can take care of the ship," the xhind said, "since there will be no trading stop." Lyddy would be drugged, but Mattern would not need drugs, for hyperspace held no more horrors for him. Or so he thought. But that night he was awakened by the sound of a screaming so hideous that, if he hadn't known voices don't change during the hyperjump, he would be tempted to think it was one result of the law of mutability -- so monstrous were these shrill, worse-than-animal cries. tTE rushed out of his cabin. In the corridor stood Lyddy, still screaming, her face contorted with terror that only the sight of Alard Raines standing there in his normal shape let Mattern know that they had already passed the Jump. The shrieking separated into words. "I saw it! It was horrible!" And she made an ugly noise in her throat. "You were right, Alard. It's true! There's a monster on board and it did something awful to me..." Her voice ebbed to a bubble as she looked down at her body beneath the thin veil of fabric and found the same voluptuous curves she had started out with. Mattern sighed. "Better come into my cabin, Lyddy." And then he jerked his head at Raines. "You come, too." He paused in the doorway when he saw there was no need for privacy. "Where are the other crewmen?" "Asleep," Raines said. "Drugged. As usual. Who do you think you're fooling, anyway?" Mattern was too disturbed at the news to take notice of the boy's manner. "But they weren't supposed to be drugged this trip! And who's in charge then? You?" Raines flushed and struggled to pronounce the word he wanted to use in return. 'Your kek -- kqyres, I'd say, is in charge. Like he always has been," he concluded triumphantly. Mattern shut the cabin door behind the three of them. Lyddy went over and sat down on the edge of the bunk, quieter now that she found her personal transformation had been ephemeral. Seeing a monster is not, after all, anywhere near as bad as being a monster. Her fright dimmed and was outshone by a strong sense of personal injury. "I thought all Alard's talk f kek-kek-monsters was just superstition," she babbled, "but it's true. I saw that thing with my own eyes and it's hideous! Len, why do you have it on board, especially when I'm here?" "I have to," Len said. "He's my partner." Her blue eyes widened in shock. "Then you've been doing more than just trading with the hyperspacers. You'e been associating with them, and they're even worse than extraterrestrials because they're so much more -- extraterrestrial!" She went on talking in this vein, but Mattern ignored her and turned his attention to the boy. "I suppose you told her not to eat or drink anything so she'd see the hyperspacer?" Raines nodded, his face essaying contempt but imperfectly concealing terror. "And I suppose you yourself did the same thing, not knowing the men weren't going to be drugged this trip?" Len sat down behind his writing table and looked thoughtfully at the young man. "You must have done the same thing before, on other trips, to know as much as you seem to. You must have heard and seen a great deal, eh?" "Plenty," Raines said, through brave, stiff lips. "Plenty." Obviously the boy hates me, Mattern thought. But why? Is Lyddy enough reason? a VjHY did you bring her into  this?" he asked, almost mildly. Lyddy didn't give Alard a chance to answer. "Because he wanted me to see you as you really are!" she shrieked. The boy shuffled his feet. "I had to tell somebody." "Why my wife, though? She owes you nothing; she owes me everything. The first woman of the streets you picked up would have made a safer confidante." "Maybe I trusted her." "Maybe you had no right to trust her!" Mattern cried, almost with sincerity. "It would have been wrong of her not to tell me." "Maybe it was because I -- I love her," Alard said, looking down at the thick rugs that covered the cabin floor. "If you fall in love with somebody, you tell them things." Mattern couldn't help smiling. "I never do," he said. "Maybe you've never been in love. Maybe you don't have any human feelings at all." There was an uncomfortable feeling in Mattern's shoulders, as if his tailor had made a mistake for once. Had he, during sixteen years of alien trade, changed into something not quite human? Was there then a solid basis for the anti-extraterrestrial prejudice? He picked up a slender, sharp thike and ran his thumb absent-mindedly along the blade. Alard stiffened in his effort not to flush. Mattern smiled and laid the thike down on the table. It was only a paperknife and had never been used for anything more. If he ever had need for such a thing to be done, the time was long past when he would have needed to do it himself. He looked at the crewman. "One would almost think you told my wife because you wanted her to tell me," he suggested. "That's ridiculous!" Alard flashed. "I may be a fool, but not that much of a fool!" "Why are you on my ship with forged papers then?" Mattern demanded. "I wanted -- I wanted to bring you to justice." "By committing a crime yourself? Surely a roundabout way. And why have you taken it upon yourself to help rid humanity of me?" "Why shouldn't I?" Alard asked. "I'm a human being; isn't that enough? But, as a matter of fact, that wasn't the reason I came to your ship. I only found out later what you were doing." Mattem waited patiently. "You killed my father!" the boy burst out. And then tension seemed to ebb from him, as if the worst had happened. "So now you know who I am!" Mattern picked his words delicately. "If you have proof that I murdered your father, why don't you prosecute? There's no statute of limitation on murder on any of the planets. Or don't you have proof?" Alard's voice broke slightly. "Everybody on Fairhurst knows you killed him, but they won't do ansrthing about it. They say he deserved what he got." now who the young man was. His brother. Another responsibility, another vain tie. "How do you know, he didn't deserve what he got?" Mattern asked. Suddenly Alard grew shy. He lowered his eyes to the rug again. "Because I didn't deserve what  got." And there, Mattern thought, Alard had him. Whatever the boy was now, he certainly had not deserved what he'd got then. But I was only sixteen, Mattern argued with himself; how could I have been held responsible? And then he told himself. You haven't been sixteen for twenty-four years. "I thought one of the women in the village would have adopted you," he said. "One of 'em did. They took rne away from her after she beat me so hard she practically killed me. Every little thing I did wrong, she said it was the bad blood coming out in me, and beat me so hard the blood did come. I went from one family to another, but nobody really wanted me." His voice cracked wide across. "You don't know what it's like to grow up with nobody caring for you!" "It so happens I do," Mattern said, "but I can't expect you to believe me." Alard wasn't interested in Mattern's life story; he wanted to wallow in his own in front of a captive audience. "The only hope I had was that you would come back for me some day. They told me you were probably dead, but I wouldn't believe it, see? It was all I had to hang onto." "I thought you were part of a family," Mattern tried to defend himself. "I thought you belonged to somebody." He almost convinced himself that this was true, but, at the back of his mind, something whispered. You ditched him. "When I was sixteen, like you'd been, I ran away to look for you. I found out where you'd gone and I followed. I even stayed a while with the flluska. I liked them better than my own people. They said I should try looking for you in hyperspace." "They are a very wise people," Mattern said. Alard hadn't had his brother's luck. None of the great starships offered him a berth. But there were unchartered vessels -- smugglers and pirates and worse -- that would hire anybody who didn't value his life very highly and knew how to keep his mouth shut. He got jobs on them. And as the bandit ships he sailed on took Jumps closer and closer in to the more sophisticated sectors, Alard began to hear of a Len Mattern. It took him a long time before he could bring himself to believe that this king of finance was the brother whom he had imagined finding derelict and penniless. Instead, he was rich and oblivious, not needing anything the younger man could give him. It was then that Alard determined revenge. It took him years to save up enough money to buy the false papers he needed -- more years to buy his way into Mattern's crew. And, finally, he had achieved his end; he was there. UT you've been with me almost a year now," Mattern pointed out, "and done nothing except talk to Lyddy against me. What were you planning to do?" "I don't know," the boy said hopelessly. "Lots of times I thought "You could have told me who you were. I'd have done something for you." Alard's eyes blazed. "Yes, you would have. When it's easy, when it wouldn't mean a damn thing to you, you'd do something for me!" Len pulled out a smokestick and offered it to the boy. Alard shook his head impatiently. Len lit one for himself. Neither of them said anything. Lyddy was sobbing softly. "You never really loved me," she whimpered. "It was just a way of getting back at Len." Alard looked away from her, met his brother's eye, and dropped his gaze to the rug, without denying the impeachment. Mattern exhaled smoke. "All right, you had a grudge against me, but what did you have against her? If you were using her to get back at me, then I think you have no cause to reproach me for anything I did. Maybe your fostermother was right; there is bad blood in the family." The young spaceman was still silent. Lyddy lifted her head. There was resolution on her tear-smudged face. "I'm going to leave you, Len! I can't go on living with a man who does the awful, evil, unnatural things you do..." Her voice petered out as her vocabulary proved unequal to her emotions. Poor Lyddy, he thought. And then, Poor Len, with emotions unequal to his vocabulary. "Everything I did, I did for your sake, Lyddy," he told her softly, but no longer with any hope of her comprehension. "It was because I was poor and couldn't afford your love that I went into hyperspace." He couldn't help adding, "Doesn't it mean anything to you that I risked a whole universe for your sake, and that now I have worlds to offer you?" "Don't put the blame on me, Len Mattern!" Angry tears stood in her eyes. "I never wanted anybody to do that much for me. All I wanted were nice things and somebody to take care of me and maybe love me. I never wanted to have the whole universe risked for me." Her voice broke on the truth. "Nobody's worth all that!" She was right, he thought -- being given too much can be worse than being given too little. The words spilled out of her; he'd been so disenchanted by her stupidity that he gave her credit for less understanding than she did have. "You wouldn't've been able to wait fifteen-sixteen years for me if you really loved me. But you were happy the way you were -- you and that extraterrestrial of yours. All you wanted was to dream about me. You were a fool ever to have come back for me; you shoulda stuck with your dreams." A ND again, he knew, she was right. He felt very tired and empty, the way he'd felt after Schiemann and Balas had died, as if nothing mattered any more. He didn't argue with her. "What would you do if you left me, Lyddy?" he asked gently. "I can always -- " she swallowed -- "go back to my old job, I guess." Alard gave an exclamation of horror, and Mattern agreed in his mind that that solution would never do. Beyond a doubt, she was his responsibility. And so was A'. A It V-.,. Vs Alard. Why had he ever longed for a family? And then an outside mind joined in with his and he knew what to do. "Alard," he said, 'Tjefore, I offered to do something for you. Now I'm not going to do anything for you, not a damn thing." Alard drew himself erect. "I wouldn't expect you to, see? Even if you wanted to, I wouldn't take -- " "I want you to do something for me," Mattern cut in. Alard paled, then flushed with anger. "If this is some half-baked way of thinking you can make up for things without me feeling -- " "Hear me out before you leap to conclusions. You said that you loved my wife... Lyddy gave a moan. "You know he was only stringing me along to get back at you." "He wouldn't have done that," said Mattern. "Not a fine, upstanding boy like Alard, no matter how much he hated me. You really love Lyddy, don't you, Alard -- as you said before?" The boy looked frightened. "Only in a manner of speaking," he said quickly. "I was trying to make you jealous. I think of her as a sister -- a sister-in-law." "She's very beautiful," Mattern reminded him. And the xhindi had done their work well. She hadn't changed; they had preserved her for him just as she had been sixteen years before. If only they had let her change, then things might have worked out They could have kept the body from growing old without holding back the mind -- or had they not held back the mind? Was this the fullest maturity it was capable of? "A man who has her as his wife should be very happy," Mattern pointed out. "You wouldn't want her to go back to what she'd been doing, and she won't stay with me." "Yes, sure." There was a desperate note in the boy's voice. "But she's not young. I mean for me -- although, of course, she looks young," he added, with a wild glance in her direction. "And she's not very -- she isn't -- " Mattern got up and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. "Then if you feel that way about her and do as I ask, it will really be a favor to me." "Why should I do you a favor?" Alard demanded. His eyes darted back and forth like an animal that is beginning to realize it is caught in a trap. "To prove you're the better man," Mattern told him. "To heap coals of fire on my head. To prove that if there's bad blood in the family, it exists only in me." Alard didn't ask what Mattern wanted him to do. He knew already. iTJ. j vvant you to take her with you." "Take her," Alard repeated numbly. "Where?" "Anywhere she wants to go -- to Earth or back to Erytheia, or any one of the planets she chooses." "Will she go with me?" Alard challenged. "You have to ask her; she has the right -- " "Oh, I'll go with you, Alard," Lyddy interrupted joyfully. "I'd go with anybody right now, but especially you." "Even if you know I love you only as a sister?" "That's better than nothing," Lyddy said. "Besides, you could change your mind. I think you and me have a lot more in common than him and me." "I want to make sure there will always be someone to take care of her, to watch over her," Mattern told his brother. "Funny, I wouldn't have done what I did except for the sake of winning her, and now that I've won her, I can't hold her because of what I did to get her. But she was my dream and I want her to be cherished." "That's noble of you, Len," Lyddy said. "I'll think of you often, and I won't be mad at you." She got up and linked her arm in Alard's. "You'll take good care of me, won't you, hon?" But it was to his brother that Alard spoke. "I'll take good care of her," he promised, his voice thick with an emotion that was one part sentiment, one part resignation. "Splendid," Mattern said. "I wouldn't want her to be cast adrift. She knows so little of any of the worlds outside her own restricted sphere." "Sure," Alard replied miserably, "I understand. I'll do my best." Mattern got up and put out his hand and, after a little hesitation, Alard took it. "I hope in time you'll come to forgive me," Mattern said, "and that your hatred will dwindle into dislike, perhaps even tolerance." "Oh, I don't hate you any more," Alard assured him. "I guess, in your way, you've had as much to put up with as I did." He frowned in perplexity. "But why did it have to be me?" "You'll change your mind about that, too," Mattern said comfortably. "Lyddy is a very accomplished woman." the two together in his cabin. At long last, he was free of responsibility, of illusion, of dreams. He didn't need a woman; it would be wrong for him to expect a woman to live with the kqyres, even unwittingly. Love was for the very young; he had his work. And now that he was free of all these vexing human entanglements, he'd be able to take hold of the business the way he should have been doing all along. The kqyres was getting old; it was time to assume the details of management himself. There were quite a few areas of operation which could become even more productive if the business was thoroughly reorganized. Mattern went up to the control room. The kqyres was there, which was not his usual place. Perhaps Alard had been right when he said it was Njeri who had drugged the other crewmen and taken control of the ship. Presently, Mattern would ask him why, but there were other matters to be discussed first. "Well," Mattern said, flinging himself into a chair, "Lyddy seems to be disposed of satisfactorily." He gave a rueful laugh. "I take it you had a hand in the arrangements. That was only fair -- she's your creation." He waved his smokestick at the xhind. "However, I'm warning you, I won't let myself be manipulated any more. You're through pushing me around." The kqyres seemed almost offended. Then there came a soft chuckle. "Manipulated, nonsense! We merely deluded you a little, in the same manner you were wont to delude yourself, but more purposefully. In truth, what else could we do? We needed you, and in order to induce you to accept our terms, we had to establish some goal, some ideal for you to aim at." Something about the kqyres' voice disturbed Mattern; he only half listened as the hyperspacer continued: "And the resources of your mind were so pitifully meager at that time that this woman was the best we could dredge up. Later, when your horizons had broadened and your perceptions deepened, we attempted to alter your goal to a more worthy one, but the woman had already become an obsession..." "You're not the kqyres," Mattern interrupted. "You have a different voice." "Not the same kqyres," the voice corrected. "Truly, it was unfair to make Lord Njeri go through a thing like this twice in one lifetime. Moreover, as he grew old, he grew careless." So that was why the men had been drugged. There had been an unscheduled stop in hyperspace. Mattern got up and looked intently at the shadowy form. The xhind flickered a little, as if in embarrassment, and embarked almost nervously upon an explanation. "You were never intended to attain Lyddy, merely to keep her image before you like the star a mariner follows but can never reach." And then the kqyres laughed. "Except, of course, that today he can reach his star." "A carrot and a donkey might be a more suitable simile," Mattern said. "Pity you couldn't have provided a better carrot." The new kqyres ignored this comment. "Lord Njeri was transferred. He has asked me to say that he looks forward to the pleasure of renewing your friendship when you come again to Ferr. Meanwhile, I have taken his place." After some hesitation, the new kqyres added, "I hope we shall be good friends, also." There was no use pretending any longer. "I know who you are," Mattern said. "I recognize your voice. You're the mbretersha herself, aren't you?" dismayed. "Yes, I am the mbretersha. I came to realize that the post of kqyres was more difficult than that of queen. Therefore, I was the only one who should rightfully undertake it As I told you, in our universe a ruler cannot afford pride. She lives only for the good of her people." "She's got to," Mattern said bluntly, "if, as you said, her nervous system is attuned to theirs. What actually did happen is that Njeri told you I was quitting the business and he couldn't control me any more. So you took his place to see if you could change my mind." "Oh, that was a mere pleasantry!" she said. "I knew you would not give up the hyperspace trade. What else would you have left?" What else would he have left? His money, his collections, his unpleasant memories. All his emotional ties now were with that other universe. "Who's ruling Ferr?" he asked, evading her question. "Lord Njeri, your former kqyres, serves as my regent. He is my father, so he is fitted by birth; his system is also attuned to the planet's, although not as sensitively as mine, since he is a male. Perhaps that would make him a better ruler; he will suffer less. And I see no reason otherwise why a male should be deemed incapable of ruling, providing he is under careful supervision." "No reason at all," Mattern agreed. "Moreover," she continued, "I have organized the whole government of my planet so that it runs itself. And, of course, from time to time, when we make our trips, I shall be able to check into what's going on." "But we're not going to make any more trips," he said. Although he had not been serious about retiring -- he knew that now -- he wasn't going to let the hyperspacers push him around. Make her sweat a little, he thought irreverently. "Will you not give me a chance, Captain?" she asked. "Is the prospect of my company so displeasing to you that it will make you give up the business immediately?" "You know it's not that. I told the kqyres before you came -- " "But my people won't know it's not that. I shall lose face." "If only you had a face!" he cried. "I'm sick of sailing with shadows!" "My form in your universe is truly horrible, Mattern," she said softly, "truly monstrous. The xhindi who have seen themselves in mirrors in your universe have often gone mad." "Anything is better than emptiness," he told her. "If I appear in my true form, then will you accept me as your kqyres?" "Well," he said, enjoying himself, "I'll make a few more trips with you, but that's all I'll promise." "I accept your promises," she said. He felt a tiny shiver rise up in him. Suppose her normspace form was even more hideous than her hyperspace form, which of course. was no longer hideous to him. Would his nerves be strong enough to bear it? II E held his breath as the vibrations began to slow down, the grays shimmering into substance, taking on all the colors of the rainbow and then flowing into one basic roseate hue. Bit by bit, the planes and shapes began to coalesce into the shape of... A woman. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A woman next to whom even the dream of Lyddy paled into thin air. And, momentarily, he became the Len Mattern of fifteen years back, standing there with his mouth agape. "But you said you'd be a monster..." "To my people, Mattern," she smiled, "this form is as monstrous as ours is to your people. You change into our doubles in hyperspace; we change into yours in normspace. Had you kept the continuity of tradition that we have, you would know what we have always known -- that xhind and human are different aspects of the same race. That is why you fear us, and we do not fear you." Of course, he thought. How else could they understand us so well? How else could they find loic in our il logic and be able to condition us according to our human natures? And he smiled to think that all objection to the xhindi from the social angle was invalid. Monsters they might be, but not nonhumans. "Once I thought this appearance was monstrous, Mattern," the mbretersha went on, in the sweet voice which suited her now, "because I thought you and your kind were, though forms of our race, monstrous forms -- not only without beauty, but without dignity or intelligence or compassion." "Maybe you were right," he said. "But since I have learned to know you and to -- like you, I have come to realize that outward semblances are meaningless. I may appear one way in your universe, another way in mine, but I am the same I. If there is beauty -- " and she gave what, in a lesser personage, would have been almost a giggle -- "it is an inner beauty." Mattern could not agree with this premise. Although he had admired the mbretersha on Ferr, he felt quite differently toward her now, and because of no suddenly discovered inner beauty. "You'll stay this way in this universe then?" he asked. "It makes it so much more comfortable for me -- than just a collection of shadows," he added hastily. "I will stay this way permanently while I am in your universe, Mattern," she told him, "if, in your turn, you will accept me as -- as -- " "As my shipmate," Mattern finished, "my kqyres. I have already done so." "Not merely as your shipmate." "As my -- wife?" he blurted, wondering whether he was reading her mind or whether she was projecting so forcibly into his that he merely spoke her thoughts for her. She nodded. To be chained again, after this brief moment of freedom! He wanted her, right enough, and he was delighted to have her for his partner, his companion, but he saw no need for formal commitments between them. "You're the mbretersha," he protested, "the queen. It wouldn't be right for you to marry a commoner!" "And you," she retorted, "are one of nature's own noblemen, and, hence, a fitting consort for me. There is no one in either universe whom I could marry without lowering myself," she explained, "so I might as well wed where there is a basis of respect, of admiration, and, to be sure, expediency." "But -- but our ceremony wouldn't be valid in your universe, would it?" he spluttered wildly. "And your ceremony -- " "We will have two ceremonies, Mattern, one in each universe." This, he could see in alarm, was going to be a truly lasting marriage. the mbretersha, for she knew how to satisfy a man's every dream as well as his desires, and of course, being the kqyres, she was the only woman who would not be disturbed by the presence of one on board. Moreover, she was a woman for whom a universe could be risked, a woman to whom worlds could be offered -- in short, just as he was the only man worthy of her, so she was the only woman worthy of him. But sometimes he fancied that the mbretersha's blue eyes had the same haunting familiarity that he had seen in Lyddy's and Alard's, and he wondered. Alard's had been explicable enough; he and Mattern had had the same mother. But why should Lyddy also have his mother's eyes -- and, stranger still, why should the mbretersha? Len could not help wondering whether, to create the ideal fantasy, the ultimate carrot, the xhindi had reached far back in his mind to get the earliest -- and thus the most fundamental -- illusion of beauty for him. Could both Lyddy and the mbretersha have been deliberately modeled on his mother, and was the mbretersha's form in normspace merely whatever she chose it to be -- or appear to be? Oh, well, he thought, perhaps an artful illusion is the truest form of reality. Business was dead, the victim could they do now but bury it? I T was a smoking day in summer and Centre Forks, Pop. #, palpitated in the heat. From above, a plane sent down a fading murmur while, in the valley, a train bored its rustling way toward the west. A few turbocars carrying housewives to their clubs hummed down Main Street and a solitary dog scratched itself listlessly in the shade. Centre Forks was a quiet town. "It would be nice," said Ephraim Fingle wistfully, staring at the sky, "if the Businessman's Special would go wrong somehow and crack up on Old Candy." The Businessman's Special carried # commuters and Old Candy was the local mountain. "It would be better," said Luke Earguard, even more wistfully, "if the Silver Streak jumped the rails at Morgan's Crossing." The Silver Streak carried # passengers and Morgan's Crossing was five miles closer to Centre Forks than Old Candy. Both men sighed longingly at the prospect. Across the street, the doors of Sam's Tavern flapped OFen and Joe Weston, the town drunk, staggered blearily onto the sidewalk. A car, a blur of red and green, came ghosting down the street as he stepped onto the pavement. Taking a sight on the glaring patch of color which was the public TV screen, Joe weaved his way toward it. Both Ephraim and Luke tensed as the path of the car and the path of the drunk coincided. "Perhaps?" Ephraim was an optimist. "No such luck." Luke was a pessimist, and Luke was right. ' I " HE snatch-field, as always, operated with its usual efficiency. The car hummed on. The drunk, picking himself up from where the field had deposited him, staggered wildly for a moment before getting his bearings, then lunged back across the street. The flap of the tavern doors was echoed by Ephraim's sigh of disappointment. "What this town needs," he said with deep conviction, "is a good, first-class funeral." "A hearse and fifteen cars," said Luke. "Limousines, big, black and dignified." "A hand-carved mahogany casket with red silk lining and solid silver hardware." truckload of tributes and the 'Death March' from Saul." "Not Saul," protested Ephraim. "Too depressing." "Maybe you're right." Luke had his own ideas, but it was too hot to argue with his ex-rival turned partner. He scowled as the dream faded. "The guy I'd like to bury," he said savagely, "is that Ambassador What's-his-name." "Sigk Gesligk." The name was written on Ephraim's heart. "From Rigel," he added. "That's the one." Luke's scowl deepened. "For him, I'd supply a split-pine box full of splinters." "Cut small," agreed Ephraim. "Without lining." "Galvanized handles and no flowers." "No embalming and no mutes." "No mutes, mourners or music." "Planted in unhallowed ground." "The bum," said Luke. Which was rather an odd way to talk about the greatest benefactor the human race had ever known. one always has to go to the wall, but that someone can't be expected to like it. There were compensations, both men admitted that, but they wouldn't have been human if they hadn't, at times, longed for the good old days. When Sigk Gesligk had arrived, bringing with him the secret of immortality, he had dealt a death blow to an honored profession. The morticians had gone to the wall. There was still a little work, of course, but it wasn't the same. Ephraim sighed as he retailed their last burial. Mrs. Chadwell's pet dog, a horrible little Peke, had rashly eaten rat poison instead of the boned chicken provided and had passed on with suitable dispatch. The whole town had turned out to witness the ceremony. But burying a dog, no matter how you looked at it, wasn't the same thing. It lacked a certain dignity, if nothing else, and both Ephraim and Luke were highly conscious of the dignity of their profession. "It isn't as if we can rely on accidents," Luke had said when they had first discussed the idea of amalgamation. "What with the snatch-fields and other gimmicks to save fools from their folly, accidents just don't happen now." "Suicide?" Ephraim had mentioned the good old reliable standby. Luke had shaken his head. "People don't get depressed now," he pointed out. "Not that depressed, anyway. No, the only way is for us to become partners and save expenses. It's that or both go out of business." But, from the look of it, they had only staved off the inevitable. The hound finished scratching itself and wandered off to investigate certain trees. Joe Weston, reeling even more now than before, left the tavern and managed to cross the street without further indignity. Slowly, as the heat faded, the town came to life. A group of youngsters wandered past staring, as usual, at the urns, headstones, caskets and wreaths in the parlor window. Luke shook his head as he listened to their comments. "Finished," he mourned. "Ended. Even the kids haven't respect for us now." "Ghouls," Ephraim said wonderingly, and shuddered at the word. "I've never been called that before." "Ephraim," said Luke, "the profession is dead. Let's face it." "Maybe not." Ephraim didn't like to admit it. "Maybe it's just a recession. Maybe there'll be a plague or something." "Not a chance." Luke sounded bitter. "We've hung on to the last, Ephraim, but now we're finished. There's nothing left but for us to sell out and get jobs in a food factory." Kedii How! The S-F anthology with the "fresh and literate toueh"t Oalaxy Edited by H. L. Gold Another great collection for every S-F bookshelf -- fifteen choice stories among the best published in Galaxy in the past few years. Humor, new worlds, fantastic ideas, and clever writing combine to give you many hours of excitement ana pleasure. Stories by Pohl, Sheckley, Leiber, McIntosh, Davidson and others. Order today . # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of hot off the press. I enclose Q check  cash  money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper.  T was hard, but it had to be faced; even Ephraim had to agree that waiting for a plague was a forlorn hope. His sigh sounded like a jet liner passing overhead. "I guess you're right, Luke," he said dispiritedly. "But it's a pity. I'd liked to have had one really first-class funeral before the end." A thought brightened his eye. "Luke!" "Uh?" "You said the profession's dead. Right?" "We're the last of the morticians," said Luke. "When we quit, it'll be the end of the profession." "Fair enough. But when a thing's dead, what do you do with it?" "How's that again?" "You bury it, that's what." Ephraim was triumphant. "Get it? We'll hold one last ceremony, give it the works, and we'll symbolically inter the entire profession." He noticed Luke's expression. "No?" "No." "Why not?" "It's symbolic, sure, but the whole thing will be treated as a joke. You heard those kids. How do you think people will react to us burying an empty casket?" Ephraim knew the answer to that one. "They'll laugh themselves sick, that's what." Luke became thoughtful. "But what if the casket wasn't empty? Or if they didn't know it was?" "What's on your mind?" Ephraim was beginning to regret he'd ever thought of the idea. "I've got an idea." Luke nodded his head thoughtfully as the details fell into place. "We'll have our funeral, but we'll do it right. As far as anyone will know, there'll be a real body. That means they will treat it with respect, so we won't be laughed at." "Nice," said Ephraim. He hated to shatter his partner's enthusiasm. "But aren't you forgetting something? How are we going to get a body?" "Easy." Luke weighed his partner with a professional eye. "We'll oretend that you've passed on. You'll make a nice corpse." "You'd make a nicer one." "You're older than I am and better known." "It was my idea in the first place," argued Ephraim. "We'll toss for it," said Luke. Ephraim lost. A S a funeral, it was a colossal success. Even Ephraim had to admit that. He'd felt a little peeved at Luke having all the fun, but he'd been allowed to choose his own casket and the floral tributes were spectacularly lavish. There had been twenty mutes and ten bearers, the high school band had given fair treatment to the "March" from Saul, and everyone who knew him, had seen him or who had known someone who had known him had followed the casket in a determined effort to get into the act. Death was so rare as to create headlines and Luke, by virtue of a third cousin connected with advertising, had done a good job on the publicity. Every hotel in town had been booked solid. Every house with a spare bedroom had coined money. TV had covered the event on a worldwide network and even a delegation of Rigelians, "-egans and other assorted members of the Galactic Civilization had come to see the fun. Centre Forks had had a field day. "Fifteen orders," gloated Luke. "From Mrs. Homer's little girl, who wants us to inter her favorite doll, to Fred Easterby, who wants us to plant his appendix. He's got it in a jar for some reason and now he wants it given decent burial." "Now wait a minute." Ephraim rubbed his sore cheeks. He'd followed the cortage hidden behind false whiskers and he was allergic to the stuff. "Since when have we fallen so low that we've begun burying dolls?" "Since we got the order." Luke busied himself with pencil and paper. "Now let me see. We've got a plank of walnut that would do for the casket and there's some of that white plush left over -- " TE added figures, doubled the amount, looked at it sidewise and then rounded off the figure. "We'll have to disinter the doll afterward, of course, but I've allowed for that." "I don't get it," said Ephraim. "That ceremony out there was to symbolically bury the profession. A clean, decent ending to an honored trade. Now you're talking about pandering to a rich kid's whim. I thought we'd quit." "That was before we got the orders." "It's not ethical." "It's money in the bank," reminded Luke. "Money isn't everything," said Ephraim piously. "I refuse to prostitute my art." "You've already done that. Remember Mrs. Chadwell's dog?" "That was a living thing which had passed to its rest," said Ephraim. "Such interments were recognized by the profession before Sigk Gesligk stabbed us in the back. Dolls are different." "Why?" "It's mockery, that's why." "You can't mock what doesn't exist." Luke threw down his pencil and tilted his chair. "Now you tell me -- how else can we stay solvent? It's no good waiting for natural business. There isn't any. People don't die any more and, as far as the world goes, we're as extinct as the dodo. While you're on the subject, perhaps you'll tell me the difference between interring a doll and burying an empty casket." "You've changed," said Ephraim sadly. "Success has gone to your head. A few weeks ago, you wouldn't have talked like this. Doesn't tradition mean anything to you?" "Sure it does," Luke replied easily. "But I like to eat too." "But we've quit. We're out of business." "Fifteen orders says different," grinned Luke. "I've changed my mind." He lost the grin as trouble, unannounced, unsuspected and entirely unwanted, joined the party. Its name was Augustus Blake and it came directly from the government. "Trial, sentence, the works. I wish I were dead." Luke refrained from the obvious comment. If Ephraim were dead, then neither of them would have had to face the prosecution Blake had instigated. "Conspiring to falsify the public records," groaned Ephraim. "Creating a public mischief by arranging for a fraudulent interment. Acquiring money under false pretenses by the sale of floral tributes. Spreading alarm and despondency by the rumored failure of the immortality treatment. Treasonable conduct in that we created strained relations between the government and the Rigelian Ambassador." He stared hollowly at his partner. "Did we really do all that?" "The judge said we did." Even the prospect of fifteen interments couldn't cheer Luke up now. He ran a trembling hand through his hair. "The way he talked to us, as if we were criminals! He said he was doing us a favor by imposing a heavy fine instead of sending us to jail." "Unless we pay up, we'll go there anyway," said Ephraim. "I know." Luke scowled as the doorbell sent echoes through the house. "More trouble. I'll bet. That or some smart-aleck kid asking after your health. You'd think some people would get tired of beating a corny old joke to death." He rose and went grumbling to the door. Ephraim, sitting at the table, heard the mumble of voices and the sound of many feet. He looked up as Luke returned. He wasn't alone. A Rigelian was with him, a tall, scaled, humanoid shape carrying the inevitable soundvision recorder hanging from a strap around its neck. A tourist, thought Ephraim sourly"Meet Gel Rangk," Luke introduced. "Mr. Rangk, this is the famous Ephraim Fingle of whom you may have heard." "I attended your most interesting trial," hissed the Rigelian. He spoke English as if he had a steam engine instead of vocal cords. "Very interesting example of primitive operation of arbitrary justice." He touched the box hanging around his neck. "Have full record for later editing and dissemination to those interested in purchasing copies of same." "How nice for you." Ephraim couldn't forget that it was this race which had reduced him to his present position. "Regret exceedingly that I missed opportunity of recording the ceremony which was the cause of your unfortunate predicament," continued the Rigelian. "Such record would be highly salable to those with interest in quaint burial customs of primitive planets. Is ceremony repeatable?" "No," said Ephraim. "Perhaps," said Luke. "No," repeated Ephraim. "Not on your life." "Will pay," said Gel Rangk. Ephraim changed his mind. and Centre Forks, Pop. #, was about to enter the last performance of the season. Ephraim Fingle, resplendent in full mourning dress, ran a critical eye over the assembled mutes, bearers, mourners and band, uke joined him just before deadline. He had a Miami tan and glowed with prosperity. He raised his eyebrows at the casket. "What's it this time?" he inquired briskly. "Granny Hilton's bedroom slippers. She won the raffle. She was about to discard them anyway, so she said they'd earned a decent burial." "They'll do as well as anjrthing." Luke scowled at one of the mutes. "Get that grin off your face. You're paid to look like one of the bereaved, not a clown." He lost his scowl as the band swung into the "Death March" from Saul. Ephraim looked self-conscious. "They like it," he explained. "Riding in the hearse?" "Why not?" Luke climbed aboard, Ephraim at his side, and both men smoothed thejr faces as the procession swung into Main Street between the lines of ranked aliens and their busily whirring recorders.      a very interesting document, interesting for more than one reason. In physical shape, it is a typescript of an article, only three and a half pages long, written about #. It must have been printed somewhere, because on the first page there are some penciled notes as to type size and so forth, but I don't know where it was published. The last page bears the author's signature: Hudson Maxim. Before I go on, I had better explain just who Hudson Maxim was. The mention of the name of Maxim brings to mind the Maxim gun, but its inventor was Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, who died in #. If the name made you think of the Maxim silencer, you were one generation closer to the present, for the silencer was invented by Sir Hiram's son, Hiram Percy Maxim, who died in #. The Hudson Maxim who wrote the article I am going to discuss was Sir Hiram's younger brother (died in #) who founded the Columbia Powder Company and then the Maxim Powder Company -- finally sold to E. I. Dupont de Nemours -- and invented the explosive called maximite. Having the "who's who" straightened out, we can proceed to the piece itself. It opens with the following sentence: "The enormous energy developed by the combustion of high explosives and smokeless powders has led many to conclude that such materials could be utilized to advantage in some form of internal combustion engine especially designed for the purpose." This sounds like a fairly innocuous beginning, and when I read it, I felt sure what the argument in the next paragraph would be. To my surprise, the argument I expected was not developed. Hudson Maxim, a few lines later, pointed out that a "smokeless powder combines within itself both the fuel and the oxygen for its own combustion; hence, it is a fuel in which the combustible is chemically combined with oxygen, and is consequently a much more expensive fuel than gasoline or anything now used in internal combustion engines." The line of reasoning is this: "The oxygen contained in an explosive cannot be compared in cheapness with atmospheric oxygen, which does not cost anything." All true, of course, but I would have expected that one of the foremost authorities on high explosives would have pointed out something different. The main argument is that a smokeless powder or a high explosive does not contain more energy than ordinary engine fuels. Most likely this simply had not yet been measured in #, strange as it may seem in retrospect. rOR a good comparison of the energy content of various fuels, the exhaust velocity (theoretical) when used in a rocket is a fine yardstick. Now if you compare these theoretical exhaust velocities, you get the following somewhat unexpected list: Dynamite (if it could be used in a rocket motor) has a theoretical exhaust velocity of almost precisely # feet per second. Smokeless powder, such as used in artillery cartridges, produces a theoretical exhaust velocity of # feet per second. Ordinary ethyl alcohol, burned with pure oxygen, has a theoretical exhaust velocity of around # feet per second. Gasoline, burned with pure oxygen, has one of about # feet per second, and even aniline burned with nitric acid proves superior to dynamite, with a theoretical exhaust velocity of # feet per second. Hudson Maxim, instead of refuting the widespread misunderstanding that "dynamite is more powerful than anything," was talking in terms of money. It would be too expensive to run a car or an airplane on smokeless powder is his main talking point. He emphasized that he was not just calculating costs. "I have conducted more experiments in the use of explosive materials for driving motors than any man living or dead. I have spent more than sixty thousand dollars in these experiments." His purpwse in making all these experiments and in spending all that money was to find a superior system of propulsion for naval torpedoes and, possibly, small torpedo boats. He pointed out that a naval torpedo is in itself an expensive item (the price he quoted was #) and that its purpose is to destroy an even more expensive enemy vessel. "It therefore matters little whether or not the propelling means or motive fluid for the run costs fifty dollars instead of five dollars; but it would make a lot of difference in the economy of running an automobile or an aeroplane." The main surprise came when I learned in which way Hudson Maxim used his high explosive for driving a naval torpedo. I had best stick to straight quotation now: "In my system of driving torpedoes, I employ a material called motorite, consisting of seventy per cent nitro-glycerin and thirty per cent guncotton. In the form in which it is used it is no longer explosive, but burns continuously without explosion. "Bars of the material seven inches in diameter and five feet long are forced into steel tubes. These tubes are closed at one end and the other end screws into a combustion chamber. Water is forced into the combustion chamber instantly upon ignition of the exposed end of the motorite in the combustion chamber. "Under three hundred pwunds pressure to the square inch, motorite burns at the rate of a foot per minute. The flame blast of the burning motorite atomizes the water by passing with the water through a tube in which baffle plates are placed at intervals. The products of combustion and steam together are utilized to drive a turbine or reciprocating engine, preferably a turbine... A pound of motorite will evaporate about two pounds of water, so that each pound of motorite consumed represents three pounds of mixed steam and products of combustion." suggests. If you have a bar of a double-base powder, # inches in diameter and # feet long, you don't use it to boil water to get steam to drive a turbine, which then drives a propeller. You take your bar of double-base powder and suspend it inside a tube in such a manner that it burns as rapidly as possible and you have a nice solid-fuel missile of reasonable size. Reading the description of the utilization -- provided that's the word to use at this point -- of motorite strikes one as a very close miss. One little accident of the right kind would have opwned his eyes. The miss is even closer when you read the concluding paragraph, which starts out thus: "I once suggested the use of motorite in small sticks for driving model aeroplanes in short trial flights. For such use the material would be cheap enough..." I can't resist quoting one more paragraph from the article: "The cost of driving an engine by means of motorite would be about two dollars per horsepower hour. Therefore, in order to drive a hundred horsepower automobile with motorite it would cost, for fuel alone, two hundred dollars an hour, and the motorite would make a heavy load for the car, as it would require the consumption of nearly a ton of motorite per hour. Therefore, if a hundred horsepower aeroplane were to use motorite for a fuel, it would be unable to carry enough for an hour's flight." When Hudson Maxim died in #, he was # years old. Conceivably he could have lived for another twenty years. If he had, he would have seen what he missed back in #, just because of the accident that didn't happen -- and that would have changed history if it had. plant which Greek-speaking traders called Zilphion. To quiet objections or questions which Basil Davenport or Rosel George Brown are likely to raise at this point, I have to explain that the first letter, if you write it in the Greek original, is a sigma, which is normally transcribed as an "s" rather than a "z." But all my teachers were in unanimous agreement that the pronunciation of the Greek sigma was that of the English "z," so why not use it? Well, to go on, if you should happen to have a hoard of old coins and among them is one of the two Two different Didrachmai pieces from classical Cyrene, showing the unknown plant Zylphlon. The actual size of these coins Is about the same as a quarter. didrachmai pieces from Kyrene (or Cyrene) pictured here, you not only have a valuable collector's item, but also a botanical mystery on your hands. For this zilphion plant is the only example of a plant which became extinct within historical times that I know of. Of animals which became extinct in historical times, we have a deplorably long list, ranging from a case like Rhytina gigas) stetleri, or Steller's seacow, of which only a few hundred specimens existed when it was discovered, to Ectopistes migratorius, the passenger pigeon which in Audubon's times flew over the North American connobody ever heard of a plant that flourished in the days of the early civilizations and is now completely unknown -- with the exception of this zilphion. What makes the mystery so astonishing is that zilphion was an article of trade that made several cities rich. The fact alone that it was put on coins indicates that it was valuable, and there existed an idiomatic phrase meaning "more valuable than zilphion." We even have a classical picture of the zilphion trade. It is a shallow bowl made around # b.c. and found in Italy. Because the main figure in the picture is the ruler Arkesilas kesilas bowl to historians. The picture shows the king seated under a sun sail, aboard a ship, surrounded by servants who are all carefully labeled. In the ship's bottom, two men stow large bags under the supervision of somebody labeled phylakos (overseer), while five men are on deck with the ruler. One is labeled eirmopharos (porter), another isophortos (in this context, this term is best translated as supervisor) and a third one zilphiomapsos, the "zilphion-kneader." And somewhere on the bowl is the exclamation oryxon ("Go away!") for reasons unknown to me or anybody else. As the picture on the oval didrachma shows, the plant had a thick and probably creeping root and a thick stem. Both the Greeks and the Romans liked the young zilphion sprouts as a vegetable, and the stem was eaten too. The taste must have been quite pronounced, because zilphion was used to flavor other dishes. The sap of the stem and the root was condensed into a kind of syrup which had a special Latin name (laserpitium) and an easy-to-remember value: If you wanted a pound of laserpitium, you handed over a pound of silver coins.  Africa and the people who grew rich ferrying it across the Mediterranean Sea claimed that it could not be cultivated. It grew in certain places in the interior and had to be gathered when in season. Pliny the Elder, in Book V, Chapter #, of his Natural History, stated that "The territory of Cyrene, to a distance of fifteen miles from the shore, is said to abound in trees, while for the same distance beyond that district it is only suitable for the production of grain: after which a tract of land, thirty miles in breadth and # miles in length, is productive of nothing but laser (zilphion)." Pliny's statement clearly implies that the plant grew wild and was not cultivated. But it was in Pliny's time that zilphion began to disappear. "The zilphion of Cyrene no longer exists," Pliny stated in went on to tell that some came from Syria. Interestingly enough, Pliny speaks about zilphion only as a medicinal plant. Repeated fumigations with the dried root made hemorrhoids disappear. The mashed root, with wine and oil, was good for bruises "and with wax for the cure of scrofulous sores." The leaves, taken with aromatic white wine immediately after a bath, helped women with a dead fetus clear out the uterus -- but the concoction was taken internally, in case one wonders how it was sup)posed to work. Three centuries after Pliny, the plant zilphion was unknown. Anybody who wanted to could -- and can even now -- read the descriptions of the plant as given by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Columella and other classical writers. It does not help much, even though the descriptions and the pictures on the coins agree nicely. Early in the nineteenth century, French botanists thought that zilphion was probably the plant listed as Thapsia garganica, but the German pharmacologist Schroff showed as long ago as # that the classical authors mentioned had described that plant separately. Obviously it was not the same as zilphion. Another guess was that zilphion might have been a local name for the plant Ferula asaioetida. But that one, as its scientific name indicates, has an unpleasant smell, and nobody in his right mind would use it as a flavoring. Besides, it did not grow in North Africa but farther East, mainly in Persia. Difficult as it is, we have to accept zilphion as extinct. And we'll never know just what kind of vegetable it made on the tables of wellto-do Greeks of antiquity.  of Johann Gutenberg, of course -- he is the "inventor of printing." The number of people who know the name of Peter Schoeffer is smaller, but those who do know of him know that he was one of the earliest printers and an associate of Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust. What I did not know until I came across a reference quite recently is that these three shared a secret which they never divulged to anybody. And it was a vital secret that greatly influenced the new art of printing. The story of the invention itself is reasonably simple. The "inventor" (I still have to use quotation marks for a short time to come ) of printing was born in or about # in the German city of Mainz. His real name was Johann Gensfleisch, which in German unfortunately means "roast goose." Understandably, Johann took his mother's maiden name, Gutenberg. Now the fact is that there was printing of some kind before Gutenberg; his real invention consisted in having movable separate letters that could be put together in any manner desired. He began to experiment with his idea around #, and some seven years later he moved back to his native city and settled there to exploit his invention. Being short of money, Gutenberg had to form a partnership with the goldsmith Johann Fust. Peter Schoeffer somehow joined the partnership and they went to work. The printing press was one problem that was not too hard to solve, for presses of various types existed. Next came the question of making the type. Peter Schoeffer suggested casting it instead of cutting the type by hand. He seems to have been the one to make copper forms for casting. So far, so good, but what metal was to be used for the tjje? Tin was likely to break under pressure. Lead was too soft They tried a mixture of tin and lead, which looked all right at first glance, it being neither too brittle nor too soft -- under ordinary circumstances. In the press, though, it still had the tendency to be squashed. It lasted for a few impressions, but not long enough. Then one of the three thought of a "secret ingredient," just as soap manufacturers and toothpaste makers still do. Peter Schoeffer later claimed loud and often that he had been the man who thought of the ingredient, and that it was his idea that made printing possible at all. But he never said what the ingredient was.  T was Professor' Edmund O. von Lippmann who, about thirty years ago, could show that the secret ingredient must have been bismuth. It is impossible to say just when bismuth became known. Professor von Lippmann could show that all the suspected mentions of bismuth prior to # a.d. referred to other things. On the other hand, miners must have come across bismuth before that time. But even much later, the miners were not convinced that bismuth was a metal in its own right. As late as the early seventeenth century, most miners were convinced that there were three kinds of lead (no, they did not think in terms of isotopes as we are likely to do nowadays), namely lead and the metal called stannum (tin) and Wismat ("white matter," our bismuth). The miners also thought that tin was a little more similar to silver than lead, and that bismuth was even closer to silver. It is reported that miners sometimes, when they found bismuth, complained that they had come too early; if they had come a century or two later, they would have found silver instead. Often, however, they had the consolation that silver could be found below the bismuth, and for that reason bismuth was called tectum argenti or "roof of silver." Well, whether the miners thought bismuth was a kind of lead or not, the fact is that nobody was interested in bismuth prior to about # and that there was a demand for it afterward. Professor von Lippmann was convinced that Schoeffer's secret ingredient was bismuth. In the first place, it would do what was needed: make the type metal harder. In the second place, at a somewhat later date (#), the German printer Huerus, who was one of the first printers in Spain, had a German merchant send him "# pounds of Wismat" for which he could not possibly have any use except as an additive to the lead and tin in his t#Te metal. Moreover, Peter Schoeffer did not even have to experiment at random to get the idea that bismuth might do what the first printers needed. In those days, many utensils were made of tin: tin spoons, tin cups, tin plates. The tin casters knew that "Wismat" improved their wares, making them harder and more shiny. In all probability the tin casters had found this out by accident, by using tin which contained bismuth. The fact is that at a somewhat later date they added bismuth on purpose, but their demand for the metal was minor, since the bismuth addition to the tin amounted to only about three per cent. Peter Schoeffer might easily have known that a small addition of the otherwise rather useless metal made tin wares harder, and might have tried to mix the lead for his type metal with this "hard tin." The addition of bismuth must have been Gutenberg's and Schoeffer's secret. Since none of the original type survived, we naturally cannot analyze it. But before the invention of printing, nobody cared about bismuth, whereas after the invention of printing there was a sudden demand for it And miners started looking for tectum argenti, even though they themselves would have preferred to find silver directly. ' Y piece about the Atlantic Missile Range in the April # Galaxy brought some corresp)ondence which was united on one point. And that point was: "What other rocket ranges are there?" The phrasing of that question was somewhat different in different letters, of course; some readers specifically wanted to know about the Russian rocket ranges, while others asked whether anybody but the United States and Russia had such firing ranges. Well, let me give as complete an answer as is possible at this moment. First, however, I have to point out that I am going to talk about missile and rocket ranges, as distinct from missile sites. I do not know how many missile sites we have in the United States and I certainly do not know how many the Russians have. As for the rocket ranges, I would say that there are four major ones in the United States. There is the White Sands Proving Ground, which was the first. Then the Atlantic Missile Range in Florida. Then there is Wallops' Island off Virginia, which is less well known to the public because none of the spectacular big missiles is fired from there. Wallops' Island specializes in scientific experiments, all of them very valuable scientifically, but often of such a nature that it would take a whole article just to explain why this particular experiment was made, and why it was made in that specific fashion. The fourth range in the United States is Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, part of which is known to many former GIs as Camp Cooke. It is fairly easy to outline the distinguishing features of each. Wallops' Island, as stated, specializes in scientific experiments using comparatively small rockets, almost exclusively solid-fuel jobs. White Sands fires military missiles smaller than Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. The Atlantic Missile Range fires anything experimental which needs exceptionally careful tracking. And Vanthe training of missile troops. As is usual, even the nicest planning runs into a snag of some kind where an exception has to be made. All satellite shots should go to Cape Canaveral, and they do -- unless the satellite is to be placed into an orbit that goes over both poles. That can't be done from Florida. From Canaveral you shoot over the Bahamas, which means to the southeast. If you are tracking, you can also shoot northeast. But you can't shoot due south or due north. If you tried to shoot due north, the first stage might fall unpleasantly close to Savannah, Georgia. If you tried to shoot due south, you might get a first stage impact near Matanzas, Cuba. From California, you also cannot shoot due north because there are too many cities in that direction. But if you shoot due south, the next land under the rocket will be Antarctica. Hence polar orbit shots have to be fired from Vandenberg, which normally specializes in troop training. Now we get to rocket ranges elsewhere in the world. NE of the oldest is the Australian range, with its firing site in South Central Australia. If you look at a map of Australia, you see, somewhat off center of the south shore, a deep inlet called Spencer's Gulf, at the head of which is Port Augusta. To the north of Port Augusta, not shown on most maps, is a mountain range called the Woomera Mountains. Woomera is the firing site, and the missiles fly to the northwest across uninhabited deserts. The distance to the shore from Woomera is around # miles. But in the same direction, if you continue for another # miles, there is a British-owned place named Christmas Island. The Woomera range, therefore, permits shots up to about # miles. The drawback is that the largest firing range of the British Empire is # miles from Great Britain. For this reason, they have a few small firing ranges for small rockets "at home" -- one at Aberporth in Wales, and one at Solway Firth in Scotland, with one more, utilizing the Hebrides Islands, under construction. The French also have a potential large firing range, much closer to their homeland than the English have. This is in the Algerian Sahara at Colomb-Bechar, while the intended target area is Lake Chad, about # miles away. Germany does not seem to have an active firing range, unless there is something we don't know about. The first rocket firing range of all was the German army's Peenemiinde establishment on the island of Usedom, north of the city and harbor of Stettin. They fired in a generally easterly direction, along the shoreline of the Baltic Sea. In the course of the war, Peenemiinde was heavily battered, and when the Russians finally took it after prolonged artillery preparation, they claimed that it was threequarters destroyed. Then, they said, they dynamited what was still standing. That area is now Polish. And the rumors say that the Russians have reactivated Peenemiinde. I can't quite believe that myself, but the stories persist. However, if they fired anything of any size from Peenemiinde, it would surely have been detected. So let us leave Peenemiinde open as a doubtful case, even though I personally am not convinced.  rocket ranges, there is one we know about. It is Kapustin Yar, almost precisely fifty miles due east of Stalingrad and north of the Caspian Sea. Kapustin Yar was started in #, as far as we know. I am phrasing this carefully because we don't know where the Russians carried on their rocket experiments before World War II. In #, remember, they had the high-altitude record for rockets with a shot to about six miles, when nobody else had yet reached two miles. This shot may have been made from Kapustin Yar. At any event, they can shoot in any direction, except to the west, from Kapustin Yar. There are deserts to the north and to the east, and the Caspian Sea to the south. In fact, it was thought at first that both Sputnik I and Sputnik II were fired from Kapustin Yar, but a Japanese astronomer, carefully going over the orbits of the first two artificial satellites, decided that Kapustin Yar had about the right latitude for these shots, but not the right longitude. He came to the conclusion that there had to be another Russian firing range farther east, in the Kyzyl Kum Desert. And that is as far as our knowledge goes right now. A death in Human or not, it mode no difference -- only o heartless person could refuse help to o lost, hurt thing because it had no heart! I  j the house O LD Mose Abrams was out hunting cows when he found the alien. He didn't know it was an alien, but it was alive and it was in a lot of trouble and Old Mose, despite everything the neighbors said about him, was not the kind of man who could bear to leave a sick thing out there in the woods. It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank. It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn't made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was too weak; it never moved an inch. It was groaning, too, but not too loud -- just the kind of keening sound a lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it than just the sound of winter wind; there was a frightened, desperate note that made the hair stand up on Old Mose's nape. Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a lot of foolhardiness. But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn't leave it there, so he walked up to it and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure out -- as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a way that no one had ever smelled before. Mose, however, was not finicky. In the neighborhood, he was not well known for fastidity. Ever since his wife had died almost ten years before, he had lived alone on his untidy farm and the housekeeping that he did was the scandal of all the neighbor women. Once a year, if he got around to it, he sort of shoveled out the house, but the rest of the year he just let things accumulate. So he wasn't as upset as some might have been with the way the creature smelled. But the sight of it upset him, and it took him quite a while before he could bring himself to touch it, and when he finally did, he was considerably surprised. He had been prepared for it to be either cold or slimy, or maybe even both. But it was neither. It was warm and hard and it had a clean feel to it, and he was reminded of the way a green corn stalk would feel. XI E slid his hand beneath the hurt thing and pulled it gently from the clump of hazel brush and turned it over so he could see its face. It hadn't any face. It had an enlargement at the top of it, like a flower on top of a stalk, although its body wasn't any stalk, and there was a fringe around this enlargement that wiggled like a can of worms, and it was then that Mose almost turned around and ran. But he stuck it out. He squatted there, staring at the no-face with the fringe of worms, and he got cold all over and his stomach doubled up on him and he was stiff with fright -- and the fright got worse when it seemed to him that the keening of the thing was coming from the worms. Mose was a stubborn man. One had to be stubborn to run a runty farm like his. Stubborn and insensitive in a lot of ways. But not insensitive, of course, to a thing in pain. Finally he was able to pick it up and hold it in his arms and there was nothing to it, for it didn't weigh much. Less than a half-grown shoat, he figured. He went up the woods path with it, heading back for home, and it seemed to him the smell of it was less. He was hardly scared at all and he was warm again and not cold all over. For the thing was quieter now and keening just a little. And although he could not be sure of it, there were times when it seemed as if the thing were snuggling up to him, the way a scared and hungry baby will snuggle to any grown person that comes and picks it up. Old Mose reached the buildings and he stood out in the yard a minute, wondering whether he should take it to the bam or house. The barn, of course, was the natural place for it, for it wasn't human -- it wasn't even as close to human as a dog or cat or sick lamb would be. He didn't hesitate too long, however. He took it into the house and laid it on what he called a bed, next to the kitchen stove. He got it straightened out all neat and orderly and pulled a dirty blanket over it, and then went to the stove and stirred up the fire until there was some flame. Then he pulled up a chair beside the bed and had a good, hard, wondering look at this thing he had brought home. It had quieted down a lot and seemed more comfortable than it had out in the woods. He tucked the blanket snug around it with a tenderness that surprised himself. He wondered what he had that it might eat, and even if he knew, how he'd manage feeding it, for it seemed to have no mouth. "But you don't need to worry none," he told it. "Now that I got you under a roof, you'll be all right. I don't know too much about it, but I'll take care of you the best I can." By now it was getting on toward evening, and he looked out the window and saw that the cows he had been hunting had come home by themselves. "I got to go get the milking done and the other chores," he told the thing lying on the bed, "but it won't take me long. I'll be right back." LD Mose loaded up the stove so the kitchen would stay warm and he tucked the thing in once again, then got his milk pails and went down to the barn. He fed the sheep and pigs and horses and he milked the cows. He hunted eggs and shut the chicken house. He pumped a tank of water. Then he went back to the house. It was dark now and he lit the oil lamp on the table, for he was against electricity. He'd refused to the line and a lot of the neighbors had gotten sore at him for being uncooperative. Not that he cared,, of course. He had a look at the thing upon the bed. It didn't seem to be any better, or any worse, for that matter. If it had been a sick lamb or an ailing calf, he could have known right off how it was getting on, but this thing was different. There was no way to tell. He fixed himself some supper and ate it and wished he knew how to feed the thing. And he wished. too, that he knew how to help it. He'd got it under shelter and he had it warm, but was that right or wrong for something like this? He had no idea. He wondered if he should try to get some help, then felt squeamish about asking help when he couldn't say exactly what had to be helped. But then he wondered how he would feel himself if he were in a far, strange country, all played out and sick, and no one to get him any help because they didn't know exactly what he was. That made up his mind for him and he walked over to the phone. But should be call a doctor or a veterinarian? He decided to call the doctor because the thing was in the house. If it had been in the barn, he would have called the veterinarian. He was on a ruralline and the hearing wasn't good and he was halfway deaf, so he didn't use the phone too often. He had told himself at times it was nothing but another aggravation and there had been a dozen times he had threatened to have it taken out. But now he was glad he hadn't. The operator got old Doctor Benson and they couldn't hear one another too well, but Mose finally made the doctor understand who was calling and that he needed him and the doctor said he'd come. With some relief, Mose hung up the phone and was just standing there, not doing anything, when he was struck by the thought that there might be others of these things down there in the woods. He had no idea what they were or what they might be doing or where they might be going, but it was pretty evident that the one upon the bed was some sort of stranger from a very distant place. It stood to reason that there might be more than one of them, for far traveling was a lonely business and anyone -- or anything -- would like to have some company along. peg and lit it and went stumping out the door. The night was as black as a stack of cats and the lantern light was feeble, but that made not a bit of difference, for Mose knew this farm of his like the back of his hand. He went down the path into the woods. It was a spooky place, but it took more than woods at night to spwok Old Mose. At the place where he had found the thing, he looked around, pushing through the brush and holding the lantern high so he could see a bigger area, but he didn't find another one of them. He did find something else, though -- a sort of outsize birdcage made of metal lattice work that had wrapped itself around an eightinch hickory tree. He tried to pull it loose, but it was jammed so tight that he couldn't budge it. He sighted back the way it must have come. He could see where it had plowed its way through the upper branches of the trees, and out beyond were stars, shining bleakly with the look of far away. Mose had no doubt that the thing lying on his bed beside the kitchen stove had come in this birdcage contraprtion. He marveled some at that, but he didn't fret himself too much, for the whole thing was so unearthly that he knew he had little chance of pondering it out. He walked back to the house and he scarcely had the lantern blown out and hung back on its peg than he heard a car drive up. The doctor, when he came up to the door, became a little grumpy at seeing Old Mose standing there. "You don't look sick to me," the doctor said. "Not sick enough to drag me clear out here at night." "I ain't sick," said Mose. "Well, then," said the doctor, more grumpily than ever, "what did you mean by phoning me?" "I got someone who is sick," said Mose. "I hoj)e you can help him. I would have tried myself, but I don't know how to go about it." The doctor came inside and Mose shut the door behind him. "You got something rotten in here?" asked the doctor. "No, it's just the way he smells. It was pretty bad at first, but I'm getting used to it by now." The doctor saw the thing lying on the bed and went over to it. Old Mose heard him sort of gasp and could see him standing there, very stiff and straight. Then he bent down and had a good look at the critter on the bed. When he straightened up and turned around to Mose, the only thing that kept him from being downright angry was that he was so flabbergasted. "Mose," he yelled, "what is this?" "I don't know," said Mose. "I found it in the woods and it was hurt and wailing and I couldn't leave it there." "You think it's sick?" "I know it is," said Mose. "It needs help awful bad. I'm afraid it's dying." T he doctor turned back to the bed again and pulled the blanket down, then went and got the lamp so that he could see. He looked the critter up and down, and he prodded it with a skittish finger, and he made the kind of mysterious clucking sound that only doctors make. Then he pulled the blanket back over it again and took the lamp back to the table. "Mose," he said, "I can't do a thing for it." "But you're a doctor!" "A human doctor, Mose. I don't know what this thing is, but it isn't human. I couldn't even guess what is wrong with it, if anything. And I wouldn't know what could be safely done for it even if I could diagnose its illness. I'm not even sure it's an animal. There are a lot of things about it that argue it's a plant." Then the doctor asked Mose straight out how he came to find it and Mose told him exactly how it happened. But he didn't tell him anything about the birdcage, for when he thought about it, it sounded so fantastic that he couldn't bring himself to tell it. Just finding the critter and having it here was bad enough, without throwing in the birdcage. "I tell you what," the doctor said. "You got something here thaf s outside all human knowledge. I doubt there's ever been a thing like this seen on Elarth before. I have no idea what it is and I wouldn't try to guess. If I were you, I'd get in touch with the university up at Madison. There might be someone there who could get it figured out. Even if they couldn't they'd be interested. They'd want to study it." Mose went to the cupboard and got the cigar box almost full of silver dollars and paid the doctor. The doctor put the dollars in his pocket, joshing Mose about his eccentricity. But Mose was stubborn about his silver dollars. "Paper money don't seem legal, somehow," he declared. "I like the feel of silver and the way it clinks. It's got authority." The doctor left and he didn't seem as upset as Mose had been afraid he might be. As soon as he was gone, Mose pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed. It wasn't right, he thought, that the thing should be so sick and no one to help -- no one who knew any way to help it He sat in the chair and listened to the ticking of the clock, loud in the kitchen silence, and the crackling of the wood burning in the stove. Looking at the thing lying on the bed, he had an almost fierce hope that it could get well again and stay with him. Now that its birdcage was all banged up, maybe there'd be nothing it could do but stay. And he hoped it would, for already the house felt less lonely.  the stove and bed, Mose realized how lonely it had been. It had not been quite so bad until Towser died. He had tried to bring himself to get another dog, but he never had been able to. For there was no dog that would take the place of Towser and it had seemed unfaithful to even try. He could have gotten a cat, of course, but that would remind him too much of Molly; she had been very fond of cats, and until the time she died, there had always been two or three of them underfoot around the place. But now he was alone. Alone with his farm and his stubbornness and his silver dollars. The doctor thought, like all the rest of them, that the only silver Mose had was in the cigar box in the cupboard. There wasn't one of them who knew about the old iron kettle piled plumb full of them, hidden underneath the floor boards of the living room. He chuckled at the thought of how he had them fooled. He'd give a lot to see his neighbors' faces if they could only know. But he was not the one to tell them. If they were to find it out, they'd have to find it out themselves. He nodded in the chair and finally he slept, sitting upright, with his chin resting on his chest and his crossed arms wrapped around himself as if to keep him warm. When he woke, in the dark before the dawn, with the lamp flickering on the table and the fire in the stove burned low, the alien had died. There was no doubt of death. The thing was cold and rigid and the husk that was its body was rough and drying out -- as a corn stalk in the field dries out, whipping in the wind once the growing had been ended. Mose pulled the blanket up to cover it, and although this was early to do the chores, he went out by lantern light and got them done. After breakfast, he heated water and washed his face and shaved, and it was the first time in years he'd shaved any day but Sunday. Then he put on his one good suit and slicked down his hair and got the old jalopy out of the machine shed and drove into town. He hunted up Eb Dennison, the town clerk, who also was the secretary of the cemetery association. "Eb," he said, "I want to buy a lot." "But you've got a lot," protested Eb. "That plot," said Mose, "is a family plot. There's just room for me and Molly." "Well, then," asked Eb, "why another one? You have no other members of the family." "I found someone in the woods," said Mose. "I took him home and he died last night. I plan to bury him." "If you found a dead man in the woods," Eb warned him, "you better notify the coroner and sheriff." "In time I may," said Mose, not intending to. "Now how about that plot?" Washing his hands of the affair entirely, Eb sold him the plot. went to the undertaking establishment run by Albert Jones. "Al," he said, "there's been a death out at the house. A stranger I found out in the woods. He doesn't seem to have anyone and I aim to take care of it." "You got a death certificate?" asked Al, who subscribed to none of the niceties affected by most funeral parlor operators. "Well, no, I haven't." "Was there a doctor in attendance?" "Doc Benson came out last night." "He should have made you out one. I'll give him a ring." He phoned Doctor Benson and talked with him a while and got red around the gills. He finally slammed down the phone and turned on Mose. "I don't know what you're trying to pull off," he fumed, "but Doc tells me this thing of yours isn't even human. I don't take care of dogs or cats or -- " "This ain't no dog or cat." "I don't care what it is. It's got to be human for me to handle it. And don't go trying to bury it in the cemetery, because it's against the law." Considerably discouraged, Mose left the undertaking parlor and trudged slowly up the hill toward the town's one and only church. He found the minister in his study working on a sermon. Mose sat down in a chair and fumbled his battered hat around and around in his work-scarred hands. "Parson," he said, "I'll tell you the story from first to last," and he did. He added, "I don't know what it is. I guess no one else does, either. But it's dead and in need of decent burial and that's the least that I can do. I can't bury it in the cemetery, so I suppose I'll have to find a place for it on the farm. I wonder if you could bring yourself to come out and say a word or two." The minister gave the matter some deep consideration. "I'm sorry, Mose," he said at last. "I don't believe I can. I am not sure at all the church would approve of it." "This thing may not be human," said Old Mose, "but it is one of God's critters." The minister thought some more, and did some wondering out loud, but made up his mind finally that he couldn't do it So Mose went down the street to where his car was waiting and drove home, thinking about what heels some humans are. Back at the farm again, he got a pick and shovel and went into the garden, and there, in one comef of it, he dug a grave. He went out to the machine shed to hunt up some boards to make the thing a casket, but it turned out that he had used the last of the lumber to patch up the hog pen. dug around in a chest in one of the back rooms which had not been used for years, hunting for a sheet to use as a winding shroud, since there would be no casket. He couldn't find a sheet, but he did unearth an old white linen table cloth. He figured that would do, so he took it to the kitchen. He pulled back the blanket and looked at the critter lying there in death and a sort of lump came into his throat at the thought of it -- how it had died so lonely and so far from home without a creature of its own to spend its final hours with. And naked, too, without a stitch of clothing and with no possession, with not a thing to leave behind as a remembrance of itself. He spread the table cloth out on the floor beside the bed and lifted the thing and laid it on the table cloth. As he laid it down, he saw the pocket in it -- if it was a pocket -- a sort of slitted flap in the center of what could be its chest. He ran his hand across the pocket area. There was a lump inside it. He crouched for a long moment beside the body, wondering what to do. Finally he reached his fingers into the flap and took out the thing that bulged. It was a ball, a little bigger than a tennis ball, made of cloudy glass -- or, at least, it looked like glass. He squatted there, staring at it, then took it to the window for a better look. There was nothing strange at all about the ball. It was just a cloudy ball of glass and it had a rough. dead feel about it, just as the body had. He shook his head and took it back and put it where he'd found it and wrapped the body securely in the cloth. He carried it to the garden and put it in the grave. Standing solemnly at the head of the grave, he said a few short words aid then shoveled in the dirt. He had meant to make a mound above the grave and he had intended to put up a cross, but at the last he didn't do either one of these. There would be snoopers. The word would get around and they'd be coming out and hunting for the spot where he had buried this thing he had found out in the woods. So there must be no mound to mark the place and no cross as well. Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself, for what could he have carved or written on the cross? By this time it was well past noon and he was getting hungry, but he didn't stop to eat, because there were other things to do. He went out into the pasture and caught up Bess and hitched her to the stoneboat and went down into the woods. He hitched her to the birdcage that was wrapped around the tree and she pulled it loose as pretty as you please. Then he loaded it on the stoneboat and hauled it up the hill and stowed it in the back of the machine shed, in the far corner by the forge. After that, he hitched Bess to the garden plow and gave the garden a cultivating that it didn't need so it would be fresh dirt all over and no one could locate where he'd dug the grave. XT E was just finishing the plowing when Sheriff Doyle drove up and got out of the car. The sheriff was a soft-spoken man, but he was no dawdler. He got right to the point. "I hear," he said, "you found something in the woods." "That I did," said Mose. "I hear it died on you." "Sheriff, you heard right" "I'd like to see it, Mose." "Can't. I buried it. And I ain't telling where." "Mose," the sheriff said, "I don't want to make you trouble, but you did an illegal thing. You can't go finding people in the woods and just bury them when they up and die on you." "You talk to Doc Benson?" The sheriff nodded. "He said it wasn't any kind of thing he'd ever seen before. He said it wasn't human." "Well, then," said Mose, "I guess that lets you out. If it wasn't human, there could be no crime against a person. And if it wasn't owned, there ain't any crime against property. There's been no one around to claim they owned the thing, is there?" The sheriff rubbed his chin. "No, there hasn't. Maybe you're right. Where did you study law?" "I never studied law. I never studied nothing. I just use common sense." "Doc said something about the folks up at the university might want a look at it." "I tell you. Sheriff," said Mose. "This thing came here from somewhere and it died. I don't know where it came from and I don't know what it was and I don't hanker none to know. To me it was just a living thing that needed help real bad. It was alive and it had its dignity and in death it commanded some respect When the rest of you refused it decent burial, I did the best I could. And that is all there is to it" "All right Mose," the sheriff said, "if that's how you want it" He turned around and stalked back to the car. Mose stood beside old Bess hitched to her plow and watched him drive away. He drove fast and reckless as if he might be angry. Mose put the plow away and turned the horse back to the pasture and by now it was time to do chores again. He got the chores all finished and made himself some supjjer and after supper sat beside the stove, listening to the ticking of the clock, loud in the silent house, and the crackle of the fire. All night long the house was lonely. The next afternoon, as he was plowing com, a reporter came and walked up the row with him and talked with him when he came to the end of the row. Mose didn't like this reporter much. He was too flip and he asked some funny questions, so Mose clammed up and didn't tell him much. A few days later, a man showed up from the university and showed him the story the reporter had gone back and written. The story made fun of Mose. "I'm sorry," the professor said. "These newspapermen are unaccountable. I wouldn't worry too much about anything they write." "I don't," Mose told him. The man from the university asked a lot of questions and made quite a point about how important it was that he should see the body. But Mose only shook his head. "It's at peace," he said. "I aim to leave it that way." The man went away disgusted, but still quite dignified. For several days there were people driving by and dropping in, the idly curious, and there were some neighbors Mose hadn't seen for months. But he gave them all short shrift and in a little while they left him alone and he went on with his farming and the house stayed lonely. He thought again that maybe he should get a dog, but he thought of Towser and he couldn't do it. One day, working in the garden, he found the plant that grew out of the grave. It was a funny-looking plant and his first impulse was to root it out. But he didn't do it, for the plant intrigued him. It was a kind he'd never seen before and he decided he would let it grow, for a while at least, to see what kind it was. It was a bulky, fleshy plant, with heavy, dark-green, curling leaves, and it reminded him in some ways of the skunk cabbage that burgeoned in the woods come spring. There was another visitor, the queerest of the lot. He was a dark and intense man who said he was the president of a flying saucer club. He wanted to know if Mose had talked with the thing he'd found out in the woods and seemed terribly disappointed when Mose told him he hadn't. He wanted to know if Mose had found a vehicle the creature might have traveled in and Mose lied to him about it. He was afraid, the wild way the man was acting, that he might demand to search the place, and if he had, he'd likely have found the birdcage hidden in the machine shed back in the corner by the forge. But the man got to lecturing Mose about withholding vital information. Finally Mose had taken all he could of it, so he stepped into the house and picked up the shotgun from behind the door. The president of the flying saucer club said good-by rather hastily and got out of there. Farm life went on as usual, with the corn laid by and the haying started and out in the garden the strange plant kept on growing and now was taking shape. Old Mose couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the sort of shape it took and he spent long evening hours just standing in the garden, watching it and wondering if his loneliness were playing tricks on him. ' I 'HE morning came when he found the plant standing at the door and waiting for him. He should have been surprised, of course, but he really wasn't, for he had lived with it, watching it of eventide, and although he had not dared admit it even to himself, he had known what it was. For here was the creature he'd found in the woods, no longer sick and keening, no longer close to death, but full of life and youth. It was not the same entirely, though. He stood and looked at it and could see the differences -- the little differences that might have been those between youth and age, or between a father and a son, or again the differences expressed in an evolutionary pattern. "Good morning," said Mose, not feeling strange at all to be talking to the thing. "It's good to have you back." The thing standing in the yard did not answer him. But that was not important; he had not expected that it would. The one important point was that he had something he could talk to. "I'm going out to do the chores," said Mose. "You want to tag along?" It tagged along with him and it watched him as he did the chores and he talked to it, which was a vast improvement over talking to himself. At breakfast, he laid an extra plate for it and pulled up an extra chair, but it turned out the critter was not equipped to use a chair, for it wasn't hinged to sit. Nor did it eat. That bothered Mose at first, for he was hospitable, but he told himself that a big, strong, strapping youngster like this one knew enough to take care of itself, and he probably didn't need to worry too much about how it got along. After breakfast, he went out to the garden, with the critter accompanying him, and sure enough, the plant was gone. There was a collapsed husk lying on the ground, the outer covering that had been the cradle of the creature at his side. Then he went to the machine shed and the creature saw the birdcage and rushed over to it and looked it over minutely. Then it turned around to Mose and made a sort of pleading gesture. Mose went over to it and laid his hands on one of the twisted bars and the critter stood beside him and laid its hands on, too, and they pulled together. It was no use. They could move the metal some, but not enough to pull it back in shape again. They stood and looked at one another, although looking may not be the word, for the critter had no eyes to look with. It made some funny motions with its hands, but Mose couldn't understand. Then it lay down on the floor and showed him how the birdcage ribs were fastened to the base. T T took a while for Mose to un derstand how the fastening worked and he never did know exactly why it did. There wasn't, actually, any reason that it should work that way. First you applied some pressure, just the right amount at the exact and correct angle, and the bar would move a little. Then you applied some more pressure, again the exact amount and at the proper angle, and the bar would move some more. You did this three times and the bar came loose, although there was, God knows, no reason why it should. Mose started a fire in the forge and shoveled in some coal and worked the bellows while the critter watched. But when he picked up the bar to put it in the fire, the critter got between him and the forge and wouldn't let him near. Mose realized then he couldn't -- or wasn't supposed to -- heat the bar to straighten it and he never questioned the entire rightness of it. For, he told himself, this thing must surely know the proper way to do it So he took the bar over to the anvil and started hammering it back into shape again, cold, without the use of fire, while the critter tried to show him the shape that it should be. It took quite a while, but finally it was straightened out to the critter's satisfaction. Mose figured they'd have themselves a time getting the bar back in place again, but it slipped on as slick as could be. Then they took off another bar and this one went faster, now that Mose had the hang of it. But it was hard and grueling labor. They worked all day and only straightened out five bars. It took four solid days to get the bars on the birdcage hammered into shape and all the time the hay was waiting to be cut. But it was all right with Mose. He had someone to talk to and the house had lost its loneliness. When they got the bars back in place, the critter slipped into the cage and starting foiling with a dingus on the roof of it that looked like a complicated basket. Mose, watching, figured that the basket was some sort of control. The critter was discouraged. It walked around the shed looking for something and seemed unable to find it. It came back to Mose and made its despairing, pleading gesture. Mose showed it iron and steel; he dug into a carton where he kept bolts and clamps and bushings and scraps of metal and other odds and ends, finding brass and copper and even some aluminum, but it wasn't any of these. And Mose was glad -- a bit ashamed for feeling glad, but glad all the same. For it had been clear to him that when the birdcage was all ready, the critter would be leaving him. It had been impossible for Mose to stand in the way of the repair of the cage, or to refuse to help. But now that it apparently couldn't be, he found himself well pleased. Now the critter would have to stay with him and he'd have someone to talk to and the house would not be lonely. It would be welcome, he told himself, to have folks again. The critter was almost as good a companion as Towser.  fixing breakfast, he reached up in the cupboard to get the box of oatmeal and his hand struck the cigar box and it came crashing to the floor. It fell over on its side and the lid came open and the dollars went free-wheeling all around the kitchen. Out of the corner of his eye, Mose saw the critter leaping quickly in pursuit of one of them. It snatched it up and turned to Mose, with the coin held between its fingers, and a sort of thrumming noise was coming out of the nest of worms on top of it. It bent and scooped up more of them and cuddled them and danced a sort of jig, and Mose knew, with a sinking heart, that it had been silver the critter had been hunting. So Mose got down on his hands and knees and helped the critter gather up all the dollars. They put them back into the cigar box and Mose picked up the box and gave it to the critter. The critter took it and hefted it and had a disappointed look. Taking the box over to the table, it took the dollars out and stacked them in neat piles and Mose could see it was very disappointed. Perhaps, after all, Mose thought, it had not been silver the thing had been hunting for. Maybe it had made a mistake in thinking that the silver was some other kind of metal. Mose got down the oatmeal and poured it into some water and put it on the stove. When it was coed and the coffee was ready, he carried his breakfast to the table and sat down to eat. The critter still was standing across the table from him, stacking and restacking the piles of silver dollars. And now it showed him, with a hand held above the stacks. that it needed more of them. This many stacks, it showed him, and each stack so high. Mose sat stricken, with a spoon full of oatmeal halfway to his mouth. He thought of all those other dollars, the iron kettle packed with them, underneath the floor boards in the living room. And he couldn't do it; they were the only thing he had -- except the critter now. And he could not give them up so the critter could go and leave him too. He ate his bowl of oatmeal without tasting it and drank two cups of coffee. And all the time the critter stood there and showed him how much more it needed. "I can't do it for you," Old Mose said. "I've done all you can expect of any living being. I found you in the woods and I gave you warmth and shelter. I tried to help you, and when I couldn't, at least I gave you a place to die in. I buried you and protected you from all those other people and I did not pull you up when you started growing once again. Surely you can't expect me to keep on giving endlessly." But it was no good. The critter could not hear him and he did not convince himself. walked into the living room with the critter trailing him. He loosened the floor boards and took out the kettle, and the critter, when it saw what was in the kettle, put its arms around itself and hugged in happniess. They lugged the money out to the machine shed and Mose built a fire in the forge and put the kettle in the fire and started melting down that hard-saved money. There were times he thought he couldn't finish the job, but he did. The critter got the basket out of the birdcage and put it down beside the forge and dipped out the molten silver with an iron ladle and poured it here and there into the basket, shaping it in place with careful hammer taps. It took a long time, for it was exacting work, but finally it was done and the silver almost gone. The critter lugged the basket back into the birdcage and fastened it in place. It was almost evening now and Mose had to go and do the chores. He half expected the thing might haul out the birdcage and be gone when he came back to the house. And he tried to be sore at it for its selfishness -- it had taken from him and had not tried to pay him back -- it had not, so far as he could tell, even tried to thank him. But he made a poor job of being sore at it. It was waiting for him when he came from the barn carrying two pails full of milk. It followed him inside the house and stood around and he tried to talk to it. But he didn't have the heart to do much talking. He could not forget that it would be leaving, and the pleasure of its present company was lost in his terror of the loneliness to come. For now he didn't even have his money to help ward off the loneliness. As he lay in bed that night, strange thoughts came creeping in upon him -- the thought of an even greater loneliness than he had ever known upon this runty farm, the terrible, devastating loneliness of the empty wastes that lay between the stars, a driven loneliness while one hunted for a place or person that remained a misty thought one could not define, but which it was most important one should find. It was a strange thing for him to be thinking, and quite suddenly he knew it was no thought of his, but of this other that was in the room with him. He tried to raise himself, he fought to raise himself, but he couldn't do it He held his head up a moment, then fell back upon the pillow and went sound asleep. ' eaten breakfast, the two of them went to the machine shed and dragged the birdcage out It stood there, a weird alien thing, in the chill brightness of the dawn. The critter walked up to it and started to slide between two of the bars, but when it was halfway through, it stepped out again and moved over to confront Old Mose. "Good-by, friend," said Mose. "I'll miss you." There was a strange stinging in his eyes. The other held out its hand in farewell, and Mose took it and there was something in the hand he grasped, something round and smooth that was transferred from its hand to his. The thing took its hand away and stepped quickly to the birdcage and slid between the bars. The hands reached for the basket and there was a sudden flicker and the birdcage was no longer there. Mose stood lonely in the barnyard, looking at the place where there was no birdcage and remembering what he had felt or thought -- or been told? -- the night before as he lay in bed. Already the critter would be there, out between the stars, in that black and utter loneliness, hunting for a place or thing or person that no human mind could grasp. Slowly Mose turned around to go back to the house, to get the pails and go down to the barn to get the milking done. He remembered the object in his hand and lifted his stillclenched fist in front of him. He opened his fingers and the little crystal ball lay there in his palm -- and it was exactly like the one he'd found in the slitted flap in the body he had buried in the garden. Except that one had been dead and cloudy and this one had the living glow of a distant-burning fire. Looking at it, he had the strange feeling of a happiness and comfort such as he had seldom known before, as if there were many people with him and all of them were friends. He closed his hand upon it and the happiness stayed on -- and it was all wrong, for there was not a single reason that he should be happy. The critter finally had left him and his money was all gone and he had no friends, but still he kept on feeling good. He put the ball into his pocket and stepped spryly for the house to get the milking pails. He pursed up his whiskered lips and began to whistle and it had been a long, long time since he had even thought to whistle. Maybe he was happy, he told himself, because the critter had not left without stopping to take his hand and try to say good-by. And a gift, no matter how worthless it might be, how cheap a trinket, still had a basic value in simple sentiment. It had been many years since anyone had bothered to give him a gift. T was dark and lonely and unending in the depths of space with no Companion. It might be long before another was obtainable. It perhaps was a foolish thing to do, but the old creature had been such a kind savage, so fumbling and so pitiful and eager to help. And one who travels far and fast must likewise travel light. There had been nothing else to give. IL z z No monarchy was ever more legal than his -- he had outlived every last challenger for the throne! T he king was annoyingly awakened before dawn by a noise in the sky. The noise was an ear-splitting roar, an avalanche of sound, a rushing, tumbling, thunderous reverberation which hlled the heavens from one horizon to another, the kind of noise -- and the volume -- that might be expected on the day the sun cracked open. The shattering thunder shook the stout old building, causing the king of the planet to creep from his shabby bed and go to the window. The dawn was still an hour or more away. Nothing but empty sky and the roseate flush in the east was visible from the tiny window, but yet the echoes of intruding soimd lapped about the building. Blinking away sleep and muttering at the trespass. the king went to the door, circuitously avoiding the cracked marble urn in the exact center of the room which contained his drinking water. He stepped out into the high grasses surrounding the building and turned to look skyward. It was there, as he had guessed. The source of the monstrous noise was a monstrous vehicle hanging many miles above him, as stationary as a rock, but even at that distance its enormous size was apparent. The thing hung effortlessly in the early morning sky, washed with the new sunlight, and seemed to be supported on small tongues of flame which everywhere studded its massive belly. A coruscating envelope of pale blue, much like ancient neon lighting, laved the vehicle to create an eerie illusion in the yellowish rays of the sun. The tremendous sound that had awakened him had been caused by the braking effort of the great machine. The king studied it closely for many minutes, watching for a Sign -- an Omen, searching for a sacred Token to suggest that it might be something other than what his mundane senses had taken it to be. He waited, but a Revelation did not come. There was nothing about the machine to excite his hopes. It was only a starship. T T had disturbed his sleep and it was nothing more than a starship, probably inhabited by a pack of crazy fools bent on exploring each new planet to fall within their sights. Now they had discovered his, and in a few hours hordes of them would be descending on him. The starship was too large and ungainly to land, but the people on it -- if they were people -- would come down on him like mosquitoes, in small scouting vessels, and conduct themselves like imbeciles on a picnic. Their military men would eye him suspiciously and cast dark glances at the surrounding forests. Their linguists would buzz about with primitive signs and symbols in an effort to establish communication. Their botanists would uproot great masses of weeds. Their archeologists would ransack the ruins and gouge deep holes in the ground, plundering graves, to carry away what they believed to be precious treasures, while their commander -- ahh, the commander! That nincompoop would fatuously plant a flag, or its gaudy equivalent, in the soil and claim ownership of the new world for his distant sovereign. The nincompoop would cheerfully ignore, of course, the very obvious fact that this world already possessed a sovereign. A pox on them. Let them come down and play, and then go away again. They were not Significant. The starship had offered no Sign, and he was not greatly interested in its coming. The king of the planet returned indoors and let himself down on the hard bed. He ruminated a short while and then drifted off to sleep, confident that their noisy scurryings would awaken him later. He had momentarily considered closing the door, and then decided against it. The prying archeologists would probably come inside anyway; they would not be able to resist temptation, for the king's indigent residence was a marble mausoleum nearly hidden among the weeds and wild grasses of an incredibly ancient cemetery. The king of the planet lived in a mausoleum because the structure had withstood the ravages of time, because he had made it somewhat comfortable, and because it had seemed the best place to wait. a single scout left the mother ship and landed almost directly beneath it, resting quietly -- but watchfully -- on a grassy clearing well away from the dense woods. More than half of the crew of twenty had emerged from the scout and fanned out, each crew member going about his particular bysiness. Some of their number had already discovered a promising mound and were bringing up heavy equipment to probe its probable mystery. One man was taking samples of the vegetation, while another was trapping insects in the soil. Within the small scout ship, a woman hunched over a set of scanning instruments, her head concealed in an enveloping hood, the better to watch a series of glass plates. She listened to a contact speaker fastened behind an ear and spoke into a throat microphone. There was a gentle excitement in her voice, but no trace of fear or hysteria. "The life-form is approaching from the northwest. Movement slow but progress steady. Near you. Seven." And a response from the clearing: "Seven, check." The woman continued, dividing her attention between two devices: "It appears to be warm-blooded and intelligent. It does not show fear of us, nor does there seem to be curiosity. I see nothing to indicate a weapon; it is carrying something that might be a walking stick. Are you tracking. Seven?" "Negative," Seven reported. "The trees interfere." "Eight?" the woman asked next. "Eight, negative," a new voice said. "I read nothing but soil life." "There are birds in the far distance," she advised. "I expect our arrival has frightened them away. I have discovered no animal life except for -- It has stopped." She scanned the disc attentively. "It has put down the walking stick. Now it is behind a tree. I am receiving only a small positive signal." A deep male voice cut into the circuit. "Nineteen here," it said. "Your animal is intelligent. It put down the stick to avoid its being mistaken for a weapon, and now is likely peeping at us from behind a tree. I'll be right out with a translator." The male voice was exultant. "Gently, gentlemen, gently. We've found a prize!" The woman at the scanner spoke up. "The object is moving -- coming directly toward the vessel. Seven, it is almost upon you! Don't you see it?" "Nega -- correction." His voice jumped. "It's coming out now. I see it!" "Eight, move in and cover," the woman snapped. "Two, start recording." "I'm forty-five seconds ahead of you," Two replied dryly. "Sight, sound and depth." "Be careful!" Nineteen cried. "Don't scare it away. What is it -- what does it look like?"  I  HE communication channel was silent for a moment and then Seven said, "It looks like you. It's a man." "Are you certain?" the woman demanded. "It's a man," the dry voice of the recorder cut in. "I can tell by his innards." Seven reported: "An old man; quite aged by the looks of him. Extremely long hair and long beard. He is naked -- I think. And he needs a bath." "Weapons?" "Negative, unless there is one hidden under the beard. There -- he's out of the woods. See him?" "I see him," she answered, and stared for a long moment. "I wish I could be more impressed. Well, I suppose we must extend the customary welcome. He is the only life-form -- " she corrected herself -- "the only human to reveal sign on this planet. Stand by. Seven." The king of the planet left the shadow of the trees and made his careful way into the clearing. He moved slowly because he could not trust his limbs to any reasonable speed and because he did not want to frighten the visitors into an unfriendly act. He had no wish to be a cripple after their departure. The king paused ten or twelve feet short of the nearest intruder and examined the ship. His examination was a cursory one because he was little interested in its origin, its means of locomotion, or its physical properties. There had been others like it and unlike it, and doubtless there were more to come. The ship and the travelers were merely transients. The impudent young fellow a dozen feet away stared at him with a friendly, idiotic grin. His feet were braced wide apart, his hands were outstretched -- palms upward -- in the usual gesture of welcome. and not too far away his mate waited with one hand resting on the butt of a weapon. They were military men, making their customary two-faced show of welcome. The king looked at the friendly face and the grinning lips and wanted to snarl, looked at the upturned palms and wanted to spit on them, but he realized that such behavior would only complicate matters. It was better to help them tidy up their business and send them on their way. He stuck out his two hands in an imitative gesture and tried to smile. It didn't quite come off. "Now that's done," he grunted. "Get on with your picking and clear off my planet!"  of course, and promptly launched into a lengthy torrent of unintelligible speech which was the Response Courteous, the standard rejoinder to a native welcome. The Response Courteous was grandiose, pompous and rhetorical, punctuated with graceful gestures and primitive symbolisms; the eloquent sentry called upon the local rain god to increase the old man's crops and upon the sun god to bless his aged bones; he complimented the native on his health, wealth and appearance, thanked him for so graciously offering the hospitality of his planet, begged him to allow them to stay a few days more that they might explore and catalogue the new world, flattered him with the observation that no other mud ball in the Universe was so beautiful as this one, assured him that they would do harm to none, and ended -- finally -- by respectfully inquiring after the old one's lovely wife (wives?) and sturdy children. It was an impressive speech, recited letter-perfect from the field manual. The sentry then bowed and mumbled an aside into his microphone. "I don't think I want to meet his lovely wife. I wish I was upwind of him." Two, the dry commentator operating the recording machine, suggested; "Perhaps you'd better run through that again. Nothing stirred beneath the leathery hide." "I'll make you a wager," Seven retorted. "I don't believe he has a rain god." "Patience, gentlemen -- I'm coming." Nineteen came running from the lock of the scout ship. He carried a large bronze box which contained his own specialized exploring tool, and he was wearing a large, pleased smile. Behind him ran a pretty, youthful girl carrying two pillows. The newcomers slowed cautiously as they approached the king of the planet and set down their equipment for his inspection. The king ignored Nineteen and his box to stare at the girl and her pillows. She dropped to her knees, placed a pillow on the ground behind him, and invited him to sit. The king sat, staring at the girl's bosom and bare legs. She smiled winningly and moved over to place a pillow for her superior. Nineteen seated himself and opened the lid of the bronze box. It contained an array of instruments and two slim bronze cables which terminated in handgrips. ' phone on the ground between himself and the native, switched on his apparatus and motioned to the assistant. The girl removed the coiled cables from their nest and gave one to the old man, showing him how to hold the grooved handle with his curled fingers. The other cable was given to the smiling translator. An electrical connection was completed between the two men, monitored by the translating rig. "H-# type," Nineteen murmured into his throat microphone. "H-# sub-a," the distant recorder corrected him matter-of-factly. "Plus sub-something else which I am not qualified to identify. I recognize only a vague x quality to his digestive and regenerative systems." "Beetles and birchbark," was Seven's snide reply. "Perhaps, but I daresay Hundred-Ten would like to lay him on her surgical table upstairs. He'd make a splendid subject for study." Nineteen cleared his throat meaningfully and the communication circuit went silent. He smiled again at the dour old man who was eying the girl. "How do you do, sir?" The king of the planet stared down at the handgrip in his gnarled fingers and wondered how they'd managed that trick; he had both heard and felt the smiling idiot's words, and the utilization of the two senses enabled him to grasp the meaning of the question. It also caused him to realize they would understand his replies only too well, unless he was careful. (The recorder whispered: "Curiosity, and mental reservations.") ("I expected it," Nineteen replied.) To the old one, he said, "I am Nineteen, a linguist. Who are you?" No harm in answering that. "I am the king of the planet." Nineteen watched the analyzers in the bronze box. (His communicator whispered: "Truth, pride.") "What are you called, sir?" The king grunted. "Many things. Ahasuerus, Joseph, Isaac, Salatheil ben Sadi... I am called many names." (The whisper: "Bitterness.") Nineteen correctly deduced that the old one had referred to himself as the leader, or overlord, of the entire world; but the multiplicity of names confused him and he was not certain that he could pronounce any of them accurately. tl watched to see if the native took offense at a possible mispronunciation. "The leader of the world. Where are your people, Joseff?" "The damned fools are dead," the king retorted. "Every one of them." "They have expired? All of them?" "That's what I said." "How did they die, Jo-seff? Why did they die?" "Because they were damned fools." ("Vituperation, anger, vague hatred.") Nineteen repeated gently, "How did they die? What caused all their deaths, Jo-seff?" "Peace!" the king spat. "Eternal peace. Senility, sterility, boredom, retrogression. They curled up in their chosen wombs and died." "I don't understand, Jo-seff." "That's too bad." The king abruptly switched languages because it pleased him to do so and because his interrogator was becoming too inquisitive. He lapsed into Latin, a tongue barely remembered. "They abolished conflict and returned to Paradise. That was the end of them." (Two reported: "Evasive tactics, but still truth.") Nineteen frowned and realized something was amiss. He studied his analyzers but found nothing wrong there; they continued to monitor and report the speech patterns in the normal fashion, giving normal readings, but despite that, he recognized a change in routine. The ancient king's subjects had stopped fighting among themselves and perished as a result -- that much was clear. But the exact manner of their going and the last two sentences were puzzling. ("Is this doubletalk?" he asked the recorder.) ("No, sir. Clear and straightforward.") "They died suffering peace, Joseff?" "They did." "How can this be?" "Easier than you think." "You did not die with them?" Nineteen asked tactfully. The king glowered, considering the question silly. Nineteen rephrased the question. "Can you tell me, sir, why you did not suffer this same death?" "I refused peace." "It was a matter of acceptance or rejection?" "It was." "You are the only living human in all this world?" "I am." "I do not understand how they in all suffered and died of this peace simultaneously." "I didn't say that!" the king snapped. "Idiot." He searched among the languages familiar to him and said, "Degeneration. Dry rot requires only a few centuries." subtle but baffling difference to the response. As before, the old man's answer was partly understood and partly guessed at, and, as before, the analyzing equipment performed in normal fashion, but for the second time there had been an undefined change in the procedure. "Degeneration" and "dry rot" were undoubtedly a form of slow death; while "centuries" was probably one or more measurable units of time. "I ask your pardon, great leader," Nineteen continued smoothly. "I believe I now understand. Your subjects suffered peace for a number of centuries and gradually perished; a kind of lingering death. Is that correct?" The king of the planet nodded dourly, his attentive eyes following the lithe movements of the young girl as she fidgeted in the grass. "Thank you, sir. And what is a century?" "One hundred years." "Ah, yes. And what constitutes a year, sir?" "One revolution about tbe sun!" The king looked at his questioner with scorn. "Is a star-traveler ignorant of the most basic astronomy?" Nineteen jumped with astonishment and listened to the murmur of surprise on the communication circuit. "Ah -- then you are aware of our identity?" The king was disgusted. "I know a starship when I see one, you fool!" "Your great wisdom pleases me, honorable leader. Have other starships visited your kingdom?" "Of course. How else would I know, stupid?" (The woman at the scanning plates said excitedly: "There are no records of any known ship visiting this planet.") (The recording engineer said: "Nonetheless, he's telling the truth. And he thinks us a pack of fools.") ("Most amazing," Nineteen commented. "And perhaps we are -- he certainly was not excited to see us, remember. Evidently his memory antedates our records. Let's put the prime question.") Nineteen returned his attention to the native. "August leader, you must have lived a very long time to have watched your people perish over the centuries, and to have seen the visiting starships. Good sir, what is the number of your glorious years?" Bitterly, the king of the planet told him. The answer was not immediately intelligible, for it involved still another x unit of local time, and, to compound matters, there had been still another shift of tonal values. Grimly, not unmixed with annoyance, the king once more changed languages and answered the question -- quite honestly -- in Moabitish. His questioner could only determine that the old man's unusual life span had stretched over an x number of centuries, and he had to be content with that for the time being. But the interrogation continued. OR the remainder of that day, and the following three, the space visitors posed endless questions. They were insatiable. Nineteen, prompted by whispers from within the ship, from those waiting far above, and from the technicians working about the clearing, valiantly attempted to pump the king of his knowledge of anthropology, archeology, astronomy, architecture, biology (running from botany through zoology -- although biometrics proved to be a most frustrating business), chemistry, commerce, electronics, geology and geography, history (a fruitful mass of data!), mathematics, medicine and pharmacy, mythology, numeration -- the list of subjects and the many detailed questions pertinent to each appeared to have no end. The visitors pried and the old man answered in his fashion. He darted from one subfamily of languages to another, leaping from tongue to dialect and back again, watching the interpreter with malicious amusement. Without warning, he would turn from ultra-modern English to Prakrit, to Illyrian, to French, to Avestan, to Vulgate Latin, to Chaldean, to Pahlavi and then to Umbrian, always secretly amused in the belief that he was bewildering the inquisitor. His mastery of the many languages was as complete as his aged memory would permit and he was enjoying himself -- until he suddenly discovered that the space visitor was wise to his game. At some time during the lengthy sessions, the visitor had discovered the subterfuge and thereafter ignored the dazzling changes. The king of the planet lapsed into Aramic, his favorite tongue, and remained there. The malicious fun was lost. The sessions were, not continuous. They paused many times to rest because the king tired, and because he would fall into moody silences that could not be broken until he was ready to break them. They stopped then to eat and drink, and the young girl would bring food from the ship and place it before the old one. He ate sparingly. They took the time to inspect the many small discoveries the archeologists were bringing back from the ancient cemetery, and at the close of each day they closed up shop to sleep. The king refused the invitation to sleep in the scout, or in the mother ship hanging far above, always preferring to return to his mausoleum. Before the king quit the clearing at the end of the first day, he made a small request, a mild one which surely could offend nobody, but it had to be refused. The translator was very sorry, but he simply could not permit the young girl to accompany the king back to his bed for the night. It just wasn't done, and besides the girl was under age. Respectful regret and all that The king strode away, greatly irritated. the morning of the second day, the king was awakened by the noise the archeologists were making in the mausoleum, and he chased them outdoors. He let them know with strong language and unmistakable gestures that his home was the one sacred place barred to them. They could not knock holes in the many vaults lining the mausoleum walls -- not even the small holes which would admit their camera lenses. On the morning of the third day, the visitors had charted the local time sequences to their satisfaction, and the newfound knowledge excited them. Nineteen probed for a solution to the riddle. "Great sir, did many of your people live through centuries? That is, for many hundreds of years?" "No." "What was their usual lifetime?" "The good died young -- they knew better than to stay alive. The worthless ones stayed longer; they were too mean to die." "But what number of years, great leader?" Nineteen strove for the impression of worshipping at the old man's hardened feet. "How young is young?" "Thirty or forty years," the king said impatiently. "And how old is old?" "Seventy, eighty, ninety. A few lived past the century." "Ah, yes. But that extreme age was a rarity, was it not? Even when your subjects were not suffering peace?" "Of course." "Pardon me, glorious one, but I do not understand your age. Why is it that you live so long?" "I rejected peace -- I've told you that!" "You did, good sir, but we still do not understand. Is not peace a desirable attainment?" "It is, until you get it. And then you rot." "And you rejected peace and thus avoided rotting. I'm afraid that isn't as simple as it sounds, but then I do not expect to imderstand the theory. But, sir, there must be some rational reason for your tremendous age, some fact that you have not made known to us." to answer. "Have you discovered the secret of eternal life?" Nineteen asked anxiously. "Do you take drugs? Is it a dietary matter? Have you found some unknown substance which prolongs your life?" HE king let his attention wander and fastened his gaze on the young girl, who was helping a botanist. ("Keep at it," the recording engineer whispered. "You scored a clean hit with one of those questions. His pulse raced.") "My own life," Nineteen said smoothly, "and the lives of my companions are reasonably long. We may expect to live about two hundred years, if we are fortunate." The king pointed at the girl. "How old is she?" "Not yet forty." Nineteen smiled. "She is my daughter, an apprentice to this crew." Without changing his conversational tone, he asked, "How old are you?" The king replied with the identical answer given on the first day. "But sir!" the translator declared. "That amounts to more than three thousand years! And that is incredible; I can scarcely believe it. How does one live for three thousand years by simply rejecting peace?" "It depends upon the manner of rejection," the old one said dourly. "And the time, and the place, and the catalyst." His hungering gaze would not leave the girl. "I'm afraid I do not understand you at all." "I didn't expect you to." "It just isn't possible to exist for so long!" "I'm existing." The king raised his eyes to the scout ship. "And that fellow yonder knows I'm not lying." (The whisper: "He isn't lying, but you've hit on something. I believe he is superstitious. Question him.") Nineteen did, digging patiently but as deeply as he was able, utilizing his every skill to draw out the old man. He reverted to a subject they had discussed on a previous day, mythology, and examined it more carefully than before. A number of significant things came to light which had been passed over before, and these new factors were weighed and balanced against all the conversations so far recorded. In the end. Nineteen admitted to a partial defeat. The day drew to a close and he packed away his equipment, preparatory to returning to the mother ship; he wished he could remain a month or a year with the aged native, but that was not possible. They were leaving after darkness fell. specimens, their recordings and their artifacts, the explorers returned to the scout. The military men dismantled the tall pole which had been planted in the clearing, and reverently packed away the varicolored ball that had spun atop it. Food and drink were left outside, as a final tribute to the king of the planet, and the scout was made secure for lifting. "It is imperative that we return to this planet," Nineteen declared later. "Perhaps in a century or two. It is important to know if he will still be living." "He will be," Seven predicted lightly. "Betties and birchbark will keep going forever." "Not forever," Nineteen contradicted, ignoring the levity. "Even he admitted it. But that last session was most productive; it must have high priority in translation and analysis. I wish I understood it more clearly now. No -- he won't live forever. He is aware of his eventual death, and, if my intuition is correct, he is looking forward to it. Can you imagine three thousand years?" "I can't," Seven replied. "Nor I, but I expect we will find he is very much correct in the figure. No wonder he wants release! His future death is hopelessly entangled in some supernatural fantasy; I no more understand that than I understand his fantastic reason for longevity. What is myth and what is real?" Two said, "He believes in those old gods of the myth, believes in them flatly and without question. Do you suppose there is something to m#dhology after all?" Nineteen smiled and shrugged. "I'm too old to say nonsense, however much I am tempted. But how many hundreds of fantastic legends have we stumbled over? How many wild fictions of imaginary men and imaginary monsters? They persist even in civilized areas. This one appears to be simply another variation -- except that this one is living." Seven laughed. "Yes -- in a cemetery." "He explained that. Again the explanation is caught up in myth. His god, or gods, are supposed to revisit the planet some day and take up all the spirits; when they left thousands of years ago, they promised they would come a second time. This second visitation is supposed to be a universal reawakening day, and the old leader sleeps in the midst of the dead so that he will not be overlooked when that day comes. It is the release he is expecting." "Release from eternal life? That is a favor?" Two cut in dryly, "Try it sometime." "I might, if I get the chance," Seven agreed. "How did the old boy manage it?" "I don't know how it really happened," Nineteen said. "But according to his mythology, he angered the gods by rejecting peace and was sentenced to live until they came again. The gods won't permit his death until that day. I wish I could get to the truth of the matter!" THE king of the planet heard the starship go. It quit the sky with a repetition of the thunder which had accompanied its arrival,  and after its passing the world was strangely quiet. It was always like that after a big ship had passed, but presently the night sounds would return and the lonely world would be normal again. In a century or so, or perhaps three, or five, another ship would come and more visitors would descend on him, annoying him, questioning him, taunting him. Without realizing it, they always taunted him. For none of them was the one visitor he awaited.    ""Don't stop experimenting with your forecast," we are commanded by our readers, and we're not stopping. With a giant I # pages to move around in, we enjoy the exciting combinations made possible, so why should we stop? Always a novella or serial to lead off with? Why? ward; you'll find here a pulse-pounding duel the like of which has never been vast Scorpion Desert of Venus, he needs all the courage a man can own -- and every bit of credit he can raise! And a newcomer, A. J. Offutt, who ought scientist, he needs just one good connection -- to get high-voltage power out of a single hot lead! And more. Don't be too aghast if you find just under half a dozen novelets in the issue. That leaves room for short stories, those vital smaller items that can be read in a quick break of one sort or another. But, we promise, no artificially padded contents page. Willy Ley, off on a data-gathering hunt, won't reveal the title of his upcoming science article until he has the whole thing in hand. Says it's highly interesting, and that is all we can get out of him as of even date. Now what the devil can it be? Can hardly wait to find out... well, it was almost a part of him. But then there wasn't very much of it to know. From floor to ceiling, it measured seven feet; from end to end, it measured seven feet; from side to side, it measured seven feet. In this harshly symmetrical volume, there were two acceleration bunks with straps, and a sort of sink that had two disparate uses. Once there had also been a radio transmitter with a subspace call key, but that had been removed so long ago that even the mark on the wall where it had been attached had faded into invisibility. In fact, as Hesketh was still capable of remembering when he turned his mind to the subject, which was seldom, it was an exact copy of the interior of a survival capsule. Or maybe -- for the Charnogs were of an economical turn of mind -- it was the interior of a survival capsule. Hesketh had more important things on his mind than such fiddling distinctions. The Charnog who should have fed him was late. It had never happened before, and his stomach, conditioned to an unvarying routine, was beginning to grumble. Patiently, he sat down on the edge of the bunk he always used in preference to the other (though there was no difference between the two). But the strangeness of the occurrence disturbed him. ' him no trouble these days. The flow of his thoughts moved as steadily as water through a smoothly turned pipe. But now he found an emotion forming: a wish tnat they would come and feed him so he could go to sleep on a full stomach. The idea of doing something about it, of course, didn't enter his head. There wasn't anything he could do about it. An imaginary itch started on his back, and he contorted himself to scratch it When that distraction had grown dull, he found himself shivering, and that was odd. The clothes he had had on when he was first brought here had long ago become unwearable through much scrubbing, but the Charnogs liked a warm climate and he had never been cold. They had allowed him to keep the calendar watch on his wrist when he was caught, once they had found he had no time sense of his own, but the unchanging pace of life in his tiny room had keyed him to a routine where he no longer glanced at the dial. He did so now, and had to knit his brows to remember what position of the hands corresponded to feeding time. Whatever it was, it wasn't the one now showing. Finally he got up and went to the door, pressing his ear against it. He knew there was a passage there, partly because he might well have seen it when he was brought here, though he no longer remembered that period very clearly, and partly because he had heard the slithering progress of Charnogs go from end to end of it more times than he could count. There was a noise out there now. But it was not the noise of a Charnog. It was a cautious noise, with a sort of irregular double beat to it, and it sounded as though it was made by something large and very clumsy. It awoke things in Hesketh's brain which had lain dormant for too long, and his shivering became uncontrollable. He sat down again on the bunk and clutched himself to preserve his body heat. This noise, it occurred to him, must have something to do with his food being late, and he felt a dull resentment. After a time, whatever was making the noise came to his door and stopped. There were fumbling sounds from the region of the catch on the outside of the sliding panel; then there were impatient movements and something white-hot and sizzling seared through the lock and burned a track down the opposite wall. Hesketh leaped to his feet and turned to run. There was nowhere to run to. "Well, I'll be damned and blasted!" A bellowing voice hurt his ears. "A man!" armored and helmeted figure in the doorway. It had been a long time since he used words, but his mind filtered the essential meaning out of what had been said. "Man," he repeated to himself, and though his voice sounded rusty, the actual noise seemed satisfactory. He managed a complete sentence. "Yes, I'm a man." "Well, I'm damned!" the newcomer said again. He took a pace back and sent a giant shout echoing down the passage. Then he held out his hand. But Hesketh had forgotten what to do with it. The stranger shrugged, exposed his teeth and pushed back his helmet. Sniffing distorted his face, and he spoke in the same bellowing voice. "Boy, I bet you're glad to see me! My name's Walters -- Second Consolidation Fleet. We got the Charnogs out of this sector today and we're taking a look at what we've got. How long have you been in this stinking hole, anyway? No, don't answer that -- you probably don't know." "My name is Hesketh," said the prisoner very quietly, not attempting to imitate the other's shouting. "And I do know how long I have been here. I have been here twentyeight years, two months and seventeen days." Now other men were gathering in the passage, weapons cautiously at the ready, to exclaim with wonder in the same high monotonous roar. Hesketh, during the whole period of his captivity, had heard no noise except his own feet padding in his cell, the splash of water and the slither of Charnogs. He had forgotten how loud a human voice could be. So far as he could, he shut his ears to the babble. They brought him clothing and a spacesuit, and somehow he got them on, thinking of the outside, the universe that had been a dimming memory for twenty-eight years. But it was still unreal beside the discomfort in his stomach. When they led him out into the passage, he looked around eagerly, hoping to see his bowl lying beside one of the dead Charnogs that littered the floor. Walters noticed his actions and grinned. "Good to see them getting a bit of their own back, hey, Hesketh?" he asked loudly. Hesketh shook his head; that gesture came back automatically. "No, I'm hungry." "Starved you, did they, as well as penning you up? The bastards! Well, as soon as we get you aboard a ship, you'll be properly looked after." Hesketh was going to explain that he wasn't starving. It was just that these people had ruined the Charnogs' careful arrangements for looking after him. But at that point he was hustled into a cramped compartment which shot suddenly up, adding another discomfort to that of hunger. Then the door of the compartment opened, and they were on the surface of a night-dark plain. of a deep heaven and struck at Hesketh's mind. A distant horizon jarred his eyes into a focus they hadn't used all the time he was in his seven-by-seven-by-seven cell. It was no wonder he blacked out. I  HE doc's given him a good intravenous meal, so he should be strong enough when he wakes up. Still, the shock must have been pretty considerable. When you've resigned yourself to dying a prisoner, I guess it's an ufsetting experience to be rescued." That was Walters' voice. It was the familiar timbre more than the actual words which caught Hesketh's attention as he struggled back to consciousness. While the next voice took up the thread, he paid it very little attention, except to try to work out where it differed from Walters'. "Especially after all this time," the second speaker agreed. "I've never heard of a similar case. I sent someone to look through the casualty lists about that time, but he drew a blank on the service list, and I haven't much hope from the civilian side -- speak of the devil. Thanks, Lai." Something rustled, and the voice went on. "Yes, this looks like it! Abdul Hesketh, reported missing from transport #, just under thirty years ago. And what's more -- " "Civilian intelligence!" said Walters excitedly "Not only do we get someone back from the Charnogs -- we get someone who's really in a position to tell us something about them! This is a stroke of luck, isn't it, sir?" "I think he's waking up," said the other voice warningly, and Hesketh remembered that his eyelids had flickered a moment before. The light had been blindingly yellow compared to the bluish-tinted Charnog illumination he was used to, but he had seen that the room was clean-looking and large, and his nose told him it smelled different from his cell. A hospital, he remembered. That's right -- a hospital. "Are you feeling all right now, Hesketh?" Walters asked. Hesketh wet his lips. "Yes," he answered, and managed to get his eyes open and keep them open. Walters' face loomed large beside the bed. Another man, heavierfaced, was beside him. "This is Commodore Vozhdov," Walters explained. "He was directing the raid that got you away from the Charnogs." Vozhdov smiled. "Well, Hesketh, you're about the luckiest man in history, you know. We were just saying we'd never heard of anyone being rescued from the Charnogs before. You've had a pretty rough time, but that's over." ' "It wasn't so bad," said Hesketh. The commodore's voice, like all the others, was too loud and grated on his ears. "I got fed, and I was warm enough, and they let me have water to wash in." "But they kept you cooped up in that tiny room for twenty-eight years!" Walters protested. "That's -- that's inhuman!" "Charnogs aren't human," Hesketh pointed out. Vozhdov recovered from that one the quicker of the two. "Of course they're not," he agreed soothingly. "Well, I guess the first thing you'll want to do is to find out what's happened all the time you've been a prisoner. Nothing much, I'm sorry to say -- touch and go, give and take, pretty much a stalemate. Thanks to you, though, I expect victory, and in damned short order!" "Thanks to me?" Hesketh was confused; abstracts like the concept of victory troubled him. "Well, no other man has ever been in such a favorable position to study the Charnogs," Walters pointed out. "And you were in civilian intelligence, weren't you, before you -- uh -- before your capture?" Hesketh said nothing. He frowned a little. "We aren't going to get very far with this at the moment," said Vozhdov, addressing Walters. "But as soon as Doc gives the okay, I want him brought around to me, and we'll bring him up to date on what's happened. I figure the sooner he starts leading a normal human life again, the more help he'll be." Hesketh shut his eyes. I HE doctor's name was Shu; he was small, rather dingy of complexion and soft of voice. That alone made Hesketh prepared to like him better than Vozhdov or Walters, and he obediently agreed to being shaved and examined. There were other people, but they made no direct impact on him. Once he had seen his own face in the mirror, and been surprised to find how much it resembled theirs, he gave up trying to remember the differences between their features. They seemed as impersonal as the many machines Shu employed to test his nervous reflexes, to ascertain his metabolic level, to study the pattern of his encephalograms. The green hospital gowns were soothing. But the hard surface table -- much harder than his familiar acceleration bunk -- was uncomfortable, and the atmosphere of detachment irked him, so that he was almost glad when Shu finally turned off the current from the last of the machines and looked directly at him. "You're all right," he said quietly. "At least, you're in better shape than anyone would have expected. You're confused, naturally, and your reflexes are slow, but physically you're as fit as I am." Hesketh didn't speak, and Shu, after hesitating a moment, crossed the room to his desk communicator. "Lieutenant Walters, please," he said, and drummed with his fingers on the desk until he was answered. The shock of hearing Walters speak made Hesketh look around and expect to see him; then he remembered and relaxed. A little. "Walters, if you'd like to come to sick quarters -- Commodore Vozhdov wanted you to take Hesketh to him." "Be there in just a moment," said Walters. While waiting, Hesketh looked at the apparatus the doctor had used. It was disturbing. It wasn't so much that it was unfamiliar; rather, it was in some way too familiar. He was almost glad when Walters turned up, hearty and loudvoiced as before. He followed without protest and without trying to remember the way they took, as Walters led him down corridors and into and out of elevators, until they arrived in a large office whose walls were almost papered with communicators and information lights. Here, at an administrator's desk, sat Vozhdov. "Mr. Hesketh to see you, sir," Walters said. The commodore shot a file of papers into a pass-to-you and swung around in his seat. He indicated chairs. Hesketh sat uncomfortably, because his was a good six inches higher than the acceleration bunks he was used to. "Well, you've become a pretty important man, Mr. Hesketh," Vozhdov began, frowning. "I reported your rescue to headquarters and it is anxious to know everything you can tell us as soon as possible. Of course, we'll have to have it all analyzed eventually, but it'll be two weeks before we get you to a proper set of computers, so we'll have to make the best of what we've got." "I don't understand," said Hesketh. " surprised. "No? I thought it was clear enough. Look at it this way: never before have we actually got someone back from Charnog custody -- someone who's observed them at first hand. Direct information about them is worth hauling a Class B cruiser out of the battle line and sending it back to Base under emergency overdrive. Which is what we've done. Because of you -- " Vozhdov glanced at his watch -- "four thousand-odd fighting men and one of the second most powerful ships in our fleet are heading away from a developing battle, and have been for eighteen hours. Maybe you see now how important you are." "This ship?" said Hesketh. Then he added hastily, not wanting to appear foolish, "It is a ship, isn't it, not a planetary base?" Vozhdov was momentarily at a loss for words. With a glance at him, Walters filled the breach. "Things have changed quite a bit since your day, Hesketh," he said. "It is a ship, of course. Since we got the Sun Ping drive twenty years ago, there's just about no limit to what we can put aloft. We could move planets around, I guess, if we wanted." Hesketh didn't respond. Walters made a grimace and shrugged. "All right," said Vozhdov heavily. "You know what your knowledge means to us, Hesketh. You're the one thing that's better than a live Charnog for our purposes. You're unique. You're invaluable. You're indispensable. Understand?" Hesketh, feeling it was expected of him, nodded. Then he said. "Well -- " and tried desperately to think of something he could say about his captors. "They slither," he suggested hopefully. "I used to hear them going down the passage outside when they fed me." "Yes, we know they slither," agreed Vozhdov patiently. "We've deduced that much from studying their anatomy. But that's not what we want. We can't keep a Charnog alive in captivity long enough to study its way of thinking -- its psychology, in short. And we need badly to know about that." "They kept me warm," said Hesketh. "It was warmer there than it is here. And they gave me water in the sink in the corner. There was a tap I had to turn." "That's interesting. They must have had to develop a new technique for that," said Walters slowly. "We know water's corrosive to them. But I guess we must have know that for fifty years." Vozhdov snorted. "All right. Fact one: they went to a lot of bother to keep Hesketh alive. But we could have guessed that from the fact that he's here now. Anything else?" "How about air?" asked Walters. "Yes, there was air," said Hesketh. "How else do you think I could have breathed?" ing anyone address a commodore in that manner; he looked righteous and indignant Vozhdov glared at him and spoke patiently to Hesketh. "How was the air provided?" Hesketh shrugged. "It was always there. I don't know where it came from. I couldn't look." "They probably piped him in oxygen through the old storage tank inlet" said Walters. "But that was all. I got a whiff of the atmosphere in that room, sir. It stank!" "And we were flushing the tunnels with oxygen, anyway, to kill off the survivors." Vozhdov grunted. "They fed you, too, didn't they?" "Yes. Regularly." Hesketh's stomach was still upset. He put emphasis on the second word. "Ah!" said Vozhdov. "How often? Maybe from that we can deduce the rotation period of their home world. That could be valuable." He looked at Hesketh expectantly. "Every twelve hours," said Hesketh. "Exactly, every twelve hours." "HE other two slumped in disappointment. "They must have noted the rotation period of the watch he had on him," Walters complained. "I saw it was still going when we brought him aboard. Hadn't gained or lost more than a few minutes, at the most, in all those years." "Which had it done?" demanded Vozhdov. Walters looked apologetic. "Sorry, sir. I did notice, as it happens -- compared it with my own. It had lost eight minutes and a few seconds." "Mm. Well, I suppose the mere fact he was allowed to keep his watch is something," Vozhdov allowed grudgingly. "Anything else, Hesketh?" "No, I can't think of anything." "You mean you were taken straight to that place immediately you were captured, and they left you locked in and never so much as looked at you again?" By the time Vozhdov finished, he was almost shouting; Hesketh's new adjustment to ordinary voice levels gave way, and he barely heard the last few words. "That can't be right, sir," said Walters. "As I recall, there's a gap of about seven months between his ship being reported missing and the time he says his captivity started. He couldn't have been in the survival capsule all that time. His supplies, even allowing for the fact that he was on his own, wouldn't have lasted him past a month, or six weeks at the ouside. And he was quite definite about the time he'd been in the cell, and his watch was working." "Okay, Mr. Hesketh," said Vozhdov bluntly. "What happened to you in those seven months?" remember," he said. "If was a long time ago." "Well, surely you remember how you ipt there?" "Oh, yes! When the ship blew up, I got into the capsule. I was lucky." "That's not when your luck started!" said Walters bitterly. "It started when I blew the lock on your cell!" "Lieutenant!" said Vozhdov sharply, and Walters subsided, looking mutinous. "Mr. Hesketh, we appreciate you've been through a great ordeal, believe me. We realize we're asking a lot of you. But it's only because you have a lot to give. It's of the utmost importance to your race that you should remember." "It was a long time ago." "This is like talking to the air!" said Vozhdov. "What did Shu say about this, Walters?" "He said Hesketh was in remarkably good shape, all things considered." "Well, take this man back with my compliments and inform Dr. Shu that he didn't consider everything. I've promised victory -- practically -- on the strength of getting this prisoner back, and I'm going to look pretty silly if we're wasting our time. And so are you." Walters got up and beckoned that Hesketh should do the same, and they retraced their steps to the hospital. Walters did not talk during the trip; he merely strolled along looking as if he could see a citation for distinguished service retreating from him under overdrive. "Well, Doc?" Walters inquired. "Do you think the Charnogs managed to get into his mind and seal it off?" "I doubt it," said the quiet little doctor, when he had finished checking Hesketh briefly. "What's more likely is that during his captivity he has repressed some unpleasant memories. I think the commodore is trying to rush matters. Give him a day or two to get used to the idea that he's human and not completely alone. Then some of thearriers may break down." "So what do you recommend we do?" Shu chewed his lower lip for a moment. "Why not show him the ship and introduce him to as many of the crew as possible? And you might -- but warn me before you do this you might take him to a survival capsule and show him that it's not really a Charnog prison cell, but a means of escape." "Doctor," said Hesketh suddenly, "is there somewhere I could be alone for a bit?" "Yes, certainly," Shu nodded. "I've assigned you a cabin right next door to sick quarters. Number # #. Come along and I'll show you where it is. My office is just a couple of doors along, so if you need me at any time, you only have to look in, and if I'm not there, one of the orderlies will be. You see, this is -- " Hesketh went into the cabin and closed the door. "Well, I'll be damned!" exclaimed Walters. "He doesn't even seem grateful that we hauled him out of that hole!" "We probably haven't given him much to feel grateful for, so far," said Shu mildly. "Don't rush him. It's a miracle that he's as sane as he is, you know." "Well, you're the expert," said Walters. "All right."  I ' HE cabin wasn't bad. There was only one bunk, but it was on the correct side for his taste, and there were a sink and a chair. The bunk was too high, but he didn't notice that once he had sunk down on it, for he fell immediately into a deep sleep. He woke up again for no reason except that a period of time had passed, went to the sink, and lay down again. But something nagged him. Finally it clarified into the fact that his stomach was empty. He swung his feet to the floor and gazed expectantly at the door panel, submerging the knowledge that there was a reason for his food not arriving. He had been waiting like a statue for a long time when there was a rap at the door. He didn't move, because nothing else hapiened. After a moment, the panel slid aside, and Walters stepped through. On seeing Hesketh, he heaved a sigh of relief. "So you are here!" he said. "We were getting worried. The doc said he hadn't seen you for hours -- " "I'm hungry," said Hesketh flatly. "Well, of course you must be. You've been alone in here for hours. Come along with me to mess and I'll introduce you to the rest of us." "All right," said Hesketh, and got up. As he stood aside to let Hesketh precede him, Walters caught sight of the sink by the door, and had to swallow hard before speaking again. "Uh -- the proper place -- didn't anybody tell you -- ? Never mind. This way." The mess was full of people: faces all very much alike except for minor differences of coloring, names all very different. The combination defeated Hesketh, and the curious soon tired of staring at him. They sat him at a table and brought a white dish containing a variety of multi-colored objects. He ignored it at first; it was different in both smell and appearance from what the Charnogs had given him. "I thought you said you were hungry," said Walters in surprise, and Hesketh, copying the actions of others sitting not far from him, took something from the plate which looked less outrageous than the rest and stuffed it into his mouth. The taste was unpleasant, but he got it down. "Something -- to drink?" he asked Walters, who was watching his actions with unconcealed wonder. Walters brightened, and signaled a mess waiter. "This'll make you feel better," he said when the man produced a bottle. "It's about the best we've got. All the way from Earth." Something pale yellow and translucent arrived in a glass set before Hesketh. After a pause, he picked it up doubtfully. "This -- this isn't water," he said. "You darned right it's not! That's our best white wine. Try it -- it's good." Walters leaned forward encouragingly. Sickly, Hesketh set the glass down. How to explain that in his personal cosmos there was only one fluid at all besides water, and that it was this color? "No, I haven't drunk anything but water for -- for a long time. Maybe I'd better not"  And there was an apparently rational explanation for Hesketh's peculiar actions. "I guess you may be right at that" he agreed. "That stuff is pretty strong. All right, waiter -- a glass of water instead." The food quieted Hesketh's stomach and he got through the meal without further difficulty. Then Walters took him off for a tour of the ship. "How about starting with the drive room?" he suggested, and so they started with the drive room -- a vast place full of tame energies that slept and sometimes crackled into wakefulness in gigantic insulated spheres. "That's the Sun Ping drive, of course," said Walters. "Like I told you, it could move planets if we wanted it to." Then they went to armaments. "There's a Charnog name stamjjed on every one of these missiles," said Walters, "if they use names. Do they?" "I don't think they talk," said Hesketh, "so they probably don't have names." Walters shrugged. "Comes to the same thing in the end." Then they went to navigation. "Charnog bases," said Walters, indicating a sweep of lights across an astral map. They glowed danger-red. "We've established the location of practically every base in this sector now. Far cry from your day, eh, Hesketh? Then we were practically fighting in the dark." "Which -- where was I?" "Here," said Walters, and tapped a green light. "That's been green ever since the day we rescued you. Pretty soon now, they'll all be green -- with your help." "Take me back to my cabin, please," said Heskefh. "Let's finish our tour," Walters said, and dragged Hesketh off to the servicing shops, and the administrative section, and the troop landing locks, and the planetary boat section, and the recreation rooms, and... Hesketh lost count Eventually he found himself back in Vozhdov's office, and the heavy-faced officer was throwing questions at him. "You already asked me that," said Hesketh firmly. "I told you I couldn't remember." Vozhdov frowned and sent for Dr. Shu. "This is getting us nowhere," he declared in anoyance. Shu shook his head. "Commodore, put yourself in his position. For twenty-eight years, Hesketh has had to think of himself as a unique individual. You can't expect him to re-establish racial identification all at once. His subconscious hasn't been troubled with problems of survival in all this time. Eventually it will come to equate personal advantage with racial advantage again, and then we'll see the barriers begin to crumble."  "Has he made any friends yet among the crew?" Walters grimaced. "I don't think he's interested. I doubt if he gives a damn even about me." "I was thinking that by this time he would at least have started to identify," Shu muttered. "Still, this is a unique case -- " "I suppose he does know something of value to us?" Vozhdov put in. "Almost certainly," said Shu. "After all, in those missing seven months, you can bet your life the Charnogs were doing their utmost to get the information they wanted out of him. So -- " "Do you think they got it?" Vozhdov cut in. "Possibly." Shu shrugged. "In which case, there may be a subconscious element of guilt involved. If he was aware he was being useful to the enemy, he may regard himself as a traitor. Such an idea is certainly repulsive enough to account for the repression of his memories." "But surely we have the techniques to eliminate repressions of that kind?" Walters commented. Shu gave a vigorous nod. "Of course! But to try and break down his mental armor by force would remove the props on which his stability depends now. He's had a long time to get used to them, remember. We might find ourselves with an insane man on our hands." "So we go on waiting," said Vozhdov. "Exactly." Into the silence which followed that remark broke a small but insistent buzz. Vozhdov flipped a switch on his desk. "Listening." "Unidentified vessel on approach course at extreme limit of detector range, sir," said an impersonal voice. "Fifteen forward by eight down by a hundred and six. I'm putting a plot of the course on your screen." life on a plastic plate inset in the desk top; Vozhdov studied it for a moment and said, "Action stations yellow." Then, over his shoulder to the others, "Get out of here." They went. "You'd better nip along, Walters," said Shu. "I'll take Hesketh with me. His cabin is close to sick quarters." twisting passages, they heard a PA speaker cough into life, and it said, "Hear this! Chamog cruiser on approach course, twelve forward by nine O five down by a hundred one. Action stations red." Shu broke into a run and Hesketh had to keep up. "What -- what's happening?" he gasped. "What do you think? On a course like that, it's coming in to the attack, obviously." Shu skidded agilely around a corner. "I hope it's a small one. This far behind the front line, it probably is. Most likely a scout -- " Another speaker boomed down another corridor: "Attack imminent! Attack imminent!" Something clicked in Hesketh's mind and he stopped in his tracks. "Capsule," he said under his breath. "Capsule -- where's a capsule?" On the last word, his voice rose to a cry, but Shu had gone around a corner, out of sight Hesketh's last despairing wail was lost on the air. He stood at an intersection, turning indecisively from one passage to another. His limbs and face trembled uncontrollably; sweat started out on his forehead and dripped into his eyes. There was a thump that shifted the entire ship on its longitudinal axis, and he lost his footing and keeled over. His head struck the hard square corner of the wall, and for a few minutes he lay unconscious. When he recovered, blood was mingling with the sweat in his eyes and his mind was clouded by an intolerable ache. He pulled himself to his feet and looked around. Nothing seemed visibly changed; whatever damage that gigantic blow had done, it was not in this area. A number painted clearly on a door attracted his notice. There was a familiar look about it, and he remembered he had a cabin, with a number. All these were in the seven hundreds and no use to him. Cabin # I -- that was it. Someone was coming at a run. He glanced in both directions, saw the owner of the pounding footsteps cross the corridor in which he stood. "Where's cabin #?" he yelled. The man barely paused in his haste. "Down three decks -- blue companionway -- third intersection -- fifth right, third left!" And he was gone. Hesketh tried to order his confused memory of the man's directions. He started off at random, and after a few paces came to the blue companionway. He went down, clinging to the rail. Three intersections -- or was that decks? Even the jumbled memories ran out on him before he came to the end of the companionway and it turned red. Spots danced before his eyes, sometimes shifting to make the outline of the figure # I and sometimes transposing themselves into # or # and sometimes just blurring his sight. His pulse was beginning to race, and from time to time the left-hand wall of the corridor he was following met him head on. Someone rounded a corner and bumped into him. "You all right, pal?" a voice queried. Desperately, Hesketh formed the words. "Cabin # #, please?" "Sick quarters? D deck, turn right and second left and it's straight in front of you. Can't miss it." The man was gone. Hesketh wandered a little further. Someone else appeared. Hesketh croaked his question: "Cabin #, please?" "This is four-one-two," said the man, jerking his arm out He was wriggling his head into a battlevision helmet and did not notice Hesketh's condition. "But if you're looking for Duhe, he's at his post in gunnery right now."  the door the man had indicated. It was locked. Focusing his eyes with an effort, he made out that its number was #, and turned indignantly to ask what the man had meant. But he was gone. "Hear this," said the PA system again. "Damage report. We were hit astern of the pwrt nose gunnery compartment by a large resonator. It failed to vibrate and -- " Realization of what the impact had meant burst in Hesketh's mind. He stared wildly left and right for the red-painted door which indicated the entrance to a survival capsule, saw none, and crumpled into a ball, trying to drive the memories newly awakening back into the depths of his mind. " -- contained the damage," continued the PA system, unmindful of Hesketh. "The raider is falling astern and steering erratically after two direct hits. That is all." Hesketh was still in his fetal position when he heard slow footsteps, doubled, making heavy work of the going. He maneuvered his eyes cautiously. Two armored orderlies were approaching, bearing between them a stretcher on which lay a badly injured man, his blood staining his blanket. Getting to his feet unsteadily, Hesketh said, "Cabin # #, please?" The first of the orderlies gazed at him in astonishment. "Who the devil sent you down to sick quarters on your own feet in that state? Come along with us!" He fell in obediently behind them, but as they entered the hospital corridor, he caught sight of the number he had been hunting for and dashed past them. As soon as the cabin door was safely slammed behind him, he flung himself face down on the bunk. What was happening to him? This giddiness, this racing pulse, profuse sweating, this feeling of -- something -- neither fullness nor emptiness nor pressure, unlike any sensation his stomach had given him in all those years? For endless ages, he lay without daring to move, moaning at intervals. Then the door opened and Dr. Shu stepped in, followed by a nurse carrying a sterilizer and dressings. "What's up with you, Hesketh?" the doctor inquired. "My orderlies said you looked pretty bad." Hesketh half-rolled on his side and gave a gasp. It could have been a word: "Help!" Shu's professional fingers searched the bloody scalp. "A scratch," he said, and added to the nurse, "Doesn't need a dressing. Just clean it up." "My -- my guts," moaned Hesketh, and Shu frowned. He took a culture disc from a sterile case and slapped it briskly on the skin of Hesketh's forearm, took it away, slid it under the objective of a pocket diagnostician. He whistled. "Here, eat this," he said, clicking a pill from a dispenser. "It'll put you right in no time. All you've got is a common cold. I suppose, being in a pretty sterile climate, you've lost a lot of your resistances. But a cold is all it is." Hesketh got the tasteless pill down somehow, and Shu turned back toward the door. "Don't leave me!" Hesketh begged. "Listen, Hesketh, I've got sixty men in sick quarters that we picked out of the wreck of the nose gunnery section. I've done everything you need, and I can't waste time holding your hand!" Then his face softened a bit. "I suppose it's encouraging that you don't want to be alone any more. Don't worry, that pill will fix you up in about six hours -- " A voice bellowed through the door: Vozhdov's. "Shu, what the hell are you doing in there? You should be operating on Gurra Singh!" "Yes, Commodore," said Shu, turning away again. "They're putting him under anesthetic now." the last time he had felt ill. Now the virus drove him swiftly into delirium and exhausted coma, from which he awoke much weakened and with his head buzzing with new memories. They made him cry out and open his eyes, to find an orderly standing by his bed. "You should be okay now, Mr. Hesketh," the man said. "Will you come through and see the doc in his office, please?" "No," said Hesketh, and turned over. Bewildered, the man withdrew, but in a few moments he was back, accompanied this time by Vozhdov and Shu. The commodore stood glowering in the background while the doctor carried out a perhaps deliberately undeft examination. Then he stepped back, peeling off sterile gloves. "He'll do," he said in a voice that sounded terribly tired. "Fever's gone and the infection's under control." "All right!" Vozhdov came forward. "You listening, Mister Hesketh?" Hesketh made no reply. Vozhdov could contain himself no longer. "Whether you want to listen or not, you're going to!" he exploded. "I've had just about all I can take from you! It's no damn good thinking that just because you're unique and important you can keep us hanging about for your private likes and dislikes. We've just lost forty good men to a Charnog attack, and the doc's fighting to keep a dozen more alive. You know enough about the Charnogs to win the war, and we're going to win it regardless of what you want!" Shu was shaking his head tiredly, in a gesture of warning, but Vozhdov turned fiercely on him. "Enough of that! Walters! Come in here instead of standing like a jackass in the passage! I told you to get this man interested in what was going on -- " "Sir," said Walters defensively, "I tried my best. I just couldn't get through to him." "Well, take him up and show him the corpses and the wreckage in nose gunnery! If that doesn't remind him he's a human being with a duty to his race, we'll remind him the hard way! All right, Hesketh," he finished in a lower tone, "get on your feet and go with Walters." Blindly, but recognizing the authority in the tone, Hesketh did so.  T seems to me," said Walters bitterly, as they funneled up an access corridor half-blocked with scattered equipment, "you care more for the bastards who cooped you up than you do for your own sFecies! I knew these guys they're hauling out of there frozen stiff and torn to pieces. They were good friends of mine. Look!" Walters caught the shoulder of a masked and armored man, swinging him around to show what he was bearing in his arms: a leg, a hand and a head that did not match each other. "Your friends the Charnogs did that, Hesketh -- understand?" The armored man pulled away and went on down the corridor with his ghastly load. Watching him depart, Hesketh felt a stir of sickness again. "What -- exactly -- happened?" "That's better. Come through the lock and I'll show you." There was a guard at the lock, which had been cut through the air-seal around the damaged section; Walters explained his mission, and they were allowed to pass. Through the headphones of a spacesuit, his voice sounded oddly unfamiliar to Hesketh, but he got his meaning. "See that big black thing in the middle of this mess?" Hesketh's eyes were unused to sorting out the kind of confusion that faced them. He stretched out a hand and pointed at something big and black and sinister which hardly ix)ked out from the heaps of ruined equipment. "That?" "That. A present from your friends. Understand? A resonator with power enough to scatter this ship across half Creation. If our damper screens hadn't stopped it vibrating we'd have been blown to hell between our lines and the nearest support base. We'd have been dead ducks, and that includes you, and it would have been your pals' doing. Get it?" Hesketh shifted uncomfortably. "It happened to me before," he said. "That must have been before I was -- before I was a prisoner... But don't they have survival capsules any more?" He waited anxiously for Walters' reply. "Of course we have survival capsules. You'll see 'em all over the ship. But they're an anachronism. What would be the chance of getting to a capsule if a resonator that size actually went off? And it would take a ship like ours days to scour the area on the chance of finding someone alive -- and you think they're going to search for improbable survivors when the ships could be knocking down Charnogs? Don't be a fool." "I -- I thought they could locate them by radio," Hesketh suggested. "Oh, sure. But you have to get pretty near to a capsule before you can pick it up on a receiver, and in any case the shock of the blast often puts the radio out of action. No, a survival capsule's a waste of effort these days." Walters changed the subject. "Well? Seen enough? Are you going to talk now?" "I don't know what I can say," pleaded Hesketh, and Walters made a disgusted gesture. "Then we'll have to find out," he said, and led the way back from the damaged area into the body of the ship. A S they were retracing their steps down a corridor, they passed a red-painted door, and Hesketh, startled, halted to stare at it. "Yes, that's a survival capsule," Walters told him. "A two-man capsule like the one you got away in. You got away! Not like those poor guys in the gunnery section -- they're all fouled up with the wreckage, aren't they?" Unhearing, Hesketh worked the control exfierimentally and the door slid open. He looked inside. The design was hardly changed from the one he had known; but then Walters had said capsules were an anachronism, and who bothers to improve an anachronism? "Satisfied?" said Walters bitingly after a long pause. Hesketh closed the door again reluctantly. "Take me back to my cabin, please," he requested, and Walters struck out down the passage toward sick quarters. But when Hesketh came within sight of cabin # I and started eagerly to it, he was surprised to find his arm gripped. "Not so fast," said Walters between his teeth. "You're coming into the doc's office first." "But -- why? I'm all right now -- my cold's gone -- " Protesting, Hesketh tried to struggle loose, but Walters was skilled at frog-marching, and willy-nilly Hesketh found himself being forced toward the doctor's door. Inside, they found Vozhdov sitting beside the doctor's desk, countersigning forms as the doctor filled them in. They looked up when Walters and Hfesketh came in. "Well?" Vozhdov demanded. "Did that straighten him up?" "Not that I can see, sir," said Walters. "All he's interested in is survival capsules." "Womb retreat," said Shu softly, and completed another form. "Hesketh, down here we've been watching men die while you've been out. These are their death certificates I'm making out. Does that mean anything to you?" "Please let me go to my cabin," said Hesketh. "I feel all right now." "That does it!" snapped Vozhdov. "Shu, we're not waiting. There's knowledge in this man's mind that we must have, and you're going to get at it. That's an order." Shu looked too weary to protest. "Serov! Quincatlan!" Vozhdov called, and two orderlies hurried into the office. "Take this man through to the operating theater. The doctor will tell you what to do with him." Hesketh's arms were pinioned, and he was forced across the floor to a different door from the one by which he had entered. As soon as he saw what was beyond, he began to scream. But he was laid out on a hard surgical bench, and a needle pricked his arm. A certain calm came over him; he stopped screaming, and his pulse quietened. But, inside, he cowered away from his own eyes for fear of what they might be going to show him. Vozhdov took a chair and sat down close to the table. Shu gave quiet commands to his orderlies, who wheeled in machines and attached suction-cup terminals to Hesketh's temples and scalp. "Why was he screaming?" asked Vozhdov. Shu passed a hand across his forehead. "I imagine it was because this is what happened to him before." "You mean when the Charnogs had him? Well, what difference can that make? This time he's helping his own race, isn't he?" "Logic like that doesn't necessarily appeal to the subconscious," said Shu, and there was something in his voice that suggested it might not appeal to him either. But he continued his preparations. A metronome with a tiny light glowing at the end of its vertical pendulum was set to ticking over Hesketh's forehead, and the stimulus touched off another scream. And another. And another. A further prick of a needle and there was darkness. on the bunk in his cabin, with Shu sitting asleep on a chair beside him. The shock of waking brought him bolt upright, staring wildly around for signs of the hypnotist's equipment which had been used on him. The doctor stirred and opened his eyes. "Don't worry, Hesketh. It's over for the moment." Hesketh relaxed, but his watchful eyes were on Shu's face, like those of a trapped animal studying its captor. "I'm sorry," Shu went on inadequately, "but it has to be done. You've been screaming -- did you know?" Hesketh realized his throat was raw and harsh. He tried to sFeak and found it painful. "Drink this -- it'll ease the soreness," Shu offered, and reached for a glass of white liquid standing on the edge of the sink. Hesketh took it warily, as if in no mood to trust it, but when he tried it, it did relieve the pain. He gave the glass back with a mutter of thanks. "I don't like what we're having to do," Shu said. "Do you understand that? But -- well, when the Charnogs captured you, they must have examined you, and studied you, and learned a lot from you. You couldn't have helped it. The mere fact that you were a living, breathing human being told them perhaps more than they'd known one chance, we got you back safely. And -- " He spread his hands helplessly. "I'd rather have left you alone till you came to of your own accord. It would have happened. But they say they need what you can tell us right away, and the commodore has ordered me to -- " "Is there going to be more?" asked Hesketh. "Yes, I'm afraid there is. We're trying to locate the memories of a few short months a good many years ago, and you've hidden them from yourself so well, it may take quite a long time for us to find them all." Shu found he could no longer face the burning intensity of Hesketh's gaze, and had to look at the blankness of the wall. The door opened; an orderly locked in and said, "Commodore Vozhdov's compliments. Doctor, and he's ready for another session." "Did you tell him I said Hesketh wasn't?" Shu replied without turning his head. "Yes, sir. He said he was tired of waiting for Hesketh." "All right." The doctor got to his feet. Hesketh was staring at him accusingly. "Damn it, Hesketh! I wish there was another way!" "I know you do," said Hesketh surprisingly. "Where"s -- Vozhdov?" "In the operating theater, I presume." Shu indicated that Hesketh should leave the cabin in front of him, and they went out. Vozhdov was indeed in the theater; he was pacing up and down impatiently. As the doctor entered, he snapped, "Where have you been? We've wasted enough time already on this!" Hesketh surveyed the room silently. It was as it had been before. The metronome was ready to start its ticking above his forehead, driving him into a trance. Deliberately, he picked up the heavy object and threw it at Vozhdov. T T hit the commodore in the chest, and the blow was followed by a moment of total astonished silence. Then Vozhdov reacted. "Why, you treacherous little -- " His fist was already swinging for Hesketh's face when Shu leaped forward. He wasn't quite quick enough; he took the full force of the blow and staggered back across the room, holding his shoulder where it had been struck. "If you do that again. Commodore," he said as soon as he had mastered the pain, "I shall forward a confidential report on your behavior to Base and have you relieved of your command." "What did you say?" the commodore demanded incredulously. "You heard." Shu rubbed his aching shoulder. "If necessary, I'll have you certified psychologically unfit. I think the staff will uphold my ruling when I tell them you endangered the sanity of the most valuable man alive. Now do you think you're going to be able to control yourself, or do I have to order you out of here?" "But -- " Vozhdov seemed unable to believe his ears. "But you saw what he did!" "Of course I saw," said Shu in icy, cutting tones. "And it was fully justified." Hesketh, finally comprehending the situation, suddenly gave the little quiet-spoken doctor a smile. "I like you!" he said. Shu  managed a tired grin in response. "You aren't going to like me much longer," he answered. "Lie down, will you?" Hesketh hesitated, looking at Vozhdov. Scowling, the commodore composed himself enough to take his seat, and Hesketh climbed irresolutely on the table. Then the metronome was set going and it all started again. He awoke this time to find himself still in the theater. Vozhdov was speaking, rubbing his hands together delightedly. "So we're getting somewhere! I told you we would, didn't I?" Hesketh rolled his head to look at Shu, who wore a sick expression. "Yes, we're getting somewhere," the doctor admitted. "I'm not sure it's very reassuring news, though." "Doesn't matter," shrugged Vozhdov. "Base will be delighted to get it. It'll upset them to learn they've been underestimating the Charnogs' knowledge of human psychology for so long, but they need a bit of shaking up." "Oh, go ahead and make your report," said Shu. "There'll probably be a promotion to follow." Vozhdov's satisfied smile vanished like frost in sunlight. "What did you say. Dr. Shu?" The doctor didn't seem to hear, but went on as if to himself. "That is, if Hesketh gets to Base with his mind in one piece... He suddenly noticed that HesP-'V-'-Xj V keth's eyes were open, and hurried up to the table. "Here," he said solicitously, "take my arm and I'll get you back to your cabin." "Couldn't you send an orderly for that?" asked Vozhdov. "I could," said Shu, helping Hesketh to the floor, and left it at that. his bunk and collapsed onto it. Shu stood over him with pitying eyes. "They must have treated you damned badly," he said. "Almost as badly as we're going to... But then they had ignorance as an excuse." When he left, Hesketh lay still. He found he was beginning to remember: a ticking bright thing at the edge of his field of vision -- which was not Shu's metronome; something attached to his scalp -- which was not Shu's encephalograph. He was recalling voices that had spoken to him, hard, hard to understand -- artificial. When he slept, it was with nightmares. They came for him when he was barely awake, and after that things settled into a standard cycle : trance, wakening with his throat raw, a brief interlude of thinking consciousness, and a period of oblivion which he reached for as blessed comfort. "How can he be so indifferent about the Charnogs, after what they must have done to him?" demanded Vozhdov at the end of one of the sessions. "What good would hate have been to him for twenty-eight years?" said Shu. "He couldn't do anything." "He could at least have looked forward to escape." "Escape! How long would you hang onto that hope?" "Well, why can't he feel angry now that he has been rescued?" pressed the commodore, and Shu gave him a short, cold look. "He's beginning to feel angry again, I assure you." "Good!" said the commodore, and Shu saw that the point of the remark was lost on him. The sessions continued. Each one left a clearer mind in Hesketh's head. As Shu had stated, he was beginning to feel angry again, but that wasn't all. After a later session, he looked at the little doctor curiously. "You really don't like doing this, do you?" he said with a hint of wonder in his voice. "I hate it," said Shu passionately. "Don't worry," Hesketh said. "It won't be going on much longer." Surprised, Shu stared at him. "How can you tell? Are you beginning to remember consciously, as well as unconsciously? I wish you could -- then we could just question you, instead of having to dig in your mind this way." "It won't be much longer now," repeated Hesketh, cursing himself for having already said too much. But he couldn't stop himself. "I -- I escaped twice, you know." "Of course you did," said Shu. "Once from the wreck of a ship and once from the Charnog base." "No," said Hesketh, and frowned. "That wasn't escape, was it? When Walters came and got me, I mean." "Strictly speaking, it wasn't," Shu agreed. "It was a rescue, not an escape." "That's what I meant," said Hesketh, and Shu looked puzzled. Yes, certainly, Hesketh thought to himself. I escaped twice. I really did escape twice. "Well," said Shu at length, "however long it takes now, the worst of it is over." aware that the worst of it was over. But what remained was pretty bad, too, and without the new clarity that had overtaken his mind, he would have succumbed to what was done to him. As it was, he continued to struggle, though he submitted readily enough now to the continuing routine: trance, wakefulness, slumber, trance... Progress grew very slow. Locked deep, deep in the lowest levels of Hesketh's subconscious, were things which his mind had overlaid protectively with layer upon layer of defensive repressions. Memories of what had actually been done to him came back comparatively quickly, although they lacerated his mind in so doing, but what was hidden below them was much more important -- memories of things he had himself done involuntarily, and of his reactions to them. Each recollection was unearthed more slowly than the previous one, and Vozhdov's impatience grew daily. The time came when it flared up and he shouted at Shu. "We're only two days from Base now and you still haven't cleaned out that data in his mind! What are they going to say when they -- " "Exactly," said Shu, his eyes like steel. "You're afraid Hesketh won't earn you a promotion, after all. You're afraid they may find your insistence on rushing matters has forever deprived the human race of the knowledge buried in Hesketh's mind. It may have -- I'm not qualified to say. But I do know this -- if you keep on driving Hesketh the way you've done up to now, you'll finish him!" Hesketh got stiffly off the surgical table and came across to Shu, who looked almost on the verge of hitting the commodore. "It's not as bad as that," he said comfortingly. "It's all over." "What d'you mean?" Vozhdov, unsure of what reply to give to Shu, was pleased to switch the object of his attention. Hesketh gave him a look of contempt and went on addressing the doctor. "There's a way out of this. And you don't want to go on, do you?" "If it hadn't been for him," said Shu, nodding at Vozhdov, "I'd never have started." "That's what I thought. Well, come along then. Let's go to a life capsule." Startled, Shu looked up. "You -- you think maybe that kind of stimulus might bring your memory back completely now?" "It might," said Hesketh cautiously. "Anyway, it's a way out, isn't it?" "I don't quite follow you, but it's worth trying. Anything but what the last session's been like! Hesketh, I'm sorry -- I feel as if I've been flaying you alive." "That's all right," said Hesketh. "It was his fault, not yours." Vozhdov purpled, but Shu silenced him with a glare. "All right, Hesketh," he said. "There's a capsule not far from here, on C deck, which will do. Try anything once..." It's worked all right before, thought Hesketh. T hey left the office together, Shu leading, Hesketh next and Vozhdov sullenly bringing up the rear. Something had cleared in Hesketh's mind; new knowledge, new purpose filled it. They reached the capsule and he put his purpose to work. He had never lifted a hand against Vozhdov since the time he had thrown the metronome at him, though he had often wanted to. Now he did; he swung around and brought the edge of his hand to the commodore's throat. The blow was as violent as he could make it. Vozhdov could not even cry out, for it smashed his larynx. "What-?" cried Shu. "What for?" Hesketh gazed at him in surprise. "I thought you understood! Well, it doesn't matter. You will in a moment. Come on!" Shu didn't move. They dared not delay, Hesketh realized -- who knew who might come past and catch them? He had to act first and explain later. So he struck the doctor apologetically under the ear, catching him as he slumped, and dragged him through the entrance into the survival capsule, laid him tidily on the bunk he didn't want for himself, and then closed the door and activated the expulsion switch. As soon as the capsule had been fired, Hesketh got up from the bunk where he had thrown himself and looked with satisfaction. He knew his surroundings so well that they were almost a part of him. In a sense, they were. There was only one thing which irritated him, and that was the radio jutting from the wall. He tugged at it, but it was mounted too securely for him to dislodge it. He clambered onto one of the bunks and kicked downward at the radio. Wires fused as they tore loose. Then he sat down to await Shu's awakening. In a few minutes, the little doctor stirred and moaned, and Hesketh spoke reassuringly. "It's all right now. Doc. Everything is all right." Shu started up and looked around. "How could I have been so stupid?" he said wonderingly. "You, told me yourself you escaped twice! Once from the wreck of the transport ship, and once from the Charnogs -- only the Charnogs recaptured you -- and each time you came to equate escape with a survival capsule. So you naturally made your third escape the same way, this time from us." He began to laugh. "Well, everything's clear now. You're out of Vozhdov's hands for good. Base'll send out ships to pick us up. It won't take them long to track down our radio signal." "Oh, no," Hesketh assured him, and fxjinted to the ruins of the radio. "That was the mistake I made both times, letting the cafsule go on signaling. You didn't think I'd make it a third time, did you?" This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. # Star Shelf F. Glantz. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # days of Capt. S. P. Meek have we had a distinguished service author than the temporarily indentured writers of WW II. But Col. Glantz, with his very first novel, erupts into front-rank prominence. His account of the U.S. Air Force's first Martian mission, codename "Far Venture," is an absolutely hypnotic job, utterly gripping and minutely credible. May Col. Glantz pilot his writing desk for a long time to come. Rating:  Anderson. J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila.  N.Y., # that makes even their potboilers into thoroughly presentable items. Unfortunately, Anderson is not in this class. However, top-notch Anderson is truly tops -- and this is Anderson at his peak. In truth. The Enemy Stars is more a descendant of Melville and Conrad than of the epics of Smith and Campbell. It concerns spacewreck, but, far more than that, it concerns itself with the reactions to disaster of four completely dissimilar individuals. Why did men go to sea and why will men go to space? Anderson has an answer, and a good one. So good that, if not for some loose ends left dangling, it would have received five stars. Rating:  Doubleday  Co., N.Y., # wrapping or inner core of his story, Bradbury's touch breathes fantasy into his most prosaic items. So, though few of the # -- # count them # -- shorts qualify as science fiction, all have an intense emotional impact. "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" is a yarn of pure magic woven from simple cloth, while "Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed" is a Martian Chronicle from the master's Red Planet period. Rating:  George O. Smith. Avalon Books, N.Y., # pleasant to take and easy to digest. Smith follows the recipe carefully in cooking up an intriguing nova theory. His instrument-maker hero detects an error in the law of conservation of energy. At the same time, a physicist discovers a jet that draws power from nowhere, and the sun is found to be going nova. Smith blends these conflicting ingredients neatly together just before the curdling point. Rating :  ed by Anthony Boucher. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # been indicted before, C. M. Kornbluth's fictional brief more than makes up the lack. "Theory of Rocketry" is a social document with all of its frightening roots in today. Two delightful changes of pace are Alfred Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" and Avram Davidson's "The Grantham Sightings," tongue-in-cheek excursions into fanciful fact. The remaining stories are fair to good. Rating:  Avalon Books, N.Y., # ise is acceptable -- a shielded world established to offer sanctuary to hunted criminals -- his laxity in creating a credible background is impossible to forgive. The planet's despot, singlehandedly responsible for its existence. is kept tiresomely naive for the author's convenience in plotting. Some of the gadgetry is interesting. Rating:  Asimov. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # eminent biochemist Asimov is well into his second score of published books. Even though he is amazingly prolific for a writer with a steady job, few other authors can claim his consistently high level of excellence. Two pointed cases are the novelets of the collection, "Profession" and "The Ugly Little Boy." The latter appeared in Galaxy as "Lastborn." Rating:  John M. Scheater. E. P. Dutton ami Co., Inc., N.Y., # when he talks in order to release psycho-galvanic energy, because English is so easy to think and talk. He's also a dynamo in tight spots, as he demonstrates in this high-adventure yarn of his trip to Venus with the Riddle kids from Earth. A Never-Never Land of Space, with an interplanetary Peter Pan, for youngsters. Rating:  Sun, Clifford D. Simak, #. Simak's wonderful novel of parallel worlds, first serialized in Galaxy, is worth rereading... Beyond the Vanishing Point, Ray Cummings; The Secret of Zi, Kenneth Bulmer; Ace Double, #(. The Cummings is the creaking prototype of The Incredible Shrinking Man, while Zi alternates extremely good with excrutiatingly bad writing in a rapidfire tale of rebellion against alien rule... Threshold of Eternity, John Brunner; The War of Two Worlds, Poul Anderson; Ace Double, #. Brunner has the vast imagination of van Vogt -- along with the same addiction to bewildering plots. Anderson's minor effort is about the manipulation of Earth and Mars into a senseless attritive war by form-changing outworlders. Morning, C. L. Moore, #('-. A fine story of intrigue in an America controlled by Comus, a vast communications complex... Cry Horror, H. P. Lovecraft, #(. A collection of typical Lovecrafty chillers titled The Lurking Fear in the original Arkham House edition. Do not your dish... BR-R-R!, Groff Conklin, #(. Another terror collection, this one untypical. Conklin's anthology is br-r-r-ed mainly by Theodore Sturgeon's deservedly famous "It" and H. L. Gold's undeservedly neglected squirmer called "Warm, Dark Places." ter the Rain, John Bowen, #. Britain's angry young SF men are cataclysmic as well. But Harold Mead, Eklmund Cooper and now newcomer John Bowen each has something fresh to offer aside from doom. Bowen's story of survival struggel on a Kon-Tiki-type raft is hard-hitting, with bitingly satiric touches for added discomfort... The Tide Went Out, Charles Eric Maine, #. Maine joins the select group above with this superior job, comparable in quality to his High Vacuum, in which bomb tests open earth rifts through which the oceans go down the drain -- along with civilization. Monster from Earth's End, Murray Leinster, #(f. Leinster's second for Gold Medal (War with the Gizmos was # I ) is excellently sustained science-horror of the Who Goes There? school. Unknown invisible predators are loosed on an isolated island base. Many shortcomings in logic, but the expertly maintained mood of terror hides most of them. ished Man, Alfred Bester, #... If ever a book was a must, this #I Galaxy novel, which copped just about every award in sight, is it... The Seedling Stars, James Blish, #. The provocative concept of pantropy: making men fit their planetary environments; one sectionoriginallyappeared in Galaxy as "Surface Tension." Vox Productions, NY. be missed -- a hi-fi recording of the subject with all the authenticity that only Ley can bring to it Ley, von Braun, Dornberger, Atlas, Jupiter-C, etc., speak for themselves. ing. Dodd, Mead  Co., N.Y., # who, practically alone, collected a petition from # scientists to the UN beseeching an end to H-bomb testing and a sane approach to world problems. His book tells why. Nostrand Co., Inc., N.Y., # haustive one-volume library; # definitions and # articles. Only a specialist could ask for more. P. Ruzic. Ruzic. Popular Mechanics Press, Chicago, # each lent school-age series featuring Randy Morrow in a novel and novel-like approach to learning about various fields. Blough. Whittlesey House, N.Y., # some twenty assorted science books to cover a broad field of interest: Space; The Sea; Electronics; etc. The scope is encyclopedic, but the treatment is warmly and interestingly intimate. by Terry Maloney. Sterling Pub. Co., Inc., N.Y., # what they might be like. How Earth might appear to astronomers and what they might guess about our environment from observation. Color plates. Moore. The Macmillan Co., N.Y., # frustrating photographic subject in the Solar System. Accordingly, we've had some Martian theories that were real beauts. Moore chronicles them all, from fact (few) to fancy (many). A. Gallant. Garden City Books, N.Y., # TV educational feature, might have been scripted from Gallant's equally excellent book, which is another in his king-sized series of lucid, beautifully illustrated tomes for youngsters from eight through high school age. Philosophical Library, N.Y., # easy solution by use of shortcuts that are amazingly easy to acquire. An excellent tool for honing the edge of work-dulled minds. A daughter of Thomas Mann turns to science fiction -- and creates this magic mountain of a story I in. "Your appointment?" "Mr. Pierre, at eight-thirty." "Your name?" "Mrs. Brogan." "Here it's Snyder. They probably got it spelled wrong. Go right ahead, please." They took off her coat, also her dress. Two, three girls around her, exceedingly trim in their hospital gowns, slipped one over her head too. They grabbed her alligator purse and dropped it into a sort of waterproof container which they fastened on the armrest of the dentist chair in which they urged her to sit. "So it's right next to you," one explained, "but without getting singed, splashed, dyed, stiffened, or shrunk as you go along." There were about twelve dentist chairs facing mirrors on the walls, most of them empty now. One was somewhat isolated, thronelike, with a steel ring around it on the ceiling on which a curtain was fastened like a baldachin. The curtain could be drawn to shut off the throne from the sight of the world. Prima Brogan just sat there. Soon a lady walked in, clad in a beautiful steel-blue suit with matching scarf. Everything about her was perfect: gait and posture, the fit of her high-heeled pumps, the soft flow of her platinum curls, the shape and shading of her eyes and long lashes. So early in the morning. Her smile bared flawless teeth. "Is this your first appointment, Mrs. Brogan?" she said with a low and modest, musical and pleasing voice. "Yes. I've never been here before." "We hoFe you'll come back often." She smiled again and walked away. Another lady walked in, no less perfect than the first. But, whereas the first was tuned in blue, the second lady's basic chord was rose. A tight dusty-rose gown buttoned down in front, with gold-red shoes and flaming hair. She smiled her smile and said, "Would you like something to read?" Then she fastened a glass table on the armrest of the dentist chair, on which she nonchalantly dropped three or four illustrated magazines. They seemed to arrange themselves spontaneously in such a way that one could read all the titles and dates: a tastefully and studiously designed pattern. Then the lady smiled again and walked away.  I HE third lady was one of those in the hospital gowns. But it was amazing what a simple belt, a tasteful pin, a bracelet falling casually from under reversed open cuffs could do. The lady had a cornflower fastened on the barrette that held her chestnut locks. She wore white satin slippers, and even if attired in a hospital gown, she was no less perfect than her two predecessors. "Would you like anything from the bar?" she asked, and smiled as she accepted Prima's negative answer, smiled discreetly and understandingly. In the meantime, other women began to trickle in. They were far less perfect than the ladies of the establishment. One had a run in her nylon; the other, deformed toes. The polish on the third one's nails was chipped, and the fourth shook dandruff from unkempt and oily fladous. They walked clumsily; their skin was dull, their eyes artless. Looking at clients and operators, one might have wondered how many sittings it would take the former to achieve the perfection of the latter, or perhaps whether the operators were not simply clients who had come here often and patiently and thus acquired esthetic perfection along with the privilege of serving as operators -- a privilege granted for good behavior to patients or inmates of other establishments or institutions as well. Having shed their clothes, donned their gowns, and secured their purses in protective custodies, the women took their places in the dentist chairs, and soon an uncouth conversation crossed the spaces between chair and chair. "Aren't you glad you don't live on Broad Street? My word, that was terrible last night." "I heard it over the late news. They announced it with all the details. I never heard anything like that..." "I saw it in this morning's paper. What pictures! Simply gruesome. I don't know how they did it. Makes your hair stand on end." "You know her father, poor soul, he was run over last month -- Oh, you didn't know? He was a second cousin of Mrs. Barnes' brother-inlaw. So I knew it all along. I wasn't surprised a bit." A bit kept repeating itself as on a cracked record, a bit a bit a bit bi bt, growing muter each time, transforming itself into air bubbles rising to a water surface. The woman's head had in fact been immersed in Mr. Pierre's shampoo. "Beauty," Mr. Pierre explained to Prima, "beauty is not something you can stick onto people; draw it; paint it on. Look at that lady there," he said, and they opened the circular curtain and rolled the woman out on a stretcher, stiff and cold. "She is dull. No sensitivity, no depth in her expression, no matter how many layers of makeup you throw there. But the lady wants -- or is supposed -- to look profound, sensitive, experienced. So what do I do? I drown her. In fifteen minutes, they will revive her. The usual exercises any life guard can handle. This is what Mr. Pierre's world-famous shampoo does for you. Look at the little folder." No bellowing coughs, no cheeping asthma. You too can have a new lease on love thanks to any oi Mr. Pierrea special aromas: Sweet Spring Libeccio Ocean Gust -- Men's Special Ardent Thyme Zephyr Gives You that Knowinic Look of those who have been face to face with death -- We Launch and Recall Him in Her Service. Single Application # Six Applications # Including complete checkup by our own specially trained medical advisors. "Hello, everyone," Mrs. Firestone said, brash and nasal. She was a beanstalk of a lady, most imperfect, with dark-rimmed glasses over a glossy nose, and walked like a dragoon. "They got him, you know. I just saw it on television. Crazy? You knew it all along? What the hell! They always say that, to keep them off the Chair. Now you saw yourself what he did last night. I sure hope he'll get the Chair. I hope they'll have to switch it on two or three times too. Would be too good for him just to die right off..." "Would you mind stepping over here, Mrs. Firestone? Mr. Irwing will be right with you." II in his black belted blouse, with manicured hands pensively stroking his Vandyke, black, trim and pointed -- a man, unless he is Mr. Frederic, Mr. Irwing, or Mr. Robert, with no face over the white gown giving off a faint odor of tobacco and eau de Cologne together with words well groomed and bleached of meaning -- a man in a beauty shop is out of place. He causes a nervous hustling and rustling. The conversation halts, towels are thrown on bared legs, curtains drawn hastily, chairs turned and mirrors covered. If, at least, he veiled his intrusion with a gentle white gown. If at least, he masked his face, like the visiting fathers in the maternity ward. But he sat there, sheer and male, in a loudly striped suit. He sat on the armrest of his girl's chair, and they looked at a fashion magazine which lay open in the girl's lap. The girl was plump, in a black jersey and gray skirt. Her stockings sagging, her heels trodden down. Her hands were stout and fat and yellow, and so was her face, in which rolled a pair of large black eyes as she nodded, too often, too rapidly, at what the man said. And her lips were thick, heavily painted, though innocent like a child's. go with the dress admirably well. cally) MR. piere: Sir. It's her first visit, isn't it? Sir, would you mind stepping over here? You see, the ladies... Mr. Pierre to a chair in the corner, round which Mr. Frederic and Mr. Robert hurriedly place a par av ant) rest of the girl's chair, dangling his legs, looking up to Mr. Pierre) You see this dress? It's nothing like the one I bought her. I don't see how I ever bought it. The terms were easy, it's true, but it adds up to a year's salary. It looks as plain as this one here. But it's worked in various metals, precious metals, I assume, on a ground of crystal -- and the effect of the colors. Her hair ought to be golden red, to go with it. That's easy, I guess, but there are those eyes. Can we get away from those cow-eyes? I mean they are very nice -- but with that dress... of that without any trouble at all. Three shots and we kill off the source of pigmentation altogether and base the color scheme on albino. There are two slight inconveniences: myopia and conjunctivitis, but we can handle that with Mr. Pierre's liquid contact lenses containing special ever-bright eye lotion. Easy application. A whole month's supply in this pocketsize easy-to-carry plastic bottle for only eight dollars. man: Of course, those lips, without those eyes -- they would seem like a blotch on the golden flow. They would ruin the neckline. They would block the contemplation of the whole... good portion. But if you've come here to take my advice, I should say that your approach is somewhat mistaken. Beauty, you know, beauty you get not by making the lady conform to the dress you choose and cherish, but by choosing a dress to suit the beautiful lady you cherish. girl: (Rolls questioning coweyes from one to the other) She is young. Vera, darling, wouldn't you like to look like this girl in that dress? cally) lady must not look like any other lady. She must look like herself: her true self. We must discern her good features, underline them, develop them; we must suppress her not-so-good features, eliminate them. Elegance, you know, means choosing, reducing to the essential. man: And who decides what is essential? Who knows her true self? through her hair, then bobbed it up, holding her head, looking over her head into the mirror; scanning, with upturned eyes, his own solemn image, pleased) I do. It's my job. My life-long experience with beautiful and not-so-beautiful ladies. should not coincide with mine? The dress: you haven't seen it. Please keep in mind the color scheme, the neckline, the rhythm, the flow. Vera, darling, you want to, don't you? cally) in the mirror, hypnotically) By the time I get through with the lady, she'll be beautiful in any dress. man: (Yielding, with feeble voice) Well, what do you suggest should be done? girl's head, still gazing into his own eyes in the mirror) First of all, the color of the face isn't right, and too much surface. Also, these bacon folds around the waistline. A bit dumpy, the whole little lady. man; Diet? Massage? None of that any more. not work. You know the ladies. The stealthy trips at night to the refrigerator... it worked beautifully. looked into their faces, where desire, frustrated for months, where triumphing will power, hardness, self-directed and other-directed, leave marks of a most appalling unfemininity. Add to this the effect of heavy, compensatory smoking, and the fidgets. No, thank you, no more dieting ladies for me. the mirror and suddenly fastening them on man) Von Barbar mask and German bath. In two hours, it's all over. man; (Cowed) If you say so... Anyway, some slimming... the dress. What else? brightened, but without bluing. The texture of the hair must be changed. look at them after the Von Barbar treatment. But my guess is they'll have to be changed altogether. man; The hand-bank... that's a delicate matter. The sleeves of the dress... assure you I know what's best for her. I haven't gone wrong yet. You may call for her in three hours. Good-by, sir. Ill RS. Firestone got under the drier. Her head, curled up and clip-spiked, in savage-warrior fashion, under the drier, her bare feet in a footbath, softening them up for the pedicure. "Roast head and stewed feet today," she scintillated. And then, as the drier deafened her, "Honey," she screamed to the operator, "would you mind handing me my purse?" "We can hear you, Mrs. Firestone," the operator said softly, her mouth close to the lady's ear. "You don't have to holler." "This drier is awfully noisy," Mrs. Firestone screamed. "I can't tell whether I am hollering or whispering." "We do that on purpose," Mr. Pierre explained to the lady he was combing. "The noise, and the isolation it imposes, is good for the ladies' nerves, therefore for their beauty. It relaxes. Some told me they heard music in the din; others faint. Of course, if they scream through it like that, it serves no purpose. Your fingernails. Miss Dirtworth, would you like Nosegay or Psyche-pink?" "Honey," Mrs. Firestone screamed, "I'm on fire. Would you mind turning this thing down some? A friend of mine, she gave herself a permanent, you know, and the drier was too hot and, guess what, her hair fell out just like that" Mrs. Firestone snapped her fingers. "The curlers dropped off, with the singed hair in it Can you beat it? She coulda died." Mr. Pierre walked over and pushed up the drier so Mrs. Firestone could hear. "Please, Mrs. Firestone, don't talk so very loud. It's no good for you and it disturbs the other ladies." Mrs. Firestone was pleased to be scolded by him. She encompassed him with melting, adoring eyes. "By the way," he added, rewarding her, "I promised to let you see a Von Barbar mask. I am doing one now. Look over there and see how it works." He walked back to Vera, where half a dozen operators were busy arranging all sorts of liquids and lotions and flames and syringes. They went silently and seriously about their business as though it were a ritual, like waiters getting ready for the crepes Suzette. Mr. Pierre pushed back his sleeves and announced for every one to hear. "You see, this is how it works. If you put the Von Barbar preparation on a lady's skin -- dried skin, spoiled unclean skin, old wrinkled skin, fatty tissue -- it dies. It simply and quite painlessly dies off. This lady here, she's young; she does not need much. We can go two layers deep with one application; but some need more. Then we have to repeat the treatment after a couple of days, and you can see them in the meantime, our clients, on the street, even at parties, with inches of dead body around them. Men too, on sunny beaches, with mute mumbling dead lips. There's nothing to it. Most of them look just as dead before the treatment, which, if applied correctly, merely confirms an extant fact." pervision, the operators handled instruments, mixed crackling fuming liquids, blotted out expanding flames, fan-cooled the finished product, and applied it gently to Vera's face, neck, arms, legs, midriff, hips and belly. Flabby and yellowish, she turned flabbier and yellower yet. "After that," Mr. Pierre went on explaining, "we take them into the German bath and the whole stuff comes off. Like the dry outer skins of an onion, till the fresh juicy core comes out. In two hours, a lady can get rid of twenty pounds of superfluous fat, of pimply skin and a threadbare scalp. She'll rise from the German bath slim, trim and prim, if somewhat shorter, and very young." Several ladies, from under driers and over manicure tables, called out: "Yes, it's wonderful." "You would think so," Mr. Pierre said, while massaging Vera's droopy cheeks with his thumbs, deadening them deeper, and gazing into his own eyes in the mirror. "You would think so. And I give them a pamphlet, a personalized pamphlet to each one, telling them how to stay the way they are and not to repeat the mistakes that made them the way they were. But you'd be amazed. As soon as they get out of here, they literally rush back into their former selves. It's shocking how they manage to get old and ugly in no time. And the nucleus thins out in the process. It is a strain, to decay in such a hurry -- and you can't repeat the treatment more than two, three times; otherwise the German bath takes off all there was to a lady. Therefore I recommend it only for very special occasions: a late untoward debutante, a business woman who has been fired, a widow who has to make her life over -- I mean unless it is a matter of an inch or two... How do you do, Mrs. Evergreen? Would you mind stepping over here? Be seated, please. Mr. Frederic will be right with you. You have your third shampoo today? Your expression has gained in profoundness. Didn't your husband tell you too? Well, happy trip." "How do you manage to keep your gas bill down?" one lady howled from under the drier. "Watch out, honey," she added, turning to the manicurist, "and don't you snip off that finger." "I use two burners instead of three," the lady under the next drier screamed back, "and don't do much baking." "And you know, every time some one gasses himself in the kitchen, that shows on the bill, terribly. Ouch, honey, I told you. Now you did chop it off..." A T that the door opened and the man came back. On his arms, before him, he carried the dress like a sleeping beauty. He walked on tiptoe, so as not to disturb. His cheeks were flushed, his chin white, his forehead studded with pearling sweat, his eyes glimmering, and every gesture racked with deep emotion. He walked straight up to the chair in which he had left the girl. Staring for a moment at her, then past her, he asked, "Where's Vera? Is she ready?" Seven operators, busy in a halfcircle over her prostrate body, lifted, their curly heads. They looked like a great halo of angel faces around her resting on the ground of their mantles which merged into a single white surface before his glimmering eyes. They shrugged their shoulders. It looked like a wave, making a half circle. "Mr. Pierre told you." the first one said. "It would take about three hours," said the second. "She is not ready yet," said the third. "It will be another hour or so," said the fourth. "Where is she?" he interrupted them, greatly alarmed. They lowered their curly heads to form a crown of great sunflowers round her head. They felt .sorry for him. "Here she is," the fifth, sixth and seventh said softly, almost whispering. It was a horrid sight. The Von Barbar mask must have reached its high point of efficacy, for Vera looked absolutely dead, an impression heightened by the ghastly pale green light flooding her from a reflector lamp posted at the footend. Her eyes, bleached to a watery tan and kept wide open by little pegs, stared glassily into the milky light. Her hair flowed from her like a piece of wet carpeting, a vicious dark copper-red, drops of which swam carelessly over her forehead and down the cheeks. Her ai ms were spread out and fastened in handcuffs to the armrest of the dentist chair. Back and armrests had been lowered to form a crossshaped bed. The sunflower crown unlocked and the black figure of Mr. Pierre inserted itself, leaning over her head. Below the deep deadness, a smile tried to stir, but did not quite reach the surface. The golden beam gathered from the diffusion of her ken, boring into his eyes with love, desire. "How is the little lady doing?" he said with a tender smile. Then he took a small trowel and stuck it into her side and turned it around. There was no blood. "I think we are ready," he said, and his voice was pleased. The man almost dropped the dress. "VeVeVeVe-" he stammered, confused. Then he lifted the dress up high before him with both hands. It seemed strangely alive in the pale green light. He pulled it onto his breast, hugged it protectively, passionately, and, without saying another word, he rushed out. German bath, she looked slim, trim and prim. Mr. Pierre combed her hair, bobbed it up with a wavy motion of his hands and. looking over her head at his own image in the mirror, he said, "Are we pleased, little lady? Tomorrow we shall have our first lesson in individualized makeup. And tomorrow we shall learn a better jwsture, more correct carriage. And tomorrow we must not nod our little head so much any more. And tomorrow -- " Ladies came and ladies left and Vera waited. She saw shampoos and masks and baths, got used to them, and waited. She listened to much uncouth gossip between chair and chair: how much disaster and crime and betrayal and misfortune. And she waited. beautiful receptionist in the blue suit with matching scarf said to her: "Well, well, how darling we look!" And then: "Honey, your skirt is too large for you now. You might just as well fix it -- it will give you something to do." Ultima rose from her dentist chair. They slipped off her gown, brushed her shining neck and shoulders. They slipped on her dress, handed her the purse, dusting, wiping, brushing, adding a last touch of perfection to their handiwork. The lady in dusty-rose called on Vera and brought her a white gown. "Take off your clothes, honey, and put on this one. You can fix them better like that." And she fastened the gown adroitly with a suitable belt, a becoming pin. The operators spread sawdust on the floor and began to sweep it. They sprayed the mirrors with windex, dusted the chairs, sterilized the combs, put away the curlers, hung the towels and locked the safe. The beautiful lady in the white gown, with the pretty pin and matching bracelet and the cornflower in her barrette, walked up to Vera. They looked like sisters now, except that Vera was a shade lighter, newer. "Honey," the lady said, and smiled gently her perfect smile, "honey, why don't you give us a hand while you are waiting?" Way up yonder A girl's hand was all he wanted of this plantation world -- I T he thin little voice buzzed and sang; "Good morning, Sutherland Master! Good morning, Boss." Berl Sutherland jumped with all his arms and legs at once, like a startled infant, and awoke. He was in a canopied bed, in -- yes, he remembered now -- in the Old House of the Blick plantation. The maid was fussing around him. "This is Persephone," cooed the maid's voice. "I am your personal servant, Sutherland Master. The Colonel wishes you good morning and hopes you enjoy your stay." "Thanks," said Sutherland blurrily. It was all beginning to come back to him -- the long flight from Leesville, the arrival in the middle of the night, the sister of the girl he loved, who had made him welcome. He watched the maid, bending over him, setting something down on the night table, touching the buttons that opened the shades and turned on the air vents and brought gently brisk music out of the speaker grille beside his bed. They and it cottoned to him no more than if he'd been a Yankee spy! certainly took care of their company on these plantations, he thought in sleepy admiration. He sat up reluctantly. "You wish to rise now, Sutherland Master?" The maid's voice came from under his pillow. That puzzled Sutherland for a moment; he had been on the planet less than twenty-four hours and its customs were still unfamiliar to him. "Yeah, I wish to rise," he replied. The maid said: "Your clothes are laid out. Call if you wish me, Sutherland Master. The name is Persephone." "Thanks," said Sutherland, but only to air; the maid had buzzed through the room at high speed and was gone. He shrugged and got out of bed. I T was a nice room, too, he thought with a touch of worry. The bed had a handsome spread of gold brocade, now neatly folded down; the carpeting was thick, the furniture expensive. Thelma's family really had it. What in all the worlds, he wondered, did she see in him? Suther'land wasn't used to underrating himself; he was aware that he was wung, healthy, reasonably bright. But he was also aware that his draft number was up and that his total income for the year would hardly buy the contents of this one room, let alone the enormous rest of the plantation owned by Colonel Blick, Thelma's brother. Still... Well, she had invited him here. Too bad she couldn't have been on hand when he arrived, but there it was. Sutherland got up, staggered over to the window and, wincing, tried to draw the shades again. Sunlight was all right in its place, but what was coming in the window was a sallow orange color, and brighter than he liked even so. But there seemed to be no way for him to draw the shades. The maid had pushed a button, he remembered, but which one? To Sutherland's groggy inspection, there seemed to be at least fifty -- if all the round, square and toggle-shaped things on the control panel by the bed could be called buttons -- and which of them might control the windows, he had no idea. Nor, on second thought, did he want to tempt fate by experimenting. It was all getting very complicated, he thought worriedly. It hadn't seemed a bit complicated back on Elarth, where one normal bright moon had filled one normal starlit sky, and one extreniely normal girl named Thelma Coolidge Blick had been out on the balcony with him. But that was half a year ago, and a good many light-years away, and besides there hadn't been a war on then. Now he was on Lee, sixth planet of the larger component of Sirius, and Thelma was -- where was Thelma? "Excuse me, sir," said a timid voice. Sutherland jumped. In the doorway of the bath -- his bath -- stood a small dark man. And in his hand the man held, for the Lord's sake, a mint julep. The man coughed apologetically. "I am Miguel Mookerjan, your neighbor. Pardon this intrusion." "Good morning," growled Sutherland. "Yes," said Mookerjan thoughtfully, "I suppose it is." He inspected the room, coming at last to the glass in his hand. "Oh, yes. Perhaps you would care for this? I am a Muslim," he said with pride, "and we are not allowed alcohol. But I do not wish to offend our host. So I came through the bath which we share to offer you, as you might perhaps say, a dividend." Sutherland was puzzled, but he followed the direction of Mookerjan's eyes, and the answer to his puzzlement was on the table by his bed. A mint julep; the maid had brought him one of the confounded things too. Before breakfast! "But you have not drunk your own," said Mookerjan with concern. "You are not of the Faith? Or perhaps A.A.? Or -- oh, I see. I deduce, sir -- " "Berl Sutherland." "I deduce, Mr. Sutherland, that you have never visited the colonel before?" Sutherland shook his head. "Ah, yes. I suppose," said Mookerjan thoughtfully, "that you are a business associate? A buyer of proto-spuds for one of the interplanetary exchanges? No? Then perhaps an attorney -- I have heard that there are some estate matters to be settled. Or could you have known his father, the late Colonel Blick, or are you related in family? Or-" "Mr. Mookerjan," said Sutherland dangerously, "I'll tell you my business here without your dredging for it. I'mi engaged to be married to his sister." "Oh, splendid!" cried Mookerjan. "A wonderful girl, Mr. Sutherland! I assure you, I have met many charming young ladies, but few compare with Robin Blick!" "Thelma Blick, Mr. Mookerjan." "That sister? But -- " Mookerjan hesitated. "Well," he said, "I wish you every happiness. And now I imagine you wish to dress. You will not want to be late for breakfast. The colonel is so much more ajproachable then! A bientot, Mr. Sutherland, a bientot!" Blick place was nothing special for the planets of the Sirian System. Sparsely populated, rich and fertile, the Sirian planets spawned countless thousands of aristocrats, so the colonel was by no means exceptional. But the total effect of the big house, seen by day, was enough to dwindle what remained of the morale of Berl Sutherland. Discount the wide marble staircase that wound down from the sleeping floor to the great hall at the entrance. Don't consider the obvious wealth of the furnishings -- tapestried walls and finely made furniture, all of them imported across light-years of space at a shipK ping cost Sutherland could not guess. These could be hand-medowns; the antebellum South on Earth, centuries before, owned many such a plantation where the owners counted themselves lucky to see a hundred dollars in cash from one year to the next. But there was much more -- so much more. The food. The fine liquors. And, over and above everything else, the servants. To Sutherland's bewildered eye, there seemed to be more servants than people in the room. All the same size, all the same shape, all stamped out of the same dies in the same factories. The plantations of Lee had their slaves, and the slaves were robots; they moved about the rooms of the Blick plantation house like busy beetles, cleaning, removing, serving and tending. Degenerate, thought Sutherland angrily. You certainly wouldn't know there was a war on. Why must these people act like Confederate massas? A body servant for every guest and the most personal tasks done for you -- it was revolting; it was nothing like the strippeddown, Spartan life he had been brought up to on Earth... But it just might be, he thought, that if there had been an endless labor supply available on Earth, every human might have just such a home. Meanwhile, he was here. He would, he decided, attempt to enjoy it. "Good morning," he said to the room at large, and let a small bronze-colored servant take him to a chair. Thelma was not in sight, he had noted at once, which freed him to observe the others who were. The Blicks liked a house full. Lolling against the upholstered pillar of a round divan. Colonel Blick himself was reading the paper and answering absently the remarks of his guests. He had nodded to Sutherland, nothing more. Miguel Mookerjan glanced up, smiled emptily, and returned to his meal. The others gave Sutherland scarcely that much attention. All right, thought Sutherland belligerently, who the devil do you think you are? But he remembered that his plan was to enjoy himself, and he gestured to the servants wheeling the little tables of food. Neither of the Blick sisters was in the room. There were three young men, a matched set, wearing the same informal sort of uniform as Colonel Blick; like him, they were more interested in their newspapers than in human society. There were a couple of girls whose identity Sutherland couldn't guess, and a man in dark glasses on Sutherland's left, solemnly eating, like looking up. And then Thelma floated into the room. ly. "Darling!" she cried across sixty feet of wall-to-wall carpeting. "Dearest, I'm so glad you got here! I've been counting the minutes!" Sutherland said awkwardly: "Hello, dear." Why, he thought, astonished, this is a beautiful girl. She was blonde, heavy-haired blonde, with two solid coils spiraling away from the nape of her neck; her eyes were bluest blue, her figure perfect. "You know Robin," she said kindly, standing on tiptoe to be kissed. There was another girl with her -- the sister, the one who had let him in. Sutherland nodded. "Poor angel," said Thelma softly, "I know what's bothering you. You wanted me to be here when you arrived." "Not necessarily," said Sutherland quickly, "but -- " "But I couldn't. Of course I couldn't! Aren't you sweet to understand that? And I would have been there, dearest, if it hadn't been for that terrible party at the Grossfaders last night And when Pat Grossfader brought me home and I heard that you'd arrived and gone to bed, why, I just wanted to throw myself into your arms. And I would have, too, if I hadn't been the teeniest bit high. Oh, those sloe gin daiquiris!" "I hope you had a pleasant night's sleep," the mousy sister said more formally to Sutherland. He nodded again. "Fine, thanks." Across the room. Colonel Blick was reading something from the paper, laughing. Sutherland allowed the servants to help him to kippers, scrambled eggs, yogurt and a blend of eight kinds of fruit juices, sweetened with Antarean honey. "Try the toast," Robin Blick said politely. "It's our own bread, baked from the proto-spuds we grow." "I'm not very hungry," Sutherland apologized. He was craning his neck. Odd, but while the robots were serving him, Thelma seemed to have disappeared. "I wonder -- " Robin said: "She's probably in the butler's pantry. She'll be back." Sutherland felt a faint chill. Around the room, the conversation flowed smoothly. Mr. Mookerjan was inquiring nervously about the animal origins of his fried scrapple. The three young army officers were chattering about the shootin' and fishin' on every landable planet in five solar systems. The girls -- Thelma had brought them home from the party at the Grossfaders, it turned out -- were perkily comparing hangovers. "I think," said Sutherland apologetically, "that I'd like to talk to your brother." "Sure," said Robin Blick. "Help yourself." G etting up, Sutherland made his way across the room. The colonel was deep in his newspaper, preening his beard. It was a hard beard to preen, being pale gold in color and the texture of the down on the back of a new-hatched chick. The colonel was nineteen years old. "Oh, hello there," said the colonel, looking up for a moment, and ; "Damn! Charles, did you see this in the paper? Grogan's going back to Mars." "Mars!" cried the nearest of the young officers, dashed. "Good heavens! But he promised to come here!" The other youths joined the chorus. Sutherland listened, puzzled. Whoever this Grogan was, he was somebody important. Perhaps a crop buyer, he thought; he knew that the big combines on Earth sent their representatives around. Or -- well, it could be something more important, something to do with the war. "I don't remember the name," he said politely. "Is Grogan a commission buyer?" "Commission buyer..." The colonel put his paper down and looked at Sutherland more carefully. "My dear fellow, Grogan's a musician." "A roar-and-shack soarer, friend," said Charles. "Oh, that roar!" added the second of the other officers. "And that shack!" "Come along!" cried the colonel, jumping up. "You've got to hear his latest tape, Sutherland!" And that was that, as far as talking to the boy about anything as important as his sister's hand was concerned; Sutherland couldn't get his attention that long. He sat listening to the subtly buzzing drone of roar-and-shack music as long as he could take it, but that wasn't very long, and when he escaped and looked for Thelma, she was gone. "Women's business," she had said, according to her sister Robin, but what the women's business was, Thelma had not said and Robin did not choose to tell. Ho-hum, thought Sutherland, somewhat dampened, it isn't a bit the way it looked from that balcony on Earth. II ' HE man in the dark glasses said : "I suppose you'll be going in, eh? Good luck, Sutherland. I was in the last one." Sutherland was impressed. Overhead, the orange-tinted plastic dome let in enough of the light from blazing bright Sirius to bring the intensity to Earth standards, though the hues were all blue-white or dying under the unshielded ultra-violet. Sutherland looked sidelong at the man in the dark glasses, his face sallow in the orange light, and said : "I guess it was pretty rough." "Oh, rough enough," the man said modestly. His name was LaFargue and he was only five years or so older than Sutherland. He must have lied about his age, Sutherland thought abstractedly. "The worst thing is that you never see the enemy. Interstellar war isn't personal. It's chart your line of fire and pop your missiles off and wait. Well, it takes forty days to get to the nearest star even in sub-space, you know. But it takes four years for the light to come back, so you don't know what luck you're having." "But then how do you know -- " "You don't know. You don't know a thing, not until the peace is declared and you can fly out there and look. We got two planets of the Antarean system, they tell me. I guess the light ought to be hitting Earth any day now. But I never went and looked. Didn't want to." He nodded politely and went back to the house. Sutherland continued to stroll around the gardens. That was a good war, he thought, when we fought the Antareans. Six months of hard fighting and it was all over; they got Pluto and two of Jupiter's outer moons, but who cared about those? Only there was always the chance that a missile might hit a really important planet. Mars, say, He swallowed, thinking of what an interstellar missile might do to rabbit-warren Earth. come to this planet -- yes, to Lee, to the whole Sirian system. It was the technique of interstellar war to stand back and try to batter your enemy to pieces, but that technique was predicated on the sure assumption that your enemy would pulverize any fleet you might send against him. That assumption held good for Antares, for Sol, for the present enemy system of Capella -- but Sirius, after all, was a frontier system. There were a few space corvettes, a few emplacements on the smaller satellites, nothing that would give a flotilla of dreadnaughts any seriousopposition. The Sirian system was fat and open to the war's dangers... Assuming, of course, that the Sirian system was really in the war. Sutherland couldn't help feeling that war was strangely remote here. No one seemed to care. Still, the Sirian system was certainly important to the war -- from Earth's point of view, anyhow. Lee was only one of the three habitable planets, but it was a good one. It produced food enough for fifty times its own population, food that Earth could very well use. The planet was near enough to its immense primary for the rays to be deadly to all who faced it without protection. That was why the plantation houses were shielded, why the crops were worked by robots. Humans wouldn't do. They would die. Still, thought Sutherland remotely, he would rather have human beings around him than -- He jumped as a shadow crossed his face. T T was one of the robots, holding something out to him. "Curse you," snapped Sutherland, "what do you mean sneaking up on me like that?" He was startled, and surprise brought on anger. The servant, silent as a shadow, continued mutely to offer him the thing that was in its hands. Sutherland looked at it at last and recognized it: a small shoulder radio. "Oh," said Sutherland ungraciously. "Thanks. I -- " He stopped, remembering. He strapped the radio on and turned on the switch. "Thanks," he said again, knowing that this time the robot would hear. "You are welcome, Sutherland Massa," said the robot's unhurried, uninflected voice. "Is there anything you wish?" "No -- " he looked at the robot's chest -- "no, Persephone." Yes, that was the same one that had brought him his morning julep, his own personal attendant. The name was inscribed on its torso plates. "You can go," he said, and watched the little thing move silently away. "Mr. Sutherland," said a girl's voice from behind him, "you really ought to keep your radio on. It's unsettling to the servants." "Sorry." It was Thelma's mousy sister, Robin. "I try to remember," he said, with only part truth. The servants were robots, same as the field hands, and their voices were radio, not sound -- as their "eyes" were radar instead of receptors for the visual spectrum of light. In order for them to hear or be heard, they needed radio equipment. That was the little box -- the same little box he had slept with under his pillow. "The gardens are lovely this morning," Robin Blick said flatly, nodding, and prepared to move away. Sutherland was galvanized into action. "Oh, Miss Blick. I wonder if you can tell me where the colonel is." The girl stopped and looked at him more thoughtfully. "I want to -- uh -- see him," Sutherland explained. She nodded. "I want to talk to him about -- about something." "Yes," she said, and smiled. Smiling, she wasn't mousy at all. "I thought you wanted to talk to him about something." That was very pleasing, Sutherland decided; he couldn't help grinning. "Oh," he said, relaxing, "then Thelma's said something to you? Of course. Why shouldn't she? Sisters are always close, exchanging confidences and so on." XT E looked around the garden hastily. There, in a patch of portulaca, was a marble bench. "I tell you. Miss Blick -- Robin. Won't you sit down for a minute? I've got a few things that are -- well, worrying me." "I bet you have," said Robin Blick. But she let him lead her to the bench. She didn't look a bit like her sister -- brown hair, brown eyes, a figure that was nice enough but hardly startling, and Thelma was definitely startling. But Robin seemed, thought Berl Sutherland, a friendly, sisterly sort of girl, who might be just the person to clear up the one or two little doubts that in the last twelve hours had percolated up to the surface of his mind. "The thing," he said, "is that Thelma's sucha high-spirited young creature. I wonder if she's ready for marriage. I thought I might have a chance to discuss it with your brother, but beseems rather -- " "My brother," said Robin Blick clearly, "is a flat-headed halfwit. He's only nineteen years old and maybe he'll smarten up -- some. But he's got a long way to go." "I see," said Sutherland after a second. "I only thought that -- you know, head of the family, good manners, the right thing to do, all that sort of thing." "I am sick to my stomach of that sort of thing, Mr. Sutherland," said Robin Blick in a pleasantly conversational tone. "I am sick to death of Lee and everything about it." Sutherland cleared his throat. Things were getting out of hand; it was time to get the conversation back where he wanted it. He said: "Tell me, what did Thelma say about me when she told you? I mean if it isn't a secret." "It isn't a secret. She didn't say a word." "But " "She didn't even say you were coming, young man." Sutherland bristled. Young man, indeed! Surely the girl wasyounger than he! "But I thought you said you had an idea what I wanted." "Mr. Sutherland," said Robin Blick patiently, "I've been Thelma's sister for a long time now. You mustn't think you're the first young man who's come to talk to her brother." in Blick on a guided tour through the gardens, but it was wasted on him. His thoughts were of Thelma Blick and not of the place in which he found himself for the love of her. But it was an interesting place, all the same. The dome around the Blick manor house was a quarter of a mile across. Nearly thirty acres bloomed under its shallow orange roof. There was the house itself and its gardens. There were six acres of farm, for the beets and tomatoes and crisp green lettuce that did poorly in Sirius's direct light. There was an artificial pond, three acres of it, that stocked fine smallmouths and doubled as a reservoir in case of fire. There was a grove of fruit trees, and there were a dozen acres of pasture for the colonel's select herd of registered Black Angus. Of course, that was only the domed portion of the estate. Outside the dome, naked under the blue violence of the primary, were over two hundred square miles. It was more than a plantation, more than a Texan's ranch; it was a principality. This was the thing about Lee's perfect climate: no dust. There wasn't any, the result of high ionization from the rays of the primary; the dust clumped and agglutinated and fell. Well, there was a little -- if there had been none, that would have been the end of farming, because it would have been the end of rain. Water vapor cannot coalesce readily without tiny dust granules for each droplet to form around. But because there was some dust, though not a great deal, the water vapor formed itself in large drops, fell and washed the air clean. Result: enough rain, and very small and few clouds between times. A perfect growing climate. And the crops that were grown were something very special indeed. The name of the principal crop was proto-spuds. A miracle crop! Wrench off the tops and you can cook yourself a superb mess of greens, rich in vitamins A, C, D and a dozen others. Dig the tuberous root and it is a treasure of assorted food. The peel, toasted, has a fine nutlike flavor. The starchy interior, dried and ground, makes a flour that bakes into delectable bread. Pulled young and green and cooked whole, the tubers resemble a superJerusalem artichoke. If none of these makes a dish to your liking, let the whole thing go to flower and seed. Then the petals make a splendid jam, a first-rate source of all the B vitamins. The seeds, toasted, split into hulls and kernels. The hulls became a peppery spice, the seeds a richly perfumed sort of cinnamon. It was a valued crop and -- variously cooked, dried, radio-sterilized or frozen -- it made a priceless export article for interstellar trade, and an essential part of production for war. All of this Berl Sutherland listened to, dr seemed to, but not much of it stayed with him. "There is one thing," he said at last, when Robin Blick paused and looked at him and seemed to expect a question. "I mean there's something I'd like to know. Wasn't -- wasn't Thelma sincere back on Earth?" "You'll have to ask her yourself," said Robin, sighing, because he was a very nice boy, good-looking and smart and with just the right degree of shyness, and she didn't like what lay ahead for him. Ill TT was time for the ten o'clock news. Sutherland fumblingly tried to turn the set on, but a servant shot past him and expertly dialed. In the gun room down the hall, roar-and-shack music whined and thumped. Sutherland said "Thanks," remembered that once again he'd forgotten to turn his radio on, and decided that he didn't care. Mr. Mookerjan drifted over and joined him. "The war, eh? Good. Let's see how long we have to dance in the citadel while the Red Death roams outside." Sutherland glanced at him quickly, but Mookerjan's pale-olive face was pleasantly blank. The program was in stereo color and the timing was perfect; the animated commercial was just ending and the news commentator ajjpeared, picking up his wand and pointing to a wall map. A fleet action had been fought off Way Rock -- though why anyone should fight for a Moon-sized hunk of frozen slag a light-year and a half from any warming star was more than Sutherland could imagine. There was, of course, no victory; the ships had shot at each other for a while, then lost contact in hyperspace evasive action. More than eight hundred planet-smashers had been launched at the enemy in the previous twenty-four hours. It was expected that the first enemy missiles would start exploding at various points in the Sol system within two weeks. The commentator at that point disappeared, though his voice remained, as the vision tank filled with a perspective star map, all the stellar bodies bright dots of light in flashing color. Colonel Blick bawled from the gun , room: "What's all the racket in there? We can't hear ourselves think!" Self-consciously, Berl Sutherland switched off the set. Colonel Blick appeared, tugging fretfully at his soft pale beard. "Sorry," he grumbled, "but really! That's Grogan's latest we were playing and you know how distracting it is to hear a lot of jibber-jabber when he's roaring." "Of course," said Sutherland. He wasn't a roar-and-shacker, but he knew that the idea was that the music itself was supposed to be formless, empty; it was the listener himself who filled in the meaning. "Kept thinking it was a damn John Philip Sousa March," complained the colonel. "Fine thing! Confounded war makes enough trouble. I don't want it busting into my music!" "I'm sorry," said Sutherland. This was, after all, Thelma's brother and the head of the family. "The set's off. You can go ahead with your tape if you want to." The colonel threw himself into a chair, breathing hard. "Later," he said. "Oh, that roar! You have to come and hear it for yourself, Sutherland. But let me get my breath first. Grogan takes a lot out of you, you know. There's plenty of them that can put out a dull beat, but for real emptiness there's nobody like Grogan."  around the room, remembering. It was the first chance he'd had to talk to the colonel, but it was a fine chance; Blick was sitting there and no one else was talking. Mookerjan had picked up a magazine. and apart from him there seemed no possibility of interruption. Sutherland cleared his throat. "Sir," he began, choked on it -- the colonel was only nineteen years old, after all! "Colonel, that is, I've been wanting a word with you." "Shoot, man. Roar away." "Back on Earth," Sutherland said rapidly, "I knew your sister in school. Well, we were drawn to each other. She's a wonderful girl. Colonel Blick, and -- " "Say," said Blick, sitting up, "where is Thelma? You know, Mookerjan?" The olive-colored man looked up from his magazine long enough to shake his head. "Robin!" Across the room, the elder sister turned around. "You seen Thelma?" "She isn't back yet," Robin Blick called. "Damn it all," complained the colonel, sinking back, "I wish she'd stay around the house long enough to tell me what to do about Pat Grossfader. You're a friend of hers, Mr. Sutherland -- maybe you can talk to her. Here she's supposed to marry Pat next month, and she's out alley-catting with every man imder the age of ninety on Lee. Pat's not going to let her get away with that forever, Sutherland." "Supposed," repeated Sutherland carefully, the words chipping out of his mouth like bits of ice, "supposed to -- to marry -- ?" "He's put up with plenty from her already," growled the colonel, tugging fretfully at his beard. "I wouldn't blame him if he called the whole thing off! That Mancini boy. That wasn't bad enough. Or the time she and George Henry Twyfort ran out of rocket fuel and stayed in orbit all night." Sutherland said, with an expensive effort to make it sound calm and clear: "You say Thelma's going to ma -- to ma -- " "And the trouble is, Sutherland, it's important. Pat's land is right next to ours. We have to think about the next generation." "Sure you do," said Sutherland at once, without the faintest idea what he was agreeing to. His mind was suddenly stopped dead in its tracks; it refused to move past the word "marry." "I suppose," said the colonel reflectively, "that Pat wouldn't kick up too much of a fuss about Twyfort if it wasn't that the boy thinks Thelma's going to marry him. That'll shack you! Marry him, and he doesn't have a foot of land to call his own!" "I think," Sutherland said carefully, "that I'll just take a little stroll around the grounds." He got up and staggered off. The colonel stared after him, then shrugged. "Nice fellow," he said to Miguel Mookerjan. "Wonder why Thelma invited him here."  N a wing chair before the fire, Sutherland hardly heard the others come into the gun room, and they didn't notice him. That was fine -- he had a good deal of firestaring to do. Married! Dimly, he heard the voice of the colonel, enthusiastically piping: "You'll like this, LaFargue. Music to Feel By. Oh, that Grogan!" A click and a whir of reels, and a bagpipe drone snarled out from the multiphonic speakers spotted around the walls of the gun room. Curse their nonsense, Sutherland mumbled to himself; but it was easier to stay there and listen than to get up and move. And once he gave the music a chance to work on him, it had something. Drone, drone; no, it wasn't like a bagpipe, or at least not like the skirling bagpipe melodies. It had only enough variation of pitch to suggest that it was music and not a distant fire siren. It made him think of something, Sutherland thought drowsily, of -- of weddings? Yes. Certainly there was a touch of Mendelssohn right there -- or something that might have suggested something that was Mendelssohn. Weddings, and bridesmaids in pink and yellow, and Thelma down the aisle, dewy and delightful, and himself in a starchy collar and striped pants -- He caught himself. But he began to see just what it was the fans liked about roar-and-shack. When the spinning tape-end had flick-ilick-flicked itself to a stop, Sutherland was feeling relatively good. Well, that was what roar-andshack was for, too. It brought what was inside you out to the surface, where you could get at it and handle it He. listened, hardly thinking of Thelma at all, to Colonel Blick's breathless: "Roar, man, roar! Oh, what a lip that Grogan has!" "Very nice," said LaFargue's voice. "A touch classical, wouldn't you say? Beethoven's Sixth -- green fields and a gathering storm, all that sort of thing. And -- " the voice became measurably brisker -- "that's what I want to talk to you about, Blick." "Eh?" "There's a storm gathering. Don't you know you're right in the middle of it?" "Oh, Sam," protested the colonel's voice with faint indignation. "Did you come here to nag me about that shortage again? I know there's a war on." "You don't act it," said LaFargue in a cold, scolding tone. "You plantation colonels act as though the Universe was staked down to bedrock. Nothing's going to change, is that it? The way Daddy did things is fine, because everything's always going to be the same as it was in Daddy's day." Colonel Blick sighed wistfully. "I've got a couple other Grogans here," he offered, but not as though he thought LaFargue would take him up on it. "No! Why can't you get the crops out?" Silence, except for the colonel's sad breathing. "I'll tell you why," said LaFargue. "There isn't a plantation on Lee that's met its quota for three months. Crops rot in the fields. Spuds spoil in storage. The robots aren't doing the job, Blick. It's up to you plantation colonels to get out there and straighten them out." "Mr. LaFargue!" "Or would you rather," LaFargue inquired, "let the Cafiellansmarch in and do it for you? Because if Lee doesn't meet its quotas. Earth isn't going to be able to eat, let alone feed its fighting men." "Oh, damn it," cried the colonel, "it isn't only us, you know." "I know. That's the bad part. Pershing's iron mines report one breakdown after another. In the Aldebaranian system, all the remoteoperated planets are getting out of hand. I don't know, Blick, maybe we're getting too soft; maybe we've given the robots more than they can handle. But it's up to us humans to step in and set things straight. I'm telling you this for your own good. If you colonels don't do it voluntarily, the government's going to have to step in." Colonel Blick said frostily: "Thank you for your comments. Mr. LaFargue. Is there anything else? No? Then, with your permission, I'll return to my other guests." R obin BUck looked in the gun room and said: "Oh, there you are. We've been looking for you." Sutherland leaned forward, recovered himself, blinked and set down the glass. "We?" "The servants helped me," Robin said impatiently, taking in the glass and the low-water mark on the brandy decanter. "You can go now," she said into the microphone on her shoulder set. "Mr. Sutherland's here." Thestt were half a dozen robots with her, Sutherland saw blurrily. Confounded things, he thought, he wished they looked more like people. Or less. They were all of a pattern; only the coloring of the enamel on their faces and torsoes distinguished them -- that and the name that was neatly lettered across each chest. There was a purple-andwhite-checked Vespasian and a blue-polka-dot Theseus, a Ganymede in shades of brown and tan, an Echo in green. "I thought," said Robin, distracting him from the retreating robots, "that you'd like to know that Thelma's back." "Oh, fine," said Sutherland, frowning. "My sister." "Oh, that Thelma," said Sutherland agreeably, and stood up. "Well. Let's go see that Thelma," he said, taking her arm. For some reason, this mousy girl named Robin seemed to be impatient with him, Sutherland noticed. That was most annoying of her. If she couldn't be a lady and polite to her guests, then what the devil kind of family was this anyway? A music-mad teen-ager posing as the head of the household, a rude old maid of every bit of twenty-three bossing the company around, and a faithless, heartless -- "Are you all right, Mr. Sutherland?" "Fine," he said emptily. "I thought I heard you grunt or something." "I'm fine," he insisted. "That's what I said, isn't it? Now where's Thelma?" They were back in the great manorial hall and the colonel was holding forth. Not on Grogan and his meltingly empty horn this time, but on Lee and its place in the war effort. "The mother planet," he was saying pontifically, "has nothing to fear. We'll do our part! No Earthman will go hungry in this war." LaFargue, keeping an obviously tight rein on his tongue, said briefly: "And if the Capellans occupy you?" "Occupy?" repeated the colonel, stupified and staring. "Occupy us? The Capellans?" And he burst out laughing. "Oh, very amusing, LaFargue. What do you think of that, friends? Lee occupied!" shrilly. LaFargue said doggedly: "It's not impossible." Somebody spoke Sutherland's name, but he wasn't interested. He'd heard the same talk, between the same two men, an hour earlier, and wasn't interested in the recap. What he was interested in was Thelma. He said; "Where is she? Thelma, I mean." Everyone turned and looked at him. Mr. Mookerjan giggled again. "Why, I saw her out on the terrace with-" "She stepped out," said Robin, hard and fast, catching an expression on her brother's face. "She'll be back, Mr. Sutherland, so why don't you sit down and have a drink?" Sutherland blinked. "Terrace, eh? Well," he said raising his voice, "I just feel the need of a little fresh air myself, and what do you think of that?" The nerve, he told himself aggrievedly, of these frontier-planet civilians, trying to pull the wool over his eyes. Yes, civilians! "Colonel" was only a courtesy title that went along with inheriting the plantation. What did young Blick or his pasty-faced friends know about war? From his towering seniority as an almost-sworn-in. soon-to-be-inducted draftee, Sutherland looked down on them with irritation and contempt, and he marched across the room and out the French windows. "Thelma!" he shouted. The terrace was empty. Not even their intelligence was any good, he told himself, grieving. "Thelma!" he cried again, and walked out into the gardens. "Thelma!" he roared, and circled the little pond, and then he saw her. Or them. "Oh, you rat!" said Sutherland, and hurled himself at the man with his arms around the woman Sutherland loved. "I don't care how much money you've got, Pat Grossfader -- Thelma loves me and she isn't going to marry you!" "Wait, buddy!" The man dodged away from the flailing fists. "Hey! You got the wrong man! I'm Charley Pough, from Cornell! I never saw Miss Blick before tonight!" Sutherland said: "You cad!" He looked at the smeared lipstick and the disarrayed hair of Thelma Blick. "Hussy!" he cried. "Faithless woman! You aren't even true to Pat Grossfader, let alone me!" And he wandered off into the night. IV constellations twinkled, dim and orange-hued through the canopy. It was full dark. The evening rain had already come and gone; now the fertile ground would steep in moisture until the morning, when bright Sirius would pour its heat and light into the making of another five inches of stalk, another quarter-inch of girth of tuber, of each plant on the Blick place. Sutherland wandered until something moved in the shadows in front of him. He jumped. "Who's there?" No answer. "Speak up!" he barked, and then he remembered what he was always forgetting, and touched the switch of the speaker at his shoulder. "Who's there?" he demanded again, and now the radio received and relayed his voice. "Apollonius, please, Sutherland Master," whispered the speaker on his shoulder softly, and a greenand-white-striped robot stood before him, scanning him with its great silver radar eyes. "Are you lost, Sutherland Master?" "Lost and damned forever," groaned Sutherland. "Do you want Apollonius to take you to the house?" whispered the radio voice, soft and sexless. "No, damn you." Ugly wretched little thing. "Get out of here. Leave me alone!" "Yes, Sutherland Master." The four-foot mannikin obediently wheeled and disappeared. Good, thought Sutherland sourly, glowering after it in the dark -- can't stand the things. Still, he thought, he might as well go back to the house. Faithless woman! But he couldn't stand out here all night. No, back to the house and up to his room. There was a lock on the door; he would use it. Speak to no one. Ignore the whole confounded mass of them. Then up early the next morning, get one of the servants to drive him to town, catch a plane to the spaceport and -- Say, he thought drearily, staring around at the trees, just where was the house? Apollonius, or whatever your name is!" There wasn't any answer. "Oh, damn," said Sutherland, irritated, and snapped the switch off. Never mind the robots; they were as obnoxious as their owners. It was impossible to be lost, he reassured himself -- that is, really lost. True, he didn't know where he was, but that was only a detail. All he had to do was to go in one direction and keep right on going. Any direction -- the way out of a wood is straight ahead, and once he was outside, he'd see the house or the dome, and either would orient him. The robot had gone that way. Well, it was as good a way as any. Sutherland trudged after. In a moment, he saw where the robot had been heading, and it wasn't toward the house at all. It was an entrance to the servants' quarters underground. It wasn't lighted and there was no one in sight, but it was perfectly clear in the dim orangy glow from the overhead stars. Sutherland hesitated. "Apollonius," he called weakly, but there wasn't any answer. Undoubtedly, he thought, the tunnel through the servants' quarters was the quickest way back to the house.  I ' HE tunnel was dark -- more than dark; it was absolute blackness. He could form no idea of its height or length. He hesitated for a while, the drink receding inside him, wondering whether, after all, it was such a good idea to entrust himself to an unknown pit whose only inhabitants would be hateful animalcules. But the drink was not all gone. And Sutherland didn't care. If Thelma was lost to him, what had life to offer? Resting one hand against a wall, he carefully advanced. In a dozen paces, he was completely blind, but he remembered his cigarette lighter;, flicked it on, found the tunnel was perfectly plain and empty; flicked it off and marched confidently ahead. Strange sounds stopped him. Funny, thought Sutherland, was it an army marching at route step or a dance troupe? More than either of those, it was like the irregular crash of raindrops on the sodden fabric of a tent, a sound without timbre, only a multiplied pat-a-pat-a-pat. He moved a few yards farther until the noises were close at hand; then flicked on the lighter once more. In the tiny flare, he saw a serpentine circle of shining bodies. Robots -- the house and garden robots, and they were -- why, dancing! Dancing! They circled about a chamber of the underground quarters and processing works, circled, spun, slipped and slithered in and out of a queerly limited pattern, like cod flopping about in a fisherman's basket. Their silvery radar orbs rolled endlessly. Their linked metal limbs waved and clutched. Dancing, thought Sutherland, dazed -- no one told me robots danced. It could have been the rain dance of chrome-plated Indian children. It could have been the sacrificial rites of some island cannibals. But it lacked one human attribute that made it very strange indeed. It was silent. No music; none at all. There wasn't the thumping of a gasolinetin drum, or the shrill of a reed fife; there wasn't any sound of breath or chanting. These were robots, not men. And if they danced to music. it was to a tune Sutherland could not hear. Could not hear? "Oh, curse the thing," he growled aloud, and snapped on the shoulder radio. Immediately a clashing squeal of static beat at his ear. Music, yes -- the robots were dancing to radio frequencies, inaudible to human ears. They were in the processing chambers under the ground, Sutherland realized, the places where the proto-spuds were cooked, shredded, worked and packed. yasii He let the little flare go out, but there was some light, he found -- not much, but enough to pick out highlights on the metallic figures, and presently there was more -- all he needed. The light came from the processing machinery. work by, not while their radar eyes bounced echoes off masses; but the machinery had not been built with robots in mind but with men. It was part of their design that the lights of their gauges and meters should tell human eyes the temperatures and pressures and R.P.M. and voltages and other operating indicia of the machines, and faint as they were, those tiny instrument lights illuminated the scene. And the robots were starting the machines, one after another. Purple lights raced across the face of a pressure cooker as a small brown-spotted robot moved a vernier with ritual precision. A panel of instrument dials on a freezer lighted up with blue and yellow and red sparks. A shredding machine groaned and chugged and began to spin, and over its blades a warning red glow gave notice that human fingers should not approach. Sutherland stood staring, for there was something here that struck home. The sounds in his radio -- yes, they were clear enough; they came from the machines. The oscillating squee in his ear kept time to the movement of the chopper blades. A rhythmic ping, ping, ping matched the strokes of the compressor that fed ground stalks to the cooker. In fifteen years or more, however long it had been since a human being had troubled to enter the underground troll-world of the robots, the electrical machinery had worn. Once-firm contacts had corroded and warped. Each machine was now a potent generator of radio static -- short-range, to be sure, because of grounding and the buried location of the plant -- but loud enough close at hand for the robots to hear. And it was radio that the robots lived by. Why, the sound of the grinder was a dance beat What must the gamma-ray generators sound like! What tunes must come from the conveyor belts and the air compressors! It was dance music, savage and primitive. It was voodoo. Staring, Sutherland thought of servile peoples and their customs. In all Earth's history, the slave pop)ulation had always its religion and its ritual. Why shouldn't robots have them as well? There was only one answer to that question -- it wasn't a question; it was a fact. The robots danced to the music they lived by, and though the steel and enamel faces showed no expression, there was emotion enough for a Haitian conjure ceremony in the stamp of metal feet and the frenzy of metal arms. He turned blindly and fled down the dark tunnel, careless that he barked his shins and scraped his knuckles, and even out in the cool fruit grove with the orange-tinted stars above, he could feel something closing in on him more weighty and more frightening than the pressure of rock above the robot warren. V clutched his head, and groaned. What a dream! All that brandy and the tumult of his emotions regarding Thelma Blick had combined to produce a hangover, a massive drunk, strange dreams... Dreams? He sat up suddenly. The maid robot was moving silently about the room. From under his pillow, the robot voice sang : "Good morning, Sutherland Master. Here is your julep." Sutherland stared at her, trying to remember. Dreams? Had it been a dream, the weird robot witchdance in the tunnel? No, he was sure. It was no dream; Persephone was one of the capering corybants. Her colors, brown spots on a silvery field -- he remembered them; the one that operated the pressure cooker, he thought, tapping switches, treading on valve-pedals, like a tympanist beating out hot riffs. He stared at the robot, but what was there to say? He ignored the julep and sat up. Quickly the robot was beside him, helping him into his robe, adjusting the little shoulder-radio, knotting his sash. "Get lost," he growled. The expressionless face hesitated; then Persephone went about her dusting-tidying duties. You could almost see the electrons cascading around the digital robot mind : Get lost? A figure of human speech. Not to be taken literally. Means: "Do not disturb at this time." Sutherland dragged himself to the bath. Behind the closed door, he switched on the shower and watched it cycling -- hot, cold, steaming, suds, rinse -- inside the stall. Steam billowed around him. "Oh, damn," he groaned. Why must life be so complicated? The girl he loved -- faithless. The war that was about to consume him -- treated here as though it did not exist -- in spite of the manifest importance of Lee and its produce to Earth's war effort. His host a roarand-shack devotee. Everything was all messed up. "Oh, damn," he growled again, staring at his face in the shaving mirror. It was a perfectly decent face; why couldn't Thelma learn to like it? Nothing special, of course, he admitted, but -- "She's nuts," he grumbled testily. "Thelma promised to marry me. I'd give anything to make her do it. I-" There was a light sharp tapping at the door, and a gentle murmur from the shoulder radio: "Sutherland Master?" Startled, he opened the door. Persephone stood there, the blind silvery radar orbs scanning him emptily. He said irritably: "What the devil do you want?" "Sutherland Master," purred the robot, "exactly what do you mean by 'anything'?" he had to say, Sutherland hurried to the breakfast room with Persephone in tow. LaFargue was silently seated near the door, a newspaper open in his lap. He looked up opaquely in his dark glasses as Sutherland came in, but said nothing. There was a commotion in the room; the colonel was pacing tautly about, grumbling, a fidget of nerves in flesh! "Oh, where is he? Do you think his copter could have crashed?" "Please," murmured one of the other young officers, slopping his coffee as his hands shook, "don't be nervous. There couldn't have been an accident." He dropped his cup crashing to the floor. "What's the matter?" demanded Sutherland. The colonel stared at him. "Oh," he said, identifying this stranger. "You. Well, it's Grogan. He's coming here! Can you believe it?" Sutherland said sharply : "That's fine, but there's something more important going on." "More important than Gro -- " "Colonel," Sutherland interrupted, "I must ask that no one leave this room. Especially you, Mr. Mookerjan." The little man looked up with his bland face politely curious; he was sitting on a hassock by the window, quietly buttering toast. "I want you to listen to this. Colonel. Persephone, come here." Obediently the maid robot came to him. The colonel fussed: "Not now, old chap. Please. Grogan's coming any minute, and -- Oh, I can't bear it if something happened to him! He was all set to go back to Mars. If there's an accident coming here, when he only came because I asked him, I couldn't bear it." Sutherland said steadily: "This is more important than Grogan. I have reason to believe that your robots are conspiring against you." The colonel whispered: "My word. What' an idea!" He glanced at his friends, shaking his head. "It's a fact. Colonel." Sutherland observed that, on the hassock by the window, Miguel Mookerjan's face was turned away. The butter knife was rigidly still in his hand. Thelma and Robin seemed politely curious. LaFargue, his eyes invisible, had quietly come closer. All the others in the room clearly thought he was mad. "Listen," said Sutherland. "Persephone! I have a problem. I love Thelma Blick, but she doesn't love me. He turned up the volume on his shoulder radio, so that all might hear. The purring voice of the robot "But isn't it true that many masters are happy, too?" bot. "And couldn't you people help me to make her love me?" TT was out. Even after what the robot had told him in his own room, Sutherland winced to hear the words come from his own mouth. Help him! It was the maddest sort of request. It was like asking a vacuum cleaner to touch for King's Evil, or a dishwasher to mesmerize a headache away. The sweetly sexless voice of the By Manly Wade Wellman Ironic destiny of a visitor from the future trying to take advantage of things to come. By F. L. 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Enter my subscription for I # books (full length, all different) at # (# additional for Foreign). Name Address. City lone. State. "Thank you, Persephone," sighed Sutherland with relief, and clicked off his set. He confronted the colonel. "Now what do you say, Blick? You see?" "I-" faltered the boy, "I I'm afraid I don't." But if the colonel failed to understand Sutherland's meaning, there was someone in the room who did not Miguel Mookerjan stood up and his hand was in the pocket of his robe. He wasn't a tall man and he looked rather like a plump little dachshund pup, but he was no figure of fun as he advanced toward Sutherland. "You should not have meddled," he said gently. "It was foolish." "Don't try anything rash!" Sutherland warned sharply. But he wondered how he could back up the warning. If Mookerjan had a gun, it gave him a certain definite edge. Certainly Sutherland could count on no help from the colonel, who was in a paralysis of surprise. Only LaFargue could be hoped for at all, and LaFargue seemed content to stand quietly by and watch. Mookerjan said softly: "I am never rash, Mr. Sutherland. It is not a characteristic of my family. Conservative, quick to learn, prolific, thrifty -- those are the traits that have made my family great We," he said proudly, "were one of the most numerous families in Granada, many centuries ago. Then we moved to Puerto Rico as Spain grew too crowded, from overcrowded Puerto Rico to New Delhi, from India to " "To Capella?" ventured Sutherland. Mookerjan looked at him thoughtfully. The accusation was plain. Sutherland was saying: You're a spy. The little man smiled apologetically and nodded. "I rather thought you realized I was a Capellan," he said with a touch of sadness. "Knowing that, you must know why I am here. That is too bad. There are a hundred like me on Lee, commission brokers or wandering journalists or doctors, as the spirit moves us to pretend. It is not convenient for us that you should know we exist, although it can scarcely defeat our purpose." "And exactly what is your purpose?" Sutherland demanded. Mookerjan sighed. "That should be obvious," he said softly. Sutherland spun and confronted Colonel Blick. "You see? Spies! Using your robots to work against your government! And not above using them, too, to help out with their own little romantic intrigues. I'll bet!" And he glanced at Thelma Blick, who seemed perfectly composed, thoughtful, disinterested -- she was idly examining her nails -- but who was blushing beet red. Colonel Blick cast a glance at his watch, a glance at the door, frowned, and then obviously set his mind to the problem at hand. "All right," he said irritably. "You've made your point, Sutherland. What about it?" Sutherland blinked. "What "Mr. Mookerjan is a spy, you say. Isn't that a matter for the Space Guard?" "It's a matter for every decent citizen of Earth!" Sutherland blazed. "Oh, of course," the colonel agreed. "But my planet is Lee, Mr. Sutherland. It isn't a state or a nation. It's a colony." Sutherland stopped short, the breath gone out of him. Incredible! "And besides," said the colonel, his voice suddenly joyful, "I hear -- yes! I hear a copter, coming through the dome port!" He went flying to the door and that was the end of that discussion. Grogan was here. corner of the room, watching the triumphal entry of the hero. For a few minutes, he had been the center of attraction; now he was ignored in the wings. What had happened? He stared at the colonel with sick disbelief. How could the man be so thoughtless, heedless, careless -- so stupid? LaFargue whispered from behind him: "Too bad, Sutherland. You tried." "Eh?" Sutherland turned and looked at him, but the eyes were invisible behind the glasses. "Yeah," he said, and looked again at Grogan, smiling and nodding, serene with the affable dignity of someone who knows he is the greatest man in the group. "Play something, Grogan!" begged the colonel, beside himself with excitement. "Oh, roar, man!" Robin Blick whispered: "You're perfectly right, you know." Sutherland stared. She was there too, beside LaFargue. "Sure," he said. Off by the window, Miguel Mookerjan had retired to his hassock and his cold toast, but his cold, bland eyes stayed on Sutherland. Sutherland sighed. "Play," coaxed the colonel, and Grogan held up his hand, laughing. He was a big man, fair and fat, with short red hair and a plump red face. "I didn't bring the pipe," he said, "but I tell you what I can do, pal. Want to hear my newest? I got the tape. Right here." "Oh, splendid," moaned the colonel, half carried away with joy, and they hastened to set the tape machine up in the great hall. "Sit down," LaFargue said softly. "Look." He was holding out something that glistened ruby -- a red-plastic I.D. card, an officer of the Space Guard. Sutherland's eyes opened wide. Robin Blick glanced, and she was surprised too; but she said: "I should have known. But really, I don't know what you can do here, Mr. LaFargue." LaFargue said harshly: "Nothing, probably. That's what I've been able to accomplish so far. Why should it change now? But I have to try. What about this robot voodoo, Sutherland?" "Oh, I can tell you more than he can," sniffed the girl. "Silly nonsense. The people -- the robots, that is -- have their own secret rites. Well, it keeps them contented. I suppose it's like that in any slave society," she admitted, flushing. "That's what this is, after all. But you mustn't think too badly of us. Plantation masters are decorations, nothing more. We sit around and the men drink juleps and the girls enjoy all the flirtations they can. And if once in a while somebody uses a little robot voodoo as a sort of love potion, what's the harm in that?" Sutherland asked: "But how -- " "Ssh." She waved to the knot around the tape player. "Don't distract my brother now. Let him get his tape going. In the past decades," she lectured, resuming, "the robots grew away from the humans. There was no common ground of culture or interest. The robots worked while we loafed, and naturally they developed their own little customs. Voodoo dances, charms, magic -- harmless enough, of course. They wouldn't hurt anyone. How could they? Robots aren't designed to hurt humans." "But the charms work!" Sutherland yelped. Robin Blick looked surprised. "Of course." Sutherland and LaFargue looked at each other. Sutherland said urgently: "Robin this is important. Don't you see what's happening here? The whole Sirian system is falling down on the job. Maybe your robots have something to do with it How do the charms work?" "Why, sub-aural compulsion," said the girl, surprised. "Didn't you know?" tuneless bagpipe drone of Grogan's latest wailed through the room. Sutherland started over to the knot around the tape machine, hesitated, looked at LaFargue. "Go on!" LaFargue whispered hotly. "Do it now!" Sutherland nodded and reluctantly started over. Well, he thought, what did he have to lose? Casually LaFargue got up and followed him. "Say," said Sutherland enthusiastically, "that's what I call roaring!" The colonel looked at him first limply, then irritably. "Quiet!" "Sorry," murmured Sutherland, and worked his way closer to the machine. All around it the audience was sprawled, boneless and tranced, in chairs and sofas; they were really sent. In fact, Sutherland realized, it was getting him too. He was being lulled to relaxation and to dreams. He took a deep breath, glanced once at LaFargue, and kicked the tape player's plug out of its socket. The Grogan roar blipped and died. The colonel twitched and sat up. "What "Oh, sorry," apologized Sutherland. "Clumsy of me! But Mr. LaFargue here will fix it -- won't you? He's an expert on -- on electronic things." The colonel gave him a look of intense pain. "Hurry it up, LaFargue," he grumbled. "I can't wait to hear the rest of it," Sutherland chattered while LaFargue busied himself with the player. "He's great." The colonel blinked. "Your taste does you credit," he said sourly. "Astonishing how it's improved." "What? Oh. Yes," said Sutherland, trying not to seem too vitally interested in what LaFargue was doing. All the thing really needed, of course, was to put the plug back in the socket, and if LaFargue took too long, it would be only a matter of time before the colonel or another of them took the task away from him. But LaFargue was thorough. He peered into the open back of the set, hesitated, moved a dial, peered again. "Come on!" growled the colonel. LaFargue stood up, thought for a second, and nodded. "All right," he said. "Turn it on." "The plug!" Sutherland whispered. "Oh, of course." LaFargue bent and stuck it back in. As he came up, he said softly: "I cut out everything but the very highs and the very lows. Let's see what happens." The tape began to mumble aid squeak. LaFargue listened carefully for a second, then cried: "That's it! The high is just overtones -- wait a second!" Quickly he turned the treble dial; the squeaking died. "But the low -- here, let's have more volume." He turned it up. A dispassionate deep voice came compellingly from the speaker: "Relax. Don't worry. Take things easy. The Capellans won't come here. If they do, so what? Earth is far away. Don't get involved. Relax. Don't worry "And there," cried Sutherland triumphantly, "is what is buried under every Grogan tape! Subaural compulsion, a hypnotic message that lulls and weakens! Grogan! I arrest you in the name of the Space Guard, as a Capellan spy -- and the same goes for you, Miguel Mookerjan!" The rest was pandemonium. " all right, and Mookerjan too; and after a few phone calls made by LaFargue, the word came that the Space Guard was on its way. "Sorry," said LaFargue handsomely to Sutherland, "but really, you can't arrest them, you know. But I'll see that you get credit for it." "I think I've got everjdhing I want already," said Sutherland. "Oh? Oh. I see," said LaFargue, and went to check on his prisoners. The colonel and his cronies said : "Uh. Sutherland. We must seem -- But you know how it is. We're sorry." "Of course," said Sutherland, and bowed as they left. Thelma Blick came flying. "You were wonderful" she cried, glowing. "Oh, darling, I'm so proud of you! And I'm sure you'll forgive silly old me for -- " "I forgive you, Thelma," said Sutherland. "Good-by, Thelma." And he held the door for her. She looked at him with popping eyes, but there wasn't any choice. She went. He turned to look at the mousy sister, who was not mousy at all, he had previously realized. She said tautly: "I thought you came here to get married." "I did," said Sutherland, "and I shall." And he took her by the arm and marched her out. And though she looked surprised, and acted surprised, the fact of the matter is that she wasn't surprised at all. Any questions or opinions you want to put to your favorite writers, artists or editors? Chances are good tkey'll be at the I #th World Science Fiction Convention. Send # membership fee (# for overseas) to Detention, # Drexel Street, Detroit #, Michigan. The convention itself -- lavishly programmed -- will be at the Pick-Fort Shelby Hotel, # West Lafayette Boulevard, Detroit #, Michigan. Get your room reservations there too; this looks like a big, well-attended one, so don't put off. ( Continued from page # ) North Pole via submarine -- this when the Navy only had one." (Wasn't that author somebody who called himself Noname? ) "In over # years, I have come to believe almost anything is possible, because present-day commonplaces seemed like the wildest dreams of fantasy when I was young. But I robots. No religious obection -- just that the human brain is too complex for duplication in a robot's brain case." (Maybe, njaybe not, but if # years could turn the wildest fantasies into commonplaces, # or # or # more could show much more certainly if it is or isn't. Industrial Research, # S. Michigan Ave., Chicago #, #., covering research in # fields vividly and in depth, says: "Cryogenics may yield cells even smaller than the infinitesimal synapses of the living brain perimenting with cryotrons of the order of # angstroms wide (less than the visible wavelength of light ). Thus, even if these future computer building blocks were would fit into the 'infinite' space of a cubic centimeter. And a component only a few cc's wide could hold far more information units than the relatively immense human skull holds neurons. A cryotron-perceptron, in this sense, would be 'more than human.' " Anyone whose mind has remained young and open for so many years is truly admirable. Don't close it now, when research into the mechanics of intelligence is moving forward so speedily and rewardingly.) lR. Raymond Wallace, Clearfield. Pa.; "I agree with the apparent trend toward a few long stories rather than a lot of short ones, but have you taken into consideration the fact that you always loaded the question?... What might have happened if you had presented the issue as a choice between short, sparkling treatments, full of wit and rapid action and long, slow-moving, page-padding anecdotes?" ( Just what did happen -- the readers who wanted short stories for quick breaks and longer ones for leisure said so and are being heeded ). "I think the reason for lack of reaction to your editorials is that the reader doesn't expect a personal reply, and without a letter column with editorial comments he doesn't get any answer either." (Not if this way of handling letters wins favor. Ifs pleasant to do. Hope ifs as pleasant to read. Is it? ) Nora Fields Kerr, Washington, D.C.; "In the editorials asking for reader votes, you came across as a nice guy I wish I'd found on that page earlier. Keep on projecting." ( Like this? ) Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below.  Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here Q Add SOc Foreign Postage # Far  # or #c each  Enclose cheek, cash or money order. We pay postage Add SOc Foreign Postage Name... Address City State... 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Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy ,  , foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues (?) # Name...City... Address Zone...State... immtmmmmmmmmmrmmmmmmmi  galaxy  by by by by And Other Stories r . With your literally thousands of letters, you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden by Robert Sheckley by George O. Smith by Jim Harmon by A. J. Offutt by Rosel George Brown by Con Blomberg by Philip K. Dick by Frederik Pohl by Robert Bloch by Willy Ley Dead or Alive? by H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. AH material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. # This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Output # KW # KW Distance # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, etc: If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find Box I #, Village Station, New York I #, N. Y. Please send Radios postpaid (# per radio) Name... Address City State. be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for persona l power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe M.J.B. ! Scribe M.J.B. l San Jose, California  Please send me the free book. The Mastery  i of Life, which explains how I may learn to  i use my faculties and powers of mind. I ' l  Name i 'J Address J !Citv ; wonderful stuff accumulates -- but if it turns out that you like keep replenishing the supply, there will be a place for it, and we won't have the guiltily selfish feeling of not being able to share. Just take a look at this hoard. Name Withheld, N.Y., sent us an # list of rules for teachers: A. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys, and trim wicks. B. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day's session. C. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual tastes of the pupils. D. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly. E. After ten hours in school, the teachers should spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books. F. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed. G. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society. H. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intentions, integrity, and honesty. I. The teacher who performs his labors faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of # per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education apprbves. Winifred Northrun Principal Name Withheld adds: "I'd hate having to share the Earth with Miss Northrun. I can't say I'd like having ever-young flappers or bobby-soxers around any better. Let's not jump into this immortality thing, shall we?" All right, but let's not put it off till every last little bug is worked out. As a courtesy to Fritz Lang, who made "Metropolis," "The Girl in the Moon" and other early science fiction films, we run this free ad: "Galaxy from #st issue to end of #; Astounding from # to end of #; Weird Tales from # to #; all complete. Best offer. Write co Willy Ley, this magazine." Lang has gone back to Germany, expects to spend the rest of his life there, can get the German edition of Galaxy. Free-ad courtesy is extended only to makers of early s-f films, and to the following: "Galaxy will be available on tape for blind science fiction enthusiasts, if enough apply to make the project possible. For information, write' Tape-Respondents, International; Blind Services Committee; Roy H. Trumbull, Assistant Director, P.O. Box #, Corte Madera, Calif. Quite some time back this department assembled evidence that There Are Aliens Among Us. Here is further evidence sent in by readers: James J. Davidson, Haddonfield, N. J.: "In the March # issue of Scientific American appeared an advertisement by American Optical Co., Instrumentation Division, concerning their microscopes, that read in part: 'You can adapt the Microstar to your exact needs with various combinations of interchangeable bodies, stages, bases and optics... Choice of # interchangeable full #rotatable bodies, monocular, binocular, and trinocular; inclined for comfort...' Inclined how for whose comfort? Not mine -- though I'd rather meet an inclined trinocular being than one standing up." Keith Newburgh, Christchurch, N. Z., offers this Wellington clipping: "The problem of where the flies go in winter is nothing like the problem the National Roads Board has with its traffic tallies on the motorway around the head of Auckland Harbour. Figures presented to the board today showed the count at # vehicles at one point on the motorway. At another check point, # miles or so further on, the number of vehicles had dropped to #. Transport Department men said there were no roads leading off the motorway between the two points and they could not explain where the other # vehicles went to." Mr. Newburgh believes this shows that aliens "are already confiscating motor vehicles on an enormous scale in order to facilitate their taking over this planet." Jacob Shekel, Kiryat Motzkin, Israel, provides a quote from William Feller's An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications: "The essential novelty is that a mother can have zero, one or more daughters," and ask that we note "the quotation hints not only at biological differences, but a different logic system as well. Using regular terran logic, I just cannot imagine what the converse (or inverse, or obverse, or any other verse) of that statement would be; so I cannot guess what the writer of that sentence would consider regular and non-novel," a comment (Continued on page #) Lost in the vast Scorpion Desert of Venus, he needed all the courage a man could own -- and every bit of credit he could raise ! T HE sandcar moved smoothly over the rolling dunes, its six fat wheels rising and falling like the ponderous rumps of tandem elephants. The hidden sun beat down from a dead-white sky, pouring heat into the canvas top, reflecting heat back from the parched sand. "Stay awake," Morrison told himself, pulling the sandcar back to its compass course. It was his twenty-first day on Venus's Scorpion Desert, his twenty-first day of fighting sleep while the sandcar rocked across the dunes, forging over humpbacked little waves. Night travel would have been easier, but there were too many steep ravines to avoid, too many house-sized boulders to dodge. Now he knew why men went into the desert in teams; one man drove while the other kept shaking him awake. "But it's better alone," Morrison reminded himself. "Half the supplies and no accidental murders." His head was beginning to droop; he snapped himself erect. Infront of him, the landscape shimmered and danced through the Polaroid windshield. The sandcar lurched and rocked with treacherous gentleness. Morrison rubbed his eyes and turned on the radio. He was a big, sunburned, rangy young man with close-cropped black hair and gray eyes. He had come to Venus with a grubstake of twenty thousand dollars, to find his fortune in the Scorpion Desert as others had done before him. He had outfitted in Presto, the last town on the edge of the wilderness, and spent all but ten dollars on the sandcar and equipment. In Presto, ten dollars just covered the cost of a drink in the town's only saloon. So Morrison ordered rye and water, drank with the miners and prospectors, and laughed at the oldtimers' yrns about the sandwolf packs and the squadrons of voracious birds that inhabited the interior desert. He knew all about sunblindness, heatstroke and telephone breakdown. He was sure none of it would happen to him. But now, after twenty-one days and eighteen hundred miles, he had learned respect for this waterless waste of sand and stone three times the area of the Sahara. You really could die here! But you could also get rich, and that was what Morrison planned to do. ume, he could hear the faintest murmur of dance music from Venusborg. Then it faded and only the hum was left. He turned off the radio and gripped the steering wheel tightly in both hands. He unclenched one hand and looked at his watch. Nine-fifteen in the morning. At tenthirty he would stop and take a nap. A man had to have rest in this heat. But only a half-hour nap. Treasure lay somewhere ahead of him, and he wanted to find it before his supplies got much lower. The precious outcroppings of goldenstone had to be up ahead! He'd been following traces for two days now. Maybe he would hit a real bonanza, as Kirk did in '#, or Edmonson and Arsler in '#. If so, he would do just what they did. He'd order up a Prospector's Special, and to hell with the cost. The sandcar rolled along at an even thirty miles an hour, and Morrison tried to concentrate on the heat-blasted yellow-brown landscape. That sandstone patch over there was just the tawny color of Janie's hair. After he struck it rich, he and Janie would get married, and he'd go back to Earth and buy an ocean farm. No more prospecting. Just one rich strike so he could buy his spread on the deep blue Atlantic. Maybe some people thought fishherding was tame; it was good enough for him. He could see it now, the mackerel herds drifting along and browsing at the plankton pens, himself and his trusty dolphin keeping an eye out for the silvery flash of a predatory barracuda or a steel-gray shark coming along behind the branching coral... Morrison felt the sandcar lurch. He woke up, grabbed the 'steering wheel and turned it hard. During his moments of sleep, the vehicle had crept over the dune's crumbling edge. Sand and pebbles spun under the fat tires as the sandcar fought for traction. The car tilted perilously... The tires shrieked against the sand, gripped, and started to pull the vehicle back up the slope. Then the whole face of the dune collapsed. Morrison held onto the steering wheel as the sandcar flipped over on its side and rolled down the slope. Sand filled his mouth and eyes. He spat and held on while the car rolled over again and dropped into emptiness. For seconds, he was in the air. The sandcar hit bottom squarely on its wheels. Morrison heard a double boom as the two rear tires blew out. Then his head hit the windshield. " ness, the first thing he did was look at his watch. It read #:#. "Time for that nap," Morrison said to himself. "But I guess I'll survey the situation first." He found that he was at the bottom of a shallow fault strewn with knife-edged pebbles. Two tires had blown on impact, his windshield was gone, and one of the doors was sprung. His equipment was strewn around, but appeared to be intact. "Could have been worse," Morrison said. He bent down to examine the tires more carefully. "It is worse," he said. The two blown tires were shredded beyond repair. There wasn't enough rubber left in them to make a child's balloon. He had used up his spares ten days back crossing Devil's Grill. Used them and discarded them. He couldn't go on without tires. Morrison unpacked his telephone. He wiped dust from its black plastic face, then dialed Al's Garage in Presto. After a moment, the small video screen lighted up. He could see a man's long, mournful, grease-stained face. "Al's Garage. Eddie speaking." "Hi, Eddie. This is Tom Morrison. I bought that GM sandcar from you about a month ago. Remember?" "Sure I remember you," Eddie said. "You're the guy doing a single into the Southwest Track, How's the bus holding out?" "Fine. Great little car. Reason I called-" "Hey," Eddie said, "what happened to your face?" Morrison put his hand to his forehead and felt blood. "Nothing much," he said. "I went over a dune and blew out two tires." He turned the telephone so that Eddie could see the tires. "Unrepairable," said Eddie. "I thought so. And I used up all my spares crossing Devil's Grill. Look, Eddie, I'd like you to 'port me a couple of tires. Retreads are fine. I can't move the sandcar without them." "Sure," Eddie said, "except I haven't any retreads. I'll have to 'port you new ones at five hundred apiece. Plus four hundred dollars 'porting charges. Fourteen hundred dollars, Mr. Morrison.' "All right." "Yes, sir. Now if you'll show me the cash, or a money order which you can send back with the receipt, I'll get moving on it." "At the moment," Morrison said, "I haven't got a cent on me." "Bank account?" "Stripped clean." "Bonds? Property? Anything you can convert into cash?" "Nothing except this sandcar, which you sold me for eight thousand dollars. When I come back, I'll settle my bill with the sandcar." "If you get back. Sorry, Mr. Morrison. No can do." "What do you mean?" Morrison asked. "You know I'll pay for the tires." "And you know the rules on Venus," Eddie said, his mournful face set in obstinate lines. "No credit! Cash and carry!" can't run the sandcar without tires," Morrison said. "Are you going to strand me out here?" "Who in hell is stranding you?" Eddie asked. "This sort of thing happens to prospectors every day. You know what you have to do now, Mr. Morrison. Call Public Utility and declare yourself a bankrupt. Sign over what's left of the sandcar, equipment, and anything you've found on the way. They'll get you out." "I'm not turning back," Morrison said. "Look!" He held the telephone close to the ground. "You see the traces, Eddie? See those red and purple flecks? There's precious stuff near here!" "Every prospector sees traces," Eddie said. "Damned desert is full of traces." "These are rich," Morrison said. "These are leading straight to big stuff, a bonanza lode. Eddie, I know it's a lot to ask, but if you could stake me to a couple of tires -- " "I can't do it," Eddie said. "I just work here. I can't 'port you any tires, not unless you show me money first. Otherwise I get fired and probably jailed. You know the law." "Cash and carry," Morrison said bleakly. "Right. Be smart and turn back now. Maybe you can try again some other time." "I spent twelve years getting this stake together," Morrison said. "I'm not going back." He turned off the telephone and tried to think. Was there anyone else on Venus he could call? Only Max Krandall, his jewel broker. But Max couldn't raise fourteen hundred dollars in that crummy two-by-four office near Venusborg's jewel market. Max could barely scrape up his own rent, much less take care of stranded prospectors. "I can't ask Max for help," Morrison decided. "Not until I've found goldenstone. The real stuff, not just traces. So that leaves it up to me." He opened the back of the sandcar and began to unload, piling his equipment on the sand. He would have to choose carefully; anything he took would have to be carried on his back. The telephone had to go with him, and his lightweight testing kit. Food concentrates, revolver, compass. And nothing else but water, all the water he could carry. The rest of the stuff would have to stay behind. By nightfall, Morrison was ready. He looked regretfully at the twenty cans of water he was leaving. In the desert, water was a man's most precious possession, second only to his telephone. But it couldn't be helped. After drinking his fill, he hoisted his pack and set a southwest course into the desert. For three days he trekked to the southwest; then on the fourth day he veered to due south, following an increasingly rich trace. The sun, eternally hidden, beat down on him, and the dead-white sky was like a roof of heated iron over his head. Morrison followed the traces, and something followed him. On the sixth day, he sensed movement just out of the range of his vision. On the seventh day, he saw what was trailing him. small, lean, with a yellow coat and long, grinning jaws, it was one of the few mammals that made its home in the Scorpion Desert. As Morrison watched, two more sandwolves appeared beside it. He loosened the revolver in its holster. The wolves made no attempt to come closer. They had plenty of time. Morrison kept on going, wishing he had brought a rifle with him. But that would have meant eight pounds more, which meant eight pounds less water. As he was pitching camp at dusk the eighth day, he heard a crackling sound. He whirled around and located its source, about ten feet to his left and above his head. A littl vortex had appeared, a tiny mouth in the air like a whirlpool in the sea. It spun, making the characteristic crackling sounds of 'porting. "Now who could be 'porting anything to me?" Morrison asked, waiting while the whirlpool slowly widened. Solidoporting from a base projector to a field target was a standard means of moving goods across the vast distances of Venus. Any inanimate object could be 'ported; animate beings couldn't because the process involved certain minor but distressing molecular changes in protoplasm. A few people had found this out the hard way when 'porting was first introduced. Morrison waited. The aerial whirlpool became a mouth three feet in diameter. From the mouth stepped a chrome-plated robot carrying a large sack. "Oh, it's you," Morrison said. "Yes, sir," the robot said, now completely clear of the field. "Williams # at your service with the Venus Mail." It was a robot of medium height, thin-shanked and flat-footed, humanoid in appearance, amiable in disposition. For twenty-three years it had been Venus's entire postal service -- sorter, deliverer, and dead storage. It had been built to last, and for twenty-three years the mails had always come through. "Here we are, Mr. Morrison," month mail call in the desert, I'm sorry to say, but it comes promptly and that's a blessing. This is for you. And this. I think there's one more. Sandcar broke down, eh?" "It sure did," Morrison said, taking his letters. through its bag. Although it was a superbly efficient postman, the old robot was known as the worst gossip on three planets. "There's one more in here someabout the sandcar. They just don't build 'em like they did in my youth. Take my advice, young man. Turn back if you still have the chance." Morrison shook his head. "Foolish, downright foolish," the old robot said. "Pity you don't have my perspective. Too many's the time I've come across you boys lying in the sand in the dried-out sack of your skin, or with your bones gnawed to splinters by the sandwolves and the filthy black kites. Twenty-three years I've been delivering mail to fine-looking young men like you, and each one thinking he's unique and different." T HE robot's eyecells became distant with memory. "But said. "They're as alike as robots off the assembly line -- especially after the wolves get through with them. And then I liave to send their letters and personal effects back to their loved ones on Earth." "I know," Morrison said. "But some get through, don't they?" "Sure they do," the robot said. "I've seen men make one, two, three fortunes. And then die on the sands trying to make a fourth." "Not me," Morrison said. "I just want one. Then I'm going to buy me an undersea farm on Earth." The robot shuddered. "I have a dread of salt water. But to each his own. Good luck, young man." The robot looked Morrison over carefully -- probably to see what he had in the way of personal effects -- then climbed back into the aerial whirlpool. In a moment, it was gone. In another moment, the whirlpool had vanished. Morrison sat down to read his mail. The first letter was from his jewel broker, Max Krandall. It told about the depression that had hit Venusborg, and hinted that Krandall might have to go into bankruptcy if some of his prospectors didn't strike something good. The second letter was a statement from the Venus Telephone Company. Morrison owed two hundred and ten dollars and eight cents for two months' telephone service. Unless he remitted this sum at once, his telephone was liable to be turned off. The last letter, all the way from Earth, was from Janie. It was filled with news about his cousins, aunts and uncles. She told him about the Atlantic farm sites she had looked over, and the wonderful little place she had found near Martinique in the Caribbean. She begged him to give up prospecting if it looked dangerous; they could find another way of financing the farm. She sent all her love and wished him a happy birthday in advance. "Birthday?" Morrison asked himself. "Let's see, today is July twenty-third. No, it's the twentyfourth, and my birthday's August first. Thanks for remembering, Janie." That night he dreamed of Earth and the blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. But toward dawn, when the heat of Venus became insistent, he found he was dreaming of mile upon mile of goldenstone, of grinning sandwolves, and of the Prospector's Special.- rison plowed his way across the bottom of a long-vanished lake. Then it was rock again, twisted and tortured into a thousand gaunt shapes. Reds, yellows and browns swam in front of his eyes. In all that desert, there wasn't one patch of green. He continued his trek into the tumbled stone mazes of the interior desert, and the wolves trekked with him, keeping pace far out on either flank. Morrison ignored them. He had enough on his mind just to negotiate the sheer cliffs and the fields of broken stone that blocked his way to the south. By the eleventh day after leaving the sandcar, the traces were almost rich enough for panning. The sandwolves were tracking him still, and his water was almost gone. Another day's march would finish him. Morrison thought for a moment, then unstrapped his telephone and dialed Public Utility in Venusborg. The video screen showed a stern, severely dressed woman with irongray hair. "Public Utility," she said. "May we be of service?" "Hi," Morrison said cheerfully. "How's the weather in Venusborg?" "Hot," the woman said. "How's it out there?" "I hadn't even noticed," Morrison said, grinning. "Too busy counting my fortune." "You've found goldenstone?" the woman asked, her expression becoming less severe. "Sure have," Morrison said. "But don't pass the word around yet. I'm still staking my claim. I think I can use a refill on these." Smiling easily, he held up his canteens. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes, if you showed enough confidence, Public Utility would fill you up without checking your account. True, it was embezzling, but this was no time for niceties. "I suppose your account is in order?" asked the woman. "Of course," Morrison said, feeling his smile grow stiff. "The name's Tom Morrison. You can just check -- " "Oh, I don't do that personally," the woman said. "Hold that canteen steady. Here we go." hands, Morrison watched as the water, 'ported four thousand miles from Venusborg, appeared as a slender crystal stream above the mouth of his canteen. The stream entered the canteen, making a wonderful gurgling sound. Watching it, Morrison found his dry mouth actually was beginning to salivate. Then the water stopped. "What's the matter?" Morrison asked. His video screen went blank. Then it cleared, and Morrison found himself staring into a man's narrow face. The man was seated in front of a large desk. The sign in front of him read Milton P. Reade, Vice President, Accounts. Morrison," Reade said, IT A "your account is overdrawn. You have been obtaining water under false pretenses. That is a criminal offense." "I'm going to pay for the water," Morrison said. "When?" "As soon as I get back to Venusborg." "With what," asked Mr. Reade, "do you propose to pay?" "With goldenstone," Morrison said. "Look around here, Mr. Reade. The traces are rich! Richer than they were for the Kirk claim! I'll be hitting the outcroppings in another day -- " "That's what every prospector thinks," Mr. Reade said. "Every prospector on Venus is only a day from goldenstone. And they all expect credit from Public Utility." "But in this case -- " "Public Utility," Mr. Reade continued inexorably, "is not a philanthropic organization. Its charter specifically forbids the extension of credit. Venus is a frontier, Mr. Morrison. a farflung frontier. Every manufactured article on Venus must be imported from Earth at outrageous cost. We do have our own water, but locating it, purifying it, then 'porting it is an expensive process. This company, like every other company on Venus, necessarily operates on a very narrow margin of profit, which is invariably plowed back into further expansion. That is why there can be no credit on Venus." "I know all that," Morrison said. "But I'm telling you, I only need a day or two more -- " "Absolutely impossible. By the rules, we shouldn't even help you out now. The time to report bankruptcy was a week ago, when your sandcar broke down. Your garage man reported, as required by law. But you didn't. We would be within our rights to leave you stranded. Do you understand that?" "Yes, of course," Morrison said wearily. "However, the company has decided to stretch a point in your favor. If you turn back immediately, we will keep you supplied with water for the return trip." "I'm not turning back yet. I'm almost on the real stuff." "You must turn back! Be reasonable, Morrison! Where would we be if we let every prospector wander over the desert while we supplied his water? There'd be ten thousand men out there, and we'd be out of business inside of a year. I'm stretching the rules now. Turn back." "No," said Morrison. "You'd better think about it. If you don't turn back now, Public Utility takes no further responsibility for your water supply." Morrison nodded. If he went on, he would stand a good chance of dying in the desert But if he turned back, what then? He would be in Venusborg, penniless and in debt, looking for work in an overcrowded city. He'd sleep in a community shed and eat at a soup kitchen with the other prospectors who had turned back. And how would he be able to raise the fare back to Earth? When would he ever see Janie again? "I guess I'll keep on going," Morrison said. "Then Public Utility takes no further responsibility for you," Reade repeated, and hung up. Morrison packed up his telephone, took a sip from his meager water supply, and went on. r I ' HE sandwolves loped along at each side, moving in closer. Overhead, a delta-winged kite found him. It balanced on the updrafts for a day and a night, waiting for the wolves to finish him. Then a flock of small flying scorpions sighted the waiting kite. They drove the big creature upstairs into the cloud bank. For a day the flying reptiles waited. Then they in turn were driven off by a squadron of black kites. The traces were very rich now, on the fifteenth day since he had left the sandcar. By rights, he should be walking over goldenstone. He should be surrounded by goldenstone. But still he hadn't found any. Morrison sat down and shook his last canteen. It gave off no wet sound. He uncapped it and turned it up over his mouth. Two drops trickled down his parched throat. It was about four days since he had talked to Public Utility. He must have used up the last of his water yesterday. Or had it been the day before? He recapped the empty canteen and looked around at the heatblasted landscape. Abruptly he pulled the telephone out of his pack and dialed Max Krandall in Venusborg. Krandall's round, worried face swam into focus on the screen. "Tommy," he said, "you look like hell." "I'm all right," Morrison said. "A little dried out, that's all. Max, I'm near goldenstone." "Are you sure?" Krandall asked. "See for yourself," Morrison said, swinging the telephone around. "Look at the stone formations! Do you see the red and purple markings over there?" "Traces, all right," Krandall admitted dubiously. "There's rich stuff just beyond it," Morrison said. "There has to be! Look, Max, I know you're short on money, but I'm going to ask you a favor. Send me a pint of water. Just a pint, so I can go on for another day or two. We can both get rich for the price of a pint of water." "I can't do it," Krandall said sadly. "You can't?" "That's right. Tommy, I'd send you water even if there wasn't anything around you but sandstone and granite. Do you think I'd let you die of thirst if I could help it? But I can't do a thing. Take a look." phone. Morrison saw that the chairs, table, desk, filing cabinet and safe were gone from the office. All that was left in the room was the telephone. "I don't know why they haven't taken out the phone," Krandall said. "I owe two months on my bill." "I do too," said Morrison. "I'm stripped," Krandall said. "I haven't got a dime. Don't get me wrong, I'm not worried about myself. I can always eat at a soup kitchen. But I can't 'port you any water. Not you or Remstaater." "Jim Remstaater?" "Yeah. He was following a trace up north past Forgotten River. His sandcar broke an axle last week and he wouldn't turn back. His water ran out yesterday." "I'd bail him out if I could," said Morrison. "And he'd bail you out if he could," Krandall said. "But he can't and you can't and I can't. Tommy, you have only one hope." "What's that?" "Find goldenstone. Not just traces, find the real thing worth real money. Then phone me. If you really have goldenstone, I'll bring in Wilkes from Tri-Planet Mining and get him to advance us some money. He'll probably want fifty per cent of the claim." "That's plain robbery!" "No, it's just the high cost of credit on Venus," Krandall answered. "Don't worry, there'll still be plenty left over. But you have to find goldenstone first" "OK," Morrison said. "It should be around here somewhere. Max, what's today's date?" "July thirty-first. Why?" "Just wondering. I'll call you when I've found something." After hanging up, Morrison sat on a little boulder and stared dully at the sand. July thirty-first. Tomorrow was his birthday. His family would be thinking about him. Aunt Bess in Pasadena, the twins in Laos, Uncle Ted in Durango. And Janie, of course, waiting for him in Tampa. Morrison realized that tomorrow might be his last birthday unless he found goldenstone. He got to his feet, strapped the telephone back in his pack beside the empty canteens, and set a course to the south. TT E wasn't alone. The birds and beasts of the desert marched with him. Overhead, the silent black kites circled endlessly. The sandwolves crept closer on his flanks, their red tongues lolling out, waiting for the carcass to fall... "I'm not dead yet!" Morrison shouted at them. He drew his revolver and fired at the nearest wolf. At twenty feet, he missed. He went down on one knee, held the revolver tightly in both hands and fired again. The wolf yelped in pain. The pack immediately went for the wounded animal, and the kites swooped down for their share. Morrison put the revolver back in its holster and went on. He could tell he was in a badly dehydrated state. The landscape jumped and danced in front of him, and his footing was unsure. He discarded the empty canteens, threw away everything but the testing kit, telephone and revolver. Either he was coming out of the desert in style or he wasn't coming out at all. The traces continued to run rich. But still he came upon no sign of tangible wealth. That evening he found a shallow cave set into the base of a cliff. He crawled inside and built a barricade of rocks across the entrance. Then he drew his revolver and leaned back against the far wall. The sandwolves were outside, sniffing and snapping their jaws. Morrison propped himself up and got ready for an all-night vigil. He didn't sleep, but he couldn't stay awake, either. Dreams and visions tormented him. He was back on Earth and Janie was saying to him, "It's the tuna. Something must be wrong with their diet. Every last one of them is sick." "It's the darnedest thing," Morrison told her. "Just as soon as you domesticate a fish, it turns into a prima donna." "Are you going to stand there philosophizing," Janie asked, "while your fish are sick?" "Call the vet." "I did. He's off at the Blake's place, taking care of their dairy whale." "All right, I'll go out and take a look." He slipped on his face mask. Grinning, he said, "I don't even have time to dry off before I have to go out again." His face and chest were wet. His face and chest were wet -- from perspiration. Staring at the partially blocked mouth of the cave, he could see green eyes, two, four, six, eight. He fired at them, but they didn't retreat. He fired again, and his bullet richocheted off the cave wall, stinging him with stone splinters. With his next shots, he succeeded in winging one of the wolves. The pack withdrew. That emptied the revolver. Morrison searched through his pockets and found five more cartridges. He carefully loaded the gun. Dawn couldn't be far away now. And then he was dreaming again, this time of the Prospector's Special. He had heard about it in every little saloon that bordered the Scorpion. Bristly-bearded old prospectors told a hundred different stories about it, and the cynical bartenders chimed in with their versions. Kirk had it in '#, ordered up big and special just for him. Edmonson and Arsler received it in '#. That was certain. And other men had had it too, as they sat on their precious goldenstone claims. Or so people said. But was it real? Was there such a thing as the Prospector's Special? Would he live to see that rainbowhued wonder, tall as a church steeple, wide as a house, more precious than goldenstone itself? Sure he would! Why, he could almost see it now... Morrison shook himself awake. It was morning. Painfully, he crawled out of the cave to face the day. He stumbled and crawled to the south, escorted closely by wolves, shaded by predatory flying things. His fingers scrabbled along rock and sand. The traces were rich, rich! But where in all this desolation was the goldenstone? Where? He was almost past caring. He drove his sunburned, driedout body, stopping only to fire a single shot when the wolves came too close. Four bullets left. He had to fire again when the kites, growing impatient, started diving at his head. A lucky shot tore into the flock, downing two. It gave the wolves something to fight over. Morrison crawled on blindly. And fell over the edge of a little cliff. It wasn't a serious fall, but the revolver was knocked from his hand. Before he could find it, the wolves were on him. Only their greed saved Morrison. While they fought over him, he rolled away and retrieved his revolver. Two shots scattered the pack. That left one bullet. He'd have to save that one for himself, because he was too tired to go on. He sank to his knees. The traces were rich here. Fantastically rich. Somewhere nearby... "Well, I'll be damned," Morrison said. The little ravine into which he had fallen was solid goldenstone. TT E picked up a pebble. Even in its rough state he could see the deep luminous golden glow, the fiery red and purple flecks deep in the shining stone. "Make sure," Morrison told himself. "No false alarms, no visions, no wild hopes. Make sure." He broke off a chunk of rock with the butt of his revolver. It still looked like goldenstone. He took out his testing kit and spilled a few drops of white solution on the rock. The solution foamed green. "Goldenstone, sure as sure," Morrison said, looking around at the glowing cliff walls. "Hey, I'm rich!" He took out his telephone. With trembling fingers he dialed Krandall's number. "Max!" Morrison shouted. "I've hit it! I've hit the real stuff!" "My name is not Max," a voice over the telephone said. "Huh?" "tyly name is Boyard," the man said. The video screen cleared, and Morrison saw a thin, sallow-faced man with a hairline mustache. "I'm sorry, Mr. Boyard," Morrison said. "I must have gotten the wrong number. I was calling -- " "It doesn't matter who you were calling," Mr. Boyard said. "I am District Supervisor of the Venus Telephone Company. Your bill is two months overdue." "I can pay it now," Morrison said, grinning. "Excellent," said Mr. Boyard. "As soon as you do, your service will be resumed." The screen began to fade. "Wait!" Morrison cried. "I can pay as soon as I reach your office. But I must make one telephone call. Just one call, so that I -- " "Not a chance," Mr. Boyard said decisively. "Alter you have paid your bill, your service will be turned on immediately." "I've got the money right here!" Morrison said. "Right here in my hand!" Mr. Boyard paused. "Well, it's unusual, but I suppose we could arrange for a special robot messenexpenses." "I am!" "Hm. It's irregular, but I daresay we... Where is the money?" "Right here," Morrison said. "You recognize it, don't you? It's goldenstone!" "I am sick and tired of the tricks you prospectors think you can put over on us. Holding up a handful of pebbles -- " "But this is really goldenstone! Can't you see it?" "I am a businessman," Mr. Boyard said, "not a jeweler. I wouldn't know goldenstone from goldenrod." The video screen went blank. tried to reach the operator. There was nothing not even a dial tone. His telephone was disconnected. He put the instrument down and surveyed his situation. The narrow crevice into which he had fallen ran straight for about twenty yards, then curved to the left No cave was visible in the steep walls, no place where he could build a barricade. He heard a movement behind him. Whirling around, he saw a huge old wolf in full charge. Without a moment's hesitation, Morrison drew and fired, blasting off the top of the beast's head. "Damn it," Morrison said. "I was going to save that bullet for myself." It gave him a moment's grace. He ran down the ravine, looking for an opening in its sides. Goldenstone glowed at him and sparkled red and purple. And the sandwolves loped along behind him. Then Morrison stopped. In front of him, the curving ravine ended in a sheer wall. He put his back against it, holding the revolver by its butt. The wolves stopped five feet from him, gathering themselves for a rush. There were ten or twelve of them, and they were packed three deep in the narrow pass. Overhead, the kites circled, waiting for their turn. At that moment, Morrison heard the crackling sound of 'porting equipment. A whirlpool appeared above the wolves' heads and they backed hastily away. "Just in time!" Morrison said. "In time for what?" asked Williams #, the postman. The robot climbed out of the vortex and looked around. said, "this is a fine fix you've gotten yourself into. Didn't I warn you? Didn't I advise you to turn back? And now look!" "You were perfectly right," Morrison said. "What did Max Krandall send me?" "Max Krandall did not, and could not, send a thing." "Then why are you here?" "Because it's your birthday," Department always give special service for birthdays. Here you are." mail, birthday greetings from Janie, and from his aunts, uncles and cousins on Earth. # said, rummaging in his bag. "I think there was something else here. Let me see... Yes, here it is." He handed Morrison a small package. wrappings. It was a birthday present from his Aunt Mina in New Jersey. He opened it. It was a large box of salt-water taffy, direct from Atlantic City. "Quite a delicacy, I'm told," said over his shoulder. "But not very satisfactory under the circumstances. Well, young man, I hate to see anyone die on his birthday. The best I can wish you is a speedy and painless departure." The robot began walking toward the vortex. "Wait!" Morrison cried. "You can't just leave me like this! I haven't had any water in days! And those wolves -- " you think I feel happy about it? Even a robot has some feelings!" "Then help me." "I can't. The rules of the Postal Department expressly and categorically forbid it. I remember Abner Lathe making much the same request of me in '#. It took three years for a burial party to reach him." "You have an emergency telephone, haven't you?" Morrison asked. "Yes. But I can use it only for personal emergencies." "Can you at least carry a letter for me? A special delivery letter?" "Of course I can," the robot postman said. "That's what I'm here for. I can even lend you pencil and paper." Morrison accepted the pencil and paper and tried to think. If he wrote to Max now, special delivery, Max would have the letter in a matter of hours. But how long would Max need to raise some money and send him water and ammunition? A day, two days? Morrison would have to figure out some way of holding out... "I assume you have a stamp," the robot said. "I don't," Morrison replied. "But I'll buy one from you. Solidoport special." "Excellent," said the robot. "We have just put out a new series of Venusborg triangulars. I consider them quite an esthetic accomplishment. They cost three dollars apiece." "That's fine. Very reasonable. Let me have one." "There is the question of payment." "Here," Morrison said, handing the robot a piece of goldenstone worth about five thousand dollars in the rough. The postman examined the stone, then handed it back. "I'm sorry, I can accept only cash." "But this is worth more than a thousand postage stamps!" Morrison said. "This is goldenstone!" said. "But I have never had any assaying knowledge taped into me. Nor is the Venus Postal Service run on a barter system. I'll have to ask for three dollars in bills or coins." "I don't have it." # turned to go. "You can't just go and let me die!" said sadly. "I am only a robot, Mr. Morrison. I was made by men, and naturally I partake of some of their sensibilities. That's as it should be. But I also have my limits, which, in their nature, are similar to the limits most humans have on this harsh planet. And, unlike humans, I cannot transcend my limits." The robot started to climb into the whirlpool. Morrison stared at him blankly, and saw beyond him the waiting wolfpack. He saw the worth of goldenstone shining from the ravine's walls. Something snapped inside him. " rison dived, tackling the robot in and half out of the 'porting vortex, struggled and kicked, and almost succeeded in shaking Morrison loose. But with a maniac's strength Morrison held on. Inch by inch he dragged the robot out of the vortex, threw him on the ground and pinned him. "You are disrupting the mail "That's not all I'm going to disrupt," Morrison growled. "I'm not afraid of dying. That was part of the gamble. But I'm damned if I'm going to die fifteen minutes after I've struck it rich!" "You have no choice." "I do. I'm going to use that emergency telephone of yours." refuse to extrude it. And you could never reach it without the resources of a machine shop." "Could be," said Morrison. "I plan to find out." He pulled out his empty revolver. "What are you going to do?" "I'm going to see if I can smash you into scrap metal without the resources of a machine shop. I think your eyecells would be a logical place to begin." "They would indeed," said the robot. "I have no personal sense of survival, of course. But let me point out that you would be leaving all Venus without a postman. Many would suffer because of your antisocial action." "I hope so," Morrison said, raising the revolver above his head. "Also," the robot said hastily, "you would be destroying government property. That is a serious Offense." Morrison laughed and swung the pistol. The robot moved its head quickly, dodging the blow. It tried to wriggle free, but Morrison's two hundred pounds was seated firmly on its thorax. "I won't miss this time," Morrison promised, hefting the revolver. my duty to protect government property, even if that property happens to be myself. You may use my telephone, Mr. Morrison. Bear in mind that this offense is punishable by a sentence of not more than ten and not less than five years in the Solar Swamp Penitentiary." "Let's have that telephone," Morrison said. rp HE robot's chest opened and a small telephone extruded. Morrison dialed Max Krandall and explained the situation. "I see, I see," Krandall said. "All right, I'll try to find Wilkes. But, Tom, I don't know how much I can do. It's after business hours. Most places are closed -- " "Get them open again," said Morrison. "I can pay for it. And get Jim Remstaater out of trouble, too." "It can't be done just like that. You haven't established any rights to your claim. You haven't even proved that your claim is valuable." "Look at it." Morrison turned the telephone so that Krandall could see the glowing walls of the ravine. "Looks real," Krandall said. "But unfortunately, all that glitters is not goldenstone." "What can we do?" Morrison asked. "We'll have to take it step by step. I'll 'port you the Public Surveyor. He'll check your claim, establish its limits, and make sure no one else has filed on it. You give him a chunk of goldenstone to take back. A big chunk." "How can I cut goldenstone? I don't have any tools." "You'll have to figure out a way. He'll take the chunk back for assaying. If it's rich enough, you're all set." "And if it isn't?" "Perhaps we better not talk about that," Krandall said. "I'll get right to Work on this, Tommy. Good luck!" Morrison signed off. He stood up and helped the robot to its feet "In twenty-three years of servfirst time anybody has threatened the life of a government postal employee. I must report this to the police authorities at Venusborg, Mr. Morrison. I have no choice." "I know," Morrison said. "But I guess five or ten years in the penitentiary is better than dying." "I doubt it. I carry mail there, you know. You will have the opportunity of seeing for yourself in about six months." "What?" said Morrison, stunned. "In about six months, after I have completed my mail calls around the planet and returned to Venusborg. A matter like this must be reported in person. But first and foremost, the mails must go through." how-" "I am simply performing my duty," the robot said as it climbed into the vortex. "If you are still on Venus in six months, I will be delivering your mail to the penitentiary." "I won't be here," Morrison said. The robot disappeared into the 'porting vortex. Then the vortex disappeared. Morrison was alone in the Venusian twilight. denstone larger than a man's head. He chipped at it with his pistol butt, and tiny particles danced and shimmered in the air. After an hour, he had put four dents in his revolver, but he had barely scratched the highly refractory surface of the goldenstone. The sandwolves began to edge forward. Morrison threw stones at them and shouted in his dry, cracked voice. The wolves retreated. He examined the outcropping again and found a hairline fault running along one edge. He concentrated his blows along the fault. The goldenstone refused to crack. Morrison wiped sweat from his eyes and tried to think. A chisel, he needed a chisel... He pulled off his belt. Putting the edge of the steel buckle against the crack, he managed to hammer it in a fraction of an inch. Three more blows drove the buckle firmly into the fault. With another blow, the outcropping sheared off cleanly. He had separated a twenty-pound piece from the cliff. At fifty dollars a troy ounce, this lump should be worth about twelve thousand dollars -- if it assayed out as pure as it looked. The twilight had turned a deep gray when the Public Surveyor 'ported in. It was a short, squat robot with a conservative crackleblack finish. "Good day, sir," the surveyor said. "You wish to file a claim? A standard unrestricted mining claim?" "That's right," Morrison said. "And where is the center of the aforesaid claim?" "Huh? The center? I guess I'm standing on it." "Very well," the robot said. Extruding a steel tape, it walked rapidly away from Morrison. At a distance of two hundred yards, it stopped. More steel tape fluttered as it walked, flew and climbed a square with Morrison at the center. When it had finished, the surveyor stood for a long time without moving. "What are you doing?" Morrison asked. "I'm making depth-photographs of the terrain," the robot said. "It's rather difficult in this light. Couldn't you wait till morning?" "No!" "Well, I'll just have to cope," the robot said. It moved and stood, moved and stood, each subterranean exposure taking longer than the last as the twilight deepened. If it had had pores, it would have sweated. "There," said the robot at last, "that takes care of it. Do you have a sample for me to take back?" "Here it is," Morrison said, hefting the slab of goldenstone and handing it to the surveyor. "Is that all?" "Absolutely all," the robot said. "Except, of course, that you haven't given me the Deed of Search." given you the what?" "The Deed of Search. That is a government document showing that the claim you are filing on is free, as per government order, of fissionable material in excess of fifty per cent of the total mass to a depth of sixty feet. It's a mere formality, but a necessary one." "I never heard of it," Morrison said. "It became a requirement last week," explained the surveyor. "You don't have the Deed? Then I'm afraid your standard unrestricted claim is invalid." "Isn't there anything I can do?" "Well," the robot said, "you could change your standard unrestricted claim to a special restricted claim. That requires no Deed of Search." "What does the special restricted part mean?" "It means that in five hundred years all rights revert to the Government of Venus." "All right!" Morrison shouted. "Fine! Good! Is that all?" "Absolutely all," the surveyor said. "I shall bring this sample back and have it assayed and evaluated immediately. From it and the depth-photographs we can extrapolate the value and extent of your claim." "Send me back something to take care of the wolves," Morrison said. "And food. And listen -- I want a Prospector's Special." "Yes, sir. It will all be 'ported to you -- if your claim is of sufficient value to warrant the outlay." The robot climbed into the vortex and vanished. Time passed, and the wolves edged forward again. They snarled at the rocks Morrison threw, but they didn't retreat. Jaws open and tongues lolling, they crept up the remaining yards between them and the prospector. Then the leading wolf leaped back and howled. A gleaming vortex had appeared over his head and a rifle had fallen from the vortex, striking him on a forepaw. The wolves scrambled away. Another rifle fell from the vortex. Then a large box marked Grenades, Handle With Care. Then another box marked Desert Ration K. Morrison waited, staring at the gleaming mouth of the vortex. It crossed the sky to a spot a quarter of a mile away and paused there, and then a great round brass base emerged from the vortex, and the mouth widened to allow an even greater bulge of brass to which the base was attached. The bulge grew higher as the base was lowered to the sand. When the last of it appeared, it stood alone in the horizon-to-horizon expanse, a gigantic ornate brass punchbowl in the desert The vortex rose and paused again over the bowl. Morrison waited, his throat raw and aching. Now a small trickle came out of the vortex and splashed down into the bowl. Still Morrison didn't move. A ND then it came. The trickle became a roar that sent the wolves and kites fleeing in terror, and a cataract poured from the vortex to the huge punchbowl. Morrison 'began staggering toward it. He should have ordered a canteen, he told himself thirstily, stumbling across the quarter of a mile of sand. But at last he stood beneath the Prospector's Special, higher than a church steeple, wider than a house, filled with water more precious than goldenstone itself. He turned the spigot at the bottom. Water soaked the yellow sands and ran in rivulets down the dune. He should have ordered a cup or glass, Morrison thought, lying on his back with open mouth. Flower Arrangement root of this problem, why were they so up in the air over it? member quite why I did it. I was sitting there in my usual condition of vague awareness, wishing Barbara's voice would stop grating away because there was a man who was going to talk to us about St. Augustine grass, and I was hoping he'd say what to do for the brown spots in my lawn. "Oh, come on, girls," Barbara was saying. "We ought to enter the Federated Gardens show. Last year we won third prize." What Barbara wanted, of course, was for us to urge her to do the Arrangement. She was the only one of us with any talent, and to be fair, Barbara is a real maestro. Every year we each make a Dried Arrangement and Barbara comes along andsays, "Um!" and presses her lips together and waves her hand over your weedy-looking mess and pokes sticks in and out of the starfoam and, presto, you have a beautiful Arrangement to keep in your living room until the next Dried Arrangements meeting. Every year I take it home and everyone says, "Oh, isn't that beautiful! Did you make it?" And of course I had been rather pretending I had made it, only if somebody asked me about it directly, I had to say, "No, Barbara James made it." I frequently wished I had the courage to rush out of the Dried Arrangements meeting before she got to me and set my weedy, whispy Arrangement on the buffet and leave it there. Needless to say, I do not have this kind of courage. Only as Barbara got to the part where she says, "O.K. Any volunteers?" something popped inside of me and I shot my hand up and said, "I'd be glad to have a try at it." Barbara's mouth quirked a little, because she knew perfectly well what kind of Arrangements I make, 'and because she had probably already decided exactly what sort of Arrangement the Eastbank Garden Group was going to enter in the Federated Gardens show. But she said, "That's fine, Sally Jo. You're to use camellias in it somewhere. I think you'd do best with a simple fan Arrangement. I'll mail you their rules book, and if you'd like any -- er -- advice, why, I'd be glad to help."  That was it, of course. She wasn't going to let it be my Arrangement at all. I didn't even hear what the man said about St. Augustine grass. All the time I was thinking, thinking, thinking. Was there any kind of Arrangement I could make that Barbara couldn't do better? Something really different, so that when I looked at it, I wouldn't have to picture Barbara pressing her lips together? TT was about eleven o'clock at night' when I got home, and of course Ronald was asleep, but I just couldn't bear this by myself. "Ronald!" I cried in a loud whisper so as not to wake Tommy. "Do you know what I've done!" Ronald snuffled irritably, then sat up with a jerk and grabbed me by the shoulders. "You ran over somebody!" "No. I volunteered to make the flower Arrangement for the Federated Gardens show!" Ronald mumbled blasphemies and sank back into his pillow. "Darling, please stay awake. You see, the thing is, I'm actually going to do this. Only there's the matter of Barbara. Now, if I can only find something -- come to think of it, there's the Hogarth Curve. Barbara can do fans or Japanese things or crescents, but the one thing Barbara has never won a prize on is the Hogarth Curve. It tends to droop, you see. Darling..." But he was asleep. For a wild moment I even considered waking up Tommy, just to have someone to talk to. The wild moment passed and I eyed the telephone. But there isn't anyone you can call up at eleven o'clock at night and say, "About the Hogarth Curve -- " I crossed my arms over my chest and slipped my feet out of my shoes so I could stride up and down the house quietly. Naturally I couldn't think of anything. I never can when I try. But it hit me the next day. I was putting some applique on a pot holder for the bazaar in January -- I loathe applique -- and there it was! The Hogarth Curve wouldn't do, because while Barbara wasn't really successful with that kind of Arrangement, she could look at it and immediately see what was wrong. But the Hogarth Curve isn't the only line in the world. Lines reminded me of math, and math reminded me of that Mathematics for Morons book Ronald brought home in one of his numerous unsuccessful attempts to improve my thinking ability. I stuck my finger with a needle, hissed at the stab, held the pot holder carefully away so as not to get blood on it. Applique, ha! There was something in that book I wanted to remember. Some really interesting line. I grabbed the book and started down the index. B. I was sure it began with a B. No. Moebius Strip. That was it. Feverishly, I flipped the pages back to find out what it was that was so interesting about the Moebius Strip, and whether it could be done with an aspidistra leaf soaked in glycerin. "Brring!" went the alarm clock, which I always reset in the morning to tell me to go get Tommy. "Damn, damn, damn," I said, glancing hastily around at the part on Moebius Strips. There were other interesting-looking lines, but I just had a feeling the Moebius one was right. " ten, I peered around for Tommy. "Everything all right?" Miss Potter asked. "Um? Oh." I guess I had a glazed look in my eyes. "Come to think of it, I've been pondering it all morning and I haven't told anybody yet. I'm going to make the Arrangement for the Federated Gardens show." "How nice! You could make a real family project out of it!" Miss Potter said with her usual misplaced enthusiasm. "Tommy loves to make things!" "I know." Tommy talked all the way home, but I didn't hear a word he said. "Make yourself a peanut butter sandwich," I said when I pushed open.the back door. "Boys my age need a good hot lunch." "My mother used to have to force me to eat a good hot lunch. I'd have liked nothing better than to come home and make myself a peanut butter sandwich." Tommy gave me his accusatory look. "Oh, all right," I said. the garage where I have my lab -- ferns being pressed between newspapers, cattails hanging up to dry, my bucket of things in glycerin. "What I need," I mused, "is the biggest aspidistra in the world." I found a really nice one. Brownish, of course, but with a reddish streak and hints of deep green in it. And best of all, a light stripe right down the middle. "This," I said, "is going to be the very soul of our flower arrangement." "What's a soul?" "A soul..." The telephone rang. I am not always this fortunate. "I wanted to let you know," Barbara said, "that I've got the perfect container for your Arrangement. A pale blue cloisonne bowl. Oval. Just the thing for a fan Arrangement." "I'm not making a fan Arrangement." "No? Well, I think it would do very nicely for one of the Japanese Arrangements." "I'm not using Japanese lines," I said. There was a silence. Then, "You're not going to try a Hogarth Curve!" "No. It's not the sort of thing you can describe, Barbara. You'll just have to see it. When I'm ready." "I can come by any evening." Fortunately, Barbara works. "Suppose I come by this evening and bring you the bowl?" "I already have a base," I lied. "I'll call you when I have the Arrangement in shape." "I didn't mean to interfere." "It isn't that. It's that the thing is -- gestating. I need to feel it for a while." "Of course," Barbara said, as thotigh I had just told her I was calling in a medium. any base at all. I needed something that was nothing. The pastry board was too big. But I have a lovely chopping board, oblong, just the right size. I scrubbed the onion and garlic smell out of it as best I could and stuck on a piece of starfoam with floral clay. Now the Moebius Strip. "Tommy!" His eyes were wide and puzzled. He didn't know what he'd done. "Why did you tear Mama's aspidistra leaf into strips?" A whole bunch of them, meeting at the stem. "It's prettier that way." I could see what he meant. There was something festive-looking about it. Like streamers tied to a stick. "Let's try it like it is," Tommy said. He picks up these insidious cooperative suggestions from Miss Potter, and he has me in the midst of family projects before I'm aware of what's going on. "Well, I guess it wouldn't hurt to try. Hand me a piece of that green wire." I gathered the ends of the streamers together, carefully halflooped them and wired them to the bottom of the stem, so that the stem was part of the curve, too. They were pliable, but not limp or crackly, from the glycerin. My idea was to make a Dried Arrangement and then wire in some camellias at the last minute. If I had been a purist, I would have left the Arrangement the way it was, with just the one leaf. Tommy and I, however, are not purists. "Go out into the garage and get me six dried okra pods off the shelf," I said. "I am a fairy godmother." "Which ones is the okra?" Tommy asked. "The stripy ones." Tommy was back in a flash. "What are you going to turn them into?" "A handsome young Dried Arrangement." "Can I stick some in?" "One." I wired them all and put in five, their slight crescents all curving in the same direction. Tommy put the sixth one in, curving, of course, in the wrong direction. Still, you know, it didn't look bad. "Now," I said, "we need something behind it For a background. Something pale. Go into the garage," I commanded, waving my magic floral wire, "and get me four ferns. They're between the sheets of newspaper." It's obvious what's wrong with all this. You should never use an even number of things in a flower arrangement. It's gauche and bourgeois and almost as bad as serving iced sherry. started, Ronald came in demanding dinner. "How am I ever going to get my Arrangement made if people keep interrupting?" I said, because I was knee-deep in weeds and it was infuriating to have to stop. "Don't you and Tommy ever think of anything but food?" "Sally Jo!" I opened cans of this and that, like the ladies on television. Ronald and Tommy ate morosely and of course the Tylers dropped by after dinner and Marcelle said, "What is that?" And I said, "Oh, it isn't finished yet," and Tommy said, "I helped," and Marcelle said, "That's awfully clever of Tommy to help make something. But tell me, dear, have you ever wondered about his subconscious?" No, I hadn't, but it was my subconscious, and after that I kept wondering, Why is my subconscious like a Moebius Strip? The best answer I could come up with was that it's because it has a halftwist in it But the next morning I got the fern in exactly right, balancing the five okra pods with three large ferns and the wrong-way one with a small fern. The aspidistra showed up beautifully against the fragile dried road fern. Then, of course, Tommy and Ronald revolted against my Creative Period, each in his own way. Tommy fell down and split his lip wide open, requiring stitches, and Ronald came down with the flu, requiring continuous bed care. I'd rather be locked up with two live octopi. And then Marcelle called and said the pot holders had to be done by the next week, so every time I had an odd moment I had to sit down and work on that wretched applique. "I'll resign!" I screamed one day, hurling a half-appliqued pot holder across the room. "Do you know that I still have the bias binding to sew on? And, Ronald, they're round." "For God's sake, resign! I've never heard of making pot holders foi a garden club, anyway." "It's for our bazaar. And I can't resign before the show. I wouldn't be able to make the Arrangement." "Which would suit me just fine," Ronald said. "Where's my pipe?" "Did you look on your pipe rack?" "There's a tube of toothpaste on my pipe rack." "Then your pipe's in the medicine cabinet." By the time Tommy was back in school and Ronald was back at work, I had one day to finish my Arrangement in. calling every night "to find out how everybody is," and hinting for me to let her take over. Somewhere, probably out of sheer irritation, I found the strength of mind to refuse her. "But you'll need my Pink Perfections," Barbara said. "After all, it's a camellia show." "Couldn't you meet me before the show? I'm going over at eight o'clock and Ronald's going to drop Tommy off at school for me. The show doesn't start until nine. You could stop by on the way to work." "I'll be there at eight o'clock," Barbara said. "How many Pink Perfections do you want me to bring? Three? Five?" "Four," I said, and hung up before she could even gasp. I worked most of the night. I filled in the curve of the Moebius Strip with some soft, sort of thistle down things. I covered the starfoam with curly moss and left the rest of the chopping board bare. I worked in the mindless way that produces the best effect. The alarm went off at six. I hopped out of bed and darted about the chilly house to get my family clothed and fed and out. I was more excited than I ought to have been over a flower show. I'd stuck my neck out too far, refusing to let Barbara help. And using a totally unorthodox Arrangement. And furthermore -- you don't ordinarily think of Flower Arranging as a vice, but it was something nasty in me that made me volunteer to do it, and to exclude Barbara, who after all needs to make Flower Arrangements because she doesn't have any children. And if one is going to have a vice at all, and neglect home and family and friends, one ought to be able to say, "There, at least I got a prize." I broke the eggs into a bowl and got the bacon started. Then I popped into the living room and turned the light on for a quick look at my Moebius Strip. There was something not quite right about it. For one thing, it no longer looked like a Moebius Strip. On the other hand, it didn't look not like a Moebius Strip. The bacon started complaining and I went to separate the pieces and at this point Tommy woke up and informed me that he was wet, as is his tendency on cold mornings. Then Ron said he couldn't find his cuff links and the cat started yowling to come in and I didn't have time to think about anything at all. Until I started in to get my flower Arrangement to bring to the John D. Ransom auditorium, where the show was going to be. Then Tommy said, "I fixed it for you." And so he had. It looked Moebius, only more so. Barbara was waiting for me just inside the door, her arms wrapped around herself, doing a little twostep to warm up. The auditorium was like a vault and the heating system was just getting started, with random, thunderous shrieks. "Why, Sally Jo!" Barbara cried, stopping in mid-two-step. "It's interesting." over to the niche marked eastit down carefully, though Barbara says an Arrangement should always be so tight you can turn it upside down and shake it. Interesting! I had a moment of wild triumph and then I was a little ashamed of myself. Barbara was generous enough to like it. "However," Barbara said, pressing her lips together and making me feel normal again, "where are we going to put the Pink Perfections?" Barbara opened the shallow box with four camellias in it. They were, of course, perfect and spotless and exactly alike. I can understand how Barbara manages to discipline her house and her dog and her husband, but I have never figured out how anyone can discipline flowers. "The camellias? Oh, yes, the camellias..." There was a baffled bellow from Ronald. He was trying to get Tommy's snowsuit off. I ran over before the zipper or Tommy could get jammed. The instant I had the snowsuit off, there was a wail from Tommy. "She ruined my Flower Arrangement!" My heart sank. "No, no, dear," I said, hurrying after him to where Barbara was, but he was right. There were bits of weed and fluff piled up on the floor and a gleam of joy in Barbara's eyes, and there was nothing left of the fascinating shape Tommy and I had made. "See?" I went on. "It's beautiful. Ifs a perfect Hogarth Curve." It was. It didn't droop at all. And Barbara had made the Arrangement. "There was something funny in there," Barbara said. "I thought it must be Tommy's, so I saved it." "It's my inside-out balloon," Tommy said, his chin quivering, "and she turned it back right-side in!" It was Tommy's multi-colored balloon, and it really didn't look much like a balloon any more, though it was still blown up. "How did your balloon get in there?" "I put it in," Tommy said, "to make the Arrangement more rounder. It's the roundest thing I ever made." Tears were gathering in his eyes. "Now, dear, I don't know why I didn't see it." "I put it in after you made it. Then I blew it up and tied it and poked in the end. It was the roundest thing in the whole world!" "But it's still tied! See? So nobody could have turned it rightside out. It looks the same on both sides." "No, it don't. The other side got magnetic paint on it That's why the balloon got ripples in it" Ron had been standing around looking impatient and he said, "Tommy, there's no such thing as magnetic paint" "There is, too," Tommy said. "I made it." "How did you make it?" "You mix up silver paint like you use for Christmas Arrangements and you add that silver glitter that you sprinkle and then you add all the old magnets you have around and you stir it good." "How many old magnets?" I asked. "Lots and lots and lots." "Then what?" "Then you turn the balloon inside out and blow it up anfl pinch the end with a clothes pin and paint it and then, when it's dry you let the air out." "And just why do you do all this?" Ron asked. Tommy didn't bother to answer it. "What about the magnets?" I asked. "You bury them in the back yard." "Oh. And do metal things stick on the magnetic paint?" "Well -- hair does, if you brush it first." "Metal things." "I think they do. A teeny bit. But now it's all on the wrong side and it's ruined." "I have to get to work," Ron said. "Here, catch." I tossed the balloon to Tommy. It stayed up in the middle of the air. "See?" Tommy said. "It's no good no more." We all stood staring, in a state of shock. "It's a funny shape," Ron said finally. "Those puckers sort of go in and if you follow that striated band... if you follow..." I was trying to follow it with my eyes, too. "... you get vertigo," Ron finished, looking off in another direction. "Yes, you do," I said. "Well, we can't just leave it here. Tommy, would you like to take it to show Miss Potter?" "Miss Potter, hell!" Ron exclaimed. "There's something extraordinary about this. I'm going to take it down to work with me and let the boys at the lab have a look at it. I've never seen anything that just stayed in mid-air like that. You notice it doesn't seem to float, as it would if it contained a gas, and..." But I was busy apologizing to Barbara for Tommy's manners and assuring her the Hogarth Curve was beautiful. I pinned the left-over camellia in my hair, because I felt I deserved something, and Ron said he'd drop Tommy and me off at kindergarten. "Isn't it marvelous," I asked Ron as I wiped off the windshield, because Tommy kept huffing on it, "to have a son who's an important scientist before the age of six?" "Now don't be getting delusions of grandeur about him," Ron said. "Whatever you and he made was purely accidental." "That goes to show what you know about the scientific method. I was making a Moebius Arrangement and Tommy was making the roundest thing in the whole world, and when you're working on something and something else happens, something scientifically important, it's called -- I can't remember what it's called, but it's a perfectly good word beginning with R. Or maybe L." "Serendipity. But you and Tommy... Never mind." called to tell me to go see a man named Craddock over at the lab, and I'd have to go by myself because Ron was busy, and I said, "All right," but it wasn't all right. The thought of going to that strange place to talk to important men was terrifying. I opened my closet and looked unhappily through my inappropriate house dresses and equally inappropriate party dresses. I finally decided on my black skirt, dark gray sweater and white cotton blouse, which I hoped would give the impression of a businesslike outfit. On the way down on the streetcar, I found a woman staring at me and I realized I had been practicing my facial expression. It was the one where I hang a cigarette out of the side of my mouth, narrow my eyes to a slit, and say, "I'm Warner. You Craddock?" What actually happened was that an office boy said, "What are you so nervous about, lady?" and brought me through a maze of forbidding-looking chambers and deposited me on a bench facing a back that was, presumably, Craddock's. I sat there trying to decide whether to address him or just wait, when he turned, looked at me, and jumped two feet. "I didn't know anyone was there," he explained, and since he was the one who had acted a little silly, I felt much better about him immediately. "I'm sorry," I said. "I was just sitting here trying to decide..." That wouldn't do. "My name's Warner," I said, omitting the facial expression. "Dr. Warner?" "Sally Jo Warner." "And you discovered this new -- force field?" "If you mean the right-side-inside-out balloon," I answered, "yes. With my son. Thomas." I decided that if he was going to be a scientist, we should stop calling him Tommy.  thin, pale, freckled-all-over people with eyes the color of the rims of his horri-rimmed glasses and he wore the same general expression of stubborn intentness that Tommy has. And I could sense in his expression the same scorn for me that Tommy so frequently has. "I'd like to discuss this with your son," he said. Of course. I couldn't be expected to say anything sensible. "Thomas has school in the mornings," I said. "Ah? Urn. Which school?" "Miss Nicholls." "Miss-" "It's a small private school. Kindergarten through third grade." "A third-grade child did this!" "No. Kindergarten. And I was not without influence in this discovery. I went to Grey Rock Junior College." "Um. Sciences?" "Yes." "I mean what sciences?" "We learned all the sciences in one course. Chemistry, biology, physics and -- well, I'd have to look in the book to remember the others." "Never mind," Craddock said, a shudder going through his slight, clattery frame. "Just tell me how you did this." He nodded at the balloon, which was encased in a glass box with a tube sort of thing leading into it. "Well, first you take an aspidistra leaf..." I began, and went on from there. Craddock wrote it all down, though he kept saying, "I just don't see how the balloon fits into all this," and finally I said, "Now we get to the balloon. And the magnetic paint." "Where did you get the magnetic paint?" "My colleague made it." Craddock was awfully picayunish about details. "How much silver paint? How much is 'the rest of a pack of glitter'?" Then he was disturbed because lots and lots and lots of magnets is eight. When I got to the part where Barbara made a Hogarth Curve out of my Moebius Strip, I asked him for a cigarette because I was still upset over it. "I know how you feel," Craddock said, being agreeable for the first time. "I don't think it'sright to make a Hogarth Curve out of a Moebius Strip, either. I wouldn't even think it was possible." "Well, that's all," I said, and Craddock grabbed my cigarette before I dropped it into what looked like an empty dish. "I have to rush off and pick up my colleague at kindergarten." O N the way to Miss Nicholls, my mind was afire with ambition. Tommy would appear on TV. Everyone would forget about the time Tommy smeared Miss Potter's chair with mucilage right before she sat down. He'd be offered articles for scientific journals and I'd write them up. And if anyone ever made remarks about my thinking ability again, I'd just say, "My method produces results." About two o'clock that afternoon, Craddock called and bawled, "The force field is leaking! Another hour and it'll all be gone!" "Stop sounding as though it's my fault," I said. "Sorry. I'm just anxious." "Why don't you catch the drippings in a pot or something?" "We tried to. But you should see the cloud chamber." I said, "I'm sure the cloud chamber is very interesting," because it was none of his business if I didn't know what a cloud chamber was. "The lines just wiggle and disappear into another dimension. I don't know how else to describe it" "What's making it leak?" "There's something unusual in the nuclei of the atoms. They're decaying." "Tommy blew up the balloon," I said, and wondered if he had cavities, though of course it was a different kind of decay. Still the thought made me a little nervous. "We're getting photographs of everything," Craddock went on, "but what's worrying us is that we haven't been able to duplicate the -- uh -- experiment." "I'll bet you didn't soak the aspidistra in glycerin. You couldn't have. There hasn't been time." "Glycerin wouldn't have anything to do with it. For that matter, neither would the aspidistra." "Plants," I informed him, "even dried ones, have all sorts of influence. If you put a bouquet of roses in a room, the whole room and all the furniture is a different shape." "That's your subjective reaction. It's because you like roses." "There! That proves my point! Why does the lamb love Mary so?" "Mrs. Warner . '... all right, why does the lamb love Mary so?" "They learn things like this at Miss Nicholls," I pointed out. "The answer is, 'Mary loves the lamb, you know.' People like roses because roses like people. Which means roses have something you don't know about." "All right, there are things I don't know. The first thing I don't know is how to carry on an intelligible conversation with you. But let's skip everything except what I called you for. Will you and your colleague please make another of those balloon affairs?" "I doubt if it can be done." "Why? If there are any materials you need, I can certainly -- " "It isn't that. It's -- well, whatever we do, it's going to be a little bit different. And I don't know if Tommy can find where he turied the magnets. But I'll try." But before I went shouting around for Tommy, I called Barbara, because something had occurred to me while I was talking to Craddock and it was only decent to tell Barbara. "What time," I asked, "do the judges come around tonight?" "About seven-thirty," Barbara said. "I'm sorry, but you ought to know. We're not going to win." "What?" "Your Hogarth Curve," I said, thinking of the leaking balloon, "is going to droop at three o'clock," and left the explanation for later. I found Tommy in the back yard, deeply involved with sticks and bits of string and old nails. I knew immediately and sadly what he was doing. It was too bad Tommy wasn't going to be a famous scientist before the age of six, but that was mostly just a joke. And it was too bad the Eastbank Garden Group wasn't going to win a prize in the Federated Gardens Show, but it was no longer my Arrangement, anyway, and Barbara's always winning other prizes for us. And it was too bad Craddock wasn't going to have his force field, but he hadn't been very nice about the whole thing. No, the real tragedy was that Tommy was going to be bitterly unhappy about something I had absolutely no control over. to explain to him why Tommy would never in the world get interested in making another Moebius Strip thing. And there's no way to make a child create . something,  any more than you can make him eat. "You see," I told Craddock, who was sputtering helplessly on the other end of the line, "he's already made the roundest thing in the whole world. It's not really hard to make the roundest thing in the whole world. I mean, things tend to be round, and all you have to do is follow a tendency. But now he's working on something else and he'll keep at it and won't think about anything else and it's going to be tragic when he finds out it just can't be done." "And what is he trying to do?" Craddock managed to say. "He's trying to make the squarest thing in the whole world." Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! If you are excited about tomorrow and get a thrill out of the idea of a man in space... get a Willy Ley Space Model in a fascinating Monogram hobby kit. Easy, Fascinating Assembly These exciting new models bring space travel closer and add reality to what you read. Designed by Willy Ley, author of "Conquest of Space" and other thrillers. producer of fine hobby kits. Assembly is easy -- fascinating. No tools required. Models are beautiful show and conversation pieces, with separating stages and many operational features. 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Booklet by Willy Ley. # Manned rocket for controlled orbital flight around the earth. # separating stages, landing gear, removable fuel tanks, launching pad, # figures. Molded in four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. # Galaxy Magazine, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. I Send at once, postpaid, Willy Ley Space Models as checked below. Remittance for   enclosed.  Space Taxi. #  TV Orbiter #  Passenger Rocket #  Orbital Rocket # Name ! Address I  l i City Zone State Sales Talk To live different and exciting lives, all I had to do was sign here -- and give up my own life! L ooking out the window, I saw them crossing the court toward the building -- two of them. One, the taller with yellow hair, was carrying a flat, expensive briefcase, and the other, of course, was carrying the large square box that contained the Sim. The buzzer sounded, announcing them at the door, and I opened it with mixed feelings. I wasn't sure myself how I would act and -- well, you hear so many stories about EL, and this was really my first contact with them. They were standing out in front, looking just like a couple of doorto-door salesmen. And that's just what they were, even if they were called Electro Medical Consultants. Just a fancy name for salesmen. They were very neat in appearance, just as good salesmen should be. Their hats looked new and so did their shoes. "Ah, Mr. Gaines," said the yellow-haired one, sticking out his neatly manicured but definitely masculine hand, "I'm very happy to meet you, sir." His grin could only be described as sincerely boyish. "Come in," I said, feeling like smiling back, so effectively pleasant were their grins. "Come in and sit down, won't you?" So they came in, doffing their hats, and sat down in two chairs that I ordinarily didn't use. They seemed to know instinctively which was my favorite chair. Oh, they were smooth! "Now, Mr. Gaines," said the light-haired man, "perhaps I should start pff with a little introduction all around and a short explanation of what Electronic Living can mean to you." No one had mentioned EL up to that point, yet they knew without a doubt that I had correctly identified them. Talk about confidence -- it was like a physical force in the room. "I'm Jake Long and this is Arnie Blik," said the light-haired one, rising and gripping my hand with a warm, dry, just right handshake. "Pleased to meet you," said Blik, gripping my hand in turn with an identical warm, dry, just right handshake. "I'm going to ask you for a bit of your time," said Long, "and I certainly hope you can grant us a few minutes without too much inconvenience." about having plenty of time. That was a laugh, and he and I both knew it. I had so little to do, I almost welcomed them just for sheer entertainment value. "Well, that's fine," said Long, "but rest assured we aren't going to try to waste any of your time. We intend to make it short and sweet, as they say." He did such a good job of keeping up the fiction of me being a busy man that I almost believed it myself. " Y ou probably know more about Electronic Living than I do," he said, and I felt for an instant that I did, "but we'll go over it anyway just so you understand me a little better. You'll remember back in #-# there was a lot of work done -- or I should say a beginning made -- in developing an electronic eye for people who had lost their eyesight. This was a start of Electronic Living in its crudest form. These early pioneers, using what little knowledge was available of the brain then, were actually able to insert a probe in the brain and enable the blind person to 'see' light. At first it was just the difference between light and dark, but after a while they did develop a kind of vision -- and then finally, after much work, the system grew into actual electronic vision. "This was, as I said, the start of Electronic Living because it advanced the basic premise that the brain can utilize outside electrical impulses for its own purposes. And of course it wasn't long before some experimenters had rigged up a human television receiver. What they did was set up a series of brain probes which were directly connected to a small television receiving apparatus, and the subject could then 'see' the broadcast image without the use of his eyes. "Since this rough beginning, we at El have done a lot of work, and we are now able to reproduce every sort of physical sensation known to man through electronic brain connections. "And recently, as a further refinement, we have been able to capture internal brain voltages and use them to reproduce thoughtlike sensations. Unfortunately, these are still in the realm of strong emotions and not true thoughts, but they are extremely effective. "Now, it is this combination of physical sensation voltages and internal brain voltages, when fed into your brain from a simple tape like this, that produces what we call Electronic Living. I " With that he pulled a piece of tape out of his pocket as if producing an elephant from a thimble. up to this point. He had hung on every word his partner uttered as though it were all new to him. Now he took up the song. "May I ask if you've ever experienced Electric Living?" he asked. "No," I said. I really had once or twice, but I figured it was none of his business. "Ah. Well, if you have no objection, I'd like to use this Simulator here for a few minutes and give you a bare idea of what's going on in Electronic Living today." "Sure," I said. "Go right ahead." Blik opened up the Sim and fished out a hat that was shaped much like a medieval knight's helmet, except that it had a couple of big fat wires connected to it at the back. "Just a moment while I tune it in," Blik said, lowering the helmet part way over his head. He closed his eyes and began fiddling with a series of small knots and buttons which were mounted inside the case. Finally he took it off his head and approached me, carrying this ridiculous helmet like it was a crown on a velvet pillow. "You will be experiencing a basketball player," he said, and plopped it down over my head. When the helmet came down, there was a momentary blank per-, iod, and then suddenly I was a basketball player who was playing a fast professional game. I was good, or should say he was? He felt exultation because his team was ahead and he'd put them there with a difficult shot. I could feel the pounding of his heart and the strain of his chest as he gulped in huge quantities of air. His eyes ranged around the court, following his teammates and opponents. It was something, all right, but not everything, because on top of the sensations and emotions of the basketball player, I was getting another series of feelings and emotion which were my own. Superimposed on the other players on the court was the image of my own living room with the two men watching rpe. Over the smell of sweat of the basketball players came the odor of my apartment. Above the sensation of running, jumping and colliding with other players was the sensation of sitting in my favorite chair with a weight on my head. In short, I was two people at cne time. Even the emotions of the basketball player -- joy at making a basket, a flare of rage at a rough opponent, and the surge of hope that a teammate would come through -- were clouded over with my own emotions of not completely accepting as right the whole concept of EL, coupled with the feeling that I didn't want to show any reaction in front of the EL men. After a short time, Blik removed the Sim, and the basketball player's Life Experience faded away. The two EL men looked at me expectantly. "Hmmm," I said, forcing myself to appear neutral. They did not seem to be disappointed by my reaction or lack of it. it?" said Blik, putting the Sim down on the floor. "Of course you realize that you don't get the full effect because you actually have two primary sets of electric images going into the brain. We never have been able to overcome the subject's own real physical and mental sensation with a device that works outside the skull." "But I'm sure Mr. Gaines gets the idea," said Long. "I'm sure I do," I said. The damn thing was plenty intriguing, but somehow, despite all its good points, I wasn't really sold on it. "Perhaps you'd be interested in the kind of thing we have programmed for our EL subscribers," said Long with a kindly smile. "If you are someone who likes active sports, we can give you an evening of that kind of thing. We don't program sports in the daytime or early evening because it interferes with the regular sports consumers, but it's nice to have later on in the evening if you like it." I nodded in what I hoped was a cold manner. "Perhaps you'd like the milieu built up around a hard-working farmer or laborer for a daytime program. A certain amount of physical labor which is coupled with a strong emotion of accomplishment and pride. An excellent milieu and one of our most popular currently." "Very interesting," I said noncommitally, intrigued in spite of myself. Then it was Blik's turn. "If you are interested in the social type of thing, we have several new milieus that fit right in with this sort of thing. I can recall one of a formal dinner party which has strong emotional connotations of well-being and a sense of -- grandeur -- yes, grandeur in the old meaning of the word. And in this same milieu it is possible to get the bon-vivant type of thing. You know, the raconteur who is a real spellbinder. That has a strong emotion of ego-fulfillment." "Very interesting," I said again, "but it doesn't quite fill the bill as far as I'm -- " "Arnie, we've been overlooking the obvious," said Long. "Mr. Gaines is looking more for the intellectual type of Life Experience. Now, I recall one of a sculptor which has a fine feel to it. Extremely intellectual and yet artistically creative, if you know what I mean. And then there's an exwith a symphony conductor in which there is an absolute physical thrill that is audio-inspired. Just the thing for anyone who is an audiophile, I'd say." I had to admit that it was beginning to sound more appealing all the time and I found myself wondering just which Life Experience one would pick first if he were to go EL. "Of course," said Blik, with a manly grin, "we have the thing we call our 'playboy milieu' which is strictly a sensual sort of a thing. It often appeals rather strongly to new subscribers, although I have to warn you that it soon becomes an Experience which palls on you." one, because after all I have normal male curiosity and all that, and naturally it's always these "playboy milieus" that you hear the most about among people who are non-EL subscribers. Yes, for a minute or two there, I was teetering on the brink, but my better sense did ultimately win out and I could feel the emotion of resistance welling up inside me. "Well, actually, gentlemen, it isn't a case of not finding the right milieu, because I'm sure you have anything that I could ever want. Ifs more on philosophical grounds that I find that I hesitate to go along with Electronic Living," I said boldly. Just saying it gave me a tremendous lift. "Ah," said Long, looking at the ceiling and making a tent of his fingers in front of his chest. "I always enjoy talking with a man who has a philosophical bent. In fact," he said, unfolding the tent and leaning close to me and lowering his voice a little, "it's the one big pleasure I get out of this job." "I'm afraid that I have to agree with you there, Jack," said Blik, digging his toe into the rug in a distinctly boyish manner.  V,r H Y don't you sort of fill us " in on your thinking, Mr. Gaines?" urged Long. "Well," I said, feeling warm under the collar and allowing my hand to tremble slightly with emotion as I got into what I now realized was the meat of my resistance to EL. "Well, let's take it from the word go. If I sign up with you now, I'll go down to the Electronic Living Center tomorrow or the next day and they'll take me into an operating room and put some tiny probes into my brain, and aside from a momentary twinge or two, I won't feel a thing. And then when it's over I'll walk out of the room looking just the way I did before, except that I'll have a neat little connection mounted high on the left side of my head where it can De tastefully covered with hair when not in use. "And I'll probably come back to this apartment to find the Electronic Living Machine installed in that corner, tastefully decorated to look like an old-fashioned antique bookcase, or a modern bar, or whatever I want it to look like. But whatever it looks like, there will be a comfortable chair unobsooner or later I'll sit down in that chair and read over the list of Life Experiences and select one. "Then I'll sink back in the chair and the little connection on my head will fit neatly into another little connection on the chair, because my chair will fit only me, and it will fit me perfectly. "And then, while I drift off to EL-land, the chair will unfold arcund me so that all sight and sound and almost all feeling will disappear and I'll be like a chrysalis in a cocoon. "So for two or three or eight hours I'll stay inside the cocoon, living another person's life. And while I'm in there, everyone will be sighing a sigh of relief that here is another potential producer who has finally given up the ghost and turned consumer. "Then when the tape is through, the cocoon will open and I'll wake up tired or refreshed or satiated or somehow changed, and then I'll get put to the food center and dial a meal or call someone up, or go out and walk around or something." but Long broke in on me. "Tell me a little more," he said, "about that one idea, will you? You know, the idea about how you will give up being a producer and will be all consumer?" "I was just coming to that," I said hotly. "Yes, they'll probably enroll my name on the EL subscribers roll with a big cheer, and all my non-EL friends will hear about it and they'll raise their eyebrows, or maybe they'll sign up too. "But the point is this. Is it right for me, a big, strong, healthy human being with powers of perception and reasoning and a capability for work and creativeness -- is it right for me to substitute this dream world of EL for actual real thinking, or doing, or creating? Do any of us have the right to subvert our normal impulses for creation and for living in this way?" "A good question," said Long with a sigh. "I'm afraid he's put it in pretty unanswerable terms, all right. Except for one minor point, I couldn't help but agree with everything he said, in spite of the fact that I -- well, I'm sold on EL, naturally." We sat for a while just sort of gazing around at nothing. Finally Blik spoke up. "What was that one point that you disagreed on Jack?" he asked his partner. "I've been running Mr. Gaines' statement over in my mind and I can't seem to find the flaw ycu mentioned." ' Oh, it was nothing." said Long impatiently. "Just a minor point." "No, I mean it," said Blik. "I'd really like to know." "Not worth talking about. Let's pack up and not take any more of Mr. Gaines' time." "Come on, Jack, tell me what it was," said Blik, in a rather positive way, I thought. "Really, Arnie," said Long, firing up a little, "take it easy, will you? We don't want to have to argue about some little point that doesn't mean anything. Just forget it." His attitude changed quickly from irritation to downright nastiness. Apparently, as head of the sales team, he wasn't going to take anything from a subordinate. It kind of irritated me in turn, because he gave me the impression that he felt as if he was too good to talk with us about it. "All right, all right," said Blik, "the hell with it. So it was a minor point." "Why not tell him?" I asked Long, cutting in quickly as Blik made a move to pack up the Sim. supercilious look that put me in the same category as assistants who had the temerity to question the boss. Then in an instant the mask returned and he was just as polite and smooth as ever -- but I'd' seen the crack in the slickness before he changed. It really got me where I live. That's one thing I can't stand -- an assault on the ego by a slick bum like that, who thinks he's so good; "Oh, I don't see how it can be that small a point," I said. "Especially if you thought of it." I said the last part as insultingly as I knew how, and I saw the color rise in his face. "Yes, speak up," said Blik, siding with me. "He's got a right to know." "All right," said Long with some asperity that even the professional mask couldn't hide, "but I warn you that it's strictly a minor point." "So it's a minor," said Blik." Tell us." "The point is," said Long, after a short pause to collect his thoughts, "that EL fills a need for some people. You see, with the big upsurge in automation years ago, it got harder and harder for a production-oriented economy to survive. Jobs got fewer and easier. People were thrown out of work. During the early years of automation, there was a lot of population displacement because of a lack of jobs, and this made for a lot of economic juggling which really didn't help matters. "It wasn't until some ten years ago that people finally came to the conclusion that production was outstripping the need for labor and that, in fact, production was beginning to become a burden on the economy. And so they turned things around a bit. Instead of giving rewards and subsidies to the production end of the economy, they began giving it to the consuming end. That was really the only way out of the hole. "But it was soon found that people are not merely organisms geared to consume. At first it was grand and glorious, but after a bit the urge to create, to work, to think began to assert itself strongly, and that's where EL came along. EL was developed to give unsatisfied people satisfactions that they couldn't get anywhere else. They couldn't be allowed to produce because that was what was wrecking things. So they had to be provided with a synthetic 'production-fulfillment.' "Today these producer-minded people can get any sort of satisfaction they need from EL, and it keeps them from wandering around trying to produce something that would just be a hindrance. After all, what we need is consumership, not production. "But that's a relatively minor point, as I said earlier," Long concluded looking at me with a superior air. "It's such a minor point, it won't even bear discussion." slick facade, implied that he wouldn't deign to discuss it with two peasants like Blik and me under any circumstances. "Just a minute " I said. "It's not a minor point at all. It seems to me that you've hit the core of the problem." "A minor point," insisted Long, his eyes blazing, although his face retained the mask of the smiling salesman. "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear," I said. "Have you ever stopped to think that if you take EL into the larger picture, it does serve a purpose, and perhaps we are all here for a different reason than I had originally discussed? Maybe the thing to be is a superconsumer -- maybe definitive consumership is the most vital thing in our life, not the production of things." "Well, that's an idea, sure enough," said Blik suddenly. He had been silent during the flareup between Long and me. "But I can't help but think," he continued, "that your original argument was a little tighter. The old virtues do have a place, don't they?" You see how slick, how welltrained, how cunning they were? When Blik opened his mouth, the bubble burst, and I knew that they had neatly switched me around to where I was arguing against myself. Up until the instant Blik started talking, I was actually selling myself on EL, and the truth was that I had almost completed the job by that time. If he had remained silent, I probably would have signed the contract -- I think I would have fought to sign it I felt an emotion of strength and power then. A top EL team had given me the works and I had seen through them. They still didn't know they had lost, but they would -- just as soon as I opened my mouth to speak. The emotion of victory is sweeter than almost anything else, and all the sweeter for having skirted defeat. "You know, Arnie," I said, "I agree with you. The old virtues are best. I think EL is a living hell." It was a sight to see, believe me. Their slick, slick faces folded like paper houses in a hurricane. Blik's hands were shaking as he bent over and started packing up the Sim without another word. You have to be good to know that fast that you have lost irrevocably. They got up then and scooped their hats up from the floor and put them on. The gracious, gentlemanly conduct was a thing of the past. "Tell me," said Long, his hand on the door, the edge of the EL contract peeking untidily out of his expensive briefcase, "where did we make our mistake?" I laughed a good loud whoop. It felt good. "It was when Arnie here switched sides." "Stupid fool," said Long, looking as though he wanted to slam the square box containing the Sim over Blik's head. "Sorry, old man," Blik said, coloring a deep red. "I'll try to make it up next time." "Not with me, you won't," said Long. "Technician!" They opened the door and went out. I jigged with glee as I looked out the window and watched them cross the court. Long was walking along in a high dudgeon, his briefcase swinging angrily with every step. Blik was trotting along to one side and behind him, his shoulders slumped, defeat written all over his form and walk. swung open and Rommy walked in with his hand outstretched. "Congratulations!" he said, beaming widely. "It was perfect! My God, it's a delight for a director to work with a real group of competent actors. All three of you were perfect!" "Thanks," I said. "I hope I was as good as you think when we play the tape back." I felt along the base of my skull where the transmitter hung encased in Natur-flesh and covered with fake hair. I could hardly believe it was there, it felt so natural. Rommy looked out the window. Long and Blik were walking back through the gate, talking and waving their arms the way people do when they're excited about doing a good job. "There's a pair of sweethearts," said Rommy. "Real actors, those boys. I checked out the transmission right up to the last minute and they really gave out -- you couldn't find a quiver of disbelief or strain. They felt it." "So did I," I said, sitting down and putting my feet up on a low table on the set. "Tell me, Rommy, what in hell is EL going to use these tapes for, anyway? It seems to me it would be sort of dangerous to put all this on tape." "We couldn't tell you before because it might have spoiled your reactions, but we have a lot of EL subscribers who are down deep opposed to EL, and this tape will be sort of a catharsis for them. It'll give them a real jolt." "Oh, producer types who are struggling to become consumer types," I said. "They'll experience the role I just got through playing, and it will make them feel they didn't sign the contract, huh?" "There's more to it than that," said Rommy. "There are some people who just like to experience an extremely strong sales-resistant emotion, mostly because they're pushovers. We wouldn't make a tape like this just for the anti-EL jerks. It's too expensive." "Tell me," I said, "what are you using Long and Blik for? I thought I detected transmitters on them, too." "Just the opposite from what you were doing. Some people like to experience a setback or even a complete failure now and then. Sort of an opposite to the 'high' tapes. Lord knows we got hundreds of 'high' tapes, but not many low ones, so we're starting to build a library of them now. A lot of subscribers are getting tired of winning all the time and they'd like to experience a defeat or two once in a while just for the contrast." Long and Blik came in the door without knocking. Rommy was on his feet in an instant. "Boys," he shouted, "you were great! I checked the tapes and nobody could be lower than you guys walking out across that court. It was sensational. Probably the best thing that's ever been done here at EL Studios!" Nothing can possibly be more baffling than a crime in a sealed room... but what if the investigator happens to have an open mind? I the apartment, even though I already knew what I had to know. Gordon Andrews had been slain in his sleep by the quick thrust of some rapierlike instrument. There wall safe stood with its door open and its contents missing. Every door and window was closed, locked, burglar-bugged, and nonopenable from the inside; the front door had been forced by the police. Furthermore, it had been raining in wind-whipped torrents for hours, yet there was no trace of moisture on any of the floors. Of course no one had heard a sound, and naturally there were no fingerprints. Police Chief Weston spied me and snapped, "What do you make of it, Schnell?" I shrugged and said, "Completely sealed room." "Got any ideas?" he demanded. I had a lot of ideas, but I was not going to express myself without a lot of stark evidence. I do not yearn to have the prefix "ex-" installed in front of my title of Captain of Detectives. I'm much too young to be retired. So instead of trying to explain, I said, "The modus operand i is -- " Chief Weston snorted, "Schnell, there isn't a clue in the whole damned building, and yet you stand there and yap about modus operand!?" "That's the point, Chief. The cluelessness is itself the modus operand , r that points to -- " "You talk as if we had a whole file of unsolved, clueless, sealedroom homicides!" "Chief," I said, "a true 'perfect crime' would be one in which no clue existed, including the fact of the crime itself -- except those clues that were deliberately planned by the perpetrator for some purpose of his own."  you driving at, Schnell?" "I'm trying to convince you that we are faced with a very clever criminal mind," I said. "A man with a fine talent. One who plans his crimes so well that they aren't even recognized as criminal." "Nonsense. You can't conceal any crime forever." "Forever isn't necessary, Chief. Just long enough to cover up completely, to remove all connection. We don't know how many bank tellers have been running on reduced salary because they somehow paid out a hundred in cashing a ten-dollar check. We couldn't demand an audit of all the big financial accounts in town, to know the why and wherefore of the transfer of any sum of money larger than the limit of petty larceny." "But now you are talking about a sly, clever operator, Schnell. This is a plain case of homicide and burglary." Plain? Was he kidding himself? I smiled crookedly. "Chief, there is no doubt in my mind that our crook intended to clean out Gordon Andrews' safe without disturbing a soul. But the imminent awakening of Andrews presented a physical threat that had to be silenced immediately." "So that is the work of your sly thief?" "Chief, just remember that Gordon Andrews was an eccentric old sourpuss who hated to do business with bankers. Now let's suppose that Andrews had awakened in the morning to find his safe cleaned out. He screeches for the cops. We come a-roaring in with the fingerprint detail and the safe specialists and the break-in experts. We find," I said with a wave of my hand, "everything just as we found it here and now. So we look Gordon Andrews in the eye and tell him that no one could get in, no one had gotten in, and that we suspect him of cleaning out his own sdfe and yelling 'Copper' to make trouble for the Mayor and the Commissioner, who refused to appoint him a special detail of city employees for bodyguards last year." "Go on, Schnell," said Chief Weston with deadly patience. "The homicide was a spur-ofthe-moment necessity. Had it been planned, the crook would have plugged Andrews with the old man's personal Banker's Special, which he kept on the bedside table, and made it look like suicide." "Know a lot about Andrews, don't you, Schnell?" "What do you mean, Chief?' , "About the Banker's Special." "I have an excellent memory," I said. "Andrews had a license for the thing. The serial number is # and the gun and license were acquired on August seventh, #." r I 'HE Chief sarcastically grunted, "Has it been fired since?" "It was fired six times at the date of delivery by the police laboratory for the land-mark records," I said. "Let's ' not try being funny, Schnell. This is a serious business. Andrews was an eccentric old curmudgeon, but he was also a philanthropist, and the papers will be after our throats if we don't come up with this super-criminal." I "He's going to be damned tough, Chief." "Okay, this is your project. Nothing else matters until he's caught and convicted -- of homicide committed during the course of grand robbery, meaning automatic hot seat." I nodded slowly. "Just remember, Schnell -- the whole department's behind you," Chief Weston assured me. I continued to nod, but his assurance didn't reassure me in the least. With about ninety-eight per cent of the general public still not quite and space travel, I had a fat chance of convincing anybody that a telepath had kept guard over the slumbering mind of Gordon Andrews, II while a perceptive solved the combination to the wall safe, so that a kinematic could twirl the dial; that the imminent awakening of Gordon Andrews had indeed been an imminent physical threat to a delicate extra-sensory undertaking, and that therefore he had been silenced by the kinematic, with a weapon located by the perceptive, after warning from the telepath; after which the crime had continued, with the loot being floated by a levitator along a freeway explored by the perceptive and scouted by the telepath and cleared of barriers by the kinematic who opened and debugged them as he went along --  -- and that the real topper for this whopper was that this operation was not the integrated effort of a clever gang of extra-sensory specialists, but rather the singlehanded accomplishment of one highly talented Psi-man! A Psi-man ruthless enough to kill before he would permit his victim to watch the turning dial, the floating loot, the opening portal, simply because there stood a probapersons on Earth might suspect the phenomena as parapsychical activity, instead of the hallucinatory ravings of a rich old eccentric who hated the incumbent political party! How best to keep a secret? Let no one suspect that any secret exists! r I "HE rain was still coming down in wind-whipped torrents that slatted along the avenue in drenching sheets. Huddled in the scant cover of the apartment door was a girl of about eighteen. The raincoat she wore was no protection; the wind drove the rain up under it. Womanlike, she was struggling with the ruins of a fashionable little umbrella instead of abandoning it for the tangled mess that it was. She looked at me as I opened the door. She was without guile. She was wet and miserable and determined to take whatever help was proffered, and hope afterward that no unfair advantage would be taken of the situation. I showed her my I.D. card and she read: "Howard Schnell, Captain, Special Detail." Her face changed from cautious immobility to a sort of wet animation, and she added as if it were important under the circumstances to be completely open, "I'm Florence Wood." I took the ruined umbrella from her unresisting hand and stood it in the foyer for the janitor to dispose of, and pointed out across the rain-ponded sidewalk to the police car. It was almost high noon, but the rain was so heavy that the identity of the car was by no means conspicuous from the apartment door. Florence Wood nodded as she caught sight of it. I said, "Now, I'll make a run for it and open the door, and get in first so that I'll be on the driver's side. As soon as I'm out of your way, just dive in and don't worry about closing the door until you're out of this rain. Catch?" She nodded. "I'd play Sir Galahad and give you my foul-weather gear to wear," I said, "but you're already so wet that it wouldn't do more than keep the water in." She smiled at me understanding. Then she looked at me with curiosity because I was standing there waiting instead of making my dash immediately. I thought of how my Psi-man could have floated the loot out of an open window and kept the rain from soaking the floor at the same time. So, to make conversation, I said, "I'm waiting until my will power builds up enough to overcome the forces of gravity, barometric pressure, and the rest of whatever goes into the making of a howling downpour like this. Considering that nature is dissipating energy equal to a couple of hundred atom bombs per second, it takes a bit of time to collect the necessary amount of mental power." Florence Wood laughed. In mere instants she'd changed from weather-drenched misery to a cheerful sort of discomfort no worse than many a human has endured for hours at a football game. She said with amusement, "Captain Schnell, why don't you start the car and drive it over here? Seems to me it would take less power than stopping this storm." "The law says that it is considered unlawful to operate a motor vehicle from any position other than the driver's seat," I replied. " I'd been anticipating finally arrived, I took advantage of it to make my run across the sidewalk. Miss Wood followed: her timing was perfect. Everything happened in a continuous sequence without a stoppage at any point. The door opened and I went in, landing hard and bouncing deliberately on the seat springs to hunch myself over; Miss Wood landed and whirled in a flurry of wet skirt and clammy raincoat, hauling one rain-booted ankle out of the way as the door swung closed with a solid and satisfying thunk. I started the car and let the engine idle to warm it up and dry it off. Then I said, "Part of my duty to the citizen includes protection of his health and comfort as well as protection from unlawful behavior. So, where do you wish to be taken?" She regarded me out of clear gray eyes. "Don't you know?" she asked with a quirk at the corner of her mouth. "Do I look like a mind reader?" "Well, you did slow down the storm." I laughed. "Miss Wood, King Canute would have been a hero instead of a bum if he'd waited until high water before he told the tide to stop. Now, what gave you any reason to suppose that I am endowed with special talents?" "Well," she said, fumbling through her handbag for the comb, which naturally was at the bottom, "you did come along when I needed help, and you did identify yourself when I so much wanted to know -- " "And since I also remembered that storms as violent as this always have lulls, you put two and two together? Well, it doesn't require telepathy to conclude that you are soaked to the skin, that you need and want help, and that you'd prefer to know just whom you are driving off in a car with, Any otherideas about my talents?" "Well, I should think -- " "Address first, Miss Wood." She gave me an address in a residential district that was the maximum distance one could get from City Hall and still enjoy the privilege of paying city taxes. I started the car and headed in that direction. Then I said, "Now, Miss Wood, let's go on with your little fancy." "Fancy?" "You've been moonbeaming about a little courtroom drama where twelve good telepaths and true are reading the mental testimony of a witness who had located some vital bit of evidence by perception and brought it to light by kinematic power." "Well, it does seem that any truly gifted person would work for the good of humanity." "I doubt that being gifted with a sense of perception would automatically endow a man with a sense of honor." "But doesn't it seem just awful to think of anything as miraculous as telepathy being used for -- for " She was trying to avoid the word "immoral" because she was of an age and experience that felt sensitive about its use. Unfortunately the only substitute was the word "sin." I came to her rescue. "It's deplorable but true that nothing was ever developed for the benefit of mankind without a few sharpshooters quickly figuring out some way to make it pay them a dishonest buck." "But it would be frightfully hard to bamboozle a telepathic policeman, wouldn't it?" she asked hopefully. whose only mistake in the sealed room murder of Gordon Andrews had been in being so good A Give the gift you'd like to receive We admit it -- we're pushovers for the Xmas spirit. "Don't do it," our accountant pleads. "We can't afford to sell subscriptions at those prices!" But Our eye goes past his piteous figure to the distant corners of the land. "Readers straining budgets to introduce Galaxy to friends and relatives, and have enough scratch left over for their own subscriptions. We can't leave the job to them!" we thunder. "Galaxy must bear its share of the burden! And not only that -- by the Lord Harry, we'll even include handsome Gift Card Announcements with their names as donors!" Out slouches our accountant, muttering, "All right, but they'd better get their orders in before December #, #" -- so rush in your order today. Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Address City State Offer # Price Sign Card Name Address City State Offer # Price Sign Card Name Address City State Offer  Price Sign Card Name Address City State Offer # Price Sign Card Name Address City State... Offer # Price Sign Card  Name Address City State that he'd actually disclosed the existence of a criminal who employed Psi faculties. "Wouldn't that depend upon whether the policeman or the criminal was the more talented?" I parried. "But that supposes that the police force would have a corps of Psi policemen." "Wouldn't they?" "Honey-chile," I said, ."at the first thin hint that the Commissioner was even interested in the possibility of hiring someone who knew what the term 'parapsychic phenomena' really meant, there would be a universal howl against 'Thought Police' so loud that it would shatter the polar icecaps." "But why?" she asked, bewildered. "They'd start screaming about 'invasion of privacy,' and cite the Bill of Rights, and that would be that." "You mean that the law has laws against telepathy?" "No, it doesn't say anything about telepathy," I admitted, knowing what was to come next. "Well, then?" "Don't sound so superior, Miss Wood. At the first attempt, the law would discover that it had a hell of a lot to say about telepathy and perception, since they'd definitely affect the interpretation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments." "I know the Fifth," she said, "but how about the Fourth?" "Unreasonable and unwarranted search," I told her. "But isn't a man guilty when he's guilty?" "I wish it were as simple as that." "But why isn't it?" "Little Miss Wood, you are now asking me to solve an ethical question that's been unanswered for more than ten thousand years." I smiled wistfully. "I am not -- repeat not -- big enough to answer the following question: 'Shall a killer in the confessional, who has been given absolution by his God, subsequently be punished by his fellow man?'" "But what has that to do with it?" "Let's have you answer one : 'Could you truly bare your secret soul to God if you suspected that some prying human being was taking it all down on a tape recorder?' " "No, I suppose not." "Then our 'Thought Police' would be standing as a human barrier between any man and his God." "I suppose so -- but couldn't I tell?" "Tell?" "Tell whether someone was listening to my thoughts?" That was another stumper. Does the sign wear out any faster if it's read? Can the radio transmitter be measured to tell whether the broadcast has any audience? Does the tree that falls in the forest barren of animal life generate the same wave-motion as it would if all the leaves were replaced by active eardrums? There are lots of analogs, but are any of them valid? I said, "If I cry out, how can I know whether I am being heard?" And in my mind I made my own reply. I thought in deep concentration: "How do you read me, Psimart?" The response was zero-zero. And it meant -- nothing. My Psi-man could have been following my every thought from the moment that my ringing telephone summoned me to Gordon Andrews' apartment to the present instant, so far as I could tell. There was no feeling of intrusion, no feeling of presence. Ill "Going to stop the rain again, Captain Schnell?" The storm was still howling. In the near suburbs, the rain came in more gracefully draped sheets and the wind was not whirlpooled by the fluelike canyons between the buildings, but residential rainwater is just as wet per cubic centimeter as the metropolitan variety. "Maybe I should drive up over the lawn," I suggested. "Daddy would blow a fuse." "We might wait for it to let up." "I'd rather not," she said soberly. "It's one thing to be driven home in a strange car during a cloudburst, but it's something else to sit out here making it look as if I were paying off by making out." It came as a pleasant surprise that she did not consider me a superannuated gaffer, and it was her youth that allowed her to discuss parapsychic phemonena without the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the older know-it-alls. I considered Florence Wood and realized that she was at least old enough so that I wouldn't be jugged for cradle-robbing so long as I had a parental acceptance. And I did want someone to talk out the business of psionics without having someone wind me in a sheet and ship me to a shrinker. And so I said, "If it will smooth things a bit, I'll umbrella you to the door, and make official explanation to the stern and anxious parent." "That we'll enjoy," she giggled. "Daddy always says that he doesn't have to be a mind reader to advise against what my boy friends have in mind. It'll be fun to face him with a -- policeman." Darkly, I said, "Most folks don't look upon me as the fun-loving type. Policemen aren't always welcome, you know." "Oh, Daddy will enjoy it. He writes a bit. He'll never be another Ellery Queen, but he will enjoy talking to a real live captain of detectives." At this point a lot of favorable things took place at once, such as the arrival of another convenient letup in the storm, the mad rush and the ringing of the doorbell, the opening of the door and some gasped introductions as we stood in a little hallway dripping puddles of rainwater on a small rug. "Police Captain -- ?" "Howard Schnell." "But Florence isn't -- ?" I laughed at Mrs. Wood. "Not at all. This is just the rescue of a very wet maiden in distress. When we're not shooting bank robbers, we also help little old ladies -- and lovely young girls -- across streets. All in the day's work, you know." Mrs. Wood hauled Florence off, saying something about hot showers and dry clothing, while Mr. Wood regarded me with interest. tFE beat all the way around the bush, trying to ascertain without actually asking pointblank whether I could spend a few moments, and, if so, would I like a drink. One must not anticipate, so I waited until he'd made his meaning clear. Then I accepted his offer of some bourbon, refused his offer of a cigar and settled myself into the chair he waved at. I tasted the highball, smiled in approval, and opened the conversation by saying, "Your daughter tells me that you write, Mr. Wood." He smiled wistfully. "Well, I'm not at the stage where the mere announcement that I am working on a novel causes an immediate prepublication sale of seventy thousand copies. You see, I'm still trying to work out a good association gimmick." "A what?" "An association gimmick. The name Erie Stanley Gardner, for instance, always means a story about Perry Mason and the inevitable courtroom scene full of legal fireworks. Rex Stout has his Nero Wolf, the fabulous detective who lets his secretary do all the work." "And," I added, "John Dickson Carr writes about Gideon Fell, who is an expert at solving sealed-room mysteries." "Exactly!" he said. "I've a series of gimmicks all planned, but I really need a strong, out-of-the-ordinary character to go along with them. You see, I propose to write a series of stories about 'perfect crimes.' " "I'm not smart," I said. "I've always assumed that the so-called 'perfect crime' would be one in which the criminal walks off scotfree with the loot under one arm and the girl on the other." He said, "From your point of view, a true 'perfect crime' would be one in which no clue existed, including the fact of the crime itself -- except those clues that were deliberately planned by the perpetrator for some purpose of his own. That is your own angle, isn't it?" I nodded. Indeed it was, and it had been expressed in precisely the same words that I had used in speaking to Chief Weston. "However," he went on blandly, "you'll agree that a clue is usually the result of a mistake, or failure to plan completely, or the result of some accidental circumstance." "Right." "But in a 'perfect crime' there would be no error, no mistake." "Yes, but aren't you backing yourself into a hole that you've lined with fish hooks yourself?" "Not at all," he replied. "Clues must.be cleverly contrived, created, and established in such a way that the episode is ultimately known to be crime and not labeled misadventure, suicide, or the like. Otherwise," he said with a genial smile, "we're writing about a 'perfectly justifiable homicide' instead of a 'perfect crime.' " I nodded again. "And, of course," he finished, "these clues must also provide precisely the correct amount of information so that the motive of the criminal is not only fulfilled, but exposed -- if not to one of the characters in the book, at least to the reader." Tlf R. Wood relaxed and sipped his own drink. From somewhere aloft, a number of individually insignificant traces added up to fairly reliable evidence that Florence and Mrs. Wood were about to return. I gathered that the cross-questioning had allayed any parental suspicion. I said, "One thing you haven't mentioned," and paused for effect. "To the Hindu, 'perfection' means the inclusion of an almost imperceptible flaw so that its maker cannot be accused of presuming to be as good as God. Is your 'perfect crime' to be perfect in the eyes of the criminal, or in the eyes of the police?" He said, "Ah, Captain Schnell, that is indeed one of my bothersome problems." Mrs. Wood came into the room, followed by Florence. The girl had lost the soaked-gamin look. She was transformed by modern alchemy into a poised young woman who forced me to revise my estimated eighteen several years upward. She nodded affably at her father, smiled at me and then came over because she noticed that my highball glass was empty. I thanked her, and she smiled wide and bright as she asked, "Has Daddy been giving you the details of his impossible bandit?" "Well, in a way." Mr. Wood said, "I'm sort of like the standard television father -- incapable of adding two and two without the close supervision of the female members of my family." "I -- that is, we -- keep telling Daddy he should hire Superman for a hero." "You've changed," chuckled Mr. Wood. "Changed?" " Y esterday you advocated that I hire a detective with telepathy and a seftse of perception." "We discussed it on the way home," said Florence. "Superman?" I asked. "No, this extra-sensory business," said Florence Mr. Wood inquired, "Are you interested in parapsychology, Captain Schnell?" "I've been interested in the subject for a good many years," I answered. "Would the public accept it, I wonder," he mused. Mrs. Wood said, "A lot of people read psychic books." Mr. Wood said plaintively, "I don't want to write psychic books. I want to write whodunits. But it would solve my problem, wouldn't it? My series would consist of crimes that would be perfect, except for the introduction of a Master of Psionics who tells the story in the first person singular, and who solves the crime by parapsychic power." "It might read better if you made your extra-sensory character the criminal," I suggested. He shook his head. "Wouldn't do at all. A criminal with extra-sensory talent would always win out over the police. There have been only a very few successful stories written in which the criminal got away." "Maybe he wouldn't," I said. "But how could he possibly fail?" "He might get sloppy." "Sloppy! Mind reading every anticipated move?" "Or bored." "Bored!" "One often leads to the other," I told him with a smile. "Which is just my policeman's way of thinking. From the policeman's point of view, you're overlooking one rather important angle." "Indeed? Well, you must tell me all about it." "  that you should not view this as a single incident in the life of an extra-sensory who has turned his talent to crime, but rather take the overall view. For instance, we can write the life history of our Psi-man in broad terms. As a schoolboy, he was considered extraordinarily lucky at games of chance and skilled in games of manual dexterity; he stood high in schoolwork and at the same time managed to do it without working very hard. By the time he enters high school, he realizes that his success is due to some sort of 'sensing' of when things will be right. This increases the efficiency of his talent and he surges forward and would have become top-of-class if in recitation made up for a lack of handed-in homework. "In other words, nothing stands as a real challenge to him. His talents surmount the obstacles that confront his fellow man. He could collect corporations or be a labor leader, President or bum. Anything he wants can be gotten without much fuss. Our Psi-man is primarily interested in a statistical income sufficient to support him to the dictates of his ambition. The trick is to achieve, say, twenty grand per annum, in such a way that the manipulation is never discovered. "At first our Psi-man plans meticulously. But soon this process seems unnecessary because the poor ignorant homo saps don't even know they're being conned. He has no hard surface against which to whet his nervous edge, and so he begins to play games. He leaves clues, at first to ascertain the true level of his fellow man's intelligence and ability. Next he leaves conflicting clues to see which way the poor dopes will jump. In a world that scoffs at parapsychic phenomena, he leaves clues to support the theory that only an extrasensory criminal could have done the dastardly deed. Will one of the ignorant apes recognize the truth? If he does, will he be in a high position, or will he be one of the diligent ones who fetch coffee for the guy in the upper office? If the work of a Psi-man is recognized, how will our bright policeman go about it, and what will he do with the evidence after it's been shown to him? "And so, Mr. Wood, our Psi-man criminal has become bored because there is no one in the world to challenge him, and he gets sloppy through his growing contempt for the antlike activities of his fellow creatures. At last he shows himself, deliberately taunting them to take action against him. And that," I concluded, with a nod at him, "might be the 'perfect crime' in which your extra-sensory criminal finally exposes himself." "But why," Mrs. Wood asked in perplexity, "would such a talented person turn to crime -- or do you think that all extra-sensory people-" I turned to smile at her. "Mrs. Wood, I was not speaking of extrasensory people as a statistical body. I was referring to one particular character." "I find him hard to believe in." "On the contrary, my dear," said Mr. Wood, "Captain Schnell has drawn an amazingly accurate thumbnail sketch of our Psi-man, and I daresay that he could go on tails." "Oh. yes, indeed," I said. "But I must leave it up to the professional liceman does when he recognizes the work as that of an extra-sensory. For instance, does he become bold enough to mention it to Chief Weston, or to Commissioner Stone? Or will he confine his discussion to the company of a rain-soaked young woman so circumstantially available and coinci"Captain Schnell," breathed Florence Wood, "what on Earth are you talking about?" "Your father," I said. Mr. Wood stepped into the breach. "Captain Schnell was dramatizing for your benefit, I'm sure. Because Captain Schnell knows very well how impossible it is to surprise a telepath into revealing himself." Florence Wood's expression changed to a mildly bothered smile. "It certainly sounded as if he were accusing you of something." "You mean -- like -- mind reading?" he asked with a big belly laugh that closed the subject. IV Y most of the rules of society,   both Mr. Wood and I were guilty of gross gentility. He greeted me overtly as the welcome guest and needled me with a show of patronizing tolerance as he implied that my basic interest was in Florence. To match him, I accepted his hospitality and made use of the proximity to spy on him and his family. There are ways and means of making a pretended deaf-mute reveal himself -- the human being does not live who will not leap halfway out of his skin at the shock of an unexpected revolver shot, no matter how well trained he is at feigning deafness. As for surprising a telepath, I knew it wouldn't work, but I had to try it anyway. I put both Mrs. Wood and Florence through a number of mental hurdles. To this, Mr. Wood took a quietly tolerant attitude. He understood and was prepared to accept as healthily normal a certain amount of lust and carnal conjecture in the minds of males who were interested in his daughter. He forgave me for mentally insulting his wife because he knew that my mental peregrinations were only aimed at determining whether his wife was telepathic. Finally he came out flatly and told me to stop wasting my effort, because neither Florence nor Mrs. Wood had a trace of extra-sensory power. Their lack of shocked or outraged response was not a case of the well-trained telepath divining my intention and planning a blank response. Furthermore, Mr. Wood asserted that neither of them knew of his extra-sensory faculty, that he fully intended to keep it that way, and that I should know damned well that such stunts wouldn't work in the first place. And so I continued to enjoy a dinner now and then, and occasionally the company of Florence. Ultimately the lack of progress brought Chief Weston's nervous system to the blowup point. He called me in and I went, knowing that trouble cannot always be avoided, and when it can't, it's just plain sense to kick out the props and have done with it. He plowed right in: "And what in hell have you been doing?" "Chief, I've been -- " "You put a make-team on some half-baked writer named Wood." "Edward Hazlett -- " "Because," he yelled, "the first person you saw when you stuck your nose outside of Gordon Andrews' apartment was Florence Wood!" "Well, Chief, you see -- " "You perhaps suspected that she'd just walked through the wall of that apartment? And naturally you pulled out your hip-pocket crime laboratory and checked that umbrella tip for bloodstains before you threw it aside." "Well, you see -- " "Schnell, would you have been so damned gallant if she'd been an ugly old hag in a ratty dress carrying a dead halibut wrapped in an old newspaper?" "But you see -- " "So you leap into gallant action, and after you've rescued the fair maiden from her watery grave, you suddenly find it desirable to use a department automobile to deliver the damsel home." "But-" "Schnell, I'll bet that Wood girl wasn't any wetter than you were. And that's how you put the long arm of coincidence to work?" TT was more than coincidence. Florence Wood had been in that soaking rain and whipping wind for more than an hour. Any housewife would have corroborated my statement that only a prolonged soaking can achieve a truly wet-through-the-seams condition. Oh, Daddy Wood was just the guy to think of a stunt like saturating the seams and fibers of his daughter's clothing by agitating the water supersonically at high amplitude, but, let's face it, that would have beaten hell out of her soft white skin. As for the umbrella, the wound could indeed have been made by a rapierlike thrust. But a comparison between the depth of the wound and the length of the tip showed that the bottom of the wound could not have been reached without forcing part of the umbrella itself into the victim's body. The face of the wound showed no such outsize penetration, hence the umbrella was not the sought-for weapon. At this point, Chief Weston's telephone interrupted him and he snatched it up, bellowed his name, and then listened. Finally he snarled that it was for me and fairly hurled the handset at me. I caught it at the end of its cord and said: "Captain Schnell, Special Detail -- " "Oh, I know it is you, Captain Schnell," said the suave voice of Edward Hazlett Wood. "I just wanted to tell you that your analysis of the umbrella's uselessness as your logic in the matter of my daughter's rain-soaked clothing was clever. I really don't regret the chewing out you are getting. You deserve it. I was hoping to find you bright enough to avoid it. Anyway, can we expect you for dinner this evening?" "Yes," I snapped, and hung up, thinking a few things that would have called for a terse reprimand about foul and abusive language if telepathy were administered by the Federal Communications Commission. "Wood?" snapped Chief Weston. "Yes." "Date?" he snarled. I groaned. Wood did have the nasty telepath's ability to maneuver me into a situation that I could not conveniently avoid. "When they start calling the office to pester you for dates -- " "I know what I'm doing!" "So do I!" he yelled. "You're doing nothing!" "Listen, Chief, I'll admit the long arm of coincidence, but you'll have to admit that when there's trouble, I'm usually the first one to smell it." "So how do you connect them up?" "Chief, I walk out of that apartment with your own words ringing in my ears. 'Looks like the classical setup for a "perfect crime,"' you said. And then I meet this girl who just happens to have a father who writes whodunits and is planning a series of books based upon the 'perfect crime.' " "Maybe," sneered Chief Weston, "the guy is a mind reader." "I've given even that some consideration." "So I hear tell." "Any objections?" I asked. of objections!" he howled. "This is a police department, not a soothsayers' convention! We're subject to enough criticism as it is. You needn't have added the act that makes us look like a bunch of damned fools." "But, Chief, I-" "So what do I hear tell?" He hauled the tray drawer of his desk open and pulled out one of the tabloids, opened to one of its hateeverything columnists. "Listen! 'In recent years the legality of the famous witchcraft trials of the past has been subject to debate, with the result that these past convictions have now been declared "miscarriages of justice." Posthumously, I must unhappily add. However, there has been little or no amendment to the laws against witchcraft, wizardry, charms, amulets and spells. " 'But brace yourselves, citizens. One of our younger and more brilliant captains of detectives has shown an interest recently in parapsychics and may be training to track down criminals by the application of extra-sensory detection. If this be true, the laws will have to be ruptured to permit him to secure evidence, since it is a tenet of the law that evidence must be secured through legal methods and processes. "'Fortune Tellers of the World, Arise! You have nothing to lose but your crystal balls!' " Chief Weston slapped the paper down. "What do you think of that?" I said, "He's just making noise. Telepathy has nothing in common with-" "I wish I could stop you from even thinking about telepathy!" "If you could," I said calmly, "you'd have to be telepathic to determine when I had violated your dictum -- and if you were telepathic, Chief, you'd have been on my side from the beginning." He merely glared at me. At this moment I should have been expecting the worst, and prepared to meet it. But please remember that there's always that mental block against prying, especially when the United States mail is concerned. But now Edward Hazlett Wood was about to show me how a real extra-sensory sharpshooter clobbers his enemies. carrying a package. I saw it, knew at once what it was, and groaned with despair. The only chance I saw of getting out of this was the forlorn hope that Weston would believe the package was a dig, probably mailed by the sniping columnist. It was cleverly contrived. The addressee's name had been blurred and half-obliterated so that it couldn't have been quietly dropped on my desk where I could have disposed of its damning contents quietly. It had, of course, come special delivery, urgent, immediate handling. If I were a believer in amulets, witches and spells, I'd have been of the opinion that an aura of urgency had been created about the box. Chief Weston's secretary handed it to him with a mumbled suggestion that it seemed to be important, and perhaps it should be opened in hopes that the contents would convey information as to the identity of the owner. I said nothing. crystal ball, a set of tarot cards with a thick book of explanations, and a second deck of cards the like of which most people have heard but few have actually seen. These were the square, circle, wiggly line cards used in parapsychic research. There was the damning evidence of a packing slip with my name clearly printed on it, and a rubber stamp notation that the merchandise order had been accompanied by a prepaid postal note. The timing was perfect. The problem of keeping that package on schedule all the way from its point of origin to its devastating delivery must have taxed Wood's faculties, but he'd done it. Chief Weston's choler rose visibly, and in a voice loud enough to be heard in Asbury Park, he yelled : "Schnell, did you -- buy -- this?" I was trapped. No matter what I said, it was calculated to get me into trouble. For in the petty cash box in the secretary's desk was a petty cash slip made out in the amount of thirty-nine dollars and seventeen cents for a postal money order payable to the Aladdin Novelty Company of Bayonne, New Jersey. The signature was good enough for me to accept it myself. All along the line it had been nicely legal -- or would have been if I'd really signed that petty cash slip. If it came to an argument, I'd have to perform miracles to prove my innocence. "Schnell," said Weston in a cold, level voice, "you'll get me a lead on the Gordon Andrews murder by tomorrow night or hand me your badge." I fumed in silence because there was nothing to say. "Get out!" As I closed the door behind me, I heard the crash of the crystal ball hitting the wall. Luckily he hadn't hurled it at the glass panel in his office door. My own phone was ringing as I approached my desk. I picked it up wearily and said, "Very clever, Mr. Wood. Very damned clever." He said, "Your basic difficulty, Captain Schnell, is that you have sworn to uphold the law and are compelled to employ legal methods. You must always work within the framework of the law. You would not think of tampering with the United States mails, even to save yourself from an unjust charge." "Wood, if I make a single move outside of the law, you'll use it against me, won't you?" "I'm afraid that's the way it has to be. You play according to your rules and I'll play according to mine." "Well, now, Mr. Wood, in our philosophy there may be strength. Remember, upon the day that the forces of law and order must violate their own concepts in order to effect their own ends, on that day law and order ceases to be the goal of honest men." "Spoken like an idealist!" Hanging up a telephone is not polite, but in this case hanging up did not snap the link of communication. V A N angry man is a poor fighter. I sat shuffling papers on my desk, half of my intellect raging helplessly. Finally I forced myself to sit and read the 'papers on the desk, even though I knew every word on every one of them. One reported that Wood had been one of the less conspicuous partners in a very successful personnel-placement agency. I could have added a penciled note that a telepath should make a very successful personnel manager. Another said that Florence Wood was employed as a safety deposit vault clerk in the Third National Bank. This didn't bother me. What the standard human gets out of staring at a solid phalanx of safety deposit boxes is a headache, not perceptive-gained information. There was a medical report that Wood had undergone a mild coronary occlusion some months ago which had hastened his retirement I wondered whether his retirement had been hastened by a real coronary occlusion or whether he'd used his extra-sensory power to fake the symptoms and control the doctor's instruments. Among the papers was a complete dissertation on the stabwound in Gordon Andrews' chest. There was no trace of any foreign body; the wound did not go all the way through the chest cavity. It was not clean cut, as if made by a sharpened weapon, but more like the semi-rounded end of an umbrella or a blunt, heavy spike. In the opinion of the medical examiner, the wound had been made with a rapid thrust, but it looked as if there had been no withdrawal. An inspection of the wound for traces of excess water (icicles) or carbon dioxide (dry ice) had failed to disclose any plausible weapon or projectile that could have evaporated or sublimed out of existence. I longed to suggest that a test be made for air. If a kinematic can create pyrotic effects by agitation of the molecules in something to be ignited, a good kinematic could make Maxwell's Demon go to work for him. Like compressing a volume of air into a .# slug and projecting it at revolver velocity. And in the end I was not leafing the reports or reading them. I was really staring at the wall. Specifically, I was staring at the calendar without paying much attention to it, and as I came out of my reverie I realized that I'd been absorbed in a little red smudge on one of the dates. Association is a funny process. The combination of calendar and red blob stared at hazily had finally brought my mind around to thinking of February the fourteenth, which honors a patron saint who has absolutely nothing to do with Jimmy Valentine, who was reputed to have been a very fast man with the combination of a safe, especially the type of safe that Gordon Andrews kept his money in because he did not trust banks, which may have been a good idea considering that Florence Wood worked in a bank vault, and her father... I jumped out of my office chair just as it tilted over backward. If I hadn't jumped, I'd have split my skull on the radiator under the window behind me. A heavy brass-edged ruler came up from the desk and swung in a whistling saber swipe at my face. I ducked in time to let the cut pass over my head; it clipped a few upstanding hairs. When it reached the end of its stroke, I wrested it out of Wood's control just to prove that an alert local force could exert more power than a distant kinematic force. Naturally I could. Leverage, of course. ' clicking sound; it was the police positive in the upper left-hand corner of my desk. I thought strongly, "Psi-man, you lift that gun and fire it at me through the desk drawer, and the angle and everything will be enough evidence to change Weston's opinion from angry rejection of all Psionics to a cold, calculated, vengeful agreement with everything I've suggested." The clicking stopped coming from the desk drawer and resumed in smaller kind from the little desk lock in the tray drawer of the desk. These desk locks can be picked with a bent hairpin, but picking takes time. Everything takes time. At any rate, it did indeed take Edward Hazlett Wood a finite time to juggle the little brass tumblers, turn the main cylinder, retract the sliding bolt, withdraw the desk tray to unlatch the side drawers, pull open the upper left-hand drawer and extract my police positive from its holster with its mechanism entering the firing cycle -- which itself takes time. By which time I'd vacated my office and was starting across the outer office floor in the brisk, stifflegged walk of a man in a hurry to go a long way fast. Wood was stalled. I thought: "Make like a poltergeist, Psi-man -- and convince everybody that you exist!" ' The outer office was a bustle of the usual police activity. But Wood did not have the ability to invade another mind and take over. At least, no one of the men in the office suddenly had a fit of homicidal mania with Captain Schnell listed as the first victim. And so I made Weston's office and shoved my head in through the outer door and yelled: "Weston -- Third National Bank -- and make it fast!" I turned and headed outside as Weston started the usual top-brass routine of wanting to know all of the infinitely variable reasons why he should leave his office at all, let alone right now. With no one to fire delaying questions at, and with a growing realization that he was not going to learn a thing by sitting there in fulmination, he fallowed. I paid no more attention to him once I knew he was on his way. I had my own hands full.  liability of the average internal combustion engine in the face of neglect, abuse and the natural ravages of weather, the automobile engine is a brute-force mechanism completely unable to support a psychosis. I was, however, appalled to discover just how many little thumb-valves, levers, wires, doodads, cams, gizmos and kadodies there are, each of which must be adjusted within ridiculously narrow limits before the so-called bruteforce mechanism will deign to turn a gear. But again, and luckily, making adjustments and maladjustments takes time. And by the logical rules of classical mechanics, the simple maladjusting turn of a screw valve takes no longer to return to adjustment provided the restorer is as bright and as quick as the wrecker. We worked our way through it like a pair of fencers or ju jitsu professionals going through the formal ritual of opening their engagement. He fastened on the starting system, but I licked him cold on that one because the ignition key controls the starter relay switch and I could handle both with one hand. He tried to block the starting relay, but the armature had started before he arrived with his kinematic barrier and the solid mechanico-electrical power carried the armature home. He made a futile attempt to flummox up the laws of Mr. Ohm, but he did not have the power to prevent amperes from flowing from the battery into the starting motor. By the time he thought of gumming up the bendix, the gear had meshed against the flywheel and the engine was turning over. He tried to flood the engine, but I held the choke valve just as I wanted it. He fiddled with the breaker-points and I blocked that until one of the cylinders fired. That kicked the whole engine into life and made the engine far too rapid to control, moving member by moving member. This caused his attention to turn to the needle valves, but as fast as he turned them out, I turned them back in again. He hit the choke again and I parried his thrust. The engine kicked over, caught, spluttered and backfired, and then went into an erratic running that smoothed out slightly as it warmed. I wasted no time; I kicked her into gear and took off in a jack-rabbit start with my siren wailing. Exultantly, I thought : "Can you hit a moving target, Psi-man?" Yes, you can stop an internal combustion engine turning at three thousand revolutions per minute by yanking off the ignition system. But not when your opponent is doing everything in his power to prevent you, and not when both of you are traveling at sixty or more miles per hour and you have a rougher driving course than he. way, driving motorists to the shelter of the side streets and parking places, and causing my fellow policemen to take charge blocks ahead to clear the path for the vehicle that had the right to exceed the city speed limit. My worthy opponent drove at sixty miles per hour at his own risk, trying to race me to the Third National Bank. Wood's extra-sensory driving was no better than mine. The traffic pattern was clear to both of us. But who should know better than a policeman what the average motorist will do in the face of an emergency? He took the time now and then to hurl something at me, but this was not very effective. If you think not, figure how many things you can see and use as weapons while driving at sixty. And, too, he was also fighting the unfavorable end of a missile-problem called "terminal control," which simply states that any guided missile approaching its target is subject to greater and greater interference by the enemy as it gets closer. Wood's near-misses I ignored with a disdain calculated to make him furious, and his nearhits I blocked with an ease that proved my ability to outguess and outmaneuver him. I chuckled to myself, for Edward Hazlett Wood had been played offbalance. He'd committed the hysterical mistake of fighting me on my ground instead of his. He had thrust and I'd parried and advanced, forcing him to thrust again before he could recover. He'd been fighting in the very odd position of conducting a vigorous offensive while back-stepping in inexorable retreat. He should have run and run until he was clear enough to prepare a single telling blow. And so ultimately I came to the front of the Third National Bank in a screeching halt. I stepped under a falling cornice, neatly avoided a revolving door that tried to slice me, and side-stepped the bronze bust of Salmon P. Chase that toppled from its niche of honor above the door. I evaded the erratic rolling of a pencil, and I trod with unerring step on a circular patch of invisible stuff that was as slippery as the proverbial frictionless lubricant. The slick flowed forward and down over the stairs as I hurried below; I held myself erect above it by sheer will power. As I strode toward the safe-deposit vault, I thought exultantly: "You're outpointed, Psi-man!" VI from her little desk and cried, "Why, Captain Schnell! How nice to see you!" "Hello," I said with a smile. "I hope you won't mind my company for a while." "I'm not likely to go for a stroll in -- Captain Schnell! Don't -- " Seven and one-half tons of finely wrought and polished tool-steel alloy swung on delicately balanced hinges, coming to rest with the metal-to-metal sound of machined surfaces sliding into a perfect fit with its precision-matched receptacle. Its piston-fit made a pressure on our eardrums. Then the automatic switches took over and motors whirred in solid muffled harmony as the massive bars slid out of their nests into the polished slots. The ponderous operation that sealed the two of us off from the outside world behind a barrier of drill-proof and burglar-proof and blast-proof solidity concluded hot with the mechanical fanfare it deserved, but with a gentle little click that was as final as the Word of God... " -- do that!" gasped Florence Wood, weakly finishing her admonition. She stared at me. The knowledge that this bank vault door was equipped with a time-lock that would not permit it to be opened except in the interval between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty in the morning of any working weekday ceased to be mere information and became vitally important to Florence Wood. So did the secondary knowledge that the bank vault was also contrived in available volume to limit the breathable air. There was not enough to support' the average human adult overnight until opening time tomorrow morning. Now there were two of them entombed in it -- and she was one of them! "We'll die!" she screamed. "Trust me, Florence?" She looked dubious. She was not competent who was so foolish as to lock himself into a bank vault -- and her with him. Florence was still struggling through her sea of mixed thoughts when the telephone rang. It was Chief Weston and he bellowed almost loud enough to hear through the yards of concrete and steel that separated us. "Schnell -- what in the bloody hell have you done?" "I've shut the vault," I said. "You'll die!" "I doubt it." "How do you propose to get out?" he demanded with heavy sarcasm. "Just ask Edward Hazlett Wood -- the Psi-man in our midst." "Schnell, if you get out of there alive, I'm going to ask for your resig -- " "If I get out of here alive, you'll need every faculty I have to keep our Psi-man jugged for good." "You and your extra-sensory -- " "Chief, get it through your thick skull that I am so convinced I'm right that I am betting my life on it!" "And can you tell me why he is going to give himself away to rescue you?" "Because I have his daughter right here beside me." "Schnell -- " "Stop yacking, Chief. Call me when Wood arrives. I have an emotional problem on my hands down here." "How do you know Wood's coming?" "He's been following my every move by telepathy," I said. "And he's been trying to block me all the way. Oh, he knows all right." of senseless gab. I turned to Florence, who was just beginning to understand what I had said and what it meant to both her and her father. She stood there with shocked eyes regarding me, and with one hand pressed back against her teeth. She said, "I don't believe it," in a barely audible voice. "It's true, and I'm sorry it's true," I told her. "It can't be true." "That's what you'd like to believe," I said softly. "But the fact remains that your father is a killer." "I'd rather die." "Florence, the choice between death and dishonor is not yours to make. Whether you live or die is up to your father, who is guilty of placing you in this awkward position by turning his talents to evil." She stared at me. "But -- how could you -- ?" "There was no other way but to bait this trap emotionally." "So cold and cruel -- " I nodded. "So were the pioneers who saved one last bullet for their wives." How could I tell this hurt girl that I had looked time and again into the minds of killers and found them far worse than the deeds they committed? When the official record states that upon such and such a date, so and so was punished for his crime, how is he punished for the harm he did to those who placed their trust in him? I hate them because they force me to reveal them for what they are, making me an agent of their betrayal. The phone rang again. "Yeah, Chief?" "Schnell, Wood's just arrived. What shall I tell him?" "Don't bother. He knows it all." "Schnell, granting that you are right, why should he show his hand when he knows -- or could easily find out -- that the time-lock setting mechanism is on your side of that vault door?" "Sure it is," I replied. "But it's covered by a sheet of five-ply safety glass." "Use your revolver!" "Chief, reprimand me for a violation of regulations if you must, but let me point out that only an idiot would wear a gun when he's pitting himself against a Psi-man." "Got everything figured out, haven't you, Schnell?" "Chief," I said, "this affair started in a sealed room, and now it's going to end in one." I yanked on the telephone and pulled it out of its connection block, snapping that link of communication. Then, to satisfy Edward Hazlett Wood, I hurled the instrument as hard as I could against the safety glass. The telephone bounced as if I had thrown it against six solid feet of battleship plate armor. are trapped!" He thought: "I've killed before, Schnell. Why shouldn't I profess helplessness and innocence, and accuse you and the whole Police Department of the stupid and wanton death of my beloved daughter?" "Because you've erred, Psi-man Wood." "Ah, now I have proof! You're a Psi-man, too! "Who -- me?" I thought without a visible change in my expression for Florence Wood to see. "You're the one who erred, Wood. You neglected the rules." "Bah -- the law! Stupid law -- " "Not so stupid, Wood. The law is really very sensible. It's strong, Wood, and it fosters the strength that comes of following it. So you see, Psi-man Wood, by never, never making any overt use of my talent, by never admitting that I know more than any clever man can see and deduce from what he knows -- it has now become quite obvious to Chief Weston that if any such shenanigans as extra-sensory manipulation of this bank-vault door take place -- you're the only one suspected of parapsychic power!" And then the time-lock setting dials clicked around, their tiny noise muted by the glass door. They came around until they pointed to the present time. Then came the louder manipulation of outside dial lock, the heavy click of massive tumblers, and then the solid turning sound of wheel and mighty lever. The vault door swung open. Outside, a pale and speechless man faced me, looking at his daughter. Weston was shaking his head, but the confusion was clearing. Weston was a good man, quite willing to operate without a full explanation, so long as there was a reasonable probability that some reasonable explanation would come later. The president and four vicepresidents of the bank stared at their vault door in dismay, wondering how anyone could from now on rely on any protection if the best of the vault-maker's art could be opened' with such ease. And Florence. She started forward with a glad cry, but stopped in mid-stride as she realized the full truth. In those fractions of a second, she became the full, mature adult who had been hurt, and who knew that hurt and pain are not the end. She stopped a full yard from him and whispered, "Daddy -- you did it!" He looked at her out of frantic eyes. "I didn't! I didn't!" Chief Weston took a pair of handcuffs from one of the uniformed cops and held them up in front of Edward Hazlett Wood's eyes. "Coming quietly, Wood, or must I weld them on you?"  move he made I would block, the murderer turned to go. I was going to have quite an interesting intellectual problem to solve. I was going to have to testify that I was clever enough to trap an extra-sensory criminal without displaying my own extra-sensory talent. It wasn't just a matter of putting a possible ending to my official usefulness to the forces of law and order if the facts became known. One word of suspicion against Captain Howard Schnell and some clever defense attorney would raise a wholly Reasonable doubt as to which Psi-man opened that vault door. And being sworn to uphold the law, and enforce the law within the framework of the law itself, I'd have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God! But, according to the same sensible law, not unless I was specifically asked. And to answer Edward Hazlett Wood's question: The perfect answer to the perfect crime committed by the perfect criminal is a perfect retribution. This state is now attainable for the first time in Man's History. The goal of all Mystic and Occult Science has been attained. It can be done for you. Write H A S I # #th Street, N.W. Washington #, D.C. war game Let the aliens get away with one thing -- and they'd get away with I N his office at the Terran Import Bureau of Standards, the tall man gathered up the morning's memos from their wire basket, and, seating himself at his desk, arranged them for reading. He put on his iris lenses, lit a cigarette. "Good morning," the first memo said in its tinny, chattery voice, as Wiseman ran his thumb along the line of pasted tape. Staring off through the open window at the parking lot, he listened to it idly. "Say look, what's wrong with you people down there? We sent that lot of -- " a pause as the speaker, the sales manager of a chain of New York department stores, found his records -- "those Ganymedean toys. You realize we have to get them approved in time for the autumn buying plan, so we can get them stocked for Christmas." Grumbling, the sales manager concluded, "War games are going to be an important item again this year. We intend to buy big." Wiseman ran his thumb down to the speaker's name and title. "Joe Hauck," the memo-voice chattered. "Appeley's Children's." To himself, Wiseman said, "Ah." He put down the memo, got a blank and prepared to reply. And then he said, half-aloud, "Yes, what about that lot of Ganymedean toys?" It seemed like a long time that the testing labs had been on them. At least two weeks. Of course, any Ganymedean products got special attention these days; the Moons had, during the last year, gotten beyond their usual state of economic greed and had begun -- according to intelligence circles -- mulling overt military action against competitive interests, of which the Inner Three planets could be called the foremost element. But so far nothing had shown up. Exports remained of adequate quality, with no special jokers, no toxic paint to be licked off, no capsules of bacteria. And yet... Any group of people as inventive as the Ganymedeans could be expected to show creativity in whatever field they entered. Subversion would be tackled like any other venture -- with imagination and a flair for wit. Wiseman got to his feet and left his office, in the direction of the separate building in which the testing labs operated.  sembled consumers' products, Pinario looked up to see his boss, Leon Wiseman, shutting the final door of the lab. "I'm glad you came down," Pinario said, although actually he was stalling; he knew that he was at least five days behind in his work, and this session was going to mean trouble. "Better put on a prophylaxis suit -- don't want to take risks." He spoke pleasantly, but Wiseman's expression remained dour. "I'm here about those inner-citadel-storming shock troops at six dollars a set," Wiseman said, strolling among the stacks of many-sized unopened products waiting to be tested and released. "Oh, that set of Ganymedean toy soldiers," Pinario said with relief. His conscience was clear on that item; every tester in the labs knew the special instructions handed down by the Cheyenne Government on the Dangers of Contamination from Culture Particles Hostile to Innocent Urban Populations, a typically muddy ukase from officialdom. He could always -- legitimately -- fall back and cite the number of that directive. "I've got them off by themselves," he said, walking over to accompany Wiseman, "due to the special danger involved." "Let's have a look," Wiseman said. "Do you believe there's anything in this caution, or is it more paranoia about 'alien milieux'?" Pinario said, "It's justified, especially where children's artifacts are concerned." A few hand-signals, and a slab of wall exposed a side room. Propped up in the center was a sight that caused Wiseman to halt. A plastic life-size dummy of a child, perhaps five years in appearance, wearing ordinary clothes, sat surrounded by toys. At this moment, the dummy was saying, "I'm tired of that. Do something else." It paused a short time, and then repeated, "I'm tired of that. Do something else." The toys on the floor, triggered to respond to oral instructions, gave up their various occupations and started afresh. "It saves on labor costs," Pinario explained. "This is a crop of junk that's got an entire repertoire to go through, before the buyer has his money's worth. If we stuck around to keep them active, we'd be in here all the time." Directly before the dummy was the group of Ganymedean soldiers, plus the citadel which they had been built to storm. They had been sneaking up on it in an elaborate pattern, but, at the dummy's utterance, they had halted. Now they were regrouping. "You're getting this all on tape?" Wiseman asked. "Oh, yes," Pinario said. The model soldiers stood approximately six inches high, made from the almost indestructible thermoplastic compounds that the Ganymedean manufacturers were famous for. Their uniforms were synthetic, a hodgepodge of various military costumes from the Moons and nearby planets. The citadel itself, a block of ominous dark metallike stuff, resembled a legendary fort; peep-holes dotted its upper surfaces, a drawbridge had been drawn up out of sight, and from the top turret a gaudy flag waved. With a whistling pop, the citadel fired a projectile at its attackers. The projectile exploded in a cloud of harmless smoke and noise, among a cluster of soldiers. "It fights back," Wiseman observed. "But ultimately it loses," Pinario said. "It has to. Psychologically speaking, it symbolizes the external reality. The dozen soldiers, of course, represent to the child his own efforts to cope. By participating in the storming of the citadel, the child undergoes a sense of adequacy in dealing with the harsh world. Eventually he prevails, but only after a painstaking period of effort and patience." He added, "Anyhow, that's what the instruction booklet says." He handed Wiseman the booklet. Wiseman asked, "And their pattern of assault varies each time?" "We've had it running for eight days now. The same pattern hasn't cropped up twice. Well, you've got quite a few units involved." The soldiers were sneaking around, gradually nearing the citadel. On the walls, a number of monitoring devices appeared and began tracking the soldier. Utilizing other toys being tested, the soldiers concealed themselves. "They can incorporate accidental configurations of terrain," Pinario explained. "They're objecttropic; when they see, for example, a dollhouse here for testing, they climb into it like mice. They'll be all through it" To prove his point, he picked up a large toy spaceship manufactured by a Uranian company; shaking it, he spilled two soldiers from it. "How many times do they take the citadel," Wiseman asked, "on a percentage basis?" "So far, they've been successful one out of nine tries. There's an adjustment in the back of the citadel. You can set it for a higher yield of successful tries." He threaded a path through the advancing soldiers; Wiseman accompanied him, and they bent down to inspect the citadel. "This is actually the power supply," Pinario said. "Cunning. Also, the instructions to the soldiers emanate from it. High-frequency transmission, from a shot-box." Opening the back of the citadel, he showed his boss the container of shot. Each shot was an instruction iota. For an assault pattern, the shot were tossed up, vibrated, allowed to settle in a new sequence. Randomness was thereby achieved. But since there was a finite number of shot, there had to be a finite number of patterns. "We're trying them all," Pinario said. "And there's no way to speed it up?" "It'll just have to take time. It may run through a thousand patterns and then -- " "The next one," Wiseman finished, "may have them make a ninety-degree turn and start firing at the nearest human being." Pinario said somberly, "Or worse. There're a good deal of ergs in that power pack. Ifs made to put out for five years. But if it all went into something simultaneously-" "Keep testing," Wiseman said. They looked at each other and then at the citadel. The soldiers had by now almost reached it. Suddenly one wall of the citadel flapped down; a gun-muzzle appeared, and the soldiers had been flattened. "I never saw that before," Pinario murmured. For a moment, nothing stirred. And then the lab's child-dummy, seated among its toys, said, "I'm tired of that. Do something else." With a tremor of uneasiness, the two men watched the soldiers pick themselves up and regroup. perior, a heavy-set, short, angry man with popping eyes, appeared in his office. "Listen," Fowler said, "you get those damn toys out of testing. I'll give you until tomorrow." He started back out, but Wiseman stopped him. "This is too serious," he said. "Come down to the lab and I'll show you." Arguing all the way, Fowler accompanied him to the lab. "You have no concept of the capital some of these firms have invested in this stuff!" he was saying as they entered. "For every product you've got represented here, there's a ship or a warehouse full on Luna, waiting for official clearance so it can come in!" Pinario was nowhere in sight. So Wiseman used his key, bypassing the hand-signals that opened up the testing room. There, surrounded by toys, sat the dummy that the lab men had built. Around it the numerous toys went through their cycles. The racket made Fowler wince. "This is the item in particular," Wiseman said, bending down by the citadel. A soldier was in the process of squirming on his belly toward it. "As you can see, there are a dozen soldiers. Given that many, and the energy available to them, plus the complex instruction data -- " Fowler interrupted, "I see only eleven." "One's probably hiding," Wiseman said. From behind them, a voice said, "No, he's right." Pinario, a rigid expression on his face, appeared. "I've been having a search made. One is gone." The three men were silent. "Maybe the citadel destroyed him," Wiseman finally suggested. Pinario said, "There's a law of matter dealing with that. If it 'destroyed' him -- what did it do with the remains?" "Possibly converted him into energy," Fowler said, examining the citadel and the remaining soldiers. "We did something ingenious," Pinario said, "when we realized that a soldier was gone. We weighed the remaining eleven plus the citadel. Their combined weight is exactly equal to that of the original set -- the original dozen soldiers and the citadel. So he's in there somewhere." He pointed at the citadel, which at the moment, was pinpointing the soldiers advancing toward it. Studying the citadel, Wiseman had a deep intuitive feeling. It had changed. It was, in some manner, different. "Run your tapes," Wiseman said. "What?" asked Pinario, and then he flushed. "Of course." Going to the child-dummy, he shut it off, opened it, and removed the drum of video recording tape. Shakily, he carried it to the projector. They sat watching the recording sequences flash by : one assault after another, until the three of them were bleary-eyed. The soldiers advanced, retreated, were fired on, picked themselves up, advanced again... "Stop the transport," Wiseman said suddenly. The last sequence was re-run. A soldier moved steadily toward the base of the citadel. A missile, fired at him, exploded and for a time obscured him. Meanwhile, the other eleven soldiers scurried in a wild attempt to mount the walls. The soldier emerged from the cloud of dust and continued. He reached the wall. A section slid back. The soldier, blending with the dingy wall of the citadel, used the end of his rifle as a screwdriver to remove his head, then one arm, then both legs. The disassembled pieces were passed into the aperture of the citadel. When only the arm and rifle remained, that, too, crawled into the citadel, worming blindly, and vanished. The aperture slid out of existence. After a long time, Fowler said in a hoarse voice, "The presumption by the parent would be that the child had lost or destroyed one of the soldiers. Gradually the set would dwindle -- with the child getting the blame." Pinario said, "What do you recommend?" "Keep it in action," Fowler said, with a nod from Wiseman. "Let it work out its cycle. But don't leave it alone." "I'll have somebody in the room with it from now on," Pinario agreed. "Better yet, stay with it yourself," Fowler said. To himself, Wiseman thought: Maybe we all better stay with it. At least two of us, Pinario and myself. I wonder what it did with the pieces, he thought. What did it make? D Y the end of the week, the citadel had absorbed four more of the soldiers. Watching it through a monitor, Wiseman could see in it no visible change. Naturally. The growth would be strictly internal, down out of sight On and on the eternal assaults, the soldiers wriggling up, the citadel firing in defense. Meanwhile, he had before him a new series of Ganymedean products. More recent children's toys to be inspected. "Now what?" he asked himself. The first was an apparently simple item: a cowboy costume from the ancient American West. At least, so it was described. But he paid only cursory attention to the brochure: the hell with what the Ganymedeans had to say about it. Opening the box, he laid out the costume. The fabric had a gray, amorphous quality. What a miserably bad job, he thought. It only vaguely resembled a cowboy suit; the lines seemed unformed, hesitant. And the material stretched out of shape as he handled it. He found that he had pulled an entire section of it into a pocket that hung down. "I don't get it," he said to Pinario. "This won't sell." "Put it on," Pinario said. "You'll see." With effort, Wiseman managed to squeeze himself into the suit. "Is it safe?" he asked. "Yes," Pinario said. "I had it on earlier. This is a more benign idea. But it could be effective. To start it into action, you fantasize." "Along what lines?" "Any lines." The. suit made Wiseman think of cowboys, and so he imagined to himself that he was back at the ranch, trudging along the gravel road by the field in which blackfaced sheep munched hay with that odd, rapid grinding motion of their lower jaws. He had stopped at the fence -- barbed wire and occasional upright posts -- and watched the sheep. Then, without warning, the sheep lined up and headed off, in the direction of a shaded hillside beyond his range of vision. TJ E saw trees, Cyprus growing against the skyline. A chicken hawk, far up, flapped its wings in a pumping action... as if, he air, to rise higher. The hawk glided energetically off, then sailed at a leisurely pace. Wiseman looked for a sign of its prey. Nothing but the dry mid-summer fields munched flat by the sheep. Frequent grasshoppers. And, on the road itself, a toad. The toad had burrowed into the loose dirt; only its top part was visible. As he bent down, trying to get up enough courage to touch the warty top of the toad's head, a man's voice said nearby him, "How do you like it?" "Fine," Wiseman said. He took a deep breath of the dry grass smell; he filled his lungs. "Hey, how do you tell a female toad from a male toad? By the spots, or what?" "Why?" asked the man, standing behind him slightly out of sight. "I've got a toad here." "Just for the record," the man said, "can I ask you a couple of questions?" "Sure," Wiseman said. "How old are you?" That was easy. "Ten years and four months," he said, with pride. "Where exactly are you, at this moment?" "Out in the country, Mr. Gaylord's ranch, where my dad takes me and my mother every weekend when we can." "Turn around and look at me," the man said. "And tell me if you know me." With reluctance, he turned from the half-buried toad to look. He saw an adult with a thin face and a long, somewhat irregular nose. "You're the man who delivers the butane gas," he said. "For the butane company." He glanced around, and sure enough, there was the truck, parked by the butane gate. "My dad says butane is expensive, but there's no other -- " The man broke in, "Just for the sake of curiosity, what's the name of the butane company?" "It's right on the truck," Wiseman said, reading the large painted letters. "Pinario Butane Distributors, Petaluma, California. You're Mr. Pinario." that you're ten years old, standing in a field near Petaluma, California?" Mr. Pinario asked. "Sure." He could see, beyond the field, a range of wooded hills. Now he wanted to investigate them; he was tired of standing around gabbing. "I'll see you," he said, starting off. "I have to go get some hiking done." He started running, away from Mr. Pinario, down the gravel road. Grasshoppers leaped away, ahead of him. Gasping, he ran faster and faster. "Leon!" Mr. Pinario called after him. "You might as well give up! Stop running!" "I've got business in those hills," Wiseman panted, still jogging along. Suddenly something struck him full force; he sprawled on his hands, tried to get back up. In the dry midday air, something shimmered; he felt fear and pulled away from it. A shape formed, a flat wall... "You won't get to those hills," Mr. Pinario said, from behind him. "Better stay in roughly one place. Otherwise you collide with things." Wiseman's hands were damp with blood; he had cut himself falling. In bewilderment, he stared down at the blood... cowboy suit, saying, "It's as unwholesome a toy as you could want. A short period with it on, and the child would be unable to face contemporary reality. Look at you." Standing with difficulty, Wiseman inspected the suit; Pinario had forcibly taken it from him. "Not bad," he said in a trembling voice. "It obviously stimulates the withdrawal tendencies already present. I know I've always had a latent retreat fantasy toward my childhood. That particular period, when we lived in the country." "Notice how you incorporated real elements into it," Pinario said, "to keep the fantasy going as long as possible. If you'd had time, you would have figured a way of incorporating the lab wall into it, possibly as the side of a barn." Wiseman admitted, "I -- already had started to see the old dairy building, where the farmers brought their market milk." "In time," Pinario said, "it would have been next to impossible to get you out of it." To himself, Wiseman thought, If it could do that to an adult, just imagine the effect on a child. "That other thing you have there," Pinario said, "that game, it's a screwball notion. You feel like looking at it now? It can wait." "I'm okay," Wiseman said. He picked up the third item and began to open it. "A lot like the old game of Monopoly," Pinario said. "It's called Syndrome." The game consisted of a board, plus play money, dice, pieces to represent the players. And stock certificates. "You acquire stock," Pinario said, "same as in all this kind, obviously." He didn't even bother to look at the instructions. "Let's get Fowler down here and play a hand; it takes at least three." Shortly, they had the Division Director with them. The three men seated themselves at a table, the game of Syndrome in the center. "Each player starts out equal with the others," Pinario explained, "same as all this type, and during the play, their statuses change according to the worth of the stock they acquire in various economic syndromes." The syndromes were represented by small, bright plastic objects, much like the archaic hotels and houses of Monopoly. They threw the dice, moved their counters along the board, bid for and acquired property, paid fines, collected fines, went to the "decontamination chamber" for a period. Meanwhile, behind them, the seven model soldiers crept up on the citadel again and again. "I'm tired of that," the childdummy said. "Do something else." The soldiers regrouped. Once more they started out, getting nearer and nearer the citadel. Restless and irritable, Wiseman said, "I wonder how long that damn thing has to go on before we find out what it's for." "No telling." Pinario eyed a purple-and-gold share of stock that Fowler had acquired. "I can use that," he said. "That's a heavy uranium mine stock on Pluto. What do you want for it?" "Valuable property," Fowler murmured, consulting his other stocks. "I might make a trade, though." XT OW can I concentrate on a game, Wiseman asked himself, when that thing is getting closer and nearer to -- God knows what? To whatever it was built to reach. Its critical mass, he thought "Just a second," he said in a slow, careful voice. He put down his hand of stocks. "Could that citadel be a pile?" "Pile of what?" Fowler asked, concerned with his hand. Wiseman said loudly, "Forget this game." "An interesting idea," Pinario said, also putting down his hand. "It's constructing itself into an atomic bomb, piece by piece. Adding until -- " He broke off. "No, we thought of that. There're no heavy elements present in it. It's simply a five-year battery, plus a number of small machines controlled by instructions broadcast from the battery itself. You can't make an atomic pile out of that." "In my opinion," Wiseman said, "we'd be safer getting it out of here." His experience with the cowboy suit had given him a great deal more respect for the Ganymedean artificers. And if the suit was the benign one... Fowler, looking past his shoulder, said, "There are only six soldiers now." Both Wiseman and Pinario got up instantly. Fowler was right. Only half of the set of soldiers remained. One more had reached the citadel and been incorporated. "Let's get a bomb expert from the Military Services in here," Wiseman said, "and let him check it. This is out of our department." He turned to his boss, Fowler. "Don't you agree?" Fowler said, "Let's finish this game first." "Why?" "Because we want to be certain about it," Fowler said. But his rapt interest showed that he had gotten emotionally involved and wanted to play to the end of the game. "What will you give me for this share of Pluto stock? I'm open to offers." He and Pinario negotiated a trade. The game continued for another hour. At last, all three of them could see that Fowler was gaining control of the various stocks. He had five mining syndromes, plus two plastics firms, an algae monopoly, and all seven of the retail trading syndromes. Due to his control of the stock, he had, as a byproduct, gotten most of the money. "I'm out," Pinario said. All he had left were minor shares which controlled nothing. "Anybody want to buy these?" With his last remaining money, Wiseman bid for the shares. He got them and resumed playing, this time against Fowler alone. "It's clear that this game is a replica of typical interculture economic ventures," Wiseman said. "The retail trading syndron , s are obviously Ganymedean hot ngs." stirred in him; he had gotten a couple of good throws with the dice and was in a position to add a share to his meager holdings. "Children playing this would acquire a healthy attitude toward economic realities. It would prepare them for the adult world." But a few minutes later, he landed on an enormous tract of Fowler holdings, and the fine wiped out his resources. He had to give up two shares of stock; the end was in sight Pinario, watching the soldiers advance toward the citadel, said, "You know, Leon, I'm inclined to agree with you. This thing may be one terminal of a bomb. A receiving station of some kind. When it's completely wired up, it might bring in a surge of power transmitted from Ganymede." "Is such a thing possible?" Fowler asked, stacking his play money into the different denominations. "Who knows what they can do?" Pinario said, wandering around with his hands in his pockets.  re you almost finished playing?" "Just about," Wiseman said. "The reason I say that," Pinario said, "is that now th only five soldiers. It's speeding ip. It took a week for the first one, ind only an hour for the seventh. I wouldn't be surprised if the rest go within the next two hours, all five of them." "We're finished," Fowler said. He had acquired the last share of stock and the last dollar. Wiseman arose from the table, leaving Fowler. "I'll call Military Services to check the citadel. About this game, though, it's nothing but a steal from our Terran game Monopoly." "Possibly they don't realize that we have the game already," Fowler said, "under another name." A stamp of admissibility was placed on the game of Syndrome and the importer was informed. In his office, Wiseman called Military Services and told them what he wanted. "A bomb expert will be right over," the unhurried voice at the other end of the line said. "Probably you should leave the object alone until he arrives." Feeling somewhat useless, Wiseman thanked the clerk and hung up. They had failed to dope out the soldiers-and-citadel war game; now it was out of their hands. T HE bomb expert was a young man, with close-cropped hair, who smiled friendlily at them as he set down his equipment. He wore ordinary coveralls, with no protective devices. "My first advice," he said, after he had looked the citadel over, "is to disconnect the leads from the battery. Or, if you want, we can let the cycle finish out, and then disconnect the leads before any reaction takes place. In other words, allow the last mobile elements to enter the citadel. Then, as soon as they're inside, we disconnect the leads and open her up and see what's been taking place." "Is it safe?" Wiseman asked. "I think so," the bomb expert said. "I don't detect any sign of radioactivity in it" He seated himself on the floor, by the rear of the citadel, with a pair of cutting pliers in his hand. Now only three soldiers remained. "It shouldn't be long," the young man said cheerfully. Fifteen minutes later, one of the three soldiers crept up to the base of the citadel, removed his head, arm, legs, body, and disappeared piecemeal into the opening provided for him. "That leaves two," Fowler said. Ten minutes later, one of the two remaining soldiers followed the one ahead of him. The four men looked at each other. "This is almost it," Pinario said huskily. The last remaining soldier wove his way toward the citadel. Guns within the citadel fired at him, but he continued to make progress. "Statistically speaking," Wiseman said aloud, to break some of the tension, "it should take longer each time, because there are fewer men for it to concentrate on. It should have started out fast, then got more infrequent until finally this last soldier should put in at least a month trying to -- " "Pipe down," the young bomb expert said in a quiet, reasonable voice. "If you don't mind." The last of the twelve soldiers reached the base of the citadel. Like those before him, he began to disassemble himself. "Get those pliers ready," Pinario grated. The parts of the soldier traveled into the citadel. The opening began to close. From within, a humming became audible, a rising pitch of activity. "Now, for God's sake!" Fowler cried. The young bomb expert reached down his pliers and cut into the positive lead of the battery. A spark flashed from the pliers and the young bomb expert jumped reflexively; the pliers flew from his hands and skidded across the floor. "Jeez!" he said. "I must have been grounded." Groggily, he groped about for the pliers. "You were touching the frame of the thing," Pinario said excitedly. He grabbed the pliers himself and crouched down, fumbling for the lead. "Maybe if I wrap a handkerchief around it," he muttered, withdrawing the pliers and fishing in his pocket for a handkerchief. "Anybody got any thing I can wrap around this? I don't want to get knocked flat. No telling how many -- " "Give it to me," Wiseman demanded, snatching the pliers from him. He shoved Pinario aside and closed the jaws of the pliers about the lead. Fowler said calmly, "Too late." suthe constant tone within his head, and he put up his hands to his ears, futilely, trying to shut it out. Now it seemed to pass directly from the citadel through his skull, transmitted by the bone. We stalled around too long, he thought. Now it has us. It won out because there are too many of us; we got to squabbling... Within his mind, a voice said, "Congratulations. By your fortitude, you have been successful." A vast feeling pervaded him ' ' perior's voice; he heard then, a sense of accomplishment "The odds against you were tremendous," the voice inside his mind continued. "Anyone else would have failed." He knew then that everything was all right. They had been wrong. "What you have done here," the voice declared, "you can continue to do all your life. Y ou can always triumph over adversaries. By patience and persistence, you can win out The universe isn't such an overwhelming place, after all..." No, he realized with irony, it wasn't. "They are just ordinary persons," the voice soothed. "So even though you're only one, an individual against many, you have nothing to fear. Give it time -- and don't worry." "I won't," he said aloud. The humming receded. The voice was gone. After a long pause, Fowler said, "It's over." "I don't get it" Pinario said. "That was what it was supposed to do," Wiseman said. "It's a therapeutic toy. Helps give the child confidence. The disassembling of the soldiers -- " he grinned -- "ends the separation between him and the world. He becomes one with it. And, in doing so, conquers it" "Then it's harmless," Fowler said. "All this work for nothing," Pinario groused. To the bomb expert, he said, "I'm sorry we got you up here for nothing." The citadel had now opened its gates wide. Twelve soldiers, once more intact, issued forth. The cycle was complete; the assault could begin again. Suddenly Wiseman said, "I'm not going to release it." "What?" Pinario said. "Why not?" "I don't trust it," Wiseman said. "It's too complicated for what it actually does." "Explain," Fowler demanded. "There's nothing to explain," Wiseman said. "Here's this immensely intricate gadget, and all it does is take itself apart and then reassemble itself. There must be more, even if we can't -- " "It's therapeutic," Pinario put in. Fowler said, "I'll leave it up to you, Leon. If you have doubts, then don't release it. We can't be too careful." "Maybe I'm wrong," Wiseman said, "but I keep thinking to myself : What did they actually build this for? I feel we still don't know." "And the American Cowboy Suit," Pinario added. "You don't want to release that either." "Only the game," Wiseman said. "Syndrome, or whatever it's called." Bending down, he watched the soldiers as they hustled toward the citadel. Bursts of smoke, again... activity, feigned attacks, careful withdrawals... "What are you thinking?" Pinario asked, scrutinizing him. "Maybe it's a diversion," Wiseman said. "To keep our minds involved. So we won't notice something else." That was his intuition, but he couldn't pin it down. "A red herring," he said. "While something else takes place. That's why it's so complicated. We were supposed to suspect it. That's why they built it." Baffled, he put his foot down in. front of a soldier. The soldier took refuge behind his shoe, hiding from the monitors of the citadel. "There must be something right before our eyes," Fowler said, "that we're not noticing." "Yes." Wiseman wondered if they would ever find it. "Anyhow," he said, "we're keeping it here, where we can observe it." Seating himself nearby, he prepared to watch the soldiers. He made himself comfortable for a long, long wait. A T six o'clock that evening, Joe Hauck, the sales manager for Appeley's Children's Store, parked his car before his house, got out, and strode up the stairs. Under his arm he carried a large flat package, a "sample" that he had appropriated. "Hey!" his two kids, Bobby and Lora, squealed as he let himself in. "You got something for us. Dad?" 'hey crowded around him, blocking his path. In the kitchen, his wife looked up from the table and put down her magazine. "A new game I picked up for you," Hauck said. He unwrapped the package, feeling genial. There was no reason why he shouldn't help himself to one of the new games; he had been on the phone for weeks, getting the stuff through Import Standards -- and after all was said and done, only one of the three items had been cleared. As' the kids went off with the game, his wife said in a low voice, "More corruption in high places." She had always disapproved of his bringing home items from the store's stock. "We've got thousands of them," Hauck said. "A warehouse full. Nobody'll notice one missing." At the dinner table, during the meal, the kids scrupulously studied every word of the instructions that accompanied the game. They were aware of nothing else. "Don't read at the table," Mrs. Hauck said reprovingly. Leaning back in his chair, Joe Hauck continued his account of the day. "And after all that time, what did they release? One lousy item. We'll be lucky if we can push enough to make a profit. It was that Shock Troop gimmick that would really have paid off. And that's tied up indefinitely." He lit a cigarette and relaxed, feeling the peacefulness of his home, the presence of his wife and children. His daughter said, "Dad, do you want to play? It says the more who play, the better." "Sure," Joe Hauck said. While his wife cleared the table, he and his children spread out the board, counters, dice and paper money and shares of stock. Almost at once he was deep in the game, totally involved; his childhood memories of game-playing swam back, and he acquired shares of stock with cunning and originality, until, toward the conclusion of the game, he had cornered most of the syndromes. He settled back with a sigh of contentment. "That's that," he declared to his children. "Afraid I had a head start. After all, I'm not new to this type of game." Getting hold of the valuable holdings on the board filled him with a powerful sense of satisfaction. "Sorry to have to win, kids." His daughter said, "You didn't win." "You lost," his son said. "What?" Joe Hauck exclaimed. "The person who winds up with the most stock loses," Lora said. S HE showed him the instructions. "See? The idea is to get rid of your stocks. Dad, you're out of the game." "The heck with that," Hauck said, disappointed. "That's no kind of game." His satisfaction vanished. "That's no fun." "Now we two have to play out the game," Bobby said, "to see who finally wins." As he got up from the board, Joe Hauck grumbled, "I don't get it. What would anybody see in a game where the winner winds up with nothing at all?" Behind him, his two children continued to play. As stock and money changed hands, the children became more and more animated. When the game entered its final stages, the children were in a state of ecstatic concentration. "They don't know Monopoly," Hauck said to himself, "so this screwball game doesn't seem strange to them." Anyhow, the important thing was that the kids enjoyed playing Syndrome; evidently it would sell, and that was what mattered. Already the two youngsters were learning the naturalness of surrendering their holdings. They gave up their stocks and money avidly, with a kind of trembling abandon. Glancing up, her eyes bright, Lora said, "It's the best educational toy you ever brought home, Dad!" for your the eighteenth century some very vague rumors about gigantic bones reached Paris. Unaccompanied by any evidence, these rumors traveled via Spain, for they originated from Argentina. Shorn of embroidery and conjecture, they stated that large bones could be found in the pampas. These were said to be as large as the bones of elephants. The gentlemen of the Academy in Paris decided that it was best not to say anything. As far as anybody knew, there were no elephants in the Americas. Still, South America was not well explored yet, so -- let the Spaniards prove their case if they have one. It so happened that they did. During the earlier years of the #th century only occasional single bones had been seen by literate men, usually in places where a river cut into the soil of the pampas. In # a complete skeleton was found, fortunately not too far from Buenos Aires, at a place called Lujan. The viceroy ordered that the bones be excavated and sent to Madrid. There a scientist named Garriga assembled them and, in #, published a first description. r I ' HE animal had been about the size of an elephant, or would have been if its legs had been a little longer. It stood eight feet tall at the shoulder and had an overall length of # feet. The first thing that impressed Garriga was the legs, but not because they were beautiful. The bones were incredibly heavy, far more massive than the corresponding bones of an elephant. The tail was also very massive and long for a big animal (which usually have tiny tails) because it was long enough to just touch the ground. But while the comparison with an elephant was obvious because of the size, it broke down when it came to the foot skeleton and the skull. They did not resemble anything ever seen before, at least not in such a size. The skull showed clearly that this giant was a sloth. Now it needed a name, which was compounded from the two Greek words for "large" (megas) and "mammal" ( therion ) in the Latinized version of Megatherium americanum. Naturally things did not stop with this first skeleton. Pictures of it got into books, partly because it was the first and partly because it was so big. More discoveries were made and scientists soon knew that there had been several species of giant sloth. The second species to be definitely established was Mylodon robustus (Fig. #), which was #I feet long and differed from Megatherium mostly in having forelegs about as long as its hindlegs; in Megatherium the forelegs are a good deal longer than the hindlegs. The third species was named Mylodon gracilis. Now the word gracilis would normally be translated as "dainty," but in this case the normal, or any other, translation just did not apply. The animal was by no means "dainty." It was a heavy-boned nine-foot monster. It is possible that gracilis was used merely as the opposite of robustus. It is more likely that this name is a case of Teutonic humor, for the man who coined it was Professor Hermann Burmeister, of Germany, who had gone to South America on a trip of exploration and then decided to stay and settle down, mostly because of Megatherium and Mylodon. fifty years old when he made this decision (in #I or #), but he still managed to enjoy thirty-one years of residence in the country he adopted for zoological reasons. When I state that he "enjoyed" these years, I do not use the term loosely. According to all accounts, life in Prof. Burmeister's house was friendly, witty and gay, and it was permanently open to any fellow scientist and any intellitalk Megatherium and other pampas fossils. That there could possibly ever be a shortage of domestic or imported wines never occurred to Burmeister, unless he had nightmares, which seems unlikely. Burmeister's closest scientific associate and his successor (when Burmeister died in # at the age of #) was Professor Florentino Ameghino. Up to #, expert descriptions of pampas fossils had been in German; from then on, they were in Spanish. But behind all the scientific gaiety and the fun and thrill of a steady stream of discoveries there was one unanswered question. How old were the bones Burmeister and Ameghino dug up, cleaned, measured, assembled and described? This question at that time was simply unanswerable, but Burmeister thought that while he could not name a figure, he could at least give an answer of sorts. There was general agreement that man had originated in Asia and invaded the American double continent via the Bering Strait. This naturally meant that man had arrived in South America much later than in North America, since he had to traverse the length of the North American continent first. Any figures which were then mentioned were naturally guesses; man had probably arrived at the northern end of South America # to # years ago. Burmeister based his answer on this figure. Man and Megatherium had never met, Burmeister was convinced, because the natives did not have any recollection of such animals and had invented a legend to account for the bones. They thought that the large animal was something like a gigantic mole which was instantly killed by sunlight if it inadvertently "broke surface." Burmeister's ideas might have been well reasoned, but the facts were against him. Megatherium, the giant sloth, was very often associated with a giant armadillo -- Glyptodon -- and the two animals had obviously lived at the same time. But remains of Glyptodon and human artifacts were sometimes found together, and the prize discovery was a human skeleton sitting inside the giant carapace of a glyptodon. This was certainly an ancient form of burial for somebody of importance. Finally, a skeleton of Megatherium was unearthed which was incomplete in a significant manner. The four legs were there and undisturbed, but most of the other bones were missing, and there had been a fire in the center, between the legs. It was perfectly apparent that here was a giant sloth that had been caught in a pit and roasted right in the trap from above. There was no doubt then that the early South American Indians had known Megatherium "in the flesh," but it still did not answer the question: when had this happened? T N the meanwhile something else had taken place which did not seem to have a connection for a long time. By coincidence, another German who had made his home in South America figures in this section of the story, though not as prominently by far as Professor Burmeister. Near the southern end of Patagonia there is a fjord or inlet -- locally called a "canal" -- with the gloomy name of Ultima Esperanza (Last Hope). There the retired German sea captain Eberhard bought himself some land and built a house. Visitors to the Eberhard ranch noticed that the hide of a large animal was hanging over some bushes. Some of these visitors -- or so it was told later -- tried to cut a piece off that hide, which proved to be extraordinarily difficult. The reason was that a large number of bean-sized "bones" were embedded in the hide. If any one of these visitors had been a naturalist, this fact would have done more than just make him suspicious; but evidently nobody, including Captain Eberhard, had any profound knowledge of natural history. At some time -- the date is uncertain, but it was after Burmeister's death -- such a piece of skin reached Ameghino. It has never been established whether this particular piece came from the Eberhard ranch; Ameghino himself did not think so. The important thing was that this piece of skin was, or looked, fresh. Not fresh like animal skin in a butcher shop, but rather like untanned hide in a saddler's establishment. In any case it certainly was not fossil and Ameghino decided that logic, however incredible, had to prevail. A piece of Mylodon skin proved that the animal still existed somewhere. Ameghino called a press conference. Newspapers around the world carried articles which dedared: "The Giant Sloth Is not Extinct." The very fact that this animal, which for so many years had been so proverbially extinct, was supposed to be still alive set thought going in various directions at once. Was there any evidence in addition to the piece of skin? Did somebody in the past mention the giant sloth in any manner, probably with a native name which conveyed no meaning to readers elsewhere? And, finally, where can they be found, to be captured for a zoological garden? Professor Ameghino said that he did have additional evidence. Besides his piece of skin from an unknown source, there was the Ultima Esperanza hide. And theq there was the story told by Ramon Lista, onetime Governor of Santa Cruz -- he was later killed by Indians. Lista reported that he had been with a hunting party in the interior of Patagonia. While camping at night, he and his party had seen an unknown animal which looked somewhat like a pangolin, except that it was covered with long hair. The animal escaped, even though the hunters shot at it with their rifles.  learned man with much experience in Patagonia (he wrote several books about his land which received high praise and are said to be still worthwhile reading), a story like this deserved attention. Strangely enough, Ameghino at first disregarded it, thinking that Lista must have been somehow mistaken. But then he suddenly changed his mind. A while later he even coined the scientific name Neomylodon listai (Lista's New Mylodon) and pointed out that it was quite possible that one or more of the hunters' shots had hit, but that they did no harm because of the bony nodules in a Mylodon's hide. Then a native legend about a Iemish was dragged into the giant sloth debate and things really became confused. The Iemish was claimed to be a large beast that lived both on land and in the water, usually hiding in the water. It was a flesh-eater and drowned horses to eat them. Or else the Iemish was a beast the size of an ox that was harmless and nocturnal. During the day it slept in burrows which it had dug with its large claws. Finally somebody supplied Ameghino with a "translation" of the word Iemish: it was supposed to mean "the one with little stones on it." Ameghino thought that all this went together beautifully and could apply only to the Neomylodon listai that he had named. All this, however, did not go together beautifully. An animal is either a flesh-eater, in which case it? can't be called harmless, or it is harmless, in which case it is not likely to be a flesh-eater. But while this could be reasoned out by logic alone, it took an enormous amount of work to establish how the confusion had taken place. The legend of the Iemish, the one that often retreats into the water and is a flesh-eater, refers essentially to the jaguar, which is a carnivore and does swim well. It probably also contains some confusion with the giant river otter of South America, which is of nearly the same size, is also carnivorous, like all otters, and, like all otters, lives in the water. The names which could be found in dictionaries that sound like iemish mostly are native words for "otter." Of course the word does not translate the way Ameghino reported. It seems to be simply a name. But Ameghino, having been handed this significant-looking "translation" by somebody, made the mistake of applying the name iemish to the other legend about the ox-sized harmless nocturnal animal. (It might be added that the two legends did not exist in the same place. Their origins were # or more miles apart.) Ameghino, after having made this mistake, concluded that he had taken care of the question of available evidence. Then he set out to answer the second question; namely, whether the giant sloth might not have been mentioned by early writers on South America under another and probably native name. Here he was not only far more careful, he was also more successful. He came across a book entitled Historia de la Conquista del Paraguay, Rio de la Plata y Tucuman by Father Pedro Lozano, S. J., published #-#, in which an animal su or succarath was mentioned. It was said to be large and to have the habit of carrying its young on its back. The natives were stated to hunt it in spite of the dangers involved, for they wanted its skin to make durable cloaks. had ever heard of Father Lozano before, but when Ameghino reported on the su in professional journals, all European zoologists had an automatic reaction. They knew the su. Its picture, however fantastic, was on the title page of the enormous zoology book by the Swiss savant Konrad Gesner (Fig. #) which every one of the Europeans had read. There in volume one of Gesner's Historia animalium (published in Zurich in #) one could find a paragraph headed De Subo ("Of the Su") which translates as follows: The Most Obnoxious Animal that might be seen, called Su in the New Lands. There is a place in the newly found land where lives a people calling itself in its language Patagones, and since the land is not very warm they cover themselves with fur from an animal they call Su, which means Water, by reason of its dwelling mainly near water. It is very dreadful, obnoxious, as may be seen. When hunted by the hunters, it takes its young upon its back, covers them with its long tail and thus flees. It is caught in pits and killed with arrows. This had made no sense until the fight about the still-living giant sloth started; now things had changed so that Gesner's paragraph might make an exciting kind of sense. As long as nobody had paid much attention to Gesner's paragraph as a whole, even less attention had been paid to a note which said that this description had been taken from "Andreas Theuetus." Since Gesner wrote in Latin, it was only logical that he used the Latinized form; actually this was the name of Andre Thevet. Thevet's paragraph on the Su is the same as Gesner's naturally, but Thevet has one more sentence telling what happens after a su has fallen into a pit: When it sees that it is caught, it maims and kills its young (as if maddened) and gives such terrible cries that it makes the Savages very fearful and timid. Yet in the end they kill it with arrows and then they flay it. Incidentally, each of the learned men made a linguistic mistake. Gesner did not know that the name of the Patagonians is not derived from their own language, and Thevet was wrong in thinking that su means water. Its meaning is "covering." Ameghino came close by translating su as "cloak." Thevet is the only literary source which might be construed as referring to a giant sloth. If one wants to accept it -- and I don't see why not -- one of the smaller forms of giant sloth must have been still alive in the southern part of South America during the Middle Ages. Where did the hide on Captain Eberhard's ranch come from? Well, Captain Eberhard himself located a cave some distance from his home. The cave was almost completely closed (one could just squeeze through) by a wall of boulders which was obviously piled up by people. Inside the cave, the amateur explorers found a human skeleton, two more hides, and what is generally called a kitchen midden. Later, professional investigators discovered Mylodon droppings over a foot deep, and when they went to work on these droppings, they saw that they contained ends of plant stalks which had been cut. The teeth of the animals could not have produced such a clean end. Fig. I : Reconstruction of extinct giant sloth Mylodon. One of the investigators, Professor Santiago Roth, then proposed to rename the animal Grypotherium domesticum, since the Indians had apparently domesticated it. This would not have been impressible by itself, but there is one major fact that speaks against the idea: domesticated animals do not become extinct! Man sees to it that they don't. If the Indians had widely domesticated the Mylodon, it would still be around with its masters. More likely the animals were just rounded up in the open and chased into the cave, where they were kept alive with forage until the time came to kill and eat them. Before finishing up with the current scientific opinion about the whole matter, one episode, amusing in retrospect, must be told. Early in this century Sir Ray Lankester, director of the Natural History Museum in London, permitted himself to be quoted to the effect that it seemed possible that a ground sloth of the Mylodon type might still be alive in littleknown parts of Patagonia. This was good enough for the owner of the London Daily Express. He decided to finance an expedition to Patagonia to search for a living mylodon and bring it back to England, alive if possible, dead Fig. #: The animal Su as it appears on title page of Konrad Gesner's Historia Animaium if it could not be helped. The expedition was headed by a man named Hesketh H. Pritchard, who must have been an impatient type. Nobody knew at the time that Ameghino had blundered with respect to the Iemish, so Pritchard set out with what he believed to be a body of facts to guide him. In South America, he quickJy learned that a major mistake had been made somewhere and he grew furious. Though he had traveled thousands of miles and had only another two or three hundred miles to go to reach Captain Eberhard's ranch, he did not do so. He turned around, went back to England and wrote perhaps the most ill-tempered book ever printed. The Iemish did not exist, the legend about it was the invention of some publicity seekers, the whole thing was a pack of lies and, most important, he, Hesketh H. Pritchard, had been hoaxed. Well, how do things stand now? i"kNE of the newer and most useful tools of science, radio-carbon dating, does not help much here for lack of material. The first list of radio-carbon dates ( Science , February #, #) contained two entries about giant sloth material. They were : No. # Chilean Sloth-. Dung of giant sloth from Mylodon Cave, Ultima Esperanza, Chile (# #'S.). Not associated with human artifacts, though sloth and man found together in three caves # miles distant (cl. sample #) #  #; #  #; #  # (years). No. # Chilean Bone: Burned bone of sloth, horse and guanaco, associated with human bones and artifacts. Valuable in determining time of arrival of man at tip of South America. Material found in Palliaike Cave, # miles east of Mylodon. Comment: Most ancient of human samples from South America. #  #. In other words, the samples that happened to be dated are pretty old and do not help us in determining how long the giant sloth lived in South America. It would be so nice if we found a sample which at least makes it certain that Thevefs Su was a ground sloth. Pritchard's expedition was not the last. Two others were organized. Both returned empty-handed. This, of course, is not proof that there are no living ground sloths any more; large portions of South America are still poorly known. And one can always argue that it is hard to see why a plant-eater should become extinct in green South America, where there have been no climatic changes for thousands of years. There is no answer to that argument except that no living, or freshly killed, ground sloth has yet turned up. jl ft pi y Charity Certainly I see things that aren't there and don't say what my voice says -- but how can I prove that I don't have my health? with "Y ou got your health, don't you?" it touched those spots inside me. That was when I did it. Why couldn't what he said have been "The best things in life are free, buddy" or "Every dog has his day, fellow" or "If at first you don't succeed, man"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me. Not if you believe me. The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide. Dad was a compact man, small eyes, small mouth, tight clothes. He was narrow but not mean. For punishment, he locked me in a windowless room and told me to sit still until he came back. It wasn't so bad a punishment, except that when Dad closed the door, the light turned off and I was left there in the dark. Being four or five, I didn't know any better, so I thought Dad made it dark to add to my punishment. But I learned he didn't know the light went out. It came back on when he unlocked the door. Every time I told him about the light as soon as I could talk again, but he said I was lying. opened and closed the door a few times from outside. The lignt winked off and on, off and on, always shining when Dad stuck his head inside. He tried using the door from the inside, and the light stayed on, no matter how hard he slammed the door. I stayed in the dark longer for lying about the light. Alone in the dark, I wouldn't have had it so bad if it wasn't for the things that came to me. They were real to me. They never touched me, but they had a little boy. He looked the way I did in the mirror. They did unpleasant things to him. Because they were real, I talked about them as if they were real, and I almost earned a bunk in the home for retarded children until I got smart enough to keep the beasts to myself. My mother hated me. I loved her, of course. I remember her smell mixed up with flowers and cookies and winter fires. I remember she hugged me on my ninth birthday. The trouble came from the notes written in my awkward hand that she found, calling her names I didn't understand. Sometimes there were drawings. I didn't write those notes or make those drawings. My mother and father must have been glad when I was sent away to reform school after my thirteenth birthday party, the one no one came to. The reform school was nicer. There were others there who'd had it about like me. We got along. I didn't watch their shifty eyes too much, or ask them what they shifted to see. They didn't talk about my screams at night. It was home. My trouble there was that I was always being framed for stealing. I didn't take any of those things they located in my bunk. Stealing wasn't in my line. If you believe any of this at all, you'll see why it couldn't be me who did the stealing. There was reason for me to steal, if I could have got away with it. The others got money from home to buy the things they needed -- razor blades, candy, sticks of tea. I got a letter from Mom or Dad every now and then before they were killed, saying they had sent money or that it was enclosed, but somehow I never got a dime of it. When I was expelled from reform school, I left with just one idea in mind -- to get all the money I could ever use for the things I needed and the things I wanted. TT was two or three years later that I skulked into Brother Partridge's mission on Durbin Street. The preacher and half a dozen men were singing Onward Christian Soldiers in the meeting room. It was a drafty hall with varnished camp chairs. I shuffled in at the back with my suitcoat collar turned up around my stubbled jaw. I made my hand shaky as I ran it through my knotted hair. Partridge was supposed to think I was just a bum. As an inspiration, I hugged my chest to make him think I was some wino nursing a flask full of Sneaky Pete. All I had there was a piece of copper alloy tubing inside a slice of plastic hose for taking care of myself, rolling sailors and the like. Who had the price of a bottle? Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched eagle beak toward us. "Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received. Amen." Some skin-and-bones character I didn't know struggled out of his seat, amening. I could see he had a lot to be thankful for -- somewhere he had received a fix. "Brothers," Partridge went on after enjoying the interruption with a beaming smile, "you shall all be entitled to a bowl of turkey soup prepared by Sister Partridge, a generous supply of sweet rolls and dinner rolls contributed by the Early Morning Bakery of this city, and all the coffee you can drink. Let us march out to The Stars and Stripes Forever, John Philip Sousa's grand old patriotic song." I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me, scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself, "Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon, sir -- " just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter. I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school. They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through his private door. I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it? Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again to the entrance -- the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the wall beside it. The box was old and made out of some varnished wood. There was a slot in the top. There wasn't any sign anywhere around it, but you knew it wasn't a mailbox. My hand went flat on the top of the box. One finger at a time drew up and slipped into the slot. Index, fore, third, little. I put my thumb in my palm and shoved. My hand went in. There were coins inside. I scooped them up with two fingers and held them fast with the other two. Once I dropped a dime -- not a penny, milled edge -- and I started to reach for it. No, don't be greedy. I knew I would probably lose my hold on all the coins if I tried for that one. I had all the rest. It felt like about two dollars, or close to it. Then I found the bill. A neatly folded bill in the box. Somehow I knew all along it would be there.  tried to read the numbers on the bill with my fingertips, but I couldn't. It had to be a one. Who drops anything but a one into a Skid Row collection box? But still there were tourists, slummers. They might leave a fifty or even a hundred. A hundred! Yes, it felt new, crisp. It had to be a hundred. A single would be creased or worn. I pulled my hand out of the box. I tried to pull my hand out of the box. I knew what the trouble was, of course. I was in a monkey trap. The monkey reaches through the hole for the bait, and when he gets it in his hot little fist, he can't get his hand out. He's too greedy to let go, so he stays there, caught as securely as if he were caged. I was a man, not a monkey. I knew why I couldn't get my hand out. But I couldn't lose that money, especially that century bill. Calm, I ordered myself. Calm. The box was fastened to the vertical tongue-and-groove laths of the woodwork, not the wall. It was old lumber, stiffened by a hundred layers of paint since #. The paint was as thick and strong as the boards. The box was fastened fast. Six-inch spike nails, I guessed. Calmly, I flung my whole weight away from the wall. My wrist almost cracked, but there wasn't even a bend in the box. Carefully, I tried to jerk my fist straight up, to pry off the top of the box. It was as if the box had been carved out of one solid piece of timber. It wouldn't go up, down, left or right. But I kept trying. While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor inside like a chicken having its neck wrung. The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by. My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box. "This," Brother Partridge said, "is one of the most profound experiences of my life." My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me. "A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup," the preacher explained in wonderment. I nodded. "Swimming right in there with the dead duck." "Cold turkey," he corrected. "Are you scoffing at a miracle?" "People are always watching me, Brother," I said. "So now they do it even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to that." The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart to even try anything but the little things. "I may be able to help you," Brother Partridge said, "if you have faith and a conscience." "I've got something better than a conscience," I told him. garded me solemnly. "There must be something special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous intervention. But I can't imagine what." "I always get apprehended somehow, Brother," I said. "I'm pretty special." "Your name?" I had been booked and printed before. Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was substantial. "Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from the money box." I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself. I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it and put it back into the slot. As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge. We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing. The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right on talking. After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to call the cops. "Remarkable," Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take a break. "One is almost -- alyou are being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure." "Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when I was fresh out of my crib?" that time means nothing in Heaven. Do you deny the transmigration of souls?" "Well," I said, "I've had no personal experience -- " Say you don't remember. Say you don't want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!" "And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous life?" He looked at me in disbelief. "What else could it be?" "I don't know," I confessed. "I certainly haven't done anything that bad in this life." sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will lift from you." It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I shook off the dizziness of it. "By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going to give it a try!" I cried. "I believe you," Partridge said, surprised at himself. He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me. "Perhaps this will help in your atonement," he said. I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty. And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself. You know how it is. Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you. to mention so far. During the year between when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man. somebody is reason enough to get punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see. I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close together. I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even for November. Two of them, dressed like Harvard seniors, caps and striped duffer jackets, came up to the crate I was dining off. "Work inside, Jack?" the taller one asked. "Yeah," I said, chewing. "What do you do, Jack?" the fatter one asked. "Stack boxes." "Got a union card?" I shook my head. "Application?" "No," I said. "I'm just helping out during Christmas." "You're a scab, buddy," Longlegs said. "Don't you read the papers?" "I don't like comic strips," I said. They sighed. I think they hated to do it, but I was bucking the system. Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a beating. That's one thing I knew Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard noises like make an example of him and do something permanent and I squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse. I made it around a comer of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down. It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I unscrewed my eyes. There was a big man in a heavy wool overcoat and gray homburg spread on a damp centerfold from the News. There was a pick-up slip from the warehouse under the fingers of one hand, and somebody had beaten his brains out. The police figured it was part of some labor dispute, I guess, and they never got to me. I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had happened that day. Brother Partridge, I finally found a strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back. There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything to eat since the day before, it enervated me. The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses, and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still from the spoon. I washed my hands and face, smoothed my hair down, combing it with my fingers. Going over my suit with damp toweling got off a lot of the dirt. I put my collar on the outside of my jacket and creased the wings with my thumbnail so it would look more like a sports shirt. It didn't really. I still looked like a bum, but sort of a neat, non-objectionable bum. The librarian at the main desk looked sympathetically hostile, or hostilely sympathetic. "I'd like to get into the stacks, miss," I said, "and see some of the old newspapers." "Which newspapers?" the old girl asked stiffly. I thought back. I couldn't remember the exact date. "Ones for the first week in November last year." "We have the T imes microfilmed. I would have to project them for you." "I didn't want to see the Times," I said, fast. "Don't you have any newspapers on paper?" I didn't want her to see what I wanted to read up on. "We have the News, bound, for last year." I nodded. "That's the one I wanted to see." She sniffed and told me to follow her, I didn't rate a cart to my table, I guess, or else the bound papers weren't supposed to come out of the stacks. The cases of books, row after row, smelled good. Like old leather and good pipe tobacco. I had been here before. In this world, it's the man with education who makes the money. I had been reading the Funk  Wagnalls Encyclopedia. So far I knew a lot about Mark Antony, Atomic Energy, Boron, Brussels, Catapults, Demons, and Divans. I guess I had stopped to look around at some of the titles, because the busy librarian said sharply, "Follow me." I heard my voice say, "A pleasure. What about after work?" I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that. She waved a hand at the rows of bound News and left me alone with them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw. It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man, because the story was on the second page of the Nov. # edition. I started to tear the page out, then only memorized the name and home address. Somebody was sure to see me and I couldn't risk trouble just now. I stuck the book back in line and left v y the side door. T went to a dry-cleaner, not the cheapest place I knew, because I wouldn't be safe with the change from a twenty in that neighborhood. My suit was cleaned while I waited. I paid a little extra and had it mended. Funny thing about a suit -- it's almost never completely shot unless you just have it ripped off you or burned up. It wasn't exactly in style, but some rich executives wore suits out of style that they had paid a lot of money for. I remembered Fredric March's double-breasted in Executive Suite while Walter Pidgeon and the rest wore Ivy Leagues. Maybe I would look like an eccentric executive. I bought a new shirt, a good used pair of shoes, and a dime pack of single-edged razor blades. I didn't have a razor, but anybody with nerve can shave with a single-edge blade and soap and water. The clerk took my two bucks in advance and I went up to my room. I washed out my socks and underwear, took a bath, shaved and trimmed my hair and nails with the razor blade. With some soap on my finger, I scrubbed my teeth. Finally I got dressed. Everything was all right except that I didn't have a tie. They had them, a quarter a piece, where I got the shoes. It was only six blocks -- I could go back. But I didn't want to wait. I wanted to complete the picture. The razor blade sliced through the pink bath towel evenly. I cut out a nice modern-style tie, narrow, with some horizontal stripes down at the bottom. I made a tight, thin knot. It looked pretty good. I was ready to leave, so I started for the door. I went back. I had almost forgotten my luggage. The box still had three unwrapped blades in it. I pocketed it. I hefted the used blade, dulled by all the work it had done. You can run being economical into stinginess. I tossed it into the wastebasket. I had five hamburgers with, and five cups of coffee. I couldn't finish all of the French fries. "Mac," I said to the fat counterman, who looked like all fat countermen, "give me a Milwaukee beer." He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. "Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?" "Wisconsin." He didn't argue. It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it. It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head. I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours since I had slept. That was enough. I left the money on the counter for the hamburgers with and coffee and the beer. There was # left. As I passed the counterman's friend on his stool, my voice said, "I think you're yellow." He turned slowly, his jaw moving further away from his brain. I winked. "It was just a bet for me to say that to you. I won two bucks. Half of it is yours." I held out the bill to him. His paw closed over the money and punched me on the biceps. Too hard. He winked back. "It's okay." I rubbed my shoulder, marching off fast, and I counted my money. With my luck, I might have given the counterman's friend the five instead of one of the singles. But I hadn't. I now had # left. "I still think you're yellow," my voice said. It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it always did. I ran. #, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a vicious beating wit a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at # Claremont, Edgeway, had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent difficulties... I had read that a year before. The car cards on the clanking subway and the rumbling bus didn't seem nearly so interesting to me. Outside the van, a tasteful sign announced the limits of the village of Edgeway, and back inside, the monsters of my boyhood went bloomp at me. I hadn't seen anything like them in years. The slimy, scaly beasts were slithering over the newspaper holders, the ad card readers, the girl watchers as the neat little carboncopy modern homes breezed past the windows. I ignored the devils and concentrated on reading the withered, washed-out political posters on the telephone poles. My neck ached from holding it so stiff, staring out through the glass. More than that, I could feel the jabberwocks staring at me. You know how it is. You can feel a stare with the back of your neck and between your eyes. They got one brush of a gaze out of me. The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a little human being of some sort. It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark. Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really knew it all the time. They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but I really got bored with all that same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of westerns in a bar. The sunlight through the window was yellow and hot. After a time, I began to dose. The shrieks woke me up. For the first time, I could hear the shrieks of the monster's victim and listen to their obscene droolings. For the very first time in my life. Always before it had been all pantomime, like Charlie Chaplin. Now I heard the sounds of. it all. They say it's a bad sign when you start hearing voices. I nearly panicked, but I held myself in the seat and forced myself to be rational about it. My own voice was always saying things everybody could hear but which I didn't say. It wasn't any worse to be the only one who could hear other things I never said. I was as sane as I ever was. There was no doubt about that. But a new thought suddenly impressed itself on me. Whatever was punishing me for my sin was determined that I turn back before reaching # Claremont.  nounced, sending the doors hissing open and the bus cranking to a stop. I walked through the gibbering monsters, and passing the driver's seat, I heard my voice say, "Don't splatter me by starting up too soon, fat gut." The driver looked at me with round eyes. "No, sir, I won't." The monsters gave it up and stopped existing. The bus didn't start until I was halfway up the block of sandine moderns and desk-size patios. Number # was different from the other houses. It was on fire. One of the most beautiful women I've ever seen came running up to me. What black hair, what red lips, what sparkling eyes she had when I finally got up that far! "Sir," she said, "my baby brother is in there. I'd be so grateful -- " I grabbed for her. My hand went right on through. I didn't try grabbing her again. This time, I had a feeling I would feel her. I didn't want to be that bad off. I walked on, ignoring the flames shooting out of #. As I reached the patio of #, the flames stopped. It was a queer kind of break. No fadeout, just a stoppage. I took a step backward. No flames this time, but the very worst and very biggest monster of them all. Coming suddenly like that, it got to my spine and stomach, even though I was pretty used to them. I stepped away from it and it was gone. Number # was different from the other houses, and it wasn't even on fire. It was on two lots, and it had two picture windows, but only one little porch and front door. I guess even the well-to-do have a hard time finding big houses and good building sites and the right neighborhood. The trouble is so many people are well-to-do and there just aren't enough old manses to go around. I strolled up the stucco path and lifted the wrought-iron knocker, which rang a bell. The door opened and there was a girl there. She wasn't much compared to the one I put my hand through. But she was all rightbrown hair, a nice face underneath the current shades of cosmetics, no figure for a stripper, but it would pass. "You the maid?" I inquired. "I am Miss Tompkins," she said. "Oh. Any relation to Harold J. Tompkins?" "My father. He died last year." "Can I see your mother?" "Mother died a few months after Daddy did." "You'll do then." I stepped inside. Miss Tompkins seemed too surprised to protest. want to help you." "Mr. Hagle, whatever it is -- insurance -- " "That's not it exactly," I told her. "I just want to help you. I only want to do whatever you want me to do." She stared at me, her eyes moving too quickly over my face. "I've never even seen you before, have I? Why do you want to help me? How?" "What's so damned hard to understand? I just want to help. I don't have any money, but I can work and give you my pay. You want me to clean up the basement, th vprrl? Ont any painting to be done? Hell, I can even sew. Anything -- don't you understand -- I'll do anything for you." T HE girl was breathing too hard now. "Mr. Hagle, if you're hungry, I can find something -- no, I don't think there is anything. But I can give you some money to -- " "Damn it, I don't want your money! Here, I'll give you mine!" I wadded up the # cents I had left, plus one bus transfer, and put it on the top of a little bookcase next to the door. "I know it doesn't mean anything to you, but it's every penny I've got. Can't I do anything for you? Empty the garbage -- " "We have a disposal," she said automatically. "Scrub the floors." "There's a polisher in the closet." "Make the beds!" I yelled. "You don't have a machine for that, do you?" The corners of Miss Tompkins' eyes drew up and the corners of her mouth drew down. She stayed like that for a full second, then smiled a strange smile. "You -- you saw me on the street." She was breathing her words now, so softly that I could only just understand them. "You thought I was -- stacked." "To tell the truth, ma'am, you aren't so -- " "Well, sit down. Don't go away. I'll just go into the next room -- slip into something comfortable -- " "Miss Tompkins!" I grabbed hold of her. She felt real. I hoped she was. "I want nothing from you. Nothing! I only want to do something for you, anything for you. I've got to help you, can't you unI hadn't meant to tell her that, of course. She screamed and began twisting and clawing the way I knew she would as soon as I said it. But she stopped, stunned, as if I'd slapped her out of hysterics, only I'd never let go of her shoulders. She hung then, her face empty, repeating, "What? What?" Finally she began laughing and she pulled away from me so gently and naturally that I had to let go. She sank down and sat on top of my money on the little bookcase. She laughed some more into her two open hands. I stood there, not knowing what to do with myself. She looked up at me and brushed away a few tears with her fingertips. "You want to get me of! of your conscience, do you, William Hagle? God, that's a good one." She reached out and took my hand in hers. "Come along down to show you something. Afterward, if you want to -- if you really want to -- you may kill me." "Thanks," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say. chinery looked complex, with all sorts of thermostats and speedometers. "Automatic stoker?" I asked. "Time machine," she said. "You don't mean a time machine like H. G. Wells's," I said, to show her I wasn't ignorant. "Not exactly like that, but close," she answered sadly. "This has been the cause of all your trouble, William." "It has?" "Yes. This house and the ground around it are the Primary Focus area for the Hexers. The Hexers have tormented and persecuted you all your life. They got you into trouble. They made you think you were going crazy -- " "I never thought I was going crazy!" I yelled at her. "That must have made it worse," she said miserably. I thought about it. "I suppose it did. What are the Hexers? What -- for the sake of argument -- have they got against me?" "The Hexers aren't human. I suppose they are extraterrestrials. No one ever told me. Maybe they are a kind of human strain that went different. I don't really know. They want different things than we do, but they can buy some of them with money, so they can be hired. People in the future hire them to hex people in the past." "Why would anybody up ahead there with Buck Rogers want to cause me trouble? I'm dead then, aren't I?" "Yes, you must be. It's a long time into the future. But, you see, some of my relatives there want to punish you for -- it must be for chain of inheritance because he died When he did. They have money now, but they are bitter because they had to make it themselves. They can afford every luxury -- even the luxury of revenge." I suppose when you keep seeing monsters and hearing yourself say things you didn't say, you can believe unusual things easier. I believed Miss Tompkins. "It was not murder," I said. "I killed him by accident." "No matter. They would hex you if you had hit him with a car in a fog or given him the flu by sneezing in his face. I understand people are hexed all the time for things they never even knew they did. People up there have a lot of leisure, a lot of time to indulge their every irritation or hate. I think it must be decadent, the way Rome was." "What do you -- and the machine -- have to do with my hex?" I asked. "This is the Primary Focus area, I told you. It's how the Hexers get into this time hypothesis. They can't get back into this Primary itself, but they can come and go through the outer boundary. It's hard to set up a Primary Focus -- takes a tremendous drain of power. They broke through into the basement of the old house before I was born and Daddy was the first custodian of the machine. He never knew that he was helping avenge his own death. They let that slip later, after -- it happened." "Why did they come to you? Why did you help them?" She turned half away. "The custodian is well paid. My relatives preferred the salary to go to someone in the family, instead of an outsider. Daddy accepted the offer and I've carried on the job." "Paid? You were paid?" She brushed at her eyes. "Oh, not in United States currency. But -- Daddy got to be president of the store. It was set up so he could make a fortune that they could inherit. All he left was his insurance, and that went to mother. She died a few months later and some of it went to me and the rest to her relatives." "You mean my life has been like it has because some descendants of yours in the future hate me for an accident that deprived them of some money?" k' "You understand! And because I helped the Hexers they hired get to you. I was afraid you wouldn't believe me. Now" -- she stopped to exhale -- "do you want to kill me?" "No, I don't want to kill you." I walked over and squinted at the hiachine. "Could I get into the future with this thing?" "I don't know how you work the outer boundary. I think you need something else. There's an internal energy contact -- you can talk to Communications." She raced through that. "You want to kill them, don't you? The Hexers and my relatives?" "I don't want to kill anybody," I told her patiently. "I feel dirty just hearing how far some people can go for revenge. I just want them to let me alone. Why don't they kill me and get it over with?" "They haven't a license to kill. Not yet. There's legislation going on." "Listen," I said, listening to the idea coming into my head, "listen. These descendants of your mother's relatives -- they did inherit money because your father died. Maybe they feel grateful to me. Maybe they would help me. Would you help me try to talk to them?" "Yes," Miss Tompkins said, and she used a dial on the machine. It was as simple as putting through a phone call. "We really understand your situation," Mr. Grimes-Tompkins said. "But it would take quite a bit to buy off the Hexers. However, we certainly appreciate the "Couldn't you buy off the Hexers, then, with some of the money I brought to your side of the family?" I asked. "We don't appreciate it that much." "What? You aren't going to pay Miss Tompkins cried, outraged. "Look," I said, "if you had some money of mine, would you pay off the Hexers for me? You do still use money up there, don't you?" "We certainly do, young man. Just what did you have in mind?" "If I gave you authorization now to use any assets I have in your time, would it be legal?" "Declarations by temporal transmission? Yes, of course. Routine transaction." "Take any money I have and use it to pay off the Hexers. Will you do it?" "I don't see why not, since our ancestor seems to approve." Miss Tompkins regarded me solemnly. "What do you intend to "Banks are out," I said, thinking hard. "They don't let inactive accounts go on drawing interest more than twenty years, or something like that. But government bonds don't have to be converted when they mature. One bond can pile up a fantastic amount of interest for them to collect." "You have government bonds, "Not yet." Miss Tompkins stood close to me. "I have plenty of money, William. I'll give it to you. You can buy bonds in my name." "No. I'll get my own money." "Shall I destroy the machine, open another Focus -- " "No, you would just get yourself hexed too." asked. "All along, ever since I was a little girl, I've known I've been helping to torture somebody. I didn't even know your name, William, but I helped torture you -- " "Because I killed your father." " -- and I've got to make it up to you. I'll give you everything, Willian, everything." "Sure," I said, "to take me off your conscience. And if I take your offer and you get hexed, what happens to my conscience? Do we go around again -- me working my tail off to raise the dough to get you unhexed, and you buying the Hexers off me? Where would it stop? We're even right now. Let's let it go at that." now we can give to each other." She looked almost pretty then, and I wanted her the way I'd always wanted women. But I knew better. She wasn't going to get me into any trouble. "No, thanks. Good-by." I walked away from her. For the first time, I could see what my life would be like if I wasn't hexed. Now I could realize that I knew how to do things right if I was only let alone. r I I HE intern took the blood smear. He reeled off a long string of questions about diseases I wasn't allowed to have. "No," I said, "and I haven't given blood in the last thirty days." He took my sample of blood and left. I had to have eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents. They paid you twenty dollars a pint for blood here. One government bond held for centuries would pile up a fortune in interest. The smallest bond you can buy is twenty-five dollars face value, and it costs eighteen seventy-five. If I had kept that twenty, I would have had a buck and a quarter change. But if I hadn't have gotten cleaned up, the hospital might not have accepted me as a donor at all. They had had some bad experiences from old bums dying from giving too often. I only hoped I could force myself to let that bond go uncashed through the rest of my life. The intern returned, his small mustache now pointing down. "Mr. Hagle, I have some bad news for you. Very bad. I hardly know how to tell you, but -- you've got lukemia." I nodded. "That means you won't take my blood." Maybe it also meant that I would never be allowed to have eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents in one lump again as long as I lived. "No," the intern finally managed. "We can't accept your blood -- " I waved him off. "Isn't there some fund to take care of lukemia victims? Feed them, house them, send them to Florida to soak up the sun?" "Certainly there is such a fund, and you may apply, Mr. Hagle." "I'd certainly benefit a lot from that fund. Doctor, humor me. Test me again and see if I still have lukemia." He did. I didn't. "I don't understand this," the intern said, looking frightened. "Transitory lukemia? It must be a lab error." "Will you buy my blood now?" "I'm afraid as long as there is some doubt -- this must be something new." "I suppose it is," I told him. "I have all sorts of interesting symptoms." "You do?" The intern was vitally interested. "Feel free to tell me all about them." "I see and hear things." "Really?" "I've sometimes wondered." "Test me as much as you like. You'll find that in any game of chance, I score consistently far below the level of wins I should get by the law of averages. I'm psionically subnormal. And that's just the beginning." "This must be really new," the intern said, eyes shining. "It is," I assured him. "And listen, Doctor, you don't want to turn something like me over to your superiors, to leave me to the mercies of the A.M.A. This can be big, Doctor, big." to a lot of comedians, but finally it was the new guy, Biff Kelsey, that got it and made it his own. He did a thirty-hour telethon for Hagle's Disease. Things really started to roll then. Boston coughed up three hundred thousand alone. The most touching contribution came from Carrville. I plugged away on the employthe-physically-handicapped theme and was made president of the Foundation for the Treatment of Hagle's Disease. Dr. Wise (the intern) was the director. So far, I had been living soft at Cedars, but I hadn't got my hands on one red cent. I wanted to get that government bond to buy off the Hexers, but at the same time it no longer seemed so urgent. They seemed to have given up, and were just sitting back waiting for their bribe. One morning three months later, Doc Wise came worriedly into my room at the hospital. "I don't like these reports, William," he said. "They all say there's  nothing wrong with you." "It comes and it goes," I said casually. "You saw some of the times when it came." "Yes, but I'm having trouble convincing the trustees you weren't malingering. And, contrary to our expectations, no one else in the country seems to have developed Hagle's Disease." "Stop worrying, Doc. Read the Foundation's charter. You have to treat Hagle's Disease, which means you can use that money to treat any disease of mine while we draw our salaries. I must have something wrong with me." Wise shook his head. "Nothing. Not even dandruff or B.O. You are the healthiest man I have ever examined. It's unnatural." Six months afterward, I had been walking all night in the park. in the rain. I hadn't had anything to eat recently and I had fever and I began sneezing. The money was still in the bank -- no, not in my name -- I couldn't touch it; Miss Tompkins' descendants couldn't touch it -- just waiting for me to -- I started running toward the hospital. I slammed my fists against Wise's door. "Obed up, Wise. Id's be, Hagle. I god a cold. That's a disease, is'd it?" Wise threw back the door. "What did you say?" "I said 'Open up, Wise. It's me, Hagle. I've got a cold'... Never mind, Wise, never mind." U about all that. You want to know about what happened in the relief office. There's not much to tell. I picked up the check from the guy's desk and looked at it. Nine fifty-seven to buy food for two weeks. I griped that it wasn't enough -- not enough to keep alive on and save eighteen seventy-five clear in a lifetime. The slob at the desk said, "What have you got to complain about? You got your health, don't you?" That's when I slugged him and smashed up the relief office, and that's why the four cops dragged me here, and that's why I'm lying here on your couch telling you this story, Dr. Schultz. I had my health, sure, bilt I finally figured out why. If you believe any of this, you're thinking that the Hexers must have laid off me, which is why I'm healthy. I thought so too, but how would that add up? Look, I tried every way I could to raise eighteen seventy-five to buy a government bond. I never made it. I never made it because I wasn't allowed to. But I didn't know it because I'd been euchred into the Foundation for the Treatment of Hagle's Disease. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, all earmarked for one purpose only -- treating my disease -- and I haven't got any! Or maybe you're figuring the way I did, that senility is a disease, and all I have to do is wait for it to creep up on me so I can get some of that Foundation money. But the Hexers have that fixed too, I'll bet. I'm not sure, but I think I'm going to live for centuries without a sick day in my life. In other words, I'm going to live that life out as poor as I am right now! It's a fantastic story, Doctor, but you believe me, don't you? You do believe every word of it You have to, Doctor! Because a persecution complex is kind of a disease and I'd have to be treated for it Now will you let me out of this jacket so I can smoke a cigarette? After the snow job this guy handed us, what else should we give him but the freeze? Howard. Why, I'm practically in bed already. See?" And she flipped the vision switch just for a second, long enough so I could get a glimpse of a sheer negligee and feathered slippers and, well, naturally, I couldn't quite believe that she really wanted me to stay away. Nobody had made her flip that switch. I said: "Just for a minute, Tandy. One drink. A little music, maybe just one dance -- " "Howard, you're terrible." "No, dearest," I said, fast and soft and close to the phone, "I'm not terrible, I'm only very much in love. Don't say no. Don't say a word. Just close your eyes, and in ten minutes I'll be there, and -- " And then, confound them, they had to start that yapping. Bleepbleep on the phone, and then: "Attention all citizens! Stand by for orders! Your World Federal Government has proclaimed a state of unlimited emergency. All heatpump power generators in excess of eight horsepower per -- " I slammed down the phone in disgust. The lousy Feds! Yackyack on the phone lines at all hours of the day and night, no consideration for anybody. I was disgusted, and then, when I got to thinking, not so disgusted. Why not go right over? She hadn't said no; she hadn't had a chance. So I got the Bug out, locked the doors and set the thermostats, and I set out. T T isn't two miles to Tandy's place. Five years ago, even, I could make it in three or four minutes; now it takes ten. I call it a damned shame, though no one else seems to care. But I've always been more adventurous than most, and more social-minded. Jeffrey Otis wouldn't care about things like that. Ittel du Bois wouldn't even know -- his idea is to bury his nose in a drama-tape when he goes out of the house, let the Bug drive itself. But not me. I like to drive, even if you can't see anything and the autopilot is perfectly reliable. Life is for living, I say. Live it. I don't pretend to understand this scientific stuff either -- leave science to the people who like it is another thing I say. But you know how when you're in your Bug and you've set the direction-finder for somebody's place, there's this beepbeepbeepbeep when you're going right and a beep when you go off the track? It has something to do with radio, only not radio -- that's out of the question now, they say -- but with sort of telephoned messages through the magma of the Earth's core. Well, that's what it says in the manual, and I know because one day I glanced through it. Anyway. Excuse me for getting technical. But I was going along toward Tandy's place, my mind full of warm pleasures and anticipating, and suddenly the beepbeepbeep stopped and there was a sort of crystal chime and then a voice: "Attention! Operation of private vehicles is forbidden! Return to your home and listen to telephoned orders every hour on the hour!" And then the beepbeepbeep again. Why, they'd even learned how to jam the directionfinder with their confounded yapping! It was very annoying and angrily I snapped the DF off. Daring? Yes, but I have to say that I'm an excellent driver, wonderful sense of direction, hardly need the direction-finder in the first place. And anyway we were close; the thermal pointers in the nose had already picked up Tandy's temperature gradient Tandy opened the locks herself. "Howard," she said in soft surprise, clutching the black film of negligee. "You really came. Oh, naughty Howard!" "My darling!" I breathed, reaching out for her. But she dodged. "No, Howard," she said severely, "you mustn't do that. Sit down for a moment. Have one little drink. And then I'm going to have to be terribly stubborn' and send you right home, dear." "Of course," I said, because that was, after all, the rules of the game. "Just one drink, certainly." TUT, damn it, she seemed to mean it! She wasn't a bit hospitable -- I mean not really hospitable. She seemed friendly enough and she talked sweetly enough, but -- Well, for example, she sat in the positively-not chair. I can tell you a lot about the way Tandy furnished her place. There's the wing chair by the fire, and that's a bad sign because the arms are slippery and there's only roomfor one actually sitting in it. There's the love seat -- speaks for itself, doesn't it? And there's the big sofa and, best of all, the bearskin rug. But way at the other end of the scale is this perfectly straight armless cane-bottomed thing, with a Ming vase on one side of it and a shrub of some kind or other rooted in a bowl on the other, and that's where she sat. I grumbled: "I shouldn't have come at all." "What, Howard?" "I said, uh, 'I couldn't come any, uh, faster.' I mean I came as fast as I could." "I know you did, you brute," she said roguishly, and stopped the Martini-mixer. It poured us each a drink. "Now don't dawdle," she said primly. "I've got to get some sleep." "To love," I said, and sipped the top off the Martini. "Don't do that," she warned. I got up from the floor at her feet and went back to another chair. "You," she said, "are a hard man to handle, Howard dear." But she giggled. Well, you can't win them all. I finished my drink and figured I would hang around about five minutes just to show who was boss and then get back in the Bug and go home. It had been a wearing day, hours and hours with the orchids, and then listening to all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row while I had played solitaire. Frankly, I was a little sleepy after a day like that and home was where I wanted to be just then. But I heard the annunciator bell tinkle. I stared at Tandy. "My," she said prettily, "I wonder who that can be?" "Tandy!" She shrugged. "Probably someone dull. I won't answer. Now do be a good boy and -- " "Tandy! How could you?" My mind raced; there was only one conclusion. "Tandy, do you have Ittel du Bois coming here tonight? Don't lie to me!" "Howard, what a terrible thing to say. Ittel was last year." "Tell me the truth!" "I told you the truth!" And she was angry. I'd hurt her, no doubt of it. "Then it must be Jeffrey. I won't stand for it I won the toss fair and square. Why can't he wait until next year? It isn't decent. I -- " She stood up, her blue eyes smoldering. "Howard McGuiness, you'd better go before you say something I couldn't forgive." I stood my ground. "Then who is it?" "Oh, dam it!" she said, and kicked viciously at the shrub by her left foot. "See for yourself! Answer the door." S O I did. Now I know Ittel du Bois's Bug and I know Jeff Otis's. It wasn't either one of them. The vehicle outside Tandy's door parked next to mine was a very strange-looking Bug indeed. For one thing, it was only about eight feet long. A bank of infra-red lamps glowed on it, bathing it in heat. The caked ice that forms in the dead spots along the hull, behind the treads and so on melted, plopped off, turned into water and ran into the drain grille. You know how a Bug will crack and twang when it's being warmed up? They all do. This one didn't. It didn't make a sound. It was so silent that I could hear the snip-snip of Tandy's automatic load adjuster, throwing another heatpump into circuit to meet the drain of the infra-red lamps. But no sound from the Bug outside. Also it didn't have caterpillar treads. Also it had -- well, you can believe this or not -- it had windows. "You see?" said Tandy, in a voice colder than the black sky full of. stars overhead. "Now would you like to apologize to me?" "I apologize," I said in a voice that hardly got past my lips. "I -- " I stopped and swallowed. I begged, "Please, Tandy, what is it?" She lit a cigarette unsteadily. "Well, I don't rightly know. I'm kind of glad you're here, Howard," she confessed. "Maybe I shouldn't have tried to get rid of you." "Tell me!" She glanced at the Bug. "All right. I'll make it fast. I got a call from this, uh, fellow. I couldn't understand him very well. But -- " She looked at me sidewise. "I get it," I said. "You thought he might be a mark." She nodded. "And you wouldn't cut me in!" I cried angrily. "Tandy, that's downright mean! When I found old Buchmayr dead, didn't I cut you in on looting his place? Didn't I give you first pick of everything you wanted -- except heatpumps and machine patterns, of course?" "I know, dear," she said miserably, "but -- hush! He's coming out." She was looking out the window. I looked too. And then we looked at each other. That fellow out of the strange Bug, he was as strange as his vehicle. He might be a mark or he might not, but of one thing I was pretty sure -- he had huge white eyes and a serpentine frill of orange tendrils instead of hair. At once all my lethargy and weariness vanished. "Tandy," I cried, "he isn't human!" "I know," she whispered. "But don't you know what this means? He's an alien! He must come from another planet -- perhaps from another star. Tandy, this is the most important thing that ever happened to us." I thought fast. "Tell you what," I said. "You let him in while I get around the side shaft -- it's defrosted." I hurried. At the side door, I stopped and looked at her affectionately. "Dear Tandy," I said. "And you thought this was just an ordinary mark. You see? You need me." And I was off, leaving her that thought to chew on as she welcomed her visitor. stranger's Bug. Whether he was a human or a monster, I could rely on Tandy to keep him occupied, so I was very thorough, and didn't rush, and came out with a splendid supply of what seemed to be storage batteries. I couldn't quite make them out, but I was sure that power was in them somehow or other, and if there was power, the heatpump would find a way to suck it out. Those I took the opportunity of tucking away in my own Bug before I went back in Tandy's place. No use bothering her about them. She was sitting in the wing chair and the stranger was nowhere in sight. I raised my brows. She nodded. "Well," I said, "he was your guest. I won't interfere." Tandy was looking quiet, relaxed and happy. "What about the Bug?" "Oh, lots of things," I said. "Plenty of metal! And food -- a lot of food, Tandy. Of course, we'll have to go easy on it, till we find out if we can digest it, but it smells delicious. And -- " "Pumps?" she demanded. "Funny," I said. "They don't seem to use them." She scowled. "Honestly, dearest! You can see for yourself -- everything I found is piled right outside the door." "What isn't in your Bug, you mean." "Tandy!" She glowered a moment longer, then smiled like the Sun bursting through clouds on an old video tape. "No matter, Howard," she said tenderly, "we've got plenty. Let's have another Martini." "Of course." I waited and took the glass. "To love," I toasted. "And to crime. By the way, did you talk to him first?" "Talk to him?" she said crossly. "Yap, yap, on and on. He was as bad as the Feds." I got up and idly walked across the room to the light switch. "Did he say anything interesting?" "Not very. He spoke a terribly poor grade of English, to begin with. Said he learned it off old radio broadcasts, of all things. They float around forever out in space, it seems." I switched off the lights. "That better?" She nodded drowsily, got up to refill her glass, and sat down again in the love seat. "He was awfully interested in the heatpumps," she murmured. I put a tape on the player -- Tschaikowsky. Tandy is a fool for violins. "He liked them?" "Oh, in a way. He thought they were clever. But dangerous, he said." "Him and the Feds." I sat down next to her. Click-click and our individual body armor went on standby alert. At the first hostile move, it would block us off, set up a force field -- well, I think it's called a force field. "The Feds are always yapping about the pumps too. Did I tell you? They're even "Oh, Howard! That's too much." She sat up and got another drink and sat, this time, on the wide, low sofa. She giggled. "What's the matter, dear?" I asked, coming over beside her. "He was so funny. Ya-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta, all about how the heatpumps were ruining the world." "Just like the Feds."  I put my arm around her shoulders. "Just like," she agreed. "He said it was evidently extremely high technology that produced a device that took heat out of its surrounding ambient environment, but had we ever thought of what would happen when all the heat was gone?" "Crazy," I whispered into the base of her throat. "Absolutely. As though all the heat could ever be gone! Absolute zero, he called it -- said we're only eight or ten degrees from it now. That's why the snow, he said." I made a sound of polite disgust. "Yes, that's what he said. He said it wasn't just snow, it was frozen air -- oxygen and nitrogen and all those things. We've frozen the Earth solid, he said, and now it's so shiny that its libido is nearly perfect." I sat up sharply, then relaxed. "Not libido, dear. Albedo. That means it's shiny." "That's what he said. He said the Feds were right... Howard. Howard, dear. Listen to me." "Ssh," I murmured. "Did he say anything else?" "But Howard! Please! You're -- " "Ssh." She relaxed, and then in a moment giggled again. "Howard, wait. I forgot to tell you the funniest part." It was irritating, but I could afford to be patient. "What was that, dearest?" "He didn't have any personal armor!" I sat up. I couldn't help it. "What?" "None at all! Unarmored as a baby. So that proves he isn't human, doesn't it? I mean, if he can't take the simplest care of himself, he's only a kind of animal, right?" I thought. "Well, I suppose so," I said. "Good," she said, "because he's, well, in the freezer. I didn't want to waste him, Howard. And it isn't as if he was human." I thought for another second. Well, why not? You get tired of mushroom steaks, and since there hasn't been any open sky for pasturing for centuries now, that's about all there is. Now that I thought back on it, he looked kind of plump and appetizing at that. And, in any case, that was a problem for later on. I reached out idly and touched the button that controlled the last light in the room, the electric fireplace itself. "Oh," I said, pausing. "Where did he come from?" "Sorry," her muffled voice came. "I forgot to ask." and found my glass. There was a little bit left; I drained it off. Funny that the creature should bother to come down. In the old days, yes, back when Earth was full of people, you might expect aliens to come rocketing down from the stars and all that. But he'd come all the way from -- well, from wherever -- and for what? Just to make a little soup for the pot, to donate a little metal and power. It was funny, in a way. I couldn't help thinking that the Feds would have liked to have met him. Not only because he agreed with them about the pumps and so on, but because they're interested in things like that. They're very earnest types -- that's why they're issuing warnings and so on. Of course, nobody pays any attention. StillWell, there was no sense bothering my brain about that sort of stuff, was there? If the heatpumps were dangerous, nobody would have bothered to invent them, would they? Of course not. I set down my glass and switched off the fireplace. Tandy was still and warm beside me, motionless but, believe me, by no means asleep. The lead story in the next issue may surprise us as much as you. As of even date, Robert Sheckley, whose ingenious "Prospector's Special" is on display in this issue, has promised a novella (no title yet) for the February issue (on sale toward the end of November, as previously explained, because the book must come off sale before the cover date or be yanked from the shelves by the newsdealers prematurely). The odds are better than good that the Sheckley novella will I ) be delivered on time, for Sheckley warms chilled editorial hearts by meeting his deadlines, and #) will be a sparkler, for Sheckley lights glazed editorial eyes by making his themes work with freshness and resourcefulness. On the other hand, Sheckley speeds through New York traffic on a motor scooter, is addicted to sailboats, the small kind that are the first to get storm warnings, which he buoyantly ignores, and has other lethal hobbies that keep taut editorial nerves jangling... As a safeguard, therefore, we are scheduling a long novelet by Frederik yes or Sheckley no, this story will run, and it is about a plant that manufactures icicles, and for no capricious reason either, and what happens when the factory shuts down makes an entertaining, mind-prodding yarn. What happens to the rest of the issue is another story. The Sheckley and the Pohl might possibly jam out other novelets -- but allow more shorts. Or if the Sheckley is delayed for one nervous reason or another, that would cut down shorts -- but allow more novelets. Either way, it will be a good issue, especially in view of what Willy Ley exciting sub-sections of his department, which incidentally includes a puzzle that ought to enliven as many living rooms as his noted Australian Shoe Size Riddle did, not long ago. # Star Shelf J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila., # ground of the SF author, has since been poached upon by mainstream authors like Cloete, Shute and now Frank. However, Frank also has a pre-H-Bomb novel under his belt, the excellent Forbidden Area. He lives in Central Florida, making foregone his choice of locale. Survival in that region, though hard, looks too easy. Also, his prime assumption -- radiation and fallout are deadly only in or to the immediate windward of impact areas -- is open to fierce rebuttal based on continuing investigation. As a post-Bomb Swiss Family Robinson-type adventure, the story is fine, but my impression is that Frank stopped too soon 'with too little. Rating:  by Robert Sheckley. Avalon Books, N.Y., # Time Killer, the deservedly popular serial seen in these pages, the above novel would have created something of a stir. However, the plot changes engineered by the publisher have compelled Sheckley to divorce himself completely from the book. Motivations have been altered and even the roles played by the principle characters have been tampered with, so that the story is unrecognizable except in its broadest outlines. There is no doubt in my mind that Sheckley has a right to object: the yarn gained nothing and lost much in its metamorphosis. However, his superbly imaginative story of a society with a for-real Hereafter has far too much interpletely. Rating:  terion Books, N.Y., # prototype, Universe, set the pattern for interstellar stories in which several lifetimes are spent in travel. Destination is forgotten, superstition and myths prevail, and culture is subordinated to survival. English author Aldiss's ship, homebound from Procyon V, is a derelict from some ancient catastrophe, though automatic functions remain intact. Its survivors, banded into antagonistic tribes and hunting their food in hydroponic jungles that choke the passageways, remind one of C. R. Tanner's Tumithak of the Corridors of many years past. The shock ending, though sufficiently clued, is abrupt and leaves so much unanswered that it must lose a full star in rating. A pity -- it has a good deal else to add in exploring this highly provocative theme. Rating: Vi Smith. Avalon Books, N.Y., # Smith's # opus is buffed to a high luster. Action flows easily and scenes change three ways without hitch or jerk from the derelict lifeboat with its three maroonees, to the space fleet of # vessels engaged in systematic search for the above, to the flagship of an overwhelmingly superior alien battle fleet. The aliens, about to make their first contact with Earth culture, are secretly observing the rescue operation, with belligerence or peace in the balance, based on their assay of humanity. A topnotch space opera -- right up to the final half-dozen pages, at which point Smith and logic part company. Rating:  Silverberg. Gnome Press, N.Y., # called his book I Was A ThreeHundred-Y ear-Old Teenager, for this paradox is the basis of Alan Donnell's quest: due to the vagaries of the Fitzgerald Contraction, spacers are pariahs, hated for their seeming longevity. They are restricted to ghettoes by the overcrowded planet dwellers during their infrequent planet-falls, and subject to lifelong tedium and routine in space. A faster-than-light drive is an obvious must for interstellar travel if an even deeper schism is to be avoided. Donnell's quest leads him to jump ship in an attempt to rediscover the invention of a man a millenium dead. Exciting story ingredients abound, but too many happenstances and line-of-least-resistance writing steal too much of its effectiveness. Rating:  ter del Rey. Avalon Books, N.Y., # formly abrim with doom. With such working material, writing a light fantasy is a tough chore. Seemingly aware of this, del Rey plunges through his story in lickety-split fashion -- let gods and giants alike fall where they may. His yarn concerns Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, with gods and giants fated to join final combat with Earth as prize. To help swing the balance, Yankee twins of Norse descent are transported to the abode of the gods, Asgard, to augment their puny magic with modern technology. Rating:  by George O. Smith. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # taste better than enough salt, it also follows that expanding Smith's idea from a novelet does not, per se, increase its interest. This is a story that Smith evidently had a lot ,-of fun writing but that the reader will find more difficult to enjoy. The struggle of the physicist hero, barely returned from the brink of insanity, to convince his psychiatrist that Earth is suffering under alien rule, is truly frustrating. The reader is kept constantly guessing, but much of Smith's evidence and clues are so unfair that he engenders a suspension of was within hailing distance of a good yarn, comparable to his Highways in Hiding. Rating:  derson. Avalon Books, N.Y., # light-hearted farce, Virgin Planet belies its initial interest and winds up taking its theme quite seriously. The idea of a solitary male explorer landing on a true virgin planet of true virgin human females, cast away for three hundred years, promises some pretty obvious fun. Anderson has it -- as well as going into the hows and whys. Rating:  (All books in the Avalon SF series have plastic dust jackets -- excellent and practical book savers.) Alan E. Nourse. David McKay Co., Inc., N.Y., # very best tradition of youthful science adventure. The action is plentiful and quick-paced, the dialogue authentic; the science unobtrusive but well grounded; black is jet and white is alabaster. While mining in the Asteroid Belt, an ex-employee of a ruthless giant mining corporation has evidently struck a bonanza and been murdered, non-evidently, by company agents. The secret of the strike's location dies with him, though, and his twin sons and former partner rocket into the Belt for the dual purposes of revenge and re-discovery of the claim. The nature of the find and its secret location are equal surprises. Rating, for youngsters:  GY by C. W. Ceram. Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., # book is as important an archeological find as any that fill its pages. Written by the author of the fantastically successful Gods, Graves  Scholars, it contains much material from the former, but differs entirely in its uncomplicated approach to the science -- as well as overflowing with some of the most enthralling photos and reproductions to be seen between covers. Harcourt, Brace  Co., N.Y., # of the atomic scientists, this is more than that. Difficult reading at times, it still is most rewarding to the student of recent atomic history, even though this true material reads almost like fiction. Andrija Puharich. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # search, Dr. Puharich encountered the myth of the sacred mushroom, purportedly used by the ancient Egyptians and others to send the mind through time and space. Dr. Puharich's deductions from information supplied by an entranced subject are not easy to follow. Whether you will want to depends on your interest in parapsychology, its experimental techniques and conclusions. Publishing Co., Inc., N.Y., # ticles qualify under the catch-all "ray" category. SF has long outgrown its Ray Period, so the objective is no longer subjective. Reinfeld's illuminating text is complemented by liberal photographic coverage. by Roy A. Gallant. Garden City Books, N.Y., # Gallant's books has been the utter beauty of the illustrations plus a forthright text. His present book covers the Solar System planet by planet, fact by fact, very clearly and readably. Irving Adler. The John Day Co., N.Y., # sciences become more complicated, so do their tools. Often these tools take fantastic shapes -- witness the giant grid of the radio telescope -- and others would never be thought of as tools by the layman at all. Adler handles this aspect of the sciences in absorbing, understandable fashion. sophical Library, N.Y., # consciously aware that there is more to time than right now. However, the concept of geologic time was greatly foreshortened only a century back. Our longer view has been due to dating methods: radioactivity, sedimentation, chemical, astrophysical, etc. Amazingly, improved methodology has increased the age of decreased the age of man from a seventy-five thousand! Time spent in this exploration of time is time well spent. This was cornball, strictly from Squaresville -- the Mad Scientist bit -- but dig this cat's pajamas! (Excerpt from Yardley University Daily Bulletin, April #, #) Professor Herbert Claymore, head of the Physics Department, announced today that he is leaving on a brief sabbatical. During his absence, Professor Claymore's classes will be conducted by Dr. Potter. I T was quarter past eight Martinis in the little bar across the street and just down the block from Television City. This was subjective time, of course, but then Don Freeman always ran on subjective time, and didn't everybody, when you came right down to it? Right down to eight Martinis, that is? Don didn't know, but he was comers. And the big trouble right now was that there weren't any comers. Apparently Rosalie wasn't going to show up after all, and nobody else in this neon-lighted nothing was worth talking to. In just a little while, Don realized, it was going to get very drunk in here. And he'd wind up talking to the bartender again. That was bad. But going home would be still worse. Besides, you can't go home again. Thomas Wolfe had said that, and it was a pretty perceptive remark, coming from a guy who hadn't even been married. Don drained his drink and extended the empty glass. "Alms, for the love of Allah," he said. The bartender did his duty. Somebody nudged Don's shoulder and stepped on his foot, hard. "Be my guest," Don muttered, but moved down to the end of the bar. It was crowded in here -- you couldn't hear yourself drink. Of course, that was the one great advantage, wasn't it? You also couldn't hear yourself think. And if you pressed your luck (and your drinks), after a time you couldn't feel yourself think, either -- to think about Rosalie and the house and the job without feeling any pain or any remorse. Or not to think about them at all. And the time was now, or at least only a Martini or two away. Soon he'd be able to forget that Rosalie was only a two-bit chirp who'd fluttered into his cage hoping to find a perch on one of the agency's shows. He'd forget about going home, too -- going home to Beverly and Pat and Michael. Not that there was anything wrong with them, really. It was just that every second guy his age seemed to be married to a girl named Beverly (or Shirley, or Susan) and they all had two kids named Pat and Michael. A S for forgetting the job, that was the real bonus deal. Funny how he'd wanted it once -- full credit listing as executive producer on Playlights. But now that he was boss man, it was just another headache; fighting the client, fighting the network, fighting the talent and the no-talent they sent him, fighting the hacks who kept on sending him the same three lousy scripts, over and over again. There was the one about the girl recovering from a nervous breakdown who gets into a bind where she thinks she's committed a murder -- only her doctor uncovers the real killer, and so they get married. There was the one about the pilot or the racer or the gunfighter who loses his nerve until the chips are down, and then he comes through. And there was the one about the young guy who has to choose between crass commercialism or personal integrity, and guess what he does! Don hated this last script worst of all. Maybe it was because he lived it. And his blonde wife hadn't made the big renunciation speech about preferring financial poverty to spiritual poverty, and he hadn't played the climactic scene where he was supposed to walk out on the boss and turn to honest creative labor. So now he was a big man, a real live producer and everything, and he was entitled to sit in a noisy bar on his night off and order another Martini. He held out his glass to the bartender once again. "Cloud Nine," he said. Again he felt himself being shoved out of the way. Half of Television City was in here tonight -- production people, musicians, agency men, even a gaggle of actors in full makeup for night dress rehearsals. If he wanted to, he could find plenty of people to talk to. But what was the use? They were here for the same reason he was here, most of them; they had their own troubles. Some day he'd write a story about the TV industry and its eventual collapse due to internal tensions. The Fall of the House of Ulcer. But not tonight. Not right now. Because here was the drink, and maybe he'd better find himself a booth in back where he could nurse fluid all over a twenty-dollar Sulka tie. Don spotted the empty in back, floated over to it, slid in. He was already seated when he realized the booth wasrtt empty. There was an elderly man sitting across from him, nursing a beer. "Sorry," Don said. "I didn't notice -- " "Quite all right," the elderly man told him. "I don't mind company." Don eyed him, doing a quick job of type-casting. I I 'HE man was in his late fifties and looked a bit like Parker Fennelly; one of those New England characters. It wasn't a makeup job either, although he was obviously an actor escaped from rehearsal, because he was wearing a costume. He had on a black doublebreasted suit with wide lapels; a celluloid collar rode above his white shirt; a string tie twined with the ribbon of his pince-nez. "The Old Professor, eh?" Don murmured. The man raised his eyebrows. "But that's remarkable," he said. "How on Eaith did you recognize me?" "Simple." Don tapped his glass. "In vino veritas." He leaned foryou know." The man looked puzzled. "Don't mind me," Don told him. "I've just come from my meteorologist and he tells me I'm a little under the weather." "But you did recognize me -- " "Of course. How could I possibly forget old -- old -- " "Herbert Claymore." "Sure! Herb Claymore, as I live and breed! The last of the big-time spenders! What are you doing here -- the Mad Scientist bit?" The man lifted his beer glass. "Please. Not so loud." He drank slowly, then looked up. "But how could you know? I mean, you must have been a mere child when you saw me. How old are you now, might I ask?" "Thirty-four," Don told him. "Then it's utterly impossible. You wouldn't even have been born." "I was born, all right," Don said. "I can show you my navel to prove it." "You're intoxicated." "Isn't everybody? What did you come here for?" "Merely to study." "Getting up on your lines, eh? Well, don't let me stop you. I'm about ready to go, anyway." "No, please stay. I was hoping to find someone to talk to. And you intrigue me. I mean, I didn't expect anyone to recognize me." "Not recognize Herb Claymore, the man who rocked the scientific world with his achievements! They mocked you, ridiculed you, laughed you out of court. But were you discouraged? No! You forged ahead, pushing back the boundaries of discovery past Preparation H, into Preparation I, even Preparation J-" "Just who are you, sir?" "Don Freeman is the name. Or as I put it to the young ladies of my acquaintance, Don Freeman, at your service." "It isn't familiar. And yet you seem to know." "I do. I do." "Is it because of my clothing?" rON nodded. "That Hoover collar would give anybody away." "Hoover collar?" The man paused. "Ah, yes, Herbert Hoover, the chap who headed Belgian Relief during the War." "President Hoover," Don corrected. "Is he?" "Not any more. But back in # -- " "Sorry. That was after my time." "After?" "Four years. I left in '#." "Did you now? And what else is new?" "Why, everything! I just arrived, and I must confess the changes are more startling than I'd anticipated. The very ground on which the university stood is now occupied by this television installation, and -- " "Come off it, Claymore. You're laying a bomb." "I beg your pardon?" "Very unfunny. We are not amused." "I assure you, I'm quite serious." Don focused on him briefly. "This isn't a rib? You aren't a fugitive from the Guild?" "I am not a fugitive in any sense of the word, sir. I am a visitor." "You, Herbert Claymore, came here in a time machine from the year #?" "In a manner of speaking, yes." Don sighed slowly. "Then I, Don Freeman, need another drink. In a manner of speaking, God, yes!" He waved to the bartender. "The same?" the bartender inquired. "No. Switch me to a Miltown Special." He peered at his companion. "How about you?" "What is a Miltown Special?" "It's just like an ordinary Martini, only there's a tranquilizer in the olive." "Well-" "Come on. I'll bet you couldn't get one back where you came from. Why, they still had Prohibition, didn't they?" "Indeed, yes." Claymore looked up at the bartender. "The same." The bartender left "No kidding," Don muttered. "From #, eh? Just like that." "Not 'just like that' as you put it. I spent eighteen years perfecting the modus operandi. Steinmetz and Edison gave me the courtesy of a hearing, but nobody else was interested in my work." "Not even Einstein?" "You refer to Albert Einstein, the German mathematician? I never met the gentleman. You see, I haven't traveled abroad." before them and Don signed the tab. "You're serious about this gag, huh?" said Don. "Time traveling. What a ball! Why'd you come here, of all places?" "I thought the university was still in existence," Claymore explained. "Now I learn it disappeared during the -- ah -- Depression, I believe they called it." "Depression. I'm an authority on Depressions, particularly my own," Don said. "Depressions, ruts, graves. Deep stuff." "But this seems a wonderful era." "Is it? Look, I'll swap you even. You stay here, I go back to #. As long as we're kicking the routine around for laughs, I mean." "It wouldn't be fair," Claymore told him. "That was a barbaric era." "I can see you haven't read the papers," Don answered. "Maybe they don't have newsboys at the asylum." "Sir, I must ask you to -- " "All right, no offense. But anyone who likes the way things are today must be crazy. Just look at the situation -- cold war, union scandals, fallout, conformity, space race, alphabet bombs, why Johnny can't read, security, censorship, anti-segregation troubles. It's murder!" "I fail to see that it's any worse than what I left behind me," said Claymore. "In # we had the Bolshevik menace, the Teapot Dome scandal, and bootlegging. As for censorship -- what about Prohibition? What about this law down in Tennessee forbidding the teaching of evolution in the schools? Anti-segregation troubles? Haven't you heard about lynching? And as for murder, our papers are full of AI Capone." "Aw right awready," Don said. "So let's play the flip side. Have you been around long enough to notice rock-'n'-roll, Presley, the tail-fin cars, the lousy ads, the crummy movies? Will Success Spoil Frankenstein's Monster -- now I ask you!" Claymore sipped his drink. "I've heard your rock-'n'-roll, as you call it, and your Mr. Presley. But have you ever heard voh-doh-dee-oh-doh songs, or Yes, We Have No Bananas? Have you ever tried to drive a Model T over a corduroy road during a rainstorm? Do your advertising tycoons ever ask the immortal question, Why Wear a Truss? And as for motion pictures, I submit the epic productions starring Mae Murray, Gilda Gray, and the cast-of-ten-thousand dramas of Cecil B. de Mille." He smiled. "At least you enjoy the benefit of modern technology." "Sure. Air-conditioning, television, supermarkets, automatic washers. Also guided missiles, and the deadliest weapon of all, the income tax." "Which we also had." D ON drank around his olive. "So it's a Mexican standoff. But let's consider the really important things. Like the crowded housing conditions that ruin our metropolitan areas, and the gray flannel straitjackets we wear, and the women we love -- those big-busted, women we love -- those bigbusted, bleached-blonde, birdbrained beauties." "Very well." Claymore smiled. "I'll match today's housing with # tenements. Did you know that only half of the homes boasted bathtubs, and less than half had inside plumbing? I needn't say anything about our atrociously uncomfortable furniture. And as for clothing, I needn't say anything about that, either. Just look at what I'm wearing as compared to your garments." "Never mind the small talk," Don interrupted. "Let's get back to fundamentals. Namely, sex." "All right. You paint a rather alluring picture of the feminine ideal. In its place I offer you the Flapper -- thin, flat-chested, neurotically shrill and neurotically slangy, gin-drinking, affected -- " "Okay, I get the message," Don cut in. "But as long as we're playing the game, why do we have to limit ourselves to my today and your yesterday? If both the past and the present are so intolerable, why can't we hop into your merry not-so-Oldsmobile and take a joyride into the future?" "I did," Claymore said. "What?" "I said I did." He drained his glass. "This is my second stop, you might say. My first was to a time approximately thirty-five years from now." "Why didn't you stay there? Don't tell me things were just as bad?" "Judge for yourself. No Communist scare any more." "Perfect!" "It's the Conservatives they're afraid of. Consies, they call them. Advocates of go-slowism in government and business and international relations. Things need to be done. They must be done. Result -- suppression of free speech, general censorship, spy hunts. Then there's the plutonium scandal to consider, and the sub-teen delinquency problem, and the druglegging. I don't think I'll mention their popular songs, or what has happened to entertainment media. Dimensional TV can be pretty overwhelming, and of course advertising has kept pace. As for comfort -- you'd never imagine the rigors and distress of a rocket flight to the Moon." "And the women?" asked Don hopefully. with his hands. "Lovely. Average weight, two hundred pounds. They're known as Queen-sized dolls. Quite aggressive, of course, as is only natural under a matriarchy. As you can perhaps detect even from the trends of today, they control virtually all of the corporations and business enterprises, together with entertainment media and government." "Then what's the answer?" Don protested. "You mean you can't beat the game? You can't get away from it, wherever you go?" "You can't get away from yourself," Claymore declared. "That's the only answer I've learned. How you live, in any age, is up to you. The adjustments you make with your own environment." "But that's corny," said Don. "You mean horse feathers?" Claymore retorted. Don nodded. "I suppose you intend to go back to # and take up just where you left off?" "Why not? I've learned what I wanted to learn. And if you have problems, I advise you to do the same. Accept reality." "That's a lot of -- " Don hesitated. Suddenly he banged on the table. "No, it isn't! You're right, by God! Accept reality, that's the answer. Now, look. You claim you actually came here in a time machine. Do you understand what this means? proposition from word one!" He hunched forward. "Look, let's you and I get together, equal partnership. I'll handle the whole deal, do all the spadework. In two weeks we'll blast everything else off the map. I can get you the biggest publicity campaign you ever heard of -- spreads in every newspaper and magazine in the country, your choice of network time. The advertising tieup is so sweet, I don't even have to talk about it. Man from the past here today -- in person! You'll hit all the big shows! Lawrence Welk, Steve Allen, Person to Person. What an endorsement job you can do on products! Shove you out next to a # icebox and let you compare it with a new freezer, let you stand up there and break a few lousy Caruso records after you listen to the latest Fats Domino album. Get the pitch? And we'll ghost a daily column for you, the homespun philosophy bit. You're going to be big, bigger than Godfrey ever was at his peak, bigger than -- " "Sorry." Claymore stood up. "I meant what I said. I'm going back where I belong." "Now wait a minute! This kind of opportunity only comes once in a lifetime. And there's no time like the present -- " "For you, perhaps. For me, there's no time like the past." "But you said yourself it stinks." "I can adjust. And that's what I'm telling you now -- adjust to your own time, your own circumstances." Don shook his head, gazing into his empty glass. When he looked up again, Claymore was gone. It he'd ever been there. Hell, maybe it was just the drinkie. travel was wacky. And so was the comball philosophy. Make the best of things as they are. In other words, his subconscious was telling him to forget Rosalie, forget the rat race, go home to the little woman and the kids. A real lousy script ending. Well, he wouldn't buy it. He didn't have to buy it. He could sell it. Sure. That was the answer. Little old subconscious working away all the time, still alive and breathing through a snorkel-tube under the ten Martinis. It had just given him a great plot. Make a fine show. There's this old pappy-guy from the past, see? He invents this time machine gizmo and comes to the present day. At first he likes it and becomes a big celebrity, but after a while he gets so he can't stand all the phony routines. Finally they're going to put him on television, to make a big speech to the nation -- sort of a Will Rogers bit -- and a bunch of politicians have him in a bind to endorse their lousy candidate. Only he gets up and doublecrosses them by denouncing the whole act. Tells the people to return to the old rugged individualism, the homely virtues, all that jazz. Why, it was a natural, that's what it was! A natural! Don fumbled around in his pocket for his notebook. Better get this down quick before he forgot. Tomorrow he could give it to a couple of the staff boys. All they'd have to do would be to run it through the typewriter -- maybe he'd give them a third of the deal, but he'd keep the writing credit. No Time Like The Present. A great title. A great idea. And a great little thought, too. A man has to make the best of what he's got. Don started to scribble. He knew where he was and what he was doing, and right now he wouldn't trade places with anyone in the world. Anywhere, any time. (Excerpt from Yardley Univerity Daily Bulletin, April #, #) Professor Herbert Claymore, head of the Physics Department, resumed his duties today after a brief sabbatical. We have on hand, in condition that the mint might well envy, these anthologies that may have escaped your purchase but shouldn't again: The Third Galaxy Reader The Fourth Galaxy Reader Each of the above will be personally inscribed to you by editor H. L. Gold, exactly as you wish him to, in # words or less, and of course autographed by him. Five Galaxy Short Novels by F. L. Wallace, Damon Knight, James E. Gunn, J. T. McIntosh, and Theodore Sturgeon. The World that Couldn't Be  Eight Other Galaxy Novelets, and you can, if you don't put off till tomorrow, get a copy autographed by Clifford D. Simak, author of the title story, an offer that is made only to readers of this magazine. All the above are # each and may be obtained by sending your order on any sheet of paper, and check or money order, to this address: Anthology Department Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. preferably permanent , in similar capacity . IFill accept opportunity to establish own circumstances. Seven years experience. Last position terminated at request of popopening. Highest remuneration and fringe benefits; comfortable Earth-type environment. Tactical knowledge and experience absolutely essential. Highest references Being a live-wire political scientist, he needed just a single good connection... to get high-voltage power out of a hot lead ! T HE hotel clerk shook his head obstinately. "I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Blacksword is an honored guest, a friend of the management. In view of the circumstances surrounding -- " he hesitated -- "the termination of his recent position, and the enmity toward him from several sources, I am afraid we must refuse -- " The little man scrawled on a sheet of hotel stationery. "Would you please have this sent up to Mr. Blacksword? He'll understand, I think." The clerk regarded the paper dubiously. "Just 'Box #'?" The little man nodded. The clerk's eyes went over the little man's shoulder and he turned. Two men stood a couple of feet behind him. They were big fellows, both wearing guns. Union bodyguards, then. One took the piece of stationery. "I'll take this up to Mr. Blacksword myself. You will please remain here." The little man bowed and the fellow strode to the elevator. His companion stood very still, his eyes on the little man. "You needn't stare," the little man said. "I won't run away. I also haven't any bombs, guns, poisons, or whatever. I assume you have a permit for your gun? May I see it?" The fellow reached inside his jacket and handed the little man a leather case. "Ummm... Protectors Union, Local #. Assigned to Mr. G. P. Blacksword. Thank you." The little man handed back the credentials and turned away, ignoring the bodyguard. The light on the house phone winked and the clerk flipped it on. "Blacksword talking. Frisk him and send him up." "All right, Mr. Blacksword," said the clerk. The little man smiled angelically and raised his arms to shoulder level. The protector patted him thoroughly. "Clean," he said, and the little man took the elevator up. The bodyguard went with him. They met the second protector in the corridor and they flanked him as he approached the door ' to Blacksword's room. They were duly scanned by winking lights and the door opened. G. Paul Blacksword sat in a chair smoking a cigar. "Come in," he said around it, and the little man went in. Blacksword touched the stud on the arm of the chair and the door closed. The little man turned and saw that the protectors had not come in. "Alone?" he asked. "I'm not a psycho," Blacksword told him. "Just cautious." He grinned around the cigar. "You know who I am," he pointed out, "so I'm one play behind." "Keplar. A. J. Keplar." Blacksword inclined his head without rising. "Representing?" "Troy." Blacksword raised his brows. "Troy!" He turned his head to one side with a twist of his mouth. "Well! Please sit down, Mr. Keplar. You'll pardon me for not rising... I'm sure you're aware I have a bad leg." T HE man generally referred to as the Black Sword blew white clouds of cigar smoke at the ceiling. "How is it that Troy finds herself so suddenly in need of a dictator, Mr. Keplar?" "Mr. Blacksword -- " "People don't call me mister," Blacksword interrupted. "Just Blacksword. Some commentator had a brainstorm once and my name became two words. It has a lovely romantic ring which the news services like. Pardon me for interrupting, but as long as I've done so, will you join me in a drink?" "I think not, Mr. -- pardon me -- Blacksword. But please feel free to hare one yourself." Blacksword grinned. His finger had already dialed a scotch-on-therocks. The servo began making noises and the glass popped out on the tray. Blacksword picked it up negligently. "Troy has been a dictatorship for thirty-one years, Blacksword," said Keplar. "For the last seventeen years, it was under Colonel Hines, who seized power in the conventional manner, a military coup. As you may be aware from the newscasts, he died very suddenly two weeks ago. The council finds that no man on Troy is capable of taking his place. So we placed our ad." "Died very suddenly, hm? How was that?" Keplar shrugged. "Rather an unromantic end for a man of Hines' stature, I'm afraid. He suffered a heart attack." "I see. Proceed." "That about sums it up, sir. After casting about for two weeks, we of the council found no acceptable successor. It goes without saying that there were numerous candidates. One, Major General Farris, attempted to seize power. He was forestalled by the council and subsequently murdered by his own men." "The council stopped him, you say?" The little man nodded. "According a secondary control council, when without a dictator, is in the hands of the council until a replacement is found for the dictator." Blacksword nodded and sipped noisily at his scotch. "We decided to advertise," Keplar went on. "When your ad coincidentally appeared at the same time, we were curious and wrote. When we received your rather -- uh -- laconic reply, we decided to take the chance of contacting you. We had requested references, of course, but naturally we are familiar with your background." "Thank you," said Blacksword. "Recognition is very flattering, especially when one finds oneself out of a job." puffed cloudily on the cigar, and regarded Keplar. "But you're a damned liar, Keplar. I happen to know the full story. Item : Troy is on the brink of war. Item: The council felt that this Major General Farris would make a better commander in wartime than Hines. So you murdered Hines. Or had him murdered. When Major General Farris tried to take command, he was killed by the army, which remained loyal to Hines. Item: You want me very badly and placed your ad immediately after you learned of mine. "Naturally, the true circumstances are not widely known," Blacksword went on. "The people of Troy, for instance, aren't aware of the illegal intervention of the Trojan Council. For your information, you were rather sloppy, and edge. But they are inclined not to take action, provided the situation is cleared up satisfactorily. They wouldn't accomplish anything by arresting the council en masse. I'm not sure of this, of course. I have little dealings with Terra Alta Imperata. I'm merely assuming their agents are nearly as competent as mine." He smiled lazily. "Although not as well paid. "Come, Keplar," Blacksword concluded. "You didn't think I'd swallow your tale, did you? Hell's bells, I have spies and sources that make your council and its machinations look like a Boy Scout troop." Blacksword stuck the cigar back in his mouth, raised one eyebrow in the characteristic mannerism He glared amusedly at the little man from Troy. Keplar sighed and spread his hands. "A test, of course. We deliberately concocted the story I told you. If you were the man we wanted, we were sure you would know it to be a fabrication." "You're still lying!" said Blacksword. "Smoothly, though, and my compliments for that. I admire a man who thinks on his feet -- a prime requisite for salesmen, dictators and diplomats." Blacksword regarded the ceiling reminiscently. "As you no doubt know, I was a salesman when I first went to Alsace. A twentythousand-a-year salesman. I was good at thinking on my feet Reading and studying were my hobby -- I can quote you chapter and verse of Napoleon and Caesar and Lee and Arthenburg. By being a good salesman and thinking on my feet and with the aid of my hobby, I took over Alsace when they decided to try a dictatorship. I ruled as absolute dictator for seven years. Then the Alsacians decided on a democracy -- the idiots! -- and, acleft the planet. Unfortunately some fool fanatic took a shot at me. So at present I'm not only out of a job, I'm out one good leg." Blacksword looked back at Keplar, puffed and grinned. "My apologies. I hadn't intended to give a personal history. It's natural enough, I suppose. A man can't be a dictator -- or even a good salesman -- without being something of an egotist." He looked squarely into Keplar's eyes. "Just as he can't be a diplomat without being an expert liar. I think you'll admit the truth of both statements, Keplar. Your story was no test. You underestimated me. You thought I might not want to talk about Troy if I knew what really happened to your last ruler. And naturally you don't want the story to get out If someone -- someone, Keplar -- mentioned publicly that Hines was assassinated by agents of the Trojan use of its knowledge and prosecute." The ex-dictator of the planet Alsace leaned forward and pointed with his cigar. "I think we fully understand each other now. Shall we discuss terms?" Keplar sighed. "Let's," he said. r T' HE major picked up the report It was stamped "Terra Alta Imperata: top secret," and sealed. He poked the packet into an unsealer, waited for the foolproof seal to open, and took out the report marked "troy: blacksword." Page one summed up the recent death of Troy's dictator, the unsuccessful attempt by Farris to gain control, and Farris' murder by the army. There was a brief summary circumstances in the situation. The major turned to page two, read a moment, then flicked the button on his intercom. "Come in here a few minutes, Jack." The young lieutenant entered and shut the door. He saw the top secret seal and locked the door. "Sit down. I want you to hear this. Light up if you want." This reading of reports aloud to his adjutant was a habit of the major's. He felt both of them gained a more thorough understanding than by scanning and digesting the reports individually. "First a quick refresher on the general situation," the major said. "Here's one that's been boiled down to the bone. It's been abridged and digested -- umm -- seven times." The lieutenant grinned and turned his face quickly away. " 'A brief summary of the Troy -- Macedon situation,"' the major read. "'There are five planets in the Hellenic system. They are called Troy, Macedon, Monos, Deutoros and Tritos. Troy and Macedon, the innermost two, are fully inhabited. Monos, Deutoros and Tritos have never been colonized, although Monos is able to support human life. "'Tensions exist between Troy and Macedon for the following basic reasons: "'(#) They use different governmental systems, Troy being a dictatorship while Macedon is a parliamentary monarchy. "'(#) They have never been able to reach a mutually acceptable mutual trade agreement. " '(# ) They have been unable to reach a mutually acceptable agreement for exploiting the remaining three worlds of their system. " 'They have consistently demediation. a strict non-intervention policy with regard to the Hellenic system.' " The major discarded the sheet. "Now to current events," he said. He read through the first page of the report and looked up. "We know that on March # Troy advertised for a dictator, identifying number. At the same time Blacksword advertised for employment. A seeming coincidence -- but we also know that Troy placed their ad after they saw Blacksword's." "In other words, they wanted him," the lieutenant said. " turned to the report. "'On March # A. J. Keplar, Vice-Presidor of the Trojan Secondary Conv trol Council, arrived on Luna. He proceeded at once to the Hotel Starlight and was subsequently admitted to the room occupied by G. P. Blacksword, recently resigned dictator of the planet Alsace, now a democracy. " 'Blacksword and Keplar remained in conference for two hours and thirty-seven minutes. At the end of that time, Blacksword checked out, and he and Keplar, accompanied by two armed guards from the Protectors Union, took a taxi to the port. All four boarded the Trojan ship Ilium, but after a few minutes the protectors came out again and left, carrying their gunbelts. Obviously they had been discharged.' " The major looked up with a wry face. "Obviously," he said drily. "This agent loves detail. Clock-and-dagger stuff goes to your head sometimes. Ummm... 'The Ilium was immediately cleared and blasted away for Troy. Report ends.' " He picked up another. " 'The Ilium landed on Troy on March #. A. J. Keplar, Vice-Presidor -- ' etc., etc., etc. Here: 'On March # G. Paul Blacksword assumed office as dictator of Troy. His first act was to accuse Council Presidor Wood of high treason. Wood and a hired assassin were ers of the ex-dictator of Troy. In his formal charge Blacksword stated that no one else on the planet was implicated in Hines' murder. Wood and the assassin were returned to Earth under guard.'" The major looked up. "Now we happen to know, Jack, that the decision to murder Hines was voted upon by the entire council and carried unanimously. The arrest of Wood and the assassin was Blacksword's way of gaining the favor of the people of Troy. On the other hand, he had no wish to replace the entire council." "Clever fellow," the lieutenant drawled. The major smiled. "That's the very mildest way of putting it, Wood and let the matter drop. We haven't any particular desire to arrest the entire council, either. Besides, if we did that now, we'd have to take Blacksword as well." "But we have something on him," the lieutenant said, "for future reference." The major nodded and resumed reading. " 'At the same time, Blacksword advised the council of his personal preference for Keplar as Presidor. The council accordingly voted Keplar into office.'" "Sounds like a deal," said the lieutenant. "Of course. A private deal between Blacksword and Keplar, aside from the council's contract with Blacksword," the major said. "'Blacksword immediately closeted himself in an all-night session with Troy's general staff. On March # Blacksword, Keplar, and Foreign Minister Cole spaced to the planet Macedon aboard the Ilium. Reports ends.' " THE major began a new page. "'On Macedon, Blacksword, Keplar, and Cole met with Macedon's King Robert and his diplomatic staff. The meetings lasted three days. At the end of this time, the Trojan delegation returned to Troy. Immediately after their departure, King Robert called for a meeting of the Macedonian general staff. Opinion: War between Macedon and Troy immediately imminent. Report ends.' " The major flipped to a new page. "'In a world-televised speech on April #, Dictator Blacksword informed Troy that Macedon remained "insolently adamant" in its demands, and that he might be "forced to call on you, the people of Troy, to lend us your loyal sons to protect our planet against the Macedonian aggressors." The speech was followed by hotly antiMacedon demonstrations all over Troy. Opinion : Immediate war between Troy and Macedon.' " "So it's war," the lieutenant commented. "Hell, we've known that for eight years. But Blacksword's presence changes things. The probability factor of Macedon's emerging victorious was # on # March. On # April, it had dropped to #. As of today, it's minus # -- #-# in favor of Blacksword's winning. Of course that's our computer. Macedon still ranks higher on the news services -- but they don't have the information we do." The lieutenant whistled. "One man." "One man. He's that good. He gets things done, even though his methods may not be the most humane or popular. Witness Alsace. He whipped them into a-power, but they were so shocked by his methods that they voted themselves a democracy." The lieutenant nodded. "What do we do?" "We -- I'll reserve my answer for a moment, Jack, until I hear your opinion. What would you say?" The lieutenant considered the problem, weighing the factors carefully in his mind. "The differences are strictly between Troy and Macedon... no other worlds are involved... no conceivable immegrade-C planets... I'd say we do intervention unless Blacksword -- no, he's too smart. We do nothing." He looked questioningly at his superior, read the verification of his decision in the major's eyes. "Correct. This is none of our business. We let them have their war. But we do a little more than sits back and watches." The major initialed the report. "Seal this and forward it to headquarters, Jack. By the way, are you and Alice doing anything Friday night? How about some bridge over at our place?" A T least ten feet long and five feet wide, the desk was empty of paper or books or letter opener. There was a calendar on it and a cigar box and two ashtrays and a visual communicator. In one corner was a panel of buttons. The desk and the big swivel chair behind it gave the impression of bigness -- bigness and power. The man behind the desk was big, too, and it was obvious he wielded vast power, just as it was obvious he was accustomed to power and knew how to wield it. Judging from what showed above the top of the desk, he had to be at least six feet two. There was a swelling expanse of at least two feet between his shoulders. His neck was thick and the head above it massive and jowly. The face was slightly red, the hair gray-shot brown and cut crisply short. The nose was too large even for the man who wore it. His brows were bushy and dark, without the streaks of gray in his hair. Beneath them, very round, very dark brown eyes glistened and pierced like diamond drills. His hands were the biggest Gorham had ever seen, and the hairiest. The cigar smelled, like all cigars to Gorham, bad. The bearman (man-bear?) behind the desk seldom took it out of his mouth, but when he did, with two hairy fingers, its ends was a wet, thoroughly shredded pulp. As Gorham entered, the cigar jutted out of the face like a second nose. "Captain Gorham, I believe," said the big man, the cigar bobbing up and down. "Come on in and sit down, Captain. I haven't bitten anyone in years." Captain Gorham walked to the desk, hesitated, and sat. The chair on his side of the desk was a great deal smaller, its front legs shorter than the rear ones. "You'll pardon me for not rising, Captain, but as you no doubt know, I'm crippled. And if you're anything like me, you wouldn't deign to shake hands with a seated man." "Quite so," Gorham said. He crossed his legs. "That isn't true, really," the big man went on. "My, leg is quite all right. I don't rise because it gives me an advantage -- makes the other fellow feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable chair, isnit it?" "Well, I wouldn't-" "Of course it is. Purposely uncomfortable, and for the same reason. I'd offer you a cigar, Captain Gorham, but this one is so visibly distasteful to you I won't waste the effort." "I never-" "What can I do for you, Captain Gorham?" Gorham mustered himself. "Mr. Blacksword -- " "Someone should've briefed you, Captain Gorham. I'm not called mister. Blacksword suffices. My father gave it to me in one piece, erty of changing it to two words. Sorry to interrupt. Please go on." The brown eyes drilled into Gorham and he cleared his throat. Then he caught the twinkle in the eyes and took another ten seconds. "If you're quite through attempting to make me feel ill at ease, Blacksword, I'd like to talk with you a few minutes and be on my way. I have pressing duties elsewhere." Blacksword stared. Then he snatched the cigar out of his mouth and fell back in the swivel chair, laughing. Following the example set by centuries of swivel chairs, it creaked. "Well, I'll just be happy damned! My very sincere apologies, Captain -- " he broke off into laughter. "My very sincere apologies! Just a moment, will you?" He bent forward across the immense desk and activated the communicator. "Bring a comfortable chair in here, please. And -- " he looked up, one eyebrow raised -- "Captain, I realize you're on duty, but you won't force a man to drink alone, will you?" "Never. Severe breach of etiquette." "Two scotches on the rocks," Blacksword continued into the box, beaming at Gorham. "Fast." TE clicked off and leaned back' with the cigar in his mouth again. "May as well discuss the weather, Captain. The s. o. b. would probably interrupt us right in the middle of a vital sentence, anyhow." "Nice weather you're having here," Gorham remarked. "Very. Sorry I had to cut your man out of it the other day. But let's face it, Captain, he's a dishis head. "Lousiest spy I ever saw." "I'm afraid I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about," Gorham smiled. "Of course you haven't. Oh, I don't mind -- that's why I fired him from my staff ostensibly for seducing one of the girls in the kitchen. But we all understand each other; she was paid to seduce him." Captain Gorham shrugged. "Suit yourself." "My prime aim in life. That's why I'm keeping my pilot. He's such a damn fine pilot, I intend to let him continue reporting to his when he sees the new uniform I've designed for him, however. Green and blue!" Gorham glanced down at his a rather sickly grin. "Ah! I think you'll find that chair a little better, Captain Gorham. Thanks, Swahili." Blacksword took the drinks and handed one to Gorham after the captain had settled himself into the new chair. "One of my personal idiosyncrasies," Blacksword said, smacking his lips. "Always call my servants Swahili." He leaned back and rattled the ice in his glass. "I reCaptain Gorham, because I thought I'd better find out your views concerning the Troy-Macedon situation." Captain Gorham appeared to swallow with the wrong tract. "Sir?" "As far as I'm able to see, there's fere," Blacksword explained. "As far as I can see, Blacksword, you're correct," Gorham said. "You're aware of our policy." "Big brother. Shoulder to cry on. Helping hand if needed. No intervention unless someone threatens galactic security. The usual beneinformed me, but I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth." Gorham made a mental note to demand a thorough security check of his staff. "I also wanted to assure you I have absolutely no intentions of threatening anyone but the Macedonians. As a matter of fact, I'm not threatening them. They're the troublemakers here." "That's very thoughtful of you," Gorham said. "In that case, we shall go on keeping an eye on you, but remain outside the dispute. By the same token, we can't be expected to lend assistance to the defeated planet." "Oh, certainly not. But naturally Earth will. She always comes through in a pinch. It's almost worthwhile being defeated, just to let good old Earth come in and rehabilitate." Gorham smiled drily. "Surely you don't intend being defeated?" Blacksword snorted. "Captain, perhaps there's one thing more we will be very happy to know this. Ifs something your spies don't -- and won't -- know. I have absolutely no intention of being defeated, because I have absolutely no intention of fighting." r T , HE big man with the smelly cigar was ushered into the office of Vassily Kearney, President of United Earth. Noting the cigar, President Kearney delightedly lit one of his own. "Have to be very careful with these," he explained. "Diplomacy, y'know. Some people don't like cigar smoke." "That's why I haven't a reputation for diplomacy," Blacksword informed him. "That a genuine Havana?" Kearney nodded, turning the cigar lovingly between his fingers. "One of our chief exports." "How well I know," Blacksword snorted. "Cost forty dollars each on Troy." Kearney extended a humidor. "In the White House, they're free to guests," he beamed. Blacksword helped himself to a handful and stuffed them in his pockets. He carefully stubbed his own out in the guest ashtray, lit the Havana, and sent up a cloud to arouse the envy of any ancient rocket ship. Kearney stared at the mangled butt. "I'm well aware of the value of your time, President Kearney," Blacksword puffed, "and I'll try to take up very little of it. As you've probably heard, I'm now affiliated with Troy." "Oh, yes. As dictator." Blacksword looked introspective. "I just had a thought. I'm not going to fire my laundry maid. The one with the Earth accent and the pocket transmitter. She doesn't find out much and she's very nice to look at." Kearney coughed. "I -- ah -- understand Troy and Macedon are about to go to war." He sounded very unhappy. Blacksword nodded and leaned back. "Looks that way," he said. "I'm glad you brought it up. That's mainly what I wanted to discuss with you." "Yes. I suppose it's about the rehab -- " "In a way. HowM this rehabilitation business get started, anyhow?" "It's one of our oldest -- ah -- traditions," Kearney said, shaking his head regretfully. "We're the Mother Planet, you know, and somehow we've always continued the -- ah -- tradition of aiding conquered peoples get back on their feet." "I see," Blacksword sympathized. "That must cost Earth a pretty penny." "My dear fellow!" Kearney cried. "You have no idea! You should see the World Debt!" "Then you'd be most happy to avoid such expenditures whenever possible. Which explains your spies being on every inhabited planet in the Galaxy, I suppose." The President looked embarrassed. "Ah -- Mr. Blacksword -- about your -- ah -- laundry maid. We shall-" "My apologies for bringing in my household affairs," Blacksword interrupted. "What would you estimate the cost of rehabilitating, say, Troy or Macedon?" Kearney threw up his hands. "Any amount! Depending, of course, on the amount of destruction." "A real holocaust," Blacksword said with a careless wave of his hand. "Say, forty per cent destruction." Kearney groaned. "That can be avoided, Mr. President," Blacksword said. Kearney stared at him questioningly. And hopefully. "I can stave off a war. Personally. Alone. I hate to sound pompous, but I doubt seriously if anyone else could." Kearney began thanking him on behalf of all Earth. "This is rather embarrassing," he said, wearing his best embarrassed look, "but we'll need a small sum to carry it off. Without a shot being fired," he went on smoothly, as Kearney opened his mouth. "A very small sum, compared to the cost of rehabilitation. We figure "Good heavens! My dear fellow -- " "You must remember," Blacksword pressed, "that Troy is a very poor planet, but that it will be a very big war." " -- is that all it would cost?" Kearney finished. and -- " Blacksword clamped his lips together and nodded solemnly. The sales job was over. "Guaranteed: no war!" Kearney was obviously elated. But he remembered to be politic. "We'd need assurance -- " "The Secondary Control Council of Troy has authorized me to write out an agreement to the effect that, in the event of war, there'd be no rehabilitation appeal to Earth. Signed by me, as Dictator of Troy." His hand came out of his pocket with a pen and a cigar. He replaced the Havana lovingly. UOOd Overjoyed, Kearney pulled letterheads from a desk drawer. "Oh, I already have the agreement. Had to clear it with the Council before I left, of course," Blacksword explained with a winning smile. "It lacks only our signatures." "Of course," the President said. Then, "Of course!" They signed. "Now there's the matter of efficacy," Blacksword said. "I believe that in a democracy the people must be consulted on expen -- " "Not at all, not at all! Comes out of petty cash. Goes on the budget under 'defense' or 'foreign affairs' or something." He pressed a button on his desk. Ten minutes later the draft made out to Blacksword personally -- was in his hands and Kearney was saying, "It has been a pleasure, sir. Delighted." "Always glad to do business with a democracy," Blacksword said, and he left. He put a coin in the Newsbuoy on the corner and requested the current handicap on the expected war between Macedon and Troy. probability factor of Macedon emerging victorious is #, Troy's #." "Suggest you check with Earth High Command," Blacksword said, and walked on. "Ah, that Kearney drives a shrewd bargain!" At a bank six blocks away, he opened an account. The size of his initial deposit carried him into the office of the president, who called the White House for verification of White House was delighted that Blacksword was opening an account on Earth. So was the president of the Home Planet Bank and Trust Co. of Earth. "A very wise move," he was saying as Blacksword left with a checkbook. "We have been in business for one hundred and seventysix years, and in all that time we have never -- " Blacksword neither heard nor cared what the bank had not done in one hundred and seventy-six years. He limped out hurriedly. At the post office on the comer, he filled out a # check from his new book, marked it for deposit only, and mailed it to the First Planetary Bank of Luna, to the personal account of G. Paul Blacksword. The owner of the First Planetary Bank of Luna, G. Paul Blacksword, then departed for Troy. ' I 'HE lieutenant took Blacksword in to the captain, who took him in to the major, who escorted him upstairs to the Sector Colonel. "The Black Sword!" Colonel McClintock exclaimed. "Come in! Sit down! What may I do for you?" Blacksword sat down quickly and rubbed his leg. "Business call, Colonel," he growled. He took the last gratis Havana from his lips and pointed it at the colonel. "I've got a complaint to make." Colonel McClintock nodded and fitted his hands together. "I see. I've heard, of course, about Troy's disagreement with Macedon -- " "No doubt. This complaint isn't against Macedon, Colonel. It's tain T. L. Gorham, and it will mean your eagles, your career, and your pension." Colonel McClintock raised the CO ; content of the room with a whoosh. "Sir?" Blacksword leaned forward and drummed stubby fingers on McClintock's desk. "Am I correct in assuming that the -- as you put it -- disagreement between my planet and Macedon is our own business tion?" "Well, I -- Blacksword, I -- yes. And we have kept our hands off." "Perhaps so. But Captain Gorham has not. I told Captain Gorham, in my office, in strictest confidence, that I had absolutely no intention of fighting Macedon." Colonel McClintock nodded. "Captain Gorham reported that fact directly to me and I assure you, sir, the information has not left this office!" "The information has left this office, Colonel. In Gorham's fat mouth. And it did not stay there! Hold on, I'm far from through. Gorham went straight to King Robert of Macedon and dropped a hint that I was not planning to fight. I suppose he hoped Macedon would be overjoyed -- they didn't really want to fight either -- there'd be no war, and he'd get the credit. I'd judge he's bucking for your job, on the sly." "The scoundrel!" "Well," Blacksword went on, "Macedon was overjoyed, all right. So overjoyed, they immediately redoubled their offensive preparations, and completely shelved defensive plans." The colonel opened his mouth. "Dammit, I'm not through yet!" Blacksword rapped out. "This conWhether Gorham was authorized spilled the beans. And he's your man. Ten words to your superior, Colonel, and that chicken farm you've been planning for your old age will end right there -- in the planning stage. Along with your career."  He sagged slowly back in his chair. It objected squeakily. When he finally found his voice, it was scarcely less squeaky than the chair. "And -- and -- ?" Blacksword leaned back complacently. "And why have I come to you, rather than your superior? Because you and I have had no trouble to date. You can handle this easily. First, you drum GorThe colonel waited a long moment, then prompted Blacksword hopefully. "Second?" "Second," came Blacksword's voice from a billowing cloud of smoke, "since my feelings are hurt and my plan endangered, and since my feelings and my plans come high, you can assuage my deep inlars." Colonel McClintock bounced up in his chair and clamped his hands on the edge of his desk. "Why, that's nothing but black -- " " -- sword," Blacksword cut in. "Careful with your language, Colonel. My feelings might get even more hurt. What's the name of your superior, by the way?" McClintock fell back in the chair. "Well, I'll be damned!" "You'll be worse than that if you don't dig out a checkbook!" Blacksword snapped. "And sign this agreement that the check is bona fide and you won't try any nonsense such as stopping payment." He flipped the paper across the desk. "And let's have no nonsense about the money. I can name you different exigencies, any one of which will never feel a mere half There were a few words bandied as to where the co-signed agreement should be kept. Blacksword, of course, limped from Colonel McClintock's office with both check and agreement. Colonel McClintock left his office shortly after with a sick headache. Blacksword sent the check, marked deposit only, to the Home World Bank and Trust Co. of Earth, special delivery. He then wrote himself a check to the amount of # on that bank. This he marked for deposit only and dispatched, regular mail, to the First Planetary Bank of Luna. He then departed for Troy. his feet. "You what?" "You heard me," Blacksword told him. "I told Colonel McClintock you dropped a hint to Macedon that I'm not planning to fight them. To save his own skin, he wrote me a rather large check -- gency account -- and immediately set into motion proceedings for having you court-martialed. You've had it with Terra Alta Imperata, Captain Gorham." "You filthy -- I didn't -- you told him a deliberate lie, Blacksword! Why? What in the devil have I -- " "Easy on that adrenalin, Captain Gorham. Sit down. There, that's much better. I want you to hear something. It's a recording of our conversation here a couple of weeks ago." Blacksword touched, a switch. " -- to interrupt. Please go on," came Blacksword's recorded voice. "If you're quite through attempting to make me feel ill at ease, Blacksword, I'd like to talk with you a few minutes and.be on my way. I have pressing duties elsewhere." That was Gorham's caustic voice. Blacksword switched off the machine and regarded Gorham over his cigar. "Surely you don't mean that merely because of that remark, you've done all this to me?" Gorham asked incredulously. "I do. Because of that remark, plus the results of a very extensive investigation, I find I like you very much, Gorham. So I set about working out a plan to have you with me, rather than wasting your incidentally, I managed to pick up well as placing Colonel McClintock in my 'bought man' ledger." Gorham leaned forward across Blacksword's massive desk. "And what's to prevent my taking this whole story to Earth High Command headquarters?" "Nothing -- except a little adult thinking on your part. You're not it and I know it. You're damned fine Blacksword material. Please allow me to point out that Blacksword men receive ample opportunity for travel and excitement, frequent raises and bonuses, and the very best of salary. As a matter of fact, the starting figure I have in mind for you is considerably "And there's another inducement. My men and I accept bribes as a matter of course, and energetically solicit such additional emolument. All I require in return is loyalty and a closed mouth." Blacksword sat back and relit the cold cigar. He regarded Captain Gorham with a very slight smile. Gorham smiled back. "Quite a sales pitch. Only it wasn't necessary. But you knew that before you began, didn't you? I assume the at once?"  Blacksword nodded. He opened a drawer in his desk and passed a deposit voucher across the desk. It showed that the sum of # had been deposited to the account of Captain T. L. Gorham. "First six months in advance," Blacksword said. Gorham examined the slip of paper with a raised eyebrow, noted it was dated two weeks earlier, and grinned. He buttoned it into his tunic. He stood. "Gorham reporting for duty assignment, sir." - "None of that. My name is Blacksword. And we don't report that way. I have little use for the military way of doing things. Keep it sloppy." Gorham stuck his hands in his pockets. "Admitting the fact that you were absolutely sure of yourself -- and me -- what if I had refused?" "Oh, that's something I forgot to mention, Tom. You'll be watched. And the man who watches you will be watched. And -- well, I hope you won't mind, but there's the matter of the recording. This is a composite of all you said when you were here before." He flipped the switch again, and again they listened to Gorham's voice. "This will give you an idea of how we do things." "If you're quite through attempting to make me feel ill at ease, Blacksword, I'd like to talk with you a few mintues and be on my way. I have pressing duties elsewhere. Never. Severe breach of etiquette. Nice weather you're having, here. I'm afraid I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about. Suit yourself. Sir? As far as I can see, Blacksword, you're correct. You're aware of our policy. That's very thoughtful of you. In that case, we shall go on keeping an eye on you, but remain outside the dispute. By the same token, we can't be expected to lend assistance to the defeated planet. Surely you don't intend being defeated?" Gorham looked questioningly at his new employer and shrugged. Blacksword grinned. "Here's what my experts have done with it." He waved at the still-playing machine. Gorham: Surely you don't intend being defeated? Blacksword : Of course not. But I want my methods kept under glass. This is a check, Captain Gorham. It's drawn to the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. Would you consider... Gorham: Never. Severe breach of etiquette. You're aware of our policy. Blacksword: Oh, naturally. But if I were to mail this check to your bank... Gorham: Suit yourself. That's very thoughtful of you. Of course we can't be expected to go on keeping an eye on you. Blacksword: Fine. It's been a pleasure, Captain Gorham. Of course this little matter will remain strictly between the two of us. Gorham : Of course. In that case, I have pressing duties elsewhere. Nice weather you're having here. Blacksword: Ah! Good! Gorham: I'd like to be on my way. Blacksword: All right. Thank you very much, Captain Gorham. Gorham stared at him. Then he burst out laughing. "At least in this work I'll never have to worry about the wisdom of my orders or my superior's competence!" Troy under constant surveillance for signs of departing warcraft. Trojan scouts kept Macedon under constant surveillance for signs of departing warcraft. Scouts from neither planet saw any evidence of action. Scouts from both planets were greatly surprised, therefore, when they were angrily called home. The Trojans disembarked to find themselves under arrest. Their protests were answered with a very curt gesture. Their eyes followed the pointing finger. There was a satellite in the sky. No, not a satellite -- it was stationary. A large round steel thing, perched on nothing, far (a hundred miles? fifty? how big was the thing?) above their capital. They were all subsequently court-martialed for gross neglect in the line of duty. They never understood how the thing had got there. But it was Macedonian, and it ended the war before it began. The assembled members of the Secondary Control Council of Troy looked up as Dictator G. Paul Blacksword limped briskly in. "Good day, gentlemen. It would appear negotiations are the order of the day." A councilor -- Frey -- stood and leveled a finger at him. "Blacksword, we hired you as dictator for one reason -- to win the war against Macedon!" he shouted. There was loud assent. Blacksword continued to the podium. He inclined his head to the seated Keplar and leaned on the lectern a moment. Then he picked up the gavel and brought it down with a crash. The head flew across the room and rattled into a corner. He dropped the handle. "This meeting will come to order! Sergeant-at-arms, you will eject Councilor Frey unless he sits down in the next ten seconds." Blacksword regarded his watch. The councilor sat and immediately shot up his hand. Blacksword chuckled around his cigar. "Okay, okay. I heard you the first time. No need repeating. Obviously your memory needs refreshing, Councilor. You say this council hired me for one reason -- to win the war against Macedon. Mmm? All right. "One: there is no war against Macedon, and there wasn't when I was hired. Two: that's not the way my contract reads. I was employed to open trade with Macedon and patch up a share-andshare-alike policy with Macedon concerning the three unpopulated worlds of this system. That correct, Mr. Presidor?" Keplar nodded without speaking. "All right. And one thing else. This is for you personally, Councilor Frey, and to you personally, every man in this room. I demonstrated my faith when I threw in with you in the matter of Colonel Hines' murder. I remind you in passing, because you force me to, that we are all accessories after the fact in the deliberate hoodwinking of the authorities in that little matter." Frey subsided. He disdained the many exchanged looks on all sides. "Now then. There's a 'satellite' in our sky. It's a ship, a spherical ship, hovering directly over our capital. Thus it isn't a satellite. It's loaded with cobalt rockets. They're aimed at Troy. What's worse, they're aimed at Troy City -- right here, gentlemen, at us. It's a Macedonian ship and we have an ultimatum -- capitulate or go the way of all atoms. "The ship broadcast that ultimatum and clammed up. It refuses to acknowledge contact. We are unable to contact Macedon because her moon is in the way, and the ultimatum runs out before the moon's out of the way. So they deliberately planned this to negate all but personal contact. I repeat: capitulate or else. Are these facts correct, Mr. Presidor?" A. J. Keplar nodded unhappily. "All right. We have one hour and -- umm -- seven minutes. Anyone here not want to capitulate?" amount of noise in the council room. But when Blacksword banged his fist in lieu of the decapitated gavel and repeated the question, there was no answer. "Sergeant-at-arms, our men are waiting at the transmitter. Please inform them that they may go ahead and read the prepared statement I have already given them." Blacksword waved meatily at a dense cloud of smoke. "Now then. Their only demand is that I, personally and unaccompanied, go to Macedon to discuss terms. Is there any objection to that?" "So long as you agree to nothing!" Frey cried. "Gentlemen, you employed me because you wanted me. I'm an expert salesman. I guarantee you my wages against double that sum that I shall open trade with Macedon and arrive at an agreement concerning the other three worlds of this system. I guarantee it against full forfeiture of my wages. Now. As of the moment I sign the papers with Macedon, I resign as Dictator of Troy. That's the contract. My job will be done. I want my money now." The stormy Frey shouted again. "And what assurance have we that you'll carry out your duty, instead of vanishing with the money?" "Why, sir, I'm shocked. But since the thought had previously occurred to me that that thought might occur to you, I have prepared an agreement which Presidor Keplar and I shall co-sign. take over if I abscond with your funds. There are a half-dozen charges: money under false pretenses, failure to fulfill governmental contract, so forth, so on." A. J. Keplar read the mutually binding agreement aloud. He and Blacksword signed it, and Blacksword handed it to him. Councilor Frey demanded it be photocopied and filed at once. Blacksword agreed, with a rueful shake of his head. Keplar gave him his wages, a check for #. Blacksword pocketed it and winked as he shook Keplar's hand. "Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure. You will agree with me in a few days when the Macedonian ambassadors arrive. Thank you, I have a ship waiting to take me to Macedon. Oh, and Councilor Frey, it's my own ship." Blacksword tarried on Troy only long enough to special-delivery the check to the Home Planet Bank and Trust Co. of Earth, for deposit only, to write himself a check on that bank to the amount of #, and to mail it to the First Planetary Bank of Luna, for deposit only. Then he departed for Macedon. Approximately one hour later, the ever-suspicious Councilor Frey discovered the very interesting fact that the agreement Blacksword had brought to the meeting had been prepared the day before the appearance of the Macedonian warship. r X , HE ports of the Ebon Cutlass opened and disgorged two men. One was the pilot. The other, when the cigar smoke had cleared in the Macedonian air, proved to be G. Paul Blacksword, leaning lightly on a cane. A very long, very black, very chrome-trimmed limousine growled up alongside Blacksword's allegorically named ship and the chauffeur leaped out and opened the rear door. Blacksword, after a couple of words to his pilot, entered the car. "I want my ship kept clear and ready for takeoff," he said to the soldier-chauffeur. "I'll see to it, Dictator." "Fine. My pilot will remain with the ship. When I am ready to leave, I'll tolerate no folderol about delays." "I'll see to it personally, Dictator." "Thank you very much." The young soldier tooled the big car across the port to the group of waiting men. "Please start at the left and give me name, rank and serial number of those men," Blacksword said as they approached the party. "I think I remember them, but I don't want to miscall any names." "Yes, sir." Starting with General Dane and ending with twentythree-year-old King Robert II, he identified the members of the Macedonian delegation. The car drew up before the group and Blacksword was out before the chauffeur could open his own door. "King Robert!" Blacksword cried jovially. "It's certainly a pleasure to see you again!" The young monarch took Blacksword's extended hand impersonally. "Dictator Blacksword," he acknowledged, and turned to his deputation. "I'm sure you'll remember -- " Blacksword was already shaking hands down the line, calling each man by name. They were obviously surprised and impressed with his "memory." Reaching the end of the line, Blacksword swung and peered up at the sky. "It is still there, sir," General Dane told him quietly. The spherical ship bearing the Trojan coat of arms hung almqst directly above them. "So I see, so I see. Well, gentlemen, we can certainly ease ourselves of that burden at once. King Robert, have I your word that there will be no last-ditch attempts, once that warship and its bombs are removed?" "We have capitulated, sir. You have our word." "Fine. Quite sufficient, of course. Where's the transmitter?" "You cannot contact your world, Dictator. Our moon is in the way and contact will not be possible for nearly an hour." "Yes, I'm aware of that. But it won't be necessary to contact Troy. The ship is under my command, as are all things Trojan." They accompanied him, exchanging looks at his brusque affability, to the transmitting room. operator and usurped his chair. "Blacksword to Ebon Cutlass. Blacksword to Ebon Cutlass. Hey, there!" A face appeared hazily on the screen. "Battleship Ebon Cutlass to Blacksword. Battleship Ebon Cutlass to Blacksword. Commander Gorham standing by for orders, sir." The Macedonians did not understand Blacksword's chuckle. T. L. Gorham, formerly of Terra Alta Imperata, had visited Macedon only once. They recognized neither the name nor the static-distorted outline of his face on the viewscreen. "Disarm cobalt rockets and pull away from Macedon at once, Commander. Proceed according to plan." "I'm sorry, sir. You'll have to give the code word." "Cry Wolf." "Very well, Dictator." The misty face disappeared. "Shall we watch, gentlemen?" Blacksword said pleasantly, and King Robert nodded with set lips. Outside, they stared up as the spherical craft jetted fire, shivered, started to move, and vanished in a soundless rush. Blacksword did not miss the Macedonian sighs. They proceeded to the palace in two cars. Blacksword waved away suggestions that he rest, shower, eat, before they began their talks, and they trooped into the conference room. "If I am not being too impertinent, Dictator, just where was your ship -- " General Dane gestured at the sky -- "based? Our scouts reported no warcraft leaving the surface of Troy." "That must remain a military secret, at least until we are through here, General," Blacksword told him. "But it did arrive suddenly and hover directly over the capital at #:# this morning, did it not? And demand immediate surrender under pain of instant bombardment with cobalt rocket-bombs?" "It did," King Robert said. "Since there would have been needless and inhumane slaying of civilians, we chose to -- " he hesitated over the word -- "surrender." "That word is equally disagreeable to me, King Robert. Let's say 'parley' instead. There has been no war, and both our worlds want precisely the same things. It will be quite satisfactory to Troy to forget that the incident occurred. We can merely state "the two governments decided to parley without the needless horrors of war' in our press releases." The Macedonians registered surprise. "In that event, I am happy we were unable to contact Troy this morning," General Dane said. "This is a gesture on your part, sir, which we cannot fail to appreciate." "Fine. Now then. We want merely three things, gentlemen. As you know, I am fully authorized by the Secondary Control Council of Troy to present our terms, haggle if I have to, and sign the necessary papers. Shall we begin?" Blacksword glanced at his watch. "As you will," King Robert II replied. -' sword turned his head politely to Robert's left and exhaled. General Dane, seated on Robert's left, coughed surreptitiously. "Well. First, we demand nothing. Not a damned thing. I mean that. Our expenditures have been slim and we have lost nothing but a bit of face. For that loss of face, or defamation of character, or whatever you choose to term your calling us -- " Blacksword paused and frowned slightly as he quoted from memory -- " 'heartless, bloodsucking aggressors dominated by a war-mongering council and a megalomaniac dictator' -- for such cruel terms, we shall require restitution. The only way that can be made is through advertising. We are undertaking a galaxy-wide publicity campaign to clear ourselves." Blacksword drew in and blew out a white cloud at the ceiling. Still regarding the ceiling, he said, "That was unkind of you, gentlemen. 'Heartless, blood-sucking aggressors dominated by a warmongering council and a megalomaniac dictator!' I should like you to know that is untrue. I completely dominate Troy myself, and the council has merely carried my words to the people." The young Macedonian minister of defense grinned and sobered quickly, glancing about to ascertain if he'd been seen. Blacksword leered at him. "As I was saying, the public relations 'campaign. We feel it only fair that Macedon should assist us in defraying the costs. And I reiterate that that is the only payment or recompense, of any kiiid, we -- request." "And the amount?" Robert II prompted suspiciously. The chief speaker of Macedon's parliament leaned forward anxiouslyBlacksword shrugged. "We feel "That sounds reasonable in the extreme, Majesty," the chief speaker observed. "I should say!" the minister of defense exclaimed. "Agreeable," King Robert said. "I admit, Dictator, we had expected far greater demands." "I told you we demanded nothing. Mmm. I do have instructions to clear each point as we reach it, so please prepare the check now, if you will, and make it out to me. A token to take home, you understand." Young Robert had appeared to bridle at Blacksword's pushing, but the final sentence satisfied him. "This government pays its debts in cash," he said with regal pride. Blacksword nearly dropped his cigar. "I suppose that will be acceptable," he said, with a desperate attempt at unconcerned calm. The king nodded at the chief speaker, who sent his secretary arunning for the money. Blacksword leaned back with a sigh. "Now. As to Monos, Deuteros and Tritos, the three unpeopled planets of this system." r I  HE Macedonians leaned forward. Robert II narrowed his eyes. "We have drawn up an agreement concerning their exploitation," Blacksword said. He paused and peered at them over the tops of the papers he held. "Monos, which is fully equipped with oxygen atmosphere and the other requirements for human life, we wish to be colonized jointly and equally by Troy and Macedon, thus permanently uniting our two worlds, and forming, with the new world, an interplanetary triumvirate." General Dane could not restrain himself. "Excellent!" he breathed. "What will be the governmental system of the planet?" King Robert asked. "And what flag will she fly?" Blacksword nodded. "First, we propose to call her Athena. Secondly, we have designed a new coat of arms and flag -- here you are. It's a combination of the symbols of Troy and Macedon. Thirdly, we propose she be governed by a Trojan-Macedonian council for two years. At the end of that time, she is to be allowed to choose her own system. That way we won't have the -- 'Athenians' -- rebelling." "Done!" Robert snapped. He was obviously admiring the sketches of the Athenian flag and coat of arms. Blacksword had had them prepared secretly on Luna by a professional designer. This had been done twelve days after Blacksword's arrival on Troy, five months before. "Fine. As for Deutoros and Tritos, we propose that a corporation be formed -- Hellenistic Enterprises, Inc., perhaps -- for exploitation of all natural resources of the worlds. The profits will be shared #-# by Troy and Macedon. We may want to sub-contract the actual work on a percentage basis to a private concern, but that can be settled later." They gaped at him. Even the. careful King Robert lost his composure. "The board of directors, of course," Blacksword went on, glancing at his watch, "will be composed of an equal number of members of the Trojan Council and the Macedonian Parliament. I'd suggest you hire a businessman as president of the corporation." Robert II had taken advantage of the opportunity to regain his outward coolness. "Dictator Blacksword, Macedon agrees," he said quietly. "Good, good. Now here is a trade agreement we have drawn up for your approval." Blacksword handed him a sheet of paper. The monarch read it, turned it over, looked at Blacksword. Blacksword answered the unspoken question. "That's all." Robert handed the page to the minister of defense. Eyebrows peaking, he passed it to General Dane. " 'There shall be free trade among the worlds of Troy, Macedon and Athena, according to the laws set down by Earth High Command'," he read. They stared. "That's all. I think we're all falaws. And that, gentlemen, is the complete article of agreement." They continued to stare. "But-" "Is there some point which needs clarification or adjustment, Majesty?" Blacksword asked innocently. "This is all?" "Not by a long shot. There's a lot of work to be done. But this is all we need discuss now. The war did not occur, and our parley is finished. I am happy its results are so mutually satisfactory. These agreements and contracts, when hundred years. We will file them at once, of course. That way there can be no more disagreement between Macedon and Troy -- not very troublesome and expensive. And you and I, King Robert, will have the satisfaction of having created something which will endure after we are gone. Shall we sign?" They signed. They beamed the documents to photocopied and recorded. The Trojan-Macedonian alliance was irrevocably sealed, at least for the next hundred years. The Macedonians were disappointed to learn that Blacksword, five fresh one-hundred-thousanddollar bills in his pocket, must leave at once. Blacksword was sure he detected tears in the eyes of King Robert as they clasped hands. They were standing on the edge of the spaceport when Blacksword glanced up and saw the ship. It was Trojan and it bore the insignia of the Secondary Control Council and it was coming down very fast. "Gentlemen, I must hurry," he snapped, and hurled his bulk, along with cane and cigar, into the limousine. "Get me to my ship and burn the paving!" he ordered. The car hurtled across the tarmac, leaving Macedonian officials scratching their heads. As the car pulled up near the Ebon Cutlass, a man ran out of the communications room and handed a message to General Dane. He glanced up at the down-sweeping ship, then at the departing Blacksword. He disappeared into the communications room. Blacksword had both feet and his cane on the ground when the siren went off. Then the loudspeaker bawled in General Dane's voice: "Stop that man! Stop Blacksword!" Blacksword's chauffeur was stupefied for four seconds before he reached for his pistol. Four seconds was approximately three too long. Blacksword, moving twice as fast as a man his size would be expected to move, cracked the fellow alongside the head with the steel-filled cane. Blacksword dived into his ship with a last backward look -- a kaleidoscope of down-hurtling Trojan taries, running armed men, and a command car full of uniforms bearing down on the Ebon Cutlass. "Gun it!" he yelled, and slammed the port. The Ebon Cutlass roared off, leaving behind some very angry men of two different worlds with some very interesting things to say. sword to Gorham: Well done! Get our "Trojan warcraft" and our "Macedonian warcraft" and all those "cobalt bombs" back to base and remove the fake insignia. They both surrendered to each other without knowing it till too late! They are now hopelessly allied, with no possibility of war for at least a century. A bonus has been deposited to your bank account, "Commander." Blacksword Ex-Dictator Troy T A I TO : G. L. Dienes Commander-In-Chief Terra Alta Imperata Lisbon Earth Lee: The business with Macedon and Troy went off very smoothly, and we even recruited a new man. ForI note from recent news releases that both Troy and Macedon were so disgusted with the way their respective governments were hoodwinked by one Blacksword, a completely unscrupulous blackguard, they have fired the whole crew and become democracies, both of them. It is my understanding they also plan to inflict this form of government on the to-be-colonized world, Athena. Since my salary is so ridiculously inadequate, and since the Trojan affair entailed such extensive expense as travel, recruiting, etc., please forward, in the usual way, expenses totaling # post haste. No swindle sheet attached. Too busy to keep one. G. Paul Blacksword Top Secret Agent # I preferably permanent, in similar capacity. Will accept opportunity to establish own circumstances. Seven years, five months experience. Last position terminated at TSetivork.      A publishing business parable goes something like this: A publisher, irritated by there never having been a book free of errors from Gutenberg on down, hired # proofreaders to proofread the # pages of a book he was publishing. When the book had been proofread # times and finally came off the press, he held it proudly and said: "At last, the perfect book!" And then he noticed that the title on the cover was misspelled. We don't claim that the October issue of this magazine could match that exorbitant care, but we can indeed match the catastrophe on that cover. To all the letter-writers and phoners who brought to our attention the fact that "Science Fiction" and "#" appeared on the October cover, we can but explain that we went back to a plant that used to do our engraving, but which unfortunately still had our old logotype. Result: chaos. The price is surprinted on this issue, since two covers are always printed together, and since publishing economics just won't allow a magazine of this size to be manufactured at anything like #. Financially, the error hurts badly, but there is a possible plus: we can now find out if "Science Fiction" on the cover helps or hurts sales. Three new democracies join the ranks. Why in the name of heaven it is considered so damned important that every world eventually adopt Earth's governmental system, I'm sure I don't know. This observation following dealings with such men as your boss, President Kearney. It does my heart good to know that men like you are around to protect men like him from the unscrupulous machinations of men like Blacksword. But so be it, and my services remain available for proselytizing via showing them the fallacies of totalitarianism. (Continued from page #) that we are unable to comment on, except to wonder why not sons as well, and fathers? A marked copy of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph points to a feature called "The Squirrel Cage" by Douglass Welch reporting that "The dour and insolent machine which dispenses hot canned foods in the building in which we work gave away all its baked beans (with pork) and all its frankfurters and sauerkraut the other day; and our fellow-employees were jubilant. The following morning the machine which stands beside it -- a big yellow monster with a single red baleful eye -- suddenly gave up all its hot coffee, like an excited puppy. This occasioned a roar of laughter from the shallowthinking humans who saw it; but we didn't laugh. To us it seemed more sinister than funny. 'Oh, come, Welch,' we can already hear you saying, "these are merely isolated instances. These are not significant.' All right. A machine working for the federal government in Chicago has been sending checks for # to an elderly couple in Payallup, Wash. This couple is entitled to receive only # a month in old-age and survivor's-insurance payments. The machine types out the right address but persists in misspelling the last name 'Evans' as 'Evcnx.' Evans has sent back three checks and a protesting letter with each of them. And what happens? Another machine in Chicago receives the checks and reads the letters with a wide, knowing smile -- and does nothing... So the bean machine gives away beans; the coffee machine gives away coffee; and the check-writing machine gives away money. Somewhere in the United States, disguised possibly as a simple gum-dispenser on a subway station platform, is the super-brain machine which is directing all this." In this column, copyright # by King Features Syndicate Inc., and perhaps others we have not seen, Mr. Welch is a valued joiner of our outnumbered posse, for The Statistical Abstract of the United States, # edition, says George H. Scithers, Stanford, Cal., adds up # more wives than husbands in the U.S. (Widows and divorcees are tabulated separately.) And John Harper, Maple Shade, N. J., warns that everybody now alive will be gone, as far as we know, by # at the latest -- deaths -- and urges us to reproduce to offset the slaughter. We say no. Human cells are completely replaced every six years. One day all those discarded cells are going to get together and leave no room for cars, vanished or otherwise, aliens, machines, or surplus wives. in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put on the inside front cover of each with your name printed on it. Bookplate No. GF-# The umteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives states: "No books are lost by loaning except the ones you particularly want to keep." with owner's name: #-#, #-# #-S# (Add State Sales Tax, if any) Actual Size #" x #" #I Hudson Street, New York #. N. Y. What's In It For You?  Subscribing to IF has so many benefits and conveniences that we often wonder why all our reader' aren't subscribers.  Money in the bank -- just check the rates below and see what you save on the newsstand price; the longer you sign up for, the more free issues you get.  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Bookplate No. GF-# The umteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives states: "No books are lost by loaning except the ones you particularly wont to keep." imprinted wilh owner's name: I#-S#, #-# #-# (Add State Sales Tax, if any) Actual Size #" x #" No. GF-# #I Hudson Street, New York #. N. Y. I i Also Published in Great Britain. France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden by Robert Sheckley by Margaret St. Clair by James Stamers by Zenna Henderson by David E. Fisher One Planet -- One Language Cover by Emsh: Home on the Rocket Range #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. # This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Output # KW # KW # KW Distance # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, etc If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees I you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find Please send Radios postpaid (# per radio) Name... Address City State. Just published! the best of Galaxy novelets with a special plus for Galaxy readers. Edited by One look at the contents tells you that this is a 'must have' book for your permanent SF library -- Richard Matheson's One for the Books; Damon Knight's An Eye for What?; Mark Clifton's A Woman's Place; Alan E. Nourse's Brightside Crossing; F. L. Wallace's Mezzerow Loves Company; Evelyn E. Smith's Once a Greech; L. Sprague de Camp's A Gun for Dinosaur; Edgar Pangborn's The Music Man of Babylon; and -- of course -- Clifford D. Simak's The World that Couldn't Be. # M. L. Gold #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of  Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. "Lancelot Buckmeister climbed the long stairs to the observation platform of the ancient, abandoned Empire State Building and scanned the skies. There it was! The faint glint of light that was far Alpha Centauri, where humanity's last surviving hope swung in orbit around a strange new star." We did, but we sent it back to the writer with a polite note that said, "If Lancelot wanted a closer look at Alpha Centauri, he would have done better to climb the long stairs down to the ancient, abandoned #th Street Station of the directly through a few thousand miles of Earth in any case. Centaurus is a southern constellation." Plowing as we do through some the right number of serials, novellas, novelets and shorts to fill with distressing frequency. It isn't always as bad as this. Sometimes (all too often!) it is far worse. Why? What keeps writers, especially new writers, from doing enough reading in the subjects they are writing about to avoid blunders? Nothing. And yet -- the incoming manuscript heap is constantly hiphigh with rockets that won't move once they are out in space (because there's no air for them to push against), bombs "dropped" from satellites (why not "drop" a bomb from Mars?), and so -- endlessly -- on. That's an editor's job, of course, and we do our best. But there's another problem where the editor can't help much -- a much worse problem in terms of the eternal struggle to find enough first-class stories. That problem is the aridity of ideas. Here, more than anywhere else, is where writers must learn to do their homework. There are stories to be written that cannot be conjured up out of last decade's textbooks, stories that come out of today's latest fruits from the laboratories and the institutes. technical journals keep us up to date on what is new in modern science, invention and technology. What is new is a very great deal. Take only one magazine -- the current issue of Industrial Research, say -- and thumb through it. Page # tells about the astonishing new "aqua-therm" -- a "pipeless pipe" that conducts water through water in a way, and with a precision, that must be seen to be believed. It melts ice, it keeps fish alive, it helps unbury buried treasure at the bottom of the sea. Is there a story there? Probably a dozen of them -- ranging from an ice-free Arctic to, perhaps, a whole new concept of underwater farming. Page # opens up a new world of lighting based on the phenomenon of electroluminescence, including such attractive notions as "seethrough" windows that emit light on both sides without obstructing vision. Page # designs half a dozen new spacecraft for us, licking the acute problems involved in getting rid of the heat of re-entry by such diverse schemes as shedding hot sparks, "sweating," "heat-sinks" and, most provocative of all, the magneto-hydrodynamic screen which keeps ship and air from contact in the first place. It tells us that "man will orbit the Earth by the end of #" (did he? It may be happening while this issue is on the press! ) And it completes the schedule of conquering space as follows: "Land on the Moon by #; be on Mars and Venus three years later; and travel almost as fast as light, that years." That is -- Alpha Centauri before we are out of the #th century. Maybe Lancelot Buckmeister will have something to look for after all! That's only one issue of one magazine, and only the barest quick scanning of its contents. There must be many stories here; there's no way of telling, given fertile imagination and writing skill, what line on what page might produce a great new story. But the pity is that the stories won't write themselves. With about one technical graduate in four going into research, with the nation's Research #s Development spending running to hundreds laboratories are turning out material enough for all our plot-provoking needs. And science-fiction writers are the logical pipeline between the scientists and the public, as far as the interpretation (not the mere reporting) of new ideas is concerned. It is the imagination in depth of a first-rate science fiction writer that can flesh out a dry technical report and show us in human ( Continued on page #) Meeting of the Minds What mission had the Quedak been given? Even he couldn't remember any more -- but he refused to die till it was completed! T HE Quedak lay on a small hilltop and watched a slender jet of light descend through the sky. The feather-tailed jet was golden, and brighter than the sun. Poised above it was a glistening metallic object, fabricated rather than natural, hauntingly familiar. The Quedak tried to think what it was. He couldn't remember. His memories had atrophied with his functions, leaving only scattered fragments of images. He searched among them now, leafing through his brief scraps of ruined cities, dying populations, a blue-waterfilled canal, two moons, a spaceship... That was it. The descending object was a spaceship. There had been many of them during the great days of the Quedak. Those great days were over, buried forever beneath the powdery sands. Only the Quedak remained. He had life and he had a mission to perform. The driving urgency of his mission remained, even after memory and function had failed. As the Quedak watched, the spaceship dipped lower. It wobbled and side jets kicked out to straighten it. With a gentle explosion of dust, the spaceship settled tail first on the arid plain. And the Quedak, driven by the imperative Quedak mission, dragged itself painfully down from the little hilltop. Every movement was an agony. If he were a selfish creature, the Quedak would have died. But he was not selfish. Quedaks owed a duty to the universe; and that spaceship, after all the blank years, was a link to other worlds, to planets where the Quedak could live again and give his services to the native fauna. He crawled, a centimeter at a time, and wondered whether he had the strength to reach the alien spaceship before it left this dusty, dead planet. spaceship Southern Cross was bored sick with Mars. He and his men had been here for ten days. They had found no important archeological specimens, no tantalizing hints of ancient cities such as the Polaris expedition had discovered at the South Pole. Here there was nothing but sand, a few weary shrubs, and a rolling hill or two. Their biggest find so far had been three pottery shards. Jensen readjusted his oxygen booster. Over the rise of a hill he saw his two men returning. "Anything interesting?" he asked. "Just this," said engineer Vayne, holding up an inch of corroded blade without a handle. "Better than nothing," Jensen said. "How about you, Wilks?" The navigator shrugged his shoulders. "Just photographs of the landscape." "OK," Jensen said. "Dump everything into the sterilizer and let's get going." Wilks looked mournful. "Captain, one quick sweep to the north might turn up something really -- " "Not a chance," Jensen said. "Fuel, food, water, everything was calculated for a ten-day stay. That's three days longer than Polaris had. We're taking off this evening." The men nodded. They had no reason to complain. As the second to land on Mars, they were sure of a small but respectable footnote in the history books. They put their equipment through the sterilizer vent, sealed it, and climbed the ladder to the lock. Once they were inside, Vayne closed and dogged the hatch, and started to open the inside pressure door. "Hold it!" Jensen called out. "What's the matter?" "I thought I saw something on your boot," Jensen said. "Something like a big bug." Vayne quickly ran his hands down the sides of his boots. The two men circled him, examining his clothing. "Shut that inner door," the captain said. 'Wilks, did you see anything?" "Not a thing," the navigator said. "Are you sure, Cap? We haven't found anything that looks like animal or insect life here. Only a few plants." "I could have sworn I saw something," Jensen said. "Maybe I was wrong... Anyhow, we'll fumigate our clothes before we enter the ship proper. No sense taking any chance of bringing back some kind of Martian bug." The men removed their clothing and boots and stuffed them into the chute. They searched the bare steel room carefully. "Nothing here," Jensen said at last. "OK, let's go inside." Once inside the ship, they sealed off the lock and fumigated it. The Quedak, who had crept inside earlier through the partially opened pressure door, listened to the distant hiss of gas. After a while he heard the jets begin to fire. The Quedak retreated to the dark rear of the ship. He found a metal shelf and attached himself to the underside of it near the wall. After a while he felt the ship tremble. during the long, slow flight through space. He had forgotten what spaceships were like, but now memory revived briefly. He felt blazing heat and freezing cold. Adjusting to the temperature changes drained his small store of vitality, and the Quedak began to wonder if he was going to die. He refused to die. Not while there was still a possibility of accomplishing the Quedak mission. In time he felt the harsh pull of gravity, and felt the main jets firing again. The ship was coming down to its planet. tain Jensen and his men were taken to Medic Checkpoint, where they were thumped, probed and tested for any sign of disease. Their spaceship was lowered to a flatcar and taken past rows of tamination Stage One. Here the sealed outer hull was washed down with powerful cleansing sprays. By evening, the ship was taken to Decontamination Stage Two. A team of two inspectors equipped with bulky tanks and hoses undogged the hatch and entered, shutting the hatch behind them. They began at the bow, methodically spraying as they moved toward the rear. Everything seemed in order; no animals or plants, no trace of mold such as the first Luna expedition had brought back. "Do you really think this is necessary?" the assistant inspector asked. He had already requested a transfer to Flight Control. "Sure it is," the senior inspector said. "Can't tell what these ships might bring in." "I suppose so," the assistant said. "Still, a Martian whoosis wouldn't even be able to live on Earth. Would it?" "How should I know?" the senior inspector said. "I'm no botanist. Maybe they don't know, either." "Seems like a waste of -- hey!" "What is it?" the senior inspector asked. "I thought I saw something," the assistant said. "Looked a little like a palmetto bug. Over by that shelf." The senior inspector adjusted his respirator more snugly over his face and motioned to his assistant to do the same. He advanced slowly toward the shelf, unfastening a second nozzle from the pressure tank on his back. He turned it on, and a cloud of greenish gas sprayed out. "There," the senior inspector said. "That should take care of your bug." He knelt down and looked under the shelf. "Nothing here." "It was probably a shadow," the assistant said. Together they sprayed the entire interior of the ship, paying particu # lar attention to the small box of Martian artifacts. They left the gas-filled ship and dogged the hatch again. "Now what?" the assistant asked. "Now we leave the ship sealed for three days," the senior inspector said. "Then we inspect again. You find me the animal that'll live through that." T I I HE Quedak, who had been clinging to the underside of the assistant's shoe between the heel and the sole, released his hold. He watched the shadowy biped figures move away, talking in their deep, rumbling, indecipherable voices. He felt tired and unutterably lonely. But buoying him up was the thought of the Quedak mission. Only that was important. The first part of the mission was accomplished. He had landed safely on an inhabited planet. Now he needed food and drink. Then he had to have rest, a great deal of rest to restore his dormant faculties. After that he would be ready to give this world what it so obviously needed -- the cooperation possible only through the Quedak mind. He crept slowly down the shadowy yard, past the deserted hulls of spaceships. He came to a wire fence and sensed the high-voltage electricity running through it. Gauging his distance carefully, the Quedak jumped safely through one of the openings in the mesh. This was a very different section. From here the Quedak could smell water and food. He moved hastily forward, then stopped. He sensed the presence of a man. And something else. Something much more menacing. called out. He waited, his revolver in one hand, his flashlight in the other. Thieves had broken into the yards last week; they had stolen three cases of computer parts bound for Rio. Tonight he was ready for them. He walked forward, an old, keeneyed man holding his revolver in a rock-steady fist. The beam of his flashlight probed among the cargoes. The yellow light flickered along a great pile of precision machine tools for South Africa, past a water-extraction plant for Jordan and a pile of mixed goods for Rabaul. "You better come out," the watchman shouted. His flashlight probed at sacks of rice for. Shanghai and power saws for Burma. Then the beam of light stopped abruptly. "I'll be damned," the watchman said. Then he laughed. A huge and red-eyed rat was glaring into the beam of his flashlight. It had something in its jaws, something that looked like an unusually large cockroach. "Good eating," the watchman said. He holstered his revolver and continued his patrol. A large black animal had seized the Quedak, and he felt heavy jaws close over his back. He tried to fight; but, blinded by a sudden beam of yellow light, he was betrayed by total and enervating confusion. The yellow light went off. The black beast bit down hard on the Quedak's armored back. The Quedak mustered his remaining strength, and, uncoiling his long, scorpion-jointed tail, lashed out. He missed, but the black beast released him hastily. They circled each other, the Quedak hoisting his tail for a second blow, the beast unThe Quedak waited for his chance. Elation filled him. This pugnacious animal could be the first, the first on this planet to experience the Quedak mission. From this humble creature a start could be made... The beast sprang and its white teeth clicked together viciously. The Quedak moved out of the way and its barb-headed tail flashed out, fastening itself in the beast's back. The Quedak held on grimly while the beast leaped and squirmed. Setting his feet, the Quedak concentrated on the all-important task of pumping a tiny white crystal down the length of his tail and under the beast's skin. But this most important of the Quedak faculties was still dormant Unable to accomplish anything, the Quedak released his barbs, and, taking careful aim, accurately drove his sting home between the black beast's eyes. The blow, as the Quedak had known, was lethal. The Quedak took nourishment from the body of its dead foe; regretfully, for by inclination the Quedak was herbivorous. When he had finished, the Quedak knew that he was in desperate need of a long period of rest. Only after that could the full Quedak powers be regained. He crawled up and down the piles of goods in the yard, looking for a place to hide. Carefully he examined several bales. At last he reached a stack of heavy boxes. One of the boxes had a crack just large enough to admit him. The Quedak crawled inside, down the shiny, oil-slick surface of a machine, to die far end of the box. There he went into the dreamless, defenseless sleep of the Quedak, serenely trusting in what the future would bring. I r I  HE big gaff-headed schooner was pointed directly at the reefenclosed island, moving toward it with the solidity of an express train. The sails billowed under powerful gusts of the northwest breeze, and the rusty Allison-Chambers diesel rumbled beneath a teak grating. The skipper and mate stood on the bridge deck and watched the reef approach. "Anything yet?" the skipper asked. He was a stocky, balding man with a perpetual frown on his face. He had been sailing his schooner among the uncharted shoals and reefs of the Southwest Pacific for twenty-five years. He frowned because his old ship was not insurable. His deck cargo, however, was insured. Some of it had come all the way from Ogdensville, that transshipment center in the desert where spaceships landed. "Not a thing," the mate said. He was watching the dazzling white wall of coral, looking for the gleam of blue that would reveal the narrow pass to the inner lagoon. This was his first trip to the Solomon Islands. A former television repairman in Sydney before he got the wanderlust, the mate wondered if the skipper had gone crazy and planned a spectacular suicide against the reef. "Still nothing!" he shouted. "Shoals ahead!" "I'll take it," the skipper said to the helmsman. He gripped the wheel and watched the unbroken face on the reef. "Nothing," the mate said. "Skipper, we'd better come about." "Not if we're going to get through the pass," the skipper said. He was beginning to get worried. But he had promised to deliver goods to the American treasure-hunters on this island, and the skipper's word was his bond. He had picked up the cargo in Rabaul and made his usual stops at the settlements on New Georgia and Malaita. When he finished here, he could look forward to a thousand-mile run to New Caledonia. "There it is!" the mate shouted. A thin slit of blue had appeared in the coral wall. They were less than thirty yards from it now, and the old schooner was making close to eight knots. A S the ship entered the pass, the skipper threw the wheel hard over. The schooner spun on its keel. Coral flashed by on either side, close enough to touch. There was a metallic shriek as an upper mainmast spreader snagged and came free. Then they were in the pass, bucking a six-knot current. The mate pushed the diesel to full throttle, then sprang back to help the skipper wrestle with the wheel. Under sail and power the schooner forged through the pass, scraped by an outcropping to port, and came onto the placid surface of the lagoon. The skipper mopped his forehead with a large blue bandanna. "Very snug work," he said. "Snug!" the mate cried. He turned away, and the skipper smiled a brief smile. They slid past a small ketch riding at anchor. The native hands took down sail and the schooner nosed up to a rickety pier that jutted out from the beach. Lines were made fast to palm trees. From the fringe of jungle above the beach a white man came down, walking briskly in the noonday heat. He was very tall and thin, with knobby knees and elbows. The fierce Melanesian sun had burned out but not tanned him, and his nose and cheekbones were peeling. His horn-rimmed glasses had broken at the hinge and been repaired with a piece of tape. He looked eager, boyish, and curiously naive. One hell-of-a-looking treasurehunter, the mate thought. "Glad to see you!" the man called out. "We'd about given you up for lost." "Not likely," the skipper said. "Mr. Sorensen, I'd like you to meet "Glad to meet you, Professor," the mate said. "I'm not a professor," Sorensen said, "but thanks anyhow." 'Where are the others?" the skipper asked. "Out in the jungle," Sorensen said. "All except Drake, and he'll be down here shortly. You'll stay a while, won't you?" "Only to unload," the skipper said. "Have to catch the tide out of here. How's the treasure-hunting?" "We've done a lot of digging," Sorensen said. "We still have our hopes." "But no doubloons yet?" the skipper asked. "No pieces of eight?" "Not a damned one," Sorensen said wearily. "Did you bring the newspapers, Skipper?" "That I did," Sorenson replied. "They're in the cabin. Did you hear about that second spaceship going to Mars?" "Heard about it on the short wave," Sorensen said. "It didn't bring back much, did it?" "Practically nothing. Still, just think of it. T wo spaceships to Mars, and I hear they're getting ready to put one on Venus." The three men looked around them and grinned. Well," the skipper said, "I guess maybe the space age hasn't reached the Southwest Pacific yet. And it certainly hasn't gotten to this place. Come on, let's unload the cargo." Vuanu, southernmost of the Solomons, almost in the Louisade Archipelago. It was a fair-sized volcanic island, almost twenty miles long and several wide. Once it had supported half a dozen native villages. But the population had begun to decline after the depredations of the blackbirders in the #s. Then a measles epidemic wiped out almost all the rest, and the survivors emigrated to New Georia. A ship-watcher had been stationed here during the Second World War, but no ships had come this way. The Japanese invasion had poured across New Guinea and the upper Solomons, and further north through Micronesia. At the end of the war Vuanu was still deserted. It was not made into a bird sanctuary like Canton Island, or a cable station like Christmas Island, or a refueling point like CocosKeeling. No one even wanted to explode alphabet bombs on it. Vuanu was a worthless, humid, jungle-covered piece of land, free to anyone who wanted it. ager of a chain of liquor stores in California, decided he wanted it. Sorensen's hobby was treasurehunting. He had looked for Lafitte's treasure in Louisiana and Texas, and for the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona. He had found neither. His luck had been better on the wreck-strewn Gulf coast, and on an expedition to Dagger Cay in the Caribbean he had found a double handful of Spanish coins in a rotting canvas bag. The coins were worth about three thousands dollars. The expedition had cost very much more, but Sorensen felt amply repaid. For many years he had been interested in the Spanish treasure galleon Santa Teresa. Contemporary accounts told how the ship, heavily laden with bullion, sailed from Manila in #. The clumsy ship, caught in a storm, had run off to the south and been wrecked. Eighteen survivors managed to get ashore with the treasure. They buried it, and set sail for the Phillipines in the ship's pinnacle. Two of them were alive when the boat reached Manila. The treasure island was tentatively identified as one of the Solomons. But which one? No one knew. Treasure-hunters looked for the cache on Bougainville and Buka. There was a rumor about it on Malaita, and even Ontong Java received an expedition. But no treasure was recovered. Sorensen, researching the problem thoroughly, decided that the Santa Teresa had sailed completely through the Solomons, almost to the Louisades. The ship must have escaped destruction until it crashed into the reef at Vuanu. His desire to search for the treasure might have remained only a dream if he hadn't met Dan Drake. Drake was also an amateur treasure-hunter. More important, he owned a fifty-five-foot Hanna ketch. Over an evening's drinks the Vuanu expedition was born. Additional members were recruited. Drake's ketch was put into seagoing condition, equipment and money saved or gathered. Several other possible treasure sites in the Southwest Pacific were researched. Finally, vacation time was synchronized and the expedition got under way. They had put in three months' work on Vuanu already. Their morale was high, in spite of inevitable conflicts between members. This schooner, bringing in supplies from Sydney and Rabaul, was the last civilized contact they would have for another six months. " pervised, the crew of the schooner unloaded the cargo. He didn't want any of the equipment, some of it shipped over six thousand miles, to be broken now. No replacements were possible; whatever they didn't have, they would  have to do without. He breathed out in relief when the last crate, containing a metals detector, was safely hoisted over the side and put on the beach above the highwater mark. There was something odd about that box. He examined it and found a quarter-sized hole in one end. It had not been properly sealed. Dan Drake, the co-manager of the expedition, joined him. "Whaf s wrong?" Drake asked. "Hole in that crate," Sorensen said. "Salt water might have gotten in. We'll be in tough shape if this detector doesn't work." Drake nodded. "We better open it and see." He was a short, deeply tanned, broad-chested man with close-cropped black hair and a straggly mustache. He wore an old yachting cap jammed down over his eyes, giving his face a tough bulldog look. He pulled a big screwdriver from his belt and inserted it into the crack. "Wait a moment," Sorensen said. "Let's get it up to the camp first. Easier to carry the crate than something packed in grease." "Right," Drake said. "Take the other end." The camp was built in a clearing a hundred yards from the beach, on the site of an abandoned native village. They had been able to rethatch several huts, and there was an old copra shed with a galvanized iron roof where they stored their supplies. Here they got the benefit of any breeze from the sea. Beyond the clearing, the graygreen jungle sprang up like a solid wall. Sorensen and Drake set the case down. The skipper, who had accompanied them with the newspapers, looked around at the bleak huts and shook his head. "Would you like a drink, Skipper?" Sorensen asked. "Afraid we can't offer any ice." "A drink would be fine," the skipper said. He wondered what drove men to a godforsaken place like this in search of imaginary Spanish treasure. Sorensen went into one of the huts and brought out a bottle of Scotch and a tin cup. Drake had taken out his screwdriver and was vigorously ripping boards off the crate. "How does it look?" Sorensen asked. "It's OK," Drake said, gently lifting out the metals detector. "Heavily greased. Doesn't seem like there was any damage -- " He jumped back. The skipper had come forward and stamped down heavily on the sand. "What's the matter?" Sorensen asked. "Looked like a scorpion," the skipper said. "Damned thing crawled right out of your crate there. Might have bit you." gotten used to the presence of an infinite number of insects during his three months on Vuanu. Another bug more or less didn't seem to make much difference. "Another drink?" he asked. "Can't do it," the skipper said regretfully. "I'd better get started. All your party healthy?" "All healthy so far," Sorensen said. He smiled. "Except for some bad cases of gold fever." "You'll never find gold in this place," the skipper said seriously. "I'll look in on you in about six months. Good luck." After shaking hands, the skipper went down to the beach and boarded his ship. As the first pink flush of sunset touched the sky, the schooner was under way. Sorensen and Drake watched it negotiate the pass. For a few minutes its masts were visible above the reef. Then they had dipped below the horizon. "That's that," Drake said. "Us crazy American treasure-hunters are alone again." "You don't think he suspected anything?" Sorensen asked. "Definitely not. As far as he's concerned, we're just crackpots." Grinning, they looked back at their camp. Under the copra shed was nearly fifty thousand dollars worth of gold and silver bullion, dug out of the jungle and carefully reburied. They had located a part of the Santa Teresa treasure during their first month on the island. There was every indication of more to come. Since they had no legal title to the land, the expedition was not eager to let the news get out. Once it was known, every gold-hungry vagabond from Perth to Papeete would be heading to Vuanu. "The boy'll be in soon," Drake said. "Let's get some stew going." "Right," Sorensen said. He took a few steps and stopped. "That's funny." "What is?" "That scorpion the skipper squashed. It's gone." "Maybe he missed it," Drake said. "Or maybe he just pushed it down into the sand. What difference does it make?" "None, I guess," Sorensen said. II through the jungle with a longhandled spade on his shoulder, sucking reflectively on a piece of candy. It was the first he'd had in weeks, and he was enjoying it to the utmost. He was in very good spirits. The schooner yesterday had brought in not only machinery and replacement parts, but also candy, cigarettes and food. He had eaten scrambled eggs this morning, and real bacon. The expedition was becoming almost civilized. Something rustled in the bushes near him. He marched on, ignoring it. He was a lean, sandy-haired man, amiable and slouching, with pale blue eyes and an unprepossessing manner. He felt very lucky to have been taken on the expedition. His gas station didn't put him on a financial par with the others, and he hadn't been able to put up a full share of the money. He still felt guilty about that. He had been accepted because he was an eager and indefatigable treasure-hunter with a good knowledge of jungle ways. Equally important, he was a skilled radio operator and repairman. He had kept the transmitter on the ketch in working condition in spite of salt water and mildew. He could pay his full share now, of course. But now, when they were practically rich, didn't really count. He wished there were some way he could -- There was that rustle in the bushes again. Eakins stopped and waited. The bushes trembled. And out stepped a mouse. Eakins was amazed. The mice on this island, like most wild animal life, were terrified of man. Although they feasted off the refuse of the camp when the rats didn't get it first -- they carefully avoided any contact with humans. "You better get yourself home," Eakins said to the mouse. The mouse stared at him. He stared back. It was a pretty little mouse, no more than four or five inches long, and colored a light tawny brown. It didn't seem afraid. "So long, mouse," Eakins said. "I got work to do." He shifted his spade to the other shoulder and turned to go. As he turned, he caught a flash of brown out of the corner of his eye. Instinctively he ducked. The mouse whirled past him, turned, and gathered itself for another leap. "Mouse, are you out of your head?" Eakins asked. The mouse bared its tiny teeth and sprang. Eakins knocked it aside. "Now get the hell out of here," he said. He was beginning to wonder if the rodent was crazy. Did it have rabies, perhaps? The mouse gathered itself for another charge. Eakins lifted the spade off his shoulders and waited. When the mouse sprang, he met it with a carefully timed blow. Then carefully, regretfully, he battered it to death. "Can't have rabid mice running around," he said. But the mouse hadn't seemed rabid; it had just seemed very determined. Eakins scratched his head. Now what, he wondered, had gotten into that little mouse? In the camp that evening, Eakins' story was greeted with hoots of laughter. It was just like Eakins to be attacked by a mouse. Several men suggested that he go armed in case the mouse's family wanted revenge. Eakins just smiled sheepishly. T WO days later, Sorensen and AI Cable were finishing up a morning's hard work at Site #, two miles from the camp. The metals detector had shown marked activity at this spot. They were seven feet down and nothing had been produced yet except a high mound of yellow-brown earth. "That detector must be wrong," Cable said, wiping his face wearily. He was a big, pinkish man. He had sweated off twenty pounds on Vuanu, picked up a bad case of prickly heat, and had enough treasure-hunting to last him a lifetime. He wished he were back in Baltimore taking care of his used-car agency. He didn't hesitate to say so, often and loudly. He was one member who had not worked out well. "Nothing wrong with the detector," Sorensen said. "Trouble is, we're digging in swampy ground. The cache must have sunk." "It's probably a hundred feet down," Cable said, stabbing angrily at the gluey mud. "Nope," Sorensen said. "There's volcanic rock under us, no more than twenty feet down." "Twenty feet? We should have a bulldozer." "Might be costly bringing one in," Sorensen said mildly. "Come on, Al, let's get back to camp." Sorensen helped Cable out of the excavation. They cleaned off their tools and started toward the narrow path leading back to the camp. They stopped abruptly. A large, ugly bird had stepped out of the brush. It was standing on the path, blocking their way. "What in hell is that?" Cable asked. "A cassowary," Sorensen said. "Well, let's boot it out of the way and get going." "Take it easy," Sorensen said. "If anyone does any booting, it'll be the bird. Back away slowly." The cassowary was nearly five feet high, a black-feathered ostrichlike bird standing erect on powerful legs. Each of its feet was threetoed, and the toes curved into heavy talons. It had a yellowish, bony head and short, useless wings. tle colored red, green, and purple. "It is dangerous?" Cable asked. Sorensen nodded. "Natives on New Guinea have been kicked to death by those birds." "Why haven't we seen it before?" Cable asked. "They're usually very shy," Sorensen said. "They stay as far from people as they can." "This one sure isn't shy," Cable said, as the cassowary took a step toward them. "Can we run?" "The bird can run a lot faster," Sorensen said. "I don't suppose you have a gun with you?" "Of course not. There's been nothing to shoot." their spades like spears. The brush crackled and an anteater emerged. It was followed by a wild pig. The three beasts converged on the men, backing them toward the dense wall of the jungle. "They're herding us," Cable said, his voice going shrill. "Take it easy," Sorensen said. "The cassowary is the only one we have to watch out for." "Aren't anteaters dangerous?" "Only to ants." "The hell you say," Cable said. "Bill, the animals on this island have gone crazy. Remember Eakins' mouse?" "I remember it," Sorensen said. They had reached the far edge of the clearing. The beasts were in front of them, still advancing, with the cassowary in the center. Behind them lay the jungle -- and whatever they were being herded toward. "We'll have to make a break for it," Sorensen said. "That damned bird is blocking the trail." "We'll have to knock him over," Sorensen said. 'Watch out for his feet. Let's go!" They raced toward the cassowary, swinging their spades. The cassowary hesitated, unable to make up its mind between targets. Then it turned toward Cable and its right leg lashed out. The partially deflected blow sounded like the flat of a meat cleaver against a side of beef. Cable grunted and collapsed, clutching his ribs. Sorensen stabbed, and the honed edge of his spade nearly severed the cassowary's head from its body. The wild pig and the anteater were coming at him now. He flailed with his spade, driving them back. Then, with a strength he hadn't known he possessed, he stooped, lifted Cable across his shoulders and ran down the path. A quarter of a mile down he had to stop, completely out of breath. There were no sounds behind him. The other animals were apparently not following. He went back to the wounded man. Cable had begun to recover consciousness. He was able to walk, half-supported by Sorensen. When they reached the camp, Sorensen called everybody in for a meeting. He counted heads while Eakins taped up Cable's side. Only one man was missing. "Where's Drake?" Sorensen asked. "He's across the island at North Beach, fishing," said Tom Recetich. "Want me to get him?" Sorensen hesitated. Finally he said, "No. I'd better explain what we're up against. Then we'll issue the guns. Then we'll try to find Drake." "Man, what's going on?" Recetich asked. Sorensen began to explain what had happened at Site #. tant part of the expedition's food and there was no work Drake liked better. At first he had gone out with face mask and spear gun. But the sharks in this corner of the world were numerous, hungry and aggressive. So, regretfully, he had given up skin diving and set out handlines on the leeward side of the island. The lines were out now, and Drake lay in the shade of a palm tree, half asleep, his big forearms folded over his chest. His dog, Oro, was prowling the beach in search of hermit crabs. Oro was a goodnatured mutt, part airdale, part terrier, part unknown. He was growling at something now. "Leave the crabs alone," Drake called out. "You'll just get nipped again." Oro was still growling. Drake rolled over and saw that the dog was standing stiff-legged over a large insect. It looked like some kind of scorpion. "Oro, leave that blasted -- " Before Drake could move, the insect sprang. It landed on Oro's neck and the jointed tail whipped out. Oro yelped once. Drake was on his feet instantly. He swatted at the bug, but it jumped off the dog's neck and scuttled into the brush. "Take it easy, old boy," Drake said. "That's a nasty-looking wound. Might be poisoned. I better open it up." He held the panting dog firmly and drew his boat knife. He had operated on the dog for snake bite in Central America, and in the Adirondacks he had held him down and pulled porcupine quills out of his mouth with a pair of pliers. The dog always knew he was being helped. He never struggled. This time, the dog bit. "Oro!" Drake grabbed the dog at the jaw hinge with his free hand. He brought pressure to bear, paralyzing the muscles, forcing the dog's jaws open. He pulled his hand out and flung the dog away. Oro rolled to his feet and advanced on him again. "Stand!" Drake shouted. The dog kept coming, edging around to get between the ocean and the man. Turning, Drake saw the bug emerge from the jungle and creep toward him. His dog had circled around and was trying to drive him toward the bug. Drake didn't know what was going on, and he decided he'd better not stay to find out. He picked up his knife and threw it at the bug. He missed. The bug was almost within jumping distance. Drake ran toward the ocean. When Oro tried to intercept him, he kicked the dog out of the way and plunged into the water. He began to swim around the island to the camp, hoping he'd make It before the sharks got him. Ill A T the camp, rifles and revolvers were hastily wiped clean of cosmoline and passed around. Binoculars were taken out and adjusted. Cartridges were divided up, and the supply of knives, machetes and hatchets quickly disappeared. The expedition's two walkie-talkies were unpacked, and the men prepared to move out in search of Drake. Then they saw him, swimming vigorously around the edge of the island. He waded ashore, tired but uninjured. He and the others put their information together and reached some unhappy conclusions. "Do you mean to say," Cable demanded, "that a bug is doing all this?" "It looks that way," Sorensen said. "We have to assume that it's able to exercise some kind of thought control. Maybe hypnotic or telepathic." "It has to sting first," Drake said. "That's what it did with Oro." "I just can't imagine a scorpion doing all that," Recetich said. "It's not a scorpion," Drake said. "I saw it close up. It's got a tail like a scorpion, but its head is damn near four times as big, and its body is different. Up close, it doesn't look like anything you ever saw before." "Do you think it's native to this island?" asked Monty Byrnes, a treasure-seeker from Indianapolis. "I doubt it," Drake said. "If it is, why did it leave us and the animals alone for three months?" "That's right," Sorensen said. "All our troubles began just after the schooner came. The schooner must have brought it from somewhere... Hey!" "What is it?" Drake asked. "Remember that scorpion the skipper tried to squash? It came out of the detector crate. Do you think it could be the same one?" Drake shrugged his shoulders. "Could be. Seems to me our problem right now isn't finding out where it came from. We have to figure out what to do about it." "If it can control animals," Byrnes said, "I wonder if it can control men." moved into a circle near the copra shed, and while they talked they watched the jungle for any sign of insect or animal life. Sorensen said, "We'd better radio for help." "If we do that," Recetich said, "somebody's going to find out about the Santa Teresa treasure. We'll be overrun in no time." "Maybe so," Sorensen said. "But at the worst, we've cleared expenses. We've even made a small profit." "And if we don't get help," Drake said, "we may be in no condition to take anything out of here." "The problem isn't as bad as all that," Byrnes said. "We've got guns. We can take care of the animals." "You haven't seen the bug yet," Drake said. "We'll squash it." "That won't be easy," Drake said. "It's faster than hell. And how are you going to squash it if it comes into your hut some night while you're asleep? We could post guards and they wouldn't even see the thing." Brynes shuddered involuntarily. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Maybe we'd better radio for help." Eakins stood up. "Well, gents," he said, "I guess that means me. I just hope the batteries on the ketch are up to charge." "It'll be dangerous going out there," Drake said. "We'll draw lots." Eakins was amused. "We will? How many of you can operate a transmitter?" Drake said, "I can." "No offense meant," Eakins said, "but you don't operate that set of yours worth a damn. You don't even know Morse for key transmission. And can you fix the set if it goes out?" "No," Drake said. But the whole thing is too risky. We all should go" Eakins shook his head. "Safest thing all around is if you cover me from the beach. That bug probably hasn't thought about the ketch yet." Eakins stuck a tool kit in his pocket and strapped one of the camp's walkie-talkies over his shoulder. He handed the other one to Sorensen. He hurried down the beach past the launch and pushed the small dinghy into the water. The men of the expedition spread out, their rifles ready. Eakins got into the dinghy and started rowing across the quiet lagoon. They saw him tie up to the ketch and pause a moment, looking around. Then he climbed aboard. Quickly he slid back the hatch and went inside. "Everything all right?" Sorensen asked. "No trouble yet," Eakins said, his voice sounding thin and sharp over the walkie-talkie. "I'm at the transmitter now, turning it on. It needs a couple of minutes to warm up." Drake nudged Sorensen. "Look over there." On the reef, almost hidden by the ketch, something was moving. Using binoculars, Sorensen could see three big gray rats slipping into the water. They began swimming toward the ketch. "Start firing!" Sorensen said. "Eakins, get out of there!" "I've got the transmitter going," Eakins said. "I just need a couple of minutes more to get a message off." es around the swimming rats. One was hit; the other two managed to put the ketch between them and the riflemen. Studying the reef with his binoculars, Sorensen saw an anteater cross the reef and splash into the water. It was followed by a wild pig. There was a crackle of static from the walkie-talkie. Sorensen called, "Eakins, have you got that message off?" "Haven't sent it," Eakins called back. "Listen, Bill. We mustn't send any messages! That bug wants -- " He stopped abruptly. "What is it?" Sorensen asked. "What's happening?" Eakins had appeared on deck, still holding the walkie-talkie. He was backing toward the stern. "Hermit crabs," he said. "They climbed up the anchor line. I'm going to swim to shore." "Don't do it," Sorensen said. "Gotta do it," Eakins said. "They'll probably follow me. All of you come out here and get that transmitter. Bring it ashore." Through his binoculars, Sorensen could see a solid gray carpet of hermit crabs crawling down the deck and waterways of the ketch. Eakins jumped into the water. He swam furiously toward shore, and Sorensen saw the rats turn and follow him. Hermit crabs swarmed off the boat, and the wild pig and the anteater paddled after him, trying to head him off before he reached the beach. "Come on," Sorensen said. "I don't know what Eakins figured out, but we better get that transmitter while we have a chance." They ran down the beach and put the launch into the water. Two hundred yards away, Eakins had reached the far edge of the beach with the animals in close pursuit. He broke into the jungle, still clinging to his walkie-talkie. "Eakins?" Sorensen asked into the walkie-talkie. "I'm all right," Eakins said, panting hard for air. "Get that transmitter, and don't forget the batteries!" The men boarded the ketch. Working furiously, they ripped the transmitter off its bulkhead and dragged it up the companionway steps. Drake came last, carrying a twelve-volt battery. He went down again and brought up a second battery. He hesitated a moment, then went below for a third time. "Drake!" Sorensen shouted. "Quit holding us up!" Drake reappeared, carrying the ketch's two radio direction finders and the compass. He handed them down and jumped into the launch. "OK," he said. "Let's go." Sorensen was tryin to re-establish contact with Eakins on the walkie-talkie, but all he could hear was static. Then, as the launch grounded on the beach, he heard Eakins' voice. "I'm surrounded," he said, very quietly. "I guess I'll have to see what Mr. Bug wants. Maybe I can swat him first, though." There was a long silence. Then Eakins said, "It's coming toward me now. Drake was right. It sure isn't like any bug I've ever seen. I'm going to swat hell out of -- " They heard him scream, more in surprise than pain. Sorensen said, "Eakins, can you hear me? Where are you? Can we help?" "It sure is fast," Eakins said, his voice conversational again. "Fastest damned bug I've ever seen. Jumped on my neck, stung me and jumped off again." "How do you feel?" Sorensen asked. "Fine," Eakins said. "Hardly felt the sting." "Where is the bug now?" "Back in the bush." "The animals?" "They went away. You know," Eakins said, "maybe this thing doesn't work on humans. Maybe -- "  "What?" Sorensen asked. "What's I happening now?" There was a long silence. Then i Eakins' voice, low-pitched and calm, came over the walkie-talkie, j "We'll speak with you again later," Eakins said. "We must take consultation now and decide what to do with you." "Eakins!" There was no answer from the other end of the walkie-talkie. IV the men were in a mood of thorough depression. They couldn't understand what had happened to Eakins and they didn't feel like speculating on it. The ravaging afternoon sun beat down, reflecting heat back from the white sand. The damp jungle steamed, and appeared to creep toward them like a huge and sleepy green dragon, trapping them against the indifferent sea. Gun barrels grew too hot to touch, and the water in the canteens was as warm as blood. Overhead, thick gray cumulus clouds began to pile up; it was the beginning of the monsoon season. Drake sat in the shade of the copra shed. He shook off his lethargy long enough to inspect the camp from the viewpoint of defense. He saw the encircling jungle as enemy territory. In front of it w as an area fifty yards deep which they had cleared. This no man's land could perhaps be defended for a while. Then came the huts and the copra shed, their last line of defense, leading to the beach and the sea. The expedition had been in complete control of this island for better than three months. Now they were pinned to a small and precarious beachhead. Drake glanced at the lagoon behind him and remembered that there was still one line of retreat open. If the bug and his damned menagerie pressed too hard, they could still escape in the ketch. With luck. Sorensen came over and sat down beside him. "What are you doing?" he asked. Drake grinned sourly. "Planning our master strategy." "How does it look?" "I think we can hold out," Drake said. "We've got plenty of ammo. If necessary, we'll interdict the cleared area with gasoline. We certainly aren't going to let that bug push us off the island." He thought for a moment. "But it's going to be damned hard digging for treasure." Sorensen nodded. "I wonder what the bug wants." "Maybe we'll find out from Eakins," Drake said. Then Eakins' voice came, sharp and shrill over the walkie-talkie. "Sorensen? Drake?" "We're here," Drake said. "What did that damned bug do to you?" "Nothing," Eakins said. "You are talking to that bug now. My name is the Quedak." "My God," Drake said to Sorensen, "that bug must have hypnotized him!" "No. You are not speaking to a hypnotized Eakins. Nor are you speaking to a creature who is simply using Eakins as a mouthpiece. Nor are you speaking to the Eakins who was. You are speaking to many individuals who are one." "I don't get that," Drake said. "It's very simple," Eakins' voice replied. "I am the Quedak, the totality. But my totality is made up of separate parts, which are Eakins, several rats, a dog named Oro, a pig, an anteater, a cassowary -- " "Hold on," Sorensen said. "Let me get this straight. This is not Eakins I'm speaking to. This is the -- the Quedak?" "That is correct." "And you control Eakins and the others? You speak through Eakins' mouth?" "Also correct. But that doesn't mean that the personalities of the others are obliterated. Quite the contrary, the Quedak state is a federation in which the various member parts retain their idiosyncrasies, their individual needs and desires. They give their knowledge, their power, their special outlook to the Quedak whole. The Quedak is the coordinating and command center; but the individual parts supply the knowledge, the insights, the special skills. And together we form the Great Cooperation." "Cooperation?" Drake said. "But you did all this by force!" "It was necessary in the beginning. Otherwise, how would other creatures have known about the Great Cooperation?" 'Would they stay if you released your control over them?" Drake asked. "That is a meaningless question. We form a single indivisible entity now. Would your arm return to you if you cut it off?" "It isn't the same thing." "It is," Eakins' voice said. 'We are a single organism. We are still growing. And we welcome you wholeheartedly into the Great Cooperation." "To hell with that," Drake said. "But you must join," the Quedak told them. "It is the Quedak Mission to coordinate all sentient creatures into a single collective organism. Believe me, there is only the most trifling loss of the individuality you prize so highly. And you gain so much more! You learn the viewpoints and special knowledge of all other creatures. Within the Quedak framework you can fully realize your potentialities -- " "No!" "I am sorry," the Quedak said. "The Quedak Mission must be fulfilled. You will not join us willingly?" "Never," Drake said. "Then we will join you," the Quedak said. There was a click as he turned off the walkie-talkie. several rats appeared. They hesitated, just out of rifle range. A bird of paradise flew overhead, hovering over the cleared area like an observation plane. As the men watched, the rats began to run forward in long zigzags. "Start firing," Drake called out. "But go easy with the ammo." The men began to fire. But it was difficult to sight on the quickmoving rats against the grayishbrown clearing. And almost immediately, the rats were joined by a dozen hermit crabs. They had an uncanny knack for moving when no one was watching them, darting forward, then freezing against the neutral background. They saw Eakins appear on the fringe of the jungle. "Lousy traitor," Cable said, raising his rifle. Sorensen slapped the muzzle of the rifle aside. "Don't do it." "But he's helping that bug!" "He can't help it," Sorensen said. "And he's not armed. Leave him alone." Eakins watched for a few moments, then melted back into the jungle. The attack by the rats and crabs swept across half of the cleared space. Then, as they came closer, the men were able to pick their targets with more accuracy. Nothing was able to get closer than twenty yards. And when Recetich shot down the bird of paradise, the attack began to falter. "You know," Drake said, "I think we're going to be all right" "Could be," said Sorensen. "I don't understand what the Quedak is trying to accomplish. He knows we can't be taken like this. I should think -- " "Hey!" one of the men called out. "Our boat!" They turned and saw why the Quedak had ordered the attack. While it had occupied their attention, Drake's dog had swum out to the ketch and gnawed through the anchor line. Unattended, the ketch was drifting before the wind, moving toward the reef. They saw it bump gently, then harder. In a moment it was heeled hard over, stuck in the coral. There was a burst of static from the walkie-talkie. Sorensen held it up and heard the Quedak say, "The ketch isn't seriously damaged. It's simply immobilized." "The hell you say," Drake growled. "For all you know, it's got a whole punched right through it. How do you plan on getting off the island, Quedak? Or are you just going to stay here?" "I will leave at the proper time," the Quedak said. "I want to make sure that we all leave together." V T HE wind died. Huge gray thunderheads piled up in the sky to the southeast, their tops lost in the upper atmosphere, their black anvil bottoms pressing the hot still air upon the island. The sun had lost its fiery glare. Cherryred, it slid listlessly toward the flat sea. High overhead, a single bird of paradise circled, just out of rifle range. It had gone up ten minutes after Recetich had shot the first one down. Monty Byrnes stood on the edge of the cleared area, his rifle ready. He had drawn the first guard shift. The rest of the men were eating a hasty dinner inside the copra shed. Sorensen and Drake were outside, looking over the situation. Drake said, "By nightfall we'll have to pull everybody back into the shed. Can't take a chance on being exposed to the Quedak in the dark." Sorensen nodded. He seemed to have aged ten years in a day's time. "In the morning," Drake said, "we'll be able to work something out. We'll... What's wrong, Bill?" "Do you really think we have a chance?" Sorensen asked. "Sure we do. We've got a damned good chance." "Be realistic," Sorensen said. "The longer this goes on, the more animals the Quedak can throw against lis. What can we do about it?" "Hunt him out and kill him." "The damned thing is about the size of your thumb," Sorensen said irritably. "How can we hunt him?" "We'll figure out something," Drake said. He was beginning to get worried about Sorensen. The morale among the men was low enough without Sorensen pushing it down further. "I wish someone would shoot that damned bird," Sorensen said, glancing overhead. About every fifteen minutes, the bird of paradise came darting down for a closer look at the camp. Then, before the guard had a chance to fire, he swept back up to a safe altitude. "It's getting on my nerves, too," Drake said. "Maybe that's what it's supposed to do. One of these times we'll -- " He stopped abruptly. From the copra shed he could hear the loud hum of a radio. And he heard AI Cable saying, "Hello, hello, this is Vuanu calling. We need help." Drake and Sorensen went into the shed. Cable was sitting in front of the transmitter, saying into the microphone, "Emergency, emergency, Vuanu calling, we need -- " "What in hell do you think you're doing?" Drake snapped.  him, his pudgy pink body streaked with sweat. "I'm radioing for help, that's what I'm doing. I think I've picked up somebody. But they haven't answered me yet." He readjusted the tuning. Over the receiver, they could hear a bored British voice saying, "Pawn to Queen four, eh? Why don't you ever try a different opening?" There was a sharp burst of static. "Just move," a deep bass voice answered. "Just shut up and move." "Sure," said the British voice. "Knight to king bishop three." Drake recognized the voices. They were ham radio operators. One of them owned a plantation on Bougainville; the other was a shopkeeper in Rabaul. They came on the air for an hour of chess and argument every evening. Cable tapped the microphone impatiently. "Hello," he said, "this is Vuanu calling, emergency call -- " Drake walked over and took the microphone out of Cable's hand. He put it down carefully. "We can't call for help," he said. "What are you talking about?" Cable cried. "We have to!" Drake felt very tired. "Look, if W e send out a distress call, somebody's going to come sailing right in -- but they won't be prepared for this kind of trouble. The Quedak will take them over and then use them against us." 'We can explain what the trouble is," Cable said. "Explain? Explain what? That a bug is taking over the island? They'd think we were crazy with fever. They'd send in a doctor on the inter-island schooner." "Dan's right," Sorensen said. "Nobody would believe this without seeing it for himself." "And by then," Drake said, "it'd be too late. Eakins figured it out before the Quedak got him. That's why he told us not to send any messages." Cable looked dubious. "But why did he want us to take the transmitter?" "So that he couldn't send any messages after the bug got him," Drake said. "The more people trampling around, the easier it would be for the Quedak. If he had possession of the transmitter, he'd be calling for help right now." "Yeah, I suppose so," Cable said unhappily. "But, damn it, we can't handle this alone." 'We have to. If the Quedak ever gets us and then gets off the island, that's it for Earth. Period. There won't be any big war, no hydrogen bombs or fallout, no heroic little resistance groups. Everybody will become part of the Quedak Cooperation." 'We ought to get help somehow," Cable said stubbornly. We're alone, isolated. Suppose we ask for a ship to stand offshore -- " "It won't work," Drake said. "Besides, we couldn't ask for help even if we wanted to." Why not?" "Because the transmitter's not working," Drake said. "You've been talking into a dead mike." "It's receiving OK," Cable said. switches were on. "Nothing wrong with the receiver. But we must have joggled something taking the transmitter out of the ship. It isn't working." Cable tapped the dead microphone several times, then put it down. They stood around the receiver, listening to the chess game between the man in Rabaul and the man in Bougainville. "Pawn to queen bishop four." "Pawn to king three." "Knight to Queen bishop three." There was a sudden staccato burst of static. It faded, then came again in three distinct bursts. "What do you suppose that is?" Sorensen asked. Drake shrugged his shoulders. "Could be anything. Storm's shaping up and -- " He stopped. He had been standing beside the door of the shed. As the static crackled, he saw the bird of paradise dive for a closer look. The static stopped when the bird returned to its slow-circling higher altitude. "That's strange," Drake said. "Did you see that, Bill? The bird came down and the static went on at the same time." "I saw it," Sorensen said. "Think it means anything?" "I don't know. Let's see." Drake took out his field glasses. He turned up the volume of the receiver and stepped outside where he could observe the jungle. He waited, hearing the sounds of the chess game three or four hundred miles away. "Come on now, move." "Give me a minute." "A minute? Listen, I can't stand in front of this bleeding set all night. Make your -- " Static crackled sharply. Drake saw four wild pigs come trotting out of the jungle, moving slowly, like a reconnaissance squad probing for weak spots in an enemy position. They stopped; the static stopped. Byrnes, standing guard with his rifle, took a snap shot at them. The pigs turned, and static crackled as they moved back into the jungle. There was more static as the bird of paradise swept down for a look, then climbed out of range. After that, the static stopped. Drake put down his binoculars and went back inside the shed. "That must be it," he said. "The static is related to the Quedak. I think it comes when he's operating the animals." "You mean he has come sort of radio control over them?" Sorensen asked. "Seems like it," Drake said. "Either radio control or something propagated along a radio wavelength." "If that's the case," Sorenson said, "he's like a little radio station, isn't he?" "Sure he is. So what?" "Then we should be able to locate him on a radio direction finder," Sorensen said. Drake nodded emphatically. He snapped off the receiver, went to a corner of the shed and took out one of their portable direction finders. He set it to the frequency at which Cable had picked up the Rabaul Bougainville broadcast. Then he turned it on and walked to the door. HP HE men watched while Drake rotated the loop antenna. He located the maximum signal, then turned the loop slowly, read the bearing and converted it to a compass course. Then he sat down with a small-scale chart of the Southwest Pacific. "Well," Sorensen asked, "is it the Quedak?" "It's got to be," said Drake. "I located a good null almost due south. That's straight ahead in the jungle." 'You're sure it isn't a reciprocal bearing?" "I checked that out." "Is there any chance the signal comes from some other station?" "Nope. Due south, the next station is Sydney, and that's seventeen hundred miles away. Much Quedak, all right." "So we have a way of locating him," Sorensen said. "Two men with direction finders can go into the jungle-" " -- and get themselves killed," Drake said. "We can position the mals can locate us a lot faster. We wouldn't have a chance in the jungle." Sorensen looked crestfallen. 'Then we're no better off than before." 'We're a lot better off," Drake said. "We have a chance now." What makes you think so?" "He controls the animals by radio," Drake said. We know the frequency he operates on. We can broadcast on the same frequency. We can jam his signal." "Are you sure about 'that?" "Am I sure? Of course not. But I do know that two stations in the same area can't broadcast over the same frequency. If we tuned in to . the frequency the Quedak uses, made enough noise to override his signal -- " "I see," Sorensen said. "Maybe it would work! If we could interfere with his signal, he wouldn't be able to control the animals. And then we could hunt him down with "That's the idea," Drake said. "It has only one small flaw -- our transmitter isn't working. With no transmitter, we can't do any broadcasting. No broadcasting, no jamming." "Can you fix it?" Sorensen asked. "I'll try," Drake said. "But we'd better not hope for too much. Eakins was the radio man on this expedition." We've got all the spare parts," Sorensen said. "Tubes, manual, everything." "I know. Give me enough time and I'll figure out what's wrong. The question is, how much time is the Quedak going to give us?" The bright copper disk of the sun was half submerged in the sea. Sunset colors touched the massing thunderheads and faded into the brief tropical twilight The men began to barricade the copra shed for the night VI the transmitter and scowled at the compact mass of tubes and wiring. Those metal boxlike things were probably condensers, and the waxy cylindrical gadgets might or might not be resistors. It all looked hopelessly complicated, ridiculously dense and delicate. Where should he begin? He turned on the set and waited a few minutes. All the tubes appeared to go on, some dim, some bright. He couldn't detect any loose wires. The mike was still dead. So much for visual inspection. Next question: was the set getting enough juice? He turned it off and checked the battery cells with a voltmeter. The batteries were up to charge. He removed the leads, scraped them and put them back on, making sure they fit snugly. He checked all connections, murmured a propitiatory prayer, and turned the set on. It still didn't work. Cursing, he turned it off again. He decided to replace all the tubes, starting with the dim ones. If that didn't work, he could try replacing condensers and resistors. If that didn't work, he could always shoot himself. With this cheerful thought, he opened the parts kit and went to work. The men were all inside the copra shed, finishing the job of barricading it for the night. The door was wedged shut and locked. The two windows had to be kept open for ventilation; otherwise everyone would suffocate in the heat. But a double layer of heavy mosquito netting was nailed over each window, and a guard was posted beside it. Nothing could get through the flat galvanized-iron roof. The floor was of pounded earth, a possible danger point. All they could do was keep watch over it. The treasure-hunters settled down for a long night. Drake, with a handkerchief tied around his forehead to keep the perspiration out of hTs eyes, continued working on the transmitter. A N hour later, there was a buzz on the walkie-talkie. Sorensen picked it up and said, "What do you want?" "I want you to end this senseless resistance," said the Quedak, speaking with Eakins' voice. "You've had enough time to think over the situation. I want you to join me. Surely you can see there's no other way." "We don't want to join you," Sorensen said. "You must," the Quedak told him. "Are you going to make us?" "That poses problems," the Quedak said. "My animal parts are not suitable for coercion. Eakins is an excellent mechanism, but there is only one of him. And I must not expose myself to unnecessary danger. By doing so I would endanger the Quedak Mission." "So it's a stalemate," Sorensen said. "No. I am faced with difficulty only in taking you over. There is The men shifted uneasily. Drake, working on the transmitter, didn't look up. "I would rather not kill you," the Quedak said. "But the Quedak Mission is of primary importance. It would be endangered if you didn't join. It would be seriously compromised if you left the island. So you must either join or be killed." "That's not the way I see it," Sorensen said. "If you killed us -- assuming that you can -- you'd never get off this island. Eakins can't handle that ketch." 'There would be no need to leave in the ketch," the Quedak said. "In six months, the interisland schooner will return. Eakins and I will leave then. The rest of you will have died," re Sorensen said. What makes you think you could kill us? You didn't do so well today." He caught Drake's attention and gestured at the radio. Drake shrugged his shoulders and went back to work. "I wasn't trying," the Quedak said. "The time for that was at night. This night, before you have a chance to work out a better system of defense. You must join me tonight or I will kill one of you." "One of us?" "Yes. One man an hour. In that way, perhaps the survivors will change their minds about joining. But if they don't, all of you will be dead by morning." Drake leaned over aad whispered to Sorensen, "Stall him. Give me another ten minutes. I think I've found the trouble." Sorensen said into the walkietalkie, "We'd like to know a little more about the Quedak Cooperation." "You can find out best by joining." 'We'd rather have a little more information on it first." # T T is an indescribable state," the Quedak said in an urgent, earnest, eager voice. "Can you imagine yourself as yourself and yet experiencing an entirely new series of sensory 'you woulH,  r exam pi ej experience the world through the perceptors of a dog as he goes through the forest following an odor which to him -- and to you -- is as clear and vivid as a painted line. A hermit crab senses things differently. From him you experience the slow interaction of life at the margin of sea and land. His time-sense is very slow, unlike that of a bird of paradise, whose viewpoint is spatial, rapid, cursory. And there are many others, above and below the earth and water, who furnish their own specialized viewpoints of reality. Their outlooks, I have found, are not essentially different from those of the animals that once inhabited Mars." "What happened on Mars?" Sorensen asked. "All life died," the Quedak mourned. "All except the Quedak. It happened a long time ago. For centuries there was peace and prosperity on the planet Everything and everyone was part of the Quedak Cooperation. But the dominant race was basically weak. Their breeding rate went down; catastrophes happened. And finally there was no more life except the Quedak." "Sounds great," Sorensen said ironically. "It was the fault of die race," the Quedak protested. "With sturdier stock -- such as you have on this planet -- the will to live will remain intact. The peace and prosperity will continue indefinitely." "I don't believe it What happened on Mars will happen again # n Earth if you take over. After a while, slaves just don't care very strongly about living." "You wouldn't be slaves. You would be functional parts of the Quedak Cooperation." "Which would be run by you," Sorensen said. "Any way you slice it, it's the same old pie." "You don't know what you're talking about," the Quedak said. "We have talked long enough. I am prepared to kill one man in the next five minutes. Are you or are you not going to join me?" Sorensen looked at Drake. Drake turned on the transmitter. Gusts of rain splattered on the roof while the transmitter warmed up. Drake lifted the microphone and tapped it, and was able to hear the sound in the speaker. "It's working," he said. A T that moment something flew against the netting-covered window. The netting sagged; a fruit bat was entangled in it, glaring at them with tiny red-rimmed eyes. "Get some boards over that window!" Sorensen shouted. As he spoke, a second bat hurtled into the netting, broke through it and tumbled to the floor. The men clubbed it to death, but four more bats flew in through the open window. Drake flailed at them, but he eouldn't drive them away from the transmitter. They were diving at his eyes, and he was forced back. A wild blow caught one bat and knocked it to the floor with a broken wing. Then the others had reached the transmitter. They pushed it off the table. Drake tried to catch the set, and failed. He heard the glass tubes shattering, but by then he was busy protecting his eyes. In a few minutes they had killed two more bats, and the others had fled out the window. The men nailed boards over both windows, and Drake bent to examine the transmitter. "Any chance of fixing it?" Sorensen asked. "Not a hope," Drake said. "They ripped out the wiring while they were at it." "What do we do now?" "I don't know." Then the Quedak spoke to them over the walkie-talkie. "I must have your answer right now." Nobody said a word. "In that case," the Quedak said, "I'm deeply sorry that one of you must die now." the gusts of wind increased in intensity. There were rumbles of distant thunder. But within the copra shed, the air was hot and still. The gasoline lantern hanging from the center beam threw a harsh yellow light that illuminated the center of the room but left the corners in deep shadow. The treasure-hunters had moved away from the walls. They were all in the center of the room facing outward, and they made Drake think of a herd of buffalo drawn up against a wolf they could smell but could not see. Cable said, "Listen, maybe we should try this Quedak Cooperation. Maybe it isn't so bad as -- " "Shut up," Drake said. "Be reasonable," Cable argued. "It's better than dying, isn't it?" "No one's dying yet," Drake said. "Just shut up and keep your eyes open." "I think I'm going to be sick," Cable said. "Dan, let me out." "Be sick where you are," Drake said. "Just keep your eyes open." "You can't give me orders," Cable said. He started toward the door. Then he jumped back. A yellowish scorpion had crept under the inch of clearance between the door and the floor. Recetich stamped on it, smashing it to pulp under his heavy boots. Then he whirled, swinging at three hornets which had come at him through the boarded windows. "Forget the hornets!" Drake shouted. "Keep watching the ground!" There was movement on the floor. Several hairy spiders crawled out of the shadows. Drake and Recetich beat at them with rifle butts. Byrnes saw something crawling under the door. It looked like some kind of huge flat centipede. He stamped at it, missed, and the centipede was on his boot, past it, on the flesh of his leg. He screamed; it felt like a ribbon of molten metal. He was able to smash it flat before he passed out. Drake checked the wound and decided it was not fatal. He stamped on another spider, then felt Sorensen's hand clutching his shoulder. He looked toward the corner Sorensen was pointing at. Sliding toward them were two large, dark-coated snakes. Drake recognized them as black adders. These normally shy creatures were coming forward like tigers. T HE men panicked, trying to get away from the snakes. Drake pulled out his revolver and dropped to one knee, ignoring the hornets that buzzed around him, trying to draw a bead on the slender serpentine targets in the swaying yellow light Thunder roared directly overhead. A long flash of lightning suddenly flooded the room, spoiling his aim. Drake fired and missed, and waited for the snakes to strike. They didn't strike. They were moving away from him, retreating to the rat hole from which they had emerged. One of the adders slid quickly through. The other began to follow, then stopped, half in the hole. Sorensen took careful aim with a rifle. Drake pushed the muzzle aside. "Wait just a moment." The adder hesitated. It came out of the hole and began to move toward them again... And there was another crash of thunder and a vivid splash of lightning. The snake turned away and squirmed through the hole. "What's going on?" Sorensen "Is the thunder frightening them?" "No, it's the lightning!" Drake said. "That's why the Quedak was in such a rush. He saw that a storm was coming, and he hadn't consolidated his position yet." "What are you talking about?" "The lightning," Drake said. "The electrical storm! It's jamming that radio control of his! And when he's jammed, the beasts revert to normal behavior. It takes him time to re-establish control." "The storm won't last forever," Cable said. "But maybe it'll last long enough," Drake said. He picked up the direction finders and handed one to Sorensen. "Come on, Bill. We'll hunt out that bug right now." "Hey," Recetich said, "isn't there something I can do?" "You can start swimming if we don't come back in an hour," Drake said. T N slanting lines the rain drove down, pushed by the wild southwest wind. Thunder rolled continually and each flash of lightning seemed aimed at them. Drake and Sorensen reached the edge of the jungle and stopped. "We'll separate here," Drake said. "Gives us a better chance of converging on him." "Right," Sorensen said. "Take care of yourself, Dan." Sorensen plunged into the jungle. Drake trotted fifty yards down the fringe and then entered the bush. He pushed forward, the revolver in his belt, the radio direction finder in one hand, a flashlight in the other. The jungle seemed to be animated by a vicious life of its own, almost as if the Quedak controlled it. Vines curled cunningly around his ankles and the bushes reached out thorny hands toward him. Every branch took a special delight in slapping his face. Each time the lightning flashed, Drake's direction finder tried to home on it. He was having a difficult time staying on course. But, he reminded himself, the Quedak was undoubtedly having an even more difficult time. Between flashes, he was able to set a course. The further he penetrated into the jungle, the stronger the signal became. After a while he noticed that the I flashes of lightning were spaced I more widely apart. The storm was I moving on toward the north, leaving the island behind. How much longer would he have the protection of the lightning? Another ten or fifteen minutes? He heard something whimper. He swung his flashlight around and saw his dog, Oro, coming toward him. His dog or the Quedak's dog? "Hey there, boy," Drake said. He wondered if he should drop the direction finder and get the revolver out of his belt. He wondered if the revolver would still work after such a thorough soaking. Oro came up and licked his hand. He was Drake's dog, at least for the duration of the storm. They moved on together, and the thunder rumbled distantly in was very strong now. Somewhere around here... He saw light from another flashlight. Sorensen, badly out of breath, had joined him. The jungle had ripped and clawed at him, but he still had his rifle, flashlight and direction finder. Oro was scratching furiously at a bush. There was a long flash of lightning, and in it they saw the Quedak. moments, that the rain had stopped. The lightning had stopped, too. He dropped the direction finder. With the flashlight in one hand and his revolver in the other, he tried to take aim at the Quedak, who was moving, who had jumped -- To Sorensen's neck, just above the right collarbone. Sorensen raised his hands, then lowered them again. He turned toward Drake, raising his rifle. His face was perfectly calm. He looked as though his only purpose in life was to kill Drake. Drake fired from less than two feet away. Sorensen spun with the impact, dropped his rifle' and fell. Drake bent over him, his revolver ready. He saw that he had fired accurately. The bullet had gone in just above the right collarbone. It was a bad wound. But it had been much worse for the Quedak, who had been in the direct path of the bullet. All that was left of the Quedak was a splatter of black across Sorensen's chest. Drake applied hasty first aid and hoisted Sorensen to his shoulders. He wondered what he would have done if the Quedak had been standing above Sorensen's heart, or on his throat, or on his head. He decided it was better not to think about that. He started back to camp, with his dog trotting along beside him. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. The Nuse Man If you ever dig Ur and find one man buried seven times -- here is the nastily simple explanation. nuse man comes to call on me. He must realize by now I'll never order a nuse installation or an ipsissifex from him; I consider them as dangerous as anything our own lethal age has produced. Nuse, which is a power source that the nuse man describes as originating worse of the two, but the ipsissifex, a matter duplicator, is bad enough. And though I listen to the nuse man's stories, I can hardly be considered a sympathetic audience. I suppose he drops in because I can always be depended on for a cup I of tea and some toast and marmaI lade. "Hello," he said as I answered I the bell. "You've aged in the last  six months." Before I could wrap my tongue around the obvious et tu (he was looking terrible -- his clothes looked as if they had been slept in by machinery, and there were bruises and cuts and lumps all over his face) he had pushed past me into the living room and was sitting down in my husband's easy chair. The dachshunds, who have never liked the nuse man, were growling at him earnestly. He put his feet up on the fireplace and lay back in the chair on his spine. "Ahhhhhh!" he sighed, and then, to me, "Put more butter on the toast than you did last time." When I came back with the tea, he was standing by one of the bookcases looking at Woolley's little book, Ur: The First Phases. "Silly book," he grumbled. "That stuff about the plano-convex bricks is all wrong." "What do you know about it?" I asked him. "I sold a nuse installation to King Nebu-kalam-dug of Ur of the Chaldees on this last trip." "Oh, yes? Well, the home office ought to be pleased with you. Perhaps they'll give you a vacation back in your own time." The nuse man made no direct answer, but his battered, lumpy face grew dark. He bit into a slice of toast so savagely that I feared for his iridium alloy teeth. "Don't tell me that something went wrong with the nuse again!" I cried. This time he couldn't have answered if he had wanted to. He had choked over some toast crumbs, and I had to beat him on the back and pour tea down him before he could speak. "Why are you so prejudiced against nuse?" he demanded at last. "The nuse had nothing to do with it. It was the king and the priests that birded it up." "I'll bet." HP HE nuse man's face turned even redder. It was a shade or two darker than the lapels around the waist of his trousers. "I'll tell you all about it!" he said passionately. "You be the judge!" "Oh, Lord." There was no polite way of getting out of it. "All right," I said. "Everything was going fine," the nuse man began, "until the old King, Nebu-kalam-dug, died. I'd sold him a nuse installation -- " "General or special?" "Special, of course. Do I look like fool enough to put a general nuse installation into the hands of a lot of # B.C. yaps? I sold him a special nuse installation in exchange for a stated number of Sumerian gold artifacts, so many on installation and so many each lunar month until the price was paid." "What were the artifacts?" "Gold wreaths and necklaces and jewelry. Of course, gold's nothing. Only good for lavatory daises. But the workmanship was interesting and valuable. I knew the home office would be pleased. Then the old yoop died." "What killed him?" "His son, Nebu-al-karsig, poisoned him." "Oh." "Everybody in the court knew it, but of course nobody would talk about it. I was sorry the old king died, but I wasn't worried, because I thought I could work out the same sort of deal with the new king. Even when I saw how scared the court ladies looked when they were getting ready for the funeral, I didn't apperceive. And then the soldiers came and arrested me!" "What had you done?" I asked suspiciously. "Nothing. They were short little tzintes with big muscles, and they wore sort of skirts out of sheepskin with the wool twisted into bunches to look elegant. They wouldn't say a word while they were arresting me. Then I found out I was supposed to be strangled and put in the royal tomb with the dead king." "Why?" "Because I'd been one of the old man's special friends. At least, that was what young Nebu-al-karsig said. The prime minister and two or three of the councilors were being strangled along with me." "Gosh." "I argued and argued, and talked and talked. I told the young king we hadn't been such good friends as all that. And finally he said, very well, I could go with the court ladies in the death pit." "Were you scared?" "Of course I was scared," the nuse man said irritably. "I didn't have my chronnox -- they'd arrested me in too much of a hurry for that -- so I couldn't get into another time. And I had no way of getting in touch with the home office. Certainly I was scared. And then there was the indignity -- somebody from when I come from, to be killed by a lot of primitive button heads. It made me sore." got to the pit," he continued, "they were just closing the old king's tomb up. You understand, the tomb was at the bottom of the pit, and there was a ramp leading down into it. They hung matting over the sides of the pit, to cover the earth, and then they backed old Nebu-kalam-dug's war chariot down the ramp; he'd want his chariot in the next world. Then the rest of us went down the ramp into the pit." "Who was 'us'?" I asked curiously"Oh, harpists and singers and court ladies and slaves and soldiers and attendants. If anybody didn't want to go, the soldiers had spears they used for prodding. I counted, and there were fifty-eight of us." "Pretty barbarous," I said sympathetically. "Nobody from your period has any right to call anything barbarous," the nuse man said severely. "I've seen some bad ages, but yours -- ! Anyway, there we were. "The funeral services began. The harpists twanged on their harps and the singers sang in high falsetto voices. It sounded awful. The priests chanted prayers from the edge of the pit above. The soldiers passed' around an opiate in little bronze cups for us to drink. The priests prayed some more. It was beginning to get dark. Then they started shoveling earth in on us." "Were you sorry for the others?" I asked. "I was more sorry for myself. It was their era, and if they wanted to die in it, that was their business. After all, they thought that when they woke up they'd go on serving old Nebu-kalam-dug in the next world. I didn't -- and even if I had, he was nobody I'd want to serve." "How did you get out?" I asked quickly. I did not like the thought of the scene in the death pit, even if it had taken place so many thousands of years ago. "I got under the car of the chariot to shelter myself from being crushed. After a long while, the earth stopped coming in and I decided the mourners had gone away. I didn't have my chronnox, and, as I told you, I couldn't get in touch with the home office. But I was wearing an ipsissifex. I started materializing myself up through the earth of the pit." "You didn't!" I said incredulously"I did, though. Each 'me' was a little farther up through the earth layer of the pit." "You mean there are five or six 'you's buried back there in Ur of the Chaldees?" "Seven. Of course they weren't really alive -- you know how an ipsissifex is." TT was the first time I had ever heard the nuse man admit that one of the devices he was peddling might have a flaw. "I clawed my way up through the last few inches of dirt without any more materializations," he said, "and started walking up the ramp. There was a soldier on guard at the top. When he saw me, his spear began to shake. It shook so much he could hardly hold it. The moon was coming up, and my shadow fell in front of me on the ramp. "He licked his lips and swallowed before he could say anything. 'Get back in the pit and die,' he said finally. 'What are you doing out here? You're supposed to serve our lord Nebu-kalam-dug in the other world. Go on back and be dead.' "I didn't say anything. I just kept walking closer to him. When I w as about two feet away, he dropped his spear and ran. "I didn't have any trouble getting in at the palace, either. Young Nebu-al-karsig was playing checkers on a fiddle-shaped board with one of his girls when I walked into the great hall. When he saw me, he jumped up and the board fell to one side and the pieces rolled over the floor. I said, 'My lord Nebu-al-karsig, I am harder to kill than your noble father was.' "He had turned a dirty greenish tan. He said, 'I saw -- I saw -- ' "I sat down on the floor in front of him and bumped my head on it a couple of times to show I was going to be polite. Then I said, in a deep, serious voice, 'A magician cannot die until his time has come, my lord. Shall we discuss extending the nuse installation I made for your respected sire?' And he said, 'Yes, let's.'" "It's a wonder he didn't try to poison you," I commented. "Scared to," the nuse man said briefly. "Anyhow, we agreed I was to increase the nuse installation by one third, and in return Nebu-alkarsig was to pay me twice as many gold artifacts each lunar month as his father had, and for half again as long. It took a lot of figuring and explaining by the royal scribes before the king could understand the terms of the agreement, but he finally was satisfied with the arithmetic. Oh, and I got my old rooms in the palace back." "What did the special installation do?" I poured the last of the tea into the nuse man's cup and went out to the kitchen to put water on to heat for more. "It made bricks," he said when I came back. "Beautiful, even, true, symmetrical mud bricks. Nebukalam-dug had been crazy about those bricks, and even Nebu-alkarsig thought they were pretty neat. You should have seen the adobe junk the brickmakers had been turning out by hand -- sloppy, roundish affairs, all different sizes, with straw sticking out of them. Yes, my installation made bricks." "What did they use the bricks for?" I asked. "For ziggurats -- stepped temple pyramids. They made the first story black, the second white, the third red, and the last blue. Sometimes, just for a change, they'd do an all-blue or an all-red pyramid. "For a while, everything was fine. Ziggurats were going up all over the place, and the skyline of Ur altered rapidly. The priests were pleased because all those ziggurats meant more priests were needed. Nebu-al-karsig was pleased because he was going down in history as the greatest ziggurat builder of his dynasty. And I was pleased because I was getting a lot of elegant artifacts. Then things started to go sour." "The nuse," I murmured. "I knew it." r I "HE nuse man glared at me. "It... was... not... the... nuse!" he said, biting off the words. "What happened was the brickmakers started to get sore. They were out of jobs, you see, because of the nuse. And the bricklayers were almost as badly off. They were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, without any overtime, trying to use up all the bricks. Pretty soon there would be riots in the streets. "Nebu-al-karsig asked me what I thought he ought to do. I told him, let the brickmakers into the bricklayers' guild. That way he'd have twice as many men to build ziggurats. So he issued a decree. And then there were riots in the streets. " 'What,' said the bricklayers, 'let those dirty sheep's livers into our union? When they haven't served a seven years' apprenticeship?' What,' said the brickmakers, 'be forced to give up our noble art, sacred to Nintud since time immemorial, in exchange for slicking mud paste over heartless mechanical bricks?' Then both sides shrieked 'Never!' and barricades, made out of brick baskets and cobblestones, began to go up everywhere. "I suppose the fuss would have died down in time. People -- as your age has learned -- can get used to anything. But Nebu-al-karsig was sleeping badly. Palace gossip had it that he'd wake up screaming from dreams about his father. He asked the priests what the cause of the trouble was, and they told him that some of the minor gods, those who hadn't got ziggurats yet, were mad at him. The people in Ur had about four thousand gods. So he decided to have the nuse installation turn out more bricks. "Every morning, as soon as it was daylight, a bunch of shaveheaded priests would file into the nuse factory. They'd stand in front of the installation, concentrating, for an hour, and then a new batch of priests would come. They kept that up all day. Nuse, of course, is basically a neural force. By the end of the day, bricks would be simply pouring out of the brick hoppers. Even to me, who had nothing to do with laying them, seeing all those mountains and mountains of bricks was very discouraging. "I tried to argue with Nebu-alkarsig about it. I told him as politely as I could that he was endangering his throne. But he'd never liked me, and after the episode of the brickmakers' guild, he hadn't trusted me. He wouldn't listen. I decided it was time I got out of Ur. "I had one more installment of artifacts due me. I would collect that and then leave. By now the chest of artifacts in my bedroom was almost full. "The day of the installment came and went, and no artifacts. I mentioned it to Nebu-al-karsig and he showed his teeth at me. But on the next day, ten or twelve priests came to my rooms with a little box. The head priest opened it and gave it to me. In it were the missing artifacts. "They weren't quite what my contract called for, but I was glad to get them. I thanked the head priest for them as nicely as I knew how, and he smiled and suggested that we have a drink. I said fine, and he poured it out One of the minor priests was carrying goblets and the wineskin. I put out my hand for the cup and the head priest -- did I tell you I'd put a small general nuse installation in my rooms?" didn't." "Well, I had," said the nuse man. "I wasn't going to be bothered with slow, stupid slaves waiting on me. I put out my hand for the cup and the priest went sailing up in the air. He hit on the ceiling with a considerable thump. Then he went around the room, floating just at eye-level, and whacked solidly against each of the four corners. He hit the fourth corner harder and faster than he had the first. I could see that his mouth was open and he looked scared. "There was a kind of pause while he hovered in the air. Then he went up and hit the ceiling, came down toward the floor, up to the ceiling, down again, up, hovered, and then came down on the floor for the last time with a great crashing whump! He landed so hard I thought I felt the floor shake. I knew he must be hurt. "I stood there frozen for a moment. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Then it came to me. The drink in my cup had been poisoned. I suppose Nebu-al-karsig hadn't had nerve enough to do it himself. And the nuse installation in my room hadn't let the head priest get away with it. "A nuse never makes a mistake. 'The airy servitor. Don't think, use nuse.' The more I sell it, the more I'm convinced that it's wonderful stuff. This time it had saved my life. I couldn't help wishing for a minute, though, that it had just tipped over the poisoned cup quietly, because banging a priest around like that was sure to be sacrilege. "The other priests had been as surprised as I was. Now they began to mutter and heft the clubs they were carrying. The nuse might be able to handle all of them at once, but I didn't wait to find out. I made a dash into the next room and bolted the door. "I was wearing my chronnox. All I had to do was grab my chest of artifacts and go to some other time. I made a dive under the bed for the chest. And it wasn't there." "Stolen?" I asked helpfully. The nuse man shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Not with a nuse installation on guard. I think the nuse had levitated the chest to some safe place for extra security. I concentrated on getting the nuse to bring the chest back, and I did hear noises, levitation noises, as though it were trying to obey me. But it had all it could do to handle the priests in the next room. "By now there was a considerable commotion in the palace. Doors were opening, people were shouting, I heard soldiers outside in the hall. Thumps and bumps from my sitting room showed that the nuse was still doing what it could with the priests, but several people were throwing themselves as hard as they could against the connecting door. I didn't know how much longer the bolts would hold. "I tried concentrating on getting the nuse to abandon the priests and bring me my chest. I'm sure it would have worked in another minute. But then there was a lot of yelling and they began using a ram on the door. One of the panels busted. The hinges were sagging. I had to go." 'T'HE nuse man looked so depressed that I poured him out more tea. Just as I had suspected in the beginning, the nuse -- always incalculable, always tricky, the essence of unreliability -- the nuse had been at the bottom of his troubles. It always was. I had too much sense to say so, though. "What was the point you were making about theplano-convex bricks?" I finally asked. The nuse man looked even more gloomy. I wished I hadn't mentioned it. He picked a leaf out of his tea with his spoon and frowned savagely at it. "I went back to Ur," he said finally. "I wanted to see what had happened about the bricks, and of course I wanted my chest. I picked a time about ten years later." "Well?" ' The first thing I noticed was the skyline. Every one of the ziggurats Nebu-al-karsig had put up was gone. I walked up to where one of them had been, and there was nothing but a heap of bricks, and the bricks looked as if people had pounded them with hammers. I walked on to the center of town where the royal palace had been. It was gone, too, and what looked like a new royal palace was going up to the north of it. It was plain what had happened. There had been a revolution, Nebu-alkarsig had been overthrown, Ur had a new king. I ought to have gone then. But I was still curious about my chest. "The nuse factory had been just outside the palace walls. It had been razed too -- my beautiful installation! -- but I could see people working around where it had been. I went over to talk to them. "When I got up to them, I saw they were making bricks. Making them by hand, in the dumb, inefficient, old-fashioned way. But these weren't rectangular bricks, the way the ones before my nuse bricks had been. These were rectangular on the sides and bottom, but they had round tops, like loaves of bread." "In other words," I said, "planoconvex bricks." "Yes. It was the most impractical idea in the world. Their changing to such a silly shape made me realize how much the brickmakers had hated the nuse bricks. By the way -- I know how curious you are -- you'll be interested to learn that walls made with bricks of that kind don't look especially different from ordinary walls." # ikH," I said. "I'd been wondering about that." "I thought you'd be glad to know," said the nuse man. "Well, I went up close to one of the brickmakers and watched him working. The pace he was going, he'd be lucky if he got ten bricks done in a day. He smoothed his brick and rounded it and patted it. He put more mud on it and stood back to watch the effect. He pushed a wisp of straw into the surface with the air of an artist applying a spot of paint. He just loved that brick. "I cleared my throat, but he didn't seem to hear me. I said, 'Say, I heard where they found a chest with gold and jewels in the ruins of the old palace yesterday.' " 'Another one?' he answered, without looking up. 'You know, they found one on the south side of the palace about five years ago. Full of treasure. Some people have all the luck. Me, I never find anything.' "The south side of the palace was where my rooms had been. I made a sort of noise. "Up to then the worker had been too busy patting his round-topped brick to pay any attention to me. Now he looked up. His eyes got wide. His jaw dropped. He stared at me. 'Aren't you -- are you -- he said doubtfully. "Then he made up his mind. 'Brothers! Brothers!' he shouted. 'It's the foreign magician, come back to curse us again! Hurry! Kill him! Kill him! Kill the stinking sheep liver! Quick!' "You wouldn't have thought that people who were working as slowly as they were could move so quick. As soon as they heard the words 'foreign magician,' they went into action, and before he got to the second 'Kill him!' the sir was black with flying bricks." "So that's how your face -- " "Y es. Of course, not all the bricks were dry. If they had been  but Antimony IX divers can't be seen, of course... but don't have anything in mind when one of them is around you! dumbwaiter even a wet brick can be painful." "And you never got your chest back." "No. All I got was the artifacts the priest brought me just before the nuse levitated him. Would you like to see them?" He sounded as if he wanted to show them to me. I said, "Yes, I'd like to." He got out a little box and opened it. Inside was a piece of lapis lazuli that he said was a whetstone, two crude gold rings with roughly cabochon cut blackish stones, and a handsome gold necklace with lapis lazuli beads and gold pendants shaped like some sort of leaf. "Very pretty," I said, examining them. "You should have seen the stuff I had! But this is better than nothing. The home office will be glad to see it. I don't usually get even this much." A depressed when he said it that I felt a burst of sympathy for him. I didn't know what to say. He picked up the last piece of toast on the plate and looked at it. "Burned," he said sourly, "and one of the other slices was, too. Listen, why don't you let me put in a nuse installation for you? Then your toast would never be burned. It's this housework that's getting you down. You might get so you didn't look any older than your real age if you used nuse." "You should live so long," I said. T HE man ahead of me had a dragon in his baggage. So the Lamavic boys confiscated it. Lamavic -- Livestock, Animal, Mineral and Vegetable, International Customs -- does not like to find dragons curled up in a thermos. And since this antipathy was a two-way exchange, the Lamavic inspectors at Philadelphia International were singed and heated all ways by the time they got to me. I knew them well. "Mr. Sol Jones?" "That's right," I said, watching the would-be dragon smuggler being marched away. A very amateur job. I could have told him. There are only two ways to smuggle a dragon nowadays. "Any livestock to declare, Mr. Jones?"      The curtain-raiser for the April Galaxy is a joyous interstellar frolic by that young-hearted oldtimer, George O. Smith. Smith has set himself (and his bewitched and bewitching characters) a whole constellation of lightminded but absolutely urgent problems: the job is the colonization of the Universe, and the tactics are... well, the tactics are what you will learn joy from beginning to end. The second position in this all-star lineup is a stirring and sharply drawn wainer Smith. (No relation to George). At novelet length, it packs in more solid emotion and dynamic drive than many a full-length book -- but then that's only to be expected from both the Smiths in the first place, isn't it? Naturally there will be shorts, but how many and by whom is anybody's g "ss as of this moment. The safe is full of first-rate examples, with the finest bylines in 'f' ence fictionAnd Willy Ley, of course. "I have no livestock on my person or in my baggage, nor am I accompanied by any material prohibited article," I said carefully, for I saw they were recording. The little pink, bald inspector with a charred collar looked at his colleague. "Anything known?" His colleague looked down at me from six feet of splendid physique, smiled unpleasantly, and flipped the big black record book. "'Sol Jones,'" he read. "'Lamavic four-star offender. Galactic registration: six to tenth power: #. Five foot ten inches, Earth scale. Blue eyes, hair variable and usually nondescript brown, ear lobes and cranial...' You're not disputing identity, Mr. Jones?" "Oh, no. That's me." "I see. 'Irrevocable Galactic citizenship for services to family of Supreme President Xgol in matter of asteroid fungus, subsequent Senatorial amnesty confirmed, previous sentences therefore omitted. Lamavic offenses thereafter include no indictable evidence but total twenty-four minor fines for introducing prohibited livestock onto various planets. Suspected complicity in Lamavic cases One through Seventy-six as follows: mobile sands, crystal thinkers, recording turtle, operatic fish, giant mastodon.' Mr. Jones, you seem to have given us trouble before." "Before what?" "Before this -- er -- " "That," I said, "is an Unconstitutional remark. I am giving no trouble. I have made a full declaration. I demand the rights of a Galactic citizen." He apologized, as he had to. This merely made both inspectors angry, but they were going to search me anyway. I knew that. Certainly I am a smuggler, and I had in fact a little present for my girl Florence -- a wedding present, I hoped -- but they would never find it. This time I really had them fooled, and I intended to extract maximum pleasure from watching their labors. once. The next leading offender has only two stars and he's out on Ceres in the penal colony. My four stars denote that I disapprove of all these rules prohibiting the carrying of livestock from one planet to another. Other people extend the Galactic Empire; I extend my Galactic credit. You want an amusing extraterrestrial pet to while away the two-hour work week, I can provide one. Of course, this pet business was overdone in the early days when any space-hopper could bring little foreign monsters back to the wife and kiddies. Any weird thing could come in and did. "You are aware, Mr. Jones, that you have declared that you are not trying to bring in any prohibited life-form, whether animal, mineral, vegetable, or any or all of these?" "I am," I said. "You are further aware of the penalties for a false declaration?" "In my case, I believe I could count on thirty years' invigorating work on a penal planet." "You could, Mr. Jones. You certainly could." "Well, I've made my declaration." "Will you step this way?" Very polite in Philadelphia Spaceport. I followed the inspectors into the screening cubicles. There was a nasty looking device in the corner. "I thought those things were illegal," I said. "Unfortunately, Mr. Jones, you are, as you know, quite right. We may not employ a telepath instrument on any unconvicted person." They looked sorry, but I wasn't. A telepath would have told them immediately where I had Florence's pet, and all about it. I smiled at them. They paid no attention, took my passport and began turning up the Lamavic manual on Antimony IX, Livestock of, Prohibited Forms. I had just come from there and so had Florence's little diver, which I had brought as a happy surprise. I sat down. The two inspectors looked as if they were going to say something, then continued flipping pages of their manual. "Here it is -- Antimony IX" One of them read out the prohibitions and the other tried to watch me and the reflex counter behind me at the same time -- a crude instrument which should be used, in my professional view, only to determine a person's capacities for playing poker with success. "Ants-water, babblers, bunces, candelabra plants, catchem-fellers, Cythia Majoris, divers, dunces, dimple-images, drakes, dunking dogs, dogs-savage, dogswater, dogs not otherwise pro vided-for, unspec., elephants-miniature, fish-any..." They went on. Antimony IX is teeming with life and almost every specimen is prohibited on other planets. We had passed the divers, anyway. I smiled and gave the reflex counter a strong jerk just as the smaller inspector was saying "Mammoths." They looked at me in silence. "Funny man," one said, and they went on reading. "Okay," the large inspector said at last. "We'll examine him for everything." OR the next three hours, they took blood specimens to see if I had microscopic livestock hidden there, they X-rayed me and my baggage, fluoroscoped everything again, put the baggage through an irritator life-indexer, investigated my orifices in detail with a variety of instruments, took skin scrapings in case I was wearing a false layer, and the only thing they found was my dark glasses. "Why don't you wear modern contact lenses?" "It's none of your business," I said, "but these old-style spectacles have liquid lenses." There was a flurry and they sent away for analysis a small drop from one of the lenses. There were no signs of prohibited life in the liquid. "I could have told you that," I said. "It's dicyanin, a vegetable extract. Diminishes the glare." I put the glasses on my nose and hooked on the earpieces. The effect was medieval, but I could see the little diver now. I could also see disturbing evidence of the inspectors' mental condition. A useful little device invented by Dr. W. J. Kilner (#-#) for the study of the human aura in sickness and health. After a little practice, which I was not going to allow the Lamavic inspectors, the retina became sufficiently sensitive to see the micro-wave aura when you looked through the dicyanin screen. As was true of most of these psi pioneers at that time, nothing was done to further Kilner's work when he died. I noticed, without surprise, that the inspectors had a mental field of very limited extent and that the little diver had survived the journey nicely. "Can I go now?" I asked. "This time, Mr. Jones." When I left, the repair staff was ; building a new inspection barrier to ! replace the parts the dragon hadi got. Such an amateur performance! j Leave smuggling to professionals and we'd have Lamavic disbanded from boredom in ten years. I nearly slipped on the fine silica dioxide which had fused in the air when . the dragon got annoyed. Nasty, j dangerous pets. The one for Florence was the! only contraband I was carrying this ! trip, which was purely pleasure, j She was waiting for me in her apartment, tall, golden, luscious,  and all mine. She thought I was j in import-export, which in a sense i was true. "I've missed you so much, Sol," she said, twining herself on me and the couch like a Venusian waternymph. "Did you bring me a present?" I lay back and let her kiss me. I "Of course I did. A small but very valuable present." I let her kiss me again. "Not -- a Jupiter diamond, Sol?" "Much rarer than that, and more useful." "Oh. Useful." "Something to help you in the house when we're married, honey. Now, don't pout so prettily, or I'll never get around to showing you." My homecoming was not developing quite as I planned, but I put this down to womanly, if not exactly maidenly, quirks. When she found out what I had brought her, I was sure she would be all over me again. I put on my dark glasses so that I could see where the diver was. "Would you like a drink, honey?" I asked. "I don't mind," she said sulkily. trated hard on the thought of a bottle from the cabinet, two glasses and a pitcher of ice from the kitchen. He went revolving through the air obediently and the items came floating out neatly. Florence nearly shattered the windows with her screams. "Now calm down, honey," I said, catching her. "Calm down. It's just a little present I brought you." The bottle, glasses and pitcher dropped gently onto the table beside us. "See?" I said. "Service at a thought. Remote control. The end of housework. Kiss me." She didn't. "You mean you did that, Sol?" "Not me, exactly. I've brought you a little baby diver, honey, all the way from Antimony IX, just for you. There isn't another one on Earth. In fact, I doubt if there's another one outside Antimony IX. I had a lot of trouble securing this rare and valuable present for you." "I don't like it. It gives me the creeps." "Honey," I said carefully, "this is a little baby. It couldn't hurt a mouse. It's about six inches in diameter, and all it is doing is to teleport what you want it to teleport." "Then why can't I see it?" "If you could see it, I wouldn't have been allowed to bring it for you, honey, because a whole row of nasty-minded Solar Civil Servants would have seen it too, and they would have taken it from your own sweet Sol." "They can have it." "Honey, this is a rare and valuable pet! It will do things for you." "So you think I need something done for me. Well! I'm glad you came right out and said this before we were married!" The following series of "but -- but -- " from me and irrelevance from Florence occupied an hour, but hardly mentioned the diver. Eventually I got her back into my arms. My urges for Florence were strictly biological, though intense. There were little chances for intellectual exchanges between us, but I was more interested in the broad probabilities of her as a woman. I could go commune with wild and exotic intelligences on foreign planets any time I had the fare. As a woman, Florence was what I wanted. "Back on Antimony IX," I explained carefully, "life is fierce and rugged. So, to keep from being r eaten, these little divers evolved themselves into little minds with no bodies at all, and they feed off solar radiation. Now, honey, minds are not made of the same stuff brains are made of, good solid tissue and gray matter and neural cortex -- " "Don't be dirty, Sol." "There is nothing dirty about the body, honey. Minds are invisible but detectable in the micro-wavelengths on any sensitive counter, and look like little glass eggs when you can see them -- as I can, by using these glasses. In fact, your diver is over by the window now. But, having evolved this far, they came across a little difficulty and couldn't evolve any further. So there they are, handy little minds for teleporting whatever you want moved, and reading other people's thoughts." S HE gasped. "Did you say reading other people's thoughts? "Certainly," I said. "As a matter of fact, that's what stopped the divers from evolving further. If they brush against any thinking creature, they pick up whatever thought is in the creature's conscious mind. But they also pick up the subliminal activity, if you follow me -- and down at that level of a mind such as man's, his thoughts are not only the present unconscious thoughts but also a good slice of what is to him still the future. It's one of those space-time differences. The divers are not really on the same space-time reference as the physical world, but that makes them all the more useful, because our minds aren't either." "Did you say reading other people's thoughts, like a telepath?" she persisted. "Exactly like a telepath, or any other class of psi. We're really living on a much wider scale than we're conscious of, but our mind only tracks down one point in time-space in a straight line, which happens to fit our bodies. Our subliminal mind is way out in every direction, including time -- and when you pick up fragments of this consciously, you're a psi, that's all. So the divers got thoroughly confused -- that's what it amounts to -- and never evolved any further. So you see, honey, it's all perfectly natural." "I think you're just dirty." "Eh?" "Everyone hates telepaths. You know that." "I don't." "Oh, you go wandering all over the Galaxy -- but my friends -- what could I say to my friends if they learned I had something like a telepath in the apartment?" "It's only a baby diver, I keep telling you, honey. And anyway, you'll be able to tell what they're really thinking about you." Florence looked thoughtful. A plump little man, leaning back in a chair by the door, got slowly up, looking Pulcher over. "In back," he said shortly. He led Pulcher behind the store, to a three-room apartment. The living room was comfortable enough, but for some reason it seemed unbalanced. One side was somehow heavier than the other. Pulcher noticed the nap of the rug, still flattened out where something heavy had been, something rectangular and large, about the size of a Tri-V electronic entertainment unit "Repossessed," said Lasser. "Sit down. Dickon called you a minute ago." "Oh?" It had to be something important. Dickon wouldn't have tracked him down for any trivial matter. "Don't know what he wanted, but he said you weren't to leave till he called back. Sit down. May'll bring you a cup of tea." Pulcher chatted while the woman fussed over a teapot and a plate of soft cookies. He was trying to get the feel of the home. He could understand Madeleine Gaultry's desperation. He could understand the Foltis boy, a misfit in any society anywhere. What about Jimmy Lasser? The elder Lassers were both pushing sixty. They were first-generation Niners, off an Earth colonizing ship. They hadn't been bom on Earth, of course -- the trip took nearly a hundred years, physical ! transport. They had been born in I transit, had married on the ship. As the ship had reached maximum population level shortly after they were born, they were allowed to have no children until they landed. At that time they were about forty. May Lasser said suddenly; "Please help our boy, Mr. Pulcher! It isn't Jimmy's fault. He got in with a bad crowd. You know how it is, no work, nothing for a boy to do." "I'll do my best." TUT it was funny, Pulcher thought, how it was always "the crowd" that was bad. It was never Jimmy -- and never Avery, never Sam, never Walter. Pulcher sorted out the five boys and remembered Jimmy: nineteen years old, quite colorless, polite, not very interested. What had struck the lawyer about him was only surprise that this rabbity boy should have the enterprise to get into a criminal conspiracy in the first place. "He's a good boy," said May Lasser pathetically. "That trouble with the parked cars two years ago wasn't his fault. He got a fine job right after that, you know. Ask his probation officer. Then the Icicle Works closed -- " She poured more tea, slopping it over the side of the cup. "Oh, sorry! But -- but when he went to the unemployment office Mr. Pulcher, do you know what they said to him?" "I know," said Pulcher. 'They asked him would he take a job if offered," she hurried on, unheeding. "A job. As if I didn't know what they meant by a job! They meant renting!" She plumped the teapot down on the table and began to weep. "Mr. Pulcher, I wouldn't let him rent if I died for it! There isn't anything in the Bible that says you can let someone else use your body and not be responsible for what it does! You know what tourists do! 'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.' It doesn't say, 'Unless somebody else is using it.' Mr. Pulcher, renting is a sin!" "May." Mr. Lasser put his teacup down and looked directly at Pulcher. "What about it? Can you get Jimmy off?" The attorney reflected. He hadn't known about Jimmy Lasser's probation before. If the county prosecutor was holding out on information of that sort, it meant Probably he would be trying for a conviction with maximum sentence. Of course, he didn't have to tell a defense attorney anything about the previous criminal records of his clients. But in a juvenile case, where all parties were usually willing to go easy on the defendants, it was customary... "I don't know, Mr. Lasser," Pulcher said. "I'll do the best I can." "Damn right you will!" barked Lasser. "Dickon tell you who I am? I was committeeman here before him, you know. So get busy. Pull strings. Dickon will back you or I'll know why!" Pulcher managed to control himself. "I'll do the best I can. I already told you that. If you want strings pulled, you'd better talk to Dickon yourself. I only know law. I don't know anything about politics." The atmosphere was becoming unpleasant. Pulcher was glad to hear the' ringing of the phone in the store outside. May Lasser answered it and said: "For you, Mr. Pulcher. Charley Dickon." Pulcher gratefully picked up the phone. Dickon's rich, political voice said sorrowfully: "Milo? Listen, I been talking to Judge Pegrim's secretary. He isn't gonna let the kids off with a slap on the wrist. There's a lot of heat from the mayor's office." ly: "But the Swinburne kid wasn't hurt! He got better care with Madeleine than he was getting at home." "I know, Milo," the committeeman agreed, "but that's the way it is. So what I wanted to say to you, Milo, is don't knock yourself out on this one, because you aren't going to win it." "But -- " Pulcher suddenly be"And what they've been doing?" "Sometimes they will do what they think they'll do. And sometimes they don't make it But it's what their subliminal plans to have happen, yes." She kissed me. "I think it's a lovely present Sol." She snuggled up to me and I concentrated on bringing the diver over to her. I thought I'd read her, just for a joke, and see what she had in mind. I took a close look. "What's the matter, Sol?" "Oh, honey! You beautiful creature!" "This is nice -- but what made you say that?" "I just got the diver to show me your mind, and bits of the next two weeks you have in mind. It's going to be a lovely, lovely vacation." She blushed very violently and got angry. "You had no right to look at what I was thinking, Sol!" "It wasn't what you were thinking so much as what you will be thinking, honey. I figure in it quite well." "I won't have it, Sol! Do you hear me? I think spying on people is detestable!" "I thought you liked the idea of tagging your friends?" "That's different. Either we go somewhere without that whateverit-is, or you can marry someone else. I don't mind having it around after we're married, but not before, Sol. Do you understand?" I was already reaching for the video yellow pages. wall in the apartment before we left and instructed the diver to stay around and watch it. They are very curious creatures, inquisitive, always chasing new ideas, and I thought that should hold the diver happily for several days. Meanwhile, I had booked adjoining rooms at the Asteroid-Central. The Asteroid-Central advertised in the video yellow pages that it practiced the Most Rigid Discrimination-meaning no telepaths, clairvoyants, clairaudients or psychometrists. Life was hard on a psi outside Government circles. But life was much harder on the rest of the world seeking secluded privacy and discretion. The Asteroid-Central was so discreet, you could hardly see where you were going. Dim lights, elegant figures passing in the gloom, singing perfumes of the gentlest kind, and "Guaranteed Psi-Free" on every bedroom door. I was humming idly in my room, with one eye on the communicating door through which, were she but true to her own mind, Florence would shortly come, and I turned on the television-wall only to see how less fortunate people were spending their leisure. An idle and most regrettable gesture. There was a quiz-game on International Channel #, dull and just finishing. All the contestants seemed to know all the answers. In fact, the man who won the trip around the Rings of Saturn, did so by answering the question before the Martian quiz-master had really finished reading it out. When the winner turned sharply on the other contestants and knocked them down, yelling, "So that's what you think of my mother, is it?" the wall was blacked out and we were taken straight to the Solar Party Convention. The nominee this decade was human. He seemed to be speaking on his aims, his pure record and altruistic intentions. The stereo cameras looked over the heads of the delegates. Starting in the row by the main aisle, each delegate shot to his feet and started booing and jeering. It rippled down' the rows like a falling pack of cards, each delegate in turn after the man in front of him, and each row picking up where the back of the previous row left off. It was as if someone were passing a galvanizing brush along the heads of the delegates, "w bv row. X V T .  Or as if a divef refreshing the delegates with a clear pictlLT e of their nominee's mind. I groaned and called Florence. "Look," I said when she came. "That damned pet has followed the program back to the cameras from your apartment, and there he is lousing up the Convention." "I vote Earth," she told me indifferently. "That isn't the point, honey. I'll have to bring the diver here, and quickly." "You do that, Sol. I'll be at home when you get rid of it." By the time the diver picked up my thoughts and came flickering into the room through the walls, Florence had left. I felt the diver off the back of my head, made my thoughts as kindly as possible, and went downstairs to the largest, longest bar. THE evening passed profitably because I was invited to join a threesome of crooks at cards. With the aid of the little diver, I was able to shorten the odds to a pleasant margin in my favor. But this was doing nothing about Florence. A not altogether funny remark about teleporting the cards did, however, suggest the answer. After the transaction was over, I sent the diver off to a friend on the faculty of Luke University, where they had a long history of psi investigation and where the diver could be guaranteed to be kept busy rolling dice and such. was easy to fix by a video call. There had been !i mes  the past when certain services to the terrestrial Zoology and Botanical Tanks had made me discreetly popular with the faculty, and anyway they thought I was doing them a favor. They promised to keep the little diver busy for an indefinite period. I reported to Florence, and after a certain amount of feminine shallI-shan't-I, she came back to the Asteroid-Central. This time I did not turn on the television-wall. I lay still. I said nothing. I hardly thought at all. And after several years compressed themselves into every minute, my own true honey, Florence, slid open the communicating door and came into the room. She walked shyly toward me, hiding modestly within a floating nightgown as opaque as a very clear soap bubble. I stood up, held out my arms and she came toward me, smiling -- and stopped to pick up something on the carpet "Ooo, Sol! Look! A Jupiter diamond!" She held up the largest and most expensive diamond I have ever seen. I was just going to claim credit for this little gift when another appeared, and another, and a long line marching over the carpet like an ant trail. They came floating in under the door. No w love is for '"cations, and betweem y Qwn sweet Fi orenC e and a diamond mine there is no comparison. I put on my dicyanin glasses and saw the baby diver was back and at work teleporting. I said so, but this time there were no hysterics from Florence. "I was just thinking of him," she said, "and wishing you had brought me a Jupiter diamond instead." 'Well, honey, it looks as if you've got both." I watched her scrambling on the carpet, gathering handfuls of diamonds and not in the least interested in me. On Antimony IX, the little divers switched from one spacetime point to another simultaneously, and the baby diver had come back from the Solar Party Convention the same way. I thought of it and it came; Florence had just thought of it and here it was. But now it seemed to be flitting lightly from Earth to Jupiter and back with diamonds, so perhaps there was no interplanetary distance to a mind. This had a future. I could see myself with a winter and a summer planet of my own, even happily paying Earth, Solar and Galactic taxes. "Well, honey, don't you worry," I said. "You don't like divers, so I'll take it back and you some  thinv " ise j us t leave it to Sol." "Take your foot off that diamond, Sol Jones! You gave me this dear little diver and he's mine!"  thought. The evidence of her thinking immediately came trickling through the door -- Venusian opals set in a gold bracelet half a pound heavy, Martian sleeze furs, spider-web stockings, platinum belts. The room was beginning to look like a video fashion center, a Galactic merchandise mart. And after Florence put on a coat and opened the door, her ideas began to get bigger. "This is fun!" she cried, teleporting like mad. "Why, I can have anything in the Galaxy just by thinking about it!" "Now, honey, think of the benefits to humanity! This is too big to be used for personal gain. This should be dedicated -- " "This is dedicated to me, Sol Jones, so just you keep your fingers off it. Why, the cute little thing -- look, he's been out to Saturn for me!" I made a decision. Think wide and grand, Sol Jones, I said. Sacrifice yourself for the greater good. "Florence, honey, you knojv I love you. Will you marry me?" That stopped her. "You mean it, Sol?" "Of course." "It's not just because of this diver?" 'Why, honey, how could you think such a thing? If I'd never brought it in for you. I'd still want to marry you." "You never said so before," she said. "But okay. If you do it now. Right now, Sol Jones." So the merchandise stopped coming in while we plugged into the video and participated in a moving and legal ceremony. The marriage service was expensive, but after all we could teleport in a few thousand credit blanks from the Solar Treasury. Immediately after we had switched off, we did so... "Are you sure you married me for myself, Sol?" "I swear it, honey. No other thought entered my head. Just you." I made a few notes while Florence planned the house we would have, furnished with rare materials from anywhere. I thought one of the medium asteroids would do for a base for Sol Jones Intragalactic Transport. I could see it all, vast warehouses and immediate delivery of anything from anywhere. I wondered if there was a limit to the diver's capacity, so Florence desired an encyclopedia and in it came, floating through the doorway. "It says," she-read, "not much is known about Antimony IX divers because none have ever been known to leave their planet." "They probably need the stimulus of an educated mind," I said. "Anyway, this one can get diamonds from Jupiter and so on, and that's what matters." dent of Sol Jones Intragalactic and was interrupted by discreet tapping on the door. The manager of the Asteroid-Central beamed at us. "Excuse," he said. "But we understand you have just been married, Mr. and Mrs. Jones." "Irrevocably," I said. "Felicitations. The AsteroidCentral will be sending up complimentary euphorics. There is just a small point, Mr. Jones. We notice you have a large selection of valuable gifts for the bride." He looked round the room and smiled at the piles of stuff Florence had thought of. "Of course," he went on, "we trust your stay will be pleasant and perhaps you will let us know if you will be wanting anything else." "I expect we will, but we'll let you know," I said. "Thank you, Mr. Jones. It is merely that we noticed you had emptied every showcase on the ground floor and, a few moments ago, teleported the credit contents of the bar up here. Not of importance, really; it is all charged on your bill." "You saw it and didn't stop it?" I yelled. "Oh, no, Mr. Jones. We always make an exception for Antimony IX divers. Limited creatures, really, but good for our business. We get about one a month -- smuggled in, you know. But the upkeep proves too expensive. Some women do shop without more than a passing thought, don't they?" I saw what he meant, but Mrs. Sol Jones took it very philosophically. "Never mind, Sol -- you have me." "Or vice versa, honey," I said... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of Galaxy to you when they should arrive -- at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: Subscription Dept., Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. With your literally thousands of letters, you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges.) The Day The Icicle Works Closed That was a sad and frightening day for Altair Ninefor on any world, when the forage grows thin, predators grow fat! I T HE wind was cold, pink snow was falling, and Milo Pulcher had holes in his shoes. He trudged through the pinkgrey slush across the square from the courthouse to the jail. The turnkey was drinking coffee out of a vinyl container. "Expecting you," he grunted. "Which one you want to see first?" Pulcher sat down, grateful for the warmth. "It doesn't matter. Say, what kind of kids are they?" The turnkey shrugged. "I mean, do they give you any trouble?" "How could they give me trouble? If they don't clean their cells, they don't eat. What else they do makes no difference to me. Which one you want to see?" Pulcher took the letter from Judge Pegrim out of his pocket and examined the list of his new clients. Avery Foltis, Walter Hopgood, Jimmy Lasser, Sam Schlesterman, Bourke Smith, Madeleine Gaultry. None of the names meant anything to him. "I'll take Foltis first," he guessed, and followed the turnkey to a cell. The Foltis boy was homely, pimply and belligerent. "Cripes," he complained shrilly, "are you the best they can do for me?" Pulcher took his time answering. The boy was not very lovable; but, he reminded himself, there was a fifty-dollar retainer from the county for each one of these defendants, and conditions being what they were, Pulcher could easily grow to love three hundred dollars. "Don't give me a hard time," he said amiably. "I may not be the best lawyer in the Galaxy, but I'm the one you've got." "Cripes." "Tell me what happened. All I know is that you're accused of conspiracy to commit a felony, specifically an act of kidnapping a minor child." "Yeah, that's it," the boy agreed. "You want to know what happened?" He bounced to his feet, then began acting out his story. "We were starving to death, see?" Arms clutched pathetically around his belly. "The Icicle Works closed down. Cripes, I walked the streets nearly a year, looking for something to do. Anything." Marching in place. "I even rented out for a while, but -- that didn't work out." Scowling and fingering his pimply face. Pulcher nodded. Even a bodyrenter had to have some qualifications. The most important one was a good-looking, disease-free, strong and agile physique. "So we got together and decided, the hell, there was money to be made hooking old Swinburne's son. So I guess we talked too much. They caught us." The boy gripped his wrists, like manacles. Pulcher asked a few more questions, and then interviewed two of the other boys. He learned nothing he hadn't already known. The six youngsters had planned a reasonably competent kidnapping, and talked about it where they could be heard, and if there was any hope of getting them off, it did not make itself visible to their court-appointed attorney. up Ihe street to see Charley Dickon. The committeeman was watching a three-way wrestling match on a flickery old TV set. "How'd it go, Milo?" he greeted the lawyer, keeping his eyes on the wrestling. Pulcher said: "I'm not going to get them off, Charley." "Oh? Too bad." Dickon looked away from the set for the first time. "Why not?" "They admitted the whole thing. Handwriting made the Hopgood boy on the ransom note. The others had fingerprints and cell-types all over the place. And besides, they talked too much." Dickon said with a spark of interest: 'What about Tim Lasser's son?" "Sorry." The committeeman looked thoughtful. "I can't help it, Charley," the lawyer protested. The kids hadn't been even routinely careful. When they planned to kidnap the son of the mayor, they had talked it over, quite loudly, in a juke joint. The waitress habitually taped everything that went on in her booths. Pulcher suspected a thriving blackmail business, but that didn't change the fact that there was enough on tape to show premeditation. The kids had picked the mayor's son up at school. He had come with Madeleine Gaultry, had been a babysitter for him. The boy was only three years old, but he couldn't miss an easy identification like that And there was more: the ransom note had been sent special delivery, and young Foltis had asked the post office clerk to put the postage on instead of using the automatic meter. The clerk remembered the pimply face very well indeed. "You'd think they wanted to get caught," Pulcher complained. The committeeman sat politely while Pulcher explained, though it was obvious that most of his attention was on the snowy TV screen. "Well, Milo, that's the way it goes. Anyway, you got a fast three hundred, hey? And that reminds me." Pulcher's guard went up. "Here," said the committeeman, rummaging through his desk. He brought out a couple of pale green tickets. "You ought to get out and meet more people. The Party's having its annual Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner next week. Bring your girl." "I don't have a girl," said Pulcher. "Oh, you'll find one. Fifteen dollars per," the committeeman said, handing over the tickets. Pulcher sighed and paid. Well, that was what kept the wheels oiled. And Dickon had suggested his name to Judge Pegrim. Thirty dollars out of three hundred still left him a better week's pay than he had had since the Icicle Works folded. The committeeman carefully folded the bills into his pocket, with Pulcher watching gloomily. Dickon was looking prosperous, all right. There was easily a couple of thousand in that wad. Pulcher supposed that Dickon had been caught along with everybody else on the planet when the Icicle Works folded. Nearly everybody owned stock in it, and certainly Charley Dickon, whose politician brain got him a piece of nearly every major enterprise on Altair Nine -- a big clump of stock in the Tourist Agency, a sizable share of the Mining Syndicate -- certainly he would have had at least a few thousand in the Icicle Works. But it hadn't hurt him much. Dickon said, "None of my business, but why don't you take that girl -- that Madeleine Gaultry?" "She's in jail." "Get her out. Here." He tossed over a bondsman's card. Pulcher pocketed it with a scowl. That would cost another forty bucks, he estimated; the bondsman would naturally be one of Dickon's club members. Pulcher noticed that Dickon was looking strangely puzzled. "What's the matter?" "Like I say, it's none of my business. But I don't get it. You and the girl have a fight?" "Fight? I don't even know her." "She said you did." "Me? No. I don't know... Wait a minute! Is Gaultry her married name? Did she used to be at the Icicle Works?" Dickon nodded. "Didn't you see her?" "I didn't get to the women's wing at the jail. I -- " Pulcher stood up, oddly flustered. "Say, I'd better run along, Charley. This bondsman, he's open now? Well -- " He stopped babbling and left. Madeleine Gaultry! Only her name had been Madeleine Cossett. It was funny that she should turn up now -- in jail and, Pulcher abruptly realized, likely to stay there indefinitely. But he put that thought out of his mind. First he wanted to see her. T HE snow.was turning lavender now. Pink snow, green snow, lavender snow -- any color of the pastel rainbow. It was nothing unusual. That was what had made Altair Nine worth colonizing in the first place. Now, of course, it was only a way of getting your feet wet. Pulcher waited impatiently at the turnkey's office while the turnkey shambled over to the women's wing and, slowly, returned with the girl. She and Pulcher looked at each other. She didn't speak. Pulcher opened his mouth, closed it, and silently took her by the elbow. He steered her out of the jail and hailed a cab. That was an extravagance, but he didn't care. Madeleine shrank into a corner of the cab, looking at him out of blue eyes that were large and shadowed. She wasn't hostile. She wasn't afraid. She was only remote. "Hungry?" She nodded. Pulcher gave the cab driver the name of a restaurant. Another extravagance, but he didn't mind the prospect of cutting down on lunches. He had had enough practice at it. A year before, this girl had been the prettiest secretary in the pool at the Icicle Works. He dated her half a dozen times. There was a company rule against it, but the first time it was a kind of schoolboy's prank, breaking the headmaster's regulations, and the other times it was a driving need. ThenThen came the Gumpert Process. That was the killer, the Gumpert Process. Whoever Gumpert was. All anybody at the Icicle Works knew was that someone named Gumpert (back on Earth, one rumor said; another said he was a colonist in the Sirian system) had come up with a cheap, practical method of synthesizing the rainbow antibiotic molds that floated free in Altair Nine's air, coloring its precipitation and more important, providing a priceless export commodity. The Galaxy had depended on those rainbow molds, shipped in frozen suspensions to every inhabited planet by Altamycin, Inc. -- the proper name for what everyone on Altair Nine called the Icicle Works. When the Gumpert Process came along, suddenly the demand vanished. Worse, the jobs vanished. Pulcher had been on the corporation's legal staff, with an office of his own and a faint hint of a vicepresidency someday. He was out. The stenos in the pool, all but two or three of the five hundred who once had handled the correspondence and the bills, they were out. The shipping clerks in the warehouse were out, the pumphands at the settling tanks were out, the freezer attendants were out. Everyone was out. The plant closed down. There were more than fifty tons of frozen antibiotics in storage and, though there might still be a faint trickle of orders from old-fashioned diehards around the Galaxy (backwoods country doctors who didn't believe in the new-fangled synthetics, experimenters who wanted to run comparative tests), the shipments already en route would much more than satisfy them. Fifty tons? Once the Icicle Works had shipped three hundred tons a day -- physical transport, electronic rockets that took years to cover the distance between stars. The boom was over. And of course, on a one-industry planet, everything else was over too. Pulcher took the girl by the arm and swept her into the restaurant. "Eat," he ordered. "I know what jail food is like." He sat down, firmly determined to say nothing until she had finished. she was ready for coffee, he burst out: "Why, Madeleine? Why would you get into something like this?" She looked at him but did not answer. "What about your husband?" Pulcher didn't want to ask it, but he had to. That had been the biggest of all the unpleasant blows that had struck him after the Icicle Works closed. Just as he was getting a law practice going -- not on any big scale but, through Charley Dickon and the Party, a small, steady handout of political favors that would make it possible for him to pretend he was still an attorney-the gossip reached him that Madeleine Cossett had married. The girl pushed her plate away. "He emigrated." Pulcher digested that slowly. Emigrated? That was the dream of every Niner since the Works closed down. But it was only a dream. Physical transport between the stars was ungodly expensive. More, it was ungodly slow. Ten years would get you to Dell, the thinaired planet of a chilly little red dwarf. The nearest good planet was thirty years away. What it all added up to was that emigrating was almost like dying. If one member of a married couple emigrated, it meant the end of the marriage. "We got a divorce," said Madeleine, nodding. "There wasn't enough money for both of us to go, and Jon was unhappier here than I was." She took out a cigarette and let him light it "You don't want to ask me about Jon, do you? But you want to know. All right. Jon was an artist. He was in the advertising department at the Works, but that was just temporary. He was going to do something big. Then the bottom dropped out for him, just as it did for all of us. Well, Milo, I didn't hear from you." Pulcher protested: "It wouldn't have been fair for me to see you when I didn't have a job or anything." "Of course you'd think that. But I couldn't find you to tell you it was wrong, and then Jon was very persistent. He was tall, curly-haired, he had a baby's face -- do you know, he only shaved twice a week! Well, I married him. It lasted three months. Then he just had to get away." She leaned forward earnestly. "Don't think he was just a bum, Milo! He really was quite a good artist. But we didn't have enough money for paints, even, and then it seems that the colors are all wrong here. Jon explained it. In order to paint landscapes that sell, you have to be on a planet with Earth-type colors. They're all the vogue. And there's too much altamycin in the clouds here." Pulcher said stiffly, "I see." But he didn't, really. There was at least one unexplained part If there hadn't been enough money for paint, then where had the money come from for a starship ticket, physical transport? It meant at least ten thousand dollars. There just was no way to raise ten thousand dollars on Altair Nine, not without taking a rather extreme step... The girl wasn't looking at him Her eyes were fixed on a table across the restaurant, a table with a loud, drunken party. It was only lunch time, but they had a threeo'clock-in-the-morning air about them. They were stinking. There were four of them, two men and two women, and their physical bodies were those of young, healthy, quite goodlooking, perfectly normal Niners. The appearance of the physical bodies was entirely irrelevant, though, because they were tourists. Around the neck of each of them was a bright golden choker with a glowing red signaljewel in the middle -- the mark of the Tourist Agency the sign that the bodies were rented. Milo Pulcher looked away quickly. His eyes stopped on the white face of the girl, and now he knew how she had raised the money to send Jon to another world. II A room and left her there, though that was not what he wanted. What he wanted was to spend the evening with her and to go on spending time with her, until time came to an end. But there was the matter of her trial. Twenty-four hours ago he had got the letter notifying him that the court had appointed him attorney for six suspected kidnappers and looked on it as a fast fee, no work to speak of, no hope for success. He would lose the case, certainly. Well, what of it? But now he wanted to win! It meant some fast, hard work if he was to have even a chance -- and at best, he admitted to himself, the chance would not be good. Still, he wasn't going to give up without a try. The snow stopped as he located the home of Jimmy Lasser's parents. It was a sporting goods shop, not far from the main Tourist Agency; it had a window full of guns and boots and scuba gear. He walked in, tinkling a bell as he opened the door. "Mr. Lasser?" came aware of the Lassers just behind him. "But I think I can get an acquittal," he said, entirely out of hope, knowing that it wasn't true. Dickon chuckled. "You got Lasser breathing down your neck? Sure, Milo. But you want my advice, you'll take a quick hearing, let them get sentenced and then try for executive clemency in a couple months. I'll help you get it. And that's another five hundred or so for you, see?" The committeeman was being persuasive; it was a habit of his. "Don't worry about Lasser. I guess he's been telling you what a power he is in politics here. Forget it And, say, tell him I notice he hasn't got his tickets for the Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner yet. You pick up the dough from him, will you? I'll mail him the tickets. No -- hold on, don't ask him. Just tell him what I said." The connection went dead. Pulcher stood holding a dead phone, conscious of Lasser standing right behind him. "So long, Charley," he said, paused, nodded into space and said, "So long," again. Then the attorney turned about to deliver the committeeman's message about that most important subject, the tickets to the Chester A. Arthur Day Dinner. Lasser grumbled: "Damn Dickon. He's into you for one thing after another. Where's he think I'm going to get thirty bucks for tickets?" "Will, please." His wife touched his arm. Lasser hesitated. "Oh, all right. But you better get Jimmy off, hear?" Pulcher got away at last and hurried out into the cold, slushy street. At the corner he caught a glimpse of something palely glowing overhead and stopped, transfixed. A huge sky trout was swimj ming purposefully down the ! avenue. It was a monster, twelve feet long, at least, and more than two feet thick at the middle. It would easily go eighteen, nineteen i ounces, the sort of lunker that I sportsmen hiked clear across the , Dismal Hills to bag. Pulcher had ; never in his life seen one that size, i In fact, he could only remember seeing one or two fingerlings swim over inhabited areas. It gave him a cold, worried feeling. The sky fish were about the only tourist attraction Altair Nine had left to offer. From all over the Galaxy sportsmen came to shoot i them, with their great porous flesh filled with bubbles of hydrogen, real biological zeppelins that did not fly in the air but swam it. Before human colonists arrived, they had been Altair Nine's highest form of life. They were so easy to destroy with gunfire that they had almost been exterminated in the inhabited sections. Only in the high, cold hills had a few survived. And now... Were even the fish aware that Altair Nine was becoming a ghost planet? T HE next morning Pulcher phoned Madeleine but didn't have breakfast with her, though he wanted to very much. He put in the whole day working on the case. In the morning he visited the families and friends of the accused boys; in the afternoon he followed a few hunches. From the families he learned nothing. The stories were all about the same. The youngest boy was Foltis, only seventeen; the oldest was Hopgood at twenty-six. They all had lost their jobs, most of them at the Icicle Works; they saw no future, and wanted off-planet. Well, physical transport meant more money than any of them had a chance of getting in any legitimate way. Mayor Swinburne was a rich man and his three-year-old son was the apple of his eye. It must have been an irresistible temptation to try to collect ransom money, Pulcher realized. The mayor could certainly afford it, and once the money was collected and they were aboard a starship, it would be almost impossible for the law to pursue them. Pulcher managed to piece together the way the thing had started. The boys all lived in the same neighborhood, the neighborhood where Madeleine and Jon Gaultry had had a little apartment. They had seen Madeleine walking with the mayor's son -- she had a part-time job now and then, taking care of him. The only aspect that was hard to believe was that Madein the scheme, once the boys approached her. But Milo, remembering the expression on the girl's face as she looked at the tourists, decided that wasn't so strange after all. For Madeleine had rented. Physical transport was expensive and eternally slow. But there was a faster way for one to travel from planet to planet -- practically instantaneous, from one end of the Galaxy to the other. The pattern of the mind is electronic in nature. It can be taped, and it can be broadcast on an electromagnetic frequency. What was more, like any electromagnetic signal, it could be used to modulate an ultrawave carrier. The result: instantaneous transmission of personality, anywhere in the civilized Galaxy. The only problem was that there had to be a receiver. The naked ghost of a man, stripped of flesh and juices, was no more than the countless radio and other waves that passed through everyone all the time. The transmitted personality had to be given form. There were mechanical receivers, of course -- computerlike affairs with mercury memory cells -- where a man's intelligence could be received, and could be made to activate robot bodies. But that wasn't fun. The tourist trade was built on fun. Live bodies were needed to satisfy the customers. No one wanted to spend the price of a fishing trip to Altair Nine in order to find himself pursuing the quarry in some clanking tractor with photocell eyes and solenoid muscles. A body was wanted, preferably a rather attractive body; one which would be firm where the tourist's own, perhaps, was flabby, healthy where the tourist's own wheezed. Having such a body, there were other sports to enjoy than fishing. Oh, the laws were strict about misuse of rented bodies. But the tourist trade was the only flourishing industry left on Altair Nine. The laws remained strict, but they remained unenforced. Charley Dickon. "I found out why Madeleine got into this thing. She rented. Signed a long-term lease with the Tourist Agency and got a big advance on her earnings." Dickon shook his head sadly. "What people will do for money," he commented. "It wasn't for her! She gave it to her husband so he could get a ticket to some place off-world." I Pulcher got up, turned around and I kicked his chair as hard as he could. Renting was bad enough for a maa For a woman it was -- "Take it easy," Dickon suggested, grinning. "So she figured she could buy her way out of the contract with the money from Swinburne?" "Wouldn't you do the same?" "Oh, I don't know, Milo. Renting's not so bad." "The hell it isn't!" "All right, the hell it isn't. But you ought to realize, Milo," the committeeman said stiffly, "that if it wasn't for the tourist trade, we'd all be in trouble. Don't knock the Tourist Agency. They're doing a perfectly decent job." "Then why won't they let me see the records?" The committeeman's eyes narrowed and he sat up straighten "I tried," said Pulcher. "I got them to show me Madeleine's lease agreement, but not till I threatened them with a court order. Why? Then I tried to find out a little more about the Agency itself -- incorporation papers, names of shareholders and so on. They wouldn't give me a thing. Why?" Dickon said, after a second; "I could ask you that too, Milo. Why did you want to know?" Pulcher said seriously: "I have to make a case any way I can, Charley. On the evidence, they're guilty. But every one of them went into this kidnapping stunt in order to stay away from renting. Maybe I can't get Judge Pegrim to listen to that kind of evidence, but maybe I can. It's my only chance. If I can show that renting is a form of cruel and unusual abuse -- if I can find something wrong in it, something that isn't allowed in its charter -- then I have that chance. Not a good chance, but a chance. And there's got to be something wrong, Charley, because otherwise why would they be so secretive?" Dickon said heavily: "You're getting in pretty deep, Milo. Ever occur to you you're going about this the wrong way?" "Wrong how?" "What can the incorporation papers show you? You want to find out what renting's like. It seems to me the only way that makes sense is to try it yourself." "Rent? Me?" Pulcher was shocked. The committeeman shrugged. "Well, I got a lot to do," he said, and escorted Pulcher to the door. The lawyer walked sullenly away. Rent? But he had to admit that there was a certain amount of sense... He made a private decision. He would do what he could to get Madeleine and the others out of trouble. Completely out of trouble. But if, in the course of trying the case, he couldn't magic up some way of getting her out of the lease agreement as well as getting an acquittal, he would make damn sure that he didn't get the acquittal. Jail wasn't so bad. Renting, for Madeleine Gaultry, was considerably worse. Ill ' into the unemployment office with an air of determination far exceeding what he really felt. Talk about loyalty to a client! But he had spent the whole night brooding about it, and Dickon had been right. The clerk blinked a him and wheezed: "Gee, you're Mr. Pulcher, aren't you? I never thought I'd see you here. Things pretty slow?" Pulcher's uncertainty made him belligerent. "I want to rent my body. Am I in the right place or not?" 'Well, sure, Mr. Pulcher. I mean, you're not, if it's voluntary, but it's been so long since they had a voluntary that it don't make much difference, you know. I mean, I can handle it for you. Wait a minute." He turned away, hesitated, glanced at Pulcher and said: "I better use the other phone." He was gone only a minute. He came back with a look of determined embarrassment. "Mr. Pulcher. Look. I thought I better call Charley Dickon. He isn't in his office. Why don't you wait until I can clear it with him?" Pulcher said grimly: "It's already cleared with him." The clerk hesitated. "But -- Oh. All right," he said miserably, scribbling on a pad. "Right across the street Oh, and tell them you're a volunteer. I don't know if that will make them leave the cuffs off you, but at least it'll give them a laugh." Pulcher took the slip of paper and walked sternly across the street to the Tourist Rental Agency, Procurement Office, observing without pleasure that there were bars on the windows. A husky guard at the door straightened up as he approached and said genially: "All right, sonny. It isn't going to be as bad as you think. Just gimme your wrists a minute." "Wait," said Pulcher quickly, putting his hands behind him. "You won't need the handcuffs for me. I'm a volunteer." The guard said dangerously: "Don't kid with me, sonny." Then he took a closer look. "Hey, I know you. You're the lawyer. I saw you at the Primary Dance." He scratched his ear. He said doubtfully: "Well, maybe you are a volunteer. Go on in." But as Pulcher strutted past, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and click, click, his wrists were circled with steel. He whirled. "No hard feelings," said the guard cheerfully. "It costs a lot of dough to get you ready, that's all. They don't want you changing your mind when they give you the squeeze, see?" "The squeeze? All right," said Pulcher, and turned away again uneasily. The squeeze. It didn't sound so good, at that. But he had a little too much pride left to ask the guard for details. Anyway, it couldn't be too bad, he was sure. Wasn't he? After all, it wasn't the same as being executed. An hour and a half later he wasn't so sure. They had stripped him, weighed him, fluorographed him, taken samples of his blood, saliva, urine and spinal fluid; they had thumped his chest and listened to the strangled pounding of the arteries in his left arm. "You pass," said a forty ish blonde in a stained nurse's uniform. "You're lucky today -- openings all over. You can take your pick -- mining, sailing, anything you like. What'll it be?" "What?" "While you're renting. What's the matter with you? You got to be doing something while your body's rented. You can have the tank if you want to, but they mostly don't like that. You're conscious the whole time, you know. It gets kind of boring otherwise." don't know what you're talking about." But then he remembered. While a person's body was rented out, there was the problem of what to do with his own mind and personality. It couldn't stay in the body. It had to go somewhere else. "The tank" was a storage device, only that and nothing more; the displaced mind was held in a sort of pickling vat of transistors and cells until its own body could be returned to it. He remembered a client of his boss's, while he was still clerking, who had spent eight weeks in the tank and had then come out to commit a murder. No, not the tank. He said, coughing: "What else is there?" The nurse said impatiently: "Golly, whatever you want, I guess. They've got a big call for miners operating the deep gas generators right now, if you want that. It's pretty hot is all. They burn the coal into gas, and of course you're right in the middle of it. But I don't think you feel much. Not too much. I don't know about sailing or rocketing, because you have to have some experience for that. There might be something with the taxi company, but usually the renters don't want that, I ought to tell you, because the live drivers don't like seeing the machines running cabs. Sometimes if they see a machinecab they tip it over. Naturally, if there's any damage to the host machine, it's risky for you." Pulcher said faintly: "I'll try mining." He went out of the room in a daze, a small bleached towel around his middle his only garment, and hardly aware of that. His own clothes had been whisked away and checked long ago. The tourist who would shortly wear his body would pick his own clothes; the haberdashery was one of the more profitable subsidiaries of the Tourist Agency. Then he snapped out of his daze as he discovered what was meant by "the squeeze." A pair of husky experts lifted him onto a slab, whisked away the towel, unlocked and tossed away the handcuffs. While one pinned him down firmly at the shoulders, the other began to turn viselike wheels that moved molded forms down upon him. It was like a sectional sarcophagus closing in on him. Pulcher had an instant childhood recollection of some story or other -- the walls closing in, the victim inexorably squeezed to death. He yelled: "Hey, hold it! What are you doing?" The man at his head, bored, said : "Oh, don't worry. This your first time? We got to keep you still, see? Scanning's close work." "But-" "Now shut up and relax," the man said reasonably. "If you wiggle when the tracer's scanning you, you could get your whole personality messed up. Not only that, we might damage the body an' then the Agency'd have a suit on its hands, see? Tourists don't like damaged bodies... Come on, Vince. Get the legs lined up so I can do the head." "But -- " said Pulcher again, and then, with effort, relaxed. It was only for one day, after all. He could stand practically anything for a day, and he had been careful to sign up for only that long. "Go ahead," he said. "It's only for twenty-four hours." "What? Oh, sure, friend. Lights out, now. Have a pleasant dream." And something soft but quite firm came down over his face. He heard a muffled sound of voices. Then there was a quick ripping feeling, as though he had been plucked out of some sticky surrounding medium. Then it hurt. Pulcher screamed. It didn't accomplish anything. He no longer had a voice to scream with. of mining as something that was carried on underground. He was under water. There wasn't any doubt of it. He could see vagrant eddies of sand moving in a current. He could see real fish, not the  hydrogen zeppelins of the air. He could see bubbles, arising from some source in the sand at his feet -- No! Not at his feet. He didn't have feet. He had tracks. A great steel bug swam up in front of him and said raspingly: "All right, you there, let's go." Funny again. He didn't hear the voice with ears -- he didn't have ears, and there was no binaural sense -- but he did, somehow, hear. It seemed to be speaking inside his brain. Radio? Sonar? "Come on!" growled the bug. Experimentally, Pulcher tried to walk. "Watch it!" squeaked a thin little voice, and a tiny, many-treaded steel beetle squirmed out from under his tracks. It paused to rear back and look at him. "Dope!" it chattered scathingly. A bright flame erupted from its snout as it squirmed away. The big bug rasped: "Go on, follow the burner, Mac." Pulcher thought of walking, rather desperately. Yes, something was happening. He lurched and moved. "Oh, God," sighed the steel bug, hanging beside him, watching with critical attention. "This your first time? I figured. They always give me the new ones to break in. Look, that burner -- the little thing that just went down the cline, Mac! That's a burner. It's going to burn the hard rock out of a new shaft. You follow it and pull the sludge out. With your buckets, Mac." Pulcher gamely started his treads and lurchingly followed the little burner. All around him, visible through the churned, silty water, he caught glimpses of other machines working. There were big ones and little ones, some with great elephantine flexible steel trunks that sucked silt and mud away, some with wasp's stingers that planted charges of explosive, some like himself with buckets for hauling and scooping out pits. The mine, whatever sort of mine it was to be, was only a bare scratched-out beginning on the sea floor as yet. It took him -- an hour? a minute? he had no means of telling time -- to learn the rudiments of operating his new steel body. Then it became dull. Also it became painful. The first few scoops of sandy grime he carried out of the new pit made his buckets tingle. The tingle became a pain, the pain an ache, the ache a blazing agony. He stopped. Something was wrong. They couldn't expect him to go on like this! "Hey, Mac. Get busy, will you?" "But it hurts." "Godamighty, Mac, it's supposed to hurt. How else would you be able to feel when you hit something hard? You want to break your buckets on me, Mac?" Pulcher gritted his not-teeth, squared his not-shoulders, and went back to digging. Ultimately the pain became, through habit, bearable. It didn't become less. It just became bearable. TT was tiresome, except when once he did strike a harder rock than his phosphor-bronze buckets could handle, and had to slither back out of the way while the burner chopped it up for him. But that was the only break in the monotony. Otherwise the work was strictly routine. It gave him plenty of time to think. That was not altogether a boon. I wonder, he thought, with a drowned clash of buckets, I wonder what my body is doing now. Perhaps the tenant who now occupied his body was a businessman, Pulcher thought prayerfully. A man who had had to come to Altair Nine quickly, on urgent business -- get a contract signed, make a trading deal, arrange an interstellar loan. That wouldn't be so bad! A businessman would not damage a rented property. At the worst, a businessman might drink one or two cocktails too many, perhaps eat an indigestible lunch. All right. So when -- in only a few hours now -- Pulcher resumed his body, the worst he could expect would be a hangover or dyspepsia. Well, what of that? An aspirin. A dash of bicarb. But maybe the tourist would not be a businessman. Pulcher flailed the coarse sand with his buckets and thought apprehensively : He might be a sportsman. Still, even that wouldn't be so bad. A sportsman might walk his body up and down a few dozen mountains, perhaps even sleep it out in the open overnight. There might be a cold, possibly even pneumonia. There might also be an accident -- tourists did fall off the Dismal Hills; there could be a broken leg. But that was not too bad. It was only a matter of a few days' rest, a little medical attention. But maybe, Pulcher thought grayly, ignoring the teeming agony of his buckets, maybe the tenant will be something worse. He had heard queer, smutty stories about rented bodies, each one against the law. But you kept hearing the stories. All of them were unpleasant. And yet in a rented body, where the ultimate price of dissipation would be borne by someone else, who might not try any or all pleasures and lusts? For there was no physical consequence to the practitioner. If Mrs. Lasser was right, perhaps there was not even a consequence in the hereafter. Twenty-four hours had never passed so slowly. r I I HE suction hoses squabbled with the burners. The scoops quarreled with the dynamiters. All the animate submarine mining machines constantly irritably snapped at each other. But the work was getting done. It seemed to be a lot of work to accomplish in one twenty-four hour day, Pulcher thought wearily. The pit was down two hundred yard # now, and braced. New wet-setting concrete pourers were already laying a floor. Shimmery little spiderlike machines whose limbs held chemical testing equipment were now sniffing every load of sludge that came out for richness of ore. The mine was nearly ready to start producing. After a time Pulcher began to understand the short tempers of the machines. The minds in these machines were not able to forget that, up topside, their bodies were going about unknown errands, risking unguessed dangers. At any given moment that concrete pourer's body, for instance, might be dying... might be acquiring a disease... might be stretched out in narcotic stupor, or might gayly be risking dismemberment in a violent sport. Naturally tempers were touchy. There was no such thing as rest, as coffee breaks or sleep for the machines; they kept going. When finally Pulcher remembered that he had had a purpose in coming here, that it was not merely some punishment that had come blindly to him for a forgotten sin, he began to try to analyze his own feelings and to guess at the feelings of the others. The whole thing seemed unnecessarily mean. Pulcher understood quite clearly why anyone who had had the experience of renting would never want to do it again. But why did it have to be so unpleasant? Surely conditions for the renter-mind in a machine-body could be made more bearable; the tactile sensations could be reduced from pain to some more supportable feeling without loss of sensation enough to accomplish the desired ends. He wondered wistfully if Madeleine had once occupied this particular machine. Then he wondered how many of the dynamiters and diggers were female, how many male. It seemed somehow wrong that their gleaming stainless-steel or phosphorbronze exteriors should give no hint of age or sex. There ought to be some lighter work for women, he thought idly, and then realized that the thought was nonsense. What difference did it make? You could work your buckets off, and when you got back topside you'd be healthy and rested... And then he had a quick dizzying qualm, as he realized that that would be the thought in the mind of the tourist now occupying his own body. Pulcher licked his not-lips and attacked the sand with his buckets more viciously than before. "All right, Mac." The familiar steel bug was alongside him. "Come on, back to the barn," it scolded. "You think I want to have to haul you there? Time's up. Get the tracks back in the parking lot." Never was an order so gladly obeyed. But the overseer had cut it rather fine. Pulcher had just reached the parking space, had not quite turned his clanking steel frame around when, rip, the tearing and the pain hit him... And he found himself struggling against "the squeeze." distant voice. Abruptly the pressure was removed from his face and the voice came nearer. "There you are. Have a nice dream?" Pulcher kicked the rubbery material off his legs. He sat up. "Ouch!" he said suddenly, and held his eye. The man by his head looked down at him and grinned. "Some shiner. Must've been a good party." He was stripping the sections of rubbery gripping material off Pulcher as he talked. "You're lucky. I've seen them come back in here with legs broken, teeth out, even bullet holes. Friend, you wouldn't believe me if I told you. Especially the girls." He handed Pulcher r another bleached towel. "All right, you're through here. Don't worry about the eye, friend. That's easy two, three days old already. Another day or two and you won't even notice it" "Hey!" Pulcher cried suddenly. "What do you mean, two or three days? How long was I down there?" The man glanced at the greentabbed card on Pulcher's wrist. "Let's see, this is Thursday. Six days." "But I only signed up for twenty-four hours!" "Sure you did. Plus emergency overcalls. What do you think, friend -- the Agency's going to evict some big-spending tourist just because you want your body back in twenty-four hours? Can't do it. You can see that. The Agency'd lose a fortune that way." Unceremoniously, Pulcher was hoisted to his feet and escorted to the door. "If only these jokers would read the fine print," the first man was saying mournfully to his helper as Pulcher left. "Oh, well. If they had any brains, they wouldn't rent in the first place. Then what would me and you do for jobs?" Six days! Pulcher raced through medical check-out, clothes redemption. payoff at the cashier's window. "Hurry, please," he kept saying, "can't you please hurry?" He couldn't wait to get to a phone. But he had a pretty good idea already what the phone call would tell him. Five extra days! No wonder it had seemed so long down there, while up in the city time had passed along. He found a phone at last and quickly dialed the private number of Judge Pegrim's office. The judge wouldn't be there, but that was the way Pulcher wanted it. He didn't want to face the judge. He got Pegrim's secretary. "Miss Kish? This is Milo Pulcher." Her voice was cold. "So there you are. Where have you been? The judge was furious." "I -- " He despaired of explaining it to her. He could hardly explain it to himself. "I'll tell you later, Miss Kish. Please. Where does the kidnap case stand now?" "Why, the hearing was yesterday. Since we couldn't locate you, the judge had to appoint another attorney. After all, Mr. Pulcher, an attorney is supposed to be in court when his clients are coming up for trial." "I know that, Miss Kish. What happened?" "It was open and shut. They all pleaded non vult -- the whole thing was over in twenty minutes. It was the only thing to do on the evidence, you see. They'll be sentenced this afternoon -- around three o'clock, I'd say. If you're interested." IV TT was snowing again, blue this time. Pulcher paid the cab driver and ran up the steps of the courthouse. As he reached for the door, he caught sight of three air fish solemnly swimming around the corner of the building toward him. Even in his hurry, he paused to glance at them. It was past three, but the judge had not yet entered the courtroom. There were no spectators, but the six defendants were already in their , seats, a bailiff lounging next to them. Counsel's table was occupied by -- Pulcher squinted -- oh, by Donley. Pulcher knew the other lawyer slightly. He was a youngster, with good political connections -- that explained the court's appointing him for the fee when Pulcher didn't show up -- but without much to recommend him otherwise. Madeleine Gaultry looked up as Pulcher approached, then looked away. One of the boys caught sight of him, scowled, whispered to the others. Their collective expressions were enough to sear his spirit. Pulcher sat at the table beside Donley. "Hello. Mind if I join you?" Donley twisted his head. "Oh, hello, Charley. Sure. I didn't expect to see you here." He laughed. "Say, that eye's pretty bad. I guess -- " He stopped. Something happened in Donley's face. The soft young cheeks became harder, older, more worriedlooking. Donley clamped his lips shut. Pulcher was puzzled. "What's the matter? Are you wondering where I was?" Donley said stiffly: "Well, you can't blame me for that." "I couldn't help it, Donley. I was renting. I was trying to gather evidence -- not that that helps much now. I found one thing out, though. Even a lawyer can goof in reading a contract. Did you know the Tourist Agency has the right to retain a body for up to forty-five days, regardless of the original agreement? It's in their contract I was lucky, I guess. They only kept me an extra five." Donley's face did not relax. "That's interesting," he said noncommittally. The man's attitude was most peculiar. Pulcher could understand being needled by Donley -- could even understand this coldness if it had been from someone else -- but it wasn't like Donley to take mere negligence so seriously. But before he could try to pin down exactly what was wrong, the other lawyer stood up. "On your feet, Pulcher," he said in a stage whisper. "Here comes the judge!" Pulcher jumped up. He could feel Judge Pegrim's eyes rake over him. They scratched like diamond-tipped drills. In an ordinarily political, reasonably corrupt community, Judge Pegrim was one man who took his job seriously and expected the same from those around him. "Mr. Pulcher," he purred. "We're honored to have you with us." Pulcher began an explanation, but the judge waved it away. "Mr. Pulcher, you do know, don't you, that an attorney is an officer of the court? And, as such, is expected to know his duties -- and to fulfill them?" "Well, Your Honor, I thought I "I'll discuss it with you at another time, Mr. Pulcher," the judge said. "Right now we have a rather disagreeable task to get through. Bailiff! Let's get started." Donley made a couple of routine motions, but there was no question about what would happen. It happened. Each of the defendants drew a ten-year sentence. The judge pronounced it distastefully, adjourned the court and left. He did not look at Milo Pulcher. Pulcher tried for a moment to catch Madeleine's eye. Then he succeeded. Shaken, he turned away, bumping into Donley. "I don't understand it," he mumbled. 'What don't you understand?" "Well, don't you think that's a pretty stiff sentence?" Donley shrugged. He wasn't very interested. Pulcher scanned the masklike young face. There was no sympathy there. It was weird in a way. This was a face of flint; the plight of six young people, each doomed to spend a decade of their lives in prison, did not move him at all. Pulcher said dispiritedly: "I think I'll go see Dickon." 'Do that," said Donley curtly, and turned away. "D UT Pulcher couldn't find Dickon. He wasn't at his office, wasn't at the club. "Nope," said the garrulous retired police lieutenant who was the club president -- and used the club headquarters as a checker salon. "I haven't seen him in a couple of days. Be at the dinner tonight, though. You'll see him there." It wasn't a question, whether Pulcher would be at the dinner or not; Pop Craig knew he would. After all, Dickon had passed the word out. Everybody would be there. Pulcher went back to his apartment. It was the first time he had surveyed his body since reclaiming it. The bathroom mirror told him that he had a gorgeous shiner indeed. Also certain twinges made him strip and examine his back. It looked, he thought gloomily, staring over his shoulder into the mirror, as though whoever had rented his body had had a perfectly marvelous time. He made a mental note to get a complete checkup someday soon, just in case. Then he showered, shaved, talcumed around the black eye without much success, and dressed. He sat down, poured himself a drink and promptly forgot it was there. Something was trying to reach the surface of his mind. Something perfectly obvious that he all the same couldn't quite put his finger on. It was annoying. He found himself drowsily thinking of air fish. Damn, he thought grouchily, his body's late tenant hadn't even troubled to give it a decent night's sleep! But he didn't want to sleep, not now. It was still only early evening. He supposed the Chester A. Arthur Day dinner was still a must, but there were hours yet before that. He got up, poured the untasted drink into the sink and set out. There was one thing he could try to help Madeleine. It probably wouldn't work. But nothing else would either, so that was no reason for not trying it. TP HE mayor's mansion was ablaze with light; something was going on. r I r Pulcher trudged up the long, cir. cling driveway in slush that kept splattering his ankles. He tappei gingerly on the door. The butler took his name doubtfully and isolated Pulcher in a contagion-free sitting room while he went off to see if the mayor would care to admit such a person. He came back looking incredulous. The mayor would. Mayor Swinburne was a healthy lean man of medium height, show ing only by his thinning hair that' he was in his middle forties. Pulcher said: "Mr. Mayor, I guess you know who I am. I represent the six kids who were accused of kidnapping your son." "Not accused, Mr. Pulcher. Convicted. And I didn't know you still represented them." "I see you know the score. All right. Maybe, in a legal sense, I don't represent them any more. But I'd like to make some representations on their behalf to you tonight -- entirely unofficially." He gave the mayor a crisply worded, brief outline of what had happened in the case, how he had rented, what he had found as a renter, why he had missed the hearing. "You see, sir, the Tourist Agency doesn't give its renters even ordinary courtesy. They're just bodies, nothing else. I can't blame those kids. Now that I've rented myself, I'll have to say that I wouldn't blame anybody who did anything to avoid it." The mayor said dangerously: "Mr. Pulcher, I don't have to remind you that what's left of our economy depends heavily on the Tourist Agency for income. Also that some of our finest citizens are among its shareholders." "Including yourself, Mr. Mayor. Right." Pulcher nodded. "But the management may not be reflecting your wishes. I'll go further. I think, sir, that every contract the Tourist Agency holds with a renter ought to be voided as against public policy. Renting out one's body for a purpose which well may be in violation of law -- which, going by experience, nine times out of ten does involve a violation of law -- is the same thing as contracting to perform any other illegal act. The contract simply cannot be enforced. The common law gives us a great many precedents on this point, and-" "Please, Mr. Pulcher. I'm not a judge. If you feel so strongly, why not take it to court?" chair, deflated. "There isn't time," he admitted. "Besides, it's too late for that to help the six persons I'm interested in. They've already been driven into an even more illegal act in order to escape renting. I'm only trying to explain it to you, sir, because you are their only hope. You can pardon them." The mayor's face turned beet red. "Executive clemency from me -- for them?" "They didn't hurt your boy." "No, they did not," the mayor agreed. "And I'm sure that Mrs. ly have done so. But can you say the same of the others? Could she have prevented it?" He stood up. "I'm sorry, Mr. Pulcher. The answer is no. Now you must excuse me." Pulcher hesitated, then accepted the dismissal. There wasn't anything else to do. He walked somberly down the hall toward the entrance, hardly noticing that guests were beginning to arrive. Apparently the mayor was offering cocktails to a select few. He recognized some of the faces -- Lew Yoder, the county tax assessor for one; probably the mayor was having some of the white-collared politicians in for drinks before making the obligatory appearance at Dickon's fund-raising dinner. Pulcher looked up long enough to nod grayly at Yoder and walked on. "Charley Dickon! What the devil are you doing here like that?" Pulcher jerked upright. Dickon here? He looked around. But Dickon was not in sight. Only Yoder was coming down the corridor toward him, was looking straight at him! And it had been Yoder's voice. Yoder's face froze.  The expression on Yoder's face was a peculiar one, but not unfamiliar to Milo Pulcher. He had seen it once before, that day. It was the identical expression he had seen on the face of that young squirt who had replaced him in court, Donley. Yoder said awkwardly: "Oh, Milo, it's you. I, uh, thought you were Charley Dickon." Pulcher felt the hairs at the back of his neck tingle. Something was odd here. Very odd. "It's a perfectly natural mistake," he said. "I'm six feet tall and Charley's five feet seven. I'm thirty-one years old and he's fifty. I'm dark and he's almost bald. I don't know how anybody ever tells us apart." "What the devil are you talking about?" Yoder blustered. Pulcher looked at him thoughtfully for a second. "I'm not sure. Are you?" Yoder spun and walked angrily away. V Across the entrance to the New Metropolitan Cafe  Men's Grille, a long scarlet banner carried the the mayor and Committeeman Dickon flanked the door itself. A squat little sound truck parked outside the door blared ancient marches of the sort that political conventions had suffered through for more than two centuries back on Earth. It was an absolutely conventional political fund-raising dinner. It would have the absolutely conventional embalmed roast beef, the one conventionally free watery Manhattan at each place and the conventionally boring after-dinner speeches. (Except for one.) Milo Pulcher, stamping about in the slush outside the entrance, looked up at the constellations visible from Altair Nine and wondered if those same stars were looking down on just such another thousand dinners all over the Galaxy. Politics went on wherever you were. The constellations would be different, to be sure; the Squirrel and the Nut were local stars and would have no shape at all from any other solar system. But... He caught sight of the tall, thin figure he was waiting for and stepped out into the stream of small-time political workers, ignoring their greetings. "Judge. I'm glad you came." Judge Pegrim said frostily: "I gave you my word, Milo. But you've got a lot to answer for if this is a false alarm. I don't ordinarily attend partisan political affairs." "It isn't an ordinary affair, Judge." Pulcher conducted him into the room and sat him at the table he had prepared. Once it had held place cards for four election-board workers from the warehouse district, who now buzzed from table to table angrily; Pulcher had filched their cards. The judge was grumbling: "It doesn't comport well with the bench to attend this sort of thing, Milo. I don't like it." "I know, Judge. You're an honest man. Thafs why I wanted you here." "Mmm." Pulcher left him before the Mmm could develop into a question. He had fended off enough questions since the thoughtful halfhour he had spent pacing back and forth in front of the mayor's mansion. He didn't want to fend off any more. As he skirted the tables, heading for the private room where he had left his special guests, Dickon caught his arm. "Hey, Milo! I see you got the judge out. Good boy! He's just what we needed to make this dinner complete." "Complete -- yes, I hope so," said Pulcher and went on. He didn't look back. There was another fine potential question-source; and the committeeman's would be even more difficult to answer than the judge's. Besides, he wanted to see Madeleine. The girl and her five accomplices were where he had left them. The private bar where they were sitting was never used for affairs like this. You couldn't see the floor from it. Still, you could hear well enough, and that was more important. The boys were showing nervousness in their different ways. Although they had been convicted hardly more than a day, had been sentenced only a few hours, they had fallen quickly into the convict habit. Being out on bail so abruptly was a surprise. They hadn't expected it. It made them edgy. Young Foltis was jittering about to himself. The Hopgood boy was slumped despondently in a corner, blowing smoke rings. Jimmy Lasser was making a castle out of sugar cubes. Only Madeleine was relaxed. As Pulcher came in, she looked up calmly. "Is everything all right?" He crossed his fingers and nodded. "Don't worry," she said. Pulcher blinked. Don't worry. It should have been he who was saying that to her, not the other way around. It came to him that there was only one possible reason for her quiet confidence. She trusted him. D UT he couldn't stay. The ballroom was full now, and irritable banquet waiters were crashing plates down in front of the loyal Party workers. He had a couple of last-minute things to attend to. He carefully avoided the eye of Judge Pegrim, militantly alone at the table by the speaker's dais and walked quickly across the room to Jimmy Lasser's father. He said without preamble: "Do you want to help your son?" Phil Lasser snarled: "You cheap shyster! You wouldn't even show up for the trial! Where do you get the nerve to ask me a question like that?" "Shut up. Do you or don't you?" Lasser hesitated, then read something in Pulcher's eyes. "Well, of course I do," he grumbled. 'Then tell me something. It won't sound important, but it is. How many rifles did you sell in the past year?" Lasser looked puzzled, but he said. "Not many. Maybe half a dozen. Business is lousy all over, you know, since the Icicle Works closed." "And in a normal year?" "Oh, three or four hundred. It's a big tourist item. You see, they need cold-shot rifles for hunting the air fish. A regular bullet'll set them on fire-touches off the hydrogen. I'm the only sporting-goods merchant in town that carries them and -- say, what does that have to do with Jimmy?" Pulcher took a deep breath. "Stick around and you'll find out. Meanwhile, think about what you just told me. If rifles are a tourist item, why did closing the Icicle Works hurt your sales?" He left. But not quickly enough. Dickon scuttled over and clutched his arm, his face furious. "Milo, what the hell! I just heard from Sam Apfel -- the bondsman -- that you got that whole bunch out of jail again on bail. How come?" "They're my clients." "Don't give me that! How could you get them out when they're convicted, anyway?" "I'm going to appeal the case," Pulcher said. "You don't have a leg to stand on! Why would Pegrim grant bail?" Pulcher pointed to Judge Pegrim's solitary table. "Ask him," he invited, and broke away. He was burning a great many bridges behind him, he knew. It was an exhilarating feeling. Chancy but tingly; he decided he liked it. There was just one job to do. As soon as he was clear of the committeeman, he walked by a circular route to the dais. Dickon was walking back to his table, turned away from the dais; Pulcher's chance would never be better. "Hello, Pop," he said. Pop Craig looked up over his glasses. "Oh, Milo. I've been going over the list You think I got everybody? Dickon wanted me to introduce all the block captains and anybody else important You know anybody important that ain't on this list?" "That's what I wanted to tell I you, Pop. Dickon said for you to ! give me a few minutes. I want to say a few words." Craig said agitatedly: "Aw, Milo, if you make a speech, they're all gonna want to make speeches! j What do you want to make a speech for? You're no candidate." Pulcher winked mysteriously. "What about next year?" he asked archly, with a lying inference. "Oh. Ohho." Pop Craig nodded and returned to his list, mumbling. "Well. In that case. I guess I can fit you in after the block captains, or maybe after the man from the Sheriff's office -- " But Pulcher wasn't listening. He was already on his way back to the little private bar. M AN had conquered all of space within nearly fifty lightyears of dull, yellow old Sol, but out in that main ballroom political hacks were talking of long-dead heads of almost forgotten countries centuries in the past Pulcher was content to listen -- to allow the sounds to vibrate his eardrums, at least, for the words made little sense to him. If, indeed, there was any content of sense to a political speech in the first place. But they were soothing. Also they kept his six fledglings from bothering him with questions. Madeleine sat quietly by his shoulder, quite relaxed still and smelling faintly, pleasantly, of some floral aroma. It was, all in all, as pleasant a place to be as pulcher could remember in his recent past. It was too bad that he would have to go out of it soon. Very soon. The Featured Guest had droned through his platitudes. The Visiting Celebrities had said their few words each. Pop Craig's voluminous old voice took over again. "And now I wanta introduce some of the fine Party workers from our local districts. There's Keith Ciccarelli from the Hillside area. Keith, stand up and take a bow!" Dutiful applause. "And here's Mary Beth Whitehurst, head of the Women's Club from Riverview!" Dutiful applause and a whistle. Surely the whistle was sardonic; Mary Beth was fat and would never again see fifty. There were more names. Pulcher felt it coming. He was on his way to the dais even before Craig droned out: "That fine young attorney and loyal Party man -- the kind of young fellow our Party needs Milo Pulcher!" Dutiful applause again. That was habit, but Pulcher felt the whispering question that fluttered around the room. He didn't give the question a chance to grow. He glanced once at the five hundred loyal Party faces staring up at him and began to speak. "Mr. President. Mr. Mayor. Justice Pegrim. Honored Guests. Ladies and gentlemen." That was protocol. He paused. "What I have to say to you tonight is in the way of a compliment. It's a surprise for an old friend, sitting right here. That old friend is -- Charles Dickon." He threw the name at them. It was a special political sort of delivery, a tone of voice that commanded: Clap now. They clapped. That was important, because it made it difficult for Charley to think of an excuse to interrupt him -- as soon as Charley realized he ought to, which would be shortly. "Way out here, on the bleak frontier of interstellar space, we live isolated lives, ladies and gentlemen." There were whispers; he could hear them. The words were more or less right, but he didn't have the right political accent; the audience knew there was something wrong. The true politician would have said: This fine, growing frontier in the midst of interstellar space's greatest constellations. He couldn't help it; he would have to rely on velocity now to get him through. "How isolated, we sometimes need to reflect. We have trade relations through the Icicicle Works -- now closed. We have tourists in both directions, through the Tourist Agency. We have ultra-wave messages -- also through the Tourist Agency. And that's about all. "That's a very thin link, ladies and gentlemen. Very thin. And I'm here to tell you tonight that it would be even thinner if it weren't for my old friend there -- yes, Committeeman Charley Dickon" and got the applause -- but it was puzzled and died away early. "The fact of the matter, ladies and gentlemen, is that just about every tourist that's come to Altair Nine this past year is the personal responsibility of Charley Dickon. Who have these tourists been? They haven't been businessmen -- there's no business. They haven't been hunters -- ask Phil Lasser over there; he hasn't sold enough fishing equipment to put in your eye. Ask yourselves, for that matter. How many of you have seen air fish right over the city? Do you know why? Because they aren't being hunted any more! There aren't any tourists to hunt them." The time had come to give it to them straight. "The fact of the matter, ladies and gentlemen, is that the tourists we've had haven't been tourists at all. They've been from right here on Altair Nine. Some of them are in this room! I know that because I rented myself for a few days -- and do you know who took my body? Why, Charley Dickon did. Charley Dickon himself rented my body!" ; He was watching Lew Yoder out of the corner of his eye. The assessor's face turned gray; he seemed to shrink. Pulcher enjoyed the sight, though he had a certain debt to Lew Yoder; it was Yoder's slip of the tongue that had finally started him thinking on the right track. He went on hastily: "And what it all adds up to, ladies and gentlemen, is that Charley Dickon and a handful of his friends in high places -- most of them right here in this room -- have cut off communication between Altair Nine and the rest of the Galaxy!" There were yells, and the loudest yell came from Charley Dickon. "Throw him out! Arrest him! Craig, get the sergeant-atarms! I don't have to sit here and listen to this maniac!" "And I say you do!" said the cold courtroom voice of Judge Pegrim. The judge stood up. "Go on, Pulcher!" he ordered. "I came here tonight to hear what you have to say. It may be wrong. It may be right. I propose to hear all of it before I make up my mind." Thank heaven for the cold old judge! Pulcher cut right in before Dickon could find a new point of attack; there wasn't much left to say anyway. "The story is simple, ladies and gentlemen. The Icicle Works was the most profitable corporation in the Galaxy. We all know that. Probably everybody in this room had shares of stock. Dickon had plenty. "But he wanted more. And he didn't want to pay for them. So he used his connection with the Tourist Agency to cut off communication between Nine and the rest of the Galaxy. He spread the word that Altamycin was worthless now because some fictitious character had invented a cheap new substitute. He closed down the Icicle Works. And for the last twelve months he's been picking up stock for a penny on the dollar, while the rest of us starve and the Altamycin that the rest of the Galaxy needs stays right here on Altair Nine and -- " He stopped, not because he had run out of words but because no one could hear them any longer. The noises the crowd was making were no longer puzzled, they were ferocious. It figured. Apart from Dickon's immediate gang of manipulators, there was hardly a man in the room who hadn't taken a serious loss in the past year from the collapse of the Works. It was time for the police to come rushing in, as per the phone call Judge Pegrim had made, protestingly, when Pulcher urged him to attend the dinner. They did barely in time. They weren't needed to arrest Dickon so much as keeping him from being lynched. leine home, Milo was still bubbling over. "I was worried about the mayor! I couldn't make up my mind whether he was in it with Dickon or not. I'm glad he wasn't, because he said he owed me a favor, and I told him how he could pay it. Executive clemency. The six of you will be free in the morning." Madeleine said sleepily: "I'm free enough now." 'And the Tourist Agency won't be able to enforce those rental contracts any more. I talked it over with Judge Madeleine, you're not listening." She yawned apologetically. "It's been an exhausting day, Milo. Anyway, you can tell me all about it later. We'll have plenty of time." Years and years," he promised. He stopped talking. Peeking over his shoulder at them, the cab driver grinned sentimentally. Youth, he thought. Love. He stiffened, slammed on the brakes, leaped out and raced shouting to a cab rank, where a machinedriven cab stood with its motor quaking. It seemed like no time before there were a dozen human drivers threatening the machine, and the racket of their retribution was deafening, but Madeleine never noticed. And neither did the happiest man on Altair Nine. -- frederik pohl for your information by willy ley history of science fiction when it was taken for granted that in the near future the United Peoples of Earth would all talk one language. More, since all Earthmen would speak the same language, they would spread it through the Galaxy, or at least through our solar system. Maybe the Martian villains still whispered to each other in "low Martian" (again the same assumption: all Mars would speak one language), but when it came to discussing business with Earthmen and Venusians, they all spoke the Earthman's language. Of course there is no "Earth language," but many people still feel that it would be nice if there were. And some wonder whether there will be. Well, if past history is any guide, the answer is a resounding no. Even if past history had been different, the answer would still be no. Let us take the Roman Empire as an example. From the north shore of Africa to the Limes in West Germany and to the "Wall" in England, there was (approximately) one set of laws. There was one system of measurements. The silver denarius and the gold solidus were accepted all over and bought the same goods everywhere, except that the big cities were naturally somewhat more expensive to live in. One empire, one law, one system of weights and measures, one coinage. If they had progressed to postage stamps, then it would also have been the same. But one language? Don't be silly. The Egyptians spoke Egyptian and the Greeks spoke Greek. Palestine spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. The Germanic tribes growled their own dialects, and while I don't know what was spoken on the Iberian peninsula, I am certain that it was not Latin. The upper crust of the Empire, in Rome itself, spoke -- Greek! After all, one couldn't just J I talk Latin like any gladiator in the arena!  Roman Empire that gave us a poor start. But what might have happened if the Roman Empire had continued? Chances are that the number of spoken languages would not have decreased. But all printed matter, all written language, would have been reduced not to one, but to two, Latin and Greek, in the confines of that imaginary continued Roman Empire. There would have been no reason for the Chinese to give up their own language(s) and switch to Latin and Greek, which probably would have seemed insipid and lacking in flavor to them. India would not have converted either. The only later empire which could match the Roman Imperium in area was the one inefficiently ruled by the Czar of all the Russias. All the Russians spoke Russian, to be sure, but that does not mean that the Russian Empire did. To begin with, the Ukrainians had their own version of Russian which, in their opinion, was far superior. The Polish section of the Russian Empire spoke Polish. The Caucasus had its own language. And virtually every place else. And in the capital of the empire, St. Petersburg, you did not climb very high if, in addition to impeccable Russian (with St. Petersburg pronunciation, substituting a "V" for an "L" whenever possible), you did not speak equally impeccable French and German. But now times have changed. People travel more. We have rapid communications. And all of the North American continent speaks the same language with the exception of Mexico and the French section of Canada, comparatively small areas compared to the whole. Correct. I am the first to acknowledge that this is so. But that is no reason for "extrapolating" an Englishspeaking Earth. At this moment probably more people speak English than speak Russian, but both together do not even match the number of people who speak Chinese. And in spite of much and easy travel and rapid communications, the number of languages has actually increased. Maybe it would have been easier for the Republic of Eire to continue to speak English. For strong psychological reasons, they elected not to do so. Weird as it may sound, if "simplicity" alone counted, the language of Israel should be German. Many thousands of the immigrants spoke German since birth and many thousands more spoke the closely related Yiddish. But obviously the adoption of German as the official language was an impossibility for Israel, and Hebrew is now back as a living tongue. At this point somebody is likely to repeat a reasoning that has been offered before. People are evidently reluctant to give up their own language in favor of somebody else's. There should be no such psychological objection to a language which is not somebody else's language, though, but one which has been constructed for the purpose. # and published a "unij versal language" called Volapiik. It died around #. In # L .L, . Zamenhof published another one j called Esperanto. Twenty years ' later Louis de Beaufront published , an improved version of Esperanto j which was called Ido. Of these early attempts -- no Esperantist J would admit, of course, that Ido I was an "improved" Esperanto -- I only Esperanto had some success, j The Esperantists themselves say that it is spoken by # people. If I suddenly announced at home that I was going to learn Finnish, my wife would probably inform me that good translations of the Kalevala into other languages are available. Some of my friends would either keep politely quiet or point out that educated Finns are likely to speak German, English, j French or Russian. But if I did learn Finnish, I could still talk to three times as many people than if I learned Esperanto. (Besides, most of them can probably speak something else that I can understand.) To put it plainly and simply (and at the risk of making a few enemies), artificial languages do not work. Some twenty years ago I started reading a journal in Esperanto. I could not finish it; it looked and sounded too silly. Very recently I thought that linguistics, like any other science, must certainly have advanced since # and maybe one of the more recent creations in this field would be better. I read through the "vocabulary" of Basic English. If I had to express myself in that vocabulary, I'd be a wreck because of frustration. (After that, using Basic English, I could not even say that I was a wreck. That word is missing as unimportant.) Ah, now, maybe I'm just prejudiced. We have, for scientific purposes, the new creation of Interlingua which is advertised as follows: "You can read Interlingua if you had no more than one semester of high school French or Spanish or Latin and flunked it." After due consideration I would reword this as reading that if you flunked. If you didn't you get a toothache first. Let me prove that. In an issue of Science News Letter which is lying around on my desk there is one page of Interlingua. It begins with a section on Physica Atomic. My eyes already hurt. If you have Physica it is darned obvious that the second word must be Atomica. But no, adding this esthetically necessary "a" would be "grammar" and that is supposed to frighten people. Another paragraph begins with the words Le oceanos es vaste reservoirs... and my eye is immediately insulted by having what is decidedly a singular article in front of a word which is just as decidedly a plural. Yes, English does well without having a plural article (and Latin and Russian manage without any articles), but why pick the one which everybody knows as the French masculine singular article? Why not one which is neutral-looking, if the introduction of a plural article is deemed too much? Then I read Le Statos Unite ha sex submarinos atomic in servicio e # al teres in preparation. This is not a language -- this is hash! If the six are in servicio, why aren't the other # in preparatio? "United States" offers certain linguistic problems, because if we want to say that something is of or belongs to the United States, we have to say that it is "American." And there are, geographically speaking, many "Americans" who are not of the United States. But I find this problem, misleading as it might be under certain conditions, superior to the Interlingua "solution" of talking about the U.S. Academy of Sciences as the -- believe it or not -- statounitese Academia National de Scientia. Since artificial languages are likely to be repulsive to the linguist and won't be learned by those who are not, the artificial language is obviously no answer at all. It cannot compete with a real language, which may have some difficulties but makes up for them in tradition and versatility and the fact that it is alive. A marble statue of Miss Universe cannot compete with the living original. Well, we cannot all agree on somebody else's living language and cannot possibly construct a satisfactory artificial language, so how about a dead language? With nobody actually speaking Latin nowadays, nobody can have feelings of jealousy or envy, not for nationalistic reasons and not for the reason once stated by an Austrian diplomat to his Russian mistress: "You should thank God every morning that you grew up speaking Russian -- you don't have to learn it." The only candidate would be Latin, since Greek, which might otherwise compete, has a different alphabet. And for many centuries Latin came close to being what is called an "international language," one used by many people in many nations. I have often wondered why Latin came into disuse; it was such a simple expedient for international science. The answer, given by an English linguist and philosopher whose name I can't remember right now, is that Latin, even when it was in international use, was just a "male" language. The man who had just finished writing a long letter in Latin to a colleague in another country would ask his wife in Dutch, French, German or English what they would have for supper or whether the tailor had delivered his new cloak. Likewise he would speak to his children (at least to his daughters) in their "native" tongue. In other words, Latin, while it was in international use, but was no longer spoken by a people, had acquired a certain artificiality. It lacked the flaws of the constructed languages, yet it was not one in which you would argue with your wife about the grocery bill. Well, what's the answer? I don't think there is one. English is doing fine as an "international language" nowadays, and is probably doing better than its political competitor, Russian, because the latter has the handicap of an alphabet of its own. But English will not replace any other language. T It can only be a secondary means of international communication. ' Nobody will ever speak "Terran." even when on Mars. T HE question of why the dinoA saurs finally became extinct, after having been the ruling group of animal life on Earth for more than as perennial a question as the one about the cause of the Ice Age. Unfortunately there is no simple answer, at least not an answer of the type which might be written on the back of a postage stamp. It is very much a case like that of the downfall of the Roman Empire -- no single cause can be found, but you can easily write # pages on the various causes and reasons which for once worked in the same direction, instead of canceling each other out. For certain types of dinosaurs and other large reptiles of the past -- I hope you remember from a former column that not every big reptile which ever lived was a dinosaur -- the reasons have been known for quite some time. The marine reptiles, for example, which are collectively called ichthyosaurs, gradually shed their teeth; the customary explanation is that their main food was, or became, soft octopi, and that the ichthyosaurs, in order to obtain their food, needed speed rather than armament. But then other large marine animals came into existence -- the mosasaurians, the ancestors of the whales of today, and several gigantic sharks -- which were big, hungry, welltoothed and presumably fast enough to take off after the ichthyosaurs. The extinction of some types of land-dwelling dinosaurs has been blamed on other much smaller saurians who made a diet of the eggs of the bigger ones. Finally there is the rather generally accepted theory of the "heat death." Reptiles can stand cold weather fairly well, much better than the layman is likely to believe. The worst that cold will normally do to a reptile is immobilize it. But since reptiles have no sweat glands, they overheat easily and literally die of heat stroke. The desert reptiles of today are forever burrowing in the sand or else seeking cracks in the rocks. If there is enough water around, they simply stay in the water, like any contemporary alligator. Applied to the dinosaurs, this theory of the "heat death" makes the Sun responsible for the extinction of just the largest types. They lived in shallow waters of endless marshes and swamps. They moved around in forests. If something happened that drained the swamps or the forests died of drought, the enormous reptiles lacked protection. They could not burrow in sand because of their bulk. They could not find cracks in the rock large enough to protect them. The Sun killed them off. I AM repeating here what I have written in the past elsewhere because recently two Russian scientists came up with still another theory. It is also a sun which professor Krassovski and Shkevski hold responsible for the extinction r'f the dinosaurs, but not our sun. They blame a star in the vicinity of our solar system, a star not more than ten or twelve light-years away. That star, they theorize, turned into at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The supernova sent incredible amounts of hard radiation into space, radiation just as nasty as that emanating from a nuclear bomb explosion. Well, if so, why didn't that radiation kill off the small mammals too? We know they were around at the time. In Canada the skeleton of an early opossum (hardly distinguishable from the current type) has been found associated with the bones of a large saurian. Krassovski and Shkevski answer that question by saying that the radiation from the supernova probably was not powerful enough after penetrating our atmosphere to kill directly. But it was, they theorize, powerful enough to cause genetic damage. Such damage is cumulative. Now small mammals like that early opossum, and small ' animals in general, like birds, lizards of assorted sizes and so forth, reproduce within a year, counting from their own birth. They did not have time to accumulate genetic damage. But the large saurians were doomed by their long life span. It has been accepted among paleontologists since the beginning of the current century that the full life span of one of the large saurians like brontosaurus was probably about a thousand years. Of course we do not know how soon they matured sexually, but for an animal with a thousand-year life span, sexual maturity at fifty sounds somewhat early. Eighty to a hundred years is more probable. Now, Krassovski and Shkevski say, during this long "pre-marital period" the dinosaurs accumulated so much genetic damage from the radiations coming from space that their rate of "effective propagation" was severely curtailed. The term "effective propagation" means precisely what it implies. The animals presumably mated as frequently as had their ancestors before that star turned into a supernova. The number of eggs they laid was probably the same too. But the number of offspring which was capable of propagating in turn was not. I offer this theory as a fascinating idea. I don't know whether it is right or wrong. In fact, I don't know whether we know enough yet about radiation-induced genetic damage to be able to say that things could have worked that way. But it is an idea which should be kept in mind for later reference. The Other End of the Flashlight Beam. vate, I have been moaning that I rarely get a question that has not been asked a dozen times before. (About # per cent of the letters still deal with the paradoxes of the theory of relativity and I am most thoroughly tired of them.) Well, I did get a new one from a gentleman in Washington whose name I shall not mention because he did not state that I could print it. At any event, this is the question. Supposing somebody shines a flashlight into the sky in the direction of a star which is several light-years away. The man with the flashlight waits until his light beam gets there; we'll assume that the batteries last long enough and we'll also forget about the fact that the Earth turns. When the beam does get there, the flashlight wielder moves the flashlight and directs it at another star, same distance from the Earth, but several light-years away from the first star. What happens to the other end of the beam? It cannot possibly travel over several light-years in half a second. My correspondent closed with the remark, "What have I forgotten?" I told him by mail that he forgot a light beam is not a steel rod. When the "originating end" on Earth is shifted, the "terminating end" does not have to follow. But I think, as I also wrote to my correspondent, that the problem is easier to understand if he does not think of a flashlight but of a machine gun with infinite range. It is quite obvious that the bullets, once they have left the muzzle, will continue to travel in the direction in which they were originally aimed. If, at a later time, you raise or traverse the barrel of the machine gun, the bullets still to be fired will travel in the new direction. An Overlooked Danger of Space Travel? to, Ontario, writes that he hopes this is a new question and then goes on: "I have an idea that one of the extreme dangers the first man in space will face will be that of nausea with vomiting while in a spacesuit and under free-fall conditions. It seems likely that, without gravity to help him, an individual would drown in his own juices very rapidly." Well, this is not a question which can be answered yes or no. It is a rather complicated question, in fact, and I am .fortunate that the medical branch of the U. S. Air Force recently published a report which provides some information along these lines. To begin with, weightlessness (over the short periods that can be produced in airplane flights: about half a minute) has not by itself caused nausea. Secondly, if a man vomits when weightless, the matter is rather forcibly ejected, but of course it would cause trouble if it were caught by the face plate of a space helmet. Now the answer to this one is that spacemen will not wear suit and helmet (at least not a closed helmet) inside the ship, just as submariners do not wear a diving suit. At the same time, it must be admitted that the first astronauts in orbit probably will wear a pressure suit just in case something goes wrong. I do not know whether this has been decided yet. One might argue that if something does go wrong, it will be so thorough that a spacesuit won't help. The Air Force studies dealt with the problem of eating and drinking while weightless. As was to be expected, it proved impossible to drink from a glass. The j test subjects not only splashed  water all over themselves, they also ' "inhaled" it into the nasal passages " and complained that they felt as if they were drowning. One man even managed to get his sinuses drowned. I can't quite figure out how he did that, but if the medical researchers say he did, I simply have to take their word for it. Drinking through a straw should work, but those who tried it made almost as bad a mess of it as they did with an open container. I can only conclude that this takes a little practice, and thirty seconds of weightlessness is not long enough to acquire practice. What did work was to squirt the liquid into the mouth from a plastic bottle. These experiments did not teach the most elegant way of drinking while under zero-g, but they did show that it could be done. The next problem was eating. There weightlessness displayed a lot of nasty tricks. For example, if the man bit into a cracker or a biscuit, the dry fragments, being weightless, managed to float up into the nasal passages, which is one of the most unpleasant sensations a person can have. But eating under zero-g worked fine as long as whatever was eaten was somewhat moist or had a pasty consistency. In other words, what was eaten had to be of such a nature that it did not crumble but held together. But now, as Professor Ehrenhaft used to say, comes the moment where the frog into the water jumps. Several test subjects, immediately after drinking (water only), did vomit. A few people will say that this was due to the fact that they had been given water to drink, but the medical researchers do not agree with this hypothesis. They don't know just what caused it. The men to whom it happened claimed unanimously that they vomited because they leaned against the (rather tight) seat belt. To go back to the original letter: no case has occurred where weightlessness brought on vomiting all by itself, but after drinking it did occur, presumably because of a constricting seat belt. But it is now known that there is a certain danger factor and further studies are no doubt under way. The Australian Shoe Size Puzzle. T'HE only feature which brought more mail in the history of this column than the one on the shoe size puzzle was the one, way back, on prime numbers. Of course I knew the explanation as I wrote it, but I did not mention it on purpose. I wanted to see how many readers could puzzle it out. A few did, but I got other mail too. If you remember, the example used dealt with a "Miss S," age #, shoe size #. No Miss S of the given age and size wrote in directly to ask whether I had been speaking about her, but two ladies got males to write in and ask this question. I don't recall ever having met either of them, but in one case "Miss S" was Sylvia Cohn and in the other case "Miss S" was Carolyn Sonderberg, both of whom herewith receive mention and the assurance that they are not the "real" Miss S. One young lady in San Antonio, Texas (wrong age, wrong size and no capital S to her name), startled me by stating that the arithmetic seemed to miscarry in her case. She always came out a year older than she actually is, which incidentally won't matter in her case for many years to come. I went over the figures twice and found that she was right -- she did come out one year too old. Fortunately she had given me all the particulars in her letter, and after a while it dawned on me that she had been born in December. Yes, if you are born at the tail end of a year, you'll come out one year too old; you have to assume that your birthday is already past on the day when you do your private arithmetic. Another aspect that had not occurred to me was pointed out by First Lieutenant David R. Barr of the U. S. Air Force. To quote his letter: "Let z be the shoe size and let x be the largest integer less than or equal to z; then z  x--y, where y is either zero or V # . After doubling z. Miss S. will obtain #z  #x  #y where #y must be either zero or one. If #z is even, then #y is zero, and Miss S leaves it alone; if #z is odd, then #y is one and Miss S subtracts one. In either case, she is looking at the number #x when this step is completed. The addition of # and the subsequent multiplication by # yields (#x  #)  #  lOx  #. When Miss S tacks a nine onto it, like another digit, she is, in effect, multiplying by ten and adding nine. This will give her lOOx  #. The subtraction of the year of her birth will yield lOOx plus age, provided Miss S is less than # years old." Well, this is the explanation, of course, but I had never thought of the provision which I have put in italics. If Miss S were # years old and still wore a size #, the result would be # instead of the # to be expected otherwise. The puzzle turns out to be rather polite -- it will still insist that the age is #, but merely increase the shoe size by one. The Hairs on Your Head. found such a response, I yield to the temptation to add one more of the same type. Supposing you live in a town which has # inhabitants, or any number larger than that. Now you pick your favorite girl (or yourself, if you are a girl) and carefully count the hairs on her (or your) head. What is the probability that there is another girl in the same town who, at that moment, has the identical number of hairs on her head? I'll just add one word of explanation, the reason for specifying "girl." It is quite simple; in the case of a man, there could always be an argument of where, near the temples, the "hair" stops and the "beard" begins. "New" Invention. N O, this is not in reply to any question. I just feel like adding it. In one of the German magazines I read an interesting ad about a new type of shower. To invigorate your skin, it says, the shower will intersperse the temperature for which you have adjusted it with "sharp stinging sprays of ice cold water." Interesting. But my own shower has been doing that for years, acting on the random hot-water use on the lower floor of my house by my wife, two daughters and, occasionally, the maid. Any time the manufacturer of that new type of shower wants a strongly negative testimonial, he has only to ask for it. With so much in a time of so little what could be hidden that they wanted still more? t Illustrated D O you remember the Depression? That black shadow across time? That hurting place in the consciousness of the world? Maybe not. Maybe it's like asking do you remember the Dark Ages. Except what would I know about the price of eggs in the Dark Ages? I knew plenty about prices in the Depression. If you had a quarter -- first find your quarter -- and five hungry kids, you could supper them on two cans of soup and a loaf of day-old bread, or two quarts of milk and a loaf of day-old bread. It was filling and -- in an after-thoughty kind of way -- nourishing. But if you were one of the hungry five, you eventually began to feel erosion set in, and your teeth ached for substance. But to go back to eggs. Those were a precious commodity. You savored them slowly or gulped them eagerly -- unmistakably as eggs -- boiled or fried. That's one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity. She had eggs for breakfast! And every day! That's one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity. I didn't know about the eggs the time she came over to see Mom, who had just got home from a twelve-hour day, cleaning up after other people at thirty cents an hour. Mrs. Klevity lived in the same court as we did. Courtesy called it a court because we were all dependent on the same shower house and two toilets that occupied the shack square in the middle of the court. All of us except the Big House, of course. It had a bathroom of its own and even a radio blaring Nobody's Business and Should I Reveal and had ceiling lights that didn't dangle nakedly at the end of a cord. But then it really wasn't a part of the court. Only its back door shared our area, and even that was different. It had two back doors in the same frame -- a screen one and a wooden one! Our own two-room place had a distinction, too. It had an upstairs. One room the size of our two. The Man Upstairs lived up there. He was mostly only the sound of footsteps overhead and an occasional cookie for Danna. over before Mom had time to put her shopping bag of work clothes down or even to unpleat the folds of fatigue that dragged her face down ten years or more of time to come. I didn't much like Mrs. Klevity. She made me uncomfortable. She was so solid and slow-moving and so nearly blind that she peered frighteningly wherever she went. She stood in the doorway as though she had been stacked there like bricks and a dress drawn hastily down over the stack and a face sketched on beneath a fuzz of hair. Us kids all gathered around to watch, except Danna who snuffled wearily into my neck. Day nursery or not, it was a long, hard day for a fouryear-old. "I wondered if one of your girls could sleep at my house this week." Her voice was as slow as her steps. "At your house?" Mom massaged her hand where the shopping-bag handles had crisscrossed it. "Come in. Sit down." We had two chairs and a bench and two apple boxes. The boxes scratched bare legs, but surely they couldn't scratch a stack of bricks. "No, thanks." Maybe she couldn't bend! "My husband will be away several days and I don't like to be in the house alone at night." "Of course," said Mom. "You must feel awfully alone." The only aloneness she knew, what with five kids and two rooms, was the taut secretness of her inward thoughts as she mopped and swept and ironed in other houses. "Sure, one of the girls would be glad to keep you company." There was a darting squirm and LaNell was safely hidden behind the swaying of our clothes in the diagonally curtained corner of the Other room, and Kathy knelt swiftly just beyond the dresser, out of sight. "Anna is eleven." I had no place to hide, burdened as I was with Danna. "She's old enough. What time do you want her to come over?" "Oh, bedtime will do." Mrs. Klevity peered out the door at the darkening sky. "Nine o'clock. Only it gets dark before then -- " Bricks can look anxious, I guess. "As soon as she has supper, she can come," said Mom, handling my hours as though they had no value to me. "Of course she has to go to school tomorrow." "Only when it's dark," said Mrs. Klevity. "Day is all right. How much should I pay you?" "Pay?" Mom gestured with one hand. "She has to sleep anyway. It doesn't matter to her where, once she's asleep. A favor for a friend." I wanted to cry out: whose favor for what friend? We hardly passed the time of day with Mrs. Klevity. I couldn't even remember Mr. Klevity except that he was straight and old and wrinkled. Uproot me and make me lie in a strange house, a strange dark, listening to a strange breathing, feeling a strange warmth making itself part of me for all night long, seeping into me... "Mom -- " I said. "I'll give her breakfast," said Mrs. Klevity. "And lunch money for each night she comes." I resigned myself without a struggle. Lunch money each day -- a whole dime! Mom couldn't afford to pass up such a blessing, such a gift from God, who unerringly could be trusted to ease the pinch just before it became intolerable. "Thank you, God," I whispered as I went to get the can opener to open supper. For a night or two I could stand it. tected as I stood in my flimsy crinkle cotton pajamas, one bare foot atop the other, waiting for Mrs. Klevity to turn the bed down. "We have to check the house first," she said thickly. 'We can't go to bed until we check the house." Check the house?" I forgot my starchy stiff shyness enough to question. "What for?" Mrs. Klevity peered at me in the dim light of the bedroom. They had three rooms for only the two of them! Even if there was no door to shut between the bedroom and the kitchen. "I couldn't sleep," she said, "unless I looked first. I have to." So we looked. Behind the closet curtain, under the table -- Mrs. Klevity even looked in the portable oven that sat near the two-burner stove in the kitchen. When we came to the bed, I was moved to words again. "But we've been in here with the doors locked ever since I got here. What could possibly -- " "A prowler?" said Mrs. Klevity nervously, after a brief pause for thought. "A criminal?" Mrs. Klevity pointed her face at me. I doubt if she could see me from that distance. "Doors make no difference," she said. "It might be when you least expect, so you have to expect all the time." "I'll look," I said humbly. She was older than Mom. She was nearly blind. She was one of God's Also Unto Me's. "No," she said. "I have to. I couldn't be sure, else." So I waited until she grunted and groaned to her knees, then bent stiffly to lift the limp spread. Her fingers hesitated briefly, then flicked the spread up. Her breath came out flat and finished. Almost disappointed, it seemed to me. She turned the bed down and I crept across the gray, wrinkled sheets and, turning my back to the room, I huddled one ear on the flat tobacco-smelling pillow and lay tense and uncomfortable in th e dark, as her weight shaped and reshaped the bed around me. There was a brief silence before I heard the soundless breathy shape of her words, "How long, O God, how long?" I wondered through my automatic Bless Papa and Mama -- and the automatic back-up because Papa had abdicated from my specific prayers -- bless Mama and my brother and sisters -- what it was that Mrs. Klevity was finding too long to bear. After a restless waking, dozing sort of night that strange sleeping places held for me, I awoke to a thin, chilly morning and the sound of Mrs. Klevity moving around. She had set the table for breakfast, a formality we never had time for at home. I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes with only my skinny, goosefleshed back between Mrs. Klevity and me for modesty. I felt uncomfortable and unfinished because I hadn't brought our comb over with me. I would have preferred to run home to our usual breakfast of canned milk and shredded wheat, but instead I watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Klevity struggled with lighting the kerosene stove. She bent so close, peering at the burners with the match flaring in her hand that I was sure the frousy brush of her hair would catch fire, but finally the burner caught instead and she turned her face toward me. "One egg or two?" she asked. "Eggs! Two!" Surprise wrung the exclamation from me. Her hand hesitated over the crumpled brown bag on the table. "No, no!" I corrected her thought hastily. "One. One is plenty." And sat on the edge of a chair watching as she broke an egg into the sizzling frying pan. "Hard or soft?" she asked. "Hard," I said casually, feeling very woman-of-the-worldish, dining out -- well, practically -- and for breakfast, too! I watched Mrs. Klevity spoon the fat over the egg, her hair swinging stiffly forward when she peered. Once it even dabbled briefly in the fat, but she didn't notice and, as it swung back, it made a little shiny curve on her cheek. fire?" I asked as she turned away from the stove with the frying pan. "What if you caught on fire?" "I did once." She slid the egg out onto my plate. "See?" She brushed her hair back on the left side and I could see the mottled pucker of a large old scar. "It was before I got used to Here," she said, making Here more than the house, it seemed to me. "That's awful," I said, hesitating with my fork. "Go ahead and eat," she said. " Y our egg will get cold." She turned back to the stove and I hesitated a minute more. Meals at a table you were supposed to ask a blessing, but... I ducked my head quickly and had a mouthful of egg before my soundless amen was finished. After breakfast I hurried back to our house, my lunch-money dime clutched securely, my stomach not quite sure it liked fried eggs so early in the morning. Mom was ready to leave, her shopping bag in one hand, Danna swinging from the other, singing one of her baby songs. She liked the day nursery. "I won't be back until late tonight," Mom said. "There's a quarter in the corner of the dresser drawer. You get supper for the kids and try to clean up this messy place. We don't have to be pigs just because we live in a place like this." "Okay, Mom." I struggled with a snarl in my hair, the pulling making my eyes water. "Where you working today?" I spoke over the clatter in the other room where the kids were getting ready for school. She sighed, weary before the day began. "I have three places today, but the last is Mrs. Paddington." Her face lightened. Mrs. Paddington sometimes paid a little extra or gave Mom discarded clothes or left-over food she didn't want. She was nice. "You get along all right with Mrs. Klevity?" asked Mom as she checked her shopping bag for her work shoes. "Y eah," I said. "But she's funny. She looks under the bed before she goes to bed." Mom smiled. "I've heard of people like that, but it's usually old maids they're talking about." "But, Mom, nothing coulda got in. She locked the door after I got there." "People who look under beds don't always think straight," she said. "Besides, maybe she'd like to find something under there." "But she's got a husband," I cried after her as she herded Danna across the court. "There are other things to look for besides husbands," she called back. "Anna wants a husband! Anna wants a husband!" Deet and LaNell were dancing around me, teasing me sing-song. Kathy smiled slowly behind them. "Shut up," I said. "You don't even know what you're talking about. Go on to school." "It's too early," said Deet, digging his bare toes in the dust of the front yard. "Teacher says we get there too early." "Then stay here and start cleaning house," I said. They left in a hurry. After they were gone, Deet's feet reminded me I'd better wash my own feet before I went to school. So I got a washpan of water from the tap in the middle of the court and, sitting on the side of the bed, I eased my feet into the icy water. I scrubbed with the hard, gray, abrasive soap we used and wiped quickly on the tattered towel. I threw the water out the door and watched it run like dust-covered snakes across the hard-packed front yard. I went back to put my shoes on and get my sweater. I looked at the bed. I got down on my stomach and peered under. Other things to look for. There was the familiar huddle of cardboard cartons we kept things in and the familiar dust fluffs and one green sock LaNell had lost last week, but nothing else. I dusted my front off. I tied my lunch-money dime in the corner of a handkerchief and, putting my sweater on, left for school. A wet semi-twilight. "Do I have to?" "You said you would," said Mom. "Keep your promises. You should have gone before this. She's probably been waiting for you." "I wanted to see what you brought from Mrs. Paddington's." LaNell and Kathy were playing in the corner with a lavender hug-metight and a hat with green grapes on it. Deet was rolling an orange on the floor, softening it preliminary to poking a hole in it to suck the juice out. "She cleaned a trunk out today," said Mom. "Mostly old things that belonged to her mother, but these two coats are nice and heavy. They'll be good covers tonight. It's going to be cold. Someday when I get time, I'll cut them up and make quilts." She sighed. Time was what she never had enough of. "Better take a newspaper to hold over your head." "Oh, Mom!" I huddled into my sweater. "It isn't raining now. I'd feel silly!" "Well, then, scoot!" she said, her hand pressing my shoulder warmly, briefly. I scooted, skimming quickly the flood of light from our doorway, and splishing through the shallow run-off stream that swept across the court. There was a sudden wild swirl of wind and a vindictive splatter of heavy, cold raindrops that swept me, exhilarated, the rest of the way to Mrs. Klevity's house and under the shallow little roof that was just big enough to cover the back step. I knocked quickly, brushing my disordered hair back from my eyes. The door swung open and I was in the shadowy, warm kitchen, almost in Mrs. Klevity's arms. "Oh!" I backed up, laughing breathlessly. "The wind blew -- " "I was afraid you weren't coming." She turned away to the stove. "I fixed some hot cocoa." I sat cuddling the warm cup in my hands, savoring the chocolate sip by sip. She had made it with milk instead of water, and it tasted rich and wonderful. But Mrs. Klevity was sharing my thoughts with the cocoa. In that brief moment when I had been so close to her, I had looked deep into her dim eyes and was feeling a vast astonishment. The dimness was only on top. Underneath -- underneath -- I took another sip of cocoa. Her eyes -- almost I could have walked into them, it seemed like. Slip past the gray film, run down the shiny bright corridor, into the live young sparkle at the far end. I looked deep into my cup of cocoa. Were all grownups like that? If you could get behind their eyes, were they different, too? Behind Mom's eyes, was there a corridor leading back to youth and sparkle? I finished the cocoa drowsily. It was still early, but the rain was drumming on the roof and it was the kind of night you curl up to if you're warm and fed. Sometimes you feel thin and cold on such nights, but I was feeling curl-uppy. So I groped under the bed for the paper bag that had my jammas in it. I couldn't find it. "I swept today," said Mrs. Klevity, coming back from some far country of her thoughts. "I musta pushed it farther under the bed." I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. "Ooo!" I said. "What's shiny?" Something snatched me away from the bed and flung me to one side. By the time I had gathered myself up off the floor and was rubbing a banged elbow, Mrs. Klevity's bulk was pressed against the bed, her head under it. "Hey!" I cried indignantly, and then remembered I wasn't at home. I heard an odd whimpering sob and then Mrs. Klevity backed slowly away, still kneeling on the floor. "Only the lock on the suitcase," she said. "Here's your jammas." She handed me the bag and ponderously pulled herself upright again. We went silently to bed after she had limped around and checked the house, even under the bed again. I heard that odd breathy whisper of a prayer and lay awake, trying to add up something shiny and the odd eyes and the whispering sob. Finally I shrugged in the dark and wondered what I'd pick for funny when I grew up. All grownups had some kind of funny. HP HE next night Mrs. Klevity couldn't get down on her knees to look under the bed. She'd hurt herself when she plumped down on the floor after yanking me away from the bed. "You'll have to look for me tonight," she said slowly, nursing her knees. "Look good. Oh, Anna, look good!" I looked as good as I could, not knowing what I was looking for. "It should be under the bed," she said, her palms tight on her knees as she rocked back and forth. "But you can't be sure. It might miss completely." "What might?" I asked, hunkering down by the bed. She turned her face blindly toward me. "The way out," she said. "The way back again -- " "Back again?" I pressed my cheek to the floor again. "Well, I don't see anything. Only dark and suitcases." "Nothing bright? Nothing? Nothing -- " She tried to lay her face on her knees, but she was too unbendy to manage it, so she put her hands over her face instead. Grownups aren't supposed to cry. She didn't quite, but her hands looked wet when she reached for the clock to wind it. I lay in the dark, one strand of her hair tickling my hand where it lay on the pillow. Maybe she was crazy. I felt a thrill of terror fan out on my spine. I carefully moved my hand from under the lock of hair. How can you find a way out under a bed? I'd be glad when Mr. Klevity got home, eggs or no eggs, dime or no dime. Somewhere in the darkness of the night, I was suddenly swimming to wakefulness, not knowing what was waking me but feeling that Mrs. Klevity was awake too. "Anna." Her voice was small and light and silver. "Anna -- " "Hummm?" I murmured, my voice still drowsy. "Anna, have you ever been away from home?" I turned toward her, trying in the dark to make sure it was Mrs. Klevity. She sounded so different. "Yes," I said. "Once I visited Aunt Katie at Rocky Butte for a week." "Anna." I don't know whether she was even hearing my answers; her voice was almost a chant "Anna, have you ever been in prison?" "No! Of course not!" I recoiled indignantly. "You have to be awfully bad to be in prison." "Oh, no. Oh, no!" she sighed. "Not jail, Anna. Prison, prison. The weight of the flesh -- bound about -- " "Oh," I said, smoothing my hands across my eyes. She was talking to a something deep in me that never got talked to, that hardly even had words. "Like when the wind blows the clouds across the moon and the grass whispers along the road and all the trees pull like balloons at their trunks and one star comes out and says 'Come' and the ground says 'Stay # and part of you tries to go and it hurts -- " I could feel the slender roundness of my ribs under my pressing hands. "And it hurts -- " "Oh, Anna, Anna!" The soft, light voice broke. "You feel that way and you belong Here. You won't ever -- " The voice stopped and Mrs. Klevity rolled over. Her next words came thickly, as though a gray film were over them as over her eyes. "Are you awake, Anna? Go to sleep, child. Morning isn't yet." I heard the heavy sigh of her breathing as she slept. And finally I slept too, trying to visualize what Mrs. Klevity would look like if she looked like the silvery voicein-the-dark. morning, letting thoughts slip in and out of my mind to the rhythm of my jaws. What a funny dream to have, to talk with a silver-voiced someone. To talk about the way blowing clouds and windy moonlight felt. But it wasn't a dream! I paused with my fork raised. At least not my dream. But how can you tell? If you're part of someone else's dream, can it still be real for you? "Is something wrong with the egg?" Mrs. Klevity peered at me. "No -- no -- " I said, hastily snatching the bite on my fork. "Mrs. Klevity -- " "Yes." Her voice was thick and heavy-footed. "Why did you ask me about being in prison?" "Prison?" Mrs. Klevity blinked blindly. "Did I ask you about prison?" "Someone did -- I thought -- " I faltered, shyness shutting down on me again. "Dreams." Mrs. Klevity stacked her knife and fork on her plate. "Dreams." I wasn't quite sure I was to be at Klevity's the next evening. Mr. Klevity was supposed to get back sometime during the evening. But Mrs. Klevity welcomed me. "Don't know when he'll get home," she said. "Maybe not until morning. If he comes early, you can go home to sleep and I'll give you your dime anyway." "Oh, no," I said, Mom's teachings solidly behind me. "I couldn't take it if I didn't stay." "A gift," said Mrs. Klevity. We sat opposite one another until the silence stretched too thin for me to bear. "In olden times," I said, snatching at the magic that drew stories from Mom, "when you were a little girl -- " "When I was a girl -- " Mrs. Klevity rubbed her knees with reflective hands. "The other Where. The other When." "In olden times," I persisted, "things were different then." "Yes." I settled down comfortably, recognizing the reminiscent tone of voice. "You do crazy things when you are young." Mrs. Klevity leaned heavily on the table. Things you have no business do ing . You volunteer when you're young." I jerked as she lunged across the table and grabbed both my arms. "But I am young! Three years isn't an eternity. I am young!" I twisted one arm free and pried at her steely fingers that clamped my other one. "Oh." She let go. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you." She pushed back the tousled brush of her hair. "Look," she said, her voice was almost silver again. "Under all this -- this grossness, I'm still me. I thought I could adjust to anything, but I had no idea that they'd put me in such -- " She tugged at her sagging dress. "Not the clothes!" she cried. "Clothes you can take off. But this -- " Her fingers dug into her heavy shoulder and I could see the bulge of flesh between them. "If I knew anything about the setup maybe I could locate it. Maybe I could call. Maybe -- " Her shoulders sagged and her eyelids dropped down over her dull eyes. "It doesn't make any sense to you," she said, her voice heavy and thick again. "To you I'd be old even There. At the time it seemed like a perfect way to have an odd holiday and help out with research, too. But we got caught."  mumbling to herself. "Three years There, but Here that's -- eight threes are -- " She traced on the table with a blunt forefinger, her eyes close to the old, wornout cloth. "Mrs. Klevity," My voice scared me in the silence, but I was feeling the same sort of upsurge that catches you sometimes when you're playing-like and it gets so real. "Mrs. Klevity, if you've lost something, maybe I could look for it for you." "You didn't find it last night," she said. "Find what?" She lumbered to her feet. "Let's look again. Everywhere. They'd surely be able to locate the house." "What are we looking for?" I asked, searching the portable oven. "You'll know it when we see it," she said. And we searched the whole house. Oh, such nice things! Blankets, not tattered and worn, and even an extra one they didn't need. And towels with wash rags that matched -- and weren't rags. And uncracked dishes that matched! And glasses that weren't jars. And books. And money. Crisp newlooking bills in the little box in the bottom drawer -- pushed back under some extra pillow cases. And clothes -- lots and lots of clothes. All too big for any of us, of course, but my practiced eye had already visualized this, that and the other cut down to dress us all like rich people. I sighed as we sat wearily looking at one another. Imagine having so much and still looking for something else! It was bedtime and all we had for our pains were dirty hands and tired backs. I scooted out to the bath house before I undressed. I gingerly washed the dirt off my hands under the cold of the shower and shook them dry on the way back to the house. Well, we had moved everything in the place, but nothing was what Mrs. Klevity looked for. Back in the bedroom, I groped under the bed for my jammas and again had to lie flat and burrow under the bed for the tattered bag. Our moving around had wedged it back between two cardboard cartons. I squirmed under farther and tried to ease it out after shoving the two cartons a little farther apart. mas, so I grasped them in the bend of my elbow and started to back out. Then the whole world seemed to explode into brightness that pulsated and dazzled, that splashed until I winced them shut to rest their seeing and saw the dark inversions of the radiance behind my eyelids. I forced my eyes open again and looked sideways so the edge of my seeing was all I used until I got more accustomed to the glory. Between the two cartons was an opening like a window would be, but little, little, into a wonderland of things I could never tell. Colors that had no names. Feelings that made windy moonlight a puddle of dust. I felt tears burn out of my eyes and start down my cheeks, whether from brightness or wonder, I don't know. I blinked them away and looked again. Someone was in the brightness, several someones. They were leaning out of the squareness, beckoning and calling -- silver signals and silver sounds. "Mrs. Klevity," I thought. "Something bright." I took another good look at the shining people and the tree things that were like music bordering a road, and grass that was the song my evening grass hummed in the wind -- a last, last look, and began to back out. I scrambled to my feet, clutching my jammas. "Mrs. Klevity." She was still sitting at the table, as solid as a pile of bricks, the sketched face under the wild hair a sad, sad one. "Yes, child." She hardly heard herself. "Something bright..." I said. her blind face turned to me. "What, child?" I felt my fingers bite into my jammas and the cords in my neck getting tight and my stomach clenching itself. "Something bright!" I thought I screamed. She didn't move. I grabbed her arm and dragged her off-balance in her chair. "Something bright!" "Anna." She righted herself on the chair. "Don't be mean." I grabbed the bedspread and yanked it up. The light sprayed out like a sprinkler on a lawn. Then she screamed. She put both hands up to her heavy face and screamed, "Leolienn! It's here! Hurry, hurry!" "Mr. Klevity isn't here," I said. "He hasn't got back." "I can't go without him! Leolienn!" "Leave a note!" I cried. "If you're there, you can make them come back again and I can show him the right place!" The upsurge had passed make-believe and everything was realer than real. Then, quicker than I ever thought she could move, she got paper and a pencil. She was scribbling away at the table as I stood there holding the spread. So I dropped to my knees and then to my stomach and crawled under the bed again. I filled my eyes with the brightness and beauty and saw, beyond it, serenity and orderliness and -- and uncluttered cleanness. The miniature landscape was like a stage setting for a fairy tale -- so small, so small -- so lovely. And then Mrs. Klevity tugged at my ankle and I slid out, reluctantly, stretching my sight of the bright square until the falling of the spread broke it. Mrs. Klevity worked her way under the bed, her breath coming pantingly, her big, ungainly body inching along awkwardly. She crawled and crawled and crawled until she should have come up short against the wall, and I knew she must be funneling down into the brightness, her face, head and shoulders, so small, so lovely, like her silvery voice. But the rest of her, still gross and ugly, like a butterfly trying to skin out of its cocoon. Finally only her feet were sticking out from under the bed and they thrashed and waved and didn't go anywhere, so I got down on the floor and put my feet against hers and braced myself against the dresser and pushed. And pushed and pushed. Suddenly there was a going, a finishing, and my feet dropped to the floor. There, almost under the bed, lay Mrs. Klevity's shabby old-lady black shoes, toes pointing away from each other. I picked them up in my hands, wanting, somehow, to cry. Her saggy lisle stockings were still in the shoes. Slowly I pulled all of the clothes of Mrs. Klevity out from under the bed. They were held together by a thin skin, a sloughed-off leftover of Mrs. Klevity that only showed, gray and lifeless, where her bare hands and face would have been, and her dull gray filmed eyes. I let it crumple to the floor and sat there, holding one of her old shoes in my hand. The door rattled and it was gray, old, wrinkled Mr. Klevity. "Hello, child," he said. "Where's my wife?" "She's gone," I said, not looking at him. "She left you a note there on the table." "Gone -- ?" He left the word stranded in mid-air as he read Mrs. Klevity's note. r T , HE paper fluttered down. He yanked a dresser drawer open and snatched out spool-looking things, both hands full. Then he practically dived under the bed, his elbows thudding on the floor, to-hurt hard. And there was only a wiggle or two and his shoes slumped away from each other. I pulled his cast-aside from under the bed and crawled under it myself. I saw the tiny picture frame -- bright, bright, but so small. I crept close to it, knowing I couldn't go in. I saw the tiny perfection of the road, the landscape, the people -- the laughing people who crowded around the two new rejoicing figures -- the two silvery, lovely young creatures who cried out in tiny voices as they danced. The girl-one threw a kiss outward before they all turned away and ran up the winding white road together. The frame began to shrink, faster, faster, until it squeezed to a single bright bead and then blinked out. All at once the house was empty and cold. The upsurge was gone. Nothing was real any more. All at once the faint ghost of the smell of eggs was frightening. All at once I whimpered, "My lunch money!" I scrambled to my feet, tumbling Mrs. Klevity's clothes into a disconnected pile. I gathered up my jammas and leaned across the table to get my sweater. I saw my name on a piece of paper. I picked it up and read it. Everything that is ours in this house now belongs to Anna-across-the-court f the little girl that's been staying with me at night. Ahvlaree Klevity I looked from the paper around the room. All for me? All for us? All this richness and wonder of good things? All this and the box in the bottom drawer, too? And a paper that said so, so that nobody could take them away from us. A fluttering wonder filled my chest and I walked stiffly around the three rooms, visualizing everything without opening a drawer or door. I stood by the stove and looked at the frying pan hanging above it. I opened the cupboard door. The paper bag of eggs was on the shelf. I reached for it, looking back over my shoulder almost guiltily. The wonder drained out of me with a gulp. I ran back over to the bed and yanked up the spread. I knelt and hammered on the edge of the bed with my clenched fists. Then I leaned my forehead on my tight hands and felt my knuckles bruise me. My hands went limply to my lap, my head drooping. I got up slowly and took the paper from the table, bundled my jammas under my arm and got the eggs from the cupboard. I turned the lights out and left. I felt tears wash down from my eyes as I stumbled across the familiar yard in the dark. I don't know why I was crying -- unless it was because I was homesick for something bright that I knew I would never have, and because I knew I could never tell Mom what really happened. Then the pale trail of light from our door caught me and I swept in on an astonished Mom, calling softly, because of the sleeping kids, "Mom! Mom! Guess what!" because she had eggs for breakfast! Every day! That's one of the reasons I remember her. Solitary lushes are not the worst kind. The worst are aliens like this -- because of what they tank up on -- and right in public, too! I t was Saturday evening and I was sitting on the stoop, working up a jag. I had my jug beside me, handy, and I was feeling good and fixing to feel better, when this alien and his robot came tramping up the driveway. I knew right off it was an alien. It looked somethirig like a man, but there weren't any humans got robots trailing at their heels. If I had been stone sober, I might have gagged a bit at the idea there was an alien coming up the driveway and done some arguing with myself. But I wasn't sober -- not entirely, that is. So I said good evening and asked him to sit down and he thanked me and sat. "You, too," I said to the robot, moving over to make room. "Let him stand," the alien said. "He cannot sit. He is a mere machine." The robot clanked a gear at him, but that was all it said. "Have a snort," I said, picking up the jug, but the alien shook his head. "I wouldn't dare," he said. "My metabolism." That was one of the doublejointed words I had acquaintance with. From working at Doc Abel's sanitorium, I had picked up some of the medic lingo. "That's a dirty shame," I said. "You don't mind if I do?" "Not at all," the alien said. So I had a long one. I felt the need of it I put down the jug and wiped my mouth and asked him if there was something I could get him. It seemed plain inhospitable for me to be sitting there, lapping up that liquor, and him not having any. "You can tell me about this town," the alien said. "I think yo u call it Millville." "That's the name, all right. What you want to know about it?" "All the sad stories," said the robot, finally speaking up. "He is correct," the alien said, settling down in an attitude of pleasurable anticipation. "Tell me about the troubles and the tribulations." "Starting where?" I asked. "How about yourself?" "Me? I never have no troubles. I janitor all week at the sanitorium and I get drunk on Saturday. Then I sober up on Sunday so I can janitor another week. Believe me, mister," I told him, "I haven't got no troubles. I am sitting pretty. I have got it made." "But there must be people... "Oh, there are. You never saw so much complaining as there is in Millville. There ain't nobody here except myself but has got a load of trouble. And it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't talk about it" "Tell me," said the alien. CO I had another snort and then  I told him about the Widow Frye, who lives just up the street. I told him how her life had been just one long suffering, with her husband running out on her when their boy was only three years old, and how she took in washing and worked her fingers to the bone to support the two of them, and the kid ain't more than thirteen or fourteen when he steals this car and gets sent up for two years to the boys' school over at Glen Lake. "And that is all of it?" asked the alien. "Well, in rough outline," I said. "I didn't put in none of the flourishes nor the grimy details, the way the widow would. You should hear her tell it." "Could you arrange it?" "Arrange what?" "To have her tell it to me." "I wouldn't promise you," I told him honestly. "The window has a low opinion of me. She never speaks to me." "But I can't understand." "She is a decent, church-going woman," I explained, "and I am just a crummy bum. And I drink." "She doesn't like drinking?" "She thinks it is a sin." The alien sort of shivered. "I know. I guess all places are pretty much alike." "You have people like the Widow Frye?" "Not exactly but the attitude's the same." "Well," I said, after another snort, "I figure there is nothing else to do but bear up under it." "Would it be too much bother," asked the alien, "to tell me another one?" "None at all," I said. So I told him about Elmer Trotter, who worked his way through law school up at Madison, doing all kinds of odd jobs to earn his way, since he had no folks, and how he finally got through and passed the bar examination, then came back to Millville to set up an office. I couldn't tell him how it happened or why, although I had always figured that Elmer had got a belly full of poverty and grabbed this chance to earn a lot of money fast. No one should have known better than he did that it was dishonest, being he was a lawyer. But he went ahead and did it and he got caught. "And what happened then?" asked the alien breathlessly. "Was he punished?" I told him how Elmer got disbarred and how Eliza Jenkins gave him back his ring and how Elmer went into insurance and just scraped along in a hand-to-mouth existence, eating out his heart to be a lawyer once again, but he never could. "You got all this down?" the alien asked the robot. "All down," the robot said. "What fine nuances!" exclaimed the alien, who seemed to be much pleased. "What stark, overpowering reality!" I didn't know what he was talking about, so I had another drink instead. being asked, and I told him about Amanda Robinson and her unhappy love affair and how she turned into Millville's most genteel and sorriest old maid. And about Abner Jones and his endless disappointments, but his refusal to give up the idea that he was a great inventor, and how his family went in rags and hungry while he spent all his time inventing. "Such sadness!" said the alien. "What a lovely planet!" "You better taper off," the robot warned him. "You know what happens to you." "Just one more," the alien begged. "I'm all right. Just one more." "Now, look here," I told him, "I don't mind telling them, if that is what you want. But maybe first you better tell me a bit about yourself. I take it you're an alien." "Naturally," said the alien. "And you came here in a spaceship." 'Well, not exactly a spaceship." "Then, if you're an alien, how come you talk so good?" "Now, that," the alien said, "is something that still is tender to me." The robot said scornfully: "They took him good and proper." "Y ou mean you paid for it." "Too much," the robot said. "They saw that he was eager, so they hiked the price on him." "But I'll get even with them," the alien cut in. "If I don't turn a profit on it, my name isn't  And he said a word that was long and twisted and didn't make no sense. "That your name?" I asked. "Yeah, sure. But you can call me Wilbur. And the  robot, you may call him Lester." 'Well, boys," I said, "I'm mighty glad to know you. You can call me Sam." And I had another drink. We sat there on the stoop and the moon was coming up and the fireflies were flickering in the lilac hedge and the world had an edge on it. I'd never felt so good. "Just one more," said Wilbur pleadingly. So I told him about some of the mental cases up at the sanitarium and I picked the bad ones and alongside of me Wilbur started blubbering and the robot said: "Now see what you've done. He's got a crying jag." But Wilbur wiped his eyes and said it was all right and that if I'd just keep on he'd do the best he could do get a grip himself. "What is going on here?" I asked in some astonishment. "You sound like you get drunk from hearing these sad stories." "That's what he does," said Lester, the robot. 'Why else do you think he'd sit and listen to your blabber." "And you?" I asked of Lester. "Of course not," Wilbur said. "He has no emotions. He is a mere machine."  thought it over and it was as clear as day. So I told Wilbur my philosophy: "This is Saturday night and that's the time to howl. So let's you and I together -- " "I am with you," Wilbur cried, "as long as you can talk." Lester clanked a gear in what must have been disgust, but that was all he did. "Get down every word of it," Wilbur told the robot. "We'll make to get back all overpayment for our indoctrination." He sighed. "Not that it wasn't worth it. What a lovely, melancholy planet." So I got cranked up and kept myself well lubricated and the night kept getting better every blessed minute. Along about midnight, I got falling-down drunk and Wilbur maudlin drunk and we gave up by a sort of mutual consent. We got up off the stoop and by bracing one another we got inside the door and I lost Wilbur somewhere, but made it to my bed and that was the last I knew. When I woke up, I knew it was Sunday morning. The sun was streaming through the window and it was bright and sanctimonious, like Sunday always is around here. Sundays usually are quiet, and that's one thing wrong with them. But this one wasn't quiet. There was an awful din going on outside. It sounded like someone was throwing rocks and hitting a tin can. I rolled out of bed and my mouth tasted just as bad as I knew it would be. I rubbed some of the sand out of my eyes and started for the living room and just outside the bedroom door I almost stepped on Wilbur. He gave me quite a start and then I remembered who he was and I stood there looking at him, not quite believing it. I thought at first that he might be dead, but I saw he wasn't. He was lying flat upon his back and his catfish mouth was open and every time he breathed the feathery whiskers on his lips stood straight out and fluttered. I stepped over him and went to the door to find out what all the racket was. And there stood Lester, the robot, exactly where we'd left him the night before, and out in the driveway a bunch of kids were pegging rocks at him. Those kids were pretty good. They hit Lester almost every time. I yelled at them and they scattered down the road. They knew I d tan tneir hides. I was just turning around to go back into the house when a car swung into the drive. Joe Fletcher, our constable, jumped out and came striding toward me and I could see that he was in his best fire-eating mood. J OE stopped in front of the stoop and put both hands on his hips and stared first at Lester and then at me. "Sam," he asked with a nasty leer, "what is going on here? Some of your pink elephants move into live with you?" "Joe," I said solemn, passing up the insult, "I'd like you to meet Lester." Joe had opened up his mouth to yell at me when Wilbur showed up at the door. "And this is Wilbur," I said. 'Wilbur is an alien and Lester is a..." 'Wilbur is a what!" roared Joe. Wilbur stepped out on the stoop and said: "What a sorrowful face. And so noble, too!" "He means you," I said to Joe. "If you guys keep this up," Joe bellowed, "I'll run in the bunch of you." "I meant no harm," said Wilbur. "I apologize if I have bruised your sensitivities." That was a hot one -- Joe's sensitivities! "I can see at a glance," said Wilbur, "that life's not been easy for you." "I'll tell the world it ain't," Joe said. "Nor for me," said Wilbur, sitting down upon the stoop. "It seems that there are days a man can't lay away a dime." "Mister, you are right," said Joe. "Just like I was telling the missus this morning when she up and told me that the kids needed some new shoes..." "It does beat hell how a man can't get ahead." "Listen, you ain't heard nothing yet..." And so help me Hannah, Joe sat down beside him and before you could count to three started telling his life story. "Lester," Wilbur said, "be sure you get this down." I beat it back into the house and had a quick one to settle my stomach before I tackled breakfast. I didn't feel like eating, but I knew I had to. I got out some eggs and bacon and wondered what I would feed Wilbur. For I suddenly remembered how his metabolism couldn't stand liquor, and if it couldn't take good whisky, there seemed very little chance that it would take eggs and bacon. A S I was finishing my breakfast, Higman Morris came busting through the back door and straight into the kitchen. Higgy is our mayor, a pillar of the church, a member of the school board and a director of the bank, and he is a big stuffed shirt. "Sam," he yelled at me, "this town has taken a lot from you. We have put up with your drinking and your general shiftlessness and your lack of public spirit. But this is too much!" I wiped some egg off my chin. "What is too much?" Higgy almost strangled, he was so irritated. "This public exhibition. This three-ring circus! This nuisance! And on a Sunday, too!" "Oh," I said, "you mean Wilbur and his robot." "There's a crowd collecting out in front and I've had a dozen calls, and Joe is sitting out there with this -- this -- " "Alien," I supplied. "And they're bawling on one another's shoulders like a pair of three-year-olds and... Alien!" "Sure," I said. "What did you think he was?" Higgy reached out a shaky hand and pulled out a chair and fell weakly into it. "Samuel," he said slowly, "give it to me once again. I don't think I heard you right." "Wilbur is an alien," I told h im, "from some other world. He and his robot came here to listen to sad stories." "Sad stories?"  "Sure. He likes sad stories. Some people like them happy and others like them dirty. He just likes them sad." "If he is an alien," said Higgy. talking to himself. "He's one, sure enough," I said. "Sam, you're sure of this?" "I am." Higgy got excited. "Don't you appreciate what this means to Millville? This little town of ours -- the first place on all of Earth that an alien visited!" I wished he would shut up and get out so I could have an after breakfast drink. Higgy didn't drink especially on Sundays. He'd have been horrified. "The world will beat a pathway to our door!" he shouted. He got out of the chair and started for the living room. "I must extend my official welcome." I trailed along behind him, for this was one I didn't want to miss. J OE had left and Wilbur was sitting alone on the stoop and I could see that he already had on a sort of edge. Higgy stood in front of him and thrust out his chest and held out his hand and said, in his best official manner: "I am the mayor of Millville and I take great pleasure in extending to you our sincerest welcome." Wilbur shook hands with him and then he said : "Being the mayor of a city must be something of a burden and a great responsibility. I wonder that you bear up under it." "Well, there are times..." said Higgy. "But I can see that you are the kind of man whose main concern is the welfare of his fellow creatures and as such, quite naturally, you become the unfortunate target of outrageous and ungrateful actions." Higgy sat down ponderously on the stoop. "Sir," he said to Wilbur, "you would not believe all I must put up with." "Lester," said Wilbur, "see that you get this down." I went back into the house. I couldn't stomach it. There was quite a crowd standing out there in the road -- Jake Ellis, the junkman, and Don Myers, who ran the Jolly Miller, and a lot of others. And there, shoved into the background and sort of peering out, was the Widow Frye. People were on their way to church and they'd stop and look and then go on again, but others would come and take their place, and the crowd was getting bigger instead of thinning out. I went out to the kitchen and had my after-breakfast drink and did the dishes and wondered once again what I would feed Wilbur. Although, at the moment, he didn't seem to be too interested in food. Then I went into the living room and sat down in the rocking chair and kicked off my shoes. I sat there wiggling my toes and thinking about what a screwy thing it was that Wilbur should get drunk on sadness instead of good red liquor. The day was warm and I was wore out and the rocking must have helped to put me fast asleep, for suddenly I woke up and there was someone in the room. I didn't see who it was right off, but I knew someone was there. It was the Widow Frye. She was all dressed up for Sunday, and after all those years of passing my house on the opposite side of the street and never looking at it, as if the sight of it or me might contaminate her -- after all these years, there she was all dressed up and smiling. And me sitting there with all my whiskers on and my shoes off.  Frye, "I couldn't help but tell you. I think your Mr. Wilbur is simply wonderful." "He's an alien," I said. I had just woke up and was considerable befuddled. "I don't care what he is," said the Widow Frye. "He is such a gentleman and so sympathetic. Not in the least like a lot of people in this horrid town." I got to my feet and I didn't know exactly what to do. She'd caught me off my guard and at a terrible disadvantage. Of all people in the world, she was the last I would have expected to come into my house. I almost offered her a drink, but caught myself just in time. "You been talking to him?" I asked lamely. "Me and everybody else," said the Widow Frye. "And he has a way with him. You tell him your troubles and they seem to go away. There's a lot of people waiting for their turn." "Well," I told her, "I am glad to hear you say that. How's he standing up under all this?" The Widow Frye moved closer and dropped her voice to a whisper. "I think he's getting tired. I would say -- well, I'd say he was intoxicated if I didn't know better." I took a quick look at the clock. "Holy smoke!" I yelled. It was almost four o'clock. Wilbur had been out there six or seven hours, lapping up all the sadness this village could dish out. By now he should be stiff clear up to his eyebrows. I busted out the door and he was sitting on the stoop and tears were running down his face and he was listening to Jack Ritter -- and Old Jack was the biggest liar in all of seven counties. He was just making up this stuff he was telling Wilbur. "Sorry, Jack," I said, pulling Wilbur to his feet. "But I was just telling him..." "Go on home," I hollered, "you and the others. You got him all tired out." "Mr. Sam," said Lester, "I am glad you came. He wouldn't listen to me." The Widow Frye held the door open and I got Wilbur in and put him in my bed, where he could sleep it off. Widow Frye was waiting. "I was just thinking, Samuel," she said. "I am having chicken for supper and there is more than I can eat. I wonder if you'd like to come on over." I couldn't say nothing for a moment. Then I shook my head. "Thanks just the same," I said, "but I have to stay and watch over Wilbur. He won't pay attention to the robot." The Widow Frye was disappointed. "Some other time?" "Yeah, some other time." I went out after she was gone and invited Lester in. "Can you sit down," I asked, "or do you have to stand?" "I have to stand," said Lester. So I left him standing there and sat down in the rocker. "What does Wilbur eat?" I asked. "He must be getting hungry" The robot opened a door in the middle of his chest and took out a funny-looking bottle. He shook it and I could hear something rattling around inside of it. "This is his nourishment," said Lester. "He takes one every day." He went to put the bottle back and a big fat roll fell out. He stooped and picked it up. "Money," he explained. "You folks have money, too?" "We got this when we were indoctrinated. Hundred-dollar bills." "Hundred-dollar bills!" "Too bulky otherwise," said Lester blandly. He put the money and the bottle back into his chest and slapped shut the door. I sat there in a fog. Hundreddollar bills! "Lester," I suggested, "maybe you hadn't ought to show anyone else that money. They might try to take it from you." "I know," said Lester. "I keep it next to me." And he slapped his chest. His slap would take the head right off a man.  sat rocking in the chair and there was so much to think about that my mind went rocking back and forth with the chair. There was Wilbur first of all and the crazy way he got drunk, and the way the Widow Frye had acted, and all those hundreddollar bills. Eespecially those hundred-dollar bills. "This indoctrination business?" I asked. "You said it was bootleg." "It is, most definitely," said Lester. "Acquired by some misguided individual who sneaked in and taped it to sell to addicts." "But why sneak in?" "Off limits," Lester said. "Outside the reservation. Beyond the pale. Is the meaning clear?" "And this misguided adventurer figured he could sell the information he had taped, the -- the -- " "The culture pattern," said Lester. "Your logic trends in the correct direction, but it is not as simple as you make it sound." "I suppose not," I said. "And this same misguided adventurer picked up the money, too." "Yes, he did. Quite a lot of it." I sat there for a while longer, then went in for a look at Wilbur. He was fast asleep, his catfish mouth blowing the whiskers in and out. So I went into the kitchen and got myself some supper. I had just finished eating when a knock came at the door. It was old Doc Abel from the sanitarium. "Good evening, Doc," I said. "I'll rustle up a drink." "Skip the drink," said Doc. "Just trot out your alien." He stepped into the living room and stopped short at the sight of Lester. Lester must have seen that he was astonished for he tried immediately to put him at ease. "I am the so-called alien's robot Yet despite the fact that I am a mere machine, I am a faithful servant. If you wish to tell your sadness, you may relate it to me with perfect confidence. I shall relay it to my master." Doc sort of rocked back on his heels, but it didn't floor him. "Just any kind of sadness?" he asked, "or do you hanker for a special kind?" "The master," Lester said, "prefers the deep-down sadness, although he will not pass up any other kind." "Wilbur gets drunk on it," I said. "He's in the bedroom now sleeping off a jag." "Likewise," Lester said, "confidentially, we can sell the stuff. There are people back home with their tongues hanging to their knees for this planet's brand of sadness." D OC looked at me and his eyebrows were so high that they almost hit his hairline. "It's on the level, Doc," I assured him. "It isn't any joke. You want to have a look at Wilbur?" Doc nodded and I led the way into the bedroom and we stood there looking down at Wilbur. Sleeping all stretched out, he was a most unlovely sight. Doc put his hand up to his forehead and dragged it down across his face, pulling down his chops so he looked like a bloodhound. His big, thick, loose lips made a blubbering sound as he pulled his palm across them. "I'll be damned!" said Doc. Then he turned around and walked out of the bedroom and I trailed along behind him. He walked straight to the door and went out. He walked a ways down the driveway, then stopped and waited for me. Then he reached out and grabbed me by the shirt front and pulled it tight around me. "Sam," he said, "you've been working for me for a long time now and you are getting sort of old Most other men would fire a man as old as you are and get a younger one. I could fire you any time I want to." "I suppose you could," I said, and it was an awful feeling, for I had never thought of being fired. I did a good job of janitoring up at the sanitorium and I didn't mind the work. And I thought how terrible it would be if a Saturday came and I had no drinking money. "You been a loyal and faithful worker," said old Doc, still hanging onto my shirt, "and I been a good employer. I always give you a Christmas bottle and another one at Easter." "Right," I said. "True, every word of it." "So you wouldn't fool old Doc," said Doc. "Maybe the rest of the people in this stupid town, but not your old friend Doc." "But, Doc," I protested, "I ain't fooling no one." Doc let loose of my shirt. "By God, I don't believe you are. It's like the way they tell me? He sits and listens to their troubles, and they feel better once they're through?" "That's what the Widow Frye said. She said she told him her troubles and they seemed to go away." "That's the honest truth, Sam?" "The honest truth," I swore. Doc Abel got excited. He grabbed me by the shirt again. "Don't you see what we have?" he almost shouted at me. "We?" I asked. "D UT he paid no attention. "The greatest psychiatrist," said Doc, "this world has ever known. The greatest aid to psychiatry anyone ever has dredged up. You get what I am aiming at?" "I guess I do," I said, not having the least idea. "The most urgent need of the human race," said Doc, "is someone or something they can shift their troubles to -- someone who by seeming magic can banish their anxieties. Confession is the core of it, of course -- a symbolic shifting of one's burden to someone else's shoulders. The principle is operative in the church confessional, in the profession of psychiatry, in those deep, abiding friendships offering a shoulder that one can cry upon." "Doc, you're right," I said, beginning to catch on. "The trouble always is that the agent of confession must be human, too. He has certain human limitations of which the confessor is aware. He can give no certain promise that he can assume the trouble and anxiety. But here we have something different. Here we have an alien -- a being from the stars -- unhampered by human limitations. By very definition, he can take anxieties and smother them in the depths of his own nonhumanity..." "Doc," I yelled, "if you could only get Wilbur up at the sanitorium!" Doc rubbed mental hands together. "The very thing that I had been thinking." I could have kicked myself for my enthusiasm. I did the best I could to gain back the ground I'd lost. "I don't know, Doc. Wilbur might be hard to handle." "Well, let's go back in and have a talk with him." "I don't know," I stalled. "We got to get him fast. By tomorrow, the word will be out and the place will be overrun with newspapermen and TV trucks and God knows what. The scientific boys will be swarming in, and the government, and we'll lose control." "I'd better talk to him alone," I said. "He might freeze up solid if you were around. He knows me and he might listen to me." Doc hemmed and hawed, But finally he agreed. "I'll wait in the car," he said. "You call me if you need me." H E went crunching on down the driveway to where he had the car parked, and I went inside the house. "Lester," I said to the robot, "I've got to talk to Wilbur. Its important." "No more sad stories," Lester warned. "He's had enough today." "No. I got a proposition." "Proposition?" "A deal. A business arrangement." "All right," said Lester. "I will get him up." It took quite a bit of getting up, but finally we had him fought awake and sitting on the bed. "Wilbur, listen carefully," I told him. "I have comething right down your alley. A place where all the people have big and terrible troubles and an awful sadness. Not just some of them, but every one of them. They are so sad and troubled they can't live with other people..." Wilbur struggled off the bed, stood swaying on his feet. "Lead me to 'em, pal," he said. I pushed him down on the bed again. "It isn't as easy as all that. It's a hard place to get into." "I thought you said -- " "Look, I have a friend who can arrange it for you. But it might take some money -- " "Pal," said Wilbur, "we got a roll of cash. How much would you need?" "It's hard to say." "Lester, hand it over to him so he can make this deal." "Boss," protested Lester, "I don't know if we should." "We can trust Sam," said Wilbur. "He is not the grasping sort. He won't spend a cent more than is necessary." "Not a cent," I promised. Lester opened the door in his chest and handed me the roll of hundred-dollar bills and I stuffed it in my pocket "Now you will wait right here," I told them, "and I'll see this friend of mine. I'll be back soon." And I was doing some fast arithmetic, wondering how much I could dare gouge out of Doc. It wouldn't hurt to start a little high so I could come down when Doc would roar and howl and scream and say what good friends we were and how he always had given me a bottle at Christmas and at Easter. I turned to go out into the living room and stopped dead in my tracks. For standing in the doorway was another Wilbur, although when I looked at him more closely I saw the differences. And before he said a single word or did a single thing, I had a sinking feeling that something had gone wrong. "Good evening, sir," I said. "It's nice of you to drop in." He never turned a hair. "I see you have guests. It shall desolate me to tear them away from you." ing noises as if his gears were stripping, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that Wilbur sat stiff and stricken and whiter than a fish. "But you can't do that," I said. 'They only just showed up." "You do not comprehend," said the alien in the doorway. "They are breakers of the law. I have come to get them." "Pal," said Wilbur, speaking to me, "I am truly sorry. I knew all along it would not work out" "By this time," the other alien said to Wilbur, "you should be convinced of it and give up trying." And it was plain as paint, once you came to think of it, and I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before. For if Earth was closed to the adventurers who'd gathered the indoctrination data "Mister," I said to the alien in the doorway, "there are factors here of which I know you ain't aware. Couldn't you and me talk the whole thing over alone?" "I should be happy," said the alien, so polite it hurt, "but please understand that I must carry out a duty." "Why, certainly," I said. The alien stepped out of the doorway and made a sign behind him and two robots that had been standing in the living room just out of my line of vision came in. "Now all is secure," said the alien, "and we can depart to talk. I will listen most attentively." So I went out into the kitchen and he followed me. I sat down at the table and he sat across from me. "I must apologize," he told me gravely. "This miscreant imposes upon you and your planet." "Mister," I told him back, "you have got it all wrong. I like this renegade of yours." "Like him?" he asked, horrified. "That is impossible. He is a drunken lout and furthermore than that -- " "And furthermore than that," I said, grabbing the words right from his mouth, "he is doing us an awful lot of good." The alien looked flabbergasted. "You do not know that which you say! He drags from you your anxieties and feasts upon them most disgustingly, and he puts them down on record so he can't pull them forth again and yet again to your eternal shame, and furthermore than that -- " "It's not that way at all," I shouted. "It does us a lot of good to pull out our anxieties and show them -- " "Disgusting! More than that, indecent!" He stopped. "What was that?" "Telling our anxieties does us good," I said as solemnly as I could. "It's a matter of confession." T HE alien banged an open palm against his forehead and the feathers on his catfish mouth stood straight out and quivered. "It could be true," he said in horror. "Given a culture so primitive and so besodden and so shameless..." "Ain't we, though?" I agreed. "In our world," said the alien, "there are no anxieties -- well, not many. We are most perfectly adjusted." "Except for folks like Wilbur?" "Wilbur?" "Your pal in there," I said. "I couldn't say his name, so I call him Wilbur. By the way..." He rubbed his hand across his face, and no matter what he said, it was plain to see that at that moment he was loaded with anxiety. "Call me Jake. Call me anything. Just so we get this mess resolved." "Nothing easier," I said. "Let's just keep Wilbur here. You don't really want him, do you?" "Want him?" wailed Jake. "He and all the others like him are nothing but a headache. But they are our problem and our responsibility. We can't saddle you." "You mean there are more like Wilbur?" Jake nodded sadly. "We'll take them all," I said. "We would love to have them. Every one of them." "You're crazy!" "Sure we are," I said. "That is why we need them." "You are certain, without any shadow of your doubt?" "Absolutely certain." "Pal," said Jake, "you have made a deal." I stuck out my hand to shake on it, but I don't think he even saw my hand. He rose out of the chair and you could see a vast relief lighting up his face. Then he turned and stalked out of the kitchen. "Hey, wait a minute!" I yelled. For there were details that I felt we should work out. But he didn't seem to hear me. I jumped out of the chair and raced for the living room, but by the time I got there, there was no sign of Jake. I ran into the bedroom and the two robots were gone, too. Wilbur and Lester were in there all alone. "I told you," Lester said to Wilbur, "that Mr. Sam would fix it." "I don't believe it, pal," said Wilbur. "Have they really gone? Have they gone for good? Is there any chance they will be coming back?" I raised my arm and wiped off my forehead with my sleeve. "They won't bother you again. You are finally shut of them." "That is excellent," said Wilbur. "And now about this deal." "Sure," I said. "Give me just a minute. I'll go out and see the man." I stepped out on the stoop and stood there for a while to get over shaking. Jake and his two robots had come very close to spoiling everything. I needed a drink worse than I had ever needed one, but I didn't dare take the time. I had to get Doc on the dotted line before something else turned up. I went out to the car. "It took you long enough," Doc said irritably. "It took a lot of talking for Wilbur to agree," I said. "But he did agree?" "Yeah, he agreed." "Well, then," said Doc, "what are we waiting for?" "Ten thousand bucks," I said. "Ten thousand..." "That's the price for Wilbur. I'm selling you my alien." "Your alien! He is not your alien!" "Maybe not," I said, "but he's the next best thing. All I have to do is say the word and he won't go with you." "Two thousand," declared Doc. "That's every cent I'll pay." We got down to haggling and we wound up at seven thousand all night at it, I would have got eighty-five hundred. But I was all fagged out and I needed a drink much worse than I needed fifteen hundred extra dollars. So we settled on the seven. We went back into the house and Doc wrote out a check. "You know you're fired, of course," he said, handing it to me. "I hadn't thought about it," I told him, and I hadn't. The check for seven thousand in my hand and that roll of hundred-dollar bills bulging out my pocket added up to a lot of drinking money. I went to the bedroom door and called out Wilbur and Lester and I said to them: "Old Doc here has made up his mind to take you." And Wilbur said. "I am so happy and so thankful. Was it hard, perhaps, to get him to agree to take us?" "Not too hard," I said. "He was reasonable." "Hey," yelled Doc, with murder in his eyes, "what is going on here?" "Not a thing," I said. "Well, it sounds to me..." "There's your boy," I said. "Take him if you want him. If it should happen you don't want him, I'll be glad to keep him. There'll be someone else along." I held out the check to give it back to him. It was a risky thing to do, but I was in a spot where I had to bluff. Tk OC waved the check away, but he was still suspicious that he was being taken, although he wasn't sure exactly how. But he couldn't take the chance of losing out on Wilbur. I could see that he had it all figured out -- how he'd become world famous with the only alien psychiatrist in captivity. Except there was one thing that he didn't know. He had no idea that in just a little while there would be other Wilburs. And I stood there, laughing at him without showing it, while he herded Wilbur and Lester out the door. Before he left, he turned back to me. "There is something going on," he said, and when I find out about it, I am going to come back and take you apart for it." I never said a word, but just stood there listening to the three of them crunching down the driveway. When I heard the car leave, I went out into the kitchen and took down the bottle. I had a half a dozen fast ones. Then I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and practiced some restraint. I had a half a dozen slow ones. I got to wondering about the other Wilburs that Jake had agreed to send to Earth and I wished I'd been able to pin him down a bit. But I had had no chance, for he had jumped up and disappeared just when I was ready to get down to business. All I could do was hope he'd deliver them to me -- either in the front yard or out in the driveway -- but he'd never said he would. A fat lot of good it would do me if he just dropped them anywhere. And I wondered when he would deliver them and how many there might be. It might take a bit of time, for more than likely he would indoctrinate them before they were dropped on Earth, and as to number, I had not the least idea. From the way he talked, there might even be a couple of dozen of them. With that many, a man could make a roll of cash if he handled the situation right. Although, it seemed to me, I had a right smart amount of money now. I dug the roll of hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and made a stab at counting them, but for the life of me I couldn't keep the figures straight. Here I was drunk and it wasn't even Saturday, but Sunday. I didn't have a job and now I could get drunk any time I wanted. So I sat there working on the jug and finally passed out. and I came awake and wondered where I was. In a little while I got it figured out that I'd been sleeping at the kitchen table and I had a terrible crick in my neck and a hangover that was even worse. I stumbled to my feet and looked at the clock. It was ten minutes after nine. The racket kept right on. I made it out to the living room and opened the front door. The Widow Frye almost fell into the room, she had been hammering on the door so hard. "Samuel," she gasped, "have you heard about it?" "I ain't heard a thing," I told her, "except you pounding on the door." "It's on the radio." "You know darn well I ain't got no radio nor no telephone nor no TV set. I ain't got no time for modern trash like that." "It's about the aliens," she said. "Like the one you have. The nice, kind, understanding alien people. They are everywhere. Everywhere on Earth. There are a lot of them all over. Thousands of them. MayI pushed past her out the door. They were sitting on front steps all up and down the street, and they were walking up and down the road, and there were a bunch of them playing, chasing one another, in a vacant lot. "It's like that everywhere!" cried the Widow Frye. "The radio just I Th said so. There are enough of them so that everyone on Earth can have one of their very own. Isn't it wonderful?" That dirty, doublecrossing Jake, I told myself. Talking like there weren't many of them, pretending that his culture was so civilized and so well adjusted that there were almost no psychopaths. Although, to be fair about it, he hadn't said how many there might be of them -- not in numbers, that is. And even all he had dumped on Earth might be a few in relation to the total population of his particular culture. And then, suddenly, I thought of something else. I hauled out my watch and looked at it. It was only a quarter after nine. 'Widow Frye," I said, "excuse me. I got an errand to run." I legged it down the street as fast as I could. f)NE of the Wilburs detached himself from a group of them and loped along with me. "Mister," he said, "have you got some troubles to tell me?" "Naw," I said. "I never have no troubles." "Not even any worries?" "No worries, either." Then it occurred to me that there was a worry -- not for me alone, but for the entire world. For with all the Wilburs that Jake had dumped on Earth, there would in a little while be no human psychopaths. There wouldn't be a human with a worry or a trouble. God, would it be dull! But I didn't worry none. I just loped along as fast as I could go. I had to get to the bank before Doc had time to stop payment on that check for seven thousand dollars. Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! If you are excited about tomorrow and get a thrill out of the idea of a man in space... get a Willy Ley Space Model in a fascinating Monogram hobby kit. Easy, Fascinating Assembly These exciting new models bring space travel closer and add reality to what you read. Designed by Willy Ley, author of "Conquest of Space" and other thrillers. producer of fine hobby kits. Assembly is easy -- fascinating. No tools required. Models are beautiful show and conversation pieces, with separating stages and many operational features. Informative Booklet Included Detailed pictorial instructions and booklet by Willy Ley describing the real space ship and its uses, included with each model. Use coupon on opposite page. TV Orbiter Easy-to-Assemble, All-Plastic Authentic, Detailed Willy Ley Models. 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Remittance for   enclosed.  Space Taxi. #  TV Orbiter. #  Passenger Rocket #  Orbital Rocket # Name Address ! City Zone .State in the morning Natural laws are cliches -- "what must be must be," for instance -- and what must be in this case was. Illustrated by T HE first thirty years of Henry Talbot's life were the most promising. He was a bright student through high school, and in college his fellow students often used the word "brilliant" in discussing his mentality; occasionally even his instructors echoed them. of all people. Dr. Talbot! Upon receiving his bachelor's degree, he went to graduate school and eventually received his Ph.D. as an experimental nuclear physicist. He applied for and got a research position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in the Electronuclear Research Division.  young scientist, began his career I enthusiastically, and ran into a brick wall. Rather, he crawled up to and against it, for it took several years for him to discover that his life's route lay not on an unobstructed downhill slide. Those years slithered past before he looked up and Realized that he had not revolutionized the scientific world; he had discovered no principle of relativity, no quantum theory. He stopped working for a moment and looked around. All his colleagues were enthusiastic and school, where throughout his life, he had been outstanding, now he was one of the crowd. What had now merely competence. Henry Talbot felt a vague need which he perceived liquor might fill. That afternoon he left work early for the first time since he had arrived at Oak Ridge. He had to buy the vodka from a bootlegger, Oak Ridge being in a dry county. But, as in most dry counties, that presented no problem. He stopped by Shorty's cab stand, across the street from the police department, and asked Shorty for a bottle. Shorty reached into the glove compartment and, for fifty cents over list price, the vodka changed hands. Henry didn't like to patronize the bootleggers, but he did feel the need for a quick one just this once. After drinking for several hours in his apartment, Henry Talbot took stock of himself and came to two conclusions: #. He was satisfied with himself and his life. He had always taken for granted that he would one day be a famous figure in some scientific field, true, but this was actually not so important as, upon casual inspection, it might seem. He liked his work, otherwise he could never have been so wrapped up in it, and he saw no reason for discontinuing it or for becoming despondent over his lack of fame. After all, he reasoned, he had never been famous and yet had been always perfectly content. #. He liked vodka. nr HE next thirty years of Henry Talbot's life, now devoid of tent. He worked steadily and drank as the mood fell upon him, publishing on the average one paper a year. These papers were thorough, the experiments well worked out, without contrived results or varnished sloppiness. The publications were accepted everywhere as solid research papers. Henry Talbot's name became familiar in the nuclear field. He did not find his face on the cover of Time, nor was he ever invited to participate as an "expert" on any television quiz programs, yet he was well known to nuclear researchers -- at least those in his own country. He was honored with a banquet on his fiftieth birthday. Person to Person once tentatively proposed to visit him, but the idea was squelched, a visit to a more buxom personality being substituted. Sex never reared its ugly head. He had not had time for it when young, and so had never fallen into the habit. At the age of sixty-five he retired. He canceled his subscription to the Physical Review, bought a fishing rod, subscribed to the New Yorker, and tried Florida. He started at Tallahassee and fished his way down to Ocala. By the time he had reached St. Petersburg, he had decided to try California. In California he took up golf. He bought a hi-fi set and a dozen progressive jazz records, advertised as unbreakable. They proved not to be, although in fairness to the advertiser it must be said that Henry Talbot had to exert himself. He decided to try a world cruise. He left the scheduled tour in Japan and visited the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Tokyo, spending some time there just generally chewing the bilingual rag. When he returned to the United States, he renewed his subscription to the Physical Review, canceled his subscription to the New Yorker, and looked around for another position. He went to work for the Arnold Research Corporation on a parttime, semi-retired basis. But he had his own lab, his hours were his own, and in a few weeks he was working full time. No one was disturbed by this, he did not apply for more money or recognition, he kept to himself, and he began publishing his one paper each year. On the tenth year afterward his paper was missing, though not missed. He began to spend less time in his lab and more in the library and behind his desk, scribbling on scraps of paper or staring into space. He was forgotten by the Arnold Research Corporation. He was content with his books and his monthly check. In his seventy-fourth year, Henry Talbot published a paper in the Philosophical Magazine on what he called the "Warped Field Theory." The theory was entirely his own, from beginning to end, and constituted -- in his opinion -- the first real breakthrough in theoretical physics since Albert Einstein's little idea in #. The day the article came out he sat behind his desk all day, puffing on his pipe, not merely content but really happy for the first time in his life. three more months. Then Larry Arnold, Jr., came into his office, carrying a copy of the Philosophical Magazine. Larry Arnold, Jr., was not a scientist but, as he put it, he was scientifically minded and was general overseer, public relations man, and coordinator of coordinators of research. He humphed a few times, groaned as he sat down across the desk from Henry, wheezed twice, smiled once, and said, "Good morning, Dr. Talbot." "Good morning," Henry replied, folding his hands and trying to look "I read your article," Arnold said, feebly waving the magazine around before him, "and I don't mind admitting I didn't understand a word of it. Well, I'm not a man to hide his lack of knowledge so I went right out and asked some of the men working here about it. They didn't understand it either. I called up a few people around the country. I -- Dr. Talbot, I don't know how exactly to say this to you. I don't know what you intended with this article, but it's got people laughing at us and we can't have that." Henry kept the same humble look on his face; he fought to keep the same expression. He didn't know what his face might look like if he relaxed for a moment. "We didn't expect much research from you when we hired you. Well, we know we're not paying you much, and we don't mind if you don't put out much work. Hell, we don't care if you don't put out any work. We get our money's worth in good will when people know we've got an old pro like you on our payroll; the young kids can see we won't kick them out when they're all used up. But when you put out papers like this one -- " and here he waved the magazine a bit more violently, getting warmed up -- "when you do this, and it says Arnold Research Corporation right here under your name, people don't just laugh at you. They laugh at the whole organization. They think that this whole place is going around doing fantastic research like this -- this warped field." He stopped when he saw the look slip a bit from Henry's face, and he saw what was there beneath it. He dropped his eyes and wheezed twice, then heaved his bulk out of the chair. "I didn't mean to slam into you that way, Dr. Talbot. You know it's an honor to have you associated with the firm. We were even thinking of giving you a testimonial banquet next week on your seventyfifth birthday... It is next week, isn't it? Well, what I mean to say is -- I mean we all appreciate the good solid research you've been doing all these years. It's just that -- well, you won't fool around like this any more, now will you? And we'll just forget all about it. No hard feelings." He left quickly, and the door closed behind him. For the first time in seventy-five years, or in the last sixty-nine at least, Henry Talbot cried. After he cried, he became angry. He wanted to shout, so he left the office early and hurried to his apartment where he could shout without disturbing anyone, which he did. He then took out the vodka, settled Bucephalus, his cat, on his lap and began to pour. Several hours later Henry Talbot sprawled in the armchair and took stock of himself. He came to two conclusions: #. At his age, what did he care about fame? He knew his theory was sound, and if the people in his own country didn't appreciate it, what difference did it make? Now, free from rancor, he could understand how they must have received his paper. They all knew old Dr. Talbot -- seventy-five and not dead yet. What a ridiculous age for a nuclear physicist! Now he's turning theoretical, they must have chuckled. So they started his paper. And when they came to the first unorthodox assumption, when they reached the first of the many mathematical complexities and indeed paradoxes, they must have closed the magazine and had a good laugh over a cup of coffee. Had the article been written by some unknown twenty-five-yearold, they would all hail him as a new genius. But coming from old Henry Talbot, the article was ludicrous. Well, he didn't care. Abroad, he was not so well known. Some countries would not have heard of him at all. They'd read the article seriously, one or two men would understand it. They'd run some experiments to confirm or deny the hypotheses and Henry was confident the experiments would prove him right. He had only to wait Of course he hadn't much time left, but perhaps they would do it in a year or two, and perhaps he'd still be here to see it and have the last laugh. #. He still liked vodka. T T was nineteen years before two Finish physicists, Arkadt and Findrun, ran the necessary experiments. Of the many who had read the article, some knew Talbot and thus laughed it off, some could not understand it, and some understood it and waxed enthusiastic. Eventually the enthusiasm spread to the Finnish Institute for Applied Research where the essential equipment was available. The experiments were an unqualified success. As soon as the experiments were confirmed, Arkadt sent a telegram to Dr. Henry Talbot, in care of the address which had appeared with his original article, informing him of the happy developments. He and Findrun were still celebrating their spectacular success a week later, this time with Dr. Arrhenial, director of the institute, when Arkadt mentioned that he had sent such a telegram and had received as yet no answer. Arrhenial smiled into his vodka. "Didn't you know? Talbot was seventy-five years old when he wrote that article. I'm afraid you were a little too late for him." "I didn't know," Arkadt replied. "A shame," Findrun murmured. "It would have made him so happy" The telephone rang and Arkadt answered it His wife was calling, with unusual news. He had just received a letter from America. Imagine that. From a Henry Talbot. the cover of Time magazine. He refused a request to appear on a television quiz program. (The contestant the network had had in mind to appear with Henry won his money nevertheless, in the category Theoretical Physics, by correctly naming the year in which Einstein first published his Theory of Relativity, the number of papers which comprised the entire theory, the language in which it was first published, die magazine in which it was first published, the year in which the magazine was first printed, the name of the first printer of the magazine, and the year in which he died.) Henry Talbot was termed "The Dean of American Men of Science" by the New York Times, which paper triumphantly reported that only thirteen people in the world understood his Warped Field Theory. When asked if there was now anything else for science to do, he replied, "Indubitably." When pressed for more details, he said that his housekeeper always removed his vodka from the refrigerator at three-thirty, and that if he did not immediately return home, it would become unbearably warm. On the occasion of his ninetyfifth birthday, he was given a gigantic testimonial banquet by the Arnold Research Corporation, "under whose auspices the entire research which culminated in the justly famous Warped Field Theory was conducted." The next week, when he requested the use of their massive cyclotron to run an experiment, he was told that the machine was in use at the time. A week later, his request was again shunted off. This happened twice more, and Henry went to see Larry Arnold, Jr. The coordinator was affable, and told Henry that he had checked himself, and that unfortunately the machine was in use and that of course since he, Talbot, was actually at the lab on only a part-time basis, he could not expect to usurp the machine from full-time research workers. Henry asked what kind of research was being done. Larry wheezed twice and told him it was investigating certain aspects of the Warped Field Theory. "I invented the goddam theory and I can't even get at the machine?" Henry shouted. "Please, Dr. Talbot. Let's be reasonable. You discovered that theory twenty years ago. I mean, after all. You're an older man now, and that's an expensive piece of machinery -- " Henry slammed the door as he walked out, was not satisfied with the effect, came back and slammed it again, this time shattering the glass. He felt a little better, strode down the hall, and resigned the next day, quietly and undramatically. He disappeared into retirement Reports of his death were printed occasionally. They were never denied. They stopped after several years, were taken to be final, and his name was not often mentioned by the newspapers. One hundred and three years after his birth, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Henry Talbot for his Warped Field Theory. The committee decided not to look into the matter of discovering Dr. Talbot's heirs until after the ceremony, expecting that someone would turn up to claim the award in his name. Henry Talbot accepted the medallion and check himself from the hand of the King of Sweden, making his acceptance speech in hurriedly learned but understandable Swedish. The newspapers of the world devoured him and made big news of the fact that he had been practically fired nine years before. He was deluged with offers of employment, most of which sought him as a public-relations man. He accepted the offer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His duties here were non-existent. He would be paid, cared for. He was to think, as much or as little as he pleased. The Institute was apologetic that they had not been aware of his unemployment previously. He was invited to stay with them for as long as he liked. Henry Talbot settled back finally, in comfort. The research upon which he now embarked was so deep, so complex, that he did not intend to come to any publishable conclusions in his lifetime. He desired no experimentation now; hewanted only to think, to think in purely mathematical terms of the universe as an entity. He withdrew into the sanctity of his study, thankful to Princeton for the peace and tranquility it offered. Several years later a notice of his death was published in the New York Times. Henry did not read the New York Times, but the treasurer at the Institute evidently did. His checks stopped coming. Henry did not complain. He had saved a lot of money and his tastes were simple. He did not have to pay a bootlegger's price in Princeton. In his hundred and eighty-first year, Henry first became seriously aware of the possibility that he might not die. night during his two hundred and forty-fifth year -- it began to seem to him purposeless, but he still kept accurate count -- Henry pushed back from his desk and sighed. Outside the window, in the gently falling snow, the campus of Princeton looked exactly as it had when he had first come, but things were different. No one now at the Institute knew him; he had known no one there for seventy-five years now. Probably at no other place in the country than at the Institute for Advanced Study could he have kept his study for so long, could he have been left so alone. And it was good, but now he was lonely. Lonely, bored by his solitude, aware of his boredom and utter lack of friends. He had realized long ago the compensation demanded for eternity. When he had first begun to think of the possibility that he might not die, he had realized that it would mean leaving his friends, his family, and continuing alone. When he had first begun to speculate on his seeming immortality, how it had come about and why, he had known he would be lonely. This is the way to the Ubermensch, This is the way to the Ubermensch, This is the way to the Ubermensch, Not in a crowd, but alone. Nearly every great mind within the past hundred years had pointed out the difficulty of man's accomplishing anything in his brief hundred years of life, had pointed out the necessity of immortality to a great mind. And what is necessary will be. But this is the way of evolution: not in a crowd, but alone. then another. It was statistically improbable that he was the first. So there must be others. But so far, in two hundred and forty-five years, he had not met any that he knew of. Then again, there was no way of knowing. Anyone passing him on the street would not know, and he meeting another would not know. A purring broke through into his reverie and, looking down, he became aware of Bucephalus, his cat, rubbing against his legs. He laughed, bent down and picked her up. Here was the exception, of course. Old Bucephalus. He laughed again, shaking his head in wonder. He had had Bucephalus for the past hundred and fifty years. "Now what justification does a cat have for living forever?" he wondered aloud, holding her at arm's length and smiling at her. She lifted one paw and dabbed at his face. He put her down and went to get her milk. "And how did we ever find each other?" Perhaps there was some subliminal way of knowing. Perhaps, without knowing, the immortals knew. While Bucephalus lapped at her milk, Henry Talbot walked out for a breath of air. He wandered off the campus, finally pausing in front of a candy-and-soda store. He felt a vague curiosity and went in to look at the newspapers. After reading through one, he stood back and sighed. The same old thing, always the same old thing. The new wave of immigrants -- he looked again to see where they were from this time; he didn't recognize the name of the place, but it didn't matter -- the new wave of immigrants was a disgrace to New York, was destroying real estate values, was a burden to society, to the last wave of immigrants who had by now made their place. The President said we would fight, if necessary, one last war to make the world safe for democracy. Statistics showed that juvenile delinquency was on the increase; it was traced to a lack of parental authority in the home. Always the same old thing. Only his work was new, always changing. But now, after nearly a hundred and fifty years of thought, he felt he was in over his head. It was getting too abstract. He needed some good solid experimental research, he felt. Something concrete, down-to-earth. He wanted to play with a hundred-channel analyzer, measure some cross sections, determine a beta-decay scheme. But he couldn't ask them here for a lab. He didn't dare tell them who he was. Too much commotion, notoriety. The newspapers again. Good God, no. He turned to go back to his study, and then stopped dead. He couldn't go back there. His brain was spinning without a clamp; he needed to fasten to something and orient himself in this vast universe. His fingers itched to get at some experiment. He couldn't go back to his study. He decided to take a vacation. He had never gotten as far as Miami Beach, he remembered. The sun would feel good, and he could do with a bit of a tan. He flew down that night. After he had checked in at the Sea Lion, and as he was following the bellboy across the high and wide lobby to the elevator, a woman crossed his path. In her late twenties, perhaps early thirties, she was simply stunning. Dark hair, light skin, blue eyes almost purple with a Eurasian slant to them, long firm legs and slim ankles. For the first time in many a year, Henry stopped to look at a woman. The bellboy realized that he had walked on alone and returned to Talbot. "That woman is beautiful." Henry gestured toward her back. The bellboy smirked. Henry followed him to his room. weeks and grew younger day by day. His skin tanned, his muscles became hard with the exertion of lengthy swims, the creases in his face smoothed out. Still he felt vaguely dissatisfied, empty. He lay on the beach, gazing into the ocean, and knew that something was missing. The woman he had seen that first night crossed between him and the ocean and continued down the beach. Henry watched her out of sight. "That woman is beautiful," he thought. Sex, he thought. I wonder if that's what's missing. There was another aspect to be considered, of course. Two hundred and forty-five. And then a blonde young lady in a bikini wavered by him and he knew in that moment that he could. He stood up and walked after her. "I wonder if I might walk a bit with you," he said. She looked him over carefully and then shrugged her shoulder, not quite dislodging the upper portion of her suit. "Suitcha self." After a while she asked, "What business ya in?" "I'm sort of retired," he explained, finding her very charming and refreshing to talk to. "I had a modest income a while ago. I invested wisely, or prudently at least, and the interest has built up into quite a fortune by now." "Really," she said. They walked down the beach, hand in hand. bed when she fell asleep. He dressed and walked despondently down to the lobby. This was not it, not it at all. God, but her conversation was absolutely impossible. He couldn't stay with her another minute. His problem was still unsolved. He wanted to get back to work, he wanted company, he wanted life again. As he came into the lobby, the woman of the first night passed by him again. She looked at him as she came, and smiled as she passed. That, he thought, is a lovely woman. He stared at her back. How old would you say she is? Late twenties, not a day over thirty. Yet with a serenity in the eyes, in the smile somehow, that gives the impression of lifetimes of living. Yet not a day over thirty, surely no older than that. That, he thought, is what I need. A woman like that to sleep with and, yes, to be with, even to talk with. She would not be like the one upstairs. But, he thought, one does not buy a woman like that One marries her. Somehow, without knowing, he knew that. And why not? Why not, indeed? He returned to his own room, stripped and consulted the mirror. Dye his hair, that was really all he needed. He smiled into the mirror. Forty, he thought, even thirty-five. Certainly, with this tan and slim body and his hair dyed, thirty-five at the most. He went to bed, happily making plans. A new life opened up for him. He would take a new name; he would liveagain. There was nothing to stop him. That night, in the Sea Lion Hotel in Miami Beach, Henry Talbot died. r F'WO months later Arnold Bottal, an experimental nuclear physicist of perhaps thirty-five, and his charming wife -- with exquisite, nearly purple Eurasian eyes -- joined the new country club in Lincoln Hills, New York, where Bottal had newly joined the Applied Physics Division of the Carbide Nuclear Company. This Arnold Bottal was not a tainly competent in his job. The company was satisfied with him. He and his wife bought a bubble home in the suburbs of Lincoln Hills and, together with their cat Bucephalus, lived happily ever after. February, #, at New York, N. Y., for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor and business managers are: Publisher Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Editor H. L. Gold, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Managing editor None; Business manager None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: ( there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September, #. Joan J. DeMario, Notary Public, State of New York, No. #-#. Qualified in Kings County. (My commission expires March #, #) Harper  Bros., N.Y., # Black Cloud by the famous cosmologist, I hoped that he would occasionally go on forsaking his telescope for the typewriter. He did. And his new book is an even happier event in some ways than its startling predecessor. Hoyle's story writing skill, technique and dialogue have improved tremendously since his first effort, which was notable mainly for its humor and rich imagination. Here he has turned out a science-mystery-spy story that has no apparent forebear in the SF repertory. In fact, John Buchan and E. P. Oppenheim are the spiritual godfathers of this action-crammed thriller. The basic idea is novel -- a brandnew industrial complex, only ten years old, secreted in a remote and intensely guarded corner of Ireland, already overshadowing the giant industrial nations and dedicated to maintaining its mystery. The secret is finally uncovered by a resourceful young Cambridge student, one of the most unorthodox spies in SF history, after some chase scenes worthy of The Thirtynine Steps. Rating:  Gold. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # that first appeared in this magazine, and that therefore are not for us to remark on. ly. Avalon Books, N.Y., # the Avalon stable of rapid-reading, action-packed authors, is even rapider and more fully packed than the average. His yam of an alien castaway marooned on Earth is spattered with the blood of some twenty murders. Appears as if the alien has power to absorb knowledge directly from other brains, but only at the cost of gruesomely exploded craniums. He can sense emotion, although not a true telepath, and can control all animal life except felines. A being like that could rule the world if he wants to and he wants to. However, we're a pretty tough species when our and our cats' backs are up, as our alien learns. Rating: V Mundy. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # ably are diminished returns, and with Tros of Samothrace the predecessor, any successor would seem foredoomed to mediocrity. However, Purple Pirate, rescued by Gnome from a quarter-century of oblivion, is fully its equal in plot audacity, skill of execution and characterization. Tros's story reopens in Egypt shortly after the death of his erstwhile bitter enemy, Caesar. He is kept busy rescuing Cleopatra's chestnuts while she maliciously holds his Norse crew hostage, forestalling his dream of circumnavigating the globe. Tros has all of Conan's attributes plus one: though a superman, he is only human. Conan never has inner thoughts or fears; Tros is plagued by them. Additionally, each chapter head holds pearls of wisdom from his introspection, as did the former book, that constitute a culture's code of ethics in themselves. Rating:  Manly Wade Wellman. Avalon Books, N.Y., # this yarn, brought back from the dust of decades, like its titled Giants. Earth is threatened by the unleashed growth of an alien life-form that absorbs and transmutes all substances into its own matter type. However, a gaseous essence of the substance has the power to revivify the dead. To solve the problem of man's survival, Oliver Norfleet recalls Tom Edison, Lou Pasteur, Charlie Darwin, Ike Newton and Cutie Curie. The naivete of the fairytale plot is refreshing, if viewed as a device for getting five delightful oldtimers back into circulation -- and if fairytale logic and dismissal of inconvenient facts don't irritate you. Rating:  Golding. Capricorn Books, N.Y., # mankind's oldest dreams is the tropic isle, plentifully stocked with accessible goodies and free from human and animal predators. Golding unloads his band of sub-teeners on such an island paradise, victims of an unnamed and undescribed war. For the first time free of adult supervision, the instinct of the British youngsters is to revel. However, for rescue, a signal fire must be tended, argues twelve-year-old Ralph who gets elected leader of a democracy. From that point on, Golding paints a truly terrifying picture of the decay of a miniscule society. Well on its way to becoming a modern classic, this '# hard-cover is welcome in its Putnam-Capricorn reissue. Rating:  by Agnew H. Bahnson, Jr. Random House, Inc., N.Y., # Conquer must be Frighten and Unite. History holds many examples and SF several notable ones, most of them meant to avert global war with phony extraterrestrial threat. every maneuver accredited to bona fide saucers, only it was secretly built in Nevada by private citizens. In early SF, this was standard, but half a thought will show what a tiger's tail such a situation is. To solve their dilemma, the three builders enlist the aid of the scientific adviser to the Air Force Chief of Staff, to help determine disposal of the super-machine to the best interests of all humanity. Enter idealism: all humanity will be united by means of impressive displays of power over Moscow and Washington by supposed ETs. Bahnson, though, hews close to reality and some best-laid plans go mighty agley. He proposes a solution that unfortunately relies on the foresight, a sadly lacking ingredient, of present world leaders. Rating: Avalon Books, N.Y., # mortality isn't dead yet, not when tackled by craftsmen like Heinlein or Simak. a few years hence, in the second century of their existence. A shared but unknown experience back in # produced several hundred immortals. They have since scouted for stragglers and experimented for the source of their longevity. Unlike the aforementioned maspeople the wisdom of their years. They act as well as look like perennial teenagers. Rating:  SF: '#, edited by Judith Merril. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # ogy, for the first time in this series, is more an anthology than the Ladies Home Journal of SF. Most of the stories are good; several, ineluding "Triggerman" by J. F. Bone, "Prize of Peril" by Sheckley, and "Or All the Seas with Oysters" by Davidson, are excellent. The Science Fact section is back, however, despite Miss Merril's admission that virtually every type of publication is giving enormously serious coverage to even the most outlandish scientific investigations. Rating: A A A (stories only) Box # Chicago #, #., # Kornbluth, Robert Bloch and Alfred Bester each delivered a lecture on the worth of science fiction early in # at the U. of Chicago. Basil Davenport has added a genuinely catalytic introduction to these, so that the contradictorinesses and mutual exclusions combine in a way that the authors never meant them to, for each, of course, has his own set of ingredients, his own measures, his own way of mixing. Davenport likes them all, and so do we. Hill  Wang, N.Y., # N.Y. State College for Teachers, Dr. Jones collected a huge quantity of lore, legend and phenomena. Though documented, his book is pegged for entertainment value; Dr. Jones admits to blending stories for enhancement. His haunts range from early colonial to post-WW II, from screamers to bumpers, from dogooders to no-goodniks. Lansdell. Philosophical Library, N.Y., # consume more power than entire townships did not too many years ago. Demands upon our power resources are therefore prodigious -- and extrapolation indicates an utterly fantastic increase in the close future. Moreover, fossil fuels, aside from increasing scarcity, must be reserved for chemical use. Other energy sources must be found. Lansdell's study, though primarily concerned with nuclear energy, includes the latest actual and conjectural data on many other sources. into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein, # (f. Heinlein's superlative time travel yarn of revenge and paradox... The Black Cloud, Fred Hoyle, #(S. Astronomer Hoyle's novalike entry into the SF firmament... The Man Who Sold the Moon, Robert A. Heinlein, #(f. Four of the six stories in the original collection; "Blowups Happen" and "Lifeline" are omitted. Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, #. Several grisly masterpieces as well as some ghosts of real stories... Plague Ship and Voodoo Planet, Andrew North, #. "Ship" is Andrew North-Andre Norton's '# Gnome juvenile. "Planet" is a new novelet... Red Alert, Peter Bryant, #. That one man can kill the world with a button is the story skeleton of a well-muscled yarn... The Invaders Are Coming, Alan E. Nourse and J. A. Meyer, # j). Bureaucratic America is a setup for a Batista-type strong man with a program... The Hidden Planet, edited by D. A. Wollheim, #. Stanley Weinbaum's "The Lotus Eaters" gleams like new despite a quarter-century... Recruit for Andromeda, Milton Lesser; The Plot Against Earth, Calvin M. Knox; Ace Double, # fi. Lesser's yarn hurtles to a pratfall. Knox's less pretentious effort holds surprises. Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham, ##. An expert chiller about a pregnant situation -- invasion by insemination... Star Science Fiction #, edited by Frederik Pohl, #(#. A good collection of new stories. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. U Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here  Add #c Foreign Postage # Per # or #c each A Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foreign Postage Name Address City State There's just one way Wilmer indicated, dropped his overnight bag beside it, and tried to relax. He'd had five hours of inactivity on the plane, but the peremptory manner with which he had been routed out of his California apartment and conveyed to Washington, D. C., had so filled his mind with unanswered questions that he still found rest to be impossible. He had been told simply that the government needed him; and when federal wheels started turning, there wasn't much a private citizen could do to stop them. He watched the tall, lean, darkhaired man, who had been introduced as Dr. Jackson Wilmer, nuclear physicist, disappear through a door. to disarm a bomb -- be at least a step ahead of it -- but what if it's always at least a step ahead of you? Flinn looked around. The room in which he sat -- comparatively small, one of hundreds in the vastness of the Pentagon-seemed to be a sort of minor office. At least there were several desks and filing cabinets. Besides himself, there were now only two other men in the room. One, a complete stranger, sat at a desk across the room with his back turned toward Flinn. The other leaned against the wall near the door. All Flinn knew about him, despite the fact that they had been as close as boy and dog for the past seven hours, was that his name was Hayes and that he was a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There was a muscular hardness about this young man that betrayed an athletic background. He was about thirty, had a craggy face beneath short brown hair, hard gray eyes, and his nose had been broken at least once. There was a light trace of beard beginning to show on the agent's face, but his brown summer suit still looked neat, and the man himself seemed something less than tried. Looking at him, Flinn felt a sense of his own shabbiness. He needed a shave as badly as his slacks and sports jacket needed pressing. At forty-two, Flinn was somewhat taller than average and slightly underweight from overwork and the irregularities of a bachelor existence. His black hair, beginning to recede a little, was peppered with silver, and his normally relaxed face was now tight, and the whites of his hazel eyes were bloodshot. T HE door beside Hayes opened and Wilmer entered, carrying a brown folder. He was in his shirtsleeves, his necktie pulled down and his collar open, and, as he approached, Flinn noted that the deeply tanned face of the physicist was as stubbled and tired-looking as his own felt. He was about the same age as Flinn. Wilmer tossed the folder on the desk in front of Flinn and then perched on one corner of the desk. He gazed at the parapsychologist for a long few seconds, his eyes startingly ice-blue in his dark face. "Well," he said presently, "I guess you're wondering what this is all about" "Yes, I guess I am," Flinn said wryly. "This bird dog -- " he indicated Hayes with a nod of his head, and the agent retaliated with a flash of teeth -- "hauls me away from an important experiment, loads me on an Air Force jet, and, after a high-altitude flight at God only knows what kind of fantastic speeds, I find myself in the holiest of holies, surrounded by MPs and -- yes, you might say I'm wondering what this is all about." Wilmer nodded patiently and rubbed one hand across his eyes. "When you find out, you'll understand the reason for the secrecy." He faced Hayes. "How long have we been on this thing now, Fred? It seems like weeks." swered. Wilmer shook his head slowly, then reached for the folder, opened it, and took out several scientific journals that Flinn recognized instantly. The physicist opened one of them. " 'Advanced Experiments in TP, by Patrick Flinn,'" he read. He laid the publication aside and picked up another. " 'A Monograph on the Probabilities of TH,' same author." He quoted at random from the introductory page: "'It is therefore my belief, based upon recent preliminary experimentation, that not only can one mind be used to scan the thoughts of another, but that ideas and suggestions may be implanted upon another's mind without the knowledge of the receptor. This is not to be confused with simple telepathic 'sending,' where the receptor is completely aware of the other's transmission. This to which I refer may, at least in one phase, be described as hypnotic in effect. The possibilities of such influence over the mindmatter of another are more than somewhat considerable...'" He paused, lowered the journal and gazed speculatively at Patrick Flinn. "Telepathy, telehypnosis," he said, rolling out the words as if they left a strange taste in his mouth. "Very interesting. Just how much truth is there in all this stuff? I mean, how far along are you, really?" for a few seconds. It was one he had heard often, especially from his colleagues at the small California college where he held an assistantship in psychology. But after twenty years of skepticism -- he had first discovered his rudimentary telepathic abilities just after graduating from college, and had been experimenting and advancing ever since -- he had become immune to criticism. "Very few people bother to read my articles," Flinn said evenly, "and still fewer understand them, and the fewest believe. But I can tell you I'm far enough along in my research to know that the human mind has latent powers that are, to quote my article, more than somewhat considerable." Wilmer and Hayes exchanged glances. "That's fine," Wilmer said, "but abstruse, wouldn't you say? What I'm getting at is, I want to see a practical demonstration." "Put up or shut up, eh?" Flinn said. "I'd rather call it an examining of credentials," the physicist countered. "All right. I don't see any connection between my work and nuclear physics, but what do you want me to do? First, though, I'd better explain that I might fail. I'm really just on the threshold." "Granted. So I'll make it easy. Suppose -- " He looked over his shoulder, faced Flinn again, and continued in a low voice: "Suppose you tell me what the man at the far desk is thinking." Flinn glanced past the physicist at the stranger across the room. The man seemed completely unaware of the others. He was poring over some papers that were spread out upon the desk. Flinn focused his eyes upon the man's head. His mind was really too steeped in fatigue for this sort of thing, but it was a chance not to be missed, a chance to demonstrate his talents in the presence of a responsible scientist, so he willed himself into a gradually deepening concentration. His eyes seemed to go myopic, out of focus. A gray, ethereal haze came into his consciousness, like swirling smoke. Easy? But presently a picture began to form, blurred at first, then fragmentary, then coming into identifiable clarity. Flinn held it for a moment, before snapping back into objective consciousness. He was grinning slightly as his eyes refocused and came to rest on Wilmer. "Well?" the physicist asked. "What's his name?" Flinn said. "Barnes. Robert Barnes." "Say, Bob!" Flinn called out The smallish, partially bald man at the far desk looked up and swiveled around to face him. "Tell me something, Bob," Flinn went on. "Do you act that way with all women, or just blondes?" Barnes' placid face suddenly underwent a marvelous transformation. First he blushed furiously. Then his jaw dropped open and the high color began to drain away. He stared across the room, his face pallid. "My God!" he managed to blurt in a stricken voice. room as Wilmer and Hayes looked from Barnes' shocked face to Flinn's smiling one. "I think it's obvious -- " Hayes started to say. "Me, too," Wilmer agreed. He looked sharply at Flinn. "Can you tell what I'm thinking at this moment?" Flinn shrugged. "Not without a special effort, and I'm not going to make that effort unless I have to." The physicist sighed and his tanned face relaxed a little. He looked at Flinn with a new respect. "I guess I'd better put you in the picture." He reopened the folder and extracted several newspaper clippings. "What I'm about to divulge is so unbelievable that -- well, I'd best break it to you gradually. You know my job. That fact and this tan -- " he pointed to his face -- "should give you an inkling of what I've been up to the last few weeks." Flinn thought, and nodded. "I'm to assume that you've been out in the Pacific, is that right?" "Yes," Wilmer said. "Eniwetok. Have you been following our progress in the papers?" "Not really. I've been a little too busy, I'm afraid." "No matter." The physicist handed the clippings to Flinn. "Read these." Flinn scanned the first clipping. It bore a recent date. "... Reliable sources,' " he read aloud, " 'report that a civilian, believed to be a scientist, is being held incommunicado in the Pentagon. All efforts on the part of newsmen to gain additional information have been met with polite but firm rebuffs. Spokesmen from or deny theories that the man's detention is in some way connected with the recent fiasco at Eniwetok Atoll...'" He read the second. It was datelined Honolulu, a week before the other. " 'Beyond the terse comment that there were "no casualties," all official sources are silent today concerning the news leak of the failure of a nuclear device in our Pacific Test Area. It has been understood that this device, the third in a series of thermonuclear test shots, failed to detonate. Since this test was scheduled to have been a "tower shot," under rigid instrumental control, much speculation has arisen... Flinn looked up hopelessly. "I don't understand. Does this concern you? I mean -- " "It concerns all of us," Wilmer said grimly. "But I know what you're getting at. No, I'm not the man they mention. I was in charge of that particular test." Hayes cleared his throat abruptly and Wilmer nodded. "I want you to understand, Mr. Flinn, before we go any further, that everything you hear and see, and have heard and seen from the time Fred first contacted you, is to be held in the strictest confidence. Is that clear?" "Yes." "All right. How much do you know about atomic physics?" somewhat past the Democritus stage, but I don't claim to be an expert." "Well, basically, in a thermonuclear explosive device, hydrogen is transformed into helium," said Hayes. "In the process there is a loss of mass. This loss results in a tremendous and sudden release of energy. Are you familiar with the energy-mass relationship, E  MO?" Flinn nodded. "Okay. In other words, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms are fused under the influence of great heat, resulting in a different element, less mass, a release of energy, and an explosion." "I'm with you so far," Flinn said. "Then you realize that once this fusion process commences, nothing in God's great universe can stop it?" "Yes." "And that after certain things are done, fusion must result?" "Surely." "Well, so all of us believed, too. But we were wrong about it." "I don't understand. You just said -- " "So I said. But let me try to describe to you the situation as it happened." He paused, not for dramatic effect, but to take a moment to force himself to recall what Flinn could see must have been a very painful experience. "We are on the command ship," Wilmer continued, "at a safe distance from the atoll. Everything is in readiness, checked and doublechecked by me, personally. The automatic firing process is in progress. The last countdown has commenced. Five, four, three, two, one, zero. Nothing happens. "I'll simplify the subsequent chain of events. After a reasonable interval, a volunteer pilot and myself and one other man fly by helicopter to the atoll. We climb the tower. I'm sweating and so are the others. We're standing beside a live hydrogen bomb. I disconnect the power sources and do various things to render the device safe. Then we check. Everything -- everything -- is in working order. There is absolutely no reason why the thing failed to detonate. Yet it did fail. "We fly back to the command ship. We hold an emergency conference. We're sitting there staring at each other. Then this -- this man, Dobbs, starts to laugh. We think it is hysterics, due to the tremendous strain that everyone has been under. But apparently it isn't. He laughs and laughs and laughs. Finally he manages to say: 'You can't figure it out, can you? Well, I know. Old Dobbsie knows. It didn't explode because I willed it not to!'" Flinn's mind was almost too tired to accept what he had heard. "Are you trying to tell me -- " "Figure it out for yourself," Wilmer said flatly. "It's your field. Telepathy, telehypnosis, and what's left?" "Psychokinesis," Flinn said in a stifled voice. "Right Psychokinesis. Mind over matter." would have used the morning ride over Washington's broad avenues to good advantage -- this was his first visit to the nation's capital -- but his mind was too filled with the preceding day's revelations to permit anything save minimal sightseeing. "I hate to keep repeating myself," Wilmer was saying, "but I must be certain you understand what's at stake here." "I know," Flinn answered with some impatience. "I'm not to reveal, under any circumstances, the fact that I have telepathic powers." "Correct." The physicist sat in the seat beside Flinn, and Hayes was in front beside the driver.  "Your job is to find out just how much this man can do. We'd like to know the way he does it, too, but that's secondary." "It strikes me," Flinn mused, "that anyone who can influence a fusion bomb can do anything." "That's what we're afraid of." Wilmer looked soberly at the paraI psychologist. "I think I can understand what's going on in your mind. This is your special love I and you're finding it difficult to divorce yourself from pure clinii cal investigation. You want, really, i to talk to Dobbs as one scientist to another. But I must warn you that this is impossible. If he gets the least inkling that you're t a special mind, something disastrous may result. As long as he gets what he wants, fine, but rub him the wrong way and -- " "And yet you have him a viri tual prisoner and he doesn't object?" "Well, at least not strenuously," Wilmer said. "I don't profess to un derstand a warped mind, but apparently Dobbs realizes that his ' confinement is mostly protective custody. It's to his own advantage. After all, he doesn't have to stand up at a public forum and shout  threats. All he has to do is contact the few to reach the many. And if he has the powers he says he has, full use of them would result in his own destruction. And he doesn't want that. He's too interested, right now, in satisfying his own animal appetites. But faced with losing everything -- " "Our biggest immediate worry," Hayes said from the front seat, "is keeping all this from the public. That's why we put Dobbs out of sight in a hurry. There have been some leaks already, but so far most people consider the papers' theories as just so much wild speculation. And thank God for that. You can understand why all recognizable public figures are keeping as far away from Dobbs as possible." dent. There were other phases of the problem that bothered him more. He was still vaguely and, as it seemed, illogically worried about the several questions he had raised the day before. The fact that Dobbs might have read his articles and hence might put two and two together, despite a cover identity, was the least of them. Flinn had never lectured in public, his efforts had received no publicity except in specialized psychological circles, and his latest monograph on TH had been published when Dobbs was working at the atoll. Wilmer, Hayes, and others had managed to assuage reasonable fears on the other point. Flinn had always assumed thas psychokinesis would be the logical result of advanced telepathy, that they were links in the same chain. Now it seemed that a person could be one without the other. Either you possessed a latent ability to scan mind-matter, or an affinity for material substance, but not necessarily both. Earlier, Wilmer and Hayes had devised a test to check the possibility that Dobbs was an advanced telepath. They had mentally vilified him beyond the ability of even an accomplished actor to resist, over prolonged periods of time, and yet Dobbs had shown not the least indication that he had intercepted their thoughts. But there was one additional point. "You used the expression 'warped mind' in describing Dobbs," Flinn said to Wilmer. "Is it your opinion then that he is definitely psychopathic? The reason I ask is that scanning a confused mind may prove to be more than I can handle." "I used that expression for want of a better," Wilmer answered cautiously. "Put it this way -- suppose you suddenly found you were able to control, even in a minor way, the stuff of the universe; would you use those powers for the benefit of mankind, or would you leap over the traces and reach for all the things that had been denied you over the years for moral, or legal, or whatever reasons?" "You paint a lurid picture," Flinn said. They turned down a side street in a residential district and drew up in front of what appeared to be a large two-story private home. Flinn took a deep breath. He was rested now, but still uncertain whether he was up to what lay ahead. After the preliminary discussion with Wilmer, Hayes, and Barnes -- the latter had proved to be a military intelligence man -- the previous afternoon, Flinn had been closeted immediately with a number of generals, admirals, and highranking civilians from both houses of Congress, the Defense Department, the Department of State, and various security agencies. There had been the usual skepticism until he had performed some simple but histrionic "mindreading" feats, and then there had been much talk about the responsibilities that had now become incumbent upon him and how perhaps even the fate of the nation was in his hands. It had left him wandering in a jungle of doubts and fears. Yet he had managed to sleep. "The wonderful ability of the human mind to reject unpleasantness," he had told himself. As a matter of fact, he had fallen into deep, untroubled unconsciousness within an hour of the time his head had first touched the pillow in the comfortable hotel room the government had provided. Hayes had been with him. "Security," Hayes had said. And now, clean-shaven, his clothes neatly pressed, the substantial breakfast still warm in his stomach, and fatigue no longer in his muscles and nerves, Flinn told himself that he was as ready as he would ever be. tive, unmarked sedan and approached the house. There was a man mowing the lawn, another clipping hedges, and still another polishing a car that was parked in the driveway just outside the spacious garage. "How's it going?" Hayes said to the hedge trimmer. "All quiet," the man answered without looking up. They went around the house and entered unchallenged through a side door. It was all very casual, yet Flinn did not have to be told that they were under constant scrutiny. The room in which he found himself was just off the kitchen. Three men in working clothes sat around a table, drinking coffee. They looked up and nodded. They seemed to be cut from much the same cloth as Fred Hayes, even to the expression. "Well, well," one of them said, "the brain trust." He surveyed Flinn with frank interest, then faced Hayes. "Say, buddy, how does a man get a transfer out of this outfit?" Hayes grinned his wolfish grin. "All in good time, partner." He pointed with his chin upstairs and raised his eyebrows. The man who had spoken, a large, broad-shouldered youngster with an affably homely face, got up, stepped back from the table, esty of a bow. "The great man has been prepared and awaits your presence." Then his expression changed. "What a party! I never saw so much liquor in my life! It's a lucky thing the rumpus room is soundproof." "And girls!" one of the seated men said. "Man, oh, man!" Flinn looked at Wilmer, and Wilmer shrugged as if to say, "That's the way it is." "Just don't forget what you're here for," Hayes said harshly. "Don't fret," the big man said. "None of us touched a drop." "Neither did Dobbs," one of the seated men interjected. "I guess that's the only reason he's alive today." He guffawed loudly and suggestively. Hayes leading, they entered a hallway and turned toward a flight of stairs. "Your boys seemed very offhand about all this," Flinn said to the government agent "Don't kid yourself," Hayes replied. "They're as nervous as cats."  called amiably from the rear of the spacious bedroom. There was an unobtrusive man in a dark suit with him, but he left immediately. Now that he was face to face with the enigmatic Mr. Dobbs, Flinn felt a momentary sense of disappointment. Malcolm Dobbs sat in a straightbacked chair beside the large bed. Next to him was a table laden with empty breakfast dishes. Dobbs was dressed in an ordinary bathrobe. He appeared to be in his mid-forties and had a full head of dark hair, slightly gray at the temples. His mild, undistinguished face was only slightly less tanned than Wilmer's, and he was of average size and weight. His dark eyes were the only things that belied the man's composed exterior; they were intelligent, interested, and intently watchful. A tiny smile lingered upon Dobbs' lips, as if he were sharing only with himself some form of immensely funny but eminently private joke. Flinn's total impression of the man was that he was not the sort one would look at twice in a crowded room -- under different circumstances. "Another delegation?" Dobbs asked. "Hello, Jack, Hayes." "Mai this is Mr. Dugan," Wilmer said, indicating Flinn. "He's from the government." Even as he acknowledged the introduction, Flinn paused momentarily over the casual familiarity between the physicist and the apparent psychokinetic, until he was reminded that they were both nuclear physicists and had been together for weeks at the atoll. Flinn found himself wondering how close they had been and what thoughts must be going through Wilmer's mind at the moment. But he squelched his curiosity. He was here to scan Dobbs' mind, nobody else's. "Be unobtrusive," he had been warned. "Stay in the background as much as possible and let Wilmer and Hayes carry the ball. And do the job quickly." Dobbs looked Flinn over carefully, then seemed to dismiss him from his mind, as if he had decided Flinn was of no particular importance -- or no immediate threat. "You boys should have been here last night," Dobbs smiled. "We had quite a party." His smile faded and he added petulantly: "The only thing -- some of the girls weren't as cooperative as I had hoped." "We'll be more selective next time," Hayes promised quickly. "See to it," Dobbs said. They seated themselves, Hayes and Wilmer close to Dobbs, and Flinn just far enough away to seem deferential without raising suspicion. G A  A X Y "Now, what can I do for you?" Dobbs queried. "Another demonstration, I assume?" "That's right," Wilmer said. "How about that disappearance thing again?" can't get it through your skulls that what I do isn't some sort of trick, can you? Even faced with the evidence of the bomb." Wilmer raised his hands. "It's not that so much, although what you can do, you'll have to admit, is rather unbelievable. It's the fact that Mr. Dugan here has never seen any evidence of your powers, and the report he will deliver to his superiors may cause even more commotion in high places -- to your advantage." Flinn was amazed that such a flimsy appeal to the appetites and ego of a man as intelligent as Malcolm Dobbs could be successful. Yet it not only could, it was, Dobbs looked again at Flinn, the strange smile playing upon his lips; then he reached across the table, picked up an opaque glass water carafe, poured out its remaining liquid into an empty cereal bowl, and replaced it on the table. "We don't want water spilled over everything, do we?" he said. Wilmer slipped one arm behind the back of his chair and signaled urgently to Flinn. Since entering the room, Flinn had been gathering all his resources for a quick and powerful effort, and, at the sight of Wilmer's waving fingers, he began. He was startled that, despite the interaction and interference of the other thought patterns in the room, he was able to make so quick a contact. Just before reaching Dobbs' mind, the thought impressed itself upon Flinn that the reason was the immense mental power that was building within, and generating from, Dobbs. It was the simplest piece of telepathic scanning with which Flinn had ever been involved. For a matter of seconds, nothing happened. Then the water carafe abruptly disappeared, its passage into apparent nothingness coincident with a faint "pop" as the air of the room rushed in to fill the vacuum. Dobbs turned triumphantly and saw Flinn still in the trancelike stupor of the telepath-in-contact. Hayes stood up to screen him, but Flinn shook his head and managed to clear his mind quickly. "Your friend seems somewhat astounded," Dobbs chuckled. "My God!" was all Flinn could say. Wilmer and Hayes looked at him questioningly, and Hayes muttered: "I think he's seen enough. Let's get out of here." "Come back anytime, gentlemen," Dobbs said. His laughter followed them as they retreated through the door and down the hall to the stairs. " They sat around the table in the room just off the kitchen, steaming cups of coffee in front of them. The three security agents who had been in the room were gone now to their respective duties. Flinn gazed down into the dark depths of the coffee, trying to organize his thoughts; trying to interpret and evaluate what he had seen. Wilmer and Hayes sipped their coffee, waiting with forced patience for the parapsychologist to speak. Presently, Flinn shivered and looked up at them. "If he says he can control a critical mass, or erase Washington, D. C., or destroy the nation, you'd better believe him." "He's telling the truth then," Hayes said grimly. "Yes," Flinn answered. "Here are my findings. Somehow Dobbs has established rapport with the atom. Any atom. Probably any number of atoms. I doubt if he can move one single mass in the ordinary conception of psychokinesis. That is, I doubt if he can cause a pebble, say, to shift one are the forces that bind atoms into molecular structures, or that hold nuclei together. Do you understand what I mean? For example, what he did up there just now was to get rid of the space between atoms in the molecules of that water carafe. I saw it clearly; there's no mistake. The space ceased to exist, the atoms crashed in upon each other, and the carafe seemed to disappear. The mass is the same. It's simply in a different form." He paused and scanned the numb faces of the government agent and the nuclear physicist beside him. "Let's get down to specifics," he continued. "What's his trump card? What is it he's holding over our heads?" "The atmosphere," Wilmer said painfully. "Oxygen," Flinn mused. "Suppose Dobbs concentrated upon the oxygen atoms all around us and caused their nuclei suddenly to fuse. What would happen?" "Nobody on the face of the Earth would know what hit him," Wilmer said. "The Moon would probably be blasted out of its orbit. And if there is any intelligent life on Mars, they'd be treated to a sight they'd never forget -- if they survived it." "Well, then," Flinn said, "we've done what we came here to do. What's the answer?" Hayes' face set into a hard mask. "There'll be a meeting of the brass, of course. But I can tell you what the result will be. I'll be assigned to kill him." tion filled the Pentagon conference room. Flinn sat in one of the several dozen chairs between Wilmer and Hayes and looked at a glass ashtray that lay on the part of the long table just in front of him. One day perhaps he, too, might be able to influence the molecular structure of such an object. Or, more likely, one of his descendants, because he would never be able to discover the short-cuts now. Planned murder. All the resources and brains of the government, the champion of the rights and dignity of the individual, gathered together to plot the deliberate destruction of one man. It filled Flinn with sadness. It was inevitable. It had to be done. No one had the right to put himself above the rules of social conduct and the welfare of several He found himself wondering what the Founding Fathers would think of such a move... all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights... Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Executions of criminals were the result of lengthy legal processes, during which all the rights of the individual were scrupulously observed. But this -- was he also one of the judges? Let the punishment fit the crime. What about the judging? "Isn't there some other way?" Wilmer broke into his thoughts. "That's what you're thinking, correct?" Flinn managed a faint smile. "And I'm supposed to be the telepath." "Lef s be entirely rational about it," Wilmer said. "Dobbs is a brilliant man, granted. But he is also a lecher and a coward." "There's some of the pig and the wolf in every man," Flinn said. "Depends on the extent," Wilmer went on. "Dobbs is way overboard. And he's a craven. I know it's hard to picture a man who voluntarily crosses a bridge into the unknown as anything but brave. I suppose there is a sort of bravado in it. But when he turns that bridge into a club to threaten the rest of mankind -- is this man. "What do you think about it, Fred?" Hayes pulled himself out of the shell of disciplined impassivity into which he had retreated shortly after passing his own unofficial death sentence upon Dobbs. He looked at the physicist and the parapsychologist. "Nothing," Hayes said bluntly. "Absolutely nothing. I'm just one of the expendables." "Aren't we all?" Wilmer said. He shrugged at Flinn. "That's why we were chosen originally. Me because I was there at the atoll when all this started, and was acquainted with Dobbs, and capable of understanding the implications of his acts. Hayes because -- " "Because I've a good enough record to be above suspicion, and because I'm young enough not to be missed," the agent said. "And you, Pat," the physicist said to Flinn, "because of your unique talents. But now we're all under the gun." background noise, and the three turned to see the President's representative rise and signal for order. He was a tall, graying man, beautifully dressed, and, as he spoke, there was a note of sad resignation in his voice. "So, gentlemen, since reasoning with Dobbs has proven to be useless, we find ourselves in agreement. All that remains is to select the time and the method. And, -- "has assured me there is no need to deviate from our original plan, at least so far as the human element is concerned. Agent Hayes will remain our -- messenger. He seems to be ideally suited for the job." There was a visible stir down the length of the table as the top men from the government tried not to look at Fred Hayes. None of them succeeded. Under thenbrief, self-conscious but probing scrutiny, Hayes' hard face betrayed not a flicker of emotion. "And now the time and the method." The Presidential assistant cleared his throat and scanned the faces of the men before him. "I should think as soon as possible." A murmur of assent swept the room. "There remains the problem of method. Dr. Wilmer cautions that it must be done very efficiently. If Dobbs even suspects that his life is to be forfeit at a predictable time -- well, I hardly need tell you the danger. Director up to Agent Hayes, since he knows his own capabilities better than anyone else. Mr. Hayes?" The tall, athletic agent rose, reached under his coat to his right hip and produced a short-barreled revolver. He held it up. "With this," he said laconically. "In the head. Death will be instantaneous." There were sudden protests from the military representatives. Hayes holstered the revolver nodded, and Hayes walked to the end of the room. From a carton, he lifted a small bullet trap and placed it against the wall. The safe area inside the trap was about the size of an opened magazine. Then he moved to the conference table, picked up one of the ashtrays, returned to the trap, and propped the tray against it. Appropriately, the tray was about the width of a man's head. Agent Hayes stood up, buttoned his coat and began walking leisurely away from the trap. At twenty paces, he whirled. It was almost too fast for the eye to follow, but the individual actions were these: With his left hand, Hayes unbuttoned his coat. With his right, he swept open the coat, turned in a crouch, simultaneously drew the revolver, and fired. The ashtray assumed a new identity -- a scattered pile of broken glass. It all happened in measurably less than a second. There was a collective expiration of breath from the men around the table.- morning, there wasn't a single one of the small group of men intimately involved with the toppriority problem who did not know that Hayes had failed. This was shocking enough in itself, but what made it even more so was the fact that Hayes was still alive to tell it -- and that anyone else was there to hear him. "I came as close as hell to swearing," Hayes said dully to Wilmer and Flinn. Neither of them needed any special powers of observation to see that the young agent was shaken. The three sat in the small Pentagon office. Coffee had been served, and they were waiting now for a quorum of the governmental officials to gather. "I had it lined," Hayes continued. "I'd waited half the night for everything to be just right. I was in a good position, close and to one side. Dobbs was as relaxed as I've ever seen him. I was just telling myself 'Now I when Dobbs looked directly at me and grinned. 'If you're planning on doing anything rash, my friend, don't. You can't possibly kill me swiftly enough to keep from destroying yourself, every person in this room, every man, woman, and child in this city, and every living thing on the face of this Earth.' What could I do?" "Thank God you didn't figure it was just a bluff!" Wilmer exclaimed. "Pulling that trigger would have been the greatest blunder in history." "Move and countermove," Flinn mused. "It was our gambit and we were checked before we started." "So I got on the open line and told the boys to fetch Flinn as quickly as possible," Hayes went on. "But I still don't understand. I'd swear that man read my mind." "I don't think so," Flinn said. "I've had two mental contacts with Dobbs, and neither time did I get the least suggestion that he was telepathic." "No need for him to be," Wilmer said. "It doesn't take a smart man to put two and two together and arrive at four. And this man is more than merely smart." "I suppose you're right," Hayes said, "but it sure knocked the props out from under me." most of them looking rumpled and gritty from lack of sleep and the realization that they had been beaten. "I just don't know," a senator said wearily. "First a man who can influence matter, then one who reads minds, and now the latter tells us the former is inviolable. It's too much for me." "I refuse to accept defeat!" a fleet admiral thundered, bringing his fist down upon the table explosively. He was an erect, bristling man with an aggressive combat record in two wars. "We've lost the first round -- so what? There will be others." "I quite agree," the Presidential assistant said. "This man must be destroyed. Already he's beginning to make impossible demands." "But how do we go about it?" a congressman said. "Personally, I think we're licked. As far as I can see, the best thing to do is let him have his head and hope for the best." "Hope for the best?" a man from a security agency echoed incredulously. "It's power Dobbs wants -- recognized power. He wants to be feared and worshipped. Sooner or later he'll let everyone know. His egotism will force it Can you conceive of what that would mean? For myself, I'd rather see the entire human race disappear in one flash of fire without ever knowing what hit it than live under the thumb of the fear of destruction!" "Gentlemen!" The Presidential assistant rapped for order. "Let's examine the situation rationally and seek out the flaws. There must be some somewhere. Nothing in the mind of man is perfect." "Well, this comes as close as anything," Wilmer interjected. "You ask what's wrong with the direct approach -- why not shoot him while he sleeps? Well, I'll answer with some questions. Have any of you died as the result of a bullet in the brain? Have you ever questioned anyone who has been killed in that manner? Then how do we know there isn't a microsecond of awareness before life is extinguished? And even -- or especially -- on the subconscious level, isn't this enough time for a preset signal? What's the time-lag between countdown zero and the explosion of a thermonuclear bomb?" "Apparently he has us blocked in every way," Flinn picked up Wilmer 's argument. "Asleep or awake. Conscious or unconscious. It's all the same. Think of it as a special circuit in his mind. Destroy Dobbs, the circuit shorts, and this preset signal to the oxygen atoms is sent, their nuclei fuse, and that's the end of everything." He scanned the faces of the men around the conference table. "Or think of it as a hypnotic suggestion. Under hypnosis, an individual is given a certain order that he is to carry out whenever a certain set of circumstances or stimuli occurs. No matter when this happens, no matter what he is doing or thinking when the moment arrives, the subject reacts according to the order buried in his subconscious." "But for every move there is a countermove," the admiral argued. "This is a situation. A fantastic one, but a situation. There has to be an answer." "I think there is," Flinn said carefully, "but it could be very risky." I T was up to the committee now. The decision rested squarely in the lap of the United States Government. Flinn had stated his ideas, presented his plan, and tried to give the odds -- although in his heart he knew that was impossible -- so it was now out of his hands. # Or was it? The parapsychologist lay on the bed in his hotel room, trying to relax, trying to store up energy for the ordeal that might be imminent. Hayes and Wilmer were in the room, too, awaiting word from the heavily guarded conference chamber in the Pentagon. The thin physicist paced up and down, his tanned face a study in strain. Wilmer had been with this as long as anyone, except Dobbs, and Flinn found himself wondering what deep inner resources the man had tapped to retain his sanity. The big federal agent slouched in a chair, looking at nothing. He had lapsed again into the welcome protection of training and discipline. Several times during the past thirty hours, since presenting his plan, Flinn had had to restrain himself from probing the minds of his two associates. At a time like this, no one had the right to invade another's privacy. And curiosity had to give way for another reason -- just one look into either of their minds might be enough to weaken or shatter his own resolve. The classic dilemma. Do nothing and face a living hell. Act and court destruction. The very simplicity of the alternatives made the problem intolerable. Telehypnosis -- the untried hypothesis. Good Lord! Flinn told himself. I'm not even proficient as a telepath yet! Outside, he could hear the murmur of the city -- the traffic, the people, moving along their separate paths to their own destinations in the humid afternoon heat. Well, anyway, once the complete curtain of security had fallen, there had been no more leaks. Proving that if a secret was big enough, it could be kept. Another classic problem. Do the people have the right to be informed? Does forewarned really mean forearmed? And how about the other nations of the world? # N hour after the dinner dishes had been cleared away by the government agent dubbing as a room-service waiter, the telephone rang with an awful insistency. Wilmer was the closest, but Hayes beat him to it by a full stride. After identifying himself, Hayes listened in silence. Then he said, "All right," and replaced the receiver. He nodded at Wilmer and Flinn. "It's go ahead." He paused and his face seemed to change -- to relent somehow. "And they wanted me to relay this message: The President says, 'May God be with you.' " Flinn felt very alone and very close to something terrible. In the gloom of the darkened bedroom that adjoined Dobbs', he could see Wilmer silhouetted against the meager light that came through the curtained window from the street lamp outside and Hayes was out in the hall. But the knowledge of the proximity of the two men did nothing to lessen Flinn's loneliness. The committee had even couched it as an order, trying to relieve him of that small burden, but if he failed, who would remain to accept the blame? A few times in his forty-two years had Flinn wondered how it would feel to have the fate of the world riding upon his shoulders. Now he knew and wished he didn't. The door opened silently and Hayes eased in. "He's asleep," the agent breathed in a barely audible voice. "You can start anytime now." The plan was simple, deceptively so. Since Dobbs' block was a kind of self-hypnotic thing, why not countermand it with a deeper hypnotic suggestion introduced by telepathy? If it could be done and was strong enough, the second would counteract the first. At least for a short time. There were terrifying flaws -- the first one obvious, the second not so easily seen. Suppose Dobbs' block had inherent within it an anti-disturbance feature that might react to any interference, including hypnotism in any form? Then the result would be an immediate "short-circuit" and -- disaster. Trembling with the responsibility that was upon him, Flinn forced himself into a deep concentration, an almost cataleptic trance. All details of the room faded from his consciousness. There was the familiar gray, swirling mist, and, for what seemed an intolerably long time, he fought to make contact with the sleeping man's mind. He almost sobbed aloud from the effort. Then at last he found it, entered, and gradually pushed down through the subconscious. H E was seeking now, probing for the deep-seated level of the block that he had discovered the second time he had investigated Dobbs' mind. It was very difficult with the sleeping man and, before he found it, more than once he felt himself standing on the precipice of the unknown, close to slipping away into a fright-filled nothingness. Finally, he had it, clear and cold. The strange, unhuman, inscrutable area that was in diabolical rapport with the basic stuff of one element of the atmosphere. Flinn lingered there for a while, wondering again why he could not read it completely, then forced himself on and on, deeper and deeper, until at last he felt the limit had been reached. His own warning thought intruded, telling him that this was the place. And the time for the first test was at hand. He could not afford the luxury of another pause. His resolve might crack... The thought arced like a highvoltage spark, the preamble of the counter-suggestion: You are to do nothing. No matter what happens, no matter what is done to you, you are to take no action whatsoever. You are not to react. You are to do nothing. You are to disregard every thought but this. The battle had been joined. The interference had bridged the gap -- yet the block remained dormant! The first hurdle had been cleared. For the better part of three hours, Flinn continued to transmit the counter-suggestion. Although he was not aware of it, sweat rolled from every pore of his body and his nerves spasmed in unfelt agony. Something happened. Flinn lost contact as a shrill of warnings welled through Dobbs' mind. A second later, the door opened and Hayes' voice hissed: "He's awake!" Flinn returned to awareness slowly. First he was conscious only of how tired he was, and then he knew that a voice was trying to reach him, and he felt a handkerchief swabbing at his face. Wilmer bent over him in the gloom. Hayes said in Flinn's ear: "Dobbs is awake. He knows something's wrong. He's moving around in there." "Then go ahead," Flinn heard his voice say. "There won't be a better time." "Maybe we should wait," Wilmer cautioned. "No! Do it now. Hurry!" The agent stiffened, stepped back, and disappeared. They heard the door to Dobbs' room open and close and the sound of voices. There was an exclamation, then Dobb's voice shouting: "What are you doing? Are you crazy? I warn you, I'll take every one of you with me!" Then a sudden explosion, muffled, but still shockingly loud, and the thump of a heavy object falling. Flinn could not bring himself to move a muscle. HP HE silence seemed absolute. It was as if even the house itself were listening, straining, preparing itself for the inevitable. One second passed. Two. Five. Ten. Nothing happened. Abruptly, Wilmer shouted: "It's all over!" Flinn heard footfalls upon the stairs and the sound of excited voices. Hayes burst into the room and turned on the light, the .# magnum still in his hand. His face was pale; his mouth worked, but no sound emerged. Flinn found that his muscles would obey him now, and he stood up and headed for the door. He felt numb, drained. He stepped out into the hall. Every special agent and security man on the premises was crowded there. Flinn turned back to Hayes. "I never thought to ask before," Flinn said. "Dobbs -- did he have any close living relatives? A wife? Children?" Hayes shook his head. "Thank God for that!" Flinn said. He started down the hall toward the stairs. The men there grew silent as he approached and moved soundlessly out of his way. He went down the stairs, through the room off the kitchen, and outside to the driveway. He looked up at the dark sky. It's over, he told himself. And now I'm a murderer. All of us are. A guilt shared by the few to save the many. But the few are the product of the many, just as each individual is, so where are we to place the blame? Twenty years of research, and where had it led? Somewhere he had failed as society had failed, and, even in success, Flinn could feel no flush of victory. The Earth was safe, but every human upon it had died a little without even knowing it. Yes, ifs over, Flinn thought finally. For now. Until the next time. He could see no stars. In a while it would be dawn. ( Continued from page # ) terms what these gifts of the laboratory will mean. Who's going to try it? How about you? F OR there is a turnover in magazines that seems to run in a five or ten-year cycle. Every magazine knows it. Sometimes the period is longer, sometimes less; but over a few years there will be almost a whole new body of readers and a corresponding change in the names appearing on the contents pages. Science fiction is peculiarly fortunate in hanging onto some of its best people -- Clifford D. Simak and Murray Leinster, who go back almost to the very beginning of magazine science fiction; Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl and a number of others with more than twenty years of service. But these are the exceptions. The magazine of a decade ago will show a major fraction of names which no longer appear on any contents page in the field. Some go on to other fields, turning to writing books or even turning away from writing altogether. Some just don't have the stamina or the ingenuity to keep up. A few (including, in the recent past, some of the very best, like Kuttner and Kornbluth) are lost to us through death. Tomorrow's writers come from today's readers. We know that in any given month from ten to a hundred readers will sit down at a typewriter, shrug, say, "Why not?" and plunge ahead. Why not, indeed? But let's make it easy on both of us. There's ideas or take a few hundred thousand) in the new developments of today's exploding technology. 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Zone State Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden Cordwainer Smith # magazine is published bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation Main offices#I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #i per copy. SubscripUon: (# cortes) S# # ner Hsew'here Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. PoLessions. New Vnrt lom if  ew York, N. Y. Copyright, GalMy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. AU rightsLncludMveViSi submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed kped fhis publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. AU stories printiwi in this magazine are fiction, and any simUarity between characters and actual persons is coincWenti Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. I N New York City twenty years ago, a world emerging from the Depression took time out for fun, and for a glimpse of the future. The bad days lay behind and war lay ahead, but fun there was, and the glimpse of the future was as true as the war that was to come. Way out at the end of the subway tracks in the borough of Queens was a place called "The Astoria Dump." It was the pit for all the trash of a giant metropolis. The Astoria Dump was permanently on fire. The Fire Department kept hoses going day and night, not to put out the fire -- there was no hope of that -- but to keep it from spreading. A sludgy creek ambled, in complete discouragement, between cliffs of garbage as high as houses. The inhabitants of the Astoria Dump were gigantic flies and rats. Here was the site for the New York World's Fair of # whose theme was "The World of Tomorrow." Would it be possible to move the mountains of rotting garbage, dispossess the fierce things that fed on it, clear away the stench -- and finally, when it never could be done before, put out the permanent fire -- so that "The World of Tomorrow" could be built here? Deliberate symbolism? No -- the fair would pay for the elimination of the dump. Fleets of earthmovers and an army of men with the ruthless weapons of peace leveled the garbage cliffs, rooted out the vermin, and covered all with clean earth through which no smell of decay or tongue of flame could ever escape. The Astoria Dump was no more, but it had to be built upon if it was not to be merely a buried pest hole. Landscapers moved in, and pavers, and carpenters, light engineers, hydraulics men -- an army as huge and as busy as the one that had interred Astoria Dump -- ai;d they turned it into "Flushing Meadows" and made the World of Tomorrow rise there. Beautiful? Yes, very beautiful -- the high spire of the Trylon and the great ball of the Perisphere, the sodiumvapor lamps along the avenues, the leaping illuminated fountains in the Lagoon of Nations, the Futurama and Vodor, the General Electric building with its manmade lightning flying around, captive, inside a wire-screen cage -- truly it was the World of Tomorrow, just as advertised, and it was world of that day could take a good look at what the future promised in the way of plenty, leisure and joy. There were girlie shows on the Midway, barkers huckstering as they have done since antiquity, and perhaps as they will do in perpetuity, crude and garish souvenirs. They didn't matter. The World's Fair of # was none of those things. It was the bright, wonderful World of Tomorrow, and all the braver and more wonderful for having been erected on the horror that had been Astoria Dump, and if people came to see the bare babes, they stayed to see the shining future. For the future was there indeed, beyond the rot of dictatorship that had to blasted out, the human vermin to be destroyed, the fire of war extinguished. The World of Tomorrow is to return to New York City in # to the same site -- Flushing Meadows, nee Astoria Dump. No need now to bury a nightmare in order to construct a dream. Meadows -- real meadows, green to the eye, sweet to the nose -- are there to hold marvels that the World of Tomorrow of # thought unimaginably distant, too far away to dare to speculate upon, but that are realities a scant quarter of a century later. The science fiction of # did more than dare. It saw how soon so many of these "unimaginably distant" marvels would happen. It dared look at the war that was to come, and beyond the war to the kinds of "peace" that were all too likely -- for the one that did come about was not a whit more likely than the others -- and beyond that, and further still, into every aspect of the future that was at all discernible, however faintly, a generation ago. The marvels of the World of Tomorrow of # are in these pages today, along with the actual world of #, whatever it may look like, for no one kind of world of # is a certainty when science packs the progress of centuries into a single generation, and steepens the curve ever and ever more sharply, so that one week's impossibility is next week's fact, or one week's inevitability next week's couldn't-have-happened. The process that science fiction uses is one familiar to businessmen and government statisticians -- extrapolation, carrying forward known data or theory to future probability. The process is more than valid; it's absolutely essential. But carry known data forward without exploring possible factors and the result can't help being funny -- or the very deadliest tragedy. Here are some examples of the funny and terribly unfunny. When the Louisiana Purchase was made at the beginning of the #th century, the territory of the U.S.A. was doubled. Not till # A.D., it was estimated, could the new lands be tamed and settled. True enough -- with only animaldrawn transportation. But along came the locomotive to hoot at the "safe" estimate. In a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain notes units of currency are so small that buckshot has real purchasing power, and astonishes the natives with the fact that a man in the #th century can earn as much as five or ten dollars a week. Present wages would have astonished him just as much, though he himself was using the unending trend away from small units of currency. The patent office belief at the end of the #th century that everything had been discovered, and it decimal points, is common knowledge. What still stuns is how the belief could have been held when major breakthroughs were being readied in the labs right at that moment. Before World War II, Capt. B. H. Liddell-Hart was the leading Allied military theoretician. Modern defense, he said, had become so powerful that the cost of overwhelming it would be unbearably prohibitive. What he neglected to speculate on was that a Maginot Line could be made entirely useless by one smash at one point, or that a country like Russia would pay the exorbitant price to overcome Finland's strategically far better Mannerheim Line, or that Singapore's defenses, all auned seaward, could be negated by a land attack from the rear, jungle or no jimgle. How could he have known? By following the published military thinking on both Allied and Axis sides. In exploring all possibilities, the boldest military thinking comes close to science fiction. In both, "impossible" and "inevitable" are meaningless words, just as they are to basic research -- because they are the most costly, impractical and escapist ones in the language. It took clear vision to see past the horror of Astoria Dump to the World of Tomorrow in #. It takes clearer vision still to see past the horror of two hostile hemispheres to the World of Tomorrow of #. And beyond that? There are all sorts of worlds and all sorts of tomorrows, and only the extrapolative skill and daring of science fiction can see their foreshadowings. There is threat in the fact that the Russians know this better than the Free World does -- nothing could be more escapist than thinking they've assigned it a crash-priority rating for escapist reading.  fill I i the best of Galaxy novelets Just published! Edited by H. L. Gold One look at the contents tells you that this is a 'must have' book for your permanent SF library -- Richard Matheson's One for the Books; Damon Knight's An Eye for What?; Mark Clifton's A Woman's Place; Alan E. Nourse's Brightside Crossing; F. L. Wallace's Mezzerow Loves Company; Evelyn E. Smith's Once a Greech; L. Sprague de Camp's A Gun for Dinosaur; Edgar Pangborn's The Music Man of Babylon; and -- of course -- Clifford D. Simak's The World that Couldn't Be. # eadets wn' riU receive ,y I ,itle story' rst # Galaxy through tViis ad author of ' t coupon now #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of  Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your masazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. Terra resounded to the triple toast of the Haldorian hordes: For Haldor! For Glory! And for Heaven's sake, let us out of here! Ruxt, my skin was light blue, and I was a moderately low-ranking member of the Haldorian Empire. Or should I say I was a member of the lower income group? No, definitely "lowranking," because, in a warrior society, even one with as high a technological level as a statistician sits low on the totem pole. He is handed the wrong end of the stick -- call it what you will; he's the one who doesn't acquire even one wife for years and he hasn't a courtesy title. He's the man they draft into their Invasion Forces -- the Haldorians are always invading someone -- and turn him into a Fighter Basic in a third of a year. "Look," I'd complained to the burly two-striper in the Receiving Center, "I'm a trained statistician with a degree and..." "Say Sir, when you address me." I started over again. "I know, Sir, that they use statisticians in the service. So if Haldor needs me in the service it's only sensible that I should work in statistics." The Hweetoral looked bored, but I've found out since that all two-stripers looked bored; it's because so many of them have attained, at that rank, their life's ambition. "Sure, sure. But we just got a directive down on all you paperpushers. Every one of you-from now on out is headed for Fighter Basic Course. You know, I envyyou, Ruxt. Haldor, what I wouldn't give to be out there with real men again! Jetting down on some new planet -- rasdng down the mongrels till they yelled for mercy -- and grabbing a new chunk of sky for the Empire. Haldor! That's the life!" He glanced modestly down at his medalled chest. "Yes, Sir," I said, "it sure is. But look at my examination records you have right there. Physically I'm only a # and you have to have a # to go to Basic Fighter. And besides," I threw in the clincher, though I was a bit ashamed of it, "my fighting aptitude only measures a #!" The Hweetoral sneered unsubtly and grabbed a scriber with heavy fingers. A couple of slashes, a couple of new entries, and lo, I was now a # in both departments. I was qualified in every respect.' "See," he said, "that's your first lesson in the Service, Ruxt. Figures don't mean a thing, because they can always be changed. That's something a figure pusher like you has to learn. So -- " he shoved out that ponderous hand and crushed mine before I could protect myself -- "good luck, Ruxt. I know you'll get through that course -- alive, I mean." He chuckled heartily. "And I know men!" But then, # per cent of draftees do get through the Basic Fighter Course, alive. But for me it took a drastic rearrangement of philosophy. Me, all I'd ever wanted was a good life. An adequate income, art and music, congenial friends, an understanding wife -- just one wife was all I'd ever hoped for. As you can see, I was an untypical Haldorian on every point. After my first day in Basic Fighter Course I just wanted to stay alive. -- "There's two kinds of men we turn out here," our Haldor told us as we lined up awkwardly for the first time (that scene so loved by vision-makers). We new draftees called our Trontar our Haldor because he actually had the power over our bodies that the chaplains assured us the Heavenly Haldor had over our liberated spirits. Our Trontar looked us over with his fatherly stare, flexing his powerful arm muscles so that his three tattooed stripes rippled and danced. "Yeah," he went on, "two kinds of men : Fighting men and dead men!" The Trontar grinned that fighting Haldorian grin you see all your lives on the Prop Sheets. "And I'll tell you something, men. When you leave here -- all Fighters Basic -- I'm going to envy you. Yeah, I'll really envy you gutsy killers when you go out in that big Out-There and grab yourselves a new chunk of sky." He paused and studied our faces. "Now we're gonna run, and I do mean run, two full decades. The last four men in get to do it over again, and pull kitchen duty tonight too." I tried, as others have tried, to slip quietly out of Basic Fighter. I tried being sick, but following sick report one found oneself doing a full day's training -- after the understanding medics had shoved some pep pills into you. I demanded a physcial examination. They weren't going to push me around. After a couple of days in solitary, I asked in a nice way for physical evaluation. Well, I asked. I wasn't very smart in those days. They weren't interested in my story of how my records had been falsified or in my fighting aptitude. "Look, draftee," the psycho-man said after I finally got to him, "the fact that you've got to see me shows you have enough of a fighting aptitude. Your Trontar didn't encourage you to request evaluation, did he? And he isn't going to like you very much when you report back to your platoon, is he?" I shuddered. "Not exactly." "Call me Sir." "No, Sir. But I was desperate. Sir. I don't think I can stand..."  some unfortunate men break down in training and that we have to take them out. Maybe you've already lost some that way. Suppose you were brought in here, gibbering, yowling, and drooling -- I guess we'd have to cure you and send you back home as non-fighter material, eh?" Someone up here liked me! Here was a tip on how to escape back to the old quiet life. I nodded agreeably. "But you know, don't you," he said softly, "that first we run a thorough test on our drooling draftee? Say it's you..." I nodded again. 'We most always detect fakers. And you know there's a death penalty for any Haldorian attempting to escape his duty." He smiled sadly, and reminiscently. I nodded. Maybe someone up here didn't like me. "So we'd shoot you dead with one of those primitive projectile weapons, as an object lesson for both you and thp draftees we had remaining." I nodded and tried to show by my countenance how much I approved of people being shot dead with primitive weapwns. "But suppose," he went on, "that you'd really cracked up or that you'd faked successfully?" "Yes, Sir?" Hope returned, hesitantly and on tip-toes, ready to flee. "Then we'd cure you," he said. "But the cure imfortunately involves the destruction of your higher mental faculties. And so there'd be nothing for it but to ship you off to one of the mining planets. That's standard procedure, if you didn't know. But I think you'll be all right now, don't you?" Hope fled. I assured him that I'd be just fine and reported back, on the double, to my training platoon. "Just in time, Ruxt," my Trontar greeted me. "Back for full duty, I take it? That's the Haldorian spirit!" He turned to the platoon which was lined up like three rows of sweaty statues. "Men, remember what I told you about taking cover when you're under fire -- and staying under cover? Just suppose we suddenly came under fire -- flat trajectory stuff -- out here on this flat exercise ground with no cover except in that latrine pit over there. Would any of you hesitate to dive into that latrine pit? And once in there, safe and sound, would any of you not stay there until I gave the word to come out?" A perceptible shudder passed like a wave over the platoon. We knew the Trontar did not ask pointless questions. "Of course you wouldn't," he assured us, "and you'd even stay in there all day under this hot sun if you had to. Ruxt! You're rested and refreshed from visiting the hospital. You demonstrate how it's done." It was a long day, even though my Trontar kindly sent some sandwiches over to me at high noon. I didn't eat much. But I did do a lot of thinking. wrote a letter to a remote clan relative who was supposed to have a small amount of influence. It was a moving letter. I told how my test results had been falsified, what beasts our trainers were, how the medics refused to retest me -- very much the standard letter that new Haldorian trainees write. As I went out to mail this plea, one evening, I met two of my fellow trainees starting out on a night march in full field equipment. "How come?" I asked, instantly fearful that I'd missed some notice on the bulletin board. "We wrote letters," one of them said simply. "The Trontar censors all our mail," said the other. "Didn't you you know? Oh, well, neither did we." As they marched off, I' made a small bonfire out of my letter after first, almost, just throwing it away -- before I remembered that the Hweetorals checked our waste cans. What a man has to do to hold two measly stripes! Acceptance of the inevitable is the beginning of wisdom, says the ancient Haldorian sage. I put in an application for transfer to the Statistical Services to be effective upon completion of Basic Fighter Course. "Statistical Services?" the Company Clerk asked. "What's that? Anyhow, you're going to be a Fighter Basic, if you get through this training," he said darkly. The Company Clerk was a sad victim of our Haldorian passion for realistic training; he had lacked one day of completing Fighter Basic when he'd let his leg dangle a bit too long after he'd scaled a wall, and the training gentlemen had unemotionally shot it off. As it turned out, our efficient surgeon replacers had been unable, for some technical reason, to grow back enough leg for full duty. So there was nothing for it but to use the man as could be best done. They'd made him a clerk -- mainly because that was the specialty they were shortest of at the time. "Who says you can put in for Statistical Services?" the Company Clerk demanded. "Reg #-#A." I was learning my way around. The night before I was on orderly duty in the office. I had tracked down the chapter and verse which, theoretically, allowed a man to change his destiny. "Know the Regs, do you? Starting to be a trouble-maker, huh? Yeah, Ruxt, I'll put in your application." I turned away with some feeling of relief. This might possibly work. The Company Clerk called me back. "You know the Regs so good, Ruxt," he said. "How come you didn't ask me for permission to leave? I'm cadre, you know." He leaned back in his chair and grinned at me. "Just to help you remember the correct Haldorian deportment I'm putting you on kitchen duty for the next three nights. That way," he grinned again, "you can divide up your five hours of sleep over three nights instead of crowding them all into one." Poor deluded Company Clerk! I actually averaged three hours of sleep every one of those three nights -- after I found out that the mess Trontar would accept my smoking ration. I felt that I was beginning to understand the system, a little and at long last, particularly after I saw my co-workers in the kitchen dodoing what should have been my work. II T hen we started combat training, and then we started losing our normal # per cent. It wasn't too bad as long as they stuck to the primitive stuff. I mean, you can see arrows and spears coming at you, and even if you have had only the five hours of sleep you can either duck the projectiles or catch them on your shield. And with the medics on the alert, the wounds are painful but seldom fatal. You just end up with a week's hospitalization and slip back to the next training group. But when they go up to the explosively-propelled solids, when the Trontar .smirks and says: "Men, this is called a boomer, or a banger, or maybe sometimes a firestick, depending on what planet you're fighting on," and when he holds up a contraption of wood and metal with a hole at one end and a handle on the other -- then. Draftee, look out! It takes time to learn. It isn't till you associate a bang in the distance with a perforated man beside you that you do learn. And when you finally come under fire from our regular production weapons like rays -- well! You might wonder why they rxm us through the entire history of weapons starting with the sling and ending with the slithers -- the name servicemen give to those Zeta Rays that diverge from line of sight to drop in on a dug-in enemy. THie usual explanation is that Haldorians are still invading places where the natives still use such things as bows and arrows. But I think, myself, that it's something the Mil Prop guys figured out. The idea is, as I see it, to run you right through the whole course of our fighting, invading Haldorian history, and in that way to make a better fighter out of you. And you do get rid of the death-prones before there's much time or work invested in them -- or before their inevitable early death means the failure of a mission. Haldoria -- most practical of Empires! But they didn't make a fighter of me. All they did was to reinforce my natural survival instinct considerably, acquaint me with the tortuous ways of the service, and give me a great urge for a peaceful existence. But to all appearances, as I stood in the orderly room after graduation, I was the ideal posterpicture of a Haldorian, completely uniformed with polished power boots and rayer, a crawler to the higher-ups and a stomper on the lower-downs, a Fighter Basic with no compassion but with a certified aptitude for advancement to at least the rank of Trontar. "Fighter Basic Ruxt," the Dispositions Hweetoral announced. "Here, Sir!" "Your application for transfer to Statistical Services has been disapproved." The two-striper's expression showed what he, as a fighting man, thought of the Statistical Services. "But we've got a real assignment for you, Ruxt! The #th Invasion Force is all set to drop on a new system. You're lucky, Ruxt, that you put in that application. We had to hold you till it bounced. Your buddies got shipped to those rear-echelon guard outfits, but you're going to a real fighting one. It should be a good invasion -- this new system's got atomic fission, I hear. And I'd like to tell you something, Ruxt..." "I know what. Sir," I said. "You envy me." T he #th was a real fighting unit all right: they had their own neckerchief, their own war cry, and a general who was on his way up. Now they had me. And they Were going to get another system for thei Haldorian Empire. You see, those intelligent worms, or maybe they are slugs -- I'm a bit vague on universe geography -- over on the next Galaxy but one, give us Haldorians all sorts of difficulties. They insist on freedom, self-determination, and all that sort of thing. That's all very well, but they insist on them for themselves. Our high-level planners decided that another solar system would make a better offensive setup for Haldoria. The planners, I xmderstand, have all sorts of esoteric theories about the ideal shape and size of an offensive unit. They ring in time and something related to time which makes Galaxy distances differ according to which direction you are travelling. As I say, esoteric. The only thing that mattered to me was that some technicians had fed some data into a computer and it had hiccupped and said; "You'll need such-and-such a planet to control such-and-such a solar system, and that will give you a better offensive set-up." Then the computer hiccuped again and said; "You'll need to draft and train Ameet Ruxt to help on this little job of taking over this planet called Terra, or Earth." That's what it amounted to, anyhow. Consequently I joined the #th Invasion Force. "So you've got an application in for transfer to the Statistical Services, huh?" Trontar Hytd, my new platoon three-striper, asked when I reported in for duty with the #th. "Yes, Sir." I'd learned, along the line, that one should never give up when applying for a transferjust keep one in the mill. "Huh, Borr, this new guy likes to work with figures," Trontar Hytd growled at Hweetoral Borr, my new squad leader. "Thinks he doesn't want to be a Fighter." Trontar Hytd looked at me questioningly. I didn't say anything. I'd learned a lot in Basic Fighter Course. "Figures?" asked Hweetoral Borr. I could see a train of thought had been started in the Hweetoral's mind. "Yeah, figures," snapped Tronter Hytd. "He likes to count things, Borr. Get it?" "Guess we need all our ray charges counted, for one thing," suggested Hweetoral Borr. "I get all mixed up with them figures." "After training hours, of course," Trontar Hytd said. "Of course, Trontar. And someone's gotta jawbone some kind of report on ammo expenditures every training day. Maybe after the rest of us have sacked in, for instance?" "Of course. Okay, Hweetoral, I guess you got the idea." Invasion was almost a relief after that brief bit of refresher training the #th was going through. Our General-on-the-way-up had outlined his plan of attack : "Drop'm, hit'm, lift'm and drop'm again." So I dropped, hit the defenders, was lifted to a new center of resistance, and dropped again. I understand it was a standard type of invasion, there's only one way to do simple things. I remember those sadistic and battle-hardened comrades of mine. Hard, gutsy Trontar Hytd stayed on his feet to direct his platoon underground after our Kansas force collapsed, and one of those little fission weapons separated his body parts too widely for even our unsentimentally competent surgeonreplacer to reassemble him. Well, they had a go at the job, but they had to ray down what they created -- some primitive regression had set in and the creature was hungry. And rough and tough Hweetoral Borr incautiously scratched his hairy ear just when one of those rude projectile weapons was firing at him. The slug slipped through that opening the Hweetoral had made in his body armor. With the brain gone -- or such brain as Hweetoral Borr possessed -- our kindly old surgeon replacer was foxed again. Then there were the new germs... But these things are as nothing to the creative military mind. A swarm of regulations, manuals and directives issue forth from headquarters, and force fields cease to collapse, and fighters keep their body armor on and adjusted. When something like the influenza germ wipes out half a platoon, the wheels turn, a new vaccine is devised, and no more Haldorians die from that particular germ. All the individual has to do is to live from one injection to the next (any civilized enemy always dreams up new diseases), move from one enemy strong point to the next, and dream of the day when he can return to his old life. For me it was a dream of returning to that quiet tiny room with its walls lined with the best of Haldorian art -- just cheap reproductions, of course -- and never again to handle a rayer or to wear armor. Real life, meanwhile, went on. "Fighter First-Class Ruxt! Take these men and blast that strong point!" That would be the order somewhere in Missouri, or maybe in Mississippi -- I never was much good on micro-geography. "Hweetoral Ruxt! Take your squad and clean out that city. New Orleans they call it. Get their formal surrender and make damn sure there are no guerrillas left when the colonel comes through to inspect." By the time I was Trontar Ruxt the invasion was practically over. As I say, it was the standard thing with one or two countries holding out after all hope was gone -- England never did formally surrender, not that it mattered -- and our successful General was made a SubMarshal of the Haldorian Empire. A real promotion and a great honor. Much good it did him when he ventured his battle fleet too far into the Slug lines a year later. With the fighting over -- the real fighting, I mean -- the everefficient Haldorians started moving their troops off Earth to get ready for a new and bigger invasion that the computers had decreed. Only a few troops were to be left behind for occupation and guard stuff. I had a talk with a fat Assignments Trontar in his plush office. "You know, Trontar," I said, "I was hoping to see more of this world here, and the rumor is that all of us excess combat t#T#es are being shipped to a training world to be shaped into new invasion forces." "Tough," he said. He should know. He'd requisitioned a mansion complete with servants and everything. He even had a native trained to drive one of their luxuriously inefficient ground vehicles. What a deal! That Trontar had no worries, his anti-grav ray was working. heard that a man doesn't even need any money if he's stationed down at our headquarters," I said, and I hauled out a handful of Haldorian notes from my pocket. "Guess I wouldn't need this stuff if I was transferred down to our headquarters." "Who needs money?" he asked. "Guys all the time trying to bribe me, Trontar. You'd be surprised. Sure glad you aren't, though, because I do hate to turn anyone in." I put the money back in my pocket. "Speaking of turning in people," I said casually, "you ever have any trouble with the undercover boys about all this loot you've picked up?" This, I thought, would shake him -- and at the same time I marvelled at how I'd changed from a simple, naive statistician to a tough and He yawned all over his fat face and swung his swivel chair so that he could better admire the picture beside his desk. I recognized the picture as a moderately good reproduction of a Huxtner, a "No," the Assignments Trontar said, "it turns out that one of my sept brothers runs the local watch birds. He often drops in here to visit with me. But anything I can do for you, Trontar?" "No," I said, and I fired at the only possible loophole left, "I'll just leave quietly so you can admire your Huxtner." He swung back to me with a start. "You recognize a Huxtner? You're the first man I've ever met in the service who ever heard of Huxtner, let alone recognizing one of his masterpieces! Hey, did you know I brought this all the way from home in my hammock roll? And just look at the coloring of that figure there!" The loophole had been blasted wide open. "You're lucky," I said, and I went on to lie about how I'd lost my own Huxtner prints in the invasion. "No one," I continued, "ever got quite that flesh tint of Huxtner's, did they?" Huxtner, by the way, is notorious for using a yellow undercoat for his blue flesh colors, unlike every realistic painter before or after who have all used green undercoats -- what else? Imagine a chrome-yellow underlaying a blue skin color. All Huxtner's figures look like two-week corpses -- but Huxtner enthusiasts are unique. The Assignments Trontar and I had a nice long chat about Huxtner, at the conclusion of which he insisted on scratching my name from the list of combat-bound men and putting me on a much smaller ' list of men scheduled for our guard outfit, stationed at the old Terran capital of Washington. I had an un-Haldorian feeling of having arranged my own life after that incident. That feeling persisted even after I took over one of the guard platoons and discovered that life in a guard outfit is rather similar to Basic Fighter Course. "Trontar Ruxt! Two men of your platoon have tarnished armor. Get them working on it, and maybe you'd better stay and see that they do it properly." "Yes, Sir." One lives and learns. I turned the job of supervising the armor cleaning to the Hweetorals of the squads and then I went home to my native woman. Yes, this guard's outfit life was like Fighter Basic Course. But only for the lower ranks. Ill those days. The duties were incredibly dull, of course, but the danger of sudden death had receded, since only a few fanatics still tried to pick off us occupation troops. And this new world of Haldoria's was rich in the things a sensitive and artistic man appreciates; painting, sculpture, music. Then there was this new and pleasing thing of living with a woman... But it wouldn't last long. Soon there'd be another planet to invade and maybe a space battle with the great enemy. More years of cramped living and lurking danger, for in the Empire one was drafted for the duration, and this duration was now some four hundred years old. The most Trontar Ruxt could expect, the very most, was to somehow keep alive for another fifty years and then to retire on a small pension to one of the lesser worlds of the Empire. "Trontar Ruxt! Your records show that you're a statistician." My commanding officer stared at me suspiciously, for a fighting man, even one on guard duty, distrusts office personnel. And as everyone knows, "Once a fighting man, always a fighting man." I think my C.O.'s last action had been thirty years ago. "I was a statistician before I got in the service. Sir." "Well, they're screaming over at headquarters for qualified office personnel, and we have to send them any trained men we have -- of any rank." "It's for Haldor, Sir," I said. By now I knew the correct answer was most often the noncommittal one. I reported to the Headquarters, #th Invasion Force. The rumor was that Phase II, Reduction of Inhabitants to Slavery with Shipment to Haldorian Colonies, was about to start. And also, our Planners were supposed to be well into Terraforming was necessary, of course, to bring the average temperature of earth down to something like the sub-arctic so that we Haldorians could live here in comfort. We lost quite a few fighters during invasion when their cooling systems broke down. Rumor, as always, was dead right; and the Headquarters was a mad rat-race. The Senior Trontar of the office was delighted to get another body. "Took your time getting here, Ruxt! You guard louts don't know the meaning of time, do you?" I remained at attention. "So you're a statistician, are you? Well, we don't need any statisticians now. We just got in a I whole squad of them. Can you use i a writer, maybe?"  iiV ES, Sir," I did not remind  the Senior Trontar that using a writer was a clerk's job, not a Trontar's, not a combat threestriper's, because the chances were that he-knew it, for one thing. And he could easily make me a clerk, for another thing. "Okay. New that we understand each other," the Senior Trontar grinned, "or that you understand me, which is all that matters, here's your job." He handed me a stack of scribbled notes, some rolls of speech tape and a couple of cans of visual stuff. "Make up a report in standard format like this example. Consolidate all this stuff into it. This report has to be ready in two days, and it has to be perfect. No misspellings, no erasures, no nothing. Got that?" "Yes, Sir." , "Yes, Sir," he mimicked. "Haldor only knows why they couldn't j send me a few clerks instead of a j squad of statisticians and one guard trontar. Do you know what this stuff is that you're going to work up? It's the final report on our invasion here!" I looked impressed. Strange how you learn, after a while, even the facial expression you are supposed to wear. "Do you know why this report has to be perfect in format and appearance?" I wouldn't say the Senior Trontar's manner was bullying, quite. Perhaps one could call it hectoring. "Because the Accountant is out in this sector somewhere and we have to be ready for him if he drops in." This time I didn't have to try to look impressed. The Accoimtant is the man who passes judgment on the conduct of all military matters -- though of course he's not one man, but maybe a dozen of them. Armed with the invaluable weapon of hindsight, he drops in after an invasion is completed. He determines whether the affair has gone according to regulations, or whether there has been carelessness, slackness or wasting of Haldorian resources of men or material. Additionally he monitors civil administration of colonies and federated worlds. There are stories of Generals becoming Fighter Basics and Chief Administrators becoming subclerks after an Accountant's visit. took the full two days -- mainly because fighting men make such incomplete and erroneous reports while action is going on. I got to understand the exasperated concern of office personnel who have to consolidate varied fragments into a coherent whole. And adding to the natural difficulties of the task was the continual presence of the Senior Trontar, and his barbed comments and lurid promises as to what would follow my failure at the work. But the rejjort was done and sent in to the Adjutant. It came back covered with scribbled changes, additions, and deletions -- and it came back carried by a much disturbed Senior Trontar. "Who in Haldor do they think I am?" he moaned. "I just handed on to you the figures that they gave me. Me! And threatening me with duty on a space freighter... and one into the Slug area at that!" I thougnt, as I looked at my ruined script, that guard duty wasn't so bad, and that even combat wasn't rough all the time. "See, Trontar," the four-striper said, calling me by my proper rank for the first time, "you did a good job, the Adjutant himself said so. But these figures..." he shuddered. "If the Accountant should see these we'd all be for it. Space-freighter duty would be getting off light." The Senior Trontar seemed almost human to me right then. "I just put down what you gave me," I said. "Yeah, sure, Ruxt But I didn't realize, nobody realized, how bad the figures were till they were all together and written up. Look, this report shows that we shouldn't Terraform this planet -- that we can't make a nudnick on the slavery proposition -- and that maybe we shouldn't have even invaded this inferno at all." "So what do you want me to do?" "I'll tell you what you're going to do..." The Senior Trontar had regained his normal nasty disposition. "You're going to redo this report. You're going to re-do it starting now, you're going to work on it all night, and you're going to have it on my desk and in perfect shape when I come in in the morning, or, by Haldor, the next thing you write will be your transfer to the space freighter run nearest the Slug Galaxy." The Senior Trontar ran momentarily out of breath. "And," he came back strongly, "you won't be going as no Trontar, neither!" "It'll be on your desk in the morning. Sir," I said. Deck hands on the space freighter run were, I'd heard, particularity expendable. T# Y the middle of the third  watch I had completed a perfect copy of the report complete with attachments, appendices, and supplements. And also by this time I knew from the differences between the original report and this jawboned version that someone had goofed badly in undertaking this invasion, and then had goofed worse in not calling the thing off. Now there was to be considerable coveringup of tracks. The thought suddenly came to me that a guard's trontar named Ruxt knew rather a lot of what had gone on. Following that mildly worrying thought came a notion that perhaps a guard's trontar named Ruxt might be considered by some as just another set of tracks to be covered up. That far-off retirement on a small but steady income became even more unlikely, and the piossibilities began to appear of a quick end in the Slug-shattered hulk of a space freighter. Had the Senior Trontar changed in his attitude towards me, towards the end of the day, perhaps acted as though I were a condemned man? Possibly. And had some of the officers been whispering about me late in the afternoon? Could have been. Shaken, I wandered down to the mess hall and joined a group of third-watch guards, who were goofing off while their Trontar was checking more distant guard posts. "It's easy," one of them was telling the others. "All you got to do is to slip some surgeonreplacer a few big notes and he gives you this operation which makes you look like a native. And then you just settle down on Astarte for the rest of your life with the women just begging you to let them support you." "You mean you'd rather live on some lousy federated world than be a Haldorian in the Invasion Forces?" There was a strong sardonic note in the questioner's voice. "Man, you ever been on Astarte?" the first man asked incredulously. "Yeah, but how are you going to be sure that the surgeonreplacer doesn't turn you in?" objected one of the others. "He could take your money, do the operation, and have you picked up. That way he'd have the money and get a medal too." "I'd get around that," the talky guy said, "I'd just..." At this point he was jabbed in the arm by one of his buddies who had noticed my eavesdropping. The man shut up. All four of them drifted off to their posts. the office. From then till dawn I dreamed up and rehearsed all manner of wild schemes to take me out of this dangerous situation. Or was it all perhaps just imagination? A Haldorian Trontar should never be guilty of an excess of that quality. But I made sure when the Senior Trontar sneaked in a bit before the regular opening time, that I was just, aiparently, completing the last page of the report. The impression I hoped to convey was that I had spent the entire night in working and worrying. "It's okay," the Senior Trontar growled after he had studied the completed report. "Guess you can take a couple of days off, Ruxt. I believe in taking care of my men. Say," he asked casually, "I suppose you didn't understand those figures you were working up, did you?" "No," I said, "I didn't pay any attention to them, they were just something to copy, that's all." I felt confident that I could outfence the Senior Trontar any time at this little game, but what had he and the Adjutant been whispering about before they had come in? "But you used to be a statistician, didn't you?" He looked at the far corner of the room and smiled slightly. "But you take a couple days off, Ruxt. Maybe we'll find something good for you when you come back." He smiled again. "Don't forget to check out with the Locator before you go, though. We don't want to lose you." I stumbled home, not even noticing the hate-filled glances my armor and blue skin drew from the natives along the streets. The glances were standard, but this feeling of being doomed was new. They were going to get me. I felt sure of that, even though my Sike Test Scores had always been as low as any normal's. But how could a Haldorian disappear on this planet? Aside from skin color, there was the need to keep body temperatures at a livable level The body armor unit was good only for about a week. Find a surgeonreplacer and bribe him to change me to an Earthman? I saw now how ridiculous such an idea was. But was there nothing but to wait passively while the Senior Trontar and the Adjutant, and whoever else did the dirty work, all got together and railroaded me off? Haldorians, though, never surrender -- or so the Mil Prop lad would have us believe. Right from the time you are four years old and you start seeing the legendary founders of Haldoria -- Bordt and Smordt -- fighting off the fierce six-legged carnivores, you are told never to give up. "Where there's Haldor, there's Hope!" "There's always another stone for the wolves, if you but look." I must confess I'd snickered (way deep inside, naturally) at these exhortations ever since I'd reached the age of thinking, but now all these childhood admonitions came rushing back to give me strength. quite as they were intended to do. I found that I could but go down like any Haldorian, fighting to the last. IV S O I put on my dress uniform the next day, and made sure that nothing could be deader than the dulled bits, or brighter than the polished ones. A bit of this effort was wasted since I arrived at Headquarters looking something less than sharp. The cooling unit in my armor was acting up a bit; and, also, three Terran city guerillas had tried to ambush me on the way. You take quite a jolt from a land mine, even with armor set on maximum. Some of those people never knew when they were licked. No wonder their Spanglt Resistance Quotient was close to the highest on record. I got through the three lines of guards and protective force fields all right, checking my rayer here, my armor there -- the usual dull procedure. By the time I reached the Admissions Officer I was down to imiform and medals. "You want to see tihie Accountant?" the Admissions Officer asked incredulously. "You mean one of his staff! Well, where's your request slip, Trontar?" "I've come on my own. Sir," I said, "not from my office, so I haven't a request slip." "Come on your own? Whafs your unit? Give me your ID card!" Let's see, I thought. I've abstracted classified material from the files and carried it outside the office, I've broken the chain of command and communication, and, worst of all, I'd tried to see a senior officer without a request slip. Yeah, maybe I'd be lucky to end up as a live deckhand on a space freighter. A bored young Zankor with the rarely-seen balance insignia of the Accoimtant's Office rose from behind the Admissions Officer. "I'll take responsibility for this man," he said casually to the A.O. "Follow me, Trontar. I was wondering when you'd turn up." "Me?" "Well, someone like you. Though usually it's scared subclerks that we drag up. And that reminds me." He turned to another young and equally bored Zankor standing nearby. "Take over, Smit, will you? They're bringing in that sub-clerk who's been writing those anonymous letters. I've reserved the Inquisition Room for a couple of hours for him." I followed the Zankor as he strode away, wondering as I did if they had more than one Inquisition Room. He led me into a small room just off the corridor and motioned me to a chair. "Before you see the Accountant, Trontar," he said, "I'll have to screen what you have. It may be that we won't have to botber the Accountant at all." ' I HE smooth way the Zankor talked and his friendly manner almost convinced me that we should both put the interests of the Accountant first. But then it occurred to me that a man with the gold knot of a Zankor on his collar wasn't often friendly with a mere Trontar. That thought snapped me out of it and I knew I should only give the minimums. "I've got documents," I said -- "document" is such a lovely strong word, "which prove that the official report on the invasion and occupation of this planet is false." That, I thought, was as minimum as one could get. "Ah, and have you?" The Zankor still looked bored. "Well, let's see them, Trontar," he said briskly. The Zankor had that sincere look the upper class always uses when they are about to do you dirt. They blush that heavy shade of blue, almost purple, and they look you straight in the eye, and they quiver a bit as to voice... and the next thing you know, you're shafted. "I'm sorry, Sir," I said, "but what I have is so important that I can give it to the Accountant only." He stared at me for rather a long moment, pondering, no doubt, the pleasures of witnessing a full-dress military flogging. Then he shrugged and picked up the speaker beside him. He didn't call the Trontar of the Guard to come and take my documents by force. I could tell that even though he spoke in High Haldorian, that harsh language the upper class are so proud of preserving as a relic from the days of the early conquerors. No, he was speaking to a superior -- there's never any doubt as to who is on top when people are speaking High Haldorian -- and then I caught the emphatic negative connected with the present-day Haldorian phrases meaning Phase II even though I don't know High Haldorian, and would never be so incautious as to admit it if I did, I knew roughly what had been said. And I was frantically revising my plans. "Follow me," the Zankor said, after completing the call. "We'll see the Accountant now, and -- " he looked at me sincerely -- "you'd better have something very good indeed. You really had, Trontar." T he Accountant turned out to be a tall and thin Full MarI shal, the first I'd seen. He was dressed in a uniform subtly different from the regulation, and he i wore only one tiny ribbon, which i I didn't recognize. He had the I slightly deeper-blue skin you often see on the upper classes, though this impression may have I been due to the green furnishings ' of the room. It was, in fact, called the Green Room, when the Terrans had used it as one of their regional capitals. I saluted the Accountant with my best salute, the kind you lift like it was sugar and drop as if it were the other. The Accountant responded with one of those negligent waves that tell you the saluter was a survivor of the best and bloodiest private military school in existence. "Proceed, Trontar," the Accountant said, leaning back and relaxing as if he didn't have a care in the universe. I launched into my speech, the one I'd been mentally rehearsing. I told him I knew I was breaking the chain of communication, but I that I was doing it for the service ! and for Haldoria, etc. Any old j serviceman knows the routine. I was, as I ran through this speech, I just as sincere and just as earnestI ly interested in the good of Haldoria as any Haldorian combat Trontar could be. But, deep inside me, the old Ameet Ruxt was both marveling at the change in himself and cynically appreciating the performance. The Accountant interrupted the performance about halfway through. "Yes, yes, Trontar," he said brusquely, "I think we can assume your action is for the good of Haldoria, may the Empire increase and the Emperor live forever. Yes. But you say you have material dealing with the overall report on our invasion and occupation of this planet. You further say this material shows discrepancies in the official report -- which you imply you have seen." "Yes, Sir," I said, and I handed over the several sheets of paper which comprised the old report and the changes of the new. Meanwhile, behind me, the Zankor was invisible but I had not a doubt but that he was there, keeping the regulation distance from me. These people knew their business. The Accountant took the collection of papers and compared them with some others he had on his desk. I continued to stand at Full Brace. Once you've been chewed out for slipping into an Ease position without being so ordered, you never forget. The Accountant laid down the papers, scanned my face, got up and walked to the far end of the .# . # .'. room. In front of a mirror he stopped and fingered that one small ribbon, quite, I thout, as if he were matching it with another one. He came back quickly and sat down again. "Zankor," he said, "set up a meeting with the top brass for this afternoon. I'll talk with the Trontar privately." The Zankor saluted and was on his way out the door when the Accountant spoke again. "And Zankor..." "Yes, Sir?"  "I should be very unhappy if  the top brass here -- the present ' top brass -- found out about this material the Trontar brought." The Zankor swallowed hard and assured the Accountant that he imderstood..."Sir." T hen we were alone and the Accountant was suddenly a kindly old man who invited me to sit down and relax. I did. I really let go and stretched out, I forgot everything I'd ever been taught as a child or had learned on my climb to the status of Trontar. I relaxed and he had me. I had been caught on the standard Haldorian SoftHard Tactic. "Disabuse your mind, Trontar," the Accoimtant snapped, and he was no longer a kindly old man but a thin-lipped Haldorian snapper, "of any idea that you have saved llie Empire -- or any such nonsense!" Having cracked his verbal whip about my Moulders he just crouched there, glaring at me, his mouth entirely vanished and his eyes -- well, I'd just as soon not think about some things. Yes, and then he gave me the ShoutSilence treatment, the whole thing so masterfully timed that at the end he could have signed me on as a permanent latrine keeper on a spy satellite in the Slug Galaxy. A genius, that man was. The sort of man who could -- and probably did -- control forty wives without a weapon. "Your information, as it happens," he said after I had regain my senses, "checks with other data I've received. It might be, of course, that the whole thing is a fabrication of my enemies. In that case, Trontar -- " he looked at me earnestly -- "you can be assured you'll not be around to rejoice at or to profit from my downfall." "Of course. Sir," I said, quite as earnestly as he. "But we both know that you are only a genuine patriot," he said with a hearty chuckle, a chuckle exactly like that of a Father Goodness -- that kindly old godfather who brings such nice presents to every Haldorian child until they are six, and who on that last exciting visit brings, and enthusiastically uses, a bundle of large and heavy whips to demonj strate that no one can be trusted, i Efficient teachers, the Haldorians. J "Just a genuine patriot," the j Accovmtant repeated "who has  rendered a considerable service to , the Empire. Trontar," he said, all friendly and intimate, "the Empire likes to reward well its faithful sons. What would you most like to have or to do?" "To serve Haldoria, Sir!" I was  back on my mental feet at last He dropped his act then. He was, I think, just practicing anyway. We had a short talk then, the kind in which one person is quickly and efficiently pumped of eversdhing he knows. After about ten minutes of question and answers, the Accountant leaned back and studied my face carefully. "Have you considered Officers' Selection Course, Trontar? I might be able to help you a little in getting in." Officers' Selection Course was, I knew. Fighter Basic Course multiplied in length and casualties. Less than # per cent graduate... or escape. iilVO, Sir," I said. "I wondered if I mightn't be of more value to Haldoria in some way other than being in the combat services." So now I'd said, it and there was nothing to do but to go on. "Perhaps," I ventured, "I might be of some help in the administrative services." The Accoimtant said nothing, his face was immobile, his hands still. He'd learned his lessons well, once. "In fact," I said, deciding to go for broke, "with my knowledge of the language and the customs here, I might be of most service to Haldoria right here on this planet" "Had you guessed, by any chance, Trontar," the Accountant's voice was neutrally soft, "that we won't be terraforming this world? And that we may not even exploit the slavery proposition?" "I thought both those possibilities likely," I admitted. "But you know that in such a case we would have no administrative services on this world? Thus you are, in fact, asking for a position that wouldn't exist." The Accountant, without a change of position of expression, somehow gave the impression of looming over me. "I thought," I said, trying to pick exactly the right words, and at the same time all too conscious of a twitching muscle in my left eyelid, "that there might be an analogous position, even so." The Accountant loomed higher. "If only," he said, "you hadn't come to us, Trontar. I mean that you, in effect, sold your associates out to me. And I hold that once a seller, always a seller. If I could be certain that you are and will be perfectly loyal to the Haldorian Way..." I managed to quiet the twitching eyelid and to look perfectly loyal to the Haldorian Way. "Yes, Trontar," the Accoimtant said decisively, "I'll buy it." T he results of my conference with the Accountant were not long in appearing. The Haldorian troops were called in, along with the military governors and the whole administrative body, and they all shipped out, somewhere into the Big OutThere they all love so much. A surprised Earth was informed that she was now a full-fledged and self-governing member of the Haldorian Empire. The Terrans were not informed of the economic factors behind this decision, though it might have been cheering for them to know that their Spanglt Resistance Quotient indicated they would make unsatisfactory slaves. Nor did the high cost of terraforming the planet get mentioned. We Haldorians prefer the gratitude of others towards us to be unalloyed with baser, or calculating, emotions. Not all the Haldorian personnel went out to fight or to administer. I understand the space-freighter run to the battle fleet in the Slug Galaxy gained many new deckhands, among them one whose uniform showed the marks where Trontar's stripes had perched. As for myself? Well, a relatively minor operation changed me into a blackskinned Terran, though the surgeonreplacers could do nothing, ironically enough in view of my new color, to increase my resistance to heat. I refnember those stirring days of combat sometimes, usually when I am making my semi-annual flight between Churchill, Manitoba, and Tierra Del Fuego. In fact, during those flights when I am practically alone is the only time I have to reflect or remember, because on both of my estates there is nothing but noise, children, and wives. But ifs a good life when the snow is driving down out of a low gray overcast, just like it does back on Haldor. It's a good life being Resident Trader on Terra, especially when one is, on the side, a trusted agent of the Accountant. It would be a perfect life -- if the Accountant hadn't been right about people being unable to stop selling out. Right now I'm up to my neck in this Terran conspiracy to revolt against the very light bonds Haldoria left on this planet. But how could I resist the tempting offer the Terrans made me? The long sought-for good life, it now occurs to me, isn't so much in escaping from something, but in knowing when to stop. But that I know. I'm drawing the line right now. I'll just tell that agent of the Slug Galaxy that I have no intention of selling out both this solar system and Haldoria! Condition of Empioyment This was one time when there had to be -- just had to be -- a way to keep a good man down! H e had been dreaming of home, and when he came awake, he held his eyes tight shut in a desperate effort not to lose the dream. He kept some of it, but it was blurred and faint and lacked the sharp distinction and the color of the dream. He could tell it to himself, he knew just how it was, he could recall it as a lost and far-off thing and place. but it was not there as it had been in the dream. But even so, he held his eyes tight shut, for now that he was awake, he knew what they'd open on, and he shrank from the drabness and the coldness of the room in which he lay. It was, he thought, not alone the drabness and the cold, but also the loneliness and the sense of not belonging. So long as he did not look at it, he need not accept this harsh reality, although he felt himself on the fringe of it, and it was reaching for him, reaching through the color and the warmth and friendliness of this other place he tried to keep in mind. At last it was impossible. The fabric of the held-onto dream became too thin and fragile to ward off the moment of reality, and he let his eyes come open. It was every bit as bad as he remembered it. It was drab and cold and harsh, and there was the maddening alienness waiting for him, crouching in the comer. He tensed himself against it, trying to work up his courage, hardening himself to arise and face it for another day. The plaster of the ceiling was cracked and had flaked away in great ugly blotches. The paint on the wall was peeling and dark stains ran down it from the times the rain leaked in. And there was the smell, the musty human smell that had been caged in the room too long. Staring at the ceiling, he tried to see the sky. There had been a time when he could have seen it through this or any ceiling. For the sky had belonged to him, the sky and the wild, dark space beyond it. But now he'd lost them. They were his no longer. A few marks in a book, he thought, an entry in the record. That was all that was needed to smash a man's career, to cmsh his hope forever and to keep him trapped and exiled on a planet that was not his own. He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, himting for the trousers he'd left on the floor. He foimd and pulled them on and scuffed into his shoes and stood up in the room. ' I ' HE room was small and mean -- and cheap. There would come a day when he could not afford a room even as cheap as this. His cash was nmning out, and when the last of it was gone, he would have to get some job, any kind of job. Perhaps he should have gotten one before he began to run so short. But he had shied away from it. For settling down to work would be an admission that he was defeated, that he had given up his hope of going home again. He had been a fool, he told himself, for ever going into space. Let him just get back to Mars and no one could ever get him off it. He'd go back to the ranch and stay there as his father had waflted him to do. He'd marry Ellen and settle down, and other fools could fly the death-traps around the Solar System. Glamor, he thought -- it was the glamor that sucked in the kids when they were young and starryeyed. The glamor of the far place. of the wilderness of space, of the white eyes of the stars watching in that wilderness -- the glamor of the engine-song and of the chill white metal knifing through the blackness and the loneliness of the emptiness, and the few cubic feet of courage and defiance that thumbed its nose at that emptiness. But there was no glamor. There was brutal work and everlasting watchfulness and awful sickness, the terrible fear that listened for the stutter in the drive, for the ping against the metal hide, for any one of the thousand things that could happen out in space. He picked up his wallet off the bedside table and put it in his pocket and went out into the hall and down the rickety stairs to the crumbling, lopsided porch outside. And the greenness waited for him, the unrelenting, bilious green of Earth. It was a thing to gag at, to steel oneself against, an indecent and abhorrent color for anyone to look at. The grass was green and all the plants and every single tree. There was no place outdoors and few indoors where one could escape from it, and when one looked at it too long, it seemed to pulse and tremble with a hidden life. The greenness, and the brightness of the sun, and the sapping heat -- these were things of Earth that it was hard to bear. The light one could get away from, and the heat one could somehow ride along with -- but the green was always there. He went down the steps, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. He found a crumpled package and in it one crumpled cigarette. He put it between his lips and threw the pack away and stood at the gate, trying to make up his mind. # UT it was a gesture only, this hardening of his mind, for he knew what he would do. There was nothing else to do. He'd done it day after day for more weeks than he cared to count, and he'd do it again today and tomorrow and tomorrow, until his cash ran out And after that, he wondered, what? Get a job and try to strike a bargain with his situation? Try to save against the day when he could buy passage back to Mars -- for they'd surely let him ride the ships even if they wouldn't let him run them. But, he told himself, he'd figured that one out. It would take twenty years to save enough, and he had no twenty years. He lit the cigarette and went tramping down the street, and even through tile cigarette, he could smell the hated green. Ten blocks later, he reached the far edge of the spaceport. There was a ship. He stood for a moment looking at it before he went into the shabby restaurant to buy himself some breakfast. There was a ship, he thought, and that was a hopeful sign. Some days there weren't any, some days three or four. But there was a ship today and it might be the one. One day, he told himself, he'd surely find the ship out there that would take him home -- a ship with a captain so desperate for an engineer that he would overlook the entry in the book. But even as he thought it, he knew it for a lie -- a lie he told himself each day. Perhaps to justify his coming here each day to check at the hiring hall, a lie to keep his hope alive, to keep his courage up. A lie that made it even barely possible to face the bleak, warm room and the green of Earth. He went into the restaurant and sat down on a stool. The waitress came to take his order. "Cakes again?" she asked. He nodded. Pancakes were make his money last. "You'll find a ship today," said the waitress. "I have a feeling you will." "Perhaps I will," he said, without believing it. "I know just how you feel," the waitress told him. "I know how awful it can be. I was homesick once myself, the first time I left home. I thought I would die." He didn't answer, for he felt it would not have been dignified to answer. Although why he should now lay claim to dignity, he could not imagine. But this, in any case, was more than simple homesickness. It was planetsickness, culturesickness, a cutting off of all he'd known and wanted. to cook, he caught the dream again -- the dream of red hills rolling far into the land, of the cold, dry air soft against the skin, of the splendor of the stars at twilight and the faery yellow of the distant sandstorm. And the low house crouched against the land, with the old gray-haired man sitting stiffly in a chair upon the porch that faced toward the svmset. The waitress brought the cakes. The day would come, he told himself, when he could afford no longer this self-pity he carried. He knew it for what it was and he should get rid of it. And yet it was a thing he lived with -- even more than that, it had become a way of life. It was his comfort and his shield, the driving force Jiat kept him trudging on each day. He finished the cakes and paid for them. "Good luck," said the waitress, with a smile. "Thank you," he said. He tramped down the road, with the gravel crunching underfoot and the sim like a blast upon his back, but he had left the greenness. The port lay bare and bald, scalped and cauterized. He reached where he was going and went up to the desk. "You again," said the union agent "Anything for Mars?" "Not a thing. No, wait a minute. There was a man in here not too long ago." The agent got up from the desk and went to the door. Then he stepped outside the door and began to shout at someone. A few m i nutes later, he was back. Behind him came a lumbering and irate individual. He had a cap upon greasy, torn letters, but aside from that he was distinctly out of uniform. "Here's the man," the agent told the captain. "Name of Anson Cooper. Engineer first class, but his record's not too good." "Damn the record!" bawled the captain. He said to Cooper: "Do you know Morrisons?" "I was raised with them," said Cooper. It was not the truth, but he knew he could get by. "They're good engines," said the captain, "but cranky and demanding. You'll have to baby them. You'll have to sleep with them. And if you don't watch them close, they'll up and break your back." "I know how to handle them," said Cooper. "My engineer ran out on me." The captain spat on the floor to show his contempt for runaway engineers. "He wasn't man enough." "I'm man enough," Cooper declared. A ND he knew, standing there, what it would be like. But there was no other choice. If he wanted to get back to Mars, he had to take the Morrisons. "O.K., then, come on with you," the captain said. "Wait a minute," said the imion agent. "You can't rush off a man like this. You have to give him time to pick up his duffle." "I haven't any to pick up," Cooper said, thinking of the few pitiful belongings back in the boarding house. "Or none that matters." "You imder stand," the agent said to the captain, "that the union cannot vouch for a man with a record such as his." "To hell with that," said the captain. "Just so he can run the engines. That's all I ask." The ship stood far out in the field. She had not been much to start with and she had not improved with age. Just the job of riding on a craft like that would be high torture, without the worry of nursing Morrisons. "She'll hang together, no fear," said the captain. "She's got a lot more trips left in her than you'd think. It beats all hell what a tub like that can take." , Just one more trip, thought Cooper. Just so she gets me to Mars. Then she can fall apart, for all I care. "She's beautiful," he said, and meant it. He walked up to one of the great landing fins and laid a hand upon it. It was solid metal, with all the paint peeled off it, with tiny pits of corrosion speckling its surface and with a hint of cold, as if if might not as yet have shed all the touch of space. And this was it, he thought. After all the weeks of waiting, here finally was the thing of steel and engineering that would take him home again. He walked back to where the captain stood. "Let's get on with it," he said. "I'll want to look the engines over." "They're all right," said captain. "That may be so. I still want to run a check on them." He had expected the engines to be bad, but not as bad as they turned out to be. If the ship had not been much to look at, the Morrisons were worse. "They'll need some work," he said. "We can't lift with them, the shape they're in." The captain raved and swore. "We have to blast by dawn, damn it! This is a goddam emergency." "You'll lift by dawn," snapped Cooper. "Just leave me alone." He drove his gang to work, and he worked himself, for fourteen solid hours, without a wink of sleep, without a bite to eat Then he crossed his fingers and told the captain he was ready. They got out of atmosphere with the engines holding together. Cooper imcrossed the fingers and sighed with deep relief. Now all he had to do was keep them running.  I  HE captain called him forward and brought out a bottle. "You did better, Mr. Cooper, than I thought you would." Cooper shook his head. "We aren't there yet. Captain. We've a long way still to go." "Mr. Cooper," said the captain, "you know what we are carrying? You got any idea at all?" Cooper shook his head. "Medicines," the captain told him. "There's an epidemic out there. We were the only ship anywhere near ready for takeoff. So we were requisitioned." "It would have been much better if we could have overhauled the engines." 'We didn't have the time. Every minute counts." Cooper drank the liquor, stupid with a tiredness that cut clear to the bone. "Epidemic, you say. What kind?" "Sand fever," said the captain. "You've heard of it, perhaps." Cooper felt the chill of deadly fear creep along his body. "I've heard of it." He finished off the whisky and stood up. "I have to get back, sir. I have to watch those engines." "We're counting on you, Mr. Cooper. You have to get us through." He went back to the engine room and slumped into a chair, listening to the engine-song that beat throughout the ship. He had to keep them going. There was no question of it now, if there'd even been a question. For now it was not the simple matter of getting home again, but of getting needed drugs to the old home planet. "I promise you," he said, talking to himself. "I promise you we'll get there." He drove the engine crew and he drove himself, day after dying day, while the howling of the tubes and the thunder of the hajnvire Morrisons racked a man almost beyond endurance. There was no such thing as sleep -- only catnaps caught as one could catch them. There were no such things as meals, only food gulped on the run. And there was work, and worse than work were the watching and the waiting, the shoulders tensed against the stutter or the sudden screech of metal that would spell disaster. Why, he wondered dully, did a man ever go to space? Why should one deliberately choose a job like this? Here in the engine room, with its cranky motors, it might be worse than elsewhere in the ship. But that didn't mean it wasn't bad. For throughout the ship stretched tension and discomfort and, above all, the dead, black fear of space itself, of what space could do to a ship and the men within it I N some of the bigger, newer ships, conditions might be better, but not a great deal better. They still tranquilized the passengers and colonists who went out to the other planets -- tranquilized them to quiet the worries, to make them more insensitive to discomfort, to prevent their breaking into panic. But a crew you could not tranquilize. A crew must be wideawake, with all its faculties intact. A crew had to sit and take it. Perhaps the time would come when the ships were big enough, when the engines and the drives would be perfected, when Man had lost some of his fear of the emptiness of space -- then it would be easier. But the time might be far off. It was almost two hundred years now since his family had gone out, among the first colonists, to Mars. If it were not that he was going home, he told himself, it would be beyond all tolerance and endurance. He could almost smell the cold, dry air of home -- even in this place that reeked with other smells. He could look beyond the metal skin of the ship in which he rode and across the long dark miles and see the gentle sunset on the redness of the hills. And in this he had an advantage over all the others. For without going home, he could not have stood it. The days wore on and the engines held and the hope built up within him. And finally hope gave way to triumph. And then came the day when the ship went mushing down through the thin, cold atmosphere and came in to a landing. He reached out and pulled a switch and the engines rumbled to a halt. Silence came into the tortured steel that still was numb with noise. He stood beside the engines, deafened by the silence, frightened by this alien thing that never made a sound. He walked along the engines, with his hand sliding on their metal, stroking them as he would pet an animal, astonished and slightly angry at himself for finding in himself a queer, distorted quality of affection for them. But why not? They had brought him home. He had nursed and pampered them, he had cursed them and watched over them, he had slept with them, and they had brought him home. And that was more, he admitted to himself, then he had ever thought they would do. TE foimd that he was alone. The crew had gone swarming up the ladder as soon as he had pulled the switch. And now it was time that he himself was going. But he stood there for a moment, in that silent room, as he gave the place one final visual check. Everything was all right. There was nothing to be done. He turned and climbed the ladder slowly, heading for the port. He foimd the captain standing in the port, and out beyond the port stretched the redness of the land. "All the rest have gone except the purser," said the captain. 'T thought you'd soon be up. You did a fine job with the engines, Mr. Cooper. I'm glad you shipped with us." "It's my last run," Cooper said, staring out at the redness of the hills. "Now I settle down." "That's strange," said the captain. "I take it you're a Mars man." "I am. And I never should have left." The captain stared at him and said again: "That's strange." "Nothing strange," said Cooper.  "It's my last run, too," the captain broke in. "There'll be a new commander to take her back to Earth." "In that case," Cooper offered, "I'll stand you a drink as soon as we get down." "I'll take you up on that First we'll get our shots." They climbed down the ladder and walked across the field toward the spaceport buildings. Trucks went whining past them, heading for the ship, to pick up the unloaded cargo. And now it was all coming back to Cooper, the way he had dreamed it in that shabby room on Earth -- the exhilarating taste of the thinner, colder air, the step that was springier because of the lesser gravity, the swift and clean elation of the uncluttered, brave red land beneath a weaker sun. Inside, the doctor waited for them in his tiny office. "Sorry, gentlemen," he said, "but you know the regulations." "I don't like it," said the captain, "but I suppose it does make sense." They sat down in the chairs and rolled up their sleeves. "Hang on," the doctor told them. "It gives you quite a jolt." It did. And it had before, thought Cooper, every time before. He should be used to it by now. He sat weakly in the chair, waiting for the weakness and the shock to pass, and he saw the doctor, there behind his desk, watching them and waiting for them to come aroimd to normal. "Was it a rough trip?" the doctor finally asked. "They all are rough," the captain replied curtly. Cooper shook his head. "This one was the worst I've ever known. Those engines..."  I " HE captain said: "I'm sorry, Cooper. This time it was the truth. We were really carrying medicine. There is an epidemic. Mine was the only ship. I'd planned an overhaul, but we couldn't wait." Cooper nodded. "I remember now," he said. He stood up weakly and stared out the window at the cold, the alien, the forbidding land of Mars. "I never could have made it," he said flafly, "if I'd not been psychoed." He turned back to the doctor. "Will there ever be a time?" The doctor nodded. "Some day, certainly. When the ships are better. When the race is more conditioned to space travel." "But this homesickness business -- it gets downright brutal." "It's the only way," the doctor declared. 'We'd not have any spacemen if they weren't always going home." "That's right," the captain said. "No man, myself included, could face that kind of beating unless it was for something more than money." Cooper looked out the window r at the Martian sandscape and shivered. Of all the God-forsaken places he had ever seen! He was a fool to be in space, he told himself, with a wife like Doris and two kids back home. He could hardly wait to see them. And he knew the symptoms. He was getting homesick once again -- but this time it was for Earth. The doctor was taking a bottle out of his desk and pouring generous drinks into glasses for all three of them. "Have a shot of this," he said, "and let's forget about it" "As if we could remember," said Cooper, laughing suddenly. "After all," the captain said, far too cheerfully, "we have to see it in the right perspective. It's nothing more than a condition of employment." The next issue solves a vital problem that we have spent all this while trying to work out: how to get a novel of such freshness, ingenuity, suspense -- and stature -- that it could bridge the gap between issues. To solve that problem, Frederik Pohl has out-Pohled himself, a big deal indeed for one who has given us Gravy Planet and other such great Galaxy book-length serials. main character is plagued by a terrifying, utterly baffling assassin. Night , after night, the assassin stalks him and will not rpst until he is dead. A commonplace predicament in fiction, of course. But in this case, it is not the man being stalked who must be dead. It is the assassin! Nor is this simply an O. Henry switcheroo -- the hard, cold, completely logical reasons will sweep you through the two installments of this compelling story. Along with this big half of a true, honest-Injun, fair-dinkum, so-help-us book-length nove' -- not a "shortened version" -- we've managed to cram in at least two novelets. dares fight -- and the man whose duty lies in preventing that war -- by , forgetting where his duty stops! covers that he would rather see than be one! I Short stories? Of course. Edgar Pangborn for sure, after too long an ; absence since his magnificent Angel's Egg and The Music Master of Babylon, plus others, as many as we can fit in -- along with Willy Ley's always enjoyable column and our regular features. A fine issue. Don't skip it. The Airq Servttor Anyone should be free to take an impossible stand -- except that is where the nuse man does business! T he clerk in the utility office looked at Denham silently. It was a look which, to Denham, seemed haughty, insolent and supercilious -- qualities he was ready by now to discern in the whole utility company. "If you dispute the amount of the bill, sir," the clerk said, "you should deposit the sum in question th the Utilities Commission while they examine your claim." "Listen," Denham said, fumbling in his pockets, "all I'm asking is that you send the meter reader out again." He pulled out a handful of receipted bills. "Look at these. Electricity in June, #. In July, #. In August, # -- that was because Franny and I were on vacation. In September, #. And then in October you send in a bill for #! It's not reasonable!" The clerk opened the book on the desk in front of him and pointed at a page. "Section five, paragraph #, sub-section #," he said woodenly. ""lu case of disputed bills, customers must deposit the amoimt in dispute with the -- ' " "I tell you, it's some blasted mistake! Somebody's mislocated the decimal point! Where am I to get # to deposit? If you'd send me a bill for #, or #, would you still expect me to deposit it with die Utilities Commission?" "' -- must deposit the amount in dispute with an impartial authority, in this case the Utilities Commission,' " he continued imperturbably. "Tending settlement of the disputed claim, such deposits are to draw interest at the rate of # per annum. In case -- " "All rit!" Denham yelled. Two people who had been talking to other clerks at the desk started and turned around to look at him. "All right!" He had completely lost the slender hold he had been keeping on his temper, and he no longer cared. "Send your blasted mechanic around and have the blasted meter taken out!" It was, Denham was pleased to observe, a look quite different in quality from the ones he had previously bestowed. It held respect, admiration, awe. "You mean you want us to have the electricity diut off? Why, sir, nobody ever does that!" "Well, I do!" Denham said. "But -- but -- how wiH you get along without it?" "That's my problem," Denham answered. "I'd rather do without power the rest of my life than deposit # with the Utilities Com  M ' mission. "Very well, sir." The clerk's lips curved in a faint smile. "Now, if you'll just sign this form..." Outside in the street again, Denham felt the beginning of a qualm. Of course he and Franny would get along all right without power, the way people used to do. The pioneers hadn't had electric refrigerators. All the same, it might be rather a nuisance. There was the Halloween dinner they were giving for the in-laws on Saturday. The thing to do was to buy a couple of oil lamps, and a little kerosene stove for Franny to cook on. (But what about the food in the refrigerator, and the hot water supply? ) Oil lamps wouldn't be so bad for a Halloween party -- appropriate, in a way, to the spirit of the occasion. But if Mrs. Murgatroyd found out that he'd had the power shut off deliberately, she'd decide that it was just another proof of the way he mistreated her daughter. Denham was well aware that his mother-in-law considered him a heartless, inconsiderate brute. Franny might tell her mother as often as she pleased that she loved her husband and was happy with him : Mrs. Murgatroyd would sigh, close her eyes, shake her head, and murmur, "My poor little girl!" It was a remark that by now almost maddened Denham. He would go to nearly any length to avoid hearing it. For a moment he wondered whether it wouldn't be wiser to go back to the power compan # s office and ask to have the power turned on again. A man stepped out from a doorway and stood in Denham's path. He was a tall, thin man with eyebrows which arched high on his forehead and then swooped down suddenly to the bridge of his nose, and his cheeks were sunken and pale. There was something indefinably odd about his clothing. It looked, Denham thought, as if it had been made from a picture by a tailor who had never seen a suit of clothes. "Heigh, gesell," he said in a harsh, hoarse voice. "Would you be interested in some nuse?" "What?" Denham said, confused, "Nuse. The airy servitor. Omnia, cient, omnipotent, invisible. Like Prospero's Ariel. 'I come  To an. swer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,  To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride  On the curl'd clouds. To thy strong bidding task  Ariel and all his quality.' The Tempest, scene #, act #. By Francis Bacon. Don't think, use nuse." "The Tempest?" Denham responded blankly. ture from one whom he had expected to offer him smuggled Alaskan sealskins, just off the boat and dirt cheap, bewildered Denham. "Whafre you talking about?" "Nuse. I said it was like Prospero's Ariel. Don't they teach you people Bacon in school these days? But never mind that, ges -- I mean, sir. That little argument with the power company -- you're going to find it pretty tough getting along without electricity, you know. Why don't you try nuse?" "You mean you're selling bootlegged power from some fly-bynight company?" Denham asked suspiciously. The stranger hesitated. Then he appeared to make up his mind. "I can see you're an intelligent man, ge -- sir" he said. "As a matter of fact, I represent the Inter-Era Trading and Exchange Corporation. We specialize in selling products of the future to the present day. Nuse is the most popular of them. Why don't you give us a trial? I'm sure you'd be more than satisfied." "We get our nuse direct from the producer, in # AJ#., and retail it to the present. Like all our items, it's top quality. We'd have to arrange a special installation, since today's abode is somewhat more complicated than when I come from, but I can promise you an adequate supply of nuse within thirty minutes after you sign the authorization. All fixed before your wife gets home." He got a little darkgreen box out of his waist pocket and showed it to Denham. "This is the plant." Denham touched it gingerly. It felt warm and the surface was resilient. "Yes, but what is it? Some kind of power?" "More than power. Much, much more. As to what it is -- well, wasn't there a period when your scientists were uncertain as to the nature of electricity? We're in much the same position with regard to nuse. All we know is that it is a transdimensional neural force. We get it, as I say, from the far side of # A.D., but our scientists can only speculate on how it actually originates." 'You mean that if I let you put that gadget in my apartment, the appliances would still work?" Denham asked, grasping at straws. "Even thou the electricity is off?" "Certainly. Much better than ever before. And more than appliances. Having nuse in an abode is like having a dozen super-efficient servants working for you. Omnipotent, omniscient, invisible. Don't think, use nuse." "Well..." Denham said. A S Denham stopped by at the novelty store on his way home, to pick up the favors and Halloween cut-outs Franny had asked him to get, he decided against telling her about the contract he had signed for nuse. It was perfectly straightforward and businesslike, of course, but he had a feeling she might not care for the idea of having her electric toaster worked by a transdimensional neural force that originated on the far side of # a.d. He was relieved to find the apartment brightly lighted when he opened the door. That meant, or ought to mean, that the nuse man had been around and the nuse was already on the job. Invisible, omnipotent, omniscient. Don't think, use nuse. "Hi, baby," he greeted his wife. "Have a good day? An # rthing new?" He noticed she was wearing a faint frown. "Not much," she answered, "only something sort of funny happened, Gus. That strawberry mousse you like -- I decided to make some for supper, and I got all the things for it out of the refrigerator. Then I decided I'd better comb my hair in case you got home ead of time. And when I went back to the kitchen, there the mousse was in the refrigerator, already mixed and everything. The dishes were washed and put away, too. And I don't remember a single thing about doing it. Oh, Gus, do you suppose there's anything wrong with my mind?" Denham gulped. Apparently the nuse wasn't going to confine itself to small-time stuff like operating electric toasters and washing machines. He comforted his wife by telling her that highly intelligent people not infrequently had these lapses, and then, while she was putting supper on the table, wandered out into the hall. After some searching he located the small green box the nuse man had showed him. It was low down by the kitchen door. No wires went into or came out of it. For the second time that day Denham touched it with his fingertips. This time it was definitely cold. The strawberry mousse, for the record, reached a new height of deliciousness. Denham's shower next morning was perfert, not, as usual, scalding one minute and freezing the next And when he went into the bedroom to dress, he foimd his brown suit laid out neatly on the bed waiting for him. Memoranda and papers had been transferred into the appropriate pockets. His shoes, too, were neatly shined. There was no use asking Franny whether die had done it -- she was busy getting dressed herself, and he knew she had not It must be the nuse. VlEN Denham got home that '  night, he found Franny sitting on Ihe living room floor in tears. Her suitcase was in front of her, and various items of her trousseau lay on the rug aroimd her. "I'm losing my mind," she quavered when she saw him. "Ever since I came home I've been doing things and forgetting about having done them. It's terrible. I'm g-going to pack up and g-go home to Mother. Its not f-f-fair toyou." "No, you're not," Denham answered grimly. He sat down on the floor beside her and told her what had happened. Franny took his disclosure with remarkable calm. "Oh, is that it? Why didn't you tell me? Say, listen, though -- it isn't costing us an awful lot, is it?" "Only four fifty a month," Denham answered. Franny's expression grew pleased. "We paid more than that for electricity and it didn't do lots of filings this new stuff does. Gus, you know what I am planning to do?" "What?" Denham asked. "I'm going to have it clean up the whole place tomorrow, new shelf paper in the kitchen, windows, floors waxed, everything, and when Mother says, my, but I must get tired working so hard, I'm going to tell her you've insisted that I have a maid. Then I'm going to have it try a lot of those dishes in the Wine Cook Book you got me -- the ones I never made because they s ."Hied too complicated -- and when she mentions those, I'll tell her tile maid did that too. And then I'll have the nuse give me a facial and a manicure and set my hair a new way. I get so tired of the way Mother talks about you all tile time. Oh, Gus! Isn't this lots of fun?" "Um," Denham said, starting to worry because his wife was accepting nuse with so much enthusiasm. His mood of depression persisted all next day. Part of it, no doubt, could be accounted for by the unattractive prospect of an evening with his in-laws, but there remained a residue of depression which Denham later was to ascribe to sheer prescience. If the nuse man had been around, he would have expressed it, probably, by quoting Francis Bacon's immortal Romeo and Juliet: "Oh, God, I have an ill-divining soul!" D enham (he had to work on Saturdays) got home and the apartment was shining like a new penny, romantic aromas of herbs and wine filled the air, and Fraimy herself was resplendent in an odd but attractive hair-do. "How'd it go?" he asked her. "Oh, wonderful! At first I thought it would make me nervous to be waited on by something I couldn't see, but it does it so quick, just like thinking, that I don't have time to get scared. And it's . awfully impersonal. "A funny thing happened, though, Gus. After I got the stuff out of the refrigerator for the gaI got to thinking I'd have to watch my weight with all this rich food. Then I decided to taste the dessert to see if it was all right Would you believe it? The nuse wouldn't let me taste it! It was just as though there was a wall between me and the gateau. It made me cross for a minute, but of course the nuse was right -- it's those little tastes that put the fat on." "ITm," Denham said uneasily. "Mother called up to say she's bringing Aunt Agatha," she said, watching him warily. "Aunt Agatha!" Denham's jaw dropped in alarm. Mrs. Murgatroyd's sister was deceptively mildlooking, but every bit as tou and mean as Mrs. Murgatroyd, and her footwork was a lot faster. "Oh, Gus, don't look at me like that She won't hurt you. I've been thinking, and I'm sure the reason she and Mother don't like you better is that they don't know you well. If they were in closer contact with you, they'd realize how nice you really are. That's why I'm putting you between them tonight." There was a lengthy pause. "O.K.," Denham said at last. The guests arrived at seven thirty-five. Mrs. Murgatroyd, Aunt Agatha, Mr. Murgatroyd (Denham liked his father-in-law whenever he remembered him), and Bert, Denham's thirteen-year-old brother-in-law -- Denham catalogued them miserably while he forced his reluctant face into a genial smile. He felt even more pessimistic and apprehensive than before. " 'Lo, Gussie," Bert said. He was wearing a cotton T shirt with "Bat Mn" written in large black letters across the chest. Under the words was tire silhouette of a nasty-looking bat. To the lapel of his jacket was pinned an improbably red rose. "What do you think of my flower?" "Fine," Denham answered. The only good quality he had ever been able to discern in Bert was that the boy was a little too old to chew bubble gum. "Very pretty." "Go on, smell it." rewarded by a douche of cold water in the face. "Did you bite!" Bert said' with deep satisfaction, "Jeepers, did you bite!" "Now, Bert," Mrs. Murgatroyd said, and then to Denham, in what might have been apology, "Bert's sense of humor is so keen." Denham went into the bathroom and dried his collar and his hair. Then he came back and handed around glasses of tomato juice. His own contained something different He tasted it cautiously and then with enthusiasm. Why had he been so apprehensive? They certainly understood how to mix drinks in # A.D. Good old -- yes, decidedly -- good old nuse! He had been longing for a drink, and here it was. The dinner, with the nuse imobtrusively helping Franny serve, went off well. Even Mrs. Murgatroyd, who had plainly been skeptical about Franny's maid, grew mellow by the time the diners reached the gateau, and Denham, whose glass had been replenished several, times, felt himself upborne on a monumental euphoria. For a small sum, say two or three hundred dollars, he would have risked kissing his mother-in-law. His self-confidence sagged abruptly at Franny's next remark. "Gus, honey," she said, "you go get the things out of the refrigerator, and we'll play that game -- you know, the one I read about in the party book. I'm sure Dad and Bert will enjoy playing it." Thou Denham rose obediently, he was feeling sick. He disliked Mrs. Murgatroyd and the nuse knew it; in the darkness, passing her bits of saturated sponge, chunks of suet, oysters limp and wet, who knew what dreadful thing might happen to her? He'd have to watch his thoughts, watch his thoughts. When he came back from the kitchen, the room was dark. He gave the parcel to Franny, sitting at the end of the table, and she began the narration. "There was an old witch who lived in a cellar," she said impressively, "and she did terrible things. On Halloween I went to visit her, though they told me she was dead. I tripped over something on the floor and picked it up." Franny fumbled in the parcel. She lowered her voice. "I knew at once that it was a piece of her arm." Fanny passed the piece of lamb shank to Bert, who yipped. From Bert it went to Aunt Agatha, to Denham, to Mrs. Murgatroyd. There followed the witch's teeth, tongue, stomach, and brain. The eyeballs, Denham thought apprehensively, would be the worst. Raw oysters in the dark -- ugh. What had possessed Franny to try this stunt, anyhow? She was a doll, but she could exhibit an unbelievable lack of tact. The eyeballs were not the worst. Before Denham even handed the oysters to Mrs. Murgatroyd, she screamed piercingly. "Worms! Worms! You've filled my lap with worms!" I T was a shriek as demoralizing as a siren's. Denham jumped. The lights came on. Mrs. Murgatroyd glared at him. There was nothing in her lap. "You did it!" she said fiercely to Denham. "You put worms in my lap. They wriggled horribly. And then you took them awsy again. You -- you -- oh, poor Franny, married to a man like you!" Denham had bitten his tongue so deeply at Mrs. Murgatroyd's first shriek that he could hardly talk, and besides he was conscious of a deep bewilderment. Worms? Franny cut across the hubbub. "For goodness' sake;, mother, be quiet! Gus didn't do ansdhing. It was just your imagination. Gus, go get the apples and the tub. We'll try another game." Mrs. Murgatroyd and her sister -- wisely, Denham thought -- refused to bob for the apples floating in the tub. He would have liked to refuse himself, but Franny nodded at him commandingly. Dumbly, still nursing his bitten tongue, he took his place behind Bert. Mr. Murgatroyd was first. He hesitated, calculated, and then plunged. To his son-in-law's surprise, he came up with a pippin firmly between his false teeth. "Nothin' to it," he said. Fraimy was next. She got wet, she screeched. But on the third try she secured an apple. She smiled at Denham and bit into it. Then Bert Denham was conscious of keeping a rigid mental grip on himself. It occurred to him suddenly that he had misinterpreted the meaning of the slogan, "Don't think, use nuse." It didn't mean, as one might suppose, that using nuse would relieve one of wear and tear on the brain; it meant something much less agreeable -- don't ttunk, if you use nuse. Bert's narrow back bent over the basin. There was a horrid feeling of tension and oppression in the atmosphere. Abruptly he dipped after an apple which floated near the edge. The water in the basin seemed to recoil from him. Then with a mighty spla it descended on Bert. Two of the apples hit him on the head. This time it took much longer to get Mrs. Murgatroyd calmed down. "You did it," die repeated bitterly to Denham. "I saw you with my own eyes." Denham couldn't think of a thing to say that would make any sense. tured toward Bert, who stood between them dripping vehemently. He was wet in the same thoroughgoing fashion that a longhaired dog gets wet; Denham had never seen a human being drip so hard. "Do you mean to tell me he did that by himself?" she demanded. "And look at those big bumps on his poor head! To think that a grown man could be so petty, so childish! Just because he played a harmless, boyish prank on you with his flower! This has opened my eyes, as if they needed opening, to the sort of man you are. Franny's infatuated with you, of course; I only hope that this will help her to realize your true character." Denham writhed helplessly. He honestly didn't think it was his fault. He hadn't been thinking about ansrthing. Over Mrs. Murgatroyd's head he looked at the others. Mr. Murgatroyd, his fingers laced together over his stomach, was looking up at the ceiling. Aunt Agatha, on the other hand, watched the scene detachedly, while a faint smile played over her lips. Fraimy's expression was shocked and incredulous. After a moment Denham caught his wife's eyes. She raised her brows in a gesture of mute questioning. Passionately he shook his head, and was relieved to get a sickly grin from her in return. At least she realized he hadn't meant to do whatever the nuse had done. Bert was led off to the bedroom and returned, somewhat drier, wearing Denham's new silk dressing gown. As he passed his host, Bert stuck out his tongue and thumbed his nose at him. Mrs. Murgatroyd, seeing her son still damp, began to talk all over again. "For heaven's sakes, Mother," Franny said, "a little water won't hurt Bert. Gus! Will you get the donkey out of the closet? We'll play another game." Denham drew his wife aside. "Listen, honey," he said earnestly, "do you think it's safe? We've had quite a lot of trouble already, and if we get blindfolded and try to pin tails on that thing... Wouldn't it be better just to sit quietly and talk or watch TV?" Franny looked miserable. "I know, Gus. I feel just as worried about it as you do. Something must have gone wrong with the nuse power source in the future. But if we don't play a game or something, Mother won't go home or anything -- she'll just stay here and complain. I think you'd better go get the donkey game." Denham for some reason was selected to try the tail-pinning first. He made a fool of himself by missing the donkey completely and attaching the tails to the plaster of the wall. He was unblindfolded to the accompaniment of Bert's malignantly triumphant howls. did fairly well. Mr. Murgatroyd, to everyone's surprise but his own, got two out of three tails in the proper place. He retired to his chair with an air of modest competence. Mrs. Murgatroyd must have been stung by her spouse's imexpected success. At any rate she insisted on being blindfolded next, despite Franny's obvious disinclination. Denham watched die process like a man who, tied helpless on top of a powder keg, sees the approach of matches and gasoline. His mother-in-law groped her way over to tiie wall. The first tail she pinned to the donkey's chest, the second to the nape of its neck. The third she attached to the right hind leg. Nothing else happened. Denham sagged back, almost sick with relief. Whatever had gone wrong with the nuse source in # A.D. must have been corrected again. "The plaster feels a little soft, Frances," Mrs. Murgatroyd said as she surrendered the blindfold to Aunt Agatha. "Perhaps your husband -- " she gave Denham a glance of pnire cyanide -- "could repair it some time." "Oh, I will," Denham babbled. "Yes, certainly. Of course. Oh, yes, you bet." He got out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow. When it was perfectly safe to do so, he decided, he'd have the nuse bring him another drink. Aunt Agatha passed her hand gropingly over the printed figure of the donkey. "The plaster does feel a little soft, Kate," she said to Mrs. Murgatroyd. She turned back to her task. "Yes a little spongy and soft. Why, what on Earth -- oh!" The wall had begun to fall down on her. First the wall, then the ceiling. Plaster fell in hunks, in chunks, in slabs. Some of it fell on Aunt Agatha, the rest on Mrs. Murgatroyd. Denham, though standing near them, was not touched. The falling plaster would have been noisy in itself, but it was accompanied by a grinding, rending, crashing roar like a cyclone breaking into a lion cage. The floor began to tremble. From the fireplace beside Denham, an andiron rose into the air and hurled itself at Mrs. Murgatroyd's midriff. An ornamental plate rose dizzily from the dinner table. Twice it smacked itself forcefully against Mrs. Murgatroyd's broad rear; then it flew over to Aunt Agatha and hit her in the face. One of the pair of silver candlesticks from the mantel brandished itself before the nose of Denham's mother-in-law as if held in an angry hand. The other plummeted down deliberately on Aimt Agatha's toes. Franny was screaming at the top of her lungs. It was as if a covey of demented poltergeists was holding a convention in the room. Articles of futuristic construction, apparently materialized by the nuse on its own hook, rained past Denham's head. Mrs. Murgatroyd was on her knees in the comer; Aunt Agatha was doubled up, with her arms raised to protect her head. Neither of them, since Aunt Agatha's first astonished exclamation, had uttered a sound, and this silence, in sharp contrast with Franny's uninhibited shrieks, impressed Denham as profoundly unnatural.  ity suspended itself. Objects returned to their usual places or fell to the floor. There was an instant of static, frozen calm. Then the carpet tore itself loose from its moorings. With irresistible momentum it advanced on the two cowering women. For a moment it reared above them like a tidal wave; then it broke over their heads. With this final burst of energy, the nuse seemed to have exhausted itself. The carpet collapsed. After a moment Aunt Agatha pushed its stiff bulk aside and looked out. Her expression was still invincibly thild, but there were bits of plaster in her hair. Mrs. Murgatroyd wobbled to her feet. Her eyes were fixed on Denham. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but no sound came out. This uncharacteristic aphasia affected him almost more than words would have done. He looked hastily around the room in search of moral support. Bert and Franny wore expressions suitable to persons who have just seen a dining room explode. But Mr. Murgatroyd -- Denham looked at him with amazement which changed arply into outraged comprehension -- Mr. Murgatroyd was a happy man. Beaming and complacent, his hands clasped over his stomach, he regarded the devastated scene. His eyes lingered on his wife's bruised person with especial pleasure. So he was the cause of everything! No doubt he'd materialized the worms in his wife's lap accidentally, realized that some strange power had obeyed him, and gone on to enjoy it! "Come, Kate," Aunt Agatha, said, "let us leave this house." And late as it was when they left, and tired as he was, Denham took a hammer and smashed the nuse. from the office one evening in April when the ntise man stepped into his path. He looked leaner and less prosperous than when Deiffiam had seen him half a year before. He had the air, somehow, of a cat which has been chased away from a lot of garbage cans and will imdoubtedly be chased away from many more. "Heigh, gesell," he said hoarsely, "how about buying an ipsissifex? Better even than nuse, the airy servitor. I hear you're working pretty hard these days. Duplicate yourself and cut your work load. We guarantee up to ten perfect replic -- heigh, wait! What are you looking at me like that for? Are you going to hit me too?" "I'm afraid I am," Denham said, and he did... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of Galaxy to you when they should arrive -- at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: Subscription Dept., Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below.  Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here  Add #c Foreign Postage # For  # or #e each Enclose check, cosh or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foraign Postaga Name Address City State, The Lady No iob was ever uglier, nastier or deadlier -- but out of it came a story to inspire generations. Hfho Sailed the Saul I T he story ran -- how did the story run? Everyone knew the reference to Helen America and Mr. Gray-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and Abelard, whose story had been found among books in a longburied library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Go-Captain Taliano and the Lady Dolores Oh. Out of it all, two things stood forth -- their love and the image of the great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars. Mention him and others knew her. Mention her and they knew him. He was the first of the inbound sailors, and she was the lady who sailed the Soul. It was lucky that people lost their pictures. The romantic hero was a very young-looking man, prematurely old and still quite sick when the romance came. And Helen America, she was a freak, but a nice one : a grim, solemn, sad little brunette who had been bom amid the laughter of humanity. She was not the tail, confident heroine of the actresses who later played her. She was, however, a wonderful sailor. That much was true. And with her body and mind she loved Mr. Gray-no-more, showing a devotion which the ages can neither surpass nor forget. History may scrape off the patina of their names and appearances, but even history can do no more than brighten the love of Helen America and Mr. Gray-no-more. Both of them, one must rememi ber, were sailors. II Che was a child and she waai  playing with a spieltier. She got tired of letting it be a chickei so she reversed it into the fur-bean ing position. When she extended the ears to the optimum develop ment, the little animal looked odd indeed. A light breeze blew the ani. mal-toy on its side, but the spieltier good-naturedly righted itself and munched contentedly on the carpet. The little girl suddenly clapped her hands and broke forth with the question, "Mama, what's a sailor?" "There used to be sailors, darling, a long time ago. They were brave men who took the ships out to the stars, the very first shipsfeat took people away from our sua And they had big sails. I don't know how it worked, but somehow the light pushed them, and it took them a quarter of a life to make a single one-way trip. People only lived a hundred and sixty years at that time, darling, and it was forty years each way, but we don't need sailors any more." "Of course not," said the child "We can go right away. You've taken me to Mars and you've taken me to New Earth too, haven't yop Mama? And we can go anywhere and it only takes one afternoon." "That's pianoforming, honey, gut it was a long time before the people knew how to planoform. they could not travel the way could, so they made great big sails. They made sails so big that they could not build them on Earth. They had to hang them out halfway between Earth and Mars. And you know, a funny thing happened... Did you ever hear about the time the world froze?" "No, Mama. What was that story about?" "Well, a long time ago, one of these sails drifted and people tried to save it because it took a lot of work to build it. But the sail was so large that it got between Earth and the sim. And there was no more sunshine, just night all the time. And it got very cold on Earth. All the atomic power plants were busy, and all the air began to smell fimny. And the people were worried and in a few days they pulled the sail back out of the way. And the sunshine came again." "Mama, were there ever any girl sailors?" A curious expwression crossed over the mother's face. "There was one. You'll hear about her when you are older. Her name was Helen America and she sailed the Soul out to the stars. She is the only woman that ever did it. And that is a wonderful story." The mother dabbled at her eyes with a handkerchief. The child said: "Mama, tell me now. Whafs ffie story all about?" At this point the mother became very firm and she said: "Honey, there are some things that you are not old enou to hear yet. But when you are a big girl. I'll tell you all about them." The mother was an honest woman. She reflected a moment, and then she added, "Unless you read about it yoiuelf first." Ill- her place in the history of mankind, but she started badly. The name itself was a misfortune. No one ever knew who her father was. The officials agreed to keep the matter quiet. Her mother was not in doubt. Her mother was the celebrated she-man Mona Muggeridge, a woman who had campaigned a hundred times for the lost cause of complete identity of the two sexes. She had been a feminist beyond all limits, and when Mona Muggeridge, the one and only Miss Muggeridge, announced to the press that she was going to have a baby, that was first-class news. Mona Muggeridge went further. She proclaimed that no woman should have consecutive children with the same man, that women should be advised to pick different fathers for their children, so as to diversify and beautify the race. She capped it all by announcing that she, Miss Muggeridge, had selected the perfect father and would inevitably produce the only perfect child. Miss Muggeridge, a bony, pompous blonde, stated that she would avoid the nonsense of marriage and family names, and that therefore the child, if a boy, would be called John America, and, if a girl, Helen America. Thus it happened that little Helen America was born with the correspondents in the press services waiting outside the delivery 'room. News screens flashed the picture of a pretty three-kilogram baby. That was just the beginning. Mona Muggeridge was belligerent. She insisted, even after the baby had been photographed for the thousandth time, that this was the finest child ever born. She pointed to the child's perfections. She demonstrated all the foolish fandness of a doting mother, but felt that she, the great crusader, had discovered this fondness for the first time. Helen America was a wonderful example of raw human material triumphing over its tormentors. By the time she was four years old, she spoke six languages, and was beginning to decipher some of the old Martian texts. At the age of five she was sent to school. Her fellow school children immediately vented a rh#mie: "Helen, Helen, Fat and dumb. Doesn't know where Her daddy's from!" Helen took all this and perhaj it was an accident of genetics tha she grew to become a compact lit tie person -- a deadly serious littii brunette. Challenged by lessonj haunted by publicity, she becami careful and reserved about friend ships, and desperately lonely. When Helen America was six teen, her mother came to a bai end. Mona Muggeridge elopa with a man she announced to h the perfect husband for the perfed marriage hitherto overlooked bj mankind. The perfect husband wai a skilled machine polisher. He al ready had a wife and four children He drank beer and his interest it Miss Muggeridge seems to havi been a mixture of good-naturet comradeship and a sensible aware ness of her motherly bankroll. Thi planetary yacht on which thej eloped broke the regulations wifi off-schedule flight. The bride groom's wife and children hat alerted police. The result was i collision with a robot barge whid left both bodies identifiable. At sixteen Helen was alreadj famous, and at seventeen alreadj forgotten, and very much alone. IV T his was the age of sailors. The; thousands of photo-reconnaissance and measuring missiles had begun to come back with their harvest from the stars. Planet after planet swam into the ken of mankind. The new worlds became known as the interstellar search missiles brought back photographs, samples of atmosphere, measurements of gravity, cloud coverage, chemical makeup and the like. Of the very numerous missiles which returned from their twoor three-hundred-year voyages, five brought back reports of New Earth, a planet so much like Terra itself that it could be settled. The first sailors had gone out almost a hundred years before. They had started with small sails not over two thousand miles square. Gradually the size of the fails increased. The technique of adiabatic packing and the carrying of passengers in individual pods reduced the damage done to the human cargo. It was great news when a sailor returned to Earth, a man born and reared under the light of another star. He was a man who had spent a month of agony and pain, bringing a few sleepfrozen settlers, guiding the immense light-pushed sailing craft which had managed the trip in an objective-time period of forty years. Mankind got to know the look of a sailor. There was a plantigrade walk to the way he put his whole body on bed, couch or ground. There was a sharp, stiff, mechanical swing to his neck. The man was neither young nor old. He had been awake and conscious for forty years, thanks to the drug which made possible a kind of limited awareness. By the time the psychologists interrogated him, first for the proper authorities of the Instrumentality and later fjr the news releases, it was plain enough that he thought the forty years were about a month. He never volunteered to sail back, because he had actually aged forty years. He was a young man, young in his hopes and wishes, but a man who had burned up a quarter of a human lifetime in a single agonizing experience. At this time Helen America went to Cambridge. Lady Joan's College was the finest woman's college in the Atlantic world. Cambridge had reconstructed its protohistoric traditions, and the neoBritish had recaptured that fine edge of engineering which reconnected their traditions with the earliest antiquity. Naturally enough the language was cosmopolite Earth and not archaic English,, but the students were proud to live at a reconstructed university very much as the archeological evidence showed it to have been before the period of darkness and troubles came upon the Earth. Helen shone a little in this renaissance. ' Helen in the cruelest possible fashion. They revived her name and the story of her mother. She had put in for six professions, and her last choice was sailor. It happened that she was the first woman to make the application -- first because she was the only woman young enough to qualify who had also passed the scientific requirements. Her picture was beside his on the screens before they ever met each other. Actually, she was not anything like that at all. She had suffered so much in her childhood from "Helen, Helen, fat and dumb" that she was competitive only on a coldly professional basis. She hated and loved and missed the mother she had lost, and she resolved so fiercely not to be like her mother that she became an embodied antithesis of Mona. The mother had been horsy, blonde, big -- the kind of woman who is a feminist because she is not very feminine. Helen never thought about her own femininity. She just worried about herself. Her face would have been round if it had been plump, but she was not plump. Black-haired, dark-ey small and slim, she was a genetj demonstration of her unknowj father. Her teachers often fearei her. She was a pale, quiet girl, anj she always knew her subject. Her fellow-students had jokt) about her for a few weeks and thei most of them had banded togethq against the indecency of the press When a newsframe came out wifl something ridiculous about the long-dead Mona, the whisper went through Lady Joan's,"Keep Helej away. Those people are at it again,' They protected her, and it wai only by chance that she saw ha own face in a newsframe. Then was the face of a man beside her He looked like a little old monkey she thought. Then she read, "per with old helpless embarrassmeit and rage, but she had grown too ex pert at being herself to do wha she might have done in her teenshate the man. She knew it wasn't his fault either. It wasn't even th fault of the news services. She hac only to be herself, if she could evei find out what that really meant had the properties of a night mare. A news service notifie( Helen that she had been awarded a week's holiday in New Madridwith the sailor from the stars. Helen refused. Then he refused too, and he was a little too prompt for her liking, ghe became curious about him. Two weeks passed, and in the office of the news service a treasurer brought two slips of paper to the director. They were the vouchers for Helen America and Mr. Gray-no-more to obtain the utmost in preferential luxury at New Madrid. The treasurer said, "These have been issued and registered as gifts with the Instrumentality, sir. Should they be canceled?" The executive of the news service had his fill of stories that day, and he felt humane. On an impulse he commanded the treasurer, "Give those tickets to them again. No publicity. We'll keep out of it. If they don't want us, they don't have to have us. Push it along. That's all. Go." The tickets went back out to rielen. She had made the highest record ever reported at the university and she needed a rest. When the news service woman gave her the ticket, she said, "Is this a trick?" Assured that it was not, she then asked, "Is that man coming?" She couldn't say "the sailor" -- it sounded too much like the way people had always talked about herself -- and she honestly didn't remember his other name at the moment. The woman did not know. "Do I have to see him?" said Helen. "No," said the woman. "The gift is unconditional." Helen laughed, almost grimly. "All right. I'll take it and say thanks. But one picturemaker -- mind you, just one -- and I walk out Or I may walk out for no reason at all. Is that all right?" It was. Four days later Helen was in the pleasure world of New Madrid, and a master of the dances was presenting her to an odd, intense old man whose hair was black. "Junior Scientist Helen America -- Sailor of the Stars Mr. Grayno-more." He looked at them shrewdly and smiled a kindly, experienced smile. He added the empty phrase of his profession, "I have had the honor and I withdraw." They were alone together on the edge of the dining room. The sailor looked at her ve sharply indeed and then said, "Who are you? Are you somebody I have already met? Should I remember you? There are too many people here on Earth. What do we do next? What are we supposed to do? Would you like to sit down?" Helen said one "Yes" to all those questions and never dreamed that the single yes would be articulated by hundreds of great actresses, each one in the actress's own speFx f cial way, across the centuries to come. They did sit down. How the rest of it happened, neither one was ever quite sure. HE had had to quiet him almost  as though he were a hurt person in the House of Recovery. She explained the dishes to him, and when he still could not choose, she gave the robot selections for him. She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremony of eating which everyone knows, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer. At last he relaxed and did not look so old. Momentarily forgetting the thousand times she had been asked silly questions herself, she asked him, "Why did you become a sailor?" He stared at her in open-eyed inquiry, as though she had spoken to him in an unknown language and expected a reply. Finally he mumbled the answer, "Are you -- you, too -- saying that -- that I shouldn't have done it?" Her hand went to her mouth in instant apology. "No, no, no. You see, I myself have put in to be a sailor." He looked at her, his young-old eyes open wide. He did not stare, but merely seemed to be trying to understand words, each one of which he could comprehend indi, vidually but which in sum amounted to sheer madness. She did not turn away from his look, odd though it was. Once again, she had the chance to note the indescribable peculiarity of this man who had managed enormous sails out in the blind, empty black between untwinkling stars. He was young as a boy. The hair i which gave him his name was glossy black. His beard must have i been removed pernaanently, be- cause his skin was like that of a middle-aged woman -- well-kept, pleasant, but showing the unmistakable wrinkles of age and betraying no sign of normal stubble. The skin had age without experi-i ence. The muscles had grown older, but they did not show how the person had grown. Helen had learned to be an acute observer of people as her mother took up with one fanatic after another; she knew that people carry their secret biographies written in the muscles of their faces, and that a stranger passing on the street tells us (whether he wishes to or not) all his inmost intimacies. If we but look sharply enough, and in the right light, we know whether fear or hope or amusement has tallied the hours of his days, we divine the sources and outcome of his most secret sensuous pleasures, we catch the dim but persistent reflections of those other people who have left the imprints of their personality on him in turn. All this was absent from Mr. Gray-no-more. mata of age; he had growth without the normal markings of growth; he had lived without living, in a time and world in which most people stayed yoxmg while living too much. He was the uttermost opposite to her mother that Helen had ever seen, and with a pang of undirected apprehension Helen realized that this man meant a great deal to her futme life, whether she wished him to or not. She saw in him a young bachelor, prematurely old, a man whose love had been given to emptiness and horror, not to the tangible rewards and disappointments of human life. He had had all space for his mistress, and space had used him harshly. Still young, he was old; already old, he was young. The mixture was one which she knew that she had never seen before, and which she suspected that no one else had ever seen, either. He had in the beginning of life the grief, compassion, and wisdom which most people find only at the end. It was he who broke the silence. "You did say -- didn't jjou? -- that you yoiuelf had put in to be a sailor?" Even to herself, her answ sounded silly and girlish. "I'm the first woman ever to qualify with the necessary scientific subjects while still young enough to pass the physical..." "You must be an unusual girl," said he mildly. Helen realized, with a thrill, a sweet and bitterly real hope that' this young-old man from the stars' had never heard of the "perfect child" who had been laughed at in the moments of being born, the girl who had all America for a father, who was famous and unusual and alone so terribly much so that she could not even imagine being ordinary, happy, decent, or simple. She thought to herself. It would take a wise freak who sails in from the stars to overlook who I am, but to him she simply said, "It's no use talking about being 'unusual.' I'm tired of this Earth and since I don't have to die to leave it, I think I would like to sail to the stars. I've got less to lose than you may think..." She was about to tell him about Mona Muggeridge, but she stopped in time. The compassionate gray eyes were upon her, and at this point it was he, not she, who was in control of the situation. She looked at the eyes themselves. They had stayed open for forty years, in the blackness near to pitch darkness of the tiny cabin. TTie dim dials had shone like blazing suns upon his tired retinas before he was able to turn his eyes away. From time to time he had looked out at the black nothing to see the silhouettes of his dials, almost blackness against total blackness, as the miles of their sweep sucked up the push of light itself and accelerated him and his frozen cargo at almost immeasurable speeds across an ocean of unfathomable silence. Yet what he had done, she had asked to do. The stare of his gray eyes yielded to a smile of his lips. In that young-old face, masculine in structure and feminine in texture, the smile had a connotation of tremendous kindness. She felt singularly much like weeping when she saw him smile in that particular way at her. Was that what people learned between the stars? To care for other people very much indeed and to spring upon them only to love and not to devour? TN a measured voice he said, "I believe you. You're the first one that I have believed. All these people have said that they wanted to be sailors too, even when they looked at me. They could not know what it means, but they said it anyhow, and I hated them for saying it. You, though -- perhaps you will sail among the stars, but I hope that you will not" As though waking from a dream, he looked around the luxurious room, with the gilt-and-enamel robot-waiters standing aside with negligent elegance. They were designed to be always present and never obtrusive: TTiis was a difficult esthetic effect to achieve, but their designer had achieved it. The rest of the evening moved with the inevitability of good music. He went with her to the forever-lonely beach which the architects of New Madrid had built beside the hotel. They talked a little, they looked at each other, and they made love with an affirmative certainty which seemed outside themselves. He was very tender, and he did not realize that in a genetically sophisticated society, he was the first lover she had ever wanted or had ever had. (How could the daughter of Mona Muggeridge want a lover or a mate or child?) On the next afternoon, she exercised the freedom of her time and asked him to marry her. They had gone back to their private beach, which, through miracles of ultrafine mini-weather adjustment, brought a Pol#mesian afternoon to the high, chilly plateau of central Spain. She asked him, she did, to marry her, and he had refused, as tenderly and as kindly as a boy of twenty aged sixty can refuse a girl of eighteen. She did not press him; they continued the love affair. They sat on the artificial sand of the artificial beach and dabbled their toes in the man-warmed water of the ocean. Then they lay down against an artificial sand dime which hid New Madrid from view. "Tell me," Helen said, "may I ask again, why did you become a sailor?" "Not so easily answered," he said. "Adventure, maybe, at least in part. And I wanted to see Earth. Couldn't afford to come in a pod. Now -- well, IVe enough to keep me the rest of my life. I can go back to New Earth as a passenger in a month instead of forty years -- be frozen in no more time than the wink of an eye, put in my adiabatic pod, linked to the next sailing ship, and wake up home again while some other fool does the sailing." Helen nodded. She did not bother to tell him that she knew all this. "Out where you sail among the stars," she said, "can you tell me -- can you possibly tell me anjrthing of what it's like out there?" His face looked inward on his soul and afterward his voice came as from an immense distance. "There are moments -- or is it weeks? You can't really tell in the sail ship -- when it seems -- worth while. You feel -- your nerve endings reach out imtil they touch the stars. You feel enormous." her. "It's trite to say, of course, but you're never the same again. I don't mean just the obvious phy. sical thing, but -- you find yourself -- or maybe you lose yourself. That's why," he continued, gesturing toward New Madrid, out of sight behind the sand dune, "I can't stand this. New Earth -- well, it's like Earth must have been in the old days, I guess. There's something fresh about it. Here..." "I know," said Helen America, and she did. The slightly decadent, slightly corrupt, too comfortable air of Earth must have had a stifling effect on the man from beyond the stars. "There," he said, "you won't believe this, but sometimes the ocean's actually too cold to swim in. We have music that doesn't come from machines, and pleasures that come from inside our own bodies without being put there. I have to get back to New Earth," he said. Helen said nothing for a little pain in her heart. "I -- I -- " she began. "I know!" he said, almost savagely turning on her. "But I can't take you! You're too young; you've got a life to live and I've thrown away a quarter of mine. No, that's not right. I didn't throw it away. I wouldn't trade it back because it's given me something inside that I never had before. And it's given me you-" "But if -- " she started again to argue. "No. Don't spoil it. I'm going next week to be frozen in my pod to wait the next sail ship. I can't stand much more of this and I might weaken. That would be a terrible mistake. But we have this time together now, and we have our separate lifetimes to remember in. Don't think of anything else. There's nothing else, nothing we can do." Helen did not tell him -- then or ever -- of the child they would now never have. She could have tied him to her with it, for he was an honorable man and would have married her, had she told him. But Helen, even then in her youth, wanted him to come to her of his own free will. To that marriage their child would have been an additional blessing. There was the other alternative, of course. She could have borne the child without naming the father. But she was no Mona Muggeridge. She knew too well the terror and loneliness of being a Helen America ever to be responsible for creating another. And for the course she had laid out, there was no place for a child. So, at the end of their time in New Madrid, she let him say a real good-by. Wordless and without tears, she left. Then she went up to an arctic city, a pleasure city where such carelessnesses are known to happen, and a confidential medical service eliminated the unborn child. Then she went back to Cambridge and confirmed her place as the first woman to sail a ship to the stars. V I "HE Presiding Lord of the Instrumentality at that time was a man named Waite. Waite was not cruel; he had a job that left no room for anything but efficiency. His aide said to him, "This girl wants to sail a ship to New Earth. Are you going to let her?" 'Why not?" said Waite. "If she fails, we will find out something eighty years from now, when the ship comes back. Don't give fier any convicts, though. Convicts are too valuable as settlers to be sent on a gamble. Give her fartatics. Don't you have twenty or thirty thousand who are waiting?" "Yes, sir, twenty-six thousand two hundred. Not counting recent additions." "Very well," said the Lord of the Instrumentality, "give her the whole lot of them and assign her that new ship. Have we named it?" "No, sir," said the aide. "Name it." The aide looked blank. A contemptuous wise smile crossed the face of the senior bureaucrat He said, "All right, thenname it the Soul -- and let the Soul fly to the stars. And let Helen America be an angel if she wants to. Poor thing, she hasn't had much of a life on this Earth, not the way she was bom and brought up. And it's no use to try and reform her, to transform her personality, when it's a lively, rich personality. It does not do any good. We don't have to punish her for being herself. Let her go. Let her have what she wants." Waite sat up and stared at his aide and then repeated very firmly: "Let her have what she wants -- but only if she qualifies." VI The doctors and the experts tried to warn her against it. One technician said: "Don't you realize what this is going to mean? Forty years will pour out of your life in a single month. You leave here a girl. You will get there a woman of sixty. There will be about thirty thousand pods stnmg on sixteen lines behind you, and you will have the control cabin to live in. We will give you as many robots as you need, probably a dozen. You will have a main sail and a foresail and you will have to keep the two of them." "I know. I have read the book," said Helen America. "And I sail the ship with lit, and if the infra, red touches that sail, I go. If I get radio interference, I pull the sails in. And if the sails fail, I wait as i long as I live."  The technician looked a little ' cross. "There is no call for you to get tragic about it Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can do it without destroying thirty thousand other people or wasting a large amount of Earth cargo and shipping. You can drown right here, or jump into a volcano, or get into an accident. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don't quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds. "Now this is the way the foresail works. That sail will be twenty thousand miles at the wide part It tapers down and the total length will be just imder # miles. It will be retracted or extended by small servo-robots. The servo-robots are radio-controlled. You had better use your radio sparingly, because these batteries have to last forty years. They have got to keep you alive." "Yes, sir," said Helen America very contritely. "You've got to remember what your job is. You're going because a sailor takes a lot less weight than a machine. There is no all-purpose computer built that weighs as little as you do. You go simply because you are expendable. Anyone who goes out to the stars takes one chance in three of never getting there. But you are not going because you are a leader. You are going because you are young, because you qualify intellectually and academically -- because your nerves are good. You understand that?" "Yes, sir." "Any questions?" "No, sir." "Furthermore, you are going because you'll make the trip in forty years. If we send automatic devices and have them manage the sails, they would get there -- possibly. But it would take them a hundred years or more, and by that time the adiabatic p)od would have spoiled, most of the human cargo would not be fit for revival, and the leakage of heat would be enough to ruin the entire expedition. So remember that the tragedy and the trouble you face is mostly work. Work, and that's all it is. That is your big job." Helen smiled. She was a short girl with rich dark hair, brown eyes, and very pronounced eyebrows, but when Helen smiled she looked almost like a child again, and a rather charming one. She said: "My job is work. I understand that, sir." N the preparation area, the  make-ready was fast but not hurried. Twice the technicians urged her to take a holiday before she reported for final training. She did not accept their advice. She wanted to go forth; she knew that they knew she wanted to leave Earth forever, and she also knew they knew she was not merely her mother's daughter. She was trying, somehow, to be herself. She knew the world did not believe, but the world did not matter. The third time they suggested a vacation, the suggestion was mandatory. She had a gloomy two months which she ended up enjoying a little bit on the wonderful islands of the Hesperides, islands which were raised when the weight of the earthports caused a new group of small archipelagoes to form below Bermuda. She reported back, fit, healthy, and ready to go. The senior medical officer was very blunt. "Do you really know what we are going to do to you? We are going to make you live forty years out of your life in one month." She nodded, and he went on, "Now to give you those forty years we've got to slow down your bodily processes. After all, the sheer biological task of breathing forty years' worth of air in one month involves a factor of about five hundred to one. No lungs could stand it. Your body must circulate water. It must take in food. Most of this is going to be protein. There will be some kind of a hydrate. You'll need vitamins. "Now, what we are going to do is slow the brain down, very much indeed, so that the brain will be working at about that five-hundredto-one ratio. We don't want you incapable of working. Somebody has to manage the sails. "Therefore, if you hesitate or start to think, a thought or two is going to take several weeks. Meanwhile your body can be slowed down some. But the different parts can't be slowed down at the same rate. Water, for example, we brought down to about eighty to one, food to about three hundred to one. "You won't have time to drink forty years' worth of water. We circulate it, get it through, purify it, and get it back in your system, unless you break your link-up. "So what you face is a month of being absolutely wide awake, on an operating table and being operated on without anesthetic, while doing some of the hardest work that mankind has ever found." again when he paused, and again he continued. "You'll have to take observations. You'll have to watch your lines with the pods of people and cargo behind you. You'll have to adjust the sails. If there is anybody surviving at your destination point, they will come out and meet you. "At least that happens most of the times. "I am not going to assiue you you will get the ship in, and if they don't meet you, take an orbit beyond the furthest planet and either let yourself die or try to save yourself. You can't get thirty thousand people down on a planet singlehandedly. "Meanwhile, though, you've got a real job. We are going to have to build these controls right into your body. We'll start by putting valves in your chest arteries. Then we catheter ize you. We are going to make an artificial colostomy that will go forward here, just in front of your hip joint. Your water intake has a certain psychological value, so that about one five-himdredth of your water we are going to leave you to, drink out of a cup. The rest of it is going to go directly into your blood stream. Again about a tenth of your food will go that way. You understand that?" "You mean," said Helen, "I eat one-tenth, and the rest goes in intravenously?" "That's right," said the medical technician. "We will pump it into you. The concentrates are there. The reconstituter is there. Now these lines have a double connection. One set of connections runs into the maintenance machine. That will become the logistic support for your body. And these lines are the umbilical cord for a human being alone among the stars. They are your life. "If they should break or if you should fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over: that's the pack on your back. "On Earth, it weighs as much as you do. You have already been drilled with the model pack. You know how easy it is to handle in space. That'll keep you going for a subjective period of about two hours. No one has ever worked out a clock yet that would match the human mind, so, instead of giving you a clock, we are giving you an odometer attached to your own pulse and we mark it off in grades. If you watch it in terms of tenthousands of pulse beats, you may get some information out of it. I don't know what kind of information, but you may find it helpful somehow." Helen nodded. He looked at her sharply and then turned back to his tools, picking up a shining needle with a disk on the end. "Now, let's get back to this. We are going to have to get right into your mind. That is a chemical too." you were not going to operate on my head." "Just the needle. That's the only way we can get to the mind. Slow it down enough so that you will have this subjective mind operating at a rate that will make the forty years pass in a month." He smiled grimly, but the grimness changed to momentary tenderness as he took in her brave, obstinate stance, her girlish, admirable, pitiable determination. "I won't argue it," she said. "This is as bad -- and as good -- as a marriage, and the stars are my bridegroom." The image of the sailor went across her mind, but sh said nothing of him. The technician went on, "We have already built in psychotic elements. You'll have to be insane to manage the sails and to survive utterly alone and be out there even a month. And the trouble is, in that month you are going to know it's really forty years. There is not a mirror in the place, but you'll probably find shiny surfaces to look at yourself. "You will see yourself aging, every time you slow down to look. I don't know what the problem is going to be on that score. It's been bad enough on men. "Your hair problem is going to be easier than men's. With the sailors we sent out, we simply had to kill all the hair roots. Otherwise the men would have been swamped in their own beards. And a tremendous amoimt of the nutrient would be wasted if it went into raising of hair on the face. I think what we will do is inhibit hair on the top of your head. Whether it comes out the same color or not is something you will find for yourself later. Did you ever happen to meet the sailor who came in?" The doctor knew she had. He did not know that it was the sailor from beyond the stars who called her. Helen managed to remain composed as she smiled at him to say: "Your technician planted a new scalp. The hair came out black and he got the nickname of Mr. Gray-no-more." "If you are ready next Tuesday, we'll be ready too. Do you think you can possibly make it by then, my lady?" Helen felt odd seeing this old, serious man refer to her as "lady," but she knew he was paying respect to a profession and not just to an individual. "Tuesday is time enough." She felt complimented that he was oldfashioned enough to know the ancient names of the days of the week and to use them. That was a sign that he had not only learned the essentials at the university but that he had picked up the elegant inconsequentials as well. ' I "WO weeks later was twentyone years later by the chronometers in the cabin. Helen turned for the ten-thousandth-times-tenthousand time to scan the sails. Her back ached with a violent throb. She could feel the steady roar of her heart like a fast vibrator as it ticked against the time-span of her awareness. She could look down at the meter on her wrist and see the hands on the dials indicate tens of thousands of pulses very slowly. She heard the steady whistle of air in her throat as her lungs seemed shuddering with sheer speed. And she felt the throbbing pain of a large tube feeding water directly into her neck. Her abdomen felt as though someone had built a fire there. The evacuation tube operated automatically, but it burned as if a coal had been held to her skin, and a catheter, which connected her bladder to another tube, stung as savagely as the prod of a scaldinghot needle. Her head ached and her vision blurred. But she could still see the instruments and she still could watch the sails. Now and then she could glimpse, faint as a tracery of dust, the immense skein of people and cargo that lay behind the sails. She could not sit down. The only way that she could be comfortable was to lean against the instrument panel, her lower ribs against the panel, her tired forehead against the meters. Once she rested that way and realized that it was two and a half months before she got up. She knew that rest had no meaning, and she could see her face moving, a distorted image of her own face growing old in the reflections from the glass face of the "apparent weight" dial. She could look at her arms with blurring vision, note the skin tightening, loosening and tightening again as changes in temperatures affected it. She looked out one more time at the sails and decided to take in the foresail. Wearily she dragged herself over the control panel with a servo-robot She selected the right control and opened it for a week or so. She waited there, her heart buzzing, her throat whistling air. Finally she checked to see if the control really had been the right one, pushed again, and nothing happened. She pushed a third time. There was no response. Now she went back to the master panel, re-read, checked the light direction, found a certain amount of infra-red pressure which she should have been picking up. The sails had very gradually risen to something not far from the speed of light itself because they moved fast with the one side dulled; the pods behind, sealed against time and eternity, swam obediently in an almost perfect weightlessness. Her reading had been correct The sail was wrong. She went back to the emergency panel and pressed. Nothing happened. HE broke out a repair robot and sent it out to effect repairs, pimching the papers as rapidly as she could, to give instructions. The robot went out and an instant (three days) later it replied. The panel on the repair robot rang forth, "Does not conform." She sent a second repair robot. That had no effect either. She sent a third, the last. Three bright lights. "Does not conform" started at her. She moved the servo-robots to the other side of the sails and pulled hard. The sail was still not at the right angle. She stood there wearied and lost in space, and she prayed. She thought she had prayed very fervently and she hoped that she would get an answer to her prayer. It did not work out that way. She was bewildered, alone. There was no sun. There was nothing except the tiny cabin and herself, more alone than any woman had ever been before. She sensed the thrill and ripple of her muscles as they went through days of adjustment while her mind noticed only the matter of minutes. She leaned forward, forced herself not to relax, and finally she remembered that one of the official busybodies had included a weapon. What she would use a weapon for, she did not know. It pointed. It had a range of two hundred thousand miles. The target could be selected automatically. She got down on her knees trailing the abdominal tube and the feeding tube and the catheter tubes and the helmet wires, each one running back to the panel. She crawled underneath the panel for the servorobots and she pulled out a written manual. She finally found the right frequency for the weapon's controls. She set the weapon up and went to the window. At the last moment she thought, "Perhaps the fools are going to make me shoot the window out. It XY ought to have been designed to shoot through the window without hurting it. That's the way they should have done it." She wondered about the matter for a week or two. Just before she fired, she turned. There, next to her, stood her sailor from the stars, Mr. Gray-no-more. He said : "It won't work that way." He stood clear and handsome, the way she had seen him in New Madrid. He had no tubes, he did not tremble, she could see the normal rise and fall of his chest as he took one breath every hour or so. One part of her mind knew that he was a hallucination. Another part of her mind believed that he was real. She was mad, and she was very happy to be mad at this time, and she let the hallucination give her advice. She re-set the gun so that it would fire through the cabin wall, and it fired a low charge at the repair mechanism out beyond the distorted and immovable sail. The low charge did the trick. The interference had been something beyond all technical anticipation. The weapon had cleaned out the forever-unidentifiable obstruction, leaving the servo-robots free to attack their tasks like a tribe of maddened ants. They worked again. They had had defenses built in against the minor impediments of space. All of them scurried and skipped about With a sense of bewilderment close to religion, she perceived the wind of starlight blowing against the immense sails. The sails snapped into position. She got a momentary touch of gravity as she sensed a little weight. The Soul was back on her course. IX ffTT'S a girl," they said to him on New Earth. "It's a girl. She must have been eighteen or twenty when she left Earth." Mr. Gray-no-more did not believe it. But he went to the hospital and there in the hospital he saw Helen America. "Here I am, sailor," said she. "I sailed too." Her face was white as chalk, her expression that of a girl of about twenty, body that of a well-preserved woman of sixty. As for him, he had not changed again, since he had returned home inside a pod. His eyes narrowed, and then, in a sudden reversal of roles, it was he who was kneeling beside her bed and covering her hands with his tears. Half-coherently, he babbled at her : "I ran away from you because I loved you so. I came back here where you would never follow, or if you did follow, you'd still be a young woman, and I'd still be too old. But you sailed here and you wanted me." The nurse of New Earth did not know about the rules which should be applied to sailors from the stars. Very quietly she went out of the room. But she was a practical woman. She called a friend of hers at the news service and said: "If you get over here fast, you can get the scoop on Helen America and. Mr. Gray-no-more. They just met like that and fell in love." The nurse did not know that they had foresworn a love on Earth. The nurse did not know that Helen America had made a lonely trip with an icy purpose, and the nurse did not know that the crazy image of Mr. Gray-no-more, the sailor himself, had stood beside Helen twenty years out from nothing-atall in the depth and blackness of space between the stars. X T he little girl had grown up, had married, and now had a little girl of her own. The mother was imchanged, but the spieltier was very, very old. It had outlived all its marvelous tricks of adaptability, and for some years had stayed frozen in the role of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed girl doll. Out of sentimental sense of the fitness of things, she had dressed the spieltier in a bright blue jumper with matching panties. The little animal creprt; softly across the floor on its tiny human hands, using its knees for hind feet. The mock-hiunan face looked up blindly and squeaked for milk. The young mother said, "Mom, you ought to get rid of that thing. It's all used up and it looks horrible with your nice period furniture." "I thought you loved it," said the older woman. "It was cute when I was a child, but I'm not a child any more, and it doesn't even work." The spieltier had struggled to its feet and clutched its mistress's ankle. The older woman took it away gently, and put down a saucer of milk and a cup the size of a thimble. The spieltier tried to courtsey, as it had been motivated to do at the beginning, slipped, fell, and whimpered. The mother righted it and the little old animaltoy began dipping milk with its thimble and sucking the milk into its tiny, toothless old mouth. "You remember. Mom -- " said the younger woman, and stopped. "Remember what, dear?" "You told me about Helen America and Mr. Gray-no-more when that was brand-new." "Yes, darling, maybe I did." "You didn't tell me everything," said the younger woman accusingly. "Of course not. You were a child." "But it was awful. Those messy people, and the horrible way sailors lived. I don't see how you idealized it and called it a romance -- " "But it was. It is." "Romance, my foot," said the daughter. "It's as bad as you and the worn-out spieltier." She pointed at the tiny, living, aged doll who had fallen asleep beside its milk. "I think it's horrible. You ought to get rid of it. And the worlds ought to get rid of sailors." "Don't be harsh, darling," said the mother. "Don't be a sentimental old slob," said the daughter. "Perhaps we are," said the mother with a little loving sort of laxh. Unobtrusively, she put the sleeping spieltier on a padded chair where it would not be stepped on or hurt. Vk m Adamljhihade of Mr -- very limally T hree studentarwere expelled for ble dancer to"ieesert Institute, Lee WJjifbrns Gilbert and John TJm. # Director did not likrfany of He liked me, Morris.lt'wasfestooge, his squirming straii his jok( "We of meai such as bi was useful for calculus is a method g uncircular curves, T barrels... but I fear Morris has allowed that thought to absorb him, hig, hig, hig, hig." That was one of Professor David Adam Smith's favorites. Or: "If you will visit me this afternoon, Morris, I will give you personal tuition in astrophysics... beginning with the more complicated parts of the alphabet, hig, hig, hig." But he owned the Desert Institute. He was the only living authority on geology, terrestrial or extraplanetary, and there was a. waiting list of students... On their last afternoon, I was sent with the disgraced three on a specimen-collecting tour of the desert. It was my routine job but a real disgrace to them. I often thought the only reason David Adam Smith allowed me to stay gj, as a student, apart from offering jjjai a target for sneering at, was jjecause of my muscles. I could jjandle the long specimen trailer and heave boulders about more easily than the others. "Do not sneer at Morris, gentlemen. Science tells us brain size is related to surface area. You should expect in Morris a potentially great brain therefore... if hJorris were not devoted to obstructing science, hig, hig, hig." The other three, Lee, Burns and John, were about six feet tall, slim, dark haired and handsome. But we were collecting specimens, not running for Miss Earth #. My extra seven inches in height extends more or less proportionately in my reach and thickness of shoulder. Anyway, they were depressed at being expelled, so I let them sit in the shade of the trailer while I set up the specimen plates and power unit, minima stand here, maxima stand there, controls on the sand beside them. "I don't expect you've done this elementary stuff for a couple of years," I said. "So... don't walk on the plates and don't touch the dial or the red and blue buttons." "Hell, Morry, we know." "Okay, okay. Only it's more tricky than it looks." HE whole desert belonged to David Adam Smith, which showed his political pull. Who else on Earth was allowed a whole room to themselves, even -- except maybe the Planetary Salvager, and the heads of the Material Recovery subdivisions and top Government people like that. But David Adam Smith had to have a complete desert. He ruled from the Holiday Probable centers of Reno to the gambling computers of Las Vegas, where the bubble dancer had come from. I put a single grain of sand on the minima plate and stood clear. "Press the blue button. Bums." Burns wasn't even listening. "Burns," I repeated. "Hell, Morry, who cares about these damned specimens? How would you like to be expelled? No classification, no chance of a job, spend the rest of your life in a compulsory Holiday Reservation." "How does he get away with it," muttered Lee, looking around at the open desert and the bare hills on the skyline. "Tomorrow we'll be back in a ten-to-a-room bachelor tmit in the Nebraska suburbs, with a fine view of continuous rooftops to the Gulf, the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, and the nearest geological specimen at the bottom of the community hydroponic tanks. And here he is -- the only David Adam Smith, the one original -- with a desert of his own. It makes me sick." John Thay shook his head. "That's just emotional reaction, Lee. We were all busting ourselves to be admitted, to be one of the select three hundred. Just because we're being slung out doesn't mean the whole Desert Institute is no good. You know perfectly well why he has the place reserved." "I know his excuse. I can just see him, flapping his cloak at the Salvagers and croaking, I don't care what you want to do with the ground, gentlemen. I must have open spaces to live in. Am I or am I not the only leading scientist of importance who has retained his sanity and continued to produce discoveries of unique value? Where pole, and so on and so on? Lost. Missing. Probably in a sodden stupor in one of the South American City-States. I tell you, science cannot produce anything in laboratories. Science must have room to breathe!' " It was a stock student's speech. I waited for the other two to round it off. "And why. Professor Smith," said Burns imitating a heavy official voice, "have you alone retained your faculties?" "Because, dear sir," Lee answered in David Adam Smith's thin voice, "I never admit more than three hundred students to the Institute. And because apparently I have the only mind capable of absorbing the weight of modern knowledge without much strain." "You do not dislike yourse! Professor." "I give credit where it is due, dear sir." Lee stopped and contiu.i ued in his normal voice. "The trouble is, he does produce the stuff. He's supposed to be a geologist, but there hasn't been an in. vention for the last decade that he didn't master-mind." "Pity he can't think of some way of speeding up the emigration," John said. "If only we could leave Earth!" the blue button myself. The grain of sand on the minima plate flicked out of our time-space: and reappeared on the maxima plate ten times larger. I picked it up and carried it back to the mini. ma plate, repeated the process and went on until the grain of quartz was more than four feet long. "Why don't you do it in one jump instead of walking backwards and forwards?" John Thay asked "Can't," I said. "It's got to be a perfect model of the crystal lattice of quartz. If you calibrate it for too big a jump in size it gets distorted No one knows why." "You don't tell us, Morry. Hell, the marvel is that it works at alL" I threw the four-foot-long crystal over to John and he put it in the trailer, after nearly losing it on the slight breeze. It is difficult to disbelieve your eyes and remember Vtb! W ve: #ft  that sn overblown specimen has yery little more than its original weight. The grain of quartz was merely expanded. Its molecular gild nuclear structure stretched out in a magnified volume of space. It as almost all holes, an open arrangement of spaces between the force points of its matter; a direct magnification of the original without any other change. We used these specimens in the Desert Institute because everyone could see the details of the crystal lattice for themselves, instead of having to use an electron microscope. It removed the practical difficulties of the principle of indeterminacy, David Adam Smith said. If light was too coarse to let him see the contents of a nucleus, he was damned well going to bring the nucleus up to a size where he could see it. And so he did, eventually, with this apparatus. I was one of the very few students ever allowed to touch the apparatus, probably because he thought I was too dumb to do anything with it. There were several sets but they never left the Institute. The world was not ready for them, he said. There was quite a lot of stuff that David Adam Smith kept to himself in the Institute. Not because the world was unready, but simply because he didn't think he would get itiaximum applause at that particular time. He only produced inventions at the right theatrical moment David Adam Smith was quite a ham. I was not supposed to tell anyone how this apparatus worked, but the three of them sitting facing me in the shade were not going anywhere after this. I didn't think it mattered. If you are not chosen at birth for emigration within the System, and if you also fail at the Institute or one of the dormitory-xmiversities, you're just an extra unit of overpopulation. something to think about instead of brooding over the bubble dancer and their expulsion. "Of course it works," I said. "It's only Einstein with a twist." The three of them laughed. "No, really. You know the clocks that go out on every stellar-reporter and come back to the Institute with dope on the composition of this and that place in the Galaxy? You were advanced students, you must have sent them off every day, well, wasn't the clock always slow when it returned?" "Against the dispatching room clock, of course it was," John agreed. "And if there was enough spare material left on Earth to send people apart from emigrants, a man would be younger than his twin when he returned." "Well," I said, "that's what happens here, except that a specimen goes out off a minima plate and comes back onto the maxima plate so fast that the time component is negligible. All that happens is that it gets moved outside the local space-time reference. It doesn't exactly go anywhere, I suppose. But instead of consuming less time on this shift out and in again, the time stays constant and it reappears occupying more space. And there you are, with a magnified version of the original." There was a silence. "Have you ever put anything living on the plate, Morry?" I blushed. John had a knack of uncovering safely hidden facts. "Well, I did make a small mistake once. A grasshopper got on the plate when I wasn't looking. I was magnifying an alumino-silicate and a few seconds after I got the specimen up to size, the grasshopper appeared in the middle of it. I had to reverse the specimen back to get it out. Meant picking the crystal off the plate fast, before the insect came through,, but I managed it." 'Was it hurt?" "The grasshopper? No. A little stunned, maybe. But perfectly well." I went back to the plates and started another quartz grain. John, Lee and Burns sat and gabbled to each other. "If the crystal lattice was expanded to start with..." "Relative to its size, the crystal would be full of breathing holes...  "You could take in nutrient through a lattice as big as that It would be relatively porous..." "... molecular pressure..." ! "... shift that battery and move: the galvanometer..." "... take out most of the instru.ij ments and fake up the records from the previous trip..." "If we weren't being expelled  this evening," said John.  They looked at me. "Are you sure about the grass- hopper, Morry?" Bums asked. j I nodded. put a half-inch expanded grain on the minima plate, when Lee White walked onto the maxima and Burns pressed the red button There was a flicker and White appeared, half an inch tall, in the middle of the expanded quartz crystal on the minima plate. He was able to move his arms. He seemed to be saying something that, amused him. I knocked Burns away from the controls, pressed the blue button, whisked the emprty crystal off the maxima plate as it came through and only just got it out of the way before Lee White reappeared on the maxima plate, his normal size again. 'Well, it works," he said. "You crazy?" I yelled at him. "Just think," Burns said, sitting up and holding his jaw. "The numjjgjof times we've watched this felja pressing his red and blue buttons, and dismissed it as elementary atuff for beginners." They calmed me down and apologized for doing a thing like that. Hell, I would have been expelled too if I had gone back to the Institute with one of them missing. Pavid Adam Smith had a very elaborate hearing aid, but it never enabled him to hear excuses. Students only on Institute property, no readmittance for expelled students -- and certainly no expelled students locked up in a lab specimen. I suppose they would have thought it funny to sit in a crystal and make faces at David Adam Smith. They were wild, all three of them, and had been since they were admitted. I had no desire to be expelled with them. "You're not going to be expelled, Morry. Not if you do as we ask." "And if you don't," Burns said, still rubbing his jaw, "we'll tell the dear Director that you explained how his specimen collector works." "Then you'll be expelled with us, Morry." "He's going to get tired of having you around to laugh at one day, Morry. Then you'll be out anyway." "No use appealing to him with the broad theme, I suppose?" I look at John Thay. "What broad theme?" I asked. "Do you know what you've got here, Morry? You have the only mass escape route from Erth." "You're euphoricked!" "No, we're not. Do you know how many habitable planets we've listed? Over three hundred and fifty. We've sent stellar-reporters out and back every day and we know. They're listed back there at the Institute. We can reach them on the hsperspace transmitter, you knoA that. The only things that stop a mass emigration are David Adam Smith, the small size of the transmitter and the impossibility of building enough ships to carry everyone. The alloy supply only just covers the standard emigration program. But a stellar-reporter comes back with the data, is re-set and goes out again and comes back again. Don't you see, Morry?" "No," I said, "I don't." "Look. If you can use the same ship over and over again, the shortage of alloys doesn't matter provided you can build the first ship." "Okay," I said, "but a stellar-reporter isn't a ship, unless you're a two foot midget and..." I stopped. If Lee White could get in and out of a crystal safely -- and he seemed to be unchanged after having just done so -- he could travel inside a stellarreporter with the other delicate mechanisms. I had never been promoted to those classes, but I knew the stelr I )ar-reporters were baby rockets I that gouged specimens from the I planets they were sent to, measI ured, recorded, and brought themjelves back on the same tracker path. When they were not burned up in stars, that is. But if the three of them were not going to get in the way. "I may not be as bright as you three," I said. "But even I can see you may have something here. If you survive the journey. You don't need to threaten me about telling you how this specimen collector works. I'll help anyway." We prepared the specimens I sent out to get, then experimented. I could not get used to seeing each of them inside an expanded grain of sand, but the pore structure and the crystal lattice itself seemed to leave them room to breathe. They could even move about, within small limits. The crystal had to be expanded up to a reasonable size before it was safe to be transmitted into it, for an unexpanded quartz crystal would be immediate suffocation. The force vortices of the quartz nuclei, even when expanded, seemed to have no effect on a living body. It was a solid solution, as John said. "The ideal," he added, "would be for us to coach Morry up to the stellar-reporter class levels. But I think we had better start meanwhile. No sense wasting time." "I think so, too," I said. desert, I unpacked the apparatus so they could examine it. They thought they could make sets without much difficulty. The apparatus was largely an electrically inhibited accelerator, they said. I knew the desert quite well, including the areas where the Institute radar bovmdary fogged out and where people could crawl in a few hundred yards without being detected. "That's all we need," Bums said. "If we plant another set of plates and power controls out there, and Morry keeps burying prepared crystals in advance, he can meet us there, do the conversion and bring each of us in in a half-inch crystal in his pocket." "Then what?" I asked. 'Then you hand us over to little Dimples. She'll get us into the right stellar-reporters together with a reduced set of plates and controls so that we can reconvert on the planet. We can travel in the specimen grabber. That will dump us out immediately the stellar-reporter lands." I knew little Dimples by sight. She was a plump redheaded student in their class. "You can't all go," I said. "Why not?" "Because I can't leave the Institute grounds. Anyway, where are you going to collect the other emigrants from, once you're out on a habitable planet at the back end of the Galaxy?" "He's right." We talked it out as I drove the trailer back to the Institute. Two of them would go immediately, each to a different planet on the list. They would return to report and be sent out again on the next stellar-reporter collecting data from that planet. Meanwhile, tiie thir d would be expelled. He would spend his compulsory Holiday selecting people for despatch. I would meet them at the boundary, convert them and carry the crystals in, for Dimples to insert into the stellar-reporters. They disappeared into the metallurgical labs as soon as I pulled up in the main courtyard. The Director missed them by David Adam Smith was a small man. With his cloak and large hearing aid and long thin face, he always made me think of a grounded bird. He came hopping over the tiles with short quick steps, peering at the specimens and at me. "Go out again tomorrow," he snapped. "I want some copper chloride specimens." "Would you like me to drive the bubble-dancer to transportation?" I asked. "Who? Oh, that girl. No, Mot' ris, I sent her away. You'll have to confine yourself to the curricul I fear,hig,hig,hig." That was odd because I thou I was about the only person in the Institute who could drive a land, vehicle. The roads outside were built over and everyone used jets. But I wouldn't have put it past him to have made the girl walk out o the desert, or to have sent her ij his own space-glass jet, dependij) on how he assessed her publicity l value. i I forgot about it while carting off the specimens. D imples was pretty, a trifle Venusian in her plumpnes but very intelligent. We met by the fountain in one of the smaller courtyards. John Thay, she told me, had volunteered to remain but I was to collect the other two from the boundary. 'They won't be too heavy win they. Morry?" "Three or four pounds. Living substance modifies in some way, or it may be the effect of being in solid solution in an expanded lattice." "But you can take them down to half an inch?" "I hope so." We arranged to meet just before the afternoon session the next day, so that Lee and Burns would be sent off in the afternoon stellar-reporters wiffi as little delay as possible. They were there at the boundary when I drove up the next day. Their converter worked. They were embedded neatly in the quartz crystals. I took them in, handed them to Dimples and that was that Neither Bums nor his stellar-reporter returned. We never knew what happened. Some of the little rockets did fail. Not many. But it was his misfortune to be in one that did not come back. Lee White did return safely, and was sent out again to his chosen planet We began to handle crystals regularly. John sent each emigrant with a miniature converter and controls, which I reduced on the edge of the desert and handed to Dimples, who inserted the crystal and the miniature converter into the next stellar-reporter due for Lee's planet. He was accumulating heaps of converters on his planet, but we could not risk leaving an emigrant helpless in his crystal when the stellar-reporter dumped it on the far planet. This way they rolled out together on arrival. We must have sent out two himdred emigrants of all kinds, for John was sending in a mixed selection to give the far planet every chance of a successful settlement, when Dimples met me at the foimtain and cried -- moistly -- all over my arm. "Oh, Morry," she wept "He's found out." "He," obviously, was David Adam Smith. "How do you know? What did he say?" "He hasn't said anything. But I saw one of the emigrants in his private lab! I shouldn't have been there, and he didn't know I was. But I saw him with one on his desk." "Sure about it?" "Absolutely certain. It looked like one of the men widi a beard we sent through about a month ago. Do you remember?" "But how did he get hold of him?" "I can't think. The stellar-reporters are going off all right. I thought they were coming back empty. I've had to let the rest of my class know, so that we could keep the records faked. We can't accoimt for two hundred stellar reporters all to the same planet, Morry, so I had to." I sent the next bunch of emigrants back with a mesesage to John Thay. He came the next afternoon and we met on the edge of the desert. I explained what had happened. Ts Dimples certain?" he asked. 'The man had a beard and was still in his crystal, the way we sent him off." John shrugged his shoulders. "Well, Morry, it can't be helped. There's only one course now. We must get hold of any crystals in the hands of David Adam Smith and send them off again -- unless you and Dimples and all of us want to end up in a satellite penitentiary. I expect he's preparing a case against us now. With his influence he can make it stick. No doubt about that." Illegal emigration, criminal use of the Institute property -- oh, from that angle there was enough to have us all put away in space all right. I had no doubt that David Adam Smith would do it, too. # # TV OW, his weakest point," John ' said, "is his vanity. That, as we know, is immense. Who else would run an Institute for three hundred students with himself as the sole Director? So, if we can arrange something to keep him occupied for a day or two, we may be able to break up into his private labs through the floor. I know for a fact the walls and ceilings M-e studded with alarms. But we thought of booby-trapping him when we were expelled, and the floor seemed the best way in." "And the diversion?" "You'd better take me in now in your pocket. I want to have a word with Dimples' class." He stepped on the maxima plate. I converted him down, buried the plates as usual and went back to the Institute. I gave the crystal to Dimples. "Meet me here in an hour," she said. An hour later, she was back. "Here, Morry. This is the power sheer from a shovel. There's one in every stellar-reporter for cutting rock specimens. John says you can come up from the cellar with that Do you know what he means?" "Yes. What's he doing with you?" "You'll see. Just come to our class area tomorrow as if you're delivering specimens. Fhit the crystal with John in it in your pocket and go and report to the Director exactly what you found in our area -- apart from the crystal, of course. You are to release John from that when you get to the cellar, immediately after David Adam Smith goes hurrying out to see what happened to us." She would not tell me any more than that. So when I found next morning that every stellar-reporter in the class area was missing and that Dimples and her entire class had gone with them, I did not have to act astonished. About a third of the Institute -- nearly a hundred students -- were in that class, doing nothing else but build a complete catalogue of the stars and their planetary systems by means of the stellar-reporters. And the whole lot had gone! David Adam Smith did not beG AL AX Y w ijeve me, either, until he saw for  jiimself. Then he sat down to work F rou the firing calibrators to find out where the stellar-reporters had tjeen sent. He waved me away. I went straight to the cellar beneath his private labs and reconverted John. He stepped off the maxima plate swiftly before the crystal could materialize him. "Hey," I said, "you've reversed it" "Naturally. It's a minor adjustment in the time-lag. Otherwise there would always have to be a second person present before you could get out of a crystal. We think that's what went wrong with poor Burns Gilbert. But we'll never know, I'm afraid. Let's get on." We set the power cutter to work on the cellar ceiling. It was only designed to ctit rock specimens small enough to be brought back in the stellar-reporters that carried it, but after two hours we had a hole right up into the private labs. I lifted John Thay and followed him up. There was a long row of crystals in a nutrient tank against one wall, arranged so that it could not be seen into from the windows. About fifty crystals were racked there and each had a six-inch figure in it I walked over to look at them with John. "These aren't the ones I sent!" John said. "They're not?" "Not one." We looked at the line in silence. I had gotten used to handling filled crystals, but the sight of all these human beings, miniature and watching us, making waving motions so far as they could within the lattice of their crystals -- this was unnerving. "No," John Thay repeated. "These are not ours. But that one there is the bubble dancer we were expelled for bringing here!" I looked at the little figure, pink against the clear quartz. "Who are the others?" I asked. John Thay walked briskly down the line scooping them up. "Never mind that for a moment, Morry. Just help me collect every one of these." I grabbed handfuls of crystals from the rack, stuffing them in my pockets, imtil between us we had every one. John took a last look to check. Then we dropped through the hole in the floor, down into the cellar. "I had an elaborate plan in mind," he said to me, as we hurried away. "But this changes everything. Is the converter in your truck working?" We shot out into the courtyard. "If you're in a hurry, John, why not use the one there in the cellar?" "Hell, you're rit This has shaken me so much I can hardly think. Quickly, let's get these crystals reconverted." We turned and rushed back to the cellar we had just left. I grabbed the power controls, John fed the crystals onto the minima plate, I pressed the button and fielded the staggering human being off the maxima plate before the enlarged crystal came following through. The crystals I kicked into the corner of the cellar. We did not talk, but concentrated on this rush conversion. When we had released the last man, there were fifty-three people in the cellar, including John, myself and the bubble dancer, who for some reason clung to me and kissed me. Most of the people were elderly men. Their clothes were tattered and stained by nutrient solution. Some were threadbare. Many had been wearing laboratory coats of ceramic fabric, which had chipped and fallen away in patches. They must have been in the crystals for a long time. I watched John bend anxiously over a group of elderly men. "Doctor Firnivale. Professor Marrpole. Doctor Hutk. And Williams." The men we had just released nodded in turn. "You, Dr. Firinvale," John said. "Did you give the advanced geophysics lectures?" "Through that crook's hearing aid," said the tattered man on the  cellar floor. "Yes, I did. I could hear the questions and I told him the answers. So did all these others here."  "Professor Marrpole, I recog.  nized you from a stereo-record you made on magnetic differentiation on small planets. Is that how David Adam Smith became the world authority when you disappeared?" "Yes," the man with the shaggy beard confirmed. "He caught me by asking me to stand on a plate for a live recording." "We have here, Morry, a careful collection of the leading specialists in the world. These people are the reason for David Adam Smith being able to outthink any fifty men. These are the fifty men he built his reputation with!" "I don't understand why you all helped him," I said. "Because he used to oscillate the crystals we were in, young man." "But now it's our turn!" "By heaven, wait imtil I meet that treacherous snake..." "I'm going to sue him for every credit he has!" "Who would care to join me in pulling him into small pieces surgically?" The babble in the cellar rose in volume and intensity. Under it all, the bubble-dancer was whispering jji my ear how grateful she was to great big me, and how that foul old goat had kept her for amusement just because she walked into his office to complain when he fired those nice boys... "He had to, I suppose," I said. "If you saw all these people in crystals." "Gentlemen, gentlemen," John roared. "Please!" There was silence. "Thank you. Which of you in fact thought of the stellar-reporters for accumulating data on other parts of the Galaxy?" "I did," said a tall thin man by the door. "Higgins is my name." Even I had heard of the astrophysicist inventor. "Had it occurred to you that with these crystals and your stellarreporters man could expand through the Galaxy?" "No. But now that you raise the point, of course we could!" "My friend, Morris here, and I and some colleagues have been doing so privately for some time..." John waited until the excited murmuring died away. "We thought David Adam Smith had discovered us. And that is really why we broke into his office... and found you all there. But I now think he knows nothing about it. Subject to your agreement, I suggest we should keep him in ignorance, lock him in a quartz crystal here and continue the private migration without involving him." "Why not bring him to justice?" asked Higgins. "Because I doubt if the government would believe their eyes. You have built David Adam Smith into a legend that wuld be difficult to break. Also because they would certainly take the Institute from anyone else, hold up the experiments and delay everything. And I have a lot of friends out there in space trying to establish a planetary colony." Marrpole laughed. "Really," he said, "we have been providing all the brain power of this Institute for so long, we may as well continue. Speaking for myself, gentlemen, a few years free from any restraint whatever are exactly what I now need. I am in favor." There was a general mutter of agreement. "Thank you," John said. "And now, if you will follow me, there are excellent showers and a whole class of spare rooms." "You stay with me," I said to the bubble-dancer. I led her through the Institute to the classrooms where Director David Adam Smith was still plotting the courses of the missing stellar-reporters. They would be back soon, but he was never to know that. I took him from behind and held him off the floor by his elbows, then twisted him round in the air so that he could see us both. "Yes," I said. "She's out And you're going in." He started to scream so I clipped him. Then I carried him out to his private labs. I made him imlock the door and unset the alarms, dumped him on the maxima plate of his own converter and shot him into a spare enlarged crystal he had on his desk, after taking off his hearing aid. He didn't need it. It was only an amplifier so that he could hear the advice of whoever was in there at the time. I put him in and clipped the mike onto my shirt. "What are you doing?" asked the bubble-dancer.  "Look," I said. "This fella could do it. And someone's got to take j the other lectures. And I'm never  going to get to be a qualified proB fessor any other way." B "But I thought they said he didn't know anrthing?" the bubbledancer asked. "He must remember some of it, or I'll oscillate him at a high frequency." Meanwhile, I thought I'd practice laughing, "hig, hig, hig." But the former Director did not seem to find it fimny. What's Only Money? T he opinion of a person on the value of money depends, as a rule, on how much of it he owns at the moment So let's not waste time with ethics, morality or financial philosophy. If I had not just sworn off philosophy, I would now say that I mean the actual money which has been with us for as long as people could count, and is apparently going to stay with us for as long as they can still count. Although in science fiction money is mentioned quite often -- some writers are realists and assume that budget fights will also be with us for as long as there are budgets, which is perhaps forever -- you rarely hear anjdhing of what kind of money it is. The hero often pays "three credits" or "two stellors" for a meal or something, but just what does he pay? Does he hand over paper bills or does he drop coins on the coimter? I can think of only a few instances where science fiction writers were more specific. When Kimball Kinnison loses a "one millo bet," he sends a coin halfway across the Galaxy, being a Lensman and, as Galactic Coordinator, presumably entitled to free mailing privileges. When the hero in Gravy Planet is lost in South America, he feeds plastic coins into a pay telephone -- without getting his coimection. George O. Smith, having invented a duplicator which can duplicate anything, then had to invent something (an alloy, I think) which could not be duplicated because it would blow up if anybody tried to. I can think of another example, this one from foreign science fiction. Kurd Lasswitz, in his On Two Planets (way back in the final decade of the last century), described how his hero had to pay for a trip on Mars. The Martians expressed values in terms of electrie current; the trip cost an unspecified number of kilowatts and the payment is made in the shape of a coin which is a storage battery actually holding that number of kilowatts. Since the future of coinage is so disputable, let us look at the past and see what has gone before. I'll not dwell on weirdies like payments in strings of cowrie shells or the big stone money of the island of Yap but stick to normal coins. F you ask anybody which metals are used for coinage, you receive the more or less automatic reply "silver and nickel." If you keep quiet, the man will somewhat shamefacedly remember that there are copper coins, and everybody knows, naturally, that Dad still handled gold coins. Actually nickel is a late-comer to the coinage picture; it is just about a century old. Before that, the coinage metals were gold, silver and copper. The most valuable of them, the gold coins, seem to have started out as electrum coins. Electrum is a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, and one might say, as a rule of thumb, that gold containing more than # per cent silver was electrum. The trouble was, of course, just how much silver a given lump of metal contained. Was it # per cent or # per cent or still more? I By about # B.C., gold could be jeparated from silver and the first gold coins came into existence. Since nobody ever threw a gold piece away, die number of coins from the past that are still aroimd is simply fantastic (everything the gold would buy has been used up, worn away, decayed or eroded, but the coins remain) and it was no great loss to history to analyze a few of them. They turned out to be # and # fine, actually too high a purity to be practical, for pure gold is a rather soft metal. When it comes to purity, the layman generally flounders a little. He knows that #-carat gold is good gold, and when he looks for a stan, it probably says #K. But if he should buy a wedding ring in England, the salesman will say "# carat, of course," but the stamp inside is likely to read #. The system here is that pure gold is # carat or #. Consequently, then, gold of # carat would be #, the other #-#th being usually silver; normally the best gold used for jewelry is # carat or #. But coins nm from # (British) to #. "Pure" coins continued to be made though, long after it was realized that pure gold was too soft. The Palatinate (in West Germany) struck coins from gold washed from the Rhine river; they felt that Rheingold must not be alloyed. The city of Hamburg for your information could not do less, so there are Hamburg coins (say of about #) of more than # purity. Aside from these facts, only a few oddities can be told. The biggest gold "coin" ever to exist is one mentioned in the Bible; it is the gold "wedge" or "tongue" of # shekels' worth. But we don't know how it looked. The largest known coin was struck in # by order of Shah-Jahan, Mogul Emperor of Hindustan. It was a #mohur piece with a diameter of # inches. Eoiowing what a mohur piece is supposed to weigh, its weight figures to more than # oimces. We can't weigh it any more because it is lost, but it was last seen in Patna in # and about that time somebody made a plaster cast which is now in the British Museum. The second largest (not lost) is a Venetian #zecchini piece (undated) with a diameter of #Va inches, while the third largest (you can buy one for about #) is a Bohemian #-ducat piece of # with a diameter of # inches. give you a more tangible comparison: the "cartwheel," the U. S. silver dollar, has a diameter of IV # inches and an official weight of # grains. Its true weight may be # grains more or less. The double eagle, the U. S. # piece, has a diameter of slightly over I Vi inch, and the diameter of the British #-pound piece is lYs inch. As for silver, it is the coinage metal. Coin catalogues usually state what metal a coin is: G for gold and C for copper, but if the coin is silver, nothing is said. Silver coins, if U. S., also have a fineness of #, but this time the # means the silver content; the remainder is mainly copper. The largest silver coin is almost the same size as the largest gold coins -- it is a #-thaler piece of Brunswick (#) with a diameter of # Vi inches, more than double the diameter of a dollar piece. Before we proceed to nickel and copper, it must be mentioned that one country once had platinum money. In Russia, three platinum coins of #, # and # ruble denomination were minted between # and #. Just in case somebody is curious: they are not rare, merely expensive; a fine specimen of the #-ruble piece will cost aroimd #. Nickel, as I mentioned, is comparatively new on the metallurgical scene. Before it became available, money smaller in value than silver would conveniently be provided by copper. Well, it was copper with other things in it and that has produced a few mysteries. Let us first get the terminology straight. Copper, when pure, is very soft too. The trick of adding tin to make it hard was discovered early. Copper with # to # per cent tin in it is called bronze; if it has # to # per cent tin in it, it is called bell metal because it was used for church bells. Brass, however, is copper with an admixture of zinc, and zinc did not become known until aroimd # A.D., and even then it was often confused with bismuth. Many copper coins through the ages contain such comparatively small admixtures of other metals that callingthem copper coins is fully justified. (The U. S. Ic piece, for example, is # per cent copper with # per cent tin and zinc.) But bronze coins with # to # per cent tin were also common since ancient times. For example, Celtic coins found in # in England and dating back to # B.C. are bronze with # per cent tin. Brass coins came much later, but they have a forerunner. One Roman coin, struck under the reign of Augustus, was found to contain # per cent zinc straight "brass" of our terminology. But real brass was not developed imtil nearly # years later. Correct -- the brass of the Roman coin must be an accident, made from copper and zinc ores that occurred in conjunction. Coins which were brass on purpose, so to speak, are rather unusual; most of them were due to an emergency of some kind. The most famous is the one which produced what is called "Irish gun money." When James II of England fled to Ireland, he gathered an army to force his return. The army wished to be paid. James took what he could get: bronze cannon and brass cannon, bellmetal bells, and bells of whatever alloy they happened to be. The guns and the bells were made into money, the so-called "brass shilling" being one of them. The workmanship of this "gun money" happens to be excellent, but the composition of any specific coin couldn't be more indiscriminate. TT may be mentioned in passing at this point that British law was peculiar for several centuries. To forge gold or silver coins was punishable by death or deportation to an outlying colony. Forging copper coins, however, was just a misdemeanor. Also in passing, the term cartwheel, so common for our silver dollar, was originally applied to a copper coin, the tuppence of ured I  inch in diameter and was also very thick. (The Czars of all the Russias beat this later with a copper coin two inches in diam' eter, but you had to travel to Russia to see it, for Russians who could travel abroad would not declass themselves by having copper coins in their purses.) Jj Though bronze has been in use for a long time on and off, it did not find much favor in the Western Hemisphere. The Confederacy struck a Ic bronze coin, but it was not placed into circulation. The Union struck a # c bronze piece in #; it did not live long. However, Americans can now handle bronze coins without crossing the ocean: the Canadian Ic of # and the Mexican # centavos of # are both bronze. In trying to get back to nickel, I first have to say that there was a wooden nickel, or rather a wooden #c piece, but itwas local. And this side issue -- nickel still has to wait -- brings up the larger side issue of which other metals were used for coinage. Well, a section of ancient India and more recently the Malay states had lead coins. More recently, on the Malay peninsula, you had "money trees" (Fig. #.) from Fig. #: Malaccan "Money Tree" when new. Brokea-ofiF "change" had center holes for stringing. The metal was pure tin. which you broke off what you needed. They were usually tin, sometimes lead. The ones who went in for new metals for coins were the Germans during the first World War. The Imperial coinage prior to # consisted of the following: #and #-pfennig pieces (copper), #-, #and #-pfennig pieces (nickel), V # mark, #-, #and #-mark coins (silver) plus #and #-mark coins (gold). About three months after the war started a few changes became necessary. The gold and silver were needed for foreign exchange, so everything from one mark up became paper. The nickel was needed for steel and the copper was needed for driving bands for artillery shells. Still, the people needed small change, or else the very lack of small change would help inflation along. So the #pfennig piece reappeared in shiny aluminum and the #-pfennig piece in dull zinc. A year or so later, the #-pfennig was no longer needed and the #-pfennig became iron. It was the first zinc and the first iron coinage. As for zinc coins, Belgium adopted this metal in # for small coins. And the Germans repeated during the second World War as occupation money for The Netherlands. Iron was used for Ic pieces in the United States in World War II. B ut the #-pfennig piece was not the first aluminum coinage. The French had announced a whole set of aluminum coins in #, but then did not issue them. (They have aluminum coins now.) The British did make aluminum coins in # for British East Africa, but they were universally distrusted. However, the first aluminum coin was a Texas local token. It was about the size of a silver quarter -- unfortunately I only have a photograph which does not show the denomination The year is clear, though -- it was #. Aluminum and especially aluminum bronze coins are now in use in many countries, and after mentioning that the state of Saxony issued piorcelain coins in about #I (they did not last long, but not because they broke easily; they didn't -- inflation soon made their denominations ridiculous), I can go on to nickel as the concluding item. Actually the U. S. "nickel" has that name mostly by courtesy, for its official composition is # per cent nickel and # per cent copper. It is what might be called nickel bronze. There is a reason for that which was first established -- rather pain-, fully -- by the Swiss government During the early part of the nine-i teenth century, when nickel became available in reasonable quantities, several manufacturers started compounding nickel alloys for cheap jewelry and ornamentation. A German firm was especially successful with an alloy which Ihey named Argentan -- Latin arfjsntum is silver; the trade name was meant to indicate that it looked like silver but wasn't -- but in other coimtries it was quickly dubbed "German silver." Its composition was, and is, # per cent copper, # per cent zinc and # per cent nickel. In # the Swiss government thought that Argentan would be a nice metal for small coins since it was so hard and durable. But the Swiss also wanted to make thencoins more valuable, so they added between # and # per cent of silver, the percentage depending on the face value of the coin. This happened to produce an alloy that they just could not handle, it was so hard. The coinage die made such a shallow impression that the coin looked as if it had been in circulation for at least thirty years. Increasing the pressure broke the die. After experimenting for several decades, the Swiss decided to use pure nickel, or almost pure, because somebody named Fleitman found that nickel became tractable with one or two per cent of magnesium added to it. Thus the Swiss in #I made genuine nickel coins. Nobody else ever did. The Belgians started the # per cent copper and # per cent nickel alloy in #. The United States struck their first nickel pieces in #. They were # c pieces. The #c nickels followed in #, slowly replacing the silver half-dimes. These #c and #c pieces had the current composition, first used by the Belgians, but from # to # we had what was called "white cents," containing # per cent nickel, otherwise copper.  first "nickel" was also accidental. Numismatists, well acquainted with a coin struck under the reign of the Bactrian king Euthydemus II in # B.C., noticed that it looked different from all other ancient coins, and finally a much damaged piece was sacrificed for chemical analysis. To the chemist who performed it, the result might not have looked too strange, but the coin experts whistled in surprise. The result: # copper; # nickel; # iron; # cobalt; # residue. No, the mintmaster of king Euthydemus II was not # years ahead of his time; the mystery can be explained if we assume that the ingots came from China. Mines in the provinces of Yunan and Szechuan did produce something called pei-tung or 'Svhite copper," an accidental mixture of nickel and copper ores. Well, now for the future. What should a one-credit coin be like? To begin with, it should not be too large, but neither should it be too light, for there is some reassurance in the heft of your change. Of course it must look attractive and not tarnish. Naturally it must not show wear. Since it will be much used in vending machines, it must have some characteristic by which the machine can test it. Let us say it must give off a sound of a specific note if dropped one centimeter onto a stainless steel bar. It might fluoresce imder ultra-violet light with a sharply defined specific wave length. It must be such, in short, that laws against counterfeiting are unnecessary because nobody could do it anyhow. And its value must be definite and stable. May your grandchildren own more of them than their helicopters can carry! Chaw Call TVr Y first letter is from somebody I know personally, a fellow writer and good personal friend: syndicated TV columnist Eve Starr out in Hollywood. She asks two feminine questions. One is easy to deal with, for it concerns the clothing that will be worn in a spaceship. The answer is: "Not very much, but what there is will be comfortable though not loose. A loose garment mit catch on a switch or something similar." The second question is one I can answer only by great good luck (other people have done a lot of research on it and have just published some of their findings). That part of the letter reads: "Just what are our astronauts going to eat in space? I know, mainly from your book, that the idea of ultra-concentrated food pills is an impossibility. But nowhere, not even in your book, have I found any specific information of just what they will eat." Yes, Eve, that is not in my book -- at least not yet -- and you are very much yourself in asking that question. For those who live in cities where Eve Starr's column does not appear, I have to explain that it deals with television and that she is in the habit of poking a well-manicured finger at precisely the point which the producer, director, actor or script writer had hoped would not be noticed by anybody. Now, as for the food which will be eaten by a space crew, it clearly falls into two categories: the food which is taken along as food, and the food which is produced while under way. The ratio between the food that is carried and the food that is manufactured will depend mostly on the duration of the trip. For orbiting Earth for a day or several, and even for the ten-day flight around the Moon without landing, all the food will be carried along. Only when a space mission takes at least a month will manufactured food be considered at all, and when the duration approaches a full year, the manufactured food will outweigh (in the literal sense) the food that has been taken along. A S regards the food which is to be taken along, there are several requirements. Of course there must be no dead weight, or as little as possible (things must be wrapped, after all). Moreover, the food must resist spoilage, remain appetizing, be not monotonous and, most important, it must be something that can be eaten under weightless conditions. The latter mainly means that it must not be dry and crunchy, for dry food is almost impossible to eat when weightless, as I explained in an earlier column. Food manufacturers have started research in two directions, the "toothpaste" foods and the "lipstick" foods. The former can be squeezed into the mouth from a tube. The ideal is that the tube itself is edible too. If that cannot be accomplished, it should have as little mass as possible (thin plastic tubes would do that). The lipstick foods also live up to their name -- there are foods of a certain consistency which can be shaped into sticks from which one can bite off a piece. If you imagine a stick of fairly soft cheese, you have a rather good idea of one type of such lipstick foods. As regards the foods manufactured en route, all I could have said only three years ago was that the space engineers had certain ideas. But now we can be much more specific -- let's admit it -- partly due to research work which did not have space travel in mind at all. For the last eight years or so, I have been pointing out that oxygen for breathing does not need to be taken along on long trips, because it can be manufactured by growing plants. For several reasons, it was known that the singlecelled alga known as CMorella was especially good as an oxygen manufacturer. All it needed was water (in which it lives), carbon dioxide (produced by the crew members) and sunlight (available in space at any time). Now these Chlorella algae, in producing oxygen, also reproduce themselves. Which means that after a week you have a much larger supply of Chlorella than you had at the outset. Once this was realized, the question came up: 'What do we do with the surplus chlorella?" The answer was: "Eat them, if they are edible." But as far as space research was concerned, no additional work was done for a while. Now it happens that Japanese researchers have investigated the edibility and food value of CMorella -- but they did not have spaceships in mind; they were just interested in additional food supplies. Chlorella, it turned out, was simply excellent. To begin with, it was edible; the Japanese made a Chlorella soup which looks green and pleased their taste. European and American researchers admitted that it might be nourishing, but said nasty things about the "cod liver oil taste." As a personal aside, I might mention that I happen not to share the wide dislike for that taste. I don't adore it, but it doesn't disturb me. Leaving the question of taste aside for the moment, the nutritional value of Chlorella is most unusual. One kilogram of dried algae contains # calories -- or one poimd contains # calories, if you prefer the unscientific measurements. Not only is the caloric value large, dried algae also contain a nice proprartion of the items that make a balanced diet; # per cent albumin, # per cent fat, # per cent carbohydrates and # per cent mineral salts. As for vitamins, dried algae come through beautifully: a mere # grams (about # Vi oimces) contain more than the vitamin requirements of an adult per day, except for vitamin C, which is plentiful in fresh living algae but destroyed in drying. sential amino acids" are present in fully sufficient quantities, and there is also enough fat. In fact, it is quite easy to make Chlorella produce more fat than it usually does. The trick is so simple as to be nearly ridiculous: just prevent the algae from getting nitrogen. If they can't get nitrogen, they cannot produce albumin, and after some time they cannot reproduce any more because there is just that much albumin available to them. However, while they can no longer split, they still go on living and producing food, but because nitrogen is lacking, the only food they can make is fat. As I mentioned, the taste is too much like cod liver oil to please Europeans and Americans. For this reason Madame N. Tamiya concocted a few recipes for nonJapanese, like white bread with Chlorella and green noodles with Chlorella. But the addition of the algae is only about six per cent, of the total weight, not enough for space voyages. Knowing that the taste is suppressed by the addition of sugar, Mme. Tamiya produced her masterpiece: Chlorella ice cream. The ice cream is very nourishing, has a pretty lit-green color (which, to our mind, is all right for ice cream but somewhat disturbing in bread) and is vanilla flavored. While Japanese scientists were going after Chlorella for direct consumption by humans, scientists of the Boeing Aircraft Company followed a different idea. Is there something that lives on Chlorella -- or any kind of algae, in case somebody comes up with another alga which is a still better oxygen producer -- and which people would eat? The answer is Tilapia (Fig. #). Fig. #: Tilapia, of the family Cichidae, the fish that will go to Mars. Tilapia is a fish, of a size that a man can comfortably hold in his hand, with the tail hanging out. It is a fresh-water fish perfectly adapted to scum-covered tropical ponds, peaceful, content if it is provided with the two necessities for its life: warm water and plenty of little algae to eat. In nature (the fish is spreading fast through the tropics, naturally), it will probably snap up insects which have fallen into the water and eat a worm if it can get one. But it will thrive and grow and make for your information nice white fish flesh on a diet of algae alone. One of the answers to the question of what to do with surplus Chlorella is Tilapia, so the astronauts will probably add fresh fish to their "toothpaste" and "lipstick" foods. T ilapia, in addition to being tasty, has another admirable characteristic for space travel purposes: about eight weeks after it has been hatched, it is ready to produce offspring. I can add one more specific item, also based on research going on at Boeing: mushrooms. They are a fast-growing kind which can be raised on waste matter. Since mushrooms are mostly water, they do not contribute many calories to the diet. But they do provide flavor and a change in the menu. Well, here is the space dinner: Chlorella soup, boiled fresh Tilapia with mushrooms, bread (taken along) with fatty Chlorella spread, Chlorella ice creani dessert. Jobs lor Space Psychiatrists? HE next letter is also from a lady, Mrs. Toni Pedigo (no address given), who writes that her husband "is going into psychiatry and would like to combine it with space research. In what way could a psychiatrist work in the field of space research without getting involved, with military service?" The joker is in the last six words of that second sentence. Otherwise I am quite sure that a good psychiatrist would be welcomed with open arms (and a steady pay check). The whole field of space research falls into three categories. First, the machinery, rocket motors, fuels, fuel pumps, control systems and so on. A fantastic amount of work is being done, and has been done in this field -- after all, what have I been writing about and revising for the last dozen years? The second item is the physical well-being of the pilot, bearable accelerations, comfortable cabin temperatures, something to eat. Here, too, a great deal of work has already been accomplished, mostly by the Department of Space Medicine of the U. S. Air Force. And, as my reply to Eve Starr shows, the food problem is under concentrated and apparently successful attack right now. As for the third item, the mental well-being of the space pilot, I find myself somewhat at a loss for words. Indubitably work is going on, but I haven't read much about the psychological end, except occasional papers by Dr. Siegfried Gerathewohl in the Jorurnal of Aviation Medicine and similar places. I may be completely off-track -- tomorrow's mail may bring a nice fat volume on psychological research -- but I have the feeling that this field has not been pursued as assiduously as the mechanical and physiological aspects. Maybe this is given by the nature of the case: first we had to find out what could be done, and then what the man (or men) will have to endure physically before psychology could be tackled. But to do any work here without being involved with the military services sounds like an impossible order. It is true that the tain factories where big rockets stone Arsenal, or to the Air Force, and then to Convair and Martin and other companies, and tells them what they want next. Since big proving groimd (their own is the comparatively small one on Wallop's Island), the firings have to be done from the Atlantic Missile Range at Cape Canaveral (run by the Air Force) or from Vandenberg in California. My opinion, therefore, is this: a ' good psychiatrist will certainly be welcomed and there will be work for him. Said psychiatrist can continue to wear a business suit instead of a uniform. But he will be involved with the armed services consciously, subconsciously and in any other way there is. There Was Darkness aver the Whole Land born in Nashville, Tennessee -- as a result of a private argument -- wrote to ask whether scientists or historians, or both, are in agreement on the natural cause of the darkness at the death of Christ, which, as the Bible says, lasted "from the sixth to the ninth hour." Either Mr. Osborn or the man with whom he argued (the letter is by no means specific on that point, possibly by design) "always" thought that the darkness was an eclipse of the Sun, while the other said it must have been a sandstorm because eclipses of the Sun do not last three hours. Half of the argument can be settled in one paragraph: it could not possibly have been an eclipse of the Sun. The Crucifixion took place on the last day preceding the Passover week, and it is clearly stated that the first day of that week was a Saturday. Since Jewish holidays begin at sundown, Passover began Friday night at sundown, so the Crucifixion took place in the afternoon of that Friday. Now at Passover the Moon must be full, hence it is at the opposite end of its orbit. However, there is one more possibility. Fridays with Passover begin ning in the evening hours are comparatively rare. During the latter part of the lifetime of Christ, there were just two. One was April seventh, # A. D.; the other April third, # A. D. (Julian calendar). Historians are generally in favor of the later date because an early Christian writer stated that the event took place "during the eighteenthyear and seventh month of the reign of Imperator Tiberius." That is, from March # to April # of the year # A.D. Astrondimically speaking, nothing out of the ordinary happened on April seventh, # A. D. But on April third, # a. d., there was a partial eclipse of the Moon, visible from Palestine. As seen from Jerusalem, the Moon rose while in partial eclipse a few minutes after six P.M. From moonrise to the end of the eclipse took half an hour. It could not have been an eclipse of the Sun. For the hours given in the Bible, it must have been meteorological, most likely a sandstorm. But on the historically most likely date, there was an eclipse of the Moon in the evening -- that is, during the first hour of the holiday week. The possibility of a later "condensation" of events certainly does exist. I can't help but end this on a note of personal curiosity. Which side am I on, that of Mr. Osborn or his opponent? Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! If you are excited about tomorrow and get a thrill out of the Idea of a man in space... get a Willy Ley Space Model in a fascinating Monogram hobby kit. Easy Fascinating Assembly These exciting new models bring space travel closer and add reality to what you read. Designed by Willy Ley, author of "Conquest of Space" and other thrillers. producer of fine hobby kits. Assembly is easy -- fascinating. No tools required. 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Booklet by Willy Ley. # Manned rocket for controlled orbital flight around the earth. # separating stages, landing gear, removable fuel tanks, launching pad, # figures. Molded in four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. # Galaxy Magazine, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Send at once, postpaid, Willy Ley Space Models as checked below. Remittance for  enclosed.  Space Taxi. #  TV Orbiter. #  Passenger Rocket #  Orbital Rocket # Name Address f'ity Zone State. Ill i don't look now OU'RE not allowed in the ambulance," Miss B Knox said. They were both tsaical advertising men, down to the motorskates strapped beneath their shoes. Their faces were so utterly undistinctive as to seem fuzzy. Each carried a large flat briefcase with a coil antenna sticking out. The Royalty Party wasn't what you would imagine -- it stood for a great deal, but there was as much it wanted no part of! "Watch it!" the attendant growled, and they skated aside with a whir. Big Carl came driving up the ramp, ducked his head to enter, and brought the bed to a stop in the belly of the ambulance. Miss Knox pressed the button and the door closed in the admen's faces. When Mr. Barger was lowered from the hovering ambulance, his swollen, tearful eyes were svmblind. Square hands clenched over and over with pain. Above the rotors' rackety-rackety-rack, Miss Knox shouted soothing things. She didn't wait for an answer. He was the worst case of laryngitis e had ever known -- the only case, really, in her professional experience. Abolished diseases always came back virulently. She and the bed sank between white hospital walls and landed in the room with a bump. The waiting attendant walked around the platform, folding the safety gates. He unhooked the four sufjport cables, each vanishing out of his grasp like spaghetti slurped from a plate. Just as the ceiling closed overhead, cutting off sight and soimd of the whirlybird against the sun. Brooks, the radiologist, came in through the door, shepherding an entire class of medical students. Then two nurses seemed to clear an inoffensive path through the chemically tainted air of the corridor -- and after them came Dr. Gesner, the greatest throat man in the country. Miss Knox knew him from his portrait in the Mushroom. Brooks winked her an "At easel" with a shaggy eyebrow and followed the fat man through the crowd. Dr. Gesner went to tiie bed and sat down. He was Barger's weight, with the same sort of elephantine bones, but he was almost two feet shorter. He stared at the nose and cheeks protruding from the bedclothes, and opened a fat black bag. A bell rang three times in the corridor. Five internes scurried into the room and stopped still, watching Dr. Gesner as though he were a golden calf. On each side of the doorway stood a student nurse at attention. Mr. Barger stopped twitching and opened one eye wide. His chin lifted, and his other chins came out from under the sheet's folded edge. One of Dr. Gesner's hands felt through the black bag. It emerged dragging a mutape by one wire. Brooks leaned forward and took out the rest of the apparatus. Shaking the hair off his forehead, he plugged into the bedside computer relay and placed the rubberrimmed cup against the patient's skull, just over the Broca convolution. Mr. Barger remained staring at the doctor through a gray film. The mutape chattered rapidly. Miss Knox craned her neck, deciphering the punched tape as it unrolled from the recorder in Brooks' hands. Sweat popped out on Mr. Barger's forehead. "Help me, damn it," read Mr. Barger's tape. "I know you. You abolished laryngitis; why should it come to me now? I have a right to stop misuse of my work and to be free from pain -- my patent is vital -- free from pain. I want to be free..." His face turned pink in a new contortion and the hands folded over. "Yes," Dr. Gesner said as the chatter stopped. "I know it hurts." He smiled gently in the middle of his face. He was writing on an index card, but his main effort was devoted to getting up from the bed with the help of two internes. "It will hurt this badly for twenty-four hours. Then the injection will have the upper hand." He turned to Brooks. "Please pass the tape around. Doctor. If any students haven't seen the X-rays yet, they're in my file." Mr. Barger's face grayed a little; the sweat had turned to patches of crust against his skin. Dipping cotton in alcohol. Miss Knox bathed his forehead. "That's all," said Dr. Gesner, handing her the card as the students began to vanish. She stalked after him. "No examination. Doctor?" she asked, ignoring Brooks' horrified expression. "Unnecessary, Nurse." He backed away from her and the door slid open. "I've already seen the X-rays and charts you phoned from the ambulance. And the patient cannot open his mouth. His intravenous menu is all here..." "Yes, Doctor." Three bells sounded in the corridor. "Calling Dr. Gesner. Emergency. Please come to the telephone. Emergency. Calling Dr. Gesner..." He rolled his eyes at the index card in her hand. "You yourself are to take the shots prescribed for you, to prevent your catching or carrying the disease. In that bed, but for the grace of God..." He was crying softly. "Doctor!" said Brooks, and the internes and nurses gasped. "After all," said Dr. Gesner, "I did abolish laryngitis." -- drive and struck a cigarette on one of the stone lions. It glowed in the dark, but the river breeze blew it out before she could draw. She snorted in annoyance. Miss Erwin looked up sharply. "Is there anywhere where you can still buy matches?" asked Miss Knox. "Not in New York City. Why?" "We used to just try again when a cigarette didn't light Now we have to throw it away." "Of course," said Miss Erwin. "That's how they train us to be right the first time." "Ridiculous. That's how they sell more cigarettes." "Why, Miss Knox! You sound like Royalty!" Miss Boiox laughed. "I'm not ready to join the British Commonwealth yet. No fooling, Hilda, you see the Silvertongue cigarette factory across the river?" Miss Erwin twisted white-gloved hands in the dark. "Why, no... mmm, smell that spray." An oceanbreathing tugboat passed, its complicated silhouette blocking the view. "No-oooooo," the whistle blew. "Just wait till that tug is gone. There, Miss Erwin. Do you see the Silvertongue factory? Just be"Is it the one with the new radio -- the radio-thing on top?" "Radiocompressor. Yes." "They used to put names on those factories. All lit up." "Well, ladies -- ladies," said a gravel voice beyond the entrance lights. "How is life in the Toadstool?" "Boney!" said Miss Knox. "The what?" asked Miss Erwin. "That's what Dr. Brooks called it. Now you tell me what he meant -- he wouldn't say. Toadstool." "Come into the light, Boney -- you frighten us," said Miss Erwin. The man appeared, smiling, and climbed the first stone step. Resting his elbows on the lion and his chin in his hand, he looked down on them sideways. "Not another new suit," said Miss Knox. It was an archaic doublebreasted suit in good condition. Where the jacket hiked up in back, a wide expanse of extra trouser seat had been folded over and tucked beneath the belt "Hundred-fifty-dollar suit," he said. "With or without the bottle?" asked Miss Knox. "What bottle?" "The one that bangs on your ribs when the breeze blows." "Now listen here, lady..." He came down the step. "Boney, I'm only kidding. You know that." "Kidding. Kidding. And here I was giving you inside information. Inside information." "What information?" Bringing his drawn face so close that they could smell the wine, he gave both women a look of scorn. Then he backed away and leaned his padded shoulder against the lion. "Boney, she's sorry," said Miss Erwin. "I am not," said Miss Knox. H e glowered at her and walked away into the dark, his spider legs dissolving sooner than expected. Then he marched back. "Sorry," he said. "Ha. I won't tell you. I'm going to tell it to the Director himself." "Forget it, Boney. He'd throw you out again. You'd better just tell us." His skeleton hand stretched toward the water. "You see that radio presser?" "You mean the new radiocompressor on the Silvertongue factory?" "Radocompressor. All right. Do you ladies know what it does?" "Anything," Miss Knox said. "Our patient, Mr. Barger, builds them. He told us all about it the moment he came. In Greek." "Not -- not all about it. I know all about it. I had a big deal going -- my Armenian partner and me, we were buying up neckties to sell in the hospital..." "What do you know? And will you stop blowing in my face?" He glowered. "I'm sorry, Boney." "Radiocompressors can do things -- any things -- without touching. Like rolling cigarettes or chopping up tobacco. The radio waves are so small they -- push things." He pushed the air with his left hand. "Not just go through them." He wiggled the brittle fingers of his right. "Everyone knows that," said Miss Knox. "What you mean is that the supra-short wave has an intense direct effect on matter. It was in all the papers." "Oh, is that so? Is that so? Well, you listen to me. This isn't in all the papers." "All right, go on." Miss Knox struck a cigarette, which blew out She threw it down and succeeded in lighting another. "You can fool people, also, with the same radio waves," said Boney. "You mean hide behind the door with a wave compressor and push chairs around? Like that?" "Don't be silly. Nothing like that. Dr. Brooks told me today, when I was sweeping his private lab in the Toadstool, he told me they make one kind where if you put it on a table, say, no one can see what else is there. You could put -- a cat on the table, and anyone would think it was just a table with a radio presser. Until the cat jumped off. Then you could see it." "Can it jump off? asked Miss Knox. "Can it jump off? Did you ever see a cat that couldn't jump? And that's not all -- " "Quite a trick," she said. "No trick. You could rule the world with that, ladies. Think about it. Rule the world. Got a cigarette? After all, I always get you coffee." She handed him one. Miss Erwin stared across the river. "I hope it isn't a new kind of bomb," she said. Boney pulled out a stick match and struck it on the stone lion. Cupping his hands around the flame, he lit up and walked away. #pUT, Dr. Brooks, when you tell Boney things like that," said Miss Knox, "he believes them, and he quotes you like mad. Don't you care about your reputation at all?" "My dear woman," Dr. Brooks replied, "I've been interested in many things in my years, but getting my portrait in the Mushroom has never been one of them -- " Mr. Barger's legs spasmed suddenly and shot straight out, jerking the covers from his fat-layered neck. But the pink shut eyelids hadn't quivered. and, anyway, Boney is right," Dr. Brooks finished. "Why do you think the Royalties want government control of the whole invention?" Miss Knox was tucking the covers around his warm, sticky jowls. "But he said you said -- " "I said she said we said." Brooks grabbed her chin between his thumb and forefinger. "Did you know that machine on the Silvertongue roof could get at us inside our own homes?" She shook her head, swinging his arm from side to side. "If you know nothing about it; girlie, let me explain." He squeezed her chin titter. "You saw those two men from the Christian E. Lodge Corporation -- Silvertongue, that is -- who came this afternoon to see Barger? The ones on motorskates?" "They shouldn't allow those buzzing things in the hospital. They make more noise than a whirlybird." She backed away, tugging at the white-coated arm until her chip was released. "I mean I saw them yesterday. They tried to get in the bird. I don't know why they visit him -- he can't say a word. Doesn't he have a family?" "No, but the Silvertongue men love him like a brother. Barger designed their radiocompressor -- the one in all the newspapers. Here, you can see it from the window if you -- " "I know. Dr. Brooks." "Do you know what that machine can really do, girlie?" 'When I was your age -- " Miss Knox began. "You are. I just look yoimg. That machine can cure and shred tobacco with supra-short waves on a polished magnesium bowl, just the way the papers say, but they have cheaper ways to process their tobacco. They really use the machine for guided tours of the factory. Public relations." "You mean float visitors through the air?" "No. You'd need flie power of ten maritime atomic piles in series just to lift Dr. Gresner to the height of-" "Very funny!" his own square root What they can do with that machine is to disguise an object -- say the incoming leaf tobacco. They can make it look firm, golden, and so forth. The girls at the sorting tables, wherever the guided tour happens to be, will all look like Norma Norden. They'll be dressed as angels and work in heaven. Then the V.I.P.S can tour the girls' homes and dormitories, and instead of a dirty slum, they'll see -- they'll see mushrooms, if they like." "How is it done?" "Only Barger Electronics really knows," said Dr. Brooks, "and the Christian E. Lodge engineers. It's something to do with compressing the wave length to approximate that of light, SO that images are canceled out. This leaves a clear field for subliminal techniques. If there are subvisual images projected on the walls, for instance, that's what the observers will see inside the room." "Oh, my God!" exclaimed Miss Knox. "The only other thing I know is that it has to be done with intersecting spheres. The machine has two portable secondary transmitters -- or projectors, or whatever they call them -- each emitting in all directions to form a wavesphere. Where the two spheres overlap, you get your possible interference with light" "Frankly, I just don't imderstand it" "Any radio waves go out in all directions to form spheres." His voice had become a mutter. "You know that." "No, I didn't." TE gave a false sigh. 'Well, take an ordinary weak phone transmitter very high up in a whirlybird. That's the simplest case. You know what sound a whirlybird makes, don't you?" "Of course," said Miss Knox. "What?" Dr. Brooks challenged, moving at her. "How does it sound?" "Oh, clatter-clatter chug-chug," she said, moving back. "No. Listen closely and you'll hear any whirlybird -- especially hospital ambulances -- go racketyrackety-rack groiindhog, racketyrack groundhog! -- a reminder to people that they belong on the ground, one may assume. Picture a microphone attached outside the bird and wired to your transmitter. 'Die radio waves go out in all directions through the air. Suppose your air is all of the same density, and so forth -- then all the waves peter out at a constant radius and form a perfect sphere going rackety-rackety-rack ground-hog! "Now compressed waves travel a certain number of feet -- theoretically, the number of footpoimds of work the power input could perform modified by a constant value called 'e' -- and at that point they revert to ordinary radio waves. This forms a sphere of compressed or supra-short waves. Do you understand that?" "No," said Miss Knox. "Well, anyway, where two spheres overlap, you get the Barger effect. And they can vary or limit the effect in interesting ways. Just move one or both projectors so that the waves intersect each other in different phases -- " "That's a fascinating way to back me into a corner of the room. Dr. Brooks. Now will you please let me look at my patient?" Mr. Barger's body convulsed and twitched, and the disordered bedclothes exposed the pink, swollen layers of his throat. Only the face slept. Miss Knox reduced the feed on the water envelope, and with her palm brushed drops of moisture from the burning, outof-focus pink skin. The drops were sticky and warm. She wiped her hands on a piece of cotton and started to prepare the blood transfusion. "Before you get out of here," she said to Dr. Brooks, "let me thank you." "For the information? You'll only forget it" "No, for the crack about my age." Slumping his eyebrows, he went to the door and stepped through almost before it could slide open. "Wait!" she commanded in a stage whisper. He appeared, the door sliding back harmlessly against his shoulder before it changed direction. "What's so terrible?" she asked. "You talk as though that radiocompressor on the Silvertongue roof were going to destroy the American home, at the very least." "They don't just have to transmit within the factory," he said. "Suppose they wanted you arrested. Say they didn't like brunettes. Well, first they get some dame to call police and say she's going to do a strip in front of the Psychiatric Pavilion wall. Then they go across First Avenue and set up a subliminal movie sequence of some stripper in action and focus it on the wall from their car. They set up two portable wave projectors and adjust their phasing to achieve the Barger effect in that one place. Then they wait for you to pass that spiot on your way to church. Very little power is required; the actual radiocompression takes place across the river." Brooks raised his pants from the knees and minced across the room, exposing curly hair above his fallen argylls. His white coat "twitched from side to side. "Now here you come. A man watching the street from the broken stool at the Green Gables twists one of his cufflinks, or maybe he just whistles. This starts the projectors and you become invisible, or very blurry, while the subliminal film gives the cops what they want Then the whole thing shuts off and the cops can see you again. You're hustled off to jail and they keep you there -- along with other V enemies -- by making a similar visual 'fix' on the results in some polling place and putting in their own judge!" "Oh, they'll probably just use  it for advertising." i "Sure," said Brooks. "How would you like it if you were watching television with your i roommate, and all of a sudden she turned into a giant pack of Silvertongue cigarettes?" '  leaving a red stain. A ringing, ringing, and the whir of motorskates receded down the corridor. It rang and rang, her hand sticky i'and warm against her cheek. It rang.  The telephone. Trying to recapture something she had known, she let groping fingers stretch toward the instrument. They descended, clenched, lifted. The ringing stopped. She forced her eyes open far enough to see her white arm return. Hunching up around her pillow with the receiver, she croaked, "Hello." "Miss Knox?" A high voice. "Boney -- it's Boney -- " "You have a nerve, Boney, to wake me up at this hour." "This isn't Boney -- it's Hilda Erwin. I'm on emergency duty and they've brought in Boney. His throat is cut -- " "No! Is he alive?" "Yes, yes. But he may never speak again. He lay there in the street for hoius and hours. Dr. Gesner's internes are here -- " "Oh, not being able to talk would be worse for him than dying. I'll come! I'll be right there!" Miss Knox dropped the receiver and swung out of bed, feeling in the darkness for her robe. She pulled it on and opened the door, and found her slippers in the faint yellow light from the hallway. As she ran, knotting the belt of her robe, she looked up and down the ancient residential corridors for a motorbed. She stumbled against a rotten wood molding. She pressed the elevator button and turned, her loose hair swinging heavily, to face the flat eye of a clock. It was five-fifteen. Overhead, the floor indicator creaked around its dial -- seven, six, five, four -- and the doors opened. There was a motorbed on the elevator. She stepped inside and pressed the button for seven, the lowest floor with a bridge to the Mushroom. The doors shut and the car moved upward. Tripping over the torn linoleum, she managed to fall backward onto the bed's driving seat. She swung her legs aroimd and turned on the switch. As the doors opened, she drove out with a jolt and entered the sparkling newness of a tubular bridge which rose through the night across First Avenue. The Mushroom towered overhead, its spiral corridors glowing. Night traffic vibrated beneath her as she crossed -- a crowd of trucks was baying north along the hidden cobblestones, following traffic lights which jumped from red to green, one after another, like "'an electronic rabbit. The trucks passed out of sight under their own diesel cloud and another pack approached in a higher key... Then a lurch as towing cables grated and took hold in the curve of the many-windowed corridor. Whining under glass, the motorbed veered off in a rising circle around the stem of the Mushroom. Around and around again, faster, while room numbers flashed red one by one on the silver doors, over the river, over the roof garden of the Administration wing, over the river, over the garden, around and around and out, out -- far out over a city of dark crumbling toys and up and up over the rim... Q HE approached the great trans parent dome of the Mushroom looking ahead into the sky, as though enemies in immense distance were triangulating upon her. An echo of voices rolled out. Far across the marble floor, one of the emergency rooms had its lights on. The door opened and a tiny figure in a motorchair sped out and along the wall, followed by a line of running dolls in white. Some of them clustered around the man in the chair, waving their arms. Thinning like a comet's tail, the procession vanished down the south escalator. The door of the room slid shut. She hurtled across beneath the stars and drove straight at the room, applying brakes sharply with a tightening in her stomach as the door began to open. Her long hair swept forward against her cheeks and shoulders. She jarred to a stop inside and rose, refocusing her senses on the enclosed white space. The bedside table held a pot of paper geraniums. Something lay beneath the covers like lumber on edge, the angles of knees projecting sideways. Out of the sheets stuck part of a thin white drainpipe neck and a face like a broken roof shingle, over which the weeping Miss Erwin cast her shadow. Brooks sat hunched over the stool, fingers buried in his hair. His lab coat was twisted awry; a bare knee protruded between two buttons. "What happened? asked Miss Knox. "He's all right," Miss Erwin sobbed at her. "Delinquents -- vandals -- they cut his throat by the river, right in front of the hospital. The mutape says -- he didn't -- see their faces." "Don't worry about him," said a low muttered voice. "He's been conscious. The doctors say he'll speak, in time." Dr. Brooks had raised his head and was trying to cover himself with the lab coat. "River rats," Miss Knox snapped, peering at Boney's wasted face. "What do you mean, in time?" "Two or three weeks. An expert job of quick surgery, really." "No! No!" Miss Erwin broke into a fit of sobbing and blindly rearranged the flowers. "Do you mean to say? -- " "Some medical students on a horror spree. Damned age of -- what did that Washington press secretary say? -- 'atomic hyperspecialization'! That means young brains growing in channels until they explode through the wall. You remember the physicist who killed his colleagues when the English won the Nobel Prize." "It can't be," said Miss Knox. She watched the hurt man grimace somewhere along his razor edge of nightmare. "It's the only likelihood. Well, we can't do anything for him now, and you look a little beat. Come on. I'll buy you coffee from the vending machine on the Administration roof." Dr. Brooks stood up, lifted Miss Knox gently beneath the arms and sat her on the motorbed, then swung a hairy shin over the driving seat. They rolled through the doorway. 'Who was that big shot in the motorchair?" Miss Knox asked. "Dr. Gesner?" Dawn had just begun to spread. They crossed within a widening circle of mushroom-shaped arches containing portraits which drew farther away until they resembled portal guards, and then converged again in full austerity on the opposite side of the great dome. "Director himself -- they can't reach Gesner anyplace," Brooks said. T hey started to descend inward from the Mushroom's edge. Numbers flashed by as they spiraled down faster along the self-steering guide rail. Over the river, over the garden. Over the river... She leaned back against the pillows. 'What was himself doing in the hospital at this hour?" she asked. "As a matter of fact" -- his shadow crossed her face as he moved the deceleration lever -- "he was with me." "With you?". "I was listening to the newscasts in bed. He came to see me because, as resident radiologist, I'm the only person who knows anything at all about electronics. While we listened, his assistant with the high voice called him on my phone and told him about Boney." "How did he react?" Brooks swung his tiller bar and they veered onto the roof of the Administration wing, the door behind them cutting off all light from inside the Mushroom. They were in a formal garden filled with scent, and surrounded by distant hedges. The few remaining stars were surprised naked, floating above a monstrous concrete birdbath. "Like a bureaucrat," he muttered as they rolled to a stop. "First he requisitioned flowers. He's probably in here somewhere now, plotting revenge against the Commissary clerk who issued the knife they found near Boney. I know he'd love to see you rushing in your bathrobe to other people's emergencies." "Disgusting. And they call him die Father of the Mushroom. Big shot." "Why?" he asked. "After all, he is a bureaucrat How did you yourself react -- like a woman, no?" He helped her down. They walked within a double row of mountain laurels to the coffee machine. "I'd forgotten all about the bathrobe," she said. "Black for me." "One day soon," he muttered, "they'll build him a mushroom he'll never see the end of. Sandwich? Anything?" "No." She took the warm plastic cup and sipped. It was bad coffee. Far below, a snort of traffic echoed down First Avenue. "I've only been here once before. I'm a bit lower-echelon for the Administrative roof." "Who isn't?" She looked past the white-onred Emergency Exit sign to a wrought-iron gate in the hedge facing the river. "Look, the Silvertongue factory is all lit up. Every single window on the top floor." "I should think so. You mean you don't know?" "Know what?" "My heavens, the fate of man's grasp on reality is being decided tonight! Congress was still in special session at five a.m. -- still is, as far as I know." "Session over what? Don't tell me the bombs have started." "Visual interference by radio wave compression. Yesterday the Royalty called an immediate special session. There is at present no law to prevent the Christian E. Lodge Corporation from buying the right to tamper with light waves in the home, for advertising purposes or -- God knows what other kinds of control." "I didn't know. I was on duty with Mr. Barger and then no one told me." "Barger was against it," said Dr. Brooks. "He sold them the device with a set of conditions on its use, but now they're buying the patent outright." "But -- don't they have to wait for him? Barger Electronics is his company." "No. He's chairman of the board, but any three or more directors can sell the patent. Once it's sold, there will be nothing Congress can do." "Why?" asked Miss Knox, staring out over the water. Some of the Silvertongue windows had winked out. The others vanished together, leaving only a pale vertical row to mark the fire stairs. Three bells sounded. "Your attention please!" -- a piping male voice. Brooks said, "I'll bet it's the Director himself." "In a moment," shrilled the voice, "we will time in the broadcast direct from Washington so that all personnel can hear history in the making. After the congressional vote. Dr. Hamilton, our director, will honor us with a few words here in the hospital, which he will repeat later for the benefit of the day shift." There was a ringing tone, growling in volume like the approach of motorskates. "I told you," Brooks shouted over the noise. "His family has stock in Silvertongue." "... been informed tiiat a purchase has been completed of full rights to the Barger Radiocompressor. I warn you that this device will be used indiscriminately against the public interest." The voice was strong but unsteady. "Barger engineers have been withdrawn. There are no controls -- " "Too late," said Brooks. "That's Thorpe of Louisiana." "Bear with me now. I do not doubt that visual interference is already being used to disrupt this session of Congress. Do you understand? I have a blinding headache, brought about externally, I am quite certain. I can no longer read the notes in front of me. If what I say is still sense, I insist I want a vote, immediate vote, to make this thing illegal -- illegal, and let the New York City police or the Militia or the Army -- the Army..." TN sudden silence, she climg to Brooks' sleeve. "Ladies and gentlemen," said the piping voice from within the hospital, "the House of Representatives is still far from approaching a vote. We will tune in debate on the Senate floor, being broadcast by another network." "... alleged that Patent Number #B has something to do with national safety. I assure you, gentlemen -- ladies and gentlemen -- that American business ethics will prevent such dangerous use of technology now as in the past, and that any weapons application will be confined strictly to that sphere where weapons are themselves a safety factor -- the sphere of national defense against foreign aggressors. "It has further been alleged that there is some connection between Patent dumber #B and Barger of Barger Electronics Company, Incorporated, who is currently afflicted with" -- the Senator breathed a chuckle -- "laryngitis. "It has even been supposed by certain Senators that the non-fatal stabbing of Nathan Bonaparte, a part-time employee... Silence. "Ladies and gentlemen," the voice from within the hospital said, "we will tune in again when the matter is brought to a vote. And now -- Dr. Hamilton." A long pause filled with buzzing. "People," said the Director, and the buzzing ended. "There is no war. Let me repeat; there is no atomic war going on." He paused. "Now there has been a lot of fuss over a steel tower on a factory across the river. I want to make it clear that no advertising gimmicks will change our job here. All hospitals -- public, like ours, or even our esteemed allies, the private hospitals -- are bound by medical and staff ethics to pay no official attention to the world of advertising, "I am especially amazed by rumors that Nat Bonaparte, or 'Boney,' who does clean-up work here from time to time, was silenced because he 'knew something' about this wonderful advertising gimmick. Nothing can be low left my office shortly before he must have been wounded by delinquents from the nearby slums. He was giving me 'inside information,' as he called it, about light-ray guns, and mechanical hypnotism, and plots against the patients. These, apparently, are the things which Boney 'knew,' and he has been talking endlessly about them since I first came into office, and presumably before." Brooks struck two cigareettes against his pack and handed one to Miss Knox. Their first puff obscured his puzzled frown. "This fuss I am talking about," continued the Director, "has been taken as grounds for wild infringement of any and all regulations by personnel of this hospital. I want it made perfectly clear that motorbeds not in official use should be stored in the proper supply rooms, according to the chart in the Commissary office. We are setting up a daily check-in system -- " "Lef s get out of here," said Miss Knox. to prevent further misuse of this equipment." "Get on the bed," said Dr. Brooks. "If they saw you go up to Boney, we can't leave it here." "Furthermore, any private or unauthorized use of this or other hospital equipment may be 'pimished by immediate dismissal -- " Miss Knox took a step toward the motorbed. "I'd like to look in on Mr. Barger." " -- with particular application to the young woman who used a motorbed tonight to visit a sick friend." Miss Knox stood feet apart, hands on hips. "The dirty son of a bitch," she said. across the Mushroom, white pumps clacketing half off her feet. "Oh!" she said, and stopped, panting. "Has the world really been taken over by admen?" Brooks stopped the motorbed. "Just America," he said, "and only a few admen." He helped Miss Knox down and they all walked toward the emergency rooms. "Boney is fine, Dr. Brooks," said Miss Erwin. "He just went back to sleep. But Mr. Barger is not feeling well." "Is Mr. Barger awake?" "Oh, no. Doctor, but he was moaning. A sort of breath-moan, with his eyes still shut. Dr. Feld took a mutape and said he wasn't getting regular delirium patterns at all." "Has Dr. Gesner been here?" "We've tried and tried to reach him, but he left no word with his office or at home. His nurses are terribly worried about him, and his wife -- oh. Miss Knox, do you suppose he drinks?" Miss Erwin's forehead grew a splotch of pink. "Oh, I'm sorry. Doctor! I'm terribly upset." "Go home, Hilda," said Miss Knox. "I can handle things -- I go on in less than an hour, anyway. Let's foul up Hamilton's schedule." "Oh, Miss Knox!" "Just one more thing -- before you go to bed, get a uniform from my room and give it to Miss Kelly, to bring with her when she comes up for day shift. If my door is open, close it." "Here's a key." Dr. Brooks said. "Give it to one of the attendants in the dining room. If no one's eating breakfast yet, leave it with Old Man Mackey. Say that I want some linens and a suit -- any suit -- brought up for me when the shift changes. Not before." "What color socks. Doctor?" "Any color." "Thanks so much," said Miss Er; win, backing toward the escalator. t Brooks muttered, "The Mushroom doesn't suit her looks." y "She's too young," said Miss : Kjiox. "What's-his-name who designed it -- you know, the one who did the museums -- was ninetyfour." "He's still designing," said Brooks. "Can I do an # dhing for you? J Preferably against regulations." ' She watched him lock the door  and close the viewplate, and rumI mage in the manila folder at the foot of the bed. ; "I don't know whafs wrong i; with these people," Dr. Brooks muttered. ; "What is it?" she asked over his shoulder. "They've gotten their tapes crossed! That idiot Feld must have had this in his machine when he came. It's some accident victim's tape -- one hundred per cent unverbalized pain, and the victim was wide awake when he made it. It might be Boney's tape. This man here has been in coma since this -- since yesterday morning, thank heaven." "Poor Boney," said Miss Knox, adjusting Mr. Barger's covers and her own loose hair. As though in answer, Mr. Barger stirred feebly, raising his arm. "Honey, there isn't much we can do," said Dr. Brooks. "You're right." She glanced down and plucked at the bathrobe around her smooth lace-bordered throat. "Can't save the world in my old nightgown." He took her by the shoulders and bent his head toward the palpitating muscle in her throat. Leaning back against the edge of the bed, she held him at arm's length. She wet her lips and said, "Did I tell you Fm supposed to wear glasses?" He sprawled forward into her embrace. Her dark mane tumbled thickly over Mr. Barger. They twisted and pulled each other down to the floor, freeing loose strands of hair from the blanket's electricity. S HE opened her eyes and saw a flat briefcase with a coil antenna sticking out "What's the matter?" whispered Dr. Brooks. "On the bottom of the bed!" He pressed his cheek to the floor and examined the under-carriage of Mr. Barger's motorbed. "Projector!" He reached in and tugged at the object, bracing his other hand against the driveshaft "Help me, quick!" She grasped smooth leather and pulled, her nails making scars, as he slid under the bed and hammered with his fist. "It's hooked on the other way," she said. He pulled, and the briefcase fell heavily to the floor. Dr. Brooks rolled to his feet, kicking the object into the light, and yanked at its buckles and straps. "My bag is somewhere near the chair. Get the mutape on him, fast!" She found his black satchel on the floor, plugged into the computer outlet and spread the apparatus over Mr. Bargee's bed. She made a trembling fist around the Broca cup, and watched the dormant pink cheeks and eyelids as she lowered the cup toward his skull. The rubber rim thudded against empty air, pleating like a horse's muzzle as she pushed. The sleeping Barger face remained a picture glowing out of reach inches beneath her straining fist, behind a smell of blood. A hand from imder the covers grasped her wrist... She struggled. Dr. Brooks, at the telephone, contorted his face and heaved the briefcase against the wall. It diattered into coils and smashed tubes and pieces of electronic chassis like a shower of silver Christmas ornaments, and a moan from the bed faded away. Brooks shouted and hung up the phone. The mutape was chattering violently. He unlocked the door, flung himself to the bed and took the recorder between his hands. The grasp on her wrist relaxed, and she leaned over to decipher the punched tape as it imrolled from the machine. Its dot patterns were unverbalized bloody agony, cleanly formulated in computer language. "He'll verbalize," Brooks said. "Just don't look at him -- thank God they've found Gesner." A red, bloated forehead above eyes fixed on her own through lenses of gray fluid as it writhed and pressed up against the Broca cup in her fist. She covered her face, and between her fingers the sleeping Barger face still lay on its pillow. features into a wink, and she turned away to watch the unrolling tape still chattering between his hands: "England is the only hope. We must go through immediately before direct control and defenses build against us -- morphine, why did you not give me morphine? Pain is intolerable." "Analgesics nullify the Gesner shots," Brooks said. "Morphine," chattered the tape, "worth it, worth it, cure me when we have left for England. And hurry, they want me alive, and as soon as they control the police... Turning under Dr. Brooks' twisted glance as he took the Broca cup, she went to the sink and scrubbed her hands. She found the hypodermic and phial in the black satchel and measured two cc of clear tincture of morphine, and turned back to the arm which grasped Dr. Brooks' wrist, pressing the cup hard against a swollen red mass. She rolled up the sleeve of the hospital gown which led to a raised shoulder (she wouldn't look at the face) and hesitated -- another needle was already stuck in the muscle, protruding just above the skin. She foimd the vein and pushed the plunger in, and withdrew her needle. Dr. Brooks said, "Get that out of there." She took tweezers from her bathrobe pocket and carefully removed an inch of broken hypodermic shaft. The blood spurted. She reached for cotton and alcohol. 'Hiree bells rang in the corridor as the door slid open, and Miss Erwin came fluttering in. "Don't look, Hilda!" warned Miss Knox. "Calling the emergency rooms," said a piping voice. "Beware of attempt to escape. He may be armed..." The mutape chattered. "Here, take the cup," said Dr. Brooks. He picked up the bedside air and placed it on the foot of fthe bed. Climbing onto the sway'ing surface like a trained ape, he reached up and loosened the crews which held the light globe in place on the ceiling, and threw it to shatter on the floor. Miss Erwin stepped backward. Then she tiptoed toward the light and steadied the chair, and stared at the patient's face in fascination. Dr. Brooks was tugging at an object resembling a camera, attached by a spring clamp between the bulbs of the ceiling fixture. "Hilda!" Miss Knox said. "Oh, look at his face now!" "Subliminal picture slide," said Dr. Brooks, dropping the object to tee floor with a crash. "There goes his sweet sleeping face -- an illuthere was nothing else for us to see." Mr. Barger's face was blotched red and covered with shiny ooze. His throat was swollen as thick as his cheeks, with lumpy rolls of neck stretched taut like strands of pink beads above the bedsheet. His mouth was hidden beneath caked blood. The mutape read, "You are running out of time." Three bells in the corridor as the door slid open. "Calling Dr. Gesner," said st cool nurse's voice. "Emergency. Calling Dr. Feld. Emergency." Five internes scurried in, surrounding the figure on the bed. Behind teem strode rawboned Dr. Feld in a red hunting jacket A motorchair rolled after him and stopped in the doorway, and an assistant administrator stood up and piped, "Hold him! He may be armed!"  and Dr. Brooks bent close over the recorder. Miss Knox stood up and prepared her needle satchel. "Don't kill him," the administrator whined. Three bells in the corridor. "All personnel," said the nurse's voice. "Day shift, please take notice. Beware of a patient, armed, seeking to escape from the emergency floor. All hospital personnel. Beware of a patient..." Big Carl kicked the motorchair out of the doorway, stepped through and handed Dr. Brooks a blue serge suit on a hanger. After him came a nurse carrying a white uniform and a paper bag. The room was filled with an echo of voices spreading across the Mushroom. "Step back," said Dr. Feld, stumbling over an interne. Two student nurses came to the doorway and stood on either side, one with her hand in the photocell beam to keep the door from closing. The noise grew. "Calling Dr. Gresner," said the cool nurse's voice. A group of internes shuffled inside, faces averted, moving sideways in the crowd around the bed. Two attendants came striding up and stood on either side of the door, next to the student nurses. A class of medical students filed in and moved along the wall, the taller ones standing on tiptoe to see the patient. A bearded professor in tweeds followed, whispering, "Here he comes, here he comes." After a pause. Dr. Gesner waddled through the doorway between his nurses. Three internes came after with white coats flying open, the middle one a Hindu in a blue sash, and then a messenger boy calling, "Telegram for Dr. Gesner!" Three bells rang in the corridor, and the door slid shut A path cleared before Dr. Gesner as he made his way to the bed. Helped to a sitting position, he opened the telegram which had been passed from interne to interne. "You don't mind," he said, turning to the patient's bloody face. He read the message and threw it away. "The police have been holding me for two days. Here my lawyers have a nice case against City Hall, just when this England business comes up -- so you're the man who's dangerous and armed! I'm sure Hamilton isn't responsible for that story." Dr. Gesner had removed some of the cake with Miss Knox's tweezers and was prodding the lipless inflammation. "Wash this off as gently as you can," said Dr. Gesner, and Miss Knox stepped forward. "And the antiseptic ointment in my bag -- it has a purple label." "I had to give him morphine," said Dr. Brooks. "Ah -- and some antibiotic?" "Ah. Now tell me, where is this other man who was put out of commission by these -- these throat specialists? I'd like to examine him." T he mutape chattered suddenly and then stopped. Dr. Brooks bent and read out loud, "Get those two on motorskates! I know them. They appear blond with their projector fields turned on; otherwise they are both narrow-faced and dark." Dr. Gesner smiled with just the middle of his face. "We caught them in the lobby on our way ia One of my lawyers is coming with us. His son plays right tackle -- young lady!" He looked straight at Miss Knox. "I understand you've been talking about this business for days, along with our friend with the cut throat. You've been in danger -- those two men were still in the building on your account, I'm sure. It's a very good ing you weren't alone, you or Dr. Brooks. I take it you were iboth on night duty." Dr. Brooks said, "If any of the iiurses or Dr. Gesner's students don't know what this is all about, I'm sure he'll make an announcement when we're all on the way to England. You must have some idea of what's happened. If anyone doesn't want to come, of course -- " "Treason and insubordination!" piped a hidden voice. "Under the circumstances. Dr. Hamilton will have you jailed when he finds out (What you're up to. Dr. Brooks." Brooks stretched his arm between two students and pulled a switch on the wall. The ceiling began to open, sweeping bright sunshine down the wall and making etal buttons twinkle on Dr. Feld's jacket. The ceiling slid back on rollers with a rumbling soimd, until nothing was overheard but the black dots of aircraft rising toward the sun. Nearby, a whirlybird took off with a rackety-rackety-rackety-rack! "I phoned the Director," Dr. Brooks told the crowd. "He's not interfering. In fact, I'm pretty sure Dr. Hamilton will come." "Dr. Feld," said Dr. Gesner, "will you show the adman out?" "I'm not-" There was the sound of a blow and the assistant administrator appeared, scrabbling for his motorchair, which was buried among the students. His spindle limbs flailed from one side to the other until he was propelled from the room at a run, screaming, and the messenger boy vanished after him. Three bells rang in the corridor as the door closed. Dr. Gesner raised his hand and voices were stilled, the shuffle of feet ended and the mutape chattered alone in the sunshine. He leaned over and read the tape, and as he straightened his back, even the recorder stopped still. He heaved himself to his feet with the help of two internes. "He says -- " puffed Dr. Gesner -- he says this is no time for sadism."  Brooks. She sat on the bed and the mutape spoke to her noisily. Big Carl had hooked two cables in place. Dr. Brooks the other two, and the floor platform began to rise through the room toward the maw of the hovering whirlybird. She tucked the covers gently around her patient's distorted throat The chatter stopped. She read, "This is something the Royalty predicted for weeks ahead of time. I thought we could avoid it, but the Silvertongue peaple must have fed me the virus at our last luncheon meeting. Then when negotiations remained uncertain -- thanks to Royalty sentiment on my board -- they came visiting while I slept and injected me with a larger dose and planted the projectors. I woke up in awful pain. You were there, young lady -- I screamed, silently, with my features. I was unable to raise my head. You wiped blood from my cheeks with your palm and cleaned it on a piece of cotton. You thought it was under water. Your eyes turned away before your hand left the projector field -- or else you could not see what you could not expect. While I looked on, you treated me like a sleeping baby and asked Dr. Brooks about radio..." The perforated tape had stopped feeding from the machine. "His tape!" she cried. "Don't worry," Dr. Brooks said. "We're unplugged from the hospital system, but I reserved the only ambulance with its own computer circuit. It conveys limited ideas, but that's better than nothing." Big Carl had erected the safety gates. "Look below," he said. She stood up and pressed her forehead to the latticework of the nearest gate. At first there was only a diamond-shaped patch of sky, with the Silvertongue factory in the bottom corner. Then, as the platforms swung on its cables, she saw the curved edge of the Mushroom, and the Administration roof swarming with figures on motorskates. They circled among the squat mountain laurels, pointing upward. The ambulance walls settled around her suddenly blocking the view, and the belly of the vehicle rumbled shut With a bump, the floor platform was deposited on its girders. Dr. Brooks said, "We're away -- I'll have the pilot phone the others!" "Where's the socket?" Miss Knox asked. "Mr. Barger and I were talking." Dr. Brooks plugged into an overhead beam and the mutape immediately began to chatter; "What is your first name. Miss Knox?" "Della," she said. "Pete Brooks." "Carl," the big man growled as he folded the gates. "Call me Bill," said Mr. Barger's tape. Mr. Barger's square hand motioned her closer beside him. "Della, do you know what we must do when we reach England? We must use the atom bomb first, before the admen have full control. Only then may we return to the America we know. The real America." "Do the English know?" asked Miss Knox. "Of course," she said. "They heard the broaddasts, and their scientists understood. They have supported our Royalty Party for years. I think I could increase the range of my device and reach America before they reached England -- but there is no time for that. The world must unite against invasion. Even the Russians know that there is no limit to the scope or methods of greedy marketing specialists" -- the machine punched out a pattern of giggles and chuckles -- "and I doul if the Russians could ever invent a radiocompressor." "Are all the admen part of this?" "Absolutely not, young lady! The very great majority has always followed a strict code of ethics that the very small minority has always subverted. Many ethical admen are in the birds now, on their way to England -- knowing perfectly well that England is X)or territory for emotional salesmanship." "But why a Royalty Party in a democracy?" Miss Knox asked. "Royalty -- " The tape showed amusement. "Not aristocracy. Royalty, as in share of and control over. Motto of the Royalty Party : 'The inventor is worthy of his invention,' meaning the right to say how his discovery shall or shall not be used -- or not be used at all, if it can only be destructive -- as well as sharing in the proceeds. Unreasonable attitudes are not possible; we have an Appeals Board that can overrule a pigheaded patentee. Radiocompressors were intended for beautification of environment, not deception or thought control." "Why England?" she persisted. "Pretty generally, the Royalty code is and has been standard procedure there. Like their constitution, it hasn't had to be put in writing." "Aren't there slums and unsightly monuments in England, too?" "Of course. Why do you think they would like to have the invention? But it's safe there; it won't be subverted to thought control and sales engineering... Tell me, Della, is Dr. Gesner on this ambulance? I would like to meet him." Dr. Brooks had come back from the control room. He sat beside her on the bed. "Dr. Gesner went ahead with Dr. Hamilton," he said, "because you're healthier than either one of them. But, Mr. Barger -- Bill -- doesn't light-wave interference need two overlapping projectors plus the subliminal image? We only found one." The recorder chattered: "I am sure the other is also somewhere in the bed. It is harmless by itself, and I am glad we have it -- it will help me instruct a team of British physicists and engineers. But who is in the other compartment? I hate to play chess with the same people over and over." "I'm afraid he doesn't play," said Brooks. "I think it's old Boney, who had his throat cut because your friends thout he mit get you some help too soon." The recorder punched out, "I would like to meet him," as Miss Knox jumped from the bed, pulling Dr. Brooks by the arm. The machine chattered again briefly and she stopped and read, "Do not neglect me altogether," and ran on. She opened the door to the other bed compartment. Miss Erwin fell on her with a cuddly embrace, and then Dr. Brooks reached over her shoulder to shake Miss Erwin's hand. "How's the patient?" he asked. Across the compartment, Boney's face expanded in a three-cornered smile. "At least he slept," said Miss Erwin. "That poor Mr. Barger -- all the time we thought he was in coma, he was wide awake!" Miss Knox said, "Oh, my God!" Miss Erwin's voice from the other room. "Why are they all flying home tonight, and we have to leave? Carl, are we -- are we a quarter of the way to England?" "No," Big Carl answered. Miss Knox called through the doorway, "This one won't let me open the hatch!" Hunched across the bed, his hair falling over his forehead, Dr. Brooks played chess with Mr. Barger. "Not in here," he said. "You can open the emergency hatch in back if you like night air. But don't expect to see the bombers -- or anything but our own landing gear." She slid past him and shut herself into the small rear compartment and turned out the light. She felt for the emergency lock and swung her weight backward as the damp black air screamed in and tugged at her face -- the whirlybird showed its fat thigh with a rackety-rackety-rack round-hogl Tears ran down her cheeks, distorting her first view of darkness. Beyond the machine's ungainly silhouette she peered and saw flashes of yellow light on water -- but nothing, nothing familiar. Thus, squinting desperately toward home, she noticed it, marking the horizon. A glowing mushroom. It must have been gigantic. Emperor of the World? Why be a cheapskate? There was simply no limit to the prospects of the man who had -- T he Power came to Larry Snell suddenly and unexpectedly, out of nowhere. How and why it came to him, he never learned. It just came; that's all. It could have happened to a nicer guy. Snell was a small-time crook -- when he thought he could get away with stealing -- but the bulk of his income, such as it was, came from selling numbers racket tickets and peddling marijuana to adolescents. He was fattish and sloppy, with little close-set eyes that made him look almost as mean as he really was. His only redeeming virtue was cowardice. It had kept him from committing crimes of violence. He was, that night, talking to a bookie from a tavern telephone booth, arguing whether a bet he'd placed by phone that afternoon had been on the nose or across the board. Finally, giving up, he growled, "Drop dead," and slammed down the receiver. He thought nothing of it until the next day when he learned that the bookie had dropped dead... while talking on the telephone... at just about the time of their conversation. This gave Larry Snell food for thought. He was not an uneducated man; he knew what a whammy was. In fact, he'd tried whammies before, but they'd never worked for him. Had something changed? It was worth trying. Carefully he made out a list of twenty people whom, for one reason or another, he hated. He telephoned them one at a time -- spacing the calls over the course of a week -- and told each of them to drop dead. They did. All of them. It was not until the end of that week that he discovered that what he had was not simply the whammy, but the Power. He was talking to a dame, a top dame, a striptease working in a top nightclub and making twenty or forty times his own income, and he had said, "Honey, come up to my room after the last show, huh?" She did. It staggered him, because he'd been kidding. Rich men and handsome playboys were after her, and she'd fallen for a casual, not even seriously intended, proposition from Larry Snell. Did he have the Power? He tried it the next morning, before she left him. He asked her how much money she had with her, and then told her to give it to him. She did, and it was several hundred dollars. He was in business. By the end of the next week he was rich. He had made himself that way by borrowing money from everyone he knew -- including slight acquaintances who were fairly high in the hierarchy of the underworld and therefore quite solvent -- and then telling them to forget it. He moved from his fleabag pad to a penthouse apartment atop the swankiest hotel in town. It was a bachelor apartment, but he slept there alone only seldom, and then only for purposes of recuperation. TT was a nice life. Even so it took a few weeks of it to make Snell realize that he was wasting the Power. Why shouldn't he really use what he had? Why not take things over -- the country first and then the world -- make himself the most powerful dictator in history? Why shouldn't he have and own everything, including a harem instead of a dame a night? Why shouldn't he have an army to enforce the fact that his slightest wish would be everyone else's highest law? If his commands were obeyed over the telephone, certainly they would be obeyed if he used radio and television. ; All he had to do was pay for ; (pay for? Simply demand!) a i universal TV network that would j J. let him be heard by everyone j  ever # Twhere. Or almost everyone. I I He could take over when he had '.only a simple majority behind ihim. The others would come into  line later. I # But this would be a Big Deal, I I the biggest one ever swung, and I j he decided to take his time plan) ning it so there would be no pos. sibility of his making a careless ; mistake. He decided to spend a few ! days alone, out of town and away from everybody. He had planning to do. i He chartered a plane to take ' him to a relatively uncrowded part of the Catskills, and from an inn (which he took over simply by telling the other guests to leave) he started taking long walks alone, thinking and dreaming. He found ' a favorite spot It was a small hill in a valley surrounded by mountains. The scenery was magnificent He did most of his thinking there, and found himself becoming more and more elated and euphoric as he began to see that it could and would work. Dictator, hell! He'd have himself crowned Emperor. Emperor of the World! Why not? Who could defy a man with the Power? The Power to make anyone obey any command that he gave them, up to and including -- "Drop dead!" he shouted from the hilltop, in sheer vicious exuberance, not caring whether or not anyone or anything was within range of his voice... A teenage boy and a teenage girl found him there the next day. They hurried back to report the dead man they had found on the top of Echo Hill. P. i I by Arthur C. Clarke. Harcourt, Brace  Co., Inc., N. Y., # The Other Side of the Sky, appeared, I remarked that practically all of the Clarke shorts worth reprinting in an all-Clarke anthology have been so honored. I never reckoned that Harcourt, Brace would issue an omnibus Clarke and knock my pat statement for a loop. All the stories are from previous volumes -- eight from Expedition to Earth, five from Tales from the White Hart and five from Reach for Tomorrow, along with two excellent novels. Childhood's End and Earthlight. As is usual with most Clarke short stories, the last sentence carries the stiJnner that virtually certifies a ten minute digestive pause between yarns. Prime examples of this shock treatment are "Inheritance," "Encounter at Dawn," and "The Fires Within." So, although an anthology culled exclusively from previous anthologies perhaps should not be given a separate rating, this bargain giant merits :  ' James Blish and Robert Lowndes. Avalon Books, N. Y., # I "I'LL BE looked upon as the ulti, mate in military plagues," says the f man who is to be duplicated five fold, "the latest achievement in biological weapons." Later, a key character says, "Is there a real hero? I can find none -- or too many." Actually, the multiplicity of prime movers is the aim of the authors. Venus, colonized by self-exiled revolutionaries and hiding behind a screen that deflects atomic missiles, has been pasting Earth haphazardly with chemical warheads for two generations. Earth, at im' easy peace under Security Council rule, is too civilized to take punitive measures against the aggressors. Hence the intricate plot of infiltration involving the Duplicated Man. Deviousness of plotting and many thumbnail character sketches enliven the book. Rating: i # by Hans Hass. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., # waned and waxed since Reefs of T aprobane, our last undersea book, Hass makes up for the long calm. Hass is one of the world's top authorities on diving with closedcircuit oxygen apparatus. The big advantage of this technique is the freedom from the exhalation bubbles of compressed-air gear that complicate observation. But, regardless of breathing methods, Hass's book is a breathtaking account of several expeditions into exotic waters. His text and photographs of his encounter with a gigantic whale shark in the Red Sea almost defy belief, as do the equally startling undersea photos obtained of the harpooning of a monstrous sperm whale in the Azores. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia and Darwin's famed Galapagos Islands also contribute to word and picture. Books, N. Y., # SF classics, this book has been out of print for so long that it is either a nostalgic memory to the older reader or a bare legend to the younger. In my case, thirty years between readings left little recallable detail. Sleeper is a prime example of the short life of the gadget story. Wells' energy to sustain his complex culture comes from batteries of huge wind vanes. His airplanes are flimsy powered gliders, his autos ridiculous toys. His guesses at science to come were so outstripped by reality that today, half a century later, they seem impossibly timid. The worth of his story lies in its human values. The social problems of the far-from-Brave New World, though based on the blackand white concepts of #th century Victorianism, make the story the classic that it still is. This is "Young Wells" at his non-Utopian best. sophical Library, N. Y . man's inhumanity to man is being constantly pushed further back into antiquity. In explanation: some of the richest finds of human remains have been the gruesome relics of antediluvian cannibal brain feasts. Palmer's book is not meant for light reading. His purpose is to chart statistically against the backdrop of time the subtle changes, physical and cultural, that gradually led to the first true Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, the evolutionary chart is still full of blank spaces. However, as a resume of current knowledge, the catchily titled volume is exceptional and possibly unique. A question arises: How far along are we, if we still resort to cracking our neighbor's skull to win an argument? Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., # states in his introduction, that this is one of the very few SF anthologies that does not contain a yam by the late C. M. Kornbluth. But this volume, compiled by his widow and written by his friends, is a sort of memorial. The roster, fittingly, is strictly big league: Knight, Pohl, Sturgeon, Davidson, Anderson, BradLeinster, Matheson and Bloch. "The Long Remembering" by Anderson and "Mantage" by Matheson, Pohl's "Man Who Ate the World" and Knight's "Ticket to Anywhere" are genuine memory grabbers. Rating:  Chase. Avalon Books, N. Y., # romp is in the rare tradition of the old John Carter tales of Burroughs -- at first. The archaically romantic dialogue, the cliff-hanging chapter endings and the monochrome characterizations pour nostalgia by the bucketful over the anesthetized reader. But the clunk of a hero can't begin to measure up to the Burroughs giants. By the time page # rolls tain that his laurels are still intact. Rating:  per  Brothers, N. Y., # #I volume is revised to include the very latest information. Concerning "Luniks," the difficulty of orbiting around the Moon is explained: "It is impossible for the Moon to trap a rocket. It must either crash, or head on out into space. Only if the vehicle is slowed by the use of braking rockets can it remain captive." The ion drive is explained and a new one, the plasma jet, is outlined. A plasma is a superheated gas such as might derive directly from fusion reactions. It could be the means of harnessing the hydrogen atom. !Y. Y., # aovelist is at once naive and shocking, earthy and sublime, occasionally expert but more frequently awkward. Author Ray seems aware of the lack of narrative interest in his philosophical talkiness and intersperses his only action scenes, laid in bed, between regular periods of continence. It is not enough. His "New School" is hardly that. Rather, it resembles the Good Life teachings of the founders of most of our modern religions. Rating: Andre Norton. Harcourt, Brace  Co.,N.Y.,# on the American Southwest as a background prototype in her latest juvenile, even though Earth has ben obliterated in an interstellar war. Her young hero, a Navajo youth named Hosteen Storm, is Beast Master of a commando team composed of a hybrid dune cat, an African eagle and two small acquisitive and inquisitive meerkats. At war's end, he and his team settle on the planet Arzor, mainly to collect a tribal debt of vengeance against a rancher formerly of Earth. Miss Norton writes so skillfully on the two operatic levels of horse and space that her young readers are sure to enjoy complete enthrallment. Rating for youngsters:  kin. Whittlesey House, N. Y., # and Homework Machine misadventures, is back again, misusing the marvelous inventions of the Dr. Doolittleish Professor Bullfinch. This time, an ionic transmitter, sort of a wireless power source, is the demon-ex-machina for, along with energy, it also creates roomsize thunderstorms. The authors reap plenty of humor from this promising situation, meanwhile sowing a considerable amount of meteorological knowledge in the process. Rating for youngsters:  day  Co., Inc., N. Y., # Don Herbert, is the famous TV scientific savant who stimulates scientific curiosity in his youthful viewers with his provocative experiments. Tbe above book is equally thought-provoking and well planned, each chapter of experiments being written with a particular branch of science in i mind. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc., N. Y., # similarity, this and Mars Journey Through Time both chart Man's progress through the ages.' The story of civilization is the discovery of the building blocks of nature, and Man's laborious efforts to put them to his use. Seaborg is truly qualified to teach -- he is a Nobel Laureate, co-discover of nine elements, and the only man since Mendeleev to make a major change in the Periodic Table. His TV lectures are ' here presented in easily assimilable doses. # This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Output # KW # KW # KW Distance # Miies # Miies # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, ei If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantee you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find Box I #, Village Station, New York I Y. Piease send Rodios postpaid (# per radio) Name... Address City State. What did Genetics and Hansen's Folly have in common? Why, everything... Genetics was statistical and Hansen's Folly impossible! I T he living room reflected wealth, position, good taste. In size it was a full ten feet by fourteen, with nearly an eightfoot ceiling. Light was furnished by glow panels precisely balanced in color to produce light's most flattering tint for the woman who sat in a delicate chair of authentic, goldenveined blackwood. The chair itself must have cost a fortune to ship from Tau Ceti Five. It was an ostentation in the eyes of the visitor, who viewed it as evidence of a self-indulgent attitude that would certainly make his job more difficult. The air in the room was fresh and very faintly aromatic, pleasing. It came draftlessly refreshed at a temperature of seventy-six degrees and a relative humidity of fifty per cent and pfermitted the entry of no more than one foreign particle (dust) per cubic foot. The coffee table was another ostentation, but for a different reason than the imported chair of blackwood. The coffee table was of mahogany -- terrestrial mahogany -- and therefore either antique, heirloom, or both, and in any combination of cases it was priceless. It gave the visitor some dark pleasure to sit before it with his comparison microscope parked on the polished mahogany surface, with the ease of one who always parked his tools on tables and stands made of treasure woods. There were four persons. Paul Hanford swirled brandy in a snifter with a series of nervous gestures. Mrs. Hanford sat in the blackwood chair unhappily, despite the flattering glow of the wall-panels. Their daughter, Gloria, sat in such a way as to distract the visitor by presenting a target that his eyes could not avoid. Try as he would, his gaze kept straying to the slender, exposed bare ankle and the delicate, high-arched foot visible beneath the hem of the girl's dress. ' visitor, and he subvocalized his tenth self-indictment as he tore his gaze away from Gloria Hanford's ankle to look into Paul Hanford's face. Ross was the Scholar of Genetics for the local division of the Department of Domestic Tranquility and he should have known all about such things, but he obviously did not. He said, "You can hardly blame yourselves, you know," although he did not really believe it. "But what have we done wrong?" asked Mrs. Hanford in a plaintive voice. Scholar Ross shook his head and caught his gaze in mid-stray before it returned all the way to that alluring ankle. "Genetics, my dear Mrs. Hanford, is a statistical science, not a precise science." He waved vaguely at the comparison microscope. "There are your backgrounds for seven generations. No one -- and I repeat, no one -- could have foreseen the issue of a headstrong, difficult offspring from the mating of characteristics such as these. I checked most carefully, most minutely, just to be certain that some obscure but important conflict had not been overlooked by the signing doctor. Doctors, however, do make mistakes." Gloria Hanford dandled her calf provocatively and caused the hem of her skirt to rise another halfinch. The scholar's eyes swung, clung, and were jerked away again. "What's wrong with me. Scholar Ross?" she asked in a throaty voice. "You are headstrong, self-willed, wild, and -- " his voice failed because he wanted to lash out at her for her brazen and deliberate display of her bare ankle; he struggled to find a drawing-room word for her that would not wholly offend the hapless parents and ultimately came up with -- "meretricious." Gloria said, "I'm all that just because I enjoy a little fun?" "You may call it fun to scare people to death by flying your aircar below roof level along the city streets, but the Department of Air Traffic says that it is both dangerous and illegal." "Pooh!" Paul Hanford said, "Gloria, it isn't that you don't know better." Mrs. Hanford said, "Paul, how have we failed as parents?" Scholar Ross shook his head. "You haven't failed. You can't help it if your daughter is a throwback -- " "Throwback!" exclaimed Gloria. " -- to an earlier, more violent age when uncontrolled groups of headstrong youths formed gangs of New York and conducted open warfare upon one another for the control of Tammany Hall. Those wild days were the result of unregistered, unrestricted, and uncontrolled matings. Since no attempt was made to prevent the unfit from mating with the unfit, there were many generations of wild ones -- troublemakers. It is not surprising that, with such a human heritage, an occasional wild one is born today."  I ' HE scholar took another surreptitious (he hoped) glance at the bare ankle and said, "No, you are not directly to blame. We know you wouldn't spawn a troublemaker willfully and maliciously. It's just an unfortunate accident. You must not despair over the past -- but you must spend your efforts to calm the troubled future." "What should we do. Scholar Ross?" asked Paul Hanford. "I have to speak bluntly. Perhaps you'd prefer the ladies to leave." "I'll not go," said Mrs. Hanford firmly, and Gloria added, "I'm not going to let you talk about me behind my back!" "Very well. As Scholar of Genetics, I am head of the local Division of Domestic Tranquility. I would prefer to keep my district calm and peaceful, without the attention of the punitive authorities, and I'm sure you'd all prefer this, too." "Absolutely!" said Paul Hanford. "Now, then," said Scholar Ross, "for the immediate problem, we'll line, one tablet to be taken each night before retiring. This will place our young lady's frame of mind in a receptive mood to suggestions of gentler pursuits. As soon as possible, Mr. Hanford, subscribe to Music To Live By and have them pipe in Program G-# every evening, starting shortly affer dinnertime and signing off shortly after breakfast. Your daughter's dinnertime and breakfast I mean, and the outlet should be in her bedroom. It is not mandatory that she heed the program material all the time, but it must be available to set her moods. Finally, upon awakening, nitrolabe will lower the patient's capacity for anticipating excitement during the day." He paused for a moment thoughtfully, and added as if it were an aside, 'Td not go so far as to suggest ftat you -- her parents -- make a conscious effort to avoid listening to periods of Program G-#, but I'd definitely warn you not to fall into the habit of listening to it." He eyed the ceiling thoughtfully, then consulted his notebook. "Come to think of it. I'll also give you a prescription for Program X-# which you can use or not as you desire. Have this one piped into your bedroom, Mrs. Hanford, and try to strike a somewhat reasonable balance. Say no greater imbalance than about two of one to one of the other and if you, Mr. Hanford, spend any time listening to your daughter's program material, you should also counteract its effect by listening to an equal time of the program prescribed for Mrs. Hanford." He turned back to Gloria and shook his head. She smiled archly at him and asked, "Now what's wrong?" "You," he told her bluntly. "If this delinquency weren't a mental gram dose of micrograine to be taken at the first quickening of the pulse prior to excitement. I don't suppose you really regret your wildness, though, do you, Miss Hanford?" S HE shook her head. "No, and I don't really enjoy the whole program you've laid out for me." "I'd hardly expect anybody to approve of a program that is calculated to change their entire personality and character," said Scholar Ross. "But a bit of common logic will convince you that it is the better thing. Miss Hanford, you've simply got to conform." "Why?" she demanded. 'We live in a free world. Miss Hanford, but it is a freedom diluted by our responsibility to our fellowman. The density of population here on Earth is too high to permit rowdy behavior. Laws are not passed simply to curtail a man's freedom. They are passed to protect the innocent bystander -- who is minding his own business -- from the unruly, headstrong character who doesn't see anything wrong in disposing of empty beer bottles by dropping them out of his apartment window, and justifying his behavior by pointing out that it is a hundredyard walk down the corridor to the trash chute. When we live so close together that no one can raise his voice in anger without disturbing his neighbor, then we have the right to pass laws against such a display of temper. It works both ways. Miss Hanford. By requiring people to behave themselves, we ultimately arrive at a social culture in which no one conducts himself in such a way as to anger his neighbor into violence. Have I made myself clear?" "In other words," said Gloria, "if II it's fim, hurry up and pass a law against it!" "Well, hardly that -- " the scholar began. "Tell me," she interrupted. "How long am I going to be on this pilland-lullaby diet?" "It may be for a long time. In severe cases, it is for the rest of the patient's life. On the other hand, we have quite a bit of evidence that your urge to excitement may dwindle with maturity. Oh, we do not propose to make a pariah out of you. Marriage and motherhood have settling effects, too." "My baby -- !" cried Mrs. Hanford. "Your baby," commented Paul Hanford in a very dry voice, "is a college graduate, twenty years old." "Nobody's asked my opinion," complained Gloria, swinging her leg and hiking the hem of her skirt another half-inch above the slender ankle. "Nobody will. However, Miss Hanford, I shall place your card in the 'eligible' file and have your characteristics checked. I'm sure that we can find a man who will be acceptable to you -- and also to the department of Domestic Tranquility." "Humph!" "Sneer if you will. Miss Hanford. But marriage and motherhood have taken the 'hell' out of a lot of hell-raisers in the past" Reed entered the commandant's office eagerly and briddy. His salute was snappy as he announced himself. Commander Breckenridge looked up at the young spaceman without expression, nodded curtly, and then looked down at the pile of papers neatly stacked in the center of his desk. Without saying a word, the commander fingered down through the pile imtil he came to a thin sheaf of papers stapled together. This file he withdrew, placed atop the stack, and then he proceeded to read every word of every page as if he were refreshing his memory about some minor incident that had become important only because of the upper-level annoyance it had caused. When he finished, he looked up and said coldly, "I presume you know why you're here, Mr. Reed?" "I can guess, sir -- because of my technical suggestion." "You are correct." "And it's been accepted?" cried the junior spaceman eagerly. "It has not!" snapped the superior officer. "In fact -- " "But, sir, I don't understand -- " "Silence!" said Commander Breckenridge. Almost automatically, his right hand slipped the top drawer open to expose the vial of tri-colored capsules. His hand stopped short of them, dangling into the drawer from the wrist resting on the edge. He looked down at the pills and seemed to be debating whether it would be better to conduct this painful interview as gentlemen should, or to let his riteous anger show. "Mr. Reed," he said heavily, "your aptitudes and qualifications were reviewed most carefully by the Bureau of Personnel, and thenconsidered judgment caused your replacement here, in the Bureau of Operations. You were not -- and I repeat, not -- placed in the Bureau of Research. Is this clear?" "Yes, sir. But-" "Mr. Reed, I cannot object to the provisions in the Regulations whereby encoiu-agement is given both the officers and men to proffer suggestions for the betterment of the Service. However, a shoemaker should stick to his last. The benefit of this program becomes a detriment when any officer or man tries to invade other departments. This works both ways, Mr. Reed. There is not an officer in the whole Bureau of Research who can tell me a single thing about organi#ing my Bureau of Operations. Conversely, I would be completely stimned if any Operations officer were to come up with something that hasn't been known to the Bureau of Research for years." "Y es, sir. I see your point, sir. But if the Bureau of Research has known about my suggestion for years, why isn't it being used?" "Because, Mr. Reed, it will not work!" "But, sir, it's gpt to work!" "And you feel so firmly convinced of this that you had the temerity to bypass my office?" "Sir, you yourself make a point of professing to know absolutely nothing about scientific matters." "All right, we'll table this angle for a few minutes. Just what makes this notion of yours so important, Mr. Reed?" said Reed, "the maxi mum range for our most efficient spacecraft is only a bit over seventeen light-years to the point of no return. My suggestion deals with a means of extending that range a hundred times. Perhaps more. If it were my decision, sir, an#Tthing that even hinted at extending the cruising range would receive a maximum-urgency priority." "In other words, you feel that anything we can do to extend our operations is the most important thing in the whole Space Service?" "Well, sir, perhaps not the most important, but -- " "Your modesty is gratifying. I presume this modesty would prevent you from accepting any more than the Letter of Commendation from the Office of the Secretary?" "I don't rmderstand, sir." "You don't? Mr. Reed, was your desire to improve the efficiency of Operations a simple desire to improve the Service -- or did you would, perhaps, provide you with a better assignment?" "I still do not understand." "Oh, you don't? Mr. Reed, why did you join the Space Service in the first place?" "Because, sir, I hoped that I could be instrumental in helping mankind to spread across the Galaxy." "Mr. Reed, have you sand in your shoes?" "Sir?" The commander sighed. "You hoped to go along on the voyage, didn't you?" 'Well, sir, I did have a hope that I'd become a real spaceman." "And you're disappointed?" Howard Reed's face was wistful, torn between a desire to confide in his commanding officer and the fear of saying what he knew to be a sharp criticism of the Space Service. Then Reed realized that he was in a bad pinch anywaand so he said, "Sir, I'm commissioned as a junior spaceman, but in three years Fve only made one short test flight -- and only to Luna! I am competent to pilot -- or at least that's what the flight simulators say in my checkout tests. Fm a jimior spaceman -- yet every time I apply for active space duty, Fm refused! Three years Fve spent in the Service, sir, solving theoretical and hypothetical problems in space operations. But aside frohi one test flight to the Moon, I haVe yet to set a foot inside of a spacecraft, let alone stand on the soil of another world!" "You must learn patience, Mr. Reed." "Patience, sk? Look, sk, I took this sedentary duty Until I'd had it up to here, and then I began to pry into the question of why we have a Space Force, complete with spacecraft, and still do so little space traveling. I found out. We're limited to a maximum tange of seventeen light-years to the point of no return. Even a trip to Eden, Tau Ceti, our nearest colony, is elevenpoint-eight light-years, and that takes prodigious power." "Granted," said the commander. "But now, sk, if we could increase our range by one hundred times, this does not necessarily mean that we must actually power the spacecraft for that point of no return. It also means that we could charge the ship with one one-himdredth of its former banks for the short trip to Eden, Tau Ceti -- which would leave a fantastic amount of storage and cargo and passenger space. Sir, we could start real commerce!"  gave no reaction. "And you hoped to be among them." "Yes, sir! As a kid, I read about mankind's first exploration of space two hundred years ago, sir. Of course, I couldn't hope to set foot on a new planet, since every possible planet within the seventeenlight-year range has been looked over. But I wanted to see space myself, sir -- and I did hope that I might extend Man's frontier beyond our rather small limit" "Yes, I can understand the impatience of youth," said Commander Breckenridge. "For that, I can forgive you. But for trying to do the other man's job, I cannot." "Sir, you're as much as saying that no one can have a good technical idea but the technical people at the Bureau of Research." In answer, the commander flipped over several pages of the file. He said: "Mister Reed, this is what resulted in your abortive attempt to gain a scientific ear instead of forwarding your suggestion through the standard channels. I'm going to quote some pertinent parts of a letter from Commander Briggs, head of the Bureau of Research. Listen: " -- young genius has rediscovered the line of mathematical argument known here at Research as 'Hansen's Folly' because it was first exploited by young Spaceman Hansen about a hundred and fifty years ago. Hansen's Folly is probably to be expected of a young, ambitious young officer with stars in his eyes. I'd be inclined to congratulate him -- if it weren't for the fact that Hansen's Folly turns up with such regularity that we here at Research hold a regular pool against its next rediscovery. You'll be happy to know that you, your yoimg genius, and your department have 'won' for me the great honor (?) of buying dinner for the crew at the Officers Club on Saturday next. "Don't be too hard on yoimg Reed; the rediscovery of Hansen's Folly takes a rather bright mind. However, Breck, I will congratulate your bright yoimg man if he can -- without any further clue -- go back over his own mathematics and locate the flaw. I'll -- " "There's more of this, but it isn't germane," said Breckenridge quietly. "This is enough." "Enough, sir?" repeated Reed blankly. "Enough to let you know what goes on. Now, Mr. Reed, you've committed nothing but a brash act of bad taste in bypassing the standard channels. Such an indiscretion demands some form of punishment, but if I were to attempt to outline punishment officially, it would be unfortunately easy for some legal eagle to point out that your behavior was, to the best of your knowledge, intended for the betterment of the Service. And furthermore that I was wreaking vengeance upon your hapless soul for having made my name the brunt of jokes at the Officers Club." "I'm sorry, sir." "Being sorry is not enough, Mr. Reed. But I have a plan that will gratify everybody concerned. You want to become an active spaceman? Very well, your next tour of duty will be at the Space Force Station on the planet Eden, Tau Ceti. It will terminate when you have finally succeeded in locating the flaw in Hansen's Folly and can show the error to the satisfaction of Commander Briggs. Have I made myself clear, Mr. Reed?" "Yes, sir, and thank you, sir. You're really doing me a favor, sir." "Mr. Reed, despite the age-old platitude, it is wise to look the gift horse in the mouth, at least before saying thanks." Ill  at his host's statement. "Yes, indeed, Mr. Harrison! Arranging these things so that we can maintain the Norm is often a delicate and arduous task. There are restrictions, and there are many variables involved, the most sensitive of which are the feelings of the people involved." "Your job must call for the ultimate in diplomacy," said Mrs. Harrison. To his host's wife. Scholar Ross nodded. "Yet," he said as an afterthought, "of even greater value is a high regard for the perfect truth. This includes the self-discipline of admitting it when one has been wrong, and being able to state precisely how, where, why, and, most important, to what degree." "I don't understand," said his hostess. "Mrs. Harrison, let's consider Bertram." She cast a glance at her son. In an earlier age, he would have been called "indolent." During dinner, Bertram had employed the correct fork, plied his knife properly, conversed with his partners on both sides -- yet she knew something was wrong. "Bertram," she said, "haven't you been forgetting your pills?" "Sorry, Mother," replied the young man tunelessly. Bertram arose and left, and Scholar Ross said, 'This is what I mean, Mrs. Harrison. Genetics is not a precise science; it is statistical. We can consider highly favorable the mating of two well-balanced people, and we can predict that this union will produce wellbalanced children. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee the desired results. Hence we have anomalies such as Bertram, whose problem is simply a lack of drive. Now this is no fault of yours, Mrs. Harrison, nor of yours, Mr. Harrison. It may be the fault of Genetics, but if it is our 'fault,' then the fault lies in the lack of total knowledge; but not in the misuse, or lack of use, of what knowledge we do already have." "I see what you mean, Scholar Ross." "You'll also see the opposite when the Hanfords arrive. Here we have parents as stable as you two. You'll pardon me if I say that if all four of your characteristic cards were dropped at once and I had been expected to render a considered opinion as to their most favorable mating combination, I could render no preference, so equal are you. However, your union has produced Bertram. Conversely, their mating has produced a girl who is wild, headstrong, willful." himself quietly, and when Scholar Ross stopped talking, Bertram said apologetically, "I took a double dose. Mother." "Is that all right?" she asked Scholar Ross. "Probably won't do any harm," he said. Mr. Harrison cleared his throat. "I'm not sure that I approve of Bertram marrying a headstrong girl. Scholar Ross." you know it's best." "For Bertram?" "Now here," said Scholar Ross, 'Sve must cease considering the welfare of the individual alone and start thinking of him as a part of an integrated society. No man is an island, Mr. Harrison. In a less advanced culture, Bertram would have been permitted to meet contemporary personalities. Perhaps might have met someone who -- as he does -- lacks drive and initiative, and the result would have been a family of dull children. Had he been imlucky enough to marry a woman with drive and ambition, their children might have been normal, but the entire home life would have been an emotional battlefield. And that -- " "Isn't that what you're about to achieve?" asked Mr. Harrison. "Not at all. We shall achieve the normal, happy children who will undoubtedly grow into fine, stable adults. To gain this end, of course, their home life must be happy and tranquil. We'll prescribe for them -- allowing for the emotional change that results from marriage and -- " The doorbell interrupted the scholar's explanation. "Allow me," he said, rising and heading for the apartment door. The Harrisons followed him at a slight distance. It was the Hanfords. There was the full roimd robin of introductions and small talk; "You had no trouble?" "No, the intercity beacon was running clear -- " "Lovely apartment, Mrs. Harrison." "Mrs. Hanford, here in Philadelphia we feel that we're almost in the suburbs." "Got a treat for you, Hanford -- been saving a bottle of natural bourbon!" "That'll be a treat, all right!" "This is a real event. Scholar Ross." "You know, Mrs. Hanford, the vidphone hardly does you justice!" "Why, thank you!" "Miss Hanford, may I present Bertram Harrison?" "How do you do?" "I do as I please. What's your excuse?" "Huh?" "Now, Gloria!" "Bertram, show Gloria the flower room. Go on, now!" Scholar Ross watched the young couple walk through a French door to an outside terrace. He turned to Harrison and said, "Everything set?" Harrison nodded. "Had a little trouble with the Music people till I used your priority. They said they'd have Program R-# piped into the flower room. Frankly, I think R-# # is better."  "Probably happy association." 'Wife and I still have it piped in for our anniversary," Mr. Harrison admitted. "Good for you! But R-# # is for normal, happily well-balanced young people who'd probably fall in love without it. R-# is sure-fire for emotional opposites." "Well, we finally got the program piped in, so what do we do now?" Scholar Ross smiled quietly. "We wait. We get acquainted, because there is a very high probability that you two families will be united through the marriage of your children. Then I shall enter a new file in the Genetics Bureau of the Department of Domestic Tranquility. We shall watch through the years as your grandchildren grow, and make periodic checks, and thereby advance mankind's knowledge of genetics." 'Doesn't this sort of masterminding ever give you a God complex?" asked Mr. Hanford. "Not at all. Were I God, I'm sure I could arrange things a lot better." "In what way?" "By Man's own laws, we are prevented from doing active genetic research on the human race. We apply what happens to mice and fruit flies to the human family tree. We've known for centuries how to breed blue-eyed or brown-eyed people, or, if we wanted, we could make the race predominantly fat or thin, tall or short. However, our main aim is not the ultimate purity of any physical characteristic. Orir goal is to produce a stable, happy people by eliminating the lethargic personality below and the excitable types above." The scholar thought for a moment, and then, remembering Bertram's error in forgetting to take his go-pills, said, "But we are blocked by law. I can prescribe medication and therapy, but I have no power to force the patient to take the treatment. This is a most difficult problem, believe me." "In what way?" asked Mrs. Harrison with some interest. "The lethargic types are very apt to forget, or to dismiss the medication or the therapy as too much trouble. The overactive type is more likely to be water skiing on Lake Superior than sitting and listening to the tranquilizing strains of prescribed music, and the medication dumped down the drain instead of taken." "You do have your problems, don't you?" said Mrs. Hanford sympathetically. "Ah, yes. But our greatest problem is the overactive young female. Young males can be siphoned off in one way or another -- work to be done that, unfortunately, females, can't also do." Scholar Ross smiled at Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. "So we actually are grateful for the lethargic types. They provide us with a fine sobering influence upon the -- " The scholar was interrupted by a wordless cry from beyond the French windows. ' I HE Harrisons, the Hanfords, and Scholar Ross leaped to their feet and started for the terrace. They did not get all the way to the French doors, for Gloria Hanford came stamping in. Her eyes were bright, and she was dusting one palm with the other. "What ?" Gloria snapped, "Someone been feeding that oaf red meat?" "But what happened?" asked Mr. Harrison. "Oh, I could stand the big dummy acting as if he'd never been alone with a girl before in all his life. But to ask me for a kiss!" "Is that what caused the eruption?" said Scholar Ross. 'When he asked me for a kiss, I told him that I was saving my kisses for a man!" "And then?" "Then he decided that I meant a man big enough to wrestle." Gloria laughed and then looked thoughtful. "What's so funny -- and not so funny now?" "I just realized that I like men!" "But Bertram?" "Darned if it isn't the first time I've ever resented being pawed," said Gloria in a matter-of-fact tone,as if it were her hair-do rather than her virtue that was the subject of discussion. "So I grabbed a hand, hung the arm over my shoulder with the inside upward, and hip-tossed the big oaf over the railing into that silly little fish pond." "Gloria!" exploded her mother. "Poor Bertram!" exclaimed his mother. Scholar Ross sighed. "These things often go awry at first. Bertram shouldn't have taken a double dose of his medication. And I'd guess that Gloria hasn't been meticulous about hers, either. Now -- " He was interrupted by the arrival of Bertram Harrison, who looked as if he'd just waded home across a mud flat at low tide. He stepped toward Gloria purposefully; the girl crouched in a judo position and said, 'Want some more? Come and get it!" "Now wait a moment," said Scholar Ross. "Gloria, where did you ever learn such brutal, belligerant tactics?" one eye on Bertram. "Out of a book -- where else in this calm old world?" The scholar said, "You see. Miss Hanford, the results of your outrageous behavior? You've committed an act of physical violence. You've The girl gave one sharp bark of laughter. "Who started it with whose caveman technique?" "I think," said Scholar Ross to the four parents, ."that this meeting should be resumed at a later date. Bertram must not overdose himself in a misguided effort to make up for omitted medication. Gloria must not avoid hers -- and, Mrs. Hanford, you'll not only have to watch closely to see that she does take her pills; you'll also have to make sure that Gloria doesn't counteract them by surreptitiously acquiring some agitators to neutralize the tranquilizers." "And suppjose I call the whole thing off?" demanded Gloria. "Sup)pose I don't agree to share bed and board with this souped-up sardine?" The room grew quieter until the background soimds were gone and from the patio came the faint, sweet strains of romantic music: Program R-#. Finally Scholar Ross said, "Miss Hanford, we cannot force you to do anything, but we can make your life extremely uncomfortable if you do not comply with what we believe to be best for society. You will find -- if you care to look it up -- that there is a drastic shortage of eligible young women on the planet Eden, Tau CetL" "You mean -- migrate -- to the colony?" "I mean just that." Gloria Hanford's face went white. She understood that if Scholar Ross decreed Eden, Tau Ceti, for her, then she would end up on Eden, Tau Ceti, and it made no difference whether by force, coercion, or gentle persuasion. Mrs. Hanford took a step forward and opened her mouth to speak. But before she could protest, her husband put out a hand and stoppjed her. His act was an admission that not money, position, nor logic Would overrule such a decision. "Ekien, Tau Ceti," breathed Gloria. She turned and faced Bertram Harrison. "Junior," she said in a dry, strained voice, "if you'll wear mittens and handcuffs, let's go back in the garden and get acquainted." Her father exhaled a full breath. Mr. Harrison tapped him on the shoulder. "How about a sample of that bottle of natural bourbon?" he suggested. "Not," Mrs. Hanford said shakily, "without me!" IV lT AN'S first sally across the gulf of interstellar space had been more fruitful than his first fumbling exploration of the Solar System by a score of one to nothing. Of all the celestial real estate that orbits around old Sol, only the Earth will support life -- at least as we know it. Survival elsewhere depends upon taking enough of Earth environment along to last of the trip. From the scientific standpoint, the first exploration of space was a brilliant operation, but before finding a place to accept the teeming millions of Earth's exploding population, the patient nearly died. For it was a quarter of a century until Murray, Langdon, and Hanover cracked the Einstein barrier. By careful design, and then by counting the last gram and striking a mathematically adjusted balance between ppwer bank and crew space, the range of a spacecraft was found to be slightly more than seventeen light-years to the point of no return. Within seventeen light-years of Sol, there are forty-one other stars. Of these forty-one stars, three are triple-sim systems, and twelve are doubles, which eliminates fifteen of them. Of the remaining twenty-six single stars, one is the blinding-blue giant Altair, two are white dwarf stars, and nineteen of them are the faint red dwarf stars of Spectral Class M, and that eliminates all but four of the orig ina l forty-one. Of this remaining four. Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, and Groombridge # fall into the orange Spectral Class K, which is not too far away from Sol's Spectral Class G. BufK is only close; it is no bull's eye when the combination of all the factors must add up to produce a planetary environment that will support human life. And so, having eliminated forty out of the forty-one stars in Sol's neighborhood, only Tau Ceti remains. Tau Ceti is also a Spectral Class G star and therefore Tau Ceti was voted the star most likely to succeed, long before Man had the foggiest notion of how to cross the light-years, long before instruments sensitive enough to ascertain that Tau Ceti possessed a planetary system were developed. Tau Ceti's planetary system can be used as an example of the brilliance of logic and reasoning. The second planet in the family of Tau Ceti is the planet Eden. Eden supports life. Or perhaps it is more proper to say that Eden's environment permits life to support itself. Voltaire, through the mouths of his characters Candide and Pangloss, had a lot to say about Earth being the best of all possible worlds, both pro and con. He had never been to Eden. Eden was christened by the rules of real estate that dictate that a housing development situated on a tree-bald plain in central Kansas shall be called "Sylvan Heights." V Reed went through a brief period of excitement and then settled down to boredom. The excitement came from his first experience in space travel, and the thrill of standing on soil almost twelve light-years from home base. This thrill faded as soon as he discovered that the people on Eden, Tau Ceti, were far too busy to be bothered with the reactions of a junior spaceman. If his duties had been demanding, Reed might have gone on for some time without becoming bored. But as a junior officer in the Space Service, Reed had no roots, no property, no basic interests on Eden. The Space Service had been born out of interservice rivalry during a tense period of international competition. There had been a strong upsurge during the early years of the initial interstellar exploration. The leaders of the Space erbed themselves into permanent positions of high authority. They discovered the best method lay in exploiting every method of scaring the public with the bogey of meeting some warlike culture "Out There." Then the years passed with neither sight nor evidence of any other form of life but Man and the creatures he carried with him. The Space Service found itself with little to do. It did not stop the clamor for money, men and materiel. But the job of the Space Service was not hunting space pirates. The only place where the power banks of a spacecraft could be restored was in the hands of the Space Service itself, and it was an installation vast enough to tax the wealth and ingenuity of a whole continent to create. The job was not fighting interstellar wars with fierce, superintelligent interstellar aliens with a taste for human flesh -- not, at least, until human and alien met. So, in a desultory manner, the Space Service maintained a perimeter of lookout and detection stations that could have been completely automated... if it hadn't been that there were more Space Service Personnel than the Service could find work for. The whole situation gave Junior I Spaceman Howard Reed a lot of I time to think. I The culture of Eden, Tau Ceti, I completed the process, f Eden used old-fashioned telej phones because its people were too widespread across the face of the planet to make the use of the vidphone practical. Radio broad. casting was maintained by the government as a public service ini' formation agency. It had to be. ! There were not commercial enterV (' prises enough to support radio ' broadcasting on a profit-making f basis. For there simply were not ...enough people. And if simple radio i broadcasting could not be support ed, there was not yet room for even rthe old flat-faced television, much I ' less trivideo... Theirs was a culture in a mixed i state. They had the know-how for ' a highly technical, closely-inte' grated urban civilization, but I lacked the hardware necessary to '.construct it. They were an aircar people, but they used horses. Horses can be raised. Aircars have I to be fabricated. It would not have I been prohibitive to trans-ship the j. basic tools and dies for aircar as: sembly from Earth, Sol, to Eden, ; Tau Ceti. But it would have been economic suicide to attempt to keep the voracious maw of an automated assembly plant satiated with raw material shipped from home base. And then, one week's run would have saturated the Tau L Ceti market. They were a people who played their own musical instruments because they were faced with the very odd economic fact that the first phonograph record from the die costs five thousand dollars. Nobody makes a dime until fifty thousand of its brothers are sold. The population to buy fifty thousand did not exist In simple fact, Eden, Tau Ceti, was far from a flourishing colony. It was a classic example of the simple economic truth that a fully integrated mechanistic society can not be supported by a sparsely populated region. The urge to return home became a drive. The result was Junior Spaceman Howard Reed's complete preoccupation with the mathematics known as Hansen's Folly. As the months went by he exhausted his original knowledge. He took to the library, to the local schools, and to self-study to improve his grasp. He approached the basic mathematics of the space drive from several different angles, even going back to the old original Einstein Equations and learning their fault in the hope that this study might point the way. Then, as the months began to grow into the close of his first year, Reed took advantage of the casually informal operation at the Space Service Base. He began to experiment with hardware on the theory that he would have a better grasp of the problem if he tried some empirical work as well as the academic approach. Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had been on Eden, Tau Ceti, for eighteen terrestrial months before his superior officer, making a tour of inspection, opened the office reserved for him at the Administration Building. On the eighth day of his visit, Commander Breckenridge summoned the junior spaceman to his office. He asked, "Mr. Reed, have you been successful in solving the flaw in Hansen's Folly?" "Well, sir, not exactly." "Have you improved your grasp of the facts of life?" "Sir? I don't quite understand." "You don't? Well, perhaps you need some help. For instance, Mr. Reed, can you give me an estimate of the useful land area of Eden, Tau Ceti?" "Sir, the total land area is about about half of that is useful, or could be." "Ah. You said 'could be'. Why, Mr. Reed?" "Let's put it this way, sir. Whether a given acreage is useful often depends upon how badly it is needed. For instance, a plot of wooded land might well be ignored for centuries by a sparsely populated agrarian culture who had a lot of open plain to cultivate. At a later date, an increasing pressure of population might make it expedient and sensible to clear vast areas of tree strimps, boulders and all sorts of hazards." "And here on Eden?" 'Well, sir, at the present time the population of Eden is about a hundred thousand. Fertile plains are growing wild with weeds because the land isn't needed yet. That is -- er -- " "That is what?" "Maybe I shouldn't have said 'wild with weeds' sir. After all, they have been encouraged. I'm told that the atmosphere smelled a lot stronger when Man first arrived."  I" HE commander sniffed and said, "It's pretty strong right now." "You don't notice it after a couple of months," said Reed. "I don't propose to be here that long," said the commander curtly. "Let's get back to your grasp of the overall picture." Commander Breckenridge leaned back in his chair and said, "No doubt you were exposed to Early North American History. You will recall that there was a strong pioneering drive in the human race that went on almost from the date of the discovery of North America until the opening phases of the so-called 'Industrial Revolution' -- that is, beginning of the electro-mechanical era. Am I not correct?" "Yes, sir." "Now, young man, what has become of this strong pioneering ' drive? How did it ooze out of the human race? Where did it go, and living in crowded conditions on Earth, while here upon Eden, Tau Ceti, a mere hundred thousand people occupy -- by your estimate -- of Earth clamored for all this extra space?" "Perhaps because space travel is so expensive." "Only in terms of cash. To be sure, it might take practically everything that a man has to buy passage. I now ask you to estimate how many men and their families sacrificed everything they had, packed a few treasured possessions into a Conestoga wagon and headed for the West." "I have no way of knowing, sir." "No, of course not. Let me tell you what happened. In that glorious phase of Early North America, men, women, and even their chil, dren toiled from sunrise to sunset I to scratch out their living. From : the dawn of history, luxury and leisure belonged to the landed  baron. Since wealth went with acreage, any man who could stake out a claim to acreage could also . claim wealth. It was a matter of #, finding the unclaimed acreage , first."  I HE commander leaned forward to press his point. "Then came the industrial revolution and the age of automation. Industrial slavery ended in a clank of gears. Your little man no longer starved to death nor toiled twelve hours a day. The finest automobile that the wealthy man could buy was only three or four times as expensive as the car driven by the average workman. Therefore the idea of staking out arable land as a means to wealth became less and less desirable. Automation hit the farm. The landed baron changed into the elected presiding officer over a stock-secured corporation. "Today," said the commander, "the man who leaves his home to migrate is not abandoning squalor and sorrow in the hope of finding something better. He's leaving luxury, culture, and leisure. For what? For the privilege of scrabbling for a bare existence. Now, Mr. Reed, are you beginning to understand?" "I think so, sir." "Good. Then you'll begin to revise your opinion as to the importance of extending the cruising range of our spacecraft." Reed blinked, "Sir?" "Be sensible, young man. A colony is a waste of effort unless it becomes more than self-sufficient. Until Eden, Tau Ceti, has become populated to the point where Ekien can support her own highly technical culture, it is an economically unsound proposition." The commander glared at the yoimg spaceman. "Must I be blunt? Every effort must be spent in raising the culture-level of Eden, Tau Ceti. That means increasing the population, Mr. Reed, until the numbers are high enough to pay for industrialization. Once the cities of Eden, Tau Ceti, offer the culture opportunity of the cities of Earth, then we'll have migration on a social level instead of the malcontents, rugged individualists, and petty lawbreakers who've been given the alternative of migration instead of incarceration. "Now, Mr. Reed, do you see what I'm driving at? It would be far wiser of you to spend your time enhancing the aspect of Ekien, Tau Ceti, than trying to figure out ways and means of getting to more distant stars and locating other distant planets -- to which the human race wouldn't migrate." "But sir-" "Mr. Reed, I recognize in you the admirable spirit of adventure. But we must remember that this same spirit that once drove men to land on Earth's moon in a multistage chemical rocket was not enough to establish a tax-paying colony there. Now, about this project of yours. You say that you have not yet located the flaw in Hansen's Folly?" "No, sir, but -- " "Mr. Reed, you realize thatyou'll stay here on Eden until you do?" "Yes, sir, but -- " "And the longer it takes you, the more ridicule will be directed at you, at me, and the Bureau of Operations?" "But, sir-" "Mr. Reed, I'll also point out that there will be no promotion until your assignment is complete." "I'm aware of that sir, but -- " "But what, Mr. Reed?" without annoying you?" "If you've something to say, go ahead. I can hardly promise not to be annoyed before I hear what the subject is." "Thank you, sir. In trying to solve Hansen's Folly I engaged in some physical experiment and measurement because I couldn't find any flaw in the mathematical argument on the abstract scale. As you know, sir, one of the ways to find out why something won't work is to try it. It isn't often the easiest or the simplest, but it is often the only way." "So go on. What happened?" "Sir, my hardware works. So far as I can see, sir, there is no flaw! I was right!" "Commander Briggs of Research -- " "Sir, there must be some mistake." "Silence! I'm not through! Commander Briggs seems to know more about my personnel than I do." "Sir?" "First, he offered to bet me a dinner at the Officer's Club that you wouldn't locate the flaw in Hansen's Folly by the time I made this tour of inspection. Knowing that you'd probably have no other ambition than to leave Eden, Tau Ceti, I snapped at this wager like a starving dog latching onto a piece of steak. I have lost, it would appear, which is only one dinner. But, Mr. Reed, when I accepted this wager. Commander Briggs compounded it by offering to bet me a dinner for the whole Bureau of Resarch that after not finding the flaw by means I of the academic analysis, you'd resort to experiment in hardware. Knowing full well that you'd not have the temerity to divert Service Materiel for your own tinkering, I 'accepted that wager also. Then to top it off, Briggs added a bet of champagne and corsages for the officers' wives that you'd complete your hardware and still not locate the flaw, and that when I arrived you'd be firmly convinced that you'd proved your point in theory and practice and that therefore you were right and the rest of the known universe was wrong." "HE commander took a deep breath under which he swore gently but feelingly. Then he went on: "And so, Mr. Reed, I am going to be 'Guest of Dishonor at the Officers' Club. I will, according to custom, be served the plate of baked S#mthetic beans whilst my contemporary officers and their wives partake of a gourmet's banquet of natural foods." "Sir, I'm sorry." "Being sorry is hardly enough!" The commander pawed through his attache case until he came to a file-folder which he looked through meticulously for several minutes as if justifying a carefully considered opinion. Finally he made a lightly pencilled note on the margin oi one page and said, "Lalande #!" Junior Spaceman Howard Reed gasped and blurted, "Flatbush, sir?" Commander Breckenridge nodded curtly. "You will man the perimeter alien-spacecraft detection station and the astrogation beacon distance and direction equipment located on Flatbush, Lalande #. And you will stay there until you have Hansen's Folly completely solved. Do you Understand?" Junior Spaceman Howard Reed nodded unhappily. Lalande # was close to the maximum range, the seventeenlight-year point of no return. Any enjoyment in knowing that he would have to be commissioned one of the finer, more efficient little spacecraft in order to get there in the first place was completely wiped out in the knowledge that once there, it would have to stand inert awaiting his return, because there would be no power to spare on side trips. One did not, with subatomic power, carry a spare can of fuel for emergency. VI and saw Scholar Ross. She smiled xmcertainly at him as she invited him in. In the Hanford living room, in the presence of Mr. Hanford, the scholar of genetics looked around cautiously and questingly. Hanford said, "Gloria is not here. She's out." "Then I may speak openly." "Of course. Is there some trouble -- again?" "Frankly, I'm not certain," said the scholar of genetics slowly. "I'd like more information if you'd be so good as to help." "Of course we'll hlp!" exclaimed Mrs. Hanford. "What's bothering you?" "How is your daughter getting on with Bertram Harrison?" "Why, I'd guess they're getting along about as well as any other young pre-marriage couple. That's what the engagement period is for, isn't it? I mean, it's been that way historically." "Yes, you're right," nodded Scholar Ross. "Did they rent the usual pre-marriage apartment?" "Oh yes. They were quite the conventional young lovers. Scholar Ross." The man from the Department of Domestic Tranquility smiled. "And you, of course, were the conventional parents of the affianced bride?" "Of course. We were so pleased that we could hardly wait for Twelfth Night." "And during that visit, were the appointments of the apartment proper?" "Why, Scholar Ross!" "No, no, Mrs. Hanford, you misunderstand. T implied no moral question. I really meant to ask if you knew whether Gloria and Bertram each and separately were properly continuing their therapy." Mr. Hanford grunted. "As parents of the affianced bride," he said, "we're paying for it!" Mrs. Hanford blushed. "I -- er -- snooped," she said. Scholar Ross looked at Mrs. Hanford with an expression that indicated that snooping was an entirely acceptable form of social behavior. "And what did you find?" . "Everything entirely right." Then she looked doubtful and bit her lower lip. "Scholar Ross, I'm no authority in these matters. In Gloria's bathroom were the same-looking kind of bottles and pills that we got when you prescribed, and when f  I turned on the speaker in her bedI room it sounded like the same kind , of music as I'd heard in her bedroom when she was living at home. It -- frankly -- depressed me." "And Bertram's?" "I know less of his medication. But I did listen to his music outlet. It removed the feeling of depression I'd gotten from Gloria's program material." "That's quite right. It sounds reasonable." S HE blushed again and looked at her husband. "Only one thing," she said very slowly. 'What's that?" "I -- er, hardly know how to put it. You see, when Gerald and I were affianced, neither one of us were undergoing any kind of corrective therapy and so I don't know how these things work out." 'What are you driving at?" "Why, Scholar Ross, with neither of us undergoing corrective therapy, it didn't matter which one of the bedrooms we used." Scholar Ross considered for a moment and then nodded. "Of course," he said with an air of complete finality. "Thafs it!" 'What's it?" asked Mr. Hanford. "The situation becomes a simple . matter of reduction to the law of most-active reaction. Look," he said, "we have one personality that requires an environment of stimulation to bring him up to normal. and another personality that requires a tranquil atmosphere to normal. Place them both in the tranquilizing environment and he is driven deeper into his lethargy, probably to the point of complete physical and intellectual torpor. Place them both in the stimulating atmosphere and he becomes normal while she goes into transports of sensuous excitement. This explains it!" "Explains what?" demanded Mr. Hanford. "Her recent behavior. Or rather escapade." None of them heard the gentle snick of the lock in the front door. "Escapade?" exclaimed Mrs. Hanford. "We didn't know that she was in any trouble," said Mr. Hanford. "That's just the point," said Scholar Ross. "Your daughter has the infuriating habit of indulging in outrageous behavior under the complishment." Gloria Hanford said, "Why, thank you, sir!" She dropped the scholar a deep curtsey, displaying several inches of slender ankle. "Gloria!" demanded her mother. "What have you been up to?" Gloria Hanford smiled at her mother in an elfin, yet superior manner. "I am the affianced bride of Bertram Harrison," she said softly. "Therefore my behavior. i whether good, bad, or indifferent, is no longer the problem of my parents." Her father said, "Gloria, I happen to be big enough in both the physical and intellectual departments to overrule both you and your husband-to-be. So you'll answer your mother." "Why," said Gloria quietly, "I've done nothing wrong." Mr. Hanford said to Scholar Ross: "Whafs your side of this?" Scholar Ross said, "Last week the Westchester Young People's Club gave a costume ball. The young ladies were to attend this affair adorned in the authentic fashion of some period in the past, and a prize was to be awarded to the most novel, yet completely authentic costume." "And," said Gloria with a smile, "I won!" "Your daughter won because she has a talent for performing the most shocking deeds under a cloak of intellectual achievement." "Do go on. Scholar Ross. What did Gloria do?" HE scholar smiled wryly. "Style and fashion ceased to be logical when clothing was designed for sly provocation rather than as a' protection against a harsh environment," he said. 'We live in a mixed-up social world. We encourage communal swimming and sun bathing in the nude -- and yet after five o'clock it is considered shocking to display more than the bare face and hands. "So in order to combine the maximum shock-effect with the cloak of utter authenticity. Miss Hanford researched the styles and fashions until she located a brief period of a few scant months late in the Twentieth Century. Her costume consisted of a many-fold voluminous skirt of semi-transparent material that draped in graceful folds from waist to mid-calf. She was completely nude above the waist! To prove her point, she offered fashion stereos of the period from style magazines." Gloria chuckled. "I might have researched back to the Old Testament," she said. Scholar Ross shook his head. "As I say, her shocking behavior could not be criticized. She could justify it according to the rules." Mr. Hanford shook his head and asked, "Gloria, what did Bertram think of all this?" "Bertram carried the style stereos," said Gloria. "There wasn't any pocket in my costume." Abruptly, Scholar Ross said, "Miss Hanford, how are you and Bertram getting along?" "As well as could be expected." "Meaning what?" "Meaning that each of us lives our own life. Berty likes his sedentary, torpid existence. In fact, he'd like to be more of a vegetable than he is. It started with his taking my pills and that was all right, I guess. But when he started sleeping in my bedroom so that he could estivate under the tranquilizing music program you prescribed for me, that was too much!" Scholar Ross looked unprecedentedly astonished. "So?" he demanded. "What do you mean 'so?' What would any red blooded woman do? I moved out and into his bedroom, naturally." "And then started taking his medication?" asked Scholar Ross curtly. "Natch!" "Oh, my God!" exploded Scholar Ross. He eyed Gloria intently. "How do you manage to get Bertram awake far enough to attend things like your costume ball?" he asked. "Well," she said with a smile, "I am really strong enough to sling a hundred and eighty-five pounds of loosely-stuffed sausage over my shoulder in a fireman's carry and tote the inert mass back to its own bedroom so that its own music will rouse it enough to reach for its bedside bottles of medication. Nature then takes its course until the awakening. Then he goes along with my desires -- because he knows that if he doesn't, I won't let him dive back into his complete inertia. It's very simple. Of course, it isn't much fun." you intend to continue this sort of self-centered, artificial life after you and Bertram are married?" "I've given the future very little thought." "You always have," said Scholar Ross tmhappily. "That's been a lot of your trouble." "So what am I supposed to do? Do you really expect me to marry that vegetable? I've got a life to lead too, you know. It may suit your overall program of genetics to breed a batch of normal children, but the same Book of Laws grants me the right to seek my own level of happiness." "Granted -- " 'Well, scholar, I can tell you that my idea of happiness is not a husband who comes into my bedroom walking like a somnambulist just barely able to cross the room before collapsing like a looselypacked sandbag." "What you need," said Scholar Ross firmly, "is a man who is strong enough to tell you what you're going to do." "And where are you going to find one?" Scholar Ross turned from Gloria to her parents. "Obviously," he said regretfully, "this proposed marriage between your daughter and Bertram Harrison is not going to culminate in a happy tmion." "Did you expect it to?" asked Gloria. "I had hopes. I can only propose a course of action. Were yOu willing to embark upon your prescribed program of coirective therapy, and so become a normally active and emotionally staUe woman, then the marriage might work out very well indeed " "It's all my fault, of iedurse?" "Yes. Of course. The decision was yours to make." "And how about tiiat lump of lard you've foisted pff on me?" treat into total lethargy is, of course, his own decision. But it, too, is only another aspit of the usual case. The strong-willed personality makes its own way. The weak one follows." I "I see," sneered Gloria, j'lt's all my fault!" t "Of course it is, snapped Scholar yourself, you'd also have been willing to correct Beitram since yours is the stronger personality." "So what's the next move? Do I get to try another dolt?" "Hardly. You'd do the same with any of them." "So what is it? Am I going to be exported to Edeji, Tau Ceti as an incorrigible?" Scholar Ross Was Silent. #f R. Hanford sard, "Certainly#-- there must be anbther Way?" Mrs. Hanford said, "Must I lose my daughter?" Scholar Ross said regretfully, "There is another way, of course, but either way is essentially a loss of your daughter, Mrs. Hanford." Mr. Hanford said, "And what is this other course. Scholar Ross?" "It's called re-orientation." "Brain-washing!" exclaimed Gloria. "That's a harsh, colloquial term." Mrs. Hanford said, "How does this re-orientation work?" Coldly, as if he were discussing the repair of some inanimate engine, Scholar Ross said, "It starts with corrective surgery on the pituitary and thyroid glands. Next comes some very complicated neuro-cerebral surgery, somewhat resembling the crude, primitive process once called 'Prefrontal Lobotomy'. Nowadays it produces the desired effect without all of the deleterious side-effects. Then, once the patient is completely disoriented, the process of re-education takes place. The patient is extremely docile and highly impressionable. All decisions carry the same weight -- " "How do you mean that?" asked Mr. Hanford. 'Why, the decision to use blue or black ink in your fountain pen becomes as important as the decision of whether to cling or jump from a damaged aircar." "Oh. And then?" "Why, since the patient is docile and impressionable, we can mold the patient's appreciation of people, places, and events into conformity. Events of the former life are not erased, but they are viewed as if the patient had seen a trivideo drama instead of having been that person. The entire list of friends and acquaintances is changed because the patient's personality is so different that the former friends no longer have anything in common with the patient. It will be," said Scholar Ross, "exactly as if your daughter left you, never to return, and then next year you are introduced to a strange woman who bears a complete resemblance to your daughter. To whom," he added, "you eventually become emotionally attached because of your daughter's memory." "It sounds pretty drastic." "I shall not fool you. It is drastic, indeed." "I don't like it," Gloria snapped. "Yes," pleaded Mrs. Hanford. 'What is the alternative?" "E!den, Tau Ceti. I'll arrange transportation under the migration act, and she'll be permitted two hundred pounds of gross." Scholar Ross smiled thinly. "You can diet a few pounds off and thus increase the net weight of your allowable possessions," he said. "But, on the other hand, if you diet down to railskinny no one will take a chance on you." Gloria demanded belligerently, "What am I, a raffle prize?" "Why, that's no better than white slavery" cried her mother. "Oh, come now!" said Scholar Ross. "Miss Hanford will receive a home and a hard-working husband on a fine new world with unlimited opportunities." Gloria Hahford snorted. "The term, 'unlimited opportunit #  is just the optimist's way of describing a situation that the pessimist would call, 'l?ck of modern conveniences.'" 'Well, Miss Hanford, you have your choice. One of three. Corrective therapy and marriage with Bertram Hnsrisoo; total re-orientation; or migration to Eden, Tau Cetii I'll not ask for your decision now. Give me your answer within thirty days." " Y ou can't force me!" "No. I can't. All I can do is to point out your three avenues of future travel and then point out that I do have the means of making your life so very inconvenient that you'll have no recourse but to make your choice from among the three desirable possibilities. Desirable, I must admit, means that which is most favorable to the furtherance of domestic tranquility!" Class M star, a faint red dwarf not visible to the naked eye from Earth, Sol. Lalande # lies fif' i " teen point nine light years froni Sol, about fifteen degrees north of the celestial equator and not quite opposite the vernal equinox. It has planets, but this does not make Lalande # unique. Like most of the planets foimd in space, neither mad dogs nor Englishmen would have anything to do with able only for the hapless wight whose erring foot has unhappily landed on the tender official toe. The planet Flatbush, Lalande #, received its name from an obscure medieval reference to a form of punishment known as "Walking a beat in Flatbush," if we are to believe MacClelland's authoritative volume The Origin of Place Names. Observed through the multipane window of the Station, Flatbush, Lalande #, was a pleasant enough planet, provided one could ignore the fact that there was not a sign nor trace of vegetation from the Installation Building to the horizon. A couple of himdted yards from the building there was a pleasant looking lake. The lake was indeed water, but it contained dissolved substances that would have poisoned a boojum snark. The warm wind of Flatbush rippled the surface of the lake, but no square yard of sail would be hoisted until someone first built a gas mask that would filter out the colorless gases that turned silver black. Fluffy clouds floated across the sky, but they rained down a mess that etched stainless steel. Out There, near the perimeter of Man's five-parsec range of operations, subelectromagnetic detector beams scoured the sky. Taking the most pessimistic standpoint -- the least possible combinations of Nature's infinite variety of environment -- Nature's own profligacy with life-forms still demanded that somewhere. Out There, another race was plying the spaceways. Someday this hypothetical race was certain to touch wings with mankind. When that took place it was the duty of the Bureau of Operations to detect them, to intercept them, and to warn the men of Earth, Sol, that Mankind was no longer alone. The fact that the subelectromagnetic detecting beams had been sweeping space for a couple of hundred years without detecting anything had no bearing on the future. The beams must be maintained so long as a human man remained alive in space. In addition to the detector beams, the outlying planets carried astrogation beacons. They were subelectromagnetic lighthouses, so to speak, that rang across space with known direction and ranging telemetered signals. Someday, Man hoped to fill the space lanes with spacecraft and the planets with interstellar commerce. Someday there might be another Marie Celeste plying its course with its crew inexplicably missing. But if this ever happened, it was not going to happen without the Space Service knowing precisely how many and which spacecraft were operating through that volume of space before, during, and . after D-for-Disaster Day and Mfor-Mysterious Minute. The equipment, of course, was  automated to modem perfection, with multi-lateral channels that I would take over in case of com ponent failure. Its factor of relia bility was well above six or seven : nines of perfection. But to admit that this perfection was adequate would have deprived the Space Service of a convenient minor penal detail to take care of brash junior officers. Manning such a station provided the junior officer with a wealth of time to contemplate his sins, and to mend his evil ways. In the case of Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, this process consisted of locating the flaw that prevented Hansen's Folly from being : Hansen's Analysis. IV OW, from the time of AlexanV ' der Selkirk, romantic history  has been dotted with accounts of : men who have been cast away with I nothing more than their hands and I their brains. And with these, they ' have succeeded in raising their caveman environment up to the I level of modern technical conveniences. Like them -- having been unable to locate the flaw in Hansen's Folly by the theoretical approach during his tour of duty on Earth, Sol, and having similarly failed to locate the error in experimental hardware during his tour of duty on Eden, Tau Ceti -- Junior Spaceman Howard Reed began to experiment on the spacecraft that stood parked on its launching pad two hundred feet from the Installation. There was plenty of equipment to work with. The Space Service did not stock its perimeter stations in a slipshod manner. Furthermore, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had plenty of time. The account of his life and adventures is hardly worth telling. He had no distractions. He worked The months passed one after the other. Flatbush, Lalande # was so far out that there was no provision made for a regular tour of inspection. Nobody bothered to drop in on Junior Spaceman Howard Reed. Gabbling on the official communication channels was strictly forbidden, so the young junior officer was denied even contact by voice. No one had come up with an economically sound means of producing entertainment programs from Earth, Sol, on the subelectromagnetic beams and so he -- like his fellows in the other perimeter stations -- received neither news nor music from home. He could terminate this tour of duty only by solving the riddle of Hansen's Folly, and then notifying his superiors on the official communications channels -- or by tucking a note in the once-each-year supply drone that came laden with enough of Earth's environment to keep the young expatriate alive for another year. The set-up was wholly conducive to work. There was time and there was equipment; his orders were to remain there imtil he had studied his way through the problem... With nothing else to do, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed was deep in his investigation... when the drone spacecraft came down along the subelectromagnetic beacon and made its landing a dozen yards away. The drone was standard spacecraft size, an unmanned hull laden with the necessities of life that would support him for a year. It was the first one that he had ever seen. This was the first time that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had had to face the problem of Supply. Packed in that droneship was enough earth environment to last a man a year. The perishables and expendables, as well as replacement for the lost fractions of the recyclables, were all there. They were dehydrated and deep frozen after all waste had been removed, then compressed into cubes of identical size for the most favorable packing fraction. Even so, it was a prodigious amount of stuff. Supply would have been impossible on a onceper-year basis, if the foul water of Flatbush, Lalande #, hadn't been distillable with ease. T he junior spaceman eyed the droneship with a sudden burst of pride in his fellow man's accomplishment. Given a pre-programmed flight along telemetered beacons originating at either terminus, the rimning equipment within the drone would bulk much less than the same mass and size as a human and his needs. Until flightdecisions were necessary, the hardware pilot was as good as the human pilot -- and far less subject to headache, tantrum, disappointment at not getting the Saturday night pass and resentment over being passed by at promotion time. Then his pride gave way to sudden, prolonged thought. The range of a spacecraft is computed from point of takeoff to point of no return. There was no way of restoring the powerbanks of a spacecraft except on Earth, Sol. Now, of course, it is entirely possible to take off and just keep going until the powerbanks are depleted. That will cover twice the stated range to the point of no return. Ships have gone out and off and away and have never been heard of again. It is possible that one or more of these have succeeded in locating an Earth-like planet beyond the point of no return, but the Earthmen at home will never know about it until the range is extended. The possibility of such a planet favoring human life and ultimately harboring a culture of technical competence enough to create and maintain the power restoring equipment is extremely remote. For spacecraft that carry women are few and far between. And it takes more than one man's lifetime to make use of the knowhow. Junior Spaceman Howard Reed knew that away back in the Twentieth Century, the average engineer could make a guess, coimt on his fingers, and come up with a pretty shrewd estimate of the horsepower per cubic inch that could be stored by the various ways and means available to the age. Removing the human pilot and his needs did give the droneship quite a bit more space for cargo and power. But, as he looked at the droneship standing there, it became plain to Junior Spaceman Howard Reed that there was not room in that size of hull for both the necessary powerbanks and the full year's store of supplies for one man. Whereupon Jimior Spaceman Howard Reed ffiopped his tools. He donned his space suit and crossed the intervening space to the droneship. He began to examine the ship's rimning gear with a critical and suspicious eye. He was examining hardware that was familiar to him. It took him no more than two hours to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that the droneship's drive was built along the theories and mathematical analysis that he had been told simply did not work! Someone had reduced Hansen's Folly to practice! XT E paused again. Hansen's Folly had been called a failure about two hundred years ago, but what did that really mean? He considered his history. In #, Stephen Gray and Granville Wheeler made the proud announcement that they had succeeded in transmitting an electrical phenomenon along a wire for a distance of # feet. Two hundred years later the entire Earth was girdled with telegraph, telephone and cable wires and linked with the invisible bonds of radio waves. In about # the Wright Brothers made their first powered airplane flight. Forty years later men were flying in airplanes that carried a wingspread greater than the distance of the Wright's first flight. Einstein's Barrier was accepted scientific dogma for a hundred years; but he, Howard Reed, was now standing in a spacecraft that had crossed the gulf between the stars at a speed that not only exceeded the velocity of propagated light -- but exceeded this speed by a few hundred orders of magnitude. So? So maybe they were right. Maybe Hansen's Folly was a failure. But the running gear in this droneship was designed to the analysis produced by Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, and it worked. Furthermore, he had only the scornful word of Commander Briggs of the Bureau of Research that his arguments had been parallel to those of the hapless Hansen. It would hardly be the first time in the history of the human race that some bureaucrat got fat on the work of his cmderlings who not only received no credit for their work, but were often hushed, hidden, or otherwise prevented from proving their right to the fame and fortune. Angrily, Howard Reed stood up and cursed. They were not going to smother him in a peg-whittling job on a single-man post sixteen light years from home base, denied of all but official communications. He was going to find out about this very strange business! Junior Spaceman Howard Reed did not even bother going back to the Station. Its Outside detectors had been sweeping deep space for a couple of hundred years without detecting anything; its astrobeacons were employed once each year when the droneship arrived. Furthermore, both equipments were automatic, on the trips, set up to bypass the one-man crew of the Station by transmitting the information on the regular Channels. So, there in the droneship, the junior spaceman merely disconnected the pre-programmed autopilot, clamped his hands around the manual gear, and took off for far-off Earth, Sol. G loria Hanford opened her apartment door, made a double take when she saw the living room lights were on, toted up the list of unexpected guests, and assessed the situation in one brief moment. She stopped short on one high heel, pivoted, and said to her escort, "Not tonight, Joseph!" "But-" 'Tve guests," she said, placing a hand flat on her escort's chest. "But-" "My guests mean trouble," she finished, shoving. Her escort disappeared -- walking backward and still trying to protest Gloria closed the loving room door with a gesture of finality, then turned to lean back against it She faced her vmexpected guests with an air of exasperated patience, as if by her silence she was inviting them to hurl the first bolt and by her attitude confident that she could turn it aside with ease. She did not have long to wait. They all started to talk at once. The resulting babble was unintelligible and the sound of the others' voices made each one of them stop without finishing. Silence fell again, and in the calm, Scholar Ross spoke up : "Under the circumstances. Miss Hanford, I think we have the right to ask that you explain your actions." Mr. Harrison grimted. "I say this is a waste of time. Let's get along with it." Mrs. Harrison added, "Yes indeed, Scholar Ross. If you'll call the authorities, we'll sign the complaint." Mrs. Hanford snapped, "I resent the implication that my daughter is wholly and solely in the wrong." Mr. Hanford said, "In my opinion, Bertram Harrison isn't bright enough to come in out of the rain, let alone being smart enough to know what's good for him. Now -- " Mr. Harrison growled, "We come calling this evening and find our son deep under the influence of tranquilizers and the catalytic action of the mood music prescribed for this philandering young hussy -- " "I'm no philanderer!" cried Gloria. "I'm not married to your cold lump of lard!" Scholar Ross spead out his hands in a gesture of supplication, as if he were pleading with the gods for a return to sanity. "Stop it!" he cried. "Stop it!" H e turned to Mrs. Hanford with a shake of theliead. "I am sorry. Your resentment of the fact that this affair is your daughter's responsibility is not going to change it." "But he's-" "Please, Mrs. Hanford. This engagement is not a matter of the personal choice of the participants. It gravely concerns Society. Now, insofar as the Department of Domestic Tranquility is concerned, it is the excitable, headstrong, unruly, willful personality that is dangerous to social stability. The calm and placid ones do not commit acts of violence. Indeed, Mrs. Hanford, were it not for the quiet, phlegmatic personality like Bertram Harrison, we in genetics would have a hard time finding a useful niche for belligerents such as your daughter Gloria." Gloria Hanford said something under her breath. Scholar Ross eyed her suspiciously and demanded that she repeat. "Cliche Sixteen," she retorted. "It pertains to tiie problem of leading horses to water." He nodded. "Yes. The horse is laudably exercising as much free will as his equine position permits him. The same platitude can also be employed to point out that blind stubbornness may prevent him from doing something that is really a good idea even if someone else did think of it first." "I say enough of this nonsense!" snapped Mr. Harrison. "Let's get this debate over with!" "Now, just a moment," said Scholar Ross. "You have no legal standing. Miss Hanford is Bertram Harrison's affianced wife. Under law, any difficulties between them are strictly a civic matter. Bluntly, sir, only the party being damaged can sign a complaint, and after making a complaint it is up to the complaining party to prove that he is being damaged at the will of the accused." "Scholar Ross, you and your Department of Domestic Tranquility may know how you hope to maintain a calm and stable social structure, but you don't know much about the law," said Mr. Harrison slowly and carefully. "One only need go back to the early days of common law to find a rather terse discussion of the proposition of maintaining an attractive nuisance. The owner of the attractive nuisance has a responsibility to the gullible citizens who are attracted." "Meaning?" "Meaning," said Mr. Harrison, "that Miss Hanford in this pre-marriage apartment did maintain a series of attractive nuisances. Tranquilizer pills. Soothing mood music. A person of calm tendencies would find them most attractive. It was therefore her responsibility to protect the other party. Now -- when Bertram has been properly treated and is able to testify -- I think we'll find that Miss Hanford not only failed to protect Bertram, but indeed encouraged him to help himself to her pills and sleep in her bedroom under the soothing influence of the mood music prescribed for her." M r. Hanford snapped, "If this attractive nuisance is as you say, Harrison, why can't we charge that Bertram did little to protect Gloria from his own therapy?" Scholar Ross raised a hand. "Permit me," he said, "to reiterate that it is the hypertonic, overactive personalities that create social troubles. A Bertram Harrison lulled into a semi-cataleptic state by the wiles of a Gloria Hanford would hardly be expected to rise in a sudden burst of strength." "So no matter what I do, I'm wrong?" the girl asked. "Not at all," said Scholar Ross. "It is your direct responsibilty -- your duty -- to do eversdhing you can to establish a firm and stable family unit here with Bertram Harrison -- " "Sorry, Scholar Ross," said Mr. Harrison icily. "You haven't really heard me. Your notion that this affair is a civil argument between an affianced couple is not true. You imply that no laws have been broken. You are wrong. I am willing to sign a complaint right now that Miss Gloria Hanford deliberately induced my son to indulge in her therapy. It was her means of lulling him into a state of mind that would permit her to go gallivanting off on a date with another man." "I am not married to Berty yet!" snapped Gloria. "Dating's still my right!" "Oh," snarled Mr. Harrison angrily, "shut up or I'll sign a complaint that you administered medical treatment without a license! Insofar as the Harrison family is concerned, this engagement shall be terminated unfavorably. Come!" he said to his wife. She rose to follow. Gloria stepped aside, but paused to ask, "Aren't you going to take Bertie with you?" Mrs. Hanford said coldly, "He's already been taken to the hospital for treatment to bring him out of the trance you got him into. And so. Miss Hanford, will you please step aside and let me pass?" And Mr. Harrison's parting shot was, "I shall sign my complaints in the morning -- or if he is able, we'll make it thoroughly legal and have Bertram sign them." He closed the door firmly. Mrs. Hanford wailed, "Now what shall we do?" Scholar Ross shook his head. "With this poor record, this noncooperation," he said slowly, "it will be well nigh impossible to arrange another union. iFurthermore, if Harrison carries out his threat -- " Gloria said quickly, "If he wants to, he can talk Bertie into anything. Anything. Such as signing the most frightful complaints and being convinced of their absolute truth and justice." Mr. Hanford said, "If that's true, he could also be talked back out of them." Scholar Ross shook his head again. "That presupposes that you could arrange access to Bertram that couldn't be overcome by another talking-to by his parents. It won't work. The young man is a mental weathervane." "So where do we stand?" "As I say, we might as well prepare for the worst. If the case of Gloria Hanford ever comes under the scrutiny of the Law, she will be declared either a delinquent or an incorrigible, depending upon whether her escapades are ruled misdemeanors or felonies." Scholar Ross turned to Gloria Hanford. "I warned you. Now, where we of the Department of Domestic Tranquility have no power to force you into a proper course of action, you'll find that the Law most certainly has. Miss Hanford, the Law will decide just how dangerous you are to the civic peace. Upon that decision, the law will further decide what action it must take to protect that civic peace from you." He paused. A silence followed his statements. He waited a few moments to let his words sink in. Then he walked to the door and said: "As of now, the future of Miss Gloria Hanford is out of my hands." Mr. Hanford said, "Scholar Ross, how bad is this likely to be?" "A lot will depend upon how swiftly Bertram Harrison responds to the restorative treatment. With on your side the matter might not reach a major catastrophe. Tomorrow may tell." IX Reed said plaintively, "But this is the Bureau of Justice. According to the Regulations you are supposed to listen to me, at least." The space officer behind the desk wore the three wide stripes of the commander's rank, topped by the fasces that symbolized the law. He was Commander Hughes, chief of the Space Service Bureau of Justice. He smiled at the junior spaceman but shook his head. "You would place us in a most difficult position were we to heed your plea without having the matter referred to us through official channels." With some exasperation, Reed said, "Look, sir, I've been subject to a severe injustice. Why can't I at least tell my problem to someone?" "That would be cutting across channels. It simply is not done." "Commander Hughes," said the junior spaceman earnestly, "you're not serving justice. You're obstructing it!" "Now see here, young man -- " "Commander Hughes, you're insisting that I request my superior officer to forward through official channels a complaint against him. First, sir, I point out that he would refuse my request unless he were absolutely certain that my case against him was ridiculously weak. Second, I'm certain that the request would bring quick retaliation." Commander Hughes shook his head. "The Regulation provides that any reasonable request be forwarded. And the Regulation further provides that there shall be no punitive action." Reed snorted. "Fine. And if I do find myself punished, must I next forward my request for investigation through the same officer?" "That is a serious charge, young man." "I can substantiate it! Look, sir, quite a long time ago I made some scientific studies, and -- " "You're an Operations officer, Mr. Reed?" "Yes, but-" "Then you're not trained in science?" "Let's not go on that rat-race right now," said the junior spaceman testily. "I've heard it before. That's why I'm here!" "Very well." Junior Spaceman Howard Reed took a deep breath and plunged into his long explanation. At the end, Commander Hughes nodded, his face in a non-committal mask. "One moment now," he said. He turned to the working desk behind him and spoke into a telephone. It had neither visual plate nor amplified output; only the user could know what was being communicated, and with whom. "Now we'll see," said the commander as he hung up the telephone.  stopped trivideo drama they stood and sat there motionless and silently as the minutes dragged past. Ultimately there was a gentle alarm ring from one of the desk drawers. Commander Hughes opened it to extract a couple of yards of stereofac paper. "Your service record," explained the commander, picking up a reading prism and starting at the top. "Just another moment." Another half dozen minutes went past. " 'Junior Spaceman Howard Reed,' " the commander read quietly at last, " 'has an exemplary record.' That is Commander Breckenridge's opinion, if we are to believe what we read in this record. Oh, perhaps, he thought, a bit headstrong and mildly argumentative, factors which he considered balanced by a faculty for deep concentration." "And how about my being transferred to Eden, Tau Ceti? And then to Flatbush, Lalande #?" Reed demanded. '"Reasons for transfer,'" read Commander Hughes from the record. "'Junior Spaceman Howard Reed is ambitious and overactive. In the considered opinion of Commander Breckenridge, he will make a fine superior officer once his duty-experience has the proper breadth.' " The commander looked up and waved a hand at the length of stereofac. The fasces wrought in gold above the stripes glittered in the light "Were it not for the Regulations against permitting a jvmior officer to inspect his own service record," said Commander Hughes with a smile, "I'd let you see for yourself that nowhere on this record is there a single word that corroborates your suggestion. Your tour of duty on Flatbush, Lalande #, and your earlier transfer to Eden, Tau Ceti, were merely the standard tour of duty, granted to satisfactory jimior officers as a means of properly broadening their experience." "In other words," snapped Reed angrily, "the fact that I have crossed space in a craft powered by a technical suggestion made by me some years ago does not prove a thing." "Can you prove that you made any such technical suggestion?" "Yes. Call Commander Briggs of the Bureau of Research. Call Commander Breckenridge of the Bureau of Operations. Demand that they state under oath, whether I did or did not make such suggestions. I was told my ideas were worthless." "In other words, the Bureau of Research says it wouldn't work?" "But look, sir! I drove a spacecraft all the way from -- " ' I " HE Bureau of Justice officer held up a hand. "Look," said the junior spaceman angrily, "all I want is justice!" "And justice you'll get!" retorted Commander Hughes. "First, Mr. Reed, let me ask how you obtained permission to leave your post on Flatbush, Lalande #, so that you could come to the headquarters in person to state your plea? Or was this trip authorized?" "Well, sir -- the detector and beacon stations are completely automated and -- " "In blunt terms you are absent without leave?" "Well, sir-" "Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, you will consider yourself under personal arrest. We have no alternative but to place you in the custody of the Space Security Police. Remain as you were!" Like the fabled case of the drowning man. Junior Spaceman Howard Reed reviewed his past in a single flash before his eyes. In the second blink, he covered his present. It wasn't to his liking. Having covered his past and discarded his present, he next inspected his most probable future and came to the almost immediate conclusion that there wasn't very much in it for him. He had never heard Napoleon's statement that God was on the side with the heaviest artillery, but, in his own way. Junior Spaceman Howard Reed came to a parallel conclusion. Justice was on the side of the heaviest rank. Bitterly, he reflected that the reward for a technical suggestion of great merit was that they wouldn't make any trouble for him -- so long as he didn't try to claim credit for it. He came back to his dangerous present quickly. Commander Hughes was talking briskly into his secret telephone. With a quick gesture, the junior spaceman leaned forward over the desk and snatched the instrument out of the senior officer's hands. He hauled in on the connecting cord imtil it came taut, and then he yanked, ripping the cord from its terminals. Brusquely, he dropped the telephone instrument into the commander's waste basket. Then as bells began to ring and corridor horns began to sound, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed left the administration building of the Bureau of Justice on a dead run. Out in the street the wail of a siren began to climb from its throaty basso to its ear-splitting ululation. X always did, with full awareness, like the transition of a small animal from slumber to flight. It was not a languid hand that reached for the telephone that had awakened her but an alert one. It flipped the accept button up and the vidphone eye button down in a single twisting gesture of thumb and forefinger. It was not modesty that caused the turn-down of the vidphone eye. It was vanity. Gloria Hanford deemed unbrushed teeth, uncombed hair, and imwashed face both unacceptable and unattractive. "Gloria Hanford here. Go ahead." "Scholar Ross calling. Miss Hanford, you should know so that you can be prepared. Bertram Harrison has not yet responded to corrective therapy." "Not -- yet -- responded." she repeated slowly. "Just how bad is this. Scholar Ross?" "It is quite grave. It's possible there may be cerebral deterioration." "You mean Bertram might evdh go from bad to worse?" "Miss Hanford, will you cease treating this as if it were a comedy? You may be defending yourself against charges of criminal negligence. It might even get to the charge of homicide before it's done." "Homicide? But he isn't dead!" "Fifth degree homicide," said Scholar Ross, "comprises the process of causing by any means the loss of impairment of personality or intellect. In layman's terms, brainwashing." "So?" "So if I were you I'd dress and be ready for the authorities. Harrison forced a special session of court last night and had Bertram declared as invalid-incommunicado. Since your engagement was formally dissolved, this places Bertram's well-being under the discretion of his next-of-kin blood relations. Father Harrison is prepared to prosecute to the fullest extent. He's even petitioned for the right to take action against the Department of Domestic Tranquility for what he calls 'incompetent meddling.' So you see, it looks bad." "Maybe there ought to be some thoughtful laws passed to protect we active ones from the dolts and dullards," said Gloria. "Okay, Scholar Ross, I'll take steps!" In a flurry of expert motion, Gloria Hanford dressed, packed, and left. The authorities who came for her hadn't had enough experience in dealing with the hypertonic, overactive, fast-thinking, anti-social type. They expected to find a slightly fuzzy-minded, still halfaslumber girl, unable to grasp both an idea and a dressing gown at the same time. They would not have equated their notion with the trim, alert, neatly and completely dressed young lady they passed on the stairs if it hadn't been for the standard, legal locks on all apartment doors. A tiny flag filled a small aperture only when the full bolt was cast home by a flip of the inside key. Its absence meant that no one was inside. The chief of the group forced his mental image through a mental photomontage that started with the original picture of the halfawakened young woman tossing a tousle of hair back out of one eye, passed through a much-abridged version of the process of female dressing, and concluded with the trim and striking number they'd passed on the stairway. Add important item: As an accessory, whistle-bait was also carrying an overnight bag in one formal-fortravelling, white-gloved hand. Nudged, his memory was good. He hauled his handset out while his men were still making dead certain that the little flag on the lock meant precisely what it said. By the time they were convinced that the apartment was truly empty and the lock bolted from the outside, he had unabashedly reported his failure, and was concluding a very excellent description of the fugitive Gloria Hanford. XI  I " HE average citizen, faced with an impressive uniform, falls into one of two very widely divided camps. One of these camps contains those of us who are impressed by the visible, exalted rank of the wearer. So, by the simple process of snapping, "Official business!" at the driver of a skycab and simultaneously tossing the driver his official I. D. card in its ornate leather folder, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed succeeded in commandeering a skycab. He took off, leaving the driver in a razzle-dazzle dream of collecting mileage from the Space Service whilst he spent the time comfortably relaxing in a pub. Protected from public gaze by the camouflaging skycab, the junior spaceman proceeded to cruise up the middle level of Ancient Fifth Avenue, driving a full eighteen inches below the legal altitude set for cruising skycabs. He turned on his pocket set to listen to the details of the search that was being organized for him. Above him, all around him, even in the subways below him, the vast and efficient organization of the Military Space Service was converging. This organization had the will and the manpower to scour almost literally soul by soul if the need be, to locate a young officer in the uniform of a Junior Spaceman. He might be driving a Military Vehicle, but more likely would be found in one of the many public vehicles or public carriers that the city offered for civilian transportation. There was also the high possibility that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed might be located afoot on the static sidewalk or on one of the tramways. And so, mentally clocking each time-point and making a careful note of the check-points, the junior spaceman built up a mental map of the city and its danger points. Until the laws of simple logic failed to operate, he was going to be exactly where they weren't. He was, in the driver's seat of a skycab, precisely as invisible as The Purloined Letter. But now, if he were to drive his skycab away from the cruising level, he needed one more accessory. He had time. So long as the Military was looking for a Military man in Military surroundings and in a Military manner, he was as safe from detection as if he really owned the skycab he'd commandeered. The civilian police were closer to success. Called by the chief of the arresting party who'd arrived at Gloria Hanford's apartment too late by minutes, the minions of Law and Order converged in their civilian efficiency. Logistically, it was a simple matter of hare and hounds. The hare couldn't win. Only one question was important: Which of the hounds would? Afoot and by jetcopter that englobed the area, they closed in. By the application of stored memory and studied information they erected invisible barriers at every exposed point along the most probable trail of their quarry, from the street outside of her apartment door to the garage stall in Monticello. Then, as a final clincher, they installed three men in Gloria Hanford's airscooter itself. By virtue of the unexpected movement one can elude the cops for a time. Gloria, on the street before her apartment building, almost went into despair when she saw that there was no skycab within hailing distance. She almost took it as a personal affront. But this was hardly the time to stamp her sandals on the hard pavement or to write letters to the Commissioner of Public Carriers. Q HE turned and disappeared into the tramway entrance heading North along Waterfront Avenue. Her coin had hardly hit the bottom of its slot when the mobile police converged to land on the spot she'd just vacated. The foremost of them saw her trim figure disappearing into the distance, eclipsed by the myriads of innocent souls whose only desire was to make use of the same Northbound Tramway. The pursuit began to reshape its surface of detection from englobement to a cylinder, the axis of which lay congruent with the Northbound Tramway. Again, she held the advantage of knowing her own decision whereas her pursuit had to divine her plans by analysis of her actions and making use of extrapolation. Gloria Hanford abruptly stepped off the Tramway at Fifty-third, walked briskly three long blocks to LaGuardia's Sixth, found herself facing a group of burly policemen, and stopped long enough to think. One of the cops shoved a galton whistle between his teeth and blew a supersonic blast that registered on every cop's detector within a quarter mile. Audibly a siren wailed. Inaudibly and invisibly the drawstring web of civic forces began to close in. Once more Gloria stepped into the kiosk of a tramway, the Crosstown. She rode one more block to Ancient Fifth and stepped off. With a wave of her hand, and then the most startling process to be found in a woman, Gloria Hanford poked two fingers in her mouth and let go with a shrill, piercing whistle that made every skycab driver within a half mile come to the point of 'customer's alert!' She made her point. The one accessory that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed needed was a passenger, preferably a female passenger that could be identified as a female for a hundred yards through a high fog driven by a blinding gale. Old, beautiful, young or ugly didn't matter, so long as it was unmistakably woman. The Military wouldn't stop a skycab with a female passenger. He needed his passenger because, until he could pull the taximeter flag -- having filled the compartment with a customer -- he was constrained by law to cruise. Cruising would get him nowhere; what he needed was the flag-down ticket of admission to the upper traffic levels. The whistle shrilled at him; he looked; and then with his spaceman's skill, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed made a mad reverse spiral landing that nosed out a half dozen other cursing drivers. He hit ground zero at velocity zero on target zero and flipped open the skycab door so close that Gloria Hanford did not have to take a middle ground step to gain entry. He took off with a rush that tossed his passenger into the deep seat and slammed the compartment door without human effort Then he went into a cruel climbing turn that wore away twenty thousand flight miles of the engine bearings. He leveled off a thousand feet above Ancient Fifth Avenue's topmost fast traffic level, and set his homing and warning beacon to zero on the spaceport. It did not bother him that his passenger hadn't taken the time to supply him with the destination she desired. After all. Junior Spaceman Howard Reed was not really a skycab driver. He didn't care. Gloria Hanford rebounded from the soft cushions of the skycab compartment and struggled her way into a position that gave her a good look out of the broad rear window. Her driver's mad upward spiral made her dizzy, but from the higher levels it was definitely obvious that there was considerable concentration of movement down there below. Men and ground cars as well as jetcopters were closing down upon the spot they'd just left. It did not bother Gloria Hanford that her driver hadn't waited to inquire as to her destination. She was just happy that he hadn't. Her destination consisted of swift flight along any vector in a solid sphere; hers was a reverse destination properly identified by the word "elsewhere." with a criss-crossing of radiodirected searchbeams, catching and identifying skycar after skycar. Up from the city's traffic levels came jetcopters and squad hoppers and some raid-gun carriers; personnel boats; even a sprinkling of mobile communications bases. To one side and almost behind them a flight of star shells burst in a fire-fall of gorgeous color. To their other side a stream of warning tracer streaked. Howard poured on the coal. Gloria made no protest; it was a most satisfactory agreement. They buzzed across the Jersey Flats. He brought the skycab down on a flat slant landing that arrowed directly in and touched ground and skidded to a stop with all landinggear brakes locked. They slid to within a few yards of the spacecraft. Only then did the junior spaceman pause to speak to his passenger: "Sorry, but I'm in a jam. So long!" He leaped out of the skycab, raced along the ground, went up the ladder on a dead run, flipped into the spacelock, snapped the "Close" switch as he passed the inner portal -- and then, without waiting for any pre-flight checkout. Junior Spaceman Howard Reed resigned from the Space Force by slamming his controls into an emergency and unauthorized flight program that took him up and out of Earth's atmosphere in barely more than nothing flat When he was free and clear, he relaxed in his pilot's seat, swiveled it around... and boggled, bug-eyed, at his passenger. Gloria Hanford, still trim and shipshape in her white sharkskin suit, still carrying the overnight bag in her formal-for-travelling, whitegloved hand, sat in the spare seat She said; "I'm sorry about this, too, but it so happens that I'm also in a jam. Where do we go from here, Spaceman?" He eyed her. 'Where do you want to go?" Gloria chuckled in a throaty voice. "Away," she said. "Can you cook?" he demanded abruptly. "Yes why?" "Then go rustle up some grub from the galley," he directed. "I'll have to keep an eye on this crate until we're free and clear. We can decide what to do next after we have time to think." She looked at him strangely. Her own attitude puzzled her. It was the first time she'd been given an order that she hadn't resented, but then of course his direction made very good sense. He looked upon her as she rose -- and he found her fair. She was. Gloria Hanford was an  extremely attractive dish in her fold by the spaceman's enforced isolation on Eden, Tau Ceti, and later upon Flatbush, Lalande #, she was a dream. Either locale would have the result of making Medusa the Gorgon look like Miss Universe of All Time, but Gloria Hanford didn't need any handicaps. By some strange chemistry of non-material radiation that required no catalyst, there was no question between them. Oh, they had a lot to find out about one another, but they had plenty of time for that. That and other things... TN the Officers' Club on Earth, someone said, "What's the latest report?" Commander Breckenridge of Operations said, "Last detected by the station at Last Gasp, Ross #, and going like hell wouldn't have them." Commander Hughes of the Bureau of Justice said, "Theyre going at it rather early, aren't they?" Scholar Ross of the Department of Domestic Tranquility waved at his comparison microscope and its data cards. "It would be hard to find two people better suited to one another." He looked at his watch and smiled. "I'd say that by now they've both forgotten completely that they were ever strangers." Commander Briggs of the Bureau of Research refilled the glasses with the finest nonsynthetic vintage champagne that the cellar of the Officers' Club could provide. He held his glass high and said, "I toast the bride and groom and the ultimate colonization of the Galaxy -- by subterfuge!" But Scholar Ross pulled the hand down. With a shake of his head, he held his own glass high. "Sorry, Briggs. But this time we toast the reactionaries, the diehards and the rule-ridden old guard who have to work like the very devil to pair off a deserving young couple, and then force them into finding a home of their own -- on some other planet. "Gentlemen. To the Troublemakers! "Ourselves!"  Finishing Basements  Finishing Attics  Essential Repairs  Built-ins  Painting  Refinishing  Landscaping  Patios and Terraces  Barbecues Don't put off those vital home repairs and improvements another day I tells you "how" in language you can understand! Imagine changing that drab kitchen, converting the basement to a game room, glamourizing your outdoor patio -- or any other luxurious improvement... all are now possible at very little cost to youl clear drawings show every detail of construction. Easy-to-follow, steparticles give you valuable pointers on how to save work, buy and save on praper materials and get a professionly-perfect jobl of your workshop library I With your literally thousands of letters, you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges. ) wmjrnmMKmKmmiWimmmmjmjmjWAwmmmmmmmmmmm Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy foreign postage) (U. S. 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Printed In the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. (jOU cok coiCbl yowvftife! Only one power controls your destiny -- a strange force sleeping in your mind. Awaken it ! Command it to obey you ! Push obstacles aside and attain your fondest hopes and ideals. Let the Rosicrucians show you how this can be done. Learn why many of history's great masters were Rosicrucians such as Leonardo de Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newtdn, Sir Francis Bacon, etc. Each of these men learned how to control their fate, to develop mind power, to attain success and happiness. The knowledge that helped these men of history is now helping thousands of thinking men and women throughout the world climb to new heights they, at one time, thought impossible. And they are no different than you ! Why not discover for yourself how you can take advantage of this priceless knowledge The Rosicrucians have preserved through the ages. If you are sincere in wanting greater success, security and happiness send book, "The Mastery of Life." There is no obligation and it may mean the turning point in your life, toward achievements you've never believed possible. Why not do it Scribe .p.L. "kNE of the most resourceful men on this planet is Lester Green of Prospect, Conn. Word for word, here are some of his truly incredible achievements that literally made news: One fall Lester flooded a meadow to insure a good ice crop for the summer. While cutting ice during February he found a setting of hen's eggs in a block of ice. These he placed in a pan on top of his furnace to thaw out. A few days later he found eight Leghorn chicks in the pan, each covered with what resembled fur instead of feathers. When Lester's chimney caught fire he went to the roof and threw sand down it. His wife, excited, mistook washing soda for salt and filled the stove with it. The fire fused the two materials and filled the stovepipe and chimney solidly with glass. Hearing of Thomas A. Edison's experiment to extract rubber from goldenrod, Lester invented a system for producing dairy products from milkweed. He attached Mrs. Green's vibrating machine and churned the juice of the plants so that the leaves exuded butter. Finding a snapping turtle that had been scared out of its shell, Lester made another for it out of concrete into which the turtle crawled and rewarded its benefactor by keeping his feed house free of rats and mice. To assure a winter crop of fresh apples Lester sprayed his trees with glue which prevented the fruit's dropping off in the fall. During the winter a fresh apple always was available merely by washing off the glue. While butchering a hog Lester discovered the fluid responsible for the curl in a pig's tail. By rubbing it on their hair Mrs. Green and her daughter produced beautiful permanent waves. Great as Lester Green is, C. Louis Mortison of the Waterbury Republican and American is greater, for Green is Mortison's invention, and the exploits quoted are among the many in Hoaxes by Curtis D. MacDougall, published by Dover Publications, # Bway., N.Y. #,  #. (Address and price are given to duck mail.) "Ridiculous as some of these stories may appear," MacDougall continues, "the following results are on record: "A Canadian farmer tried to buy a pair of the fur-coated chickens. Mortison answered that they had sweltered to death in the warm weather. "Two prominent chemical engineers tried to find the Green home to investigate the chimney filled with glass. "American and Canadian glue manufacturing concerns sent letters addressed to Lester Green asking what kind of glue he used for his apples, and a representative of a Boston concern came to Prospect to investigate. "Mrs. Green was inundated with requests for the exact method of extracting the pigtail fluid." MacDougall's worthy purpose is to expose hoaxes -- and hoaxes should indeed be exposed, especially vicious ones. But it is no disrespect to his purpose to say that the charm of Hoaxes is the array of engaging whoppers constructed for the sheer love of invention, not only meant to hurt nobody but to enrich their lives, as indeed they do. For MacDougall, in attributing the success of hoaxes to everything from indifference to prejudice and ignorance, does not attribute enough to their inventors' ability to sweat illogic into the shape --  if not the substance -- of logic. This is deadly, of course, in evil causes. For instance, the Nazi claim that Jews have a far higher incidence of insanity than any other religious group is true. But it happens to coincide with the urban rate, which is the only one that should be applied. Ukases forbidding Jews to own land forced them into the cities, making them an urban people -- and therefore subject to the same stresses as all other city folk. As to the oft-made charge that they prefer city life, the Bible says otherwise, and the phenomenal modern agricultural production of Israel confirms the Bible's testimony. Very far from evil in such intent or effect are Mortison's hoaxes. And that a faker can be a hero, commemorated as one, you can see for yourself outside Winsted, Conn., where the welcoming signs read: Winsted, founded in #, has been put on the map by the ingenious and queer stories that emanate from this town and which are printed all over the country, thanks to L. T. Stone. Unfortunately, Louis T. Stone, the "Winsted Liar," is not living proof. He died in #, managing editor of the Evening Citizen, whose building also marks his memory with a plaque, and a bridge named after him has been built over -- what else? -- Sucker Brook. Beginning his journalistic tailly manufactured circumstances that made the following dazzlers seem entirely reasonable: A tree on which baked apples grew. A farmer who plucked his chickens for market with a vacuum cleaner. A rooster that stopped a train. (MacDougall doesn't say, but my recollection of latter-day versions -- hoaxes neither die nor fade away -- was that the rooster stopped the train to save a life.) A deaf and dumb pig. A three-legged bullfrog. A hen that laid a red-white-andblue egg on the Fourth of July. A Plymouth hen that hopped off a railroad engine's cowcatcher when "Plymouth" was called, and left an egg "to pay for her ride." A cat with a harelip that whistled "Yankee Doodle." A modest cow owned by two old maids that refused tolet any man milk her. Three tunneling trout that burrowed their way underground from Highland Lake to Mr. Stone's brook and received their New Year's Day meal annually from Mr. Stone's hand. A man who painted a spider on his bald head to keep the flies away. A watch in the stomach of a cow that lost only two hours over a period of years because the breath of the animal acted as an automatic winder. Hoaxes deserves to be read for its relentless tracking down of frauds in art, history, literature, science, politics and journalism. But there is a wonderfulness in the harmless exuberant imaginations -- the purely entertaining variety -- that science fiction could use more of, not just now but at any time in the past or future. This, in other words, is one thing there can't be too much of. tacled aliens might instead be inspired by the whirling whimpus, which spins so fast that nobody knows what one looks like; the rubberado, which bounces when shot, and anyone who eats it bounces, too; the tripodero, which has extensible legs and stuns its enemies with clay pellets shot from its blowgun proboscis; the rackabore -- adapted to living on hills, it has two legs, either left or right, shorter than the other two -- but may be overspecialized because neither the leftnor right-legged type can turn in the opposite direction. These and the wonders of the ancients were invented with such minuteness of detail to amaze the folks back home. Until the stars are explored, we all are the folks back home, and we love being amazed by cleverly fashioned aliens. Tentacles? Bah, humbug! Planet, Slave Ship anti other great Galaxy serialsl born in the year # and now thirty. He is a teacher. Mathematics is his discipline. Number theory is his specialty. What he instructs is the mnemonics of number, a study which absorbs all his creative thought. But he also thinks about girls a lot. He is unmarried. He sleeps alone and that is not so good. If you wander around his small bedroom (it has lilac walls and a cream ceiling; those are the Math Tower colors), you will hear a whispering and a faint whirring sound. These are not the sounds of Cornut's breath, although he is sleeping peacefully. The whispering is a hardly audible wheep, wheep from an electric clock. (It was knocked to the floor once. A gear is slightly off axis; it rubs against a rivet.) The whir is another clock. If you look more carefully, you will find that there are more clocks. There are five clocks in this room, all told. They all have alarms, set to ring at the same moment. Cornut is a good-looking man, even if he is a little pale. If you are a woman (say, one of the girls in his classes), you would like to get him out in the sun. You would like to fatten him up and make him laugh more. He "is not aware that he needs sunshine or fattening, but he is very much aware that he needs something. He knows something is wrong. He has known this for seven weeks, on the best evidence of all. The five clocks march briskly toward seven-fifteen, the time at which they are set to go off. Cornut has spent a lot of time arranging it so that they will sound at the same moment. He set the alarm dial on each, checked it by revolving the hands of the clocks themselves to make note of the exact second at which the trigger went off, painfully reset and rechecked. They are now guaranteed to ring, clang or buzz within a quarterminute of each other. However, one of them has a bad habit. It is the one that Cornut dropped once. It makes a faint click a few moments before the alarm itself rings. It clicks now. The sound is not very loud, but Cornut stirs. His eyes flicker. They close again, but he is not quite asleep. After a moment he pushes back the covers and sits up. His eyes are still almost closed. Suppose you are a picture on his wall -- perhaps the portrait of Leibnitz, taken from Ficquet's old engraving. Out of the eyes under your great curled wig, you see this young man stand up and walk slowly toward his window. His room is eighteen stories up. If a picture on the wall can remember, you remember that this is not the first time. If a picture on the wall can know things, you know that he has tried to leap out of that window before, and he is about to try again. He is trying to kill himself. He has tried nine times in the past fifty days. If a picture on a wall can regret, you regret this. It is a terrible waste for this man to keep trying to kill himself, for he does not at all want to die. II his sleep. He felt drowsily that he had worked himself into an awkward position, and besides, someone was calling his name. He mumbled, grimaced, opened his eyes. He was looking straight down, nearly two hundred feet. At once he was fully awake. He teetered dangerously, but someone behind him had caught him by an arm, someone shouting. Whoever it was, he pulled Cornut roughly back into the room. At that moment the five alarm clocks burst into sound, like a welldrilled chorus; a beat later the phone by his bed rang; the room lights sprang into life, controlled by their automatic timer, one reading lamp turned and fitted with a new, brighter tube so that it became a spotlight aimed at the pillow where Cornut's head should have been. "Are you all right?" The question had been repeated several times, Cornut realized. He said furiously, "Of course I'm all right!" It had been very close; his veins were suddenly full of adrenalin, and as there was nothing else for it to do, it charged him with anger... "I'm sorry. Thanks, Egerd." The undergraduate let go. He was nineteen years old, with crewcut red hair and a face, normally deeply tanned, that was now almost white. "That's all right." He cautiously backed to the ringing phone, still watching the professor. "Hello. Yes, he's awake now. Thanks for calling." "Almost too late," said Cornut, "alarms, lights, phone, you..." "I'd better get back, sir. I'll have to -- oh, good morning, Master Carl." The house master was standing in the doorway, a gaggle of undergraduates clustered behind him like young geese, staring in to see what all the commotion was. Master Carl was tall, black-haired, with eyes like star sapphires. He stood holding a wet photographic negative that dripped gently onto the rubber tiles. "What the devil is going on here?" he demanded. Cornut opened his mouth to answer, and then realized how utterly impossible it was for him to answer that question. He didn't know! The terrible thing about the last fifty days was just that. He didn't know what; he didn't know why; all he knew was that this was the ninth time he had very nearly taken his own life. "Answer Master Carl, Egerd," he said. r T' HE undergraduate jumped. Carl was the central figure in his life; every student's hope of passing, of graduating, of avoiding the military draft or forced labor in the Assigned Camps lay in his house master's whim. Egerd said, stammering, "Sir, I -- I have been on extra duty for Master Cornut. He asked me to come in each morning five minutes before wake-up time and observe him, because he -- That is, that's what he asked me to do. This morning I was a little late." Carl said coldly, "You were late?" "Yes, sir. I --  "And you came into the corridor without shaving ?" The undergraduate was struck dumb. The cluster of students behind Carl briskly dissolved. Egerd started to speak, but Cornut cut in. He sat down shakily on the edge of his bed. "Leave the boy alone, will you, Carl? If he had taken time to shave, I'd be dead." Master Carl rapped out, "Very well. You may go to your room, Egerd. Cornut, I want to know what this is all about. I intend to get a full explanation..." He paused, as though remembering something. He glanced down at the wet negative in his hand. "As soon as we've had breakfast," he said grimly, and stalked back to his own rooms. Cornut dressed heavily and began to shave. He had aged a full year every day of the past seven weeks; on that basis, he calculated, he was already pushing eighty, a full decade older than Master Carl himself. Seven weeks, and nine attempts at suicide. And no explanation. He didn't look like a man who had just sleepwalked himself to the narrow edge of suicide. He was young for a professor and built like an athlete, which was according to the facts; he had been captain of the fencing team as an undergraduate, and was its faculty advisor still. His face looked like the face of a husky, healthy youth who for some reason had been cutting himself short on sleep, and that was also according to the facts. His expression was that of a man deeply embarrassed by some incredibly inexcusable act he has just committed. And that fit the facts too. Cornut was embarrassed. His foolishness would be all over the campus by now; undoubtedly there had been whispers before, but this morning's episode had had many witnesses and the whispers would be quite loud. As the campus was Cornut's whole life, that meant that every living human being whose opinion counted with him at all would soon be aware that he was recklessly trying to commit suicide -- for no reason -- and not even succeeding ! TT E dried his face and got ready to leave his room -- which meant facing everybody, but there was no way out of that. A bundle of letters and memoranda was in the mail hopper by his desk. He paused to look at them: nothing important. He glanced at his notes, which someone had been straightening. Probably Egerd. Cornut's scrawled figures on the Wolgren anomaly were neatly stacked on top of the schema for this morning's lectures. In the center of the desk, with a paperweight on top of it, was the red-bordered letter from the president's office, inviting him to go on the Field Expedition. He reminded himself to ask Carl to get him off that. He had too much to do to waste time on purely social trips. The Wolgren study alone would keep him busy for weeks, and Carl was always pressing him to publish. But trying to get off the Field Expedition was premature. Three months from now... maybe... if Computer Section allocated enough time, and if the anomalies didn't disappear in someone's long-past error in simple addition. And if he was still alive, of course. "Oh, damn it all, anyhow!" Cornut said. He tucked the president's letter into his pocket, picked up his cape and walked out irritably. The Math Tower dining room served all thirty-one masters of the Department, and most of them were there before him. He walked in with an impassive fgce, expecting a sudden hush to stop the permanent buzz of conversation in the hall. It did. Everyone was looking at him. "Good morning," he said cheerfully. One of the few women on the staff waved to him, giggling. "Good for you, Cornut! Come sit with us, will you? Janet has an idea to help you stop suiciding!" Cornut smiled and turned his back on the two women. They slept in the women's wing, of course, twelve stories below his own dorms, but already the word had spread. Naturally. He stopped at the table where Master Carl sat alone, drinking tea and looking through a sheaf of photographs. "I'm sorry about this morning, Carl," he said. Master Carl looked vaguely up at him. With his equals, Carl's eyes were not the star sapphires that had pierced Egerd; they were the mild, blue eyes of a lean Santa Claus, which was much closer to his true nature. "Oh? Oh. You mean about jumping out of the window. Sit down." He made a space on the table for the student waitress to put down Cornut's place-setting. The whole cloth was covered with photographic prints. He handed one to Cornut. "Tell me," he said apologetically, "does that look like a picture of a star to you?" "No." Cornut was not very interested in his department head's hobbies. The print looked like a light-struck blob of nothing much at all. Carl sighed and put it down. "All right. Now, what about this thing this morning?" Cornut accepted a cup of coffee from one of the student waitresses and waved away the others. "I wish I could," he said seriously. Carl waited. "I mean -- it's hard," said Cornut. Carl waited. of coffee and put down his cup. Carl was probably the only man on the faculty who hadn't been, listening to the grapevine. It was almost impossible to say to him the simple fact of what had happened. Master Carl was a child of the University, just as Cornut himself was; like Cornut, he had been born in the University's medical center and educated in the University's schools. He had no taste for the boiling, bustling Townie world outside. In fact, he had very little taste for human problems at all. Lord knew what Carl, dry as digits, his head crammed with Vinogradoff and Frenicle de Bessy, would make of so non-mathematical a phenomenon as suicide. "I've tried to kill myself nine times," Cornut said, plunging in. "Don't ask me why; I don't know. That's what this morning was all about. It was my ninth try." Master Carl's expression was exactly what Cornut had anticipated. "Don't look so incredulous!" Cornut snapped. "I don't know any more about it than that. It's at least as much of an annoyance to me as it is to you!" The house master looked helplessly at the photographic prints by his plate, as though some answer might be there. It wasn't. "All right," he said, rubbing the lobes of bone over his eyes. "I understand your statement. Has it occurred to you that you might get help?" "Help? My God, I've got helpers all over the place! The thing is worst in the morning, you see; just when I'm waking up, not fully alert, that's the bad time. So I've set up a whole complicated system of alarms. I have five clocks set; I got the superintendent's office to rig up the lights on a timed switch; I got the night proctor to call me on the house phone -- all of them together, so that when I wake up, I wake up totally. It worked for three mornings, and, believe me, the only thing that the experience resembles is being awakened by a pot of ice water in the face. I even got Egerd to come in every morning to stand by while I woke, just on the chance that something might go wrong." "But this morning Egerd was late?" "He was tardy," Cornut corrected. "A minute or two more and he would have been late, all right. And so would I." Carl said, "That's not exactly the sort of help I had in mind." "You mean the Med Center?" Cornut reached foi a cigarette. A student waitress hurried over with a light. She was in one of his classes; a girl named Locille. She was pretty and very young. Cornut said absently, following her with his eyes, "I've been there, Carl. They offered me analysis. In fact, they were quite insistent." nous with interest. Cornut, turning back to look at him, thought that he hadn't seen Carl quite so absorbed in anything since their last discussion about the paper Cornut was doing for him: the analysis of the discrepancies in Wolgren's basic statistical law. Carl said, "I'll tell you what astonishes me. You don't seem very worried about all this." Cornut reflected. "... I am, though." "You don't show it. Well, is there anything else that's worrying you?" "Worried enough to kill myself? No. But I suppose there must be, mustn't there? The evidence speaks for itself." Carl stared into the empty air. The eyes were bright blue again; Master Carl was operating with his brain, examining possibilities, considering their relevancy, evolving a theory. "Only in the mornings?" "Oh, no, Carl. I'm much more versatile than that! I can try to kill myself at any hour of the day or night. But it happens when I'm drowsy. Going to sleep, waking up -- once, in the middle of the night, I found myself walking toward the fire stairs, God knows why. Perhaps something happened to half-wake me, I don't know. So I have Egerd keep me company at night until I'm thoroughly asleep, and again in the morning. He's my -- babysitter." Carl said testily, "Surely you can tell me more than this!" 'Well... Yes, I suppose I can. I think I have dreams." "Dreams?" "I think so, Carl. I don't remember very well, but it's as though someone were telling me to do these things, someone in a position of authority. A father? I don't remember my own father, but that's the feeling I get." The light went out of Carl's face. He had lost interest. Cornut said curiously, "What's the matter?" The house master leaned back, shaking his head. "No, it's fallacious to believe someone is telling you, Cornut. There isn't anyone. I've checked the matter of dreams very thoroughly. Dreams come from the dreamer." "But I only said -- " Master Carl held up his hand. "To consider any other possibility," he lectured, in the voice that week, "involves one of two possibilities. First, there might be a physical explanation. That is, someone may actually be speaking to you as you sleep. That isn't very likely, now is it? The second possibility is telepathy. And that," he said sadly, "does not exist." "But I only " "Look within yourself, my boy," the old man said wisely. Then, his expression showing interest again, "And what about Wolgren? Any progress with the anomalies?" plea that he was late for an appointment, Cornut made his escape. There were twelve tables in the room and he was invited to sit down at eight of them for a second cup of coffee... and, oh yes, what is this story all about, Cornut? His appointment, although he hadn't said so to Master Carl, was with his analyst. Cornut was anxious to keep it. He wasn't very confident of analysis as a solution to his problem. Despite three centuries, the techniques of mental health had, never evolved a rigorous proof system, and Cornut was skeptical of whatever was not susceptible of mathematical analysis. But there was something else he had neglected to tell Master Carl. Cornut was not the only one of his kind. The man at the Med Center had been quite excited. He named five names that Cornut recognized, faculty members who had died in ambiguous circumstances within the past few years. One had made fifteen attempts before he finally succeeded in blowing himself up after an all-night polymerization experiment in the Chem Hall. A couple had succeeded on the first or second try. What made Cornut exceptional was that he had got through seven weeks of this without even seriously maiming himself. The all-time record was ten weeks. That was the chemist. The analyst had promised to have all the information about the other suiciders to show him this morning. Cornut could not deny that he wanted to see the data. Indeed, it was a matter of considerable concern. Unless all precedent was wrong, he would succeed as all the others had ultimately succeeded. He would kill himself one way or another, and it was unlikely that he ever would know why he had done it. And unless precedent was wrong again, it would happen within the next three weeks. Ill r T'HE University was beginning its day. In the Regents Office, a clerk filled a hopper and flipped a switch, and Sticky Dick -- sometimes written as S. T.-I (C.E.), Di. C. -- began to grind out grades on the previous day's examinations in English, Sanskrit and the nuclear reactions of the Bethe Phoenix cycle. Student orderlies in Med School wheeled their sectioned cadavers out of the refrigerated filing drawers, playing the timehonored ribald jokes with the detached parts. In the central Tape Room, the TV technicians went about their endless arcane ritual of testing circuits and balancing voltages; every lecture was put on tape as a matter of course, even those which were not either broadcast or syndicated. Thirty thousand undergraduates ran hastily over the probable mood of their various instructors, and came to the conclusion that they would be lucky to live through to evening. But it was better than trying to get along in the outside world, the Townie world. And in the kitchen attached to the faculty dining room of Math Tower, the student waitress, Locille, helped a Culinary Engineer mop the last drops off the stainless steel cooking utensils. She hung up her apron, checked her makeup in the mirror by the door, descended in the service elevator and went out to the hot, loud walks of the Quad. Locille didn't think them either hot or loud. She had known much worse. Locille was a scholarship girl; her parents were Town, not Gown. She had been at the University for only two years. She still spent some of her weekends at home. She knew very clearly what it was like to live in the city across the bay -- or, worse, to live on one of the texases off the coast -- with your whole life a rattling, banging clamor day and night and everyone piled up against everyone else. The noise in the Quadrangle was human noise and the ground did not shake. Locille had a happy small face, short hair, a forthright way of walking out. She did not look worried, but she was. He had looked so tired this morning! Also he wasn't eating, and that was not like him. If it wasn't scrambled eggs and bacon, it was a hot cereal with fruit on top, always. Perhaps, she planned, smiling at a boy who greeted her without really seeing his face at all, tomorrow she would just bring the scrambled eggs and put them in front of him. Probably he'd eat them. Of course, that wasn't getting at the real problem. Locille shivered. She felt helpless. It was distressing to care so much what happened to someone, and be so far outside the situation itself... behind her and slowed. "Hi," panted her most regular date, Egerd, falling into step. "Why didn't you wait at the door? What about Saturday night?" "I don't know yet. They might need me at the faculty dance." Egerd said brusquely, "Tell them you can't make it. You have to go out to the texas. Your brother has, uh, some disease or other, and your mother needs you." Locille laughed. "Aw, look. I've got Carnegan's boat for the evening! We can go clear down to the Hook." her hand. She liked Egerd. He was a good-looking boy and he was kind. He reminded her of her brother... well, not of her real brother, but the brother she should have had. She liked Egerd. But she didn't like him. The distinction was quite clear in her mind. Egerd, for example, obviously liked her. Egerd said, "Well, you don't have to make up your mind now. I'll ask you again tomorrow." That was a salesman's instinct operating; it was always better to leave the prospect with a "maybe" than a "no." He guided her between two tall buildings toward the back gardens of the campus, where Agronomy had made a little Japanese retreat in the middle of fifteen intensively farmed acres of experimental peas and wheat. "I think I got some demerits from old Carl this morning," he said gloomily. 'Too bad," Locille said, although that was not an unusual phenomenon. But then he caught her attention. "I was just trying to do Cornut a favor. Trying? Hell, I saved his life!" She was all attention now. "He was practically out the window. Loopy! You know, I think half of these professors are off their rockets. Anyway, if I hadn't got there when I did, he would've been dead. Splop. All over the Quad. At that," he said cheerfully, "I was kind of late." "Egerd!" He stopped and looked at her. "What's the matter?" "You shouldn't have been late! Didn't you know Master Cornut was relying on you? Really! That was awful of you!" She was actually angry. Egerd studied her thoughtfully and stopped talking; some of the pleasure had gone out of the morning for him. Abruptly he caught her arm. "Locille," he said in a completely serious tone, "please marry me for a while. I know I'm here on a scholarship and my grades are marginal. But I won't go back. Listen, I'm not going to stay with Math. I was talking to some of the fellows at Med School. There's a lot of jobs in epidemiology, and that way my Math credits will do me some good. I'm not asking for ten years of your life. We can make it month to month, even, and if you don't opt for a renewal, I swear I won't hold it against you. But let me try to make you want to stay with me, Locille. Please. Marry me." He stood looking down at her, his broad, tanned face entirely open, waiting. She didn't meet his eye. After a moment he nodded composed ly. "I can't compete with Master Comut, can I?" She suddenly frowned. "Egerd, I hope you won't feel -- I mean, just because you've got the idea I'm interested in Master Cornut, I hope -- " "No," he said, grinning, "I won't let him dive out a window. But you know something? You're a very pretty girl, Locille, but I don't think Cornut knows you're alive." r T HE analyst followed Cornut to the door. He was frustrated and not concealing his frustration. Comut said stiffly, "Sorry, but I won't put everything else aside." "You'll have to, if you succeed "That's what you're supposed to prevent, isn't it? Or is this whole thing a complete waste of time?" "It's better than suicide." Comut shrugged. It was a logically impeccable point. "Won't you even stay overnight? Observation might give us the answer." "No." The analyst hesitated, shook his head, shook hands. "All right. I guess you know that if I had my way, I wouldn't be asking you. I'd commit you to Med Center." "Of course you would," Comut said. "But you don't have your way, do you? You've tried to get an order from the president's office already, haven't you?" The analyst had the grace to look embarrassed. "Front office interference. You'd think they'd understand that Mental Health needs a little cooperation once in a while..." Comut left him still muttering. As he stepped out onto the Quad, the heat and noise struck him. He didn't mind, either; he was used to it. He had recovered enough to think of the morning's escape with amusement The feeling was wry, with a taste of worry to it, but he was able to see the funny side. And it was ridiculous, no doubt about it Suicide! Miserable people committed suicide, not happy ones, and Cornut was a perfectly happy man. Even the analyst had as much as admitted that. It had been a total waste of time, making Comut dig and dig into his cloudy childhood recollections for some early, abscessed wound of the mind that was pouring poisons out of its secret hiding place. He didn't have any! How could he? He was Gown. His parents had been on the faculty of this very University. Before he could walk, he was given over to the creches and the playschools, run by the best-trained experts in the world, organized according to the best principles of child guidance. Trauma? There simply could not be any! Not only was it impossible on the face of it, but Comufs whole personality showed no sign of such a thing. He enjoyed his work very much, and although he knew there was something he lacked -- a secure love -- he also knew that in time he would have it. "Good morning, good morning," he said civilly to the knots of undergraduates on the walks. He began to whistle one of Carl's mnemonic songs. The undergraduates who nodded to him smiled. Cornut was a highly popular professor. He passed the Hall of Humanities, the Lit Building, Pre-Med and the Administration Tower. As he got farther from home ground, the number of students who greeted him became smaller, but they still nodded politely to the Master's cloak. Overhead, the shriek of distant passing aircraft filled the sky. The great steel sweep of the Bay Bridge was behind him now, but he could still hear the unending rush of cars across it and, farther and louder, the growl of the city. Cornut paused at the door of the studio where he was to deliver his first lecture. He glanced across the narrow strait at the city. There was a mystery. It was, he thought, a problem greater than the silent murderer in his own brain. But it was not a problem he would ever have to solve. makeup man." That was one of Master Carl's maxims. Cornut sat down at the long table and methodically applied a daub of neutral-colored base to each cheekbone. The camera crew began sighting in on him as he worked the cream into his skin, down from the bone and away. "Need any help?" Cornut looked up and saw his producer. "No, thanks." He brought the corners of his eyebrows down a fraction of an inch. The clock was clicking off halfseconds. Cornut penciled in agelines (that was the price you paid for being a full professor at thirty) and then brushed on the lip color. He leaned forward to examine himself more closely in the mirror, but the producer stopped him. "Just a minute! Dammit, man, not so much red!" The cameraman turned a dial. In the monitor, Cornut's image appeared a touch paler, a touch greener. "That's better. All done, Professor?" Cornut wiped his fingers on a tissue and set the golden wig on his head. "All done," he said, rising just as the minute hand touched the hour of ten. From a grille at the top of the screen that dominated the front of the studio came the sounds of his theme music, muted for the studio audience. Cornut took his place in front of the class, bowed, nodded, smiled, and pressed the pedal of the prompter until he found his place. He had more than a hundred students physically present. Cornut liked a large flesh-and-blood enrollment -- because he was a traditionalist, but even more because he could tell from their faces how well he was getting across. This class was one of his favorites. They responded to his mood, but without ever overdoing. They didn't laugh too loudly when he made a conventional academic joke; they didn't cough or murmur. They never distracted the attention of the huger, wider broadcast audience from himself. Cornut looked over the class while the announcer was finishing the intro to the broadcast watchers. He saw Egerd, looking upset and irritable about something, whispering to the girl from the faculty dining room. What was her name? Locille. Lucky fellow, Cornut thought absently to himself, and then the Binomial Theorem entered his mind -- it was never far away -- and displaced everything else. "Good morning," he said, "and let's get to work. Today we're going to take up the relationship of Pascal's Triangle to the Binomial Theorem." A sting of organ music rode in under his words. Behind him, on the monitor, the symbols p  q appeared in letters of golden fire. "I presume you all remember what the Binomial Theorem is -- unless you've been cutting your classes." Very small laugh -- actually a sort of sub-aural grunt, just about what the very small jocular remark deserved. "The expansion of p plus q is, of course, its square, cube, fourth power and so on." Behind him an invisible hand began multiplying p  q by itself in bright gold. "P plus q squared is psquared plus two pq plus qsquared. P plus q cubed -- " The writer in gold noted the sum as he spoke: p #f#p # q  # pq q # . "That's simple enough, isn't it?" He paused; then, deadpan, "Well, then, how come Sticky Dick says fifteen per cent of you missed it in the last test?" A warmer giggle, punctuated with a couple of loud, embarrassed hee-haws from the back. Oh, they were a very fine class. HP HE letters and numbers wiped themselves from the screen and a little red-faced comic cartoon figure of a bricklayer dropped into view and began building a pyramid of bricks : "Now, forget about the theorem for a moment. That won't be hard for some of you." Small giggle which he rode over. "Consider Pascal's Triangle. We build it just like a brick wall, only... Hold it a minute there, friend." The cartoon bricklayer paused and looked curiously out at the audience. "Only we don't start from the bottom. We build it from the top down." The cartoon bricklayer did a comic pratfall in astonishment. Then, shrugging, he got up, erased the old wall with a sweep of his trowel, hung a brick in space and began building a triangle under it. "And we don't do it with bricks," added Cornut. "We do it with numbers." The bricklayer straightened up, kicked the wall off the screen and followed after it, pausing just at the rim of visibility to stick his tongue out at Cornut. The monitor went to a film with live models, cartwheeling into view along the banks of seats of the university's football stadium, each model carrying a placard with a number, arranging themselves in a Pascal Triangle: I I I # I # # I I # # # I I # # # # I Cornut turned to relish the construction Pascal had first written down, centuries before. "You will note," he said, "that each number is the sum of the two terms nearest in the line above it. The Pascal Triangle is more than a pretty pattern. It represents -- " Cornut picked up the ivorytipped pointer that lay on his desk, clustered with the ceremonial desk furnishings of the instructor -- paper cutter, shears, pencils, all there for appearance -- and, with the aid of every audio-visual help possible to Man, began explaining to three tween Pascal's Triangle and the binomial distribution. every word, every posturing ballet dancer or animated digit that showed itself on the monitor behind him was caught in the tubes of the cameras, converted into high-frequency pulses and hurled out at the world. Cornut had more than a hundred live watchers -- the cream; the chosen ones who were allowed to attend University in person -- but his viewers altogether numtower at Fort Monmouth, a senior shift engineer named Sam Gensel watched with concentrated attention as across the dimpled tummies of the five girls in the fourth line of the Pascal Triangle electronics superimposed the symbols: p #  #p # q  #p # q #  #pq #  q # He was not interested in the astonishing fact that the sign of the five terms in the expansion of (p  q) # were #, #, #, # and I -- the same as the numbers in the fourth line of the Triangle -- but he cared very much that the image was a trifle fuzzy. He twisted a vernier, scowled, turned it back, threw switches that called in an alternate circuit, and was rewarded by a crisper, clearer image. At some relay point, a tube was failing. He picked up the phone to call the maintenance crew. The crisper, clearer signal was beamed up to the handiest television-relay satellite and showered back down on the world. On the Sandy Hook texas, a boy named Roger Hoskins, smelling seriously of fish, paused by the door of his room to watch. He di# not care about mathematics, but he was a faithful viewer; his sister was in the class, and Mom was always grateful when he could tell her that he'd caught a glimpse of their very fortunate, very seldom encountered daughter. In a creche over Lower Manhattan, three toddlers munched fibrous crackers and watched; the harried nursery teacher had discovered that the moving colors kept them quiet. On the twenty-fifth floor of a tenement on Staten Island, a monocar motorman named Frank Moran sat in front of his set while Cornut reviewed Pascal's thesis. Moran did not get much benefit from it. He had just come off the night shift. He was asleep. There were many of them, the accidental or disinterested dialersin. But there were more, there were thousands, there were uncounted hundreds of thousands who were following the proceedings with absorption. For education was something very precious indeed. The thirty thousand at the University were the lucky ones; they had passed the tests, stiffer every year. Not one out of a thousand passed those tests. It wasn't only a matter of intelligence; it was a matter of having the talents that could make a University education fruitful -- in terms of society. For the world had to work. The world was too big to be idle. The land  could, if it wished, take tests and accumulate credits. That was what Sticky Dick was for; electronically, it graded papers, supplied term averages and awarded diplomas for students no professor ever saw. Almost always the credits led nowhere. But to those trapped in dreary production or drearier caretaker jobs for society, the hope was important. There was a young man named Max Steck, for example, who had already made a small contribution to the theory of normed rings. It was not enough. Sticky Dick said he would not justify a career in mathematics. There were thousands of Max Stecks. Then there was Charles Bingham. He was a reactor hand at the #th Street generating plant. Mathematics might help him, in time, become a supervising engineer. It also might not -- the candidates for that job were already lined up a hundred deep. But there hams. Sue-Ann Flood was the daughter of a farmer. Her father drove a helipopper, skimming the plowed fields, seeding, spraying, fertilizing, and he knew that the time she put in on college-level studies would not help her gain admittance to the University. Sue-Ann knew it too. But she was only fourteen years old and she could hope. like Sue-Ann, and every one of them knew that all the others would be disappointed. were the invisible audience who watched Master Cornut's busy image on a cathode screen. But there were others. One watched from Bogota and one from Buenos Aires. One in Saskatchewan said, "You goofed this morning," and one flying high over the Rockies said, "Can't we try him now?" And one was propped on soft pillows in front of a set not more than a quarter of a mile from Cornut himself; and he said, "It's worth a try. The son of a bitch is getting in my hair." T T was not the easiest task ever given Man, to explain the relationship between the Pascal Triangle and the binomial distribution, but Cornut was succeeding. Master Carl's little mnemonic jingles helped, and what helped most was the utter joy Cornut took in it all. It was, after all, his life. As he led the class, he felt again the wonder he himself had felt, sitting in a class like this one. He hardly heard the buzz from the class as he put his pointer down to gesture, and blindly picked it up again, still talking. Teaching mathematics was a kind of hypnosis for him, an intense absorption that had gripped him from the time of his first math class. That was what Sticky Dick had measured, and that was why Cornut was a full professor at his age. It was a wonder that so strange a thing as numbers should exist in the first place, rivaled only by the greater wonder that they should perform so obediently the work of mankind. The class buzzed and whispered. It struck Cornut cloudily that they were whispering more than usual. He looked up absent-mindedly. There was an itch at the base of his throat. He scratched it with the tip of the pointer, half distracted from the point he was trying to make. But the taped visual aids on the screen were timed just so and he could not falter. He picked up the thread of what he was saying. Itch and buzz faded out of his mind... Then he faltered again. Something was wrong. The class was buzzing louder. The students in the first row were staring at him with a unanimous, unprecedented expression. The itch returned compellingly. He scratched at it. It still itched. He dug at it with the pointer. No. Not with the pointer. Funny, he thought, there was the pointer on his desk. Suddenly his throat hurt very much. "Master Cornut, stop!" screamed someone -- a girl. Tardily he recognized the voice, Locille's voice, as she leaped to her feet, and half the class with her. His throat was a quick deep pain, like fire. A warm tickling thread slipped across his chest -- blood! From his throat! He stared at the thing in his hand, and it was not the pointer at all but the letter opener, steel and sharp. Confused and panicked, he wheeled to gaze at the monitor. There was his own face, over a throat that bore a slash of blood! Half the studio class was boiling toward him, Egerd and the girl ahead of the rest. "Easy, sir! Here, let me -- " That was Egerd, with a tissue, pressing it against the wound. "You'll be all right, sir! It's only -- it was close!" Close? He had all but cut his jugular vein in two, right in front of his class and the watching television world. The murderer inside his head was getting very strong and sure, to brave the light of day. IV literally, now. He had a neat white sterile bandage on his throat, and the medics had assured him that when the bandage was gone, there would be a handsome scar. They demanded that he stay around for a complete psychomedical checkup. He said no. They said, "Would you rather be dead?" He said he wasn't going to die. They said, "How can you be sure?" But, as it turned out, the clinic was not going to be free for that sort of thing for a couple of hours, and he fought his way free. He was furious at the medics for annoying him, at himself for being such a fool, at Egerd for staunching the flow of his blood, at Locille for seeing it. His patience with the world was exhausted. G Cornut strode like a beamguided aircar to the Math Tower gym, looking neither to left nor right, for he knew what he would see. Eyes. The eyes of everyone on the campus looking at him. He found an undergraduate who own business (the boy only looked slightly doubtful when Cornuf chose his epee, but one glimpse of Cornut's face made his own turp into opaque stone), and they fenced for a murderous half-hour. The medics had told Cornut to be sure to rest. Winded and muscles aching, he returned to his room to do so. He spent a long afternoon lying on his bed and looking at the ceiling, thinking, but nothing came of it. The whole thing was simply too irritating to be borne. Medics or not, at a quarter of five he put on a clean shirt to keep his appointment at the faculty tea. The tea was a sort of official send-off to the University's Field Expedition. Attendance was compulsory, especially for those who, like Cornut, were supposed to make the trip; but that was not why he was there. He considered it to be his last good chance to get off the list. There were three hundred persons in the huge, vaulted room. The University conspicuously consumed space; it was a tradition, like the marginal pencilings in all the books in the library. Every one of the three hundred glanced once quickly at Cornut as he came in, then away -- some with a muffled laugh, some with sympathy, the worst with an unnatural lack of any expression at all. So much for the grapevine. Damn them, Cornut thought bitterly, you'd think no professor ever tried to suicide before. He couldn't help overhearing some of the whispers : "And that's at least the seventh time. It's because he's desperate to be Department Head and old Carl won't step down." "Esmeralda! You know you're making that up!" briskly past the little knot. It was like a fakir's bed of coals; every step seemed to crisp him. But there were other things being gossiped about at the tea besides him. " -- want us to get along with a fourteen-year-old trevatron. You know what the Chinas have? Six brand-new ones. And coin silver for the windings!" them. Per capita, we stack up pretty -- " Cornut felt minutely better. He halted in the middle of the drinking, eating, talking, surging mass and looked about for Master Carl. He caught sight of him. I he department head was paying his respects to a queer-looking, ancient figure -- St. Cyr, the president of the University. Cornut was startled. St. Cyr was an old man and by his appearance a sick one; it was rare to see him at a faculty tea. Still, this one was special -- and anyway, that could make it a lot easier to get off the list. Cornut pushed his way toward them, past a stocky drunk from Humanities who was whispering ribaldly to a patient student waitress, and threaded his way through a group of anatomists from the Med School. "Notice what decent cadavers we've been getting lately? It hasn't been this good since the last shooting war. Of course, they're not much good except for geriatrics, but that's selective euthanasia for you." "Will you watch what you're doing with that martini?" Cornut made his way slowly toward Master Carl and President St. Cyr. The closer he got, the easier it was to move. There were fewer people at St. Cyr's end of the room. He was the central figure of the gathering, but the guests did not cluster around him. That's the kind of a man he was. HP HE kind of man St. Cyr was was this: He was the ugliest man in the room. There were others who were in no way handsome -- old, or fat, or sick -- but St. Cyr was something special. His face was an artifact of ugliness. Deep old scars made a net across his face like the flimsy cloth that holds a cheese. Surgery? No one knew. He had always had them. And his skin was a cyanotic blue. Master Greenlease (Phys Chem) and Master Wahl (Anthropology) were there, Wahl because he was too drunk to care whom he spoke to, no doubt; Greenlease because Carl had him by the elbow and would not let him go. St. Cyr nodded four times at Cornut, like a pendulum. "Nice wea-ther," he said, tolling it like a clock. "Yes, it is, sir. Excuse me. Master Carl-" St. Cyr lifted the hand that hung by his side and laid it limply in Cornut's hand -- it was his version of a handshake. He opened his seamed mouth and gave the series of unvoiced glottal stops that were his version of a chuckle. "It will be heav-y weath-er for Mast-er Wahl," he said, spacing out the syllables like an articulate metronome. It was his version of a joke. Cornut gave him a waxen smile and a small waxen laugh. The reference was to the fact that Wahl, too, was scheduled to go on the Field Expedition. Cornut didn't think that was funny -- not as far as he himself was concerned, anyway -- not when he had so many more urgent things on his mind. "Carl," he said, "excuse me." But Master Carl had other things on his mind; he was badgering Greenlease for information about molecular structure, heaven "knew why. And also St. Cyr had not removed his hand. Cornut grumbled internally and waited. Wahl was giggling over some involved faculty joke to which St. Cyr was listening like a judge. Cornut spared himself the annoyance of listening to it and thought about St. Cyr. Queer old duck. That was where you started. You could acount for some of the queerness by, say, a bad heart. That would be the reason for the blueness. But what would be the reason for not having it operated on? And then what about the other things? The deadpan expression. The lifeless voice, with its firmly pronounced terminals "ings" and words without a stress syllable anywhere. St. Cyr talked like a clockwork man. Or a deaf one? But again, what would be the reason for a man allowing himself to be deaf? Especially a man who owned a University, including an #-bed teaching hospital. Wahl at .last noticed that Cornut was present and punched his shoulder -- cordially, Cornut decided, after thought. "Committed any good suicides lately, boy?" He hiccoughed. "Don't blame you. Your fault, President, you know, dragging him off to Tahiti with us. He doesn't like Tahiti." Cornut said, with control, "The Field Expedition isn't going to Tahiti." Wahl shrugged. "The way us anthropologists look at it, one good island is like another good island." He even made a joke of his specialty! Cornut was appalled. St. Cyr seemed neither to notice nor to mind. He flopped his hand free of Cornut's and rested it casually on Wahl's weaving shoulder. The other hand held the full highball glass which, Cornut had observed, always remained full. St. Cyr did not drink or smoke (not even tobacco), nor had Cornut ever seen him give a second look to a pretty girl. "Lis-ten," St. Cyr said in his slow-march voice, turning Wahl to face Carl and the chemist. "This is in-ter-est-ing."  ident, of Cornut, of everything except the fact that the chemist by his side knew something that Carl himself wanted to know. The information was there; he went after it. "I don't seem to make myself clear. What I want to know, Greenlease, is how I can visualize the exact structure of a molecule. Do you follow me? For example, what color is it?" The chemist looked' uncomfortably at St. Cyr, but St. Cyr was apparently absorbed. "Well," Greenlease said. "Uh. The concept of color doesn't apply. Light waves are too long." "Ah! I see!" Carl was fascinated. "Well, what about the shape? I've seen those tinker-toy constructions. The atoms are little balls and they're held together with plastic rods -- I suppose they represent connecting force. Are they anything like the real thing?" "The connecting force is real enough, but you can't see it -- or maybe you could, at that." Greenlease, like most of the faculty members present, had had a bit more than enough; he was not of a temper to try to interpret molecular forces in tinker-toy terms for professors who, whatever their status in number theory, were physicalchemical idiots. "Maybe you could, that is, if you could see the atoms in the first place. One is no more impossible than the other. But the connecting force would not look like a rod, any more than the gravitation that holds the Moon to the Earth would look like a rod... Let's see... Do you know what I mean by the word 'valence'? No. Well, do you know enough atomic theory to know what part is played by the number of electrons in -- Or look at it a different way." Greenlease paused. By his expression, he was getting seriously annoyed, in a way he considered unjust -- like an ivory hunter who, carrying a .# Express in his crooked arm, cannot quite see how to cope with the attack of a hungry mosquito. Greenlease seemed on the point of reviewing atomic structure back through Bohr and well on the way to Democritus. "I'll tell you what," he said at last. "Stop around tomorrow if you can. I have some plates made under the electron-microscope." "Oh, thank you!" cried Carl with enthusiasm. "Tomorrow -- But tomorrow I'll be off on this con -- " He smiled at St. Cyr. "Tomorrow I'll be with the Field Expedition. Well, as soon as I get back, Greenlease. Don't forget." He warmly shook hands and the chemist went quickly away. Cornut hissed angrily: "That's what I want to talk to you about." Carl looked startled but pleased. "I didn't know you were interested in my little experiments, Cornut. That was quite fascinating. I've always thought of a molecule of silver nitrate, for example, as being black or silvery. Perhaps that's where my work has gone wrong. Greenlease says -- " "No, I'm not talking about that. I mean the Field Expedition. I can't go." A N observer a yard away would have thought that all of St. Cyr's attention was on Wahl; he had lost interest in the dialogue between Carl and Greenlease minutes before. But the old head turned like a parabolic mirror. The faded blue eyes radared in on Cornut. The slow metronome ticked: "You must go, Cor-nut." "Must go? Of course you must go. Good heavens, Cornut! Don't mind him, President. Certainly he'll go." "But I have all the Wolgren to get through -- " "And then a su-i-cide to commit." The muscles at the corner of the mouth tried to twitch the blue lips upward, to show that it was a pleasantry. But Cornut was nettled. "Sir, I don't intend to -- " "You did not intend to this morn-ing." Carl interrupted. "Cornut, be quiet. President, that was distressing, of course. I've had a full report on it and I believe we can pass it off as an accident. Perhaps it was an accident. I don't know. It would have been quite easy to pick up the paper-knife in error." Cornut said, "But -- " "In an-y case, he must go." "Naturally, President. You understand that, don't you, Cornut?" "But-" "You will take the ad-vance plane, please. I want you to be there when I ar-rive." "But -- " said Cornut, but he could not get a word deeper into that thought; through the mill of faculty came a man and a woman with the tense, nervous bearing of Townies. The woman carried a phototaper; the man was a reporter from one of the nets. "President St. Cyr? Thanks for inviting us. We'll have a whole crew here when your expedition gets back, but I wonder if we can't get a few photographs now. As I understand it, you've located seven aboriginals. I see. It's a whole tribe, then, but seven are being brought back here. And who is the head of the expedition? Oh, naturally. President St. Cyr?" The reporter's thumb was on the trigger of his voicetaper, getting down the fact that nine faculty members were going to bring back the seven aboriginals, that the expedition would leave, in two planes, at nine o'clock that night, so as to arrive at their destination in early morning, local time; and that the benefits to anthropological research would surely be beyond calculation. Cornut drew Master Carl aside. "I don't want to go! What the hell does this have to do with mathematics anyhow?" "Now, please, Cornut. You heard the President. It has nothing to do with mathematics, no, but it is purely a ceremonial function and a good deal of an honor. At the present time, you should not refuse it. You can see that some rumors of your, uh, accidents have reached him. Don't cause friction." "What about the Wolgren? What about my, uh, accidents? Even here I nearly kill myself, and I'm all set up against it. What will I do without Egerd and my system of alarms?" "I'll be with you." "No, Carl!" Carl said, speaking very clearly, "You are going." The eyes were star sapphires. Cornut studied the eyes for a moment, and then gave up. When Carl got that expression and that tone of voice, it meant that argument served no further useful purpose. Since Cornut loved the old man, he always stopped arguing at that point. "I'm going," he said. But the expression on his face would have soured wine. '-' # minutes -- and went back to the clinic to see if diagnostic space was free. It was not. He was cutting his time very close -- takeoff for the first plane was in less than an hour -- but mulishly he took a seat in the reception room and stolidly he did not look at the clock. When the examination room was available, things went briskly. His vital statistics were machinemeasured and machine-studied, his blood spectrum was machine-chromatographed, automatically the examining table was tipped so that he could step off, and as he dressed, a photoelectric eye behind where garments had hung glanced at him, opened the door to the outside corridor and said, "Thank you. Wait in the outer office, please," from a machine-operated tape. Master Carl, in a fluster, found him waiting. "Good heavens, boy! Do you know the plane's about to take off? And the president especially said we were to go in the first plane. Come on! I've a scooter waiting!" "Sorry." "What the devil do you mean, sorry? Come on!" Cornut said flatly, "I agreed to go. I will go. But, as there is some feeling, shared by yourself, that the medics can help keep me from leave this building until they tell me what I must do. I am waiting for the results of my examination now." Master Carl said, "Oh." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "I see." He sat down beside Cornut thoughtfully, but then suddenly he grinned. "Quite right, boy. The president can't argue with that." Cornut relaxed. He said, "Well, you go ahead, Carl. No reason for both of us to get in trouble -- " "Trouble?" Cornut realized it had finally occurred to the house master that this trip was a sort of vacation; he was practicing for a holiday mood. "Why should there be any trouble? You have a good reason for not being on time. I, too, have a good reason for waiting for you. After all, the president urged me to bring the Wolgren analysis along. He's quite interested, you know. And I did not see it in your room, so I suppose it is in your bags. Therefore I will wait for your bags." Cornut protested, "But it isn't anywhere near finished!" Carl actually winked. "Now, do you suppose he'll know the difference? Be flattered that he is interested enough to pretend to look at it!" "Well, all right. But how the devil did he hear about it in the first place?" "I told him, of course. I -- I've had occasion to discuss you with him a good deal, these past few days." Carl's expression lost some of its glow. "Cornut," he said severely, "we can't let this go on, can we? Your life must be regularized. Take a wife." exploded. "You have no right to interfere in my personal affairs!" "And let you suicide?" the old man said. "This arrangement of alarms and Egerd is only a makeshift. A thirty-day marriage would surely see you through the worst of it, wouldn't it?" Three weeks, thought Cornut -- that's how long I have -- with luck. "And, truly, you need a wife. It is bad for a man to go through life alone." Cornut snapped, "How about you?" "I'm old. You're young. How long is it since you've had a wife?" Cornut was obstinately silent. "You see? There are many lovely young girls in the University. They would be proud. Any of them." Cornut did not want his mind to roam the corridors that had just been opened for it, but it did. "Besides, you will have her with you at all the dangerous times. You won't need Egerd." Cornut's mind ran back quickly and began to trace a more familiar less attractive maze. "I'll think about it," he said at last, just as the medic came in with his report, a couple of boxes of pills and a sheaf of papers. The report was negative, all down the line. The pills? They were just in case -- they couldn't hurt; they might help. And the sheaf of papers... The top one said: Confidential. Tentative. Studies of Suicidal Tendencies in Faculty Members. Cornut covered it with his hand, interrupted the medic, who was about to explain the delay in getting the dossiers for him, and cried, "Let's get a move on, Carl! We can still make that plane." As fast as the scooter would go, they got to the aircraft park -- just in time to see the first section of the Field Expedition lift itself off the ground with a great whistling Much to Comut's surprise, Master Carl was not upset. "Oh, well," he said, "we had our reasons. It isn't as though we were arbitrarily late. And anyway -- " he allowed himself another wink, the second in a quarter of an hour -- "this gives us a chance to ride in the president's private plane, eh? Real living for us underprivileged Gownies!" He even opened his mouth to chuckle, but he didn't do it, or if he did the sound was not heard. Overhead, there was a gruff giant's cough and a bright spray of flame. They looked up. Flame, flame all over the heavens, falling in great white droplets to the Earth. "My God!" said Cornut softly. "That was our plane!" IVL ' Master Carl thoughtfully, "I kissed your concubine." He squinted out the window of the jet, savoring the sentence. It was good, yes, but was it perfect? A towering cumulonimbus, far below, caught his attention and distracted him. He sighed. He didn't feel like working. Apparently everyone else in the jet was asleep. Or pretending to be. Only St. Cyr, way up front, propped on pneumatic pillows in the semicircular lounge, looked as much awake as he ever did. But it was better not to talk to St. Cyr. Carl was aware that most conversations involving himself turned, sooner or later, to either his private researches or to number theory. As he knew more about either than anyone else alive, they wound up as lectures. That was no good with St. Cyr. He had made it clear long ago that he was not interested in being instructed by the instructors he hired. Also he was in a bad mood. It was odd, thought Master Carl, less in resentment than in a spirit of scientific inquiry, but St. Cyr had been quite furious with Cornut and Carl for no good reason. It could not have been for missing the first plane. If they'd caught it, they would have died, just like its crew and the four graduate students it carried. But St. Cyr had been furious, the tick-tock voice hoarse and breathless, the hairless eyebrows almost scowling. Master Carl took his eyes away from the window and abandoned the question of St. Cyr. Let him sulk. Carl didn't like problems that had no solution. Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine. But mightn't it be better to write it as a song? He became conscious of a beery breath on the back of his neck. "I'm glad you're awake, Wahl," he said, turning, his face inches away from the hung-over face of the anthropologist. "Let me have your opinion, please. Which is easier to remember: 'Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine.' Or: 'Last digit? O, a potential square!' " Wahl shuddered. "A little pity, please. I just this minute woke up." "Why, I don't think that matters. It might help. The whole idea is to present the mnemonic in a form that is available under any conditions -- including," Master Carl said delicately, "a digestive upset." He rotated his chair to face Wahl, flipping through his notebook to display a scribbled page. "Can you read that? The idea, you see, is to provide a handy recognition feature for quick factoring of aliquot numbers. Now you know, of course, that all squares can end in only one of six digits. No square can end in two, three, seven or eight. So my first idea -- I'm still not sure that I wasn't on the right track -- was to use, 'No, quantity not squared.' You see the utility, I'm sure. Two letters in the first word, 'no.' Eight letters in 'quantity,' three in 'not' and seven in 'squared.' It's easy to remember, I think, and it's self-defining. I consider that a major advantage." "Oh, it is," groaned Wahl. tive. Also there is the chance that 'no' can be misread for 'nought' or 'nothing' -- meaning zero. So I tried the reverse approach. A square can end in zero, one, four, five, six or nine. Letting the ejaculative 'O' stand for 'zero,' I then wrote: 'Last digit? O, a potential square.' Four, five, zero, one, nine and six -- you see? Excuse me. I'm so used to lecturing to undergraduates that sometimes I tend to overexplain. But, although that has a lot to recommend it, it doesn't have -- well -- yumph." He smiled with a touch of embarrassment. "So, just on an inspiration, I came up with 'Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine.' Rather catchy, no?" "It's all of that, Carl," agreed Wahl, rubbing his temples. "Say, where's Cornut?" "You realize that the 'nothing' again is 'zero.' " "Oh, there he is. Hey, Cornut!" "Let the boy sleep!" Carl snapped, jolted out of his concentration. He leaned forward to look into the wing-backed seat ahead of him and was gratified to find that Cornut was still snoring faintly. Wahl burst into a laugh, stopped abruptly and clutched his head. After a moment he said, "You take care of him like he was your baby." "There is no need to take that sort of tone." "I've heard of accident-prones, but this one's fantastic. Wrecks planes that he ought to be in but isn't!" Master Carl bit back his rejoinder, paused to regain his temper and pondered an appropriate remark. He was saved the trouble. The jet lurched slightly and the distant thunderheads began to wheel toward the horizon. It wasn't the clouds; it was the jet swinging in for a landing vectored by unseen radar. Only a very small motion, but it sent Wahl lurching frantically to the washroom and it woke Master Cornut. Carl leaped up as soon as he saw the younger man move, stood over him until his eyes were open. "Are you all right?" Cornut blinked, yawned and stretched his muscles. "I guess so. Yes." 'We're about to land." There was relief in Carl's voice. He had not expected anything to happen. Why should it? But there had been the chance that something might. "I can get you a cup of coffee from the galley." "Yes, I'd like -- no, never mind. We'll be down in a minute." Below them, the island was slipping back and forth slantwise, like a falling leaf -- a leaf that was falling upward, at least to them, because it was growing enormously fast. Wahl came out of the washroom and stared at the houses. "Dirty hovels," he growled. It was raining beneath them -- no, around them -- no, over. They were through the patchy cloud layer, and the "hovels" Wahl had glimpsed were clear beneath. Out of the patches of clouds, rain was falling. "Cum-u-lus of or-o-graph-ic ori-gin," said St. Cyr's uninflected voice, next to Master Carl's ear. "There is al-ways cloud at the island. I hope the storm does not dis-turb you." Master Wahl said, "It disturbs me" screaming thinly as they touched the wet concrete runway. A short, dark man with an umbrella ran out and, holding it protectively over St. Cyr's head, escorted them to the administration building, though the rain had nearly stopped. It was evident that St. Cyr's reputation and standing were working for them. The whole party was passed through customs under seal; the brown-skinned inspectors didn't even touch the bags. One of them prowled around the stack of the Field Expedition's luggage, carrying a portable voicetyper. "Research instruments," he chanted, singsong, and the machine clacked out its entry. "Research instruments... Research instruments." Master Carl interrupted. "That's my personal bag! There aren't any research instruments in it." "Excuse," said the inspector politely, but he went right on calling every bag "research instruments." The only concession he made to Carl's correction was to lower his voice. It was, to Master Carl, an offensive performance, and he had it in his mind to speak to someone in authority about it, too. Research instruments! They had nothing resembling a research instrument to their names, unless you counted the collection of handcuffs Master Wahl had brought along, just in case the aboriginals were obstinate about coming along. He thought of bringing it up with St. Cyr, but the president was talking to Cornut. Carl didn't want to cut in. He had no objection to interrupting Cornut, but interrupting the president of the university was something else again. Wahl said, "What's that over there? Looks like a bar, doesn't it? How about a drink?" Carl shook his head frostily and stomped out into the street. He was not enjoying his trip, and it was a pity, he thought, because he realized that he had been rather looking forward to it. One needed a change of scene from the Halls of Academe every once in a while. Otherwise one tended to become stuffy and provincial, to lose contact with the mass of humanity outside the university walls. For that reason, Carl had made it a practice, through all the decades since he began to teach, at least once in every year to accept or invent some task that would bring him in contact with the non-academic world... They had all been quite as distasteful as this one, but since Master Carl had never realized this, it didn't matter. He stood in a doorway, out of the fresh hot sun, looking down a broad street. The "filthy hovels" were not filthy at all; it was only Wahl's bad temper that had said that, not his reason. Why, they were quite clean, Master Carl marveled. Not attractive. And not large. But they did have a quaint and not too repulsive appearance. They were clumsy prefabs of some sort of pressed fiber, plasticbonded -- a local product, most likely, Master Carl diagnosed; pulp from palm trees had gone into the making of them. A roadable helipopper whirred, dipped, settled in the street before him, folded its vanes and rolled up to the entrance of the building where Carl was standing. The driver jumped out, ran around the side of the craft and opened the door. N OW, that was odd. The driver acted as though the Empress Catherine were about to set foot on the soil she ruled, and yet what came out of the copter was no great And hurry up that old goat St. Cyr, lady but what seemed, at least at will you?" first glance, like a fourteen-yearTo Carl's surprise, St. Cyr old blonde. Carl pursed his thin didn't strike the child dead. He lips and squinted into the bright came out and greeted her as afsun. Curious, he marveled -- the fably as his corpse's voice could creature was waving at him! be made to sound, and he sat beThe creature said, in the brassy side her in the front seat of the voice of no fourteen-year-old, popper in the wordless association "You're Carl. I'm Madame Sant # of old friend. But it wasn't the only Anna. Come on, get in. I've been surprising thing. Looking a little waiting for you people for an hour more closely at the "girl" was a and a half, and I've got to get clear kind of surprise too, because a girl back to Rio de Janeiro tonight, she was not. She was a painted grandmother with a face-lift The outrageous grandmother was Bermuda shorts and a blonde chattering away in St. Cyr's ear, bob! Why couldn't the woman her voice queer and muffled ungrow old gracefully, like St. Cyr, der the sound of the sequenced or for that matter like Master Carl rockets that whirled the vanes, himself? "President St. Cyr! Please have All the same, if St. Cyr knew her, this pilot turn back." But St. Cyr she couldn't be all bad, and anydidn't even turn his head, way Carl had something else bothMaster Carl was worried. He ering him. pressed his face to the window, The helipopper was already on looking back toward the native the bounce. Carl stood up. "Wait! town, but already it was too far to We're missing someone. Where's see anything. Cornut?" No one was listening. He had promised the boy... He felt very guilty indeed. But of course, he told himself, there was no danger. There were no hostile natives anywhere in the world. Lightning would not strike. Cornut was as safe as if he were in his own bed. Exactly as safe, Carl's own mind assured him sternly. And no safer. "D UT the fact of the matter was that Cornut was drinking a glass of beer at a dusty sidewalk table. For the first time in -- was it forever? -- his mind was at rest. He was not thinking of the anomalies a statistical census had discovered in Wolgren's Distributive Law. He was not thinking of Master Carl's suggestion about term marriage, or even about the annoying interruption that this expedition represented. It did not seem quite as much of an annoyance, now that he was here. It was so quiet. He tested it experimentally with his ears and decided that, though odd, it was pleasant. A few hundred yards away some aircraft chugged into the sky, destroying the quiet, but the odd thing was that the quiet returned. Cornut now had the chance he had been looking for since leaving the clinic, the night before and ten thousand miles away. He ordered another beer from the sallow waitress and reached into his pocket for the sheaf of reports that the medic had handed him. There were more of them than he had expected. How many cases had the analyst said had occurred at their own University? Fifteen or so. But here were more than a hundred case histories. Cornut scanned the summaries quickly and discovered that the problem extended beyond the University -- cases from other schools, cases from outside University circles entirely. There seemed to have been a rash of them among Government employees. There was a concentration of twelve on the staff of a single television network. He read the meaningless names and studied the almost as meaningless facts. One of the TV men had succeeded in short-circuiting a supposedly foolproof electric mattress eight times before he managed to die of it. He was happily married and about to be promoted. "Ancora birra ?' Cornut jumped, but it was only the waiter. "No, thanks -- no, wait." There was no sense in these continual interruptions. "Bring me a couple of bottles and leave them." The sun was setting, the clouds overhead powerless to shield the island from its heat, for the horizon was bare blue. It was hot and the beer was making him sleepy. It occurred to him that he really ought to be making an effort to catch up with the rest of the party. It was only chance that they had gone off without him; probably Master Carl would be furious. It also occurred to him that it was comfortable here. On an island as small as this, he would have no trouble finding them when he wanted them. Meanwhile he still had some beer, and he had all these reports, and it did not seem particularly disturbing to him that, though he read them all from beginning to end, he still found none where the course of the syndrome had taken more than ten weeks to reach its climax. Ten weeks. He had twenty days left. # J. "Turn back! You can't leave the poor boy to die!" St. Cyr whinnied surprisingly. The woman shrrilled: "He'll be all right. What's the matter, you want to spoil his fun? Give the kid a chance to kill himself, will you?" Carl took a deep breath. Then he started again, but it was no use; they insisted on treating the matter lightly. He slumped back in his seat and stared out the window. The helipopper came down in front of a building larger than most of the prefabs. It had glass in the windows, and bars over the glass. Madame Sant' Anna leaped up like a stick doll and shrilled, "Everybody out! Hop to it, now! I haven't got all day, you know!" Carl morosely followed her into the building. He wondered how, even for a moment and at a distance, he had taken her for a child. Bright blue eyes under blonde hair, yes; but the eyes were bloodshot, the hair a yellow mop draped on a skull. Loathing her, and worrying about Cornut, he climbed a flight of steps, went through a barred door and looked into a doublebarred room. "The ab-o-rig-i-nes," St. Cyr said in his toneless voice. It was the local jail, and it had only one cell, and that cell was packed with a dozen or more short, olive-skinned, ragged men and women. There were no children. No children, thought Master Carl petulantly, but they had promised an entire population to select from! These were all old. The youngest of them seemed at least a hundred. "Observe them care-ful-ly," came St. Cyr's slow voice. "There is not a per-son there more than fif-ty years old." Master Carl jumped. Mindreading again! He thought with a touch of envy how wonderful it must be to be so wise, so experienced, so all-understanding that one could know, as St. Cyr knew, what another person was thinking before he spoke it aloud. It was the sort of wisdom he hoped his. subordinates would attribute to him; and they didn't; and it hurt to see that in St. Cyr it existed. Master Carl moved fretfully down the corridor, looking through the electrified bars at the aborigines. A sallow fat man in flowered shorts came in through the door, bowed to the blonde woman, bowed to St. Cyr, stared contemptuously through the others, and offered a slight inclination of the head to Master Carl. It was an instructive demonstration of how a really adept person could single out the categories of importance of a group of strangers on first contact. "I," he announced, "am your translator. You wish to speak to your aboriginals, sir. Do so. The short one there, he speaks some English." "Thank you," said Master Carl. The short one was a surly looking fellow wearing much the same costume as the others. All of them were basically clad in ragged shorts and a short-sleeved jacket with an incongruous, tight-fitting collar. The clothes looked very, very old; not merely worn, but old. Men and women dressed alike. Only in the collars and shoulder-bars of the jackets were there any particular variations. They seemed to have military insigne to mark their ranks. The woman's collar, for example, bore a red cloth patch with a gold stripe running through it; the red was faded, the gold was soiled, but once they had been bright. Across the gold stripe was a five-pointed star of yellow cloth. The shortest of the men, the one who looked up when the translator spoke, had a red patch with much more gold on it, and with three stars of greenish, tarnished metal. Another man had a plain red patch with three cloth stars. the women, stepped forward, placed their palms on their knees and bowed jerkily. The one with the metal stars spoke breathily: "Tai-i Masatura-san. I captain, sir. These are of my command: Heicho Ikuri, Joto-hei Shokuto." Master Carl stepped back fastidiously. They smelled! They didn't look dirty, exactly, but their complexions were all bad -- scarred and pitted and seamed, as well as sallow; and they did have a distinct sour aura of sweat hanging over them. He glanced at the interpreter. "Captain? Is that an army rank?" The interpreter grinned. "No army now," he said reassuringly. "Oh, no. Long gone. But they keep military titles, you see? Father to son, father to son, like that. This fellow here, the tai-i, he tells me they are all part of Imperial Japanese Expeditionary Force which presently will make assault landing in Washington, D.C. Tai-i is captain; he is in charge of all of them, I believe. The heicho -- that's the woman -- is, the captain tells, a sort of junior corporal. More important than the other fellow, who is what they say a superior private." "I don't know what a corporal or a private is." "Who does? But to them it is important, it seems." The translator hesitated, grinned, and wheezed: "Also, they are related. The tai-iis daddy, the heicho is mommy, the joto-hei is son. All named Masatura-san." "Dirty looking things," Master Carl commented. "Thank heaven I don't have to go near them." "Oh," said a grave, slow voice behind him, "but you do. Yes, you do. It is your re-spon-si-bi-li-ty, Carl. You must su-per-vise their tests by the med-ics."L" complained, but there was no way out of it. St. Cyr gave the orders, and that was the order he gave. The medics looked over the aboriginals as thoroughly as any dissecting cadavers. Medics, thought Master Carl in disgust. How can they! But they did. They had the men and women strip -- flaccid breasts, sagging bellies, a terminator of deepening olive showing the transition from shade to sun at the lines marked by collars and cuffs and the hems of their shorts. Carl took as much of it as he could, and then he walked out -- leaving them nakedly proud beside their rags, while the medics fussed and muttered over them like livestock judges handing out ribbons. It was not only that he was tired of the natives -- whose interest to a mathematician was not zero, no, but a quantity vanishingly small. More than that, he wanted to find Cornut. T N the light of a huge moon, Carl retraced his steps to where the helipopper was casting a black silhouette on the silver dust. The pilot was half asleep on the seat, and Carl, with a force and determination previously reserved for critical letters in Math. Trans., said sharply: "Up, you! I haven't all night!" The startled pilot was airborne with his passenger before he realized that it was neither his employer, the young-old blonde, nor the old, old St. Cyr. By then it did not much matter. In for a penny, in for a pound; when Carl ordered him back to the town where the jet had landed, the pilot grumbled to himself but complied. It was not hard to find where Cornut had gone. The scooter police told Carl about the sidewalk cafe, the cashier told him about the native cafeteria, the counterman had watched Cornut, failing to finish his sandwich and coffee, stagger back to -- the airport again. There the traffic tower had seen him come in, try to get transportation to follow the others, fail, and stagger off into the jungle on the level truck road. He had been hardly able to keep his eyes open, the towerman added. Carl pressed the police into service. He was frightened. The little scooter bounced along the road, twin spotlights scanning the growth on both sides. Please find him, begged Carl silently. I promised him... The brakes squealed and the scooter skidded to a halt. The police were small, thin, young and agile, but Master Carl was first off the scooter and first to the side of the huddled figure under the breadfruit tree. For the first time in weeks, Cornut had fallen asleep -- passed out, in fact -- without a guardian angel. The moment of helplessness between walking and sleeping, the moment that had almost killed him a dozen times, had caught him by the side of a deserted road, in the middle of an uninhabited sink of smelly soft vegetation. Carl gently lifted the limp head. "My God," he said, a prayer instead of an oath, "he's only drunk. Help me get him to bed."  mouth and a banging head. Master Carl was seated at a field desk, a shaded light over his head. "Oh, you're up. Good. I had the porter call me a few minutes early, in case -- " "Yes. I know." Cornut waggled his jaw experimentally, but that was not a pleasant experiment. Still, he felt very good. He had not been drunk in a long, long time, and a hangover was strange enough to him to be interesting in itself. He sat on the side of the bed. The porter had evidently had other orders from Master Carl, because there was coffee in a pewter pot, and a thick pottery cup. Cornut drank some. Carl watched him for a while, then browsed back to his desk. He had a jar of some faintly greenish liquid and the usual stack of photographic prints. "How about this one?" he asked. "Does it look like a star to you?" "No." Carl dropped it back on the heap. "Becquerel's was no better." "I'm sorry, Carl," Cornut said cheerfully. "You know I don't take much interest in psion -- " "Cornut!" "Sorry. In your researches into paranormal kinetics, then." Carl said doubtfully, having already forgotten what Cornut had said, "I thought Greenlease had put me on the track of something. You know I've been trying to manipulate single molecules by P. K. -- using photographic film -- on the principle that as the molecules are just about to flip over into another state, not much energy should be needed to trigger them. Well, Greenlease told me about Brownian movement. Like this." He held the jar of soap solution to the light. "See?" Comut got up and took the quart jar from Master Carl's hand. In the light, he could see that the greenish color was the sum of myriad wandering points of light, looking more gold than green. "Brownian movement? What about it?" "The actual motion of molecules," Carl said solemnly. "One molecule impinging on another, knocking it into a third, the third knocking it into a fourth. There's a term for it in -- " "In math, of course. Why, certainly. Drunkard's Walk." Cornut remembered the concept with clarity and affection. He had been a second-year student, and the House Master was old Wayne; the audiovisual had been a marionette drunkard, lurching away from a doll-sized lamp post with random drunken steps in random drunken directions. Cornut smiled at the jar. "Well, what I want to do is sober him up. Watch." Carl puffed and thought; he was a model of concentration; Rodin had only sketched the rough outlines, compared to Master Carl. Then he panted. "Well?" Apparently, Cornut thought, what Carl had been trying to do was to make a molecule move in a straight line. "I don't think I see a thing," he admitted. "No. Neither do I... Well," said Master Carl, retrieving his jar, "even a negative answer is an answer. But I haven't given up yet. I have a few more thoughts on photographs -- if Greenlease can give me a little help." He sat down next to Cornut. "And you?" "You saw." Carl nodded seriously. "I saw that you were still alive. Was it because you were on your own Drunkard's Walk?" Cornut shook his head. He didn't mean no. He meant, "How can I tell?" "And my idea about finding a wife?" asked Carl. "I don't know." "That girl in the dining hall," Carl said with some acuteness. "How about her?" "Locille? Oh, good Lord, Carl, how do I know about her? I -- I just barely know her name. Anyway, she seems to be pretty close to Egerd." Carl got up and wandered to the window. "Might as well have breakfast. The aboriginals ought to be ready now." He stared at the crimson morning. "Madame SanfAnna has asked for a helper to get the aboriginals to Valparaiso," he said thoughtfully. "I think I'll help her out." V ' I ' EN thousand miles away, in the early afternoon, Locille was not very close to Egerd at all. "Sorry," she said. "I would like to. But -- ' Egerd stood up. "What's the record for suiciders?" he said angrily. "Ten weeks? Good enough. I'll be around to see you again -- along about the first of the month." He stalked out of the girls' dayroom. Locille sighed, but as she did not know what to do about Egerd's jealousy, she did nothing. It was difficult to be a girl sometimes. For here's Locille, a girl, a pretty girl, full of a girl's problems. It is a girl's business to keep her problems to herself. It is a girl's business to looked poised and lovely. And available. It is not true that girls are made of sugar and spice. These mysterious creatures, enameled of complexion, scented with distant flower fields and musk, constricted here and enlarged there -- they are animals, as men are animals, sustained by the same sludgy trickle of partly fermented organic matter -- and indeed with a host of earthy problems men need never know. Womanhood has always been a triumph of artifice over the animal within. And here, as we say, is Locille, twenty years old, student child of a retired subway enginer and his retired social-worker wife. She is young. She is nubile. She has the health of a plowmare. What can she know of mysteries? But she knew. the night the Field Expedi-tion was due to return, Locille was excused all of her evening classes. She took advantage of an hour of freedom to telephone her parents, out on the texas. She discovered, as she had discovered a hundred times before, that there was nothing to say between them; and returned to the kitchens of the Faculty Mess in time to take up her duties for the evening. The occasion was the return of the Field Expedition. It promised to be a monstrous feast. More than two hundred visiting notables would be present, as well as most of the upper faculty of the University itself. The kitchens were buzzing with activity. All six C.E.s were on duty, all busy. The Culinary Engineer in charge of Sauces and Gravies spied Locille first and drafted her to help him, but there was a struggle; the Engineer whose charge was Pastries knew her and wanted her too. Sauces and Gravies won out, and Locille found herself emulsifying caked steer blood and powdered spices in a huge metal vat. The sonic whine of the emulsifier and the staccato hiss of the steam as she valved it expertly into the mixture drowned out the roar of the settling jet -- the Field Expedition had returned without her knowing it. The first clue she had was when there was a commotion at one end of the kitchens, and she turned, and there was Egerd, shepherding three short, sallow persons she didn't recognize. He saw her. "Locille! Come on over and meet the aboriginals!" She hesitated and glanced at her C.E., who pantomimed take-ten-ifit-won't-spoil-the-gravy. Locille slipped off her gauntlets, set the automatic timers and thermostats and ducked past the kneading, baking, pressure-cooking machines of the Faculty Kitchen toward Egerd and his trophies. "They're Japanese," he said proudly. "You've heard of World War Two? They were abandoned on an island, and their descendants have been there ever since. Say, Locille -- " She took her eyes off the aboriginals to look at Egerd. He seemed both angry and proud. "I have to go to Valparaiso," he said. "There are six other aboriginals who are going to South America, and Master Carl picked me to go along." She started to answer, but the young instructor, Master Cornut, was wandering into the room, looking thoughtful. Egerd looked thoughtfully back at him. "I wondered why Carl picked me for this," he said, not bitterly, but with comprehension. "Good enough." He turned to leave through another door. "He can have his chance -- for the next sixteen days." and thoughtful he was. He had never proposed marriage before. "Hello, Locille," he said formally. She said, "Hello, Master Cornut." He said, "I, uh, want to ask you something." She said nothing. He looked around the kitchen as though he had never been in it before, which was probably so. He said, 'Would you like to -- ah -- would you like to meet me on Overlook Tower tomorrow?" "Certainly, Master Cornut." "That's fine," he said politely, nodding, and was halfway into the dining room before he realized he hadn't told her what time. Maybe she thought he expected her to stand there all day long! He hurried back. "At noon?" "Yes, Master Cornut." "And don't make any plans for the evening," he commanded, hurrying away. It was embarrassing. He had never proposed marriage before, and had not succeeded in proposing now. But he was wrong. He had. He didn't know it, but Locille did. The rest of the evening passed very rapidly for Cornut. The dinner was a great success. The aborigines were a howl. They passed among the guests, smoking their pipe of peace with anyone who cared to try it, which was everyone, and as the guests got drunker, the aborigines, responding to every toast with a loud Banzai!, then a hoarse one, then a simper -- the aborigines got drunker still. Cornut caught glimpses of Locille from time to time at first, then not at all. He asked after her, asked the waitress, asked the aborigines, finally found himself asking -- or telling -- about Locille with his arm around the flaccid shoulders of Master Wahl. He was quite drunk early, and he kept on drinking. He had moments of clarity. Master Carl listening patiently while Cornut tried to demonstrate Brownian motion -- the Drunkard's Walk of molecules -- in, appropriately, a rye-and-ginger-ale; a queer, alone moment when he realized he was staggering around the empty kitchen, calling Locille's name to the cold copper caldrons. Somehow, God knows how, he found himself in the elevators of Math Tower, when it must have been very late, and Egerd in a cream-colored robe was trying to help him into his room. He knew he said something to Egerd that must have been either coarse or cruel, because the boy turned away from him and did not protest when Cornut locked his door, but he did not know what coarse or cruel thing he had said. Had he mentioned Locille? When had he not! He fell sprawled on his bed, giggling. He had mentioned Locille a thousand times that night, and he stroked the pillow beside him as he drifted off to sleep. #TE drifted off to sleep and halted, for a moment sober, for a moment terrified, knowing that he was on the verge of sleep, again alone. But he could not stop. He could not stop because he was a molecule in a sea of soapy soup and Master Carl was hurling him into the arms of Locille. Master Carl was hurling him at Locille because Egerd had hurled him at Master Carl; Locille thrust him at St. Cyr, and St. Cyr, voicelessly chuckling, hurled him clear out of the jar, and he could not stop. He could not stop because St. Cyr told him: "You are a molecule, drunken molecule. You are a molecule, drunk and random, without path. You are a drunken molecule and you cannot stop." He could not stop though the greatest voice in the world was He could not stop because the world was reeling, reeling. He tried to open his eyes to halt it, but it would not stop. He was a molecule. He saw that he was a molecule and he saw he could not stop. Then -- the molecule -- stopped. VI locked door for nearly five minutes and then went away. He could have stayed longer, but he didn't want to. He thought it out carefully and concluded, first, that he had done what he undertook to do -- in spite of the fact that Cornut's choosing to marry Locille upset the undertaking -- and second, that if he was too late, he was already too late. An hour later, Cornut woke up. He was alive, he noticed immediately. It had been a most peculiar dream. It did not seem like a dream. His afternoon lecture, with Pogo Possum drawling hickorybark rules for factoring large integers, was much more fantasy in his mind than the dream-scene of himself contemplating himself, staggering drunk and with a bottle in his hand, trapped in the ceaseless Brownian zigzag. He knew that the only way a molecule could stop was to die, but curiously he had not died. He got up, dressed and went out. He was remarkably hung over, but it was much, much better outside. It was bright morning and, he remembered very clearly, he had an engagement with Locille at noon. He was on tape for the A.M. lecture; it gave him the morning off. He walked about the campus aimlessly, past the green steel and glass of the stadium, past the broad lawns of the lower campus to the bridge. The Med School lay huddled under the bridge itself. He liked the bridge, liked its sweep across the Bay, liked the way it condescended to drop one pylon to the island where the University had been built. He very much liked that pylon. That was Overlook Tower. On impulse, thinking that this was a good time to be wholly sober, he stopped at the clinic to get a refill on his wake-up pills. The clinic was not manned at that hour, except for emergencies, but because Cornut was a returnee, he was admitted to the automatic diagnosis machines. It was very much the same as the experience before the Field Expedition, except that there was no human doctor at all. A mechanical finger inserted a hair-thin tendril into his arm and tasted his blood, compared it with the recent chromatograph, and whirred thoughtfully while it considered if there had been changes. In a moment the Solution light winked pink, there was a click and clatter, and in a hopper by his hand there dropped a plastic box of his pills. He took one. Ah, fine! It was a strange and rewarding sensation. Whatever the pills contained, they fought fatigue at first encounter. He could trace the course of that pill clear down his throat and into his abdomen. The path tingled with well-being. He felt pretty good. No, he felt very good. He walked out into the fresh air again, humming to himself. It was a long climb up the pylon to Overlook Landing, but he did it on foot, feeling comfortable all the way. He popped another pill into his mouth and waited in patient good humor for Locille. k' class. From the base of the pylon, she glanced up at the Overlook Landing, nearly two hundred feet over her head. If Cornut was there, she couldn't see him. She rode up on the outside escalators, twining round the huge hexagonal tower, for the sake of the air and the view. It was a lovely view -- the clean white rectahedron of the Biologicals factory, the dome-shaped Clinic under the spreading feet of the pylon itself, the bright University buildings, the green of the lawns, the two dissimilar blues of water and sky. Lovely... But she was nervous. She stepped off the escalator, turned around the bulk of the pylon and bowed. "Master Cornut," she said. The wind caught at her blouse and hair. Cornut stood dreaming over the rail, his own hair blown carelessly around his forehead. He turned idly and smiled with sleepy eyes. "Ah," he said. "Locille." He nodded as though she had answered -- she had not. "Locille, I need a wife. You will do." "Thank you, Master Cornut." He waved a gentle hand. "You aren't engaged, I understand?" "No." Unless you counted Egerd -- but she didn't count Egerd. "Nor pregnant, I presume?" "No. I have never been pregnant." "Oh, no matter, no matter," he said. "I don't mind that. No sort of physical problem, I suppose?" "No." She didn't meet his eye that time, though. For there was a sort of physical problem, in a way. There couldn't have been a pregnancy without a man, and she had avoided that. She stood waiting for him to say something else, but he was a long time in getting around to it. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted that he was taking pills out of that little box as though they were candy. She wondered if he knew he was taking them. She remembered the knife-edge at his throat in class. She remembered the stories Egerd had told. Silly business. Why would anyone try to kill himself? T E collected himself and cleared his throat, taking another pill. "Let me see," he mused. "No engagements of record, no physical bars, no consanguinity, of course -- I'm an only child, you see. Well, I think that's everything, Locille. Shall we say tonight, after late class?" He looked suddenly concerned. "That is -- you have no objection, do you?" "I have no objection." "Good." He nodded, but his face remained clouded. "Locille," he began," perhaps you've heard stories about me. I -- I have had a number of accidents lately. And one reason why I wish to take a wife is to guard against any more accidents. Do you understand?" "I understand that, Master Cornut." "Very good. Very good." He took another pill out of the box, hesitated, glanced at it. His eyes widened. Locille stood motionless; she didn't know that a sudden realization had come to Master Cornut. It was the last pill in the box. But there had been twenty -- at least twenty -- not more than threequarters of an hour before -- twenty! He cried hoarsely: "Another accident!" It was as if the realization released the storm of the pills. Cornut's pulse began to pound. His head throbbed in a new and faster tempo. The world spun scarlet around him. A rush of bile clogged his throat. "Master Cornut!" But it was already too late for the girl to cry out. He knew; he had acted. He hurled the box out into space, stared at her, crimson, then without ceremony leaped to the rail. Locille screamed. She was after him, clutching at him, but impatiently he shrugged her off, and then she saw that he was not climbing to hurl himself to death. He had his finger down his throat. Without romance or manners, Master Cornut was getting the poison out of him quickly, efficiently -- Locille stood by silently, waiting. After a few minutes his shoulders stopped heaving, but he leaned on the rail, staring, for minutes after that. When he turned, his face was the racked face of a damned soul. "I'm sorry. Thanks." Locille said softly, "But I didn't do anything." "Of course you did. You woke me up -- " She shook her head. "You did it by yourself, you know. You did." He looked at her with irritation, then with doubt. And then, at last, he looked at her with the beginning of hope. Hr HE ceremony was very simple. Master Carl officiated. There was a friendly meal, and then they were left alone, Locille and Cornut, by the grace of the magisterial power vested in house masters man and wife. They went to his room. "You'd better rest," said Locille. "Right." He sprawled on the bed. He was very much aware of her, now studying, now doing womanlike tasks around his room -- no, their room. She was as inconspicuous as a flesh-and-blood person could be, moving quickly when die moved. But she might have been neon-lit and blaring with sirens for the way she kept distracting him. He stood up and dressed himself, not looking at her. She said questioningly, "It's time for sleep, isn't it?" He fumbled. "Is it?" But the clock said yes, it was: he had slept the day through. "Right," he said, as though it were some trivial thing and not world-shaking at all. "Yes, it's time for -- sleep. But I think I will take a walk around the campus, Locille. I need it." "Certainly." She waited, polite and calm. "Perhaps I shall be back before you are asleep," he went on. "Perhaps not. Perhaps -- " He was rambling. He nodded, cleared his throat, picked up his cloak and left. No one was in the corridor outside, no one in sight in the hall. There was a thin electronic peep from the robot night-proctors, but that was all right. 'Master Cornut was no undergraduate, to wriggle under the scanning beams. It was his privilege to come and go as he chose. He chose to go. He walked out onto the campus, quiet under a yellow moon, the bridge overhead ghostly silver. There was no reason why he should be so emotionally on edge. Locille was only a student. The fact remained -- he was on edge. But why should he be? Student marriage was good for the students, good for the masters; custom sanctioned it; and Master Carl, from the majesty of his house master's post, he had suggested it in the first place. Queerly, he kept thinking of Egerd. There had been a look on young Egerd's face, and maybe that was what bothered him. Master Cornut was not so many years past his sheepskin that he could dismiss the possible emotions of an undergraduate. Custom, privilege and law to one side, the fact remained that a student quite often did feel jealous of a master's prerogatives. While a student, Cornut himself had contracted no liaisons to be interfered with. But other students had. And there was no doubt that, in Egerd's immature, undergraduate way, he might well be jealous. # UT what did that matter? Egerd's jealousy could harm only himself. No serf, raging inwardly against his lord's jus primae noctis, was less able to make his anger felt than Egerd. But somehow Cornut was feeling it. He felt almost guilty. He was no logician; he was Mathematics. But this whole concept of right, he thought as he paced along the river bank, needed some study. What the world sanctioned was clear: The rights of the higher displaced the rights of the lower, as an atom of fluorine will drive oxygen out of a compound. But should it be that way? It was that way -- if that was an answer. And all of class, all of privileges, all of law, seemed to be working to produce one single commodity -- a product which, of all the world's goods, is unique in that it has never been in short supply, never quite satisfied its demand and yet never failed to find a market: babies. Wherever you looked, babies. In the creches in the women's dorms, in the playrooms attached to the rooms of the masters -- babies. It was almost as though it had been planned that way; custom and law determined the fact that as many adult humans as possible spend as much of their time as possible in performing the acts that made babies arrive. Why? What was the drive that produced so many babies? It wasn't a matter of sex alone -- it was babies. Sex was perfectly possible and joyous under conditions that made the occurrence of babies utterly impossible; science had arranged that decades, even centuries, before. But contraception was no answer. And so, all over the world, this uncomplicated and unaided practice of baby-making added a clear two per cent to the world's population every time the Earth sailed around the Sun. Two per cent per year! There were now something over year's census would show two per cent more than that. And why? What made babies so popular? Crazy as it was, the conclusion forced itself on Master Cornut: It was planned that way. By whom, he wondered, settling down to a long night's thoughtful ramble and a pursuing of the line of thought to its last extreme -- But not tonight, because he looked up and there was his own dorm. His feet had known more clearly than he the ultimate answer to the question: Babies? He was back at the entrance of Math Tower where the girl, Locille, was waiting. r ' , HE thing was -- the bed. She had had a bed of her own moved into the room, for that was the way it was done; but of course there was his bed already there, much larger, so that -- Well, which bed would she be in? He took a deep breath, nodded blindly to the unseeing electronic night-proctor, and opened the door of his room. A riotous alarm bell shattered the stillness. Master Cornut stood staring, stupidly, while the flesh-and-blood undergraduate charged with supervising the corridors came peering worriedly around the comer, drawn by the sound; and the bell continued to ring. Then he realized it was connected with the door. It was his automatic alarm bell, rigged by himself. But he had not connected it this night. He stepped in quickly, threw a scowl at the undergraduate, and closed the door. The ringing stopped. Locille was rising from the bed -- his bed. Her hair was braided about her head and her eyes were downcast but bright. She had not been asleep. She said, "You must be tired. Would you like me to fetch you something to eat?" He said in a tremblingly stern voice, "Locille, why did you bug the door?" "Why, to wake me up when you came in. The bell was there. I only had to turn it on." "And why?" "Why?" she said. "I wanted to." And she yawned, rather prettily, and excused herself with a smile, and turned to straighten the covers on the bed. Cornut, watching her from behind as he had never watched her from the front, made note of two incredible facts. The first was that this girl, Locille, was beautiful. She was wearing very little, only a sleeping skirt and a sleeping yoke, and there was no doubt of her figure; and she was wearing no makeup that the eye could see, and there was no doubt about her face. Amazing, Cornut told himself, conscious of commotions inside himself, amazing, but I want this girl. I want her very much. And that led him to the other fact, which was more incredible still. He looked at her and knew what had never entered into his calculations. It had never occurred to him that she might want him. r F' AP, tap. The girl shook him awake -- fully awake. "What do you want?" Cornut cried crossly at the door. Beside him, Locille made a face, a sweet, a mock-arrogant face, that was a tender caricature of his own; so that by the time the morning-proctor opened the door a crack and peered around it, Cornut was smiling at him. Wonders never-ceasing, thought the proctor, and said timidly, "Master Cornut, it is eight o'clock." Cornut drew the covers over Locille's bare shoulder. "Go away," he said. "Thanks, but go away." The door closed, and one of Locille's pink slippers slapped lightly against it. She raised the other to toss after the first. Cornut caught her arm, laughing very softly; and she turned to him, not quite laughing, and kissed him, and sprang away. "And stay awake," she warned. "I have to go to class." Cornut leaned back against the pillow. Why, it was a pleasant morning, he thought, and maybe in a way a pleasant world! It was perfectly astonishing what hues and brightnesses there were in the world that he had either never suspected or long forgotten. He watched the girl, miraculously a part of his life, a segment joined on without a trace or seam where he ad never suspected a segment was missing. Quick-quick, she was dressed; much too quickly. "You," said Cornut, "are in much too much of a hurry to get out of here." Locille came and sat on the edge of the bed. Even in the uniform she was beautiful now. That was another amazing thing. It was like knowing that a chalice was purest gold under the enamel; the colors were the same, the design was the same; but suddenly what had been a factory product was become a work of art, simply through knowing what graces lay underneath. She said, "That is because I am in a hurry to return." She looked at him again, questioningly. "You won't go back to sleep?" "Of course not." She was frowning slightly, he saw with fondness, reminding him of the reason he had sought a companion in the first place -- that old reason. She kissed him, rose, found her carry-all where she had left it on a chair, and her books. She caroled softly to herself: "Strike the Twos and strike the Threes, the Sieve of Eratosthenes. When the multiples -- Cornut, you're sure you won't go back to sleep?" "Sure." She stood, hesitating with one hand on the door. She said doubtfully, "Maybe you'd better take a wake-up pill. Will you?" "I will," he said, rejoicing in being nagged. "And you'd better start dressing in a few minutes. It's only half an hour until your first class -- " "I know." She blew him a kiss, and a smile; and she was gone. found himself the pillbox with the red and green sleeping regulators, took one and returned to bed. He had never felt better in his life. He lay back against the pillow, utterly relaxed and at peace. He had bought himself an alarm clock and it turned out to be a wife. He smiled at the low cream ceiling and stretched and yawned. What a perfectly fine bargain! What a superperfect alarm clock! And that reminded him. He glanced at his watch, but he'd taken it off, and the wall clock was out of his angle of vision. Well, no matter; the wake-up pill would keep him from going back to sleep again. It felt as though he had been lying here half an hour, but it couldn't be more than five minutes; that was how wake-up pills worked. He fumbled in the little divided box. Fortunate that they were handy; another pill would make doubly sure. He swallowed it, leaned back again and yawned. There was something about the pillow... He turned his head, sniffed, breathed deeply. Yes, there was Locille about the pillow; that was what it was. Locille, who left a fragrance behind her. Beautiful fragrance of Locille. Beautiful name. Beautiful girl. He caught himself yawning again -- Yawning? Yawning! He blinked the eyes that were much too heavy, and tried to turn the very weary head. Yawning! But after two wake-up pills -- or was it three -- or six? History was repeating! Red pills for wake-up, green for sleep. The green pills, he sobbed in his thoughts, he'd been taking the green ones! Oh, Lord, he whimpered soundlessly -- oh, Lord, why now? Why did you wait to catch me until I cared? Concluded Next Issue # This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Output # KW # KW # KW Distance # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord. If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees' you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find Please send Radios postpaid (# per radio) Name Address City State. Earth was being bet on to break her blockade... but what was the purse... and who was to collect ? T HE sight of an Earthman impossible for an outlander to be, brought angry crowds to surround John Crownwall as he strode toward the palace of Viceroy of the Universal Holy Empire of Sunda. He ignored the snarling, the spitting, the waving of boneless prehensile fingers, as he ignored the heavy gravity and heavier air of the unfamiliar planet. John Crownwall, florid, redheaded and bulky, considered himself to be a bold man. But here, surrounded by this writhing, slithering mass of eight-foot creatures, he felt distinctly unhappy. Crownwall had heard about creatures that slavered, but he had never before seen it done. These humanoids had large mouths and sharp teeth, and they unquestionably slavered. He wished he knew more about them. If they carried out the threats of their present attitude, Earth would have to send Marshall to replace him. And if Crownwall couldn't do the job, thought Crownwall, then it was a sure bet that Marshall wouldn't have a chance. He climbed the great ramp, with its deeply carved Greek key design, toward the mighty entrance gate of the palace. His manner demonstrated an elaborate air of unconcern that he felt sure was entirely wasted on these monsters. The clashing teeth of the noisiest of them were only inches from the quivering flesh of his back as he reached the upper level. Instantly, and unexpectedly to Crownwall, the threatening crowd dropped back fearfully, so that he walked the last fifty meters alone. Crownwall all but sagged with relief. A pair of guards, their purple hides smoothly polished and gleaming with oil, crossed their ceremonial pikes in front of him as he approached the entrance. "And just what business do you have here, stranger?" asked the senior of the guards, his speaking orifice framing with difficulty the sibilances of Universal Galactic. "What business would I have at the Viceroy's Palace?" asked Crownwall. "I want to see Ffallk." "Mind your tongue," growled the guard. "If you mean His Effulgence, Right Hand of the Glorious Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the Twelfth Sector of the Universal Holy Empire" -- Universal Galactic had a full measure of ceremonial words -- "he sees only those whom he summons. If you know what's good for you, you'll get out of here while you can still walk. And if you run fast enough, maybe you can even get away from that crowd out there, but I doubt it." "Just tell him that a man has arrived from Earth to talk to him. He'll summon me fast enough. Meanwhile, my highly polished friends, I'll just wait here, so why don't you put those heavy pikes down?" Crownwall sat on the steps, puffed alight a cigarette, and blew expert smoke rings toward the guards. An elegant courtier, with elaborately jeweled harness, bustled from inside the palace, obviously trying to present an air of strolling nonchalance. He gestured fluidly with a graceful tentacle. "You!" he said to Crownwall. "Follow me. His Effulgence commands you to appear before him at once." The two guards withdrew their pikes and froze into immobility at the sides of the entrance. Crownwall stamped out his smoke and ambled after the hurrying courtier along tremendous corridors, through elaborate waiting rooms, under guarded doorways, until he was finally bowed through a small curtained arch. At the far side of the comfortable, unimpressive room, a plump thing, hide faded to a dull violet, reclined on a couch. Behind him stood a heavy and pompous appearing Vegan in lordly trappings. They examined Crownwall with great interest for a few moments. "It's customary to genuflect when you enter the Viceroy's presence," said the standing one at last "But then I'm told you're an Earthling. I suppose we can expect you to be ignorant of those niceties' customary among civilized peoples." "It's all right, Ggaran," said the Viceroy languidly. He twitched a tentacle in a beckoning gesture. "Come closer, Earthling. I bid you welcome to my capital. I have been looking forward to your arrival for some time." in his pockets. "That's hardly possible," he said. "It was only decided yesterday, back on Earth, that I would be the one to make the trip here. Even if you could spy through buildings on Earth from space, which I doubt, your communications system can't get the word through that fast." "Oh, I didn't mean you in particular," the Vegan said with a negligent wave. "Who can tell one Earthling from another? What I meant was that I expected someone from Earth to break through our blockade and come here. Most of my advisors -- even Ggaran here -- thought it couldn't be done, but I never doubted that you'd manage it. Still, if you were on your home planet only yesterday, that's astonishing even to me. Tell me, how did you manage to get here so fast, and without even alerting my detection web?" "You're doing the talking," said Crownwall. "If you wanted someone from Earth to come here to see you, why did you put the cordon around Earth? And why did you drop a planet-buster in the Pacific Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered to go off if we tried to use the distorter drive? That's hardly the action of somebody who expects visitors." Ffallk glanced up at Ggaran. "I told you that Earthlings were unbelievably bold." He turned back to Crownwall. "If you couldn't come to me in spite of the trifling inconveniences I put in your way, your presence here would be useless to both of us. But you did come, so I can tell you that although I am the leader of one of the mightiest peoples in the Galaxy, whereas there are scarcely six minor planet, we still need each other. Together, there is nothing we can't do." "I'm listening," said Crownwell. "We offer you partnership with us to take over the rule of the Galaxy from the Sunda the socalled Master Race." "It would hardly be an equal partnership, would it, considering that there are so many more of you than there are of us?" His Effulgence twitched his ear stalks in amusement. "I'm Viceroy of one of the hundred Sectors of the Empire. I rule over a total of a hundred Satrapies; these average about a hundred Provinces each. Provinces consist, in general, of about a hundred Clusters apiece, and every Cluster has an average of a hundred inhabited solar systems. There are more inhabited planets in the Galaxy than there are people on your single world. I, personally, rule three hundred own race. And yet I tell you that it would be an equal partnership." "I don't get it. Why?" "Because you came to me." Crownwall shrugged. "So?" TP HE Vegan reached up and en" gulfed the end of a drinking tube with his eating orifice. "You upstart Earthlings are a strange and a frightening race," he said. "Frightening to the Sunda, especially. When you showed up in the spaceways, it was decreed that you had to be stopped at once. There was even serious discussion of destroying Earth out of hand, while it is still possible. "Your silly little planet was carefully examined at long range in a routine investigation just about fifty thousand years ago. There were at that time three different but similar racial strains of pulpy bipeds, numbering a total of perhaps a hundred thousand individuals. They showed many signs of an ability to reason, but a complete lack of civilization. While these creatures could by no means be classed among the intelligent races, there was a general expectation, which we reported to the Sunda, that they would some day come to be numbered among the Servants of the Emperor. So we let you alone, in order that you could develop in your own way, until you reached a high enough civilization to be useful -- if you were going to. "Intelligence is very rare in the Galaxy. In all, it has been found only fifteen times. The other races we have watched develop, and some we have actively assisted to develop. It took the quickest of One such race we left uncontrolled too long -- but no matter. "You Earthlings, in defiance of all expectation and all reason, have exploded into space. You have developed in an incredibly short space of time. But even that isn't the most disconcerting item of your development. As an Earthling, you have heard of the details of the first expedition of your people into space, of course?" "Heard about it?" exclaimed Crownwall. "I was on it." He settled down comfortably on a couch, without requesting permission, and thought back to that first tremendous adventure; an adventure that had taken place little more than ten years before. The Star Seeker had been built in space, about forty thousand kilometers above the Earth. It had been manned by a dozen adventurous people, captained by Crownwall, and had headed out on its ion drive until it was safely clear of the warping influence of planetary masses. Then, after several impatient days of careful study and calculation, the distorter drive had been activated, for the first time in Earth's history, and, for the twelve, the stars had winked out. The men of Earth had decided that it should work in theory. They had built the drive -- a small machine, as drives go -- but they had never dared to try it, close to a planet. To do so, said their theory, would usually -- seven point three four times out of # -- destroy the ship, and everything in space for thousands of miles around, in a ravening burst of raw energy. So the drive had been used for the first time without ever having been tested. And it had worked. In less than a week's time, if time has any meaning under such circumstances, they had flickered back into normal space, in die vicinity of Alpha Centauri. They had quickly located a dozen planets, and one that looked enough like Earth to be its twin sister. They had headed for that planet confidently and unsuspectingly, using the ion drive. Two weeks later, while they were still several planetary diameters from their destination, they had been shocked to find more than two score alien ships of space closing in on them -- ships that were swifter and more maneuverable than their own. These ships had rapidly and competently englobed the Star Seeker, and had then tried to herd it away from the planet it had been heading toward. prise, the Earthmen had acted swiftly. Crownwall recalled the discussion -- the council of war, they had called it -- and their unanimous decision. Although far within the dangerous influence of a planetary mass, they had again activated the distorter drive, and they had beaten the odds. On the distorter drive, they had returned to Earth as swiftly as they had departed. Earth had immediately prepared for war against her unknown enemy. "Your reaction was savage," said Ggaran, his tentacles stiffening with shock at the memory. "You bloody-minded Earthlings must have been aware of the terrible danger." Ffallk rippled in agreement. "The action you took was too swift and too foolhardy to be believed. You knew that you could have destroyed not only yourself, but also all who live on that planet. You could also have wrecked the planet itself and the ships and those of my own race who manned them. We had tried to contact you, but since you had not developed subspace radio, we were of course not successful. Our englobement was just a routine quarantine. With your total lack of information about us, what you did was more than the height of folly. It was madness." "Could we have done anything else that would have kept you from landing on Earth and taking us over?" asked Crownwall. "Would that have been so bad?" said Ggaran. "We can't tolerate wild and warlike races running free and uncontrolled in the Galaxy. Once was enough for that." "But what about my question? Was there any other way for us to stay free?" "Well, no. But you didn't have enough information to realize that when you acted so precipitously. As a matter of fact, we didn't expect to have much trouble, even after your surprising action. Of course, it took us a little time to react. We located your planet quickly enough, and confirmed that you were a new race. But by the time we could try to set up communications and send ambassadors, you had already organized a not inconsiderable defense. Your drones blew up our unmanned ships as fast as we could send them down to your planet. And by the time we had organized properly for war against you, it was obvious that we could not conquer you. We could only destroy you." "That old fool on Sunda, the Emperor, decided that we should blow you up, but by that time I had decided," said His Effulgence, "that you might be useful to me -- that is, that we might be useful to each other. I traveled halfway across the Galaxy to meet him, to convince him that it would be sufficient just to quarantine yot. When we had used your radio system to teach a few of you the Universal Galactic tongue, and had managed to get what you call the 'planet buster' down into the largest of your oceans, he figured we had done our job. "With his usual lack of imagination, he felt sure that we were safe from you -- after all, there was no way for you to get off the planet. Even if you could get down to the bottom of the ocean and tamper with the bomb, you would only succeed in setting it off, and that's what the Sunda had been in favor of in the first place. "But I had different ideas. From what you had already done, I suspected it wouldn't be long before one of you amazing Earthlings would dream up some device or other, head out into space, and show up on our planet. So I've been waiting for you, and here you are." "It was the thinking of a genius," murmured Ggaran. "All right, then, genius, here I am," said Crownwall. "So what's the pitch?" "Ggaran, you explain it to the Earthling," said His Effulgence.  ceans on Sunda -- the lobsterlike creatures that rule the Galaxy -- are usurpers. They have no rights to their position of power. Our race is much older than theirs. We were alone when we found the Sundans -- a primitive tribe, grubbing in the mud at the edge of their shallow seas, unable even to reason. In those days we were desperately lonely. We needed companionship among the stars, and we helped them develop to the point where, in their inferior way, they were able to reason, almost as well as we, The People, can. And then they cheated us of our rightful place. "The Emperor at Sunda is one of them. They provide sixty-eight of the hundred Viceroys; we provide only seventeen. It is a preposterous and intolerable situation. years we have waited for the opportunity for revenge. And now that you have entered space, that opportunity is at hand." "If you haven't been able to help asked Crownwall, "how does the sight of me give you so much gumption all of a sudden?" Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and he slavered in fury, but the clashing of his teeth subsided instantly at a soothing wave from His Effulgence. "War in space is almost an impossibility," said the aged ruler. "We can destroy planets, of course, but with few exceptions, we cannot conquer them. I rule a total of seven races in my Sector. I rule them, but I don't let them intermingle. Each race settles on the planets that best suit it. Each of those planets is quite capable of defending itself from raids, or even large-scale assaults that would result in its capture and subjugation -- just as your little Earth can defend itself. "Naturally, each is vulnerable to economic blockade -- trade provides a small but vital portion of the goods each planet uses. All that a world requires for a healthy and comfortable life cannot be provided from the resources of that single world alone, and that gives us a very considerable measure of control. "And it is true that we can always exterminate any planet that refuses to obey the just and legal orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve Order on Coupon Below. We Pay Postage. Delivery Guaranteed. Transport and work ship. Opening cargo door and cargo. Pilot and three figures in space suits. Terrestrial globe mounting and base. # Vi inches long. Molded in four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. # Two manned and separating stages for passenger service in outer space at # mile altitude. Retractable landing gear, launching pad, # figures. Molded in # colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. # Television from outer space. Depicts actual rocket, designed to put a television camera in orbit around the earth. # separating stages, television nose cone, launching pad, service tower, # figures. Molded in four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. # Manned rocket for controlled orbital flight around the earth. # separating stages, landing gear, removable fuel tanks, launching pad, # figures. Molded in four colors. Booklet by Willy Ley. # Galaxy Magazine, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Send at once, postpaid, Willy Ley Space Models as checked below. Remittance for  enclosed.  Space Taxi. #  TV Orbiter #  Passenger Rocket #  Orbital Rocket # Name Add ress City Zone State a working balance in our Empire. We control it adequately, and we live in peace. "The Sundans, for example, though they took the rule of the Empire that was rightfully ours away from usj through trickery, were unable to take over the Sectors we control. We are still powerful. And soon we will be allpowerfull. In company with you Earthlings, that is." Crownwall nodded. "In other words, you think that we Earthyear-old stalemate. You've got the idea that, with our help, you can conquer planets without the necessity of destroying them, and thereby take over number one spot from these Sunda friends of yours." "Don't call those damn lobsters friends," growled Ggaran. He subsided at the Viceroy's gesture. "Exactly," said His Effulgence to Crownwall. "You broke our blockade without any trouble. Our instruments didn't even wiggle when you landed here on my capital world. You can do the same on the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just tell us how you did it, and we're partners."  brow quizzically, but remained silent. He didn't expect his facial gesture to be interpreted correctly, but he assumed that his silence would be. He was correct. "Of course," His Effugence said, "we will give you any assurances that your people may desire in order to feel safe, and we will guarantee them an equal share in the government of the Galaxy." "Bunk," said Crownwall. His Effulgence lifted a tentacle swiftly, before Ggaran, lunging angrily forward, could speak. "Then what do you want of us?" "It seems to me that we need no wordy assurances from each other," said Crownwall, and he puffed a cigarette aglow. "We can arrange something a little more trustworthy, I believe. On your side, you have the power to destroy our only planet at any time. That is certainly adequate security for our own good behavior and sincerity. "It is impossible for us of Earth to destroy all of your planets. As you have said, there are more planets that belong to you than there are human beings on Earth. But there is a way for us to be reasonably sure that you will behave yourselves. You will transfer to us, at once, a hundred of your planetdestroying bombs. That will be a sufficient supply to let us test some of them, to see that they are in good working order. Then, if you try any kind of doublecross, we will be able to use our own methods -- which you cannot prevent -- to send one of those bombs here to destroy this planet. "And if you try to move anywhere else, by your clumsy distorter drive, we can follow you, and destroy any planet you choose to land on. You would not get away from us. We can track you without any difficulty. "We wouldn't use the bombs lightly, to be sure, because of what would happen to Earth. And don't think that blowing up our planet would save you, because we naturally wouldn't keep the bombs on Earth. How does that sound to you?" "Ridiculous," snorted Ggaran. "Impossible." After several minutes of silent consideration, "It is an excellent plan," said His Effulgence. "It is worthy of the thinking of The People ourselves. You Earthlings will make very satisfactory allies. What you request will be provided without delay. Meanwhile, I see no reason why we cannot proceed with our discussions." "Nor do I," consented Crownwall. "But your stooge here doesn't seem very happy about it all." His Effulgence wiggled his tentacles. "I'm afraid that Ggaran had expected to take what you Earthlings have to offer without giving anything in return. I never had any such ideas. I have not underestimated you, you see." "That's nice," said Crownwall graciously. "And now," Ggaran put in, "I think it's time for you to tell us something about how you get across light-years of space in a few hours, without leaving any traces for us to detect" He raised a tentacle to still Crownwall's immediate exclamation of protest. "Oh, nothing that would give us a chance to duplicate it -- just enough to indicate how we can make use of it, along with you -- enough to allow us to begin to make intelligent plans to beat the claws off the Master Race." Crownwall nodded. "I don't see why not. Well, then, let me tell you that we don't travel in space at all. That's why I didn't show up on any of your long-range detection instruments. Instead, we travel in time. Surely any race that has progressed as far as your own must know, at least theoretically, that time travel is entirely possible. After all, we knew it, and we haven't been around nearly as long as you have." "We know about it," said Ffallk, "but we've always considered it useless -- and very dangerous -- knowledge." "So have we, up until the time you planted that bomb on us. Anyone who tried to work any changes in his own past would be almost certain to end up finding himself never having been bom. So we don't do any meddling. What we have discovered is a way not only of moving back into the past, but also of making our own choice of spatial references while we do it, and of changing our spatial anchor at will. "For example, to reach this planet, I went back far enough, using Earth as the spatial referent, to move with Earth a little more than a third of the way around this spiral nebula that is our Galaxy. Then I shifted my frame of reference to that of the group of galaxies of which ours is such a distinguished member. "Then of course, as I continued to move in time, the whole Galaxy moved spatially with reference to my own position. At the proper instant I shifted again, to the reference frame of this Galaxy itself. Then I was stationary in the Galaxy, and as I continued time traveling, your own mighty sun moved toward me as the Galaxy revolved. I chose a point where there was a time intersection of your planet's position and my own. When you got there, I just changed to the reference plane of this planet I'm on now, and then came on back with it to the present. So here I am. It was a long way around to cover a net distance of # light-years, but it was really very simple. "And there's no danger of meeting myself, or getting into any anachronistic situation. As you probably know, theory shows that these are excluded times for me, as is the future -- I can't stop in them." "Are you sure that you haven't given us a little too much information for your own safety?" asked Ffallk softly. "Not at all. We were enormously lucky to have learned how to control spatial reference frames ourselves. I doubt if you could do it in wall rose to his feet "And now, Your Effulgence, I think it's about time I went back to my ship and drove it home to Earth to make my report, so we can pick up those bombs and start making arrangements." "Excellent," said Ffallk. "I'd better escort you; my people don't like strangers much." "I'd noticed that," Crownwall commented drily. "Since this is a very important occasion, I think it best that we make this a Procession of Full Ceremony. It's a bother, but the proprieties have to be observed."  broad corridor and whistled a shrill two-tone note, using both his speaking and his eating orifices. A cohort of troops, pikes at the ready and bows strapped to their backs, leaped forward and formed a double line leading from His Effulgence's sanctum to the main door. Down this lane, carried by twenty men, came a large sedan chair. "Protocol takes a lot of time," said His Effulgence somewhat sadly, "but it must be observed. At least, as Ambassador, you can ride with me in the sedan, instead of walking behind it, like Ggaran." "I'm glad of that," said Crownwall. "Too bad Ggaran can't join us." He climbed into the chair beside Ffallk. The bearers trotted along at seven or eight kilometers an hour, carrying their contraption with absolute smoothness. Blasts from horns preceded them as they went. When they passed through the huge entrance doors of the palace and started down the ramp toward the street, Crownwall was astonished to see nobody on the previously crowded streets, and mentioned it to Ffallk. "When the Viceroy of the Seventy Suns," said the Viceroy of the Seventy Suns, "travels in state, no one but my own entourage is permitted to watch. And my guests, of course," he added, bowing slightly to Crownwall. "Of course," agreed Crownwall, bowing back. "Kind of you, I'm sure. But what happens if somebody doesn't get the word, or doesn't hear your trumpeters, or something like that?" Ggaran stepped forward, already panting slightly. "A man with knots in all of his ear stalks is in a very uncomfortable position," he explained. "Wait. Let me show you. Let us just suppose that that runner over there" -- he gestured toward a soldier with a tentacle -- "is a civilian who has been so unlucky as to remain on the street after His Effulgence's entourage arrived." He turned to one of the bowmen who ran beside the sedan chair, now. strung and at the ready. "Show him!" he ordered peremptorily. In one swift movement the bowman notched an arrow, drew and fired. The arrow hissed briefly, and then sliced smoothly through the soldier's throat. "You see," said Ggaran complacently, "we have very little trouble with civilians who violate this particular tradition." His Effulgence beckoned to the bowman to approach. "Your results were satisfactory," he said, "but your release was somewhat shaky. The next time you show such sloppy form, you will be given thirty lashes." He leaned back on the cushion and spoke again to Crownwall. "That's the trouble with these requirements of civilization. The men of my immediate guard must practice with such things as pikes and bows and arrows, which they seldom get an opportunity to use. It would never do for them to use modern weapons on occasions of ceremony, of course." "Of course," said Crownwall, then added, "It's too bad that you can't provide them with live targets a little more often." He stifled a shudder of distaste. "Tell me, Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's race -- the Master Race -- also enjoy the type of civilization you have just had demonstrated for me?" "Oh, no. They are far too brutal, too morally degraded, to know anything of these finer points of etiquette and propriety. They are really an uncouth bunch. Why, do you know, I am certain that they would have had the bad taste to use an energy weapon to dispose of the victim in a case such as you just witnessed! They are really quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely be called civilized at all. But we will soon pur a stop to all of that -- your race and mine, of course." "I sincerely hope so," said Crownwall. to His Effulgence and to Crownwall during the trip, without interrupting the smooth progress of the sedan. The soldiers of the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran continued to run -- without food, drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence of fatigue. After several hours of travel, following Crownwall's directions, the procession arrived at the copse in which he had concealed his small transportation machine. The machine, for spatial mobility, was equipped with the heavy and grossly inefficient anti-gravity field generator developed by Kowalsky. It occupied ten times the space of the temporal translation and coordination selection systems combined, but it had the great advantage of being almost indetectable in use. It emitted no mass or radiation. After elaborate and lengthy farewells, Crownwall climbed into his machine and fell gently up until he was out of the atmosphere, before starting his enormous journey through time back to Earth. More quickly than it had taken him to reach his ship from the palace of His Effulgence, he was in the Council Chamber of the Confederation Government of Earth, making a full report on his trip to Vega. When he had finished, the President sighed deeply. "Well," he said, "we gave you full plenipotentiary powers, so I suppose we'll have to stand behind your agreements -- especially in view of the fact that we'll undoubtedly be blown into atoms if we don't. But from what you say, I'd rather be in bed with a rattler than have a treaty with a Vegan. They sound ungodly murderous to me. There are too many holes in that protection plan of yours. It's only a question of time before they'll find some way around it, and then -- poof -- we'll all be dust." "Things may not be as bad as they seem," answered Crownwall complacently. "After I got back a a little careless and let my ship dip down into Vega Ill's atmosphere for a while. I was back so far that the Vegans hadn't appeared yet. Now, I didn't land -- or deliberately kill anything -- but I'd be mighty surprised if we didn't find a change or two. Before I came in here, I asked Marshall to take the ship out and check on things. He should be back with his report before long. Why don't we wait and see what he has to say?" he was escorted into the Council Chamber. He bowed briefly to the President and began to speak rapidly. "They're gone without trace -- all of them!" he cried. "I went clear to Sunda and there's no sign of intelligent life anywhere! We're all alone now!" "There, you see?" exclaimed Crownwall. "Our enemies are all gone!" He looked around, glowing with victory, at the others at the table, then slowly quieted and sat down. He turned his head away from their accusing eyes. "Alone," he said, and unconsciously repeated Marshall's words: "We're all alone now." In silence, the others gathered their papers together and left the room, leaving Crownwall sitting at the table by himself. He shivered involuntarily, and then leaped to his feet to follow after them. Loneliness, he found, was something that he couldn't face alone. Tin  little inoev.-ie" e he long os he m alien for for ! T HE SHI briefly and withfeWt foItwasspherOUtag ? diameter about ical, the estimat waS m an twenty-seven  # ml les orbit appr # J e of the Earth Mo rrsis -- The ship itself occasioned some excitement, but back there at the tattered end of the #th century, what was one visiting spaceship more or less? Others had appeared before, and gone away discouraged -- or just not bothering. #-dimensional TV was coming out of the experimental stage. Soon anyone could have Dora the Doll or the Grandson of Tarzan smack in his own living-room. Besides, it was a hot summer. The first knowledge of the escape came when the region of Seattle suffered an eclipse of the sun, which was not an eclipse but a near shadow, which was not a shadow but a thing. The darkness drifted out of the northern Pacific. It generated thunder without lightning and without rain. When it had moved eastward and the hot sun reappeared, wind followed, a moderate gale. The coast was battered by sudden high waves, then hushed in a bewilderment of fog. Before that appearance, radar had gone crazy for an hour. The atmosphere buzzed with aircraft. They went up in readiness to shoot, but after the first sighting reports only a few miles offshore, that order was vehemently canceled -- someone in charge must have had a grain of sense. The thing was not a plane, rocket or missile. It was an animal. If you shoot an animal that resembles an inflated gas-bag with wings, and the wingspread happens to be something over four miles tip to tip, and the carcass drops on a city -- it's not nice for the city. The Office of Continental Defense deplored the lack of precedent. But actually none was needed. You just don't drop four miles of dead or dying alien flesh on Seattle or any other part of a swarming homeland. You wait till it flies out over the ocean, if it will -- the most commodious ocean in reach. IT, or rather she, didn't go back over the Pacific, perhaps because of the prevailing westerlies. After the Seattle incident she climbed to a great altitude above the Rockies, apparently using an updraft with very little wing-motion. There was no means of calculating her weight, or mass, or buoyancy. Dead or injured, drift might have carried her anywhere within one or two hundred miles. Then she seemed to be following the line of the Platte and the Missouri. By the end of the day she was circling interminably over the huge complex of St. Louis, hopelessly crying. She had a head, drawn back most of the time into the bloated mass of the body but thrusting forward now and then on a short neck not more than three hundred feet in length. When she did that the blunt turtle-like head could be observed, the gaping, toothless, suffering mouth from which the thunder came, and the soft-shining purple eyes that searched the ground but found nothing answering her need. The skin-color was mud-brown with some dull iridescence and many peculiar marks resembling weals or blisters. Along the belly some observers saw half a mile of paired protuberances that looked like teats. She was unquestionably the equivalent of a vertebrate. Two web-footed legs were drawn up. close against the cigar-shaped body. The vast, rather narrow, inflated wings could not have been held or moved in flight without a strong internal skeleton and musculature. Theorists later argued that she must have come from a planet with a high proportion of water surface, a planet possibly larger than Earth though of about the same mass and with a similar atmosphere. She could rise in Earth's air. And before each thunderous lament sihe was seen to breathe. It was assumed that immense air sacs within her body were inflated or partly inflated when she left the ship, possibly with some gas lighter than nitrogen. Since it was inconceivable that a vertebrate organism could have survived entry into atmosphere from an orbit # miles up, it was necessary to believe that the ship had briefly descended, unobserved and by unknown means, probably on Earth's night-side. Later on the ship did descend as far as atmosphere, for a moment... St. Louis was partly evacuated. There is no reliable estimate of the loss of life and property from panic and accident on the jammed roads and rail lines. # dead, # injured is the conservative figure. abandoned that area, flying heavily eastward. The droning and swooping gnats of aircraft plainly distressed her. At first she had only tried to avoid them, but now and then during her eastward flight from St. Louis she made short desperate rushes against them, without skill or much sign of intelligence, screaming from a wide-open mouth that could have swallowed a fourengine bomber. Two aircraft were lost over Cincinnati, by collision with each other in trying to get out of her way. Pilots were then ordered to keep a distance of not less than ten miles until such time as she reached the Atlantic -- if she did -- when she could safely be shot down. She studied Chicago for a day. By that time Civil Defense was residents had already fled to open country before she came, and the loss of life was proportionately smaller. She moved on. We have no clue to the reason why great cities should have attracted her, though apparently they did. She was hungry perhaps, or seeking help, or merely drawn in animal curiosity by the endless motion of the cities and the strangeness. It has even been suggested that the life forms of her homeland -- her masters -- resembled humanity. She moved eastward, and religious organizations united to pray that she would come down on one of the lakes where she could safely be destroyed. She didn't. She approached Pittsburgh, choked and screamed and flew high, and soared in weary circles over Buffalo for a day and a night. Some pilots who had followed the flight from the West Coast claimed that the vast lamentation of her voice was growing fainter and hoarser while she was drifting along the line of the Mohawk Valley. She turned south, following the Hudson at no great height. Sometimes she appeared to be choking, the labored inhalations harsh and prolonged, like a cloud in agony. When she was over Westchester, headquarters tripled the swarm of interceptors and observation planes. Squadrons from Connecticut and southern New Jersey deployed to form a monstrous funnel, the small end before her, the large end pointing out to open sea. Heavy bombers closed in above, laying a smoke screen at # feet to discourage her from rising. The ground shook with the drone of jets, and with her crying. Multitudes had abandoned the metropolitan area. Other multitudes trusted to the subways, to the narrow street canyons and to the strength of concrete and steel. Others climbed to a thousand high places and watched, trusting the laws of chance. She passed over Manhattan in the evening -- between # : # and #:# P.M., July #, # at an altitude of about # feet. She swerved away from the aircraft that blanketed Long Island and the Sound, swerved again as the southern group buzzed her instead of giving way. She made no attempt to rise into the sun-crimsoned terror of drifting smoke. r I A HE plan was intelligent. It should have worked, but for one fighter pilot who jumped the gun. He said later that he himself couldn't understand what happened. It was court-martial testimony, but his reputation had been Hammond Green -- of New London, Connecticut, flying a one-man jet fighter, well aware of the strictest orders not to attack until the target had moved at least ten miles east of Sandy Hook. He said he certainly had no previous intention to violate orders. It was something that just happened in his mind. A sort of mental sneeze. His squadron was approaching Rockaway, the flying creature about three miles ahead of him and half a mile down. He was aware of saying out loud to nobody: "Well, she's too big." Then he was darting out of formation, diving on her, giving her one rocket-burst and reelHe never did locate or rejoin his squadron, but he made it somehow back to his home field. He climbed out of the cockpit, they say, and fell flat on his face. It seems likely that his shot missed the animal's head and tore through some part of her left wing. She spun to the left, rose perhaps a thousand feet, facing the city, sideslipped, recovered herself and fought for altitude. She could not gain it. In the effort she collided with two of the following planes. One of them smashed into her right side behind the wing, the other flipped end over end across her back, like a swatted dragonfly. It dropped clear and made a mess on Bedloe's Island. She too was falling, in a long slant, silent now but still living. After the impact her body thrashed desolately on the wreckage between Lexington and Seventh Avenues, her right wing churning, then only trailing, in the East River, her left wing a crumpled slowly deflating mass concealing Times Square, Herald Square and the garment district. At the close of the struggle her neck extended, her turtle beak grasping the top of Radio City. She was still trying to pull herself up, as the buoyant gasses hissed and bubbled away through the gushing holes in her side. Radio City collapsed with her. For a long while after the roar of descending rubble and her own roaring had ceased, there was no human noise except a melancholy thunder of the planes. 'T'HE apology came early next morning. The spaceship was observed to descend to the outer limits of atmosphere, very briefly. A capsule was released, with a parachute timed to open at # feet and come down quite neatly in Scarsdale. Parachute, capsule and timing device were of good workmanship. The communication engraved on a plaque of metal (which still defies analysis) was a hasty job, the English slightly odd, with some evidence of an incomplete understanding of the situation. That the visitors were themselves aware of these deficiencies is indicated by the text of the message itself. Most sadly regret inexcusable escape of livestock. While petting same, one of our children monkied (sp?) with airlock. Will not happen again. Regret also imperfect grasp of language, learned through what you term Television etc. Animal not dangerous, but observe some accidental damage caused, therefore hasten to enclose reimbursement, having taken liberty of studying your highly ingenious methods of exchange. Hope same will be adequate, having estimated deplorable inconvenience to best of ability. Regret exceedingly impossibility of communicating further, as pressure of time and prior obligations forbids. Please accept heartfelt apologies and assurances of continuing esteem. The reimbursement was in fact properly enclosed with the plaque, and may be seen by the public in the rotunda of the restoration of Radio City. Though technically counterfeit, it looks like perfectly good money, except that Mr. Lincoln is missing one of his wrinkles are upside down.      Never will we be counted among those who deplore the practice of waiting until all installments of a serial are on hand before going on a reading spree. But in the case of Galaxy serials, who do deplore -- deplore, nothing; we think it's self-theft to read the synopsis of the first installment and then the whole second, as if something as rich and strong and sensitive as the installment in this issue could be more than dehydrated and packed into a Pohl consists of only two installments, as we promised our serials would be -- but you're missing a lot if you are one of the aufothieves mentioned above. You know, having # pages to sprawl around in -- more pages than any other magazine in this field, regardless of price, and now maybe you understand what looked like funny arithmetic at the time; we knew what our esteemed rivals were going to do, how much it would cost you per page, and how much less each page of Galaxy came to; we just didn't figure they would take so long to make the change. To get back to that interrupted thought, having # pages to sprawl around in, we put our fingers in our ears and leaped into a Forecast with an installment of a serial and two novelets. So -- two more novelets are herewith predicted for the next issue: powerful man in the world, who can make anybody do -- anything. to worry. Why is he being offered a reward that couldn't be bigger -- to break up a dope ring that couldn't be tinier? unusual features. Be on hand, won't you? iiria avil KWl more devoted exclusively to questions from readers. This also applies to this opening section, which unfortunately cannot be credited to individual readers, for questions about rocket fuels were the most frequent item during the last few weeks. They ranged from the simple but pretty unanswerable "Please tell me what they put into solid fuels" to a rather long and confused letter from a lady in New Jersey who said all kinds of things that simply aren't so. To begin with, she "knew" that the Russian successes in the space field were all due to the use of solid fuels, while our explosions at Cape Canaveral occurred because of liquid fuels. She then went on to say that this solid fuel was indubitably a German invention and that we could probably find about it if we read all the patents taken out by the German company of I. G. Farbenindustrie -- I may add that she misspelled the name. Since this situation is unbearable, she was writing to her senator, and she urged me to write to the President, asking him to order our chemists to go ahead and invent a solid fuel. I don't know what her senator said to all this, but I tried to straighten her out as best I could in a letter: namely, that the Russian space rockets burn refined kerosene with liquid oxygen, as suggested by Konstantin Eduardovitch Ziolkovsky in #, and that they use solid-fuel rockets only, as far as is known, to boost their smaller high-altitude research rockets off the launching pad, but that these rockets, too, are liquidfuel devices. I also wrote that our chemists probably learned all I. G. Farben patents by heart as a matter of routine -- and that we do have several companies which are in the business of concocting solid rocket fuels -- without requiring a special order from the President. with the question of why solid fuels are "superior" -- "They must be or else the armed forces would not specify that they want solidfuel rockets from now on" -- and just what is meant by the term "families of fuels." Though I have touched on some of these questions in the past, it is necessary to go over the whole problem in a more systematic manner to explain what is really involved. What # per cent of the people who worry about the "secret" of solid fuels -- Russian, German, Japanese, Yugoslav or what have you -- do not seem to realize is that all rockets started as solidfuel rockets. When the English fireworks maker of the #th century or the naval architect of the #th century, or the German gunnery master of the same period retired to his laboratory to make some rockets, he concocted a mixture of # per cent saltpeter, # per cent charcoal and # per cent sulfur. The proportions varied by one or two per cent from case to case, and there were special trade secrets as to how the saltpeter should be refined, how to obtain pure sulfur, and which kind of wood to burn into charcoal. But the recipe was the one just given. It worked. And it was the only recipe there was. In the language of modem rocket engineering, the men made a "mixed composite" which had a number of advantages. It was simple, the ingredients were not expensive, and it was reasonably safe to make. That the rockets had a tendency to deteriorate in storage was another problem. And that they could not be made very large was still another one. It was due to these two drawbacks of poor storability and restricted size that inventors scouted around for other possibilities. Hermann Ganswindt in Germany (around #) andlater Dr. Robert H. Goddard in the United States (# and following years) thought about the possibility of a machinegun-like firing mechanism, using solid-fuel cartridges. Ziolkovsky (# or #, depending on whether you have the year of writing or the year of publication of his first treatise in mind) wondered about the possibility of using liquid fuels. Goddard (patent of #) and Hermann Oberth (publication of #) followed suit. Goddard was the first to actually experiment with liquid fuels. His first test-stand rimtook place on November #, #, his first free flight on March #, #. In both cases, gasoline and liquid oxygen were used. The first liquid-fuel rocket in Europe rose on March #, #; it had been built by Johannes Winkler and used liquid methane (CH # ) and liquid oxygen. The first Russian liquid-fuel rocket (built by Blagonravov, fuels probably kerosene and liquid oxygen) rose sometime in #. Of course each of these flights had been preceded by test-stand runs, most of which took place in spring and early summer #. A T about the same time, an in J"ventor tried his hand on a liquid-fuel rocket motor in which the oxidizer was not liquid oxygen. He was Friedrich Wilhelm Sander who, sometime during #, demonstrated a test-stand run with nitric acid as an oxidizer and an unnamed substance (probably fuel oil) as the fuel proper. Sander's accomplishments are a difficult job for the historian for a very simple reason. Friedrich Wilhelm Sander was one of the very few people who, at that time, were in the rocket business; he made his living manufacturing rockets for signaling purposes, line-throwing lifesaving rockets and so forth. They were all stilt based on the old blackpowder formula mentioned, but he tried to make new inventions in his field, preferably before any competitors would come up with the same idea. Sander, as he made perfectly clear in a letter to me, was not interested in furthering science. He wanted to enlarge his business. While this is understandable, it leaves a few gaps in the history of the whole. One cannot even ask him to tell what he did and when he did it, because he disappeared early in the Second World War (rumor has it that he was arrested by the Gestapo and put into a concentration camp) and must be presumed dead. My reason for stressing this gap in our historical knowledge is that Sander may have been the first to experiment with a new solid fuel too. There is, as has to be explained first, a "family" of solid rocket fuels which is called the "double-base powders." Their original inventor is Alfred Nobel and the invention itself is based on the fact that guncotton and nitroglycerin can be kneaded together into a jelly-like substance. This substance was, for many years, the most powerful explosive known and was sold under the name of "blasting gelatin" and half a dozen other trade names. Because each of the two ingredients is an explosive itself, the term "double-base explosive" was natural. Later, Alfred Nobel developed this original "double-base" explosive into safer solid double-base powders which received trade names like "ballistite." It goes without saying that the "ballistite" of today is not the "ballistite" that Alfred Nobel and his chemists put together. But the one is the offspring of the other. In fact, most of the "smokeless powders" in rifle cartridges are offsprings of the double-base experiment too. What I don't know is who was the first to try a double-base smokeless powder for rocket propulsion. It is known that Nobel himself experimented with rockets on and off, but the scanty descriptions that exist stress that his rockets carried a payload of nitroglycerin which produced a blinding flash even in daytime and a very sharp report that could be heard for several miles. Whether Nobel used his new substances for propulsion or whether he stuck to the old formula is something I would like to learn. First World War, did make laboratory experiments with smokeless powders (commercial types) in order to measure their exhaust velocities, but to the best of my knowledge he never produced a smokeless-powder rocket charge of any duration. It is logical that he didn't, because he had his machinegun-type firing mechanism in mind. It is, therefore, very likely that Sander was the first to use doublebase powders for rocket propulsion (unless Nobel did), but he did not arrive at a commercial product. This being his goal, he did not talk about his experiments. I know about it only because he once permitted Max Valier to watch a series of teststand runs, and Valier told me about them -- just a few months before his own death, when a liquid-fuel rocket motor blew up on him. Naturally Sander, though probably the first, was not the only one to think of Nobel's doublebase powders for rocket propulsion. The British Military Establishment did. So did the Ordnance Corps of the U.S. Army. So did the WaffenpTuiamt (Weapons Research Office) of the German Army. And when the Second World War came, everybody blossomed out sooner or later with double-base rockets, propelled by sticks of "cordite" or "ballistite." Just as the old "mixed composite" had a standard composition from which the individual manufacturers did pot deviate much, the new double-base sticks also had a standard. Half of them was nitroglycerin, between # and # per cent was guncotton, while the remainder were additives with special functions. Main additive was diethyl-diphenyl urea, which was a gelatinizer. Carbon black was another additive, after it had been found out that an optically opaque charge burned more reliably than a translucent one. Now the double-base charges were superior to the old blackpowder in not deteriorating in storage -- or at least much more slowly, for these things are relative too -- in being more powerful and safer all around. But they still could not be very large. It was necessary, for the bigger types of war rockets, to put several "sticks" into the rocket. The breakthrough to what is claimed to be a theoretically unlimited size (personally I am still sitting back waiting to see whether limits of some kind will not show up) did not come until after the war. Of course secrecy still prevails here. But the secret seems to be mainly in the manufacturing process, not so much in the composition. The composition, in fact, is familiar. There is a cast double-base type (# per cent nitroglycerin, # per cent nitrocellulose, # per cent additives). There is a mixed composite with ammonium nitrate as the oxidizer. And there are several which are actually synthetic rubber, with an oxidizer kneaded in. So we do have solid fuels galore.  questions from readers were newspaper stories dealing with specific items as, for example, that the Army's liquid-fuel Redstone rocket is to be replaced by the solid-fuel Pershing, and that the liquid-fuel Atlas and Titan are eventually to be replaced by the solid-fuel Minuteman. The Minuteman is to be a three-stage rocket with the warhead in the third stage. The third stage, used by itself, would be a #-mile rocket. The third stage on top of the second stage would be a #-mile rocket. All three stages together would add up to a #-mile rocket. Well, newspaper readers ask somewhat belligerently, if they are going to replace both the Redstone and the Atlas by solid-fuel rockets, doesn't that prove solid fuels are better? The answer, and this is really the key to the whole discussion, is that it does not prove anything like that. The choice is not one of "superiority" as the layman thinks of the term, but one of superior convenience. A solid-fuel rocket is much like a cartridge : once it has been made, it can be used at almost any time. A liquid-fuel rocket is more comparable to an airplane: it needs servicing, fueling and so forth. Naturally, for military purposes, the simpler version is the better one -- not because it is inherently "better" but because it is more convenient in every respect. Actually the best solid fuels of today are still somewhat less powerful than the customary liquid fuels. This is admittedly a transitory talking point, for next week the fuel chemists may come up with a solid which is somewhat more powerful than the liquids in use. And whether there really is no limit to the size of solid-fuel units is something that still has to be proved, whereas we know right now that there is no limit to the size of a liquid-fuel unit, provided you have the skill and experience to build it. The trend toward solids for miltary purposes is due to ease of handling and storage. But even this trend is not unanimous. Recently the Air Force made the interesting discovery that a certain solid-fuel missile has to be replaced by a liquid-fuel missile. It is a missile which is carried "externally" under the wings of a fighter or bomber. Carrying rockets and missiles externally is old, of course. It always worked fine and was expected to work fine for all time to come. But one point had been overlooked. If the plane which carries the missile cruises at # mph, there is no problem. If it cruises at supersonic speeds, one factor changes -- the missile is heated up. Being heated changes the performance of a rocket charge, but especially of a solid-fuel charge. Liquids are far less sensitive in that respect, and for this reason a solid-fuel job is now being replaced by a liquid-fuel device. And the liquid-fuel engineers have gone over to a counterattack with new liquid fuels which allow a missile to be fueled and then stored as a sealed unit, just like a solid-fuel missile. items, the military trend is in the direction of the solid-fuel missile, essentially for reasons of convenience. This being so, what can be said in favor of the liquids? Technological guessing is difficult, but it seems likely that the liquids will continue to be somewhat more powerful. If a new solid catches up with the current liquids in power, the new liquids will probably jump ahead again. The liquid-fuel units are much larger now, and are likely to stay ahead in this respect too. Every once in a while somebody in Washington makes a news item by declaring that missiles should be smaller, because the warheads are growing smaller without being diminished in power. Well, yes -- if the warhead can be smaller, and the rocket can be smaller and therefore easier to handle, and possibly even cheaper, this is fine for military purposes. But for space activities, things have to grow bigger, and bigger, and then bigger some more. Finally, a solid-fuel charge will do what it has been designed to do, but nothing else. The thrust of a liquid-fuel rocket can be adjusted in various ways, and when it comes to maimed flight, that is what is needed. Being at the end of my answer to many different letters, I wonder whether I've made that answer clear. The point is that one type of fuel is not inherently and in all ways "better" than all others. A certain type of fuel, or even a specific fuel, is likely to be better for a specific purpose. And as long as you have several sets of purposes, you'll need several kinds of fuels. T T is pretty well known to everybody by now that a satellite in orbit does not have any weight in the ordinary sense of the word. It does have -- a point which apparently cannot be emphasized often enough -- mass and inertia, but it does not have any "weight." Almost inevitably this brings up the question of what it would weigh at a certain altitude if it did have weight -- if, say, it rested on top of a tower of that height. The general rule is, of course, the one given by Sir Isaac Newton. If the force of gravity is a given amount one planetary radius from the center (which means at the surface of the planet), then it is one-quarter of that value at a distance of two radii from the center (or one radius from the surfact), one-ninth at a distance of three radii from the center, and so forth. But what would the weight be at lower altitudes? Well, at the surface, the gravitational acceleration of the planet Earth is # feet per second squared. At a height of # miles this figure is still # ft. p. sec. squared. At # miles it has reached the value of # ft. p. sec. squared; at # miles it is still # ft. p. sec. squared. At # miles it is down to # ft. p. sec. squared and at # miles to #. But # miles is not a satellite altitude; an artificial satellite placed in an orbit # miles from the ground would not last very long. The lowest feasible satellite altitude would be around # miles. The value for "g" at that altitude would still be # feet per second squared, only about # per cent less than at the surface. Recently, in a radio broadcast, a reference to "anti-radiation drugd' was made. What are these drugs and how do they work? Robert S. Stanley Jacksonville, Florida Yes, there some drugs which do help the body to overcome radiation damage. The one on which most work has been done has the chemical name of S(#-aminoethyl) isothiuronium hydrobromide and the formula. NH #   NH  HBr and even chemists refer to it by experiment with a group of mice. One-half of that group was not treated and subjected to # roentgens of radiation. Half of the untreated mice died within one month after radiation was applied. The other half of the original it took # roentgens to kill off half of the treated mice. You might say that the resist to radiation was just about doubled. An important point to rememwill "cure" radiation damage. If such a pill is possible, we haven't present in the body before the exposure to radiation occurs, for it is a protecting chemical. It can be injected into a vein or simply swallowed. The method of introducing it into the body does not seem to make any difference. The fact that such a protecting chemical has been found makes it probable that others exist and can be made; presumably there will be some which are far superior to chemicals is somewhat handicapped at the present moment by the fact that nobody knows how The majority opinion among the researchers has it that the harmful effects of radiation are caused indirectly, via a chemical detour. The radiation is believed to produce so-called "free radicals," chemicals which are highly active and for this reason do not exist for any length of time since they quickly combine with whatever is on hand. The "raw material" from which the free radicals in question are formed is the water of the body tissues, but some researchers feel that the presence of free oxygen increases the formation of free radicals. These researchers believe, therefore, that a lowering of the oxygen content of the tissues will be a partial answer. Other researchers shoved the question of whether free oxygen plays such a role somewhat aside as a trap for free radicals and makes them harmless, no matter how they were formed. The promolecules would consist of "using up" the free radicals before they can attack the "living compounds" of the cell. Still another group of researchers point out that if this were the whole story, any chemical which "uses up" free radicals should be an "anti-radiation drug." But quite a number of compounds are known that do use up free radicals, but that do not produce any radiation protection. These remodified by body chemistry, combines with the sensitive substances of the cell instead, forming substances which free radicals cannot attack. These researchers think that the body gets rid of the free radicals through other reactions and that afterward the comconstituents somehow falls apart so that the living cell can resume its functions. Of course additional protective chemicals may be found even if it it not clear just how they work. But the search for such chemicals would be eased if it could be established just how they do, or should, work. Please tell me whether any man has yet reached an altitude oi more, than # feet and how different space would be from whatever altitude has been reached. Chicago, #. The highest flight mentioned in professional literature is one by the late Captain Iven C. Kincheloe who took the rocket-propelled research airplane X-# to a height of #, # feet in August # and landed it safely after what he described as an uneventful flight. Except for the air resistance experienced by a fast-moving body, conditions at # feet do not differ noticeably from free-space conditions. At about # feet, # per cent of the Earth's atmosphere is below the pilot; hence his cabin has to protect him as thoroughly as the cabin of a spaceship would. One difference I can think of would be conditions of illumination. The contrast between illuminated objects and lightless background should be more pronounced and the space pilot would suffer if his eyes were not protected by light filters. This condition, however, would prevail to a large extent at # feet too. It is not stressed in the report on the flight, presumably because the time at the peak was so short. A friend of mine says that ", megathis true? Please answer in your column. I don't want to sign my name in case my friend was only joking. Friend, you could have signed your name, because "megabuck" that does not mean that the term is an adaptation of a number of new terms introduced by the National Bureau of Standards denoting large and small figures so that they can be (A) easily pronounced and (B) avoid the confusion which always attends large numbers because the American method of naming large numbers unfortunately differs from the European system. For example, the figure #. # is usually called a Readers of this column may have noticed that I never use the National Bureau of Standards has picked the terms "tera," "giga" and "mega" for large figures. The word "tera" comes from Greek terastios meaning "monstrous." "Giga" is from Greek gigas which means either a giant or just "mighty." "Mega" is from Greek megas, meaning "large." The names denote: Tera -- # (Eulion); Giga'  #; Mega -- #. Then comes Kilo -- #; Hecto -- # and Deka -- #. Below the decimal point you have Dec'  #; Centi  #; Mitli #; Micro  #,#I tions, Nano -- #,#I and Pico  #,#. Is there a substance called gadolinium"? If so, what is it and what is it used for? I tried to look it up in a book on chemistry which my father has, but I could not find it. I presume it is quite rare and not listed for that reason. Dolores Goldstein Alameda Blvd. Burbank, Calif. If your father's chemistry text is more than a dozen years old, gadolinium may not have rated a separate paragraph because it was then mostly a chemical curiosity. But you should haye found it in the periodical table of the elements. Gadolinium is element No. #, one of the rare-earth elements, hence a metal. It is named in honor of Professor Johan Gadolin of the University of Abo in Finland. Gadolin, who died in #, discovered a substance he named "yttria" because it came from Ytterby in Sweden. Yttria later turned out to be a complex mixture of compounds of many of the rare-earth elements of which gadolinium is one. In spite of the name attached to the whole group, it is not particularly rare; it was just difficult to isolate. The pure metal looks about like silver. The use of gadolinium as moderator rods in atomic piles was discussed several years ago, but I can't say whether it is actually so used now, nor do I know of any other uses. " by between the appearance of the February issue on the newsstands and the writing of this column, so there is very little mail as yet about the problem of the girls in the same town with the same number of hairs on their heads. I have, in fact, exactly two pieces of mail, both of them postcards. One states that it could not possibly be the case. The other remarks philosophically that one should not deny that anything is possible, but that this certainly is not probable. Well, this is one of the cases where "common sense" and mathematics are at odds with each other, ,and in these cases mathematics always wins. Let's repeat the problem: the town has # inhabitants or more. Without going into fractional percentages of statistics, this means that # inhabitants are female. Subtracting # per cent of that number as being female children, we get an adult female population of #. We'll postulate (in the hope of being mistaken) that one of these women suffers from an extreme case of what dermatologists call alopecia totalis, which means in plain English she does not have a single hair on her head. The number of her hairs therefore is zero. This is the one possible extreme. She can't have any less. Now what is the maximum number possible? How many hairs are there in a really luxuriant densejungle-type head of hair? The estimates of the expert vary a little; the figure usually runs between # and #, though some the possible maximum. Hence the girls in that town can have between zero and # hairs on their heads. Since there are more than # girls, not only one or two but several thousand will have the same number of hairs on their heads at a given moment. Behind all science fiction is a stranger-than-fiction science truth. Stimulus is a dynamic new book for the intelligent layman, with a dramatic analysis of the.facts of science today -- and an enlightened projection into the mystery of science tomorrow ,... The nation's leading science authorities are writing stimulus now, for the aware layman, student, or technical man. The colorfully illustrated, hardcover volume contains chapters on space technology, basic research, energy and civilization, and psychology in today's industry. It discusses the past, present, and future history of rocketry; the power of the seas; machines that perceive; and many other exciting subjects which provide the key to understanding the present and future of science. Order stimulus for # now. ( normally #.) science-minded -- proves truth really is stranger than fiction. research -- a bimonthly magazine for creative engineers and executives in all fields of science. If you subscribe now to ixdustri.u . research, you'll be able to take With a # year subscription. # S. Michigan Av,, Chicago #  Please send me  copies of Stimulus at the pre-publication price of # ea.  Enter my subscription to Industrial Research at these special rates;  # for I year;  # for # years;  # for # years (plus a free Sb'muus) name position company address city zone state Somebody had to get the human angle on this trip... but what was humane about sending me? M Y agent was the one who got me the job of going along to write up the first trip to Mars, He was always getting me things like that -- appearances on TV shows, or mentions in writers' magazines. If he didn't sell much of my stuff, at least he sold me. ' "It'll be the biggest break a writer ever got," he told me, two days before blastoff. "Oh, sure there'll be scientific reports on the trip, but the public doesn't want them; they want the human slant on things." "But, Louie," I said weakly, "I'll probably be locked up for the whole trip. If there are fights or accidents, they won't tell me about them." "Nonsense," said Louie, sipping carefully at a paper cup of scalding coffee. "It'll be just like the public going along vicariously. They'll identify with you." "But, Louie," I said, wiping the dampness from my palms on the knees of my trousers as I sat there, "how'll I go about it? A story? An article? A you-are-there type of report? What?" Louie shrugged. "So keep a diary. It'll be more intimate, like." "But what if nothing happens?" I insisted hopelessly. Louie smiled. "So you fake it." I got up from the chair in his office and stepped to the door. "That's dishonest," .I pointed out. "Creative is the word," Louie said. So I went on the first trip to Mars. And I kept a diary. This is it. And it is honest. Honest it is. October #, # date from the March, #, New York Times, which stated that this was the most likely time for launching. Trip time is supposed to take # days (that's one way), so we're aimed toward where Mars will be (had better be, or else). There are five of us on board. A pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist. And, of course, me. I've met all but the pilot (he's very busy today), and they seem friendly enough. Dwight Kroger, the biochemist, is rather old to take the "rigors of the journey," as he puts it, but the government had a choice between sending a green scientist who could stand the trip or an accomplished man who would probably not survive, so they picked Kroger. We've blasted off, though, and he's still with us. He looks a damn sight better than I feel. He's kind of balding, and very iron-gray-haired and skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's, and right now he's telling jokes in the washroom with the copilot. Jones (that's the co-pilot; I didn't quite catch his first name) is scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and gives the general appearance of belonging under the spreading chestnut tree, not in a metal bullet flinging itself out into airless space. Come to think of it, who does belong where we are? The navigator's name is Lloyd Streeter, but I haven't seen his face yet. He has a little cubicle behind the pilot's compartment, with all kinds of maps and rulers and things. He keeps bent low Over a welded to the wall (they call it the bulkhead, for some reason or other) table, scratching away with a ballpoint pen on the maps, and now and then calling numbers over a microphone to the pilot. His hair is red and curly, and he looks as though he'd be tall if he ever gets to stand up. There are freckles on the backs of his hands, so I think he's probably got them on his face, too. So far, all he's said is, "Scram, I'm busy." Kroger tells me that the pilot's name is Patrick Desmond, but that I can call him Pat when I get to know him better. So far, he's still Captain Desmond to me. I haven't the vaguest idea what he looks like. He was already on board when I got here, with my typewriter and ream of paper, so we didn't meet. My compartment is small but clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't during blastoff. The inertial gravities didn't bother me so much as the gyroscopic spin they put on the ship so we have a sort of artificial gravity to hold us against the curved floor. It's that constant whirly feeling that gets me. I get sick on merry-go-rounds, too. They're having pork for dinner today. Not me. October #, # Kroger gave me a box of Dramamine pills. He says they'll help my stomach. So far, so good. Lloyd came by, also. "You play chess?" he asked. "A little," I admitted. "How about a game sometime?" "Sure," I said. "Do you have a board?" He didn't. Lloyd went away then, but the interview wasn't wasted. I learned that he is tall and does have a freckled face. Maybe we can build a chessboard. With my paper and his ballpoint pen and ruler, it should be easy. Don't know what we'll use for pieces, though. Jones (I still haven't learned his first name) has been up with the pilot all day. He passed my room on the way to the galley (the kitchen) for a cup of dark brown coffee (they like it thick) and told me that we were almost past the Moon. I asked to look, but he said not yet; the instrument panel is Top Secret. They'd have to cover it so I could look out the viewing screen, and they still need it for steering or something. I still haven't met the pilot. October #, # kind of squat, with a vulturish neck and close-set jet-black eyes that make him look rather mean, but he was pleasant enough, and said I could call him Pat. I still don't know Jones' first name, though Pat spoke to him, and it sounded like Flants. That can't be right Also, I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon, with a bluish blurred crescent beyond it that Pat said was the Earth. The back of the Moon isn't much different from the front. As to the space in front of the ship, well, it's all black with white dots in it, and none of the dots move, except in a circle that Pat says is a "torque" result from the gyroscopic spin we're in. Actually, he explained to me, the screen is supposed to keep the image of space locked into place no matter how much we spin. But there's some kind of a "drag." I told him I hoped it didn't mean we'd land on Mars upside down. He just stared at me. I can't say I was too impressed with that # x # view of outer space. It's been done much better in the movies. There's just no awesomeness to it, no sense of depth or immensity. It's as impressive as a piece of velvet with salt sprinkled on it. Lloyd and I made a chessboard out of a carton. Right now we're using buttons for men. He's one of these fast players who don't stop and think out their moves. And so far I haven't won a game. It looks like a long trip. October #, # queen-button for my bishop-button and left his king in jeopardy, and I checkmated him next move. He said chess was a waste of time and he had important work to do and he went away. I went to the galley for coffee and had a talk about moss with Kroger. He said there was a good chance of lichen on Mars, and I misunderstood and said, "A good chance of liking what on Mars?" and Kroger finished his coffee and went up front. When I got back to my compartment, Lloyd had taken away the chessboard and all his buttons. He told me later he needed it to back up a star map. Pat slept mostly all day in his compartment, and Jones sat and watched the screen revolve. There wasn't much to do, so I wrote a poem, sort of. Mary, Mary, Quite contrary. How does your garden grow? With Martian rime, Venusian slime, And a radioactive hoe . I showed it to Kroger. He says it may prove to be environmentally accurate, but that I should stick to prose. October #, # He wrote something in the ship's log, and I saw his signature. His name is Fleance, like in "Macbeth." He prefers to be called Jones. Pat uses his first name as a gag. Some fun. And only # days to go. April #, #I days or so, because there's nothing much new. I brought some books with me on the trip, books that I'd always meant to read and never had the time. So now I know all about Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and Babbitt. They didn't take as long as I thought they would, except for Vanity Fair. It must have been a riot when it first came out. I mean, all those sly digs at the aristocracy, with copious interpolations by Mr. Thackeray in case you didn't get it when he'd pulled a particularly good gag. Some fun. And only # days to go. June #, #I on the screen today. It seems to be descending from overhead, but Pat says that that's the "torque" doing it. Actually, it's we who are coming in sideways. We've all grown beards, too. Pat said it was against regulations, but what the hell. We have a contest. Longest whiskers on landing gets a prize. I asked Pat what the prize was and he told me to go to hell. June #, #I filled. Looks like Death Valley. No sign of canals, but Pat says that's because of the dust storm down below. It's nice to have a "down below" again. We're going to land, so I have to go to my bunk. It's all foam rubber, nylon braid supports and magnesium tubing. Might as well be cement for all the good it did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully far away. June #, #I to wear gas masks with oxygen hook-ups. Kroger says the air is breathable, but thin, and it has too much dust in it to be any fun to inhale. He's all for going out and looking for lichen, but Pat says he's got to set up camp, then get instructions from Earth. So we just have to wait. The air is very cold, but the Sun is hot as hell when it hits you. The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger says it's the dust. The sand underfoot is kind of rose-colored, and not really gritty. The particles are round and smooth. No lichen so far. Kroger says maybe in the canals, if there are any canals. Lloyd wants to play chess again. Jones won the beard contest. Pat gave him a cigar he'd smuggled on board (no smoking was allowed on the ship), and Jones threw it away. He doesn't smoke. June #, #I not to go too far from camp, so, when I took a stroll, I made sure every so often that I could still see the rocket behind me. Walked for maybe an hour; then the oxygen gauge got past the halfway mark, so I started back toward the rocket. After maybe ten steps, the rocket disappeared. One minute it was standing there, tall and silvery, the next instant it was gone. Turned on my radio pack and got hold of Pat. Told him what happened, and he told Kroger. Kroger said I had been following a mirage, to step back a bit. I did, and I could see the ship again. Kroger said to try and walk toward where the ship seemed to be, even when it wasn't in view, and meantime they'd come out after me in the jeep, following my footprints. Started walking back, and the ship vanished again. It reappeared, disappeared, but I kept going. Finally saw the real ship, and Lloyd and Jones waving their arms at me. They were shouting through their masks, but I couldn't hear them. The air is too thin to carry sound well. All at once, something gleamed in their hands, and they started shooting at me with their rifles. That's when I heard the noise behind me. I was too scared to turn around, but finally Jones and Lloyd came running over, and I got up enough nerve to look. There was nothing there, but on the sand, paralleling mine, were footprints. At least I think they were footprints. Twice as long as mine, and three times as wide, but kind of featureless because the sand's loose and dry. They doubled back on themselves, spaced considerably farther apart. "What was it?" I asked Lloyd when he got to me. "Damned if I know," he said. "It was red and scaly, and I think it had a tail. It was two heads taller than you." He shuddered. "Ran off when we fired." "Where," said Jones, "are Pat and Kroger?" I didn't know. I hadn't seen them, nor the jeep, on my trip back. So we followed the wheel tracks for a while, and they veered off from my trail and followed another, very much like the one that had been paralleling mine when Jones and Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly thing. "We'd better get them on the radio," said Jones, turning back toward the ship. There wasn't anything on the radio but static. Pat and Kroger haven't come back yet, either. June #, #I the scaly things have come toward the camp, but a few rifle shots send them away. They hop like kangaroos when they're startled. Their attitudes aren't menacing, but their appearance is. And Jones says, "Who knows what's 'menacing' in an alien?" We're going to look for Kroger and Pat today. Jones says we'd better before another windstorm blows away the jeep tracks. Fortunately, the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we always have the smears to follow, unless they get covered up, too. We're taking extra oxygen, shells, and rifles. Food, too, of course. And we're locking up the ship. jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of those big tracks nearby. We're taking the jeep to follow the aliens' tracks. There's some moss around here, on reddish brown rocks that stick up through the sand, just on the shady side, though. Kroger must be happy to have found his lichen. The trail ended at the brink of a deep crevice in the ground. Seems to be an earthquake-type split in solid rock, with the sand sifting over this and the far edge like pink silk cataracts. The bottom is in the shade and can't be seen. The crack seems to extend to our left and right as far as we can look. There looks like a trail down the inside of the crevice, but the Sun's setting, so we're waiting till tomorrow to go down. Going down was Jones' idea, not mine. June #, #I there's water here, a shallow stream about thirty feet wide that runs along the center of the canal (we've decided we're in a canal). No sign of Pat or Kroger yet, but the sand here is hard-packed and damp, and there are normal-size footprints mingled with the alien ones, sharp and clear. The aliens seem to have six or seven toes. It varies from print to print. And they're barefoot, too, or else they have the damnedest-looking shoes in creation. The constant shower of sand near the cliff walls is annoying, but it's sandless (shower-wise) near the stream, so we're following the footprints along the bank. Also, the air's better down here. Still thin, but not so bad as on the surface. We're going without masks to save oxygen for the return trip (Jones assures me there'll be a return trip), and the air's only a little bit sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose and mouth solve this. We look like desperadoes, what with the rifles and covered faces. I said as much to Lloyd and he told me to shut up. Moss all over the cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger. with the help of the aliens. Or maybe I should call them the Martians. Either way, it's better than what Jones calls them. They took away our rifles and brought us right to Kroger and Pat, without our even asking, Jones is mad at the way they got the rifles so easily. When we came upon them (a group of maybe ten, huddling behind a boulder in ambush), he fired, but the shots either bounced off their scales or stuck in their thick hides. Anyway, they took the rifles away and threw them into the stream, and picked us all up and took us into a hole in the cliff wall. The hole went on practically forever, but it didn't get dark. Kroger tells me that there are phosphorescent bacteria living in the mold on the walls. The air has a fresh-duggrave smell, but it's richer in oxygen than even at the stream. We're in a small cave that is just off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels come together. I can't remember which one we came in through, and neither can anyone else. Jones asked me what the hell I kept writing in the diary for, did I want to make it a gift to' Martian archeologists? But I said where there's life there's hope, and now he won't talk to me. I congratulated Kroger on the lichen I'd seen, but he just said a short and unscientific word and went to sleep. There's a Martian guarding the entrance to our cave. I don't know what they intend to do with us. Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just left us here, and we're out of rations. Kroger tried talking to the guard once, but he (or it) made a whistling kind of sound and flashed a mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the teeth are in multiple rows, like a tigershark's. I'd rather he hadn't told me. June #, #, I think zoo. I can't tell which. There's a rather square platform surrounded on all four sides by running water, maybe twenty feet across, and we're on it. Martians keep coming to the far edge of the water and looking at us and whistling at each other. A little Martian came near the edge of the water and a larger Martian whistled like crazy and dragged it away. "Water must be dangerous to them," said Kroger. "We shoulda brought water pistols," Jones muttered. Pat said maybe we can swim to safety. Kroger told Pat he was crazy, that the little island we're on here underground is bordered by a fast river that goes into the planet We'd end up drowned in some grotto in the heart of the planet, says Kroger. "What the hell," says Pat, "it's better than starving." It is not June #, #, probably else. Right now I could eat a dinner raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it down. A Martian threw a stone at Jones today, and Jones threw one back at him and broke off a couple of scales. The Martian whistled furiously and went away. When the crowd thinned out, same as it did yesterday (must be some sort of sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked Lloyd into swimming across the river and getting the red scales. Lloyd started at the upstream part of the current, and was about a hundred yards below this underground island before he made the far side. Sure is a swift current. But he got the scales, walked very far upstream of us, and swam back with them. The stream sides are steep, like in a fjord, and we had to lift him out of the swirling cold water, with the scales gripped in his fist. Or what was left of the scales. They had melted down in the water and left his hand all sticky. Kroger took the gummy things, studied them in the uncertain light, then tasted them and grinned. The Martians are made of sugar. said that the Martian metabolism must be like Terran (Earth-type) metabolism, only with no pancreas to make insulin. They store their energy on the outside of thenbodies, in the form of scales. He's watched them more closely and seen that they have long rubbery tubes for tongues, and that they now and then suck up water from the stream while they're watching us, being careful not to get their lips (all sugar, of course) wet. He guesses that their "blood" must be almost pure water, and that it washes away (from the inside, of course) the sugar they need for energy. I asked him where the sugar came from, and he said probably their bodies isolated carbon from something (he thought it might be the moss) and combined it with the hydrogen and oxygen in the water (even I knew the formula for water) to make sugar, a common carbohydrate. Like plants, on Earth, he said. Except, instead of using special cells on leaves to form carbohydrates with the help of sunpower, as Earth plants do in photosynthesis (Kroger spelled that word for me), they used the shape of the scales like prisms, to isolate the spectra (another Kroger word) necessary to form the sugar. "I don't get it," I said politely, when he'd finished his spiel. "Simple," he said, as though he were addressing me by name. "They have a twofold reason to fear water. One: by complete solvency in that medium, they lose all energy and die. Two: even partial sprinkling alters the shape of the scales, and they are unable to use sunpower to form more sugar, and still die, if a bit slower." "Oh," I said, taking it down verbatim. "So now what do we do?" "We remove our boots," said Kroger, sitting on the ground and doing so, "and then we cross this stream, fill the boots with water, and spray our way to freedom." "Which tunnel do we take?" asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the thought of escape. Kroger shrugged. "We'll have to chance taking any that seem to slope upward. In any event, we can always follow it back and start again." "I dunno," said Jones. "Remember those teeth of theirs. They must be for biting something more substantial than moss, Kroger." "We'll risk it," said Pat. "It's better to go down fighting than to die of starvation." The hell it is. June #, #, for sure mines. That's what they use those teeth for. We passed through one and surprised a lot of them chewing gritty hunks of anthracite out of the walls. They came running at us, whistling with those tubelike tongues, and drooling dry coal dust, but Pat swung one of his boots in an arc that splashed all over the ground in front of them, and they turned tail (literally) and clattered off down another tunnel, sounding like a locomotive whistle gone beserk. We made the surface in another hour, back in the canal, and were lucky enough to find our own trail to follow toward the place above which the jeep still waited. Jones got the rifles out of the stream (the Martians had probably thought they were beyond recovery there) and we found the jeep. It was nearly buried in sand, but we got it cleaned off and running, and got back to the ship quickly. First thing we did on arriving was to break out the stores and have a celebration feast just outside the door of the ship. It was pork again, and I got sick. June #, #I that a week is all we were allowed to stay and that it's urgent to return and tell what we've learned about Mars (we know there are Martians, and they're made of sugar). "Why," I said, "can't we just tell it on the radio?" "Because," said Pat, "if we tell them now, by the time we get back we'll be yesterday's news. This way we may be lucky and get a parade." "Maybe even money," said Kroger, whose mind wasn't always on science. "But they'll ask why we didn't radio the info, sir," said Jones uneasily. "The radio," said Pat, nodding to Lloyd, "was unfortunately broken shortly after landing." Lloyd blinked, then nodded back and walked around the rocket. I heard a crunching sound and the shattering of glass, not unlike the noise made when one drives a rifle butt through a radio. Well, it's time for takeoff. thought I was getting my space-legs, but Pat says there's less gravity on Mars, so escape velocity didn't have to be so fast, hence a smoother (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing bunks. Lloyd wants to play chess again. I'll be careful not to win this time. However, if I don't win, maybe this time I'll be the one to quit. Kroger is busy in his cramped lab space trying to classify the little moss he was able to gather, and Jones and Pat are up front watching the white specks revolve on that black velvet again. Guess I'll take a nap. June #, #I there are two baby Martians loose on board ship. Pat told him he was nuts, but there are certain signs he's right. Like the missing charcoal in the air-filtration-andthe water gauges are going down. But the clincher is those two sugar crystals Lloyd had grabbed up when we were in that zoo. They're gone. Pat has declared a state of emergency. Quick thinking, that's Pat. Lloyd, before he remembered and turned scarlet, suggested we radio Earth for instructions. We can't. Here we are, somewhere in a void headed for Earth, with enough air and water left for maybe three days -- if the Martians don't take any more. Kroger is thrilled that he is learning something, maybe, about Martian reproductive processes. When he told Pat, Pat put it to a vote whether or not to jettison Kroger through the airlock. However, it was decided that responsibility was pretty well divided. Lloyd had gotten the crystals, Kroger had only studied them, and Jones had brought them aboard. So Kroger stays, but meanwhile the air is getting worse. Pat suggested Kroger put us all into a state of suspended animation till landing time, eight months away. Kroger said, "How?" June #, #I thirsty. Kroger says that at least -- when the Martians get bigger -- they'll have to show themselves. Pat says what do we do then? We can't afford the water we need to melt them down. Besides, the melted crystals might all turn into little Martians. Jones says he'll go down spitting. Pat says why not dismantle interior of rocket to find out where they're holing up? Fine idea. How do you dismantle riveted metal plates? June #, #I and the water gauges are still dropping. Kroger suggests baking bread, then slicing it, then toasting it till it turns to carbon, and we can use We'll have to try it, I guess. Jones came forward to tell us die loaves were cooling, and when he got back they were gone. However, he did find a few of the red crystals on the galley deck (floor). They're good-sized crystals, too. Which means so are the Martians. Kroger says the Martians must be intelligent, otherwise they couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates present in the bread after a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat says let's jettison Kroger. This time the vote went against Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve by suggesting the crystals be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric acid. He says this'll produce carbon. I certainly hope so. So does Kroger. acid-sugar combination not only produces carbon but water vapor, and the gauge has gone up a notch. That means that we have a quart of water in the tanks for drinking. However, the air's a bit better, and we voted to let Kroger stay inside the rocket. Meantime, we have to catch those Martians. June #, #I caught one of the Martians in the firing chamber. We had to flood the chamber with acid to subdue the creature, which carbonized nicely. So now we have plenty of air and water again, but besides having another Martian still on the loose, we now don't have enough acid left in the fuel tanks to make a landing. Pat says at least our vector will carry us to Earth and we can die on our home planet, which is better than perishing in space. The hell it is. March #, # Martian is still with us. He's where we can't get at him without blowtorches, but he can't get at the carwhich is a help. However, his tail is prehensile, and now and then it snakes out through an air duct and yanks food right off the table from under our noses. Kroger says watch out. We are made of carbohydrates, too. Fd rather not have known. March #, # control room. Pat says if we're lucky, he might be able to use the bit of fuel we have left to set us in a descending spiral into one of the oceans. The rocket is tighter than a submarine, he insists, and it will float till we're rescued, if the plates don't crack under the impact We all agreed to try it. Not that we thought it had a good chance of working, but none of us had a better idea. the story, about how that destroyer spotted us and got us and my diary aboard, and towed the rocket to San Francisco. News of the "captured Martian" leaked out, and we all became nine-day wonders until the dismantling of the rocket. Kroger says he must have dissolved in the water, and wonders what that would do. There are about a thousand of those crystalscales on a Martian. So last week we found out, when those red-scaled things began clambering out of the sea on every coastal region on Earth. Kroger tried to explain to me about salinity osmosis and hydrostatic pressure and crystalline life, but in no time at all he lost me. The point is, bullets won't stop these things, and wherever a crystal falls, a new Martian springs up in a few weeks. It looks like the five of us have abetted an invasion from Mars. Needless to say, we're no longer heroes. I haven't heard from Pat or Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked up attacking a candy factory yesterday, and Kroger and I were allowed to sign on for the flight to Venus scheduled within the next few days -- because of our experience. Kroger says there's only enough fuel for a one-way trip. I don't care. I've always wanted to travel with the President. T HE small group of Earth colonists stood on a hill, tense and expectant, as their leader advanced. He walked slowly away from the huddled mob holding up his gun. You could hear the mother weep. I stood at ease to one side, as was proper. I knew what would happen, because I was from Transstar. We have been taught to understand the inevitable. The child came running out of the woods. I noted that they were A Transstar agent's duty was to observe, not to save lives. But sometimes his duty was -- not to know where his duty stoppedl not the woods of Earth, though they were brown. Nor was the grass the grass of Earth, though it was green. The child cried, "Mother!" The leader raised his gun and shot it. Even though I understood that the child was no longer a "him" and had become an "it" since falling into the hands of the aliens, I felt a tremor underneath my conditioning. In Transstar you are taught that the conditioning is a sheath, pliable but breakable; you do not put all faith in it. Now the important thing was the reaction of the small group of Earth colonists. They had seen the heartbreaking inevitable. They knew with the logic of their minds that the boy had to die. On this planet there were two races, two kinds of life: the eaber and the Earthmen. The eaber would lure a child away if they could and see to its infection, returning it to the Earth colony. It was a good trick the first time or two, and for the love of its children three thousand lives had been lost, two starting colonies wiped out. This third colony had to succeed. I suspected that was why Transstar sent me here. The leader turned sadly towards his colonists. A man advanced: "A burial! It is safe to bury!" "It is not safe to bury," said the leader. The man raised his arm. The leader hesitated and lost both his leadership and his life, because the half-maddened parent shot him in the chest... star ship. "You stood there," he said, eyes accusing. "You sit here now. You let the eaber do these things to us -- yet you're from Transstar, representing the incredible power of the Sol system. Why?" "Transstar was formed to handle star-sized situations," I replied. "So far this colony is meeting only the problems of a local situation." "Local situation!" He laughed bitterly. "I'm the third mayor in three weeks." "There'll be no more children lost to the eaber," I said. "That's for certain-sure," he said, "but Transstar might lose one of its representatives if it doesn't help us in our fight against the eaber. Our colony , is sickened to watch you with your magnificent star-ship and your empire of power, standing by while we suffer." "I am sorry." He raised his hands and stepped towards me, but an orange light hummed from the walls. He looked surprised. He dropped his hands. "Now that you've properly cursed me, tell me the real reason for your visit, Mr. Mayor," I said, flicking the protective button off. He eased into his chair wearily. It was a great planet to take the starch out of the leaders. "We had a visit from the eaber." He went on talking eagerly. The eaber had picked this planet, Point Everready, as an advance planetcity for their own culture. They would kill the Earth colony if it didn't leave. Rackril had told them about Transstar, about me. That I represented the total war capacity of the solar system. That I was in instantaneous touch with Transstar Prime, near Mars, and that ships and countless prime fighting men, with weapons of power and vigor that could pulverize the eaber to dust. That I was there to see that the Earth colony survived, "This is only partly true," I said. "I afn here to see whether an Earth colony can survive." Anyway, Rackril had gotten the eaber stirred up. They were coming to see me. Okay? "I am Transstar," I said. "I can only observe, not interfere." He got mad again, but there was really no more to say. He left, going from the marvelous machinery of my ship back to the crudeness of the village. I felt sorry for him and his people and wished I could reassure him. I could not. Yet somewhere back at Transstar Prime there was more than ordinary interest in Point Everready. I wondered, as every Transstar agent must, how far Transstar would go on this project. Few Transstar men have ordered Condition Prime Total Red. Condition Prime Total Red is the complete amassing and release of our total war-making capacity directed at one enemy in one place at one time. once in decades; men in Transstar have served a lifetime and never directed one. devastating in cost, machines and men. It is the most jealously guarded prerogative of the Transstar system, which is in itself merely a check-and-report to keep track of all Earth colonies spread out among the stars. panel. It glowed an off-white on the neat star-ship wall. Condition white, nothing unusual; the same color I had stared at for five years as a full agent and fifteen years before that as both associate and assistant, learning the Transstar operation. I thought about the dead boy, sleeping now on the grasses of Everready, as I made my daily report, pricking a card with three simple marks, feeding it to the transmitter which reported back to Prime. It seemed unfair, even with all my years of Transstar conditioning, that a boy would only deserve three pinpricks in a daily report. The human race had not been standing behind him. It probably would not stand behind this colony. For that matter, though I had the safety of this rather expensive star-ship, the human race would probably not stand behind me, if the eaber turned out to be tough aliens. Many an agent has died in local or regional situations. I drank a cup of tea, but the warm drink didn't help. Somehow these last years I had become more emotional. It was hard to be a Transstar agent -- for, by the time you learned how, you were too knowing in the ways of space to keep that prep school enthusiasm. I remembered the men who had lived and the men who had died as I drank my tea and felt sad. Towards midnight the colonists sent scout ships up, as ordered by Rackril. They were met by an equal number of eaber scout ships. The patrol fight was dull, with drones being chopped off by both sides. Nothing decisive. The eaber were good. I wondered if they also had a Transstar somewhere back at their home planet, a totality of force that might match Condition Prime Total Red, and result in a stand-off fight. This had never happened in history. Someday we might even find somebody better At that instant expansion to the stars would stop, I knew. Whatever I thought about the eaber at long distance, I'd have a chance to learn more. A couple of them were now approaching my ship. They were sentient life. They were neither monsters nor particularly Earthlike. It was this balance of like-unlike that gave me the beginnings of a shudder under my conditioning. The reddish one advanced into my cabin. "Euben," he said. He made a motion of turning with his hands, tapered fingers spread. A surge of sickness tickled in me, rushed up to a nerve agony. I just had time to relax and let the raping power of his ray, or whatever it was, knock me out into a welcome darkness. A non-conditioned man would have screamed and writhed on the floor, fighting the overpowering darkness. I rushed with it, gave in to it. tie bird-twitter. I sat up; Euben's power turned off. He laughed down at me. "Some Earth-power, some potency," he said, gesturing at my control panel. I had, indeed, pushed my orange safety button, which should have frozen him immobile as it had Rackril. It had no effect on him or his friend. I tried to get up, but was as weak and shaking as an old man. So I sat there. "You are the protector to the Earthians," he said. "No, Euben. I am merely here to observe." "You'll observe them made extinct, Watcher," he said. "This is the perimeter of eaber. We want this planet ourselves." "That remains to be seen," I said, finally rising stiffly and plopping into my chair. I turned off the useless orange button. Euben roamed his eyes around the ship. "Better than your colony has. You are special." "I am special," I said. "They say you represent great power," he said. "That is true." "We have waited a long time to see this power," said Euben. "We have exterminated two of your colonies, and have not seen it." "If this is all of eaber, it isn't very large," I said. "This planet could hardly hold a hundred thousand." "I said we were perimeter. Behind us, thousands of planets. Trillions of eaber. There is nothing like us in the universe." "We've heard that before." This time he brought up two hands, to begin his twirling. I reacted with a hypnosis block, which shunted off all my natural functions fpr a micro-second (with the help of the plate I was standing on). The pain was much less. He merely brought me to my knees. "Ah, you are not totally feeble," he said. "Still I make you bow to me with the twisting of my bare hands in the air." "Yes. But Earthmen do not greet new races with tricks and talk like two small boys bragging about how tough their older brothers are," I said. "I am not here to brag tough. I am here to observe." "If you don't like what you observe?" "Perhaps we will do something about it. Perhaps not." He threw back his head and laughed. "You will die, die, die," he said. 'Watch this." He nudged the other eaber who stepped forward and brought something out of his robe. It was a boned, dehydrated human. The thing -- evidently a human survivor of an earlier colony -- had the floppy, mindless manner of a puppy dog, mewling and whimpering on its long chain. Euben snapped his fingers. The former human ki-yied and scampered back under its owner's robe. "Cute," said Euben. "De-skeletoned Earthmen bring a good price in the pet-shops of eaber, so you are not a total loss in the universe." and convulsion from the eaber's robe. The eaber jumped back. The tragic, deboned human fell to the floor dead, spending a thin, toobright red ebb of blood. "Eh -- how did you do that?" asked Euben, stepping back a little, "I am Transstar," I said. "Certain things we do not permit with our life-form. I urge you not to continue this practice." "So -- " said Euben toeing at the dead man. "And he was so cute, too. Ah, well. There are more out there." I controlled my voice and did not look down. "Can you establish your need for this planet?" I asked. "Yes. We are eaber; that is enough anywhere in space." I stepped to a wall chart and made a gesture. "This planet also falls along our perimeter. We occupy this space -- so. We have well utilized the solar and alpha planet systems, and it is time that we move out once more. This planet is but one of a thousand Earth colonies moving out to new space." Euben shook his head. 'What a ridiculous civilization! All space in this arc is saber. We close the door, so -- " He made a fast gesture with his hand that tore inside of me, like a hot knife, scraping the bottom of my lungs. I was pretty much riding on my conditioning now. I was sickened, angry with Euben and his race. But it was slightly different from dealing with an Earth neighbor you dislike. Bravery and caution! Always bravery -- and caution. "So you block us here," I said. "Perhaps we will go elsewhere for a hundred or a thousand years. It's no use to fight over space. There "Do you truly believe so?" smiled Euben. "Naive! The eaber do not like unknown life-forms prowling the universe. We will come to solar and alpha, as you call them, and put you on a chain like that one dead on the floor." 'We might resist that," I said. "How?" said Euben, bringing a black box out from under his robe. I have had my share of black boxes in my Transstar years. Before it was barely in sight, I had retreated to my all-purpose closet He laughed, peering at me through the observation window and tried the various rays and whatnot in his weapon. Nothing much happened for a while -- heat, radiation, gas, sonic vibrations, the standard stuff. Pretty soon I knew he could take me; but it would take him about three days. Fair enough. The eaber were tough, but not unbeatable -- at least on what he had shown me. He put away his black box. I stepped through the door. Decontamination worked all right, but the heat-reducer was wheezing like an asthma victim in a grain field. "So. You are junior good," said Euben. He turned and left the ship, whistling in a very Earthian way, not bothering to look back. The other eaber remained. I offered him a cup of tea, which he drank greedily. He had something that looked a little like a serpent's tongue which he ran quickly over the control board panels. He snifftasted the instruments, the furnishings, the modest weapons and communications equipment I had. Then he stepped back. "You will not survive eaber," he said. He left, not bothering to step over the deboned Earthman. I picked up the soft, cooling mass and set it on the TV cradle. I didn't call through channels. I slapped the Transstar Central button and let them have a look at the creature on the plate. at Transstar Prime, near Mars. He gasped. "That's not good," he said. "Just a minute." I sank into the chair and made more tea with shaking hands. The screen above me lighted and I was staring at Twelve. Thirteen is as high as you get in Transstar. "You've bought it," he said. "In your arc you have the only mindcontact with the eaber. Elsewhere they've only made patrol war," "Anybody solved them?" I asked. "Yes and no," said Twelve Jackson slowly. "They can hit us with a freeze-burn system they've got. Explodes you. We can reach them with most of our conventionals, but they don't die easily. Range and depth of their civilization, unknown." according to Euben. Then I asked, "Whaf s my condition?" Jackson hesitated and I saw his hands twiddle over his buttons. "Condition orange," he said, taking me off white. Power reached through space. In seventy-five seconds I could feel the sudden, subtle shift in the ship's power fields, as they built up. "Don't get excited," he said. "I've got a dozen oranges on the board." "What about the colony here?" I said. "A colony is a local situation," said Jackson. "Unfortunately, if we squandered our life-power everytime a few colonists died, we'd still be confined to the moon. They colonize of their own free will." I touched the dead Earthman. "Yeah," he said. "Nobody knew about that. It'll get your planet plenty of free space in the TV casts. We'll get a blubbering from the League for Space Safety." "It makes me want to blubber a little myself," I said. Twelve Jackson gave me a long, hard look. "Stay Transstar or get out," he said. I gave him the rest of my reportinterview on the tape and tried to get some sleep. The eaber came over the colony about midnight and bombed it a little, and I groaned awake. It must have been a half-hour later that I heard a scratching on the ship's window. It was Rackril, peering in at me. When I joined him in the soft spring night he was excited. "I've got something to show your high-falutin' boys back at Mars," he said. "A real something." We went in silence to his headquarters through the sweet night grasses of Everready. It was truly a planet of richness and beauty in a natural sense, and I thought again of the contrast of the poisoned boy and the monstrosities of human pets that the eaber had created under this moon, in their eaber cities, on this fine world. My mood was shattered the instant we stepped into Rackril's combination mayor's home-administration center. The Colony Correspondent had arrived. There are simply too many Earth colonies for the space news services to cover them all. So they assign a Colony Correspondent to cover the whole arc, and you always find them where the most trouble is. of the young, peppy breed of females that start out life as a tomboy and remain in trouble all of their lives because they like to take chances. I was doubly disturbed. First because it meant that wildly distorted stories would soon be muddying things back in solar and alpha; second, because this cute lady reminded me of my own Alicia, who had been a Transstar agent along with me, back a seeming thousand years ago when I was merely a Four. She had the same snapping black eyes, the same statuesque figure, the same lighthumored air. "Well, so Transstar is really here!" she said. "Hey, Chief, how about a Transstar quote?" "Young lady, I am not Chief," I said drily. "My name is Webster, and I hold the Transstar rank of Seven, and you well know that all Transstar quotes must come from Transstar Prime." "Those fossilized, dehumanized old men on Mars," she said. "Never mind. I'll find my own stories." "Not here you won't," said Rackril, with authority's natural fear of the tapes. "It's past midnight. Go to bed. Tomorrow my tape man will give you a tour." She stuck out her tongue. "I've had the tour. They're all alike, full of lies and grease, signifying nothing. Only thing I ever learned on an official tour was how to defend myself against the passes of the tape men." But she allowed herself to be pushed out. I guess it was the neartragic urgency of our manner. Rackril led me into an inner room. On the bed rested a woman, but there was a strangeness to her. She was ancient in her skin, yet something about her bones told you she was hardly thirty. Her flesh was blue-splotched, the eyes animalbright. Rackril gestured at her; she whimpered and squirmed in her bed. I laid a hand on his arm. "The eaber can hypnotize and make a hand gesture that tears you apart inside," I said. "Don't hold up your hands in front of her." "We got her story," said Rackrill, low-voiced. "She's been prisoner to the eaber for over a year. From Colony Two, I guess. The eaber used her for -- breeding." He led me to a smaller cot, where a blanket covered a figure. For a fleeting second I didn't want him to pull back the blanket. He pulled it back. The creature on the bed was dead, shot with a Colony bullet. You could tell that it was a boy about three feet long. There was Earthman in him and eaber. The head and arms were Earthian, the rest eaber. It was shocking to see the hard-muscled dwarf body under that placid, almost handsome head. "Barely five months," whispered the hag on the bed. "Forced insemination. Always the hands twisting -- always the pain." "A friendly scientific experiment," said Rackril. "They want drones for the slag jobs in their cities. Jobs eaber won't do. They've produced a hundred or so of those idiots from captive women colonists. Force-fed and raised -- this one is barely five months old, yet look at his size!" ing my tape, holding on to my objectivity through a force of will and my conditioning. Rackril opened the dead mouth. It was an exaggerated eaber tongue, black and reptile shaped. "No speech, therefore no intellect. Nor does it have mind speech like true eaber. It begs for food and does crude tasks to get it. I showed it to the men. One of them shot it. Nobody blamed him. Tomorrow we're going out and take these rats, and rescue those poor women that are still over there. Does your highness condescend to ask for a little Transstar help?" "Transstar won't like this lifeform meddling," I said. 'This is the second time." Rackril slumped into a chair, looking at the woman who whispered some private incantation against the evils she had come to know. "I've got two thousand colonists, five hundred ships," he said. "With or without your help, we're going out tomorrow and take them." "They've got a few more ships, Rackril." He appeared not to hear. He sat there staring at the woman while I gathered up the eaber drone's body to take back to my ship. "For God's sake, get Transstar," he said, as I left, and it was a prayer. Shortly before noon next day, Rackril was back at my ship. He pointed to the sky over the colony, where his small fighting ships were rising. "What did your bosses say?" he asked. "They said," I replied, "that Transstar has to look after the safety of the whole human race, and cannot match colonists man for man. There are safe places in alpha and solar to live -- men are not obligated to seek danger. However, they are disturbed about the drone. I am to give an official protest and warning to Euben the eaber, which I have done." "Is that all!" I closed my eyes. "They also demoted me one rank, from a Seven to a Six, for having left my ship unattended in the middle of last night. During the time we examined the drone, a bumptious Colony Correspondent sneaked into my ship and taped an eaber monstrosity I had on the TV plate. She flung her sensationalism to the planets and nations of alpha and solar. To put it mildly, this has rocked the Galaxy, which is fine with our Colony Correspondent. She gets paid according to the number of TV stations that play her tape." "The universe should know!" cried Rackril. "The universe has always known," I said. "Every history book tells of worse things in almost every Middlesex village and town. Transstar is not in show business, nor in policy-making. It observes and objectively attends to the broad general welfare of the Earthian universe." Rackril's voice was hoarse. "I have one empty ship," he said bitterly. "I lack a pilot. Will Transstar at least do me the favor of helping to fill that?" "It will," I said, reaching for my combat slacks. and I knew it. But I wanted to get as close as I could to eaberland, which I had only observed at a distance. And I wanted to do something about the affronts to my system. Sometimes it's good to fire a killing ray, even if it doesn't mean much. We passed over three middlesized eaber cities, the queerest cities I'd ever seen. "Practically all landing fields," said a feminine voice in my ear. I looked to my left. The Colony Correspondent was riding a patrol ship on my right. I thanked her for achieving my embarrassment. "Oh, that's all right, Doc," she said. "You're officialdom. Natural enemy. You'll get in your licks." "I'd rather take mine in kicks. And I know where I'd like to plant my foot," I said. I got a brash laugh. Foolish girl! Women do not have to be aggressive. There's the kind that make a fetish of rushing in where brave men hesitate. On their maimed and dead persons, the news tapes fatten and flourish. Rackril's group thought they were fighting the battle of the eon. They were trying to land at the most advanced city where the captive Earthwomen were thought to be. The action was good. I was gloriously bashed around and managed to shoot down my eaber ship. It wasn't a difficult action for a Transstar-trained man. I was more interested in observing that the eaber had out an equal patrol of five hundred to oppose us. But, with all the noise and banging that a thousand-ship fight makes, I could observe that there were easily ten or fifteen thousand more eaber military ships on the ground we ranged over. So the cities were not colonies. They were military bases for a large operation. More interesting than the ships at hand were the extremely large areas being cleared and laid out for additional ship concentrations. I estimated that they could eventually base over a hundred thousand ships. That would interest Transstar immensely. Rackrill broke off the action when he had a mere hundred ships left. We limped back to the colony without being able to land in eaber territory. In fact, I doubted if the eaber chiefs regarded this as more than a quiet afternoon's patrol action. With their layout I couldn't blame them. We almost missed the colony and had to sweep back once more. Yes, there was my Transstar ship, glowing orangely on the ground. But what a changed ground! It was brown and bare, a desert as far as the horizon. During Rackril's attack a secret eaber counter-attack had swept the colony's transport ships, its buildings, and Rackril's fifteen hundred colonists into oblivion. TN times of shock men do drastic -- or foolish -- things. Rackril's group of survivors began to bring down the cooking equipment and bedding from their ships, preparing a camp for the night on the blighted cemetery of their colony, dazed and tearful. "Ada, Ada," Rackril moaned softly, his thick fingers picking at a gleaming aluminum pot. "Ada gone, Johnny gone -- " I noticed that Martha Stoner, the tape-girl, had at last lost some of her high gloss. She stared at the scene, stunned. I could almost calibrate the change in her, from a high-spirited girl to a shocked and understanding woman. I couldn't hold back comment. "Now you see the frontier," I said to her. "Now you've got a real tape that all the stations can use." She shook her head dumbly. "Go home, Rackril," I advised the benumbed leader. "Take your men and go home." He turned on me with teeth bared and lip trembling. "You -- and that Transstar fraud. You let this happen! Tell your piddling button-pushers we will never go home!" The words rang bravely on the scorched ground, while an eaber patrol, high up, gently wafted over us on an observation mission. I shook my head. "At least go off in the forest where you have some protection -- and some wood for your fires!" I turned to go. A clod of soil struck my back, then a small stone. "Go, Transstar filth, go!" They were all picking up the chant now. "I'll file a tape all right!" cried Martha. "I can still get through to the world. The people will act, even if Transstar won't." I didn't want to run. I swear, this was my worst moment, because I had seen this distress many times. I understood their monumental shock. But if I did not run I could be seriously disabled by their attack. At any moment one might pull a gun. My job was to remain in good health so I could observe. So I ran towards my ship. They followed in a ragged company, shouting, cursing and at last pulling guns. I barely escaped into the orange-hued safety of the Transstar ship before the rays flew. The colonists danced and pranced around the ship, shooting at it and beating on it, like nothing so much as forest natives attacking an interloper. I understood and discreetly closed the portholes. "Order them home," I begged Twelve Jackson. "They are doomed here." "We don't have the power," said Jackson. 'We can only help them home if they want to go." I rang up Euben on the eaber channel which I used for official communications -- so far, mostly for protests. Euben made his innocent, bird-twitter laugh. "Thank you for your protest about the colony extinction," he said. "This keeps my clerks busy. Your colony may leave at any time. In fact, I recommend this. We will need all the space on this planet very soon." I found the remnant of Rackril's tattered colony in a sort of forest stockade. They were stiff with me, embarrassed about the stoning incident. They were ghost men, and a few women, going through the motions of building crude houses and planting their food. Martha was an exception, "They will stay," she said proudly, her eyes glowing. "They will be buttressed by the great crusade our space tapes have started. First the story of the miserable pet-human, then the eaber drone thing, then the mass attack on the unguarded colony. Back home men are leaving their jobs, pouring their savings into fighting ships. Institutions are subscribing money. Governments are amassing new fighters. We've got the backing of all the thinking men in solar and alpha!" "It is too late in civilization for an emotion-powered, unorganized mass movement to succeed," I said. "Only Transstar is properly equipped for space war." "Even Transstar men are quitting to join us!" she cried. "Possibly a few at the lower levels. Not the agents." "No -- not the dehumanized agents! Nor the feeble old men of Transstar Prime who stole their power from the governments of men, who drool over buttons they never dare push!" "The eaber do this to provoke us," I said, "to show our power at their command, at their site of battle, at a time they control. That's why Transstar Prime won't be sucked into the trap." "They want to fight us. The time is now!" she said. "The time is not yet," I said. I went back to my lonely ship, haunted by the faces of Rackril and his men as they glowed on my report tapes. I hunted the news broadcasts of solar and alpha and watched the revulsion and convulsion of men back home -- the enormous waste of the emotional jag. I saw ships starting from Earth to reach us, ill-prepared even to reach the moon, hurling across space vastnesses to become derelicts. I saw men throwing their pocket money at passing paraders of the anti-eaber crusade, normal shipping woefully hampered by the ridiculous items being sent to Rackril's defenders. Government leaders, sensing the temper of the voters, threw their weight at Transstar Prime, calling for action. They got nowhere. Transstar resists temporary popular politics just as it does local situations. "You certainly can't call this a local situation!" I told Twelve Jackson. He sighed. "No, not any more. But the principle is missing. Everybody's mad, but the eaber haven't yet posed a major threat to the human race." "They've got a couple hundred thousand fighting ships at our perimeter," I said. "They haven't invaded territory we call our own. All the fighting is in no-man's land. We're trained to determine a real danger from a false one, and so far they don't seem to be a real danger." "It can get late fast," I said. "Are you ready to ask for Condition Prime Total Red?" There was a silence while I tried to separate my sympathetic feelings from the intelligence of the military situation. "No, sir," I said. "Thirteen Mayberry agrees with you," said the Twelve, looking over his shoulder, and then I saw the shadow of a sleeve of the top man. Transstar's Prime Prime, as the agents half-jokingly called him. At least the desiccated old men near Mars were getting more interested. fN the day the first Earth-crusade task force arrived, both Martha and Rackril came to the ship. "You know it's the end of Transstar," Martha told me. She was more subdued and serious, but she still had the high-school glow of mysticism in her eyes. "The people have been sold out for the last time." "No one's been sold out," I said. "We are in a painful contact with a race that is both powerful and primitive. They can't be reasoned with, yet we can't blow them up until, at least, they give evidence that they intend to blow us up. So far it's only a border incident, as they used to be called in one-world days." "We aren't waiting," said Martha. "Five thousand ships! The first wave of the ariti-eaber crusade will attack soon." Martha put me so much in mind of Alicia -- the way she held her head, the way she moved her hands. Once both Alicia and I had been at a point of resigning from Transstar and leading normal lives. But something in the blood and bone had made our marriage to Transstar stronger -- until she was killed on a mission, and it was forever too late for me to quit I was aware that I was too loyal to the organization, which was, after all, merely another society of men. Yet, right now, I found myself questioning Prime's judgment. Certainly they could have given me power to negotiate for the colony with Euben. Certainly there were some potent weapons, short of total war, which we could have used on these vain primitives as easily as the ones they used on us. Nor need I have been brought to my knees in front of Euben. Yet my orders were to observe -- report -- take no action. We went aloft to watch the Earthmen's attack. Both Martha and Rackril were set for an initial penetration to the first eaber city. As the massive fleet from Earth wheeled in from space and went directly to the attack, they cheered like students in a rooting section. I cautioned them that five thousand ships, strained from a long flight from alpha, could hardly upset the eaber. "It's only the first group!" cried Martha. "This is only the glorious beginning!" The eaber took no chances. They lofted fifteen thousand ships and pulled the Earthmen into a box. It took them about four hours to defeat the Earth attack. When the four hours passed, only about three hundred of the Earth fleet remained to sink to the oblivion of Rackril's colony and lick their wounds. "No matter," said Martha as we landed. "There will be more tomorrow and the day after that and after that. We'll blacken the skies with ships." But she went quickly, avoiding my eyes. "You'll always have sanctuary on my ship," I told Rackril as he went. "Your ship!" he snorted. "After today I'd rather trust my own stockade when Euben comes around. Incidentally, he has been kidnapping my work parties. Tell him we don't like that. Tell him we've been able to catch a few eaber, and when we do we cut them into four equal parts while they're still alive." "Please don't," I said. having my evening tea. "Ah, my scholarly friend with the glasses and the tea-drinking, the big words and the scoldings. I must thank you for keeping at least a part of our fleet in practice. A rather nice patrol action today, Webster. Is that your Transstar?" "No. I ask you now what your intentions are as to this planet and our future relations," I said, aware that Transstar Prime, through this ship, had been watching the long day's affairs. Euben had brought his friend with him. They both lolled at their ease in my cabin. "It has been hard to determine," said Euben. "We have finally decided that, rather than waste rays simply turn them into eaber. An inferior eaber, but still eaber. We have taken a few samples from Rackril's post as prototypes." "This is forbidden!" I snapped. "You will declare war?" asked Euben eagerly. I thought his eagerness had grown. "We don't know whom we deal with," I said. "You may be only a patrol captain, with a small command." "I could also be commander-inchief of all the eaber in space," said Euben. "Which I happen to be." He said it too offhandedly to be a lie, although I suspected he was really deputy commander to the silent eaber who stood behind him. "Then I formally demand that you cease and desist all harassments, mutilations and hostilities against humans," I said. Euben looked at me a long time. Then he held out what could reasonably be called an arm, which his companion grasped. My ship seemed to whirl about me. It was no such thing. Instead I was suspended upside down in the air over my desk, and Euben and the other left the ship, "Farewell, brave-foolish," called Euben mockingly. "Next time I come it is to collect you for eaberization!" His laugh was proud and full of confidence. When I finally managed to right myself and get back behind my desk, I called Transstar Prime and got Twelve Jackson. I feared I saw a flick of amusement in his eyes. "They are determined now for war," I said. "How do we stand?" "You continue to observe," said Jackson. "Point Everready is not necessary to Earth. And you have not convinced us that a battle needs to be fought." # had not convinced them. But what did I -- a mere agent -- have to do with it? I rang off and closed the ship, in sorrow and anger. I had been aloof from the situation, to the point where Euben had stood me on my head and threatened to capture me bodily. I put on my combat slacks and broke out my weapons. Transstar could remain uninvolved, but I wasn't going to sit at my desk, be stood on my ear and blithely be turned into an eaber all for the glory of the organization. I rode over to Rackril's stockade full of cold purpose. I was no rugged-primitive colonist. I was a trained agent, with quite a few good weapons and considerable experience in hostilities, especially against alien life-forms. Euben would have no easy time taking me. I found Rackril in more trouble. "Look," he fumed, pointing to a dead eaber at the wall of the stockade. "We shot this fellow. Look closely." It was easy to see that it was one of his own colonists, upon which extensive biology had been used to turn him into something eaber-like. "It's going to happen to us all," shuddered Martha. "The crusade has collapsed. There'll be no more Earth ships. Distances are too great -- governments are too busy with their home affairs. We have been outlawed in all major planets." I stared at the white-faced colonist leaders in distaste. "For God's sake, quit sniveling and feeling sorry for yourselves," I said. "We're going to fight these beasts and do it right. First, I want an antenna. I can draw power from my ship that the eaber can't crack. Second, I want to fight an eabertype war. Get your colonists together for indoctrination. These eaber have primitive mind-reading abilities; I want to start training our men to set up mind guards against that. Last, we're going to dig some tunnels in this ground and blow the eaber into orbit. They don't like things underground. They have no defense for it. So let's get organized!" "Thank God!" cried Martha. "Transstar is coming in at last." "No," I said. "Just Charles Webster." VjrTE fought the eaber for twen" ty days. They couldn't penetrate the power wall I set up with the help of the ship, using Transstar power. They couldn't waylay our work parties in the woods after I taught them how to use mind-blocks which were meaningless to the eaber. We got our tunnel through and blew up one third of an eaber city with one of my strontium # pills. We were also able to capture a few eaber patrol ships and send them right back, with fair-sized atomic blasts. The rest we manned and used against the eaber. They were totally confused with being attacked by their own ships. It wasn't enough to destroy a twentieth of their operation. But it kept them busy. I was never once outside my combat slacks. I got little sleep. I lived for the present moment, working hand and shoulder with Raclcril's men. When disaster came, it came all at once. I led a night patrol to place the next strontium # pill overland runnel me was too slow. I caught an eaber freeze-ray that shattered my leg. In the confusion we lost Martha to the eaber, which I only learned when I'd been carried back to the stockade. When dawn broke, Rackril shook me out of a dazed sleep. "Look," he said. "Ten thousand ships to destroy two dozen men," I laughed. "It's all right, Alicia." Rackril slapped my face. "Better come out of it, Webster. Can we stand an attack like that?" I gulped a wake-up pill and brought myself alert. "No, we cannot. This is our day for extinction. Our only decision now is to pick the time and place of our going. Let's get over to the Transstar ship as fast as possible." "I'm not leaving Point Everready," growled Rackril. "Nor am I," I said. "Let's move, man." It was a sticky hour getting back to my ship. By that time our stockade, power block and all, had been pulverized to dust behind us by the attacking weight of the eaber ships. "Take me up, Rackril," I said as we reached the bottom of the ship. "I can't climb any more." He pointed up dumbly. The fox face of Euben and his eternal companion grinned down at us. I shifted out a gun and took off the safety. "Take me up, Rackril." It was almost ceremonial as Rackril and the bare half-dozen who had made it through gathered about me in the cabin. I eased painfully into my chair. Euben saw my leg and grinned. "Looks like an amputation before we can make you auseful eaber," he said. My bullet skipped across his shoulder. "Stand over by that wall, you," I said. "You, Euben! I'm talking to you." "You cannot order me," he said, but he moved back sprightlily enough. "I humor you, you see," he said. "Your stockade is gone. You have nothing but this ship. I have decided to have it gently blasted into space as worthless junk." He gestured out of the window, where his ships were making passes now. My Transstar ship shuddered. "We can bounce it off the planet like a harmless rubber ball," he said. He gestured in back of me. "I have also returned your woman of whom you think so much. She is worthless to become an eaber." shape of what had once been Martha, huddled on my navigator's bench. It was obvious that they had treated her roughly. From the trickle of blood at her mouth, she was badly hemorrhaged. She could not live. I stared down at her. It was hard to tell if she still recognized me. She opened her mouth slightly, and I saw the black familiar shape of the eaber reptile tongue. I turned away, light-headed with sorrow and anger. I jabbed a button and looked up at the tall TV. It wasn't Twelve Jackson. It was Thirteen Mayberry, Mr. Prime himself. "What are you staring at, you old goat?" I cried, a little hysterically. "Sore because I took action to save my own hide?" "No, you young fool. I was just wondering how long you'd permit this minor outrage to go on." "It ends now!" I said. "Listen, Prime, I have Earth people here who demand sanctuary of Transstar." "You have it," he said. "We will up that ship, son. No power in the universe will keep it on the ground." "The eaber are upping it quite nicely, thanks," I said. "But we don't want it upped!" I had to stop talking while the thudding blows of the gentle eaber rays buffeted the ship. "Not upped?" asked Mayberry. "No, sir, not upped. We're staying! We hold the ground that this Transstar ship rests on, in the name of Earth. It isn't much, only about fifty feet long and twenty-five wide, but it's Earth territory. No race or force may deprive us of our real estate." "You tell him!" cried Rackril. I turned to Euben. "Now, friend," I said, "just ease this ship back to our ground. It's Earth ground. We intend to hold it!" "Your leg-wound has made you mad," said Euben, with a shrug. "We have decided that you are not even worthy to be eaber pets." "Last warning, Euben! You've got yourself a Transstar situation." Euben didn't hesitate. He turned his hands in the air. I rolled in pain, but I kept seated. When I could see again from the pain, I looked up. Mayberry and Jackson and Hennessy and the forty-one division commanders of Transstar were blazing from the wall. The TV looked like a Christmas tree. "Transstar orders this ship down, aijd that ground preserved in the name of Earth-alpha!" said Mayberry shortly to Euben. Euben looked at the old man and shook his head. "Madmen," he said. "I spit on you." He spit on the screen at Mayberry. He had learned Earth insults well. "My condition is Prime Total Red," I told Mayberry. He leaned forward and closed the seldom-closed circuit at Transstar Prime. "Your condition is Prime Total Red, and your ship is now command post for all Earth-alpha star power." button. We left Point Everready in a beautiful swoop that only a Transstar ship could perform. I held us high in the atmosphere over the planet and looked sadly down. It had been a beautiful planet I hit another button and looked up at the forty-one division commanders of Transstar. "Your orders are to destroy the eaber," I said. I sat back. For a few seconds it was deathly silent, while Euben sputtered and fussed about his quick ride up over the planet Then there was the faintest whisper of -- something -- back and out and behind us. "Brace yourselves, folks," I told the Earthmen. "It's going to be loud and crowded around here!" Euben jabbered at some kind of communicator he held in his hands. His partner likewise gabbled. "We have a hundred and fifty thousand ships," he told me. "We'll tear you to shreds!" I kicked a chair over at him. "Sit down. You're going to want to sit in a minute." "Something's wrong with the ship!" cried Rackril. "It's heavy and dead!" "We're drawing most of the broadcast power this side of Mars," I said. "In a minute you'll be glad we have that protection!" Transstar came then. The fast patrols whisked out of black space and leaped into our atmosphere like gleaming fish that fired a rocking blast of weaponry and were gone to rendezvous, reform and pass again. They were like nothing the eaber had ever seen. They were made for a star-go like this, a burst of light, a dazzle and a thunder that came and came and came. Behind them came the light patrols and then the medium patrols and then the heavy patrols and then the fast light shock ships and then the medium shock ships and then the heavy shocks, wave upon wave, upon wave. Even wrapped in our thick blanket of power we were stunned. The planet came alight like a pearl below us. The air was jammed with sound shocks, the dazzle was like a spreading, thickening bomb of light that transfixed the eyeballs even through the dark screens I had set up. "This is early stuff," I told Euben conversationally. "They just do a little holding till the important ships arrive. Patrols and first shocks -- the usual things, you know." Euben's mouth was open. He took time to swallow before he screamed orders to his ships below. The patrols and shocks were suddenly past firing range. For a moment you could see the planet through the haze. Its shore lines and rivers had sickened and wavered. The eaber ships, which had been a blanket, were a tattered rag. Hennessy, the headquarters jokester, couldn't resist a comment that probably earned him a fine. "Here comes the Cavalry," he said over the TV. And they came. TT was good professional stuff, geared to star action. Now we had the regulars. They came in waves of ten thousand, which was a wee bit impressive, I thought. There were the ground regulars, the medium regulars and the high regulars, each division with thirty categories, each category with its subdivisions of missiles, rockets and drones. The atmosphere screamed at us. The density of the light assumed sun proportions, and our poor little ship was like a chip on an angry ocean. Rackril had his mouth wide open. He was yelling to relieve his tension at the awesome sight; the others were lost in the overwhelming cataclysm of it. I had seen it in movies. I poured myself a cup of tea. "These are just the on-call regulars," I told Euben. "Of course, you realize that in a Prime Red we're getting total mobilization. We'll get the first hour. The rest will come later." Euben had stopped shouting orders. He stared at me. He said something that I couldn't hear. The pounding went on for fifteen minutes; then the planet cleared. There weren't any shore lines or rivers any more. There weren't very many eaber ships. "Stop it," he said. I shook my head. "Sorry. A Prime Red can't be stopped easily. Once the momentum starts it has to run its course. Get set now. Here come your specials." As the specials started to arrive, I taunted the Division Commanders. "Transstar is getting rusty. You've hardly nicked the planet. Can't your boys shoot properly any more?" They came in fat and sleek. Far off they waddled and wallowed, like a bunch of old ladies hitting a bargain counter. But suddenly they were serious, close up, and I had to close the portholes against the awesome roar and light of their work. You name the ray, bullet, bomb, gas -- it was there. A half-hour later the din eased off and we looked. A large fragment of seared rock floated in space. The entire eaber fleet had long ago disappeared. So had everything else except that radioactive rock. The last wave was the massive attack unit, very slow and lumbering compared to the others, but packed with power. The first five thousand took eager bites of the rock -- and there was nothing left for the other twenty-five thousand. There was nothing left at all of Point Everready except some haze hanging below us in space. But it was too late to stop the attack. To one side of us the returning waves began to streak by -- the patrols, fast, light, medium and heavy, the shocks, first, second and third, the regulars in their streaming divisions and then the specials. Meanwhile, closer by, the second wave was coming in, first patrols and first shocks, darting a few shots to keep their hand in, at the floating dust patches. ships to his left and to his right and behind him and below him and above him and in all positions in between. It was such a heavy concentration that the stars were blocked out and, though no atmosphere existed for a non-existent planet, we were a planet of moving ships, ourselves creating a gravity and a stinking jet-flame atmosphere. It was a moving dream of hell, enough to make your mind crack open with the motion of it. It was the phantom action of a This was the total war capacity delivered to order. What it cost in disruption and money and waste was incredible to contemplate. But that was Prime Total Red -- everything we had. And it wasn't at all pointless. "The eaber surrender," said Euben. He stood respectfully now, his commander behind him. I guess he was thinking of the remaining eaber colonies on other planets, as there was nothing left to surrender here. I handed him a rag. "You may now wipe the spit off my TV plate receiver," I said. He did it with alacrity. "We will go elsewhere," said Euben's companion. "After all, space is big. There is plenty of room for two great races." "One great race," I said. "Of course," he said affably, "May we have our lives spared?" "We want you to have them -- so you can take the word home." The action outside had stilled. I opened the ports and began to move slowly towards another planet where the eaber had dwellings, as requested by the shaken Euben. Rackril patted my shoulder. "Boy, that Transstar!" he exulted. "It's quite a lot," I admitted. I painfully inched over to the stricken Martha and squeezed her hand. I thought she squeezed back. I thought I saw a flicker of joy at our success -- but there was so much eaber and so much death in her eyes it was hard to know. I had to leave her then, for the medics came aboard for her. I began to glide down on the new planet to discharge Euben and the other eaber. "Look," I said gesturing over my shoulder. Behind us the Transstar fleet followed docilely, the mass and weight of them, guns racked and quiet, the great beast behind my tiny patrol dot. "We'll stay around a few days in case you want to argue some more," I told Euben. He shook his head. "That will not be necessary, my good friend. We are not stupid. In the future you'll see very little of the eaber." r  I HE ship settled. I opened the door and put down the ladder and Euben's companion descended, then Euben. "I am sorry -- " he began. But I thought of Martha and the dead boy who had died on Everready and the pet human and the drone eaber and the others who had suffered and died to make this creature sorry. So I planted my good foot on his rear. He crashed into his master and they both fell in the mud at the bottom of the ladder. They got up, mud-splattered, and ran like the wind towards eaberdom, capes flying out behind them. Rackril laughed. It was the first relaxed laugh I'd heard in all that assignment. It pulled things back to normal. I turned back to my blazing board and hit a button. "Condition White," I said, "and don't kid me that you got up all these star-ships on seventy-five seconds notice. They left Earth-alpha weeks ago. You knew from the first we were in for a Condition Prime Total Red with the eaber." The old man grinned. "It's the agents who louse us up. We were afraid you'd observe so long that you'd start the action on an orange and build a whole new tradition -- Ten." Ten! I remembered then that automatically up for Ten rank and sent to a nice, soft job at Prime. "Save me a wide, plump chair at the TV console at Prime," I said. "Get me a desk-sized teapot, and a soft cushion for a bum leg." I turned the ship around and started to lead the massive fleet home. I stared at the far-flung stars of space as I drank my tea, eyes blurred a little with tears. I was an organization man. The organization was all I had, or would ever have. It didn't seem enough. Even the playing of the Transstar victory song left me depressed. Then suddenly the light broke. A Transstar agent is both the most and the least important of men. He is a fireman who puts out fires -- a hero, but a shadow. A master sometimes, but mostly a servant. I winked at Mayberry on the screen. They saw I knew and winked back. They had finally lost a pompous, Transstar-impressed agent and gained a useful career man. They were satisfied. So was I. Qalaxy. With your literally thousands of letters, you have proven that Galaxy is the most widely read science fiction magazine on Earth (see above for evidence of our foreign editions). Subscribing to Galaxy is similar to a profit-sharing arrangement; for the more you invest, the greater your dividends. And this, as you've seen, and will go on seeing, is truly voting stock. (No need to cut up this attractive copy. Your order on any sheet of paper will convey the same vote and privileges. ) Under the cloud of casthimself? H E was down corrid' slanted in thro blue knapsack ang endlessly g, glass-walled Bright sunlight i one wall, on the loss his shoulders. Who he was, and what he was doing here, was clouded. The truth lurked in some corner of his consciousness, but it was not reached by surface awareness. The corridor opened at last into a large high-domed room, much like a railway station or an air terminal. He walked straight ahead. At the sight of him a man leaning negligently against a stone pillar, to his right but within vision, straightened and barked an order to him, "Halt!" He lengthened his stride but gave no other sign. Two men hurried through a doorway of a small anteroom to his left, calling to him. He turned away and began to run. Shouts and the sound of charging feet came from behind him. He cut to the right, running toward the escalator to the second floor. Another pair of men were hurrying down, two steps at a stride. With no break in pace he veered into an opening beside the escalator. At the first turn he saw that the aisle merely circled the stairway, coming out into the depot again on the other side. It was a trap. He glanced quickly around him. At the rear of the space was a row of lockers for traveler use. He slipped a coin into a pay slot, opened the zipper on his bag and pulled out a flat briefcase. It took him only a few seconds to push the case into the compartment, lock it and slide the key along the floor beneath the locker. There was nothing to do after that -- except wait. The men pursuing him came hurtling around the turn in the aisle. He kicked his knapsack to one side, spreading his feet wide with an instinctive motion. Until that instant he had intended to fight. Now he swiftly reassessed the odds. There were five of them, he saw. He should be able to incapacitate two or three and break out. But the fact that they had been expecting him meant that others would very probably be waiting outside. His best course now was to sham ignorance. He relaxed. He offered no resistance as they reached him. They were not gentle men. A tall ruffian, copper-brown face damp with perspiration and body oil, grabbed him by the jacket and slammed him back against the lockers. As he shifted his weight to keep his footing someone drove a fist into his face. He started to raise his hands; and a hard flat object crashed against the side of his skull. The starch went out of his legs. #cn you make anything out of it?" the psychoanalyst Milton Bergstrom, asked. John Zarwell shook his head. "Did I talk while I was under?" "Oh, yes. You were supposed to. That way I follow pretty well what you're reenacting." "How does it tie in with what I told you before?" Bergstrom's neat-boned, fairskinned face betrayed no emotion other than an introspective stillness of his normally alert gaze. "I see no connection," he decided, his words once again precise and meticulous. "We don't have enough to go on. Do you feel able to try another comanalysis this afternoon yet?" "I don't see why not." Zarwell opened the collar of his shirt. The day was hot, and the room had no air conditioning, still a rare luxury on St. Martin's. The office window was open, but it let in no freshness, only the mildly rank odor that pervaded all the planet's habitable area. "Good." Bergstrom rose. "The serum is quite harmless, John." He maintained a professional diversionary chatter as he administered the drug. "A scopolamine derivative that's been well tested." The floor beneath Zarwell's feet assumed abruptly the near transfluent consistency of a damp sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave and rolled gently toward the far wall. Bergstrom continued talking, with practiced urbanity. "When psychiatry was a less exact science," his voice went on, seeming to come from a great distance, "a doctor had to spend weeks, sometimes months or years interviewing a patient. If he was skilled enough, he could sort the relevancies from the vast amount of chaff. We are able now, with the help of the serum, to confine our discourses to matters cogent to the patient's trouble." The floor continued its transmutation, and Zarwell sank deep into viscous depths. "Lie back and relax. Don't..." The words tumbled down from above. They faded, were gone. standing on a vast plain. There was no sky above, and no horizon in the distance. He was in a place without space or dimension. There was nothing here except himself -- and the gun that he held in his hand. A weapon beautiful in its efficient simplicity. He should know all about the instrument, its purpose and workings, but he could not bring his thoughts into rational focus. His forehead creased with his mental effort. Abruptly the unreality about him shifted perspective. He was approaching -- not walking, but merely shortening the space between them -- the man who held the gun. The man who was himself. The other "himself" drifted nearer also, as though drawn by a mutual attraction. The man with the gun raised his weapon and pressed the trigger. With the action the perspective shifted again. He was watching the face of the man he shot jerk and twitch, expand and contract. The face was unharmed, yet it was no longer the same. No longer his own features. The stranger face smiled approvingly at him. He brought his hands up and joined the tips of his fingers against his chest. "But it's another piece in the jig-saw. In time it will fit into place." He paused. "It means no more to you than the first, I suppose?" "No," Zarwell answered. He was not a talking man, Bergstrom reflected. It was more than reticence, however. The man had a hard granite core, only partially concealed by his present perplexity. He was a man who could handle himself well in an emergency. Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing his strayed thoughts. "I expected as much. A quite normal first phase of treatment." He straightened a paper on his desk. "I think that will be enough for today. Twice in one sitting is about all we ever try. Otherwise some particular episode might cause undue mental stress, and set up a block." He glanced down at his appointment pad. "Tomorrow at two, then?" Zarwell grunted acknowledgment and pushed himself to his feet, apparently unaware that his shirt clung damply to his body. TP HE sun was still high when Zarwell left the analyst's office. The white marble of the city's buildings shimmered in the afternoon heat, squat and austere as giant tree trunks, pock-marked and gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell was careful not to rest his hand on the flesh searing surface of the stone.  The evening meal hour was approaching when he reached the Flats, on the way to his apartment The streets of the old section were near-deserted. The only sounds he heard as he passed were the occasional cry of a baby, chronically uncomfortable in the day's heat, and the lowing of imported cattle waiting in a nearby shed to be shipped to the country. All St. Martin's has a distinctive smell, as of an arid dried-out swamp, with a faint taint of fish. But in the Flats the odor changes. Here is the smell of factories, warehouses, and trading marts; the smell of stale cooking drifting from the homes of the laborers and lower class techmen who live there. Zarwell passed a group of smaller children playing a desultory game of lic-lic for pieces of candy and cigarettes. Slowly he climbed the stairs of a stone flat He prepared a supper for himself and ate it without either enjoyment or distaste. He lay down, fully clothed, on his bed. The visit to the analyst had done nothing to dispel his ennui. The next morning when Zarwell awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving. The feeling was there again, like a scene waiting only to be gazed at directly to be perceived. It was as though a great wisdom lay at the edge of understanding. If he rested quietly it would all come to him. Yet always, when his mind lost its sleep-induced lethargy, the moment of near understanding slipped away. This morning, however, the sense of disorientation did not pass with full wakefulness. He achieved no understanding, but the strangeness did not leave as he sat up. He gazed about him. The room did not seem to be his own. The furnishings, and the clothing he observed in a closet, might have belonged to a stranger. He pulled himself from his blankets, his body moving with mechanical reaction. The slippers into which he put his feet were larger than he had expected them to be. He walked about the small apartment. The place was familiar, but only as it would have been if he had studied it from blueprints, not as though he lived there. The feeling was still with him when he returned to the psychoanalyst. f IP HE scene this time was more kaleidoscopic, less personal. A village was being ravaged. Men struggled and died in the streets. Zarwell moved among them, seldom taking part in the individual clashes, yet a moving force in the confict. The background changed. He understood that he was on a different world. Here a city burned. Its resistance was nearing its end. Zarwell was riding a shaggy pony outside a high wall surrounding the stricken metropolis. He moved in and joined a party of short, bearded men, directing them as they battered at the wall with a huge log mounted on a many-wheeled truck. The log broke a breach in the concrete and the besiegers charged through, carrying back the defenders who sought vainly to plug the gap. Soon there would be rioting in the streets again, plundering and Zarwell was not the leader of the invaders, only a lesser figure in the rebellion. But he had played a leading part in the planning of the strategy that led to the city's fall. The job had been well done. Time passed, without visible break in the panorama. Now Zarwell was fleeing, pursued by the same bearded men who had been his comrades before. Still he moved with the same firm purpose, vigilant, resourceful, and well prepared for the eventuality that had befallen. He made his escape without difficulty. He alighted from a space ship on still another world -- another shift in time -- and the atmosphere of conflict engulfed him. Weary but resigned he accepted it, and did what he had to do... him with speculative scrutiny. "You've had quite a past, apparently," he observed. Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment. "At least in my dreams." "Dreams?" Bergstrom's eyes widened in surprise. "Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have forgotten to explain. This work is so routine to me that sometimes I forget it's all new to a patient. Actually what you experienced under the drug were not dreams. They were recollections of real episodes from your past." Zarwell's expression became wary. He watched Bergstrom closely. After a minute, however, he seemed satisfied, and he let himself settle back against the cushion of his chair. "I remember nothing of what I saw," he observed. "That's why you're here, you know," Bergstrom answered. "To help you remember." "But everything under the drug is so..." "Haphazard? That's true. The recall episodes are always purely random, with no chronological sequence. Our problem will be to reassemble them in proper order later. Or some particular scene may trigger a complete memory return. "It is my considered opinion," Bergstrom went on, "that your lost memory will turn out to be no ordinary amnesia. I believe we will find that your mind has been tampered with." "Nothing I've seen under the drug fits into the past I do remember." "That's what makes me so certain," Bergstrom said confidently. "You don't remember what we have shown to be true. Conversely then, what you think you remember must be false. It must have been implanted there. But we can go into that later. For today I think we have done enough. This episode was quite prolonged." "I won't have any time off again until next week end," Zarwell reminded him. "That's right." Bergstrom thought for a moment. "We shouldn't let this hang too long. Could you come here after work tomorrow?" "I suppose I could." "Fine," Bergstrom said with satisfaction. "I'll admit I'm considerably more than casually interested in your case by this time." up the next morning and he rode with a tech crew to the edge of the reclam area. Beside the belt bringing ocean muck from the converter plant at the seashore his bulldozer was waiting. He took his place behind the drive wheel and began working dirt down between windbreakers anchored in the rock. Along a makeshift road into the badlands trucks brought crushed lime and phosphorus to supplement the ocean sediment. The progress of life from the sea to the land was a mechanical process of this growing world. Nearly two hundred years ago, when Earth established a colony on St. Martin's, the land surface of the planet had been barren. Only its seas thrived with animal and vegetable life. The necessary machinery and technicians had been supplied by Earth, and the long struggle began to fit the world for human needs. When Zarwell arrived, six months before, the Vitalized area already extended three hundred miles along the coast, and sixty miles inland. And every day the progress continued. A large percentage of the energy and resources of the world were devoted to that essential expansion. The reclam crews filled and sodded the sterile rock, planted binding grasses, grain and trees, and diverted rivers to keep it fertile. When there were no rivers to divert they blasted out springs and lakes in the foothills to make their own. Biologists developed the necessary germ and insect life from what they found in the sea. Where that failed, they imported microorganisms from Earth. Three rubber-tracked crawlers picked their way down from the mountains until they joined the road passing the belt. They were loaded with ore that would be smelted into metal for depleted Earth, or for other colonies short of minerals. It was St. Martin's only export thus far. Zarwell pulled his sun helmet lower, to better guard his hot, dry features. The wind blew continuously on St. Martin's, but it furnished small relief from the heat. After its three-thousand-mile journey across scorched sterile rock, it sucked the moisture from a man's body, bringing a membrane-shrinking dryness to the nostrils as it was breathed in. With it came also the cloying taste of limestone in a worker's mouth. Zarwell gazed idly about at the other laborers. Fully three-quarters of them were beri-rabza ridden. A cure for the skin fungus had not yet been found; the men's faces and hands were scabbed and red. The colony had grown to near selfsufficiency, would soon have a moderate prosperity, yet they still lacked adequate medical and research facilities. Not all the world's citizens were content. Bergstrom was waiting in his office when Zarwell arrived that evening. hard cot, with his eyes closed, yet with his every sense sharply quickened. Tentatively he tightened small muscles in his arms and legs. Across his wrists and thighs he felt straps binding him to the cot. "So that's our big, bad man," a coarse voice above him observed caustically. "He doesn't look so tough now, does he?" "It might have been better to kill him right away," a second, less confident voice said. "It's supposed to be impossible to hold him." "Don't be stupid. We just do what we're told. We'll hold him." "What do you think they'll do with him?" "Execute him, I suppose," the harsh voice said matter-of-factly. "They're probably just curious to see what he looks like first. They'll be disappointed." Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to observe his surroundings. It was a mistake. "He's out of it," the first speaker said, and Zarwell allowed his eyes to open fully. The voice, he saw, belonged to the big man who had bruised him against the locker at the spaceport. Irrelevantly he wondered how he knew now that it had been a spaceport. His captor's broad face jeered down at Zarwell. "Have a good sleep?" he asked with mock solicitude. Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge that he heard. The big man turned. "You can tell the Chief he's awake," he said. Zarwell followed his gaze to where a younger man, with a blond lock of hair on his forehead, stood behind him. The youth nodded and went out, while the other pulled a chair up to the side of Zarwell's cot. While their attention was away from him Zarwell had unobtrusively loosened his bonds as much as possible with arm leverage. As the big man drew his chair nearer, he made the hand farthest from him tight and compact and worked it free of the leather loop. He waited. The big man belched. "You're supposed to be great stuff in a situation like this," he said, his smoketan face splitting in a grin that revealed large square teeth. "How about giving me a sample?" "You're a yellow-livered bastard," Zarwell told him. The grin faded from the oily face as the man stood up. He leaned over the cot -- and Zarwell's left hand shot up and locked about his throat, joined almost immediately by the right. The man's mouth opened and he tried to yell as he threw himself frantically backward. He clawed at the hands about his neck. When that failed to break the grip he suddenly reversed his weight and drove his fist at Zarwell's head. Zarwell pulled the struggling body down against his chest and held it there until all agitated movement ceased. He sat up then, letting the body slide to the floor. The straps about his thighs came loose with little effort. TP HE analyst dabbed at his upper lip with a handkerchief. "The episodes are beginning to tie together," he said, with an attempt at nonchalance. "The next couple should do it." Zarwell did not answer. His memory seemed on the point of complete return, and he sat quietly, hopefully. However, nothing more came and he returned his attention to his more immediate problem. Opening a button on his shirt, he pulled back a strip of plastic cloth just below his rib cage and took out a small flat pistol. He held it in the palm of his hand. He knew now why he always carried it. Bergstrom had his bad moment. "You're not going to..." he began at the sight of the gun. He tried again. "You must be joking." "I have very little sense of humor," Zarwell corrected him. "You'd be foolish!" Bergstrom obviously realized how close he was to death. Yet surprisingly, after the first start, he showed little fear. Zarwell had thought the man a bit soft, too adjusted to a life of ease and some prestige to meet danger calmly. Curiosity restrained his trigger finger. "Why would I be foolish?" he asked. "Your Meninger oath of inviolable confidence?" Bergstrom shook his head. "I know it's been broken before. But you need me. You're not through, you know. If you killed me you'd still have to trust some other analyst." "Is that the best you can do?" "No." Bergstrom was angry now. "But use that logical mind you're supposed to have! Scenes before this have shown what kind of man you are. Just because this last happened here on St. Martin's makes little difference. If I was going to turn you in to the police, I'd have done it before this." Zarwell debated with himself the truth of what the other had said. 'Why didn't you turn me in?" he asked. "Because you're no mad-dog killer!" Now that the crisis seemed to be past, Bergstrom spoke more calmly, even allowed himself to relax. "You're still pretty much in the fog about yourself. I read more in those comanalyses than you did. I even know who you are!" Zarwell's eyebrows raised. 'Who am I?" he asked, very interested now. Without attention he put his pistol away in a trouser pocket. Bergstrom brushed the question aside with one hand. "Your name makes little difference. You've used many. But you are an idealist. Your justice to the places you visited. By now you're almost a legend among the human worlds. I'd like to talk more with you on that later." While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom pressed his advantage. "One more scene might do it," he said. "Should we try again -- if you trust me, that is?" Zarwell made his decision quickly. "Go ahead," he answered. A LL Zarwell's attention seemed on the cigar he lit as he rode down the escalator, but he surveyed the terminal carefully over the rim of his hand. He spied no suspicious loungers. Behind the escalator he groped along the floor beneath the lockers until he found his key. The briefcase was under his arm a minute later. In the basement lave he put a coin in the pay slot of a private compartment and went in. As he zipped open the briefcase he surveyed his features in the mirror. A small muscle at the comer of one eye twitched spasmodically. One cheek wore a frozen quarter smile. Thirty-six hours under the paralysis was longer than advisable. The muscles should be rested at least every twenty hours. Fortunately his natural features would serve as an adequate disguise now. He adjusted the ring setting on the pistol-shaped instrument that he took from his case, and carefully rayed several small areas of his face, loosening muscles that had been tight too long. He sighed gratefully when he finished, massaging his cheeks and forehead with considerable pleasure. Another glance in the mirror satisfied him with the changes that had been made. He turned to his briefcase again and exchanged the gun for a small syringe, which he pushed into a trouser pocket, and a singleedged razor blade. Removing his fiber-cloth jacket he slashed it into strips with the razor blade and flushed it down the disposal bowl. With the sleeves of his blouse rolled up he had the appearance of a typical workman as he strolled from the compartment. Back at the locker he replaced the briefcase and, with a wad of gum, glued the key to the bottom of the locker frame. One step more. Taking the syringe from his pocket, he plunged the needle into his forearm and tossed the instrument down a waste chute. He took three more steps and paused uncertainly. When he looked about him it was with the expression of a man waking from a vivid dream. V murmured admiringly. "You had your mind already preconditioned for the shot. But why would you deliberately give yourself amnesia?" "What better disguise than to believe the part you're playing?" "A good man must have done that job on your mind," Bergstrom commented. "I'd have hesitated to try it myself. It must have taken a lot of trust on your part." "Trust and money," Zarwell said drily. "Your memory's back then?" Zarwell nodded. "I'm glad to hear that," Bergstrom assured him. "Now that you're well again I'd like to introduce you to a man named Vernon Johnson. This world..." Zarwell stopped him with an upraised hand. "Good God, man, can't you see the reason for all this? I'm tired. I'm trying to quit." "Quit?" Bergstrom did not quite follow him. "It started on my home colony," Zarwell explained listlessly. "A gang of hoods had taken over the government. I helped organize a movement to get them out. There was some bloodshed, but it went quite well. Several months later an unofficial envoy from another world asked several of us to give them a hand on the same kind of job. The political conditions there were rotten. We went with him. Again we were successful. It seems I have a kind of genius for that sort of thing." He stretched out his legs and regarded them thoughtfully. "I learned then the truth of Russell's saying: 'When the oppressed win their freedom they are as oppressive as their former masters.' When they went bad, I opposed them. This time I failed. But I escaped again. I have quite a talent for that also. "I'm not a professional dogooder." Zarwell's tone appealed to Bergstrom for understanding. "I have only a normal man's indignation at injustice. And now I've done my share. Yet, wherever I go, the word eventually gets out, and I'm right back in a fight again. It's like the proverbial monkey on my back. I can't get rid of it." He rose. "That disguise and memory planting were supposed to get me out of it. I should have known it wouldn't work. But this time I'm not going to be drawn back in! You and your Vernon Johnson can do your own revolting. I'm through!" Bergstrom did not argue as he left.- well from his flat the next day -- a legal holiday on St Martin's. At a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered in the shadow of an adjacent building watching workmen drilling an excavation for a new structure. When a man strolled to his side and stood watching the workmen, he was not surprised. He waited for the other to speak. "I'd like to talk to you, if you can spare a few minutes," the stranger said. Zarwell turned and studied the man without answering. He wa medium tall, with the body of an athlete, though perhaps ten year beyond the age of sports. He had a manner of contained energy. "You're Johnson?" he asked. The man nodded. Zarwell tried to feel the anger he wanted to feel, but somehow it would not come. "We have nothing to talk about," was the best he could manage. "Then will you just listen? After, I'll leave -- if you tell me to." Against his will he found himself liking the man, and wanting at least to be courteous. He inclined his head toward a curb wastebox 'with a flat top. "Should we sit?" Johnson smiled agreeably and they walked over to the box and sat down. "When this colony was first founded," Johnson began without preamble, "the administrative body was a governor, and a council of twelve. Their successors were to be elected biennially. At first they were. Then things changed. We haven't had an election now in the last twenty-three years. St. Martin's is beginning to prosper. Yet the only ones receiving the benefits are the rulers. The citizens work twelve hours a day. They are poorly house, poorly fed, poorly clothed. They..." Zarwell found himself not listening as Johnson's voice went on. The story was always the same. But why did they always try to drag him into their troubles? Why hadn't he chosen some other world on which to hide? The last question prompted a new thought. Just why had he chosen St. Martin's? Was it only a coincidence? Or had he, subconciously at least, picked this particular world? He had always subject of glib persuaders... but mightn't some inner compulsion of his own have put the monkey on his back? "... and we need your help." Johnson had finished his speech. Zarwell gazed up at the bright sky. He pulled in a long breath, and let it out in a sigh. "What are your plans so far?" he asked wearily. Mars had gifts to offer and... Earth had muck in return -- if viaa HB K : ',:p delivery could be arranged! K room, meditating. From outside the door he caught a thought wave equivalent to a knock, and, glancing at the door, he willed it to slide open. It opened. "Enter, my friend," he said. He could have projected the idea telepathically; but with only two persons present, speech was more polite. Ejon Khee entered. "You are up late tonight, my leader," he said. "Yes, Khee. Within an hour the Earth rocket is due to land, and I wish to see it. Yes, I know, it will land a thousand miles away, if their calculations are correct. Beyond the horizon. But if it lands even twice that far the flash of the atomic explosion should be visible. And I have waited long for first contact. For even though no Earthman will be on that rocket, it will still be first contact -- for them. Of course our telepath teams have been reading their thoughts for many centuries, but -- this will be the first physical contact between Mars and Earth." Khee made himself comfortable on one of the low chairs. "True," he said. "I have not followed recent reports too closely, though. Why are they using an atomic warhead? I know they suppose our planet is uninhabited, but still -- " "They will watch the flash through their lunar telescopes and get a -- what do they call it? -- a spectroscopic analysis. That will tell them more than they know now (or think they know; much of it is erroneous) about the atmosphere of our planet and the composition of its surface. It is -- call it a sighting shot, Khee. They'll be here in person within a few oppositions. And then-" Mars was holding out, waiting for Earth to come. What was left of Mars, that is; this one small city of about nine hundred beings. The civilization of Mars was older than that of Earth, but it was a dying one. This was what remained of it: one city, nine hundred people. They were waiting for Earth to make contact, for a selfish reason and for an unselfish one. direction from that of Earth. It had developed no important knowledge of the physical sciences, no technology. But it had developed social sciences to the point where there had not been a single crime, let alone a war, on Mars for fifty thousand years. And it had developed fully the parapsychological sciences of the mind, which Earth was just beginning to discover. Mars could teach Earth much. How to avoid crime and war to begin with. Beyond those simple things lay telepathy, telekinesis, empathy ,... And Earth would, Mars hoped, teach them something even more valuable to Mars: how, by science and technology -- which it was too late for Mars to develop now, even if they had the type of minds which would enable them to develop these things -- to restore and rehabilitate a dying planet, so that an otherwise dying race might live and multiply again. Each planet would gain greatly, and neither would lose. And tonight was the night when Earth would make its first sighting shot. Its next shot, a rocket containing Earthmen, or at least an Earthman, would be at the next opposition, two Earth years, or roughly four Martian years, hence. The Martians knew this, because their teams of telepaths were able to catch at least some of the thoughts of Earthmen, enough to know their plans. Unfortunately, at that distance, the connection was one-way. Mars could not ask Earth to hurry its program. Or tell Earth scientists the facts about Mars' composition and atmosphere which would have made this preliminary shot unnecessary. Tonight Ry, the leader (as nearly as the Martian word can be translated), and Khee, his administrative assistant and closest friend sat and meditated together until the time was near. Then they drank a toast to the future -- in a beverage based on menthol, which had the same effect on Martians as alcohol on Earthmen -- and climbed to the roof of the building in which they had been sitting. They watched toward the north, where the rocket should land. The stars shone brilliantly and unwinkingly through the atmosphere.  N Observatory No. I on Earth's moon, Rog Everett, his eye at the eyepiece of the spotter scope, said triumphantly, "Thar she blew, films are developed, we'll know the score on that old planet Mars." He straightened up -- there'd be no more to see now -- and he and ly. It was an historical occasion. "Hope it didn't kill anybody. Any Martians, that is. Rog, did it hit dead center in Syrtis Major?" "Near as matters. I'd say it was maybe a thousand miles off, to the south. And that's damn close on a you really think there are any Martians?" then said, "No." He was right. # Star Shelf Putnam's Sons, N. Y., # science fiction is tied inexorably to the era in which it is written, and this story could no more have been done a generation ago than it could have avoided being written now. Its frightful weapons exist. What is done a generation ago than it could speculation -- but whether Chevalier's remorsely logical speculation is considered believable is the real answer to the deadliest of questions: has so much hindsight improved this generation's foresight Chevalier tests smug replie with an acid that instantly dis solves self-delusion. His centre character is a physicist, an arden fellow-traveler -- and a genius. Th military needs him to coordinat the super-bomb project. His polit cal background must be white washed pure. Impossible? Was the real-lif example that the story parallel impossible? No, Chevalier's character is a too possible, and so is what happen to him. He becomes convinced tha only he can save the world fror atomic suicide. Where that belief leads to has the shattering inevitability of true tragedy, the personal tragedy of men whose compromises with principle beget ever more compromises -- the end-product of the principle that the end justifies the means. Rating :    :i!  Vernon. Avalon Books, N. Y. S#. and intrigue, this book unfortunately goes off in the author's face. Vernon's future world is inventive in the pattern set by Hugo been averted by the perfection of the force screen, available in every size, from personal to the large, economy continent-size which enables nations to hide and to pull in the holes after them. After years of stalemate, America has developed robots that can pass as human, and the "Equalizer," the ultimate force-screen penetrant. The plot is built on the theft of the plans by a rogue robot -- which could not have had access to the plans or stolen them in the first place. Rating:   V# Oberth. Harper and Bros., N. Y # above-surface flight will be out of the question, and immense crevasses may make surface travel equally unfeasible. Prof. Oberth, at least godfather if not father of rocket flight, has put his still fertile brain to work on the problem and proposes a unipedal vehicle that can do a bit of both. First offered in his recent Man Into Space, Moon Car carries these thoughts into design and construction -- two vital steps closer to field tests on the Moon itself. Crown Publishers, N. Y., # to wait for the creator of Donovan's Brain to put typewriter to paper. Skyport is a delight to read -- so much so that one could almost wish Siodmak were not so successful a Hollywood writer-director. The skyport itself is the fictional evolution of Wernher von Braun's wheel-like space station, # miles up, so that it revolves orbitwise in two hours. The deluxespace-hotel idea, brainchild of physicist Lee Powers, requires considerable selling to the corporate giants necessary to finance and erect such a structure. Once sold, the financial maneuverings and machinations become as hazardous to the project as the technical problems. The novel's one weak point is the assumption that the U. S. would permit the first space station to be a purely civilian venture, put up there as the latest link of the Wharton hotel chain. If you can get past that, however, the superlatively imaginative wedding of finance and science engineered by Siodmak will repay your charity tenfold. Rating: i  # by Leonard Wibberley. G. P. Putnam's Sons, N, Y S# numerous fictional revivals, in marked contrast to his liege, Arthur Pendragon. As chronicler of their joint return, Wibberley, pastmaster of rib-tickling irony, seemed nothing short of ideal. But almost all the provocative situations conjured up by him bewilderingly remain unexplored. The yarn concerns itself with poor Princess Pamela, heiress to the throne of England, and her attempt to run away from her velvet prison. She inveigles a parttime truckdriver, an American Arthurian student, into helping her escape from Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, all this happens after a most promising opening in which an English ditchdigger is accused of poaching rabbits on the last scrap of land owned by a destitute baronet. The baronet's permission, granted two hours after his death, is being challenged in a court of law. King Arthur, summoned by the ditchdigger and the ghost of Sir Timothy, embarks on a Don Quixote quest via ancient Rolls Royce for the sword Excalibur. If only Princess Pam had stayed in her nice, cool palace, what a heart-warming yarn this might have been! Rating :    and Bros., N. Y., # phenomenal: he blueprints not a single fantastic invention. Instead, he follows the threads of sociological trends into the immediate future, for his concern is with tomorrow, not the Millenium. His subjects -- Working Wives, Senior Citizens, Dwindling Families, Increased Leisure, The Schooled Generation, etc. -- are objects of gently humorous profundity. by Manly Wade Wellman. Avalon Books, N. y.,# Wellman offered tlie then startling hypothesis that it is possible to harass an overwhelming enemy into defeat by the adoption of merciless nuisance tactics. A tragically few short years later, his theory was put to practical test in Occupied France, Norway, Yugoslavia, Russia and the Philippines. Although in no instance was the conqueror ousted, logistic disruption laid the occupiers open to easier invasion. Wellman's yarn suffers from defects common to the period -- varicolored "rays" and an embarrassing love story. As an adventure yarn, though, it stands quite succuessfully on its own, as well as having the added interest engendered by any prototype. Rating:    Vi and Schuster, N. Y., # how van Vogt burst into SF prominence with his exceptional stories of alien intelligences back in the '#s. Since then, few of his yarns have escaped the overabundance of tortouous plotting that characterizes his major works. Among these few are several that appeared sporadically in Astounding during Decade Forty. They have been assembled here into novel form without undue distortion and serve as a good example of how van Vogt writes when not doing wheel-within-wheel plotting. Rulls, wormlike monstrosities, can control light vibrations to enable themselves to masquerade as humans. Fantastic safeguards must be exercised and fantastic situations and monsters arise until the war's final resolution. Rating :    V # Dr. W ember von Braun and Willy Ley. Vox Productions, Inc., N. Y. nothing but gab for four whole sides of two LP disks and still succeed in mesmerizing the listener into rapt attention, a considerable accomplishment has been achieved. Von Braun and Ley bat the breeze back and forth in lively fashion and in the doing give the eavesdropper a basic fill-in on virtually all the inside story of rocket development in our generation. And who knows better than these two charter members of the old German Interplanetary Society? A don't-miss item. kell and Orchestra. Imperial Records, Inc., Hollywood spinning anyway, I recommend trying this platter of interesting effects combined with some enjoyable genuine music. Sampling: Weightless Blues, Asteroid Hop, Moonlight Cha-cha-cha. athan N. Leonard. World Publishing Co., Cleveland  N. Y., # TO MY mind, there is no finer single volume suitable to serve as an introduction to science in general and to the study of mankind in particular. The excellent and numerous illustrations are certain to arouse curiosity that the wellintegrated text will stimulate and channel. Ages # and up. Tannenbaum and Myra Stillman. Whittlesey House, N. Y., # the few specimens to date of Homo Genius. It is almost inconceivable that his amazing mind formulated the Theory of Optics, Universal Gravitation, the Three Laws of Motion and the Calculus -- all before he reached the age of twentyfive. The authors' work is admirably documented and yet contains enough personal trivia to breathe humanity into a charter member of Mankind's All-Star Team. For any age, but teen-agers especially. dre Norton. World Publishing Co, Cleveland  N. Y., # make a good juvenile -- or a good adult book, for that matter -- are present in full measure in Galactic Derelict. It suffers not at all in being a sequel to Miss Norton's excellent Time Traders. The U. S. Army's race with the Russians through and against Time remains her background. Both search for abandoned wrecks of a race that had interstellar travel back in Man's infancy. Travis Fox, young Apache, joins Ross Murdock and Dr. Gordon Ashe, time agents of Trader, in attempting the transfer, intact, of an alien ship through # years to the present. Inadvertently, controls are activated and the group is launched on an involuntary galactic tour. Their efforts to return to Here and Now constitute a top-notch science-adventure yarn. Rating (for youngsters) :       A ccording to this morning's paper, Arthur Penfold stands a good chance of being in the next Honours List. Sir Arthur -- and I knew him when he wasa nobody, when he was a third-rate putterer, working in the electronic back-room laboratory research of Ferdinand's Radio and Television. We had a lot in common, he and I, that day we met. He'd had a bright idea, and fumbled it, and he had been sacked. The same thing had happened to me. He, having no idea what to do next, had gravitated to a little pub at the end of the road where he had spent most of his working life. I had followed my nose there, too -- and there the resemblance ends. Ideas are my stock in trade, and I had plenty of ideas what to do next. My search for beer was to drown a strong sense of injustice. Who wouldn't? I mean, if you'd The saddest words of all are these: I work my head to the bone and he takes the glory! uncorked a twenty-four-carat, jeweled-in-every-hole idea, and seen someone else muff it, like a mutton head -- and then been blamed for the whole thing -- wouldn't you? It's bad enough when a cracker of an idea goes sour, but to have him blame me for it! "You're fired!" Robel had said. "You're an idea man. You should have thought of this and you didn't. You're fired!" As if I could foresee everything! All right, I am an idea man, and don't ever let anybody sell you the idea that ideas sell themselves -- they don't. That old line about building a better mousetrap just isn't so. Getting ideas is tough. Getting them sold, at a profit, is what separates the dreamers from the doers. And getting blamed for somebody else's goof -- that was the end! So I was boiling. There's six foot three of me, square, and none of it fat, so, when I boil, it looks sort of scary. Not that I was thinking of anything like that when I shoved my way into this pub. I was making resolutions. Never again, I thought. Next time I get a good idea, I'll push it, promote it, and profit from it myself. And I ran into Penfold, never dreaming that there was my next time waiting for me, I could cry, just thinking of it. Penfold the magnificent, the famous, the lion of the day -- and I had it all right in my hand, and I -- idea man! I" T began, as I suppose all such things do, in the most banal way. Robel had sent for me, to give me my weekly pep talk. George Robel, my boss -- Robel's Rib Ticklers, The Famous Firm for Fun, jokes and jests, gags and gadgets for all occasions -- a household word. George Robel, a fat and balding Napoleon type, employed four idea men. We knew of each other, but never met. We avoided each other like the plague, scared of plagiarism. And he gave each one of us a going over once a week. "Ah, Bright!" he said, from behind his desk. "We haven't been very Bright, this week, have we, Bright? We will have to do much better, won't we, otherwise our prospects won't be very Bright, will they?" And so on, with all the variations. I think it was sheer selfdefense against the cracks about my name which made me become an expert on ideas in the first place. I'm often asked, "Where do you get your ideas from?" -- and I could quote a well-known author on that. "If I knew that," he said, "I'd go back for more!" But you can't talk like that to your employer. So I just let him talk himself dry. Coming out, I intercepted a knowing sneer from the girl in the outer office. "Well, well, Mr. Bright," she cooed nastily. "Been neglecting your homework, again?" I stopped and leaned on her desk. "When I'm around you, Joyce, honey," I told her, "there's only one kind of homework I can think of!" This was nasty of me, because she was a girl with almost too much of everything -- and terribly self-conscio"s about it. "Surely," she snapped right back, "you can't mean that? Not me, the girl who's all shape and no brains -- remember?" Which was fair. As I said, having ideas is not enough. Joyce had one hundred per cent perfect eidetic recall. Let her see or hear a thing just once and she had it for always. So her head must have been as full of ideas as her dress was full of her -- but she had no idea what to do with them. She didn't have the wit to use her talents, even, until I sold her to Robel as a cheap, efficient and mobile filing cabinet. That was just one of my ideas which had paid off, and for which he was grateful for a whole week. And I had made rude references to her brain-power from time to time since. "Who cares about what's inside?" I leered, keeping the gag rolling. "With what you've got on the outside, it wouldn't matter if you were hollow -- " And it happened -- a beautiful, big, bright idea -- just like that! I was all on edge as I turned and staggered back into Robel's office. "Get out!" he said. "Go back to work. I'm busy!" "I've go it!" I mumbled dazedly, "Got a cracker of an idea -- " "Stay in!" he said in exactly the same tone. "Sit down. There. Talk!" "Pinups!" I said, and his bushy eyebrows went up. "Life-size!" I added, and the brows lowered again. "Been done," he snorted, but I hadn't finished yet. "Inflatable -- plastic -- balloons?" H E took his pudgy hands off the desk and sat quite still. I could see the glow spreading over him. "By George, Bright, I think you have something there!" he said, and shut his eyes. "Perfectly detailed copies, colored, life-size -- and inflatable -- fold away in a drawer, pack flat for mail orders -- sounds right. Who should we model?" He was fast, once he started, but I was just ahead of him there. "Tina Teton," I suggested, "very up and coming, out to make herself a name, but not in the star class yet. Known but not famous, if you wouldn't cost too much." You see what I mean? You have to sell an idea. I knew that Robel went for the risque so long as it wasn't risky, so I had him from that angle. Robel has a string oi items that never get in any catalogues. The grapevine sells them, just as it would sell this. Take, for instance, an item I'll bet you never saw in print, a very fashionable pair of unmentionables, complete with frills and lace -- the elastic is guaranteed to hold up for one hour -- then body heat does something to the formula, and you get your kicks. That can be bought, if you know how, and plenty people do, it seems. And they'd be the ones who'd go for this, so I knew Robel would like it. But, for my sins, I also knew him as a hard man with the pennies. Thus Tina Teton. "All right!" Robel said briskly. "I'll handle this. Just a minute." He flipped his desk buzzer. "Joyce, come in here!" This was routine. I would recite the gist of my idea to her; she would blink, think, then tell me where and when she'd seen, heard or read of it before; I would hate her intestines, and go away to try again. But not this time. "It's new to me," she told him. For me, she added, "Trust you to think up a disgusting idea like that." "You're my inspiration," I told her, and, as another spark lit up, I said, "See here, Mr. Robel -- it might be a lot cheaper if you only had to get Tina Teton's name and maybe her head. Joyce, here, could model the body -- !" That repaid me tor all the dirty cracks, and a bit over. The next few weeks were hectic. Joyce was livid when she found that she had to be smothered in plaster, and broken out, like a chicken from its shell. She screamed so loud that Robel actually gave her a percentage of the net profit to shut up. I was highly unpopular around the office, but that was no change. " had a thousand units from the first trial run and were standing by for the flood. We sold four. Six weeks later, the number had swelled to nine, and I was in the office again. I guessed what for, and I had insurance -- an idea I'd been hoarding just for some such moment. It was a string of cutplastic jewels with a miniature light inside each one, and a hearing-aid battery built into the clasp. With a bi-metallic "flasher" to make it light up and switch off automatically -- a novelty -- no girl with any taste would be seen dead with one, but Robel didh't sell to that kind, anyway. It softened his anger a little -- but not much. "A flop," he growled. "You and your life-size balloons. Not so Bright, after all -- " He had one standing by his desk as he spoke, and, standing as close as that to it, I didn't wonder nobody wanted to buy. It scared me, somehow. With a picture on the wall, you know it's a picture. But this thing was so real you could damn near see it breathe. I was mumbling something about being sorry, which I wasn't, when one of our peddlers came in, and I was privileged to listen in on the conversation. He made a big thing out of the hard work he'd put in, trying to sell the balloons -- and something else. "One chap," he said, "seemed interested in the process -- the idea itself. I think he has the notion that with a change here and there, plus a bit of know-how, he might be able to sell it -- " "Better than we can, eh?" "I doubt it, Mr. Robel, but he was interested in buying the rights." "Price?" "Well, he's only a small man -- he suggested five hundred." "Double -- in cash." The telephone came into play, and there was some terse bargaining. In the end, we lost Tina Teton, in effigy, for seven hundred and fifty pounds, and Robel was able to use one of his precious stock of smiles. "I forgive you, Bright," he said. "Apparently there are others who aren't very bright either!" One month later, to the day, the blow fell. Braced for my routine dressing-down, because a man can't have new ideas all the time, I entered the office, and Robel practically hit me in the face with a copy of a trade journal. This not-very-bright "small" man had taken our idea -- my idea -- and given it a golden twist. Using a quick-setting plastic and a sprayon, peel-off technique, he was producing and supplying -- by the thousand -- shop-window dummies! It was so obvious I could have kicked myself. The rag trade was falling over itself to get them -- all sizes and colorings and attitudes -- lifelike, easy to store, easy to handle, and cheap. You glued a pair of shoes to a heavy base, inserted the feet before inflating, and they stood steady enough to wear clothes. There was even a mention of future developments -- a personal-copy service, for do-it-yourself dressmaking. This guy had thought of everything. Robel was livid in a deadly, cold way. "You're fired!" he said. "You're an idea man. You should have thought of this and you didn't. You're fired!" # ND that was how I came to be at the bar of the Dog and Pullet on a Friday afternoon -- and met Penfold. If there'd been anyone else in the place, I'd never have noticed him. He was that sort of person then. Small, ineffectual, helpless-looking, and a mumbler. I bet that's all changed now, but at the time I was in no mood to care. "Have one on me, friend," I told him. "Whatever it is, have another. Join me in celebrating my emancipation from the yoke of servitude. A slave no longer, Billy Bright now works for Billy Bright!" "Lost your job?" he asked dully. "Me, too -- just been sacked." "Makes two of us. What did you do?" "Oh, nothing much." He gloomed into his glass. "You might say I had an idea -- and my chief liked the sound of it -- so I worked on it -- and it didn't turn out the way he expected -- so he gave me the sack." "But that's my story," I marveled. "Word for word -- exactly what fate did to me. That's what it is -- Kismet." My intuition was into top gear, straight off. I knew, somehow, that this was fate's repayment for the dirty deal I'd just been handed. I escorted him to a table, sat him down and bade him tell all. "It's something I've been working on, on my own time, for more than ten years," he mumbled. "About a year ago I began to get some interesting results, so I went to Mr. Ferdinand, my chief, and told him, and he was impressed." He took time out to tell me that he was an electronics technologist, working for Ferdinands, that he spent all his spare time in his back room, fiddling about on a theory. I was practically foaming at the mouth by the time I interrupted. "What was the idea, for heaven's sake?" "Matter transmission," he said timidly, as if he expected me to throw something at him. I didn't. I was too busy coughing back the part of my drink that had gone down the wrong way. "Matter transmission?" I choked. "Sending material objects by radio waves?" "You know about it, then?" "Man, it's as old as the hills!" "Oh." He looked quite worried. "I didn't know it had been done." "Outside the pages of fiction, Arthur," I told him sorrowfully, "it has not, nor ever will be. I don't wonder your boss gave you the heave-ho, if that is what you were trying to sell him. Matter transmission, hah!" I sat there shaking my head and wondering what had gone wrong with the old "feel," that it could let me in for a nut like this. "But I did it!" he insisted. "That is, I did it -- in a sort of a way. Mr. Ferdinand -- he was like you, at first -- until I showed him some of my results, and figures -- and then he was different. 'Penfold,' he said to me, 'I believe you might have something there. You carry on with it -- on your own time, of course -- but work on it!' So I did. And this morning I went to see him with my very latest results -- " "And he shot you out on your ear -- for perfecting a method of matter transmission?" wasn't perfect -- not to his way of thinking. He expected me to be able to transmit solid objects -- " "Hold it, now," I interrupted again. "That's what I would have expected, too. You mean your gadget won't -- " "Of course not." "Then what the hell... Pardon me. What does it transmit?" "Matter, of course!" he said. "That's all any sane person would expect!" He was beginning to boil now. "Take this glass, for instance. Its shape is the end result of a number of factors -- structural stresses, chemical bonds, surface tension -- forming a three-dimensional spatial pattern. None of that is electrical, so how can you expect to transmit it?" "Damned if I know," I confessed. "You're the genuis. What do you send?" 'Molecules, of course," he said witheringly, as if I should have known that for myself. "The applied field breaks down the material form into its elementary molecules -- dispersing all the mechanico-chemical components -- and then the molecules, which are purely electronic values, are converted into radio-type patterns. These are transmitted, and received, reconverted, in the receiving unit. You see?" "So," I said, "if you shoved this glass into your gadget, it would come out at the other end as a heap of silica and stuff?" "That's right." He nodded. "Only I'd have to powder the glass first. My apparatus doesn't develop a field strong enough to break down a structure as rigid as this." "That's a pity." I put down the glass. "For a moment there, I thought you had maybe the makings of a distintegrator." 'What's a disintegrator?" "You're strictly a one-idea man, aren't you, Arthur? A disintegrator is something you don't see which makes something you do see into something you don't see. See?" He didn't, of course, and I was wasting my time. "But," I went on to point out, "your gadget is crazier than that. Who'd want to send a pinch of powder anywhere?" "That was Mr. Ferdinand's complaint," he mumbled sorrowfully. "He was expecting something quite different -- and he used the same words. 'Pinch of dust!' he said. 'What's the use of that? I can do better with ordinary television. At least I can send and receive a recognizable picture!' So we got into an argument and he sacked me." And it happened! Again! A real H-bomb of an idea this time -- so big that it scared me stiff, and all my brakes went on full. "Arthur," I said very softly. "Arthur Penfold, I think I've got the solution to your problem, but I want to be absolutely sure before I get your hopes up. Let me ask a few questions. First, do you still have the gadget? I mean, in full working order -- and it's all yours -- not made of spare parts from the firm, or anything like that?" H E went a shade of pink that would have alarmed a doctor. "Damn right it's all mine, and in working order! I have it at home, in my back room, just as Mr. Ferdinand saw it! Why?" "And I can see it with my own eyes?" I asked urgently. "I don't see why not." He began to catch something of the fever that was burning me. "I say, do you think there's anything important about it? Mr. Ferdinand didn't seem to think very much of it-" "That's what I'm counting on, Arthur. You see, I think I have the order of events right this time. Thisis a stupendous idea and somebody else has had first crack at it and slipped up -- so it's my turn to come in second and reap the harvest. This time it can't go wrong!" He looked dubious. "I don't see what's so wonderful about it. An interesting phenomenon, yes -- and possible developments, perhaps -- but what's your bright idea -- er, I beg your pardon. No offense, I hope?" "Think nothing of it." I brushed it to one side. "I'm used to that. The idea? It's big -- biggest thing I ever fell into, but this time I'm going to play it carefully. This time I'm digging out the snags first, if there are any -- and that's all I'm going to say until I've actually seen this thing with my own two eyes." So we went, by bus, and I saw. His stuff was all scrambled about, crazily, in a stuffy back room that was a death trap of looping wires, naked terminals, milk bottles by the dozen, and several Pisa-like stacks of slices of stale bread. Penfold, with apologies, explained that he used milk bottles as collector units, because they were all of a standard size, and bread as his experimental transmission material because it was cheap, handy and the right kind of texture. And he showed me. I'm no genius at electronics, but you have to know a smattering in my line, so I could recognize transformers and coils -- some really tortuous ones, in vacuum tubes -- and a mess of wiring that tangled my eyes just to look at. But the thing that really mattered -- the focal point, as it were -- was on the end of the bench, and it looked exactly like an old-fashioned fishbowl. It was a fishbowl, with a copper-wire tripod inside, and some trimmings, connected to the rest of the hookup. "Watch!" he said, switching things on here and there. After a few clicks and a hum or two, I saw a bright blue haze spread itself like a little table cloth on the tripod. He took a slice of bread and crumbled it into the bowl, and it fizzed a little, then lay in a thin layer, on the blue haze. And that was that. "It hasn't gone anywhere," I observed, and he snorted. "Of course it hasn't. There isn't anywhere for it to go!" "But in all the stories, it just vanishes -- and there it is, presto, in the cabinet thing. Where's your cabinet?" "Fiction! Look here -- " There was quite a transformation in Arthur now. This was his stamping ground and he was thoroughly disgusted with my ignorance. "Let me make this quite clear, Bright. This is not radio, although analogous to it in many ways -- frequency and wave-length characteristics, for instance. But in other ways it resembles ordinary, everyday electric current..." TT E launched into a highly technical exposition, which didn't do anything for me at all, and it must have showed on my face, because, after a few minutes, he switched off. "Oh, dear," he sighed. "Look, suppose I took a length of insulated wire, bared one end, and stuck it in that socket there -- what would happen?" "There would be a big blue flash and all the lights would go out?" "No! Good gracious, don't you know anything? Nothing would happen -- nothing at all -- until I grounded the other end. The juice must have somewhere to go. It's the same with this. The molecular substance cannot go anywhere until I provide it with a ground." He was talking to me like a child now, which was a laugh, as there was enough of me to make four of him, easy -- but I didn't mind. I was watching what he did. He took a dinky little gadget out of a drawer and fitted it on to the top of a milk bottle. It looked like shiny black bakelite, like a collar, and there was a fine wire grid across the hole, and a button on the side. "Now watch!" he said, and pressed the button. There was a quiet sizzle, and the bottle was about one-third full of a fine white mist. It began to settle. And die bread crumbs had gone from the fish bowl, from one end of the bench to the other, without any visible connection. All of six feet. It looked all right. But I was cautious. "I'd like to see that again " I told him. Then I was in trouble. I wanted to have the "go" and the "come back" effects properly separated, and to watch them both at the same time. It couldn't be done. In the end, I had to compromise. I put the bread crumbs in by myself, and I held the milk bottle, and switched on the collector by myself -- with him by my side all the time -- and it still worked. Still with my brakes on, I asked, "But how do you know it will work with anything else? Have you tried?' "What did you have in mind?" he asked. "A piece of coal, for instance." Well, he looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, but we did it. Chunk of coal in there -- black haze of molecular carbon and stuff out here, among the bread powder. I began to ache with the effort to hold back my enthusiasm. This was it. all right. I couldn't find a thing wrong with it. But hold on a bit... "How about liquids?" I demanded, and he was puzzled for a minute. "Shouldn't make any difference," he decided, and came back with a jug of water. I came right up on my toes with fright as he sloshed about half a pint into the bowl, all over that power-haze -- but nothing happened. It just lay there, in mid-air, quietly. Before I could get my breath back, he said, "We can try it at a slightly longer range, if you like. I have only a limited power source, but it should carry as far as the next room, at least." And he marched out of his clutter, with me hot-footing after him. Standing in, his little bed-sitting room, I thought of that power angle. "That's a point!" I said. "It uses a hell of a lot of wattage, doesn't it?" " snag somewhere -- it was too good. But he shook his head gently. "No. So far as I can detect, there is almost no power drain on the transmission. There is a hefty power investment in setting up the original field, of course, but it is all returned when the field is broken down again. As a matter of fact, that was one of my biggest troubles. I had no way of handling all that return current -- " "Never mind," I told him. "Not now -- I can't bear it. Just let me try this last experiment." I grabbed the bottle from him and pressed the button. Immediately, I had a bottle full of grayblack mud, which filled up and lifted off the collector collar. It fizzed down to the floor, jetting a spurt of fine mist, and I stood there with the filthy stuff drooling down over my hands -- and I gloated. He began to go off excitedly about something, and it was quite a while before I realized just what. "The hell with the carpet, man!" I cried. "What does a carpet matter when you have the world in your lap? Wealth, fame, prestige, power -- all shall be yours, Arthur! Just let me handle this and you'll be a hero of science -- a Nobel Prize-winner -- an immortal!" But he kept right on about that lousy carpet, and what his landlady would say, and it took me a lot of work to get him to sit down and listen -- and to promise, first, that he would let me be the master mind in charge. Then I wrapped it all up in one word and gave it to him: Rockets! Now it was his turn to look blank and for me to feel superior, but I hadn't time for that. I had to get it across to him -- to sell it. "Listen, I said. "Preparations are, being made for a manned satellite, and then a Moon trip, a trip to Venus, Mars -- and who's doing it all? America and Russia. Why? Because rocketry is a super-colossal-expensive business. Why is Britain out of it? Because we can't afford it. Do we want to be in on it? Of course we do. Even Royalty has been heard to express some concern because Britain is lagging behind. Isn't that so?" He had to nod there, because it was all true, but he was puzzled. "What does this have to do with rocketry?" he mumbled. "You know what the biggest headache is in rocketry? It's fuel! A rocket just devours fuel -- and it has to lift and carry all its fuel with it, and fuel is weight -- and the more fuel you carry, the more weight you carry, and the more fuel you need to lift the weight, until it takes more fuel to lift the weight of fuel than you have fuel to lift the weight. Are you getting the picture now?" "That part, yes. But what does my -- "This gadget of yours will end that. No need to design for fuel tanks at all any more -- or to allow for the weight of it! You transmit it as required! Can you imagine it? And it's for Britain, boy! This will put us away out in front in the space race. Just wait until the Space Travel Commission hears of this, or the Interplanetary Exploration Board, or the Rocket Experimental Office, or whatever they all it. Just wait -- you'll see their eyes light up!"  great evening, I can tell you. But the weeks that followed were such as try the soul. Would you believe it, there isn't a Space Travel Commission, or an Interplanetary Exploration Board, or anything like it in this benighted country? There isn't even an authorized body for carrying out rocket tests! So far as I could make out, the only people doing anything with rockets are the firework manufacturers. And the civil lawwell, I'd rather not dwell on that, if you don't mind. There was only the military left -- and who wants to tangle with them in any country? But that's what it came to in the end. We were out of money, for one thing. I soon ran through my little pile, and Penfold didn't have much -- we were both out of a job, remember. So I had to go ask Joyce for a loan. I didn't have much hope of her, but she surprised me. She had managed to hang on to her rights and was taking a sizeable percentage of the window-model business. She wouldn't lend money, though. She bought into Penfold instead. And I thought she was stupid! And, at last, the day came. We had kept everything as hush-hush as possible, but you can't kill rumors about such things as the verified and signed experimental transmission of five hundred gallons of fuming nitric acid from one end to the other of a carefully watched and guarded air strip somewhere in the West Country. So we foregathered with a very impressed, and impressive, comoak leaves, eggheads, senior civil servants, and a cabinet minister or two, plus a swarm of experts and consultants -- and Penfold and me. It had been tested and considered and debated ad nauseam, and this was the final formality. The Government was going to buy rights in our very nice baby and nurse it for us. We were made! We all sat ourselves at a long table, ready to work ourselves tired signing a lot of papers. An undersecretary of some kind began serving out sheafs of forms to all and sundry. There was a barrage of rustling, coughing, spectacle-case poppings -- lips moved and twitched silently -- mutterers muttered. Somebody walloped the table with a gavel. We came to order... Then a beefy, red-faced merchant got up, not far from me, with a funny look on his face. "My Lord -- " he said, then coughed. "I beg your pardon -- Mr. Chairman." It was a gaffe, the kind of procedural gaffe you don't hear at a meeting like this, and it had everyone by the ear in a minute. Dead silence. "May I draw attention to page three, second paragraph, of the proposal, wherein there is a definitive description of Mr. Penfold's device?" He hemmed a couple of times, and then read carefully, " -- hum -- humoperating by the transmission of molecular energies between two termini in harmonic correspondence with each others; i.e., matching in frequency and wave length, in a manner analogous with conventional long-wave radio transmission and reception -- " He stopped to clear his throat "I would emphasize the term 'long-wave' -- " You could have cut the quiet with a cleaver. Then he said, "If I may ask -- what about the Heaviside Layer?" It was murder. Because of the Geophysical Year, even I had heard of the Heaviside Layer and Van Allen radiation belts and the like, and I knew that long-wave stuff bounces off -- it doesn't go through. I got a momentary flash of our rocket bellowing up and going phut -- out of juice, just beyond the ionosphere -- and I wanted to die right there. Lord knows why I had taken it for granted that Penfold's stuff was ultra-short-wave, but I had, and so had everybody else, until redface spotted it. T T was the end, of course. All over. I believe they shooed us out gently. I'm not too sure. I was too ruined, mentally, to take much notice. The next clear memory I have is of Penfold and me slumped in a little pub, just the other side of Admiralty Arch, wondering what had hit us. The way Penfold was looking at me, I could see that it was going to happen again. It was going to be all my fault. But just as he was drawing a big breath, ready to let fly, we were interrupted by a tall, thin guy, with a hairline mustache, slick hair, and the kind of suit you see only in Bond Street ads. "May I join you?" he asked, and sat, all in one motion. "I was a member of that committee. I'm sorry it all came to nothing. It must have been a severe blow for you chaps." "A blow?" Penfold sounded as if he might cry any minute. "The blow happened when I first met him! I should never have listened to a word he said. I don't know what I shall do now. I'm out of a job, broke, in debt, disgraced, my professional reputation ruined -- " "I'm sorry," the stranger said. "Perhaps I can help. My name is Parker. I think your idea has possibilities, Mr. Penfold. Of course, it will need a lot of work done on it, and modifications. I think you need a new partner, perhaps, and some financial backing. I would like to buy in." "Nothing to buy," I told him bitterly. "He says he's in debt. That's a laugh. I'm the one who's gone into hock for this thing!" "Very well," he said. "What would it take to cover your debts, plus a little something for your trouble, in return for your share?" "Well, now -- " I thought, fast. "Five hundred will get me out of the red -- and, say, a thousand for my share?" Penfold's eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets at this. "A thousand pounds?" he screamed. "You have the cheek to ask this man -- ' a perfect stranger -- to give you a thousand pounds for nothing?" But Parker wasn't paying him any attention. He was busy with a very nice-looking cheque book. I had one little quiver of uncertainty as I put out my hand for that pretty slip of paper -- but it died, and I took it. And I cashed itAnd that's the last I ever saw of Arthur Penfold. That was three years ago. You know the rest. He belongs to the world ifow. Everybody has heard of tjte PenfoldParker Power Pack.   " didn't I remember that cars, lorries, trucks, motorbikes, buses, trains, diesel engines, aircraft and motorboats -- and big liners -- all use fuel? You know how it is now. You hire a Power Pack, with a meter on it -- you clip it on to the fuel feed of your car or whatever -- and you pay what it reads on the meter, the end of the month, into your nearest Penfold-Parker office. There's one in every large town, here and overseas. Pretty soon the only engines with fuel tanks will be those in the museums. Why didn't I think of it? as Durante used to say. For instance, if you live all alone, as I do, you'll know what it is to want to heat up a tin of beans. You have to mess about with a pan, waste time heating up the water. There's no need. Just punch a small hole in the top of the tin, stick a bit of cellophane tape over it, and put the tin on a single flame. When the heat and pressure are right, the tape will burst. Pressure-cooker principle, get me? You don't? You'd rather have a girl like Joyce cook for you? Funny, so did Arthur -- he married her. Now why didn't I think of that?      the best of Galaxy novelets -- with a special plus for Galaxy readers. Edited by One look at the contents tells you that this is a 'must have' book for your permanent SF library -- Richard Matheson's One for the Books; Damon Knight's An Eye for What?; Mark Clifton's A Woman's Place; Alan E. Nourse's Brightside Crossing; F. L. Wallace's Mezzerow Loves Company; Evelyn E. Smith's Once a Greech; L. Sprague de Camp's A Gun for Dinosaur; Edgar Pangborn's The Music Man of Babylon; and -- of course -- Clifford D. Simak's The World that Couldn't Be. # H. L. Gold #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of  Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. young, personable enough, health perfect. Suppose he has all the money he can reasonably, or even unreasonably, use. He is successful in a number of different fields of work in which he is interested. Certainly he has security. Women? Well, maybe not any woman in the world he might want. But still, a very nice, choice selection of a number of the very finest physical specimens. The finest -- and no acute case of puritanism to inhibit his enjoyment. Take all that. Then add to it the positive assurance of continuing youth and vigor, with a solid life expectancy of from # to # more years. Impossible? Well -- just suppose it were all true of someone. A man like that, a man with all those things going for him, you'd figure he would be the happiest man in the world. Wouldn't you? Sure. A man with all that would have to be the happiest -- unless he was crazy. Right? But me, Johnny Barth, I had it I had all of it, just like that. I sure wasn't the happiest man in the world though. And I know I wasn't crazy either. The thing about me was, I wasn't a man. Not exactly. I was a colony. Really. A colony. A settlement. A new but flourishing culture, you might say. Oh, I had the look of Every man wants to see a Garden of Eden. John Barth agreed with his whole heart that he'd rather see than be one sS#pk , # #ar f M v . 'g a man, and the mind and the nerves and the feel of a man too. All the normal parts and equipment. But all of it existed -- and was beautifully kept up, I'll say that -- primarily as a locale, not a man. I was, as I said before, a colony. Sometimes I used to wonder how New England really felt about the Pilgrims. If you think that sounds silly -- perhaps one of these days you won't. THE beginning was some ten years back, on a hunting trip the autumn after I got out of college. That was just before I started working, as far off the bottom as I could talk myself, which was the personnel office in my Uncle John's dry cleaning chain in the city. That wasn't too bad. But I was number four man in the office, so it could have been better, too. Uncle John was a bachelor, which meant he had no daughter I could marry. Anyway, she would have been my cousin. But next best, I figured, was to be on good personal terms with the old bull. This wasn't too hard. Apart from expecting rising young executives to rise and start work no later than #:# a.m., Uncle John was more or less all right. Humor him? Well, every fall he liked to go hunting. So when he asked me to go hunting with him up in the Great Sentries, I knew I was getting along pretty well. I went hunting. The trip was nothing very much. We camped up in the hills. We drank a reasonably good bourbon. We hunted -- if that's the word for it. Me, I'd done my hitch in the Army. I know what a gun is -- and respect it. Uncle John provided our hunting excitement by turning out to be one of the trigger-happy types. His score was two cows, a goat, a couple of other hunters, one possible deer -- and unnumbered shrubs and bushes shot at Luckily he was such a lousy shot that the safest things in the mountains were his targets. Well, no matter. I tried to stay in the second safest place, which was directly behind him. So it was a nice enough trip with no casualties, right up to the last night. We were all set to pack out in the morning when it happened. Maybe you read about the thing at the time. It got a light-hearted play in the papers, the way those things they called it. We were lounging by the campfire after supper and a few good snorts. Uncle John was entertaining himself with a review of some I, to tell the truth, was sort of dozing off. Then, all of a sudden, there was a bright flash of blue-green light and a loud sort of a "zoop-zing" sound. And a sharp, stinging sensation in my thighs. I hollered. I jumped to my feet I looked down, and my pants were peppered with about a dozen little holes like buckshot. I didn't have to drop my pants to know my legs were too. I could feel it. And blood started to ooze. I figured, of course, that Uncle John had finally shot me and I at once looked on the bright side. I would be a cinch for a fast promotion to vice president. But Uncle John swore he hadn't been near a gun. So we guessed some other hunter must have done it, seen what he had done and then prudently ducked. At least no one stepped forward. TT was a moonlight night. With Uncle John helping me we made it the two and a half miles back down the trail to Poxville, where we'd left our car and stuff. We routed out the only doctor in the area, old Doc Grandy . He grumbled, "Hell, boy, a few little hunks o' buckshot like that and you make such a holler. I see a dozen twice's bad as this ever' season. Ought to make you wait till office hours. Well -- hike yourself up on the table there. I'll flip 'em out for you." Which he proceeded to do. If it was a joke to him, it sure wasn't to me, even if they weren't in very deep. Finally he was done. He stood there clucking like an old hen with no family but a brass doorknob. Something didn't seem quite right to him. Uncle John gave me a good belt of the bourbon he'd been thoughtful enough to pack along. "What was it you say hit you, boy?" Doc Grandy wanted to know, reaching absently for the bottle. "Buckshot, I suppose. What was it you just hacked out of me?" "Hah!" He passed the bottle back to Uncle John. "Not like any buckshot I ever saw. Little balls, or shells of metallic stuff all right. But not lead. Peculiar. M-mph. You know what, boy?" "You're mighty liberal with the iodine, I know that. What else?" "You say you saw a big flash of light. Come to think on it, I saw a streak of light up the mountainside about that same time. I was out on the porch. You know, boy, I believe you got something to feel right set up about. I believe you been hit by a meteor. If it weren't -- ha-ha -- pieces of one of them flying saucers you read about." Well, I didn't feel so set up about it, then or ever. But it did turn out he was right. Doc Grandy got a science professor from Eastern State Teachers College there in Poxville to come look. He agreed that they were meteor fragments. The two of them phoned it in to the city papers during a slow week and, all in all, it was a big thing. To them. To me it was nothing much but a pain in the rear. The meteor, interviewed scientists were quoted as saying, must have almost burned up coming through the atmosphere, and disintegrated just before it hit me. Otherwise I'd have been killed. The Poxville professor got very long-winded about the peculiar shape and composition of the pieces, and finally carried off all but one for the college museum. Most likely they're still there. One I kept as a souvenir, which was silly. It wasn't a thing I wanted to remember -- or, as I found later, would ever be able to forget. Anyway, I lost it. All right. That was that and, except for a lingering need to sit on very soft cushions, the end of it. I thought. We went back to town. Uncle John felt almost as guilty about the whole thing as if he had shot me himself and, in November, when he found about old Bert Winginheimer interviewing girl applicants for checker jobs at home in his apartment, I got a nice promotion. happy, successful businessman. And then, not all at once but gradually, a lot of little things developed into problems. They weren't really problems either, exactly. They were puzzles. Nothing big but -- well, it was like I was sort of being made to do, or not do, certain things. Like being pushed in one direction or another. And not necessarily the direction I personally would have picked. LikeWell, one thing was shaving. I always had used an ordinary safety razor -- nicked myself not more than average. It seemed OK to me. Never cared too much for electric razors; it didn't seem to me they shaved as close. But -- I took to using an electric razor now, because I had to. One workday morning I dragged myself to the bathroom of my bachelor apartment to wash and shave. Getting started in the morning was never a pleasure to me. But this time seemed somehow tougher than usual. I lathered my face and put a fresh blade in my old razor. For some reason, I could barely force myself to start. "Come on, Johnny boy!" I told myself. "Let's go!" I made myself take a first stroke with the razor. Man! It burned, like fire. I started another stroke and the burning came before the razor even touched my face. I had to give up. I went down to the office without a shave. That was no good, of course, so at the coffee break I forced myself around the comer to the barber shop. Same thing! I got all lathered up all right, holding myself by force in the chair. But, before the barber could touch the razor to my face, the burning started again. I stopped him. I couldn't take it. And then suddenly the idea came to me that an electric razor would be the solution. It wasn't, actually, just an idea; it was positive knowledge. Somehow I knew an electric razor would do it. I picked one up at the drug store around the corner and took it to the office. Plugged the thing in and went to work. It was fine, as I had known it would be. As close a shave? Well, no. But at least it was a shave. Another thing was my approach to -- or retreat from -- drinking. Not that I ever was a real rummy, but I hadn't been one to drag my feet at a party. Now I got so moderate it hardly seemed worth bothering with at all. I could only take three or four drinks, and that only about once a week. The first time I had that feeling I should quit after four, I tried just one -- or two -- more. At the first sip of number five, I thought the top of my head would blast off. Four was the limit. Rigidly enforced. All that winter, things like that kept coming up. I couldn't drink more than so much coffee. Had to take it easy on smoking. Gave up ice skating -- all of a sudden the cold bothered me. Stay up late nights and chase around? No more; I could hardly hold my eyes open after ten. That's the way it went. I had these feelings, compulsions actually. I couldn't control them. I couldn't go against them. If I did, I would suffer for it. True, I had to admit that probably all these things were really good for me. But it got to where everything I did was something that was good for me -- and that was bad. Hell, it isn't natural for a young fellow just out of college to live like a fussy old man of seventy with a grudge against the undertaker. Life became very dull! About the only thing I could say for it was, I was sure healthy. It was the first winter since I could remember that I never caught a cold. A cold? I never once sniffled. My health was perfect; never even so much as a pimple. My dandruff and athlete's foot disappeared. I had a wonderful appetite -- which was lucky, since I didn't have much other recreation left. And I didn't even gain weight! Well, those things were nice enough, true. But were they compensation for the life I was being forced to live? Answer: Uh-uh. I couldn't imagine what was wrong with me. Of course, as it turned out the following spring, I didn't have to imagine it. I was told. II TT was a Friday. After work I stopped by Perry's Place with Fred Schingle and Burk Walters from the main accounting office. I was hoping it would turn out to be one of my nights to have a couple -- but no. I got the message and sat there, more or less sulking, in my half of the booth. Fred and Burk got to arguing about flying saucers. Fred said yes; Burk, no. I stirred my coffee and sat in a neutral corner. "Now look here," said Burk, "you say people have seen things. All right. Maybe some of them have seen things -- weather balloons, shadows, meteors maybe. But space ships? Nonsense." "No nonsense at all. I've seen pictures. And some of the reports are from airline pilots and people like that, who are not fooled by balloons or meteors. They have seen ships, I tell you, ships from outer space. And they are observing us." "Drivel!" "It is not!" "It's drivel. Now look, Fred. You too, Johnny, if you're awake over there. How long have they been reporting these things? For years. Ever since World War II. "All right. Ever since the war, at least. So. Suppose they were space ships? Whoever was in them must be way ahead of us technically. So why don't they land? Why don't they approach us?" Fred shrugged. "How would I know? They probably have their reasons. Maybe they figure we aren't worth any closer contact." "Hah! Nonsense. The reason we don't see these space people, Fred my boy, admit it, is because there aren't any. And you know it!" "I don't know anything of the damned sort. For all any of us know, they might even be all around us right now." Burk laughed. I smiled, a little sourly, and drained my coffee. I felt a little warning twinge. Too much coffee; should have taken milk. I excused myself as the other two ordered up another round. I left. The conversation was too stupid to listen to. Space creatures all around me, of all things. How wrong can a man get? There weren't any invaders from space all around me. I was all around them. A LL at once, standing there on the sidewalk outside Perry's Bar, I knew that it was true. Space invaders. The Earth was invaded -- the Earth, hell! # was invaded. I didn't know how I knew, but I knew all right. I should have. I was in possession of all the information. I took a cab home to my apartment. I was upset. I had a right to be upset and I wanted to be alone. Alone? That was a joke! Well, my cab pulled up in front of my very modest place. I paid the driver, overtipped him -- I was really upset -- and ran up the stairs. In the apartment, I hustled to the two by four kitchen and, with unshakable determination, I poured myself a four-finger snort of scotch. Then I groaned and poured it down the sink. Unshakable determination is all very well -- but when the top of your head seems to rip loose like a piece of stubborn adhesive coming off a hairy chest and bounces, hard, against the ceiling, then all you can do is give up. I stumbled out to the front room and slumped down in my easy chair to think. I'd left the door open and I was sitting in a draft. So I had to -- that compulsion -- go close the door. Then I sat down to think. Anyway I thought I sat down to think. But, suddenly, my thoughts were not my own. I wasn't producing them; I was receiving them. "Barth! Oh, Land of Barth. Do you read us, oh Barthland? Do you read us?" I didn't hear that, you understand. It wasn't a voice. It was all thoughts inside my head. But to me they came in terms of words. I took it calmly. Surprisingly, I was no longer upset -- which, as I think it over, was probably more an achievement of internal engineering than personal stability. "Yeah," I said, "I read you. So who in hell -- " a poor choice of expression -- "are you? What are you doing here? Answer me that." I didn't have to say it, the thought would have been enough. I knew that. But it made me feel better to speak out. "We are Barthians, of course. We are your people. We live here." "Well, you're trespassing on private property! Get out, you hear me? Get out!" "Now, now, noble Fatherland. Please, do not become upset and unreasonable. We honor you greatly as our home and country. Surely we who were born and raised here have our rights. True, our forefathers who made the great voyage through space settled first here in a frightful wilderness some four generations back. But we are neither pioneers nor immigrants. We are citizens born." "Invaders! Squatters!" "Citizens of Barthland." "Invaded! Good Lord, of all the people in the world, why me? Nothing like this ever happened to anyone. Why did I have to be picked to be a territory -- the first man to have queer things living in me?" "Oh, please, gracious Fatherland! Permit us to correct you. In the day of our fathers, conditions were, we can assure you, chaotic. Many horrible things lived here. Wild beasts and plant growths of the most vicious types were everywhere." "There were -- ?" "What you would call microbes. Bacteria. Fungi. Viruses. Terrible devouring wild creatures everywhere. You were a howling wilderness. Of course, we have cleaned those things up now. Today you are civilized -- a fine, healthy individual of your species -- and our revered Fatherland. Surely you have noted the vast improvement in your condition!" "Yes, but-" "And we pledge our lives to you, oh Barthland. As patriotic citizens we will defend you to the death. We promise you will never be successfully invaded." Yeah. Well, that was nice. But already I felt as crowded as a subway train with the power cut out at rush hour. But there was no room for doubt either. I'd had it. I still did have it; had no chance at all of getting rid of it. their story. I won't try to repeat it all verbatim. I couldn't now, since my memory -- but that's something else. Anyway, I finally got the picture. But I didn't get it all the same evening. Oh, no. At ten I had to knock it off to go to bed, get my sleep, keep up my health. They were insistent. As they put it, even if I didn't care for myself I had to think about an entire population and generations yet unborn. Or unbudded, which was the way they did it. Well, as they said, we had the whole weekend to work out an understanding. Which we did. When we were through, I didn't like it a whole lot better, but at least I could understand it. It was all a perfectly logical proposition from their point of view -- which differed in quite a number of respects from my own. To them it was simply a matter of survival for their race and their culture. To me it was a matter of who or what I was going to be. But then, I had no choice. According to the Official History I was given, they came from a tiny planet of a small sun. Actually, their sun was itself a planet, still incandescent, distant perhaps like Jupiter from the true sun. Their planet or moon was tiny, wet and warm. And the temperature was constant. These conditions, naturally, governed their development -- and, eventually, mine. Of course they were very small, about the size of a dysentery amoeba. The individual life span was short as compared to ours but the accelerated pace of their lives balanced it out. In the beginning, something like four of our days was a lifetime. So they lived, grew, developed, evolved. They learned to communicate. They became civilized -- far more so than we have, according to them. And I guess that was true. They were even able to extend their life span to something like two months. "And to what," I inquired -- but without much fire, I'm afraid; I was losing fight -- "to what am I indebted for this intrusion?" "Necessity." It was, to them. Their sun had begun to cool. It was their eviction notice. They had to move or adapt themselves to immeasurably harsher conditions; and they had become so highly developed, so specialized, that change of that sort would have been difficult if not impossible. And they didn't want to change, anyway. They liked themselves as they were. The only other thing was to escape. They had to work for flight through space. And they succeeded. There were planets nearer to them than Earth. But these were enormous worlds to them, and the conditions were intolerably harsh. They found one planet with conditions much like those on Earth jungle world, dominated by giant reptiles -- which were of no use to the folk. But there were a few, small, struggling, warm-blooded animals. Small to us, that is -- they were county size to the folk. Some genius had a great inspiration. While die environment of the planet itself was impossibly harsh and hostile, the conditions inside these warm little animals were highly suitable! It seemed to be the solution to their problem of survival. Small, trial colonies were established. Communication with the space ships from home was achieved. The experiment was a success. r T' HE trouble was that each colonys existence depended on the life of the host. When the animal died, the colony died. Life on the planet was savage. New colonies would, of course, be passed from individual to individual and generation to generation of the host species. But the inevitable toll of attrition from the violent deaths pf the animals appalled this gentle race. And there was nothing they could do about it. They could give protection against disease, but they could not control the hosts. Their scientists figured that, if they could find a form of life having conscious power of reason, they would be able to establish communication and a measure of control. But it was not possible where only instinct existed. They went ahead because they had no choice. Their only chance was to establish their colonies, accepting the certainty of the slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of entire communities -- and hoping that, with their help, evolution on the planet would eventually produce a better host organism. Even of this they were by no means sure. It was a hope. For all they could know, the struggling mammalian life might well be doomed to extermination by the giant reptiles. They took the gamble. Hundreds of colonies were planted. They did it but they weren't satisfied with it. So, back on the dying home moon, survivors continued to work. Before the end came they made one more desperate bid for race survival. They built interstellar ships to be launched on possibly endless journeys into space. A nucleus of select individuals in a spore-like form of suspended animation was placed on each ship. Ships were launched in pairs, with automatic controls to be activated when they entered into the radius of attraction of a sun. Should the sun have planets such as their own home world -- or Earth type -- the ships would be guided there. In the case of an Earth type planet having intelligent life, they would -- They would do just what my damned "meteor" had done. They would home in on an individual, "explode," penetrate -- and set up heavy housekeeping on a permanent basis. They did. Lovely. Oh, joy! Well. We would all like to see the Garden of Eden; but being it is something quite else again. Me, a colony! My -- uh -- population had no idea where they were in relation to their original home, or how long they had traveled through space. They did hope that someplace on Earth their companion ship had established another settlement But they didn't know. So far on our world, with, its masses of powerful electrical impulses, plus those of our own brains, they had found distance communication impossible. "Well, look, fellows," I said. "Look here now. This is a noble, inspiring story. The heroic struggle of your -- uh -- people to survive, overcoming all odds and stuff, it's wonderful! And I admire you for it, indeed I do. But -- what about me?" "You, Great Land of Barth, are our beloved home and fatherland for many, many generations to come. You are the mighty base from which we can spread over this enormous planet." "That's you. What I mean is, what about me?" "Oh? But there is no conflict. Your interests are our interests." That was how they looked at it. Sincerely. As they said, they weren't ruthless conquerors. They only wanted to get along. A ND all they wanted for me were such fine things as good health, long life, contentment. Contentment, sure. Continued irritation -- a sour disposition resulting in excess flow of bile -- did not provide just the sort of environment in which they cared to bring up the kiddies. Smoking? No. It wasn't healthy. Alcohol? Well, they holiday now and then. Within reason. Which, as I already knew, meant two to four shots once or twice a week.  have any. "But," they told me with an attitude of broad tolerance, "we want to be fair. We will not interfere with you in this matterother than to assist you in the use of sound judgment in the selection of a partner." But I shouldn't feel that any of this was in any way real restrictive. It was merely practical common sense. For observing it I would get their valuable advice and assistance in all phases of my life. I would enjoy -- or have, anyway -- perfect health. My life, if that's what it was, would be extended by better than # years. "You are fortunate," they pointed out, a little smugly I thought, "that we, unlike your race, are conservationists in the truest sense. Far from despoiling our homeland and laying waste its resources and natural scenic wonders, we will improve it." I had to be careful because, as they explained it, even a small nick with a razor might wipe out an entire suburban family. "But fellows! I want to live my own life." "Come now. Please remember that you are not alone now." "Aw, fellows. Look, I'll get a dog, lots of dogs -- fine purebreds, not mongrels like me. The finest. I'll pamper them. They'll live like kings... Wouldn't you consider moving?" "Out of the question. "An elephant then? Think of the space, the room for the kids to play-" "Never." "Damn it! Take me to -- no, I mean let me talk to your leader." That got me no place. It seemed I was already talking to their highest government councils. All of my suggestions were considered, debated, voted on -- and rejected. They were democratic, they said. They counted my vote in favor; but that was just one vote. Rather a small minority. As I suppose I should have figured, my thoughts were coming through over a period that was, to them, equal to weeks. They recorded them, accelerated them, broadcast them all around, held elections and recorded replies to be played back to me at my own slow tempo by the time I had a new thought ready. No, they wouldn't take time to let me count the votes. And there is where you might say I lost my self control. "Damn it!" I said. Or shouted. "I won't have it! I won't put up with it. I'll -- uh -- I'll get us all dead drunk. I'll take dope! I'll go out I didn't do a damned thing. I couldn't. Their control of my actions was just as complete as they wanted to make it. While they didn't exercise it all the time, they made the rules. According to them, they could have controlled my thoughts too if they had wanted to. They didn't because they felt that wouldn't be democratic. Actually, I suppose they were pretty fair and reasonable -- from their point of view. Certainly it could have been a lot worse. Ill Faust and his deal with the devil. My soul was still my own. But my body was community property -- and I couldn't, by God, so much as bite my own tongue without feeling like a bloody murderer -- and being made to suffer for it, too. Perhaps you don't think biting your tongue is any great privilege to have to give up. Maybe not. But, no matter how you figure, you've got to admit the situation was -- well -- confining. And it lasted for over nine years. Nine miserable years of semislavery? Well, no. I couldn't honestly say that it was that bad. There were all the restrictions and limitations, but also there was my perfect health; and what you might call a sort of a sense of inner wellbeing. Added to that, there was my sensationally successful career. And the money. All at once, almost anything I undertook to do was sensationally successful. I wrote, in several different styles and fields and under a number of different names; I was terrific. My painting was the talk of the art world. "Superb," said the critics. "An astonishing otherworldly quality." How right they were -- even if they didn't know why. I patented a few little inventions, just for fun; and I invested. The money poured in so fast I couldn't count it. I hired people to count it, and to help guide it through the tax loopholes -- although there I was able to give them a few sneaky little ideas that even our sharpest tax lawyers hadn't worked out. Of course the catch in all that was that, actually, I was not so man. I was a booming, prosperous nation. The satisfaction I could take in all my success was limited by my knowledge that it was a group effort. How could I help being successful? I had a very fair part of the resources of a society substantially ahead of our own working for me. As for knowledge of our world, they didn't just know everything I did. They knew everything I ever had known -- or seen, heard, read, dreamed or thought of. They could dig up anything, explore it, expand it and use it in ways I couldn't have worked out in a thousand years. Sure, I was successful. I did stay out of sports -- too dangerous; entertainment -- didn't lend itself too well to the group approach; and music -- they had never developed or used sound, and we agreed not to go into it. As I figured it, music in the soul may be very beautiful; but a fullsize symphony in a sinus I could do without. So I had success. And there was another thing I had too. Company, Privacy? No, I had less privacy than any man who ever lived, although I admit that my people, as long as I obeyed the rules, were never pushy or intrusive. They didn't come barging into my thoughts unless I invited them. But they were always ready. And if those nine years were less than perfect, at least I was never lonesome. Success, with me, was not a lonely thing. And there were women. Yes, there were women. And finally, at the end of it, there was a woman -- and that was it. A S they had explained it, they were prepared to be tolerant about my -- ah -- relations with women as long as I was "reasonable" in my selection. Come to find out, they were prepared to be not just tolerant but insistent -- and very selective. First there was Helga. Helga was Uncle John's secretary, a great big, healthy, rosycheeked, blonde Swedish girl, terrific if you liked the type. Me, I hadn't ever made a move in her direction, partly because she was so close to Uncle John, but mostly because my tastes always ran to the smaller types. But tastes can be changed. Ten days after that first conversation with my people I'd already cleared something like # in a few speculations in the commodity market. I was feeling a little moody in spite of it, and I decided to quit my job. So I went up that afternoon to Uncle John's office to tell him. Uncle John was out Helga was in. There she was, five foot eleven of big, bouncy, blonde smorgasbord. Wow! Before, I'd seen Helga a hundred times, looked with mild admiration but not one real ripple inside. And now, all at once, wow! That was my people, of course, manipulating glands, thoughts, feelings. "Wow!" it was. First things first "Helga, Doll! Ah! Where's Uncle John?" "Johnny! That's the first time you ever called me -- hm-m -- Mr. Barth has gone for the day... Johnny" She hadn't even looked at me before. My -- uh -- government was growing more powerful. It was establishing outside spheres of influence. Of course, at the time, I didn't take the trouble to analyze the situation; I just went to work on it. As they say, it is nice work if you can get it. I could get it. It was a good thing Uncle John didn't come bustling back after something he'd forgotten that afternoon. I didn't get around to quitting my job that afternoon. Later on that evening, I took her home. She wanted me to come in and meet her parents, yet! But I begged off that -- and then she came up with a snapper. "But we will be married, Johnny darling. Won't we? Real soon!" "Uh," I said, making a quick mental plane reservation for Rio, "sure, Doll. Sure we will." I broke away right quick after that. There was a problem I wanted to get a little advice on. What I did get, actually, was a nasty shock. Back in my apartment -- my big, new, plush apartment -- I sat down to go over the thing with the Department of the Interior. The enthusiastic response I got surprised me. "Magnificent," was the word. "Superb. Great!" Well, I thought myself that I had turned in a pretty outstanding performance, but I hadn't expected such applause. "It is a first step, a splendid beginning! A fully equipped, well-armed expedition will have the place settled, under cultivation and reasonably civilized inside of a day or two, your time. It will be simple for them. So much more so than in your case -- since we now know precisely what to expect." I was truly shocked. I felt guilty. "No!" I said. "Oh, no! What a thing to do. You can'tl" "Now, now. Gently," they said. "What, after all, oh Fatherland, might be the perfectly natural consequences of your own act?" "What? You mean under other -- that is -- " "Exactly. You could very well have implanted a new life in her, which is all that we have done. Why should our doing so disturb you?" Well, it did disturb me. But then, as they pointed out, they could have developed less pleasant methods of spreading colonies. They had merely decided that this approach would be the surest and simplest. "Well, maybe," I told them, "but it still seems kind of sneaky to me. IV Besides, if you'd left it to me, I'd certainly never have picked a great big ox like Helga. And now she says she's going to marry me, too!" "You do not wish this? We understand. Do not be concerned. We will -- ah -- send instructions to our people the next time. She will change her feelings about this." She dropped the marriage bit completely. We had what you might call an idyllic association, in spite of her being such a big, husky model -- a fact which never bothered me when I was with her. "She is happy," I was assured, "very happy." She seemed pleased and contented enough, even if she developed, I thought, a sort of an inward look about her. She and I never discussed our -- uh -- people. We had a fast whirl for a couple of weeks. And then I'd quit my job with Uncle John, and we sort of drifted apart. Next thing I heard of her, she married Uncle John. Well. I have my doubts about how faithful a wife she was to him, but certainly she seemed to make him happy. And my government assured me Uncle John was not colonized. "Too late," they said. "He is too old to be worth the risk of settling." But they respected my scruples about my uncle's wife and direct communication with Helgaland was broken off. But there were others. OR the next nine years -- things came easy for me. I suppose the restrictions, the lack of freedom should have made me a lot more dissatisfied than I was. I know, though they didn't say so, that my people did a little manipulating of my moods by jigger ing the glands and hormones or something. It must have been that with the women. I know that after Helga I felt guilty about the whole thing. I wouldn't do it again. But then one afternoon I was painting that big amazon of a model and -- Wow! I couldn't help it. So, actually, I don't feel I should be blamed too much if, after the first couple of times, I quit trying to desert, so to speak. And time went by, although you wouldn't have guessed it to look at me. I didn't age. My health was perfect. Well, there were a couple of very light headaches and a touch of fever, but that was only politics. There were a couple of pretty tight elections which, of course, I followed fairly closely. After all, I had my. vote, along with everyone else and I didn't want to waste it -- even though, really, the political parties were pretty much the same and the elections were more questions of personality than anything else. Then one afternoon I went to my broker's office to shift around a few investments according to plans worked out the night before, I gave my instructions. Old man Henry Schnable checked over the notes he had made. "Now that's a funny thing," he said. "You think I'm making a mistake?" "Oh, no. You never have yet. so I don't suppose you are now. The funny tiling is tnat your moves here are almost exactly the same as those another very unusual customer of mine gave me over the phone not an hour ago." "Oh?" There was nothing very interesting about that. But, oddly enough, I was very interested. "Yes. Miss Julia Reede. Only a Possibly a genius. She comes from some little town up in the mountains. She has been in town here for just the past six months and her investments -- well! Now I come to think about it, I believe they have very closely paralleled yours all along the line. Fabulously successful. You advising her?" "Never heard of the girl." "Well, you really should meet her, Mr. Barth. You two have so much in common, and such lovely investments. Why don't you wait around? Miss Reede is coming in to sign some papers this afternoon. You two should know each other." H E was right. We should know each other. I could feel it. 'Well, Henry," I said, "perhaps I will wait. I've got nothing else to do this afternoon." That was a lie. I had plenty of things to do, including a date with the captain of a visiting women's track team from Finland. Strangely, my people and I were in full agreement on standing up the chesty Finn, let the javelins fall where they may. Henry was surprised too. "You are going to wait for her? Uh. Well now, Mr. Barth, your reputation -- ah -- that is, she's only a child, you know, from the country." The buzzer on his desk sounded. His secretary spoke up on the intercom. "Miss Reede is here." Miss Reede came right on in the door without waiting for a further invitation. We stood there gaping at each other. She was small, about #'#" maybe, with short, black, curly hair, surface-cool green eyes with fire underneath, fresh, freckled nose, slim figure. Boyish? No. Not boyish. I stared, taking in every little detail. Every little detail was perfect and -- well, I can't begin to describe it. That was for me. I could feel it all through me, she was what I had been waiting for, dreaming of. I made a quick call on the inside switchboard, determined to fight to override the veto I was sure was coming. I called. No answer. For the first time, I got no regular answer. Of course, by now I always had a kind of a sense or feeling of what was going on. This time there was a feeling of a celebration, rejoicing, everybody on a holiday. Which was exactly the way I felt as I looked at the girl. No objections? Then why ask questions? "Julia," old Henry Schnable was saying, "this is Mr. John Barth. John, this is -- John! John, remember -- " I had reached out and taken the girl's hand. I tucked her arm in mine and she looked up at me with the light, the fire in the green depths swimming toward the surface. I didn't know what she saw in me -- neither of us knew tnen -- but the light was there, glowing. We walked together out of Henry Schnable's office. "John! Julia, your papers! You have to sign -- " Business? We had business elsewhere, she and I. "Where?" I asked her in the elevator. It was the first word either of us had spoken. "My apartment," she said in a voice like a husky torch song. "It's close. The girl who rooms with me is spending the week back home with her folks. The show she was in closed. We can be alone." We could. Five minutes in a cab and we were. I never experienced anything remotely like it in all my life. I never will again. A ND then there was the time J afterwards, and then we knew. It was late afternoon, turning to dusk. She lifted up on one elbow and half turned away from me to switch on the bedside lamp. The light came on and I looked down at her, lovingly, admiringly. Idly, I started to ask her, "How did you get those little scars on your leg there and... those little scars? Like buckshot! Julia! Once, along about ten years ago -- you must have been a little girl then -- in the mountains -- sure. You were hit by a meteor, weren't you??" She turned and stared at me. I pointed at my own little pockmark scars. "A meteor -- about ten years ago!" "Oh!"' "I knew it. You were." " 'Some damn fool, crazy hunter,' was what Pop said. He thought it really was buckshot. So did I, at first. We all did. Of course about six months later I found out what it was but we -- my little people and I -- agreed there was no sense in my telling anyone. But you know." It was the other ship. There were two in this sector, each controlled to colonize a person. My own group always hoped and believed the other ship might have landed safely. And now they knew. We lay there, she and I, and we both checked internal communications. They were confused, not clear and precise as usual. It was a holiday in full swing. The glorious reunion! No one was working. No time at the communications center talking to Julia and me. They were too busy talking to each other. I was right. The other ship. Of course, since the other ship's landfall had been a little girl then, the early movements of the group had been restricted. Expansion was delayed. She grew up. She came to the city. Then -- well, I didn't have to think about that. We looked at each other, Julia and I. A doll she was in the first place and a doll she still was. And then on top of that was the feeling of community, of closeness coming from our people. There was a sympathy. The two of us were in the same fix. And it may be that there was a certain sense of jealousy and resentment too -- like the feeling, say, between North and South America. How did we feel? "I feel like a drink." We said it together and laughed. Then we got up and got the drinks'. I was glad to find that Julia's absent roomate, an actress, had a pretty fair bar stock. W E had a drink. We had another. And a third. Maybe nobody at all was manning the inner duty stations. Or maybe they were visiting back and forth, both populations in a holiday mood. They figured this was a once in a millenium celebration and, for once, the limits were off. Even alcohol was welcome. That's a line of thought that kills plenty of people every day out on the highway. We had a couple more in a reckless toast. I kissed Julia. She kissed me. Then we had some more drinks. Naturally it hit us hard; we weren't used to it. But still we didn't stop drinking. The limits were off for the first time. Probably it would never happen again. This was our chance of a lifetime and there was a sort of desperation in it. We kept on drinking. "Woosh," I said, finally, "wow. Let's have one more, wha' say? One more them -- an' one more those." She giggled. "Aroun' an aroun', whoop, whoop! Dizzy. Woozy. Oughta have cup coffee." "Naw. Not coffee. Gonna have hangover. Take pill. Apsirin." "Cannot! Cannot take pill. Won' lemme. 'Gains talla rules." "Can." "Cannot." "Can. No rules. Rule soff. Can. Apsirin. Cmon." Clinging to each other, we stumbled to the bathroom. Pills? The roommate must have been a real hypochondriac. She had rows and batteries of pills. I knocked a bottle off the cabinet shelf. Aspirin? Sure, fancy aspirin. Blue, special. I took a couple. "Apsirin. See? Easy." Her mouth made a little, red, round "O" of wonder. She took a couple. "Gosh! Firs' time I c'd ever take a pill." "Good. Have 'nother?" It was crazy, sure. The two of us were drunk. But it was more than that. We were like a couple of wild, irresponsible kids, out of control and running wild through the pill boxes. We reeled around the bathroom, sampling pills and laughing. "Here's nice bottla red ones." There was a nice bottle of red ones. I fumbled the top off the bottle and spilled the bright red pills bouncing across the white tile bathroom floor. We dropped to our knees after them, after the red pills, the red dots, the red, fiery moons, spinning suddenly, whirling, twirling, racing across the white floor. And then it got dark. Dark, and darker and even the red, red moons faded away. Some eons later, light began to come back and the red moons, dim now and pallid, whirled languidly across a white ceiling. out of it, I think." "Oh," I said. "Ugh!" I didn't feel good. I'd almost forgotten what it was like, but I was sick. Awful. I didn't particularly want to look around but I did, eyes moving rustily in their sockets. There was a nurse and a doctor. They were standing by my bed in what was certainly a hospital. "Don't ask," said the doctor. I wasn't going to. I didn't even care where I was, but he told me anyway, "You are in the South Side Hospital, Mr. Barth. You will be all right -- which is a wonder, considering. Remarkable stamina! Please tell me, Mr. Barth, what kind of lunatic suicide pact was that?" "Suicide pact?" "Yes, Mr. Barth. Why couldn't you have settled for just one simple poison, hm-m? The lab has been swearing at you all day." "Uh?" "Yes. At what we pumped from your stomach. And found in the girl's. Liquor, lots of that -- but then, why aspirin? Barbiturates we expect. Roach pellets are not unusual. But aureomycin? Tranquilizers? Bufferin? Vitamin B complex, vitamin C -- and, finally, half a dozen highly questionable contraceptive pills? Good Lord, man!" "It was an accident. The girl -- Julia -- ?" "You are lucky. She wasn't." "Dead?" "Yes, Mr. Barth. She is dead." "Doctor, listen to me! It was an accident, I swear. We didn't know what we were doing. We were, well, celebrating." "In the medicine cabinet, Mr. Barth? Queer place to be celebrating! Well, Mr. Barth, you must rest now. You have been through a lot. It was a near thing. The police will be in to see you later." With this kindly word the doctor and his silently disapproving nurse filed out of the room. The police? Julia, poor Julia -- dead. Now what? What should I do? I turned, as always, inward for advice and instructions. "Folks! Why didn't you stop me? Why did you let me do it? And now -- what shall I do? Answer me, I say. Answer!" There was only an emptiness. It was a hollow, aching sensation. It seemed to me I could hear my questions echoing inside me with a lonely sound. I was alone. For the first time in nearly ten years, I was truly alone, with no one to turn to. They were gone! At last, after all these years, they were gone. I was free again, truly free. It was glorious to be free -- wasn't it? The sheer joy of the thing brought a tightness to my throat, and I sniffled. I sniffled again. My nose was stuffy. The tightness in my throat grew tighter and became a pain. I sneezed. Was this joy -- or a cold coming on? I shifted uneasily on the hospital bed and scratched at an itch on my left hip. Ouch! It was a pimple. My head ached. My throat hurt. I itched. Julia was dead. The police were coming. I was alone. What should I do? "Nurse!" I shouted at the top of my voice. "Nurse, come here. I want to send a wira Rush. Urgent. To my aunt, Mrs. Helga Barth, the address is in my wallet. Say, 'Helga. Am desperately ill, repeat, ill. Please come at once. I must have help -- from you.' " She'll come. I know she will. They've got to let her. It was an accident, I swear, and I'm not too old. I'm still in wonderful shape, beautifully kept up. But I feel awful. Well -- how do you suppose New England would feel today, if suddenly all of its inhabitants died?      Looking Ahead? You must be, or you wouldn't be reading this magazine. Looking ahead, for instance, into the future of technology, sociology, ecology, space and time and terrestrials and extraterrestrials. But what about looking ahead to:  Saving money? (The longer your subscription to IF, the more free issues you get.)  Saving steps? (A subscription brings IF right to your mailbox, irrespective of heat, cold, snow, rain, gloom of night -- and mailed flat, to boot.)  Saving time? (You get your copies at least a week before the newsstands receive theirs.)  Saving your temper? (IF can and often does sell out; with a subscription there's no need to hunt from stand to stand.) IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the issue. 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The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe TJ.W.  Scribe T.J.W. i San Jose, California  Please send me the free book. The Mastery J i of Life, which explains how I may learn to ! i use my faculties and powers of mind. (  Name ! j Address I ! Cit y ! Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden by Christopher Anvil by Tom Purdom by Jack Sharkey by Neal Barrett , Jr. by L. J. Stecher, Jr. by Frederik Pohl by Willy Ley How to Slay Dragons by H. L. Gold by Floyd C. Gale #I Hudson Street. New York #. N. Y. #y per copy. Subscription: (# copies) #.S# per year in the United States. Canada. Mexico. South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York. N. Y. Copyright, New York #. by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibilty for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.  why a man was antagonistic toward him, said, "I can't imagine why. I haven't done anything for him." The Chinese, unlike the rest of us, knew this unlovely attribute was not true only of the next guy and made anyone who saved a life responsible for that life ever after. Most favor-doing, of course, is not life and death, so Mark Twain, in noting that friendship can survive anything but a small loan, had more ancient and infinite wisdom than the Chinese. To claim membership in the human race (the flaw, luckily, seems confined only to mankind -- at least so far), I can't disclaim the attribute. But where contributions to this magazine are concerned, I couldn't be more grateful. For instance, to Alex Eisenstein, Chicago, #., who writes: "Having read all your 'There Are Aliens Among Us' articles, I wonder why you never brought in the fact that during the Ice Age, the Cro-Magnon man had a slightly larger brain size (proportionally) than Homo sapiens sapiens (not a misprint; a subspecies). Is it possible that this is the result of some great (maybe accidental) galactic interbreeding? And what about the fact that there are some human beings with six (count 'em, six) wellproportioned fingers, and that this is a dominant, inherited characteristic? Another galactic hybrid? It is a well-known fact, I am sure, that all amphibian, reptilian, and mammalian animals are based on an original five-digit hand or foot, and that all of these animals (except in this instance) have no more than five fingers... "There is another and more sinister mystery with us now, however. Did you ever stop to think that the whole order of primates might be alien? Consider the facts: #) the blood cells of primates differ from other mammalian blood cells in that they have no nuclei (at least, they contain no nuclei when mature); #) the skin of man and the primates is tight against the musculature... whereas other mammals have loose skins (an example of this is the loose 'scruff of the neck in cats, rabbits, etc.); #) and finally, the female primates have the mammary glands situated on the upper part of the torso, while the other average, run-of-the-mill mammals have them in the lower region. "Still, I must concede that the home planet for us primates must be inhabited by some very Earth-type creatures. There are very many more similarities to 'Terran' mammals than there are differences. But who knows?" The answer may be in this clipping from the Florida Alligator, a campus newspaper, reading: "The University of Florida has hit a record enrollment of #... Male students comprise # of the total, while female students make up the other #." The unnamed student who sent it in shakily points out: "The figures for male and female students, when subtracted from the total, leave # of something left over. Are they going to school here to find out more about us?" What more is there to find out after a few classes and dates? It the chap up ahead is right, interbreeding could be the answer. Check nuclei, skin tight against the musculature, mammary gland location -- in that order, if possible. Remember what Mother and Dear Abby told you. The somethings may not think more of you if you wait till after the altar, but you'll be able to take out skip insurance. That's better than sending a rhesus monkey in a five-f ourthree-two-one-damncountdown rocket to bring them back, isn't it? Writes Charles Aylworth, Eugene, Oregon: "The combination letter-and-editorial column is the best new idea in years... About the Aliens Among Us: In .our town there is a plumber named Jessie Godlove; on his trucks he has put 'Godlove the Plumber.' Another man, Ike Blood, has on his fuel trucks 'Heat with Blood.' It is apparent that religion takes a practical turn on Jessie's world. I'd rather not speculate on Ike's." Gory, no doubt of it, but blood is also a great coolant when warm instead of cold. By using this trick, we mammals carry our thermal environment with us into arctic or tropics. An external supply for heat may be as big an improvement over ours as ours is over reptiles'. Contrary to opinion, not all aliens are reticent. So ask. Writes Simon A. Stricklen, Jr., Auburn, Alabama: "You have omitted the most important and effective subversion by the invaders -- temporal theft. On the alien world, the time is of a much poorer quality than ours. It is as repellent to them as to us, and for this reason they want to conquer us and enjoy our fine time while we suffer theirs... For example, when I'm with my favorite girl, my watch says four hours have passed, while my senses, in which I have much more confidence, inform me it's only minutes. For the opposite example, fishermen friends of mine tell me that a whole day can drag by in an hour, and I have tnany other such reports from reliable sources... With this enormous backlog of first-rate time, the aliens could jig right in -- and imagine us trying to repel the invasion, dragged down by that irritable, depressed feeling caused by a softening-up bombardment of second-rate time!" Invasion? They're doing fine with their low-cost theft, judging by your data, and by the next item, sent in by an unknown reader, which appeared in the Glens Falls, N. Y ., Post-Star: The undersigned, as of date of this notice, is no longer interested in or a participant in or has any opinions on anything of a neighborhood, community, city, township, county, state, national, international, political, government, or controversial nature. The undersigned's sole interests are: #. Family. #. Business. Clifford B. Witham Writes George Bond, Montreal: "The mounting evidence does indubitably show There Are Aliens Among Us. Analysis of your analyses bears out your contention that we're host not to one kind or another but a great many. Some may indeed intend to take over the Earth, but they don't stand a chance; the meek are scheduled to inherit it. They also seem to be going about the job clumsily. Take the Tidal Bore at the Petitcodiac River, for instance, in New Brunswick. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides on Earth. At low tide, the river bottom is dry enough to walk across, and so is the ocean floor between St. Andrews and Minister's Island, where you can cross by car. A minute later, the Tidal Bore comes pounding over ocean floor and up the river. And near by is Magnetic Hill, which hauls a car right up a steep road with motor and brakes off. Both are great tourist attractions, so that part's smart. But a #-foot tide that gets only an occasional victim and a magnetic hill that gets none I know of -- these are weapons? Why, our own highways chalk up more kills to the dollar, or credit, or whatever unit the war profiteers who got these outrageous contracts use!" As of even date, Disneyland is not trying to swallow up California, though it's every bit as good a tourist attraction; the highways  leading to them could be the actual weapons -- yet they're built by us -- or are they? Colder had reason to worry -- why was he being offered a reward that couldn't be bigger -- to break up a dope ring that couldn't be tinier? Mind Partner f J IM Calder studied the miniature mansion and grounds that sat, carefully detailed, on the table. "If you slip," said Walters, standing at Jim's elbow, "the whole gang will disappear like startled fish. There'll be another thousand addicts, and we'll have the whole thing to do over again." Jim ran his hand up the shuttered, four-story replica tower that stood at one corner of the mansion. "I'm to knock at the front door and say, 'May I speak to Miss Cynthia?' " Walters nodded. "You'll be taken inside, you'll stay overnight, and the next morning you will come out a door at the rear and drive away. You will come directly here, be hospitalized and examined, and tell us everything you can remember. A certified check in five figures will be deposited in your account. How high the five figures will be depends on how much your information is worth to us." "Five figures," said Jim. Walters took out a cigar and sat down on the edge of his desk. "That's right -- # to #." Jim said, "It's the size of the check that makes me hesitate. Am I likely to come out of there in a box?" "No." Walters stripped the cellophane wrapper off his cigar, lit it, and sat frowning. At last he let out a long puff of smoke and looked up. "We've hit this setup twice before in the last three years. A city of moderate size, a quietly retired elderly person in a well-to-do part of town, a house so situated that people can come and go without causing comment." Walters glanced at the model of mansion and grounds on the table. "Each time, when we were sure where the trouble was coming from, we've raided the place. We caught addicts, but otherwise the house was empty." "Fingerprints?" "The first time, yes, but we couldn't trace them anywhere. The second time, the house burned down before we could find out." "What about the addicts, then?" "They don't talk. They -- " Walters started to say something, then shook his head. "We're offering you a bonus because we don't know what the drug is. These people are addicted to something, but what? They don't accept reality. There are none of the usual withdrawal symptoms. A number of them have been hospitalized for three years and have shown no improvement. We don't think this will happen to you -- one exposure to it shouldn't make you an addict -- but we don't know. We have a lot of angry relatives of these people backing us. That's why we can afford to pay you what we think the risk is worth." Jim scowled. "Before I make up my mind, I'd better see one of these addicts." Walters drew thoughtfully on his cigar, then nodded and picked up the phone. ters and two white-coated attendants, Jim went into the room at the hospital. The attendants stood against the wall. Jim and Walters stood near the door and watched. A blonde girl sat motionless on the cot, her head in her hands. "Janice," said the doctor softly. "Will you talk to us for just a moment?" The girl sat unmoving, her head in her hands, and stared at the floor. The doctor dropped to a halfkneeling position beside the cot. "We want to talk to you, Janice. We need your help. Now, I am going to talk to you until you show me you hear me. You do hear me, don't you, Janice?" The girl didn't move. The doctor repeated her name again and again. Finally she raised her head and looked through him. In a flat, ugly voice, she said, "Leave me alone. I know what you're trying to do." "We want to ask you just a few questions, Janice." The girl didn't answer. The doctor started to say something else, but she cut him off. "Go away," she said bitterly. "You don't fool me. You don't even exist. You're nothing." She had a pretty face, but as her eyes narrowed and her lips drew slightly away from her teeth and she leaned forward on the cot, bringing her hands up, she had a look that tingled the hair on the back of Jim's neck. The two attendants moved warily away from the wall. The doctor stayed where he was and talked in a low, soothing monotone. The girl's eyes gradually unfocused, and she was looking through the doctor as if he weren't there. She put her head hard back into her hands and stared at the floor. The doctor slowly came to his feet and stepped back. "That's it," he told Jim and Walters. N the way back, Walters drove, and Jim sat beside him on the front seat. It was just starting to get dark outside. Abruptly Walters asked, "What did you think of it?" Jim moved uneasily. "Are they all like that?" "No. That's just one pattern. An example of another pattern is the man who bought a revolver, shot the storekeeper who sold it to him, shot the other customer in the store, put the gun in his belt, went behind the counter and took out a shotgun, shot a policeman who came in the front door, went outside and took a shot at the lights on a theater marquee; he studied the broken lights for a moment, then leaned the shotgun against the storefront, pulled out the revolver, blew out the right rear tires of three cars parked at the curb, stood looking from one of the cars to another and said, 'I just can't be sure, that's all.' " Walters slowed slightly as they came onto a straight stretch of highway and glanced at Jim. "Another policeman shot the man, and that ended that. We traced that one back to the second place we closed up, the place that burned down before we could make a complete search." "Were these places all run by the same people?" "Apparently. When we checked the dates, we found that the second place didn't open till after the first was closed, and the third place till the second was closed. They've all operated in the same way. But the few descriptions we've had of the people who work there don't check." Jim scowled and glanced out the window. "What generally happens when people go there? Do they stay overnight, or what?" "The first time, they go to the front door, and come out the next morning. After that, they generally rent one of the row of garages on the Jayne Street side of the property, and come back at intervals, driving in after dark and staying till the next night. They lose interest in their usual affairs, and gradually begin to seem remote to the people around them. Finally they use up their savings, or otherwise come to the end of the money they can spend. Then they do like the girl we saw tonight, or like the man in the gun store, or else they follow some other incomprehensible pattern. By the time we find the place and close it up, there are seven hundred to twelve hundred addicts within a fifty-mile radius of the town. They all fall off their rockers inside the same twoto three-week period, and for a month after that, the police and the hospitals get quite a workout." "Don't they have any of the drug around?" "That's just it. They must get it all at the place. They use it there. They don't bring any out." "And when you close the place up-" "The gang evaporates like a sliver of dry ice. They don't leave any drug or other evidence behind. This time we've got a precise model of their layout. We should be able to plan a perfect capture. But if we just close in on them, I'm afraid the same thing will happen all over again." "Okay," said Jim. "I'm your man. But if I don't come out the next morning, I want you to come in after me." "We will," said Walters. J IM spent a good part of the evening thinking about the girl he'd seen at the hospital, and the gun-store addicts Walters had described. He paced the floor, scowling, and several times reached for the phone to call Walters and say, "No." A hybrid combination of duty and the thought of a fivefigure check stopped him. Finally, unable to stay put, he went out into the warm, dark evening, got in his car and drove around town. On impulse, he swung down Jayne Street and passed the dark row of rented garages Walters had mentioned. A car was carefully backing out as he passed. He turned at the next corner and saw the big, old-fashioned house moonlit among the trees on its own grounds. A faint sensation of wrongness bothered him, and he pulled to the curb to study the house. Seen through the trees, the house was tall and steep-roofed. It reached far back on its land, surrounded by close-trimmed lawn and shadowy shrubs. The windows were tall and narrow, some of them closed by louvered shutters. Pale light shone out through the narrow openings of the shutters. Unable to place the sensation of wrongness, Jim swung the car away from the curb and drove home. He parked his car, and, feeling tired and ready for sleep, walked up the dark drive, climbed the steps to the porch, and fished in his pocket for his keycase. He felt for the right key in the darkness, and moved back onto the steps to get a little more light. It was almost as dark there as on the porch. Puzzled, he glanced up at the sky. The stars were out, with a heavy mass of clouds in the distance, and a few small clouds sliding by overheard. The edge of one of the small clouds lit up faintly, and as it passed, a pale crescent moon hung in the sky. Jim looked around. Save for the light in the windows, the houses all bulked dark. Jim went down the steps to his car and drove swiftly back along Jayne Street. He turned, drove a short distance up the side street, and parked. This time, the outside of the huge house was dark. Bright light shone out the shutters onto the lawn and shrubbery. But the house was a dark bulk against the sky. Jim swung the car out from the curb and drove home slowly. f T I HE next morning, he went early to Walters' office and studied the model that sat on the table near the desk. The model, painstakingly constructed from enlarged photographs, showed nothing that looked like a camouflaged arrangement for softly floodlighting the walls of the house and the grounds. Jim studied the location of the trees, looked at the house from a number of angles, noticed the broken slats in different shutters on the fourth floor of the tower, but saw nothing else he hadn't seen before. He called up Walters, who was home having breakfast, and without mentioning details asked, "Is this model on your table complete?" Walters' voice said, "It's complete up to three o'clock the day before yesterday. We check it regularly." Jim thanked him and hung up, unsatisfied. He knelt down and put his eye in the position of a man in the street in front of the house. He noticed that certain parts of the trees were blocked off from view by the mansion. Some of these parts could be photographed from a light plane flying overhead, but other positions would be hidden by foliage. Jim told himself that floodlights must be hidden high in the trees, in such a way that they could simulate moonlight. In that case, the question was -- why? Jim studied the model. He was bothered by much the same sensation as that of a man examining the random parts of a jigsaw puzzle. The first few pieces fitted together, the shapes and colors matched, but they didn't seem to add up to anything he had ever seen before. A S he drove out to the house,  the day was cool and clear. The house itself, by daylight, seemed to combine grace, size, and a sort of starched aloofness. It was painted a pale lavender, with a very dark, steeply slanting roof. Tall arching trees rose above it, shading parts of the roof, the grounds, and the shrubs. The lawn was closely trimmed, and bordered by a low spike-topped blackiron fence. Jim pulled in to the curb in front of the house, got out, opened a low wrought-iron gate in the fence, and started up the walk. He glanced up at the trees, saw nothing of floodlights, then looked at the house. The house had a gracious, neat, well-groomed appearance. All the window-panes shone, all the shades were even, all the curtains neatly hung, all the trim' bright and the shutters straight. Jim, close to the house, raised his eyes to the tower. All the shutters there were perfect and even and straight. The sense of wrongness that had bothered him the day before was back again. He paused in his stride, frowning. The front door opened and a plump, gray-haired woman in a light-blue maid's uniform stood in the doorway. With her left hand, she smoothed her white apron. "My," she said, smiling, "isn't it a nice day?" She stepped back and with her left hand opened the door wider. "Come in." Her right hand remained at her side, half-hidden by the ruffles of her apron. Jim's mouth felt dry. "May I," he said, "speak to Miss Cynthia?" "Of course you may," said the woman. She shut the door behind him. They were in a small vestibule opening into a high-ceilinged hallway. Down the hall, Jim could see an open staircase to the second floor, and several wide doorways with heavy dark draperies. "Go straight ahead and up the stairs," said the woman in a pleasant voice. "Turn left at the head of the stairs. Miss Cynthia is in the second room on the right." Jim took one step. There was a sudden sharp pressure on his skull, a flash of white light, and a piercing pain and a pressure in his right arm -- a sensation like that of an injection. Then there was nothing but blackness. aware that he was lying on a bed, with a single cover over him. He opened his eyes to see that he was in an airy room with a light drapery blowing in at the window. He started to sit up and his head throbbed. The walls of the room leaned out and came back. For an instant, he saw the room like a photographic negative, the white woodwork black and the dark furniture nearly white. He lay carefully back on the pillow and the room returned to normal. He heard the quick tap of high heels in the hallway and a door opened beside him. He turned his head. The room seemed to spin in circles around him. He shut his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, a tall, dark-haired woman was watching him with a faint hint of a smile. "How do you feel?" "Not good," said Jim. "It's too bad we have to do it this way, but some people lose their nerve. Others come with the thought that we have a profitable business and they would like to have a part of it. We have to bring these people around to our way of thinking." "What's your way of thinking?" She looked at him seriously. "What we have to offer is worth far more than any ordinary pattern of life. We can't let it fall into the wrong hands." "What is it that you have to offer?" She smiled again. "I can't tell you as well as you can experience it." "That may be. But a man going into a strange country likes to have a road map." "That's very nicely put," she said, "but you won't be going into any strange country. What we offer you is nothing but your reasonable desires in life." "Is that all?" "It's enough." "Is there any danger of addiction?" "After you taste steak, is there any danger of your wanting more? After you hold perfect beauty in your arms, is there any danger you might want to do so again? The superior is always addicting." He looked at her for a moment. "And how about my affairs? Will they suffer?" "That depends on you." "What if I go from here straight to the police station?" "You won't. Once we are betrayed, you can never come back. We won't be here. You wouldn't want that." "Do you give me anything to take out? Can I buy -- " "No," she said. "You can't take anything out but your memories. You'll find they will be enough." As she said this, Jim had a clear mental picture of the girl sitting on the cot in the hospital, staring at the floor. He felt a sudden intense desire to get out. He started to sit up, and the room darkened and spun around him. H E felt the woman's cool hands ease him back into place. "Now," she said, "do you have any more questions?" "No," said Jim. "Then," she said briskly, "we can get down to business. The charge for your first series of three visits is one thousand dollars per visit." "What about the next visits?" "Must we discuss that now?" "I'd like to know." "The charge for each succeeding series of three is doubled." "How often do I come back?" "We don't allow anyone to return oftener than once every two weeks. That is for your own protection." Jim did a little mental arithmetic, and estimated that by the middle of the year a man would have to pay sixteen thousand dollars a visit, and by the end of the year it would be costing him a came to the place. "Why," he asked, "does the cost increase?" "Because, I've been told to tell those who ask, your body acquires a tolerance and we have to overcome it. If we have to use twice as much of the active ingredient in our treatment, it seems fair for us to charge twice as much." "I see." Jim cautiously eased himself up a little. "And suppose that I decide right now not to pay anything at all." She shook her head impatiently. "You're on a one-way street The only way you can go is forward." "That remains to be seen." "Then you'll see." She stepped to a dresser against the wall, picked up an atomizer, turned the little silver nozzle toward him, squeezed the white rubber bulb, and set the atomizer back on the dresser. She opened the door and went out. Jim felt a mist of fine droplets falling on his face. He tried to inhale very gently to see if it had an odor. His muscles wouldn't respond. He lay very still for a moment and felt the droplets falling one by one. They seemed to explode and tingle as they touched his skin. He lay still a moment more, braced himself to make one lunge out of the bed, then tried it. He lay flat on his back on the bed. A droplet tingled and exploded on his cheek. He was beginning to feel a strong need for breath. He braced himself once more, simply to move sidewise off the pillow. Once there, he could get further aside in stages, out of the range of the droplets. He kept thinking, "Just a moment now -- steady -- just a moment -- just -- Now!" And nothing happened. He lay flat on his back on the bed. A droplet tingled and exploded on his cheek. The need for air was becoming unbearable. J IM'S head was throbbing and the room went dark with many tiny spots of light. He tried to suck in air and he couldn't. He tried to breathe out, but his chest and lungs didn't move. He could hear the pound of his heart growing fast and loud. He couldn't move. At the window, the light drapery fluttered and blew in and fell back. He lay flat on the bed and felt a droplet tingle and explode on his cheek. His skull was throbbing. His heart writhed and hammered in his chest. The room was going dark. Then something gave way and his lungs were dragging in painful gasps of fresh air. He sobbed like a runner at the end of a race. After a long time, a feeling of peace and tiredness came over him. The door opened. He looked up. The woman was watching him sadly. "I'm sorry," she said. "Do you want to discuss payment?" Jim nodded. The woman sat down in a chair by the bed. "As I've explained, the initial series of three visits cost one thousand dollars each. We will accept a personal check or even an I. O. U. for the first payment. After that, you must have cash." Jim made out a check for one thousand dollars. The woman nodded, smiled, and folded the check into a small purse. She went out, came back with a glass of colorless liquid, shook a white powder into it, and handed it to him. "Drink it all," she said. "A little bit can be excruciatingly painful." Jim hesitated. He sat up a little and began to feel dizzy. He decided he had better do as she said, took the glass and drained it. It tasted exactly like sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water. He handed her the glass and she went to the door. "The first experiences," she said, "are likely to be a little exuberant. Remember, your time sense will be distorted, as it is in a dream." She went out and shut the door softly. Jim fervently wished he were somewhere else. He wondered what she had meant by the last comment. The thought came to him that if he could get out of this place, he could give Walters and the doctors a chance to see the drug in action. He got up, and had the momentary sensation of doing two things at once. He seemed to lie motionless on the bed and to stand up at one and the same time. He wondered if the drug could have taken effect already. He lay down and got up again. This time he felt only a little dizzy. He went to the window and looked out. He was in a second-story window, and the first-floor rooms in this house had high ceilings. Moreover, he now discovered he was wearing a sort of hospital gown. He couldn't go into the street in that without causing a sensation, and he didn't know just when the drug would take effect. H E heard the soft click of the door opening and turned around. The woman who had talked to him came in and closed the door gently behind her. Jim watched in a daze as she turned languorously, and it occurred to him that no woman he had ever seen had moved quite like that, so the chances were that the drug had taken effect and he was imagining all this. He remembered that she had said the first experiences were likely to be a little exuberant, and his time sense distorted as in a dream. Jim spent the night, if it was the night, uncertain as to what was real and what was due to the drug. But it was all vivid, and realistic events shaded into adventures he knew were imaginary, but that were so bright and satisfying that he didn't care if they were real or not. In these adventures, the colors were pure colors, and the sounds were clear sounds, and nothing was muddied or uncertain as in life. It was so vivid and clear that when he found himself lying on the bed with the morning sun streaming in, he was astonished that he could remember not a single incident save the first, and that one not clearly. He got up and found his clothes lying on a chair by the bed. He dressed rapidly, glanced around for the little atomizer and saw it was gone. He stepped out into the hall and there was a sudden sharp pressure on his skull, a flash of white light, and a feeling of limpness. He felt strong hands grip and carry him. He felt himself hurried down a flight of steps, along a corridor, then set down with his back against a wall. When he felt strong enough to, he opened his eyes. The plump, gray-haired woman took a damp cloth and held it to his head. "You'll be all over that in a little while," she said. "I don't see why they have to do that." "Neither do I," said Jim. He felt reasonably certain that she had done the same thing to him when he came in. He looked around, saw that they were in a small bare entry, and got cautiously to his feet. "Is my car still out front?" "No," she said. "It's parked in back, in the drive." "Thank you," he said. "Say good-by to Miss Cynthia for me." The woman smiled. "You'll be back." He was very much relieved to get outside the house. He walked back along the wide graveled drive, found his car, got in, and started it. When he reached the front of the house, he slowed the car to glance back. To his surprise, the two shutters on the third floor of the tower had broken slats. He thought this had some significance, but he was unable to remember what it was. He sat for a moment, puzzled, then decided that the important thing was to get to Walters. He swung the car out into the early morning traffic, and settled back with a feeling compounded of nine parts relief and one part puzzlement. What puzzled him was that anyone should pay one thousand dollars for a second dose of that. 'T'HE doctors made a lightning examination, announced that he seemed physically sound, and then Walters questioned him. He described the experience in close detail, and Walters listened, nodding from time to time. At the end, Jim said, "I'll be damned if I can see why anyone should go back!" "That is puzzling," said Walters. "It may be that they were all sensation-seekers, though that's a little odd, too. Whatever the reason, it's lucky you weren't affected." "Maybe I'd better keep my fingers crossed," said Jim. Walters laughed. "I'll bring your bankbook in to keep you happy." He went out, and a moment later the doctors were in again. It wasn't until the next morning that they he was about to leave, one of them remarked to him, "I hope you never need a blood transfusion in a hurry." "Why so?" Jim asked. "You have one of the rarest combinations I've ever seen." He held out an envelope. "Walters said to give you this." Jim opened it. It was a duplicate deposit slip for a sum as high as five figures could go. Jim went out to a day that wasn't sunny, but looked just as good to him as if it had been. After careful thought, Jim decided to use the money to open a detective agency of his own. Walters, who caught the dope gang trying to escape through an unused steam tunnel, gave Jim his blessing, and the offer of a job if things went wrong. Fortunately, things went very well. Jim's agency prospered. In time, he found the right girl, they married, and had two boys and a girl. The older boy became a doctor, and the girl married a likable fast-rising young lawyer. The younger boy had a series of unpleasant scrapes and seemed bound on wrecking his life. Jim, who was by this time very well to do, at last offered the boy a job in his agency, and was astonished to see him take hold. The years fled past much faster than Jim would have liked. Still, when the end came near, he had the pleasure of knowing that his life's work would be in the capable hands of his own son. He breathed his last breath in satisfaction. And woke up lying on a bed in a room where a light drapery blew back at the window and the morning sun shone in, and his clothes were folded on a chair by his bed. J IM sat up very carefully. He held his hand in front of his face and turned it over slowly. It was not the hand of an old man. He got up and looked in a mirror, then sat down on the edge of the bed. He was young, all right. The question was, was this an old man's nightmare, or was the happy life he had just lived a dope addict's dream? He remembered the woman who had doped him saying, "What we offer you is nothing but your reasonable desires in life." Then it had all been a dream. But a dream should go away, and this remained clear in his memory. He dressed, went out in the hall, felt a sudden pressure on his skull, a flash of white light, and a feeling of limpness. He came to in the small entry, and the plump, gray-haired woman carefully held a damp cool cloth to his head. "Thanks," he said. "Is my car out back?" "Yes," she said, and he went out. As he drove away from the house he glanced back and noticed the two broken shutters on the third floor of the tower. The memory of his dream about this same event -- leaving the place -- jarred him. It seemed that those broken shutters meant something, but he was unable to remember what. He trod viciously on the gas pedal, throwing a spray of gravel on the carefully tailored lawn as he swung into the street. He still did not see why anyone should go back there with anything less than a shotgun. He told Walters the whole story, including the details of his "life," that he remembered so clearly. "You'll get over it," Walters finally said, when Jim was ready to leave the hospital. "It's a devil of a thing to have happen, but there's an achievement in it you can be proud of." "You name it," said Jim bitterly. "You've saved a lot of other people from this same thing. The doctors have analyzed the traces of drug still in your blood. They think they can neutralize it. Then we are going to put a few sturdy men inside that house, and while they're assumed to be under the influence, we'll raid the place." The tactic worked, but Jim watched the trial with a cynical eye. He couldn't convince himself that it was true. He might, for all he knew, be lying in a second-floor room of the house on a bed, while these people, who seemed to be on trial, actually were going freely about their business. This inability to accept what he saw as real at last forced Jim to resign his job. Using the generous bonus Walters had given him, he took up painting. As he told Walters on one of his rare visits, "It may or may not be that what I'm doing is real, but at least there's the satisfaction of the work itself." "You're not losing any money on it," said Walters shrewdly. "I know," said Jim, "and that makes me acutely uneasy." On his #nd birthday, Jim was widely regarded as the "Grand Old Man" of painting. His hands and feet felt cold that day, and he fell into an uneasy, shallow-breathing doze. He woke with a start and a choking cough. For an instant everything around him had an unnatural clarity; then it all went dark and he felt himself falling. He awoke in a bed in a room where a light drapery fluttered at the window, and the morning sun shone into the room. doubts as to whether or not this was real. He got up angrily and smashed his fist into the wall with all his might. The shock and pain jolted him to his heels. He went out the same way as before, but he had to drive onehanded, gritting his teeth all the way. The worst of it was that the doctors weren't able to make that hand exactly right afterward. Even if the last "life" had been a dream -- even if this one was -- he wanted to paint. But every time he tried to, he felt so clumsy that he gave up in despair. Walters, dissatisfied, gave Jim the minimum possible payment. The gang escaped. Jim eventually lost his job, and in the end he eked out his life at poorly paid odd jobs. The only consolation he felt was that his life was so miserable that it must be true.He went to bed sick one night and woke up the next morning on a bed in a room where a light drapery fluttered at the window and the early morning sun shone brightly in. This happened to him twice more. The next time after that, he lay still on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The incidents and details of five lives danced in his mind like jabbering monkeys. He pressed his palms to his forehead and wished he could forget it all. The door opened softly and the tall, dark-haired woman was watching him with a faint smile. "I told you," she said, "that you couldn't take anything away but memories." He looked up at her sickly. "That seems like a long, long while ago." She nodded and sat down. "Your time sense is distorted as in a dream." "I wish," he said drearily, looking at her, "that I could just forget it all. I don't see why anyone would come back for more of that." She leaned forward to grip the edge of the mattress, shaking with laughter. She sat up again. "Whew!" she said, looking at him and forcing her face to be straight. "Nobody comes back for more. That is the unique quality of this drug. People come back to forget they ever had it." He sat up. "I can forget that?" "Oh, yes. Don't get so excited! That's what you really paid your thousand dollars for. The forgetfulness drug lingers in your bloodstream for two to three weeks. Then memory returns and you're due for another visit." Jim looked at her narrowly. "Does my body become tolerant of this drug? Does it take twice as much after three visits, four times as much after six visits, eight times as much after nine visits?" "No." "Then you lied to me." S HE looked at him oddly. "What would you have expected of me? But I didn't lie to you. I merely said that that was what I was told to tell those who asked." "Then what's the point of it?" Jim asked. "What's the point of bank robbery?" She frowned at him. "You ask a lot of questions. Aren't you lucky I know the answers? Ordinarily you wouldn't get around to this till you'd stewed for a few weeks. But you seem precocious, so I'll tell you." "That's nice," he said. "The main reason for the impossible rates is so you can't pay off in money." "How does that help you?" "Because," she said, "every time you bring us a new patron, you get three free visits yourself." "Ah," he said. "It needn't be so terribly unpleasant, coming here." "What happens if, despite everything, some sorehead actually goes and tells the police about this?" "We move." "Suppose they catch you?" "They won't. Or, at least, it isn't likely." "But you'll leave?" "Yes." "What happens to me?" "Don't you see? We'll have to leave. Someone will have betrayed us. We couldn't stay because it might happen again. It isn't right from your viewpoint, but we can't take chances." For a few moments they didn't talk, and the details of Jim's previous "lives" came pouring in on him. He sat up suddenly. "Where's that forgetfulness drug?" She went outside and came back with a glass of colorless liquid. She poured in a faintly pink powder and handed it to him. He drank it quickly and it tasted like bicarbonate of soda dissolved in water. He looked at her. "This isn't the same thing all over again, is it?" "Don't worry," she said. "You'll forget." The room began to go dark. He leaned back. The last thing he was conscious of was her cool hand on his forehead, then the faint click as she opened the door to go out. He sat up. He dressed, drove quickly to Walters and told him all he could remember. Walters immediately organized his raid. Jim saw the place closed up with no one caught After two weeks and four days, the memories flooded back. His life turned into a nightmare. At every turn, the loves, hates, and tiny details of six separate lives poured in on him. He tried drugs in an attempt to forget, and sank from misery to hopeless despair. He ended up in a shooting scrap as Public Enemy Number Four. And then he awoke and found himself in a bed in a room with a light drapery blowing in at the window, and the early morning sun shining brightly in. "Merciful God!" he said. The door clicked shut. J IM sprang to the door and looked out in the carpeted hall. There was the flash of a woman's skirt; then a tall narrow door down the hallway closed to shut off his view. He drew back into the room and shut the door. The house was quiet. In the distance, on the street, he could hear the faint sound of a passing car. He swallowed hard. He glanced at the window. It had been, he reasoned, early morning when he had talked to the woman last. It was early morning now. He recalled that before she went out she said, "You'll forget." He had then lived his la.st miserable "life" -- and awakened to hear the click as the door came shut behind her. That had all taken less than five seconds of actual time. He found his clothes on a nearby chair and started to dress. As he did so, he realized for the first time that the memories of his "lives" were no longer clear to him. They were fading away, almost as the memories of a dream do after a man wakes and gets up. Almost as the memories of a dream, but not quite. Jim found that if he thought of them, they gradually became clear again. He tried to forget and turned his attention to the tree he could see through the window. He looked at the curve of its boughs, and at a black-and-yellow bird balancing on a branch in the breeze. The memories faded away, and he began to plan what to do. No sooner did he do this than he remembered with a shock that he had said to Walters, "If I don't come out next morning, I want you to come in after me." And Walters had said, "We will." So that must have been just last night. Jim finished dressing, took a deep breath, and held out his hand. It looked steady. He opened the door, stepped out into the hall, and an instant too late remembered what had happened six times before. When he opened his eyes, the plump, gray-haired woman was holding a damp cloth to his forehead and clucking sympathetically. Jim got carefully to his feet, and walked down the drive to his car. He slid into the driver's seat, started the engine, and sat still a moment, thinking. Then he released the parking brake, and pressed lightly on the gas pedal. The car slid smoothly ahead, the gravel of the drive crunching under its tires. He glanced up as the car reached the end of the drive, and looked back at the tower. Every slat in the shutters was perfect. Jim frowned, trying to remember something. Then he glanced up and down the street, and swung out into the light early morning traffic. He wasted no time getting to Walters. "tFE was greeted with an all-encompassing inspection that traveled from Jim's head to his feet. Walters looked tense. He took a cigar from a box on his desk and put it in his mouth unlit. "I've spent half the night telling myself there are some things you can't ask a man to do for money. But we had to do it. Are you all right?" "At the moment." "There are doctors and medical technicians in the next room. Do you want to see them now or later?" "Right now." In the next hour, Jim took off his clothes, stood up, lay down, looked into bright lights, winced as a sharp hollow needle was forced into his arm, gave up samples of bodily excretions, sat back as electrodes were strapped to his skin, and at last was reassured that he would be all right. He dressed, and found himself back in Walters' office. Walters looked at him sympathetically. "How do you feel?" "Starved." "I'll have breakfast sent in." He snapped on his intercom, gave the order, then leaned back. He picked up his still unlit cigar, lit it, puffed hard, and said, "What happened?" Jim told him, starting with the evening before, and ending when he swung his car out into traffic this morning. Walters listened with a gathering frown, drawing occasionally on the cigar. A breakfast of scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon was brought in. Walters got up, and looked out the window, staring down absently at the traffic moving past in the street below. Jim ate with singleminded concentration, and finally pushed his plate back and looked up. Walters ground his cigar butt in the ashtray and lit a fresh cigar. "This is a serious business. You say you remembered the details of each of those six lives clearly ?" "Worse than that. I remembered the emotions and the attachments. In the first life, for instance, I had my own business." Jim paused and thought back. The memories gradually became clear again. "One of my men, for instance, was named Hart. He stood about five-seven, slender, with black hair, cut short when I first met him. Hart was a born actor. He could play any part. It wasn't his face. His expression hardly seemed to change. But his manner changed. He could stride into a hotel and the bellboys would jump for his bags and the desk clerk spring to attention. He stood out. He was important. Or he could slouch in the front door, hesitate, look around, blink, start to ask one of the bellboys something, lose his nerve, stiffen his shoulders, shamble over to the desk, and get unmercifully snubbed. Obviously, he was less than nobody. Or, again, he could quietly come in the front door, stroll across the lobby, fade out of sight somewhere, and hardly a person would notice or remember him. Whatever part he played, he lived it. That was what made him so valuable." out of his mouth, and listened intently. "You mean this Hart -- this imaginary man -- is real to you? In three dimensions?" "That's it. Not only that, I like him. There were other, stronger attachments. I had a family." "Which seems real?" Jim nodded. "I realize as I say these things that I sound like a lunatic." "No." Walters shook his head sympathetically. "It all begins to make sense. Now I see why the girl at the hospital said to the doctor, 'You aren't real.' Does it hurt to talk about these 'lives'?" Jim hesitated. "Not as long as we keep away from the personal details. But it hurt like nothing I can describe to have all six of these sets of memories running around in my head at once." "I can imagine. All right, let's track down some of these memories and see how far the details go." Jim nodded. "Okay." Walters got out a bound notebook and pen. "We'll start with your business. What firm name did you use?" "Calder Associates." 'Why?" "It sounded dignified, looked good on a business card or letterhead, and wasn't specific." "What was your address?" "Four North Street. Earlier, it was # Main." "How many men did you have working with you?" "To begin with, just Hart, and another man by the name of Dean. At the end, there were twentyseven." "What were their names?" Jim called them off one by one, without hesitation. Walters blinked. "Say that over again a little more slowly." Jim repeated the list. "All right," said Walters. "Describe these men." Jim described them. He gave more and more details as Walters pressed for them, and by lunch time, Walters had a large section of the notebook filled. The two men ate, and Walters spent the rest of the afternoon quizzing Jim on his first "life." Then they had steak and French fries sent up to the office. Walters ate in silence for a moment, then said, "Do you realize that you haven't stumbled once?" J IM looked up in surprise. 'What do you mean?" Walters said, "Quiz me on the names of every man who ever worked for me. I won't remember all of them. Not by a long shot. You remember every last detail of this dream life with a total recall that beats anything I've ever seen." "That's the trouble. That's why it's pleasant to forget." Walters asked suddenly, "Did you ever paint? Actually, I mean. I ask because you say you were an outstanding painter in one of these 'lives.' " 'When I was a boy, I painted some. I wanted to be an artist." "Can you come out to my place tonight? I'd like to see whether you can really handle the brushes." Jim nodded. "Yes, I'd like to try that." They drove out together, and Walters got out a dusty paint set in a wooden case, set up a folding easel, and put a large canvas on it. Jim stood still a moment, thinking back. Then he began to paint. He lost himself in the work, as he always had, all through the years, and what he was painting now he had painted before. Had painted it, and sold it for a good price, too. And it was worth it. He could still see the model in his mind as he painted with swift precise strokes. He stepped back. "My Lady in Blue" was a cheerful girl of seventeen. She smiled out from the canvas as if at any moment she might laugh or wave. Jim glanced around. For an instant the room seemed strange. Then he remembered where he was. Walters looked at the painting for a long moment, then looked at Jim, and swallowed. He carefully took the painting from the easel and replaced it with another blank canvas. He went across the room and got a large floor-type ashtray, a wrought-iron affair with a galloping horse for the handle. "Paint this." Jim looked at it. He stepped up to the canvas, hesitated. He raised the brush -- and stopped. He didn't know where to begin. He frowned and carefully thought back to his first lessons. "Let's see." He glanced up. "Do you have any tracing paper?" "Just a minute," said Walters. Jim tacked the paper over the canvas and methodically drew the ashtray on the paper. He had a hard time, but at last looked at the paper triumphantly. "Now, do you have any transfer paper?" Walters frowned. "I've got carbon paper." "All right." Walters got it. Jim put a sheet under his tracing paper, tacked it up again, and carefully went over the drawing with a pencil. He untacked the paper, then methodically began to paint. At length, weary and perspiring, he stepped back. Walter looked at it. Jim blinked and looked again. Walters said, "A trifle off-center, isn't it?" There was no doubt about it, the ashtray stood too far toward the upper right-hand corner of the canvas. Walters pointed at the other painting. "Over there we have a masterpiece that you dashed off freehand. Here we have, so to speak, a piece of good, sound mechanical drawing that isn't properly placed on the canvas. This took you longer to do than the other. How come?" "I had done the other before." "And you remember the motions of your hand? Is that it?" He put another canvas up. "Do it again." Jim frowned. He stepped forward, thought a moment, and began to paint. He lost himself in a perfection of concentration. In time, he stepped back. Walters looked at it. He swallowed hard, glanced back and forth from this painting to the one Jim had done at first. He lifted the painting carefully from the easel and placed it beside the other. They looked identical. r T'HE sun was just lighting the horizon as they drove back to the office. Walters said, "I'm going in there and sleep on the cot. Can you get back around three this afternoon?" "Sure." Jim drove home, slept, ate, and was back again by three. "This is a devil of a puzzle," said Walters, leaning back at his desk and blowing out a cloud of smoke. "I've had half a dozen experts squint at one of those paintings. I've been offered five thousand, even though they don't know the artist's name. Then I showed them the other painting and they almost fell through the floor. It isn't possible, but each stroke appears identical. How do you feel?" "Better. And I've remembered something. Let's look at your model." They went to the big model of the mansion, and Jim touched the upper story of the tower. "Have some of the boys sketch this. Then compare the sketches with photographs." Soon they were looking at sketches and photographs side by side. The sketches showed the tower shutters perfect. The photographs showed several slats of the shutters broken. Walters questioned the men, who insisted the shutters were perfect. After they left, Jim said, "Everyone who sketched that place wasn't drugged. And the cameras certainly weren't drugged." Walters said, "Let's take a look." They drove out past the mansion, and the shutters looked perfect. A new photograph showed the same broken slats. Back at the office, Walters said, "Just what are we up against here?" Jim said, "I can think of two possibilities." "Let's hear them." "Often you can do the same thing several different ways. A man, for instance, can go from one coastal town to another on foot, riding a horse, by car, by plane, or in a speedboat." "Granted." "A hundred years ago, the list would have been shorter." Walter nodded thoughtfully. "I follow you. Go on." "Whoever sees those shutters as perfect is, for the time being, in an abnormal mental state. How did he get there? We've assumed drugs were used. But just as there are new ways of going from one city to another, so there may be new ways of passing from one mental state to another. Take subliminal advertising, for instance, flashed on the screen too fast to be consciously seen." "It's illegal." "Suppose someone found out how to do it undetected, and decided to try it out on a small scale. What about nearly imperceptible verbal clues instead of visual ones?" "We'll analyze every sound coming out of that place and check for any kind of suspicious sensory stimulus whatever. What's your other idea?" "Well, go back to your travel analogy. Going from one place to another, any number of animals can outrun, outfly, and outswim a man. Let Man work on the problem long enough, and roll up to the starting line in his rocket-plane, and the result will be different. But until Man has time to concentrate enough thought and effort, the nonhuman creature has an excellent chance to beat him. There are better fliers, better swimmers, better fighters, better -- " Walters frowned. "Better suggestionists? Like the snake that's said to weave hypnotically?" "Yes, and the wasp that stings the trapdoor spider, when other wasps are fought off." "Hmm. Maybe. But I incline to the subliminal advertising theory myself." He looked at the mansion. "Where would they keep the device?" "Why not the tower?" Walters nodded. "It's an easy place to guard, and to shut off from visitors." Jim said, "It might explain those shutters. They might not care to risk painters and repairmen up there." Walters knocked the ash off his cigar. "But how do we get in there to find out?" They studied the model. Walters, "Say we send in a 'building inspector.' They'll merely knock him out, hallucinate a complete series of incidents in his mind, and send him out totally ignorant. If we try to raid the place in a group, they'll vanish with the help of that machine. But there must be some way." Jim said thoughtfully, "Those trees overhang the room." "They do, don't they?" The two men studied the trees and the tower. Jim touched one of the arching limbs. "What if we lowered a rope from here?" Walters tied an eraser on a string and fastened the string to a limb. The eraser hung by the uppermost tower winder. Walters scowled, snapped on the intercom, and asked for several of his men. Then he turned to Jim. "We'll see what Cullen thinks. He's done some jobs like this." Cullen had sharp eyes and a mobile face that grew unhappy as he listened to Walters. Finally, he shook his head. "No, thanks. Ask me to go up a wall, or the side of a building. But not down out of a tree branch on the end of a rope." He gave the eraser a little flip with his finger. It swung in circles, hit the wall, and bounced away. "Say I'm actually up there. It's night. The rope swings. The limb bobs up and down. The tree sways. All to a different rhythm. I'm spinning around on the end of this rope. One second this shutter is one side of me. The next second it's on the other side and five feet away. A job is a job, but this is one I don't want." Walters turned to Jim after Cullen went out. "That settles that." Jim looked at the tree limb. Two or three weeks from today, he told himself, the memories would come flooding back. The people who had done it would get away, and do it again. And he would have those memories. Jim glanced at Walters stubbornly. "I am going to climb that tree." r I I HE night was still, with a dark overcast sky as Jim felt the rough bark against the insides of his arms. He hitched up the belt that circled the tree, then pulled up one foot, then another as he sank the climbing irons in higher up. He could hear Cullen's advice: "Practice, study the model, do each step over and over in your head. Then, when you're actually doing it and when things get tight, hold your mind on what to do next. Do that. Then think of the next step." Jim was doing this as the dark lawn dropped steadily away. He felt the tree trunk grow gradually more slender, then begin to widen. He worked his way carefully above the limb, refastened the belt, and felt a puff of warm air touch his face and neck, like a leftover from the warm day. Somewhere, a radio was playing. He climbed, aware now of the rustling around him of leaves. The trunk widened again, and he knew he was at the place where the trunk separated into the limbs that arched out to form the crown of the tree. He pulled himself up carefully, and took his eyes from the tree for a moment to look toward the mansion. He saw the slanting tile roof of an entirely different house, light shining down from a dormer window. He glanced around, to see the looming steep-roofed tower of the mansion in the opposite direction. He realized he must have partially circled the tree and lost his sense of direction. He swallowed and crouched in the cleft between the limbs till he was sure he knew which limb arched over the tower. He fastened the belt and started slowly up. As he climbed, the limb arched, to become more and more nearly horizontal. At the same time, the limb became more slender. It began to respond to his movements, swaying slightly as he climbed. Now he was balancing on it, the steep roof of the tower shining faintly ahead of him. He remembered that he had to take off the climbing irons, lest they foul in the M '.iCwVwri y. : --  r. v ' ,h  rope later on. As he twisted to do this, his hands trembled. He forced his breath to come steadily. He looked ahead to the steep, slanting roof of the tower. The limb was already almost level. If he crawled further, it would sag under him. He would be climbing head down. He glanced back, and his heart began to pound. To go back, he would have to inch backwards along the narrow limb. Cullen's words came to him: "When things get tight, hold your mind on what to do next. Do that. Then think of the next step." TT E inched ahead. The limb began to sag. There was a rustling of leaves. The limb swayed. It fell, and rose, beneath him. He clung to it, breathing hard. He inched further. The leaves rustled. The limb pressed up, then fell away. He shut his eyes, his forehead tight against the bark, and crept ahead. After a time, he seemed to feel himself tip to one side. His eyes opened. The tower was almost beneath him. With his left arm, he clung tightly to the limb. With his right, he felt carefully for the rope tied to his belt. He worked one end of the rope forward and carefully looped it around the limb. He tied the knot that he had practiced over and over, then tested it, and felt it hold. A breeze stirred the leaves. The limb began to sway. The dark lawn below seemed to reach up and he felt himself already falling. He clung hard to the limb and felt his body tremble all over. Then he knew he had to go through the rest of his plan without hesitation, lest he lose his nerve completely. He sucked in a deep breath, swung over the limb, let go with one hand, caught the rope, then caught it with the other hand, looped the rope around one ankle, and started to slide down. The rope swung. The limb dipped, then lifted. The tree seemed to sway slightly. Jim clung, his left foot clamping the loop of the rope passed over his right ankle. The swaying, dipping, and whirling began to die down. His hands felt weak and tired. He slid gradually down the rope. Then the shutter was right beside him. He reached out, put his hand through the break in the slats, and lifted the iron catch. The hinges of the shutters screeched as he pulled them open. A dead black oblong hung before him. He reached out, and felt no sash in the opening. He climbed higher on the rope, pushed away from the building, and as he swung back, stepped across, caught the frame, and dropped inside. The shutters screeched as he pulled them shut, but the house remained quiet. He stood still for a long moment, then unsnapped a case on his belt, and took out a little polarizing flashlight. He carefully thumbed the stud that turned the front lens. A dim beam faintly lit the room. There was a glint of metal, then another. Shiny parallel lines ran from the ceiling to floor in front of him. There was an odd faint odor. The house was quiet. A shift of the wind brought the distant sound of recorded music. stud of the flashlight further around, so the light grew a trifle brighter. The vertical lines looked like bars. He stepped forward and peered into the darkness. Behind the bars, something stirred. Jim reached back, unbuttoned the flap of his hip pocket and gripped the cool metal of his gun. Something moved behind the bars. It reached out, bunched itself, reached out. Something large and dark slid up the bars. Jim raised the gun. A hissing voice said quietly, "You are from some sort of law-enforcement agency? Good." Jim slid his thumb toward the stub of the light, so he could see more clearly. But the faint hissing voice went on, "Don't. It will do no good to see me." Jim's hand tightened on the gun at the same instant that his mind asked a question. The voice said, "Who am I? Why am I here? If I tell you, it will strain your mind to believe me. Let me show you." The room seemed to pivot, then swung around him faster and faster. A voice spoke to him from all sides; then something lifted him up, and at an angle. He stared at the dial, rapped it with his finger. The needle didn't move from its pin. He glanced at the blue-green planet on the screen. Photon pressure was zero, and there was nothing to do but try to land on chemical rockets. As he strapped himself into the acceleration chair, he began to really appreciate the size of his bad luck. Any solo space pilot, he told himself, should be a good mechanic. And an individual planetary explorer should be his own pilot, to save funds. Moreover, anyone planning to explore Ludt VI, with its high gravity and pressure, and its terrific psychic stress, should be strong and healthy. These requirements made Ludt VI almost the exclusive preserve of big organizations with teams of specialists. They sent out heavily equipped expeditions, caught a reasonable quota of spat, trained them on the way home, and sold the hideous creatures at magnificent prices to the proprietors of every dream parlor in the system. From this huge income, they paid their slightly less huge costs, and made a safe moderate profit on their investment. With a small expedition, it was different. A small expedition faced risk, and a one-man expedition was riskiest of all. But if it succeeded, the trained spat brought the same huge price, and there were no big-ship bills for fuel, specialists, power equipment, and insurance. This, he thought, had almost been a successful trip. There were three nearly trained spat back in his sleeping compartment. But, though he was a competent trainer, a skilled explorer, a passable pilot, and in good physical condition, he was no mechanic. He didn't know how to fix what had gone wrong. He sat back and watched the rim of the world below swing up in the deep blue sky.  Jim was standing in the dark, seeing the bars shining faintly before him. The black knot still clung to the bars. Somewhere in the old mansion, a phone began to ring. Jim said, in a low voice, "You were the pilot?" "No. I was the spat. The others died in the crash. Some of your race found me and we made a -- an agreement. But it has worked out differently here than I expected. The experiences I stimulate in your minds are enjoyable to you and to me. Yet either the structure of your brains is different from that of the pilot, or you lack training in mind control. You cannot wipe away these experiences afterward, and though I can do it for you easily, it is only temporary." A door opened and shut downstairs. There was a sound of feet on the staircase. The hissing began again. "You must go and bring help." Jim thought of the rope and the trees. His hand tightened on the gun and he made no move toward the window. The hissing sound said, "I see your difficulty. I will help you." There was the crack of a rifle, then several shots outside. Jim swung the shutter open, felt a faint dizziness, and looked down on a warm sunlit lawn some three feet below. A hissing voice said, "Take hold the rope. Now carefully step out. Loop the rope with your foot." Somewhere in Jim's mind, as he did this, there was an uneasiness. He wondered at it as he climbed up the rope to the bar overhead, swung up onto the bar, slipped and nearly lost his grip. He could see the bar was steady and solid, and he wondered as it seemed to move under him. The green lawn was such a short distance down that there clearly was little danger, and he wondered why his breath came fast as he swung around on the bar, slid down to a sort of resting place where he put on climbing irons before starting down again. Always on the way down, the whistling voice told him that it was just a few feet more, just a few feet, as bit by bit he made his way down, and suddenly heard shots, shouts, and a repeated scream. Jim stepped off onto the soft lawn, stumbled, and knelt to take off the climbing irons. His heart pounded like a trip-hammer. He realized there was a blaze of spotlights around him. He saw lights coming on in the mansion, and memory returned in a rush. He drew in a deep shaky breath, glanced at the tree, then saw a little knot of people near the base of the tower. He walked over, recognized Walters in the glow of the lights and saw a still figure on the ground. Walters said, "I shouldn't have let him try it. Cover his face, Cullen." Cullen bent to draw a coat up over the head of the motionless figure, which was twisted sidewise. Jim looked down. He saw his own face. of something hard beneath him. Voices came muffled from somewhere nearby. He heard the sound of a phone set in its cradle, the slam of a door, the scrape of glass on glass. He breathed and recognized a choking smell of cigar smoke. Jim sat up. Nearby was the model of the mansion. Jim swung carefully to his feet, made his way across the room, and opened the door to the next office. He blinked in the bright light, then saw Walters look up and grin. "One more night like this and I retire. How do you feel?" "I ache all over and I'm dizzy. How did I get here?" "I was afraid your going in there might misfire and touch off their escape, so I had the place surrounded. We saw you go in, there was about a five-minute pause, and the shutters seemed to come open. A figure came out. Then there was the crack of a rifle from the dormer window of a house across the street. I sent some men into that house, and the rest of us closed in on the mansion. We used the spotlights on our cars to light the place. We'd just found what we thought was your body -- with a broken neck -- when there was a thud behind us. There you were, and the other body was gone. "Right then, I thought it was going to be the same as usual. But this time we nailed several men and women in quite a state of confusion. Some of them have fingerprints that match those from the first place we raided. We don't have the equipment yet, because that tower staircase was boarded up tight... What's wrong?" Jim told his own version, adding, "Since that shot came before I opened the shutters, the 'figure' you saw go up the rope must have been an illusion, to fool whoever had the gun across the street. And since I heard someone running up the stairs a few minutes before you came in, I don't see how the stairs can be boarded up." Walters sat up straight. "Another illusion!" Jim said, "It would be nice to know if there's any limit to those illusions." Walters said, "This afternoon, we tried looking at those shutters through field glasses. Beyond about four hundred feet, you could see the broken slats. So there's a limit. But if there's no equipment, tfris is uncanny, 'spat' or no 'spat.'" Jim shook his head. "I don't know. You can use the same electromagnetic laws and similar components to make all kinds of devices -- radios, television sets, electronic computers. What you make depends mainly on how you put the parts together. It may be that in the different conditions on some other planet, types of nerve components similar to those we use for thought might be used to create dangerous illusions in the minds of other creatures." "That still leaves us with a problem. What do we do with this thing?" "I got the impression it was like a merchant who has to sell his wares to live. Letme go back and see if we can make an agreement with it." "I'll go with you." Jim shook his head. "One of us has to stay beyond that fourhundred-foot limit." HP HE stairs were narrow leading up into the tower. Jim found weary men amidst plaster and bits of board at a solid barricade on the staircase. He scowled at it, then shouted up the stairs, "I want to talk to you!" There was a sort of twist in the fabric of things. Jim found himself staring at the wall beside the stairs, its plaster gone and bits of board torn loose. The staircase itself was open. He started up. Behind him, a man still staring at the wall said, "Did you see that? He went around somehow." The back of Jim's neck prickled. He reached a tall door, opened it, turned, and he was standing where he had been before. There was a faint hissing. "I am glad you came back. I can't keep this up forever." "We want to make an agreement with you. Otherwise, we'll have to use force." "There is no need of that. I ask only food, water, and a chance to use my faculties. And I would be very happy if the atmospheric pressure around me could be increased. Falling pressure tires me so that it is hard for me to keep self-control." Jim thought of the first night, when there had been the appearance of light on mansion and grounds, but heavy clouds and only a thin moon in the sky. The hissing voice said, "It had stormed, with a sharp fall in atmospheric pressure. I was exhausted and created a wrong illusion. Can you provide what I need?" "The food, water, and pressure chamber, yes. I don't know about the opportunity to 'use your faculties.' " "There is a painting in the world now that wasn't there before. You and I did that." "What are you driving at?" "I can't increase skill where there has been no practice, no earnest thought or desire. I can't help combine facts or memories where none have been stored. But within these limits I can help you and others to a degree of concentration few men of your world know." "Could you teach us to concentrate this way on our own?" "I don't know. We would have to try it. Meanwhile, I have been here long enough to have learned that your race has used horses to extend their powers of movement, dogs to increase their ability to trail by scent, cows and goats to convert indigestible grass and leaves into foodstuffs. These all were your partners in the physical world. It seems to me that I am much the same, but in the mental world." Jim hesitated. "Meanwhile, you can help us to forget these dream lives?" "Easily. But, as I say, the effect is not permanent." Jim nodded. "I'll see what we can do." He went to tell Walters, who listened closely, then picked up the phone. climbed the steps to the high narrow door of the tower, put on dark glasses and went in. Right behind him came a corporal with a creepie-peepie TV transmitter. From outside came the windmill roar of helicopters, and, high up, the rumble of jets. The corporal opened the shutter and spoke quietly into the microphone. A hissing voice spoke in Jim's mind. "I am ready." Jim said, "This entire place is being watched by television. If there is any important difference between what observers here report and what the cameras show, this place and everything in it will be destroyed a few seconds later." "I understand," said the hissing voice. Then it told him how to loosen one of the bars, and Jim loosened it and stood back. There was the sound of footsteps on the staircase. A large heavy box with one end hinged and open was thrust in the doorway. On the floor, something bunched and unbunched, and moved past into the box. Jim closed the box and snapped shut the padlock. Men lifted it and started down the staircase. Jim and the corporal followed. As they went out the front door, heavy planks were thrown across to a waiting truck. Sweating men in khaki carried the box up the planks into the truck. Then the rear doors swung shut, the engine roared, and the truck moved away. Jim thought of the truck's destination, a pressure tank in a concrete blockhouse under a big steel shed out in the desert. He looked around and saw Walters, who smiled at him and held out a slim envelope. "Good work," said Walters. "And I imagine some hundreds of ex-addicts reclaimed from mental hospitals are going to echo those sentiments." Jim thanked him, and Walters led him to the car, saying, "Now what you need is sleep, and plenty of it." "And how!" Once home, Jim fell into an exhausted sleep, and had a nightmare. In the nightmare, he dreamed that he woke up, and found himself in a bed in a room where a light curtain blew in at the window, and the morning sun shone brightly in. He sat up, and looked around carefully at the furniture, and felt the solid wall of the room as he asked himself a question that he knew would bother him again. Which was the nightmare? Then he remembered his fear as he climbed the tree, and Cullen's advice: "When things get tight, hold your mind on what to do next. Do that. Then think of the next step." He thought a moment, then lay back and smiled. He might not be absolutely certain this was real. But even if it wasn't, he felt sure he would win in the end. No nightmare could last forever... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of Galaxy to you when they should arrive -- at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: Subscription Dept., Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Just published! the best of Galaxy novelets -- with a special plus for Galaxy readers. Edited by H. L. Gold One look at the contents tells you that this is a 'must have' book for your permanent SF library -- Richard Matheson's One for the Books; Damon Knight's An Eye for What?; Mark Clifton's A Woman's Place; Alan E. Nourse's Brightside Crossing; F. L. Wallace's Mezzerow Loves Company; Evelyn E. Smith's Once a Greech; L. Sprague de Camp's A Gun for Dinosaur; Edgar . Pangborn's The Music Man of Babylon; and -- of course -- Clifford D. Simak's The World that Couldn't Be. # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of  Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. I admit it -- he beat my time. But my day time will come for me to meet my wife's husband. I can hardly wait. Every dog has his day and Professor Thurlow Benjamin has just about had it. Every day has its dog, too, and I am going to return to him with full five years' interest the bad time he gave to me. The dog. Dog? Look, he stole my girl not once but twice. The second time he, you might say, took his time to beat my time -- and left me behind to the bad time that belonged to him. Benji is -- or he was and he will be -- a scientifically sneaky, two-timing dog, and a dog's life is what he gave me. But now, after nearly five years, time is on my side. He will get what, minute by minute, is coming to him not soon enough, but soon. Benji -- Professor Thurlow Benjamin -- was my oldest, closest friend. I was his. We hated each other dearly in the way that only two boyhood pals can and by chance or mischance that quality of bitter-friendly, boyish rivalry never left our relationship. Why? A woman, naturally. The first time we met, he was a tall, gangling, red-headed, bignosed kid of nine. I, Bull (for Boulard) Benton, was shorter, stockier, heavier. Maybe not handsome exactly, but clean cut, very clean cut. Benji knocked a chip off my shoulder and I knocked his block off, but not without collecting a few lumps doing it. From then on, we fought together against anyone else. When no one else was handy, we fought each other. And naturally we each wanted what the other had. After high school, we roomed together at Burnington Univeris coming. Any minute now time is about to run out on him! sity right there in our home town, Belt City. Benji was a brain, a scholar. I was an athlete. So he broke nearly every bone in his body trying to be a six-foot-three, one hundred and thirty ninepound scatback, while I nearly sprained a brain that was deep, definitely deep, but maybe not quite as quick on its feet as some, trying for scholarship. The last year and a half at the university, the competition between us narrowed down to a battle for Vera Milston, old Dean Milston's statuesque daughter. That was all a mistake. I can see it now. So can Benji. But not then. est, sourest, meanest old tyrant ever to suspend a football captain for a couple of unimportant "D"s. One afternoon in junior year at basketball practice -- Benji was out, dragging around a cast -- Jocko Bunter bet me ten I didn't have the nerve to date the dean's daughter. Well, hell, I'd seen her around, visiting the dean as regularly as I had to. She was a lot of girl. Tall, honey-blonde -- a little on the regal, commanding side, and maybe her lips were a mite set over a chin that the old man should have kept to himself -- but there are times when a young man doesn't analyze the details as carefully as he might. She was built like nothing I had tackled all fall. So I took a chance, got a date, won ten, and that might and should have been that. She had a way of saying "No!" that made me think of her father. But, the thing was, Benji didn't know about the bet. I dated her once. So he had to date her twice. Again, I didn't analyze. I jumped to the conclusion Benji had the hots for her and went to work to cut him out. That kept us busy the next year and a half and I led all the way. Vera and I got engaged at the spring prom to be married right after my graduation -- which improved the odds on my graduating considerably. The dean was a grim old devil who considered Hamlet a comedy and could refuse anything to anyone -- except Vera, and how could I have known it was fear rather than affection that made him give in to her? Anyway, perhaps the strain of passing me a diploma was too great. The next day the old devil passed on himself, and no matter where he may be sitting, I know he is happy as long as he can watch the others fry. But I shouldn't grumble. He saved me, unintentional though it was. Vera, possibly having second thoughts as she looked over the Dean's List, said she couldn't marry me till after a reasonable period of mourning. The Army took me and rejected Benji. He stayed on for post-graduate study in physics. I told you he was a brain. A brain, but not equally acute in all fields. When I got back to Belt City three years later, Benji was already an assistant professor of physics -- and Vera's husband. They were settled in the old dean's big, ancient house just off the campus and Benji was aiming -- or being aimed -- at a distinguished academic career. I came back to town with the idea of winding up the family insurance and real estate business and pulling out, mostly to keep away from them. It wasn't, you understand, that I was carrying such a heavy torch for Vera. She hadn't blighted my life; not then, that is. But it seemed to me that living in town with her and Professor Thurlow Benjamin -- a gloating, triumphant Benji, laughing at me because he'd succeeded in marrying my girl -- would be a real annoyance. But, of course, when I hit town I had to call them and they had to invite me to dinner. For one time, anyway, I figured I had to accept. I gritted my teeth and went. I never had a sweeter, more enjoyable evening in all my life. evening and walked up the steps to the big old porch on the dean's house feeling a bit nervous and upset. I'd walked up those same steps often enough before, feeling nervous and upset, but this was different. I lifted the oversized brass knocker and rapped. Vera's voice, coming from the back of the house someplace, cut through the evening air. "Thurlow! Answer the door!" "Yes, sweets. I'm on my way, Vera hun bun." That was Benji. Hun bun, yet! And his voice was misery. It cringed and whined. I grinned to myself and began to feel more cheerful. Benji let me in. His glasses were thicker and his hair thinner and he looked a lot older. But it was Benji, the same old lanky, gangling redhead; yet not the same, too. He had a hang-dog look that was new and suddenly I felt so good, I punched him playfully in the ribs. He winced -- and didn't even counter. If the fight hadn't gone out of him, it had sure been watered down. We went on in to the parlor across the hall from the dean's old study. Vera joined us. She didn't look bad -- at a glance. But if you checked right close, and I did, there was something in her look -- a sharpness I hadn't noticed before; her nose seemed bigger, beak-like; the broad, solid shoulders; deep-down grooves at the corners of her mouth. She threw her arms around me and kissed me. My temperature stayed steady and cool. "Boulard! Boulard, darling! You look marvelous!" I felt great, too. "Vera, girl. You're as gorgeous as ever, radiant, blooming, still the campus goddess. And Mrs. Thurlow Benjamin now, hm-m? Old Benji is sure a lucky dog." Benji forced a hollow laugh. Vera smiled a positive agreement. Then Benji sort of coughed out a faint note of hope and pleaded, "Vera, sweet, this is a -- uh -- an occasion, don't you agree, dear? Don't you -- ah -- do you think maybe I ought to -- fix us all a drink?" "Thurlow! You drink far too much! You had a highball before dinner at Professor Dorman's only night before last." Almost -- but not quite -- I felt sorry for him. "Ah, well, Vera doll," I said, "this is an occasion, after all. And I do want to drink a toast to you and Benji." "Hmph." "Especially you, the love of my life, lost now, but lovelier than ever." "Boulard!... Well, Thurlow, don't stand there like an idiot. Go mix us some drinks. And mind the line on the bottle." And then she turned back with some more gush for me. I enjoyed it, knowing now what I had been saved from. In fact, as I said, I enjoyed the whole evening; my playing up to Vera made her just that much rougher on Benji. Revenge bn Benji plus relief at what I had escaped made life seem pleasant, and right there and then I changed my mind about leaving town. I decided to stay and settled down. too far down. Instead of selling out Uncle George's insurance and real estate firm, I went to work in it. It was prosperous enough and light work. There were plenty of girls around town if you got around, and I did. Looking back, those were the happy years. Naturally I kept seeing quite a bit of Vera and Benji. Rubbing it in? Sure, why not? Hell, half the pleasure in any success comes from giving a hard time to those who gave you a hard time. It may not be nice, but it is normal. I lolled in the shade and laughed; Benji sweated and suffered. His boss's whip cracked merrily. He plodded ahead in the University Physics Department and fiddled around his lab whenever he could escape into it. Then there came a black Friday evening in early autumn. I was due at Benji's for dinner, just him and me. Vera had gone up to Chicago that morning to see her ever-dying Aunt Bella and do some shopping. She would not be back till the next day so she called on me to keep an eye on Benji. So I was due for a quietly pleasant early evening listening to Benji talk about his sorrows. Then, I figured, Benji would go to his lab in the old dean's study and I would go out on the town. I had a date, one of the very best, Starlight Glowe, formerly Daisy Hanzel, formerly an office clerk. She was a pert little strawberry blonde, cute, with a lot of good humor and a lot of everything else too; about as unlike Vera as a girl could be. That week she was between nightclub engagements, back in her old home town. And back in the old groove with me, too. I looked forward to the evening -- first Benji's troubles and then my own pleasures. I pulled up in front of Benji's old place just at dusk. A late working lineman from Beltsville Power was fiddling around on the pole outside Benji's lab room. "Hey, Mac," he hollered, "you going in there? Look, tell the prof they'll cut it in at seven ayem, huh? Can't make it a minute sooner." I nodded as I went up the steps and across the porch; knocked once. Walked on in -- and stopped dead in the hallway to stare up the stairs. It was Benji, but not the Vera's Benji I was used to. He was dressed in the evening clothes Vera got him to wear only at major faculty functions. He carried a cane, wore a flower. Tonight he was Benji, man about town, knight of the evening. Sharp. Cool. Cocky. He strutted on down the stairs and past me. He winked, grinned that dirty, sneaky grin of his I remembered all too well from the old days. At the door, he looked back over his shoulder, still grinning, and said, "Stick around a minute, Bull boy. I have something to show you." The door slammed shut. T couldn't believe it; he wouldn't dare. Then I heard my car, my new sport car, starting outside and I swore, grabbing the doorknob. "Wait, Bull. You couldn't catch me." I spun around. Damned if it wasn't old Benji, coming down the stairs again just as though it wasn't impossible. This time he looked himself, but worse. He had on an old lab smock and a new hangover. He looked awful -- but with a hint of satisfaction too, like remembering the time he'd had getting into such lousy shape. "Well, Bull boy," he mumbled, wavering on down the steps, holding the top of his head on with one hand, "come on out in the lab. Maybe we could find a little nip. And I have something tfl show you." "So you said." "Eh? Oh, yes, so I did. Last night, when I was going out." "It was just now -- only you went out all dressed up, and here you are all beat up. What's this all about?" "Come on," he said with a flash of temper. "When I get a hair or two of the dog, I'll explain it to you." I followed him into his lab, the dean's old study. It was the only thing Benji could call his own. Vera let him have it on the off-chance that he might find something important enough to give their social and financial position a boost. In the lab, Benji fished an amber-filled flask from the wastebasket under the old rolltop desk and poured himself a double, me a single, in a couple of big test tubes. I only half saw him out of a corner of the eye. What I was really looking at was a damned peculiar rig that filled up about a third of the space along the side wall next to the kitchen. It was -- I couldn't figure it. It looked something like one of those jungle gym outfits in the kids' playgrounds. But there were wires running from it to half a dozen wall plugs, and a seat up in the middle with a bunch of dials and things. It was all odd, and oddest was the way it all sort of shimmered and blurred as I watched it. "What in hell is that?" I walked across the. lab toward it, reaching out. "Better not touch it, Bull. You might knock something out." Since he put it like that, I raised my hand to grab hold of one of the cross bars by the seat in the center of the thing -- and there I was resting comfortably on a small cloud in far outer space, watching a great spiral nebula whirling in infinite majesty through the vast, empty blackness, and I thought about the mystery of the universe. I felt that if I could just reach out, I would have in my grasp the final answer. But then it drifted away and the nebula slowly narrowed and evolved into a great system of suns, planets, moons -- and finally into the big, old chandelier in the dean's study. bilize at that point, I sat up a little shakily. The room, Benji's lab now, was still there. I stood up and felt lousy. My head ached. I looked around. Benji was sitting at the desk slumped over, his head on his folded arms. The flask of whiskey, half gone, was on the desk beside him. I emptied it out a little more, into me, and checked my watch. Six o'clock and the sky showed gray outside. I had been out all night. I put my foot on the base of Benji's swivel chair and shoved hard. The chair rolled back, out from under him. He slumped down with a pleasing thud on the floor. He woke up with a pained expression that helped my headache a little. "Damn you, Benji," I said, "you did that out of spite, to break my date with Daisy, I bet." He yawned. "I told you you'd better not touch it." "Because you knew then I'd have to go ahead and do it. It's a wonder, with me knocked out, you didn't go try to steal my girl." "I did. I am." "You what?" "I did go out with Daisy. I am with her now." "Are you cracked? You are right here with me." "True, but I am simultaneously with Daisy." He grinned reflectively. "And I don't mind saying Daisy is much better company than you... Now wait, Bull. I know this is difficult for you to grasp, but it is a fact that I am in two places at the same time -- only on different circuits. This is big, Bull, really big! After you help me with one or two details, I am going to share it with you. Listen to me." Sometimes I can be sickeningly gullible. "All right. Start explaining." "Think, Bull! Last night you saw me go out the front door. At substantially the same time, you also saw me, dressed quite differently, come down the hall stairs. It should be obvious. I have built a time machine." I looked down at my watch and then back at him, with raised eyebrows. "No, Bull. Not a machine for telling time; a machine for traveling through time or, actually, more or less around it. You see my machine there." The jungle gym rig was still at the side of the room, blurred and shimmering. "Yeah, I see it. And don't bother telling me not to touch it again. I won't." "Your own fault. Ordinarily you could touch even one of the bars; it is perfectly safe. But just now the machine is there twice. That creates further static force fields." "Benji -- " "Look at it. Looks as though you were seeing double, hm-m? And you are. You see, Bull, this coming morning at ten to seven, I took -- and will take -- the machine and I traveled back to ten to five yesterday afternoon. At that time the machine was already there. Actually, I should have moved it just before I used it this morning, to limit the overlaps. But I was rushed. You'll see. Daisy and I will be here shortly." He grinned. It was an expression I had never particularly cared for. "Have another drink, Bull." That was an expression I liked better. I did have one. His story was unbelievable. But I was beginning to believe it -- partly because of the machine there and the fact that I had seen two of him practically at once the evening before, partly because I knew Benji would be capable of almost anything if it would let him steal a girl from me and get away from Vera besides. and went on. "I won't strain your limited facilities by trying to give you the technical side of it. More or less, it is a matter of setting up the proper number of counteracting magnetic force fields, properly focused, in a proper relationship each with the other to bend the normal space factors in such a way as to circumvent time. Is that clear?" "Not to me," I said. "Is it to you?" "Not altogether. But what is clear is this. My machine works. I can jump through time. To any time." "Got any special messages from Cleopatra?" "The amount or period of time is a question of power. With only the regular house current I have connected now, about a day at a step is the limit. That is as far as I have gone. Of course I could go one day and then another and then another, forward or back, indefinitely. With more current, there would be no such limitations." "How about taking a run up to the end of the week and let me know how the World Series is going to come out?" "Ah, now you begin to see! I told you this is a big thing -- tremendous! And all I ask is just a little help from you, and you will share in the proceeds." "What, me help? How?" "I had the power company run in a special power line yesterday. It will cut in this morning at seven. With this added power, the machine can travel five years. Five years at a jump, which as far as I -- we, that is -- want to go." "Well, just suppose what you say is true, Benji. If it is, then you used your sneaky machine to two-time me with Daisy last night, eh? I like that. Vera will like that, too. But you expect to bribe me with a share in your rig to help you out. How? With what?" "Bull, it's like this. I did go out last night, my first time in a long time. You know Vera. So, considering the past few years, you can understand that I was -- uh -- maybe a bit reckless last night, ran into a few little problems. Nothing serious, of course. And besides, with your help, the police won't be able -- " "The police?" "Yes. But, Bull, you've been right here with me all night. You can swear to that. So I couldn't possibly have driven your car up the steps and through the glass doors into the ancient history section of the museum." "My car!" "Now, Bull, we'll make money -- you can get lots of cars. And I didn't mean to smash up yours. I simply wanted to give Daisy a rough idea of a time trip back into the past. But you can tell the police I was right here when someone broke out through the window by the Neanderthal exhibit while the police were coming in the front door after us. So someone else must have driven off in the police car." "You stole the police car?" I yelped. we won't keep it," he said airily. "But perhaps they are upset about our borrowing it and about the duet of 'As Time Goes By' that Daisy and I sang over the police radio." "Lord! And when did you finish all this fun and games?" I demanded. "When? Let's see. It's #:#a.m. So we -- Daisy and I -- are on our way back here now. In the patrol car." "Now? You and Daisy? In the patrol car?" "The one we borrowed. The police -- they seem to have a lot of cars -- are not far behind. I believe they think they recognized me. You can tell them how wrong they are." He stopped to listen. I heard it too, a sound of sirens in the distance, coming closer. "So, Benji. In a minute or so, you -- a second edition of you, when one has always been plenty -- you are coming here, with all the cops in town on your tail, and with my girl. And you expect me to step forward and, lying in my teeth, tell these enraged cops that you are innocent. This is quite a request, Benji" There was the roar of a car racing down the quiet, Saturdaydawn street. Benji looked at me anxiously. "Here we come. Bull, please! You wouldn't turn me over to the police. Would you?" No, I didn't want the cops to get him. I wanted to get him myself -- and let Vera finish him. There was a sound of running footsteps up the porch stairs. The hallway door opened. Arm in arm, laughing like a pair of idiots, in came Benji -- Benji II -- and my girl, Daisy. They staggered across the room. Benji II threw his arms around Daisy and kissed her with conviction and assurance. Then, quickly, he stepped away from her and walked over to the time-machine rig. "Hurry it up," said the first Benji, "quick. The power will cut off any second now, until they switch in the new line." Drunk or not, Benji II knew what he was doing. He dragged the straight chair by the wall to the side of the machine and climbed it. He swayed, almost fell. Then, without touching any of the bars, he managed to step from the chair into the seat of the machine rig. He fiddled with a dial or knob -- and vanished. The double exposure look of the machine disappeared too. "Benji," said Daisy, staring blankly at the machine. "Daisy," said the leftover Benji, walking toward her. The sound of sirens outside sounded loud and louder -- and then moaned to a stop in front of the house. "Benji," Daisy said again, giving me and the sirens about as much attention as an individual ant gets at a family picnic, "Benji, it was true then! All that you were telling me about going through time was true! And we can -- " "Of course, sweet. I told you I'd be with you, that everything will be all right, with good old Bull to help us. What time have you, Bull?" "Hah?" I was dazed. "The time? What time is it?" "It's just about seven. But -- " Heavy footsteps pounded up the front stairs and across the porch. The front door knocker thundered. "Bull," said Benji, "Bull, old friend. I think there may be someone at the door. Would you see who it is?" T don't know why I didn't make him go answer. I still don't know. But I walked out into the hall from the lab and opened the front door -- and nearly got trampled by a squad of four cops, headed by big, tough Sergeant Winesap. There were, I saw through the open door, two squad cars parked out front and another coming down the block, just behind a taxi. "Oh," said Winesap, "it's you, Benton. Say, you weren't in this crime wave, too, were you? We only saw two, that madman friend of yours, Professor Benjamin, and the girl, in your car... Look, you know what they did? They knocked off three hydrants whooping about time and the fountain of youth, and wrecked the museum, and the police car -- and what they did to Officer Durlin... Maybe you weren't in on it, Benton, but we know they came in here. Friend or no friend, don't try to obstruct justice. Where are they?" "Yes, officer?" inquired Benji, bland as could be, from the lab door. "What seems to be the trouble? Did you wish to see me?" His manner must have been disarming. At least they didn't shoot him on the spot. They just advanced, loosening guns in holsters, like a thoughtful lynching party. Benji strolled back into the lab and over to Daisy, who was standing by the machine at the side of the room. The officers were confused. Benji, sober or nearly so, in his old lab smock, looked a good deal different to them from the wild man they'd been chasing all over town. But there was Daisy in her evening gown. "That'i. them, all right," said a young rookie with a fine-blooming shiner. "She's the one that threw the eggplants. I'd know her anywhere." "And that's Benjamin," said Winesap, grimly. "Okay, both of you, don't try to run. Come along and no more nonsense." Benji held up one hand -- and slipped the other arm around Daisy's waist. "Gentlemen, please! I have no idea what this is about. But surely it can have nothing to do with me. Mr. Benton and I have been right here in my laboratory all night, working. He can verify that." They looked at me. I opened my mouth. I didn't say a word. Vera did. She stood there in the doorway. It must have been her in the cab, coming back bright and early from Chicago. She took in the whole scene. Benji. Daisy. Police. Me. "Benji!!!" she said. You couldn't imagine what she put into that one word. Everyone turned then to look at her. Slowly and with infinite menace, she started across the room. "Now, dear," said Benji nervously, "now, sweet, take it easy. This is only a little experiment. Not what you are thinking at all." We swung back toward Benji. He had boosted Daisy onto the seat of his time rig and swung up beside her. Vera yelled and started to run toward them. Benji twisted a knob and grinned. "Good-by now," he said. And they were gone. Benji was gone again. Daisy was gone. The whole rig was gone. " and foolish, ended up her dash stumbling into the empty space where the thing had been. I expect we all looked a little foolish, standing there, gaping. But I had to carry foolishness to the ultimate of idiocy. Vera at that single moment seemed sort of sad and helpless. And, Lord knows, I was mixed up. I walked over and put an arm around Vera, saying, "There, there, Vera, hon. It's all right. I'm here." I should never have called her attention to it. There I was -- and, the hell of it was I had kept playing up to her all this time just to needle Benji. When, that morning, I put my arm around her, I never had a chance. I was married. To Vera. I still am. It has been a long, long time. Almost five years by the calendar, centuries by subjective time. I am Vera's husband, sitting by the light of a kerosene lamp in Dean Milston's old study, which had been Benji's lab, writing. Benji and Daisy got away and I got caught. But now I can smile about it. Now, after nearly five years. You understand? With the power he got into his machine from the new power line, he said he could go just five years at a jump. Of course, away from Vera. Probably he figured on going further, that he would go the power limit of five years, stop, and then jump again, and again, far enough for complete safety. But I have had a lot more time to figure than he did. I am figuring on a little party; a little reception in honor of our first intrepid time traveler. A surprise party. It will be five years to the hour since Daisy and Benji left. Benji will be the surprise, since only I know that he will pop up in our midst. It will surprise Benji. It will surprise Vera -- and our guests, among whom I have included Sergeant (Captain now) Winesap and the others of his squad. Eccentric, a party like that? I suppose. But, to Vera and the others, it is a breakfast anniversary party -- the anniversary of the very moment of our engagement. Vera is flattered enough to be tolerant and even pleased at this romantic notion. And, since I know I have only one out and that it is coming, I am a dutiful -- cringing and servile, that is -- husband. So Vera indulges me in a harmless eccentricity or two. My other little eccentricity is electric power -- I don't favor it. I use Benji's lab, the old dean's study, as my den. I claim to be writing a historical novel. I need realism, atmosphere. I have had all electric power lines removed from that entire section of the house. There is no power. None. That's why I'm writing by lamplight. Our anniversary party will be here. The lamps and candles and the dawn of a bright new day will be light enough when, to the total astonishment of Vera and our guests, Benji and Daisy and the time rig suddenly appear among us. I will greet them with enthusiasm -- but this will be as nothing to the greeting they will get from other sources. Benji will work his dials and controls, frantically. Nothing will happen. No power. Vera will step forward. The hell with whether the statute of limitations may or may not have run out on Benji's assorted legal crimes and misdemeanors. The wrath of Vera accepts no limitations. Benji will have run out of time and it will be my time then. T HE discussion I have in mind in writing this took place in Long Beach, California, and it happened to be in German. It also got nowhere, but the locality had nothing to do with this; the result would have been the same in Chicago, New Orleans, New York, London or West Berlin. The problem involved several unknowns and such discussions tend to get out of hand no matter when or where. That the conversation was in German is a little more to the point because my indubitably honorable but less than learned opponent kept quoting books written in that language and never translated, as far as I know. There were four books he kept bringing up. The first of them was Hanns Horbiger's World Ice Doctrine, published in Germany about #. By way of explanation, I have to say that this # page quarto volume attempted to explain the origin of the Solar System, the nature of the Sun and geological history. Since this attempt was made long before anything definite about atomic energy became known, it misfired, of course. You can succeed in understanding the nature of a star to about the same extent if you don't know about nuclear physics as you can in building a jet plane of wood and bricks. The second book was by one Dr. Edgar Dacque, published about #, and was an attempt to turn evolution around. What Dacque tried to show was that the "human line" was the central line of evolution; in other words, that all living creatures above the level of single-celled organisms had descended from Man. The third one was a book on Atlantis of about # vintage and the fourth one was Velikovsky's ridiculous Worlds in Collision. ' ' in common was that they laid an enormous stress on legends. Hanns Horbiger had ransacked the world's store of legends to prove his own ideas. One of his pet ideas was that at one time recently (geologically speaking) a moon of Earth had collided with us. So he hauled out every legend dealing with fire in the sky, the Norse gods battling in the sky, Biblical references to stars falling from the sky, and so forth and so on. Edgar Dacque repeated the game; he added to Horbiger's store of legends -- in the meantime, ethnologists had written some twenty books or so about tribal legends in various corners of the Earth -- and quoted a whole set of different legends, those that might be twisted into having a bearing on evolution and the past in general. (His main source was a large work by Ben Gurion. I often wondered what Ben Gurion himself thought about all this.) The man who wrote the Atlantis book had also quoted a large number of "age-old" legends, some of which were not so "ageold" at all, having been taken from a novel by the Hungarian writer Maurus Jokai. And, of course, Velikovsky, whose book was full of the most surprising similarities to Horbiger's work, also stressed heavily that what he said explained ancient legends and ws, in turn, bolstered by them. Our fruitless discussion revolved around the question of just how valuable a legend is, or can be. "You yourself," my opponent said, "have written in one of your books that African natives had a legend about the okapi. Then it was discovered." I pointed out that the natives did not have a "legend" about the okapi; they talked about it matter-of-factly. That some of the white explorers labeled the talk "legend" because they happened not to know the animal at the time was exclusively their fault. "All right," said my opponent, "let's take an old legend then. Don't you think that the old legend of the dragon reflects a memory of the dinosaurs?" I said no, I don't think so and that I have many reasons for not thinking that they do, the point being mostly that the dragon itself is a fairly late invention which cannot be traced back even as far as the time of Christ. By that time my opponent, rather exasperated, asked the crucial question: "Don't you think that a legend has been caused by something?" He was probably surprised when I said yes, certainly a legend is caused by something, some event. But unless you can establish the facts by other means, you will never be able to reconstruct the original event from the later legend! As an example, I offered the story of the Lindwurmdenkmal in Klagenfurt in Austria, which happened to be fresh on my mind. Just two days earlier, I had met a man who had seen this monument before the war and wanted to know if I had any information -- whether it had survived the war intact, or damaged, or not at all. wurmdenkmal in detail would be a waste of time since I can offer an illustration, Fig. #. I only have to add that Lindwurm is the Germanic equivalent of "dragon" and that Denkmal means "monument." The location is the central square of the city of Klagenfurt where it was placed with proper ceremonies on June #, #. The monument consists of two figures, a club-swinging giant and the dragon. It does not seem to be known who sculpted the figure of the giant, but the dragon was carved from stone from the nearby Kreutzberg by the sculptor Ulrich Vogelsang in #. Legend has it that the skull of the dragon was found in # at the Zollteld -- the name means "customs field;" presumably some ducal boundary line ran through there at one time -- in the vicinity of Klagenfurt. A gravel pit on this field is still called the dragon's pit. These are the facts. Now try to reconstruct from this legend what really happened; try to guess at the "original event." Well, obviously the dragon is actually the memory of large inimical animals which once existed; if not a memory of the dinosaurs, it might be a memory of large man-eating lizards of some kind. Mind you, the legend does not necessarily prove that these man-eating lizards lived around Klagenfurt, but it does seem to prove that such animals existed at one time and that our remote forefathers had trouble with them. How about the shape -- specifically the bat wings attached to the body of a lizard? Well, the shape is so traditional that it probably reflects the real shape of whatever it was, and as for the wings, who can say that they did not have wings in reality? Of course one might conclude that the wings are just symbolic, indicating that these animals were very fast. All reptiles can move fast, can't they? Have you ever seen a lizard turn around and run, or seen a snake strike? (Having kept lizards, frogs and snakes for many years of my life, I know this fact well.) All right, now let's go on to the #Q giant who slays the dragon. What about him? Well, in the first place, can one say that there never were giants? But it is possible that the meaning of the giant is symbolic, too. Just as the wings of the dragon -- if they are symbolic -- signify speed, so the large size of the giant might be taken to symbolize the incredible courage of our remote ancestors who stood up against these animals. I did not make up these arguments. I could have quoted just this kind of reasoning from books, giving title, author, date and place of publication and page number, if desired. But that would have taken at least three times as much space as this condensation did. At any event, these arguments have been seriously offered by people like Horbiger and Dacque. They sound reasonably logical and require only one two-part assumption, namely that a legend must have a cause and that this cause can be reconstructed by careful reasoning. Fortunately, more than I have told so far is known in the case of the Lindwurmdenkmal, and because more is known, we can really reconstruct the background for the legend. The important point is that we cannot reconstruct it from the legend. ved his dragon, he had a model to go by -- not a model of the whole animal, but at least a model for its head. He had the skull from the "dragon's pit" which had been found # years earlier. The nice thing about it all is that we still have the skull; it has been preserved in the Municipal Museum of the city of Klagenfurt. It is the skull of a woolly rhinoceros of the Ice Age, known to zoologists and paleontologists as Rhinoceros ( Tichorhinus ) antiquitatis. Its nearest living relative is the white rhino of Africa. Fig. #: The skull of the "dragon pit" You can see how the background splits right at this point into two backgrounds. On the one hand, we have the background of the skull, which involves many thousands of man hours of scientific spade work (you can take the term literally, if you want to) leading to a knowledge of the Ice Age and the different kinds of animals which then inhabited Europe. Some of them including -- or rather especially -- the woolly rhinoceros certainly were a menace to "our remote ancestors." On the other hand, you have the background for the remainder of the dragon. Can we sit back here and let the legend hunters take over, acting like the Great Detective who shuts himself up with his pipe and reasons it all out while the dumb policemen have to go around checking laundry marks, dental records and ringing doorbells? In reality, it is the police who get the results, and with some checking -- of old books in this case -- we can trace the remainder of the dragon, too. The word "dragon" comes from the Greek drako, which was the term used for especially large snakes; simply large snakes of the python type. The Germanic word lind (or lint ) also just means snake. Readers familiar with the N ibelungenlied may recall, at this point, that the leaf which fell between Siegfried's shoulder blades, producing his one vulnerable point, was a leaf from the Linden tree. Actually the two words have no known connection, but the similarity in sound made a good poetic alliteration, to an audience familiar with the word lind for snake. Fig. #: How Rhinoceros (Tichorhinus) antiquitatis really looked Fig. #: "Young Dragon" at pictured in Pierre Belon's book fTHE name dragon -- or Lindwurm -- therefore automatically suggested a snake-like body. Which again leaves the question of the wings. But these wings can be explained. The only assumption we have to make is that Ulrich Vogelsang had a few of the then better-known books to look at. We don't even have to assume that he could read, though an artist in the year # probably could. The Frenchman Pierre Belon -- latinizing his name into Petrus Bellonius -- had published his works on natural history some # years before that date, and in it is the picture of a "young dragon" (Fig. #). It is the first picture where a dragon has wings. The reason: around the middle of the #th century, the Javanese tree lizard -- which later was called, half-jokingly, Draco volans or "flying dragon" -- became known. It is a small lizard, with a maximum length of about four inches, which has a "parachute." Half a dozen "false ribs" stick out from its body, connected by a membrane. The membrane can be stretched out or partly folded, but otherwise these "wings" cannot move. There you have the origin of the dragon shape of the monument: the skull of an extinct rhinoceros, the body from the name, and the wings from Pierre Belon's poor and probably second-hand drawing of a Javanese tree lizard. And now I can go back to the argument about legends, and the two-part assumption that a legend must have a cause which can be discovered by reasoning. Yes to the first part; every legend certainly has a cause. But no to the second part; the legend itself very effectively cloaks its origin as a rule. Sometimes the cause can be unearthed, but only by the patient detail work which should have been applied in the first place. -- at a guess, about # -- I encountered the name of Andre Laurie for the first time. I was then reading the German biography of Jules Verne, written by a Dr. Max Popp who was evidently an early science fiction fan, because nearly half of his #-page book is devoted to stories of the Jules Verne type, but not written by Jules Verne. "The hero of Laurie's story," Dr. Popp wrote, "intends to establish a connection between the Moon and the Earth by bringing the Moon to the Earth with the aid of an enormous magnet. The Moon does come uncomfortably close, but finally the friendly queen of the night proves to be more powerful than the magnetic mountain; the mountain is pulled out of the Earth and Laurie's travelers inadvertently reach the Moon in this manner." Naturally I did not remember that paragraph verbatim -- I just now looked it up for the purpose of translating it -- but its content stuck in my mind. I also remembered (this is mentioned elsewhere in Dr. Popp's book) that this French novel bore an English title, Selene Company Limited. Sometimes, when I was in a library for different reasons and purposes, I would recall that there was an old French space travel novel I should read one day and checked the index cards for it, unsuccessfully each and every time. In between, whenever a new book on old science fiction appeared, I looked for Andre Laurie; maybe somebody would give a more complete synopsis. Nobody ever did. Matter of fact, nobody even mentioned Andre Laurie's name. Philip B. Gove's The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction takes no notice of him. Neither does J. O. Bailey's Pilgrims Through Space and Time, which is remarkable for its omissions all the way through. But even Marjorie Nicolson in her Voyages to the Moon doesn't have a word to say about Laurie -- possibly because he is too close to the present to be deserving of her rather patrician notice. The only place I found something about him is in Kenneth Allott's American Jules Verne biography where Allott says, with reference to the year #: "The only other publication that year was a work in collaboration with Andre Laurie -- The Wreck of the Cynthia. Laurie admired Verne greatly and followed in his footsteps, writing scientific romances that had a wide circulation in France." I finally got a copy of Laurie's book from an antiquarian, an English translation (called The Conquest of the Moon ) published in # in London. A label pasted inside states that this copy was awarded by B. Brucesmith, Esq., Principal of the Byron House and Ealing Grammar nott for being #st in a class of # boys in Bookkeeping. I wonder whether the award winner ever read this book, which is rather removed from bookkeeping and, if so, what he thought of it. Well, I read it. About #:# in the morning, my wife started complaining and I retired to my study with a bottle of wine, two cigars and the book. Is the book that, wonderful? Yes, in the same way as the woman in England who was so incredibly ugly that no man could take his eyes off her. the main theme quite well. A French astronomer has the idea of bringing the Moon closer to the Earth and reasons that a sufficiently large magnet must be built to accomplish this feat. (Don't ask me why a magnet of any size should influence the Moon.) He looks for a mountain of pure iron ore which could be magnetized and finally finds one, by lucky coincidence in the French Sudan. The French Sudan was in various kinds of revolt and political troubles at the time, which helped to fill the book with all kinds of sub-plots. When the mountain is found, the necessary money is raised -- in Australia, of all places -- and the work begins. First the base of the mountain is insulated by pouring molten glass into spaces made for the purpose. The engineering aspects of the venture are rather vague, but there is the interesting touch that the energy is furnished by solar collectors. At about the time Laurie wrote the book, the French Professor Mouchot (mentioned by Laurie) made experiments with solar collectors and steam engines for pumping water for irrigation in North Africa. An observatory and living quarters are built on top of the mountain. Cables are wound around the mountain to convert Designed by Foremost Rocket and Space Authority! 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Meanwhile an army of Arab rebels lays siege to the observatory which, however, this possibility having been foreseen, is "well provisioned with everything." The mountain is then magnetized and the astronomer predicts that within five days and a number of hours the Moon would be close enough to "be inside the Earth's atmosphere." Up to that point, the main quarrel of a present-day reader would be with a wrong premise and a ludicrous style which is partly the fault of an inept translator. But then the scientific fun begins. Acted upon by the giant magnet, the Moon comes closer and closer. But does that change its orbital period? Oh, no -- from everything that is mentioned, it is quite clear that its orbital velocity remains just what it always was. Even when closer than # miles, it still rises in the egst and sets in the west. In reality, the Moon's main behavior, aside from appearing larger in size, would be first an apparent slow-down in motion (due to the fact that its true orbital period would decrease so that its apparent motion would not be almost exclusively due to the Earth's turning on its axis) and then an apparent reversal with rising in the west and setting in the east. At the last moment, somebody in the observatory panics and reverses the power, and that's when the magnetized mountain is torn from its undermined foundations and pulled toward the Moon. The people in the observatory are knocked unconscious and, after awakening, first think that the Moon had struck the Earth. After a considerable time, they realize that their whole mountain has jumped to the Moon, luckily landing with its base first. TY that time -- wonder of wonders -- the Moon is back in its original orbit! (Kepler, Newton, Halley, Cassini, Gauss and a few dozen lesser lights must have orbited in their graves when this was printed.) The Moon did take a little air along so that the travelers have time to stuff rags into the cracks of the window frames and so forth. Now they have to make oxygen. Fortunately there are tons and tons of potassium chlorate among the provisions. This provides them with the oxygen they need. While nothing was said as to how the oxygen was produced, I suspected that the figures were prodigiously wrong. After finishing the book (and getting my delayed sleep) I took a handbook to check a few facts. Yes, my handbook is recent, but these particular facts could also be found in the handbooks of Andre Laurie's time. The chemistry of the case is this: potassium chlorate -- the quite # degrees Fahrenheit. When you heat it beyond its melting point, you get the following transformation: There is a small amount of practical trouble involved. It does not work below the melting point of the substance, but at only # degrees Fahrenheit above melting point, the release of oxygen is so violent that it can almost be called an explosion. Nowadays we can make this safe by adding an oxide of manganese (MnO a ) which causes the same reaction at lower temperatures. I don't know whether this was known at the time the book was written. More important is the fact that the decomposition of potassium chlorate will produce about twofifths of its weight in pure oxygen. Allowing for poor equipment and other losses, we'll say that every four pounds of potassium chlorate produce one pound of pure oxygen. Now what does Mr. Laurie's hero do? As the lunar night approaches, he prepares the necessary oxygen for a dozen people for two weeks. So he decomposes # tons of potassium chlorate. Since this is a French book, these would be metric tons, totaling #I lbs. avoirdupois. This would produce a minimum of # lbs. of oxygen, probably more, whereas twelve people will need about # lbs. of oxygen in two weeks. Mr. Laurie has no excuse for this slip except the true one -- he neglected to do his arithmetic. (That at another point the three villains dump something into a take to be a translator's error. The original probably read six mille metres, # meters.) "" novelist to calculate these things? The answer is: I do; but Monsieur Laurie did a few other things which are equally horrible and have nothing to do with arithmetic. For example, a dead man is found somewhere. A doctor who is a member of the party whips out his stethoscope to listen to the heartbeat and then remembers that there is no sound on the moon! He has to feel for the corpse's pulse instead! It was known in Laurie's day that not only air transmits sound. Then they find an ancient building of the long-dead selenites. They marvel at the size of the structure, but they remember that "since the Moon's gravity is only ## of what we have on Earth, the foundations must be made more massive and dug deeper down in proportion." Why? To support one-sixth as much weight? Once inside they see a number of artifacts "made of pure gold, now tarnished with age." And I always thought that one of the attractive things about gold is that it does not tarnish or discolor. It does not even dirty easily. And so it goes on. I just could not stop reading in incredulous but sustained amazement. In the end the travelers get home: they use their magnetic mountain once more to graze the Earth's atmosphere and then jump off with a large parachute. (Yes, the Moon snaps back into its orbit again.) Then they find that nobody will believe their tale. No question about it, the "good old science fiction" had more "sense of wonder" than today's. Almost every page of The Conquest of the Moon makes one wonder how it got by the author, editor, typesetter, proofreader and reader. This book aside, some of the good old science fiction was good. Now it is merely old. as follows: At a party recently, a young man said that he could write down, without any preparation, numbers of six figures all of which would be divisible by # and also by #. He made good his boast. Miss Helmssen wrote down a few of the numbers he produced, but states that he went on for almost an hour. The numbers she transmitted to me were #; #; # and #. The question was, "How did he do it?" I did not know how, but as I brooded over the numbers, the last one caught my interest. It was obviously a multiple of #. So were all the others, I saw, as soon as I realized the fact. Now #I is divisible by #, by I I and, as you can find out easily, also by #. In fact, #I is # times #I times #. In order to produce figures divisible by # and by #, you don't have to do anything more strenuous than to mentally multiply #I with anything -- anything at all. Mr. D. A. Turner of Visalia, California, has a far more serious problem on his mind. "Is it not possible, or even likely, that a few years from now a manned space vehicle might be rammed and destroyed by one of the many, many (by then) SputnikVanguard-etc. satellites whizzing around Earth in their various and sundry orbits? Is this problem of man-made space hazards being given any attention at this time?" The answer to the question is yes, naturally scientists are very much aware of this problem. One of the reasons why research satellites were placed on long elliptical orbits with their perigees inside the atmosphere was that satellites in such orbits would clear themselves out of space again by gradual orbital decay and final burn-up. On January #st, #, nine artificial satellites were in orbit; by December #st, only six of these will be left. Three of them are expected to burn up this year -- coincidentally, at about the time this issue will be on the Twenty years from now, only two will be still in orbit -- Vanguard I and Russia's Cosmic first pictures of the far side of the Moon. In short, the intention, when a satellite is fired into orbit, is that it will burn up in the end. But every once in a while one happens to slip into an orbit where even the perigee is so high as to be outside the Earth's atmosphere. This happened with Vanguard I and was a more or less accidental result of the shot around the Moon. The latter could just as easily have run into the Earth on its first trip back. In time, a number of such accidentally too-lucky shots will accumulate in space and. will have to be removed when the era of manned space flight arrives. What better way to take them out of space than by a manned maneuverable ship? r T , HE riddles I stuck in just for fun in recent columns, such as the one about the number of hairs on a girl's head, seem to have been received with enthusiasm. Readers asked for more, although one sternly cautioned: "Don't use the same that Martin Gardner has in the Scientific American I won't. But here is another. The main means of transportation in The Netherlands is the bicycle. Unlike bicycles elsewhere, Netherlands bikes must follow traffic regulations and patterns as if they were automobiles. Moreover, there is a strictly enforced rule: three days in jail for both if the rider lets someone else ride on the handlebars. Now we have Cornelis Potgieter and Pieter van Gelderbrook standing on a road. They both have to be in a place # kilometers away. They should arrive more or less at the same time. And they have only one bike. Says Cornelis: "Tell you what we do. Here is a key to my padlock, I'll ride # meters ahead and chain the bike to a tree. You walk, then take the bike and ride # meters. I keep walking in the same direction in the meantime. Then I take my bike which you have chained to a tree after # meters of riding and ride # meters myself, and we keep alternating till we get to our destination." Question is: what do they gain by this procedure? Or do they gain anything at all? Giving Certain Powers the business for a change would be a joy -- but it must not backfire -- and here at last was the perfect recoilless diddle! I N #, the United States Air Force found itself possessed of a formidable tool of battle, a radar resistant airplane. While this was the occasion for much rejoicing among the Defense Department members who were cleared for Top Secret, this national-defense solution merely posed a greater problem: What should we do with it? "There must," said the Secretary of Defense, "be some utilization of this new device to demonstrate to 'Certain Powers' that the world can be made safe for Freedom and Democracy!" " 'Certain Powers,' my foot," said the President. "Why don't we ever come out and just say it?" "Policy," the Secretary said. "We've always walked softly in our Foreign Policy; especially softly in cases where we didn't have the 'big stick' to carry." "Well," grumbled the President, "we've got the big stick now. What do we do with it?" "We just want to shake it a bit," said the Secretary. "No contusions intended, of course. We just have to let them know we have it, but are too kind-hearted to use it. Unless provoked, naturally." "I can see," said the President, "that this new plane is burning a hole in your pocket. Suppose we do send it flying over Rus -- " "Mister President!" said the Secretary of Defense. The President sighed. "All right, all right. Flying over 'Certain Areas,' then. Let's say we get it there. Fine. What do we do with it? Drop leaflets?" "No. That comes under the proselytizing clause in the Geneva Conference of '#." "I don't suppose a small -- well, you know." "Aggression," said the Secretary. "We'd lose face in the Middle East." "So?" demanded the President, spreading his hands. "They don't like us anyhow, do they? Or the competition -- or each other, for that matter." "That's not the point. We have to feel as though our dollars are buying friends, whether or not it's true." "Well, then, what can we do?" said the President. "No leaflets, no aggression. We couldn't maybe seed their clouds and make it rain on them?" "And get sued by other countries for artificially creating lowpressure conditions that, they could claim, robbed them of their rightful rainfall? We've had it happen right here between our own states." "Maybe we should just forget about it, then?" "Never! It must be demonstrated to the world that -- " "We could take a full-page ad in the New York Times." "It just isn't done that way," the Secretary protested. "Why not? It'd save money, wouldn't it? A simple ad like, 'Hey, there, Certain Powers! Lookie what we got!' What'd be wrong with that?" "They'd accuse us of Capitalistic Propaganda, that's what! And to get the egg off our face, we'd have to demonstrate the plane and -- " "And be right back where we are now," the President realized aloud, nodding gloomily. "Okay, so what do we do?" The Secretary looked to left and right, although they were alone together in a soundproofed, heavily guarded room, before replying. "We drop an agent!" he whispered. r HE President blinked twice before responding. "Have you gone mad? What man in his right mind would volunteer for such a thing? 'Drop an agent,' indeed! Ten minutes after landing, he'd be up against a wall and shot. Wouldn't that be lovely for Freedom and Democracy? We'd have the R -- the Certain Powers gloating over the air waves for weeks about nipping a Capitalist Assassination Plot in the bud, not to mention the Mothers of America beating down the White House door because one of Our Boys was sacrificed. You know how our country reacts: If an entire division is wiped out, we bite the bullet and erect statues and make speeches and then forget it. But let a single man get in dutch and the whole populace goes crazy until something is 'done' about it. No, it won't work." "May I finish?" said the Secretary patiently. The President shrugged. "Why not?" "This agent would be something special, sir. One that would not only demonstrate our new aircraft, but which would positively leave the R -- damn, you've got me doing it! -- Certain Powers tied in knots. In point of fact, our military psychologists think that this agent might be the wedge to split Communism apart in hopeless panic!" "Really?" the President said, with more enthusiasm than he had shown throughout the entire meeting. "I'd like to meet this agent." The Secretary pressed a black button upon the conference table. An instant later, the door opened and the Secretary's personal aide stepped in. "Yes, sir?" "Jenkins, have the corridor cleared and Secret Service men posted at all entrances and exits. When it's safe, bring in Agent X-#." He paused. "And Professor Blake, too." "At once, sir." Jenkins hurried out. "X-#?" said the President. "Has he no name?" The Secretary smiled inscrutably. "Teddy, sir." "Why that smirk?" "You'll see, sir." They sat in fidgety silence for another minute, and then a buzzer sounded, twice. "Ah, that's Jenkins," said the Secretary, and pressed the button once more. Jenkins came in, followed by a tall gray-haired man who carried a large black suitcase. The President arose, and, as Jenkins left the room again, shook hands with the man. "Agent X-#?" he asked. "Professor Charles Blake," the man corrected him calmly. "Agent X-# is in here." The President stared. "In the suitcase? What are we sending? A dwarf?" "Hardly," said the Secretary, snapping up the hasps on the suitcase and opening it upon the table. "This," he said, lifting something from under tissue-paper padding, "is Agent X-#." The President's gaze was returned by two shiny black eyes, set on either side of a little brown muzzle with a gentle, stitched-on smile. Agent X-# was clad in flight helmet, miniature jacket and tiny boots, with a baggy pair of brown canvas trousers belted at the waist with a bandolier holding a dozen small wooden bullets, and dangling a patentleather holster containing a plastic water pistol. And he wore a small parachute and harness. "But that's a teddy bear!" cried the President. "Precisely," Professor Blake said. A the President, and did so, visibly looking like a man who believes he is surrounded by lunatics. "And look here!" said the Secretary, slipping his hand within Teddy's jacket and withdrawing a small oilskin pouch. "It's rather tering is genuine, and our ambassador assures us the layout is correct." The President took the pouch, unfolded it and drew out a small sheet of paper, covered with the inscrutable letterings, and numerous rectangles and curving red lines. "I give up," ' he said. "What is it?" "A map of the Kremlin," said the Secretary, his eyes dancing. "That big red 'X' is the location of the Politburo Council Chamber." "Perhaps," the President said weakly, "you could explain... ?" "Mister President," said Professor Blake, "I am the new Chief of Propaganda for the government." The President nodded, poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher and drained it. "Yes, yes?" he said. "Naturally, I have spent my career studying the psychology of a Certain Power..." The President groaned. "Please, gentlemen, let's name names! It need never go outside this room. My lips are sealed!" The professor and the Secretary exchanged a look, a raising of eyebrows, then a shrug of surrender. "Very well," said Blake. "Russia -- " "There," said the President. "That's more like it." Blake cleared his throat and went on. "We know the weak spot in the Russian armor is the mentality of the average Communist official," he explained, while the Secretary, who had heard this all before, fiddled with the straps of Teddy's parachute and hummed softly to himself. "They have a distrust complex. Everything and everybody is under #-hour-a-day suspicion." "Yes, so I hear," said the President. "What do you suppose would happen to an agent that was caught by the Russians?" asked Blake. "I'd rather not even think about that." "Not the sadistic details, sir. I mean the general train of events, from the time of capture onward." The President pondered this. "After his capture," he said thoughtfully, "he would be questioned. Through various methods -- hopelessly at variance with the regulations of the Geneva Convention -- they would discover his mission, and then he would be shot, I guess, or imprisoned." Blake nodded grimly. "And what if an agent landed there that could not divulge his mission?" r T'HE Secretary stopped fiddling with the harness and watched the President's face. On the worn features he read first puzzlement, then incredulity, then a flash of sheer amazement. "Good heavens!" said the President. "They'd -- they'd have to admit a defeat, I suppose..." "But can they?" Blake leaned forward and slammed his fist upon the tabletop. "Can the Communist mentality ever admit that it's been bested?" "I -- I guess not. At least, they never do," said the President "But this -- " he wagged a forefinger at the stuffed thing on the table -- "this certainly won't upset them. I mean, after all... He looked from one to th other for agreement and found none. "But, gentlemen, it's nothing but a stuffed bear!" "It won't upset them?" queried Blake slowly. "Are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. They'll find the bear, wherever it lands, and they'll -- well, they'll know it's a gag and just laugh at us." "How will they know?" Blake persisted. "Well, they'll be pretty well certain!" the President said scathingly: "I mean a stuffed toy -- " "Would they give up on something of which they were 'pretty well' certain?" "They'd have to. Teddy, here, certainly couldn't tell them anything. They'd say it was a joke and forget it..." His voice barely sounded the last few words. He no longer believed them. A smile flickered upon his face. "Gentlemen, you don't think they'd -- " "The Russians," said Blake, without emotion, "would go off their rockers, sir. To be unable to explain a thing like this would devastate their morale. The Communist is a man who must hold all the aces. He'll shuffle and reshuffle until he gets them, too. Well, we're giving him a cold deck, sir. There are no aces for him to find." "Hmmm," said the President. "As long as there's any doubt in their minds, they'll have to keep plugging at it, won't they! And since there's no solution -- " His smile grew calculating. "Yes, yes I begin to see. It's a small thing, to be sure, but I find I must leap at the opportunity to stick a few ants in their pants for a change." "It won't wipe them out," began the Secretary. "But it'll wear them down a little," Blake finished. "Done!" said the President. "How soon can we get Operation Frustration under way?" "The plane is ready to leave right now," said the Secretary, with a small blush. "I -- I rather thought you'd see this thing our way." The President frowned at this, then shrugged. "Good enough. Let's get this bear into the air." sure this plane will work?" asked the President, averting his face from the spray of leaves caught up in the shrieking jet stream of the waiting plane. "It's too simple not to," said Blake, clutching the suitcase -- on whose side a large red "Top Secret" had been stenciled -- to his chest, and shouting over the scream of the plane. "The radarresistant device is nothing more than a radio-receiver that blankets the structure, making the entire plane a receiver. If it receives the radar impulses, they can't bounce back and make a blip on the enemy radar screens." The President sighed. "You make it sound almost too easy. Very well." He shook the man's hand. "Good luck." "Thank you, sir," said Blake, patting the suitcase. "I'll take good care of Teddy." The President nodded and moved away. Blake boarded the jet, and, minutes later, the President was watching a last fading streamer of the twin exhausts dwindling upon the eastern horizon. "I shan't sleep till he's back," said the Secretary. "Nor I," said the President. "I have the weirdest damned apprehension..." "About what, sir?" asked the Secretary, as they made their way from the field. "About the -- " the President looked around, then lowered his voice to a whisper -- "the Russians. There's something in their makeup we may have overlooked." "Impossible, sir," said the Secretary of Defense. "Blake is our top psychologist." "I hope you're right. If this fails, I'd hate for it to be traced to us." "It can't be. The jacket was made in Japan, the boots in Mexico, the parachute in -- " "I know, I know," said the President. "But if they should trace it to us, we'll be a laughingstock." "They won't," the Secretary assured him. back, his manner jovial when he met in secret session once more with the two executives. "Couldn't have gone more perfectly, gentlemen," he said, rubbing his hands together and bouncing on his toes. "We passed directly over Moscow, at a height of ten miles, on the stroke of midnight. The night was overcast and starless. Teddy was dropped through the bomb bay. I saw his parachute open myself. He's down there now, and we're sure to see signs any day now of the little cracks in the Iron Curtain." "You had no trouble with the enemy?" the President asked, though the answer -- since Blake was back alive -- was obvious. "None," Blake said. "The radar shield performed exactly as specified, sir. Not a blink of a searchlight nor a single groundto-air rocket did we see. Perhaps, on hearing us pass by, they sent up an investigating plane or two, but we were long gone by then. That's the advantage of moving faster than the sound you make," he added pontifically. "I still feel we've overlooked something," said the President. "In the back of my mind, a small voice keeps trying to remind me of something about the Russians, something that should have made me veto this whole scheme at the start." Blake looked puzzled. "What about them, sir? If it's in regard to their psychology, I can assure you -- " "I don't mean their psychology at all," said the President. "No, wait -- yes, I do, in a minor way. They must pursue this thing, no matter what, but -- " A light glimmered, then burned brightly in the President's eyes, and he stood up and smacked his fist into his open palm. "Of course!" he said. "Their methods!" "Methods?" asked Blake, a little nervously. The President's reply was interrupted by a knock at the door. The three men exchanged a look; then the Secretary jabbed the button, and Jenkins came in. "This just came for you, sir," he said, handing the Secretary a small envelope, and making his exit silently. The President waited impatiently as the envelope was torn open and its contents read. Then the Secretary's hands opened limply and the message fell upon the table. "Diplomatic note -- Russian -- Teddy," he whispered. "What!" yelped the President. He snatched the paper from the table and read it, then sank into his chair once more, his face grim and eyes suspiciously moist. "The dirty, lowdown, rotten..." Blake, hovering at tableside, hesitated a moment, then asked, "What about Teddy? What's happened?" "What we might have expected," said the Secretary dolefully. "You don't mean -- " Blake mumbled, horrified. He couldn't continue, just waited for the worst. The President nodded miserably. "He's confessed." I N a beer hall on the eightyfirst floor of the Hotel Mark Twain fourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner. "I'll go up there by myself," Sordman said. He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. His fashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent. Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made him one of the four truly developed psionic adepts in the world. With drugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers. Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the general thought patterns of the people near him. "We'd better go with you," Lee Shawn said. "There's an awful lot of fear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent." She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. A lawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. For years she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent. "Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone." Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw him as the tree and herself as the rain and the earth. "Go ahead and laugh," George Aaron said. "But you'll need big medicine to fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important." "I've thought it over," Sordman said. "I'll depend on God and nothing else." He felt George's mind squirm. As a psychologist, George accepted Sordman's Zen-Christian faith because Sordman needed it to control the powers of his Talent. But George himself was a confirmed skeptic. The men up there were scared. Sordman knew he would die if he lost control. But Lee and George were scared, too. Even now, standing in the park in early morning, their fear battered at his mind. He thought about swimming in the ocean. He made his skin remember salted wind. The real Atlantic, a mile away, helped the illusion. It was the right symbol. He felt his friends calm. "Let him go," George said. "He's manipulating us," Lee said. "I know. But let him go." He was the most powerful man in the world. He could make anybody do anything -- and yet he was the slave of a mad criminal's mindl Sordman laughed. Lee bent and tore a clump of grass from the earth. "Take this, Andy." "Thank you." It was wet with dew. He held it to his nose and smelled the dirt and grass. Two things kept him from destruction by his own Talent. He loved the physical world and he believed in God. "I'll call you if I need you," he said. "Be careful," George said. "Many people need you." "You've got status," Lee said. "Use it. You're dealing with the kind of people it impresses." r T'HE hotel stood three hundred stories tall. Surrounded by a five-mile-square park, connected to the major coastal cities by high speed vacuum tubes, the building was a small town. Eighty-five thousand people lived within its walls. Sordman rode an empty elevator. Through the glass sides he studied the deserted halls and shops. They were frightened here. Murder had been done. A Talent had destroyed two men. Lord, protect us from the malice of a witch. The eighty-first was a commercial floor. He got off the vator and walked down the main corridor. A man watched him through the door of a bar. A girl in a blue kimono froze behind the counter of a pastry shop. He stopped before the doors of the beer hall. He dropped to his knees and prayed. Once the brave leader walked into a panicky group and it was enough to look calm. Now he had to be calm. It was not enough to square the shoulders, walk erect, speak in a confident tone. Sordman's true emotions radiated from him every moment. Those within range felt them as their own. He drove thoughts like knives into the deepest corners of his mind. He begged release from fear. He prayed his God to grant him love for the frightened men within. He stood erect and squared his shoulders. His bulb-shouldered morning coat was grey as dawn. He thought a well loved formula, a Buddhist prayer from the Book of Universal Worship. All life is transitory. All people must suffer and die. Let us forgive one another. He roared his name and titles at the door. "I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow for Life of the Guggenheim Foundation, by Senate Act Protector of the People! By the laws of our country, I ask the right to enter." Silence. "I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow -- " "Go away, witch!" Without drugs and preparation, Sordman needed visual contact to sense emotions. But he didn't need Talent to sense the hatred in that voice. He pictured a rough block of stone. Using a basic skill, he kept the picture in his mind as he opened the door and planned his words. "I have taken no drugs and made no preparation. You have nothing to fear. I'm your Protector and I've come to talk." r F'HE beer hall was large and gloomy. The butts and ashes of the night's smoking filled its trays. Fourteen men watched him come. Half a dozen had hunting rifles. Hunched over, weeping, a thin, dark-haired girl sat beneath an unshaded light. A shiver of anger crossed his brain. "Kill the witch!" a young man shouted. Lord, grant me love... His eyes focused on the rifle bearers. One of them half-raised his gun. Then the butt clumped on the floor. "You're bewitched!" the young man said. "I told you not to let him in." "I've come to talk," Sordman said. "Who's the leader of your group?" The young man said, "We don't have a leader. Here we're all equals." Sordman studied the young man's emotions. He was frightened, but only a little more than the others. There was something else there, too. Something very strong. Sex frustration! The young man had an athletic body and a handsome, chiselled face. On his yellow vest he wore the emblem of a Second Class Technician. But even a young man with adequate finances could be frustrated. Keeping the stone in his mind, he undressed a certain actress. He loved women and engaged in sex with lusty, triumphant joy. To him it was a celebration of the sacred mystery of life. He hoped some of this emotion reached its target. He started talking without asking for a parley. "Two men died yesterday. I've come to hunt out the murderer and put him away. What's the evidence against this girl?" "We found drugs and a divining rod in her room." "She's had a reputation for a long time." "The school kids say she's a daydreamer." Sordman understood their fear. Psi was a new and dangerous force. Its use demanded moral and intellectual discipline. Only a rare and carefully developed personality could encounter the anger, hostility and fear in other minds and still retain compassion and reasonable respect for human beings. An undisciplined person panicked and went into a mental state approaching paranoia. Sordman fought panic every day. He fought it with a total acceptance of human motivations, cultivated tenderness and compassion, and a healthy ego which could accept and enjoy its own self-love. Those things, Sordman would have said, and also the necessary grace of God. But the most undisciplined personality could practice psi destructively. Hostile minds roamed the world. Death could strike you in a clear field beneath an open sky while your murderer lay home in his bed. No wonder they dragged a girl from her parents and bullied her till dawn. his way through fourteen minds. As always, he found what he wanted. A fat, redheaded man sat a little apart from the group. He radiated a special kind of concern. He was concerned for the girl and for his own children. He believed the actions of the night had been necessary, but he felt the girl's pain and he wasn't sure he was doing the right thing. Above all, he was a man who wanted to do the right thing -- the really right thing. "You all have children," Sordman said. "Would you like to see them dragged out at night and treated the way you've treated this girl?" "We've got to protect ourselves!" the young man said. "Let him talk!" the fat man growled. He stared at the thick hands he spread on the table. "The girl has said all night she's innocent. Maybe she is. Maybe the Protector can do what we haven't done and find the real killer." "I'm a master Talent," Sordman said. "If the killer is in the hotel, I can track him down before midnight. Will you give me that long?" "How do we know you'll bring in the right man?" "If he's the right man, he'll make it plain enough." "You'll make him confess," the young man said. "You'll manipulate him like a puppet." "What good will that do?" Sordman said. "Do you think I could control a man all the time he's in prison and on trial? If I use my Talent more than a few hours, I collapse." "Can we hold the girl here?" asked the redheaded fat man. "Feed her and treat her right," Sordman said. "What's your name?" "John Dyer. My friends were about to use their belts on her." A rifleman shuffled uneasily. "It's the only way. Mind killers use their Talent to tie their tongues and confuse us. Only pain can break their control." "That's a fairy tale," Sordman said. "Without drugs a Talent is helpless." "We've got the girl," John Dyer said. "She can't hurt us while we're waiting." "He can!" the young man screamed. "Are you a plain fool? He can go outside and kill us all." Sordman laughed. "Sure I could. And tomorrow I'd have to fight off an army. That I couldn't do if I was fool enough to try. You're frightened, boy. Use your head." "You are excited, Leonard," said an armed man. He wore a blue morning coat with Manager's stars and the emblem of a transportation company. "We can wait a day. If we've got the killer, then we're safe. If we don't, then we've failed and the Protector should try." "I'm not frightened. I just don't like Talent." Most of the men frowned. They didn't share the prejudice. A few nodded and mumbled and shot dark glances at Sordman. He let them talk. He stood there and thought apple pies and the brotherhood of man and the time he and his second wife spent three days in bed. And the big block of stone. He was a high-powered transmitter broadcasting joy, good will toward men and tranquility. In the end they listened to Dyer. "But don't think you'll get a minute past midnight," said the young man. "Technician, your Protector will remember."  been a hard, quick little man in his early fifties. On the day of his death, the hotel newspaper had published his picture and announced his promotion to Director of Vocational Testing for the entire Atlantic Region. He had lived with his wife and his nineteen-year-old son, and his wife had been a lifetime wife. Esponito had been a Catholic, and that faith still called short-term marriages a mortal sin. For a moment Sordman wondered what it would be like to know only one woman your entire life. He loved the infinite variety of God's creation and wanted to sample as much of it as he could. "My lady Widow, our apologies." Lee bowed, hands before her chest, and Sordman and George Aaron bowed with her. "We intrude on you," Lee said, "only because we have to find the real killer. Other people may be in danger." The Widow Esponito bowed in return. "I understand, Politician Shawn." Even with her face scarred by tears she looked lovely. From the earliest years of their marriage, her husband had been high in the Civil Service and able to buy her beauty treatments. "Mylady," Sordman said, "I need your help for two things. We want to know who you think wanted to kill your husband. And we need your want." "Our want?" her son asked. He stood rigidly beside his mother's chair. His clothes were rich and formal tweed. "Do you want to find the killer?" The boy nodded soberly. "The moment I heard of his murder, I promised to avenge him." "John!" His mother trembled. "You were raised to be a Christian!" Sordman said, "I want to locate the image I think was used to kill him. For that I want to hook your strong desires into my thoughts. You won't know I'm doing it. But if you're near me, I'll use your emotions." "Your husband was a very important man," Lee said. "Would anyone gain by his death?" "Everyone liked my husband. He was always laughing, he -- " The old-young woman started crying. Her son put his arm around her shoulders.  winced. Death and pain were part of Creation, but he hated them and often cursed them. At times like these, he understood George's skepticism. The boy said, "Manager Kurt didn't like him." Mylady stifled her sobs and sat up. "Manager Kurt has been our guest every month. Protector, John's upset. He's talking wildly." "Father told me. He said Manager Kurt didn't like him." "Your father and the Manager were good friends." He felt a sudden resentment in the woman. Why? The boy didn't feel as if he was lying. Maybe Esponito had been the kind of man who didn't talk about his job with his wife. But his son -- who would some day be a member of his father's class -- would have received a certain amount of practical advice. Perhaps Mylady resented being left out of her husband's professional life. That was a common family pattern, after all. George felt impatient. Sordman shot him a questioning glance. "Where does Manager Kurt live?" "In Baltimore," the boy said. "Mylady, may we use your phone?" "You don't take John seriously?" Mylady said. "We'll have to ask the Baltimore police to check on the Manager. It may not mean anything, but we have to follow every lead." "Use the phone, Protector." Sordman and George stepped into the dining room. "We're wasting time," George said. "They're both upset and there seems to be a family quarrel." "I know. But Esponito's murder gives us more leads than Bedler's. Bedler didn't even have a onemonth wife when he died. Lots of people knew the Administrator and might have had a grudge against him." George clasped his hands behind his back. "We've unraveled twenty-three murders in the last four years. Judging by that experience, I'd say there are three possibilities: both victims were picked at random; both victims are in some way related; or one victim was killed to confuse the police." "Unless we have something entirely new." "That's been the pattern so far." "I think we're both coming to the same conclusion." "Find out if the murderer used the picture from the paper?" "Mmm. If he did, Administrator Esponito was probably attacked on the spur of the moment And we should be seeing who wanted to kill Bedler." "What about Manager Kurt?" "Have Lee call the Baltimore police while I try to locate the murder weapon. At least they can search his home for drugs." lor and Sordman stripped to his yellow vest. From the pockets of his morning coat he removed a leather case and a tiny plastic package. Unfolded, the plastic became a thin red robe with a yellow bomb-burst on the back. He called it his battle robe. Habit played a big part in the development of Talent. The same clothing, the same ritualized movements, helped put his mind in the proper state. He filled a hypodermic with a pink liquid and jabbed the needle into his wrist. As the drug took effect, he knelt to pray. "Grant me, God, the strength to bind the demons in my mind." He stood up. At this point many Talents danced. Sordman loved to use his body, but ritual dancing made him feel ridiculous. It had been proven, however, that the Power flowed at its freest when the body was occupied, so he took three colored balls from the case and started juggling. The balls soared higher and faster. He mumbled a hymn. His voice grew stronger. He roared his love of life at the world. The wall between his conscious and unconscious mind collapsed. Lightning flashed in his eyes. Colors sang in his brain. Walls, floor, table, chairs became extensions of his mind. They danced with the balls between his hands. The Universe and he flowed together like a sea of molten iron. His hands, miles from his mind, fumbled in the case. The balls danced and bobbed in the air. He laughed and unfolded his divining rod. The furniture bounced. Mylady Esponito screamed. All Creation is a flow. Dance, you parts of me, you living things, you atoms of my dust! He had torn Esponito's photo from a newspaper. Now he let the colored balls drop and stuck the picture on the end of the rod. "This and that are one in kind. Servant rod, find me that!" He stretched out the rod and turned on his heels. He sang and blanked his mind and listened to the tremors in his hands. Stop. Back right. Now the left. Too far. Down. Correct left... Here! He pressed a button on the rod. A tripod sprang out. A pair of sights flipped up. Carefully he sighted down the rod, out through the window-wall beside the table, to a grove of trees in the park.  head, divining rod in hand, he stormed out the door and down the hall. Lee and George hurried after him. The presence of their well known minds pleased him. There was George's unexpressed belief that he had "mastered" and guided the Power he feared. There was Lee's worry for him and her keen awareness of human realities. And there, too, were self-discipline, intelligence, affection, and a richness of experience and thought he expected to draw on for another forty years. on the walls of existence, the Power. His power. He, the master of the world! He who could uproot the trees, spin the earth, make the ground shake and change the colors of the sky. He felt George's clear-eyed, good-humored tolerance. A hypnotic command triggered in his mind. He saw a Roman Caesar ride in triumph and the slave behind him said, "Caesar, remember you are mortal." My power? It is a gift from the Fountain of Creation. Mine to use with the wisdom and restraint implanted by my teachers. Or else I'll be destroyed by my power. He laughed and rolled into a cannon ball and hurled his body through the wood. "Andy! Andy, you're losing us!" He picked them up and towed them with him. The girl in the beer hall cried in his heart. The fox is many hills away and the hound grows impatient. They landed in a heap. George said, "Andy, what the hell are you doing?" "I brought you down in a soft spot." "You felt like an elephant running amok! Boy, you've got to be careful. Since you were a little boy I've taught you to watch every move. For a moment I don't think you knew how you felt." "You're right," Sordman mumbled. "That was close." "Let's find the picture," Lee said. "Has the drug worn off?" "Just about. The picture's over by that tree. It feels like it's rumpled up." After a minute's hunt, they found it. It had been rolled into a ball and tossed away. "We're dealing with an amateur," Lee said. "A Talent who was even half-developed would have burned this." Unrolled, the picture fell in half. It had been sliced with a blade. "Let's walk back," Sordman said. "Let's talk." They crossed a log bridge. He ran his hands along the rough bark and smelled the cool water of the stream. Most of the big park was wilderness, but here and there were pavilions, an outdoor theatre, open playing fields and beautifully planned gardens. A man could have a home surrounded by the shops and pleasures of civilized living and yet only be a ten-minute elevator ride from God's bounty. "The fact the killer used the newspaper picture doesn't prove Bedler was the real victim," George said. "But it indicates it." "Let's assume it's true," Sordman said, "and see where it leads us." "Bedler was married," Lee said. "I remember that from our briefing." Sordman rabbit-punched a tree as he passed it. "It was a one-year contract, and it ended two weeks ago." "I smell jealousy," Lee said. "The world is filled with it," George said. "I favor short-term marriages. They're the only way a person can practice a difficult art and make mistakes without committing himself for life. But about half the mental breakdowns I used to get were due to the insecurities caused by a temporary contract. One party almost always hopes the marriage will somehow become permanent." "Let's talk to Bedler's ex-wife," Sordman said. She was just over five feet tall and blonde. She wore glasses with green frames. Sordman liked big women but he had to admit this little creature made him feel like swatting and rubbing. She wore a sea-green kimono and bowed gracefully at the door. "Citizen Baker, I'm Protector Andrew Sordman. May we talk to you?" "Certainly, Protector. Welcome." They entered and he introduced Lee and George. After they exchanged bows, the girl offered them some wine. She took a bottle of clear Rhine wine from the cooler and asked George to open it. There were several journals on a throw table. "Are you a doctor, Citizen?" Lee asked. "No, Politician. A medical technician." They drank the first glass of wine. "Technician," George said, "we have to ask you some questions. We'll try not to upset you." The girl closed her eyes. "I'll try not to be upset. I hope you find whoever killed him. I'd like to find her." The girl felt lonely. She ached with unsatisfied needs. I'd like to lie with you and comfort you, Sordman thought. I'd like to hold you in my arms and drain all the tears you're holding back. But he couldn't. His contract with his wife had six months to run and no one committed adultery any more. "When the rules are carefully tailored to human needs," Lee often said, "there's no excuse for breaking them." "Why 'her'?" Lee asked. "Why 'her' instead of 'him'?" The girl looked at Sordman. "Can't you just probe my mind? Do I have to answer questions?" "I'm afraid so," Sordman said. "My Talent has its limits. I can't deep-probe everybody's mind, any more than a baseball pitcher can pitch all day." Lee said, "Even if he could, our warrant says we can't probe more than four suspects." "Now can you tell us why you think the killer is a woman?" George asked. r T , HE girl held out her glass and George filled it. "Because he was the kind of man who made you want to kill him. He was understanding and loving. He made me feel like a princess all the time I lived with him. But he can't keep to one girl." She gulped down the whole glass. "He told me so himself. He was so wonderful to live with I went insane every time he looked at another girl. I knew he was shopping for his next wife." She wiggled in her chair. "Is that what you want to know?" "I'm sorry," Sordman said. "Do you know who he was interested in before he died?" The girl had big, myopic eyes. "Our contract ended sixteen days ago." She took a cigarette from inside her kimono. "Protector Sordman, could I just talk to you?" "Certainly," Sordman said. Lee and George went to a coffee house on the next floor down. "I want to talk to just you," the girl said. "I feel safe with you. You make me feel right." "It goes with being a Talent," Sordman said. "Either we like people and let them know it or we crack." "I know it's all right to tell you things. I love Joe. I broke the rules for him. I didn't avoid him for three months the way you're supposed to. I went everywhere I knew he'd be. I had to see him." Sordman stroked his beard. Mentally, he cuddled her in his arms and murmured comfort to her. She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her body. "Just before our marriage ended, I found out he was seeing Raven English as much as he could. He didn't break the rules. But when we went to dances he always danced with her once or twice. And she and her husband used to meet us in bars. After the contract expired, he couldn't see her much because she and her husband have another six months to go. But there was a dance last week and I saw the two of them disappear into the park. Raven's husband hunted all over for her. He looked horrible. I pitied him." "Who's Raven English?" "She's a sadist. I know she is. She's just the type to do this. She likes to play with men and hurt them. Her poor husband is a nervous wreck. I know she killed Joe, Protector. She hates us!" He stood up. The girl watched him with big eyes. He put his hand on her head. "Sleep is a joy," he said. Unprepared, he couldn't have done that to many people. But she was a woman, which added to his influence, and totally exhausted. TT E got off the vator and looked around for the coffee house. Dozens of people wandered the halls and the shops. As he walked down the hall, some of them looked away or got as far from him as they could. Others ignored him or found his presence reassuring or studied him curiously. A fat woman in a black kimono walked toward him. She had one hand on her hip and her eyes were narrowed and hard. Sordman smiled. He felt her fear and distrust, and her determination not to let such emotions conquer her. "Good afternoon, Protector." "Good afternoon, Citizen Mother." He felt her triumph and her pleasure with herself. His fellow humans often made him gawk in wonder. Some people say we're psychic cripples, he thought. And maybe we are. But we do our work and we enjoy ourselves. And we do dangerous things like putting bases on Venus and falling in love. Surrounded by death and danger, crippled though we are, we go on. He swelled with feeling. People smiled and glanced at each other or hid shyly from the organ chords of his emotion. An old man stepped in front of him. "Monster! Freak!" He was thin and perfectly dressed. Sordman stopped. God of Infinite Compassion, this is my brother... "They ought to lock you up," the man said. "They ought to keep you away from decent people. Get out of my head! Leave me alone!" People stared at them. A small crowd gathered. Lee appeared in the door of the coffee house. "It's all right," Sordman told the people. "It's all right." He started to go on. The man stepped in front of him. "Leave me alone, freak. Let me think my own thoughts!" "Citizen, I haven't touched your mind." "I felt it just then!" "It was no more than I could help. I'm sorry if I've hurt you." "Go away!" "I'm trying to." "Murderer! Mind witch!" He was faced with a strong mind that valued its independence. Anything he did would be detected and resented. "Citizens," he said, "this man deserves your respect. No matter what a man does, he's bound to offend someone. This Citizen values his privacy -- which is good -- and therefore I make him angry. I hope the good my Talent lets me do outweighs the bad. Forgive me, brother." He stepped to one side. "Leave him alone," someone said. "Let the Protector work." "Leave him alone, old man." "I'm not an old man " "No, you're not," Sordman said. "I admire your courage." He walked on. Behind him the old man shouted curses. "Are you all right?" Lee said. "Sure. Let's go in and sit down." There were just a few people in the coffee house. Sordman ordered and told them what he had learned. "I wish you could probe everyone in the building," George said. "All we get is gossip." "The husband of this Raven English has a motive," Lee said. "Why don't we visit her?" "I think we should." Sordman drank his coffee. "Citizen English herself might have killed them." "I doubt it," George said. "It all sounds like a lot of talk," Sordman said. "But we have to follow it up. This business is nothing but wearing out your legs running after every lead. If your legs are strong, you can run anybody down." They finished their coffee and cigarettes and trudged out. of Leonard Smith, did not meet them at the door with gracious bows. Instead, a wall panel by the door shot back. They stared at a square of one way glass. "Who are you?" a girl's voice said. "I'm Andrew Sordman, your Protector. I come on lawful business. May we enter?" "No." "Why not?" Lee asked. "Because I don't like witches. Keep out." "We're hunting the killer," Sordman said. "We're on your side. I've taken no drugs and made no preparations. You don't have to be afraid." "I'm not afraid. I just don't want you in my home." "You have to let us in," Lee said. "Our warrant gives us entry into every room in this hotel. If we have to break the door down, we can." "I hope we don't have to break the door down." "You're getting fat," George said. "You need the exercise." "You won't break in," the girl said. Sordman crossed the hall to get a good start. "I'm about to, Mylady." His shoulder filled the doorway behind him. This looks like fun, he thought. He liked to feel his body working. The door opened. A dark-haired, slender girl stood in the doorway. Her skin was brown and her lips were pink, unpainted flesh. She wore a red kimono. "All right. Come in." "Gladly," Sordman said. It was a three-room apartment, with the kitchen tucked into one wall of the parlor. A painting stood on an easel by the window. The window was a shoulder-high slit and from it, here on the hundred and forty-first floor, he could see across the park to the beach and the rolling Atlantic. God grant me self-control, he thought. If this is the killer, grant me self-control. He made his savage thoughts lie down and purred at the world. "I'm sorry we have to force our way in," he said. "And I'm sorry you don't approve of Talent. But please remember two men have died and a little girl may die, too. There are lots of panicky people in the Mark Twain. We've got to find the killer soon and you can help us." "Why bother me?" the girl said. "This is awkward," Lee said. She stood erect but looked past the girl. She felt embarrassed. "Someone told us you and Bedler were seeing each other." "Oh, quit being prudish," George said. "These things happen all the time." He turned to the girl. "We were told you and Joe Bedler were making plans to get married when your present contract ends." "That's a lie!" Sordman laughed in his belly. No matter what the rules were, few women publicly admitted they had broken them. By the standards of the period from # to #, the whole marriage system of the Twenty-First Century was immoral; but there were still prudes. And women still preserved the conventions. "Who told you that?" Raven English said. She frowned. "Was it that Jackie Baker?" "Why her?" George asked. "Because she's a logical person for you to talk to and because it's the kind of thing she'd say." "Yes," Sordman said. "She ought to see a psycher! And that's why you came?" "We're not accusing you," Sordman said. "But we've got to follow every lead." r I  HE girl swore. "Why would I kill Joe? Why are you all suspicious? That's why I hate Talents! All you've done is make everyone suspicious. Everybody's afraid of everybody else." "Are you an artist?" Sordman asked. "What?" "Are you an artist?" "What's that got to do with it? No, I'm not. My husband paints." He felt her stall and evade. She would grab at any subject to distract them. He decided he would let his mind probe at random. "Is he a professional painter?" Lee asked. "No, he's an engineer. They wouldn't let him go to art school. He's trying to teach himself." She shrugged and ogled the ceiling. Her emotions said, Men are like that. "What does your husband think of Talent?" Sordman asked. "Does he share your prejudice?" "Didn't you meet Len?" "Where?" He stroked his beard. "Is he the Len downstairs in the beer hall?" "Of course!" "I'm afraid I didn't make the connection." He felt two other minds run like hounds down the same trail. Lee studied the painting. "Why does your husband hate Talent?" "Is this a survey?" Lee grinned. "I'm the lobbyist for the Guggenheim Foundation. Asking that kind of question is a reflex." The girl walked around the room. She looked out the window and stretched. Sordman bellowed lust at her flanks and the long curve of her hips. "Why do men do anything?" Raven yawned. "When he was in Voc school some kid took him in the back room and showed him some tricks. Maybe that did it. Is there a psycher in the house?" "There is," George said. "Is Citizen Smith an astronautical engineer?" "You could say so. He works on instruments for space labs." "That's funny." George stared at the sun flashing on the far-off ocean. "I remember I felt bitter once because I couldn't be a space engineer. I wanted to build rockets and ride to the planets. But the Voc people told me I was too weak in math. So I became a healer of the psyche and I learned my love for rockets was a hunger for power. But still I love the brutes and now I'm an old man I still sometimes wish I'd been an engineer." "That's too bad," the girl said politely. "Yes. I suppose your husband feels that way about art?" "He gets drunk about it sometimes." "Double motive!" Sordman said. "One conscious," George said, "plain jealousy. The other halfconscious -- resentment. Nobody kills at random. There's always a reason why he took these lives instead of others." "Plus a lot of self-pity," Lee said, "and I think his wife despises him." "What are you talking about?" Raven said. "What did you say about me?" "We think we've got a suspect," Sordman said. "I didn't do it!" "I'm going to probe your husband." "My husband hates Talent." "We have to hurry," Sordman said. "If your husband's innocent, I'm sorry. We're not saying he's guilty. But I have to examine him." At the door he paused and thought, God of Infinite Compassion... The girl sat down and stared at the wall. powers. The commonest, available in any drug store, is a pill of codeine and half a dried peyote bean. Leonard Smith had both in his pocket when he ran out the side door of the beer hall. Sordman swore wildly. The girl screamed. The men, the hunters of witches and killers, either froze or shouted and ran to the door. Only John Dyer and two others ran shouting down the hall. Sordman ran to the door and saw Smith leap into the elevator. He grabbed a wall phone and dialed the Manager's office. "We've got the killer," he shouted. "His name's Leonard Smith. He's a young man, dark, wiry, good looking, and he's on the elevator going down." "We'll get him!" "Leave him alone! I saw him swallow something as he left. I think he's drugged. Clear the lobby but watch him from hiding. I'll get him before he goes far." John Dyer trudged back to the beer hall. "Give me your rifle," he told an armed man. Before the man could say anything Dyer snatched the rifle from him. "All right," Dyer said. "Who's going with me?" "Hold on," Sordman said. "Where are you going?" "After Smith." "I'm going after him. Let him go and I'll have him out cold before an hour's up." "There isn't anything a rifle can't stop." Sordman understood. These men were afraid of Talent. But some, like Dyer, had to fight that fear. They had to prove that intelligence and the technical power organized society gives individual men were superior to Talent. "I can't stop you," Sordman said. "But listen to me. Smith has to be captured alive. The man is insane. He's no more a villain than you or me. He just tampered with a force he couldn't control. You might stop him with a bullet but you'll have to kill him to do it." "He killed two of us," a man said. "He's drugged. He can hide and kill you from a distance." "So can we," Dyer said. "That's what we do with rifles." Sordman ran his fingers through his hair. "Stay under cover then. And if I get him pacified, let him live." HP HE wall phone buzzed. "Sordman." "This is the Manager. He stole a hatchet in the leisure store. He's out in the park." "Did anybody try to stop him?" "I cleared the place out." "Some of your tenants are going after him. Don't let anybody else join them. I wish myself they wouldn't go." After he hung up the three of them went up a floor and rang the buzzer of a one-tenant apartment As politely as they could, Lee and George bundled the occupant out. "I wish you'd let the state police capture him," George said. "I've got to get to him before they kill him," Sordman said. "Andy, there are limits to what you can take! Smith has gone berserk. You connect with an insane man and you may shatter all over the place." Sordman stroked his beard. "Let him go," Lee said. "Can't you feel he has to do this?" "Yes, but I won't admit it. I trained you, Andy. You're my life's work. I don't want you to wreck yourself." Sordman nodded soberly. "I know, George. I'll take care of myself." He thought tender thoughts and tried to make them feel how much he loved them. "Let's go," Lee mumbled. "Come on, George." He closed the door gently. The window of the apartment overlooked the park. He stared at the thick trees and wondered where Smith was running under that green roof. Then he turned to the picture phone and punched out a number. The screen lit. It was in full color, praise God. "Andy!" His wife smiled when she saw him. She was a big girl with long breasts and full thighs. She wore a dark kimono. She bowed. "Good afternoon, Husband." "Good afternoon, Wife." He pressed his palms together and returned the bow. "Why are you calling, Andy?" "BecauseT love you. And I want to ask you a favor, Tina." "What, Husband?" "Will you undress for me now?" "Andy! My, my, my." He explained the situation to her. "Be careful," she said. "I love you." "I'll be careful. But I've got to be aware of myself as a physical being. You understand." She smiled. "May I take my time?" "Not too long." She was an uninhibited girl and took great pleasure in displaying herself. Her skin was pure white and her stomach smooth and softly rounded. He could feel the weight of her breasts on his palm. "God is good," he said. "Thank you." His glands flooded his body. His body ached to stroke, squeeze, kiss, penetrate. "You'd better go," he said. "Before I break the screen down." She bowed. "Live with God, Husband." "Live with God, Wife." his robe and jabbed the hypodermic into his wrist. Then he knelt to pray. He did not pray for power. Intelligence and hard work could give him that. He prayed for mercy, compassion, recognition of his own flawed nature. He prayed for courage and the end of fear. The balls danced between his hands. He sang the Song of Praise, the love song to the world. Gloria mundi. Glory in the world, glory in the flesh, glory in the flow of life. Creation is a flow and man a bubble bouncing on the flow. Bubble that will burst but bubble that is. Bubble that feels, strives, blends with other bubbles. Bubble that can fill Creation! He roared at the walls of existence. His mind yawned and stretched and came awake. He prowled across the woods and parks. Gigantic, he gazed at the mortals who stumbled through the shaded tunnels of the world. These are such as me. These share my doomed existence. And that one? That one lying in the brush with an axe? That one, preparing to kill, clawing since he was a baby at a world that torments him? That also is me. Smith rose to his knees and swung the axe. John Dyer crumpled with a severed spine. The axe swung twice and two men fell. The hunters dropped to their bellies. Rifles cracked. Bullets sang in the grass. Now they knew they had to kill Smith or die. Now they felt no mercy. Sordman hovered over them. What he feels, I will feel. His hate will be my hate. His anger mine. His hate must be absorbed in great compassion, in tenderness and rationality. Or I will be destroyed with him. In the room the balls spun and whirled. He lay prostrate on the floor, the yellow bomb-burst on his back. He was afraid. His weakness was naked. He had always known he would someday meet a personality he could not forgive. When that day came he would shatter and flee, like Smith, to any refuge he could make. "Show your heads! Show your heads and I'll kill you!" A bullet smashed into Smith's leg. He screamed and flailed the axe. Shouting curses and threats, he crawled through the brush. The hunters crawled after him. Sordman located Smith. He shuddered as malice bit the edges of his mipd. He sang a long note of praise to life. Listen, Smith. I'm your friend. I am Sordman, the Protector of all, of the hunters and the hunted. I come in love. I am Sordman, small brother of the Lord, bubble in the Fountain of Creation... Once men had thought a Talent would fell his opponents with a blast of mental energy. It wasn't that easy. Sordman had to find the cause of Smith's hate. He was no rifleman, hurling a blast of energy, but a surgeon probing for the source of a disease. Two minds tangled. Sordman bore the light of himself into darkness. -- I'll kill you, too. Get out of me. Get out! Snarl, growl, slash. Two minds linked as one. Sordman fighting Sordman, Smith fighting Smith. Aaaaaaaah! He doubled up on the floor and hugged his knees. The Protector wept and sobbed. Hate! How he hated hate. How he wanted to kill the haters. They clawed his brain, they tortured every moment, and yet he had to love them. Love them! God, grant your servant strength. Be merciful... He had lost his contact but he had to go back. Weak man or not, he had to return or Smith would die. I'll kill them all. He saw the hunters creeping after him. He felt his body's dirty sweat and the blood draining on his leg. Run, said his belly. A hunter fired. He saw a blue morning coat in the bush and felt the gun pointed at his head. Kill! The axe swung back in his hand. He remembered the swift stroke, the hard resistance of the spine, the joy of having struck and won. I never got to win. They always held me back. My hands wouldn't paint what I told them, my mind wouldn't reach where I wanted to go. When I loved Raven she didn't let me out, she denied me, she made me hold my feelings back. But now I strike! Now I swing an unfettered arm. Sordman knew what he was joined with now. Smith was what the psycher Talents called an unopened personality. A mind totally absorbed in what things meant to itself. A mind which had not learned to feel the pain and joy of other minds. Smith's arm had stretched all the way back. He had to act now or someone else would die. He was Sordman the Protector, one of the four best Talents in the world and his powers were running like a river at flood. All he had to do was make the right move. He linked Smith's mind with the mind of the rifleman. coat was forty-three years old. He worked in New York City, the assistant manager of a transportation line's local office. His second wife had grown pregnant by accident, which under law meant they were automatically married for life. They had been married for fifteen years and still didn't know each other. His two sons thought he was a spineless old fool who slept all the time and couldn't give them what they needed. He didn't like his job but he knew it was all he would ever do, an exact definition of his limits. Alone in his house, imprisoned by his work, he smoked and slept and ate without appetite. But now he aimed his rifle and thought, I'll kill the witch. That will be something. I'll know I did that. The two minds were one. Each knew the other's pain, the other's fear. If one died, the other felt his death. Each recognized the other man's hunger, his frustration, his imprisonment within his body and the limits of his life. Sordman felt the weight of their lives. He gathered in the strength he called a gift. His voice and mind, his total self, sang the Liturgy of Joy. He gave his feelings and thoughts. The axe dropped. The finger squeezed the trigger and the bullet cut the bark from a tree. His thoughts became a lullaby, a drowsy murmuring of peace and healing sleep. George and Lee ran from the woods. "Andy! Don't shoot them. Andy!" "Where?" -- Here. He wiggled the leaves and branches of the brush. Here! They stood over the unconscious men. The hunters crept from their hiding spots and joined them. "We'll bring him in," George said. "A psycher team is on the way." -- Good. Lee said, "You feel tired, Andy." -- I think they get harder. They take more out of me. Lee? "What, Andy?" -- It'll never end, will it? He was a young man speaking to an older person. He had seen much of humanity, but there were things only years could tell. "Probably not. Is it too much?"No. to tell the truth He didn't have a thing to worry about -- if the enemy quizzed him too keenly, he would simply die! to bright sunlight streaming through a large window. He looked down at his feet and past them to the foot of the bed. Bed? What was he doing in bed? He tried hard to think. White walls white sheets white bed bright sunlight. He sat up with a start. Hospital. Then he saw the man sitting in the chair beside his bed. Tall, middle-aged, the man had a weatherlined face tanned by some alien sun. He was putting out a cigarette and smiling at Kevinson. "Good afternoon," he said. "I'm Colonel Griffin, Federation Intelligence. Feel like talking, Major?" Kevinson looked at the Colonel, noted the battle ribbons on his crisply tailored jacket and the double eagles on his shoulder. He lay back down on the soft pillow and closed his eyes. The instant he did, he suddenly remembered. The six red dots coming out of nowhere on the screen, the nerve-jangling clang of battle stations and no time to think, no time to do anything, just punch the button and get the hell out. And after that -- Kevinson grimaced. After that, what? "Take it easy, Major -- you've had a rough time of it," said the Colonel. He gave Kevinson's arm a strong, friendly grip. "You tell me what you can remember and I'll fill you in." "There isn't much to tell," said Kevinson. "I spotted the Kjard patrol as they came out of subdrive, punched the random escape pattern and -- well, I guess we made it." Colonel Griffin smiled, lit a cigarette, and held out the pack to Kevinson. "That's about the way we figured it must have happened," said Griffin. "You got into sub-drive all right, but the Kjard hit you with a stunner first. You and your crew drifted around for two days before we found you. All sleeping like babies." Kevinson reddened. "Don't worry about it," grinned the Colonel. "It could happen to anyone. Dealing with the Kjard is tricky business." "Thank you, sir," said Kevinson. He was suddenly very fond of the friendly Colonel. Not like some of those Intelligence characters. You could trust a man like Colonel Griffin. You could tell him anything. A guy like that had seen action somewhere besides back of a desk. "Now about your mission," said Griffin, "it was a very important assignment, as you know, Major. And since you won't be up and around for a few days, we'd like to get all we can -- you know, fill in for the next crew that goes out. Now let's see, you were to patrol Sector # and -- " Kevinson sat up. The sweat was cold under his arms and the blue light hurt his eyes. The thrum of sub-space engines tingled in his legs and there was no white bed, no bright sunlight, no Colonel Griffin. Kevinson felt sick. Then he felt nothing. desk with his eyes half closed and his thick arms crossed over his furry chest. Adjutant Nvec stood at attention before him. The Adjutant looked a little like a tall grizzly bear that had been left out in the rain too long. He was younger than Marshal Ftel and his pelt was still a pale silky blue. Nvec made a gentle mumbling sound in his throat and the Marshal opened his eyes and glowered. "I am not sleeping, Nvec. It is not necessary to make noises." "Yes, sir," said Nvec. "I have the reports, sir." "Then read them to me." "Yes, sir. Major Kevinson lasted one minute and sixteen seconds under illusion. Then -- " "Then," said Ftel sourly, "you came right out and asked him what his mission was and he blacked out." Ftel turned his cold red eyes on Adjutant Nvec. "Don't you have any finesse, Nvec? "Sir," stammered Nvec, "it's very seldom an officer talks under illusion. We -- " "All right, Nvec, don't tell me things I am aware of already. Get on with your report." Nvec cleared his throat and continued. "Sir, report from Neural Examination is as follows: Kevinson was born in -- " Ftel's great fist slammed down on his desk. "For Tree's sake, I don't want to hear another Terr an life history! Dog named Rover or Spot, check? Kissed the girl next door at fifteen, check? Now get on with it! What did you find on him? What have I got to work with?" Ftel fumed and settled his huge bulk lower in his chair. and began to read again. "One nerve-deadener control in base of spine just below skin, hidden beneath mole. Control contained built-in breaking-point circuit with confession-selector timer and # separate pain-level nodes. We found four more nerve control centers over his body, two obvious fakes, and others interconnected on a random circuit efficient up to twelve levels of standard psychic interrogation." Nvec took a deep breath and turned a page. "We also found six micro-transmitter grids, one very well hidden between two layers of toenail tissue." "Ridiculous," grunted Ftel in annoyance. "Sir?" "Go on." "Yes, sir. There were fourteen dummy pain neutralizers, six very easy to detect, three medium-well hidden, three very secure, two which we almost missed." And a dozen more, thought Ftel sourly, that you'll probably never find. Oh, for the days of rack and thumbscrew. "In the brain," Nvec went on, "we have uncovered and dug through or bypassed # neural blocks with interlocked variations. Also # cover alternates, with corresponding backgrounds, personalities and missions." Nvec stopped. Marshal Ftel looked up. "Is that all? Nothing besides the standard equipment?" "Well, sir, there are the usual indications. But with their delicate neural structures, we don't dare dig any deeper." "No," growled Ftel, "not ordinarily. But this time we've got to try. Headquarters has an idea there's something big going on. Crucial point of the war and all that sort of thing. If the Terrans are up to something in this sector, we'd better find out what it is." He studied Nvec from under silvery brows. "I'm sure you don't relish the thought of your mates receiving a package with your pelt in it any more than I do, Nvec." "No, sir." Nvec swallowed. "What do you suggest, sir?" "Use the psycher and see if you can find any more deep-set indications that we can get to. I know they can implant a block lower than the levels indicated by your report." Nvec nodded. "But be careful," warned Ftel. "Remember the suicide circuit. Cut through that with the wrong frequency and that's it. He's no good to us dead or insane." Nvec saluted and lumbered toward the door. "And Nvec -- " "Sir?" "Remember, if the fur flies on this' deal, we all get tanned." He paused and raised a pudgy finger. "But you first, Adjutant." Nvec saluted nervously and softly closed the door. Ftel glanced at the pile of reports on his desk, mumbled a low obscenity to himself, and pulled a bottle of Bvorlta from his pouch. In the female Kjard, the pouch was used for carrying young. The male Kjard had long ago found other, more practical uses. was being run through the Kjardian mill, and doubly aware there wasn't a thing he could do about it. The Corps spent approximately # per officer preparing for just such an event, and now it was up to his mental blocks, psychic torture adjusters, confession nodes and whatever else they had in him to do the job. Kevinson's mind below the primary and secondary levels was now a complete blank, both to Kevinson himself and, with luck, to the Kjard. The answers he would give, or had already given, came to his conscious mind from a source over which he had no control. The war with the Kjard was now in its eighth year. Space maneuvers were intricate operations, involving tremendous expenditures of time, materiel, men and money. Once a fleet was committed to action, it was a gargantuan task to pull it out and unwind its complex coordinates and divert it in a new and doubly complex direction. If there was anything left to divert. As the war progressed, prisoner interrogation methods improved, and counter-interrogation became a fine art. The # worth of neural implants was considered well worth the expense if an officer could be kept from revealing lar operation. Of course, the cost of training every crewman was prohibitive. The Federation and the Kjard solved this problem by simply keeping their crewmen in the dark about everything not connected with their immediate duties. This suited the crewmen fine. When captured, they told all they knew about military matters -- which was nothing. The officers had much the same reassurance; they knew they wouldn't be physically tortured, and they knew they couldn't talk. There was only one hitch. Counter-Interrogation tried to keep up with new developments, but defense and offense seldom overlap. If you happened to be unlucky enough to be captured at the wrong stage of this game -- tough. When they probed within range of your secret, a little alarm went off somewhere in your built-in circuits and a switch closed before the information could be extracted. The suicide circuit. And that, thought Kevinson as they strapped him down again, was something to think about. Marshal Ftel stood in the background with Adjutant Nvec. They were watching Group Seven in a series of twelve tests designed to bypass the suicide circuit of Major Kevinson and bring his information up to an extractable level. Ftel had taken a very personal interest in the Kevinson tests. Confirming information indicated that Kevinson had almost certainly been captured while scouting for a major Federation breakthrough. Ftel was taking every precaution to keep his own pelt in one piece. Kevinson's unmanned ship continued to send routine reports back to Federation headquarters. Every detail, every scrap of information collected from the vital sectors involved was filtered and sifted through Ftel's office. But Kevinson himself was the key -- if he couldn't be broken, the rest of the information was worthless. "What are they doing now?" asked Ftel impatiently. "Sir, they are testing to discover the type of suicide circuits that have been planted in Kevinson. If they can isolate the method in which his system will be destroyed -- " "I know, I know," snapped Ftel. "I mean what area are they working on?" "The stomach tissue, sir. If you recall, sir, Area Nine lost a lieutenant two weeks ago when a virus in his stomach mutated as we made contact." "They're still testing for that? Federation's probably changed the circuit a dozen times in two weeks!" Ftel turned on Nvec, raising a hairy paw to the Adjutant's Face. "Fumble this for me and you won't see another shedding season." He turned and stalked out of the room, feeling to see if the bottle of Bvorlta was still in his pouch. Kevinson was conscious of what was being done to him, but he refused to let it bother him. Or, rather, certain circuits told him it didn't bother him, which was just as good, if not better. He knew, for instance, that the Kjard were probing his stomach with sonic scalpels, and he could feel the wave pulsations running through his body. One certain note made his teeth ache. He hoped the suicide circuit wasn't in his teeth. One of the Kjard grinned, revealing a set of strong white molars. "Don't worry," he said. "We already checked the teeth." Kevinson glanced up. The Kjard wore earphones and evidently had the dull job of monitoring Kevinson's primary thoughts. "Thanks," thought Kevinson, "you overgrown, smelly slob." The Kjard flushed. "that we are finally getting somewhere, Nvec." Nvec smiled broadly. "I certainly hope so, sir." Ftel frowned. "Get overconfident, though, and we'll pull some fool trick like Gtem, in Area Four." He bent over the reports again. Nvec shuddered. He had read the official report on the late Marshal Gtem, who had somehow let a two-cluster Federation Admiral die under the probe. "Sir?" asked Nvec. "Hmmm?" Ftel didn't look up. "Sir, what happens to a Federation officer who -- makes mistakes -- big mistakes, sir?" "Like Gtem made, you mean?" "Yes, sir." "And Gtem's Adjutant?" "Yes, sir," said Nvec. Ftel looked up. "They get promoted, Nvec." "Sir?" "I believe the Terran term is 'kicked upstairs.' And don't ask me to explain it to you." Ftel bent over his work again. "Yes, sir," said Nvec, who was so engrossed in the wonders of alien psychology that he forgot to salute as he left. Kevinson was being wheeled down the long corridor again. By now, he had lost all count of the number of times he had gone from the tiny room, down the hall, and into the examining chamber. Any estimate of the elapsed time since his capture would have to include periods under sedation, narcohyphosis, dream-sleep, subsonic suspension and a number of other states that can only be described as variations on semi-consciousness and pseudo-death. As far as Kevinson was concerned, anywhere from thirty seconds to ten thousand years had swept dreamily by. At present, he was aware of two things. The pale blue Kjard lighting was giving him a headache again, as it always did when he was conscious enough to realize he had a head. Secondly, he was dimly aware that there was entirely too much activity going on for a regular examination period. The corridor was literally swarming with Kjard officers and technicians. One Kjard in particular seemed to express a keen interest in him. Kevinson had never seen him before, at least not that he could remember, but he rocognized the silver triple-spangled shoulder insignia as the badge of a full Marshal of Interrogation. As they reached the examination chamber, it was the Marshal himself who put the blinder helmet over Kevinson's eyes. The helmet was only used during certain phases of the examination, and Kevinson hadn't yet decided whether it was to keep the patient from seeing what was being done to him out of kindness or for security reasons. While Kevinson was being readied for examination, Marshal Ftel took the opportunity to inspect the interrogation equipment. There was no reason for a Marshal to inspect the equipment personally, but Ftel knew the technicians expected it of him, and would lose respect for him if he failed to find a spot of grease or a bit of dust. Ftel had been in the business long enough to know that a satisfied officer might well expect to wake up some morning with his pelt nailed to a bulkhead. nation chamber, a thirty-foot bank of gleaming bronze-colored instruments circled in an arc around the central examining table. The table was joined to the bank by a tangled snarl of multicolored cable which occasionally bypassed the bank itself to join other instruments placed at random on the walls, floor and even the ceiling. At the beginning of the war, the examination chamber had been a neat and orderly place to work in; now it resembled a weird organism that had not quite made up its mind what it wanted to be when it grew up. Of necessity, the chamber was in a constant state of flux, a desperate race to adapt to new developments of the enemy as well as the efforts of their own technicians. The miles of cable, tons of tubes, transistors, switches and just plain gadgets were being readied for what Ftel believed to be the most important job they would ever perform: the extraction of vital information from the mind of Major Kevinson. For weeks, the technicians had worked around the clock for this moment. First, the various primary level mental and physical protective and confusion blocks were removed. Then, and more carefully, the secondary probes went after the subtler devices. Here the danger to Kevinson, and indirectly to the Kjard, became acute. A hasty probe or a mistaken analysis and the suicide circuit could bring the examination to a deathly halt. During this phase, Marshal Ftel's pelt itched constantly, and his supply of Bvorlta ran alarmingly low. Adjutant Nvec lumbered up to Ftel and huffed smartly to attention. "Sir, we are ready to begin." Ftel paused, his eyes on the Terran strapped to the examining table. Then he nodded to Nvec. Kevinson was aware of being questioned. Whether the voice came from inside or out of his head, though, was impossible to tell. "Kevinson," said the voice, "you will be asked several questions. You will answer them all with one word: True. You will answer in this manner until otherwise instructed. Do you fully understand what you are to do?" Kevinson answered, "Yes, fully." "Your name is Bruce B. Kevinson?" "True." "You hold the rank of Major in the Federation Forces?" "True." "Your serial number is KH# ?" "True." "A man can live on the face of the sun?" "True." "A man can breathe in space without benefit of a protective suit?" "True." The questioner paused. Glancing at the lighted panel by his side, he noted that Kevinson's test questions had all been answered as they should be. The bank of lights also indicated that Kevinson realized the last two answers should have been False. The questioner nodded to his assistants and more switches were thrown into play. New banks of lights flickered on and off, and the emergency organ bank next to Kevinson's body hummed into life. Ftel could feel the moisture creep up under his pelt. The organ bank meant they were ready to proceed to third level probing. Here they would certainly come up against the suicide circuit and, if successful, disarm it. If any organ in Kevinson's body were destroyed in the process, they would attempt to keep him alive by cutting in a duplicate organ from the bank. And, Ftel uneasily thought, probably unsuccessfully. The suicide circuit was usually too quick and too thorough; likely to set off half a dozen alternate circuits before the organ bank could take control. A N hour later, Kevinson was no longer conscious of existing. The protective devices left in his mind and body had taken complete control in a last-ditch effort to guard the thoughts deep within his brain. "Circuit TG," said the head technician. "Activated." "Begin probe in Area V." "Easy!" "Give me a check on that. We hit something" "There... Now!" Kevinson's mind reacted to the shock of the probe with all its available weapons. Two shields were penetrated, and then another. As the probe delicately pushed through to the fourth, a green light buzzed and blinked frantically on the control panel. The Kjard technician hastily withdrew. His pelt was soaked and his paws shook. "We nearly did it. That was the suicide circuit." His assistant frowned in disbelief. "The circuit? In conjunction with the shield?" "Something new, all right. Call the Marshal over here." Ftel and Nvec hastily joined the technicians at the table. "What is it?" said Ftel. "What's wrong?" "We've hit a barrier with a suicide circuit implanted in a field around it. If we try to break through, we'll set it off. If we don't break through, we'll never get anything. I feel sure the shield we're after is a major block." Ftel bit his lip and scowled. Surrounding a shield with a circuit was something the Kjard or the enemy were bound to come up with eventually. Now it was here. Ftel cursed under his breath and turned to the head technician. "You're convinced it's a major block?" "Yes, sir. I'm almost certain it's the major block." "Hmmm. That means we can't bypass it." "Not to any advantage, sir." "Go ahead and try. We can't do anything else," grunted Ftel. The technician nodded grimly. His assistant shrugged and began. Kevinson's mind screamed in agony and fought back with savage force. The probe penetrated the suicide circuit and began to implode. "He's gone!" hissed the technician. "No. Wait." "He's gone, I tell you! We set it off!" "No, by Tree, we stopped it!" "It won't hold long! Disarm, quickly!" A moment later, the head technician nodded to Ftel and sank weakly to a chair. Ftel reached in his pouch and, to Nvec's everlasting astonishment, brought out a bottle of Bvorlta and offered it to the Adjutant. The rest was routine. Kevinson came slowly out of shock, his mind naked and open, stripped bare of protection. The first horrifying thing he remembered was his mission. Then the voice went to work. "Your instructions, please, Major Kevinson." Kevinson answered without hesitation. There was no way he could stop himself now. "I am a Sector Scout for Federation Battle "Great Stars," whispered Ftel, "I knew it! A major attack force!" He could almost feel the new silver cluster on his shoulder. Kevinson talked. He talked about the fleet coordinates, he talked about rendezvous sectors, he talked about the armament of each individual class of vessel, he talked about any and every item the Kjard wished to know. And when it was over, and he was wheeled out of the chamber and back toward his room, Kevinson broke. Now there were no protective devices to ward off his apprehensions and fears. Now, although he had been helpless to stop himself, he had talked. And he knew it. Ftel watched Kevinson disappear down the pale blue hall. A wide grin spread across his furry jaws. r P WO months after the battle, Interrogation Marshal Ftel stared sullenly at the wall aboard the Federation Prison Ship Bat Masterson. He was uncomfortable, in spite of the fact that his rank entitled him to sit near the only air shaft. "Hello, Marshal Ftel." Ftel started and looked up. A tall man in Federation blues stood above him. Ftel cringed. "Kevinson," he said. "How nice of you to drop in." Adjutant Nvec looked on, his furry jowls hanging wide. "I heard you were aboard," said Kevinson, "so I thought I'd say hello." "Thank you," said Ftel. "I thought you'd like to know -- " "I already know," mumbled Ftel. "It was a simple, ridiculous plan that anyone could have seen through. So it worked, naturally. Since you couldn't lie to us, you did the next worse thing -- you told us the truth." "Or rather," added Kevinson, "what I was told was the truth." Ftel's shoulders drooped heavily. "I'm not a Fleet Admiral. If Headquarters acts on my information, that's their business." "Anything you need?" asked Kevinson. "Yes," said Ftel, "a drink." "Sorry," grinned Kevinson. "But I will see if I can get these lights dimmed." Ftel murmured his thanks. Later, Nvec turned to Marshal Ftel. "Sir?" "What is it?" "Sir," said Nvec, "I've been wondering. I noticed Major Kevinson has been promoted to Colonel, and you said the Federation, as you put it, kicked its officers upstairs when they made mistakes -- big mistakes." "Oh, shut up!" snapped Marshal Ftel.      You know, people living in a Golden Age never are aware that they are, except in retrospect, and then only by contrast. Maybe those contrasts shouldn't happen to a dog, but they don't last forever, and it takes a spell of them, it seems, to make the superlative the highest one can attain, not the least one will settle for What topples Golden Ages? More than anything else, perhaps, it's the hopeless job of trying to greaten greatest into greatester, greatestest, and on from there. Cases in point are such masterworks as Gravy Planet. No, Virginia, they didn't win instant acclaim. Instant yelps and welts is what they raised. When the howling ceased -- the things were unfamiliar, you see, and had to be lived with a while to lose their dangerous aspects, the danger being new ideas -- then they emerged as masterpieces. Gravy Planet is sure to be compared unfavorably with it by at least one terribly tired, terribly disenchanted reviewer, though Pohl's mastery is far more mature, sure, complete, than in the earlier story. For we are at the beginning of another Golden Age, in which Pohl and other gladly welcomed old masters welcome as gladly as we do the appearance of vital, vigorous new talents to the I #s. Kim Lang, Neal Barrett, Jr., Jim Harmon, R. A. Lafferty -- it's a long, exciting list that goes on and on. Where were they all this while? Serving their apprenticeships, honing their talents, building writing muscles, getting ready for the big time... and it's here. Galaxy, ending its tenth year, is going into its next decade with a Golden Age. This could be the first in the history of man that's recognized as such, and not only in retrospect, but while it's going on. Not a chance? Stick around and see! # This perfect radio, a marvel of modern science, is unconditionally guaranteed Reception range Stations Output # KW # KW # KW Distance # Miles # Miles # Miles Clip on radiator, telephone, or light cord, If for any reason whatsoever this radio is not entirely satisfactory, the manufacturer guarantees you an immediate refund. The fulfillment of this guarantee is warranted by Galaxy Magazine. Enclosed find Please send Radios postpaid (# per radio) Name... Address City State # Star Shelf Anthony Boucher. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N.Y., # for two volumes. ity, this nevertheless needs individual treatment. Each volume has two full-length novels, a couple. of novellas, some novelettes and some shorts. Volume One has Wyndham's excellent Rebirth and van Vogt's intricate Weapon Shops of Isher as novel attractions. The two novellas are "The (Widget), the (Wadget) and Boff," a big bit of Sturgeon, and Heinlein's famous "Waldo." Novelettes: "Pillar of Fire," typically off-trail Bradbury, and the haunting "Children's Hour" by Kuttner and Moore. Best of the shorts are "Gomez" by Kornbluth and "The Dick. Despite weak sisters, the total of superior wordage is high. Rating:  tional novels are highlights, Brain Wave by Poul Anderson and The Stars My Destination, a Galaxy classic by Alfred Bester. "The Man Who Sold the Moon," Heinlein's big novella about a latter-day Promised Land and its Moses, is the longest of the remaining yarns. Provocative is a pale word to describe "The Lost Years," Oscar Lewis's novelette about Lincoln's declining years after his recovery from his near-assassination. Top-notch shorts are "Letters from Laura" by Mildred Clingerman and "The Morning of the Day They Did It" by E. B. White. Boucher allowed himself too much latitude with the other material to justify the "Great" in his title. Lord knows he had enough to pick from. Rating:  David Grirmell. Avalon Books, N. Y., # shock effect of unleashed imagination, succeeds instead in creating a comic strip without pictures. His tarnished hero, holing up from the law in Arizonia, rescues an alien from the wreckage of its space vehicle. Before death, the alien implants a message in his host's arm bone plus a compulsion to deliver the message to Pluto. To insure delivery, the hero, unlike children, will be seen but not noticed. With this handy attribute, the ex-con reaches Russia unnoticed, tossing test animals from its moon missile to make room for himself. Now the tale starts to get a bit confusing. Another set of invaders mixes in. There's a rescue from Mars in a fossil space craft, and an escape from Jupiter, quick-frozen in a plastic projectile fired from a titanic cannon. Rating:  lace West. Gnome Press, Inc., Hicksville, N. Y., # fairy tale achieves its highest degree of success with Part One, the account of the First and Second Martian Expeditions and the brawl leading directly to war between the planets. In this section, the author tells his story of the Martians, a winged, angeliclooking race, slowly dying for lack of power and raw materials. Their outwitting of a would-be Peter Minuit who attempts a repeat of the twenty-four-dollar Manhattan Island swindle is a delight. The remainder of the book, though quick-paced and deftly written, is all downhill from the peak reached by Part One. Rating: y # L. Sprague de Camp. Avalon Books, N. Y., # it is debatable whether his two trepid travelers have actually gone back to Classical Periclean Greece or whether the Golden Age has come forward to the twenty-seventh century Present of the story. De Camp's neat puzzle derives from the braving of the puppet emperor's force screen about modern Greece by a magazine reporter and the bereft husband of a kidnapped wife. Their shipwreck occurs in ancient Greece -- or does it? Robert A. Heinlein's foreword points out that the wellspring of de Camp's humor is the human quality of his characters. Heroes and villains alike are bumblers and never drawn bigger than life. So, though there isn't a bellylaugh in the book, there are plenty of chuckles and unostentatious erudition. Rating:  by Robert M. Coates. Putnam Capricorn Books, N. Y ., # knowledges his intimate acquaintance with the Paris of the Twenties and its fabulous inhabitants: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Satie, etc. In those days, for a book to sell well denoted failure of a sort. So, thirty-odd years after its original satisfactorily limited success, Putnam's reprint is now risking failure of a sort. Since murders are committed from afar by an undetectible Xray Bullet, there is no doubt that the story is also science fiction of a sort, even though it has been called the first surrealist novel in English. Coates' manipulation of language and plot are often amusing, often irritating, always fascinating. Rating:  Lukens. Avalon Books, N. Y., # "Imagination Is Funny," is descriptive of the above book -- funny-peculiar and unconsciously funny-comical. However, a reasonable doubt of the author's guilt does exist. Numerous clues point to the possible butchery of a larger, less episodic, less pathetic work, hacked away at to fit into a too-small container. If so, it would be a mercy to author and reader if someone published the original book. Rating:  Sohl. Rinehart  Co., Inc., N. Y ., # put this book down should find breaking the smoking habit easy. Sohl has written an excellent how-did-it, well paced, crisply dialogued and mounting terror. A tiny college alumnus group, the Forty Two Club, is at the core of the action. Following their #th annual shindig, one of the wealthiest, best-adjusted members of the group of seven commits suicide by walking into the ocean. During the last week of his life, he unaccountably had generated either blind fear or maniacal hatred in anyone near him, even including his own wife and son, but without undergoing any noticeable personality change. With the equally unlikely suicide of another member, it becomes obvious that the group is being plagued -- but by whom, why -- and, most important of all, how? A sweet setup. One more revision of the ending probably would have added the extra star that the story deserved and should have gotten. Rating:  V # Asimov. Houghton, Mifflin Co., Boston, # Isaac Asimov. Houghton, Mifflin, # can make your mental mouth water over dry facts. Words, designed primarily to dispel the layman's fear of weighty terminology, holds perhaps the greater interest. What an odd switcheroo that we use the Arabic "al koh'l" for alcohol -- while the Arabs borrowed "spir'ts" from us! Numbers is a bit rougher going in its step-by-step approach to modern mathematics. Starting with finger counting, it ends with the mind-cracking concept of infinite series of infinite series of endlessnesses. MacMillan Co., N.Y., # that Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity are not in themselves too difficult. Rather, the consequences of the deceptively simple formulae are the conceptual troublemakers. With the aid of his own whimsically humorous drawings, he ably manages to bring Einstein's titanic concepts down to understandable size. Ginger. Henry Holt  Co., N. Y ., # studied approach to "The World of Science." Tremendously broad in scope, its contents page is evolved from that of a general science magazine. Articles run all the way from building Brookthe Stream of Consciousness. The illustrations are truly striking. The simplest-looking is a splendid microphoto of platinum atoms. The most complex-looking is a set of tranparent pages showing successive layers of organs of a dissected frog. ace books: Solar Lottery, Philip K. Dick, #. Civilization as based on randomness and the Games Theory... Star haven by Ivar Jorgenson and The Sun Smasher by Edmond Hamilton, Ace Double, #. Crimedom's brave new world; Hamilton's tale of an unknowing exile from his own planet... Rocket to Limbo by Alan E. Nourse and Echo in the Skull by John Brunner, Double, #. Good interstellar exploration by Nourse; intrigue against humanoids by alien parasites... Fire in the Heavens by George O. Smith and Masters of Evolution by Damon Knight, Double, #. Smith's sun threatens novacide; Knight's superior story originally known as "Natural State" when printed in these pages... Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, #. From the picture of the same name... First to the Stars by Rex Gordon, #. Problems of first contact with an extra terrestrial civilization. for Tomorrow by Brian Aldiss, #. These # yarns prove Aldiss a genuine topnotcher... The Other Side of the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke, #. A double dozen of Clarke's best short-shorts, all tricky. Earth by Louis Charbonneau, #. Credibly incredible revolt against a fierce dictatorship... The Star of Life by Edmond Hamilton, #. A stellar search for the Fountain of Youth. by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, #. Their fine # Galaxy Novel... The Fourth "R" by George O. Smith, #. A five-year-old machinetaught genius fights society for survival... Seed of Light by Edmund Cooper, #. A well-written if unstartling starship story... The Outward Urge by John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, #. A heroic dynasty that won't keep its feet on the ground... Star Science Fiction No. # edited by Frederik Pohl, #. Eight new stories. gold medal: Four from Planet # by Murray Leinster, #. Earth invaded by children from Earth. an eLephant fop the ppinkip A Delta class freighter can carry anything -- maybe more than its skipper can bear! isn't pretty to look at, but it can be adapted to carry most anything, and occasionally even to carry it profitably. So when I saw one I didn't recognize sitting under the gantry at Helmholtz Spaceport, I hurried right over to Operations. It looked as if I might be able to get my Gasha root off-planet before it started to spoil, after all. It was the Delta Crucis, they told me. She was a tramp, and she hadn't yet been signed for a cargo. The skipper was listed as his own agent. They told me where they thought I could find him, so I drifted over to the Spaceport bar, and looked around. I found my man quickly enough. He had the young-old look of a deep spacer. He wore a neat but threadbare blue uniform, with the four broad gold rings of command -- rather tarnished -- on each sleeve. He had a glass of rhial -- a liquor that was too potent for my tastein front of him at ten o'clock in the morning, and that wasn't a good sign. But he looked sober enough. So I picked up a large schooner of beer at the bar and strolled over to his table in the far corner away from the window. "Mind if I join you?" I asked casually. "I hate to drink alone." He stared at me for a minute out of those pale-blue spacer's eyes of his, until I figured he thought he had me catalogued. Then he motioned me to the chair across from his at the small table. We sat for a few minutes in silence, sizing each other up. "That's a mighty nice looking freighter out there on pad seven," I said at last. "Yours?" sip of rhial, snicked the cover back, and let the heady stuff evaporate in his mouth. He breathed in sharply in the approved manner, but he didn't even shudder. He just nodded slowly, once. That appeared to pass the conversational ball back to me. "I might have a cargo for you, if you can handle it," I said. "I hear these Delta class ships can manage almost anything, but this is a rough one. The Atmabelle is the only ship in the area built to take my stuff, and she's grounded with transposer troubles." He cocked one sandy eyebrow at me. I interpreted this to be a request for the nature of my cargo, so I told him, and let him ponder about it for a while. "Gasha root," he said at last, and nodded once. "I can handle it. That'll be easy, for Delta Cruc is. Like you said, she can handle anything. Her last cargo was a live elephant." We completed our deal without much trouble. He drove a hard bargain, but a fair one, and he had plenty of self-confidence. He signed a contingent-on-satisfactory-delivery contract, and that's unusual for a ship that's handling Gasha. Hadn't thought I'd be so lucky. Gasha is tricky stuff. We went over to the Government office to complete the deal -- customs arrangements, notarizations, posting bonds and so forth -- but we finally signed the contract, all legal and binding. His name turned out to be Bart Hannah. Then, by unspoken consent, we went back to the bar. It was after noon, by that time, so I had a Scotch, and then I had N Kl P # another. I was so relieved to have found a ship for my cargo that I didn't even think about lunch. and talkative as time went by, but the skipper just sat there, breathing rhial. He didn't seem to change a bit. Something had been bothering me, though, and I finally figured out what it was. So I stopped talking about my farming troubles, and asked Captain Hannah a direct question. "You say you carried an elephant ?" I asked. "A live elephant? In a space ship?" He nodded. "It's an animal," he said. "A very large animal. From Earth." "I know all about that," I said. "We're civilized here. We're not just a bunch of back-planet hicks, you know. We study all about the Home Planet at school. But why -- and how -- would anyone take an elephant into space?" He stared at me for a while, then took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "I'll tell you," he said. "After all, it's nothing to be really ashamed of." He pondered for a full minute. "It all started just a few standard months ago, on Condor -- over in Sector Sixty-four W." "Sixty-four W?" I broke in. "That's clear over on the other, side of the Galaxy." He looked at me for awhile, and then went on just as if I hadn't spoken. "I'd been doing all right with Delta Crucis" he said, "and salting away plenty of cash, but I wasn't satisfied. It was mostly short-haul stuff -- ten or twenty light years -- and it was mostly run-of-the-mill loads. Fleeder jewels, kharran, morab fur -- that sort of thing, you know. I was getting bored. They said a Delta class freighter could carry just about anything, and I wanted to prove it. So when I heard that a rich eccentric, one planet out, on Penguin, might have an interesting job for me, I flitted right over. "The Prinkip of Penguin wasn't just rich. He was rich rich. Penguin has almost twice the diameter of this planet, but it's light enough to have about the same surface gravity. To give you an idea, its two biggest bodies of water are about the size of the Atlantic Ocean, back on the Earth you've studied so much about. On Penguin they call them lakes. And the Prinkip owns the whole planet -- free and clear. I should be so lucky with Delta Crucis. iiTP HE Prinkip is a little skinny man, but that doesn't keep him from having a large-size hobby to go with his large-size planet The Prinkip collects animals -- one from each planet in his sector. He had a zoo with nearly three hundred monsters in it -- always a sample of the largest kind from whatever planet it came from. "He showed me around. It was the damndest sight you ever saw. He had one animal called a pfleeg. It was almost two hundred feet long; it walked around on two legs and sang like a bird. He had another one that had two hundred and thirty-four legs on a side. I counted them. It had four sides. Didn't care which one was up. He had animals under glass that didn't breathe at all. He had one animal under a microscope that was about a thousandth of an inch long, but he told me that it was the biggest one on Fartolp. He had a big satellite stuck up overhead in a onerevolution-a-day orbit for animals that needed light gravity. He had thirty-seven more beasts in that. All in all, he had one animal from every planet in Sector Sixty-four W that had life. He figured that he needed just one more animal to complete his collection. He wanted a sample of a creature from the Home Planet; one live and healthy sample of Earth's biggest animal. And he wanted to know if I could ship it to him. "Well, I didn't give the matter too much thought. After all, I said to myself, if somebody had managed a three hundred ton monster almost two hundred feet long, I ought to be able to manage a little bitty elephant. So I said yes, and I gave him a contingent-on-satisfactory-delivery contract, for one adult specimen of Earth's largest animal, male or female, in good condition. "It wasn't until about that time that the Prinkip told me how that biggest monster had been shipped. It had arrived in a cardboard box, wrapped in cotton. It seems that pfleeg eggs weigh just a little under three ounces. Well, I'd been done but I still figured I could make delivery." ment, thinking deeply. "Did you know that there are two kinds of elephants on Earth, the African and the Indian, and that they aren't exactly the same size?" he asked. I shook my head. "Our schools don't go that far," I said. He nodded. "Neither do ours. So I immediately bought an Indian elephant. They're the kind, back on the Home planet, that you can find tame and easy to handle. They're also the wrong kind. The only reason I didn't head right back with it is that I was having trouble figuring out how to carry it in the Crucis. Even an Indian elephant weighs about six tons. At least, mine did. In itself, that's not a very big load, but the trip back would take a good many months of subjective N K I P # time, and of course elephants eat on subjective time. And how they eat! The food I carried would weigh the same as the elephant. "I wondered how elephants would like weightlessness, so I took my Indian elephant up on a little jaunt around Earth's satellite. The Moon, they call it. Elephants don't like weightlessness at all." He paused, and signaled the bartender for another drink. "I hope you never have to clean up after a space-sick elephant," he said darkly. "That meant that I'd have to put spin on the Crucis for the entire trip back to Penguin. It's hard enough to try to navigate in hyperspace with spin on your ship, but that wasn't the worst of it. An elephant is a tremendous amount of off-center load for a ship with a large fraction of a one-gee spin on it. Too much load even to think about handling. Even though I couldn't come up with an answer, right off hand, I went ahead and turned in my Indian elephant on an African model. Beulah was her name, and she was a husky girl. She weighed in at just a little more than eight tons." I waved my whisky glass at Captain Hannah. "But I don't see your problem," I said. "If you put the elephant on one side and his food on the other, there wouldn't be any off-balanced load, would there?" "Not until the food was eaten, anyway," said the skipper witheringly, and I subsided with a fresh drink. for all of her tonnage," said the skipper. "She had two enormous tusks, and a pair of ears like wings, and a nose that was longer than her tail. But she was mighty friendly, after she got to know me. She'd pick me up and carry me around, if I asked her to. And she'd eat right out of my hand. She turned out to be even tamer than the Indian elephant. All I had to do was figure out how to carry her. "For a starter, I figured like you said, to have Beulah on one side of the cargo compartment, and her chow on the other. Then I calculated to have my own supplies on the other two sides of the space, so that I could move them away from her as her food stocks got smaller, and hold the balance that way. That wasn't enough, of course, so I built a couple of water tanks on the opposite side of the ring from Beulah. "As you know, not much can be done about moving water around in a space ship -- it's got its own cooling chores to perform -- but every little bit helped. Finally, I jockeyed the master computer and the auxiliary computer down and ran them on tracks, so I could slide N K I P # them around to compensate for Beulah's appetite. Some lead slugs brought the auxiliary's weight up equal to the master's, and they also brought my total load up to the absolute maximum that I could carry. "It was almost enough. But a miss is as good as a mile, for a space ship. I was stuck, and there didn't seem to be a thing I could do about it. Even if I could have carried more weight it wouldn't have helped. Any more mass in the cargo compartment would have thrown the c.g. too far aft." He beckoned for more rhial. "So what did you do?" I prompted. "You did say that you carried the elephant, didn't you?" "Sure. Like I said, a Delta class freighter can do almost anything. Beulah gave me the answer herself. If you've ever lived with an elephant, one thing becomes clear mighty fast. They're a mighty efficient machine for converting fodder into elephant droppings. So I made a bin on the opposite side of the compartment from Beulah, and let l?er gradually fill it while she ate me out of balance. The weight of the -- what's a nice word for it? -- was just enough to let me keep the whole setup in dynamic balance." "Compost heap?" I suggested dreamily, picturing the arrangement in my mind. There was poetry in it. Or was it poetic justice that I had in mind? Hannah. "Compost heap. Well, I started the journey with the ship full and Beulah and the compost heap empty. I finished pretty much the other way around. I suppose it sounds easy, but it wasn't. "I started off with Beulah chained down in the middle of the compartment, and everything stacked around her. She didn't want me to leave when I went up to the bridge to take off, and hollered as piteously as you can imagine. But I couldn't have a nurse for her -- mahout, they call them. I couldn't spare the weight. Or the salary, for that matter. She was chained down, so she couldn't move around and upset the balance. "After chemical take off, we slid into parking orbit as sweet as you please. I hurried down to shift the load around. I didn't want to stay weightless any longer than I had to, because I remembered that sick Indian elephant -- and Beulah outweighed him by almost two tons, and had a larger stomach to match. Of course, the Indian elephant had gone into orbit on a full belly, and I hadn't let Beulah have a bite to eat for hours. It made a difference, let me tell you. "Beulah made trouble in her own way, though. As soon as I got within reach, she grabbed me with that long nose of hers, and wouldn't let go. She didn't hurt me or anything like that; she just wanted company in her misery. I couldn't coax her with food. The very thought of food made her shudder. "I couldn't reach her chains to cut her loose, and I couldn't reach the radio to call for help. If it hadn't been for the Ionosphere Guard, I might have starved to death. I'd hired the parking orbit for twelve hours, and when I was still in it after that time, Port Control started to holler. I could hear them on my loud speaker, but I couldn't answer them. So the Ionosphere Guard finally sent up a small craft with a lieutenant and a three-man crew in it to see what was wrong. They didn't even look surprised; they just went to work as if they handled elephants in space every day. They drove four lines through the ring bolts I'd welded in the spin-deck, cast Beulah loose and hauled her over to her new spot as neat as you please. "Then, no nonsense, the lieutenant ordered Beulah to let loose of me. She did, too. "After that they left, stopping for just one drink of my good bourbon. I didn't drink rhial then. "I wirelessed Port Control my penalty fees and another twelve hour's hire in the orbit, and started shifting the load. I was working on an empty stomach, and Beulah still didn't feel hungry, so she didn't remind me that I hadn't eaten. I almost collapsed before I got the job done. "Then I put spin on, which made Beulah comfortable at last, and tried to juggle the ship into a hypertrajectory, still without stopping for food or sleep. It didn't take long before Beulah started squalling for supper. After I fed her I had to adjust balance all over again. By that time I was pushing my new twelvehour limit, and I didn't give much of a damn any more. I just counted to ten and pushed the button. Then I turned in and slept until Beulah started squalling for breakfast. I ignored her until I ate about three squares in a row, then I fed her anc adjusted balance. After that I checked my trajectory. "It was the best I've ever made in twenty-four years of jumping. It was beautiful. "So I turned back in again and slept until Beulah woke me for lunch. I didn't know it at the time, but Beulah was eating for two. That possibility probably should have occurred to me earlier, what with the name 'Beulah', but you can't think of everything, and there I was, the first man to go into hyperspace with an elephant. Anyway, it didn't even worry me, even when I found out about it. I checked the contract. Everything seemed to be well covered. And according to my book on elephants, Beulah should still be only a potential mother when we reached Penguin. As a matter of fact, the whole idea made me feel just a little bit proud. Like a father, you know? "What with having to shift weights after every meal, and Beulah setting the schedule for meals, I was kept mighty busy. My selfwinding wristwatch overwound itself and stopped, in spite of the advertisements about it, and I didn't find out for almost two weeks, subjective, that Beulah's stomach ran fast. What's more, I think she knew it. Because when I finally woke up to what was going on, and started to run her schedule by the clock, she didn't fuss a bit. Beulah's a clever girl. "I was so worn out when we finally reached Penguin that I just slid into orbit, kept spin on, laid out a couple of extra meals for Beulah and slept the clock around. The Prinkip was mighty mad about it when I finally turned on my radio, but I told him I had my cargo ready for delivery and where did he want me to put it? So he calmed down and gave me the coordinates. #"k F course, I had to take off the spin and shift Beulah back to the landing deck, and there wasn't any Ionosphere Guard around to help me if I got into any kind of trouble. So I was mighty careful. I put the chains on Beulah again, and then set up trip ropes so I could cut her loose without getting inside of reach of that nose of hers. Then I ran lines back to the first set of ring bolts, so I could drag her back, weightless, without any trouble. Beulah looked a little unhappy, but didn't make any fuss about it all. I started to take spin off, giving the orders to the angle jets through the computer right down in the cargo compartment, so the old girl wouldn't worry about where I was. "Beulah didn't squall as her weight came off this time. She just reached down and tripped loose the chains around her ankles. Did I tell you that she was mighty clever?" I nodded. "Well, she started around that spin deck after me. I punched into the computer the maximum order for spin reduction, and started around the spin deck to keep away from her. Beulah grabbed hold of the computer with her nose -- for support, I guess -- when she got over there. She yanked the whole thing clear off the deck, breaking its cable. Crucis lurched once. "And I ended up in the compost heap. "With Beulah way off center, and with that last wild burst from the jets before they cut off, the ship was gyrating in a way that made my stomach uneasy. It didn't seem to bother Beulah, though. She just wanted to be near me. I got out of there fast, and went up onto the bridge. 'The main computer was out, of course. I couldn't interrogate the auxiliary computer remotely, so I had to fly that wobbling ship to a stop by the seat of my pants. I did it, too. "Then I went back to the cargo compartment and hauled Beulah into the center. She didn't make any more trouble -- she was sorry for what she had done. "The coordinates the Prinkip had given me looked almighty close to a big pond that I didn't recall having seen before, but I was too busy making a landing with minimum fuel to ask him about it. I finally fought her down safely with one leg of my tripod actually in the pond, and clouds of steam rising up around Delta Crucis. I call it a pond. But on a normal-size planet it would be a good big lake. "Anyway, I had made it safely to Penguin, and my elephant was alive and healthy. I congratulated Beulah when I untied her, and then I took her outside to meet the Prinkip. I think I was a little proud of myself, and of Beulah, and of Delta Crucis, too." about this successful conclusion of Captain Hannah's mission that I shook his hand warmly and ordered a round of drinks for everyone in the room. Fortunately, it was not very crowded at the time. "That's not quite the end of the story," said the skipper. "You see, the Prinkip had built the pond to keep Beulah in. He had somehow gotten the idea that I was bringing him a whale." I looked blank. "An Earth mammal. It lives in the oceans, and runs to maybe seventy or eighty tons." I sat down slowly, and then made a sudden dive for my contract for the use of the Delta Crucis. The skipper nodded. "I had a contingent contract with the Prinkip, too," he said, "and I hadn't delivered. I still haven't figured out how to make delivery of a whale, but I will some day. "And if you're looking for that part of our contract where you agree to store any residual cargo I may be carrying, it's all legal and binding. Until I get back from hauling your Gasha root, you'll have to care for one adult female African elephant. But I'm sure you'll get to like Beulah as much as I have. She's a mighty clever elephant." I called the waiter over and ordered a beaker of rhial. "But you're lucky at that," said Hannah. "Check subparagraph f of paragraph # of our contract: Incidental accrual. When Beulah has her baby, the little tyke will be all yours." Now I know why Captain Hannah drinks rhial in the morning. So do I. N K I P A war of total annihilation raged within one man. He decidedly was not his own worst enemy. Then who was? f T'HE assistant audio engineer, staring bemused through the humming to himself. It irritated Master Carl. He could not help fitting words to the tune: Strike the twos and strike the threes: The Sieve of Eratosthenes! When the multiples sublime The numbers that are left are prime. It did not alleviate his annoyance that the song was one of his own. Classic prime-number exposition was not the subject of the morning's class; it was set theory. C ornut has only this one problem: he keeps trying to kill himself. There is no reason for it that he can find. Only unhappy people commit suicide and Cornut is a busy, productive mathematics instructor, specializing in the Mnemonics of Number, so successful that not only does he have but a live one of almost a hundred Gownies! The Townies, all # billion of them, live and eat and work bunched together, pressed for room, whereas Gownies are privileged to attend University -- and Cornut is specially privileged, for he was born at University, raised there in the most approved trauma-free manner, studied and now teaches there. And yet nine times in the past seven weeks he has nearly killed himself, the latest being an attempt to climb out of his window, # stories above the ground, and is saved just barely in time by Egerd, an undergraduate, whom Cornut has drafted into an elaborate system of alarms to protect himself against suicide. Since the danger is greatest when Cornut is waking, Egerd's job is to come into Cornut's room and make sure he is really awakened by the synchronized alarms. This time, however, Egerd is just tardy enough for Cornut to be half out of the window, but in time to pull him back, and for being in the corridor without shaving he is severely reprimanded by Master Carl, house master, aged #, head of the Mathematics Department, and Cornut's friend. To the extent that Master Carl can remain interested in anything but math and submicrophotography and other such preoccupations, he would like to help Cornut. But a Field Expedition has been ordered by St. Cyr, the president of the University, a very old, very strange, very dictatorial man, to pick up several aborigines from an island in the Pacific, and even though that means leaving the system of safeguards and has nothing whatever to do with mathematics, Master Carl insists on Cornut's coming along on the Field Expedition rather than risk St. Cyr's displeasure. Before going, Cornut is told by Med Center that others have gone through the same baffling process of causeless suicides. Some succeeded quickly, others took longer, but the very longest on record is ten weeks -- and Cornut has made nine attempts in seven weeks -- so his maximum life expectancy is # days! Master Carl urges him to take a wife and suggests Locille, a pretty undergraduate, in love with Cornut, loved by Egerd, and Cornut does offer her a marriage of convenience -- his convenience. For something surely has to be done to protect him, and, as Master Carl argues, what better protection than a wife who will be on hand at those falling asleep and waking moments? On the morning after his marriage, Cornut finds he has looked for a human alarm clock and received very much more. Locille, going to class, has asked him to take wake-up pills, not only to get to his own class on time but to avoid the deadly drowsy state. In horror, Cornut discovers that he has taken sleepy pills by mistake, and as he drifts helplessly toward murderous slumber, his bitterness is heightened by being caught now that he cares. He snapped: "Be still, man! Don't you like your work here?" The assistant audio engineer paled. He had been brought up on a texas and never stopped dreading the day that he might have to go back to one. It was not really true that the humming distracted Master Carl. At his age, you either know what you are doing or you don't, and he knew. He went on at the precise moment his theme began and spoke the words he always spoke, while his mind was on Cornut, on the Wolgren anomaly, on his private investigation of the paranormal, on -- especially on -- the responses and behavior of each individual undergraduate in his studio audience. He noted every yawn of a drowsy nucleonics major in the far corner; he observed with particular care the furtive passage of notes from the boy, Egerd, to his protege's -- Cornut's -- new wife, Locille. He did not intend to do anything about it He was grateful to Locille. As a good watchdog, she might very well save the life of Cornut, the only man on the faculty Carl considered to have any chance of ever replacing himself. In five minutes he had concluded the live portion of his lecture and, indulging his own harmless desires, left the studio. Taped figures danced on the screen behind him, singing The Ballad of Sets. Let S be a number set, then progress: If, of any two numbers (a and b ) in S, Their sum is also in the set, The set is closed! And so we get A reproductive set with this definition: " The number set S is closed by addition " mind and eagerly drew a sheaf of photographic prints out of his briefcase. He had slept only restlessly the night before and had risen early to work at his newest hobby. He had had many. He needed many. Carl was in no way dissatisfied, could not have conceived a world in which he would not have been a mathematician, but it wasn't all pleasure to be a towering elder statesman in a young man's game. It was a queer fact of mathematics that nearly every great mathematician had done his best work before he was thirty. And most of them, like Carl, had turned to other curiosities in their later years. Someone opened the door, and the choral voices reached him: If number set M is closed by subtraction, A modul is the term for this transaction! Master Carl turned, frowning like ice. Egerd! He demanded terribly: "What is a number set closed by multiplication?" Egerd quailed but said: "It's a ray, Master Carl. It's in the fourth canto. Sir, I want to -- " "Closed to addition and subtraction as well?" "A ring, sir. Can I speak to you a moment?" Carl grunted. "I did study the lesson, Master Carl, as you can see." He would have said more, but Carl had not finished being stern. "There is no excuse, Egerd, for leaving a class without permission. You know that. It may seem to you that you are able to grasp set theory by studying from books, no doubt. You are wrong. A mathematician must know these simple classical facts and definitions as well as he knows that February has twenty-eight days, and in the same way. By mnemonics! I assure you that you will never become a first-rate mathematician by cutting your classes." "Yes, sir. That's it. I want to transfer out. As soon as I get back from South America, if it's all right with you, sir." Master Carl was horrified. This was not a case for discipline, he saw at once. Carl did not consider that the separation of Egerd from mathematics would be a loss to mathematics. It was compassion for the boy himself that gave him concern. He temporized by handing Egerd one of his photographs. "See anything?" took the time to examine the print thoroughly before shaking his head. "Look at it from this angle, Egerd... No?" Master Carl sighed and put the photograph back on the desk. No, it didn't really look like a star at all. It looked like light-struck film, botched in developing. "Becquerel's didn't look any better," he said. "Well. What is it you want to transfer to?" "Med School, sir. I've made up my mind." He added, "You can understand why, Master Carl. I don't have much talent for this stuff." Carl didn't understand; he would never understand. He had, however, some long time before that made up his mind that there were things about his students that didn't much need understanding. His students had many facets; only one concerned him. They were like those paper patterns the soft-headed undergraduates in Topology played with, hexihexiflexagons, constructions that turned up new sides in bewildering variety each time they were flexed. He said mournfully: "All right. I'll sign your release." He scowled when he saw that Egerd already had it filled out and ready for him; the boy was too eager. The door opened again. Master Carl halted with the pen in his hand. "Now what?" He recognized the man -- vaguely -- that hanger-on of the Department of Liberal Arts whose name escaped him. The man said with agitation: "Excuse me. I'm sorry. Name's Farley. I'm Master Cornut's sex writer -- " "I have no objection to that. I do object to having my privacy disturbed." Although that was not quite true, either. Master Carl was prude enough (perhaps because he was woman-shy enough) to feel that the private affairs of men and women should not be inspired by scripts provided by sexwriters or, as they were once called, marriage counselors. He would never have employed one, and he was irked with Cornut. As it turned out, neither had Cornut. "I was a wedding present," Farley explained, "and so I went to see Cornut this morning with a rough thirty-day draft. I don't use standard forms; I believe in personalized counseling. So I thought I'd better interview the male subject right away because, as I'm sure you know -- " Egerd interrupted desperately: "Master Carl. Please sign my transfer." The expression in his eyes said more than his words. The flexagon turned up another side, and this time Carl was able to read its design. He nodded and wrote his name. It was entirely clear that Egerd's reasons for transferring away from Locille and Master Cornut had nothing to do with his talent for mathematics. But the sexwriter would not be stopped. "Then where is the female subject, Master Carl?" he demanded. "They said she would be here." "Locille? Of course." A terrible thought entered Carl's mind. "You mean that something happened again? When you went to see Cornut, he was -- " "Out cold, yes. Almost dead. He's having his stomach pumped now, though. They think he'll be all right." room, the medic was scanning a spectrum elaborated for him by a portable diagnosticon. Cornut himself was unconscious. The medic reassured them: "Close, but he missed again. How far is he from that ten-week record?" Carl interrupted frostily: "Can you wake him up? Good. Then do." The medic shrugged and fished for a hypodermic. He slipped the piston of the needle into the barrel; the faint spray appeared over Cornut's unbroken skin. The tiny droplets found their way through dermis and epidermis and subcutaneous fat and, in a moment, Cornut sat up. He said clearly: "I had the most ridiculous dream." And then he saw Locille and his face went alight. That, at least, was no dream. Master Carl had little tact, but he had enough to take the medic and leave the two of them there. The experience of having one's stomach pumped is not attractive. This was Cornut's third time, but he had not come to like it; he tasted bile and foulness, his esophagus had been painfully scraped, and the sleepy pills had left him with a headache. "I'm sorry," he said. Locille brought him a glass and one of the capsules the medic had left. He swallowed it and began to chuckle. "Lucky Wahl," he said. "You know, if I'd been awake when that fellow came in, I'd have gone over and puncjied Wahl in the head. It was his idea -- he got half of Anthropology to chip in to buy us Farley's services for a year. As it is -- I guess Wahl saved my life." He got up and began to wander around. In spite of the taste and the head, he was feeling rather cheerful, in an unanalyzed way. Even the dream, though queer, had not been unpleasant. Master Carl and Egerd had been in it, and so had St. Cyr and the woman from South America; but so had Locille. He paused by his desk. "What's this?" It was a neat sheaf of papers clipped in a folder on which was printed: S. R. Farley, Consultant. That was all. Just Consultant. He opened it and found the first page a cleanly typed set of what seemed to be equations. The symbols  and # occurred frequently, along with strokes, daggers and congruencies which he more or less remembered from an undergraduate course in symbolic logic. "That's almost a Boolean notation," he said interestedly. "I wonder... Say, look at this, Locille. Line three. If you substitute these three terms from the expansion in line four, and then -- " He stopped. She was blushing. But he hadn't noticed; he was suddenly scowling at his desk. "My Wolgren! Where is it?" "If you mean the report on distributive anomalies you were preparing for Master Carl, he took it as he went out." "But it isn't finished!" "He didn't want you working on it. Or anything. He wants you to take the day off -- get away from the campus -- and he wants me to stay with you." dow. "Hum." He made tasting motions with his lips and tongue and made a face. "Where is there to go, off campus? Do you have any ideas?" Locille looked a little worried. "As a matter of fact," she said diffidently, "I do." At sundown they boarded the one-a-day ferry to the texas; there was traffic enough from the city to the texas, and even from the University to the city, but between the texas and the University there was almost none. They leaned against the rail as the ferry rose, looking down at the University's island, the city and the bay. The almost silent blades overhead chopped the scarlet sunset sky into dots and dashes. All they could hear inside the domed deck of the ferry was a bass flutter of blades and a more-than-soprano hiss of the blade-tip jets. Locille said abruptly: "I didn't tell you about Roger. My brother," she added in a rush. Cornut stopped an emotion before it had quite got started. "What about him?" he asked, relieved. "He isn't University caliber. He might have been, but -- when Roger was about five years old, he was swimming off the texas -- there was another boy in the water, and he dove. They collided. The -- the other boy drowned." She paused, turning to look at him. "Roger fractured his skull. Ever since then, he's been -- his intelligence never developed much past that point." Cornut received the information, frowning. It was not that he minded a stupid brother-in-law; it was only that he had never thought of there being any brother-in-law at all. It had never occurred to Cornut that marriage involved more than two people. "He isn't insane," Locille said worriedly, "just not intelligent." Cornut hardly heard her. He was busy trying to cope with the thought that there was more here than watchdog or love; there was something here that he had never counted on. It took twenty minutes to fly the rest of the way to the texas, and it took all of that time for Cornut to puzzle out the fact that he had taken on more than a convenience or a pleasure -- he had assumed a sort of obligation as well. THE texas stood in ninety feet of water, just over the horizon from Sandy Hook. It was fifteen acres of steel decks, twelve levels high, the lowest of the levels forty feet above mean high water. It was not the fault of the designers of the texas that "mean high water" was an abstraction, the average distance between trough and peak of the great swells of the ocean. The texas crouched on hundreds of metal legs that sank through the ooze to the bedrock beneath, and it was a target. In storms the whitecaps slapped punishingly at its underbelly. If there was lightning, it was sure to strike at the radar beacon on the tower. Time was when those radars had been the reason for the existence of texas towers. That time was past; satellite eyes and ionosphere-scatter search methods had ended their importance. But the world had found other uses for them. They guided the whale-backed submersibles of the world's cargo fleets surfacing over the continental shelf to find harbor. They served as mother "ships" for the ranging fishery fleets in shallow seas. They provided living room for tens of board alone. They provided work space for nuisance industries -- the ones that smelled, or were loud, or were dangerous. Power was free, nearly, on a texas. Each hollow leg was slotted in its lower stretch. The waves that came crashing by compressed the air in the columns, valved through a one-way exhaust into a pressure tank; pneumatic turbines whirred at the release vents of the tanks, and the texas' lights and industries drew current from those turbines. In "good" weather -- when the waves roared and pounded -- there was power enough to smelt aluminum; the ore boats that unloaded the raw materials carried away the slag, dumping it within sight of the texas itself in the unfillable disposal pit of the ocean. When weather was "bad" -- when the Atlantic was glassy smooth -- aluminum making stopped for a while. But weather was never really "bad" for long. Locille's parents lived with her brother in a three-room apartment in the residential area of the texas. It was leeward of the fisheries, across the texas from the aluminum refinery, six levels above the generators. Cornut thought it horrible. It smelled and it was noisy. Locille had brought presents. A sash for her father, something cosmetic for her mother and, Cornut saw with astonishment, one of the flags of the aborigines as a gift for her brother Roger. It had not occurred to Cornut that there should be gifts, much less gifts as expensive as any aboriginal artifact; the things were in great demand as conversation pieces. But he was grateful. The flag was a conversation piece here, too, and he needed one. Locille's mother brought out coffee and cakes, and Cornut entertained them with the Field Expedition to the Pacific island. He did not, however, mention the blowing up of the plane he was to have been on, his blackout by the side of the road in the tropical jungle -- and he could not keep his eyes off Roger. young man, taller than Cornut, with a pleasant expression and dull eyes. He was not offered coffee and refused cake; he sat there, watching Cornut, fingering the worn fabric of his gift, even smelling it, rubbing it against his face. Cornut found him disconcerting. Bar the aboriginals and a handful of clinical cases under study, there was not one human being on the campus with an IQ under a hundred and ten, and Cornut had no experience of the simple-minded. The boy could talk -- but mostly did not -- and though he seemed to understand what Cornut was saying, he never changed expression. The fact of the matter was that Roger didn't much care what Cornut was saying. His whole attention was taken up with his gift. As soon as he thought it was proper to do so, he excused himself and carried it to his room. Roger was aware that it was very old and came from very far away, but that could have been something of last week's, from the city just below the horizon; he had little memory. What Roger thought principally about the flag was that it was a pretty color. He fixed it with magnetic tacks to the wall of his room, stood back thoughtfully, removed the tacks and replaced the flag closer to his bed. He stood there looking at it, because somehow it satisfied him to stand and look at it. It was bright moonlight outside, but there was a fair wind sweeping across the long reach from Portugal. The waves were high; and the pneumatic hammerhammer, and the rattleslam of the valves opening and closing pounded through the texas, one noise reinforcing the other. It made it hard for anyone to talk in the other room. (Cornut was growing more and more hoarse and deafened and uneasy.) But it didn't bother Roger. Since the day his own crushed skull had minced a corner of his brain, nothing had really bothered Roger. He liked the flag. After ten minutes of staring at it, lie took off the magnets that held it, folded it and put it under his pillow. Smiling with pleasure, he went back into the other room to say goodnight to his sister's new husband. IX not-disturb sign on his door and opened the folding screen that hid his little darkroom from the casual eyes of the student housekeepers. He was not ashamed of the hobby that made him operate a darkroom; it was simply none of their business. Carl was not ashamed of anything he did. His room attested to that; it bore the marks of all his interests. Three boards held chess problems half worked out and forgotten, the pieces lifted, dusted and replaced by a dozen generations of student maids. On the walls were framed prints of Minoan scenes and inscriptions, the ten-year-old relics of his statistical examination into the grammar of Linear B. A carton that had once contained a dozen packs of Rhine cards (and still contained five unopened packs) showed the two years he had spent in demonstrating to his own satisfaction, once for all, that telepathy was not possible. The proof rested on an analogy, but Master Carl had satisfied himself that the analogy was valid. If, he supposed, telepathic communications could be subsumed under the general equations of Unified Field Law, it had to fall into one of the two possible categories therein. It could be tunable, like the electromagnetic spectrum; or it could be purely quantitative, like the kineto-gravitic realms. He eliminated the second possibility at once: it implied that every thought would be received by every person within range, and observation denied that on the face of it. Telepathy, if it existed at all, therefore had to be tunable. Carl then applied his analogy. Crystals identical in structure resonate at the same frequency. Humans identical in structure do exist; they are called identical twins. For two years Master Carl had spent most of his free time locating, persuading and testing pairs of identical twins. It took two years, and no more, because that was how long it took him to find three hundred and twenty-six pairs; and three hundred and twenty-six was the number the chi-square law gave as the minimum universe in which a statistical sampling could be regarded as conclusive. As soon as the three hundred and twenty-sixth twin had failed to secure significantly more than chance correlation with the card symbols viewed by his sibling, Carl had closed out the experiment at once. When the two-year job was ended, Carl was not angry; he had simply disproved something. It did not occur to him to go on to a three hundred and twentyseventh set. He did, however, permit himself to turn to investigating other aspects of what had once been called psionics. nated on logical grounds. Clairvoyance he pondered over for several months before deciding that, like the conjecture that flying saucers were of extraterrestrial origin, it offered too few opportunities for experimental verification to be an attractive study. Hexing he ruled out as necessarily involving either telepathy or clairvoyance. It was not the cases in which the sufferer knew he was hexed that offered a problem; simple suggestion could account for most of those -- a man who saw the wax doll with the pins in it, or was told by the ju-ju man that his toenails were being roasted, might very easily sicken and die out of fear. But if the victim did not learn of his hex through physical means, he could learn only by either telepathy or clairvoyance; and Carl had eliminated them. The traditional list of paranormal powers included only two other phenomena: Fire-sending and telekinesis. Carl elected to consider the first only a subdivision of the second. Speeding the Brownian movement of molecules (i.e., heating them) to the point of flame was surely no different in kind than gross manipulation of groups of molecules (i.e., moving material objects). His first attempts at telekinesis involved a weary time of attempting to shift bits of matter, papers first, then balanced pins, hanging threads, finally grains of dust on a microbalance. There was no result. Co-opting some help from Classical Physics, Carl then began a series of tests involving photographic film. It was, the drafted physicists assured him, the medium in which the least physical force produced the greatest measurable effect. A photon, a free electron, almost any particle containing energy could shift the unstable molecules in the film emulsion. Carl worked with higher speed emulsions, and higher and higher, learning tricks to make the film still more sensitive -- special developers, close temperature control, pre-exposing the film to "soak up" part of the energy necessary to produce an image. With each new batch of film, he sat for hours, attempting to paint circles, crosses and stars on the emulsion with his mind, visualizing the molecules and willing the change-over. He scissored out stencils and held them over the wrapped film packs, considering it possible that the mental "radiation" might show only as a point source. He had one temporary and illusive success: A plate of particularly trigger-happy film, wrapped under his pillow all one night, developed the next morning into a ghostly, wavering "X." Master Florian of Photochemistry disillusioned him. Carl had only succeeded in so sensitizing the film that it reacted to the tiny infrared produced by his own body heat.--this night involved pre-exposing a specially manufactured batch of X-ray film by means of contact with a sheet of luminescent paper. The faint gamma radiation from the paper needed hours to affect the emulsion, but those hours had to be accurately timed. To fill the space of those hours, Master Carl had another pleasant task. He sent a student courier to his office for the unfinished draft he had abstracted from Cornut's room. It was headed: A Reconciliation Of Certain Apparent Anomalies In Wolgren's Distributive Law Carl drew a stiff-backed chair up to his desk and began to read, enjoying himself very much. Wolgren's Law, which had to do with the distribution of nonuniform elements in random populations, was purely a mathematician's rule. It did not deal with material objects; it did not even deal with numerical quantities as such. Yet Wolgren's Law had found applications in every sort of sampling technique known to man, from setting parameters for rejecting inferior batches of canned sardines to predicting election results. It was a general law, but the specific rules that could be drawn from it had proved themselves in nearly every practical test. In every test but one. One of Carl's graduate students attempted to reconcile the Wolgren rule with census data for his doctoral thesis -- queerly, the subject seemed never to have been covered. The boy failed. He found another subject, got his degree and was now happily designing communications systems for the TV syndicates, but in failing he had produced a problem worth the attention of a first-rate mathematician; and Carl had offered it to Cornut. Cornut had worked on it, in his own after-hours time, for six months. Incomplete as it was, the report gave Master Carl three hours of intensive enjoyment. Trust Cornut to do a beautiful job! Carl followed every step, mumbling to himself, cocking an eyebrow at the use of chi-squared until it was proved by a daring extension of Gibbs' phase-analysis rule. The mathematical statement concerned him, not the subject of census figures themselves. It was only when he had finished the report and sat back, glowing, that he wondered why Cornut had thought it was not finished. But it was! Every equation checked! The constants were standard and correct, the variables were pinned down and identified with page after page of expansions. "Very queer," said Carl to himself, staring vacantly at the bench where his X-ray film was quietly soaking up electrons. "I wonder if -- " He shrugged and attempted to dismiss the problem. It would not be dismissed. He thought for a moment of calling in Cornut, but stopped himself. The boy would not be back from his visit to Locille's family, and even if he were, it was no longer in good taste to burst in on him. Dissatisfied, Master Carl read again the last page of the report. The math was correct. This time he allowed the sense of it to penetrate: "Of n births, the attained age of the oldest member of the population shall equal n times a constant e-log q." Well? Why not? Carl was irritated. He glanced at his clock. It was only ten. Frowning, he buttoned his jacket and went out, leaving lights on, door open, report open on the desk... and the X-ray film still firmly taped to its gamma-emitting paper. " Cornut's door, so Master Carl, after a moment's thought, pushed it open. The room was empty; the couple had not returned from the texas. Carl grumbled at the nightproctor and took the elevator down to the campus. He thought a stroll might help. It was chilly, but he scarcely noticed. The q quantity -- was there something wrong with that? But its expansions were all in order. He recalled, as clearly as though they were imprinted on the wall of the Administration Building ahead of him, the equations defining q; he even remembered what quantities those equations involved. Public health, warfare, food supply, a trickily derived value for the state of the public mind... they had all been in the accompanying tabulations. "Good night, Carl-san." He stopped, blinking through the woven iron fence. He had reached the small encampment where the aboriginals were housed; the captain, whatever his name was, had greeted him. "I thought you people were off -- ah -- lecturing," Carl said lamely. "On exhibition," he had been about to say. "Tomorrow, Carl-san," said the waffle-faced man, offering Carl a long, feathered pipe. That had been in the briefing; it was a peace pipe, a quaint and for some reason, to the anthropologists a surprising, custom of the islanders. Carl shook his head. The man -- Carl remembered his name; it was Masatura-san -- said apologetically, "You softspeak hard, sir. I smell you coming long way yesterday." "Really?" said Carl, not hearing a word. He was thinking about e-log and the validity of applying it; but that had been all right, too. "Softspeak brownie not smell good," the man explained seriously. "No, of course not." Carl was wondering about the values for a, the age factor in the final equation. Tai-i Masatura-san said, growing agitated: "Cornut-san smell bad also, St. Cyr-san speak. Carlsan! Not speak brownie!" Master Carl glanced at him. "Certainly," he said. "Good night." The tai-i called after him beseechingly, but Carl still did not hear; he had realized what it was that was unfinished about Cornut's report. The numerical values had been given for every quantity but one. It was still early; he did not intend to sleep until he had that one remaining value...  Locille, yawned into the face of the red moon that hung over the horizon. It was growing very late. They had had to take the ferry to the city and wait to transfer; the only direct popper from the texas to the city was in midmorning, and Locille's family had no place to put them up. Nor, if they had, would Cornut have stayed. He needed time to become accustomed to domesticity -- it was too many things at once; bad enough that he should have to interrupt his routine to accommodate Locille's presence in his room. But it was, on the whole, worth while. The University was under them now, the cables of the bridge lacing the red moon, the lights from the Administration Building bright in the dark mass of towers. It was odd that the Administration Building should still be lighted. Drowsily Cornut looked, out of the corner of his eye, at the neat, sleepy head of his wife. He did not know if he liked her better or worse as a member of a family. Her parents -- dull -- amiable, he supposed, but he was er was an unfortunate accident, of course, but he had been so enchanted with the rag Locille had brought him, like a child, like an animal. Cornut was not quite pleased to be related to him. Naturally you couldn't choose your relatives. His own children, for example, might be quite disappointing... His own children! The thought had come quite naturally; bpt he had never had that particular thought before. Involuntarily he shivered, and looked again at Locille. She said sleepily, "What's the matter?" And then: "Oh. Why, I wonder what they want." The ferry was coming in close, and on the hardstand several men were waiting patiently, behind them a police popper, its blades still but its official-business light winking red. In the floodlights that revealed the landing X to the pilot, Cornut recognized one of the men, an administration staffer; the others all wore uniforms. "I wonder," he said, glad that he didn't have to explain the shudder. "Well, I'll certainly sleep tonight." He took her hand and helped her, unnecessarily but pleasurably, down the steps. A squat uniformed man stepped forward. "Master Cornut? Sergeant Rhame. You undoubtedly don't remember me, but -- " Cornut said, "But I do. You were in one of my classes. six or seven years ago. Master Carl recommended you; in fact, he was your advocate at the orals for your thesis." There was a pause. "Yes, that's right," said Rhame. "He wanted me to apply for the faculty, but I'd majored in forensic probabilities and the Force had already accepted me, and -- well, that's a long time ago." Cornut nodded pleasantly. "Nice to see you again, Rhame. Good night."--nut stopped, a quick, vague fear beginning to pulse in his mind. No one enjoys the sudden knowledge that the policeman in front of him wants to discuss official business; Rhame's expression told Cornut that that was so. Cornut said sharply: "What is it?" Rhame was not enjoying himself. "I've been waiting for you. It's about Master Carl; you're his closest friend, you know. There are some questions -- " Cornut hardly noticed Locille's sudden, frightened clutching at his arm. He stated: "Something's happened to Carl." Rhame spread his hands. "I'm sorry. I thought you knew. The lieutenant sent word to have you called from the texas; you must have left before the message got there." He was trying to be kind, Cornut saw. "It happened about an hour ago, around twelve o'clock. The president had gone to bed -- St. Cyr, I mean. Master Carl came storming into his residence -- very angry, the housekeeper said." "Angry about what?" asked Cornut in alarm. "I was hoping you could tell us that. It must have been something pretty serious. He tried to kill St. Cyr with an axe. Fortunately -- " He hesitated, but could find no way to withdraw the word. "As it happened, that is, the president's bodyguard was nearby. He couldn't stop Master Carl any other way. He shot Master Carl to death." X  night and the next day in confusion. It was all very simple, everything was made easy for him, but it was impossibly hard to take. Carl dead! The old man shot down -- attempting to commit a murder! It was more than unbelievable, it was simply fantastic. Cornut' could not admit its possibility for a second. But he could not deny that it had happened. Locille was with him almost every moment, closer than a wife, even closer than a watchdog. He didn't notice she was there. But he would have noticed if she were missing. It was as though she had always been there, all his life, because his life was now something radically new, different, something that had begun at one o'clock in the morning, stepping out of a ferry popper to see Sergeant Rhame. Rhame had asked him all the necessary questions in a quarter of an hour, but he had not left him then. It was charity, not duty, that kept him. A policeman, even a forensic probabilistician detailed to Homicide at his own personal request, is used to violence and unlikely murderers, and can sometimes help explain difficult facts to the innocent bystanders. He tried. Cornut was not grateful. He was only dazed. He canceled his classes for the next day -- tapes would do -- and accompanied Rhame on a laborious retracing of Carl's last moves. First they visited St. Cyr's residence and found the president awake and icy. He did not seem shaken by his experience; but then he never did. He gave them only a moment of his time. "Carl -- a kill-er. It is a great shock, Cor-nut. Ge-nius, we can-not ex-pect it to be sta-ble, I sup-pose." Cornut did not want to linger. St. Cyr's presence was never attractive, but the thing that repelled him about the interview was the sight of the #th century halberd replaced on the floor where, they said, Master Carl had dropped it as the gunman shot him down. The pile of the carpet there was crisper, cleaner than the rest. Cornut was sickly aware that it had been washed, and aware what stain had been so quickly dissolved away. He was glad to be out of the president's richly furnished residence, though the rest of the day was also no joy. Their next stop was the night-proctor on Carl's floor, who confirmed that the house master had left at about ten o'clock, seeming disturbed about something but, in his natural custom, giving no clue as to its nature to an undergraduate. Because it did not occur to them to question the aboriginals, they did not learn of his brief and entirely one-sided conversation, but they picked up his trail at the next point. at the Stacks at twenty-five minutes past ten, demanding instant service from the night librarian. The librarian was a student, working off part of his tuition, as most students did. He was embarrassed and Cornut quickly deduced why. "You were asleep, weren't you?" The student nodded, hanging his head. The news of Master Carl's death had reached every night clerk on the campus, and the boy had been unable to get to sleep. "He gave me five demerits and -- " He stopped, suddenly angry with himself. "Consider them canceled," Cornut said kindly. "You're quite right in telling us about the demerits, however. Sergeant Rhame needs all the information." "Thank you, Master Cornut. I -- uh -- I also didn't have a chance to get the ashtray off my desk, and he noticed it. But he just said he wanted to use the Stacks." The undergraduate waved toward the great air-conditioned hall where the taped and microfilmed University Library was kept. The library computer was served by some of the same circuits as the Student TestIndices (College Examinations) Digital Computer on the level above it; all the larger computers on the campus were cross-hooked to some degree. Rhame was staring at the layout. "It's got more complicated since I was here," he said. "Did Master Carl know how to use it?" The student grinned. "He thought he did. Then he came storming back to me. He couldn't get the data he wanted. So I tried to help him -- but it was classified data. Census figures." "Ah," said Cornut. Sergeant Rhame turned and looked at him. "Ah what?" Cornut said, "I think I know what he was after, that's all. It was the Wolgren." Rhame understood what he was talking about -- fortunately, for it had not occurred to Cornut that anyone would fail to be aware of Wolgren's Distributive Law. Rhame said, "I only use some special Wolgren functions. I don't see exactly what it has to do with census figures." Cornut sat down, beginning to lecture. Without looking, he put out his hand and Locille, still with him, took it. "It's not important to what you're looking for. Anyway, I don't think it is. We had a question up for study -- some anomalies in the Wolgren distribution of the census figures -- and, naturally, there shouldn't be any anomalies. So I took it as a part-time project." it beaten, but I ran into trouble. Some of the values derived from my equations turned out to be ridiculous. I tried to get the real values, but I got the same answer as Master Carl -- they were classified. Silly, of course." The student librarian chimed in, "He said moronic. He said he was going to take it up with the Saint -- " He stopped, blushing. Rhame said, "Well, I guess he did. What were the values that bothered you?" Cornut shook his head. "Not important; they're wrong. Only I couldn't find my mistake. So I kept going over the math. I suppose Carl went through the same thing, and then decided to take a look at the real values in the hope that they'd give some clue, just as I did." "Let's take a look," said Rhame. The student librarian led them to the library computer, but Cornut nodded him aside. He set up the integrals without any assistance. "Age values," he explained. "Nothing of any great importance. No reason it should be a secret. But -- " He finished with the keyboard and indicated the viewer of the screen. It flickered and then bloomed with a blunt legend: Rhame stared at the words. He said, "I don't know." "I can't believe it, either. True, Carl was a house master. He felt he had certain rights..." The policeman nodded. "What about it, son? Did he act peculiar?" "He was mad as hell," said the student librarian. "He said he was going right over to the S -- to the president's residence and get clearance to receive the data. Said it was moronic -- let's see -- 'moronic, incompetent bureaucracy,' " he finished with satisfaction. Sergeant Rhame looked at Cornut. "Well, the inquest will have to decide," he said after a moment. "Do you think he would try to kill a man because of anything like this?" Cornut demanded harshly. "Master Cornut," said the policeman slowly, "I don't think anybody ever really wants to kill anybody. But he blew his top. If he was angry enough, who knows?" He didn't give Cornut a chance to debate the matter. "I guess that's all," he said, turning back to the night librarian. "Unless he said anything else?" The student hesitated, then grinned faintly. "Just one other thing. As he was leaving, he gave me ten more demerits for smoking on duty." r T'HE following morning Cornut was summoned to the chancellor's office to hear the reading of Carl's will. Cornut was only mildly surprised to find that he was Master Carl's sole heir. He was touched, however. And he was saddened, for Master Carl's own voice told him about it. That was the approved way of recording the most important documents, and it was like Master Carl to believe that the disposition of his tiny estate was of great importance. It was a tape of his image that recited the sonorous phrases: "Being of sound and disposing mind, I devise and bequeath unto my dear friend, Master Cornut -- " Cornut sat blinking at the image. It was entirely lifelike. That, of course, was the point; papers could be forged and sound tapes could be altered, but there was no artisan in the world who could quite succeed in making a change in a video tape without leaving a trace. The voice was the voice that had boomed out sets for decades. Watching, Cornut hardly listened to the words but found himself trying to tell when it was that Carl had made the decision to leave him all his worldly goods. The cloak, he recalled vaguely, was an old one; but when was it Carl had stopped wearing it? It didn't matter. Nothing mattered about Master Carl, not any more; the tape rattled and flapped off the reel, and the picture of Master Carl vanished from the screen. Locille's hand touched his shoulder. The chancellor said cheerfully, "Well, that's it. All yours. Here's the inventory." Cornut glanced over it rapidly. Books, more than a thousand of them, value fixed by the appraisers (they must have been working day and night!) at five hundred dollars and a bit. Clothing and personal effects -- Cornut involuntarily grinned -- an arbitrary value of #. Cash on hand, a shade over a thousand dollars, including the money in his pocket when he died. Equity in the University pension plan, #; monthly salary due, calculated to the hour of death, #; residuals accruing from future use of taped lectures, estimated, #. Cornut winced. Carl would have been hurt by that, but it was true; there was less and less need for his old tapes, with newer professors using newer techniques. And there was an estimate of future royalties to be earned by his mnemonic songs, and that was unkindest of all: #.  read the itemized liabilities -- inheritance tax, income tax, miscellaneous bills. He only noted the net balance was a shade over  # , # . The funeral director walked silently from the back of the room and suggested, rather handsomely, "Call it eight thousand even. Satisfactory? Then sign here, Master Cornut." "Here" was at the bottom of a standard mortuary agreement, with the usual fifty-fifty split between the heirs and the mortician. Cornut signed quickly, with a feeling of slight relief. He was getting off very lightly. With cemetery space at such a premium, the statutory minimum fee for a basic funeral was #. If the estate had been less than #, he would have inherited only the balance above #. If it had been under #, he would have had to make up the difference. That was the law. More than one beneficiary, legally responsible for funeral expenses, had regretted the generous remembering of the deceased. (In fact, there were paupers in the world who sold their wills as an instrument of revenge on occasion. For food, drink, clothing, or whatever, they would bequeath their paltry all to the benefactor's worst enemy, who would then, sooner or later, find himself saddled with an inescapable # cost.) Sergeant Rhame was waiting for them outside the chancellor's office. "Do you mind?" he asked politely, holding out his hand. Cornut handed over the mortuary agreement, containing the inventory of Carl's estate. The policeman studied it thoughtfully, then shook his head. "Not much money, but he didn't need much, did he? It doesn't help explain anything." He glanced at his watch. "I'll walk over with you. Were due right now at the inquest." AS a tribute to the University the state medical examiner had impaneled a dozen faculty members as his jury. Only one was from the Mathematics Department, a woman professor named Janet, but Cornut dimly recognized several of the others from faculty teas and walks on the campus. St. Cyr testified, briefly and in his customary uninflected pendulum-tick voice, that Master Carl had shown no previous signs of insanity but had been wild and threatening indeed the night of his death. St. Cyr's housekeeper testified the same, adding that she had feared for her own life. The bodyguard who killed Carl took the stand. Cornut felt Locille shrink in the seat beside him; he understood; he felt the same revulsion. The man did not seem much different from other men, though. He was middleaged, husky, with a slight speech impediment. He stated that he had been in President St. Cyr's employ for nearly ten years; that he had once been a policeman and that it was not uncommon for very wealthy men to hire ex-policemen as bodyguards; and that he had never before had to kill anyone in defense of St. Cyr's life. "But this one. He was dangerous. He was... going to kill... somebody." He got the words out slowly, but without appearing particularly concerned. Then there were a few others -- Cornut himself, the nightproctor, the student librarian, even the sexwriter, Farley, who said that Master Carl had indeed seemed agitated on his one personal contact with him but, of course, the occasion had been a disturbing one -- Farley had told him of Master Cornut's most recent suicide attempt. Cornut attempted to ignore the faces that turned toward him. The verdict took five minutes: "Killed in self-defense, in the course of attempting to commit murder." For days after that, Cornut kept away from St. Cyr's residence, for the sake of avoiding Carl's executioner. He had never seen the man before Carl was killed and never wanted to see him again. But as time passed, Carl's death dwindled in his mind; his own troubles, more and more, filled it. He began to approach, then reached, finally passed the all-time record for suiciders. the endless patience and watchfulness of Locille. Every night she watched him go to sleep; every morning she was up before him. She began to look pale, and he found her taking catnaps in the dressing room while he was lecturing to his classes, but she did not complain. She also did not tell him, until he found the marks and guessed, that twice in one week, even with her alert beside him, he had nearly severed his wrists, first on a letter opener, second on a broken drinking tumbler. When he chided her for not telling him, she kissed him. That was all. He was having dreams, too, queer ones; he remembered them sharply when he woke, and for a while told them to Locille, and then stopped. They were very peculiar. They had to do with being watched -- being watched by some gruff, irritated warden, or by a hostile Roman crowd waiting for his blood in the arena. They were unpleasant and he tried to analyze them by himself. It was because he was subconsciously aware of Locille watching him, he told himself; and in the next breath said, Paranoia. He did not believe it... but what then? He considered returning to his analyst, but when he broached it to Locille, she only looked paler and more strained. Some of the sudden joy had gone out of their love, and that worried Cornut, and it did not occur to him that the building of trust and solidarity between them was perhaps worth more. But not all the joy had gone. Apart from interludes of passion, somewhat constrained by Locille's ironclad determination to stay awake until he was fully asleep, apart from the trust and closeness, there were other things. There was the interest of work shared, for as Cornut's wife Locille became more his pupil than ever before in one of his classes; together they rechecked the Wolgren, found it correct, shelved it for lack of confirming data and began a new study of prime distribution in very large numbers. They were walking back to the Math Tower one warm day, planning a new approach through analytic use of the laws of congruence, when Locille stopped and caught his arm. Egerd was coming toward them. He was tanned, but he did not look well. Part of it was for reasons Cornut had only slowly come to know; he was uncomfortable in the presence of the girl he loved and the' man she had married. But there was something else. He looked sick. Locille was direct: "What in the world's the matter with you?" Egerd grinned. "Don't you know about Med School? It's traditional, hazing freshmen. The usual treatment is a skin fungus that turns sweat rancid, so you stink, or a few drops of something that makes you break out in orange blotches, or -- well, never mind. Some of the jokes are kind of, uh, personal." Locille said angrily: "That's terrible! It isn't a bit funny to me, Egerd!" Cornut said to her, after Egerd had left, "Boys will be boys." She looked at him swiftly. Cornut knew his tone had been callous. He didn't know that she understood why; he thought his sudden sharp stab of jealousy had been perfectly concealed. ter Master Carl's death, the proctor knocked on Cornut's door to say that he had a visitor. It was Sergeant Rhame, with a suitcase full of odds and ends. "Master Carl's personal effects," he said. "They belong to you now. Naturally, we had to borrow them for examination." Cornut shrugged. The stuff was of no great value. He poked through the suitcase; some shabby toilet articles, a book marked Diary -- he flipped it open hopefully, but it recorded only demerits and class attendances -- an envelope containing photographic film. XI Sergeant Rhame said: "That's what I wanted to ask you about. He had a lot of photographic equipment. We found several packs of film, unopened, which Master Carl had pressed against some kind of radiation-emitting paint on a paper base. The lab spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. They guessed he was trying to get the gamma radiation from the paint to register on the film, but we don't know why." Cornut said: "Neither do I, but I can make a guess." He told Rhame about Carl's off-duty interests, and the endless laborious put into them. "I'm not sure what his present line was, but I know it had something to do with trying to get prints of geometrical figures -- stars, circles, that sort of thing. Do you mean he finally succeeded in getting one?" "Not exactly." Sergeant Rhame opened the package and handed Cornut a glossy print. "All the negatives were blank except one. This one. Make anything of it?" Cornut studied it. It seemed to be a photograph of a sign or a printer's proof. He puzzled over it for a while, then shook his head. The lettering on the print said simply: stretched cables under the texas made a bull-roarer sound as they vibrated. The pneumatic generators rattled, whined and crashed. Locille's brother was too used to them to notice. He was feeling rather poorly, but it was his custom to do what his parents expected him to do, and they expected that he would watch the University broadcasts of his sister's classes. The present class was Cornut's, and Roger eyed with polite ignorance the professor's closely reasoned exposition of Wilson's Theorem. He watched the dancing girls and the animated figures with more interest, but it was, on the whole, a disappointing show. The camera panned the studio audience only twice, and in neither case was he able to catch a glimpse of Locille. He reported to his mother, took his last look at the flag Locille had brought him, and went to work. As the day wore on, Roger felt worse. First it was his head pounding, then his bones aching, then an irresistible sudden nausea. Roger's job was conducive to that; he spent the whole day standing thigh-deep in a smelly fluid composed of salt water, fish lymph and blood. Ordinarily it didn't bother him (as nothing much bothered him, anyhow). Today was different. He steadied himself with one hand against a steel-topped table, shook his head violently to clear it. He had just come back from a hasty trip to the washroom, where he had vomited. Now it seemed he was close to having to race out there again. Down the table, the sorter called: "Roger! Hey! You're holding up the works." Roger rubbed the back of his neck and mumbled something that was not intelligible, even to himself. He got back to work because he had to; the fish were piling up. It was the sorter's job to separate the females of the stocked Atlantic salmon run from the males. The male fish were thrust down a chute to a quick and undistinguished death. But the females, in breeding season, contained something too valuable to be wasted on the mash of entrails and bony parts that made dry fish meal. That was Roger's job -- Roger's and a few dozen others who stood at tables just like his. The first step was to grasp the flopping female by the tail with one hand and club her brains out. The second was to hold her with both hands, exposing her belly to his partner across the table, whose knift ripped open the egg sac inside. (Sometimes the knife missed. Roger's job was not sought after.) A quick wringing motion; the eggs poured one way, the gutted body slid another, and he was ready for the next fish. Even the 'dullest grew to dislike the work. Roger had held the same job for four years. "Come on, Roger!" the sorter was yelling at him again. Roger stared at him woozily. For the first time he became suddenly aware of the constant slam, bang, rattle, roar that permeated the low-level fishery plant. He opened his mouth to say something, and then he ran. He made it to the washroom, but just barely in time. A N hour later, his mother was astonished to see him home. "What happened?" He tried to relate everything that had happened, but it involved some complicated words. He settled for: "I didn't feel good." She was worried. Roger was always healthy. He didn't look good, ever, but that was because the part of his brain that was damaged had something to do with his muscle tone; but in fact he had been sick hardly a week's total in his life. She said doubtfully: "Your father will be home in an hour or so, but maybe I ought to call him. I wonder. What do you think, Roger?" That was rhetoric; she had long since reconciled herself to the fact that her son did not think. He stumbled and straightened up, scowling. The back of his neck was beginning to pain badly. He was in no mood to contemplate hard questions. What he wanted was to go to bed, with Locille's flag by his pillow, so that he could fondle it drowsily before he slept. That was what he liked. He told his mother so. She was seriously concerned now. "You are sick. I'd better call the clinic. You go lie down." "No. No, you don't have to. They called at the place." He swallowed with some pain; he was beginning to shiver. "Mr. Garney took me to the dia -- the dia -- " "The diagnosticon at the clinic, Roger." "Yes, and I got some pills." He reached in his pocket and held up a little box. "I already took one and I have to take some more later." His mother was not satisfied, but she was no longer very worried; the diagnostic equipment did not often fail. "It's that cold water you stand in," she said, helping him to his room. "I've told you, Roger, ' you ought to have a better job. Sheer, maybe even sorter. Or maybe you can get out of that part of it altogether. You've worked there enough years..." "Good night," Roger said inappropriately -- it was early afternoon. He began to get ready for bed, feeling a little better in the familiar, comfortable room with his familiar, comfortable bed and the little old Japanese flag wadded up by the pillow. "I'm going to sleep now," he told her, and got rid of her at last. He huddled under the warming covers -- set as high as the rheostat would go, but still not high enough to warm his shaking body. The pain in his head was almost blinding now. At the clinic, Mr. Garney had been painfully careful to explain what the pills were for. They would take away the pain, stop the throbbing, make him comfortable, let him sleep. Feverishly Roger shook another one out of the box and swallowed it. It worked, of course. The clinic's pills always performed as advertised. The pain dwindled to a bearable ache, then to a memory. The throbbing stopped. Roger felt drowsily peaceful. He could not see his face and therefore did not know how flushed it was becoming. He had no idea that his temperature was climbing rapidly. He went quite happily to sleep -- with the old, frayed flag against his cheek -- just as he had done for nearly three weeks now, and as he would never in this life do again. f T'HE reason Roger hadn't seen his sister in the audience was that she wasn't there; she was waiting in Cornut's little dressing room. Cornut suggested it. "You need the rest," he said solicitously, and promised to review the lesson with her later. Actually he had another motive entirely. As soon as he was off the air, he wrote a note for Locille and gave it to a student to deliver: There's something I have to do. I'll be gone for a couple of hours. I promise I'll be all right. Don't worry. Before the note reached her, Cornut was at the bridge, in the elevator, on his way to the city. He did have something to do and he did not want to talk to Locille about it. The odd dreams had been worsening, and there had been other things. He nearly always had a hangover now, for instance. He had found that a few drinks at night made him sleep better and he had come to rely on them. And there was something else about which he could not talk to Locille at all because she would not talk. The monotrack let him out far downtown, in a bright, noisy, stuffy underground station. He paused at a phone booth to check the address of the sexwriter, Farley, and hurried up to street level, anxious to get away from the smell and noise. That was a mistake. In the open, the noise pounded more furiously, the air was even more foul. Great cubical blocks of buildings rose over him; small threewheeled cars and large commercial vehicles pounded on two levels around him. It was only a minute's walk to Farley's office, but the minute was an ordeal. The sign on the door was the same as the lettering on his folder: S. R. Farley Consultant The sexwriter's secretary looked very doubtful, but finally reported that Mr. Farley would be able to see Master Cornut without an appointment. Cornut went in, sat across the desk, refused a cigarette and said directly: "I've studied the sample scripts you left for us, Farley. They're interesting, though I don't believe I'll require your services in future. I think I've grasped the notation, and I find that there is one page of constants which seems to describe the personality of my wife and myself." "Oh, yes. Very important," said Farley. "Yours is incomplete -- I had no real opportunity to interview you -- but I secured your personnel-file data, the profile from the Med Center and so on." "Good. Now I have a question to ask you." Cornut hesitated. The proper way to ask the question was to say: "I suspect, from a hazy, sleepy recollection, that the other morning I made a rather odd suggestion to my wife." That was the proper way, but it was embarrassing, and it also involved a probability of having to reveal how many rather odd things he had done, some of them nearly fatal, in those half-waking moments... "Let me borrow a piece of paper," he said instead, and rapidly sketched in a line of symbols. Stating the problem in terms of  and # made it vastly less embarrassing. He shoved it across the desk to the sexwriter. "What would you say to this? Does it fit in with your profile of our personalities?" Farley studied the line and raised his eyebrows. "Absolutely not!" he said. "You wouldn't think of it and she wouldn't accept it!" "You could say it was an objectionable thing?" "Master Cornut! Don't use moralistic terms! What is customary and moral in one place is -- " "Please, Mr. Farley. In terms of our own personalities -- you have them sketched out on the profile -- this would be objectionable?" The sexwriter laughed. "More than that, Master Cornut. It would be absolutely impossible." Cornut took a deep breath. "But suppose," he said after a moment, "I told you that I had proposed this to my wife." Farley drummed his fingers on the desk. "Then I can only say that other factors are involved." "Like what?" Farley said seriously: "You must be trying to drive her away from you." TN the two blocks between Farley's office and the monotrack station entrance, Cornut saw three men killed; a turbotruck on the upper traffic level seemed to stagger, grazed another vehicle and shot through the guard pedestrians. It was a shocking interpolation of violence into Cornut's academic life, but it seemed quite in keeping with the rest of his day. His own life was rapidly going as badly out of control as the truck. You must be trying to drive her away from you. Cornut boarded his train, hardly noticing, thinking hard. He didn't want to drive Locille away! But he also did not want to kill himself, and yet there was no doubt that he had kept trying. It was all part of a pattern and there could be no doubt of its sum: He was trying to destroy himself in every way. Failing to end his life, that destroyer inside himself was trying to end the part of his life that had grown to mean most to him, his love for Locille. And yet it was the same thing really, he thought, for with Locille gone, Carl dead, Egerd transferred, he would have no one close to him to help him through the dangerous half-awake moments that came at least twice in every twenty-four hours. He would not last a day. He slumped back into his seat, with the first sensation of despair he had ever felt. One part of his mind said judgmatically: "It's too bad." Another part entirely was taking in his surroundings. Even in his despair, the novelty of being among so many non-University people made an impression. They seemed so tired and angry, he thought abstractedly; one or two even looked sick. He wondered if any of them had ever known the helplessness of being under siege from the most insidious enemy of all, himself. But suppose Master Carl was right after all, said Cornut to himself, quite unexpectedly -- what if he was right? The thought startled Cornut. It came through without preamble, and if there had been a train of rumination that caused it, he had forgotten its existence. Right? Right about what? The PA system murmured that the next stop was his. Cornut got up absently, thinking. Right? He had doubted that Master Carl had really tried to kill St. Cyr. But the evidence was against Carl. The police lab had verified his fingerprints on the axe, and they could not have been deceived. So suppose Carl really had picked up the weapon to split the old man's skull. Incredible! But if he had... and if Carl had not merely gone into an aberrated senile rage... Why, then, said Cornut to himself, emerging from the elevator at the base of the bridge pier and blinking at the familiar campus, perhaps he had a reason. Perhaps St. Cyr needed being plunged under the surface of the sea. The lights were blue-green, concealed and reflecting from blue-green walls. A spidery mural of blue and green lines covered one wall like a wave pattern. From boxes along the floor, great curving branches of pale plants from the hybridization farms rose, resembling the kelp of the mermaid forests. The pelagic motif was not a matter of design; it was only that these shapes and these colors were the ones that most pleased and comforted President St. Cyr. This was his room. Not his study, with its oak panels and ancient armor; not even the "private" drawing room where he sometimes entertained members of the faculty. This was the room he reserved for a very, very few. Four of these few were present now. A fat man, gross arms quivering, turned himself around and said, "When?" He said, "Do you want us all?" He said, "That's Jillson's job." St. Cyr grinned and, after a moment, his bodyguard said, "No, I don't. Really. You enjoy it more than I do." A woman in a preposterously young frock opened her thinlipped mouth and cackled hilariously when there was a knock on the door. Jillson, the bodyguard, opened it and revealed St. Cyr's thin, silent housekeeper with Master Cornut. St. Cyr, on a turquoise wing chair, raised a hand. Jillson took Master Cornut by the arm and led him in, the door behind him closing on the housekeeper. "Mas-ter Cor-nut," said St. Cyr in his odd, uninflected voice. "I have been wait-ing for you." The old woman in the young dress laughed shrilly for no visible reason. The bodyguard smiled. The fat man chuckled. Cornut could not help, even then, looking around this room where he had never been. It was cool -- the air was kept a full dozen degrees under the usual room temperature Cornut liked. There was a muted muttering of music in the background, too low to distinguish a tune. And these people -- were odd. He ignored Jillson, the assassin of Master Carl, whom he remembered from the inquest. The fat man blinked at him. "Sen-a-tor Dane," said St. Cyr. "And Miss May Kerbs." Miss May Kerbs was the one who had laughed. She swayed over to Cornut, looking like a teen-age girl in her first party formal. "We were talking about you," she said shrilly, and Cornut, with a physical shock, recognized that this was no teenager.  woman from South America whom he had met on the Field Expedition; the features were not much alike, but their state of repair was identical. The face was a skull's face under the makeup. She was fifty if she was a day -- no, seventy-five -- no, she was older than that. She was older than he liked to think, for a woman who dressed like a brash young girl. Cornut found himself acknowledging the introductions. Talking about him? What had they been saying? "We knew you'd be here, pal," said the assassin, Jillson, kindly. "You think we murdered the kid." "The kid?" "Master Carl," said Jillson, not quite in a stammer. He had a reason, said a thought in Cornut's mind. Queerly, it came in the half-stammering accent of Jillson. "But sit down, Mas-ter Cornut." St. Cyr gestured. Invitingly, the woman plumped cushions of aqua and turquoise on a divan. "I don't want to sit down!" "No. But please do." St. Cyr's blue-tinged face was only polite. The fat man wheezed, "Too bad, youngster. We didn't want to poke him along. I mean, why bother? But he was a nuisance. Every year," he expanded cheerily, "we get maybe half a dozen who really make nuisances of themselves, mostly like you, some like him. His trouble was going after the classified material in the 'Stacks. Well," he said, severely waving a fat finger, "that material is classified for a reason." Cornut sat down at last because he couldn't help himself. It was not going at all as he had expected; they were not denying a thing. But to admit that they killed Carl to protect some unimportant statistic in the census figures? It made no sense! The blonde laughed piercingly"Forgive Miss Kerbs," said the fat man. "She thinks you are funny for presuming to judge whether or not our actions are sensible. Believe me, young man, they are." Cornut found that he was grinding his teeth. These onesided conversations, the answers coming before the questions were spoken, these queer halfunderstood remarks... It was as though they knew every thought he had. It was as though they were -- but no, it couldn't be! Carl had proved it! The damn old fool. Cornut jumped. The thought was in the tones of the fat man's wheeze, and he remembered where he had seen words like that before. The fat man nodded, his chins pulsing like a floating jellyfish. "We exposed his photographic plate for him," he chuckled. "Oh, yes. It was only a joke, but we knew he would not live to make trouble over it. Once he had the Wolgren analysis, he would have to be helped along." He said politely, "Too bad, because we wanted him to publish his proof that telepathy was impossible. Quite true, it is. For him. But not for us. And unfortunately not, my young friend, for you." reaching out at once to Cornut's side of the bed; but he was not in it. She turned on the room lights and scanned the nearest of the battery of clocks; one o'clock in the morning. Locille got up, looked out the window, listened at the hall door, turned on the broadcast radio, shook the speaker-mike of the University annunciator to make sure it was working, checked the telephone to see that it was not unhooked, sat down on the side of the bed and, finally, began silently to shake. She was frightened. Whatever compulsion drove Cornut to try suicide had never before stricken him when he was wide-awake and in possession of his thoughts. Was that no longer true? But if it was still true, why had he gone off like that? The radio was whispering persuasively its stream of news bulletins: Strikes in Gary, Indiana, a wreck of a cargo rocket, three hundred cases of Virus Gamma in one twelve-hour period, a catastrophic accident between a nuclear trawler and a texas (she listened briefly, then relaxed) off the coast of Haiti. Because it did not mention Cornut's name, she heard very little. Where could he be? When the telephone sounded, she answered it at once. It was not Cornut; it was the rough, quick voice of a busy man. " -- asked me to call. She is with your brother. Can you come?" "My mother asked you to call?" Impatiently: "That's what I said. Your brother is seriously ill." The voice did not hesitate. "It is likely that he will die within the next few hours. Goodby." Locille dressed swiftly. She left urgent instructions with the night-proctor on what to do when -- not if; when -- Cornut returned. Watch him asleep; keep the door open; check him every half hour; be with him when he wakes. "Yes, ma'am," said the student, and then, with gentleness, "He'll be all right." But would he? Locille hurried across the campus, closing her mind to that question. It was too late for a ferry from the island. She would have to go to the bridge, ride to the city, hope for a helipopper ferry to the texas from there. The Med Center was bright with lights from many rooms; curious, she thought, and hurried by. In their wired enclosure, the aboriginals were murmuring, not asleep. Curious again. But suppose the proctor forgot? Locille reassured herself that he would not forget; he was one of Cornut's own students. In any case, she had to take the chance. She was almost grateful that something was making her leave, for the waiting had been unbearable. She walked by the president's residence with the barest glance; that it, too, was lighted was of no relevance to her own problems, she thought. In this she was wrong. It was not until she was actually boarding the monotrack that realization of where she was going and why finally struck her. Roger! He was dying. She began to weep, for Roger, for the missing Cornut, for herself. A T that moment, Cornut, sore"eyed, was picking himself up from the floor. Over him stood Jillson, holding a club wrapped with a wet cloth. Cornut was aching as he had never imagined he could. He mumbled: "You don't have to hit me any more." "Per-haps we do," said St. Cyr from his blue-green throne. "We do not like this, you know, but we must." "Speak for yourself," said Jillson, and the ancient blonde screeched with laughter. They were talking among themselves, Cornut realized; he could hear only the aural part, but they were joking, commenting... they were having a fine old time, while this methodical maniac bludgeoned him. The fat senator wheezed: "Understand our position, Cornut. We aren't cruel. We don't kill you shorties for nothing. But we aren't human and we can't be judged by human laws... All right, Jillson." The bodyguard brought the club down and Cornut sank against the cushions the thoughtful old blonde kept repiling for him. What made it particularly bad was that the senator held a gun. The first time Cornut was beaten, he had fought, but then the senator had held him at gunpoint while Jillson systematically battered him. And all the time they kept talking! St. Cyr said mildly: "Stop." It was time for another break. That had been the fifth beating in six or seven hours, and in between they had interrogated him. "Tell us what you understand, Cor-nut." The club had taught him obedience. "You are a worldwide organization," he recited, "of the next species after humanity. I understand that. You need to survive and it doesn't matter if the rest of us don't. Through your telepathic abilities you can suggest suicide to some persons who have the power in a latent form -- " Thud. "An a-bort-ed form," corrected St. Cyr as Cornut struggled erect again after the blow. He coughed and saw blood on the back of his hand. But he only said: "An aborted form. Like myself." "Abortions of mutations," chuckled the senator. "Unsuccessful attempts on the part of nature to create others like ourselves." "Yes. Abortions of mutations, unsuccessful attempts. That is what I am," Cornut parroted. "And -- and you are able to suggest many things, as long as the subject has the -- the abortive talent, and as long as you are able to reach his mind when it is not fully awake." The blonde said, "Very good! You're an apt learner, Cornut. But telepathy is only a fringe benefit. Do you know what it is that makes us really different?" He cringed away from Jillson as he shook his head. The bodyguard glanced at the woman, shrugged and said, "All right, I won't if you say so. Go ahead." "What it is that makes us different is our age, my dear boy." She giggled shrilly. "For example, I am two hundred and eighty-three years old." and let him rest. Although he ached in every cell, there was hardly a mark on hinf; that was the reason for padding the club. And that had a meaning, too, Cornut thought painfully. If they didn't want to mark him, then they realized that he would be seen. Which meant that, at least, they weren't going to kill him out of hand and bury him somewhere. Two hundred and eighty-three years old. And yet she was the next to youngest of the four of them; Jillson was only a century or so old. The senator had been born while America was still a British colony. St. Cyr had been born in Louis Napoleon's France. The whole key had been in the restricted areas of the Stacks, for the anomaly in the Wolgren application was not Wolgren's fault at all. What the data would have shown was a failure of some people to die. Statistically insignificant for thousands of years, that fraction had grown and grown in the last two or three centuries -- since Lister, since Pasteur, since Fleming. They were immortal not because they could not become diseased or succumb to a wound, but because they would not otherwise die. " tive medicine, they had begun to assert their power. They were not wiser than the rest of humanity or stronger. Even their telepathy was, it seemed unique only because the short-lived human had not the time to develop it; it depended on intricate and slow-forming neuronic hookups. Everything that made them powerful was only the gift of time. They had money. But who, given a century or two of compound interest, could not be as rich as he choose? They had furthered many a war, for what greater boon than war is there to medical science? They had endowed countless foundations, for the surgery of the short-lived could help preserve their own infinitely more valuable lives. And they had only contempt for the short-lived who fed them, served them and made their lives possible. They had to be a closed corporation. Even an immortal needs friends, and the ordinary humans could for them be nothing more than weekend guests. Contempt... and fear. There were the Cornuts, they told him, who had a rudimentary telepathic sense, who could not be allowed to live to develop it. lived one died; it was that easy. The sleeping mind can build a dream out of a closing door, a distant truck's exhaust. The halfawake mind can convert that dream into action... He heard a shrill laugh and the door opened. Jillson came in first. "No!" cried Cornut, bracing himself against the club. mother in the hospital's cafeteria, grateful that at last they had found a place to sit down. The hospital on the texas was unusually busy, worried visitors occupying every inch of space in the waiting room, the halls outside the reception area, even the glassed-in sundeck that hung over the angry waves and was normally used for the comfort of the patients during the day. It was very late and the cafeteria should have been closed, but the hospital had opened it for coffee and very little else. Her mother said something, but Locille only nodded. She hadn't heard. It was not easy to hear, with the loud bull-roarer twangg of the suspended cables from the texas droning at them. And she had, besides, been thinking mostly of Cornut. There had been no fresh news from the night-proctor on the phone; Cornut still had not returned. "He ate so well," her mother said suddenly. Locille patted her hand. The coffee was cold, but she drank it anyhow. The doctor knew where to find her, she thought, though of course he would be busy... "He was the best of my babies," said her mother. Locille knew that it was very close to ending for her brother. The rash that baffled the medics, the fever that glazed his eyes -- these were only the outward indicators of a terrible battle inside his motionless body; they represented the fact of blood and pain and death, but they were not the fact itself. Roger was dying. The outward indicators had been controlled, but salve could only dry up the pustulant sores, pills could only calm his breathing, shots could only ease the pain in his head. "He ate so well," her mother dreamed aloud, "and he talked at eighteen months. He had a little elephant with a music box and he could wind it up." "Don't worry," said Locille worriedly. "But we let him go swimming," sighed her mother, looking around the crowded room. It was she, not Locille, who first saw the nurse coming toward them through the crowd, and she must have known as soon as Locille, from the look on the nurse's face, what the message would be. "He was the tenth today," whispered the nurse, after looking for a private place to tell them and not finding it. "He never regained consciousness."  residence, blinking. It was morning. "Nice day," he said politely to Jillson, beside him. Jillson nodded. He was pleased with Cornut. The kid wasn't going to give them any trouble. As they walked, Jillson "shouted" in Cornut's mind. It was hard with these half-baked telepaths, but it was part of his job. He was the executioner. You need to die. You'll kill yourself. "Oh, yes," said Cornut, aloud. He was surprised. He'd promised, hadn't he? He bore no resentment for the beating. He understood that it had a purpose; the more dazed, the more exhausted he was, the surer their control of him. He had no objection at all to being under the control of four ancient immortals. You die, Cornut, but what difference does it make? Today, tomorrow, fifty years from now. It's all the same. "That's right," Cornut agreed politely. He was not very interested. The subject had been thoroughly covered, all night long. He noticed absently that there was a considerable crowd around the Med Center. The whole campus seemed somehow uneasy. They crossed under the shadow of the Administration Building and circled around it, toward Math Tower. You will die, you know, shouted Jillson. One day the world will wake up and no Cornut. Put a stethoscope to his poor chest, no heartbeats. The sound of a beating heart that you have heard every day of your life will never be heard again. Cornut was embarrassed. These things were true; he did not mind being told them, but it was certainly rather immature of Jillson to take such evident pleasure in them. The brain turns into jelly, chanted Jillson gleefully. The body turns into slime. He licked his lips, hot-eyed. Cornut looked about him, anxious to change the subject. "Isn't that Sergeant Rhame?" Jillson pounded on: The hangnail on your thumb that hurts now will dissolve and rot and molder. Not even the pain will ever be thought of by any living human again. Your bedgirl, is there anything you ever put off telling her? You never will now. "It is Sergeant Rhame. Sergeant!" Damn! crashed a thought in Cornut's mind; but Jillson was smiling, smiling. "Hello, Sergeant," he said with his voice, his mind raging. TF Cornut had known how, he would have helped Jillson along, but his half-dazed condition robbed him of enterprise. Too bad, he thought consolingly, hoping that Jillson would pick up the thought. I know St. Cyr ordered you to stay with me until I was dead, but don't worry. I'll kill myself. I promise. Sergeant Rhame was talking gruffly to Jillson about the mob at Med Center. Cornut wished Rhame would go away. He understood that Rhame was a danger to the immortals; they could not be involved with the same people in violent deaths. Rhame had investigated the death of Master Carl at Jillson's hands; he could not now be allowed to investigate even the suicide of Master Cornut, when he had seen Jillson with him going to his death. Jillson would have to leave him now. Too bad. It was so right, Cornut thought, that he should die for the sake of preserving the safety of the immortals. He knew this; they had told him so themselves. Something caught his attention: " -- since the sickness began they've been mobbing every hospital," Sergeant Rhame was saying to Jillson, waving at the mob before Med Center. "Sickness?" asked Cornut. He stared at the policeman. It was as though Rhame had said, "I've got to get some garlic. There are vampires loose tonight." Sickness was a relic of the dark ages. You could have a headache or a queasy stomach, yes, but you went to the clinic and the diagnosticon did the rest. Rhame grumbled, "Where've you been, Master Cornut? Nearly a thousand deaths in this area alone. Mobs seeking immunization. It's smallpox, they think." "Smallpox?" Even more fantastic! Cornut knew the word only as an archeological medical relic. "Accidents all over the city," said Rhame, and Cornut thought suddenly of the crash he had seen. "Fever and rash and -- hell, I don't know what all the symptoms are. But it's fatal. The -- the medics don't seem to have a cure." "Me disfella smellim," said a voice from behind Rhame. "Him spoilim fes distime. Plantim manyfella pox." It was one of the aboriginals, quietly observing while Rhame's police squad erected barricades in front of their enclosure. "Plantim mefella Mary," he added sadly. Rhame said, "Understand any of it? It's English, if you listen close. Pidgin. He's been saying they know about smallpox. He said his wife died of it." "Plantim mefella Mary," agreed the aboriginal in a melancholy voice. Rhame said, "Unfortunately, I think he's right. Looks like your Field Expedition brought a lot of trouble back with it; the focus of infection seems to vector from these people. Look at their faces." Cornut looked. The broad, dark cheeks were waffled with old pitted scars. "So we're trying to keep the mob from making trouble here," said Sergeant Rhame, "by putting a fence around them." Cornut was even more incredulous than before. Mob violence? It was not really his problem... since he would have no more problems in the world. He nodded politely to Rhame, conspiratorially to Jillson, and moved on toward Math Tower. The aboriginal yelled something after him -- "Waitimup mefella Masatura-san! He speak you!" -- it sounded like. Cornut paid no attention. Jillson "yelled" after him too. Don't forget! You must die! Cornut turned and nodded. Of course he had to die. It was only right. not in the room. Cornut felt, and quelled, a swift reeling sense of horror at the thought of losing her. It was only an emotion, though, and he was its master. Probably Pithecanthropus had had similar emotions, he thought, casting about for a convenient way to die. He made sure his door was locked and decided to treat himself to a farewell drink. He found a bottle, poured, toasted the air and said aloud: "To the next species." Then he buckled down to work. The idea of dying is never far from the mind of any mortal, but Cornut had not viewed it as anything up close in the foreground of his future. It was curiously alarming. Everybody did it, he assured himself. (Well, almost everybody.) Why did it seem so hard? As Cornut was a methodical man, he sat down at his desk and began to make a list, headed: #. Poison. #. Slash wrists. #. Jump from window. (Or bridge.) #. Electrocution. He paused. Electrocution? It didn't sound so bad, especially considering that he had already tried most of the others, helped along by the insistent siren voice of the immortals in his brain. It would be nice to try something new. He poured himself another drink to think about it and began to hum. He was feeling quite peaceful. "It's only right that I should die," he said. "Naturally. Are you listening, Jillson?" He couldn't tell, of course, but probably they were. And maybe they were worried. That was a saddening thought; he didn't want the immortals to worry about him. "I understand perfectly," he said out loud. "I hope you hear me. I'm in your way." He paused, not aware that he had raised a lectorial finger. "It is like this. Suppose I had terminal cancer. Suppose St. Cyr and I were in a shipwreck and there was only one lifebelt. He has a life ahead of him; I have at best a week of pain. Who gets the lifebelt?" He shook the finger. "St. Cyr does!" he thundered. "And this is the same case. I have a mortal disease, humanity. And it's their lives or mine!" He poured another drink and decided that the truths that had been whipped into him were too great to lose. The sheet of paper with suicide possibilities fell unheeded to the floor. Humming, he wrote: We are children and the immortals are fully grown. Like children, we need their knowledge. They lead us; they direct our universities and plan our affairs; they have the wisdom of centuries and without them we would be lost, random particles, statistical chaos. But we are dangerous children, so they must remain secret and those who guess must die... paper angrily. He had nearly spoiled everything! He saw all the more clearly why he had to die to protect their secret. He scrambled on the floor for the list of suicide possibilities, but stopped, bent over, staring at the floor. The truth was that he didn't like any of them. He sat up and poured a drink. He couldn't rely on himself to do a good job, he grumbled to himself. Slashing his wrists, for example. Someone might come; and what could be more annoying than waking up on an operating table with sutures in his veins and the whole damned thing to do over again? He noticed that his glass was again empty, but didn't bother to refill it. He was feeling quite sufficiently alcoholic already. If it weren't for his own confounded human ineptitude, he could be feeling pretty good, in fact, for it was nice to know that in a very short time he would be serving the best interests of the world by dying. Very nice... He . got up and wandered to the window, beaming. Outside, the mobs were still swarming, trying to get immunization at the Med Center. Poor fools. He was so much better off than they! "Strike the twos and strike the threes," he sang. "The Sieve of -- say!" He had an idea. How fine it was, he thought gratefully, to have the wise helping hand of an elder friend in a time like this. He didn't have to worry about how to die or whether he'd make a mess of it. He needed only to give St. Cyr and the others a chance. Just relax... let himself get drowsy... even more drunk, perhaps. They would do the rest. "The Sieve of Eratosthenes," he sang cheerfully. "When the multiples sublime, the numbers that are left are prime!" He stumbled over to his bed and sprawled on it. After a moment he got up, angrily. He wasn't being a bit fair. If it was difficult for him to find a convenient way of dying in his room, why should he impose that problem on his good liege, St. Cyr? He was extremely irritated with himself over that; but, picking up the bottle, marching out into the hall, singing as he looked for a conveniently fatal spot, he gradually began to feel very good again.  the barricades in front of the aboriginal enclosure and sent his men back to trying to control the mobs at Med Center. All the time his squad was working, the aboriginals had been trying to talk to them in their odd pidgin, but the police were too busy. The one who spoke English at all well, Masatura-san, was in his hut; the others were almost incomprehensible. Rhame glanced at his watch and decided that he had time for a quick cup of coffee before going over to help his men with the crowd. Although, he thought, it might be kinder to leave the crowd alone to crush half its members to death. At least it would be quick: And the private information of the police department surgeon was that the inoculations were not very effective... He turned, startled, as a girl's voice called him. It was Locille, weeping. "Please, can you help me? Cornut's gone, and my brother's dead, and -- I found this." She held out the sheet with Cornut's carefully lettered list of suicide possibilities. The fact that Rhame had been taken from his computer studies to help hold a mob down was evidence enough that he really belonged there; but he hesitated and was lost. Individual misery was that much more persuasive than mass panic. He began with the essentials: "Where is he? No idea at all? No note? Any witnesses who might have seen him go? You didn't ask? Why -- " But he had no time to ask why she had failed to question witnesses; he knew that every moment Cornut was off by himself was very possibly the moment in which he would die. They found the student proctor, jumpy and distracted but still somewhere near his post. And he had seen Cornut! "He was kind of crazy, I thought. I tried to tell him something -- you know Egerd, used to be in his class?" (He knew perfectly just how well Locille had known Egerd.) "He died this morning. I thought Master Cornut would be interested, but he didn't even hear when I told him." Rhame observed the expression on Locille's face, but there was no time to worry about her feeling for a dead under-graduate. "Which way? When?" Cornut had gone down the corridor more than half an hour before. They followed. Locille said miserably: "It's a miracle he's alive at all! But if he lasted this long... and I was just a few minutes late..." "Shut up," the policeman said harshly, and called out to another undergraduate. Trailing Cornut was easy; he had been conspicuous by his wild behavior even on that panicky day. A few yards from the faculty refectory, they heard raucous singing. "It's Cornut!" cried Locille, and raced ahead. Rhame caught her at the door of the kitchens where she had worked so many months. Cornut was staggering about, singing in a slurred howl one of Master Carl's favorite tunes: Add ray to modul, close th ' set To adding, subtracting -- He stumbled against a cutting table and swore good-naturedly. Produce a new system, an' this goddam thing Is gen' rally termed a (hie) ring! In one hand he had a sharp knife, filched from the meatcutter's drawer; he waved it, marking time. "Come on, damn it!" he cried, laughing. "Poke me along!" "Save him!" cried Locille, and started to run to him, but Rhame grabbed her arm. "Let go of me! He might kill himself with that knife!" Cornut didn't even hear them; he was singing again. Rhame said at last: "But he isn't doing it, you see, and he's had plenty of time, by the look of the place. Maybe I'm wrong, Locille, but it looks to me as if he's not suicidal -- just blind drunk." elsewhere there were scenes like the one in front of Med Center, as a populace panicked by the apparition of pestilence -- vanished these centuries! -- scrambled for the amulet that would guard them against it. Hardly one in a couple of hundred was seriously ill, but that was enough. Half of one per lions of cases of the most deadly, most contagious and least excusable disease in medicine. For smallpox can infallibly be prevented, and only a world which had forgotten Jenner could have been taken by it unaware... or a world in which the memory of Jenner's centuries-old cure had been systematically removed. In the highest tower of Port Monmouth, the eight major television networks shared joint transmitter repeater facilities. Equatorially mounted wire saucers scanned the sky for the repeater satellites. As each satellite in its orbit broke free of the horizon, a saucer hunted and found it. That saucer clung to it as it traversed the sky, breaking free and commencing the search pattern for a new one as the old one dipped beneath the curve of the Earth again. There were more than sixty satellites circling the Earth which the repeaters could use, each one specially launched and instrumented to receive, amplify and rebroadcast the networks' programs. Sam Gensel was senior shift engineer for the all-network technical crew at Port Monmouth. It was not up to him to go out and get the pictures, to stage the shows or to decide what went out on the air. Lecturing math professors, dimple-kneed dancers, sobbing soap-opera heroines -- he saw all of them on the banked row of monitors in his booth, yet he saw none of them. They were only pictures. What he really liked was test patterns; they showed more of what he wanted to see. He watched for ripples of poor phasing, drifts off center, the electronic snowstorm of line failure. If the picture was clear, he hardly noticed what it represented... except tonight. Tonight he was white-faced. "Chief," moaned the rabbity junior engineer from Net Five, "it's all over the country! Sacramento just came in. And the relay from Rio has a local collect that shows trouble all over South America." "Watch your monitor," Gensel ordered, turning away. It was very important that he keep a clear head, he told himself. Unfortunately the head that he had to keep clear was aching fiercely. "I'm going to get an aspirin," he growled to his line man, a thirty-year veteran whose hands, tonight, were trembling. Gensel filled a paper cup of water and swallowed two aspirins, sighed and sat down at the coffeeringed desk in the office he seldom had time to use. One of the monitors showed an announcer whose smile was desperate as he read'a newscast: " -- disease fails to respond to any of the known antibiotics. All persons are cautioned to stay indoors as much as possible. Large gatherings are forbidden. All schools are closed until further notice. It is strongly urged that even within families personal contact be avoided as much as possible. And, above all, the Department of Public Health urges that everyone wait until an orderly program of immunization can be completed." the monitor and picked up the phone. He dialed the front office. "Mr. Tremonte, please. Gensel here. Operational emergency priority." The girl was businesslike and efficient (but did her voice have a faint hysterical tremor?). "Yes, sir. Mr. Tremonte is at his home. I will relay." Click, click. The picture whirred, blurred, went to black. Then it came on again. Old man Tremonte was slouched at ease in a great leather chair, staring out at him irritably; the flickering light on his face showed that he was sitting by his fireplace. "Well?" That queer, thin voice. Gensel had always, as a matter of employee discipline, stepped down hard on the little jokes about the Old Man -- he had transistors instead of tonsils; his wife didn't put him to bed at night, she turned him off. But there was something creepy about the slow, mechanical way he talked, and that old, lined face! Gensel said rapidly: "Sir, every net is carrying interrupt news bulletins. The situation is getting bad. Net Five canceled the sports roundup, Seven ran an old tape of Bubbles Brinkhouse -- the word is he's dying. I want I # permission to go over to emergency procedure. Cancel all shows, pool the nets for news and civil-defense instructions." Old man Tremonte rubbed his thin, long nose and abruptly laughed, like a store-window Santa. "Gensel, boy," he rasped, "don't get upset over a few sniffly noses. You're dealing with an essential public service." "Sir, there are people sick, dying!" Tremonte said slowly: "That leaves a lot who aren't. We'll continue with our regular programs -- and, Gensel, I'm going away for a few days; I expect you to be in charge. I do not give you permission to go over to emergency procedure," and he cut the contact. I never got a chance to tell him about the remote from Philadelphia, thought Gensel despairingly, thinking of the trampled hundreds at the Municipal Clinic. He felt his warm forehead and decided cloudily that what he really needed was a couple more aspirin... although the last two, for some reason, hadn't agreed with him. Not at all. In fact, he felt rather queasy. Definitely queasy. At the console, the line man saw his chief gallop clumsily toward the men's washroom, one hand pressed to his mouth. The line man grinned. Fifteen minutes later, though, he was not grinning at all. That was when the Net Three audio man came running in to report that the chief was out cold, breathing like a broken-down steam boiler, on the washroom floor. him, was beginning to come back to something resembling normal functioning. He heard Rhame talking to Locille: "What he really needs is massive vitamin injections. That would snap him right around -- but you've seen what the Med Center looks like. We'll have to wait until he sobers up." "I am sober," said Cornut feebly, but he knew it was untrue. "What happened?" He listened while they told him what had been going on in the past twenty-four hours. Locille's brother dead, Egerd dead, plague loose in the land... the world had become a different place. He heard and was affected, but there was enough liquor in him and enough of the high-pressure compulsion exercised by the immortals so that he was able to view this new world objectively. Too bad. But he felt shame -- why had he failed to kill himself? Locille's hand was in his, and Cornut, looking at her, never wanted to let it go again. He had not died when he should have, and now he wanted to live. It was shameful, but he could not deny it. The liquor in him gave the world a warm, fresh appearance. He still was ashamed, but the feeling was remote; it was a failure of his childhood, bad, but so long ago. Meanwhile he was warm and comfortable. "Please drink some more coffee," said Locille, and he was happy to oblige her. All the stimuli of twenty-four full hours were working on him at once, the beating, the strain, the compulsion of the immortals, the liquor. He caught a glimpse of Locille's expression and realized he had been humming. "Sorry," he said, and held out his cup for more coffee. were growing higher. The black barges tossed like chips. Locille's parents braved the wind-blown rain topside to witness the solemn lowering of their son's casket into the blackdecked funeral barge. They were not alone -- there were other mourners with them, strangers -- and it was not quiet. Dwang-g-g went the bullroarer vibration of the steel cables. Hutchchumpf, hutchchumpi, the pneumatic pens in the tower's legs caught trapped air from the waves and valved it into the pressure tanks for the generators. The noise nearly drowned out the sound of the music. It was the custom to play solemn music at funerals, from tapes kept in the library for the purpose. The bereft were privileged to choose the program -- hymns for the religious, chorales for the classicists, largos for the merely mourning. Today no choice was offered. The audio speakers played without end, a continuous random selection of dirges. There were too many mourners watching their children, parents or wives being winched onto the tossing barges, on their way to the deep-sea funerary drop. Six, seven... Locille's father carefully counted eight barges lying along the texas, waiting to be loaded. Each one held a dozen bodies. It was a bad sickness, he thought with detachment, realizing that the bodies outnumbered the mourners because, often enough, whole families were being put aboard the barge together. He rubbed the back of his neck, which had begun to hurt. The mother standing beside him neither thought nor counted, only wept. gan to view his world and his past day in harsher, clearer perspective. Rhame helped. The policeman had the scraps of paper Cornut had left and he was remorseless in questioning. " Why must you die? Who are the immortals? How did they make you try to kill yourself -- and why didn't you this last time, with every chance in the world?" Cornut tried to explain. To die, he said, remembering the lesson that had come with the beating, that is nothing; all of us do it. Suicide is a victory in a way, because it makes death come to us on our terms. St. Cyr and the others, however -- "St. Cyr's gone," snapped the policeman. "Did you know that? He's gone and so is his bodyguard. Master Finloe from Biochemistry is gone, and his secretary says he left with Jillson and that old blonde. Where?" Cornut frowned. It was not in keeping with his concept of immortality that they should flee in the face of a plague. Supermen should be heroic, should they not? He tried to explain that, but Rhame pounced on him: "Super-murderers, you mean! Where did they go?" Cornut said apologetically: "I don't know. But I assure you that they had reasons." Rhame nodded. His voice was suddenly softer. "Yes, they did. Would you like to know what those reasons were? The savages brought that disease. They came off their island carrying active smallpox, nearly every one of them. The most active cases were brought; the well ones were left on the island. They were given injections -- to cure them, they thought, but the surgeon says they were only cosmetic cures; the disease was still contagious. And they were flown to every major city in the world, meeting thousands of people. They were coached," said Rhame, his face working, "in the proper behavior in civilized society. For example, the pipe of peace isn't their custom; they were told it would please us. Does that add up to anything for you?" Cornut leaned forward, his horrified eyes on Rhame. Add up? It added up; the sum was inescapable. The disease was deliberately spread. The immortals had, in their self-oriented wisdom, determined to move against the short-lived human race, in a way that had nearly destroyed it more than once in ancient days: They had spread a fearsome plague. Locille screamed. Cornut realized tardily that she had been drowsing against his shoulder, unable to sleep, unable after the sleepless night to stay fully awake. Now she was sitting bolt upright, staring at the tiny glittering manicure scissors in her hand. "Cornut!" she cried. "I was going to stab you in -- in the throat!" TT was night, and outside the high arch of the bridge was a line of color, the lights of the speedy monotracks and private vehicles making a moving row or dots. On one of the monotracks, the motorman was half listening to a news broadcast: "The situation in the midwest is not as yet critical, but a wave of fear has spread through all the major cities of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. In Omaha more than sixty persons were killed when three heli-buses bearing emigrants collided in a bizarre midair accident, apparently caused by pilot error in one of the chartered planes. Here in Des Moines all transportation came to a halt for nearly ninety minutes this morning as air-control personnel joined the fleeing throngs, leaving their posts unattended. In a statement released -- " The motorman blinked and concentrated on his controls. He was fifty years old, had held this job and almost this run more than half his life. He rubbed the sensor collar irritably; he had worn it nearly thirty years, but tonight it bothered him. The collar was like a deadman's switch, designed to monitor temperature and pulse, electronically linked to cut the monotrack's power and apply the brakes in the event of death or serious illness to the motorman. He was quite used to wearing these collars and appreciated their need; but tonight, climbing the approach ramp to the bridge in third speed, his throat began to feel constricted. Also his head ached. Also his eyes itched and burned. He reached for the radio mike that connected him to the dispatcher's office, and croaked, "Charley, I think I'm going to black out. I -- " He fell forward. The sensors around his neck had marked his abnormal pulse and respiration and reacted as he collapsed. The monotrack stopped dead. But another one drove catastrophically into its tail. The motorman of the second unit had been feeling queasy for more than an hour and was anxious to get to the end of his run; he had been overriding the automatic slowdown controls all the way across the bridge. As he passed the critical parameters of sensor monitoring, his own collar switched off the power in his drive wheels, but by then it was too late; the wheels raced crazily against air. Even the sensor collars had not been designed to cope with two motorman failures in the same second. White sparks flew from bridge to water and died -- great white sparks that were destroyed metal. The sound of crashing battered at the campus of the University below. The bridge stopped, its moving lights becoming a row of colored dots with one great hideous flare of color in the middle. Distant ambulance sirens began to wail.  wife, his face incredulous, his mind working. Locille trying to kill him? Impossible! But like the other impossible factors in his own life, it was not inexplicable. He became conscious of faint whispering thoughts in his own mind. He said to Rhame: "They couldn't reach me! They tried to work through her!" "Why couldn't they reach you?" Cornut shrugged and patted Locille's shoulder. She sat up, saw the scissors and hurled them away. "Don't worry, I under stand," he said to her, and to the policeman: "I don't know why. Sometimes they can't Like in the refectory kitchen; they could have killed me. I even wanted them to, but they didn't. And once on the island, when I was all beered up. And once -- remember, Locille? -- on the bridge. Each time I was wide open to them, and on the bridge they almost made it. But each time I was fuddled. I'd been drinking," he said, "or taking sleepy pills, and they should have been able to walk right in and take possession..." His voice trailed thoughtfully off. Rhame said sharply: "What's the matter with Locille?" The girl blinked and sat up again. "I guess I'm sleepy," she apologized. "Funny..." Cornut was looking at her with great interest, not as a wife but as a specimen. "What's funny?" "I keep hearing someone talking to me," she said, rubbing her face fretfully. She was exhausted, Cornut saw; she could not stay awake much longer -- not even if she thought herself a murderer, not even if he died before her eyes, not even if the world came to an end. "Talking to you? Saying what?" "I don't know. Funny. 'Me softspeak you-fella.' Like that." Rhame said immediately: "Pidgin. You've been with the aboriginals." He dismissed the XV matter and returned to Cornut: "You were on the point of something. You said sometimes they could get at you, sometimes not. Why? What was the reason?" "Drinking or taking sleepy pills." It was true! Three times he had been where death should have found him, and each time it had missed. And each time he had been fuddled! The alcohol or sedation in his brain, the selective chemicals that struck first at the uppermost level of the brain, reducing visual discrimination, slowing responses... it had deafened him to the mind voices that willed him to death! "Smellim olefella bagarimop allfella," Locille said clearly, and smiled. "Sorry. That's what I wanted to say." Cornut sat frozen for an endless second. Then he moved. The bottle he had carried with him, Rhame had thriftily brought back to the room. Cornut grabbed it, up-ended it, took a deep swallow and passed it to Locille. "Drink! Don't argue -- take a good stiff drink!" He coughed and wiped tears from his eyes. The liquor tasted foul; it would take little to make him drunk again. But that little might save his life... Locille's life... it might save the world's! r T , AI-I Masatura-san got up from his bed and walked to the strong new fence. The crazy white people had not come up with dinner for them. It was getting very late, he judged. A few weeks ago, on his island, the Southern Cross, wheeling about the sky, was all the clock a man needed. These strange northern constellations were cold and unpleasant. They told him nothing he wanted to know, neither time nor direction. His broad nostrils wrinkled angrily. In order to become a tai-i, a captain, he had had to become skilled in the art of reading the stars, among many other arts. Now that art was of no value, rendered useless by the stronger art of the white man. His gift of deepsmell -- the reaching out with a part of his mind to detect truth or falsehood that made him a tribal magistrate -- had been voided by the old ones, who smelled so strongly and yet could baffle his inner nose. He should never have trusted the softspeaking white man of great age, he thought, and spat on the ground. His second in command moaned at the door of the hut. In the creolized speech which served them better than the tribe's pidgin or Masatura-san's painful English, the man whimpered : "I have asked them to come, but they do not seem to hear." "One hears," said Masaturasan. "The old ones are softspeaking endlessly," whined the sick man. "I hear," said Masatura-san, closing his mind. He squatted, looking at the stars and the fence. Outside, the campus was still noisy, voices, vehicles, even so late at night. He thought very carefully what he wanted to do. Masatura-san was a tai-i because of strength and learning, but also because of heredity. When the Japanese off the torpedoed destroyer had managed to reach that Pacific island in #, they had found a flourishing community. The Japanese strain in Masatura-san's ancestry came only from that generation. Before that, his forebears were already partly exotic, for the twelve Japanese were not the first sailors to wash ashore. Once "Masatura-san" had been "Masterson." English fathers and Melanesian mothers had produced a sturdy race -- after the objecting male Melanesians had been killed off. The Japanese repeated the process with the hybrids they found, as the English had done before them, except for a few. One of those few was the greatgrandfather of Tai-i Masaturasan. He had been spared for exactly one reason: He was the chief priest of the community, and had been for nearly a century; the islanders all would have died to save him. Three hundred years later, his second-generation offspring had inherited some of his talents. One was "deepsmelling" -- no sniff of the nostrils, but a different sense entirely. Another was age. Masatura-san himself was nearly a century old. It was the only thing he had managed to conceal from the owners of the strange softspeak voices who had found him on his island, and promised him much if he would help them. The "deepsmell" of the world beyond the barricade was very bad. Tai-i Masatura-san thought carefully and made a decision. He moved over to the hut and poked his second in command with his foot. "Speak along himfella two-time again," he ordered in pidgin. "Me help."  laxly and sound asleep. "I'll be back," he whispered, and with Sergeant Rhame hurried out onto the campus. The wind was rising and stars broke through scudding clouds. The campus was busy. Around the Med Center, hundreds of people still waited, not because they had hope of immunization -- the fact that the vaccine was ineffective had been announced -- but because they had nowhere else to go. Inside the clinic, medics with white faces and red eyes labored endlessly, repeating the same tasks because they knew no others. In the first hour they had discovered that the reference Stacks had been looted of three centuries of epidemiology; they could not hope to replace them in time, but they could not help but try. Half the medics were themselves sick, ambulatory but doomed. Cornut was worried, not for himself but for Locille. Thinking back to the Field Expedition, he remembered the shots that they had all taken and felt it more than likely that everyone receiving them had been rendered immune to the smallpox. But what of Locille? She had had nothing. He had already told Rhame about the shots, and Rhame had instantly reported to the police headquarters; they would radio the island, try to locate the medics who had administered the vaccine. Neither of them was hopeful. The immortals would surely have removed all traces of what might halt their attack against the short-lived bulk of humanity. But that thought had a corollary, too: If the immortals had removed it, the immortals had it now. The aboriginals were waiting. "You called us?" said Cornut -- it was a question; he still could not really believe in it -- and Masatura-san nodded and reached for his hand. Rhame blinked at them dizzily. Cornut had made him also take three large drinks -- not because Rhame had shown any signs of being telepathic, only because Cornut was not sure. It seemed like a drunken vision, the math teacher linking hands with the squat brown man, wordless. But it was no vision. After a moment Cornut released the islander's hand. Masatura-san nodded and, without a word, took the bottle from Cornut, drank deep, and passed it to his second in command, barely conscious on the ground behind him. "Let's go," said Cornut thickly, his eyes glazed. (It was hard to be just drunk enough! ) "We need a popper. Can you get one?" Rhame reached into his pocket automatically and spoke briefly into his police radio before he asked questions. "What happened?" Cornut wavered and caught his arm. "Sorry. It's the immortals. You were right; they imported the smallpox carriers -- went to a lot of trouble. But this fellow here, he's a lot older than he looks. He can read minds, too." The police radio squawked faintly. "They'll meet us over near Med Center," Rhame said, putting it back in his pocket. "Let's go." He was already moving before he asked: "But where are we going?" Cornut was having difficulty walking. Everything was moving slowly, so slowly; his feet were like sausage-shaped balloons, he was wading through gelatine. He measured his movements carefully, in a drunken, painstaking effort at clarity; he did not dare get really drunk, he did not dare become really sober. He said: "I know where the immortals are. He told me. Not words -- holding my hand, mind to mind; physical contact helps. He didn't know the name of the place, but I can find it in the popper." Cornut stopped and looked astonished. "God, I am drunk. We'll need some help." Rhame said, stumbling over the words, "I'm drunk, too, but I figured that out for myself. The whole Emergency Squad is meeting us." r T'HE cleared space near the Med Center was ideal for landing helipoppers, even though it was dotted now with prostrate figures, sick or exhausted. Rhame and Cornut heard the staccato bark and flutter of the helipoppers and stood at the edge of the clear space, waiting. There were twelve police poppers settling toward them. Eleven poised themselves in air, waiting; the twelfth blossomed with searchlights and came on down. In the harsh landing light, one of the recumbent figures near them pushed himself up on an elbow, mumbling. His eyes were wide even in the blinding light. He stared at Cornut, his lips moving, and he cried faintly: "Carriers!" Rhame first realized the danger. "Come on!" he said, beginning to trot, lurching, toward the landing popper. Cornut followed, but others were waking feverishly. "Carriers!" they cried, a few of them and then dozens. It was like the birth of a lynch mob. "Carriers! They did it to us! Get them!" Sick figures pushed themselves to their knees, hands clutching at them. Some men, drooping in a knot, whirled and came toward them. "Carriers!" Cornut began to run. Carriers? Of course they were not carriers; he knew what it was. It was St. Cyr perhaps, or one of the others, unable to break through the barrier of alcohol to reach his own mind, working with the halfwaking minds of the feverish or exhausted hundreds on the grass to attack and destroy them. It was quite astonishing, meditated one part of his mind with drunken gravity, that there were so many partial telepaths in this random crowd; but the other part of his mind cried Run, run! Stones began to fly, and from fifty yards away, across the green, Cornut heard a sound that might have been a shot. But the popper was whirling its blades above them now. They boarded it and it lifted, leaving the sudThe popper rose to join the rest of the squad. "That was just in time," breathed Cornut to the pilot. "Thanks. Now head east until -- " The co-pilot was turning toward him, and something in his eyes stopped Cornut. He and Rhame acted together. As the copilot was reaching for his gun, the police sergeant brought up his fist. Co-pilot went one way, the gun another. Cornut jumped for the gun, pointed it at the pilot. "This is an emergency popper, right? With medical supplies?" Rhame understood at once. He leaped for the locker and broke out a half-liter of brandy in a sealed flask. He handed it to the pilot. "Drink!" he ordered. Then: "Get on the radio! Tell every man in the squad to take at least two ounces of brandy!" It was, thought Cornut fuzzily, a hell of a way to fight a war. but the pilot of the lead popper was a deputy inspector. The other helipoppers questioned the order, but they obeyed. The fleet sailed out over the bay, over the city, up toward the mountains. Under them, the city lay helpblind crowds roamed in terror. Cornut could see, even from a thousand feet, the fires of wrecked vehicles, the litter of motionless bodies, the utter confusion that the plague had wrought. There had been by now, the deputy inspector said, more than ten thousand reported deaths in the city, but only a fraction of them were from smallpox. Accident and violence had slain the rest. How many deaths were unreported? Twice as many, a hundred times as many -- there was no way of telling. It was, Cornut knew, what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of short-lived cattle for a long time; the herd had increased until it threatened to deprive its unseen owners of space, food, everything. Like any herdsmen, the immortals had decided to thin it 'out. What could be more painless -- for them -- than a biological thinner? Myxomatosis had given Australia control of the rabbit swarm; smallpox could bring the human one under control. Cloudily, Cornut was able to read the motives of St. Cyr and the others, striking down those who like himself might learn of their existence, defeating research that might give them away by concealing it. It was a constant defensive action, and he could understand their need to remove every threat. He could forgive their attempts on his own of so much of a world. But he could not forgive the threat to Locille. For she was exposed. Some would survive the plague in any event -- some always did -- but Cornut was a mathematician and he did not accept such odds. All these years, he mused, immortals were directing humanity in directions they chose. No wonder the great strides in medicine, no wonder the constant competition between manufacturers to outdo each other producing luxuries and comforts. What would happen to progress if the immortals were destroyed? And yet, he thought, beginning to sober up, wasn't there something in Wolgren about that? No, not Wolgren. Somewhere in statistical theory. Something about random movements. The Brownian movement of molecules -- that had been on Master Carl's mind, he remembered. The Drunkard's walk -- the movement from a dead center ever smaller, asymptotically, never stopping. Straight-line progress was always to an end. If the immortals directed it, it could go only so far as they could conceive, and no further. They were not the future, he realized with sharp clarity. They instigated -- and let humanity do the solving, because they could solve nothing themselves. They were the old generations refusing to make way for the new, and the future was always the new generations, never the old, and -- Cornut! said a shrill, angry voice in his brain. Panicky, he grabbed for the flask of medicinal brandy. The liquor supply was getting low. They would have to hurry; they dared not get sober.  ly and crackled an oath with his mind that sent ripples of laughter through the party. Don't laugh! he thought. I've lost them again! But was there real reason to worry? Senator Dane never drank, but he had observed the shorties drinking and he knew what drinking could do. They would pile up against a hill; they would crash into each other. Certainly they would never find this place -- although Masatura-san's mind had been powerfully clear, and possibly there had been a leak, and -- no, St. Cyr himself had selected Masatura-san's tribe for the job of extermination and no one could conceal anything from St. Cyr. And the place was unfindable. It had been a resort hotel at one time, used for conventions of the sort that are not meant to be public, pre-empted from a gangster who had in turn preempted it from its not very legitimate builders. The gangster had been a nuisance and the immortal who killed him had felt rather virtuous as he murdered a murderer. The hotel no longer had roads leading to it and there was no other habitation within twenty miles. That had been expensive, but, expense was the least important factor in any of their plans. There was room for all of them, seventy-five immortals from every part of the world, children of sixty or sixty-five on up to the oldest, a man who had been born in the reign of Caligula. (There were few born before the twentieth century, because of the public-health contribution to their longevity, but to die at all.) There were women who, with repeated plastic surgery, had managed to keep themselves in the general appearance, from a distance, of youth. There were visible ancients, like St. Cyr with his cyanosis and his scars, the squat old Roman with his great recurring keloids, the hairless, fat black man who had been born in slavery on the estate of the King's Governor of Virginia. Color made no difference to them, nor race nor age; the factor that counted was power. They were the strongest in the off anyone potentially stronger. Not one had seen a war or an earthquake or a volcano at close range. Each had, for all of his prolonged life, surrounded himself with walls and with guards. There were drawbacks to their lives, but not such a drawback as dying. In the hotel, staffed by Sudanese flown in a decade earlier -- kept completely out of touch with the world and guarded from even chance contact with a wanderer by a totally unfamiliar tongue -- the immortals prepared to sit out the plague. Senator Dane wandered among them, jovial but inclined to worry. He annoyed them. The undertone of worry irritated. They chaffed him about it, in words of fifty languages (they knew them all) or in thoughts, with gesture and tone. But he infected them all. man who is starving does not fear the early frost that may destroy the crops. He can only worry about what is close at hand. The well-fed man can worry years ahead. The immortals could worry a full century ahead. They looked far into the future, and every distant pebble in their path was a mountain. Suppose, mumbled the fear behind Dane's jolly mask, that they do find our place here. True, we can destroy them with their minds, as we always have -- but that is a nuisance -- and some of us may get hurt. This is our best place, but we have others, and staying far away from scenes of violence has always been the best policy for us. Shut up, thought (or said, or gestured) the others. He was interfering with their fun. The Roman was demonstrating a delicate balance of a feather on a soap-bubble (he was the strongest of them; it was hard to move physical objects with the mind, but with age it became possible). But the fear said: We have lost them. They might be anywhere. (The bubble collapsed.) The fear said: Even if we flee, they are not stupid; they might search the house and find our own medics. And then -- look then! Then they can end the plague, and, with not enough of be hunting down us seventy-five! (The feather floated to the ground. The immortals shouted at Dane peevishly.) "Go," said St. Cyr in his clocktick voice, angry enough to speak aloud, "de-stroy the ser-um. Do not spoil our day!" mumbling worry stopped abruptly, and cheerfully they went back to their enjoyment. It stopped abruptly for Dane too. He was in the downstairs hall, looking for one of the Sudanese, when he heard a sound behind him. But he was fat and he was, in spite of everything, very old. The blow caught him and he fell heavily. He was only vaguely conscious of the hands that rolled him over, the acrid taste of the liquid -- was it brandy? But he never drank! -- they were forcing down his throat. He did not know, but there were a dozen stumbling figures around him. As he began to recover consciousness, he knew, but then it was too late. It was so still! The voices in his mind were not speaking! The alcohol was a barrier; it deafened him, blinded him, marooned him; he had only eyes and mouth and ears, and for one whose life has been illuminated by the rapid flash of the mind itself, that is black silence. He began to sob, hardly noticing that the figures who had attacked him were now moving on toward the main hall, not noticing at all that they carried guns. '"' # pletely on the way back and slept soddenly for hours. Rhame let him sleep. There was time enough for everything now, even for sleep. The medics, with the restored tapes for the Stacks, had already begun the task of preparing vaccine; the captured hundred liters of serum was already being rationed to the public. The mobs were quieted -- it took only hope to end their terror -- and the danger, for most, was past. Not for all. The serum would never reach places in time for some, and there were many already dead. But the dead were Cornut woke up like an explosion. His head was pounding; he staggered to his feet, ready to fight. Rhame, full of wake-up pills, reassured him quickly. "It's all right. Look!" They were back in the city, in a hastily cleared penal wing of one of the hospitals. Along a corridor, room after room, there were old, old men and women, sleeping or staggering. "Twenty of them," said Rhame proudly, "and every one guaranteed to have one point five per cent of alcohol in the blood or better. We'll keep them that way until we decide what to do next." "Only twenty?" demanded Cornut, suddenly alarmed. "What about the others?" Rhame smiled like a shark. "I see," said Cornut, visioning that queer contradiction, dead immortals. Better, he told himself, than a dead planet. He did not linger. Rhame had already phoned the campus and learned that Locille was well but still asleep, but Cornut needed to see her himself. A police popper took him to the campus in a pelting rainstorm and he ran through the wet grass. The grass was stained and littered; the windows of the Med Center showed where the mob had nearly smashed its way in. He hurried past, past the aboriginal camp, now deserted, past the Administration Building, past the memory of Master Carl and the clinic where Egerd had died. The rain clouds stank of fumes from fires in the city; across the river there still lay thousands of unburied dead. But the clouds were thin and radiance was beginning to shine through. In his room, Locille stirred and woke. She smiled. "I knew you'd be back," she said. He took her in his arms, but even in that moment he could not forget what Rhame had told him, what they had already learned from the drunken, babbling immortals. It was not short-lived humans the immortals had killed or driven to death -- it was young immortals. The mutant gene was a dominant, and now that it had shown so often, it would soon fill the race. The immortals had not preserved themselves at the expense of a race that should have become extinct. They had only protected their own power against the Cornuts, the Locilles, the countless others with whom they refused to share. "I knew you'd be back," she whispered again. "I told you I would," he said. "I'll always be back"... and he wondered how to tell her what "always" had suddenly come to mean for them. Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. 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The publisher assumes no responsibilty for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U.S, Pat. Off. thors to offer interesting aliens, not just tentacled ones. Offered examples like rackabore -- animal with two short side legs adapted to hillside living, but too specialized because leftand right-legged can't turn in opposite direction. Amplifies Robert A. Heinlein: "In southern Missouri where I was born we have two local varieties, the Hillside Snee and the Sidehill Murk, which have solved the problem of how to turn around. They have very large mouths -- when closely pursued, they open same quickly, jump through, turning themselves inside out, and thus can reverse direction. This works just fine with the Snee, which is smoothskinned. Unfortunately the Murk is fuzzy curly; once the fuzz is inside, it tickles poor beastie and he has a tendency to laugh himself to death, unless he again reverses quickly. The Murk is thus rapidly becoming extinct." Raise a collection? They're fun. Like Fund for Widow of Unknown Soldier -- went over the top till spoil sported. And recent classified ad saying, "This is your last chance to send I to" and named nothing but a box number; people did send their buck. J. F. Bone in town not long ago. Veterinarian prof at U. of Oregon, thinks of self as short, tubby, absent-minded -- could snatch horns off charging water buffalo, forgets nothing -- not a thing. Got onto subject of aliens and animals; what else with a vet? Mentioned above and alligators in N. Y. C. sewage system. Got same damned skeptical laugh as when showing an egg can't be crushed between hands if held lengthwise -- no one has ever done it and principle is being worked into new building materials. Explanation of alligators in N. Y. C. sewage system: baby alligators cute and tiny, but the things grow, get flushed away. Doc Bone thoughtful, realized food plentiful, temperature great -- blend of hot and cold water, no winter wind; they should prosper. They do. Bone solved lion-versus-tiger controversy in return for fascinating info on alligators. One lion, one tiger, dead lion -- tiger bigger, heavier, smarter. Six lions, six tigers, six dead tigers, most or all lions alive -- tigers hunt singly; lions gang up, would take each tiger in turn. Doc Bone went on to claim membership in club of vets who have spayed male cats -- once. Horrible feeling, he says, fishing around in welter of sweat. Fast look; owner said spay but didn't know sex of cat. Stitch, alter, charge double for ghastly moment, check carefully ever after. I looked closely; memory of the ghastly moment still had him sweating. Evidently not an experience one gets over readily. Neither is extrapolating sewage systems after accumulation of high-interest data and then finding it all go down the drain. Reason later. Data: Detergents, first breakthrough in cleansing agents since discovery of soap, reported on here some while ago as coming out of mains in mile-long, house-high, unbustable bubbles. Hose crews needed on #-hour duty till bubble problem solved. Fine, steady uptrend in sewage engineering that would let a fellow take a sound flying guess into the future. Now? Pow! How? In a minute. Ancient cities limited in size by sanitation facilities. Rome's Cloaca Maxima caused first population explosion. Sewer chases popular in books, films, TV shows. Skip all that to short while ago. Sterilized sludge first-rate topsoil -- for Park Department. Methane gas by-product hot competitor against natural or illuminating gas -- but rigid restrictions on sale. Put sewage in private hands, I'd have said. There's a fortune in it. But not now. Radioactive wastes? Nope, they're barred. The wonder drugs -- antibiotics, tranquilizers, steroids and so forth -- it'd take a miracle of extrapolation to figure effects on topsoil manufacture, deep-sea farming and other such marvels that free enterprise might have plumbed. Will situation settle down? Doubtful -- all breakthroughs like ones in drugs create more breakthroughs. Still, there might be some in sanitation engineering; busting the detergent bubble was one. (Wonder how they did it, but no use querying them now. Them? Oh, forgot to mention Dept, of Sanitation has a publicity section. Private ownership, though, and there'd have been a seat on the Exchange, advertising campaigns, maybe a TV show called, say, "The Man from Flushing.") Home again in Oregon, Dr. Bone wrote that his daughter, #, thinks he's unplugged and I'm way round. Wrote back that this damage to parental self-esteem is inexcusable in modem civilization, suggested organized Teen Exchange, to begin the minute teeners know everything except why their parents are so cubic, to end the minute they outgrow it, with enough visits in between to see that this is the best possible arrangement. Maybe it is at that. What did I have in mind here? -- "Everytime someone says, 'I don't believe in theories,' a theory dies. Do you believe in theories?" -- "The cat comes on little fog feet." Every writer has things like that in his idea file, like lady author who woke in great excitement, scribbled, went back to sleep -- the cosmic discovery was safe -- and read in the morning: "Hoggimus, higgimus, men are polygamous; higgimus, hoggimus, women monogamous." Note on the koala story. Oh, yes! Man with very tired voice phoned one evening; he worked for Railway Express and had a koala for me and what was the best way to my address? I said, "A what?" and he wearily read off name and address of consignor, a woman in Australia, my name and address and amount of insurance -- #. I poked for a break in the story, but there was none; all heavily insured items were accompanied, he had done it for # years, and he'd deliver in the morning. I asked why would anybody send me something insurable at # and how was I to feed the pickiest eater on Earth? He said his job was to make the delivery, not do detective work, and he had a supply of food for the koala for a few days. I called Willy Ley, who agreed that eucalyptus leaves were a problem, but koalas couldn't legally be shipped out of Australia and was I sure this wasn't from Mexico, where they were being bred? The insurance? Entirely possible -- getting a koala safely Vi around the world is quite a trick. Asked to be kept informed. I said sure. Man phoned, had checked into hotel, shaved, eaten. Very tired. Would I take delivery that night so he could get home to family in Calif.? I said sure. Would I pay for taxi so he could make certain train? I said sure, kept Ley informed. Phone again. Right downstairs, big battle with taxi driver -- koala had messed upholstery, would I -- I said bring up driver and I'd take care of everything. Called Ley. He said, "Oh, ho! A koala wouldn't mess -- hard and dry, like a goat's. You won't see the man, but if -- " I said sure. No man, no koala, natch, but beautiful detail work, except that last bit, and fine acting. My compliments, and my thanks for a fun evening. fliS i tlf was hopelessly out of reach for these ing, shallow, I burned east on U.S. Twenty at ninety miles an hour, wishing I could suck into my lungs some of the wind that howled across the windshield. I heard the siren in my phones. I glanced out the left side of my helmet to find a blue-clad figure on motorcycle looming up beside me, waving me toward the shoulder. A law-abider to the last gasp of asphyxia, I braked my little green beast over to the berm. The state cop angled his bike across my left headlamp and stalked back to where I sat, tugging a fat book of traffic-tickets out of his hip pocket. "Unscrew that space-helmet, Sonny," he said. "You've just been grounded." "Grounded, I'll grant," I said, my voice wheezing from the speaker on the chest of my suit; "but I can't take off the fishbowl, officer." "Then maybe you'd better climb out of your flying saucer," the policeman suggested. "And if you're toting pearl-handled rayguns, just leave 'em hang." I got out of the car, keeping my hands in view, feeling like the fugitive from space-opera this cop evidently took me for. He examined me the way a zoologist might examine the first live specimen of a new species of carnivore; very interested, very cautious. After observing the cut of my wash-andwear plastic sterility-suit -- known to us who wear them as a chastitysuit -- the policeman walked around me to examine my reserveair tank, which is cunningly curved and cushioned against my spine so that I can lean back without courting lordosis. He inspected the bubble of plastic that fit over my head like the belljar over a museum specimen, and stared at the little valve on the left shoulder of my suit, where used air was wheezing out asthmatically. "I guess fallout has got you bugged," he said. "Not fallout, bacteria," I explained. "I'm one of the Lapins from Central University." "That's nice," the policeman said. "And I'm one of the Bjornsons, from Indiana State Police Post #-A. What were you trying to do just now, break Mach One on wheels? Or do you maybe come from one of these foreign planets that don't know the American rules of the road?" I breathed deep, trying to find myself some oxygen. "I was born right here in Indiana," I said. "The reason I'm wearing this suit and helmet is that I'm bacteriologically sterile." "So maybe you could adopt a kid," Officer Bjornson suggested. "Sterile like germ-free," I said. "Gnotobiotic. I grew up in the Big Tank at Central University." the big tank at South Bend if you're snowing me, Sonny," he said. "Let's see your driver's license." I got my billfold out of the glove-compartment -- a chastitysuit doesn't have any pockets -- and handed my license to Bjomson. "John Bogardus, M.D.," he read. "You're a doctor, eh? This tral University, South Bend. Means your practice is limited to certain teeth?" "I'm a resident in pathology, and I'm damned near out of air," I said, annoyed at the prospect of suffocating while acting straight-man to acronym for Bacteriological Institute, Central University Special Projects in Infectious Disease. I'm a Lapin, which is a human guineapig. I'm sorry, officer, that I broke the Indiana speed-limit but my air-filter is clogged with condensation. If I don't get back to the Big Tank at the University within the next few minutes, I'll run out of air. And you'll have to spend the rest of the evening testifying before St. Joseph's County Coroner." "So what happens if you crack open your space-helmet and breathe the air us peons use?" he asked. "Pretty quick, I'd die," I said. "I've got no antibodies, no physiological mechanism to combat inspired or ingested bacteria." "That's the sort of answer that makes my job the joy it is," Bjornson said. "Next thing you know, I'll be chasing drunken drivers from Mars." "There's no intelligent native life on Mars," I said. "You think maybe there are intelligent natives on U.S. Twenty?" he asked, returning my license. "Okay, Doctor Bogardus, I've bought your story. You leadfoot your bomb along after me, and we'll hit the Central campus like we're crossing the payoff line at the Mille Miglia." Bjornson cowboyed into the saddle of his bike, spurred it off and cut siren-screaming down the concrete toward South Bend and Central U. I jumped back into my sports-car and tailed him, the wind soaring past my 'phones like rocket exhaust. We cut through the field of Sunday drivers in a horizontal power-dive. I was half-blinded by the sweat condensed on my air-cooled faceplate. Formaldehyde bath or no, I'd have to cut in my reserve-air pretty soon. W E made it while I was still breathing. I braked in front walked as fast as I dared, dizzy and panting with the concentration of C# # bottled up with me in my chastity-suit. Outside the door to the contaminated labs, I shook Bjomson's hand and told him that I considered the expense of my Gross Income Tax justified by his employment. I went inside then, climbed the steel steps to the glasswalled shower. I cut in my suitradio and announced my arrival. "Bogardus here. I'm nearly out of wind; my filter's soaked. I'm cutting in reserve-air. Anybody around to see that I scrub behind my ears?" Dr. Roy McQueen, Director of where he'd monitored my announcement from the loudspeaker set above his desk, and faced the glass door of the shower room. He waved to me and cut on his microphone. "Okay, Johnny," he said. I sealed off my air-filter and cut in the reserve-air. That canned wind felt to my lungs like cold beer to the throat on a July day. I felt the oxygen percolating through me to my toes and fingertips, tingling them back to life. Turning on the detergent shower, I sloshed around beneath it, washing the outside dust off my chastity-suit. "You're dry by the tank," Dr. McQueen said into his hand microphone. I picked up the long-handled shower brush and scrubbed back there. I showered the suit's armpits, the folds behind the knees, the soles of the suit's boots, scrubbing hard with the brush. "You're all wet, Johnny," the Chief said. "Got enough air for half an hour in the bathtub?" "Yes, sir," I said, checking the gage of my reserve-air tank. Having scrubbed off most of the flora I'd picked up in the great wild world of Indiana, I climbed down through the manhole into the bathtub, a sump of formaldehyde solution eight feet deep. I sat on the iron bench at the bottom to soak. "How about switching on some music, Chief? I didn't think to bring anything waterproof to read." "You'll hear music from me," Dr. McQueen said. "This is a big day first time one of you kids ever came home from a date with a police escort. What happened? Anne's old man decide he didn't want a plastic-wrapped son-in-law? He call the law to throw you off his front porch?" "My air-filter got bolixed," I explained into the microphone, "so I leaned on the gas pedal pretty heavy on the way home. A friendly gendarme named Bjornson turned up." "You should be more careful, Johnny. I'd hate to have to post you." Like the rest of us, Dr. McQueen did post-mortems on the germ-free animals who died of old age or stir-fever in the Big Tank, or had to be sacrificed as routine sterility controls. Last winter, for the first time, the Chief had had to autopsy one of us Lapins. Poor Mike Bohrman had gone off his rocker and stripped off his sterility-suit in the snow. All we wear underneath is a pair of shorts. That's the way Mike had run around, almost naked in a northern Indiana February. It was hours before he'd been missed. He went to the hospital with severe frostbite, but he died two days later of pneumonia complicated by streptococcal septicemia. "Stick around down there, Johnny," the Chief said. "I'm coming down to join you." tor microphone over to one of the technicians out in the contaminated labs. Oh hell, I thought. Here comes a chewing-out that would leave me raw up to the duodenum. The worst thing about being told off when you've done something dumb is the futility of being told about it. Nobody knew better than I that it was stupid to stay outside the Big Tank for eight solid hours. Hydraulic pressure aside, a chastity-suit isn't designed to hold a man more than about four. It took Dr. McQueen a quarter hour to get suited up and scrubbed. Then he came down the ladder to join me in the pale green soup, his airhose snaking along behind him like strayed umbilical cord. He sat on the bench beside me. Before he cut in his suit radio, he leaned close and touched his helmet to mine. "Damn it, Johnny! If you don't stop chasing after that dame in Valpo, I'll toss mothballs in the gas-tank of your silly little car." Then he toggled his radio. "Testing," he said, for the benefit of the monitoring technician listening out in the contaminated labs. "This is McQueen. Someone suited up?" "Safety man is suited and scrubbing, Chief," the monitor said. "I read you loud and clear. Now, let's hear from you, Brother Bogardus." "This is John Bogardus, the Voice of Purity," I said, "broadcasting from the bottom of Central pool. You want I should dedicate my next record to the gang at the brewery?" "Happy to hear you testify, canned-goods," the technician said. "The I.U. game is on the radio now. You want me to pipe it to the phones so you can hear our team smear 'em?" "I'll take your word for it that they'll do that," I said. "My sport ago, Central University's gate receipts from football had made posin gnotobiotics, using mice and roaches and hamsters. Despite this historical tie between me and football, I felt no special affinity for the game. "Trouble with you, cannedgoods, is you've got no school spirit," the monitor complained. "If you or the Chief feel your feet getting wet, just whistle. I'll be here." "Will do." For all the thousands of times I'd been through this antiseptic drill, I was happy to know that a lifeguard was suited up above our poisonous bathtub, ready to fish either of us out should our suits spring a leak. If formaldehyde-methanol started seeping into my chastity-suit, I knew I'd have an overwhelming desire to undress. Dr. McQueen cleared his throat, a sound which broadcast very like a growl. "Okay, Johnny. Let's have a synopsis of your Sunday outing." #TT'S springtime, Chief," I said. "You know what the month of May does to a young man's fancy, and reticuloendothelial system, and all." "I wish you'd stop seeing her," the Chief said. "You've got fifteen of the most nubile girls in the Midwest living in the Big Tank with you. Sweet, intelligent -- available. So why did you have to get the hots for an outsider?" "It's that ol' debbil incest-taboo, Chief," I said. "I've slept amongst those fifteen canned peaches for the last twenty-three years. The result is that my warmest feeling toward any of them is brotherly love. Who itches to shack with a sibling?" "Your only alternative seems to be a lifetime of cold showers," McQueen said. "Speaking of canned peaches, have you seen Mary deWitte today?" "No." "Mary has extramural interests, too," he said. "Her intended is a basketball player in pre-Law. A fellow roughly fifteen feet tall. Mary has been gone all day. I presume that she's been visiting this legal obelisk; and I'm beginning to feel the twinges of fatherly anxiety. But tell me about Anne, Johnny." "I met her at a concert last fall," I said, not giving a damn about the safety man and the monitor kibitzing. "Anne didn't bug at my chastity-suit the way most of the hens on campus do. This impressed me. She liked the way I talked, even though she could hear my voice only from the speaker on the chest of my suit. I liked fine the way she listened. So we had a date. Lots of dates. Said goodnight by shaking hands -- Please Excuse My Glove. "One evening we drove down to the beach at Hudson Lake. As we lay there on the sand, I pointed out for Anne the red disk of Mars. I told her about the men up there, at New Caanan and Bing City and Bitterwater, working to uncover one world while they built a new one. I told her about the mystery of the Immermann skull, and what it might mean. I pointed to the stars and named them for her. All the time, Chief, I kftew that I could touch Betelgeuse or Phobos as easily as I could touch Anne. "Anyway, we went swimming together, just like we were in Technicolor and VistaVision. I screwed the cap on my air-filter and breathed from the reserve tank. Anne wore a bikini. I might as well have been aboard a midget submarine. After that evening, we decided not to go swimming any more; and Anne started wearing strict and conservative clothes." "What happened today, Johnny?" McQueen asked me. "What could happen?" I demanded. "We broke up. She's contaminated, poor girl. She's been aswarm with bacteria and yeasts and molds and miscellaneous protista ever since the obstetrician slapped her on the rump, while I'm Boy Galahad, fifty-six onehundredths percent purer than Ivory Soap. My strength is as the strength of ten, so I told Anne at noon today that she'll have to find herself a new boy friend. She needs a guy who can eat the other half of the pizza with her, someone who can lend her his comb and breathe the air she breathes. It took me weeks to steel my soul to the prospect of kissing Anne off -- there's an ironic metaphor for you, Chief but I did it." "I'm sorry, Johnny," McQueen said. "I'm afraid I've diluted the antiseptic with my tears," I said. "Just singing those old formaldehyde blues." I'd soaked for the regulation half-hour now, and the gage of my reserve tank was on red, so I got up to go. "I can see myself at ninetyfive," I said. "I'll be patriarch of the Big Tank. The oldest male virgin on campus. See you inside, Chief." I climbed up the ladder through the second manhole over the formaldehyde sump and stepped out into the sterile precincts of the Big Tank. Home. A let the water blast the formaldehyde off my chastity-suit, popped off my helmet and stripped. Air against sweat-steamed skin felt good. I showered again, naked. I blotted myself dry and dressed in fresh shorts, all the clothing a man needed in the air-conditioned Elysium of the Big Tank. I carried my suit into the locker room to refit it for my next trip outside. Snapping its collar to the bushing of the compressed-air supply and turning on the pressure, I inflated my suit so that it stood on its headless shoulders, ready for inspection. The wet air-filter that had almost asphyxiated me had been caused, I discovered, by a break in the moisture-trap of the unit. Careful checking assured me that the filter had failed-safe bacteriologically. No outside bugs were in my suit. I might have suffocated, but my corpse would have remained uncorrupted. Such a comfort. I replaced the trap and filter with a fresh unit and fit a charged bottle of air onto the back of the suit. Then I gave every inch of my chastity-suit an inspection for worn spots, for bubbles forming on its moist surface -- an inspection as painstaking and as sure as a window washer's check of his working harness, or an exhibition jumper's folding of his parachute. Satisfied that the suit was all set for my next adventure into the world of normal, septic human beings, I racked it and the helmet in my locker and walked out into the garden. There I stretched out on the grass under the ultra-violets, refreshing my tan while I waited for Dr. McQueen to come up from the sump. The garden was my favorite room in the Big Tank. It was in establishing the garden that I'd discovered that my Machiavellian mind is articulated to a pair of green thumbs. The crafty bit came over coffee in the cafeteria. I, of course, just sat there to listen and talk; not even C.U. Cafeteria coffee is aseptic enough for a Lapin to drink, even if there were some way to get a cup of the stuff inside the helmet of a sterility-suit. Anyway, I chided these two graduate students from the botany department about the research possibilities they were missing by not growing any gnotobiotic green stuff. I gave them the Boom-Food pitch. Would cabbages, grown in an environment free of bacteria, grow large as king farouks? I hit them with the Advance the Frontiers of the Biological Science line: could soil-nitrates be utilized by legumes in the absolute absence of Nitrobacteriaceae? TP HE two botanists leaped to my vegetable bait like a brace of starving aphids. A couple days after I'd commenced my con, three tons of quartz sand were shipped through the Big Tank's main autoclave. The lifeless stuff was poured over a grill of perforated pipes. The pipes were connected to a brewtank of hydroponic juices, and the wet sand was planted with germfree seeds of grass, tomatoes, carrots, and other useful herbs. We Lapins had a ball, planting the aseptic seeds in the dirtless dirt eagerly as a band of ribbon-hungry #-H'ers. What had been our sunroom blossomed, after a decent period of germination, into our lawn and garden. For some reason, the garden of our Eden never got an apple-tree. But we did have lettuce on our sterile sandwiches now, and fresh tomatoes, infinitely superior in texture and taste to the "radared" fruit -- almost pureed by the highenergy beams that made it germfree -- that we'd grown up on. The lesser mammals with whom we twenty-nine Lapins shared the Big Tank, the rabbits and guineapigs and hamsters and like small fowl, didn't go much for fresh vegetables, having developed a palate for an autoclaved diet. The monkeys, though, proved to be real competitors for carrots and raw sweet corn. They had to be locked out of the garden, rather as certain of their disobedient relatives had been. I reached out from my supine, sun-drenched position to pull a turnip. I shook off the moist sand and wiped the hydroponic wetness off my shorts, to munch grittily while I waited for the Chief to join me. As soon as he'd soaked in the formaldehyde mixture for half an hour, Dr. McQueen came up through the manhole. Under the shower he squirted the chemical B.O. off his modified sterility-unit, then came out into the garden to join me, dragging his air-hose. We sat side by side on the park bench I'd built beside the onion-patch. (I was fond of my onions. They were the only living things in the Big Tank with the honest stink of life to them). "Where did you plant the marijuana, Johnny?" the Chief asked me. His voice was muffled by the wetness of his suit-speaker. "Now, there's a pregnant idea," I said. "We won't plant muggles, Chief. We'll plant tobacco. All we Lapins need to keep us happy is a good solid vice like smoking." I looked at the Chief. "Why'd you follow me here, Dr. McQueen? I know I've been naughty." "Self-pity doesn't became a man, Johnny," he said. "And why the hell not?" I demanded, my blood-pressure ready to challenge any manometer in sight. "If I can feel compassion for some poor joker on TV, why can't I hurt a little for myself -- for John Bogardus, swaddled from his darling by a damned plastic divingsuit? I was -- I am -- in love with Anne, Doctor." "Your marriage-night would kill you, John," he said. fists, then flopped down onto the grass, laughing at the picture I saw. Battle of the Century. In this corner, wearing helmet, chastity-suit, and thirty-five feet of airhose, Roy McQueen, Ph. D. In the far corner, clad only in brown trunks (grass-stained on the seat, folks), John Bogardus, M.D. "It makes a grand old dirty joke, doesn't it?" "It makes a painful reality," Dr. McQueen said. "I know how you must lie awake nights, thinking about gradually acclimatizing yourself to the contaminated world in which Anne lives. You know, though, that the death-rate with the lower animals who've tried this acclimatization is steep. Even the survivors don't survive very long, because of their low gut-tone and their tardy antibody response. I suppose, though, that the imminence of death is as helpless before love as the locksmith." Dr. McQueen sighed. "If it's what you want, Johnny, I'll ignore everything we both know about the probable consequences and help you break out of here... Think how embarrassed you'd feel, though, if you died of a B. subtilis septicemia or a fulminant chickenpox the day before the wedding." "I could have married Anne, and made her either an unkissed bride or an early widow," I said. "Neither of these alternatives struck me as an attractive career for the woman I love, so I left her. It's so logical it's practically simple arithmetic. Anne put up a fight to keep me, Chief; it was most warming to my amour-propre. Women aren't logical like us men of science. What a stinking situation!" "It is," Dr. McQueen said. "But remember, John, lovers outside the Big Tank often get just as starcrossed as you and Anne." "And they have dental caries to contend with, which we don't," I said. "Somehow, Chief, we'll get this experiment into its second generation, past the miseries of the gnotobiotic first-born, we Adams and Eves who were delivered into purity by aseptic Caesarian section. Maybe we'll have to toss coins or draw cards to pair up for parenthood. But any kids we raise will be spared that indignity. Know how I've got it figured, Chief? We've got to make provision for exogamous matings, right? Novelty, in other words, is essential to romance. Here's the way we'll work it. We'll set half the babies, boys and girls together, on one side of a wall, half on the other side. We'll have established two tribes of kids, each growing up in ignorance of the other; and we'll keep them strictly apart till they're in their middle teens. Then, maybe the night of the Junior Prom, we'll cut a doorway in that wall and introduce them to each other." D R. McQueen smiled. "That will be a splendid evening, John. And a situation to make an anthropologist's mouth water. You may have found the answer to one of your children's major problems. I only wish we had as simple a solution to the current troubles of John Bogardus." "Don't blame yourself for what's happened to me," I said. "I've carried on pretty bad today, but that doesn't mean that I or any of the other Lapins blame you for causing us to be birthed into the Big Tank. It had to be done. Once Dr. Reyniers had made gnotobiotics possible, a colony of germ-free humans became available. Y ou did a good and honest job of bringing us colonists up, Chief. As good a job as anyone could do." "Thank you, John," he said. "I often wonder, though, whether the Nuremberg Principles really gave us the right to build and populate this germless microcosm. We told your mothers when they volunteered that the results of raising humans gnotobiotically would be important. They have indeed. Thousands of lives have been saved by what we've learned here. We saw to it, as we'd also promised your mothers, that your health hasn't suffered by reason of experiments, that you've been given the education you need to earn a good living, and especially that your dignity as human beings has always been respected. The core question is, did we have the right to involve fellow humans, not yet bom, in a process the end of which we couldn't entirely predict? Enough of this, though. My conscience is my own problem. For your immediate relief I can offer only: keep busy." "Work is dandy, but liquor's quicker," I said. "A wound of the heart calls for a therapeutic drunk." "I'll honor your prescription, Doctor," the Chief said. "The moment I get outside, I'll Seitz you some of my own Scotch." He stood up and caught hold of his air-hose. "Forgive me for behaving so like Pollyanna, John," he said. "I wish I could offer you relief more potent than Scotch and sympathy." "Such spiritual Band-aids are all the help there is, Chief. Thank you for them." He slapped me on the shoulder with his gloved right hand, then walked through the shower-room, trailing his black air-hose, and dropped down the manhole into the formaldehyde sump on his way back out into the world. I sat on my bench in my artificial garden in the middle of the great steel womb I'd been delivered into, and I thought about my Anne. # TF I had a chisel and about four tons of Carrara marble," the girl standing behind me said, "I'd hack me out a statue on your model, and call it The Thinker." Dorothy -- the Firebird -- Damien plumped her little backside onto the bench beside me and scintillated eagerness to converse. I didn't want to talk to anyone at the moment, certainly not to the Firebird. To employ a metaphor from an appetite less exalted than love, seeing the Firebird after losing Anne was too much like being offered hamburger after having had a filet mignon snatched from under nose. Still, as my peripheral vision distributed five-foot-three, I realized that my metaphor was false. That flame-colored hair and impish, freckled face; that halter taut as a double-barreled ballista cocked to fire twin rounds; I turned my attention to the girlscape beside me, quite innocent of covetousness, my interest purely aesthetic. No hamburger, this. Firebird Damien was filet mignon. But she wasn't Anne. Suddenly I was contrite toward my fellow captive. "You're looking splendid, Miss Damien," I said. "And you got a face peeled off the iodine bottle. Tell mamma where it hurts." "Don't delve, doll." "Woman-trouble?" she asked. "The term is tautological," I said. "Woman and trouble are synonyms. If the language had any logic the words would rhyme." The Firebird put a freckled arm across my shoulder and squeezed my deltoid with her resting hand. I shrugged. "Don't try to shake me loose, Johnny," she said. "I'm trying to find out what sort of people you are. Whether you're a Shrinker or a Flesh-Presser." "Obviously, you're of the Shrinker persuasion," I said. "Hoo-hah! Shrinkers are the other race from me," the Firebird said. "They're the people who quail at shaking hands, who never slap a back nor playfully pinch. They hate to be crowded, don't like to be touched. My sort of people, though, tend to cuddle like puppies, or like cattle in a thunderstorm; we take comfort in the closeness of other humans. We're not erotic about this, Johnny. Not necessarily erotic, I mean. We have our moments, too, or the Shrinkers would long since have taken over the world in spite of their dreadful handicap. We're bers. The kind who say hello to you with a Roman handshake and a clasp on the shoulder. We're the doctors with the healing touch, the most tender nurses. We're the Flesh-Pressers." She gently squeezed my shoulder-muscle again to demonstrate. "Tell me whafs the matter, Johnny. Maybe I can help." trouble," I said. "Anne and I are through. It was hopeless. I was like the goldfish in love with the cat. So I called our romance to a halt today and drove home in my little green sports-car, feeling a little green and hardly sporty at all. Please don't mention this again, Firebird; not till I'm old and bald and my wound has healed to a thin white scar." "Can I say one thing?" "You will, so do." "I'm really sorry, Johnny." "Thank you, Firebird," I said. "The Chief promised to send some therapeutic juices through the Seitz filter. If you've a mind to sample a little sterile White Horse, perhaps tie one on with me this evening, you'd be most welcome." "I'll be proud and happy," the Firebird said. She scooted even closer. I found her propinquity not at all unpleasant. Was I perhaps of the Flesh-Presser clan myself? The girT smelled good, the faint wholesome feminine odor of my Lapin foster-sisters -- a perfume an outside wench, host to a universe of bacteria, could approximate only with Pepsodent and the most meticulous attention to her underarms, I gather from TV. "How am I to entertain you, sir?" the Firebird asked me. "I have current gossip, vintage scandal, clever anecdotes lifted from the steaming pages of my autoclaved Reader's Digest, imitations of birdsongs -- heavy on the matingcalls, these -- and sheer adoration." She paused. "Scratch that last offering, Johnny," she said. "It's unhygienic for a girl to wear her heart on her sleeve, even here." "I've lost touch with the Big Tank social whirl these last few weeks," I said. "I've been spending all my alive-time in the greater world of Valparaiso, Indiana. Bring me abreast of the local gossip, Firebird, if you please." "Gladly. First there's the case of Mary deWitte. She's still on the trail of her basketball star -- a fellow named Lofting -- confident that somehow they'll manage to compromise her hateful purity... Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Mary," she said, seeing that I was frowning. "I was just thinking," I said. "Miss deWitte and I might get together to establish an Amour Anonymous group in the Big Tank." "If you do, Johnny," the Firebird said softly, "write me up a card as a charter member." "The Chief was talking about Mary deWitte only a few minutes ago," I said. "Hasn't she accepted the fact that we Lapins can't hope to breed with those jungle weeds outdoors?" "Have you accepted that fact, Johnny?" the Firebird asked. "Apt question," I admitted. "Sure. I've decided that Anne is as unavailable to me as Mars is. I don't know which makes me more bitter, Firebird; losing Anne or being denied the chance at the stars. Now that the solar system is getting man's footprints all over it, now that the Orion ships are slamming out to Mars and back on a busline's schedule, and the biggest ship of all is being fitted for deep space at the back of the moon, the constellations don't seem much further off than Chicago. But not for me." "You think you're bitter, bud, you should hear me with my hair down," the Firebird said. "But we've had dirges enough for one evening. Your whiskey should be filtered through by now. Let's go wet our Scotch aperitif, and have dinner." "I'm not hungry," I said. "I just ate a turnip." "Will turnips make you big and strong? You need solider food, like Scotch. That's my professional opinion, Doctor." She got up and .tugged at my hand. "Come on, Johnny. I'm not about to let you sit here all evening and brood." "Is this your prescription, sweet Firebird?" I asked. "That I'm to go back to the madding crowd, mingle with my twenty-eight fellows in aseptic togetherness? Well, you're probably right." I got up from my park-bench to walk with her, hand-in-hand, to the dining room, stopping en route at my room for a shirt. Dinner was a formal affair in the Big Tank, shirts for the gentlemen and shoes for all. r   HE other Lapins were already eating. They greeted me and especially the Firebird with jokes and fellowshippy sounds. I felt very much at home with them. There was Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astrophysicist, his magnificent u.v.-blackened body a study in the surface musculature of the human male. At his table was Karl Fyremeister, who has a practically complete collection of the airmail stamps of the world to console him on long winter evenings. All the stamps are quite sterile. Karl was talking with Gloria Moss, whose academic specialty was group dynamics. She demonstrated muscular dynamics so attractively that when she walked about the campus in her chastity-suit she drew whistles, a truly remarkable accolade when you consider that the c-suit is somewhat less faithful to the wearer's form than a poncho. Keto Hannamuri sat the four-place table with Bud and Karl and Gloria. He was my fellow-medic among McQueen's Beasts, a pediatrician. Kids loved him. Wearing his sterility-suit as he made his Ped Ward rounds, that Oriental smile showing through the faceplate of his mask, Keto seemed to the television-nurtured youngsters the very model of the friendly extra-solar alien, complete with space-suit. Besides his flair for showmanship, Keto was a remarkably fine doctor. As we passed his table, he slapped the Firebird's short-shorted callipygia in a kinship-gesture of the Flesh-Presser clan. I felt a sudden overwhelming love for all these people, my brothers-and-sister-in-exile. I took my tray to sit down quick with the Firebird before my reserve, depleted by the emotional beating I'd taken at noon, gave way. The menu featured radared steak. The meat was germ-free and somewhat tenderized by the high-energy beams. (A purist in culinary proteins might go so far as to say denatured.) The nearest any Lapin came to ingesting a bacterium was here at the table, where The bugs achieved a post-mortem revenge by triggering the production of faint bacterial antibodies in our blood. Besides the steaks and the myriads of murdered microbes, we had an aseptic salad prepared from Tank-grown hydroponic vegetation, dressed with Roquefort, the my private hall of fame as the noblest product ever a mold gave man. The Scotch that Dr. McQueen had promised to send was on hand, Seitz-filtered into a sterile White Horse bottle. Not really caring to dilute my poignancies with alcohol, I passed the whiskey among the tables nearby. ' I 'HE Firebird was managing to A stay quite close to me, though technically remaining on her own side of the table, eating and talking and now and then flashing me such a glance of yearning that I was pierced by the sight of her and by a remembered line of e. e. Cummings's:... your slightest look easily will unclose me though I have closed myself as fingers... Just as suddenly, I realized that mine was a highly pathological state of mind, the rinse-phase of the brain-wash. Autism can be produced as surely by loneliness or unrequitable love as by injecSo I turned my attention to my environment, consciously flexing my muscles of mental health. I answered the Firebird's sallies with automatic flippancy. I ate my steak, savoring its flavor. And I looked about the dining-room, examining it as though I'd never eaten there before. The Lapins' dining-room in the Big Tank is about the size of a railroad restaurant car. (Not that I've ever been aboard a train to make the comparison. The stringencies of the sterility-suit tie such of us to the Big Tank on a short leash: the most sanitary of outside washrooms would prove a pesthole to a Lapin.) The kitchen, which was under the supervision of the Firebird, our dietitian, could have been squeezed into a telephone booth. It served chiefly as receiving-station for the autoclave and the radar-room, through which all our food came. With its ten little four-place tables, each covered with a gypsy red-checkerboard cloth, set with a green glass vase of Tank-grown daisies, our diningroom was friendly enough. The Tank-ness of it, though, was emphasized by a mural along one wall, a fantasy of stars and men and microbes that half a dozen of us had planned and painted one week. Where the mural was now had once been a picture window, overlooking a green stretch of Central campus, a source of comfort to us all. An Air Force jet, though, pulling out of a dive invisibly above us, had sonic-boomed a crack in both panes of the double glass of the window, causing a general alert as we realized that some airborne Proteus or fortunate Staphylococcus or lonely Aspertress through this almost microscopic breach in our walls. Careful decontamination had saved our sterility, but now the Big Tank had no window. "I was saying..." the Firebird said, in a firm voice. "Sorry, doll. You were saying?" "That Mary deWitte isn't here. Do you suppose she's still outside? She checked out her sterility-suit about the same time you did." "That's a good nine hours ago," I said, glancing at the clock set over Saturn on our mural. "Either Mary has been on a restrictedfluids diet, or True Love has made hercareless of visceral discomfort." "Don't be coarse, Johnny." "The demands of the kidney are as exigent as those of the heart, Firebird," I said. "I think I'd better call Dr. McQueen." "You'll only cause trouble for her and Lofting," Firebird said. "I've decided that it's better to be lovesick than dead," I explained, getting up from the table. ner of the dining-room and dialed Dr. McQueen's home. "Chief? John Bogardus. Mary deWitte still hasn't come home to roost. I think we'd better find her before she does something splendid and foolish." "Like perhaps marrying her contaminated basketball-player and setting out on a suicidal honeymoon?" Dr. McQueen suggested. "You're right, John; we should prevent that sort of thing. The rub is, we're too late. I got a phonecall from Mary a few minutes after I got home this evening. She abandoned her sterility-suit in a downtown Chicago hotel room at noon today, and married her fledgling lawyer in a civil ceremony at one o'clock. I tried to find out from her where she was, but she just said she was very happy and hung up." "Hell! What are we going to do?" "I'm flying to Chicago, where I'll ask the help of the police in finding Mary," the Chief said. "Once I've run down the happy couple, though, damned if I know what I'll do next. Shall I stand outside the bridal chamber with a syringeful of broad-spectrum antibiotics, waiting for Mary to sneeze?" "They'll have a short marriage," I said. "Mary knows how likely it is that she'll never grow old," Dr. McQueen said. "But I suspect that she hasn't said a word to her husband. I'd better go now, John. My plane leaves in twenty minutes." "Don't let this prey on you too much, Chief," I said. "We Lapins have free will, too. We're old enough to bear the responsibilities for our own actions." "Thank you, Johnny." Dr. McQueen hung up. I returned to the table with no enthusiasm for the remaining half of my steak. "What's up, Johnny?" the Firebird asked me. "Now we are twenty-eight," I said. "They were married in Chicago at one o'clock." "How wonderful!" the Firebird exulted. She stood and pounded our table-top with the vase, scattering damp daisies on the cloth. "Quiet, everybody! I've got an announcement." The chatter over dessert simmered down. "Mary deWitte got married today -- here's to the bride!" Firebird slopped two ounces of White Horse into her glass and downed them at a heroic gulp. She sat, sputtering. The chatter at the other tables crescendoed as our colleagues reminded one another of the significance of the Firebird's news. "Will you also propose the toast at Mary's wake?" I asked. " say!" "It was, Firebird," I said. "Forgive me, please. This thing has left me in a wounding mood." "Is Mary really in such danger?" Firebird asked. "She may last a week, not much more. Today she'll meet Klebsiella, probably; perhaps E. coli and Shigella. Pretty soon she'll start to sniffle with the first common cold she's ever experienced. Polio get to her first, and establish themselves before there is sufficient growth of bacterial flora to give them competition. Her intestinal walls are thin and weak, so she may suffer megacolon as a result of gas-producing fermentation. From a pathologist's point of view, I'll find it most instructive to learn the manner of Mary Lofting's death. From the standpoint of a friend and fellow Lapin, though, I'll think her death a damned shame." "I'm getting a little drunk, Johnny," the Firebird said, "and a little maudlin. So, say you're right. After all, you're the doctor and I'm just a dumb dietitian. But don't you think maybe it's worth while, what Mary's done? Condemning herself to die, I mean, because she's really in love, and death is what she's got to pay for a few days' happiness. Don't you think the price is fair, Johnny?" "If I did, I'd be paying it," I said... "No, Firebird. Seizing a little love and poetry before the sacrifice is great stuff for epics, but it doesn't make much sense to me. When I'm married I'll want to see my children all the way through Spock and Gesell. I'll want to grow old with my wife, if you'll excuse the com." "We Flesh-Pressers have a natural reverence for corn," the Firebird said. "It's part of the syndrome. Johnny, if you really want what you just said, want those things badly enough to set up a marriage on half a love, give me a call. Anytime. Even though I don't set your blood aflame." She stood up, a little unsteady, and rubbed her hand across her eyes in a tardy effort to hide tears. "Save the brushoff till tomorrow, Johnny," she said. "Goodnight." "Goodnight, sweet Firebird," I said. She turned and walked quickly from the dining-room. Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astronomer, left his three companions to bring his coffee over and sit with me. Bud was the Lapin who'd have been a Central U. fullback as an undergraduate, if only Dr. McQueen had let him play the game in a chastity-suit. "What will happen to Mary deWitte, John?" he asked. "She'll die," I said. "One flight in the sunlight, then her wings fall off. We Lapins are a fragile race. May I?" I nodded. Dorsey poured some of the Scotch into Firebird's empty water-glass and sipped it. # r T' HE men who devised the Nuremberg Principles failed us when they forgot to underwrite the romantic aspirations of human guinea-pigs," I said. "As a result of their oversight, it seems that McQueen's Beasts have made a bigger contribution to sociology than to bacteriology. We've demonstrated that familiarity doesn't breed. Here we are, now, fourteen pairs of healthy Americans in their middle twenties, and neither a marriage nor a pregnancy amongst us. Why?" 'Tell me, John," Dorsey said. "I'll tell you why," I said. "It's because we're fond of our fostersisters, but we're also a little bored with them. And they with us. We men know every canned peach's flirtations and frailties and conversational gambits so thoroughly that one of us could no more marry one of them than the average outsider could marry his kid sister." "Even that's been done, John, just for principle's sake," Dorsey said. "The Pharaohs wed their sisters because no one else was exalted enough for the honor. Our predicament is not dissimilar. The primal urge, John, will in time overwhelm the curse of contiguity." "Could be," I said. "But it's not just sex that's agonizing me, Bud. Prison has whole constellations of frustration. However warm and understanding our guards may be, this is still a prison, and half of us are stir-crazy. Why did Mike Bohrman take off his chastity-suit last winter, to walk barefoot through the snow with only his suit-shorts on, till he collapsed from the cold? It was a prisonbreak, Bud. So was Mary deWitte's witless marriage. They were both suicide, the lifer's one way over the wall." "Stir-crazy?" Dorsey asked. "You're exaggerating, John." "Open your eyes, Bud," I said. "Look at Karl Fyrmeister's hands, for example. I'm violating no medical confidence to tell you that Karl got his dermatitis as the result of compulsive hand-washing. There's a fine neurotic symptom for a germ-free Lapin! If I'm exaggerating our collective un-sanity, Bud, tell me why Lucy Cashdollar has become an apprentice alcoholic. Why does Fizz Ewell, with an I.Q. that must range in the #'s and the most brhliant record the Nuclear Engineering Department has ever seen, spend six hours a day working crossword puzzles? Why do you have that tic of your left orbicularis oculi? Why am I an insomniac, with a nasty barbiturate habit? Look around, Bud. You'll see that our little home has turned into something of a snakepit. Our neuroses are only garter snakes so far; but they'll grow into cobras, given time and further frustration to feed on." though my mentioning his tic had triggered it. He self-consciously raised his fingers to the vellicating muscle, more to hide than to soothe it. "While our keepers were sending Lapins through every major discipline offered on the campus," he said, "it seems they'd have done well to have trained one of us in psychiatry." "For what?" I demaftded. "So we could have someone right here in the Tank to spoon out our soothing-syrups? Man, we've got a right to be stir-crazy. We're life prisoners and we've committed no crime." I stopped to get my calm back. "Bud," I asked, "do you know what I want more than anything else, next to Anne?" "Of course I do," Dorsey said. "Like you've pointed out, John, we've got no secrets from each other. Your big itch is to step aboard one of fhe Orion ships. You want to join up for the chase after interplanetary white whales." "It's only natural," I said. "When we were kids, Bud, we saw the same TV programs, the same space-adventure movies, as the kids who are now the men in space. Every boy in America was conditioned to long for a space-suit. I'm one of the ones who could have made it, Bud. I love medicine, and I think I'm going to be a damned fine pathologist; but I'd turn in my M.D. for an Ordinary Spaceman's ticket without a second's hesitation. When I read, two years ago, that Immermann had discovered that human skull in the oxide rubble below Roosevelt Ridge in Syrtis Major, I cried for the first time since I was six years old. Twenty thousand years ago there was man on Mars. And I'm confined to Earth for life." "How much do you know about the Immermann skull, John?" Dorsey asked me. "What I've said. Is there more?" "One point," Dorsey said. "My field, radio astronomy, is a deepspace sort of specialty; but I do from time to time condescend to read the Journal of Aerology and the other parochial, solar-system publications. Somewhere I read that there's something odd about that skull Colonel Immermann dug up." "If you're suggesting that it was a second Piltdown hoax, planted in that Martian talus to jar larger Air Force appropriations from Congress, keep it from me," I said. "I cherish the illusion that the Immermann is genuine, and a mystery." uT T isn't phony, and it's sure A as hell a mystery," Dorsey said. "Colonel Immermann's initial report of the skull's discovery was verified by every member of the Orion Gamma's crew, a gang recuited mostly from ServiceAcademy grads and other high moral types. The peculiarity I'm talking about isn't forensic. It's functional. If you were to mix in the Immermann skull with an assortment of skulls of modern western men, age forty or thereabouts, only one characteristic would allow you to pick it out from the mixture again. 'Look, Mom -- No Cavities!' Like us Lapins, Immermann Man had acarious teeth." "Because he was germ-free?" I suggested. "It's possible. Or his medical science may have gotten oral bacteria under control with drugs. Maybe he preserved his teeth by diet, or with fluorides in his drinking-water. Perhaps his mother never let him eat candy when he was a kid," Dorsey said. "Who knows? Good teeth and all, though, our Immermann Man died twenty thousand years ago. Why? Was he germ-free, as you suggest; and was he killed by some species of Martian micro-organism that's since gone extinct from drought and a shortage of hosts? The big question, to my mind, is why none of our explorers has yet found any sign of the rest of the expedition." "Expedition?" I asked. "A man could hardly have been alone on Mars," Dorsey said. "From where?" "Pick any 'F'or 'G'-type star with planets," Dorsey said. "After all, it's easier to posit extrasolar man than to suppose a flint-drive spaceship was devised by some early neolithic von Brauns." "I'd never expected to see an astrophysicist take off on such a flight of improbabilia," I said. "John, would you like to hear a thread-recording I just got from the radio observatory at Adelaide?" Dorsey asked. "Hi-fi?" "The radio sky is strictly sparkgap quality, no fi at all," Dorsey said, getting up to lead the way from the dining-room. "This transmission you're going to hear doesn't have anything to do with the ordinary # #.I #centimeter neutral-hydrogen radiation; but of course you realize that our big paraboloid bowls can catch anything from hydrogen hiss to lowflying bats. Remember the Christmas celebration at New Caanan that was telecast to earth a couple years back? That show was caught by the six-hundred-foot receiver at Green Bank, West Virginia, and rebroadcast by C.B.S." IV XT e entered the Big Tank's common room, where a few of our colleagues sat reading or writing notes for tomorrow's classes -- talking; playing chess or bridge; or sitting behind the closed glass doors of the TV alcove watching the picture through stereo spectacles. We entered the alcove at the other end of the room, where the record-player and music library were, and closed the door. Dorsey took a three-inch spool of magnetic thread from his shirt pocket and fit it to the playback head of the machine. "I'm interested in your uninstructed reaction, John," he said. "So don't ask me any questions till you've heard the whole sequence." "Spin it, professor," I said. The Australian thread had a noisy background, sounding like a dozen rashers of bacon tossed into a too-hot skillet. Over this hissing, tered my count of each burst of sequence went: #, #; #, #; #, #; #, #; #, #; #, #; then #, #, #; #, #. There the count stopped climbing and commenced again with the pair of ones, to repeat the whole set again. Dorsey cut off the machine. "I've got four hours of the same thing on this thread," he said. "Want to hear it all, or have you got it already?" "It's obvious, up to a point," I asked. "It's a table of the first eight natural integers and their squares, except for the number seven, which for some reason is split in two." "It took me quite a while to recognize what happened to that seven," Dorsey said. "Listen to it again." He spooled the thread back and I listened again to the fracagain the forty-nine clicks, sevensquared. Dorsey switched off the player. "Let's have the distillate of your cerebrations now, Brothers Bogardus," he said, dropping into the deep, red-leather easy chair beside the thread-player. "It's syncopation, Brother Dorsey,' I said. "I'd never have given my own modest observations so high-flown a title," Dorsey said. "I'd simply have called it, country boy at heart that I am, 'Shave-and-a-Haircut, two-bits!' " "So it is," I said. "Now we've deciphered that broadcast, and listened to the singing commercial. But I'm still puzzled, Bud. We don't have the sponsor's name and address; and I'm not at all sure I caught the name of his product. What's he advertising?" "His presence," Dorsey said. "I interpret the message as a simple CQ." "Seek you?" I asked. "Xes. Radio-ham code for, 'I'm lonely -- will somebody please talk tome?"' T'LL accept that interpretation only till I can think of one even more fantastic," I said. "O.K., John," Dorsey said. "Getting the address of the station was a simple exercise, thanks to my Digger confreres in Adelaide and the men at Harvard's South African radio observatory. We first heard the message two years ago. It's' still being broadcast, unchanged. The fist on the key that sent out our arithmetic message belongs to someone in the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri." "Hot damn!" I said. "But why didn't I know about this? I read Time, and all. Why wasn't this headlined?" "Because it's guesswork," Dorsey explained. "This may be the result of some cosmic coincidence as unrelated to intelligent planning as Bode's Law." "You'll have to explain that to this groundsman," I said. "Bode's law, too, looks like an intelligently devised code of some sort," Dorsey said. "Take the series: #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #. Add # to each number, and divide by ten. The result will be, when you take the asteroid belt into consideration and fudge a little, very nearly the proportional distance from the sun of the first seven planets. Accident, or evidence of intelligent planning? Turned out there are excellent physical reasons for this relationship, reasons old Johann Elert Bode couldn't possibly have guessed. Things like this make astronomers leary of teleology. Make them avoid the splendid guess." "Go ahead, make a splendid guess," I said. "I won't report you to the Astronomers Union." "Sure," Dorsey said. "Alpha Centauri, as the U. Cal's five-meter Luna 'scope demonstrated several years ago, has a system of at least three planets. We don't know much about those planets except their time of revolution." "And that one of them has a citizen clever enough to calculate natural squares and build a radio transmitter..." "... one hell of a transmitter!" Dorsey said. "... and whistle, 'Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits,'" I went on; "which musical interlude argues for a certain degree of conviviality on the part of our Centaurian. This thing of his message, though. Do you think he was just looking for other hams to talk with?" sending out the same 'CQ' for two solid years," Dorsey said. "It's hardly practical to communicate between stars, John. Broadcasting from here to Alpha C. and back, it would take more than nine years just to ask how's the wife and kids. "The way it looks to me, our friend out there got the duty of cutting an educational recording to be broadcast automatically to the rest of the galaxy. Kind of a lighthouse, to help his race get in touch with any relatives it might have. That same recording has been played over and over again ever since, sending To Whom It Might Concern its dual message. Simple math -- and the most persistent rhythmical cliche known to man." "What's being done about it?" I asked. "We've answered," Dorsey said. "A big radio noise on the moon is broadcasting the same message, minus the syncopation, and adding the next two terms; all this beamed toward Alpha Centauri. And two years ago, the Defense Department cut other programs to the bone to start construction of Orion Zeta, the sixth of the big nuclearpulse ships. She's up in von Weizsacker Crater on the back of the moon now, John, nearly finished. She's not meant to call at solarsystem ports." "The government thinks, and you think, that our operator four and a half light-years from here was human," I said. "I can't speak for the government. But that's what I think. Isn't it human to toss notes out to sea in bottles? What's more human than dropping a joke into an arithmetical table?" "All we've got to do to prove your splendid guess is to highjack a germ-free spaceship," I said. "You and me and any of the other Lapins who feel as we do. We'll go shake the hand -- or other prehensile member, if he's not human after all -- of our Centaurian thread-jockey. What's to keep our feet in the mud, when our heads are 'way the hell out in a southern constellation?" "I gather, Herr Doktor, that you jest," Dorsey said. "If you were serious, I'd point out one minor flaw in your blueprint for adventure. It would take our little band of pirates one hundred twenty-five years to get to Alpha Centauri, after we'd stolen the ship. That's with the gas-pedal to the floor." "I was joking," I said. "I was pretending to be the hero of one of those TV space-operas we used to watch... But if I were serious, I don't think a mere century and a quarter would faze me. We couldn't reach our goal in person, Bud; but we could send our children's children. All we'd need to make the trip, if I were serious about my suggestion, would be a few more volunteers. A proper proportion of those volunteers had best be philoprogenitive females." brass will be happy to see its expensive guinea-pigs taking off into space?" Dorsey asked. "Since '#, John, there's been gnotobiotics here at Central University. We're the payoff. We can hardly expect Dr. McQueen to stand on the launching-pad, tossing roses and shouting Bon Voyage as we blast off forever." "I think they could be persuaded to be, if not enthusiastic, at least resigned to our departure," I said. "It does prisoners good to plot escape-plans, even when they're as obviously fantastic as this one," Dorsey said. "Go on, John." "As you say, our purpose in this adventure would be to escape," I said. "There's no place on earth that can take us, so we're forced to escape into space. We'll have to talk this up around the Big Tank to see how many want to break out with us. What the sex-distribution of the volunteers is, whether we've got the right range of specialists to man a spaceship. Right, Bud?" "It's your dream," Dorsey said. "O.K. Immermann Man appears to have been germ-free," I said. "Perhaps his culture had been gnotobiotic for so long that they'd forgotten the existence of microorganisms. Landing on other planets, they'd not rediscover the danger of infectious disease till it was too late. Suddenly they'd start falling, dying of illnesses as mysterious to them as the plague was to men of the Renaissance. This may have been the manner in which the original owner of the Immermann skull died, on Mars. We have a reasonable suspicion that there was germ-free human life in our corner of the galaxy twenty thousand years ago. Perhaps, as you suggested, these visitors were members of an exploration party. From Alpha Centauri? Is our ham who hammered out the table-of-squares a member of that gnotobiotic race? Is he our brother in purity?" "Go on, Johnny," Dorsey said. "You ain't even winded, yet." "The Orion Zeta is being built for deep space," I went on. "Some group from earth is certain to set out in her on the four-generation hop to Alpha Centauri. Would it be morally right to allow this group of ambassadors to be made up of 'normal,' contaminated humans? To carry to a possibly defenseless population a mixed bag of goodies like Micrococcus ureae, Bacillus vulgaris, Staphylococcus aureus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis -- a whole spectrum of benign and malignant bacteria? Remember, Bud, bugs that are benign or only mildly pernicious on earth might prove to be killers away from home." "Lots of maybes," Dorsey said. "Lots of perhapses." # T 'VE got one more shaft in the quiver," I said. "This one's got a poisoned point, and it carries the names of our keepers. It's dirty, Bud. It's hardly fair to Dr. McQueen to use such blackmail." "Blackmail sounds like just what we need," Dorsey said. "O.K. Thirty of us were bom into the Big Tank," I said. "One has already died as a result of his mental state, caused by imprisonment. Another is certain to die within the next few days. Had they been entirely sane, Mike Bohrman and Mary deWitte wouldn't have shed their sterility-suits outside the Tank. Without purpose to their lives, they cracked up. "Two of us dead in the first twenty-six years of the human "Two, out of an original thirty. An attrition-rate of six and seventenths percent. How many more Lapins will wander out to commit innocent suicide in the snow, their minds messed up by the frustration and hopelessness of the guinea-pig way of life? How many more of us will escape from the Big Tank into the morgue? The Orion Zeta could be our salvation, Bud. It could give us the sort of purpose human beings must have in order to live." Dorsey shook his head. "The Defense Department set up its young Clydeside in von Weizsaqker Crater just to build, test, and launch one ship: the Zeta. Two years of round-the-chronometer work have been poured into her," dollars so far, Johnny; and they haven't bought the living-room furniture yet. I hardly think the generals will volunteer the result of all this effort to serve as psychotherapy for twenty-eight neurotic Hoosiers." "You miss the point, Bud," I said. "We Lapins were born to crew the Zeta. Where else could you find a crew that's already spent twenty-odd years or so inside a box, living together in close quarters, being conditioned against claustrophobia? This Big Tank of ours could be a grounded spaceship, Bud! It's airtight, armored against outside dangers, even has the formaldehyde sump to serve us for airlock. What's a sterility-suit, any. way, but a special breed of space suit? Could you find a better cre than us twenty-eight, skilled in two dozen professions, young, sound o to take on the job? None of whom will ever have appendicitis, halij tosis, toothache, barber's itch, or athlete's foot? Any one of whom can, in case of accident, first-ai( his wounds with a spit-damp hand kerchief, and heal wholesome! Man, we're what those generals have been dreaming of! Once we've been trained to aim that big ship and kick her off the back of the moon, we'll be the finest extra-solar crew that ever blasted free of the system!" "One question," Dorsey said "Where do I sign Ship's Articles?" T R. McQueen was in Chicago for three days before he found Mary Lofting, nee deWitte. She had wakened that morning suffering from a headache, a stiff neck, and four degrees of fever. Her husband had called an ambulance to take her to Michael Reese Hospital. There, just before she'd lost consciousness, Mary had asked a authorities had in turn called Dr. McQueen in Chicago. She came home on a stretcher, a bottle of fructose solution dripping into her veins. Mary had already been loaded with a double-barreled shotgun-blast of every antibiotic she could safely take. Dr. McQueen rode back to the University in the ambulance with her, and with her husband. Lofting, holding the girl's hand, explained time after time that she'd never told him about the likely consequence of her removing her chastity-suit in an unchaste world. The basketball player said he'd never forgive himself if she didn't recover. Mary was taken to the C.U. hospital. Wearing a sterility-suit, I attended her examination, which was conducted by my chief-ofservice, the staff pathologist, as well as the hospital's internist and neurologist. I took a few cc's of Mary's cerebrospinal fluid back inated labs. There, to anticipate a few days' deliberate bacterial growth in media, her meningoencephalitis was discovered to have been caused by Erysipelothrix monocytogenes, an organism whose more usual victims are rabbits. Mary's husband could explain her coming in contact with so exotic a pathogen only by the fact that they'd visited the Brookfield Zoo on the second, and last, day of their honeymoon. By the time these technical details were known they were academic. The epidemiological problem had become secondary to the pathological. Mary Lofting had died. I was asked to assist Dr. McQueen and the senior pathologist at autopsy -- I was, after all, a resident in pathology, and had besides a special interest in this case -- but I found the job more than I could take. Mary had been a sister to me for twenty-three years. In tears, I left the morgue during the classic cruciform incision. brary. I recognized her through the anonymity of her chastity-suit by the characteristic pose of her head and arms as she sat reading: elbow braced on the table-top, her right fist blocked stubbornly against the plastic cheek of her helmet, her left arm curved around the book as though to be a breakwater against distraction. I sat beside her, and said, "Dorothy." Without a word she closed her book, stood, and replaced it on the shelf. We walked hand in hand out into the autumn campus. "Last year," I said, "it was Mike Bohrman, walking through snow-drifts in his suit-shorts, wanting for once in his life to feel the real world against his skin. So he died. Five days ago, Mary deWitte married the man she loved. So she died," I said. "Our life isn't generally as hopeless as that," the Firebird said. "No," I said. "We're fed and entertained. We're being educated at one of the finest universities in the world -- for us, she's been a genuine, homogenized-milk Alma Momma. She even gives us an allowance to buy airmail stamps for our collection, or bar-bells, or gas for our sports-car. She's given us everything we need for happiness. Everything, Firebird, but purpose. That's why we're all going nuts -- why Mike went barefoot in the snow and Mary used love for a suicide-weapon. That's why we've got to break free." "Free?" she asked. "You mean, free to step outside the Big Tank, shed our sterility-suits, turn septic and die?" "I mean free to step off earth." We sat by mutual consent on a bench beneath a sugar maple, brushing aside half an inch of multicolored leaves. I told the Firebird of the broadcast from a southern star, and about the Immermann skull. I told her all I knew about the Orion rockets, the nuclearpulse ships that had gone through five prototypes to reach the Zeta. "She's built to travel light-years," I said. "I'm going with her when she leaves." "Of course, I'm going with you," she said. "Your spacemen will need a dietitian to make metabolic sense out of algal soups and hydroponic salads for the first couple of generations, and to teach the youngsters to take over the kitchen once they're on their own." "Firebird," I said, "I'm happy to welcome you aboard. Now we've got to get that ship." "We'll get it," she said. "Understand, Johnny, it's not the professional challenge that makes me want to blast off for Alpha Centauri with four generations to feed, I've got no special urge to tame frontiers. The reason I'm going forgive me for mentioning it again, and cold sober -- is to stay near, you." I stood up, drawing her up after me, and was struck again by the aptness of the nickname, "chastitysuit." "Perhaps I've overestimated the effectiveness of a certain taboo," I said. "Come on, sweet Firebird. Let's get back to the Tank to help Bud recruit the rest of our crew."  for eagles. My fellow volunteers-designate and I, all twentyeight of us, were gathered in the lounge of English Hall, creaking and wheezing in our sterility-suits, looking very ready for hard space. The colonel wore crisp blues. His tunic was decorated by a triple row of medals-for-merit. It was not his fault that he wore no battlestars. Barrett had graduated from the Air Academy into our seemingly endless Pax Desperandum. He'd never had a chance to see a roentgen radiated in anger. The Marsman Badge at the center of his left breast pocket was one rarely seen: the circle-with-arrow symbol of Mars had within it a been a member of the Third Mars Expedition, back in the days when a flight to Mars had been something more than a teamster's run. The Marsman Badge was balanced by the star-topped, laurel-wreathed -- and anachronistic -- silver wings of a Command Pilot. As I shook hands with Colonel Barrett I found it difficult to conceal the envy that writhed in me. He'd seen the continents spread cloud-flecked on the receding, curving earth, the stars shining beside the sun against the black sky. He'd splashed across the dust-carpet of the moon, tasted water melted from the polar cap of Mars. As a member of Expedition Three, he'd been with the crew of the Orion Gamma when Immermann discovered the twenty-thousand-yearold skull at the base of Roosevelt Ridge. Colonel Barrett addressed his remarks to me. "Central University," he said, "will lose the results ment if you people leave. They'll be getting off cheap, compared to us. The Defense Department has been requested to turn over to you twenty-eight untrained groundsmen the greatest spaceship yet built, the first of the interstellar ships. The Zeta cost the taxpayers four dollars a pound to build. She weighs five hundred thousand tons, Dr. Bogardus." "You're mistaken, Colonel, when you say that the University's investments in gnotobiotic research over the past eighty years will be lost if we Lapins end our part of the experiment. That's not true. That investment has been repaid many times over. More has been learned of human physiology, nutrition, and disease processes in the twenty-six years' study of germfree humans than was learned concerning these subjects during any similar period in medical history. "And, Colonel," I went on, "we're not untrained. Bud Dorsey, to your right, is an astrophysicist who worked with the Agassiz Observatory team in mapping the interstellar anti-matter dust clouds. Dr. Keto Hannamuri is a pediatrician. Dorothy Damien, our Firebird, is a dietitian. Fizz Ewell is a nuclear engineer. Karl Fyrmeister's degree is in chem engineering, as is Janie Bohrman's. Gloria Moss is working on her doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, Colonel, deals with the social dynamics of small human groups such as ours. Alfred MacCoy, standing behind you, has written three symphonies and an oratorio so far; and R.C.A. Victor has threaded them all with the New York Philharmonic. Lucy Cashdollar has had her works of sculpture displayed in the National Gallery and at London's Tate. There are some few resources here, Colonel." "I didn't intend to belittle your intellectual accomplishments, Dr. Bogardus," the Colonel said. "I've read your dossiers. They're impressive. When I called you untrained, what I really meant was that you're totally unskilled in terms of my own specialty. I meant that none of you knows anything of the skills of simple chemical rocketry, much less the techniques required nuclear-pulse thrust." "We can learn," I said. "I hope so," Colonel Barrett said, "because I've been ordered to teach you." it W E'RE in?" Bud Dorsey de" manded. "You're in," Colonel Barrett said. "The decision in the Pentagon went against my recommendation that professionals in rocketry be recruited for the Alpha Centauri flight. The generals liked your argument, Dr. Bogardus, that we should send a germfree ship and a germ-free crew to a possibly germ-free planet. In a sense, this is tradition. Back in the '#s, moon-missiles were sponged down with Lysol before launching, just in case they got where they were aimed at. Our people didn't want to contaminate the moon's surface with earthly microorganisms, cluttering up the picture for the bacteriologists who were scheduled to arrive later. The Chief of Staff said that if there is a germ-free population on one of the Centaurus planets, we must not initiate our contact with them by handing out the sort of prizes Cook's crew brought to the South Seas -- measles, tuberculosis, smallpox. We can't know that even innocuous bacteria might not be fatal to a gnotobiotic, alien population. So you go." "Colonel," I said, "I'm sure that Washington didn't give up the Zeta to us out of sheer altruism. What's their real reason?" "Where else could we get a crew of twenty-eight men and women who've given proof they can live together for a long period of time, peaceably, retaining a fair degree of sanity? Miss Moss's studies in group dynamics were most interesting to the Chief of Staff. Doubtless they did much to influence his decision in your favor." "There's one thing I don't understand, Colonel Barrett." "What's that, Miss Damien?" he asked. "Why is it that you seem so unhappy about our being accepted as the Zeta's crew?" she asked. "After all, you've been given the duty of training us to take her between stars. That's a pretty important assignment, isn't it, even for a bird colonel?" "You're right, Miss Damien," Colonel Barrett said. "My new assignment is a vital one. You must forgive me if I seemed curt and unfriendly." He paused. "I've been trying to hide my feelings, but evidently I failed. You see, Miss Damien, my wife and I had headed the previous list of volunteers -- the contaminated crew." rocket that had brought us from Memorial Orbital Station, I'd thought von Weizsacker Crater the most impressive sight I'd ever seen. The Orion Zeta looked from our height like nothing so much as a miniature silver cocktail-shaker, glinting at the center of the vast circle of von Weizsacker. Later, standing a few hundred feet from Zeta's base, I'd found the order of impressiveness reversed. The great ship was a tower of fifteen hundred feet, blacking out the stars like a geometric mountain; while the crater's twenty-thousandfoot ringwall, so far away in all directions, was no more obtrusive that a decorative hedge. This ship, I thought, is the intelligent comet on which we'd be passengers until the day we died, some two and a fraction light-years away from home. We were guaranteed immortality, though, in our offspring. Our descendants would very literally become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, as our bodies were resurrected to vegetable life in the hydroponic tanks of the ship. We Lapins clustered close together on the moon-dust, staring up the sides of our ship. Her upper reaches were hidden by the globular bulge of the enormous thrustchamber, where kiloton capsules of nuclear fuel would be fired, three a second, to blast us into space. In this great ship our children would be born and would die, and our grandchildren as well. From the Zeta, our aged greatgrandchildren, limping down long ladderways to the exit-hatches on the arms of their teen-aged grandsons, would step onto the soil of a planet that circled Alpha Centauri. One hundred and twenty-five years from now, I thought, clasping the Firebird's hand in mine. So little in history, so big in human lives! One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Brooklyn Bridge had been brand-new. U.S. Grant, defrauded and cancer-ridden, was gritting his teeth against the pain to write his memoirs. President Chester A. Arthur had just signed into law a bill prohibiting polygamy in the territories. As far away as those things lay our goal. We entered the sublunarian chambers beneath the ship. Dr. McQueen had preceded us here; and under his direction the Orion Zeta had been made as aseptic as the Big Tank itself. Colonel Barrett and his subordinates who'd train us to operate the Zeta would have to wear sterility-suits aboard her, and would enter through the formaldehyde sump that was now her only entrance. Even the dust of the moon was not entirely sterile. The Firebird took my arm to urge me toward the liquid gateway to the ship, eager to see our new home. "Wait," I said, holding her back till all the others had gone thrnucrh thp antisentic nool. "Cold feet, Johnny?" she teased me. "Gloria Moss once told me, Firebird, that a healthy respect for tradition is essential to the organic strength of a group such as ours," I said. "So..." I bent and picked the Firebird up, her weight moontrimmed to that of a three-year-old. She put her arms around my neck as I carried her down the ladder into the poisonous decontamination tank that was our front door ! to Alpha Centauri. a step -- when the star trail is the road that leads to -- The Hills of Home T HE boy on the riverbank was named Kimmy. He was eleven, but he looked younger. He stood as though listening to some distant sound. There was a tarnished nickelplated faucet in his hand and a wooden sword had been thrust through the belt of his denim shorts. The river ran still and deep, gray and green in the eddies, with the smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. The madrone and willow trees stood limp in the early evening quiet. It wasn't the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched the gemencrusted cliffs of the shore of the Lost Sea of Korus and had vanished, leaving only the stillness of dusk and the lonely cry of high flying waterbirds. From downstream came the faint sound of music. It might have been a phonograph playing a Rudy Vallee record in one of the summer cabins with names like Pollyann Roost and Stumble Inn. But to Kimmy it was the hated cry of the Father of Therns, calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of helpless pilgrims borne into this Valley of the Lost Sea of Korus by the mysterious Iss. Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian radium pistol into his left hand and checked his harness. A soft smile touched his lips and he brushed a dark fall of hair out of his eyes. He was well armed. There was nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned upstream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search for Tars Tarkas along the base of the Golden Cliffs... r  "HE Charge of Quarters said, "Oh three hundred, Major. Briefing in thirty minutes." Major Kimball tried to see him in the early morning gloom. He had not been asleep. It would have been wasteful to spend these last few hours sleeping. Instead, he had been remembering -- He said, "All right, Sergeant. Coming up." He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment wishing he hadn't given up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured taste of the cigarette on his tongue. Oddly enough, he wasn't tired. He wasn't nervous or excited, either. And that was odder still. He stood up and opened the window to look out at the velvet night of the Cape. He could hear the sea. Overhead the stars were brilliant. Mars gleamed russet-colored against the sable night. He smiled, remembering again. So long a road from then to now. He stopped smiling and turned away from the window. The road had also been hard. Combat, test flying, competition all the way. The goddam headshrinkers were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and Rorschach blots. "You're a lonely man, Kimball." "Too much imagination could be bad for this job." Kimball shook his head and grinned slightly. You couldn't blame them in a way. What was it like when a man sat there with pentothal in his veins and encephalograph electrodes on his head and told you about the still waters of Korus, or the pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium, or the way the tiny slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer? Cry in the wilderness, headshrinkers! He thought of them with satisfaction. There were five picked for Project Mercury. But only one for Project Ares. Kimmy Kimball is going to Mars. No one else. He snapped on a light and looked at his watch. Oh three ten hours. Zero minus one fifty. He opened his steel locker and began to dress. T HE water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind that madrone tree, Kimmy thought with delicious horror. Was that a Plant Man? He could see the thick white trunk and the bloodsucking arms -- The radium pistol's weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it tightly. He could not cope with a Plant Man with a sword alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley of Korus ready to attack the white Therns and their Plant Men. For a moment Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening stillness of the riparian dusk was closing in all around him. Even the music of the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let it be the color of an emerald. He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet. Looking up at the green beacon of the planet of his birth, he thought: I've left all that behind me. I'm sorry about leaving mother and dad, but it was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I belong. With my friends, John Carter the Warlord, Tars Tarkas the Great Green Jeddak, and all the beautiful brave people. The hated Father of Therns sang with Vallee's voice: Come with me where southern skies will Kimmy's eyes narrowed. He waded stealthily across the shallows of the Sacred Iss. He could see Matai Shang, the Them Father, resplendent in his jeweled harness and his yellow wig and Holy Diadem, spreading his arms out to the sunset. He stood safely in his balcony above the river while the Plant Men responded to his call. Were they gathering to attack Tars Tarkas or another band of helpless pilgrims? Matai Shang looked a little like Mr. Grossman standing on the verandah of his cottage. But that was all right. The dreadful Valley of Korus was wonderfully alive with adventure. It didn't matter that Matai Shang looked like Mr. Grossman and sang like Rudy Vallee. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast and soon someone was sure to start calling him. There wasn't much time left.L"-the bright glare of the briefing bunker's lights, a strange figure in G-suit and helmet. The representatives of the press had been handed their mimeographed relistening to the briefing being delivered by General Hazel, the Project Officer. Occasionally Kimball would surprise one of the newsmen looking at him with mixed admiration and doubt. Kimball knew what they were thinking. Why him? Out of all the applicants -- and there are always applicants for a nearlysure-death job -- why this particular one? Well, Kimball thought, why not? Maybe Project Ares was meant to be mine from the beginning. General Hazel talked, reading from the mimeographed sheet. He was skirting some highly sensitive areas. He spoke carefully and without expression, wishing he didn't have to talk at all to these civilians. Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes like wounds, red with sleeplessness and the celebration last night at the Officers' Club -- the celebration in his honor that, of course, he hadn't attended. On the dais nearby, listening to General Hazel but watching Kimball, sat Colonel Steinhart, the Project Psychiatrist. Kimball returned his steady gaze without flinching, inwardly amused. If I look away, he thought, Steinhart will write it down. The accumulation of trivia was the good doctor's life work. Kimball felt sorry for him. It must be a bitter thing, he thought, to wish to know the human mind and find only shadows. Stephen Crane once wrote: There is nothing but opinion -- and opinion be damned. It was like that. The big clock on the wall of the bunker said oh three fifty-five. Zero I minus one hour and five minutes.  The countdown on the rocket had begun twentyfive minutes ago. No hold so far; none expected. Kimball looked around at the' red eyes and open mouths. What have I to do with you now? There are worse things than being alone. Outside the bunker, the night lay j warm and still over the base. Floodi dunes and the scrubby palms, high fences casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of ferroconcrete. As the men filed out of the briefing room, Dr. Steinhart climbed into the command car with Kimball. Was it chance or design? The pilot wondered. The others were leaving them alone. "We haven't gotten on too well, have we, Major?" Steinhart said in a quiet voice. Kimball thought: He's pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn't there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into the whispering night. That's what it was. Odd that he should have forgotten. How many of my generation, he wondered, were raised on those Edgar Rice Burroughs books anyway? And how many remembered now that all the Them priests wore yellow wigs and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on their foreheads? 'We've done as well as could be expected," he said.  rette and then stopped, remembering that Kimball had given them up because of the Project. Kimball caught the doctor's movement and half smiled. He's good, the pilot thought. He's very good. Friendly, compassionate, concerned. They probably taught him that in medical school. "I didn't try to kill the assignment for you, Kim," the doctor said. "Well, it doesn't matter now." "No, I suppose not. I just don't want you to think of me as an enemy." Kimball shrugged. The bindings of his pressure suit creaked slightly. "Your record is good all the way. You know that," Steinhart said. "It's just some of the things -- " Kimball said, "I talked too I much." "You had to." "You wouldn't think my secret I life was so dangerous, woujd you?" Kimball said, smiling. The doctor made an impatient I gesture. "You won't try to underI stand." Kimball shrugged. He didn't I really care now. "I know you were married and ' divorced, Kim," the doctor said. "Would you tell me what happened now?" "For the record? More therapy?" "No. This is for me. I'd like to  know." The pilot shrugged again. "It just didn't work. She was a fine girl, but  she finally told me it was no go." And he remembered what she said. "You don't live here, Kim." That ! was a strange thing for a wife to say. But there was no point in telling Steinhart. He'd make something significant out of it. "She didn't like the life," Kimball said with finality. The doctor frowned. "She knew ; you were a career officer. What did she expect?" Kimball didn't answer. He had j forgotten Steinhart already. He was looking out across the ramp at  the Project Ares launching pad. Dr. Steinhart sighed and said, "I  wish you luck, Kim. I mean that." j "Thanks." Kimball answered him across a widening gulf. "You'll have a long, lonely wait for the next shoot," Steinhart said. "I've got my instructions," Kimball said. "Two years alone -- " They are all so sure I'll be alone, Kimball thought. He glanced up at the red planet low on the horizon and smiled. Amber smoke was rising from the control bunker. It was now zero minus fifty-six minutes. fflIM," Steinhart said slowly. Am. "There is something you should know about. Something you should be prepared for." "Yes?" Disinterest in his voice, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or incipient neurosis already? If they had only listened to me, Steinhart thought. Steinhart continued, "Our tests showed you to be a schizoid -- well compensated, of course. You know there is no such thing as an absolutely normal human being. We all have tendencies toward one or more types of aberration. In your case, the symptoms are an overactive imagination and sometimes an inability to distinguish reality from -- well, fancy." "You headshrinkers see a looney under every bush," Kimball said vaguely. Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. "No one is saying anything about loonies, Kim. It's just that we have so little data on the psychology of spaceflight." "That's what I'm supposed to provide, isn't it, Colonel?" Kimball was looking up at the sky. "What I'm trying to say, Kim, is that a man of your type sometimes regresses -- " "Doctor," Kimball said patiently, "I passed all the tests." Steinhart nodded reluctantly. "Yes. Yes, you did." "Then let's drop it, please." Steinhart subsided into uncomfortable silence. He listened to the rumble of the tires on the concrete, the murmur of the motor. I could be wrong, he thought. After all, what is reality? Reality was the rocket, towering in the floodlights, garishly painted in black and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn. they saw him. In their new, low-waisted middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the pebbled shore of the Sacred Iss. They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret, older than he at fifteen and seventeen. But they were walking into the Valley of Korus and into danger. Behind him he could hear the rustle of the Plant Men as the evening breeze came up and touched the willows. "Kimm-eee -- " # " They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far down the river. "Mr. Grossman, have you seen Kimmy?" The hated Father of Therns shrugged and pulled on his galluses. "Kimmm-eeee -- !" Kimmy knew he should answer then, but he did not. Behind him he could hear the Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror. He stood very still and listened to his sisters talking, letting their voices carry into the clump of willows where he hid from the dangers of the Valley of the Lost Sea of Korus. "Where is that little brat, anyway?" "He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find him. It isn't fair!" "Playing with that silly old faucet!" Cruel mimicry now. "My raydee-yum pistol -- " "Oh, where is he anyway? Kimmeee, you answer!" Something died in him. He tried hard to keep it alive. It wasn't a faucet. It was a radium pistol! Tars Tarkas the Great Green Jeddak had given it to him himself! He looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren't really his sisters. They were Therns with their yellow hair and pale skins. He and John Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies for barricades and weaving a pattern of skillful swordpoints in the shifting light of the two moons. "Kimmmm -- eee! We know you can hear us! Mom is going to be mad at you! Answer us, you hear?" If only Tars Tarkas would come now! If only the Great Green Jeddak would come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords clashing -- "I see him! He's hiding in that clump of willows!" "Kimmy, you come here this instant!" The Valley of Korus was fading, blurring. The Golden Cliffs were turning into sandy, worn riverbanks and the battlements and balconies were the verandahs of summer cottages. The faucet felt heavy in Kimmy's grimy hand. He shivered -- not with wonder now, with cold. He walked out of the willows, stumbling on the rocks. embryo in the nose cone. Time was not. Time became the ticking of the timers and immense speed. He was thinking of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows. Never before and never afterward had it held that same evocative magic. He remembered his sisters, thin and angular creatures as he recalled them through the eyes of an elevenvea r-old. And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the screenporch of the rented cottage and saying exasperatedly: "You worry us so running off like that, Kimmy!" He thought with vague amusement: "I've really run off now." It was good to dream of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage and the thick close darkness of the summer nights. Oh, there had been such longing. For something. What was it? A place, a time? Perhaps that. The place was a world of low red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through long, long days. And canals -- yes, canals that were clear and still. And the time, what was the time? The time was youth. The time was tomorrow and yesterday. The time never was. But the place? Kimball thought with sudden wonder : I'm going to Mars! There were routine duties in the tiny cone. That way time slipped by as all around the missile spread the stunning, star-dusted night. a hundred days when the descending orbital spiral began. The great ribbon parachute burst from the nose cone. Heat. Terrible heat and tumbling blows. Kimball never knew when the cone landed. He lay for a long while, shocked and injured, but alive. In time he opened the shielded ports. He shrank from what he saw. Desolation! An eternity of wasteland. Red sands blowing across a sere and sterile plain. Emptiness. "I'm alone," he murmured. The dry, icy wind plucked at the scored surfaces of the cone. He could feel panic clutching at him. The protective suit he wore seemed to press in on him, suffocatingly. The wasteland beyond the port had been a wasteland for ten times weight of these years pressing on his sanity. He began to whimper softly. "Help me," he said pleadingly. "Help me, Kimmy -- " Something began to move on the great empty desert. Kimball cried out with joy and clawed desperately at the hatch. Suddenly the inner pressure jerked the valve from his hand and he plunged to the rusty sand, his ears cracking and his lungs gasping for air in the thin Martian atmosphere. His vision was cloudy and his head felt light. Something was moving on the plain. A shadowy cavalcade. Strange, monstrous men on fantastic war-mounts, long spears and fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the circling hubs, and armored giants -- The figments of a long-remembered dream. He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry, rusty soil. He fought to suck air into his laboring lungs. "Kimm-eeee!" A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him, pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon. "Kimm-eeee!" The voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice. He knew it from long ago in the Valley of Korus, by the shores of the mysterious sacred river. He came to his knees and then his feet, stumbling happily across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice, he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach before he died. They were the hills of home. R.S.Y.P. You are most cordially invited to the #th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held at the Penn-Sheraton Hotel, Pittsburgh, Pa., Labor Day weekend, September #, # and #, #. Guest of honor will be James Blish, winner of the # Hugo Award for his novel A Case of Conscience. Isaac Asimov, Philip Jose Farmer, Hal Clement and many other science fiction luminaries will be present. Among the stellar events will be a masquerade, a banquet where the # Hugo Awards will be presented, an auction of books, artwork and manuscripts. Registration fee is # ( I .# for overseas). Mail your registration fee and requests for further information to: #, Pa. Make your checks or money orders payable to P. Schuyler Miller, Treasurer, or to #th World Science Fiction Convention Committee. shouting through the forest until he could run no more. He fell headlong into a patch of blue moss and whooped with delight in having this day free for exploring. He was free to see the ocean at last. When he had caught his breath, he looked back through the forest. No sign of the village; he had left it far behind. Safe from the scrutiny of brothers and parents, there was nothing now to stop him from going to the ocean. This was the moment to stop time. "On your mark!" he shouted to the rippling stream and its orange whirlpools. He glanced furtively from side to side, pretending that some object might try to get a head start. "Get set!" he challenged the It was a fine day at the beach for Purnie's game -- but his new friends played very rough! thin-winged bees that hovered over the abundant foliage. "Stop!" He shrieked this command upward toward the dense, low-hanging purple clouds that perenially raced across the treetops, making one wonder how tall the trees really were. His eyes took quick inventory. It was exactly as he knew it would be: the milky-orange stream had become motionless and its minute whirlpools had stopped whirling; a nearby bee hung suspended over a paka plant, its transparent wings frozen in position for a downward stroke; and the heavy purple fluid overhead held fast in its manufacture of whorls and nimbi. With everything around him in a state of perfect tableau, Purnie hurried toward the ocean. If only the days weren't so short! he thought. There was so much to see and so little time. It seemed that everyone except him had seen the wonders of the beach country. The stories he had heard from his brothers and their friends had taunted him for as long as he could remember. So many times had he as he ran along, he could clearly picture the wonderland as though he were already there. There would be a rockslide of petrified logs to play on, the ocean itself with waves higher than a house, the comical three-legged tripons who never stopped munching on seaweed, and many kinds of other wonderful creatures found only at the ocean. He bounced through the forest as though the world was reserved this day just for him. And who could say it wasn't? he thought. Wasn't this his fifth birthday? He ran along feeling sorry for fouryear-olds, and even for those who were only four and a half, for they were babies and wouldn't dare try slipping away to the ocean alone. But five! "I'll set you free, Mr. Bee -- just wait and see!" As he passed one of the many motionless pollen-gathering insects he met on the way, he took care not to brush against it or disturb its interrupted task. When Purnie had stopped time, the bees -- like all the other creatures he met -- had been arrested in their native activities, and he knew that as soon as he resumed time, everything would pick up where it had left off. sweetness that told him the ocean was not far off, his pulse quickened in anticipation. Rather than spoil what was clearly going to be a perfect day, he chose to ignore the fact that he had been forbidden to use time-stopping as a convenience for journeying far from home. He chose to ignore the oft-repeated statement that an hour of time-stopping consumed more energy than a week of footracing. He chose to ignore the negative maxim that "small children who stop time without an adult being present, may not live to regret it." He chose, instead, to picture the beaming praise of family and friends when they learned of his brave journey. The journey was long, the clock stood still. He stopped long enough to gather some fruit that grew along the path. It would serve as his lunch during this day of promise. With it under his arm he bounded along a dozen more steps, then stopped abruptly in his tracks. He found himself atop a rocky knoll, overlooking the mighty sea! He was so overpowered by the vista before him that his "Hurrah!" came out as a weak squeak. The ocean lay at the ready, its stilled waves awaiting his command to resume their tidal sweep. The breakers along the shoreline hung in varying stages of disarray, some having already exploded into towering white spray while others were poised in smooth orange curls waiting to start that action. And there were new friends everywhere! Overhead, a flock of spora were frozen in a steep glide, preparatory to a beach landing. Purnie had heard of these playful creatures many times. Today, with his brothers in school, he would have the pets all to himself. Further down the beach was a pair of two-legged animals poised in midstep, facing the spot where Purnie now stood. Some distance behind themwere eight more, each of whom were motionless in a curious pose of interrupted animation. And down in the water, where the ocean ran itself into thin nothingness upon the sand, he saw standing here and there the comical tripons, those three-legged marine buffoons who made handsome careers of munching seaweed. "Hi there!" Purnie called. When he got no reaction, he remembered that he himself was "dead" to the living world: he was still in a zone of time-stopping, on the inside looking out. For him, the world would continue to be a tableau of mannikins until he resumed time. #"U" I there!" he called again; but now his mental attitude was that he expected time to resume. It did! Immediately he was surrounded by activity. He heard the roar of the crashing orange breakers, he tasted the dew of acid that floated from the spray, and he saw his new friends continue the actions which he had stopped while back in the forest. He knew, too, that at this moment, in the forest, the little brook picked up its flow where it had left off, the purple clouds resumed their leeward journey up the valley, and the bees continued their pollen-gathering without having missed a single stroke of their delicate wings. The brook, the clouds, and the insects had not been interrupted in the least; their respective tasks had been performed with continuing sureness. It was time itself that Purnie had stopped, not the world around him. He scampered around the rockpile and down the sandy cliff to meet the tripons who, to him, had just come to life. "I can stand on my head!" He set down his lunch and balanced himself bottoms-up while his legs pawed the air in an effort to hold him in position. He knew it was probably the worst head-stand he had ever done, for he felt weak and dizzy. Already time-stopping had left its mark on his strength. But his spirits ran on unchecked. The tripon thought Purnie's feat was superb. It stopped munching long enough to give him a salutory wag of its rump before returning to its repast. Purnie ran from pillar to post, trying to see and do everything at once. He looked around to greet the flock of spora, but they had glided to a spot further along the shore. Then, bouncing up to the first of the two-legged animals, he started to burst forth with his habitual "Hi there!" when he heard them making sounds of their own. "... will be no limit to my operations now, Benson. This planet makes seventeen. Seventeen planets I can claim as my own!" "My, my. Seventeen planets. And tell me, Forbes, just what the hell are you going to do with them -- mount them on the wall of your den back in San Diego?" "Hi there, wanna play?" Pumie's invitation got nothing more than a startled glance from the animals who quickly returned to their chatter. He scampered up the bench, picked up his lunch, and ran back to them, tagging along at their heels. "I've got my lunch, want some?" "Benson, you'd better tell your men back there to stop gawking at the scenery and get to work. Time is money. I didn't pay for this expedition just to give your flunkies a vacation." ' I I HE animals stopped so suddenly that Purnie nearly tangled himself in their heels. "All right, Forbes, just hold it a minute. Listen to me. Sure, it's your money that put us here; it's your expedition all the way. But you hired me to get you here with the best crew on earth, and that's just what I've done. My job isn't over yet. I'm responsible for the safety of the men while we're here, and for the safe trip home." "Precisely. And since you're responsible, get 'em working. Tell 'em to bring along the flag. Look at the damn fools back there, playing in the ocean with a three-legged ostrich!" "Good God, man, aren't you human? We've only been on this planet twenty minutes! Naturally they want to look around. They half expected to find wild animals or worse, and here we are surrounded by quaint little creatures that run up to us like we're longlost brothers. Let the men look around a minute or two before we stake out your claim." "Bah! Bunch of damn children." As Purnie followed along, a leg shot out at him and missed. "Benson, will you get this bug-eyed kangaroo away from me!" Purnie shrieked with joy at this new frolic and promptly stood on his head. In this position he got an upside down view of them walking away. He gave up trying to stay with them. Why did they move so fast, anyway? What was the hurry? As he sat down and began eating his lunch, three more of the creatures came along making excited noises, apparently trying to catch up to the first two. As they passed him, he held out his lunch. "Want some?" No response. Playing held more promise than eating. He left his lunch half eaten and went down to where they had stopped further along the beach. "Captain Benson, sir! Miles has detected strong radiation in the vicinity. He's trying to locate it now." "There you are, Forbes. Your new piece of real estate is going to make you so rich that you can buy your next planet. That'll mak eighteen, I believe." "Radiation, bah! We've found low-grade ore on every planet I've discovered so far, and this one'll be no different Now how about that flag? Let's get it up, Benson. And the cornerstone, and the plaque . #I "All right, lads. The sooner we get Mr. Forbes's pennant raised and his claim staked out, the sooner we can take time to look around. Lively now!" back to join the rest of theii group, the first two resumed walking: Purnie followed along. 'Well, Benson, you won't have to look far for materials to use for the base of the flag pole. Look at that rockpile up there. "Can't use them. They're petrified logs. The ones on top are too high to carry down, and if we move those on the bottom, the whole works will slide down on top of us." 'Well -- that's your problem. Just remember, I want this flag pole to be solid. It's got to stand at least -- " "Don't worry, Forbes, we'll get your monument erected. What's this with the flag? There must be more to staking a claim than just putting up a flag." "There is, there is. Much more. I've taken care of all requirements set down by law to make my claim. But the flag? Well, you might say jt represents an empire, Benson. The Forbes Empire. On each of symbol of development and progress. Call it sentiment if you will." "Don't worry, I won't. I've seen real-estate flags before." "Damn it all, will you stop referring to this as a real-estate deal? What I'm doing is big, man. Big! This is pioneering." "Of course. And if I'm not mistaken, you've set up a neat little escrow system so that you not only own the planets, but you will virtually own the people who are foolish enough to buy land on them." "I could have your hide for talking to me like this. Damn you, man! It's people like me who pay your way. It's people like me who give your space ships some place to go. It's people like me who pour good money into a chancey job like this, so that people like you can get away from thirteen-story tenement houses. Did you ever think of that?" "I imagine you'll triple your money in six months." When they stopped, Purnie stopped. At first he had been interested in the strange sounds they were making, but as he grew used to them, and as they in turn ignored his presence, he hopped alongside chattering to himself, content to be in their company. He heard more of these sounds coming from behind, and he turned to see the remainder of the group running toward them. "Captain Benson! Here's the flag, sir. And here's Miles with the scintillometer. He says the radiation's getting stronger over this way!" "How about that, Miles?" "This thing's going wild, Captain. It's almost off scale." hovering around him with a little box. Thankful for the attention, he stood on his head. "Can you do this?" He was overjoyed at the reaction. They all started making wonderful noises, and he felt most satisfied. "Stand back, Captain! Here's the source right here! This little chuckwalla's hotter than a plutonium pile!" "Let me see that, Miles. Well, I'll be damned! Now what do you suppose -- " By now they had formed a widening circle around him, and he was hard put to think of an encore. He gambled on trying a brand new trick: he stood on one leg. "Benson, I must have that animal! Put him in a box." "Now wait a minute, Forbes. Universal Law forbids -- " "This is my planet and I am the law. Put him in a box!" "With my crew as witness, I officially protest -- " "Good God, what a specimen to take back. Radio-active animals! Why, they can reproduce themselves, of course! There must be thousands of these creatuf es around here someplace. And to think of those damn fools on Earth with their plutonium piles! Hah! Now I'll have investors flocking to me. How about it, Benson -- does pioneering pay off or doesn't it?" "Not so fast. Since this little fellow is radioactive, there may be great danger to the crew -- " "Now look here! You had planned to put mineral specimens in a lead box, so what's the difference? Put him in a box." "He'll die." "I have you under contract, Benson! You are responsible to me, and what's more, you are on my property. Put him in a box." Pumie was tired. First the timestopping, then this. While this day had brought more fun and excitement than he could have hoped for, the strain was beginning to tell. He lay in the center of the circle happily exhausted, hoping that his friends would show him some of their own tricks. He didn't have to wait long. The animals forming the circle stepped back and made way for two others who came through carrying a box. Purnie sat up to watch the show. "Hell, Captain, why don't I just pick him up? Looks like he has no intention of running away." "Better not, Cabot. Even though you're shielded, no telling what powers the little fella has. Play it safe and use the rope." "I swear he knows what we're saying. Look at those eyes." "All right, careful now with that line." "Come on, baby. Here you go. That's a boy!" with perplexed concern. He sensed the imploring quality of the creature with the rope, but he didn't know what he was supposed to do. He cocked his head to one side as he wiggled in anticipation. He saw the noose spinning down toward his head, and, before he knew it, he had scooted out of the circle and up the sandy beach. He was surprised at himself for running away. Why had he done it? He wondered. Never before had he felt this fleeting twinge that made him want to protect himself. He watched the animals huddle around the box on the beach, their attention apparently diverted to something else. He wished now that he had not run away; he felt he had lost his chance to join in their fun. "Wait!" He ran over to his halfeaten lunch, picked it up, and ran back into the little crowd. "I've got my lunch, want some?" The party came to life once more. His friends ran this way and that, and at last Purnie knew that the idea was to get him into the box. He picked up the spirit of the tease, and deliberately ran within a few feet of the lead box, then, just as the nearest pursuer was about to push him in, he sidestepped onto safer ground. Then he heard a deafening roar and felt a warm, wet sting in one of his legs. "Forbes, you fool! Put away that gun!" "There you are, boys. It's all in knowing how. Just winged him, that's all. Now pick him up." The pang in his leg was nothing: purnie's misery lay in his confusion. What had he done wrong? When he saw the noose spinning toward him again, he involuntarily stopped time. He knew better than to use this power carelessly, but his action now was reflex. In that split second following the sharp sting in his leg, his mind had grasped in all directions to find an acceptable course of action. Finding none, it had ordered the stoppage of time. The scene around him became a tableau once more. The noose hung motionless over his head while the rest of the rope snaked its way in transverse waves back to one of the two-legged animals. Purnie dragged himself through the congregation, whimpering from his inability to understand. As he worked his way past one creature after another, he tried at first to not look them in the eye, for he felt sure he had done something wrong. Then he thought that by sneaking a glance at them as he passed, he might see a sign pointing to their purpose. He limped by one who had in his hand a small shiny object that had been emiting smoke from one end; the smoke now billowed in lifeless curls about the animal's head. He hobbled by another who held a small box that had previously made a hissing sound whenever Purnie was near. These things told him nothing. Before starting his climb up the knoll, he passed a tripon which, true to its reputation, was comical even in fright. Startled by the loud explosion, it had jumped four feet into the air before Purnie had stopped time. Now it hung there, its beak stuffed with seaweed and its three legs drawn up into a squatting position. Leaving the assorted statues behind, he limped his way up the knoll, torn between leaving and staying. What an odd place, this ocean country! He wondered why he had not heard more detail about the beach animals. Reaching the top of the bluff, he looked down upon his silent friends with a feeling of deep sorrow. How he wished he were down there playing with them. But he knew at last that theirs was a game he didn't fit into. Now there was nothing left but to resume time and start the long walk home. Even though the short day was nearly over, he knew he didn't dare use time-stopping to get himself home in nothing flat. His fatigued body and clouded mind were strong signals that he had already abused this faculty. " again, the animal with the noose stood in open-mouthed disbelief as the rope fell harmlessly to the sand -- on the spot where Purnie had been standing. "My God, he's -- he's gone." Then another of the animals, the one with the smoking thing in his hand, ran a few steps toward the noose, stopped and gaped at the rope. "All right, you people, what's going on here? Get him in that box. What did you do with him?" The resumption of time meant nothing at all to those on the beach, for to them time had never stopped. The only thing they could be sure of was that at one moment there had been a fuzzy creature hopping around in front of them, and the next moment he was gone. "Is he invisible, Captain? Where is he?" "Up there, Captain! On those rocks. Isn't that him?" "Well, I'll be damned!" "Benson, I'm holding you personally responsible for this! Now that you've botched it up, I'll bring him down my own way." "Just a minute, Forbes, let me think. There's something about that fuzzy little devil that we should... Forbes! I warned you about that gun!" Purnie moved across the top of the rockpile for a last look at his friends. His weight on the end of the first log started the slide. Slowly at first, the giant pencils began cascading down the short distance to the sand. Purnie fell back onto solid ground, horrified at the spectacle before him. The agonizing screams of the animals below filled him with hysteria. The boulders caught most of them as they stood ankle-deep in the surf. Others were pinned down on the sand. "I didn't mean it!" Purnie screamed. "I'm sorry! Can't you hear?" He hopped back and forth near the edge of the rise, torn with panic and shame. "Get up! Please get up!" He was horrified by the moans reaching his ears from the beach. "You're getting all wet! Did you hear me? Please get up." He was choked with rage and sorrow. How could he have done this? He wanted his friends to get up and shake themselves off, tell him it was all right. But it was beyond his power to bring it about. The lapping tide threatened to cover those in the orange surf. the hill, imploring them to save themselves. The sounds they made carried a new tone, a desperate foreboding of death. "Rhodes! Cabot! Can you hear me?" J -- I can't move, Captain. My leg, it's... My God, we're going to drown!" "Look around you, Cabot. Can you see anyone moving?" "The men on the beach are nearly buried, Captain. And the rest of us here in the water -- " "Forbes. Can you see Forbes? Maybe he's -- " His sounds were cut off by a wavelet gently rolling over his head. Purnie could wait no longer. The tides were all but covering one of the animals, and soon the others would be in the same plight. Disregarding the consequences, he ordered time to stop. Wading down into the surf, he worked a log off one victim, then he tugged the animal up to the sand. Through blinding tears, Purnie worked slowly and carefully. He knew there was no hurry -- at least, not as far as his friends' safety was concerned. No matter what their condition of life or death was at this moment, it would stay the same way until he started time again. He made his way deeper into the orange liquid, where a raised hand signalled the location of a submerged body. The hand was clutching a large white banner that was tangled among the logs. Purnie worked the animal free and pulled it ashore. It was the one who had been carrying the shiny object that spit smoke. Scarcely noticing his own injured leg, he ferried one victim after another until there were no more in the surf. Up on the beach, he started unraveling the logs that pinned down the animals caught there. He removed a log from the lap of one, who then remained in a sitting position, his face contorted into a frozen mask of agony and shock. Another, with the weight removed, rolled over like an iron statue into a new position. Purnie whimpered in black misery as he surveyed the chaotic scene before him. At last he could do no more; he felt consciousness slipping away from him. He instinctively knew that if he lost his senses during a period of time-stopping, events would pick up where they had left off... without him. For Purnie, this would be death. If he had to lose consciousness, he knew he must first resume time. Step by step he plodded up the little hill, pausing every now and then to consider if this were the moment to start time before it was too late. With his energy fast draining away, he reached the top of the. knoll, and he turned to look down once more on the group below. Then he knew how much his mind and body had suffered : when he ordered time to resume, nothing happened. His heart sank. He wasn't afraid of death, and he knew that if he died the oceans would roll again and his friends would move about. But he wanted to see them safe. He tried to clear his mind for supreme effort. There was no urging time to start. He knew he couldn't persuade it by bits and pieces, first slowly then full ahead. Time either progressed or it didn't. He had to take one viewpoint or the other. Then, without knowing exactly when it happened, his mind took command... first one he saw stir lay on his stomach and pounded his fists on the beach. A flood of relief settled over Purnie as sounds came from the animal. "What's the matter with me? Somebody tell me! Am I nuts? Miles! Schick! What's happening?" "I'm coming, Rhodes! Heaven help us, man -- I saw it, too. We're either crazy or those damn logs are alive!" "It's not the logs. How about us? How'd we get out of the water? Miles, we're both cracking." "I'm telling you, man, it's the logs, or rocks or whatever they are. I was looking right at them. First they're on top of me, then they're piled up over there!" "Darnnit, the logs didn't pick us up out of the ocean, did they? Captain Benson!" "Are you men all right?' "Yes sir, but-" "Who saw exactly what happened?" "I'm afraid we're not seeing right, Captain. Those logs -- " "I know, I know. Now get hold of yourselves. We've got to round up the others and get out of here while time is on our side." "But what happened, Captain?" "Hell, Rhodes, don't you think I'd like to know? Those logs are so old they're petrified. The whole bunch of us couldn't lift one. It would take super-human energy to move one of those things." "I haven't seen anything superhuman. Those ostriches down there are so busy eating seaweed -- " "All right, let's bear a hand here with the others. Some of them can't walk. Where's Forbes?" "He's sitting down there in the water, Captain, crying like a baby. Or laughing. I can't tell which." "We'll have to get him. Miles, Schick, come along. Forbes! You all right?" "Ho-ho-ho! Seventeen! Seventeen! Seventeen planets, Benson, and they'll do anything I say! This one's got a mind of its own. Did you see that little trick with the rocks? Ho-ho!" "See if you can find his gun, Schick; he'll either kill himself or one of us. Tie his hands and take him back to the ship. We'll be along shortly." "Hah-hah-hah! Seventeen! Benson, I'm holding you personally responsible for this. Hee-hee!" consciousness returned. Had his friends gone? He pulled himself along on his stomach to a position between two rocks, where he could see without being seen. By the light of the twin moons he saw that they were leaving, marching away in groups of two and three, the weak helping the weaker. As they disappeared around the curving shoreline, the voices of the last two, bringing up the rear far behind the others, fell faintly on his ears over the sound of the surf. "Is it possible that we're all crazy, Captain?" "It's possible, but we're not." "I wish I could be sure." "See Forbes up ahead there? What do you think of him?" "I still can't believe it." "He'll never be the same." "Tell me something. What was the most unusual thing you noticed back there?" "You must be kidding, sir. Why, the way those logs were off of us suddenly -- " "Yes, of course. But I mean beside that." "Well, I guess I was kind of busy. You know, scared and mixed up." "But didn't you notice our little pop-eyed friend?" "Oh, him. I'm afraid not, Captain. I -- I guess I was thinking mostly of myself." "Hmmm. If I could only be sure I saw him. If only someone else saw him too." "I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir." "Well, damn it all, you know that Forbes took a pot shot at him. Got him in the leg. That being the case, why would the fuzzy little devil come back to his tormentors -- back to us -- when we were trapped under those logs?" "Well, I guess as long as we were trapped, he figured we couldn't do him any more harm... I'm sorry, that was a stupid answer. I guess I'm still a little shaky." "Forget it. Look, you go ahead to the ship and make ready for takeoff. I'll join you in a few minutes. I think I'll go back and look around. You know. Make sure we haven't left anyone." "No need to do that. They're all ahead of us. I've checked." "That's my responsibility, Cabot, not yours. Now go on." A S Purnie lay gathering strength Jfor the long trek home, he saw through glazed eyes one of the animals coming back along the beach. When it was nearly directly below him, he could hear it making sounds that by now had become familiar. "Where are you?" Purnie paid little attention to the antics of his friend; he was beyond understanding. He wondered what they would say at home when he returned. "We've made a terrible mistake. We -- " The sounds faded in and out on Purnie's ears as the creature turned slowly and called in different directions. He watched the animal walk over to the pile of scattered logs and peer around and under them. "If you're hurt I'd like to help!" The twin moons were high in the sky now, and where their light broke through the swirling clouds a double shadow was cast around the animal. With foggy awareness, Purnie watched the creature shake its head slowly, then walk away in the direction of the others. Purnie's eyes stared, without seeing, at the panorama before him. The beach was desertednow, and his gaze was transfixed on a shimmering white square floating on the ocean. Across it, the last thing Purnie ever saw, was emblazoned the for your information cold night in Texas as we walked across the campus. A nearly full Moon was straight overhead and we stopped for a moment to look at it. "Gosh," said one of the girls, it's so clear you can actually see there is no air on the Moon!" And that is, of course, what every textbook since Giovanni Battista Riccioli's Almagestum novum of #I has said: there is no air on the Moon. And when modem astronomers speak about a "lunar atmosphere," they are not contradicting this idea, even if it may seem so at first glance. It all depends on your definition. If by "atmosphere" you mean something that you can breathe and which exerts enough pressure on your body to keep the body fluids liquid, then the Moon has no atmosphere. But if your definition of atmosphere is more scientific -- a collection of free molecules of gases on the surface of a body of planetary or nearplanetary mass -- then the Moon does have an atmosphere. It is, in fact, a very special atmosphere, consisting exclusively (we think) of those gases which are collectively referred to as "rare gases" or, sometimes, as "noble gases." The first of these terms needs no explanation; they are rare. The second term, used in Europe, refers to the fact that they do not combine with anything to form any chemical compounds; they do not, you see, associate with the common elements. Why, they are so "noble" that they do not even associate with each other! Just to be thorough, I have to add that there are American chemists who call them "the inert gases." There is some justification for this because the name of one of them, argon, is the Greek word for "lazy" or, more politely, "inert." However, the Radon was originally named Niton (shining), but the name was later changed to indicate its close relationship to radium. term is rather misleading because some ordinary gases such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide can be rather inert too, depending on circumstances, and are so called in industry. To call the rare gases inert gases can (and in the classroom does ) lead to misunderstandings. For reasons which will become apparent in a moment, it is necessary to give a table of these gases, together with their atomic weight. Name Meaning Helium (He) sun Neon (He) new Argon (A) inert Krypton (Kr) hidden Xenon (Xe) stranger Radon (Rn) weights is this: As the temperature increases, the velocity of the molecules (or atoms) of a gas increases, too, and for a given temperature the lighter gases have, of course, higher velocities. Since the escape velocity of the Moon is not very high -- # miles per second -- the "so clear that you can see there is no air there." Photograph by Mt. Wilson Observatory Atomic Weight # # #. # molecules (or atoms) can reach this escape velocity if the temperature is high enough. Then they will simply depart for unspecified points somewhere in space, the lighter gases first. The surface temperature on the Moon can be # centigrade (# Fahrenheit) and a useful rule, first stated by Dr. Harold C. Urey, is that it will not be able to hold onto anything with an atomic weight less than #. Now this seems to restrict the list of the gases which could stay at the Moon's surface to the last three, but radon is a kind of theoretical case only. It is radioactive with a half-life of only # days, so that it disappears for reasons of its own. In reality, then, the Moon can hold krypton and xenon. Theoretical reasoning says that it should be mostly xenon, because xenon-# must be produced steadily from the radioactive isotope of iodine, iodine#. The number of xenon atoms produced per second on the Moon must be about # krypton is far lower, so that the lunar "atmosphere" would be likely to consist of # per cent xenon and # per cent krypton. Radioactive processes always produce helium at fairly high rates, but helium is too light to be kept by the Moon. Neon is also too light, but argon is an interesting borderline case. Its weight is about #, which is lighter than the lower limfl postulated by Dr. Urey. On the other hand, that figure of #' Fahrenheit is rather high and so might the production rate of argon be. The source of argon would be the radioactive isotope of potassium, potassium-#. As Dr. Isaac Asimov pointed out, # grams of potassium-# are likely to decay every second. Eleven per cent of this potassium# turns into argon-# (the remainder becomes calcium-#) which means a production per second of nearly # grams (close to # ounces) of argon-#. Even though a good percentage of this argon must dissipate in space, these figures indicate that the lunar atmosphere should be composed of argon, krypton and xenon. Possibly traces of another gas must be added, carbon dioxide. Last year the Russians observed a phenomenon on the Moon which they described as a volcanic eruption. English and American astronomers did not doubt the observation itself, but inclined to the belief that it was a carbon dioxide outbreak, which carried surface dust up with it and therefore looked more substantial than it really was. Now the molecular weight of carbon dioxide is #, just about the same as argon. Therefore the same reasoning applies to it, t, u t the question mark is the production rate. The only source of carbon dioxide on the Moon w ould be volcanism -- and the most anybody can say about this is that there might be some lunar volcanic activity left -- with fairly much emphasis on the word "might." How high this highly attenuated mixture of xenon and krypton with some argon and possibly some carbon dioxide extends is a question which can cause a long and inconclusive debate. At any event, the idea of catching some with a closely orbiting rocket is not feasible. It will need a soft landing of an instrument capsule to find out.'career, Galileo Galilei grew very doubtful about the idea that had come down from Aristotle, namely that the speed of falling objects varies in accordance with their weight. That, for example, an object weighing ten pounds will fall ten times as fast as an object weighing only one pound. Galileo Galilei was at that time professor at Pisa, the city of the famous leaning tower (which was and is called the Campanile), and one day in #, he assembled his pupils and as many of the faculty as he could round up at the foot of the Campanile and he dropped a cannon ball and a musket ball from the top of the tower. They struck the ground simultaneously and from that day on Aristotelian teachings were disbelieved. Of course it's a familiar story. It can be found in all books on Galilei and any popular book dealing with the history of science. A few months ago, however, I received a letter from a Mr. Cockroft in New Zealand who had come across an article in an American magazine in which it was loudly stated that this "whole silly story" had been invented by an English writer by the name of R. A. Gregory in a book published in London in #, but had since been thoroughly disproved by Lane Cooper, Professor of English at Cornell University. When the letter arrived I happened to be on a long lecture tour on the West Coast. All I could do at the moment was write a letter in reply, promising to check the facts as soon as I could. I also ordered a copy of Professor Cooper's book. For the rest of the lecture tour I wasn't quite happy. I had used the story of Galileo Galilei's experiment from the leaning tower myself, but because it had been a minor incident in my case, I had not specially checked on it. While flying to my next engagement I tried to remember what Galilei himself had said in his famous Dialogues... concerning Two New Sciences. He did use the famous argument there that the Aristotelian concept was illogical. If a larger stone fell faster than a smaller one, what would happen if the two were tied together? Would they fall still faster because they weighed more? Or would the lighter stone hamper the movement of the heavier one? I seemed to remember that he had spoken of experiments.-dinner in the home of a gentleman who had a large library. Yes, a biography of Galilei was among his books and it contained the story of the leaning tower and stated that Galilei (who was then about # years old) had not published anything while at Pisa. My host remarked, after I told him about the inquiry I had received, that the original source was probably buried in a volume with a title like "Correspondence between Galileo Galilei and So-and-so" -- such letter collections are always a treasure for biographers but a nuisance for a man who wants to find something in a hurry. For this reason we didn't even try the university library the next morning, though there would have been time to do so. If this were a story, I would have Professor Cooper's book waiting for me when I came home. Since this isn't a story, it was not. I went on two more lecture tours and forgot all about it. But then Professor Cooper's book (entitled: Aristotle, Galileo and the Tower of Pisa) did come and a week or so later I got around to reading it. It is a most careful work, quoting all the sources in their original tongues as well as in translation. That the general feeling of confusion emerges from its pages is not Professor Cooper's fault. The story itself is confused. To make it as clear as circumstances permit, let us examine the whole thing piecemeal, beginning with what Aristotle said. "An iron ball of one hundred pounds, falling from a height of one hundred cubits, reaches the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen a single cubit." But these are Galilei's words (from the Dialogues) and not the words of Aristotle. Then what did Aristotle himself say? Well, finding that out is not so simple. Aristotle did not write systematically about motions and fall, which is to say he did not develop a theory of his own. He was arguing against the atomists, whom he disliked, and his statements are meant to show how wrong they were. However, there is one sentence which seems to be the one Galilei had in mind: "For any two portions of fire, small or great, will exhibit the same ratio of solid to void; but the upward movement of the greater is quicker than that of the less, just as the downward movement of a mass of gold, or lead, or of any other body endowed with weight, is quicker in proportion to its size." This is quoted from his book On the Heavens. Elsewhere (in Physics) he stated: "We see that bodies which have greater rhope either of weight or of lightness, if they are alike in other respects, move faster over an equal space, and in the ratio which their magnitudes bear to each other." The Greek word rhope unfortunately is quite rubbery in its meaning; the Latin editions of Aristotle use velocitas or celeritas (both meaning "speed," of course) where the original uses rhope . But in English the words "impulse," "momentum," "trend" or even "tendency" might be used with nearly equal justification. actually speak of "fall, velocity of," but of movement, and Galilei's rendering which has replaced the original phrasing might be considered a "popularization." However, it was "always" taken to apply to the speed of falling bodies too. Ioannos Philoponus, who wrote a commentary on Aristotle's Physics in # A. D., said that the reasoning was "absolutely false" and that this was one of the cases where the phenomenon can better be tested by observation than by logic. "If you take two masses greatly differing in weight and release them from the same elevation, you will see that the ratio of times in their movements does not follow the ratio of the weights, but that the time difference is extremely small; so that if the weights do not greatly differ, but one, say, is double the other, the difference in the times required for falling a given distance will be either none at all or imperceptible." Now that we know the concept Galilei was fighting, we come to the crucial point. When did he drop the cannon ball and the musket ball from the leaning Campanile and what did he say about it himself? The answer, surprisingly, is that he never said a word about it. In his writings (and not only his published books but many of his letter are known)' he never even mentions Pisa's Campanile. And while he wrote much later that one could easily test his ideas by dropping weights from a high place, such as a tower, he nowhere says that he did it. Then who originated the story? It can be found for the first time in a biography of Galilei by Vincenzio Viviani. Viviani completed his manuscript in #, twelve years after Galilei's death. That it was not printed until # is probably unimportant; it was then customary to let manuscripts and handmade copies of manuscripts circulate among learned men, like Vincenzio Viviani himself. Viviani described the great event in rather dry language. He said that Galilei had disproved many of the conclusions of Aristotle: "among others that the velocities of moving bodies of the same material, but of unequal weight, moving through the same medium, did not mutually preserve the proportion of their weight as taught by Aristotle, but all moved at the same speed; demonstrating this with repeated experiments from the height of the Campanile of Pisa in the presence of the other teachers and philosophers, and the whole assembly of students..." Three things will be noted: Viviani does not mention the weights of the bodies dropped and does not say what they were. He also does not give the year -- but since Galilei was in Pisa from the latter part of # to the early part of #, as he says elsewhere, he probably did not think it necessary to be specific. But while everybody else at a later date spoke about one dramatic demonstration, Viviani calmly said "repeated experiments." r T'HE historical problem here is, of course, the reconciliation between Galilei's own silence and Viviani's statement. Before I get to this, it must be mentioned that Galilei's experiment was not as unique as it is usually portrayed. Hieronymus Cardanus, in his book Opus Novum de Proportionibus, published in Basel in #, began a chapter with the straight statement: Si duae sphaerae ex eadem materia descendant in aere eodem temporis momento ad planem ueniunt. "Two spheres made of the same material, falling in (meaning through) air, will arrive at a plane at the same instant." The word "plane" is to be understood in its mathematical sense; the illustration given by Cardanus looks as if he had a table top in mind. And the Dutchman Simon gtevin, in a book published in Leyden in #, wrote: "The experiment against Aristotle is like this: take two balls of lead (as the eminent Jean Grotius... and I did some time ago), one ball ten times the other in weight; and let them go together from a height of # feet down to a plank below... the sound of the two in striking will seem to come back as one single report." And at some time before # a defender of Aristotle, Giorgio Coresio, did drop things from the tower of Pisa. Another man, Jacopo Mazzoni, had made such experiments finding Aristotle wrong. Coresio said that this was due to the fact that Mazzoni did not go high enough; he probably just dropped things from his window, whereas Coresio had gone up all the way to the top of the tower and at this great height had found Aristotle's assertion correct. Am I, in quoting all these other authors, delaying a decision of the main question? No, I have quoted these contemporary facts because their existence, in my opinion, is the clue to the historical riddle. The riddle is the silence of Galilei himself -- unless he used Viviani as his mouthpiece. This is what the editors of the Italian edition of Galilei's works believe, namely that Galilei told Viviani about the Pisa experiments when he was old. There is no doubt that they had close personal contact and it is known that Galilei was blind for the last five years of his life. He might very well have told Viviani things which he had never written down. He might even have said something that wasn't so. History is full of statements ascribed to voluble old men which could not be checked and which are, to say the least, doubtful. There is no reason to think that Viviani invented the story. Galilei himself might have, but I don't think so. That he did not mention it earlier in his writings can have several reasons. "NE assumption is that he '"did mention it in some early letters which were not kept by their recipients or were destroyed by accident before they saw print. Another possibility is that, being busy all his life and often harrassed, he just didn't. That such a thing can happen is within my own experience. Some time ago I came across a discussion, bolstered by high-speed photographs, showing that if you drop a drop of milk in water the resulting splash will carry some of that milk upward. Whereupon I told my wife that I, as a schoolboy (about seventh grade), amused myself by trying to hit a floating piece of wood with thrown pebbles and discovered that the splash from a stone was clean, while the splash from a clump of earth was decidedly dirty. It had at that time intrigued me so much that I forgot all about the floating wood and even called classmates to watch the effect. I may have missed a "discovery" by waiting for others to photograph drops of milk. In thinking all this over, one point occurred to me which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. Modern writers have made much of the paramount importance, the decisiveness, of the drop from the Campanile. If it had been so decisive, contemporary literature should be full of it. Since contemporary literature literally doesn't say a word, the German Emil Wohlwill (in #) was the first to conclude that the whole story probably was not true. And Lane Cooper, a quarter century later, drew the same conclusion for the same reason. But what if the experiment, though carried out "repeatedly" as Viviani says, simply did not impress the contemporaries? We do have convincing and much more recent examples. Everybody in the airplane and airline business now makes a large to-do every December #th about "Kitty Hawk Day." But the actual Kitty Hawk Day, when the Wright brothers flew for the first time, hardly got into the newspapers. All the recognition originally received for the first flight could be reprinted on one page of this magazine. Likewise March #, #, is the day the first liquid-fuel rocket in all history (Goddard's) lifted itself off the ground. Historic day, isn't it? Again the publicity received would fit this magazine page -- and the editor could specify nice large type because of the importance of the event and the meagerness of the recognition. Sometime in # the first Russian liquid-fuel rocket (Blagonravov's) rumbled upward. Certainly a historic date, too, but it seems that even the Russians do not know the date; I have only seen the year mentioned. And the first liquid-fuel rockets in Germany (mixed system Oberth, Riedel, von Braun and Ley) received publicity only because we made it -- we needed publicity to raise money. It is quite conceivable that Galilei rounded up his students and some faculty members, made the demonstration -- and did not impress anybody. This would be reason enough for his later silence. All the more so because jje could not even claim priority, since Cardanus had written about it in #, twenty years prior to Galilei's Pisa tenure, and even Simon Stevin's book appeared ahead of Galilei's own Dialogues. If the Pisa experiments did not impress anybody, Galilei had no reason to talk about them in his later works. They had not made him famous and they were not even new. Until he reached old age and had stopped being active and started reminiscing..." intelligent life has developed on other planets somewhere in our galaxy and that these intelligences have learned how to build interstellar ships... that they have used these ships to colonize countless other planets... that they might have had to destroy painlessly unsuccessful evolutionary developments on such other planets to replace "painful evolution by painless colonization"... that they have left other planets undisturbed "as a biological reservoir" or as control experiments, as we might call it... and that they have refrained from communicating with us and possibly other planets like ours waiting for us to take the first step in interstellar communication? Let me say first that these thoughts were written down in about #, but were probably conceived by the man who wrote them at a much earlier age, since in # he was over seventy years old. Now stop for a moment; don't read on. Try to figure out who said this. The answer is: Not a science fiction writer, but Konstantin Eduardovitch Ziolkovsky, who wrote the first of the modern treatises on space travel in # and saw it published in #. I saw an article in a photographic magazine proving that the pictures which the Russians said they took of the other side of the Moon are fakes. Where does that put us in the space race? I have also read that the Russians claim to have discovered a new planet beyond Pluto. Is there any truth to this? Erwin Richter Farmingdale, Long Island. As for the first item, I can only say that all reputable scientists the world over accept the pictures released by Russia as genuine. Personally I don't have the slightest doubt. That somebody crops up with the intention of keeping his eyes firmly closed is no novelty at all. For instance, I recently got a phone call from somebody who still maintains that the Earth is flat. So this "revelation" has absolutely no bearing on the space race; we still are where we were before, several years behind, with no prospect of narrowing the gap during # and little chance for doing this in #. As for the "discovery of a major planet beyond Pluto," I can report that this isn't so -- the "claim" seems to have been a mistake in translation. The actual story is that the Russian astronomer Edward Denisiuk, at the observatory near Alma-Ata, photographed an unlisted "object" in August #. He did not then know what it was; it could have been a new comet. Near the end of # the "object" was found on other plates taken in # and a preliminary orbit calculation could be made, proving that it was an unlisted asteroid. Just who changed this into a "trans-Plutonian planet" will probably never become known. The culprit has not owned up yet and it seems very unlikely that he ever will. How many elements are there now, including the man-made ones? Welson S. Mann Hollywood, Calif, The usual statement is that there are # elements, from No. #, hydrogen, to No. #, uranium. But actually three of these # do not occur in nature. They are No. #, technetium; No. #, pronium ) ; and No. #, astatine. On the other hand No. #, plutonium, usually a man-made element, does occur in nature, though in quantities far far smaller than even radium. The man-made elements, so far, are No. #, neptunium; No. #, plutonium; No. #, americium; No. #, curium; No. #, berkelium; No. #, californium; No. #, einsteinium; No. #, fermium; No. #, mendelevium, and No. #, nobelium. However, the ones above plutonium have been made in such small quantities that they would be invisible to the naked eye, in some cases invisible even under a laboratory microscope. H E was in some dark, moving medium which pressed him gently and released him and pressed against him again with irregular rhythm. He could not feel his hands. He could not feel any part of his body, except a sort of itching in his calf. He thrust downward to relieve this mild irritation and, surprisingly, seemed to rise up. He seemed to they had been human -- estipy # pr an incredible net . bihlive. He had.mo ideaiwhire, or even when, or whether tBesf were valid "questions, fak the jftp had been entering hyJpacetime when they hit the aSteijbil belt. Warps and elongations took place in hyper-spaBn Perhaps ne was now a ljyper-spacemn. He could recall his name. It was John Shepherd. He could remember objective events such as Doctor Adelitka Wynn creating a scene in the Mars terminal bar. Her sociology was better than her sense, as she accused him of making a pass at her. He would have liked to, perhaps, but ship's etiquette said: "Crews date, captains wait, space is not the place." He and she had been the last alive, and the last image he had seen on the screen had been a sun. Whose sun, which sun, and where were just uninformed speculations. But he was alive and conscious of himself. And he was buried deep in something. He tried to define his feelings. The alternating pressure of the darkness was felt only in one spot, in the area of his heart and about the size of a small bean. The occasional itching came from below this. He thrust again and again rose upward. Yet he had no heart, or no sense of hearing, for he could hear no sound of pumping. After several years in space he was only too familiar with the sound of his own blood circulating in his veins. The voids of space turned men into especially noisy bodily orchestras. There was none of that now. He thought of himself as having the shape of a man, but perhaps that was just habit. The only area he could in fact feel was the bean slightly higher than his middle... and a column perhaps attaching him to the bean... and this itching down below, in what seemed to be one doubled-up leg. He thrust again and again, rising higher each time. There was nothing else to do. He never felt tired. He never felt anything, except the itching. ening on the upward pressure. He had kicked with his one leg, risen and found no resistance. Warmth played over him and he uncurled his head. So he had a head. Habit had accustomed him to seeing with his eyes, from one set focal point. It was some time before he found he could see, in a general way, from any point on his exposed surface. He could even see parts of himself, where the edges doubled over. It was like being able to run round a large gallery on the top of a dome, looking out at the view -- and yet being the entire dome. He was green! He looked down beneath him and saw a long green pillar, tubular and shiny, rising out of a brown background. He could still feel the beating pressure down below. It struck him that he was a plant, growing from seed which presumably his liquified, atomized or dissolved body had provided, and emerging on die surface of a planet. Immediately overhead a bright orange satellite swung through a less there were two suns here, this was no more than a satellite body, yapped in orbit, for he could feel the fierce beat on his surface from another source on the other side of the sky. This was a vast fiery globe traveling at immense speed. He felt a vigorous thrusting inside his structure as he expanded. But darknesss rushed up from the bottom of the pit in which he stood, and cloud came in to mask the sky. The general inference was that he was on a very warm planet around which the bright orange satellite swung, and that both were circling the hot sun at a speed far exceeding that of Mercury. Naturally that was only a subjective impression. But the little he had seen did not suggest any system he had ever heard of. He curled up. Each time the sun went past he grew further out toward the edge of the pit. He branched and clung to the earth with subsidiary tendrils. It was exactly as though he were clawing with fingers into the earth, except that he did not remove them but simply grew on past them. When he reached the top of the pit, and accustomed his seeing to the greater distances now before him, he saw a violently active world of fire and steam. The ultra-rapid rotation of this planet made day and night into the flickering of a primitive film. Mountains of earth were raised up, broke off and shattered. Remote volcanoes fizzed into action briefly like fireworks and faded, their tremendous display spent. Whole swamps heaved and moved with internal motion. He became big enough to be able to lose a side creeper without giving it a thought. He felt no pain. There were advantages in being a plant, and particularly in being an apparently highly active creeper. He could see from any point in his enormous network. He could organize races between his outlying tendrils. He found that the orange satellite exerted quite a strong pull on his internal sap system, which was not unpleasant. r I ' HE first sign of life other than himself, oddly, came up from a neighboring pit. It lay within the area he had grown over, but he had never bothered to send down shoots and side creepers into it. It was a peculiar sensation to recognize -- Dr. Adelitka Wynn. He sent out a sly root and detected that she was a bulb formation. Her indignation was transmitted violently along the ground, in a series of sharp shocks. She stood in tall sheaves of broadbladed grass which rustled in the wind. He found it was intelligible, though of a different timbre than the deep, rough scraping he made with his own hairy leaves. "Kindly keep to yourself," she said in effect. Her leaves had a high hissing note. He marveled that she had managed to retain the same unpleasant approach to life. She was objectionable again when she had filled her pit and found she could not extend onto the flat earth beyond, because he had already covered the area. "Come on," he said. "We've got the whole world to ourselves." "I can't," she answered hissingly. "You have spikes on your stems. They'll tear my leaves." He shut off the sap from a whole spread over his withered shoots and leaves without a sound of acknowledgment. They both developed toward the marshes. As he approached, leaving her slower bulb-formation behind as he raced tendril ahead of tendril down the slope, he saw there were other forms of life, in the water. He said nothing. But he quietly doubled his thorns and built up a reserve in his advance tendrils, so that he could rush an armored shoot across the ground at high speed if necessary. The aquatic life moved and died extremely fast. Whole species expanded from a single specimen, and for no visible reason extinguished themselves. Life on the planet did not seem to be stable. It was highly experimental. He had been down at the marsh for some time before the first crablike object came into existence and began to leave the water in fitful dashes. He gave it an early dose of his thorns. Thereafter it left him alone. The former Dr. Adelitka Wynn, however, approached the marsh without looking. He watched with satisfaction. She was a golden brown and tender green, and highly succulent apparently to the crab tribe. She cried for help. They were, after all, the only two of human origin on the planet So he put his reserve to work and sent an armored set of shoots racing across the ground as a barrier between her and the marsh. The crab tribes retreated. "Thank you," she said, regenerating her clipped stems. "That's the first time you've ever said that," he said hoarsely. "I'm sorry. I am... really glad you're here." "How glad?" "This is a most peculiar world," she said, changing the subject. "I don't recognize it at all." He said nothing but sent out an advancing barrier of thorns to clear a small area of marsh for her. He performed small services with his roots and tendrils, levering apart her bulbs where they were in danger of rotting, brushing small insects off her leaves when they became established in colonies. His main trunk was now thicker than the body of a man, and he covered several miles. In the marsh, his shoots were thick and black, standing like dark fingers deep into the ooze. Out in the drier areas, which seemed to be spreading, he modified his system to conserve internal moisture. He grew fine multitudes of hairs against the heat and predatory insects. Dr. Adelitka Wynn covered several acres herself, surrounded by his thorn barriers.  she flowered in great blue blossoms, heavy with orange pollen. He had been waiting, and flowered all along his immense length in every color of the spectrum, mile upon mile of wide flat flowers, open and ready for the breeze. She did not protest. He sent clouds of pollen from his anthers, turning the landscape into a fine mist that drifted over her. He covered her with several pounds of fine golden dust. "Thank you," she said. He wondered whether she would produce a bulb like her or a young creeper like himself. He kept young tendrils hanging around her like a catcher's glove, until she told him to go away and let her seed in peace. She seeded in a particularly stormy period and in profusion. She did it with a gusto and variety that amazed him. Seeds with airborne devices, parachutes, airvanes, twirling rotators, balls of down, with hard shells, soft shells. She even kept some pods, and, with a gesture almost tender, allowed ripe seeds to fall into his waiting leaves. He passed these very slowly and carefully along his system, from cup to cup. He cleared a slope near the marsh and brushed deep furrows with his thorns to put the seeds in. He planted them gently and grew an open lattice of thorny stems above them, so that only the sunlight could get in. As they grew, he retreated his protective screen to allow them air and free ground of their own. They shot up straight and tall, saplings headed for the stars. The other seeds had taken hold in remote regions, in marshes, on the rising and falling mountains, and in great flat stretches of pulverized volcanic dust. He found he was aware of them and could, by concentrating, even gain a vague impression of the ground around them, as if each were a locus of his consciousness. He also found a telepathic link now existed between him and their mother. It was vague at first but it became clearer, eventually superseding speech between them. None of their children had flowers. Only the two of them flowered, pollinated and seeded with regularity. Their seeds spread in a variety -- and variety was the word, for in the first seeding she had packed as many variations as she could imagine. There was, in his opinion, too much emphasis on grasses after her own general style and too few creepers like himself. But that was a small detail. The original form did not last long in any case. Some of his seedlings had been enclosed by the rising marshes and were now more comfortable under water than above. A few wilder members even retained a measure of mobility and spent their lives floating from place to place. H E did not entirely approve of this. But, as the marshes grew under the constant rain and acquired an unpalatable saltiness so that they were virtually seas, he saw the sense of this development. He now covered, by himself and in proxy through his seeds, almost the entire land area of the planet. She extended just as far. They came to a working agreement to leave certain areas primarily for the grasslike progeny and others for his more treelike seedlings. The global view led them both to consider the same experiment. There were occasional worms and crablike creatures, minute bodies floating with his somewhat gipsy water-seedlings, but they and their own seeds were the only significant forms of life on their planet. "Shall we see what we can evolve?" he suggested. "I had that thought myself," she answered. "At least we know the end product. It seems unlikely, now, but man must have come from much this environment on Earth." "Very well. Where shall we start?" "I have some enterprising waterplants," he said diffidently. "We have." It was an ambitious program. But, on the other hand, life on Earth had presumably also developed against all probabilities. Here on their planet they could provide continual intelligent guidance. They went out into their waterplants and sensed through their miles of sensory surfaces the most favorable areas of the planet. They encouraged the water-plants to breed, cross-breed and extend. They fed fractional parts of themselves to each other, loaded certain areas with nutrient life, encouraged mobility. Great continental areas rose and sank. Generation after generation was rapidly produced and as rapidly developed and died. The planet was littered with the remains of unsuccessful experiment. But, mainly by concentration on iron-rich diets and localizing their sight perceptions repeatedly in one particular part of their species, they produced plants which no longer responded to them. They had separate existence of their own. At last they managed to lure repeated generations out of the water and onto land. They had the advantage not of merely controlling the environment but of being the environment. Subject to the violence of volcanoes and the endless shifting of the planet's crust, aberrations in the plane of rotation, and rapid changes of climate, as ice mounted and retreated and heat waxed and waned, within these limits they could and did make arbitrary decisions. By withdrawing from an area, either of them could create a desert. By doubling their rate of growth in a local tributary of themselves, they could create a forest. Their descendant seeds were as much part of themselves as the original trunks. In fact, they rarely distinguished between that original growth and later developments. It came as quite a surprise to them both to find there was not much left of the first bulb clusters and the first sprawling creeper. more-or-less fishes to leave the water, progress was rapid. There was never a difficulty quite as great as that again. On land, wherever the land happened to be at the time, they could induce generations of different shapes and sizes by modifying the vegetation -- themselves, in their many forms. He took his branches higher and higher in a sparse zone, for example, to encourage the necks of the local animals to extend. They were remodeling their program deliberately on their old Earth, cutting off what they knew to be unsuccessful by-paths and nurturing the developments that should lead to man. The original crablike inhabitants had long since passed away, though they had used some features of these. The insects continued to multiply on their own by sheer probability and without thenguidance. They were both ruthless in thenexperiments. Once they abolished whole races of enormous vegetarians by withholding themselves in inaccessible areas. Like the dinosaurs, whom they resembled closely, these great reptiles were too big and too stupid. She blamed him for having allowed them to feed too many generations on too highly radioactive parts of themselves. "I can't be everywhere at once all the time," he said. To annoy her, and because he had been a space captain, he encouraged an entirely abortive series of flying reptiles. His excuse was true. By exerting his consciousness to its maximum, he could be aware of almost all the planet simultaneously, but this awareness lacked intensity and definition. The comfortable maximum for concentration was about a hundred square miles. If he focused his attention within a square mile, his roots and trunks and branches hissed with massive life and rapidly propagated themselves into a thick jungle. This in turn multiplied the surface areas and diffused his attention. There was a lot going on in the undergrowth that they both missed. They almost missed their ultimate triumph. ' I I HE satellite of their planet had cooled. The sun around which they swung was shielded by thick banks of the carbon dioxide they breathed off from their myriad bodies. They had stabilized most of the animals. Despite the repeated cataclysms they had arrived at descendants who could flower just as they themselves originally had flowered. As a matter of fact, he was quite deeply taken with an offshoot wood of flowering trees. In the guise of honeysuckle he spent most of his time wooing tenderly round their trunks, to the fury of her grasses and the lashing of her reeds. An object that was a rudimentary improvement on an ape came shambling into the wood where he was and quite idiotically tore off some of his prettier flowers. On checking, he found there were several varieties of this object in various parts of the planet. None appeared any better than this brute, who whizzed through the trees and bred and died in a flicker of time. "He'll never last," he said to her. "His metabolism burns out before he has time to do anything." "He'll reproduce all the faster," she answered. "And leave those trees alone. At your age, really!" . She was right about the prototype brute. Never in their experiments had they produced a creature that was so active. They had raised animals that bred much faster, but none that bred at a reasonable pace and also kept flashing about the planet in a restless motion. They had to litter the ground with suitable seeds before the humanoids stopped long enough in one spot to try planting for themselves. And even then, the idea did not take root for many many generations. But here and there, at last, they had the beginnings of a culture, and the beginnings of speech. The telepathic content of the humanoids' speech was intelligible to them, though not apparently intelligible to the humanoids themselves. They concentrated on the temperate zones, where they could most easily encourage the humanoids to stand still from generation to generation. The humanoid dwellings flickered into existence and decayed too rapidly for any reliable observations until several tribes of them took to using stone for building materials. "Well," he said thankfully, "at  as t I can tell where they are without dashing from branch to branch like one of your monkeys." He still did not believe her monkey experiments had had much to do with it. Secretly he suspected she had encouraged that development to annoy him -- by putting multitudes in his hair, so to speak. It was just and proper, therefore, that the humanoids trampled all over her grasslands by preference. It was in this mood that he created cool groves of tall trees and concentrated in them thoughts of love and pleasure. The humanoids took the hint remarkably quickly. He had many happy generations encouraging the humanoids to sport in his groves. She was furious. But trees were his province and there was nothing she could do about it. "You're debasing them," she complained. "They're enjoying themselves, aren't they?" "Voyeur!" Well, he frankly enjoyed the swift rush of little pink bodies in and out of the groves. He was sorry when she succeeded in countering with a sterner line of thought, bred out of her deserts and thin-grassed mountains, where she was full of thought of privacy, and continence, and wonder and the stars. When he could, he made life uncomfortable for these higher-minded generations. He was never slow to create sybaritic and sensual surroundings to knock them off their mental perches. In one group of islands -- which she could not reach because his pines starved out her seeds before they had a chance to establish -- he had a series of permanent statues erected to himself by the humanoids, and he had frank and open worship. He considered it very proper. He maintained a cool and bracing temperature in the trees around the sandy shores. He had passed through four or five hundred generations of giant redwoods before the little humanoids established themselves in the cities across the planet. Many of their activities were too fast for him to perceive, but he could contemplate their cities. These were temporary structures, on the scale of the thrusting growth he felt in one of his redwoods. Still, to these dizzy little humanoids no doubt the cities lasted long enough. It was rare now for him to pick up a humanoid thought. Unlike their first models, the present generations thought at the high speed which characterized their entire life. A blurred flicker of an impression to him was apparently the whole life's output of one of her contemplatives sitting in a cave, until he fell to pieces and was whizzed away. The pink varieties no longer worshipped him, save fitfully, but he still had a pleasant range of warmer-colored humanoids whom he could tempt into an orgy. This kept him deep in the forests on the central belt of the planet.  the main ocean. He transferred his consciousness to join her on the edge of one of her wide prairies. "I think we've done very well," she said. "Surely you didn't call me all the way here just to say that." "Yes. It really is Earthlike, isn't it? I felt it was about time you congratulated me." He thought back. "I don't remember, now," he said. "But it seems to be roughly similar." "Roughly! After all this time, you dare to suggest I have only achieved a rough similarity? I was a trained sociologist, kindly remember. It is exactly like Earth." He looked patiently up at the satellite and the stars. She was detailing the achievement interminably. "It's very difficult to tell," he said, interrupting her. "Our time scale is quite different from what it was on Earth. These humanoids of ours breed and die like ephem. erids." She rustled impatiently. "If you took trouble to examine the species from their time scale, you would find it is precisely the same as Earth time to them." "Is it? Very well, I believe you. We have created an exact duplicate of the other Earth. Congratulations." "You're just agreeing without proof. I have evidence to show the sociology is a detailed replica. These humanoids are repeating human history exactly as we knew it! One of our ivy shoots even reported a tombstone marked 'Killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill, June # , # .'" "Now you're exaggerating!" he said. "How could they possibly duplicate a time system that applied on the other Earth?" "What other Earth?" she said. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. What a wife! Pretty, smart... and when she cooked it was just out of this worldl cry snooker called from the bathm # room. There was no answer. George wrapped a towel around his rump and came into the living room. Rosy sat curled up reading a magazine. "Do me a favor, Rosy," George said. "Put caps on bottles so your perfume won't evaporate. I paid twelve bucks for that Chanel." Rosy looked up at him, stretcbing her neck a little. "And next time close the damn Bendix so I won't have to swim through the basement to shut it off." "I told you, die catch wouldn't catch." "The catch would catch all right if you didn't leave Timmy's diaper hanging out." "That's not fair," Rosy said. "Blaming little Timmy." His hands tried to crush an invisible bowling ball. "Just a little... presence of mind, Rosy. Okay?" "You dropped your towel," Rosy said, looking away. George ran into the bedroom and came back in his pajamas. 'Tor God's sake, honey, try to remember what you're doing when you're doing it. Like with the power mower." "I suppose that was my fault?" "Don't you know enough to cut the engine when you're done?" "I wasn't done. I had to answer the phone, didn't I?" George threw up his hands. "So all right. So you left it running and it went right through Charlie's fence." "Sometimes," Rosy said, putting down the magazine, "you exasperate me, George. I told you, I put it in neutral or whatever it is." "You put it in high and let it run through Charlie's fence." Rosy looked at him as at a bad tomato. "Why," she said, "do I get blamed every time something mechanical goes wrong?" But they kissed and made up because it was the night before their third wedding anniversary. A T the breakfast table next morning George gave her the diamond cocktail ring she'd drooled over. Rosy gave him the self-winding time piece he'd slobbered over in Cellini's window. Dear girl, had the courage to get it for nothing down and thirty-six months to pay. 'Don't gulp your food," Rosy said. "It's Charlie's turn to drive you." In his high chair, Timmy scooped up handfuls of oatmeal and heaved them over the port side. When Charlie came to the door he had a gift-wrapped box for them. It looked heavy. He gave it to Rosy and slipped on one of Timmy's oatmeal bombs and flew headlong into the couch. "Happy wedding anniversary, you two," Charlie said, picking himself up. 'When are you going to fix my fence?" Rosy weighed the box in her arms. "Charlie, that's real sweet of you and Beth. Let's open it now, George." 'We're late," Charlie said. He wiped his shoe on the rug. "Come on, pal." They took the freeway out of Sunnydale. Downtown the clock on the Trojan Life  Casualty building gave them four minutes to get there. "What was in that box you brought?" George asked. "A pressure cooker." "Oh, no." "Supposed to build up terrific pressure," Charlie said. "Five thousand pounds per square inch." George stared before him as they drove into the Park-O-Port He had not a moment free till his coffee break at ten. Mr. Perkins wanted the Lawndale policies cleared right away and Mr. Zungenspiel had all the juniors in for a briefing on exorbitant rates. When he got back to his desk Maude Doody waited to interview him about his wedding anniversary for her "Sweetness and Light" column in Keep Smiling, the company weekly. "I hope you're always polite to Rosy," Meddlin' Maude said. "I can't stand rude men. How old is Timmy now?" "He'll be three in September." Maude made a quick mental calculation. She looked doubtful. "And could you tell us what you gave Rosy for her wedding anniversary?" "A pressure cooker," George said, forgetting everything else. "Is that all? What kind of pressure cooker, George?" "Five thousand pounds per square inch." "I mean the brand" Maude said, stabbing the air with her sharp pencil. 'Don't you think the folks would like to know the brand?" "Uh, I guess the best." "They're all best," Maude said. "Can't you remember the brand?" "No," he said. Meddlin' Maude rose to her feet. She looked down at him severely. "George, you're slipping," she said and marched off to the Keep Smiling office. phone. Five thousand pounds per square inch, he thought. Whammo! The phone rang seven times. Then he dialed Charlie's house, but Beth did not answer either. Rosy and Beth spent hours at the supermart. 'It was the social center of Sunnydale where the gals could gossip a little and compare brands. George took the elevator up to the company cafeteria. On the fifth floor Mr. Perkins stepped in. "Just got your Lawndale policies," Mr. Perkins said. "Fast work, son. Keep it up." "Thank you, sir. I had an inquiry this morning, sir. About domestic accidents." "Shoot the problem, son." 'Does it cover injury by pressure cooker?" 'Was it Full Coverage or Complete Coverage?" "Complete, sir." "Covers everything from electrocution in the bath tub to getting hit by a stray rocket from Cape Canaveral." The elevator let them out at the cafeteria. "Mr. Perkins, I'd like to double my wife's policy." "Mighty sensible of you, George. Can you afford it?" "No, sir." "That's the spirit! How about your own policy, George? Isn't it about time you went up a notch?" "You mean it, sir?" "I've been keeping my eye on you," Mr. Perkins said. "I'll see what I can do." George thanked him profusely. "Not at all, not at all," Mr. Perkins boomed. "That's what old dad Perkins is here for." George got his coffee and joined Charlie at their corner table. "Getting chummy with old dad Perkins?" Charlie asked. "I just got told," George said, leaning forward, "I could increase my insurance." "No!" "Said it was time I moved up a notch." Charlie clenched his fist. "We can make the Country Club, I tell you. I'm almost twelve thousand in the red, not counting the house and the boat. Lefs celebrate, Georgie. All four of us. We can go to the Emperor Room for sixty bucks. That is, if you're still talking to your humble friends." "Come off it." "I've seen it happen," Charlie said bitterly. "People getting so deep in debt they start snubbing their more solvent friends." When Arlene dropped the noon mail on George's desk he sat dreaming. More insurance, more credit; more credit, more debt; more debts, more prestige. He sat up with a start and dialed Rosy. was fine. She'd spent the morntest entry blanks and buying a big roast for the pressure cooker. "Oh, George, it's a wonderful pressure cooker. It looks like a space ship, with bolts and portholes and all." "I don't want you to -- " "And it's got a remote control i panel or something, with all kinds of buttons and blinkers, Timmy just loves it!" "Is Timmy anywhere near it?" "He's in it. It's a big one." Arlene came by his desk "Where's Charlie?" she asked. "I got a telegram for him." George waved her away and brought the receiver close to his mouth. "Rosy, listen," George hissed. "Put that damn thing away till I get home. We're going to the Emperor Room with Beth and Charlie." There was a short silence. "You said you wanted a home-cooked meal," Rosy said. "To remind you how married you are." George looked up at Maude Doody standing at his desk. "That sounds like a personal call," Meddlin' Maude said. "It's my wife." "You've been on that phone three minutes," Meddlin' Maude said, glancing at her watch. "You know company policy on personal calls, George." "I'm a homemaker," Rosy was saying. "I want to make dinner for you and Timmy." "Oh, go to hell!" George said. Meddlin' Maude clutched at her heart. Rosy gasped. Five minutes later: "Of course I love you, baby doll," George said weakly. In a semi-circle around him stood Meddlin' Maude, Mr. Zungenspiel, Mr. Perkins, Arlene, and an assortment of lesser office authorities. "Just don't touch that pressure cooker till I get home, dammit. It's dangerous." "I can only do my best, George," Rosy said with hard finality. "If that's not good enough for you, darling" -- she choked on a sob -- "well, I'm sorry." The phone clicked and the wire went dead. A dozen faces bent over him. "George," Meddlin' Maude said, raising her sharp pencil. "Just a minute, Miss Doody," said Mr. Zungenspiel. "Young man, would you step into my office when you have a tree moment?" "If you see Charlie before they fire you," Arlene said, "tell him I left a telegram on his desk." "George," Miss Doody shrilled, her sharp pencil raised, "did you or did you not tell me to go to hell?" Charlie crashed through the crowd, waving a telegram. "Look at this, George!" George read the telegram : George dropped the telegram. "What are you waiting for, man?" Charlie said. "Call Rosy, will ya?" "She won't answer," George said. "She thinks I don't love her." "Come on! We better get home before she starts making dinner." They ran down to the Park-OPort. "Ahm sorry, Mistuh Charlie," the snappy attendant said. "Caint git yuh cah now. It's on de top floh behind seven lines of cahs an dey aint comin out till five like every weekday sept Satterdays, Sunneys an holidays." "Give him a tip and let's get a taxi," George said. He ran into the street just in time to flag a cab. George tossed the cabbie ten dollars. "Step on it. It may be a matter of life and death." "I could have called Beth," Charlie said. "We'll get there almost as fast." They zoomed through the underpass and turned onto the freeway. A cycle cop emerged from behind a Schlitz billboard and took after them, his siren wailing. "Never mind the cop," George said. The cabbie hunched forward and gripped the wheel. "Mister," he said, "I've been waiting for a chance like this." as he came abreast George grew confused. He saw the cop's big sun glasses shining like the eyes of a wasp and his hat snapping in the wind. George had never broken the law in his life. He had a deep respect for the police, preservers of law and order. The cop motioned the cabbie to pull over. The cab zoomed over a crest on the freeway and ripped down the slope with marked increase in speed. George rolled down the window and flapped his arms. "My wife!" he yelled. The cop cut the siren. His hand went down to his holster. "My wife!" George yelled. "Pressure cooker." The cop grinned and nodded to say he understood, and roaring ahead waved them to follow. The siren started up again. They lost him when they turned off the freeway and raced past the supermarket to their street. Sunnydale looked peaceful in the afternoon. George's house came in view. He heaved a sigh of relief as the cabbie pulled to a stop. "Rosy!" he yelled, dashing up the walk. He flung open the door and stopped. The house was silent except for Rosy's voice in the kitchen. She was counting backwards: "Five... four... three..." "Rosy!" "One... zero." A steaming hiss sounded in the kitchen. In a moment it rose to a howling pitch. There was a tremendous crash and a tremor shook the plaster from the walls. In the settling dust Timmy crawled out of the kitchen with a pot on his head. In the kitchen Rosy sat on the floor, clutching the instruction booklet. "Now see what you did, George!" "What did?" "Barging in like that," Rosy said, tears of frustration streaking her dusty cheeks. "I must have pressed the wrong button." Beside her on the floor lay the Touch Command Control Panel. Its colored lights blinked on and off like a pinball machine. Charlie came into the kitchen with Timmy in his arms. "Oh my gosh!" Rosy cried, looking up at the ceiling. A hole was ripped out in the roof and through it they could see God's blue sky. panel and they ran outside. They saw the snooker describing a lovely ellipse over Sunnydale. "My roast!" Rosy wailed. "It seems to be waiting for orders," Charlie said. "Have to get it down," George said, setting the control panel on the lawn. "Before it slams into some airplane." He pressed a large red button. The snooker wobbled for a moment, then broke its orbit and dove for Charlie's house. It smashed in at the back and came out the front. Beth ran out in a bathrobe, screaming. "Stop it!" Charlie yelled, flinging himself at the control panel and pressing a yellow button. The snooker resumed its orbit, then wobbled and dove into every second or third house in the street, working the houses from side to side. Women ran out and stood dazed, clutching their children and watching the snooker. Desperately George pressed the blue button. The snooker resumed its orbit, wobbled, flew once over the street as if to check what all needed to be hit, then slammed through the whole length of houses from end to end. Two houses caught fire. Charlie pressed the largest button of all, the green one. The snooker righted itself and flew out over the town. Wherever it struck a small cloud of dust rose in the air. Four fire-engines turned into the street. Three of them turned around and raced back to downtown. They lost sight of the snooker for a while. All they saw was the clouds of dust mushrooming all over town, and here and there a fire. When the snooker came in view again, it was rising toward a jet plane circling overhead. "It'll get hit!" Charlie said. George pressed all four buttons. The snooker wobbled for a moment. Then it seemed to shake off file confused commands and rose into the plane's path. The plane veered. The snooker turned after it and rose steeply. Then it dove and slammed down through the fuselage. They all stared as the plane crashed into the supermarket. Above them the pilot floated down in a parachute. He seemed to see the blinking lights of the control panel and worked the chute calmly. He landed through the hole in Rosy's kitchen. He came out of the house eating a piece of cold chicken. He wore an air-research uniform with a belt slanted across his chest and high shiny boots, and in his hand he carried a Rommel whip. H E strode up to George and looked down at the blinking control panel. With the toe of his boot he pushed a black button in the lower left corner and squinted up at the sky, chewing the chicken. The snooker obeyed instantly and resumed its original elliptical orbit. "Ja," he said. "Very goot." He gazed out over the town, the clouds of dust and the fires burning. "Excellent," he said, tossing the chicken bone over his back. It hit Charlie in the face. "You must be the dismantling expert," George said hopefully. "I am more. I am the infentor of pressure snooker." He noticed Rosy and Beth. "Ladies," he said, clicking his heels and bowing. "I haf the honor to present myself. Vernher von Wissenschaft, at your serfice." "Lkiewise," Rosy said. "Could you get my pressure cooker down before it does any more damage?" "Ha ha!" Vernher von Wissenschaft laughed. "Very goot! Pressure cooker! Hm, goot way to deceive brutal enemy. Export five hoondred tausend pressure cookers to enemy homes. Ja, I like it." "You don't understand," Rosy said. "My roast will be ruined if you don't get it down pretty soon." "You cook rosht in my intention?" "Biggest roast you ever saw," Rosy said. She hugged George. "You see, this is our wedding anniversary and I'm dying to know how it came out." "Rosht?" he mused, following the snooker with his eyes and licking his fingers thoughtfully. "Why not? Maybe I make deal on side with Amerikan Kitchen Appliance Inkorporated. If rosht comes out goot." He looked at the broken houses and the firemen spraying the fires. "Ja," he decided, "kill two experiments mit one snooker." He waited for the snooker to pass overhead. Then he gave the control panel a sharp kick with his heel, breaking it in two. The snooker wobbled and exploded. Bits of steel whirred out over Sunnydale. A brown cloud appeared above them and in a moment they were all drenched in a rainfall of roast beef. By the time the gravy hit them it had cooled enough to taste. "It's wonderful!" Rosy said. "Chust a minute," Vernher von Wissenschaft said. "Scientific experiment not so fast." He removed a shred of roast beef from behind his ear and chewed. "Isn't it good?" Rosy asked anxiously. Vernher von Wissenschaft finished tasting. He thought a moment, stretched his face. "Excellent," he said. "Do you really like it?" "Ja, excellent." He held up a finger. "Perhaps," he suggested, "two more grains pepper." r T'WO weeks later, when all the fires in the town had been put out and the damage assessed, a great banquet was held in the Emperor Room to honor George. In the street a huge crowd of well-wishers waited to greet him as he came out. The Emperor Room could accommodate only the town's important personages; there were so many of them that some of the best families did not bribe the mayor in time to get a seat. But George managed to get standing room for Mr. Perkins and Mr. Zungenspiel. Beside George at the table of honor sat Charlie. Next to hinm Vernher von Wissenschaft in a splendid uniform, cracking his . Rommel whip from time to time. Everybody who was anybody was there: the Police Commissioner, the Gambling Czar, the District Attorney, the Teamsters' Boss, Senator Smiley, Coroner Schadenfrohm, the Election Commissioner, the Slum Owner, the Housing Inspector. "Never before," the mayor ; orated, "has so much damage been done by such a little man in such a short time." Vernher cracked his whip. "Very , goot," he said, turning to George. "Rhetoric, you know." "The national economy," the mayor continued, "was in danger of imminent collapse ever since our old-fashioned P.O. -- planned obsolescence -- reached a point of no return. We had to produce more and more until the market was glutted. Of course we would not sell so much as a toaster to our brutal enemy." (Applause.) Vernher cracked his whip. "Very goot." "But now," the mayor said, smiling at George, "the solution to our economic impasse has been found! This young man had the daring concept to our economics. S. D. --  Senseless Destruction!" (Applause.) Vernher cracked his whip. "Excellent." The mayor raised his arms for silence. "I have good news," he said. "Congress has just voted one struction research!" (Wild applause.) Vernher cracked his whip six times. "I can promise you, ladies and gentlemen," the mayor continued, "what happened to our town is only the beginning. As a result of the visionary experiment by this daring young man, fifty thousand idle construction workers have already been put back on the job; twenty new banks have sprung up to handle the flood of mortgages; a new steel mill will be erected in our world-famous game preserve. But I need not go on. The industries, businesses and stock markets that will profit by Senseless Destruction can hardly be numbered. The biggest boom in history is on! And as long as we have the snooker it will never end!" (General pandemonium.) When order was restored, the mayor turned solemnly to George and said: "In grateful recognition of your..." After the recognition speech George accepted humbly the following sums, not listing gifts under #: # from Home Builders Assn.  # from Construction Union, Local #. # from Last Bank of America. # from Unified Steel Corp. # from Chicago Furniture Mart.  # from Congress in Series E Bonds. George also received the following appointments: Special Adviser to Mayor on Senseless Destruction, with nominal yearly income of # tax free. Vice-President of Trojan Life  Casualty Co. Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Sunnydale Game and Wood Preserve. Honorary Supreme Commander of Juvenile Senseless Destructionists, to be organized. ily in the control room of his chateau on Indian Rock overlooking the town. Snookers buzzed over rooftops like flies. Clouds of dust rose prosperously everywhere. In the streets construction gangs raced in speed trucks. George had begun to wonder how it would all end. After the novelty had worn off, Senseless Destruction became more monotonous, more depressing than the Installment Way of Life before it. People worked harder than ever now and had less to show for it. Of course, it was unpatriotic to have anything to show for it. Nobody in his right senses would argue against Roundthe-Clock Employment for All. And if you didn't go around grinning and saying how happy you were with your seventh mortgage, people began to suspect you. George had talked it all over with Rosy and she agreed. Sure, it was all right for them -- for the time being. But George had begun to despise himself. He had to keep sharp control over the snookers. Some of them showed a tendency to sneak off course, looking for some nice fresh target -- like the chateau, maybe. The butler came in and presented a calling card on a silver platter. "Vernher! Show him in at once." Vernher von Wissenschaft marched in, cracking his Rommel whip. He looked worried. "Bad news," Vernher said, shaking hands. "Chust come from the President." "How is Charlie?" "Goot. But too much work. And trouble. These snookers." Vernher strode to the window and looked out over the town. "They're doing a fine job," George assured him. Vernher turned. A grim smile slashed his face. "Too goot. Russian economy caught up with ours. They vant snookers too. Must have snookers or they go kaput." "What's so bad about that? Let them go kaput. Cold war will be over at least." Vernher shook his head. "They threaten atomic war if they don't get snookers. This time for real." "Ja," Vernher sighed. "Charlie had secret cabinet meeting. We cannot take chance. You must go teach them how." "Can't you go?" "I'm leaving for Johannesburg tonight. United Africa also caught up." "As it is our economy barely keeps ahead of the Russians!" "Ja. But cannot be helped." "Maybe," George said, "if you invented something bigger, better, more efficient." "You think I haf not tried?" George stood thinking a long moment. He said, "Vernher, is there no way out?" "Sure," Vernher laughed. "If we go back to savage pre-civilization." "All right," George said. "I'll go tell Rosy. Watch the control panel a moment, will you? Especially the Eastern Section." "What's the matter with them?" "They seem to be getting restless lately." "Nonsense! My snookers haf no emotions." "Just seems that way sometimes," George said, going out. Their job could even make stones feel something, he thought. He ran down to Rosy in the kitchen. She had consented to having servants only because of her social position, but she still insisted on personally running the kitchen her own way. George pulled her into the hallway and put his arms around her and kissed her. "What on earth?" she said. "You must be very brave, darling." He fixed her with his eyes. "Rosy, this is it." It?" "E-Day." E for Escape. "We can't talk now," he said. "Vernher is at the controls." "Can I change?" "No time. Are the suitcases packed?" "They're in the garage, behind the beer barrels." "Go get Timmy," George said. "I'll drive the station wagon round to the back door." At the gate to the grounds they stopped and took a last look at the chateau. They could see Vernher standing in the control window. He seemed to be enjoying the spectacle in the town below. Rosy gripped George's arm. "Look!" A snooker had strayed off its orbit and was hissing in toward the chateau. It came fast over the grounds, heading straight for the control window. Vernher never saw it coming. Probably he did not even hear the glass crashing as the sharp slivers shot into the room. D Y the end of May George was still chopping a small clearing in the Montana woods. George and Charlie's old campsite. It was harder work than he'd expected. But it was a good site and the tent would be replaced by a heavy log cabin before winter set in. Sometimes they'd climb one of the peaks on the Flathead Range and sit gazing at Hungry Horse Reservoir in the distance. The trees were stubborn here, blunting the ax. But they'd make it all right. George sat down to rest. Rosy waved to him from the potato patch. A strand of smoke rose peacefully from the stone oven. He waved back and grinned. Timmy worked his way up bravely to where George sat. He'd gotten used to his bark shoes and had quite forgotten that he had ever worn any other kind. "Can I help you, Daddy?" Education too, George thought. The real kind. "No, thanks, son," he said. "You'd better help your mother plant the potatoes." That evening at supper, as they sat enjoying sundown and the quiet of woods and mountains, they heard a motor far away. The wind took it away and then it sounded much nearer, grinding in low gear. George stood up as a jeep came round the mountain. In it sat a man and a woman. The jeep came into the clearing, swaying over stones and roots. "Charlie!" "Hi," Charlie said. He helped Beth down. George yanked Timmy to his feet. "Stand up, son. This is the Note: this coupon is for your conven tehee only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send in your order on a sheet of paper. President of the United States." "I got a present for you, George," Charlie said. "Not another pressure cooker!" Rosy said. "A peace pipe," Charlie said. Timmy's big round eyes took him in. "Are you the President?" he asked in a small, awed voice. "Not any more," Charlie said. George stared at him. "You didn't give up the White House?" "What else could I do?" Charlie said. "I gave it back to the Indians." Edited by H. L. Gold One look at the contents tells you that this is a 'must have' book for your permanent SF library -- Richard Matheson's One for the Books; Damon Knight's An Eye for What?; Mark Clifton's A Woman's Place; Alan E. Nourse's Brightside Crossing; F. L. Wallace's Mezzerow Loves Company; Evelyn E. Smith's Once a Greech; L. Sprague de Camp's A Gun for Dinosaur; Edgar Pangborn's The Music Man of Babylon; and -- of course -- Clifford D. Simak's The World that Couldn't Be. # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of  Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  the best of Galaxy novelets -- with a special plus for Galaxy readers T HE Double-A call light wailed and blinked itself into a bright red hemorrhage on the wall. I woke up fast. My first thought was fire. Logically, reasonably, I know there hasn't been a hotel fire in # years -- but tradition is tradition. I punched the visor and Greel's face popped on the screen. The lobby clock over his shoulder read # : #. I moaned silently and flipped on vocal. "Duncan here." "Chief, get down here quick." I didn't ask why. Greel's my head bellhop and bellhops can smell hotel trouble. "Where are you?" "Level #. Desk #." "Check. Hold everything, kid." I started to cut off, then I saw something else behind him. I took a deep breath and held it. "Greel. Is that Ollie?" Greel nodded. Like he was going to be sick. I was in my clothes and out the door. I took a manual emergency lift and fell seventy-eight floors in eighty seconds, not even thinking about my stomach. Not with Ollie to think about. Ollie's uncle is Mike Sorrenson, owner of Hotel Intergalactica, and a reasonably decent person. Ollie is something else again. Crewcut, eager, bowtie and fresh out of college. My job -- teach him "all there is to know about the hotel business." Which should be a real snap, as he already knows all there is to know about everything. Thursday, for instance. Ollie got his menus mixed and served scrambled eggs to five hundred visiting Vegans. That's all. No trouble. Except the difference between a Vegan and a chicken is strictly a matter of size and evolution -- and we're still cleaning up Ballroom Nine. stomach only ten floors behind. Ollie popped out of his chair and came toward me, a sick smile pasted across his face. "Mr. Duncan, I -- " "Sit down, Ollie, and shut up," I said quietly. He swallowed and sat down. I turned to Greel. "Okay," I said. "I'm ready. Let's have it." "I'll save the details for later," said Greel. "We've got to get moving. Fast. I have reason to believe there are from four to fifty Skeidzti loose in the hotel." I drew a blank at first. Then it hit me and I felt cold all over. "Oh, my God," I said, sending a withering look at Ollie. "Uh-huh." Greel nodded. "The way I get it from Ollie, four Stentorii checked in about #:#. They wanted to go right up tb their room so Ollie sent a boy with them and told the Stentorii he'd put their luggage in a lift right away." "They kind of grinned at me, Mr. Duncan," Ollie interrupted, "and said that was fine, there was no hurry about the bags." "Yeah, I'll bet they did," I said. I looked at Greel, and we both felt sick. "Don't tell me the rest. Ollie checked them in on the Master Register, turned to get their bags -- and what-do-you-know, they were gone." Ollie looked surprised. He started to ask how I could possibly know but I glared him back to his chair. "Okay," I said. "What have you done so far?" Greel took a deep breath. "First, they have about thirty to thirty-five minutes head start. I've shielded four levels above and below. I don't think they'll get that far, but no use taking chances. We've got one lucky break. Since the whole Quadrant borders on Free City they can't get out except through a Registration area." "What about -- " Greel nodded. "Already done it. I've closed all five Desks in the Quadrant. Anyone wants to register has to come in by way of Seven." "Fine. Just one thing -- " I flipped through the register. "Could they have gotten outside through this door?" "No. It was unshielded, all right But there were no checkouts after the Stentorii registered." O UR luck was holding. At least the Skeidzti were still just the hotel's problem. I've got a few friends on Free City's revolving council, but I don't like to mess with those boys unless I have to. I sent Greel to organize the bellboys into search squads. Then I checked the Stentorii's room number and hauled Ollie out of his chair, figuring the only way to make sure he stayed out of trouble was to keep him with me. Before I left the lobby I picked up a pair of lowcharge stunners and handed one to Ollie. 'Took," I said, "do you think you could possibly handle one of these things without knocking us both out cold?" Ollie nodded vaguely. He took the weapon and held it as if he were certain it would go off in his hand. "Sure, Mr. Duncan, but why do we need weapons? I mean. I'm sorry I let those things get loose, but -- " I stopped at the lift and stared at him. I suddenly realized the poor kid had no idea what he had done wrong. All he could see was that Greel and I were making a big fuss over a couple of alien housepets. "Ollie," I said patiently, "do you really know what a Skeidzti is? I don't want an oration. Just tell me the simple truth. Do you or don't you?" He started to say something, then changed his mind and shook his head. "I thought so. Well, first of all, don't refer to them as 'pets.' They may be cute as a kitten to a Stentorii, but as far as you're concerned they are dangerous, quick, carnivorous, highly adaptable little monsters. Only 'adaptable' is about as descriptive as calling the ocean moist. A Skeidzti in a kitchen will hide in a stack of plates and, by God, you'll eat off of him and swear he is a plate. A Skeidzti in a garden is a rock, a weed, a pile of leaves. In your bedroom he's a garter, a sock or a necktie. Only -- put one around your neck and you'll damn well know he's not a necktie. Now do you think it might be permissible for me to continue to bear arms against the Skeidzti, just in case?" Ollie was taken aback, I could tell. Almost enough to keep his mouth shut He thought for maybe a full second before he said anything. "But Mr. Duncan, if the Stentorii knew they were dangerous -- " And that did it. I poked a hard finger in his chest and backed him against the wall. "Look, Ollie," I said grimly, "that college line of logic is what got us into this jam in the first place. Now get this, and remember it. You don't need a degree in Alien Psychology to know that Rule One is never use your own viewpoint as a premise in guessing what an alien is thinking or doing. It just simply doesn't work that way. An alien's actions are based upon what he thinks is reasonable and proper -- not what you think he ought to think. "Why do you think we have separate Quadrants and private entrances to each room? It sure as hell isn't for economy's sake, I can tell you that. It so happens that some of these so-called reasonable civilized beings still consider each other as rare culinary delights. in Free City, this hotel is strictly out of bounds. And here's another rule you can put down in Duncan's lectures on Alien Psychology: If a guest phones down for a midnight snack, he may mean he wants the key to his neighbor's room." I took a deep breath. "Am I getting through to you, Ollie?" Ollie nodded, wide-eyed, and I shoved him into the lift ahead of me. We hung for a moment, then the gravs caught hold. IN my business you learn to get along with aliens, or at least put up with the ones you can't possibly get along with. And some are completely impossible -- like the Nixies. Except for simple trade relations, I can't conceive of anything I might have in common with a Nixie. And there was another rule of thumb for Ollie: Never be deceived by appearances. An alien's resemblance to human form is no indication that his outlook will in any way resemble human logic and reason. Until you know, don't guess; and don't assume, either, that a lack of human form denotes a lack of common interest. A Goron is a repulsive, warty glob of pink and brown protoplasm consisting of twelve eyes, nine pseudoarms -- and an entirely human liking for jazz, poetry, Scotch and women Or anyway, Goron females. On the other hand, ignoring the general hairiness and the rodentlike features, a Stentorii looks as humanoid as I do. He is also a completely alien, cold-blooded, murderous creature without a shred of mercy in his body. I stared hard at the Stentorii who opened the door. He stared back at me from tiny red eyes set wide on either side of his whiskery pink muzzle. Then he saw Ollie and gave a high squeaky laugh, baring a mouthful of sharp yellow teeth. He turned into his room and said something in Stentor to his companions. They nearly fell apart I had had just about enough. Time was running out I switched on my portable recorder and said: actic Standard Code, I wish to invoke the privilege of communicating with you; without fear of future prosecution in case I may offend, by way of accidental implication, any tradition, custom or moral standard of your race." The Stentorii just grinned. I spoke a little louder. "I said I speak without offense!" The Stentorii frowned. He didn't like that at all. But he understood it. "All right," he said grudgingly, "I accept." "Fine," I said, and let him see that I had switched off my recorder. I never start an argument with an alien without invoking the nonoffense clause. Of course, the same clause is stated in every Registration Contract, providing mutual protection for the hotel's guests and its employees. But I like to play it safe. By now the three other Stentorii were up, grinning at Ollie. I ignored them and spoke to the one at the door. "My name is Duncan," I told him. "I am manager of the hotel. This is my assistant, Mr. Sorrenson. I will come right to the point. You played a little joke down. in the lobby a few minutes ago. Although this incident is a serious breach of your Registration Conmatter if I am able to gain your full cooperation. On behalf of Hotel Intergalactica, I formally request you recall your Skeidzti immediately and turn them over to me for housing in the hotel kennel." The Stentorii glanced at his companions, then turned to me with a look of mock astonishment. "Mr. Duncan, do you imply the hotel has allowed my pets to become lost? Naturally, I will hold you responsible if they come to any harm while in your charge." I had half expected something like this I couldn't do a thing but play it out "All right," I said, "I haven't time to appreciate your humor. You know it is illegal to bring unregistered alien pets into this hotel. I am also certain you are aware that we are in the Federation Circle, which is not in Free City territory -- which means all guests, by the act of signing their Registration Contracts, place themselves under Federation law for the duration of their stay here." T HE Stentorii grinned, showing X his yellow teeth. "Mr. Duncan, you are bluffing. I am quite aware of the law, and respectfully submit that if you check your copy of our Registration Contracts you will find your employee here countersigned the Alien Responsibility Clause." Well, that was his round. I was sure he was too oily a character to fall for it, but I had had to try. He was right. Under our Registration Contract it is presumed that while the hotel is responsible for a full knowledge of the Galactic Customs Restrictions, an alien cannot be expected to inform the Desk Clerk of all possible violations he may be guilty of on any particular world. And any clerk green enough, or stupid enough, or both -- like Ollie -- who signs a Responsibility Clause without checking Galactic Customs -- ought to have his head examined. Of course, we could take the Stentorii to court. Maybe we might even win, on the grounds of purposeful malice, but I don't like to get the hotel into law suits. It's bad publicity, and it gives other wise guys grand ideas. The legal pitch having failed, I was ready to continue with Unveiled Threat No. #. "Look," I said wearily, "I admit you are within your legal rights. Although just how far within I'm not too certain at the moment. But before you come to any decision let me remind you that, while I may not be in a position to take official action against you, I fully intend to file a Warning Report to every member of the Galactic Hotel Association, which includes nearly their subsidiaries. I don't know what your business is. But since you are here I presume it entails traveling. Traveling means hotels. If you refuse your cooperation, I assure you it may be quite difficult to find a decent room within twelve thousand parsecs of this planet" The Stentorii shrugged and closed the door on my foot. I'm sure he would have hacked it off for a souvenir if I hadn't jerked it out. I looked at Ollie. His fists were clenched by his side and there was a look of iron determination in his eyes. "Well?" I said. "Boy," said Ollie. "Just wait unhotel again." "Ollie," I said weakly, "I didn't come up here to actually accomplish anything with those characters. It is strictly a matter of form. A necessary routine for the record. Everything I said went completely down the drain. They were not impressed, frightened or embarrassed in any way. It is impossible to reason with a Stentorii because he is inherently incapable of taking anything you say seriously. He is also incapable of caring whether he gets a hotel room. Anywhere. Ever. He has one now, and the future is absolutely of no importance. He doesn't care about you, me, life, death or hotel rooms. Didn't you hear anything I said in the lift?" "Sure, Mr. Duncan, but -- " "Ollie. Shut up." off at my office for a wake-up pill. Greel had his command post set up in the Level # lobby and I joined him there. The lobby was full of squat Fensi bellhops, swarming in and out of the lifts like agitated ants. Most of my bellhops and some of the Administrative staff are Fensi. I like to have them on the payroll, and I'd hire fifty more if I could get them. Fensi are quick, alert, reasonably honest and highly adaptable. Their adaptability alone makes them worth their weight in gold to a big hotel. A Fensi can breathe a wide variety of atmospheres, take plenty of G's, and doesn't care whether he's hot, cold or in-between. Unless you're a Fensi, room service around here Greel sprinted across the lobby, a wide smile stretching over his hairless blue face . "I'm glad you're so happy," I said. "Maybe you should have gone to see our friends upstairs." Greel laughed. "Maybe we won't need 'em, chief. The boys think we can clean the Skeidzti out by morning -- with a little luck, of course." "More than a little, if you ask me. Get any yet?" Greel held up a finger. "One. Skorno picked up an ashtray on Ten and it nearly bit his hand off." He nodded toward the desk and Ollie and I followed. He picked up a small stationery box and pushed it toward me. "Skorno got it before it could change completely -- you can see what it was trying to do." I could. The object in the box was a dead Skeidzti, but only onequarter of it was in its natural form. The last thing it had touched was Skorno's hand. Following its blindrule instinct it had imitated a hairless blue Fensi arm nearly up to the elbow, before it had either run out of material or died. Now that it was dead it was slowly changing back to its natural form. The part we could see resembled a thin, eight-inch-wide worm-like creature with stubby serrated legs. I figured it could move about as fast a caterpillar without adapting. It was a highly vulnerable creature, and in order to survive it had developed a high degree of protective camouflage. With its soft body and slow speed almost anything could pick up a quick and easy meal. And its natural color didn't help at all. The dead quarter most phosphorescent orange. "Well, son, get some idea what we're up against?" Ollie's eyes were glued to the box and his face was as blue as Greel's. "Can they -- can they adapt to anything?" "No," said Greel, "they have limitations. I'm sure they can imitate most anything, but they couldn't change as quickly under six or eight G's, or, say, in a methane atmosphere." "Not for two or three generations, anyway," I added soberly. Greel nodded. "Anyway, Ollie, the point is these varmints are already used to a Stentor-Earth atmosphere. And if any get out -- " "It would be comparable," I added, "to a plague of invisible bobcats." was hit with the seriousness of our problem. I could sense a kind of helpless panic in his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized he'd opened the floodgates and let the valve break off in his hand. "Mr. Duncan, I -- well, maybe we ought to get help. I mean -- I'll take the blame -- and -- and -- " He was shaking like a leaf. I eased him down to a chair. "And just what sort of help did you have in mind?" I asked. "Well, the police! Couldn't you -- " I shook my head firmly. "No. I certainly could not. That, my friend, is all we need. The Federation would quarantine the hotel, rout several thousand guests out of their various notions of sleep, and raise enough hell to wake every DeepDream addict from here to Andromeda." "Aside from the fact," Greel added, "that every Skeidzti in the hotel could hitch a free ride out of here in some cop's pocket." "Right. No, we can handle it ourselves, a hell of a lot quieter. We've had worse before." Ollie's face told me he thought I was an out and out liar. But then, like I said, this kid has a lot to learn about the hotel business. The Skeidzti had been loose in the hotel since #:# a.m. By #:# we had killed eight of them. And eight Fensi bellhops had bandaged hands. It was obvious we couldn't go around touching everything in the hotel to see if it was real or Skeidzti. Added was the problem of knowing when we had killed them all. The Skeidzti came in disguised as four pieces of Stentorii luggage, but we had no idea how many had clustered together to form each piece. And the Stentorii weren't telling. I called Greel and Ollie to the Desk for a strategy meeting. Ollie dropped in a chair and sank into brooding silence. Even Greel's customary optimism seemed to have temporarily vanished. He reported the bellhops were doing their poking with sticks now, but the results were still alarmingly low. "What we need," Greel complained, "is a system." "Yeh, we need a system, all right," added Ollie helpfully. I stood up, paced around the Desk. The strategy meeting was dying on its feet. "Look," I said, "let's analyze it Our problem is to get rid of the Skeidzti, right?" "Right," from Greel and Ollie. "Okay. Now to kill them we have to see them. And by seeing them I mean we have to see them as they really are." #J P IgpT...    i iI i i "Or catch them during a change," added Greel. "Exactly." Somewhere in the back of my head an idea was catching hold. I kept talking, trying to push it out. "Then our problem is this. We have to force them to change into something we can recognize as a definite Skeidzti." Greel's frown vanished. He sat up straight in his chair. "You mean, like if we made them all change into an object we knew we only had one of." "Sort of like that. Only that means we'd have to be able to isolate the Skeidzti in a specified area -- and even if we could do that it'd be a hell of a problem to get rid of all the objects we didn't want them to imitate. Which means more stick poking. Remember, they can flatten out on the walls and ceiling just as easily as they can curl up like an ashtray or a sofa pillow." Greel's face dropped back into a disappointed frown. "No, you've got the general idea," I said quickly. "But I think I've got a way to work the same thing, only quicker." Greel suddenly looked around, and I turned and saw Skorno, our first casualty, coming out of the lift. In his bandaged hand he held an ominous looking club, and in the other a limp and bloody throwrug. He stopped before us, grinning, and tossed the rug on the floor. E said, "Three more, chief." I bent down for a closer look. This time, three Skeidzti had joined to imitate a portion of the rug. It was a near-perfect job. They had continued the intricate pattern, carrying out the design exactly where the real rug stopped. The only thing wrong, Skomo explained, was that he passed the rug fifty times a day and knew it was about twice as large as it should have been. Something about Skomo's rug worried me. I asked him how long he thought it took for the Skeidzti to change from one form to another. "About half a second," he said. "But I think it varies, depending on what they're imitating." "For instance?" "Well, on a plain surface, like a wall or something, they're fastermuch faster." "You mean," I asked, "if they have something more complicated to imitate, it takes longer?" Skomo shook his head. "I wish it did. When I said it varies, I meant just the first few times. Once they've imitated something, they don't forget it" 'Well, hell," I snapped, "I know they can't imitate simultaneously! There has to be some definite minimum time lapse!" Skomo spread his hands helplessly. "I know, chief. But whatever it is, it's too small to do us much good. They're just too fast for our reaction time. We still only get about one out of every ten we see." Swell, I thought. If they were too fast for the Fensi, we were really up the creek. "What about spraying a lowcharge disrupter all over the place and picking up the pieces?" said Greel hopefully. Skomo said, "I forgot to mention that with a low-charge you have to hit them in just the right place or they're only knocked out for awhile." "And while they're unconscious they're just as safe as ever," I finished for him. Then Skomo's words suddenly sank in. "Good Lord! Do you mean you're using high-charge disrupters -- inside this hotel!" Skorno nodded sheepishly. "What else can we do, chief? Sure, the place looks like a two-cluster cruiser plowed through. But we're getting 'em, slow but sure." I was beginning to get a little bit mad. I thought about the Stentorii, sleeping peacefully in their rooms while we blasted four levels of valuable real estate looking for their damnable pets. And what, I asked myself, are we doing about it? Mooning around in the lobby on our respective rears, that's what we are doing. I stood up again, glaring at Ollie on general principles. "All right," I said firmly. "This has gone far enough, gentlemen. I'm not saying there is any other way to finish off this mess, but I do have one humble idea that might save a little of Hotel Intergalactica's property. I figure as long as we're going to turn this place into a shooting gallery we might as well have something to shoot at." I went over our floor plan with Greel and Skomo and picked out an area where the Skeidzti had proven particularly obnoxious. Then I sent Greel to seal off the other contaminated levels, and told Skorno to marshal his forces in Humanoid Hall. I picked Humanoid Hall for two reasons: One, plenty of Skeidzti to work on, and two, a minimum of furniture. For previously stated reasons I kept Ollie with me, and hopped a ClassA lift for Level Eight. reason to be thankful we enforce strong lift security measures. No matter where the Skeidzti might go, I was dead sure they would never reach guest quarters. There's a good reason for this. We ordinarily house about thirty thousand guests in the hotel at any one time. That number represents five to fifteen thousand separate races, each one requiring its own unique set of conditions. In Quadrant Four IVe got Denebian Iceworms at# F. right "next door" to a cluster of Calistan Feroids sleeping soundly in boiling mercury. No problem. We can handle # different atmospheres, with innumerable variations in density, temperature and lighting. The real problem is sociological, not mechanical. If the Galaxy is old, the oldest thing in it are its grudges. To put it bluntly, some of these characters have hated each other's guts so long they forgot why Naturally, an Altaran isn't going to walk into a Vegan's room and strangle him. There's a problem of about # degrees and thirty G's to overcome first. But that's no real problem either -- about # years ago they swarmed all over each other's planets in protective armor, and strangling was the nicest thing that happened. And that's where we come in. What they do outside Hotel Intergalactica is none of our business -- but inside we make sure no one is faced with temptation. That's why our room segregation is vertical instead of horizontal. The hotel is built on the hive principle. Each cell or room has a private entrance bordering on the lift. There are no halls or corridors to wander around in, and any connecting rooms connect up and down. No exceptions. It's a necessary rule and we enforce it. There are plenty of Common Rooms on the opposite side of the lifts for conferences and amiable gatherings -- free of charge. We work it that way for economical reasons, too. It's a lot easier to, say, keep a gravitic lift at #G constant for a Cygnian than to change it to forty-five for a Lyri passenger. Everybody minds thenown business -- and nobody waits for an elevator. That's where lift security comes in. We run a high density forceshield over each lift entrance. Try to enter one that's not attuned to your requirements and you run smack into an invisible wall. Which is precisely what would happen if the Skeidzti tried it. Imitation is one thing. Fortunately, duplication is another. It suddenly dawned on me that here was the real reason the Stentorii played their little joke on Ollie. They knew the Skeidzti couldn't get by the lift shields, so they didn't even try. A typical bit of Stentorii humor, I thought wryly. Don't dump your problems just anywhere -- toss em where they can do some good. pect on Level Eight. It was worse. What did Skorno say? Like a two-cluster cruiser plowed through? It was more like a complete reinactment of the Battle of the Rim. Through a low cloud of acrid blue smoke I made out the dim outlines of Fensi bellhops, lined up in military order across the room. Skorno groped toward me through the wreckage. I put a handkerchief to my nose and stumbled out to meet him, Ollie choking along behind. The air was full of the smell of fused plastic, burnt carpeting and a particularly nauseous odor I identified as fried Skeidzti. "Are you sure there's anything left alive up here?" I asked. Skorno nodded, breathing in the poisonous atmosphere like fresh country air. "Sure, chief, they're here all right. You just can't see 'em." He nodded toward the ready Fensi crew. "We're all here, I think. What next?" "Nothing," I choked, "until this smoke clears away. What happened to the air conditioning?" "Greel's working on it. We had to block off some of the' vents. Grid's not fine enough to keep out a Skeidzti." I looked up. The air was already beginning to clear. I gave it a few more minutes, then stepped up on a scorched sofa. I was anxious to get started so I cut it as short as possible. The idea, I explained, was to take advantage of the fact that there was a lapse, however small it might be, between the time a Skeidzti could change from one form to another. Catch them in that stage, and we had 'em. Simple as that, if it worked. I lined the Fensi in a crude circle in the center of the room, facing outwards. Then I pulled some debris together for a shield, jerked Ollie down behind it and dimmed the lights. Dimmed them -- not turned them off. The idea was to force the Skeidzti to adapt to new lighting conditions, and I was afraid if I turned them off altogether they'd sense they were safe in the absolute darkness and not adapt at all. I gave them plenty of time, dimming the lights slowly until I could hardly tell they were on at all. Then I pressed the switch for maximum brightness and the room was And there they were. They were fast, but not faster than the speed of light. For nearly a full second they stood out like ink spots on a clean white sheet, and we poured it on 'em. They were stunned perhaps a quarter-second past their normal reaction time. The Fensi are fast anyway, and that quartersecond margin was all they needed. We went through the routine three more times, then had to wait for the smoke to clear. We had killed thirty-seven Skeidzti. Fine. But it gave me something to think about. We had estimated there were at most fifty or sixty Skeidzti loose -- and if we had killed thirty-seven on one level, in one room -- how many did that mean were left? I mentioned it to Greel. He shrugged it off with typical Fensi optimism. "What difference does it make, chief? We've got 'em on the run!" "Sure," I said cautiously, "we've got 'em on the run now, all right." Both Greel and Skomo were grinning from ear to ear, having the time of their lives. But I wasn't sure at all. Something kept asking me how long it would be before the Skeidzti caught on to the system -- and whether we could come up fast enough with something to meet them. Before I left I gave explicit instructions to keep all isolation shields up -- even after they were sure a room was clean. Greel gave a resigned shrug. I could tell they both thought the old man was taking the sport of Skeidzti hunting entirely too seriously. Back in the lobby I sank into a chair and lit a cigarette. Ollie brought coffee, and we stared bleary-eyed at each other for half an hour. Ollie obviously didn't feel like talking and I was too damn tired to chew him out anymore. I could tell he was giving it to himself pretty hard anyway. That was probably doing more good than anything I could say. night of crisis at Hotel Intergalactica had rubbed off a considerable amount of shiny college exterior. His perfectly trimmed hair was caked with ceiling plaster. His neat bow tie dangled from his neck like last night's lettuce, and somehow he had managed to crack one side of his gold-rimmed glasses. He was beginning to look exactly like what he was supposed to be -- a harried night clerk, who wished to hell he could remember why he had ever thought of going into the hotel business. At #:# I located my army on the intercom. They had finished Eight, Nine and Ten, and were mopping up on Eleven. I told Greel to split his crew and send half up to Thirteen. We gulped the last of our coffee and headed down to Eleven. I breathed a sigh of relief. Eleven wasn't nearly as bad as Eight. Either the Fensi had improved their marksmanship or the light trick was cutting out a lot of random shooting. Greel walked up, holstering his weapon. "Well," I asked, "what do you think?" "I think we just may survive the night," he said tiredly. "I'm going to try one more go-around here, then move up to Twelve." "I have purposely been avoiding that thought," I said dryly, picturing the grinning Fensi horde blasting through my expensive lobby. "And of course," I added casually, "we haven't really seen any Skeidzti in the lobby, Greel. It may be that -- ah -- " Greel shot me a suspicious glance and I shut up. So who needs a lobby? Greel reloaded his disruptor -- a little too eagerly, I thought and leaned against the wall. "Actually," he said, "I don't picture it being too bad on Twelve." "You don't, huh?" I said doubtfully. "No, I mean it, chief. Funny thing, they were as thick as flies on Eight and Nine, but on Ten, and here on Eleven -- they seem to be sort of thinning out" I raised an eyebrow at that. "I don't suppose there could be a leaky shield, somewhere, or they might be catching on to that light trick." "Oh, no," Greel insisted, "we're getting them all. They're just not as thick is all. I figure when they got loose on Twelve they all hightailed it down to the lower floors for some reason, maybe to make -- " I grabbed Greel's arm and squeezed it hard. Something he had said suddenly sent a cold chill down my neck. Greel looked puzzled. I motioned him and Ollie to a quiet corner of the room, then turned to Greel. "Did you send half your crew up to Thirteen?" I asked carefully. Greel shrugged. "Sure, chief. You said -- " "Okay. Now think. I want to know exactly how many men you had here -- before you split the crew." Greel thought. "Forty-eight." "Exactly forty-eight?" "Exactly. I'm sure because it's the whole night shift for the Quadrant and everyone's on duty." "Mr. Duncan," said Ollie, "what are you -- " I cut him off sharply. "Hold it, Ollie. Whatever it is can wait." I turned back to Greel. "Then if you split your crew, we should have twenty-four men in this room. Right?" Greel nodded. He started to speak, gave me a puzzled frown instead. He turned and carefully counted his crew. "Oh, my God!" he said. "I get thirty-six," I told him. "Ollie?" Ollie nodded, wide-eyed. I felt Greel stiffen beside me. I looked, and his hand was sliding toward his holster. "Hold it," I said. "There's one way to make sure." I checked on the intercom with Skorno on thirteen. Skorno counted twenty-four men. I nodded to Greel and Ollie. idzti would come up with to counter our move. Now I knew. They had done the only thing they could do. They had imitated the most common thing in the room, the only thing that wasn't being blasted to shreds by the disruptors: the Fensi themselves. I walked quickly to the center of the room. "Attention, everyone," I yelled. "Line up against the wall, quick!" I watched them carefully, getting dizzy trying to spot the phonies. "I'm going to tell you this once," I said. "Listen, and get it right!" I told them right off that twelve of them were fakes. They caught on fast, knowing better than anyone what the Skeidzti were capable of. I wasn't worried about warning the Skeidzti. Whatever they were, they were no more intelligent than a well-trained dog. "There is going to be some shooting," I said. "Ignore it and do exactly as I say." I paused, and Ollie and Greel drew their weapons. "All right, first man. When I say go, walk to the lift and drop to Ten. Go!" The first Fensi walked to the lift and disappeared. "Second man, go!" "Third man, go!" The third Fensi walked to the lift, exactly like the first two. Only that was as far as he could go. Ollie, Greel and I burned him before he could change. Then it happened. The Skeidzti sensed something wrong. Eleven fakes suddenly bolted for the lift. The real Fensi ignored my order and joined the shooting. I yelled but no one could hear me. Suddenly the whole area about the lift erupted in blinding blue flame. I shielded my face and felt a sharp pain in my side as the floor came up to meet me. Greel was on his feet first. I shook my head and limped over to him. There was a large jagged hole in the wall and I knew right away what it was, even before I saw the tangled mass of fused wire and metal. I picked up a hunk of carpet and tossed it down the lift. Then I went limp all over. The carpet went down the lift as smooth as any living thing. The shields were down. The Skeidzti had the run of the whole Quadrant. Greel was giving his crew a royal chewing out. I cut him off and ordered the Fensi to Level Twelve, on the double. It was too damn late for chewing out now. We were in real trouble. I looked around for Ollie. He was gone. I cursed myself and kicked a piece of furniture halfway across the room. That's all I needed -- the Skeidzti and Ollie running loose. "Greel! Check the inner shields, see if we've still got anything sealed off in this place!" "I did. So far as I can tell it's just the lift." "That's bad enough," I said grimly. "On this side of the lift they're open to anything one room deep. And on the other side, the first guest who steps out of his room will -- " Greel shook his head violently. I brightened, suddenly remembering. We had already sealed the guest side and I knew the two sides were controlled separately. Unless something else happened, we still had them sealed into the lift with access restricted to the Common Rooms, kitchens and ballrooms. They were still within the Quadrant, and away from the guests. # A LL right," I said as calmly as possible, "we start jover. It means maybe eighty floors of isolation, and they won't fall for that light trick again. We'll have to escort every guest through the lift and arrange for alternate dining areas. And I want every Fensi tested through a shield that? s working. I don't think they'll try that again, but -- " The intercom crackled and Skorno's voice came on high and frantic. "Chief! Listen, that crazy kid has opened the shields! He broke into Central Control and let down every barrier in the Quadrant!" "What! Why in -- look, it may be too late but try to get the damn things up again. Quick!" Skorno moaned. "I can't. He's fused the controls! I can't even find the cut-off switch!" I felt a sharp pain in my mouth and realized I was trying to bite my tongue off. If I ever got my hands on that kid -- "Listen, Skorno, find him! I don't care what you do to him, just find him!" "I can't figure it," moaned Greel. "He must have gone completely off his rocker." "He had better be off his rocker," I said grimly. "That's the only thing that's going to save him from me." The intercom sputtered again. Ollie. Somehow, I knew before he even spoke. "Mr. Duncan, listen, I had to do it. I couldn't tell you because I knew you'd -- " "Listen, you little punk -- " growled Greel. I frowned and shook my head. "Ollie," I said gently, "this is Mr. Duncan. I understand. I'm not angry. Not at all. Now listen, Ollie. I know you're not feeling well. You're tired, Ollie. Tell us where you are and we'll come and get you -- help you, I mean -- " "Listen," Ollie said angrily, "I'm not crazy. Now pay attention and do what I say -- exactly!" I swallowed. He was gone, all right. "Yes, Ollie. We're listening. Go ahead." His voice relaxed. "I'm on Eighteen. The Crystal Ballroom." I swallowed again. My beautiful new ballroom. "Come up through the loading entrance," Ollie went on. "You'll enter at Lift, ah -- Forty-five, Humanoid Kitchen annex." "Yes, Ollie. We'll do that." "And Mr. Duncan" "Yes, Ollie?" 'This is not a threat, sir. But don't bring any weapons." "Oh -- " The intercom went dead. Ollie was through talkin g , 'Well?" said Greel. 'Well what?" I snapped. "Do you want to flush him out of there?" Greel shrugged. "Lift Forty-five is this way, chief." The smell nearly knocked us back into the lift. "Gahhhh! What is it, Ollie!" "Ghayschi stew," he said. "Pretty horrible, isn't it? Here. Wear these." He tossed me a box and I quickly jammed two of the Chefs Little Wonder Air Filters into my nose and passed the box to Greel. Ghayschi stew, I thought. The kid has really flipped. "Ollie -- " Then I stopped. He was evidently not kidding. His eyes were a little too bright and his face was wet and glistening. Also, he had a disruptor in his hand. "It's on low charge," he said, "but I don't want to knock anybody out, Mr. Duncan. I got us into this mess and I've got to get us out -- my own way." He paused. "Now," he said, "will you give me a hand with this pot?" I shot him a skeptical glance. "Why? Where are we taking it?" Ollie tensed. "Mr. Duncan," he pleaded, "you've got to trust me!" "Trust you! You've wrecked my hotel, let those infernal pests loose, and you -- you stand there with a gun in your hand and ask me to trust you? Move the damn pot yourself!" Ollie seemed to think a minute, then a hurt expression spread over his face. "All right," he said calmly. "If I give you the gun, will you help me? You said yourself the hotel is wrecked. Why not give me a chance?" I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Okay, Ollie. Give me the gun." Ollie handed me the disruptor. Greel started to move and I motioned him back. Ollie was right. I really had absolutely nothing to lose. I grabbed one end of the pot. "This way," said Ollie, shoving open the door to the ballroom. "Here?" Ollie nodded. The Crystal Ballroom is new, and I'm proud of it. The floor is imported Denebian seaglass and the walls are Serinese protomurals. When the murals are on and the floor is lit, there isn't a hotel in the system that can touch it. I cringed as we set the large pot of Ghayschi stew square in the middle of the seaglass floor. "Now what?" I asked. "Now we get out of here. Quick." I followed him back to the kitchen. Behind him he trailed a long, thin wire. One end was attached to the top of the pot. Greel and I watched in silent wonder as he pulled the wire through the kitchen and into a tiny room off the kitchen pantry. I knew where we were; it was the light control booth for the seaglass floor. I had shown it to Ollie several days before. Ollie seated himself at the control board and began to play the lights. Through a small window I could see the ballroom, and the huge pot of Ghayschi stew. The floor began to glow, pulsing from gold to blue to green and back again. Ollie experimented a while, then seemed to be satisfied. "Now," he said finally, without turning away from the controls, "we are ready." I raised an eyebrow at Greel. Both of us were wondering just exactly what we were ready for. "Fortunately," said Ollie, "the ballroom itself doesn't border directly onto one of the unshielded lifts. The anteroom shield is still up, though. And now -- " he pressed a button by his chair -- "it's down." Greel and I exchanged another look. "Next," said Ollie suddenly, "dinnertime." I shut my eyes. Ollie jerked his wire. The pot tipped and the gray and brown viscous mess of Ghayschi stew spread slowly across the ballroom floor. "Now what?" I asked cautiously. "Now we wait. I've turned on the auxiliary blowers. The smell is spreading through the Skeidtzi occupied areas." I had a few choice comments on this move, but I kept them to myself. This was Ollie's party. I figured I could always strangle him later. We waited ten minutes. Then Ollie suddenly went into action. His hands swept over the light control board and the seaglass floor danced and pulsed with shifting colors, shifting faster and faster through the spectrum. I watched Ollie's face. His skin was tight and great beads of sweat poured from his forehead down his neck. Then the tense mask suddenly broke and a wide grin spread over his face. "Look!" he yelled, nodding toward the floor. I looked. At first there was nothing to see. Then I rubbed my eyes. The fast-changing lights must have affected my vision because the whole floor seemed alive with bright orange spots. Then it hit me. Skeidzti! The floor around the stew was crowded three deep with them -- and they were all changing back to their natural form! We watched for an hour and a half. Finally Ollie jerked a lever and the colors faded away. He sank weakly back in his chair. I felt cold all over, and suddenly realized I was soaking wet. Later, we counted two hundred seventynine dead Skeidzti on the ballroom floor. It was all over. saved them until after breakfast. Some of it I could figure out, but I still didn't know how Ollie had been sure the Skeidzti would eat his infernal stew. "Oh, I knew they'd like it," said Ollie. "Ghayschi stew is a favorite Stentorii dish. I looked it up. I figured the Skeidzti ate table scraps." "That I can guess," I said. "But when they couldn't keep up with the changing lights why didn't they stop eating? Were they too stupid to know they either had to give up a meal or die?" "No," said Ollie, "not stupid. They just couldn't help themselves. I figured any animal that could adapt so quickly and move around so fast was bound to have a pretty high metabolism. Any animal like that has to eat, oh, maybe six or eight times his weight in food every day or starve to death. They came into the hotel at #:#. When I turned on the lights upstairs it was nearly ten o'clock. After seven hours they had to eat. There was nothing in the world that could have stopped them." Ollie paused, sipped his coffee. "They finally adjusted to your light trick because they had no alternative stronger than survival. I used the same idea, but this time they had to make an impossible choice between two basic instincts." "And they couldn't," I added. "So to avoid it they sort of, what -- died of a nervous breakdown?" "Something like that. In school there was this thing about some old experiments where a chicken or a rat was trained to certain responses, then the responses were mixed or taken away and -- " I yawned and got up to leave. "Sure, Ollie," I said. "Let's be sure and talk about it some time." J started for the door. "Mr. Duncan -- ?" "Yes?" "Am I fired?" I thought a minute. I was so tired I could hardly hear him. "No, Ollie," I said wearily, "j don't think so. There's just one thing, though." "Sir?" "Keep," I said sternly, "the hell out of my kitchens!" A OF The weatherman was always right: Temperature, #; humidity, # ; occasional light showers -- but of what? B  T HE pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously. It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp # degrees, the humidity a mildly dessicated # . The sun was a flaming orange ball in a cloudless blue sky. His pockets were picked eleven times. It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses, one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions. But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome Conditions (a crisp # degrees, a mildly dessicated #  ) when a bogus postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman rifled Fownes's handkerchief and inside jacket pockets. H E was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence. The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time. He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the handkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put and take -- the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he was playing. There was an occasional tinkle of falling glass. It fell on the streets and houses, making small geysers of shiny mist, hitting with a gentle musical sound, like the ephemeral droppings of a celesta. It was precipitation peculiar to a dome: feather-light fragments showering harmlessly on the city from time to time. Dome weevils, their metal arms reaching out with molten glass, roamed the huge casserole, ceaselessly patching and repairing. Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still intrigued by a temperature that was always # degrees, by a humidity that was always #, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and handedness behind. By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an orange patrol car parked down the street. been affected by his job. Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope. Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it, Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own small efforts, rarer. Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable. Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes. "Sometimes his house shakes," Lanfierre said. "House shakes," Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he stopped and frowned. He reread what he'd just written. "You heard right. The house shakes," Lanfierre said, savoring it. MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of the windshield. "Like from... side to side?" he asked in a somewhat patronizing tone of voice. "And up and down." MacBride returned the notebook to the breast pocket of his orange uniform. "Go on," he said, amused. "It sounds interesting." He tossed the dossier carelessly on the back seat. Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke in an incessant chatter of cliches, and thenactions were unbelievably trite. Then a fine robust freak came along and the others -- theechoes -- refused to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a vacation. "Why don't you take a vacation?" Lieutenant MacBride suggested. "It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A zephyr?" "I've heard some." "They say there are mountaintops where winds blow all the time. Strong winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds did blow, it would shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down the avenue." pursed his lips. "I'll tell you something else," Lanfierre went on. "The windows all close at the same time. You'll be watching and all of a sudden every single window in the place will drop to its sill." Lanfierre leaned back in the seat, his eyes still on the house. "Sometimes I think there's a whole crowd of people in there waiting for a signal -- as if they all had something important to say but had to close the windows first so no one could hear. Why else close the windows in a domed city? And then as soon as the place is buttoned up they all explode into conversation -- and that's why the house shakes." MacBride whistled. "No, I don't need a vacation." A falling piece of glass dissolved into a puff of gossamer against the windshield. Lanfierre started and bumped his knee on the steering wheel. "No, you don't need a rest," MacBride said. "You're starting to see flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You've got winds in y #Ur brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigu e zephyrs of irrationality -- " At that moment, all at once every last window in the house slammed shut The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound. MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the ghostly babble of voices to commence. The house began to shake. It rocked from side to side, it pitched forward and back, it yawed and dipped and twisted, straining at the mooring of its foundation. The house could have been preparing to take off and sail down the... MacBride looked at Lanfierre and Lanfierre looked at MacBride and then they both looked back at the dancing house. "And the water," Lanfierre said. "The water he uses! He could be the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole family of thirsty and clean kids, and he still wouldn't need all that water." The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages now in amazement "Where do you get a guy like this?" he asked. "Did you see what he carries in his pockets?" "And compasses won't work on this street." The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed. He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There was something implacable about his sighs. "He'll be coming out soon," Lanfierre said. "He eats supper next door with a widow. Then he goes to the library. Always the same. Supper at the widow's next door and then the library." MacBride's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "The library?" he said. "Is he in. with that bunch?" Lanfierre nodded. "Should be very interesting," MacBride said slowly. "I can't wait to see what he's got in there," Lanfierre murmured, watching the house with a consuming interest. They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes widened as the house danced a new step. to brush the plaster of paris off his shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation of his was also responsible for the dancing house -- he simply hadn't noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch from outside. He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a draw-pull. Every window slammed shut. "Tight as a kite," he thought, satisfied. He continued on toward the closet at the foot of the stairs and then stopped again. Was that right? No, snug as a hug in a rug. He went on, thinking: The old devils. The downstairs closet was like a great watch case, a profusion of wheels surrounding the Master Mechanism, which was a miniature see-saw that went back and forth # times an hour. The wheels had a curious stateliness about them. They were all quite old, salvaged from grandfather's clocks and music boxes and they went around in graceful circles at the rate of # and # I times an hour... although there was one slightly eccentric cam that vacillated between # and #. He watched as they spun and flashed in the darkness, and then set them for seven o'clock in the evening, April seventh, any year. Outside, the domed city vanished. It was replaced by an illusion. Or, as Fownes hoped it might appear, the illusion of the domed city vanished and was replaced by a more satisfactory, and, for his specific purpose, more functional, illusion. Looking through the window he saw only a garden. Instead of an orange sun at perpetual high noon, there was a red by an occasional arcover which left the smell of ozone in the air. There was also a gigantic moon. It hid a huge area of sky, and it sang. The sun and moon both looked down upon a garden that was itself scintillant, composed largely of neon roses. Moonlight, he thought, and roses. Satisfactory. And cocktails for two. Blast, he'd never be able to figure that one out! He watched as the moon played, Oh, You Beautiful Doll and the neon roses flashed slowly from red to violet, then went back to the closet and turned on the scent. The house began to smell like an immensely concentrated rose as the moon shifted to People Will Say We're In Love. seemed all right. A dreamy sunset, an enchanted moon, flowers, scent. They were all purely speculative of course. He had no idea how a rose really smelled -- or looked for that matter. Not to mention a moon. But then, neither did the widow. He'd have to be confident, assertive. Insist on it. I tell you, my dear, this is a genuine realistic romantic moon. Now, does it do anything to your pulse? Do you feel icy fingers marching up and down your spine? His own spine didn't seem to be affected. But then he hadn't read that book on ancient mores and courtship customs. How really odd the ancients were. Seduction seemed to be an incredibly long and drawn-out process, accompanied by a considerable amount of falsification. Communication seemed virtually impossible. "No" meant any number of things, depending on the tone of voice and the circumstances. It could mean yes, it could mean ask me again later on this evening. He went up the stairs to the bedroom closet and tried the rainmaker, thinking roguishly: Thou shalt not inundate. The risks he was taking! A shower fell gently on the garden and a male chorus began to chant Singing in the Rain. Undiminished, the yellow moon and the although the sun occasionally arced over and demolished several of the neon roses. The last wheel in the bedroom closet was a rather elegant steering wheel from an old # Studebaker. This was on the bootleg pipe; he gingerly turned it. Far below in the cellar there was a rumble and then the soft whistle of winds came to him. He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents. The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and the moon shook a trifle as it whispered Cuddle Up a Little Closer. He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start. My dear Mrs. Deshazaway. Too formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic garden; time to be a bit forward. My very dear Mrs. Deshazaway. No. Contrived. How about a simple, Dear Mrs. Deshazaway. That might be it. I was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't rather stay over instead of going home... Preoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the Studebaker valve wider and wider... The neon roses thrashed about, extinguishing each other. The red sun shot off a mass of sparks and then quickly sank out of sight. The moon fell on the garden and rolled ponderously along, crooning When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day. The shaking house finally woke him up. He scrambled upstairs to the Studebaker wheel and shut it off. At the window again, he sighed. Repairs were in order. And it wasn't the first time the winds got out of line. Why didn't she marry him and save all this bother? He shut it all down and went out the front door, wondering about the rhyme of the months, about stately August and eccentric February and romantic April. April. Its days were, thirty and it followed September. And all the rest have thirty-one. What a strange people, the ancients! He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street. W EN are too perishable," Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. "For all practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die." "Would you pass the beets, please?" Humphrey Fownes said. She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. "And don't look at me that way," she said. "I'm not going to marry you and if you want reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse." The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything passionately -- talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had never known anyone like her. "You forgot to put salt on the potatoes," she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. "Do you have any idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace." "As long as there are people," he said philosophically, "there'll be talk." "But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale, I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily worse for him." "I don't seem to mind the air." She threw up her hands. "You'd be the worst of the lot!" She left the table, rustling and tinkling about the room. "I can just hear them. Try some of the asparagus. Five. That's what they'd say. That woman did it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record. "Really," Fownes protested. "I feel splendid. Never better." He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his shoulders. "And what about those very elaborate plans you've been making to seduce me?" Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork. "Don't you think they'll find out? I found out and you can bet they will. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't have another man die on me, it's bad for my selfesteem. And now you've gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar." "Dear Mrs. Deshazaway," he started to say. "And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes, you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask me a few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer." "I hadn't thought of that," Fownes said quietly. "Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman -- " "That won't be necessary," Fownes said with unusual force. "With all due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway." "But my dear Mr. Fownes," she said, leaning across ' the table. "We're lost, you and I." "Not if we could leave the dome," Fownes said quietly. "That's impossible! How?" In no hurry, now that he had the widow's complete attention, Fownes leaned across the table and whispered : "Fresh air, Mrs. Deshazaway? Space? Miles and miles of space where the real-estate monopoly has no control whatever? Where the wind blows across prairies; or is it the other way around? No matter. How would you like that, Mrs. Deshazaway?" Breathing somewhat faster than usual, the widow rested her chin on her two hands. "Pray continue," she said. "Endless vistas of moonlight and roses? April showers, Mrs. Deshazaway. And June, which as you may know follows directly upon April and is supposed to be the month of brides, of marrying. June also lies beyond the dome." "I see." "And," Mr. Fownes added, his voice a honeyed whisper, "they say that somewhere out in the space and the roses and the moonlight, the sleeping equinox yawns and rises because on a certain day it's vernal and that's when it roams the Open Country where geigers no longer scintillate." "My." Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. "If you can get us outside the dome," she said, "out where a man stays warm long enough for his wife to get to know him... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes... you may call me Agnes." stepped out of the widow's house, there was a look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It would be such a deliciously insane experience. ("April has thirty days," Fownes mumbled, passing them, "because thirty is the largest number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor with it are primes." MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier. Lanfierre sighed.) Pinning his hopes on the Movement, Fownes went straight to the library several blocks away, a shattered depressing place given over to government publications and censored old books with holes in them. It was used so infrequently that the Movement was able to meet there undisturbed. The librarian was a yellowed, dog-eared woman of eighty. She spent her days reading ancient library cards and, like the books around her, had been rendered by time's own censor into near unintelligibility. "Here's one," she said to him as he entered. "Gulliver's Travels. Loaned to John Wesley Davidson on March #, # for five days. What do you make of it?" In the litter of books and cards and dried out ink pads that surrounded the librarian, Fownes noticed a torn dust jacket with a curious illustration. "What's that?" he said. "A twister," she replied quickly. "Now listen to this. Seven years later on March # #, #, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book. What do you make of that?" "I'd say," Humphrey Fownes said, "that he... that he recommended it to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about this book and then they... they went to the library together and she borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married." "Hah! They were brother and sister!" the librarian shouted in her parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning. Fownes smiled weakly and looked again at the dust jacket. The twister was unquestionably a meteorological phenomenon. It spun ominously, like a malevolent top, and coursed the countryside destructively, carrying a Dorothy to an Oz. He couldn't help wondering if twisters did anything to feminine pulses, if they could possibly be a part of a moonlit night, with cocktails and roses. He absently stuffed the dust jacket in his pocket and went on into the other rooms, the librarian mumbling after him: "Edna Murdoch Featherstone, April #, #," as though reading inscriptions on a tombstone. HP HE Movement met in what had been the children's room, where unpaid ladies of the afternoon had once upon a time read stories to other people's offspring. The members sat around at the miniature tables looking oddly like giants fled from their fairy tales, protesting. "Where did the old society fail?" the leader was demanding of them. He stood in the center of the room, leaning on a heavy knobbed cane. He glanced around at the group almost complacently, and waited as Humphrey Fownes squeezed into an empty chair. "We live in a dome," the leader said, "for lack of something. An invention! What is the one thing that the great technological societies before ours could not invent, notwithstanding their various giant brains, electronic and otherwise?" Fownes was the kind of man who never answered a rhetorical question. He waited, uncomfortable in the tight chair, while the others struggled with this problem in revolutionary dialectics. "A sound foreign policy," the leader said, aware that no one else had obtained the insight. "If a sound foreign policy can't be created the only alternative is not to have any foreign policy at all. Thus the movement into domes began -- by common consent of the governments. This is known as self-containment." Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be arranged for him to get out. "Out?" the leader said, frowning. "Out? Out where?" "Outside the dome." "Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and leave." "And that day I'll await impatiently," Fownes replied with marvelous tact, "because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future wife and I have to leave now." "Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country. You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And dialectically very poor." "Then you have discussed preparations, the practical necessities of life in the Open Country. Food, clothing, a weapon perhaps? What else? Have I left anything out?" The leader sighed. "The gentle, man wants to know if he's left anything out," he said to the group. Fownes looked around at them, at some dozen pained expressions. "Tell the man what he's forgotten," the leader said, walking to the far window and turning his back quite pointedly on them. Everyone spoke at the same moment. "A sound foreign policy," they all said, it being almost too obvious for words... O N his way out the librarian shouted at him: "A Tale of a Tub, thirty-five years overdue!" She was calculating the fine as he closed the door. Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one block away from his house. It was then that he realized something unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too. His house was dancing. It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense curiosity. The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch. From a prone position on his miniscule front lawn, Fownes watched as his favorite easy chair sailed out of the living room on a blast of cold air and went pinwheeling down the avenue in the bright sunshine. A wild wind and a thick fog poured out of the house. It brought chairs, suits, small tables, lamps trailing their cords, ashtrays, sofa cushions. The house was emptying itself fiercely, as if disgorging an old, spoiled meal. From deep inside he could hear the rumble of his ancient upright piano as it rolled ponderously from room to room. He stood up; a wet wind swept over him, whipping at his face, toying with his hair. It was a whistling in his ears, and a .tingle on his cheeks. He got hit by a shoe. As he forced his way back to the doorway needles of rain played over his face and he heard a voice cry out from somewhere in the living room. "Help!" Lieutenant MacBride called. Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly. "Winds," he said in a whisper. "What's happening?" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa. "March winds," he said. 'What?!" "April showers!" The winds roared for a moment and then MacBride's lost voice emerged from the blackness of the living room. "These are not Optimum Dome Conditions!" the voice wailed. "The temperature is not # degrees. The humidity is not #!" the rain fall on it. "Moonlight!" he shouted. "Roses! My soul for a cocktail for two!" He grasped the doorway to keep from being blown out of the house. "Are you going to make it stop or aren't you!" MacBride yelled. "You'll have to tell me what you did first!" "I told him not to touch that wheel! Lanfierre. He's in the upstairs bedroom!" When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a wheel in his hand. "What have I done?" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock. Fownes took the wheel. It was off a # Studebaker. "I'm not sure what's going to come of this," he said to Lanfierre with an astonishing amount of objectivity, "but the entire dome air supply is now coming through my bedroom." The wind screamed. "Is there something I can turn?" Lanfierre asked. "Not any more there isn't." They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap. Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully edged out of the house and forced the front door shut. The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum Dome Conditions of the bright avenue. "I never figured on this," Lanfierre said, shaking his head With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house. They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a wild, elated jig. "What kind of a place is this?" MacBride said, his courage beginning to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed it away. "Sure, he was different," Lanfierre murmured. "I knew that much." When the roof blew off they weren't really surprised. With a certain amount of equanimity they watched it lift off almost gracefully, standing on end for a moment before toppling to the ground. It was strangely slow motion, as was the black twirling cloud that now rose out of the master bedroom, spewing shorts and socks and pill ow cases every which way. "Now what?" MacBride said, thoroughly exasperated, as this strange black cloud began to accelerate, whirling about like some malevolent top... the dust jacket he'd found in the library. He held it up and carefully compared the spinning cloud in his bedroom with the illustratioa The cloud rose and spun, assuming the identical shape of the illustraBut Fownes had already begun to run on toward the next house, dodging mountainous puffs of glass as he went. "Mrs. Deshazaway!" he shouted. "Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Deshazaway!" The dome weevils were going berserk trying to keep up with the precipitation. They whirred back and forth at frightful speed, then, emptied of molten glass, rushed to the Trough which they quickly emptied and then rushed about empty-handed. "Yoo-hool" he yelled, running. The artificial sun vanished behind the mushrooming twister. Optimum temperature collapsed. "Mrs. Deshazaway! Agnes, will you marry me? Yoo-hoo!" Lanfierre and Lieutenant MacBride leaned against their car and waited, dazed. There was quite a large fall of glass. tion. "It's a twister," he said softly. "A Kansas twister!" "What," MacBride asked, his bravado slipping away again, "what... is a twister?" The twister roared and moved out of the bedroom, out over the rear of the house toward the side of the dome. "It says here," Fownes shouted over the roaring, "that Dorothy traveled from Kansas to Oz in a twister and that... and that Oz is a wonderful and mysterious land beyond the confines ot everyday living." MacBride's eyes and mouth were great zeros. "Is there something I can turn?" Lanfierre asked. Huge chunks of glass began to fall around them. "Fownes!" MacBride shouted. "This is a direct order! Make it go back!" We have on hand, in condition that the mint might well envy, these anthologies that may have escaped your purchase but shouldn't again: The Third Galaxy Reader The Fourth Galaxy Reader Each of the above will be personally inscribed to you by editor H. L. Gold, exactly as you wish him to, in # words or less, and of course autographed by him. Five Galaxy Short Novels by F. L. Wallace, Damon Knight, James E. Gunn, J. T. McIntosh, and Theodore Sturgeon. The World that Couldn't Be  Eight Other Galaxy Novelets , and you can, if you don't put off till tomorrow, get a copy autographed by Clifford D. Simak, author of the title story, an offer that is made only to readers of this magazine. All the above are # each and may be obtained by sending your order on any sheet of paper, and check or money order, to this address: Anthology Department Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. and engineers by the hundreds of thousands yearly -- and the production of science fiction has class-A priority with her fiction factories. These are two of the reasons for this month's king-size Junior Education Corner. Abelard-Schuman, N. Y., # bet that the Moon will be the first extraterrestrial body to be visited by man, Dr. Gamow's book leads off the astronomical section. It is a clear exposition of fact and theory about our satellite: its origin, composition, effects upon the Earth, etc. This revision of his # book still retains the amusingly archaic excerpts from Verne's classic From the Earth to the Moon in a chapter headed "Moon Projectile -- a Dream." Not to end on this note, however, it is followed immediately by "Moon Rocket -- a Reality" -- which it is indeed. by Clyde B. Clason. G. P. Puttiam's Sons, N. Y., # is a solid technical work designed for junior and high school level, his style is far from pedantic. "Planetoid Icarus is named after a legendary Greek boy who flew too close to the sun with his wax wings. "Look, Pa. No hands!' " Despite, or perhaps because of, this semi-humorous approach, Clason establishes a rapport with his youthful audience that makes his space medicine easy to take. Alexander L. Crosby and Nancy Larrick. Random House, N. Y ., # tures simple sentences built from easy words. However, though written for the eight-to-ten-yearold, the plentiful and technically excellent illustrations appeal also to a maturer audience. In fact, the information apparent in the illustrations frequently is not treated in the text, so that even adults can look and learn from this rocket primer. lishers, N. Y., # history is written in a facile style that is exceptionally easy to take to mind. Evans skillfully weaves interesting vignettes of the founders of astronomy into his book and chronicles its laborious growth from superstition to its present eminence among the sciences. Viking Press, N. Y., # agery by applying basic physical and chemical laws, but his understanding of these sciences differed greatly. Chemistry, the interlocking of particles impossibly small to see, had to wait for theory to catch up with practice, whereas physical phenomena were self-evident. Irwin's book, entertainingly informative, highlights epochal moments of discovery that helped lift chemistry to today's level of achievement. by Elizabeth K. Cooper. Harcourt, Brace #s Co., N. Y., # splendid follow-up, to Romance, which whets the intellectual appetite. She provides plenty of experimental material for the neophyte, a concise work program and a proper respect for a "serious form of fun." P. Grant. Whittlesey, N. Y ., # Sootin. Vanguard Press, N. Y., # Beckhard. G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., # came from poor families who sacrificed enormously to give them schooling. Their battle for education was equally against hunger and privation. Moreover, Mendel's only hope for a livelihood lay in joining the priesthood. His fame rests on the results of an eight-year experiment with garden peas. Mendel, applying numerical method and rigid control, discovered the mathematics of genetics. Unfortunately, he died unrecognized, his work requiring rediscovery. Pasteur, however, lived to receive the highest honors. His process of sterilization saved breweries as well as creameries from ruin. Possessing enormous powers of concentration, he plunged into work that saved the French silk industry, and he did it despite the deaths of three of his children. His most valuable contribution, though, remains the germ theory of infection. Both books are inspirational and well integrated. Not so with Einstein. Working in a restrictive #-page frame, Beckhard has cut and snipped Einstein's life into a silhouette. This is a pity, he was decidedly by F. R. Elwell and Dr. J. M. Richardson. Criterion Books, N. Y., # magic when its practitioners began to tie together cause and effect. Unfortunately, medical practice lost two thousand years to mumbo-jumbo, even though Hippocrates, the ancient Greek, set standards for observation and diagnosis. eries should channelize the social urge of any young do-gooder. Homer E. Newell, Jr. McGrawHill Book Co., Inc., N. Y ., # Newell equals his books in interest -- he is Associate Director in charge of Space Science nautics and Space Administration. His book brims equally with authority. The upper atmosphere is his special province and here he presents knowledge that was completely unsuspected until rocket soundings became feasible these last several years. Isaac Asimov. Abelard-Schuman, N. Y., # a fascinating theme -- Time. He travels this dimension from mankind's ancient Moon and Sun timepieces to the present accurate atomic clocks that, by comparison, make the heavens so reliable that the costliest timepieces are as a Mickey Mouse watch. ards. J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila.,  # in that order, attract the interest of laymen or prospective students of Earth science, Richards avers, and his book is planned accordingly. It abounds with information for the neophyte archeologist -- from tips on sites for excavation and research to specific information on identification of the aforementioned three categories. man. Abelard-Schuman, N. Y., # Atomic Age was assisted by numerous midwives. An enormous amount of information has been distilled into laudably compact, digestible form; no small feat when dealing with the contributions of such as the Curies, Einstein, Rutherford and -- contemporary giants. Walters. Criterion Books, N. Y., # line of the Moon mountain, Pico, causes Britain to hurry its space program in the fear that Russia may already have a base there. A young Cambridge student, short enough to fit a hastily redesigned research rocket, is selected for a preliminary hundred-mile photo-survey jump into space. The book, a vivid fictional account of the training program necessary for such a venture, includes plenty of action and international intrigue. Plausible and detailed, it is a juvenile Prelude to Space. (For Youngsters) Rating:  Robert A. Heinlein. G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y. # penned a juvenile that really is not. This is a new and bitter and disillusioned Heinlein. His story opens with flaming action and then acquaints the reader, via flashbacks, with his hero, set on acquiring a citizen's franchise and voting rights by serving in the armed forces. From boot camp into combat, story is well told, crammed with political theory, and of exceptional interest to veterans with battle experience... but youngsters will find it melancholy and verbose. Thus my split rating. Rating for children:  V # Rating for adults Rating for civilians: ? Andre Norton. World Publishing Co., Cleveland, # Shann Lantee, from the slums of planet Tyr, is one of two human survivors of a Terr an survey team on Warlock. Insect-derived Throg beetle-men, with whom Earth has fought to stalemate for years, have wiped out the advance outpost on Warlock, preparatory to interdicting the coming colonist transport. Miss Norton has again written in an endearing animal team, this time Taggi and Togi, Terran wolverines, to assist Lantee i n his vendetta against the Throgs. Her skill in making the incredible believable was never better demonstrated than in this imaginative and adventuresome yam. Rating:  The John C. Winston Co., Phila., # installation, high in the Andes, is robbing Earth of solar energy. When discovered and smashed by an archeological expedition, other solar traps are planted on each planet. To destroy them, America's first anti-gravity ship is pressed into an odyssey through the Solar System. The story is rich in action and mystery -- up to the very moment that Wollheim presents his villains. Then? Not good. Rating:  Whittlesey House, #. for the first time anywhere, here is a description of the greatest exhibit in the monumental Bernard Baroque Museum on Sigma Corvi IV. that we have priceless specimens of mediums of exchange that the Universal Credit Card has rendered obsolete. In his dealings in alien monies, Timothy Root from time to time came across choice specimens, extracted them, attached them end to end, and in # U.E. left to the Bernard Baroque Museum in Sigma Corvi IV the renowned Galactic "Short-Snorter." This is not simply a souvenir of his calling, and of the trading and traveling it called for, but, because of his practice of writing on the margins of each bill as he acquired it some account of the society in which it functioned, a veritable compendium of the history of economics. Indeed, to appreciate to the full these more or less worn catalysts, one must view them not only as bits of various materials of various sizes, shapes, and colors, but as bits of history. Needless to say, we do not always agree with Timothy Root's evaluations -- in fact, we discount many, many of them. But it is as a trail-blazer that we honor him. Inasmuch as the Short-Snorter winds and coils in and out of three large rooms of the Museum, we can give only a sampling of its riches here. begin with than (a) in the exhibit. This is at once the largest and smallest piece of currency, compensating in size for its minuscule denomination. It is a ## wfuddo bill and was in use on Megrez I for paying taxes. In # U.E. the government there began taxing a person on what he valued himself. Psychiatrists from all over the Galaxy flocked there, and the natives flocked to the psychiatrists -- to achieve feelings of inadequacy. The government made out fairly well on the take from the psychiatrists till the psychiatrists took to going to one another. The Sterope IV trader who passed on to Timothy Root the next item (b) himself received it as a reward for supplying the authorities misleading information. A guilt-filled Steropean had of a leading citizen. To substantiate his confession, he furnished details only the killer could know. One detail he was unaware of -- the state had just emptied the state treasury to build a new Treasury Building. Knowing a murder trial would cost the state over # lemuc, it had given secret strict instructions to prevent a trial. The trader, a brother-in-law of the police commissioner (and, incidentally, a sub-son-in-law of the builder), came forward and to the great relief of the state furnished the self-styled killer with an alibi. (c) This charred banknote is othy Root came across it, with "nervous belly," in his words, poking through rubble. The planet was in ruins. But the scattering of starving survivors had one remnant of pride. They had, before the attack by El Kophrah V, succeeded, by cutting defense-research spending, in balancing the budget. (d) A reserve note from Alcyone II. This is little more than play money for second childhood. One result of longer life-expectancy was the postponing of inheritance till the heirs were themselves rich in years, and, because of welfare benefits, in no need of such windfalls, which soon became a mere matter of form. This kind of note came mostly into play in the buying and selling of pasts -- contracts for the purchase or sale of produce raised, harvested, delivered and eaten years before. example (e) of non-monetary money, the scrip of Maia V. This is not currency per se but a symbol of a product that the currency would have bought. This particular civilization was attempting to move from material gain to the purely spiritual. For the benefit of those of its citizens who were still in the intermediate stages, the government printed scrip bearing the names of coveted objects and distributed them free, in lieu of the objects themselves. In accord with its policy of gradually eliminating the main physical stumbling block, the money mart, the government each year took away another exchange seat. The members had to compete physically for the remaining seats. The narrowing group of survivors, striving to stay in condition to maintain their sitting, grew more and more fiercely engrossed with the wholly physical. The last two felt their joint strength was enough to enable them to turn the tables on the government. It was. They pensioned off the deposed leaders with scrip bearing titles of power. (f) A non-negotiable instrument from Talitha IX. A suave, persuasive missionary to that planet, hoping a wealthy elderly native lady would endow his mission, sold her on the transmigration of souls. With unremitting hatred, he listened to the reading of her will. She had left all her money and effects to herself. Her estate has remained intact, as the executors have so far been unable to determine which if any of the life-forms of Talitha IX she has come back as. (g) This is a replica; the original note vanished in a frightening puff shortly after the transaction in which Timothy Root obtained it. The Electra money to encourage spending and discourage hoarding. The note bore a printed circuit and a timing device that set off the note at some indeterminate moment within six Terran .months of issue. Whoever had possession of the note at the time was left with a hole burned in his pocket. (h) The opposite extreme -- a bill that is practically indestructible. It was in this currency paid off migrant workers who had erected a dome on a new satellite. This payoff resulted in the workers blasting the dome to shards -- not out of eagerness for more work in rebuilding the dome, but out of resentment. They had worked to get the money in order to sacrifice it as a burnt offering of the fruit of hasty deal for the fulminating grant workers rebuilt the dome. The money went off just before the dome was finished and they blew it up again. (i) A banknote from Aldebaran I. The luminosity of the money rubs off; the richer the person, the more he glowed. Naturally, to preserve this distinction of status, the government had to lay down restrictions on the passing of notes. For example, tellers and clerks were not allowed to handle money. (j). As automation and specialization more and more removed the sense of actually having to do with production, people of this planet grew more and more uneasy. They found it hard to justify their economic upkeep. To give people the feeling that they were really earning the money, the government turned out its notes in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. One had to piece it together before it could be banked or spent. This worked for a time, but the notes had to become increasingly difficult to assemble, to make an acceptable work week. This specimen is one of the last notes issued. A piece is missing. This is not owing to any slip-up on the part of Timothy Root. It was a deliberate omission, a shameful, debasing device of the government's to put off the final reckoning, which came a week later... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of Galaxy to you when they should arrive -- at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: Subscription Dept., Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. No doubt of it, success calls tor a salute -- but a one-gun salute? Illustrated by Burns T HE mists of preconditioning rolled away. Harold Smith-Jones came back to himself on the hospital-like metal table of the Technical Center. They were just cranking the hood up off him. "There you go," said one of the white-coated technicians, giving him a hand up. Off the table and once more on his feet, Harold frowned at the youngster. " -- sir!" he corrected. "There you go, sir," the technician made haste to amend. Harold's frown relaxed. He did not approve of this modern laxity -- but they were good boys. He did not approve of riding subordinates, either. He allowed himself to be helped on with his regency coat. A tall, blond young boy was standing back from the group a bit, waiting. His new decoy, no doubt. A good type, in jumper and slacks, athletic, his only adornment the thin, sharp-edged strip of polished steel that held the watch on his wrist. The boy was somewhat tight-faced and looked nervous. "Cheer up, there!" said Harold, giving him a friendly whack on the back. "All in the day's work." The decoy managed a grin. A trifle sick -- but a grin. Good lad, thought Harold, and, leaving the room, headed out for the job. As he stepped, a moment later, out of the gray building's austere sunlight struck him a sudden, dazzling blow, and for a moment the street before him wavered and blurred. "Steady on, now -- " he thought, catching hold of the left arch of the entrance. He felt the gray stone rough under his palms, took a deep breath, and the street steadied and came back in focus. The preconditioning again, of course, he told himself. It must be he had developed a sensitivity to the hypnotic drug they used to put him in a receptive state for instructions. Slight allergic reaction on his part, possibly. He made a mental note to mention the fact in his report later. There was no point in his being uncomfortable. On the other hand, it would hardly do to take on a job without the protection of full preconditioning. Under the latest laws dealing with this sort of thing, the opposition had the right to question him if they happened to get their hands on him before he reached the street afterward. Only if he showed obvious evidence of preconditioning, so that he could tell them nothing of how he had planned the job, would there be no point in their doing so. And such questioning could be -- well, there was no point in dwelling on unpleasant details. Not that anything would go wrong. Not with a job he himself had researched and planned. Not with a possible new world's record staring him in the face. Thirty-four consecutives. Thirty-four! Without a hitch, or a scratch upon him. He would take a little vacation after this one, thought Harold. Rest on his laurels. He took another deep breath and stepped hard on his left foot. The outline of the small plastic gun could be felt through the inner sole, and at the feel of it the old magic flooded through him once again, like a spate of warm wine. Ah, he thought, never mind fame and riches, never mind palaces and beautiful women. Give me a gun. With confidence and even good G A L AX humor returned, he got down onto the nearest strip of the moving sidewalk before him and let it carry him off. The sidewalk slid him off down the block and swept around a corner. As he came around the curve, he caught sight of his own dark image, obscurely reflected in a passing store display window. Perfect, perfect! small man in regency coat, breeches and jackboots -- with vases at each ankle. Thank God nowadays everybody dressed the way they wished. When he had been a boy, back in the nineteensixties, everybody he remembered had dressed alike. But now, with the overpopulation pressures, nobody cared much whether the individual lived or died, let alone how he dressed. A damned, dull time, the past, no matter what the historical entertainments liked to pretend. He preferred the present. Of course, for business reasons, mainly. With any costume permissible, it was that much easier to create the image of a harmless, pompous, little fat man. On the other hand, thought Harold, his feet changing slideways without consulting his brain, maybe his liking for the present was based on the fact he was in a special situation. Few people had his opportunities for what you might call excitement and adventure. After all, he reminded himself, he had originally intended to be a wine-taster, having that wonderful discrimination of taste that is born in hadn't been for that little psychotic upset (but everyone had them these days) he might not have lost it, and never gone into this business at all. And never discovered what an aptitude he had for it. Ah, yes -- "Some are born great. Some have greatness thrust upon them... On the other hand... Harold found himself glancing at a street sign, and changed to another moving sidewalk with the automated reaction of good preconditioning. On the other hand, aptitude itself was really only the cornerstone of his success. Study, study -- plan, plan -- practice, practice -- that was the real secret; that and his attention to details like seldom using the same decoy more than twice, and valley on his boots. And the man in the street thought all it took was a good target eye and a touch of sadism. Harold stepped off the sidewalk into an entrance blazoned above with the legend mother turner's tea rooms. Marvelous, thought Harold, the way the preconditioning had brought him right to the place when every jot of knowledge about the job had been hidden from his mind by the hypnotic block. He'd had no idea where he was heading until the moment of recognition right now. The boys in the technical department deserved a commendation in his report. And would get it. Entering, he nodded to himself. One of the decently exclusive gathering places. Wisely, these places kept their prices up and excluded the salaried mob, who never ceased to be baffled by the fact that the Tea Rooms offered no better drinks or accommodations than their own cocktail lounges. They missed the point entirely. Harold passed on into a dim-lit foyer. Two men converged on him immediately. "Mind stepping on this metal plate, sir?" -- hum of detectors. "Excuse me, sir." -- hands patting him swiftly all over. "Not at all, boys. I know you've got a job to do." Harold's voice rang heartily; a generous man, a jolly, fat man with an untroubled conscience. With a cheerful wave of his hand, he turned to the right. There, before an arched interior entrance, was a placard. Editorial Auction nodule of pre-planted information said in Harold's head, releasing its interior surprise of information. Klannert was the author of that best-selling new philosophical novel, Existence? s Worth; and this was one of those publicity affairs promoted by his publishers under the guise of auctioning off a subsidiary right or two. Really, just a good public relations excuse to introduce Klannert to magazine editors, TV and film people, etc. He himself, Harold pre-remembered suddenly, was supposed to edit one of the intellectual weeklies under the name of Spence. "Oh, Mr. Spence! Here you are! Martini?" Harold became suddenly aware of a seductive blonde in flame-purple, standing just inside the entrance to the placarded room and tempting him in with a full cocktail glass. A hostess, of course -- preconditioned to recognize all those to whom invitations had been distributed. Harold himself (or the technical boys) had been thorough with this detail, too. Harold went graciously toward her. "Why, thanks, no," he said. "I never drink." True enough. Did the gunmen of the old West -- the good ones, that is -- drink while awaiting their moment of truth? And how much more foolish for Harold. "Iced tea, perhaps." "Of course, Mr. Spence. Of course!" She swept off to get him one. He glanced about the room. There, that was Klannert over there -- the peaceful-faced, silver-haired man seated on the little dais at the end of the oval room, a crowd clustered around him. "Your iced tea, Mr. Spence." "Thank you, ma'mselle. Cheers!" "Oh, cheerio, Mr. Spence!" He continued on into the room, glass in hand, caught up immediately in the good-sized crowd. "Oops, terribly sorry -- " He had collided with a small brunette. "My fault, really. Say, I don't know you, do I? I'm Hepzibah Collins. Wasteland." "Aneas Spence. The Fabliau Weekly." "You must give me your biog and I'll have it preconditioned into me the next time at the office. I do feel it's everybody's duty to know everyone they meet, don't you?" "Absolutely." Harold fumbled artistically in a huge pocket of his regency coat. "I don't seem to have a biog slip with me -- " "Oh, dear. Well, tape it to me. K There's Samantha! Sam!" She disappeared into the crowd. Moving off himself, Harold came on to a small empty balcony and stepped up on it for a look at the crowd. The number of people he saw rang a sudden icy tocsin of warning in his mind. There were at least twenty or thirty more here than his formal estimate of attendance had calculated. In a small room with a single exit, such a mob could hamper escape; and he would not legally be free from capture or reprisal until he was actually out of the building. Harold carefully set down his glass of iced tea and took another deep breath, putting his weight once more on his left foot to feel the solid shape of the gun. The situation at once became clearer. He congratulated himself on his early study of Yoga. Like every other bit of knowledge he had painstakingly acquired, it paid off a thousandfold at times. ' more objectively, the crowd might not hamper him. It might even help him by interfering with pursuit. Harold smiled. Once again his wisdom in leaving the final situation fluid and adaptable was proving itself. He turned his attention to the business of spotting Klannert's bodyguards. Klannert would be expecting someone to try to do a job on him sooner or later. Everyone in the public eye knew such things were inevitable. Harold let his gaze search the crowd. That girl -- Hepzibah Collins, the Wasteland editor -- was one, of course. An expert frisker, undoubtedly; her collision with him would have been for the purpose of doubling-checking the detectives' search. Odd existence, thought Harold, momentarily struck by that strange, sad, philosophical turn of mind that had been growing on him these last few years. Imagine making a living going through life bumping up against people! Still, some sorts of persons might actually enjoy it. The hostess was undoubtedly another. And then that tall, heavy senatorial type. An excellent actor, but Harold had not studied over fifty thousand job reports in the past fifteen years for nothing. This man had been a bodyguard in the Claire Dumont job in April '#. Then there was -- good lord, whom did they expect to fool with that? That beetle-browed plug-ugly who was supposed, no doubt, to look so much like a bodyguard that nobody could suspect he would be one. And that was the lot -- no, wait. That small old lady over there. She looked perfectly innocent; but the minute Harold's eyes noted the way she held her silver mesh purse, he knew. Those hands had had judo and karate training. Harold paused, out of thoroughness, to take one last survey of the crowd. But there were no more opposition people to be uncovered. If there had been, he would have known who they were, even if his conscious gaze could find no flaw in them. Sixth sense, in his case, so many people in the Organization said. Nothing of the sort! It was the result of long years of study so intense that few minds could have stood up under it. But it was time for that decoy of his to be here. Harold turned toward the entrance and spotted the slacks-and-jumper outfit. Then he stiffened slightly. The young fool! His decoy had brought a goodlooking redheaded girl along as part of his camouflage. What was the matter with the boy? Had he been asleep during Harold's lectures to the apprentice classes? A decoy's job was to draw the attention of the bodyguards gradually upon himself. Any woman could either attract too much attention or else sidetrack it unduly. With this woman -- well, it was damned lucky that Harold's timetable had not called for elaborate pre-action proceedings. For the boy's own good, Harold should censure him in his report. But on the other hand, he thought, softening, why make an official matter of it? Teach the lad a lesson instead -- Harold smiled slightly to himself -- by taking that good-looking redhead away from him afterward. Harold seldom went out of his way now for female companionship, but it was an accepted fact that no woman could resist a successful professional in his line of work. And it would drive home to the boy that lessons were to be learned. Possibly save his life as well, someday. It was time to begin work. and went down into the crowd. The cocktails, he noticed, had been flowing freely and the people were already beginning to clump in little gossipy or argumentative groups. He wandered around a while and then joined one about halfway between the balcony and the dais where Klannert still sat. " -- Nobel Prize," a short, belligerent, broad-shouldered, middle-aged man was saying. He had a bushy, black, ill-trimmed spade beard which he was thrusting at all his hearers. "Deserved every cent of it! What? Man is more than merely a sustaining mechanism! No one like Klannert!" "Come now," said Harold, smoothly intruding. "Mechanism, after all, is an accepted sociological theory. All of us like to see it questioned, for form's sake, if nothing else. But to throw it out completely -- " "Who're you?" said the bearded man. "Spence. Fabliau Weekly." "I know your rag!" said the bearded man. "Didn't think you'd have the nerve to stick your nose in here!" Smiling -- for the Fabliau was wholly imaginary -- Harold bent his head politely. "I think my lead article in the issue before last answers your arguments," he said. "Lies, lies, lies -- " sputtered the bearded man. But Harold was already on his way to another group one step nearer to Klannert. He paused with this group -- they were also singing Klannert's praises, but Harold refused to let himself be drawn into conversation this time. He had already made the point -- for anyone who happened to be taking an unduly suspicious interest in him -- that he was not trying to make himself unobtrusive by hiding his own point of view. In fact, he had avoided drawing nusual attention to himself by drawing a small amount of the usual sort of attention to himself. At the second group he listened a while, smiled noncommittally nd moved on. That feeling, almost of sadness, slipped over him again as he continued to circle about the room. It was all so simple, if you knew what you were doing. xperience taught you what the opposition would expect. You gave them something else. It was as easy as that. So simple it was almost a little pitiful. Look at Klannert up there. A good man, by the standards of those who considered themselves good men. But he had offended somebody or other. Who, of course, would never be known; the Organization was strict about protecting clients. But somewhere, somebody had signed the necessary credit chit -- and here was Harold, about to put a period to the life that had been considered good. And for what? Not really for the money. A little for the excitement of the business. Possibly a little more because this would make a new world's record. But really because that was the way the world wagged these days -- for himself, for Klannert, for everybody.  wheel of life, thought Harold, with a touch of soft melancholy. All to the same wheel. After this, he would take a vacation, get away for a long rest to some place where he could be a common man once more among men. It was time, and overtime, for a change. He stopped. He had worked his way clear across the room on a slant. He stood now by some egg-yellow wall draperies, not fifteen feet from where Klannert sat. Elsewhere about the room, the people were all huddled in small, busily talking groups. There was space to run between the groups. Now. Once excitement had struck, they would mill around, getting in each other's way and in the way of pursuit. But by that time, he should be in the foyer, if not out into the safety of the public street. He looked for his decoy. There the boy was, still with the girl, standing out among the less attractive mortals grouped around Klannert, very satisfactorily. The hostess, Harold noted with satisfaction, was standing with apparent casualness quite close to them. Harold smiled entirely to himself, internally, with that same touch of melancholy. He glanced around without seeming to. His glass of iced tea was almost finished. He drained the last few drops from it; and as he did, it slipped from his fingers. It dropped with a soft thump to the thick carpet, rolling half out of sight under the draperies. Exclaiming in annoyance, he bent over as if to pick it up. Instead, without any undue attempt at concealment, his hand went to the toe of his left boot. Toe and hand lifted together, the top part of the boot and bootsole peeled away from the bottom half, and the plastic gun slipped out into his fingers. He straightened up --  -- and something tremendously heavy crashed down on him from behind. He was aware of himself suddenly, on his knees and going down further, with the full weight of another adult on his back. His head was foggy. He could still see and hear, but everything had a dreamlike quality about it. He felt the thick, deep carpet pressing up against the palms of his hands as he flung them out to break his fall. He had a sudden kaleidoscopic glimpse of nearby faces turning to stare in his direction. And then, thin and clear, above the sound of voices still talking, he heard a woman scream. The weight on his back rolled suddenly off. Turning his head, Harold saw that his assailant had been the belligerent, . spadebearded man who had been holding forth to the first group of talkers. The man was now scrambling to his feet and launching himself in the direction of the room's entrance. For a second the crowd opened out a little, and Harold had a sudden glimpse of his decoy, bare-wristed, running for the entrance, while the girl with him stopped and half turned, lifting a gun with cool expertness and sending several shots into the spade-bearded man. Scrambling to his own feet as the spade-bearded man went down, Harold caught sight of Klannert stumbling down from the dais. His hands were up at his chest; and sticking out from between two fingers was a thin strip of metal, a strip of steel about the width of a wristwatch band. As Harold watched, Klannert's knees gave way and he sank down below the bodies of the people who were rushing toward him. gun -- but in that second, hard hands seized him and hustled him through the crowd. Twisting his head back over his shoulder, he saw he was in the grasp of one of the detectivebodyguards and an unidentified stranger. They impelled him swiftly into the lobby. i "They'll shoot me now -- " Ithought Harold, his heart yammering at his throat. Then, like the thudding of some huge, sickening velvet hammer, despair came to shatter his panic. What did it matter? Caught on the job -- a failure -- execution left to a decoy. Or had he been doublecrossed?  He became aware that those holding him had stopped, and the detective had stepped across the room, leaving Harold pinned by the stranger in an efficient judo hold. Harold could not turn his head to see, or make out the words of the conversation. Suddenly they were interrupted by an ugly laugh from the detective. Heavy footsteps returned behind him.  He was grabbed and rushed forward to the open entrance -- hurled roughly out into the street. for balance on the slideway outside. Laughter echoed behind him. He whirled, wild with rage. The gun was still clutched in his hand. They had forgotten it. He jerked it up before him --  -- and, abruptly, the mists of preconditioning vanished from his brain. They left him with the suddenness of support jerked away. He stared at the entrance to Mother Turner's Tea Rooms, and then at the gun down in his hand. He began to weep. Quite a crowd had accumulated about him. A city policeman came pushing through it, to stand before Harold, red-faced and sweating. "All right, all right! Move on!" he shouted. The crowd started to drift away. He turned on Harold. "What're you doing with that in your hand? Don't you know it's illegal? Where's your license?" Harold shook his head, unable to speak. The policeman snatched the gun from him and turned it over in two freckled hands. His expression faded from anger to exasperation. He shoved the gun back into Harold's hands and turned away. "Get off the street," he said to Harold, and then, to those of the crowd that still lingered, "All right, all right -- move along! The gun's a fake. He's only a decoy, just snapped out of conditioning. Nothing more to see. Move along now!" He shoved Harold impersonally. "You too." Harold moved off, weeping, clutching the imitation gun in his hand, the salt tears streaming down his face. Staghorn dared tug at the veil that hid the future. Maybe it wasn't a crime to look . maybe it was just that the future was ugfyi ustrated by D man. His increasing irritation was caused, he realized, by the fear that his conscience was going to intervene between him and the vast fortune that was definitely within his grasp. Milenjoy it. He didn't want to skulk through life avoiding the eyes of everyone he met -- particularly when his life might last for centuries. So he sat glowering at the rectangular screen that was located just above the CQntrol console of Roger Staghorn's great digital computer. At the moment Peccary was ready to accuse Staghorn of having no conscience whatsoever. It was only through an act of scientific detachment that he reminded himself that Staghorn neither had a fortune to gain nor cared about gaining one. Staghorn's fulfillment was in Humanac, the name he'd given the electronic monster that presently claimed his full attention. He sat at the controls, his eyes luminous behind the magnification of his thick lenses, his lanky frame arched forward for a better view of Humanac's screen. Far from showing annoyance at what he saw, there was a positive leer on his face. As well there might be. On the screen was the full color picture of a small park in what appeared to be the center of a medium-sized town. It was a shabby little park. Rags and tattered papers waggled indolently in the breeze. The grass was an unkempt, indifferent pattern of greens and browns, as though the caretaker took small pains in setting his sprinklers. Beyond the square was a church, its steeple listing dangerously, its windows broken and its heavy double doors sagging on their hinges. Staghorn's leers and Dr. Peccary's glowers were not for the scenery, however, but for the people who wandered aimlessly through the little park and along the street beyond, carefully avoiding the area beneath the leaning steeple. All of them were uniformly young, ranging from perhaps seventeen at one extreme to no more than thirty at the other. When Dr. Peccary had first seen them, he'd cried out joyfully, "You see, Staghorn, all young! All handsome!" Then he'd stopped talking as he studied those in the foreground more closely. Their clothing, to call it that, was most peculiar. It was rags. Here and there was a garment that bore a resemblance to a dress or jacket or pair of trousers, but for the most part the people simply had chunks of cloth wrapped about them in a most careless fashion. Several would have been arrested for indecent exposure had they appeared anywhere except on Humanac's screen. However, they seemed indifferent to this -- and to all else. A singularly attractive girl,, in a costume that would have made a Cretan blush, didn't even get a second glance from, a young Adonis who passed her on the walk. Nor did she bestow one on him. The park bench held more interest for her, so she sat down on it. Peccary studied her more closely, then straightened with a start. # # I'LL be damned," he said. "That's Jenny Cheever!" Staghorn continued to leer at the girl. "So you know her?" "I know her father. He owns the local variety store. She's only twenty today, and there she is a hundred years from now, not a day older." "Only her image, Dr. Peccary," Staghorn murmured. "Only her image. But a very pretty one." Peccary came to his feet, unable to control his irritation any longer. "I won't believe it!" he said. Somehow a piece of misinformation has been fed into that machine. Its calculations are all wrong!" Staghorn refused to be perturbed. "But you just said you recognize the girl on the bench. I'd say that Humanac has to be working with needle-point accuracy to put recognizable people into a prediction." "Then shift the scene! For all I i know this part of town was turned into an insane asylum fifty years from now." The use of the past tense when speaking of a future event was not ungrammatical in the presence of Humanac. "Do you have the volume up?" "Certainly. Can't you hear the birds twittering?" "But I can't hear anyone talking." "Perhaps it's a day of silence." Staghorn took another long look at the girl on the parkbench and then turned to the controls, using the fine adjustment on the geographical locator. The screen flickered, blinked, and the scene changed. The two men studied it. "Recognize it?" said Staghorn. Peccary gave an affirmative grunt. "That's the Jefferson grammar school on Elm Street. I'm surprised it's still there. But, lord, as long as they haven't built a new one, you'd think they'd at least keep the old one repaired." "Very shabby," Staghorn agreed. It was. Large areas of the exterior plaster had fallen away. Windows were shattered, and here and there the broken slats of Venetian blinds stuck through them. The shrubbery around the building was dead; weeds had sprung up through the cracks in the asphalt in the big play yard. There was no sign of children. "Where is everyone?" Peccary demanded. "You must have the time control set for a Sunday or holiday." "It's Tuesday," Staghorn said. Then both were silent because at that moment a child appeared, a boy of about eleven. IX E burst from the schoolhouse door and ran across the cracked asphalt toward the playground, glancing back over his shoulder as though expecting pursuit. Reaching the play apparatus he paused and looked around desperately. The metal standards for the swings were in place but no swings hung from them. The fulcrums for the seesaws were there but they held no wooden planks to permit teetering. The only piece of equipment that looked capable of affording pleasure was the slide. It was a small one, only about six feet high, obviously designed for toddlers and not for a boy of eleven. Nonetheless, the boy headed for it eagerly. But he'd hardly set foot upon the bottom step of the ladder when the schoolhouse door burst open a second time. A young woman charged toward him shouting, "Paul! Get down from there at once! Paul!" She was an attractive woman, but her voice held a note of panic. She ran so swiftly that Paul, whose ascent of the ladder was accelerated rather than retarded by her command, hadn't quite reached the top when she seized him around the legs and tried to drag him down. "Please, Miss Terry!" he pleaded desperately. "Just this once let me get to the top! Let me slide down it just once!" "Get to the top?" Miss Terry was aghast. "You could fall and kill yourself. Down you come this instant!" "Just one time!" Paul wailed. "Let me do it just once!" Miss Terry paid no heed to his anguished cries. She tugged at his legs while Paul clung to the handrails. But he was the weaker of the two, and in a few seconds Miss Terry had torn him loose and set him on the ground. Then, seizing him firmly by the hand, she led him back toward the schoolhouse. Paul went along, sniveling miserably. They entered the building and the play yard was once more silent and deserted. "By God, Staghorn," Peccary thundered, "you've doctored it! You've deliberately fed false information into Humanac's memory cells!" Staghorn turned to glare at his guest, his eyes flaming at the outrageous suggestion. "The only hypothetical element I've fed into Humanac is your Y Hormone, Dr. Peccary! You saw me do it. You watched me check the computer before we started." "I refuse to believe that my Y Hormone will bring about the consequences that machine is predicting!" "It's the only new factor that was added." "How can you say that? During the next hundred years a thousand other factors can enter in." "But the Y Hormone bears an essential relationship to the whole. Sit down and stop waving your arms. I'm going to see if we can get into the school." Peccary sat down, seething.  T had been a mistake to bring his Y Hormone to Staghorn. It was simply that he'd been thinking of himself as such a benefactor to the human race that he couldn't wait to see a sample of the bright future he intended to create. "Think of it, Staghorn!" he'd said happily, earlier in the evening. "The phrase 'art is long and time is fleeting' won't mean anything any more! Artists will have hundreds of years to paint their pictures. Think of the books that 'will be written, the music that will be composed, the magnificent cities that will be built! Everyone (will have time enough to achieve perfection. Think of your work and mine. We'll live long enough to unravel all the mysteries of the universe!" Staghorn had said nothing. Instead, he'd uncorked the small bottle Dr. Peccary had given him and sniffed at it. The bottle contained a sample of the Y Hormone which Dr. Pec'cary had spent many years developing. Its principal ingredient was a glandular extract from insects, an organic compound that controlled the insects' aging process. If administered artificially, it could keep insects in the larval 'stage almost indefinitely. Dr. Peccary's great contribution had been to synthesize this extract -- which affected only insects -- with protein elements that could be assimilated by mammals and humans. It had required years of experimentation, but the result was his Y Hormone -- Y for Youth. In his laboratory he now had playful kittens that were six years old and puppies that should have been fully grown dogs. The only human he'd so far experimented on was himself. But because he'd started taking the hormone only recently, he was as yet unable to say positively that it was responsible for the splendid health he was enjoying. His impatience to know the sociological consequences of the hormone had made him bring a sample of it to Staghorn. After sniffing at the bottle, Staghorn had poured its Contents into Humanac's analyzer. The giant computer gurgled and belched a few seconds while it assessed the nature of the formula. Then Staghorn connected the analyzer with the machine's memory units. As far as Humanac was concerned, the Y Hormone was now an accepted part of human history. But, except for this one added factor, the rest of Humanac's vast memory was solidly based upon the complete known history of the earth and the human race. Its principles of operation were the same as those controlling other electronic "brains," which could be programmed to predict tides, weather, election results or the state of a department-store inventory at any given date in the future. Humanac differed chiefly in the tremendously greater capacity of its memory cells. Over the years it had digested thousands of books, codifying and coordinating the information as fast as it was received. Its photocells had pressions. Its auditory units had absorbed the music and languages of the centuries. And its methods of evaluation had been given a strictly human touch by feeding into its resistance chambers the cephalic wave patterns produced by the brains of Staghorn's colleagues. A N added feature, though by no means an original one, was the screen upon which Humanac produced visually the events of the time and place for which the controls were set. This screen was simply the big end of a cathode-ray tube, similar to those used in television sets. It was adapted from LB.M.'s # electronic computer used by the Vanguard tracking center to produce visual predictions of the orbits of artificial satellites. Staghorn was constantly having trouble explaining to people that Humanac was not a time machine that could look into the past or future. Its pictures of past events were based upon information already present in its memory cells. Its pictures of future events were predictions calculated according to the laws of probability. But because Humanac, unlike a human, and one variables impinging upon any human situation, its predictions were startlingly accurate. Humanac had never been exposed to pictures of Dr. Peccary's home town nor to those of a girl named Jenny Cheever. It arrived at the likeness of both town and girl through a purely mathematical process. Staghorn's ultimate purpose in building the machine was to use it in developing a true science of history. Because Humanac was only a machine, Staghorn could alter its memory at will. By removing the tiny unit upon which the Battle of Hastings was recorded and then "re-playing" English history without it, he could find out what actual effect that particular battle had. He was surprised to discover that it had very little. According to Humanac, the Normans would have conquered England anyway a few months later. At another time, while reviewing the events leading up to the American Revolution, Humanac had produced a picture of Benjamin Franklin kissing a beautiful young woman in the office of his printing shop. On impulse Staghorn removed this seemingly insignificant event from Humanac's memory and then turned the time dial forward to the present to see what effect, if any, the episode had had upon history. To his amazement, with that single kiss missing, Humanac produced a picture of the American continent composed of six different nations speaking French, German, Chinese, Hindu, Arabic and Muskogean -- the last being the language of an Indian nation occupying the Mississippi Valley and extending northward to Lake Winnepeg. It served as a buffer state between the Hindus and Chinese in the west and the French, Germans and Arabs to the east. I T was Humanac's ability to predict the future consequences of any hypothetical event, however, that made it an instrument capable of revolutionizing history. Once its dependability was thoroughly established, it would be possible for a Secretary of State to submit to Humanac the contents of a note intended for a foreign country, then turn the ;time controls ahead and get Humanac's prediction of the note's consequences. If the consequences were good, the note would then be sent. If they were bad, the Secretary could destroy the note and try others -- until he composed one that produced the desired result. Humanac's flaw was that it had no way of explaining the predictions produced on its screen. It merely showed what would happen when and if certain things were done. It left it up to the human operator to figure out why things happened that way. This was what was troubling Dr. Peccary. He could see not the remotest relationship between his Y Hormone and the fact that a mathematical probability named Miss Terry should refuse another mathematical probability named Paul permission to climb to the top of a six-foot playground slide. Meanwhile Staghorn had been using the fine adjustment on the geographic locator and now grunted his satisfaction. "Good! We're in the building, at least." On the screen was a dusky corridor. On either side of it were classroom doors, some closed, some ajar. Staghorn moved his hand from the fine adjustment to the even more delicate vernier control which permitted him to shift the geographic focus inches at a time. The focus drifted slowly forward to one of the half-open doors, and then he and Dr. Peccary were able to see into the classroom. It was deserted. Desks were thick with dust. Books, yellow with age, were strewn on the floor. Staghorn's hand sought the vernier control again. The picture led them on down the corridor to another open door. Again it was a scene of desolation. "This can have nothing to do with my Y Hormone!" Peccary insisted. "Then why is your picture on the wall there?" Staghorn said with a note of malicious pleasure. Dr. Peccary looked and started. On the classroom wall was a faded photograph of himself. Except that he was wearing a different suit in the picture, he looked just as he looked at the present moment. Staghorn got a closer focus on the photograph so that Peccary could read the legend beneath it. Dr. Clarence Peccary, the man who gave the world the Y Hormone. "All right then," said Peccary, somewhat modified by this tribute. "If they put my picture on school room walls a hundred years from now, it means I'm an honored man, a man the world admires. And therefore the Y Hormone can't be the cause of all this desolation!" "I've found that Humanac's reasoning and human reasoning differ in many ways," said Staghorn. On the screen they were out in the corridor again when from somewhere ahead came a woman's voice. "You may recite now, Paul. Please stand up." "Ah, that sounds like Miss Terry," said Staghorn. He fingered the vernier control. The focal point slid forward along the corridor. "Stand up and recite, Paul," Miss Terry said more sharply. "I think they're in the room on the left," said Peccary. II 'T'HE focus shifted to the open door and then Peccary and Staghorn could see into the classroom. This one was in slightly better order than the others and was occupied by two people. In I front sat Miss Terry, obviously i the teacher, and at one of the desks sat Paul. He seemed to be the entire class. At Miss Terry's ' urging he was coming to his feet, his face still stained with tears. He held his book a few inches from his nose and stared over the top of it sullenly. "Go ahead, Paul," said Miss Terry, sweetly stubborn. 'Tm waiting." Paul looked at his book and read from it in a monotone, enunciating each word carefully as though it had no relationship to the other words. "I am a human being and as long as I obey the six rules I shall live forever." "Very good, Paul. Now read the six rules." Paul sniffled loudly and commenced reading again. "Rule one: ; I must never go near fire or my clothing may catch aflame and burn me up. Rule two: I must keep away from deep water or I may fall in and drown. Rule three: I must stay away from high places or I may fall and dash my brains out." He paused to sniffle and wipe his nose on his sleeve, then sighed and continued dismally. "Rule four: I must never play with sharp things or I may cut myself and bleed to death. Rule five: I must never ride horses or I may fall off and break my neck." Paul paused, lowering his book. "And the sixth rule?" said Miss Terry. "Go ahead and read the sixth rule." Reluctantly Paul lifted his book. "Rule six: Starting when I'm twenty-one I must take Dr. Peccary's Y Hormone once a week to keep me young and healthy forever." "Excellent, Paul!" said Miss Terry. "And which rule were you breaking just now on the playground?" "I was breaking Rule Three," Paul said, then quoted sadly, "I must stay away from high places or I may fall and dash my brains out." stomping around in front of the computer. "Sheer idiocy," he muttered. "He doesn't have any brains to dash out! I'll admit that a computer with sufficient information about the state of the world might be able to make accurate predictions of events a few months or possibly a year into the future -- but not one hundred years! In that long an interval even the most trivial error could distort every circuit in the machine." He jabbed a finger toward the screen where Paul was seated at his desk again. "And that's what that picture is -- a distortion. I'm not going to let it influence me one bit in what I intend to -- " He broke off because of what was happening on the screen. From somewhere outside the school building came the wail of a deep-throated alarm. Both Miss Terry and Paul were on their feet and by their expressions, terrified. "The Atavars!" Paul cried, his entire body shaking. "To the basement, Paul!" Miss Terry's face was blanched as she grasped Paul's hand and headed toward the door. But halfway there, both came to a halt, breathless and staring. A powerful bearded man strode into the classroom. Paul and Miss Terry fell back as he advanced. He was a man of about fifty, his bushy hair shot with gray, his eyes cold and blue. He was followed by two younger men who studied Paul and Miss Terry with interest. All three wore rough work clothing. The bearded man pointed at Paul. "There's the boy," he said quietly. "Take him." Paul let out a shriek of terror and fled into a corner as the two men advanced. He clawed futilely as they laid hands on him. "For God's sake, shut up," one' of the men said with more disgust than anger. He pinioned Paul's arms while the other man bound them together with a strip of cloth. Miss Terry meanwhile had collapsed into her chair. One of Paul's captors glanced at her and spoke to the bearded man. "What about her?" The bearded man stepped close to Miss Terry and put a hand on her shoulder. She recoiled as from a snake. "How old are you?" he asked. Miss Terry made some inarticulate squeaks and the man spoke more sharply. "When were you born?" "Two thousand four," she managed to stutter. The bearded man considered this and shook his head. "Over fifty. By that time they're hopeless. Leave her and bring the boy." Miss Terry let out an agonized wail of protest and fainted across her desk. One of the men slung Paul over his shoulder and the bearded leader led the group from the room. Jhorn. "Absolutely amazing. One never knows what to expect." "Pure gibberish," said Peccary, then betrayed his interest by saying, "Can you follow them?" "I'm trying to." Staghorn worked at the geographic adjustment and finally got the screen focused on the corridor again. It was deserted. The bearded man and his companions had already departed. Staghorn touched the controls again, the screen flickered and once more the little park came into focus. But now it, too, was deserted. None of the ragged men and women were in sight, neither in the park nor on the street beyond. Staghorn twisted the focus in all directions without discovering anyone. "That whistle we heard was obviously some kind of alarm," he said. "Everyone must be in hiding -- from the Atavars, whoever they are. I strongly suspect that bearded fellow of being one." "You might as well shut it off, Staghorn," Dr. Peccary Said coldly. "It's too much nonsense for any sane man to swallow. And unless that machine can provide a full and satisfactory explanation as to why my Y Hormone will bring about the conditions depicted on that screen, I see no reason to keep the hormone off the market." Staghorn turned from the controls to study his companion. "The only possible way that Humanac could give us the entire background of events leading up to what we've just seen would be to set the time control to the present and then leave the machine running until it arrived at this same period again. That would take a hundred years, and I'm not going to sit here that long. What's more, I'm not going to touch your Y Hormone even if you do put it on the market." "There'll be plenty who will!" "That's what Humanac says, yes." Dr. Peccary gestured despairingly. After all, he did have a conscience. "I simply don't believe my hormone can be responsible!" "I'll remind you that your picture was on the classroom wall and that the sixth rule read by that boy indicated that he was supposed to start using your hormone when he reached the age of twenty-one. That would be about the age to stop growing older." "That boy is nothing but a mathematical probability!" Staghorn said owlishly. "Mathematical probabilities. Despite Omar, nothing exactly like either of us has ever existed before or will exist again." "But damn it. Staghorn..." Dr. Peccary sat down, his face in I've invested years of work and all the money I could scrape together. I don't see anything wrong in a scientist's profiting by his discoveries. And to keep it off the market just because that insane computer says that a hundred i years from now -- " He broke off, glaring at Humanac's screen which was still focused on the deserted park. "It simply doesn't make sense! The machine doesn't give any reasons for anything. If there were a way I could talk directly to some of those mathematical probabilities, question them, ask them what it's all about..." He was on his feet, striding back and forth before the computer again. "Perhaps there is a way," Staghorn said quietly. "Eh?" "I said that it may be possible for you to talk with them." "How?" "By making your mind a temporary part of the computer." Peccary studied the huge machine apprehensively -- its ranks of memory units, its chambers of flickering tubes, the labyrinth of circuits. "How would you go about it?" "I put you in the transmitter," Staghorn said. He stepped away from the console and slid back a panel to reveal a niche with a seat in it. Above the seat was a sort of helmet that resembled a hair drier in a beauty parlor, except that it was studded with hundreds of tiny magnets and transistors. Staghorn indicated the helmet. "This picks up and amplifies brain waves. I've used it to record the cephalic wave pattern of about a hundred men and women. The recordings are built into the computer, enabling Humanac to assign a mathematical evaluation to the influence of human emotion in making historic decisions. In your case, instead of making a recording of your brain waves, I'd feed the impulses directly into Humanac's memory units." "And what would happen then?" "I'm not altogether sure," said Staghorn, and it seemed to Peccary that Staghorn was finding a definite relish in his uncertainty. "I've never tried the experiment before." "I might get electrocuted?" "No. There's no danger of that happening. The current that activates the transmitter comes from your own brain, and as you know, such electrical impulses are extremely feeble. That isn't what worries me." "Well then, what does?" "In 'some ways Humanac behaves peculiarly like a living organism. For example, there's one prediction it can never make. Several times I've fed into it the hypothetical information that the two opposing factions of the world have declared war. Naturally everyone would like to know about the outcome of such a war." Staghorn paused, gazing lovingly at his majestic creation. "And what happens?" Dr. Peccary said impatiently. "Nothing. That's just it. The moment I turn Humanac into the future to get a prediction, the screen goes dead. Do you know why it goes dead?" Staghorn looked at Peccary with a pleased smile and didn't wait for Peccary to cue him. "It goes dead because, if war were declared, Humanac would be the first target for enemy bombs. When it predicts a future event, it has to take all factors into consideration. If one of those factors is its own destruction, it can predict nothing beyond that moment." tence in his mind while he slowly digested its meaning. What it seemed to mean was that, although Staghorn and Peccary thought of Humanac as only a complicated machine, Humanac's opinion of itself was altogether otherwise. It could foresee its own death. "I often wonder," mused Staghorn, "about those people we see wandering around on Staghorn's screen. To us they're only images made by a stream of electrons hitting the end of a cathode ray tube. Their space and time is an illusion. All the same, Humanac comprises an entire system -- a system modeled as accurately as possible on our own. It's just possible that the boy we saw, Paul, was experiencing a real terror." Dr. Peccary examined Staghorn in amazement. He had often suspected that Staghorn's genius was tinged with madness. "You're not suggesting that those... those images are conscious?" "Ah! What is consciousness?" "I didn't come here to get into a metaphysical argument." "No, but it's only fair for me to suggest the possible emotional hazzards involved in hooking you up to Humanac. Because you have to admit that you' be conscious during the experiment." "Certainly. But I'll be sitting right there." Peccary pointed to the seat in the transmitter unit. "In a sense, yes. Very well, take your seat." Peccary eyed the helmet uneasily "I'm not sure I want to do this." "But you do want to make millions from the Y Hormone. And you want to enjoy it with a clear conscience. Perhaps it's as you say -- there may be other factors involved. By knowing what they are you may be able to negate their influence." Staghorn's voice was a soft purr as he took Dr. Peccary's arm and urged him into the transmitter unit. Peccary sat down. The seat was small and hard. "Just bear one thing in mind," Staghorn said. "Don't get lost. It will be best if you stay in the little park where I can see you and where you'll be in focus. Unless you're in focus it might be impossible to -- ah -- disengage you." Dr. Peccary could find no meaning whatsoever in this statement, except confirmation of his suspicion that Staghorn was mad. He felt this so strongly that he started to rise from his seat and escape from the transmitter cell. But at that moment Staghorn lowered the helmet onto his head. The sensation he experienced was so novel and startling that he remained seated. For a second or two he could feel the tiny metallic contacts on the inside of the helmet pressing against his skull, but this sensation of physical pressure vanished almost at once. It was replaced by one of headlessness. His body up to his chin still seemed to be sitting in the transmitter -- but his intellect had lost completely its sense of localization in the head. He could think clearly enough, but had no notion as to the spot where his thoughts originated. Indeed, the whole concept of relative position seemed ridiculous. At the same instant he felt tall as a mountain and as low as a rug. His mind could fill the entire universe, while resting neatly in a thimble. He could also see Staghorn, for his eyes continued to function and transmit optical patterns, but precisely where he was while receiving these patterns he couldn't possibly say. He heard Staghorn remark, "Fine. The connection is perfect. It's always better when the subject is bald. I'm going to switch you over into Humanac's circuits now." Staghorn's hand moved across the controls and one of his long fingers flipped a switch. saw of Roger Staghorn. Instantly he found himself standing in the center of the small park in his home town. His reaction was not one of alarm. Quite to the contrary, his immediate thought was one of surprise that he wasn't alarmed. Standing there in the little square felt entirely normal and proper. Next he was jolted by the realization that he must be an image on Humanac's screen. He quickly looked about in all directions, half expecting to see Staghorn's huge face peering down from the sky like God. There was no sign of Staghorn, however. The world about him was as three-dimensional as any he'd ever known. He was in his home town a hundred years after he'd last seen it. Good lord! He was a hundred and forty-two years old! This realization was followed by a host of others. Like a man coming out of amnesia, his past berich. He was the richest man on earth. His Y Hormone was used the world over. A mile away, on the outskirts of town, he could see a portion of his huge production plant. He lived in a majestic palace surrounded by every manner of automatic protective device. Protection? From what? And how had he dared to venture out here in the park alone? But wait... wait. It was all an illusion. Actually he was only an image on Humanac's screen, a mathematical probability. He must keep that fact firmly in mind, or he might lose his mental balance. He gazed about at the town, dismayed by its appearance. Not a person in sight. Not even an automobile. Of course, the motor car might have become obsolete during the passage of a hundred years. There must be some new mode of transportation -- something undreamed of a century ago! While he was wondering what this might be, he heard a clopclop-clopping and was astonished to see three horsemen approaching the square. As they came closer he recognized them as the bearded man and his two companions. The boy Paul was bound firmly behind one of the saddles. A strange panic arose in Dr. Peccary's breast, but he managed to suppress it with a reminder that this was all illusion. He was here for purposes of information; he must have the courage to get  it. So he forced himself to the curb at the edge of the park. When J the riders were within speaking ; distance, he managed to hail them with, "Hey, you!" His nervousness made his words harsh. But then, there was no reason why he should speak politely i to kidnapers. He saw that Paul was conscious. The boy had a gag over his mouth but his eyes were i open... '  I HE three riders reined in their horses and looked at Peccary with frank curiosity. "Here's one that didn't hide," one of them remarked, in a tone that Dr. Peccary decided was disrespectful. He stepped forward boldly. "May I ask what you intend to do with that boy?" he demanded. "He wants to know what we intend to do with the boy," said the same man. "Yes, I heard what he said," the bearded man remarked quietly. He hadn't ceased to study Peccary with his piercing blue eyes. Now he urged his horse closer. "You must be a stranger here, son?" "Not exactly," said Peccary. "As a matter of fact, I was born here. That was some time ago and it's true I haven't been here recently." The way the bearded man stared at him made him extremely nervous. "But I'm sure that kidnaping is against the law. If you don't release that boy I'll have to -- to make a citizen's arrest!" Peccary knew that his words sounded ridiculous. From the way the three riders exchanged glances it was evident that they thought the same thing. "He's going to make a citizen's arrest," commented the one who liked to repeat whatever Peccary said. "Hush," said the bearded leader. And then to Peccary, "What's your name, son?" "Clarence Peccary. If you don't do as I say I'll -- " He stopped short, his heart leaping as the force of his indiscretion struck him. The three men had been struck also. The two younger ones were already on the ground, one on either side of him. Only the bearded man remained mounted. He leaned forward. "I thought you looked familiar. You're Doctor Peccary of the Y Hormone?" His voice was a menacing whisper. Peccary finally answered with a slow nod. "He must have flipped, running around alone like this," a man beside him said. "However, let's never insult fortune!" This was the last Dr. Peccary heard. For at that instant one of the men -- he never knew which -- struck him forcibly over the head with a blunt instrument.# Ill A T Humanac's controls Roger Staghorn leaped to his feet in alarm as he saw what was happening on the screen. Peccary had collapsed now. The two men were draping him across the bearded man's saddle. There wasn't an instant to lose! Staghorn leaped to the transmitter cell where Peccary's material body was seated, his eyes peacefully closed. Staghorn flipped the switch to disengage Peccary's consciousness from Humanac's circuits. Nothing happened. Peccary's body remained as before, blissfully asleep. Good lord, of course nothing happened! How could it? Peccary had just been knocked cold; at the moment he didn't have any consciousness! Staghorn opened the circuit again and' whirled back to the control console. He looked at the screen. All three men were mounted again. The bearded leader gestured them on. They set spurs to their horses and galloped away, taking the unconscious Peccary with them. "No!" Staghorn shouted at the fleeing images. "No, Dr. Peccary! Stay in focus!" The horsemen paid no heed -- nor did Staghorn expect them to, rationally. His shouts were only involuntary expressions of despair. Grasping the geographic locator, he twiddled it wildly, managing to keep the three riders in focus for several blocks as they sped down a street of the deserted town. Then they rounded a comer and he lost them. By the time he got a focus on the area around the corner they were gone. For several minutes he continued to search, shifting the focal point all over town, but in vain. Dr. Clarence Peccary was lost inside Humanac's labyrinthean brain! Staghorn was stunned. There would be no difficulty in keeping Peccary's physical body alive indefinitely by intravenous feeding, but it was as good as dead while separated from its sense of identity. Worse yet were the probable consequences to Humanac of having a free soul loose in its mathematical universe. These were too dire to contemplate. The machine's reliability might be altogether mined and Staghorn's life work destroyed. Under the circumstances there was but one course of action. He had to find Dr. Peccary and get him back into focus, so that he could be disengaged from the computer. First Staghorn focused the geographic locator on the town square, the point from which Peccary had been abducted; from there he could begin tracking him. Next he set the time control so that it would automatically disengage the transmitter units in exactly three hours. Whether or not he could find Dr. Peccary in that period of time Staghorn had no way of knowing; but at least he should be able to get himself back into focus at the proper moment. Then, in case he'd failed to find Peccary, he could reset the time clock and try again. Next he opened a second transmitter unit, sat down on the little seat and pulled the helmet down on his head. As sensations of vastness and lost dimensions spread through him, he reached out and pressed down the switch that would pour his own brain impulses into Humanac's circuits. cary, Staghorn found himself standing in the little park. He examined his hands and slapped his sides a few times, taking time to assimilate the fact that he felt perfectly solid. Ah, Bishop Berkeley was right all the time! The universe was subjective -- a creation of consciousness! He left off these speculations and recalled himself to his mission. Glancing around, he saw that people were beginning to reappear. They came up from basements and out of the doors of the dilapidated houses and buildings. If there had been a panic, there was no sign of it now. The men and women moved indolently, returning toward the park and the sunlit streets. All were so much the same age and of such similar beauty that it was difficult to distinguish individual members of the same sex. But he finally recognized the girl Dr. Peccary had identified as Jenny Cheever. She had an attractive strawberry birthmark on her hip. She strolled back into the park accompanied by a young man. The two of them took possession of the bench where Jenny had been seated earlier. They sat well apart from each other, silently contemplating the other passersby. Feeling that his knowledge of Jenny's name constituted a sort of introduction, Staghorn approached the couple. The man paid no attention to him but Jenny watched him curiously. Staghorn was not a man over whom women swooned, and it occurred to him that she found something odd about his dark suit and thick spectacles. He seemed to be the only man in town wearing either. "How do you do," he said to her. "I believe you're Ben Cheever's daughter." She continued to examine him languidly, slowly stroking a heavy strand of her auburn hair. "Am I?" she said at last. "It's been so long I've forgotten. But then I had to be someone's daughter and since my name is Cheever, you may be right. I don't remember you. We must have met ages and ages ago." "This is the first time we've met. You were pointed out to me by a friend." She considered this with a puzzled air, and, idly curious, said, "Do you want to marry me?" "Good heavens, no!" Jenny didn't seem to be insulted by his abruptness. "I just wondered why you'd speak to me," she said. "Because if you want to marry me you have to wait. I've promised to marry him first." She gestured to the man on the bench with her. The man looked at Staghorn for the first time. "Yeah," he said. when is this... merry event to take place?" "Some day," Jenny said indifferently. "When we both feel like it. There's no use rushing things. I don't want to use up all the men too soon." "Use them up?" "He'll be my twenty-fifth husband." "Yeah," said the man. "She'll be my thirty-second wife." "Your marriages can't last very long," said Staghorn. Despite the physical attractiveness of both Jenny and her escort, Staghorn began to feel clammy in their presence. He had an impression of deep ill health, a sense of unclean, almost reptilian lassitude. "They get shorter all the time," said Jenny, and turned away as though the conversation bored her. The man too had lost interest. Staghorn stood ignored for a moment and then spoke bluntly. 'Who are the Atavars?" The word produced the first genuine reaction. Jenny leaped to her feet. The man turned red. "Don't say that word!" Jenny said. "I'm sorry. I'm a stranger." "No one can be that much of a stranger!" "It's indecent," the man said. He stood up and touched Jenny's arm. "I feel my blood pounding. Let's go get married." Jenny nodded and, with a cold glance at Staghorn, moved away with her companion. Staghorn was tempted to follow and demand an answer to his question when he saw Miss Terry approaching. Miss Terry was more likely to have the information he needed, and in any case -- since she was only in her fifties -- she was less than half of Jenny Cheever's age. He hoped this would make a difference in her attitude. That she was capable of emotion he already knew. Her expression, as she approached, was disconsolate. Staghorn bowed low before her and introduced himself. "Good afternoon, Miss Terry. I'm a stranger to you but since you're a teacher by profession, you may have heard of me. I'm Dr. Roger Staghorn." He straightened, twisted his lips into a smile and waited for Miss Terry to associate his name with those scientific achievements that had so startled the world a hundred years earlier. To his chagrin Miss Terry only gazed at him blankly and shook her head. ' tears formed in her eyes and she tried to move on. Staghorn stopped her. "Forgive me," he said. "I'm aware of your recent loss. Your pupil, Paul." Her tears dropped more freely. "Sooner or later I knew they'd get him. The only child in town. And now I have nothing to do. Nothing at all!" "They? Just who are they -- the Atavars?" Miss Terry turned pale. "Don't say it," she pleaded. "In time I'll forget." "But where have they taken Paul? And what will they do with him?" "He'll die, of course." She spoke these words almost indifferently, then wept copiously as she added, "But I'll live on with nothing to do!" "Then why didn't someone stop them?" He gestured angrily at the handsome young males wandering through the park. "All these men -- why don't they rescue Paul?" This suggestion so shocked Miss Terry that she stopped weeping. ; "That's impossible! There'd be violence. Someone might get killed!" "They think of that with a boy's life at stake?" Staghorn felt his rage rising. He was an irascible man by nature and had controlled himself so far only because he knew he was part of an illusion. The sense of illusion was fading rapidly, however. The guiding principles of morals and ethics were themselves abstractions and therefore operated just as powerfully in an abstract universe. He grasped Miss Terry by the arm. "I'll go after him myself. Where do I find him?" "You can't find him! If you follow they'll capture you too!" "I'll chance that! Where have they gone?" "I can't tell you! They might punish me!" Staghorn shook her heartily, ignoring the fact that she was over fifty. "Tell me! It so happens that besides Paul, they've captured Dr. Clarence Peccary, and I'm responsible for his life!" At this statement Miss Terry let out a cry of horror. "They've caught Dr. Peccary? No! No!" "They most certainly have. So hurry up and tell me -- " "We'll all die!" wailed Miss Terry. "We'll all die!" "In that case it can't hurt you to tell me." "The mountains!" cried Miss Terry. "High Canyon!" It was with great difficulty that Staghorn forced directions from her. The news of Peccary's capture had unsettled her entirely. But despite the roughness with which he was forced to use her, no one came to her rescue. Several young men and women gathered at a safe distance to watch, but they did nothing to interfere. information that High Canyon was several miles north of town and could be reached by following a dirt road. To his inquiry as to where he could rent a car, Miss Terry went blank again. There were no cars. They had been abolished before Miss Terry was born. She thought there might be one in the museum. Staghorn glanced at his watch. He'd already been in the transmitter thirty minutes. He had only two and a half hours to get to High Canyon, rescue Dr. Peccary and Paul and return to the square. He dared not cut it too fine. He'd have to be back with a few minutes to spare. So, after learning the location of the museum, he took off at a run. It was evident that at some period in the past the town had gone through a surge of prosperity, for there were several quite majestic buildings whose cornerstones bore dates of the late twentieth century. But it was also clear that during the last fifty years not only had few new enterprises been started but the old ones had been allowed to languish. The museum even lacked an attendant at the door -- unless one gave this title to the bust of Dr. Peccary which stood on a pedestal just inside the entrance. The plaque beneath the bust noted that Dr. Peccary had given the museum to the city in # "to preserve for our immortal posterity a true picture of the world of mortals." In the seven and a half decades since, however, this true picture had suffered badly. In the absence of curtains and draperies, and in the nudeness of the mannekins whose purpose could only have been to display twentieth century costumes, Staghorn gained a hint as to where the populace got at least a part of the rags they wore. He didn't pause to examine details, however. A wall directory with a faded map of the building had given him the location of the wing of twentieth century machines. He headed there at once, passing by displays of tractors, bulldozers, jackhammers and other commonplaces before reaching the automobiles. There was an excellent selection of standard and sports models, all a uniform gray under their coats of dust -- and all of them out of gas. After so long a time it was doubtful if any would have run anyway. He had simply hoped that one lone attendant might have kept one in working condition. In the next room, however, he found the reward for his effort. Bicycles. He chose a racing model. A few minutes later he was pedaling rapidly northward on the dirt road that led to High Canyon. IV gers probing at his sore head. A bit of damp cloth or cotton was pressed against his upper lip. The sharp odor that stabbed his nostrils made him jerk his head away and suck in his breath. "Good. He's coming around." Dr. Peccary opened his eyes. For a few seconds faces and objects swung around him giddily, but finally the environment achieved stability. He saw that he was in a log cabin, on a bunk. Seated in a chair beside him was a man whose manner could belong only to a doctor. Standing behind the doctor was the bearded man. "He'll be all right," the doctor said, packing bottles and probes into his little black bag. Dr. Peccary sat up and touched the back of his head gingerly. It was very, very sore. He'd never had an illusion quite like this before. Besides, the illusion had persisted too long. How long had he been out? Hours? Days? Good lord, had Staghorn deserted him? The bearded man ushered the doctor out, locked the door and came back to observe Peccary. He put a booted foot on the chair and leaned an elbow on his knee. "I hardly need tell you, Dr. Peccary," he said, "that this is the happiest day of my life." "But not of mine," Peccary responded sourly. "I doubt if you can make it a bit worse by telling me what this is all about and what you plan to do with me." The bearded man showed surprise. "You don't know?" "No! I don't know!" Peccary was losing his detachment. The bearded man considered him thoughtfully. "I shouldn't have let the doctor go so soon. Apparently you were hit harder than we thought. On the other hand it's just possible, living as you have these last seventy years locked up in your palace and isolated from the rest of the world, that you've lost touch with what is going on." "I've lost touch with a great many things. Obviously I'm a prisoner. How long is this going to last?" "Only until my demolition squad is ready. Then we take you to your production plant where you produce the Y Hormone. There will be a gun at your back, of course. You know the combination to get us safely past the automatic guards. Ah, I've waited all my life for this! Once we're in the plant, my men will do the rest." "You're going to blow it up?" "Absolutely!" ?? A ND what do you gain by that? The formula for the Y Hormone still exists!" The bearded man laughed. "Yes, I can see you've been out of touch with the world. It's been thirty years since the country produced anyone capable of working with that formula. That's when the last university closed dowfi -- thirty years ago." "That's shocking," said Dr. Peccary. "But my experiments showed conclusively that the Y Hormone has no deleterious effect upon intelligence. I took every precaution!" "Nothing wrong with anyone's intelligence," said the bearded man, "except that no one's under pressure to use it. When the future stretches on indefinitely, it gets easier and easier to put things off until tomorrow -- even education -- until finally it's put off forever. There's only one man living who understands that formula." I "And who is that?" The bearded man looked down at him balefully. "Yourself, Dr. Peccary! That's why we're so delighted to capture you -- because now you'll never use it again!" Peccary stared at him aghast. "I understand now! You mean to steal it. You mean to force it out of me and start producing the Y Hormone yourself!" This accusation resulted in a violent reaction from the bearded man. He grasped Peccary by the lapels of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. Peccary could feel the man's powerful hands trembling with rage. "You fool! You utter imbecile! Don't even yet know who we are?" Peccary was so throttled by the man's clutch that he could only waggle his head in the negative. The bearded man's face came close to his. "We're mortals!" He flung Peccary back on the bunk contemptuously. "We accept our allotted span of years and call it quits. But during that time we live! We have to. It's all the time we have!" He glared at Peccary a moment before resuming in a milder tone. "After we destroy your production plant, Dr. Peccary, we're going to kill you. You might as well know. It's the only way to make certain that the formula for the Y Homone will never be used again." Then he smiled. "But take consolation. With the plant destroyed you'd gradually get old and die anyway. For the brief period before we execute you, you might even regain an appreciation for life." He bent suddenly, gripped Peccary's wrist and hauled him to his feet again. "In fact, you might have forgotten what life is. I'll refresh your memory. Come along!" He dragged Peccary to the door, opened it and led him outside. Peccary looked around. He found himself on the level floor of a canyon whose vertical walls rose high on either side He recognized the place at once. Often when he was a boy he'd come here to camp overnight. It had been a delightful wilderness with a year-round stream. 'I "HE canyon had changed. Some forty cabins like the one he'd been in were built in the shade of the southern cliff, and the canyon floor was covered with green crops and pasture. He heard singing, laughter. People were at work in the fields, children were building rock castles at the base of the cliff. On a cabin porch two elderly men sat playing checkers. "The last of the mortals," said the bearded man. "If there are any other colonies we don't know of them. But when you're gone, Dr. Peccary, they'll be the first of a # I new race! You asked earlier what we intended to do with the boy we kidnaped. There he is." And he pointed toward the canyon wall. Peccary looked and saw Paul climbing upward along crevices and ledges. The bearded man cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. "Paul! How is it?" The boy straightened on a rocky pinnacle and looked back. His face was ecstatic. "I'm climbing!" he crowed. "I've never been so high! I'm climbing all the way to the top!" He waved and clambered on. "Once in a great while a child is born to one of the immortals," the bearded man said. "If we find him in time we can save him." Peccary watched the boy move upward along the cliff. 'Then why was he so terrified when you captured him?" "Because he'd had it pounded into him that if the Atavars got him he'd die. He will, too, eventually. Like any other mortal. But in the meanwhile -- " He broke off and turned on Peccary savagely. "You see, there's one thing you didn't consider at all! The Y Hormone stops aging and keeps people healthy, but it can't protect them from accidents. The immortals can still die if they get hit by a train or fall overboard in the middle of the ocean. A mortal can accept the possibility of accidental death because he knows he's going to die anyway sooner or later, but can't you see the psychological shock to the immortals when one of them dies? A man who had the potential of living forever, suddenly wiped out! It's like the end of the world. And so they started eliminating hazards. Automobiles went first. Then planes and trains. They weren't needed anyway, because people stopped traveling. To travel is to court accident. But one precaution breeds another, and before long people were avoiding all dangerous occupations. With immortality at stake, even the smallest risk was too much. Planing mills, machine shops, mines, smelters -- bah! Name me an occupation that doesn't occasionally entail some hazard. Even motherhood!" for birth control! I had the plans all set up." "There was birth control all right, but not the way you planned it. Ten years after your hormone went on the market the world had few years they produced a surge of energy until the older immortals started eliminating the hazards. After that, starvation set in. Three-fourths of the population died. Your hormone can't keep people from starving, either, and it was a shock from which those who survived never recovered. Every new mouth to feed was a threat. Childbirth practically stopped. But that left the remaining immortals in a very soft position. For years now they've been existing on the leftovers from civilization, finding shelter in the old houses, ransacking the attics and closets of the dead for scraps of clothing, daring to plant a few crops in areas where they'll grow with little care. And after that -- boredom." He thrust an , accusing finger at Peccary. "And you dared to use the slogan, 'Time to achieve perfection!' I tell you, Dr. Peccary, the source of man's courage and energy is the knowledge of death! Man was meant to be mortal. We strive because we know the time is short. We climb mountains, make love, descend to the depths of the sea and reach for the stars because the certainty of death urges us on. It's the only certainty the world had -- and you would destroy it!" Peccary quailed before the bearded man's ferocity. He was relieved when his captor's attention was diverted by a party of horsemen who rode up in neat order and stopped before their leader. Several horses were loaded with explosives. "We're ready, Sir," their spokesman said. "Good," said the bearded man. "I see no reason to delay an instant." An extra horse had been provided for Dr. Peccary. He was on the point of being forcibly hoisted into the saddle when he was given a reprieve by a diversion of another kind. Approaching on the path through the center of the canyon, pedaling his bicycle frantically, came -- Staghorn! H E rode up to the group and leapt from his seat, his face blue from exertion. He'd been climbing all the way from town. He stood gasping for breath while he dragged his big gold watch from his pocket and consulted the time. He managed a groan. "Only thirty minutes left. Miles to go! But it's down hill all the way; we can make it!" He shoved his bicycle forward. "On the handlebars, Dr. Peccary, quick!" Peccary would have liked nothing better. But his movement toward Staghorn was stopped instantly by the men who were trying to put him on his horse. "They're going to kill me!" he cried. "They're going to blow up my factory and kill me!" "No, no!" said Staghorn. "That can't be. The consequences would be disastrous." He turned to the bearded leader. "Look, Sir, I have no time to explain, and I'm sure you wouldn't believe me even if I did. All of you are illusions! This entire situation is nothing but a mathematical probability. And so I insist that you release my friend, Dr. Peccary, at once!" The bearded man was so amazed by this request that he forgot to take offense. He gaped at Staghorn. "Who are you? I can't imagine an immortal risking himself on a bicycle!" "At this moment I'm desperately mortal, and so is Dr. Peccary!" "Nonsense. Dr. Peccary is a hundred and forty-two years old!" "I've told you this situation has no existence in reality!" The bearded man stomped the ground. "I've been living on this planet fifty-five years. I know reality when I see it! And what's more, I'm beginning to think you are one of the immortals. Even an immortal might show some courage when he knows he's going to be deprived .of the Y Hormone." "If you must know, I'm Dr. Roger Staghorn! I can see that there's industry and education in this canyon and so it's possible you've heard of me. I have quite a record of scientific achievements back in the twentieth century." A T this announcement the bearded man goggled at him, then threw back his head and laughed uproariously. "You couldn't have picked a worse masquerade. Dr. Roger Staghorn died in #!" "I can't help that. I'm Staghorn!" The bearded man stopped laughing and thrust his face forward threateningly. "You're a fraud! Because it so happens that I'm Staghorn!" "You? Staghorn?" "I'm Henry Staghorn, greatgrandson of the real Dr. Roger Staghorn!" "Impossible. I have no intention of ever getting married!" "Dr. Roger Staghorn married when he founded the Atavars, ninety years ago! He saw the need of leaving mortal offspring and sacrificed himself to that end. And he's buried in the cliff over there. Furthermore, he became Dr. Peccary's most bitter enemy. If he were alive today, he'd be tying the knot for Peccary's neck instead of trying to rescue him." The bearded man drew a revolver from inside his jacket. "I think I'll execute you here and now!" Peccary all but fainted. If Staghorn were killed all hope was gone. But Staghorn threw up a commanding hand. "Stop, Henry! What you say may be perfectly true from your peculiar viewpoint. But I'm still Roger Staghorn! Are you going to shoot your own great-grandfather?" Staghorn's tone, rather than his words, made the bearded man pause. He turned to a companion. And in that instant Staghorn moved. After all, he was slightly younger and more agile than his great-grandson. He leapt onto his bicycle, shouting at Peccary, "Turn around!" Peccary whirled and sprang in the air as Staghorn aimed the bicycle between his legs. He landed neatly on the handlebars, and with simultaneous kicks sent the men on either side sprawling. Then he and Staghorn were off down the canyon. Behind them they could hear the thundering hoofs as the horsemen started in pursuit. "Go, Staghorn, go!" Peccary shouted. The race would have been lost at once except for the downhill grade. But because of it, Peccary's added weight was a help instead of a hindrance. Shots rang out; bullets bounced from the rocks on either side. They made it out of the canyon's mouth and the grade increased on the long straightaway toward town. Staghorn's feet spun as they darted downward, maintaining their lead in front of the pursuing horsemen. The town loomed ahead of them, closer and closer until at last they sped into a street where the buildings gave them protection from bullets. The bicycle slowed. They were on level ground again. Staghorn skidded around a corner and stopped so suddenly that Dr. Peccary was propelled forward and landed on his feet at the mouth of an alley. Abandoning the bicycle, both men charged into it. "The square!" Staghorn gasped. "I'm focused on the square!". He hauled out his watch as he ran. Only seven minutes remained. r T , HE deep-throated alarm whistle was sounding over the town. Its inhabitants must have sighted the approach of the Atavars for they were scurrying into buildings and basements, leaving the way clear for Peccary and Staghorn. They emerged from the alley and turned left for a block, then doubled back as they were sighted by the searching horsemen. The hue and cry was on again, but Peccary's familiarity with his home town served them well until they came within sight of the square. Then they stopped in dismay and ducked into a doorway. Across the street in the center of the little park, as though divining that it must be their destination, was Staghorn's great-grandson and three of his men. Their position enabled them to watch all four approaches to the square at the same time. Staghorn tugged out his watch again. Two minutes. They had to be in focus! A second late and they'd be locked forever. He watched the second hand creep around the dial. "We have to chance it," he said. 'When I start running, run with me!" The second hand crept on. A minute left. Staghorn judged the distance from their hiding place to the grassy plot where the bearded man was standing. About seventy-five yards. Could he do seventy-five yards in ten seconds? Could Peccary? Thirty seconds left... twenty-five... twenty. He'd never gone through such a painful count-down... fifteen seconds "Ready, Dr. Peccary. It's now or never." Thirteen... tweleve... eleven... "Go!" Staghorn burst from his hiding place with Peccary at his heels. They dashed for the square. They were over the curb and into the street before the men in the park saw their approach and let out cries of triumph. "Dip and weave, Dr. Peccary! Dip and weave!" They dipped and wove, while bullets ripped at their clothing. They were running right into the fire, making better targets at every stride. Staghorn ran with his watch in his hand, and never had time and distance diminished so slowlySeven seconds, six, five, and they were still alive and across the street. Four seconds, three, two. They were over the park and onto the grass. A bullet crashed into Staghorn's leg and he fell, diving forward. "Got him!" cried his greatgrandson. "Now get Peccary!" But at some point in the bullets' flight toward Peccary and Staghorn, the square and everything in it vanished. Staghorn found himself sitting in Humanac's transmitter unit. The time clock had functioned. He was disengaged. He lifted the helmet from his head and stumbled from the cell, drawing a trouser leg up to examine his leg. It seemed that he could detect a scar. Then he turned and helped Dr. Peccary from the other transmitter. Both men stepped toward the console to look at Humanac's screen. It was still focused on the little park. The bearded man and his companions were now exchanging glances of consternation. After a moment the bearded man wet his lips. "Maybe he was right," he said in awed tones. "No one but my great-grandfather could ever do a trick like that. And maybe what he said is true. It's all illusion. We're nothing but mathematical probabilities!" At this point Staghorn hauled down the master switch. The screen went dead as Humanac's power was shut off. Some twenty minutes later he had finished draining Dr. Peccary's sample of the Y Hormone from Humanac's analyzer and had thoroughly cleansed the computer of any last traces of it. He handed the little bottle of the hormone back to Dr. Peccary. "There," he said. "As far as Humanac is concerned, it's as though it never was. Do as you wish." Dr. Peccary looked at the bottle lions. Then slowly he moved to a laboratory sink and poured the contents of the bottle down the drain. "I can't help wondering," mused Staghorn, "of whose computer we're a part right now -- slight factors in the chain of causation that started God knows when and will end..." "When someone pulls the switch," said Dr. Peccary.      The next issue, like this one you have in your hands, looks like a peach, a pip, a corker, a -- how about leaving the superlatives to Mad Ave and saying it's another darned good issue? Among the novelets are: and we hope never will. Blurb: "Space combat was what I'd been trained for. I had wangled the job. Now all I had to do was find out what I was supposed to combat." No superlatives, remember, but it's not easy -- the story behind that blurb is really taut. been a stray. Say "Oops, sorry" to a planet that has been conquered by mistake? No, find a diplomatic formula -- meaning justify conquest -- or else! following: "All he wanted to do was go from here to there -- but somehow the entire Milky Way had been converted into a squirrel cage." Short stories, certainly, and possibly another novelet, perhaps a shortshort... weird one, right enough. Downright hard to believe, but true, every word of it. See you next issue? Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #. N.Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. ze -- UEanmi MMfcb i MKbe by Fritz Leiber # For  # or #c each Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foreign Postage Name . Address City State Looking Ahead? You must be, or you wouldn't be reading this magazine. 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Easy-to-follow, steparticles give you valuable pointers on how to save work, buy and save on proper materials and get a professionly-perfect job) of your workshop library! I A RE the tales of strange human powers false? Can the mysterious feats erformed by the mystics of the Orient e explained away as only illusions? Is there an intangible bond with the universe beyond which draws mankind on? Does a mighty Cosmic intelligence from the reaches of space ebb and flow through the deep recesses of the mind, forming a river of wisdom which can carry men and women to the heights of personal achievement? Have You Had These Experiences?... that unmistakable feeling that you have taken the wrong course of action, that you have violated some inner, unexpressed, better judgement? The sudden realization that the silent whisperings of self are cautioning you to keep your own counsel -- not to speak words on the tip of your tongue in the presence of another. That something which pushes you forward when you hesitate, or restrains you when you are apt to make a wrong move. These urges are the subtle influence which when understood and directed has made thousands of men and women masters of their lives. There IS a source of intelligence within you as natural as your senses of sight and hearing, and using now! Challenge this statement! Dare the Rosicrucians to reveal the functions of this Cosmic mind and its great possibilities to you. Let This Free Book Explain Take this infinite power into your partnership. You can use it in a rational and practical way without interference with your religious beliefs or personal affairs. The Rosicrucians, a world-wide philosophical movement, invite you to write today for your Free copy of the fascinating book, "The Mastery of Life" which explains further. Address your request to Scribe A.H.V. 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Off. can make is that almost anything that has gone out of style will come back into style, that, at least on the political scene, friends will become enemies and enemies . friends, and the like. Newton's Third Law of Motion, in other words. I have not now nor have I ever read Hegel and Marx, but I had, God wot, more than enough gab about "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" brayed at me as dialectics, when action, reaction and rest were meant. You know what? I miss those verbal storm centers. I wouldn't if people were not playing things cool, no sweat, and other such terms for mental cyclone cellars. Right, left, middle and way the devil off in Cuckoo Land, the attackers, defenders and straddlers of the barricades in the living rooms cared. I would put "cared" in italics except that every reminiscer who has found his present lacking did so, clear back to Cato, and you know what he said. Besides, that's not the point here; I admire many of George Jessel's ex-wives -- oh, ten or twenty, not all, I want it clearly understood -- and I have no ambition to fit the comment one of them made: "Georgie has been reminiscing since he was six years old." My anecdotage, to quote somebody else, is, or feels, a good way off. My point is beards and I appear to be trying to make it the hard way. Beards were the cat's whiskers in the #th century, and yet no President, from Washington to Grant, stumped the country without a razor. Lincoln? It was not until he was elected and sending out change-of-address notices that he sprouted. A little girl named Grace Bedell of Westfield, N. Y., had written him that she thought he would look better with whiskers. So he tried it, and by the hair of the Prophet, she was right! In the next half century, all but two Presidents were beavers -- Andrew Johnson (would he have come so close to impeachment if he'd been bearded?) and that figure in his assassination?) -- and a skimpy three mustaches, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Taft. Since then, not even five o'clock shadow has darkened the faces of our Chief Executives. Hair grew wild in those days. The assumption was that the male of the species, as with other critters, had to do his attracting with masculine appurtenances. (The females attracted right back, but this would be of note only if they either suddenly started or stopped.) A man could just let his crop grow from the time he was a shaver, of course, with never a pruning, but such types were rare. In beardhood's full flowering, there were goatees, mutton chops, sideburns, and on and on and on, culminating, at least to my view, in the astonishing adornment worn by Horace Greeley, a fringe from lobe to lobe, not one whisker daring to raise its head above the jaw line. Now that was an age when a stylist could make other people's -- and his own, more than likely -- hair stand on end, or lie flat, or twist with wax, or any of the seemingly thousands of combinations with bristles below mouth and nose, and involving those items and eyes, ears and chin -- a real landscaping job. Now this is not an argument for or against beards. I am simply observing that the beard is returning; all countries have their Beat Generation, and the beard is the commonest denominator, so that Beardnik would perhaps be a closer-cropped term, instead of Beatnik and Teddy boys. Like all first-generation growth, whether it be furze or forest or fuzz, today's beards are primeval. I know there are women who want to run their fingers through the things -- wonderfully, there are women who want to run their fingers through anythingness or nothingness -- but these are merely the shaggy forerunners of what may become a handsome and varied facial lawn, complete with hedges, windrows and terracings, and heaven knows what else, for styles in beards are sure to be as different and unpredictable as those in clothes and modes of transportation and anything else you might care to name. Now we run into the seeming wall of attitude. Ignore it. Attitude has never yet kept a style from happening or unhappening. To those men and women who would rather be caught dead than have or be married to a beard, for reasons seldom expressed in twenty-five words or less, I offer the assurance that when everybody else has or is married to one, the lack thereof would overrule all present objections. One genius, trying to determine the very bravest act in the whole history of mankind, decided it was the first swallow of the first oyster. My compliments to the man for a thorough sifting of history, and my apologies for cock-hatting his notion. My money says it was a kid. Kids love to be the first on their block, a desire and aim coldly exploited by the purveyors of the dried bread crumbs known as breakfast cereal. Papa may not want to be caught dead with a beard. Mama may share the feeling, though this is questionable when beards are becoming the fashion. But neither is proof against Junior's urging, cajoling, and, when nothing else works, accusations that this shows they don't love him. Status -- along with relationship and basis -- is a workhorse word that ought to be allowed to rest up, but yes, status was very much involved in a man's ability to grow a beard and have something fresh and appealing done with it, and it can be again if a trend to the beard leads to all that was involved in every bearded era: male authority, the autocrat of the breakfast (and dinner) table the defender of honor, name and family. The sword and dueling pistol were the weapons of previous times; lawsuits and business ruin, public exposure to being outdone, all that sort of updated rivalry, make fine substitutes for antlers. But updated antlers can also be. All this from non-conformist conformity in beard-growing? Except for the leaders, who always are a year or two ahead, non-conformity has been and is and can be expected to be conformity among the led. There lies the seed of the beard. A number of reactions, heard round the world, strengthen the odds against beardlessness. Progressive education and permissive child-rearing are very heavily under fire, and female domination is also getting its lumps -- more from women than men -- and what, barring some unlovely exceptions, distinguishes the sexes more than the ability to grow a beard? In other words, action has caused reaction. Like all reactions, it can be counted on to go too far. In what direction? Here's one educated guess -- right from Barber's College. The Wrong World By j. t. McIntosh Say "Oops, sorry" to a planet that has been conquered by mistake? No, find a diplomatic formula -- meaning justify conquest -- or else! Breeli couldn't have had a better first impression of the newly conquered world. The stepped from the ship, and the richness of this planet called Earth dazzled him. Even the clouds, white and fleecy in an otherwise blue sky, were beautiful. Breeli had never seen beautiful clouds before. The landscape, rolling in gentle swells and curves to a shimmering gold and blue horizon, was a dream in green and brown. Earth was quite a planet. It was a pity that the Terrans were only at the Fifteenth Level. This wasn't a world to conquer, a world to ravage, a world to keep in subjection. This was a world to welcome cordially as a full member of the Pastan Federation. However, only members of human races which had reached the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Levels were eligible for full membership of the Federation, and according to the last survey... Breeli's reflections were disturbed as his gaze fell on two nasisa m U'h m iMgP 'fsZOs. wmtvwwimum 'ftMtttm AVi MmM IS'?, 'Mt War. W-Mrr tive men painting a fence across the spaceport. Their white overalls didn't reveal much of their physical contours, but enough to indicate that the Terrans were a hundred per cent human, though the males were broader and heavier than Pastan men. What interrupted Breeli's train of thought wasn't the mere sight of the two natives, however, but the way they were working. They seemed to be doing the job quickly, sensibly and efficiently, and without supervision. Their overalls, too, weren't of Pastan design, yet at that distance they looked well designed and serviceable. Breeli could have sworn he was looking at two members of an Eighteenth Level race. General Prani would never have gone ahead with the total conquest plans if the Terrans had turned out to be Eighteenth Level. Anyway, the last survey had been made only a few thousand years before, and the Terrans had then been unquestionably Fifteenth Level, having just learned the uses of metals. They were probably Sixteenth Level now, but no higher. "There's a car waiting for you, sir," said the lieutenant at Breeli's elbow. "I'm to drive you to General Prani's headquarters." Breeli didn't allow his pleasure at the first sight of Earth to lure him into familiarity. Consolidation Officers held rank equivalent to field marshals, and since they were, in effect, civilians arriving after the shooting was over to take matters out of the hands of the military, they were never exactly popular with them. Scrupulous formality was best. "Thank you. Lieutenant," he said. "And this is your shield, sir," said the lieutenant, holding out a plastic belt with four small black discs on it. Breeli raised his eyebrows. "I thought this world was supposed to be conquered." "Depends what you mean by conquered, sir. There's no military resistance any more. But we all wear shields." The standard equipment defense shield radiated around its wearer a force field which in ordinary circumstances remained completely quiescent. But if enough energy was generated within it quickly enough, the field became a miniature hyperspace drive. A bullet entering the field, for example, was rapidly shunted into hyperspace, its own impetus supplying the necessary power. Men wearing shields could be strangled or stabbed, but they couldn't be shot, and an explosion wouldn't harm them, unless it was violent enough and big enough to swamp the field and topple shield, wearer and blast into hyperspace. Shields even afforded protection against too enthusiastic knife-thrusts. If you wanted to kill a man wearing a shield, you had to insert your knife into a convenient vital spot and press it home gently but firmly. And it was no use trying to hit him on the head with a blunt instrument. But Breeli always felt uncomfortable when he wore one. "Put it away, Lieutenant," he said. "I'll take my chances." "General Prani's orders, sir," the lieutenant persisted. "All Pastan personnel must wear shields at all times." "I imagine my orders overrule General Prani's," Breeli remarked. "Where's the car, Lieutenant?" The lieutenant wasn't enjoying himself, but he stood firm. "I can't drive you to headquarters if you don't have a shield, sir." Lieutenants just didn't dictate to Consolidation Officers. But Breeli knew in his heart the lieutenant was right. Instead of making an issue of it -- he could have had him arrested on the spot -- Breeli meekly accepted the belt, swallowed hard and buckled it on. they came to it. It was long, black and shiny, with a lot of glittering chromium. He wanted to ask the lieutenant who had built a car like that, and why, but restrained himself. No doubt somebody had made it to impress the natives. The greatest shock came when the car turned smoothly onto a six-lane highway. Breeli was stunned. This roadway couldn't have been constructed by the occupying forces in the time at their disposal. Besides, why would they want a six-lane motorway? Obviously, therefore, it had been there before they came. The Terrans had made it. The implications were shattering. A Seventeenth Level race could have made such a road, conceivably even a Sixteenth Level race under intelligent supervision. But only an Eighteenth Level civilization would have any use for such a trafficway. It was suddenly clear that the car he was in was of Terran origin, made for the highway on which it was running with such effortless ease, speed and comfort. "Lieutenant," he said, controlling his voice with an effort, "these Terrans are Eighteenth Level." "Yes, sir," said the lieutenant. "Perhaps Nineteenth." "Then why -- " Breeli began, and checked himself abruptly. Better to see Prani first. An error of catastrophic proportions had been made. General Prani, sent to conquer Earth, had attacked and subdued an Eighteenth -- possibly Nineteenth -- Level culture. It was a ghastly blunder. When you moved in on a world peopled by apes, what the apes thought about it didn't matter very much. Even a Fifteenth Level race could be shoveled aside without much compunction -- not exterminated, of course, for all races had a right to develop. A race at the Seventeenth Level, curiously enough, invariably welcomed conquest. They fought hard and savagely, but they respected conquest and learned rapidly from their conquerors. Conquest was good for them. An Eighteenth Level race, however, had a great respect for the value of human life and liberty. It had a delicately balanced economy which could easily be ruined. It had a highly developed social structure. Most of all, it had pride and a strong sense of its own importance. Moral issues aside, conquering an Eighteenth Level civilization didn't pay. It wasn't good for the conquerors or conquered. But moral issues couldn't be kept aside. A capital crime had been committed. Heads would roll for this. r P HE car slowed slightly to turn off the motorway. There had been no other vehicles on it, and the only living creatures to be seen had been Pastan guards on foot, patrolling the grass verges. Presumably General Prani had commandeered this whole area, permitting no Terrans to enter. The exit was ingenious. The car sped off to the right to turn to the left, crossing the motorway by a bridge. Silently, Breeli cursed General Prani. Hadn't it been obvious at a glance that these Terrans must be wooed, not ravished? The very much inferior road on which they were now traveling had footpaths on each side, and Breeli's eyes almost popped from his head when he had his first glimpse of Terran women -- three of them, on the sidewalk. "Stop the car!" he shouted. "Those women..." The lieutenant slowed the car but didn't stop. "Sorry, sir," he said. His face was red with embarrassment at having to thwart a Consolidation Officer for the second time in ten minutes. "Don't you think you'd better see General Prani first, sir? I mean, you don't know the native language, and anyway... I'm very sorry, sir." "You have no specific orders to stop when I tell you?" Breeli asked. "No, sir. But... no, sir." "It's merely your own idea, then, not to do what I tell you, and make me do what I don't want to do?" "I... yes, sir." "What's your name?" "Lieutenant Wilt, sir," the driver said miserably, knowing he was in for trouble. Breeli, his first unthinking impulse to stop and take a closer look at the three women thwarted, could see excellent reasons why he should not do so. As Wilt had said, he couldn't speak the language. Also, he didn't yet know the terms of Earth's surrender. Perhaps there were religious, racial and social taboos of which he knew nothing. Once more Lieutenant Wilt was undoubtedly right. Wilt was a man to watch, possibly a man to have promoted. However, there was no need to reassure him just at this moment. The car turned into a drive flanked by trees and slowed to a crawl. So Prani's headquarters still had to be protected by a diverter, Breeli mused. Natural enough, if the Terrans really were Nineteenth Level. The diverter was simply a big defense shield with a wider field of application. Ships protected by it could divert even atomic explosions into hyperspace. When it was used for the defense of a town or building, it could be set so low that only a shell or bombblast would cause a reaction violent enough to trigger the shield, or so high that even a stray dog blundering into it would be toppled into hyperspace. The fact that the lieutenant dropped the car's speed to about ten miles an hour as he approached the yellow building among the trees indicated that General Prani had his diverters at very cautious settings. ognize the yellow building as a roadhouse, but he was struck by its attractive, functional lines. The sick feeling which had come over him returned as he saw the sparkling swimming pool to one side of the building. That was conclusive. Only a civilized race could have the know-how and organizing ability to collect and pipe water where they wanted it in such quantities that a huge openair pool with a circulating system was a practical proposition. A Seventeenth Level race might collect and pipe the water, but it couldn't circulate, purify and aerate it. Prani would be executed. Breeli wouldn't be held responsible for something he had arrived too late to prevent, but things wouldn't be exactly comfortable for him either. Breeli was a little surprised to be ushered in by a native ' woman who spoke fluent Pastan with a tolerable accent. "What's your name?" he asked. "Dorothy Green, sir. I am chief Terran liaison officer." "Appointed by the Terrans or by General Prani?" "By mutual agreement, sir." She had a pleasant voice which didn't go with her appearance. Unlike the three women Breeli had seen on the way, she was frankly unattractive. She was painfully thin, colorless, and though her drab brown-gray uniform was neat and spotless, it did nothing for her. As long as Terran females had to be employed at HQ, it was very sensible that they should be unattractive enough to prove no distraction. If those three girls had jobs at HQ, Breeli reflected, very little paper work would be done. "How do I address you?" he asked, wondering if this would provoke a bitter retort. "As you wish," she said. "Dorothy or Green or both." "Very well," he said, not committing himself. He thought he sensed sorrow in this girl, which would account for some of her drabness. He wondered if it was sorrow on account of the Pastans or anything they had done. "Don't you ever smile?" "Not very often," she said, not smiling. "You'll find General Prani in there, sir." fat and complacent and had the thick, moist lips of a sensualist. Everything became clear to Breeli at first sight of him. General Prani wasn't very bright. Somehow, through sheer good luck, he had been saved from ignominy time and again by the ability and intelligence of his subordinates. Somehow he had become a general and had been entrusted with an important mission. And, of course, he had bungled it. "Glad to see you, sir," said Prani. "I think we'll manage to make you comfortable here. The native women are quite... shall we say cooperative? Yes, this is a splendidworld. Modesty apart, I think I've done a pretty good job, sir." The buffoon was actually pleased with himself. "General," said Breeli quietly, "the Terrans are at the Eighteenth Level, I understand." "I haven't given it much thought, sir. Nineteenth, I should say. No detailed assessment has been made. Modesty apart, not every general could conquer a Nineteenth Level world." "General, aren't you aware that it's a serious crime under Federation law to interfere with races above the Seventeenth Level?" "But I was sent to conquer this world. Naturally I obeyed my orders." "You were sent to subjugate a Fifteenth or Sixteenth Level world. You found a race at the Nineteenth Level. Didn't it even occur to you that your orders no longer applied?" "Sir," Prani said stiffly, "I have risen to my present position in the Pastan Federation Army by doing exactly as I was told. It is not for me to question the orders of men far abler... hum... than myself. In this case my orders were to conquer Earth. It was nothing to me if the Terrans were Fifteenth Level, or Nineteenth, or any other level. I merely did my duty as a soldier in the service of the Pastan Federation." "Quite," said Breeli drily. There were two possible ways out, neither particularly honest -- but in interstellar politics, expediency had to play a large part. If the Terran resistance had been slight, it might be possible to pretend there had been no conflict at all, merely police action. And if sufficient time could be gained somehow, it might be possible to pretend that the Terrans had been at the Seventeenth Level when Prani conquered the world, and had developed rapidly afterwards, owing to contact with the Pastans. "Have you seen the native women, sir?" Prani asked, magnanimously forgiving Breeli for failing to appreciate him. "Some of them." "Do you want one, sir?" Breeli restrained himself with an effort. Anyone capable of the criminal idiocy of attacking a Nineteenth Level world was naturally incapable of seeing that it was criminal idiocy. "There will be no difficulty about that?" he asked. "None, sir," said Prani expansively. "At first these Terrans bitterly resented what they called the rape of their women, but there was a sudden reversal of their attitude. I have not, of course, taken it upon myself to permit marriage between Pastans and native women, but if you will be guided by me, sir, you will give permission soon. Many Terran women are exceedingly attractive -- " "Like Dorothy Green?" "You're joking, sir. Certainly not like Dorothy Green. Intelligent girl, useful, but ugly. Modesty apart, I am very attractive to women, sir, and... but meantime, shall I have half a dozen sent in for you to choose from?" tered on Breeli's lips. But he wanted to know more before committing himself. "As you wish." General Prani spoke into the intercom. When he had finished, Breeli said: "I take it Terran resistance was slight? That's an extremely good thing. We may yet manage to get out of this without -- " "Slight?" Prani cried, affronted. "Sir, this has been the greatest campaign in the entire history of the Pastan Federation, and, modesty apart, the greatest victory!" Breeli groaned. Prani settled himself comfortably behind his desk and started his prepared speech complacently. "I'll begin with a paradox, sir. These people are advancing technologically at an enormous rate. In the last fifteen of their years -- about ten of ours -- they have advanced more rapidly than we ever did in any fifty years of our history. Yet, if we had arrived fifteen years ago, we'd never have conquered them at all." "They have been concentrating too much on nuclear power?" Prani's jaw dropped. In his astonishment, he was rude. "Who told you?" "No one. But I am not unintelligent, General -- and this kind of thing has happened before." The general was not convinced. "I see you deserve your high position, sir. You are precisely right. Fifteen years ago -- I use the local measure of time, of course -- the Terrans' defenses were largely non-nuclear. In the meantime they have gone over almost entirely to nuclear power." "So when you arrived, channeling all nuclear explosions into hyperspace, they had nothing to fight with?" Prani wasn't pleased at the brusque interruption. "Frankly, sir, it was an unpleasant shock to be attacked with atomic weapons when we believed this was a Fifteenth Level world. But I pride myself on flexible command. Modesty apart, few generals could have changed their plans so rapidly. I-" "At the moment, I don't want a campaign report, General. You fought the Terrans and beat them." The general waved a pudgy hand deprecatingly. " was in command, sir. Despite the fact that I had been completely misinformed about the people of this world, I pressed home the attack without fear of consequences, and won a great victory for the Pastan Federation." "General," said Breeli drily, "consequences have caught up with you. But before I say any more, what were your losses in men and materials?" "The Terrans fought with considerable military skill. Had I not myself been resolute -- " "Yes, General. The losses?" "It was, of course, an expensive campaign, sir." "Precisely. Let me see the figures." "I have them here, sir." He handed Breeli a single sheet of paper. There was a long silence. Then: "You call this victory?" Breeli whispered. "I told you it was the greatest battle in the entire history of the Pastan Federation, sir." "So you did. The Terrans, I imagine, suffered similar losses?" "Oh, considerably more, sir." trophe was even greater than Breeli had feared. There was nothing for it but to place Prani under arrest and have him sent back to Pasta for trial. Breeli had one last try. Almost pleadingly he said: "When you found the Terrans far more advanced than you had been led to expect, didn't you consider trying to form a peaceful alliance with them, instead of going ahead with plans for conquest?" "No, sir," said Prani bluntly. "I was ordered to conquer this world. I had no authority to do anything else." Breeli sighed. Lieutenant Wilt had no authority to stop the Consolidation Officer doing something rash -- yet Wilt had done so. Twice. "General, if you were ordered to make a surprise attack on Tuesday evening and you discovered on Tuesday afternoon that the enemy had not only heard about the attack but were waiting for it -- would you still attack?" "Certainly," said Prani. Breeli sighed again. "I gather," said Prani, "that you consider I have acted wrongly in this matter?" "General Prani, your family will find it necessary to change their name. Every official who had anything to do with sending you on this mission will be examined for latent insanity -- and rightly so, for most of the blame is theirs. You, General, will consider yourself-" A welcome relief for the shocked, incredulous Prani was afforded by the sudden arrival of the six Terr an girls he had requested. They came in boldly and arranged themselves against one wall of the office, smiling and laughing. They were neither insolent nor timid. And Breeli would have rated each one of them, individually, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. That they looked exotic was hardly surprising. They were slightly paler, slightly smaller than Pastan women. Their eyes were a little larger, set further apart. Their legs were longer, their arms a little shorter. The contrasts of their bodies were more extremelarger busts and hips, smaller waists. Any one of them would have been a sensation in a Pastan street, and it would have occurred to no one to think of her as alien. In dress they varied considerably. Two wore long skirts, one a very short skirt. One wore loose slacks, one tight pants, one very brief shorts. All wore belts that emphasized their small waists, and all except one had tight blouses or dress tops that plainly showed why they had tight blouses. There were two blondes, three brunettes, one redhead. "Do any of them speak Pastan?" Breeli asked. "We all do," said the redhead. She was the one in the shorts. All the girls looked as if they had good figures, but in her case there was no possible doubt about it. Above her tiny red shorts she wore a white strapless suntop, and as he looked at her Breeli felt as he hadn't felt since he left his concupiscent teens behind him. "That's Margo Day," said Prani, who had already recovered his usual complacency. "I'd have taken her myself, only I already have a woman, and those Terran girls are very jealous." "Any of us would consider it an honor to meet your requirements, Consolidation Officer Breeli," said the redhead, Margo Day. Breeli started. "You know me?" "And your high position," she said respectfully. "You're what we would call a governor. Please make your choice, sire. Satisfaction is guaranteed, sire." "What is 'sire'?" "It means father. A very respectful form of address, sire." knew irony when he heard it. Margo Day was laughing up her non-existent sleeve at him. Only a fool complains about something he can't prove, however. Until this moment he had merely been playing along with the situation, without any real intention of taking a Terran mistress. But why not take one? If Terran women were as compliant as this, nothing he did was going to make the position any worse than it was already. Indeed, it seemed as if the Terrans had fully accepted the situation, and in that case the effects of General Prani's colossal blunder might not be so bad. Every instinct in Breeli but one screamed at him to choose Margo Day. She headed the group in looks, personality and brains. The dissenting instinct, however, was a very important one. If the enemy -- and these women were the enemy, after what Prani had done -- wanted him to do something, he preferred to do something else. "What's your name?" he asked the blonde beside Margo. "Helen Krauss," the girl in the tight pants said, and Breeli sensed with satisfaction that she and Margo Day and all the others were in some way disconcerted. He hadn't been expected to pick Helen Krauss. "Wait for me outside," he told Helen Krauss, and turned back to Prani. The six girls filed out. "Tell me," said Breeli sharply, when the door had closed behind them, "are these people really conquered? Is their resistance over?" "I would not have given the signal for your arrival otherwise," Prani said loftily. "You mean there's no sabotage? No assassination? Can I trust that woman Helen Krauss with my life?" "Oh, I wouldn't suggest that, sir," said Prani. "You'll have a guard, naturally. You have your shield. She'll be searched frequently. She mustn't be given the slightest chance to -- " "Then there is sabotage? Assassination?" "Occasionally, when officers and men are careless, sir. But -- " "Why don't you stop it by reprisals?" "There's a clause in the surrender terms, sir. They wouldn't sign without it. No reprisals for acts by individuals. A conspiracy has to be proved. After all, sir, we're the conquerors. For years individual rebels will commit what subversive acts they can. Modesty apart, sir, I consider it a triumph to arrange such an early armistice. Without that clause they'd have gone on fighting until-" "I see." So it was neither a peaceful alliance with the Terrans nor a proper conquest. The sooner Breeli found out exactly what it was, the better. "I'm going on a tour of inspection of the district," Breqjy said, postponing the question of what to do about General Prani. "Can I have Lieutenant Wilt as guide?" "Who's Lieutenant Wilt, sir?" "He drove me from the spaceport." "Then he must have gone back there, sir. I'll detail Captain Barvel." "I'd rather have Lieutenant Wilt. Oh, well, never mind." been sent, back to the spaceport after delivering his important passenger. The girl Helen Krauss was waiting outside. Breeli particularly wanted to have her along, being sure that he could find out a great deal from her -- not necessarily believing what she said. What she talked freely and truthfully about would be what the Terrans didn't mind his knowing. When she seemed to be lying, or refused to answer, or pretended not to know, he would have a few lines to investigate. He had no idea what he was going to do. He couldn't very well tell the Terrans the attack on them had been a mistake. The conquest of Earth was an accomplished fact, and Breeli could see no way of making a tactical withdrawal and pretending that umpteen thousand dead Pastans and Terrans were still alive. Yet the subjection of a Nineteenth Level world couldn't go on. It wasn't a moral question any more. It was a political one. The moral crime had already been committed; now the problem was to minimize its effects. Since Earth was still struggling under the yoke, perhaps the Pastan Army could allow itself to be driven from the planet, allegedly by a Seventeenth Level race' on the threshold of the Eighteenth Level. Then, a few centuries later, Earth, now an acknowledged Nineteenth Level civilization, could be offered peaceful affiliation to the Federation. That would get around most of the awkward points. But too many Pastan Army officers and men knew that the Terrans were already far beyond the Seventeenth Level, and when they got home the explosive truth would be out. No, that wouldn't work. But what would? Breeli became aware that Dorothy Green was carefully instructing Captain Barvel on the itinerary to be followed. Although Breeli said nothing, he thought a lot. This Terran female seemed to have a lot of responsibility, and she knew exactly where he was going to be all afternoon at any moment. Why was she trusted to such an extent? "Please stick to this route, Captan Barvel," she was saying earnestly, "or I can't be responsible for what might happen." Breeli took another good look at Dorothy Green. She was a small, slim, restless, energetic creature, with tiny, sharp features and short dark hair. Her body was stringy and bony, and he couldn't imagine anyone of any race finding her desirable. It was a pleasure after looking at Dorothy Green to watch Helen climbing into the car assigned to him. He climbed in after her. He found it interesting that she recoiled involuntarily at first as his hip touched hers, and then leaned against him provocatively. "What do you think of Dorothy Green?" he asked abruptly. r T , HE unexpected question baf- fled her, and it was some seconds before she could think of anything to say. "Why, what should I think of her?" "That's what I'm asking you," said Breeli. "Do you despise her as a traitor?" "Her husband is a hostage. She's got to work for you." "I didn't know there were any hostages." "General Prani wouldn't accept Terran liaison officers unless he had hostages." That was sensible of Prani, in the circumstances. Although it had been criminal idiocy to attack and defeat the Terrans, it wouldn't improve matters to be so weak and ingratiating that the occupation was ineffective. Perhaps the fact that Dorothy Green's husband was a hostage explained her somber manner. "So you have a ceremony of marriage?" asked Breeli. "Of course," Helen said, surprised. "Are you married?" "Me? No." "Don't you want to be married?" "Every girl does." "Then why aren't you?" "Nobody ever asked me." "And somebody asked Dorothy Green?" "Yes." She clearly had no idea what he was getting at. Apparently Terran men married girls with brains rather than beauty. It was logical, but Breeli knew of no other race which was logical in that particular way. If it was true that Terran men married women for their intelligence rather than their looks, that might explain why six girls like those he had seen in Prani's office had nothing better to do with themselves than become the mistresses of Pastan officers. Y et Margo Day had seemed intelligent... The car was returning to the six-lane highway. Captain Barvel was in the back with a couple of guards. Breeli would have preferred to be alone with Helen, but recognized the need for guards. He was the most important man in many light-years. No doubt the Terrans, who seemed to know all about him, would kill him if they could. He remembered Dorothy's earnest warning to Barvel : "Please stick to this route, or I can't be responsible for what might happen." The car reached the feed-in to the motorway. Again it was necessary to cross the vast trafficway by a bridge, since they were going in the opposite direction from the spaceport. The six lanes looked naked without cars flashing along them. "Where's all the traffic now?" Breeli asked. Barvel started to answer, but Breeli cut him off. He was interested in Helen's answers, not Barvel's. "None of us are allowed in this area except liaison personnel," she said. "How about you and Margo and the other girls?" "We're liaison personnel." So the Terrans officially provided mistresses for high-ranking Pastan officers. "How do you feel about us, Helen?" "Does it matter?" "Yes. Do you hate us?" S HE struggled to find an answer. Apparently she didn't want to say yes, but felt the impossibility of saying no. "Why are you here with me?" Breeli asked pointedly. "Because you told me to -- " "You know what I mean." "It's an honor..." Helen said without conviction. "Nonsense. Margo Day was being sarcastic when she said that. What are you doing it for? Money? Prestige? A chance to slip a knife between my ribs?" She said nothing, which was sensible of her. Helen Krauss wasn't bright for a Terran. There was no character, no personality, no humor in her answers. She was like a beautiful robot which made the right responses when the right buttons were pushed. A beautiful robot. Breeli considered it seriously for a moment Possibly the Terrans were sufficiently advanced to make lifelike robots... no, that was absurd. However, to make absolutely sure, he resolved to have Helen Krauss X-rayed when they got back. Still considering the possibility, he was a little too late in noticing something which would normally have put him on his guard at once. The driver had asked Barvel a question, Barvel had replied, and Helen had said: "Say, are we going to Heronville? Why didn't you tell me? Turn off right here and we'll save fourteen miles." Suppose she were a robot. Prani had a Terran mistress too. Suppose some night, when practically every high-ranking Pastan officer had a beautiful Terran robot with him, a button was pushed and all the beautiful robots blew up... The car had turned off the highway and was traveling more slowly along a narrow feed road. "Wait a minute," said Breeli. "Didn't Dorothy Green say -- " The mine tripped by the car's front wheels exploded under the rear left wheel. The car and its contents flew in many directions in many pieces. Their shields entirely enveloped in the explosion, Barvel, the driver and the two guards were victims of blowback and disappeared into hyperspace. And Helen Krauss had no shield. Breeli, farthest from the explosion, was saved by his shield. But he was blown twenty feet in the air, and as he approached the ground extremely rapidly, the shield, faced with the task of shunting a world eight thousand miles in diameter into hyperspace, prudently gave up. Breeli landed in a bush and found to his dazed astonishment that he was able to scramble out of it. He staggered a short distance and tripped over something. Looking down, he felt sick. Helen Krauss had been no robot. ness in bed. For a few seconds he lay bringing himself up to date, reliving the explosion. Then he opened his eyes. Lieutenant Wilt was with him, young, solid, reassuring. Breeli was puzzled. Why Wilt? Breeli could hardly guess that Prani, distracted and terrified after the incident, jolted out of his usual state of self-satisfaction, hadn't dared to face Breeli. After dredging his mind for someone to whom he could delegate the task, he had remembered that Breeli had asked for Wilt as his driver. "What shape am I in?" Breeli asked. "You're fine, sir," Wilt said. "Not even concussion. Bruises, of course. You'll be able to walk out of here tomorrow." "The others?" "All dead or going into hyperspace, sir." Wilt was bewildered. He had expected a strong reprimand once Breeli had seen General Prani, and when he'd been called back from the spaceport, he had expected to get it. Instead he found that Consolidation Officer Breeli had had a miraculous escape from death and that he, Wilt, was expected to sit and wait for him to regain consciousness. Why he had been chosen for this, Wilt couldn't begin to guess. He assumed some mistake had been made in the transmission of orders. Breeli wasn't thinking about Wilt at the moment, nor of his escape, nor of the people who had been with him. He was wondering how the explosion had been arranged. Dorothy Green had sent him on the route he had taken, but the alteration in the route had been Helen's. How had that dumb Terran blonde fixed things so that four Pastan officers and very nearly the Consolidation Officer as well had been killed? "What are you doing here?" he asked abruptly. "I don't know, sir," said Wilt. "I was told to sit with you. I'm Lieutenant Wilt, sir, the driver who -- " "I know. You nearly died in that car, Wilt. I asked for you as driver." "You did, sir?" Wilt was astonished. "Perhaps you wouldn't have died. Perhaps you'd have had the sense not to follow that girl's directions." "It was her then, sir?" "I don't know. I'm going to find out. Bring Dorothy Green here." "Yes, sir." He hesitated. "Are you... can you handle this affair, sir?" "If I can't," said Breeli, closing his eyes, "I'll have the benefit of your wisdom and experience, Lieutenant." Wilt looked at him doubtfully. "Yes, sir." faced but resolute. "I gave your driver a route entirely on roads which are constantly guarded," she said. "He should have known not to turn off them at any point, for any reason." "But you're not heartbroken that four Pastan officers died." "Governor Breeli, I -- " "If I cut a hole in you," Breeli said thoughtfully, "would you bleed?" "Naturally." "We'll try it and see." She went even whiter. But her voice was steady. "Governor, your people so far have at least been just. You know I couldn't have been directly concerned in the attempt on your life." "Not directly -- but indirectly?" "In no way. Most of the roads in this country are mined. I know that. Your men know that. Ask anyone. Ask the lieutenant here. Anyone who turned off the highway was a fool. I couldn't have made him do it even if I wanted to. If I had given your driver a route involving side roads, I'd have been questioned at once." "Give me your hand." She did so, wonderingly. He grasped her thin wrist. Her heart was beating rapidly but strongly. It was inconceivable that she was anything but a human female. He would have to abandon the robot idea. "You can go," he said. Then, when she was relieved and off her guard, he asked: "Do you still love your husband, Dorothy?" She recoiled from him. "Until you said that," she whispered, "I thought you were quite human, Governor." Breeli was at a loss. "I'm not threatening to have him killed. I merely asked if you love him." "The answer is yes, I do." And for the first time he saw fierce warmth in her brown eyes as she stared back defiantly at him. Her fierceness couldn't make her pretty -- but it could, and did, make her suddenly intensely alive. "Where is he?" Breeli asked. "At an internment camp a hundred miles from here. I see him every Sunday." "You could visit him oftener than that if you like. Shall I arrange it?" "It wouldn't be any good," she said, the fierceness fading. She puzzled him. No doubt the separation from the man she loved explained her unhappiness. But in his experience intelligent, efficient, energetic people usually managed to get what they wanted, even if they didn't have beauty to help them. Surely, if all she wanted was to be with her husband, she could get out of serving as a liaison officer and have him restored to her. "When were you married?" he asked. "Six years ago, when I was twenty." "Were you pretty then?" "No more than I am now." "It doesn't bother you, not being pretty?" "I'm quite happy the way I am." He made a gesture, and she went. "Is it true that most of the roads are mined?" Breeli asked Wilt. "Yes, sir. Your driver was very careless." "Well, he paid for it." Wilt looked at him curiously. This Consolidation Officer revealed a humanity rare in the lieutenant's experience of high-ranking officers. She had changed her already scanty costume for an even scantier one. Now she wore white striped shorts and a completely -- and deliberately -- inadequate black halter. Lying in bed, Breeli suddenly felt uncomfortably warm. "Do you always dress like that?" he asked. "No, sire," she said, "but I thought that if I gave you a better look at the merchandise, I might make a sale." "And if it doesn't?" "Maybe I should have played hard to get. Shall I go and put on a long black cloak instead?" "You mean you want to take Helen's place? You think I'd be fool enough to let another Terran girl try to kill me?" "Well, that's the snag," Margo said frankly. "That's why I have to use good salesmanship." She was actually admitting that she was prepared to be his mistress just for a chance to kill him. 'Were you in on the plan?" "No, that must have been Helen's and nobody else's." "How do you think she managed it?" "Oh, she was just lucky there was a mine there, and unlucky that she was killed and you weren't. Still, it was a good bargain -- her life for four Pastans." "Your attitude seems different from what it was earlier." "How? I said it would be an honor to be your mistress. Which, in this crazy situation, it is. It would be an even greater honor j to kill you, sire." "Dorothy Green's been trying hard to convince me she wouldn't kill me." "She's different. Her husband is a hostage. Anyway, she's a renegade. If you don't stay in control, she'll get half a dozen bullets in the guts anyway. I'm not a renegade. I've got nothing to fear from my own people." "Despite collaboration?" "What collaboration? Everybody knows I'll stick a knife in your back if I get the chance." Her honesty was startling. Yet everything she said made sense. Conquerors on a human planet umpteen light-years from their own had to have women, even women who would kill them if they could. "Suppose you gave me your word not to make any attempt on my life?" "Suppose anything you like. You'd be stupid to take my word, sire." "Would you give it?" She laughed. "This is a very theoretical conversation, isn't it? Sure, I'll promise not to try to kill you. I've already told you that I'll do it if I get the chance. That makes me a liar anyway." "I think I'll take you up on your offer, all the same." "That's great, sire. Want me to get into bed with you now?" Wilt choked. "No. I'll send for you when I want you." "Mean you want me to go?" "Yes." " behind her, Breeli said thoughtfully: "Have you got an Earth girl, Wilt? "Yes, sir." "Doesn't it bother you to know she'd stick a knife in you if she could?" "She wouldn't, sir. Not Nancy." "Don't be too sure, Lieutenant. These people seem to have a remarkable passion for freedom." "Yes, sir. 'Give me liberty or give me death.' A Terran saying, sir." "Said by a man or a woman?" Wilt looked surprised. "A man, sir. Terran society isn't a matriarchy." "No? That makes the present situation very hard to understand." "Sir?" "Never mind. It looks as if the attempt on my life and the deaths of my guards will have to be passed off as a regrettable accident. Wilt, was the war really savage?" "Yes, sir." "Yet you don't think your little friend would kill you?" "I'm sure of it. She -- she loves me, sir." "Why?" "Sir?" "Why? Is she pretty?" "Yes, sir. Very." "How does that make sense, Wilt? Earth's far beyond the stage of respecting conquerors. Why do their most beautiful women throw themselves at our heads? Outside of fiction, girls like Margo Day don't have to be heroines. They can leave that to plain girls. Why, Wilt, why?" "I don't quite understand, sir." "Well, think about it, Lieutenant. Meanwhile, bring me some publications to read. Terran publications, with pictures." "Yes, sir. Some came in, today." "I want old ones too. Publications printed before the occupation." "There aren't any, sir." "Then find some." "I mean there are none left, sir. They've all been destroyed." "Get some from a waste disposal organization." "You still don't understand, sir. A lot of us wanted to see old Terran publications, to get some kind of picture of what Earth was like before we came. But we've never been able to find any. The Terrans have destroyed them all." "Deliberately, so that we can't see them?" "It would appear so, sir." "That's strange," Breeli mused. "What would there be in publications that they wouldn't want us to see?" "We don't know, sir. We've often wondered." "Yet current publications are freely available?" "Yes, sir." "All right, Lieutenant, bring me ! some." thoughts. There were many things about which he was puzi zled. But very soon he would I have to take some sort of action. I The present situation couldn't I be allowed to continue, that was J certain. The Pastan Federation  would never ratify any solution to the Earth problem based on a military occupation of a NineI teenth Level world. Already Breeli had once been on the point of ordering Prani to consider him self under arrest. Yet how could he go to the Terran leaders, whoever and wherever they were, and say : "I'm I sorry General Prani conquered : Earth. It was a stupid mistake. Now can we please be friends?" He might say: "The Pastan Federation is just. We will withdraw under certain conditions," and give them all they asked. But the Terrans were intelligent enough to realize that that came to the same thing. Damn General Prani! Breeli glanced moodily through  the publications that Wilt had brought. Unable to understand a  single word of the text, all he could do was look at the pictures. I There were newspapers, books,  technical journals, women's magazines, weeklies and monthlies devoted to current events, fashion, sport, finance, hobbies of various kinds, music, films, agriculture, television, radio, education... "Wilt!" he shouted. The lieutenant, who had been on guard outside the door, came in at once. "Get hold of some Terran films made before the occupation force arrived. Any kind of films." Wilt shook his head. "Sorry, sir. There aren't any of those either." "Destroyed like the old publications?" "Yes, sir. They didn't destroy their art treasures, though, if that's any help, sir." "Well, is it?" "Not that I could see, sir. Lots of nudes. Very beautiful females. The males are pretty bulky, however." "True to life, at least. Terran men are mostly overbuilt." Breeli waved him away and stared at the publications that littered his bed. In what way were these different from the ones which had appeared before the occupation? In their occasional reference to the Pastans, certainly. But that was no reason to hide or destroy pre-conquest publications. One of the magazines had a color picture of Margo Day on the cover, wearing panties and folded arms. In one of the others was a picture of Helen Krauss, not wearing anything at all. He wished he could read what was said about them... Still staring at the beautiful picture of Margo, he found sleep closing in on him. Not unnaturally, he had lurid dreams in which Margo was much more to him than a sister. T HE next day he was able to walk out of the hospital, as Wilt had promised, stiff and sore but otherwise in good working order. Wilt wanted to take his arm; Breeli refused help. "I am not old enough to be your father, Lieutenant," he said, annoyed. "No, sir. I didn't think you were." "Send Margo Day to me." "Is that wise, sir?" Breeli stifled the impulse to snap at him. Having chosen Wilt because Wilt would answer back, he wouldn't be acting very logically to snap at Wilt for doing so. "Are you sure Nancy wouldn't kill you?" Breeli asked instead. "Quite sure, sir. But that's different. I've known her for weeks. We'll be married whenever marriages between Terrans and Pastans are permitted. This girl Margo Day -- " "Nancy's prepared to go and live in Pasta?" "Yes, sir. She loves me. But Margo Day -- " "It is inconceivable that any woman could ever love me, Lieutenant?" "No, sir. But not in five minutes. Next month Margo Day might not want to assassinate you. Even next week. But today she means what she says." There was a lot of sense in what Wilt said, and Breeli made due allowance for it. Normal women with normal instincts, whatever their race, found cold hate difficult to preserve along with growing affection. Wilt's Nancy had probably started out with the attitude which Margo had forcefully expressed, but now... yes, Wilt was probably right. About Nancy and about Margo. "Send Margo Day to me," Breeli said. "Yes, sir," said Wilt disapprovingly. It was very pleasant. It gave Breeli no answers. Nor, in the days that passed, did Breeli find any simple solution to his problem. In a military sense, Earth was submissive. There weren't even riots. The countries of the world went about their business, for the most part ignoring the Pastan conquest. Earth's economic, social and political systems hadn't been as easily upset as Breeli had feared. But every day, somewhere, despite their shields, four or five Pastan soldiers died. Usually four or five Terrans died with them. But Earth could afford it, not being at the end of a light-yearslong supply and reinforcements line. The plain fact was, Earth didn't want to be occupied. Once Breeli said to Dorothy Green: "If I wanted to have a conference with Earth's leaders, could you arrange it? How long would you need?" "You can tell me anything you want communicated to the Terran governments, sir." "Yes, but I might want to see them myself." "I'm chief liaison officer, sir." There was mild reproof in her tone.  "I know that. But what if I have an offer to make?" "You can make it to me, sir." And with that Breeli had to be content. He made no offer. He didn't know what to offer.  sued an order permitting intermarriage. One of the first to take advantage of this was Lieutenant Wilt, who married his Nancy. Breeli attended the wedding and kissed the bride. Wilt was right -- Nancy was a pretty girl. Not a Margo Day, but pretty. Seeing them together, Breeli didn't think Nancy could possibly be playing a part. As far as he could, Breeli kept out of Prani's way because he knew that whatever happened he was Prani's executioner. Breeli had no choice about that -- only about the manner and date of Prani's trial. He made a lot of visits to various parts of the world, accompanied by Margo and a suitable number of guards. In Hawaii Margo said: "Come for a swim, sire. I'll find out where you're most likely to be eaten by a shark." In the Swiss Alps she said: "Let's climb a mountain, sire, and I'll push you off." In Brazil she stopped calling him "sire." Knowing she used the title as an insult, Breeli had steadfastly refused to comment on it one way or the other. But when she started calling him Breel -- the "I" on the end of his name was titular -- he began to suspect that even if she got the chance to assassinate him, she wouldn't. ' In Australia she said: "Do you really need all these guards, Breel? I'm getting tired of sleeping six in a bed." This was exaggeration. Breeli never slept in the same room as she did, but apart from refusing to let her near him when he was asleep, he took no special precautions against her. In England he gave her a chance to kill him and she didn't take it. In Florida she said: "Yes, Breel, I'll marry you." She insisted on fixing the date of the wedding, which for a moment made him suspicious again. Assassinations had tailed off lately. Intuitively, when she picked the following Friday, he suspected that something was due to happen on Friday. Suppose a Terran coup of some kind had been planned. Surprise would be essential, for the Pastans had decisively overcome all Earth's resistance once, and could do it again. And if such a coup had been planned, Margo, given the chance to assassinate the Consolidation Officer, might very well refrain. "You're up to something," he said. "Look, Breel," she said. "We'd better get one thing straight. If I marry you, I'll mean it. I'll go anywhere with you. I'll become as Pastan as you are. There's nothing new in that. Lots of girls have married former enemies. Once we're married, you can trust me." "I believe all that. But you make me more certain than ever that something's going to happen between now and Friday." She laughed in the old mocking way and said nothing. I N the night he tossed and turned uneasily, and at last opened his eyes and looked at Margo, sleeping peacefully beside him. The moonlight which shone through the uncurtained window rimlit the lovely satin skin of cheek, shoulder and breast. For a week now he had trusted her to the extent of sleeping with her. He loved her and he was all but certain she loved him. Yet he knew his duty was to find out whatever it was she knew, however he had to do it. She knew something and had hardly bothered to deny it. When they had talked hours ago, things had been easy, comfortable between them, and it had been more or less a joke that Margo wouldn't tell him what was on her mind. In the stillness of the night, it was clear that it was no joke. He ought to turn her over to the psychologists to have whatever she knew pried out of her. He got up and paced about the bedroom restlessly. Aside from the time when the car he was in had been blown to pieces, his stay on Earth had been too pleasant, too easy, too spuriously comfortable. He hadn't seen any shooting, heard of, except that one incident, had been offstage. Yet he knew that the Terrans had a passionate love of liberty and would do anything to drive the invaders from their world. The only reason for their present comparative passiveness was that there was nothing they could do against the diverter, and they knew it. They could attack every one of the Pastan Army's bases and installations from all directions at once, but if they did so, they'd simply be shut out until the Pastans were ready to strike back, and then get beaten as decisively as before. They knew it. That was why the occupation was apparently peaceful. There remained the fact that Prani had immorally and illegally attacked and conquered a Nineteenth Level world, and Breeli still hadn't the ghost of an idea what to do about it He had never had a survey made to establish beyond doubt what the Terrans' cultural level actually was. The reason was that it was still possible to pretend that Earth was Seventeenth Level, although the pretense was pretty thin. After a survey, it would no longer be possible. "Come back to bed, darling," Margo muttered sleepily. "What's going to happen on Friday?" he demanded. "Friday?" She smiled without opening her eyes. "I'm going to get married." Long after she was asleep, Breeli stared at her. Finally he told himself he was imagining things. long been permitted between Pastans and Terrans, already nearly half the occupying forces had married Terran girls. It wasn't really surprising -- only single men were sent on occupation duties, except for top brass like General Prani. The strange thing was that the Terrans seemed to regard PastanTerran marriage as a joke. When it was announced that Governor Breeli was to marry Margo Day, cartoons depicting him and Margo in improbable attitudes appeared in most Terran newspapers. They were never actually obscene or libelous. But Breeli learned how astute Terran newspapermen could be in establishing just how far they could go, and then go there with barely Breeli found Margo at the pool chuckling over a cartoon in one of the New York papers. It depicted a very glamorous Margo with an unglamorous Breeli at her feet and the Earth at Breeli's. "Is that funny?" he asked. "I think so. You wouldn't." "I'm supposed to have a sense of humor." "The man who gets a custard pie in his face never thinks it's funny." "Is marrying you like getting a custard pie in my face?" She sobered. "You don't really mind, Breel? I didn't think it would bother you." "It doesn't. But I didn't expect to find you laughing at a thing like that." "Well, you at my feet, and the ' Earth at yours... Every girl wants to marry a prince, especially Americans, who sneer at princes, and you're a sort of prince. Tell me, is the wedding off?" He looked at her. She wore a deep green swimsuit which brought out all her vivid coloring. He had had plenty of opportunity to tire of her, but the result had been quite the opposite. He reached for her. Feeling her stiffen, he cast a glance over his shoulder. He blinked incredulously. Dorothy Green, most unexpectedly clad in a white two-piece swimsuit, and smiling, was coming to join them. She looked more like a bean-pole than usual. "Mind if I talk to you?" she asked Breeli. "Go right ahead," said Margo viciously, and jumped to her feet and walked away. Breeli stared after her. "What got into Margo?" he asked. Dorothy sat by the edge of the pool where Margo had been. "She's a patriot," she said indifferently. "Patriots can't be expected to like me." "But she's marrying me. I'm a Pastan. Why should she hate you for working with Pastans?" Dorothy shrugged. "I thought you understood people, Governor. Does anyone like a traitor -- even the people who use the traitor?" "But you're not... well, never mind. What do you want to talk about?" It was the wedding, of course. Dorothy was in charge of security arrangements. For ten minutes they discussed the matter as impersonally as if it were a cattle show. Breeli agreed that a Terran church wedding would be best, with a Pastan ceremony back on Pasta later. At the end of ten minutes, finding Dorothy brighter and more sympathetic than usual, Breeli I asked : "What kind of wedding did you have?" A spasm crossed her face. "Please. We're concerned only with you and Margo Day." "We could arrange to have your husband present if you like." her eyes. She jumped to her feet exactly as Margo had done, and was going to hurry away likewise. But Breeli caught her around the waist and pulled her down again. It was like handling an undernourished child. "Dorothy," he said, "is there something I don't know about your husband? Was he wounded in the fighting? Has he been badly treated? Or what?" Her passion died, and her small breasts stopped heaving. "You don't know?" she whispered. "I thought you did, I thought... I apologize, Governor. No, it wasn't anything to do with the fighting. Long before that, Jack was... sick." "What do you mean, sick?" "His njind... if you must have it in plain language, Governor, he's out of his mind. No, he isn't badly treated. In fact, one of the reasons I took this job was because he'd be treated better as a hostage, better looked after, than I could afford otherwise." "But why hasn't he been cured?" "Incurable, Governor." There was a world of grief in her voice. "Brain damage?" "No. I'm not a psychologist, Governor, and anyway, I'd rather not talk about it. There's a Pastan doctor at the internment camp, a Dr. Morn. Ask him." Breeli stood up. "I will. Dorothy, if I've said anything that hurt you, I'm sorry. I didn't know about this." He had himself driven to the camp and saw Jack Green through one-way glass. Dorothy's husband was a tall, massive young man who sat very still and stared at the floor. "Manic-depressive," Dr. Mom explained, turning away. "A very sad case. I've requested permission to treat him, but so far I've had no reply. I presume my request is shuttling back and forth along a series of muddy ruts known as the usual channels." "Could you cure him?" "Within a week." "Then go ahead. You have permission now." "Thank you. These Terrans have a wry saying: Better late than never." "Have you any idea, Doctor, why the Terrans left him like that? Is he some kind of criminal or outcast?" Dr. Morn raised his eyebrows quizzically. "Do you mean you don't know? Haven't you seen my report?" "It, too, is probably shuttling through the usual channels," said Breeli drily. "What was it about?" "The Terrans haven't cured him because they can't. Though a very advanced people in many ways, they're backward in psychological medicine." Breeli stared at him. "You mean they can't cure neuroses? But I haven't seen an uncompensated neurotic yet." "You wouldn't. They're really a remarkably stable race -- which, perhaps, is why psychological medicine has lagged among them. Really serious neurosis is comparatively rare. But when it does occur, they can't do a thing about it." "So, unless you took a hand, Jack Green would be like that for the rest of his life?" "Yes." "His wife, Doctor -- have you met his wife?" "Yes." The doctor sighed. "A remarkably plain girl, in a world of such feminine pulchritude. However, she's gone through a lot of unnecessary misery." "Didn't you tell her he could be cured?" "Until I was permitted to do so, I hardly thought it humane to tell her I could." "No, of course not. And by the same token, I won't tell her what's going on until he is cured. Will you send him to HQ when the cure is complete, Dr. Mom? I'll take the responsibility." The doctor looked puzzled. "But why not tell her now?" "And get her so hopeful that she has no thought for -- collaboration? That's not practical politics, Doctor." I T wasn't until he was almost back at HQ that the significance of Dr. Morn's explanation detonated under Breeli like the bomb which had nearly killed him. The Eighteenth Level was the level of stability. It was the level of culture at which a race learned to repair its own mental disorders. The Terrans were an exceptionally stable race, though quite possibly they themselves didn't think so. Neurotics among them generally managed to compensate without treatment. Though they remained neurotics, they seldom reached the state at which treatment, in a Pastan world, would have been compulsory. Consequently the Terrans had, in effect, reached the Nineteenth Level by a different route from the usual one. From the standard point of view, they were Nineteenth Level; there was no doubt about that. But part of the definition of the rise from Seventeenth to Eighteenth Level was the development of practical psychological medicine. Technically, the Terrans were Seventeenth Level and the conquest of Earth had been quite in order. It was a technicality, of course, Put on the right track, Terran psychologists could develop the necessary techniques in a matter of months. Then, by any standards, they would be Nineteenth Level. But it was all Breeli needed. Now he could whitewash Prani and the conquest of Earth and anything else he liked. There would be no need to mention that he'd spent weeks on Earth before learning about the gap. He almost danced into HQ. "General," he said with more cordiality then he had shown since the moment he met Prani, "you're saved. The Terrans are Seventeenth Level." Prani was affronted. "Sir, you know very well they're Nineteenth. No Seventeenth Level race could have fought such battles. Modesty apart, I may say -- " "General," said Breeli with only mild exasperation, "if you follow that line, you're dead. Your only hope is to let me show that the Terrans are Seventeenth Level. Now are you going to do as I say, or do I have to relieve you of your command?" "Sir!" The general went white, then red, then mottled. "I can do it, you know." "Yes, sir, I know, but -- " "All right, then. I have reason to believe that something's brewing. I don't know what, but it doesn't matter. As of ten minutes from now, all bases will be closed until further notice. Recall all personnel. Set diverters to exclude bombs, shells, gas, men, women, children and all animals, insects and bacteria. Transmit these orders through Pastan personnel, not through Dorothy Green, or any other Green or Dorothy. The only contact between Pastans and Terrans in the next few days will be the marriage of myself and Margo." "But that's the first thing to cancel, sir! If there's really going to be a revolt, there must be plans for your assassination at the ceremony!" "I don't think so. But I'll warn Dorothy and Margo that if there are, it'll be the worst mistake Earth ever made." " found Dr. Morn's report, stuck fast in a bottleneck. He read it with interest. The Terrans, like all races which didn't have psychotherapy that really worked, were all more or less off balance. That didn't make them much different from any other highly developed race, or the Pastans themselves, for every advanced civilization permitted a lot of personal liberty, which meant that only dangerous psychotics could be compulsorily treated. Earth achieved much the same practical result by shutting dangerous psychotics away in asylums or prisons. But the Terrans were conscious of the deficiency and uneasy about it. There were experiments in rehabilitation -- idealistic, dangerous experiments when no practical psychotherapeutic techniques existed. The Terrans would be very glad to have a psychotherapy which worked. Seeing all his troubles dissolving, Breeli once more felt like dancing. When he met Margo in one of the corridors, he did literally dance into his office with her. "What's got into you, Breel?" she asked breathlessly. "I've just found the key!" he cried. "What key?" "The key to Terran-Pastan cooperation. Friendship. Peace. Alliance." "Isn't that a bit optimistic?" "No. After we're married, I'll tell you about it." "I think you'd better tell me now." He grinned at her. "Margo, I don't care what you've got up your sleeve. I've got something bigger She looked at him thoughtfully. "You've got something that's going to put you in a strong position?" "Yes." "Then maybe it had better wait. You're going to need it" He sobered. "Margo, I'm trusting you. If there's anything funny about the ceremony, your world will regret it for generations. That's not a threat. It's a friendly warning." "Didn't I promise it would go off according to plan?" "Yes, but long ago you told me you'd promise anything I liked, and I'd be a fool to believe you. Didn't you?" She was hurt. "Why are you marrying me if you don't trust me?" "Because you're beautiful and I love you." "Is that the right order of importance?" "No. Honestly, Margo, I don't think you'd betray me." She looked at him with troubled eyes. r I ' HE wedding of Margo Day and Consolidation Officer Breeli -- or Governor Breeli, as he was known to the Terrans -- was a big propaganda occasion. It took place in St. Clement's Church in a small town near Prani's headquarters. Film and television cameras were there in force. Margo and Breeli were attended by nearly all the Pastans who had married Terrans, and Terrans who had married Pastans -- a large congregation. That had been Dorothy Green's inspiration. Margo looked ravishing in pink. Breeli wore a Terran suit Dorothy Green was matron of honor. The Reverend Thaddeus White had refused to perform the ceremony until he had a chat with Breeli about religion. Finding that the Pastan view of a Divine Purpose was not so different, he had withdrawn his objections and agreed to officiate. Nothing untoward happened until Margo and Breeli left the church. Then Breeli was rather surprised to find Dorothy coming into their car with them. "Do we need a chaperon?" he asked Margo. "Mr. Breeli," said Dorothy, as the car started, "you are no longer governor. You and Margo are being deported at once." Breeli smiled. "Tell me more." "I'm sorry about this, Breel," Margo said, "but I did want to marry you, and I also wanted to free Earth. That's why it was timed this way. I'm coming with you to the spaceport." "And what are you going to do about the Pastan bases all over Earth?" "We're not going to do anything," said Dorothy calmly. "We've done it." For the first time Breeli became anxious. "What are you trying to tell me?" "Well, it's been a fairly bloodless victory," Dorothy Green said. "We don't want another war. But you're reasonable people. Now that we have the diverter, I don't think you'll want to -- " "You have the diverter?" Dorothy shrugged. "Well, how long did you think it would take us to crack it? An hour ago, we cancelled all diverter fields, and thousands of men walked into every Pastan base and took over. There were hardly any casualties. I'm sorry to report that General Prani is deadhe wasn't very good with weapons, I'm afraid. We're sending you and every Pastan officer or soldier who married a Terran girl back to Pasta, and keeping everybody else prisoner. I , think we should be able to reach agreement after you've reported the facts to your government and come back to arrange terms." Breeli began to laugh silently. Prani's death was unfortunate, but it would simplify matters. It was ironic that as soon as Breeli had discovered Earth was technically a Seventeenth Level world, and the conquest was therefore justified, they should pull something like this. Margo was laughing too, puzzled but prepared to share the joke. Dorothy was merely puzzled. "Tell the driver to take us to HQ," Breeli said. "We're taking you to the spaceport. You're to be -- " "I know. Let's go to HQ all the same. I'm expecting somebody there." "You're not Governor Breeli any more," Dorothy said again. "You don't give the orders -- " "I'm expecting Jack Green," Breeli said. That passion in her eyes again, she grabbed Breeli's shoulders. "What have you done to him?" "Tell the driver," Breeli said. She did so. same, except that there were no Pastans about, only Terrans, mostly men, none of whom Breeli had ever seen before. A tall, broad Terran colonel called Armstrong seemed to be in charge. "Well done," Breeli congratulated him. "A very well-planned operation." "Thank you," said the colonel, surprised but courteous. "What are you doing here?" Breeli had Margo on one arm and Dorothy on the other. "Frankly, this maneuver of yours comes at a very convenient time. I'm glad it was comparatively bloodless, though. I couldn't have condoned a massacre. Now that this has happened, I think we should withdraw in force. Only don't you think it would be better if the Pastans who have married Terran women remain here, and all the others go home?" "You don't seem to understand the situation," said Armstrong. "We're in command now." "Perhaps," Breeli admitted. "But the Pastans with Terran sympathies are the obvious ones to stay here while the agreements are arranged. Margo and I will go, but not for long. We'll be back." The colonel's courtesy was wearing thin. "Mr. Breeli, we don't want a state of perpetual warfare between Earth and Pasta. That's why we planned a coup with as few casualties as possible on either side. But "But we still have something to offer," Breeli said, "a high card to play." His gaze rose over Dorothy's head. She turned and gasped. Jack Green strode to her and took her in his arms. There was something in his appearance, his bearing, that showed he was a whole man again. Suddenly the unfeminine Dorothy Green became very feminine. "Was that your key?" Margo demanded. "Yes. Won't Earth be grateful for sanity? No more psychopaths. You'll be able to get by with almost no prisons and much smaller asylums. We can't do anything for congenital defects, I'm afraid, but aside from that, only physical brain damage is beyond our skill." The colonel was out of his depth. Dorothy, however, once she had recovered from the altogether pleasant shock, became chief liaison officer very strongly biased in Breeli's favor. "Shall we go into your office, Mr. Breeli?" she asked, still in Jack Green's arms. I N the end, as Breeli had suggested, it was the Pastans who had not married Terran women who returned immediately to their own world. Some of them were very reluctant to go. Margo and Nancy were the only Terrans to leave with them. Breeli was not unaware of the effect they were going to have on Pastan TV. The arrangements had been easy because Earth had prudently decided not to be difficult, realizing that if Pasta's tail were tweaked too violently, Earth might still be reconquered. "You seem happy," Margo said as the Pastan ship prepared to make the first hyperspace jump. "I am," said Breeli. "I'm going on my honeymoon. And you should see my bride!" "You don't care that we won in the end?" He wondered whether to tell her the truth, and decided against it. It wouldn't make any Terran any happier to know that the brief war had been unnecessary, that those who had died shouldn't have died. Let Margo believe, as Breeli's superior's would believe, that Earth had been a paradox, a Seventeenth Level world that went straight to Nineteenth when Pastan psychologists told them a few things they ought to have seen for themselves long ago. He kissed her instead. S HE released herself. "Breel, I've got a confession to make." "You needn't bother," he said. "I figured it out long ago." She gasped. "And I don't mind," he added. "Why should I?" "I didn't think you would, because it's what you think that matters. But how did you know?" "You went too far trying to hide it. Destroying all old publications and films..." "Yes, but if any Pastan had seen one, he'd have known -- " "Perhaps. But girls like you and Helen Krauss and the others were brave, and you were necessary to Earth's plans. We had to take Terran mistresses or you'd never have been able to find out the things you did. Only somebody thought we'd better not know that the Terran girls we happened to admire weren't the ones Terrans regarded as glamor girls. It wouldn't have made any difference, Margo. You -- and the Rubens and Greek nudes -- would still have appealed to us." "That's what's so wonderful," she said. "You'd never believe how nice it is to find people who think you're beautiful after knowing all your life that -- " Breeli shook his head. "You're perfect." "Glad you think so." And she meant it. "They must have found out very early," Breeli said, "that we were attracted to the Rubens type. And they thought something might be made of the fact. So they carefully prevented us from finding out the kind of girls they were attracted to. They needn't have bothered. We must have seen some of the girls they think are beautiful, and didn't give them a second glance." "You did," said Margo. 'Who, for instance?" "Dorothy Green." "You're not going to tell me she's the Terran idea of a glamor girl!" "Six years ago," said Margo, "she was Miss America -- just before she married Jack Green." -- j. t. McIntosh      A Konv cylinder was the key to space -- but there was one power it could not match! beside the little Wolf river in Wisconsin. Once it had been a summer cottage owned by a rich man from Chicago. The rich man died. His heirs sold it. Now it was well insulated and Mrs. Jamieson and her son were very comi fortable, even in the coldest winter. During the summer they rented a few row boats to vacationing fishermen, and she had built a few overnight cabins beside the road. They were able to make ends meet. Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the Agents had killed her husband. That was back in '#, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus; but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from place to place except by the conventional methods of travel. Also, she wore her hair long, almost to the shoulders. People said, "There goes one of the old-fashioned ones. That hair-do was popular back in the sixties." They did not suspect that she did this only to cover the thin, pencil-line scar, evidence that a small cylinder lay under her skin behind the ear. For Mrs. Jamieson was one of the Konvs. Her husband had been one of the small group who developed this tiny instrument Not the inventor -- his name was Stinson, and the effects produced by it were known as the Stinson Effect. In appearance it resembled a small semi-conductor device. Analysis by the best scientific minds proved it to be a semiconductor. Yet it held the power to move a body instantly from one point in space to any other point. Each unit was custom built, keyed to operate only by the thought pattern of the particular individual. Several times in the past seven years Mrs. Jamieson had seen other Konvs, and had been tempted to identify herself and say, "Here I am. You are one of them; so am I. Come, and we'll talk. We'll talk about Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus. And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee shop in Bangkok, Siam." her husband's death, an Agent came and stayed in one of her cabins. She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and frustration. That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his bed and shot him with a .# rifle. She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth; while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong. She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown. Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylin-' der -- not yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own. Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge. Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents could be lived. It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs. Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She looked behind his ear. It was there. "Mom!" he cried. "Mom!" He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight. Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of trousers. "Here, get yourself dressed. Then we'll talk." stopped him. "No, do it right here. You may as well get used to it now." "Get used to what?" "To people seeing you nude." "What?" "Never mind. What happened just now?" "I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His hair was all white, and his eyes looked like... well, I never saw eyes like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then he said, 'Come with me.' I went with him. I don't know why. It seemed the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it, that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house, not far away and went inside. And that's all I can remember until I woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in some language I don't know." Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. "I don't remember clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And then I was here." Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. "What is it?" he asked, desperately. "What happened to me?" "Better put your trousers on," Mrs. Jamieson said. "It's something very unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful." "But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?" Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his trousers. "Guess I know now. They made me a Konv." "Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it." "But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!" He started for the door, but she called him back. "No, don't run away from it now. This is the time to face it. There are two sides to every story, you know. You hear only one side in school -- their side. There is also our side." He turned back, a dawning comprehension showing in his eyes. "That's right, you're one, too. That is why you killed that Agent in the third cabin." It was her turn to be surprised. "You knew about that?" "I saw you. I wasn't sleeping. I was afraid to stay inside alone, so I followed you. I never told anyone." "But you were only nine!" "They would have taken you away if I'd said anything." Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. "Come here, son. It's time I told you about us." S O he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in I New Jersey, holding in his hand a I small cylinder moulded from siliI con with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder... and it was a cold day outside... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach -- And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no mistake. On the plane back to New Jersey he came to certain conclusions regarding the strange power of his device. He tried it again, secretly. Then he made more cylinders. He was the only man in the world who knew how to construct it, and he kept the secret, giving cylinders to selected people. He worked out the j basic principle, calling it a kinetic ordinate of negative vortices, which was very undefinitive. It was a subject of wonder and much speculation, but no one took serious notice of them until one night a federal Agent arrested one man for indecency. It was a valid charge. One disadvantage of this method of travel was that, while a body could travel instantaneously to any chosen spot, it arrived without clothes. The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought of them as human. Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus. He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought. He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty, broken-down farmhouse in Missouri -- and disappeared in a body, leaving the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky. "You have asked many times," Mrs. Jamieson said, "how your father died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before the group left They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin? I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him." "I don't blame you, mother," ; Earl said simply. "But we are freaks. Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on the walls in rest rooms." "Of course they do -- because they don't understand! They are afraid of us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if you couldn't do them?" Just like that, it was over. That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave I the house, walking slowly along the I river, a boy with a man's problems. I His friends called to him from the j river, but he chose not to hear. He wanted to be alone. He needed to  think, to feel the newness of the thing. Perhaps he would crqss the river and enter the deep forest there. When the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the tricks others had learned. It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the river to cool herself. TT'OR the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them. They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching for some clue to their identity. It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as : one of the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson j took his group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns i peculiar to themselves. These could i be identified, if caught on their detectors, and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others. Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies behind. They could have followed if they chose -- what could stop them? But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even murder -- without fear of the law. Earl changed. Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his friends began to bore him. "Be careful, Earl," his mother would say. "Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready." During the long winter evenings, after they had watched their favorite video programs, they would sit by the fireplace. "Tell me about the great ones," he would say, and she would repeat all the things she remembered about Stinson and Benjamin and Straus. She never tired of discussing them. She would tell about Benjamin's wife, Lisa, and try to describe the horror in Lisa's young mind when the news went out that E. Mason Jamieson had been killed. She wanted him to learn as much as possible about his father's death, knowing that soon the Agents would be after Earl. They were so clever, so persistent. She wanted him to be ready, not only in ways of avoiding their traps... but ready with a heart full of hate. Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to stand up and scream at her son, "Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to hate!" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he would learn it faster if she avoided the word. ' I I HE winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers. Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret. They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the "damn Agents" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote rendezvous. "When you have finished college," Mrs. Jamieson told her son, "we will go to Centaurus." "Why not now?" "Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even the great ones get sick." She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and intelligent He could kill many Agents. So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before. The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school. Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly. This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever. A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for convenience due to the irregular hours of college students. It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent hunting. Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious. Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing one of them -- a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent, bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land. She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it. "Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students are always having," she said. "There will be no friends," he answered, "not here. No Konvs will be at the university." "Why not? Stinson selected only educated, intelligent people. When one dies the cylinder is taken and adjusted to a new thought pattern -- usually a person from the same family. I would say it is very likely that Konvs will be found here." H E shook his head. "No. They knew we were coming, and no one said a word about others being here. I'm afraid we are alone." 'Well, I think not," she said firmly. "Anyway, the room will be comfortable." He shook his head again. "Why can't I be in the house with you? There are two bedrooms." She said quickly, "You can if you wish. I just thought you'd like being alone, at your age. Most boys do." "I'm not like most boys, mother. The Konvs saw to that. Sometimes I'm sorry. Back in high school I used to wish I was like the others. Do you remember Lorane Peters?" His mother nodded. 'Well, when we were seniors last year she liked me quite a lot. She didn't say so, but I knew it. She would sit across the aisle from me, and sometimes when I saw how her hair fell over her face when she read, I wanted to lean over and whisper to her, 'Hey, Lorrie -- ' just as if I was human -- 'can I take you to the basketball game?' " Mrs. Jamieson turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. "You understand what I'm saying, don't you?" "No, I don't!" she said sharply. "You're old enough to face realities. You are a Konv. You always will be a Konv. Have you forgotten your own father?" She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was crying just beyond the wall. Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway. In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but she soon grew aware of her mistake. One day he disappeared. #T RS. Jamieson was alarmed.L" Had the Agents found him? She watched the papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed. The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv had raided the Agent's ofgetting killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle. When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room. "Where have you been?" she asked petulantly. "Oh, here and there." "I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm." He shook his head. She stood in the doorway and watched him leaning over his desk, attempting to write something on a sheet of paper. She was proud of his profile, tow-headed as a boy, handsome in a masculine way. He cracked his knuckles nervously. "What did you do?" she asked. Suddenly he flung the pencil down, jumped from his chair and paced the floor. "I talked to an Agent last night," he said. 'Where?" "Bangkok." Mrs. Jamieson had to sit down. Finally she was able to ask, "How did it happen?" "I broke into the office there to get at the records. He caught me." "What were you looking for?" "I wanted to learn the names of the men who killed Father." He said the word strangely. He was unaccustomed to it. "Did you find them?" He pointed to the paper on his desk. Mrs. Jamieson, trembling, picked it up and read the names. Seeing them there, written like any other names would be written, made her furious. How could they? How could the names of murderers look like ordinary names? When she thought them in her mind, they even sounded like ordinary names -- and they shouldn't! She had always thought that those names, if she ever saw them, would be filthy, unholy scratches on paper, evil sounds, like the rustle of bedclothes to a jealous lover listening at a keyhole. "Tom Palieu" didn't sound evil; neither did "AI Jonson." She was shaken by this more than she would permit Earl to see.  W HY did you want the  names?" "I don't know," he said. "Curiosity, maybe, or a subconscious desire for revenge. I just wanted to see them." "Tell me what happened! If an Agent saw you... well, either he killed you or you killed him. But you're here alive." "I didn't kill him. That's what seems so strange. And he didn't try to kill me. We didn't even fight. He didn't ask why I broke in without breaking the lock or even a window. He seemed to know. He did ask what I was doing there, and who I was. I told him, and... he helped me get the names. He asked where I lived. 'None of your damn business,' I told him. Then he said he didn't blame me for not telling, that Konvs must fear Agents, and hate them. Then he said, 'Do you know why we kill Konvs? We kill them because there is no prison cell in the world that will hold a Konv. When they break the law, we have no choice. It is a terrible thing, but must be done. We don't want your secret; we only want law and order. There is room enough in the world for both of us.'" Mrs. Jamieson was furious. "And you believed him?" "I don't know. I just know what he said -- and that he let me go without trying to shoot me." Mrs. Jamieson stopped on her way out of the room and laid a hand on his arm. "Your father would have been proud of you," she said. "Soon you will learn the truth about the Agents." Beyond the closed door, out of sight of her son, Mrs. Jamieson gave rein to the excitement that ran through her. He had wanted the names! He didn't know why -- not yet -- but he would. "He'll do it yet!" she whispered to the flowered wallpaper. She didn't care that no one heard her. She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the might even be taken by Agents -- and used by them, for the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them. And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a cylinder and were now Konvs themselves. r I 'WO weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were working on the case. She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk. She took the paper into Earl's room. "Did you do this?" He turned away from her. "It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They will suspect me. His name was on the list." "They will," she agreed. "It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you and the list of names, and it's all they need." "Well, what else can he do?" Earl asked. "After all, he is an Agent. If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows." "You're defending him? Why?" she cried. "Tell me why!" He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his flesh. "I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people to me. I can't hate them the way you do." Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white. Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face. So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion, Earl stunned immobile -- not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she could hate so suddenly, viciously. She controlled herself. "We must find a way to leave here," she said, calmly. "They won't find us." "Oh, yes they will," she said. "Don't underestimate them. Agents are picked from the most intelligent people on Earth. It will be a small job for them. Don't forget they know who you are. Even if you hadn't been so stupid as to tell them, they'd know. They knew my pattern from the time your father was alive. They got yours when we were together years ago, teasing them. They linked your pattern with mine. They know that your father and I had a son. Your birth was recorded. The only difficult aspect of their job now is to find where you live, and it won't be impossible. They will drive their cars through every city on Earth with those new detectors, until they pick up your pattern or mine. I'm afraid it's time to leave Earth." just as well. I thought maybe some day I might hate them too, or learn to like them. But I can do neither, so I am halfway between, and no man can live this way." She did not answer him. Finally he said, "It doesn't make sense to you, does it?" "No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and talk." Suddenly they were not alone. No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax. He was entirely nude... but it seemed natural and right. Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him. "Benjamin!" she cried. "I knew someone would come." He smiled. "This is your son?" "Yes," she said. "We are ready." "I remember when you were born," he said, and smiled in reminiscence. "Your father was afraid you would be twins." Earl said, 'Why was my father killed?" "By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents thought Jamieson -- I mean, your father -- did it. Jamieson was the greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders. Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables with cylinders have never reached Centaurus." Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside. 'We'd better hurry," Mrs. Jamieson said. Benjamin held out his hands. They took them, to increase the power of the cylinders. As the Agents pounded on the door, Mrs. Jamieson flicked one thought of hatred at them, but of course they did not hear her. Benjamin's hands gripped tightly. Mrs. Jamieson slowly opened her eyes... She no longer felt the hands. She was still in the room! Benjamin and her son were gone. Her outstretched hands touched nothing. Her power was gone! The Agents stepped into the room over the broken door. She stared at them, then ran to Earl's desk, fumbling for the gun. The Agents' guns rattled. Love, Benjamin said, the greatest of these is love. Or did someone else say that? Someone, somewhere, perhaps in another time, in some misty, forgotten chip of time long gone, in another frame of reference perhaps... Mrs. Jamieson could not remember, before she died. really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. lor your information T HE theme of this column has been suggested to me by the most unusual introduction I have received so far. The place was a small town in Tennessee, the occasion a dinner party preceding a lecture. One gentleman, upon learning my name, took me to meet his wife and introduced me as "the man who doesn't believe anything." While both his wife and I looked surprised, he continued: "He doesn't think that there are any cosmic secrets in the Great Pyramid; he doesn't believe that Atlantis ever existed; he doesn't think that the Dalai Lama could have killed off the whole invading Chinese communist army with a single magical gesture if he had wanted to use his powers. He also doesn't think that the flying saucers are spaceships watching us. In short, he doesn't think that there are any mysteries!" All this was stated with a fair amount of belligerence. Next day, looking out across the overcast from an airplane window, I suddenly had the impression that this belligerence had been directed at the lady. But that was an afterthought (and possibly a wrong one); at the moment I had just replied politely that my disagreement with the stories about the Great Pyramid and Atlantis was due to the fact that I believe I know how they came to be written. I added that I am positive I had never said anything about the Dalai Lama and his alleged magical powers. There I had simply had to trust the news services, which reported that he did flee from the invaders and took something as prosaic as money with him. As for mysteries which are still left, I don't have to "think," as the gentleman phrased it. I know there are a number of them and they are good ones. They are fully documented, but at the same time they are as inexplicable as if they were the merest hearsay. Here is a sampling. told the English traveler Powell, "this shrub is covered with blossoms Powell knew that the blossoms, which he had seen before, would be bright scarlet and that the shrub bore the scientific name of Erythrina indica  it is time to see whether the boats and the baskets are ready. Then, when the Sisi plant related to the myrtle blooms, we look for the Moon. Soon after, the Moon will be just above the horizon toward evening (west) at dawn. Ten days later we will have Mblalolo levu and a month after that Mblalolo lailai. You'll see." Powell noted that the islander's face was beaming in anticipation when saying Mblalolo lailai. It was a big event for the Samoans as well as for the Fiji Islanders, these two feasts coming a month apart. The term "feast" is to be taken in its primitive meaning, an occasion where everybody present eats until nothing can possibly be stuffed inside any more. Fig. #: Palolo morning off Samoa, about # (From Kosmos, #, original artist unknown) It must be remembered here that these islands are in the southern hemisphere; though the two months in question are October and November, this was a spring festival. It might also be useful to state that the word levu means "little" or "minor" and the word lailai means "large" or "major." The word Mblalolo, finally, was adapted by somebody, possibly by Powell, for Western tongues by changing it to palolo. During the night of the Mblalolo the Samoans did not go to sleep. Late, after midnight, they rowed out, but not very far. While the men handled the oars, the women had loosely woven baskets ready. Other women and boys who did not yet have adult status sat at the shore with their baskets. All of a sudden, at four A. M., the sea became alive. Wormlike shapes wiggled at the surface, as suddenly as if they had been ejected by a submerged explosion. Within less than ten minutes the surface was solidly covered with worm bodies, wiggling, squirming, in steady motion. The girls scooped them into the boats with their baskets and everybody aboard -- and ashore -- started to eat. The worms were so thick that one did not even need a basket; just reaching into the water with bare hands would bring edible results. But only for an hour or so. At the end of that time the ocean would look cloudy, as if m ilk had been poured into it, but no more worms. The boats returned to shore with their catch; the gourmets preferred their worms baked in palm leaves. And countless runners were waiting ashore too, to carry baskets to those living farther inland. On Samoa, as reported by a later investigator, the islanders had organized relays of runners fo get the delicacy inland just as fast as well-exercised legs could do it. These were the cultural aspects, the two feast days, or rather nights in spring, based on the sudden appearance of an edible marine creature. The zoological aspects were not quite as simple. to the surface in uncountable multitudes were worms was beyond any doubt. In fact they were annelid worms, of the same general type as our earthworm, but a large marine version. They came in two colors. One was darkish green or bluish green; these were filled with eggs, literally to the bursting point, for that's the way they disappeared an hour or so later, by bursting. The other kind was whitish or yellowish or about the color of egg yolk. These contained the male sperm. As for the length of the worms, the reports were at first a bit confusing; any length between one inch and fourteen inches was reported. But it was soon realized that the shorter ones were literally pieces, segments broken off the bigger ones. So far things were nice and clear; the two Mblalolo nights were the mating periods of these worms. As the Samoans had said all along, the two mating nights were one month apart, but they did not fall on the same dates in successive years. Outside of these two mating nights, nobody had ever seen a Mblalolo. It obviously lived at the bottom of the sea normally. The worm was first given a scientific name, Palolo viridis, the second word with reference to the green color of the eggcontaining segments. A little later the scientific name was changed to Eunice viridis. It was quite clear from the outset that the sexes were very strictly separated, each worm being either male or female. But the early observers reported with headshaking that all the worms were headless. Samoa, at the time I am talking about (ca. #), was still an independent kingdom with three countries yielding a good deal of influence: the United States (which had leased the harbor of Pago Pago -- pronounced Pango I Pango -- ), Great Britain and Germany. In # trouble developed which led to the withdrawal of Great Britain and a partition of the Samoan islands between the United States and Germany. Fig. #: Eunice viridis, alias Palolo. Complete specimen; the spawning break occurs where segments become roundish But before this political de velopment took place a Germai zoologist, Dr. Benedikt Fried lander, had arrived on the scene, His first attempt had been to find the palolo in its natura habitat and under pre-swarmint conditions. He fished for it a fail distance from the shore and at considerable depth. Of course he caught some marine worms but none of them was Palolo viridis While thinking about the equip, ment he would need to fish at even greater depths (and, logic, ally, still farther from shore) he talked to Samoans. Somewhat puzzled, he tolc after his return to Berlin tha the information coming from "at old woman" had been best -- presumably he expected tha young and actively fishing mei should know most about it. The old woman told Dr. Friedlander that the worms lived in cracks ol the coral rock, not very deep and close to the shore. Benedikt thing once -- he even tried the green palolo segments when they swarmed, reporting that they tasted like almost unsalted Rus sian caviar -- had a number ol blocks of dead coral hauled up, Yes, there was Palolo viridis complete with head and up to about # inches long. The old woman had also told him that the worms in the coral rock, if placed in pails of sea water, would swarm at the same time as the worms in the open. Friedlander was too busy to make the experiment but did not doubt the statement; he just stated honestly that he had not verified it. worm (Fig. #) many of the puzzles became quite clear. The worm as a whole does not swarm. The head and about the first fifth of its length stays quietly where it always lives. The latter part of the body, the portion containing the eggs or the sperm, is detached at the right moment, rises squirming to the surface and, after a while, bursts, thus uniting eggs and sperm. One segment of the worm population does this in October; this is the smaller group. The larger group (suspected to be the older worms) does it in November. Friedlander watched the Mblalolo lailai of November #, #. Well, all this is admittedly somewhat weird, but the facts are established. What is the "mystery"? The mystery is the timing. The Samoans, as has been mentioned, looked for the Moon after the Sisi plant bloomed. Friedlander found that the first swarming occurred when the Moon was in its last quarter, after the first full moon in October. The second (and bigger) swarming took place when the Moon was in its last quarter after full moon in November. Now these figures must not be understood as being approximations. The palolo does not swarm "about a week after full moon," but at the moment the Moon is in its last quarter, with a leeway to be measured in hours only. Nobody ftas been able to figure out why. It can't be the light of the Moon. To begin with, the moonlight is obviously much stronger when the Moon is full, but nothing happens then. Moreover, the Mblalolo lailai watched by Friedlander happened to be a night with heavy cloud cover, and during the second part of that night rain poured unceasingly. It can't be the tidal influence. Again, that would be more pronounced at full moon. The great Swedish scientist Svante Arhhenius thought that it might have something to do with atmospheric electricity -- the Samoans had said that sometimes there had been thunderstorms during those nights. But more often there had been no thunderstorms. There is no use wasting space on the problem. We simply do not know. But since Friedlander's day we have found something else: a related worm with the same behavior, this time in the northern hemisphere and in the Atlantic. It is Eunice iucata of the island Loggerhead Key in the West Indies. It also swarms when the Moon is in its last quarter, but here it is the last quarter following the full moon in July. Because the numbers are smaller, it is not as spectacular as around Samoa and the Fiji Islands. But the performance is the same and the mystery of the timing is the same. t cyclopedias are in need of constant revision, our popular sayings should be amended too from time to time. The man who says "Everything that goes up must come down" should be obliged to add "unless it reaches escape velocity." Likewise the man who says "with the speed of lightning" should make the provision "but I don't mean ball lightning." Ball lightning may move as slowly as three inches per second. It may even stand still for a short time. Ball lightning is one of the things I have yet to see myself. I also have never seen a volcanic eruption, but this problem (if it prayed on my mind) could be easily solved by flying to the scene of an erupting volcano. Ball lightning is, as far as we know, pure chance. But I do know that my chance would be somewhat better in Europe north of the Alps. So many Americans have never even heard of ball lightning because it happens to be very rare in North America, That a natural phenomenon should be rare in one area and not rare in another seems somewhat incredible at first glance. But it is a fact, for example, that "twisters" are rare in northern Europe (and if they do occur they are quite weak compared to their American counterpart) and ball lightning, while by no means a frequent phenomenon in Europe, seems to be positively abundant compared to its rarity in the United States. Instead of describing ball lightning and how it behaves, let me give a condensed quotation of a case which took place in Paris just after noon on July #, #, and for which sworn statements were filed with the French Academy of Science. It was during the summer and for this reason the fireplace in the apartment was not in use. According to custom the front opening of the fireplace had been closed by a wooden frame to which stout wrapping paper had been pasted. Likewise the curved stove pipe on top of the fireplace had been taken down and the round hole in the wall into which the stovepipe fitted had also been pasted over with wrapping paper. The apartment in the Rue St. Jacques, next to the Val-deGrace Church, was located on the fourth floor and occupied by a tailor. He had finished lunch but remained seated at the table because there was a thunderstorm going on. Some time (not immediately) after a very strong thunderclap, the frame closing the fireplace was pushed out as if by a strong gust of wind. Then a fiery ball, the size of a human head, emerged from the opening and meandered slowly about the room, a few inches above the floor. The ball was brightly luminous but did not radiate any heat. It approached the tailor's feet ("like a cat," he said later) but the man did not wish to be touched. He pulled his feet back without rising from the chair and watched the ball which slowly moved around in the center of the room. Then it suddenly rose to about one yard above the floor. It became slightly elongated and flew to the hole in the wall. The paper was peeled off without being damaged in the process and the ball disappeared in the chimney. After it had climbed to the top of the chimney -- very slowly -- it exploded with a loud noise, destroying the top portion of the chimney. such a description for the first time, all this sounds pretty far-fetched. But to anyone who is conversant with the behavior of ball lightning this is merely typical, as can easily be seen from another case, this time from Konigsberg, East Prussia. The owner of a beer garden outside the city, a Herr Babinski, rendered the following description: "We had a strong thunderstorm during the early afternoon hours and my beer garden was hit by lightning which, however, did not cause any damage. Immediately afterward there appeared, at about my eye level, a reddish rotating ball approximately # inches in diameter, in the open door of the restaurant kitchen. Since the other door of the kitchen was open too there was a considerable draft. The sphere, rotating all the time, passed quite a number of people, climbed up along the wiring of the electric bell, was then apparently caught by the draft, then moved along another electric wire to the stable and exN # ploded with a loud noise above the door of the stable." That ball lightning likes to travel along a conductor is almost proverbial. One was seen on May #, #, in the Dutch city of The Hague. It moved for a very considerable distance along a streetcar rail, then jumped into a transformer box and disappeared. A real estate owner in East Prussia, Reich by name, had the interesting experience of being pursued by ball lightning. In the evening of "the Day of Pentecost, #, at # P.M." Herr Reich drove his carriage along a country road lined on both sides by wire fences. His carriage was of the open type, with four rather large iron-rimmed wooden wheels, running on iron axles and normally drawn by two, but since this was in horse-breeding East Prussia, more likely by four horses. "The sky was covered with clouds, but it was not raining. Two very bright head-sized balls appeared on both wire fences, moving along the fences at the same rate as the carriage. Many sparks jumped from these balls to the carriage axles. The horses shied and increased their pace but the faster the carriage moved the faster the .fire balls moved until we came to the end of the wire fences. There both balls, collapsed into nothing, without an explosion but with a noise like crumbling a sheet of paper." Finally a case which happened near the small town of Bischofswerda in Saxony on April #, #, at half an hour after noon. It was one of the rare cases of a violent lightning ball which was described by many witnesses. Taking it chronologically, the first witness was a mailman by the name of Fasold who asserted that he had not known about ball lightning. He was on the road and saw "a grayish-black cloud from which something dangled which almost looked like a trouser leg. Suddenly something fell from this dangling trouser leg which looked like a golden beer barrel. This body landed near a telephone pole with a loud crash and I had the impression that it came apart, somewhat like emptying a basket of potatoes. From this heap real lightning jumped and one of the strokes hit the school. I was so surprised that I can't say whether the crash was followed by real thunder or not, but I know that it was raining a bit before and that a little hail fell afterward." Mailman Fasold also stated that the trees looked for a short time like Christmas trees, as if they had candles at the tips of the twigs. lightning ball move along the telephone wire (later it turned out that it had first smashed a transformer box) traveling at about the rate of a briskly walking man. The ball moved into the apartment of the teacher (which was part of the school building). The teacher (male) w as using the telephone and stated that the lightning ball threw him to the floor. The telephone itself was not damaged. The door to the teacher's apartment had a glass pane; later it was found to have two holes both perfectly circular and clean. One of these two holes was the size of a silver dollar, the other that of a quarter (the German report mentions other coins, of course, but of the size of the American coins named) and it is thought that the bigger hole was that caused by the entry while the smaller one was caused on leaving, when the ball had expended some of its energy. Like other lightning balls, it moved along wires, but this one melted the wires into tiny spherules of metal. But it did not ignite inflammable material in its direct path -- also a common feature of all the reports, lightning balls have been known to melt down quarter-inch bronze rods, but nestle in excelsior without igniting it -- and then proceeded along a ceiling. It must have moved under the plaster, because the plaster was forced off. Then it broke through a wall and disappeared. Afterward additional damage was found, presumably caused before the lightning ball entered the school building. The telephone wire had been melted down for # feet of its length, several telephone poles, including a fifteen-foot support of angle iron, were splintered, a cable # V # feet below ground was severed as if with a stroke with a sharp axe, the trunk of a cherry tree was split and several men working near the road were thrown to the ground without harming them otherwise. And all this, as far as the witnesses could recall, without making any noise at all! The overall picture is that a rather large amount of electrical energy is concentrated in one spot, that the lightning ball prefers to follow electrical conductors which it may or may not melt in the process, that it does not set fires and does not electrocute people. Several people have been touched by lightning balls, much against their will and inclination, in most cases without experiencing any sensation. Some people were thrown to the ground, but without other harm than that caused by the fall itself. Most of the time the end of the ball is by way of an explosion which is described as sounding like the sharp crack of an enormous whip. But the damage caused by the explosion is minor. Often the balls just go out. In most cases the witnesses cannot tell where the ball came from. In a few cases it has been seen to fall from a cloud, but very slowly, as if its weight were negligible. In a few other cases witnesses think that it followed the path of a normal lightning stroke which preceded it. Sometimes lightning balls have appeared without an accompanying thunderstorm. Most of them, however, were associated with thunderstorms, though it is almost a rule that they appear at the end of the storm -- the end for the area in question, that is. Now, how do they originate? Well, that's the mystery in this case. A Norwegian engineer by the name of A. Nielson once obtained an artificial lightning ball by accident when short-circuiting a #-volt generator. This ball rose in the air and then disappeared (dissipated?) -- it may not have been a real lightning ball but just a cloud of superheated air and metal vapor which happened to take on a spherical shape. Soviet atomic scientist P. Kapitsa busied himself with theoretical study of ball light, ning. His reasoning is very inter, esting, though I have a feeling that it is not the answer. Academician Kapitsa pointed out that the cloud resulting from an atomic explosion lasts a very short time in spite of its enorni. ous size. Such an explosion cloud consists of gases which Kapitsa assumes to be # per cent ionized. Ball lightning, which must consist at least partly of ionized gases, is known to last for a minute and longer, and its size, compared to that of an atomic explosion cloud, virtually microscopic. Hence, Kapitsa reasoned, the lightning ball must have a steady "energy income" during its lifetime. When this "energy income' cut off, the ball shrivels into nothing; it just goes out. If the supply is cut off very suddenly the ball collapses, its collapse causing a shock wave which makes the sharp crack. The noise, then, would be that of an implosion rather than that of an explosion. (The nature of the sound is no clue as to which it is, unfortunately. Either an explosion or an implosion can cause such a sharp crack.) Kapitsa's guess as to what feeds the lightning ball for the  Give Galaxy a the gift you'd like to receive We admit it -- we're pushovers for the Xmas spirit. "Don't do it," our accountant pleads. "We can't afford to sell subscriptions at those prices! But our eye goes past his piteous figure to the distant corners of the land. "Readers straining budgets to introduce Galaxy to friends and relatives, and have enough scratch left over for their own subscriptions. We can't leave the job to them!" we thunder. "Galaxy must bear its share of the burden! And not only that -- by the Lord Harry, we #I even include handsome Gift Card Announcements with their names as donors!" Out slouches our accountant, muttering, All right, but they'd better get their orders in before December #. --  -- so rush in your order today. Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to I enclose the following and send gift card announcements. Name Address Address City Offer # Price City Sign Card Name Address Name City Address Offer # , , . City Sign Card Offer # Sign Card duration of its existence is natural radio waves, presumably generated by the storm cloud and reflected by the ground. A very interesting idea, but this is really explaining one unknown by another one. It seems logical that a thundercloud might generate radio waves, but we don't know to what extent. Kapitsa is too much of a scientist to insist that his idea is right just because it is his idea. His paper begins with the sentence: "The nature of ball lightning is not as yet understood." But while I don't think that Kapitsa's reasoning, novel as it is, has solved the problem of the origin of ball lightning, he quoted a case reported in Nature (No. #, April #) where a lightning ball entered the interior of an airplane flying at an altitude of # feet. This is the first recorded instance of high-altitude ball lightning that has come to my attention. But I have always suspected that high-altitude ball lightning exists. Naturally I have not quoted all the cases on record -- they would fill a book. In fact, they do fill a book; it was written by Dr. Walther Brand in # and published during the same year in Hamburg by the publisher Henri Grand. (Its title is Der Kugelblitz.) In reading through this book soon after it was published, I was impressed by the fact that only a small number were reported from flat land areas near sea level. Ball lightning seemed to occur much more frequently in mountainous areas, at least a thousand feet above sea level. I may add here that the only two eyewitness accounts I got in the United States conformed to this pattern: one came from a mountainous area in the East and the other from Denver. Assuming that ball lightning was more likely in a somewhat rarefied air, I wondered whether it might not occur fairly high up -- say # feet -- in free air. When, near the end of the Second World War, we got those reports about the so-called "foo fighters" -- balls of light following our airplanes near their wingtips for long distance without ever doing anything -- I immediately thought of the two lightning balls which had accompanied the open carriage on the country road. Taking the same risk which Kapitsa took, namely of calling on one unknown to explain another one, I have held for a long time that the answer to many "flying saucers" is ball lightning in mid-air. Since we don't know how ball lightning forms, one might even speculate whether the presence of the airplane is not one of the factors which causes it to form. But at least we do know that ball lightning exists. What we still have to learn is how it comes into existence. we know everything except the reason behind the timing, or, better, the mechanism of the timing. In (he case of ball lightning, we know that the phenomenon is electrical and we have a number of case histories, but do not know reasons or conditions for its occurrence. Our next mystery is one where we just know that it exists. It has been well described just once, in the January # issue of the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, by ComLike a good seaman, Commander Bodler supplied all the detail: "Date, # November #, #' N., # #' E. Wind NW'ly force #. Sea calm with slight surface ripples; no swell. Air # F., sea # F. Visibility: very good. A clear bright night with no moon. Course # T., speed through the water # knots, actual speed over the bottom approx. # knots due to strong head current. At no time were any unusual deviations of the magnetic compass observed." In landman's language this means that the vessel, bound for India, had come from some port on the Persian Gulf and was about to enter the Gulf of Oman. At that time the third mate called the skipper to the bridge. "About four points on the port bow, toward the coast of Iran, there was a luminous band which seemed to pulsate." At first Commander Bodler thought that it was near the horizon; then it turned out that it was below the horizon, in the water. The luminous patch, which clearly pulsated, happened to be on course of the vessel so that the two drew together. "At a distance of about a mile from the ship," to quote Commander Bodler, "it was apparent that the disturbance was roughly circular in shape, about # to # feet in diameter. The pulsations could now be seen to be caused by a revolving motion of the entire pattern about a rather ill-defined center; with streaks of light like the beams of searchlights, radiating outward from the center and revolving (in a counterclockwise direction) like the spokes of a gigantic wheel." A sketch drawn by Commander Bodler shows that the outer ends of the "spokes" lagged behind, as if whatever made up the spokes of the wheels moved with a nearly uniform speed, so that the extreme ends naturally lagged. "For several minutes the vessel occupied the approximate center of the phenomenon. Slightly curved bands of light crossed the bow, passed rapidly down the port side from bow to stern, and up the starboard side from aft, forward. The bands of luminance seemed to pass a given point at about half-second intervals... The central 'hub' of the phenomenon drew gradually Fig. #: How Commander Bodler's phenomenon might have looked from an airplane to starboard and passed aft; becoming more and more distant on the starboard quarter. While it was still in sight, several miles astern and appearing, by this time, as a pulsating band of light, a repetition of the same manifestation appeared fine on the starboard bow. This was slightly smaller in area than the first, "Approximately half an hour later, a third repetition of this manifestation was observed. The general characteristics, direction of rotation, etc., were the same as the others, but this one was much diameter was not over # to # feet and compared to the other two was unimpressive." another report just like this. Some fifty years ago somebody whose name I don't remember wrote a description of an especially impressive example of phosphorescence he had witnessed from board of a passenger liner bound from the Mediterranean for Yokohama. He wrote that sometimes it looked as if the ship were the center of a gigantic fireworks pinwheel -- but such a comparison can well be made, as everybody knows who has seen it, without experiencing the phenomenon described by Commander Bodler. No, I don't know the explanation, but the discussion of the palolo phenomenon made me think of another marine worm, the fire worms of Bermuda. Like the palolo, they come to the surface to spawn a few days after the full moon, but not with such precise timing, and several months in a row in midsummer and early fall. The females come to the surface first and circle around, emitting flashes of greenish light. This attracts the males, which dart after them, also emitting flashes of light. Then they mate and burst open like the palolo -- but the fire worms die because they take their heads along when swarming. It has been suggested that the much discussed light which Columbus saw during the night before landfall was not a native's torch on the water, but fire worms in the water. It is, of course, possible that Commander Bodler's observation has a similar explanation. But at the moment this is just conjecture. We know of no marine organisms whatsoever which swarm in such a pattern.      pattern went on. One more city to search for a man I did not know, whose face I would not recognize. I had no copy of either his fingerprints or encephalograph, or any other clue to his identity. Yet he had to be found. At one time he had been my best friend. His name was Howard Zealley then. He wouldn't be using the same name now. And the "bug" in his brain would by this time have made him a stranger. There was only one way the job could be done: I had to make contact -- even though I might not be aware of it at the time -- reveal who I was, and hope he'd come out after me. I rented a room in a cheap hotel. But not so cheap that it wouldn't have a grid connection with information service. I wrote my name big on the was always the chance that he would see it. He would remember the name. The room was small, a standard "living-in" cubicle. Which was all right. I didn't intend to sleep here. I hadn't slept in nine years now -- a year before the chase began. I kicked off my saddle shoes and walked on stockinged feet to the vid coin slot and dropped in a half dollar. The screen flickered once and the face of a beautiful, smiling woman came into focus. "May I help you, sir?" she asked in a pleasant, very friendly voice. I realized that the woman was not actually speaking, as she appeared to be doing. She was merely a woman image, with her voice and facial expressions synchronized in some way with the word impulses coming from information central. A folding the pillow under my head to have an unobstructed view of the screen. "Give me the names of the city's two hundred most prominent male citizens," I said. There was no sign of surprise on the woman face, but I got the usual expressive long pause from central. The request was unusual. Central relays always had trouble with the proper definition of "prominent." "Any particular category?" the woman image finally asked. "All categories," I answered. Another pause. Even a mechanical brain would take a bit of time to assemble that information, but get it I would. After a while the woman began. "Edward Anderson. Russell Baker. Joseph Dillon. Francis..." As her gently modulated voice went on, I closed my eyes, keeping my mind blank, letting each name pass without resistance through my consciousness. Sometimes a hunch came that way. There was no need to make a written list. I had total recall. I became aware that I had opened my shirt collar and that I was perspiring. I hadn't noticed how hot the day was or that the room had no air conditioning. I took a minute to concentrate. The perspiration dried and my body adjusted itself to the room's temperature and humidity. When I was comfortable again, I returned my attention to the woman voice. At the end of the reading, no name had stayed with me. I opened my eyes. "Eliminate all except those within the age range of twenty to forty," I said. Zealley would be thirty-seven by now -- but probably appear younger. "Got that?" "Yes sir." "How many left?" I asked. "Sixty-four." It was always a temptation to cut the list further. I was weary of the seemingly endless repetition of the same routine and the frustrating lack of any results. Eight years is a long time to search for a man. Yet I could not afford to be careless. I was gambling everything on my having figured out the way Zealley's mind operated, how he would act, where he would hide. When the woman finished speaking, I walked to the vid and switched it off. I noted by the wall clock that it was almost noon. I hadn't had breakfast yet. In the back of my mind, as I ordered a meal, was the certainty that someday this appetite too would grow sated and dull. There were so few satisfactions left... was Edward Anderson. The city's mayor. It took me two hours to get into his office, and two minutes to be on my way out again. I had asked my questions and met the usual blank response. On the street I spent another hour strolling through the shopping district. No shadower picked me up. Which pretty well eliminated Anderson -- or anyone in close contact with him. Second name, Russell Baker. Industrialist. Minneapolis Mining  Allied Products. I got as far as his secretary, John Roesler. "What can I do for you?" Roesler asked. He was a bigboned, handsome man, with an air of sleepy indolence. He cleaned and trimmed his fingernails with a small gold penknife. "I'd like to see Mr. Baker," I said. "What about?" "Confidential business." "No one gets in to see a man like Mr. Baker that easy. If they could, he'd be pestered by every crackpot in town." This was as far as I was going to get. I had to make the best of it. "Will you give him a message then?" I asked. Roesler shrugged. "If I think he should have it." "I would advise you to deliver it," I said making my tone as impressive as possible. "If he doesn't get it, you may be out of a job." His eyebrows raised slightly. "Tell him," I said, "that Max Calof wants to see him," and spelled my last name for him. "And what should I say you want to see him about?" I had caught a slight breakT in Roesler's composure. "About a mutual friend -- Howard Zealley," I replied. "I think he'll be interested." Roesler hid a yawn behind a well-manicured hand. "We'll see," he said, and I went back out. Twice within ten minutes I observed the same pale-faced youth trailing me, and my pulse gave a great racing bound. This could be it. I stopped and studied the men's hats in a shop window. From the side of my eye I saw the youth stop also. He leaned against a traffic light stanchion and kicked idly at a scrap of paper on the sidewalk. I wandered through a department store, stopping to purchase a toothbrush and a handkerchief, and he followed, keeping always a discreet distance behind. My last doubt was removed. I returned to my hotel. With luck, the hunter would now become the hunted. In my room I pulled a grip from under the bed and took out a rubber-handled screwdriver and a pair of pliers, a pocket knife, several lengths of copper wire, and a small instrument in a black case about the size of my fist. Climbing on a straight-back chair, I removed the frosted globe from the room's center light. I bared the wires, carefully spliced on two pieces of wire, connected the black box, and replaced the globe. I had a little more trouble with the electrical clock's wiring, but at the end I was satisfied. The time was two-fifteen. I made my setting for three o'clock. Zealley should be here before then. If not, I could always set the timing back. There was nothing to do now except wait. ' from the time I finished my preparations, and I was beginning to think Zealley would be late, when the door of my compartment was kicked savagely open. The man who followed the kick was lean and dark, with wavy brown hair combed meticulously into place. A bent nose dispelled any illusion of softness. I was disappointed. If this was Zealley, it was not at all the way I had expected him to look. I had thought he would be more polished perhaps, more intelligent, with more of the outward signs of success. This weighing I did with a fleeting glance, and passed to the two men who followed my first visitor: Roesler and the palefaced youth. Roesler was wearing a yellow hat. I swung my legs over the side of the bed where I had been lying and sat up. "Come in," I said. The sarcasm was not wasted on Roesler. He kept his gaze on me, but spoke to the two men with him. "Stay by the door, George," he ordered the boy. "You, Steve," he addressed the lean man, "get on the other side of him. Stay close." He let himself ease into the lounge chair behind him. I decided to stir things up a bit. "I see you brought a boy," I said, nodding at the one by the door. "This might turn out to be a man's job." Roesler glanced aside at the youth, whose lips pulled away from his teeth and eyes filled with quick hate. He pulled a switchblade knife from his pocket and snapped it open. I found myself making a swift reappraisal. The lad was not the simple hood type I had first judged him to be. There was a flat look about the wide whites of his eyes that warned of something apart from courage. "Not yet, George," Roesler said, and his voice, though almost gentle, stopped the boy before he took a step. Roesler pulled his penknife from a coat pocket and began trimming his nails. "Someday you're going to rim out of fingernails," I said. Roesler laughed soundlessly, amused. I glanced unobtrusively at the clock. Ten minutes to three. Time passed slowly in a situation like this. Roesler regarded me speculatively. " Y ou don't seem very nervous," he said. "Should I be?" "I would think so," he said. "If I were in your position, I think I'd be nervous." "Would you?" "Take off your clothes," he said, with no change of tone. I took in a long breath and began opening my shirt. Another glance at the clock told me I needed at least eight more minutes. I had to stall. hurry me. He was a man certain of his control of the situation. I kicked off my shorts, the last of my clothes, and for the first time felt ill at ease. Standing stripped to the raw before these men put me at a mental disadvantage. I feared them only to the point of discretion, but I had lost a bit of my poise. I sat back on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette, doing my best to appear unconcerned. Roesler turned to the dark man. "The shade, Steve," he directed. "Pull it down a minute." Steve did as he was told. The fact that my skin glowed with a faint phosphorescent sheen in the semidarkness was no surprise to me. Roesler leaned forward and the penknife, which he had set on one knee, slipped off. Without attention he caught it before it touched the floor. Which confirmed my original suspicion. No one had reflexes that fast -- except Zealley -- and myself. I had estimated him correctly then. He had been too clever to expose himself to any searcher; he had disdained the prestige he might have acquired, staying in the background, but in a position where he could observe any pursuer if and when he appeared. Roesler-Zealley had noted the brief play of understanding on my face and he nodded. "I had to be certain, Max," he said. "You've changed too, you know." Which was true. The mites in our veins had altered us both considerably through the years. We had developed some small empathy with them and they often performed as we wished. It was not that they could read our thoughts. Their activities were probably only reactions to our emotional and glandular functions. Moreoyer, they acted as often in ways that suited their own designs, changing our body structures, and regulatingour metabolisms, seemingly at random. "What did you want with me, Max?" Zealley asked, still being very pleasant. "Did you come to join me in conquering the world?" He was being facetious and I did not answer him. He knew why I was here. Overhead a faint click came from the light globe, a sound that probably only I noticed, and I knew that my alarm had gone off. I judged it would take the police only a few minutes to reach here. "Or are you going to pretend that the medics have found a way to boil the bugs out of us?" Zealley asked. Did I detect a concealed pleading for just that assurance? I shook my head. "No, they haven't found any way, Howard," I obliterated the hope. "Good old Max." Bitterness crept into his voice. "Faithful, selfless old Max. Going to save the world. Going to save the whole of humanity," he amended expansively. He hadn't changed too much. Sarcasm had always come natural with him, which made it no more likable. H stupid, cloddish old Max. The words would have better matched the tone of his voice. At that, he might be right. The authorities back on our home world of New Nebraska had said pretty much the same thing, only more diplomatically. "You and Zealley are different," I'd been told. "That was one of the reasons we made you a team, originally. Zealley is clever and imaginative, but basically an egotist. A to-hellwith-the-other-fellow character. Fortunately, you're not like him. You're a man who accepts his responsibilities, a man with a strong sense of duty. We know we can trust you." Whether it was actually trust or only that they had little choice, I had not let myself decide. "We had such high hopes." Zealley was reminiscing, speaking more to himself than to me. We had. We'd been a two-man survey crew, mapping out new territory for the future expansion of the human race. On a world listed only as TR#-L-# on the star maps, we had run into disaster. We found the planet unfit for human habitation, but not before we'd been bitten several times by things we never did see. No infection had resulted and we thought little about it, until w e were a good part of the way home. Gradually then we noticed a quickening of our sensory processes, a well-being of body too pronounced to be normal. During the next several weeks of flight, Zealley wrote a historical novel that I was certain would turn out to be a classic. I found myself mastering, without difficulty, higher math, which had always been beyond me before. At the end of the third month we stopped needing sleep. During the days and nights that folsubjects that had not interested us before, and the depth of which we couldn't have fathomed if they had interested us. We were at a loss to explain the reason for the change, though we knew it tied in somehow with our stay on TR#-L-#, and probably with the things that had bitten us. The cause was of secondary importance; the marvel of the reality was what intrigued us. We looked forward with poorly restrained excitement to displaying our new mental and physical dexterity. were every bit as impressed as we had anticipated. The medics readily found that we had been infested by a germ, but by a benevolent germ, a true symbiote. That discovery was followed by months of tests and examinations. Between sessions with our own medics and laboratory men and various visiting specialists, we amused ourselves by showing our new abilities. At least a dozen times a day I had to put someone down in an arm .wrestle. Even when they devised a way to pit two against me at a time, I had little difficulty besting them. Zealley's displays tended toward the more flamboyant. One of the tricks he delighted in was taking a razor blade, and, while his audience watched with repelled fascination, cut a long gash in his forearm. For an instant the blood would ebb out, then quickly clot and cease to flow. The next day he would show them the arm, where a thin red line at the most would remain to mark where the wound had been. Apparently Zealley's reminiscing had kept pace with my own. "It seems such a shame, doesn't it, Max?" he asked. He was genuinely sad. So was I. Test results and theories developed fast in those early days. The findings showed that the symbiotes repaired damage and faults in our systems and protected us against disease. It was even hazarded that they would prolong our lives indefinitely. Yet we were warned against complacency. The bug -- we always spoke of it in the singular, even though we knew the original mites had spawned in our blood streams -- could not act quickly enough to save our lives in the event of major damage to essential organs or the brain. Also, we could drown. Or we could die in a fall from a great height. Or starve to death. The first intimation we had that all was not well had started as a rumor. Two of the staff biochemists had been experimenting with transplants of the bugs in fruit flies. They had turned up something sensational. Zealley was not present when I received the disastrous news. At the end of what would normally be a twentyor thirtyyear cycle -- the chemists were not able to estimate it any closer -- the symbiotes evolved into tiny winged insects. At that stage they acquired size and flying strength by devouring the tissues of their hosts. In twenty or thirty years, then, our benign cohabitants would kill us -- and spread out by the animal life. Unless they were destroyed, not only would Zealley and I die, but all humanity on all the worlds would face the prospect of becoming infested. Zealley must have surmised what was coming. He had disappeared a week earlier. Before he left, I had noticed considerable change in our body and facial features. He would very soon be impossible to identify. The only lead the authorities ever got on him was that he had fled to Earth. At that particular time Earth and New Nebraska were involved in one of the more serious interworld bickerings. Citizens of each were denied admittance to the other, which was probably the reason Zealley had chosen Earth as a haven. New Nebraska's authorities called me in and briefed me on what I was to do. They were able to smuggle me to Earth with forged papers that identified me as a citizen of another planet. Zealley had to be found -- and I was their one hope. in that clock?" Zealley's words jarred me out of my retrospection. Silently I cursed myself for letting my thoughts and eyes stray. I was dismayed, too, to find that only a few minutes had passed since I'd last looked. Even so, the police were taking longer than I had calculated. Zealley abandoned all pretense of joviality. "Now, George," he said to the pale-faced youth, who still stood by the door with his knife in his hand. The boy started toward me and I tensed, shifting my feet to face him. Something crashed against my right temple and only then did I remember Steve, the man behind me. The force of the blow knocked me sideways but not unconscious. I started to turn and a second glancing blow split the skin across my forehead. I slid off the bed on the side away from him. I retained just enough control of my faculties to get to my feet as the youth reached me and to grab him in a bear hug, but not fast enough to keep the long blade of his knife from ripping into my stomach. The symbiote, though able to repair damage, was not able to block pain. The bite of the knife clenched my muscles in a spasm of agony, and dimly I heard the youth give a grunt of distress as my arms squeezed and bent him back at the waist. Something landed on my foot -- his knife. With blackness closing in, my arms lost their strength and I slid down his body. I blanked out, but only for an instant. The kid had fallen with me and my hands clutched his ankles as I fought to stay conscious. I stood up, still holding his ankles. Putting everything I had into the effort, I swung him around and sent him crashing into Steve, who was just rounding the foot of the bed. They went down together. I gasped in air, clutching the gash in my stomach with hands that were sticky and wet with blood. I turned toward Zealley. He was still seated in his chair, still smiling. One hand, resting negligently in his lap, held a snub-nosed pistol. He could have killed me any time before this, but he had wanted the fun of watching me fight for my life. He opened his mouth to say something but closed it abruptly as someone pounded at the door. "Come in!" I shouted through the froth in my mouth. "Damn you," Zealley said softly. He wiped the pistol on his trousers and slid it across the floor away from him. The door burst inward. "These men tried to kill me," I told the two police officers. simulated surprise. "I?" he asked. "I heard noise in here as I was passing in the hall. I came in to see what the trouble was." "He's lying," I said as the policemen turned inquiringly toward me. "He's with them." Zealley shook his head sadly. "He must be delirious -- " he began, but the evidence was all on my side. "Shut up!" one of the officers said, grabbing him by the shirt front and jerking him to his feet. I had started dressing immediately. I wanted to hide the wound in my stomach. It burned, but I kept my face blank. Zealley was silent now. If I had been just superficially wounded, his bluff would have worked -- I'd have healed right there and then. I hadn't, so he had to wait for developments. I hoped I could give him some. While one of the officers worked to revive the youth -- the thug named Steve was already on his feet -- I went to the bowl in the alcove and washed the blood off my hands and stomach. They had the kid upright when I turned around. "Are you hurt bad?" the policeman holding Zealley asked me. "Not too bad." I managed to keep my voice steady. "I'll be all right until you can send an ambulance." He stood uncertainly for a moment. "I don't like to leave you alone, but I can put in a call from our cruiser. The ambulance should get here within ten minutes." "I'll be OK," I said. The sound of the closing door was the only way I had to know they were gone. For the past half minute, my tight grip on the bed headboard was all that held me erect. Now the starch went out of my body and I crumpled to the floor. This time I did not blank out, but lay twisted and tight, waiting for the pain to stop -- or to kill me. A small easing of the torment came and I forced myself to relax. I was able now to steel my mind against the racking spasms and pull myself to my feet. I was not at all safe yet; even if I was not mortally wounded, it would take the symbiote hours to repair the damage. I managed to pull on my clothes with numbed, awkward fingers and get out of the room before the ambulance arrived. I took with me only my grip. I would still need that. There was small chance that the police could hold Zealley. He would probably be free on bail this same afternoon. The odds were against me. I was fighting in Zealley's own back yard, wounded and entirely alone, while he must have been prepared for this contingency for years. But I had succeeded in the first part of my plan. I had found out who he was, and I had put him in a position where he could not use his superior resources, for a time at least. Now I had to get to him before he was able to mobilize those resources. attack of cramps in my upper diaphragm, and I got down on one knee and made a pretense of adjusting a shoe strap as J fought the torment. Perspiration gathered in clammy globules all over my body. When the pain left, I rose and pushed grimly on. Opposite Minneapolis Mining's main offices, and a quarter of a block down, I found the type of commercial building I was looking for, and went in and sought out the building superintendent. "Do you have an office for rent on one of the lower floors?" I asked him. "One that faces the front street?" "We have several," he answered with professional courtesy. He thumbed through a row of cards and pulled out one with a small brown envelope attached. "Here's a fine office on the sixth floor. It's, only one room, but -- " "I'll take a look at it," I interrupted him. "Of course." He tore open the small envelope and took out a brass key. "I'll take you up." "I'd rather go alone." As he hesitated, I took out my billfold and separated' a hundreddollar bill from two others of its kind and laid it on his desk. "I'll leave a deposit -- in case I should like it," I said, taking the key from his hand. "I suppose it will be all right," he murmured doubtfully. "Thank you," I called back ; over my shoulder. "I may be a while. I want to look it over carefully." I ignored the fact that he seemed to have more he wanted to say. The office was small, but that made little difference to me. There was a clear view of the street from the window. That was all I cared about. In one corner was a small packing case, left by the former tenant. I dragged it over by the window and sat down. From my grip I took a rifle barrel and stock and assembled them, and filled the magazine with ammunition. I kept part of my attention on the building down the street while I worked. I hoped I had guessed right -- that Zealley would get free of the police, and that he would return to his office. The day-shift workers had begun to pour from the Mining building before a taxi drew up to the curb and a man in a yellow hat alighted. Zealley had come. He was alone. I aligned the sights of my rifle on his head, waited until I had a clear shot, and squeezed the trigger. The yellow hat sprang upward and Zealley sank from sight among the hurrying workers. The job was done. Nebraska took me a year, for I no longer fitted my passport picture and description at all. "Except for the danger to others," I said when I reported in, "I wouldn't have bothered coming back." "A good thing for you that you did bother to come back here," I was told. The biochemists had gone on with their work through the years I'd searched for Zealley. They had learned that the symbiotes' life cycle developed in three distinct stages: five years of propagation, fifteen years in the dormant aging process, an undetermined number of .years in the final form. If the blood of a carrier was replaced any time during the first five years, the bugs in the residual blood in the body began to propagate again, delaying the aging process another five years. "In other words," I was told, "we can control the symbiote. Mankind can reap the benefits -- with not a single one of the dangers." Except poor Zealley, I thought pityingly, but wonderingly. The hogs, the smart boys who have every angle figured in getting the jump on everybody else -- how is it they never figure the last angle? He should have waited instead of grabbing. If Phelan was right, all worlds in the cosmos were freaks; only this one behaved as a world should. And its spectacular inhabitant was... I I one of the them that was M fun," remarked Brian. "There's been entirely too much solemnity in the universe. Did you never panic on thinking of the multiplicity of systems?" "Never," said Georgina. "Not even when, having set down a fine probability for the totality of worlds, you realized suddenly that you had to raise it by a dozen powers yet?" "What's to panic?" "Not even when it comes over you, 'This isn't a joke; this is serious; every one of them is serious.'?" " 'Cosmic intimidation,' Belloc called it. And it does tend to minimize a person." "And did you never hope that out of all that prodigality of worlds, one at least should have been made for fun? One should have been made by a wild child or a mixed-up goblin just to put the rest of them in proper perspective, to deflate the pomposity of the cosmos." "You believe this is it, Mr. Carroll?" "Yes. Bellota was made for fun. It is a joke, a caricature, a burlesque. It is a planet with baggy pants and a putty nose. It is a midget world with floppy shoes and a bull-roarer voice. It was designed to keep the cosmos from taking itself too seriously. The law of levity here conspires against the law of gravity." "I never heard of the law of levity. And Mr. Phelan believes that he will soon have the explanation for the peculiar gravity here." "The law of levity does not apply to you, Georgina. You are immune. But I spoke lightly." The theory that Bellota was made for a joke had not been proved; no more were the other theories about it. But it was a sport, a whole barrelful of puzzles, a place of interest all out of proportion to its size, eminently worthy of study. And the six of them had been set down there to study it.  besides they weren't a bad bunch at all. Meet them now, or miss them forever. They were six. #. John Hardy. Commander and commando. As capable a man as ever lived. A good-natured conglomerate of clanking iron who was always in control. A jack of all techniques, a dynamic optimist. He had the only laugh that never irritated, however often heard, and he handled danger cavalierly. He was a blue-eyed, red-headed giant, and his face was redder than his hair. Billy) Cross. Engineer, machinist extraordinary, gadgeteer, theorist, arguefier, first mate, navigator, and balladier. Billy was a little older than the rest of them, but he hadn't mellowed. He said that he was still a green and growing boy. #. Daniel Phelan. Geologist and cosmologist, and holder of heretical doctrines about field forces. "Phelan's Corollary" may be known to you; and, if so, you must be both intrigued and frustrated by the inherent contradictions that prevented its acceptance. A highly professional man in the domain of magnetism and gravity, he was also a low amateur rake and a determined wolf. A dude. Yet he could carry his share of the load. #. Margaret Cot. Artist and photographer, botanist and bacteriologist. Full of chatter and a sort of charm. Better-looking than anyone deserves to be. Salty, really the newest thing in salinity. A little bit wanton. And a little kiddish. #. Brian Carroll. Naturalist. And natural. He had been hunting for something all his life, but did not know what it was, and was not sure that he would know it. when he found it, but he hoped that it would be different. "O Lord," he would pray, "however it ends don't let it have a pat ending. That I couldn't stand." He believed that anything repeated was trite. And it was for that reason that there were pleasant surprises for him on Bellota. #. Georgina Chantal. Biologist and iceberg. But the capsule description may be unjust. For she was more than biologist and much more than iceberg. Frosty only when frostiness was called for, she was always proper and often friendly. But she was no ' Margie Cot, and in contrast perhaps she was a little icy. Actually there wasn't a bad apple in that basket. ity of Bellota was its gravity, which was half that of Earth's, though the circumference of the globe was no more than a hundred miles. It was on account of this peculiarity that Daniel Phelan was on the little planet in the first place. For it was held by those who decide such things that there was a bare chance that he could find the answer; no one else had found it. His own idea was that his presence there was fruitless: he already had the answer to the gravity behavior of Bellota; it was contained in Phelan's Corollary. Bellota was the only body that behaved as it should. It was the rest of the universe that was atypical. And in other ways Bellota was a joker. Fruits proved noisome and thorns succulent. Rinds and shells were edible and heartmeat was not. Proto-butterflies stung like hornets, and lizards secreted honeylike manna. And the water -- the water was soda water -- sheer carbonated soda water. If you wanted it any other way, you caught rain water, and this was so highly nitric that drinking it was something of an experience also; for the thunder storms there were excessive. No, they were not excessive, claimed Phelan, they were normal. It was on all other atmospheric planets known that there was a srange deficiency of thunder showers. Here, at least, there was no deficiency: it rained about five minutes out of every fifteen, and the multi-colored lightning was omnipresent. In all their stay there, the party was never without the sound of thunder, near or distant, nor of the probe of lightning. For this reason there could be no true darkness there, not even between the flashes; there were flashes between the flashes. Here was meteorology concentrated, without dilution, without filler. "But it is always different," said Georgina. "Every lightning flash is entirely different, just as every snowflake is different. Will it snow here?" "Certainly," said Phelan. "Though it did not last night, it should tonight. Snow before midnight and fog by morning. After all, midnight and morning are only an hour apart." At that time they had been on the planet only a few hours. "And here the cycle is normal," said Phelan. "It is normal nowhere else. It is natural for humans and all other creatures to sleep for two hours and to wake for two hours. That is the fundamental cycle. Much of our misbehavior and perversity comes from trying to adapt to the weird day-night cycle of whatever alien world we happened to be borne on. Here within a week we will return to that normal that we never knew before. "Within what kind of a week?" asked Hardy. "Within Bellota's twenty-eighthour week. And do you realize that the projected working week here would be just six and two-thirds hours? I always thought that that was long enough to work anyhow." There were no seas there, only the soda-water lakes that covered a third of the . area. And there were flora and fauna that burlesqued more than they really resembled Earth's and kindred worlds'. The trees were neither deciduous nor evergreen (though Brian Carroll said that they were ever-green), nor palm. They were trees as a cartoonist might draw them. And there were animals that made the whole idea of animals ridiculous. And there was Snuffles.  sibly -- and of sorts. The bear is himself a caricature of animalkind, somehow a giant dog, somehow a shaggy man, an ogre, and also a toy. And Snuffles was a caricature of a bear. Billy Cross tried to explain to them about bears. Billy was an old bear man. "It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tykes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousands of others. Their existence there is not of adult suggestion, but of innate childhood knowledge. "But there is a duality about this boogerman. He is friendly and fascinating as well as frightening. The boogerman is not a story that adults tell to children. It is the only story that children tell to adults who have forgotten it." "But how could you know?" asked Margie Cot. "I had no idea that little boys dreamed of bears. I thought that only girls did. And with us I had come to believe that the bear dreams symbolized grown man in his fundamental aspect, both fascinating and frightening." "To you, Margie, everything symbolizes grown man in his fundamental aspect. Now the boogerman is also philologically interesting, being actually one of the less than two hundred IndoEuropean root words. Though Bog has come to mean God in the Slavic, yet the booger was earlier an animal-man demiurge, and the Sanscrit bhaga is not without this meaning. In the sense of a breaker, a smasher, it is in the Old Irish as bong, and the early Lithuanian as bangs. In the sense of a devourer, it survives in the Greek root phag, and as one who puts to flight it is in the Latin fug. We have, of course, the Welsh bwg, a ghost, and bogey has been used in the meaning of the devil. And we have bugbear, which rounds out the circuit." "So you make God and the Bear and the Devil one," said Georgina. "In many mythologies it was the bear who made the world," said John Hardy. "After that he did nothing distinguished. It was felt by his devotees that he had done enough." Snuffles was not a bear exactly. He was a pseudo-ursine. He was big and clumsy, and bounced around on four legs, and then up so, for he was huge. And he snuffled like some old trackeating train. He was a clown, but he seemed to observe the line that the visitors drew. He did not come really close, though often too close for comfort. He obeyed, or when he did not wish to obey, he pretended to misunderstand. He was the largest animal on Bellota, and there seemed to be only one of him. UWBY DO we call him he?" " asked Brian Carroll, the naturalist. "Only surgery could tell for sure, but it appears that Snuffles has no sex at all. There is no Way I know of that he could reproduce. No wonder there is only one of him; the wonder is that there should be any at all. Where did he come from?" "That could be asked of any creature," said Daniel Phelan, ixphe question is, where is he going? But he shows a certain sophistication in this. For it is only with primitives that toy animals (and he is a toy, you jcnow) are sexed. A modern teddy bear or a toy panda isn't, jjor were the toys in the European tradition except on the fringes (Tartary before the ninth century, Ireland before the fifth) since pre-classical times. But before those times in its regions, and beyond its pale even today, the toy animals are totems and are sexed, exaggeratedly so." "Yes, there is no doubt about it," said Brian. "He does not have even the secondary characteristics of mammal, marsupial, or what you will. But he has characteristics enough of his own." Snuffles was, among other things, a mimic. Should a book be left around, and they were a bookish bunch, he would take it in his forepaws and hold it as to read, and turn the pages, turn them singly and carefully. He could use his padded paws as hands. His claws were retractable and his digits projective. They were paws, or they were claws, or they were hands; and he had four of them. He unscrewed caps and he could use a can opener. He kept the visitors in firewood, once he understood that they had need of it, and that they wanted dry sticks of a certain size. He'd bite the sticks to length, stack them in small ricks, bind them with lianas, and carry them to the fire. He'd fetch water and put it on to boil. And he gathered bellotas by the bushel. Bellota means an acorn, and they had named the planet that from the profusion of edible fruit-nuts that looked very like the acorn. These were a delicacy that became a staple. And Snuffles could talk. All his noises were not alike. There was the "snokle, snokle, snokle" that meant he was in a good humor, as he normally was. There was a "snook, snook" and a "snoof." There were others similar in vocables but widely varied in tone and timbre. Perhaps Billy Cross understood him best, but they all understood him a little. In only one thing did Snuffles become stubborn. He marked off a space, a wild old pile of rocks, and forbade them to enter its circle. He dug a trench around it and he roared and bared footlong fangs if any dared cross the trench. Billy Cross said that Snuffles did this to save face; for Commander John Hardy had previously forbidden Snuffles a certain area, their supply dump and weapons center. Hardy had drawn a line around it with a mattock and made it clear that Snuffles should never cross that line. The creature understood at once, and he went and did likewise. down there for two Earth weeks -- twelve Bellota weeks -- to study the life of the planetoid, to classify, to take samples, tests, notes, and pictures; to hypothesize and to build a basis for theory. But they ventured hardly at all from their original campsite. There was such an amazing variety of detail at hand that it would take many weeks even to begin to classify it. A feature there was the rapidity of enzyme and bacterial action. A good wine could be produced in four hours, and a fungus-cheese made from grub exudations in even less time. And in the new atmosphere thoughts also seemed to ferment rapidly. "Every person makes one major mistake in his life," said John Hardy to them once. "Were it not for that, he would not have to die." 'What?" quizzed Phelan. "Few die violently nowadays. How could all die for a mistake?" "Yet it's a fact. Deaths are not really explained, for all the explanations of medicine. A death will be the result of one single much earlier rashness, of one weakening of the mind or body, or a crippling of the regenerative force. A person will be alive and vital. And one day he will make one mistake. In that moment the person begins to die. But if a man did not make that one mistake, he would not die." "Poppycock," said Daniel Phelan. "I wonder if you know the true meaning of 'poppycock'?" asked Billy Cross. "It is popytalk, opium-talk, the rambling of one under the narcotic. Now the element 'cock' in the word is not (as you would imagine) from either the Norwegian kok, a dung heap, nor from coquarde in the sense that Rabelaise uses it, but rather from -- " "Poppycock," said Phelan again. He disliked Billy Cross's practice of analyzing all words, and he denied his assertion that a man who uses a word without feeling its full value is a dealer in false coinage, in fact a liar. "But if a person dies only by making a mistake, how does an animal die?" asked Margie Cot "Does he also make a mistake?" "He makes the mistake of being an animal and not a man," said Phelan. "There may be no clear line between animal and man," Margie argued. "There is," said Phelan, and three others agreed. "There is not," said Billy Cross. "An animal is paradoxically a creature without an anima -- without a soul," said Phelan. "This comes oddly from me because I also deny it to man in its usual connotation. But there j s a total difference, a line that the animal cannot cross, and did not cross. When we arrive at wherever we are going, he will still be skulking in his den." "Here, at least, it is the opposite of that," said Brian Carroll. "Snuffles sleeps in the open, and it is we who den." campsite, their supply dump and weapons center, there were three blind pockets, grottoes back in the rocks. Billy Cross, Daniel Phelan, and Margie Cot each had one of these, filled with the tools of their specialties. Here they worked and slept. And these were dens. John Hardy himself slept in the weapons center, inside the circle where Snuffles was forbidden. And the hours that he did not sleep he kept guard. Hardy made a fetish of security. When he slept, or briefly wandered about the region, someone else must always take a turn at guard, weapon at hand. There was no relaxation of this, no exception, no chance of a mistake. And Snuffles, the animal, who right out slept in the open ("Is it possible," Brian asked himself, "that I am the only one who notices it? It is possible that it happens?") did not get wet. It rained everywhere on that world. But it did not rain on Snuffles. "The joy of this place is that it is not pat," said Brian Carroll. As previously noted, he hated anything that was pat. "We could be here for years and never see the end of the variety. With the insects there may be as many species as there are individuals. Each one could almost be regarded as a sport, as if there were no standard to go by. The gravity here is cockeyed. Please don't analyze the word, Billy; I doubt myself that it means rooster-eyed. The chemistry gives one a hopeful feeling. It uses the same building blocks as the chemistry elsewhere, but it is as if each of those blocks were just a little off. The lightning is excessive, as though whoever was using it had not yet tired of the novelty; I never tired of the novelty of lightning myself. And when this place ends, it will not have a pat ending. Other globes may turn to lava or cold cinders. Bellota will pop like a soap bubble, or sag like spaghetti, or turn into an exploding world of grasshoppers. But it won't conform. I love Bellota. And I do hate a pat ending." "There is an old precept of 'Know thyself,' " said Georgina Chantal. They talked a lot now, as they were often wakeful, not yet being accustomed to the short days and nights of Bellota. "Its variant is 'Look within.' Look within, but our eyes point outward! The only way we can see our faces is in a mirror or in a picture. Each of us has his mirror, and mine is more often the microscope. But we cannot see ourselves as we are until we see ourselves distorted. That is why Snuffles is also a mirror for all of us here. We can't understand why we're serious until we know why he's funny." "We may be the distortion and he the true image," said Billy Cross. "He lacks jealousy and pomposity and greed and treachery -- all the distortions." "We do not know that he lacks them," said Daniel Phelan. So they talked away the short days and nights on Bellota, and accumulated data. II  pened right in narrow daylight. The phrase was Brian's, who hated a pat phrase. It happened right in the middle of the narrow two-hour Bellota day. All were awake and aware. John Hardy stood in the middle of the weapons center on alert guard with that rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Billy and Daniel and Margaret were at work in their respective dens; and Brian and Georgina, who did not den, were gathering insects at the open lower end of the valley, but they had the center in their sight. There was an unusual flash of lightning, bright by even Bellota standards, and air snapped and crackled. And there was an unusual sound from Snuffles, far removed from his usual "snokle, snokle" talk. And in a moment benignity seemed to drain away from that planet. Snuffles had before made as if to cross the line, and then scooted off, chortling in glee, which is perhaps why the careful John Hardy was not at first alarmed. Then Snuffles charged with a terrifying sound. But Hardy was not tricked entirely; it would be impossible for man or beast to trick him entirely. He had a split second, and was not one to waste time making a decision, and he was incapable of panic. What he did, he did of choice. And if it was a mistake, why, even the shrewdest decision goes into the books as a mistake if it fails. He was fond of Snuffles and he gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him. It was a heavy rifle; a shoulder shot should have turned the animal. If it did not, there would not be time for another shot. It did not, though, and there w as not. Commander John Hardy made one mistake and for that he died. He died uncommonly, and he did not die from the inside out, as meaner men do. It was ghastly, but it was over in an instant. Hardy's head was smashed and his face nearly swiped off. His back was broken and his body almost sheared in two. The great creature, with the foot-long canines and claws like twenty long knives mangled him and crushed him and shook him like a red mop, and then let go. It may be that Brian Carroll realized most quickly the implications. He called to Georgina to come out of the valley onto the plain below, and to come out fast. He realized that the other three still alive would not even be able to corpe out. A that went through Brian Carroll's mind was a tirade of an ancient Confederate general against ancient General Grant, to the effect that the blundering fool had moved into a position that commanded both river and hill and blocked three valley mouths, and it could only be hoped that Grant would move along before he realized his advantage. But Brian was under no such delusion. Snuffles realized his advantage; he occupied the supply dump and weapons center, and commanded the entrances to the three blind pockets that were the dens of Billy Cross and Daniel Phelan and Margie Cot. With one move, Snuffles had killed the leader, cornered three of the others, and cut off the remaining two from base weapons, to be hunted down later. There was nothing unintentional about it. Had he chosen another moment, when another than John Hardy was on guard, then Hardy alive would still somehow have been a threat to him, even weaponless. But, with Hardy dead, all the rest were no match for the animal. Brian and Georgina lingered on the edge of the plain to watch the other three, though they knew that their own lives depended on getting out of there. "Two could get away," said Georgina, "if a third would make a rush for it and force Snuffles into another charge." "But none of them will," said Brian. "The third would die." It was a game, but it couldn't last long. Phelan whimpered and tried to climb the rock wall at t jje blind end of his pocket. Margie cajoled and told Snuffles how good friends they had always been, and wouldn't he let her go? Billy Cross filled his pipe and lit it and sat down to wait it out. Phelan went first, and he died like a craven. But no one, not sure how he himself might die, should hold that overly against a man. Snuffles thundered in, cut him down in the middle of a scream, and rushed back to his commanding spot in the middle of the weapons center. Margie spread out her hands and began to cry, softly, not really in terror, when he attacked. The pseudo-bear broke her neck, but with a blow that was almost gentle in comparison with the others, and he scurried again to the center. And Billy Cross puffed on his pipe. "I hate to go like this, Snuff, old boy. In fact, I hate to go at all. If I made a mistake to die for, it was in being such a pleasant, trusting fellow. I wonder if you ever noticed, Snuff, what a fine, upstanding fellow I really am?" And that was the last thing Billy Cross ever said, for the big animal struck him dead with one tearing blow. And the smoke still drifted in the air from Billy's pipe. N U F F L E S coming out of the valley after the other two, for that clumsy animal could move. They had a start on him, Brian and Georgina had, of a hundred yards. And soon their terror subsided to halfterror as they realized that the shoulder-shot bear animal could not catch them till they were exhausted. In a wild run, they could even increase their lead over him. But they would tire soon and they did not know when he would tire. He had herded them away from the campsite and the weapons. And they were trapped with him on a small planet. Till day's end, and through the night, and next day (maybe five hours in all) he followed them until they could hardly keep going. Then they lost him, but in the dark did not know if he was close or not. And at dawn they saw him sitting up and watching them from a quarter of a mile away. But now the adversaries rested and watched. The animal may have stiffened up from his shot. The two humans were so weary that they did not intend to run on again till the last moment. "Do you think there is any chance that it was all a sudden fury and that he may become friendly again?" Georgina asked Brian. "It was not a sudden fury. It was a series of very calculated moves." "Do you think we could skirt around and beat him back to the weapons center?" "No. He has chosen a spot where he can see for miles. And he has the interceptor's advantage -- any angle we take has to be longer than his. We can't beat him back and he knows it." "Do you think he knows that the weapons are weapons?" "Yes." "And that all our signal equipment is left at the center and that we can't communicate?" "Yes." "Do you think he's smarter that we are?" "He was smarter in selecting his role. It is better to be the hunter than the hunted. But it isn't unheard of for the hunted to outsmart the hunter." "Brian, do you think you would have died as badly as Daniel or as well as Billy?" "No. No to both." "I was always jealous of Margie, but I loved her at the end. She didn't scream. She didn't act scared. Brian, what will happen to us now?" "Possibly we will be saved in the nick of time by the Marines." "I didn't know they had them any more. Oh, you mean the ship. But that's still a week away, Earth time. Do you think Snuffles knows it is to come back for us?" "Yes, he knows. I'm sure of that." "Do you think he knows when it will come?" "Yes, I have the feeling that he knows that too." "But will he be able to catch us before then?" "I believe that all parties concerned will play out the contest with one eye on the clock."  a trick. At sundown of the short day, he would give a roar and come at them. And they would have to start their flight just as the dark commenced. They ran more noisily than he and he would always be able to follow them; but they could never be sure in the dark that he was following, or how closely. They would have to go at top panting, gasping, thumping speed for an hour and a half; then they would ease off for a little in the half hour before dawn. And in the daytime one of them had to watch while the other slept. But Snuffles could sleep as he would, and they were never able to slip away without his waking instantly. Moreover, he seemed to herd them through the fertile belt on their night runs and let them rest on the barrens in the daytime. jt wasn't that food was really scarce; it was that it could only be gathered during time taken from flight and sleep and guard duty. They also came on a quantity of red fruit that had a weakening and dizzying effect on them, yet they could hardly leave it alone. There was a sort of bean sprout that had the same effect, and a nut, and a cereal grass whose seed they winnowed with their hands as they went along. 'This is a narcotic belt," said Brian. "I wish we had the time to study it longer, and yet we may get all too much of studying it. We have no idea how far it goes, and this method of testing its products on ourselves may be an effective one, but dangerous." From that time on, they were under the influence of the narcotics. They dreamed vividly while awake and walking. And they began to suffer hallucinations which they could not distinguish from reality. It was only a Bellota day or so after their dreaming began that Brian Carrol felt that the mind of Snuffles was speaking to him. Carroll was an intelligent amateur in that field and he put it to the tests; there are valid tests for it. And he concluded that it was hallucination and not telepathy. Still (and he could see it coming) there would be a time when he would accept his hallucination and believe that the ursine was talking to him. And that would signal that he was crazy and no longer able to evade death there. Carroll renounced (while he still had his wits) his future belief in the nonsense, just as a man put to torture may renounce anything he concedes or confesses or denies under duress. V#"ET, whatever frame it was placed in, Snuffles talked to him from a distance. "Why do you think me a bear because I am in a bear skin? I do not think you a man, though you are in a man skin. You may be a little less. And why do you believe you will die more bravely than Daniel? The longer you run, the meaner will be your death. And you still do not know who I am?" "No," said Brian Carroll aloud. "No what?" asked Georgina Chantal. "It seems that the bear is talking to me, that he has entered my mind." "Me also. Could it be, or is it the narcotic fruit?" "It couldn't be. It is hallucination brought on by the narcotics, and tiredness from travel, and lack of sleep -- and our shock at seeing our friends killed by a toy turned into a monster. There are tests to distinguish telepathic reception from hallucination: objective corroboration, impossible at this time (with Snuffles in his present mood) and probably impossible at any time; sentient parallelism -- surely uncertain, for I have more in common with pseudo-ursine; circumstantial validity and point-for-point clarity -- this is negative, for I know myself to be fevered and confused and my senses unreliable in other matters. By every test that can be made, the indication is that it is not telepathy, that it is hallucination." "But there isn't any way to be sure, is there, Brian?" "None, Georgina; no more than I can prove that it is not a troup of Boy Scouts around a campfire that is causing pain and burning in my gullet, that it is really the narcotic fruit or something else I have eaten conspiring with my weariness and apprehension to discomfort me. I cannot prove it is not Boy Scouts and I cannot prove it is not telepathy, but I consider both unlikely." "I don't think it is unlikely at all, Brian. I think that Snuffles is talking to me. When you get a little nuttier and tireder, then you'll believe it too." "Oh, yes -- I'll believe it then -- but it won't be true." "It won't matter if it's true or not. Snuffles will have gained his point. Do you know that Snuffles is king of this world?" "No. What are you talking about?" "He just told me he was. He told me that if I would help him catch you, he would let me go. But I won't do it. I have become fond of you, Brian. Did you know that I never did like men before?" "Yes. You were called the iceberg." "But now I like you very much." "You have no one else left to like." "It isn't that. It's the mood I'm in. And I won't help Snuffles catch you unless he gives me very much better reasons for it." Tamn the girl! If she believed-Snuffles talked to her, then for all practical purposes he did And, however the idea of a trade for her life had been implantec in her mind, it would grow there. Now Snuffles talked to Brian Carroll again, and it was somehow a waste of time to intone the formality that it was hallucination only. "You still do not know what I am, but you will have to learn it before you die. Hardy knew it at the last minute. Cross guessed it from the first. Phelan still isn't sure. He goes about and looks back at his body lying there, and be still isn't sure. Some people are very hard to convince. But the girl knew it and she spread out her hands." In his fever, that was the way the bear animal talked to him. They ate leaves now and buds. They would have no more of the narcotic fruits even if they had to starve. But narcosis left them slowly, and the pursuit of them tightened. It was just at sunset one day that disaster struck at Brian. The bear had near hypnotized him into immobility, talking inside his head. Georgina had started on before him and repeatedly called for him to follow, but for some reason he loitered. When Snuffles made his sudden sundown charge, there seemed no escaping him. Brian was trapped on a rim-rock. Georgina had already taken a winding path to the plain below. Brian hesitated, then held his ground for the bruin's charge. He believed that he could draw Snuffles on, and then break to the left or the right at the last instant, and perhaps the animal would plunge over the cliff. But old Snuff modified but did not halt his charge at the last minute. He came in bottom-side first, like an elephant sliding bases, and he knocked Brian off the cliff. There are few really subjective accounts of dying, since most who die do not live to tell about it. But the way it goes is this: First one hangs in space; then he is charged by the madly rising ground armed with trees and rocks and weapons. After that is a painful sleep, and much later a dazed wakening. Ill that was sure, and roughly, though at a slow rate of speed. Perhaps that is the normal way for people to travel after they are dead. He was hung from the middle in an odd doubled-up manner, and seemed supported and borne along by something of a boatlike motion, yet of a certain resilience and strength that was more living than even a boat. It had a rough softness, this thing, and a pleasant fragrance. But, though it was bright morning now, it was hard to get a good look at the thing with which he was in contact. All he could see was grass flowing slowly by, and heels. Heels? What was this all about? Heels and backs of calves, no more. He was being carried, carried slung like a sack over her shoulder by Georgina. For the "Did any of you ever make a world? I tell you that there are at once. And there can be no such thing as a bad world, since each of them is a triumph. Whether it was that I made the others and I forgot them is only a premise; or whether I will make them in the future, and they are only now talked of out of their proper time. But some of your own mythologies indicate that I made your own. "I would tell you more, only you would not understand it. But after I have conserved your matter, then you will know all these things." me today," said Georgina Chantal. "Is he also cranky with you?" "Yes," said Brian Carroll. "He says that he made Bellota. Did he tell you that too? Do you believe it?" "He told me. I do not believe it. We are delirious. Snuffles cannot communicate." "You keep saying that, but you aren't sure. He told me that when he chews us up he will take a piece of me and a piece of you and chew them together and make a new thing, since we are belatedly taken with each other. Isn't that nice?" "How cozy." "I wonder why he made the grass so sharp, though. There is no reason for it to be like that." "Why, and what?" "Snuffles. Why did he make the grass so sharp? My shoes are "Georgina hold onto what's left of your mind. Snuffles did not make the grass or anything else. He is only an animal, and we are sick and walking in delirium." So they walked on a while, for evening had come. Then the voice of Snuffles came again inside the head of Brian. "How was I to know that the grass should not be sharp? Are not all pointed things sharp? Who would have guessed that it should be soft? If you had told me gently, and without shaming me, I would have changed it at once. Now I will not. Let it wound you!" So they lived with it, and continued on for several short days and nights. "Brian, do you think that Snuffles knows the world is round?" "If he made it, he must know it," "Oh, yes, I had forgotten." "Dammit, girl, I was being ironic! And you are now quite nutty, and I hardly less so. Of course he didn't make it. And of course he doesn't know that it's round. He's only an animal." "Then we have an advantage back again." 'Yes. I'd have noticed it before if I hadn't been so confused. We are more than halfway around the little planet. He is no longer between us and our weapons center, but he behaves as though he thought he was. We have no more than forty miles to go to it. We will step up our pace, though gradually. Our old camp valley is prominent enough so that we could recognize it within several miles either way, and we can navigate that close. And if he seems to say in your mind that he is onto our trick, do not believe him. The animal does not really talk to our minds."  creased. "It isn't a narcotic belt" said Brian. "It is a narcotic season on all Bellota -- a builtin saturnalia. But we have not been able to enjoy the carnival." "Snuffles shows up well as a carnival king, though, don't you think? It is easier to believe in time of carnival that he made the cosmos. I went to the big carnival once in Nola when I was a little girl. There was a big bear wearing a crown on one of the floats, and I believe that he was king of the carnival. It wasn't an ordinary bear. I am sure now that it represented Snuffles, though I was only six years old when I saw it. Do you think that Snuffles' explanation of the law of gravity here is better than Phelan's?" "More easily understandable at least than the corollary, and probably more honest. I always thought that the corollary also embraced a simple mathematical error and that Phelan stuck to it out of perversity." "It is one thing to stick to an error. It is another to build a world to conform to it. Brian, do you know what hour it is?" "It is the three hundred and twelfth since we were set down." "And they return for us at the three hundred and thirty-sixth. We will be back at our campsite and in control by then, won't we?" "If we are ever to make it back and be in control, we should make it by then. Are you tired, Georgina?" "No. I will never again be tired. I have been walking in a dream too long for that. But I never felt more pleasurable than now. I look down at my feet which are a sorry mess, but they don't seem to be my feet. Only a little while ago I felt sorry for a girl in such a state, and then I came to half realize that the girl was me. But the realization didn't carry a lot of conviction. It doesn't seem like me." "I feel disembodied myself. thing of the pleasant fragrance was Georgina Chantal. She set him down then. It was a very rough valley they were in, and he saw that they had traveled perhaps four miles from the base of the rim-rock; and Snuffles had settled down in the morning light a quarter of a mile behind them. "Georgina, did you carry me all night?" "Yes." "How could you?" "I changed shoulders sometimes. And you aren't very heavy. This is only a halfgravity planet. Besides, I'm very strong. I could have carried you even on Earth." "Why wasn't I killed by the fall?" "Snuffles says he isn't ready to kill you yet, that he could kill you any time he wanted to with the lightning or rock or poison berry. But you did hit terribly hard. I was surprised to be able to pick you up in one piece. And now Snuffles says that I have lost my last chance." "How?" "Because I carried you away from him before he could get down the cliff in the dark. Now he says he will kill me too." "Snuff is inconsistent. If he could kill me any instant with the lightning, why would he be angered if you carried me away from him?" the world, he had begun to guess "I thought of that too. But says he has his own reasons. And that lightning -- do you know that it doesn't lighten all the time everywhere on Bellota? Only in a big circle around Snuffles, as a tribute to him. I've noticed myself that when we get a big lead over him, we almost move clear out of the lightning sphere." "Georgina, that animal doesn't really talk to us. It is only our imaginations. It is not accurate to so personify it." "It may not be accurate, but if that isn't talk he puts out, then I don't know talk. And a lot of his talk he makes come true. But I don't care if he does kill me for saving you. I'm silly over you now." "We are both of us silly, Georgina, from the condition we are in. But he can't talk to us. He's only an animal run amok. If it were anything else, it would mean that much of what we know is not so." one sunny afternoon a couple of Bellota days later. He was dozing and Georgina was on guard when Snuffles began to talk inside his head. "You insult me that you do not recognize my identity. When Hardy said that in many mythologies it was the Bear who made who I was. I am the creator and l made the world. I have heard that there are other worlds besides Bellota, and I am not sure whether I made them or not. But if they are there, I must have made them. They could not have made themselves. And this I did make. "It isn't an easy thing, or all # f you would have made them, and you have not. And there is pride in creation that you could not understand. You said that Bellota was made for fun. It was not made for fun. I am the only one who knows why it was made, for I made it. And it is not a little planet; it is a grand planet. I waited for you to confess your error and be amazed at it. Since you did not, you will have to die. I made you, so I can kill you if I like. I must have made you, since I made all. And if I did not, then I made other things, red squirrels and white birds. "You have no idea of the achievement itself. I had very little to work with and no model or plans or previous experience. And I made mistakes. I would be the last to deny that. I miscalculated the gravity, a simple mathematical error that anyone could make. The planet is too small for the gravity, but I had already embodied the calculated gravity in other works that I did not choose to undo, and I had no material to make a larger planet. So what I have made I have made, and it will continue so. An error, once it is embodied, becomes a new truth. "You may wonder why my birds have hair. I will confess it, I did not know how to make feathers, nor could you without template or typus. And you are puzzled that my butterflies sting and my hornets do not? But how was I to know that those fearfully colored monsters should have been harmless? It ill befits one who has never made even the smallest -- but why do I try to explain this to you? "You wonder if I am talking to you or if it is only a delusion of your mind. What is the difference? How could there be anything in your mind if I did not put it there? And do not be afraid of dying. Remember that nothing is lost. When I have the pieces of you, I will use them to make other things. That is the law of conservation of matter as I understand it. "But do you know that the one thing desired by all is really praise? It is the impelling force, and a creator needs this more than anyone. Things and beings are made to give praise, and if they do not, they are destroyed again. You had every opportunity to give it, and instead you jeered. But I don't believe that this comical old body that I observe will carry me much farther." "Snuffles is trying to talk to us." "Yes, I feel him. No, dammit, Georgina, we will not give in to that nonsense. Snuffles is only a wounded old bear that is trailing us. But our hallucination is coming again. It will take a lot of theory to cover a dual hallucination." "Hush, I want to hear what he says." Then Snuffles began to talk inside the heads of the two of them. "If you know and do not tell me, then you are guilty of a peculiar affront. A maker cannot remember everything, and I had forgotten some of the things that I had made before. But we are coming on a new world now that is very like Bellota. Can it be that I have only repeated myself, and that I did not improve each time? These hills here I made once before. If you know, then you must tell me now. It may be that I cannot wait to chew your brains to find out about it. How will I ever make a better world if I make them all alike?" "He has forgotten that he made it round, Brian." "Georgina, he did not make anything. It is our own minds trying to reassure us that he does not know we are ahead of him and going toward our weapons," "But how do we both hear the same thing if he isn't talking to us?" "I don't know. But I prefer it the way it is. I never did like easy answers." when they were within sight of their original valley; and if they moved at full speed through the night, they should reac their campsite very soon after dawn. "But the weariness is begi ning to creep up through the narcosis," said Brian. "Now I'm desiring the effect that we tried to avoid before." "But what has happened?" "I believe that the narcoticl period of the planet is over. Thi carnival is coming to an end." "Do you know something, Brian? We did not have to go around the world at all. At any time we could have separated and outmaneuvered him. He could not have intercepted both of us going toward the weapons pile if we went different ways. But we could not bear to part." "That is a woman's explanation." "Well, let's see you find another one. You didn't want to be parted from me, did you, Brian?" "No, I didn't." It was a rough, short night, U F F L E S but it would be the last. They moved in the agony of a cosmic hangover. "I've become addicted," said Brian, "and the fruit has lost its numbing properties. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so tired." "I'd carry you again if I weren't collapsing myself." "Dammit, you couldn't! You're only a girl!" "I am not only a girl! Nobody is only an anything. Our trouble here may have started with your thinking that Snuffles was only an animal, and he read your thoughts and was insulted." "He did not read my thoughts. He is only an animal. And I will shoot his fuzzy hide full of holes when we get to our campsite. Let's keep on with it and not take any chances of his catching or passing us in the dark." "How could Phelan's corollary apply to this planet and no other when he had never been here then?" "Because, as I often suspected, Phelan had a touch of the joker in him and he composed it sardonically." "Then he made it for fun. And do you still think that Bellota was made for fun?" "The fun has developed a grotesque side to it. I am afraid I will have to put an end to a part of that fun. The dark is coming, and there is our campsite, and we are in the clear. I'll make it before I drop if I have to bust a lung. There's an elephant gu n with a blaster attachment that I'll take to that fur-coated phony. We're going to have bear steak for breakfast." He had reached the wobbly state, but he still ran. He was inside the circle and at the gun stack, when a roar like double thunder froze his ears and his entrails. He leaped back, fell, rolled, crawled, snaked his way out of reach; and the sudden shock of it bewildered him. And there was Snuffles sitting in the middle of the supply dump and smoking the pipe of Billy Cross. And when the words rattled inside Brian's head again, how could he be sure that it was hallucination and not the bear talking to him? "You thought that I had forgotten that Bellota was round? If you knew how much trouble I had making it as round as it is, you would know that I could never forget it." Georgina came up, but fell to her knees in despair when she saw that Snuffles was there ahead of them. "I can't run any more, Brian, . a nd I know that you can't. I am down and I can never get up again. How soon will they get here?" "The Marines?" "Yes, the ship." "Too late to help us. I used to wish they would be late just once. I am getting that wish, but it isn't as amusing as I anticipated." pipe then, as a man would; and laid it carefully on a rock. Then he came out and killed them: Georgina, the friendly iceberg, and Brian, who did hate a pat ending. And Snuffes was still king of Bellota. in part: "No explanation of the fact that no attempt seems to have been made to use the weapons, though two of the party were killed nearly a week later than the others. All were mangled by the huge pseudo-ursine which seems to have run amok from eating the local fruit, seasonally narcotic. Impossible to capture animal without unwarranted delay of takeoff time. Gravitational incongruity must await fuller classification of data." made embodied certain improvements, and he did correct the gravity error, but it still contained many elements of the grotesque. Perfection is a very long, very hard road... P away from San Francisco over two months. The airtaxi left him at his place, he showered and shaved. Then he decided he would walk, down through Chinatown and over into North Beach, to Beth's apartment. It was a warm Saturday afternoon and he unbuttoned his dacron blazer a block or so into j Chinatown. He smiled as he wandered by the bright restaurants and shops, the rows of ivory Buddhas in window after window. On one corner Pendleton stopped and took a deep breath, watching a scattering of tourists taking pictures of each other. Someone had lost a half dozen fortune cookies on the sidewalk and they crackled and spread fragments and fortunes as people passed. While he was waiting for a signal to change, three small Chinese boys charged a fourth who had ducked around Pendleton. They all ran around the corner and Pendleton looked after them. There was an old curio and toy shop there. He went toward its streaked window, trying to identify the objects. Some kind of procession of tin soldiers made up the main display. The door of the shop opened and an old man with a flared white beard came out. His dark suit hung loose on him and his tie was coming untied as he hurried away. The old man brushed by Pendleton, nudging him. "Many pardons," he said, cutting across the street. He ran downhill, weaving a little, and into an alley. The bells over the toy shop door rattled again. "Stop, thief!" shouted the fat Chinese, who came running up to Pendleton. The man shouted again and stopped on the corner, his hands on his hips, looking. Pendleton crossed the street and turned down the alley the old man had used. This would cut off a block of the way to Beth's. He had kept quiet about the thief because he didn't want to get involved in a lot of delaying questioning. saw an arm dangling out of a garbage can. Pendleton blinked and approached the shadowed area around the can. He flipped the lid up and the coat sleeve that had been tangled on the can edge slipped free and dropped into the can. If the old man was wandering around naked, they shouldn't have much trouble catching him. Pendleton liked the pre-quake apartment house Beth lived in. In almost any weather he liked to see its narrow brown wood front waiting there in the middle of the block. He smiled as a big blue-gray gull flew low overhead and then circled up and away behind Beth's building. Pendleton took the rough steps in twos and threes and swung at Beth's bell. There was a folded note for him glued on her mail box lid with Scotch tape. It told him she might be delayed a bit and to get her keys from under the rubber-plant pot on the porch and let himself in. He did that, thinking again that Beth's notes always looked as though she wrote them on horseback. Upstairs he dropped her keys on the small mantle over the  small real fireplace. Her bedI room door was slightly open. Just as he noticed this, Beth called out to him. "I hope that's you, Ben?" she said from her room. "Where'll I put the ice, lady?" I he said. "You're supposed to be out." "Welcome back. I just got here and I had to change so I left the keys down there in case you got here while I was changing. How was New York?" "Okay, but I'm glad I'm with the agency out here. How'd you get in without keys?" He sat down in the soft tan sofachair j he'd given her. "I have a key to the kitchen way. Is the show all right now?" j "I guess we fixed it for a while. How are you?" "Fine. And, hey, I have a good part in Alex' new play. It just happened and I couldn't write." "You have lousy handwriting, you know," Pendleton called. Grinning, he got out a cigarette and reached into his coat pocket for a book of matches. Something jabbed into the palm of his hand. "It's because I'm so intense," Beth said, near her bedroom door. Pendleton winced and pulled a small toy Chinese junk out of the pocket. The price stamp was still on the bottom of the boat, # cents. The old man must have dropped it in his pocket when he nudged him. Beth came up behind him. "It's warm in here. Give me your coat. I have a whole new concept about making martinis. This fellow in Actors' Lab told me. You do it with Zen." Her hands rested on Pendleton's shoulders. "I'll be damned," he said, rubbing his palm with the boat as he stood. Beth slid her arms over his shoulders and locked her hands on his chest. "What's that, Ben?" Pendleton turned around in her hold. He tapped her tanned nose with the toy boat and told her about it. "I suppose I should take it back," he said finally. Beth laughed. "Makes you a receiver of stolen goods." She took the toy boat and walked to the fireplace. She put it next to her keys and turned to him. She was wearing a light blue dress with a flared skirt. No stockings, flat black shoes. She'd cut her blonde hair short since he'd seen her last. 'Welcome back," she said, smiling. A light wind was starting up, tapping windows with tree branches, as Pendleton let himself into Beth's darkening apartment. He flipped the light switch on and started for the tan sofa chair, jiggling the keys in his hand. The bedroom door slammed. "You in there?" Pendleton called. Her note said she'd gone out for some forgotten groceries. Pendleton opened the bedroom door and turned on the lights. The window beyond Beth's low, blue-covered bed was open and the wind was flapping the curtains against her dressing table. A strong flap caught a lipstick and flipped it into the thick rug. Edging around the bed, Pendleton closed the window and picked up the lipstick. He left the bedroom door a bit open and went back to the chair. There was a paper back by Eisenstein on the coffee table and he picked that up and read down the contents page. The wind got stronger and parts of the old building creaked, first something down under him, then something way up and to the right. Now and then there would be a bang from out in back. Pendleton dropped the book and got down on his knees in front of the fireplace and kindled a fire. As the fire took hold, bright sparks popped out into the room. Something started tapping on the window behind Pendleton's chair. At last, in a lull between creaking and banging, he became aware of a tapping. He looked at the window and the early night sky. The tapping went on. There was a gray cat sitting on the sill outside. The cat was tangled up in an orange and blue bead necklace. "Lonely out there," Pendleton said. He didn't much like cats, but this one looked sad. He opened the window and the cat jumped in, the necklace falling free and clattering against the wall. "We'll see if maybe Beth's got something around to give to wandering cats." Pendleton reached out to pick up the cat. Sputtering, the animal raked at his fingers and dived between his legs. Pendleton spun and saw the cat scoot through the open bedroom door. "Hey, you little bastard, you'll knock over things." He was two steps from the door when it slammed and locked. Pendleton stopped, wondering how the animal had managed to bang into the door hard enough to close it. He didn't think the cat should stay in there and anyway Beth would want to get in when she got home. He'd pick the lock. Crouching, he reached for the knob. Something clicked and the door swung in. He recognized Beth's terry robe and he looked up and saw her face, very pale. "Okay," she said. "I guess I was too cute with the key bits. Go away, Ben, and leave me alone. Please?" 'What's the matter?" He was still squatting and her stepping forward sent him over. "Just go away, Ben. Please, now." She brushed by him and sat in a bucket chair, putting both bare feet down hard on the floor. Ben got himself up. "You drunk?" thought if you were sitting out here and I showed up in the bedroom, you'd think I came in the back way. Or that I was already in there and just hadn't heard you." She bit her thumb. "Just another trick I wanted to try." "What are you talking about?" He bent and scooped up the bead necklace. "Go away. That's all." "Well, why?" He twisted the string of beads around his knuckles. "Somebody else?" "Yes. Alex." She smiled. "Alex? That fruiter who runs the Actors' Lab." The string broke and beads splattered away from him. Three landed in the fire. "Or maybe my Uncle Russ. Did you know we lived with with him for three years when I was a kid and I was always having odd fevers and things? He had some kind of quack x-ray business." Pendleton took Beth's shoulders. "You're sick, is that it?" "No. Go away, Ben." 'Well, what is it?" Beth sighed, annoyed. "You know about Method. You have to feel the parts, live them." "Sure." Beth shrugged her shoulders until Pendleton let go. "One weekend afternoon -- oh, about two or three weeks after the agency sent you off -- I was here trying to be an old lady. For an exercise at the Lab. And I was." Pendleton blinked at her still pale fact. "That's swell, Beth. A guy likes to know what his fiancee is up to while he's away." "I was an old lady." She stood with her body thrust almost against him. "See? I changed." He backed a little. "How about a drink?" "Don't you get it, Ben? How the hell do you think I just came in?" "The back way." Pendleton decided to try a drink on her and then find out who her doctor was these days. "I was the cat. Now you know about it and can go away, Ben." She let herself fall to the floor and she huddled there, crying. "How long have you had this idea?" He knelt beside her, running one hand over her back. "You know who put that silly damn boat in your pocket?" she asked. "Sure. You were that little old man." Beth rolled and sat up, her legs tangled in the robe. She took a deep breath. "Listen, Ben. I got a kick out of changing into different kinds of people. It was a help in my work ab the Actors' Lab. Then I got the idea it would be fun to try other things. Animals, chairs, tables. One rainy night I was a footstool until it was time to go to bed." "I was a tea kettle as a boy. Stop kidding." "I don't know, Ben. It gets sort of vacant all around when you're away somewhere. I had this feeling that I wanted to see if I could just step into a store or someplace and try to swipe something. Anything." A starting to shake. He put his arms around Beth. "That was you, then, taking junk from an old Chinese." "I could change, you see, and take things as all sorts of odd characters. If I was spotted and followed, I'd try to duck in an alley or a doorway and change again. The clothes are extra. Sometimes I could hide clothes in a lot. Most of the time, though, I'd have to change into something new. A bird, a cat. Then I'd carry what I had stolen in my beak or around my neck. She laughed softly. "Once I copped an umbrella and changed into a big dog and went off with it in my mouth." She twisted slightly in his arms. "I'm sorry. It's all sort of odd and silly. I do it." "Well, why?" "I don't know." "Beth?" He inched up, lifting her with him. "Yes?" She let him sit her in the sofa chair. "You have to go see somebody. You have to stop." She stiffened. "If it was as simple as insanity, I would." "Please, Beth." He wandered to the fireplace and threw in more wood. "The stealing does bother me. I think the changing is good. I can use it to really go someplace in my acting career. Quit the secretary business altogether. I actually changed to an old woman for one of Alex's one-acters. He thought I'd just done a good job of makeup. I don't believe I want to simply stop, Ben." "You have to!" "Don't start shouting commands." Pendleton sat across from her on the sofa. "Will you promise to start seeing somebody? Maybe I can find out about a good man. Promise you'll see him." j "You going to ask around? I Why don't you do a TV spot? We are happy to announce that Beth Gershwin is daffy.' " "Relax, Beth. You decide I what you want to do. I won't j talk to anybody." Beth moved to the window, j The wind had died. "I don't  know, Ben." "Let it rest. Let's have the drink." He came to her side. "I think I'd like to be alone for a while." "I'd like to stay." "I'd like you to go. Please." "Beth." "Go on, Ben." She stared at him, then walked into her bed; room. She didn't close the door and he followed. Her robe was spread-eagled on the bed. Pendleton looked around the room. Before, there had been one carved stool at the vanity table. Now there were two. Pendleton left the apartment and ran down the hall, taking short, shallow breaths. But he couldn't just leave her. He bit his lip and went back through the still open door. "Come on, Beth. Don't be stubborn," he said into the bedroom, watching the two stools. He waited an hour. Then he turned off the lights and started to leave. Going out this time, he stepped on one of the wooden beads and almost fell onto the coffee table. Pendleton slammed Beth's door and went out into the clear night. If she could be stubborn, so could he. for she called him to apologize. She'd got him at the agency. He didn't stay in his apartment much. He kept talking to himself if he did. You could see the street from the little Italian restaurant they'd agreed to meet in. Pendleton sat at a round table close to the wide window and watched for Beth. There was a slight haze in the afternoon air and most of the secretaries that passed were coatless. Beth started smiling a quarter of a block from him. She was in a light cotton dress, weaving in and out of the noontime pedestrians. "Nice day," Pendleton said, standing. Beth smiled and sat down. "I noticed that right off." They ordered and Pendleton said, "How've you been?" "Great." She clasped her hands together on the checkered table top. "You were right, Ben. I'm sorry I was mean." Pendleton moved his glass of water three inches. "Good." "I've started seeing a very highly recommended analyst. Things are starting to look up. I haven't even had an impulse to filch anything in days." The food arrived. "It'll take time." "I have a great part in Alex's next play. It's really a challenge. By Ionesco. Being able to change will help." Pendleton set his fork down. "Huh?" "I tried changing into the character last night. It came off fine." "What are you seeing a psychiatrist for, then?" he asked, his voice low. "So I won't steal things any more." He held the edge of the table for a minute, not meeting her eyes. Finally he said, "I see. Well, that's fine, Beth. How've things been at work?" Beth grinned and told him. and the trees had started scattering dry leaves into the wind. On a sharp weekend afterin the produce district before driving over to Beth's. There was a coffee shop open and Pendleton thought about crossing over for a cup of coffee. The whitewashed door of the place shot open and a fat woman with an orange-fringed shawl came out. She was carrying something wrapped up in a paper napkin. She glanced at Pendleton, hesitated a second and then went running off toward a closed warehouse. By the time she reached it, the shortorder cook was on the street looking after her. He threw a gesture after her and went back inside. Pendleton shivered once slightly. He started walking for his car and a block from it he found himself running. He got to Beth's place ahead of the approaching dusk. The downstairs door wasn't locked, but Beth's apartment door didn't open when he tried it. Pendleton grunted, slapping his pockets for something to pick the lock with. The door opened. Beth, in capris and a striped sweater, looked out at him, her head tilted slightly to one side. "Did I hear applause? You're early." "You know why I'm here early." He pushed into the room. "I thought you were better. What the hell were you doing down there?" "Where? What's the matter?" She backed across the rug to the fireplace. A small fire was going and she turned to warm her hands at it. "I just saw you steal something from that diner. Silverware maybe. You want me to search the place?" Facing him, her lips hardly parted, Beth said, "I should think you would trust me, being we love each other and all. I was rehearsing until a half hour ago and Alex dropped me off. I've been here since then." Pendleton's hands fell to his sides. "Well, nothing I guess is wrong. I'm just jumpy. This changing thing bothers me." Beth reached out and patted his arm. "It's okay, Ben?" "Yeah." He sat down in the tan chair and looked up at her. "Want to eat here tonight, by the fire? I'll have the Flying Something deliver food." "Good. And send out for a bottle or two." Beth bent and kissed him. "Trust me again?" He brushed at her hair and nodded. much wood into the fireplace and a stick snapped out onto the rug. He gingerly picked up the stick and poked it back into the flames. He went back to the low sofa Beth was on. He found his glass in the dark and refilled it from the pitcher. Beth reached out with one bare foot and stroked the side of his head. She had put on a dark blue dress with several stiff lace petticoats and whenever he tried to touch her she made crackling sounds. "You're really a nice fellow," Beth said, finding his ear with her toe. "So are you," he said, finishing his drink. "Maybe we should go ahead and get married." Ben agreed and poured fresh drinks. "Ben?" "Yeah?" "I'm sorry." She was crying. "What is it?" "It was me this afternoon. I have been doing those things. I never went to any highly recommended man at all." Pendleton felt tolerant. "So what? Things will work out somehow." Ben." Pendleton thought he heard an odd quaver in her voice. "You're not onstage now, kid. Save the phony touches." Her leg swung round, just missing his head, and she stood up. "That's your trouble. You're totally incapable of comprehending." "I comprehend you. You're loony and a liar." Beth slapped him. "It'll be simpler if I stop being me!" Pendleton had somehow gotten his arm stuck under the sofa. "Take it easy." He was aware of a rustling sound and when he got loose and came up he saw Beth naked by the window for an instant. As he looked she changed. Then there were two tan sofa chairs in the room. Pendleton called Beth's name over and over, but she wouldn't come back. It got cold in the apartment after a time and he threw all the wood he could find in the fire. He crawled over to the martini pitcher and drank from it. He noticed that some sticks had fallen out and landed in the tangle of petticoats Beth had left and he smiled at the disorder of everything and put his head back against the sofa. Petticoats crackling woke him. Even before he got his head up very high in the room, he was coughing. The room was turning bright, sparkling orange. "Beth!" he said. "Beth!" There were still the two tan sofa chairs. "Beth, sober up now! Come on, change! We've got to get out!" Nothing happened. Pendleton looked at the chairs a moment. The one on the left. He grabbed it up and wavered to the apartment door. To make sure, hed have to come up for the other one. For several minutes it seemed the chair would stay wedged in the doorway. It came free finally and he went back with it and tumbled and twisted down the stairs. night outside. The engines were already there. The firemen were heading for the building. Spray fell back across the street where Pendleton took the chair. "Beth, please," he said in a low voice. "Change now." He tried to go get the other chair, to be sure, but they wouldn't let him. He fell into the one he'd picked and began crying softly. The sirens stopped. Before he let the ambulance people look at him, he insisted that the chair be looked after. No trace of Beth was found and Pendleton couldn't explain what had happened. After they let him go, he had the chair sent to his apartment. He put it very carefully in the living room by the liquor cabinet and sat down near it to wait. You take the you give IF has become more and more a factor in the science fiction field. The line-up for # already includes such authors asClifford Simak, Robert Bloch, Fred Pohl, Philip Jose Farmer, Ray Russell and many more of your favorites, that are certainly favorites of the person you plan to give this most welcome gift. A special card will announce your gift to the lucky recipient and each issue will remind him of your thoughtfulness. (These special low prices are good until December I #th, (# issues) I Year or #st Subscription  Subscription IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Name Address... state City Price I year # years Price Sign Card Sign Card Name Address City State. I year # years Price... Sign Card Name , Address City State I year # years Price. Sign Card Name Address City .' State I year # years Price Sign Card Name Address City by Robert A. Heinlein. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N. Y., # is that once he explores a situation, not much is left to be said. His prototypes are up-to-theminute masterworks. Take, for example, the famous time travel paradox, "By His Bootstraps." In # years I haven't seen its equal. Likewise for the frightening classic from Galaxy, "Year of the Jackpot." Ditto again for the # "Goldfish Bowl." Of the more recent items, a startler is the tongue-in-cheek Ladies-HomeJournal-type approach of "The Menace from Earth," set in a wildly imaginative alien environment. The minor stories pull down the batting average, but only a little. Rating: i # Kingsley Amis. Harcourt, Brace  Co., New York, # several successful mainstream Stats novels, is sufficiently renowned to be used in N.Y. Times crossword puzzles. In #-#, while visiting lecturer at Princeton, he delivered a series of talks for Seminars in Criticism from which most of this book is taken. Whereas most serious studies of science fiction notoriously are written by critics with neither background nor liking for the field, Amis is a longtime reader, though not writer, of it. A well-known author with a very considerable knowledge of the field -- shouldn't one expect his influence to be beneficial? Regrettably, it isn't. Amis has read science fiction long enough to specialize, to narrow his interests remorselessly. "Nasty" is his thematic word -- it appears just about everywhere throughout the book -- and his title buttons up the tank he would like to make of science fiction to bust through mainstream literature (which he says bites off less than it can chew) and civilization (which he wants this field to criticize, and, he stresses, sharply), among other prime but purely personal targets. In short, Amis demands sociological science fiction and, it seems clear, nothing else. As a reader, he could easily restrict his choices to that. As an influence on the field, however, his restrictions would be deadly constrictions. E. Kelleam. Avalon Books, N.Y., # Brons, normal-sized descendants of a #-year-old emergency landing on Earth, inhabit a gigantic cavern extending under half the U. S. According to Kelleam, we're the peace-disturbing upstairs neighbors, our noisy atom bomb parties draining energy from their pint-sized sun. A hothead member of a secret mission of undergrounders kills our Chief of Staff and Dr. Jack Odin, prophetic name, becomes a modern Dr. Mudd by treating the assassin's wounds. Brought back to the underworld paradise by Princess Maya, a dish, he embraces their cause (and her). A slight, frothy adventure pegged solely for entertainment, it comes reasonably close to its mark. Rating:  Gordon and Sophie Sorkin. Simon and Schuster, N.Y., # except pictures: stories, facts, fantasy, poetry, plays, biography. The common denominator is science and everything of interest goes, from excerpts of Newton's correspondence with the Royal Society to Percy Shelley; from Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon" to Sidney Howard's "Yellow Jack;" from the Book of Job to Richard E. Byrd alone in the Antarctic. This is that rare book into which one can dip with reward again, again and yet again. Robert P. Mills. Doubleday and Co., N.Y., # new direction sticks to the trail set by its predecessors. There are such superior items as Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," Heinlein's "All You Zombies," Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast" and Bester's "The Pi Man." However, there are also the Ferdinand Feghoot things and "Invasion of the Planet of Love," another example of humor delicately applied with a shovel. Despite these, the overall quality is high. Rating:  Dunn. Simon  Schuster, N.Y., # frequent speculation on other planets is more than funny. Though this is ostensibly an account of a fact-finding expedition from Mars to Earth to answer the above question, Dunn actually needs no alien viewpoint to point up the screwiness of human behavior. His cartoon and text format is a delight just to look and laugh at -- but don't take it personally. Vergara. Harper  Bros., N.Y., # apparently haphazard question and answer format that he used in his highly successful Science in Everyday Things. The prime difference is that his present book presupposes an acquaintance by the reader with high school math. Some conversation-piece excerpts: Possible baseball lineups, excluding pitchers, #; with only # friends, the possibility of any two having identical birthdays is better than even; the chances are # to I against drawing a flush. Fun aside, though, there's plenty of useful information in text and added tables. SF:#, edited by Judith Merril. Gnome Press, Hicksville, # leaner than in past years or else Editor Merril gleaned instead of digging. There are a handful of fine yarns: "The Prize of Peril" by Pill," Davidson's "Or All the Seas with Oysters." Most of the remainder are of average interest and the fact articles still do not belong. Rating:  tis W. Casewit. Avalon Books, N.Y., # control of one of the last two His agents comb the rubble of the world for scientists, professional men and soldiers. Little do they suspect that he will make them develop weapons to conquer what's left of the world. Creaking plot aside, a tangled jungle of colons, semicolons and mixed metaphors also conspires to trip the unwary reader. "He left the purges to Dolusi, the arrests, the disappearances; he couldn't be bothered; he had merely asked for extreme care with scientists: the backbone of his new army." And, "Dolusi let a smile drip toward the scientist." Rating:  Dutton and Co., Inc., N.Y., # graphs is the book's strong point. Here are page after page of beautiful, needle-pointed aircraft; slim, graceful short-range missiles; impressively powerful The text is for teenagers and up. The pictures would interest any age. Jerome S. Meyer. World Publishing Co., Cleveland, # prototype was right in front of each eye, man's invention of the lens took thousands of years. Meyer's concisely written book explains the mechanics of lenses and prisms and their numerous uses. Obviously, astronomy would be hamstrung without the lens, but few laymen appreciate the enormous value of the prismatic tools in star work. Halacy, Jr. The Macmillan Co., N.Y., # the sun on only the backwaters of Boulder Dam is greater than that developed by the mighty generators! Halacy's How-To book contains seven projects designed to capitalize on some of that wasted free power: a solar furnace, radio, water heater, oven, motor, reflector cooker and still. Practical? My family successfully constructed a solar radio from his plans. by Hugh Walters. Criterion Books, N.Y., # # is as carefully and realistically detailed as its predecessor. The same cast of characters enlivens its pages, except for the cold-fish director of the international effort to eliminate strange domes on the moon. These alien structures, bombarding Earth with neutrons, cause atomic piles to reach critical activity as well as increase the incidence of anemia and mental disorders. Young Chris Godfrey is called on in the crisis as the only human qualified to ride the rocket that will eject a beacon pinpointing the domes and homing a swarm of atomic warheads for their destruction. Walters writes a taut, tense and human yarn that will appeal to the young reader -- and skillfully leaves room for a sequel. Rating:  Robert Silverberg. The John C. Winston Co., Inc., Phila., # told without frills and without too many chills. Sally and Jim's biologist father takes his family along when given a one-year research grant on Mars. Earth's only colony struggles for existence beneath a huge plastic dome and antagonism toward the nonproductive family runs high. Sally and Jim, hoping for a measure of prestige, search the desert for the fabled Lost Race. Rating:  Little, Brown  Co., Boston, # #-#-year-olds is qualitatively comparable to her delightful Mushroom Planet series. A mystery, its reliance is primarily on suspense, rather than on the fetching whimsy of its forerunners. The Churnadryne, dimly seen by young Tom and his sister Jennifer, appears to be a local sea monster, although the other inhabitants of the California coastal town laughingly disagree. The children's efforts to prove their fish story true make up the tale. Rating for youngsters:  All he wanted to do was go from Epseri II had been chauffered from the Centaur Queen to the administration building of the spaceport, the man whose papers identified him as Robert L. Winstead trailed the others to the Insterstellar Travel Agency counter. His taking an unobtrusive place near the end of the line was entirely in keeping with his unobtrusive appearance. Of medium height but somewhat underweight, Winstead looked like a tired clerk who had not slept well in space. The wide trousers of his conservative maroon suit flapped about his thin shins and drew attention to the fact that he had donned one blue and one green sock. The processing was rapid; most of the two dozen passengers meant to stay here on St. Andrew V. Only a few, of whom Winstead was one, carried "ultimate destination" tickets. They remained after the locals had been taken in charge by a guide who T from here to there -- but somehow the entire Milky Way had  been converted into a squirrel cage. would see them into the adjacent city. Winstead finally reached a clerk, a dark, extremely brisk young man. He presented his papers. The young man riffled through them, stamped the date of arrival on the travel record according to both local and Terr an calendar, then turned back abruptly to the card showing Winstead's destination. He shook his head in puzzled annoyance. "I'm very sorry, Mr. -- uh -- Winstead. Is this the proper ticket you've given me? Could you have gotten it mixed up with someone else's?" The traveler coughed and spluttered worried, questioning noises. A look of vague alarm spread over his undistinguished features. His wispy gray hair had become rumpled when he had pulled off and stuffed into a side pocket his rather sporty maroonand-white checked cap. This, plus the fact that he had to look up to the clerk, lent him an air of the typical little man in the wrong queue. It did not help that he wore old-fashioned sunglasses instead of colored contacts, and had forgotten to remove them before peering at the ticket. "Why -- er -- yes, yes, this is right," he said. "See, here's my name on it." r "HE clerk sighed as he looked around, but his partner was busy. "Someone seems to have blown a nova, sir," he condescended to explain. "It says here your ultimate destination is Altair IV." "Quite right, quite right," said Winstead. "Going out there to see what the sales possibilities are for -- " "And they sent you here from Epssri? That can't be, sir." "But -- they told me -- don't you Agency people take care of picking out the routes?" "Yes, sir, of course. Beyond the local Terran sphere of travel, there are very few scheduled flights and most of them are for important cargo. That's why your ticket simply shows your ultimate destination, and that's why the Interstellar Travel Agency was developed -- to arrange for the traveler's progress by stages." "Yes," said Winstead. "That is how they explained it to me." The clerk met his worried gaze for a few moments before shaking himself slightly. He prodded the ticket on the counter between him and Winstead with a disdainful forefinger. "Let me put it as simply as possible, Mr. -- uh -- Winstead," he said very patiently. "Somebody at your last stop sent you in the wrong direction." "But -- but -- you just said it went by stages. I realize I can't go in a direct line. It depends on whether you can find me the right ship, doesn't it?" The young man glanced about once more for help, but none was available. "We'll see what we can do," he said, examining the ticket sourly. He thumbed a button to roll out a length of note paper from a slot in the counter top and scribbled upon it with his lectropen. "Now, if you will please accompany that young lady to the Agency hotel with those other travelers, we will notify you the moment a desirable ship is scheduled to leave." Winstead thanked him gratefully and turned away to locate his baggage. Under the conditions imposed by space travel, only the barest minimum was permitted. Even so, some little time was required to find his bag -- an unlikely occurrence that the clerk accepted with a resigned air. Finally, with the half dozen who also would be traveling onward, Winstead was off to the hotel and a day's res,t. As a matter of fact, it was three days' rest, before he was summoned. He was, perhaps by intent, confronted upon his arrival by a different clerk, a solid, square-faced girl. Winstead's nervous questions were reflected unanswered from a shield of impervious calm. He received all the information the Agency seemed to feel was good for him and was sent out with a personal guide. The guide delivered him to a thick thing named the Stellar Streak, clearly a workhorse freighter. Somehow, it never did become plain to Winstead until after he had emerged from his acceleration net that the destination was Topaz IV. "But, Captain!" he protested. "Are you sure the people at the spaceport have not made some mistake? That is more or less the direction I came from." The pilot stared impatiently at the papers thrust under his nose. "Can't say, sir. We have our work cut out just to take the ship to where they tell us. Only reason we carry passengers is that regulations require cooperation with the Agency. Don't believe in it myself." returned to his quarters. At least, on this ship, he still had a private compartment in which to float his net. There was even a chair, equipped with a safety belt and folding table, bolted to the deck. What he did miss was the general dining saloon of the liner he had taken from Epseri II. Still, he reflected, travel can't always be luxurious. He spent some time, after the ship had slipped into stellar drive, in unpacking his one small suitcase. He found that he had to take his shaver to the general head to plug it in, but otherwise got along comfortably enough. One or two of the crew who shared his turn at the galley counter, in fact, took him for an old space hopper and began to exchange yarns. This sort of semi-suspended living passed the four-day hop to the Topaz system and the extra day necessary for planetary approach. When they landed, Winstead was the only passenger, either incoming or outgoing, to show up at the cargo shed designated as the spaceport administration building. Here on Topaz IV, the Agency clerk was a part-time man who had to be called from the mines on the far side of the city. He arrived to find Winstead dozing on a cot at the end of the shed. "Billy Callahan," he introduced himself. "They say you're not for the mines." "That is correct," answered Winstead, stretching a kink out of his back. "I have my destination here in these papers... if you will bear with me a moment..." He fumbled out his identification, travel record, and ticket. Callahan, rubbing his carroty hair with a large, freckled hand, pored over them. A few minutes of I searching through the battered I desk that was his headquarters I revealed the official arrival stamp. Its inky smear was duly added to the record. "Now for your way outa here," . grunted Callahan. "Meanwhile, how about a cigar, Mr. WinI stead?" "Why -- thanks very much." j Winstead regarded the torpedo doubtfully. He wondered upon which planet the tobacco for it -- if it was tobacco -- had been grown. "This might take a little while," # said Callahan, applying to the ends of their cigars a lighter that  could have welded I-beams. "It j ain't every day we get a through I traveler here. I gotta look up the j Galatlas an' the shipping notices." j He hoisted a bulky catalogue from a side table onto his desk ' and blew off a cloud of dust. J Winstead seized the excuse to cough out a lungful of smoke. His host reached out for the ticket. "Ultimate destination FomalThat ain't one I ever had to handle before!" He leafed through the volume for some minutes, reexamined the ticket, then dug into two or three appendices. He tapped a knobby knuckle against his chin. It don't look to me, Mr. Winstead," he said thoughtfully, "like you shoulda wound up here at of a way from here!" "The clerk at the last spaceport did seem to think there had been a mistake," Winstead volunteered cautiously. "Somethin' sure slipped. Maybe some jet-head read his directions wrong an' sent you so many degrees Sol north instead of Sol south. Best you can say is you're still on the right general side of the Solar System." "Oh, dear!" Winstead said, flustered. "What can you do about that?" "Depends what ships, if any, are due here. If I was you, I'd take the first one out. Get to a bigger settlement, where you'll get a better choice of ships." cigar and inquired whether Winstead had retained quarters aboard the Stellar Streak. He was undaunted by the negative reply. "Never mind," he said heartily. "We're too small to have an Agency hotel here, but I'll fix you up a place to stay in town." They left Winstead's bag under the desk and set off by dilapidated groundcar for Topaz City. This turned out to be a crude, sprawling village of adobe walls and corrugated plastic roofs. The varied colors of the roofs contrasted in desperate gaiety with the dun walls. As soon as Callahan skidded to a halt, the car was enveloped by its own dust cloud. "Phew!" coughed Callahan. "Some day they're gonna have to pave the street!" Winstead pulled out a handkerchief to mop his tear-flooded eyes. His thin chest heaved and he spat out muddy saliva. "I'm sorry about that," apologized Callahan. "Tell you what -- we don't have much civilization yet, but we do have a little cocktail lounge. Come along an' I'll get you somethin' to clear your throat." The traveler allowed himself to be helped out of the car and guided along the "street" to a low building marked by a small parking jam. Most of the men and women that passed them on the way shouted out a greeting to his companion. They dressed with little distinction between the sexes in rough shirts, boots, and pants of a narrower pattern than Winstead's conservative suit. He was introduced to six or seven people he never expected to lay eyes upon again. Frontier culture, he deduced. Where humans are rare, each one counts for more. The first thing he saw in the lounge was the girl guitarist. She was the only woman he had yet seen who was not wearing pants. In fact, it had hardly occurred to him that there might be someone in town who was not connected with the mines. This girl was hardly connected to her own brief costume. The second thing he saw was a wall of friendly, weather-beaten faces, turning his way in response to Callahan's cheerful whoop. The third was a man-size drink somebody thrust at him. After listening for quite a while to a repertoire of apparently ribald songs, most of them too local in humor for Winstead to follow, the traveler was led by Callahan to a sort of restaurant just down the street. Winstead thought later that he had eaten something there, but what it might have been he forgot as soon as they returned to the cocktail lounge, for a bottleswinging brawl broke out almost immediately in a far corner. After a form of order had been restored, there was a girl who danced; and presently Callahan was shaking him up and down on a spine-stiffening bed in a small, darkened room. Winstead promptly discovered that he had, indeed, eaten. When he recovered, he followed Callahan out on wobbly legs to seek a remedy. It was a bright, sunny day, but he could not even guess at the local time. A little while after they had been successful in finding the remedy, he forgot about it. "Take care of Bobby Winstead for me a little while, George," he heard Callahan say to someone, j "I gotta stop out at the port to check a ship for him. Be right back." T HE hospitality shown him shamed Winstead into inquiring where he might cash a traveler's check. With the proceeds, he was permitted to buy about one round in a dozen, and to join in the singing. He was eagerly pumped between stops along the street for the latest news of Terra. His least little knowledge was of interest to those he encountered. At one point, he came to himself in the midst of drawing a current dress design on the bar for one of the girls. Callahan, whose return he had missed, dissuaded the lady from taking his charge home with her as a gesture of pure gratitude. He declared that Winstead had just enough time for a nap. Winstead's next awakening was in the echo of a terrified scream. A light was turned on and he discovered that the man-eating vine which had been strangling him was in reality an acceleration net. The face that floated before him was clean-shaven and anxious. With considerable mental effort, Winstead deduced that the face was inquiring as to his health. "Quite... fine... thank... you," he answered with difficulty. "Haven't we met somewhere?" "Sure! Last week, Mr. Winstead, when we took you to Topaz IV," said the face. Winstead tried shaking his head. It did not hurt -- very much -- but he felt that his thinking was terribly slow. Then things began to click. He recognized the man as the second pilot of the Stellar Queen. It might have been easier had the spacer not been standing upside down to Winstead's twisted position. He groped dizzily for a question that would not make him sound a complete idiot. The pilot saved him. "Callahan, back on Topaz IV," he volunteered, "asked us to tell you the best routing he could figure was to go on with us to port, so he thinks you can make better connections." "Oh. I... see," murmured Winstead. Unzipping the opening of his net, he floated himself out gingerly. "I hope it's all right, Mr. Winstead," said the spacer. "I know you went in there on an Altair IV destination, but old Callahan seemed to think he was sending the truth, I think he was a little over-fueled." "I... didn't notice," said Winstead. "Tell me -- how long were you down at Topaz?" "Three days," the spacer told him. "They sure took a liking to you there, Mr. Winstead. A big crowd brought you out to the spaceport with Callahan. We found your bag under his desk by ourselves, but I don't know where you got that orange suit." Winstead looked down at his clothing for the first time and flinched. "But that was yesterday," continued the pilot. "You ought to be feeling like some chow by now, eh? Hey wait -- the door is down here, Mr. Winstead!" In six days, including one of landing maneuvers, they reached world that was a minor crossroads of space travel. Here, Winstead bade farewell to the Stellar Queen. His first stop was the communications office. He left a message to be transmitted to Callahan on Topaz IV by "fastest means" -- i. e., by the next spaceship headed that way. He said, simply, "Thanks for everything." travelers wandering about the clean, beautifully furnished waiting room of the Agency here. Winstead sank into a softly upholstered armchair, opened his bag, and began to sort out his papers. No sooner did he look up from this task than there appeared before him a pleasantly smiling, gray-haired man. He was about Winstead's height, but chunky and full of bounce. "My name is John Aubrey," he announced. "I trust I can be of service. Are you stopping here on Bessie?" "No, I -- I'm just passing through," said Winstead. "I assume you are the Agency official here?" "One of them," Aubrey said. "Ah, your papers? Thank you. We can just step this way into my office if you like." He threaded his way between chairs, tables, and occasional travelers to one of a row of offices. It was the size of a large closet, but cheerfully decorated. Aubrey gave Winstead a chair and sat himself down behind an extremely modern desk to commit the required formalities upon the traveler's papers. The ultimate destination ticket Winstead had included gave him pause. "Well, well, well!" he exclaimed. "Achernar X! Really! You must be with the government, I suppose? Or a scientist? As I recall, Achernar is rather blue for human use, except our research outpost there, isn't it?" "I -- er -- I am engaged in a little research," said Winstead. "You did very well to remember the place offhand." "It is a long way out. Interesting. I wonder how I can get you there. Someone seems to have sent you -- well, no matter. Just leave it to me. You'll be staying at our hotel, of course? Might as well, since you have paid for the service, eh? I'll have you flown over right away." An aircar carried Winstead to the roof of a hotel overlooking a considerable metropolis. Having left his bag in his room, he found his way to the hotel department store and ordered another suit He spent the rest of the afternoon sightseeing and decided that he might just as well have been on Terra. When he sat down to an excellent dinner that evening, he discovered that his appetite, unfortunately, had not recovered from his stay on Topaz IV. He was awakened before dawn by the soft chime of his bedside screen. A touch of the button brought on the happy features of Aubrey. Does he never rest? thought Winstead. He pushed the audio button and answered. "Good morning, Mr. Winstead," said the Agency man brightly. "Sorry to call so early, but I was extremely lucky to find you a passage toward Achernar." "Not sure I want to go," Winstead muttered into his pillow. Aubrey, apparently not hearing him, bubbled merrily on. There would be an aircar on the hotel roof for Winstead in half an hour. Haste was necessary because the ship was leaving from a spaceport fifty miles outside the city. Indeed, Winstead could count himself fortunate to have had the chance so quickly. Aubrey had found it only by checking all the private spacelines. After all, Achernar was a long way off. Winstead thanked him blearily before switching off. He then dialed the hotel store, but got no more answer than he expected. Giving up thoughts of his new suit, he rose and struggled into his clothes. poked her corona above the horizon when the aircar delivered him to a little island spaceport south of the city. A stocky, taciturn shadow met him. They walked silently out to a ship that towered darkly overhead. "No inside elevator?" asked Winstead, peering at the skeleton framework rising beside the ship. 'Too much load." They rode a creaking platform up through the chilly breeze until Winstead thought they would go past the nose of the monster. Clutching his bag in one hand and the single railing in the other, he edged across a narrow gangway to an airlock. Inside, he followed the crewman down a short, three-foot-diameter shaft to a square chamber, catching his bag on the ladder no more than a few times. In the more adequate light here, the spacer was revealed as a swarthy man with a muscular, dark-stubbled face. He wore tight trousers and shirt of navy blue and a knit cap that might once have been white. With a preoccupied air, he pulled open a small door on the bulkhead at chest level. "Let's have your bag," he said. Winstead handed it over. The spacer shoved it into what seemed to be a spacious compartment in spite of the yardsquare door. "Now you," he said. "I'll give you a hand up." "Up where?" asked Winstead innocently. "In there. That's your acceleration compartment. Plenty of room. Armored, air-conditioned, has its own emergency rations of air and water." Winstead stooped to peer into the opening. It was deeper than he had thought, but a three-foot square was not much of a cross section. All surfaces inside were thickly padded and springy to the touch. "Here's the light switch," the spacer said, turning on a soft interior light. "The rest of the facilities and instructions are on this plate beside the hatch. Okay now, grab that handhold up there so you go in feet first. Alley-oop!" As long as I don't come out that way, thought Winstead, sliding into the compartment with surprising ease. He twisted around and discovered that the door had a small window. "Make yourself comfortable," said the spacer. "Just don't forget to close the hatch when the takeoff buzzer sounds. You'd better listen for it" He turned away. Winstead saw him look into several other little windows along the bulkhead. "Are there other passengers?" asked Winstead. "No. Just checking to see if all my crew stayed. Always seems to be one that slides down the pipe before takeoff. Dunno why they sign on if they don't like the risk." "What -- what risk?" "Didn't the Agency tell you? We've got nothing below here but tanks of concentrated landing fuel for the station on Gelbchen II. The idea makes some of them nervous now and then. They talk quiet, they walk quiet, and they wouldn't wear an orange suit." He pulled open a door and nodded in gloomy satisfaction when the compartment proved to be empty. "Is it dangerous?" asked Winstead. r T , HE spacer gnawed upon a very short thumbnail. "What's dangerous?" he retorted at last. "You can get killed any day under a downcoming aircar." Winstead considered. "Where's the captain?" he inquired. "I'm the captain." "But -- aren't you preparing to blast off?" "I generally let my second pilot do it," said the spacer. "But why? I thought -- " "Why? Because I own the ship, that's why." "What has that got to do with it?" said Winstead. "I should think you'd want all the more to handle it yourself!" "Listen -- I sweated out years in space, saving the price of this can. If she blows up, d'you think I want to know that I did it? There's the buzzer. Button up!" He pulled himself into a compartment like Winstead's and clapped the door shut. Winstead, beginning to perspire gently, found the safety straps, secured himself, and awaited the worst. The Leaky Dipper sped through interstellar space for five silent and introverted days before reaching the little yellow sun named Gelbchen. The highlight of the flight was the day one of the crew dropped his mess tray on the deck, causing one faint, one case of palpitations, and one fist fight, in approximately that order. The captain spent two days groping his way into an orbit about the second planet. When he announced that the cargo would be pumped into a number of small local tankers that had risen from the surface to meet them, Winstead volunteered to go down in the first one. "Don't blame you," said the swarthy spacer. "I'd like to go too. Don't worry -- they'll be good and careful landing. The stuff's that much more expensive now that it's been freighted out here." "That is a -- a great relief," said Winstead. "It's been very interesting. Good-by and good luck!" "Likewise," said the captain. If I ever meet Aubrey again! thought Winstead. On the surface of the planet, he met with a thriving community that lived in a peculiar milieu blended of well-being and isolation. The spaceport was a center for refueling and repair. It was supported by mines and mills, and by just enough agricultural organization to get by. The standard of living was comfortably high because of the services rendered and charged for; but some of the customs struck Winstead as being almost too informal. "I think you're pulling my leg!" exclaimed the slim blonde at the Agency counter when Winstead was escorted in from the field. "Nobody would travel on the Leaky Dipper without being paid for it. You must have real nerve!" She leaned uninhibitedly across the counter and planted a kiss on his cheek. He could not help noticing that she was not slim everywhere. "I assure you, Miss -- er -- here are my papers." "Oh, those! Let me see, I have a stamp somewhere in one of my drawers." gHE rummaged through sev eral hiding places under the counter. Winstead thought of the compartments on the Leaky Dipper. He leaned wearily on one elbow. "Oh, well, it's time to close up anyway," the girl decided. She swept his papers into a drawer, after a fast glance at them. "We can fix these up tomorrow, Bob." "You are a very quick reader," Winstead said. "It said 'Robert L.,' didn't it? That's all I was looking for -- your name. Mine's Carole, just to keep things straight. Now, since no more ships are due and no passengers can leave tonight, let's get out of here." Winstead looked around, but the mechanic who had brought him in from the field had long since disappeared. Other clerks went about their own affairs in the background without showing any interest in him. Carole hoisted herself onto the counter and twisted across in a swirl of skirts. There was no way for Winstead to avoid catching her. He saw that she was not really slim anywhere. Grabbing his hand, she set off at a smart pace. He had just time to hook his bag off the counter as they passed it. "You'll be wanting a place to stay," she said. "I'll bet you never slept well on that spaceship." This so neatly paralleled Winstead's own opinion that he rejected a half-formed impulse to drag his feet. They dashed pell-mell through a wide exit from the building to a parking lot. Carole led the way to a monstrous groundcar that looked as if its mother had been frightened by a truck. A moment later, they were boosting up to stellar speed along a more-or-less paved road to the city. "They call it 'Junction,' " Carole informed him. "You'd think they could have picked a better name for the only real city on the planet." They buzzed through a narrow band of suburbs, along the edge of an open square and decelerated at a well-lighted avenue that looked like an entertainment section. Winstead noted that most of the men and women strolling past the taverns and theaters were dressed in work clothes. "Just finishing their shifts, like me," Carole explained. She slowed the monster a bit more upon entering a side street. They came to a section of fourand five-storied buildings whose metal curtain walls had the air of business offices. It developed immediately that they were apartment houses. Carole pulled into an opening in a row of parked vehicles similar to hers. Winstead got out quickly, since his hostess seemed about to crawl across his lap to reach the door. He stared at the groundcar meditatively. "Awful heap, isn't it?" said the blonde. "They have to make them that way here, so they can be converted for trucking. The spaceships count on Gelbchen II; everything else -- including us -- is what can be scraped up to do the job. Well, come on in!" I really must be very tired, Winsteadthought as he meekly followed the girl into the lobby of the building.-were lounging on wooden chairs of austere design. One leaped to his feet at the sight of Carole. As he strode toward them, Winstead glanced over his shoulder to make sure of the door. Turning back, he was just in time to find the young man seizing Carole in an enthusiastic embrace. The two melted together in a passionate kiss. Then the young man stepped back, checked his wristwatch and dashed for the door. "Good night, kid," he called to her over his shoulder. Carole waved jauntily. She took Winstead by the elbow. "That was Wilfie," she explained. "We'll be getting married if we can ever get our job shifts straightened out. I hope I didn't make him late, poor boy -- it was his only chance to see me until tomorrow." Winstead was hardly aware of having been steered into an elevator. When they reached the second floor, Carole led him a few steps along the hall. She used' a simple light-key to open an apartment door. Winstead followed her inside wordlessly. "Let me take your bag," she said. "In here is the bedroom. I'll bet you didn't have that much room on the spaceship." "Well..." "Now let's go in the kitchen and see what we can get you for dinner. I might as well feed you, since I figure to charge you fifty credits for the night." Winstead remained silent by a considerable effort. He wondered what his expression showed. Carole did not seem to notice anything. She prattled on about the folly of trying to find a room in one of the few hotels boasted by the city of Junction. Most of them, she claimed, would be full of carousing spacers. Meanwhile, she rummaged through a frozen food unit. Winstead agreed to something in a foil package without knowing what. She popped it into an automatic infra-red heater. He allowed himself to be led by the hand to a large chair in the living room. "There's the entertainment program for the TV," she told him. "Not that we have much here -- most of it is old tapes from Terra. Make yourself comfortable while I change." She pattered off into the bedroom, leaving Winstead weighing the program in a limp hand. He looked around the room. There were two doors to rooms or exits he had not been shown. What he had seen or could examine from where he sat was very comfortably furnished, with a resilient carpet substitute from wall to wall and new-looking furniture of the simple Gelbchen style. Carole seemed partial to reds and other bright colors. Only the pastels of the walls had prevented a disaster. Is it worth fifty credits? he asked himself. On the other hand, if I go out looking for a hotel, will I just happen to have a hard time getting a ship? He glanced indecisively at the door to the bedroom into which Carole had vanished. It had been left slightly ajar. About the time he became aware of this, a tinny chime began to sound from the direction of the kitchen. It continued until Winstead realized that he would have to investigate for himself. He entered the kitchen to find that the automatic heater had flipped up a small sign saying, "Hot!" to get the door of the appliance open, looked around until he located a tray and tongs, and removed his dinner. Further search supplied him with cutlery. He opened the foil, discovering that he had chosen a meal of roast beef with mashed potatoes and two vegetables he had never seen on Terra. Carole still had not appeared, so he carried his tray out to the dining area, which was furnished with bronze-colored metal chairs and table. It looked like a dinner for one, he reflected, but he was on a strange planet. As he hesitated, the bedroom door was flung back and footsteps sounded behind him. "Go ahead and enjoy it," called Carole. "Wine in the sideboard there. Then make yourself at home for the night." Winstead turned. The girl was bending to zip the front of one shoe. She was clad in coveralls of a yellow that made Winstead blink. "I'm off," she announced cheerfully. "Got a second-shift job as an ambulance driver. I tell you, it's one big rat race to meet expenses on Gelbchen II! It helps when I can bring home guests from the spaceport, but Wilfie wants me to cut that out when we get married." She waved and bustled out to the elevator. Winstead wondered whether he had said good night. He discovered after some minutes that he was leaning on the table with one thumb in the hot potatoes. He sat down, examining his thumb attentively. After due consideration, he licked off the potato, found a fork, and began to prod dubiously at the local idea of vegetables... He awoke next morning with a start of surprise at finding himself in neither a net nor a padded compartment. The bed was soft. It invited him to roll over for another half hour's snooze in the faintly perfumed room. Perfume? Bedroom... Carole! Winstead sat straight up as full memory returned. Everything was quiet. He threw back the electric blanket, checked a clock that must be set to planetary time, and decided that it was early morning. The window filters yielded to trialand-error manipulation, flooding the room with cheerful sunlight not unlike that of a Terran summer morning. Winstead walked softly to the door and opened it a crack. The room outside remained dim and silent. He washed in the adjoining bathroom and dressed rapidly. Feeling better prepared for the day, he sallied out to seek breakfast. The first sight that met his eyes was that of Carole sleeping on a couch under an aquamarine blanket she had plugged in at the socket of a floor lamp. The thought of fifty credits restrained the impulse to pat her blonde head in commiseration. He thought of it a little more, thereby fighting down a mild attack of conscience over appropriating the bed. Alter all, he thought, here I have to get my own breakfast. She's probably tired out, but that's the reward of moonlighting. Ifs her planet, not mine. kitchen door, slipped furtively through, and closed the door as quietly as possible behind him. Two men eating breakfast at a small table looked up at him amiably. "Gaagh!" said Winstead. "Good morning," replied one man, who wore a rather feminine dressing gown. The other, a ruddy, farmerish individual, grunted past a mouthful of toast. "I beg your pardon," Winstead said. "You must be another star traveler," said the gentleman in the dressing gown. "We knew there must be one when we saw Carole on the couch. I hope she gets you out of here quicker than she's finding a ship for me." "You have been waiting for a spaceship?" Winstead asked. "Over two weeks now," said the other. "The kid's fair enough about it, I must admit. She can't ship me toward Epseri, so she's been giving me a discount on my room." "Sit down and have some eggs," invited the farmer type. "Brought 'em into town myself, along with my other produce." Winstead eyed the platter of fried eggs. They were entirely too large to have come from chickens, but they looked good. He decided not to ask any questions. It developed after he joined them at the table that the farmer was in the habit of boarding with Carole whenever he came to Junction on business. The traveler, one Cecil Feigelson, excused his borrowing Carole's robe on grounds of the scanty baggage allowed space travelers and the fact that he had been hanging about for so long. They assured him that he looked fine in pink. Winstead drained his cup of coffee substitute, considered having another. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "it hardly seems necessary to spend all that time finding a ship headed for Epseri. I -- uh -- happen to be going that way too. I suspect that a good, close look at the schedules down at the spaceport might show us a way." "But Carole is the clerk in charge." "I also happen to know a little about how it's done," said Winstead quietly. He added, "From traveling so much you know." "Well, if you think anything L "round-and-round can be done, I'm all for it." "When the kid wakes up, she could drive you down," suggested the farmer. "That should require only a moment to arrange," said Winstead, rising to fill a pitcher with ice water. Fifty credits a night! he thought. Wait till I get my hands on her shipping schedules! Hardly five minutes later, they all spilled out of the elevator into the lobby. Carole was still rather damp and angry. Cecil Feigelson's suitcase zipper was only threequarters closed. Fortunately, he was wearing pants under the girl's dressing gown, which clashed horribly with Winstead's rumpled orange suit. "Hey!" someone yelped as they blazed through the lobby. Young Wilfie catapulted from a chair where he appeared to have been dozing. Doesn't he have a home? wondered Winstead. Carole's groundcar outside, the youth had somehow inserted himself into the group in place of the farmer. Winstead set the machine in motion while the others were scrambling for seats. "Do you know how to drive one of these, friend?" asked Feigelson. "I am an expert groundcar operator," Winstead assured him. Unfortunately, he was soon forced to admit, he was accustomed to Terran cars that floated on cushions of air. Although bumps in the spaceport road encouraged a good deal of floating at the speed he was making, the Gelbchen vehicle was really designed for less intermittent wheel-to-ground contact. The trip seemed shorter, though, than it had the previous evening. Winstead skidded to a halt at their destination and discovered that he was perspiring slightly. His passengers were in a frank sweat and lost several yards trailing him into the terminal and over to the Agency counter. When they arrived, still quite pale, Winstead was already up to his elbows in shipping schedules and blank forms. A few passing clerks glanced curiously at Feigelson's frilly pink dressing gown, but they were used to outworld garb. "Wait! That's my Galatlas you're tearing apart!" Carole protested breathlessly. "How would you know, my dear?" asked Winstead, riffling the pages furiously. "Hah! Just as I thought -- this cruise ship down here for supplies, the Virgo, is listed to make New Ceres next. The Galatlas shows that New Ceres is halfway to Epseri, Feigelson!" "Wilfie!" wailed Carole. "Make him stop tearing the place apart like a saloon! Look at that stack of folders spilled all over the floor!" Wilfie bestirred himself, but he was handicapped by being on the other side of the counter with Carole and Feigelson. "What do you think you're doing?" he demanded truculently. "Where did you come from, anyway?" "I came from Terra," said Winform, "and I am more than ready to return. Combining a vacation with a business inspection trip occasionally becomes too exciting for a man of my years." "Inspection trip?" echoed Carole, freezing. "My hobby," said Winstead. "It keeps one in touch with the people who make the Agency go. This place, now, is the most slapdash, disorganized -- Young man! You quit one of your jobs and take over this branch of the Interstellar Travel Agency. Don't argue -- of course you can! What is your full name?" "ATe?" gasped Wilfie. "Wilfred Evans." "All right, Evans, you're hired. You'll be able to get married and put a stop to all this nonsense of renting rooms while ships go out without our passengers." "What authority have you to -- " began Carole indignantly. "The first test of a chief agent," said Winstead, scribbling upon a business card, "is to know when to tell an assistant manager to button her hatch." Wilfie accepted the card and glanced at both print and scribbling. "Button your hatch!" he ordered Carole over his shoulder. k' open about the same distance as Feigelson's. Winstead looked about for a local clock, and snatched up one of the sheets strewn about the counter. A departure time listed upon it made him swear. He leaped to Carole's phone, switching on sound and screen with one swipe of his thumb. The blonde advanced a timid step, to read the card bearing Wilfie's appointment. "Robert Winstead Lewis, Terra... President, Interstellar Travel Agency..." "Winstead" was shouting at a face on the phone screen. "You tell them who I am!" he demanded, holding up another of his cards to the scanner. "They'll manage to hold the ship three minutes until we reach her!" He switched off, mopping his forehead with the back of his hand, and started around the counter. Carole swayed weakly against Feigelson's supporting arm. "Now, then!" snapped Winstead. "This branch will be checked in the near future, Evans. I trust that you are the sort of man who can show a firm hand, should he return home to discover a star traveler in his bedroom." He smacked the flat of his own hand significantly upon the counter, staring at Carole between the eyes. Wilfie nodded thoughtfully. Robert Winstead Lewis flagged down an unwary porter driving by on an empty baggage truck. "Bring the bags, Feigelson!" he commanded, hopping aboard and seizing the controls. "As far as New Ceres, anyhow, we'll be going first-class!" Picking up speed, the baggage truck squealed around a turn and headed for an exit to the spaceport. The porter looked back with a horrified expression, the pink gown fluttered beside the orange suit one last time, and they disappeared through the portal. The air about the disorganized counter and reorganized agents continued to vibrate for some minutes. Finally, the distant roar of a ship lifting for space penetrated to restore a sense of relative There were two varieties of aliens -- blue and bluer -- but not as blue as the Earthmenl pilot, I'm not dumb. I mean I'm not that dumb. I admit that Dr. Ellik and Dr. Chon outrank me, because that's the way it's got to be. A pilot is only an expendable part. But I had been the first one to see the natives on this planet, and I was the first one to point out that they came in two attractive shades of blue, light blue and dark blue. Four Indigos were carrying an Azure. I called the others over to the screen. "A sedan chair," identified Lee Chon. "Think the light-skinned one is a kind of a priest?" Mike Ellik shook his head. "I doubt it. The chair isn't ornate enough. I think that's probably the standard method of travel -- at least for a certain social elite." "Do you notice anything unusual about those bully boys?" "You tell me what you see," Ellik evaded. "Three of them are mongoloid idiots," said Chon. "I thought so," Ellik said, "but I wasn't quite sure -- aliens and all." "They're humanoids," Chon said, "and humanoids are my specialty. I know." "The fourth one doesn't look much better." "His features are slack and his jaw is loose, all right, but they aren't made that way. It's an expression he could change. His head isn't shaped like that." "Um. The man in the chair is a striking specimen. No cerebral damage in him." "I don't think the answer is brain damage. If the 'noble' trusts those four to carry him, their actions and reflexes must be pretty well coordinated. They can't have anything like palsy or epilepsy." "They must breed a special type of slave for the job," Ellik suggested. "They aren't slaves, Mike," I told him. "No?" Ellik said, like talking to a kid. "And what are they, Mike?" little disgusted that big brains like Ellik and Chon couldn't see the translucent truth. "They are just four dumb slobs who can't get a better job, so they are hauling His Highness around because they have to make a living the hard way." "That doesn't quite cover it, Johnny," Chon said. "The carriers are a completely different race." "What's different about them?" I asked. 'They've got hands to work with, eyes to see with, noses to smell with. If you kick one of them, I bet he'll hurt. It's just their bad luck to be dumb slobs." Ellik grunted. "Unfortunately, Johnny, there are subtler differences. The darker aliens, the indigo-colored ones, seem to be definitely down further on the scale of local evolution. They must be an inferior race to the lighter, azure species." Chon had been looking at us and listening to everything. Finally he said, "You can't be sure of that, Mike. You haven't seen all of the Indigos. Some of them may not be as far down as the common carriers." Ellik sighed. "Explorers have to make snap decisions on insufficient data. We don't have time to see the whole damned planet before we write up a report." "Yes, explorers have to make snap decisions," Chon repeated to himself. "Are you going to take a look at those buildings, see if it's a village?" "I thought I'd see if our blueblood friend out there wants to show it to me," said Mike Ellik. "He won't," I said. They both looked at me. "You don't have any chair and nobody to carry you," I went on. "He'll think you're just a slob." "Jonathan," Ellik said, "you show occasional flashes of genius." I smiled and shrugged it off. "I know I'm not nearly as smart as you boys. But that doesn't mean I can't think at all." Ellik clapped me on the shoulder. "Of course it doesn't." But his grip was too strong. "Johnny," Ellik said gravely, "do you think you could carry me?" "Wait a minute. You want me to act like one of those slobs? That's asking a lot." "But could you?" "Not all the way to those buildings. What was the gravity reading, Lee?" "Point nine seven three." "There!" I said. "I couldn't tote you three or four miles piggy-back." "Look," Chon said, "we can strip down a magnetic flyer and you can ride the seat, Mike. Johnny can pretend to carry you, like on a platter. It'll impress the yokels with the strength of our flunkies." "Mike could carry me," I pointed out. Chon laid a delicate hand on my back. "But, buddy, Mike outranks you." I shook my head. "Not that way, he doesn't." 'We may be going to a lot of trouble for nothing," Mike said. "That gang may jump us as soon as we decant and try to have us for dinner." "There's always that risk," Chon agreed solemnly, "but naturally I will remain on duty at the controls of the stun cannon." "Securely inside," Ellik added. "Always on duty," Chon said. "Always inside," Ellik said. "It's in the records, Ellik. I took the last one." Lee said it a little too sharp and it cut the kidding. "Go soak your soft head in brine," Ellik said, disgruntled. 'Wait a minute," Chon called. Ellik turned back. "Yeah?" "Don't forget to take your communicator with you." Chon's voice was choked. "You may get out of line of sight if you go off with that troupe." "I know this business," Ellik said, turning away. "Mike, I'm sorry if I offended you. Shake, huh?" Ellik smiled sourly. "Forget it." "Come on, shake." "Okay, we're buddies. Do I actually have to pump your clammy paw?" "Please!" "Oh, for Pete's sake!" Ellik turned around and kissed Chon on the forehead. Ellik was just sore, of course. But the manual warns against that sort of horseplay when you've been out a long time. "Satisfied now?" Ellik asked. "No." Chon's voice was strained tight. "It should have been me to kiss you." Chon turned to me. "Luck out there, Johnny." I grabbed his hand and levered it fast, before he could decide I needed kissing. "Sure thing, Lee. Thanks." T HE buildings weren't much to see, but they were a step above primitive huts. They were adobe, or maybe plastic. The aliens understood the stress principles of the dome, Ellik said, because all the buildings had curved roofs. Unbaked pottery was what they looked like to me, and they looked as if they would be brittle as coffee-colored chalk. Actually, their ceramic surfaces were at least as hard as steel. The Azure had welcomed Ellik with an outstretched hand. Mike wasn't one to jump to conclusions, so he just held out his own hand. The native grabbed and let it go after pulling it some. The alien saw me apparently carrying Ellik on a seat cushion with one hand, and he kicked me in the leg. To test my muscles, I guess. I managed to keep from yelling or jumping. The Azure looked impressed and the Indigos did a bad job of hiding a lot of envy and hate. As the Indigos toted their man along on the litter and I guided Ellik's seat cushion along the channel of magnetic feedback, the two riders began talking. Ellik's translator collar broke the language barrier, of course. It was a two-way communicator on a direct hook-up to our cybernetic calculator on the ship. The brain analyzed the phonetic structure of the alien language under various systems of logic or anti-logic and fed the translation into Ellik's ear. Then it went through its memory banks and played back the right sounds to translate Ellik's talk into the alien language. I understand things like that. I'm a pretty good mechanic. I didn't have my translator turned on, but it seemed to me that somehow I could understand what the plug-uglies, the Indigos, were saying. Ellik told me that it was because all their speech was based on the one universal humanoid sound, "mama." Everything good in the way of norms and verbs (there were no other particles of speech) was some inflection of "m-m" and everything bad was "uh-m-m." Ellik was pretty "uh-m-m." I was plenty "uh-m-m." I threatened their jobs, they thought. They were a real miserable bunch of slobs, those Indigos. We passed through the wide places between the houses -- I wouldn't call them streets -- and saw a lot of Indigos crouched in doorways, watching us, and Azures being toted around. The clothing they wore was also pretty universal for sentient bipeds -- a tunic or sarong, kind of. For the Azures, it was smooth and colorful; and for the Indigos, a loincloth of some rough, duncolored stuff. Ellik chinned off his translator switch and leaned down toward my ear. "They are two distinct races, Johnny. Notice that all the Indigos are menials. There does not appear to be anything to correspond to a freedman or even a higher-ranked house servant. The Azures treat the Indigos only as animals." "Slobs," I said. "Poor dumb slobs." The nuclear flash washed over us, peppering us with a few excess roentgens. We couldn't look at the spaceship going up, but we knew it was going. It was making a dawn. The aliens were all frightened. They fell on the ground and started praying to the ship, all of them, the Azures and the Indigos. 'What's wrong with that crazy Chinaman?" Ellik yelped. "Lee knows what he's doing," I said. Ellik unsnapped his communicator from his belt. "Johnny says you know what you're doing, Chon. Do you?" "I know." Chon's voice sounded right beside us, perfectly natural. Belt communicators work just as well as those consoles. People only buy consoles for prestige. 'Well?" Ellik demanded. 'What are you doing, Lee?" I thought maybe something had gone wrong with the communicator. Chon's voice finally reached us. "I'm leaving you and Johnny on this planet, Mike," he said. A N Indigo brought us in our morning supply of fruit. Ellik felt me looking at him. kicked the Indigo. "It's overripe, blockhead. Amum, amum." The Indigo backed out, bowing, eyes very round. Ellik felt me looking at him. 'Well, I don't like kicking the oaf, but that's all he's been conditioned to understand as a sign of disapproval." "Sure," I said. Ellik passed through the scimitar of gray shadow into the sunlight that washed lines and years out of his face. He braced a hand against the doorframe and craned his head back. It stopped and steadied. "He's still there," Ellik said. "Sometimes I wish his orbit would decay enough to burn him up in this damned sour air." He coughed into his fist. "He could probably correct," I suggested. Ellik sneered. "He hasn't got the brains." "Pretty hard for one man to manage a takeoff. He was lucky to make it into orbit." "I just wish he would come down. Somehow, someway, I'd get to him, no matter where he went on this planet." "I suppose that's why he stays up." Ellik slammed his fist into his palm. "I'm going to call him again. He can't get away without us. If he fouled up a takeoff that badly, he's not going to try to solo into hyperspace." "I don't think anyone would solo into hyperspace. I don't think he would be able to come back." "Oh, what do you know about it?" Ellik said shortly. "He's just building up his courage to try the big jump. He's yellow, sure, but sooner or later he'll get desperate enough, or scared enough, to actually go. Then we'll be stranded for fair. This planet may not be colonized for centuries!" "Probably never," I said. "Not after Lee's reports." "You think he would falsify reports?" Ellik asked, blinking at me. "I suppose he'll have to." Ellik held his head with his hands. "Of course, of course. There's no limit to the depths to which he would plummet." He ran over to the corner and snatched a communicator off the pile of our gear. "I'm going to call him and tell him what I think of him and his wild obsession." I didn't remind Ellik that he had been telling Chon just that at least once a day for a month. I knew his nerves got tighter and tighter and cussing out Chon helped release them and make him feel better. "Come down, Lee!" Ellik called. "The three of us can make the jump together. You're martyring yourself for a crazy reason!" "We've talked this over before," Chon answered. "This is the last time I'm going to respond to your call. I've made it clear to you that I think knowledge of this world will cause great suffering, a lot of death, among the majority of Earth's people." "You're talking prejudice, Lee! Your prejudice. People aren't like that any more." "We haven't gone that far, Mike. The bigots, the hatemongers, the pettiness and xenophobia lurking in everybody haven't been asleep that long. Just look at it from my side, Mike. What will the white people of Earth think about the Orientals, Negroes and Indians of Earth when they find out the dark-skinned humanoids of another planet are -- measurably, unquestionably, vastly -- inferior to the lightskinned race of the same world? I ask you, Mike!" ept analogy, Lee, and you know it." "But most people reason by analogy," said Lee Chon. "No, Mike. I have to leave you and Johnny to prevent a recurrence of racial hatred, intolerance and all the ugly consequences on both sides. This is the last time I'll answer you, Mike. I'm getting lonesome. In a few years, I'll get hungry for human companionship. I don't want to be tempted down. Good-by, Johnny. So long, Mike." Ellik screamed. "Wait! Answer one more call, Lee. It's the least you can do for me. I don't know when I'll make it. It may be in a few weeks or a few years. It won't be just argument, Lee. I'll have something you'll want to tell Earth about this place and these people." "I'm still here. Tell it to me now," Chon's voice said. "No. I want to get proof. Let me rig up some kind of video circuit for you. I can use parts out of our tape camera and the translators. I want to get it all across to you." I could hear Chon breathing. "Very well. I'll answer your next call." "Lee," I called out, "Mike and me will be expecting you to answer." Chon laughed. "I'm not going anywhere, Johnny. Only around this world every couple of hours." "You couldn't make the jump through hyperspace without us, Lee," Ellik said. "That's right, Mike. I'm -- I'm sorry to quarantine you two down there." "Quarantine!" Ellik stormed. "We're not sick, Lee. You are the sick one!" There wasn't any sound, not even of breathing. "You have an idea to change Lee's mind, Mike?" I asked. He cupped his hand on the back of my neck. "Affirmative, Jonathan. A pretty damned good one, too." Ellik stood staring out the door, gnawing on one of his knuckles, letting the sun turn the front of him into gold, so he looked like half a statue, and half a man. "I suppose it had to come out in him sooner or later," he said. "What, Mike?" "What could we expect? It's the basic quality of treachery in the Oriental mind." their longest and the alien sun was down the closest to the horizon without actually going under, Ellik marched up the path shoving a new Indigo. The Azures supplied Mike with all the flunkies he wanted to gather food and the like for him, as his natural right. But I thought we had enough of them hanging around our quarters. I couldn't imagine what he would want with another one. The alien hovered at the door. Ellik kicked him in the calf to make him understand he was to go inside. "Look at him, Johnny," Ellik said, pushing the fellow forward. "Not a mongoloid, would you say?" "No." The alien looked stupid -- blue and stupid. His face was hanging there, but it wasn't pushed out of shape any more than the faces of the Azures. The Indigo blinked back at me. What he also looked was not friendly. Ellik took the Indigo's cheeks in his hand and angled the face toward the light. "He's a halfbreed, Johnny, or otherwise the gene was recessive. He wasn't damaged before birth, only after -- when he started to breathe." "What do you mean, Mike?" "You ever hear of cyanosis, Johnny?" "No." "Well, these creatures have something like it. The Indigos don't get enough oxygen in their blood cells. It makes them sluggish; it turns them blue like the pictures of 'blue babies' in the old books." "I never saw a picture like that in an old book," I said. "Did you ever see a book? Sorry, Johnny. Just kidding." Ellik rubbed his hands together. "Well! I theorized that there is no basic difference in the Azures and the Indigos except improper aeration of their blood. So, you see, an Indigo is only a sick Azure, and I am going to make this Indigo well." "How can you do that?" "It's simple," Mike said irritably. "The Indigos must have a malformation of the heart causing an abnormal communication between the venous and arterial side of the circulation system. A little surgery and I adjust a valve in the heart. No more communication. Proper aeration. Enough oxygen. The deep blue color goes, leaving only the lighter blue of the natural pigmentation. The patient feels better, acts better, thinks better, looks better. In short, he is no longer an Indigo but an Azure." "Is -- is this what you're going to show Lee?" I ventured. "Of course! It proves the Indigos aren't an inferior race. They are the same as the Azures except that they are sick. Their being sick can't reflect unfavorably on any terrestrial colored race. There is no analogy. But I have to prove it to Chon. We're going to tape the whole process and feed it to him." "I think," I said, "that that might get to him." "Sure if will." Ellik's jaw muscles flexed. "I should ruin Lee with this thing, but I won't. I'm not a vindictive man. Lee and I will probably be working together for years. But whenever he gets out of line -- has some stubborn idea about doing something his way -- don't think I won't remind him of this!" Suddenly, he was smiling again. He turned to the gawking Indigo. He pointed two fingers at him. "Mmr?" Ellik asked. The alien tapped himself on his chest cavity twice. "Mhaw," he gave his name. "Mhaw M'i uh M'i m M'rriuh?" Ellik asked him, without even using the translators. "M-m-M-m-M," the alien went, slapping himself on the chest with his opened palms. Ellik turned to me, grinning. "I asked him if he wanted to stop being an Indigo and become an Azure. He thinks I can do anything and he's all for it." of null-shock from our packs, Doc Ellik started to slice him open with a ceramic knife he had borrowed from the Azures. But Ellik had forgotten that the alien might get frightened seeing himself cut open, even if he couldn't feel any pain. It had never happened to him before. The alien lumbered to his feet, his chest hanging open, showing his heart beating like some animal caught inside a blueberry pudding. I drove a right cross into his jaw, and felt the jar all the way up to my shoulder. He melted back down onto the pallet. "Good work, Johnny," Ellik said, stooping and starting his work. Right away, Mhaw started to lose that Indigo color and get real light -- lighter than the Azures, in fact. None of the blue of the race was actually in the pigmentation, Mike found out. Even the Azures suffered some degree of improper aeration of the blood. "You going to call Lee Chon now?" I asked Mike. "You going to show him the tape we had running during the operation and all?" "Not quite yet, Johnny," he said. "First I want to educate Mhaw a bit, up to the Azure level or better. That should convince Lee." Mhaw learned fast, probably faster than the Azures, even. Almost the first thing he wanted was for us to stop calling him Mhaw and start using an Azure name, Aedo. Once a day, Ellik left our hut to take some exercise -- a walk along the alien esplanade, he called it. I used to stay with the doctored alien, now Aedo, but we finally learned we could trust him to follow our orders -- which were to stay inside, away from the others, since we didn't know how they would take him. So I got to walking along with Ellik. As dusk lengthened, we could see the spark that was our ship in its orbit along the retreating horizon. Ellik twisted back his head and the side of his mouth. "Look at him up there -- look!" The spark burned brighter and danced in another direction. "He's gone! He left us!" Ellik said. "It's okay. He's still there. Just corrected the orbit a little, I guess." "No, no, no," Ellik said. "He started to make another try. But he got afraid to try to go into hyperspace alone." "He was just correcting for orbital decay." "You don't understand, Johnny. He's a coward. That makes him dangerous. He's getting desperate. That desperation will burst the dam of his own weakness and wash away our hope, our lives." His voice hushed. He stood staring starkly ahead, his palms outstretched at his sides. "Maybe he isn't that cowardly," I said hopefully. nounced. He meant he had finished editing the tape showing the operation on the alien and his recovery from his blue disease, from being an Indigo to better than an Azure. "The transmitter is finished too," I said. Ellik had suggested a way of switching the tape camera to a video converter for one of the audio communicators, and I had been able to do it easy. It took parts from both our communicators and translators too. Ellik fitted the coiled snake of tape into place. "This will be a great day for your people, Aedo. After our friend from heaven lands, we will be able to teach you a way to cure all of your sick, to make all the Indigos like you." "Like me? Make like me?" Aedo said in the pidgin terrestrial that Mike Ellik had taught him. "Yes. We'll show them how we cured you and how all can be cured." "You make show fellow like me? Make tell make that fellow like fellow like me?" "Everything's ready, Mike," I called. "That's right, Aedo," Mike said. "You'll show your people the way to equality." "Make all fellow like this fellow?" Aedo asked. "Shall I call in Lee?" I asked Mike. "Yes, that's right, Aedo. Just right." "No," Aedo said. The alien stomped the tape camera and the communicator to bits before I could get a hammerlock on him. Ellik just stared at the complete wreck of our only means of communication with the spaceship. "I be much man now. I much smart. Much smart than Azure hicks and Indigo slobs. I much smart all. I much man! Not to be all same now. No." The snarl hung on in Aedo's throat. Ellik lifted his head and sort of smiled. But not quite. "Well," he said slowly and sadly, "what could you expect in the way of gratitude from a dirty alien?" THE Azures did accept Aedo all right. They seem to think he must have come from some other tribe. They don't associate him with the Indigo that disappeared. No Indigo ever became an Azure before. Of course, Azures sometimes become Indigos, we found out. It seems there's a virus of what Ellik called pseudo-cyanosis in the air. The Azures have become a pretty resistant breed to it, while the Indigos are all easy victims. But once in a while an Azure will come down with it and turn Indigo. Mike Ellik caught it too. It happened pretty fast. By the time we realized what it was, he was already too stupid to finish the operation he started on himself. I had to sew him up, not very neatly. Ellik is treated pretty much like the rest of the Indigos. So am I. He takes it all pretty calm. He can still talk a little Earth. Whenever anybody kicks him, Ellik just mutters something about, "What can fellow expect bunch lousy creeps like those fellow?" I guess I'll get it too. I think I am getting it. It won't be so bad for me. Just like maybe going around drunk all the time, not being able to think or coordinate very well. It will be kind of bad being a member of an inferior race, but the thing I'll hate about it the most isn't that, or even leaving old Lee up there, circling around and waiting for our call forever. No, the thing I hate is having it happen now, just when I'm beginning to learn something. I'm not dead sure I know just exactly what I learned, but I think maybe I do: You get just what you damned well expected all along from a bunch of blue-blooded mongrels!      Deep in the affections of all true lovers of science fiction is a lady author named Evelyn E. Smith, astonishingly and rewardingly intelligent, witty, inventive and resourceful, yet, pretty as Rima of Green Mansions, she is every bit as elusive as that most exasperating of fictional creations. In other words, strapping her to the typewriter is a real job, but one from which we have not flinched between each and every one of her stories. This announcement, then, is to call attention to our unexpectedly great success in extracting an entire novella from her -- no little bitty item but a real story, cleverly plotted, touchingly characterized, gracefully and tellingly told, with a logic that should confound those who believe women and logic are incompatible -- a silly dogma we don't hold to, but especially in Evelyn E. Smith's case. who is convinced that there must be a way to get up in the world, and indeed there is -- but who'd ever think this was it? End of announcement, except that everything else in the issue will be a bonus, an Evelyn E. Smith story being worth the price of admission. Oh, and we're at her for more, and will continue until she brings one forth, at which point we will repeat the process. Ad, if necessary, infinitum. C banning wanted a planet. Had they sold him a pup? Jim Charming strode purposefully to the reception desk of Planet Enterprises, Inc. "I want," he told the well-built blonde who was making an interested survey of his lean features, "to buy a planet." "Yes, sir." Her interest evaporated. She took a card from a filing cabinet and handed it to him. "If you will just fill this out" It was a simple questionnaire -- type, location, size -- and Channing's stylo moved rapidly over it. He hesitated only at the last, stark question, "How much are you prepared to pay?" Then he wrote neatly in the space provided "One hundred thousand credits." That was exactly the amount of his signing-off bonus. It also represented his total finances. The unimaginative minds that calculated the pay of a red-blooded space officer didn't take into account all the attractive ways of spending it that a rumbustious pioneer Vector provided. He gave the blonde the card and she wrote a name on it. The smile she gave him was altogether impersonal. She liked the look of the big, gangling fellow with "Space" written all over his bronzed face and crinkled blue eyes, but... She said, "Will you come this way, please?" The name on the desk identi' fled him as "Mr. Folan" and he was a tall, affable man. "I think we can suit you. Commander -- er -- Mr. Channing," he said, "though what we have in mind mightn't be quite as large as you wish. Earth-type planets come rather high, you know. Now if you were to choose a Siriusor a Vega-type -- " "Thank you, no," Jim said firmly. He had heard too much about the hazards of alien-type planets. "In that case," Mr. Folan said busily, "let's see what we have available." "-the automatic shuttle slid across and admitted Jim Channing to the third planet of Phylox Beta. It also disgorged one spaceboat, a clutter of machinery, a thousand tons of strawberry plants and a fully equipped house. While he was still taking in the first glimpse of his future home, the massive doors slammed shut and the giant ship took off smoothly and silently. A moment later it winked into sub-space. He was in business. The planet possessed only one sizable island -- it could hardly be dignified by the name of continent. The rest was covered by a vast ocean. Still, as Folan had explained, he couldn't really expect anything more -- not in the line of an Earth-type, anyway -- for the money. He spent a week figuring out the remote controls that operated the planting machinery. Once it clanked into operation, it worked entirely on its own. He had only to push a few buttons to send it lumbering in new directions and the big island steadily took on a resemblance to a huge strawberry patch while Channing fished and lounged in the sun. When the galactic trade agent came, the strawberries were waiting for him, neatly piled into a mountain of gleaming cans. He was a friendly, talkative little man, glad to exercise his tongue again after the lonely months in space. "What are you growing here?" he asked Channing. "Strawberries." The friendly smile disappeared. "Every planet in the Galaxy seems to be growing strawberries this year. I can't even give them away." "But I thought the Ursa Major colonies -- " The little man shook his head. "So does everyone else. There's the colonies can't use headed there already. Now if it was upklin seeds -- " "Upklin seeds?" The agent looked at him in surprise. "You mean you haven't heard about upklin seeds?" "No. Not a thing." 'Well, of course, you are a newcomer. It's this new race that's been discovered somewhere in The Sack. They are as rich as all get-out and they have a passion for upklin seeds. Trouble is they can't grow them on local planets and they are offering fancy prices to anybody that can supply them. I paid a thousand credits a bushel for them to your next-door neighbor on the fourth planet last week. Got a hundred bushels." Channing did a bit of mental arithmetic. A hundred thousand credits for one crop. Whew! "Could I grow them here?" The agent shook his head. "You need plenty of soft marsh and a Jupiter-type atmosphere." Then he had a sudden idea and he spoke long and seriously to Channing, explaining quite a few things that were new to him. Channing was still considering them, staring thoughtfully at 'the ground, after the little man left. ' for the nearest sub-space center and a few hours later he was in Mr. Folan's office at Planet Enterprises, gingerly balancing his cap on his knee. Mr. Folan's sleek head nodded as Channing made his points and when he was finished the executive pressed a buzzer and called for the file. "You realize, Mr. Channing," he said conversationally, as he turned over the pages, "that what you are asking will be a most expensive undertaking." "I know that," Channing said eagerly, "but upklin seeds are such a sure-fire proposition that I thought Planet Enterprises a percentage basis." Mr. Folan wrote some figures on the margin of the folder and considered deeply. "Yes," he said at last, "I think it would work out on a seventy-thirty split." "Seventy-thirty?" Mr. Folan inclined his head graciously. "Seventy per cent for Planet Enterprises and thirty for yourself." Channing said slowly "That's a bit steep." In a few brisk words, Mr. Folan showed just why he was an executive of Planet Enterprises, Inc. He gave Channing the figures for transforming the planet's characteristics to those of Jupiter; he told him what acreage of upklin seeds he could grow and the exact profit to be expected. Channing's share should be about one hundred and fifty thousand credits per crop. Fighting a rearguard battle, Channing said, "Your three hundred and fifty thousand won't look so bad on the balance sheet, either." Folan reeled off his figures again with practiced glibness. Channing had the sudden suspicion that his proposition wasn't entirely unexpected. But the figures sounded reasonable and he had to admit that Planet Enterprises was risking a great deal of money. "Then there is the not inconsiderable cost of your own metamorphosis, Mr. Channing," Folan added. "Huh?" said Channing. There followed the most excruciating half-hour of Channing's life. Proposition followed explanation, counter-explanation followed counter-proposition. At the end of that time he emerged from the office with a stricken look and a small white card. The blonde receptionist read the look correctly and definitely and finally crossed him off her list at all bad-looking. His four legs growing directly from the bottom of the muscular, hairy trunk were strong and sturdy -- always a mark of handsomeness in a male, for the legs had to take most of the strain of a gravitational pull several times that of Earth. He had three flexible tentacles, a thin melon slice for a mouth, but nothing resembling a nose. He didn't need one, since he breathed through a set of gills at the sides of his head. He remembered vaguely that he had once been Jim Channing, an Earthman, but the memory had nearly faded. He had been warned of that, that he would soon forget he had ever been anything except what he was now, but he had already forgotten the warning. too, and in as great a degree. The wide ocean had become a turgid, soupy mush, covered by the trailing growths of the upklin flowers. The blue skies had turned an angry red and the sharp wind that rustled the hair on his squat body was almost pure methane. He waddled down to the low disk-shaped skimmer and started the jets. As it pushed its way through the clinging masses of the upklin flowers, he surveyed his crop happily. This was his I  second crop and it promised to j be even better than the first. He was going to be a very wealthy buk, he told himself. He could . buy... His mind floundered. He didn't know what Jubes longed for, what they sought wealth for. I He was certain at the same time I that there was a flaw in his conI tentment, that something was I missing What he was missing dropped I from the sky a few days later. It came in a spaceboat and was his neighbor from Phylox Beta IV. Her body hair was a rich golden brown and she wore pretty bracelets, studded with basim stones, on each of her four legs. Ckm Dyk's single eye, with its perpendicular outer eyelids and horizontal nictitating inner membranes to filter out the infra-red rays, shone with an emotion that was more than pleasure. Her thoughts flooded his mind. There was a warm recognition of his admiration and a delicious suggestion that it wasn't unacceptable. "The agent told me you were upklin farming. I came to see if I could be of any help," she told him. The sentences rang like golden bells within his burgeoning consciousness. He tried to shape his answering thought coherently, but his lack of telepathic experience betrayed him. She flinched momentarily beneath the raw, undirected stream of passionate love that overwhelmed her mind. Then an answering wave of shy, tender awareness and acquiescence laved his senses. Without the clumsy barrier of speech between them, they had scaled in a few pulsating moments the shining heights of love and devotion that human passion sometimes cannot find in a lifetime of searching. Ckm Dyk had never been so happy. They decided to farm the two planets together so they could be with each other always. There was sound economic sense in this; with both of them helping, the output of each planet would be nearly doubled. It meant a huge increase in administrative and paper work for Ckm Dyk, but he didn't mind that. Often, as he pored over account books and production figures, a tremulous, shy devotion would envelop him in a gauzy mental cloud and he would lay down his stylo and answer Ain Muh with all the great love that surged within him. As the months passed, his happiness increased. The perfect attunement of their minds excluded all the scalding jealousies and the offended silences of misunderstanding that can mar the most loving human relationships. They did not need to see each other; the physical presence of the beloved was unimportant; they loved more with their minds than with their bodies. It seemed improbable that such a glorious idyl should ever be disturbed. Then, one morning, a shuttle-spacer came silently out of the red sky and landed beside the house. Ckm Dyk waddled toward it, impelled by a carefully built-in series of reflexes which he had completely forgotten about and entered its gaping maw. He never once looked at Ain Muh and the passionate entreaties that echoed through his mind only roused in him a dull irritation. himself in Mr. Folan's office. The figures the tall, sleekhaired man was reading out to him made tuneful music. Even when Planet Enterprises' massive deduction was made, his share was comfortingly more "Not bad payment, Mr. Channing, for five years of life! In any case, it's all over now -- just a bad memory." The executive smiled at him from his comfortable, familiar chair, aware of the torrents of confused thoughts hidden behind the gray eyes. When he had come out of the stupor that succeeded the almost disintegrating effects of his remetamorphosis, Jim Channing remembered clearly the terms of the bargain he had made. He was to become a Jube, a living nightmare, living in a nightmare world, for five years. At the end of that time, Planet Enterprises promised him, he would be given back his humanity and he would have earned enough money to keep him in luxury for the rest of his life. They had kept their promise -- to the letter. He felt it ungrateful of him that his paramount emotion was fury. He had been happy; no human attachment could ever make him as happy again. He longed for the glorious love and trust he had shared during that tremendous five years. Perhaps he had been a repulsive monster from whom any woman would run screaming. But he didn't want a woman. He wanted Ain Muh. He said, picking his words with the greatest care, "Would a further metamorphosis be possible?" question he'd never expected to hear from any of the men who had taken the terrible choice for the glittering reward he held out to them. Most of them had picked up their vouchers and asked the way to the nearest tavern; many of the alien races did not find alcohol compatible with their metabolisms. A few had inquired tentatively about his current receptionist. Planet Enterprises had a big turnover in pretty receptionists, but they didn't lose them to men who had been unhuman horrors for five years. One big red-haired character had wanted to start a private war against the Sirians, whose brother he had been until two days previously. But none of them had wanted to go back. He said, "It's possible, Mr. Channing. But I must tell you that a second metamorphosis is very expensive -- and it's permanent." "You mean if I become a Jube again, I must stay one?" The executive nodded. Channing gestured toward the payment voucher. "You said it was expensive. Is there enough there to cover it?" Folan looked curiously at him. "Yes, more than enough." He waited to hear what the big man would say next. Channing licked dry lips. A terrible doubt assailed him. Maybe Ain Muh had been metamorphosed too. Maybe she had returned to her former self -- whatever that may have been -- while he sat here. He looked down at the big, freckled hands resting on his knees. They were trembling and his palms felt moist Without looking up, he asked, "Is the period of metamorphosis, always for a term of five years?" "Invariably. No other term is possible in the present state of our knowledge of the technique -- except permanency." A great sigh escaped Channing. That was all right, then. Ain Muh was genuinely a Jube. The agent had told him about her -- mentioned her by name, he remembered now -- had said that she was upklin farming on the neighboring planet. If she had been metamorphosed, she would have been taken from him more than a year ago. He tossed his cap on the table decisively and stood up. "All right. I'll take the permanent treatment." ane through his gills with satisfaction. It was good to be home again. He had forgotten already that he had ever been Jim Channing, that he would never be human again. He did not know that less than five minutes after the shuttleship had borne him off to Galactic Enterprises, Ain Muh had sent her spaceboat hurtling toward the fiery orb of Phylox Beta, mad with the grief of having lost him. It would not have concerned him much if he had known. Jubes make tender and devoted lovers, but they are notorious for their exceedingly bad memories... please let us know, will you? We want to get your copies of Galaxy to you when they should arrive -- at least a week before the newsstands get theirs -- but we can't unless you inform us that you've moved or are moving. Send both addresses, the old and the new, to: Subscription Dept., Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. and # other Novelets from Galaxy One of the best collections of Science Fiction Stories edited by Horace Gold, published by Doubleday  Co. Priced at #. We have # copies available at # while they last. Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc., #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. I enclose # for each copy. (We pay postage.) copies at I .# total. Name . Address City Zone State -- Space combat was what I'd been trained tor. I had wangled the job. Now all I had to do was find out what I was supposed to combat. I did and he did and so here I post on Darian Four. Lieutenant Barlow closed the facsimilograph folder, rose, kicked the leg of his desk just for the hell of it, walked over to the window and stared out at the black, dripping sky. "Dykes," he said, "you've just finished a tour of duty on Wellborne. Right?" "Right." "Fighting Wispies. Right?" "Right." a doorstop. "There are two hundred and sixty-three active fronts in this war. Right?" I smiled. "If you don't count  aboard, Dykes." The Officer of the Day impaled my orders on his "process" spike and gave me the once-over. The nameplate on his desk read "Lieutenant Stephen Barlow, Corps. His face was thin and his eyes jumpy, as though habitually searching for cover. He must have been young, being only a lieutenant, but his hair was almost all gray. He thumbed through the facsimilograph of my service records. "I see you've had duty in this sector before." "On Wellborne, the next system rimward," I lied -- to the same extent that my records did. "Which is also in the Wispie penetration area..." He left it hanging. "That's right." It was all I could think of to say. And that was enough for a man who wouldn't recognize a Wispie if he met one face to face. Let me fill you in on the details: How'd you like to go through training, get your bars as a combat lieutenant, then spend the next four years nursing a strategy calculator at Federation Nerve Center? Point two: If you had a bosom pal in Personnel Assignment, wouldn't you get him to fix your records and find you a spot where there was some fighting to be done? the Battle of the Bureaus." His face remained sober, lit up anew every few seconds by another bolt of lightning. From what I had gathered, there were more storms going on at any given second in the Darian sky than on any other planet. "And," he went on, "even right now you could be checking in for a slice of duty Solarside. Right?" I nodded. But my attention had suddenly become riveted on an ashtray that seemed to have gotten a bad case of jitters. Under its own power, it was clattering around on top of the desk. "Then why in hell would a man like you decide, voluntarily, on another tour in the Wispie sector?" he demanded. By now the tray was jumping over everything. But Barlow ignored it. "I guess I just wasn't through fighting Wispies," I answered. Which evidently wasn't the right thing to say, for he looked at me as though I had messed up my orbit. Across the room, an orderly watched the tray slam up and hit the ceiling. Then he went over and placed a small, white object on the desk. It looked like a piece of bone carved in the shape of a cross with legs. The ashtray quieted down. "On the other hand, maybe we ought to be thankful you're here." Barlow kicked out at the leg of a chair. "If you came through one hitch against the Wispies, you might be able to show us a thing or two about fighting 'em." He snatched up my orders and strode for the door. "I'll have these rushed over tt the Old Man. He's waiting to welcome you aboard." The orderly watched Barlow leave, then shrugged. "Don't mind the lieutenant. He just volunteered for the PM Detail. Bet you had some damned good PMs on Wellborne." "Pretty good." I had to keep up the deception. "Taut bunch -- capable, efficient." He grinned. "Real fighting spirit?" "Best in the Corps." He elbowed my ribs and roared, laughing. I had to smile too. If I didn't, he might suspect I had no idea what a PM Detail was. But just then the windows started shattering -- pane after pane, left to right, top to bottom -- until there wasn't a square of glass left in the office. The orderly choked down his laughter, swore, performed an odd ritual with gesturing hands and ducked down behind the desk.  field, I headed for the Skipper's office. There was a brisk wind and I stepped up the power of my rain shield to keep from getting drenched. The word "miserable" would hardly do justice to Darian Four's weather. Take right now: Despite a downpour, the wind was screeching past the buildings. And whenever it managed to die down, it only moderated to a doleful moaning. The incessant lightning was something fierce and the thunder jarred your teeth out of their sockets. Abruptly I found myself remembering the swastika-shaped bone the orderly had tossed beside the cantankerous ash tray. Then I realized why my thoughts had returned to that object: The buildings themselves were laid out in the form of a swastika, with a gas flare burning at each angle and end of the figure. I wanted to ask the next man I saw what was the meaning of the symbolism -- if that's what it was. But if Wellborne, the place I had allegedly just come from, was also in the Wispie sector, then maybe I was supposed to know about these things. Anyway, the next person I saw was apparently in no position to answer questions. A noncom, he was hightailing it across the field, not even aware that he'd forgotten to turn his shield on and was getting drenched. With the next burst of lightning, I saw his face. And if I were supposed to be "stouthearted, intrepid" (or so the videoposters say), I would have sworn he was near panic. He finally lunged into one of the buildings and slammed the door behind him. I shrugged uncertainly, wondering whether I had done the right thing finagling duty on Darian. There was a tap on my shoulder and I turned. But nobody was there. While I stared in that direction, there was a prodding finger dug into my other arm. Still nobody. Frowning, I pushed on across the field. About the only thing I was looking forward to now was my respects to the Old Man. Bachelor Officers Quarters, its windows ablaze with warmth and cheer, was like a welcoming beacon among the other decrepit buildings. And I felt thankful always gave its officers the best accommodations possible. Lieutenant Barlow stepped out of the Skipper's quarters just as I mounted the steps. He glanced at me, shook his head pityingly and started back for the OD's shack. I noticed he had his fingers crossed on both hands and there was a circular mirror dangling from a ribbon around his neck. I watched him make his way across the field -- kicking a stone, taking four or five steps to catch up with it, kicking it again. Odd habit that Barlow had. And I wondered what was behind it. But then I remembered the orderly had explained it already with, "Don't mind the lieutenant; he just volunteered for the PM Detail." head" Mason, studied me with eyes of sad steel that seemed to be hiding the memory of happier days. He was a compact, wiry little guy whose nickname was a perfect fit. One more thing: He was the only Corpsman I'd seen on Darian who didn't have gray hair. There was a reason, though: He had none at all. Warhead indicated a chair. "Damned happy to have you with us, Dykes." He jerked his head around and stared at the wall behind him. At first, I thought he had seen a Wispie. "Nice to be with you, sir." I sniffed. There was a peculiar smell, but I couldn't identify it. "I don't know what the situation is on Wellborne," he continued, "but we're having a hell of a time handling things here." He pressed a stud and the far wall blazed with the features of a contour map. "In the mountains north of here," he went on, glancing nervously over his shoulder again, "the enemy is trying to establish a foothold." An arrow of illumination speared across the map to indicate the spot. "We've thrown them back six times. But they're damned tough." Still crinkling my nose at the sharp odor, I took inventory of the room: two swastika emblems hanging on opposite walls, a pail of red liquid beside the desk, three circles and a hexagon drawn on the floor with chalk, a pile of dry soil on the Old Man's blotter. Outside of that, the office was pretty normal, unless you include the fifty or sixty mirrors of assorted sizes and shapes that decorated the walls. Warhead spied a movement in one of the mirrors and almost jumped out of his boots. He caught a grip on himself, however, when he realized it was only his own reflection. I wanted to ask him what all the gimmicks were for. But it was just possible that conditions on Darian and Wellborne were identical, and if I let anybody see I was confused by what I was running into here, they might realize I had never been on Wellborne. My best bet was to go on pretending familiarity with anything that happened and keeping my eyes open until I learned enough to get by on. Skipper resumed, "we're getting strong hyperterminal emanations up there. The Wispies should have all coordinates zeroed in for breakthrough by tomorrow. I'm going  to send you out with Lieutenant Barlow, Captain Randell and a plug-up detail. I expect you to give them a lot of pointers on Wispie fighting." The Old Man took another anxious look over his shoulder and I went back to aiming my nose here and there, sniffing, trying to pin down the pungent scent. "Ever think of going PM?" he asked. I hesitated. "What makes you ask?" "After all, it's a logical step after a man's already had duty in the Wispie sector." "I suppose it is." "With your experience, you'd make a hell of a PM man." "That's what I've been told." "I'd sign up myself if I didn't have to hold things together around here." I had an idea I was getting the soft sell. But several things happened in the next instant. The lights flickered and dimmed, letting the erratic glow of flaring lightning flood in through the windows. There was a whistling moan in the far corner, as though a blast of wet wind had sneaked inside. And, somewhere near the groan, a dark shadow began swirling like a vortex. Shouting, the Skipper lunged from his chair. "Frankson! Lassiter!" He seized the end of a rope beside his desk and gave it a tug. The other end uncoiled from around the starter pully of an auxiliary generator and the engine putt-putted to life. "Frankson! Lassiter!" he roared again. "Damned PM Detail! Never around when you need them!" The generator's output built up and the lights brightened again. Power returned to the sound-negation system, deadening the roar of thunder outside. At the same time, the cloud that was hovering at the far end of the room began swallowing itself up in its own vortex. But not before a nearby chair did a shuddering dance across the floor, then hurled itself to destruction against the side of the desk. Warhead stood there with perspiration on his forehead. He fished a little white sack from under his blouse and jiggled it at the end of its string. And now I was almost choking with the scent I couldn't identify before. "Concentrated garlic extract," he explained. "We find it works better than anything else. What are you using?" "I -- that is -- nothing at the moment." He started. "Nothing! Nothing at all?" "I mean -- well, I just haven't had a chance to get squared away yet and -- " "You get down to Supply on the double and check out the full works! I won't have any man in my command unnecessarily exposed -- no matter how brave he thinks he is!" f I "HE supply clerk was a cocky old bird. He was a fourstriper, meaning only four reenlistments, but the lines on his face looked like dozens of years of tough service. I watched the mound of Federation Issue grow on the counter as he added to it, item by item: a carton of candles sprinkled with silver dust, three bags of garlic extract, a box of mud, a jar of dirty water with larvae flipping around in it, two swastika medallions, an assortment of mirrors, mounted and unmounted. He produced a gunny sack and began shoving the stuff inside. "While I'm here," I interrupted, "I'd like to check out a proton pistol, some anti-personrifle." The idea was to beef up my modest arsenal of one betazip hand gun, which I had brought along from Solarside. The noncom reared back. "Very funny, sir." He handed me the sack and turned. "You have armament, don't you?" He slapped a rapid-fire somnidart caster in my hand. This was more than I could tolerate. On one of the hottest fronts in a war that stretched a tenth of the way across the local galactic arm, he had give me something that only produced pleasant dreams for a couple of hours! The noncom's rigid expression changed slightly. "I can see you're new here, Lieutenant. We got the heavy stuff, all right, but it's for those who's shipping out -- or in case anybody decides to go PM." Obviously, the PM bunch was the only ones who could count on adequate self-protection. I shouldered the gunny and paused in the doorway to adjust my environment-control belt : Rain shield, full capacity; anti-lightning field, maximum negativity; capsular light projection range, fifteen feet (night had gotten a good grip on the base by now); noise dampener, plus eighty-decibel setting to keep the thunder from turning my ears into kettle drums. Without exaggeration, I think it might be said that my environment regulators were fairly humming with activity as I plunged back outside. I had covered only half the ing Bachelor Officers Quarters when the entire base was suddenly flooded with light. It came from two sources: Someone had turned up the gas flares, and an entire row of maintenance shacks was on fire. I switched off my capsular light generator and watched base personnel running all over the place. Some were converging on a man who lay writhing near the center of the drill field. "General Quarters! General Quarters!" the public address system blared. "Man all posts! Unassigned personnel take cover! Garlic and mirrors are the order of the day!" I followed a major and a sergeant who were racing for the injured man. By the time I arrived there, the sergeant was kneeling beside him and a dozen other men were crowding around. The sergeant swore. "Another casualty!" "That makes the third one today," the major said angrily. "There'll be more before this raid's over." The victim lay on his back, lifeless eyes boring skyward, his face glistening with raindrops. And I found new resolve to bag myself a bunch of Wispies. Sneak attacks were being pulled off on one or two of the more remote, primitive fronts. But, for the most part, fighting was on an honest, out-in-the-open basis. I liked it that way -- not like this. "How'd it happen?" I asked. The sergeant peeled back the collar and exposed red marks left by powerful fingers that had choked the life out of the victim. Two other noncoms hoisted the casualty on a stretcher and bore him off. "Poor old Fowler," the sergeant mumbled. "I told him he should have gone PM." "Guess he would have," the major said, "if he'd known he was going to get it like this." hail-sized drops testing the strength of my shield and thunder making the night seem like a stomping ground for invisible giants. Darkness pressed in on me, until I remembered I had turned off my light projector. I flicked it on again. The wind moaned close to my ear but I ignored it -- till I realized that, for a change, there was no wind blowing. something cold and sticky slapped me across the neck. When I turned, nothing was there. I went faster and ran into a tangle of dry cobwebs. Dry cobwebs -- in this weather? Lurching through the invisible and took the steps two at a time, hurling myself against the door. It opened easily and I was in a vast room that didn't at all resemble a conventional Bachelor Officers Quarters layout. Steel bars sliced the space into cubicles that were furnished with satin-canopied beds, contour chairs and piled carpets. Each cell contained a tall, lean, fur-covered thing with a sad, naked face full of wrinkles. They were bipeds and had prehensile hands. Soft music played and scores of entertainment screens sent their flickering light out in all directions. A Medical Corps captain went from cell to cell passing out fruit from a silver bowl. He reached where I was standing and said, "You're the new man from Wellborne, aren't you?" I only continued staring at the hairy things. "Got to keep 'em satisfied, you know," he said, nodding toward his charges. "Damned right," I said, wondering what they were. The medical officer satisfied my curiosity. "I think it may be safely said that I keep the happiest compound of Wispies in this entire sector. How do these facilities compare with those on Wellborne?" "Why -- no comparison at all." It was an ambiguous answer, but not to him. He took it with a proud grin. The door opened and an elderly but rugged-looking civilian in a trenchcoat barged in and stood shaking the water off his sleeves. An arm band identified him as a member of the Press Corps. "All right, Doc," he said, "I've got a portable translator. Now how's about me interviewing that latest batch of prisoners?" "Not on your life," the captain answered. "They're in the best of spirit. I want them to stay that way." The correspondent swore, looked at me for sympathy, then smiled. "You the guy from Wellborne?" I recognized him. "You're Starhop Stanton." "That's right, Dykes. Maybe I can squeeze some copy out of you. How's about it?" I wasn't quite sure whether he rated a handshake or a stiff boot to his posterior. You see, he was partly responsible for my being on Darian. His clustercasts usually rang with emotion, sure to raise the fighting spirit in any man. I can even remember the particular 'cast -- his first from Darian -- that had set me on fire. All about "a real man's front" where the "most courageous warriors in the noble history of mankind" face the "severest challenge imaginable." Technically, it wasn't a good videocast. Too much interstellar interference and signal fading. But one bit came through clear enough to raise goosebumps and send me out waving the flag. It was something about "the Federation's bravest heroes" being "hunted relentlessly by the most treacherous foe we have ever known." "I said I'd like to try to milk some copy out of you," he repeated. "The folks back home, you know, are eager to hear -- " "I'm going out on patrol tomorrow. Maybe right after I get back -- " "Fine! I'll corner you then." "my arm. "Thought I saw you duck in there. I'm Randell -- Rusty Randell." Projecting a blaze of capsular illumination, he was stockily built and had a pleasant face. The three small mirrors and two sacks of garlic extract that were strung around his neck almost hid his captain's bars. "I'm going out with you and Barlow in the morning," he explained. "You suppose we'll get us any Wispies?" I asked. "They'll be there to get, all right. I was wondering -- maybe you can tell me something about powdered snails.". We headed for a smaller, darkened building off to the left. "Powdered what?" "Snails -- crushed, dried -- instead of garlic. I hear you fellows did wonders with it over on Wellborne." "Oh, not too bad." The "oh" signified disappointment, real disappointment. I had just been trying to decide whether to tell him I had never been on Wellborne. He looked friendly enough to take me under his wing until I got my feet on the ground. But now he was saying, "Damn! Am I ever glad to draw an old veteran of Wispie warfare like you! Dykes, I feel safe now for the first time since I got here." Supper in Officers' Mess was almost uneventful. Randell and I had the place to ourselves, practically, since I had been delayed checking in. Near the end of the meal, a bowl half full of soup floated off a tray as it was being carried back to the galley. The mess boy ducked, but not in time. He came up with the bowl inverted on his head and its contents dripping down his face. Later, four chairs in a corner started a thumping dance that didn't end until one of the tables shot up to the ceiling and slammed down on top of them. Randell took it all with an occasional wince or dodge, whenever appropriate, but offered no comment. I was beginning to figure out some of the answers for myself. Suppose, for instance, the Wispies had some way of exerting force over a distance. Get what I mean? They could play hell with our morale. Old Warhead Mason must have been really sold on this idea of teaming me with Randell and Barlow. When we finally reached three of us bunks together in one corner of the (I started to say "room," but I'd better use the more appropriate word) building. No individual rooms with all the latest gimmicks and conveniences. Instead, the barnlike quarters had stud-bare walls with black building paper showing between the two-by-fours and siding. The floor sagged and buckets placed here and there took care of the roof leaks. Randell cuffed me on the shoulder and said, "I'll bet you didn't have anything like this on Wellborne, eh, Dykes?" The suggestion was that I ought to be thankful for the improvement. He was dead serious, too. were already asleep when Randell and I crawled into our sacks. Just then Barlow came in. He kicked one of the pails and showered us with rain water. Then he propped his foot on my bunk and began unzipping his jacket. "So here's the guy who's going to show us how to fight Wispies." "Ignore him, Dykes," Randell told me. "He's naturally cynical." Barlow kicked out at the leg of my bed. "I hear he doesn't put much stock in garlic and mirrors. Tell us why, Dykes." J  Randell came to my rescue. "Simple, Barlow. Nothing to it. If we keep our eyes and ears open instead of our mouths, we might learn something." Dropping his boots on the floor, the lieutenant kicked them into the corner. "Well, he'll have to show me." "Barlow just signed up for the PM Detail," Randell offered, by way of explaining Barlow's ill temper. This took Barlow's attention off me. "Just had my P-I session." "Haw'd it go?" the captain asked. "Checked in with a point two rating and came out with a PM quotient of eighty-three point six." "Is that good?" "Good? Watch." Barlow pinched his nose and the covers on his bed folded back all by themselves. The pillow rose, fluffed itself and floated down again. "Of course," he added, "I won't be able to use more than a fraction of the potential until I get squared away in full PM status." I always figured that if you pay attention and keep at it, you can dope out almost anything. A lot of this PM stuff, for instance, was starting to make sense. When you're up against an enemy that can exert force over a distance, wouldn't you try to duplicate that talent among your own men? If this PM deal gave you that sort of training, it sounded like pretty good duty. Maybe I'd even have a shot at it myself -- after I brought down a few Wispies the orthodox way.--his pillow and made a prop for his chin. "You get rated on Wellborne, Dykes?" I nodded. "Point three five." "That's pretty damned good!" Barlow crawled into bed and sounded off with a skeptical grunt. "What difference does it make? He'll never go PM." "That's what you think," the captain shot back. "I got it straight from Warhead that Dykes might join the detail." Evidently the Skipper had put words into my mouth. "What about it, Dykes?" Barlow challenged. "My money says you'll never stick your neck out for that detail." "Oh, I don't know," I said. "I just might at that." "Real brave guy, huh?" But Randell gave me a respectful glance. "Well, PM's not for me. I want to get home again when this is all over." Abruptly a crackling sound came from the decibel dampener on the far wall. As smoke curled up out of the box, the sonic shield gave way and the tireless, roaring thunder crashed in on us. One of the beds began bouncing around, hopping first on two legs, then on the other two. It spilled its startled occupant and slammed half through the wall, wedging itself among the studs and splintered weatherboards. Barlow lunged up and threw a switch. Somewhere outside a siren immediately began wailing into the storm. everyone scurrying around trying to escape entanglement in the sheets and blankets that were flying through the air. Confounded, I sat up and watched -- until I realized my own bed was swaying ominously. I gripped the springs and held on as the floor shot away below. I did a poor job of dodging a rafter in the way of my head. When I came to, things seemed to have quieted down somewhat. But the room was still a beehive. Two of the officers, each with a bowl of dirty water, were rushing around sprinkling the corners and walls. A third was embedding two crossed candles in their own melted wax on the table. Another lay on the floor rolling from side to side and groaning while a Medical Corpsman applied a splint to his leg. In the center of the room, an officer and a group of enlisted men were swinging mirrors and using spray guns to fill the air with a fog that stank of garlic. A PM Detail, no doubt. I gathered that much because their efforts seemed to be directed toward a patch of greenish-white haze that lurked in the shadows up there among the rafters. "You okay, Dykes?" Barlow bent over my caved-in bed and looked down at me. I rubbed my head. "I doubt if my helmet will fit for a while." The special detail officer turned toward Randell. "That's the best we can do for you tonight." "Think we'll have any more trouble?" "Not much chance of it. We've got the place pretty well roped off and stunk up." They sprayed a bit longer, then left. We all hit the sack, but I didn't do much sleeping. Instead, I spent the rest of the night assuring myself that the greenishwhite shadow wasn't coming any closer.  rode a negativized floater up through the storm, broke out of the basic overcast at fifteen thousand feet and headed for a towering slope whose peak was hidden in a still higher cloud layer. It was dry, though, and there was no snow or ice. Randell steered the floater down to a barren slope, cluttered with boulders, crags and scrub growth and sliced by ravines and crevasses. We landed next to a group of men gathered around a fieldpiece that looked formidable enough to hurl a planetbuster into orbit. I felt relieved. Here, finally, was evidence that we did go after Wispies with something more lethal than a somnidart caster. Randell led one squad off the floater and Barlow took another. I followed, looking disdainfully down at my dart caster in its holster and feeling more satisfied with the bulge of the beta-zip hand gun under my jacket. We reached the fieldpiece and everybody crowded around the captain. "What's the situation?" Randell asked. "We're getting peak readings from between those two boulders," a sergeant reported, pointing. "Breakthrough ought to come in ten or fifteen minutes." Something tugged at my leg and I kicked out in reflex. But nothing was there. One of the enlisted men, too, was having a little trouble. He kept slapping his face as though trying to swat an invisible fly. A corporal finally handed him a mirror and he stood staring at his reflection and radiating relief. "We have with us," Randell announced, "Lieutenant Kenneth Dykes, fresh from mixing it up with Wispies on Wellborne." All eyes turned respectfully toward me. "A real hero," Barlow added scathingly out of the side of his mouth. His foot lashed idly out at a rock and it went clattering down the slope. "Since we have a few minutes before deploying," Randell went on, "the lieutenant will give us a few pointers on taking care of Wispies." I squinted at the big gun's control board and saw there were no conventional knobs and levers -- only a few toggles and a score of calibrated dials. Evidently it wasn't a fieldpiece at all, but some kind of detecting instrument! "Lieutenant Dykes," Randell prompted. I started. "I -- ah, that is -- yes?" "I said you were going to give us some pointers." "Oh, sure. The first thing to remember is -- no, wait -- suppose you go ahead and take care of this breakthrough as usual. We'll have an evaluation session afterward and I'll tell you how we would have done it on Wellborne." "Sounds like a good idea," Randell commented. k' across the face and I staggered back, tripped and fell. I rolled down the slope, checked my momentum and tried to get up. But I was suddenly choking in a swirling cloud of moist dust that was going into orbit about my head. Round and round it went, trailing a streamer of haze that fell against my neck, loop after loop. The coils tightened and I couldn't breathe. On one knee, I tore at my collar, coughing. Then somebody was sprinkling dirty brown water in my face and several other medics were dangling garlic bags all around my head. "What the hell, Dykes!" Randell said. "Aren't you using anything?" "Of course not." Barlow folded his arms and glowered down at me. "He left his security gear in his locker. You did, didn't you, Dykes?" I feigned a few unnecessary coughs to keep from having to answer. "What would a fearless veteran of Wispie warfare need with security gear?" Barlow mocked. Someone slipped a garlic bag around my neck. "You'd better use this, sir." The indicator that looked like a fieldpiece started buzzing. "Breakthrough!" snapped the sergeant. "Into squads -- form!" Randell ordered. "Dykes, you stick with Barlow and his men. I'll be floating around from squad to squad." Barlow held up a clenched fist and his men formed around him. "We'll take up positions behind that outcropping over there. Come on, Dykes, let's go; we'll see what you can do." I had to hand it to him -- he had guts, all right. He moved off leisurely, kicked a rock, followed it, kicked it again and went after it once more. When we reached the outcropping, the rest of his squad had already taken cover. Somnidart guns drawn, they faced the clearing between the two boulders and stiffened. A tiny point of violet light, suspended in the air, was rapidly expanding into a sphere. When it reached twenty feet in diameter, the first Wispie came through. His dark brown fur contrasting the sparkling color of the sphere, he carried a tubular weapon and dived for cover in a fissure. I tensed, but Barlow laid a hand on my arm. "We always let a few of them through before we cut loose. Wait for the captain's signal." For once I had forgotten all my other difficulties. I wasn't even concerned that the invisible something was back again, tugging at my boot this time. All that mattered was that at last I was in a man's war, ready to start bringing down my share of Wispies. Eight more furry things poured out of the sphere and dashed for cover. Barlow drew his somnidart caster, apparently expecting Randell's signal, and centered one of the running figures in his sights. I fumbled under my jacket, found the beta-zip gun and lunged out from behind the outcropping. I dropped to one knee and took aim. "Hey, Dykes!" cried Barlow. "What the hell are you doing?" He hit me with a shoulder block and we both went tumbling down the slope. Between rolls, he grunted, "You trying -- to hurt -- one of those -- things?" and smoking as fierce lances of white light exploded all around us. We came to rest against another outcropping and I saw that the Wispies streaming out of the sphere were cutting loose with all the firepower they had. Barlow pulled me behind a slanting slab while the air sang with both the gentle woosh of darts and the crack of enemy weapons. Wispies were falling all over the place. But so were some of our own men. By this time I had my dart gun out too, since I'd lost my beta-zip somewhere on the slope. But I couldn't see if I was scoring any hits. A few minutes later Randell came scurrying up to us. "What happened over here?" "This veteran," Barlow said, jerking a thumb in my direction, "tried to crack down on a Wispie with a beta-zip." "The hell he did!" Randell's eyes bulged. "You out of your mind, Dykes?" "I only tried -- "  across the way. "We got 'em contained!" the captain exclaimed, scampering off. "Spread out and start mopping up." "We're lucky this time," Barlow shot back. "Not a single casualty -- so far." He must have been blind. From where I stood I could count four men dead and three wounded. There were Wispies lying all over the battlefield. But, after the dart juice wore off, they'd be all right. "Stay here and keep out of trouble." Barlow trotted away. "We'll pick you up later." Then, in the next instant, I was fighting off a net of coarse, sticky cobwebs that I couldn't even see. A swirling cloud of shadows a few feet off to my left began growing darker and inching closer. I clutched the garlic bag and jiggled it desperately in front of my face. But something had me by the leg and was dragging me off down the slope. I didn't even look to see what it was because I knew it wouldn't be there. Shouting, I anchored myself to a rock and tried to kick my leg free. But my left foot was caught up in another invisible grip and I hung there, half suspended above the ground, with my legs spread wide and my arms outstretched to hold on to the rock. The swirling shadow bored closer, whistling and groaning all the time. With a frenzied kick, I wrenched my legs loose and scurried back up the slope. When I cut around a boulder, however, I practically ran over three Wispies who were firing on an advancing squad of Corpsmen. I bowled two of them over, knocking them loose from their weapons, as the third whirled and fired a blast just past my head. I scrambled to one side and my hand struck one of their guns. I came up with it and brought it around in a parrying thrust. But the thing went off and its shaft of white light bored a hole through the chest of the still-armed Wispie. With the tube spitting out a steady stream of fiery hell, I turned it on the other two furry things before they could reach me. Then darts were singing through the air from all directions. One of them got me in the shoulder and I crumpled where I stood. "Damn it!" I heard Barlow's voice, fading fast. "He got some Wispies after all!" "Maybe they aren't dead yet," Randall said hopefully, just before I passed out. "Call the medics! Get an ambulance sled!" " I was again aware of voices on either side of me. "He's all right, sir," Lieutenant Barlow said crisply. "I had to put him out with a dart." "I don't understand." I recognized Colonel Mason's voice. The Old Man added, "He should know more about combat techniques than any of us -- he's fresh off Wellborne." This time it was Captain Randell who spoke, in a grating whisper that was full of alarm. "He plugged three Wispies!" "Dead?" I flicked an eyelid open in time to see Randell and Barlow, on one side of my bed, nodding. "Oh, no!" Old Warhead exploded. "That does it! Those are the casualties that'll break our back!" "We lost seven men out of the plug-up detail," Randell said, "and brought back six wounded." But Colonel Mason only held his head in his hands. "Three Wispie casualties! Of all the rotten luck! Call out the PM volunteers! Let's get things rolling before we're knocked on our butts!" He glanced down and saw I was awake and sputtered. "Dykes! You're supposed to be an experienced man from Wellborne. What in hell ever possessed you?" Either I had to carry out my bluff even more convincingly than before, or I had to confess that my orders had been rigged. But if I made a clean breast of everything, then I'd spend the rest of the war on a prison planet, and my friend in Personnel would be right there with me. Barlow sneered. "Maybe he just got reckless. Or maybe he decided to go PM." It was only a straw, but I grabbed it. "That's right, Skipper. The whole idea was to get on the PM Detail." Warhead backed off, eyed me skeptically, then broke out in a smile. "Ohho! Now I see why you did it. Dykes, my hat's off to you." He turned to Randell. "How about that? The boy's got real fighting spirit, hasn't he?" The captain nodded in awe. "I've never seen anything like it." "You realize of course, Dykes, that once you take the P-I treatment you can't back down," the Old Man reminded me soberly. "We couldn't afford the waste." I answered with an indifferent shrug. "A soldier's duty transcends everything else, sir." There was respect even in Barlow's stare. "Guess I had you figured wrong, Dykes. But, I don't know -- " he shuddered He glanced down at a wad of paper on the floor, kicked it toward the door, overtook it, kicked it into the hall, caught up with it again, and booted it down the corridor. Warhead gripped my arm. "If there's anything, anything at all, I can do for you, just let me know -- in time, I mean." He leaned out into the hall and shouted, "Orderly! Come take Lieutenant Dykes down to Psyche Intensification. He's going PM." in the P-I Lab. A medical major said something about "strengthening hell" out of my psyche and making it as "razorsharp, artificially, as any Wispie's is naturally." Then he stabbed me in the arm. When I came to, there were no after-effects. In a casual tone, I asked: "Does this make me a full-fledged PM?" The major slapped me on the back and guffawed. "Boy! What a joker! Does that make him a full-fledged PM! What nonchalance!" When he finished laughing, he said, "See if you can pick me up." I grabbed him around the waist. "No, no." He started laughing again. "The other way." This time I understood. I pinched the bridge of my nose and, through slotted eyelids, watched him shoot toward the ceiling as though caught up in a cyclone. "Enough!" he cried. And I let him down gently. "Dykes," he said, "you've really got it! You're going to do a slam-bang job when all the distractions are cut off. The Skipper wants to see you on the field in front of his office. They're going to activate the new PM Detail right away. We've got some Wispie-Bs to take care of, you know." For once it wasn't raining outside. Oh, the sky was as dismal as ever, with great rolling black clouds dogging one another from horizon to horizon, but the lightning and thunder seemed to have retreated momentarily, leaving a drill field with its puddles peacefully reflecting the light of the gas flares. Colonel Mason had the base complement drawn up in block formation and standing at parade rest -- commissioned officers on his right and noncoms and enlisted men on his left. It appeared to be a solemn occasion, for the men were uncovered and had their heads bowed -- all except a squad that stood by itself off to one side. I started across the field to join them, but was overtaken by a slim figure in a trenchcoat. It was Starhop Stanton, the war correspondent. "Just heard about your going PM," he said, falling in step. "Congratulations. You got a lot of guts." I was beginning to feel better about volunteering for the special detail. It certainly seemed to carry prestige with it. "I've got you to thank for my being over here in the first place," I explained. "If it hadn't been for your clustercast about the 'Federation's bravest heroes' being 'hunted relentlessly by the most treacherous foe,' I might not have risen to the challenge." He paused in midstride, confused and frowning. I went ahead, covering the remaining distance on the double, and drew up before the Old Man with a brisk salute. He returned it and asked, "You ready, Dykes?" "Yes, sir," I assured him. "We're going to activate the new PM Detail?" "Right, son. We can't gamble away any more time." He turned to face the men, almost stumbled over a rock, regained his balance and shouted, "Company, 'ten-shun!" They snapped to and I wondered what I was supposed to do. "PM volunteers, front and center!" Mason ordered. Barlow and a sublieutenant came forward, together with three candidates from the enlisted men's ranks. They lined up abreast of me and drew erect. "Men," Mason said, "it would be impossible for me to adequately express the appreciation of this base and the entire Federation for what you are about to do."  a drum began rolling softly. Starhop Stanton stood in the background, looking at me. His arms were folded and he was shaking his head slowly. And I noticed the sublieutenant next to me was fidgeting and sweating. "Actually," Colonel Mason went on, "we hadn't planned on activating this new PM Detail just yet. But there were those three Wispie casualties -- " He laughed and glanced at me -- "which Lieutenant Dykes here arranged, I'm sure, as a personal challenge to himself -- " He became sober again -- "and two more Wispies managed to commit suicide. So I don't have to spell out the absolute necessity." The sublieutenant screamed, "I won't do it! I changed my mind!" He broke and tried to run. But there were two guards waiting behind him. They grabbed his arms and held him. Mason stared pityingly at the man. "Son, you can't change your mind. It's too late." Starhop Stanton drew up behind me. "About that clustercast," he explained, "I didn't say our heroes were being 'hunted relentlessly.' If you'd been on Wellborne, you'd have known that I said they were being 'haunted relentlessly.' " Before I could turn, the colonel signaled for silence. "We'd best get this over with in a hurry." He was still looking sympathetically at the sublieutenant. "Lieutenant Barlow, I believe you have the first honor." The drum rolled more urgently and Barlow took five steps to the side and three forward. There were several sharp, metallic clicks -- like gun bolts being drawn -- and I jerked my head toward the squad that was off to itself. They were armed with Just as I turned, confounded, back toward Barlow, the eight weapons went off and Barlow collapsed. Colonel Mason produced a small ledger and an electroscriber from his pocket. He touched the electrode to his tongue so it would conduct a stronger charge, then inscribed a single check mark on the paper. "Lieutenant Stephen Barlow, and permanently transferred to the Post-Mortem Detail." Then he gazed into the distance and saluted. "Good counterhaunting, Barlow." And the rock Mason had stumbled over earlier hurled itself forward ten paces, came to rest, waited, hurled itself forward another ten paces and came to rest again.      Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. For  # or #c each Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foreign Postage Name . Address City State won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! 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IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the -- issue. I enclose (check one): # issues... # # issues... # Foreign Postage # Issues #c Additional Name  Address -- P.O. Zone. State City be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. 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Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. ' J .-iiiHinD tran!lations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibilty for unsolicited material. All printed irtffis magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental.  Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., inc. N. Y. i e g...  XT'S a dismaying lot of years  since I first said, "I'm psick of psi pstories," and yet the pstuff pstill comes out of authors. This isn't personal. I would fight just as strenuously against a takeover by any one theme, whatever it might be, at the expense of all the others that science fiction should explore. And I did. There are cycles in themes -- ypu can get robots until you can't look another in the photocell eye, and then comes time travel and you wish you had some robot stories on hand, and so forth. An editor who wants science fiction to .do its proper job -- extrapolate into every aspect of civilization -- sometimes has a bit of doing to do. For if the cycle is allowed to continue too long, science fiction would not continue. Psi is threatening to do just that. Back when it was clear that this was no cycle, that it was being hauled out of writers, I thought, "All right, let's go get smashers that nobody can top! Maybe that will bulldoze it out of the way so science fiction can go forward instead of being made to stand still!" Alfred Hester's The Demolished Man should have knocked down the wall. It did not. Neither did his The Stars My Destination nor others that ran in Galaxy, going far beyond mill-rim psi pstories. And here it's still with us, shoving other themes aside. Of course psi is a legitimate theme and I would run good examples of it with no more argument than any other. And of course I've had my share of psi experiences. Like what? Well, back in World War II, there came the Battle of the Bulge and our CO gave us the "Men, this is it!" talk. As orientation man, I had to know the score and I, without minimizing the seriousness of the Bulge, said it was a hopeless military move. Our top sergeant, a lovable fellow named Moore, said, "Awright, wise guy, when is the war gonna end?" I felt a ghastly tension and out came the words: "April #th." He demanded a bet and # was the best I could scrape up. The war ended in Europe May #th. Moore collected, but he had to do some of his lovable barking not to get ganged up on because, at that distance, I had been only a week off. We were heading for the Pacific in a Hog Islander built in #, too slow for a convoy, nothing but a terrier of a destroyer escort to protect us, and (Continued on page #) There had to be a way for Sub-Archivist Clarey to get up in the world -- but this way was right out of the tri-di dramas. that reclassification could be only in one direction. The machine had not originally given him a job commensurate with his talents; why should it suddenly recognize them? He'd known of people who had been reclassified -- always downward. I'm a perfectly competent SubArchivist, he told himself; I'll fight. But he knew fighting wouldn't help. All he had was the right at Classification Center so many times that he came now more out of habit than hope. He didn't even look at the card that the test machine dropped into his hand until he was almost to the portway. And then he stopped. "Report to Room # for reclassification," it said. Ten years before, Clarey would have been ecstatic, sure to refuse any job he could claim was not in his line; the government would then be obligated to continue his existence. There were many people who did subsist on the government dole: the aged and the deficient and the defective -- and creative artists who refused to trammel their spirits and chose to be ranked as Unemployables. Clarey didn't fit into those categories. Dispiritedly, he passed along innumerable winding corridors and up and down ramps that twisted and turned to lead into other ramps and corridors. That was the way all public buildings were designed. It was forbidden for the government to make any law-abiding individual think the way it wanted him to think. But it could move him in any direction it chose, and sometimes that served its purpose as well as the reorientation machines. So the corridors he passed through were in constant eddying movement, with a variety of individuals bent on a variety of objectives. For the most part, they were of Low Echelon status, though occasionally an Upper Echelon flashed his peremptory way past. Even though most L-Es attempted to ape the U-E dress and manner, you could always tell the difference. You could tell the difference among the different levels of L-E, too -- and there was no mistaking the Unemployables in their sober gray habits, devoid of ornament. It was, Clarey sometimes thought when guilt feelings bothered him, the most esthetic of costumes.  I "HE machine in Room # extracted whatever information it was set to receive, then spewed Clarey out and sent him on his way to Rooms #, #, and #, where other machines repeated the same process. Room # proved to be that rare thing in the hierarchy of rooms -- a destination. There was a human Employment Commissioner in it, splendidly garbed in crimson silvet and alexandrites -- very Upper Echelon, indeed. He wore a gold mask, a common practice with celebrities who were afraid of being overwhelmed bytheir admirers, an even more common practice with U-E non-celebrities who enjoyed the thrill of distinguished anonymity. Then Clarey stopped looking at the Commissioner. There was a girl sitting next to him, on a high-backed chair like his. Clarey had never seen a U-E girl so close before. Only the Greater Archivists had direct contact with the public, and Clarey wasn't likely to meet a U-E socially, even if he'd had a social life. The girl was too fabulous for him to think of her as a woman, a female; but he would have liked to  have her in his archives, in the glass case with the rare editions. "Good morning, Sub-Archivist Clarey," the man said mellowly. "Good of you to come in. There's rather an unusual position open and the machines tell us you're the one man who can fill it. Please sit down." He indicated a small, hard stool. Clarey remained standing. "I've been a perfectly competent Sub-Archivist," he declared. "If MacFingal has -- if there have been any complaints, I should have been told first." "There have been no complaints. The reclassification is upward." "You mean I've made it as a Musician!" Clarey cried, sinking to the hard little stool in joyful atony. "Well, no, not exactly a Musician. But it's a highly artistic type of job with possible musical overtones." Clarey became a hollow man once more. No matter what it was, if it wasn't as duly accredited Musician, it didn't matter. The machine could keep him from putting his symphonies down on tape, but it couldn't keep them from coursing in his head. That it could never take away from him. Or the resultant headache, either. "What is the job, then?" he asked dully. "A very important position, Sub-Archivist. In fact, the future welfare of this planet may depend on it." "It's a trick to make me take a job nobody else wants," Clarey sneered. "And it must be a pretty rotten job for you to go to so much trouble." The girl, whom he'd almost forgotten, gave a little laugh. Her eyes, he noticed, were hazel. There were L-E girls, he supposed, who also had hazel eyes -- but a different hazel. vince you of the job's significance," the interviewer said huffily. He took off his mask and looked at Clarey with anticipation. He had a sleek, ordinary, middle-aged-to-elderly face. There was an awkward interval. "Don't you recognize me?" he demanded. Clarey shook his head. The girl laughed again. "A blow to my ego, but proof that you're the right man for this job.'m General Spano. And this is my Mistress, Secretary Han Vollard." The girl inclined her head. "At least you must know my name?" Spano said querulously. "I've heard it," Clarey admitted. " "The Fiend of Fomalhaut,' they call you," he went on before he could catch himself and stop the words. The girl clapped her hand over her mouth, but the laughter spilled out over and around it, pretty U-E laughter. Spano finally laughed, too. "It's a phrase that might be used about any military man. One carries out one's orders to the best of one's ability." "Besides," Clarey observed in a non-Archivistic manner, "what concern have I with your military morality?" "He's absolutely perfect for the job, Steff!" she cried. "I didn't think the machines were that good!" "We mustn't underestimate the machines, Han," Spano said. "They're efficient, very efficient. Someday they'll take over from us." "There're some things they'll never be able to do," she said. Her hazel eyes lingered on Clarey's. "Aren't you glad, Archivist?" "Sub-Archivist," he corrected her frostily. "And I hadn't really thought about it." "That's not what the machines say, Sub-Archivist," she told him, her voice candy-sweet. "They deep-probed your mind. You don't do anything, but you've thought about it a lot, haven't you?" Clarey felt the blood surge up. "My thoughts are my own concern. You haven't the right to use them to taunt me." "But I think you're attractive," she protested. "Honestly I do. In a different way. Just go to a good tailor, put on a little weight, dye your hair, and -- " "And I wouldn't be different any more," Clarey finished. That wasn't true; he would always be different. Not that he was deformed, just unappealing. He was below average height and his eyes and hair and skin were too light. In the past, he knew, there had been pale races and dark races on Earth. With the discovery of other intelligent life-forms to discriminate against together, the different races had fused into a swarthy unity. Of course he could hide his etiolation with dye and cosmetics, but those of really good quality cost more than he could afford, and cheap maquillage was worse than none. Besides, why should his appearance mean anything to anybody but himself? He'd had enough beating around the bush! "Would you mind telling me exactly what the job is?" "Intelligence agent," said Spano. "Isn't it exciting?" she put in. "Aren't you thrilled?"  from his chair. "I won't sit here and be ridiculed!" "Why ridiculed?" Spano asked. "Don't you consider yourself an intelligent man?" "Being an intelligence, agent has nothing to do with intelligence!" Clarey said furiously. "The whole thing's silly, straight out of the tri-dis." "What do you have against the tri-dis. SubArchivist?" Spano's voice was very quiet. "Don't you like any of them?" the girl said. "I just adore Sentries of the Sky!" Her enthusiasm was tinged, obscurely, with warning. 'Well, I enjoy it, too," Clarey said, sinking back to the stool. "It's very entertaining, but I'm sure it isn't meant to be taken seriously." "Oh, but it is, Sub-Archivist Clarey," Spano said. "Sentries of the Sky happens to be produced by my bureau. We want the public to know all about our operations -- or as much as it's good for them to know -- and they find it more palatable in fictionalized form." "Documentaries always get low ratings," the girl said. "And you can't really blame the public -- documentaries are dull. Myself, I like a love interest." Her eyes rested lingeringly on Clarey's. They must think I'm a fool, Clarey thought; yet why would they bother to fool me? "But I am given to understand," he said to Spano, "even by the tri-dis, that an intelligence agent needs special training, special qualifications." "In this case, the special qualifications outweigh the training. And you have the qualifications we need for Damorlan." "According to the machines, all I'm qualified for is human filing cabinet. Is that what you want?" Spano was growing impatient. "Look, Clarey, the machines have decided that you are not a Musician. Do you want to remain a Sub-Archivist for the rest of your days or will you take this other road? Once you're on a U-E level, you can fight the machines; tape your own music if you like." Clarey said nothing, but his initial hostility was ebbing slowly away. "I wanted to be a writer," Spano said. "The machines said no. So I became a soldier, rose to the top. Now -- this is in strictest confidence -- I write most of the episodes of Sentries of the Sky myself. There's always another route for the man with guts and vision, and, above all, faith. Why don't we continue the discussion over lunch?" TT was almost unthinkable for L-E and U-E to eat together. For Clarey this was an honor -- too great an honor -- and there was no way out of it. Spano and the girl put on their masks; the general touched a section of the wall and it slid back. There was a car waiting for them outside. It skimmed over the delicately wrought, immensely strong bridges that, together with the tunnels, linked the great glittering metropolis into a vast efficient whole. Spano was not really broadminded. Although they went to the Aurora Borealis, it was through a side door, and they were served in a private dining room. Clarey was glad and nettled at the same time. The first few mouthfuls of the food tasted ambrosial; then it cloyed and Clarey had to force it down with a thin, almost astringent pale blue liquid. In itself, the liquor had only a mild, slightly pungent taste, but it made everything else increasingly delightful -- the warm, luxurious little room, the perfume that wafted from the air-conditioning ducts, Han Vollard. "Martian mountain wine," she warned him. "Rather overwhelming if you're not used to it, and sometimes even if you are..." Her eyes rested on the general. "But there are no mountains on Mars," Clarey said, startled. "That's it!" Spano chortled. "When you've drunk it, you see mountains!" And he filled his glass again. While they ate, he told Clarey about Damorlan -- its beautiful climate, light gravity, intelligent and civilized natives. Though the planet had been known for two decades, no one from Earth had ever been there except a few selected government officials, and, of course, the regular staff posted there. "You mean it hasn't been colonized yet?" Clarey was relieved, because he felt he should, as an Archivist, have known more about the planet than its name and coordinates. "Why? It sounds like a splendid place for a colony." "The natives," Spano said. "There were natives on a lot of the planets we colonized. You disposed of them somehow." "By co-existence in most cases, Sub-Archivist," Spano said drily. "We've found it best for Terrans and natives to live side by side in harmony. We dispose of a race only when it's necessary for the greatest good. And we would especially dislike having to dispose of the Damorlanti." "What's wrong with them?" Clarey asked, pushing away his half-finished creme brulee a la Betelgeuse with a sigh. "Are they excessively belligerent, then?" "No more belligerent than any intelligent life-form which has pulled itself up by its bootstraps." "Rigid?" Clarey suggested. "Unadaptable? Intolerant? Indolent? Personally offensive?"  back with half-shut eyes, as if this were a guessing game. "None of those." "Then why consider disposing of them?" Clarey asked. "They sound pretty decent for natives. Don't wipe them out; even an ilf has a right to live." "Clarey," the girl said, "you're drunk." "I'm in full command of my faculties," he assured her. "My wits are all about me, moving me to ask how you could possibly expect to use a secret agent on Damorlan if there are no colonists. What would he disguise himself as -- a touring Earth official?" He laughed with modest triumph. Spano smiled. "He could disguise himself as one of them. They're humanoid." "That humanoid?" "That humanoid. So there you have the problem in a nutshell." But Clarey still couldn't see that there was a problem. "I thought we -- the human race, that is -- were supposed to be the very apotheosis of life species." "So we are. And that's the impression we've conveyed to such other intelligent life-forms as we've taken under our aegis. What we're afraid of is that the other ilfs might become... confused when they see the Damorlanti, think they're the ruling race." Leaning forward, he pounded so loudly on the table both the others jumped. "This is our galaxy and we don't intend that anyone, humanoid or otherwise, is going to forget it!" "You're drunk, too, Steff," the girl said. She had changed completely; her coquetry had dropped as if it were another mask. And it had been, Clarey thought -- an advertising mask. An offer had been made, and, if he accepted it, he would get probably not Han herself but a reasonable facsimile. He tried to sort things out in his whizzing brain. "But why should the other ilfs ever see a Damorlant?" he asked, enunciating very precisely. "I've never seen another life-form to speak of. I thought the others weren't allowed off-planet -- except the Baluts, and there's no mistaking them, is there?" For the Baluts, although charming, were unmistakably non-human, being purplish, amiable, and octopoid. "We don't forbid the ilfs to go off-planet," Spano proclaimed. "That would be tyrannical. We simply don't allow them passage in our spaceships. Since they don't have any of their own, they can't leave." "Then you're afraid the Damorlanti will develop space travel on their own," Clarey cried. "Superior race -- seeking after knowledge -- spread their wings and soar to the stars." He flapped his arms and fell off the stool. "Really, Steff," Han said, motioning for the servo-mechanism to pick Clarey up, "this is no way to conduct an interview." "I am a creative artist," the general said thickly. "I believe in suiting the interview to the occasion. Clarey understands, for he, too, is an artist." The general sneezed and rubbed his nose with his silver sleeve. "Listen to me, boy. The Damorlanti are a fine, creative, productive race. It isn't generally known, but they developed the op fastener for evening wear, two of the new scents on the roster come from Damorlan, and the snettis is an adaptation of a Damorlant original. Would you want a species as artistic as that to be annihilated by an epidemic?" "Do our germs work on them?" Clarey wanted to know. "That hasn't been established yet. But .their germs certainly work on us." The general sneezed again. "That's where I got this sinus trouble, last voyage to Damorlan. But you'll be inoculated, of course. Now we know what to watch out for, so you'll be perfectly safe. That is, as far as disease is concerned." noble aspect. "Naturally, if you're discovered as a spy, we'll have to repudiate you. You must know that from the tri-dis." "But I haven't said I would go!" Clarey howled. "And I can't see why you'd want me, anyway!" "Modest," the general said, lighting a smoke-stick. "An admirable trait in a young intelligence operatiie -- or, indeed, anyone. Have a smoke-stick?" Clarey hesitated. He had never tried one; he had always wanted to. "Don't, Clarey," the girl advised. "You'll be sick." She spoke with authority and reason. Clarey shook his head. The general inhaled and exhaled a cloud of smoke in the ' shape of a bunnit. "The Damorlanti look like us, but because they look like us, that doesn't mean they think like us. They may not have the least idea of developing space travel, simply be interested in developing thought, art, ideals, splendid cultural things like that. We don't know enough about them; we may be making mountains out of molehills." "Martian molehills," Clarey snickered. "Precisely," the general agreed. "Except that there are no moles on Mars either." "But I still can't understand. Why me?" The general leaned forward and said in a confidential tone, "We want to understand the true Damorlan. Our observations have been too superficial; couldn't help being. There we come, blasting out of the skies with the devil of a noise, running all over the planet as if we owned it. You know how those skyboys throw their gravity around." Clarey nodded. Sentries of the Sky had kept him well informed on such matters. "So what we want is a man who can go to Damorlan for five or ten years and become a Damorlant in everything but basic loyalties. A man who will absorb the very spirit of the culture, but in terms our machines can understand and interpret." Spano stood erect. "You, Clarey, are that man!" The girl applauded. "Well done, Steff! You finally got it right side up!" "But I've lived twenty-eight years on this planet and I'm not a part of its culture," Clarey protested. "I'm a lonely, friendless man -- you must know that if you've deep-probed me -- so why should I put up a front and be brave and proud about it?" laugh. "I see. That's the reason you want me. I have no roots, no ties; I belong nowhere. Nobody loves me. Who else, you think, but a man like me would spend ten years on an alien planet as an alien?" "A patriot, Sub-Archivist," the general said sternly. "By God, sir, a patriot!" "There's nothing I'd like better than to see Terra and all its colonies go up in smoke. Mind you," Clarey added quickly, for he was not as drunk as all that, "I've nothing against the government. It's a purely personal grievance." The general unsteadily patted his arm. "You're detached, m'boy. You can examine an alien planet objectively, without trying to project your own cultural identity upon it, because you have no cultural identity." "How about physical identity?" Clarey asked. "They can't be ex-exactly like us. Against the laws of nature." "The laws of man are higher than the laws of nature," the general said, waving his arm. A gout of smoke curled around his head and became a hdlo. "Very slight matter of plastic surgery. And we'll change you back as soon as you return." Then he sat down heavily. "How many young men in your position get an opportunity like this? Permanent U-E status, a hundred thousand credits a year and, of course, on Damorlan you'd be on an expense account; our money's no good there. By the time you got and a half waiting for you, with interest. You could buy all the instruments and tape all the music you wanted. And, if the Musicians' Guild puts up a fuss, you could buy it, too. Don't let anybody kid you about the wheel, son; money was mankind's first significant invention." "But ten years. That's a long time away from home." "Home is where the heart is, and you wanting to see your own planet go up in a puff of smoke -- why, even an ilf wouldn't say a thing like that!" Spano shook his head. "That's too detached for me to understand. You'll find the years will pass quickly on Damorlan. You'll have stimulating work to do; every moment will be a challenge. When it's all over, you'll be only thirtyeight -- the very prime of life. You won't have aged even that much, because you'll be entitled to longevity treatments at regular intervals. "So think it over, m'boy." He rose waveringly and clapped Clarey on the shoulder. "And take the rest of the afternoon off; I'll fix it with Archives. We wouldn't want you coming back from Classification intoxicated." He winked. "Make a very bad impression on your co-workers." Han masked herself and escorted Clarey to the restaurant portway. "Don't believe everything he says. But I think you'd better accept the offer." "I don't have to," Clarey said. "No," she agreed, "you don't. But you'd better."  underground route home. His antiseptic little two-room apartment seemed even bleaker than usual. He dialed a dyspep pill from the auto-spensor; the lunch was beginning to tell on him. And that evening he couldn't even talce an interest in Sentries of the Sky, which, though he'd never have admitted it, was his favorite program. He had no friends; nobody would miss him if he left Earth or died or anything. The general's right, he thought; I might as well be an alien on an alien planet. At least ; I'll be paid better. And he wondered whether, in lighter gravity, his spirits might not get a lift. He dragged himself to work the next day. He found someone did care after all. 'Well, SubArchivist Clarey," Chief Section Archivist MacFingal snarled, "I would have expected to see more sparkle in your eye, more pep in your step, after a whole day of nothing but sweet rest." "But -- but General Spano said it would be all right if I didn't report back in the afternoon." "Oh, it is all right, SubArchivist, no question of that. How could I dare to complain about a man who has such powerful friends? I suppose if I gave you the Sagittarius files to reorganize, you'd go running to your friend General Spano, sniveling about cruel and unfair treatment." So Clarey started reorganizing the Sagittarius files -- a sickeningly dull task which should by rights have gone to a junior archivist. All morning he couldn't help thinking about Damorlan -- its invigorating atmosphere, its pleasant climate, its presumed absence of archives and archivists. During his lunchstop he looked up the planet in the files. There was only a small part of a tape on it. There might be more in the Classified Files. It was, of course, forbidden to view secretapes without a direct order from the Chief Archivist, but the tapes were locked by the same code as the rare editions. After all, he told himself, I have a legitimate need for the information. So he punched for Damorlan in the secret files. He put the tape in the viewer. He saw the natives. Cold shock filled him, and then hot fury. They were humanoid all right -- pallid, pale-haired creatures. Objective viewpoint, he thought furiously; detachment be damned! I was picked because I look like one of them! He was wrenched away from the viewer. "Sub-Archivist Clarey, what is the meaning of this?" Chief Section Archivist MacFingal demanded. "You know what taking a secretape out without permission means?" Clarey knew. The reorientation machine. "Ask General Spano," he said in a constricted voice. "He'll tell you it's all right." was, indeed, all right. "I'm so glad to hear you've decided to join us. Splendid career for an enterprising young man. Smokestick?" Clarey refused; he no longer had any interest in trying one. "Don't look so grim," Spano said jovially. "You'll like the Damorlanti once you get to know them. Very affectionate people. Haven't had any major wars for several generations. Currently there are just a few skirmishes at the poles and you ought to be able to keep away from those easily. And they'll simply love you." "But I don't like anyone," Clarey said. "And I don't see why the Damorlanti should like me," he added fairly. "I'll tell you why! Because it'll be your job to make them like you. You've got to be friendly and outgoing if it kills you. Anyone can develop a winning personality if he sets his mind to it. I though you said you watched the tri-dis!" "I -- I don't always watch the commercials," Clarey admitted. "Oh, well, we all have our little failings." Spano leaned forward, his voice now pitched to persuasive decibels. "Normally, of course,, you wouldn't stoop to hypocrisy to gain friends, and quite right, too -- people should accept you as you are or they wouldn't be worthy of becoming your friends. But this is different. You have to be what they want, because you want something from them. You'll have to suffer rebuffs and humiliations and never show resentment." "In other words," Clarey said, "a secret agent is supposed to forget all about such concepts as self-respect." "If necessary, yes. But here self-respect doesn't enter into it. These aren't people and they don't, really matter. You wouldn't be humiliated, would you, if you tried to pat a dog and it snarled at you?" "Steff, he's got to think of them as people until he's definitely given them a clean bill of health," Han Vollard protested. "Otherwise, the whole thing won't work." "Well," the general temporized, "think of them as people, then, but as inferior people. Let them snoop and pry and sneer. Always, at the back of your mind, you'll have the knowledge that this is all a sham, that someday they'll get whatever it is they deserve. You might even think of it as a game, Clarey -- no more personal than when you fail to get the gardip ball into the loop." "I don't happen to play gardip. General," Clarey reminded him coldly. Gardip was strictly a U-E pastime. And, in any case, Clarey was not a gamesman. He was put through intensive indoctrination, given accelerated courses in the total secret agent curriculum: Self-Defense and Electronics, Decoding and Resourcefulness, Xenopsychology and Acting. "There are eight cardinal rules of acting," the robocoach told him. "The first is: Never Identify. You'll never be able to become the character you're playing, because you aren't that character -- the playwright gave birth to him, not your mother. Therefore -- " "But I'm only going to play one role," Clarey broke in. "All I need to know is how to play that role well and convincingly. My life may depend on it." "I teach acting," the robocoach said loftily. "I don't run a charm school. If you come to me, you learn -- or, at least, are exposed to -- all I have to offer. I refuse to tailor my art to any occasional need. Now, the second cardinal rule..."  absorb the languages and social structure of the planet through the impersonal hypnotapes. He had to learn more than one language because the planet was divided into several national units, each speaking a different tongue. Inefficient as far as planetary operation went, but advantageous to him, Han Vollard pointed out, because, though he'd work in Vangtor, he would be supposed to have originated in Ventimor; hence his accent. "Work?" Clarey asked. "I thought I was going to be an undercover agent." "You'll have a cover job," she explained wearily. "You can't just wander around with no visible source of income, unless you're a member of the nobility, and it would be risky to elevate you to the peerage." "What kind of a job will I have?" Clarey asked, brightening a little at the idea of possibly having something interesting to do. "They call it librarian. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but Colonel Blynn -- he's our chief officer on the planet -- says that after indoctrination you ought to be able to handle it." Clarey already knew that jobs on Damorlan weren't officially assigned, but that employer and employee somehow managed to find each other and work out arrangements themselves. Sometimes, Han now explained, employers would advertise for employees. Colonel Blynn had answered such a job in Vangtor on his behalf from an accommodation address in Ventimor. "You were hired sight unseen, because you came cheap. So they probably won't check your references. Let's hope not, anyway." one long aching agony. Since luxury liners naturally didn't touch on Damorlan, he was sent out on a service freighter, built for maximum stowage rather than comfort. Most of the time he was spacesick. The only thing that comforted him was that it would be ten years before he'd have to go back. They landed on the Earthmen's spaceport -- the only spaceport, of course -- at Barshwat, and he was hustled off to Earth Headquarters in an animal-drawn cart that made him realize there were other ailments besides spacesickness. "Afraid you're going to have to hole up in my suite while you're with us," Colonel Blynn apologized when Clarey was safely inside. "The rest of the establishment is crawling with native servants -- daytimes, anyway; they sleep out -- but they have orders never to come near my quarters." He looked interestedly at Clarey. "Amazing how the plastosurgeons got you to look exactly like a native. Those boys really know their stuff. Maybe I will have my nose fixed next time I go Earthside." Clarey glared venomously at the tall, handsome, dark young officer. "Don't worry," Blynn soothed him. "I'm sure when you go back they'll be able to make you look exactly the way you were before." He gave Clarey a general briefing and explained to him that the additional allowance he'd be receiving -- since he couldn't be expected to live on a Damorlant salary -- would come from an alleged rich aunt in Barshwat. "Where'll you get the native currency?" Clarey asked. "We do some restricted trading with the natives, bring materials that're in short supply; salt, breakfast cereals, pigments, thread -- stuff like that. Nothing strategic, nothing they could possibly use against us... unless they decide to strangle us with our own string." He guffawed earsplittingly. of Earth officers hustled Clarey into a hax-cart. A little later, equipped with a native kit, an itinerary, and a ticket purchased in Ventimor, he was left a short distance from a large track-car station. He was so numb with fright he had to force himself to move in the right direction leg by leg. He gained a little confidence when he was able to find the terminus without needing to ask directions; he even managed to find the right chain of cars and a place to sit in one of them. He didn't realize that this was something of an achievement until he discovered that certain later arrivals had to stand. He wondered why more tickets were issued than there were seats available, then realized the answer was simple -- primitives couldn't count very accurately. Creakily and slowly, the chain got imder way. Clarey's terror mounted. Here he was, wearing strange clothes, on a strange world, surroxmded by strange creatures. They aren't really repulsive, he told himself; they look like people; they look like me. Some of the natives seemed to be staring at him. His heart began to beat loudly. Could they hear it? Did their hearts beat the same way? Was their hearing more acute than his? The tapes had seemed so full of information; now he saw how full of holes they'd been. Then he noticed that the natives were staring at each other. His heart quieted. Only a local custom. After a while, little conversational groups formed. No one spoke to him, for he spoke to no one. He was not yet ready to thrust himself upon them; he had enough to do to reach his destination successfully. He tried to follow the conversations for practice and to keep his mind off his fears. The male next to him was talking to the male opposite about the weather and its effect on the sirtles. The three females on his other side were telling each other how their respective offspring were doing in school. Some voices he couldn't identify with owners were complaining how much sagor and titulwirt cost these days. I don't know why the government is so worried, he thought; they're not really very human at all. The chain had been scheduled to reach the end of its run in three hours. It took closer to five. He got off at what would have been around midnight on Earth, and the terminus where he was supposed to take the next chain was almost empty of people, completely empty of cars. Although it was still a few minutes before his car was due, he was worried. Finally, he approached a native. "Is this -- is this not where the #:# to Zrig is destined to appear?" he asked, conscious as he uttered Vangtort aloud for the first time that his phrasing was not entirely colloquial. The native stared at him with small pale eyes and bit his middle finger. "Stranger, eh?" he asked in a small pale voice. "Yes." The native waited. "I come from Ventimor," Clarey told him. Nosy native, he thought furiously; prying primitive. "You don't hafta shout," the native said. "I'm not deef." Clarey realized what he hadn't noted consciously before -- the natives spoke much more softly than Earthmen. Local custom two. "You'll be finding things a lot different here in Vangtor," the native told him. "Livelier, more up to date. F'rinstance, do the cars always run on time in Ventimor?" "Yes," Clarey said firmly. "Well, they don't here. Know why? That's because we've got more'n one chain of 'em." He made a noise like a wounded turshi. He was laughing.  ached. "About the #:#? It is rather important to me, as I understand the next chain does not leave for several days." The native lifted a chronometer hanging around his neck. "Ought to get in around # or so," he said. "Whyn't you get yourself a female or a bite to eat?" He waved his hand toward the two trade booths that were still open for business. Clarey was very hungry. But, as he got near the food booth, the stench and the sight of the utensils were too much for him. He went back to the carways and sat huddled on a banquette until his chain came in at #:#. The car he picked was empty, so he stretched out on the seat and slept until it got to Zrig, very early in the morning. When he got out, day was dawning and a food booth hadn't had time to accumulate odors so he climbed to one of the perches and pointed to something that looked like a lopsided pie and something else that looked like coffee. Neither was what it appeared to be, but the pseudo-pie was edible and the pseudo-coffee was good. Somehow, the food seemed to diminish his fright; it made the world less strange. "Where you going, stranger?" the native asked, resting his arms on the top of the booth. "Katund," Clarey said. The other looked puzzled. "It is a village near Zrig." "That a fact?" The native bit his little finger. "You look like a city feller to me." "That is correct," Clarey said patiently. "I come from Qytet. It is a place of some size." He waited a decent interval before collapsing his smile. "Now, why would a smartlooking young fellow like you want to go to a place like this Katund, eh?" Clarey started to shrug, then remembered that was not a Damorlant gesture. "I have received employment there." "I should think you'd be able to do better'n that." The native nibbled at his thumb. "What did you say you worked at?" "I didn't. I am a librarian." The native turned away and began to rinse his utensils. "In that case, I guess Katund's as good a place as any." Surely, Clarey thought, even a Damorlant would at this point rise up and smite the food merchant with one of his own platters. Then he forgot his anger in apprehension. What in the name of whatever gods they worshipped on this planet could a librarian possibly be? He got up and was about to go. Then he remembered to be friendly and outgoing. "I have never tasted better food," he told the native. "Not even in Barshwat." The native picked up the coin Clarey had left by way of tip and bit it. Apparently it passed the test. "Stop here next time you're passing this way," he advised, "and I'll really serve you something to write home about!" proved to be nothing but a large cart drawn by a team of hax. Clarey waited for internal manifestations as he rode. None came. I've found my land legs, he thought, or, rather, my land stomach. And with the hax jogging along the quiet lanes of Vangtor, he found himself almost at peace. Earth was completely urbanized: there were the great metropolises; there were the parks; there were the oceans. That was all. So to him the Vangtort countryside looked like a huge park, with grass and trees and flowers that were slightly unrealistic in color, but beautiful just the same -- even more, perhaps. It was idyllic. There's bound to be some catch, he thought. The other passengers, who'd been talking together in low tones, turned toward Clarey. "You'll be the new librarian, I take it?" the tallest observed. He was a bulky creature, wearing a rich but sober cloak that came down to his ankles. For a moment Clarey couldn't understand him; the local dialect seemed to thicken the words. "Why, yes. How did you know that?" The native wiggled his ears. "Not many folks come to Katund and a new librarian's expected, so it wasn't hard to figure. Except you don't look my idea of a librarian." Clarey nervously smoothed the dark red cloak that covered him from shoulder to mid-calf. Was it too loud? Too quiet? Too short? "What give you the idea of cornin' to Katund?" the oldest and smallest of the three asked in a whistling voice. "It's no place anybody who wasn't born here'd choose." "Most young fellers favor the city," the third -- a barrel-shaped individual -- agreed. "I'd of gone there myself when I was a lad, if Dad hadn't needed somebody to take over the Purple Furbush when he was gone." "Maybe he's runnin' away," the ancient sibilated. "When I was a boy, there was a feller from the city came here; turned out to be a thief." All three stared at Clarey. "I -- I replied to an advertisement in the Dordolec District Bulletin," he said carefully. "I wished for a position that was peaceful and quiet. I am recovering from an overset of the nervous system." The oldest one said, "That'd account for it right enough." Clarey gritted his teeth and beamed at them. "Typical idiot smile," the ancient whispered. "Noticed it myself right off, but I didn't like to say." "Is it right to have a librarian that isn't all there?" the proprietor of the Furbush asked. "Foreigner, too. I mean to say -- the young ones use him more'n most." "We've got to take what we can get," the biggest native said. "Katund's funds are running mighty low." "What can you expect when you ballot yourself a salary raise every year?" the old one whistled. The other two made animal noises. Clarey must not jump; he must learn to laugh like a turshi if he hoped to be the life of any Damorlant party. well as he could in the swaying cart. "Guess I'd better interduce myself," he said, holding out a sturdily shod foot. "I'm Malesor, headman of Katund. This is Piq; he deals in blots and snarls. And Hanxi here's the innkeeper." "My name is Balt," Clarey said. "I am honored by this meeting." And he went through the conventional toe-touching with each one. "Guess you'll be putting up with me imtil you've found permanent quarters, Til Balt," Hanxi said. "Not that you could do much better than make your permanent home at the Purple Furbush. You'll find life more comfortable than if you lodge with a private fam'ly. Bein' a young unmarried man -- " he twisted his nose suggestively -- "you'd naturally want a bit of freedom, excitement." "Remember he's a librarian," Piq whistled. "He might not appreciate as good a time as most young fellers." Clarey was glad when a cluster of domes appearing over the horizon indicated that they'd reached Katund. He looked about him curiously. The countryside he'd been able to equate with a park, but this small aggregate of detached dwellings bore no relationship to anything in his experience. His kit was dexterously removed from his hand. "Guess you'll want to check in first," Hanxi said, "so I'll just take your gear over to the inn for you.' He pointed out a small dome shading from lavender at the bottom to rose pink on top. Over the door were glittering symbols which Clarey was able to decipher after a moment's concentration as "Dordonec District Public Library -- Katund # . Branch," and underneath, in smaller letters, "Please Blow Nose Before Entering." Hesitantly, he touched the screen that covered the portway. It rolled back. He went inside. At his first sight of what filled the shelves from floor to topmost curve of the dome, Clarey became charged with fury. The ancient books in the glass cases back on Earth were of a different shape and substance, but, "My God," he cried aloud, "it's nothing but another archive!" The female in charge glared at him. "Silence, please!" Suddenly the anger left him, and the fear. He was no longer a stranger on a strange world. He was an archivist in an archive. She took a better look at him and " the local equivalent of a bright smile shone on her face. "May I help you, til?" she asked in a softer, sweeter voice. "I am Balt, tial," he said, "I am the new librarian." She came out from behind the desk to offer the ceremonial toe touch. "I'm Embelsira, the head librarian, and I am very glad to see you!" Her tone was warm; she really seemed to mean it. "Everything's in such a mess," she went on. "I've needed help so very badly, so very long," She looked up at him, for she was a good deal shorter than he. "So glad," she murmured, "so very. very glad to see you, really." "Well, now you have help," he said with quiet strength. "Where are the files?" They were written instead of punched, of alien design, in an alien language, arranged according to alien patterns, but he understood them at a glance. "These will need to be reorganized from top to bottom," he said. "Yes, Til Balt," she said demurely. "Whatever you say."  Clarey went for a long weekend to visit his "Aunt Askidush" in Barshwat. Barshwat was the largest city on Darmorlan; it was the capital of Vintnor -- the greatest nation. Earthmen, Clarey thought, as he traveled there in the comparative luxury of a first-class compartment -- as a rich nephew, he saw no real reason to travel third-class -- were disgustingly obvious. That first time, he was five hours late, and Blynn was a nervous wreck. "I was afraid you'd been killed or discovered or God knows," he babbled, practically embracing Clarey in a fervency of relief. "I was afraid -- " "Come, come. Colonel," Clarey interrupted, striding past him, "you know how inefficient Damorlant transport is, and I had to make two chain connections." "Of course," the colonel said, wiping the perspiration off his forehead. "Of course. And you must be dead tired. Sit down; let me take your cloak -- " "How about the servants?" Clarey asked. "This is their weekend off." Blynn pulled himself together. "Really, my dear fellow, I've been in this business longer than you. I know what precautions to take." "Never can be too careful." "I see you've got yourself another cloak," the colonel said as he hung it in the guest snap. "Very handsome. I've never seen one like it." "Yes. As a matter of fact, several people on the chains wanted to know where I'd got it" "Where did you get it?" asked Blynn, feeling the material. "Might go well as an export." "Afraid it couldn't be exported. It's a custom job, you see. Handwoven, hand-decorated. It was a birthday present." The colonel stared at him. "Well," Clarey said, "if you didn't expect me to get birthday presents, you shouldn't have put a birth date on my identity papers. My boss baked me a melxhane -- " "Your boss!" "The relationship between employer and employee is much different from the way it is on Earth," Clarey explained. Reaching over, he flipped the switch on the recorder and repeated the statement, adding, "Embelsira is kind, considerate, helpful; she can't do enough for me." He put his mouth close to the mechanism. "Be sure to tell MacFingal that." "Now, now," the colonel said, turning the switch off. He pushed a small tea wagon over to Clarey. "You must be starving. Have some sandwiches and coffee. I'm sure you'll be glad to taste good Earth food again." "Yes, indeed," Clarey said, trying not to make a face. "Er -- shouldn't we start recording while everything's fresh in my mind?" "Might as well," the colonel said, flipping the switch again. "Pity we don't have a probe here. Would save so much time. But, of course, it's an expensive installation. All right, Clarey, over to you."  ful of sandwich and hesitated. "Begin with your very first impressions," the colonel urged. "Well, the archives -- the library -- was in a real mess. Took me over two weeks to get it in even roughly decent shape. Three different systems of classification and, added to that -- " "Not so much the library, old chap. Leave the technical stuff for later. What I meant was yoiufirst impressions of the natives... Is something wrong with the coffee? And you've hardly touched your sandwich. Maybe you'd like another kind. I have several varieties here -- ham and cheese and -- " "Oh, no," Clarey protested. "The one I have is fine. It's just that I'm -- well, to tell you the truth," he confessed, "I've grown accustomed to Damorlant food." "Don't see how you could," the colonel said. "Nauseating stuff -- to my way of thinking," he added politely. He opened a sandwich "You've only eaten at public places. Even the better restaurants don't put themselves out for Earthmen, say they have no -- palates, I guess the word would be. But you ought to taste my landlady's cooking!" "All this is being taped, you know. They'll have to listen to every word on Earth." "If only I could convey the true picture through words. Her ragouts are rhapsodies, her souffles symphonies -- I'm using rough Terrestrial equivalents, of course -- " "The cuisine comes later, please. Over-all impressions first." "Well," Clarey began again, "at first I was a bit surprised that you'd stuck me in a quarter-credit place like Katund. Naturally in a village the people'd be more backward than in the cities, so you'd have a poorer idea of how they were developing. Then I realized that you couldn't help putting me there, that you probably couldn't write a letter good enough to get me a job in any of the big centers. Embelsira said she was surprised to find me so much more literate than she would have expected from the letter." The colonel sat erect huffily. "I've never pretended to be a philologist. And, anyway, Damorlan isn't like Earth. Here the heartbeat of the planet is in its villages." "Earth hasn't any villages, so the comparison doesn't apply." Clarey cleared his throat. "Don't you have anything to drink except coffee?" "Tea?" "That would be better. Do you know the Katundi have a special variety of tea, or something very like it, which is -- " "Tell me what they think of Earthmen," the colonel interrupted desperately. "Not much. What I mean is, nobody in Katund's actually had any contact with them, though they've heard of them, of course. Every now and then there's a little article in the Dordonec Bulletin from their Barshwat correspondent, and sometimes, if there isn't any real news, he gives a couple of inches to the Earthmen." "Exactly how do they regard us?" the colonel asked as he spooned tea into the pot. "Demigods? Superior beings? Are they in great awe of us?" "They regard us as visitors from another planet," Clarey said. "They don't realize from quite how far away we hail, think it's only a matter of a solar system or two, but they've got the general idea. Don't forget, they may not be a mechanical people, but they do have some idea of astronomy. They're not "What do they think of our spaceships? Great silver birds, something like that?" "They think our spaceships are cars that fly through the sky without tracks. And they think it's silly, our having machines to fly in the sky and none to go on the ground. There's an old Dordonec proverb: 'One must run before one must fly.' Originally applied to birds, but -- " "But what else do they think about us?" Clarey was hurt. "That's what I was getting to, if you'll only give me time. After all, I've been speaking Vangtort for six months and it's a little hard to go back to Terran and organize my thoughts at the same time." "Terribly sorry," the colonel apologized, handing him a cup of tea. "Carry on." "Thank you. They say if you -- if we -- are so smart, why do we use hax or the chains like anybody else? They think somebody else must have given us the starships, or else we stole them. That's mostly Piq's idea; he's the village lawyer and, of course, lawyers are apt to think in terms like that." "Um," the colonel said. "We didn't think it would be a good idea to introduce ground cars. Upset their traffic and cause dissatisfied yearnings." "They're satisfied with their hax carts. The#re not in any hurry to get anywhere. But Katund's a village. Attitudes may be different in the cities." "You stick with your village, old chap. If you feel a wild urge for city life, you can always take a weekend trip to Zrig. Stay at the Zrig Grasht; it's the only decent inn. By the way, you spoke of a landlady. Do you mean at the inn?" No, Clarey told him, at first he had put up at the inn, but he found the place noisy, the cooking poor, and the pallet covers dirty. Besides, Hanxi had kept importuning him to go on visits to a nearby township where he promised him a good time. "I was wondering, though," Clarey finished, "if it would be possible for an Earthman and a Damarlent to -- er -- have a good time together." "Been wondering myself!" the colonel said eagerly. "I didn't dare ask on my own behalf, but it's your job, isn't it? I'll check back with the X-T boys on Earth. Go on with your story." Clarey told Colonel Blynn, he'd found that he was expected to join the men in the bar parlor every evening, where they'd drink and exchange appropriate stories. But he'd choked on the squfur and was insufficiently familiar with the local mores to be able to appreciate the stories, let alone tell any. He'd concentrated on smiling and agreeing with whatever anybody said, with the result that the others began to agree with Piq that he was a bit cracked. "They were, for the most part, polite enough to me, but I could sense the gulf. I was a stranger, a city man, and probably a bit of a lunatic." A few of the younger ones hadn't even been polite. "They used to insult me obliquely," Clarey went on, "and whisper things I only half-heard. I pretended I didn't hear at all. I stood them drinks and told them what a lovely place Katund was, so much cleaner and prettier and friendlier than the city. That just seemed to confirm their impression that I was an idiot." He stopped, took a sip of tea, and continued, "The females were friendly enough, though. Every time they came into the library they'd always stop for a chat. And they were very hospitable -- invited me to outdoor luncheons, temple gatherings, things like that. Embelsira -- she's the chief librarian -- got quite annoyed because she said they made so much noise when they all gathered round my desk." He paused and blushed. "I have an idea that -- well, the ladies don't find me unattractive. I mean they're not really ladies. That is, they're perfect ladies; they're just not women." "I'm not a bit surprised," the colonel nodded sagely. "Very well-set-up young fellow for a native -- only natural they should take a liking to you. And only natural the men shouldn't." Clarey gave an embarrassed grin. "One evening I was sitting in the bar-parlor, talking to Kuqal and Gazmor, two of the older men. And then Mundes camo in; he's the town muscle boy. You know the type -- one in every tri-di series. He was rather unpleasant. I pretended to think he was joking. I've learned to laugh like one of them. Listen." He gave a creditable imitation of an agonized turshi. T he colonel shuddered. "I'm sure if anything would convince the chaps back on Earth that the Damorlanti aren't human, that would do it. What then?" "Finally he made a remark impugning the virility of librarians that I simply could not ignore, so I emptied my mug of squfur in his face." "Stout fellow!" "I knew he'd attack me and probably beat me up, but I thought that perhaps if I put up a show of courage they'd respect me. There was something like that in Sentries of the Sky a year or so ago -- but of course you'd have missed that episode; you were up here. Anyhow, as I expected, he hit me. And then I hit him..." He smiled reminiscently into his cup of tea. "And then?" "I beat him," Clarey said simply. "I still can't figure out how I did it. I think it must be because my muscles are heaviergravity type." He smiled again. "And I beat him good. He couldn't dance at the temple for weeks." The colonel's jaw dropped. "He's a temple dancer?" "Chief temple dancer. I was a little worried about that, because I didn't want to get in bad theologically. So I went to the priest and apologized for any inconvenience I might have caused. He said not to worry; Mundes had had it coming to him for a long time and his one regret was that he hadn't been there to see it. Then we touched toes and he said he liked to see a young fellow with brawn who also took an interest in cultural pursuits like reading. He trusted I'd have a beneficial effect on the youth of the village. And then he asked me to fill in for Mundes as chief temple dancer until he -- ah -- recovered. It's a great honor, you know!" he said sharply, as the colonel seemed more moved to mirth than awe. "But I've never been much of a dancing man and that's what I told him." "Very well done," the colonel said approvingly. "But you still haven't explained where you got lodgings and a landlady." "She's Embelsira's mother. I was invited over for dinner from time to time... It's a local custom," he explained as Blynn's eyebrows went up. "So, when Embelsira told me her mother happened to have a compartment to let with meals included, i I i j . i ( I I jumped at it. Blynn, you really ought to taste those pastries of hers!" The colonel managed to divert him onto some of the other aspects of Katundut life. When he'd finished taping everything he had to say, the colonel gave him a list of artifacts and smallsized flora and fauna the specialists on Earth wanted him to collect for his next trip, providing he could do so without arousing attention or violating tabus. They shook hands. "Clarey," the colonel said, "you've done splendidly. Earth will be proud of you. And you might bring along one or two of those pastries, by the way." Katund, Embelsira and her mother gave a little welcome home party for him. "Nothing elaborate," the widow said. "Just a few neighbors and friends, some simple refreshments." The tiny residential dome was packed with people; the refreshments, Clarey thought, as he munched industriously, were magnificent. But then he'd been forced to live on Earth food for a weekend, so he was no judge. After they'd finished eating, the young people folded the furniture, and, while one of the boys played upon a curious instrument that was string and percussion and brass all at once, the others danced. Clarey made no attempt to participate. In his early youth, he'd flopped at the Earth hops -- and the Damorlanti had a distinctly more Dionysian culture than his home world. He stood and watched them leaping and twirling. When they'd dropped, temporarily exhausted, he made his way over to the musician, whom he recognized as one of Piq's numerous grandsons; this one was Rini, he thought. "Is that difficult to learn?" he asked, touching the instrument. "The ulerin is extremely difficult," the boy said importantly. "It takes years and years of practice. And you've got to have the touch to begin with. Not many do. All our family have the touch, my brother Irik most of I ;  : 'I all. He's in Barshwat, studying to be a famous musician." Clarey looked at the ulerin with unmistakable wistfulness. "Care to try it?" the boy asked. "But, mind, you have to pay for any bladders you burst." "I shall be very careful," Clarey said, taking the instrument reverently in his hands. He had never touched a musical instrument before -- an Earth instrument would have been no less unfamiliar, no more wonderful. Gently he began to pluck and bang and blow, in imitation of the way the boy had done, and, though the sounds that came out didn't have the same smoothness, still they didn't fall harshly on his ears. The others stopped talking and listened; it would have been difficult for them to do otherwise, as he was unable to find the muting device. "Sounds like the death wail of a hix," Piq sibilated, but he added grudgingly, "Foreigner or not, I have to say this for him -- he's got the touch." "Yes, he's got the touch," others agreed. "You always can tell." Rini smiled at Clarey. "I believe you do. I'll teach you to play, if you like." "I would, very much." Clarey was about to offer to pay for the lessons; then he remembered that, though this would have been the right thing on Earth, it would be wrong on Damorlan. "If it is not too much trouble," he finished. "It's the kind of trouble I like." The boy twisted his nose at Clarey. "Sometime you can hide the reserved books for me." Clarey insisted on helping the women with the putting away. "Well, as long as Embelsira has a pair of brawny arms to help her," the widow yawned, "I might as well be getting along to my pallet. I seem to get more and more tired these days -- old age, I expect. One day I'll be so tired I'll never wake up and Embelsira'll be alone and what'll she do, oor thing? Who can live on a librarian's salary? Now, on two librarians' salaries -- " "Mother," Embelsira interrupted furiously, "you go to bed!" She did, hurriedly. "Don't worry, Embelsira," Clarey said. "She will be weaving away for decades yet. Everybody says she's the best weaver in the district," he added, to change the subject. "Yes," Embelsira said as they gathered all the oddments the guests had left, "she's been offered a lot of money to go work in Zrig. But she won't leave Katund; she was born here, and so were her parents." r "I do not blame her for wanting to stay," he said. "It's a very -- homelike place." She sighed. "To us it is, but I I don't suppose someone who's city born and bred would feel the same way. I know you won't let yourself stay buried here forever, and what will I -- what j will Mother and I ever do without you?" "It is -- very kind of you to , say so," he replied. "I am honored." The girl -- she was still young enough to be called a girl, though , no longer in her first youth -- , looked up at him. Blue eyes could be pleasing in their way. "Why are you always so stiff, so cold?" "I am not cold," he said honestly. "I am -- afraid." "There is nothing to be afraid  of. You're safe, among friends, no matter what you may have done back where you came from." "But I have done nothing back there," he said. "Nothing at all. I Perhaps that is the trouble with me. She looked up at him and then away. "Then isn't it about time you started to do something?" Barshwat he took a lot of luggage with him, because, besides the artifacts and the flora and fauna, he brought cold pastries for the colonel. The colonel ate one in silence, then said, "Try to get the recipe." "By the way," said Clarey, "the X-T boys made a few mistakes. The bugg isn't an insect; it's a bird. And the lule isn't a bird; it's a flower. And the paparun isn't a flower; it's an insect." "Oh, well, I guess they'll be able to straighten that out," the colonel said, licking crumbs from his thick fingers. "We do our jobs and they do theirs." He reached for another pastry. "Take good care of the bugg," Clarey said. "He likes his morning seed mixed with milk; his evening seed with wine. His name is Mirti. He's very tame and affectionate. I -- said I was bringing him to my aunt..." He paused. "You are going to take him back alive, aren't you? You'd get so much more information that way." "Wouldn't dream of hurting a hair -- a feather -- no, it is a hair, isn't it? -- of the little fellow's head." Clarey looked out of the window at the purple night sky. Then he turned back to the colonel. "I've been taking music lessons," he said defiantly. "Fine! Every man should have a hobby!" "But I've no music license." ! "Come now, Clarey. You still don't seem to realize you're on Damorlan, not Earth. Not a blooded intelligence man yet! There aren't any guilds on Damorlan, so enjoy yourself." "Speaking of that, did you find out about -- er -- Earthmen and -- " "Yes, I'd meant to drop you a note, but it seemed rather odd information for your aunt to be giving you. It's absolutely all right, old chap. Go ahead, have your bit of fun." Clarey was unreasonably annoyed. "I wasn't thinking of what you're thinking. I mean -- well, Katund is a village and the native morality is very strict in these matters." "Afraid I don't quite follow you." Clarey bit his finger. "Well," he finally admitted, "the truth of the matter is I'd like to get married." The colonel was extremely surprised. "A legal arrangement! Is it absolutely necessary? How about the females that the innkeeper's so anxious to have you -- ah -- meet?" explain. "I'heir standards of cleanliness..." he began, and stopped. Then he started again: "I suppose I'd like a permanent companion." "I don't suppose there's any real reason why you shouldn't enter into a legal liaison while you're here," said the colonel. "After all, it isn't as if the two races could interbreed. That could be decidedly awkward. Who's the lucky little lady?" "My landlady's daughter," Clarey said. "Your boss, eh? Flying high, aren't you, old chap?" His massive hand descended on Clarey's shoulder. Then he grew serious. "Can she cook like her mother?" "Even better." "My boy," the colonel said solemnly, "you have my unqualified blessing. And when I ask you to save me a piece of the wedding cake, I ask from the heart." So, when Clarey went back to Katund, he asked Embelsira to marry him and she accepted. The whole village turned out for the wedding. Clarey managed to take some vocpix of the ceremonies for the X-Ts with a finger unit. I ought to get a handsome wedding present for this, he thought. And, to his surprise, on the wedding day, an elaborate jewelstudded toilet service did arrive from Barshwat -- with the affectionate regards of his aunt, who was too ill to travel. They tie up everything, he thought, but he knew it was a little more than simply remembering to pick up a loose end. The toilet set was vulgar, ostentatious, hideous -- obviously selected with loving care and Terrestrial taste. Everybody in Katund and a lot of people from the surrounding country came to look at it. It seemed to establish his eligibility beyond a doubt. "Never thought 'Belsira'd do it, and at her age, too," Piq was heard to comment. "But it looks like she really got herself a catch. What's a little weakness in the dome-top when there's money, too?" Clarey's marriage were happy ones. He and Embelsira got on very nicely together and, since he was fond of her mother, he didn't mind her constant presence too much. Once a week he took a ulerin lesson from Rini. He practiced assiduously and made progress that he himself could see was sensational. He did wish that Rini would accept money; it would have been so much less of a nuisance than replacing the music books the boy stole from the library, but he couldn't expect local customs to coincide with his own. The money, of course, didn't matter; he still wasn't living up to his allowance, although he was beginning to spread himself on elaborate custom-made cloaks and tunics. On Earth he had dressed soberly, according to his status, but here he felt entitled to cut a dash. At the colonel's request, on his next trip to Barshwat he brought his ulerin and taped some native melodies. "I like 'em," the colonel said, nodding his head emphatically. "Catchy, very catchy. Hope the X-Ts appreciate them; they don't usually like music if it sounds at all human." And, catching the look on Clarey's face, "Well, you know what I mean. To them, if a tune can be hummed, it isn't authentic." News of Clarey's skill on the ulerin spread through the countryside. When he played in the temple concerts, people sometimes came from as far away as Zrig to hear him. Clarey was a little disturbed about this, because he didn't subscribe to the local faith. But the high priest said, "My son, music knows no religious boundaries. Besides, when you play, we always get three times as much in the collection nets." At the time Clarey got word from Barshwat that General Spano and the staff ship were expected shortly, he had risen to the post of chief librarian. Embelsira had retired to keep dome and wait for the young ones who would, of course, never come. Clarey had hired a hixhead of an assistant from Zrig to assist him; he saw now why the village had originally been grateful to get even a foreigner of doubtful background for the job. "I'm going to have to stay at least a week with Aunt Askush this time," he told his wife. "Legal matters. I think she's drawing up a will or some such," he added, hoping that this would keep Embelsira happy and convinced. Maybe it worked too well. "But why can't I come with you? I've always wanted so much to meet her." "I keep telling you her illness is a disfiguring one; she won't meet strangers. And don't say you're not a stranger -- you'd understand, but she's the one who wouldn't. Please don't nag me, Belsir." "Sometimes I think you're a stranger, Balt," Embelsira declared emotionally. "Yes, dear, I'm a stranger, anything you say, but let me get packed." He started folding a robe crookedly, hoping it would distract her into taking over the job. But she leaned against the lintel, staring at him. "Balt, sometimes I wonder if you really have an aunt." The only thing he allowed himself to do was put down the robe he was holding. "Do you think I send expensive toilet sets to myself? You must think Piq's right -- I'm just plain crazy." "Piq doesn't think you're crazy any more. He and the other old ones say you have a woman in Barshwat. But I don't believe that!" "Maybe I do, Embelsira. A man's a man, even if he is a librarian." "I know it isn't true. I think it's... something else entirely. You're so strange sometimes, Balt. How could somebody who comes only from the other side of the same world be so strange?" you've become very cosmic. What do you know of our -- of the world? It's a big place. And nobody else in Katund seems to be so impressed by my strangeness; they think a foreigner's entitled to his queer ways." "Nobody in Katund knows you as well as I do. And I've seen foreigners before. They're not different in the way you are." She looked intently at him. "It's not a shameful kind of strangeness, just a... strange kind of strangeness. Fascinating in its way -- I don't want you to think I just married the first stranger who came along..." "I'm sure you had many offers, dear. Come, help me fold this cloak or I'll never make the bus." "You know what I'm reminded of?" she said, coming forward and taking the cloak. "Of the old tale about the lovely village maiden who marries the handsome stranger and promises she'll never look into his eyes. And then one day she forgets and looks into his eyes and sees -- " "What does she see?" "The worst thing of all, the greatest horror. She sees nothing. She sees emptiness." He laughed. "The moral's clear. She shouldn't have looked into his eyes." "But how can you help looking into the eyes of the man you love? Maybe that's the moral -- that it was an impossible task he set her." "In those tales it's always the man's fault, isn't it? Not much doubt who made them up. Now, Belsir, please, I've got to finish packing. It'll be just my luck to have today be the day the bus to Zrig's on time." "A couple of weeks ago I was in Zrig shopping and I saw an Earthman," she said, folding his cloak into the kit. "The way he walked, the way he moved, reminded me a little of you." It was a long moment before he could speak. "Do I look to you like a dark-faced, darkhaired, brown-eyed -- " "I didn't say you were an Earthman! But if Earthmen can travel through the sky, they might be able to do other things, too; maybe even change the way a man looks." He snapped the kit-fastener. "If you really believe that, you should be careful. Creatures as clever as that might be able to pluck your words from my brain." "What if they did? I'm not ashamed. Or afraid, either." He reached out and patted her arm. Maybe she wasn't afraid, but he was. For her. And for the people of Damorlan. If there was a deep-probe on the staff ship... If only something could happen to him, so he could never reach Barshwat... Spano wouldn't know. He might guess, but he wouldn't know. He'd have to start all over again -- and maybe things would turn out better next time. secretary were waiting in Blynn's office. Clarey stretched out his foot in greeting, then recollected himself and reached out his hand. "You see, sir," he said with a too-hearty laugh, "I'm really living my part." spano beamed. "Damorlan certainly seems to agree with you, my boy. You look positively blooming. Doesn't he, Han?" She nodded grave agreement. The general sniffed. "What's that you two are smoking?" "Marac leaves," Clarey said. "A native product. Care to try one?" He extended his pouch to Spano. "Don't mind if I do," the general said, taking a roll. "Which part do you light? And why don't you offer one to Secretary Vollard?" "Oh, sorry; I didn't think of it. The women here don't use it. Care to try one. Secretary?" As she took a roll, she looked at him searchingly. She was still beautiful in an Amazonian way, but he preferred Embelsira's way. He could never imagine Han Vollard warm and tender. "Well, Clarey," Spano said, "you seem to be doing a splendid job. I've been absolutely enthralled by your reports." He settled himself behind Blynn's desk. "Pity the information's top secret. It could make a fortvme on the tri-dis." Clarey bowed. "And those musictapes you sent back created quite a stir. We've brought along some superior equipment. The rig here is gpod enough for routine work, but we need better fidelity for this. And it would be appreciated if the colonel didn't beat time with his foot while you played -- no offense, Blynn." He turned back to Clarey. "Do you think you can pick up some of those what-do-you-call-'ems -- ulerins -- for us, too, or is there a tabu of some kind?" "Not ulerins," Clarey corrected, "uleran. And you can walk up to any marketplace and get as many as you like -- providing you have the cash, of course." "I told you the job had musical overtones. I'll bet that makes up for some of the discomforts and privations." "It's not too uncomfortable." "There speaks a true patriot!" Spano approved. Han measured Clarey with her eyes. "You're quiet. Secretary," he said nervously. "You used to talk a lot more." Blynn stared at him. She smiled. "You're the one who has things to tell now, Clarey." "And show," the general said, almost licking his lips. "Every one of your tapes made my mouth fairly water. I trust you brought an ample and varied supply of those delicacies." Clarey's smile was unforced this time. "I got your message and I brought along a large hamparful, but it'll be hard to make the people back home keep thinking my aunt's an invalid if she eats like a team of hax. My wife baked some pastries, which I especially recommend to your attention." "I think we ought to get business over before we start on refreshments," Han suggested. "Yes," Spano agreed reluctantly. "I suppose you had better be deep-probed first, Clarey... Not even one taste beforehand, Han?... Well, I suppose not." Clarey tensed. "You've got a probe on the ship?" he asked, as if the possibility had never occurred to him. "That's right," Han Vollard said. 'Tt's an up-to-date model. The whole thing'll take you less than an hour, and we'll have the information collated by morning." "I -- I would prefer not to be deep-probed. You never can tell: it might upset all the conditioning I've received here; it -- " "Let us worry about that, Clarey," she said. He sat looking out of the window, knowing there was nothing he could do. Embelsira was in danger -- her people were in danger -- and he couldn't lift a finger to save them. When he came down to breakfast, he saw that the reports had been collated and read. "So your wife suspects, does she?" the general asked. "Shrewd little creature. You must have picked one of the more intelligent ones." Clarey struggled on the pin. "Wives often have strange fancies about their husbands. You mustn't take it too seriously." "How often have you been married, Clarey?" Han asked. "Or even linked in liaison? How many married people did you know well back on Earth?" There was no need to answer; she knew all the answers. "I think Clarey did a rattling good job," Blynn said stoutly. "It wasn't his fault that she suspects." "Of course not!" the general agreed. "Feminine intuition isn't restricted to human females. In fact, in some female ilfs it's even stronger than in humans. The precognitive faculties in the grua, for example -- " "What are you going to do?" Clarey interrupted bluntly. Han Vollard answered him: "Nothing yet. You've got us a lot of information, but it's not enough. You'll have to keep on as you are for another three years or so." It was all Clarey could do to keep from trembling visibly with relief. "It doesn't even matter too much that one of the natives suspects," Han went on, "as long as she doesn't definitely know." "She doesn't," Clarey said, "and she won't. And she won't tell anybody; she'd be afraid for me." But he wasn't all that sure. The Damorlanti didn't hate Earthmen and they didn't fear them, and so Embelsira wouldn't think it was a shameful thing to be. He was glad he'd already been deep-probed. At least this thought would be safe for three years or so. "At any rate, they don't seem antagonistic toward Earthmen," the general said, almost as if he'd read part of Clarey's mind. "I think that's nice." Han Vollard looked at him. "It's not their attitude toward us that matters. They couldn't do anything if they tried. It's what they are that matters, what they will be that matters even more." "I take back what I said before!" Clarey flared. "You talk too damn much!" "Nerves," said Blynn nervously. "Every agent lets go when he's back among his own kind. Nothing but release of tension." ship was ready to go back to Earth. "Don't forget to tell your wife how much I enjoyed the pies," Spano said; then, "Oh, I was forgetting; you could hardly do that. But do see if you can work out something with the dehydro-freeze. I'd hate to have to wait three years before tasting them again. You can keep your marac rolls, though; I'll take my smoke-sticks." "Try not to get any more involved, Clarey," Han Vollard said as they stood outside the airlock. "Maybe you ought to move on -- to a city, perhaps, another country -- " "When I want your advice. I'll ask for it!" he snapped. After they'd gone, Blynn turned on him. "Man, you must be out of your mind, talking to Secretary Vollard like that." "Why does she have to keep meddling? It's none of her business -- " "None of her business! Secretary of the Space Service, and you say it's none of her business?" Clarey blinked. "I thought she was Spano's secretary." Blynn laughed until the tears dampened his dark cheeks. "Spano's only Head of Intelligence. She's his Mistress." "Of course -- mistress, feminine of master! I should have realized that before." Then Clarey laughed, too. "I'm a real all-round alien. I can't even understand my own language." On the way back home he couldn't help thinking that Han Vollard might be right. It could be the best thing for him to disappear now; the best thing for himself, the best thing for Embelsira. He could pretend to desert her -- better yet, Blynn could fake some kind of accident, so her feelings wouldn't be hurt. A pension of some kind would be arranged. She could marry again, have the children she wanted so much. If he waited the full ten years, she might never be able to have them. He had no idea at what age Damorlant females ceased to be fertile. But she wasn't just a Damorlant female -- she was his wife. He didn't want to leave her. Maybe he never would have to. Hadn't Spano said that when his term was over he could pick his planet? He would pick Damorlan.  from Barshwat, Embelsira said nothing more about her suspicions, but greeted him affectionately and prepared a special supper for him. Afterward, he wondered if making love to an Earth girl could be as pleasant. He wondered how it would be to make love to Han Vollard. The days passed and he forgot about Han Vollard. After much persuasion, he agreed to give a series of concerts at Zrig, but only on condition that Rini played with him and had one solo each performance. He was embarrassed at having so far outstripped his teacher, but Rini seemed unperturbed. "My technique's still better than yours will ever be," he said. "It's this new style of yours that gets 'em. I understand it's spreading; it's reached as far as Barshwat. You should see the angry letters Irik writes about it!" Rini chuckled. "And he hasn't the least idea it started right here in his own home village that he's always sneered at for being so backward!" Clarey smiled and clapped the boy on the neck. If it made Rini feel better to think Clarey had a new style rather than that Clarey played better than he did, Clarey had no objection. Clarey was offered the post of head librarian at Zrig, but Embelsira didn't want to leave Katund, and, when he thought about it, he really didn't want to either. So he refused the job and didn't bother mentioning the matter to Headquarters. As he grew more sure of himself and his position, he allowed his wealth to show. He and Embelsira moved into a larger dome. Instead of sending to Zrig or even Barshwat for the furnishings, they hired local talent. Tavan, the carpenter, made them some exquisite blackwood pieces inlaid with opalescent stone that everyone said was the equal of anything in Barshwat. A talented nephew of Hanxi's painted glowing murals; Embelsira's mother wove rugs and draperies in muted water-tones. The dome became the district showplace. Clarey realized he now had a position to keep up, but sometimes it annoyed him when perfect strangers asked to see the place. He was invited to run against Malesor as headman but declined. He didn't want to be brought into undue prominence. Trouble was, as he became popular, he also aroused animosity. There were the girls who felt he should have married them instead of Embelsira, and their mothers and subsequent husbands. A lot of people resented Clarey because they felt he should have decorated his house differently, dressed differently, spent his money differently. A man can live ignored by everyone, he discovered, but he can't be liked by some without finding himself disliked by others. his fourth spring there. He thought of it as spring, although on Damorlan the seasons had no separate identities; they blended into one another, without its ever being very hot or very cold, very rainy or very dry. The reason he called this time of the year spring was that it seemed closest to perfection. It was less perfect that year. Because it was then that Rini's brother Irik came back from Barshwat, after a six years' absence. He was very much the city man, far more so than anyone Clarey had seen in Barshwat itself. His tunics were shorter than his fellow villagers', and his cloaks iridesced restlessly from one vivid color to another. He wore a great deal of jewelry and perfume, neither of the best quality, and the toes of his boots were divided. Clarey described this in detail to Embelsira the night Irik put in his first appearance at the Fur bush. "You should have seen the little horror!" "That's the way city men dress," Embelsira told him. "It's fashionable." "But, dear, I've been to Barshwat." "You don't have an eye for clothes. You never notice when I put on anything new. And I think it's unfair to take a dislike to Irik just because you don't care for the way he dresses." "It's more than that, Belsira." And yet how could he explain to her what he couldn't quite understand himself, that Irik was vain, stupid, hostile; hence, dangerous? "I swear to you, Balt," Embelsira said demurely, "that whatever there was between me and Irik, it all ended six years ago." Clarey gave a start and then held back a smile. "I believe you, dear." And he kissed her nose. every evening of his stay in Katund. He had grievances and he aired them generously. He hated everything -- the government, taxes, modern music, and Earthmen, whom he seemed to consider in some way responsible for the modern music, or at least its popularization. "Barbarians -- slept completely through my concerts." "But people are always falling asleep during concerts, Irik," Malesor pointed out reasonably. "And how could you expect barbarians to appreciate good music? What do you care for Earthmen's opinions as long as your sown people like your music?" Irik hesitated. "But the Earthmen have taken up the new kind of music; they stay awake during that. And -- a lot of people seem to think that whatever's strange is good, so whatever the Earthmen like eventually becomes fashionable." Hanxi wiggled his ears. "Fashions change. Well, who's ready to have his mug refilled?" "But the Earthmen will keep on setting the fashions," Irik snarled. "Many people think the Earthmen know everything, just because they're aloof and have sky cars." "Well," Malesor said, "the sky cars certainly prove they know something we don't. Better stick to your music, boy." The smoky little bar-parlor resounded with laughter and Irik's face turned a nasty red. "They don't know anything about music and they don't know everything about machinery. We might surprise them yet. A friend of mine knows Guhak, the fellow who invented that new brake for the track car a few years ago." "We know about that brake," Piq observed. "It stops a car so good, the chains are twice as late nowadays as they used to be, and you couldn't strictly say they were ever on time." Everybody laughed again. Irik quivered with anger. "Guhak has invented a car that doesn't need to go on tracks. It can run whenever it wants wherever it wants. And one car will be able to go faster than three hax teams." "That I'll believe when I've ridden on it," Kuqal grinned. "Even the chains aren't that fast." The others bit their thumbs and nodded -- except Clarey, who was rigidly keeping out of the conversation. He forced squfur down his tightening throat and said nothing. "You're backward clods!" Irik raged. "If the Earthmen can have cars that go through the sky without tracks why shouldn't we have cars that run on the ground the same way? Have we tried?" "Doesn't seem to me it's worth the effort," Malesor said. "Our cars can get us where we're going as fast as we need to go already, why bother?" "Whatever an Earthman can do, we can do better! Soon Guhak will get his ground cars on the road. After that, it'll only be a short step to cars that go in the sky. Then we'll find out where the Earthmen come from and why they're here. We'll be as powerful as they are. We'll get rid of them and their rotten music." The bar parlor was silent, except for the clink as Clarey put his mug on the table. If he held it an instant longer, he was afraid he would spill it. One or two of the men looked at him uneasily out of the corners of their eyes. Malesor spoke: "In the first place, you don't know how powerful Earthmen are. In the second place, who wants to be poWrful, anyway? The Earthmen haven't done us any harm and they're a good thing for the economy. My cousin in Zrig tells me one of 'em come into his store a coupla months ago and bought out his whole stock, every bolt of cloth. Paid twice what it was worth, too. Live and let live, I say." The others murmured restlessly"If there are ways of doing things better," Rini suggested, "why shouldn't we have them. too?" His eyes darted quickly toward Clarey's and then as quickly away. Irik turned his head and looked directly at Clarey for the first time. "You're silent, stranger. What do you think of the Earthmen?"  finished the squfur and set the mug back down on the table. "I don't know much about Earthmen. An ugly-looking lot, true, but there doesn't seem to be any harm in them. Of course, living in Barshwat, you probably know a lot more about them than I do." "I doubt that," Irik said. "You have an aimt in Barshwat." Clarey allowed himself to look surprised before he said courteously, "I'm glad you find riie and my family so interesting. Yes, it so happens I do have an aunt there, but she's rather advanced in years and doesn't enjoy hanging around the starship field the way the children do." Irik's face darkened. 'What is your aunt's name?" This time everyone looked surprised. The question' itself was not too out-of-the-way, but his tone decidedly was. "She's a great-grandmother," Clarey said. "She would be too old for you. And I assure you it's difficult to part her from her money. I've tried." Everybody laughed. Irik was furious. "I understand that your aunt lives very close to Earth Headquarters ! " Somebody must have followed him on one or more of his trips to Barshwat, Clarey realized. "If the Earthmen chose to establish themselves in the best residential section of Barshwat, then probably my aunt does live near them. She's not the type to leave a comfortable dome simply because foreigners move into the neighborhood." "Perhaps she has more than neighborhood in common with Earthmen." The room was suddenly very quiet again. "She does sometimes go to sleep at concerts," Clarey conceded. Irik opened his mouth. Malesor held up a hand. "Before you say anything more against the Earthmen, Irik," he advised, "you oughta find out more about them. Their cars move faster and higher than ours. Maybe their catapults do, too." No one looked at Clarey. Malesor had averted a showdown, he knew, but this was the beginning of the end. And he had a suspicion who was responsible -- innocently perhaps, perhaps not. Love does not always imply trust. And when he told Embelsira what had happened in the Furbush, she, too. couldn't meet his eye. 'That Irik," she said, "I never liked him." "I wonder how he knows so much about me." "Rini writes him very often," she babbled. "He must have told him you were responsible for the new music. That would make him hate you. Rini likes to irritate Irik, because he's always been jealous of him. But the whole thing's silly. How could you possibly make over the world's music, even if you were -- " Her voice ran down. "An Earthman?" he finished coldly. "I suppose you went around telling everybody your suspicions, and Rini wrote that to Irik, too?" protested indignantly. "Not a soul!" She met his eye. "Except Mother, of course." "Your mother! You might as well have published it in the District Bulletin!" "You have no right to speak of Mother like that, even if it's true!" Embelsira began to sob. "I had to tell her, Balt -- she kept asking why there weren't any young ones." "You could've told her to mind her own business!" he snapped, before he could catch himself. Five years, and he still made slips. It was her business. On Damorlan, it was a woman's duty not only to have children but to see that her children had children and their children had children. He made himself look grave and self-reproachful. "I have a confession to make, Belsir. I should have told you when I married you. I can't have children." "I never heard of such a thing! Everybody has children -- unless they're not married, of course," she added primly. "It's an affliction sent by the gods." "The gods would never do anything like that!" she declared confidently. How primitive she is, he thought, and, then, angrily, how provincial I am! He had never stopped to think about it, but he knew of no married couple who had not at least one offspring; he and Embelsira were the only ones. It hadn't occurred to the X-T specialists that a species whose biological assets were roughly the same might have different handicaps. Apparently there was no such thing as sterility on Damorlan. "Are you really an Earthman, then, Balt?" she asked timidly. She had spread the news around, ruined him, ruined the work Earth had been doing, perhaps ruined even more than that -- and she hadn't even been sure to begin with. But it was too late for recriminations. He had to salvage what little he could -- time, maybe; that was all. "Are you going to tell?" he asked. She hesitated. "Do you swear you don't mean my people any harm?" "I swear," he said. 'Then I swear not to tell," she said. He kissed her. After all, he thought, it isn't a lie. I don't mean her people any harm. Besides, sooner or later, her mother will get it out of her, so she won't be keeping her part of the bargain. Barshwat he knew he would be followed. He tried to shake the follower or followers off, but he couldn't be sure he'd succeeded. He found the colonel looking out of the window with an expression of quiet melancholy. If there had been any Earthwomen on Damorlan, Clarey would have thought he'd been crossed in love. "Things are taking a bad turn, Clarey," Blynn said. "There have been certain manifestations of hostility from the natives. Get any hint of it?" "No," Clarey said, taking his usual chair, "not a whisper." The colonel sat down heavily. "Katund's too oufof the way. We should've moved you to a city once you'd got the feel of things. But you do go to Zrig occasionally. Haven't you heard anjrthing there?" "Only that an Earthman bought out a cloth merchant's entire stock at one blow." Blynn grinned weakly. "Maybe it was rather an ostentatious thing to do, but the fabric's beautiful stuff." He rubbed his nose reflectively. "Fact is, I've been hearing disturbing rumors. They say some fellow named Kuhak's invented a ground car that can run without tracks." Clarey almost said "Guhak," but caught himself in time. "Nonsense," he scoffed. "The more I know of them, the more surprised I am they ever got as far as inventing the chains." "But they did, no getting around that. This is what Earth's afraid of, you know," he reminded Clarey -- unnecessarily. "This is why you were sent here. And, if the rumor's true, it looks as if you weren't needed at all. I got the bad news by myself." "But why should it be that upsetting?" Clarey tried to laugh. "You look as if it were the end of the world." The colonel gave him a long, level look. "I consider that remark in the worst of taste." Clarey stopped laughing. "Remember," the colonel reminded Clarey, again unnecessarily, "this is the way we ourselves got started." "But the Damorlanti don't have to move in the same direction. They may look human and even act human, but they don't think human." The colonel clasped his hands behind his head and sighed. "There have been articles against us in the paper, and whenever we go out in the street people -- natives, I mean -- make nasty remarks and sometimes even faces at us. And what have we done to them? Carefully minded our own business, avoided all cultural contacts except for trade purposes, paid them much more than the going price for their goods, and gave them one or two tips on health and sanitation. As a result, they're beginning to hate us." "But if you send a report, it'll bring the staff ship in ahead of time. Maybe the whole thing'll blow over. This way, you're not giving it a chance to." The colonel chewed his lip. "Well," he finally said, "I might as well wait and see if the rumor's verified before I report it." The months went by. The friendly atmosphere in the Furbush had vanished, and not as many people stopped and chatted when they came to the library. But there wasn't any actual incident until the evening Clarey was walking home after late night at the library and a stone struck him between the shoulder-blades. "Dirty Earthman!" a voice called, and several pairs of feet scuttled off. He didn't mention the incident to Embelsira, not wanting to worry her, but the next morning he went to the Village Dome and informed Malesor. "Very bad," the headman muttered. "Very bad. Whoever did it will be punished." "You won't be able to catch them," Clarey said, "and there'd be no point in punishment, anyway. Look at it like this, Mai. Suppose I had been an Earthman, don't you see how dangerous this would be, not for me but for you? Can't you imagine the inevitable results?" Malesor nodded. "The Earthmen's catapults do go farther and faster, then?" "And maybe deeper," Clarey agreed, pretending not to notice that it had been a question. "After the way Irik talked, I couldn't help drifting over to the starfield when I was in Barshwat and watching an Earth ship come. You've no idea how incredibly powerful a thing it was. Anyone who has power in one direction is likely to have it in another." "I wonder if the Earthmen always had power," Malesor mused, "if they weren't like us once. If, given time, we couldn't be like them..." Clarey didn't say anything. Malesor's pale face turned gray "You mean we might not be given time?" Clarey wiggled his ears. "Who can tell what's in the mind of an Earthman?" Malesor looked directly at him. "Why do you tell me this?" "Because I'm one of you," Clarey said stoutly. Malesor shook his head. "You're not. You never can be. But thanks for the warning -- stranger." Never identify, the robocoach had said. You'll never be able to become the character yotre trying to play. He was talking only of the stage, Clarey told himself angrily, as he left the Dome. Reports trickled in from the cities. Earthmen had been stoned twice in Zrig, more often than that in Barshwat. Clarey got an agitated letter from his aunt. "Watch out for yourself. Nephew," she warned. "They may take it into their heads to attack all foreigners. Remember, come what may, you'll always have a home with me." Then everything broke open. A group of natives attacked Earth Headquarters in Barshwat. The Earthmen sprayed them with 'a gas which made the attackers lose consciousness without harming them; that is, it was intended to work that way. However, one of them hit his head on the wall when he fell, and he died the next day. The people of Vintnor were aroused. They milled angrily around Earth Headquarters carrying banners that said, "Go home. Earth murderers!" The headman of Barshwat called upon Colonel Blynn. The colonel courteously refused to withdraw his men from the planet. "I'm under orders, old chap," he said, "but I'll report your request back to Earth." "It isn't a request," the headman said. Colonel Blynn smiled and said, "We'll treat it as one, shall we?" Clarey knew what happened, because the headman gave a report of the conversation to the Barshwat Prime Bulletin. He also got a letter from his aunt describing the incident as vividly as if she had been there herself. The Barshwat Prime ran a series of increasingly intemperate editorials calling upon all the nations of Damorlan to unite against the Earthmen; it was spirit that counted, it said. rather than technology. Malesor wrote a letter asking how superior spiritual values could compete against presumably superior weapons. He read it aloud in the Purple Furbush before he sent it to the editor of the Barshwat Prime, which was lucky, because the Prime never printed it, although the Dordonec Bulletin ran a copy. Prime did print letters from editors in different countries. All of them pledged firm moral support. It also printed a letter from an anonymous correspondent in Katund which alleged that there was an Earth spy in that village, disguised as a Damorlant, and it was this spy who was personally responsible for the decline of musical taste on the whole planet. But the Bulletin seemed to consider this merely as an emanation from the lunatic fringe: "It would be as easy to disguise a hix as one of us as an Earthman. And, although we could certainly not minimize the importance of music in our culture, it is hardly likely that Earth would be attempting to achieve fell purposes through undermining that art. No, the decline in musical taste represents part of the general decline in public morality which has left us an easy prey." Irik went back to Barshwat to help riot, but he left the Katundi convinced that Clarey was, if not actually an Earthman, at least a traitor. When he came into the Furbush, everybody got up and left. Nobody patronized the branch library any more. The constant readers went to the main library at Zrig, and, since the trip was expensive, their books were usually overdue and they had to pay substantial fines. Sometimes they never returned the books at all and messengers had to be sent from the city. Finally the chief librarian at Zrig issued a regulation that only those resident within the city limits could take books out; all others in the district had to read them on the premises. The Katundi blamed that on Clarey, too. One night they broke into his library and stole all the bestsellers. A couple of days later, he came home and found all the windows of his dome broken. Best-sellers are often disappointing, he thought. He found a note from Embelsira, saying, "I have gone home to Mother." He knew she expected him to go after her, but he wrote her a note saying he was going to see his aunt who was terrified by all the riots, and put it in the mail, so she wouldn't get it too soon. He packed his kit with his most important possessions and he took his ulerin under his arm. When he reached Barshwat, he had some difficulty getting through the crowd in front of Earth Headquarters. All the windows were boarded up and the garbage hadn't been collected for a considerable length of time. Just as he reached the door, a familiar voice called, "That's the Earth spy!" "Don't be silly!" another voice said. "He's obviously one of us!" "But a traitor!" cried another voice. "Otherwise why go in there?" Stones splattered against the door, followed by impartial cries of "Spy!'... Traitor!... Fool!" the last seemingly addressed to each other, rather than Clarey. Blynn was haggard and anxious-looking "I've been wondering when you'd show up. Afraid maybe they'd got you -- " "I'm all right," Clarey interrupted. "But what are we going to do?" Blynn laughed without stopping for a full minute. "Do? I'll tell you what 'we're going to do. We're going to sit tight and wait for the staff ship." Two months later the staff ship came. Blynn radioed for the general and the secretary to come in a closed ground car. "But why?" the general's voice crackled plaintively over the corn-unit. "I thought we didn't want them to know about ground cars -- " "They know," Blynn said crisply. "They've got one of their own now, maybe more. Crazy-looking thing, but it works. You'll see it outside Headquarters when you get here. The letters on the side mean 'Earthmen, Go!' Form imperative impolite emphatic." Han Vollard strode into Headquarters, eyes ablaze. "Why didn't you send a report before trouble started? How could you allow an emergency situation to happen?" Neither Blynn nor Carey said anything. "Very distressing thing,." Spano declared. "Maybe it hit them so suddenly they didn't know it was building." "You and Blynn get over to the ship right away for deepprobing," Han Vollard ordered, as both began to speak at once. "It's the only way I'll be able to get a coherent report." After the results came through, her anger was cold, searing, unwomanly. "You knew a year ago that things were beginning to go wrong and you didn't even mention it on the tapes! I could have both of you broken for this." "If only that were all there was to worry about," Clarey sighed wistfully.  feeling sorry for yourself!" The sudden loss of control in that dark amazon was more threatening than anything that had happened yet. "I'm not feeling sorry for myself," he said. "It's the Damorlanti I feel sorry for." "You feel sorry for them because you identify with them. That makes you sorry for yourself." She misunderstood his motives as she misunderstood everything he did or said, but their rapport wasn't at stake now. "What are you going to do?" he forced himself to ask. "The decision will have to be made on Earth. Unless you mean what's going to happen to you? That's simple -- you'll go back with us. Blynn will stay here, pending orders." The colonel saluted. "But I thought I was going to stay here ten years," said Clarey. "Five to ten years," she corrected. "Apparently five was enough -- " She cut herself short. "What's the matter with me?" she suddenly exclaimed. "I've been letting myself think in the same woolly way you do." Suddenly, almost frighteningly, she smiled. "Clarey, you did the job we sent you out to do! You did it better than we expected! What threw me off was that we sent you out to act as an observer. Instead, you became a catalyst!" She seized his hand and wrung it warmly. "Clarey, I apologize. You've done a splendid job!" He wrenched his hand from her grasp. "I didn't act as a catalyst! It would have happened anyway." His voice rang in his own horrified ears -- a voice begging for reassurance. And she was a woman; she had maternal instincts; she reassured him. "It would have happened anyway," she said soothingly, "but it would have dragged on for years, cost the taxpayers "And now," he whispered, still unable to believe that the thing had really happened, "will you... dispose of everyone on Damorlant?" She smiled and threw herself into a chair, her body limp and tired and contended-looking. "Come, Clarey, we're not that ruthless. Some kind of quarantine will probably be worked out. We just made the whole thing sound more drastic to appeal to your patriotism." The general beamed. "So everything has worked out all right, after all? I knew it would. I always had the utmost confidence in you, Clarey." She was busily planning. "We'll arrange some kind of heroic accident... I have it! You died saving your aunt from the flames." "What flames?" "The flames of the fire that burned down her house. She died of the local equivalent of shock. Embelsira will be rich, so she'll want to believe the story. She'll be able to find herself another husband; she'll have children. She'll be better off, Clarey." He looked at her, his misery welling out of his eyes. "Oh, I don't mean it that way, man! All I meant was that you're a human being; she's not. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm saying they're different." "But I felt less different with her, with the Damorlanti, than with anyone on Earth," he said. She walked across to the window and looked out at the Damorlanti rioting ineptly below. "Most of us are happier in our dream world," she said at last, "but society couldn't function if we were allowed to stay there." "Damorlan wasn't a dream world." "But it will be," she said. A ND SO Clarey went back to Earth on the staff ship. Once its luxury would have given him pleasure; now the cabin with its taps that gave out plain water, salt water, mineral water, and assorted cordials held no charm; neither did the self-contained tri-di projector-receiver. The only reason he stayed there most of the time was to avoid the others. However, he couldn't avoid turning up in the dining salon for meals. The greater his sorrow, the greater his appetite. One day after lunch, Han stopped him forcibly, grasping his arm. "I've got to talk to you. Afterward you can go off and sulk if you want to. But we're going to make planetfall in a few days. It's necessary to discuss your future now." "I have no future," he said. "Come this way, Clarey. That's an order!" Obediently, he followed her into a lounge that was a dazzle of color and splendor. There were eight pseudo-windows, each framing a pseudo-scene of a different planet at a different season. The harsh, barren summer of Mars, the cold, bleak winter of Ksud, the gentle green spring of Earth... It must be a park, he knew; in no other place on Earth could spring be manifest -- and yet it gave him a little pang to look at it. He tore his eyes away to turn them toward the others, and then up at the domed ceiling, fashioned to resemble a blue sky with clouds drifting across it. A domed ceiling... and he thought of the domes of Damorlan, lightyears away among the stars... "I'm afraid the decor's a bit gaudy," Han apologized. "We didn't check the decorator's past performance until it was too late. But it's comfortable, anyway. Try one of these chairs. They accommodate themselves to the form." She threw herself on a chaise lounge that accommodated itself perfectly to her form. She wasn't wearing her usual opulent secretarial garb, but something simple of clinging stuff that occasionally went transparent. So we're back to the first movement, Clarey though wearily. He made sure that the chair opposite her was old-style before he lowered himself into it. "Where's the general? I thought he always sat in on these conferences." "The formalities are over now," she said, smiling up at him. "Besides," she added, "if he doesn't take a nap after lunch, it wreaks havoc with his digestion. Afraid to be alone with me, Clarey?" she asked huskily. "Yes," he said, rising, "as a matter of fact, I am, now that you mention it." She sat up. "Sit down!" He sat down. She didn't recline again. Her dress went opaque, but her voice grew silken once more. "Listen, Clarey, I don't want you to think we're cheating you out of any-; I thing we promised. Even though you stayed only five years, you're i going to have it all. You'll have  U-E status -- " ? "What do I want that for?"  "Doesn't it mean anything to  you any more, Clarey? It used to ! mean a lot, though you denied  it even to yourself." "Did it?" He forced his thoughts back through time. "I suppose it did. But I've changed. You know, those five years on Damorlan seem like -- " "Like a lifetime," she finished. "Couldn't we dispense with the ) cliches?" j "On Damorlan the things I said I were fresh and interesting. On  Damorlan I was somebody pretty j special. I'd rather be a big  second-hand fish in a small primj itive puddle. Isn't there some I way -- " "No way at all, Clarey! The puddle's drying up. We've got a nice aquarium ready for you. Why not dive in gracefully?" "It was my puddle," he said, a "I belonged."  sank back into the chair which arched to meet the arch of her body. Lying down, she didn't look nearly as tall. "All right, let's give the whole opera one final ' run-through. Nobody cared for i you on Earth; on Damorlan your  friends liked you; your wife loved you. On Earth you never felt welcome andor appreciated; on Damorlan you felt both welcome and appreciated. On Earth -- " He was stung out of his apathy. "That's right! I'm not saying I'm unique, only that I fitted -- " "How about trying to look at it from another point of view? Did it ever occur to you that, if the Damorlanti accepted you, so might your own people, if you approached them in the same way? Did you ever try to make friends on Earth?" "But on Earth I shouldn't have to. They were my own people." "Aha!" she cried gleefully. "I mean -- well. General Spano said it would be wrong to stoop to hypocrisy to win the friendship of my own people; that, if I did, their friendship wouldn't be worth anything. You can't buy friendship." "You bought your ulerin. Does it play any the worse because you paid for it? Does it mean any the less to you?" "What you're getting at," he said cautiously, "is that that's the way to make friends? By being a hypocrite?" "Was it a sham with the Damorlanti?" He had to stop for a moment before he could bring out an answer. "It started out as a sham -- but I really got to like them afterward. Then it was real." "So then you weren't a hypocrite, Clarey." Her voice grew more resonant. "Open yourself to people, show them that you want to be friends. Basically, everybody's shy and timid inside." "Like you?" he said, casting an ironical glance at her dress. "That's still the outside," she smiled, making, no move to adjust it. "Listen to me, Clarey, and don't go off on sidetracks: The people of Earth are your own people. Your loyalties have always been with them." She had almost had him convinced, but this he couldn't swallow. "If my loyalties had been with Earth, I would have sent back reports of the trouble. But I didn't. I tried to stop it from happening. There just wasn't anything I could do." "The deep-probe never lies, Clarey. You didn't really try to stop it." She paused, and then went on deliberately: "Because you could have stopped it, you know quite easily." . "There was nothing I could have done," he stated. "Nothing." "Remember the first time the staff ship came? Just before you left for Barshwat, the woman told you she suspected you were an Earthman. You were afraid for her. Do you remember that?" He nodded. Yes, he remembered how terrified he had been then, how relieved afterward, thinking everything was going to be all right. Lucky he hadn't realized the truth, or he wouldn't have had those extra years of happiness. "And you thought if only something would happen to you en route, she would be safe. We might guess why it had happened, but we couldn't know for sure. We'd have had to start all over again." He couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't think. She spaced each word carefully, sweetly. "You were quite right. Because you were the only man on Earth, Clarey, who had the particular physical requirements and the particular kind of mental instability that we needed for the job. You just said you weren't unique, Clarey. You were too modest; you are. If you'd killed yourself then, your death would have served a purpose; you would have died a hero. Kill yourself now and you die a coward." "But at least I'd be dead. I wouldn't have to live with a coward for the rest of my life." "You're not a coward, Clarey," she said. "You wouldn't admit it, but you are and always have been a patriot. To you. Earth came first. It's as simple as that." She had deep-probed his mind. She must know his true feelings. There was no gainsaying that. He could know only his surface thoughts; she knew what lay behind and beneath. And, he reminded himself, at the end the Damorlanti were actually turning on him. "Try to think of the whole thing as a course in charm that you've passed with flying colors," she said. "It seems rather an expensive way of making me charming," he couldn't help saying, with the last struggle of something that was dying in him, something alien that perhaps should never have been there in the first place. "Whole civilizations have been sacrificed for nothing at all. This one will not be sacrificed, only quarantined. But its contribution could be of cosmic magnitude." "Now what are you going to try to sell me?" he asked drearily. "Are you saying that the essence of the Damorlant civilization is going to live on in me, that I carry its heritage inside myself, and so I have a tremendous responsibility to the Damorlanti on my shoulders?" She laughed. "You're really getting sharp, Clarey. If you stayed in the service, you could be one of our best operatives. But you're not going to stay in the service. Yours is a higher destiny. Here, catch!" She tossed him something that glittered as it arched through the air. It was a U-E identcube, made out in his name. He had only seen them at a distance, and now he was holding one warm and gleaming in his hand, with his name and his face in it. His face... and yet not his face. "That's what you're going to look like when the plastosurgeons get through," she explained. "They'll pigment your eyes and skin and hair, and they may be able to add a few inches to your height. Though I think you actually have grown a little. Something about the air, or, more likely, the food." "Embelsira thought I was handsome the way I was. Embelsira..." But Embelsira was light-years away. Embelsira was part of a fading dream -- and he was awakening now to reality. "Look at the cube. Look at your status symbol." He looked at it, and he kept on looking at it. He couldn't tear his eyes away. He was hypnotized by the golden glitter of it, the golden meaning of it. "Musician," he said aloud. "Musician..." A dream word, a magic word. He hadn't thought of it for years, but this he didn't have to reach back for. Once touched on, it surged over him, complete with its memories. ingless, too. He managed to tear a laugh out of his throat. "Spano said I'd be able to buy the Musicians' Guild when I had you've been able to bargain them down." "This cost nothing except the standard initiation fee," she told him. "You came by it honestly -- through your music, nothing else. And you have more than a -- nearly ten times that, with more pouring iii' every day." She touched a boss on the side of her chair and white light hazed around them. "I think we're close enough to Earth to get some of the high-power tri-dis," she said, "although we can't expect perfect reception." Blurrily, a show formed -- a variety show. At first it seemed the same sort of thing that he remembered dimly, more interesting now because it had almost the character of novelty. Then an ornate young man appeared and it took deeper significance. He was carrying a musical instrument -- refined, machined, carefully pitched. He played music on the ulerin while a trio sang insipid Terrestrial words. "Love Is a Guiding Star" they called it, but that didn't matter. It was one of the tunes Clarey had taped. She touched another boss. The blur reformed to a symphony orchestra, playing as background music to a soloist with another ulerin. "That's your First Ulerin Concerto," she said. "There are three more." Another program was beginning, an account of the tribulations of an unfortunate Plutonian family. It faded in to the strains of ulerin music, to a tune of Clarey's. If they could have endured it to the end, she told him, it would have faded out the same way. "Every time they play it," she said, "somewhere on Earth a cash register rings for you. And this one's a daily program." He watched transfixed and transfigured as program after program featured his music, his ulerin. "Not just on Earth," Han said, "but on all the civilized planets, even in a few of the more sophisticated primitive ones. Y ou're a famous man, Clarey. Earth is waiting for you, literally and figuratively. There'll be ulerin orchestras to greet you at the field; we sent a relay ahead to let them know you were coming." But his mind was slowly alerting itself. "And where am I supposed to be coming from, then, since they're never to hear about Damorlan?" "They've been told that you retired to a lonely asteroid to work -- to perfect your art and its instrument." Of course they couldn't divulge the truth about Damorlan. "It seems a little unfair, though," he said. "Why unfair? After all, Clarey, the music is yours. You took Damorlan's melodies and made them into music. You took their ulerin and made it into a musical instrument. They're all yours, every note and bladder of them." She reached over and put out a hand to him. "And I'm yours, too, Clarey, if you want me," she breathed. There was obviously no doubt in her mind that he did want her. And in his, too. One didn't reject the Secretary of Space. He took the chilly hand in his. The skin was odd in texture. I'm imagining things, he thought. It's a long time since I touched a human female's hand. "I must be a very important Musician," he said aloud.  ing to misunderstand. "Yes, important enough to rate the original and not a reasonable facsimile. You're a lucky man, Clarey." And then she smiled up at him. "I can be warm and tender, I assure you." It took him a moment to realize what she meant. For a moment he had that pang again. She would never be the same as Embelsira, but a man needed change to develop. He was still troubled, though. "I want to do something. Even an empty gesture's better than none at all. The last few months, I started putting together a longer thing; I guess it could be a symphony. When I finish it. I'd like to call it the 'Damorlant Symphony.' " "Why not?" she said. He thought she was humoring him, but she added, "They'll think you just picked the name from an astrogation chart." In a final burst of irony he dedicated the "Damorlant Symphony" to the human race, but, as usual, he was misunderstood. In fact, one of the music critics -- all of whom were enthusiastic over the new work -- wrote, "At last we have a great musician who is also a great humanist." Eventually Clarey forgot his original intent and came to believe it himself.    Monthly at New York. N. Y... for October #. #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher Robert M. Guinn, #J Hudson St., New York #. N. Y.; Editor H. L. Gold. #I Hudson St... New York #, N. Y.; Managing editor None; Business manager None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation. its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galazy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y., Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder). #I Hudson St... New York #, N. Y. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owing or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: ( there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company, as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required by the act of June #. # to be included in all statements regardless of frequency of issue.) #. Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September, #. Joan J. DeMario. Notary Pdblic, .State of New York, No. #-#. Qualified in Kings County. Term expires March #, #. (My commission expires March #. #) for his other star -- and this miserable contraption bucked right backl the kitchen table serving as desk, Brigadier General Straut leveled his binoculars and stared out through the secondfloor window of the farmhouse at the bulky object lying canted at the edge of the wood lot. He watched the figures moving over around the gray mass, then flipped the lever on the field telephone at his elbow. "How are your boys doing, Major?" "General, since that box this morning -- " "I know all about the box. Bill. So does Washington by now. What have you got that's new?" "Sir, I haven't got anything to report yet. I have four crews on it, and she still looks impervious as hell." "Still getting the sounds from inside?" "Intermittently, General." "I'm giving you one more hour. Major. I want that thing cracked." The general dropped the phone back on its cradle and peeled the cellophane from a cigar absently. He had moved fast, he reflected, after the State Police notified him at nine fortyone last night. He had his men on the spot, the area evacuated of civilians, and a preliminary report on its way to Washington by midnight. At two thirty-six, they had discovered the fourinch cube lying on the ground fifteen feet from the huge object -- missile, capsule, bomb -- whatever it was. But now -- several hours later -- nothing new. The field phone jangled. Straut grabbed it up. "General, we've discovered a thin spot up on the top side. All we can tell so far is that the wall thickness falls off there..." "Air right. Keep after it. Bill." This was more like it. If Brigadier General Straut could have this thing wrapped up by the time Washington awoke to the fact that it was something big -- well, he'd been waiting a long time for that second star. This was his chance, and he would damn well make the most of it. the thing. It was half in and half out of the woods, flat-sided, round-ended, featureless. Maybe he should go over and give it a closer look personally. He might spot something the others were missing. It might blow them all to kingdom come any second; but what the hell, he had earned his star on sheer guts in Normandy. He still had 'em. He keyed the phone. "I'm coming down. Bill," he told the Major. On impulse, he strapped a pistol belt on. Not much use against a house-sized bomb, but the heft of it felt good. The thing looked bigger than ever as the jeep approached it, bumping across the muck of the freshly plowed field. From here he could see a faint line running around, just below the juncture of side and top. Major Greer Recently published! Galaxy Short Novels OAlaxy Edited by H. L. Gold Five masters in their field are represented by five favorite short novels in this volume of spine-tingling reading vhich deserves an honored place in your permanent SF library. Thrill to Bodyguard, by Christopher Grimm; How-#, by Clifford D, Simak; Delay In Transit, by F. L. Wallace; The City Of Force, by Daniel F. Galouye; and Whatever Counts, by Frederik Pohl! # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N.Y. Please send me copies of body Check  Cash  Money order in the amount of  Note: this coupon is for your convenience only; if you prefer to keep your magazine intact, please send your order on a sheet of paper. Pete Marshall, Vicki Cummings and Eddie Andrews, directed by Academy Awardwinner Harry Horner. Negotiations are underway with #th Century-Fox for turning. hadn't mentioned that. The line was quite obvious; in fact, it was more of a crack. With a sound like a baseball smacking the catcher's glove, the crack opened, the upper half tilted, men sliding -- then impossibly it stood open, vibrating, like the roof of a house suddenly lifted. The driver gunned the jeep. There were cries, and a teeth on edge. The men were running back now, two of them dragging a third. Major Greer emerged from behind the object, looked about, ran toward General Straut shouting. " a man dead. It snapped; we weren't expecting it..." Straut jumped out beside the men, who had stopped now and were looking back. The underside of the gaping lid was an iridescent black. The shrill noise sounded thinly across the field. Greer arrived, panting. "What happened?" Straut snapped. "I was... checking over that thin spot. General. The first thing I knew it was... coming up under me. I fell; Tate was at the other side. He held on and it snapped him loose, against a tree. His skull -- " "What the devil's that racket?" "That's the sound we were getting from inside before. General. There's something in there, alive -- " "All right, pull yourself together, Major. We're not unprepared. Bring your half-tracks into position. The tanks will be here soon." Straut glanced at the men standing about. He would show them what leadership meant. "You men keep back," he said. He puffed his cigar calmly as he walked toward the looming object. The noise stopped suddenly; that was a relief. There was a faint and curious odor in the air, something like chlorine... or seaweed... or iodine. There were no marks in the ground surrounding the thing. It had apparently dropped straight in to its present position. It was heavy, too -- the soft soil was displaced m a mound a foot high all along the side. Behind him, Straut heard a yell. He whirled. The men were pointing; the jeep started up, churned toward him, wheels spinning. He looked up. Over the edge of the gray wall, six feet above his head, a great reddish limb, like the claw of a crab, moved, groping. Straut yanked the .# from its holster, jacked the action and fired. Soft matter spattered, and the claw jerked back. The screeching started up again angrily, then was drowned in the engine roar as the jeep slid to a stop. Straut stooped, grabbed up a leaf to which a quivering lump adhered, jumped into the vehicle as it leaped forward; then a shock and they were going into a spin and...-somebody said. And somebody else asked, "What about the driver?" Silence. Straut opened his eyes. "What... about..." A stranger was looking down at him, an ordinary-looking fellow of about thirty-five. "Easy, now. General Straut. You've had a bad spill. Everything is all right. I'm Professor Lieberman, from the University." "The driver," Straut said with an effort. "He was killed when the jeep went over." "Went... over?" "The creature lashed out with a member resembling a scorpion's stinger. It struck the jeep and flipped it. You were thrown clear. The driver jumped and the jeep rolled on him." Straut pushed himself up. "Where's Greer?" "I'm right here, sir." Major Greer stepped up, stood attentively. "Those tanks here yet?" "No, sir. I had a call from General Margrave; there's some sort of holdup. Something about not destroying scientific material. I did get the mortars over from the base." Straut got to his feet. The stranger took his arm. "You ought to lie down. General -- " "Who the hell is going to make me? Greer, get those mortars in place, spaced between your tracks." The telephone rang. Straut seized it. "General Straut." "General Margrave here, Straut. I'm glad you're back on your feet. There'll be some scientists from the State University coming over. Cooperate with them. You're going to have to hold things together at least until I can get another man in there to -- " "Another man? General Margrave, I'm not incapacitated. The situation is under complete control -- " "It is, is it? I understand you've got still another casualty. What's happened to your defensive capabilities?" "That was an accident, sir. The jeep -- " "We'll review that matter at a later date. What I'm calling about is more important right now. The code men have made some headway on that box of yours. It's putting out a sort of transmission." "What kind, sir?" "Half the message -- it's only twenty seconds long, repeated -- is in English. It's a fragment of a recording from a daytime radio program; one of the network men here identified it. The rest is gibberish. They're still working over it." "What -- " "Bryant tells me he thinks there may be some sort of correspondence between the two parts of the message. I wouldn't know, myself. In my opinion, it's a threat of some sort." "I agree. General. An ultimatum." "Right. Keep your men back at a safe distance from now on. I want no more casualities." hung up the phone. Margrave was ready to relieve him, after he had exercised every precaution. He had to do something fast, before this opportunity for promotion slipped out of. his hands. He looked at Major Greer. "I'm neutralizing this thing once and for all. There'll be no more men killed." Lieberman stood up. "General! I must protest any attack against this -- " Straut whirled. "I'm handling this. Professor. I don't know who let you in here or why but I'll make the decisions. I'm stopping this man-killer before it comes out of its nest, maybe gets into that village beyond the woods. There are four thousand civilians there. It's my job to protect them." He jerked his head at Greer, strode out of the room. Lieberman followed, pleading. "The creature has shown no signs of aggressiveness. General Straut -- " "With two men dead?" "You should have kept them back -- " "Oh, it was my fault, was it?" Straut stared at Lieberman with cold fury. This civilian pushed his way in here, then had the infernal gall to accuse him. Brigadier General Straut, of causing the death of his own men. If he had the fellow in uniform for five minutes... "You're not well, General. That fall -- " "Keep out of my way. Professor," Straut said. He turned and went on down the stairs. The present foul-up could ruin his career; and now this egghead interference... With Greer at his side, Straut moved out to the edge of the field. "All right. Major. Open up with your .# calibers." Greer called a command and a staccato rattle started up. The smell of cordite and the blue haze of gunsmoke -- this was more like it. He was in command here. Lieberman came up to Straut. "General, I appeal to you in the name of science. Hold off a little longer; at least until we learn what the message is about." "Get back from the firing line. Professor." Straut turned his back on the civilian, raised the glasses to observe the effect of the recoilless rifle. There was a tremendous smack of displaced air, and a thunderous boom as the explosive shell struck. Straut saw the gray shape jump, the raised lid waver. Dust rose from about it. There was no other effect. "Keep firing, Greer," Straut snapped, almost with a feeling of triumph. The thing was impervious to artillery; now who was going to say it was no threat? "How about the mortars, sir?" Greer said. "We can drop a few rounds right inside it." "All right, try that before the lid drops." And what we'll try next, I don't know, he thought. THE mortar fired with a muffled thud. Straut watched tensely. Five seconds later, the object erupted in a gout of pale pink debris. The lid rocked, pink. ish fluid running down its opalescent surface. A second burst, and a third. A great fragment of the menacing claw hung from the branch of a tree a hundred feet from the ship. Straut grabbed up the phone. "Cease fire!" Lieberman stared in horror at the carnage. The telephone rang. Straut picked it up. "General Straut," he said. His voice was firm. He had put an end to the threat. "Straut, we've broken the message," General Margrave said excitedly. "It's the damnedest thing I ever..." Straut wanted to interrupt, announce his victory, but Margrave was droning on. "... strange sort of reasoning, but there was a certain analogy. In any event, I'm assured the translation is accurate. Here's how it reads in English..." Straut listened. Then he carefully placed the receiver back on the hook. Lieberman stared at him. "What did it say?" Straut cleared his throat. He turned and looked at Lieberman for a long moment before answering. "It said, 'Please take good care of my little girl.' " for your information General Robert Dyrenforth traveled from Washington, D. C., to Texas to spend nearly # on gunpowder and high explosives. He was not heading a military expedition of some kind and the powder and explosives were not expended against outlaws, Indians or Mexicans. This was research for which Congress had appropriated the sum mentioned. General Dyreni forth by that time was no longer an active military man but represented the Department of Agriculture. And the explosions were set off to influence the weather, to cause rain if it could be done. It was the first instance of largescale research on weather control. Did it work? It did rain occasionally after a few barrels of gunpowder had been set off. But if some Texan who stood around and watched the activities claimed that it would have rained anyway, there wasn't much General Dyrenforth or anybody else could say in reply. The increase in rainfall was not decisive. The whole experiment had been an outgrowth of a story, revived by the Civil War, that had started in Europe a century #I so earlier. Veterans of' the Seven Years' War told anybody battle had been followed by a downpour. After the Napoleonic wars the story was revived, and again after the Civil War in the Western Hemisphere. By # an American engineer by the name of Powers decided to collect all stories of this kind -- of course not all the stories were purely military; some of them related to rains following the accidental explosion of powder magazines -- and to check on their accuracy as far as this could be done. Powers was so convinced that the stories were accurate that he titled his book War and Weather. It appeared in #I and was the ultimate reason for the appropriation of # to the Department of Agriculture. first work to say that human activities, voluntary and involuntary, influenced the weather. In #I another American, James Pollard Espy, had published a book with the title Philosophy of Storms. In this book he explained that rainfall was often caused by large fires, as for example forest fires. He reasoned that the air heated by the fire would rise, other air had to rush in laterally, and a fire which lasted for some time would therefore produce convection currents leading to the formation of cumulus clouds from which it would rain. It should be said right now that this does happen, but not every time. The adherents of the "gunpowder theory" did not claim that explosions caused the clouds but felt that the shock waves caused by the explosions induced the clouds to shed their moisture. At a later date this theory was somewhat amended by saying that the solid particles released into the atmosphere in the form of smoke acted as "condensation kernels" on which the water vapor of the clouds could condense. Parallel with the belief that the gunfire of a battle caused rain to fall, another belief grew up which does not seem to have made its way to the New World and which cannot be traced in detail even in Europe, where it was confined to the countries to the north of the Alps. That was the belief that shooting, even if it did not produce rain, at least would prevent hail. Many townships, especially in agricultural regions, bought cannon and held them ready to fire oversized charges but without projectiles whenever a cloud which looked as if it might ruin the crops with hail appeared in the sky. Whether it actually did any good is doubted by all meteorologists, but at the time it certainly looked as if it were effective. In the first place, not every black cloud is a hail cloud. In the second place, the hail cloud might sail on, and who cared about hail in the next region? In the meantime the hail cannon got all the credit. To return to scientific reasoning: during the period from, say, # to #, it was realized that some cooling effects in the clouds must have had something to do with the onset of precipitation. Well, if such was the case it might be possible to help the cooling along. Somebody by the name of Louis Gathmann is on record as having been the first man to suggest (in #) shooting liquid carbon dioxide into reluctant rain clouds. of some early experiments with what we now call "cloud seeding" performed prior to the First World War. Each and every one of these experiments seems to have been severely underfinanced and none of them was conclusive. Besides, the experimenters did not yet know the necessary details; modern cloud seeding looks for clouds which are already supercooled and just tries to trigger them. The early experimenters apparently tried to make clouds by cooling the air with their carbon dioxide or liquid air. It isn't completely impossible that this may be made to work, but it would require enormous quantities of cooling agents, and if it could be made to work, it certainly would not pay. The first modern experiments along those lines were performed in # in Holland by Augustus W. Veraart and they do sound "modern." To begin with, he used an airplane. And he seeded clouds with "dry ice" and with a mixture of "dry ice" (frozen carbon dioxide) and supercooled normal T ice crystals. While the experijnents themselves were quite scientific, Veraart's presentation of them apparently was not. He is said to have made such exaggerated claims that he annoyed people just by the way he made them. At any event the Royal Dutch Ministry of Agriculture as well as the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society publicly washed their hands of the whole affair, with the result that other researchers did not even bother to read Veraart's articles, which were written in Dutch. There followed some theoretical work. In # the Swedish meteorologist T or Bergeron stated that it should be possible to release rain from existing clouds by introducing ice crystals into them. Five years later the German physicist Walter Findeisen went over the problem mathematically and especially emphasized the need for the natural presence of supercooled water droplets while the ice crystals were being introduced. As often happens in science, Bergeron's and Findeisen's works were later lumped under the name of the "Bergeron-Findeisen Theory" which makes it sound as if they had cooperated in the formulation. The next chapter in the story bears the name of a company: General Electric. It was one of those stories which would sound pretty weak if it were fiction, but in reality things happen that way sometimes. It began with a request by the Chemical Warfare Board to find out just how the filters in gas masks do their work. General Electric's chief scientist, Dr. Irving Langmuir, assisted by Dr. Vincent J. Schaefer, went to work. Now if you want to test filters, you must test them on something. So Langmuir and Schaefer started producing all kinds of "smokes," which led to research on smoke screens in all kinds of weather. Cold-weather research prompted them to investigate aircraft icing. The icing of an airplane wing obviously builds up from particles in the cloud, hence the next point was to investigate how ice particles in clouds grew. of dry ice did cause supercooled clouds (small laboratory type) to form water ice crystals. Bergeron and Findeisen had been right. The next problem was somewhat different. The tiny ice crystals would stay aloft with the cloud. Would they grow large enough to fall out of the cloud, melting into raindrops before they hit the ground? This had to be tested in the open and in November # Dr. Schaefer started scattering dry ice pellets into clouds from above. Yes, the ice crystals did grow large enough to fall from the cloud. Soon afterward another researcher, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, discovered that microscopic silver iodide crystals -- one of the "smokes" that had been made -- were more efficient than ice or dry ice. For some reason silver iodide crystals will cause ice to form at higher temperatures than either dry ice or water ice. Once it had been established that something could be done, several branches of the government started specific projects. One was Project Cirrus, paid for by the Army and Navy with airplanes supplied by the Air Force. Another was the Cloud Physics Project, sponsored by the Weather Bureau, the Air Force, the National Advisory Committee Then came the Department of Defense's Artificial Cloud Nucleation Project. The result of all this work can be summed up in one sentence: You can make it rain if the right kind of cloud is available. A hundred years ago this would have been acclaimed as a fantastic achievement. But now you hear voices saying, "Is that all? Can't we really do something about the weather? Can't we at least prevent or stop a hurricane?" And you hear complaints like, I "Why doesn't anybody think big  any more? Why don't they try to melt the polar icecap? It would be so simple. And whatever hap. pened to the suggestion by the Russian fellow who wants to put a ring around the Earth like that ' of the planet Saturn?" As for hurricanes, a big research program is on the way. Before anybody can suggest what ' might be done, he has to know , with as much detail as possible what is going on. No doctor can prescribe a remedy or a treatment if he does not know what is wrong with his patient. The medical comparison may be unjust, but one of my teachers (the professor of zoology who had started out as a medical student) told us with a smile that when he was a student his teacher faced a medical riddle. There were elderly people among his patients, married for # years or more, having slept in the same double bed all these years. One was sick, the other was not: why didn't they infect each other? The answer, to us, is quite simple: the patients were diabetics! What I mean to say is that we haven't really diagnosed a hurricane yet. That nothing can be done about one which is in force is clear -- the Weather Bureau estimates that a full, fledged hurricane develops about the energy of ten plutonium bombs per second. But once we know enough, we might be able to prevent one from developing. Or it might be possible to deflect one into areas where it will do the least harm. N OW let's have a quick look at the "big thoughts," beginning with the arctic icecap. Ice and snow reflect sunlight well -- they have, to use astronomical language, a very high albedo. If you dusted the ice over with something dark, like coal dust, the albedo would be very strongly reduced, the sunlight of the arctic summer would be utilized and the ice would be melte.d. Let us assume for a moment that it could be done, all climatologists, meteorologists and a good number of economists would form a united front saying that it cannot be taken for granted that this would be a wise and beneficial move. We don't have to worry about the wisdom, however, because Dr. H. Wexler, director of meteorological research of the U. S. Weather Bureau, indulged in a little arithmetic Science, Oct. #, #) running as follows. The layer of coal dust would not have to be thick to do its job. prabably be enough. But the total area of the arctic ice pack north of latitude # N. and of the adjacent snowfields is #  lO" square kilometers. This calls for # million tons of coal dust. Using C-# Globemasters which could carry # tons per sortie, it would down the absorbing layer. Naturally this would take a little time to do and in the meantime there should be no winds to interfere with the experiment and, of course, no fresh snow must fall on the areas already dusted, which is also difficult. The idea published by some Russian about a ring around the Earth has precisely the same set of drawbacks. If the Earth had a ring like Saturn, the arctic and antarctic nights would be illuminated and somewhat warmed. In fact, no night would ever be completely black again; there would always be about as much light as would be shed by half a dozen full moons. Unlike the natural ring of Saturn, the artificial ring should be inclined to the equator; an inclination of about # would probably give the best results if the lessening of polar winter nights were the main objective. Whether this would do more good than harm is again a question we can't answer yet. Nobody can say at the moment what this steady influx of additional if reflected sunlight would do to the Earth's climate in general.  what are the logistics of the operation? I don't know the Russian figures; I don't even know whether any figures were published. Therefore I had to devise my own. I assumed that the ring would start # kilometers (# miles) above sea level and that it would be # kilometers (about # miles) wide. I assumed a thickness of one kilometer mostly for the reason that it would be very hard to make it any thinner. That all this is in the area of the inner Van Allen belt is relatively unimportant; the rockets which lay down the ring do not have to be manned. The material would best be ice crystals (Saturn's natural ring mostly consists of ice crystals, too) since they reflect the sunlight well and do not cost much. The area of the ring then besquare kilometers. Since it is assumed to be one kilometer thick, its volume is the same figure in cubic kilometers. If we cubic meter of ring volume, the calculations become quite simple. One metric ton (# lbs. if you insist on the measurements of the old merchant guilds) weighs # cubic meters. Making the ring, therefore, requires as many tons of water as its volume in cubic tons. in the form of ice crystals can form more than one crystal, we might be able to cut down the necessary weight somewhat. Let's have just one ice crystal per cubic ice crystals for that volume. If we say that each crystal, on the average, would weigh one-tenth tons. If, with super-accurate guidance, the ring can be made half a kilometer (a mere # feet) in thickness, we need only # million tons. Had enough of big thoughts? Of course we still should try to do something about the weather. But first we have to learn much more about it. Do meteorites hit the Moon? If so, why is there no evidence? Astronomers have assured me that, so far as we know, meteorites must hit the Moon at about the same rate ( allowing for the smaller size of Luna ) they hit the Earth. But if they do, they should pockmark the surfaces of the maria with craters; they should also stir up dust or pumice clouds momentarily. In either case we might not be able to see the impact but we should see the result. When the Moon is dark, the smash of a meteorite on stone should certainly set up a spark of light which would be visible (comparatively speaking) as a match lit a long way off on a dark night. Finally it seems reasonable that, at one time or another, since Galilei, the Moon must have been clobbered by a big meteor on the facing side. This would leave a new crater... but apparently no change in the Moon's surface has ever been discovered. Can you explain this odd situation? Boyd Hill Playa del Rey, Calif. Well, I can try to explain it. But before I go on, I want to go on record that this reply is being typed on August #, #, just in case the Moon is struck by a colossal body the next day and the whole answer becomes negligible, superfluous and obsolete. First let us be clear about one point. The gravitational field of a planet (or large moon) is of very minor, if any, importance with regard to the number of meteorites striking it. The meteorites are simply in orbits around the sun and sometimes a planet and a meteorite happen to be on collision courses. The gravitational field of the Earth might help in changing an "almost collision course" (near miss of a quarter-mile) into a collision course, but that is all. Therefore, in a comparison between the number of solid particles which either the Earth or the Moon will sweep out of space, we don't have to wonder about the comparison of their gravitational field. All that counts are their cross sections -- the size of the "target," so to speak. The Earth's diameter is abbut # miles, that of the Moon about #. The area of "Target Earth" is, therefore, a little more than fourteen times that of "Target Moon." All you have to do is to compare the squares of the diameters, or of the radii. Since we know, or can estimate, the number of particles swept up by the Earth, the number swept up by the Moon would be about l#th of the figure for the Earth. But since we can see only about one-half of the lunar surface, the number of impacts that might be seen would be only ## #th of what we get for the whole Earth. To simplify life a bit, let's say that the Earth will sustain # times as many hits as the visible hemisphere of the Moon. No actual count of what hits the Earth is possible, but the generally accepted estimate is a during a #-hour period. Of this cles have a diameter smaller than per #-hour period will have a size of half an inch or larger. Half a dozen will be fist-sized or even larger. What our Earth sweeps out of space in the course of a day has been labeled "a very large dump truck of dust with a few pebbles in it." How will this look to an observer? Well, everything smaller will simply be invisible. The ones be made out as a faint "shooting star" on a dark night. Those which are larger than an inch will be "rather bright," while those of the size of a man's fist would light up the landscape as they pass overhead. Offhand, I would guess that a meteorite which hits the Moon would have to weigh at least # pounds to make an impact that could be seen from Earth if it hits the dark portion of the Moon and if somebody happens to be looking through a reasonably powerful telescope. Earth may collect one per month, which means that the visible portion of the Moon would collect one every three years. But remember the other requirements: somebody would have to look through a telescope at the dark portion of the Moon (which is not too customary) at the right time. Still, j every once in a while an observer has reported a spot of light; in : some cases it might have been a meteoric impact. Not even a #-pounder would produce a crater which would be visible from Earth, even through a powerful telescope. We don't know just how much would be needed, but the Russian payload that did hit the Moon gives a basis for a few guesses. The weight of that payload was around # pounds and the Russians fired for the center of the visible half of the Moon. Naturally they timed their shot so they would be able to observe the impact -- of course when they have night, we have daylight. They claim they could observe the dust cloud caused by the impact. They calculated that the impact of the lunar probe itself would have caused a crater # feet in diameter and the impact of the top stage of their rocket a crater # feet in diameter, provided they struck a thick dust layer. For striking solid rock, the crater diameters would have been # feet for the probe and # feet for the rocket. They must have struck solid rock, because so far no photographs of the two new craters could be produced. Since small lunar formations are pinpointed by their shadows at sunrise and sunset rather than by direct visibility, the failure to find the impact craters of the Russian moonshot is not surprising. At the very best they would be at the limit of detectability, if they had struck in an otherwise featureless plain. Obviously they did not. Equally obviously a #pound meteorite would not produce a conspicuous crater. One more point to be considered is the question of for how long we have good lunar maps. We can't count from the invention of the telescope -- some of the names proposed by the Italian Riccioli for lunar formations are not in use now for the simple reason that modern astronomers are not sure just which formations Riccioli had in mind. We can say that we have maps which might be good enough to help in spotting a new crater for only the past # years. It is easily possible that nothing big enough struck the Moon on the visible hemisphere during that time. On Earth we had two known meteorite falls of sufficient size in this period, both striking in Siberia. One was in #, the other a dozen years ago. (Of course a few more big ones might have fallen into the oceans, or in Greenland, or in Antarctica, though no trace has been found.) But considering the ratio of about # to #, it isn't at all surprising that no new crater has appeared on the Moon during the last # years. Why wouldn't it be a good idea to build some sort of catapult for getting our larger rockets off the ground? (Name withheld ) San Francisco, Calif. I am withholding the name because I  had to reply to my correspondent that (A) it is not a good idea, that (B) I get this question about once a week and that (C) the Space Agency not more often. This constant stream of the same question has, incidentally, been reinforced by some magazine writer who claimed to know that this was the way the Russians got their satellites into orbit. I may insert here that it is just possible that this is one more of the many translators' mistakes which have been plaguing us recently. The Russian word for catapult is the same as ours (it is one of those international words which are the same in most languages, like "radio," "airplane," "transistor" and so forth) and it is conceivable that the word is applied to a booster rocket. But I still have to explain why it is not a good idea. If you want to accelerate a rocket initially by means of a catapult, you deal with several factors. The first one is how fast you want your rocket to be going at the instant it leaves the catapult; or, phrased differently, how much velocity you want the catapult to supply. The second factor is the length of travel of the catapult -- through what distance does it move? Both these factors together tell you what the acceleration will have to be. Now the solid-fuel booster of the old Aerobee rocket supplied just short of # feet per second, or # meters, since # meters equal # feet. To supply any less than this velocity would not be worth the effort, so let's stick to this figure. The three factors in question are tied together by the simple equation: avV#s. In this equation "a" stands for the acceleration which will result, "v '" is the square of the velocity desired, while "s" is the distance traveled in the course of producing the desired velocity. Now let us check the values with this velocity in mind. First doing the righthand portion of the equation, we have to assume a value for "s" and for a first attempt we make "s" equal to # feet too, or # meters. Then vV#s reads # divided by #, which is #. This figure stands for the mean acceleration the rocket would have to stand. One g in the metric system is #I msec" so that this figure of # means just about #-## g. Well, this is fine. The rocket will be able to stand an acceleration of #-## g. Yes, but no catapult is a thousand feet tall. In reality we'd probably have to be satisfied with a hundred feet, in which case our rocket would have to undergo an acceleration of # g. Some of the smaller solid-fuel jobs might be able to take this without being deformed (and blowing up) in the process. But a liquid-fuel rocket just could not stand this acceleration, and certainly not a big one. So things boil down to the following choices: You provide only # or # feet per second. In this case it isn't worth the trouble. Or else you strengthen the rocket to withstand the high acceleration, in which case you have more dead weight in the rocket itself and you pay a higher penalty for the dead weight than you gain by even a thousand feet per second. With all this we haven't yet touched another point, a rather sore one, namely the expense of the catapult -- and its own weight. If you want to help an Atlas off the ground, you have to accelerate (in round figures) # tons. The moving portion of the catapult would have to weigh at least # tons. And you have to move these ten tons too. This V will cost fuel of some kind. The V same amount of fuel will do more  good if it is incorporated in the rocket itself -- and you save the price of the catapult. For the Puzzle Addicts I am sorry I forgot to give the explanation (as quite a number of readers reminded me) of the problem of the two Dutchmen with only one bike. What you need here is not mathematics but logic. No matter how the course is broken up, each one gets to ride a total of half the total distance. So, obviously, they save travel time -- as one reader proved by the use of integral equations. Now here is another one, cribbed froma friendly European magazine the name of which will be revealed with the answer in the next issue. The sequence of the first nine whole numbers is, of course, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, # and #. You must leave them in this sequence. But between them you may insert plus and minus signs, , or multiplication signs or dividing signs. You may use the figures in the forrrT (#  ##) or (# times #) or even in the form # or #. All that is needed is that they remain in their natural sequence. No fractions permitted (like ##), nor figures of the type of #'. The result must be #. I'll add that it can be done in several ways. Is This Your Real Name? item for this column, the fact that the last two words always are my name reminded me of the most surprising question I ever got after a lecture. It was in Chicago and the custom of the particular group which sponsored my lecture was to admit written questions only, "to avoid speeches from the floor." One of these written questions read: "Is this your real name?" I first asked back to find out whether the question concerned my own name and I heard a timid "yes," followed by the question whether it should not be may have worried about the same important problem. I'll give an answer here (as I did in the lecture hall) hoping that this will end the discussion. No, my first name is not as stated on the certificate of birth, the certificate of baptism, the certificate of confirmation and my old (German) passport. Willy (in this spelling and this spelling only) is a separate, full-fledged and officially recognized name. Contemporaries who have the same name are Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, and Prof. Willy Messerschmitt, the airplane designer. Actually I was named after Prof. Willy Stdwer, a painter who around the time of my birth had the pleasure of knowing that reproductions of his paintings could be found in any German home. They were of ships, usually the High Seas Fleet. As for my last name, it means "cliff" or "rock" (e.g., Loreley, the first part of that designation being spelled "lure" in English). I probably had an unfortunate ancestor who was the unproud owner of land full of big rocks. I recently came across an English name with the same meaning: Stoneacre. But for those who are likely to check with books on the origin of names, I wish to add that I have done so myself. Both works I checked -- one about fifty years older than the other -- agree: Ley, "rock" or "cliff," or else derived from St. Eligius. I didn't think the St. Eligius part could possibly apply to me, but just on principle I checked on St. Eligius and learned that he is the patron saint of the blacksmiths. Now I'm not sure which is which. My father's father was a blacksmith (until he opened a tavern) and he told me that his smithy had been family property for generations. In fact, he believed that his ancestors had settled in East Prussia as armorers to the Teutonic Knights. In that case, I won't have to pity the unknown ancestor who was stuck with rocky land but can sign off in the knowledge that my name is really Smith. Administration problems, the Underground, a missing volume of his encyclopedia, and now an old love turned rebel -- enough was enough! his office with the prisoner, the director said: "Now, what is this secret you can reveal to my ears alone?" "Are you sure none of them are listening?" The prisoner was a young man with seedy clothing and an odd haircut. As he spoke, he managed to grin in a conspiratorial way, as if he already shared some vital and amusing secret with Director Ahlgren. And this is about the average of the Underground, thought the director, studying his victim with distaste. And in the next room Barbara waited her turn at being interrogated. How could she have ever become connected, however indirectly, ' with the ideals or people of this Underground represented before him? "None of them are listening," said the director, who took daily steps to discourage that sort of thing among his subordinates. It was not entirely unheard of for a Party member to turn traitor and join the Underground. "Quickly now, what have you to tell me?" "This -- I will act as a double agent for you," volunteered the young wretch, in a stage whisper, maintaining the idiotic grin. He sat propped erect in his chair by a stiff pillow the director kept handy for such use, his voluntary muscles still mainly paralyzed from the stun pistols of the Political Police. Director Ahlgren frowned thoughtfully. He took a cigarette from a box on his plain but highly polished desk. "Care for one?" "No, no. Do you understand what I am offering you? I am a highly trained agent, and I will betray them all to you, because you are the strongest here, and I must serve the strongest." The young man nodded earnestly as if he hoped the director would imitate the movement and so agree with him. The director puffed smoke. "Very well, I accept. Now you must show me that you will really do what you say. Tell me the address of your contact cell." his forehead, in an apparent effort to conceive a stroke of Machiavellian strategy. Ahlgren pursued him. "I know each cell of the Underground has its contact with the rest of the organization through one other cell and that you know the address of yours. How can I trust you as a double agent if you won't tell me that much?" "Wouldn't any of the others tell you? My dear comrades from my own cell?" All the dear comrades seemed to have taken memory-scrambling drugs, as captured rebels often did, though the director sometimes thought it a superfluous action on their part. "None of the others offered to act as a double agent." Ahlgren was trying to humor this babbler out of the one piece of valuable information he was likely to possess. "Our comrades in the contact cell will have heard about the arrests this morning," said the prisoner, with a sudden happy thought. "They'll have moved already anyway." Quite likely true, Director Ahlgren knew. "So it can't hurt them if you tell me," he encouraged. The prisoner pondered a moment longer, then named an address in a quiet residential section about a mile from the Party Building. "Anything else you can tell me?" Careful consideration. "No." PolPol Chief Lazar and a couple of guards came into the office quickly after the director touched the signal button. "Take him down to Conditioning," said the director, leaning back in his chair. He felt his head beginning to ache. The rebel screamed and rolled his head, about the most violent motion he could make, as the two PolPol guards caught him gently by the arms and lifted him from his chair. "Traitor! You are the traitor, not I! You have betrayed my confidence, your own honor, you -- " He seemed suddenly to realize what was going to happen to him. "Conditioning! No, not my mind, not my mind! Can't you beat me or something instead? I won't be meee any lonnnggerrrr..." The screaming died away down the corridor outside the office. "Careful with him," Lazar called sharply to the guards, from the doorway. "Don't let his legs bump, there. You bruised that man this morning; we want no more of that." He came back into the office, closing the door, viewing Ahlgren with the proper expression of respect. "Would you like me to conduct the next interview, sir?" "No. Why do you ask?" "I thought you might feel a certain reluctance, sir. I understand you knew the young lady years ago." "Before I joined the Party. Yes, quite right, I did." The director arose from his chair and walked toward the wide window, past the bookshelves that almost filled one wall, giving the office the air of a study and concealing his secret exit. out upon the sunset that reddened the sky over his prosperous city where bright lights were coming on against the dusk. I understand Lazar, he thought, because he is ambitious, as I am, or as I was. Under one of the old dictatorships, I would have had to fear such ambition in a subordinate and consider taking steps against him. But I need not fear Lazar, because the Party claims his perfect loyalty, and he can do nothing against me until I begin to fail the Party. And is that time perhaps drawing near? Will my secret exit always be only a private joke? Watching his own eyes in the half-mirror of the window, the director told himself: Someone must govern the people; someone always has. The worldwide Party does better than the old governrnents. There are no wars. There is no corruption and no real struggle for power among Party members, because there is practically no disobedience in the carefully chosen ranks. The mass of the citizens seem content with their bread and circuses. There is only the Underground, and maybe some kind of Underground is necessary in any society. "Lazar." "Sir?" "How do we do it? How do we attain such perfection of power that the essence of power is enough, that we have no need to constantly threaten or stupefy the citizens?" The gay and active city below was now brightening itself against the gathering night. No giant signs proclaimed the glories of the Party. No monolithic statues deified the World Directors, past or present. The Party was invisible. Lazar seemed a bit shocked at the question. "The selfless obedience of each individual is the life and strength of the Party, sir." A phrase from the catechism. "Of course... but look, Lazar. That Citizens Policeman directing traffic down there. He's probably never even thought of joining the Party. He wears a stun pistol, because of the non-political criminals he must sometimes deal with; but if one of your PolPol agents were to walk up to him and arrest him, the odds are he would offer no resistance. Now why? The Citizens Police are as well armed and I think more numerous than your men." Lazar studied the traffic cop below through narrowed eyes. "I can't remember when we've had to arrest a Citizens Policeman." "Neither can I. The point is -- how do we do it?" "Superior dedication and discipline will prevail, sir." "Yes." But the parroted phrases were no real answer. The Citizens Police were presumably disciplined and dedior unable to really discuss the subject. Such questions had not occurred to Ahlgren himself until recently. He could not remember ever seriously considering the possibility of himself opposing the Party in any way, even before that day five years ago when he had been accepted as a member. "And we of the Party control the means of Conditioning," said Lazar. "Conditioning, yes." Barbara. He had to fight to keep anything from showing in his face. It was hard. He knew there was not one person in the gay and bright-lit city before him who could not be brought to the basement of this building at any time, at a word from himself, to undergo Conditioning. The Ultimate Pain, he had heard it called by Party theorists. But it needed no dramatization. The citizens had a slang term for it that he had heard somewhere: brain-boiling. The office intercom sounded on the director's desk. "Chief Lazar's office would like him to come in, if possible." Tight security. No details would be spoken unnecessarily over even the director's line. No risks would be taken at all. He was faintly relieved. "Your office wants you for something; I won't need you here any longer. Good job today." "Thank you, sir." Lazar was gone in a moment. soft-lit office. His eyes ranged along the bookshelves. The Party put no restrictions on reading. Aquinas -- some of the Eastern philosophers -- Thomas Paine -- Russell. The encyclopedia, with the gap where that one volume had been missing for a week. Volume P. What the devil could have happened to it? Was there a kleptomaniac on his staff? It seemed absurd for anyone to steal an ordinary book. But he was only procrastinating. He went to sit again at his desk, leafed through papers. Bulky contracts and specifications for the new water supply for his city. And the Citizens Council had voted a new tax; he would have to hire collectors. Too much non-political work, as usual, and now the Underground flaring up again, and -- He keyed the intercom and ordered, "Bring the girl in," without giving himself any more time to think about what he was going to have to do. He sat waiting, his head aching, trying to hold nerves and face and hands steady. The PolPol report on Barbara was on his desk, mixed up now with the waterworks, and he read it for the hundredth time. She had spoken in public against the Party this morning in the presence of a PolPol officer. She came into the office quietly, between the blank-faced uniformed PolPol women. She walked unaided and Ahlgren felt a faint, smothered gladness that it had not been necessary to stun her. "Leave us," he told the guards, who instantly obeyed. Would it look suspicious for him to want to be alone with another prisoner? It didn't matter -- in a few minutes he would send her to Conditioning, because he had to send her; there was nothing else the Party could do with her. He felt his heart sinking. He met her eyes for the first time and was vastly grateful to see no terror in them. "Sit down, Barbara." She sat without speaking and watched him as if more sorry for him than for herself. It was her look of that day years ago, when he had told her of losing a job... If I had married her in those days, he thought, as I almost did, and never joined the Party, I would now be sitting in some outer office waiting, desperate to do anything to spare her the Pain, but helpless. Now I sit here, representing the Party, still helpless. But no, if I had married her I would have found some way to keep her from this. "I'm sorry, Barbara," he said finally. "You know what I must do." The waiting, unchanging sympathy of her eyes wrenched at him. She had never been beautiful, really, but so utterly alive... "I -- would like you to come back when you are -- recovered," he heard himself maundering. "You'll be all -- " "Will you be able to marry me then?" Her first words to him burst out in a voice near breaking, like a question held in too long, that she had not meant to speak aloud. He sat up straight in his chair, feeling as if the world had suddenly shaken beneath him. "How can you ask me that? You know I can't marry -- I have chosen the Party!" He gripped the desk to stop his hands from trembling; then he realized that she must be only making a desperate attempt to save herself from Conditioning. sir," said City PolPol Chief Lazar in a hushed and slightly awed voice, shaking the hand thrust toward him by District Director Perkins. They stood in a small room in the basement of the Party Building in Ahlgren's city. One-way glass in a wall showed a view of a Treatment Room where Conditioning was sometimes practiced. "Lazar. I've studied your record." Perkins' handshake was massive, like his bearing. "I think you may be taking over in this city very soon, so I had you called down here to watch something. The doctors called me in the District Capital last night about Ahlgren and we've arranged a little test for him today -- he doesn't know I'm here, of course. We should be able to see the climax, if things go as planned." "I -- I hardly know what to say, sir." Perkins eyed him shrewdly. "Think maybe you're the one being tested? No, son, not today. But it won't hurt you to see this." He frowned. "Ahlgren started out well in the Party, too. Seemed to have a fine future ahead of him. Now... Perkins shook his head. A door leading to a corridor opened and a man dressed in the green smock of a doctor stuck his head into the room. "Would you mind if I watched from here, sir?" "No, no, come in. Lazar, this is Citizen Schmidt. Doctor Schmidt, I should say, eh?" Lazar acknowledged the introduction perfunctorily. A loyal non-Party citizen was neither a political danger nor a competitor for advancement, and therefore almost totally uninteresting. Lazar turned to study the Treatment Room through the one-way glass. It was not impressive, except for the treatment table in the center, a low monstrous thing of wires and power. There were soft lights, chairs, a desk in one corner, and above the desk a small bookshelf. Lazar could see that one book had been placed behind the others, as if someone had tried to hide it. Looking closer, he made out that it was part of an encyclopedia. Volume Paa-Pyx. bara by the wrists; he pulled her across the desk and kissed her. His decision had been made with no real struggle at all. Maybe he had made the decision weeks or months ago, without knowing, and had just beeiil traveling with the Party on inJ ertia. Barbara trembled and tried, to pull back and then let herself go against him. She was not only, acting to save herself now; she could not be. "They say life can be good again after Conditioning, Barbara," he whispered to her. "They say many regain full normal intelligence. They say -- no, I could never send you to that! Not you, not that!" "Oh, Jim, Jim." Years since anyone had called him by that name. Or was it so long? A halfmemory came disturbingly and I fled before he could grasp it. But ' a real memory came plainly to him, bringing with it a plan of action that was at least better than nothing: the memory of the address the young rebel had spoken to his ears alone. "Listen!" He grabbed Barbara's arm and held her away from him. "There may be one chance, just one small chance for us." "What?" "The Underground. I have an address." "No, Jim. You can't do that." She backed away, looking toward the door as if she heard the guards coming to seize them both. "Why not? Don't you understand what Conditioning means? Don't you understand what you are facing?" "Yes, but..." Indecision showed in her voice and manner. "I don't know if I should try to tell you." "Tell me what? Don't you realize what you're facing?" "Yes, but you..." "Me?" So she could think of his welfare first, even while she faced the Ultimate Pain. She roust have loved him all these years. "I've had enough of the Party anyway." The words came so easily and sincerely to his lips that he was surprised as if at hypocrisy in himself, but it was not that. Somehow in the past few minutes his whole outlook on the world had shifted abruptly; the change must have been building for a long time. His mind raced ahead, planning, while Barbara watched his face intently, one hand held up to her mouth. He pulled a stun pistol out of his desk, checked the charge and thrust it into his belt. "Follow me. Quickly." A section of the bookcase swung outward at his touch. He led Barbara into the narrow passage in the wall and indicated an unmarked phone set into a small niche. "Private line to District HQ. This may buy us a little time." She reached out tentatively to restrain him, clenched her fingers and made no objection. He picked up the phone and waited until he heard someone on the other end, then said: "Ahlgren here. Rebel plot. They've infiltrated. I must flee." He hung up. Of course District HQ would doubt the message, but it should divide at least for a time the energies of the Party that would now be arrayed against him -- and against the frightened girl he now led toward the tiny secret elevator that would take them down to street level. In his revolt against the authority he had accepted for so long, he felt less alone than he had for years. by coming out of the wall in a little-used entrance to a rather shabby apartment house a block from the Party Building, after Ahlgren had studied the glowpanel-lit hallway through a peephole to make sure it was unoccupied. He had discarded his uniform belt and insignia inside the secret passage; his jacket lid the butt of the pistol in his belt. If no one looked too closely at him, he might pass in the half-dark streets for a plainly dressed citizen. They walked the side streets toward the Underground address, not going fast enough to attract attention. Barbara held his arm and from time to time looked back over her shoulder until he whispered to her to stop it. Other couples strolled past them and beside them; the normal evening life of the city progressed around them as if the Party and the Underground were no more than fairy stories. The young rebel might have told someone else the address before or after Conditioning had wrenched and battered his mind out of human shape. Ahlgren could not rely on the place being even temporarily safe. Barbara and he could only pause there in their flight, warn any Underground people they could find, and try to flee with them to some place of slightly less danger, if any existed. It was a weak chance, but their only one. There had been no time at all to plan anything better. Rebellion against the Party had burst in Ahlgren with the suddenness of a PolPol raid. His very lack of preparation for this step and his good record to date might make District think for a long time that he was indeed the victim of infiltrating Underground plotters. The address proved to be that of a middle-sized, unremarkable building in a lower-class residential area, two or three apartments over a quiet-looking small tavern. A single front entrance divided inside, where stairs led up to the) apartments and two steps led down to the level of the tavern. A couple of male patrons looked around from the bar with mild interest as Ahlgren and the girl entered. They and the bartender seemed nothing but solid citizen types. While Ahlgren hesitated, uncertain of what to say or whether to speak at all, the bartender said suddenly: "Oh, that bunch. They're upstairs." The man's face assumed an unhappy look, Ahlgren took no time to worry over whether he and Barbara were such obvious rebels already, or how the bartender fitted in. The PolPol might be right on their heels. He only nodded and led Barbara up the stairs. There were two doors at the top; he chose at random and knocked. No answer. He tried the other. After at least a minute of feverishly quiet rapping on both doors, one opened enough to reveal a thin man with a blank suspicious stare. "Let us in," Ahlgren whispered desperately. "It is vital to the Underground." The PolPol might close in at any moment; he had to take the chance and speak plainly. His hand was under his jacket on the butt of his stun pistol and his foot was in the door. "I don't know what you mean," said the thin man tonelessly. "Look at me! I am the director of this city. I have deserted the party." T he man's eyes widened and there were excited whisperings in the room behind him. "Let them in, Otto," said a voice. Ahlgren pushed his way into the room, dragging Barbara with him. A fat man sat at a table with a bottle and glasses before him, and a little pile of dingy books and folders on the floor at his feet. A pair of unwholesomelooking women sat on a sagging couch along one wall. A door with a homemade look in another wall seemed to lead into the other apartment. Evidently the Underground used the whole second floor. Ahlgren wasted no time with preliminaries. "Listen to me. The PolPol may be on their way here now. Get out while you can and take us with you. Have you some place to run to?" The fat man regarded Ahlgren owlishly and belched. "Not so fast. How do we know -- " There was a glare of searchlights against the dirty windows, through the drawn shades, and a booming amplified voice: "Ahlgren, come out peacefully. We know you're there. Ahlgren, come out." He gripped Barbara and looked into her eyes. "Try to remember me after the Pain." "Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, you don't know, you don't understand!" He dragged her downstairs, seeking a way out of the trap. The PolPol would have the building surrounded, of course, but they would expect him to flee upward, to try to fight them off on the stairs, and perhaps try to escape over the roofs, as rebels often did. The four Underground people had burst into passionate argument, but were doing nothing purposeful. The lights were out in the tavern downstairs. The two patrons were standing behind the bar, the attitude of their vague shapes suggesting that they were waiting as interested spectators. The windows here too glared wfth searchlights, and the barkeep stood in the middle of the room glaring at Ahlgren. "Ahlgren! Come out peacefully and no one will be hurt! Your case will be fairly heard!" "Why don't you just do like the man says?" the barkeep suggested angrily. What was wrong with these people? Didn't they realize -- but he had no time. "Shut up. Where does that back door lead?" "Nowhere. I keep it locked." The barkeep swore. "Hope they don't smash the place, but they sure as hell will if you don't go out. Sure, they say, we pay compensation, but look how long it takes. Sure, the glass they put in won't cut nobody, but I gotta sweep it up and put up pl#rwood panels. Why don't you just go out?" "Take it easy, Sam," said one of the patrons behind the bar, with a chuckle. Barbara was babbling, too, something she was sorry for, or sorry about. A window smashed in and a PolPol officer stood outlined in the frame, flashlight in one hand sweeping the room. The director shot first. The invisible soundless stun beam doubled up the man; the flashlight spun crazily through the room as he dropped it. Ahlgren picked up a stool to batter at the rear door. It was the only way left. "That don't go nowhere, I told ya! Stop! Why did I ever sign up?" the barkeep moaned, grabbing at Ahlgren to keep him from smashing at the door with the stool. Ahlgren let him have the stun beam at close range. It didn't bother the man in the least. "Not on me, friend not on me. Tickle all you want," the barkeep said in obscure triumph, pulling the stool from Ahlgren's grip, which loosened from surprise. The director felt the paralyzing tickle of a beam stab his own side; he had time to see Lazar grinning in at a window before sinking to the floor and into unconsciousness.propped up by a stiff pillow when awareness returned. There was a sense of strangeness in his mind that he could not fully account for by what he remembered happening. Drugs? They were seldom used on anyone. It was a Treatment Room; they were not going to waste any time. Lazar's face looked down at him, grinning, as he had seen it at the tavern window. Two or three of the greensmocked doctors who always administered Conditioning stood beside the monstrous table, watching him and waiting. And Barbara. She stood free in the background, not stunned or restrained in any way. Lazar caught the direction of his gaze. "Oh, yes, the young lady has been most helpful to us, future Citizen Ahlgren. It was in large part her idea -- " "Please." The doctor's voice had an edge to it. "I must insist, sir, that you not interfere with treatment." "Very well." Lazar's grin was wider than ever. He touched Ahlgren's shoulder as one might pat a dog about to be gassed. "I was comfortably set to watch this show when you made me get up and work for it. But it'll be worth the trouble. Good luck in your new life." He went out jauntily. Ahlgren let his eyelids close; he could not look at Barbara. She was whispering with a doctor. He prayed to the God of his childhood for the Pain to come quickly and bring complete forgetfulness. A doctor was in front of Ahlgren. "Open your eyes. Look at me. Trust me. Never mind who's watching or that you think you've been betrayed. We didn't plan that, but it can't be helped now. I want you to do something and it won't hurt. Will you try?" The doctor's eyes burned down. His voice compelled. Ahlgren was held. "Try what?" he asked. "What do you think it is I want?" the doctor asked with calm patience. "Try to remember." Remember? What was there to remember? Ahlgren's eye roved about the room, fell upon the little bookshelf above the desk in one corner, and slid away again. But he supposed there was no escape from -- what? "You can get up now if you like, Jim. Move around." He tried. His legs pushed him w erect. His arms functioned. Surprisingly, he could move; it took an effort but was not painful. How long had he been out from the stunning? He found himself approaching the little bookshelf, while the doctors and Barbara watched silently. She was crying quietly; too late now. But he couldn't hate her. reached behind the little row of books and pulled out what he saw with a shock was Volume P. "Who hid this here?" he demanded. "I've been looking for it." "Don't you remember, Jim?" asked a doctor gently. "You pushed it back there the last time. Now shall we try reading some things again?" The sense of strangeness deepened until there was no standard left to judge the strangeness by. That doctor had a cursed familiar way of talking to the director of a city, even an arrested director, but the director opened the book. He would show them; there was no subject he couldn't read about. He found the place he thought they wanted and began to read aloud, "Pain, the Ultimate," but all that followed was "see Conditioning." "No, Jim. Turn further back. Let's try again Where we were last time. Do you remember?" Ahlgren turned pages, suddenly fearful that something was coming that he could not face. Paine, Thomas. Lucky man, bound up safe in a book. "Party, the?" he asked, looking around at the doctors. He thought he remembered reading this article once; much of it had been only a vague jumble of nonsense. High-priced encyclopedia, too. "No, we won't try that one today. Turn further back to where we were last time. Remember?" Ahlgren knew it had to be done. For some reason. His hands began to tremble as he turned the pages. Pe. Pi. He was getting closer to something he didn't want to find. Po. He dropped the book, but made himself pick it up again. Barbara gave him a violent nod of encouragement. She was stilh almost crying over something. Women. But this time she was here to help him and he was going to succeed. He turned a few more pages and there it was. Something he had tried to face before -- how many times? -- and had always forgotten about after failure. His eyes scanned the clearly printed symbols, but something in his brain fought against interpreting them. "I can't read it. It's all blurry." He had said that before. Barbara whispered: "Try, Jim. Try hard." Ahlgren stared at the page in an immense effort, failed, and relaxed for a moment. The title of the article suddenly leaped into focus for him: began to read aloud in a quavery voice: " -- from the Latin, posse power, plus mania. Of all mental diseases doubtless the most evil, in terms of the total suffering inflicted upon humanity throughout history; and one of the most resistant to even modern therapy." Why had they wanted him to read this? Why had it been difficult? An awful idea loomed on the horizon... " "Unique among diseases in that its effects are put to practical use by society, it in fact forms the basis of modern government fsee Party, the).' " Ahlgren faltered and looked around him uncertainly. He felt sweat beginning to bead his forehead. The article went on to great length, but he flipped pages rapidly back to find Party, the. He skimmed rapidly through a few paragraphs, then read aloud in an impersonal, shrill, hurried tone: " 'Those with this abnormal lust for power over ethers generally find means to satisfy it in any society; ours is the first to maintain effective control over its members who are so afflicted. Now, the victims of the disease are necessarily detected during the compulsory annual psychological examination. If immediate therapy fails to effect a cure, as it usually does, mental Conditioning is applied to initiate or strengthen the delusions, welcomed by the patient, that the Party has the rest of the citizenry at its mercy and -- ' " "Take your time, Jim." " ' -- and that -- that Conditioning is a painful and often crippling punishment employed by the Party itself, to erase thoughts of political opposition. The world was turning under Ahlgren. He forced himself to read on slowly and sanely. Could this be truth? " 'Following what is now to him the only practical course, the victim is guided to apply for Party membership as those found to be compulsive rebels andor punishment-seekers are . shuttled to the complementary organization (see Underground, the). He is of course invariably accepted and assigned, depending on his skills, to the Administration or the Political Police (see PolPol).'" Again pages fluttered under Ahlgren's fingers. PolPol. " ' -- stun pistols locked at low neural frequencies that produce only a tickling sensation, to which all Party and Underground members are Conditioned to respond by going into psychic paralysis, unless in a situation where it would be physically dangerous to do so -- ' " Ahlgren skipped from article to article, his mind grabbing recklessly at the words that had been forbidden him. " ' -- most people generally ignore the activities of both Party and Underground, except as occasional sources of unexpected amusement -- ' " " ' -- Underground members captured by the Party are quickly turned over to the government doctors for Conditioning. They are given treatments and sent out again to a different area, believing themselves rebel couriers or escapees. At each capture they are tested to see if their disease has abated to within the reach of therapy -- ' " " ' -- the PolPol raid the same houses over and over, being Conditioned to remember no such addresses and to keep no records of them. Property owners are compensated for damage incurred. Personal injury in these cases is of course extremely rare and accidental, when it does occur, due to the Conditioning of both Party and Underground people against it -- ' " " ' -- Party members composing the Administration perform most of our essential government functions, being constrained by their Conditioning against any abuse of power, corruption or dishonesty... ' " over him. His headache was gone, but his throat felt raw. How long had he been reading aloud? "That's fine, Jim, that's fine!" a doctor said. "Can you go on a little further?" It took a giant's effort. Yet it was something that must be done. " 'By the interaction of Conditioning with , the disease, the victim is prevented from apprehending the true state of affairs. He is, for example, unable to read this very article with any true comprehension. If read aloud to him, it will not make sense to his mind; he will interpret it to suit, the needs of the moment, then quickly forget it. Indeed, this article, and similar writings, are frequently used as tests to determine a patient's progress...' " Ahlgren's hand holding the book dropped to his side. He stood swaying on his feet, utterly weary. He only wanted sleep, oblivion, forgetfulness. A doctor carefully took the book from him, found the place, and read: " 'When continued therapy has brought a Party member near the point of cure, as is finally possible in about half of all cases, a realization of the true state of affairs becomes possible for the patient'... That's you now, Jim. You're over the hump. Understand me? You're getting well!" Director Ahlgren was weeping quietly, as if from weakness and exhaustion. He sat down on the edge of the treatment table and the doctors gathered around him and began to fit the attachments of the table to him. He helped them; he was familiar with the process. "I think this'll be the last, Jim. We're going to de-Condition you this time. Then one more subconscious therapy -- " The doctor's voice came through speakers... into the next room, where Perkins, Lazar, and Doctor Schmidt watched and listened. Lazar stared through the oneway glass, gripped by vast elation. The director's chair was his! The girl in the Treatment Room had thrown her arms about Ahlgren; perhaps she regretted that she had been used against him. She should be grateful. It was not often that a mere citizen had such a chance to help the Party. Doctor Schmidt was saying something to Lazar. "What?" "I said, would you tell me what you thought of the material the former director read aloud just now?" Lazar frowned. Why, it had been something -- unpleasant. He turned to Perkins, giving up the problem with relief to his superior. "What he read was a lot of subversive nonsense," Perkins rumbled, after a thoughtful pause. "It amounted to a confession of guilt." "I see," said Doctor Schmidt. He looked a little sad. "Thank you, gentlemen. Shall we go?" Perkins was staring with bright and hungry eyes at the motionless form of former Director Ahlgren on the table. "Too bad we have to inflict such pain," he said. sleep, and the first thing he did was to reach out and find her hand. He looked up at her face. He remembered now -- she d said she'd wait... five years before. "Was it your idea," he asked, "to help last night yourself?" "No, the doctors suggested it. darling.They thought you were approaching a crisis... but it's all right now." "Then stop crying," he told her. "Every time I look at you, you're crying. Think I want to watch you cry all the time?" But she was half laughing, too, so it really was all right. He lay in peace. Mountains had been lifted off him. H IS mother was bending over him anxiously. He saw there was morning light coming into a hospital room. "Son, are you all right?" "I'm fine. Mother. No, no pain." Barbara was still there, looking happy. His father came in, a little older and grayer than he remembered, shaking his head in the familiar way at his mother's ignorant worry about the supposed pain of Conditioning. "It was on the Party news just now," his father said, grinning. "You were denounced for traitorous activity yesterday and purged last night. The usual appeal -- for the citizenry to treat you kindly and not blame your new personality for your acts of treason... I think we can manage that somehow." Jim Ahlgren looked around at the three of them. He said softly: "I've been gone a long time." Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below.  # or #c each  Name Address City Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foreign Postage State It could be deadly. It had to be tested. But Sales wanted a new product this very minute. A mos parry, a regional manager for Whelan, Inc. (Farm #s Ranch Chemicals #s Feeds), had come to work a few minutes early and was waiting in the lab when Frank Barnes arrived. He saw that the division's chief chemist was even more nervous than usual, so he invested a few minutes in soothing small talk before saying, "Frank, Sales is beginning to push for that new hormone." Immediately, Barnes came xmsoothed. "Bill Detrick was on the phone about it yesterday, Mr. Parry. Fm sorry I was abrupt with him." Amos grinned. "If you were, he hasn't had a chance to menHI Cd d a Q tion it to me yet. But I think we'd better light a fire under the thing. We'll probably get a blast from Buffalo before long. How many men do you have on it?" "Well, two helping with routine work, but I've done most of it myself, evenings and weekends. I didn't want anybody to know too much about it. Mr. Parry, I'm worried about it." 'Worried? How do you mean?" 'Well -- let me show you the litter we've been testing it on." The pigs were in pens outside the lab. Amos had seen figures on weight gain and general health (the latter was what promised to be sensational) but hadn't seen the animals for two weeks. He eyed the first bunch. "How old is that boar pig?" "Not quite four months." Amos was no expert, but he'd spent many hours on customers' farms and he thought the animal looked more mature than that. So did the shoats in the same pen, though they tended more to fat. All of the group had an odd look, certainly not normal for Yorkshires of their age. He thought of wild hogs. "Is it just the general health factor?" he asked. "I don't think so, Mr. Parry. You remember I told you this wasn't actually a hormone." "I know. You wanted to call it that for secrecy, you told me." "Yes, sir, but I didn't tell you what it really was. Mr. Parry, are you familiar with hypnotics? Mescaline, especially?" "No, I'm not, Frank." "Well, it's a drug that causes strong hallucinations. This is a chemical derivative of it." Amos grinned again. "Pipe dreams for hogs?" He quit grinning as implications struck him. If this thing didn't pan out, after the money they'd spent and the rumors that had seeped out, there'd be some nasty questions from Buffalo. And if it did, and they began selling it... "What would it do to human beings?" asked Amos. Barnes avoided his eyes. "That's one of the things I'm worried about," he said. "I want to show you another pig." This one was isolated in its own pen, and it looked even stranger than its siblings. In the first place, its hair was thicker, and black. There was an oddness in its shape and a vaguely familiar sinuousness in the way it moved that made Amos skin prickle. "What's wrong with it?" he asked. "It's healthy except for the way it looks and acts." "Same litter and dosage?" "Yes, sir -- all of them got just one dose. The effects seem to be permanent." They were leaning over the fence and the animal was looking up at them. There was an oddity in its eyes; not intelligence exactly, but something unpiglike. Abruptly, it stood up on its hind legs, putting its forefeet against the fence and raising its head toward them. It squealed as if begging for attention. Amos knew that pigs made affectionate pets. Drawn to it as well as repelled, he reached down and patted it, and the squealing stopped. It was standing too easily in that position, and suddenly Amos recognized what was familiar about it. He jerked his hand away, feeling a strong desire for soap and water. "How long's it been this way?" "It's changed fast in the last week." Amos looked toward the doorway of the lab, just inside of which a large black tomcat sat watching them. "Is the cat out here a lot?" Barnes' eyes went to the cat, widened, and turned back to the pig. He looked as ill as Amos felt. his sales manager was already waiting. His mind only half present, Amos sized up the stuffed briefcase and the wider-thannecessary smile as he responded automatically to the amenities. "Just get back?" he asked. "Early train. Darned planes grounded again." Detrick looked full of energy, though he'd undoubtedly rushed home, shaved, showered and changed, and hurried to the office with no rest. He sat down, extracted papers from the briefcase, and beamed, "Wrote up the Peach Association." He'll give me the good news first, Amos thought. "Fine, fine," he said. "The whole year?" "Yep. Got a check from the Almond Growers, too. All paid up now." "Good," said Amos, and waited. It came. "Say, I was talking to Frank Barnes about that new hormone he's got and he seemed a little negative about it. When do you think we can have it?" It was a temptation to answer with false optimisms and duck the issue for a while, but Amos said, "The slowest thing will be State and Federal testing and registration. I'd say not less than a year." Detrick nodded. "Competition's selling more and more stuff that's not registered." "Fly-by-night , outfits and they're always getting caught." Detrick smiled. "Every night they fly away with more business." Amos managed a smile. though the argument was old and weary. "We'll put it up to Buffalo if you want to, Bill. You know I can't okay it myself." Detrick dropped the subject, not being a man to beat his head against a stone wall if there were ways around it, and for the next hour Amos had to listen to the troubles; competition had cut prices on this, upped active ingredients in that, put such and such a new product on the market (Whelan's factories and warehouses already groaned under a crippling diversity of products but Sales didn't feel that was their problem) and even the credit policies needed revising. But the worst of all was a fifteen-thousand-dollar claim for damage to pear trees, caused by a bad batch of Whelan's arsenical insecticide. Amos got rid of Detrick with a few definite concessions, some tentative ones, and some standoffs. He made sure no one was waiting to see him and told his secretary he didn't want to be bothered before lunch. He had a lunch date with a customer and dreaded it -- it meant three or four highballs and overeating and an upset stomach later. Before then, though, he had a few minutes to try to get his mind straightened out. He mixed a glassful of the stuff he was supposed to take about now. The Compleat Executive, he thought; with physician and prescription attached. It didn't seem possible that this same body had once breezed through anything from football to fried potatoes. Mechanically, his mind on the lab's pigs, he got a small bag of grainout of a desk drawer. He hoped nobody (except his secretary, of course ) knew he wasted time feeding pigeons, but it helped his nerves, and he felt he had a right to one or two eccentricities. They were already waiting. Some of them knew him and didn't shoo off when he opened the window and scattered grain on the ledge outside. A few ate from his hand. It was a crisp day, but the sun slanting into the window was warm. He leaned there, watching the birds -- more were circling in now -- and looking out over the industrial part of the city. The rude shapes were softened by haze and there was nothing noisy close by. He could almost imagine it as some country landscape. He looked at his watch, sighed, pulled his head in and shut the window. The air conditioner's hiss replaced the outside sounds. Not even imagination could get rid of the city for long. TH E D R U G '-he saw that Alice Grant, his secretary, already had her lunch out on her desk. She was a young thirty, not very tall and just inclined to plumpness. She wore her blonde hair pulled back into a knot that didn't succeed in making her look severe, and her features were well-formed and regular, if plain. Amos noticed a new bruise on one cheek and wondered how long she'd stay with her sot of a husband. There were no children to hold her. "I'll probably be back late," he said. "Anything for this afternoon?" "Just Jim at two-thirty and the union agent at three." The lunch didn't go too badly, lubricated as the customer liked it, and Amos was feeling only hazily uneasy when he got back. A stormy session with his plant superintendent jarred him into the normal disquiet. Jim Glover was furious at having to take the fifteen-thousand-dollar claim, though it was clearly a factory error. He also fought a stubborn delaying action before giving Amos a well-hedged estimate of fifty thousand to equip for the new drug. He complained that Frank Barnes hadn't given him enough information. Amos was still trembling from that encounter when the union business agent arrived. The lunch was beginning to lump up and he didn't spar effectively. Not that it made much difference. The union was going to have a raise or else. By the time he d squirmed through that interview, then dictated a few letters, it was time to go home. He hoped his wife would be out so he could take some of his prescription and relax, but she met him at the door with a verbal barrage. Their son, nominally a resident of the house, had gotten ticketed with the college crowd for drunken driving and Amos was to get it fixed; the Templetons were coming for the weekend; her brother's boy was graduating and thought he might accept a position with Amos. She paused and studied him. "I hope this isn't one of your grumpy evenings. The Ashtons are coming for bridge." His control slipped a little and he expressed himself pungently on Wednesday night bridge, after a nightclub party on Tuesday and a formless affair at somebody's house on Monday. She stared at him without compassion or comprehension. "Well, they're all business associates of yours. I wonder where you think you'd be without a tain." He'd been getting a lot of that lately; she was squeezing the role of Executive's Wife for the last drop of satisfactioa Well, since he couldn't relax with his indigestion there was only one thing to do. He headed for the bar. "Now don't get tipsy before dinner," she called after him. He got through the evening well enough, doused with martinis, and the night that followed was no worse than most. A t nine the next morning, the call he'd been expecting from Buffalo came through. "Hello, Stu," he said to the president of the company. "Hello, Amos. Still morning out there, eh? How's the family? Good. Say, Amos; couple of things. This big factory charge. Production's screaming." "It was definitely a bad batch, Stu." "Well, that's it, then. Question is, how'd it happen?" "Jim Glover says he needs another control chemist." "Hope you're not practicing false economy out there." "We wanted to hire another man, Stu, but Buffalo turned it down." "You should have brought it to me personally if it was that important. It's going to take a big bite out of your year's profit Been able to get your margin up any?" no Amos didn't feel up to pointing out that Sales wanted lower prices and the union wanted higher wages, so that the margin would get even worse. He described a couple of minor economies he'd been able to find, then mentioned the contract with the Peach Association. "Yes, I heard about that," said the president of the company. "Nice piece of business. By the way, how you coming on that animal hormone?" That was the main reason for the call, of course. Detrick had undoubtedly phoned east and intimated that Amos was dragging his feet on a potential bonanza. T was going to call you on that, Stu. It'll take a year to test and get registered and -- " "Amos, I hope you're not turning conservative on us." The message was plain; Amos countered automatically. "You know me better than that, Stu. It's the Legal Department I'm worried about. If they set up a lot of roadblocks, we may need you to run interference." "You know I'm always right behind you, Amos." That's true, thought Amos as he hung up. Right behind me. A hell of a place to run interference. He knew exactly what to expect. If he tried to cut corners, the Legal Department would scream about proper testing and registration. Production would say he was pushing Jim Glover unreasonably, and everyone who could would assume highly moral positions astraddle the fence. A ton of paperwork would go to Buffalo to be distributed among fifty desks and expertly stalled. Not to mention that this was no ordinary product. He realized for the first time that the Government might not let him produce it, let alone sell it. Even as a minute percentage in feeds. If it was a narcotic, it could be misused. was surprised when Mrs. Grant announced Frank Barnes. It was out of character for Frank not to make a formal appointment first. One look told Amos what was coming. He listened to Frank's resignation with a fraction of his mind while the rest of it mused upon the purposeful way things were converging. Barnes stopped talking and Amos said mechanically, "You've been part of the team for a long time, Frank. It's especially awkward to lose you just now." It was banal, but it didn't matter; he wasn't going to change the man's mind anjrway. He looked closer. The timidity was gone. So were the eyeglasses. A frightening thought struck him. "You've taken some of that drug." Barnes grinned and handed a small vial full of powder across the desk, along with a file folder. "Last night," he said. "Between frustration with the job and curiosity about this stuff, I yielded to temptation." Amos took the vial and folder. "What are these for?" "So you can destroy them if you want to. I've doctored up the lab records to make the whole thing look like a false alarm. You're holding all that's left of the whole program." Amos looked for signs of irrationality and saw none. "Do you feel all right?" "Better than you can imagine. But let me tell you what you're up against. I can at least do that for you, Mr. Parry." "Thanks. Don't you suppose you could call me Amos now?" "Sure, Amos. First of all, you were right about that pig trying to imitate the cat. He couldn't do much because he only had a pig's brain to work with." He stopped and grinned, evidently at Amos' expression. "I'll try to explain. What is an animal? Physically, I mean?" Amos shook his head. "You've got the floor." "All right. An animal is a colony of cells. Different kinds of cells form organs and do different things for the colony, but each cell has a life of its own, too. When it dies a new one of the same kind takes over. But what regulates the colony? What maintains the pattern?" Amos waited. "Part of it's automatic replacement, cell for cell. But beyond that there's a control; and it's the unconscious mind." He paused and studied Amos. "You think I'm theorizing. I'm not. That drug broke down some barriers, and I see all this as you see your own fingers moving." Amos remembered the mention of hallucinations. say it's only one per cent awake and walled off from the conscious mind. What would happen if something removed the wall and woke up the other ninety-nine per cent?" Remembering the pig, it was impossible not to feel a cold seed of belief. Amos dreaded what was coming next; clearly, it would be a demonstration. Barnes held out his hand, palm up. In a few seconds a pink spot appeared. It turned red, oozed dismayingly, and became a small pool of blood. Barnes let it stay for a moment, then wiped it off with a handkerchief. There was no more bleeding. "That's something I can do fast," he said. "I opened the pores, directed blood to them, then closed them again. Amos, do you believe in werewolves?" Amos wanted to jump up and shout, "No! You're insane!" but he could only sit staring. "I could move that thumb around to the other side of my hand," Barnes said thoughtfully. "I'm still exploring, but I don't think even the bone would take too long. You'll notice I don't need glasses any more." The buzzer buzzed. Amos jumped, and from habit answered. "Bill Detrick and that customer are here, Mr. Parry," came Alice Grant's voice. "I -- ask them to wait," he managed. His mind was a muddle; he needed time. 'Y'ou -- Frank -- will you stay for a few days?" "Sure. I'm in no hurry now. And while you're thinking, let me give you a few hints. No more cripples or disease. No ugly people, unless they choose to be. And no law." "No -- law?" "How would you police such a world? A man could change his face at will, or his fingerprints. Even his teeth. Probably he could do things I can't imagine yet." The buzzer went again, with Mrs. Grant's subtle urgency. Amos ignored it, yet he hardly knew when Frank left the room. He realized the chemist had done him a favor. The selfish thing would have been to keep the secret and the boon all to himself; instead, he'd given Amos the choice. But what was the choice? Suppressing the drug would cost him his job. There was no doubt about that. He was standing with his back to the door when he heard it open. He turned and faced Detrick's annoyed frown. "Amos, we can't keep this man waiting. He's -- " All of Amos' frustration and the new burden coalesced into rage. He ran toward Detrick. "You baboon-faced huckster!" he yelled. "Get out! Get out! I'll tell you when you can come in here!" He barely caught his upraised fist in time. Detrick stood petrified, his face ludicrous. Then he came to life, ducked out, and pulled the door shut behind him. Amos waited no longer; if he had to decide, he wanted the data first-hand. He spread out the file Barnes had left him and looked through it for dosages. Apparently it wasn't critical, so he poured a little of the powder into a tumbler, added water and threw it down. There was a mild alkaline taste, which he washed out of his mouth with more water. Then he sat down to wait. rattling off trivia; almost faster than he could grasp it, even though it was in his head and not in his ears ; ' Paris greencalcium acetoarsenitebeetle invasion Texan cottonpaint pigmentobsoleteshould eliminatecompensation claimman probably faking infectionDetrick likes because we only sourcefelt like hitting him when we argued about itcorrespondence Buffalo last yearthey say keep check how use as poisondamned wife -- " The last thought shocked his intellect awake. "Hey!" Intellect demanded. "What's going on here?" "Oh; you've broken through," said Unconscious. "That was fast. Fifteen minutes and twentythree seconds since you drank it. Probable error, one-third second. I've only been awake a few minutes myself. Minute sixty per hour twenty-four hours day days getting shorter September have raincoat in car wife wants new car raincoat sweats plasticizer stinksHyatt used camphor -- " "Hold up a minute!" cried Intellect. "You want me to stop scanning?" "Is that what you're doing? Scanning what?" "Memory banks, of course. Don't you remember the book we read three years ago? Human brain estimated -- ' Oh, all right; I'll slow down. You could follow me better if you'd let me grow some permanent direct connections." "Am I stopping you?" "Well, not you, exactly. I'll show you." Unconsicous began directing the growth of certain nerve tendrils in the brain. Amos could only follow it vaguely. "Fear!" screamed a soimdless voice. "Stop!" "What was that?" Intellect asked, startled. "That was Id. He always fights any improvements, and I can't override him." "Can #?" "Of course; that's mainly what you're for. Wait till I get these connections finished and you #I see the whole setup." It was strange being integrated; Amos found he was aware on two levels simultaneously. While he responded normally to his external environment, a lightning inner vision saw everything in vastly greater detail. The blink of an eye, for instance, was an amazing project. Even as commands flashed out and before the muscles started to respond. extra blood was rushing into the area to nourish the working parts. Reports flowed back like battle assessments: these three muscles were on schedule; this was lagging; that was pulling too hard. An infinitesimal twinge of pain marked some minor accident, and correction began at once. A censor watched the whole operation and labeled each incoming report: trivial, do not record; trivial, do not record; trivial, do not record; worth watching, record in temporary banks; trivial, do not... He felt now that he could look forward to permanent health, and so far he didn't seem to be losing his identity or becoming a moral monster (though certain previously buried urges -- toward Alice Grant, for instance -- were now rather embarrassingly uncovered). He was not, like Frank Barnes, inclined to slip out of the situation at once. He still felt the responsibility to make the decision. He carried the vial of powder and the lab records home with him, smuggled them past his wife's garrulity (it didn't bother him now) and hid them. He went out with her cheerfully to visit some people he didn't like, and found himself amused at them instead of annoyed. In general, he felt buoyant, and they stayed quite late. " urgent message was waiting on the telephone recorder, and it jolted him. He grabbed up the hat and coat he'd just laid down. "What is it?" his wife demanded. "I've got to go down to the plant." He hesitated; it was hard to say the words that were charged with personal significance. "The watchman found Frank Barnes dead in the laboratory." "Who?" "Frank Barnes! My chief chemist!" "Oh." She looked at him, obviously concerned only with what effect, if any, it might have on her own circumstances. "Why do you have to get mixed up in it?" "I'm the boss, damn it!" He left her standing there and ran for the garage. The police were already at the plant when he arrived. Fred's body lay on the floor of his office, in a corner behind some file cabinets, face up. "What was it?" Amos asked the man from the coroner's office, dreading the answer he expected. The answer wasn't the one he expected. "Heart attack." Amos wondered if they were mistaken. He looked around the office. Things weren't disarrayed in any way; it looked as if Frank had simply lain down and died. "When did you find him?" he asked the watchman. "A little after one. The door was closed and the lights were out, but I heard the cat yowling in here, so I came in to let it out, and saw the body." "Any family?" one of the city men asked. "No," said Amos slowly, "he lived alone. I guess you might as well take him to the... morgue. When can I call about the autopsy?" "Try after lunch." Amos watched them carry Frank away. Then he put out the lights and closed up the laboratory. He told the watchman he'd be around for a while, and went to his office to think. As nearly as he knew, Frank had taken the drug less than twenty-four hours before he had. Death had come late at night, which meant Frank had been working overtime. Why? And why hadn't he been able to save himself? "Not logical," his unconscious stated firmly. "He should have felt it coming and made repairs." "This whole thing's a delusion," said Amos dully, aloud. "No, it isn't," said a peculiar voice behind him. He whirled and saw the black tomcat grinning up at him. He gasped, wondering if he were completely insane, but in a flash understanding came. "Frank!" "Well, don't act so surprised. I can tell that you took some yourself." "Yes -- but how -- " "I thought it would be an easy life and I want to stay around here and watch things for a while. There ought to be fun." "But how?" "I anesthetized the cat and grew a bridge into his skull. It took five hours to transfer the bulk of my personality. It's odd, but it blended right in with his." "But -- your speech!" "I've made some changes. I'm omnivorous now, too, not just carnivorous -- or will be in a few more hours. I can go into the hills and live on grass, or grow back into a man, or whatever I like." Amos consulted his own inwardness again. "Is this possible? Can a human mind be compressed into a cat's brain?" "Sure," said Unconscious, "if excess." He thought about it. "So you're going to stay around and watch," he said to the cat -- no, Frank. "An intriguing idea. My family's taken care of, and nobody'll really miss me." "Except Alice Grant," said Frank cattily. "I've seen the way F you look at her. 'i'he cat part of me has, I mean. And she looks back, too, when you aren't watching." "Well," said Amos. "Hm. Maybe we can do something there too." a lot longer than five hours; he had a much bigger job of alterations to finish. It was nearly two months before he got back to the plant. He peered in through the window at Detrick, who'd inherited Amos' old office. Detrick was chewing out a salesman. Amos knew what would be happening now; Detrick's ambitious but unsound expansion would have gotten the division all tangled up. In fact, with his sharp new eyes, Amos could read part of a letter from Buffalo that lay on the desk. It was quite critical of Detrick's margin of profit. The salesman Detrick had on the carpet was a good man, and Amos wondered if he was to blame for whatever it was about. Maybe Detrick was just preparing to throw him to the wolves. A man could hang on a long time like that, shifting the blame to his subordinates. The salesman was finally excused, and Detrick sat alone with all the frustration and selfish scheming plain on his face. No, Amos thought, I'm not going to turn this drug loose on the world for a while. Not while there are people like Detrick around. There were no other pigeons on the window ledge except himself and Alice; the rest had stopped coming when Amos disappeared and the feeding ended. For that matter, they tended to avoid him and Alice, possibly because of the abnormal size, especially around the head, and the other differences. He noticed that Alice was changing the color of her feet again. Just like a woman, he thought fondly. "Come on. Pigeon," he said, "let's go somewhere else. This tightwad Detrick isn't going to give us anjrthing to eat." F rom the arboretum at the far end of the patio to the landing stage of the transporter itself, the whole household was at sixes and sevens over the business of preparing the party for the celebration. As usual, Carter was having to oversee everything himself, otherwise it would not have gone right; and this was all the harder in that, of late, his enthusiasms seemed to have run down somewhat. He was conscious of a vague distaste for life as he found it, and all its parts. He would be forty-seven this fall. Could it be the imminent approach of middle age, seeking him out even in the quiet backwater of this small, suburban planet? Whatever it was, things were moving even more slowly than usual this year. He had not even had time to get into his costume of a full dress suit (#th-#th cent.), with tails, which he had chosen as not too dramatic, and yet kinder than most dress-ups to his tall, rather awkward figure -- when the chime sounded, announcing the first arrival. Dropping the suit on his bed, he went out, cutting across the patio toward the gathering room, where the landing stage of the transporter was -- and almost ran headlong into one of the original native inhabitants of the He'd planned Happy Escape Day's celebration with such care. Lucky there was no lawyer -- doctor and native chief made trouble enough. planet, standing like a lean and bluish post with absolute rigidity in the center of the pretty little flagstone path. "What are you doing here?" cried Carter. The narrow, indigo, horselike face leaned confidentially down , toward Carter's own. And then Carter recognized the great mass j' of apple blossoms, like a swarmi ing of creamy-winged moths, held to the inky chest. "Oh -- " began Carter, on a  note of fury. Then he threw up his hands and took the mass of ' branches. Peering around the immovable alien and wincing, he got a glimpse of his imported apple tree. But it was not as badly violated as he had feared. "Thank you. Thank you," he said, and waved the native out of the way. Carter stared -- then saw that in addition to the apple blossoms the thin and hairless creature, though no more dressed than his kind ever were, had in this instance contrived belts, garlands, and bracelets of native flowers for himself. The colors and patterns would be arranged to convey some special meaning -- they always did. But right at the moment Carter was too annoyed and entirely too rushed to figure them out, though he did think it a little unusual the native should be holding a slim shaft of dark wood with a firehardened point. Hunting was most expressly forbidden to the natives. "Now what?" said Carter. The native (a local chief, Carter suddenly recognized) lifted the spear and unexpectedly made several slow, stately hops, with his long legs flicking up and down above the scrubbed white of the flagstones -- like an Earthly crane at its mating. "Oh, now, don't tell me you want to dance!" The native chief ceased his movements and went back to being a post again, staring out over Carter's head as if at some horizon, lost and invisible beyond the iridescences of Carter's dwelling walls. Carter groaned, pondered, and glanced anxiously ahead toward the gathering room, from which he could now hear the voice of Ona, already greeting the first guest with female twitters. "All right," he told the chief. "All right -- this once. But only because it's Escape Day Anniversary. And you'll have to wait until after dinner." The native stepped aside and became rigid again. Carter hurried past into the gathering room, clutching the apple blossoms. His wife was talking to a short, brown-bearded man with an ivory-tinted guitar hanging by a broad, tan band over one red-and-white, checked-shirted shoulder. "Ramy!" called Carter, hurrying up to them. The landing stage of the transporter, standing in the middle of the room, chimed again. "Oh, take these will you, dear?" He thrust the apple blossoms into Ona's plump, bare arms. "The chief. In honor of the day. You know how they are -- and I had to promise he could dance after dinner." She stared, her soft, pale face upturned to him. "I couldn't help it." He turned and hurried to the landing stage, from the small round platform of which were now stepping down a short, academic, elderly man with wispy gray hair and a rather fat, button-nosed woman of the same age, both wearing the ancient Ionian chiton as their costume. Carter had warned Ona against wearing a chiton, for the very reason that these two might show up in the same dress. He allowed himself a small twinge of satisfaction at the thought of her ballroom gown as he went hastily now to greet them. "Doctor!" he said. "Lidi! Here you are!" He shook hands with the doctor. "Happy Escape Day to both of you." "I was sure we'd be late," said Lidi, holding firmly to the folds of her chiton with both hands. "The public terminal on Arcturus Five was so crowded. And the doctor won't hurry no matter what I say -- " She looked over at her husband, but he, busy greeting Ona, ignored her. and two women, quite obviously sisters in spite of the fact that they were wearing dissimilar costumes, appeared on the platform. One was dressed in a perfectly ordinary everyday kilt and tunic -- no costume at all. The other wore a close, unidentifiable sort of suit of some gray material and made straight for Carter. "Cart!" she cried, taking one of his hands in both of her own and pumping it heartily. "Happy Escape Day." She beamed at him from a somewhat plain, strong-featured face, sharply made up. "Ani and I -- " She looked around for her sister and saw the kilt and tunic already drifting in rather dreamlike and unconscious fashion toward the perambulating bar at the far end of the room. "I," she corrected herself hastily, "couldn't wait to get here. Who else is coming?" "Just what you see, Totsa," said Carter, indicating those present with a wide-flung hand. "We thought a small party this year -- a little, quiet gathering -- " "So nice! And what do you think of my costume?" She revolved slowly for his appraisal. "Why -- good, very good." "Now!" Totsa came back to face him. "You can't guess what it is at all." "Of course I can," said Carter heartily. "Well, then, what is it?" "Oh, well, perhaps I won't tell you, then," said Carter. A small head with wispy gray hair intruded into the circle of their conversation. "An artistic rendering of the space suitings worn by those two intrepid pioneers who this day, four hundred and twenty years ago, burst free in their tiny ship from the iron grip of Earth's prisoning gravitation?" Totsa shouted in triumph. "I knew you'd know, Doctor! Trust a philosophical researcher to catch on. Carter hadn't the slightest notion. Not an inkling!" "A host is a host is a host," said Carter. "Excuse me. I've got to get into my own costume." He went out again and back across the patio. The outer air felt pleasantly cool on his warm face. He hoped that the implications of his last remark -- that he had merely been being polite in pretending to be baffled by the significance of her costume -- had got across to Totsa, but probably it had not. She would interpret it as an attempt to cover up his failure to recognize her costume by being cryptic. The rapier was wasted on the thick hide of such a woman. And to think he once... you had to use a club. And the worst of it was, he had grasped the meaning of her costume immediately. He had merely been being playful in refusing to admit it... The native chief was still standing unmoved where Carter had left him, still waiting for his moment. "Get out of the way, can't you?" said Carter irritably, as he shouldered by. The chief retreated one long ostrichlike step until he stood half-obscured in the shadow of a trellis of roses. Carter went on into the bedroom. and he climbed into the clumsy garments, his mind busy on the schedule of the evening ahead. The local star that served as this planet's sun (one of the Pleiades, Asterope) would be down in an hour and a half, but the luminosity of the interstellar space in this galactic region made the sky bright for hours after a setting, and the fireworks could not possibly go on until that died down. Carter had designed the set piece for the finale himself -- a vintage space rocket curving up from a representation of the Earth, into a firmament of stars, and changing into a star itself as it dwindled. It would be unthinkable to waste this against a broad band of glowing rarefied matter just above the western horizon. Accordingly, there was really no choice about the schedule. At least five hours before the thought of fireworks could be entertained. Carter, hooking his tie into place around his neck before a section of his bedroom wall set on reflection, computed in his head. The cocktail session now starting would be good for two and a half, possibly three hours. He dared not stretch it out any longer than that or Ani would be sure to get drunk. As it was, it would be bad enough with a full cocktail session and wine with the dinner. But perhaps Totsa could keep her under control. At any rate -- three, and an hour and a half for dinner. No matter how it was figured, there would be half an hour or more to fill in there. Well -- Carter worked his way into his dress coat -- he could make his usual small speech in honor of the occasion. And -- oh, yes, of course -- there was the chief. The native dances were actually meaningless, boring things, though Carter had been quite interested in them at first, but then his was the inquiring type of mind. Still, the others might find it funny enough, or interesting for a single performance. Buttoning up his coat, he went back out across the patio, feeling more kindly toward the native than he had since the moment of his first appearance. Passing him this time. Carter thought to stop and ask, "Would you like something to eat?" Remote, shiny, mottled by the shadow of the rose leaves, the native neither moved nor answered, and Carter hurried on with a distinct feeling of relief. He had always made it a point to keep some native food on hand for just such an emergency as this -- after all, they got hungry, too. But it was a definite godsend not to have to stop now, when he was so busy, and see the stuff properly prepared and provided for this uninvited and unexpected guest. out of the gathering room by the time he reached it and into the main lounge with its more complete bar and mobile chairs. On entering, he saw that they had already split up into three different and, in a way, inevitable groups. His wife and the doctor's were at gossip in a corner; Ramy was playing his guitar and singing in a low, not unpleasant, though hoarse voice to Ani, who sat drink in hand, gazing past him with a half-smile into the changing colors of the wall behind him. Totsa and the doctor were in a discussion at the bar. Carter joined them. " -- and I'm quite prepared to believe it," the doctor was saying in his gentle, precise tones as Carter came up. "Well, very good. Cart." He nodded at Carter's costume. "You think so?" said Carter, feeling his face warm pleasantly. "Awkward get-up, but -- I don't know, it just struck me this year." He punched for a lime brandy and watched with pleasure as the bar disgorged the brimming glass by his waiting hand. "You look armored in it. Cart," Totsa said. "Thrice-armed is he -- " Carter acknowledged the compliment and sipped on his glass. He glanced at the doctor to see if the quotation had registered, but the doctor was already leaning over to receive a refill in his own glass. "Have you any idea what this man's been telling me?" demanded Totsa, swiveling toward Carter. "He insists we're doomed. Literally doomed!" "I've no doubt we are -- " began Carter. But before he could expand on this agreement with the explanation that he meant it in the larger sense, she wa foaming over him in a tidal wave of conversation. "Well, I don't pretend to be unobjective about it. After all, who are we to survive? But really -- how ridiculous! And you back him up just like that, blindly, without the slightest notion of what he's been talking about!" "A theory only, Totsa," said the doctor, quite unruffled. "I wouldn't honor ft by even calling it a theory!" "Perhaps," said Carter, sipping on his lime brandy, "if I knew a little more about what you two were -- " "The point," said the doctor, turning a little, politely, toward Carter, "has to do with the question of why, on all these worlds we've take over, we've found no other race comparable to our own. We may," he smiled, "of course be unique in the universe. But this theory supposes that any contact between races of differing intelligences must inevitably result in the death of the inferior race. Consequently, if we met our superiors -- " He gave a graceful wave of his hand. "I imagine it could," said Carter. "Ridiculous!" said Totsa. "As if we couldn't just avoid contact altogether if we wanted to!" "That's a point," said Carter. "I imagine negotiations -- " "We," said Totsa, "who burst the bonds of our Earthly home, who have spread out among the stars in a scant four hundred years, are hardly the type to turn up our toes and just die!"-sumption. Cart" -- the doctor put his glass down on the bar and clasped his small hands before him -- "that the racial will to live is dependent upon what might be called a certain amount of emotional self-respect. A race of lesser intelligence or scientific ability could hardly be a threat to us. But a greater race, the theory goes, must inevitably generate a sort of death-wish in all of us. We're too used to being top dog. We must conquer or -- " "Absolutely nonsense!" said Totsa. "Well, now, you can't just condemn the idea offhand like that," Carter said. "Naturally, I can't imagine a human like myself ever giving up, either. We're too hard, too wolfish, too much the last-ditch fighters. But I imagine a theory like this might well hold true for other, lesser races." He cleared his throat. "For example.  V I've had quite a bit of contact I since we came here with the I natives which were the dominant I life-form on this world in its natural state -- " "Oh, natives!" snapped Totsa scornfully. "You might be surprised, Totsa!" said Carter, heating up a little. An inspiration took hold of him. "And, in fact, I've arranged for you to do just that. I've invited the local native chief to dance for us after dinner. You might just find it very illuminating." "Illuminating? How?" pounced Totsa. "That," said Carter, putting his glass down on the bar with a very slight flourish, "I'll leave you to find out for yourself. And now, if you don't mind, I'm going to have to make my hostly rounds of the other guests." He walked away, glowing with a different kind of inner warmth. He was smiling as he came up to Ramy, who was still singing ballads and playing his guitar for Totsa's sister. "Excellent," Carter said, clapping his hands briefly and sitting down with them as the song ended. "What was that?" "Richard the Lion-heart wrote ft," said Ramy hoarsely. He turned to the woman. "Another drink, Ani?" Carter tried to signal the balladeer with his eyes, but Ramy had already pressed the buttons on the table beside their chairs, and a little moto unit from the bar was already on its way to them with the drinks emerging from its interior. Carter sighed inaudibly and leaned back in his chair. He could warn Totsa to keep an eye on Ani a little later. He accepted another drink himself. The sound of voices in the room was rising as more alcohol was consumed. The only quiet one was Ani. She sat, engaged in the single-minded business of imbibing, and listened to the conversation between Ramy and himself, as if she was -- thought Carter suddenly -- perhaps one step removed, beyond some glasslike wall, where the real sound and movement of life came muted, if at all. The poetry of this flash of insight -- for Carter could think of no other way to describe it -- operated so strongly upon his emotions that he completely lost the thread of what Ramy was saying and was reduced to noncommittal noises by way of comment. I should take up my writing again, he thought to himself. opportunity presented itself, he excused himself and got up. He went over to the corner where the women were talking. " -- Earth," Lidi was saying, "the doctor and I will never forget it. Oh, Cart -- " She twisted around to him as he sat down in a chair opposite. "You must take this girl to Earth sometime. Really." "Do you think she's the t?ackto-nature type?" said Carter, with a smile. "No, stop it!" Lidi turned back to Ona. "Make him take you!" "I've mentioned it to him. Several times," said Ona, putting down the glass in her hand with a helpless gesture on the endtable beside her. "Well, you know what they say," smiled Carter. "Everyone talks about Earth but nobody ever goes there any more." "The doctor and I went. And it was memorable. It's not what you see, of course, but the insight you bring to it. I'm only five generations removed from people living right there on the North American continent. And the doctor had cousins in Turkey when he was a boy. Say what you like, the true stock thins out as generation succeeds generation away from the home world." "And it's not the expense any more," put in Ona. "Everyone's rich nowadays." "Rich! What an uncomfortable word!" said Lidi. "You should capable, dear. Remember, riches are merely the product of our science, which is the fruit of our own capabilities." "Oh, you know what I mean!" said Ona. "The point is. Cart won't go. He just won't." "I'm a simple man," Carter said. "I have my writing, my music, my horticulture, right here. I feel no urge to roam -- " he stood up -- "except to the kitchen right now, to check on the caterers. If you'll excuse me -- "But you haven't given your wife an answer about taking her to Earth one of these days!" cried Lidi. "Oh, we'll go, we'll go," said Carter, walking off with a goodhumored wave of his hand. As he walked through the west sunroom to the dining area and the kitchen (homey word!) beyond, his cheerfulness dwindled somewhat. It was always a ticklish job handling the caterers, now that they were all artists doing the work for the love of it and not to be controlled by the price they were paid. Carter would have liked to wash his hands of that end of the party altogether and just leave them to operate on their own. But what if he failed to check and then something went wrong? It i was his own artistic conscience operating, he thought, that would not give him any rest. ready set up in classic style with long table and individual chairs. He passed the gleam of its tableware and went on through the light-screen into the kitchen area. The master caterer was just in the process of directing his two apprentices to set up the heating tray on which the whole roast boar, papered and gilded, would be kept warm in the centerpiece position on the table during the meal. He did not see Carter enter; and Carter himself stopped to admire, with a sigh of relief, the boar itself. It was a master-work of the carver's art and had been built up so skillfully from its component chunks of meat that no one could have suspected it was not the actual animal itself. Looking up at this moment, the caterer caught sight of him and came over to see what he wanted. Carter advanced a few small, tentative suggestions, but the response was so artificially polite that after a short while Carter was glad to leave him to his work. Carter wandered back through the house without returning directly to the lounge. With the change of the mood that the encounter with the caterer had engendered, his earlier feelings of distaste with life -- a sort of melancholy -- had come over him. He thought of the people he had invited almost with disgust. Twenty years ago, he would not have thought himself capable of belonging to such a crowd. Where were the great friends, the true friends, that as a youngster he had intended to acquire? Not that it was the fault of those in the lounge. They could not help being what they were. It was the fault of the times, which made life too easy for everybody; and -- yes, he would be honest -- his own fault, too. His wanderings had brought him back to the patio. He remembered the chief and peered through the light dusk at the trellis under the light arch of which the native stood. Beyond, the house was between the semi-enclosed patio in the west. Deep shadow lay upon the trellis itself and the native under it. He was almost obscured by it, but a darkly pale, vertical line of reflection from his upright spear showed that he had made no move. A gush of emotion burst within Carter. He took a single step toward the chief, with the abrupt, spontaneous urge to thank him for coming and offering to dance. But at that moment, through the open doorway of his bedroom, sounded the small, metallic chimes of his bedside clock, announcing the twenty-first hour, and he turned hastily and crossed through the gathering room, into the lounge. "Hors-d'oeuvres! Hors-d'oeuvres!" he called cheerfully, flinging the lounge door wide. "Horsd'oeuvres, everybody! Time to come and get it!" D inner could not go off otherwise than well. Everyone was half-tight and hungry. Everyone was talkative. Even Ani had thrown off her habitual introversion and was smiling and nodding, quite soberly, anyone would swear. She was listening to Ona and Lidi talking about Lidi's grown-up son when he had been a baby. The doctor was in high spirits, and Ramy, having gotten his guitar-playing out of his system earlier with Ani, was ready to be companionable. By the time they had finished the rum-and-butter pie, everyone was in a good mood, and even the caterer, peering through a momentary transparency of the kitchen wall, exchanged a beam with Carter. Carter glanced at his watch. Only twenty minutes more! The time had happily flown, and, far from having to fill it in, he would have to cut his own speech a little short. If it were not for the fact that he had already announced it, he would have eliminated the chief's dance -- no, that would not have done, either. He had always made a point of getting along with the natives of this world. "It's their home, too, after all," he had always said. He tinkled on a wine glass with a spoon and rose to his feet. Faces turned toward him and conversation came to a reluctant halt around the table. He smiled at his assembled guests. "As you know," said Carter, "it has always been my custom at these little gatherings -- and old customs are the best -- to say a few -- " he held up a disarming hand -- "a very few words. Tonight I will be even briefer than usual." He stopped and took a sip of water from the glass before him. "On this present occasion, the quadricentennial of our great race's Escape into the limitless bounds of the universe, I am reminded of the far road we have come; and the far road -- undoubtedly -- we have yet to go. I am thinking at the moment," he smiled, to indicate that what he was about to say was merely said in good-fellowship, "of a new theory expressed by our good doctor here tonight. This theory postulates that when a lesser race meets a greater, the lesser must inevitably go to the wall. And that, since it is pretty generally accepted that the laws of chance ensure our race eventually meeting its superior, we must inevitably and eventually go to the wall." He paused and warmed them again with the tolerance of his smile. "May I say nonsense! "Now, let no one retort that I am merely taking refuge in the blind attitude that reacts with the cry, 'It can't happen to us.' Let me say I believe it could happen to us, but it won't. And why not? I will answer that with one word. Civilization. "These overmen -- if indeed they ever show up -- must, even as we, be civilized. Civilized. Think of what that word means! Look at the seven of us here. Are we not educated, kindly, sympathetic people? And how do we treat the races inferior to us that we have run across? "I'm going to let you answer these questions for yourselves, because I now invite you to the patio for cognac and coffee -- and to see one of the natives of this planet, who has expressed a desire to dance for you. Look at him as he dances, observe him, consider what human gentleness and consideration are involved in the gesture that includes him in this great festival of ours." Carter paused. "And consider one other great statement that has echoed down the corridors of time -- As ye have done to others, so shall ye be done by!" and glowing, to applause, then rose immediately to precede his guests, who were getting up to stream toward the patio. Walking rapidly, he outdistanced them as they passed the gathering room. For a second, as he burst out through the patio doorway, his eyes were befuddled by the sudden darkness. Then his vision cleared as the others came through the doorway behind him and he was able to make out the inky shadow of the chief, still barely visible under the trellis. Leaving Ona to superintend the seating arrangements in the central courtyard of the patio, he hurried toward the trellis. The native was there waiting for him. "Now," said Carter, a little breathlessly, "it must be a short dance, a very short dance." The chief lowered his long, narrow head, looking down at Carter with what seemed to be an aloofness, a sad dignity, and suddenly Carter felt uncomfortable. "Um -- well," he muttered.  "you don't have to cut it too ; short." Carter turned and went back to the guests. Under Ona's direction, they had seated themselves in a small semicircle of chairs, with snifter glasses and coffee cups. A chair had been left for Carter in the middle. He took it and accepted a glass of cognac from his wife. "Now?" asked Totsa, leaning toward him. "Yes -- yes, here he comes," said Carter, and directed their attention toward the trellis. The lights had been turned up around the edge of the courtyard, and as the chief advanced into them from the darkness, he seerqed to step all at once out of a wall of night. "My," said Lidi, a little behind and to the left of Carter, "isn't he big!" "Tall, rather," said the doctor, and coughed dryly at her side. The chief came on into the center of the lighted courtyard. He carried his spear upright in one hand before him, the arm half-bent at the elbow and halfextended, advancing with exaggeratedly long steps and on tiptoe -- in a manner unfortunately almost exactly reminiscent of the classical husband sneaking home late at night. There was a sudden titter from Totsa, behind Carter. Carter flushed. Arrived in the center of the patio before them, the chief halted, probed at the empty air with his spear in several directions, and began to shuffle about with his head bent toward the ground. Behind Carter, Ramy said something in a low voice. There was a strangled chuckle and the strings of the guitar plinked quietly on several idle notes. "Please," said Carter, without turning his head. There was a pause, some more indistinguishable murmuring from Ramy, followed again by his low, hoarse, and smothered chuckle. "Perhaps -- " said Carter, raising his voice slightly, "perhaps I ought to translate the dance as he does it. All these dances are stories acted out. This one is apparently called 'An Honorable Death.' " throat. No one said anything. Out in the center of the patio, the chief was standing crouched, peering to right and left, his neck craned like a chicken's. "You see him now on the trail," Carter went on. "The silvercolored flowers on his right arm denote the fact that it is a story of death that he is dancing. The fact that they are below the elbow indicates it is an honorable, rather than dishonorable, death. But the fact that he wears nothing at all on the other arm below the elbow tells us this is the full and only story of the dance." Carter found himself forced to clear his throat again. He took a sip from his snifter glass. "As I say," he continued, "we see him now on the trail, alone. The chief had now begun to take several cautious steps forward, and then alternate ones in retreat, with some evidence of tension and excitement. He is happy at the moment because he is on the track of a large herd of local game. Watch the slope of his spear as he holds it in his hand. The more it approaches the vertical, the happier he is feeling -- " Rami murmured again and his coarse chuckle rasped on Carters ears. It was echoed by a giggle from Totsa and even a small, dry bark of a laugh from the doctor. " -- the happier he is feeling," repeated Carter loudly. "Except that, paradoxically, the line of the absolute vertical represents the deepest tragedy and sorrow. In a little paper I did on the symbolism behind these dance movements, I advanced the theory that when a native strikes up with his spear from the absolute vertical position, it is because some carnivore too large for him to handle has already downed him. He's a dead man. The chief had gone into a flurry of movement. "Ah," said Carter, on a note of satisfaction. The others were quiet now. He let his voice roll out a little. "He has made his kill. He hastens home with it. He is very happy. W'hy shouldn t he be? He is successful, young, strong. His mate, his progeny, his home await him. Even now it comes into sight." The chief froze. His spear point dropped. "But what is this?" cried Carter, straightening up dramatically in his chair. "What has happened? He sees a stranger in the doorway. It is the Man of Seven Spears who -- this is a superstition, of course -- " Carter interrupted himself -- "who has, in addition to liis own spear, six other magic spears which will fly from him on command and kill anything that stands in his way. What is this unconquerable being doing inside the entrance of the chief's home without being invited?" The wooden spear point dropped abruptly, almost to the ground. "The Man of Seven Spears tells him," said Carter. "He, the Man of Seven Spears, has chosen to desire the flowers about our chief's house. Therefore he has galaxy it -- the mate and the little ones -- that their touch may be cleansed from flowers that are his. Everything is now his." liquid being poured filled in the second of Carter's pause. "Not too much -- " whispered someone. "What can our chief do?" said Carter sharply. The chief was standing rigid with his head bent forward and his forehead pressed against the perfectly vertical shaft of his spear, now held upright before him. "He is sick -- we would say he is weeping, in human terms. All that meant anything to him is now gone. He cannot even revenge himself on the Man of Seven Spears, whose magic weapons make him invincible." Carter, moved by the pathos in his own voice, felt his throat tighten on the last words. "Ona, dear, do you have an antacid tablet?" the doctor's wife whispered behind him. "He stands where he has stopped!" cried Carter fiercely. "He has no place else to go. The Man of Seven Spears ignores him, playing with the flowers. For eventually, without moving, without food or drink, he will collapse and die, as all of the Man of Seven Spears' enemies have died. For one, two, three days he stands there in his sorrow; and late on the third day the plan for revenge he has longed for comes to him. He cannot conquer his enemy -- but he can eternally shame him, so that the Man of Seven Spears, in his turn, will be forced to die. "He goes into the house." The chief was moving again. "The Man of Seven Spears sees him enter, but pays no attention to him, for he is beneath notice. And it's a good thing for our chief this is so -- or else the Man of Seven Spears would call upon all his magic weapons and kill him on the spot. But he is playing with his new flowers and pays no attention. "Carrying his single spear," went on Carter, "the chief goes in to the heart of his house. Each house has a heart, which is the most important place in it. For if the heart is destroyed, the house dies, and all within it. Having come to the heart of the house, which is before its hearth fire, the chief places his spear butt down on the ground and holds it upright in the position of greatest grief. He stands there pridefully. We can imagine the Man of Seven Spears, suddenly realizing the shame to be put upon him, rushing wildly to interfere. But he and all of his seven spears are too slow. The chief leaps into the air -- " Carter checked himself. The chief was still standing with his forehead pressed against the spear shaft. "He leaps into the air," repeated Carter, a little louder. And at that moment the native did bound upward, his long legs flailing, to an astonishing  height. For a second he seemed to float above the tip of his spear, still grasping it -- and then he descended like some great, dark, stricken bird, heavily upon the patio. The thin shaft trembled and shook, upright, above his fallen figure. "and the whole company was f on their feet. But the chief, slowly rising, gravely removed ! the spear from between the arm and side in which he had cleverly caught it while falling; and, taking it in his other hand, he stalked off into the shadows toward the house. A babble of talk burst out behind Carter. Over all the other voices, Lidi's rose like a halfchoked fountain. " -- absolutely! Heart failure! I never was so upset in my life -- " "Cart!" said Ona bitterly. "Well, Cart," spoke Totsa triumphantly in his ear. "What's the application of all this to what you told me earlier?" I Carter, who had been sitting stunned, exploded roughly out of his chair. "Oh, don't be such a fool!" He jerked himself away from them into the tree-bound shadows beyond the patio. Behind him -- after some few minutes -- the voices lowered to a less excited level, and then he heard a woman's footsteps approaching him in the dark. "Cart?" said his wife's voice hesitantly. "What?" asked Carter, not moving. "Aren't you coming back?" "In a while." There was a pause. "Cart?" "What?" "Don't you think -- " "No, I don't think!" snarled Carter. "She can go to bloody hell!" "But you can't just call her a fool -- " "She is a fool! They're all fools -- every one of them! I'm a fool, too, but I'm not a stupid damn bloody fool like all of them!" "Just because of some silly native dance!" said Ona, almost crying. "Silly?" said Carter. "At least it's something. He's got a dance to do. That's more than the rest of them in there have. And it just so happens that dance is pretty important to him. You'd think they might like to learn something about that, instead of sitting back making their stupid jokes!" His little explosion went off into the darkness and fell unanswered. "Please come back. Cart," Ona said, after a long moment. "At least he has something," said Carter. "At least there's that for him." "I just can't face them if you don't come back." "All right, goddammit," said Carter. "I'll go back." to the patio. The chair tables had been cleared and rearranged in a small circle. Ramy was singing a song and they were all listening politely. "Well, Cart, sit down here!" invited the doctor heartily as Carter and Ona came up, indicating the chair between himself and Totsa. Carter dropped into it. "This is one of those old sea ballads. Cart," said Totsa. "Oh?" asked Carter, clearing his throat. "Is it?" He sat back, punched for a drink and listened to the song. It echoed out heartily over the patio with its refrain of "Haul away, Joe!" but he could not bring himself to like it. Ramy ended and began another song. Lidi, her old self again, excused herself a moment and trotted back into the house. "Are you really thinking of taking a trip Earthside -- " the doctor began, leaning confidentially toward Carter -- and was cut short by an ear-splitting scream from within the house. Ramy broke off his singing. The screams continued and all of them scrambled to their feet and went crowding toward the house. They saw Lidi -- just outside the dark entrance to the gathering room -- small, fat and stiffly standing, and screaming again and again, with her head thrown back. Almost at her feet lay the chief, with the slim shaft of the spear sticking up from his body. Only, this time, it was actually through him. The rest flooded around Lidi and she was led away, still screaming, by the doctor. Everyone else gathered in horrified fascination about the native corpse. The head was twisted on one side and Carter could just see one dead eye staring up, it seemed, at him alone, with a gleam of sly and savage triumph. "Horrible!" breathed Totsa, her lips parted. "Horrible!" But Carter was still staring at that dead eye. Possibly, the thought came to him, the horrendous happenings of the day had sandpapered his perceptions to an unusually suspicious awareness. But just possibly... Quietly, and without attracting undue attention from the others, he slipped past the group and into the dimness of the gathering room, where the lights had been turned off. Easing quietly along the wall until he came to the windows overlooking the patio, he peered out through them. A considerable number of the inky natives were emerging from the greenery of the garden and the orchard beyond and approaching the house. A long, slim, fire-hardened spear gleamed in the hand of each. It occurred to Carter like a blow that they had probably moved into position surrounding the house while the humans' attention was all focused on the dancing of their chief. His mind clicking at a rate that surprised even him. Carter withdrew noiselessly from the window and turned about. Behind him was the transporter, bulky in the dimness. As silently as the natives outside, he stole across the floor and mounted onto its platform. The transporter could move him to anywhere in the civilized area of the Galaxy at a second's notice. And one of the possible destinations was the emergency room of Police Headquarters on Earth itself. Return, with armed men. could be equally instantaneous. Much better this way, thought Carter with a clarity he had never in his life experienced before; much better than giving the alarm to the people within, who would undoubtedly panic and cause a confusion that could get them all killed. Quietly, operating by feel in the darkness. Carter set the controls for Police Headquarters. He pressed the Send button. Nothing happened. He stared at the machine in the impalpable darkness. A darker spot upon the thin laquered panel that covered its front and matched it to the room's decor caught his eye He bent down to investigate. It was a hole. Something like a ritual thrust of a fire-hardened wooden spear appeared to have gone through the panel and into the vitals of the transporter. The machine's delicate mechanism was shattered and broken and pierced.      April's a triple-treat month for us, with a line-up that includes Fritz Leiber, J. T. McIntosh and Theodore Sturgeon... not to mention half a dozen or so other top-ranking science-fiction writers who have given us stories with excitement and impact. (Sorry, but we can't tell you just now who the others are-depends on how the type sets, as alxvays.) The Leiber is a beautiful short job. Leiber says we don't have to go to the stars for aliens. He says the aliens are right here among us-licking their paws and living their secret lives-and he says it in Kreativify for Kafs. McIntosh's yarn is I Can Do Anything, and that's exactly what his hero can do. The trouble starts when he has to prove it... and does. Then we come to the Sturgeon -- Tandy's Story -- and the only thing that can be better than being able to tell you this one is coming up in April is to be able to tell you (which we can!) that this is only the first of many. You'll love Tandy, a perfectly charming little girl who loves to build doll-houses. But not for dolls. n li What else? Well, a great deal else (Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, Mack Reynolds, Jack Vance and just about everybody else is in inventory), but as mentioned we can't yet be sure just which. We're sure of Willy Ley, of course. And we're sure of the other regular features. And we're surest of all that April's a month you shouldn't miss! years apart, that delineate the role of the monastery in the slow climb back to comprehension of the sacred circuit diagrams and fragmentary mathematical texts. Practically all SF stories dealing with religious themes have been top-drawer, written with a careful eye toward perfection because of their controversial nature. Miller's belongs at the very top of the top. It has many passages of remarkable power and deserves the widest possible audience. Rating:  J. B. Lippincott Co., Phila., # material was an effective evocation of a post-nuclear world. Based on a seeming gag situation, a monastic order devoted to the blind salvaging of written knowledge by an obscure electronics technician, Isaac Leibowitz, the story far transcends the humor of incongruity. The expanded novel deals with three historical eras, spaced # by Stanton A. Coblentz. Avalon Books, N. Y., # since the early Thirties. Today's best compares favorably in sheer writing with most of the best mainstream efforts. But Coblentz's work still suffers from the crudity, creakiness of plot and poor characterization that marked his early work. His two young spacemen, investigating the lost Mercurian colony # years after the Hydrogen Wars have devastated Earth, refer to each other ad nauseam as "Old fellow; old pal; old chap; old chum; old sport" or "old duck" in dialogue and plot a half cut above Tom Swift or the Rover Boys. Rating:  by John Pfeiffer. Random House, N.Y., # ' cent of the poetry of Carson's The Sea Around Us. By unfailingly choosing the most dramatic and communicative effect, his story of the gigantic sweep of the evolution of galaxies and life is as gripping as a novel. "We exist in an enormous nearnothingness, a universe which just barely falls short of complete emptiness." "Information contained in a set of genes is enormous. Compared with Nature's feat of molecules, engraving the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin is sky writing." And wonder of wonders, "Sex appears early in the history of life. It has even been observed in bacteria." wald. McGraw Hill Book Co., Inc., N.Y., # of N.Y. has gone on record advocating bomb shelters for the common man. Roshwald's book is an extension of this idea of escape into a grave. Although the theme has been done to death in SF, the subject book is a clinical study of the psychology of the principals involved in modern push-button warfare. The nominal hero (no name -- just Push-Button Officer X#) has received training exclusively for the purpose of pushing the buttons required for retaliation against attack. He and three son for "Level #," a complex of # souls, # feet underground, completely self-sustaining and equipped to last # years without surface contact. All are buried for life, whether or not they are called upon to button push, in this safest of all possible shelters. The story of the adjustment of X# and his male and female companions to their strange life has the weird unreality and impact of the too intense reality. Rating:     Vz by Robert A. Heinlein. Gnome Press, Hicksville, N.Y., # ella from Unknown, vintage #, should shock present-day Heinlein lovers with a brand of fantasy-mystery they would never associate with him. Hoag, though well-heeled, has no idea of his profession or daytime activity. A doctor tosses him out in horror after analyzing the filth from under his fingernails. A husband-wife detective team, retained by him to uncover his alter ego, become ensnared in impossible happenings, the distaff half losing her soul in escrow to an organization called the Sons of the Bird. They walk through mirrors. Fantasy always reads silly in synopsis, doesn't it? But Heinlein's skill makes his ding-dong story credible. Several free bonuses also: "They," "He Built a Crooked House," "All You Zombies," "Our Fair City" and the wonderfully titled "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants" round out this delightful book. Rating:  ## Hendrickson, Jr. Bobbs, Merrill, Inc., Indianapolis, # claims that his book "may be helpful even after you become a spaceman." This is indisputably so since it is cram-packed with all manner of information from rocket design to escape velocities of the planets. However, to let the punishment fit the crime, I recommend that either he or his proofreader be marooned on Triton: "Triton is # miles in diameter. It is # miles from Neptune." "Titan is # miles in diameter. It is # miles from Saturn." "The satellite farthest from Uranus is Oberon, # miles distant. It circles Uranus in an orbit # miles above that planet." Even worse, "The reefs in the solar system have practically all been chartered (my italics) from Earth." The list of Bloopers is dishearteningly long. What if the Pentagon had not "checked the manuscript and given it an intensive going-over in the interests of both accuracy and security"? trow. The Macmillan Co., N.Y., # questions and answers and technical papers, as presented at the April # Washington Symposium on Space Physics, make up the daunting-looking pages of the book. However, there is more than enough clear text for even the layman to realize that this is the stuff on which dreams are made. The names: Whipple, Newell, Kuiper, de Vacouleurs, Shapley, Maenzel, etc., etc. The subjects: every field which touches on the book's title (first used by Arthur C. Clarke). An exciting, up-to-the-stars, down-to-Earth volume. Gibbon. W.W. Norton  Co., Inc., N.Y., # Russian communism is hardly a virgin theme. However, Fitzgibbon is concerned with cause rather than effect, with the events that might conceivably lead to a Russian coup. Unfortunately for comfort of mind, his logic is based on closefetched possibilities -- a general election in which almost all elected candidates run on an Anti-Nuclear-Bomb platform. Committed to disarmament, the new government must force the U. S. to dismantle all airand rocket-bases and evacuate all troops. Key officials can then unlock the Trojan gates, first to a Russian Inspectorate, then to police forces, called by the government to help quell an internal disturbance. As for story plotting, there are a romantic triangle, a quadrangle, a tragic interracial affair, a homosexual, a working-stiff nobleman, a Jewish banker turned Catholic, but not a single individual on which to hang reader-identification. Rating:  tions, New York, # each volume. back series of notable reprints is enriched by the above exercises and puzzles by the most famous Oxford Don of all. It joins priceless reproductions of some of the most famous works of Mankind: Newton's Opticks, Descartes's Geometry, Galileo's Dialogues, Einstein on Relativity, etc., etc. Each book is a beauty, sewn binding, fine paper and clear typography. by Georg Lockemann. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # The History of Chemistry, for this is not narrative in style or intent. Rather, it is a concentrated encyclopedia of chemical events and personae. Some nine hundred names stucco its pages, each with complete chronology. For the average layman, the book is a rubble of names and dates, but for the specialist or information seeker, it is a rich vein of lore. Fletcher Pratt. Avalon Books, N. Y., # magazine version as a lad back in '#, the story seemed utterly improbable. On rereading, I have to revise my estimate utterward. Rigellian invaders wipe out all but a selected few humans by intensive radiation which converts flesh to metal and turns the survivors into wonderfully fabricated mechanisms. Machina ex deus, sort of. But the Rigellians behave with unbelievable stupidity and the metal humans with their built-in stiff upper lips are too flip and glib, considering that only fortyodd Americans survive the holocaust. Pratt's reputation rests secure on much better ground than this bog. Rating:   by Walter W. Lee, # Armacost Ave., Los Angeles, Calif., # list all feature-length SF and Fantasy motion pictures released up to time of publication." Release date, scenarist, stars and other pertinent information are offered. Apprecfetion is due Lee for his labor-of-love compilation. Order direct. Illustrated by Harrington Civilizations must make sense somehow. But was this one the gaudy, impossible exception? of the ship's landing skids, at least two things became obvious ; One -- although they had missed the city (if that's what it was) by miles, they had nevertheless managed to slam down near one of the numerous rural estates. Two -- the landscape would be crawling with Zaortian Fuzzy Tails for a long while to come. They were still pouring out of hatches sprung open by the crunching impact. Kent Cassidy untangled himself from the control column and plucked one of the Fuzzy Tails from his neck. The creature scampered around until it found the ruptured hatch, then scurried through to join the squealing zoological exodus. I "There goes ten thousand credits' worth of cargo," groaned Gene Mason. His stout form slumped in dejection before the view port. Cassidy sniffed the refreshing air that was drifting into the ship. "Any idea where we are?" "After the directional stabilizer blew, we made three blind jumps, all in the direction of Galactic Center. We could be anywhere between Zaort Seven and the Far Rim." "Hey, look," said Cassidy. From the hatchway, the sumptuous estate sprawled nearby, its many gabled manor closed off behind a high wire fence. Cassidy squinted, but failed to recognize the bold, flowing architectural style. A small, bent figure clung to the wire netting of the fence. He was shouting at the ship, but his excited words were no match for the decompression hisses of the auxiliary drive. "Humanoid?" Mason suggested. "Human, I'd say." Cassidy gestured toward the gear locker. "Better break out the translator." In baggy trousers and sagging blouse, the man raced back and forth behind the fence -- the picture of frustrated anger. However, large, doleful eyes, complemented by a bald head and huge, pendulous ear lobes, belied his furious actions. Presently the squeals of the Fuzzy Tails trailed off in the distance and the auxiliary drive quieted with a final sigh. And now the native's shouts rang out distinct and loud : "Quick! From here get you! Shoo! Scram! Or out there I'll come and apart tear you!" "It's English!" Mason exclaimed. "Of a sort. Archaic, but understandable. And not at all friendly." Mason scratched his blunt chin. "Guess we're not too far off the beaten star paths, eh?" Cassidy could find no grounds for challenging this observation as they started down the ladder -- not until he looked overhead and saw three suns shining in the same sky. As far as he knew, there were no settled trinary systems. Beyond the fence the native, a wisp of a man was still fuming. "The hell away from here get! You I'm warning -- no closer come!" Mason displayed a half frown. "He's sure a sour cuss." "You stay with the ship," said Cassidy. "I'll see what's fouling his tubes." B efore Cassidy , reached the fence, his pet Fuzzy Tail came scampering from behind a bush. It clambered up his  trousers and wrapped itself around his neck. This encouraged the speculation that perhaps the shipment of Tails could be bartered for repairs to the stabilizer -- if there was a local space technology, and if they could corral the animals. The native grew even more frenzied now as Cassidy drew up before him. "Trespasser! Back get! My property this be! Scram! You I'll kill!" The Fuzzy Tail uncoiled itself from around Cassidy's neck. Perching on his shoulder, it fussed back at the native in chirping, excited tones. It not only acted at times as though it owned Cassidy, but it also exercised a personal responsibility for his welfare. "Quiet!" Cassidy snapped out. It caught both the Fuzzy Tail and the old man by surprise. The animal bounded for cover while the native rocked back on his heels. "Be you not just a -- little bit afraid?" His eyebrows mounted ; the wrinkled expanse of his forehead. The nearby hedge rustled and parted to let through a dark haired girl whose tanned skin suggested accustomed exposure to the multiple sunlight. Wearing a belted tunic that lacked inches of reaching her knees, she confronted the old man calmly. "It's all about what. Papa?" she asked, with a trace of an amused smile. "Trespassers! On our property, Riva! The alarm sound! Scat! To the woods take! Or a dead duck you be!" "Now, Papa," she chided. Then, through the fence, "Him you musn't mind. It's only his duty he's attending to." From the distance, Cassidy had suspected the man was of Terran descent. Now, with Riva in the picture, he was certain this world was stocked either by intent or accident with true humans. "We're from Terra," he said. She frowned. "Ter-ra?" "Earth. The original world -- " Incomprehension flooded her even features. But her confusion was only temporary. "Let's play." It seemed like an altogether acceptable suggestion, Cassidy thought, eying the attractive girl. But he went on, "This is our ship and -- " "Ship?" Then she chased away her puzzlement with a sudden smile. "Some nice games I know." There was no space technology on this planet, Cassidy decided. They'd be strictly on their own as far as repairing the directional stabilizer was concerned. By this time Papa, his eyes focused afar, had exploded again. "Charge!" he roared. "After him! Wa-hoo! Away don't let him get!" He was gripping the fence and straining toward the field. Cassidy turned and saw, in the distance, a skimmer vehicle floating along several feet off the ground. In full pursuit was a shouting youth who paused occasionally to seize a rock and hurl it at the craft. The old man turned toward his daughter. "A good chase that be. Bet he wins." "Not a chance." The girl frowned. "That be Nedal. Not so swift is he. Loses interest too quick, he does." She surveyed Cassidy. "Be you a chaser?" "No, but I could do with a couple of stiff shots." This drew Papa's attention back to the matter at hand. "Trespassers! The road hit! Scat! Some dust kick up!" "Quiet!" Cassidy shouted. "Will you listen a minute? I -- " Two loyal Fuzzy Tails came charging up to the fence and added their raucous chatter to Papa's screeching diatribe, which had continued unchecked despite Cassidy's loud, desperate plea. In the next instant, though, it seemed that a dam had burst overhead. Materializing from nowhere, at least a ton of water poured down on the agiletongued native, the two Fuzzy Tails, Riva and Cassidy himself, bringing an abrupt end to all the commotion. The animals streaked for the safety of the bushes while Papa and the girl dived back through the hedge. Bedraggled, Cassidy headed for the ship, wondering what sort of meteorological quirk he had encountered. ' later as he attacked the directional selector with pliers and a screwdriver, "I don't like the setup. I don't like it worth a damn." Mason traced the power lead to the junction box beside the hatch. "Maybe they aren't all like that." "In this sort of place, chances are that the first people you run into are typical. I'm afraid -- " "Say!" Mason interrupted, staring outside. "Look at this!" Cassidy went over to the hatch and watched a dozen or so men sprinting across the field, their voices rising in excited waves. A lithe young woman was in full flight before them. But she was screaming in delight as she turned now and then to beckon them on. One overtook her and brought her down with a waist tackle. She rebounded to her feet, however, and took off again. Two of the pursuers collided and sprawled on the ground. They sprang up and tore into each other. Unconcerned with the personal dispute, the chase struck off in a new direction, heading toward the ship as it paralleled one of the nearby fenced-in estates. Behind the wire mesh, a burly young man came charging down the main steps of the manor and raced along with the others. "That be the way!" he yelled encouragement. "Her go get! It's gaining you are! Hurry!" He drew up in time to avoid crashing into the side fence, then stood there watching the chase recede in the distance. Within a hundred feet of the ship, one of the men fell out of the group, panting. He squinted at the vessel, then crept forward, circling to the right. Within arm's reach, he walked back and forth alongside the hull, giving it a close inspection. Finally he paused and fumbled with his clothes. Cassidy started. "Look what he's doing!" "Against the side of the ship, too!" said Mason. Hearing them, the native jerked his head up toward the hatch, then backed off for a better view. "Stinkers!" he yelled, shaking his fist. "Out here come and fight! Take you both on I can!" When they only gaped, he whirled and sped off to rejoin the chase. "You see?" said Cassidy. "Now what do you think?" "I think we'd better get that directional stabilizer working." locate the trouble. "The rectifier circuit's shot," Cassidy said finally. "But maybe we can patch it up. Some of the amplifiers I suppose we can do without. But a hyper-oscillator we've got to have." "Say, you're doing it too," said Mason. "What?" "Talking like the natives." Cassidy looked up. "Guess it's something that grows on you. Well, what do we do now?" "Maybe the natives can help us." "If they don't even know where they're from, they probably left their volts and amps behind too. But that's only an assumption." "In that case," Mason said with a sigh, "there's only one thing left to do -- take Riva up on her invitation to, ah, play." "Funny," Cassidy grunted, heading for the hatch. "I was only joking." "I'm not. If we can get in that house, we'll know for sure whether or not they've developed electronic devices." Halfway across the field, they were almost run down by the laughing girl and her retinue of galloping suitors, if that's what they were. She was a well-proportioned blonde whose windfrothed tresses suggested a nymph in flight. At the fence, they were confronted by Riva, who smiled up at Cassidy and said, "You I was just going to come and get. Ready to play yet you are?" He looked away and cleared his throat. "Not quite, Riva. We'd like to visit your house." "It's some interesting games I know. Enjoying them you'd surely be." Her smile, revealing even teeth that contrasted ruddy cheeks, was as persistent as her intent on playing. Staring at the girl, Cassidy wrestled with a pang of wistful envy over the Olympian life he had witnessed thus far on this world. Maybe they were all irresponsible and childlike. But was that bad? ward the meadow in front of the next estate. An ominouslooking, furry thing, supported on six or eight spindly legs, was racing across their field of vision. "Hurt you he won't," the girl assured them, noticing their apprehension. "Nothing to be afraid of there is." "What is it?" Cassidy was still trying to determine whether it was an overgrown spider or a dry-land octopus. "Look!" Mason exclaimed. "It's on a leash!" And Cassidy noticed the thong that extended from the creature to the human who was running along behind it. "To Wolruf he belongs," the girl explained. "One of them I can get for you too -- if you want." Her slender hand reached out through the fence and tugged at Cassidy's sleeve. "To chase me wouldn't you like?" she asked, pouting. Glancing behind her, Cassidy spotted the girl's father bearing down on them in a sprint that was nothing short of phenomenal for his age. He began shouting with the last few strides and was in full lung when he hurled himself at the fence. "Git! Out! Away! I'll -- " Riva moved back and glanced overhead and Papa, seeing some hidden significance in her gesture, lowered his voice. "You I'll tear into and apart I'll rip!" he went on in a menacing whisper. "Your limbs I'll scatter like -- " "Papa, it's not afraid of you they are." "They're not?" He was disappointed. "The house they want to come in and see." He began working up a rage again, but caught himself and . looked up into his daughter's face. "Mean you -- my house they want to see?" When she nodded Papa seized the lowest strand of wire and lifted the fence high enough for f Cassidy and Mason to crawl  under. "Why, arranged it can be, I think." , Its architectural prominences i rendered shadowless in the trisolar light, the manor was even  more imposing close at hand. Of I stone construction, it flaunted  millwork and beams whose rich i carvings would have been welcome on any mansion in the known Galaxy. Mounting the steps. Mason  observed, "Nice little layout t they've got here." Riva moved closer to Cassidy. "Inside is cozy," she said behind  a coy smile. "Play we can really , in there." ; Papa had been at the door for j some time, fumbling with the i lock. In a burst of impatience, he drew off and gave it a solid kick. Then he went back and tried j rattling the handle. After a while j there was a click and it swung ; open. Cassidy followed him into a blaze of iridescent color and unfamiliar form. The huge, circular room was like a vast diorama and it was impossible to tell exactly where the solid objects blended in with the jumbled geometric pattern of the wall. He walked across a carpet of undulant fibers that reached well above his ankles. And he tripped across a padded, Z-shaped slab that protruded from the wall but slithered into a U and retracted as soon as it received the burden of his weight. Laughing, Riva helped him up and he paused for a closer visual inspection of his outlandish surroundings. Objects of weird shapes and unguessable purposes hung from the ceiling, some changing form and size as he watched. Scattered about were articles of furniture (he guessed) that resembled giant starfish supported at their centers and extremities by coiled springs. Only, each arm was shaped like a trough that ran into the bowl-like central depression of the piece. behind them and Papa went tearing by. With a running leap, he landed on an arm of one of the starfish. Its supporting spring contracted under the weight, then catapulted him ceilingward. When he came down again, it was on an arm of another starfish, then another. The fourth collapsed, depositing him on the floor, and its spring went twanging across the room. Struggling to his feet, he staggered into something resembling a clothes tree, knocked it over and sprawled beside it. He roared with delight as he snapped the stem of the thing across his knee and hurled the pieces at the ceiling. They scored direct hits on one of the bulky objects suspended overhead and it came crashing down with a twinkling roar amid a shower of sparks. "Yow-ee!" he exuberated. "So much fun I never had!" Riva helped him up. "Papa, it's control yourself you must. The last time -- remember?" But he only shook her off and went bounding through an archway. His hectic progress through the house was punctuated by sounds of crashing destruction. "Honestly," Riva said, spreading her hands, "what to do with him I don't know." Cassidy continued staring in the direction the old man had gone. "He's wrecking the place!" "That he is," she admitted sighing. "And such a nice joint it be, too." "He's just plain nuts!" said Mason. Riva smiled. "But it's so much fun he has." Cassidy moved away to get a better view of a silvery gray screen set in the wall and flanked by twin rows of dials and knobs. "You got stereovision, Riva?" he asked. Mason went over and twisted several of the controls until a soft light began suffusing the screen. "Ster-eo-what?" the girl asked. "Video, television -- pictures with sound." Her face brightened. "Pictures we got -- sounds too. Right in that little window." Just then Papa, uninhibited as ever, came storming back into the room with a lusty "Ya-hoo!" He lost his footing and crashed against the screen. Sparks shot out and the picture that was beginning to take shape faded into obscurity. "It that settles. Papa!" Riva said, exasperated. "Outside I'm going and for what happens to you I'm not responsible!" At the door, she paused and smiled at Cassidy. "It'll have to be out there that we play, but no less fun will we have. Put on my best cavorting clothes I'm going to." Mason turned the knobs again, but produced nothing more than the smell of burning insulation and a few snickers from Papa. "At least," Cassidy observed, "they evidently do know something about electronics. All we have to do now is run down one of the technicians and we might get the parts we need for the stabilizer." down on the steps and sat with his shoulders slumping. "Damnedest thing I've ever seen," he mumbled. Cassidy paced to the edge of the porch and stared out over the field. A monstrous skimmer craft appeared in the distance, floating over toward what seemed to be a pile of trash in front of one of the estates. Twin beams of crimson light darted from the nose of the vehicle and played over the mound. In seconds, the heap had melted away and the skimmer floated on. Wolruf was still walking his octopus-spider pet. There were now two packs of youths out chasing girls. And another skimmer car was having no difficulty surviving the stone-throwing assault of not one, but two dedicated pursuers. Outside of that, Cassidy noted, things appeared quite normal. Mason slapped his thighs and rose. "You go see if Riva knows how we can contact the authorities. I'm going back and stay with the ship." Cassidy watched him crawl under the fence, then went around the side of the house. When he caught sight of the girl, she was just disappearing into a smaller structure that might have been a guest house or garage. Following, he knocked on the door and called out her name anxiously. "To play are you ready?" There was an eager note in her voice as it came through the panel. "In come on. It's all set I'll be in a jiffy." He turned the knob, stepped half into the room, lurched back outside and slammed the door behind him. "Riva!" The door started to open, then closed again as the girl laughed. "Oh, all right. Funny you be. It's to play you want, don't you?" He assured her that he did and added, "But there's something we have to talk about now, Riva." "Talk, talk, talk. And it gets you where? Only wastes time, it does." A moment later the door opened and she stood there smiling, with legs apart and hands on her hips. But he hardly had time to react to the skimpiness of her halter and skirt. "Now," she urged as she sprang up on her toes and kissed him full on the lips, "like a chaser make! To the races we're off!" With that, she whirled and went streaking through the next room. ings. It was an ordinary bedroom with conventional furnishings -- perhaps a bit crude even for a culture without any space technology. But, then, it didn't seem uncharacteristic, considering the circumstances. Recognizing the contrast between this guest house and the manor, he frowned as he started off in search of the girl. A worrisome suspicion dogged his thoughts -- there had to be sense to Riva and her father and this sumptuous estate, natives who made sport of chasing skimmer craft and voluptuous women when they weren't otherwise indiscreetly occupied. But what? In the kitchen, he discovered Riva's shapely leg protruding from behind a cabinet. He suspected the exposure was not as accidental as she wanted him to believe. He was certain of that when, as he seized her ankle, she crawled out laughing. Now she stood before him, unsmiling and impatient, and her slender arms reached out for his shoulders. "Riva, this is serious!" He forced her hands down again. "I'm in trouble. I need help." "It's to help you I've been trying all along." "I've got to get in touch with the authorities -- your government." She looked blank. He simplified it, "Your leaders." "Oh, it's easy that is. There be Aline and Clio and Leah and -- but that Leah! It's the cake she takes! Thirty chasers she led on the best drag-out of all. Two whole days it lasted!" "No, Riva! Not that kind of leader. I mean -- well, someone who get things done. The kind who gets behind things and -- " "That be Leanc. Behind those floating cars he's getting all the time. And how he can throw so many rocks I'll never know!" He mussed his hair in frustration, then composed himself. "How do I get to the city?" "That crowded place with all the big houses?" When he nodded, she went on, "It's never been there I have. Now we play?" He drew in a hopeless breath. "All right. Now we play. You go hide." She radiated a warm eagerness as she initiated the game all over again with a kiss and then went sprinting toward the front of the house. He watched her disappear through the next room, then went out the nearest door, heading for the fence and his ship beyond. It had required no small degree of restraint not to go racing off after her. At the comer of the manor he was bowled over bv a shouting Papa who was in full flight as he shot out around a hedge, heading for the guest house. "All your fault it is!" he cried, recovering his balance and plunging on. "You it be who caused this! that I'll remember!" Cassidy sat up, arms resting on his updrawn knees, and stared after the old man. "Ow! Rival Ouch!" Papa clutched his rear as he neared the cottage. "Help! Oh, my aching back!" in the shadow of the ship, fascinated by another girl chase that was in progress nearby. The swirl of action swerved toward him and Mason tensed, shifting from one foot to the other. Withthe wind pressing her clothes in revealing tightness about her, the flaxen-haired sprite swept past and he lunged for her. "Mason!" Cassidy shouted. "Seemed like a good idea," Mason explained, checking himself. "Wonder what it takes to get in on that chase." Cassidy forced a fetching thought of Riva out of his mind. "What we ought to be wondering is how soon we can blast off." "But if we get spaceborne before the stabilizer's working, we'll only be floundering around again." Cassidy started for the ladder. "There's one thing we can do -- patch up the hatches and jump over to another spot on this planet. Maybe we'll find somebody who's normal, at least." But Mason caught his arm and pointed toward Riva's estate where a skimmer car was now parked on the side of the manor opposite the guest house. "Anybody who can drive one of those things," he suggested, "must know something about the city and how to get there. Maybe he'll even give us a lift." M ason circled the skimmer craft. "It's a fine piece of workmanship," he said in admiration. "I'll say," Cassidy agreed. "If we can find out where that was made, I'm sure we'll -- " His vision was suddenly cut off by a pair of hands that came around his head from behind and clamped themselves over his eyes. If he had any doubt as to the identity of their owner, it was soon cleared up by a soft voice next to his ear; "Not right this is. 'It's chasing me you're supposed to be." "Riva," he said, facing her, "we'd like to meet the person who came here iii that skimmer." "Excuses, excuses," she complained. "Always something more important than a chase it is." I ( S "Take us to the driver of that thing," Mason prompted. "We -- " But he tensed and stared up in alarm toward the field. Cassidy followed his gaze to the skimmer vehicle that had earlier reduced a pile of trash to nothing. The craft was just now floating up to their ship. Its two beams of sizzling red light swept over the hull from stem to stern, again and again -- until there was nothing left of their ship but incandescent molten metal. Mason displayed a sickened, then resigned expression, thrust his hands in his pockets and shuffled off toward the field. "Getting in on one of those chases I think I'll be," he said. But he paused outside the fence, turned to say something, then lurched back. "Cassidy! Watch out! There's orte of those things!" The spider-octopus came into view from around the rear of the manor and crawled leisurely toward the guest house. Its body, covered with a multitude of eyes and an unkempt mat of fuzz, was like a coal-black knob perched atop hairy stilts. Evidently, Cassidy guessed as he dived behind a hedge and pulled the girl with him, the thing had gotten away from its master, for it was trailing its leash in the dust. "It's hurt you he won't," Riva assured, quite puzzled over his apprehension. "He belongs to -- " But Cassidy clamped a hand over her mouth. The thing reached the guest house and made a queer noise in front of the door. Papa came outside on the ' double. The spider-octopus picked up the other end of the thong and clamped its braceletlike device around the old man's wrist. Grinning, Papa pulled toward the gate, straining at the leash. Eventually, Cassidy was aware of Riva's smiling, inquisitive face in front of his. "Play?" she invited. And, glancing back at the charred remains of his ship, he didn't see why not.    L The game of life hadn't quite been played out -- it still had that last little catch in it. DAT he king of the world sat on a balcony, listening to the wind blow around his tower. He was drunk. He would get drunker still, and then he would be sick, and the dogs would take care of him. By tomorrow afternoon, he would be drunk and sick again. The dog Roland lay near his feet -- not quite near enough for a kick. The man felt his patient gaze like an itch, like the scab of an ill-healed wound that he could not scratch. He glanced down at the dog, and saw the grizzled fur above the great bloodshot eyes, the hanging dewlaps, the yellow teeth. You're old too, my lad, he thought with bitter satisfaction. You won't last another century. Dogs and men, they all died eventually. The dogs lived five hundred years at most; all the art of their masters had not been able to give them more. But the race of dogs was not finished yet; the race of man was. There were fifty-nine dogs left, fifty-eight females, one male. There was one man, who could call himself the king of the world, or the Dalai Lama, or an#d:hing he liked, because there was no one left to dispute the honor with him. No one to talk to; no one to remember. He was nine thousand and some odd hundreds of years old. Long ago, in the first fraction of that life-span, he had been given the organic catalysts that slowed down the process of maturity and decay almost to zero... not quite. At the age of one thousand, he had been a man of thirty, at two thousand, not quite forty. The golden years of full maturity, full powers, were multiplied until it had seemed they would never end. But the years of decay were multiplied too. He had been a very old man for over a millennium. For a thousand years he had been dying. The dogs kept him alive. They tended the machines, served him, did the work he was too feeble to do. The clever dogs, the faithful dogs, who would still be alive when he was dead. He thought with bitter regret of his mother. He barely remembered her; she had died four thousand years ago. She could have had a daughter, he told himself. She needn't have left me to finish it all alone! Perhaps she had tried. He thought he remembered that she had, that there had been miscarriages. The human strain was grown thin and sickly with too much care. He himself might have been incapable of fathering a child, even in his years of strength: now it was too late to wonder. Not like the dogs, he told himself somberly. Bred for use, not for their own pleasure. I never wanted a child when I was young. They think of nothing else. He glanced again at Roland, and the dog's tail thumped against the paved floor. A knot of pain gathered abruptly in the man's chest. He could well imagine the bigskulled whelps gathered around a fire in the evening, listening and looking while the older dogs told them of Man. He imagined their howls of dismay when they learned there were no more men in the world. Century after century... perhaps in time they would forget there had ever been a race of masters. Perhaps their sorrow and their loss would turn to a vague sadness, a restless urge that would drive them as Man's restless seeking had driven him. In time they might be great. And then all the works of Man would be forgotten, lost to eternity -- merely the unimportant prelude to the reign of Dog. The thought sharpened his pain intolerably. He picked up the cool tube of the tankard that lay on the table beside him and drew a long draft. The liquor lay heavily in him now. He was going to be sick soon. He drank again and sucked air. He threw the tankard petulantly over the balustrade. "The tankard's empty," he said. "Fetch me another." Roland was up instantly, wagging his foolish tail. "Yes, master," and he was away, the tankard clutched in his clumsy fingers. tight band of pain at the base of his spine, the complaining twinges in his legs. However altered and bred, the canine body was not designed to walk erect. You took the gift and you gloried in it, but you paid for it. That was where old age first struck: very old dogs could not stand at all, but crept miserably on all fours, and the shame of it, Roland thought, shortened their lives. The real agony came when duty pointed two ways at once; all else was of little account. For it was one thing to know what was best for the master -- even to understand, in a dim corner of the mind, that the master was foolish, bitter, jealous, cruel. It was another thing to do what was best when the master ordered otherwise. To obey was joy and utter necessity; if the master commanded, "Kill me!" -- though the heart burst with remorse, a dog would obey. Thus it was joy to fill the tankard, to serve, and it was pain, for the liquor was a slow poison. And even this was nothing. There was the question of breeding, which must be settled soon now. Roland was the last male of his line. He knew how the others had died, one for clumsiness, one for a tail too big, others for a habit of drooling or for the wrong pattern of spots, or simply because the master was in a rage. But Roland was coming to the end of his potent term, and still the order to breed had not been given. The food machine was still dropping, into every morsel of food the dogs ate, the chemical agent that kept them sterile. The youngest bitch now living could not survive more than another three hundred years. The master, if he were well served, could live another thousand. As it had many times before, Roland's mind skirted around the unvoiced thought of the death that would be the master's -- the lonely, miserable death of an outcast cur... The dogs must breed. The master must give the order. He filled the tankard and climbed the ramp, panting as the strain told on his tired legs. Near the doorway stood one of the females, waiting for him. She did not speak, but there was a question in her anxious eyes. Roland shook his head sorrowfully and passed on. He put the tankard on the little table, laid the drinking tube near the master's hand. The master did not appear to see him. Slumped among the cushions that filled the ebon and argent throne, he was gazing out into the sky. His bitter face was relaxed, almost peaceful. the days of his youth, when he had roamed the whole world and made it his. Perhaps he was musing on the greatness his ancestors had known -- the globegirdling engines, the mighty cities, the depth and daring of intellect that had plumbed the last secrets of the universe. It was a good time; Roland dared delay no longer. His heart was thudding painfully and his throat was dry as he said, "Master, may I speak?" The man turned his head slowly and his red-rimmed eyes focused with surprise on Roland's face. "You back?" he asked heavily. "Where's the tankard?" "Here, master," said Roland, moving it forward. He waited while the man picked up the tube and drank. Then he said again, "Master, may I speak?" The man belched and wiped his crusted lips with his hand. "All right, what is it?" The words tumbled out in confusion. "Master, I am the last male dog. I am near the end of my breeding time. If we do not breed, you will be left unattended when this generation is gone." The man looked at him with open hostility in his narrow eyes. "Well, breed, then," he said. "Don't come to me for permission to play your dirty little games." Roland's throat was hot with shame. "Master, to breed, I must stop the chemical in the food." "Stop it." They were playing a game, Roland knew. The master's memory was bad, but not this bad. His spirits lifted a little, even though he had little hope. If it was a game, then it gave the master pleasure. He said, "Master, that is done by an automatic machine. The control cylinder is under your seal." The man stared at him silently for a moment, and scrubbed the bristles on his chin with one splotched and bony hand. "So that's it, is it?" he said. "You want me to unlock the cylinder so you can make another generation of whining, dirty pups." "Yes, master." "You want your whelps to outlive me." "No, master!" Volumes of unutterable things contended in Roland's mind. He felt shame, and horror, and a bottomless despair; and at the same time he knew that these were the things he was intended to feel, and he was glad. For a dog, however fine, is a dog; a man, however base, is a man. The master said slowly, "What do you want then, Roland?" "I want you to live," said the dog, nd his voice broke. The slow, seldom tears of his race coursed down his cheeks. The man was silent for a moment; then he turned away. "All right, bring it here to me," he said. halfway down the ramp; two more were behind her. They shrank timidly at his approach, but their eagerness hel them. He had no heart to reprimand them as they deserved. "Did he -- ?" "Yes!" said Roland. He hurried down the ramp, and the females followed him. More of them appeared at each stage of the descent, some racing ahead of him, some clustering behind. The corridor was filled with their involuntary yelps and whimpers of delight. In the food room, a dozen of them were waiting for him, grouped around a cabinet against the far wall. They made a lane for him as he approached, and carefully, with ceremony, he unlocked the case and drew out the long cylinder, bound around with the wire and wax of the master's seal. TN his throne of ebony and sil- ver, the king of the world sat and stared at the blank, meaningless face of the sky. Behind him, down the ramp that always smelled of dog no matter how it was disinfected, he heard the faint far echo of canine glee. Roland had told them all about it, he thought, and paused. He felt hurried, cheated of his chance of decision. It was necessary to give them renewed life. and # other Novelets from Galaxy One of the best collections of Science Fiction Stories edited by Horace Gold, published by Doubleday  Co. Priced at #. We have # copies available at # while they last. Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc., #I Hudson St... New York #. N. Y, I enclose # for each copy. (We pay postage.) copies at I .# -- total. Name Address City Zone State he knew; he would suffer, otherwise; he would die painfully and alone. But he could not prolong his life without sparing them also; and that was bitter as gall. Better to end all at once, dog and man... Roland came in, breathless, joy in his eyes, holding the cylinder carefully in his hands. Wordless, he held it out. The man took it -- a slender tube of silvery metal, dotted with line-up slots and the sockets of other components, and laced about with wire and the red wax of his own seal. How long ago had he done that? A hundred, two hundred s years -- he had known even then that this day must come. He glanced at the waiting dog -- and remembered to his astonishment that in the days of his youth, this dog's ancestor and image had been his dear friend. They had been closer than brothers. He had mourned for years after that dog's death. How was it possible that things had so changed? He looked at Roland again, saw the broad, crinkled brow, the worshipful eyes. There had been no change here. It was incredible, to think how faithful that race had been. Millennium upon millennium, from the dawn of history until this day -- all the thrown sticks retrieved, the households guarded, the blows accepted without anger. The weight of that loyalty seemed to him abruptly a crushing thing. Afhat had his kind done to deserve it? And how could they ever repay? The dogs were worthier... And would survive. In an instant that vision of the dog world that had forgotten Man came back to him, and his guilt receded, twisted upon itself, became a slow, bitter wrath. He clutched the control cylinder in his hands, as if their feeble strength could break it. "Master -- said Roland falteringly. "Is anything wrong?" "Wrong?" he said. "Not for you. Your whelps will inherit the Earth. A bunch of dirty, fleabitten, mangy dogs." T he words were not enough; they came out in the quavering, impotent whine of an old man. He raised the cylinder, perhaps to strike; he did not know what he meant to do. "Master? You will unseal the cylinder?" Tears of rage leaked from the man's eye-corners. He said thickly, "Here's your damned cylinder. Catch it and you can have it!" And then the thing was done; he had flung out his arm with all its waning strength, and the cylinder was turning in the air, beyond the parapet. Roland acted without thought. His hands and feet scrabbled on the flagstones, his muscles bunched in a pattern as old as the race; then he felt the smooth ivory of the balustrade for an instant under his feet. He snapped once, vainly, at the cylinder as its arc passed him. Then there was nothing but the rushing wind around him. The king of the world sat on his throne and listened to the bitches howl. Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. It yocj cart reacA this   n q s n    O # n m X  m   S m o  s nI z  Suddenly the biggest thing in the universe was the very tiniest. T here were suns, which were nearby, and there were stars which were so far away that no way of telling their distance had any meaning. The suns had planets, most of which did not matter, but the ones that did count had seas and continents, and the continents had cities and highways and spaceports. And people. The people paid no attention to their insignificance. They built ships which went through emptiness beyond imagining, and they landed upon planets and rebuilt them to their own liking. Suns flamed terribly, resenting their impertinence, and storms swept across the planets they preempted, but the people built more strongly and were secure. Everything in the universe was bigger or stronger than the people, but they ignored the fact. They went about the businesses they had contrived for themselves. They were not afraid of anything until somewhere on a certain small planet an infinitesimal single molecule changed itself. It was one molecule among unthinkably many, upon one planet of one solar system among uncountable star clusters. It was not exactly alive, but it acted as if it were, in which it was like all the important matter of the cosmos. It was actually a combination of two complicated substances not too firmly joined together. When one of the parts changed, it became a new molecule. But, like the original one, it was still capable of a process called autocatalysis. It practiced that process and catalyzed other molecules into existence, which in each case were duplicates of itself. Then mankind had to take notice, though it ignored flaming suns and monstrous storms and emptiness past belief. Men called the new molecule a virus and gave it a name. They called it and its duplicates "chlorophage." And chlorophage was, to people, the most terrifying thing in the universe. TN A strictly temporary orbit around the planet Altaira, the Star Queen floated, while lift-ships brought passengers and cargo up to it. The ship was too large to be landed economically at an unimportant spaceport like Altaira. It was a very modern ship and it made the Regulus-to-Cassim run, which is five hundred light-years, in only fifty days of Earthtime. Now the lift-ships were busy. There was an unusual number of passengers to board the Star Queen at Altaira and an unusual number of them were women and children. The children tended to pudginess and the women had the dieted look of the wives of well-to-do men. Most of them looked red-eyed, as if they had been crying. One by one the lift-ships hooked onto the airlock of the Star Queen and delivered passengers and cargo to the ship. Presently the last of them was hooked on, and the last batch of passengers came through to the liner, and the ship's doctor watched them stream past him. His air was negligent, but he was actually impatient. Like most doctors, Nordenfeld approved of lean children and wiry women. They had fewer things wrong with them and they responded I better to treatment. Well, he was the doctor of the Star Queen and he had much authority. He'd exerted it back on Regulus to insist that a shipment of botanical specimens for Cassim travel in quarantine -- to be exact, in the ship's practically unused hospital compartment -- and he was prepared to exercise authority over the passengers. He had a sheaf of health slips from the examiners on the ground below. There was one slip for each passenger. It certified that so-and-so had been examined and could safely be admitted to the Star Queen's air, her four restaurants, her two swimming pools, her recreation areas and the six levels of passenger cabins the ship contained. He impatiently watched the people go by. Health slips or no health slips, he looked them over. A characteristic gait or a typical complexion tint, or even a certain lack of hair .luster, could tell him things that ground physicians might miss. In such a case the passenger would go back down again. It was not desirable to have deaths on a liner in space. Of course nobody was ever refused passage because of chlorophage. If it were ever discovered, the discovery would already be too late. But the health regulations for space travel were very, very strict. He looked twice at a young woman as she passed. Despite applied complexion, there was a trace of waxiness in her skin. Nordenfeld had never actually seen a case of chlorophage. No doctor alive ever had. The best authorities were those who'd been in Patrol ships during the quarantine of Kamerun when chlorophage was loose on that planet. They'd seen beamed-up pictures of patients, but not patients themselves. The Patrol ships stayed in orbit while the planet died. Most doctors, and Nordenfeld was among them, had only seen pictures of the screens which showed the patients. woman. Then he glanced at her hands. They were normal. The young woman went on, unaware that for the fraction of an instant there had been the possibility of the landing of the Star Queen on Altaira, and the destruction of her space drive, and the establishment of a quarantine which, if justified, would mean that nobody could ever leave Altaira again, but must wait there to die. Which would not be a long wait. A fat man puffed past. The gravity on Altaira was some five per cent under ship-normal and he felt the difference at once. But the veins at his temples were ungorged. Nordenfeld let him go by. There appeared a whitehaired, space-tanned man with a briefcase under his arm. He saw Nordenfeld and lifted a hand in greeting. The doctor knew him. He stepped aside from the passengers and stood there. His name was Jensen, and he represented a fund which invested the surplus money of insurance companies. He traveled a great deal to check on the business interests of that organization. The doctor grunted, "What're you doing here? I thought you'd be on the far side of the cluster." "Oh, I get about," said Jensen. His manner was not quite normal. He was tense. "I got here two weeks ago on a Q-and-C tramp from Regulus. We were a ship load of salt meat. There's romance for you! Salt meat by the spaceship load!" The doctor grunted again. All sorts of things moved through space, naturally. The Star Queen carried a botanical collection for a museum and pig-beryllium and furs and enzymes and a list of items no man could remember. He watched the passengers go by, automatically counting them against the number of health slips in his hand. "Lots of passengers this trip," said Jensen. "Yes," said the doctor, watching a man with a limp. "Why?" Jensen shrugged and did not answer. He was uneasy, the doctor noted. He and Jensen were as much unlike as two men could very well be, but Jensen was good company. A ship's doctor does not have much congenial society. The file of passengers ended abruptly. There was no one in the Star Queen's airlock, but the "Connected" lights still burned and the doctor could look through into the small lift-ship from the planet down below. He frowned. He fingered the sheaf of papers. "Unless I missed count," he said annoyedly, "there's supposed to be one more passenger. I don't see -- " A door opened far back in the lift-ship. A small figure appeared. It was a little girl perhaps ten years old. She was very neatly dressed, though not quite the way a mother would have done it. She wore the carefully composed expression of a child with no adult in charge of her. She walked precisely from the liftship into the Star Queen's lock. The opening closed briskly behind her. There was the rumbling of seals making themselves tight. The lights flickered for "Disconnect" and then "All Clear." They went out, and the lift-ship had pulled away from the Star Queen. "There's my missing passenger," said the doctor. HE child looked soberly about. She saw him. "Excuse me," she sid very politely. "Is this the way I'm supposed to go?" "Through that door," said the doctor gruffly. "Thank you," said the little girl. She followed his direction. She vanished through the door. It closed. There came a deep, droning sound, which was the interplanetary drive of the Star Queen, building up that directional stress in space which had seemed such a triumph when it was first contrived. The ship swung gently. It would be turning out from orbit around Altaira. It swung again. The doctor knew that its astrogators were feeling for the incredibly exact pointing of its nose toward the next port which modern commercial ship operation required. An error of fractional seconds of arc would mean valuable time lost in making port some ' ten light-years of distance away. The drive droned and droned, building up velocity while the ship's aiming was refined and re-refined. The drive cut off abruptly. Jensen turned white. The doctor said impatiently, "There's nothing wrong. Probably a message or a report should have been beamed down to the planet and somebody forgot. We'll go on in a minute." But Jensen stood frozen. He was very pale. The interplanetary drive stayed off. Thirty seconds. A minute. Jensen swallowed audibly. Two minutes. Three. The steady, monotonous drone began again. It continued interminably, as if while it was off the ship's head had swung wide of its destination and the whole business of lining up for a jump in overdrive had to be done all over again. Then there came that "Ping-g-g-g!" and the sensation of spiral fall which meant overdrive. The droning ceased. Jensen breathed again. The ship's doctor looked at him sharply. Jensen had been taut. Now the tensions had left his body, but he looked as if he were going to shiver. Instead, he mopped a suddenly streaming forehead. "I think," said Jensen in a strange voice, "that I'll have a drink. Or several. Will you join me?" Nordenfeld searched his face. A ship's doctor has many duties in space. Passengers can have many things wrong with them, and in the absolute isolation of overdrive they can be remarkably affected by each other. "I'll be at the fourth-level bar in twenty minutes," said Nordenfeld. "Can you wait that long?" "I probably won't wait to have a drink," said Jensen. "But I'll be there." The doctor nodded curtly. He went away. He made no guesses, though he'd just observed the new passengers carefully and was fully aware of the strict health regulations that affect space travel. As a physician he knew that the most deadly thing in the universe was chlorophage and that the planet Kamerun was only one solar system away. It had been a stop for the Star Queen until four years ago. He puzzled over Jensen's tenseness and the relief he'd displayed when the overdrive field came on. But he didn't guess. Chlorophage didn't enter his mind. Not until later. come out of the airlock last of all the passengers. She sat on a sofa as if someone had told her to wait there until something or other was arranged. Doctor Nordenfeld barely glanced at her. He'd known Jensen for a considerable time. Jensen had been a passenger on the Star Queen half a dozen times, and he shouldn't have been upset by the temporary stoppage of an interplanetary drive. Nordenfeld divided people into two classes, those who were not and those who were worth talking to. There weren't many of the latter. Jensen was. He filed away the health slips. Then, thinking of Jensen's pallor, he asked what had happened to make the Star Queen interrupt her slow-speed drive away from orbit around Altaira. The purser told him. But the purser was fussily concerned because there were so many extra passengers from Altaira. He might not be able to take on the expected number of passengers at the next stop-over point. It would be bad business to have to refuse passengers! It would give the space line a bad name. Then the air officer stopped Nordenfeld as he was about to join Jensen in the fourth-level bar. It was time for a medical inspection of the quarter-acre of Banthyan jungle which purified and renewed the air of the ship. Nordenfeld was expected to check the complex ecological system of the air room. Specifically, he was expected to look for and identify any patches of colorlessness appearing on the foliage of the jungle plants the Star Queen carried through space. The air officer was discreet and Nordenfeld was silent about the ultimate reason for the inspection. Nobody liked to think about it. But if a particular kind of bleaching appeared, as if the chlorophyll of the leaves were being devoured by something too small to be seen by an optical microscope -- why, that would be chlorophage. It would also be a death sentence for the Star Queen and everybody in her. But the jungle passed medical inspection. The plants grew lushly in soil which periodically was flushed with hydroponic solution and then drained away again. The UV lamps were properly distributed and the different quarters of the air room were alternately lighted and darkened. And there were no colorless patches. A steady wind blew through the air room and had its excess moisture and unpleasing smells wrung out before it recirculated through the ship. Doctor Nordenfeld authorized the trimming of some liana-like growths which were developing woody tissue at the expense of leaves. The air officer also told him about the reason for the turning off of the interplanetary drive. He considered it a very curious happening. The doctor left the air room and passed the place where the little girl -- the last passenger to board the Star Queen -- waited patiently for somebody to arrange something. Doctor Nordenfeld took a lift to the fourth level and went into the bar where Jensen should be waiting. He was. He had an empty glass before him. Nordenfeld sat down and dialed for a drink. He had an indefinite feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on it. There are always things going wrong for a ship's doctor, though. There are so many demands on his patience that he is usually short of it. Jensen watched him sip at his drink. "A bad day?" he asked. He'd gotten over his own tension. his scowl deepened. "There are a lot of new passengers." He realized that he was trying to explain his feelings to himself. "They'll come to me feeling miserable. I have to tell each one that if they feel heavy and depressed, it may be the gravityconstant of the ship, which is greater than their home planet. If they feel light-headed and giddy, it may be because the gravity-constant of the ship is less than they're used to. But it doesn't make them feel better, so they come back for a second assurance. I'll be overwhelmed with such complaints within two hours." Jensen waited. Then he said casually -- too casually, "Does anybody ever suspect chlorophage?" "No," said Nordenfeld shortly. Jensen fidgeted. He sipped. Then he said, "What's the news from Kamerun, anyhow?" "There isn't any," said Nordenfeld. "Naturally! Why ask?" "I just wondered," said Jensen. After a moment: "What was the last news?" "There hasn't been a message from Kamerun in two years," said Nordenfeld curtly. "There's no sign of anything green anywhere on the planet. It's considered to be -- uninhabited." Jensen licked his lips. "That's what I understood. Yes." Nordenfeld drank half his drink and said unpleasantly, ple on Kamerun when the chlorophage appeared. At first it was apparently a virus which fed on the chlorophyll of plants. They died. Then it was discovered that it could also feed on hemoglobin, which is chemically close to chlorophyll. Hemoglobin is the red coloring matter of the blood. When the virus consumed it, people began to die. Kamerun doctors found that the chlorophage virus was transmitted by contact, by inhalation, by ingestion. It traveled as dust particles and on the feet of insects, and it was in drinking water and the air one breathed. The doctors on Kamerun warned spaceships off and the Patrol put a quarantine fleet in orbit around it to keep anybody from leaving. And nobody left. And everybody died. And so did every living thing that had chlorophyll in its leaves or hemoglobin in its blood, or that needed plant or animal tissues to feed on. There's not a person left alive on Kamerun, nor an animal or bird or insect, nor a fish nor a tree, or plant or weed or blade of grass. There's no longer a quarantine fleet there. Nobody'll go there and there's nobody left to leave. But there are beacon satellites to record any calls and to warn any fool against landing. If the chlorophage got loose and was carried about by spaceships, it humans in the galaxy, together with every green plant or animal with hemoglobin in its blood." "That," said Jensen, and tried to smile, "sounds final." "It isn't," Nordenfeld told him. "If there's something in the universe which can kill every living thing except its maker, that something should be killed. There should be research going on about the chlorophage. It would be deadly dangerous work, but it should be done. A quarantine won't stop contagion. It can only hinder it. That's useful, but not enough." Jensen moistened his lips. Nordenfeld said abruptly, "I've answered your questions. Now what's on your mind and what has it to do with chlorophage?" Jensen started. He went very pale. "It's too late to do anything about it," said Nordenfeld. "It's I probably nonsense anyhow. But I what is it?" Jensen stammered out his story. It explained why there were so many passengers for the Star Queen. It even explained his departure from Altaira. But it was only a rumor -- the kind of rumor that starts up untraceably and can never be verified. This one was officially denied by the Altairan planetary govern: ment. But it was widely believed by the sort of people who usually  were well-informed. Those who , could sent their families up to the Star Queen. And that was why Jensen had been tense and worried until the liner had actually left Altaira behind. Then he felt safe. Nordenfeld's jaw set as Jensen told his tale. He made no comment, but when Jensen was through he nodded and went away, leaving his drink unfinished. Jensen couldn't see his face; it was hard as granite. And Nordenfeld, the ship's doctor of the Star Queen, went into the nearest bathroom and was violently sick. It was a reaction to what he'd just learned. were so far away that their distance didn't mean anything. There were planets beyond counting in a single star cluster, let alone the galaxy. There were comets and gas clouds in space, and worlds where there was life, and other worlds where life was impossible. The quantity of matter which was associated with life was infinitesimal, and the quantity associated with consciousness -- animal life -- was so much less that the difference couldn't be expressed. But the amount of animal life which could reason was so minute by comparison that the nearest ratio would be that of a single atom to a sun. Mankind, in fact, was the least impressive fraction of the smallest category of substance in the galaxy. But. men did curious things. There was the cutting off of the Star Queen's short-distance drive before she'd gotten well away from Altaira. There had been a lift-ship locked to the liner's passenger airlock. When the last passenger entered the big ship -- a little girl -- the airlocks disconnected and the. lift-ship pulled swiftly away. It was not quite two miles from the Star Queen when its emergency airlocks opened and spacesuited figures plunged out of it to emptiness. Simultaneously, the ports of the lift-ship glowed and almost immediately the whole plating turned cherryred, crimson, and then orange, from unlimited heat developed within it. The lift-ship went incandescent and ruptured and there was a spout of white-hot air, and then it turned blue-white and puffed itself to nothing in metallic steam. Where it had been there was only shining gas, which cooled. Beyond it there were figures in spacesuits which tried to swim away from it. The Star Queen's control room, obviously, saw the happening. The lift-ship's atomic pile had flared out of control and melted down the ship. It had developed something like sixty thousand degrees Fahrenheit when it ceased to flare. It did not blow up; it only vaporized. But the process must have begun within seconds after the lift-ship broke contact with the Star Queen. In automatic reaction, the man in control of the liner cut her drive and offered to turn back and pick up the spacesuited figures in emptiness. The offer was declined with almost hysterical haste. In fact, it was barely made before the other lift-ships moved in on rescue missions. They had waited. And they were picking up castaways before the Star Queen resumed its merely interplanetary drive and the process of aiming for a solar system some thirty light-years away. When the liner flicked into overdrive, more than half the floating figures had been recovered, which was remarkable. It was almost as remarkable as the flare-up of the lift-ship's atomic pile. One has to know exactly what to do to make a properly designed atomic pile vaporize metal. Somebody had known. Somebody had done it. And the other lift-ships were waiting to pick up the destroyed lift-ship's crew when it happened. The matter of the lift-ship's destruction was fresh in Nordenfeld's mind when Jensen had told his story. The two items fitted together with an appalling completeness. They left little doubt or hof)e.  passenger records and presently was engaged in conversation with the sober-faced, composed little girl on a sofa in one of the cabin levels of the Star Queen. "You're Kathy Brand, I believe," he said matter-of-factly. "I understand you've been having a rather bad time of it." She seemed to consider. "It hasn't been too bad," she assured him. "At least I've been seeing new things. I got dreadfully tired of seeing the same things all the time." "What things?" asked Nordenfeld. His expression was not stern now, though his inner sensations were not pleasant. He needed to talk to this child, and he had learned how to talk to children. The secret is to talk exactly as to an adult, with respect and interest. "There weren't any windows," she explained, "and my father couldn't play with me, and all the toys and books were ruined by the water. It was dreadfully tedious. There weren't any other children, you see. And presently there weren't any grownups but my father." Nordenfeld only looked more interested. He'd been almost sure ever since knowing of the lift-ship's destruction and listening to Jensen's account of the rumor the government of Altaira denied. He was horribly sure now. "How long were you in the place that hadn't any windows?" "Oh, dreadfully long!" she said. "Since I was only six years old! Almost half my life!" She smiled brightly at him. "I remember looking out of windows and even playing out-of-doors, but my father and mother said I had to live in this place. My father talked to me often and often. He was very nice. But he had to wear that funny suit and keep the glass over his face because he didn't live in the room. The glass was because he went under the water, you know." Nordenfeld asked carefully conversational-sounding questions. Kathy Brand, now aged ten, had been taken by her father to live in a big room without any windows. It hadn't any doors, either. There were plants in it, and there were bluish lights to shine on the plants, and there was a place in one corner where there was water. When her father came in to talk to her, he came up out of the water wearing the funny suit with glass over his face. He went out the same way. There was a place in the wall where she could look out into another room, and at first her mother used to come and smile at her through the glass, and she talked into something she held in her hand, and her voice came inside. But later she stopped coming. kind of place which would answer Kathy's description. When she was six years old she had been put into some university's aseptic-environment room. And she had stayed there. Such rooms were designed for biological research. They were built and then made sterile of all bacterial life and afterward entered through a tank of antiseptic. Anyone who entered wore a suit which was made germ-free by its passage through the antiseptic, and he did not breathe the air of the aseptic room, but air which was supplied him through a hose, the exhaled-air hose also passing under the antiseptic outside. No germ or microbe or virus could possibly get into such a room without being bathed in corrosive fluid which would kill it. So long as there was someone alive outside to take care of her, a little girl could live there and defy even chlorophage. And Kathy Brand had done it. But, on the other hand, Kamerun was the only planet where it would be necessary, and it was the only world from which a father would land his small daughter on another planet's spaceport. There was no doubt. Nordenfeld grimly imagined someone -- he would have had to be a microbiologist even to attempt it -- fighting to survive and defeat the chlorophage while he kept his little girl in an aseptic-environment room. She explained quite pleasantly as Nordenfeld asked more questions. There had been other people besides her father, but for a long time there had been only him. And Nordenfeld computed that somehow she'd been kept alive on the dead planet Kamerun for four long years. Recently, though -- very recently -- her father told her that they were leaving. Wearing his funny, antiseptic-wetted suit, he'd enclosed her in a plastic bag with a tank attached to it. Air flowed from the tank into the bag and out through a hose that was all wetted inside. She breathed quite comfortably. It made sense. An air tank could be heated and its contents sterilized to supply germ-free -- or virus-free -- air. And Kathy's father took an axe and chopped away a wall of the room. He picked her up, still inside the plastic bag, and carried her out. There was nobody about. There was no grass. There were no trees. Nothing moved. Here Kathy's account was vague, but Nordenfeld could guess at the strangeness of a dead planet, to the child who barely remembered anything but the walls of an aseptic-environment room. Her father carried her to a little ship, said Kathy, and they talked a lot after the ship took off. He told her that he was taking her to a place where she could run about outdoors and play, but he had to go somewhere else. He did mysterious things which to Nordenfeld meant a most scrupulous decontamination of a small spaceship's interior and its airlock. Its outer surface would reach a temperature at which no organic material could remain uncooked. And finally, said Kathy, her father had opened a door and told her to step out and good-by, and she did, and the ship went away -- her father still wearing his funny suit -- and people came and asked her questions she did not understand. "fectly into the rumor Jensen said circulated among usually well-informed people on Altaira. They believed, said Jensen, that a small spaceship had appeared in the sky above Altaira's spaceport. It ignored all calls, landed swiftly, opened an airlock and let someone out, and plunged for the sky again. And the story said that radar telescopes immediately searched for and found the ship in space. They trailed it, calling vainly for it to identify itself, while it drove at top speed for Altaira's sun. It reached the sun and dived in. Nordenfeld reached the skipper on intercom vision-phone. Jensen had been called there to repeat his tale to the skipper. "I've talked to the child," said Nordenfeld grimly, "and I'm putting her into isolation quarters in the hospital compartment. She's from Kamerun. She was kept in an aseptic-environment room at some university or other. She says her father looked after her. I get an impression of a last-ditch fight by microbiologists against the chlorophage. They lost it. Apparently hr father landed her on Altaira and dived into the sun. From her story, he took every possible precaution to keep her from contagion or carrying contagion with her to Altaira. Maybe he succeeded. There's no way to tell -- yet." The skipper listened in silence. Jensen said thinly, "Then the story about the landing was true." "Yes. The authorities isolated her, and then shipped her off on the Star Queen. Your well-informed friends, Jensen, didn't know what their government was going to do!" Nordenfeld paused, and said more coldly still, "They didn't handle it right. They should have killed her, painlessly hilt at once. Her body should have been immersed, with everything that had touched it, in full-strength nitric acid. The same acid should have saturated the place where the ship landed and every place she walked. Every room she entered, and every hall she passed through, should have been doused with nitric and then burned. It would still not have been all one could wish. The air she breathed couldn't be recaptured and heated white-hot. But the chances for Altaira's population to go on living would be improved. Instead, they isolated her and they shipped her off with us -- and thought they were accomplishing something by destroying the lift-ship that had her in an airtight compartment until she walked into the Star Queen's lock!" The skipper said heavily, "Do you think she's brought chlorophage'on board?" "I've no idea," said Nordenfeld. "If she did, it's too late to do anything but drive the Star Queen into the nearest sun... No. Before that, one should give warning that she was aground on Altaira. No ship should land there. No ship should take off. Altaira should be blocked off from the rest of the galaxy like Kamerun was. And to the same end result." Jensen said unsteadily; "There'll be trouble if this is known on the ship. There'll be selves." "Sacrifice?" said Nordenfeld. "They're dead! But before they lie down, they can keep everybody they care about from dying too! Would you want to land and have your wife and family die of it?" The skipper said in the same heavy voice, "What are the probabilities? You say there was an effort to keep her from contagion. What are the odds?" "Bad," said Nordenfeld. "The man tried, for the child's sake. But I doubt he managed to make a completely aseptic transfer from the room she lived in to the spaceport on Altaira. The authorities on Altaira should have known it. They should have killed her and destroyed everything she'd touched. And still the odds would have been bad!" Jensen said, "But you can't do that, Nordenfeld! Not now!" "I shall take every measure that seems likely to be useful." Then Nordenfeld snapped, "Damnation, man! Do you realize that this chlorophage can wipe out the human race if it really gets loose? Do you think I'll let sentiment keep me from doing what has to be done?" He flicked off the visionphone. THE Star Queen came out of overdrive. Her skipper arranged it to be done at the time when the largest possible number of her passengers and crew would beasleep. Those who were awake, of course, felt the peculiar inaudible sensation which one subjectively translated into sound. They felt the momentary giddiness which -- having no natural parallel -- feels like the sensation of treading on a stair-step that isn't there, combined with a twisting sensation so it is like a spiral fall. The passengers who were awake were mostly in the bars, and the bartenders explained that the ship had shifted overdrive generators and there was nothing to it. Those who were asleep started awake, but there was nothing in their surroundings to cause alarm. Some blinked in the darkness of their cabins and perhaps turned on the cabin lights, but everything seemed normal. They turned off the lights again. Some babies cried and had to be soothed. But there was nothing except wakening to alarm anybody. Babies went back to sleep and mothers returned to their beds and -- such awakenings being customary -- went back to sleep also. It was natural enough. There were vague and commonplace noises, together making an indefinite hum. Fans circulated the ship's purified and reinvigorated air. Service motors turned in remote parts of the hull. Cooks and bakers moved about in the kitchens. Nobody could tell by any physical sensation that the Star Queen was not in overdrive, except in the control room. There the stars could be seen. They were unthinkably remote. The ship was light-years from any place where humans lived. She did not drive. Her skipper had a family on Cassim. He would not land a plague ship which might destroy them. The executive officer had a small son. If his return meant that small son's death as well as his own, hewould not return. All through the ship, the officers who had to know the situation recognized that if chlorophage had gotten into the Star Queen, the ship must not land anywhere. Nobody could survive. Nobody must attempt it. So the huge liner hung in the emptiness between the stars. waiting until it could be known definitely that chlorophage was aboard or that with absolute certainty it was absent. The question was up to Doctor Nordenfeld. He had isolated himself with Kathy in the ship's hospital compartment. Since the ship was built it had been used once by a grown man who developed mumps, and once by an adolescent boy who developed a raging fever which antibiotics stopped. Health measures for space travel were strict. The hosoital compartment had only been used those two times. used to contain an assortment of botanical specimens from a planet seventy light-years beyond Regulus. They were on their way to the botanical research laboratory on Cassim. As a routine precaution they'd been placed in the hospital, which could be fumigated when they were taken out. Now the doctor had piled them in one side of the compartment, which he had divided in half with a transparent plastic sheet. He stayed in that side. Kathy occupied the other. She had some flowering plants to look at and admire. They'd come from the air room and she was delighted with their coloring and beauty. But Doctor Nordenfeld had put them there as a continuing test for chlorophage. If Kathy carried that murderous virus on her person, the flowering plants would die of it -- probably even before she did. It was a scrupulously scientific test for the deadly stuff. Completely sealed off except for a circulator to freshen the air she breathed, Kathy was settled with toys and picture books. It was an improvised but well-designed germproof room. The air for Kathy to breathe was sterilized before it reached her. The air she had breathed was sterilized as it left her plastic-sided residence. It should be the perfection of protection for the ship -- if it was not already too late. The vision-phone buzzed. Doctor Nordenfeld stirred in his chair and flipped the switch. The Star Queen's skipper looked at him out of the screen. "I've cut the overdrive," said the skipper. "The passengers haven't been told." "Very sensible," said the doctor. "When will we know?" "That we can go on living? When the other possibility is exhausted." "Then, how will we know?" asked skipper stonily. Doctor Nordenfeld ticked off the possibilities. He bent down a finger. "One, her father took great pains. Maybe he did manage an aseptic transfer from a germ-free room to Altaira. Kathy may not have been exposed to the chlorophage. If she hasn't, no bleached spots will show up on the air-room foliage or among the flowering plants in the room with her. Nobody in the crew or among the passengers will die." He bent down a second finger. "It is probably more likely that white spots will appear on the plants in the air room and here, and people will start to die. That will mean Kathy brought contagion here the instant she arrived, and almost certainly that Altaira will become like Kamerun -- uninhabited. In such a case we are finished." iX SO likely, but preferable, white spots may appear on the foliage inside the plastic with Kathy, but not in the ship's air room. In that case she was exposed, but the virus was incubating when she came on board, and only developed and spread after she was isolated. Possibly, in such a case, we can save the passengers and crew, but the ship will probably have to be melted down in space. It would be tricky, but it might be done." The skipper hesitated. "If that last happened, she -- " "I will take whatever measures are necessary," said Doctor Nordenfeld. "To save your conscience, we won't discuss them. They should have been taken on Altaira." He reached over and flipped off the phone. Then he looked up and into the other part of the ship's hospital space. Kathy came out from behind a screen, where she'd made ready for bed. She was beaming. She had a large picture book under one arm and a doll under the other. "It's all right for me to have these with me, isn't it. Doctor Nordenfeld?" she asked hopefully. "I didn't have any picture books but one, and it got worn out. And my doll -- it was dreadful how shabby she was!" The doctor frowned. She smiled at him. He said, "After all, picture books are made to be looked at and dolls to be played with." She skipped to the tiny hospital bed on the far side of the presumably virusproof partition. She climbed into it and zestfully arranged the doll to share it. She placed the book within' easy reach. She said, "I think my father would say you were very nice. Doctor Nordenfeld, to look after me so well." "No-o-o-o," said the doctor in a detached voice. "I'm just doing what anybody ought to do." She snuggled down under the covers. He looked at his watch and shmgged. It was very easy to confuse official night with official day, in space. Everybody else was asleep. He'd been putting Kathy through tests which began with measurements of pulse and respiration and temperature and went on from there. Kathy managed them herself, under his direction. He settled down with one of the medical books he'd brought into the isolation section with him. Its title was Decontamination of Infectious Material from Different Planets. He read it grimly. Star Queen should have come out of overdrive with the sun Circe blazing fiercely nearby, and a green planet with ice caps to be approached on interplanetary drive. There should have been droning, comforting drive noises to assure the passengers -- who naturally could not see beyond the ship's steel walls -- that they were within world where sunshine was normal, and skies were higher than ship's ceilings, and there were fascinating things to see and do. Some of the passengers packed their luggage and put it outside their cabins to be picked up for landing. But no stewards came for it. Presently there was an explanation. The ship had run under maximum speed and the planetfall would be delayed. The passengers were disappointed but not concerned. The luggage vanished into cabins again. The Star Queen floated in space among a thousand thoutors had computed a course to the nearest star into which to drive the Star Queen, but it would not be used unless there was mutiny among the crew. It would be better to go in remote the news of chlorophage on Altaira, if Doctor Nordenfeld reported it on the ship. Time passed. One day. Two. Three. Then Jensen called the hospital compartment on visionphone. His expression was dazed. Nordenfeld saw the interior of the control room behind Jensen. He said, "You're a passenger, Jensen. How is it you're in the control room?" Jensen moistened his lips. "The skipper thought I'd better not associate with the other passengers. I've stayed with the officers the past few days. We -- the ones who know what's in prospect -- we're keeping separate from the others so -- nobody will let anything out by accident." "Very wise. When the skipper comes back on duty, ask him to call me. I've something interesting to tell him." "He's -- checking something now," said Jensen. His voice was thin and reedy. "The -- air officer reports there are white patches on the plants in the air room. They're growing. Fast. He told me to tell you. He's -- gone to make sure." "No need," said Nordenfeld bitterly. He swung the vision-screen. It faced that part of the hospital space beyond the plastic sheeting. There were potted flowering plants there. They had pleased Kathy. They shared her air. And there were white patches on their leaves. "I thought," said Nordenfeld with an odd mirthless levity, "that the skipper'd be interested. It is of no importance whatever now, but I accomplished something remarkable. Kathy's father didn't manage an aseptic transfer. She brought the chlorophage with her. But I confined it. The plants on the far side of that plastic sheet show the chlorophage patches plainly. I expect Kathy to show signs of anemia shortly. I'd decided that drastic measures would have to be taken, and it looked like they might work, because I've confined the virus. It's there where Kathy is, but it isn't where I am. All the botanical specimens on my side of the sheet are untouched. The phage hasn't hit them. It is remarkable. But it doesn't matter a damn if the air room's infected. And I was so proud!" Jensen did not respond. ' cally, "Look what I accomplished! I protected the air plants on my side See? They're beautifully green! No sign of infection! It means that a man can work with chlorophage! A laboratory ship could land on Kamerun and keep itself the equivalent of an aseptic-environment room while the damned chlorophage was investigated and ultimately whipped! And it doesn't matter!" Jensen said numbly, "We can't ever make port. We ought -- we ought to -- " "We'll take the necessary measures," Nordenfeld told him. "Very quietly and very efficiently, with neither the crew nor the passengers knowing that Altaira sent the chlorophage on board the Star Queen in the hope of banishing it from there. The passengers won't know that their own officials shipped it off with them as they tried to run away... And I was so proud that I'd improvised an aseptic room to keep Kathy in! I sterilized the air that went in to her, and I sterilized -- " Then he stopped. He stopped quite short. He stared at the air unit, set up and with two pipes passing through the plastic partition which cut the hospital space in two. He turned utterly white. He went roughly to the air machine. He jerked back its cover. He put his hand inside. Minutes later he faced back to the vision-screen from which Jensen looked apathetically at him. "Tell the skipper to call me," he said in a savage tone. "Tell him to call me instantly he comes back! Before he issues any orders at all!" He bent over the sterilizing equipment and very carefully began to disassemble it. He had it completely apart when Kathy waked. She peered at him through the plastic separation sheet. "Good morning. Doctor Nordenfeld," she said cheerfully. The doctor grunted. Kathy smiled at him. She had gotten on very good terms with the doctor, since she'd been kept in the ship's hospital. She did not feel that she was isolated. In having the doctor where she could talk to him at any time, she had much more company than ever before. She had read her entire picture book to him and discussed her doll at length. She took it for granted that when he did not answer or frowned that he was simply busy. But he was company because she could see him. Doctor Nordenfeld put the air apparatus together with an extremely peculiar expression on his face. It had been built for Kathy's special isolation by a ship's mechanic. It should sterilize the used air going into Kathy's part of the compartment, and it should sterilize the used air pushed out by the supplied fresh air. The hospital itself was an independent sealed unit, with its own chemical air freshener, and it had been divided into two. The air freshener was where Doctor Nordenfeld could attend to it, and the sterilizer pump simply shared the freshening with Kathy. But -- But the pipe that pumped air to Kathy was brown and discolored from having been used for sterilizing, and the pipe that brought air back was not. It was cold. It had never been heated. So Doctor Nordenfeld had been exposed to any contagion Kathy could spread. He hadn't been protected at all. Yet the potted plants on Kathy's side of the barrier wtere marked with great white splotches which grew almost as one looked, while the botanical specimens in the doctor's part of the hospital -- as much infected as Kathy's could have been, by failure of the ship's mechanic to build the sterilizer to work two ways: the stacked plants, the alien plants, the strange plants from seventy light-years beyond Regulus -- they were vividly green. There was no trace of chlorophage on them. Yet they had been as thoroughly exposed as Doctor Nordenfeld himself! The doctor's hands shook. His eyes burned. He took out a surgeon's scalpel and ripped the plastic partition from floor to ceiling. Kathy watched interestedly. "Why did you do that. Doctor Nordenfeld?" she asked. He said in an emotionless, unnatural voice, "I'm going to do something that it was very stupid of me not to do before. It should have been done when you were six years old, Kathy. It should have been done on Kamerun, and after that on Altaira. Now we're going to do it here. You can help me."  I 'HE Star Queen had floated out of overdrive long enough to throw all distance computations off. But she swung about. and swam back, and presently she was not too far from the world where she was now many days overdue. Lift-ships started up from the planet's surface. But i the Star Queen ordered them  back. # "Get your spaceport health ofI ficer on the vision-phone," orI dered the Star Queen's skipper.  "We've had chlorophage on board." There was panic. Even at a distance of a hundred thousand miles, chlorophage could strike stark terror into anybody. But : presently the image of the spaceport health officer appeared on I the Star Queen's screen. ' "We're not landing," said Doci tor Nordenfeld. "There's almost certainly an outbreak of chloroI phage on Altaira, and we're go' ing back to do something about I it. It got on our ship with passengers from there. We've  whipped it, but we may need  some help." ' The image of the health offiI cer aground was a mask of horror for seconds after Nordenj feld's last statement. Then his i expression became incredulous, though still horrified. ' "We came on to here," said Doctor Nordenfeld, "to get you to send word by the first other ' ship to the Patrol that a quaran! tine has to be set up on Altaira, and we need to be inspected for recovery from chlorophage infection. And we need to pass on, officially, the discovery that whipped the contagion on this ship. We were carrying botanical specimens to Cassim and we discovered that they were immune to chlorophage. That's absurd, of course. Their green coloring is the same substance as in plants under Sol-type suns anywhere. They couldn't be immune to chlorophage. So there had to be something else." "Was -- was there?" asked the health officer. "There was. Those specimens came from somewhere beyond Regulus. They carried, as normal symbiotes on their foliage, microorganisms unknown both on Kamerun and Altaira. The alien bugs are almost the size of virus particles, feed on virus particles, and are carried by contact, air, and so on, as readily as virus particles themselves. We discovered that those microorganisms devoured chlorophage. We washed them off the leaves of the plants, sprayed them in our air-room jungle, and they multiplied faster than the chlorophage. Our whole air supply is now loaded with an airborne antichlorophage organism which has made our crew and passengers immune. We're heading back to Altaira to turn loose our merry little bugs on that planet. It appears that they grow on certain vegetation, but they'll live anywhere there's phage to eat. We're keeping some chlorophage cultures alive so our microorganisms don't die out for lack of food!" The medical officer on the ground gasped. "Keeping phage alive?" this," said Nordenfeld. "It's rather important. This trick should have been tried on Kamerun and Altaira and everywhere else new diseases have turned up. When there's a bug on one planet that's deadly to us, there's bound to be a bug on some other planet that's deadly to it! The same goes for any pests or vermin -- the principle of natural enemies. All we have to do is find the enemies!" There was more communication between the Star Queen and the Star Queen would not make other contact with on this trip, and presently the big liner headed back to Altaira. It was necessary for official as well as humanitarian reasons. There would need to be a health examination of the Star Queen to certify that it was safe for passengers to breathe her air and eat in her restaurants and swim in her swimming pools and occupy the six levels of passenger cabins she contained. This would have to be done by a Patrol ship, which would turn up at Altaira. The Star Queen's skipper would be praised by his owners for not having driven the liner into a star, and the purser would be forgiven for the confusion in his records due to off-schedule operations of the big ship, and Jensen would find in the ending of all terror of chlorophage an excellent reason to look for appreciation in the value of the investments he was checking up. And Doctor Nordenfeld... He talked very gravely to Kathy. "I'm afraid," he told her, "that your father isn't coming back. What would you like to do?" She smiled at him hopefully. "Could I be your little girl?" she asked. Doctor Nordenfeld grunted. "Hm... I'll think about it." But he smiled at her. She grinned at him. And it was settled. (Continued from page #) we lost our rudder. It all sounds funny -- like our boiler going out and being reconnected to the scuttlebutt, which, for those who haven't had the pleasure, is a drinking fountain, and our ackack and the DE's practicing on helium-filled balloons and not downing a single one, while, a day ahead of us, a cruiser was sunk -- but funny it wasn't in waters like those, with more than a sufficiency of sharks and Portuguese men-of-war all around. Up came our lovable top sergeant with the same challenge, when the chant was "Golden Gate in '#!" Again there was that awful clench and I said, "August #th." But this time I was a bit smarter; I got #-to-l odds and a leeway of a month in either direction. I was off by only a day. With the war over, I was beset by buddies wanting to know when they would be going home. I told them I didn't know about them, but I was leaving in February. Until recently, I thought I left in March. I didn't. It was February. For those who collect such documented instances, please leave me out of it and hound the #th Combat Engineers for confirmation. And, yes, I had my run-ins with telepathy as well as precognition. I have had no personal experience with the other pisi factors, if any of them actually exist. And I have to get to my point in a rather round-about fashion. Some time back, poker hunger brought me into contact with odd lots of people -- writers and artists and editors, of course, but also composers, musicians, clothing manufacturers, a whole crosssection that eventually led to psychoanalysts -- two, to be exact. One always looked green and ill; if you feel like laughing, hold on a moment -- the evidence seems to indicate that only the sick can truly abide sickness. The other analyst was big and bouncy -- he had clearly been told in his analysis to be bouncy. He kicked off his shoes as soon as he' entered, flung himself at furniture and women, and tried infuriatingly to play wild games. Traits aside, he's the one who counts here. He needed a Ph.D. thesis and asked if I had an idea. I did. Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer of the #th century, spent -- as far as I know -- his last years checking out reports of fisher folk knowing when their men were drowning at sea. Vivid dreams, sudden frightening visions, that sort of thing. Flammarion found that these were all but universal in the fishing villages whenever the men put out. Only the ones that proved true were remembered. He naturally drew the wrong conclusion. In the psych journals today, analysts are mooning around with startling examples of telepathy and foreknowledge in their patients, and, like Flammarion, drawing wrong conclusions, but for opposite reasons -- the ones that have held psi in an iron grip since Odd John. Olaf Stapledon, the author of Odd John, confessed even before being asked that he was not a storyteller, as if that weren't completely apparent. He came closest to telling a story in this book, however, and of course I used it as a Galaxy Novel -- I'm a professional editor, which means I put aside my convictions if they get in the way of a story. But as a professional editor, had Stapledon been alive, I would have had him do two things: -- Tell the story entirely through the narrator, without once quoting Odd John. If he's that much beyond sapiens, John would be as incomprehensible, barring a handful of phrases, as a man to a dog. Instead, he sounds like a jackass, and an unforgivably wordy one. -- For the love of plain common sense, make that whole last section add up! Why go to all that trouble if that colony of psis, gathered with such care and secrecy, suddenly knows it is endangered -- and goes under rather than disperse at once to protect its precious alleged genes? But those two changes would be for story, nothing else. The common denominator would not be involved. Nor would it be now if that suction pump would get out of authors' typewriters. For psi must revert to just another theme, to be explored from all angles, not frozen to the belief that it is a superior faculty, or blasted out of our path. Flammarion was the first to note that psi does not hold up under statistical conditions. But he was in the right place -- the common denominator is anxiety. Anyone who thinks that anxiety is a necessary or even useful human condition should envy Pavlov's dogs -- anxiety is precisely what he was inducing and the pathetic creatures were doing their canine best to read him. They didn't do very well -- and neither do humans; the accuracy is spottily startling, nothing to bet on as a whole. Think back on the overwhelmings that temporarily made you a ham radio in a pstatic pstorm. Y ou were functioning at your best? Higher faculty, huh? won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. CM-I# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run outthe mail never does. 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I Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy  foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues (?) # Name City Address Zone State A re the tales of strange human powers false? Can the mysterious feats performed by the mystics of the Orient be explained away as only illusions ? Is there an intangible bond with the universe beyond which draws mankind on? Does a mighty Cosmic intelligence from the reaches of space ebb and flow through the deep recesses of the mind, forming a river of wisdom which can carry men and women to the heights of personal achievement? Hove You Hod These Experiences?... that unmistakable feeling that you have taken the wrong course of action, that you have violated some inner, unexpressed, better judgement? The sudden realization that Sie silent whisperings of self are cautioning you to keep your own counsel -- not to speak wotcfc on the tip of your tongue in the presence of another. That something which pushes you forward when you hesitate, or restrains you when you are apt to make a wrong move. These urges ate the subtle influence which when understood and directed has made thousands of men and women masters of their lives. There IS a source of intelligence within you as natural as your senses of sight and hearing, and using now! Challenge this statement! Dare the Rosicrucians to reveal the functions of this Cosmic mind and its great possibilities to you. Let This Free Book Explain Take this infinite power into your partnership. You can use it in a rational and practical way without interference with your religious beliefs or personal affairs. The Rosicrucians, a worldwide philosophical movement, invite you to write today for your Free copy of the fascinating book, "The Mastery of Life" which explains further. Address your request to Scribe C.J.L. San Jose, California b Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden The Puzzle Called Gegenschein #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibilty for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off... by Fred Saberbagen # by J. T. McIntosh # by Theodore Sturgeon # by Fritz Leiber # by James Stamers #...by Daniel F. Galouye # by R. A. Lafterty # fiction writer? Well, we can kick that one around all day, but most of us will agree on one thing: It takes what the late Alfred Korzybski called an ability to think "out of categories" -- that is, to take the whole body of human learning, history, education and experience and contemplate it from outside. Ex-servicemen will remember the battery of tests they were given upon induction -- tests to discover knowledge and abilities, but also tests to discover in what areas each new recruit could be expected to do well if he had the training. We recently came across a couple of child's riddles that led us to some distinctly non-childish areas of speculation, and might even have something to do with the "out of categories" sort of mental processes we were talking about. Maybe they might show whether you yourself can be a science-fiction writer! These are the riddles: #. The word ax (or axe) can be spelled with either two or three letters. It can, however, always be spelled with two letters, neither of which is "A" or "X" or "E." What are those two letters? #. Rearrange the letters in the words "new door" to make one word. Have you figured out the answers yet? It's worthwhile to take a moment to do so before going on... Present these riddles to someone of at least reasonable intelligence (who has never heard them before, of course) and you learn something about the way he thinks. There are three main lines of attack possible in trying to solve them. The first is what you might call the "electronic computer" method. It is laborious, mechanical, repetitious, boring... and quite infallible, providing all the information is accessible. (And providing that the instructions are programmed correctly -- that is, that the question is "fair.") It would work something like this, on the first riddle: The machine reaches into its memory banks and discovers that there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Three of them are excluded by the rules -- A, X and E. The machine then systematically pairs each unexcluded letter with every other unexcluded letter: B -- B B -- C B -- D B -- F and so on. It then scans each pair and compares it with, say, an unabridged dictionary to see if by any chance one of them spells the word "axe." Of course, none of them does. It then lights up its red "reject" panel and waits, humming sulkily, for a "fair" question. Or it might not get that far. It might merely compare the first statement with the second statement, decide that they are mutually contradictory (which they are!), and refuse to play at all. (A similar program might be tried on the second riddle. Solving it "like a computer" would mean constructing a table of all the permutations of the seven characters in the words "new door" -- an even longer, and just as fruitless, job.) decimals, predict the lunar eclipses of the year #I A.D. or chart the behavior of nuclear particles -- but it isn't worth beans for solving riddles. And it isn't much good for plotting a sciencefiction story either. A really sophisticated computer -- or a fairly bright human being -- would not bother with it. Or if he did try the laborious method and found it didn't work, he would then re-examine the basic premisses. He would conclude the question wasn't "fair." What this assumption then requires is to analyze all the statements for "catches" -- for example, a failure to distinguish between the use of "language" -- i.e., the use of words to describe things -- and "metalanguage" or the use of words to describe symbols for things. He would then restate the questions to show such distinctions. In written English we use a convention of quotation marks to distinguish words-that-refer-to-words and words-that-refer-to-things, which means that we need only to repunctuate the questions. However, to make them clearer we should also drop out the unnecessary, merely dust-in-the-eye information, which is included only to confuse our thinking. The revised riddles then come out like this: #... "It" can... be spelled with two letters... What are those two letters? #. Rearrange the letters in the words "new door" to make "one word." The answers to those two questions are just about instantly apparent to any human being over the age of eight -- provided they have not previously seen the same problems in their tricked-up form. But it's interesting to note that a sizeable fraction of the human race can't answer those questions at all if they've seen the other form first! (If you are one such, the answers are respectively "I-T" and "O-N-E W-O-R-D.") It seems that they learn all too easily. Merely seeing the questions stated in a confusing way sticks in their minds to such a degree that a pattern of confusion persists even after the confusion has been removed. Now this (as far as we know; step farther than they've told us) is a bit beyond the power of the average computer. It is also beyond the power of many humans. What it comes down to is being asked a question by the universe and getting at the truth by changing the question. This is a writer's job -- any writer. He has to take the facts of the world as they exist and shuffle them around to invent a new "plot" in order to tell us his story, or "answer." But a science-fiction writer goes even a step farther. VjE actually tried the questions out on a couple of science-fiction writers. One of them barely glanced at the first riddle, then set down two quick scribbles: In his phonetic shorthand, the vowel "A" and the double consonant "X" are each written with one character. We objected: "We meant letter of the English alphabet." He said: "You didn't say so!" The other answered the second riddle. He came up with the word "O'Rowned," and defined it as, "The state of having been subjected to a process named after a Mr. O'Rown, as in 'macadamed' (a road), 'Hoovered' (a floor), etc." We were about to object that we didn't mean coined words -- but there, too, we hadn't said so! And there is the third method of solution. The first was to operate according to the apparent rules; the second to deduce what the framers of the rules meant... and the third is to deduce new rules, or expansions of rules, for yourself. If the first is that of the machine and the second that of the writer, then the third is that of the science-fiction writer. It is up to him to tell us not what things are like but what they might be like if different conditions obtained -- say, in the future; or in paratimee; or on another planet. He cannot change the questions that are asked of him. But he can change the basic postulates that lie behind the questions. In other words, when the universe asks him a cheating riddle -- he cheats back! One stranger was a god the other a devil. Strange that they should be on the same side! D uring the weeks that the starship Yuan Chwang had hovered in close observation of the new planet Aqua, ship's time had been jockeyed around to agree with the suntime at the place chosen for first landing. Boris Brazil saw no evidence of sane thinking behind this procedure; it meant the planeteer's briefing for the big event was set for #, and he had to get up in what was effectively the middle of the night -- a thing to which he had grown accustomed, but never expected to learn to enjoy. Leaving his tiny cabin in a state of disorder that might have infuriated an inspecting officer -- had there been an inspecting officer aboard interested in the neatness of cabins -- he set forth in search of chow. Brazil was tall and bony, resembling a blond young Abe Lincoln. He rubbed sleep from his eyes as his long legs carried him toward the mess hall. A distracting young squab from Computing sailed past him in the opposite direction, smiling. "Good luck," she said. "Is the coffee that bad?" It was the best facsimile of a joke he could think of this early. But the girl hadn't been talking about coffee. Chief Planeteer Sam Gates had picked Brazil to go along on the first landing attempt, he learned when he met Gates in the chow line. He saw by the small computer clipped to Sam's belt that the other man had been up early on his own, double-checking the crew chief and maintenance robots who were readying their scoutship. Brazil felt vaguely guilty -- but not very. He might well have been just another body in the way. Sam Gates stood in the chow line swinging his arms and snapping his fingers, chewing his dark mustache as he usually did when nervous. "How's it look?" Brazil asked. "Oh, free and clear. Guess we'll have ground under our feet in a few hours." -twenty-four planeteers were in the chow line, with a fair number of people from other departments. The day's operation was going to be a big one for everybody. Trays loaded with S#mthetic ham, and a scrambled substance not preceded or followed by chickens. Gates and Brazil found a table. Ten scoutships were going down today, though only one would attempt to land; most of the night shift from all departments seemed to think it time for quickly. "Here comes the alien," said Gates, gesturing with his fork. Brazil raised his eyes toward the tall turbaned man bearing a tray in their direction. "Hi, Chan. Pull up a chair." Chandragupta was no more an alien here than any other Earthman; his job had earned him the nickname. "Good morning," said the Tribune with a smile, sitting down with Gates and Brazil. "I hope my people treat you well today." He had not yet seen one of "his people" and possibly never would; but from the moment high-altitude reconnaissance had established that intelligent life at an apparently primitive technological level existed on Aqua, his job had taken on substance. He was to represent the natives below in the councils aboard the Yuan Chwang, to argue for what he conceived to be their welfare at every turn, letting others worry about the scientific objectives that had brought the exploration ship so far from Earth, until he was satisfied that the natives needed no help or the mission was over. "No reason to expect any trouble," said Brazil. "This one looks fairly simple." "Except we know there are some kind of people down there," said Gates. "And people are never as simple as you'd like them to be." "I wonder if they will need my help," said Chan, "and I wonder if I will be able to help them." The job of Tribune was a new one, really still experimental. Chan shrugged. "But there is no point in my speculating now. In a few hours perhaps I will know." "We're not trying to conquer them, you know," said Brazil, half amused and a little offended by Chan's eagerness to defend against Earth a people he had never seen. "Oh, I know. But we must be sure not to conquer them by accident, eh?" Chan attacked his ersatz eggs again. When Brazil got up to walk without Gates, he could feel the eyes on his back, or thought he could. Here go the heroes, he thought. First landing. Hail, hail. And deep inside he felt a pride and joy so fierce he was embarrassed to admit it to himself -- to be one of the first Earthmen stepping onto this unknown world. mission this size. The twenty planeteers who were going down into atmosphere, plus two reserve crews, slouched in their seats and scribbled notes and smoked and whispered back and forth about business, concentrating so intently on the job at hand that an outsider might have thought them bored and distracted. Captain Dietrich, boss of the Yuan Chwang, mounted the low dais in the front of the briefingroom. He was a rather small man, of mild and bookish appearance. After working with him for a while, you tended to treat cautiously all small men of mild and bookish appearance. Tribune Chandragupta entered the briefing room through the rear door. The Captain eyed him thoughtfully. This was the first voyage on which he had been required to carry a Tribune; the idea had been born as a political move in the committee meetings of Earth Parliament, and had earned certain legislators reputations as defenders of liberty, albeit only the liberty of certain as yet unmet aliens. Captain Dietrich had no wish to conquer anyone, having of course passed the Space Force to give the Tribune system a trial. After all, he could always overrule the man, on condition he thought it necessary for the safety of members qjf the expedition -- though he was the only one aboard who could do so. But it seemed to the Captain that this placing of a civilian official aboard his ship might be only the 'start of an effort by the groundbound government to encroach upon the domain of the Space Force. Every time he went home he heard complaints that the SF was growing too powerful and cost too much. "Militarism," they would say, over a drink or anywhere he met civilians. "We've just managed to really get away from all that on Earth, and now you want to start all over, on Mars and Ganymede and this new military base on Aldebaran #." "The Martian Colony is hardly a military base," he would remind them patiently. "It now has its own independent civilian government and sends representatives to Earth Parliament. The Space Force has practically pulled out of Mars altogether. Ganymede is a training base. Aldebaran # you're right about, mostly; and we do have other military bases." "Aha! Now how do we know that none of these outlying bases or colonies will ever threaten Earth?" "Because all spaceships and strategic weapons are controlled by the SF, and the SF is controlled by the psych tests that screen people trying to enter it. Admittedly, no system is perfect, but what are our alternatives?" "We could destroy all strategic weapons," they might say. Or: "We could cut down on this space exploration, maybe stop it altogether. It's devilish expensive, and there seems no hope it will ever relieve our crowding on Earth. What do we get out of it anyway that makes it really profitable?" "Well," Captain Dietrich might say, "since you talk of militarism, I will ignore the valuable knowledge we have gained by exploration, and answer you in military terms. We have the ability to travel hundreds of light-years in a matter of months, and to melt any known planet in minutes, with one ship delivering one weapon. How many other races do you think live in our galaxy with similar capabilities?" ## Earthman had met any but  ' primitive aliens -- yet. But people had begun to comprehend the magnitude of the galaxy, where man's hundred-light-year radius of domination gave him no more than a Jamestown Colony. "Assume a race with such capabilities," the Captain might continue, "and with motivations we might not be able to understand, spreading out across the galaxy as we are. Would you rather have them discover our military base on Aldebaran this year, or find all humanity crowded on one unprotected Earth, perhaps the year after next?" Dietrich got a wide range of answers to this question. He himself would much prefer to meet the hypothetical advanced aliens a thousand light-years or more from Earth, with a number of large and effective military bases in between. But right now it was time for him to start briefing his planeteers, who probably knew as much about Aqua as he, who had never driven a scoutship into her upper atmosphere. "Gentlemen, we've found out a little about this planet, the only child of a Sol-type sun, after watching it for six weeks. One point one AU from its sun, gravity point nine five, diameter point nine, eighty-five per cent of surface is water. Oxy-nitrogen atmosphere, about fifteen thousand feet equivalent. We won't try breathing it for some time yet. Full suits until further notice. "What land there is is probably quite well populated with what we think are humanoids with a technical level probably nowhere higher than that of medieval Europe. Several rather large sailing ships have been spotted in coastal waters. There are only a couple of long paved roads, and none of the cities are electrically lit on nightside. We don't think anyone down there can have spotted us yet." Most of his audience looked back at him rather impatiently, as if to say: We know all this. We're the ones who found it out. But the Captain wanted to make sure they all had the basic facts in proper focus. "The main objective of this mission is to make a first contact with the natives with the purpose of finding a way to establish a temporary scientific base on the surface, to continue our investigation here with seismic studies, biological studies, and so forth -- and of course to see what we can learn from and about the intelligent inhabitants." "'HE Captain raised his eyes and spoke as much to the Tribune as to his planeteers. "There seems very little chance of any permanent colony being established here, due to the inadequate air, and the native population on a very limited land area. This same apparently high population would seem to preclude any chance of establishing our temporary base in some remote area, without knowledge of the natives. So we will have to deal with them somehow from the start. "I've never believed in the godfrom-the-sky approach, and you know SF policy is to avoid it if possible. It injects a false note into what may become a permanent relationship, even if we intend it now to be temporary. And he who takes godhood upon himself is likely to have to spend more time at it than at the business for which he came, and to assume responsibility for farreaching changes in the native history. "We've met enough primitive races to know that some change is bound to result from any contact, but SF policy is to keep it at a minimum and to try to make it beneficial." The Captain paused, then looked at another man who stood waiting to speak, paper in his hand. "Meteorology?" "Roger, sir." On a wall appeared a photomap of the island that had been picked for the first landing attempt, an irregular shape of land about a hundred miles long by ten wide. Air temperature at dawn in the landing area should be about fifty degrees F, the water a little cooler. There might be enough fog to aid the landing scoutship in an unseen descent. Meteorology also discussed characteristics of the atmosphere that might affect radio and video communication between scouts and mother ship, and predicted the weather in the landing area for the next twenty-four hours. He paused to answer a couple of questions, and introduced Passive Detection. The PD man discussed Aqua's Van Allen belts, magnetic field, the variety and amount of solar radiation in nearby space and that to be expected on the surface, and what the natives probably burned for heat and light in the nightside cities. He confirmed the apparent absence of any advanced technology below. Biology was next, with a prediction that the island would show diverse and active life. It was near the tropics in the spring hemisphere, and green with vegetation. Scout photos showed no evidence of very large animals or plants. Some areas appeared to be under cultivation. Anthropology took the dais to speculate. The people of Aqua were thought to be humanoid, but in the photos anything as small as a man was at the very limit of visibility, and the estimate of the creatures' appearance was based on lucky shots of dawn or dusk shadows striding gigantic across more or less level ground. Inhabitants of such a watery world would be expected to be sailors, and indeed ships had been photographed. There was some massive construction, probably masonry, in the one sizable city on the island. A sea wall and a couple of large structures had been built on a finger of land that protected the city's small harbor.  to outline the patterns he wanted the non-landing scouts to fly. "The target island is pretty well isolated from the planet's main land areas, so if we put a base here it should have minimal effect on native culture. Also, if we botch things up here, we may be able to move on and try again without the natives in the new spot having heard of us." He looked around at his men; the idea was strcmgly conveyed to them that the Captain preferred they not botch things up. "Chan -- anything you want to say? No? All right, board your scouts." Brazil strode beside Gates out the door in the rear of the briefing room, passing under the sign that read: Maybe they're real telepaths down there. Maybe they're a mighty race now retired from active competition and preferring the simple life. Maybe... Maybe nothing, Brazil told himself, quick-stepping beside Sam Gates along the corridor past the doors of scoutship berths that occupied this part of the hull of the Yuan Chwang. The time was for the planeteer's motto: Go Down and Find Out. The main preflight check had been run yesterday. Gates and Brazil now faced the final quick Medical #s Psych in the corridor. Brazil had long since given up trying to startle the psych doc by giving to the inevitable weird question an even weirder answer. "I'd swear you were sane if I didn't know you better," the doctor told him this time. "Pass on." They fitted themselves into the suits of armor, light, space and ground, that had been selected for this job. The suits included among their accessories flotation bubbles that when inflated enabled the wearers to maneuver with supposed ease through several hundred feet of water. The suits now received a quick semifinal test. Captain Dietrich was waiting in the berth that was almost filled by the fifty-foot-long stubby bulk of scoutship Alpha. Gates and Brazil juggled checklists and fishbowl helmets to offer him each an armored paw to shake. The captain said something about good luck. The two planeteers climbed through the scout's hatch, twisting sideways with practiced movements to meet the ninetydegree shift in artificial gravity between mother ship and scout. Gates climbed on toward the control room while Brazil stayed to seal the hatch. On planet they would of course use an airlock. Engines started. Ship's power off and disconnected. All personnel out of berth. Ready for sterilizing. Lethal gas, swirling around the scout's hull, was mostly pumped away to be saved and reused. Then a blast of ultraviolet, more intense than the raw Sol-type sunshine outside, bathed the inside of the berth. No microorganisms must be carried down into atmosphere.  control room chairs, ports sealed, watching the tiny world of the berth by video screen. Gates and Brazil were nearly ready. The berth door slid open on schedule, and what was left of gas inside went out in a faint puff of sudden mist. The watery world that someone with little imagination had named Aqua, ten thousand miles away, filled the opening. A quarter of it was dayside, blue-black as a fluorescent bruise; nightside was eerie with subtle atmospheric glows. "Stand by one. Alpha," came over the radio. "A little trouble clearing Delta." "Roger," said Sam Gates. "Hey, Boris, I like those video stories at home. The guy just drives his ship up to a new planet and lands. The faithful crew stands around scratching their heads. 'Well, what'll we do now?' says one. Then they wait for some hero to speak up." " 'Let's get out and look around,' " said Brazil, grinning. " 'O.K., but let's all be careful. Maybe we better close the door of the ship after us.' " Sam gave a rare smile. "Then one shmoe takes his h#met off to eat a coconut. Only it turns out to be a chieftain's daughter." "And they're all in the soup. They never seem to learn." "Stand by. Alpha," said Operations over the radio, unnecessarily. Gates pointed to the slim volume wedged under an arm of Brazil's chair, secured, like everything else aboard, against some possible overloading or failure of the artificial gravity on the coming flight into the unknown. "What's the book this time?" "Thoreau. I thought I might need some philosophy if you get us stuck in the mud for a couple days down there." "Always meant to read the old nature lover through some day." Gates nodded at the screens showing the waiting planet. "Wonder what he would have thought of all this." Brazil looked at the Passive Detection screen, where the image of the planet showed the dawnline creeping imperceptibly across upper atmosphere as a rainbow of varying ionization and light pressure. He smiled at a sudden recollection. "Ha. Maybe he wouldn't've been so surprised as you might think." He quoted: "Walden Pond -- let's see -- 'A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above... I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.' " "He wrote that in the middle of the nineteenth century?" asked Gates, astonished. "Let me see that book when you're done with it." "You're clear for takeoff. Alpha. Good luck," said the radio. Scoutship Alpha outraced the dawnline by an hour to the island and eased down on schedule, without hurry, into thicker and thicker air, until it entered predawn darkness and fog. Gates used his radar for the first time, to work his way down toward the water a quarter of a mile off the rocky coastline. Aqua was Brazil's ninth new planet, but I won't forget this one, he thought in some corner of his brain not used for watching and interpreting screens. And he was right. 'HE plan called for an offshore landing unseen by the natives, the concealment of the scoutship in about a hundred feet of water as near land as possible, and the going ashore of Gates and Brazil in protective suits to make contact with the local intelligent life. Tight-beam communication was to be maintained at all times with the Yuan Chwang. A small video eye rode above each planeteer's left ear; whatever the eye saw was transmitted to the mother ship. The versatile and roughly humanoid robot that accompanied every scoutship (following men onto new planets but never leading them) would be left in the submerged scout, and would bring it to the human crew if they summoned it by radio. The Y uan Chwang was not orbiting Aqua, but hovering and trying to keep its quarter-milediameter bulk invisible, ten thousand miles above the island. The other scouts were cruising in upper atmosphere in the general area of the target island, observing what they could. The plan might be altered or abandoned at any step at the Chief Planeteer's discretion, or by order from above. Detection screens picked out what looked to Brazil like the infra-red pattern of smoldering fires and fainter body heats of a small village where the recon photos had shown a village to be. Gates worked the scout by radar to an offshore point half a mile from the village, which lay on the shore of a small cove. He dipped the scout low enough to put a sonar probe under water and get a picture of the bottom. "Nothing strange down there," said Gates. "We'll go ahead." Cutting in automatic stabilizers, he lowered the scout into and through choppy water and made slowly toward shore, while Brazil studied the ocean and bottom, trying to read half a dozen presentations at once. Near the rocky upthrust of land. Gates let the little ship settle gently down onto sandy bottom. He summoned the robot and told it to use enough drive to prevent sinking into the bottom. The robot got into the pilot's seat as the humans checklisted themselves into helmets, out of the control room, and into the lock. They stood with legs spread and arms raised while gas and UV sterilized their suits and the chamber. Gates nodded and Brazil opened a valve to let alien sea into the lock; in a few seconds they stepped out of the world of checklists and into dark water. Brazil lingered to feel that the lock door was secured behind them, let gas into his flotation bubbles, and followed Gates up through the darkness. Once something like a luminous smokering curled greenly past them through the water. "Can you bliphate the distance phlooh that?" asked a voice from the Yuan Chwang, half-strangled by transmission through space, air, and water. "Hard to say; I'd guess only a few yards," Gates answered, waiting until his head had broken surface and he had taken a look around. Brazil was right behind him; he could barely see Gates' helmet above the water ten feet away. The rough rock face of the coastline was only a vaguely deeper darkness at one side. They paddled toward it; waves sloshed them against it; they gripped it and began to climb. the land of a new world, looking more like primeval lungfish than conquering demigods. They climbed rock uncertainly and slowly and halted at the top of a small gentle cliff. The suits were engineered for easy movement and reasonable comfort for twenty-four continuous sealed-in hours in almost any environment. Old planeteers sometimes said soberly that they needed a suit on to feel comfortable but they usually preferred to take the suit off before sitting r down to discuss. How comfortably they wore it. "Wait for a little more light," said Gates' radio voice. Brazil sat down beside a large rock and tried to see what was on the inland slope away from the cliff. The sun was not far below the hilly horizon now and a gray predawn light made the scene gradually intelligible. A faint excuse for a road wandered along a few yards away, roughly paralleling the shoreline; it might be a cattle path that led toward the village. Beyond the road were fields with a semi-cultivated look, holding orderly rows of squat bushes above a mat of low-growing vines that seemed to cover most of the ground in sight. Green hills rose beyond the fields. The dawn brightened slowly. To Brazil, sunrises always brought awe, whether he saw them on an outworld or on crowded Earth, or across the red deserts of the world to which his parents had emigrated and where he had been born. Sitting on this alien rock with sea water dripping from his armor and his hand on a gunbutt, he thought: First Landing; it's like a First Morning. Let there be light. "Light enough," said Gates. "Let's get started." They walked on crunching vines to the road, heads swiveling constantly and air microphones tuned to high sensitivity. Brazil caught himself listening for the ape howling that had accompanied each new morning on his last new planet. It wasn't good to carry such mental baggage when stepping into an unknown environment. He would have to unload it. They paced along the faint road toward the village. The hardpacked brownish soil of the road showed no trace of whatever traveled here. "Smoke ahead," said Gates suddenly. It was a barely visible thin vertical tracery in the sky, rising not far away. The road curved around a craggy little hill; when they had rounded this, the village was before them. Large rowboats were beached on the sand of a small sheltered cove. Forty or fifty yards back from the water stood about twenty huts, built mainly from what looked like mats of the groundvine. A small stream trickled through the village, flowing from the direction of a structure like a low fortress, beyond the huts and much larger than any of them. Its dark walls of mud or clay or stone were surrounded by a considerable space cleared of all vegetation. Brazil turned his head to one side and saw his first native. His stomach went cold and he said I to Gates: "On the rock up there. Look." native was undoubtedly humanoid and had apparently been dead a long time. He was bound somehow with vines to the crag that almost overhung the road, ten or fifteen feet above the Earthmen, and around his neck hung a placard that looked like cardboard, bearing a short inscription in bold characters resembling Arabic. He had been a tall man in life, by Earthly standards, and long strands of pale hair were still in evidence. "Get this?" asked Gates of the observers in the sky. "Roger. You're going on?" "Don't see why not." "We never mind these 'No Trespassing' signs," said Brazil, with an attempt at flippancy he didn't feel. Dead men were nothing new to him, but this one had a considerable resemblance to himself, and had, so to speak, sneaked up on him. There were no living people yet in sight, but there were shrill cries in the dawn from the village, and a small flock of hawklike birds with oversized wings sprang up into flight from among the huts. The birds were green and vivid orange against the misty sky and flew circling over the village. "Let's go," said Gates. They began down the sloping road toward the huts, trying to look confident but not frightening. At an open gateway in the wall of the fortified structure a figure appeared, a red-haired man dressed in dark jerkin and leggings and boots, with breastplate of silvery metal that matched the round helmet he carried in one hand. In the other was a spear. He stretched himself and yawned, and appeared to be trying to scratch his ribs with the helmet. He was still a good distance away and gave no sign that he had spotted two aliens in strange suits walking into his town. The birds were more alert. The cries of the circling flock changed suddenly in tone, and in a moment it had become a living arrow launched at Gates and Brazil. The two Earthmen stopped, each considering the possibility of mowing down the birds with stun pistols -- which should have a disorganizing but not fatal effect on any complex nervous system -- before the flock could strike them as it seemed it must, and both rejecting the idea, like twin channels of a single computer. The armored suits were tougher than any bird was likely to be; leave defense to the suits and don't hurt the native pets. The flock broke off before contact, to circle the intruders in a blurred uproar of wings and claws, but several birds scraped the helmets, which were almost invisible in mild light, and one tore head-on at Brazil's apparently unprotected face, possibly meaning to veer away an inch from his eyes. The thud of impact was impressive; when Brazil's eyes opened from the reflex blink, the bird was flopping on the ground with something badly broken. He picked it up, intending to impress the natives with his friendliness by treating kindly their pet that had attacked him, and also to suggest to them that it was futile to attack; but it struggled and fought his armored hands so he could do nothing else if he tried to hold it. as the first natives came blinking and shivering out of their huts to see what all the noise was about, some of them still pulling on scanty rags of clothing. They were all of a type with the body on the rock, blond, tall humanoids with deep chests and slender limbs; in the living people were visible a dozen small distinctions of facial and bodily proportion that added up to an obvious but not at first definable difference from any Earthman. The red-haired man of the fortress had ducked inside the gateway, which was still open. A domestic-looking animal with plumes on its head looked out at the strangers with interest. The blond natives stood together in front of their huts, as if waiting for a group picture to be taken, gaping at their visitors in silence. The watchbird flock still screamed and flew, now in widening circles, having given up assault at least temporarily. Gates kept moving forward until he stood near the center of the cleared space between beach and huts. Brazil stopped beside him there and they stood almost motionless, smiling, arms spread with hands open, in the approved position for approaching Apparent Primitives who seem timid. The sun stood over the horizon now, dissipating the morning fog. Brazil became aware that the whole crowd was watching him. Only now and then did one shoot a quick glance at Gates, as if puzzled about something. Gates spoke via throat mike and radio, without moving his smiling lips. "You look like 'em, boy. I think you better play leader. They may have never seen anyone dark as me before." Brazil made the practiced throat-muscle movement that switched on his speaker and opened his mouth to begin the greeting of his public with soothing sounds. He was interrupted by Sam's voice in his ear again. "Coming from the fort." Six Apparent Primitives who looked anything but timid were marching in sloppy formation down the slope from the walled structure, straight toward the Earthmen, bearing spears and facial expressions that Brazil could not interpret as meaning anything good. They were all redhaired and armored, muscular, well fed, and bulbous-nosed, evidently of a different tribe or race than the blond hut dwellers. Brazil's barefoot audience watched the warriors' approach nervously and began to fade back into their huts. But one of the older men who had been staring Brazil in the eye with an expression of mounting and intense emotion -- the planeteer grew edgy at not being able to decide what emotion -- now sprang forward in serious excitement, to grab Brazil, by the arm and harangue him with the first native speech he had heard, looking at him with the gaze of a pleading worshiper. The six red warriors were very near and didn't look happy at all. They also seemed to be concentrating on Brazil. spair, the old man tore himself away from Brazil and fled toward a hut as if in mortal terror. One of the approaching warriors threw his spear with a whipping expert motion; it caught the old man in the back and sent him dying on his face in the sand. "Well, I'll be -- " Boris Brazil roared out the first Earth words into the air of Aqua. The red-haired warriors stood before him, eying him with what he interpreted as incredulous contempt. One of them barked something that he thought he could almost translate: "What are you doing, you blond peasant clod, dressed up in that outlandish armor?" He probably looked more like a blond native in the suit, with his physical proportions somewhat concealed, than he would without it. The one who had speared the old man started walking toward his victim, maybe to retrieve his weapon. Brazil started that way too, with no clear idea of what he was going to do, but with the feeling that the old man had appealed to him in vain for help. As Brazil started to move, the five other spears were suddenly leveled at him. A hysterical blond boy ran out of a hut to kneel beside the old man and scream something that sounded nasty at the approaching warrior. Gates was standing motionless a few yards away. A spear thrust fast and hard against Brazil's chest with plain intent to kill, setting him back on his heels; a lordly voice from the Yuan Chwang said in his ear, "This is not our affair." Brazil grabbed the thrusting spear in his left hand, jerked its owner forward off balance, and delivered with his armored right fist what seemed an appropriate greeting to an Apparent Primitive Attempting Murder of Earthman. The blow knocked the man out from under his helmet and dropped him to the sand. Spears rocked Boris from all sides, clashed and slid around his helmet. He caught a glimpse of the sixth warrior kicking the boy, knocking him over, and pulling a short axe from his belt for a finishing blow. The arm swinging back the axe suddenly released it; the weapon spun through the air to land yards away and the warrior sat down suddenly and nervelessly. Sam Gates had decided it was time for stun pistols. Before Brazil had reached the same conclusion, the four remaining spearmen had given up trying to stick him through his suit and were grabbing at his arms to hold him. Gates potted two more of them, in the legs, with silent and invisible force. The remaining two abandoned the fight and backed away toward their stronghold with spears leveled, shouting what was no doubt a call for reinforcements. The red that Brazil had felled got up and tottered dazedly after them. "Let's get out of here," said Gates. Brazil's eye swept around. The old man was dead, the spear still in him. The young boy who had been kicked was lying unconscious right in front of a warrior who was going to be considerably annoyed as soon as he felt a little better. Brazil scooped the child up and got him over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and looked at Gates, who gave a sort of facial shrug, as if to say: If we can save a life, there's no need to ponder possible bad consequences, since this whole operation looks like a fizzle now anyway. out of the village as the watchbirds screamed a cheerful farearound the gateway of the fort as the Earthmen went over the rise and out of sight, but no organized pursuit was yet visible. Once out of sight of the village they began a steady loping run, the small body bouncing on Brazil's shoulders. Gates called for the robot to bring the scout up to the surface at the shoreline. "This is the Tribune," said a voice. "What do you intend doing with that child?" "Saving his neck," said Gates. "Maybe we can learn something from him too." They ran with stun pistols drawn, spinning around frequently to see if anyone followed them. No one pursued. Brazil was gasping when he finished the climb down the rocks to the shoreline and set his unconscious burden -- no, half conscious now, with a swelling lump on the forehead -- down inside the airlock. The outer door shut behind Gates and the robot had the scout underwater and moving out to sea in a moment. Entertaining an alien aboard a scoutship was something the Space Force had learned to plan for ahead of time. A door in the back of a suit locker led from the airlock into the tiny Alien Room, into which Gates was now feeding atmosphere from outside, via snorkel and remote control. When the room was ready, Brazil carried the boy into it, sealing the door behind him. Gates could now decontaminate in the airlock, and go to the control room. Brazil would have to wear suit and helmet for a while yet. Medical was already on the communicator in the Alien Room when Brazil turned to look at the screen, after putting the kid  Kiwi down on the bed-acceleration couch that took up most of the room, checking the air pressure and setting the temperature up a few degrees. "Kid doesn't look too bad off," Brazil told the doctor. He smiled reassuringly at the boy, who was now fully conscious and lay watching with wide eyes and a growing yellowish Ipmp on his forehead. He might be ten or eleven years old, judged by Earth standards. "Keep him quiet. And get us a blood sample as soon as possible. Do you think we'll have to feed him?" "Yes. If we can keep him for a week or two we should get the language and a good line on the local culture. We've got synthetic proteins and simple sugars on the scout, of course, so I guess he won't starve -- but I'll try for your blood sample first. And listen, this may be important -- I'm turning off the video screen for now, so it won't alarm him. But when it's on again, keep anyone with red hair off it. Use blond, noble, handsome people like me if possible." Brazil started to call Sam on the intercom, but through a valve into the Alien Room came sterile blankets and a painless blood sample syringe, before he could ask for them. Chandragupta's voice came into his helmet: "This is the Tribune. I have little complaint of your actions so far, except that your striking that man with your fist served no good purpose. But I must forbid you to keep that child any longer than is necessary for his own welfare." "How long will that be, Chan?" asked Captain Dietrich's voice, getting no immediate answer. "Would the boy be welcomed home, or speared like that old man, or what? I think we'd better learn the language and ctistoms before trying to decide. And as for Brazil's hitting that man -- " A debate went on. Brazil listened with half an ear while he covered his guest with blankets and sat beside him, trying to inspire confidence. "It's all right, sonny, it's all right." I hope, he thought. He patted the boy gently with his armored hand. That was the only treatment he dared attempt imtil he knew considerably more about the biology of his guest. And the guest could be very valuable. Children made good subjects for First Contact as a rule, if they were not too young. Their minds adapted quickly to the alien. They caught on quickly to the game of language teaching. And they were likely to give an honest and direct view of their own culture. Brazil handed the blood-sample syringe to the boy after locking the plunger. The kid took it after a brief hesitation, looked it over cautiously, then gave a sudden shy smile and said something that might have been a question. If his head was bothering him he gave no sign of it. Brazil answered with some kindly nonsense and took the ssringe back. He made a show of rubbing it on his own suited arm, turning his head to the other side as he did so. Then he turned the boy's head gently away and got his blood sample without fuss, on the first try. He valved the loaded syringe out into the airlock, where the robot came to load it into a courier tube that would carry it up to the Yuan Chwang. out to be too alien to one another for infectious disease to pose a problem either way. Brazil shed his suit with relief. The courier tube returned before sunset with containers of vile looking gunk that Supply swore would feed the boy, whose name was approximately Tim. Tim tasted the stuff but looked unhappy, so Gates went out spearfishing. Tim was pleased with some of the assortment and ate it raw, while turning down the rest in disgust. He seemed to be suffering no after effects from the kick in the head, but Brazil did his best to keep him quiet anyway. For the next few days the scout stayed well out at sea, mostly submerged. Brazil spent most of his time in the Alien Room, pretending to learn Tim's language almost as fast as he could hear the words, while the linguistically expert brains, human and mechanical, aboard the Yuan Chwang, looked and listened over his shoulder. They forgot nothing, and spoke into his ear, prompting him on what to say next. Tim became restlessly active after getting over his first awed fascination with video screen, doors, acceleration couch and plumbing. When told he was aboard a ship, he wanted to see it all. Brazil kept the robot, at least, out of Tim's sight, and had to struggle to learn more than he taught. He played games with Tim to give him exercise, and to gather data on his physical strength and dexterity. The hungry brains aboard the Yuan Chwang devoured Tim's language. Within two weeks they had fed it by memory tape to every planeteer. A few days of practice would give them command of it. It was time for a major conference. The two planeteers on surface sat in with Captain Dietrich and the department heads above, via communicator, while Tim was confined discontentedly to the Alien Room. "Gentlemen, we have a choice between two main courses of action," the Captain began. "We can try again to establish relations with the natives of this island, on some friendly basis, or we can pull out and start over somewhere else, and hope we don't get into a brawl with the local authorities at the start." The Captain was not chewing out his planeteers for the fight; when he chewed, there was never anything equivocal about his words. "Those authorities I didn't mind brawling with," said Gates. The Captain went on. "I think we can agree that our only major problem on this island is likely to be intercultural?" ' were no horrendous non-intelligent life forms, volcanos or other insuperable acts of nature in evidence on the target island. "I'd like to say that I hope we can find a way to set up a base on this island," said Biology. "That luminous water-ring was fascinating, even though I'm not sure it's in my field. And that groundvine..." "We can't complete our gravitic tables for this system without seismic measurements of the planet," put in Geology. "That island still looks like a good place to me." "Well, then -- does everyone think we should try the island again?" The Captain looked around as if a bit surprised. "We've got the language here now," said Brazil. "Our tapes show the red tribe's speech is nearly the same as Tim's. And they're already trying to kill us on sight, so what can we lose by another try?" "We can cause considerable damage to the people of this island if we are not careful, Mr. Brazil," said Chandragupta sharply. "Indeed, we may have caused damage already, by inserting ourselves into a situation of considerable tension between two tribes -- though any harm we may have done was accidental and I do not blame you for it. Yet we are not on this world by invitation, and so we must assume a certain responsibility for such accidents." "You mean that sociological damage has been caused by our visit?" asked the Captain. He had already heard all about it, but he wanted the subject talked over now. "I think I can explain that," said Sociology, clearing his throat. "The data we have from Tim fit in with what we saw on First Contact. Everything indicates that conditions on the island may be ripe for civil war. "The picture is this: a local settled tribe, fishermen and parttime farmers -- the Blonds, as we have come to call them -- invaded and conquered by a warrior tribe of the Viking type, probably fewer in numbers. The invaders seem to have come from the smaller islands farther north. Perhaps they were driven out themselves by someone else. Now they have settled down here as a ruling class. Tim says this invasion was a very long time ago, before he was born, but that his grandfather -- the old man who unfortunately was killed during our First Contact -- could remember a time when there were no Reds on the island, and his people were free. We make the invasion to have been about fifty years ago. We've seen no evidence of intermarriage, although in fact we've seen none of the Red women or children yet." "Tim talks of a day when his people will rise up and destroy the Reds," said Brazil. "The dream of his young life seems to be to find a way to slaughter them wholesale. He wants me to lead the revolution. I have the feeling though that he doesn't really hate them, or didn't until grandpa bit the dust. It's mainly just a sort of exciting game in his mind. But I don't doubt he would wipe them out if given a chance. Someone has talked a lot of revolution to him, that's for sure. "Tim's grandfather thought I was a tribal folk-hero, come back from the great beyond or somewhere, wearing strange armor, to lead them out of slavery. That's what the old man was talking to me about. I suppose that's why they speared him. It's on the tape, of course, if any of you haven't seen it. Now I can understand what he was saying." Brazil fell moodily silent. "I suppose the First Contact incident might have touched off a Blond rebellion?" someone asked. "If conditions had been just right, yes," said Sociology. "Apparently they were not." "During the last five days we've made numerous high speed photo runs with recon robots from as low as five miles on clear days. If there were any riots or open warfare in progress, we'd be pretty sure to spot it." "How about that body lashed to the rock?" someone asked after a brief pause. "Have we learned anything on that?" "Tim can't read or write," said Sociology. "So neither can we, yet. So we don't know what the placard hung around the fellow's neck says. Tim says the Reds put him up there because they were angry at him. Seems reasonable, if not illuminating." "Captain, I wish we had made such photo runs as you now mention before First Contact," said the Tribune. "We weren't sure of their technological level then," said the Captain, a little wearily. "We didn't want them to spot us flying over. It's one of those choices you have to make. We didn't want to shock them by appearing as gods, remember?" The discussion flowed on for a while. Finally Dietrich brought it back to his original question: "Shall we continue to try for a base on this island, or shall we move on?" "Let's try again here, since we've got a start," said Gates. "If we can't make it, we can always move on to another island." Chandragupta: "The question I must insist we try to answer, Mr. Gates, is this: How can we be helpful to the people of this island, where we have already interfered?" The Captain: "Chan, we didn't come all this way to open a social service bureau." "I realize that. Captain." Grimly. "Nevertheless, I consider our effect upon the natives more important than seismic measurements. I would like to ask if you plan to conclude an agreement f with the authorities controlling j those Red soldiers, for a scientific base on the island?" "I'm considering it." "I believe our doing so would ' in effect recognize their authority to live as they do, holding another tribe in slavery." ! Sociology raised his eyebrows. i "What do you mean by slavery? j It would be unusual if it could I not be found in some form at this level." "Perhaps I should have been more precise. I consider it evil that a member of the ruling class should have it in his power to take at any time the life of one i of the lower class, as we have seen here. I think we are now bound to try to correct such a , condition. Of course I do not expect that we shall be able, or should attempt, to establish our idea of a perfect society here. But I think we must try to set these people on the road to greater freedom and justice." Chandragupta raised his voice above several protesting ones. "We are already committed to interference here, in my view. We must now see that the changes we  produce are for the better." The Captain smiled faintly. "Are you arguing for the revolution now, Chan?" "I think you know better." The Tribune was somewhat irritated. 'We could hardly expect the total i effect of a general armed uprising to be beneficial." "Just what do you think we should do, then, to start these people on the road to greater freedom and justice, as you put it?" Chandragupta sighed. "I think we must first investigate them further, to learn how best to help." There was a little silence. "Anyone got further comment he thinks important?" asked the Captain. "All right, this is it. We continue work on this island. We try to stabilize native affairs on as just a basis as possible, and then deal for our base. Boris, you say Tim has relatives in an inland village who can hide him out from the Reds if need be?" "So he tells me." "All right. Take him to this inland village, tonight or tomorrow night. Talk with some of the adults there. Especially try to find out more about the political situation. Is there a Blond resistance group, how strong, and so on. Since we seem to be committed to some sort of interference here, we'd better get all the data we can, and quickly. Any questions?" THE following night was dark and foggy. Gates drove the scoutship silently and he hoped invisibly over the island's hills toward the village of Tim's relatives. They boy acted as pilot, guiding an electronically presented green spot over a contour map of the island, with an air of sophistication. He had, he said, seen maps before, if not flying machines. But he was excited at the prospect of showing off Brazil in armor to people he knew, and telling them of the wonders he had seen. Brazil had given him orders to keep the scoutship's flying powers secret if possible. Brazil changed the scale of the map to show only the area within a mile of the village. Tim guided Gates to a clear landing spot, out of sight of the village but within easy walking distance. Gates brought the scout down quickly, probing below with radar and infrared, until the little ship settled with a crackle of crushed vines into a tiny hollow between hills. Gates left the autopilot on to keep the scout balanced on its tail at ground level, and joined Brazil in observing the outside world with instruments. The chittering and movement of small life alarmed by their landing gradually quieted. There were no signs of human alarm. Brazil suited up, for protection against other dangers than infection. He led Tim into the airlock, and paused for a final briefing. "Now, who did we agree you should look for in the village?" "First of all I will look for Sunto. He is one of my cousins. He hates the Reds and is not afraid of them. If he is not home I will seek Lorto or Tammamo, who are the junior headmen of the village. Only if I can find none of those will I talk to my female cousins, who do not understand these things. I will try to avoid Tamotim, who I think is still the boss headman here. He likes the Reds and tells them things. If I see no one who is safe to talk to I will come back here and we will talk over what to do next." "And if someone stops you and asks you questions?" "I will not hide anything. I will just say there is a strange man out here who wants to speak with someone from the village. I know what to do, you don't have to worry. I won't say you are our Warrior Spirit, or anything like that. Unless there are Reds in the village, who capture me; then I will cry out for Warrior Spirit and you will come and kill them, eh?" "My name's not Warrior Spirit. And if you see any Reds, just come back." Brazil opened the lock's outer door and they stepped out and down into matted vines. "Remember, just say I brought you over the hills if anyone asks how you come to be here. No one else need know yet that my ship can fly." "All right. Over that way is a path," said Tim, becoming oriented. "And that way is the village." "Get going, then." Brazil sent him off with a gentle shove, and stood quietly, testing the alien night with artificially aided senses. The sound of Tim's bare feet faded quickly on the path. "I'll take her up a ways," said Gates on radio. "Roger. I'll move over." the scoutship lift in silence that was almost eerie even to him, and drift up out of sight into fog and darkness. No stars to see tonight, he thought. Well, I've seen enough of them. For a while. He found the path with his infrared lamp and waited just at one side of it. He hoped the kid wouldn't run into any trouble. About five minutes passed before the glass of his helmet, set for infrared translation, showed him some large life moving toward him along the trail from the village. "One -- two of them, Sam, coming this way." "Roger, I have them now." "Boro?" His native name, called in a soft voice from the darkness. Brazil switched his air mike on again. "Right here." Tim approached him. "This is Tammamo with me. Boro. He is a junior headman." Brazil gave the second vague shape a slight bow, which Tim had told him was the ordinary greeting between equals. "Sam, keep a sharp eye out. We need to use a little light down here." Planeteers worked their air-mike switches for such asides as quickly and naturally as they used their tongues. "Rog." Sam outdid himself in brevity. Brazil turned on what he hoped was a dim and non-startling electric glow from a detachable suit lamp, revealing a Tammamo bug-eyed at being called out of his hut at night to meet what he might think was the Warrior Spirit. Boris greeted him in a matterof-fact, business-like way. Maybe the fact that he spoke the common language of the peasants put the junior headman more at ease. Tammamo had heard a version of the First Contact incident which began with the Red garrison of the coastal village executing an old man for daring to worship the Sea God in a way reserved for rulers. Dying, the elder had called down a curse upon their heads, whereupon the Warrior Spirit of the Blonds appeared, and slew sixty Reds with a sweep of his arm -- or perhaps it had taken several armsweeps, the point was uncertain. A Red magician had been called upon by the enemy. He had evoked from somewhere a dark and evil spirit, also clad in armor. The Blond Warrior had departed to do battle with this other elsewhere, not wishing to devastate the entire island in the struggle, but it was expected he would win and return shortly to -- and this point was whispered very cautiously -- slay all the Red warriors and turn over their women and children to the Blonds as slaves. Tammamo almost managed to look Brazil hopefully in the eye as he finished the tale. I 'IM started to speak with the exasperated eagerness of a youngster to point out errors -- or maybe in disappointment at being left out of the story altogether. But Brazil shushed him by putting a hand in front of his face. He spoke carefully to Tammamo. "Junior headman -- look at me carefully. I am only a man, nothing more. I am not a Warrior Spirit, or any kind of god. I am only a man from a far land, who looks like one of your people and wears armor that is strange to you. Now I wish to speak in private with the leaders of your people -- not with the headman who tells everything to the Reds, but to the leaders of your own people, who may not be known to everyone. Do you understand me?" "If you say you are a man, so be it." Tammamo seemed to be shivering with more than the night chill. "The leaders you speak of -- I do not know anything about such matters, except for stories heard by all. I am a junior headman, wishing no one to hate me. There is a man in the village who might know. His name is Sunto. I can tell him what you want when I meet him. Will that please you?" "It will. And I think there is no need for you to speak of me to anyone else." "I will not! I will not!" "Then send Sunto here to meet me at this time tomorrow night. One thing more, junior headman -- this boy goes to live now with his relatives in your village. I want you, Tammamo, to see to it that no harm comes to him from the Reds. As I said, I am only a man, yet I can do many things. I would be quite angry if the Reds were to harm this boy. Do you understand?" Tammamo indicated vehemently that he understood. Obviously he wished himself a hundred miles at sea, or an#rwhere out of this situation. "Tim, keep out of trouble. Go, both of you, and send me Sunto here tomorrow night." Evidently it was not a Blond habit to waste any time in farewells. Brazil watched them out of sight, realizing suddenly he was going to miss having the kid around. "Okay, Sam, you can bring her down." Trudging to where the scout was crackling down into vines, Brazil paused and looked up toward the invisible nose with a sudden grin. "Hey, dark and evil spirit," he called via radio. "How come you let that Red magician evoke you to fight me?" "Shut up and get in." pointed place on the following night, escorted by Tim. This time the scout had not landed; Brazil was lowered the last few hundred feet by cable. Sunto seemed less timid than Tammamo. He too had heard of the First Contact fight, but was shrewd enough to realize how events could change in the seeing and retelling of them. He professed no doubt that Brazil was only a man, and a friend of the Blonds. Would he arrange a meeting with the Blond leaders? Certainly. There was going to be a meeting of those leaders in the remote hills, three nights from now. Boro could come to it if he wished, there would be many large fires at the meeting place # it would be easy to find. Was Boro living in the hills now? Did everyone know about this meeting, Brazil asked him. What if the Reds saw this large fire? Why had Tammamo been so timid about discussing Blond leaders? Sunto did not quite understand; he used several new words in trying to answer the questions. Eventually the idea came across that this was going to be a religious meeting, and not political at all. He, Sunto, knew no more than that timid Tammamo about political matters. Of course the Reds would not interfere with this religious meeting; the Sea God might become angry with them if they did. True, the Reds controlled the Tower, but that didn't mean others couldn't hold meetings of this type, did it? "Of course not," agreed Brazil soberly. He got a repeat on the time and place of the meeting, and went home to the scout. They located the meeting without trouble, as Sunto had predicted. Brazil was lowered by cable again, a quarter mile from the circle of fires in the hills near the center of the island. Gates held the scout overhead, ready for anything, while Brazil walked to the lighted area. About fifty Blonds of both sexes were quietly busy with varied rituals within the illuminated circle. There were no detectable lookouts posted around the place, or any attempt at concealment. Brazil watched for a little while, far enough away to be invisible to those near the fires. Then he walked slowly in on them, arms spread out in a gesture of peace. There seemed to be nothing frantic or very rigid about the ceremonies, so he had no great worry about interrupting. Gradually they became aware of him, the nearer ones first. They stopped what they were at and turned to watch him with grave eyes. Within a few seconds all of them were standing still, calmly and silently watching him. Then a few of them moved slightly, opening a lane from where Brazil stood to a place near the center of the circle. He could see now a low structure of stone that stood there, a few feet square. It might be an altar. "Any advice?" he subvocalized to the watchers above. "Best thing I can think of is to bow in greeting and tell them to proceed with what they're doing," said some anonymous expert. No one argued with him. The final decision on what to do rested with Brazil, as it usually did with the planeteer -- the man on the spot, with the responsibility. He was rarely given orders in any detail. T his time he accepted the advice offered from above. It seemed to go over all right. The attention of the Blond group turned from him to the central altar, where a few men and women began to perform some simple rites. The others stood watching with folded arms. Brazil folded his. No one was sitting down, and he resigned himself to what might be a long stand. An hour went by. He wished himself wearing armor, ground, heavy, with powered legs that would let you nap standing if you wished. Not that he wanted to nap now. There was the ceremony to watch, although it had so far shown him little that was new or especially interesting. It had elements that Brazil had seen in life or on training tapes of a hundred primitive religions on a dozen planets. But the climax of the ceremony was unique. A pair of muscular -- deacons? Brazil could distinguish no one set apart as clergy -- came from the darkness outside the waning firelight. They bore a large and heavy pottery vessel that wobbled in their grip as they carried it, as if it held a quantity of liquid. Someone held a torch to illuminate the altar top. A slender tower about two feet high had been built of small flat pebbles, surrounded by a low wall of similar construction. The men with the jar approached the rear of the altar and raised the vessel toward it, as a woman thrust a trough into position. They tipped the big jar evenly. What looked like clear water sluiced out of it, guided by the trough toward the pebbletower. For a moment it looked to Brazil as if the little structure might withstand the flood, but some vital part of the base gave way suddenly. The men continued to tilt the vessel smoothly till it was empty. The tower toppled, taking with it part of the surrounding wall. It was washed piecemeal from the sloping altar by the last of the flood. It hit them hard, Brazil could see, looking from one Blond face to another in the firelight. None of them stirred for a long minute. It was plain that the collapse of the tower had had some evil significance. Tower? Simto had mentioned a tower connected with the Sea God, and controlled by the Reds. The Blonds seemed to shake off some of their gloom. Again they were turning toward Brazil. "Ceremony didn't turn out too well, I think," said the voice from the Yuan Chwang. "Just hope they don't blame it on you." Once more everyone was watching Brazil, except for a couple of men who had begun to dismantle the altar. Might as well get started, he thought. He switched on his air mike. He could not see most of his audience well in this light, and could not pick out anyone as leader. fXE spoke out loudly: "I am a man who has come from a far land, and I would learn what I can about the people here." The faint stir and whispering among them ceased. All watched him with guarded faces. There was only the fire glow and crackle, and the twittering background of animals or insects. "This -- " Brazil realised he had no certain word for ritual or ceremony. "What you have done at this meeting is strange to me. If I can do so without giving offense, I would learn about it. Will someone here tell me?" A light clear voice came from somewhere in the background: "Are you he of whom it is said, that he slew sixty Reds with a sweep of his arm?" "It is said, but it is not true. I fought with six of them, but I slew none." "You fought with six of them, yet none of them slew you." The still anonymous voice used a more subtle grammar than Tim had taught, and had a slightly different accent. With his limited experience in listening to the natives, Brazil could not identify it as male or female. But it smelled of authority to him. He answered the implied question. "My armor is strong. And I had help from one who is wrongly called a dark demon, who is only a man like me, my countryman and friend." "So have I heard it." The speaker moved forward slowly into brighter firelight -- a woman. Not a girl, and not an old woman, or middle-aged. Not the kind that a man will follow with his eyes from the first glance, but the kind he will turn to see again a quarter-minute later, and remember. So Brazil thought of her at first sight, and only remembered with a start the subtle unearthliness of her face and body. "So have I heard it, from those who were there and saw with open eyes." She came close to Brazil, dressed as simply as the others. She studied him for a moment. "You speak with the tongue of a simple Blond peasant." "It was one such who taught me. "You learned well." What is your name?" "In your tongue it is best said as Boro. And what is yours, if I may ask without giving offense?" She smiled. "Certainly, there has never been a god so fearful of giving offense. My name is Ariton. Tell these people whether you are god or man. I fear some of them will still not believe what you told Sunto." Brazil loudly pledged again his membership in humanity. Ariton waved her hand, and her people turned away. Most of them went to sit in a circle around where the altar had been. They began a low-voiced chant. S HE walked with Brazil a little away from the group, and tried to answer his questions about the ceremony he had witnessed. Her explanation was unintelligible with new words at first; finally he got her to simplify it enough for him to understand that the tiny tower on the altar had been an analog of a full sized structure in the island's chief city. The big Tower was sacred to the Sea God. Now it was monopolized by the Red priests, and beside it the king of the Reds, Galamand, had built a castle. At mentioning the king's name, Ariton moved her foot as if grinding something into the dirt beneath her heel. Tim had sometimes done that when speaking of the Reds. "And what did the water-pouring mean?" "Maybe something bad." She looked at Brazil thoughtfully and raised a hand to touch his transparent helmet. "I have seen -- before," she said, using a new word that he thought meant glass, from the context. "Now I will ask a question. Why could not the Reds slay you, when they attacked you with spears?" "My armor is stronger than it looks." "And why did you slay none of them?" "There was no need." "Those of my people who watched with open eyes say that you were angry at the slaying of an old man you did not know. Why?" Brazil pondered. "There was no need for his slaying, either, that I could see." "You carry no spear or sword or bow, nor did your dark companion. How could you fight six spearmen?" After a moment Brazil raised a hand to touch his helmet. "My armor is not easily seen, yet it is very strong. So is it with my weapons." "Strong Red warriors could not hurt you with their spears," Ariton said thoughtfully. "And when they tried to seize you they were struck down by cramps and sickness, like swimmers who have entered cold water with full bellies. So the Sea God might..." "But it was not the Sea God. Shall we sit down here?" He gallantly let her have the low boulder that presented itself, and crunched his armored seat down into groundvine. The suit was a load to stand around in, even at .# gravity. "Where is your dark companion now? And your ship?" "He is not far. And our ship is near the island." Ariton apparently thought it natural that a man alone among strangers should be a bit secretive about the location of his friends. Some water from the altar flood had run into the nearest fire, and the light grew dimmer yet. There was no word in Brazil's ear from above. "It might be thought that you and your friend are only castaways upon this island, as none have seen your ship." "It is not so. Our ship is near, with others of my people aboard." "Why have you come to this island?" "My countrymen and I travel to learn things, about new lands none of us has seen before. Some of us would like to live on this island for a little while, perhaps a few years, on some land your people do not use. We do not want to boss your people, or to take anything we do not pay for." "I have no land to give anyone, while there are Reds on the island." Ariton's voice was sharp. "Some of my people will talk to the Reds, too, about using land. But we will not trade with a tribe that holds another tribe in slavery." She was puzzled. "But who does not own slaves, if he can? If we could enslave the Reds, we would. Do you own no slaves at home?" "It has been very many years since my tribe held slaves. A tribe becomes stronger when it does not depend on them. My people have traveled far and looked at many tribes, and it is always so." "But if all were free to choose, who would da the mean and dirty work of slaves by choice?" Ariton looked at him searchingly. Brazil gave a faint sigh. "True, someone must do such work -- sometimes someone must be forced to do it. But even such lowly persons should be treated as members of the tribe, and not killed or beaten as animals would be." "And if there are two tribes, as on this island?" "Two tribes can live as one, if their leaders are wise and strong." "That is a strange thought to me. But then I have never traveled in the far parts of the world." Ariton meditated for a few moments, before she spoke again. "Will you. Boro, go to speak with the Red king about this matter of land? You still look like a Blond, so maybe the Reds will try again to slay you or imprison you." Brazil thought it over. "I may go. It is only chance that I look like a Blond. My shipmates are of varied appearance; some of them resemble Reds." He thought to himself: What planeteer looks most like a Red? Foley, but his hair isn't nearly the right shade. A little dye will fix that, if need be. "I will go with you, when you go to speak to Galamand," Ariton announced. Brazil was surprised. "Do you enter safely into the Red king's castle at will?" "The Reds are not likely to do me harm, and I think Galamand will see me if I visit him." Ariton smiled. "I am a high priestess of the Sea God." as soon as Brazil was hoisted home to his scoutship. "Religion may give us a way to promote unity here," said Sociology. 'We see that Reds and Blonds both worship the same powerful Sea God. However, his sacred Tower seems to be a point of contention between the tribes." "We think we have that Tower located, by the way," put in Captain Dietrich. "And what's probably the Red king's castle, or at least his summer home. It seems too far from fresh water to withstand a siege. Where's that chart? Here, on this peninsula that protects the harbor at Capital City, a large stone structure. Right next to it, on the side toward the ocean, is the tallest building on the island, a tower about ninety feet high. Then there's a sea wall running the length of the peninsula, for protection against waves and maybe invaders. "Foley, you and Brazil will be visiting Galamand as soon as we can locate him. Get your hair dyed to match the Reds. Maybe we can at least impress the natives with the idea that it's possible for Red and Blond to co-operate." "I trust everything possible will be done to avoid another fight." Chandragupta wore a frown. 'We'll have to talk to the Reds sooner or later, if we're going to get anywhere," the Captain said. "Though it's possible we may have to fight our way out again. Is anyone against sending a delegation to Galamand as soon as possible?" "Should we take Ariton along, as she suggested?" Gates asked the conference. "It might make us seem to be committed as her allies against the Reds." "No doubt that's what she wants." "But it would bring the two leaders face to face. If there's any possibility of ending the conflict between them, such a meeting might give us a clue to it." Planeteer Foley, hair reddened, was flown down and transferred to scoutship Alpha, which lay out at sea again. Gates intended to hold himself in reserve, in the scout, to rescue the delegation if necessary. First it was necessary to locate the king, and to arrange to take Ariton to the planned meeting with him. Hoping to do both, Brazil almost literally dropped in, shortly after sunset one evening, on the hill village where she had told him she could usually be found. No Reds were in evidence. Again a flock of watchbirds assaulted Brazil with futile energy. The Blond natives stared at him with some awe, but little surprise. They directed him to a building set against a hill. groundvine mats and rare wooden poles. Carved or molded masks hung in profusion at the gateway, the first artwork of any kind Brazil had seen on the island, except for the decorated armor of the Reds. He stood at the gateway in the low fence and called a greeting to the dark and open doorway of the house. In a few moments a Blond man, unusually tall and carrying an oil lamp, emerged from the rambling building. He stood studying Brazil emotionlessly. "I am looking for Ariton," Brazil repeated. The towering Blond somehow made him feel for a ridiculous moment like an adolescent suitor come to call on his girl and greeted by her older brother. "Ariton has gone to Capital City," the man said finally. "To meet you or your countrymen there when you go to visit the king of the Redmen." Again the grinding foot-motion at mention of Galamand. This man conveyed a suggestion erf insolent freedom and power to Brazil. It was impossible for him to think of this man or Ariton as slaves. "Is Galamand now in his castle beside the Tower of the Sea God?" Brazil asked. "Yes." The Blond man paused, then seemed to reach a sudden decision involving Brazil. "Come with me." He beckoned with his lamp and led the way into the house. They followed a passage leading back toward the hillside. The open rooms they passed contained things of shapes unknown to Brazil, things carven and feathered and stained. More temple than home, certainly. "Here." The Blond turned aside suddenly, and stooped to roll up a floor mat. Buried among mats of groundvine that filled a hole evidently of considerable depth, were row upon row of spears, simply made but strong and sharp. "When your king comes to this island," said the Blond, showing powerful white teeth above his beard, "he will find ready help to topple the Reds from power. live the lives of animals. Long have we planned and waited. The Reds are fewer than we. Each year they stay more within their forts and in their walled city, and each year hurt us more, Brazil took a deep breath. "If you want to help me, you will not rise armed against the Reds. You will agree to live with them as one tribe, when they also agree." The man stared at Brazil for a long moment, then gave a short and nasty laugh. "When they say that will be the day when they are helpless." "But remember what I say, if you wish your own people well," said Brazil, turning to leave. "Let there be no armed rising against the Reds." "Not yet," said the Blond in a cold voice. "Not yet for a little while." among tall bushes and grass on a hillside with a fair view of the town whose name translated into Capital City, early after sunrise on the next morning. They wore heavy ground armor, in camouflage colors. They studied the city before them, adjusting their heavy glass faceplates for telescopic vision. Capital City was plainly divided into two sections. The Reds dwelled on a hill at the far side of the harbor from the watching planeteers, .in an area sxurounded by a defensive wall. Their buildings were mainly of stone or mud brick, and a number of Blond servants could be seen going about various menial tasks. In the Blond section, on lower ground and closer to Brazil and Foley, no Reds were visible except for an occasional squad of patrolling soldiers. They stuck close together, looking grimly over their shoulders. The houses were built mostly of dried groundvine mats, though some mud bricks were used. Beyond the Blond section were the docks. The water of the harbor was studded with the low shapes of fishing boats and, larger, a few of Galamand's war galleys. "Well -- shall we march?" asked Foley. "Might as well. I expect Ariton will know we're here before we've gone very far." Brazil moved his legs. The suit servos drew power from the tiny hydrogen fusion lamp in the backpack; the suit legs churned the massive shape ahead. The wearer had the sensation of moving in light summer clothing, but he could plow through heavy bush and small trees if he chose. Brazil and Foley had no wish to leave such a monstrous trail, so they picked their way with care to the nearest road and set out at a slow walk toward town. Ariton met them in a narrow street before they were well inside the town. She stared at Foley hard when Brazil introduced him, but gave him a common greetingword in a pleasant voice. "Sunto is waiting with a boat in the harbor," she told them. "It is the shortest and easiest way to Galamand's building." The planeteers followed her through narrow winding streets toward the harbor, ever a center of apathetic, curious, hopeful, or poker-faced stares from the Blond slum-dwellers. None of the Red patrols came within sight. That suited Brazil fine. Sunto was waiting at a low dock, in a crude and lopsided rowboat fashioned of reeds plastered together with clay. "Hope the blasted thing can hold us," said Foley on radio, trying to check his suit floats unobtrusively. "It'd be a long swim from the middle of the harbor." The sun was still bright in the morning sky, promising a warm day. Galamand's castle rose forbidding across the harbor, beyond the fishing boats and the moored biremes of his navy. Above and beyond the castle rose the slender stone Tower of the Sea God. HE rowboat held up as Sunto  propelled it across the calm water of the harbor, straight toward the landing steps at the base of the castle. Reds appeared on the steps, watching. Their number grew as the boat approached. "Galamand will have heard of you, of course," said Ariton. "I think he will be eager to see you for himself. Of course he may decide to kill you." She observed them. "I don't think he will harm us," said Foley. From inside heavy ground armor they could remonstrate gently but confidently with Galamand while he boiled them in oil or his cohorts attempted to bash in their faceplates with axes. It would require a local Archimedes and considerable work for any primitive king to damage them seriously, inside of a days time. But Ariton wore not much of any clothes at all. Foley asked her; "Do you think you will be safe?" "The priestess of the Sea God is safe even from Galamand," she answered absently. Brazil thought she was worried, but not about herself. A slight leak developed in the rowboat. Foley bailed rapidly with a leaky gourd, muttering exotic curses. Brazil scanned the ranks of grimly watching Reds as they neared the landing steps. "Is Galamand among those?" "I do not see him. No doubt he awaits you in the great hall inside." The boat wallowed up to the landing. Ariton hopped nimbly out and made it fast with a rope of vine. A couple of Red soldiers made half-hearted motions of leveling spears in her direction. but no one moved to stop her. Brazil and Foley disembarked and stood quietly, giving the Reds the chance to look them over and make the first move if they felt like it. There were no women or children in sight. Ariton moved her hand in an intricate gesture, in the air above Sunto's head; then touched his head briefly. "Now they will not bother him -- for a while," she said to Brazil. "Well, let us go on and try to see the king." A sword-bearing Red who might be an army officer stepped forward. "King Galamand has been told that you are here. Stand and wait." He eyed Foley with unconcealed and unfriendly curiosity. Some of the Red troops looked Brazil over and commented among themselves with openly truculent contempt. His blondness was plainly visible through the faceplate. He looked back at them, deadpan, unobtrusively inflating his suit's flotation bubbles. Giant red swellings ballooned out around his shoulders and torso. The soldiers stared and fell silent. "Brazil, what are you doing?" hissed a peremptory voice in his helmet. "All right, I guess it wasn't funny." He deflated the bubbles and tried to wait patiently. lence. Then a more elaborately costumed Red appeared, and imperiously beckoned the delegation to follow him into the castle. There were only a few Blonds inside the walls. They had the . look of prisoners or the lowest of slaves. Now a few Red women and children were in evidence, but they retreated rapidly out of sight of the visitors. The complex of walls and buildings making up the stronghold had been built of heavy stone, with little if any mortar used. But the stones were cut and fitted superbly, especially in the lower levels of the walls. The great hall was a high chamber about thirty yards by ten, dimly lit by smoking torches and small high windows. It was crowded with Red men of varied appearance. But across one end of the room stood a solid wall of tall soldiers bearing shields and leveled spears. "The old boy's probably right behind his army," Brazil radioed. "Stand and wait here," said the distinguished Red who was acting guide, indicating a spot not far from the leveled spears. He disappeared into the crowd at one side. Brazil and Foley turned casually around as they waited, studying the chamber and the Reds in it. No attempt had been made to surround the visitors at close quarters. The door by which they had entered still stood open. Ariton stood waiting between the planeteers, with utter calm. Another important-looking Red appeared before them; but it was somehow obvious that he was not the king. He held his hands clasped before him and owned a nose remarkable in size even for one of his tribe. "Do you bear weapons?" he demanded sharply, looking from Foley to Brazil. "We do," said Foley. "And we are not the only men here who bear them." He tried to give his speech the accent of a Red. "You must give me your weapons," said the chamberlain. "Then you may advance and prostrate yourselves before the king." "We will advance to greet the king in all friendliness," said Foley. "But the law of our own nation forbids us to do homage to him or to give up our weapons." The chamberlain hesitated a moment, then began to screech at the Earthmen threateningly, as if they were slaves. He raved and glared and waved his arms, and jabbered so fast he became almost unintelligible. Yet Brazil got the impression the man was trying to avoid direct personal insult. It was a masterful performance of denouncing their disrespectful behavior but not themselves. "Better just wait him out," Brazil subvocalized to Foley via radio. "Maybe they just want to see if we bluff. It wouldn't do for the king himself to fail." T he planeteers stood silent a full thirty seconds longer, glaring stony-eyed back at the speaker. The harangue gave no sign of slackening. "Better squelch him," Brazil said. Evidently the torrent of words was going to continue until they reacted to it in some way. Brazil did not now want to give the impression that Earthmen had infinite patience. The squelch might be better accepted coming from the "Red" planeteer. "Silence!" Foley bellowed, after turning up his airspeaker volume. He got what he called for with magical suddenness. Ariton wore a pleased smile. "We have come here to talk with a king, not to listen to you," Foley went on. "If King Galamand is not pleased' to receive us today, we will return tomorrow. Our business is important." "Get out of the way," said a firm voice from behind the wall of soldiers. "Let them come here." The rank of soldiers opened, but stayed within spear-thrusting distance on either side. Brazil, Ariton and Foley advanced toward the man who sat alone upon an ancient carven chair. The low dais and throne were nothing remarkable. The helmet and breastplate of the king were richer than those of his soldiers. Upon the breastplate was worked in relief an image of the Tower of the Sea God, the torchlight glinting on it. The man upon the throne was not ordinary. A vast scar sliced across his face, nearly obliterating one of his eyes. He was approaching middle age, not big for a Red, but thick-limbed and strong. Foley opened his mouth to say something a little nasty about the way the chamberlain had spoken to them. "Greetings, oh king," was what came out. Galamand's bright blue eye seemed to nail you with more effect than if there had been two. "Greetings, oh, king," said Brazil. Ariton stood between the Earthmen, saying nothing and watching Galamand haughtily. The king ignored her and spoke to the armored planeteers, looking from one to the other. "I bid you welcome," he said perfunctorily. "Does your king send greetings to me?" "He does, indeed," said Foley. "And would send you gifts, as is our custom." He waited momentarily for a reaction which did not come, then added: "But in some lands it is considered an insult to present such gifts immediately. It is, indeed, so considered by us." The king raised an eyebrow, and his mouth twisted slightly. Some facial expressions seem to be well-nigh universal among humanoids, Brazil thought. He spoke up: "Oh, there are such lands. King Galamand. Not many, but a few." The blue eye fixed on his. "I thank your king for his greetings. Is he Red or Blond?" "Neither," said Brazil, truthfully enough. "In our country there are men of many tribes, who live together fairly peacefully. It is only by chance that I look like one of the Blonds of this island. But Foley here was chosen deliberately to come here today, because he looks like a Red, that you might not think we believe Reds to be our enemies." The king nodded toward Ariton. "You bring this woman with you. Why?" "I have come with these my friends, to speak for my people," she said, flaring up at him. "And I speak also to the Sea God, as you well know." amused. "Do you speak against me to the Sea God, woman? Your words are not strong enough. The Tower still stands against the waves. The sea-sound is faint in my ear, and soothing as I go to sleep at night. Will you arouse the Sea God to destroy me?" Brazil heard the faintest stir and mutter among the soldiers on either side; evidently the king's words might be thought a provocation to the God. Galamand swept his blue eye around, but said nothing to his men. He spoke again to the planeteers: "And you are this woman's friends?" "We would be friends with Red and Blond alike." Galamand digested the statement swiftly and without comment, and changed the subject. "Your ship is swift and hard to see; my ships have circled the island every day since you first appeared, and have not found it. Yet at night it draws near, for you to land. And when you leave, your ship is not seen either. Now I admit this puzzles me." "He may be convinced that you're just castaways," said a rapid whisper from the Yuan Chwang in Brazil's ear, bringing him no news. He answered the king: "As you say, our ship is swift, and hard to see. It is not the wish of our king that our first visits here be seen by many ships upon the sea." "And why do you come here at all?" "We seek always the knowledge of new lands, oh king," said Foley. "Some twenty or thirty of us would like to live on this island for a year or two, on some small area of land that you who live here now do not need. We are with a government engaged in civil war, under which two tribes contend against each other; or with a king who holds another tribe in slavery." "No one contends against me here and lives." Galamand spoke quietly and distinctly. He gave Ariton his twisted grin and asked; "Is it not so?" It stung her deeply, and her voice rose loud; "Your day is not forever, Redman. One day your children will be our slaves, if you beget any before you die. We will -- " Brazil's voice rose over hers. "That is not what we want! That would yet be war and slavery." Both native rulers looked at him, for a moment united against the outsider. Then Galamand asked quietly; "How would you have us live?" "As one tribe." Galamand narrowed his operational eye and scratched his beard. "You spoke of payment, for the use of land. What do you mean to offer?" Foley answered; "To a just and peaceful ruler we would offer, to begin with, a great quantity of cord, stronger and more lasting than your vines, to make excellent fishnets, oh king." "And weapons?" The king's voice was casual and gentle. "A quantity of swords and spears might be included -- " "You do not carry swords or spears." "We carry them for trade." They could be made up. Galamand's blue eye did not waver from Foley's face, but his right arm shot out toward the nearest guard, and his fingers snapped. The haft of the guard's spear was instantly in his grip. T he king stood up and thrust the spear, butt first, toward Foley, at the same time holding out this left hand open. "If you are men who deal in spears, then I will deal with you. I offer in trade this good Red spear, for that weapon you wear at your side." Foley assumed an expression of deep trouble, and he answered reluctantly; "Oh king, we have no wish to anger you. But we must refuse to trade our weapons. If we did, the anger of our king would fall heavily upon our heads. And agaihst his anger we have no defense." "And against mine?" Galamand's voice was still gentle. So is a gorilla, when not offended. "We have our weapons, which we will not trade," said Brazil, with utmost courtesy. The blue eye lanced at him, and he looked right back down the shaft of it, while from the corners of his eyes he watched the spearmen carefully. He wondered if Galamand could really identify the butt of a stun pistol as a weapon. Galamand grounded the butt of the spear and stood drumming his fingers on the shaft. "Fishnets," he said meditatively. He looked from one planeteer to the other. "Your great king has then no weapons to spare? I would reward you well if you were to convince him that he has; or if you were to act, shall we say, on your own..." He reached into a pouch at his side and brought out a lustrous pearl, bigger than a grape. Foley shook his head slowly, forgetting that the gesture might mean nothing or anything here. "Oh king, it cannot be so. If you offer us kingdoms greater and richer than this whole island, still we will give or trade to you no weapons, save such as you can make yourselves." Galamand tossed the spear back to the soldier and seated himself again. "And your armor, I suppose? I admit I have not seen such glass." This time Brazil joined in the headshaking, to preserve unity, since no one had seemed shocked by the gesture. "Strange men," Galamand mused. "You say you will not trade with a ruler who holds another tribe in slavery. I will not ask you why. I have not asked for any trade with you that would pay me in fishnets, and I want none. While the waves spare the Tower, the Sea God supports me. I am king upon this island. My slaves are my slaves. something worth while for the use of my land, you may come again and speak with me." "Suggestions?" Brazil radioed. "Leave without argument," said a voice from above. "We can analyze what we've got and try again." while Brazil and Foley bowed deeply to the king, who told them with a straight face that he was providing them with an escort back to their ship, that no harm should come to them on the way. "They'll see the scout unless we can shake them," Brazil radioed, starting out of the throne room. "Guess maybe we'll have to give them a minimum marvel to look at," said Gates' voice. "There's a suitable deep cove just outside the city, about two miles from where you are. Just walk south along the shore; I'll bring the scout up partly out of the water for you to get in, and let them get a good enough look to be sure it's a ship and not a sea monster. Okay?" "Good idea," said Captain Dietrich. "A submarine will explain to them why they haven't seen our ship. It'll startle them some, but it should further convince them we're not spirits who just materialize." Ariton walked with the planeteers out of the castle; they stopped at the landing steps to pick up Sunto, who was much relieved to see them. Sunto ceased bailing and climbed out of his rowboat when told they were leaving by land. He said to a Red soldier standing guard nearby: "I leave to you as a gift the noble craft which you have praised so highly." And he ground his foot against the stone stair. The Red glowered but said nothing. The walk out of the city was uneventful. Within an hour the four of them stood on the steep sloping shore within the chosen cove, with Galamand's heavily armed honor guard watching very carefully from a little distance and a Red galley casually standing by off shore. Foley was telling Ariton that a ship would soon come to take Brazil and him aboard, but she and Sunto would have to stay on shore. She agreed calmly, and watched the horizon for the ship, with some puzzlement.  Brazil turned to Sunto. "The Tower of the Sea God is very important to your people and the Reds, is it not?" "Yes." Sunto did not seem especially interested in the subject. "It is our old belief that as long as the Tower is not destroyed by the waves of the sea, the Sea God smiles upon the rulers of the island, whoever they be." "What if the waves should knock the Tower down?" Brazil asked. Sunto smiled wryly. "Then I think you would see upon this island the one tribe for which Ariton says you asked the king. , For the Tower to be so destroyed would mean the Sea God thinks the rulers of the island evil. The destruction of his own Tower is to be his last warning before he overwhelms with waves the entire island, slaying everyone on it and carrying the evildoers down to  be frozen forever in the ice at the bottom of the sea." "Get more on this, Boris," said an excited radio voice. "Ask Ariton about the Tower, Foley. She should be the real authority. I Gates, hold that scout imderwater I for a minute." i B razil asked Simto; "Do you think the Sea God will ever destroy the Tower?" Sunto looked out at the ocean soberly; it was dull and placid in the sun. "May I never see the day -- but I am a practical man. Whoever is king will surely see to it that the sea wall of large rocks is kept strong at the base of the Tower, to break the force of the waves. Some day, perhaps, a very great storm... but there are great storms every year. The Tower has stood for many years." "Is the season for great storms coming soon?" Brazil felt the vague beginnings of what might be a valid idea. "No, it is just past. Now is the time of the steady-but-not-toostrong winds." "Oh. I see." "That checks," said Meteorology from above. Sunto continued: "Also, the Tower stands on a straight shoreline, and the Sea God hurls his waves most strongly against the points of land that jut out into his domain, as if he were jealous." "That is true in all lands," said Brazil absently. He had just the start of a plan to get these people co-operating, by somehow making the Tower seem threatened by a storm, and scaring them. It might be just possible to induce a violent storm. But what would it do to the rest of the island? The scheme seemed worthless... "That is true in all lands. As it is true that the waves come in nearly always parallel to the shore, no matter from which point at sea the wind is blowing. And the reason is the same... Brazil fell silent, as if in a sudden dream. "Why, that is so, but I have never thought about it," said Sunto in surprise. "Truly, the waves are like women, for men watch them long and understand them but little." "... that they travel more slowly as the water beneath them grows more shallow," said Brazil with a far-away look. He gave a sudden laugh at the sight of Sunto's startled face. "Waves, I mean, not women. Sunto, tell me this. If the Tower were destroyed by some means other than the waves, what then?" "What then?" Sunto gave the Blond equivalent of a shrug. "Why, the Tower would simply have to be rebuilt, and the king would gain merit in the Sea God's eyes by rebuilding." He thought for a moment. "Maybe the Red king would rebuild it on some inland hill, where no wave could ever reach it, and so make his rule safe." Brazil nodded as if satisfied. with Foley in scoutship Alpha, gratefully peeling off gadgets and chunks of armor. He faced on a segmented screen the debriefing assembly of their peers and bosses, electronically gathered to analyze the visit to Galamand. The astounded natives who had watched the two planeteers enter the submarine craft were by now no doubt attendiiig their own conferences on the subject. "First, just tell me this," Brazil invited, eyes alight with an idea. "Does it seem likely that a massive assault of ocean waves on this Tower might make these together, at least for a while, so we could deal with a halfway representative government?" "I would say yes, based on what Ariton told me," said Foley. "I would tend to agree," said Sociology, cautiously. "It might well give us a start in the right direction." "An assault of ocean waves, you say." Captain Dietrich frowned. "Not of forcefields, explosives, chemicals or sonic vibrations." "Captain, I think there's a chance it can be done with this scoutship, and not by directing any of those modern weapons against the Tower." "I am afraid I would have to forbid tbe use of such weapons against the natives, on principle," said Chandragupta grimly. "The idea is not to wreck the Tower," said Brazil, "but to make the natives think the Sea God has decided to wreck it." "That Galamand's no fool," said Gates. "He's probably thinking up antisubmarine devices already. And how are you going to stir up suitable waves with a scoutship?" "I'm not going to stir them up, exactly. And I don't think Galamand will notice a submarine acting several miles out at sea, away from his Tower." "Are you drunk?" "No, on duty. Another reason for trying to get this situation settled. Now I'll need some information before I can tell if this scheme has a chance of working." Late that afternoon a cute chick who happened to be an expert oceanographer gave Brazil data he had requested. He studied it for a few moments, then favored the girl's screen image with a look like that of an elated predator. "Baby, I think I could kiss you." "Your threats don't frighten me at this distance," she answered, unperturbed. "Is there anything else you want -- having to do with the job, that is?" He turned serious. "Now I need a weather forecast of such massive solidity that we can all lean on it -- one that includes a steady ocean breeze here." Sea God, and chief caretaker of the Tower, was awakened by the sound of the waves, to which he listened with half an ear even while asleep. The sound was now too loud for his liking. He arose from his pallet and was dressing in the stone-damp darkness of his chamber in the Tower's base when he received a shock. A streaming puddle of cold sea water flowed against his bare foot on the floor. He hastened to light a candle from the smoldering brazier that fought uselessly against the permanent dampness of his bedchamber. It was true, he saw with distress. Water was entering in thin streams through chinks in the massive masonry of the inner Tower wall. It was something that happened only in the heaviest storms. The booming roar of the waves pounding the heavy sea wall outside brought him to the beginning of real fright. In ten years in the Tower he had never heard it so .loud. A mighty storm must be raging, though the season for them was past, and the weather signs had given no indication of any approaching tempest. Trofand was nearly dressed when an underling came with a torch, pounding on his door and opening it with a minimum of courtesy. "My lord, the waves, the waves! They are very bad!" "I have ears, fool. Someone should have called me sooner. What are the signs of the storm's length?" "My lord, there is no storm." Trofand started an angry retort to the foolish statement, but something in the pale frightened face before him made him pause. Fastening his belt, he led the way out of the chamber to the stair that climbed to the Tower's top. He could soon see for himself what was happening. It was true, he realized, emerging into the pre-dawn darkness atop the Tower. The sky was clear. The wind was steady in direction from the sea, but it was not strong. The surf at the Tower's foot should be fairly gentle. He thought he felt the stones of the Tower quiver underfoot with each leisurely watery smash. An assistant was at his elbow, speaking with a worried voice. "My lord, what shall we do? The signs are that the wind will rise throughout the day, and remain steady in direction. If the waves become yet higher -- " "If they do, we will deal with them. The Sea God is not our enemy. Go rouse out the Tower slaves. Conscript more if need be. Have them . stand by the fresh slabs of rock, ready at dawn to strengthen the sea wall. Then go you to offer the day's sacrifice to the Sea God. But do not take too long about it." "I obey." The man was gone in an instant, down the stair. Other junior priests of the Tower huddled about Trofand in the chill night, in the light of a dim torch, looking to him for guidance. Trofand said to himself. He was thinking of the extra stones, weighing many tons apiece, that he had long ago ordered to be kept on rollers in the courtyard below. They were constantly ready to be moved to reinforce the sea wall in case a storm of unprecedented violence should threaten the Tower. But now he had a question to decide immediately. Should he order the king awakened? After all, the Tower seemed in no immediate danger. Galamand might grumble if he were waked up for something unimportant. But he might have the man boiled alive who failed to wake him for a real emergency, priest of the Sea God or not. It was not a hard decision to make. "You -- go rouse the king. Tell him I say that waves threaten the Tower. Tell no one else." "I obey." King Galamand was beside Trofand within a few minutes, looking over the parapet and frowning at the strange intensity of waves that were driven by such a modest wind. He observed the preparations that had been made to reinforce the sea wall at dawn, then turned and struck his fist against the parapet, i "You did well to call me. But i these stones have stood through! out my lifetime, and I say that they will stand yet a good while longer." Trofand saw him outlined against the first gray light , in the east. i The Blond slaves, whipped on j by overseers, now began to roll the mighty rock slabs into posi tion to reinforce the sea wall. It ! would be dangerous work. But j slaves could be replaced, while  the Tower --  There was an outcry somej where inside the Tower. In a  minute an exhausted runner appeared, helped up the stairs by others. He leaned against the stones beside the king in near panic. "My lord, the sea wall -- the wall away from the Tower, up and down the peninsula -- " "Is it breached by waves? Where?" "No, my lord." A gasp for breath. "I came along the wall, after carrying your message conscripting slaves -- " 'Well?" "Elsewhere, my lord, the waves are small. Only here at the Tower do they rise abnormally, as if in raging anger. As if the Sea God has grown angry and -- uh!" Galamand's vicious backhand blow knocked the man sprawling. "Enough! Do not preach the anger of the gods at me, or I will show you what anger is! I am the king!" The king turned away to peer, with Trofand and the others, at the waves beating against the sea wall at a distance from the Tower. The fast brightening dawn revealed that the messenger had spoken the truth. saw, as he strode along the sea wall road toward the Tower and the fortified complex of Galamand's castle. A puzzled Ariton walked between him and Foley. Reds and Blonds stood in little groups along the wall, commenting on the waves that were assaulting the base of the Tower. Faces turned toward them as they passed, but ever turned back again to the greater wonder of the waves. Each long swell marched in from the clear horizon of the ocean, foaming up and curling over as the depth of the water below approaching the height of the wave, to smash itself finally against the rocks piled in the shallow water at the base of the sea wall. But in the sea before the Tower, each incoming rise of water seemed to squeeze itself together along its long axis, rising to at last three times the height of the waves elsewhere, before it piled up in a foaming fury of discriminating violence upon that part of the sea wall. Ariton paused at her first sight of this, whispering something that might have been a prayer. "You knew of this?" she asked Brazil. "This is why you brought me here?" "I'm taking you to talk to Galamand," Brazil evaded. "I think if you and he can't come to some peaceful agreement soon, there won't be any Tower left for either of you to use. You have lived near the sea all your life. You know the strength that is in large waves." "What do you mean?" she stared at him, half afraid. "Do you speak for the Sea God?" "We are only men," he answered innocently. "But do I not understand your gods correctly? Is it not so that the Sea God may destroy his own Tower when there is great strife in the land and evil rulers, as a final warning to all the people, before he destroys the entire island?" "It is true the Reds are evil rulers," she said after a long moment, as if thinking aloud. Then she took her eyes from Brazil's face and turned toward the Tower. "Come, whoever you are. It is my place to be there now." "Is this going to work?" Foley radioed while they walked. "I mean that Tower isn't built out of pebbles, exactly. And it's stood through a lot of storms." "On Earth," answered Brazil in professorial accents, "wave forces have been measured at well over three tons per square foot. Engineers will not build a shoreline structure on Earth without carefully considering local conditions regarding the effect we are now employing. "Besides, the idea is to scare Galamand and the little lady here into co-operating, not to actually wreck the Tower. That would probably kill someone, and I hate to think what might happen in the panic." A T the castle gate, the guards seemed almost to be looking over their shoulders at the Tower as they halted the three visitors and sent word to Galamand of their arrival. Everyone in sight. Red or Blond, was obviously thinking or talking of nothing but the waves. Within a few minutes, a guide appeared to escort the visitors to the bare top of the Tower. Brazil could see by the flags above the castle that the wind had increased slightly and was holding a steady direction, as Meteorology had promised it would. If we were only gods enough to control the winds in an area of a few square miles, thought Brazil. We can come a hundred light years to stick our noses into our neighbors' business, but if the weather doesn't quite suit our schemes when we arrive, we can only wait until it does. Galamand scoured them with his single eye when they had climbed the stairs to the Tower's top. The king paused in his pacing amid a group of high-ranking Reds. "Come you to preach the Sea God to me also?" he inquired in an ominously quiet voice. Ariton looked about her. "Where is Trofand?" "He has gone to offer sacrifices in the chapel below," said the king, with a tinge of amusement in his voice. He leaned against the parapet with thick arms folded and his back to the sea as if in contempt. "He has rather suddenly remembered to take his religious obligations seriously." "A human sacrifice?" asked Brazil. He hadn't counted on this. "He considers it," said Galamand. "But I think the Sea God has lives enough for one day." He moved his head to indicate that they should look over the parapet. In the cold boiling hell of surf at the Tower's foot a hundred Blond slaves struggled on the slippery rocks, straining on levers and vine ropes to move an enormous block of stone into the surf at a place where the waves had weakened the wall. With each torrential ebb and surge of water, Brazil saw, a pale object in the surf was drawn out and hurled in near the rocks, buried in foam and tossed up again -- a fish-pale thing that had blond hair and no longer any face. And there was another -- and another... No Blond slave or Red overseer took any apparent notice of the drowned men, much less attempted to pull them from the sea. Every living man down there was concerned too intently with his own footing on the treacherous rock. "Take it easy, old man," said a voice inside Brazil's helmet. red-hot planeteer, said a louder voice inside Brazil's mind. Just trust him, and he'll come up with a great scheme to set everyone on the road to happiness without bloodshed. That's important, no bloodshed. Well, you can't see any blood down there, can you? Now that's enough. Shut up and get to work, there's a job to finish. "Why does the surf attack only the place of the Tower, oh king?" he asked, turning, stony-faced. The blue eye studied him. "Had I a ship so cunningly built as to travel underwater, I might discover why." Galamand turned to his aides. "Send boats and divers out beyond the white water. See if anything strange lies under the surface." "The old boy's uncomfortably shrewd," said Foley on radio. "Doesn't seem likely they'll search the bottom five miles out and a couple hundred feet deep, though." Boats and divers soon appeared in the sea a few hundred yards out from the Tower, and made a show of investigating underwater conditions. It was not a really dangerous job for such skillful sailors and swimmers, out there where there were no rocks to be dashed against. But the Red seamen seemed to approach the job with a vast reluctance. Their faces turned often toward the Tower, as if in hope that the king would recall them. Time passed. By noon the wind was obviously gaining strength again. "I go to join Trofand in the chapel," said Ariton to the king, as if daring him to stop her. He pulled at his beard and appeared not to hear. When she had gone he ordered food brought to him. His aides grew continually more gloomy. They looked often at the king, but sought to avoid his eye. Galamand was amused to see the planeteers drink their lunch from tubes inside their helmets. He asked if their suits had sanitary facilities too, and roared with laughter when he was told they had. But the laughter had a forced sound to skillful ears. The wind grew yet stronger, though it was still far from a : gale. Down below, an incoming wave got under a forty-ton slab of rock just right, and skipped it like a flat chip against the base of the Tower itself. Slaves and overseers miraculously scrambled clear. Stones split and flew; one I fragment spun almost to the Tower's top. The next wave poured through the gap in the sea wall, like the paw of a giant beast forced into a hole to grope for prey. The next tore free another huge stone from the edge of the hole. The bones of the Tower quivered. Slaves and masters at the Tower's foot scrambled desperately to move another massive rock into a defensive position. Brazil saw it was a futile thing for creatures weak as men to attempt. One roaring curl of water caught a Red, who dropped his whip and grabbed at the slippery rock to save himself. Brazil saw the upturned face, the eyes seemingly looking straight into his own, the mouth opened as if to yell something. The next wave tore the man away and dragged him out of sight. 'orders for more slaves to be brought. "You have strange powers and weapons," he demanded suddenly of Foley. "Can you help me now?" Brazil pulled himself out of a hideous fascination with what was happening down below. "And if we can?" asked Foley. "It might be that the agreement you sought with me could be quickly reached." The wind tore at Galamand's words, and shot spray past his head, here ninety feet above the normal sea. A small wave-tossed rock clattered against the parapet, as if shot from a giant's sling. "Then order those men from the sea down there," Brazil demanded. "And give your word to make of Red and Blond one tribe." "Then you can cure this," barked the king. "And it may be you have caused it!" The other Reds glared at the Earthmen; some weapons were drawn. Then cries came from the stairway, distracting attention. Ariton and Trofand were suddenly at the top of the stair, in ceremonial robes half sodden with sea water. "My king, the Sea God pours his wrath into the very chapel. I -- " Trofand jumped back, as if he thought the king's sudden lunge was directed at him. But Galamand seized Ariton, had her arm twisted behind her back and his dagger at her throat in a moment. "Sacrilege! Sacrilege!" howled Trofand. The other Reds looked on, wavering, wide-eyed, undecided. The king swung Ariton to face the planeteers. "Now, aliens," he roared. "Cause the waves to cease, and quickly, or I will butcher this so-called queen with whom you ally yourselves. You seek to put her on a throne, but I alone am king. And so I will remain!" "My lord." Ariton's low voice stopped the king in surprise. Doubtless it was the first time she had used any title of respect to him. "My death will not save our island. But I will marry you and bear your sons, if that be the only way to save it. And we will live here as one tribe." For the first time in his experience, Brazil saw Galamand taken aback. But it was only for a moment. "No, I'll not have it! I am the king here, I alone. Not you, or the aliens, or the Sea God him-, self, can order me, do this or that!" Trofand moaned and covered his face; every other Red was visibly shaken by the king's defiance of the god. He's weakening, Brazil thought, with a sudden turn of sympathy for Galamand, and he's cutting himself off from his followers. Be ready for the moment... The sea-flung stone, the size of a grapefruit, actually missed Galamand's helmeted head by less than a foot, and flew on to bounce off the opposite wall and down the stairway. The jolt from Brazil's quick-drawn stun pistol took the king in the head about one second later, when all eyes were on Galamand. No native doubted that the rock had grazed the king's helmet and caused his sudden collapse. Brazil's pistol was reholstered as quickly as it had been drawn. The Red priests and soldiers stared at the fallen ruler in awe Plainly he had been struck down for blasphemy. None of then moved to aid him. out his first-aid kit and begin ning a quick radio conference with the medics of the Yuan Chwang. The stun-jolt should wear off in a matter of minutes; administered now should ease the situation then considerably. A Red officer of apparent high rankspoke almost imploringly to Trofand: "We will obey you, my lord. Is there any way to save the island?" The priest looked uncertainly at Ariton. Brazil asked her: "Will you now marry the king, as you offered, and so unite your people with his?" She rubbed the arm that Galamand had twisted, and frowned. "There is no need for that now. The Sea God has rejected him. With your help, I will be ruler -- " "Do you want the Tower to stand?" Brazil cut her off brutally. "Remember, too, that the Red soldiers are still strong, and perhaps not eager to serve you." She nodded, meekly wide-eyed for once. Brazil turned to Trofand. "Can the marriage be done at once? As soon as the king awakes?" "If he can be made to agree to it; I see that the Sea God has spared his life, for now his eyelids move." "I think he can be made to agree," said the high-ranking officer, grimly. "I think it is time we had a certain heir to the throne, and also an end to this unprofitable fighting in our own land." Brazil switched off his air speaker, with throat muscles beginning to quiver with the relaxation of tension. "Sam, start cutting down that hump. But better stand by to rebuild, until I give you the word that the honeymoon has started." Five miles out at the sea and two hundred feet below the surface, scoutships Alpha and OmiCTon braced themselves on waterfilled space, and thrust noses equipped with jury-rigged bulldozer blades against the mound of mud and sand rising from the bottom, the mound they had carefully constructed in the same manner the day before. It was not much of a mound for size, really, and unimpressive-looking to any but an oceanographer. But it shallowed the water above it, and so it slowed the waves, refracting those from one certain direction, focussing them as a lens treats light, causing them to converge on one small area five miles away... eyes. He had not been asleep, though he sat slouched in an easy chair in an alcove of the recreation lounge aboard the Yuan Chwang. Chandragupta was standing looking down at him. f They are the aliens among us -- and their ways and wonders are stranger than extraterrestrials!  "Do you mind if I ask what you see behind your eyelids, my friend?" the Tribune asked. Brazil was not quick to answer. "Perhaps you see drowned men." The Tribune sat down facing Brazil and spoke with quiet sympathy. "My friend, you have what must be one of the most difficult jobs in the known universe; you must be a researcher, a diplomat, a fighter, a linguist and a survival expert, by turns or all at once. And I know I have left out many things. I think you do very well in your job, considering that you are no more than human. We here agreed that your plan of threatening the Tower with waves should be tried. I still think it was good. It has set the islanders on the road to unity, and so no doubt averted more suffering than it caused. The next time a similar situation arises, no doubt it can be used with even greater success." "Thanks, Chan. I can't help feeling we could have avoided getting those men drowned -- but there's no use brooding on it now." Brazil uncoiled slowly up from the chair to stretch. A little humor came back into his face. "I'm going to play it as lazy as I can for a couple of days." He straightened his off-duty semiuniform, and said, half to himself: "Maybe I'll just mosey over toward Oceanography and look up something. Hmmm -- " "Boris?" Foley's voice was heard before he came into sight "There you are. Scout just sent back word from over nightside; they spotted one of those luminous water-rings over there, this one's eight miles across. Our regular standby crew is out, so Gates wants you in the briefing room on the double. Oh yeah -- " Foley gave the uncertain smile of the bearer of a joke who doesn't understand it. "He says: "What would Thoreau have to say about that?"' Brazil's answer was probably inaccurate. thoughtfully at the molten silver image of the sun in his little bowl of water on the floor inside the kitchen window. He knew from experience that it would make dark ghost suns swim in front of his eyes for a few moments, and that was mildly interesting. Then he slowly thrust his head put over the water, careful not to ruffle its surface by rough breathing, and stared down at the mirror cat -- the Gummitch Double -- staring up at him. Gummitch had early discovered that water mirrors are very different from most glass mirrors. The scentless spirit world behind glass mirrors is an upright one sharing our gravity system, its floor a continuation of the floor in the socalled real world. But the world in a water mirror has reverse gravity. One looks down into it, but the spirit-doubles in it look up at one. In a way water mirrors are holes or pits in the world, leading down to a spirit infinity or ghostly nadir. Gummitch had pondered as to whether, if he plunged into such a pit, he would be sustained by the spirit gravity or fall forever. (It may well be that speculations of this sort account for the caution about swimming characteristic of most cats.) There was at least one exception to the general rule. The looking glass on Kitty-Come-Here's dressing table also opened into a spirit world of reverse gravity, as Gummitch had discovered when he happened to look into it during one of the regular visits he made to the dressing table top, to enjoy the delightful flowery and musky odors emanating from the fragile bottles assembled there. But exceptions to general rules, as Gummitch knew well, are only doorways to further knowledge and finer classifications. The wind could not get into the spirit world below Kitty-Come-Here's looking glass, while one of the definitive characteristics of water mirrors is that movement can very easily enter the spirit world below them, rhythmically disturbing it throughout, producing the most surreal effects, and even reducing it to chaos. Such disturbances exist only in the spirit world and are in no way a mirroring of anything in the real world: Gummitch knew that his paw did not change when it flicked the surface of the water, although the image of his paw burst into a hundred flickering fragments. (Both cats and primitive men first deduced that the world in a water mirror is a spirit world because they saw that its inhabitants were easily blown apart by the wind and must therefore be highly tenuous, though capable of regeneration.) Gummitch mildly enjoyed creating rhythmic disturbances in the spirit worlds below water mirrors. He wished there were some way to bring their excitement and weird beauty into the real world. this sunny day when our story begins, the spirit world below the water mirror in his drinking bowl was particularly vivid and bright. Gummitch stared for a while longer at the Gummitch Double and then thrust down his tongue to quench his thirst. Curling swiftly upward, it conveyed a splash of water into his mouth and also flicked a single drop of water into the air before his nose. The sun struck the drop and it flashed like a diamond. In fact, it seemed to Gummitch that for a moment he had juggled the sun on his tongue. He shook his head amazedly and touched the side of the bowl with his paw. The bowl was brimful and a few drops fell out; they also flashed like tiny suns as they fell. Gummitch had a fleeting vision, a momentary creative impulse, that was gone from his mind before he could seize it. He shook his head once more, backed away from the bowl, and then lay down with his head pillowed on his paws to contemplate the matter. The room darkened as the sun went under a cloud and the young golden dark-barred cat looked like a pool of sunlight left behind. Kitty-Come-Here had watched the whole performance from the door to the dining room and that evening she commented on it to Old Horsemeat. "He backed away from the water as if it were poison," she said. "They have been putting more chlorine in it lately, you know, and maybe he can taste the fluorides they put in for dental decay." Old Horsemeat doubted that, but his wife went on, "I can't figure out where Gummitch does his drinking these days. There never seems to be any water gone from his bowl. And we haven't had any cut flowers. And none of the faucets drip." "He probably does his drinking somewhere outside," Old Horsemeat guessed. "But he doesn't go outside very often these days," Kitty-ComeHere countered. "Scarface and the Mad Eunuch, you know. Besides, it hasn't rained for weeks. It's certainly a mystery to me where he gets his liquids. Boiling gets the chlorine out of water, doesn't it? I think I'll try him on some tomorrow." "Maybe he's depressed," Old Horsemeat suggested. "That often leads to secret drinking." This baroque witticism hit fairly close to the truth. Gummitch was depressed -- had been depressed ever since he had lost his kittenish dreams of turning into a man, achieving spaceflight, learning and publishing all the secrets of the fourth dimension, and similar marvels. The black cloud of disillusionment at realizing he could only be a cat had lightened somewhat, but he was still feeling dull and unfulfilled. Gummitch was at that difficult age for he-cats, between First Puberty, when the cat achieves essential maleness, and Second Puberty, when he gets broadchested, jowly and thick-ruffed, becoming a fully armed sexual competitor. In the ordinary course of things he would have been spending much of his time exploring the outer world, detail-mapping the immediate vicinity, spying on other cats, making cautious approaches to unescorted females and in all ways comporting himself like a fledgling male. But this was prevented by the two burly toms who lived in the houses next door and who, far more interested in murder than the pursuit of mates, had entered into partnership with the sole object of bushwacking Gummitch. Gummitch's household had nicknamed them Scarface and the Mad Eunuch, the latter being one of those males whom "fixing" turns, not placid, but homicidally maniacal. Compared to these seasoned heavyweights, Gummitch was a welterweight at most. Scarface and the Mad Eunuch lay in wait for him by turns just beyond the kitchen door, so that his forays into the outside world were largely reduced to dashes for some hiding hole, followed by long, boring but perilous sieges. He often wished that old Horsemeat's two older cats, Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra, had not gone to the country to live with Old Horsemeat's mother. They would have shown the evil bushwackers a thing or two! Mad Eunuch, Gummitch spent most of his time indoors. Since a cat is made for a half-andhalf existence -- half in the wild forest, half in the secure cave -- he took to brooding quite morbidly. He thought over-much of ghost cats in the mirror world and of the Skeleton Cat who starved to death in a locked closet and similar grisly legends. He immersed himself in racial memories, not so much of Ancient Egypt where cats were prized as minions of the lovely cat-goddess Bast and ceremoniously mummified at the end of tranquil lives, as of the Middle Ages, when European mankind waged a genocidal war against felines as being the familiars of witches. (He thought briefly of turning Kitty-ComeHere into a witch, but his hypnotic staring and tentative ritualistic mewing only made her fidgety.) And he devoted more and more time to devising dark versions of the theory of transmigration, picturing cats as Silent Souls, Gagged People of Great Talent, and the like. He had become too self-conscious to re-enter often the makebelieve world of the kitten, yet his imagination remained as active as ever. It was a truly frustrating predicament. More and more often and for longer periods he retired to meditate in a corrugated cardboard shoebox, open only at one end. The cramped quarters made it easier for him to think. Old Horsemeat called it the Cat Orgone Box after the famed Orgone Energy Accumulators of the late wildcat psychoanalyst Dr. Wilhelm Reich. If only, Gummitch thought, he could devise some way of objectifying the intimations of beauty that flitted through his darkly clouded mind! Now, on the evening of the sunny day when he had backed away from his water bowl, he attacked the problem anew. He knew he had been fleetingly on the verge of a great idea, an idea involving water, light and movement. An idea he had unfortunately forgotten. He closed his eyes and twitched his nose. I must concentrate, he thought to himself, concentrate... ' remembered her idea about Gummitch's water. She boiled two cupfuls in a spotless enamelware saucepan, letting it cool for half an hour before using it to replace the seemingly offensive water in the young cat's bowl. It was only then she noticed that the bowl had been upset. She casually assumed that bigfooted Old Horsemeat must have been responsible for the accident, or possibly one of the two children -- darting Sissy or blundering Baby. She wiped the bowl and filled it with the water she had dechlorinated. "Come here, Kitty, come here," she called to Gummitch, who had been watching her actions attentively from the dining room door. The young cat stayed where he was. "Oh, well, if you want to be coy," she said, shrugging her ' shoulders. There was a mysterj" about the spilled water. It had apparently disappeared entirely, though the day seemed hardly dry enough for total evaporation. Then she saw it standing in a puddle by the wall fully ten feet away from the bowl. She made a quick deduction and frowned a bit worriedly. "I never realized the kitchen floor sloped that much," she told Old Horsemeat after dinner. "Maybe some beams need to be jacked up in the basement. I'd hate to think of collapsing into it while I cooked dinner." "I'm sure this house finished all its settling thirty years ago," her husband assured her hurriedly. "That slope's always been there." "Well, if you say so," KittyCome-Here allowed doubtfully. Next day she found Gummitch's bowl upset again and the remains of the boiled water in a puddle across the room. As she mopped it up, she began to do some thinking without benefit of Concentration Box. meat and Sissy had vehemently denied kicking into the water bowl or stepping on its edge, she voiced her conclusions. "I think Gummitch upsets it," she said. "He's rejecting it. It still and # other Novelets from Galaxy One of the best eollections of Seienee Fietion Stories edited by Horace Gold, published by Doubleday  Co. Priced at #. We have # copies available at # while they last. Galaxy Publishing Co... Inc., #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. I enclose # for each copy. We pay postage.) copies at I .# -- . -- total. Name  Address . City Zone State doesn't taste right to him and he wants to show us." "Maybe he only likes it after it's run across the floor and got seasoned with household dust and the corpses of germs," suggested Old Horsemeat, who believed most cats were bohemian types. "I'll have you know I scrub that linoleum," Kitty-Come-Here asserted. "Well, with detergent and scouring powder, then," Old Horsemeat amended resourcefullyKitty-Come-Here made a scornful noise. "I still want to know where he gets his liquids," she said. "He's been off milk for weeks, you know, and he only drinks a little broth when I give him that. Yet he doesn't seem dehydrated. It's a real mystery and -- " "Maybe he's built a still in the attic," Old Horsemeat interjected. " -- and I'm going to find the answers," Kitty-Come-Here concluded, ignoring the facetious interruption. "I'm going to find out where he gets the water he does drink and why he rejects the water I give him. This time I'm going to boil it and put in a pinch of salt. Just a pinch." "Y ou make animals sound more delicate about food and drink than humans," Old Horsemeat observed. "They probably are," his wife countered. "For one thing they don't smoke, or drink Martinis. It's my firm belief that animals -- cats, anyway -- like good food just as much as we do. And the same sort of good food. They don't enjoy canned catfood any more than we would, though they can eat it. Just as we could if we had to. I really don't think Gummitch would have such a passion for raw horsemeat except you started him on it so early." "He probably thinks of it as steak tartare," Old Horsemeat said. Next day Kitty-Come-Here found her salted offering upset just as the two previous bowls had been. the Great Spilled Water Mystery that preoccupied the human members of the Gummitch household for weeks. Not every day, but frequently, and sometimes two and three times a day, Gummitch's little bowl was upset. No one ever saw the young cat do it. But it was generally accepted that he was responsible, though for a time Old Horsemeat had theories that he did not voice involving Sissy and Baby. Kitty-Come-Here bought Gummitch a firm-footed rubber bowl for his water, though she hesitated over the purchase for some time, certain he would be able to taste the rubber. This bowl was found upset just like his regular china one and like the tin one she briefly revived from his kitten days. All sorts of clues and possibly related circumstances were seized upon and dissected. For instance, after about a month of the mysannounced, "I've been thinking back and as far as I can remember it never happens except on sunny days." "Oh, Good Lord!" Old Horsemeat reacted. Meanwhile Kitty-Come-Here continued to try to concoct a kind of water that would be palatable to Gummitch. As she continued without success, her formulas became more fantastic. She quit boiling it for the most part but added a pinch of sugar, a spoonful of beer, a few flakes of oregano, a green leaf, a violet, a drop of vanilla extract, a drop of iodine... "No wonder he rejects the stuff," Old Horsemeat was tempted to say, but didn't. Finally Kitty-Come-Here, inspired by the sight of a greenly glittering rack of it at the supermarket, purchased a half gallon of bottled water from a famous spring. She wondered why she hadn't thought of this step earlier -- it certainly ought to take care of her haunting convictions about the unpalatableness of chlorine or fluorides. (She herself could distinctly taste the fluorides in the tap water, though she never mentioned this to Old Horsemeat.) One other development during the Great Spilled Water Mystery was that Gummitch gradually emerged from depression and became quite gay. He took to dancing cat schottisches and gigues impromptu in the living room of an evening and so forgot his dignity as to battle joyously with the vacuum-cleaner dragon when Old Horsemeat used one of the smaller attachments to curry him; the young cat clutched the hairy round brush to his stomach and madly clawed it as it whuitled menacingly. Even the afternoon he came home with a shoulder gashed by the Mad Eunuch he seemed strangely light-hearted and debonair. solved one sunny Sunday afternoon. Going into the bathroom in. her stocking feet, Kitty-Come-Here saw Gummitch apparently trying to drown himself in the toilet. His hindquarters were on the seat but the rest of his body went down into the bowl. Coming closer, she saw that his forelegs were braced against the opposite side of the bowl, just above the water surface, while his head thrust down sharply between his shoulders. She could distinctly hear rhythmic lapping. To tell the truth, Kitty-ComeHere was rather shocked. She had certain rather fixed ideas about the delicacy of cats. It speaks well for her progressive grounding that she did not shout at Gummitch but softly summoned her husband. By the time Old Horsemeat arrived the young cat had refreshed himself and was coming out of his "well" with a sudden backward undulation. He passed them in the doorway with a single mew and upward look and then made off for the kitchen. The blue and white room was bright with sunlight. Outside the sky was blue and the leaves were rustling in a stiff breeze. Gummitch looked back once, as if to make sure his human congeners had followed, mewed again, and then advanced briskly toward his little bowl with the air of one who proposes to reveal all mysteries at once. Kitty-Come-Here had almost outdone herself. She had for the first time poured him the bottled water, and she had floated a few rose petals on the surface. Gummitch regarded them carefully, sniffed at them, and then proceeded to fish them out one by one and shake them off his paw. Old Horsemeat repressed the urge to say, "I told you so." When the water surface was completely free and winking in the sunlight, Gummitch curved one paw under the side of the bowl and jerked. Half the water spilled out, gathered itself, and then began to flow across the floor in little rushes, a silver ribbon sparkling with sunlight that divided and subdivided and reunited as it followed the slope. Gummitch crouched to one side, watching it intensely, following its progress inch by inch and foot by foot, almost pouncing on the little temporary pools that fotmed, but not quite touching them. Twice he mewed faintly in excitement. #T#'S playing with it," Old Horsemeat said incredulously. "No," Kitty-Come-Here countered wide-eyed, "he's creating something. Silver mice. Watersnakes. Twinkling vines." "Good Lord, you're right," Old Horsemeat agreed. "It's a new art form. Would you call it water painting? Or water sculpture? Somehow I think that's best. As if a sculptor made mobiles out of molten tin." "It's gone so quickly, though," Kitty-Come-Here objected, a little sadly. "Art ought to last. Look, it's almost all flowed over to the wall now." "Some of the best art forms are completely fugitive," Old Horsemeat argued. "What about improvisation in music and dancing? What about jam sessions and shadow figures on the wall? Gummitch can always do it again -- in fact, he must have been doing it again and again this last month. It's never exactly the same, like waves or fires. But it's beautiful." "I suppose so," Kitty-ComeHere said. Then coming to herself, she continued, "But I don't think it can be healthy for him to go on drinking water out of the toilet. Really." Old Horsemeat shrugged. He had an insight about the artistic temperament and the need to dig for inspiration into the smelly fundamentals of life, but it was difficult to express delicately. Kitty-Come-Here sighed, as if bidding farewell to all her efforts with rose petals and crystalline bottled purity and vanilla extract and the soda water which had amazed Gummitch by faintly spitting and purring at him. "Oh, well," she said, "I can scrub it out more often, I suppose." Meanwhile, Gummitch had gone back to his bowl and, using both paws, overset it completely. Now, nose a-twitch, he once more pursued the silver streams alive with suns, refreshing his spirit with the sight of them. He was fretted by no problems about what he was doing. He had solved them all with one of his characteristically sharp distinctions: there was the sacred water, the sparklingly clear water to create with, and there was the water with character, the water to drink. for your information but not in June or July, or in December or January. If there is a moon in the sky it should be a sickle only; if the moon is full or nearly full you can give up before you started. Now if you have a clear night in one of the eight months where it can be done -- and where there is no full moon -- try to figure out where the sun is at the moment. Then look at the spot in the sky precisely opposite to the position of the sun. If, in addition to ever # rthing else, your night vision is good you'll see a patch of light, very faint light. I have never succeeded myself (I keep trying, though) but the books say that this patch of light is roughly elliptical in shape, does not have a clear outline and that its largest diameter is three to four times the diameter of the moon. That i the Gegenschein. The name is German. Its English equivalent would be "counterglow" and up until a few days ago I thought that the "counter" part of the name refers to the fact that it is opposite the sun. Now, having waded through old accounts, it seems equally probable to me that the Gegenschein has its name because it is opposite to the zodiacal light. As has been hinted by the list of provisions in the first paragraph the Gegenschein is so weak that it is drowned out by the light of the full moon. The reason why two months in winter and two months in summer are ruled out is that during those months the Milky Way covers the area of the Gegenschein. Even the Milky Way is more luminous than this patch of light. The Gegenschein was discovered by -- but here we run into the first complication. The Gegenschein seems to have about as many discoverers as the atmosphere of Venus which was first noticed either by the American Rittenhouse or else by the Russian Lomonossov -- with the fair probability that a note may turn up somewhere crediting somebody more than a century earlier. are in fair agreement that the first discover of the Gegenschein was the German astronomer Theodor Brorsen. Brorsen, born in # in the township of Norburg on the island of Alsen made his discovery in # and published it the following year in a scientific journal under the title Ueber eine neue Erscheinung am Zodiakallicht ("On a new phenomenon of the zodiacal light"). But Brorsen himself stated that he was not the first to see it, and credits an observer with the name of Pezenas as having been the first to have seen it in #. What strikes me as strange is that it was not seen earlier. When Giovanni Domenico Cassini was director of the Paris Observatory -- from #I until near the end of his life in # -- he once spoke to his assistant Niccolo Fatio about the zodiacal light and suggested that Fatio observe it as often as possible, which, in the temperate zone, is not very often. Fatio devoted several years to watching for the zodiacal light and wrote a treatise about his observations in #. It seems somewhat incredible that he should not have come across the Gegenschein but apparently he didn't; Brorsen was careful to check astronomical literature for forerunners of his own discovery. Presumably because the Gegenschein is so hard to see nobody followed up on Brorsen's first report. But twenty-two years later the Geenschein was discovered again, this time by an Englishman, T. W. Backhouse. He lectured to the Royal Society about it. The paper was published in the Monthly Notices in # under the title On the aspect of ihe zodiacal liht opposite the Sun. The third (or fourth, if you count Mr. Pezenas) discoverer of the Gegenschein was an American, Edward Emerson Barnard, whose eyesight seems to have had built-in amplifiers. He saw it one night in # and thought that it was a very high thin cloud illuminated by starlight. But during the following night the "cloud" was still in the same place. Barnard who had not been brought up as an astronomer (he was originally a photographer) did not know about Brorsen's and Backhouse's earlier papers at the time. But he immediately concluded that this was an astronomical phenomenon. Now if we agree on the definition that everything more than # miles from sea level is an astronomical phenomenon Barnard's conclusion is unassailable. Unfortunately this does not tell us what it is. THE oldest explanation ties the Gegenschein to the zodiacal light, which appears as a slanting cone of light that can be seen (especially in the tropics) after sunset. If you watch in the morning before sunrise the same cone of light often precedes the rising of the sun. In fact, in the Near East, where some religious practices depend on the moment of sunrise, the zodiacal light had been noted down under names meaning "false dawn" as having no religious significance. (According to Alexander von Humboldt, in his Kosmos, vol. I., page # of the original edition, the inhabitants of Mexico knew the zodiacal light prior to #.) Because of this shape its first systematic observer, Niccolo Fatio, concluded that the zodiacal light was actually an accumulation of dust particles in space, generally lens-shaped, its central plane more or less coinciding with the ecliptic, and illuminated by the sun. Fatio, and many others, thought that the diameter of this dust lens was less than the diameter of the earth's orbit. Now, some astronomers said after the discovery of the Gegenschein, all we have to do is to assume that the dust lens, in an attenuated form, extends beyond the earth's orbit. Each dust particle would naturally behave like a tiny moon. Those' particles closer to the sun than we are would turn their dark backsides to us and we could not see them. Those at the same distance from the sun as the earth would show a half-moon phase, but since there are not many of them we don't notice them. But those farther away would have "full phase", comparable to the full moon when it is farther from the sun than the earth. Those we see, as a very dim patch of light. That the Gegenschein is always opposite to the sun is, therefore, easily explained. The laws of optics demand it; we see only those which, to us, are fully illuminated. And they are opposite the position of the sun. Barnard himself improved on this idea by pointing out that the earth's atmosphere should act as a lens and concentrate sunlight in that direction. The reason why anybody bothered to think of additional explanations was that, as time went on, astronomers had less and less use for that much dust in space and found more and more reasons to doubt its existence. sible, hence the Gegenschein might be an isolated dust cloud. It could be mathematically proved that a body located on the line connecting the center of the sun and the center of the earth would be dragged along by the earth, if it was located either somewhat closer to the sun or somewhat farther from the sun. There were just two conditions, in addition to the location on that line. One was a certain distance, # miles from the earth, if the body was farther away from the sun. The Gegenschein could be at just that distance. At any event one trianfrom earth. The other condition was that the body to be dragged along had to have a very small mass as compared to the mass of the earth. Well, obviously a dust cloud would be virtually massless as compared to earth. (See Figure.) In between, some other reMotion Relative positions off Earth, Moon and Gegenschein. (Not to scale.) searchers, for example Svante Arrhenius, pointed out that they had reasons to believe that our earth had a very tenuous tail, like a comet. And like a comet's tail it would point away from the sun. The Gegenschein was simply this tail, as it appeared to people looking from its origin along its length. Still later -- beginning in about # -- Dr. Edward O. Hulburt, then one of the research directors at the Naval Research Laboratory, evolved another theory which has some similarity to the comet tail postulated by Arrhenius. It goes under the name of "atmospheric ion theory." It assumes a hairpin-shaped 'Veil" of ions around the earth, with the two "legs" of the hairpin pointing away from the sun. The light of the Gegenschein, according to this theory, is the end on view of the "legs" of the veil, much as thought by Arrhenius. The zodiacal light would be caused by the ions of the hairpin's bend, reemitting solar energy as visible light. In about # the Russians began to feel that some modern work should be done on both zodiacal light and Gegenschein, and at the Gorna Astrophysical Observatory at Alma Ata they tried to take spectrograms of both. They succeeded in taking spectrograms, but these turned out to be just somewhat more powerful versions of the lines that the night sky would produce anywhere. The puzzle of the Gegenschein is still unsolved. Could we do something with a space probe? Well, if the old dust cloud theory is correct the answer is yes. But trying to shoot a rocket into the Gegenschein would be tricky indeed. Shooting "straight out" is an impossibility. What could be tried is to shoot past the moon when the moon is in about the position shown on the diagram. Then, if the rocket passes close enough (it might also have to be slowed down) the moon would deflect its path to the extent that the so-called "escape leg," after passing the moon, will point in the direction of the Gegenschein. Some additional guidance would certainly be needed. In fact, the whole shot looks too difficult for the immediate future. But if we do get a space probe to go through the Gegenschein we would know what it is. In the meantime I'll keep trying at least to see it. The Annexation of Patagonia readers that they like my column to be as far-ranging as possible, the virtually forgotten story of the "annexation" of Patagonia by the German Empire might prove to be amusing, especially since it has a scientific aspect. The year was #, at the time when all the European powers grabbed colonies whereever they could. And the unwitting "hero" was Dr. Ludwig Brackebusch, professor of mineralogy at a university in Argentina, a native of Northeim in Germany and recipient of a Ph.D. from the nearby University of Gottingen. The news first "broke" in a small newspaper which served both Northeim and Gottingen, the two townships interested in Dr. Brackebusch as a native son. The paper reported that Prof. Brackebusch -- in a manner which was left completely unexplained -- had annexed all the land to the south of # southern latitude and for some distance to the west of # western longitude, generally known as Patagonia. The article went on to say that the erection of a meteorological station at Cape Horn was being planned and that the newly annexed area should have some profitable aspects. To begin with, tobacco growing had just been undertaken there and was found to be very promising. And the land was thickly dotted with copses of a tree popularly known as the vinegar pear (scientific name: Pirus communis var. acetosa). While the fruit of this tree was unlikely to find a wide market, the wood would be welcome since it was' just like mahogany. That news of such far-reaching importance as the acquisition o'f a whole new colony should originate in an obscure provincial paper was explained by the bigger newspapers as presumably due to the fact that Prof. Brackebusch had first told this fact to members of his family. At any event a dozen other German newspapers reprinted the story, papers which were progressively more important. Naturally the "news" was taken over by other newspapers, especially in England. A notice even made the Times in London. As for Prof. Brackebusch he was peacefully teaching mineralogy all along. Until, one day, he received a letter from the government of Argentina, firmly requesting his presence in Buenos Aires on a certain day and at a certain time. In Buenos Aires they considered Patagonia a part of Argentina and nobody was ready for a compromise of any sort. Well, Brackebusch could prove that he had not been absent from the campus for long enough even to take a trip to Patagonia and the session ended with both head and handshaking. Fortunately it soon turned out that a group of graduates in Gottingen, after imbibing a sufficient quantity of beer, had written the original notice in the little paper. The storm blew over. Brackebusch, about a year later, called on them during a leave of absence, armed with specially printed calling cards reading Prof. Dr. Ludwig Brackebusch Protector of Patagonia and in general nobody was harmed or mad for very long. Oh, the scientific aspect of the story? Nobody -- but nobody -- had checked the coordinates on a piap. The ocean there is probably two miles deep. Mathematical Note on Seven-League Boots TT was probably inevitable that somebody who recently saw me off at an airport, looking at the Boeing # jet waiting for me, remarked "Now you step into your seven-league boot and you'll be in New York in about five hours." This sounded like a nice literary remark at the time, but later, during the flight, I started to think in figures. Part of it was due to the fact that I remembered a science r I fiction (or fantasy) story I had I read more than # years ago. I The story -- it was of short novel length, and I seem to remember that it was of French origin although I wouldn't swear to it -- began with the incident that a corpse is found on a country road. It is a corpse of a fairly young man, mangled and bruised and cut beyond description. Every bone in his body is broken and there is just enough left of his face to make a drawing for a public poster asking, "Has anybody seen this man recently?" The only thing which is not damaged are the high walking boots the man is wearing; they are new, Russian style, well made and in perfect condition. A week or two later the wife of a dairy farmer reports to the police. Yes, she had seen the man, on the same day he was found dead. He had come asking for something to eat. She had given him something to eat and, seeing that his shoes were in an impossible condition, had given him the boots which had been around the hoUse. When she turned around the man was gone, without even having said thank you. And the boots, the policeman wanted to know, did they belong to your husband? No, said the woman, we took them off a man my husband and the gendarme found dead in the forest a few years ago after the spring thaw. He could not be identified and he was in rags. But his boots were too new and too good to be buried with him. The story is, of course, that the narrator then traced the indestructible boots backward until he had seven cases of dead bodies, all wearing new Russian style walking boots. And each corpse was found seven leagues from the place where the man had been given a new pair of boots by somebody who felt sorry for him. Well, my modern seven-league boot, the # jet, was making about ten miles a minute at the time, flying high up in thin air to reduce aerodynamic drag. This was fast all right, but not yet as fast as the seven-league boots. At normal walking pace you make about three steps in two seconds. In sixty seconds you make, therefore, # steps. Wearing the seven-league boots you would cover # times # leagues. Since the league is usually defined as three statute miles, this means you would walk # miles per minute or # miles per hour. Regretfully I had to conclude that the author of that partly remembered story (which was such a nice idea) had made a mistake. His conclusion was that the seven-league boots had been created by an evil magician to claim victim after victim. They would have done no such thing. The very first man to wear them, with his very first step, would not only have gone into orbit but would have acquired more than escape velocity and would have disappeared from this earth forever. #f I stood on another planet would the sky look different? Could I, lor example, see the Southern Cross? Dorothy Steinfeld Elizabeth, N. J. My first impulse, when I received this question, was to write at the bottom of the letter, "Yes, provided you look in the right direction," but then it occurred to me that this is a far more interesting point than it appears to be at the surface. The general answer is, of course, that, as far as the socalled fixed stars are concerned, it does not make any difference whether you look up from the nightside of Mercury or from the surface of Neptune's larger moon, cury. The major constellations will look alike from  any planet in our solar system. It is true that the distance just mentioned would cause a minor shift for a few nearby stars, but that would not be enough to be perceptible to the naked eye. But otherwise the sky would look different from different planets. Let's quickly run through the list. From the brightside of Mercury you wouldn't see anything. An eye adjusted to the sun glare of the brightside would not be capable of registering star images. From the nightside of Mercury you would see two really Earth) but aside from them the picture of the sky would be the same as from Earth. From Venus, if you could look through its atmosphere. Earth would be the would look much brighter than it does from Earth. The sky as seen from Mars would be fairly different. To begin with you would have two evening (or morning) stars, Venus and Earth, with the Earth much the brighter of the two. Then you would have another very bright star, nearly motionless, namely the outer moon of Mars, Deimos. The inner moon, Phobos, would provide most of the entertainment. It would rise in the West and climb to its zenith in # hours and # minutes, increasing visibly in size and also changing its phases in the process. When at its zenith, twice r I out of three times, it would wink out, eclipsed by the planet's shadow. The view from one of the moons of Jupiter would again be much different. Of course, the masive planet would be the dominant object in the sky. If you were on one of the smaller moons of Jupiter the four large moons would be interesting sights, too. The Sun would have only about l#th the apparent diameter as compared with the view from Earth, still showing a The other small moons of Jupiter would not be visible to the naked eye. Of the inner planets, Venus and Earth should be visible quite close to the sun. It is very likely that the two clusters of the "Trojans" -- the small groups of asteroids in Jupiter's orbit, # degrees ahead of and behind the planet -- could be seen. Since the eye very likely would not be able to tell the several bodies apart they might look somewhat diffuse. And at times the brightest planet in the sky would be Saturn, naturally. The sky as seen from one of Saturn's moons is again something different. Again the planet would be the dominant object in the sky. Since all of Saturn's moons are fairly large, the other eight should be visible from any of the nine. The sim would be down to one-tenth of the size to which we are used but still would shed a large amount of light. Jupiter would be the most brilliant planet in the sky. The inner planets would no longer be naked-eye objects. Of course if Saturn and Uranus are in the same sector of their respective orbits, Uranus would also be a very bright planet. Naturally Neptune, if in the proper sector of its orbit, would be a nakedeye object. From one of the moons of Uranus the sky would be mostly the sky of the fixed stars, Of course the other moons of Uranus would be clearly visible. Of the planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune would be naked-eye objects. But Neptune would put in an appearance only several centuries apart, Jupiter would appear to be close to the sun (and the sun that the planet that could be seen much of the time would be Saturn -- with disappearances amounting to about a dozen Earth years. And from Neptune's larger moon you would see the sun), the smaller moon of Neptune on frequent occasions and for long periods not a single one of the other planets. But from each planet -- especially if you had a pair of binoculars to help you -- the appearance of the constellations would be typical enough so that one hour of observation would tell you where you are. Why is a division by zero undefined? If you answer that it is undefined by definition (paradox? ) why doesn't somebody define it? Charles T. Warren West Chester, Penna. This is a question which requires two answers, and I don't think that two answers to one question is too paradoxical. The first answer is that mathematicians, like lawyers and judges, do not always use the Queen's English the way other people do. Mathematicians will say, without batting an eyelash, that the "trivial divisors" are naturally ruled out and that they expect a "unique" solution to this problem. But a "trivial divisor" just means either the figure itself or else "one," while a unique solution is not an unusual one but merely means that there is only one solution. Now for the "undefined" division. You realize easily that multiplying a figure by zero will always result in zero -- because the reV quest to multiply #, or # or # by zero is a request not to multi' ply it at all, not even once. Now if you tried to divide by zero you would have the following: The figure M is to be divided by N, with X as the result. Logically, then, N times X must equal M. Now let us assume that N  # so that you divide M by zero and start looking for the value of X, assuming, naturally, that M is a figure other than zero. The equation N times X  M now has turned into zero times X  M. But zero times X is zero, hence M would have to be zero too which makes the whole operation nonsense because this produces X  ##. Going over the procedure once more slowly, you'll realize that you either find that X just doesn't have any logical value, or else you find that zero times X equals zero -- which we knew all along. Hence, some mathematicians call this operation "undefined," with the meaning that it doesn't yield a result. Other mathematicians feel more strongly about it and have added a commandment saying, "Thou shalt not divide by zero." i Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street. New York #, N.Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. # For !# or #e each Enclose cheek, cosh or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foreign Postage Name Address City State... What I wanted was a sleep. What I got rights with the most pack of sleepwalkers . up through the stone steps of the Medical Center and broke on my shoe. According to my watch, it was time for the breakfast I didn't have that morning, so I waited a moment for the usual two rashers of bacon. When they materialized, I hopped aside to avoid them and went back into the building, where the elevator took me straight up to the psychiatric floor, without asking. "Your blood pressure, salts, minerals, vitamins, basal metabolism, brain pattern, nervous reflexes and skin temperature control are within accepted tolerances," it droned, opening the doors to let me off. "You have no clinical organic disorders; you weigh a hundred and fifty-two pounds. Earth, measure six feet one inch, and have a clear pallid complexion and an egg on your shoe." I walked down the corridor to Dr. Doogle Spacio-Psycho Please Enter and went determinedly in. "Name, please," said the blonde receptionist, tapping her nail eroder. "Jones. Harry Jones." "Mr. Harry K. Jones, the physicist?" "Yes." "Oh, no," she said, fiddling with the appointment list, "Mr. Harry K. Jones has just had his morning appointment and left." "I know," I said. "An important piece of clinical data has just turned up. I have returned with an egg on my shoe." "I think you'd better see the doctor." I sat down to wait and took the little bottle of pills from my pocket. "From the Galaxy to you, through Dr. Doogle, SpacioPsycho," it said on the label. "The last word in tranquilizers. Conservative Zen methods only, appointments any hour, first consultation free, no obligation, #-#, Earth. Active ingredients oxylatohydrobenzoic-pheophenophino, sugar, coloring to # ." inner office door opened and Dr. Doogle smiled fatly at me from behind his expensive desk. "Do come in," he called, "and tell me all about it." "It's happened again," I said, going into his office. "Well, why not, if you feel that way? Nurse, bring me Mr. Hing-humph's case history." "Mr. Har-ry K. Jo-nes' film is in the transcriber. Doctor," said the receptionist. "Mr. Jones, the physicist." "Ah, yes, of course. Please sit down, Mr. Jones. Now what exactly is the trouble? Hold nothing back, tell me all, reveal your intimate thoughts." "The main entrance just served me the breakfast that your diet forbids," I said, sitting down. "Plain case of wish fulfillment. Put it down to poltergeists, Mr. Jones." "And what exactly do you mean by that?" "Well, now," Dr. Doogle said, drumming his fat fingers, "I don't think we need to go into technicalities, Mr. Jones." "Look," I said firmly. "I came to you to get a quiet night's sleep. No more insomnia, you said, leave your problems in the laboratory, let not the nuclei! banish sleep, work hard, sleep hard, take tranquilizers and enjoy the useful recuperation of the daily wear on body tissues, deep dreamless sleep of the innocent." He look at me suspiciously. "It sounds like the sort of advice I might have given," he admitted. "Well, at least I managed to keep my dreams in my head until I started your treatment. I have an urgent problem to solve that vitally affects national security. I can't have this sort of thing happening in the middle of an experiment." I pointed to the fried egg on my shoe and shook it off on the pile of his green carpet. "Yes. Well," he said, peering over the desk at it. "If you feel that strongly, Mr. Jones, perhaps you'd better give up the diet and just take the pills." "I want to know how it happens," I said, and I settled firmly into the consulting chair. Dr. Doogle coughed professionally. "Of course, of course. You are an intelligent man, Mr. Jones. One of our leading physical scientists. Naturally you wish to know the precise mechanism of such phenomena. Very commendable and entirely natural. Think no more about it." "Dr. Doogle, do you know what you are doing?" "Spacio-Psycho is still in its early stages, Mr. Jones. You are really privileged to be a pioneer, you know. We have had some most interesting results with that new tranquilizer. I hope you're not losing faith, Mr. Jones?" "I accept the orthodox philosophy of Spacio-Psycho, it is only the basic philosophy of Ch'anna or Zen, and I had the routine scientific education, naturally." "Ah," said Dr. Doogle with rapture, "the substratum of the imiverse is no-mind, and thus all material things are in constant unimpeded mutual solution. Ji-jimuge, the appleness of an apple is indistinguishable from the cupness of a cup." "And an egg on the shoe is the breakfast I didn't have," I said. "Here," he said. "I think those pills are sending your sleeping mind down beyond the purely jjersonal level of your own emotions and subconscious cerebrations. Take these, in a little water, half an hour before going to bed." I stood up and walked over to the door. "What are they?" I asked. "Same as before, only stronger. Should send you right down to the vK)t of things. Pass quiet nights in no-mind, Mr. Jones, sleep beyond the trammels of self, support yourself on the universal calm sea of no-mind." "If these don't work, there'll be no-fee," I told him. pills that night, turned off the light and lay back in bed, waiting for sleep to come and get me. The antiseptic odor of the Medical Center recalled itself, but nothing else happened, and I was still waiting to go to sleep when I woke up next morning. No dreams of a breakfast I couldn't eat, no dreams at all. I had been smelling the memory of formaldehyde and just slid off to sleep. I could still smell it, for that matter, as if it were coming from the slightly open bedroom window. I looked up. "Hallo," said the tall skinny man in a doctor's coat on the window sill. "Hallo yourself," I said. "Go away, I'm awake." "Yes, you are. At least I assume you are. But I'm not." I sat up and looked at him, and he obligingly turned his head to profile against the brightness of the window. He had a sharp, beaky face that was familiar. "Haven't we met somewhere?" I asked. "Certainly," he said, in a. slightly affected voice. 'Well?" "I don't know your name," he said, "but I have a very important post-operative case at present, and you keep charging around the ward when you're asleep. I just came over, as soon as I could get a few hours sleep myself, to ask you to stop doing it, if you don't mind." "I've done no such thing." "You were doing it all last night, my friend." "I was not," I said. "I spent last night here in my own bed. I didn't even dream." "Ah, that probably accounts for it. Tell me, do you take drugs, tranquilizers, by any chance? We've had a lot of trouble with that. They seem to cause a bubble in the sequence of probabilities and things shift about. I've been taking a new one myself, while this case is on. I suspect that although I'm dreaming you, I think, you are not asleep at all. At least I wasn't when you made all that noise in my ward last night." "No, I'm awake," I said. "Very much so." "I see. Well, I shall wake up soon myself and go back to my own world, of course. But while I'm here, I suppose you haven't any advanced works on postoperative hyperspace relapse? 'Tity," he said, as I shook my head. "I suppose you have no information on the fourth octave of ultra-uranium elements?" He shook his head. "Didn't even know they existed," he said. "I don't believe they do in my probable time. What are you, a physicist? Ah," he added, as I nodded, "I wanted to specialize in physics when I was in college, but I went in for medicine instead." "So did I," I said, "medicine, I mean, but I never passed pharmacology with all those confusing extraterrestrial derivatives." "Really?" he said interestedly. "It's my weakest subject, too. I'm a pretty good surgeon, but an awful fool with medications. I suppose that's how we got together. You won't come busting up the ward again, will you?" "I'd like to be obliging, but if I don't dream and I don't know where I am when I'm asleep, I don't see what I can do to stop it. It's not as if I'm really there, is it?" H e crossed his arms and frowned at me. "Look," he said. "In my probable time, you're as much physically there as I am now in your time here. I'll prove it. I know I'm asleep in the emergency surgeon's room in my hospital. You know you're awake in your bedroom." He held out his hand and walked across the floor to me. "My name's Jones," he said. "So's mine," I answered, shaking his solid hand. "This must be a very vivid dream to you." We smiled at each other, and as he turned away, I caught sight of his reflection in the wall mirror beside my hairbrush on the cabinet. "Good heavens!" I said. "In a mirror, you look exactly like me. Is your name Harry Jones?" He stopped, walked over to the mirror and moved about until he could see me in it. "Harold EL Jones," he said. 'You've got the face I shave every morning, but I've only just recognized you. You're me." "I prefer to think you are me," I said. "So you did fail that final pharmacology exam, eh? And I didn't, in my probability. Well, well. I must admit it seemed more probable I would fail at the time, but I passed." "It was that tramp Kate's fault. She said yes too easily." He coughed and looked at his fingers. "She said no to me. And, as a matter of fact, after I passed I married her. She's my wife." "Tm sorry. I meant nothing personal." "You never married?" "I never really got over Kate," I said. "I wonder what would have happened if I had qualified and then not married her." "You mean what did happen -- to the Harry K Jones who passed in pharmacology but did not marry Kate. He must be around in another probability somewhere, the same as we are. Good heavens," I shouted, "somewhere I may have solved the fourth octave equation." "You're right, Harry. And I may have found out how to get hyperspace relapse under control." "Harold," I said, "This is momentous! It is more probable that you-I and I-you will make a mess of things, but there must be other probability sequences where we are successful." "And we can get to them," he shouted, jumping up. "Are you using oxylatohydrobenzoic-pheophenophino?" "Something like that." "Three pills last thing at night?" "Yes." "Ever have foreign bodies materialize into your time-space?" "Several breakfasts," I said. "The last egg was yesterday, on my shoe." "It was Virginia ham with me, so I stopped dieting and increased the dosage." "So did I," I said. "I suppose, apart from major points where a whole probability branches off, we lead much the same lives. But eggs don't dream. How did the ham get into your waking world?" "Harry, really! I have a tendency to jump to conclusions, which you must control. How do you know eggs don't dream? I would have thought, though, that a pig was peculiarly liable to the nightmare that it will end up as a rasher -- . any reasonably observant pig, that is. But I don't think that is necessary. Obviously, we are dipping down to a stratum where things coexist in fact, and not merely one in fact and the other in mind, or one probability and not its twin alternative. Now, how do I get hold of the me that solved this hyperspace relapse business?" "And I the ultra-uranium octave relationship," I added. "Look out," he said. "I'm waking up. Good-by, Harry. Look after myself..." He flickered, paused in recovery and then faded insubstantially away. I looked around my empty bedroom. Then, because it was time to go to work at the laboratory, I shaved, dressed and left my apartment, as usual. had been visiting the laboratory, showing off to their females how they were important enough to visit the top-secret bomb proving labs, and the thick perfume was hanging in the sealed rooms like a damp curtain. "I wish they wouldn't bring women into the unventilated labs," I grumbled to my assistant "Never mind. Chief. If you can make this bomb work, they'll let you build your own lab in the Nevada desert, with no roads to it. Have you found the solution?" "I'll tell you when I have," I said. "But I do have a new approach to the problem." And as soon as I could, I left I the labs and went back to my apartment downtown, took three! pills and lay still, waiting for sleep. I could not get the smell of that perfume in the lab out of my nose. It was a heavy gardenia-plus-whatnot odor. I woke up in the middle of the night with the perfume still clinging to the air. The room was dark and I crossed my fingers as I leaned over to turn; on the bedside lamp. If mental concentration on all the possible errors in my work was the key, the successful me should be here in the room, snatched from his own segment of probability. I turned on the light. There was no one else in the room. "Hell," I said. Perhaps it just meant he, or that me, was not asleep, or was perversely not using tranquilizers. Or didn't that matter? No, I controlled this alone and had gone wrong. "Did you say something, Jiany?" asked Kate, stepping out of the bathroom and pulling the top of her nightgown into, I guess, place. "Ooo, fancy dreaming about you. This is odd." I sat up and covered myself protectively in the bedsheets. "Look, Kate," I said. "I don't want to see you. I'm not your husband, really. He's a pleasant fellow, I met him today, and he's not me. I never became a doctor. No doubt you remember what I was doing instead of studying." That was a mistake, for she came and sat on the edge of the bed and ran her fingers into my hair. "I thought it was odd I should dream about my husband," she said. "I'll believe you, because I don't know how I got here and you do look like the Harry I used to know, before he went all high scientific surgeon and no time for fun." She curved more fully than she had when she was eighteen, but there was neat sjmimetry to her sine formulae, and she still had blonde hair. Her perfume was the same as the one in the lab I had been smelling all day, it was now reaching me at high amperage. So that was the key, the evocative power of smell association. I sniffed deeply at the perfume in appreciation. "Like it?" Kate asked, wriggling. "Only for its scientific values," I said. "It suggests a most valuable line of research." "I'm in favor," she said, and pressed me to the bed. "Your husband is coming!" I shouted, and it worked. She disappeared. Presumably she woke up in her own probability timespace. And no doubt Kate's reflexes by now were trained to snap her awake and away at the suggestion that her husband was around. It was highly improbable that Kate would alter much. I got up to make myself some coffee. There was no point in wasting sleep without a plan. Clearly, I had to take the pills and fix the appropriate smell in my mind, and when I woke up I would drag the proper slice of another probability with me. And then I would interview the me who had solved the ultrauranium heavy element equation. And the bomb to end all bombs would be perfected. The test was ready, waiting for me to say, "Let's go, boys. We know what will happen this time." But there Was, it struck me, the difficulty of finding the right scent to evoke the right probable me. paste, deodorant, shaving stick, aftershave lotion I could find in the bathroom and started on the toothpaste. I inhaled deeply and lay down, with the first tube on my chest. But after the coffee, I slept very briefly, and when I looked up there was only a toothbrush on the carpet. It was not mine in this world and I had no idea whose it was, or rather which probable me it belonged to. But at least this established the principle. The smell produced the object -- and, if I went deep enough in sleep, it would produce the whole Jones. I dressed quickly and went out for a walk in the night air, breathing deeply and memorizing every scent I came across. Then I went back to the apartment, sniffed hard at the row of personal unguents, and lay down to sleep. When I woke up, it was morning and the room was full of people. There were about a dozen of me, some wearing very odd clothes, some scowling, others grinning unbecomingly, and some looking just plain stupid. "Gentlemen," I said, standing up on my bed, "I am sorry to disturb your dreams but a matter of vital consequence has made me call you all here. I am Harry, or Harold K Jones, and I became a physicist. I need your help. Do any of you know anything about the octaves of elements beyond uranium?" There was a babble, through which I heard chiefly: "The man's mad... He says he's me... Who are you, anyway?... No, you're not. I'm Jones..." "Please, gentlemen," I said. "I don't expect we have much time before some of you wake up in your own probability. You, sir, in the armchair -- yes, you in the tight pants -- how about you?" "Me?" he said. "I'm Captain Jones. Third Vector Spacefleet. Engineer rank. Who the galactic hellix are you, eh?" Even from the bed, I could detect the smell of sweat and grease from his working uniform. "I suppose you took up flight engineering at high school?" I suggested. "Quite right," he snapped. An early deviation, obviously. I remembered being enthralled with the arrival when I was a kid of the early space rockets, but my enthusiasm was daunted by old Birchall, who made us stick to airplanes. Obviously, his was not. "How about you?" I asked, pointing to the thinnest me in the room. "Penal colony on Arcetus," he ; said. "Eternal labor." "Oh, I'm sorry. I wonder which time -- well, how many physicists are there here, or physical chemists, or astronomers, or even general scientists?" I walked around the room, detecting toothpaste brands A, B, C and Whitebrighter, and a range of toilet preparations with manly odors contributing to our popularity with friends, relatives, girls and bosses, but no other physicist. Not a trace of research in my line. And one or two of them were already showing signs of waking up elsewhere and disappearing from the room. I was about to start tracing it back to the point when I abandoned a medical career, and I could still smell the formaldehyde, when Dr. Harold K. Jones appeared. "Look," he said, "I want you to keep away from Kate. Perhaps I didn't make that clear yesterday... Good heavens, where did you get all, of these me from? Does anyone here know anything about post-operative hyperspace relapse?" -more than half of them did. Perhaps I should have been a doctor, after all. The probabilities were heavily represented in medicine. I sat on the bed and stared at my toes while the doctors babbled excitedly together. I gathered that Dr. Harold K. Jones had solved his problem, anyway. "Excuse me," said a thoughtful me in a very quiet voice. "I didn't want to make myself obtrusive, but I did do a certain amount of research on the theoretical possibilities of elements heavier than uranium. It seemed to me they might go on being discovered almost indefinitely." "They are," I said quickly, "octave after octave of them. Tell me about it, please." "Look," he said, "it was only an idea. I really specialized in biochemistry, but we do use trace elements, and the formula I worked out at the time was -- let me see..." "Please try to remember," I said. "Ah, yes, it was this," he said, and the strain of remembering woke him up and he disappeared back to his own probability. 'This was damned well planned, Harry!" said Dr. Harold K. Jones enthusiastically. "I think we can save hundreds of people every year now. I always knew I had it in me." "Listen, Jones," said Captain Jones of the Third Vector Spacefleet, pushing himself through the crowd. "I've been talking to one or two of the others, see, and if you have the galactic gall to disturb my sleep again, I'm going to blast you. Is that clear?" "Perfectly," I said. "It's tricky out in space, you know. No hard feelings, but the fraction of a micro-error and poof! You see what I mean. I must get a sound sleep at standdown." "Don't forget what I said about Kate," Dr. Harold K. Jones remembered to warn me. "I know how to do it, too. And you can have an accident with my instruments -- easily." He disappeared. I watched as the others woke up and went, one by one, even the felon from Arcetus, until they were all gone and I was alone with dark thoughts on heavy elements. It was so improbable that I was the only me who had worked on these lines, and very probable that if two of us with similar minds did work on the same problem, we could between us find the answer. Look at Dr. Jones and his hyperspace relapse. Thinking of Dr. Jones made me think of Kate, and I fell asleep again with the memory of her scent in my head, as if I were really smelling it. When I woke up again, halfway through the morning, there she was in my room. She was at least dressed E R E N C E this time, but she smiled familiarly at me. "For God's sake, Kate," I said, "go back to your husband!" Haroldkin," she said. "I'm so glad to see you. I must be dreaming, because I know you're dead, but I've kept everything just the way it was. Look -- I haven't even touched your messy desk." "Are you sitting in a room?" I asked. "I'm in your study, Haroldkin," she said, surprised. "Can't you see?" "No, as a matter of fact, I can't." "Oh! Then I can throw out all these old papers?" "What old papers?" "Oh, I don't know, Haroldkin," Kate said. "You made such a fuss about failing that silly medical exam that you never let me touch your desk when you graduated in physics." "Physics!" "Yes," said Kate, throwing paper after paper onto the carpet. She made sweeping motions in the air and dumped a mass of notes into her lap. They appeared on her fingertips, but they stayed in existence when she dropped them on the carpet. "How did I die?" I asked, bending down and thumbing rapidly over the papers. "A bomb went off," she said. "I really don't want to talk about it. But you were so eminent, Haroldkin!" I must have been very soft in the discrimination to have allowed that revolting nickname, I thought, but it was clear from the papers I was holding that I knew my physics. And there it was, printed in an issue of the Commission's Journal that never existed in my time-space, the whole equation I was looking for. It was so obvious when I read it that I could not understand how I failed to think of it for myself -- for my own myself, that is. When I looked up, this probable Kate had gone. I wanted to thank her, but the evening would do. Meanwhile, here was the ultra-uranium fourth octave equation. I called the laboratory, read it off to my assistant, and told him to get on with the test. "Right, Chief. I'll go down myself and give you a report when I get back." I said fine and took the rest of the day off. It was the peak of my career so far, and from the widow Kate's comments, it seemed as if I had a great probable career to come. Of course, I would have to redouble our safety precautions at the labs and it would be best if I never went near the proving grounds. That other physicist me probably made some error that I would avoid, being forewarned. By evening, I decided to try to locate that probable Kate again, to thank her, and to find out exactly how that poor me blew himself up with a bomb. With care, I recalled the perfume and also the musty smell of the papers, for I did not want Dr. Harold K. Jones' Kate appearing. Then I removed all other odoriferous substances from the bedroom, took three pills and was about to lie down to sleep when my assistant called to report on the test. "That you. Chief? What a success! We're made. Your name's in lights. Chief! It was the most colossal explosion I've ever seen. It burned the area like toast. It even smelled like toast, with a touch of ozone and sulphur. Very strong smell..." "Stop!" I screamed. "Stop!" But it was too late. I could smell it clearly as he had described it. And now the pills are working. How in the name of heaven am I going to stay awake? Because once I fall asleep... A few months ago we announced that Galaxy Magazine was to be available for the blind in a Talking Record edition. Now we are also to be found in Braille. Starting with the October, #, issue a Braille edition has been printed by blind workers at Clovernook Printing House, published by Galaxy Publishing Corporation through the facilities of the Library of Congress. Each Braille issue runs to four parts. If you have sightless friends who enjoy science fiction -- or who you think might if they had a chance to read it -- copies of the Braille edition may be obtained from the Regional Library for the Blind. Periodicals to be reprinted in Braille are chosen by the number of requests from sightless persons. Galaxy is the only science-fiction magazine to be available in this form. When a man makes that claim, don't make the mistake of asking him to prove it. T rouble was brewing at Nick's. There was nothing surprising in that -- it was payday at the mines, and miners are the same all over the Galaxy. In some places, however, they're more the same than others, and Cronfeld was easily the toughest of the so-called civilized worlds. Ricky Chiotza, the big Blue Star foreman, was in the early stages of the slow burn which in due course would inevitably reach the point of spontaneous combustion. Trouble was, somebody had stolen Rickses girl He didn't know who, any more than he knew precisely who his girl was, but if there was one thing sure it was that Ricky Chiotza was going to get the guy. Occasionally Chiotza shot black looks at Sammy Talbot, who had taken a hundred dollars from him in a poker game, the night before. Except when he was drunk, as he was now. that slick so-and-so was too smart for his own good. Chiotza swore every week never to play poker with him again -- and every week he joined the game in the hope of getting back what he'd lost the week before. Most of the ladies -- that was the polite name for them -- had scented the raw passion that was writhing in the garish, smokefilled air of Nick's, and had prudently retired to powder their noses. Some thirty big, sweating. unsteady, check-shirted, womanless miners were left, drinking neat whisky like beer, talking in loud, belligerent tones and listening to nobody else. Sammy Talbot, the smallest man in the room, was rapidly reaching the state of furious drunkenness when he would tell the world at the top of his voice that he could do anything. When that happened, the effects were predictable. Sammy's luck with cards didn't make him popular with the men who had been losing regularly to him for years. Nobody believed that he had any superhuman abilities, and it was quite true that with cards he hadn't -- he just happened to be a good poker player. Drunk, as he was now, Sammy wasn't so smart. Sammy was quite likely to pick a fight with Ricky Chiotza, who was three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than Sammy. Afterward, someone would rustle up Cliff Burns from whatever high society function he happened to be honoring with his presence, and Cliff, after cursing for a minute or two, would come and scrape up what was left of Sammy. it could rain only in Cronfeld. There was no wind -- there seldom was. Cronfeld had virtually no weather except blasting heat, rain, fog and, occasionally, snow. The rain poured patiently out of the dark sky, keeping the paved road perpetually four inches deep in water despite the efficiency of the drainage -- drainage on Cronfeld had to be efficient or there was no use messing with it -- and elsewhere of years of experimental evidence to the contrary that silicon dust would eventually dissolve in water. Across the street from Nick's was the Garden, the West End of the mining town. You couldn't be on the right or wrong side of the tracks on Cronfeld, there being no railroad. But you could be a miner or something else. If you were a miner, you lived in the shacks or the hostels, fought, drank, sweated, ate like a pig and died like a wolf, torn to pieces by the rest of the pack. If you weren't a miner, you lived in Garden City, wore expensive clothes or impractical clothes to prove you weren't a miner, and spent your whole life insisting vehemently that there really was cultured, educated society on Cronfeld. There is no upper set quite so frenetically gay, quite so extravagant, quite so artificial, as a privileged class which exists side by side with an exceedingly underprivileged group. The vast contrasts of the French Revolution, the Tsarist regime and the Great Depressions weren't curious, inexplicable accidents. No more than two hundred yards from Nick's, Cliff Burns adjusted his already perfect white tie, smoothed his impeccable tails, and surveyed the scene in the Benjamin ballroom with carefully assumed boredom. There had been a mix-up and half the guests had thought it was a fancy dress ball and the other half hadn't. It didn't matter -- everybody agreed that this only made it a better party than ever. The floor and the walls were of glass, the drapes dull crimson. An enormous crystal staircase curved voluptuously into the ballroom itself, and in the center of the glass floor a fountain cascaded, lit by concealed colored lights. The guests were pale and antiseptically clean, for on a dirty, muddy world where it was easy to acquire a deep brown tan it was naturally a mark of quality ' to be spotlessly clean and pale as a white orchid. Everybody was having a wonderful time, and the gayest of all were the people who secretly wished they were in bed and asleep. The orchestra was playing a Strauss waltz. Strauas himself had been buried four centuries ago on a world # light-years away, but nobody thought there was anshing odd in playing his music on Cronfeld. You could be cultured and still listen to Strauss, and he was a lot easier to listen to than Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart or any of that crowd. A blonde in black tights flicked her whip at Cliff's white tie, laughing shrilly, but he hardly looked at her. He was looking for Shirley Benjamin. He needn't have bothered. The daughter of the house could hardly be expected to make an ordinary, unheralded entrance. Abruptly the orchestra stopped playing Voices of Spring, went into Lovely to Look At, and Shirley slowly descended the crystal staircase, regally alone, to polite applause.  ward to meet her at the foot of the stairs. Before he could say anything, she giggled and said: "I know. Cliff. You're angry because I'm not wearing your ring. Don't be mean. Cliff. That would spoil it. Don't you see the idea? No earrings, necklace, ring, bangles -- " "I see the idea all right," Cliff growled. She laughed again. "Oh, I get it. You don't want anybody to see me like this but you, is that it? Go ahead, Cliff, be jealous. That's all right." He choked back his annoyance with an effort. He simply couldn't afford to quarrel with Shirley. She represented his one chance of escape from Cronfeld. "Well, if you aren't going to ask me to dance," she said, piqued, "I can easily find somebody else..." The orchestra was playing a slow drag. He took her in his arms and they moved out on the floor. If he had dared he would have sent her back upstairs to put on more clothes. But there was too much at stake -- and you didn't tell Shirley Benjamin what she could and couldn't do. Mamma and Papa Benjamin were looking on dotingly. No hope of support there. In their eyes Shirley could do no wrong. himself that it was just as well that they felt like that, for if Shirley hadn't been allowed to do exactly as she chose there wouldn't have been much chance of Cliff Burns ever succeeding in becoming engaged to her. Gradually Cliffs annoyance subsided. Every man in the room envied him, he knew, and probably most of them knew that Shirley wasn't going to close her bedroom door on him after the ball. Long ago, when he was planning his campaign to marry Shirley and escape from Cronfeld, he had decided that Shirley was the kind of girl who would be easier to marry afterward if he'd seduced her first, who would be easier to hold if she thought she had to work to hold him. Naturally he had never allowed her to suspect that he'd have married the sleaziest girl from Nick's if that would have gotten him off Cronfeld. He was just beginning to enjoy himself when he felt a tug at his sleeve. "Excuse me," the butler murmured. "Phone call." Cliff stepped away from Shirley with a muffled curse. Why couldn't Sammy keep out of trouble for just one night? He forced his lips to smile. "Excuse me, darling." It was Bill Monkton, phoning from Nick's. Uptown and Downtown had only one thing in common -- the telephone system. But even that wasn't as egalitarian as it might be. Every instrument in Garden City had a red light on it which lit up wamingly whenever the call was from the Jungle. And if you didn't want to be soiled by even telephonic contact, you didn't need to take the call. The red light was on now. "Sammy's going to get hurt," Monkton whined. "Chiotza is spoiling for a fight, and any moment Sammy is going to oblige him. Chiotza will kill Sammy." Monkton wasn't very bright. Cliff thought, if it had never occurred to him that nothing would suit Cliff better. But despite the trouble Sammy was always getting into and the number of fights he lost, Sammy never did get killed, and Cliff was getting impatient. "What's the good of telling me that?" Cliff demanded. "I can't come over there and drag Sammy out of it, can I? Call again if anything happens." TE hurried back to the ball-room. Shirley was on the bandstand, her supple torso writhing rhsdhmically in an exhibition that was five per cent dance and ninety-five per cent sex. Cliff pulled her down from the stand, not very gently. He was angry again. It offended his dignity that the girl he was going to marry should act like a tramp. "That low-life pal of yours again. Cliff?" Shirley said. "What's he got on you?" "We knew each other on Earth," Cliff said easily. It was a lie -- he had met Sammy for the first time on Cronfeld. They had barely started dancing again when Cliff was called to the phone once more. This time he didn't muffle his curses. Shirley giggled and blew him a kiss. "He ain't hurt bad," Monkton said over the phone. "You've seen him a lot worse." "Where is he?" "In the gutter outside Nick's." Cliff cut the connection and called a taxi. It came right to the door, close against the canopy, so that he could step into it without getting wet. "Nick's," he snapped. The cab splashed diagonally across the road and stopped beside a limp form face down in the gutter. "Lift him in," said Cliff. "I can't do it alone," the cabbie complained. "I need help." He got it, but not from Cliff. A slight figure dashed from the side door at Nick's, a figure in a shapeless raincoat. At first annoyed, for no particular reason. Cliff suddenly smiled. This girl, whoever she was, could see Sammy home, and he could go right back to the party. ' Between them the taxi-driver and the girl hoisted Sammy into the back of the car and propped him in a comer. Cliff kept well into the opposite corner, hoping his immaculate clothes weren't going to be soiled. "Get in," Cliff told the girl curtly. She blinked, but obeyed. Suddenly Sammy turned his head and saw Cliff. He tried to get up. "I'm not staying in the same room with that guy," he said indistinctly but vehemently. "You're not in a room, you're in a taxi," the girl said soothingly. "Susie... What are you doing here with this heel, Susie? Let me get at him and I'll -- " "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Sammy. Every time you get into trouble, Mr. Burns always comes and gets you out of it." Cliff was startled. Although he'd never seen this girl Susie before, apparently she knew all about him. "He gets paid for it," Sammy muttered. "Sammy!" Cliff exclaimed. "Watch what you're saying!" "You're my keeper. You get paid to keep an eye on me. You wish I was dead, but any time I get in trouble you've got to haul me out in case I die and you're held responsible. But you're really only looking for a chance to finish off the job some time when you're absolutely certain the first guy is going to get blamed for the whole thing -- " Forgetting his concern over his clothes. Cliff brushed Susie aside and slapped Sammy hard on both cheeks. Instantly he foimd himself struggling with the girl. And she was winning. "Look," he gasped. "I've had enough of this. You -- what's your name? -- Susie, will you see that Sammy gets home?" She stopped struggling, puzzled. She couldn't make out whether Cliff was Sammy's friend or not. "Sure," she said. "Sure." The taxi crossed the street again and Cliff got out. He paid the driver and stood back under the canopy of the Benjamin house. The car sloshed away, sending out bow waves like a speedboat. hostel was untidy but not dirty. There were signs that he wasn't just an ordinary miner -- books, a water color or two, a chess game he was working through. Such evidences of a not uncultured background weren't unknown among the miners. The only good reason to become a miner on Cronfeld was to escape the law, and usually men who chose this way of escape were quite unaware that the law was perfectly satisfied to know that they were there. Occasionally men escaped from jails and often men were released from jails. But nobody ever came back from the minefields of Cronfeld. Once a miner, you were stuck on Cronfeld for life. There was nothing to stop people from the Garden traveling on the space freighters which carried the more valuable ores back to the inner worlds. It was easier, however, to get through the eye of a needle than to make the short journey from the Jungle to the Garden. Money didn't help. The miners were reasonably well paid, and it was no secret that Sammy, the poker king, must have thousands stashed away somewhere. But money alone couldn't get him into the Garden. No social door had ever been more tightly bolted and barred than the door of the Garden against the Jungle. The authorities on many worlds were well aware of this. Criminals and undesirables were often helped on their way, without having the faintest suspicion of the fact, by the police of the country or world they were leaving. Susie found a rag and soaked it at the cracked sink. "I c'n do anything," Sammy uttered. "Sure you can," said Susie, working on his injuries, which weren't serious this time. Susie wasn't as pretty as Shirley Benjamin. In fact, she wasn't pretty at all, although she had a passable figure. A girl didn't have to be pretty on a world like Cronfeld. Merely to be young was enough, and Susie was about eighteen. She had nevertheless been one of Nick's girls for six years, which meant that in some kinds of experience she was as old as time. "I c'n do anything," Sammy insisted, turning his head petulantly away from her. "If I liked, I could... Susie, I've told you before. They sent me here because... Look, Susie, I'm not a killer or a thief or a brute like the rest of them. I never did anything really bad -- no more than you'd expect when a fellow can do anything he likes." "Sure, honey," said Susie tenderly. She had no other name but Susie. Having been sold to the proprietors of Nick's at the age of three months, and then boarded out with one of Nick's girls for twelve or thirteen years until she should become a commercial asset, Susie had naturally known very little tenderness in her life. Not that she had any complaints -- people who have things tough right from birth rarely do have complaints. When she met Smmy, however, it had been like a door of a prison opening into a lovely, sunny valley. Sammy wasn't much. He was always pitying himself, and getting drunk whenever he had a chance, and playing the same old bombastic I-can-do-anything record whenever he got drunk. But Sammy was nice to her in a way no one had ever been before. Sometimes she cried when she thought of it. Imagine anybody realizing she had feelings! And not merely realizing she had feelings, but respecting them. Once he had tried to give her money, a lot of money. She hadn't counted it, but it seemed to Susie's astonished eyes to be more money than she had believed, to that moment, existed in all of Cronfeld. "Go on, take it," he had said. "It's no good to me. I can't use it to get off Cronfeld. You might, if you went the right way about it." But when he had seen that she was refusing the money because of finer feelings than he had credited her with, he apologized sincerely, treating her with such respect and courtesy that she felt ashamed. At the same time, womanlike, she loved him more for it. drtmk. Susie had grown up with hard liquor, trained to make the men with her drink as much as possible, and Sammy was the only man she ever tried to stop drinking. Drunk, he was like any man. Sober, there was something fine about Sammy. "That Cliff Burns..." Sammy whispered, with loathing. "Honey, I don't get it about you and him. Does he really get paid, like you said? Like Norma was paid to look after me?" "I'm not suposed to talk about it." "Sure, honey, but you keep talking about it all the same. You keep saying that you can do anything, but you're not supposed to, and you're not even supposed to talk about it, and Cliff Burns gets paid for looking after you, but you're not supposed to talk about that either." Although when other people said such things Sammy flew into a blind rage, Susie's tone was so warm and sjrmpathetic that he couldn't be angry. "Maybe I should try to explain it to you, Susie. A guy's got to talk to somebody, sometime... I spent four years on a dead planet once. This planet hasn't even a name, but the race that used to live there called it Xyt. It was four years before I was picked up -- " "I know, honey," said Susie patiently. "Y ou told me." "I'm not supposed to tell anybody. More than that, I'm not supposed to do anything. That's why Cliff Burns is here. If I do anything, he's free to scramble me. Then he can leave here. But if he scrambles me and can't prove I did ansdhing, he'll be sent back -- as a miner this time. I'm safe from Cliff so long as I don't -- " "Honey, you just don't make no sense." His head ached. The raw whisky was still working on him. He knew, however, that even sober he'd be unable to make Susie believe what he said, and understand it. Susie was loyal and generous. She had a certain shrewdness which had once made him hope that there was something to work on in her dark head. He had discovered however, that she was completely lacking in imagination, and that her shrewdness was merely the cunning any determined animal develops in jungle conditions. She couldn't understand anything outside her own experience, and in her experience people like Sammy and people liWp Cliff could never have anything in common. Just as miners never crossed the figurative tracks to the Garden, people from the Garden never sank to the miners' level. If the charity of their friends didn't keep them from disaster, the#d lie and cheat and steal to stay in the Garden -- and if that failed, there was always suicide. "If only you'd believe me, Susie," Sammy whispered, "it wouldn't be so bad. I can do anything, Susie -- except control the encephalograph Cliff's got hidden somewhere. It would give me away. And if I make him show me where he keeps the scrambler and the encephalograph, it only lands me in deeper trouble. And it's no good phone calls every morning at ten o'clock, and if he doesn't make them I'll be scrambled anyway -- " one no good." "I never wanted to kill anybody but Cliff. That's all. I hate his guts." "That never did no one no good neither." "Don't you hate anybody, Susie?" She stared at him. "Me? Who would I hate?" He said nothing. A few minutes later she saw he was asleep. Sighing, she took off her garish dance frock and lay down beside him. He was trembling as he always did when he slept. She knew about that. It was the Dream. Poor Sammy. She loved him, pitied him, and admired him, all at once. But most of all she loved him.  something out of the France of Louis Quinze. The bed was an enormous four-poster with silk curtains which could be drawn for privacy within privacy. The dressing table was almost as massive as the bed, with three huge mirrors in which she could see herself in triplicate -- you couldn't have too much of a good thing -- or examine the back of her head if she wanted to. There were big cut-glass jars of cosmetics and silver-backed hairbrushes. And there was Shirley, standing in front of the three mirrors and looking at herself with satisfaction. She still wore her ball dress. For the moment she had forgotten Cliff, standing behind her, in her pleasure in her own beautiful body. "Shirley," said Cliff, "I want to talk to you." She pouted. It was hardly a compliment when a man admitted to her bedroom after the party was over wanted to talk. Cliff realized his mistake at once. In a moment he was behind her, pulling her against him and gently stroking her. She began to writhe in anticipatory pleasure. "There's nothing to talk about. Cliff," she whispered. "The passages are booked. We leave on the next ship, in two weeks' time. Isn't that what you wanted?" "So soon?" Cliff breathed. "You've been trying to get me to fix it for so long... Daddy finally agreed this morning. I knew it would be a wonderful surprise for you. Cliff." It was a wonderful surprise, but it was also a shock. Although he automatically went on caressing Shirley, Cliff had almost forgotten her existence. His thoughts were racing, and they weren't thoughts of Shirley Benjamin. When he'd been sent to Cronfeld to keep an eye on Sammy Talbot, he had thanked his chief with heartfelt sincerity. It had been that or a jail sentence for prisoner. Banishment on full salary to a world with civilized society seemed, at the time, infinitely preferable to jail. He had even admired, at the time, the chiefs solution to the whole problem. The chief had made no secret of the fact that he wanted Sammy scrambled, but the court had shown unexpected clemency, as courts sometimes did. Neither Cliff nor the chief really believed the stories about Sammy Talbot, but that wasn't the point. Scrambled, Sammy could be released, could be forgotten. Unscrambled, Sammy had to be watched. There no was no doubt that Sammy could do something. After three years, Cliff had changed his mind. The court's merciful ruling -- that Sammy was not to be scrambled unless or until he used his trick again -- meant that Cliff was tied up on Cronfeld, that he had to employ a couple of assistants there, that every ship from Cronfeld had to be carefully checked... in short, the court's ruling meant that instead of the Sammy Talbot case being firmly closed when he was caught, as it should have been, it stayed open until Sammy obligingly got himself killed or gave Cliff reasonable grounds for scrambling him. In three years, Sammy had done neither. Cliff wasn't worried about anything Sammy might do. Sammy was such a whining, boasting, irritable, ineffectual character that it was impossible to be worried about anything he might do. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side. Cliff had always acted as if Sammy really was dangerous. He had two auxiliaries. Monkton, who worked beside Sammy, ate with him and drank with him, and Keig, who lived in the Garden and had never seen Sammy. Each of them had a detector and a preset scrambler unit, and their job was to use the latter if the former ever showed anything. Sammy might nullify Monkton, but he could hardly cancel out Keig, of whose existence he knew nothing. Sammy was hogtied and he knew it. Cliff trusted Monkton and Keig for the excellent reason that they didn't dare cross him and they knew it. Lieutenant Gibson of the Cronfeld police also knew something about Sammy and about Cliff's responsibility for him -- not much, but something. In fact, scores of people were involved in the safety measures taken against the whining, ineffectual Sammy -- and all because a court on Earth had said, "No, don't scramble him yet." Naturally Cliff had thought often enough about scrambling Sammy and going back home with a convincing explanation. Unfortunately, he knew that he wasn't going to be convincing enough. Once Sammy Talbot was no longer a problem. Cliff could go back to Earth -- that had been the agreement. But Cliff had been assured that unless he returned with ironclad proof that he'd had to scramble Sammy, he would be on the next ship back to Cronfeld -- and this time he wouldn't be residing in the Garden. "I thought you'd be pleased," Shirley said. "Daddy didn't want to let me go. If you'd rather stay here, I can soon -- " "Of course I'm pleased," said Cliff. "I'm speechless." "Well, you don't have to talk," said Shirley. "There are other ways of expressing your appreciation." Idly Cliff wondered how a girl in Shirley's position could be so insecure that she needed so much reassurance. There were rumors that she had been an unattractive child, strange as that seemed now -- did that explain everything? In any case, there was no doubt about what he had to do now. It was surprising how being compelled to do a thing turned what should have been a great pleasure into rather a bore. same. First, Sammy lived through the crash again. Everybody but himself had been killed instantly. It had been one of those hyperspace disasters which no spaceman ever thought about, just as an airplane pilot with no parachute didn't think about crack-up in mid-air. There was no percentage in it. If you were spewed out of hyperspace, your chance of rescue was no chance any. Nobody was going to come out of a hyperspace vector voluntarily, that was for sure. The hyperspace routes were so carefully established that you didn't work them out any more; you fed the right card into the ship's computer. There was no card for the world on which Sammy's ship crashed. The chance of any other Terran ship arriving there was like the chance of a collision between the only car on the American continent and the only car in Australia. Sammy, who had been an ordinary spaceman then, survived the crash because he was thrown against a padded bulkhead which broke loose and careened on through the ship, to be stopped gradually by an aluminum water tank which acted as a giant hydraulic brake. Not unexpectedly, nobody else was as fortunate. He found himself on a cold desert world which had obviously once been hot, a world with the right kind of air but not quite enough of it, and once he fully comprehended his situation he honestly wished there had been no survivors. The ship was less than a wreck; it wasn't even a shelter. And there was no life, no water, in the desert in which it lay. Since his death from lack of air, food and water was only a matter of time, Sammy's decision to make for the mountains he could see to the north was not unreasonable. He reached the mountains fairly easily and found that they enclosed a vast valley at the bottom of which there was enough trapped air for his needs. So he wasn't going to die of lack of air, after all. There was also a stream whose waters he found he could drink without ill effects. He wasn't going to die of thirst, either. Although there was an abundance of small animals little larger than rats but much less active, it seemed for some time that this fact wasn't going to help him much. Every time he killed and ate one of them, he was violently sick. He eventually discovered, however, that it was the mixture of Terran and native food that his stomach couldn't stand. It could and did adapt to the animal life of Xsrt. So neither was he going to die of hunger. He still didn't look on his future on Xsrt with any enthusiasm -- not even when he found the ruins. For two years the ruins in the valley and the things he foimd in them meant no more to Sammy than something to keep him sane. It transpired that the Xjdiians had used a kind of paper which was less destructible than their stone and metal buildings, and which the small animals couldn't eat. Consequently Xytian literature survived complete when even their strongest buildings and machines had collapsed in rust and ruin. At the end of two years Sammy was reading Xytian literature voraciously. Even children's primers had survived, and consequently learning the language presented no great problem to a man with unlimited time on his hands. He would never be able to speak it, of course; but since there would never be anyone, Xytian or human, to speak it to, this hardly seemed to matter. The Xytians must have been very nearly human mentally, although physically there had been few resemblances. Xytian anecdotes made sense to Sammy, even if they never managed to make him laugh. He didn't do much laughing on Xyt. At the end of three years Sammy was beginning to understand Power. Power was the nearest equivalent to the Xytian word. Power had been outlawed among the Xsrtians, and yet it had killed them off in the end. Presumably, like most outlawed things, it was used by outlaws. Power was a means of doing an#d:hing -- or, rather, of making anybody else do anything. It was partly telepathic, but mainly a technique for control of another person through the unconscious. In other words, it wasn't very far removed from hypnotism. A human being given a posthypnotic command to do something, no matter how unreasonable, will dream up a reason for doing it which he is convinced is the real reason. X#?tian Power went several stages further. In the first place, since it was telepathic, words weren't needed. In the second place, since the socalled unconscious was always conscious, even in sleep, it was always accessible. Third, the unconscious had no natural defenses -- you could invade another person's unconscious without having to get past it. Fourth, once you'd done what you wanted to do in the victim's unconscious, his own conscious was on your side, working for you. At this point in his researches Sammy was still merely reading for something to do. There wasn't much direct instruction about Power in X#dian literature, naturally enough, since it was an illegal technique. But there was plenty about telepathy, which was perfectly legal. And one day when his studies of Xytian mental science were sufficiently advanced, Sammy read a paper explaining how telephathy worked through hyperspace. The Xytians knew nothing of space travel. They knew nothing of hyperspace as an extension of a point-to-point flight, a way of getting from A to B without having to traverse all the distance between A and B. Being a telepathic race, they knew hyperspace only as a medium for telepathic communication. They had been in telepathic communication with at least a score of intelligent races in the universe. Not Earthmen -- at that time the ancestors of Earthmen had been swimming about in the sea. It was then that Sammy had his first wild hope of rescue. Could he learn telepathy? Could he learn Power? Could he make Terrans in Terran ships come to Xyt for him? over. But the noise which had disturbed him went on. He sat up, blinding pain in his temples. Susie was asleep beside him, so deeply asleep that the noise of the telephone out in the hall didn't bother her. Still drunk, Sammy climbed out of bed and staggered into the hall. Vaguely wondering why the ringing had disturbed nobody else, he remembered that Smith and Proctor, who had the two nearest rooms, had both been with girls at Nick's and probably wouldn't be back until morning. "Huzza?" he said into the phone. Cliff, too, had left a woman sleeping. Shirley, like Susie, was a very deep sleeper, and that was what had given Cliff his idea. The evidence of a mistress wasn't always enough for the police, but on Cronfeld the testimony of a Benjamin -- if it should happen to be asked -- was the strongest, safest, most absolute evidence there was. Some girls would object to giving testimony like that. But not Shirley. Shirley was quite open about her relations with Cliff. She boasted about them, as if she'd been the ugliest girl on Cronfeld instead of one of the prettiest. She would say he had been with her all night -- if necessary. "Sammy, this is Cliff. No, don't hang up -- this is vital. Sammy, you and I both want to get away from Cronfeld. Well, has it ever occurred to you that if we work together, we can do it -- both of us?" Sammy was drunker than he had been when he had fallen asleep. Yet Cliff's words made sense. Sure, he hated Cliff Burns, his keeper -- his warden. Nevertheless, he had thought long ago, apparently long before the idea had occurred to Cliff, that if the two of them worked together there ought to be a way in which they could both get what they wanted. "Listen, Sammy, is Susie still with you?" Sammy looked around owlishly. There was no sign of Susie. "No," he said. "She isn't here." "Okay. Sammy, I've got to see you right away. Up by Ricky Chiotza's place. At the back, where -- " "I'm not going near that guy," said Sammy emphatically. "Had a fight with him. Bastard hit me with a bottle." Cliff had guessed as much. "It's just a place to meet, Sammy," he said. "We're not going to see Chiotza. We're just going to talk in that old shed behind his house -- to be out of the rain." Sammy thought tortuously. The shed behind Chiotza's house. "Okay," he said, and hung up. He looked down. He was stark naked. Well, that was all right -- no sense in getting his clothes wet. Why, he wondered vaguely, was he going to the shed behind Chiotza's? To meet Cliff. Cliff had an idea to get them both off Cronfeld. Might as well hear it. Could always say no. Would say no, unless Susie could come too. He staggered downstairs and out at the back door. The rain still poured steadily. Sammy didn't mind -- it felt good on his skin. Chiotza's house was only a few hundred yards away. Sammy skirted it, went around behind it, pushed open the rickety door of the old shed. Where was that Cliff Burns? It had taken Sammy perhaps five minutes to reach the shed from the telephone in the hostel. Nevertheless, it seemed like a rank discourtesy that Cliff shouldn't be waiting for him. He sat down on the stone floor, finding a piece of sacking to insulate his bare bottom from the concrete. Mus' watch this Cliff, he thought. Capable of anything, that man. Mas' be on my guard. On his guard, waiting for Cliff, Sammy fell asleep. N the face of it, Sammy's  undertaking had been a pretty wild one. The Xytians had been a telepathic race. The very nature of their literature showed this clearly. What was written down, for the most part, was what minds were liable to forget, what one mind couldn't easily pass to another mind, what was needed to supplement mental communication. Humans weren't a telepathic race. It had been shown that they weren't telepathically blind, deaf and dumb, that was all. But Sammy didn't care how fantastic his plan was. It was far more realistic, certainly, than waiting hopefully for someone to come and rescue him. And he still dreamed of rescue. Soon he began to realize that his efforts weren't so fantastic after all. What was personality, what was personal magnetism, but Power? Wasn't it possible that even if a human conscious mind couldn't reach out and touch another human conscious mind, it might be able to reach a human unconscious? Wasn't there plenty of evidence in human relations that it could? And the Xytians had not merely used telepathy, but also studied it, developed it, catalogued it. There were exercises for X#Ttian children. Exercises in extending the consciousness. Exercises in remembering-seeingprojection. Exercises in thoughtdirection. One day Sammy foimd he could control the little animals which had been his staple diet for three years. After that he hated eating them. It seemed inhuman to bring them to him to be killed and make them stand while he killed them. Yet when he could do that, did it make sense to go out and try to stun them with stones, as he'd been doing for years? Power was a way of stabbing direct at the unconscious. All animals had an unconscious, and therefore all animals could be controlled by someone who had the Xytian Power. It was doubtful whether Sammy, or anyone else, could have developed the faculty without such a stimulus. For Sammy, learning to operate Power, or not learning, was a matter of life or death. He learned. Or he thought he learned. How could he tell? The fact that he could control the Xytian creatures proved nothing beyond the fact that he had a stronger intellect than they, which was pretty obvious anyway. They could be the telepaths. Anyway, he began broadcasting his commands. They should, if everything went according to plan, be going out by hyperspace. They should reach Earth, or more particularly, any Terran ship in space. They should slide direct into the imconscious minds of Terran spacemen, who should then seek them to their source, not knowing why they really did so, but inventing for their own satisfaction perfectly good reasons why they should... The ship arrived four years and ten days after Sammss ship was wrecked. It was a survey ship, and the members of the crew were all convinced that they had been ordered to survey this section of space. For a long time after that Sammy didn't attempt to use Power again. It could have been a coincidence that the survey ship came to Xyt. In due course he would know for sure. In any case, although the survey team examined and photographed the Xytian remains, Sammy cautiously refrained from showing them any Xytian literature. It naturally didn't occur to them that any could have survived. B ack on Earth, Sammy continued to be cautious for a while. But why should he work if people could be made to want to help him, support him, love him? Any doubt that he possessed Power was soon at an end. He could do anything he wanted -- or make others do anything he wanted. With certain exceptions. About one person in a hundred was somehow blocked to him. Power just didn't work with these rare individuals. It didn't seem to matter. Sammy never found it vitally necessary to have any truck with these stubborn, intractable people -- invariably men and women who were resistant to hypnosis, too. For nearly a year Earth paid him back for the loneliness he had suffered on Xyt. Earth rePeople loved Sammy Talbot and didn't know why they loved him. It didn't matter -- they could, and did, invent plenty of reasons. On the whole, Sammy wasn't too ambitious or too cruel. That was what saved him later. He merely took what he wanted, making others want to give. When he tired of anything or anyone, he always neatly rounded off the incident in a way which gave pain to no one. He did some good, too. Sammy could touch the unconscious direct. And when people were miserable, or when people were insane, it was because of something wrong in the unconscious, something which Sammy could set right. But he did take a lot... The police must have done a good job. Of course, they had the evidence of those rare individuals whom Sammy couldn't touch. They even used a couple of them as assistants. All the same, it must have been quite a job, tracing everything back to Sammy and believing the incredible. It would have been impossible if Sammy had actually been able to read minds. But he couldn't. He could merely control other people's unconscious minds. Another thing that helped the cops was the fact, unknown to Sammy, that when he used Power, encephalographs for miles around went mad. Indeed, before they took him in they had developed a small, simple detector which was nothing like as complicated as an encephalograph but which detected Power activity at a range of several miles. After that, Sammy was hooked. police surgeon inserted a tiny instrument in a cavity in his skull. From then on Sammy could be scrambled at any time, at any distance up to a hundred miles. And so Sammy, with his magnificent Power, was as helpless as Gulliver. There were people, admittedly rare people, whom he couldn't affect. There was a Power detector. And he could be scrambled without even being caught. For a while Sammy became a secret-secret-secret agent working for the government. But the Power which only Sammy Talbot had was so awful, so dangerous, that it was decided he couldn't be allowed to keep it. After the way he carried out his assignments, who would feel safe with him unscrambled? But there justice stepped in, good old kindly, fatuous, bumbling human justice. Sammy couldn't be sentenced without a trial. So he had a trial -- a secret trial, but not a rigged one. The court ruled that Sammy had not done anything bad enough to be scrambled for it. So Sammy was sent to Cronfeld, almost a free man, with Cliff Burns to watch over him. Cliff was not, unfortunately, one of the rare individuals immune to Sammy. None of those, as it happened, could be compelled to go to Cronfeld. Cliff could. That Sammy should be exiled to Cronfeld wasn't quite what justice had intended. It certainly wasn't what the kindly, humane court which wouldn't give permission for scrambling had intended. It was a police decision and it wasn't stupid. It wasn't nearly as stupid as it looked. Neither Sammy nor Cliff knew the points which had been considered by Cliff's chief when the situation was set up. They were: #. Sammy would probably use Power and be scrambled. If that didn't happen, #. Cliff would probably scramble Sammy anyway, claiming he had used Power. Or #. Cliff would murder Sammy in the hope of gaining his freedom. That would be a pity, of course; but it would certainly be the end of an awkward moral, legal and sociological problem. #. In any case, every human being who left Cronfeld would be screened at short, medium and long range to make sure he couldn't possibly be Sammy Talbot. A lthough cuff didn't entirely believe in Sammy's alleged superhuman abilities, he reviewed what he had heard of them as he approached the hut, just in case. It was known that Sammy wasn't a telepath. That was pretty obvious anyway -- you couldn't very well drug a telepath and take him prisoner. So all Cliff had to do was make sure that he got Sammy before Sammy could do anything. Cliff couldn't use a gun, unfortunately; the miners had no guns. It would have to be a knife -- a knife like any miner's knife. Not in the heart, for men lived and used their brains after being stabbed in the heart. It would have to be in the brain. If Sammy's heart went on beating, it wouldn't matter. He couldn't do any superhuman tricks with his heart. Chiotza and Sammy had fought only a few hours ago. And Susie hadn't stayed with Sammy at the hostel -- there was no reason why Sammy should lie about that. When Sammy was found dead behind Chiotza's house, what would everybody think? Well, what did it matter what they thought? Nobody cared much about the death of a miner after a drinking session. Cliff Burns, if anybody cared to check, would have an alibi. Besides, Cliff was Sammy's friend; everybody knew that. Most of all, would anybody from the Garden be crazy enough to venture into the Jungle at night? Cliff exulted. Once Sammy was dead, he was safe, and he knew it. The Cronfeld police, who never meddled much with probably never even consider him as a suspect. He would marry Shirley and go and live on a decent world. And Cliff wouldn't have ansdhing to fear from his chief, who would have the Cronfeld police's report on Sammy's death. Cliff exulted in his cleverness, but he wasn't quite clever enough to realize that what he was doing now had been planned long ago, on Earth. He moved forward silently and pushed open the door of the hut. In the gloom he could make out Sammy, sitting down against the wall, asleep, naked. The poor drunken sot. He wanted to be killed. Cliff swung his knife in a short arc terminating at Sammy's right eye. Warned by a sense which had nothing to do with Power, Sammy opened both eyes. He hadn't time to move, hadn't even time to think. Cliff pulled his hand back and savagely hacked his own throat, almost severing his head from his shoulders. He pitched on the floor a fraction of a second after a stream of his own gushing blood. Sammy got up unsteadily. He was suddenly completely sober. He knew instantly what this meant. He had always known what it would mean when he used Power again. In that moment Sammy became a different person, very different from the weak, drunken, hopeless braggart he had been as a Cronfeld miner. Suddenly he was more like the desperate but patient man who had deciphered the Xytian manuscripts. You couldn't have a gift like that, keep it bottled up inside you and live a normal, useful life. Having Power and not using it was like sitting down for the last time, refusing to use your perfectly good legs ever again. You became a weeping, moaning, whining, self-pitying wreck of a man when you didn't do what you could do. But now they would get him and he'd be scrambled. There was no doubt about that. Already, somewhere, a tiny Power detector, a tiny Sammy Talbot detector, had jumped and made a permanent record. The suspended sentence on Sammy Talbot was now automatically confirmed, three years later. where it lay and padded through the incessant rain like a pale ghost. It was about two o'clock in the morning. He probably had eight hours, until ten. Perhaps less, certainly no longer. At the hostel he went first to the strongbox in the cellar. He didn't count the money he took from it. He didn't have to. Poker was a lucrative profession among miners who played boldly, aggressively, but not skillfully. There was nearly twenty thousand dollars in his hands. Cautiously, making sure he wasn't seen, he went back to his room. Susie was still asleep, which was just as well. First he did the superficial things. Susie could be pretty, and since nothing Sammy did would make any difference now, Susie might as well be pretty. The human brain can control far more than it believes it can control. Sammy couldn't make Susie look much different now, but he could make her look quite a bit different in a few weeks' time. He changed the pattern of Susie's physical supply lines. The changes he made were small, apparently insignificant, hardly worth bothering about. Yet, as a result of them, Susie's slightly bulbous nose would gradually slim away until it was small and straight. Her slightly heavy chin would become lean and smooth. Her skin would become clearer, all over her body, and she would lose a little fat around her hips. More important than these things was the change he made in Susie's physical balance. People are recognized by their friends more by the set of their heads, the way they walk, the way they sit in a chair, the way they hold themselves, than by their facial features. A good figure depends less on shape than on bearing. Susie had started with good teeth and a passable figure. Sammy made her a pretty girl with a figure a showgirl could be proud of. At least, that was what she would be in perhaps three weeks. Even now her walk, her bearing would be so different that nobody who didn't look closely at her face would recognize Susie. And in three weeks she wouldn't even resemble Susie. Strangely enough, what Sammy did next was easier for him. He stimulated areas in Susie's brain which had previously been dormant. He sent carefully calculated charges of mental impulses along the channels she normally did use. He stimulated tag-ends of talent and potential which had never before been touched. He couldn't make Susie a genius even if he wanted to, and he didn'tt Geniuses with too much emotion never made much out of life. And Susie had a lot of emotion in her, good, generous emotion. Sammy didn't want to destroy the best of Susie. She opened her eyes when he was done, and even Sammy was startled at the immediate change. For now they were fine. intelligent eyes. She was changed. Rapidly he told her about Cliff, explained everything. She understood all he said at once, believed it all at once. When you actually experience a miracle, you don't have to waste time marveling at it. "But you, Sammy," she said urgently. "What's going to happen to you?" "I'll be scrambled," he said simply. E ven in her horror there was some relief. "They won't Sammy smiled. "I didn't kill Cliff." "But you just said -- " "The police have a machine which traces and establishes nerve patterns, Susie. When Cliff is found, the knife will still be in his hand. The cops will check his arm and find he cut his own throat." "But you made him... I see. Your gift, this Power isn't in the book, is that it? They won't be able to charge you with a crime that doesn't exist?" He nodded. "Anyway, I don't think they will. They'll scramble me and let it go at that. Probably at ten o'clock tomorrow. A daily check is made on the detector then." "Sammy, isn't there any way you can escape? Couldn't you "For days or weeks, perhaps. But there are men and women here, as well as on Earth, who are immune to me, Susie. I'd lose out in the end -- inevitably. And I might have more to face than scrambling." "Sammy, I love you. You know that. And you've made me into a girl you could love. Together, we -- " "We haven't time to talk about that, Susie. What's your favorite name? You can't be Susie any more." 'What do you mean?" "Susie, I haven't time to argue. What's your favorite girl's name?" "I once read a book. The heroine was called Amanda Randolph. I thought that was a lovely name." "Fine, Miss Randolph -- or may I call you Amanda? Now put your clothes on. We're going somewhere." She didn't ask any more questions. The new Susie was as patient as the old. In character she hadn't changed -- only in capacity. She didn't seem to notice the difference in herself as they dressed, but Sammy noticed. She stood straighter now, with her chin up and her shoulders back. As a result her bust tilted higher, her waist was slimmer and her stomach flatter. Sammy was satisfied with the preliminary signs of the transformation he had wrought. This wasn't Susie. This was Amanda. She would even speak better. Of course, he hadn't been able to extend her very limited vocabulary, but she'd do that herself, very rapidly. And she couldn't help expressing herself better, even with the words she knew now. Amanda. In the recesses of his mind, he called her Galatea. back to Nick's -- closed and silent now, although the upstairs lights were on -- and crossed the street to Garden City. Susie hung back. "You're not going to -- "I'm not going to do anything very bad, Susie. And I'm going to do one good thing. I'm going to make Cliff's girl happier without Cliff than she ever was with him." He rang the bell of the Benjamin house. When at last the butler came, he ushered Sammy and Susie in as if he'd been expecting them. Down the wide, silent staircase came three people, belting dressing gowns about them. First was Mrs. Benjamin, small and plump. Then Mr. Benjamin, tall, gray-haired, blinking. Finally Shirley, tousled, sleepy. "Cliff is dead," Sammy told them without preliminaries. "But you don't mind that, do you?" The question was addressed to Shirley, who hadn't changed expression on being told of Cliff's death. "No," said Shirley mechanically. "I didn't love him." "Why did you think you did?" "He wanted me." "You have to love anybody who wants you?" "Yes. Nobody ever wanted me. "Is that true, Mrs. Benjamin?" The three Benjamins were like sleepwalkers. Sammy was holding them in a kind of trance in which they had no choice but to tell the truth, the real truth, the underlying truth. It was similar to questioning under sodium pentothal but deeper, much deeper. "Yes, it's true," said Mrs. Benjamin in a dull tone similar to Shirley's. "The doctors told me I'd die if the child was born." "Why was Shirley born, then?" "A specialist was to come and operate. He didn't come. The other doctors wouldn't perform the operation. Shirley was born. I nearly died, but after a year I recovered." "And you still didn't want Shirley?" "She had caused me so much pain..." "Did your feelings change, Mrs. Benjamin?" The woman sighed. "Of course. Could I go on hating my own daughter?" Sammy turned back to Shirley. "You had to love anybody who wanted you, because your parents didn't want you. But later they loved you." "Later they loved me," said Shirley blankly. "They love you now. There's no need to love a man just because he says he wants you." "No need any more," Shirley repeated. Sammy lifted the trance slowly, gradually. "No need any more!" said Shirley joyfully, and turned to hug her mother. A S Sammy knew from experience, this method worked. It was time to turn to his next aim. "This is your friend Amanda, Shirley," he said. "No, Sammy, no!" Susie exclaimed. "My friend Amanda," said Shirley happily. "She's staying with you. She's -- " "Sammy," said Susie urgently, pulling at his arm. "This isn't right. It's like stealing. I can see what you're trying to do, and I know you're doing it for me, but -- " "You're going to help Shirley," Sammy said quietly. "She's got to rebuild her life. She can do it if a girl like you is around to help her, Amanda." "But I'm from the Jungle, and -- " "Stay in this house for three weeks and I promise you that when you go out, nobody will know you. You're Amanda Randolph. I'm going to leave you here and go over to Nick's to kill off Susie. She died yesterday and was buried the same day." "Sammy, I. can't stay here. It won't work. You can make these people believe I'm Shirley's friend and that I've never been in the Jungle in my life, but I can't live on them for the rest of my life. I can't -- " "Of course you can't." He gave her an envelope. "That won't keep you forever, but it's enough to silence questions, that and the fact that you're Shirley's friend. You came from somewhere in the south. You like the Garden and you're going to stay. Twenty thousand dollars is a pretty good introduction to society." "I can't take it." "Don't let's go into that again. What good is it to me?" "Sammy, you can't get away with all this." "Of course not," he said wryly. "I told you, remember?" "But, Sammy, if you..." She Stopped. There was nothing she could suggest to him, nothing he could do. Sammy turned back to the Benjamins. "Amanda Randolph has been Shirley's friend for a long time. She isn't seeing anybody just now because she's had an operation on her face, and she'll change during the next few weeks. Her parents are dead and she doesn't know anybody in town but Shirley. In a month or so you'll help her to get a job in the Garden, won't you?" "Of course." Sammy took a last look at them. When people knew a thing, loose ends didn't bother them. Shirley was radiant because she knew, knew beyond argument, that she wasn't unloved after all. Although it would take her many weeks to rethink her life, reassess everything that had ever happened to her, she'd be able to do it in the end, with the help of a generous, sympathetic friend like -- like Amanda. Amanda was doubtful, bewildered, but soon she would respond to these people and flower in the easier life of the Garden. Holding them for a moment, he ducked out into the street, out of their lives. HE rain had stopped. It was easy to find and rouse a few of the miners, convincing them absolutely that Susie had died suddenly the day before and had been buried. It wasn't so easy when he went to the police. Here he had to do a much more careful, subtle job, for laterthese men would know about Cliff Burns' suicide and that Sammy Talbot had been scrambled for using a strange, secret Power over men. No doubt there would be an attempt later to find out just what Sammy had actually done. After he had finished his calls -- which hadn't been made at all, for no one would remember them -- there was nothing for him to do but return to the hostel. As he made his way there, he thought without regret of the events of the last few hours. Human beings shouldn't have this Power, obviously, and he bore nobody any malice for what was going to happen to him. His life and personality weren't so remarkable that he had any real excuse for wanting to preserve them. Being a man, he did want to preserve them. But he was content -- as content as any man could be knowing he was going to be scrambled in the next few hours. He didn't reach the hostel. Suddenly he felt an intense pain in his head and knew at once what it meant. Pitching forward in the mud, he lay still. itTT'S all I could collect," said Sergeant Teiger, dropping two typewritten sheets on Lieutenant Gibson's desk. "Doesn't amount to much, but I'd sure appreciate it if you can make it do for your report to Earth. Snooping around in the Jungle asking questions isn't the healthiest occupation I know." Gibson lit his pipe before picking up the sheets. "Party at Benjamins' broke up around twelve. Cliff Burns left about one," he mused. "Found next morning in shed behind Ricky Chiotza's place, throat cut, undoubtedly suicide. Chiotza had fight with Sammy Talbot earlier in evening, taxi-driver says Burns picked up Talbot and girl, drove Burns back to Benjamins', Talbot and girl to hostel in Jungle. Girl un traced... Talbot's girl, Susie, died earlier same day..." He looked up. "Bill, this isn't a report. It's a dog's jjreakfast." "I know. Lieutenant. I can't help it." "Hell, all this was three weeks ago. Surely by this time -- " "Look, if that guy Keig hadn't pressed the button the moment he woke up and saw Talbot had been up to something, we might have made some sense out of this. Sure, those were his instrucf tions, and now we've got to pat Keig and Monkton on the back and let them go on the next ship, though we know Monkton at least is a crook -- " "Relax, Bill," said Gibson. "If Talbot was a mutant or something, naturally the affair got tangled at the end. I must say the whole thing leaves a bad taste -- poor devil gets sent out to the mines here with Burns, Keig and Monkton waiting for him to make a false move so that they could slap him down. Okay, Bill, I'll do what I can with this. It isn't our business, anjrway. If the Earth authorities want to know what really happened, they can come here and try to find out." Teiger went out. Gibson started to write his report. Teiger came back. "Dame wants to see you about Talbot." "What kind of dame?" "Your type. My type. Anybody's type." "Okay, show her in." "I thought you'd say that." The girl who came into Gibson's office was no Helen of Troy, but nobody who found her on his line would throw her back. Her face was lean and attractive, and she held herself like a queen. Gibson let his appreciation show. He came forward to meet her. "I'm Lieutenant Gibson," he said warmly, taking her hand. She smiled. "Amanda Randolph." "You knew Sammy Talbot, Miss Randolph?" "How would I know a miner?" How would she, indeed? That was what had interested Gibson. Her expensive gray silk dress showed that she wouldn't know anything about the Jungle or its inhabitants. "Then what is your interest in him?" "I'm interested in psychology. Lieutenant Gibson, and I have a lot of time on my hands. Can anything be done for anyone like Talbot?" "Oh, sure. In about ten years he'll be more or less normal." "Where is he now?" "At the hospital. When a scrambling sentence is carried out, the prisoner becomes a state charge." "Could I go and see him? I've read about scrambling and I'd like to see the results." "Frankly, Miss Randolph, I don't want to have any hand in turning a poor guy like that into a sort of sideshow." "I don't mean it like that, lieutenant. I said I had a lot of time on my hands. Perhaps I could help with Talbot. I don't suppose he gets much attention at the hospital." "I guess you're right at that," Gibson sighed. "Okay, if you go over to the hospital I'll call them right now and tell them it's all right" "Thank you, Lieutenant." Amanda Randolph stood up. "Tell me, is he a prisoner?" "Prisoner? Hell, no. His sentence was carried out. He's being kept at the hospital because he couldn't live a normal life, that's all." "Thank you. Lieutenant," Amanda said again. coated doctor said: "Sure, go in. He's not dangerous." "Is he getting any treatment?" "Well, Miss Randolph, you know how it is. Cases like that don't need treatment; they need re-education. It would make sense to send him to school with the five-year-olds, in about two years or so when he's learned to talk." "Suppose I came every day?" "That would be fine of you. Miss Randolph. But you'd better see him first and see if you still want to." "Doctor, let me put a hypothetical case. Suppose someone married him and took him out of here -- suppose his wife was with him all the time, except when she had to work -- couldn't he be, well, normal in a fairly short time?" The doctor smiled ruefully. "You said hypothetical. Miss Randolph. If there was some woman who had loved the guy before -- it would have to be before, for there's nothing left now for any woman to love -- she might make him into something resembling a human being in a few months. But itll be years before he can talk like an adult, and read, and count, and build up the background of general knowledge we all have... Look, you'd better see him before you consider any more hypothetical questions. Miss Randolph." Amanda thanked him and pushed open the door. Sammy lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He looked around as Amanda came in and sat down beside the bed. "Hello, Sammy," said Amanda quietly. His face was as clear and empty as a child's. The mind behind it was even emptier. Amanda sighed. She had endless patience and it was clearly going to be needed. "Ssssss," she said. "Ith?" Sammy inquired. "Ssssss." "Iss." She let pleasure show in her face, and Sammy responded to it with a cackle. "Iss!" he crowed. "Iss! Iss! Iss!" Viking Press, N. Y., # Mr. Rebeck, the story's hero, is only one step removed from death. In fact, he has lived hermit-like in a mausoleum in the Yorkchester (a N.Y.C. apartment house project) cemetery for twenty years, tended and provisioned by a loyal but bellicosely talkative raven. "The raven puffed for breath. "Bernard Baruch eats com flakes but you have to have baloney.' " 'Did you have trouble bringing it?' ""Damn near ruptured myself,' the raven grunted." There are also a wonderfully brash Bronx housewife who stumbles across Rebeck in her visits to her husband's monstrously marble mausoleum; two young ghosts who fall spiritually in love and a huge caretaker, gifted, like Rebeck, with ghostseeing ability. Beagle's fable is tender, funny and wise, about as different (and good) as a "ghost" story can be. Rating:  Avalon Books, N. Y # Kline was the only serious competitor of the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Venusian and Martian tales. And like Burroughs, his tales smacked more of the Arabian Nights than they did of Verne or Wells. Although hopelessly dated by modern SF or fantasy standards, it is still a pleasure to meet again the above quaint old fairy tale. Cliffs are hung from in dizzying succession and romantic misunderstandings abound, which was standard for plots of the time. Rating: V # Asimov. Abelard-Schuman, N.Y., # that land animals took a bit of the ocean with them in the form of blood when they left its nourishing and life-giving depths. What they don't know about the amazing liquid is what Asimov has jam-packed into each fascinating page of his book. "The brain, a solid, is # water. Blood, a liquid, is # water." (!!!) Item: to prevent accidental clotting within our bodies, there are ten or more separate factors which must chain-react before fibrin, the clotting agent, is formed. If this sampling fails to excite interest, something must be thicker than blood. ited by H. L. Gold. Doubleday and Co., N. Y., #. short novels from Galaxy." Hunter Holly. Avalon Books, N. Y., # comes up with a gem like this in its monthly run-of-the-mine science adventures. The titular Green Planet is a supposed primitive paradise to which opponents of Earth's dictatorial League are exiled, a seemingly magnanimops gesture. However, the deadliness of the killer planet becomes slowly apparent in pages of expertly sustained suspense and rising terror. Mysteries are posed the would-be colonists (and reader) that beg solution before the small group is whittled down to zero. Rating:  by Joseph H. Simons. Philosophical Library, N. Y., # vided into three parts. I is a detailed explanation of what science is and isn't and who its practitioners are. II maps the basic intuitive concepts; Matter, Force, Inertia, etc. and the abstractions; Space, Time, Energy. Ill extrapolates from present knowledge the theoretical realm of uncertainty, relativity, etc. Simon's lucid book is an excellent adjunct for the layman interested in the thought patterns employed in science. Wallace West. Avalon Books, N. Y., # "Timaeus" and "Critias," West has done a revision of Bullfinch's "Mythology." The gang from Mt. Olympus and the Heroes -- Heracles, Jason, Theseus, et al, were, according to West, Martians. Not indigenous ETs, but Earthmen who fled when ice overwhelmed Lemuria. Returning to Earth, they founded Atlantis, set in the Valley of the Mediterranean. Anyhow, that's West's story and he has given it interest. Rating: Vi Patrick Moore. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., # the sayings and doings add up to very little actual knowledge of our unidentical twin planet. In fact, the only items known with certainty are her orbit, period of revolution and diameter including cloud cover. Even her actual role of our nearest planetary neighbor is usually ascribed to brother Mars. Moore struggles manfully but his strenuous efforts are mainly directed to parading the enormous amount of conjecture and paucity of fact about Venus. Mark Clifton. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., # Es for short, troubleshooters capable of involuted thought processes beyond and outside of scientific methodology, are the turnkeys for Clifton's puzzle. Unprecedentedly, Planet Eden fails to answer Communications HQ on schedule. Investigation shows that there is no longer any trace of edifices or artifacts on the planet and the colonists have reverted to nudity. A junior E, one step removed from a superman, is dispatched to Eden to earn his letter. The synopsis reads far poorer than the story, which is a fine exercise in logic. Rating:  ## by Tom Altum. Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., Indianapolis, N. Y ., # built heavily on fortuitous coincidences, he manages enough suspense and adventure to captivate at least his juvenile audience. A covey of escaped prisoners and a teenage youth are the unfrustrated inventor of a gravitycontrolling spaceship that has been rejected as impractical by the government. Following the death of the inventor-pilot on the planet Emperor, the success of the return trip depends entirely on the youngster's untried skill at astronavigation under compulsion by the convicts. Rating: (for youngsters)  of the North Pole by Jules Verne, #. The Gun Club of 'Trom the Earth to the Moon" fame attempts to change the climate of Earth... The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction #rd series, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, #. The # collection, a good year... Bombs in Orbit by Jeff Sutton, #. Somebody's gotta shoot down # H-bomb Sputniks... The Time Traders by Andre Norton, #. One of Miss Normatch wits through Time... The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction #th Series edited by Anthony Boucher, #. # was Boucher's first year without McComas as co-ed... Past the Future by Charles Eric Maine, #. A who's-doing-it about a missile project with a good buildup but abrupt letdown... Unearthly Neighbors by Chad Oliver, #. Earthman meets Siriusman... The Soxmd of His Horn by Sarban, #. A tality in a future that they own... The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, #. One of Galaxy's most famous novels in its #rd Ballantine reprinting... The Unexpected Dimension by Algis Budrys, #. A collection of three novelettes and four shorts... Strange Relations by Philip Jose Farmer, #. Five imaginative tales of weird familial relationships in alien environments... Invisible Men edited by Basil Davenport, #. Eleven tales looking at invisibility from every angle... The Man Who Ate the World by Frederik Pohl, #. Five of Pohl's super Galaxy specials... The Climacticon by Harold Livingston, #. A slick, funny yarn about a device that measures feminine emotional impulses... complete Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, #. Welcome to the delightful twenty year old fantasy. Great Stories of Science-Fiction edited by Groff Conklin, #. SF's prime anthologist collects a baker's dozen of fine yarns... Dark December by Alfred Coppel, #. The aftermath of atomic war. My Sky edited by Leo Margulies, #. Three novellas by Blish, Anderson and Scortia. lah's Children by Robert A. Heinlein, #. Heinlein's famous story of the immortal Families, and their problems... Islands in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke, #. A superbly detailed juvenile about life aboard a space station... Starship by Brian Aldiss, #. I likened this one in impact to Tumithak of yore... Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by Brian W. Aldiss, #. Aldiss ties eight shorts together into a Stapletonesque Long View of Man's future. 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Did they think they were people -- or did people think they were? T here it was again! Like a wounded bird's stridor, the whine of the phase condenser pierced the ship's silence. Vance Lorry, perched on the edge of his bunk, stared up. His lean, youthful face was overcast with apprehension. Across the compartment. Mart Burton slapped his thigh and rose. "That does it. Let's hit the lifeboat." "No! Wait!" Lorry went to the door and posted himself in front of it. "Maybe there's a chance! Let's sit it out for just one more jump!" "Look, sonny," Burton said, "there's no time to thrash this out. We're already six hundred light-years from the nearest outpost. We can't let ourselves get dragged through another leap by that runaway condenser!" "But they'll get it fixed! They just need more time!" Although his tone was plead-' ing. Lorry remained planted in front of the door. The whine intensified and Burton, study- ing Lorry's determined stance, laughed. It was not unfriendly, but it did suggest the absurdity of a scuffle between himself and his smaller, younger companioa Lorry said, "Give them a chance, Burton. The crew's got as much at stake as we have!" "Let's get this straight, sonny. Any time a main hyperdrive condenser gets stuck in automatic repeat, we've had it. We'll just keep on barreling ahead till we run clear out of galaxy." 'That's the way it used to be -- in the days of sub-identity cybernetics. But this crew can take care of any kind of trouble!" "You mean they're supposed to be able to. They've been at it for two days and haven't gotten anywhere. Now it's time to junk this crate while we're still within lifeboat range of an outpost." "You go ahead." Lorry moved aside from the door. "I'm staying with the others." Frustrated, Burton shouted in his face, "You're boarding that lifeboat if I have to drag you there!" "You mean you'd desert the crew -- just like that?" Burton sucked in a breath. "Can't you get it through that damned thick head that they're not people? They're only electronic circuits with identity biasing. Their purpose is -- " "I know," Lorry broke in. "Besides their primary functions, they're supposed to provide a homey atmosphere. That's so you and I don't get in each other's hair while we're out planting navigation markers. But they're more than that. Burton. They're reair Burton swore and clamped a big hand around Lorres arm. "We're boarding that lifeboat now." But Lorry only laughed. "Too late." He gestured aft where the whining condenser had reached a screeching pitch. "We'll be jumping in a second." He'd succeeded in duping Burton with pleading and argument. Now there wasn't enough time to reach the boat. And, after the leap, the surrogate crew would have four more hours to repair the condenser while the ship lay motionless in normal space. L orry tried to make it to the bunk but failed. The phasing condenser's shriek mounted to an ear-splitting climax and blackness closed in as he fought the subjective onslaught of the leap. A vortex of blinding energy struck at the foundations of his consciousness -- a whirling, nauseous pattern of alien sensations that directed their relentless force at the hallucination centers of his brain. He was knee-deep in a field of wind-tossed blossoms that lapped with gentle determination at the base of a hill. The air was crisp j and pure against an azure sky. j G A L A X Y ? ( I # It was a pristine exhilaration that he felt as he pushed forward against the swaying stalks. But he paused, anxious and alert, as he heard his name being carried by the whisper of the breeze. Then he saw her -- almost a silhouette on the crest of the hill. Slim and graceful, she stood there with rippling clothes hugging her lithe form and with sheening brown hair dancing to the capricious tempo of the wind. All beauty and grace and animated charm -- that was Trix. "Vance! Vance!" she called out again in a tone as clear and Then she was descending the slope in a study in fluid motion. He raced forward to meet her. They joined hands and stood gazing at each other as the wind scattered the gaiety of their laughter among the blossoms below. Then seriousness shaded her exquisite face. "Is this how you imagined I'd be?" It was ever the same question. And he answered it as always: "I couldn't have expected more." The face of a mischievous tyke poked out from behind a nearby tree. "Sis's got a beau-o! Sis's got a beau-o!" Odd, Lorry thought, how he'd always imagined Trix was Kid's sister. He squirmed and Trix's cheeks crimsoned. "Come away from there, Kid!" It was Gumpy. Lorry was siuprised to see the old man on the hill, although he should have realized the three of them would never be too far apart. His bearing straight and proud, Gumpy came forward. It was obvious that, despite his wrinkled face and sparse white hair, the cane was no necessity, merely an affectation. Kid tried to dart away, but Gumps reflexes were light-fast. (Weren't they always?) He used the crook of his cane to snag the boy's arm. Then, catching a handful of tousled hair, he marched him off. "Kid don't rightly understand these things," Gumpy aptologized over his shoulder. "But he'll grow up someday." Lorry watched them disappear around the hill and eventually was aware that Trix was smiling up at him. But he was wrestling with a puzzling inconsistency. Of course they were a tight little family, but how could a man as old as Gumpy be Kid's father? Then it was all gone -- the tingling warmth of the girl's hand in his, swaying blossoms, crisp azure sky, the fragrant wind. In their place were the lusterless metal walls of the crew's compartment, broken only by a porthole alive with the blazing fires of alien suns. The jump was over. And Lorry, lying on the deck, wondered what would happen should the phase condenser freeze in mid-discharge. Would he remain eternally suspended in the interval between space and hyperspace? With all physical processes arrested in timelessness, would his World of the Leap Interim become a reality? Bitter over the abrupt end to his hallucination, he made his way to the control compartment. B urton was already there, having apparently shaken off the effects of the leap minutes ago. He was pacing before the three consoles at the far end of the compartment. "Try the auxiliary drive again," he directed. "No soap, Mr. Burton," replied the speaker of the cabinet on the right 'When that condenser's in automatic repeat, I can't budge a thing." "Try it!" The video pickup cells on the next console glowed. "Let the Kid be, Burton," its speaker rasped. "He ain't stinting none." "Honest, Mr. Burton," Kid pleaded. "Like Gumpy says, I tried my best. But nothing happened!" The lad was as prankish as any ten-year-old in other matters, Lorry conceded as he approached Burton and the consoles. But when it came to his official duties as auto-pilot. Kid showed the seriousness of an accomplished technician. "Don't ride them, Burton," Lorry said. "They're doing all they can." "So yotre back again. I'm warning you -- just stay out the way." "They'll get it straightened out before the next leap." "Don't you know that when a phase condenser jumps track, the only thing you can do is slap in a new one? But can we do that? No! Why not? Because Gumpy here forgot to requisition spare parts!" 'Weren't really an oversight," Gumpy's speaker offered in weary protest. "Blame it on that danged character-conditioning. In senility-biasing, some of the forgetfulness trait must've spilled over into the operational circuits. The spare condenser just plumb slipped my mind." "There!" Burton said. "That's efficient cybernetics for you! We've got a good communications and internal control system, but things 'just slip' its mind!" He fumed for a moment, then asked, "Why in hell don't you bleed the overdrive circuit? That'll keep us from jumping. Then we can just sit here till we get the condenser fixed!" "Can't. If that condenser don't get current, I don't get the juice to do anything about fixing it. Nobody else knows anything about the circuit, so you got to let me do it my way." With greater calm than exhibited by Burton, Lorry confronted the central console. 'Well, what are you doing about the trouble, Gumpy?" "Aside from yakking with you two. I'm trying to override the auto-repair program and pull some capacitance tests." "Very well, then," Burton relented. "Fade out and stick with it. But I want a report at least from you an hour before the next jump." Gumpy's video pickup cells dulled over and his speaker lost its backgroimd purr, joining Kid's in silence. Burton headed for the passageway. "I'm going to doublecheck the provisions on the lifeboat. Looks like we're going to spend a long time cooped up in that thing." went over to the third console and stood there for a long while, staring up at the nameplate that read simply, "Navigatrix." The cabinet's speaker emitted a soft hum, then paused. "Vance?" It was the distant chiming of bells borne on the breath of a warm breeze. It was full of both tender concern and wistful laughter. When he only continued staring, the voice became more brusque but lost none of its overpowering charm. "Station Two reporting, sir. Our position -- " "Cut it out, Trix." "If you were any more serious, I'd feel like crying." The clear woodwind tones of her words pierced and shattered him. God, he thought, what a voice they had engineered! "Gumpy doesn't seem to be getting ansTwhere," he said finally. "No, I don't suppose he does," she admitted. Somehow, he felt that if he ripped the panel off the console and dug past the tangle of leads and relays, he'd find her somewhere within the warm confines of the box. She seemed that real. "Vance, I don't want you to stay any longer. It's too dangerous. Leave with Burton before the next leap." He forced a laugh. "Why, I've got more faith in Gumpy than you have!" "It isn't that." Even in dejection, her voice had the quality of silk brushing against velvet. "He'll fix that condenser -- sooner or later." "Then what are we bothered about?" "Fll show you." Light flooded an electronic screen on the opposite bulkhead. It showed a vista of densely packed stars and nebulous patches. Close to its center, a green circle was displaced several degrees from the familiar cross hairs. 'With that last leap," she explained, "we went three degrees off. An element of drift has crept in. When we try to backtrack, I'm afraid I won't be able to compensate." "I'm not worried. I know -- " "Please don't say it, Vance. Another couple of leaps and we'll be hopelessly lost." He was silent for a moment. "Don't tell Burton about this." "I won't promise that. I want you to get back safely." "But what about you and Kid and Gumpy?" 'We don't matter -- not that much." Before he could take issue, she added, 'We just finished a leap, Vance. Were you on that hill again?" "I was there." "And I too?" When he nodded, she went on with more enthusiasm, "Tell me again. What am I like?" "Tall and slender and graceful, like -- " "Like a gazelle?" "Yes." "What's a gazelle?" "A very beautiful Earth creature." "And I'm like one of them?" He felt suddenly embarrassed over the intimate situation he'd let develop during the months they'd been at space. In objective perspective, it was a mixture of forlorn frustration and selfridicule. Yet was it his fault that they'd endowed Trix with so appealing a personality? Still, Trix and Kid and Gumpy were more than surrogate crew members. They were gifted with fully human identities and consciousnesses. "You're like one -- of us, Trix." somewhere deep within the ship and the deck lurched under Lorry. Thrashing, he tried to maintain his balance but only went plunging against the bulkhead. "Trix! What is it?" Regaining his feet, he fought the sensation that the ship was spinning around him. 'Wait. I'm trying to find out." Her tone was impatient, excited. From where he stood against the bulkhead, the deck seemed to rise ahead of him like a steep slope. "I've got Gumpy on a direct hookup," Trix said. "He says one of the grav coils shorted out." Lorry made it back to the console and caught a grip on the panel to steady himself. "Gumpy!" he demanded. 'What went wrong?" "He's too busy to answer," Trix explained. "He was trying to trace down the trouble in that condenser when he tripped the wrong relay. An overload got through to the environmental circuits." All the lights were flickering now and the circulation system was sending only wisps of smoke through the ventilators. Somewhere forward, an automatic hatch was opening and closing, opening and closing. "Mr. Lorry! What's wrong?" He turned and saw the cells on Kid's cabinet all aglow. "Nothing to get excited about," he lied. "Gumpy's taking care of it." "It's something bad, I know! I felt the current drain. I can still feel it!" "Don't worry. Kid." Lorry shifted again to compensate for the fluctuating gravity field. "Everthing's going to be all right." "Gosh, Mr. Lorry, I don't like it at all!" "Look, Kid," Trix said with the stern solicitude of a big sister. 'What did I tell you about people who face danger and become heroes? Remember?" "I -- I guess so. But -- but we are going to get home again, aren't we?"  "This is our home," she said firmly. Canting twenty degrees to the right against the off-center gravity, Burton came storming back into the compartment. 'What the hell's happening now, Gumpy?" When there was no answer, he gave the cabinet a kick. Its cells brightened and the speaker grumbled, "Dampen your tubes! Ain't I got my hands full with this danged mess of wires and switches?" "What," Burton demanded, "is the story now?" "Damnation if I didn't whip up an overload that fused a whole batch of leads in the internal control trunk." "Well, switch over to the alternate trunk. That's what it's there for!" "Ain't there any more -- not now it ain't." 'What do you mean?" "Guess it plumb slipped my mind to tell you, but we been running on alternate for the past couple of months." 'Why?" "Had another overload and blew out a flock of circuits on the main." B urton swore and tore at his hair. "All right, Gumpy," he said at last with deliberate calm. "Yotre internal control. You tell me what we're going to do." "Don't rightly know at the moment," said Gumpy. "Hear those gyros whining?" Burton shot at him. "It's gravdisplacement strain that's causing that. If they don't snap their shafts, those gyros won't be worth a damn for getting us back home." "Well," Gumpy said speculatively, " 'pears I'll have to start from scratch and rebuild the circuits so as to have at least one complete internal control system and -- " "And," Burton interrupted, "find the trouble in the hyperspace condenser and repair it -- all that in the two hours we have left before we jump another fifty or sixty light-years away from home?"  Gumpy made a "hm-m-mming" sound. "Kind of looks impossible, don't it?" The central console's cells flickered. "I'm afraid, Gumpy! You can do something, can't you, so they won't have to leave us out here?" "Hush, Kid," Trix comforted. "Remember what I told you. Just think of the fun we'll have when the ship's all ours." Lorry stepped in front of the girl's cabinet. "It doesn't have to be that way, Trix. I have a plan." "No, Mr. Lorry," she said, electing formality in the presence of the other man. 'We're not going to let you endanger your lives any longer. Mr. Burton, there's something we haven't told you. The ship's developed a radical drift." 'What kind of a drift?" Burton asked. "I don't know. Maybe it's some new force in this sector of the Galaxy. Whatever it is, I can't factorize it for navigation. Another couple of leaps and we'll be completely lost." Burton drew in a deep breath and looked down at his hands. "Can you still plot a course home?" "It wouldn't be on the nose. We'd come out of the last leap maybe fifteen or twenty lightyears off." "That's good enough. Plot it for the lifeboat." Lorry felt the press of desperation creeping up on him. He couldn't let Burton abandon the surrogate crew! "The course has already been fed into the boat's control schedule," Trix said. "I took care of it six leaps ago. Since then I've kept up running modifications." "Good girl," said Burton. Then he told Lorry, "All right, Vance -- let's go home. We did all we could." But Lorry only backed off. This drew an irate glare from Burton. "Look, sonny. I've been damned patient. I understood how it was possible for a man -- a young man at space for three months with nothing but a sorry old bird like me for company -- to get droopy-eyed over a pretty voice. Just another form of space fatigue, I suppose. But I was decent enough to pretend I didn't notice it. Now -- " He stepped forward, squarely into a right hook that Lorry hadn't even guessed he had in him. JT required some effort to sling the big man over his shoulder. But, even despite the ship's list, he made it to the storage compartment and dumped Burton inside. Then he secured the lock and turned to face the surrogate crew. "Oh, Vance!" Trix exclaimed. "Why did you do it?" "Let him have the spot, girl," Gumpy said. "It's his show. Could be he's got something in mind." Kid grabbed at the hope. hat's right, Trix. He knows what to do. Don't you, Mr. Lorry?" "I think I do. Kid. But I'm going to need plenty of help." The handle of the storage compartment's door rattled violently. "Lorry!" Burton's muffled voice came through. "Let me out!" "Open that door, Vance," Trix sighed. "It's the only thing you can do." "No, it's not!" Lorry insisted. "I'm going to take you aboard the lifeboat -- all of you." "See!" Kid yelped. "I told you he'd -- " Shut up. Kid," Gumpy said. "Can't be done, Vance. Ain't got enough room on that boat." "And there's no time!" Trix added. "It would take days and an entire crew of cyberneticians to take these consoles apart!" "Of all the damned fool plans!" said Burton. The ship lurched again and Lorry readjusted himself to the erratic gravity. In the next instant, the shrieking of straining gyros mounted perceptibly and one of the ventilation ducts belched a cloud of smoke. "I'm not going to take the cabinets intact," he shouted so Burton could hear too. "Only the main parts -- memory cells, response-pattern drums, adaptation banks -- " 'Won't work," Gumpy said. "Too many units involved, Vance," the girl explained. "Even if you knew anything about cybernetics, it would take days." "Nope," Gumpy reiterated. "Can't be done." "Yes, it can!" Kid begged. "Mr. Lorry can do it! Just give him a chance!" "I'll need your help," Lorry went on. "You'll have to lead me step by step." The storage compartment door bucked under the impact of Burton's shoulder. But it held. Then Lorry cringed before a subtle sound that mounted in intensity as it charged through the passageways. The phase condenser, screeching with a fury, was getting ready to kick off again and hurl them another fifty light-years into obscurity. "Oh, Vance!" Trix cried. "Get to the lifeboat! Get off the ship!" "But it's only been two hours since the last jump!" he protested. "Danged if it ain't," Gumpy acknowledged. "Means only one thing -- fluctuation's getting wilder. Could even blow up the whole works this leap, or the one after." "I'm afraid it's too late to reach the lifeboat now, Vance," Trix groaned. "If we make it through this hop, you'll have to abandon ship right away." "Lorry!" Burton roared. "For God's sake, come to your senses! Let's get out of here!" The condenser's whine peaked and blackness closed in over everything. " meadow was a strange, hostile place. Where there had been exhilarating, delightfully scented breezes, there was now only a desolate calm. Dense clouds hovered over the hill and the blossoms that carpeted the plain were stained and wilted, gripped in the stillness of death and overpowering stench of, putrescence. He pressed forward through the sea of decaying vegetation, perplexed by the sudden change that had overtaken his private World of the Interim. Nowhere could he see Trix, or Kid, or Gumpy. He called their names and was startled at the alien sound of his own voice as it intruded on the foul quiet of the meadow. Then he saw her -- standing halfway up the slope, her arms folded in rigid indifference and her hair coarse and still as it hung down either side of her expressionless face. Kid darted out from behind the girl and thumbed his nose at Lorry. "Trix! Kid!" The boy seized a clump of dry dirt and hurled it down the slope. It hit Lorry. "Kid! Trix! What's wrong?" he demanded. Her stare only became more disdainful as the boy mocked Lorry in a derisive voice. Gumpy came around the hill, shaking his fist and waving threats with his cane. Lorry spread his arms imploringly. "Tell me -- what's wrong? I don't understand!" The girl tossed her head scornfully, then spat out his name as though it were a curse; "Vance!"  And Gumpy repeated the word with utter contempt. And the words that had served as a fadeout from the chimerical scene on the hillside had only been the girl's voice piercing the veil of unconsciousness and prompting him back to reality: "Vance! Vance!" But even more urgent was Burton's voice from the storage compartment. "You're all wrong. Lorry!" he was shouting. "Don't you see your logic's off?" Lorry went over to the locked door. "All I'm trying to do is save -- " "No, Vance," Trix cut in. "Listen to him. He's right." "They're not real. Lorry!" Burton continued. "There's not a single element of conscious awareness in their makeup. They can't actually think! It's just an effect -- a gimmick!" "Sure," Lorry said. "That's the way it's supposed to be. But they know what's happening to them, all right." "No, Vance, they don't. It's hokus-pokus with complicated circuit arrangements and crossindexed reaction banks. It's all engineered so they'll respond realistically to any situation." "It's no illusion." "Yes, it is, Vance. It's the same old automatic stimulus-response mechanism, dressed up in elaborate trimmings." "Isn't that all you and I actually are?" "There's a difference. It's consciousness, awareness of being, spark of life, ego, the ability to get a subjective lift out of a sensation -- call it anything you want. But the difference is there." Silence held the compartment for a while. "Trix," Kid piped. "Is Mr. Burton trying to say we're not like him?" "Hush, Kid." "That's just one way of looking at it, boy," Gumpy comforted. "Listen, Lorry," Burton shouted. "That leap condenser's phasing erratically. It could jump us again in five minutes. or it could blow the guts out of this ship instead! If we do make that next skip, Trix won't be able to give us a course to get back home in the boat. Come on now and let me out of here!" "Can't do it." "All right, then! Ask them if they're real!" Lorry turned toward Trix, but she spoke before he could phrase a question. "Only circuits and transistors and relays and special banks. That's all, Vance." "You're lying! Gumpy?" "I can get mad as heck if things don't go right. But I don't suppose it's really an emotion -- just surge current in negative feedback." "In the next galaxy it is! Kid?" "When you told me that story about the little boy that got lost, I -- I felt like crying, Mr. Lorry. I wanted to help him. I don't know." He hesitated. "I guess -- " "That's not fair, Vance," Trix objected. "Special human appeal was engineered into the boy's character and -- Vance! You've got to go now! Look!" One of the screens on the forward bulkhead flared up and compartment. It showed a dense cluster of stars surrounding a sparkling-white sun whose fire was so intense that it seemed to warm the compartment, even over the vast distance and through the viewscreen. 'What is it?" Burton demanded from the locker. 'What's going on?" "That's a Sirius-type sun!" the girl blurted out. ' "I've just finished plotting our vector. The next jump is going to put us within lethal range of that star!" Lorry could taste the bitterness, the incredible irony of this new situation. In any random jump through hyperspace, the chances of accidentally materializing within the limits of a solar system were in the order of a to happen to them! "You hear that. Lorry?" Burton banged on the door again. "For God's sake, let's get out of here!" " 'Pears as though that settles it, gal," Gumpy said. "I been holding off, hoping maybe something would crop up. But -- " Above the other noises of the ship there was the click of a lock. The storage compartment door swung open and Burton, caught off balance, tumbled out. He looked even more surprised than relieved. Gumpy cackled. "Guess it plumb slipped your mind that I got control over all the hatches on this here crate." Dazed, Lorry only stood his ground as Burton advanced. "Go with him, Vance," Trix entreated. "And just remember -- when you find that hill and all those flowers. I'll be there too -- in a way." Burton reached out to seize his arm and Lorry yanked away. He didn't even see Burton's fist. penseful quiet in the control compartment now. The hatch that had gone out of control wasn't banging any longer. With a hiss that evidenced smoothly functioning machinery, the dead gravity coil came to life and the ship lurched back to equilibrium on its lateral axis. All the gyros were now whispering a sibilance of well-being. A final wift of smoke drifted out of the ventilation duct, fob lowed by a soft, steady breeze. It lasted only for a moment, though. Then the stream of air was snipped off with a finality that suggested oxygen would no longer be an important shipboard item. One lonely observation screen framed a lifeboat dwindling in size as it drifted astern. Abruptly, it emitted the eerie shimmer that attends departure of a vessel into hyperspace. One by one, all the screens in the control compartment came ablaze with the scintillating grandeur of the Milky Way as seen in a score of directions from the ship -- great star clusters and nebulous masses, monstrous suns and rifts and patches of obscuring material and multiple stars. Then a speaker diaphragm crackled against the silence of the compartment. "Things back in order yet, Gumpy?" "Just about, Trix. Last thing left is to get the hyperdrive off automatic repeat. There -- that does it!" "We made it!" Kid squealed. "That we did, boy," Gumpy said. "But you really hammed it up there for a while." "If that's the case, then Trix overplayed it a bit too." Her laughter tinkling through the ship, she said, "Doesn't matter. We swung it, didn't we?" "Yup," Gumpy agreed. "And I guess nobody will ever get the idea a surrogate crew might have a hankering to take off on its own. You plot the course for those two, Trix?" "Naturally. They'll get back." "Where we heading?" "The Coal Sack. I've always wanted to see what it's like over there." "I kinda thought we might meander over toward Andromeda for a spell. But I guess it can wait. After all, we got time to burn." Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. A nthony Trotz went first to the politician, Mike Delado. "How many people do you know, Mr. Delado?" "Why the question?" "I am wondering just what amovmt of detail the mind can hold." "To a degree I know many. Ten thousand well, thirty thousand by name, probably a hundred thousand by face and to shake hands with." "And what is the limit?" Anthony inquired. "Possibly I am the limit." The politician smiled frostily. "The only limit is time, speed of cognizance and retention. I am told that the latter lessens with age. I am seventy, and it has not done so with me. Whom I have known I do not forget." "And with special training could one go beyond you?" "I doubt if one could -- much. For my own training has been quite special. Nobody has been so entirely with the people as I have. I've taken five memory courses in my time, but the tricks of all of them I had already come to on my own. I am a great believer in the commonality of mankind and of near equal inherent ability. Yet there are some, say the one man in fifty, who in degree if not in kind do exceed their fellows in scope and awareness and vitality. I am that one man in fifty, and knowing people is my specialty." "Could a man who specialized still more -- and to the exclusion of other things -- know a hundred thousand men well." "It is possible. Dimly." "I think not. He might learn that many faces and names, but he would not know the men." Anthony went next to the philosopher, Gabriel Mindel. "Mr. Mindel, how many people do you know?" "How know? Per se? A se? Or In Se? Per suam essentiam, perhaps? Or do you mean Ab alio? Or to know as Hoc aliquid? There is a fine difference there. Or do you possibly mean to know in Substantia prima, or in the sense n c TJ o n of comprehensive noumena?" "Somewhere between the latter two. How many persons do you know by name, face, and with a degree of intimacy?" "I have learned over the years the names of some of my colleagues, possibly a dozen of them. I am now sound on my wife's name, and I seldom stumble over the names of my offspring -- never more than momentarily. But you may have come to the wrong man for -- whatever you have come for. I am notoriously poor at names, faces, and persons. I have even been described (vox faucibus haesit) as absentminded." "Yes, you do have the reputation. But perhaps I have not come to the wrong man in seeking the theory of the thing. What is it that limits the comprehensive capacity of the mind of man? What will it hold? What restricts?" "The body." "How is that?" "The brain, I should say, the material tie. The mind is limited by the brain. It is skull-bound. It can accumulate no more than its cranial capacity, though not one tenth of that is ordinarily used. An unbodied mind would (in esoteric theory) be unlimited." "And how in practical theory?" "If it is practical, a pragma, it is a thing and not a theory." Tin Tony Trotz had only one job -- to watch out for something a little odd -- in a universe that was insane! By R. A. Illustrated by "Then we can have no experience with the unbodied mind, or the possibility of it?" "We have not discovered any area of contact, but we may entertain the possibility of it. There is no paradox there. One may rationally consider the irrational." the priest. "How many people do you know?" "I know all of them." 'That has to be doubted," said Anthony after a moment. "I've had twenty different stations. And when you hear five thousand confessions a year for forty years, you by no means know all about people, but you do know all people." "I do not mean types. I mean persons." "Oh, I know a dozen or so well, a few thousands somewhat less." "Would it be possible to know a hundred thousand people, a "A mentalist might know that many to recognize; I don't know the limit. But darkened man has a limit set on everything." "Could a somehow emancipated man know more?" 'The only emancipated man is the corporally dead man. And the dead man, if he attains the beatific vision, knows all other persons who have ever been since time began." "All." 'With the same brain?" "No. But with the same mind." "Then wouldn't even a believer have to admit that the mind which we have now is only a token mind? Would not any connection it would have with a completely comprehensive mind be very tenuous? Would we really be the same person if so changed? It is like saying a bucket would hold the ocean if it were fulfilled, which only means filled full. How could it be the same mind?" "I don't know." Anthony went to see a psychologist. 'How many people do you know. Dr. Shirm?" "I could be crabby and say that I know as many as I want to; but it wouldn't be the truth. I rather like people, which is odd in my profession. What is it that you really want to know?" 'How many people can one man know?" "It doesn't matter very much. People mostly overestimate the number of their acquaintances. What is it that you are trying to ask me?" "Could one man know everyone?" "Naturally not. But unnaturally he might seem to. There is a delusion to this effect accompanied by an euphoria, and it is called -- " "I don't want to know what it is called. Why do specialists use Latin and Greek?" "One part hokum, and two parts need; there simply not being enough letters in the alphabet of exposition without them. It is as difficult to name concepts as children, and we search our brains as a new mother does. It will not do to call two children or two concepts by one name." 'Thank you. I doubt that this is delusion, and it is not accompanied by euphoria." questioning the four men since (as a new thing that had come to him) he knew everybody. He knew everyone in Salt Lake City, where he had never been. He knew everybody in Jebel Shah where the town is a little amphitheater around the harbor, and in Batangas and Weihai. He knew the loungers around the end of the Galata bridge in Istambul, and the porters in Kuala Lumpur. He knew the tobacco traders in Plovdiv, and the cork-cutters of Portugal. He knew the dock workers in Djibouti, and the glove-makers in Prague. He knew the vegetable farmers around El Centro, and the muskrat trappers of Barrataria Bay. He knew the by name and face, and with a fair degree of intimacy. "Yet I'm not a very intelligent man. I've been called a bimgler. And they've had to reassign me three different times at the filter center. I've seen only a few people, and it seems unusual that I should know them all. It may be a delusion as Dr. Shirm says, but it is a heavily detailed delusion, and it is not accompanied by euphoria. I feel like green hell just thinking of it." He knew the cattle traders in Letterkenny Donegal; he knew the cane cutters of Oriente, and the tree climbers of Milne Bay. He knew the people who died every minute, and those who were born. "There is no way out of it. I know everybody in the world. It is impossible, but it is so. And to what purpose? There aren't a handful of them I could borrow a dollar from, and I haven't a real friend in the lot. I don't know whether it came to me suddenly, but I realized it suddenly. My father was a junk dealer in Wichita, and my education is spotty. I am maladjusted, introverted, incompetent and unhappy, and I also have weak kidneys. Why would a power like this come to a man like me?" The children in the streets hooted at him. Anthony had always had a healthy hatred for children and dogs, those twin harassers of the unfortunate and the maladjusted. Both run in packs, and both are cowardly attackers. And if either of them spots a weakness he will never let it go. That his father had been a junk dealer was not reason to hoot at him. But how did the children even know about that? Did they possess some fraction of the power that had come to him lately? UT HE had strolled about the town for too long. He should have been at work at the filter center. Often they were impatient with him when he wandered off from his work, and Colonel Peter Cooper was waiting for him when he came in now. "Where have you been, Anthony?" 'Walking. I talked to four men. I mentioned no subject in the province of the filter center." "Every subject is in the province of the filter center. And you know that our work here is confidential." "Yes, sir, but I do not understand the import of my work here. I would not be able to give out information that I do not have." , "A popular misconception. There are others who might understand the import of it, and be able to reconstruct it from what you tell them. How do you feel?" "Nervous, unwell, my tongue is furred, my kidneys -- " "Ah yes, there will be someone here this afternoon to fix your kidneys. I had not forgotten. Is there anything that you want to tell me?" "No, sir." Colonel Cooper had the habit of asking that of his workers in the manner of a mother asking a child if he wants to go to the bathroom. There was something embarrassing in his intonation. Well, he did want to tell him something, but he didn't know how to phrase it. He wanted to tell the colonel that he had newly acquired the power of knowing everyone in the world, that he was worried how he could hold so much in his head that was not noteworthy for its capacity. But he feared ridicule more than he feared anything else and he was a tangle of fears. But he thought he would try it a little bit on his co-workers. "I know a man named Walter Walloroy in Galveston," he said to Adrian. "He drinks beer at the Gizmo bar, and is retired." "What is the superlative of so what?" "But I have never been there," said Anthony. "And I have never been in Kalamazoo." "I know a girl in Kalamazoo. Her name is Greta Harandash. She is home today with a cold. She is prone to colds." But Adrian was a creature both uninterested and uninteresting. It is very hard to confide in one who is uninterested. "Well, I will live with it a little while," said Anthony. "Or I may have to go to a doctor and see if he can give me something to make all these people go away. But if he thinks my story is a queer one, he may report me back to the center, and I might be reclassified again. It makes me nervous to be reclassified." So he lived with it a while, the rest of the day and the night. He should have felt better. A man had come that afternoon and fixed his kidneys; but there was nobody to fix his nervousness and apprehensions. And his skittishness was increased when the children hooted at him as he walked in the morning. That hated epithet! But how could they know that his father had been a dealer in used metals in a town far away? one. He spoke to Wellington who also worked in his room. "I know a girl in Beirut who is just going to bed. It is evening there now, you know." "That so? Why don't they get their time straightened out? I met a girl last night that's cute as a correlator key, and kind of shaped like one. She doesn't know yet that I work in the center and am a restricted person. I'm not going to tell her. Let her find out for herself." It was no good trying to tell things to Wellington. Wellington never listened. And then Anthony got a summons to Colonel Peter Cooper, which always increased his apprehension. "Anthony," said the colonel, "I want you to tell me if you discern anything unusual. That is really your job, to report anything unusual. The other, the paper shuffling, is just something to keep your idle hands busy. Now tell me clearly if anything unusual has come to your notice." "Sir, it has." And then he blurted it all out. "I know everybody! I know everybody in the world. I know them all in their worried sick." "Yes, yes, Anthony. But tell me, have you noticed anything odd? It is your duty to tell me if you have." "But I have just told you! In some manner I know every person in the world. I know the people in Transvaal, I know the people in Guatemala. I know everybody." "Yes, Anthony, we realize that. And it may take a little getting used to. But that isn't what I mean. Have you (besides that thing that seems out of the way to you) noticed anything unusual, anything that seems out of place, a little bit wrong?" "Ah -- besides that and your reaction to it, no, sir. Nothing else odd. I might ask, though, how odd can a thing get? But other than that -- no, sir." "Good, Anthony. Now remember, if you sense anything odd about anything at all, come and tell me. No matter how trivial it is, if you feel that something is just a little bit out of place, then report it at once. Do you understand that?" "Yes, sir." But he couldn't help wondering what it might be that the colonel would consider a little bit odd. Anthony left the center and walked. He shouldn't have. He knew that they became impatient with him when he wandered off from his work. "But I have to think. I have all the people in the world in my brain, and still I am not able to think. This power should have come to someone able to take advantage of it." He went into the Plugged Nickel Bar, but the man on duty knew him for a restricted person from the filter center, and would not serve him. He wandered disconsolately about the city. "I know the people in Omaha and those in Omsk. What queer names have the towns of the earth! I know everyone in the world, and when anyone is born or dies. And Colonel Cooper did not find it unusual. Yet I am to be on the lookout for things unusual. The question rises, would I know an odd thing if I met it?" A ND then it was that something just a little bit unusual did happen, something not quite right. A small thing. But the colonel had told him to report anything about anything, no matter how insignificant, that struck him as a little queer. It was just that with all the people in his head, and the arrivals and departures, there was a small group that was not of the pattern. Every minute hundreds left by death and arrived by birth. And now there was a small group, seven persons; they arrived into the world, but they were not born into the world. So Anthony went to tell Colonel Cooper that something had occurred to his mind that was a little bit odd. But damn-the-dander-headedtwo-and-four-legged-devils, there were the kids and the dogs in the street again, yipping and hooting and chanting; "Tony the tin man. Tony the tin man." He longed for the day when he would see them fall like leaves out of his mind, and death take them. "Tony the tin man. Tony the tin man." How had they known that his father was a used metal dealer? Colonel Peter Cooper was waiting for him. "You surely took your time, Anthony. The reaction was registered, but it would take us hours to pin-point its source without your help. Now then, explain as calmly as you can what you have felt or experienced. Or, more to the point, where are they?" "No. You will have to answer me certain questions first." "I haven't the time to waste, Anthony. Tell me at once what it is and where." "No. There is no other way. You have to bargain with me." "One does not bargain with restricted persons." "Well, I will bargain till I find out just what it means that I am a restricted person." "You really don't know? Well, we haven't time to fix that stubborn streak in you. Quickly, just what is it that you have to know?" "I have to know what a restricted person is. I have to know why the children hoot Tony the tin man' at me. How can they know that my father was a junk dealer?" #"OU had no father. We give to each of you a sufficient store of memories and a background of a distant town. That happened to be yours, but thre is no connection here. The children call you Tony the Tin Man because (like all really cruel creatures) they have an instinct for the truth that can hurt; and they will never forget it." 'Then I am a tin man?" 'Well, no. Actually only seventeen percent metal. And less than a third of one percent tin. You are compounded of animal, vegetable, and mineral fiber, and there was much effort given to your manufacture and programming. Yet the taunt of the children is essentially true." "Then, if I am only Tony the Tin Man, how can I know all the people in the world in my mind?" "You have no mind." "In my brain then. How can all that be in one small brain?" "Because your brain is not in your head, and it is not small. Come, I may as well show it to you; Fve told you enough that it won't matter if you know a little more. There are few who are taken on personally conducted sight-seeing tours of their own brains. You should be grateful. "Gratitude seems a little tardy." They went into the barred area, down into the bowels of the main building of the center. And they looked at the brain of Anthony Trotz, a restricted person in its special meaning. "It is the largest in the world" said Colonel Cooper. "How large?" "A little over twelve hundred cubic meters." 'What a brain! And it is mine?" "You are an adjunct to it, a runner for it, an appendage, inasmuch as you are anything at all." "Colonel Cooper, how long have I been alive?" "You are not." "How long have I been as I am now?" "It is three days since you were last reassigned, since you were assigned to this. At that time your nervousness and apprehensions were introduced. An apprehensive unit will be more inclined to notice details just a little out of the ordinary." "And what is my purpose?" They were walking now back to the office  work area, and Anthony had a sad feeling at leaving his brain behind him. 'This is a filter center, and your purpose is to serve as a filter, of a sort. Every person has a slight aura around him. It is a characteristic of his, and is part of his personality and purpose. And it can be detected, electrically, magnetically, even visually under special conditions. The accumulator at which we were looking (your brain) is designed to maintain contact with all the auras in the world, and to keep a running and complete data on them all. It contains a multiplicity of circuits for each of jects. However, as aid to its operation, it was necessary to assign several artificial consciousnesses to it. You are one of these." HE dogs and the children had found a new victim in the streets below. Anthony's heart went out to him. "The purpose," continued Colonel Cooper, "was to notice anything just a little bit peculiar in the auras and the persons they represent, anything at all odd in their comings and goings. Anything like what you have come here to report to me." "Like the seven persons who recently arrived in the world, and not by way of birth?" "Yes. We have been expecting the first of the aliens for months. We must know their area, and at once. Now tell me." "What if they are not aliens at all. What if they are restricted persons like myself?" "Restricted persons have no aura, are not persons, are not alive. And you would not receive knowledge of them." "Then how do I know the other restricted persons here, Adrian and Wellington, and such?" "You know them at first hand. You do not know them through the machine. Now tell me the area quickly. The center may be a primary target. It will take the machine hours to ravel it out. Your only purpose is to serve as an intuitive short-cut." But Tin Man Tony did not speak. He only thought in his mind -- more accurately, in his brain, a hundred yards away. He thought in his fabricated consciousness: "The area is quite near. If the colonel were not burdened with a mind, he would be able to think more clearly. He would know that cruel children and dogs love to worry what is not human, and that all of the restricted persons are accounted for in this area. He would know that they are worrying one of the aliens in the street below, and that is the area that is right in my consciousness. "I wonder if they will be better masters? He is an imposing figure, and he would be able to pass for a man. And the colonel is right; The Center is a primary target. 'Why! I never knew you could kill a child just by pointing a finger at him like that! What op)portunities I have missed! Enemy of my enemy, you are my friend." And aloud he said to the colonel: "I will not tell you." "Then we'll have you apart and get it out of you mighty quick." "How quick?" "Ten minutes." "Time enough," said Tony, for he knew them now, coming in like snow. They were arriving in the world by the hundreds, and not arriving by birth. : practice, it may reveal something about us that we've never known. I i on the first one -- I T T Walraven, ship's i communications man," Costain I said, low-voiced. "Captain Maxon I and Vaughn have called in. I There's been no word from RaI gan." I Coordinator Erwin took his seat beside the psychologist, his bearing as militarily authoritative in spite of civilian clothing as the room's air was medical. "Maybe Ragan won't turn up," Erwin said. "Maybe we've still got a man out there to bring the ship back." Costain made a quieting gesture, his eyes on the three-man psych team grouped about Walraven's wheeled reclining chair. "They've given Walraven a light somnolent. Not enough to put him out, just enough to make him relive the flight in detail. Accurately." The lead psych man killed the room's lighting to a glow. "Lieutenant Walraven, the ship is ready. You are at your post, with Captain Maxon and Lieutenants Vaughn and Ragan. The first Mars flight is about to blast off. How do you feel?" Walraven lay utterly relaxed, his face dreaming. His voice had the waning sound of a tape running down for lack of power. "Jumpy," he said. "But not really afraid. We're too well conditioned for that, I guess. This is a big thing, an important thing. Exciting." The long preparation over, training and study and news interviews and final parties all dreamlike and part of the past. Outside now, invisible but hearteningly present beyond the ship's impermeable hull, the essential and privileged people waiting to see them off. The ship's power plant was humming gently like a giant, patient cat. Captain Maxon passed out muscle-relaxant capsules. The total boneless relaxation that was their defense against acceleration came quickly. The ship was two hours out, beyond lunar orbit and still accelerating, when, trained for months against the moment, set each about his task. Readings occupied Maxon and Vaughn and Ragan while Walraven checked his communications and telemetering gear. It was not until the transmitter slot had licked up its first coded tape -- no plain text here, security before even safety -- and reported all well, the predicted borne out, that they became aware of the Feeling. The four of them sat in their unsqueaking gimbaled seats and looked at each other, sharing the Feeling and knowing that they shared it, but not why. Vaughn, who was given to poetry and some degree of soul-searching, made the first open recognition. "There's something wrong," he said. The others agreed and, agreeing, could add nothing of explanation to the wrongness. Time passed while they sat, seeing within themselves for the answer -- and if not for answer, at least for identification -- but nothing came and nothing changed except that with time the steady pressure of the Feeling grew stronger. Vaughn, again, was first to react to the pressure. "We've got to do something." He twisted out of his seat and wavered in the small pseudogravity of the ship's continuing, acceleration. "I've never in my life felt so desolate, so -- " He stopped. "There aren't any words," he said helplessly. Less articulate than Vaughn and knowing it, the others did not try to help find the words. Only Ragan, professional soldier without family or close tie anywhere in the world, had a sugI gestion. I "The ship's power plant is partly psionic," Ragan said. "I don't understand the principle, I but it's been drilled into us that no other system can give a onedirectional thrust without reaction. The psi-drive is tied into our minds in the same way it's tied into the atomic and electronic components. It's part of us and we're part of it." Even Maxon, crew authority on the combination drive, missed his meaning at first. "If our atomic shielding fails," Ragan explained, "we're irradiated. If our psionics bank fails, we may feel anything. Maybe the trouble is there." Privately they disagreed, certain that nothing so disquieting as the Feeling that weighted them down could be induced even by so cryptic a marriage of dissimilar principles as made up the ship's power plant. Still it was a possible avenue of relief. "It's worth trying," Maxon said, and they checked. And checked, and checked. Walraven said, "but nothing came of it. None of us, even Maxon, knew enough about the psi-drive to be sure, but we ended up certain that the trouble wasn't there. It was in us." The drug was wearing thin, leaving him pale and shaken. His face had a glisten of sweat under the lowered lights. The lead psych man chose a hypodermic needle, looked to Erwin and Costain for authority, and administered a second injection. "You gave up searching," he said. "What then. Lieutenant?" "We waited," Walraven said. He relaxed, his face smoothing to impersonal detachment as his mind slipped back to the ship and its crew. Watching, Costain felt a sudden deep unease as if the man's mind had really winged back through time and space and carried a part of his own with it. "There was only one more possible check," Walraven said. "We had to wait two days for that." The check was Maxon's idea. I simple of execution and unarguable of result. At halfway point acceleration must cease, the ship rotate on its gyros and deceleration set in. There would be a period of waiting when the  power plant must be shut off completely. If the Feeling stemmed from the psi-drive, it would lift then. It did not lift. They sat weightless and disoriented while the gyros processed and the ship swung end by end and the steady pressure of the Feeling mounted  up and up without relief. "It gets worse every hour," Vaughn said raggedly. "It's not a matter of time," Maxon said. "It's the distance. The Feeling grows stronger as we get farther from home." They sat for another time without talk, feeling the distance build up behind them and sensing through the unwindowed hull of the ship what the emptiness ; outside must be like. The ship was no longer an armored projectile bearing them snugly and swiftly to a first planetfall. It was a walnut shell without strength or direction. In the end they talked out their problem because there was nothing else they could do. "We're men," Maxon said, not K but as if it were a premise that  had to be made, a starting point i for all logic. "We're reasoning creatures. If the trouble lies in ourselves we can find its source and its reason for being." He picked Vaughn first because Vaughn had been first to sense the wrongness and because the most sensitive link in a chain is also predictably its weakest. "Try," Maxon said. "I know there are no words to describe this thing, but get as close as you can."  sickness. It's a different thing altogether from nostalgia. It's not just fear. I'm afraid -- not of any thing, just afraid in the way a child is afraid of falling in his dreams, when he's really had no experience with falling because he's never fallen more than a few inches in his life... When I think of my wife, it's not the same at all as if I were just in some far corner of the Earth with only land and water between us. Even if I were marooned on an uncharted island somewhere with no hope of seeing home again, I wouldn't feel this way. There wouldn't be this awful pulling." Ragan agreed with Vaughn that the Feeling was essentially a pull, but beyond agreement could add nothing. Ragan had covered the world without forming a tie to hold him; one place was as good as another and he felt no loss for any particular spot on Earth. "I only want to be back there," he said simply. "Anywhere but here." "I was born on a farm in New England," Walraven said. "Out of the land, like my father and his people before him. I'm part of that land, no matter how far from it I go, because everything I am came from it. I feel uprooted. I don't belong here." Uprooted was the key for which they had hunted. Maxon said slowly, "There are wild animals on Earth that can't live away from their natural homes. Insects -- how does a termite feel, cut off from its hive? Maybe that's our trouble. Something bigger than individual men made the human race what it is. Maybe we've been a sort of composite being all along, without knowing it, tied together by the need of each other and not able to exist apart. Maybe no one knew it before because no one was ever isolated in the way we are." Walraven had more to say, almost defiant in his earnestness. "This is going to sound wild, but I've been fighting inside myself ever since Vaughn mentioned being pulled toward home. I have the feeling that if Fd only let go, I'd be back where I belong." He snapped his fingers, the sound loud in the room. "Like that." No one laughed because each found in himself the same conviction waiting to be recognized. Ragan said, "Walraven's right. There's no place on Earth I care for more than another, but I feel I could be back there in any one of them" -- he snapped his fingers, as Walraven had done -- "as quickly as that." "I know," Maxon said. "But we can't let go. We were sent out to put this ship into orbit around Mars. We've got to take her there." " easy. The Feeling got worse as we went out and out. Knowing what it was helped a little, but not enough. We held onto each other, the four of us, to keep the group together. We knew what would happen if we let go." The head psych man looked to Costain and put his needle away when Costain shook his head. "The ship," Coordinator Erwin said sharply. "Walraven, you did put her into orbit?" "Yes," Walraven said. "We put her into orbit and turned on the telemetering equipment -- theyll be picking up her signals by now -- and then we turned our backs on each other and we let go. There wasn't any feeling of motion or speed, but I felt a I w I t: t It i I i ( i fresh breeze on my face and when I opened my eyes I was standing beside a familiar stone fence on a hill above the house where I was born. You haven't told me, but the others came back, too, didn't they?" "All but Ragan," Erwin said. His tone made Costain think wryly. Even the military can snatch at straws. "Maxon and Vaughn called in. But we haven't heard from Ragan." "He wasn't left behind," Walraven said with certainty. "Ragan has no family, but he has a home. We're standing on it." An orderly came in with an envelope for Costain, who opened it and handed the paper to Erwin. To Walraven, Costain said, "It's a cablegram from North Ireland. Ragan is back." Erwin was still gripping the paper in his hand when he walked with Costain out of the hospital into the bright airiness of a spring day. He glared at the warm, blue sky. "We'll find a way," Erwin said. "We've proved that we can put men on Mars. With the right conditioning, we can keep them there." "You're a dedicated and resolute man. Coordinator," Costain said. "Do you really suppose that any amount of conditioning could fit you to do what those boys failed at?" The long moment of considering that passed before Erwin answered left a fine sheen of sweat on his face. "No," Erwin said. Borax for brownies and the moonwateher who missed -- the crinkled getter and the Canaverai sneeze -- these are the things that make up -- . T his is Tandy's story. But first, take a recipe; the Canaveral sneeze; the crinkled getter; the Condition adrift; the analogy of the Sahara smash; Hawaii and the missing moon; and the analogy of the profit-sharing plan. There is no discontinuity here, nor is the chain more remarkable than any other. They are all remarkable. If this were your story, it might compound from the recipe of a letter that never got mailed, a broken galosh clip, a wistful memory of violet eyes, the Malthusian theory and a cheese strudel. However, it is Tandy's. We begin then with the Canaveral sneeze, delivered by a white-gowned, sterile-gloved man in a germ-free lab, as gently he lifted a gold-plated twenty-threeinch sphere into its ultimate package. Not having a third hand at the time, he was unable to cover his mouth in time. Gesundheit. And now to Tandy's story. only child for the first two years of his life and he would never get over it. Noel, her sister, was born when Tandy was crossing that high step into consciousness called Three Years Old. (Timothy, the other brother, wasn't until later. Anjrway, this isn't his story. This is Tandy's story.) When Tandy was five, then, it was clear to her that while the older Robin was bigger, stronger, more knowledgeable and smarter (he wasn't, but she hadn't been around long enough to learn that yet) and could push her around at will until she yelled for help -- while, to put it another way, she was attacked from above -- the sister below was excavating the groimd under her feet. Noel imaccountably delighted everyone else, even Robin, for she was a blithe little bundle. But her advent necessarily drained off a good deal of parental attention from Tandy, who lost the household position of The Baby without gaining Robin's altitude as The Firstborn. It didn't seem fair. So she did what she could about it. She yelled for help. It wasn't any ordinary yell, if an ordinary yell is a kind of punctuation or explosion or communicative change-of-pace. There were times when it wasn't, except for its purpose and figuratively, a yell at all. It was at times a whine -- a highly specialized one, not very loud but strident, that could creep in and out of her voice twice in a sentence. Or it might be merely a way of asking for something, and asking and asking, so that she couldn't even hear a "yes" and was not aware of the point at which it furiously turned to a "no." Or perhaps an instantaneous approach to tears, complete with where anyone else might use the mildest emphasis: "It was Tuesday I wore the blue dress, not Monday," and the equally instantaneous disappearance of the tears (which, somehow, was the annoying part). Or utter, total, complete, unmoving non-response to an order through the third, the fourth, the fifth repetition, and then a sudden shattering screech; "I heard you!" Tandy had, in short, a talent approaching genius for getting under one's skin and prickling. This established, it is mere justice to all concerned to report also that Tandy was loved and lovable as well. Her parents took the matter of child-rearing seriously. The reasons (over and above innate talent) for Tand#r's more irritating proclivities were quite known to them. And Tandy, long-lashed, supple, with hair the color of buckwheat honey and golden freckles spattered across her straight perfect nose, was an affectionate child, and her parents loved her and showed it very often. And this did not alter one whit her position as No. Two Child, her distaste for the role, her yelling for help and therefore, for all the love, the concurrent war of abrasion. There were times when she and Robin got along as contemporaries and splendidly. And of course almost anyone could get along with the biddable Noel. But these times were more wished-for than often. When they occurred, they were so welcome that one is reminded of the lady with the perennially battling children who called out into an unwonted silence one mid-morning: "What are you kids doing?" From under the porch a young voice replied, "Burning the wrappers off these razorblades with matches, Mommy." "That's nice," she replied, "Don't fight..." At such times, in short, they could get away with practically anything, and Tandy's usual occupations were staged alone and away from people. Yet never completely away. crowded loneliness, she liked to be on the outside looking in or on the inside looking on, but not of the group. When the neighborhood gathered on the lawn for hide-and-seek or kickball, and the game was well started, Tandy would be seen forty paces off, squatting by the driveway, making a cake-sized cake of earth, perhaps, and decorating it with pebbles and twigs; or acting out some elaborate dialogue with her doll Luby (whether or not Luby was with her,) bowing and mugging and murmuring the while in a number of voices. Tandy spoke beautifully. She had since the beginning, and her command of idiom and tone was too expert to be cute. There were times when it was downright embarrassing, as when the father overheard her demanding of a peonybush, with precisely his own emphasis, "What the hell are you, hypnotized?" There were times when these performances at the edge of the activity of others attracted considerable attention. She was surprisingly deft for a five-year-old, being one of these kids who from birth, apparently, can with a single movement draw a closed figure so that you are unable to see where the ends of the line join, and whose structures with blocks never seem jumbled, but quite functional (as indeed, to the fantasy of the moment, they are). Once in a while she drew quite a gallery of the curious with, say, six careful rows of red Japanese maple leaves and deep pink trumpet-vine blossoms alternating on the lawn, before which she would posture severely, murmuring under her breath and pointing to one and another with a stick. At such times she seemed quite oblivious to six or eight children magnetically drawn round her, who watched mystified. Sometimes she would answer and sometimes she would not. Sometimes it would take drastic measures, as for example Robin's shuffling through the careful arrangement of leaves and petals, before it could be learned (the hard way, in this case) that she was teaching school, that the leaves were boys and the trumpets girls, and that she was now going to tell Mama to throw Robin's Erector set into the garbage, and a good deal more -- precisely what more, no one knew, for by then the screech would have destroyed intelligibility. placed near the base and inside the metal envelope of an RF amplifier tube in the telemetry circuit of the big rocket's second stage. The getter's function was to absorb the residual gases in the tube and harden the vacuum therein. Its crinkle was an impurity, but so slight as to cause no trouble until the twelfth hour of countdown. Then rarefied gas began to ionize and toop! discharge and ionize and foop! discharge again. To replace the tube required that they go back to twenty-four hours and start the countdown again. The extra twelve hours delay enabled sneeze-mist to dry on die, and others to encyst, and a smear of virus, sub-microscopically, to turn to a leathery, almost crystalline jelly. woods which in turn were in, or nearly in, the very middle of the upstate village, a pleasant accident derived from the landgrabbing, land-holding traditions of three neighbors' fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. The three acres on which Tandy's house stood were surrounded by perhaps twenty acres of other people's woods and a small swamp; yet the house was barely ten minutes on foot away from the village green. Somewhere, then, in house or garden, lawn, swamp or wood, the brownie came to Tandy. It had that stuffed-toy, left-outin-the-rain aspect possible only to stuffed toys which have been left out in the rain. It was about nine inches high. Its clothing, or skin (properly, the outside layer was both), was variously khaki-colored and mottled green. The appellation "brownie" derived from what appeared to be a tapered hat, though once the father was heard to remark that it was the damn thing's head that was pointed. The arms and legs were taut and jointless, and looked like sausages on which lived lichens. For hands there were limp yellow-pink leaves of felt, and for feet, what might have been the model for a radical cartoonist's rendering of the knotted moneybags of Old Moneybags. As for a face -- well, it was a face. That's all. Black disks for eyes, so faded you couldn't tell whether they were supposed to be open or closed, a ditto-mark for a nose and a streak below which may have been some clumsy whimsy -- a smile up on the right scowling downward to the left -- or a streak of dirt. In the light of all that happened, one would think there would be a day of discovery, an hour of revelation, an open-thepackage kind of Event. But there wasn't. The brownie was kicking around the place for weeks, months maybe; they had all seen it, kicked it aside, used it as a peg for that parental sigh, "Got to clean out all this junk sometime..." Robin dug a grave for a dead cat once and then couldn't find the cat, so buried the brownie instead. Noel had taken it to bed with her once, and the mother had thrown it out the window during the night. It was one of those things, along with the bent but not quite broken doll carriage, the toy electric motor with the broken brush and Noel's wind-up giraffe, which needed new ears. So the brownie wove its indistinct thread into the tapestry of days, in and out of the margin between toys and trash. The exact beginnings of Tandy's preoccupation with the brownie were also vague, and even when first her interest was total, it made little impression, because Tandy was... well, for example, the caterpillar. Once when she was four she caught a tent caterpillar and kept him in a coffee can for two days and named him Freddy and fed and watered him and even covered him at night with a doll blanket. During the second night she awoke crying, agonizing after Freddy, inconsolable until the can was found and brought and shown to her. Her grandmother, who was around at the time, said sagely, "That child needs a pet!" and everybody nodded and conversed about pets. The next morning Tandy put Freddy on the flagstones out front "so he could go for a walk." He went for a walk. Altogether. For half a day people tiptoed around Tandy as if she were full of fulminate and had dined on dynamite. But not only did she not ask about Freddy, she never even mentioned him. She stumbled over the can and almost fell and kicked it away and did not even glance at it Thereafter Tandy's preoccupations were beyond judgment or prediction; they might be blood-sistership, like the affair with her doll Luby Cindy, or they might be passing passions like Freddy. The brownie... well, people became aware not that Tandy had a new one, but that for some indeterminate time she had been orbiting around this artifact. And when Tandy orbited, so did the cosmos or it -- all of it -- would be accountable to Tandy. the Condition adrift. No other name for it will do, and even that is inaccurate. It was... well, matter; but matter in such a curlicue, so self-involved in stress, that Condition is a better word than Thing. It had been made where it was useful to its makers, and one might say it had a life of its own though it had not years. By a coincidence as Unlikely as the existence of the reader of this history or a world to read it on, but as true, the Condition adrift found itself matching course and speed with the golden ball in space. It contacted, interpenetrated, an area of the golden surface four by eight microns, and happily found itself a part of organic material -- a dried and frozen virus and two encysted bacteria. The latter it dissected and used. The former it activated, but in a wild reorganizing way so radical its mammy amino wouldn't have recognized it. The Condition became then a Thing (without losing its conditional character) and it scored itself across and divided. And divided again. And that was the end of that, for it had used up its store of a certain substance too technical to mention, but as necessary as number. Such was the nature of this organism that once alive it must grow, but if it could not grow it must cease dividing, and if it ceased dividing it must undergo an elaborate, eons-long cycle ' before it could come round to being again a mere Condition adrift. But unless it could begin that cycle it must die. By means known to it, it flowed through the lattices of the sputtered gold, quartered the sphere, searched and probed, and at last stopped. It turned its attention to the great globe beneath.  in the early spring, though Tandy herself could never remember just when -- she got the brownie a house. Actually it was an old basketwork fishing creel she had found behind the garage. but the one thing one learned most quickly about Tandy was that things were what she said they were. Anything else was only your opinion, to which you were not entitled. And there was a certain justice in her attitude, for it did not take long for such an object to lose its creelship and become what she said it was. She set it against the back wall of the garage, in the tangled ground between the wall and the old stone fence, under the shelter of the adjoining carport -- for a wall-less shelter had been hung to the side of the garage to accommodate the second car they hoped for some day. It was a nice sort of outdoors-indoors place. She drove a row of stakes in front of the creel and on it placed a rectangle of discarded plywood -- a miniature of the carport -- but as time went on she added walls. First they were cardboard. The creel was the bedroom and the rest of it was the living room. At Easter she saved her basket and it was a bed. She got the brownie up every morning and put him to bed every night, and on weekends he took his nap too. She fed him. She had a small table -- not a cream cheese box, a table! -- for him, and on the table were clamshell plates and an acorn cup. and a pill-bottle -- strike that; a flower vase -- which, from the time spring first started to show her colors, she kept supplied. But before that she was feeding him snow ice-cream, sawdust cereal, mushroom steaks, and wooden bread. She talked to him constantly, sometimes severely. And in that unannounced way of hers, she spent all her free time with him. No one noticed it especially, in March and almost through April, except perhaps to be grateful for the quiet. A minute spent with the brownie was a minute without Tandy's moaning, whining, sobbing, screeching or otherwise yelling for help. Of course, there had to be minutes spent away from the brownie. Most of them were at school.  course, and it may have been that there was just too much of it for Tandy. Due to factors of distance and necessities of school buses, the kindergarten was not, as is usual for such establishments, a nine-to-noon affair, but instead lasted for the whole school day, ending at three. In spite of a long rest period after lunch, it was the opinion of many that this was asking too much of five-year-olds. It may have been the teacher's opinion as well. It was certainly Tandy's opinion. Her first report card was not resoundingly good, and her second one was somewhat worse. Neither was bad enough to cause concern, but the parents were jolted by the specific items on which she scored worst. Beside the item Speak clearly and distinctly the teacher had marked the symbols which meant "Hardly ever," and beside Knows right from left was the mark for "Seldom." The parents looked at one another in amazement, and then the father said, "That can't be right!" and the mother said, "That can't even be Tandy. She's given her the wrong report card!" But she had not, as the mother found out by visiting the teacher at school one afternoon. The mother, going in like a lion, came out numb with awe for the teacher's forbearance, and for the second time (Robin had done this to her once, on another matter) suffering that partly amused but nonetheless painful experience of learning how little one knows of one's own. Or as the bemused father put it, "It's a wise father who knows his own child." For, fully documented and with inescapable accuracy, the teacher had described a Tandy they never saw around the house -- a Tandy recalcitrant, stubborn, inactive, disobedient and, most incredible of all, talking incessant baby talk. The teacher's ability to see below the surface, to know that the child wasn't really as bad as all that, helped the overall picture not at all, because it became manifest that Tandy did not know right from left on purpose; that she spoke baby-talk by choice; that she fell from grace in matters of handkerchiefs and handwashing not because she forgot, but because she remembered. Above and beyond everything else was that the degree of this behavior was by no means excessive. She had never once been subjected to the routine punishment of being made to stand out in the hall. She could always stop just short of outright delinquency. She was the foot that drags, the pressure which is not quite toothache, the discomfort which is not yet heartburn. The parents conferred unhapipily with each other and then with Tandy, who answered every "Why?" with "I just -- " and an infuriating shrug, rolling upward of the eyes, flinging the hands out and down to flap helplessly against the thighs. It was the mother's exact gesture, which of course is precisely why it was infuriating. So the father, his anger at last arriving, drew a bead on Tandy with his long forefinger and declared, "This is a rule. No more brownie." ""HE analogy of the Sahara smash is the anecdote of one of the desert crashes of a B-# in Africa. Unlike tragic others, this one had a happy ending, and this is why: the crew made no attempt to trek out of there in a body, but instead assigned one man to march out and get help. The significant thing is that he carried with him not only a compass, but almost their entire water supply. The rest of the crew rationed themselves down to three tablespoonsful a day and lay as still as possible buried in the sand under the broken fuselage. So it was that the organism on the golden satellite told off one of itself to ooze patiently out to the tip of one of the whip antennae; then, by means known to it -- for as related, it contained unheardof stresses, neatly curled up and intertwined -- it bent the whip double and released it, and out into the emptiness, in the opposite direction from orbital motion, was snapped this infinitesmal fleck of substance. It tracked along with the satellite for a long time, but separating always, until it was lost in the glittering emptiness. But with it it carried all but a fraction of the organic substance available to the whole. Three parts were left quiescent, waiting moveless to die or be saved. The fourth fell toward Earth, which took -- as long as it took... trol-by-giving (hits in the head or ice cream) and a school of taking away, and the father, when aroused, tended to the latter. In extreme cases a child can learn never to express preference or fondness for anything lest he qualify it for the disciplinary list. This was not that extreme. It would not be because of the mother, who despised this kind of thing and whose reactions were very fast. One glimpse of Tandy's stricken face at this "No more brownie!" dictum and she added, "... if you go on making people unhappy." And, ignoring the father's stifled cry of rage, she went on, "Now you run on out and talk it over with the brownie." Tandy did as she was told, leaving her parents to instruct one another about child-rearing, and communed with the brownie; and perhaps this was the real beginning of it all. For she had done a great deal for this brownie. Now, for the first time, she had made it clear that there were things that needed doing for her. If things changed at school, it was naturally not immediately apparent at home. Things at home did not change. That is, the busy-ness with the brownie continned to use up the whining time, the screeching time, the opportunities for chance medley and battle royal with Noel and Robin. One weekday morning the mother had hung out a line-full of clothes and, being face to face with the garage, was moved to go round and see how Tandy was coming along with Project Brownie. She hadn't seen it for some weeks. She recalled vaguely that the cardboard sides had been replaced, and she knew that the tiny flower-vase had borne violets, and baby's breath, and alyssum. And she recalled the time she had turned out her sewing basket apd the kitchen gadget drawer and rearranged them, all in one morning, and had given the detritus to Tandy for her brownie. Time was when Tandy would have gathered up such a treasure-trove with a shrill shriek of joy, would have fought selfishly and jealously with the other children over the ownership of every ribbon-end, every old cork and worn-out baby-bottle nipple, only to leave bits and pieces exasperatingly all over the house and yard within the next couple of hours. But this time she had spread the whole clutter out on the living room table, darted her deft small hands in and out of the pile, and in a few seconds had selected the blunt end of a broken nutpick. the china handle of a Wedgewood pitcher, a small tangle of pale blue nylon-and-wool yarn, and a brass wing-nut. "He wants these," she said positively. "That's all?" the mother had asked, astonished. And Tandy had replied, precisely mimicking the father, "Now what would a brownie want with all that junk?" It wasn't so much the modesty of Tandy's wants that had surprised the mother. It was the absolute and unhesitating certainty with which she chose. Thinking of this, the mother rounded the garage and saw the brownie's house. bedroom, but the rest of the structure had vastly altered. The cardboard walls had been replaced with wood -- some ends of shiplap that used to lie under the sleeping-porch -- and since the mother had heard nothing of any carpentry by or for Tandy, she could see that the stony ground had been carefully and laboriously dug to various depths so that the little boards, buried upright, could present an even eaveline. On one side were two small square window-openings, glazed with cellophane; on the other was a longer opening like a picturewindow. The roof, still the castoff piece of plywood, had been covered with a layer of earth, thatched with living star-moss. The mother knelt to look inside. The floor of the house was covered with a blinding-white powder of some kind. She took a pinch of it and felt it and smelt it and even tasted it a little without recognizing it; she'd ask Tandy later. The table was covered with a cloth which had once been part of a dust-rag which had once been one of the mother's dresses; it was spotlessly clean -- it seemed even to have been ironed -- and was so folded and placed that the torn edges were out of sight. On the table was the pill-bottle flower-vase, just half full of clean water, in which stood a single stem and blossom of bleeding-heart. The effect was simple, tasteful, sort of Japanese-y. And further inside was the creel bedroom, with an oval dresser (despite the neat cloth cover and skirt, she recognized the lines of an inverted sardine tin) over which was the mirror which had been in Tandy's birthday pocketbook, and before which was a handsome little round chair, made of a bit of cardboard glued to a large wooden threadspool, also covered and skirted with a scrap of material matching the dresser. And in bed was the brownie. The mother had to go down almost flat on her stomach to see what it was which covered his pillow so whitely, so clean and thick-textured. A luxury material indeed -- dogwood petals. He was covered with a quilt (she couldn't bring herself to call it one of her old pot-holders) and he was sleeping. She chuckled at herself. How were those round black painted eyes to look open or closed?... and she looked again and thought they were open. She almost said "Excuse me!" and she actually did blush at disturbing his nap. Wagging her head, she backed away and stood up. Between her and the old stone fence was usually a carpet of weeds. There was no pretense of making lawn or garden out of the stony soil here. Actually, the front lawn had been grown on trucked-in topsoil. Yet -- Yet this area was now planted. A row of early marigolds between the brownie's house and the onetime weed-bed. And, from there to the fence, a dark-green plant, low, spidery, in rows. She did not recognize the plant except perhaps as just another weed. Speechless, she returned to the house. that day; Robin came home bloody and triumphant. Mother had meant to talk about brownie, but it was some time before events sorted themselves out. It appeared that a "big kid" had started chanting the wellknown chant about "I seen Tandy's underwear," and Robin had punched him and gotten clobbered for it. The bus monitor broke it up, and in spite of Robin's having gotten the worst of it, he came home bursting with pride and Tandy awash with admiration. The mother felt both. It was the first time Robin had ever brought arms to bear in defense of his sister, and after the question and cross-question and verbal jigsaw-puzzling which is always necessary to get an anecdote out of a child, and the awkward telephone conversation with the parent of the party of the other part, she found herself alone not with Tandy, but with Robin, Tandy having escaped to her preoccupation behind the garage. "Robin, I don't like fighting but I must say, I like the way you took up for Tandy." "Aw, she's okay," said Robin, not noticing how the mother of what he usually called that little tattletale, that squeaky wheel, that pushfaced squint-eyed bowlegged stoop... how the mother of this repulsive sibling let drop her jaw, and slumped into a chair. She was still sitting there, trying to recover her strength, while Robin pedalled away on his bicycle and while, a moment later, Tandy came in. She came totteringly, mounded down with clean laundry. The mother leapt up to help her get the screen door open and then had to sit down again. "Tandy!" she cried. "Well, they was all dry. Mommy, so I brought them in." "They were," said the mother weakly. "Sure they were. Mommy..." She was going to ask for something. If it was a diamond tiara, the mother thought, she'd get her one if she had to murder for it. "Yes, honey." "Mommy, would you teach me how to set the table? I could do it every day while you get dinner." So for the time being the mother utterly forgot to ask any questions about the brownie. THE mother thought about the brownie a good deal, although -- perhaps it was a remnant of her comical embarrassment at having caught him in bed -- she seldom went back there to look at the house. But one afternoon, thinking about the neatness of the little table, the dresser and chair and mirror, the shining white floor (what was that stuff, anyway?) it occurred to her that the three-year-old Noel would find that arrangement back there irresistible, and she shuddered at the mental picture of Noel bellying delightedly into the careful structure, churning up the white floor, leaning too hard on the cheese-box table, tumbling the mossy roof. "Noel... "Noel, we've all got to be specially careful of Tand#s brownie house. You wouldn't ever play with it unless she asked you to, would you?" Noel gravely shook her helmet of tight curls. "I not allowed." The mother tipped her head to one side and regarded the child. There were a number of things Noel was not allowed to do which she... "But all the same, you won't go back there by yourself." "I not allowed," said Noel with great emphasis, and simultaneously the mother thought (a) that she'd like Tandy's formula for not allowing if it worked like this and (b) let's keep an eye on Noel all the same. It was demonstrated, about ten days later, just how unnecessary it was to stand guard over the brownie's house. It was a Saturday. The father was home, Robin was off somewhere on his bicycle, and Tandy was slaving happily away behind the garage. The father, from the front of the house, called out, "Do you know what happened to the hand cultivator?" The mother's photographic memory saw it lying beside a row of green. Oh, of course. "Noel, darling, run out behind the garage and get the cultivator. Tandy'll show you." "Pleadingly, "No, Mommy!" "Noel!". "I not allowed to!" said Noel, and incredibly, for she was a cheerful child, she began to cry. The first impulse was to lay on some muscle and authority, the next a deep sympathy for the little one. "Oh... Noel..." "I gon' hide!" shrieked Noel in something very like Tandy's special rasping shriek; and go she did, hide she did, ineffectively (the mother knew she was in the baby's blue chiffonier) but with great purpose. Apparently her "not allowed" was big enough to make it worth while defying the giants. Sighing, the mother went to the back door. "Tandy!" "Yes, Mommy..." "Bring Daddy's cultivator to him, he needs it!" "The handle-fingers?" "That's right, dear." She watched Tandy, in a yellow dress, bounding from behind the garage and heading for the front lawn. She waited until she saw the flash of yellow again and called her to the back steps. "Tandy, you must have "been terribly rough to Noel about not playing with your brownie. She's afraid to go back there because you said she's not allowed." "No, I didn't. Mommy." "Tandy!" (The explosion of the name alone was the mother's favorite curb.) "COR the first time in many weeks Tandy began to pucker up, the eyes grew bright, the mouth trembled. "I reely, reely, reely..." Moving on impulse, the mother stepped forward and took Tandy's wrist. "Shh, honey. Take me out and show me what you're doing." Tandy immediately shut it all off and they went back of the garage, Tandy skipping. The mother was prepared to be complimentary as one normally is, multiplied by the wonder of what she had seen before; but she was not prepared for what she found. One wall had been removed from the little house, the shiplap scraps unearthed and tossed aside. The roof was still supported by the other side and the top of the creel. A heap of flat stones lay near, and a small sack of ready-mixed concrete. A seedflat was doing service as a miniature mortar-board, and a discarded pancake-turner as a trowel. Tandy was composedly replacing the wooden wall with one of fieldstone. "Tandy! Why, I never... who taught you to do this?" "I asked Mr. Holmes-the-gymteacher." (Tandy's teachers' names were all compound like this.) "But -- but... where did you get the concrete?" "I boughted it. I saved my 'lowance money and all my ice-cream money. That's all right, isn't it? I didn't go into town, Robin did on his bicycle." She slopped water from a toy sand-bucket and began to mix the concrete. "Robin never told me," said the mother faintly. "I guess you never asked him. Mommy." "I guess I never." The mother wet her lips. "Tandy, how did you ever think of all this?" "I didn't think of it. I just did it, that's all." She picked up a slather of cement and ladled it on to the top course of her new wall. "You wouldn't expect a brownie to go on living in a ol' wood house, now, would you?" she demanded in grandmotherly tones. "No, I -- I suppose not... Tandy, I saw the dresser and the little chair and the tablecloth. They're lovely. Tandy, did someone iron the tablecloth for you?" "Oh, it irons itself," said Tandy. "You wash it an' rinse it and stick it on a window an' when it's dry it's ironed." "What's that lovely white floor?" stone, then carefully laid it on the course. "Borax," she said. "And you bought that with your ice-cream money too?" "Sure. Brownies like borax and the little lumps off roots and that stuff there." She pointed to the rows of dark-green weed. "What is that?" "The brownie's farm." "I mean, the plant." "I don't know what the real name is. I found it through the woods there, there's a whole patch. I call it brownie spinach. Look, over there's the lump. It's like candy to a brownie." She pointed to a heap of roots, from some legume or other -- the mother couldn't tell, for the leaves were gone; but the root-hairs had clusters of the typical nitrogenous nodules. "Tandy, how on earth do you know so much about brownies?" Tandy gave her an impish glance. "I guess the same way you know about little girls." The mother laughed. "Oh, but I had little girls of my own!" Tandy just nodded: "Mm-hm." The mother laughed again. When she left Tandy was fitting a whiskey-bottle -- the three-sided "pinch" bottle -- full of water, into the wall she was building, taking infinite pains to have it slant just so. The mother wasn't laughing. though, later when she told her husband about it. As such things occasionally do, these developments had come about invisibly to him, having shown themselves mostly when he was away during the day. He listened, frowning thoughtfully, and when the children were glued to the television set the parents went out to look at the brownie house. All he said -- all he could find to say, over and over, was: "Well, how about that." When they left he snapped off a sprig of the dark green weed and put it in his pocket. "And she sets the table every night," breathed the mother. stone house (even the roof was stone, laid over the plywood from which the mossy earth had been swept away) Tandy seemed to abandon the brownie and his house altogether. She went back to one of her earlier passions, modelling clay, and spent her time studiously working it. But not ducks, not elephants. She would make thick rectangular slabs of it, and draw, or score, deeply into it. Some of the channels she cut were deeper than others, some curved, some straight but cut with her stylus at an acute angle, so that portions were undercut. "Looks like a threedimensional Mondrian," said the father one night when the kids were asleep. He worked in a museum and knew a great many things, and had access to a great many more. That plant, for example. "It's astralagus vetch" he told his wife. "And I knew I'd read something about it somewhere, so I looked it up again. It's a pretty ordinary sort of vegetable except for some reason it has a fantastic appetite for selenium. So much so that proposals have been made to mine selenium -- and you know, that's that light-sensitive element they use in TV tubes and photocells and the like -- by planting the vetch where selenium is known to be in the soil, harvesting the whole plant, burning it and recovering selenium from the ash. All of which is beside the point -- what on earth made the little fuzzhead pick the stuff up and plant it?" "Brownies like it," the mother said, and smiled. It was the very next morning that Tandy was missing from the breakfast table. There was only a small flurry about it; the mother knew just where to look. The child was busily packing armloads of vetch and tangles of knobby roots into a hole in the solid front of the brownie house. The brownie himself sat against the garage, its face turned toward her, its notclosed, not-open eyes seeming to watch. "I'm sorry. Mommy," Tandy said brightly, "but I'm not late for school, am I?" "No, dear, but your breakfast is ready. What on earth are you doing to the brownie's house?" "It isn't a house any more," said Tandy, in the tones of one explaining the self-evident to one who should know better without asking, "it's a factory." She put both hands in the hole and pushed hard. Apparently the house was baled full of weeds and roots. She daubed mortar around the opening quickly. "Come, dear." "Just finished. Mommy." She took a flat stone and set it into the opening, which must have been prepared for it, for it seemed a perfect fit. Another slap of mortar and she was up smiling. "I'm sorry. Mommy, but this is the day I had to do that." "For the brownie." "For the brownie." They went back to the house. should have been but was not more than a sergeant at the missile tracking station, grunted and straightened away from the high definition screen. "Lost it." He pulled a tablet toward him, glanced at the clock, and started Nobody saw the faint swift streak as the satellite died. But if there had been a witness to that death -- placed not to see faint swift streaks, but right on the scene, with a high-speed stroboscopic viewing device, he would have had some remarkable pictures. As the golden sphere surrendered to the ravening attack of frictional heat, in that all but immeasurable fragment of time wherein its parts became malleable, plastic, useful -- they were used. Selenium from the solar cells, nitrogen from the pressurized interior, borosilicates ripped from refractory parts, were gleaned and garnered and formed and conformed. For a brief time (but quite long enough) there existed a device of molten alloy bars and threads surrounding a throat, or gate, which was composed of a pulsing, An#Tthing placed within this blue area would cease to exist -- not destroyed in any ordinary sense, but utterly eliminated. And the laws of the universe being what they are, such eliminated matter must reappear elsewhere Exactly where, depends of course on circumstances. hanging clothes when a flash of light caught her eye. She put down her clothes-basket and went to the back of the garage. The brownie sat with his back to the garage, staring glumly at the torn-up remnants of his "farm." The midmorning sunlight, warm and bright in this clear dry day, struck down through a gap in the trees and poured itself on and over the pinch bottle, half in and half out of the near wall of the little house. The colors were, she found by screening her vision through her eyelashes, lovely and very bright -- flame-orange and white -- why, the bottle itself seemed to be alight. Or was it the inside of the little house? There was a violent, sudden hiss as the bottle, full of water, popped its cork and sent a gout of water inside the little stone structure. Steam rolled up and then disappeared, and she took a pace back from the sudden wave of heat. Terrified, she began to think of hose, of extinguisher... the garage, all these trees, the house... and then she saw that the side of the brownie's house which adjoined the wooden garage was fieldstone too. The hear. whatever it was, was contained. It seemed to diminish a little. Then the glass bottle wavered, softened, slumped and fell inside. Heat blasted out again, and again diminished. She stepped closer and peered down through the hole left by the bottle. She could clearly see, lying on the floor of the stone chamber, the clay slab Tandy had made, with its odd, geometrical system of ditches and scorings. But they seemed filled with some quivering liquid, which even as she watched turned from yellow to silver and then dulled to what could only be called a chalky pewter. The lines and ditches, filled with this almostmetal, made a sort of screen, but not exactly. It was too tangled for that. Say an irregular frame about an irregular opening in the center of the slab. And this center area began to turn blue and then purple, and then throb in some way she would never be able to describe. She had to turn her eyes away. Looking away seemed to snap the thread of fascination with which she had leashed fear. She fled to the house, dialed the telephone, got her husband. "Quick," she said, and stopped to pant, alarming him mightily. "Come home." It was all she could manage. She hung up and sank into a couch. She was therefore unaware of Noel, who came trotting across the back of the house and straight and fearlessly behind the garage. She stood for a while with a red lollipop in her mouth and pink hands behind her, watching the heat-flickers over the stones, then circled them carefully to windward and squatted down where she could peer inside. Carefully then, and much more steadily than even a deft three-year-old might be expected to move, she reached down with her delicate lollipop and probed the molten slag. don't, don't!" the mother said later back of the garage, as the father stabbed angrily at the hot stones with a crowbar. "Tandy might... she might... oh, it's meant so much to her..." "I don't care, I don't care," he growled, stabbing and slashing and ruining. "I don't like it. Just say it's about fire, like playing with matches. We won't punish her or anything." "No?" she said woefully, looking at the ruins. "And this," he said, "damn devilish thing." He scooped up the brownie and thrust it among the scorching rocks. It flamed up easily. The last thing to go was the pair of dull eyes. The mother was at last sure they had been open the whole time. "Just tell her we almost had a fire," growled the father... which was the selfsame day Tandy brought back her report card, the absolutely perfect report card, and the note;... truly the first absolutely perfect report card I have ever made out in my twentyeight years of teaching school. The change in Tandy is quite beyond anything I have ever seen. She is an absolute delight, and I think it safe to say that probably she always was; her previous behavior was, perhaps, a protest against something which she has now accepted. I shall never be able to express my gratitude to you for coming in for that talk, nor my admiration of you for your handling of the child (whatever that was!) It might be gracious of you to say that perhaps I had something to do with this; I would like to forestall that compliment. I did nothing special, nothing extra. It is you who have wrought the most pleasant kind of miracle. It was signed by her teacher, and it left them numb. Then the mother kissed Tandy and exclaimed, "Oh darling, whoever in the world magicked you?" Exclamation or no, Tandy took it as a question and answered it directly: "The brownie." There was a heavy silence, and then the mother took Tandy's hand. "You have to know about something," she said, and ungently to the father, "You come too." They went out behind the garage, the woman touching Tandy's shoulders with ready mother hands. "There was a fire, honey. It all burned up. The brownie burned too." The father, watching Tandy's face, which had not changed at the sight of the ruin (was this that un-seeing you read about, when people in shock deny to themselves what they see?) said suddenly and hoarsely, "It was an accident." "No, it wasn't," Tandy said. She looked at her father and her mother but they were both looking at their feet. "And anyway, he isn't burned up, he wasn't in that fire." "He was," said the father, but she ignored him. "Anyway," the mother said, "I'm terribly sorry about your pretty little house, Tandy." Tandy poked out her lips briefly. "It wasn't a house, it was a factory, I told you," she said. "And anyway it's all finished with anyway." "You better understand," said the father doggedly, "that brownie did burn." "You remeiiiber. You left him sitting right there," said the mother. "Oh," said Tandy, "that wasn't a brownie! You can't see a brownie, silly. I've got the brownie. Don't you know that? Didn't you see the 'port card?" "How did the..." She couldn't say it. "It was easy. Any time I got to do something, I think about should I or not, and if I should, how I should do it; when I think of the right way, something inside here goes bwoop-eee!" (she made a startlingly electronic sound, the first syllable glissading upward and the second fiat and unmusical, like a "pure" tone) "and I know that's what I should do. It's easy. And that's the brownie." "Inside you." "Mm-hm. That dirty old doll, that was just a way to get some fun out of all that hard work. I couldn't've done it without having some sort of fun. So I made it easy for brownies to live in this whole world and they make it easy for me." The mother thought about a metallic twisted thing with a purple mystery atremble in it. It was like looking through a window into a -- another place. Or a door. "Tandy," she said, moved as she sometimes was by sheer impulse, "how many brownies came through the door?" "Four," said Tandy blithely, and began to skip. "One for me, one for Robin, one for Noel and one for the baby. Could I have some juice?" They walked back to the house. Robin was home. He was giving Noel back her lollipop and saying "Thank you" the way they always wished he would. Noel always was a generous child. She had already given the baby a lick. HE analogy of the profit-sharing plan appears as we imagine a self-satisfied tycoon at his desk and a bright-eyed junior exec sprinting in bearing mimeographed sheets. "Gosh, J. G., this is the first look I had at the new plan. You're doing a lot for your people here, J. G., a whole lot." And homiletically the great man inclines his head, accepting the tribute, and says "A happy worker is a loyal worker, my boy." And while bobbing his head, the junior executive is thinking, "Yeah, and what's good for the happy workers is good for management, how about that?" Yet enlightened and cooperative self-interest is not always to be sneered at. Ask any symbiote. Whatever it was that bubbled up out of that blue orifice had been designed simply and solely to adapt a host fully to its environment, in order to induce that cardinal harmony called -- joy. Not satisfaction, not contentment, not pleasure. These can be had in other ways, and by using less than all of the environment. A surge of joy within the host created that special substance on which the symbiote fed, and it was as simple as that. Oh happy worker. Oh happy management... "Well, thank God anyway she's back to normal," said the father. He came in from the porch where he and the mother had stood watching the neighborhood kids and Robin and Tandy playing on the lawn. The mother did not point out to him that Tandy, in and of the whole group now, may have been plajdng normally, but she wasn't back to it; she'd come to it. The mother stood watching, silent, happy, and frightened. Inside, the father picked up his newspaper and threw it down again when he heard one of those special in-group code sounds which come to families like secret cyphers. This one was the click of heavy glass against hardwood, and meant that the baby, who had been put down in the crib in the master bedroom, had lashed out with a strong left hook in his random way and belted his bottle out of his mouth and up against the crib bars. The father stopped just inside the bedroom. His jaw dropped, and all he could do was slowly to raise a hand to his chin and close it and hold it closed. For the baby, the six-months-old Timothy, who only yesterday could hopelessly lose a bottle five-eighths of an inch away from his hungry face, pulled himself to a sitting position by the bars, half-turned to the left and pulled the pillow on which the bottle had been perched away from the side of the crib and up to a formal position across the end of the mattress; half-turned to the right to grasp the bottle, then lay back. He not only took the bottle firmly in his two hands; he not only got his mouth on it; he also elevated it so it would flow freely. And for a long moment there was no sound but his suckings, his rhythmic murmurs of sheer joy, and the faint susurrus of tiny bubbles valving back into the bottle; for the father was holding his breath. At last the father inhaled and opened his mouth to call his wife witness to this miracle. He then thought better of it, closed his mouth, wagged his head and quietly left the room. As he entered by one door, Robin, the firstborn, bounded in at the front. The screen door went to the stretch, and uncorked a curve that promised to tear out the moldings when it hit. The father squinched up his face and eyes in preparation for the crash, but Robin, for the first time in his life -- a boy has to be at least eleven before he stops slamming screen-doors, and Robin was only eight -- Robin reached behind him without looking and buffered the door with his fingertips, so it closed with a whisper and a click. He galloped past the unthunderstruck father and went into the kitchen; a moment later he was seen, all unbidden, lugging the garbage out. The father fell weakly back into the big wicker chair. Cordwainer Smith is one science-fiction writer who made his mark strictly on quality, not quantity, because up to now the quantity has been, as any connoisseur knows, far too small. It's a pleasure to know that he has got down to work and the quantity is on the increase -- and quality, if anything, better than ever! We've got him firmly pinned down for the June Galaxy with a story which elucidates a simple three-part law: Poor communications deter theft; good communications promote theft; perfect communications stop theft. That's the idea behind the story. The way Cordwainer Smith fleshes it out is what "Daddy..." He put down his paper. Noel came to him with a long cardboard box stretching her threeyear-old arms out almost straight. She plead, "You wanna play chest with me?" He looked at her for a long moment. Many times they had sat on the carpet and made soldier-parades with the chessmen. But now he -- he... He shuddered. He tried to control it but he couldn't. "No, Noel," he said. "I don't want to play chest with you..." But oh, that's Noel's story, not Tandy's. makes a first-rate novelette out of our forthcoming Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons. (Yes, that's the way it's spelled!) What else? More than we have space to say! There's Mack Reynolds with a long novelette called Farmer -- Frank Herbert with one called A-W-F Unlimited -- maybe another novelette -- and the usual lineup of features... And among the shorts one at least that deserves a special word: A Gentle Dying, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. Kornbluth's death broke up one of the finest writing teams in science fiction. This may be the last time that familiar double by-line will appear in Galaxy... You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints...  the  IVa Hark (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects able -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-ALens, #x# inch Art Board, # tubes Oil Paint, Oil, Turpentine, # Brushes, # page Instruction Book. avail only .# Montgomery Word, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not hove it, ask them to order on assortment. Address inquiries to: Vi-a-lens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna.  Range the stars!  Explore the past, present and future!  See worlds that might have been!  Be in on ideas that are just aborning! All this adventuring comes with each issue of IF Science Fiction Magazine -- and a subscription saves you money, beats the newsstands by a week to ten days, arrives flat and neat -- there are too many reasons for subscribing to list on this page, but there are some, and another is that you're sure to get your copies. Neither snow nor rain -- you know? Cut out the coupon or send your order in on any scrap of paper about, along with check, money order or cash. We don't need the coupon; it's there just in case you want to use it. But whatever you do, don't use up the future -- subscribe today! IF Science Fiction  #I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the issue. I enclose (check one): # issues... # # issues... # Foreign Postage # Issues #c Additional Name Address City I p.O. Zone State    . i GALAXY JUNE #I galaxy # i K BY A-W-F BY BY BY  Range the stars!  Explore the past, present and future!  See worlds that might have been!  Be in on ideas that are just aborning! All this adventuring comes with each issue of IF Science Fiction Magazine -- and a subscription saves you money, beats the newsstands by a week to ten days, arrives flat and neat-there are too many reasons for subscribing to list on this page, but there are some, and another is that you're sure to get your copies. Neither snow nor rain-you know? Cut out the coupon or send your order in on any scrap of paper about, along with check, money order or cash. We don't need the coupon; it's there just in case you want to use it. But whatever you do, don't use up the future -- subscribe today! IF Science Fiction  # I Hudson Street  New York #, New York Start my subscription to IF Science Fiction with the issue. I enclose (check one): # issues... # # issues... # Foreign Postage # Issues #c Additional Name Add ress P.O. Zone State City be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hickden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe ld.l ! Scribe LD.L i San Jose, California i J Please send me the free book ,Tbe Mastery J , of Life, which explains how I may learn to J i use my faculties and powers of mind. i i i I Name -- j  Address  ! Cit y  Also Published in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Finland and Sweden The Strait Named After Vitus Bering by Mack Reynolds # by R. A. Lafferty # by Cordwainer Smith # by Frank Herbert # #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #y per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons " coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. ter from a fellow stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Unfortunately he doesn't sign his name, but he encloses an advertising throwaway from the field, which lists under Lost and Found: baseball glove. Says this is another clear proof that There Are Aliens Among us. Submitted same to our board of experts; they decide that the evidence is ambiguous. It doesn't prove aliens are here. It only proves that aliens were here; may have departed, leaving their sixfingered baseball gloves behind. Ten A. M. Two letters from the sponsors of s-f conclaves. One, the Midwescon, to be held June #rd, #th and #th, at the North Plaza Motel, #I Reading Road, Cincinnati, Ohio; will we let our readers know about it? The other from the SeaCon Committee -- that is, the Nineteenth World Science-Fiction Convention, to be held in Seattle, Washington, over Labor Day weekend. Their plans are proceeding rapidly. The place will be the Ryatt House (they claim it's America's first air-age hotel, with direct fly-in accommodations); the Guest of Honor will be Robert A. Heinlein; the place to write for information is Seattle ScienceFiction Club, P. O. Box #, Broadway Branch, Seattle #, Washington. And they too would like us to tell our readers. Eleven-thirty, and the telephone: "Sir, I'm Dr. , and I have here a patient under light hypnosis who -- " "A what?" "A patient. I have him under light hypnosis. He is recalling from memory a poem which appeared in the October, #, issue of Galaxy, page #. Will you check it, please? I would like to know if he has it right." "Um... Well... Just a minute." (Search through files.) "Hello? There's no poem on that page. It's part of a story by Daniel F. Galouye. Come to think of it. Galaxy never ran a poem on any page of any issue." "Thank you." (End of telephone call.) Two o'clock. The afternoon package mail arrives. Big square package; open it up, and it's a two-volume book by Isaac Asimov. The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science. Looks pretty exciting. Read a couple of sentences here and there. On the future development of computers: We represent, for the first time in the history of life on the Earth, a species capable of bringing about its own possible replacement. Of course, we have it in our power to prevent such a regrettable denouement by refusing to build machines that are too intelligent. But it is tempting to build them nevertheless. What achievement could be grander than the creation of an object that surpasses the creator? On our neighbor worlds in space: There may be as many as five known Universe... On at least some of those planets life may very well have evolved to what we would call "intelligent" forms. Even if this has happened in only one inhabited still be # planets in our Galaxy Fascinating stuff! Would be good to sit down and start reading the whole thing right now... but there's a mass of proofreading to get through... a magazine to edit... and what's this other package, anyway? Turns out to be nothing more nor less than a Galaxy for Galaxy. No fooling. It's called the "Seelo Galaxy Globe" -- transparent vinyl plastic, the size of a beach ball; blow it up (with a bicycle pump; this is no ordinary beach ball; the moisture in the breath harms it) and you have in three dimensions the entire sky as seen from Earth -- a desk-sized planetarium for Everyman! The accompanying literature tells us something about the man who made it. He is also a college teacher -- mathematics, this time. A Californian; his name is Theodore Vincent. He spent six months preparing his master stencils, and now can convert two sheets of vinyl plastic into a Galaxy Globe by running them through a silk screen six times -- to show the star names, the constellations, the latitude and longitude and various other data in five colors; and to show the stars themselves and the Milky Way in fluorescent white. Fluorescent? Let's try. We hold the inflated globe up to a ceiling light, locate a dark room -- and there it is. The night sky. Big Dipper, Gemini, Orion -- Southern Cross, Magellanic Clouds -- everything. A beautiful job! Five o'clock. Telephone again, from the Production Department: "Where the devil are those proofs?" But tomorrow will be another and # other Novelets from Galaxy One of the best collections of Science Fiction Stories edited by Horace Gold, published by Doubleday  Co. Priced at #. We have # copies available at # while they last. Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc., #I Hudson St., New York #. N. Y. I enclose # for each copy. (We pay postage.) copies at # total. Name Address "  Qjy Zone State Someone out there didn't like trees. He wanted to wreck the i O NE of the auto-copters swooped in and landed. Johnny McCord emptied his pipe into the wastebasket, came to his feet and strolled toward the open door. He automatically took up a sun helmet before emerging into the Saharan sun. He was dressed in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt, wool socks and yellow Moroccan babouche slippers. The slippers were strictly out of uniform and would have been frowned upon by Johnny's imhit.  mediate superiors. However, the in the swank air-conditioned Arabs had been making footwear buildings of Colomb-Bechar, Tasuitable for sandy terrain for cenmanrasset and Timbuktu, from turies before there had ever been whence they issued lengthy bula Sahara Reforestation Commisletins on the necessity of never sion. Johnny was in favor of allowing a Malian to see a Corntaking advantage of their knowmission employee in less than the how. Especially since the top correct dress and in less than brass made a point of staying commanding dignity. While they were busily at work composing such directives, field men such as Johnny McCord went about the Commission's real tasks. It was auto-copter #, which Johnny hadn't expected for another half hour. He extracted the reports and then peered into the cockpit to check. There were two red lights flickering on the panel. Work for Reuben. This damned sand was a perpetual hazard to equipment. Number # had just had an overhaul a few weeks before and here it was throwing red lights already. He took the reports back into the office and dumped them into the card-punch. While they were being set up, Johnny went over to the office refrigerator and got out a can of Tuborg beer. Theoretically, it was as taboo to drink iced beer in this climate, and particularly at this time of day, as it was to go out into the sun without a hat. But this was one place where the Commission's medics could go blow. By the time he'd finished the Danish brew, the card-punch had stopped clattering so he took the cards from the hopper and crossed to the sorter. He gave them a quick joggling -- cards held up well in this dry climate, though they were a terror further south -- and sorted them through four code numbers, enough for this small an amount. He carried them over to the collator and merged them into the proper file. He was still running off a report on the Alphabetyper when Derek Mason came in. Johnny drawled in a horrible caricature of a New England accent, "I say, Si, did the cyclone hurt your barn any?" Derek's voice took on the same twang. "Don't know, Hiram, we ain't found it yet." Johnny said, "You get all your chores done, Si?" Derek dropped the pseudotwang and his voice expressed disgust. "I got a chore for you. Johnny, that you're going to love. Rounding up some livestock." Johnny looked up from the report he was running off and shot an impatient glance at him. "Livestock? What the hell are you talking about?" "Goats." Johnny McCord flicked the stop button on the Alphabetyper. "Where've you been? There isn't a goat within five hundred miles of here." Derek went over to the refrigerator for beer. He said over his shoulder, "I was just making a routine patrol over toward Amerene El Kasbach. I'd estimate there were a hundred Tuareg in camp there. Camels, a few sheep, a few horses and donkeys. Mostly goats. Thousands of them. By the looks of the transplants, they've been there possibly a week or so." Lord. What clan were they?" Derek punched a hole in his beer can with the opener that hung from the refrigerator by a string. "I didn't go low enough to check. You can never tell with a Tuareg. They can't resist as beautiful a target as a helicopter, and one of these days one of them is going to make a hole in me, instead of in the fuselage or rotors." Johnny McCord, furious, plunked himself down before the telephone and dialed Tessalit, # kilometers to the south. The girl on the desk there grinned at him and said, "Hello, Johnny." Johnny McCord was in no mood for pleasantries. He snapped, "Who's supposed to be on Bedouin patrol down there?" She blinked at him. "Why, Mohammed is in command of patroling this area, Mr. McCord." "Mohammed? Mohammed who? Eighty percent of these Malians are named Mohammed." "Captain Mohammed Mohmoud ould Cheikh." She added, unnecessarily, "The Cadi's son." Johnny grunted. He'd always suspected that the captain, had got his ideas of what a cadi's son should be like from seeing Hollywood movies. "Look, Kate," he said. "Let me talk to Mellor, will you?" Her face faded to be replaced by that of a highly tanned, middle-aged executive type. He scowled at Johnny McCord with a this-better-be-important expression, not helping, Johnny's disposition. He snapped, "Somebody's let several thousand goats into my eucalyptus transplants in my western four hundred." Mellor was taken aback. Johnny said. "I can have Derek back-trail them, if you want to be sure, but it's almost positive they came from the south, this time of year." Mellor sputtered, "They might have come from the direction of Timmissao. Who are they, anyway?" "I don't know. Tuareg. I thought we'd supposedly settled with all the Tuareg. Good Lord, man, do you know how many transplants a thousand goats can go through in a week's time?" "A week's time!" Mellor rasped. "You mean you've taken a whole week to detect them?" Johnny McCord glared at him. "A whole week! We're lucky they didn't spend the whole season before we found them. How big a staff do you think we have here, Mellor? There's just three of us. Only one can be spared for patrol." "You have natives," the older man growled. "They can't fly helicopters. Most of them can't even drive a Land Rover or a jeep. Besides that, they're scared to death of Tuaregs. They wouldn't dare report them. What I want to know is, why didn't you stop them coming through?" Mellor was on the defensive. He ranked Johnny McCord, but that was beside the point right now. He said finally, "I'll check this all the way through, McCord. Meanwhile, I'll send young Mohammed Mohmoud up with a group of his men." "To do what?" Johnny demanded. "To shoot the goats, what else?" these days a bunch of these Tuareg are going to decide that a lynching bee is in order, and that's going to be the end of this little base at Bidon Cinq." Mellor said, "If they're Tuareg nomads then they have no legal right to be within several hundred miles of Bidon Cinq. And if they've got goats, they shouldn't have. The Commission has bought up every goat in this part of the world." Johnny growled, "Sure, bought them up and then left it to the honor of the Tuareg to destroy them. The honor of the Tuareg! Ha!" The other said pompously, "Are you criticizing the upper echelons, McCord?" Johnny McCord snapped, "You're damned right I am." He slammed off the telephone and turned on Derek Mason. "What are you grinning about?" Derek drawled, "I say, Hiram, I got a sneaky suspicion you ain't never gonna graduate off'n this here farm if you don't learn how to cotton up to the city slickers better." "Oh, shut up," Johnny growled. "Let's have another beer." Before Derek could bring it to him, the telephone screen lit up again and Paul Peterson, of the Poste Weygand base, was there. He said, "Hi. You guys look like you're having a crisis." "Hello, Paul," Johnny McCord said. "Crisis is right. Those jerks down south let a clan of Tuareg, complete with a few thousand goats, camels and sheep through. They've been grazing a week or more in my west four hundred." "Good grief." Paul grimaced. "At least that's one thing we don't have to worry about. They never get this far up. HowM it happen?" "I don't know, but I'm going to find out. I haven't seen the mess yet, but it's certain to wreck that whole four hundred. Have you ever seen just one goat at work on the bark of three-year transplants?" Paul shuddered sympathetically. "Look, Johnny," he said. "The reason I called you. There's an air-cushion Land Rover coming through. She just left." Derek Mason looked over Johnny's shoulder into the screen. "What d'ya mean, she?" Paul grinned. "Just that, and, Buster, she's stacked. A Mademoiselle Helene Desage of Paris Match." Johnny said, "The French magazine? What's she doing in a road car? Why doesn't she have an aircraft? There hasn't been a road car through here this whole year." Paul shrugged. "She claims she's getting it from the viewpoint of how things must've been twenty years ago. So, anyway, we've notified you. If she doesn't turn up in eight or ten hours, you better send somebody to look for her." "Yeah," Johnny McCord said. "Well, so long, Paul." The other's face faded from the screen and Johnny McCord turned to his colleague. "One more extraneous something to foul up our schedule." Derek said mildly, "I say, Hiram, what're you complaining about? Didn't you hear tell what Paul jest said? She's stacked. Be just like a traveling saleswoman visitin' the farm." "Yeah," Johnny growled. "And I can see just how much work I'll be getting out of you as long as she's here." II known in the Sahara as Bidon Cinq, is as remote a spot on earth in which man has ever lived. Some # kilometers to the south is Bourem on the Niger river. If you go west of Bourem another # kilometers, you reach Timbuktu, the nearest thing to a city in that part of the Sudan. If you travel north from Bidon Cinq # kilometers you reach Colomb-Bechar, the nearest thing to a city in southern Algeria. There are no railroads, no highways. The track through the desert is marked by oil drums filled with gravel so the wind won't blow them away. There is an oil drum every quarter of a mile or so. You go from one to the next, carrying your own fuel and water. If you get lost, the authorities come looking for you in aircraft. Sometimes they find you. In the latter decades of the Twentieth Century, Bidon Cinq became an outpost of the Sahara Reforestation Commission which was working north from the Niger, and south from Algeria as well as east from the Atlantic. The water table in the vicinity of Bidon Cinq was considerably higher than had once been thought. Even artesian wells were possible in some localities. More practical still were springs and wells exploited by the new solarpowered pumps that in their tens of thousands were driving back the sands of the world's largest desert. Johnny McCord and Derek Mason ate in the officer's mess, divorced from the forty or fifty Arabs and Songhai who composed their work force. It wasn't snobbery, simply a matter of being able to eat in leisure and discuss the day's activities free of the chatter of the larger mess hall. Derek looked down into his plate. "Hiram," he drawled, "who ever invented this here now cous cous?" Johnny looked over at the tall, easy-going Canadian who was his second in command and scowled dourly. He was in no humor for their usual banter. "What's the matter with cous cous?" Johnny growled. "I don't know," Derek said. "I'm a meat and potatoes man at heart." Johnny shrugged. " Cous cous serves the same purpose as potatoes do. Or rice, or spaghetti, or bread, or any of the other bland basic foods. It's what you put on it that counts." Derek stared gloomily into his dish. "Well, I wish they'd get something more interesting than ten-year-old mutton to put on this." Johnny said, "Where in the devil is Pierre? It's nearly dark." "Reuben?" Derek drawled. "Why Reuben went out to check the crops up in the northeast forty. Took the horse and buggy." That didn't help Johnny's irritation. "He took an air-cushion jeep, instead of a copter? Why, for heaven's sake?" "He wanted to check quite a few of the pumps. Said landing and taking off was more trouble than the extra speed helped. He'll be back shortly." "He's back now," a voice from the door said. Pierre Marimbert, brushing sand from his clothes, pushed into the room and made his way to the mess-hall refrigerator. He said nothing further until he had a can of beer open. Johnny said, "Damn it, Pierre, you shouldn't stay out this late in a jeep. If you got stuck out there, we'd have one hell of a time finding you. In a copter you've at least got the radio." Pierre had washed the dust from his throat. Now he said quietly, "I wanted to check on as many pumps as I could." "You could have gone back tomorrow. The things are supposed to be self-sufficient, no checking necessary more than once every three months. There's practically nothing that can go wrong with them." Pierre finished off the can of beer, reached into the refrigerator for another "Dynamite can go wrong with them," he said. T HE other two looked at him, shocked silent. Pierre said, "I don't know how many altogether. I found twentytwo of the pumps in the vicinity of In Ziza had been blown to smithereens -- out of forty I checked." Johnny rapped, "How long ago? How many trees... ?" Pierre laughed sourly. "I don't know how long ago. The transplants, especially the slash pine, are going to be just so much kindling before I get new pumps in." Derek said, shocked, "That's our oldest stand." Pierre Marimbert, a forty-yearold, sun-beaten Algerian colon, eldest man on the team, sank into his place at the table. He poured the balance of his can of beer into a glass. Johnny said, "What... what can we do? How many spare pumps can you get into there, and how soon?" Pierre looked up at him wearily. "You didn't quite hear what I said, Johnny. I only checked forty. Forty out of nearly a thousand in that vicinity. Twenty-two of them were destroyed, better than fifty percent. For all I know, that percentage applies throughout the whole In Ziza area. If so, there's damn few of your trees going to be left alive. We have a few spare pumps on hand here, but we'd have to get a really large number all the way from Dakar." Derek said softly, "That took a lot of men and a lot of dynamite. Which means a lot of transport -- and a lot of money. We've had trouble before, but usually it was disgruntled nomads, getting revenge for losing their grazing land." Johnny snorted, "Damn little grazing this far north." Derek nodded. "I'm simply saying that even if we could blame our minor sabotage on the Tuareg in the past, we can't do it this time. There's money behind anything this big." Johnny McCord said wearily, "Let's eat. In the morning we'll go out and take a look. I'd better call Timbuktu on this. If nothing else, the Mali Federation can send troops out to protect us." Derek grunted. "With a standing army of about # men, and a half square miles of desert?" "Can you think of anything else to do?" "No." ing cous cous into a soup plate, then poured himself a glass of vin ordinaire. He said, "I can't think of a better place for saboteurs. Twenty men could do millions of dollars of destruction and never be found." Johnny growled, "It's not as bad as all that. They've got to eat and drink, and so do their animals. There are damned few places where they can." From the door a voice said, "I am intruding?" They hadn't heard her car come up. The three men scrambled to their feet. "Good evening," Johnny McCord blurted. "Hell... o!" Derek breathed. Pierre Marimbert was across the room, taking her in hand. "Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Que puis-je faire pour vous? Voulezvous une biere bien fraiche ou un aperitif? #I fait tres chaud dans le desert." He led her toward the table. "Easy, easy there, Reuben," Derek grumbled. "The young lady speaks English. Give a man a chance." Johnny was placing a chair for her. "Paul Peterson, from Poste Weygand, radioed that you were coming. You're a little late, Mademoiselle Desage." She was perhaps thirty, slim, long-legged, Parisian style. Even at Bidon Cinq, half a world away from the Champs Elysees, she maintained her chic. She made a moue at Johnny, while taking the chair he held. "I had hoped to surprise you, catch you off guard." She took in the sun-dried, dour-faced American wood technologist appraisingly, then turned her eyes in turn to Derek and Pierre. "You three are out here all alone?" she said demurely. "Desperately," Derek said. Johnny McCord said, "Mademoiselle Helene Desage, I am John McCord, and these are my associates, Monsieur Pierre Marimbert and Mr. Derek Mason. Gentlemen, Mademoiselle Desage is with Paris Match, the French equivalent of Life, so I understand. In short, she is undoubtedly here for a story. So ixnay on the ump-pays." "I would love cold beer," Helene Desage said to Pierre, and to Johnny McCord, "These days a traveling reporter for Paris Match must be quite a linguist. My English, Spanish and Italian are excellent. My German passable. And while I am not fluent in Pig-Latin, I can follow it. What is this you are saying about the pumps?" "Oh, Lord," Johnny said. "Perhaps I'll tell you in the morning. But for now, would you like to clean up before supper? You must be exhausted after that # kilometers from Poste Weygand." Pierre said hurriedly, "I'll take Mademoiselle Desage over to one of the guest bungalows." "Zut!" she said. "The sand! It is even worse than between Reggan and Poste Weygand. Do you realize that until I began coming across your new forests I saw no life at all between these two posts?" The three forestry experts bowed in unison, as though rehearsed. "Mademoiselle," Derek, from the heart, "calling our transplant forests is the kindest thing you could have said in these parts." They all laughed and Pierre led her from the room. Derek looked at Johnny McCord. "Wow, that was a slip mentioning the pumps." Johnny was looking through the door after her. "I suppose so," he said sourly. "I'll have to radio the brass and find out the line we're supposed to take with her. That's the biggest magazine in the French-speaking world and you don't get a job on it without knowing the journalistic ropes. That girl can probably smell a story as far as a Tuareg can smell water." "Well, then undoubtedly she's already sniffing. Because, between that clan of Tuareg with its flocks and the pump saboteurs, we've got more stories around here than I ever expected!" Ill TN the morning Helene Desage managed to look the last word in what desert fashion should be, when she strolled into Johnny McCord's office. Although she came complete with a sun helmet that must have been the product of a top Parisian shop, she would have been more at place on the beaches at Miami, Honolulu or Cannes. Her shorts were short and fitting, her blouse silken, her walking shoes dainty. He considered for a moment and then decided against informing her that Moslems, particularly in this part of the world, were little used to seeing semi-nude women strolling about. He'd leave the job of explanation to Pierre, as a fellow Frenchman and the oldest man present to boot. "Bonjour she said. "What a lovely day. I have been strolling about your little oasis. But you have made it a garden!" "Thanks," Johnny said. "We've got to have something to do after working hours. Entertainment is on the scarce side. But it's more than a garden. We've been experimenting to see just what trees will take to this country -- given water and care through the early years. Besides, we use it as a showplace." "Showplace?" "For skeptical politicians who come through," Johnny said, seating her in a chair near his desk. "We give them the idea that the whole Sahara could eventually be like this square mile or so at Bidon Cinq. Palm trees, fruit trees, pines, shade trees. The works." "And could it?" Johnny grinned sourly. "Well, not exactly. Not all in one spot, at least. You've got to remember, the Sahara covers an area of square miles. In that area you find almost everything." "Everything except water, eh?" She was tapping a cigarette on a polish-reddened thumbnail. As he lit it for her, Johnny McCord realized that he hadn't seen fingernail polish for a year. He decided it was too long. "Even water, in some parts," he said. "There's more water than most people realize. For instance, the Niger, which runs right through a considerable part of the Sahara, is the eleventh largest river in the world. But until our commission went to work on it, it dumped itself into the Gulf of Guinea, unused." "The Niger is a long way from here," she said through her smoke. He nodded. "For that matter, though, we have a certain amount of rain, particularly in the highland regions of the central massif. In the past, with no watershed at all, it ran off, buried itself in the sands, or evaporated." "Mr. McCord," she said, "you are amazingly optimistic. Formerly, I must admit I had little knowledge of the Sahara Reforestation Commission. And I deliberately avoided studying up on the subject after receiving this assignment, because I wanted first impression to be received on the spot. However, I've just driven across the Sahara. My impression is that your Commission is one great -- Comment dit-on? -- boondoggling project, a super-W.P.A. into which to plow your American resources and manpower. It is a fake, a delusion. This part of the world has never been anything but wasteland, and never will be." Johnny McCord heard her out without change in expression. He'd been through this before. In fact, almost every time a junketing congressman came through. There was danger in the viewpoint, of course. If the fantastic sums of money which were being spent were cut off, such pessimistic views would become automatically correct. He took the paperweight from a stack of the correspondence on his desk and handed it to her. She looked at it and scowled very prettily, but still a scowl. "What is this? It's a beautiful piece of stone." "I picked it up myself," Johnny said. "Near Reggan. It's a chunk of petrified wood, Miss Desage. From a tree that must have originally had a diameter of some ten feet. Not quite a redwood, of course, but big." "Yes," she said, turning it over in her hand. "I can see this part, which must have once been bark. But why do you show it to me?" "The Sahara was once a semitropical, moist area, highly wooded. It can become so again." S HE put the piece of fossil back on his desk. "How long ago?" she said bluntly. "A very long time ago, admittedly. During the last Ice Age and immediately afterwards. But, given man's direction, it can be done again. And it must be." She raised pencilled eyebrows at him. "Must be?" Johnny McCord shifted in his chair. "You must be aware of the world's population explosion, Miss Desage. The human race can't square miles of land to be valueless." He grunted in deprecation. "And at the rate it was going, it fore long." She didn't understand. Johnny spelled it out for her. "A desert can be man-made. Have you ever been in the Middle East?" At her nod, he went on. "Visitors there usually wonder how in the world the ancient Jews could ever have thought of that area as a land of milk and honey. On the face of it, it's nothing but badlands. What was once the Fertile Crescent now looks like Arizona." Helene Desage was frowning at him. "And you suggest man did this -- not nature?" "The goat did it. The goat, and the use of charcoal as fuel. Along with ignorance of soil erosion and the destruction of the wonderful watershed based on the Cedars of Lebanon. Same thing applies to large areas of Libya and Tunisia, and to Morocco and Spain. Those countries used to be some of the richest agricultural areas of the Roman Empire. But you can't graze goats, probably the most destructive animal domesticated, and you can't depend on charcoal for fuel, unless you want to create desert." "Those things happened a long time ago." Johnny snorted. 'When we first began operations, the Sahara was going south at the rate of two miles a year. Goats prefer twigs and bark even to grass. They strip a country." "Well," the reporter said, shrugging shapely shoulders, "at any rate, the task is one of such magnitude as to be fantastic. Yesterday, I drove for nearly eight hours without seeing even a clump of cactus." "The route you traveled is comparatively untouched by our efforts, thus far," Johnny nodded agreeably. "However, we're slowly coming down from Algeria, up from the Niger, and, using the new chemical methods of freshening sea water, east from Mauretania." He came to his feet and pointed out spots on the large wall map. "Our territory, of course, is only this area which once was called French West Africa, plus Algeria. The battle is being fought elsewhere by others. The Egyptians and Sudanese are doing a fairly good job in their country, with Soviet Complex help. The Tunisians are doing a wonderful job with the assistance of Common Europe, especially Italy." She stood beside him and tried to understand. "What is this area, here, shaded green?" He said proudly, "That's how far we've got so far, heading north from the Niger. In the past, the desert actually came down to the side of the river in many places. The water was completely wasted. Now we've diverted it and are reforesting anywhere up to three miles a year." "Three miles a year," she scoffed. "You'll take five centuI ries." "It's a progressive thing. Water is admittedly the big problem. But as our forests grow, they themselves bring up the moisture content of the climate. Down in this area -- " he made a sweeping gesture over the map which took in large sections north of the Niger -- "we've put in hunwhich is particularly good for sandy soil and fast growing. In ten years you've gone from twoyear-old seedlings to a respectable forest." Johnny pointed out Bidon Cinq on the map. "At the same time we found what amounts to a subterranean sea in this area. Not a real sea, of course, but a water-bearing formation or aquifer, deep down under the surface of the earth -- layers of rock and gravel in which large quantities of water are lying. The ! hydro-geological technicians who surveyed it estimate that it holds water. Utilizing it, we've put in several hundred square miles of seedlings and transplants of various varieties. Where there are natural oases, of course, we stress a lot of date palm. In rocky areas it's acacia tortila. In the mountains we sometimes use varieties of the pinyon -- they'll take quite a beating but are a little on the slow-growing side." She was looking at him from the sides of her eyes. "You're all taken up by this, aren't you Mr. McCord?" Johnny said, surprise in his voice. "Why, it's my work." Derek came sauntering in and scaled his sun helmet onto his own desk. "Good morning, Mademoiselle," he said. And to Johnny, "Hiram, that city slicker from Timbuktu just came up with his posse." Helene said, "What is this Si, Hiram and Reuben which you call each other?" Johnny smiled sourly, "In a way, Miss Desage, this is just one great tree farm. And all of us are farmers. So we make jokes about it." He thought for a moment. "Derek, possibly you better take over with Mohammed. I want to get over to In Ziza with Reuben. "To see about the pumps?" Helene said innocently. Johnny frowned but was saved from an answer by the entrance of Mohammed Mohmoud. He was dark as a Saharan becomes dark, his original Berber blood to be seen only in his facial characteristics. He wore the rather flamboyant Mali Federation desert uniform with an air. When he saw the girl, his eyebrows rose and he made the Moslem salaam with a sweeping flourish. Johnny said, "Mademoiselle Desage, may I present Captain Mohammed Mohmoud ould Cheikh, of the Mali desert patrol." He added sourly, "The officer in charge of preventing nomads from filtering up from the south into our infant forests." The Moslem scowled at him. "They could have come from the east, from Timissao," he said in quite passable English. "Or even from Mauritania." He turned his eyes to Helene Desage. "Enchante, Mademoiselle. Tres heureux de taire ta connaissance." She gave him the full benefit of her eyes. "Moi aussi, Monsieur." Johnny wasn't through with the Malian officer. "There's a hundred of them," he snapped, "with several thousand head of goats and other livestock. It would have been impossible to push that number across from Mauritania or even from the east, and you know it." A lighter complexion would have shown a flush. Mohammed Mohmoud's displeasure was limited in expression to a flashing of desert eyes. He said, "Wherever their origin, the task would seem to be immediately to destroy the animals. That is why my men and I are here." Pierre Marimbert had entered while the conversation was going on. He said, "Johnny, weren't you going over to In Ziza with me?" Helene Desage said, the tip of her right forefinger to her chin as she portrayed thought, "I can't decide where to go. To this crisis of the Tuareg, or to the crisis of the pumps -- whatever that is." Johnny said flatly, "Sorry, but you'd just be in the way at either place." Mohammed Mohmoud was shrugging. "Why not let her come with me? I can guarantee her protection. I have brought fifty men with me, more than a match for a few bedouin." "Gracious," she said. "Evidently I was unaware of the magnitude of this matter. I absolutely must go." Johnny said, "No." She looked at him appraisingly. "Mr. McCord," she said, "I am here for a story. Has it occurred to you that preventing a Paris Match reporter from seeing your methods of operation is probably a bigger story than anything else I could find here?" She struck a mock post. "I can see the headlines. Sahara Reforestation Authorities Prevent Journalists from Observing Operations." "Oh, Good Lord," Johnny growled. "This should happen to . me, yet! Go on with Derek and the captain, if you wish." ny McCord took one of the faster helicopters, Pierre piloting. I With French elan he immediately  raised the craft a few feet and then like a nervous horse it  backed up, wheeled about and dashed forward in full flight. Spread below them were the several dozen buildings which j comprised Bidon Cinq; surrounding the buildings, the acres of palm and pine, eucalyptus and black locust. Quick-growing, dry! climate trees predominated, but there were even such as balsam fir, chestnut and elm. It made an attractive sight from the air. The reforestation projects based on Bidon Cinq were not all in the immediate vicinity of the home oasis. By air, In Ziza was almost # kilometers to the northeast. By far the greater part of the land lying in between was still lacking in vegetation of any ; sort. The hydro-geological engineers who had originally surveyed the area for water had ' selected only the best sections for immediate sinking of wells, placement of solar power pumps, and eventually the importation of two-year seedlings and threeand four-year-old transplants. The heavy auto-planters, brought in by air transport, had ground their w ay across the desert sands in their hundreds, six feet between machines. Stop, dig the hole, set the seedling, splash in water, artfully tamp down the soil, move on another six feet, stop -- and begin the operation all over again. Fifty trees an hour, per machine. In less than two months, the planters had moved on to a new base further north. The mob of scientists, engineers, water and forest technicians, mechanics and laborers melted away, leaving Johnny McCord, his two assistants, his half dozen punch-card machines, his automated equipment and his forty or fifty native workers. It was one of a hundred such centers. It would eventually be one of thousands. The Sahara covered an area almost the size of Europe. Johnny McCord growled, "Friend Mohammed seems quite taken with our reporter." Pierre grinned and tried to imitate a New England twang. "Why not, Hiram? She's the first, eh, women folks seen in these parts for many a day." He looked down at the endless stretches of sand dunes, gravel and rock outcroppings. "Mighty dry farm land you've got around here, Hiram." Johnny McCord grunted. "Derek said the other day it's so dry even the mirages are only mud holes." He pointed with his forefinger. "There's the first of our trees. Now, what pumps did you check?" Pierre directed the copter lower, skimmed not much higher than the young tree tops. Some of them had already reached an impressive height. But Johnny McCord realized that the time was not too distant when they'd have to replant. Casualties were considerably higher than in forest planting at home. Considerably so. And replanting wasn't nearly so highly automated as the original work. More manpower was required. "These pumps here seem all right," he said to Pierre. "A little further north," Pierre said. "I came in over the track there, from the road that comes off the main route to Poste Weygand. Yes, there we are. Look! Completely destroyed." Johnny swore. The trees that had depended on that particular pump wouldn't last a month, in spite of the fact that they were among the first set in this area. He said, "Go higher. We should be able to spot the complete damage with glasses. You saw twenty-two, you say?" "Yes, I don't know how many more there might be." There were twenty-five destroyed pumps in all. And all of them were practically together. It was sheer luck that Pierre Marimbert had located them so soon. Had his routine check taken place in some other section of the vast tree development, he would have found nothing untoward. "This isn't nearly so bad as I had expected," Johnny growled. He was scowling thoughtfully. "What's the matter?" Pierre said. "I just don't get it," Johnny said. "Number onfe, nomads don't carry dynamite, unless it's been deliberately given them. Two, if it was given them by someone with a purpose, why only enough to blow twenty-five pumps? That isn't a drop in the bucket. A few thousand trees, are all we'll lose. Three, where did they come from? Where are their tracks? And where have they gone? This job wasn't done so very long ago, probably within a week or two at most." "How do you know that?" "Otherwise those trees affected would already be dying. At their age, they couldn't stand the sun long without water." Pierre said, his face registering disbelief, "Do you think it could be simple vandalism on the part of a small band of Tuareg?" "Sure, if the pumps had been destroyed by hand. But with explosives? Even if your band of Tuareg did have explosives they wouldn't waste them on a few Sahara Reforestation Commission pumps." "This whole thing just doesn't make sense," Pierre Marimbert decided. "Let's land and take a look at one of those pumps," Johnny said. "You know, if you get the whole crew to work on this you might be able to replace them before we lose any of these transplants. It's all according to how long ago they were destroyed." IV afternoon, Johnny McCord was greeted by the native office assistant he'd left in charge while all three of the officers were gone. Mellor, at the Tissalit base, had made several attempts to get in touch with him. "Mellor!" Pierre grunted. "How do you Americans say it? Stuffed shirt!" "Yeah," Johnny McCord said, sitting down to the telephone. "But my boss." While Pierre was fishing two cans of beer from the refrigerator, Johnny dialed Tissalit. Kate's face lit up the screen. Johnny said, "Hi. I understand the old man wants to talk to me." "That's right," the girl said, and moved a switch. "Just a minute, Johnny." Her face faded to be replaced by that of Mellor. Johnny noted that as usual the other wore a business suit, complete with white shirt and tie -- in the middle of the Sahara! Mellor was scowling. "Where've you been, McCord?" "Checking some pumps near In Ziza," Johnny said evenly. "Leaving no one at all at camp?" the other said. Johnny said, "There were at least a score of men here, Mr. Mellor." "No officers. Suppose an emergency came up?" Johnny felt like saying, An emergency did come up, two of them in fact. That's why we were all gone at once. But for some reason he decided against explaining current happenings at Bidon Cinq until he had a clearer picture. He said, "There are only three of us here, Mr. Mellor. We have to stretch our manpower. Derek Mason had to go over to Amerene el Kasbach with Mohammed Mohmoud and his men to clear out those nomads and their livestock." "What did they find? Where were the Tuareg from?" "They haven't returned yet." Automatically, Johnny took up his can of beer and took a swallow from it. Mellor's eyebrows went up. "Drinking this early in the day, McCord?" Johnny sighed deeply, "Look, Mr. Mellor, Pierre Marimbert and I just returned from several hours in the desert, inspecting pumps. We're dehydrated, so we're drinking cold beer. It tastes wonderful. I doubt if it will lead either of us to a drunkard's grave." Mellor scowled pompously. He said finally, "See here, McCord -- the reason I called -- you can be expecting a reporter from one of the French publications -- " "She's here." "Oh," Mellor said. "I just received notice this morning. Orders are to give her the utmost cooperation. Things are on the touchy side right now. Very touchy." "How do you mean?" Johnny said. "There are pressures on the highest levels," Mellor said, managing to put over the impression that these matters were above and beyond such as Johnny McCord but that he, Mellor, was privy to them. 'What pressures?" Johnny said wearily. "If you want me to handle this woman with kid gloves, then I've got to know what I'm protecting her against, or hiding from her, or whatever the hell I'm supposed to do." Mellor glared at him. "I'm not sure I always appreciate your flippancy, McCord," he said. "However, back home the opposition is in an uproar over our expenditures. Things are very delicate. A handful of votes could sway the continuance of the whole project." Johnny McCord closed his eyes in pain. This came up every year or so. Mellor said, "That isn't all. The Russkies are putting up a howl in the . Reunited Nations. They claim the West plans to eventually take over all northwest Africa. That this reforestation is just preliminary to make the area worth assimilating." Johnny chuckled sourly, "Let's face it. They're right." Mellor was shocked. "Mr. McCord! The West has never admitted to any such scheme." Johnny sighed. "However, we Sahara out of kindness of heart. The Mali Federation alone has population. Already, there's fewer people than are needed to exploit the new lands we've opened up." Well, that brings up another point," Mellor said. "The Southeast Asia Bloc is putting up a howl too. They claim they should be the ones allowed to reclaim this area and that it should go into farmland instead of forest" "They're putting the cart before the horse," Johnny said. "At this stage of the game, the only land they could use really profitably for farming would be along the Niger. We're going to have to forest this whole area fifst, and in doing so, change the whole climate. Then it'll..." Mellor interrupted him. "I'm as familiar with the program of the Sahara Reforestation Commission as you are, I am sure, McCord. I need no lecture. See that Miss Desage gets as sympathetic a picture of our work as possible. And, for heaven's sake, don't let anything happen that might influence her toward writing something that would change opinions either at home or in the Reunited Nations." "I'll do my best," Johnny said sourly. The other clicked off. other can of beer, ready opened. "So Mademoiselle Desage is to be handled with loving care." Johnny groaned, "And from what we've seen so far of Mademoiselle Desage, she's going to take quite a bit of loving care to handle." Outside, they could hear the beating of rotors coming in. Two helicopters, from the sound of it. Beer cans in hand they went over to the window and watched them approach. "Derek and the girl in one, Mohammed in the other," Pierre said. "Evidently our good captain left the messy work of butchering goats to his men, while he remains on the scene to be as available to our girl Helene as she will allow." The copters swooped in, landed, the rotors came to a halt and the occupants stepped from the cockpits. The Arab ground crew came running up to take over. Preceded by Helene Desage, the two men made their way toward the main office. Even at this distance there seemed to be an aggressive lift to the girl's walk. "Oh, oh, my friend," Pierre said. "I am afraid Mademoiselle Desage is unhappy about something." Johnny groaned. "I think you're right. But smile, Reuben, smile. You heard the city slicker's orders. Handle her with all the care of a new-born heifer." Helene Desage stormed through the door and glared at Johnny McCord. "Do you realize what your men are doing?" "I thought I did," Johnny said placatingly. Derek and Mohammed Mohmoud entered behind her. Derek winked at Johnny McCord and made a beeline for the refrigerator. "Beer, everybody?" he said. Mohammed Mohmoud said, "A soft drink for me, if you please, Mr. Mason." Derek said, "Sorry, I forgot. Beer, Miss Desage?" She turned and glared at him. "You did nothing whatsoever to prevent them!" Derek shrugged. "That's why we went out there, honey. Did you notice how much damage those goats had done to the trees? Thousands of dollars worth." Johnny said wearily, "What happened?" He sank into the chair behind his desk. The reporter turned to him again. "Your men are shooting the livestock of those povertystricken people." Mohammed Mohmoud said, 'We are keeping an accurate count of every beast destroyed, Mr. McCord." His dark face was expressionless. Johnny McCord attempted to explain to the girl. "As I told you. Miss Desage, goats are the curse of the desert. They prefer leaves, twigs and even the bark of young trees to grass. The Commission before ever taking on this tremendous project arranged through the Mali Federation government to buy up and have destroyed every grazing animal north of the Niger. It cost milcouldn't even begin until it was accomplished." "But why slaughter the livelihood of those poor people? You could quite easily insist that they return with their flocks to whatever areas are still available to them." Derek offered her a can of beer. She seemed to be going to reject it, but a desert-born thirst changed her mind. She took it without thanking him. The lanky Canadian said mildly, "I tried to explain to her that the Tuareg aren't exactly innocent children of the desert. They're known as the Apaches of the Sahara. For a couple of thousand years they've terrified the other nomads. They were slave raiders, bandits. When the Commission started its work the other tribes were glad to sell their animals and take up jobs in the new oases. Send their kids to the new schools we've been building in the towns. Begin fitting into the reality of modern life." Her eyes were flashing now. "The Apaches of the Sahara, eh? Bien sur! If I remember correctly, the American Apaches were the last of the Indian tribes which you Americans destroyed. The last to resist. Now you export your methods to Africa!" Johnny McCord said mildly, "Miss Desage, it seems to be the thing these days to bleed over the fate of the redman. Actually, there are a greater number of them in the United States today than there were when Columbus landed. But even if you do carry a torch for the noble Indian, picking the Apaches as an example is poor choice. They were bandit tribes, largely living off what they could steal and raid from the Pueblo and other harder working but less warlike Indians. The Tuareg are the North African equivalent." "Who are you to judge?" she snapped back. "Those tribesmen out there are the last defenders of their ancient desert culture. Their flocks are their way of life. You mercilessly butcher them, rob their women and children of their sole source of food and clothing." over his face in an unhappy gesture. "Look," he said plaintively. "Those goats and sheep have already been bought and paid for by the Commission. The Tuareg should have destroyed them, or sold them as food to be immediately butchered, several years ago. Where they've been hiding is a mystery. But they simply have no right to be in possession of those animals, no right to be in this part of the country, and, above all, no right to be grazing in our transplants." "It's their country! What right have you to order them away?" Johnny McCord held up his hands, palms upward. "This country is part of the Mali Federation, Miss Desage. It used to be called French Sudan and South Algeria. The government of the Federation gladly accepted the project of reforestating the Sahara. Why not? We've already succeeded in making one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the world a prosperous one. Far from there being unemployment here, we have a labor shortage. Schools have opened, even universities. Hospitals have sprung up. Highways have been laid out through country that hadn't even trails before. The Federation is booming. If there are a few Tuareg who can't adapt to the new world, it's too bad. Their children will be glad for the change." She seated herself stiffly. "I am not impressed by your excuses," she said. Johnny shrugged and turned to Mohammed Mohmoud who had been standing silently through all this, almost as though at attention. Johnny said, "Did you learn where this band comes from? Where they had kept that many animals for so long without detection?" The Moslem officer shook his head. "They wouldn't reveal that." Johnny looked at Derek Mason. The Canadian shook his head. "None of them spoke French, Johnny. Or if they did, they wouldn't admit it. When we first came up they looked as though they were going to fight. Happily, the size of the captain's command made them decide otherwise. At any rate, they're putting up no resistance. I let them know through the captain, here, that when they got back to Tissalit, or Timbuktu, they could put in a demand for reimbursement for their animals -- if the animals were legally theirs." Johnny looked at the Malian officer again. "How come you've returned to camp? Shouldn't you be out there with your men?" "There were a few things to be discussed," the Moslem said. He looked significantly at the French reporter. Helene Desage said, "Let me warn you, I will not tolerate being sent away. I want to hear this. If I don't, I demand you let me communicate immediately with my magazine and with the Transatlantic Newspaper Alliance for whom I am also doing a series of articles on the Sahara Reforestation scheme." Johnny McCord winced. He said, "There is nothing going on around here, Miss Desage, that is secret. You won't be ordered away." He turned to Mohammed Mohmoud. "What did you wish to discuss, Captain?" "First, what about the camels, asses and horses?" "Shoot them. Practically the only graze between here and Tissalit are our trees." "And how will they get themselves and their property out of this country?" the reporter snapped. Johnny said wearily, "We'll truck them out, Miss Desage. They and all their property. And while we're doing it, we'll feed them. I imagine, before it's all over it will cost the Commission several thousand dollars." He turned back to the desert patrol captain. "What else?" From a tunic pocket Mohammed Mohmoud brought a handgun and handed it to Johnny McCord. "I thought you might like to see this. They were quite well armed. At first I thought there might be resistance." Johnny turned the automatic over in his hands, scowling at it. "What's there to see that's special? I don't know much about guns." Mohammed Mohmoud said, "It was made in Pilsen." Johnny looked up at him. "Czechoslovakia, eh?" The other said, "So were most of their rifles." Helene Desage snorted in deprecation. "So, we'll drag in that old wheeze. The red menace. Blame it on la Russie." Johnny McCord said mildly, "We haven't blamed anything on the Russkies, Miss Desage. The Tuareg have a right to bear arms, there are still dangerous animals in the Mali Federation. And they are free to purchase Czech weapons if they find them better or cheaper than western ones. Don't find an exciting story where there is none. Things are tranquil here." Helene Desage stared at him. So did Mohammed Mohmoud and Derek Mason for that matter. Only Pierre Marimbert realized Johnny McCord's position, and he chuckled and went for more beer. V who didn't like to be thrown out of routine. He resented the interference with his schedule of the past few days. By nature he was methodical, not given to inspiration. All of which was probably the reason that he spent a sleepless night trying to find rhyme and reason where seemingly there was none. At dawn, he stepped from the door of his Quonset hut quarters and looked for a moment into the gigantic red ball which was the Saharan sun. Neither dawn nor sunset at Bidon Cinq were spectacular, nor would they become so until the Sahara Reforestation Commission began to return moisture to desert skies. Johnny wondered if he would live to see it. He made his way over to the huge steel shed which doubled as garage and aircraft hanger. As yet, none of the native mechanics were stirring, although he could hear sounds of activity in the community kitchen. Derek Mason looked up from his inspection of Helene Desage's air-cushion Land Rover. Johnny McCord scowled at him. "What in the hell are you doing here?" The lanky Canadian came erect and looked for a long moment at his superior. He said finally, soberly, "It occurs to me that I'm probably doing the same thing you came to do." "What have you found?" "That a small bomb has been attached to the starter." Johnny didn't change expression. It fitted in. "What else?" he said. Derek handed him a steel ring. Johnny McCord looked at it, recognized it for what it was and stuck it in his pocket. "Let's go back to the office. Yell in to the cook to send some coffee over, and call Pierre. We've got some notes to check." Mademoiselle Desage was a late riser. When she entered the office, the three Sahara Reforestation Commission officers were already at work. She said snappishly to Johnny McCord, "Today I would like to see these destroyed pumps." Johnny said, his eyebrows questioning, "How did you know they were destroyed?" "It doesn't seem to be much of a secret. The story is all about the camp." "Oh?" Johnny sighed, then drawled to Derek, "I say, S ; , you better go get the hired hand, we might as well finish this up so we can get back to work." Derek nodded and left. Johnny McCord left the collator he'd been working with, went around behind his desk and sat down. "Take a chair, Miss Desage. I want to say a few things in the way of background to you." She sat, but said defiantly, "I have no need of a lengthy lecture on the glories of the Sahara Reforestation Commission." "Coffee?" Pierre Marimbert said politely. "No, thank you." Johnny said, his voice thoughtful, "I imagine the real starting point was back about # when the Chinese discovered that a nation's greatest natural resource is its manpower." S HE frowned at him. "What in the world are you talking about?" He ignored her and went on. "Originally, appalled by the job mouths, they had initiated a birth control plan. But after a year or two they saw it was the wrong approach. They were going to succeed, if they suceeded, in their Great Leaps Forward by utilizing the labor of every man, woman and child in the country. And that's what they proceeded to do. The lesson was brought home to the rest of the world in less than ten years, when such other countries as India and Indonesia failed to do the same." Johnny leaned back in his chair, and his eyes were thoughtful but unseeing. "Even we of the west learned the lesson. The most important factor in our leadership was our wonderful trained labor force. As far back as # Americans working daily in industry and distribution. Even the Russkies, with their larger population, didn't begin to equal that number." "What are you driveling about?" the reporter demanded. "To sum it up," Johnny said mildly, "the battle for men's minds continues and each of the world's great powers has discovered that it can't afford to limit its population -- its greatest resource. So population continues to explode and the world is currently frantically seeking sources Amazon basin is being made into a tropical garden; the Japanese, landless, are devising a hundred methods of farming the sea; Australia is debouching into its long unpopulated interior, doing much the same things we are here in the Sahara. The Chinese are overflowing into Sinkiang, Mongolia and Tibet; the Russkies into Siberia. We of the west, with the large underdeveloped areas of the western hemisphere have not been so greatly pushed as some others. However, there is always tomorrow." Derek entered with Captain Mohammed Mohmoud. The latter day Rudolph Valentino had a puzzled expression on his dark face. "Here's the hired man, Hiram," Derek drawled. The desert patrol officer nodded questioningly to the men and said, "Bonjour," to Helene Desage. Johnny went on. "Yes, there's tomorrow. And by the time we run out of Lebensraum in Brazil and Alaska, in Central America and the Argentine, in Texas and Saskatchewan, we're going to miles of the Sahara." She said in ridicule, "It will take you a century at least to reforest the desert." "At least." Johnny nodded able to look that far ahead. Possibly by that time our opponents will also be looking for new lands for their expanding peoples. And where will they find them? The advantage will be ours, Miss Desage." Mohammed Mohmoud looked from one to the other, frowning. "What are we discussing?" he said. "I should be getting back to my men." Derek yawned and said, "Forget about it, pal. You're never going to be getting back to your men again." THE desert patrol officer's eyes widened. He turned his glare on Johnny McCord, "What is all this?" Johnny said, "I'll tell it, Derek." Helene Desage was as surprised as the Malian. "What is going on? Are you trying to whitewash yourselves by casting blame on this gentleman?" "Let me go on," Johnny said. "Needless to say, there are conflicting interests. The Soviet Complex obviously would as soon we didn't succeed. However, wars are impractical today, and the Russkies and Chinese are taken up with their own development. The Southeast Asia bloc wouldn't mind taking over here themselves, they desperately need land already. But they aren't our biggest opponents. There's another group even more involved -- the colons of Algeria and Morocco and those of even such Mali cities as Dakar. I suppose it is this last element that you represent, Miss Desage." She was staring unbelievingly at him now. "Their interest is to get the Sahara Reforestation Commission out of the way so that they can immediately exploit the area. They are interested in the now, not the potentialities of the future. They resent the use of the Niger for reforestation, when they could use it for immediate irrigation projects. They would devote the full resources of the Mali Federation and Algeria to seeking oil and minerals and in the various other ways the country might be exploited. Finally, they rather hate to see the western schools, hospitals, and other means used to raise the local living standards. They liked the low wage rates that formerly applied." Johnny nodded. "Yes, I imagine that's your angle." Helene Desage stormed to her feet. "I don't have to listen to this!" Derek said, "Honey, we sure aren't holding you. You're free to go any time you want. And you can take this pal of yours along with you." He jerked his head contemptuously at Mohammed Mohmoud. Pierre Marimbert said, "Mademoiselle, we have no idea of where you two met originally, nor how close your relationship, but the captain should have, remembered that I too am French. A gentleman, on first meeting a lady, would never, never address her as tu in out language." Johnny sighed again and looked at his watch. "Other things pile up too, Miss Desage. You let slip a few moments ago that you knew about the pumps being destroyed. You said the rumor was all around camp. But it couldn't be. The only persons who knew about it were myself, Pierre and Derek. On top of that, there were no signs of bedouin or animals near the exploded pumps; the person who did the job must have come in an aircraft or aircushion car. And, besides, we found the pin of a hand grenade in your land rover this morning. We had thought at first that dynamite had been used, but evidently you smuggled your much more compact bombs across the desert with you. Obviously, no one would have dreamed of searching your vehicle. "No, Miss Desage, it's obvious that you detoured from the track on the way down from Poste Weygand, went over to In Ziza, a comparatively short distance, and blew up twenty-five of our pumps." Johnny turned to the Malian officer now. "At the same time you were coordinating with her, you and whatever gang is hiring you. Someone supplied those Tuareg with the livestock and paid them to trek up here. You, of course, turned your back and let them through. The same someone who supplied the livestock also supplied Czech weapons." Helene Desage was still sputtering indignation. "Ridiculous! Why? What would motivate me to such nonsense?" Johnny grimaced. "The whole thing makes a beautiful story at a time when the American government is debating the practicality of the whole project. You could do quite a sob story on the poor, poverty-stricken Tuareg having their livestock destroyed. Then, quite a tale about the bedouin raiding our pumping stations and blowing them up. And quite a tale about the Tuareg being armed with Czech weapons. Oh, I imagine before it was through you'd have drawn a picture of civil war going on here between the nomads and the Commission. Blowing up your own car with a small bomb attached to the starter was just one more item. By the way, were you going to do it yourself? Or did you intend to allow one of our mechanics to kill himself?" She flushed. "Don't be ridiculous. No one would have been hurt. The bomb is a very small one. More smoke and flash than anything else." "Well, thanks for small favors," Derek said sarcastically. gave up. "Very well," she  snapped. "There is nothing you can do. This whole project, as I said before, is nothing but American boondoggling, a way of plowing endless resources into a hole. Your real motivation is an attempt to prevent depression and unemployment in your country." Pierre Marimbert said softly, "So you admit to this whole scheme to discredit us?" "Why not?" She turned to the door. "I will still write my articles. It's my word or yours." Derek grinned at her. "I think I could fall in love with you, honey," he said. "Life would provide few dull moments. However, you didn't notice how nice and automated this office is. Card machines, electric typewriters, all the latest -- including tape recorders for office conversations. You talked too much, honey." "Cochon!" she shrilled at him. She whirled and was through the door. Johnny turned to Mohammed Mohmoud. "I guess the best thing for you would be to turn in your commission, Captain." Dark eyes snapped. "And if I say no?" Johnny shook his head. "The Mali Federation passed some awfully strict laws when it was drawing up its constitution. Among them was one involving capital punishment for anyone destroying a source of water in the desert. Miss Desage did the actual work but you were hand in glove with her. I'd hate to have to report that to your superiors." Derek jumped forward quickly. His hand snaked out and chopped the other's forearm. The heavy military pistol fell to the floor, and the Canadian kicked it to one side. "Shucks," he drawled, "the hired hand sure is tricky, ain't he?" "Good Lord," Johnny McCord said disgustedly, "I didn't say I was going to report you. Just threatened to if you didn't resign. Now get out of here, we've got work to do. I'm three days behind on my reports!" for your information ovitch Borisov is, as his name clearly indicates, a Russian. Professionally he is a mining engineer who has specialized in oil wells. He hopes to be an innovator. And he is a man with an obsession: cold weather. Cold weather, to him, is personified by the Arctic Ocean. When he speaks about cold weather or the Arctic Ocean he grows eloquent -- one might even say heated. "Look at this," he recently said to one of the editors of the Literaturnaya Gazyeta, pointing to a map of the Arctic Ocean, "here in the north the Soviet Union is wide open to the cold air masses blowing in from the Arctic Basin. That is why almost half -- in fact, # per cent -- of Soviet earth is occupied by zones of eternal frost. Over three quarters of our territory the temperature may drop to minus # degrees. # per cent is nothing but uninhabited wild tundra... The cold weather is a beast of prey that devours huge sums of money. The building of factories, power plants and mines in the northeast of the Soviet Union -- and in other countries where the climate is identical -- is one and a half times or twice as expensive as in districts with a more temperate climate. In the U.S.S.R. cold weather eats up, on the average, # per cent of the country's investments." And what about the losses sustained yearly by the cessation of marine and river transport during the winter? Not to mention the northern sea route, the most labor-consuming and most expensive marine communication in the world? "The Arctic Ocean is to blame, in the main, for the fact that rice frequently fails to ripen in North Japan and that the north part of the Yellow Sea freezes over... More than any other country, except the U.S.S.R., the United States suffers from the frigid blasts blowing down from the Arctic Ocean. Alaska is a land of severe frosts. The chilly climate of the Arctic Basin pierces the very heart of the United States... Then there is Canada with its vast areas of tundras and eternal frosts." The conclusion to be drawn from these facts is simple to Engineer Borisov: "We must melt the ice sheet of the Arctic Ocean." As to how this ice sheet formed, he has his own theory too: "It is not because the waters of the oceans are so cold. The fault lies not with the ocean itself, but with the rivers that flow into it: the Ob, Lena and Yenisei, among others. Their fresh waters are lighter than the salty water of the ocean... they form an upper mixed layer which freezes over and forms an ice sheet blocking the warmth of the deeper waters." His idea is that, once this ice sheet is melted and the Arctic Ocean is open water, the solar radiation which is normally reflected by the ice and snow would be absorbed by the water. This, of course, would not transmute the Arctic Ocean into a warm sea. But it should ameliorate the climate of all the countries that reach beyond or even near the Arctic Circle. U P to this point everybody is more or less in agreement with Borisov. If the Arctic Ocean were open water, the climate would improve. Nor would there be much danger of flooding, because the ice in question is not piled high on land masses, like the Greenland ice and the ice of Antarctica, but is floating on water. So the volume change if it were melted would be rather minor. The disagreement begins at the next stop, which is whether it can be done at all and how it could be done. Borisov thinks that the solution is a dam across the Bering Strait. The width of the Bering Strait is # miles and the average depth is about # feet. Borisov admits that this would be a big dam. (His estimate of the cost Soviet currency. In the new Soviet currency it would be # bildepending on whether you go by the proclaimed value or by the gold content.) But he is firm in asserting that it would not be an impossible dam. But the dam would be only the first phase. It is meant to be a barrier stopping uncontrolled flow through the Bering Strait. After the dam has been built, Borisov wants to install gigantic pumps in several places -- the published versions of his idea are by no means clear about the locations of these pumps -- which are to remove large amounts of water from the Arctic Ocean. This removal should be made in such a manner that the cold currents now impeding the Gulf Stream would disappear, or at least be greatly weakened, so that the Gulf Stream can enter the Arctic Ocean between Greenland and Norway and melt the surface ice. Borisov's compatriot, scientist D. A. Drogaytsev, writing in the journal Priroda ("Nature"), doesn't think that scheme could possibly work. The only thing that probably could be done would be to build the dam itself. But this would cause "irreparable harm." To the north of the dam the Arctic ice would clog the sea completely and make it unnavigable all year round. The ice would also clog up all the northflowing rivers of Siberia, and thus destroy the value as transport arteries which they now possess except during the winter months. More, the accumulation of ice along the North Siberian coast would chill the land and extend the Gobi desert and other Asian deserts all the way north to the coastline, destroying areas now fertile. Such tampering with nature, Drogaytsev is positive, can only be bad. Whether this will stop the discussion is something I would not dare to predict. But I want to add that another discussion about the Bering Sea, in the United States, interested as important a scientist as Charles P. Steinmetz. Interestingly enough, the idea to which Steinmetz devoted some time (I do not know whether it was completely his own) is the precise opposite of Borisov's plan. Instead of closing the Bering Strait with a dam it should be opened wider. Look at a map of the Arctic. Both the American continent and the Asian continent extend peninsulas, the Seward Peninsula on the American side and the Chukotski Peninsula on the Siberian side. The narrowest distance between them is # miles, as has been mentioned. And to the south of the Bering Strait there is St. Lawrence Island, looking almost like a displaced stopper. Now, it was said, the fairly warm Japan current comes up from the South, passing by the Japanese Islands and flowing in such a way that it would go into the Arctic Ocean, if St. Lawrence Island and the two peninsulas did not block its way. If the island and large portions of the two peninsulas could be removed, wideningBering Strait from # to about # miles, the Japan current would keep going North. Probably it would split into two currents, one going eastward around Alaska, the other bearing westward along the Siberian coast. In time the waters of this current would melt the floating ice and make the Arctic Ocean an open sea. Of course the job of removing hundreds of square miles of land is even bigger than Borisov's dam. But there might be a chance of helping the Japan current in a more gentle manner, such as dredging flow channels for it, or even helping the flow along by artificial means. At any event the Bering Strait -- and what might, or should, or should not, be done with it -- is going to be a lively theme in years to come. That piece, in the February # issue, brought a great deal of comment and for the first time in my life did I really understand that sign which you can see in some stores: "If you are displeased, tell us; if you are pleased, tell others." The ones who agreed with me did so loudly, wholeheartedly and so forth, in person. But I did not get .a single letter of agreement. However, I got a fair number of letters bawling me out. Of those who bawled me out one defended Interlingua and five or six defended Esperanto -- or rather attacked me for not being in love with it. One of these was Harry Harrison, whose letter follows here in full. I have something to say about his arguments in four places, so marginal notes follow after that. One planet -- one language! I agree with you that it would be a nice idea if this were possible. I also agree with you that we will probably never have a single "Earth language." (#) But there is a language that may be spoken by all Earthmen that is already in use today -- and succeeding quite well. I am speaking of Esperanto, which language got quite a kicking around in your article. In the name of fair play I would like to present the other side of the case, some facts about Esperanto that are rarely heard. Esperanto is a constructed language that aims to replace no other languages. It works side-by-side with national languages. When you say it does not work, I am forced to state blankly that it does. In this single case I claim superior knowledge (I would be hard-pressed to find another one!) because I have used it successfully for over fifteen years. I can write and speak it with an automatic ease I have never been able to capture in any language other than my native English. I have sat in groups of up to twelve people where no two people shared the same national language, yet all enjoyed perfect communication with Esperanto. I subscribe to a half dozen magazines from all over the world -- out of the eighty-nine listed in the Esperanto yearbook. When I travel I find Esperantists in every city I visit. We are friends as soon as we meet, and speak a common language. The only thing wrong with Esperanto is that it is new. The world has a high resistance to new ideas. In the U.S. we recognize the value of the decimal system and laugh at the density of the English with their pence (divide by twelve). Then we turn around and do our measuring in yards, feet and inches. How long has the metric system been in use? (#) You have two arguments against Esperanto, and I think they are both personal ones. When you read Esperanto it, "... sounded too silly." To whom? Finnish is a nightmare to anyone but a Finn. Danes all sound like they are strangling to death when they talk. Esperanto has a J for the Y sound. Yes is spelled Jes -- and is pronounced and means the same as in English. The people in the linguistic groups that are used to pronouncing J this way won't find it strange. It is impossible to make every letter look familiar to every group. This goes for the supersigns as well. In English we say such and sure, making the letter # stand for two different sounds. In Esperanto the such S is S. The sound that starts sure is S. Isn't it easier to memorize one new letter than countless words? These supersign letters (and there are only six) give Esperanto an exotic look that doesn't exist in reality. Spoken, it sounds very much like Italian or Spanish. (#) The second thing you have against Esperanto is that most Esperantists "... can probably speak something else that I can." Probably true -- if they are Europeans. But how is your Cantonese, Arabian, Japanese or Serbo-Croatian? I have met and enjoyed pleasant conversation with native speakers of these languages -- whose only second language was Esperanto. I have a good friend in Italy who speaks fair English. About as good as my Italian. We talk always in Esperanto -- though we have both put in thousands of hours of studying each other's native language. (#) That's the real kicker. You can learn Esperanto in no time flat. Both to read and to speak. It is simple but completely flexible. Irregular forms don't make a language interesting -- they just make it hard to learn. In Esperanto you take ten seconds to memorize the fact that the endings of all verbs in the past, present and future tenses are is, as and os respectively. Then you can use the saved time to increase your word knowledge and familiarity with the language. Esperanto may not be the world language -- but it is the successful language the world could speak! Here are my notes to Harry Harrison's letter: (#) I could say right here that we have no argument at all, since my discussion was about a language, natural or artificial, which would become the "earth language." (#) The resistance to new ideas exists, of course, but it is not universal. It seems to depend on whether there is a feeling that this new idea is not really needed. In science (and also in commerce) new ideas are accepted rather fast, if the new idea is one which makes the recipients feel that they needed it. (#) A few supersigns over letters do not disturb me at all, but it does disturb me when one of your Esperantists writes me a letter which begins Kara amigo. I shall not accept any explanation of any kind; this is wrong. Either I am male (which happens to be the case) and then the address should be Karo amigo. Or else, if I were female, it should read Kara amiga. If Kara amigo is "right" Esperanto grammar, then its "right" grammar is wrong! (#) Harry, you are an intelligent man. You cannot have spent "thousands of hours" learning Italian. I can prove it, too. You #I admit that if you concentrate ten minutes a day on learning three words of a language you have learned them so thoroughly that you'll never forget them again. This, in one year, will net you a vocabulary of # words. In reality, because of the existence of identical or very similar words, your vocabulary will be around # words. Then, at the end of the year, you can learn any grammar, even a complicated one, in a #-hour week. Hence you spend #I hours learning # words plus # hours learning the grammar which enables you to read a newspaper. The actual expenditure in time was # hours of concentration in the course of one year. Whether this could be done in # consecutive hours is something I can't judge since I have never tried it. But you cannot possibly have spent "thousands of hours" on Italian and still feel uncertain when subjected to it! J the column in the December issue proved extraordinarily popular. Many readers had something to say about it, and a fair number were able to contribute something which I would have liked to have known when I wrote it. Taking them in their original order, we first had the marine worm, the palolo which mates when the moon is right. You may remember that the islanders talked to Mr. Powell about Mbalolo levu and Mbalolo lailai, the "minor" and the "major" appearance. I'll freely admit that my sources phrased their sentences in such a way that one could not tell which word meant which and I had the definite impression that they were not sure. Preferring to be unambiguous, I took a shot in the dark as to which meant "major" and which meant "minor." Professor (of Linguistics and Anthropology ) Charles F. Hockett, at the moment Carnegie Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, informed me that I missed: "The words levu and lailai are Fijian, and their meanings are just the reverse of what you assign in the article. Levu is 'big' or 'major'; compare Viti levu, 'Major Fiji,' the name of the largest island in the archipelago... In Fiji, at any rate, the 'small' appearance (lailai) precedes the 'large' (levu). Two students of mine will be in Fiji for the Mbalolo levu season this year; with luck we can find out what they taste like." I am grateful to Prof. Hockett for the correction -- and envious of his students. The response to the second section, Slow Lightning, consisted of half a dozen letters which all read as if they had been written by the same person. In each case the man (or woman) who wrote the letter said, "Thank you for the article. About fifteen years ago, when I lived in I saw such a lightning ball but nobody ever believed me. I didn't even talk about it any more, but now that I have this article..." The stories themselves were just typical, as the following example (written by Mr. H. A. J. in Westfield, N. J.) shows: "Thirty-five years ago I was a camper in a boys camp in Chicopee, Pennsylvania. It was mid or late afternoon. I was sitting on my bunk next to an open window, looking outside at the general area of the camp quadrangle which had just been inundated by a severe thunderstorm. Because of the storm we were in our cabins rather than at an activity. All the windows of these cabins were usually kept open. Suddenly, I saw coming directly toward me a ball of fire, yellow golden in color, about the size of a basketball. It was moving fairly quickly... in retrospect I would guess that it was travelling # or # miles per hour. As I saw it heading toward my window I pulled my head back away from the opening in time to see it pass by my head, go through the cabin to the other side and out an opposite window... There was no damage to anyone in the cabin or to the cabin itself. The ball did not follow a conductor, at least I do not recall any wiring going in the same direction. Perhaps the electrical inlet for the cabin was outside my window. I do not know. There was no noise whatsoever. This I do remember." Another letter from a Canadian pilot added something new. He wrote me that a friend (presumably fellow pilot) of his was flying a fast fighter jet over British Columbia at an altitude of # feet. They were flying so high to avoid the tops of spectacular cumulonimbus towers which were building up over the area. Because the cloud formations were so spectacular the friend of my correspondent took pictures. In a black thundercloud they saw (and photographed) a luminous object. "The second shot shows it obscured by a tongue of cloud but shining through it. The ball must have been about the size of an aircraft remember that fighter planes are under discussion, not passenger liners if the visual clues are consistent. Although it appeared to the eye to have well-defined edges, according to the witnesses, the photo shows it definitely fuzzy. Maybe they radiate in the ultraviolet or higher as well." Apparently in the thundercloud building up a lightning ball did form. That there happened to be somebody around to see and to photograph it is a lucky coincidence but not new in itself. Lightning balls have been seen to fall out of clouds; hence they must have been in the clouds before. What is new is the estimate of size, which is about a dozen or more times larger than any lightning ball observed near the ground. Are they larger when forming and contract as they age? Or does the size correspond more or less to the ambient air pressure? Since the planes were at # feet to clear the tops of the towers this lightning ball may well have been at # feet or thereabouts, where the air pressure is down to about # Too bad that with such a fascinating subject we have to depend on luck only! " section, Pinwheels under Water, Mr. Charles R. Tanner of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote: "Dig up Charles Fort's Book of the remarkable to me that the two phenomena should be noted in the same part of the world. When I first read the Book of the Damned I remember being impressed by this letter, which seemed to have a ring of truth that not one in a thousand of Fort's phenomena do have. It stuck in my mind all these years for that reason." Naturally I reached for Fort's book. I have the one-volume edition published by Henry Holt in #. In that edition the twenty-first chapter of the Book of the Damned begins, on p. #, with a letter that appeared in the now defunct magazine Knowledge on Dec. #, #. With very minor condensations it reads as follows: "I am tempted to ask for an explanation of the following which I saw when on board the British India Company's steamer Patna, while on a voyage up the Persia Gulf. In May, #, on a dark night, about #:# P.M., there suddenly appeared on each side of the ship an enormous luminous wheel, whirling around, the spokes of which seemed to brush the ship along. The spokes would be # or # yards long... Each wheel contained about sixteen spokes, and, although the wheels must have been some # or # yards in diameter, the spokes could be distinctly seen all the way round. The phosphorescent gleam seemed to glide along flat on the surface of the sea, no light being visible in the air above the water... I may mention that the phenomenon was also seen by Captain Avern, of the Patna, and Mr. Manning, third officer." The signature was "Lee Fore Brace," and below that was a P.S. reading: "The wheels advanced along with the ship for about # minutes." It was probably the silly signature which inspired somebody signing himself "A. Me. D." to write a letter to the editor which contained the requested explanation: "It is that before #:# P.M. there had been numerous accidents to the 'main brace' and that it had required splicing so often that almost any ray of light would have taken a rotary motion." In the issue dated January #,' #, the original correspondent, now signing his letter. "J. W. Robertson," complained: "I do think it's rather unjust to say a man is drunk because he sees something out of the common." Charles Fort, after meandering around for several pages in his characteristic and intensely annoying manner, then does quote a few more cases of the same sort of phenomenon. One (the source is identified as Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, #-#) states that Captain Hoseason of the ship Kilwa saw vast "ripples" of light appeared suddenly. "Ripple" followed upon "ripple." The light was faint, appeared suddenly and died out gradually in about fifteen minutes. Time and place: April #, #, about #:# P.M. in the Persian Gulf. Another one (from Nature, #-#) is a report by Captain Evans that Commander J. E. Pringle of H. M. S. Vulture had seen rapidly moving luminous waves or pulsations in the water. "On looking toward the east, that appearance was that of a revolving wheel with a center on that bearing, and whose spokes were illuminated, and, looking toward the west, a similar wheel appeared to be revolving, but in the opposite direction." (Commander Pringle considered the second wheel an optical illusion but was firm about the first one. He estimated the width of each shaft of light about # feet, the spaces between them about # feet. Duration of the phenomenon: about # minutes. Time: #:# P.M. Location: Lat. # #' N., Long. # IT E., in the Persian Gulf. The date was May #, #. of the Royal Meteorological Society (#-#) contained excerpts from a letter written by Mr. Douglas Carnegie saying that in # he saw a bank of apparently quiet phosphorescence. But when the ship came close, "shafts across the ship's bows... These light bars were about # feet apart and most regular... They first struck us on our broadside and I noticed that an intervening ship had no effect on the light beams: they started away from the lee sides of the ship just as if they had travelled right through it." The place was the Gulf of Oman, the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Fort has two more cases, one with the date of June #, #, off the coast of Malabar and one with the date of March #, #, in the Malacca Strait. The Malabar coast is the western coast of the Indian Peninsula, the direct continuation of the coastline which is the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The Malacca Strait is the water separating the Malay Peninsula from Sumatra. I wish to state that I did not have the time to check the sources given by Fort. It is therefore possible that Fort, by condensing and shortening the reports, left out detail which to other eyes than his would have been significant. He does mention that Mr. Carnegie scooped up a bucket of water during the event and later examined samples under a microscope without finding anything unusual. He also mentions that Commander Pringle reported the sea "before and after the display" as having floating patches of fish spawn. Of the seven cases just mentioned (the seventh is, of course, the one reported by Commander Bodler and quoted in the December issue) just one is geographically far removed from the other six, the one from the Malacca Strait. It differs from others also as to the time of day, or rather of night, since it was seen at # A.M. All others were seen before midnight. From the few reports available a few patterns emerge. One has just been mentioned: the phenomenon is usually seen between the beginning of darkness and midnight. The second pattern is the time of the year. The one seen from the ship Kilwa occurred on April #; the one seen from board of the Vulture on May #. The one seen from the ship Patna was also in May. The phenomenon off the Malabar coast dates June #. The one from the Gulf of Oman is undated, except for the year. Commander Bodler's case occurred on November #, #. It is the only one in Fall. All others that are dated (including the Malacca Strait case which was in March) were seen in Spring or late Spring. But the most interesting pattern is the geographical one. Of a total of seven known, four were seen in the Persian Gulf, one in the Gulf of Oman (a directly adjacent body of water) and one off the Malabar coast -- which is still an adjacent body of water, though a considerable distance away when expressed in miles. Does the Persian Gulf differ in any respect from other bodies of water? Yes, there is one difference. It has a higher salinity. The three bodies of water with the highest salinity are the Dead Sea in Palestine, the Great Salt Lake in the United States and the Bay of Kara-Bogaz-Gol, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. But they are all unconnected with the oceans. The Persian Gulf has the highest salinity of any body of water accessible from the ocean. And, of course, it has a hot climate. The concentration of the sightings in a very salty arm of the sea and the concentration in the Spring may be of importance. As I said in the December issue, it is my impression that it was a biological phenomenon which was seen. But even this suggestion is in the nature of a wild guess. The only truthful thing one can say is that we don't know. Please find enclosed an article about radiation danger in space from today's New York Times (Nov. #, #.) I would appreciate it very much if you told me your personal opinion of whether radiation danger in space will prevent manned space travel. Elizabeth, New Jersey Dorothy Steinfeld Well, my personal opinion about this (and a few other things) is that the purpose of a difficulty is that it should be overcome. But for the sake of the readers generally it should be explained that we are dealing with several sources of radiation in space. To begin with, our Sun (and probably every other star) emits X-rays along with visible radiation, heat rays and radio waves. But our Sun is a very weak X-ray star. There may be other stars which are powerful X-ray stars; but that is a problem for the next generation. In short, the direct X-rays from our sun will be stopped by the skin of the vessel. The second source of radiation in space is what physicists still call by the German name of Bremsstrahlung. The term was originally coined by the discoverer of the X-rays, Prof. Dr. Konrad Rontgen and since so few physicists dealt with this phenomenon on the one hand, and since it is hard to translate on the other hand, nobody bothered to invent an English term. The one I have used in magazine articles, namely "impact radiation," seems to come closest. What happens is that X-rays are produced when an electron is stopped in its flight by a solid body. (That is what the German term coined by Dr. Rontgen means: Strahlung means "radiation" while bremsen means "to brake" or "to bring to a stop") Such impact radiation will be produced by any solid body, including spaceships, in the Van Allen belt. However, Dr. James A. Van Allen, after whom the belts are named, believes that his outer belt could be penetrated fast enough so that comparatively little shielding would be needed. In fact the skin of the ship, plus its meteor bumper, would probably be thicker than is needed to make a radiation shield for this particular danger. What has just been said was mainly with reference to the outer of the two Van Allen belts. The inner belt is likely to be nastier. But it can easily be avoided, since it reaches only from about # northern to about # southern latitude. The current worry deals with sudden outbursts of protons from in November #, ran into a proton burst where an average of # protons per square centimeter per second were encountered. Earlier bursts, also reported # to # protons per square centimeter per second. That heavy burst amounted to about # roentgens of radiation -- an awful lot, since # roentgens is the dose which kills half of its victims within # days of exposure. The real problem, then, is these outbursts from the sun -- partly because they can be lethal, partly because they do not seem predictable. Of course one can shield against them, but it would be a heavy weight which the ship would have to carry around. Some scientists have suggested what they half-jokingly called "storm cellars," heavily shielded capsules aboard the ship, metal cocoons into which the crew members would slip as soon as the detectors begin to chatter. The unsolved problem here is whether these outbursts which come from the Sun just disappear into space or whether they are reflected back by magnetic fields far from the Sun, possibly outside the solar system. If they just come from the Sun and disappear into space with no reflection worth mentioning, the radiation shield could be very much like an old warrior's shield, a heavy slightly curved metal plate which is always held over the sunward side of the ship. Naturally a single shield of this kind would weigh much less than "storm cellars" for every crew member. And it would not interfere with operations, either. To find out whether we deal with a shielding problem in all direction or in one direction only is a special project called Project Ranger, which is slated to get underway in midsummer of #. In the past you have often written about forthcoming space events in your column. I notice that you don't do this any more. Why? Albert Rezniczek Hollywood, Calif. In the past Galaxy was a monthly, which meant that less time went by between writing my column and its appearance on the newsstands. Also, in the past space events were much rarer than they are now. Just look what happened in was, as its name says, the #th satellite that was fired into a polar orbit with the intent to recover its capsule. That this was intended was announced from the first shot on; but who could foretell that number thirteen would be the first one where recovery would be successful? (The capsule was fished from the ocean.) That shot was made on August #. On August # Echo went into orbit. Echo had also been in the planning stage for a long time. On August # and its capsule was promptly recovered the next day. And on that day the Russians put Sputnik V into orbit -- then recovered it (as a whole, even though the animal capsule was separated with a parachute after re-entry) on August #. Only the daily paper can keep up now. And even the daily paper will limp somewhat behind on occasion. But I can tell you about space events which are planned sufficiently far ahead so that you'll be able to read this before the newspapers make headlines out of them: The manned capsule ( Project Mercury ) is due in Fall, #; though the program has shown some slippage it may still meet its own deadline. For #, several interplanetary unmanned probes are planned ( Project Mariner ) for both Mars and Venus. For #, Project Surveyor is planned. This involves the "soft" landing of a #-pound instrument capsule on the moon. Most likely Wernher von Braun's Saturn will put communications satellites into the #-hour orbit during the same year. For #, Project Voyager is foreseen, larger and more sophisticated probes to jIars and Venus with the hope that they can be actually landed. For #, we have Project Prospector, the landing of a small mobile tank-like vehicle on the moon which can be directed to move around and TV-scan whatever gets in its way. For # or # we expect Project Rover, the nuclear-powered rocket, to go into space; and for # or # w e expect Project Apollo to do its job, which is a manned flight around the moon without landing. And we better hurry Project Apollo (and everything else)... or one of the pictures taken by the crew of Project Apollo will be a nice sharp photograph of a lunar structure with a name like Ziolkovsky Base or Soviet Outpost No. #.      Did you read the May by j. t. McIntosh and many other great science-fiction stories by your favorite writers. May IF still on sale don t miss it! There are worse things than coming down with an epidemic -- like not catching it, and I 'D forgotten how The Pit smells. I'd also forgotten my nose filters. The second I the stink hit me like a tidal wave. It was all coming back to me -- I hadn't been away that long. They were all there, every shape, size and color; clambering, sweating, shoving, clutching their records in their wet hands, getting sick from their shots. They probably thought it smelled, too. I gagg e d my way through to the main desk and past the gate. The receptionist jerked up, annoyed. "Hey! You'll have to get to the end of the -- oh! Yes? ' She spotted my white and gray T-# rating and added: " -- sir? "I'm Steuberk," I said, trying some jerk with the plague. Where am I? I mean, where am I supposed to be?" She consulted a list. "Oh. Mr. Steuberk. Room #." She looked at me queerly. "No nose filters, Mr. Steuberk?" "Do!" I choked, "Do dose vilders. You hab sub?" "No," she said, "but I'm sure Miss Cress will. Why didn't you use the back lift, sir?" "I haben't bid -- I haven't been here for a long time, miss! I snapped. She glanced at the rating again, and blushed slightly. "Oh. No, of course not, sir. In there and to your right, Mr. Steuberk. Go right TT wasn't much better in the inner hall. They were there, too, half a dozen at each door, waiting for their interviews. I found #, went in, and leaned weakly against the door. "Filters, miss, filters!" The girl at the desk looked up, frowning. Then understanding dawned on her pretty face. She slit one of the little packages with her nails and handed it to me. I jammed them up my nostrils and took a deep breath. Better. in for -- for -- " "Mr. Harris," she said. "I'm Leeta Cress." She was a long-legged ash blonde with black eyes. The way the eyes tilted she was probably a Cythian Hybrid, Showgirl Class. What she was doing as a T-# secretary is anybody's guess. "Yes, Mr. Steuberk?" One eyebrow tilted defiantly. "Oh. Yes. Well -- let's get on with it, shall we?" "Yes," she said, "let's do that." I went around to my own desk, which was at right angles to hers. I took out a cigarette, lit it and nodded to Miss Cress. She pressed a button and spoke into her intercom. "Number K dash four-foureight-one-six. You may come now, please." I pulled the top folder from the stack on my desk, noted the number was correct, and opened it. There was one paper in the folder, the Preliminary History Form CC-#. It was absolutely blank. I frowned at Miss Cress. "I know," she shrugged. "All the T-l Clerks are out too, Mr, Steuberk. We'll just have to start from scratch." "Just what," I asked curiously, "is the matter with you people? Don't you take your shots down here?" She nodded. "It's something last ship. Kripstian Trot, I think." I bit my cigarette. "Kripstian Trot, Miss Cress?" It sounded awful. "What does it do?" Miss Cress reddened. "Mr. Steuberk, I'd rather not -- " I waved her off. "Okay, okay. Forget it." We were saved by the door. There was a hesitant knock, and Miss Cress released the lock from her desk panel. In they came. I've seen 'em all. I've been fifteen years ago. I've pulled my way up the bureaucratic ladder from T-# Lice Jockey to Counselor. I've worked in a hot suit in I've even (as a T-#, of course) hosed out the Sleepers. I thought I'd managed a long time ago to keep my feelings out of my work. I have 'em, all right. We all do, or we wouldn't be here. But we know we're here to help people, n# t feel sorry for them, and you learn pretty quick that pity is a very infectious disease. I couldn't help it. It was impossible not to feel sorry for the sad-looking creatures that filed in through the door. There were four of them, two adults and two children. Officially, they were Refugees, Bipedal, Humanoid, Oxygen-breathers. Unofficially -- they were a mess. I'll try to explain it: If frogs were blue, and if blue frogs had orange hair covering their bodies, and if blue, orange-haired frogs came down with a bad case of poison ivy and mange -- they'd be standing in my office, molting all over the floor. I looked at Miss Cress and she swallowed hard. "Names, please?" she asked. J. a step. He was dressed like the others, in a faded smock patched and washed to the limit of endurance. He was bent at the waist, and his shoulders sloped in a deep curve toward his hollow chest. He looked as if he were carrying a heavy, invisible load on his back. They all did. "Name's Graybe, ma'am. I'se Sut, this here's Sari, and the youngun's is Joak an' Luti." I bit my lip and looked down at my desk. I recognized the accent the minute he opened his mouth. This was going to be a tough one. Getting a refugee, a misplaced person, . back to his home world is bad enough. Most of them wouldn't be here if they still had worlds to go to. But that was nothing compared to Sut Graybe and his family. They were migratory workers -- a prewar phenomenon now extinct -- unwanted, unsponsored, un-anything. I might convince someone to put Sut on a quota list -- at the bottom -- in  about twenty years. "What's your home planet, Mr. Graybe?" I asked. I knew we might as well toss out the forms on this one. The Labor Corps was already overcrowded, and there aren't many decent jobs a live organism can do any more as well or as cheap as a robot. And those that are left require stronger stuff than the Graybes. The only hope we had was finding his own world -- if it still existed -- and trying to get him back among his own. Sut Graybe hesitated a moment, glanced at his feet and said: "Well, suh, I reckon we's born on Raath, suh, 'cept fer the kids. Course thass a long time ago, warn't it, Sari?" His wife nodded solemnly. The two children gazed wide-eyed about the. room, clinging to their mother's drab gray smock. Miss Cress verified the spelling, and ran "Raath" through the tapes. In a moment we had fourteen possibilities, allowing for phonetic latitude and pronunciation. Nine we ruled out immediately. They could not support an oxygen-breather. One, "Rayyt," had no intelligent life, and another, "Wretsh," had belonged to the Enemy -- and it was now a bright light around the beak of Cygnus. That left three. Slides of the native life and geography of Ritk, Ratiki and Root brought definite noes from the Graybes. We were stuck on the ground. "I don't suppose you know the coordinates of Raath, Mr. Graybe?" ' ' The question brought nothing but bewilderment to the faces of Sut and Sari. "Sector? System? Nearby stars?" Nothing. I turned to Miss Cress. "Maybe it's uncatalogued." Miss Cress chewed thoughtfully on her knuckle a moment, then shook her head. "Have to be pretty old, Mr. Steuberk. Or real new." "Yeah. Is there any other name for Raath, Sut? Do you ever call it by anything else?" Sut turned to his wife. "No suh, reckon not. Jest Raath -- all we evah knowed." Meanwhile, Miss Cress telefaxed photos of the Graybes to up against another blank. Gray, be's race, as well as his world, was uncatalogued. Not that that was unusual. We've mapped maybe one-quarter of the galaxy and half of that's still pretty wild and woolly. I looked at my watch. We were getting nowhere and there were plenty of others waiting. a goldmine of information. His home star was "kinda big an' yeller" -- I could have guessed that. He reckoned the constellations, as seen from Raath, were "right purty." Swell. "Mr. Steuberk?" I turned to Miss Cress. She was making motions with her hands around her shoulders. I raised an eyebrow. They were nice shoulders, but I didn't think she had anything like that in mind. "His tag, Mr. Steuberk," she said firmly. "Oh." I had forgotten the big paper ID card the refugees wear. I examined Sut's. I shuddered and looked at Miss Cress. "Gomal," I said. She looked away. "I didn't think anyone got off Gomal," I told Mr. Graybe. He shook his head, remembering"Warn't many, suh. Guess we 's mighty lucky folks." I guessed so too. I knew what had happened on Gomal. "What were you doing there, Sut?" "We's pickin' Skibi blossoms warn't thet it, Sari? Them little purty pink 'uns?" Sari nodded sadly. "And before Gomal?" He answered readilly. "Fredrickson Two. We's bringin' in the bananapple crop. Mighty hot, suh. Mighty hard work." Sari nodded sadly. At least we were getting somewhere. Slowly. Sut Graybe was able to remember working on Trev, Eynthion, Psyche, Vix, Ornsburg, Gryphon and about two dozen more. The Graybes had seen more worlds than a Navy Chief! About halfway through the second dozen something began to worry me. Even if you're riding the Star Fields a lot of time passes between worlds, and I knew those big lunky LongSleepers took their time with a frozen human cargo. If he'd spent only a day or two on each world, even, he -- "Mr. Graybe," I asked suddenly, "just what is your lifespan?" He looked at me, puzzled. "Let's put it another way. How long does the average -- uh, do most people live on Rath?" His face brightened with understanding. "Oh, yes, suh. Nine, ten hunnert years, ah reckon." I sat up straight. "What?" Miss Cress bit her knuckle and the eyebrows went up again. "In Standard years, Mr. Graybe? You know what a Standard year is, don't you?" "Yes suh, reckon ah do that. 'Bout four hunnert days, ain't it?" "Uh, yes," I said slowly. "That's correct." "Exactly how old are you then, Mr. Graybe?" asked Leeta Cress. He turned to his wife. " 'Bout five hunnert, reckon." He grinned. "I'se oldern' Sari. 'Course she don't like to 'zactly give her age -- you know how wimminfolks is, ah reckon, ma'am." I took a deep breath. Well, it was certainly not impossible. There are a few long-lived races in the Union, though I'd never heard of any humanoids over two or two-fifty. Still, it made sense -- if you wanted to look at it like that. It was the only way he could have seen all those worlds in one lifetime by LongSleeper. "You're sure, Mr. Graybe? You're sure it's five hundred Standard years? You're not using some other calendar?" "No suh, reckon ah five hunnert, all right." He chuckled. "Feel like it sometimes, anyways." I took another look at him. It was possible all right... I scribbled a note on a piece of paper and handed it to Miss Cress. Then I wrote another one for the Graybes. Miss Cress frowned 'at me over her pretty nose. I ignored her. "Mr. Graybe," I said, "I want you and your family to go to this room." I handed him the paper. "Now. You'll be told what to do there. Then I'd like to ask you to do one more thing. I want you and Mrs. Graybe to go back to the Camp, and I want you to list every world you've ever worked on, starting back with, uh -- Korby, yes, that was the last one we got to. Do you think you can do that, Mr. Graybe?" He scratched his head and ran a long webbed hand over his face. "Ah shore try, suh. It been a heap a places, though." I leaned toward him over my desk. "It would help a lot, Mr. Graybe, if you could just tell us the first world you worked on after Raath. Sure you can't remember that?" "Naw," he said slowly, "it gonna take a little stewin'. Best ah Works back slow like, way we's a-doin' heah." "Okay. You do the best you can. And come back at the same time tomorrow." He nodded, and his shaggy brood dragged out after him. I turned to Leeta Cress. She was shaking her head slowly, like I was the boy who wrote the dirty word on the blackboard. "That just isn't done. Mr, Steuberk," she said darkly. "It isn't, eh? You sent the order up the tube, didn't you?" , "I did. But I don't like it. You can't go -- shoving every other case to the head of the line. They'll get a physical anyway, you know." "Sure," I said, "in about eight months. I want one now." She let out a deep sigh. "All right, Mr. Steuberk, but it isn't the way Mr. Harris would have handled it." I scowled. "Mr. Harris has the Galloping Rot, Miss Cress." "The Kripstian Trot, Mr. Steuberk," she sniffed. VW T E got through about half a " dozen more cases without much trouble. We closed up shop and I asked Leeta Cress if she'd I care to have dinner with me and -- bang -- we were in trouble again. So I had dinner by myself and a few drinks in the Red Tape Bar. I couldn't get the Graybes out of my mind. I made a note to have Research take a special look for Raath tomorrow, Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. : : Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here  Add #c Foreign Postage  # or #c each  Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Add #c Foreign Postage Name Address City State just in case it had gotten misplaced somewhere. I've worked in Research, too. We lost a whole System once behind a filing cabinet. Meanwhile I had something else on my mind. Besides Miss Cress. I hopped a cab, rode across town and set down at the StarDome. It was late, and I didn't figure any of the big brains would be using it this time of night. I went in, sat down before the big the round ceiling lit up with a panorama of the Galaxy. Before I left the office I had copied down the planets Graybe had already given us, and now I took my notebook out and punched the names into the board. I pressed dropped down on top of me. Now I was looking at roughly one-quarter of the big lens, centering in the Union. Everything was bright, sparkling and welldefined until the edge, which dimmed on out to places we hadn't been, but could map, then on to a vague luminosity that was someone's general idea of Galactic Central. The planets I had coded appeared as oversize red dots on the map. I connected them with a thin white line, in order of Graybe's migration, pulled a Tridi shield over my eyes, and brought the picture up as far as I could and still keep everyone in view. I now had a dimensional idea of Graybe's travels -- and it told me absolutely nothing. If there was any pattern or direction, it was related to the picking season of the Zidze nuts or some damn thing, and that wasn't likely to show up on the StarDome. Before I went to bed I called asked him what the symptoms were of the Kripstian Trot. He was asleep and it served me right for asking. He told me. Well! I" used the back lift this time, and I didn't forget my nose filters. There were two things waiting for me at the office: Miss Cress and a phone call. She handed me the number with a sugary smile, like Lucretia Borgia passing the cup. The call was from Zack Miles a tired, basset-faced character with a crooked smile. He looked at me happily. "You been demoted, Steuberk? Not surprised." in down here. Whole section's out with -- " I caught Leeta Cress'eye -- "with, ah, this new disease." "Yeah." He grinned nastily. "I know. 'Been up in Bio all morning trying to catch it." Miss Cress mouth opened and she fled the room. "Look," said Zack, "about those characters -- " "Well?" He shrugged. "Too early to give you anything definite. They could be, mind you they could be, what they say. Just had time for a preliminary check. Can you get 'em back up here?" I promised I would and asked: "Is Sut Graybe really five hundred years old?" Zack scowled. "Let's put it this way. He has the body of a not-too-well preserved man of fifty. If his life expectancy is one thousand, like he claims, then that would work out about right." "But you don't know for sure. Is that it?" "I don't," said Zack patiently, "because I haven't finished the tests. But, yes -- okay -- probably is. And I figure his 'kids,' if you'll pardon the expression, are about eighty and a hundred. The woman won't talk but she's around four-fifty." "Oh, yes," I said seriously, "if she's a day." Zack ignored me. "Listen, Steu, where is this Raath, anyway?" "It's a terrific place," I said, "you live to be a thousand and all the girls have got the Kripstian Trot." He leered a second, daydreaming, and hung up. I turned. Miss Cress was standing in the door. I grinned sheepishly. "You'll just have to put up with me, Miss Cress. Harris still has the -- " Her hands clapped over her ears. I had a feeling we wouldn't have that dinner tonight, either. The Graybes filed in about four -- only six hours late. Sut's eyes were droopier and more bloodshot than usual, and Sari didn't look much better. Orange hair fluttered to the floor in great clumps. "Well, Sut, how did you do?" He shook his head doubtfully and handed me the list. "Sorry we's late, suh, but me 'n Sari done our bes', tryin' to rec'lec all them places. We's up all night, reckon." "Oh, now, that wasn't necessary Sut, we -- " I stopped. I had glanced down at the list. In a scrawly, crabbed hand, Sut had painfully set down, in reverse order, each planet he had visited, the approximate date, and in most cases the crops they picked. But that wasn't what threw me. There were over two hundred and fifty names on the list. I clutched the paper tightly. "Are you sure, Sut? You've been to all these places? You're not just making this up?" He looked pained. "No suh, ah ain't. Reckon ah knows wheah ah been, all right, suh." I raised a hand in peace. "Okay. Okay, I believe you, Sut." I glanced at the bottom of the list. Yuvor. "Well now we're getting somewhere," I said. "Miss Cress, run Yuvor, Y-U-V-O-R, through the tapes. You're sure this is the first world you hit after Raath, eh?" His eyes widened and he shook his head violently. Orange hair floated to every corner of the room. "No, suh! You don' unnerstan', suh!" I rubbed a hand wearily across my face. "What, Mr. Graybe, what don't I understand?" "Well, suh, like ah said, we done our bes', but we failin' sleep fore we's finished." I didn't say a word for a minute. I stared at Sut, then at Miss Cress. Miss Cress was definitely better looking. "All right," I said calmly as possible. "All right, Sut. You go back. Yes. You go back and finish the list. Then come back." He grinned. The whole hairy crew shuffled out again. I laid my head in my hands. I looked at my watch. It was five. "Miss Cress... ?" She shook her head sweetly. "No, Mr. Steuberk." run the new planets through the StarDome. I'd wait until Sut -- correction: if Sut, finished his list. I skipped dinner and had a drink in the Red Tape Bar. I had two drinks. I had three --  oh, never mind. I couldn't find the back lift in the morning. Miss Cress shook her pretty head sadly. "You look terrible, Mr. Steuberk." I said, "Shut up, Miss Cress." She ignored me. "They're waiting for you," she said. I looked up. It sounded ominous. "Who? The little men?" "No sir. The Graybes. With Dr. Zack." She frowned. "Miles." I lit a shaky cigarette. "Okay. Let's get it over with." Zack filed in after the Graybes, leered at Leeta and leaned over my desk. "You look terrible, Steu." "I know. I've been informed." He beamed hopefully. "You lucky devil, you don't suppose you're coming down with -- " "Never mind, it's just a hangover. Some doctor. Well, what did you find?" He shrugged. "It's true. They are genuine long-lifers, all right. I borrowed a carbon-dater from Physics, tried it on a cell sample. They replace tissue about every seventy-five years." I looked up. "Carbon-dater? I thought -- " He shook his head. "Course, the radioactivity involved is -- " "Never mind. I'll take your word for it. Anything else?" He hesitated. "Maybe. Don't know. The kids have a funny kind of squiggly line in their brain-wave pattern. The adults don't." "A funny squiggly line?" I said acidly. "Are you sure you're a doctor, Zack?" Zack is not sensitive. He went on. I don't know what it is. All I know is the kids have it -- parents don't. And I'd like to say you've advanced the science of Geriatrics tremendously -- but I can't. We've been over them pretty thoroughly. They're old, all right. I just don't know why." "Okay," I said, "stick around if you want to. If we ever find Raath, maybe you can ask the head man, the, uh -- " "Raathskeller?" I winced and turned to Sut. "Well, think you've got the whole thing now, Mr. Graybe?" He shuffled forward, handed me the list. "Ah reckon so, suh. Purt' near busted mah haid, athinkin' so much." He crackled, nudging Sari in the ribs. I looked at the names. There were only about twenty additions. I hurried through, said the last name aloud. "Crohznar. Is that it, Sut? The first place you worked after Raath?" He nodded. "Yes suh, that it, awright. Tol'ble purty, too. We's pickin' them big ol' Gushi buds an' -- " I stood up. "Fine. Miss Cress?" "You want me to run Crohznar through the tape, Mr. Steuberk?" "No. I want you to call us a cab for the StarDome. A big cab." Miss Cress frowned. "Oh, we can't close up like that, Mr. Steuberk, we -- " "Miss Cress," I said darkly, "are you coming or aren't you? Dr. Miles thinks I may be coming down with something. Any minute, now. Do you know what he thinks I have, Miss Cress?" She paled, bringing her hand to her face. "All right, then. Let's get out of here." WT made a great picture trailY ing up the steps to the StarDome. Zack, Leeta Cress, me and the molting Graybes. I sat them all down and had Zack feed me the names on the lists. Granted, I could have worked from Crohznar alone, but I wanted, if possible, to get a full directional picture of the trip from there to Gomal, where the Graybes were picked up. I pressed us of Ooooohs and Aaaaaahs went up from the Graybes. I pulled the Tridi shield over my eyes and brought up the magnification. They were all there. Gomal back to Crohznar and all points in between. The picture was a little clearer now, but not much. The Graybes hadn't traveled in any orderly direction from Crohznar. They had gone where the work was, and the connecting white lines made a crazy pattern over half the Union. Still, there was a general, if ill-defined, drift from Sector II of the Union, where Crohznar was, "downward" toward Gomal. I called Sut to the panel, explained the situation as well as I could and pulled a Tridi over his eyes. "Mighty purty," said Sut. "Terrific. Now look, Sut, I've shown you where Crohznar is. And you can see the route you took to Gomal. You took pretty average hops all the way, so it stands to reason Raath is probably about as far from Crohznar as your average jump. Does anything around there look familiar?" "No, suh. Sho' don't," he said sorrowfully. "Nothing?" "No, suh. Jest a heap a purty lights, suh." I slapped my head. "Okay, hold it, Sut." I dialed a view of the constellations as seen from Crohznar. "Now, Sut? That's the way the stars look from the first planet you worked on after Raath. Doesn't anything look familiar?" He shook his head sadly. I pulled the Tridi off his eyes. I looked at Zack and Leeta Cress. They shrugged helplessly. I lit a cigarette and leaned toward Sut. "Now think," I told him. "Can you remember how long it took to get from Raath to Crohznar? Did anyone on the LongSleeper ever mention how much Standard time, how much real time it would take? I know it was a long time ago, but try to remember." Sut scratched his head and looked at me queerly. "Now what's the matter?" I asked. "Well, suh, it jest ah can't rightly tell how long they takes from Raath. Don' see how ah kin." I frowned. "Why not?" "Well, suh, we didn' take no LongSleeper from Raath to that place." I let out a deep breath. "Okay, Sut," I said sarcastically, "how did you go? Plushline?" Sut thought that was a riot. "No, suh," he laughed, "reckon not. Me 'n Sari, we swift-thunk it." I could feel the hairs crawling up the back of my neck. "Swift-thunk?" "Yes, suh. Pickin's was right pore on Raath, an' we's both purty young an' spry, 'bout two hunnert, reckon. So we swiftthunk 'bout some nice place what had work fer us an' we's jus' up and thar." No one said a thing. Finally Zack broke the silence. "Steu? Is he trying to say what I think he's trying to say?" I nodded. "Uh-huh." My voice came out a little dry. "He thinks he and Sari teleported from Raath." a little nervously for an honest-to-goodness scoff, "if they had any psi, operating or latent, we would have caught it on the tests. If they ever had it, they sure as hell don't have it now." "You talkin' 'bout swift-thinkin,' suh?" Sut interrupted. "You right, suh, we ain't got it no more. Can't do it when you is old, suh. Reckon we done use all ours up a-gettin' there," he laughed. I turned slowly to Zack. "Those -- squiggly lines?" He swallowed hard. "Yep." "Sut," I said, " why didn't you say something about this before?" "Didn' ask, suh. Didn't say nuthin' 'bout swift-thinkin'. Jes' wantin' to know whar Raath is." "If he's telling the truth," I said, "and I wish I could believe he isn't -- we might as well give up Raath. He doesn't know where it is, either." "What do you mean?" asked Zack. "If he swift-thu -- teleported at random, he wouldn't have any idea what Raath looks like from a distance, only what the rest of the sky looks like from Raath. And if he didn't come from anywhere near Crohznar -- " "Oh, ah 'spect we know our home when we see it, suh," said Sut. That was too much. "Then you're lying about the whole thing," I yelled at him. "You couldn't know!" "You don' unnerstan' bout us, I reckon," he said. "We kinda feels whar home is, even 'haps we can't see it. Gotta know, see, so we kin git back. Can't do that no more; done used up all our swift-thinkin', but can't never fergit. always got that, even if you can't do nuthin'. Don' know whar Raath is, suh, but if I'se evah to see it again, 'spect I'd surely know." Zack, Leeta and I just looked at each other. No one said a word. Then Sut said: "Reckon you could brighten this here thing up more than you has it? Lemme take another peek? I'd be powerful happy was I to find it 'gin." I leaned over and boosted the magnification as far as it would go. For maybe two minutes, Sut moved the scanner all over the StarDome. Then, a wide grin stretched over his face. "Sari, come look! There she is! Shore purty from here!" I moved up. Sut grabbed my arm and pulled me to the scanner. "There 'tis, suh. Right there. She look a lot different from heah, but that it, awright. See there? That bright, sorta fuzzy star 'neath thet big-n." I looked. This time the chill started at my feet and kept going. "That -- one, Sut?" "Yes suh, that it all right." I pointed it out to Zack and Leeta. I grinned stupidly. "That one," I said. "Mr. Steuberk?" "Yes, Miss Cress?" "Now." "Now, what?" "Now," she said, "I'm ready for that drink, Mr. Steuberk." I don't know what became of the Graybes of Raath. I'm not supposed to know. But I do know one thing -- there are no Gushi buds to pick at Union Security Headquarters, so they must be up to something else over there. I imagine those boys have a few questions for Sut and Sari. And I'll give you ten to one they don't i have an answer between them. Maybe we'll know when the Graybe kids reach maturity -- . , in about a hundred years. I won't, , of course, but Leeta and I'll have some grandchildren who might. Every once in a while I burst out laughing just thinking about it. Do you suppose that sorrylooking, mangy-haired lout really did swift-think here from that fuzzy looking "star" from Andromeda?      its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Supplies are limited! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) really dress up your library when they're kept in our handsome gold-stamped binders, instead of just being allowed to accumulate. Arranged according to date, easy to hold, protected from tinued rereading pleasure... and increase constantly in value. Each binder holds six issues and costs only # postpaid from Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please #I Hudson St. rush me  copies of New York # , N.Y. The Original Edition -- Complete ! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # City State I Enclose. dying. It was time. He had lived in the world for one hundred and nine years, though he had seen little enough of it except for the children. The children, thank God, still came. He thought they were with him now: "Coppie," he whispered in a shriveled voice, "how nice to see you." The nurse did not look around, although she was the only person in the room besides himself, and knew that he was not addressing her. The nurse was preparing the injections the doctor had ordered her to have ready. This little capsule for shock, this to rally his strength, these half-dozen others to shield him from his pain. Most of them would be used. DeBeckett was dying in a pain that once would have been unbearable and even now caused him to thresh about sometimes and moan. DeBeckett's room was a great twelve-foot chamber with hanging drapes and murals that reflected scenes from his books. The man himself was tiny, gnomelike. He became even less material while death (prosey biology, the chemistry of colloids) drew inappropriately near his head. He had lived his life remote from everything a normal man surrounds himself with. He now seemed hardly alive enough to die. DeBeckett lay in a vast, pillared bed, all the vaster for the small burden he put on it, and the white linen was whiter for his merry brown face. "Darling Veddie, please don't cry," he whispered restlessly, and the nurse took up a hypodermic syringe. He was not in unusual pain, though, and she put it back and sat down beside him. The world had been gentle with the gentle old man. It had made him a present of this bed and this linen, this great house with its attendant horde of machines to feed and warm and comfort him, and the land on which stood the tiny, quaint houses he loved better. It had given him a park in the mountains, well stocked with lambs, deer and birds of blazing, spectacular color, a fenced park where no one ever went but DeBeckett and the beloved children, where earthmoving machines had scooped out a Very Own Pond ("My Very Own PondWhich I sing for you in this songIs eight Hippopotamuses Wide And twenty Elephants Long.") He had not seen it for years, but he knew it was there. The world had given him, most of all, money, more money than he could ever want. He had tried to give it back (gently, hopefully, in a way pathetically), but there was always more. Even now the world showered him with gifts and doc-, tors, though neither could prevail against the stomping pitchfire arsonist in the old man's colon. The disease, a form of gastroenteritis, could have been cured; medicine had come that far long since. But not in a body that clung so lightly to life. He opened his eyes and said strongly, "Nurse, are the children there?" The nurse was a woman of nearly sixty. That was why she had been chosen. The new medicine was utterly beyond her in theory, but she could follow directions; and she loved Elphen DeBeckett. Her love was the love of a child, for a thumbed edition of Coppie Brambles had brightened her infancy. She said, "Of course they are, Mr. DeBeckett." He smiled. The old man loved children very much. They had been his whole life. The hardest part of his dying was that nothing of his own flesh would be left, no son, no grandchild, no one. He had never married. He would have given almost anything to have a child of his blood with him now -- almost anything, except the lurid, grunting price nature exacts, for DeBeckett had never known a woman. His only children were the phantoms of his books... and those who came to visit him. He said faintly, "Let the little sweetlings in." T HE nurse slipped out and the door closed silently behind her. Six children and three adults waited patiently outside, DeBeckett's doctor among them. Quickly she gave him the dimensions of the old man's illness, pulse and temperature, and the readings of the tiny gleaming dials by his pillow as well, though she did not know what they measured. It did not matter. She knew what the doctor was going to say before he said it: "He can't last another hour. It is astonishing that he lasted this long," he added, "but we will have lost something when he goes." "He wants you to come in. Especially you -- " She glanced around, embarrassed. "Especially you children." She had almost said "little sweetlings" herself, but did not quite dare. Only Elphen DeBeckett could talk like that, even to children. Especially to children. Especially to these children, poised, calm, beautiful, strong and gay. Only the prettiest, sweetest children visited Elphen DeBeckett, half a dozen or a score every day, a year-in, yearout pilgrimage. He would not have noticed if they had been ugly and dull, of course. To DeBeckett all children were sweet, beautiful and bright. They entered and ranged themselves around the bed, and DeBeckett looked up. The eyes regarded them and a dying voice said, "Please read to me," with such resolute sweetness that it frightened. "From my book," it added, though they knew well enough what he meant. The children looked at each other. They ranged from four to eleven, Will, Mike, blonde Celine, brown-eyed Karen, fat Freddy and busy Pat. "You," said Pat, who was seven. "No," said five-year-old Freddy. "Will." "Celine," said Will. "Here." The girl named Celine took the book from him and began obediently. "'Coppie thought to herself -- '" "No," said Pat. "Open." The girl opened the book, embarrassed, glancing at the dying old man. He was smiling at her without amusement, only love. She began to read: Coppie thought to herself that the geese might be hungry, for she herself ate Lotsandlots. Mumsie often said so, though Coppie had never found out what that mysterious food might be. She could not find any, so took some bread from Brigid Marie Ann-Erica Evangeline, the Cook Whose Name Was So Long That She Couldn't Remember It All Herself. As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles's Very Own Pond -- Celine hesitated, looking at the old man with sharp worry, for he had moaned faintly, like a flower moaning. "No, love," he said. "Go on." The swelling soft bubble before his heart had turned on him, but he knew he still had time. The little girl read: -- As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles's Very Own Pond, she thought and thought, and what she thought finally came right out of her mouth. It was a Real Gay Think, to be Thought While Charitably Feeding Geese: They don't make noise like little girls and boys, And all' day long they're aswimming. They never fret and sputter 'cause they haven't any butter, They go where the water's wetly brimming. But say -- Anyway -- I Like Geese! There was more, but the child paused and, after a moment, closed the book. DeBeckett was no longer listening. He was whispering to himself. On the wall before him was painted a copy of one of the illustrations from the first edition of his book, a delightful picture of Coppie Brambles herself, feeding the geese, admirably showing her shyness and her trace of fear, contrasted with the loutish comedy of the geese. The old man s eyes were fixed on the picture as he whispered. They guessed he was talking to Coppie, the child of eight dressed in the fashions of eighty years ago. They could hardly hear him, but in the silence that fell on the room his voice grew stronger. He was saying, without joy but without regret, "No more meadows, no more of the laughter of little children. But I do love them." He opened his eyes and sat up, waving the nurse away. "No, my dear," he said cheerfully, "it does not matter if I sit up now, you know. Excuse me for my rudeness. Excuse an old and tired man who, for a moment, wished to live on. I have something to say to you all." The nurse, .catching a sign from the doctor, took up another hypodermic and made it ready. "Please, Mr. DeBeckett," she said. Good humored, he permitted her to spray the surface of his wrist with a fine mist of droplets that touched the skin and penetrated it. "I suppose that is to give me strength," he said. "Well, I am grateful for it. I know I must leave you, but there is something I would like to know. I have wondered... For years I have wondered, but I have not r been able to understand the answers when I was told them. I think I have only this one more chance." H E felt stronger from the fluid that now coursed through his veins, and accepted without fear the price he would have to pay for it. "As you know," he said; "or, I should say, as you children no doubt do not know, some years ago I endowed a research institution, the Coppie Brambles Foundation. I did it for the love of you, you and all of you. Last night I was reading the letter I wrote my attorneys -- No. Let us see if you can understand the letter itself; I have it here. Will, can you read?" Will was nine, freckled darkly on pale skin, red haired and gangling. "Yes, Mr. DeBeckett." "Even hard words," smiled the dying man. "Yes, sir." DeBeckett gestured at the table beside him, and the boy obediently took up a stiff sheet of paper. "Please," said DeBeckett, and the boy began to read in a high-pitched, rapid whine. " 'Children have been all my life and I have not regretted an instant of the years I devoted to their happiness. If I can tell them a little of the wonderful world in which we are, if I can open to them the miracles of life and living, then my joy is unbounded. This I have tried, rather selfishly, to do. I cannot say it was for them! It was for me. For nothing could have given me more pleasure.' " The boy paused. DeBeckett said gravely, "I'm afraid this is a Very Big Think, lovelings. Please try to understand. This is the letter I wrote to my attorneys when I instructed them to set up the Foundation. Go on, Will." " 'But my way of working has been unscientific, I know. I am told that children are not less than we adults, but more. I am told that the grown-up maimers and cheats in the world are only children soiled, that the hagglers of commerce are the infant dreamers whose dreams were denied. I am told that youth is wilder, freer, better than age, which I believe with all my heart, not needing the stories of twenty-year-old mathematicians and infant Mozarts to lay a proof. "'In the course of my work I have been given great material rewards. I wish that this money be spent for those I love. I have worked with the heart, but perhaps my money can help someone to work with the mind, in this great new science of psychology which I do not understand, in all of the other sciences which I understand even less. I must hire other eyes. " 'I direct, then, that all of my assets other than my books and my homes be converted into cash, and that this money be used to further the study of the child, with the aim of releasing him from the corrupt adult cloak that smothers him, of freeing him for wisdom, tenderness and love.'" "That," said DeBeckett sadly, "was forty years ago." head a rocket was clapping through the sky, and DeBeckett looked wildly around. "It's all right, Mr. DeBeckett," comforted little Pat. "It's only a plane." He allowed her to soothe him. "Ah, loveling," he said. "And can you answer my question?" "What it says in the 'Cyclopedia, Mr. DeBeckett?" "Why -- Yes, if you know it, my dear." Surprisingly the child said, as if by rote: "The Institute was founded in # and at once attracted most of the great workers in pediatric analysis, who were able to show Wiltshauer's Effect in the relationship between glandular and mental development. Within less than ten years a new projective analysis of the growth process permitted a reorientation of basic pedagogy from a null-positive locus. The effects were immediate. The first generation of -- " She stopped, startled. The old man was up on his elbow, his eyes blazing at her in wonder and fright. "I'm -- " She looked around at the other children for help and at once wailed, "I'm sorry, Mr. DeBeckett!" and began to cry. The old man fell back, staring at her with a sort of unbelieving panic. The little girl wept abundantly. Slowly DeBeckett's expression relaxed and he managed a sketchy smile. He said, "There, sweetest. You startled me. But it was charming of you to memorize all that!" "I learned it for you," she sobbed. "I didn't understand. Don't cry." Obediently the little girl dried her eyes as DeBeckett stretched out a hand to her. But the hand dropped back on the quilt. Age, surprise and the drug had allied to overmaster the dwindling resources of Elphen DeBeckett. He wandered to the phantoms on the wall. "I never understood what they did with my money," he told Coppie, who smiled at him with a shy, painted smile. "The children kept coming, but they never said." "Poor man," said Will absently, watching him with a child's uncommitted look. The nurse's eyes were bright and wet. She reached for the hypodermic, but the doctor shook his head. "Wait," he said, and walked to the bed. He stood on tiptoe to peer into the dying man's face. "No, no use. Too old. Can't survive organ transplant, certainty of cytic shock. No feasible therapy." The nurse's eyes were now flowing. The doctor said to her, with patience but not very much patience, "No alternative. Only kept him going this long from gratitude." The nurse sobbed, "Isn't there anything we can do for him?" "Yes." The doctor gestured, and the lights on the diagnostic dials winked out. 'We can let him die."  on a chair, much too large for her, and dangled her feet. "Be nice to get rid of this furniture, anyway," she said. 'Well, nurse? He's dead. Don't wait." The nurse looked rebelliously at the doctor, but the doctor only nodded. Sadly the nurse went to the door and admitted the adults who had waited outside. The four of them surrounded the body and bore it gently through the door. Before it closed the nurse looked back and wailed: "He loved you!" The children did not appear to notice. After a moment Pat said reflectively, "Sorry about the book. Should have opened it." "He didn't notice," said Will, wiping his hands. He had touched the old man's fingers. "No. Hate crying, though." The doctor said, "Nice of you. Helped him, I think." He picked up the phone and ordered a demolition crew for the house. "Monument?" "Oh, yes," said another child. "Well. Small one, anyway." The doctor, who was nine, said, "Funny. Without him, what? A few hundred thousand dollars and the Foundation makes a flexible world, no more rigid adults, no more -- " He caught himself narrowly. The doctor had observed before that he had a tendency to over-identify with adults, probably because his specialty had been geriatrics. Now that Elphen DeBeckett was dead, he no longer had a specialty. "Miss him somehow," said Celine frankly, coming over to look over Will's shoulder at the quaint old murals on the wall. "What the nurse said, true enough. He loved us." "And clearly we loved him," piped Freddy, methodically sorting through the contents of the dead man's desk. "Would have terminated him with the others otherwise, wouldn't we?" i Odd planet! The bipeds talked from their heads and saw only what lay before them. In short, they were pathetic -- and deadly! A S I am now utterly without hope, lost to my mission and lost in the sight of my crew, I will record what petty thoughts I may have for what benefit they may give some other starfarer. Nine long days of bickering! But the decision is. sure. The crew will maroon me. I have lost all control over them. Who could have believed that I would show such weakness when crossing the barrier? By all the tests I should have been the strongest. But the final test is the event itself. I failed. I only hope that it is a pleasant and habitable planet where they put me down... Later. They have decided. I am no longer the captain even in name. But they have compassion on me. They will do what they can for my comfort. I believe they have already selected my desert island, so to speak, an outof-the-way globe where they will leave me to die. I will hope for the best. I no longer have any voice in their councils... Later. I will be put down with only the basic survival kit: the ejection mortar and sphere for my last testament to be orbited into the galactic drift; a small cosmoscope so that I will at least have my bearings; one change of blood; an abridged universal language correlator; a compendium of the one thousand philosophic questions yet unsolved to exercise my mind; a small vial of bug-kill; and a stack of sexy magazines... Later. It has been selected. But my mind has grown so demoralized that I do not even recognize the system, though once this particular region was my specialty. The globe will be habitable. There will be breathable atmosphere which will allow me to dispense with much bothersome equipment. Here the filler used is nitrogen, yet it will not matter. I have breathed nitrogen before. There will be water, much of it saline, but sufficient quantities of sweet. Food will be no problem; before being marooned, I will receive injections that should last me for the rest of my probably short life. Gravity will be within the range of my constitution. What will be lacking? Nothing but the companionship of my own kind, which is everything. What a terrible thing it is to be marooned!  say that the only unforgivable sin in the universe is ineptitude. That I should be the first to succumb to space-ineptitude and be an awkward burden on the rest of them! But it would be disastrous for them to try to travel any longer with a sick man, particularly as their nominal leader. I would be a shadow over them. I hold them no rancor. It will be today... Later. I am here. I have no real interest in defining where "here" is, though I have my cosmoscope and could easily determine it. I was anesthetized a few hours before, and put down here in my sleep. The blasted halfacre of their landing is near. No other trace of them is left. Yet it is a good choice and not greatly unlike home. It is the nearest resemblance I have seen on the entire voyage, which is to say that the pseudodendrons are enough like trees to remind me of trees, the herbage near enough to grass to satisfy one who had never known real grass. It is a green, somewhat waterlogged land of pleasant temperature. The only inhabitants I have encountered are a preoccupied race of hump-backed browsers who pay me scant notice. These are quadruped and myopic, and spend nearly their entire time at feeding. It may be that I am invisible to them. Yet they hear my voice and shy away somewhat from it. I am able to communicate with them only poorly. Their only vocalization is a sort of vibrant windy roar, but when I answer in kind, they appear more puzzled than communicative. They have this peculiarity: when they come to an obstacle of terrain or thicket, they either go laboriously around it or force their way through it. It does not seem to occur to them to fly over it. They are as gravity-bound as a newborn baby. What air-traveling creatures I have met are of a considerably smaller size. These are more vocal than the myopic quadrupeds, and I have had some success in conversing with them, but my results still await a more leisurely semantic interpretation. Such communications of theirs as I have analyzed are quite commonplace. They have no real philosophy and are singularly lacking in aspiration; they are almost total extroverts and have no more than the rudiments of introspection. Yet they have managed to tell me some amusing anecdotes. They are quite good-natured, though moronic. They say that neither they nor the myopic quadrupeds are the dominant race here, but rather a large grublike creature lacking a complete outer covering. From what they are able to convey of this breed, it is a nightmarish kind of creation. One of the flyers even told me that the giant grubs travel upright on a bifurcated tail, but this is difficult to credit. Besides, I believe that humor is at least a minor component of the mentality of my airy friends. I will call them birds, though they are but a sorry caricature of the birds at home... am being hunted by the giant grubs. Doubling back, I have seen them on my trail, examining it with great curiosity. The birds had given me a very inadequate idea of these. They are indeed unfinished -- they do lack a complete outer covering. Despite their giant size, I am convinced that they are grubs, living under rocks and in masses of rotten wood. Nothing in nature gives the impression of so lacking an outer covering as the grub, that obese, unfinished worm. These are, however, simple bipeds. They are wrapped in a cocoon which they seem never to have shed, as though their emergence from the larval state were incomplete. It is a loose artificial sheath covering the central portion of the corpus. They seem never to divest themselves of it, though it is definitely not a part of the body. When I have analyzed their minds, I will know the reason for their carrying it. Now I can only conjecture. Ijt would seem a compulsion, some psychological bond that dooms them in their apparent adult state to carry their cocoons with them. Later. I am captured by three of the giant grubs. I had barely time to swallow my communication sphere. They pinned me down and beat me with sticks. I was taken by surprise and was! not momentarily able to solve  their language, though it came to me after a short interval. It was discordant and vocal and entirely gravity-bound, by which I mean that its thoughts were chained to its words. There seemed nothing in them above the vocal. In this the giant grubs were less than the birds, even ! though they had a practical power and cogency that the birds lacked. "What'll we do with the blob?" asked one. "Why," said the second, "you hit it on that end and I'll hit it on this. We don't know which end is the head." "Let's try it for bait," said the third. "Catfish might go for it." "We could keep it alive till we're ready to use it. Then it ' would stay fresh." "No, let's kill it. It doesn't look too fresh, even the way it is." "Gentlemen, you are making a mistake," I said. "I have done nothing to merit death. And I am not without talent. Besides, you have not considered the possibility that I may be forced to kill I you three instead. I will not die stop pounding on me with those sticks. It hurts." I was surprised and shocked at the sound of my own voice. It w as nearly as harsh as that of the grubs. But this was my first attempt at their language, and musicality does not become it. "Hey, fellows, did you hear that? Was that the blob talking? Or was one of you playing a joke? Harry? Stanley? Have you been practicing to be ventriloquists?" "Not me." "Not me either. It sure sounded like it was it." "Hey, blob, was that you? Can you talk, blob?" responded. "I am not an infant. Nor am I a blob. I am a creature superior to your own kind, if you are examples. Or it may be that you are only children. Perhaps you are still in the pupa stage. Tell me, is yours an early stage, or an arrested development, or are you indeed adult?" "Hey, fellows, we don't have to take that from any blob. I'll cave in its blasted head." "That's its tail." "It's its head. It's the end it talks with." "Gentlemen, perhaps I can set you straight," I said. "That is my tail you are thwacking with that stick, and I am warning you to stop it Of course I was talking with my tail. I was only doing it in imitation of you. I am new at the language and its manner of speaking. Yet it may be that I have made a grotesque mistake. Is that your heads that you are waving in the air? Well, then, I will talk with my head, if that is the custom. But I warn you again not to hit me on either end with those sticks." "Hey, fellows, I bet we could sell that thing. I bet we could sell it to Billy Wilkins for his Reptile Farm." "How would we get it there?" "Make it walk. Hey blob, can you walk?" "I can travel, certainly, but I would not stagger along precariously on a pair of flesh stilts with my head in the air, as you do. When I travel, I do not travel upside down." "Well, let's go, then. We're going to sell you to Billy Wilkins for his Reptile Farm. If he can use a blob, he'll put you in one of the tanks with the big turtles and alligators. You think you'll like them?" "I am lonesome in this lost world," I replied sadly, "and even the company of you peeled grubs is better than nothing. I am anxious to adopt a family and settle down here for what years of life I have left. It may be that I will find compatibility with the species you mention. I do not know I what they are." "Hey, fellows, this blob isn't a bad guy at all. I'd shake your hand; blob, if I knew where it was. Let's go to Billy Wilkins' place and sell him." II WfE traveled to Billy Wilkins' " place. My friends were amazed when I took to the air and believed that I had deserted them. They had no cause to distrust me. Without them I would have had to rely on intuition to reach Billy Wilkins, and even then I would lack the proper introductions. "Hey, Billy," said my loudest friend, whose name was Cecil, "what will you give us for a blob? It flies and talks and isn't a bad fellow at all. You'd get more tourists to come to your reptile show if you had a talking blob in it. He could sing songs and tell stories. I bet he could even play the guitar." "Well, Cecil, I'll just give you all ten dollars for it and try to figure out what it is later. I'm a little ahead on my hunches now, so I can afford to gamble on this one. I can always pickle it and exhibit it as a genuine hippopotamus kidney." "Thank you, Billy. Take care of yourself, blob." "Good-by for now, gentlemen," I said. "I would like you to visit me some evening as soon as I am acclimated to my new surroundings. I will throw a whingding for you -- as soon as I find out what a whing-ding is." "My God," said Billy Wilkins, "it talks! It really talks!" "We told you it could talk and fly, Billy." "It talks, it talks," said Billy. "Where's that blasted sign painter? Eustace, come here. We got to paint a new sign!" The turtles in the tank I was put into did have a sound basic philosophy which was absent in the walking grubs. But they were slow and lacking inner fire. They would not be obnoxious company, but neither would they give me excitement and warmth. I was really more interested in the walking grubs. Eustace was a black grub, while the others had all been white; but like them he had no outside casing of his own, and like them he also staggered about on flesh stilts with his head in the air. It wasn't that I was naive or hadn't seen bipeds before. But I don't believe anyone ever became entirely accustomed to seeing a biped travel in its peculiar manner. "Good afternoon, Eustace," I said pleasantly enough. The eyes of Eustace were large and white. He was a more handsome specimen than the other grubs. "That you talking, bub? Say, you really can talk, can't you? I thought Mr. Billy was fooling. Now just you hold that expression a minute and let me get it set in my mind. I can paint anything, once I get it set in my mind. What's your name, blob? Have blobs names?" "Not in your manner. With us the name and the soul, I believe you call it, are the same thing and cannot be vocalized, so I will have to adopt a name of your sort. What would be a good name?" "Bub, I was always partial to George Albert Leroy Ellery. That was my grandfather's name." "Should I also have a family name?" "Sure." "What would you suggest?" "How about McIntosh?" "That will be fine. I will use it." Eustace was painting my portrait on tent canvas. "Is the name of this world Florida?" I asked one of them. "The road signs said Florida." "World, world, world, water, water, water, glub, glug, glub," said one of them. "Yes, but is this particular world we are on named Florida?" "World, world, water, water! glub," said another. "Eustace, I can get nothing from these fellows," I called. "I # this world named Florida?" "Mr. George Albert, you are right in the middle of Florida, the greatest state in the universe." "Having traveled, Eustace, J have great reservations that it is the greatest. But it is my new home and I must cultivate a loyalty to it." I went up in a tree to give advice to two young birds trying to construct a nest. This was obviously their first venture. "You are going about it all wrong," I told them. "First consider that this will be your home, and then consider how you can make your home most beautiful." "This is the way they've always built them," said one of the birds. "There must be an element of utility, yes," I told them. "But the dominant motif should be beauty. The impression of expanded vistas can be given by long low walls and parapets." j "This is the way they've always built them," said the other bird. "Remember to embody new developments," I said. "Just say to yourself, 'This is the newest . nest in the world.' Always say that about any task you attempt. It inspires you." 'This is the way they've alwa ys built them," said the birds. "Go build your own nest." "Mr. George Albert," called Eustace, "Mr. Billy won't like your flying around those trees. You're supposed to stay in your tank." "I was only getting a little air and talking to the birds," I said. "You can talk to the birds?" asked Eustace. "Cannot anyone?" "I can, a little," said Eustace. "I didn't know anyone else could." But when Billy Wilkins returned and heard the report that I had been flying about, I was put in the snake house, in a cage that was tightly meshed top and sides. My cellmate was a surly python named Pete. "See you stay on that side," said Pete. "You're too big for me to swallow. But I might try." "There is something bothering you, Pete," I said. "You have a bad disposition. That can come only from a bad digestion or a bad conscience" "I have both," said Pete. "The first is because I bolt my food. The second is because -- well, I forget the reason, but it's my conscience." "Think hard, Pete. Why have you a bad conscience?" "Snakes always have bad consciences. We have forgotten the crime, but we remember the guilt." "Perhaps you should seek advice from someone, Pete." "I kind of think it was someone's smooth advice that started us on all this. He talked the legs right off us." cage with another "man," as the walking grubs call themselves. "That it?" asked the other man. "And you say it can talk?" "Of course I talk," I answered for Billy Wilkins. "I have never known a creature who couldn't talk in some manner. My name is George Albert Leroy Ellery McIntosh. I don't believe that I heard yours, sir." "Bracken. Blackjack Bracken. I was telling Billy here that if he really had a blob that could talk, I might be able to use it in my night club. We could have you here at the Snake Ranch in the daytime for the tourists and kids. Then I could have you at the club at night. We could work out an act. Do you think you could learn to play the guitar?" "Probably. But it would be much easier for me merely to duplicate the sound." "But then how could you sing and make guitar noise at the same time?" "You surely don't think I am limited to one voice box?" "Oh. I didn't know. What's that big metal ball you have there?" "That's my communication sphere, to record my thoughts. I would not be without it. When in danger, I swallow it. When in extreme danger, I will have to escape to a spot where I have concealed my ejection mortar, and send my sphere into the galactic drift on a chance that it may be found." "That's no kind of gag to put in an act. What I have in mind is something like this." Blackjack Bracken told a joke. It was a childish one and in poor taste. "I don't believe that is quite my style," I said. "All right, what would you suggest?" "I thought that I might lecture your patrons on the Higher Ethic." "Look, George Albert, my patrons don't even have the lower ethic." "And just what sort of recompense are we talking about?" I asked. "Billy and I had about settled on a hundred and fifty a week." "A hundred and fifty for whom?" "Why, for Billy." "Let us make it a hundred anj fifty for myself, and ten per cent for Billy as my agent." "Say, this blob's real smart isn't he, Billy?" "Too smart." "Yes, sir, George Albert, you're one smart blob. What kind of contract have you signed with Billy here?" "No contract." "Just a gentlemen's agree, ment?" "No agreement." "Billy, you can't hold him in a cage without a contract. That's slavery. It's against the law." "But, Blackjack, a blob isn't people." "Try proving that in court. Will you sign a contract with me, George Albert?" "I will not dump Billy. He befriended me and gave me a home with the turtles and snakes. I will sign a joint contract with the two of you. We will discuss terms tomorrow -- after I have estimated the attendance both here and at the night club." Ill the walking grubs (who call themselves "people") there are two kinds, and they place great emphasis on the difference. From this stems a large part of their difficulties. This distinction, which is one of polarity, ts quite across the years and ability and station of life. It is n# t confined only to the people grubs, but also involves apparently all the beings on the planet Florida. It appears that a person is committed to one or the other polarity at the beginning of life, maintaining that polarity until death. The interlocking attraction-repulsion complex set up by these two opposable types has deep emotional involvements. It is the cause of considerable concern and disturbance, as well as desire and inspiration. There is a sort of poetic penumbra about the whole thing that tends to disguise its basic simplicity, expressible as a simultaneous polarity equation. Complete segregation of the two types seems impossible. If it has ever been tried, it has now evidently been abandoned as impractical. There is indeed an intangible difference between the two types, so that before that first day at the Reptile Ranch was finished, I was able to differentiate between the two more than ninety per cent of the time. The knowledge of this difference in polarity seems to be intuitive. These two I will call the Beta and Gamma, or Boy and Girl, types. I began to see that this opposability of the two types was one of the great driving forces of the people. In the evening I was transported to the night club and I was a success. I would not entertain them with blue jokes or blue lyrics, but the patrons seemed fascinated by my simple imitations of all the instruments of the orchestra and my singing of comic ballads that Eustace had taught me in odd moments that day. They were also interested in the way that I drank gin -- that is, emptying the bottle without breaking the seal. (It seems that the grub-people are unable to absorb a liquid without making direct contact with it.) And I met Margaret, one of the "girl" singers. I had been wondering to which type of people I might show affinity. Now I knew. I was definitely a Beta type, for I was attracted to Margaret, who was unmistakably a Gamma. I began to understand the queer effect that these types have on each other. She came over to my cage. "I want to rub your head for good luck before I go on," she said. "Thank you, Margaret," I replied, "but that is not my head." She sang with incomparable sadness, with all the sorrow and sordidness that appear to be the lot of unfortunate Gammas. It was the essence of melancholy made into music. It was a little bit like the ghost music on the asteroid Artemis, a little like the death chants on Dolmena. Sex and sorrow. Nostalgia. Regret. Her singing shook me with a yearning that had no precedent. She came back to my cage. "You were wonderful, Margaret," I said. "I'm always wonderful when I'm singing for my supper. I am less wonderful in the rare times that I am well fed. But are you happy, little buddy?" "I had become almost so, till I heard you sing. Now I am overcome with sorrow and longing. Margaret, I am fascinated with you." "I go for you too, blob. You're my buddy. Isn't it funny that the only buddy I have in the world is a blob? But if you'd seen some of the guysI've been married to -- boy! I wouldn't insult you by calling them blobs. Have to go now. See you tomorrow night -- if they keep us both on." lyrOW there was a problem to ' face. It was necessary that I establish control over my environment, and at once. How else could I aspire to Margaret? I knew that the heart of the entire place here was neither the bar nor the entertainment therein, nor the cuisine, nor the dancing. The heart of the enterprise, was the Casino. Here was the money that mattered; the rest was but garnish. I had them bring me into the gambling rooms. I had expected problems # f complexity here with which the patrons worked for their gain or loss. Instead there was an almost amazing simplicity. All the games were based on first aspect numbers only. Indeed, everything on the Planet Florida seemed based on first aspect numbers. Now it is an elemental fact that first aspect numbers do not carry within them their own prediction. Nor were the people even possessed of the prediction key that lies over the very threshold of the second aspect series. These people were actually . wagering sums -- the symbols of prosperity -- blindly, not knowing for sure whether they would win or lose. They were selecting numbers by hunch or at random with no assurance of profit. They were choosing a hole for a ball to fall into without knowing whether that was the right hole! I do not believe that I was ever so amazed at anything in my life. But here was my opportunity to establish control over my environment. I began to play the games. Usually I would watch a round first, to be sure that I understood just what was going on. Then I would play a few times... as j a ny as it took to break the game. I broke game after game. When he could no longer pay m e, Blackjack closed the Casino in exasperation. Then we played poker, he and I and several others. This was even more simple. I suddenly realized that the grub-people could see only one side of the cards at a time. I played and I won. I owned the Casino now, and all of those people were now working for me. Billy Wilkins also played with us, so that in short order I also owned the Reptile Ranch. Before the evening was over, I owned a race track, a beach hotel, and a theater in a place named New York. I had begun to establish control over my environment... days. I increased my control and did what I could for my friends. I got a good doctor for my old friend and roommate, Pete the python, and he began receiving treatment for his indigestion. I got a jazzy sports car for my friend Eustace imported from somewhere called Italy. And I buried Margaret in mink, for she had a fix on the fur of that mysterious animal. She enjoyed draping it about her in the form of coats, capes, cloaks, mantles and stoles, though the weather didn't really require it. I had now won several banks, a railroad, an airline, and a casino in somewhere named Havana. "You're somebody now," said Margaret. "You really ought to dress better. Or are you dressed? I never know. I don't know if part of that is clothes or if all of it is you. But at least I've learned which is your head. I think we should be married in May. It's so common to be married in June. Just imagine me being Mrs. George Albert Leroy Ellery McIntosh! You know, we have become quite an item. And do you know there are three biographies of you out -- Burgeoning Blob, The Blob from Way Out, The Hidden Hand Behind the Blob -- What Does it Portend? And the governor has invited us to dine tomorrow. I do wish you would learn to eat. If you weren't so nice, you'd be creepy. I always say there's nothing wrong with marrying a man, or a blob, with money. It shows foresight on the part of a girl. You know you will have to get a blood test? You had better get it tomorrow. IV You do have blood, don't you?" I did, but not, of course, of the color and viscosity of hers. But I could give it that color and viscosity temporarily. And it would react negative in all the tests. She mused, "They are all jealous of me. They say they wouldn't marry a blob. They mean they couldn't... Do you have to carry that tin ball with you all the time?" "Yes. It is my communication sphere. In it I record my thoughts. I would be lost without it." "Oh, like a diary. How quaint!" Yes, those were the golden days. The grubs appeared to me in a new light, for was not Margaret also a grub? Yet she seemed not so unfinished as the rest. Though lacking a natural outer casing, she had not the appearance of crawling out from under a rock. She was quite an attractive "girl." And she cared for me. What more could I wish? I was affluent. I was respected. I was in control of my environment. And I could aid my friends, of whom I had now acquired an astonishing number. Moreover, my old space-ineptitude sickness had left me. I never felt better in my life. Ah, golden days, one after the other like a pleasant dream. And soon I am to be married! change. As on the Planet Hecube, where full summer turns into the dead of the winter in minutes, to the destruction of many travelers, so was it here, I My world is threatened! It is tottering, all that I have built up. I will fight. I will have the best lawyers on the planet I am not done. But I am threat- ened... Later. This may be the end. # The appeal court has given its decision. A blob may not own I property in Florida. A blob is not a person. Of course I am not a person. I never pretended to be. But I am a personage! I will yet fight I this thing... Later. I have lost everything. The last appeal is gone. By defi-I nition, I am an animal of indeterminate origin, and my prop erty is being completely stripped from me. I made an eloquent appeal and it moved them greatly. I There were tears in their eyes. But there was greed in the set of their mouths. They have a ! vested interest in stripping me. ; Each will seize a little. And I am left a pauper, a vasj sal, an animal, a slave. This is always the last doom of the  marooned, to be a despised alien at the mercy of a strange world. Yet it should not be hopeless. I will have Margaret. Since my contract with Billy Wilkins and Blackjack Bracken, long since bought up, is no longer in effect, Margaret should be able to handle my affairs as a person. I believe that I have great earning powers yet, and I can win as much as I wish by gambling. We will treat this as only a technicality. We shall acquire new fortune. I will reestablish control over my environment. I will bring back the golden days. A few of my old friends are still loyal to me, Margaret, Pete the python, Eustace... Later. The world has caved in completely. Margaret has thrown me over. "I'm sorry, blobby," she said,' "but it just won't work. You're still nice, but without money you are only a blob. How could I marry a blob?" "But we can earn more money! I am talented." "No, you're box-office poison now. You were a fad, and fads die quickly." "But, Margaret, I can win as much as I wish by gambling." "Not a chance, blobby. Nobody will gamble with you any more. Y ou're through, blob. I will miss you, though. There will be a new blue note in my ballads when I sing for my supper, after the mink coats are all gone. 'By now." "Margaret, do not leave me! What of all our golden days to. gether?" But all she said was " 'By now." And she was gone forever. I T AM desolate and my old space-ineptitude has returned, My recovery was an illusion. I am so ill with awkwardness that I can no longer fly. I must walk on the ground like one of the giant grubs. A curse on this planet Florida and all its sister orbs! What a miserable world this is! How could I have been tricked by a young Gamma type of the walking grub? Let her crawl back under her ancestral rocks with all the rest of her kind... No, no, I do not mean that. To me she will always remain a dream, a broken dream. I am no longer welcome at the Casino. They kicked me down the front steps. I no longer have a home at the Reptile Ranch. "Mr. George Albert," said Eustace, "I just can't afford to be seen with you any more. I have my position to consider, with a sports car and all that." And Pete the python was curt "Well, big shot, I guess you aren't so big after all. And you Vhen you had that doctor cure me of my indigestion, you left # e with nothing but my bad conscience. I wish I could get my indigestion back." "A curse on this world," I said. "World, world, water, water, glug, glug," said the turtles in their tanks, my only friends. So I have gone back into the woods to die. I have located my ejection mortar, and when I know that death is finally on me, I will fire off my communication sphere and hope it will reach the galactic drift. Whoever finds it -- friend -- space traveler -- you who were too impatient to remain on your own world -- be you warned of this one! Here ingratitude is the rule and cruelty the main sport. The unfinished grubs have come out from under their rocks and they walk this world upside down with their heads in the air. Their friendship is fleeting, their promises are like the wind. I am near my end.      In the wide-open pages of a magazine the size of Galaxy (biggest in the field at any price, we like to keep reminding you) is room for many stories. This is a good thing, because we've got many stories (and fine ones) in the bank to draw on, and we're splurging them out to you as fast as we can. We don't know for sure everyone who will show up next issue. But we have in inventory first-rate yarns by Robert Bloch, Margaret St. Clair, J. F. Bone, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Mirriam Allen deFord, Edward Wellen, Allen Kim Lang and Algis Budrys... We do know that Jack Vance will be with us in August. This wonder and touch of strange that Vance knows how to give. Is the Moon Moth a person? No. Is it an animal? No. It's -- well, read the story, and then you'll know better than we can say. Also J. T. McIntosh is on the docket, with a fine, moving novelet about two men who had to be enemies but could not help best -- and that's very good indeed. For the shorts we can promise you Lester del Rey and Judith Merril, and maybe a clutch from the illustrious lineup above... and the usual features, of course! The Vortex Blaster by E. E. Smith. Gnome Press. roost for a decade and a half during the years surrounding the Troubled Thirties. Each magazine installment of his Skylark and Lensman stories was breathlessly awaited by Space Opera addicts (and, in those days, who wasn't one?) The Vortex Blaster, the latest of the Lensman sagas, is as tremendously broad in scope as its famous predecessors and, also like them, on occasions painfully coy. Synopsis: Atomic vortexes, raging areas of destruction, are blighting the surfaces of numerous planets. Inherently unstable, they must be quenched by an exactly calculated blast at a precise instant of time. Computers have been unable to supply data fast enough to do the job. Ergo, the Vortex Blaster, a mental freak with a combination of Uni vac and Superman condensed into the brain of one man. It is he who discovers the vast plot against civilization masked by t he immediate peril of the vortexes. Plotwise composed of pure nostalgia, it is easy to see how the modern trend of SF has passed good Doc Smith by. But hang me for a Boskonian zwilnik an d also by the great god Klono if I didn't get a huge bang out of his super-duper yarn. Rating: (auld land syne)  Agent of Vega by James H. Schmitz. Gnome Press. the grand manner," , brags the blurb in what turns out to be almost an understatement. This lineal descendant of the Doc Smith sagas fittingly follows the old master's latest and points up the "new look" of S. O. This is Space Opera composed by a Space-Wagner, for a universe-wide stage and a chorus and orchestra of ET's. Three novelettes from Astounding and one from Galaxy present a picture of titanic conflict against ruthless enemies. Zone Agents -- supermen and women of the Eliot Ness ilk -- are forced to conduct their campaigns against evil on a sub-rosa level due to the restrictions of interstellar agreement and laissez-faire. However, their mental, physical and mechanical equipment are such that it hardly remains a fair fight. The space ships of the agents themselves are telepathic and omnipotent. Even E. E. Smith never had it that good! What places Schmitz's work above run of the mill S. O. is the quality as well as breadth of his imagination, but most of all his touch for characterization -- which suffuses even his ET's and super-mechanisms with the (sometimes incongruous) flush of humanity. Rating:     y # A Guide to the Stars by Patrick Moore. W. W. Norton  Co., Inc. noted British professor of astronomy, Moore believes that popularizations excite interest so that the non-scientific layman can follow up his thirst for knowledge with more authoritative information. Moore does well by his audience. Though his book contains "no new theories or world-shaking pronouncements," he writes with skill sufficient to engross even a merely superficially interested reader. First Men to the Moon by Wemher von Braun. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. barreled. The central core is a fictional story of the adventuresome voyage of the first two men to reach the moon. It is a highly detailed and absorbing blow-byblow account of the #-day argosy. The secondary section of the book is a serious text explaining the technical points raised by the fiction, and is marginally placed on the identical pages so that reference can be immediate. The illustrations are exceptional in lucidity, detail and abundance. Even the best grounded SF buff will find new and astonishing material over which to dream. Conquest oi Lite by Adam Lukens. Avalon Books, N. Y. # able originality in his first Avalon novel, The Sea People. Unfortunately that opus had little else to recommend it. His present story concerns a future when Earthwomen, who outnumber males, are also murderously sadistic in their quest for entertainment. These delightful females purchase "reclaimed men", factory-rebuilt human robots fashioned from corpses, a la Frankenstein, as slave companions. The story's prime mover is a former colonist of a distant star, widowed on a primitive plan claimed man. The yarn is concerned with her humanitarian attempt to eradicate the slave conditioning of the human robots, Lukens's story is fast paced and cerebrally interesting but i plagued by an unfortunate inability to handle words. Rating: Vi Star Surgeon by Alan E. Nourse. David McKay Co. to many authors, but I believe that this is the first time that it has been the Hospital Center of the universe. Such a plot pivot is understandable, stemming from ' A. E. Nourse, M. D. Dr. Nourse cuts a wide swath with his crusading pen: he attacks bigotry, nationalism and dependency with equal virulence. Bigotry he finds in the treatment ' of the only alien ever to attempt to earn his degree on Hospital Earth; nationalism in the desire of certain top officials to retain a monopoly of medical knowledge and skill for Earth alone; dependency of the alien on well-in tentioned Terrans to an excessive degree, stultifying growth of character and self-reliance. The story concerns the odyssey of the probationary three man crew of a General Practice patrol ship to star systems covered by a sort of Blue Cross plan. The plot is predictable but credible, characterizations good, detail fine. Rating:  The Challenge of the Sea by Arthur C. Clarke. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. back on the water wagon, interpreting the wet frontier in much the manner of his Exploration of Space. It is difficult to judge which of the two frontiers holds the greater attraction for him -- or for us, for that matter. We are at the bare threshold of each and both hold mysteries and promises beyond our imagination. More than just dealing with the obvious -- we are rapidly depleting our land-based resources and must turn more and more to the sea for food, minerals and power -- Clarke presents, a plethora of fascinating fact interspersed with conjecture. Item: "Six miles down, air is squeezed denser than water. A bubble would not rise but sink." Item: In #, Greek divers found bronze fragments that hid their secret for more than # years. They are parts of an elaborate calculating machine... a computer built before the time of Christ! The Fantastic Universe Omnibus edited by Hans Stefan Santessen. Prentice-Hall, Inc. has joined the too-lengthy list of defunct SF Mags, the above anthology helps to perpetuate its title. There are a round score of stories, diversified in plot, treatment and quality. Among the best of the stories, Bounty Hunter by Avram Davidson, a shocker; A Thing of Custom by L. Sprague de Camp, a sprightly bit of froth about extraof Earth; and Exile from Space, a long novelette by Judith Merrill, stand out above the rest. The remainder of the yarns are uneven enough to earn an overall. Rating: y # Stadium Beyond the Stars by Milton Lesser. John C. Winston Co. tone account in black and white of mankind's first interstellar Olympiad, twenty generations after colonization of Proxima Centauri. Although melodramatic hogwash plotwise, the story contains enough action and originality for Rating for youngsters: V  This night she glanced for the jo-hundredth time at the warnjg bank. The bank was quiet. No danger lights shone. Yet she felt a n enemy out somewhere in the un iverse -- an enemy waiting to strike at her and her world, to snatch at the immeasurable wealth of the Norstrilians -- and s he snorted with impatience. Come along, little man, she thought. Come along, little man, a nd die. Don't keep me waiting. She smiled when she recognized the absurdity of her own thought. She waited for him. And he did not know it. They were the strangest of pets... and the deadliest of enemies... they were -- Poor communications deter theft; good communications promote theft; perfect communications stop theft. Van Braam I T HE moon spun. The woman watched. Twenty-one facets had been polished at the moon's equator. Her function was to arm it. She was Mother Hitton, the Weapons Mistress of Old North Australia. She was a ruddy-faced, cheerful blonde of indeterminate age. Her eyes were blue, her bosom heavy, her arms strong. She looked like a mother, but the only child she had ever had died many generations ago. Now she acted as mother to a planet, not to a person; the Norstrilians slept well because they knew she was watching. The weapons slept their long, sick sleep. H E, the robber, was relaxed enough. He was Benjacomin Bozart, and was highly trained in the arts of relaxation. No one at Sunvale, here on Ttiolle, could suspect that he was a Senior Warden of the Guild of Thieves, reared under the light of the starry-violet star. No one could smell the odor of Viola Siderea upon him. "Viola Siderea," the Lady Ru had said, "was once the most beautiful of worlds and it is now the most rotten. Its people were once models for mankind, and now they are thieves, liars and killers. You can smell their souls in the open day." The Lady Ru had died a long time ago. She was much respected, but she was wrong. The robber did not smell to others at all. He knew it. He was no more "wrong" than a shark approaching a school of cod. Life's nature is to' live, and he had been nurtured to live as he had to live -- by seeking prey. How else could he live? Viol Siderea had gone bankrupt a long time ago, when the photonic sails had disappeared from sjjace and the pianoforming ships began to whisper their way between the stars. His ancestors had been left to die on an off-trail planet. They refused to die. Their ecology shifted and they became predators upon man, adapted by time and genetics to their deadly tasks. And he, the robber, was champion of all his people -- the best of their best. He was Benjacomin Bozart. He had sworn to rob Old North Australia or to die in the attempt, and he had no intention of dying. The beach at Sunvale was warm and lovely. Ttiolle was a free and casual transit planet. His weapons were luck and himself: he planned to play both well. The Norstrilians could kill. So could he. At this moment, in this place, he was a happy tourist at a lovely beach. Elsewhere, elsewhen, he could become a ferret among conies, a hawk among doves. Benjacomin Bozart, Thief and Warden. He did not know that someonq was waiting for him. Someone who did not know his name was prepared to waken death, just for him. He was still serene. Mother Hitton was not serene. She sensed him dimly but could not yet spot him. One of her weapons snored. She turned it over. A thousand stars away, Benjacomin Bozart smiled as he walked toward the beach. II ist. His tanned face was tranquil. His proud, hooded eyes were calm. His handsome mouth, even without its charming smile, kept a suggestion of pleasantness at its corners. He looked attractive without seeming odd in the least. He looked much younger than he actually was. He walked with springy, happy steps along the beach of Sunvale. The waves rolled in, whitecrested, like the breakers of Mother Earth. The Sunvale people were proud of the way their world resembled Manhome itself. Few of them had even seen Manhome, but they had all heard a bit of history and most of them had a passing anxiety when they thought of the ancient government still wielding political power across the depth of space. They did not like the old Instrument tality of Earth, but they respected and feared it. The waves might remind them of the pretty side of Earth; they did not want to remember the not-so-pretty side. This man was like the pretty side of old Earth. They could not sense the power within him. The Sunvale people smiled absently at him as he walked past them along the shoreline. The atmosphere was quiet and everything around him serene. He turned his face to the sun. He closed his eyes. He let the warm sunlight beat through his eyelids, illuminating him with its comfort and its reassuring touch. Benjacomin dreamed of the greatest theft that any man had ever planned. He dreamed of stealing a huge load of the wealth from the richest world that mankind had ever built. H# thought of what would happen when he would finally bring riches back to the planet of Viola Siderea where he had been reared. Benjacomin turned his face away from the sun and languidly looked over the other people on the beach. There were no Norstrilians in sight yet. They were easy enough to recognize. Big people with red complexions; superb athletes and yet, in their own way, innocent, young and very tough. He had trained for this theft for two hundred years, his life prolonged for the purpose by the Guild of Thieves on Viola Siderea. He himself embodied the dreams of j,; s own planet, a poor planet once a crossroads of commerce, n# W sunken to being a minor outpost for spoliation and pilferage. He saw a Norstrilian woman come out from the hotel and go down to the beach. He waited, an d he looked, and he dreamed. He had a question to ask and no adult Australian would answer it. "Funny," thought he, "that I call them 'Australians' even now. That's the old, old Earth name for them -- rich, brave, tough people. Fighting children standing on half the world... and now they are the tyrants of all mankind. They hold the wealth. They have the santaclara, and other people live or die depending upon the commerce they have with the Norstrilians. But I won't. And my people won't. We're men who are wolves to Man." fully. Tanned by the light of many suns, he looked forty though he was two hundred. He dressed casually, by the standards of a vacationer. He might have been an intercultural salesman, a senior gambler, an assistant starport manager. He might even have been a detective working along the commerce lanes. He wasn't. He was a thief. And he was so good a thief that people turned to him and put their property in his hands because he was reassuring, calm, gray-eyed, blondhaired. Benjacomin waited. The woman glanced at him, a quick glance full of open suspicion. What she saw must have calmed her. She went on past. She called back over the dune, "Come on, Johnny, we can swim out here." A little boy, who looked eight or ten years old, came over the dune top, running toward his mother. Benjacomin tensed like a cobra. His eyes became sharp, his eyelids narrowed. This was the prey. Not too young, not too old. If the victim had been too young he wouldn't know the answer; if the victim were too old it was no use taking him on. Norstrilians were famed in combat; adults were mentally and physically too strong to warrant attack. Benjacomin knew that every thief who had approached the planet of the Norstrilians -- who had tried to raid the dream world of Old North Australia -- had gotten out of contact with his people and had died. There was no word of any of them. And yet he knew that hundreds of thousands of Norstrilians must know the secret. They now and then made jokes about it. He had heard these jokes when he was a young man, and now he was more than an old man without once coming near the answer. Life was expensive. He was well into his third lifetime and the lifetimes had been purchased honestly by his people. Good thieves all of them, paying out hard-stolen money to obtain the medicine to let their greatest thief remain living. Benjacomin didn't like violence. But when violence prepared tlje way to the greatest to use it. The woman looked at him again. The mask of evil which had flashed across his face faded into benignity; he calmed. She caught him in that moment of relaxation. She liked him. She smiled and, with that awkward hesitation so characteristic of the Norstrilians, she said, "Could you mind my boy a bit while I go in the water? I think we've seen each other here at the hotel." "I don't mind," said he. "I'd be glad to. Come here, son." Johnny walked across the sunlight dunes to his own death. He came within reach of his mother's enemy. But the mother had already turned. fTHE trained hand of Benjacomin Bozart reached out. He seized the child by the shoulder. He turned the boy toward him, forcing him down. Before the child could cry out, Benjamin had the needle into him with the truth drug. All Johnny reacted to was pain, and then a hammerblow inside his own skull as the powerful drug took force. Benjacomin looked out over the water. The mother was swimming. She seemed to be looking back at them. She was obviously unworried. To her, the child seemed to be looking at something the stranger was showing him in a relaxed, easy way. "Now, sonny," said Benjacomin, "tell me, what's the outside defense?"  The boy didn't answer. "What is the outer defense, sonny? What is the outer defense?" repeated Benjacomin. The boy still didn't answer. Something close to horror ran over the skin of Benjacomin Bozart as he realized that he had gambled his safety on this planet, gambled the plans themselves for a chance to break the secret of the Norstrilians. He had been stopped by simple, easy devices. The child had already been conditioned against attack. Any attempt to force knowledge out of the child brought on a conditioned reflex of total muteness. The boy was literally unable to talk. Sunlight gleaming on her wet hair, the mother turned around an d called back, "Are you all right, Johnny?" Benjacomin waved to her instead. "I'm showing him my pictures, ma'am. He likes 'em. Take your time." The mother hesitated and then turned back to the water and swam slowly away. Johnny, taken by the drug, sat lightly, like an invalid, on Benjacomin's lap. Benjacomin said, "Johnny, you're going to die now and you will hurt terribly if you don't tell m e what I want to know." The boy struggled weakly against his grasp. Benjacomin repeated, "I'm going to hurt you if you don't tell me what I want to know. What are the outer defenses? What are the outer defenses?" The child struggled and Benjacomin realized that the boy was putting up a fight to comply with the orders, not a fight to get away. He let the child slip through his hands and the boy put out a finger and began writing on the wet sand. The letters stood out. A man's shadow loomed behind them. Benjacomin, alert, ready to spin, kill or run, slipped to the ground beside the child and said, "That's a jolly puzzle. That is a good one. Show me some more." He smiled up at the passing adult. The man was a stranger. The stranger gave him a very curious glance which became casual when he saw the pleasant face of Benjacomin, so tenderly and so agreeably playing with the child. The fingers were still making the letters in the sand. There stood the riddle in letT HE woman was coming back from the sea, the mother with questions. Benjacomin stroked the sleeve of his coat and brought out his second needle, a shallow poison which it would take days or weeks of laboratory work to detect. He thrust it directly into the boy's brain, slipping the needle up behind the skin at the edge of the hairline. The hair shadowed the tiny prick. The incredibly hard needle slipped under the edge of the skull. The child was dead. Murder accomplished, Benjacomin casually erased the secret from the sand. The woman came nearer. He called to her, his voice full of pleasant concern, "Ma'am, you'd better come here, I think your son has fainted from the heat." He gave the mother the body of her son. Her face changed to alarm. She looked frightened and alert. She didn't know how to meet this. For a dreadful moment she looked into his eyes. Two hundred years of training took effect... She saw nothing. The murderer did not shine with murder. The hawk was hidden beneath the dove. The heart was masked by the trained face. Benjacomin relaxed in professional assurance. He had been prepared to kill her too, although he was not sure that he could kill an adult, female Norstrilian. Very helpfully said he, "You stay here with him. I'll run to the hotel and get help. I'll hurry." He turned and ran. A beach attendant saw him and ran toward him. "The child's sick," he shouted. He came to the mother in time to see blunt, puzzled tragedy on her face and with it, something more than tragedy: doubt. "He's not sick," said she. "He's dead." "He can't be." Benjacomin looked attentive. He felt attentive. He forced the sympathy to pour out of his posture, out of all the little muscles of his face. "He can't be. I was talking to him just a minute ago. We were doing little puzzles in the sand." The mother spoke with a hollow, broken voice that sounded as though it would never find the right chords for human speech again, but would go on forever with the ill-attuned flats of unexpected grief. "He's dead," sh e said. "You saw him die and j guess I saw him die, too. I can't tell what's happened. The child was full of santaclara. He had a thousand years to live but no he's dead. What's your name?"  Benjacomin said, "Eldon. Eldon the salesman, ma'am. I liv e here lots of times." tons. Mother Hitton's littul  kittons." The silly phrase ran in his mind. Who was Mother Hitton? What was she the mother of? What were kittons? Were they a misspelling for "kittens?" Little cats? Or were they something else? Had he killed a fool to get a fool's answer? How many more days did he have to stay there with the doubtful, staggered woman? How many days did he have to watch and wait? He wanted to get back to Viola Siderea; to take the secret, bad as it was, for his people to study. Who was Mother Hitton? He forced himself out of his room and went downstairs. The pleasant monotony of a big hotel was such that the other guests looked interestedly at him. He was the man who had watched #hile the child died on the beach. Some lobby-living scandalmongers that stayed there had made up fantastic stories that he j, a d killed the child. Others attacked the stories, saying they knew perfectly well who Eldon w as. He was Eldon the salesman. It was ridiculous. People hadn't changed much, even though the ships with the Go-Captains sitting at their hearts whispered between the stars, even though people shuffled between worlds -- when they had the money to pay their passage back and forth -- like leaves falling in soft, playful winds. Benjacomin faced a tragic dilemma. He knew very well that any attempt to decode the answer would run directly into the protective devices set up by the Norstrilians. Old North Australia was immensely wealthy. It was known the length and breadth of all the stars that they had hired mercenaries, defensive spies, hidden agents and alerting devices. Even Manhome -- Mother Earth herself, whom no money could buy -- was bribed by the drug of life. An ounce of the santaclara drug, reduced, crystallized and called "stroon," could give forty to sixty years of life. Stroon entered the rest of the Earth by ounces and pounds, but it was refined back on Old North Australia by the ton. With treasure like this, the Norstrilians owned an unimaginable world whose resources overreached all conceivable limits of money. They could buy anything. They could pay with other peoples' lives. For hundreds of years they had given secret funds to buying foreigners' services to safeguard their own security. Benjacomin stood there in the lobby: "Mother Hitton's littul kittons." He had all the wisdom and wealth of a thousand worlds stuck in his mind but he didn't dare ask anywhere as to what it meant. Suddenly he brightened.-thought of a good game to play, a pleasant diversion to be welcomed, a companion to be remembered, a new food to be tasted. He had had a very happy thought. There was one source that wouldn't talk. The library. He could at least check the obvious, simple things, and find out what there was already in the realm of public knowledge concerning the secret he had taken from the dying boy. His own safety had not been wasted, Johnny's life had not been thrown away, if he could find any one of the four words as a key. Mother or Hitton or Littul, in its special meaning, or Kitton. He might yet break through to the loot of Norstrilia. He swung jubilantly, turning on the ball of his right foot. He moved lightly and pleasantly towhich lay the library. He went in. This was a very expensive hotel and very old-fashioned. It even had books made out of paper, with genuine bindings. Benjacomin crossed the room. He saw that they had the Galactic Encyclopedia in two hundred volumes. He took down the volume headed "Hi-Hi." He opened it from the rear, looking for the name "Hitton" and there it was. "Hitton, Benjamin -- pioneer of old North Australia. Said to be originator of part of the defense system. Lived A.D. #-#." That was all. Benjacomin moved among the books. The word "kittons" in that peculiar spelling did not occur anywhere, neither in the encyclopedia nor in any other list maintained by the library. He walked out and upstairs, back to his room. "Littul" had not appeared at all. It was probably the boy's own childish mistake. He took a chance. The mother, half blind with bewilderment and worry, sat in a stiff-backed chair on the edge of the porch. The other women talked to her. They knew her husband was coming. Benjacomin went up to her and tried to pay his respects. Sh e didn't see him. "I'm leaving now, ma'am. I'n, going on to the next planet, but I'll be back in two or three sub. jective weeks. And if you need me for urgent questions, I'll leave my addresses with the poli Ce here." ing mother. Benjacomin left the quiet hotel. He obtained a priority passage. The easy-going Sunvale Police made no resistance to his demand for a sudden departure visa. After all, he had an identity, he had his own funds, and it was not the custom of Sunvale to contradict its guests. Benjacomin went on the ship and as he moved toward the cabin in which he could rest for a few hours, a man stepped up beside him. A youngish man, hair parted in the middle, short of stature, gray of eyes. This man was the local agent of the Norstrilian secret police. Benjacomin, trained thief that he was, did not recognize the policeman. It never occurred to him that the library itself had been attuned and that the word "kittons" in the peculiar Norstrilian spelling was itself an alert. Looking for that spelling had set off a minor alarm. He had touched the trip-wire. The stranger nodded. Benjacomin nodded back. "I'm a traveling man, waiting over between assignments. I haven't been doing very well. How are you making out?" "Doesn't matter to me. I don't earn money; I'm a technician. Liverant is the name." Benjacomin sized him up. The man was a technician all right. They shook hands perfunctorily. Liverant said, "I'll join you in the bar a little later. I think I'll rest a bit first." They both lay down then and said very little while the momentary flash of planoform went through the ship. The flash passed. From books and lessons they knew that the ship was leaping forward in two dimensions while, somehow or other, the fury of space itself was fed into the computers -- and that these in turn were managed by the GoCaptain who controlled the ship. They knew these things but they could not feel them. All they felt was the sting of a slight pain. The sedative was in the air itself, sprayed in the ventilating system. They both expected to become a little drunk. r  'HE thief Benjacomin Bozart was trained to resist intoxication and bewilderment. Any sign whatever that a telepath had tried to read his mind would have been met with fierce animal resistance, implanted in his unconscious during early years of training. Bozart was not trained against deception by a technician; it never occurred to the Thieves' Guild back on Viola Siderea that it would be necessary for their own people to resist deceivers. Liverant had already been in touch with Norstrilia -- Norstrilia whose money reached across the stars, Norstrilia who had alerted a hundred thousand worlds against the mere thought of trespass. Liverant began to chatter. "I wish I could go further than this trip. I wish that I could go to Olympia. You can buy anything in Olympia." "I've heard of it," said Bozart. "It's sort of a funny trading planet with not much chance for businessmen, is it?" Liverant laughed and his laughter was merry and genuine. "Trading? They don't trade. They swap. They take all the stolen loot of a thousand worlds and sell it over again and they change and they paint it and they mark it. That's their business there. The people are blind. It's a strange world, and all you have to do is to go in there and you can have anything you want. Man," said Liverant, "what I could do in a year in that place! Everybody is blind except me and a couple of tourists. And there's all the wealth that everybody thought he's mislaid, half the wrecked ships, the forgotten colonies (they've all been cleaned out), and bang! it all goes to Olympia." Olympia wasn't really that good and Liverant didn't know why it was his business to guide the killer there. All he knew was that he had a duty and the duty was to direct the trespasser. Many years before either man was born the code word had been planted in directories, in books, in packing cases and invoices. Kittons misspelled. This was the cover name for the outer moon of Norstrilian defense. The use of the cover name brought a raging alert ready into action, with systemic nerves as hot and quick as incandescent tungsten wire. By the time that they were ready to go to the bar and have refreshments, Benjacomin had half forgotten that it was his new acquaintance who had suggested Olympia rather than another place. He had to go to Viola Siderea to get the credits to make the flight to take the wealth, to win the world of Olympia. IV AT home on his native planet Bozart was a subject of a gentle but very sincere celebration. The Elders of the Guild of Thieves welcomed him. They congratulated him. "Who else could have done what you've done, boy? You've made the opening move in a brand new game of chess. There has never been a gambit like this before. We have a name; we have an animal. We'll try it right here!" The Thieves' Council turned to their own encyclopedia. They turned through the name "Hitton" and then found the reference "kitton." None of them knew that a false lead had been planted there -- by an agent in their world. The agent, in his turn, had been seduced years before, debauched in the middle of his career, forced into temporary honesty, blackmailed and sent home. In all the years that he had waited for a dreaded countersign -- a countersign which he himself never knew to be an extension of Norstrilian intelligence -- he never dreamed that he could pay his debt to the outside world so simply. All they had done was to send him one page to add to the encyclopedia. He added it and then went home, weak with exhaustion. The years of fear and waiting were almost too much for the thief. He drank heavily for fear that he might otherwise kill himself. Meanwhile, the pages remained in order, including the new one, slightly altered for his I colleagues. The encyclopedia indicated the change like any normal revision, though the whole entry was new and falsified: Beneath this passage one revision ready. Dated #th year of second issue. The reported "Kittons" of Norstrilia are nothing more than the use of organic means to induce the disease in Earth-mutated sheep which produces a virus in its turn, as refinable as the santaclara drug. The term "Kittons" enjoyed a temporary vogue as a reference term both to the disease and to the destructability of the disease in the event of external attack. This is believed to have been connected with the career of Benjamin Hitton, one of the original pioneers of Norstrilia. The Council of Thieves read it and the Chairman of the council said "I've got your papers ready. You can go try them now. Where do you want to go? Through Neuhamburg?" "No," said Benjacomin. "I thought I'd try Olympia." "Olympia's all right," said the chairman. "Go easy. There's only one chance in a thousand you'll fail. But if you do, we might have to pay for it." He smiled wryly and handed Benjacomin a blank mortgage against all the labor and all the property of Viola Siderea. The Chairman laughed with a sort of snort. "It'd be pretty rough on us if you had to borrow enough on the trading planet to force us to become honest -- and then lost out anyhow." "No fear," said Benjacomin. "I can cover that." all dreams die, but squareclouded Olympia is not one of them. The eyes of men and women are bright on Olympia, for they see nothing. "Brightness was the color of pain," said Nachtigall, "when we could see. If thine eye offend thee, pluck thyself out, for the fault lies not in the eye but in the soul." Such talk was common in Olympia, where the settlers went blind a long time ago and now think themselves superior to sighted people. Radar wires tickle their living brains; they can perceive radiation as well as can an animal-type man with little aquariums hung in the middle of his face. Their pictures are sharp, and they demand sharpness. Their buildings soar at impossible angles. Their blind children sing songs as the .tailored climate proceeds according to the numbers, geometrical as a kaleidoscope. There went the man, Bozart himself. Among the blind his dreams soared, and he paid money for information which no living person had ever seen. Sharp-clouded and aqua-skied, Olympia swam past him like another man's dream. He did not mean to tarry there, because he had a rendezvous with death in the sticky, sparky space around Norstrilia. went about his arrangements for the attack on Old North Australia. On his second day on the planet he had been very lucky. He met a man named Lavender and he was sure he had heard the name before. Not a member of his own Guild of Thieves, but a daring rascal with a bad reputation among the stars. It was no wonder that he had found Lavender. His pillow had told him Lavender's story fifteen times during his sleep in the past week. And, whenever he dreamed, he dreamed dreams which had been planted in his mind by the Norstrilian counterintelligence. They had beaten him in getting to Olympia first and they were prepared to let him have only that which he deserved. The Norstrilian Police were not cruel, but they were out to defend their world. And they were also out to avenge the murder of a child. The last interview which Benjacomin had with Lavender in striking a bargain before Lavender agreed was a dramatic one. Lavender refused to move forward. "I'm not going to jump off anywhere. I'm not going to raid anything, I'm not going to steal anything. I've been rough, of course I have. But I don't get myself killed and that's what you're bloody well asking for." "Think of what we'll have. The wealth. I tell you, there's more money here than anything else anybody's ever tried." Lavender laughed. "You think I haven't heard that before? You're a crook and I'm a crook. I don't go anything that's on speculation. I want my hard cash down. I'm a fighting man and you're a thief and I'm not going to ask you what you're up to... but I want my money first." "I haven't got it," said Benjacomin. Lavender stood up. "Then you shouldn't have talked to me. Because it's going to cost you money to keep me quiet whether you hire me or not." The bargaining process started. Lavender looked ugly indeed. He was a soft, ordinary man who had gone to a lot of trouble to become evil. Sin is a lot of work. The sheer effort it requires often shows in the human face. Bozart stared him down, smiling easily, not even contemptuously. "Cover me while I get something from my pocket," said Bozart. Lavender did not even acknowledge the comment. He did not show a weapon. His left thumb moved slowly across the outer edge of his hand. Benjacomin recognized the sign, but did not flinch. "See," he said. "A planetary credit." Lavender laughed. "I've heard that, too." "Take it," said Bozart. The adventurer took the laminated card. His eyes widened. "It's real," he breathed. "It is real." He looked up, incalculably more friendly. "I never even saw one of these before. What are your terms?" Meanwhile the bright, vivid Olympians walked back and forth past them, their clothing all white and black in dramatic contrast. Unbelievable geometric designs shone on their cloaks and their hats. The two bargainers ignored the natives. They concentrated on their own negotiations. Benjacomin felt fairly safe. He placed a pledge of one year's service of the entire planet of Viola Siderea in exchange for the full and unqualified services of Captain Lavender, once of the Imperial Marines Internal Space Patrol. He handed over the mortgage. The year's guarantee was written in. Even on Olympia there were accounting machines which relayed the bargain back to Earth itself, making the mortgage a valid and binding commitment against the whole planet of thieves. "This," thought Lavender, "was the first step of revenge." After the killer had disappeared his people would have to pay with sheer honesty. Lavender looked at Benjacomin with a clinical sort of concern. Benjacomin mistook his look for friendliness and Benjacomin smiled his slow, charming, easy smile. Momentarily happy, he reached out his right hand to give Lavender a brotherly solemnification of the bargain. The men shook hands, and Bozart never knew with what he shook hands. V grass from sky to sky. Not near the weir, dear. Not a mountain, low or high -- only hills and gray gray. Watch the dappled, dimpled twinkles blooming on the star bar. "That is Norstrilia. "All the muddy gubbery is gone -- all the work and the waiting and the pain. "Beige-brown sheep lie on bluegray grass while the clouds rush past, low overhead, like iron pipes ceilinging the world. "Take your pick of sick sheep, man, it's the sick that pays. Sneeze me a planet, man, or cough me up a spot of immortality. If it's barmy there, where the noddies and the trolls like you live, it's too right here. "That's the book, boy. "If you haven't seen Norstrilia, you haven't seen it. If you did see it, you wouldn't believe it. "Charts call it Old North Australia." was the farm which guarded the world. This was the Hitton place. Towers surrounded it and wires hung between the towers, some of them drooping crazily and some gleaming with the sheen not shown by any other metal made by men from Earth. Within the towers there was open land. And within the open land there were twelve thousand hectares of concrete. Radar reached down to the surface of the concrete and the other radar threw patterns back and forth, down through molecular thinness. The farm went on. In its center there was a group of buildings. That was where Katherine Hitton worked on the task which her family had accepted for the defense of her world. No germ came in, no germ went out. All the food came in by space transmitter. Within this, there lived animals. The animals depended on her alone. Were she to die suddenly, by mischance or as a result of an attack by one of the animals, the authorities of her world had complete facsimiles of herself with which to train new animal tenders under hypnosis. This was a place where the gray wind leapt forward released from the hills, where it raced across the gray concrete, where it blew past the radar towers. The polished, faceted, captive moon always hung due overhead. The wind hit the buildings, themselves gray, with the impact of a blow, before it raced over the open concrete beyond and whistled away into the hills. Outside the buildings, the valley had not needed much camouflage. It looked like the rest of Norstrilia. The concrete itself was tinted very slightly to give the impression of poor, starved, natural soil. This was the farm, and this the woman. Together they were the outer defense of the richest world mankind had ever built. Katherine Hitton looked out the window and thought to herself, "Forty-two days before I go to market and it's a welcome day that I get there and hear the jig of a music. "Oh, to walk on market day, "And see my people proud and gay!" She breathed deeply of the air. She loved the gray hills -- though in her youth she had seen many other worlds. And then she turned back into the building to the animals and the duties which awaited her. She was the only Mother Hitton and these were her littul kittons.  and her father had bred them from Earth mink, from the fiercest, smallest, craziest little minks that had ever been shipped out from Manhome. Out of these minks they had made their lives to keep away other predators who might bother the sheep, on whom the stroon grew. But these minks were born mad. Generations of them had been bred psychotic to the bone. They lived only to die and they died so that they could stay alive. These were the kittons of Norstrilia. Animals in whom fear, rage, hunger and sex were utterly intermixed; who could eat themselves or each other; who could eat their young, or people, or anything organic; animals who screamed with murder-lust when they felt love; animals born to loathe themselves with a fierce and livid hate and who survived only because their waking moments were spent on couches, strapped tight, claw by claw, so that they could not hurt each other or themselves. Mother Hitton let them waken only a few moments in each lifetime. They bred and killed. She wakened them only two at a time. All that afternoon she moved from cage to cage. The sleeping animals slept well. The nourishment ran into their blood streams; they lived sometimes for years without awaking. She bred them when the males were only partly awakened and the females aroused only enough to accept her veterinary treatments. She herself had to pluck the young away from their mothers as the sleeping mothers begot them. Then she nourished the young through a few happy weeks of kittonhood, until their adult natures began to take, their eyes ran red with madness and heat and their emotions sounded in the sharp, hideous, little cries they uttered through the building; and the twisting of their neat, furry faces, the rolling of their crazy, bright eyes and the tightening of their sharp, sharp claws. She woke none of them this time. Instead, she tightened them in their straps. She removed the nutrients. She gave them delayed stimulus medicine which would, when they were awakened, bring them suddenly full waking with no lulled stupor first. Finally, she gave herself a heavy sedative, leaned back in a chair and waited for the call which would come. " the call came through, she would have to do what she had done thousands of times before. She would ring an intolerable noise through the whole laboratory. Hundreds of the mutated minks would awaken. In awakening, they would plunge into life with hunger, with hate, with rage and with sex; plunge against their straps; strive to kill each other, their young, themselves, her. They would fight everything and everywhere, and do everything they could to keep going. She knew this. In the middle of the room there was a tuner. The tuner was a direct, empathic relay, capable of picking up the simpler range of telepathic communications. Into this tuner went the concentrated emotions of Mother Hitton's littul kittons. The rage, the hate, the hunger, the sex were all carried far beyond the limits of the tolerable, and then all were thereupon amplified. And then the waveband on which this telepathic control went out was amplified, right there beyond the studio, on the high towers that swept the mountain ridge, up and beyond the valley in which the laboratory lay. And Mother Hitton's moon, spinning geometrically, bounced the relay into a hollow englobement. From the faceted moon, it went to the satellites -- sixteen of them, apparently part of the weather control system. These blanketed not only space, but nearby subspace. The Norstrilians had thought of everything. The short shocks of an alert came from Mother Hitton's transmitter bank. A call came. Her thumb went numb. The noise shrieked. The mink wakened. Immediately, the room was full of chattering, scraping, hissing, growling and howling. Under the sound of the animal voices, there was the other sound: a scratchy, snapping sound like hail falling on a frozen lake. It was the individual claws of hundreds of mink trying to tear their way through metal panels. Mother Hitton heard a gurgle. One of the minks had succeeded in tearing its paw loose and had obviously started to work on its own throat. She recognized the tearing of fur, the ripping of veins. She listened for the cessation of that individual voice, but she couldn't be sure. The others were making too much noise. One mink less. Where she sat, she was partly shielded from the telepathic relay, but not altogether. She herself, old as she was, felt queer wild dreams go through her. She thrilled with hate as she thought of beings suffering out beyond her -- suffering terribly, since they were not masked by the built-in defenses of the Norstrilian communications system. She felt the wild throb of longforgotten lust. She hungered for things she had not known she remembered. She went through the spasms of fear that the hundreds of animals expressed. Underneath this, her sane mind kept asking, "How much longer can I take it? How much longer must I take it? Lord God, be good to your people here on this world! Be good to poor old me." The green light went on. She pressed a button on the other side of her chair. The gas hissed in. An she passed into unconsciousness, she knew that her kittons passed into instant unconsciousness too. She would waken before they did and then her duties would begin: checking the living ones, taking out the one that had clawed out its own throat, taking out those who had died of heart attacks, re-arranging them, , dressing their wounds, treating them alive and asleep -- asleep and happy -- breeding, living in their sleep -- until the next call should come to waken them for the defense of the treasures which blessed and cursed her native world. VI actly right. Lavender had found an illegal planoform ship. This was no unconsequential accomplishment, since planoform ships were very strictly licensed and obtaining an illegal one was a chore on which a planet full of crooks could easily have worked a lifetime. Lavender had been lavished with money -- Benjacomin's money. The honest wealth of the thieves' planet had gone in and had paid the falsifications and great debts, imaginary transactions that were fed to the computers for ships and cargoes and passengers that would be  almost untraceably commingled in the commerce of # worlds. "Let him pay for it," said Lavender, to one of his confederates, an apparent criminal who was also a Norstrilian agent. "This is paying good money for bad. You better spend a lot of it." Just before Benjacomin took off Lavender sent on an additional message. He sent it directly through the Go-Captain, who usually did not carry messages. The Go-Captain was a relay commander of the Norstrilian fleet, but he had been carefully ordered not to look like it. The message concerned the planoform license -- another twenty-odd tablets of stroon which could mortgage Viola Siderea for hundreds upon hundreds of years. The Captain said: "I don't have to send that through. The answer is yes." Benjacomin came into the control room. This was contrary to regulations, but he had hired the ship to violate regulations. The Captain looked at him sharply. "You're a passenger, get out." Benjacomin said: "You have my little yacht on board. I am the only man here outside of your people." "Get out. There's a fine if you're caught here." "It does not matter," Benjacomin said. "I'll pay it." "You will, will you?" said the Captain. "You would not be paying twenty tablets of stroon. That's ridiculous. Nobody could get that much stroon." Benjacomin laughed, thinking of the thousands of tablets he would soon have. All he had to do was to leave the planoform ship behind, strike once, go past the kittons and come back. His power and his wealth came from the fact that he knew he could now reach it. The mortgage of twenty tablets of stroon against this planet was a low price to pay if it would pay off at thousands to one. The Captain replied: "It's not worth it, it just is not worth risking twenty tablets for your being here. But I can tell you how to get inside the Norstrilian communications net if that is worth twenty-seven tablets." Benjacomin went tense. TOR a moment he thought he might die. All this work, all this training -- the dead boy on the beach, the gamble with the credit, and now this unsuspected antagonist! He decided to face it out. "What do you know?" said Benjacomin. "Nothing," said the Captain. "You said 'Norstrilia.' " "That I did," said the Captain. "If you said Norstrilia, you must have guessed it. Who told you?" "Where else would a man go if you look for infinite riches? If you get away with it. Twenty tablets is nothing to a man like you." "It's two hundred years' worth of work from three hundred thousand people," said Benjacomin grimly. "When you get away with it, you will have more than twenty tablets, and so will your people." And Benjacomin thought of the thousands and thousands of tablets. "Yes, that I know." "If you don't get away with it, you've got the card." "That's right. All right. Get me inside the net. I'll pay the twentyseven tablets." "Give me the card." Benjacomin refused. He was a trained thief, and he was alert to thievery. Then he thought again. This was the crisis of his life. He had to gamble a little on somebody. He had to wager the card. "I'll mark it and then I'll give it back to you." Such was his excitement that Benjacomin did not notice that the card went into a duplicator, that the transaction was recorded, that the message went back to Olympic Center, that the loss and the mortgage against the planet of Viola Siderea should be credited to certain commercial agencies in Earth for three hundred years to come. Benjacomin got the card back. He felt like an honest thief. If he did die, the card would be lost and his people would not have to pay. If he won, he could pay that little bit out of his own pocket. Benjacomin sat down. The GoCaptain signalled to his pinlighters. The ship lurched. rOR half a subjective hour they moved, the Captain wearing a helmet of space upon his head, sensing and grasping and guessing his way, stepping to stepping stone, right back to his home. He had to fumble the passage, or else Benjacomin might guess that he was in the hands of double agents. But the Captain was well trained. Just as well trained as Benjacomin. Agents and thieves, they rode together. They planoformed inside the communications net. Benjacomin shook hands with them. "You are allowed to materialize as soon as I call." "Good luck, sir," said the Captain. "Good luck to me," said Benjacomin. He climbedinto his space yacht. For less than a second in real space, the gray expanse of Norstrilia loomed up. The ship which looked like a simple warehouse disappeared into pianoform, and the yacht was on its own. The yacht dropped. As it dropped, Benjacomin had a hideous moment of confusion and terror. He never knew the woman down below but she sensed him plainly as he received the wrath of the much-amplified kittons. His conscious mind quivered under the blow. With a prolongation of subjectiveexperience which made one or two seconds seem like months of hurt drunken bewilderment, Benjacomin Bozart swept beneath the tide of his own personality. The moon relay threw minkish minds against him. The synapses of his brain re-formed to conjure . up might-have-beens, terrible things that never happened to any man. Then his knowing mind whited out in an overload of stress. His subcortical personality lived on a little longer. His body fought for several minutes. Mad with lust and hunger, the body arched in the pilot's seat, the mouth bit deep into his own arm. Driven by lust, the left hand tore at his face, ripping out his left eye ball. He screeched with animal lust as he tried to devour himself... not entirely without success. The overwhelming telepathic message of Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons ground into his brain. The mutated minks were fully awake. The relay satellites had poisoned all the space around him with the craziness to which the minks were bred. Bozart's body did not live long. After a few minutes, the arteries were open, the head slumped forward and the yacht was dropping helplessly toward the warehouses which it had meant to raid. Norstrilian police picked it up. The police themselves were ill. All of them were ill. All of them were white-faced. Some of them had vomited. They had gone through the edge of the mink defense. They had passed through the telepathic band at its thinnest and weakest point. This was enough to hurt them badly. They did not want to know. They wanted to forget. One of the yonger policemen looked at the body and said, "What on earth could do that to a man?" "He picked the wrong job," said the police captain. The young policeman said: "What's the wrong job?" "The wrong job is trying to rob us, boy. We are defended, and we don't want to know how." The young policeman, humiliated and on the verge of anger, looked almost as if he would defy his superior, while keeping his eyes away from the body of Benjacomin Bozart. The older man said: "It's all right. He did not take long to die and this is the man who killed the boy Johnny, not very long ago." Those back issues you need are initial monthly circulation of # active collectors or a refund given. # issues for #, # AD (I value) with a # issue subscription. Use a fairly new type the AD in the form of a rectangle, # lines deep by #I Pica or # Elite spaces wide. Charter Subscribers will receive chased at the regular price. graphed fanzines. Send your unwanted S-F to be distributed to fans overseas. P.#. Box #, Los Alamos, N. Mex. "Oh, him? So soon?" "We brought him." The old police officer nodded. "We let him find his death. That's how we live. Tough, isn't it?" r  "HE ventilators whispered  A softly, gently. The animals slept again. A jet of air poured down on Mother Hitton. The telepathic relay was still on. She could feel herself, the sheds, the faceted moon, the little satellites.  Of the robber there was no sign. She stumbled to her feet. Her raiment was moist with perspira' tion. She needed a shower and fresh clothes... Back at Manhome, the Comj mercial Credit Circuit called shrilly for human attention. A junior subchief of the Instrumen tality walked over to the machine and held out his hand. The machine dropped a card  neatly into his fingers. He looked at the card. "Debit Viola Siderea -- credit I Earth Contingency -- subcredit I Norstrilian account -- four hunI Though all alone, he whistled to himself in the empty room. "We'll all be dead, stroon or no stroon, before they finish paying that!" He went off to tell his friends the odd news. The machine, not getting its card back, made another one. cyrt ch c-h) cyncyrt c" H E didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He pointblank refused to admit he was sick that way -- in the head! Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes -- like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows -- he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing. The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste... Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school. He turned and shook Edna. "What happened to Davie?" She cleared her throat, mumbled, "Huh? What happened to who?" "I said, what..." But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children. He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. "Like hotcakes for breakfast?" "Eggs," he said. "Bacon." And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. "Course," he muttered. "Can't have bacon. Rationed." She was fully awake now. "If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could -- " "You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and..." She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins -- he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said. He himself just couldn't remember it. He went to the bed and sat down beside her. "Sorry. That !  was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son." He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't. TE went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and atq. Part way through the meal, he paused. "Got an awful craving for meat," he said. "Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!" "We're having meat for lunch," she said placatingly. "Nice cut of multi-pro." "Multi-pro," he scoffed. "God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there." 'Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know." The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn. He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. "Why, this ain't the way I had my barn..." He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn! He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, "Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertiliser for tang." He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe... He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen -- he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four -- behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. "Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?" "Yes," he shouted... She disappeared. He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chewy in... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers. No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed. H E whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house! No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it. He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too. He was at the supply bin -- like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it -- or whatever they allowed you -- with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even. He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide. Edna hustled over excitedly. "Anything good on this week, Harry?" He looked down the listings, and frowned. "All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night." He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her. She said it now. "Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither." "I'm gonna lie down," he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. "But the door..." he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong. The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong! had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now. When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock? Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease? He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations -- one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week. She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. "You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?" "Same as everyone else," she said. "Government agents paid flat rates." He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs. He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. "Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions." Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, "How's Penny?" "Fine," Gloria answered. "Fm starting her on the kindergarten book next week." "She's five already?" Harry asked. "Almost six," Walt said. "Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book." "And Frances?" Harry asked. "Your oldest? She must be starting high..." He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. "Just a joke," he said, laughing and rising. "Let's eat. I'm starved." talked -- or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing. Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming. He was sitting in the living living room when Edna came in. She was crying. "Harry, please see the doctor." He got up. "I'm going out. I might even sleep out!" "But why, Harry, why?" He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. "It'll do me good, like when I was a kid." "If you say so, Harry." He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people... He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone. He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he? He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town. Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine. He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field. His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His' entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind. He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. "Phineas Grotton Farm." He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around. Was he forgetting again?  ton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county -- old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more. He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but... everything was wrong. His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire -- five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this? He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve. He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side. The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid. It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county. He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction. And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring. Flooring! He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it. He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County. A mind trembled too. He walked, and cam# to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt. He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything. Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again. It was getting light. His head was splitting. Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town... Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening. He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs. Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately -- a long time lately? The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangboms and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that... He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life? He reached the Shanks' place, and passed if at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. "Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!" other house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him: "You theah! Stop!" "Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!" There was no place called Piney Woods in this county. Was this how a man's mind went? He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines. He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a tenfoot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hardpacked sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it -- a car. A car! TT was one of those tiny foreign  jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. "You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us." He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum. The other officer was walking around the horse. "Rode her hard," he said, and he sounded real worried. "Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now..." The officer holding Harry's arm said, "Pete." The officer examining Plum said, "It won't make any difference in a while." Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear. "Take the horse back to his farm," the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. "He sure must like horses," he said. "Yes." "Am I going to jail?" "No." 'Where then?" "The doctor's place." They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it -- or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks? He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big. When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end -- a good two hundred yards away -- a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people. He did hear something; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere. doors on the. right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. "Where's Petey?" he asked. "Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm." The old man sighed. "I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence." "No violence, Dad." "Fine, Stan." He looked at Harry. "I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything..." 'What happened to Davie?" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again. Stan helped him up. "Just step this way, Mr. Burr." He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane. "What happened to my son Davie?" The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch. "Please," Harry whispered. "Just tell me about my son." The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. "Dead," he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead -- except for us." Harry stared at him. #T can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us -- myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you." "I don't understand," Harry said. "I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities..." "I haven't the time," the doctor repeated, voice rising. "I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would." Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines? "You survived," the doctor said. "Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive." He laughed, high and thin. His son said, "Please, Dad..." "No! I want to talk to someone sane! You and Petey and I -- we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing." He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. "Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife..." He choked and stopped. Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa. And this wasn't Iowa. The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons...  And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, "We're on..." but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, "Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one... What do you call these treatments?" "Diathermy," the little doctor muttered. Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. "That's certainly reasonable enough," Harry said. The doctor nodded. "There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations." Harry said, "Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?" "You will, Mr. Burr." Harry walked to the door. "We're on an ark," the doctor said. Harry turned around, smiling. "What?" "A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye." Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations. "Me?" he exclaimed, amazed. "Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!" L 'lueL The offices of Singlemaster, Hucksting and Battlemont held something that could destroy the universe and its name was . , . armor problem fell into the agency's lap, Gwen Everest had breakfast at her regular restaurant, an automated singleniche place catering to bachelor girls. Her order popped out of the slot onto her table, and immediately the tabletop pro jecta-menu switched to selling Interdorma's newest Interpretive Telelog. "Your own private dream translator! The secret companion to every neurosis!" Gwen stared at the inch-high words doing a skitter dance above her fried eggs. She had written that copy. Her food beneath the ad looked suddenly tasteless. She pushed the plate away.Along the speedwalk into Manhattan a you-seeker, its roboflier senses programmed to her susceptibilities, flew beside her ear. It was selling a year's supply of Geramyl -- "the breakfast er!" The selling hook this morning was a Gwen Everest idea: a life insurance policy with the first year's premiums paid -- "absooffer now!" In sudden anger, she turned on the roboflier, whispered a code phrase she had wheedled from an engineer who serviced the things. The roboflier darted upward in sudden erratic flight, crashed into the side of a building. A small break in her control. A beginning. Waiting for Gwen along the private corridor to the Singlemaster, Hucksting and Battlemont executive offices were displays from the recent Religion of the Month Club campaign. She ran a gamut of adecals, layouts, slogans, projos, quartersheets, skinnies. The works. "Subscribe now and get these plete text of the Black Mass plus Abridged Mysticism!" She was forced to walk through an adecal announcing: "Don't be Half Safe! Believe in Everything! Are you sure that African Bantu Witchcraft is not the True Way?" At the turn of the corridor stood a male-female graphic with flesh-stimulant skinnies and supered voices, "Find peace through Tantrism." The skinnies made her flesh crawl. Gwen fled into her office, slumped into her desk chair. With mounting horror, she realized that she had either written or supervised the writing of every word, produced every selling idea along that corridor. The interphon on her desk emitted its fluted "Good morning." She slapped the blackout switch to keep the instrument from producing an image. The last thing she wanted now was to see one of her co-workers. "Who is it?" she barked. "Gwen?" No mistaking that voice: Andre Battlemont, bottom name on the agency totem. 'What do you want?" she demanded. "Our Gwenny is feeling nasty this morning, isn't she?" "Oh, Freud!" She slapped the disconnect, leaned forward with elbows on the desk, put her face in her hands. Lefs face it, she thought. I'm #, unmarried, and a prime mover in an industry that's strangling the universe. I'm a professioned strangler. "Good morning," fluted the interphon. She ignored it. "A strangler," she said. Gwen recognized the basic problem here. She had known it since childhood. Her universe was a continual replaying of "The Emperor's New Suit." She saw the nakedness. "Good morning," fluted the interphon. She dropped her right hand away from her face, flicked the switch. "Now what?" "Did you cut me off, Gwen?" "What if I did?" "Gwen, please! We have a problem." "We always have problems." Battlemont's voice dropped one octave. "Gwen. This is a Big problem." Uncanny the way he can speak capital letters, she thought. She said: "Go away." "You've been leaving your Interdorma turned off!" accused Battlemont. "You mustn't. Neurosis can creep up on you." "Is that why you called me?" she asked. "Of course not." "Then go away." Battlemont did a thing then that everyone from Singlemaster on down knew was dangerous to try with Gwen Everest. He pushed the override to send his image dancing above her interphon. of anger, Gwen correctly interpreted the act as one of desperation. She found herself intrigued. She stared at the round face, the pale eyes (definitely too small, those eyes), the pug nose and wide gash of mouth above almost no chin at all. Plus the hairline in full retreat. "Andre, you are a mess," she said. He ignored the insult. Still speaking in the urgency octave, he said: "I have called a full staff meeting. You must attend at once." "Why?" "There are two military people in there, Gwen." He gulped. "It's desperate. Either we solve their problem or they will ruin us. They will draft every man in the agency!" "Even you?" "Yes!" She moved her right hand toward the interphon's emergency disconnect. "Good-by, Andre." "Gwen! My God! You can't let me down at a time like this!" "Why not?" He spoke in breathless haste. "We'll raise your salary. A bonus. A bigger office. More help." "You can't afford me now," she said. "I'm begging you, Gwen. Must you abuse me?" She closed her eyes, thought: The insects! The damned little insects with their crummy emotions! Why can't l tell them all to go to composite hell? She opened hereyes, said: "What's the military's flap?" Battlemont mopped his forehead with a pastel blue handkerchief. "It's the Space Service," he said. "The female branch. The to almost nothing." She was interested in spite of herself. "What's happened?" "Something to do with the space armor. I don't know. I'm so upset." 'Why have they tossed it into our laps like this? The ultimatum, I mean." Battlemont glanced left and right, leaned forward. "The grapevine has it they're testing a new theory that creative people work better under extreme stress." "The Psychological Branch again," she said. "Those jackasses!" "But what can we do?" "Hoist 'em," she said. "You run along to the conference." "And you'll be there, Gwen?" "In a few minutes." "Don't delay too long, Gwen." Again he mopped his forehead with the blue handkerchief. "Gwen, I'm frightened." "And with good reason." She squinted at him. "I can see you now: Nothing on but a lead loincloth, dumping fuel into a radioactive furnace. Freud, what a picture!" "This is no joke, Gwen!" "I know." "You are going to help?" "In my own peculiar way, Andre." She hit the emergency disconnect. away from his interphon, crossed his office to a genuine Moslem prayer rug. He sat down on it facing the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked eastward across midtown Manhattan. This was the #th floor of the Stars of Space building, and it was quite a view out there whenever the clouds lifted. But the city remained hidden beneath a low ceiling this morning. Up here it was sunny, though -- except in Battlemont's mood. A fear-cycle ululated along his nerves. What he was doing on the prayer rug was practicing Yoga breathing to calm those nerves. The military could wait. They had to wait. The fact that he faced the general direction of Mecca was left over from two months before. Yoga was a month old. There was always some carry-over. Battlemont had joined the Religion of the Month Club almost a year ago -- seduced by his own agency's deep motivation campaign plus the Brotherhood Council's seal of approval. This month it was the Rein.Spired Neo-Cult of St. Freud. A test adecal superimposed itself on the cloud-floor view beneath him. It began playing the latest Gwen-Everest-inspired rainbow letters danced across the fleecy background. "Make your advice immortal! .Let us store your voice and thought patterns in everlasting electronic memory circuits! When you are gone, your loved ones may listen to your voice as you answer their questions exactly the way you would most likely have answered them in Life!" Battlemont shook his head. The agency, fearful of its dependence on the live Gwen Everest, had secretly recorded her at a staff conference once. Very illegal. The unions were death on broken down with the first question put to Gwen's ghost-voice. "Some people have thought patterns that are too complex to permit accurate psyche-record," the engineer explained. Battlemont did not delude himself. The sole genius of the agency's three owners lay in recognizing the genius of Gwen Everest. She was the agency. It was like riding the tiger to have such an employee. Singlemaster, Hucksting and Battlemont had ridden this tiger for # years. Battlemont closed his eyes, pitched her in his mind: a tall, lean woman, but with a certain grace. Her face was long, dominated by cold blue eyes, framed in waves of auburn hair. She had a wit that could slash you to ribbons, and that priceless commodity: the genius to pull selling sense out of utter confusion. Battlemont sighed. He was in love with Gwen Everest. Had been for # years. It was the reason he had never married. His Interdorma explained that it was because he wanted to be dominated by a strong woman. But that only explained. It didn't help. For a moment, he thought wistfully of Singlemaster and Hucksting, both taking their annual three-month vacation at the geriatrics center on Oahu. Battlemont wondered if he dared ask Gwen to take her vacation with him. Just once. No. He realized what a pitiful figure he made on the prayer rug. Pudgy little man in a rather unattractive blue suit. Tailors did things for him that they called "improving your good points." But except when he viewed himself in a Vesta-Mirror to see the sample clothes projected back onto his own idealized image, he could never pin down what those "good points" were. Gwen would certainly turn him down. He feared that more than anything. As long as there remained the possibility... Memory of the waiting Space Service deputation intruded. Battlemont trembled, broke the Yoga breathing pattern. The exercise was having its usual effect: a feeling of vertigo. He heaved himself to his feet. "One cannot run away from fate," he muttered. That was a carry-over from the Karma month. agency's conference room had been copied from a Florentine bordello's Emperor Room. It was a gigantic space. The corners were all flossy curliques in heavy gilding, an effect carried over into deep carvings on the wall panels. The ceiling was a mating of Cellini cupids with Dali landscapes. Period stuff. Antique. Into this baroque setting had been forced a one-piece table # feet wide and # feet long. It was an enlarged bit of Twentieth Century Wallstreetiana fenced in by heavy wooden chairs. Beanbag paperweights and golden wheel ashtrays graced every place. The air of the room was blue with the smoke of mood-cigs. ("It rhymes with Good Bigs!") The staff seated around the table was fighting off the depressant effect of the two Space Service generals, one male and one female, seated in flanking positions beside Battlemont's empty chair. There was a surprising lack of small talk and paper rustling. All staff members had learned of the ultimatum via the office grapevine. Battlemont slipped in his side door, crossed to his chair at the end of the table, dropped into it before his knees gave out. He stared from one frowning military face to the other. No response. He cleared his throat. "Sorry I'm... ah... Pressing business. Unavoidable." He cast a frantic glance around the table. No sign of Gwen. He smiled at one officer, the other. No response. On his right sat Brigadier General Sonnet Finnister of the tlemont had been appalled to see her walk. Drill-sergeant stride. No nonsense. She wore a self-designed uniform: straight pleated skirt to conceal bony hips, a loose blouse to camouflage lack of upper development, and a long cape to confuse the whole issue. Atop her head sat a duck-billed, flat-fronted cap that had been fashioned for the single purpose of hiding the Sonnet Finnister forehead, which went too high and too wide. She seldom removed the hat. (This particular hat, Battlemont's hurried private investigations had revealed, looked hideous on every other member of called it  "the Sonnet Bonnet." There had been the additional information that the general herself was referred to by underlings as "Sinister Finnister" -- partly because of the swirling cape.) On Battlemont's left sat General Nathan Owling of the Space Engineers. Better known as "Howling Owling" because of "a characteristic evidenced when he became angry. He appeared to have been shaped in the officer caste's current mold of lean, blond athlete. The blue eyes reminded Battlemont of Gwen's eyes, except that the man's appeared colder. If that were possible. Beyond Owling sat Leo Prim, the agency's art director. He was a thin young man, thin to a point that vibrated across the edge of emaciation. His black hair, worn long, held a natural wave. He had a narrow Roman nose, soulful brown eyes, strong cleft in the chin, generous mouth with large lips. A mood-cig dangled from the lips. If Battlemont could have chosen his own appearance, he would have liked to look like Leo Prim. Romantic. Battlemont caught Prim's attention, ventured a smile of cameraderie. No response. General Sonnet Finnister tapped a thin finger on the tabletop. It sounded to Battlemont like the slack drum of adeath march. "Hadn't we better get started?" demanded Finnister. "Are we all here -- finally?" asked Owling. Battlemont swallowed past a lump in his throat. "Well... ah... no... ah..." Owling opened a briefcase in his lap, glanced at an intelligence report, looked around the table. "Miss Everest is missing," he announced. Finnister said: "Couldn't we go ahead without her?" "We'll wait," said Owling. He was enjoying himself. Damned parasites need a touch of the whip now and then! he thought. Shows 'em where they stand. a hawk stare that had reduced full colonels (male) to trembling. The stare rolled off Owling without effect. Trust the high command to pair me with a male supremacy type like Owling! she thought. "Is this place safe from snooping?" asked Owling. Battlemont turned his own low-wattage glare on the staff seated in the mood smoke haze around the table. No glance met his. "That's all anybody ever does around here!" he snapped. "What?" Owling started to rise. "Busybodies!" blared Battlemont. "My whole staff!" "Ohhh." Owling sank back into his chair. "I meant a different kind of snooping." "Oh, that." Battlemont shrugged, suppressed an urge to glance up at the conference room's concealed recorder lenses. "We cannot have our ideas pirated by other agencies, you know. Absolutely safe here." Gwen Everest chose this moment for her entrance. All eyes followed her as she came through the end door, strode down the length of the room. Battlemont admired her grace. Such a feminine woman in spite of her strength. So different from the female general. Gwen found a spare chair against the side wall, crowded it in between Battlemont and Finnister. glared at the intruder. "Who are you?" Battlemont leaned forward. "This is Miss Everest, our... ah..." He hesitated, confused. Gwen had never had an official title with the agency. Never needed it. Everyone in the place knew she was the boss. "Ahh... Miss Everest is our... ah... director of coordination," said Battlemont. "Why! That's a wonderful title!" said Gwen. "I must get it printed on my stationery." She patted Battlemont's hand, faced him and, in her best undercoveragent-going-into-action voice, said: "Let's have it, Chief. Who are these people? What's going on?" General Owling nodded to Gwen. "I'm Owling, General, Space Engineers." He gestured to the rocket splash insignia on his shoulder. "My companion is Gwen had recognized the famous Finnister face. She smiled brightly, said: "General Woms!" "Finnister!" snapped the female general. "Yes, of course," said Gwen. "General Finnister Woms. Must not go too informal, you know." Finnister spoke in slow cadence: "I... am... General... Sonnet... Finnister... of... the... Women... of... Space! "Oh, how stupid of me," said Gwen. "Of course you are." She patted the general's hand, smiled at Battlemont. Battlemont, who well knew the falsity of this mood in Gwen Everest, was trying to scrunch down out of sight in his chair. In that moment, Gwen realized with a twinge of fear that she had reached a psychic point of no return. Something slipped a cog in her mind. She glanced around the table. Familiar faces leaped at her with unreal clarity. Staring eyes. (The best part of a conference was to watch Gwen in action.) I can't take any more of this, thought Gwen. I have to declare myself. She focused on the military. The rest of the people in this room owned little pieces of her, but not these two. Owling and Finnister. Space generals. Symbols. Targets! Let the chips fall where they may! Fire when ready, Gridley. Shoot if you must this old gray head... Wait until you see the whites of their eyes. Gwen nodded to herself. One misstep and the agency was ruined. Who cares? It all passed in a split second, but the decision was made. Rebellion!  Owling. "Would you be kind enough to end this stalling around and get the meeting under way?" "Stall..." Owling broke it off. The intelligence report had said Gwen Everest was fond of shock tactics. He gave her a curt nod, passed the nod to Finnister. The female general addressed Battlemont. "Your agency, as we explained to you earlier, has been chosen for a vital task, Mr. Battlefield." "Battlemont," said Gwen. Finnister stopped short. "What?" "His name is Battlemont, not Battle?ed," said Gwen. "What of it?" "Names are important," said Gwen. "I'm sure you appreciate this." The Finnister cheeks flushed. "Quite!" Owling stepped into the breach. "We are authorized to pay this agency double the usual fee for performance," he said. "However, if you fail us we'll draft every male employee here into the Space Service!" "What an asinine idea!" said Gwen. "Our people would destroy the Space Service. From within." Again she smiled at Battlemont. "Andre here could do it all by himself. Couldn't you, ducky?" She patted Battlemont's cheek. Battlemont tried to crouch farther down into the chair. He avoided the eyes of the space brass, said: "Gwen... please..." "What do you mean, destroy the Space Service?" demanded Finnister. Gwen ignored her, addressed Owling. "This is another one of the Psych Branch's brainstorms," she said. "I can smell the stench of 'em in every word." Owling frowned. As a matter of fact, he had the practical builder's suspicion of everything subjective. This Kverest woman made a good point there. But the military had to stand shoulder to shoulder against outsiders. He said: "I don't believe you are properly equipped to fathom military tactics. Let's get on to the problem we... "Military tactics yet!" Gwen rapped the table. "Deploy your forces, men. This is it! Synchronize your watches. Over the top!" "Gwen!" said Battlemont. "Of course," said Gwen. She faced Finnister. "Would you mind awfully outlining your problem in simple terms that our unmilitarized minds could understand?" A pause, a glare. Finnister spewed her words through stiff have fallen to an alarming degree. You are going to correct this." Behind Gwen, Battlemont nodded vigorously. "Women can release men for the more strenuous tasks," said Owling. "And there are many things women can do that men cannot do," said Finnister. "Absolutely essential," said Owling. "Absolutely," agreed Finnister. "Can't draft women, I suppose," said Gwen. "Tried to get a bill through," said Owling. "Damned committee's headed by an anti-military woman." "Good for her," said Gwen. "You do not sound like the person for this job," said Owling. "Perhaps..." "Oh, simmer down," said Gwen. "Miss Everest is the best in the business," said Battlemont. Gwen said: "Why are enlistments down? You've run the usual surveys, I suppose." "It's the space armor," said Finnister. "Women don't like it." "Too mechanical," said Owling. "Too practical." "We need... ah... glamor," said Finnister. She adjusted the brim of her cap. Gwen frowned at the cap, cast a glance up and down the Finnister uniform. "I've seen the usual news pictures of the armor," she said. "What do they wear underneath it? Something like your uniform?" Finnister suppressed a surge of anger. "No. They wear special fatigues." "The armor cannot be removed while they are in space," said Owling. "Oh?" said Gwen. "What about physical functions, that sort of thing?" "Armor takes care of everything," said Owling. "Apparently not quite everything," murmured Gwen. She nodded to herself, mulling tactics. aj sniffed the atmosphere of the conference room. Staff all alert, quiet, attentive. Mood had lightened somewhat. Gwen appeared to be taking over. Good old Gwen. Wonderful Gwen. No telling what she was up to. As usual. She'd solve this thing, though. Always did. Unless... He blinked. Could she be toying with them? He tried to imagine Gwen's thought patterns. Imeven do it. Unpredictable. All Battlemont could be certain of was that Gwen would get a gigantic belly laugh from the picture of the agency's male staff members drafted, slaving away on space freighters. Battlemont trembled. General Finnister was saying: "The problem is not one of getting women to enlist for Earthbased service. We need them in the ships, the asteroid stations, the..." "Let's get this straight," said Gwen. "My great-great-grandmother was in some kind of armed service. I read her diary once. She called it the 'whackies' or something like that." "Yes," said Gwen. "It was during the war with Spain." "Japan," said Owling. "What I'm driving at is, why all the sudden interest in women? My great-great-grandmother had one merry old time running away from some colonel who wanted... Well, you know. Is this some kind of a dodge to provide women for your space colonels?" Finnister scowled her blackest. Quickly suppressed chuckles sounded around the table. Owling decided to try a new tack. "My dear lady, our motives 'are of the highest. We need the abilities of women so that mankind can march side by side to the stars." Gwen stared at him in open admiration. "Go-wan!" she said. "I mean it," said Owling. "You're a poet!" said Gwen. "Oh... and I've wronged you. Here I was -- dirty-minded me -- thinking you wanted women for base purposes. And all the time you wanted companions. Someone to share this glorious new adventure." Again, Battlemont recognized the danger signals. He tried to squeeze himself into as small a target as possible. Most of the staff around the table saw the same signals, but they were intent, fascinated. "Exactly!" boomed Finnister. Gwen's voice erupted in an angry snarl: "And we name all the little bastards after the stars in Virgo, ehhh?" It took a long moment for Finnister and Owling to see that they had been gulled. Finnister started to rise. "Siddown!" barked Gwen. She grinned. She was having a magnificent time. Rebellion carried a sense of euphoria. Owling opened his mouth, closed it without a howl. Finnister sank back into her chair. "Shall we get down to business?" snapped Gwen. "Let's look at this glorified hunk of tin you want us to glamorize." Finnister found something she could focus her shocked attention on. "Space armor is mostly plastic, not tin." "Plastic-schmastic," said Gwen. "I want to see your Iron Gertie." General Owling took two deep breaths to calm his nerves, snapped open the briefcase, extracted a folder of design sketches. He pushed them toward Gwen -- a hesitant motion as though he feared she might take his hand with them. He now recognized that the incredible intelligence report was correct: this astonishing female was the actual head of the agency. "Here's -- Iron Gertie," he said, and forced a chuckle. Gwen leafed through the folder while the others watched. Battlemont stared at her. He realized something the rest of the staff did not: Gwen Everest was not being the usual Gwen Everest. There was a subtle difference. An abandon. Something was very wrong!  the drawings, Gwen addressed herself to Finnister. "That uniform you're wearing, General Finnister. You design that yourself?" "What? Oh, yes. I did." Battlemont trembled. Gwen reached out, rapped one of Finnister's hips. "Bony," she said. She turned a page in the folder, shook her head. "Well!" exploded Finister. Still without looking up, Gwen said: "Simmer down. How about the hat? You design that, too?" "Yesss!" It was a sibilant explosion. Gwen lifted her attention to the hat, spoke in a reasonable tone: "Possibly the most hideous thing I've ever seen." "Well of all the -- " "Are you a fashion designer?" asked Gwen politely. Finnister shook her head as though to clear it of cobwebs. "You are not a fashion designer?" pressed Gwen. Finnister bit the words off. "I have had some experience in choosing -- " "The answer is no, then," said Gwen. "Thought so." She brought her attention back to the folder, turned a page. Finnister glared at her in open-mouthed rage. Gwen glanced up at Owling. "Why'd you put the finger on this agency?" Owling appeared to have trouble focusing his attention on Gwen's question. Presently, he said: "You were... it was pointed out that this agency was one of the most successful in... if not the most successful... "We were classified as experts, eh?" "Yes. If you want to put it that way." "I want to put it that way." She glanced at Finnister. "So we let the experts do the designing, is that clear? You people keep your greasy fingers off. Understood?" She shot a hard stare at Owling, back to Finnister. "I don't know about you!" Finnister snapped at Owling, "but I've had all -- " "If you value your military career you'll just sit down and listen," said Gwen. Again, she glared at Owling. "Do you understand?" Owling shook his head from side to side. Amazement dominated him. Abruptly, he realized that his head shaking could be interpreted as negative. He bobbed his head up and down, decided in mid-motion that this was undignified. He stopped, cleared his throat. What an astonishing female! he thought. Gwen pushed the folder of design sketches uptable to Leo Prim, the art director. "Tell me, General Owling," she said, "why is the armor so bulky?" Leo Prim, who had opened the folder, began to chuckle. "Marvelous, isn't it?" said Gwen. Someone farther uptable asked: "What is?" Gwen kept her attention on Owling. "Some jassack engineer in the Space Service designed a test model suit of armor like a gigantic woman -- breasts and all." She glanced at Finnister. "You ran a survey on the stupid thing, of course?" Finnister nodded. She was shocked speechless. "I could've saved you the trouble," said Gwen. "One of the reasons you'd better listen carefully to what expert me has to say. No woman in her right mind would get into that thing. She'd feel big -- and she'd feel naked." Gwen shook her head. "Freud! What a combination!" Owling wet his lips with his tongue. "Ah, the armor has to provide sufficient shielding against radiation, and it must remain articulate under extremes of pressure and temperature," he said. "It can't be made any smaller and still permit a human being to fit into it. "Okay," said Gwen. "I have the beginnings of an idea." She closed her eyes, thought: These military jerks are a couple of sitting ducks. Almost a shame to pot them. She opened her eyes, glanced at Battlemont. His eyes were closed. He appeared to be praying. Could be the ruination of poor Andre and his lovely people, too, she thought. What a marvelous collection of professional stranglers! Well, can't be helped. When Gwen Everest goes out, she goes out in a blaze of glory! All flags flying! Full speed ahead! Damn the torpedoes! "Well?" said Owling. Fire one! thought Gwen. She said: "Presumably, you have specialists, experts who can advise us on technical details." "At your beck and call whenever you say the word," said Owling. eyes, stared at the back of Gwen's neck. A ray of hope stabbed through his panic. Was it possible that Gwen was really taking over? "I'll also want all the dope on which psychological types make there is such a thing as a best Battlemont closed his eyes, shuddered. "I don't believe I've ever been treated this high-handedly in my entire career!" blurted Finnister. "I'm not entirely sure that -- " "Just a moment, please," said Owling. He studied Gwen, who was smiling at him. The intelligence report said this woman was "probable genius" and should be handled delicately. "I'm only sorry the law doesn't give us the right to draft women, too!" barked Finnister. "Then you wouldn't really have this problem, would you?" asked Gwen. She turned her smile on Finnister. It was full of beatitudes. Owling said: "I know we have full authority to handle this at our own discretion, General Finnister, and I agree that we've  been subjected to some abuse but... "Abuse!" Finnister said. "And high time, too," said Gwen. A violent shudder passed through Battlemont. He thought: We are doomed! "However," said Owling, "we mustn't let our personal feelings cloud a decision for the good of the service." "I hear the bugles blowing," murmured Gwen. "This agency was chosen as the one most likely to solve the problem," said Owling. "There could have been a mistake!" said Finnister. "Not likely." "You are determined to turn this thing over to... to..." Finnister broke off, tapped her palms on the table top. "It's advisable," said Owling. He thought: This Gwen Everest will solve our problem. No problem could resist her. No problem would dare! General Owling had become a Gwenophile. "Very well, then," snarled Finnister. "I will reserve my judgment." General Finnister had become a Gwenophobe. Which was part of Gwen Everest's program. "I presume you two will be available for technical consultations from time to time," said Gwen. "Our subordinates take care of details," said Owling. "All General Finnister and I are interested in is the big picture, the key to the puzzle." "Big picture, key to puzzle," mused Gwen. "Wonderful idea." "What?" Owling stared at her, puzzled. "Nothing," said Gwen. "Just thinking out loud." Owling stood up, looked at Finnister. "Shall we be going?" Finnister also stood up, turned toward the door at the end of the room. "Yesss!" Together, one on each side of the table, they' marched the length of the room: tump-athump a tump a thump a tump... Just as they reached the door and Owling opened it, Gwen jumped to her feet. "Charrrrge!" she shouted. The two officers froze, almost turned, thought better of it. They left, slamming the door. Battlemont spoke plaintively into the silence. "Gwen, why do you destroy us?" "Destroy you? Don't be silly!" "But, Gwen..." "Please be quiet, Andre; you're interrupting my train of thought." She turned to Leo Prim. "Leo, take those sketches and things of that big-breasted Bertha they designed. I want adecal workups on them, full projos, the entire campaign outlay." "Big Bertha adecals, projos, the outlay," said Prim. "Right!" "Gwen, what are you doing?" asked Battlemont. "You said yourself that -- " "You're babbling, Andre," said Gwen. She glanced up at the ceiling. An eye in one of the Cellini cupids winked at her. "We got the usual solid recordings of this conference, I presume?" "Of course," said Battlemont. "Take those recordings, Leo," said Gwen. "Do a sequence out of them featuring only General Sinister Sonnet Bonnet Finnister." "What'd you call her?" asked Prim. Finnister nicknames. "The fashion trade knows all about her," she finished. "A living horror." "Yeah, okay," said Prim. "A solid sequence of nothing but Finnister. What do you want it to show?" "Every angle of that uniform," said Gwen. "And the hat. Freud! Don't forget that hat!" Battlemont spoke plaintively. "I don't understand." "Good," said Gwen. "Leo, send me Restivo and Jim Spark... a couple more of your best design people. Include yourself. We'll..." "And, lo! Ben Adam's name led all the rest," said Battlemont. Gwen turned, stared down at him. For one of the rare times in their association, Battlemont had surprised her with something he said. I wonder if our dear Andre could be human? she mused. No! I must be going soft in the head. She said: "Andre, go take a meditation break until time to call our next conference. Eh? There's a good fellow." Always before when she abused me it was like a joke between us, thought Battlemont dolefully. But now she is trying to hurt. His concern now was for Gwen, not for the agency. My Gwen needs help. And I don't know what to do. "Meditation break time," said Gwen. "Or you could go to a mood bar. Why don't you try the new Interdorma mediniche? A niche in time saves the mind!" "I prefer to remain awake for our last hours together," said Battlemont. A sob clutched at his throat. He stood up to cover the moment, drew himself to attention, fixed Gwen with a despairing glare. "I feel the future crouching over us like a great beast!" He turned his back on her, strode out through his private door. "I wonder what the devil he meant by that?" mused Gwen. Prim said: "This is the month of St. Freud. They go for prescience, extrasensory perception, that sort of thing." "Oh, certainly," she said. "I wrote the brochure." But she found herself disturbed by Battlemont's departure. He looked so pitiful, she thought. What if this little caper backfires and he gets drafted? It could happen. Leo and the rest of these stranglers could take it. But Andre... She gave a mental shrug. T oo late to turn back now. Department heads began pressing toward Gwen along the table. "Say, Gwen, what about the production on... "If I'm going to meet any deadlines I'll need more..." "Will we have to drop our other..." "Shaddup!" bellowed Gwen. She smiled sweetly into the shocked silence. "I will meet with each of you privately, just as soon as I get in a fresh stock of crying towels. First things first, though. Number one problem: we get the monkey off our backs. Eh?" And she thought: You poor oafs! You aren't even aware how close you are to disaster. You think Gwen is taking over as usual. But Gwen doesn't care. Gwen doesn't give a damn any more. Gwen is resigning in a blaze of glory! Into the valley of death rode the #! Or was it #? No matter. War is hell! I only regret that I have but one life to give for my agency. Give me liberty or give me to the WO MS. Leo Prim said: "You're going for the throat on these two military types, is that it?" "Military tactics," said Gwen. "No survivors! Take no prisoners! Death to the White Eyes!" "Huh?" said Prim. "Get right on that assignment I gave you," she said. "Uhh..." Prim looked down at the folder Owling had left. "Workups on this Big Bertha thing'... a solido on Finnister. Okay." He shook his head. "You know, this business could shape up into a Complete Flap." "It could be worse than that," Gwen cautioned. Someone else said: "It's absolutely the worst I've ever seen. Drafted!" And Gwen thought: Ooooh! Someone has trepidations! Abruptly, she said: "Absolutely worst flap." She brightened. "That's wonderful! One moment, all you lovely people." There was sudden stillness in the preparations for departure. "It has been moved that we label this business the Absolutely Worst Flap," she said. Chuckles from the staff. "You will note," said Gwen, "that the initials A-W-F are the first three letters in the word awful." Laughter. "Up to now," said Gwen, "we've only had to contend with Minor, Medium and Complete Flaps. rhymes with the grunt of someone being slugged in the stomach!" Into the laughter that filled the room, Prim said: "How about the U and L in awful? Can't let them go to waste." "Un Limited?' snapped Gwen. "Absolutely Worst Flap UnLimited!" She began to laugh, had to choke it off as the laughter edged into hysteria. Whatinell's wrong with me? she wondered. She glared at Prim. "Let's get cracking, men! Isn't a damn one of you would look good in uniform." The laughter shaded down into nervous gutterings. "That Gwen!" Gwen had to get out of there. It was like a feeling of nausea. She pushed her way down the side of the room. The sparkle had gone out of her rebellion. She felt that all of these people were pulling at her, taking bits of herself that she could never recapture. It made her angry. She wanted to kick, bite, claw. Instead, she smiled fixedly. "Excuse me. May I get through here? Sorry. Thank you. Excuse me." And an image of Andre Battlemont kept intruding on her consciousness. Such a pitiful little fellow. So... well... sweet. Dammit! Sweet! In a despicable sort of way. off the calendar. Twenty-five days of splashing in a pool of confusion. Gwen's element. She hurled herself into the problem. This one had to be just right. A tagline for her exit. A Gwen Everest signature at the bottom of the page. Technical experts from the military swarmed all through the agency. Experts on suit articulation. Experts onshielding. Pressure coefficients. Artificial atmosphere. Waste reclamation. Subminiature power elements. A locksmith. An expert on the new mutable plastics. (He had to be flown in from the West Coast.) Plus the fashion experts seen only by Gwen. It was quite a job making sure that each military expert saw only what his small technical world required. Came the day of the Big Picture. The very morning. Adjacent to her office Gwen maintained a special room about # feet square. She called it "my intimidation room." It was almost Louis XV: insubstantial chairs, teetery little tables, glass gimcracks on the light fixtures, pastel cherubs on the wall panels. The chairs looked as though they might smash flat under the weight of a medium-sized man. Each (with the exception of a padded throne chair that slid from behind a wall panel for Gwen) had a seat that canted forward. The sitters kept sliding off, gently, imperceptibly. None of the tables had a top large enough for a note pad and an ashtray. One of these items had to be balanced in the lap or placed underfoot. That forced an occasional look at the carpet. The carpet had been produced with alarming psychological triggers. The uninitiated felt that they were standing upside down in a fishbowl. General Owling occupied one of the trick chairs. He tried to keep from staring at the cherub centered in a wall panel directly across from him, slightly to the right of the seated figure of Andre Battlemont. Battlemont looked ill. Owling pushed himself backward in the chair. His knees felt exposed. He glanced at General Finnister. She sat to his right beyond a spindly table. She pulled her skirt down as he watched. He wondered why she sat so far forward on the chair. Damned uncomfortable little chairs! He noted that Battlemont had brought in one of the big conference room chairs for himself. Owling wondered why they all couldn't have those big, square, solid, secure chairs. For that matter, why wasn't this meeting being held in the big conference room? Full staff. The Big Picture! He glanced up at the wall panel opposite. Stupid damned cherub! He looked down at the rug, grimaced, tore his gaze away. Finnister had looked at the rug when she came into the room, had almost lost her balance. Now, she tried to keep her attention off it. Her mind seethed with disquieting rumors. Individual reports from the technical experts failed to reveal a total image. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from separate puzzles all thrown together. She pushed herself backward in the chair. What an uncomfortable room. Intuition told her the place was subtly deliberate. Her latent anger at Gwen Everest flared. Where is that woman? Battlemont cleared his throat, glanced at the door to his right through which Gwen was expected momentarily. Must she always be late? Gwen had avoided him for weeks. Too busy. Suddenly this morning she had to have Andre Battlemont front and center. A figurehead. A prop for her little show. He knew pretty much what she was doing, too. In the outward, physical sense. She might be able to keep things from some of the people around here, but Andre Battlemont ran his own intelligence system. As to what was going on in her mind, though, he couldn't be sure. All he knew was that it didn't fit. Not even for Gwen. Finnister said: "Our technical people inform us that you've been pretty interested -- " she pushed herself back in the chair -- "in the characteristics of some of the newer mutable plastics." "That is true," said Battlemont. "Why?" asked Owling. "Ahhh, perhaps we'd better wait for Miss Everest," said Battlemont. "She is bringing a solido projector." "You have mockups already?" asked Owling. "Yes." "Good! How many models?" "One. Our receptionist. Beautiful girl." "What?" Finnister and Owling in unison. "Oh! You mean... that is, we have the one to show you. It is really two... but only one of..." He shrugged, suppressed a shudder. Finnister and Owling looked at each other. eyes. Gwen, please hurry. He thought about her solution to the military problem, began to tremble. Her basic idea was sound, of course. Good psychological roots. But the military would never go for it. Especially that female general who walked like a sergeant. Battlemont's eyes snapped open as he heard a door open. Gwen came in pushing a portable display projector. A glance of mutual dislike passed between Gwen and Finnister, was masked by mutual bright smiles immediately. "Good morning, everybody," chirped Gwen. Danger signal! thought Battlemont. She's mad! She's... He stopped the thought, focused on it. Maybe she is. We work her so hard. "Anxious to see what you have there," said Owling. "Just getting ready to ask for a progress report when you called this meeting." "We wanted to have something first that you could appreciate as an engineer," said Gwen. Owling nodded. Finnister said: "Our people report that you've been very secretive about your work. Why?" "The very walls have ears. Loose lips lose the Peace! Don't be half safe!" Gwen positioned the projector in the center of the room, took the remote control, crossed to a panel which swung out to disgorge her chair. She sat down facing Finnister and Owling. Seconds dragged past while she stared in fascination at Finnister's knees. "Gwen?" said Battlemont. Finnister tugged down on the hem of her skirt. "What do you have to show us?" demanded Owling. He pushed himself back in the chair. "First," said Gwen, "let us examine the perimeters of the problem. You must ask yourself: What do young women want when they enter the service?" "Sounds sensible," said Owling. Finnister nodded, her dislike of Gwen submerged in attention to the words. "They want several things," said Gwen. "They want travel... adventure... the knight errant sort of thing. Tally-ho!" Battlemont, Finnister and Owling snapped to shocked attention. "Gives you pause when you think about it," murmured Gwen. "All those women looking for something. Looking for the free ride. The brass ring. The pot at the end of the rainbow." She had them nodding again, Gwen noted. She raised her voice: "The old carrousel! The jingledingle joy journey!" Battlemont looked at her sadly. Mad. Ohhh, my poor, poor Gwenny. Owling said: "I... uh..." "But they all want one commodity!" snapped Gwen. "And what's that? Romance! That's what's that. And in the unconscious mind what's that romance? That romance is sex!" "I believe I've heard enough," said Finnister. "No," said Owling. "Let's... uh... this is all, I'm sure, preliminary. I want to know where... after all, the model... models they've developed..." "What's with sex when you get all the folderol off it?" demanded Gwen. "The psychological roots. What's down there?" Owling scratched his throat, stared at her. He had a basic distrust of subjective ideas, but he always came smack up against the fear that maybe (just maybe now) they were correct. Some of them appeared (and it could be appearance only ) to work. "I'll tell you what's down there," muttered Gwen. "Motherhood. Home. Security with a man. The flag." Owling thought: It all sounds so sensible... except... "And what does your armor do?" asked Gwen. "Armor equals no amour! They're locked up in desexed chunks of metal and plastic where no men can g'et at them. Great Freud! Men can't even see them in there!" "Women don't really want men to get at them!" barked Finnister. "Of all the disgusting ideas I've ever -- " "Just a minute!" said Gwen. "A normal woman always wants the possibility. That's what she wants. And she wants it under her control. You've eliminated the possibility. You've taken all control out of their hands, put your women at the mercy of the elements, separated from cold, maslayer of plastic and metal." Battlemont stared at her helplessly. Poor Gwen. Doomed. And she won't even sell this idea. We're all doomed with her. still smarting under the implied dig of the word normal. "How do you propose to get around these, ah, objections?" asked Owling. "You'll see," said Gwen. "Let's go in from the perimeter now. Remember, the basic female idea is to be able to run away with the assurance that she will be caught. She wants a certain amount of exposure as a female without being too bare-ahhh-faced about it." "Mmmmph!" said Finnister. Gwen smiled at her. Gwen is deliberately destroying herself and us with her, thought Battlemont. "Do you see what is lacking?" asked Gwen. "Hmmmm-ahhhhh-hmmmmm," said Owling. "A universal symbol," said Gwen. "A bold symbol. A symbol!" "What do you propose?" asked Owling. "That's it!" said Gwen. "A proposal! Plus -- " she hesitated -- "the symbol! The key is very simple." She sat up, perky, grinning at them. "In fact, it's a key!" Finnister and Owling Spoke in unison: "A key?" "Yes. Two keys, actually. Symbolism's obvious." She produced two keys from her jacket pocket, held them up. 'As you can see, one key is hard, angular... a masculine key. The other has fancy curves. It's daintier, more the..." "Do you. mean to tell me," howled Owling, "that you people have spent all these weeks, all those consultations with our experts, and come up with... with... with... He pointed, unable to continue. Gwen shook her head from side to side. "Oh, no. Remember, these are just symbols. They're important, of course. One might even say they were vital. Each key will be inscribed with the name of the person who gets it." "What are they keys to?" asked Finnister. She was fascinated in spite of herself. "To the space armor, naturally," said Gwen. "These keys lock your people in their armor -- both men and women." "Lock them?" protested Finnister. "But you said..." "I know," said Gwen. "But, you see, a key that will lock people into something will also let them out. As a matter of fact, any one of these keys will open any suit. That's for the safety factor." "But they can't get out of their suits when they're in space!" howled Owling. "Of all the..." "That's right!" said Gwen. "They can't really get out. So we give them the symbol of getting out. For exchanging." "Exchanging?" asked Finnister. "Certainly. A male astronaut sees a girl astronaut he likes. He asks her to trade keys. Very romantic. Symbolic of things that may happen when they return to Earth or get to a base where they can get out of the suits." "Miss Everest," said Finnister, "as you so aptly pointed out earlier, no astronaut can see one of our women in this armor. And even if he could, I don't believe that I'd..." She froze, staring, shocked speechless. Gwen had pushed a stud on the solido projector's remote control. A suit of space armor appeared to be hanging in the center of the room. In the suit, wearing a form-fitting jacket, stood the agency's busty receptionist. The suit of armor around her was transparent from the waist up. "The bottom half remains opaque at all times," said Gwen. "For reasons of modesty... the connections. However, the top half... Gwen pushed another stud. The transparent upper half faded through gray to black until it concealed the model. "For privacy when desired," said Gwen. "That's how we've used the new mutable plastic. Gives the girl some control over her environment." Again, Gwen pushed the first stud. The upper half of the model reappeared. Finnister gaped at the formfitting uniform. Gwen stood up, took a pointer, gestured in through the projection. "This uniform was designed by a leading couturier. It is made to reveal while concealing. A woman with only a fair figure will appear to good advantage in it. A woman with an excellent figure appears stunning, as you can see. Poor figures . -- " Gwen shrugged -- "there are exercises for developing them. Or so I am told." Finnister interrupted in a cold voice. "And what do you propose to do with that... that uni... clothing?" "This will be the regulation Gwen. "There's a cute little hat goes with it. Very sexy." Battlemont said: "Perhaps the changeover could be made slowly so as to... "What changeover?" demanded Finnister. She leaped to her feet. "General Owling?" Owling tore his attention from the model. "Yes?" "Completely impractical! I will put up with no more!" barked Finnister. Battlemont thought: I knew it. Oh, my poor Gwenny! They will destroy her, too. I knew it. "We can't waste any more time with this agency," said Finnister. "Come, General." "Wait!" yelped Battlemont. He leaped to his feet. "Gwen, I told you... Finnister said: "It's regrettable, but..." "Perhaps we're being a little hasty," said Owling. "There may be something to salvage from this..." "Yes!" said Battlemont. "Just a little more time is all we need to get a fresh..." "I think not," said Finnister. other, thought: What a prize lot of gooney birds! She felt a little drunk, as euphoric as if she had just, come from a mood bar. Rebellion, it's wonderful! Up the Irish! Or something. Owling shrugged, thought: We have to stand together against civilians. General Finnister is right. Too bad, though. He got to his feet. "Just a little more time," pleaded Battlemont. Too bad about Andre, thought Gwen. She had an inspiration, said: "One moment, please." Three pairs of eyes focused on her. Finnister said: "If you think you can stop me from going through with our threat, dissuade yourself. I'm perfectly aware that you had that uni... that clothing designed to make me look hideous!" "Why not?" asked Gwen. "I was only doing to you what you did to virtually every other wom"Gwen!" pleaded Battlemont in horror. "Be still, Andre," said Gwen. "It's just a matter of timing, anyway. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Not really important." "Oh, my poor Gwenny," sobbed Battlemont. "I was going to wait," said Gwen. "Possibly a week. At least until I'd turned in my resignation." "What're you talking about?" asked Owling. "Resignation!" gasped Battlemont. "I just can't toss poor Andre here to the wolves," said Gwen. "The rest of our men, yes. Once they get inside they'll chew your guts out, anyway." "What are you talking about?" asked Finnister. "The rest of the men in this agency can take care of themselves... and you, too," said Gwen. "Wolves among wolves. But Andre here is helpless. All he has is his position... money. He's an accident. Put him someplace I where money and position are less important, it'll kill him." "Regrettable," said Finnister. "Shall we be going, General Owling?" "I was going to ruin both of you," said Gwen. "But I'll tell you what. You leave Andre alone and I'll just give one of you the business." "Gwen, what are you saying?" whispered Battlemont. "Yesss!" hissed Finnister. "Explain yourself!" "I just want to know the pecking order here," said Gwen. "Which one of you ranks the other?" "What does that have to do with it?" asked Finnister. "Just a minute," said Owling. "That intelligence report." He glared at Gwen. "I'm told you've prepared an adecal on the test model we made before coming to you." "Big Bertha," said Gwen. "And it's not just an adecal. I have everything needed for a full national campaign. Look!" A solido of the breast-bearing test model replaced the transparent suit hanging in the center of the room. "The idea for Big Bertha here originated with General Owling," said Gwen. "My campaign establishes that fact, then goes on to feature an animated model of Big Bertha. She is a living panic. Funniest thing you ever saw. General Owling, you will be the laughing stock of the nation by nightfall of the day I start this campaign." Owling took a step forward. Battlemont said: "Gwen! They will destroy you!" Owling pointed at the projection. "You... you wouldn't!" "But I would," said Gwen. She smiled at him. Battlemont tugged at Gwen's arm. She shook him off. "It would ruin me," whispered Owling. "Presumably, you are capable of going through with this threat," said Finnister. "Regrettable." Owling whirled on Finnister. "We must stand together!" he said desperately. "You bet," said Gwen. She pushed another stud on the remote control. A projection of General Finnister in her famous uniform replaced Big Bertha. "You may as well know the whole story," said Gwen. "I'm all set with another campaign on the designing of this uniform, right from the Sonnet Bonnet on down through the Sinister Finnister cape and those sneaky walking shoes. I start with a dummy model of the general clad in basic foundation garments. Then I go on to show how each element of the present for the... ah... Finnister... ah... figure." "I'll sue!" barked Finnister. "Go ahead. Go ahead." Gwen waved a sinuous arm. She acts drunk! thought Battlemont. But she never drinks. "I'm all set to go black market with these campaigns," said Gwen. "You can't stop me. I'll prove every contention I make about that uniform. I'll expose you. I'll show why your enlistment drives flopped." TED suffused the Finnister face. "All right!" she snapped. "If you're going to ruin us, I guess there's nothing we can do about it. But mark this, Miss Everest. We'll have the men of this agency in the service. You'll have that on your conscience! And the men we draft will serve under friends of ours. I hope you know what that means!" "You don't have any friends," said Gwen, but her voice lacked conviction. It's backfiring, she thought. Oh, hell. I didn't think they'd defy me. "There may even be something we can do about you!" said Finnister. "A presidential order putting you in the service for reasons of national emergency. Or an emergency clause on some bill. And when we get our hands on you, Miss Everest..." "Andre!" wailed Gwen. It was all getting out of hand. I didn't want to hurt anybody, she thought. I just... She realized that she didn't know what she had wanted. Battlemont was electrified. In # years, Gwen Everest had never appealed to anyone for help. And now, for the first time, her appeal was to him! He stepped between Gwen and Finnister. "Andre is right here," he said. He felt inspired. His Gwen had appealed to him! "You assassin!" he said, shaking a finger under the Finnister nose. "Now, see here!" snapped Owling. "I won't stand for any more of -- " "And you!" barked Battlemont, whirling. "We have recordings of every conference here, from the first, and including this one! They show what happened! Don't you know what is wrong with this poor girl? You! You've driven her out of her mind!" Gwen joined in the chorus: "What?" "Be still, Gwen," said Battlemont. "I will handle this." Gwen couldn't take her attention off him. Battlemont was magnificent. "Yes, Andre." "I will prove it," said Battlemont. "With Interdorma psychiatrists. With all the experts money can buy. You think you have seen something in those campaigns our Gwen set up? Hah! I will show you something." He stabbed a finger at Owling. "Can the military drive you insane?" "Oh, now see here," said Owling. "This has gone -- " "Yes! It can drive you insane!" said Battlemont. "And we will show, step by step, how you drove our poor Gwen out of her mind with fear for her friends. Fear for me!" He slapped himself on the chest, glared at Finnister. "And you know what we will do next? We will say to the public: This could happen to you! Who is next? You? Or you? Or you? Then what happens to your money from Congress? What happens to your enlistment quotas?" "Now see here," said Owling. "We didn't..." "Didn't you?" snarled Battlemont. "You think this poor girl is in her right mind?" "Well, but we didn't..." "Wait until you see our campaign," said Battlemont. He took Gwen's hand, patted it. "There, there, Gwenny. Andre will fix." "Yes, Andre," she said. They were the only words she could find. She felt stupified. He's in love with me, she thought. Never before had she known anyone to be in love with her. 'Not even her parents, who had always been repelled by the intellect they had spawned. Gwen felt warmth seeping through her. A cog slipped into motion in her mind. It creaked somewhat from long idleness. She thought: He's in love with me! She wanted to hug him. 'We seem to be at a stalemate," muttered Owling. Finnister said: "But we can't just -- " "Shut up!" ordered Owling. "He'll do it! Can't you see that?" "But if we draft -- " "He'll do it for sure, then! Buy some other agency to run the campaign." "But we could turn around and draft -- " "You can't draft everybody who disagrees with you, woman! Not in this country! You'd start a revolution!" "I... Finnister said helplessly"And it's not just us he'd ruin," said Owling. "The whole service. He'd strike right at the money. I know his type. He wasn't bluffing. It'd be catastrophic!" ing a parade of crumbling military projects pass before his mind's eye, all falling into an "You are an intelligent man, General Owling," said Battlemont. "That Psych Branch!" snarled Owling. "Them and their bright ideas!" "I told you they were fuzzyheads," said Gwen "You be still, Gwen," said Battlemont. "Yes, Andre." "Well, what're we going to do?" demanded Owling. "I tell you what," said Battlemont. "You leave us alone, we leave you alone." "But what about my enlistments?" wailed Finnister. "You think our Gwen, sick or well, can't solve your problems?" asked Battlemont. "For your enlistments you use the program as outlined." "I won't!" "You will," said Owling. "General Owling, I refuse to have..." "What happens if I have to dump this problem on the General Staff?" asked Owling. "Where will the head-chopping start? In the Psych Branch? Certainly. Who'll be next? The people who could've solved it in the field, that's who!" Finnister said: "But -- " "For that matter," said Owling, "Miss Everest's ideas sounded pretty sensible... with some modifications, of course." "No modifications," said Battlemont. He's a veritable Napoleon! thought Gwen. "Only in minor, unimportant details," soothed Owling. "For engineering reasons." "Perhaps," agreed Battlemont. "Provided we pass on the modifications before they are made." "I'm sure we can work it out," said Owling. Finnister gave up, turned her back on them. "One little detail," murmured Battlemont. "When you make out the double-fee check to the agency, make a substantial addition -- bonus for Miss Everest." "Naturally," said Owling. "Naturally," said Battlemont. When the space brass had departed, Battlemont faced Gwen, stamped his foot. "You have been very bad, Gwen!" "But, Andre -- " "Resignation!" barked Battlemont. "But -- " "Oh, I understand, Gwen. It's my fault. I worked you much too hard. But that is past." "Andre, you don't -- " "Yes, I do! I understand. You were going to sink the ship and go down with it. My poor, dear Gwen. A death wish! If you'd only paid attention to your Interdorma telelog." "I didn't want to hurt anyone here, Andre. Only those two -- " "Yes, 'y es I know. You're all mixed up." "That's true." She felt like crying. She hadn't cried... since... she couldn't remember when. "You know," she said, "I can't remember ever crying." "That's it!" said Battlemont. "I cry all the time. You need a stabilizing influence. You need someone to teach you how to cry." "Would you teach me, Andre?" "Would I..." He wiped the tears from his eyes. "You are going on a vacation. Immediately! I am going with you." "Yes, Andre." "And when we return -- " "I don't want to come back to the agency, Andre. I... can't." "So that's it!" said Battlemont. "The advertising business! It bugs you!" S HE shrugged. "I'm... I just can't face another campaign. I... just... can't." "You will write a book," announced Battlemont. "What?" "Best therapy known," said Battlemont. "Did it myself once. You will write about the advertising business. You will expose all the dirty tricks: the hypnoj ingles, the subvisual flicker images, the advertisers who finance textbooks to get their sell into them, the womb rooms where the you-seekers are programmed. Everything." "I could do it," she said. "You will tell all," said Battlemont. "Will I!" "And you will do it under a pseudonym," said Battlemont. "Safer." "When do we start the vacation, Andre?" "Tomorrow." He experienced a moment of his old panic. "You don't mind that I'm... ugly as a pig?" "You're just beautiful," she said. She smoothed the hair across his bald spot. "You don't mind that I'm smarter than you?" "Ah, hah!" Battlemont drew himself to attention. "You may be smarter in the head, my darling, but you are not smarter in the heart!" the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his distant search radar. Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out here beyond Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in a concentration that would make mining profitable. It's a long way home from outer space -- especially if you have to walk itl The thing on his radar screen looked quite small and therefore not too promising. But, as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing better was in sight at the moment. Marty leaned back in the control seat and said: "We've got one coming up, baby." He had no need to address himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within the better part of a couple of billion miles. Laura's voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below. "Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?" Marty studied the radar. "About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won't be a waste of energy to decelerate and look the thing over." He gave Clem's main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it. "Come and eat!" "All right." He and the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man, not considering it anything of particular importance, left the control room to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked downstairs in the steadily-maintained artificial gravity, he heard the engines starting. r  "EN hours later he examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing alertness that balanced between an explorer's caution and a prospector's elation at a possibly huge strike. The incredible shape of X, becoming apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long, as near as his radar could measure, and about a hundred yards thick -- dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find anywhere in space. It was obviously no random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and swatted him playfully. "Oh, you!" she said. Another, more real possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient fear of the Alien that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand years of intermittent space exploration, that had never been realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar eye. Aliens were always good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be not particularly amusing when you were possibly conmiles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic contacts or heroics. And with the only human assistance a girl on her first space trip, Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in such a situation. It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files for any reference to a spaceship having X's incredible dimensions. There was a chance -- how good a chance he found hard to estimate, when any explanation looked somewhat wild -- that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was certainly intriguing. Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity relative to Sol now also hung at zero. "I wonder," he muttered. "Space anchor...?" The space anchor had been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that there was still life aboard her; once "dropped," an anchor could hold as long as a hull could last. Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to him in the control room. "If we call the Navy and they bring it in we won't et anything out of it," he told her between bites. "That's assuming it's -- not alien." "Could there be someone alive on it?" She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn but, he thought, not frightened. "If it's human, you mean? No. I know there hasn't been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever heard of with this crazy shape..." The robot librarian indicated that it had drawn a blank. "See?" said Marty. "And I've even got most of the ancient types in there." There was silence for a little while. The evening's recorded music started somewhere in the background. "What would you do if I weren't along?" Laura asked him. He did not answer directly, but said something he had been considering. "I don't know the psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always done -- go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons. Therefore if X is alien I don't think Clem would stand a chance, trying to fight or run." He paused, frowned at the image of X. "That damned shape -- it's just not right for anything." "We could call the Navy -- not that I'm saying we should, darling," she added hastily. "You decide, and I'll never complain either way. I'm just trying to help you think it out." He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous. "If I was alone," he said, "I'd jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to Ganymede and sell it for a unique whatever-it-is. Maybe I'd make enough money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a first-rate ship -- or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of robot prospectors. I don't know, though. Maybe we'd better call the Navy." She stood up and laughed at him gently. "We're married enough already, and we had all the style I wanted. Besides, I don't think either of us would be happy sitting on an asteroid very long. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?" At the airlock door she had misgivings: "Oh, it is safe enough, isn't it? Marty, be careful and come back soon." She kissed him before he closed his helmet. They had moved Clem to within a few miles of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and approached it slowly, from the side. The vast length of X blotted out a thin strip of stars to his right and left, as if it were the distant shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds below him were watery reflections of the ones above. But space was too black to permit such an illusion to endure. The tiny FM radar on his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed up. "Lifeboat berth... empty," he said aloud, looking through the bike's little telescope. "Then it is a derelict? We're all right?" asked Laura's voice in his helmet. "Looks that way, yeah, I guess there's no doubt of it. I'll go in for a closer look now." He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but... At ten yards distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear, made sure a line from it was fast to his belt and launched himself out of the saddle gently, headfirst toward X. The armored hands of his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked around. He detected no response to his arrival. Marty turned toward Sol, sighting down the miles of dark cylinder that seemingly dwindled to a point in the starry distance, like a road on which a man might travel home toward a tiny sun. Near at hand the hull was smooth, looking like that of any ordinary spaceship. In the direction away from Sol, quite distant, he could vaguely see some sort of projections at right angles to the hull. He mounted his bike again and set off in that direction. When he neared the nearest projection, a mile down the hull, he saw it to be a sort of enormous clamp that encircled X -- or rather, part of a clamp. It ended a few yards from the hull, in rounded globs of metal that had once been molten but were now too cold to affect the thermometer Marty held against them. His radiation counter showed nothing above the normal background. "Ah," said Marty after a moment, looking at the half-clamp. "Something?" "I think I've got it figured out. Not quite as weird as we thought. Let me check for one thing more." He steered the bike slowly around the circumference of X. A third of the way around he came upon what looked like a shallow trench, about five feet wide and a foot deep, with a bottom that shone cloudy gray in his lights. It ran lengthwise on X as far as he could see in either direction. A door-sized opening was cut in the clamp above the trench. Marty nodded and smiled to himself, and gunned the bike around in an accelerating curve that aimed at the Clementine. only a part of one," he told Laura a little later, digging in the microfilm film with his own hands, with the air of a man who knew what he was looking for. "That's why the librarian didn't turn it up. Now I remember reading about them. It's part of an Old Empire job of about two thousand years ago. They used a somewhat different drive than we do, one that made one enormous ship more economical to run than several normal sized ones. They made these ships ready for a voyage by fastening together a number of long narrow sections side by side, how many depending on how much cargo they had to move. What we've found is obviously one of those sections." Laura wrinkled her forehead. "It must have been a terrible job, putting those sections together and separating them, even in free space." "They used space anchors. That trench I mentioned? It has a forcefield bottom, so an anchor could be sunk through it; then the whole section could be slid straight forward or back, in or out of the bunch... here, 'I've got it, I think. Put this strip in the viewer." One picture, a photograph, showed what appeared to be one end of a bundle of long needles, in a glaring light, against a background of stars that looked unreal. The legend beneath gave a scanty description of the ship in flowing Old Empire script. Other pictures showed sections of the ship in some detail. "This must be it, all right," said Marty thoughtfully. "Funny looking old tub." "I wonder what happened to wreck her." "Drives sometimes exploded in those days, that could have done it. And this one section got anchored to Sol somehow -- it's funny." "How long ago did it happen, do you suppose?" asked Laura. She had her arms folded as if she were a little cold, though it was not cold in the Clementine. "Must be around two thousand years or more. These ships haven't been used for about that long." He picked up a stylus. "I better go over there with a big bag of tools tomorrow and take a look inside." He noted down a few things he thought he might need. "Historians would probably pay a good price for the whole thing, untouched," she suggested, watching him draw doodles. "That's a thought. But maybe there's something really valuable aboard -- though I won't be able to give it anything like a thorough search, of course. The thing is anchored, remember. I'll probably have to break in anyway to release that." She pointed to one of the diagrams. "Look, a section thirty miles long must be one of the passenger compartments. And according to this plan, it would have no drive at all of its own. We'll have to tow it." He looked. "Right. Anyway, I don't think I'd care to try its drive if it had one." He located airlocks on the plan and made himself generally familiar with it. r T , HE next "morning" found Marty loading extra tools, gadgets and explosives on his bike. The trip to X (he still thought of it that way) was uneventful. This time he landed about a third of the way from one end, where he expected to find a handy airlock and have a choice of directions to explore when he got inside. He hoped to get the airlock open without letting out whatever atmosphere or gas was present in any of the main compartments, as a sudden drop in pressure might damage something in the unknown cargo. He found a likely-looking spot for entry where the plans had led him to expect one. It was a small auxiliary airlock, only a few feet from the space-anchor channel. The forcefield bottom of that channel was, he knew, useless as a possible doorway. Though anchors could be raised and lowered through it, they remained partly imbedded in it at all times. Starting a new hole from scratch would cause the decompression he was trying to avoid, and possibly a dangerous explosion as well. Marty began his attack on the airlock door cautiously, working with electronic "sounding" gear for a few minutes, trying to tell if the inner door was closed as well. He had about decided that it was when something made him look up. He raised his head and sighted down the dark length of X toward Sol. Something was moving toward him along the hull. He was up in the bike saddle with his hand on a blaster before he realized what it was -- that moving blur that distorted the stars seen through it, like heat waves in air. Without doubt, it was a space anchor. And it moved along the channel. Marty rode the bike out a few yards and nudged it along slowly, following the anchor. It moved at about the pace of a fast walk. Moved... but it was sunk into space. "Laura," he called, "something odd here. Doppler this hull for me and see if it's moving." Laura acknowledged in one businesslike word. Good girl, he thought, I won't have to worry about you. He coasted along the hull on the bike, staying even with the apparent movement of the anchor. Laura's voice came: "It is moving now, towards Sol. About six miles per. hour. Maybe less -- it's hard to read, so slow." "Good, that's what I thought." He hoped he sounded reassuring. He pondered the situation. It was the hull moving then, the forcefield channel sliding by the fixed anchor. Whatever was causing it, it did not seem to be directed against him or the Clem. "Look, baby," he went on, "something peculiar is happening." He explained about the anchor. "Clem may be no battleship, but I guess she's a match for any piece of wreckage." "But you're out there!" "I have to see this. I never saw anything like it before. Don't worry, I'll pull back if it looks at all dangerous." Something in the back of his mind told him to go back to his ship and call the Navy. He ignored it without much trouble. He had never thought much of calling the Navy. About four hours later the incomprehensible anchor neared the end of its track, within thirty yards of what seemed to be X's stern. It slowed down and came to a gradual stop a few yards from the end of the track. For a minute nothing else happened. Marty reported the facts to Laura. He sat straight in the bike saddle, regarding the universe, which offered him no enlightenment. In the space between the anchor and the end of the track, a second patterned shimmer appeared. It must necessarily have been let "down" into space from inside X. Marty felt a creeping chill. After a little while the first anchor vanished, withdrawn through the forcefield into the hull. Marty sat watching for twenty minutes, but nothing further happened. He realized that he had a crushing grip on the bike controls and that he was quivering with fatigue. sleeping and watching, that night aboard the Clementine. About noon the next day Laura was at the telescope when anchor number one reappeared, now at the "prow" of X. After a few moments the one at the stern vanished. Marty looked at the communicator that he could use any time to call the Navy. Faster-thanlight travel not being practical so near a sun, it would take them at least several hours to arrive after he decided he needed them. Then he beat his fist on the table and swore. "Must be some kind of mechanism in her still operating." He went to the telescope and watched number one anchor begin its apparent slow journey sternward once again. "I don't know. I've got to settle this." The doppler showed X was again creeping toward Sol at about six miles an hour. "Does it seem likely there'd be power left after two thousand years to operate such a mechanism?" Laura asked. "I think so. Each passenger section had a hydrogen power lamp." He dug out the microfilm again. "Yeah, a small fusion lamp for electricity to light and heat the section, and run the emergency equipment for..." His voice trailed off, then continued in a dazed tone: "For recycling food and water." "Marty, what is it?" He stood up, staring at the plan. "And the only radios were in the lifeboats, and the lifeboats are gone. I wonder... sure. The explosion could have torn them apart, blown them away so... "What are you talking about?" He looked again at their communicator. "A transmitter that can get through the noise between here and Pluto wouldn't be easy to jury-rig, even now. In the Old Empire days..." "What?" "Now about air -- " He seemed to wake up with a start, looked at her sheepishly. "Just an idea hit me." He grinned. "I'm making another trip." An hour later he was landing on X for the third time, touching down near the "stern". He was riding the moving hull toward the anchor, but it was still many miles away. The spot he had picked was near another small auxiliary airlock, upon which he began work immediately. After ascertaining that the inner door was closed, he drilled a hole in the outer door to relieve any pressure in the chamber to keep the outer door shut. The door opening mechanism suffered from twenty-century cramp, but a vibrator tool shook it loose enough to be operated by hand. The inside of the airlock looked like nothing more than the inside of an airlock. made in the outer door so he would be able -- he hoped -- to open the inner one normally. He operated the outer door several times to make sure he could get out fast if he had to. After attaching a few extras from the bike to his suit, he said a quick and cheerful goodbye to Laura -- not expecting his radio to work from inside the hull -- and closed himself into the airlock. Using the vibrator again, he was able to work the control that should let whatever passed for hull atmosphere into the chamber. It came. His wrist gauge told him pressure was building up to approximately spaceship normal, and his suit mikes began to pick up a faint hollow humming from somewhere. He very definitely kept suit and helmet sealed. The inner door worked perfectly, testifying to the skill of the Old Empire builders. Marty found himself nearly upside down as he went through, losing his footing and his sense of heroic adventure. In return he gained the knowledge that X's artificial gravity was still at least partly operational. Righting himself, he found he was in a small anteroom banked with spacesuit lockers, now illuminated only by his suit lights but showing no other signs of damage. There was a door in each of the other walls. He moved to try the one at his right. First drawing his blaster, he hesitated a moment, then slid it back into its holster. Swallowing, he eased the door open to find only another empty compartment, about the size of an average room and stripped of everything down to the bare deck and bulkheads. Another door led him into a narrow passage where a few overhead lights burned dimly. Trying to watch over his shoulder and ahead at the same time, he followed the hall to a winding stair and began to climb, moving with all the silence possible in a spacesuit. The stair brought him out onto a long gallery overlooking what could only be the main corridor of X, a passage twenty yards wide and three decks high; it narrowed away to a point in the dim-lit distance. A man came out of a doorway across the corridor, a deck below Marty. He was an old man and may have been nearsighted, for he seemed unaware of the spacesuited figure gripping a railing and staring down at him. The old man wore a sort of tunic intricately embroidered with threads of different colors, and well tailored to his thin figure, leaving his legs and feet bare. He stood for a moment peering down the long corridor, while Marty stared down momentarily frozen in shock. Marty pulled back two slow steps from the railing, to where he stood mostly in shadow. Turning his head to follow the old man's gaze, he noticed that the forcefield where the anchors traveled was visible running in a sunken strip down the center of the corridor. When the interstellar ship of which X was once a part had been in normal use, the strip might have been covered with a moving walkway of some kind. "HE old man turned his attention to a tank where grew a mass of plants with flat, dark green leaves. He touched a leaf, then turned a valve that doled water into the tank from a thin pipe. Similar valves were clustered on the bulkhead behind the old man, and pipes ran from them to many other plantfilled tanks set at intervals down the corridor. "For oxygen," Marty said aloud in an almost calm voice, and was startled at the sound in his helmet. His helmet airspeaker was not on, so of course the old man did not hear him. The old man pulled a red berry from one of the plants and ate it absently. Marty made a move with his chin to turn on his speaker, but did not complete it. He half lifted his arms to wave, but fear of the not-uriderstood held him, made him back up slowly into the shadows at the rear of the gallery. Turning his head to the right he could see the near end of the corridor, and an anchor there, not sunken in space but raised almost out of the forcefield on a framework at the end of the strip. Near the stair he had ascended was a half-open door, leading into darkness. Marty realized he had turned off his suit lights without consciously knowing it. Moving carefully so the old man would not see, he lit one and probed the darkness beyond the door cautiously. The room he entered was the first of a small suite that had once been a passenger cabin. The furniture was simple, but it was the first of any kind that he had seen aboard X. Garments hanging in one corner were similar to the old man's tunic, although no two were alike exactly. Marty fingered the fabric with one armored hand, holding it close to his faceplate. He nodded to himself; it seemed to be the kind of stuff produced by fiber recycling machinery, and he doubted very much that it was anywhere near two thousand years old. Marty emerged from the doorway of the little apartment, stood in shadow with his suit lights out, looking around; the old man had disappeared. He remembered that the old man had gazed down the infinite-looking corridor as if expecting something. There was nothing new in sight that way. He turned up the gain of one of his suit mikes and focused it in that direction. Many human voices were singing, somewhere down there, miles away. He started, and tried to interpret what he heard in some other way, but with an eerie thrill became convinced that his first impression was correct. While he studied a plan of going back to his bike and heading in that direction, he grew aware that the singing was getting louder. And therefore no doubt closer. bulkhead in the shadow at the rear of the gallery. His suit, dark-colored for space work far from Sol, would be practically invisible from the lighted corridor below, while he could see down with little difficulty. Part of his mind urged him to go back to Laura, to call the Navy, that these unknown people could be dangerous to him. But ' he had to wait and see more of them. He grinned wryly as he realized he was not going to get any salvage out of X after all. Sweating in spite of his suit's coolers, he listened to the singing grow rapidly louder in his helmet. Male and female voices rose and fell in an intricate melody, sometimes blending, sometimes chanting separate parts. The language was unknown to him. Suddenly the people were in sight, first only as a faint dot of color in the distance. As they drew nearer he could see that they walked in a long neat column eight abreast, four on each side of the central strip of forcefield. Men and women, apparently teamed according to no fixed rule of age or sex or size -- except that he saw no oldsters or young children. The people sang and leaned forward as they walked, pulling their weight on heavy ropes that were intricately decorated, like their clothing and that of the old man who had now stepped out of his doorway again to greet them. A few other oldsters of both sexes appeared near him to stand and wait. Through a briefly opened door Marty caught a glimpse of a well-lighted room holding machines he recognized as looms only because of the half-finished cloth they held. He shook his head wonderingly. All at once the walkers were very near; hundreds of people pulling on ropes that led to a multiple whiffletree made of twisted metal pipe, that rode over the central trench. The whiffletree and the space anchor to which it. was fastened were pulled past Marty -- or rather the spot from which he watched was carried past the fixed anchor by the slow, human-powered thrust of X toward Sol. Behind the anchor came a small group of children, from about the age of ten up to puberty. They pulled on small ropes, drawing a cart that held what looked like containers for food and water. At the extreme rear of the procession marched a man in the prime of life, tall and athletic, wearing a magnificent headdress. with Marty, this man stopped suddenly (young and old alike walked steadily at the same fast pace) and uttered a sharp command. Instantly the pulling and singing ceased. Several men nearest the whiffletree moved in and loosed it from the anchor with quick precision. Others held the slackened ropes clear as the enormous inertia of X's mass carried the end of the forcefield strip toward the anchor, which now jammed against the framework holding anchor number two, forcing the framework back where there had seemed to be no room. A thick forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework, expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into space "below" the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise anchor number one... He found himself descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came. Outside, he said: "I'm out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other end and I'll come home." He scarcely heard what she said in reply, but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better. The bike shot him thirty miles down the dream-like length of X toward Sol in a few minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he thought... and Sol was dim ahead. Almost recklessly he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving toward Sol once more. He looked in almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed. impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face. "People," he said, sitting down. "Alive over there. Earth people. Humans." "You're all right?" "Sure. It's just -- Godl" He told her about it briefly. "They must be descended from the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically there's no reason why they couldn't live when you come to think of it -- even reproduce up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen -- I bet their air's as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and gravity... they have about everything they need. Everything but a space-drive." He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was hard for him to stop talking to her. She was silent for a little, trying to assimilate it all. "But if they have hydrogen power couldn't they have rigged something?" she finally asked. "Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they'd keep moving." Marty thought it over. "Moving a little faster won't help them." He sat up and opened his eyes again. "And they'd have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them. "Somehow they had the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way, to evolve a system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going their children, and their grandchildren, and after that... Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused on the telescope screen. "All those years," Laura whispered. "All that time." "Do you realize what they're doing?" he asked softly. "They're not just surviving, turned inward on weaving and designing and music. "In a few hours they're going to get up and start another day's work. They're going to pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it. That's their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about thirty miles closer to home. "Honey, these people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a religion with them by now, or something very near it..." He put an arm around Laura. it take them?" "Space is big," he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize. After a few moments he continued. "I said just moving a little faster won't help them. Let's say they've traveled thirty miles a day for two thousand years. That's -- somewhere near twenenough to get from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they've got a long way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars' orbit. We're well out beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they're just about where they started from." He smiled wanly. "Really they're not far from home, for an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of their own solar system, and they've been walking toward the threshold ever since." Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the Navy within a few hours. She paused. "How long would it take them now," she asked, "to get somewhere near Earth?" "Hell would freeze over. But they can't know that any more, or maybe they still know it and it just doesn't bother them. They must just go on, tugging at that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday now and then... I don't know how they do it. They work and sing and feel they're accomplishing something... and really, they are, you know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they say of Earth, how they think about it." Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator. Marty watched her. "Are you sure?" he pleaded suddenly. "What are we doing to them?" But she had already sent the call. For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.      won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if anyNo. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy for P postoge j (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  #  AUGUST #I O  CjLxy #  K K Jack Vance J. T. McIntosh Judith Merril You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the VisKlens m  TratU Mark (overlay! way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-Ai Lens, #x# inch Art T" Board, # tubes Oil jfl.# Paint, Oil, Turpentine, flia # Brushes, # page In struction Book. Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Vis-a-lens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. hese great minds were Rosicrucian. Benjamin Frankli; Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose copy of ' 'The Mastery of Life" -- ligation; A nonprofit organization. Address : Scribe Z.G.L. Scribe Z.G.L. San Jose, California, U.S.A. California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address -- City State by Jack Vance by J. T. McIntosh by Jim Harmon by Keith Laumer by Margaret St. Clair by Bill Doede by R. A. Lafferty by Henry Slesar by Lester del Rey by Judith Merril by Sheri S. 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Off. touch of insomnia, especially if they don't happen to live more than two or three states away from New York, may now and then hear a radio program called "The Party Line," in which Long John Nebel and a panel of cohorts nightly plumb the problems of the world. In their time, they have looked into everything from the first-hand stories of men who claimed to be on friendly terms with flying-saucer people to the offstage opinions of show-biz folk. Not too long ago the subject was science fiction. The panel for the night included Lester del Rey (author of Nerves, The Wind Between the Worlds and innumerable other fine science-fiction stories), James Blish (author of A Case of Conscience, Surface Tension and, again, innumerable others) and Frederik Pohl (who, among other attributes, has lately been an occupant of Galaxy's editorial masthead.) In five and a half hours (the program begins at midnight and ends somewhere around dawn), there is time to explore a subject pretty thoroughly. That night science fiction got about as intensive a going-over as it has had in public for some years. The verdict: Mixed, but hopeful. "The trouble with science fiction," began Lester del Rey -- striking a note that makes an interesting harmony with his story in this issue -- "is that too much of the wonder has gone out of it. The wonder is still around us. Science still has exciting new things to write about. But to make them into stories requires thought -- and too many writers just won't give their stories that much thought." But, the panel agreed, there are more troubles than that. And one of the troubles is that no two people seem to be able to agree just what a science-fiction story is in the first place, much less what is good and what is bad in science fiction. "Every good writer who comes to science fiction makes his own rules," Jim Blish said. "There's very little in common between, say, Ray Bradbury and Hal Clement. The only definition I know that fits at least most of the cases is Theodore Sturgeon's: 'A science fiction story is a story like any other story except that, if you subtract the scientific element from it, there isn't any story left at all. Naturally the panel at once began listing stories which were exceptions to even that rule... and so it went on, until the dawn. There was much more -- five and a half hours more -- including excursions into psionics ("Not a science," ruled Blish and del Rey; "Well, maybe it might be, some day," ventured Pohl), dianetics, deros, fan feuds, convention goings-on and... well... everything. The producer of the show tells us that it was taped and will probably be replayed some time in the future. Maybe you'd enjoy sampling it when it is. M eanwhile, what about it? Is there a definition of science fiction that makes sense? And is it true that modern science gives writers countless opportunities to write fine science-fiction stories? Modern science probably gives just about everybody just about everything, since it operates in so many areas and on so many levels. The satellites and atomicpropelled submarines are "modern science." So are the confusing flipflop reversals that characterize so much of the theory behind the "life sciences." (Neurosis is -- isn't -- is caused by childhood shock, with no physical basis. Microbiological theory tells us staphylococcus -- only the staph fools us by adopting a whole new metabolism that pretends penicillin doesn't exist. Soil conservation techniques, warding against fire and like catasirophes, turn out merely to insure that when the catastrophe does come it is enormously more destructive... Say, is that an idea for a story? Is the universe really out to get us? ) On its higher, more abstruse levels, certainly there is much in modern science that is hardly known to the non-technical world, much less adopted by sciencefiction writers for their stories. "Science," says Dr. Edward Teller, "is constantly becoming more simple and more beautiful." And certainly we are each year acquiring new insights into the grandeurs of the basic laws of the universe; and certainly wonderful patterns and unexpected relationships begin to appear. But it's at least a question whether the basic laws of the universe are very useful to the science-fiction writer. And it's hardly a question at all that the sputniks and Moon probes are no longer in themselves enough to build science fiction out of. (We can't compete with the daily papers!) So between the here-and-now (rockets) and the far-out (the Dirac universe, Hoyle's steadystate cosmology and, yes, psionics) there should be a middle ground, a world of scientific ideas neither too big nor too little to spark great science-fiction stories. We maintain that ground exists. Confound it, we maintain that Galaxy has pitched its tent on it for lo, these many years! has the "wonder" we seek. The all-embracing cosmic discovery is too remote. (Honorable exceptions? Sure! But how few?) Of smaller bits our lives are made, and it is stories that touch our own lives in some way that give us pleasure. We think that good science fiction occurs when the static nucleus ("writer") absorbs the plodding neutron ("scientific idea") and, willy-nilly, explodes into the searing hard radiation that illuminates our lives, inside and out -- "good science-fiction story." "Good" becomes "best" when the scientific idea is itself something fresh and interesting, or when the writer has found something new to say about it. It does not have to be something as big as a theory of the origin of the universe. It can be: What would happen if we raised human beings in germ-free environments, as we now do with laboratory animals? (Allen Kim Lang's World in a Bottle .) Or: Suppose non-material aliens attack and we have to fight them? (Daniel F. Galouye's Fighting Spirit .) Or: What if evolution continues and the dog evolves to roughly human intelligence, the human to something beyond? (Damon Knight's Auto-da-Fe.) Or: How would an alien, not malevolent, go about getting the things it needed from a human child? (Theodore Stugeon's Tandy's Story.) Or: What will it be like in the Sahara when at last we get around to reclaiming it as living space? (Mack Reynolds's Farmer . ) These, you know, are stories that appeared right here in Galaxy in the last few months! Every one of them was solidly built on a basis of scientific idea, every one of them was handsomely extrapoOf course, there are more kinds of good science fiction than we have indicated here -- as James Blish says, there's a kind for every good writer. But there is the middle ground where the "wonder" can be found. And it's fertile soil! There's nothing wrong with science fiction -- nothing that good stories won't cure; and we think we've got them for you! That's our opinion -- what's yours? I A S the ships of two warring worlds fought savagely in space and in air over Belcron, Moka's capital city, Hugh Hawkins paced anxiously up and down the vast, empty MT area. It wasn't his own safety he was concerned about -- the Singalese ships would be as careful as Moka's own not to run any risk of damaging the Gate, and it was for that reason that Hugh's standing orders were to take cover in the MT area at the first threat of an enemy raid. Although scores of people were dying every minute all around him, Hugh Hawkins, the Mokan Gatekeeper, had no choice but to stay under cover and take no part in defense duties or even rescue operations. Not for Hugh Hawkins the safest of space-raid duties. He was far too valuable. Besides, he was technically neutral. Of course, it was always possible in such a ferocious, chaotic battle that a stray shot would find him, or that a damaged ship would crash down on the huge enclosures which was generally known as the Gate. But if that happened, if the Gate itself was accidentally destroyed, Hugh Hawkins wouldn't be valuable any more. The equation of power was easily balanced: He had the key to victory in their struggle against another planet -- they had his wife I By j. t. McIntosh It was not, however, any such considerations that made Hugh so jumpy. It was the fact that Alice was out in the middle of the turmoil. When the first warning came, a special flash to the Gatekeeper, Hugh had tried to take her to the Gate with him. But she had pointed out that it was test night and he'd have to be at the Gate until after midnight. So if they both went there straight away, and the fighting went on into the evening, they'd get nothing to eat all day. "I'll stay and fix a picnic dinner, honey," she had said. "You get over right away. I'll follow when I'm ready." He had protested, but she had pointed out that she wasn't under strict orders to dive for cover at the first hint of a raid, and he was. "Maybe I'll get there before anything happens," she had said optimistically. But she hadn't. The fighting had lasted for over an hour already. And merely by the noise and the ground tremors Hugh could tell that it was a big raid. He clenched and unclenched his hands. Didn't she know that he'd rather go hungry all day and all night than go through this torment? He was so sick with worry that by the time she did arrive he wouldn't be able to eat anyway. Strictly, no one but the Gatekeeper himself was allowed in the MT area, not even the Gatekeeper's wife. Nearly two years ago, however, Hugh had told the Secretary flatly that he wouldn't take refuge there unless Alice could come too. The Secretary had shrugged and said, "Oh, well." So two people out of Moka's two MT enclosure -- Hugh and Alice Hawkins. The Secretary wasn't. The President wasn't. Most particularly the army and navy chiefs weren't. Hugh walked across bare concrete to the door through which Alice would enter. On the other side of that door were three sentries. A guardhouse was built onto the Gate enclosure on the left; and other guards protected all the access roads around the Gate. Most of the time only a token force policed the checkpoints, for the Gate without the Gatekeeper was like an omelette without eggs. But when Hugh was there, and most particularly every eleventh night, when the tests were run, the Gate was guarded more closely than the treasury vaults. Hugh willed the bell over the door to ring. When it did ring, as he watched it, he jumped convulsively, his heart racing from shock. Leaping to the door, he pressed his thumb to the lock and -- slowly and automatically, as though alive -- it opened. carrying a picnic basket. She was immaculate in a yellow nylon shirt and flared red skirt, with bubble stockings and red plastic shoes, as if she had dressed for a picnic in the country instead of a dash through a city of destruction and death. "Did you have any trouble, darling?" Hugh asked, the weight suddenly lifted from his heart. "You took two hours." "Did I? Well, I had to fix dinner. And naturally I had to change. You wouldn't want your wife to look like any ordinary pretty girl, would you?" "Anyway, you're here now. Let's go to the office." "Yes, let's." She looked round the empty concrete arena and shuddered slightly. "This place gives me the creeps when it's like this. And I used to love it when it was busy. Say, Hugh, I drove straight through without being stopped. There's three guards outside that door, of course, but they were the only ones I saw." "I guess the raid has disorganized things. Is it bad out there, darling?" "Pretty bad," she said quietly. When they reached the office in the control block at the center of the area, Hugh phoned the checkpoints. He couldn't get an answer from Block A, but Block B replied at once. "Say, Sergeant, my wife just drove straight through. Is something wrong?" Sergeant Bronowski's voice came back. "We've been trying to raise Block A, sir, but can't. They may not have been hit, though. Communications often go during a raid. You think you're okay in there, sir? Hadn't you better go to one of the deep shelters?" "I'm okay here. The Singalese ships won't harm the Gate," said Hugh confidently. "If they're so careful about the Gate, how come they raid Belcron?" "They've got to do it occasionally, Sergeant, in case we trade on the protection of the Gate and surround it with important personnel, munition dumps and our most dangerous -- to them -- defense installations." "I get it, sir. Okay, we'll send a party over to Block A. Are you going ahead with the tests tonight, sir?" "Oh, sure. Even if the fighting's still going on, it doesn't affect the tests. But I think the Singalese ships will be called off before the tests are due." "I hope you're right, sir. I sure hope so."---Since he found Alice beside him, he reached out for her. At first he merely meant to touch her shoulder, but then, still affected by his recent fear when he had thought something might have happened to her, he found himself taking her in his arms and kissing her as if the date of their wedding had been next week instead of ten years past. "Well, well," said Alice, surprised. "Haven't you made a mistake, Buster? I'm your wife." "My wife is the most wonderful girl in the world. My wife is the most beautiful girl I know. My wife is the nicest, kindest, cleverest person I ever met." "Thank you, honey," said Alice, kissing him tenderly. "The best of it is, all that you said is true." It was true, certainly, that she was a beautiful girl. Her oval face was the kind beloved by artists and photographers but not movie directors -- she looked too intelligent to be a film star. And her figure at twenty-eight was better than it had been at eighteen, when Hugh married her. Then she had been slim but angular, occasionally awkward. In the last ten years she had developed curves that she didn't possess before, but no bulges. "I'm really a pretty lucky fellow," Hugh mused. "Married to a girl like you. Kept out of any danger in the middle of an interplanetary war. Given a nice house and paid a fat salary for doing not a hell of a lot." A slight cloud passed over Alice's face. Although what Hugh said was essentially true, sometimes she wished Hugh was still started four years ago there had been five Gatekeepers, and the other four hadn't retired voluntarily. Nor had they been sacked. Two years ago, when Hugh had been appointed Gatekeeper, it had seemed, for one thing, that the war with Singal wouldn't last were on half-pay for the duration, since they weren't doing anything, and the Hawkins's financial position had been close to desperate, especially as there had been a false alarm at the time that Alice was going to have a baby. But two years later the war was still going on, and nobody believed any more that it would be over soon. Official propaganda was taking the line that it would last at least three years more. And official propaganda was generally over-optimistic. Alice turned away and began to unpack the basket. Hugh moved after her and put his arms round her from behind. Although he had always known he loved her, not for years had he felt as he had felt in the last couple of hours, when he was forced to face the thought of life without her. "Darling, it's much too soon to eat," he whispered. And he began to pull her shirt out of the waistband of her skirt. "Hugh, it's the middle of the afternoon," she protested laughingly, "and broad daylight -- " "And we're in the center of the MT area," Hugh murmured, "the most private place in Belcron." He caressed her bare waist. Her breath came faster, "I thought we were too old for this kind of behavior," she said. They weren't. II  guard and unlocked the door behind him. After he had passed through the door and locked it again, he expelled his breath in a slow sigh of relief, as he always did when he was alone in the vast MT area at Newlyon. Blaken was an old man and it had been a long time since he had feared death. Yet only here, where there could be no danger of any kind, did he ever really relax. He had been the Singalese Gatekeeper for eleven months now, and it seemed like eleven years. It wasn't death he feared. It was the possibility that if he were ever tested, he would be proved unworthy. Six other Singalese Gatekeepers had died rather than betray their beliefs -- could he? He was becoming more and more afraid that he couldn't. He wasn't brave. Indeed, he knew himself to be a physical coward. Perhaps he should resign, so that one of the two deputies could be appointed Gatekeeper. Perhaps it was his duty to resign. In his mind he ran through the events which would follow his resignation. There would be surprise and suspicion when he said he wanted to resign, for a man of his known beliefs should never want to relinquish the post of Gatekeeper. Then he would have to complete the training of the new Gatekeeper. The master lock on the MT control board would be changed, the new lock keyed to the new Gatekeeper and not to him. And everybody would know that he had resigned because he was a coward. He shook his head. He wasn't brave enough to admit he was a coward. Even if it was his duty. Besides, if he weren't Gatekeeper, what would he do in this bitter, all-embracing war between two sister-worlds which had become enemies? Before Chet was appointed Gatekeeper, things had been tough for him, for he was a pacifist. In no circumstances would he have fought his fellow-man. So it was fortunate for him that he had been appointed to a job in which he had to be one hundred per cent non-combatant. Fortunate? Yes, but the last eleven months had hardly been the happiest of his life. In a few hours he would call Hugh Hawkins on Moka and they would talk before running the routine tests. It was only with Hugh, whom he had never seen, who was on a world at war with his own, that Chet could talk these days with any real sympathy and friendship. TF ever two worlds shouldn't have fought a war, they were Moka and Singal. The only two inhabited worlds of the Biara system, they were so far from any other inhabited world that contact with the rest of the human race was slight and trade non-existent. Moka and Singal should have been the friendliest of sister-worlds, and for a long time they had been. There was little natural competition: Singal, the inner world, was poor in metals but rich in food, while Moka, a manufacturing world, grew little but made everything the two worlds needed. And when the Gate had finally gone into operation after nearly fifty years of heartbreaking trial and error, and the loss of thousands of lives, it had seemed less than ever likely that the two worlds would ever have differences more serious than squabbles. Moka and Singal had seemed too dependent on each other ever to resort to war. The matter transmission Gates at Belcron on Moka and Newlyon on Singal had operated ceaselessly day and night. Metals, coal, manufactured goods, oil and synthetic textiles had passed through the Gate from Moka to Singal; meat, hides, wool, butter, cheese, grain, vegetables and wine had gone from Singal to Moka. The exchange had been roughly a million tons per day -- roughly, for matter transmission was reckoned in volume rather than in weight. Yet four years ago that had suddenly ceased. For four years the great MT areas had been empty and silent. As usual, something to fight about had been found. The casus belli in this case was the asteroid belt between the two worlds. Moka was jealously afraid that Singal would get all the metals she needed there, set up factories and thus become independent; Singal objected to Moka's greedy cornering of all the natural resources in the system. It had been predictable that when war did come it would be long, bitter and indecisive. Moka was short of food and Singal was short of everything else. But Moka could synthesize food and Singal could improvise. When the war finally did end, it wouldn't be because Moka was starving or because Singal had nothing left to fight with. Chet glanced at his watch. It was only #:#. Tests were usually carried out at midnight on the eleventh day, since conditions were best then on both worlds. Ten of Singal's days equalled eleven on Moka, with a little matter of eleven minutes over. Singal allowed for the eleven minutes by an adjustment every month. TT took Chet five minutes to cross the vast reception area and reach the control block. He spent them envying Hugh Hawkins, not because Hugh was young, but because Hugh had a wife whom he loved and who loved him. Unlike Chet Blaken, Hugh Hawkins didn't have to face his vast responsibility always alone. Chet went straight to the radio room and switched on the tape recorder. It was too soon to call Hugh; Hugh wouldn't come on the air until #:#. Chet always recorded his talks with Hugh, and played them back when loneliness weighed most heavily on him. In the machine was the tape he had recorded at the last test, eleven days ago. The machine started in the middle of conversation, the quality so good despite the fifty Moka that Hugh's cheerful young voice was reproduced as well as Chet's older, wearier tones... getting very short of white wine," Hugh was saying, "despite the fact that it's all been doctored with synthetic grape-juice and alcohol to make it go ten times as far -- making it barely drinkable, as you might guess. You wouldn't drink the stuff, Chet. But it's still better than synthetic beer." Chet's own voice: "I'll slip you half a dozen cases in the next test transmission. Sorry I can't get them for you now." A slight plop -- the tape recorder was monitored to operate only when there was a signal, and it took nine minutes for Chet's voice to reach Moka and the answer return. On playback, owing to the monitoring, there was no delay. "You tempt me, Chet. God knows how you tempt me. But I won't accept the offer. If anybody found out, there'd be the devil to pay. And what happened here would be nothing to what would happen there if anybody discovered you'd been transmitting contraband. But I'll tell you what we can do. I'll send you that metal fishing-rod you wanted, made out of a new alloy, and your story can be that we wanted to test whether MT affected the temper. You'll get away with that because nothing of this material has ever been sent through the Gate. And you can send me a dozen chickens." "Chickens?" Chet echoed, astonished. "I can't do that, Hugh. I'll get hung. Food is Number One contraband. One chicken, maybe, alive, since a living creature is the best test. But not a dozen, for Pete's sake. Hell, you wouldn't take wine and you want chickens! Have you gone crazy in the head, Hugh?" The plop again, and then Hugh's chuckle. "This is something that can only be worked so often, Chet, but the last time was three years ago, before our time. You send a live chicken on test, right? Only something goes wrong and the chicken arrives dead -- but edible, of course. Naturally the two Gatekeepers get worried and you send out for more live chickens and we use a different link. Only the next one arrives dead too. This goes on until I have eleven dead chickens, and after that one comes through alive, and we're both relieved we've found the fault and cured it." "I get it. Okay, you can have your chickens. And I'll sure be glad to get that fishing-rod. The season's just starting here." ended, for after that the tests had begun and Chet never taped what was said then. Hugh wasn't so careful. He even had his wife with him sometimes. From things which had been said Chet gathered that she was very beautiful, and she certainly had a lovely voice. He would have liked to see a picture of her but had never liked to ask for one in case the request should be misunderstood. He thought of Alice as a friend, like Hugh. Looking at his watch again, Chet saw that it was barely eight o'clock. Still three and a half hours to go. These regular tests were more than just routine. MT depended ting and receiving links being in perfect register. Every slight deviation had to be detected and corrected at once. Moreover, all the variables -- solar interference, gravitic bias, bounce effect, space dust concentration -- had to be laboriously plotted and allowed for as they occurred. The Gatekeepers didn't do all the calculations themselves, but they had to make all the adjustments. It was because of all this that it hadn't been possible, when the war started, simply to close down the MT stations for the duration. Unless they were kept in constant register there would be no Gate at the end of the war -- merely two vast junkheaps. So it was necessary that if the Gate was to be preserved, it must be regularly tested and adjusted. But not used, except for the tests. Obviously. The ringing of Chet's phone bell was a welcome diversion. He snapped the switch and the sentry's voice came through, sounding puzzled. "Guy here with a truck, Gatekeeper," he said. "Apparently passed through the other checkpoints okay. Says something about chickens." "That's right," said Chet. "I'll be right out." He walked back through the vast, empty arena. Hugh Hawkins would get his chickens. Chet had arranged the matter so that even if an official inquiry was made, which was unlikely, he'd be in the clear. He would take in only one bird, leaving the others outside the Gate in the care of the sentries. But a little after twelve o'clock he'd be out again, looking agitated, and telling the sentries that there was something wrong, that he'd need some more chickens. It was strange, Chet thought, that two men like Hugh and himself, who would die if they had to (and they might easily have to) in order to discharge their main responsibility as Gatekeepers, were quite unconcerned about illegally slipping a friend a steel fishing-rod or a dozen chickens. Ill---face, shrugged and drank some more. Catching Alice's eye, he blew her a kiss. She was sleek and immaculate again, and there was nothing to show that she had so recently been so active in the emotions of love. Indeed, she looked like a wise virgin. The virginal quality in her beauty had always been one of her chief charms, and after ten years of marriage she seemed in no danger of losing it. They had eaten a fair meal, considering how uninteresting synthetic food generally was. And the wine, poor as it was, was better than no wine at all. "Chet Blaken offered to send half a dozen cases of wine," Hugh said. "And you didn't take it?" "Couldn't very well. How could I carry out half a dozen cases of wine without anybody noticing?" "If you gave the guards a bottle each they wouldn't notice." Hugh shook his head. "Once bribery starts, corruption soon sets in. I told Chet to make it a dozen chickens instead, and we have a story to cover us in case anybody finds out." "How are you going to carry them out?" "Simple. In the picnic basket." Alice nodded at the fishing-rod in a canvas case leaning against the wall. "That's for Chet?" "Yes. We've got a story for that, too." "I'm sorry for Chet," Alice said quietly. "People don't understand how it is with Gatekeepers. But we've got each other. He's got nobody." "Huh? What are you talking about, darling?" "Maybe I get it more than you. People treating me as a sort of enemy, because you're the Gatekeeper. Everybody knows that if you let the army and the navy have their way, the war would be over in a week." "But there's an agreement... " " know, honey, you don't have to convince me. You and Chet are guardians, to see the Gate isn't used or tampered with, so that it'll still be there when the war's over. And if Singal didn't trust you, or Moka didn't trust Chet, the Gate would just have to be destroyed. But people who have lost sons, daughters, husbands and parents aren't very reasonable. All they can see is that if you let the army send through an atom bomb that would blow up half Singal -- " "If I did, it would be the biggest sell-out in history." "Of course it would. But don't you see, honey -- I know all that, I agree with you, I can stand anything that happens because I know we're right. But Chet hasn't got a lovely understanding wife like me." "I knew it was a mistake to say all those nice things about you." screaming noise far away began as a high whisper and became a shriek. It sounded more like a ship than a shell. Abruptly the scream was cut off and the ground shivered, although the ship must have crashed at least ten miles away. They said nothing about what they had heard; there was nothing to say. The phone bell rang. Bronowski's voice said: "Block A was flattened. Gatekeeper. None of the men got out. But we've sewn everything up now, sir. There's no risk of anybody getting through." Hugh acknowledged the message and put down the instrument. He looked round, puzzled, as he heard Alice gasp. Three men stood in the doorway, three men in the dark green uniform of the Mokan Army. One was a general and the other two were colonels. All three had guns covering both Hugh and Alice. "Stand away from that phone, Hawkins, or I'll shoot your wife dead," the general said harshly. For the next few minutes Hugh was to curse himself for doing as he was told. If he had picked up the phone Alice would certainly have been shot, and probably himself as well. But the guard force would have been alerted, and whatever the raiders had in mind would have failed. But hope springs eternal in the human breast, and Hugh had stepped away from the phone, hoping that some other way might be found, before he realized that he wasn't going to get such a chance again. One of the colonels moved between Hugh and the phone. The other moved behind Alice, whose face was ashen. "I'm General Howth," said the tall, lean-faced man who led the group. "Don't be alarmed, Mrs. Hawkins. We're no renegades. We have the full backing of the Army." "But not of the government," Hugh said sharply. "As you say. There are times of extreme emergency when it's necessary to take special powers and bypass the government, Hawkins." "You're wasting your time," said Hugh. "I presume you have some scheme for using the Gate, and consequently need me. It'll save a lot of trouble if you realize that I'll never co-operate with you, and that nothing you can do will make me." "Your wife is here, Hawkins," said Hpwth meaningly. "Why is it that military chiefs never have any imagination? Why is it they always see only their own side of any problem? General, the Gate cost lars to install, and it took fifty years to do it. It took thousands of ships, Mokan and Singalese, strung out in space to relay the first transmissions. Thousands of men died before it was working properly. And when the war started, nothing would have been easier, here or on Singal, than to destroy one installation so that the whole colossal, dangerous, expensive, heart-breaking job would have to be done again after the war. Didn't it give you some hope for the human race when the governments of Moka and Singal decided four years ago that even though temporarily we were going to be at war, the Gate would be maintained and never used, so that it would still be there when the war was over? Didn't you feel, as I did, that at last human beings were beginning to act like adults instead of maladjusted children?" Alice turned her eyes to Howth, praying that Hugh's appeal would have some effect. Couldn't he see that what Hugh said was so? When wars started, soldiers invariably blew up tunnels and bridges and roads that led across and under the defended lines. Naturally. And three or four years later, when the war was over, the bridges and tunnels and roads were rebuilt. But the Gate, the matter-transmission link between Belcron on Moka and Newlyon on Singal, was something bigger than any tunnel or bridge or road. Bigger, and yet more vulnerable. Obviously neither planet could allow it to be used while the state of war existed. But if it were destroyed -- and destruction of that tenuous link would be tragically easy -- then when the war was over, as one day it would be over, the vast labor of reconstructing the Gate, and the vast expense, would have to be borne by two wounded, bleeding worlds who were dependent on each other and would always be dependent on each other, even if r i f  . LZ? : .    . I i they quarreled often and occasionally fought. And it might take another fifty years -- fifty years during which there could be no prosperity on either world, not without the Gate. It might, in such circumstances, take more than fifty years. There might never be a Gate again. So the governments of Moka and Singal had said: Right, we're at war, and the Gate must go into cold storage. But whatever happens, whoever wins and whoever loses, the Gate is going to be needed again. Instead of destroying this wonderful thing that took so long to create, we'll appoint men independent of the war, independent of Moka or Singal, who will maintain the link without ever allowing it to be used for purposes of war. Men who alone, one in Belcron and one in Newlyon, will be able to control the Gate. Men of such honesty and sincerity and idealism that Moka can trust the Sinhalese Gatekeeper and Singal can trust the Gatekeeper on Moka. And since the war began four years ago, the Gate had never been used except for the regular tests operated bv the two Gatekeepers. But Moka now had its fifth Gatekeepers and Singal had its seventh. Ten men had been idealistic enough to die for their ' " f t t r   :   ' r s ' i  i ideals. And it began to seem that the toll would soon rue. and she saw with a stab of pain in her heart that he was quite unmoved by Hugh's appeal. "Hawkins," Howth said grimly, "we're losing this war. Yet we have a weapon that can win it. An atom bomb through the Gate... a battalion of men... a flight of bombers... a bacteriological onslaught. Five minutes' use of the Gate could win the war for us. And you say -- " "I say it's never going to happen," said Hugh. "General, have you ever heard the name Chet Blaken?" The General frowned. "Blaken? No." "He's my colleague, my friend. Chet Blaken is the Gatekeeper at Newlyon. If it weren't for Chet Blaken, an atom bomb would come through our Gate. Or a battalion of men. Or a flight of bombers. Or just tainted air carrying pestilence that would kill us all. But Chet Blaken is so honest that even you thrust him." "That's where you're wrong. The army believes that we must use the Gate to defeat Singal before Singal uses it to defeat us." "For Christ's sake, General, use your head! Singal could have done this fiendish thing you want to do any time in the last four years. Six Singalese Gatekeepers have been killed seeing that nobody did." "This argument is singularly pointless," Howth said coldly. "Hawkins, the Army means to use the Gate." "And I tell you that it never will." "You don't understand, Hawkins. You accepted our appearance with commendable coolness. You haven't asked how we got here. Although we took advantage of the raid to get past Block A, we found it necessary to kill the three guards and substitute men of our own. You'll understand from this that we're quite determined." "You're crazy killers," said Hugh bitterly. "Please, Hawkins," Howth said, and through his voice came the first hint that he was a man with human feelings, "don't make this any worse than it has to be. You must be aware that we're prepared to cut your wife to pieces before your eyes if necessary. Or if you seem able to bear your wife's pain better than your own, we can demonstrate that you can suffer terrible agony without any possibility of escaping by dying. Please recognize this and act like a reasonable man." Hugh said nothing. His eyes sought Alice's, and they tried to sum up ten happy years together in one final moment together. IV  opened it. The three guards were wary but not really suspicious; anything which got past the other checkpoints must be all right. And besides, the small dilapidated livestock truck driven by one old man didn't look as if it need concern them very much. Their wariness didn't do them any good. The silent shots from the interior of the truck must have been absolutely simultaneous. The three sentries dropped with hardly a sigh, two of them with their heads blown off and the third with a hole the size of a soup-plate in his chest. Only a second or so later Chet was seized from both sides and bundled back through the door from which he had just emerged. There were six men in all, dressed in rough, dark clothes and all with cloths over their faces. Alarmed as he was, Chet couldn't help finding this slightly reassuring. The fact that he wesn't to be allowed to see their faces strongly suggested that he was going to be alive afterwards. If he was to meet the same fate as the guards they wouldn't be concerned about whether he'd recognize them again or not. A short man with sparse fair hair did the talking: "Everything has gone like clockwork, Blaken, so you needn't waste your time thinking you're going to be rescued. The truck will drive back in a few minutes and check out. The guards on the door aren't due to be relieved until two o'clock: So we won't be disturbed." "Who are you?" Chet demanded. It wasn't a very intelligent question to ask six masked men, but he felt the need to force himself to be bluntly defiant. Now that the crisis had come, he was as scared as he had always feared he would be. They were marching him back to the control building. One of them ran on ahead to check up. The short man laughed. He wasn't scared. Indeed, he seemed exultant, as perhaps he had a right to be. A successful raid on the Gate must have been well planned and faultlessly carried through. Chet's request that a livestock truck should be passed through must have been seized on as a heaven-sent opportunity. Chet still didn't see how the truck had been able to get through with six men concealed in it, but that was an academic point, no longer of any great interest. They were here. Perhaps some of the guards at the checkpoints had been heavily bribed beforehand. "You can call me the Peacemaker," the blond man said, "for I'm going to end the war." He chuckled, pleased with himself. block and Chet was nudged back into the radio room he had recently left. The man who called himself the Peacemaker had a quick look round. Apparently satisfied, he nodded. Three of the men went out, probably to go to the entrance of the MT area and pose as the sentries who had been murdered. "You may as well know the situation," the Peacemaker said. "We left a box outside just now. At midnight you will send that box through the Gate to Moka. The instant it arrives, temperature and atmospheric pressure differences will cause it to detonate, spraying bacteria over a large area." He shrugged. "I grant that if Moka expected this, or learned exactly what had happened within a few minutes, it might be possible to destroy the whole area and nullify our efforts. But Moka won't realize what has happened for some hours. They will be reluctant to destroy the Belcron Gate, and by the time any countermeasures are taken they will be much too late." "You fool," said Chet contemptuously, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the Peacemaker draw himself up angrily. "You can't do this crazy thing without me, and you certainly can't do it with me." "You're going to find just what kind of a fool I am," said the other man. Clearly he was an egotist; Chet had touched him on the raw. "Listen. Our organization found out that tonight a heavy Singalese raid is being made on Belcron. We know that the Navy's orders are to destroy as much as possible in the neighborhood of the Gate there without damaging the Gate itself. Knowing this, knowing that there would be chaos in Belcron at this moment, we decided that tonight was the time to win this war. We discovered also that you had given orders that a truck was to be passed through. It was necessary then to -- " "You fool," said Chet again. "I gather you belong to some tinpot so-called patriotic organization? Friends of Singal, Singalese Victory Party, or something of the sort? Don't you think the Government knows what's best for Singal? Of course you don't. Like all crazy fanatics, you -- " "Blaken," said the other furiously, "if you were not necessary to us I'd have you shot as those guards were shot. You're a traitor. You want Singal to lose this war." "Like all fanatics, you see a little bit of the problem and dismiss everything else as unimportant," said Chet. He was finding that so long as he talked as if he wasn't afraid, he almost succeeded in preventing himself from being afraid. "Suppose this insane plan of yours works. The culture you wish to release in Moka will presumably cause an epidemic which will spread over the whole world and into the Mokan Navy. Inevitably, if it is sufficiently virulent to bring Moka to her knees, it will spread here too, and -- " "We have the antidote. Moka hasn't. Everything has been thought of, Blaken."  "Can't you see that Moka and Singal are dependent on each other? That if you weaken Moka, you weaken Singal? When this war ends, as it must end, Singal is going to need Moka!" The short man spun on his heel. "Number Two, get that syringe ready. Three, hold this old man." Chet felt a stab of fear again. They were going to drug him, make him incapable of resisting them. His fear made him speak when a braver man would have said nothing. "I said you were a fool. You're going to drug me with menticol or narco-meryllium. You know that only I can operate the Gate, that only the individual pattern of my brain's impulses will unlock the machines? Without me the Gate is useless. Don't you know that if I am drugged, my brain pattern alters so that even I can't operate the machines?" The Peacemaker's muffled curse showed that he had heard something of the sort but had hoped that it wasn't true. Chet already wished that he had stayed silent. True, menticol would damage his brain seriously and probably permanently, but it would have been quick and easy. He could have let them drug him, knowing that although he would soon cease to be aware of what was going on and he might do and say things that would horrify him if he knew about them, he couldn't be made to operate the Gate. "Go ahead," he said. "Try it. Drug me and see what happens." "It will have to be the other way," said the man who called himself the Peacemaker. "Do you enjoy pain, Blaken?" And Chet knew that he was going to need all the courage he could screw up, and more. A fanatic would stop at nothing, because fanatics always knew -- knew beyond all possibility of doubt -- that they and they alone were right. This was what Gatekeepers always feared. That was what Gatekeepers always had to be prepared for. No matter how carefully the Gate was guarded, sooner or later a group of socalled patriots temporarily captured the Gate and its Gatekeeper. This was the seventh time it had happened in four years. And the other six Gatekeepers had duly died to protect the Gate and the Gate agreement. So the six previous attempts had been abject failures. But where was Chet Blaken going to get the courage to make the seventh a failure too? V   didn't suspect for a moment that on Singal Chet Blaken might be going through the same kind of ordeal at exactly the same time. Although at various times and in various ways attempts had been made on both worlds to force the current Gatekeeper to assist in some unofficial or semiofficial attempt to bypass the rigid Government control of the Gate, at no time had there ever been simultaneous attempts on both worlds. Yet the coincidence was not remarkable. It had been the Singalese raid on Belcron which had made the Singalese extremists decide on this particular time for their effort; and it was the Singalese raid on Belcron which allowed General Howth and his Army opportunists to slip into the MT area undetected by the guards. No one but the gods knew that there was a risk of pestilence from Singal being released on Moka at the same time as an atom bomb from Moka exploded on Singal. The old classical gods, certainly, would have been amused. It was the kind of situation they enjoyed. Hugh had been shown the bomb. It lay outside in one of the transmission bays, a small, uninteresting object which looked like a two-gallon water can. Despite its unimpressive appearance, it could destroy a quarter of the population of Singal, and more than a quarter of Singal's material resources. Undoubtedly this would be enough to end the war. "It would be sensible to bow to the inevitable," Howth said. Hugh shook his head. Howth turned. "Take the woman outside," he ordered harshly, "and soften her up. Then bring her back and the real business can begin." A black-browed colonel seized Alice roughly by her belt. When she started to struggle he cuffed her hard on each side of the head, heavy blows that buffeted her a foot each way. Hugh leaped at the colonel. The paralyzing charge from the third man's gun caught him in midair. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes and didn't even see Alice being dragged out. were temporarily dead. He could see nothing but the floor under his face, so close that his eyes couldn't focus on it. He could hear, however. He heard Alice run, her high heels beating a staccato patter of fear on the concrete. He heard her fall heavily. He heard her scream. He heard sickening noises that sounded like a boot being driven hard into a soft body. He heard Alice sobbing in anguish and, worse, begging and pleading. The paralyzing charge had been minimal. Hugh was able to squirm within seconds, and as Alice was brought back he was climbing stiffly and awkwardly to his feet. There .was hardly any change in her appearance, apart from the fact that her hair was disordered. But the bloom was off her. She wasn't lovely and assured any more. Her fear made her look almost ugly, and it was horrible to see her cowering away from the man who had hurt her. Howth faced Hugh. "Are you going to send that bomb through?" "No," said Hugh wearily. Howth looked at his watch. "The Singalese Gatekeeper will expect you to call him in three hours' time. Three hours is a long time. It can be made to seem longer. For the last time, are you going to co-operate, Hawkins?" "No." Hugh found himself collapsing again. The man behind him must have paralyzed him. Helpless, he was hauled up, sat on a chair and tied in it. He saw Alice only when his head happened to be turned in her direction. When they had finished with him, they tied Alice in another chair facing him. Hugh tried to smile at her but couldn't. The paralysis hadn't worn off yet. Howth's voice was exasperated. "We don't want to do this, Hawkins. We're not enjoying it. But we have to make you send that bomb through. Carry on, Berton." Berton was enjoying it. Hugh could see that. Slowly, with lascivious pleasure, he cut away Alice's shirt, piece by piece, until she was quite nude above the waist. Hugh writhed in fury when he saw the dark contusions on her ribs, the huge angry red mark on her side. Berton enjoyed suspense, too. Turning away from Alice, he left her like that while he prowled about the room, picking up things and laying them down again. Presently he found something which interested him. It was the metal fishing-rod intended for Chet Blaken. He took out the top section, the thinnest, springiest part of the rod, and tried whipping the air with it experimentally. The swish it made in the air seemed to delight him. He kept cracking the rod viciously and then looking at Alice, who had gone very pale. "Get on with it, Berton," said Howth harshly. "Yes, sir." Berton approached her with the rod. A moment later, however, she opened them again, unable to wait passively, unable to pretend that what happened to the pale half-naked body tied in a chair was a matter of no concern to her. Berton swung with the rod and a fraction of a second later Alice screamed -- a raw, agonized scream which showed that the pain was worse than anything she had expected. A straight red line was drawn across her ribs, blood just beginning to ooze from it and spoil the. thin, neat line. Berton swung again, and this time the sound of the blow was covered by another scream from Alice; she screamed before the blow landed. Another red line nearly a foot long spurted bright red, across her shoulders this time. There was a gap of an inch or so in the middle. The hollow between her breasts began just there and the steel whip hadn't quite reached the bottom of the cleft. For the third time Berton struck, and this time Alice hadn't stopped screaming between the strokes. The third long red line was only an inch above her skirt, on the soft flesh of her waist. There was no bone there to protect her, and this time the gash was as deep as a sword-slash. Blood gushed down and tried to hide on her red skirt. Hugh didn't realize he was going to surrender until he had done so. He never remembered afterwards what he said. He would have said anything to stop what Berton was doing to Alice. After he had said it, whatever it was, he was conscious only of relief as Berton reluctantly stepped back, mingled with horror as Alice slumped in a faint. For a moment Hugh was afraid she was dead. Howth was speaking, but Hugh didn't listen. All that mattered was that Alice would be hurt no more. He didn't regret his surrender; he only regretted that he had delayed it. Whatever happened, even if a miracle somehow saved them both, Alice would carry three terrible scars to her grave. Whether Hugh would keep his word was another matter altogether. It didn't trouble his conscience that he had told the General he would do as he was told, without having the slightest intention of actually sending an atom bomb through the Gate to Newlyon. Even if he had merely postponed Alice's ordeal for a few hours, that was something. Of one thing there was no doubt. He couldn't have let Berton beat Alice to death. He would say anything rather than allow that. Whether he would do anything rather than allow that still remained to be seen... I T was #:#. "Watch him," said the Peacemaker as Chet began to snap switches. "If he does anything but what he said he'd do, let him have it." Apart from the waiting, Chet hadn't had a bad time. More sensibly, perhaps, than Hugh Hawkins, he had allowed the threat of torture to convince him. In a way all attempts to coerce a Gatekeeper were futile. In the end, he had to be in sole control of the machines. Whatever had been said and done, whatever he had promised, the question in the end was whether he would betray his trust and save his life or toss his life away and in doing so make all schemes to control him, and through him the Gate, a complete waste of time. The trouble was, his life was forfeit. Chet knew perfectly well that if he jammed or fused or disoriented the machines so that matter transmission was temporarily impossible, the Peacemaker would not say to him: "Okay, you win. We'll go away and leave you in peace." Ten other Gatekeepers, faced with something like this situation, had been able to do their duty. Six on Singal and four on Moka. Was he going to add to the list? Or was he to be the first without the courage to guard the Gate with his life? It was Hugh's turn to speak first this time. But the clock on the wall registered #:#, and then #:#, and still no sound emerged from the loudspeaker. The Peacemaker was impatient. "I thought you said -- " "I told you," Chet explained. "Hawkins began to transmit at #:#. But we won't hear his voice until nearly #:#. Wait." "When he speaks," said the Peacemaker grimly, "do exactly what you always do. Don't think you can outsmart us, Blaken. Don't try talking in code that he'll understand and we don't. Unless that case goes through the Gate, you're going to die. Remember that." Chet nodded. There was no need to act scared. He was scared. Being scared, he could try to act as if he weren't. At last it came: "Hugh Hawkins, Mokan Gatekeeper. You there, Chet?" "I'm here, Hugh," Chet said. He knew what to do; the only question was whether he could do it or not. The impulse to postpone the moment was strong -- so strong that he knew that if he started postponing, he'd go on postponing. "This is Chet Blaken, Singalese Gatekeeper. You know my voice, don't you? Well, there are three men here with me. They -- " There were two loud curses, and a shot. Chet Blaken's brains, the only brains in existence which could operate the Singalese Gate, were splashed against the metal case of the radio transmitter. Chet Blaken hadn't failed after all. VI A T Belcron they all had to wait four and a half minutes for Chet's reply. Howth and the two colonels were very careful to say nothing; anything they did or said would be picked up on Singal and the Singalese Gatekeeper would instantly switch off his matter transmitter. Alice was pale and drawn, wrapped in Hugh's jacket. Howth had let Hugh wash her wounds and bind them up, but they had no opportunity to talk privately. She had tried to talk with her eyes, pleading, despite her fear, despite her desire to live, that whatever he did he wouldn't send the atom bomb through the Gate. Without words she had tried to tell him that although she had screamed, although she had pleaded, she didn't want them to purchase their lives at such a price. Hugh himself still didn't know what he was going to do. The bomb wasn't going through, that was certain. But exactly how he was going to handle the situation he didn't yet know. Perhaps something Chet said would give him a clue. Then Chet's voice came. "I'm here, Hugh." A pause. "This is Chet Blaken, Singalese Gatekeeper. You know my voice don't you? Well, there are three men here with me. They -- " They heard other voices cursing, and the sound of a shot. Then silence. Hugh began to laugh. It was semi-hysteria. There was nothing funny about. the death of Chet Blaken, Singalese Gatekeeper, his friend. The laughter was shock, not humor. Howth was slapping him. "Get that bomb through!" he was slapping him. "Get that bomb through!" he was shouting. "Get it through now, before -- " "It's too late," said Hugh, getting control of himself with an effort. "It's much too late. There can't be any matter transmission without Chet, and Chet's dead." "He may not be dead. What we heard may be -- " "It doesn't matter whether he's dead or not. The microphone was on when you started shouting." Howth cursed. In his frustration he caught sight of Alice. "Berton!" he snapped. Hugh didn't wait for the order Howth was going to give. He interrupted quickly, forcing them to listen, to think, to realize that fury at their failure could accomplish nothing. "Don't you understand? What happened here happened at Newlyon too. There was somebody with Chet, trying to make him do what you were trying to make me do. Don't you understand yet? Chet Blaken died to save Moka ." Howth paused. It wouldn't have any permanent effect. He was not a man of much imagination. But for an instant he glimpsed something that he had never seen before and would never see again -- that there were things more important than victory, even in the middle of a bitter war. He growled and gestured to the other two. And the next moment they were gone. Alice threw herself in Hugh's arms, winced with pain and then broke down completely. Hugh wondered if he should phone the guards to warn them that there were men coming out of the MT area, but decided it was unnecessary. Anyone at all, except Hugh or Alice Hawkins, who emerged from the Gate area would be held under heavy guard. Even a general and two colonels. There would be a court-martial. The three men wouldn't get the death sentence, but they'd get long terms of imprisonment. Of course they had known that all along, and went ahead anyway. They were patriots. came three days later. The Secretary sent for Hugh. Hugh thought nothing about the summons, asuming that the Secretary merely wished to talk about the Howth affair or to inform him of new security arrangements  designed to make sure that nothing of the sort could ever happen again. But when he saw the Secretary's face, Hugh knew that the matter was much more important than that. "This is in strict confidence, Hawkins," the Secretary said. "Of course, sir:" Although a Gatekeeper was a great and important and valuable person, he naturally addressed the Secretary as "sir." "Singal is prepared to make peace," said the Secretary. Hugh jumped to his feet. "That's great news, sir." "Wait. The terms Singal offers are..." He shrugged. "Not good, not bad. Barely acceptable. The point is, Hawkins -- this is what I want to consult you about -- they say the reason for offering terms concerns the Gate." "The Gate, sir?" "It seems... I don't pretend to be an expert on these matters, Hawkins. Although the Gate is in my department, there is so much secrecy that... However. The Singalese Gatekeeper, as we all know, died defending the Gate. I understand that there are always two deputies available with the necessary knowledge and training, and that in such a case one is selected as the new Gatekeeper and the installation is keyed to his brain pattern." "That's so, sir." "The Singalese government tells us that one of these deputies died in a raid a week ago and the other was killed yesterday in a motor accident. They say that there is consequently only one way in which the Gate can be saved. They say they are prepared to make peace so that this thing can be done. What I want to ask you, Hawkins, is this: Is this a Singalese maneuver to gain some advantage, or is what they say likely to be true?" Hugh was suddenly very happy and very proud. "You can take the Singalese offer at its face value, sir. The only way the Gate can be saved is to appoint one of our deputies here and for me to go to Singal and establish a new Singalese Gatekeeper. That is, unless -- " he paused for a moment, the implications of the situation only gradually unfolding themselves to him -- "unless both brain locks are removed and the Gate is thrown open again." "In which case you'd still have to go to Singal?" "Yes, sir, if the two Singalese deputies are both dead. You see, sir, although before the war there were hundreds of MT officers who could control routine matter transmission, the security measures which were taken at the beginning of the war didn't stop at brain locks keyed to a single Gatekeeper. The method of operation was changed so that at any one time only the Gatekeeper and his two deputies know how to operate the controls. And of course only the Gatekeeper himself can -- " "I see, I see. So you think Singal's offer is genuine?" "Yes, sir." A ND two days later, even before the peace was official, Hugh and Alice Hawkins left for Newlyon -- by spaceship. In their private lounge in the ship, Hugh put his arm round her tenderly, being careful not to touch her wounds. Nevertheless, he felt something, or rather, the absence of something, and looked down at her accusingly. "You've taken off the bandages," he said. "They should still be on." "I know, honey, but with a figure like mine is it fair to spoil it with bandages?" She sounded like herself again. "What are you thinking?" she asked presently. "If anything." "About Chet. He was always afraid he'd fail if he was ever really tested. Well, he didn't." "He saved us," said Alice quietly. "You weren't going to send it through, were you?" "Of course not." She nodded. "I knew you only promised to stop them..." She shuddered uncontrollably for a moment, then went on bravely: "Anyway, Chet saved us." "He saved more than us, darling. He saved Moka and Singal." "How do you make that out?" Hugh was silent for a moment before replying. Then he said: "This is the first time that any two powers fighting a war have ever admitted that there's anything more important than their war. Chet and I both felt that was a great concession. That was one reason why we couldn't let the Gate agreement be broken. Chet's death was the final straw." "How?" "It showed that security didn't work and that one of these things had to happen. One, some Gatekeeper wouldn't be such a hero as Chet and the Gate would be used as a weapon of war. Two, the Gate would have to be destroyed. Three, Moka and Singal would have to make peace. Well, the two worlds decided they didn't want One or Two to happen. So there was only Three left." Alice stirred a little as her wounds itched. "Now there won't be any more Gatekeepers. You're There isn't much glamor in that title." "Hell, didn't I tell you, honey? They're giving me a courtesy title. Poor Chet gets posthumous medals from both Moka and Singal. But I didn't die, so I get a courtesy title instead. They invented it just for me." "What is it, darling?" "The Last Gatekeeper." L He came from the water system -- and could have flooded Earth ling is only approximate stuck his head up through the sink drain. It was a good thing Franny had left the basket stopper out of the drain; he would never have been able to lift such a heavy weight. He listened. His round, intelligent eyes were bright with curiosity. After a moment he expanded the frilly lettuce-green crest on the top of his head that was his organ for distance thought perception. He listened with it too, cocking his head thoughtfully from time to time. He did hope this was going to be a nice place. No quarreling or harsh words. The atmosphere of the kitchen -- freshly baked cherry pie -- seemed to reassure him. He put his tiny paws on the edge of the drain hole and levered his limber, celery-talk body up on the porcelain. It took him a long time. At last he was out. Out, and hungry. The cherry pie, cooling on the counter opposite him, smelled delicious. But his thought organ (Lochinvar was an extremely sensitive receiver, too sensitive for his own comfort, but he couldn't send at all), and with something beyond belief.  he ttuce frill on the top. of his head picked up ideas of "Precious" and "Taboo" from the cherry pie. He wasn't, after all, intolerably hungry and he didn't want to antagonize anybody. He'd wait. He bunched his four neat little paws under him, let his undercurved frondy tail hang down into the sink, and composed himself for a nice nap on the rim of the drainboard. He liked the smooth, soft feel of its monelmetal surface. He slept. Franny, coming in about five to start supper, found him still sleeping there. She gave a startled yip. Don, in the living room, heard her. He and Franny had been married nearly five years, but he was still a little silly about his wife and probably always would be. He came running in. "What is it, kid?" "There on the drainboard." She pointed. "A little green thing." squeeze and then bent over to look where she was pointing. "It's a -- " he said, and stopped. "I don't know what it is," he confessed. "I thought it was some sort of lizard, but it's shaped more like a sea horse. It doesn't look dangerous, anyhow." Lochinvar had opened his agate eyes and was looking at them. Not for the first time, he wished he had vocal cords. He hoped they wouldn't get scared and start poking at him. Fear wasn't as unpleasant for him to receive as anger and hostility, but it was bad enough. "It's sort of cute," Franny said after a while. "Those little feet and those big bright eyes and the way its tail hangs down. It seems friendly somehow. Where do you suppose it came from, Don?" "I can't imagine. Or what it is, for that matter. But, as you say, it's cute." Franny was still studying Lochinvar. Rather nervously she held out one hand to him. Lochinvar twitched his tail. Then he gathered his muscles, jumped, and landed accurately on Franny's forefinger. He clung there, using his frondy tail to balance with. "Be careful!" Don warned. "It might sting you." "Oh, no. You can't imagine how gently he's holding on with those little bits of paws. Do you suppose he'd like something to eat?" "I expect so, but what? Too bad he can't indicate his food preferences." Lochinvar had been waiting for just such an invitation. He hopped off Franny's finger, humped up his back, and took a long, long leap across the kitchen to beside the cherry pie. He looked up at them inquiringly. Don's jaw dropped. "He understood me!" "He wants some of the pie, Don." "That was for my supper," Don said. "I've been asking you for weeks to make a cherry pie." "Oh, he'll only eat a tiny piece." While her husband looked on reproachfully, she cut a sliver of the pie and put it on a saucer. Lochinvar ate daintily, partly nibbling, partly licking, like a cat, with his delicate golden tongue. When he had finished, he hopped on Franny's hand again. She stroked his head with one fingertip. Her blue eyes were bright with pleasure. "Why, he's covered with fur!" she said, surprised. "That green stuff is as soft as silk." "I wonder where he came from," Don said.    whose visit to Terra was a secret known only to three top-level people, was noticeably worried and distraught. Lochinvar had made himself quite at home in the Vennor household. Under the sobriquet of Boopus, he sat on Franny's shoulder as she did her housework, partook daintily of a French apple pie, and appeared to listen attentively to the baseball news on the radio when Don tuned it in. "He's the nicest pet we ever had," Franny said. "Um-hum. Practically human, and better-looking than most human beings. Besides being a Giant fan. Listen, kid -- " "Well?" "About that motorboat -- I've been thinking, and I can't see why we have to wait any longer for it." Franny's ordinarily smooth brow contracted in a frown. "Don, we just can't afford it now. We've been over this a dozen times." "Why can't we afford it? It only means borrowing a little more money. What am I living for?" Their voices had begun to rise. Lochinvar looked from Don to Franny anxiously. Were they going to have a quarrel? He hated it so. "Borrow more money? I want you to have what you want, Don. But this isn't reasonable." "Damn it, Franny, you're not being reasonable yourself. I -- " Lochinvar felt quite desperate. He must stop them. He jumped up and down a couple of times on Franny's shoulder, to attract her attention, and then made a valiant attempt to jump across to Don and repeat the performance. He misjudged the distance. He landed with an audible thud on the carpet. Franny and her husband both hurried to pick him up. As they stooped simultaneously, their heads bumped together. The next minute they were in each other's arms. "Is Boopus hurt?... Go ahead and get the boat, Don. It isn't worth fighting about." J"No, he's okay... I can wait for the boat, Franny." "We'll go shopping for it the middle of next month. I promise, Don. By then the payments for the trip we took to Tahiti will be out of the way... Are you sure he's all right?" "I think so." Don was probing Lochinvar's tiny person carefully. "He weighs so little that a fall's not serious for him, the way it would be for a larger creature. Besides, he doesn't act hurt." This was true enough. Lochinvar, who was feeling extremely relieved, had hopped on to Franny's hand and was looking at them with his usual expression of lovable, amiable intelligence. "He's so cute!" Franny said, delighted. She added, in one of the understatements of the ages, "He doesn't like it when we quarrel." all the languages of the Galaxy, better suited to the expression of deadly, elaborate, ceremonious insult than High Martian. The messages that Ivvy, the Martian ambassador, was getting from home were so lethally expressive that they made him turn pale and blink his eyes. None the less, what he had to do was so distasteful that he put it off for nearly a day longer. At last he forced himself to the unavoidable interview with the that Ivvy was serious, he acted. Agents went out. People were interviewed. Trails were followed. And ads appeared in the papers.    us," Franny said. She read aloud, "Lost, on July #th near the spaceport, exotic small green animal with brown eyes. Bushy tail. Very attractive and intelligent. Will finder please call KY #-#I immediately? Extremely liberal reward." "That ad must have cost a lot," Don said. "It's a display ad, not in the ordinary lost and found. Somebody wants Boopus back badly." He moved toward the phone on the table. "What are you going to do?" Franny asked. if) "Call the number, of course." "Wait." She put out her hand. "I don't want to give him up." "For a big reward? Franny, you mustn't be unreasonable!" "What could we buy with the money that would be as nice as he is?" "Um. Well, he is a Giant fan. But we can't just keep him, when his owner wants him back. That would be stealing." "Would it? I don't think anyone who's as careless as the owner must be deserves to have him. He'd never have got lost, if his owner had taken proper care of him." "Well..." Don said indecisively. The crest on Lochinvar's head was vibrating furiously. These people liked him and didn't want to give him up. Fine. He liked them too. But they'd quarreled once before, and he'd barely been able to stop them. If they quarreled again, anything might happen. He wouldn't be able to help himself. Lochinvar had no vocal cords, but in moments of intense emotion he was able to swallow air and emit a grumbling noise. He did this now. When he saw that Franny and Don were both looking at him, he hopped over to the phone and sat down on it. Once more he made the grumbling noise. Franny sighed. She ran one hand unhappily through her long blonde hair. "Go ahead and call," she said. "He wants you to." arrived somewhat later. His eyes were anxious and his lips, as he pressed the front door buzzer, were white. Nobody knew better than he what Lochinvar's possibilities were -- possibilities that, for all their comic aspects, were apt to end tragically. Franny opened the door. " 'Lo," she said muzzily. "Nize day." She giggled. "You the man about the ad?" What Ivvy had been afraid would happen obviously had been happening. Fortunately, it didn't seem to have gone very far. "Y es, I have come for the little animal," he answered. "Do I see him on your shoulder?" "Sure," Franny answered. "Boopus." She lowered her voice confidentially. "He's all stiff." "Oh, my," said Ivvy. That must mean Lochinvar had been rebroadcasting for quite a while. "Oh, dear." He produced a transparent globe that looked like plastic but was, in actual fact, made of kaointh -- a word that, in Martian, means "impervious to neural force." "Excuse me," he said to Franny. A little unsteadily -- for by now Ivvy was feeling the effect of Lochinvar's involuntary transmission himself -- he reached across to the girl, plucked Lochinvar from her shoulder, and dropped him tenderly through the opening in the kaointh globe. He closed the opening. He drew a long breath. "Ah," he said, "I am finally much relieved." Franny had been watching vacantly. Now she rubbed one hand over her face. "Relieved? Oh, I see. You were afraid somebody might hurt him. I see." She didn't see at all, but Ivvy found no reason for enlightening her. He followed her into the living room, holding the kaointh globe. He put the globe down on the cocktail table and began shelling out what was, precisely as the ad had said, an extremely liberal reward. Don had been sitting on the floor, looking bewilderedly at an unsteady tower he had apparently been building out of dominoes. Now he scrambled to his feet and shut the radio off. Ivvy began putting the money in his hand. Don accepted without enthusiasm. He had liked Lochinvar and he felt, just as Franny did, that there was something odd and unsatisfactory about the transaction. "How did the animal happen to get lost?" he asked. Ivvy's plump lips worked, but no sound came out. What point was there in relating to these Earth people the series of fantastic mishaps that had ended in Lochinvar's getting out of his protective case and being dropped into one of the city's reshosts chanced to fly over it in a 'copter? "He got into the water system by mistake," he said at last. "Oh." Ivvy put his wallet away. "You were listening to the radio?" he asked. "Yes." Don's good-humored face grew sour. "Giants are losing again," he said bitterly. "Every year they start out fine, every year they manage to foul it up. Makes my blood really boil." Ivvy nodded. What had happened was obvious. This Earthman's angry thoughts had grown too much for Lochinvar to absorb, and the wretched animal had begun re-emitting them involuntarily. Fortunately Ivvy had arrived in time. Franny followed him. "He was the nicest pet we ever had," she said wistfully. "We hate to let him go. You'll be good to him?" Once more the ambassador's face worked. This woman didn't realize -- and, if he had his way, never would realize -- that she and her husband had been harboring one of the fabulous Gryna animals. The Gryna animal's peculiar mental abilities run like a particolored thread through Martian history. Time and again whole cities have been betrayed to the enemy by the surreptitious conveying of a Gryna, minus its protective case, into their citadels. The animal itself is harmless, well-meaning and intelligent. But when it receives a certain quantum of hostile thought impulses from the human around it, it involuntarily re-emits them. It re-emits them transformed into a monumental, paralyzing euphoria. The firsf stages of this are not so bad -- rather like the happy phase of a drinking bout. Franny and Don had been at this stage when Ivvy came for Lochinvar. It is a stage of muzziness and block-building. But as the euphoria continues, it grows dangerous. Those within the radius of its effects are capable of walking off a cliff to see what is at the bottom, or putting their hands into a glowing furnace to pat the pretty flames. And a beleaguered city will open its gates to its enemies, saying happily, "Do come in." "I said we hate to let him go," Franny repeated a little insistently. "He has such a gentle nature. He hated it when we quarreled." Ivvy licked his lips. He thought of the incredulity that face when Ivvy had tried to tell him that Lochinvar was an ordinary precaution of Martian diplomacy. He thought of the worsening of high-level MarsTerra relations that was bound to result. He thought of what would have happened if Lochinvar had received enough hostile thoughts to get him really going before Ivvy reclaimed him. He thought of his own blasted career as a diplomat. But the code of Martian politeness is a compelling one. Ivvy forced his stiff face into a smile. "Yes, I'll be kind to him," he told Franny truthfully. "As you say, he responds badly to harsh words."      The sand-thing was powerful, lonely and strange. No doubt it was a god -- but who wasn't? sand where he fell, gloating over the success of his arrival. He touched the pencil-line scar behind his ear where the cylinder was buried, marveling at the power stored there, power to fling him from earth to this fourth planet of the Centaurian system in an instant. It had happened so fast that he could almost feel the warm, humid Missouri air, though he was light years from Missouri. He got up. A gray, funnelshaped cloud of dust stood off to his left. This became disturbing, since there was scarcely enough wind to move his hair. He watched it, trying to recall what he might know about cyclones. But he knew little. Weather control made cyclones and other climatic phenomena on earth practically non-existent. The cloud did not move, though, except to spin on its axis rapidly, emitting a high-pitched, scarcely audible whine, like a high speed motor. He judged it harmless. He stood on a wide valley floor between two mountain ranges. Dark clouds capped one peak of the mountains on his left. The sky was deep blue. He tested the gravity by jumping up and down. Same as Earth gravity. The sun -- no, not the sun. Not Sol. What should he call it, Alpha or Centaurus? Well, perhaps neither. He was here and Earth was somewhere up there. This was the sun of this particular solar system. He was right the first time. The sun burned fiercely, although he would have said it was about four o'clock in the afternoon, if this had been Earth. Not a tree, nor a bush, nor even a wisp of dry grass was in sight. Everywhere was desert. The funnel of sand had moved closer and while he watched it, it seemed to drift in the wind -- although there was no wind, Stinson backed away. It stopped. It was about ten feet tall by three feet in diameter at the base. Then Stinson backed away again. It was changing. Now it became a blue rectangle, then a red cube, a violet sphere. He wanted to run. He wished Benjamin were here. Ben might have an explanation. "What am I afraid of?" he said aloud, "a few grains of sand blowing in the wind? A wind devil?" He turned his back and walked away. When he looked up the wind devil was there before him. He looked back. Only one. It had moved. The sun shone obliquely, throwing Stinson's shadow upon the sand. The wind devil also had a shadow, although the sun shone through it and the shadow was faint. But it moved when the funnel moved. This was no illusion. Again Stinson felt the urge to run, or to use the cylinder to project himself somewhere else, but he said, "No!" very firmly to himself. He was here to investigate, to determine if this planet was capable of supporting life. Life? Intelligence? He examined the wind devil as closely as he dared, but it was composed only of grains of sand. There was no core, no central place you could point to and say, here is the brain, or the nervous system. But then, how could a group of loosely spaced grains of sand possibly have a nervous system? It was again going through its paces. Triangle, cube, rectangle, sphere. He watched, and when it became a triangle again, he smoothed a place in the sand and drew a triangle with his forefinger. When it changed to a cube he drew a square, a circle for a sphere, and so on. When the symbols were repeated he pointed to each in turn, excitement mounting. He became so absorbed in doing this that he failed to notice how the wind devil drew closer and closer, but when he inhaled the first grains of sand, the realization of what was happening dawned with a flash of fear. Instantly he projected himself a thousand miles away. " fuse vegetation. It was twilight. As he stood beside a small creek, a chill wind blew from the northwest. He wanted to cover himself with the long leaves he found, but they were dry and brittle, for here autumn had turned the leaves. Night would be cold. He was not a woodsman. He doubted if he could build a fire without matches. So he followed the creek to where it flowed between two great hills. Steam vapors rose from a crevice. A cave was nearby and warm air flowed from its mouth. He went inside. At first he thought the cave was small, but found instead that he was in a long narrow passageway. The current of warm air flowed toward him and he followed it, cautiously, stepping carefully and slowly. Then it was not quite so dark. Soon he stepped out of the narrow passageway into a great cavern with a high-vaulted ceiling. The light source was a mystery. He left no shadow on the floor. A great crystal sphere hung from the ceiling, and he was curious about its purpose, but a great pool of steaming water in the center of the cavern drew his attention. He went close, to warm himself. A stone wall surrounding the pool was inscribed with intricate art work and indecipherable symbols. Life. Intelligence. The planet was inhabited. Should he give up and return to earth? Or was there room here for his people? Warming his hands there over the great steaming pool he thought of Benjamin, and Straus, and Jamieson -- all those to whom he had given cylinders, and who were now struggling for life against those who desired them. He decided it would not be just, to give up so easily. The wide plaza between the pool and cavern wall was smooth as polished glass. Statues lined the wall. He examined them. The unknown artist had been clever. From one angle they were animals, from another birds, from a third they were vaguely humanoid creatures, glowering at him with primitive ferocity. The fourth view was so shocking he had to turn away quickly. No definable form or sculptured line was visible, yet he felt, or saw -- he did not know which senses told him -- the immeasurable gulf evolution. Then nothing. It was not a curtain drawn to prevent him from seeing more. There was no more. wall and clutched for support, but his knees buckled. His hand slid down the wall, over the ancient inscriptions. He sank to the floor. Before he lost consciousness he wondered, fleetingly, if a lethal instrument was in the statue. He woke with a ringing in his ears, feeling drugged and sluggish. Sounds came to him. He opened his eyes. The cavern was crowded. These creatures were not only humanoid, but definitely human, although more slight of build than earth people. The only difference he could see at first sight was that they had webbed feet. All were dressed from the waist down only, in a shimmering skirt that sparkled as they moved. They walked with the grace of ballet dancers, moving about the plaza, conversing in a musical language with no meaning for Stinson. The men were darkskinned, the women somewhat lighter, with long flowing hair, wide lips and a beauty that was utterly sensual. He was in chains! They were small chains, light weight, of a metal that looked like aluminum. But all his strength could not break them. They saw him struggling. Two of the men came over and spoke to him in the musical language. "My name is Stinson," he said, pointing to himself. "I'm from the planet Earth." They looked at each other and jabbered some more. "Look," he said, "Earth. E-A-R-T-H, Earth." He pointed upward, described a large circle, then another smaller, and showed how Earth revolved around the sun. One of the men poked him with a stick, or tube of softie kind. It did not hurt, but angered him. He left the chains by his own method of travel, and reappeared behind the two men. They stared at the place where he had been. The chains tinkled musically. He grasped the shoulder of the offender, spun him around and slapped his face. A cry of consternation rose from the group, echoing in the The men instantly prostrated themselves before him. The one who had poked Stinson with the stick rose, and handed it to him. Still angered, Stinson grasped it firmly, with half a notion to break it over his head. As he did so, a flash of blue fire sprang from it. The man disappeared. A small cloud of dust settled slowly to the floor. Disintegrated! Stinson's face drained pale, and suddenly, unaccountably, he was ashamed because he had no clothes. "I didn't mean to kill him!" he cried. "I was angry, and... Useless. They could not understand. For all he knew, they might think he was threatening them. The object he had thought of as a stick was in reality a long metal tube, precisely machined, with a small button near one end. This weapon was completely out of place in a culture such as this. Or was it? What did he know of these people? Very little. They were humanoid. They had exhibited human emotions of anger, fear and, that most human of all characteristics, curiosity. But up to now the tube and the chain was the only evidence of an advanced technology, unless the ancient inscriptions in the stone wall of the pool, and the statues lining the wall were evidences. the crowd. An object like a pallet was brought, carried by four of the women. They laid it at his feet, and gestured for him to sit. He touched it cautiously, then sat. Instantly he sprang to his feet. There, at the cavern entrance, the wind devil writhed and undulated It remained in one spot, though, and he relaxed somewhat. One of the women came toward him, long golden hair flowing, firm breasts dipping slightly at each step. Her eyes held a language all their own, universal. She pressed her body against him and bore him to the paflet, her kisses fire on his face. Incongruously, he thought of Benjamin back on earth, and all the others with cylinders, who might be fighting for their lives at this moment. He pushed her roughly aside. She spoke, and he understood! Her words were still the same gibberish, but now he knew their meaning. Somehow he knew also that the wind devil was responsible for his understanding. "You do not want me?" she said sadly. "Then kill me." "Why should I kill you?" She shrugged her beautiful shoulders. "It is the way of the Gods," she said. "IT you do not, then the others will." He took the tube-weapon in his hands, careful not to touch the button. "Don't be afraid. I didn't mean to kill the man. It was an accident. I will psptect you." She shook her head. "One day they will find me alone, and they'll kill me." "Why?" She shrugged. "I have not pleased you." "On the contrary, you have. There is a time and place for everything, though." Suddenly a great voice sounded in the cavern, a voice with no direction. It came from the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the steaming pool. It was in the language of the web-footed people; it was in his own tongue. "No harm must come to this woman. The God with fingers on his feet has decreed this." Those in the cavern looked at the woman with fear and respect. She kissed Stinson's feet. Two of the men came and gave her a him, and he thought he had never seen a more beautiful face. sounded again, but those in the cavern went about their activities. They did not hear. "Who are you?" Stinson looked at the wind devil, since it could be no one else speaking, and pointed to himself. "Me?" "Yes." "I am Stinson, of the planet Earth." "Yes, I see it in your mind, now. You want to live here, on this planet." "Then you must know where I came from, and how." "I do not understand how. You have a body, a physical body composed of atoms. It is impossible to move a physical body from one place to another by a mere thought and a tiny instrument, yet you have done so. You deserted me out in the desert." "I deserted you?" Stinson cried angrily, "You tried to kill me!" "I was attempting communication. Why should I kill you?" He was silent a moment, looking at the people in the cavern. "Perhaps because you feared I would become the God of these people in your place." Stinson felt a mental shrug. "It is of no importance. When they arrived on this planet I attempted to explain that I was not a God, but the primitive is not deeply buried in them. They soon resorted to emotion rather than reason. It is of no importance." "I'd hardly call them primitive, with such weapons." "The tube is not of their technology. That is, they did not make it directly. These are the undersirables, the incorrigibles, the nonconformists from the sixth planet. I permit them here because it occupies my time, to watch them evolve." "You should live so long." "Live?" the wind devil said. "Oh, I see your meaning. I'd almost forgotten. You are a strange entity. You travel by a means even I cannot fully understand, yet you speak of time as if some event were about to take place. I believe you think of death. I see your physical body has deteriorated since yesterday. Your body will cease to exist, almost as soon as those of the sixth planet peoples. I am most interested in you. You will bring your people, and live here." "I haven't decided. There are these web-footed people, who were hostile until they thought I was a God. They have destructive weapons. Also, I don't understand you. I see you as a cone of sand which keeps changing color and configuration. Is it your body? Where do you come from? Is this planet populated with your kind?" The wind devil hesitated. "Where do I originate? It seems I have always been. You see this cavern, the heated pool, the statues, the inscriptions. Half were as you. That is, they lived in physical bodies. Our technology surpassed any you have seen. The tube these webfoots use is a toy by comparison. Our scientists found the ultimate nature of physical law. They learned to separate the mind from the body. Then my people set a date. Our entire race was determined to free itself from the confines of the body. The date came." "What happened?" "I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the greatest law of all -- that an entity, once in existence, can never cease to exist." of the endless years of searching through the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking, glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already. The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. "Please ask the Sand God," she said, "to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us." "As for the webfoots," the wind devil, or Sand God, said, "I will destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet." "Destroy them?" Stinson asked, incredulously, "all these people? They have a right to live like any one else." "Right? What is it -- 'right?' They are entities. They exist, therefore they always will. My people are the only entities who ever died. To kill the body is unimportant." "No. You misunderstand. Listen, you spoke of the greatest law. Your law is a scientific hypothesis. It has to do with what comes after physical existence, not with existence itself. The greatest law is this, that an entity, once existing, must not be harmed in any way. To do so changes the most basic structure of nature." The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was silent, and Stinton felt as if he had been taken from some high place and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes pleaded. When he looked back, the Sand God was gone. Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now. But he understood her. "They'll kill me!" she cried. Stinson pointed the disintegrating weapon at them and yelled. They dropped back. "We'll have to get outside," he told her. "This mob will soon get out of hand. Then the tube won't stop them. They will rush in. I can't kill them all at once, even if I wanted to. And I don't." Together they edged toward the cavern entrance, ran quickly up the inclined passageway, and came out into crisp, cold air. The morning sun was reflected the rocks, the trees and grass. A silver thaw during the night had covered the whole area with a coating of ice. Stinson shivered. The woman handed him a skirt she had thoughtfully brought along from the cavern. He took it, and they ran down the slippery path leading away from the entrance. From the hiding place behind a large rock they watched, as several web-footed men emerged into the sunlight. They blinked, covered their eyes, and jabbered musically among themselves. One slipped and fell on the ice. They re-entered the cave.  mering skirt, smiling as he did so. The others should see him now. Benjamin and Straus and Jamieson. They would laugh. And Ben's wife, Lisa, she would give her little-girl laugh, and probably help him fasten the skirt. It had a string, like a tobacco pouch, which was tied around the waist. It helped keep him warm. He turned to the woman. "I don't know what I'll do with you, but now that we're in trouble together, we may as well introduce ourselves. My name is Stinson." "I am Sybtl," she said. "Syb-tl." He tried to imitate her musical pronunciation. "A very nice name." She smiled, then pointed to the cavern. "When the ice is gone, they will come out and follow us." "We'd better make tracks." "No," she said, "we must run, and make no tracks." "Okay, Sis," he said. "Sis?" "That means, sister." "I am not your sister. I am your wife." "What?" "Yes. When a man protects a woman from harm, it is a sign to all that she is his chosen. Otherwise, why not let her die? You are a strange God." "Listen, Sybtl," he said desperately, "I am not a God and you are not my wife. Let's get that straight." "But..." "No buts. Right now we'd better get out of here." He took her hand and they ran, slid, fell, picked themselves up again, and ran. He doubted the wisdom of keeping her with him. Alone, the webfoots were no match for him. He could travel instantly to ' any spot he chose. But with Sybtl it was another matter; he was no better than any other man, perhaps not so good as some because he was forty, and never had been an athlete. How was he to decide if this planet was suitable for his people, hampered by a woman, slinking through a frozen wilderness like an Indian? But the woman's hand was soft. He felt strong knowing she depended on him. Anyway, he decided, pursuit was impossible. They left no tracks on the ice. They were safe, unless the webfoots possessed talents unknown to him. So they followed the path leading down from the rocks, along the creek with its tumbling water. Frozen, leafless willows clawed at their bodies. The sun shone fiercely in a cloudless sky. Already water ran in tiny rivulets over the ice. The woman steered him to the right, away from the creek. numb from walking on ice. Christ, he thought, what am I doing here, anyway? He glanced down at Sybtl and remembered the webfoots. He stopped, tempted to use his cylinder and move to a warmer, less dangerous spot. The woman pulled on his arm. "We must hurry!" He clutched the tube-weapon. "How many shots in this thing?" "Shots?" "How often can I use it?" "As often as you like. It is good for fifty years. Kaatr -- he is the one you destroyed -- brought it from the ship when we came. Many times he has used it unwisely." "When did you come?" "Ten years ago. I was a child." "I thought only criminals were brought here." She nodded. "Criminals, and their children." "When will your people come again?" She shook her head. "Never. They are no longer my people. They have disowned us." "And because of me even those in the cavern have disowned you." Suddenly she stiffened beside him. There, directly in their path, stood the Sand God. It was blood red now. It pulsed violently. The great voice burst forth. "Leave the woman!" it demanded angrily. "The webfoots are nearing your position." "I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them." "What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or they will kill you." Stinson shook his head. The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes. "You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such primitive logic long before it reached your level of development." "Yes," Stinson said, "and your race no longer exists." The Sand God became a sphere of blue flame. A wave of intense heat drove them backward. "Earthman," the great voice said, "go back to your Earth. Take your inconsistencies with you. Do not come here again to infect my planet with your primitive ideas. The webfoots are not as intelligent as you, but they are sane. If you bring your people here, I shall destroy you all." The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely hills.  arm. "The Sand God is angry," she said. "My people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a warning that no more of us must come here." Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are hotter off on Earth. We can't fight a monster like him. Sybtl touched his arm. "Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak." "He spoke to me." "I did not hear." "Yes, I know now. His voice sounds like thunder in the sky, but it is a voice that speaks only in the mind. He said I must leave this planet." She glanced at him with suddenly awakened eyes, as if thinking of it for the first time. "Where is your ship?" "I have no ship." "Then he will kill you." She touched her fingers on his face. "I am sorry. It was all pr me." "Don't worry. The Sand God travels without a ship, why shouldn't I?" "Now?" "As soon as you are safe. Come." Steam rose from the burned area, charred like a rocket launching pit. They stepped around it carefully. Stinson felt warm air, but there was no time, now, to warm cold feet or dwell on the vagaries of Sand Gods. Together they crossed the narrow valley. Sybtl led him toward a tall mound of rock. Here they came to the creek again, which flowed into a small canyon. They climbed the canyon wall. Far away, small figures moved. The webfoots were on their trail. She drew him into a small cave. It was heated, like the great cavern, but held no walled pool nor mysterious lighting. But it was warm, and the small entrance made an excellent vantage point for warding off attack. "They will not find us..." A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was in an audible range. "The Sand God," Sybtl said. "Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the loneliest God in the universe." "What makes you think he's lonely?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I just know. But he's an angry God now. See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's angry?" "The Sand God isn't doing this," Stinson said. "It's only a storm." She covered his lips with her fingers. "Don't say. that. He may hear you and be more angry." "But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess." Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers. "Poor little Godwith-fingers-on-his-feet," she said. "You do not understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots awaf." build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also. "He never did this before," she said. "He never made the earth shake before." Great boulders crashed down the canyon walls and dropped into the creek. They dared not move from the cave' although death seemed certain if they stayed. "I'll leave for a moment," he said. "I'll be back soon." "You're leaving?" There was panic in her voice. "Only for a moment." "And you won't come back. You will go to your world." "No. I'll be back." "Promise? No, don't promise. The promises of Gods often are forgotten before the sounds die away." "I'll be back." He disappeared at once, giving her no chance to object again, and went to the desert of sand, where he had first arrived on the planet. He wanted to see if the storm were world-wide. Stinson had never been in a sand storm before, even on Earth. He could not breathe. He could not see. Bullets of sand stung his skin. Bullets of sand shot into his eyes. Clouds of sand howled around him. He fell, and the wind rolled him over and over in the sand like a tumbleweed. The skirt flew up around hi face. He could not get up again. He returned to the cave. Soon after, while they sat huddled together, watching the chaos of tumbling rocks, lightning, and driving rain, the high-pitched keening came again. A sphere of blue fire appeared in the east. shame. It bore down on the cave swiftly, purposefully. Stinson prepared himself to leave. In spite of his desire to protect Sybtl, it was useless to get himself killed when he was powerless to help her. But at the last moment it veered off. "Fiend!" Stinson screamed the word, vaguely marvelling at his own fury. The blue sphere turned and came back. "Monster!" Again. "Murderer!" "Adolescent!" This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped. Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl emerged from the cave. There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter. "The Sand God is tired," Sybtl said. "He is not angry now. I'm glad. Perhaps he will let you stay." "No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live here with a God who is half devil." appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs, of creeping, crawling nether things. The bird's twitter stopped abruptly. "Earthman," the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement. Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in one of his fits, but it might be worth it. "Don't go," she said. "Not yet." "Earthman, hear me." "I hear you." "Why does your mind shrink backward?" "I've decided not to bring my people here." "You decided?" "Certainly," Stinson said boldly. "Call it rationalization, if you wish. You ordered us away; and I have several good reasons for not coming here if the door was open." "I've changed my mind. You will be welcomed." "Listen to that, will you?" Stinson said angrily. "Just listen! You set yourself up as a God for the webfoots. You get them eating out of your hand. Then what do you do? You throw a fit. Yes, a fit! Like an adolescent. Worse." "Earthman, wait..." "No!" Stinson shot back. "You've owned this planet for a here alone since before my people discovered fire, and in all those ages you never learned selfcontrol. I can't subject my people to the whims of an entity who throws a planetary fit when it pleases him." Stinson relaxed. He'd had his say. Sybtl trembled beside him. A small mammal, round, furry, hopped by, sniffing inquisitively. Sybtl said, "Is the Sand God happy?" She shook her head. "No, he is not happy. He is old, old, old. I can feel it, My people say that when one gets too old it is well to die. But Gods never die, do they? I would not like to be a God." "Stinson," the Sand God said. "You said I was adolescent. You are correct. Do you remember I told you how my people, the entire race, left their bodies at the same time? Do you imagine all of us were adults?" "I suppose not. Sounds reasonable. How old were you?" "Chronologically, by our standards, I was nine years old." "But you continued to develop after..." "No."  At first there must have been a single voice crying into a monstrous emptiness, "Mother, where everyone?" A frenzied searching of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy. Then a returning to the planet. Empty... Change. Buildings, roads, bridges weathering slowly. Such a race would have built of durable metal. Durable? Centuries, eons passed. Buildings crumbled to dust, dust blew away. Bridges eroded, fell, decomposed into basic elements. The shape of constellations changed. All trace of civilization passed except in the cavern of the heated pool. Constellations disappeared, new patterns formed in the night sky. The unutterably And a nine-year-old child brooding over an empty world. "I don't understand why your development stopped," Stinson said. "Nor do I. But perhaps... well, I sense that I would continue, if you brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any portion of this planet that suits you. Take the webfooted woman for your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way." "The webfoots?" "You and they shall share the planet." The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said, "Is the Sand God angry again?" "No, he is not angry." "I'm glad. You will leave now?" "No. This is my home." She laughed softly. "You are a strange God." "Listen," he said, "I am not a God. Get that through your head." She drew him into the cave. Her lips were cool and sweet. The cave was pleasantly warm. Have you read The July issue is packed with headliners: by j. t. mcintosh -- and many more! July issue still on sale -- don't miss it! brightly than anyone in memory. And then he was gone. Yet there was ironic laughter where he had been; and his ghost still walked. That was the oddest thing: to encounter his ghost. It was like coming suddenly on Haley's Comet drinking beer at the Plugged Nickel Bar, and having it deny that it was a celestial phenomenon at all, that it had ever been beyond the sun. For he could have been the man of the century, and now it was not even known if he was alive. And if he were alive, it would be very odd if he would be hanging around places like the Plugged Nickel Bar. This all begins with the award. But before that it begins with the man. Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg was acutely embarrassed and in a state of dread. "These I have to speak to, all He appeared in glory and sank without a trace. Why? How? For the first time anywhere, here is the startling inside story. these great men. Is even glory worth the price when it must be paid in such coin?" Aloys did not have the amenities, the polish, the tact. A child of penury, he had all his life eaten bread that was part sawdust, and worn shoes that were part cardboard. He had an overcoat that had been his father's, and before that his grandfather's. This coat was no longer handsome, its holes being stuffed and quilted with ancient rags. It was long past its years of greatness, and even when Aloys had inherited it as a young man it was in the afternoon of its life. And yet it was worth more than anything else he owned in the world. Professor Aloys had become great in spite of -- or because of? -- his poverty. He had worked out his finest theory, a series of nineteen interlocked equations of cosmic shapeliness and simplicity. He had worked it out on a great piece of butchers' paper soaked with lamb's blood, and had so given it to the world. And once it was given, it was almost as though nothing else could be added on any subject whatsoever. Any further detailing would be only footnotes to it and all the sciences no more than commentaries. Naturally this made him famous. But the beauty of it was that it made him famous, not to the commonalty of mankind (this would have been a burden to his sensitively tuned soul), but to a small and scattered class of extremely erudite men (about a score of them in the world). Their recognition brought him almost, if not quite, complete satisfaction. But he was not famous in his own street or his own quarter of town. And it was in this stark conglomerate of dark-souled alleys and roofs that Professor Aloys had lived all his life till just thirty-seven days ago. When he received the announcement, award, and invitation, he quickly calculated the time. It was not very long to allow travel halfway around the world. Being locked out of his rooms, as he often was, he was unencumbered by baggage or furniture, and he left for the ceremony at once. With the announcement, award, and invitation, there had also been a check; but as he was not overly familiar with the world of finance or with the English language in which it was written, he did not recognize it for what it was. Having used the back of it to write down a formula that had crept into his mind, he shoved the check, forgotten, into one of the pockets of his greatcoat. river boat to the port city, hidden and hungry. There he concealed himself on an ocean tramp. That he did not starve on this was due to the caprice of the low-lifers who discovered him, for they made him stay hidden in a terrible bunker and every day or two they passed in a bucket to him. Then, several ports and many days later, he left the ship like a crippled, dirty animal. And it was in That City and on That Day. For the award was to be that evening. "These I have to speak to, all these wonderful men who are higher than the grocers, higher than the butchers even. These men get more respect than a policeman, than a canal boat captain. They are wiser than a mayor and more honored than a merchant. They know arts more intricate than a clockmaker's and are virtuous beyond the politicians. More perspicacious than editors, more talented than actors, these are the great men of the world. And I am only Aloys, and now I am too ragged and dirty even to be Aloys any more. I no longer am a man with a name." For he was very humble as he walked the great town where even the shop girls were dressed like princesses, and all the restaurants were so fine that only the rich people would have dared to go in them at all. Had there been poor people (and there were none) there would have been no place for them to eat. "But it is to me they have given the prize. Not to Schellendore and not to Ottlebaum, not to Francks nor Timiryaseff, not even to Pitirim-Koss, the latchet of whose shoe I am not -- but why do I say that? -- he was not, after all, very bright -- all of them are inadequate in some way -- the only one who was ever able to get to the heart of these great things was Aloys Foulcault-Oeg, who happens to be myself. It is a strange thing that they should honor me, and yet I believe they could not have made a better choice." So pride and fear warred in him, but it was always the pride that lost. For he had only a little bit of pride, undernourished and on quaking ground, and against it was a whole legion of fears, apprehensions, shames, dreads, embarrassments, and nightmarish bashfulnesses. He begged a little bit when he had found a poor part of town. But even here the people were of the rich poor, not the poor as he had known them. When he had money in his pocket, he had a meal. Then he went to Jiffy Quick While You Wait Cleaners Open Day and Night to have his clothes cleaned. He wrapped himself in dignity and a blanket while he waited. And as the daylight was coming to an end, they brought his clothes back to him. "We have done all we could do. If we had a week or a month, we might do a little more, but not much." town, cleaner than he had been in many years, and he walked to the hall of the Commendation and Award. Here he watched all th great men arrive in private cars and taxis: Ergodic Eimer, August Angstrom, Vladimir Vor. He watched them and thought of what he would say to them, and then he realized that he had forgotten his English. "I remember dog, that is the first word I ever learned, but what will I say to them about a dog? I remember house and horse and apple and fish. Oh, now I remember the entire language. But what if I forget it again? Would it not be an odd speech if I could only say apple and fish and house and dog? I would be shamed." He wished he were rich and could dress in white like the street sweepers, or in black leather like the newsboy on the corner. He saw Edward Edelstein and Christopher Cronin enter and he cowered on the street and knew that he would never be able to talk to those great men. A fine gentleman came out and walked directly to him. "You are the great Professor Foulcault-Oeg? I would have known you anywhere. True greatness shines from you. Our city is honored tonight. Come inside and we will go to a little room apart, for I see that you will have to compose yourself first. I am Graf-Doktor Hercule Bienville-Stravroguine." Whyever he said he was the Graf-Doktor is a mystery, because he was Willy McGilly and the other was just a name that he made up that minute. Within, they went to a small room behind the cloak room. But here, in spite of the smooth kindness of the gracious gentleman, Aloys knew that he would never be able to compose himself. He was an epouvantail, a pugalo, a clown, a ragamuffin. He looked at the nineteen-point outline of the address he was to give. He shuddered and he gobbled like a turkey. He sniffled and he wiped his nose on his sleeve. He was terrified that the climax of his life's work should find him too craven to accept it. And he discovered that he had forgotten his English again. "I remember bread and butter, but I don't know which one goes on top. I know pencil and penknife and bed, but I have entirely forgotten the word for maternal uncle. I remember plow, but what in the world will I say to all these great men about a plow? I pray that this cup may pass from me." Then he disintegrated in one abject mass of terror. Several minutes went by.- the room he was a different man entirely. Erect, alive, intense, queerly handsome, and now in formal attire, he mounted with the sure grace of a panther to the speaker's platform. Once only he glanced at the nineteenpoint outline of his address. As there is no point in keeping it a secret, it was as follows: #. Cepheid and Cerium -- How Long Is a Yardstick? #. Double Trouble -- Is Ours a Binary Universe? #. Cerebrum and Cortex -- the Mathematics of Melancholia. #. Microphysics and Megacyclic Polyneums. #. Ego, No, Henteis -- the Personality of the Subconscious. #. Linear Convexity and Lateral Intransigence. #. Betelgeuse Betrayed -- th Myth of Magnitude. #. MuMeson, the Secret of Metamorphosis. #. Theogony and Tremor -- the Mathematics of Seismology. #. Planck's Constant and Agnesi's Variable. #. Diencephalon and Di-Gamma -- Unconscionable Thoughts about Consciousness. #. Inverse Squares and the Quintesimal Radicals. #. The Chain of Error in the Lineal B Translation. #. Skepticism -- the Humor of the Humorless. #. Ogive and Volute -- Thoughts on Celestial Curviture. #. Conic Sections -- Small Pieces of Infinity. #. Eschatology -- Medium Thoughts about the End. #. Hypo-polarity and Cosmic Hysteresis. #. The Invisible Quadratic, or This is All Simpler than You Think. You will immediately see the beauty of this skeleton, and yet to flesh it would not be the work of an ordinary man. He glanced over it with the sure smile of complete confidence. Then he spoke softly to the master of ceremonies in a whisper with a rumble that could be heard throughout the hall. "I am here. I will begin. There is no need for any further introduction." For the next three and a half hours he held that intelligent audience completely spellbound, enchanted. They followed, or seemed to follow, his lightning flashes of metaphor illumining the craggy chasms of his vasty subjects. They thrilled to the magnetic power of his voice, ' urbane yet untamed, with its polyglot phrasing and its bare touch of accent so strange as to be baffling; ancient, surely, and yet from a land beyond the Pale. And they quivered with interior pleasure at the glorious unfolding in climax after climax of these before only half-glimpsed vistas. Here was a world of mystery revealed in all its wildness, and it obeyed and stood still, and he named its name. The nebula and the conch lay down together, and the ultra-galaxies equated themselves with the zeta mesons. Like a rich householder, he brought from his store treasures old and new, and nothing like them had ever been seen or heard before. Timiryaseff cried out in bafflement and incomprehension, and Doctor Ergodic Eimer buried his face in his hands, for even these most erudite men could not glimpse all the shattering profundity revealed by the fantastic speaker. And when it was over they were limp and delighted that so much had been made known to them. They had the crown without the cross, and the odd little genius had filled them with a rich glow. The rest was perfunctory, commendations and testimonials from all the great men. The trophy, heavy and rich but not flashy, worth the lifetime salary of a professor of mathematics, was accepted almost carelessly. And then the cup was passed quietly, which is to say the tall cool glasses went around as the men still lingered and talked with hushed pleasure. "Gin," said the astonishing orator. "It is the drink of bums and impoverished scholars, and I am both. Yes, anything at all with it." Then he spoke to Maecenas, who was at his side, the patron who was footing the bill for all this gracious extravagance. "The check I have never cashed, having been much in movement since I have received it. And as to me it is a large amount, though perhaps not to others, and as you yourself have signed it, I wonder if you could cash it for me now." "At once," said Maecenas, "at once. Ten minutes and we shall have the sum here. Ah, you have endorsed it with a formula! Who but Professor Aloys FoulcaultOeg could be so droll? Look, he has endorsed it with a formula!" "Look, look! Let us copy! Why, this is marvelous! It takes us even beyond his great speech of tonight. The implications of it!" "Oh, the implications!" they said as they copied it off, and the implications rang in their heads like bells of the future. Now it had suddenly become very late, and the elated little man with the gold and gemmed trophy under one arm and the packet of bank notes in his pocket disappeared as by magic. Oeg was not seen again; or, if seen, he was not known, for hardly anyone would have known his face. In fact, when he had painfully released the bonds by which he had been tied in the little room behind the cloak room, and removed the shackles from his ankles, he did not pause at all, but slipped into his greatcoat and ran out into the night. Not for many blocks did he even remove Jthe gag from his mouth, not realizing in his confusion what it was that obstructed his speech and breathing. But when he got it out, it was a pleasant relief. A kind gentleman took him in hand, the second to do so that night. He was bundled into a kind of taxi and driven to a mysterious quarter called Wreckville. And deep inside a secret building he was given a bath and a bowl of hot soup. And later he gathered with others at a festive board. Here Willy McGilly was king. As he worked his way into his cups with the gold trophy in front of him, he expounded and elucidated. "I was wonderful. I held them in the palm 'of my hand. Was I not wonderful, Oeg?" "I could not hear all, for I was on the floor of the little room. But from what I could hear, yes, you were wonderful." "Only once in my life did I give a better speech. It was the same speech, but it was newer then. This was in Little Dogie, New Mexico, and I was selling a snake-oil derivative whose secret I still cannot reveal. But I was good tonight and some of them cried. And now what will you do, Oeg? Do you know what we are?" "M oshennekov." "Why, so we are." "Schwindlern." "The very word." "Low-life con men. And the world you live on is not the one you were born on. I will join you if I may." "Oeg, you have a talent for going to the core of the apple." For when a man (however unlikely a man) shows real talent, then the Wreckville bunch has to recruit him. They cannot have uncontrolled talent running loose in the commonalty of mankind. its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus #f for postage and handling. # Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately ! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, Name Address. City The Original Edition -- Complete I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage #State. I Endos Let the dead past bury its dead? Not while I am alive , I T surely was all right for me to let myself do it now. I couldn't have been more safe. In the window of the radio store a color television set was enjoying a quiz by itself and creased in my pocket was the newspaper account of the failure of a monumental human adventure in the blooming extinction of a huge rocket. The boys on the corner seemed hardly human, scowling anthropoids in walrus-skin coats. It was my own time. Anybody could see I was safe, and I could risk doing what I ached to do. I turned the corner. The breaks were against me from the start. It didn't come as any surprise. I could never get away with it. I knew that all along. There was a Packard parked just beyond the fire plug. The metal and glass fronts of the buildings didn't show back here, only seasoned brick glued with powdering chalk. The line of the block seemed to stretch back, ever further away from the glossy fronts into the crumbling stone. A man brushed past me, wearing an Ivy League suit and snapbrim hat, carrying a briefcase. And, reassuringly, he was in a hurry. I decided to chance it. I certainly wanted to do it in the worst way. My footsteps carried me on down the block. A little car spurted on past me. One of those foreign jobs, I decided. Only it wasn't. I fixed the silhouette in my mind's eye and identified it. A Henry J. Still, I wasn't worried. It was actually too early in the day. It wasn't as if it were evening or anything like that. The little store was right where I left it, rotting quietly to itself. The Back Number Store, the faded circus poster proclaimed in red and gold, or now, pink and lemon. In the window, in cellophane envelopes, were the first issue of Life, a recent issue of Modern Man with a modern woman fronting it, a Big Big Book of Buck Rogers and the Silver Cities of Venus, and a brand-new, sun-bleached copy of Doctor Zhivago. There was a little car at the curb. This time I recognized that it wasn't an import, just a Crosley. I went in, the brass handle making me conscious of the sweat on my palm. r "HE old man sat behind a fortress of magazines and books, treacherously reading the funnies in a newspaper. His bald head swiveled on the hunched shoulders of his sweater which was azuring toward white. He grinned, toothless. "Came back for more of the stuff, did you?" He laid down the newspaper. (That subheadline couldn't really be making so nasty a suggestion to a noted general, could it? ) "Yes," I laughed, not very true. "I know what a craving can be. I shouldn't smoke, but I do. I've tried to stop but I lie there thinking about cigarettes half the night. Long ones, short ones, smoked ones, ones unlit. I feel like I could smoke one in each hand. It like that with you?" "Not that bad. To me it's just -- " "Don't tell me reading isn't a craving with some of you fellows. I've seen guys come in here, hardly two threads stuck together on them, and grab up them horror magazines and read and read, until sweat starts rolling off the end of their nose. I've hardly got the heart to throw 'em out." Horror magazines. 'Ones with lovely girls about to have their flesh shredded by toothy vampires. Yes, they were a part of it. Not a big part, but a part. "That's not what I want to see. I want -- " The old man snickered. "I know what you want. Indeed I do. This way." I followed his spidering hand and sure enough, there they were. Stacks upon stacks of air-war pulp magazines. "Fifteen cents for ones in good condition," the old man pronounced the ritual, "a dime for ones with incomplete covers, three for a quarter, check 'em at the desk when you go." I ran my hand down a stack. Wings, Daredevil Aces, G-# and his Battle Aces, The Lone Eagle, all of them. The old man was watching me. He skittered back across the floor and snatched up a magazine. It was a copy of Sky Fighters with a girl in a painted-on flying suit hanging from the struts of a Tiger Moth. "This one, this one," he said. "This must be a good one. I bet she gets shoved right into that propeller there. I bet she gets chopped to pieces. Pieces." "I'll take it." Reluctantly he handed over the magazine, waited a moment, then left me. I stared at the stacks of flying story magazines and I felt the slow run of the drop of sweat down my nose. My sickness was terrible. It is as bad to be nostalgic for things you have never known as for an orphan who has never had a home to be homesick. always me. I never watched anything on TV made later than #. I was in love with Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Dolores del Rio. My favorite stars were Richard Dix, Chester Morris and Richard Arlen. The music I listened to was Gershwin and Arlen and Chicago jazz. And my reading was the pulp literature harking back to the First World War. This was the biggest part of it all, I think. You identify with the hero of any story if it's well enough written. But the identification I felt with the pilots in air-war stories was plainly ridiculous. I was there. I was in the saddle of the cockpit, feeling on my face the bite of the slipstream -- no, that was a later term -- the propwash? -- no, that was still later -- the backlash from the screw, that was it. I was lifting to meet the Fokker triplanes in the dawn sky. Then in a moment my Vickers was chattering in answer to Spandaus, firing through the screw outfitted with iron edges to deflect bullets that did not pass to the left and right. And back through the aerial maps in the cockpit pocket at my knee. Here he comes, the Spandaus firing right through the screw in perfect synchronization. Look at that chivalrous wave. You can almost see the dueling scar on his check from old Krautenberg. He can afford to be chivalrous in that Fokker. I'd like to trade this skiddoo for it. That may be just what I do too if I don't watch it. You ain't any Boelcke, mister, but this is from the Fifth for Squadron #. Missed! Hard on that rudder! God, look at the snake in that fabric. At least it was a lie about them using incendiaries. One of your own tricks for you, Heinie. Up on the stick, up under your tail, into the blind spot. Where am I? Where am I? Right here. Look at that tail go. Tony can't be giving you as good stuff as he claims. So long. I'm waving, see. He's pulling her up. No tail and he's pulling her up. He's a good man. Come on. A little more. A little more and you can deadstick her. Come on, buddy. You're doing it. You're pulling her up -- But not enough. God, what a mess. I'm sick. That damned castor oil in the carburetor. I'll be in the W. C. until oh-six-hundred... lTO, the air wasn't one of castor  oil but the pleasant smell of aged paper and printer's ink. I'd been daydreaming again. I shouldn't forget things were getting different lately. It was becoming dangerous. I gathered up an armload of air-war magazines at random. Leaning across the table, I noticed the curtain in back for the first time. It was a beaded curtain of many different colors. Theda Bara might have worn it for a skirt. Behind the curtain was a television set. It was a comforting anti-anachronism here. The sixor eight-inch picture was on a very flat tube, a more pronounced Predicta. The size and the flatness didn't seem to go together. Then I saw that the top part of the set was a mirror reflecting an image from the roof of the cabinet where the actual picture tube lay flat. There was an old movie on the channel. An old, old movie. Lon Chaney, Sr., in a western as a badman. He was protecting a doll-faced blonde from the rest of the gang, standing them off from a grove of rocks. The flickering action caught my unblinking eyes. Tom Santschi is sneaking across the top of the rocks, a knife in his dirty half-breed hand. Raymond Hatton makes a try for his old boss, but Chaney stops his num is riding up with the posse. Tom makes a try with the knife, the girl screams, and Chaney turns the blade back on him. It goes through his neck, all the way through. The blonde is running toward Farnum as he polishes off the rest of the gang and dismounts, her blouse shredded, revealing one breast -- is that the dawn of Bessie Love? Chaney stands up in the rocks. Farnum aims his six-shooter. No, no, say the girl's lips. "No!" "No!" says the subtitle. Farnum fires. Swimming in blood, Chaney smiles sadly and falls. I had seen movies like that before. When I was a kid, I had seen Flicker Flashbacks between chapters of Flash Gordon and Johnny Mack Brown westerns. I looked at old movies and heard the oily voice making fun of them. But hadn't I also seen these pictures with the sound of piano playing and low conversation? I had seen these pictures before the war. The war had made a lot of difference in my life. Comic books were cut down to half their size, from # to # pages, and prices had gone up to where you had to pay # for a pair of shoes, so high that people said Wilson should do something about it. Tom Mix had gone off the air and he and his Cowboy Commandos beat the Japs in comic books. Only, hadn't he sold Liberty Bonds with Helen Morgan? And at school I had bought Defense -- War -- Savings -- Security -- Liberty -- Freedom -- I had bought stamps at school. I never did get enough to trade in for a bond, but Mama had taken my book and traded parts of it in for coffee. She could never get enough coffee... "Nobody would look at my magazines," the old man chuckled, "if I put it out front. My boy got me that. He runs a radio and Victrola store. A good boy. His name's in the fishbowl." I pressed some money on him and walked myself out of the store. Shutting the door, I saw that the copy of Doctor Zhivago had been replaced by Gone With the Wind. 'T'HE street was full of woodenpaneled station wagons, blunt little roadsters with canvas tops, swept-back, tailless sedans. Only one dark, tailed, over-thyroided car moved through the traffic. It had a light on the roof. I dodged in front of a horsedrawn garbage wagon and behind an electric postal truck and ran for that light, leaving a trail of gaudy air battles checkering the street behind me. I grabbed the handle on the door, opened it and threw myself into the back seat. "Madison Avenue," I said from my diaphragm, without any breath behind it. Something was wrong. Two men were in the front seat. The driver showed me his hard, expressionless face. "What do you think you are doing?" "This isn't a taxicab?" I asked blankly. "Park Police." I sat there while we drove on for a few minutes. "D.  D.," the second man said to the driver. "Right into our laps." The second officer leaned forward and clicked something. "I'll get the City boys." "No, kill it, Carl. Think of all that damned paper work." Carl shrugged. "What will we do with him?" I was beginning to attach myself to my surroundings. The street was full of traffic. My kind of traffic. Cars that were too big or too small. "Look, officers, I'm not drunk or disorderly. I thought this was a cab. I just wanted to get away from back then -- I mean back there." The two policemen exchanged glances. "What were you running from?" the driver asked. How could I tell him that? Before I even got a chance to try, he said: "What did you do?" "I didn't do anything!" The car was turning, turning into shadows, stopping. We were in an alley. Soggy newspapers, dead fish, prowling cats, a broken die, half a dice, looking big in the frame of my thick, probably bullet-proof window. The men opened their doors and then mine. "Out."  climbed out and stood by the A car, blinking. "You were causing some kind of trouble in that neighborhood back there," the driver announced. "Really, officers -- " "What's your name?" "We don't want you going back there again, Turner, causing trouble. Understand?" "Officer, I only bought some books -- I mean magazines." "These?" the second man, Carl, asked. He had retrieved them from the back seat. "Look here, Sarge. They look pretty dirty." Sarge took up the Sky Fighters with the girl in the elastic flying suit. "Filth," he said. "You know about the laws governing pornography, Turner." "Those aren't pornography and they are my property!" I reached for them and Carl pulled them back, grinning. "You don't want to read these. They aren't good for you. We're confiscating them." "Look here, I'm a citizen! You can't -- " Carl shoved me back a little. "Can't we?" Sarge stepped in front of me, his face in deadly earnest. "How about it, Turner? You a narcotics user?" He grabbed my wrist and started rolling up my sleeve to look for needle marks. I twisted away from him. "Resisting an officer," Sarge said almostly sadly. At that, Carl loped up beside him. The two of them started to beat me. They hit clean, in the belly and guts, but not in the groin. They gave me clean white flashes of pain, instead of angry, redstreaked ones. I didn't fight back, not against the two of them. I knew that much. I didn't even try to block their blows. I stood with my arms at my sides, leaning back against the car, and hearing myself grunt at each blow. They stood away from me and let me fold helplessly to the greasy brick. "Stay away from that neighborhood and stay out of trouble," Sarge's voice said above me. I looked up a little bit and saw an ugly, battered hand thumbing across a stack of half a dozen magazines like a giant deck of cards. "Why don't you take up detective stories?" he asked me. I never heard the squad car drive away. A room from the door, looked around for intruders for the first time I could remember, and went inside. I threw myself on the couch and rubbed my stomach. I wasn't hurt badly. My middle was going to be sorer in the morning than it was now. Lighting up a cigarette, I watched the shapes of smoke and tried to think. I looked at it objectively, forward and back. The solution was obvious. First of all, I positively could not have been an aviator in World War One. I was in my mid-twenties; anybody could tell that by looking at me. The time was the late 'Fifties; anybody could tell that from the blankfaced Motorola in the corner, the new Edsels on the street. Memories of air combat in Spads and Nieuports stirred in me by old magazines, Quentin Reynolds, and re-runs of Dawn Patrol on television were mere hallucinations. Neither could I remember drinking bootleg hooch in speakeasies, hearing Floyd Gibbons announce the Dempsey-Tunney fight, or paying # to get into the first run of Gone with the Wind. Only... I probably had seen mother to a matinee? Didn't she pay # for me? So how could I remember taking a girl, brunette, red sweater, Cathy, and paying # each? I couldn't. Different runs. That was it. The thing had been around half a dozen times. But would it have been # no more than ten years ago? I struck up a new cigarette. The thing I must remember, I told myself, was that my recollections were false and unreliable. It would do me no good to keep following these false memories in a closed curve. I touched my navel area and flinched. The beating, I was confident, had been real. But it had been a nightmare. Those cops couldn't have been true. They were a small boy's bad dream about symbolized authority. They were keeping me from re-entering the past where I belonged, punishing me to make me stay in my trap of the present. Oh, God. I rolled over on my face and pushed it into the upholstery. That was the worst part of it. False memories, feelings of persecution, that was one thing. Believing that you are actively caught up in a mixture of the past with the present, a Daliesque viscosity of reality, was something else. I needed help. Or if there was no help for me, it was my duty to have myself placed where I couldn't harm other consumers. If there was one thing that working for an advertising agency had taught me, it was social responsibility. I took up the phone book and located several psychiatrists. I selected one at random, for no particular reason. Dr. Ernest G. Rickenbacker. I memorized the address and heaved myself to my feet. as the inside of a mentholated cigarette commercial. The cool, lovely receptionist told me to wait and I did, tasting mint inside my mouth. After several long, peaceful minutes the inner door opened. "Mr. Turner, I can't seem to find any record of an appointment for you in Dr. Rickenbacker's files," the man said. I got to my feet. "Then I'll come back." He took my arm. "No, no, I can fit you in." "I didn't have an appointment. I just came." "I understand." "Maybe I had better go." "I won't hear of it." I could have pulled loose from him, but somehow I felt that if I did try to pull away, the grip would tighten and I would never get away. I looked up into that long, hard, blank face that seemed so recently familiar. "I'm Dr. Sergeant," he said. "I'm taking care of Dr. Rickenbacker's practice for him while he is on vacation." I nodded. What I was thinking could only be another symptom of my illness. He led me inside and closed the door. The door made a strange sound in closing. It didn't go snickbonk; it made a noise like clickclack-clunk. "Now," he said, "would you like to lie down on the couch and tell me about it? Some people have preconceived ideas that I don't want to fight with at the beginning. Or, if you prefer, you can sit there in front of my desk and tell me all about it. Remember, I'm a psychiatrist, a doctor, not just a psychoanalyst." I took possession of the chair and Sergeant faced me across his desk. "I feel," I said, "that I am caught up in some kind of time travel." "I see. Have you read much science fiction, Mr. Turner?" "Some. I read a lot. All kinds of books. Tolstoi, Twain, Hemingway, Luke Short, John D. MacDonald, Huxley." "You should read them instead of live them. Catharsis. Sublimate, Mr. Turner. For instance, to a certain type of person, I often recommend the mysteries of Mickey Spillane." I seemed to be losing control of the conversation. "But this time travel..." "Mr. Turner, do you really believe in 'time travel'?" "No." "Then how can there, be any such thing? It can't be real." "I know that! I want to be cured of imagining it." "The first step is to utterly renounce the idea. Stop thinking about the past. Think of the future." "How did you know I keep slipping back into the past?" I asked. expressive than his face. "You mentioned time travel..." "But not to the past or to the future," I said. "But you did, Mr. Turner. You told me all about thinking you could go into the past by visiting a book store where they sold old magazines. You told me how the intrusion of the past got worse with every visit." I blinked. "I did? I did?" "Of course." I stood up. "I did not!" "Please try to keep from getting violent, Mr. Turner. People like you actually have more control over themselves than you realize. If you will yourself to be calm..." "I know I didn't tell you a thing about the Back Number Store. I'm starting to think I'm not crazy at all. You -- you're trying to do something to me. You're all in it together." Sergeant shook his head sadly. I realized how it all sounded. I put my hands to my face and I felt the vein over my left eye swelling, pulsing. Through the bars of my fingers I saw Sergeant motion me down with one eloquent hand. I took my hands away -- I didn't like looking through bars -- and sat down. "Now," Sergeant said, steepling his fingers, "I know of a completely nice place in the country. Of course, if you respond properly..." Those hands of his. There was something about them that wasn't so. They might have been the hands of a corpse, or a doll... I lurched across the desk and grabbed his wrist. "Please, Mr. Turner! violence will -- " My fingers clawed at the backs of his hands and my nails dragged off ugly strips of some theatrical stuff -- collodion, I think -- that had covered the scrapes and bruises he had taken hammering away at me and my belt buckle. Sergeant. Sarge. I let go of him and stood away. For the first time, Sergeant smiled. I backed to the door and turned the knob behind my back. It wouldn't open. I turned around and rattled it, pulled on it, braced my foot against the wall and tugged. "Locked," Sergeant supplied. He was coming toward me, I could tell. I wheeled and faced him. He had a hypodermic needle. It was the smallest one I had ever seen and it had an iridescence or luminosity about it, a gleaming silver dart. I closed with him. knew he was used to physical combat, but you can't win them all, and I had been in a lot of scraps when I had been younger. (Hadn't I?) I stepped in while he was trying to decide whether to use the hypo on me or drop it to have his hands free. I stiff-handed him in the solar plexus and crossed my fist into the hollow of the apex arch of his jawbone. He dropped. I gave him a kick at the base of his spine. He grunted and lay still. There was a rapping on the door. "Doctor? Doctor?" I searched through his pockets. He didn't have any keys. He didn't have any money or identification or a gun. He had a handkerchief and a ballpoint pen. The receptionist had moved away from the door and was talking to somebody, in person or on the phone or intercom. There wasn't any back door. I went to the window. The city stretched out in an impressive panorama. On the street below, traffic crawled. There was a ledge. Quite a wide, old-fashioned ornamental ledge. The ledge ran beneath the windows of all the offices on this floor. The fourteenth, I remembered. I had seen it done in movies all my life. Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton were always doing it for some reason or other. I had a good reason. I unlatched the window and climbed out into the dry, crisp breeze. The movies didn't know much about convection. The updraft nearly lifted me off the ledge, but the cornice was so wide I could keep out of the wind if I kept myself flat against the side of the building. The next window was about twenty feet away. I had covered half that distance, moving my feet with a sideways crab motion, when Carl, indisputably the second policeman, put his head out of the window where I was heading and pointed a .# revolver at me, saying in a lefshave-no-foolishness tone: "Get in here." I went the other way. The cool, lovely receptionist was in Sergeant's window with the tiny silver needle in readiness. I kept shuffling toward the girl. I had decided I would rather wrestle with her over the needle than fight Carl over the rod. Idiotically, I smiled at that idea. I slipped. I was falling down the fourteen stories without even a moment of just gone. Lines were converging, and I was converging on the lines. You aren't going to be able to Immelmann out of this dive, Turner. Good-by, Turner. Death. A sleep, a reawakening, a lie. It's nothing like that. It's nothing. The end of everything you ever were or ever could be. I hit. My kneecap hurt like hell. I had scraped it badly. Reality was all over me in patches. I showed through as a line drawing, crudely done, a cartoon. Some kind of projection. Hightest Cinerama, that was all reality meant. I was kneeling on a hard surface no more than six feet from the window from which I had fallen. It was still fourteen flights up, more or less, but Down was broken and splattered over me. I stood up, moving forward a step. It brought me halfway through the screen, halfway through the wall at the base of the building. The other side of the screen. The solid side, I found, stepping through, bracing a hand on the image. Looking up fourteen floors, I saw an unbroken line of peacefully closed panes. the elevator, the moments inside, the faint feeling of vertigo. Of course, who was to say the elevator really moved? Maybe they had only switched scenery on me while I was caught inside, listening to the phony hum, seeing the flashing lights. Either cut down or increase the oxygen supply inside the cubicle suddenly and that would contribute a sensation of change, of movement. They had it all worked out. My fingers rubbed my head briskly, both hands working, trying to get some circulation in my brain. I guessed I had to run. There didn't seem much else to do. I ran. Get help? Not this old lady and her daughter. Not this Neanderthal sailor on his way to a bar and a blonde. Not the bookkeeper. Maybe the car salesman, exArmy, Lions Club member, beefy, respectable, well-intentioned, not a complete fool. The guy on the corner reading a newspaper by the bus stop. "I need help," I panted to him. "Somebody's trying to kidnap I me. "Really makes you sick to hear about something like that, doesn't it?" he said. "I'm in favor of the Lindbergh Law myself." "I'm not sure whether -- " "This heat is murder, isn't it? Especially here in these concrete canyons. Sometimes I wish I was back in Springfield. Cool, shaded streets..." "Listen to me! These people, they're conspiring against me, trying to drive me insane! Two men, a girl -- " "For my money, Marilyn Monroe is the doll of the world. I just don't understand these guys who say she hasn't got class. She gets class by satirizing girls without any..." He was like anybody you might talk to on the street. I knew what he would say if I cued him with "baseball" or "Russia" instead of the key words I had used. I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the insubstantiality he was. There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a two-trouser suit. Hide. I went into the first shop I came to -- Milady's Personals. Appropriately, it was a false front. A neutral-colored gray surface, too smooth for concrete, stretched away into some shadows. The area was littered with trash. Cartons, bottles, what looked like the skin of a dehydrated human being -- obviously, on second thought, only the discarded skin of one of the things like the one I had deflated. And a moldering pile of letters and papers. Something caught my eye and I kicked through them. Yes, the letter I had written to my brother in Sioux Falls, unopened. And which he had answered. My work. The work I had done at the agency, important, creative work. There was my layout, the rough of the people with short, slim glasses, the parents, children, grandparents, the caption: Vodka is a Part of the American Tradition. All of it lying here to rot. Something made me look away from that terrible trash. Sergeant stood in the entrance of Milady's, something bright in his hand. Something happened. I had been wrong. The shining instrument had not been a hypodermic needle. #Y OU ' RE tou g h " Sergeant said as I eased back into focus. "You aren't, not without help," I told him in disgust. "Spunky, aren't you? I meant mental toughness. That's the one thing we can never judge. I think you could have taken the shock right from the start. Of course, you would still have needed the conditioning to integrate properly." "Conditioning? Conditioning?" It came out of me, vortexing up, outside of my piloting. "What have you done to my mind?" "We've been trying to get it to grow back up," Sergeant said reasonably. "Think of this. Fountain r of Youth. Immortality. Rejuvenation. This is it. Never mind how it works. Most minds can't stand being young and knowing they will have to go through the same damned thing all over again. We use synapse-shift to switch your upper conscious memories to your id and super-ego, leaving room for new memories. You remember only those things out of the past you have to, to retain your identity." Jf ' "Identity," I repeated. "I have no identity. My identity is a dream. I have two identities -- one of them years beyond the other." Sergeant tilted hi? head and his eyes at me and slapped me across the face. "Don't go back on me now. We gave you the best we could. The Rejuvenation Service couldn't help it if you were too old for a beta. You shouldn't have waited until you were so old, so very old. We used the very oldest sets and mock-ups we had for betas, but you, you had to keep wandering onto alpha territory, while they were striking sets, even. Beta or not, we gave you good service. Don't slip now." I heard the voice and I heard another voice, and it said "What could you expect of a beta?" and they were only some of the voices I was hearing, and I wondered what you could expect from a beta, and I didn't know, or think that I would ever know.      October -- big month! At least four novelettes -- maybe half a dozen short stories -- all in all, an issue crammed with good reading. For instance? Well, what about a fine new Fritz Leiber? The name of his October contribution is The Beat Cluster, a story about... (pause while editor fights against temptation -- and loses)... a bunch of Beats who are Really Out of This World. Or there's a great Cordwainer Smith novelette, perhaps his best ever: A Planet Named Shayol. Shayol turns out to be, indeed, another word for Hell. But perhaps the really big story for October is Arcturus Times Three. It's the first of a series and, as you long-time addicts know. Galaxy has seldom been tempted into the dangers of publishing series stories. This one, though, has a premise too good to miss! jack Sharkey is the writer; you'll be seeing a lot of him here. Yes, indeed. Big month -- big magazine. (More pages than any other in the field!) Don't miss October! ON Three creatures sat on the sands of Mars, and the first, to the ancient twiddling bars that the second played on a twalreg flute sang a canal lay most convolute, while the third, with his horn in the sand, sat mute, considering the stars. At last the second stilled his fife, and the third twonged out (his voice was rife with a hint of fear) "Do you know that there, where the third planet spins in its veil of air, I'm convinced there's a spot, a jot, a hair, a widge, perhaps, of life." The first began an amusement dance, while the second, fourth eyes crossed, askance, skibbed with extreme severity, "You ought to watch your tongues," quoth he. "One should not affront the Deity by mentioning such chance. "For years our scientists have spent their time in the establishment of reasons why the life we know could not exist above, below, or anyplace but here! They show that fact self evident." Just then their eyes were caught, aghast, for where the air-veiled planet passed a ball of fire had blossomed wide, and holocausts together vied to rip the ravened glpbe aside with nothing left at last. Murmured the first, "You will allow, by every old and sacred vow, this proves my point and proves it well. Those pyrotechnics must compel you to recant!" The third said, "Hell, it doesn't matter now." And they sat back down on the sands of Mars to hear the ancient, twiddling bars of a Martian dirge or the twalreg flute, in troches old and dissolute, while the third, with his horn in the sand, sat mute, considering the stars. Would it work? Yes. X How would it work?  Exactly like this. Illustrated by Ritter said. "For God's sake, X I Doctor, no more lies. I've been living with lies for the  past year and I'm tired of them." Bernstein closed the white door . before answering, mercifully ob' scuring the sheeted, motionless mound on the hospital bed. He took the young woman's elbow and walked with her down the tiled corridor. "He's dying, of course," he said conversationally. "We've never lied to you about that, Mrs. Hills; you know what we've told you all along. I hoped that by now you'd feel more resigned." "I was," she said bitterly. They had stopped in front of Bernstein's small office and she drew her arm away. "But then you called me. About this drug of yours -- " "We had to call you. Senopoline can't be administered without permission of the patient, and since your husband has been in coma for the last four days -- " He opened the door and nodded her inside. She hesitated, then walked in. He took his place behind the cluttered desk, his grave face distracted, and waited until she sat down in the facing chair. He picked up his telephone receiver, replaced it, shuffled papers, and then locked his hands on the desk blotter. "Senopoline is a curious drug," he said. "I've had little experience with it myself. You may have heard about the controversy surrounding it." "No," she whispered. "I don't know about it. I haven't cared about anything since Andy's illness."  "At any rate, you're the only person in the world that can decide whether your husband receives it. It's strange stuff, as I said, but in the light of your husband's present condition, I can tell you this -- it can do him absolutely no harm." "But it will do him good?" "There," Bernstein sighed, "is the crux of the controversy, Mrs. Hills."    '--sang in his mind, feeling the lapping tongues of the cool lake water against his fingers, drifting, drifting, under obeisant willows. Paula's hands were resting gently on his eyes and he lifted them away. Then he kissed the soft palms and pressed them on his cheek. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that the boat was a bed, the water only pelting rain against the window, and the willow trees long shadows on the walls. Only Paula's hands were real, solid and real and comforting against his face. He grinned at her. "Funniest damn thing," he said. "For a minute there, I though? we were back at Finger Lake. Remember that night we sprang a leak? I'll never forget the way you looked when you saw the hem of your dress." "Andy," she said quietly. "Andy, do you know what's happened?" He scratched his head. "Seems to me Doc Bernstein was in here a while ago. Or was he? Didn't they jab me again or something?" "It was a drug, Andy. Don't you remember? They have this new miracle drug, senopoline. Dr. Bernstein told you about it, said it was worth the try..." "Oh, sure, I remember." He sat up in bed, casually, as if sitting up in bed were an everyday occurrence. He took a cigarette from the table beside him and lit one. He smoked reflectively for a moment, and then recalled that he hadn't been anything but horizontal for almost eight months. Swiftly, he put his hand on his rib cage and touched the firm flesh. "The girdle," he said wonderingly. "Where the hell's the girdle?" "They took it off," Paula said tearfully. "Oh, Andy, they took it off. You don't need it any more. You're healed, completely healed. It's a miracle!" "A miracle..." She threw her arms about him; they hadn't held each other since the accident a year ago, the accident that had snapped his spine in several places. He had been twenty-two when it happened. hospital three days later; after half a year in the hushed white world, the city outside seemed wildly clamorous and riotously colorful, like a town at the height of carnival. He had never felt so well in his life; he was eager to put the strong springs of his muscles back into play. Bernstein had made the usual speech about rest, but a week after his discharge Andy and Paula were at the courts in tennis clothes. Andy had always been a dedicated player, but his stiffarmed forehand and poor net game had always prevented him from being anything more than a passable amateur. Now he was a demon on the court, no ball escaping his swift-moving racket. He astounded himself with the accuracy of his crashing serves, his incredible play at the net. Paula, a junior champion during her college years, couldn't begin to cope with him; laughingly, she gave up and watched him battle the club professional. He took the first set #-#, #-#, #-#, and Andy knew that something more magical than medicinal had happened to him. They talked it over, excited as schoolchildren, all the way home. Andy, who had taken a job in a stock-brokerage house after college, and who had been bored silly with the whole business until the accident, began wondering if he could make a career on the tennis court. To make sure his superb playing wasn't a fluke, they returned to the club the next day. This time, Andy found a former Davis Cup challenger to compete with. At the end of the afternoon, his heart pounding to the beat of victory, he knew it was true. That night, with Paula in his lap, he stroked her long auburn hair and said: "No, Paula, it's all wrong. I'd like to keep it up, maybe enter the Nationals, but that's no life for me. It's only a game, after all." "Only a game?" she said mockingly. "That's a fine thing for the next top-seeded man to say." "No, I'm serious. Oh, I don't mean I intend to stay in Wall Street; that's not my ambition either. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of painting again." "Painting? You haven't painted since your freshman year. You think you can make a living at it?" "I was always pretty good, you know that. I'd like to try doing some commercial illustration; that's for the bread and potatoes. Then, when we don't have to worry about creditors, I'd like to do some things on my own." "Don't pull a Gauguin on me, friend." She kissed his cheek "lightly. "Don't desert your wife and family for some Tahitian idyll..." "Wh,at family?" She pulled away from him and got up to stir the ashes in the fireplace. When she returned, her face was glowing with the heat of the fire and warmth of her news. Andrew Hills, Junior, was born in September. Two years later, little Denise took over the handme-down cradle. By that time, Andy Hills was signing his name to the magazine covers of America's top-circulation weeklies, and they were happy to feature it. His added fame as America's topranked amateur tennis champion made the signature all the more desirable. three, Andrew Senior made his most important advance in the field of art -- not on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, but in the halls of the Modern Museum of Art. His first exhibit evoked such a torrent of superlatives that the New York Times found the reaction newsworthy enough for a box on the front page. There was a celebration in the Hills household that night, attended by their closest friends: copies of slick magazines were ceremoniously burned and the ashes placed in a dime-store urn that Paula had bought for the occasion. A month later, they were signing the documents that entitled them to a sprawling hilltop house in Westchester, with a north-light glassed-in studio the size of their former apartment. He was thirty-five when the urge struck him to rectify a sordid political situation in their town. His fame as an artist and tennis-champion (even at thirtyfive, he was top-seeded in the Nationals) gave him an easy entree into the political melee. At first, the idea of vote-seeking appalled him; but he couldn't retreat once the movement started. He won easily and was elected to the town council. The office was a minor one, but he was enough of a celebrity to attract countrywide attention. During the following year, he began to receive visits from important men in party circles; in the next state election, his name was on the ballot. By the time he was forty, Andrew Hills was a U.S. Senator. That spring, he and Paula spent a month in Acapulco, in an enchanting home they had erected in the cool shadows of the steep mountains that faced the bay. It was there that Andy talked about his future. "I know what the party's planning," he told his wife, "but I know they're wrong. I'm not Presidential timber, Paula." But the decision wasn't necessary; by summer, the Asiatic Alliance had tired of the incessant talks with the peacemakers and had launched their attack on the Alaskan frontier. Andy was commissioned at once as a major. His gallantry in action, his White Mountain, and eventual triumphant march into Nome guaranteed him a place in the High Command of the Allied Armies. By the end of the first year of fighting, there were two silver stars on his shoulder and he was given the most critical assignment of all -- to represent the Allies in the negotiations that were taking place in Fox Island in the Aleutians. Later, he denied that he was solely responsible for the successful culmination of the peace talks, but the American populace thought him hero enough to sweep him into the White House the following year in a landslide victory unparalleled in political history. He was fifty by the time he left Washington, but his greatest triumphs were yet to come. In his second term, his interest in the World Organization had given him a major role in world politics. As First Secretary of the World Council, his ability to effect a working compromise between the ideological factions was directly responsible for the establishment of the World Government. When he was sixty-four, Andrew Hills was elected World President, and he held the office until his voluntary retirement at seventy-five. Still active and vigorous, still capable of a commanding tennis game, of a painting that set art circles gasping, he and Paula moved permanently into the house in Acapulco. He was ninety-six when the fatigue of living overtook him. Andrew Junior, with his four grandchildren, and Denise, with her charming twins, paid him one last visit before he took to his bed.   Paula said. "Does it cure or what? I have a right to know!" Dr. Bernstein frowned. "It's rather hard to describe. It has no curative powers. It's more in the nature of a hypnotic drug, but it has a rather peculiar effect. It provokes a dream." "A dream?" "Yes. An incredibly long and detailed dream, in which the patient lives an entire lifetime, and lives it just the way he would like it to be. You might say it's an opiate, but the most humane one ever developed." Paula looked down at the still figure on the bed. His hand was moving slowly across the bedsheet, the fingers groping toward her. "Andy," she breathed. "Andy darling..." His hand fell across hers, the touch feeble and aged. "Paula," he whispered, "say goody-by to the children for me." Science-fiction convention time is drawing near again. This time the place is Seattle, Washington; the date. Labor Day Weekend, September, #. and scores of other great science-fiction stories from Galaxy and elsewhere. Heinlein is a reliable star performer on the speaking platform; you won't want to miss him. This is every science-fiction reader's chance to meet and ask questions of a clear working majority of his favorite authors, editors, artists, fans and everybody else in the science-fiction field. For further information, write: SeaCon, co Seattle Science Fiction Club, Inc., P. O. Box #, Broadway Branch, Seattle #, Washington. looked across at the rundown lot with the windblown trash packed against the wire mesh barrier fence and the yellow glare panel that said row of city-scarred hacks parked on the cracked ramp. They hadn't suffered the indignity of a washjob for a long time. And the twostory frame building behind them -- that had once been somebody's country house -- now showed no paint except the foot-high yellow letters over the office door. Inside the office a short broad man with small eyes and yesterday's beard gnawed a cigar and looked at me. "Portal-to-portal escort cost you two thousand C's," he said. "Guaranteed." "Guaranteed how?" I asked. He waved the cigar. "Guaranteed you get into the city and back out again in one piece." He studied his cigar. "If somebody don't plug you first," he added. "How about a one-way trip?" "My boy got to come back out, ain't he?" He was a sort of taxi-driver, I had spent my last brass tendollar piece on a cup of coffee eight hours before, but I had to get into the city. This was the only idea I had left. "You've got me wrong," I said. "I'm not a customer. I want a job." "Yeah?" He looked at me again, with a different expression, like a guy whose new-found girl friend has just mentioned a price. "You know Gra'nyauk?" "Sure," I said. "I grew up here." He asked me a few more questions, then thumbed a button centered in a ring of grime on the wall behind him. A chair scraped beyond the door; it opened and a tall bony fellow with thick wrists and an adams apple set among heavy neck tendons came in. The man behind the desk pointed at me with his chin. "Throw him out, Lefty." Lefty gave me a resentful look, came around the desk and reached for my collar. I leaned to the right asd threw a hard left jab to the chin. He rocked back and sat down. "I get the idea," I said. "I can make it out under my own power." I turned to the door. "Stick around, mister. Lefty's just kind of a like test for separating the men from the boys." "You mean I'm hired?" He sighed. "You come at a good time. I'm short of good boys." I helped Lefty up, then dusted off a chair and listened to a half-hour briefing on conditions in the city. They weren't good. Then I went upstairs to the chart room to wait for a call. TT was almost ten o'clock when Lefty came into the room where I was looking over the maps of the city. He jerked his head. "Hey, you." A weasel-faced man who had been blowing smoke in my face slid off his stool, dropped his cigarette and smeared it under his shoe. "You," Lefty said. "The new guy-" I belted my coat and followed him down the dark stairway, and out across the littered tarmac, glistening wet under the polyarcs, to where Haug stood talking to another man I hadn't seen before. Haug flicked a beady glance my way, then turned to the stranger. He was a short man of about fifty with a mild expressionless face and expensive clothes. "Mr. Stenn, this is Smith. He's your escort. You do like he tells you and he'll get you into the city and see your party and back out again in one piece." The customer looked at me. "Considering the fee I'm paying, I sincerely hope so," he murmured. "Smith, you and Mr. Stenn take number # here." Haug patted a hinge-sprung hood, painted a bilious yellow and scabbed with license medallions issued by half a dozen competing city governments. Haug must have noticed something in Stenn's expression. "It ain't a fancy-looking hack, but she's got full armor, heavyduty gyros, crash-shocks, two-way music and panic gear. I ain't got a better hack in the place." Stenn nodded, popped the hatch and got in. I climbed in the front and adjusted the seat and controls to give me a little room. When I kicked over the turbos they sounded good. "Better tie in, Mr. Stenn," I said. "We'll take the Canada turnpike in. You can brief me on the way." I wheeled # around and out under the glare-sign that read bound linkway I boosted her up to #. From theway the old bus stepped off, she had at least a megahorse under the hood. Maybe Haug wasn't lying, I thought. I pressed an elbow against the power pistol strapped to my side. I liked the feel of it there. Maybe between it and old # I could get there and back after all. U M Y destination," Stenn said, That suited me perfectly. In fact, it was the first luck I'd had since I burned the uniform. I looked in the rear viewer at Stenn's face. He still wore no expression. He seemed like a mild little man to be wanting into the cage with the tigers. "That's pretty rough territory, Mr. Stenn," I said. He didn't answer. "Not many tourists go there," I went on. I wanted to pry a little information from him. "I'm a businessman," Stenn said. I let it go at that. Maybe he knew what he was doing. For me, there was no choice. I had one slim lead, and I had to play it out to the end. I swung through the banked curves of the intermix and onto the turnpike and opened up to full throttle. It was fifteen minutes before I saw the warning red lights ahead. Haug had told me about this. I slowed. "Here's our first roadblock, Mr. Stenn," I said. "This is an operator named Joe Naples. All he's after is his toll. I'll handle him; you sit tight in the hack. Don't say anything, don't do anything, no matter what happens. Understand?" "I understand," Stenn said mildly. I pulled up. My lights splashed on the spikes of a Mark IX tank trap. I set the parking jacks and got out. "Remember what I told you," I said. "No matter what." I walked up into the beam of the lights. A voice spoke from off to the side. "Douse 'em, Rube." I went back and cut the lights. Three men sauntered out onto the highway. "Keep the hands away from the sides, Rube." One #f the men was a head taller than the others. I couldn't see his face in the faint red light from the beacon, but I knew who he was. "Hello, Naples," I said. He came up to me. "You know me, Rube?" "Sure," I said. "The first thing Haug told me was pay my respects to Mr. Naples." Naples laughed. "You hear that, boys? They know me pretty good on the outside, ha?" any more. "I don't see you before." "My first trip." He jerked a thumb at the hack. "Who's your trick?" "A businessman. Name is Stenn." "Yeah? What kind business?" I shook my head. "We don't quiz the cash customers, Joe." "Let's take a look." Naples moved off toward the hack, the boys at his side. I followed. Naples looked in at Stenn. Stenn sat relaxed and looked straight ahead. Naples turned away, nodded to one of his helpers. The two moved off a few yards. The other man, a short bulletheaded thug in a grease-spatted overcoat, stood by the hack, staring in at Stenn. He took a heavy old-style automatic from his coat pocket, pulled open the door. He aimed the gun at Stenn's head and carefully squeezed the trigger. The hammer clicked emptily. "Ping," he said. He thrust the gun back in his pocket, kicked the door shut and went over to join Naples. "Okay, Rube," Naples called. I went over to him. "I guess maybe you on the level," he said. "Standard fee. Five hundred, Old Federal notes." I had to be careful now. I held a bland expression, reached in -- slowly -- took out my wallet. I extracted two hundredC notes and held them out. Naples looked at them, unmoving. The thug in the dirty overcoat moved up close, and suddenly swung the edge of his palm at my wrist. I was ready; I flicked my hand aside and chopped him hard at the base of the neck. He dropped. I was still holding out the money. "That clown isn't worthy of a place in the Naples organization," I said. Naples looked down at the man, stirred him with his foot "A clown," he said. He took the money and tucked it in his shirt pocket. "Okay, Rube," he said. "My regards to Haug." I got in the hack and moved up to the barrier. It started up, trundled aside. Naples was bending over the man I had downed. He took the pistol from the pocket of the overcoat, jacked the action and aimed. There was a sharp crack. The overcoat flopped once. Naples smiled over at me. "He ain't worthy a place in the Naples organization," he said. I waved a hand vaguely and gunned off down the road. II hummed. I grunted an acknowledgement and a blurred voice said, "Smith, listen. When you cross the South Radial, pick up the Midwest Feed-off. Take it easy and watch for Number Nine Station, Pull off there. Got it?" I recognized the voice. It was Lefty, Haug's Number One boy. I didn't answer. "What was the call?" Stenn asked. "I don't know," I said. "Nothing." The lights of the South Radial Intermix were in sight ahead now. I slowed to a hundred and thought about it. My personal motives told me to keep going, my job as a paid Escort was to get my man where he wanted to go. That was tough enough, without detours. I eased back up to one-fifty, took the Intermix with gyros screaming, and curved out onto the thruway. The speaker hummed. "What are you trying to pull, wise guy?" He sounded mad. "That was the South Radial you just passed up -- " "Yeah," I said. "That's right. Smitty takes 'em there and he brings 'em back. Don't call us, we'll call you." There was a long hum from the speaker. "Oh, a wiseacre," it said finally. "Listen, rookie, you got a lot to learn. This guy is bankrolled. I seen the wad when he paid Haug off. So all right, we cut you in. Now, get this..." He gave me detailed instructions. When he was finished, I said, "Don't wait up for me." I took the speaker out of my ear and dropped it into the disposal slot. We drove along quietly for quite a while. I was beginning to recognize my surroundings. This section of the turnpike had been opened the year before I left home. Except for the lack of traffic and the dark windows along the way it hadn't changed. I was wondering just what Lefty's next move would be when a pair of powerful beams came on from the left, then pulled onto the highway, speeding up to pace me. I rocketed past before he had made full speed. I heard a loud spang, and glass chips scattered on my shoulder. I twisted and looked. A starred hole showed in the bubble, above the rear seat.-"leaned over, put his head down. The beams were gaining on me. I twisted the rear viewer, hit the IR switch. A three-ton combat car, stripped, but still mounting twin infinite repeaters. Against that, old # was a kiddie car. I held my speed and tried to generate an idea. What I came up with wasn't good, but it was all I had. A half a mile ahead there should be a level-split, one of those awkward ones that caused more than one pile-up in the first few months the turnpike was open. Maybe my playmates didn't know about it. They were about to overtake me now. I slowed just a little, and started fading to the right. They followed me, crowding my rear wheel. I heard the spang again, twice, but nothing hit me. I was on the paved shoulder now, and could barely see the faded yellow cross-hatching that warned of the abutment that divided the pavement ahead. I held the hack in the yellow until the last instant, then veered right and cleared the concrete barrier by a foot, hit the downcurve at a hundred and eighty in a howl of gyros and brakes -- and the thunderous impact of the combat car. Then I was off the pavement, fighting the wheel, slamming through underbrush, then miraculously back on the hard surface and coasting to a stop in the clear. I took a deep breath and looked back. The burning remains of the car were scattered for a quarter of a mile along the turnpike. That would have been me if I had gauged it wrong. I looked at the canopy of the hack. Three holes, not a foot apart, right where a passenger's head would be if he were sitting upright. Stenn was unconcernedly brushing glass dust from his jacket. "Very neat, Mr. Smith," he said. "Now shall we resume our journey?" "Maybe it's time you leveled with me, Stenn," I said. He raised his eyebrows at me slightly. "When Joe Naples' boy Friday pointed the gun at your head you didn't bat an eyelash," I said. "I believe those were your instructions," Stenn said mildly. "Pretty good for a simple businessman. I don't see you showing any signs of the shakes now, either, after what some might call a harrowing experience." "I have every confidence in your handling -- " "Nuts, Stenn. Those three holes are pretty well grouped, wouldn't you say? The man that put them there was hitting where he was aiming. And he was aiming for you." "Why me?" Stenn looked almost amused. "I thought it was a little shakedown crew, out to teach me a lesson," I said. "Until I saw where the shots were going." Stenn looked at me thoughtfully. He reached up and took a micro-speaker from his ear. "The twin to the one you rashly disposed of," he said. "Mr. Haug was kind enough to supply it -- for a fee. I must tell you that I had a gun in my hand as we approached the South Radial Intermix. Had you accepted the invitation to turn off, I would have halted the car, shot you and gone on alone. Happily, you chose to resist the temptation, for reasons of your own... He looked at me inquiringly. "Maybe I'm sap enough to take the job seriously," I said. "That may possibly be true," Stenn said. "What's your real errand here, Stenn? Frankly, I don't have time to get involved." "Really? One wonders if you have irons in the fire, Smith. But never mind. I shan't pry. Are we going on?" I gave him my stern penetrating look. "Yeah," I said. "We're going on." TN twenty minutes, we were on the Inner Concourse and the polyarcs were close together, lighting the empty sweep of banked pavement. The lights of the city sparkled across the sky ahead, and gave me a ghostly touch of the old thrill of coming home. I doused that feeling fast. After eight years there was nothing left there for me to come home to. The city had a lethal welcome for intruders; it wouldn't be smart to forget that. I didn't see the T-Bird until his spot hit my eyes and he was beside me, crowding. I veered and hit the brakes, with a half-baked idea of dropping back and cutting behind him, but he stayed with me. I had a fast impression of squealing metal and rubber, and then I was skidding to a stop up against the deflector rails with the TBird slanted across my prow. Its lid popped almost before the screech died away, and I was looking down the muzzles of two power pistols. I kept both hands on the wheel, where they could see them, and sat tight. I wondered whose friends we had, met this time. Two men climbed out, the pistols in sight, and came up to the hack. The first one was a heavyset Slavic type zipped into a tight G. I. weather suit. He motioned. I opened up and got out, not making any sudden movements. Stenn followed. A cold wind was whipping along the concourse, blowing a fine misty rain hard against my cheek. The polyarcs cast black shadows on gray faces. The smaller man moved over to Stenn and crowded him back against the hack. The Slav motioned again, and I moved over by the T-Bird. He fished my wallet out and put it in his pocket without looking at it. I heard the other man say something to Stenn, and then the sound of a blow. I turned my head slowly, so as not to excite my watchdog. Stenn was picking himself up. He started going through his pockets, showing everything to the man with the gun, then dropping it on the ground. The wind blew cards and papers along until they soaked up enough water to stick. Stenn carried a lot of paper. T HE gunny said something and Stenn started pulling off his coat. He turned it inside out, and held it out. The gunny shook his head, and motioned to my Slav. He looked at me, and I tried to read his mind. I moved across toward the hack. I must have guessed right because he didn't shoot me. The Slav pocketed his gun and took the coat. Methodically, he tore the lining out, found nothing, dropped the ripped garment and kicked it aside. I shifted position, and the Slav turned and backhanded me up against the hack. "Lay off him, Heavy," the other hood said. "Maxy didn't say nothing about this mug. He's just a Escort." Heavy started to get his gun out again. I had an idea he was thinking about using it. Maybe that's why I did what I did. As his hand dipped into his pocket, I lunged, wrapped an arm around him and yanked out my own artillery. I held onto a handful of the weather suit and dug the pistol in hard. He stood frozen. Heavy wasn't as dumb as he looked. His partner had backed a step, the pistol in his hand covering all of us. "Drop it, Slim," I said. "No hard feelings, and we'll be on our way." Stenn stood absolutely motionless. He was still wearing his mild expression. "Not a ' chance, mug," the gunny said softly. No one moved. "Even if you're ready to gun your way through your pal, I can't miss. Better settle for a draw." "Maxy don't like draws, mister." "Stenn," I said. "Get in the TBird. Head back the way we came, and don't slow down to read any billboards." Stenn didn't move. # ET going," I said. '-'Slim won't shoot." "I employed you," Stenn said, "to take care of the heroics." "If you've got any better ideas it's time to speak up, Stenn. This is your only out, the way I see it." Stenn looked at the man with the gun. "You referred to someone named 'Maxy.' Would that by any chance be Mr. Max Arena?" Slim looked at him and thought about it. "Could be," he said. Stenn came slowly over to the Slav. Standing well out of the line of fire, he carefully put a hand in the loose pocket of the weather suit and brought out the pistol. I saw Slim's eyes tighten. He was having to make some tough decisions in a hurry. Stenn moved offside, pistol in hand. "Move away from him, Smith," he said. I didn't know what he had in mind, but it didn't seem like the time to argue. I moved back. "Drop your gun," he said. I risked a glance at his mild expression. "Areyou nuts?" "I came here to see Mr. Arena," he said. "This seems an excellent opportunity." "Does it? I -- " "Drop it now, Smith. I won't warn you again." I dropped it. Slim swiveled on Stenn. He was still in an awkward spot. "I want you to take me to Mr. Arena," Stenn said. "I have a proposition to put before him." He lowered the gun and handed it to Heavy. It seemed like a long time until Slim lowered his gun. "Heavy, put him in the back seat." He motioned me ahead, watched me as he climbed in the T-Bird. "Nice friends you got, mug," he said. The T-Bird started up, backed, and roared off toward the city. I stood under the polyarcs and watched the tail glare out of sight. Max Arena was the man I had come to the city to find. Ill O LD number # was canted against the deflector rail, one side shredded into curled strips of crumpled metal. I looked closer. Under the flimsy fairings, gray armor showed. Maybe there was more to Hang's best hack than met the eye. I climbed in and kicked over the starter. The turbos sounded as good as ever. I eased the gyros in; she backed off the rail with a screech of ripped metal. I had lost my customer, but I still had wheels. The smart thing to do now would be to head back out the turnpike to Haug's lot, turn in my badge and keep moving, south. I could give up while I was still alive. All I had to do was accept the situation. I had a wide choice. I could sign on with the New Confeds, or the Free Texans, or any one of the other splinter republics trying to set up shop in the power vacuum. I might try to get in to one of the Enclaves and convince its Baron he needed another trained bodyguard. Or I could take a post with one of the kingpins in the city. As a last resort I could go back and find a spot in the Naples organization. I happened to know they had a vacancy. I was just running through mental exercises to hear myself think. I couldn't settle for the kind of world I had found when I touched planet three months back, after eight years in deep space with Hayle's squadron. When the Interim Administration shot him for treason, I burned my uniform and disappeared. My years in the Service had given me a tough hide and a knack for staying alive; my worldly assets consisted of the clothes I stood in, my service pistol and a few souvenirs of my travels. For two months I had been scraping along on the cash I had in my pocket, buying drinks for drifters in cheap bars, looking for a hint, any lead at all, that would give me a chance to do what had to be done. Max Arena was the lead. Maybe a dud lead -- but I had to find out. The city lights loomed just a few miles away. I was wasting time sitting here; I steered the hack out into the highway and headed for them. -ence didn't extend far beyond the South Radial. The two roadblocks I passed in the next five miles took my money, accepted my story that I was on my way to pick up a fare, said to say hello to Haug and passed me on my way. Haug's sour yellow color scheme seemed to carry some weight with the town Organizations, too. I was well into the city, cruising along the third level Crossover, before I had any trouble. I was doing about fifty, watching where I was going and looking for the Manhattan Intermix, when a battered Gyrob fourseater trundled out across the fairway and stopped. I swerved and jumped lanes; the Gyrob backed, blocking me. I kicked my safety frame down and floorboarded the hack, steering straight for him. At the last instant he tried to pull out of the way. He was too late. I clipped him across his aft quarter, and caught a glimpse of the underside of the car as it stood on its nose, slammed through the deflector and over the side. Old # bucked and I got a good crack across the jaw from the ill-fitting frame, and then I was screeching through the Intermix and out onto the Manhattan Third level. Up ahead, the glare panels at the top of the Blue Tower reared up half a mile into the wet night sky. It wasn't a hard address to find. Getting inside would be another matter. I pulled up a hundred yards from the dark cave they used to call the limousine entrance and looked the situation over. The level was deserted -- like the whole city seemed, from the street. But there were lights in the windows, level after level of them stretching up and away as far as you could see. There were plenty of people in the city -- riots and the Food Scare and the collapse of legal government. The automated city supply system had gone on working, and the Kingpins, the big time criminals, had stepped in and set things up to suit their tastes. Life went on -- but not out in the open. Not after dark. I knew almost nothing about Arena. Judging from his employees, he was Kingpin of a prosperous outfit. The T-Bird was an expensive late model, and the two thugs handled themselves like high-priced talent. I couldn't expect to walk into his HQ without jumping a few hurdles. Maybe I should have invited myself along with Stenn and his new friends. On the other hand, there were advantages to arriving unannounced. It was a temptation to drive in, with the hack's armor between me and any little surprises that might be waiting, but I liked the idea of staging a surprise of my own. I eased into drive and moved along to a parking ramp, swung around and down and stopped in the shadow of the retaining wall. I set the brake and took a good look around. There was nothing in sight. Arena might have a power cannon trained on me from his bedroom window, for all I knew, but I had to get a toe into the water sometime. I shut down the turbo, and in the silence popped the lid and stepped out. The rain had stopped, and the mcon showed as a bright spot on the high mist. I felt hungry and a little bit unreal, as though this were happening to somebody else. T moved over to the side of the parking slab, clambered over the deflector rail and studied the shadows under the third level roadway. I could barely make out the catwalks and service ways. I was wondering whether to pull off my hard-soled shoes for the climb when I heard footsteps, close. I gauged the distance to the hack, and saw I couldn't make it. I got back over the rail and waited. He came into sight, rangy, shock-haired and preternaturally thin in tight traditional dress. When he got close I saw that he was young, in his early twenties at most. He would be carrying a knife. "Hey, Mister," he whined. "Got a cigarette?" "Sure, young fellow," I said, sounding a little nervous. I threw in a shaky laugh to help build the picture. I took a cigarette from a pack, put the pack back in my pocket, held the weed out. He strutted up to me, reached out and flipped the cigarette from my fingers. I edged back and used the laugh again. "Hey, he liked that," the punk Whined. "He thinks that's funny. He got a sense of humor." "Heh, heh," I said. "Just out getting a little air." "Gimme another cigarette, funny man." I took the pack out, watching. I got out a cigarette and held it gingerly, arm bent. As he reached for it, I drew back. He snatched for it. That put him in position. I dropped the pack, clenched my two hands together, ducked down and brought them up hard under his chin. He backflipped, rolled over and started crawling. I let him go. I went over the rail without stopping to think it over and crossed the girder to the catwalk that ran under the boulevard above. I groped my way along to where the service way branched off for the Blue Tower, then stopped and looked up. A strip of luminous sky showed between the third level and the facade of the building. Anybody watching from the right spot would see mfe cross, walking on the narrow footway. It was a chance I'd have to take. I started to move out, and heard running feet. I froze. The feet slid to a stop on the level above, a few yards away. "What's up, Crackers?" somebody growled. "The mark sapped me down." been spotted and the punk had been sent to welcome me. Now I knew where I stood. The opposition had made their first mistake. "He was starting to cross under when I spot him," Crackers went on, breathing heavily. "He saps me and I see I can't handle him and I go for help." Someone answered in a guttural whisper. Crackers lowered his voice. It wouldn't take long now for reinforcements to arrive and flush me out. I edged farther and chanced a look. I saw two heads outlined above. They didn't seem to be looking my way, so I started across, walking silently toward a narrow loading platform with a wide door opening from it. Below me, a lone light reflected from the wet pavement of the second level, fifty feet down; the blank wall of the Blue Tower dropped past it sheer to the glistening gutters at ground level. Then I was on the platform and trying the door. It didn't open. It was what I should have expected. Standing in the full light from the glare panel above the entry, I felt as exposed as a fandancer's navel. There was no time to consider alternatives. I grabbed my power pistol, flipped it to beam fire and stood aside with an arm across my face. I gave the latch a blast, then kicked the door hard. It was solid as a rock. Behind and above me, I heard Crackers yell. I beamed the lock again, tiny droplets of molten metal spattering like needles against my face and hand. The door held. "Drop it and lift 'em, mug," a deep voice yelled. I twisted to look up at the silhouettes against the deflector rail. I recognized the Slavic face of the man called Heavy. So he could talk after all. "You're under my iron, mug," he called. "Freeze or I'll burn you." I believed him, but I had set something in motion that couldn't stop now. There was nothing to go back to; the only direction for me was on the way I was headed -- deeper into trouble. I was tired of being the mouse in a cat's game. I had taken the initiative and I was keeping it. I turned, set the power pistol at full aperture, and poured it to the armored door. Searing heat reflected from the barrier, smoke boiled, metal melted and ran. Through the stink of burning steel, I smelled scorched hair -- and felt heat rake the back of my neck and hands. Heavy was beaming me at wide aperture, but the range was just too far for a fast kill. The door sagged and fell in. I jumped through the glowing opening, hit the floor and rolled to damp out my smouldering coat. T got to my feet. There was no time now to stop and feel the pain of my burns. They would expect me to go up -- so I would go down. The Blue Tower cohered four city blocks and was four hundred stories high. There was plenty of room in it for a man to lose himself. I ran along the corridor, found a continuous service belt and hopped on, lay flat, rode it through the slot. I came out into the light of the service corridor below, my gun ready, then down and around again. I saw no one. It took ten minutes to cover the eighteen floors down to the sub-basement. I rolled off the belt and looked around. The whole space was packed with automatics; the Blue Tower was a self-sufficient city in itself. I recognized generators, heat pumps, air plants. None of them were operating. The city services were all still functioning, apparently. What it would be like in another ten or twenty years of anarchy was anybody's guess. But when the city systems failed the Blue Tower could go on on its own. Glare panels lit the aisles dimly. I prowled along looking for an elevator bank. The first one I found indicated the car at the hundred-eightieth floor. I went on, found another indicating the twentieth. While I watched, the indicator moved, started down. I was getting ready to duck when it stopped at the fifth. I waited; it didn't move. I went around to the side of the bank, found the master switch. I went back, punched for the car. When the door whooshed open, I threw the switch. I had to work fast now. I stepped into the dark car, reached up and slid open the access panel in the top, then jumped, caught the edge and pulled myself up. The glare panels inside the shaft showed me the pony power pack on top of the car, used by repairmen and inspectors when the main power was off. I lit a permatch to read the fine print on the panel. I was in luck. It was a through car to the four-hundredth. I pushed a couple of buttons, and the car started up. I lay flat behind the machinery. As the car passed the third floor feet came into view; two men stood beyond the transparent door, guns in their hands, watching the car come up. They didn't see me. One of them thumbed the button frantically. The car kept going. There were men at almost every floor now. I went on up, passed the hundredth floor, the one-fiftieth, and kept going. I began to feel almost safe -- for the moment. T was gambling now on what little I knew of the Blue Tower from the old days when all the biggest names congregated there. The top floor was a lavish apartment that had been occupied by a retired fleet admiral, a Viceaire, in turn. If I knew anything about Kingpins, that's where Max Arena would hang his hat. The elevator was slow. Lying there I had time to start thinking about my burned hide. My scalp was hit worst, and then my hands; and my shoulders were sticking to the charred coat. I had been travelling on adrenalin since Heavy had beamed me, and now the reaction was starting to hit. It would have to wait; I had work to do. Just below the three hundred and ninety-eighth floor I punched the button and the car stopped. I stood up, feeling dizzy. I grabbed for the rungs on the wall, hung on. The wall of the shaft seemed to sway... back... Sure, I told myself. The top of the building sways fifteen feet in a high wind. Why shouldn't I feel it? I dismissed the thought that it was dead calm outside now, and started up the ladder. It was a hard climb. I hung on tight, and concentrated on moving one hand at a time. The collar of my coat rasped my raw neck. I passed up the #th and #th -- and rammed my head smack against a dead end. No service entry to the penthouse. I backed down to the #th. I found the lever and eased the door open, then waited, gun in hand. Nothing happened. I couldn't wait any longer. I pushed the door wide, stepped off into the hall. Still nobody in sight, but I could hear voices. To my left a discreet stair carpeted in violet velvet eased up in a gentle curve. I didn't hesitate; I went up. The door at the top was an austere slab of bleached teak. I tried the polished brass lever; the door swung open silently, and I stepped across the threshold and was looking across a plain of honey-colored down at a man sitting relaxed in a soft chair of pale leather. He waved a hand cheerfully. "Come on in," he said. IV shouldered six-footer, with clean-shaven blue jaws, coarse gray-flecked black hair brushed back from a high forehead, a deeper tan than was natural for the city in November, and very white teeth. He was showing them now in a smile. He waved a hand toward a chair, not even glancing at the gun in my hand. I admired the twinkle of light on the polished barrel of a Norge stunner at his elbow and decided to ignore it too. "I been following your progress with considerable interest," Arena said genially. "The boys had orders not to shoot. I guess Luvitch sort of lost his head." "It's nothing," I said, "that a little skin graft won't clear up in a year or so." "Don't feel bad. You're the first guy ever made it in here under his own steam without an invitation." "And with a gun in his hand," I said. "We won't need guns," he said. "Not right away." .I went over to one of the big soft chairs and sat down, put the gun in my lap. "Why didn't you shoot as I came in?" Arena jiggled his foot. "I like your style," he said. "You handled Heavy real good. He's supposed to be my toughest boy." "What about the combat car? More friends of yours?" "Nah," he said, chuckling easily. "Some Jersey boys heard I had a caller. They figured to knock him off on general principles. A nifty." He stopped laughing. "The Gyrob was mine; a remoted job. Nice piece of equipment. You cost me real dough tonight." "Gee," I said. "That's tough." "And besides," he said, "I know who you are." I waited. He leaned over and picked something off the table. It was my wallet. "I used to be in the Navy myself. Academy man, believe it or not. Almost, anyway. Kicked out three w r eeks before graduation. A frame. Well, practically a frame; there was plenty of guys doing what I was doing." "That where you learned to talk like a hood?" For a second Arena almost didn't smile. "I am perfectly capable of expressing myself like a little gentleman, when I feel so inclined, he said, "but I say to hell with it." "You must have been before my time," I said. "A year or two. And I was using a different name then. But that wasn't my only hitch with the Service. When the Trouble started, I enlisted. I wanted some action. When the Navy found out they had a qualified Power Section man on their hands, I went up fast. Within fourteen months I was a J. G. How about that?" "Very commendable. "So that's how I knew about the trick I. D. under the emulsion on the snapshot. You should have ditched it, Maclamore. Or should I say Captain Maclamore?" M Y mouth opened, but I couldn't think of a snappy answer to that one. I was in trouble. I had meant to play it by ear once I reached Arena to get the information I needed. That was out now. He knew me. He had topped my aces before I played them. Suddenly Arena was serious. "You came to the right man, Maclamore. You heard I had one of your buddies here, right? I let the word leak; I thought it might bring more of you in. I was lucky to get Admiral Hayle's deputy." "What do you want with me?" Arena leaned forward. "There were eight of you. Hayle and his aide, Wolfgang, were shot when they wouldn't spill to the Provisional Government -- or whatever that mob calls itself. Margan got himself killed in some kind of tangle near Denver. The other four boys pulled a fast one and ducked out with the scout you guys came back in. They were riding dry tanks -- the scout had maybe thirty tonhours fuel aboard -- so they haven't left the planet. That leaves you stranded. "Nith six sets of Federal law looking for you. Right?" "I can't argue with what's in the newspapers," I said. "Well, I don't know. I got a couple newspapers. But here's where I smell a deal, Maclamore. You want to know where that scout boat is. Played right, you figure you got a good chance of a raid on an arsenal or a power plant to pick up a few slugs of the heavy stuff; then you hightail out, join up with the rest of the squadron and, with the ordnance you pack, you can sit off and dictate the next move." Arena leaned back and took a deep breath. His eyes didn't leave me. Okay. I got one of you here. I found out something from him. He gave me enough I know you boys got something up your sleeve. But he don't have the whole picture. I need more info. You can give it to me. If I like what I hear, I'm in a position to help -- like, for example, with the fuel problem. And you cut me in for half. Fair enough?" "Who is it you've got?" He shook his head. "Uh-uh." "What did he tell you?" "Not enough. What was Hayle holding out? You birds found something out there. What was it?" "We found a few artifacts on Mars, I said. "Not Martian in origin; visitors. We surveyed -- " Don t string me, Maclamore. but if you make it tough for me -- " "How do you know I haven't got a detonator buried under my left ear, I said. "You can't pry information out of me, Arena." "I think you want to live, Maclamore. I think you got something you want to live for. I want a piece of it." "I can make a deal with you, Arena, I said. "Return me and my shipmate to our scout boat. Fuel us up. You might throw in two qualified men to help handle the ship -- minus their blackjacks, preferably -- then clear out. We'll handle the rest. And I'll remember, with gratitude." Arena was silent for a long moment. A Maclamore," he said finally. "But I won't. Max Arena is not a guy to pick up the crumbs or wait around for handouts. I want in. All the way in." "This time you'll have to settle for what you can get, Arena." I put the gun away and stood up. I had a feeling I would have to put it over now or not at all. The rest of the squadron is still out there. If we don't show, they'll carry on alone. They're supplied for a century's operation. They don't need us." That was true up to a point. The squadron had everything -- except fuel. "You figure you got it made if you can get your hands on that scout-boat," Arena said. "You figure to pick up fuel pretty easy by knocking off say the Lackawanna Pile." It shouldn't be too tough; a fleet boat of the Navy packs a wallop." Arena tapped his teeth with a slim paper-cutter. "You're worried your outfit will wind up Max Arena's private Navy, right? I'll tell you someill thing. You think I'm sitting on top of the world, huh? I own this town, and everybody in it. All the luxury and fancy dinners and women I can use. And you know what? I'm bored." "And you think running the Navy might be diverting?" "Call it whatever you want to. There's something big going on out there, and I don't plan to be left out." "Arena, when I clear atmosphere, we'll talk. Take it or leave it." The smile was gone now. Arena looked at me, rubbing a finger along his blue cheek. "Suppose I was to tell you I know where your other three boys are, Maclamore?" "Do you?" I said. "And the boat," Arena said. "The works." "If you've got them here, I want to see them, Arena. If not, don't waste my time." "I haven't exactly got 'em here, Maclamore. But I know a guy that knows where they are." "Yeah." I said. Arena looked mad. "Okay, I'll give it to you, Maclamore. I got a partner in this deal. Between us we got plenty. But we need what you got, too." "I've made my offer, Arena. It stands." "Have I got your word on that, Maclamore?" He stood up and came over to stand before me. "The old Academy word. You wouldn't break that, would you Maclamore?" "I'll do what I said." Arena walked to his desk, a massive boulder of Jadeite, cleaved and polished to a mirror surface. He thumbed a key. "Send him in here," he said. I waited. Arena sat down and looked across at me. Thirty seconds passed and then the door opened and Stenn walked in. "Well," he said. "Mr. Smith." "The Smith routine is just a gag," Arena said. "His name is -- Maclamore." For an instant, I thought I saw a flash of expression on Stenn's face. He crossed the room and sat down. "Well," he said. "A very rational move, your coming here. I trust you struck a profitable bargain?" He looked hard at me, and this time there was expression. Hate, I would call it, offhand. "Not much of a deal at that, Stenn," Arena said. "The captain is a tough nut to crack. He wants my help with no strings attached. I think I'm going to buy it." "How much information has he given you?" Arena laughed. "Nothing," he said. "Max Arena going for a deal like that. Funny, huh? But that's the way the fall-out fogs 'em." "And what have you arranged?" "I turn him loose, him and Williams. I figure you'll go along, Stenn, and let him have the three him where the Scout boat is, so there's no percentage in your holding out." "What else?" "What else is there?" Arena spread his hands. "They pick up the boat, fuel up -- someplace -- and they're off. And the captain here gives me the old Academy word he cuts me in, once he's clear." There was a long silence. Arena smiled comfortably; Stenn sat calmly, looking at each of us in turn. I crossed my fingers and tried to look bored. "Very well," Stenn said. "I seem to be presented with a fait accompli... I let a long breath out. I was going to make it... "   But I would suggest that before committing yourself, you take the precaution of searching Mr. Maclamore's person. One never knows." I could feel the look on my face. So could Arena. "So," he said. "Another nifty." He didn't seem to move, but the stunner was in his hand. He wasn't smiling now, and the stunner caught me easily. V THE lights came on, and I blinked, looking around the room. My mementos didn't look like much, resting in the center of Arena's polished half-acre of desk top. The information was stored in the five tiny rods, less than an inch long, and the projector was a flat polyhedron the size of a pillbox. But the information they contained was worth more than all the treasure sunk in all the seas. "This is merely a small sample," Stenn said. "The star surveys are said to be unbelievably complete. They represent a mapping task which would require a thousand years." "The angles," Arena said. "Just figuring the angles will take plenty time." "And this is what you almost let him walk out with," Stenn said. Arena gave me a slashing look, "Don't let your indignation run away with you, Arena," Stenn said. "I don't think you remembered to mention the fuel situation to Mr. Maclamore, did you?" Arena turned to Stenn, looming over the smaller man. "Maybe you better button your lip," he said quietly. "I don't like the way you use it." "Afraid I'll lower you in the gentleman's esteem?" Stenn said. He looked Arena in the eye. "Nuts to the gentleman's esteem," Arena said. "You thought you'd squeeze me out, Arena," Stenn said. ' You didn't need me any more. You intended to let Maclamore and lowed. There was no danger of an escape, since you knew they'd find no fuel." He turned to me. "During your years in space, Mr. Maclamore, technology moved on. And politics as well. Power fuels could be used to construct bombs. Ergo, all stations were converted for short half-life secondaries, and the primary materials stored at Fort Knox. You would have found yourself fuelless and therefore helpless. Mr. Arena would have arrived soon thereafter to seize the scout-boat." "What would he want with the boat without fuel?" I asked. "Mr. Arena was foresighted enough to stock up some years ago," Stenn said. "I understand he has enough metal hoarded to power your entire squadron for an indefinite time." "Why tell this guy that?" Arena asked. "Kick him to hell out of here and let's get busy. You gab too much." "I see that I'm tacitly reinstated as a partner," Stenn said. "Most gratifying." "Max Arena is no welcher," Arena said. "You tipped me to the tapes, so you're in." "Besides which you perhaps sense that I have other valuable contributions to make." "I figure you to pull your weight." "What are your plans for Mr. ; Maclamore?" "I told you. Kick him out. He'll never wise up and cooperate with us." "First, you'd better ask him a few more questions." "Why? So he'll blow his head off and mess up my rug, like..." Arena stopped. "You won't get anything out of him." "A man of his type has a strong aversion to suicide. He won't die to protect trivial information. And if he does -- we'll know there's something important being held out." "I don't like messy stuff," Arena said. "I'll be most careful," Stenn said. "Get me some men in here to secure him to a chair, and we'll have a nice long chat with him.". "No messy stuff," Arena repeated. He crossed to his desk, thumbed a lever and spoke to  someone outside. Stenn was standing in front of me. "Let him think he's pumping you," he hissed. "Find out where his fuel is stored. I'm on your side." Then Arena was coming back, and Stenn was looking at me indifferently. sion to messy stuff sufficiently to hit me in the mouth now and then during the past few hours. It made talking painful, but I kept at it. "How do I know you have Williams?" I said. Arena crossed to his desk, took out a defaced snapshot. "Here's his I. D." he said. "Take a look." He tossed it over. Stenn held it up. "Let me talk to him." "For what?" "See how he feels about it," I mumbled. I was having trouble staying awake. I hadn't seen a bed for three days. It was hard to remember what information I was supposed to get from Arena. "He'll join in if you do," Arena said. "Give up. Don't fight. Let it happen." "You say you've got fuel. You're a liar. You've got no fuel." "I got plenty fuel, wise guy," Arena yelled. He was tired too. "Lousy crook," I said. "Can't even cheat a little without getting caught at it." "Who's caught now, swabbie?" Arena was getting mad. That suited me. "You're a lousy liar, Arena. You can't hide hot metal. Even Stenn ought to know that." "What else was in the cache, Maclamore?" Stenn asked -- for the hundredth time. He slapped -- also for the hundredth time. It jarred me and stung. It was the last straw. If Stenn was acting, I'd help him along. I lunged against the wires, swung a foot and caught him under the ribs. He oofed and fell off his chair. "Don't push me any farther, you small-time chiselers," I yelled. "You've got nothing but a cast brass gall to offer. There's no hole deep enough to hide out power metal, even if a dumb slob like you thought of it." "Dumb slob?" Arena barked. "You think a dumb slob could have built the organization I did, put this town in his hip pocket? I started stock-piling metal five years ago -- a year before the ban. No hole deep enough, huh? It don't need to be so deep when it's got two feet of lead shielding over it." "So you smuggled a few tons of lead into the Public Library and filed it under Little Bo Peep." "The two feet was there ahead of me, wisenheimer. Remember the Polaris sub that used to be drydocked at Norfolk for the tourists to rubberneck?" "Decommissioned and sold for scrap," I said. "Years ago." "But not scrapped. Rusted in a scrapyard for five years. Then I bought her -- beefed up her shielding -- loaded her and sank her in ten fathoms of water in Cartwright Bay." "That," Stenn said, "is the information we need." Arena whirled. Stenn was still sitting on the floor. He had a palm gun in his hand, and it was pointed at the monogram on Arena's silk shirt. "A cross," Arena said. "A lousy cross..." got to his feet, eyes on Arena. "Where'd you have the stinger stashed?" "In my hand. Stop there." Stenn moved over to me. Eyes on Arena, he reached for the twisted ends of wire, started loosening them. "I don't want to be nosey," I said. "But just where the hell do you fit into this, Stenn?" "Naval Intelligence," Stenn said. Arena cursed. "I knew that name should have rung a bell. Vice Admiral Stenn. The papers said you got yours when the Navy was purged." "A few of us eluded the net." Arena heaved a sigh. "Well, fellows," he said -- and jumped. Stenn's shot went wild, and Arena left-hooked him down behind the chair. As he followed, Stenn came up fast, landed a hard left, followed up, drove Arena back. I yanked at my wires. Almost -- Then Arena, a foot taller, hammered a brutal left-right, and Stenn sagged. Carefully Arena aimed a right cross to the jaw. Stenn dropped. Arena wiped an arm across his face. "The little man tried, Mister. Let's give him that." He walked past my chair, stooped for Stenn's gun. I heaved, slammed against him, and the light chair collapsed as we went over. Arena landed a kick, then I was on my feet, shaking a slat loose from the dangling wire. Arena stepped in, threw a whistling right. I ducked it, landed a hard punch to the midriff, another on the jaw. Arena backed, bent over but still strong. I couldn't let him rest. I was after him, took two in the face, ducked a haymaker that left him wide open just long enough for me to put everything I had in an uppercut that sent him back across his fancy desk. He sprawled, then slid onto the floor. I went to him, kicked him lightly in the ribs. kept kicking and asking. After five tries, Arena shook his head and tried to sit up. I put a foot in his face and he relaxed. I asked him again. "You didn't learn this kind of tactics at the Academy," Arena whined. "It's the times," I said. "They have a coarsening effect." Arena said. "No guts. He pulled the stopper." "Talk plainer," I said, and kicked him again, hard -- but I knew what he meant. "Blew his lousy head off," Arena yelled. "I gassed him and tried scop on him. He blew. He was out cold, and he blew." "Yeah," I said. "Hypnotics will trigger it." "Fancy goddam wiring job," Arena muttered, wiping blood from his face. T got the wire and trussed Arena up. I had to clip him twice before I finished. I went through his pockets, looked at things, recovered my souvenirs. I went over to Stenn. He was breathing. Arena was watching. "He's okay, for crissake," he said. "What kind of punch you think I got?" I hoisted Stenn onto my shoulder. "So long, Arena," I said. "I don't know why I don't blow your brains out. Maybe it's that Navy Cross citation in your wallet." "Listen," Arena said. "Take me with you." "A swell idea," I said. "I'll pick up a couple of tarantulas, too." "You're trying for the hack, right?" "Sure. What else?" "The roof," he said. "I got six, eight rotos on the roof. One highspeed job. You'll never make the hack." "Why tell me?" "I got eight hundred gun boys in this building alone. They know you're here. The hack is watched, the whole route. You can't get through." "What do you care?" "If the boys bust in here after a while and find me like this... They'll bury me with the wires still on, Maclamore." "How do I get to the roof?" He told me. I went to the right corner, pushed the right spot, and a panel slid aside. I looked back at Arena. "I'll make a good sailor, Maclamore," he said. "Don't crawl, Arena," I said. I went up the short stair, came out onto a block-square pad. Arena was right about the rotos. Eight of them. I picked the four-place Cad, and got Stenn tied in. He was coming to, muttering. He was still fighting Arena, he thought... I'll hold... you... get out..." "Take it easy, Stenn," I said. "Nothing can touch this bus. Where's the boat?" I shook him. "Where's the boat, Stenn?" He came around long enough to tell me. It wasn't far -- less than an hour's run. "Stand by, Admiral," I said. "I'll be right back." "Where... you... "We need every good man we can get," I said. "And I think I know a guy that wants to join the Navy." from the communicator screen. "I think we'd be justified in announcing victory now, Commodore." As usual, he sounded like a professor of diction, but he was wearing a big grin. "Whatever you say, chief," I said, with an even sappier smile. I made the official announcement that a provisional Congress had accepted the resignations of all claims by former office holders, and that new elections would be underway in a week.   I switched over to Power Secme a snappy highball. Damned if he wasn't grinning too. "I guess we showed 'em who's got the muscle, Commodore," he said. "Your firepower demonstration was potent, Max," I said. "You must have stayed up nights studying the tapes." "We've hardly scratched the surface yet," he said. "I'll be crossing back to Alaska now, Mac," Stenn said. I watched him move across the half-mile void to the flagship. Five minutes later the patrol detail broke away to take up surveillance orbits. They would be getting all the shore leave for the next few years, but I was glad my squadron had been detailed to go with the flagship on the Deep Space patrol. I wanted to be there when we followed those star surveys back to where their makers came from. Stenn wasn't the man to waste time, either. He'd be getting under way any minute. It was time to give my orders. I flipped the communicator key to the squadron link-up. "Escort Commander to Escort," I said. "Now hear this..."     i #####  T was later than Daniel Shawn had thought when JL they finally came out of the little farmhouse and headed for the big car of Tommy Rogers. It was almost sundown. And there had been a light rain. He took a slow breath, almost tasting the vigor of the air. Strange that it should be late, though. Time had seemed to go so slowly. The whole visit of Professor Rogers had been a mistake that was hard on both of them. Now it was ending clumsily, as it had begun and continued in awkwardness. Once Tommy had been his friend. But that was before Tommy went into Administration and Shawn had given it all up to come back here to the little Minnesota farm where he had been born. "A rainbow!" Tommy exclaimed suddenly. "I haven't seen one in years." "Nor missed it, I'll warrant," Shawn guessed, raising his eyes to see it. It lay in the gap between the locust trees, adding a jeweled light to their dark greenness. Tommy laughed his administrator's unoffended laugh and glanced back over the little farmyard before climbing into the car. "What do you find here, Dan? Kerosene lamps, outdoor plumbing, not even a radio. I still say it's no place for you -- when you could take over the Chair of History if you'd be sensible." "I was born here," Shawn replied, evading the part of the question he didn't want to answer. "But that was forty-five years ago!" Shawn nodded. "Yes. And sometimes, I think, so was the reality of myself. Let it be, Tommy, and I'll ride into Utica with you." Tommy couldn't let it go, of course. There was that in the man which hated any way of life he could not understand. Maybe that was why he'd once studied sociology, only to find that the science could never supply enough answers. He repeated his question as the motor started. "I don't know," Shawn answered slowly, fumbling for his pipe as he tried again to answer it to himself. "Something I almost saw as a child and then lost. Maybe all of us lost it once. That's why I turned to history, to find where it went. But I never found it. You used to do a lot of reading once, Tommy. You tell me. What was in Spencer, in Coleridge a little, in Orlando -- only like an 'echo, but now it's gone from all our writing. "I never thought there was anything like that," Tommy said flatly. Shawn sighed. He should have known the answer that was a part of the man. Then they reached the little village, no more than a mile from the farm. He got out, putting out a hand. B UT Tommy wasn't ready to end it yet. "If you're going to eat here, I'll join you," he suggested. Shawn shrugged, then nodded. He was sorry that he had given in to the man's importunings over the phone and let him make the useless drive from Chicago. There should have been an end to it now. Yet Shawn had intended to dine here, since his own cooking was no better than it should be. He picked up tobacco and the paper at a little store before leading the other to the restaurant beside the gas station. They ordered and waited for the food, with nothing to say between them. The paper, Shawn saw from the headlines, had been another mistake, but he glanced at it while consuming the tasteless food. There was a dark ugliness to the news. As there always was. The lilt of life was lacking in every part of it. It was heavy and ponderous, even when it tried to be witty. And around him, the few diners were filled with a heaviness that made their laughter a deliberate effort and gave them no pleasure in the stories they told endlessly to each other. "Why?" Shawn asked abruptly, pointing to the headlines. "You're still a sociologist, Tommy. Tell me, why all the dark ugliness?" For a moment, it seemed that there was a measure of understanding in the man. He sighed. "Sociologists don't know much more about the present cultural matrix than anyone else, Dan. Too much technology, maybe, before the culture can absorb it. Or maybe this is just one of the plateaus in an evolution tQward a sense of group maturity." "Maturity?" Shawn questioned bitterly. "It could be." And now the administrator's optimism was creeping back into the face. "Oh, I know, there's still hate and ugly conflict.' But think of the earlier ages, Dan. Look at the superstitious panics, the persecutions, the witch-burnings. There was a time when anything different from what was considered human was to be killed on sight. Children ostracize or fight with anyone who differs from the group norm. Seems to me we've improved a lot in that respect -- at least in this country. We're trying to understand other peoples. Why right now, Dan, if little green men got out of a saucer, most people would be delighted to meet them. Lots of men are hoping to find alien races -- look at Project Ozma. Or look at the case of that priest who is writing about the question of redemption for non-human beings. If there were werewolves today, I'll bet that there'd be a lot more scientific interest in them than fear or hatred. There wouldn't even be any persecution of witches, unless they went in for criminal activity. That could be considered a form of maturity." Or maybe the human race was so unconsciously sick of its own sordidness that it would welcome even alien relief, Shawn thought. But he let the conversation die. There was as little answer to the problem in sociology as in history -- as he had known all along. He went out with Tommy at last, putting out his hand awkwardly in silence as the other reached his car. "You sure you won't come back, Dan?" Tommy asked for the last time. "You're definitely turning President Schuyler down?" "I won't come back, Tommy." He stepped back from the car and stood watching it drive away. Then he sighed and dismissed the whole unfortunate business from his mind.  T was already so far into dusk that the stars were shining as he turned to walk homeward. The Moon was full and startlingly white in the dark sky. Wisps of clouds fleeced its path. The night was going to be one of loveliness. For a moment he was glad he had ridden in, since it gave him an excuse to travel back through the beauty of it. The road went across the railroad tracks that led to all the earth, and yet the rails seemed to lead nowhere in the moonlight. It carried him on, past the school where once a teacher had touched his mind, then past , the old cemetery, shaded with hollows of darkness. For a moment, there was a touch of the spiritual hush he had felt long before as he moved by the quiet place. Then it was shattered by a coarse laugh, and a burst of smut-tinged words of a juke song on a transistor radio. Superstition was dying, as Tommy had said. At least, the older superstitious fear of things in the night. But the darkness of it was being replaced by an even darker veil of sordid ugliness. Even the dead had no peace. A couple had found the retreat for their own use, but without even the respect of silence. And maybe these dead could never feel the lack, if they could know. Yet he felt his soul rubbed in dirt as he guessed the ages of the couple. They were using the time for what should have been an opening outward in them for things better reserved for later years. The houses thinned out and were behind him, except for a single light back from the road half a mile ahead. Here the land dipped down, carrying the road with it. It had been a graveled road once. Shawn missed the sound of the pebbles. But the Moon was the same he had known long ago, its light like a kiss across the fields. Even crops cultivated by great machines instead of horses could take on a difference in the silvering from above. Where had men lost whatever they had lost? History had taught him nothing, though he had searched. And the keys in literature were too elaborately carved to fit the lock. Books were written to bury the feelings of a past generation, not to reveal what might be happening in the present. There had been a magic in men once. Oh, to be .sure, it had been rare enough, and whole areas has missed it. Rome had been mighty in valor without it. Much of Greece had lost it, though it lay somewhere in the soft hint of legends older than Olympus. But there had been Persia. There had been Queen Maev and the Isle of Avalon, the sea warriors of Ys and the dreams that misted across man s rise from a beast. No time had ever been without it before. A whatever it was. Save for a few bits borrowed from the past in Yeats, there was no song or dream in the poetry now; and nobody even read poetry to look for such things. The art was as ugly and machine-symboled as the thoughts of the little minds that made it. The music was noise and the only legend was the legend of power. A car filled with teen-agers passed him. The top was down, but none of them were seeing the moonlight. Shawn passed the sandstone ridge at the edge of his farm, lifted a wire gate and left the road. The woods still stretched along the road. They were his woods, as they had been once when he was a boy. There, along the little rutted trail through them, was the hazel bush, or one like the one he remembered. The wild grapes were ripe and sweet, beaded with the rain or dew. He tasted them and went meditatively on. There had been a lilting in a few men's thoughts once -- enough to lighten the others, and to echo still, faintly, out of the filter of older literature and legendry. It had gone. Maybe the industrial revolution? But that was a poor answer, since the revolution had touched only lightly on much of the world, yet the wonder had vanished just as quickly. Maybe the drive toward power? And yet, there had been power before without the death of the glamyr he could sense without defining. Something had gone out of men. In its place was only the body of man's work -- the machines, the dark forces that drove him on to bombs and destiny, the rockets that could lift him toward outer space but hide the dancing of the stars. Hundreds of years before, the lilt -- and there was no other word -- had vanished. History had failed to show a reason why. Shawn had come back here, looking for the threads he had lost in childhood. He was still seeking them. He walked on through the stubble left from the harvested barley... and something seemed to whisper in his veins. that he should go on. He went, past the sagging barn and down the lane toward the orchard. The pump at the old well creaked and gave forth water that was reddened with rust, but cold and tingling on his palate. He stopped to pluck an apple from an unpruned tree and munched on it. And now the tingling was stronger, and there was a faint singing of the blood in his ears, as if a horn were being blown somewhere. It became louder as he crossed a stile into the meadow. The grass was faintly damp. There was the smell of clover in the air, over the faint, rich musk of the earth itself. He moved across it, listening to the bending of the grass and the soft scuttling sounds of the little creatures that lived in it. From a pond beyond the orchard lane, the croaking of frogs reached him, the eerie call of a screech owl, the chirping of crickets. The bugling of the strange excitement in his mind was stronger now. He headed for the little dip near the center of the meadow. As a boy, he had lain there in the sunlight out of the wind and read Princess of Mars and Haggard and Dunsany, or crouched in the moonlight at times when he was too restless to sleep and too filled with unremembered plans. It was too damp now for a man of forty-five to return to the earth, but the spot drew him. And then he saw the thing, centered in the spot toward which he was headed, and his heart seemed to leap with shock and then with expectancy. He moved to it slowly. He tried to tell himself it was something left behind by some wooing couple or as a practical joke by his neighbors. But he knew better. It looked like a shell made of something milky-white. Half was almost buried in the grass. The other half of the opened shell was resting backwards against a rock. It seemed to be lined with a softness like the packed down of a milkweed pod. And it was perhaps eight feet long. But it was the sweep of the lines and the rightness of the form that held his eyes. There was a fluting of the milky substance that lifted something in him as he had felt it lift before at an ancient jade screen or a phrase of Mozart. There was no mark to show how it had come there. It must have been after the rain, since the lining was dry and soft to his touch. Inevitably, he thought of flying saucers. But he threw the idea out of his mind, like a man brushing dirt from himself. The ugliness of the times was reflected in the pitiful situation where men's dreaming of better things led only to the banality of the cults. And of all the cults, the flying saucer ones were the least alive with a spark of the -- lilt. Yet he knew without questioning that this thing had never been shaped on Earth. And as if to confirm his idea, his eyes caught sight of a design that was revealed softly in the moonlight against the lid of the shell. He bent to see it, but it was still too dim. Finally, as he had known he was going to do, he kicked off his wet shoes and stepped into the hollow of the padding, letting himself down gently until his eyes were near the carving. through the lid, making it hard to be sure of details. But somehow, his eyes filled with the figure. It was a woman -- or rather, not a woman, since the features were planed as no human face could be. A strange woman, thinner than any human and more supple, from the dance in which she was frozen. The final proof of lack of humanity lay in the hair that rippled from her head and grew into a double crest on her back, spreading out! i wards across each of her shoulders, but standing well above her skin. And suddenly, her hand seemed to move! Shawn blinked. But it had been no illusion. The carved fingers opened and the arm moved toward him, just as the lid began to move inward to close the shell. There was a dancing cloud of motes that sprang from her hand and sped toward him. He lifted his arms, but it was too late. The gleaming motes struck his eyes, and they dosed. Gentle waves of sleep washed across his brain. He had only time to feel the shell lift somehow and ride upwards into the moonlight before the sleep claimed him completely... There was a sense of the passage of time, eventually. His eyes would not open, but he lay somewhere that was not on Earth, and he could sense that hours had passed. Hours, he thought. Not days or weeks, but only hours. Around him, there was a stirring. He could sense that the shell was gone, and there was an alien but earthy odor in his nostrils. Now sounds came -- voices -- but no voices he had ever heard. There was a silvery quality to them, like the voices of children mysteriously robbed of the harsh overtones of chilldish screams. These were almost liquid. Yet he could sense a frenzy and worry in them. In the background, there was a chanting, and the heart inside him seemed to be crying at is ended. He tried to sit up and open his eyes, but his mind was still not in control of his body. Some sign must have shown, however. There was a gentle touch on his forehead, and a few words obviously meant to be soothing. The words held a hint of familiarity, but he could understand none of them. "Where am I?" he asked. There was a sigh near him, and another voice answered. It was a strong, masculine voice with a power of command and responsibility behind it, even though there were no really deep tones. "You would call it Mars," the words came in oddly accented English. "Mars? In a few hours?" Yet as Shawn protested, he sensed the rightness of the answer. The weight of him was little more than a third that which he had always known. The voice was sober and somehow withdrawn. "Our ways are not your ways, man. Our science means as little to you as yours to us. We accept the way of the universe where you bend the laws of nature against themselves. Who shall say which is better? Yet for this one thing of moving beyond the distances you know, we have ways you have not." "Yet you speak English." "There have been others before you. Not many." The voice was falling, like the ending of an organ note. "So few. And now..." It died away, and then resumed more normally. "But enough. We go to confer. Use the time until we return as you will." There were rustlings again, and then light shone weakly through Shawn's lids. Something touched his face, and he found his eyes opening. This time when he tried to sit up, his body obeyed, though the motion was awkward in the unfamiliar pull of the planet. fantasy. He'd wake in the morning wet and soaked in the meadow, sneezing with a cold from exposure. But he knew better. A dream like this could be none of his making. There were elements in it, as he stared about, that could never have come from his mind. There wasn't much to see. He was in a room that must have been carved from colored rock, and there was a sense of a great many feet of similar rock above him. The light seemed to be in the air itself, diffused and softly silver over everything. He lay on what must be a couch, but a couch with soft curves an dornaments no man could have planned. And beyond him was a fountain. It was a tiny fountain, carved out of the wall of rock, with a thin spray of water falling over into a basin, making a soft tinkling sound. In front of the basin was the carving of a kneeling girl. This time there was only a hint of the shoulder crests of hair, but the green of the stone made the other features easier to see. No human artist could have fashioned that, and no human model could have posed for it. The girl was beautiful, but it was as if she came from a race that had descended from something related to the lighter monkeys, as man claimed descent from a great anthropoid ancestor of himself and the gorilla. Then, without warning, a curtain seemed to fall across the room. It cut off most of it, leaving him with only a little space before the couch. But if the blackness was of cloth, it fell without a rustle. And behind it was the stirring of others moving into the room and finding places. Behind the screen, the voice he took to be that of a leader began again. "What are you called, man? I am Porreos, a prince of my people." "Danny," Shawn answered. His own response surprised him. He'd not called himself that since his childhood. But he let it stand. "Then, Danny, we have conferred And we feel you are better for not seeing us, since you cannot remain with us. We are sorry to have brought you here, though it is too late to alter that. But you will be returned." Shawn puzzled over it, finding no logic to the decision. Why couldn't he remain? Why pick him up and bring him over all the distance for nothing but this? And why had the shell been on Earth in the first place? He did not think he had spoken aloud, but Porreos sighed and began to answer. "We had hoped for a child of your race, Danny. One who could learn to live with us, as you could never do here. And the call of the shell was set for the yearning of one of your children. Strange that you should have answered. As strange as the shells that have returned to us empty. It has been so long..." organ note. And behind it came the hint of a wailing song in many voices, a snatch of group response that cut into Shawn's nerves and brought tears to his eyes, though he could understand none of it. There was a delicacy here, a lack of strength and force, that hardly matched a race able to span space at the breathtaking speed of the shells. The air around him was almost as thick as that of Earth, and there had been a fountain of water. It fitted no picture of Mars, as these voices fitted no people he had expected to find on the harshness of the little world. Suspicion grew in his mind suddenly. "You never camd from this planet, Porreos!" This time, the wailing chant began before the prince could answer. It was a thing of beauty and tradition, but the ache in it was like the ache of a man who would reach for the stars to melt them against the palm of his hand, and then look to find them gone. There was a laughter to it like the laughter that there would be because of the aching he felt too strong inside his breast for anything else. Shawn learned more from the song behind the words than from the answer that Porreos made. No, they had never developed on Mars, but far away. They had years before. But on their world there had been another race, stronger, younger, with all that they lacked. And for a time, the two had touched falferingly, to the benefit of both. But then had come a great change over the younger race. Something that the old ones could not understand had taken over the whole emotions of the new ones. It had built a sudden hatred. The race that had sometimes feared and sometimes loved the race of Porreos was deliberately filled with superstition and belief that all other creatures were things of ultimate evil, to be shunned, hated and mistreated. And the old race had been unable to withstand it. They had never been strong. They had dwelt on only a part of the home planet at any time. But now, finally, they were forced to flee. Mars was the best they could find. They had carved dwellings out under the surface and trapped what little air and water there was. It was a poor home to them, but all they had. And now they were dying, slowly and gently. They each lived for a long time, but they bred infrequently to make up for it. And there was no longer the heart in them to keep up their numbers. All of the race that was left were here, behind the curtain. "All," Porreos repeated as the song came to its end like the sound of the last leaf falling in the forest of winter. "It is a respect we owe you, at least, for disturbing you." "But you'll disturb children, porreos? You don't mind stealing them and bring them here?" "Don't condemn us without understanding," the voice said, and there was dignity and hurt in it. "We're a lonely people. We need others, and even a single child whom we can adopt and make into one of us helps. And besides, there's another need which doesn't concern you." And there, Shawn realized, must lie the real crux of the matter. There was some need. There had to be, to send the shells across space looking for someone from Earth. "Maybe it does," he decided slowly. "You've brought me here. The reason should concern me as much. as it would concern a child." "No!"  adult might put pressure on a balky child. He heard the same pressure mount behind the screen, with a rising tempo of rustlings and subdued whispers in the tantalizingly familiar alien tongue. "Don't ask us that, Danny!" It was almost a roar of pain from the prince. "A child we can adopt and make one of us and be bound to. But it is not for you to ask! We're an old, proud people, and our traditions are stronger than the laws of nature you Earthlings fight. We cannot ask favors outside our own. We cannot beg -- not even for a part of the world that was our own. And we shall not beg of you!" It was a nightmare experience. Logic was in abeyance, as if some part of him had already recognized that normal logic could not be used. But it was no more a nightmare than his own culture had become to him in the last few years. Beside that ugliness, this unreason was almost childishly simple. "You're not begging," he told the group behind the curtain. "I'm giving. Tell me what you want of me and take it." There was a shock of silence, and a whisper that was not in the voice of the prince. "You trust us that rrfuch?" To his own surprise, he did. Somewhere his mind was making a pattern out of all this, and he was not afraid of them. "As a free gift, then," Porreos said at last, and some of the fatigue seemed to lift from the voice. "We have one who is dying. And there is something in your blood which can save her -- a resistance that our bodies lack. We need a few drops of your blood, Danny." Shawn got up quietly from the couch and approached the curtain. He thrust out his bared arm experimentally, surprised when it penetrated with almost no resistance. He grinned at himself as he waited. There was the tiniest of prickings on his finger, and a brief itch. When he withdrew his hand, something like a fine mesh of cobweb lay over the end of the finger. He was sure there would be no infection. There were stirrings but no voices behind the screen, and he waited, staring again around the limited section of the room he could see. It was beautiful. There was a shaping of beauty no man could have rendered. But there wss a weakness, a lack of the very brutal force he sensed in even the ugliness that was overtaking Earth... And there was no lilt here either. last. "Danny, there is life among us in one who was dying. Your blood is our debt. Before we return you to Earth, there is another tradition which we must keep. Make one request of us, as is your right now. And if we can fulfill, it, the boon is yours." It was what Shawn had expected. It could be no other. And there was still a surprise. No, he thought, there could be no lilt here and none among his people. The dark force there and the fair lack of force here were neither complete. And the lilt he had named and sought could only come from a true comple. tion. No wonder the shell had come to him in answer to his yearning. No wonder that these people sought a child of Earth while his people lost their superstitious xenophobia and even wanted alien contact from the stars. "Porreos," he asked, "can you follow my thoughts?" "A little, Danny Shawn." The voice was reluctant, as if the admission carried unknown dangers. Then it was suddenly filled with intensity. "Yes, oh yes, We can follow!" The curtain vanished, leaving the room visible to Shawn, and he could see all of the ancient race that was left before him. There were less than a hundred there, green-clad and browngarbed men, and women with delicate winglike mantles of hair. Their faces were inhuman and their tiny bodies were strange. But they were familiar as no alien being could ever be. "Ask your boon," the prince of the fairy folk cried. But they already knew, and there was laughter rising and smiles spreading across the elfin faces that looked up toward the human. "Come home," Shawn asked them. "Come back to Earth. We need you!" for your information Reader's Digest is still running the series of articles called "The Most Fascinating Man I Ever Met;" at any event, some time ago I was asked by somebody whether I had ever contributed to that series. My answer was "no" -- which inevitably led to the question: "well, who is the most fascinating man you met?" I have about half a dozen candidates in mind, but I can't answer this question. Partly because I would have trouble making up my mind which one of this half dozen people deserves the crown; partly because most of them are still alive and I don't know how they will develop. More important, to me at least, I am still alive -- which means that I'll probably meet a few more fascinating people. Since I cannot write about the most fascinating man I met I'll write, instead, about a (presumably) fascinating man I almost met. I was in High School then. I must have been about # years old. My teacher of French, Dr. Sepp Schneider, was a ski enthusiast... which has some bearing on the story. He had helped to make a feature-length movie about skiing and needed some help in distributing literature to the audience of a first private screening. I was drafted. To enhance my enthusiasm for this job he told me that he had invited Dr. Theodor Zell to be in the audience and that he would introduce me to Dr. Zell after the screening. That was enough for me. I had been reading Dr. Zell's books for some six years and had bought all of them that were still in print. (Fortunately for my pocketbook most of them were what we now call paperbacks.) Dr. Schneider had known Dr. Zell for many years. He told me what was then still a secret, namely that the well known name, "Dr. Theodor Zell," was a pen name. His real name was Dr. Leopold Bauke. Germans are, as a rule, bitterly opposed to name changes since this implies a wilful break with family traditions. Dr. Bauke had. made an exception. It so happens that his real name is the idiomatic German word (somewhat mispronounced, which produces a humorous effect) for the bass drum of an Infantry band. Such a name would not do on the cover of a zoological book. Therefore Bauke had changed it (for literary purposes only) to Zell. This corresponded, or at least hinted at, the zoological content, since the German word Zelle means "cell" in the biological sense. It does mean a cell in jail, too; but it was most unlikely that anybody would take that meaning for a pseudonym. Well, Dr. Zell did not come to the movie preview. His friend Dr. Schneider promised me that he would make another appointment. It was scheduled several months later and then cancelled. Schneider remarked, "Theodor seems to be quite sick." He was. Half a year later I read about his death. So I never actually did meet Dr. Zell. VL#HO was he?  The external circumstances of his life can be told in one paragraph, and even that paragraph is just for completeness' sake. He was born in # on an estate some three score miles from Berlin. He studied law, presumably at his father's request, and finally received the title Doktor beider Rechte, or "doctor of both laws" -- meaning Roman and Code Napoleon. Then he settled in Berlin and started writing about animals. Within five years he was famous. Of course, a few people attacked his views; but ten times as many defended them. Only a very few people knew him personally, though some of his books sold more than # copies. In # he quietly died. His obituary did not even mention the cause of death. There exists a joke about a man who, for the first time in his life, attends a theatrical performance, which happens to be Hamlet. On his way out he is heard to mutter: "All that fellow Shakespeare did was string a lot of quotations together." Something similar may be said about Dr. Zell's work. Many of the ideas are now simply taken for granted that even people old enough to know about Dr. Zell do not know that it was he who said so first. And the younger generation of zoologists doesn't even know his name. In writing about Dr. Zell it is therefore not very important who he was. What counts is what he said. His specialty was to explain actions of animals which seem mysterious or senseless to the casual observer. Interestingly enough, he never ran an animal experiment in the modern sense. He only observed. Some of his work dealt with stories current in his time. One of them, which I heard myself as a boy from a forester, dealt with the mixed offspring of wolves and domesticated dogs. That they do interbreed is a fact well known to every outdoorsman in the areas where wolves occur. The story was that puppies resulting from such a mixed marriage could be domesticated, but that pure wolf puppies could not. But if you found puppies in the forest, how could you tell whether they were dog, mixed or wolf? Very simple, said the people of what is now Poland and the western fringe of Soviet Russia. You pen them up for a few hours. Then, when they are likely to be thirsty, you give them water. If they lap it up with their tongues like domestic dogs they are dogs or mixed and can be kept. But if they drink like sheep, they are wolves and must be killed. Nobody ever doubted that story; everybody had learned it early in life from his father. Except Dr. Zell. He had grown up with lots of dogs and had seen wolves. There was no difference in the build of the mouth; why should there be one in drinking habits? "It took one trip to the zoo," he wrote, "but then it took five hours of patience." After that time all three species of wolves had performed for him, all of them lapping the water like his own dogs. Another problem was the one of bow carrion-eating birds find their food. The customary answer was that these birds have a fantastically keen sense of smell, so keen that they not only smell a dead body miles away but that they can even smell it if a person or an animal is going to die soon. We now know that this is nonsense. Birds (with the possible exception of the New Zealand kiwi) don't have any sense of smell at all. True, the bill of most birds still shows holes where nostrils normally belong, but there is nothing behind it to do the actual smelling. About sjxty years ago a naturalist began to grow doubtful. He expressed his thoughts in the following manner: "The eye operates by means of light rays; the nose needs particles of the smelling substance to work on. A bird circling, say, five hundred yards up is likely to be above the limit to which such particles will ascend. Moreover, it is moving so fast that its nose would be handicapped by its very speed. Therefore I believe that, in the case of birds, the sense of smell plays a very minor role in the process of locating food." Dr. Zell went one step farther. With numerous examples he showed that in the case of birds the sense of smell plays no role at all. (This was before the anatomical impossibility of a bird smelling anything had been demonstrated.) When he declared categorically, "Birds go by sight only," he had already postulated his main theory, namely the distinction of animals into "eyeguided" and "nose-guided". Just to avoid misunderstandings I have to point out that Dr. Zell (though he mentioned insects occasionally) was essentially concerned with mammals and birds. Since it turned out that all birds are exclusively "eyeguided," the discussion of animal behavior dealt with mammals, especially with domesticated animals and game. He related at one time that the casual question of why some dogs bay at the moon started him thinking. Another thing that stuck in his mind was the rather unflattering German saying, "Soand-so behaved just as stupid as a cow confronted with a new door to the stable." The third example that provided a clue to him was a story told by a lady who owned an English bulldog. While the maid was taking the dog for a stroll, a new and very large mirror was installed in the lady's boudoir. As the dog was brought in and saw his reflection in the big mirror he started to growl and evidently got ready for battle, approaching his reflection stiff-legged, cautious and teeth ready, until he was about a yard from the mirror. Then he sniffed a few times and quietly settled down in his favorite corner on the carpet. The lady concluded that her pet quieted down as soon as he recognized himself in the mirror. That, Dr. Zell said, was not the reason -- even though he did not doubt the facts as related. Dogs are the commonest example of a nose-guided animal. If dogs could talk (this is my statement, not Dr. Zell's), they would not say, "Let me see," they would say, "Let me smell." To a dog things do not "look right," they "smell right." And just as we may look very carefully at something which is by no means a pretty sight, so a dog may carefully sniff something which doesn't smell nice at all. He needs a "smell identification" to make sense out of something (or just to remember it) while we need a "picture identification" for the same reasons. Keeping in mind that the dog is "nose-guided," the story of the bulldog and the large mirror appears in a different light. On entering the boudoir the dog saw another dog and prepared himself for a fight, just in case. As he came closer, the "other dog" came closer too. But when they were within jumping distance the bulldog could not smell the "other dog." Hence there was no other dog -- and he might as well take a nap. The cow that stands, seemingly the epitome of stupidity, in front of the new stable door is in a similar dilemma. Cows are "noseguided" too. Now, all the way home all the smells are as they should be and where they should be. But just before entering the stable one expected smell (that of the old door) is missing and a new one, not at all resembling the old one (namely freshly cut wood and paint), is in its place. To a nose-guided animal this can only mean that there is something fundamentally wrong. To an eyeguided animal the difference would be minor; the door would have the right size and shape and approximately the same color as the old one. Oh, yes, the baying at the moon. Well, there is something up there which can be seen. It isn't there all the time, in which case one would probably learn to ignore it. But even when there it has no smell at all, which is dismaying. As Dr. Zell phrased it: "Just try to imagine how we would feel if there was something in our room which we could smell and even feel, but could not see. It would be a rather upsetting experience!" Since the nose is so important to the dog, their habit of leaving a "visiting card" at trees and fireplugs becomes clear too. They smell not just that another dog has been there, but which other dog. If you watch your own dog's behavior carefully you can almost guess it too, because one other dog is considered a friend, while another dog is the opposite. The point here is again that you have to see how your own dog behaves; your dog goes by his nose. Dr. Zell coined the term "the noseguided animal's post office" for these landmarks where a "notice" (in the form of a smell) is left. The American writer Ernest Thompson-Seton had arrived at the same conclusion, incidentally. He wrote that when the wolf Lobo stuck his nose into the air and sniffed for ten minutes it was to him as if you spend ten minutes with the morning newspaper. You learn what has been going on in your absence, or while you were asleep. Naturally Dr. Zell's distinction into nose-guided and eye-guided was not supposed to mean that the animal in question goes by this one sense only. Except the birds; it is quite possible that the old naturalist guessed right when he pointed to the high speed of movement as the cause. We are ourselves eye-guided animals. But we sniff for a gas leak (this partly due to the fact that we know that gas cannot be seen), and when a piece of meat which has been overlooked in the refrigerator for some time does not "look right" we make our nose a consultant. Likewise dogs do see, though apparently poorly (with the exception of some breeds like the greyhound), but to them sight is secondary. We trust our eyes. The dog trusts his nose. In passing it may be remarked that this explains why an old blind dog does not seem to be particularly unhappy. He is in about the position of a man who has lost his sense of smell; it's distressing on occasion, but no major catastrophe. Mostly because some critics misconstrued "nose-guided" into "exclusively nose-guided" and other critics brought up the question "what about hearing?" Dr. Zell later phrased his guiding idea differently by saying that "among higher mammals the sum of the three major senses (sight, smell and hearing) is a constant." It seems to me that the nose-guided animals place a little more reliance on their hearing than do the eye-guided animals. Well, that's the story of the man I didn't meet. Possibly he wouldn't have been too interesting as a person. But his ideas were -- and these we can still talk about. I have two questions. (#) Is it true that a ship which sinks where the ocean is very deep will never reach the bottom? (#) Some time ago I called a young porcupine a hedgehog. My neighbor laughed at me and said they were two different animals. Is this true? David E. Brown Cleveland Heights, Ohio "No" to the first, "yes" to the second. The idea that a sinking ship may not reach bottom in deep water is rather widely distributed, but there is no truth in it. Since water is a virtually incompressible liquid -- as most liquids are -- the density of the water at the bottom of the ocean is only very slightly greater than that of surface water. Hence a piece of sheet steel, such as a no longer watertight ship, will sink all the way to the bottom no matter how deep the water. Of course, it is just possible that a damaged ship has a number of compartments which still hold air; such a ship may, for a while, behave like a submerged submarine, drifting a few dozen feet below the surface. Whether such a case has actually been observed is somethng I don't know. But in time the air will escape from these compartments too, and then the ship will sink. As regards the porcupine and the hedgehog, they are two entirely different animals which have only two things in common: both are mammals and both are spiny. But the porcupine is a rodent, like rabbits, squirrels, rats, etc., while the hedgehog, which is somewhat smaller than a porcupine, belongs to the much older Insectivores (like moles and shrews). There are no hedgehogs in the United States except in zoological gardens. I am asking this question of you because you are the author of Dragons in Amber. I have a beautiful piece of amber jewelry and while showing it to a friend of mine remarked that the "stone'" years old. She admired the piece but remarked that, after all, every presume this is true, or is it? Remember that we were speaking of jewelry, that is, of stones like a diamond, a ruby, an opal or a topaz, not just a piece of rock. (Mrs.) Rutka Perkainen Englewood, New Jersey Well, we could include odd "pieces of rock" in the discussion, too. In fact, it may be helpful if we do so. A piece of chalk, having been formed during the Cretaceous Period, is obviously older than a piece of amber which was formed during the very early part of the Tertiary Period. And a piece of anthracite coal is older, too, having been formed during the Carboniferous Period, or And some plain rock samples from Canada could be # million years old. As regards the age of an opal or a topaz, the answer is unfortunately that we do not know. Most gem stones are chemically rather simple substances. Ruby and sapphire, for example, are aluminum oxides, opal and amethyst are silicon oxides and so forth. What counts is that they are crystallized, and have just the proper kind (and amount) of impurities for color, etc. We don't know how long the process of formation takes in nature but, under the proper conditions, it might be less than the time a woman would beautiful stone. Since the process of formation must be rather short there is no way of judging how long ago it took place. A fine amethyst might have been formed thousand years ago. To determine the age of a particular gem is, at least at present, impossible. The diamond is a special case -- mainly because, chemically speaking, it is the simplest of all gems, merely crystallized carbon. The first man to crystallize carbon in the laboratory was the French chemist Henri Moissan, a little over sixty years ago. Moissan suspected that carbon might not crystallize under ordinary pressures and thought of a way to produce high pressure suddenly. He dissolved carbon in liquid iron and then dumped the whole into cold water. The sudden contraction of the molten iron produced the high pressures he wanted, and he did find minute diamonds in the iron afterwards. Evidently they had formed instantaneously. (General Electric is making diamonds, at present structurally poor and blackish in color, up to one carat in size, employing temperatures from # to # degrees Fahrenheit and pressures between # and # pounds per square inch. But they don't say how long it takes -- for obvious reasons.) If great heat and sudden high pressure is what makes a diamond it was suggested almost immediately after Moissan's success that diamonds might be created by the impact of large meteorites. This suggestion has been revived recently. If this is correct the diamond would be formed in a fraction of a second. If a process similar to Moissan's laboratory experiment is responsible for the origin of crystallized carbon the same would be true. In a display of various gem stones it is quite possible, therefore, that the big diamond which is the center of the display has the least chronological age -- if the most value -- of all of them. After you and L. Sprague de i Camp have traced the wanderings of Odysseus in your book Lands Beyond I am wondering whether a similar job could not be done for the deeds of Hercules, or Herakles? Sandra Rosen The Bronx, N. Y. In general the answer is "no". In the Odyssey the technique of the poet -- later imitated by whoever composed the tales of Sindbad the Sailor -- is to lead the listener gradually from the known into the unknown. The audience at such a recital was, of course, rather mixed. Many were people who had never left their village. Others would have more knowledge because of association and education. And some might be sailors who had been in distant places. These must not be given a chance to get up and say: "Nonsense! After you round that isle the black headland is in the direction of sunset, not in the direction of noon." For this reason the geographical facts in the Odyssey are as accurate as they could be made -- which in turn makes it possible to trace just what the poet had in mind. The tales around Herakles lack this desire for accuracy. True, the country ruled by Geryon is most likely what we now call Spain, but that is as far as it goes. However, for one of the deeds of Herakles one scholar has made an interesting suggestion. It is the as you'll recall, is the nine-headed serpent-like monster which devastated the countryside. Of its nine heads, one was immortal. When Herakles went to work on the monster, lopping off its heads, it grew two new ones for every one it lost. Finally a flaming torch was applied to the necks after a head had been chopped off and they would not grow again. But the immortal head could not be killed, so Herakles buried it under a huge rock. Just for your amusement I add here an artist's attempt to picture the Hydra, it is from Konrad Gesner's Historia Animalium, (#.) Now the "explanation." The name Hydra bears a most suspicious resemblance to the Greek word for "water," namely  hydor, and the Hydra therefore, was probably something liquid. And if you try to block a rivulet or creek it will probably flow around the obstacle in two rivulets, "growing two heads for the one lopped off." But a wellspring of any kind would improve the landscape, not devastate it. Yes, said the scholar. If hydor meant "water" only, it certainly would. But in ancient times hydor probably was used for any liquid, and an oil well would devastate the purely rustic landscape. Hence the hydor stops flowing when a torch is applied to it. The immortal head is, of course, the oil well itself... but a huge rock might block it. It would be nice if we knew just what geographic locality is meant. We could then judge whether oil is likely there. I am the first to admit that this is a very ingenious explanation. Whether it is also correct is an entirely different question. ####...  #. 'T'HE problem published in the February issue was, as you probably remember, to use the figures from I to # in their natural order but, by interspersing plus and minus or other mathematical signs between the figures, to produce an equation balanced by the figure #. I got the idea from the West German magazine Kosmos which posed the same question, but did not require the figures natural sequence. To begin with the Kosmos published a number of solutions, of which seven complied with my stricter rule. They were: (#X#X#X#)  #  #  (#X#)  #  # (K.l) (#X#X#) #### (#X#)  # (K.#) #  # -- #  # -- #  # (K.#) #  #  #-(#:#)  #  # (K.#) #X#X# -- (#X#)  (#X#)  (#X#)  # (K.#) I  (#X#)  (#X#) -- #  #  (#X#)  # (K.#) I  C(#X#X#X#):#I  #  (#X#)  # (K.#) most of which were also found by Galaxy readers. One amusing (and otherwise flattering) letter from Sally Markowitz in Brooklyn provided the following: I  #  #  #  #  #  #  (#X#)  # with the statement that it couldn't be correct because it was so easy. But the ones who really went to town were the team of Robert Salzman, John Bailey and Donald Maclachlan, all of Raytheon Company in Andover, Mass. These patient mathematicians found # solutions using only the basic operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They added five more using square roots (of course only the roots of # and # are actually useful in this short sequence of numbers) and, as if this were not enough, they found two equations using factorials and four more using factorials and the square root of nine. In their first sixteen they duplicated K.#. The others are: #-#  (#X#)  #  (#X#)  # # -- I -- (#X#X#)  #  #-#  # (#X#) -- #  #  (#:#)  #  # I  # -- (#X#) -- #  (#X#)  (#X#)  #I  (#:#)#) #  (#X#)  #  # -- I  (#X#)  # -- (#X#)  # # I  (#X#)  (#X#) -- #  #  (#X#)  # (-I  #)(#  #)(#  #):#  #  # ( -- I #X##  #  # -- #)  # # I  #  # -- #  # -- #  #  # -- I  #  # (#X#X#X#:#) -- #  # ( -- I  #)#  # -- #  #  #  # (#X#)  #  #  # -- # -- #  # ( -- I  #)#  #( -- #  #)  #  # These are the simple equation. Actually the others really are no more complicated but some readers may not know what a factorial is. Well, a factorial is the figure you get when you multiply all integers up to the number. Factorial five (written #!) is I X # X # X # X #  #. Here are the two solutions: I  #  #  #  #.' -- # -- # -- # -- #  # I  #  (#X#!) -- #  #  # #  #  # And finally the five involving square roots: -- I  (#X#X#X#:#)  #  V# #  # # -- #  # -- V# # -- #  (#X#)  (#X#)  (#X#)  V# I  #  (#X#X#)  (#X#) -- #  V# -- I  #  V# -- # -- #  #  # I feel sure that there are still more solutions. But for the moment we have enough. He couldn't defeat the dragon, he was certain of that. Nor -- even more surely -- could he face losing! Ihe PqWN D?gn A' . i to look -- and understand: White flatness of the wide wall dissolved into mist as the room dimmed. Then whiteness itself broke apart, from all-color to each component. Pinpoints of brightness swirled and coalesced into new patterns of color and shape. Pinks and yellows here. Silver, blue, black there. Brown, gray, green. Rainbow stripes. First flat, like a painted scene, then deepening to its own kind of reality, the scene glowed in the center of nothingness where the wall had been before. The scene had been exactly the same before, she remembered. There was the strangely clear-air atmosphere, thin and sharp. The sketched-in effect of the background -- hills, oddly shaped? A domed structure closer? -- was simply a matter of her  focused attention, not distance haze. Through this transparent air detailed vision would be possible at a far distance. And the background hills were far; for the moment, however, they were only background. What counted was front-center, bright-colored... as real as when she had seen it the first time, for herself. The three footprints. The shoe. The square of cloth. The three bushes. In color, focus and meaning they were identical. Her own shoe, with the silly spike heel and lacy strap unfastened, was lying where it dropped on the pink-hued sand, alongside the alien prints. The first time she had not known why, exactly, the prints were "alien." Now she saw it was the shoe that accomplished the effect. Plenty of three-toed things left prints in sand, but nothing exactly the length of her own foot was tripartite. Nothing on Earth. It was the same thing with the brown-gray-green thorn bushes... planted, she suddenly realized, by some insane gardener, to landscape that circular blockhouse thing in the background! Or maybe not so insane. Nowhere else in sight was there a growing or green thing at all. Poor green was better than none. Spikes, spines and thorns did grow. They were alive, if still -- alien? Why? Of course, the same thing. The patterned robe. A square of cloth, from the same bolt from which she had made the robe, only last week, hung impaled on the farthest bush. Farthest? Nearest! Nearest to the door of the house, from which the strange footprints curved down and off-scene. Half the wall was filled now. Inch by slow fraction of inch the scene widened. She sat forward, breathing almost not at all, tensed with knowing the next print,' or the one beyond it, would contain the print-maker, the -- alien. Alien? Whatan odd thought! That was the second -- the third? -- time she'd thought it. She did not remember the thought from the first seeing of the same scene. "Strange," maybe. "Unknown." Not "alien." Odd... Odder still, as her forming print at the far edge of the scene, she saw her own sandal alongside the trail, silly spike heel and lacy strap, still fastened as it had been on her foot... That wasn't just odd. It was wrong! And the torn strip of fabric ripped from her robe by the thornbush -- "That's not how it was! That's not the way it went," she thought, and the scene faded out. The light brightened in the room as the wall came back to normality, and she realized that she had not just thought it, but spoken aloud. Gordon was smiling. "Only the very first frame is identical. It starts branching off right away. The colors, for instance?" Ruth thought back and of course he was right. Hers had been much yellower. Pink sand was absurd. She laughed out loud, at the absurdity of thinking anything in the projection absurd. Then she explained. "Pink sand. I was thinking how silly that was, and then I remembered that mine had little pink clouds floating over my pure yellow desert! Why on Earth do you think he'd have pink sand, though?" Gordon smiled again as she realized how her own question had answered itself. "... on Earth..." she had said. Of course. Why should it be Earth at all? With the questioning thought came concern. Why had hers been on Earth? Did that mean...? Were they showing her Charles's sequence just to explain, in the kindest way, why she failed? She wouldn't finish the thoughts, even in her own head. But Gordon was chuckling quietly as he watched her. Of course he knew what had been crossing her -- face, she decided, as well as her mind! Other people had been through this whole thing before. Half of them must have gone through the same thoughts. Half of them would have been worried... and how many of them had good cause to be? "Relax, Ruth," he said warmly. "You haven't failed or passed yet. There's a lot more to it than the sequence. But I can tell you that it makes no difference where you make the setting, or when. At least -- " he frowned faintly, and she knew it was impatience with his own imprecision in a vital communication. "At least, it makes no more difference -- and no less -- than your choice of colors or textures. A good bit less difference than clothing, for instance." She looked at him gratefully. "All right," she said. "I'll try to forget my own sequence." "The best way is just to let yourself go, as completely as you can. There's no harm in being aware of the difference, just so you aren't contrasting. It won't rationalize. But you don't have to stop being you to be him for a while, you know." He smiled again. She nodded and grinned. Some things did not have to be verbalized. She shivered and settled back, ready to watch -- to feel, to know, be, exist -- in his mind and body. Gordon didn't say any more. The room dimmed again, and once more the misting wall focused the scene. When it had covered the wall, Ruth had forgotten that there was a wall there at all. Or that she was herself. More completely than ever before, or again (unless and until they fused to a new person, their child) she was one with the man who had made her his own. r T'HE trail of prints led tantalizingly out of sight, curving away behind a low ridge . of dunes. Unless the creature, whatever it was, moved much more swiftly than the prints promised, it had been more than a few minutes since it happened. He looked again at her slipper dropped on its side in the sand. The first glimpse had been more incongruous than anything else. The alienness of the prints contrasted ridiculously with the spiced femininity of Ruth's shoe on the orange-pink sand. Now it seemed to him that the slipper was not dropped but thrown. Or kicked. Kicked off her foot? For the first time, fear grabbed him, a clawed fist of ice in his belly that turned him to look again at the bright rainbow of stuff draped and torn on the edge of the bush near the door. It was part of the skirt of the new robe, the one she made herself last week, after he noticed the new fabric in the shop window. He had liked it; so she had bought it and fashioned into a garment to please him. Now it hung cruelly torn by spiked thorns. And she -- He tore himself loose from the immobility of anxiety, and ran for the house. Somewhere in back of his mind the question was registered: What shop? Where? The nearest shop was question was registered, filed, and ticketed for later thought. Right now he could not even stop to wonder why he had not noticed the door before. He had to have seen it, when he saw the bush. How do you not notice that the thick door of a pressure hut has been torn loose from its hinges? What kind of wild man speculates about his wife's robe when his home, in which he left her safe and protected, no more than five hours ago, has been violated? That was a dangerous word. He unthought it, and the red haze cleared away. He could see again. "Ruth!" he shouted. "Ruth'." No answer. He had known there could not be one. "Ruth!" he kept shouting to thin-aired emptiness inside the dome that had been -- five short hours ago -- rich with Earth air and scents, sounds and solidity: Ruth. His gun hung by the door. It had been a joke, he remembered. Pioneers ought to keep a gun by the front door. Damn right they should! He grabbed it as he ran, stride unbroken. He tore off down the trail of the monstrous prints, past the bushes and the sandal, fifty feet more. His lungs were on fire inside him. He would have cursed in his futility, but there was no strength or breath for self-anger; not even, just now, for anger better placed. It was not even possible now to run back to the copter. He had wasted too much strength. He had to drag himself full length along the sand, catching and holding the thin concentration of lichen's oxygen at the sand surface. Inside the copter, lungs full again, he was coasting along fifteen feet above the prints of horned three-toed feet. He had time enough, and more than he wanted, to think and to question his idiocies. As if he had forgotten where he was. At the first hint of danger they faced he went into shock. As if he were back on Earth, wrapped in her warm air, strong-armed gravity. Ancestral memories reacting for him in moment of panic? He sneered back at himself for that kind of excuse. The only part that applied was the single word, "panic." He'd panicked. Okay. Don't forget it, boy. But don't let it slow you down, either. File for future reference. Take it out and examine it -- later. Meantime, what counts is down there. Right now, you're just a pair of eyes. Later you may get to be arms and legs, a back, if you're lucky a gun. Right now -- just eyes. And a computer. He studied the prints. Twofooted or four? He couldn't decide -- and then he saw the pattern, and it was not two or four, but three. Three? Distribute N pounds of weight -- divided at any time on two of three feet, in prints that each dug in deeper than his own foot woqld, with his full weight on it. The damn thing was big. N pounds was too many. That didn't make sense. What kind of Thing made prints like that on Mars? On a planet whose largest life-form was adapted to breathing air no more than two feet above ground? And even those didn't cross desert dryness. They lived in the still thinly moist and green valley of old sea bottoms. The error was obvious. What kind of creature could make a print like a man's, on Mars? Largest native life-form, he had meant. So this Thing, with threetoed, three-legged stride, hardbottomed foot digging too deep in dry sand, had a stride barely more than a man's, one meter maybe from print to print along the trail. It was not long enough to be that heavy. Not man, not Martian. Something else. Alien. He tried to think more, but either there were no more clues or the block was too great. Alien, from where? No way to know. What for? Where to? Why? When? For the moment, the "when" was what counted the most. Whatever and whyever. It had Ruth with It. Was she still alive? Did she have an oxytank? He tried to remember, aside from the door, what signs of violence, struggle or damage he'd seen in the house. He remembered none. The door, the robe and the slipper. That was all. f "EN minutes after the copter lifted, he came to the first rock outcroppings. For a while after that he could still follow the trail without too much trouble. The creature tended to stay on the sand-drifted crevices between hills. There were still plenty of prints clear enough to be seen from the height he had to maintain to stay clear of the jagged-edged, sand-scoured shapes of bare hilltops. But as the ground level rose, there was less and less sand between rocks to catch imprints, and it was more difficult to peer down and navigate at the same time. Hard to say if he would be better off on 'the ground. He could spend hours trying wrong passages, backing and trying again, to search out the scattered prints that made the only trail now. Circling above, he could save time -- maybe. Certainly, if he could stay in the air, he kept an advantage he'd never have face to face. (Face to chest? belly? thigh? No way at all to judge relative height.) Not to mention armament, general equipment. Inside the copter, he had the distilled and neatly packaged essence of Earth technology to fight for him. On foot in the hills, with whatever he could carry on his own back -- ? It was obvious he had no choice. He had just noticed the time. Twilight would fall fast and dark across him in a half hour or less. Moonless, or as good as moonless, dark would follow short minutes after. The kind of cross-eyed trail-following and peak-hopping he could barely manage in sunlight would then be impossible. Find a place where he could land, then. Now, quickly, while he still could. The copter dropped, and he found a ledge just firm and wide enough. Charles went methodically... through lockers, picking and choosing, till at last he had a pile he thought he could manage, with all the essentials, in one form or other. Searchlight, rope, hand pickaxe, knife. Pistol-grip torch, which he thought of as a flame thrower. Plain old pistol. Extra airtank. Extra mask. Light warm blanket. Bullets, and gas for the torch. Food concentrates. Two water flasks. He climbed into his heat suit, discarded the blanket, and took her suit instead. He had thought to make a knapsack of the blanket, carrying the rest of the stuff on his back, but that was silly. He had to be able to get at whatever he needed, but fast. He got out a package of clip-back hooks and studded his suit with them, hanging him : self like a grim Christmas tree inside-out: bright flame-red suit underneath; dull gray, brown and black tanks, handles, tools and weapons dangling all around. He practiced bending over, sitting, squatting, reaching. He could climb. Okay. The weight was going to be hard to handle, but not impossible. He added one more airtank, and one more flask. If it all got too heavy, he could leave a trail of his own behind him. At least the stuff would be nearer than here in the copter. He was half out of the hatch when he remembered it: The first aid kit. He started into the hills with his searchlight flooding the pass at his feet just as darkness collapsed from the sky. He wondered as he stumbled forward and up -- following an edge of toe here, of heel there -- what else he had not thought to take. off redness on rockside. A smear, that's all. Red blood. Not alien. Ruth's! His gloved hand reached out, and the red smudged. Still wet? Impossible. In this atmosphere, the seconds they'd need to get out of sight would have dried blood. He looked closely at his gauntlet and moved forward more swiftly, with an exultation of knowledge and purpose he had not dared let himself hold until then. It was not blood. It was spilled red powder. Rouge! She was alive, able to think, to act! She knew he would have to come after, and she was helping by leaving a trail. He no longer followed footprints. He followed the crimson trail blazes. And wondered how far back they'd started, how much time he might have gained had he abandoned the copter sooner. No use wondering. No use thinking back. Now it was only the next moment and the next. Was he gaining or losing? This he had to know. He was traveling at his best speed. He went faster. If he lost ground now, he had no chance. The creature was making a path as straight as the hard rockside hills would permit; It knew where It was headed. The Thing could not climb, that was clear, so It would not have gone through the hills without cause. But wherever It was headed, presumably that spot offered It some protection. He had to find It and head It off first. He found he could go faster still. And then, suddenly, he knew he'd better slow down. It was nothing he'd seen -- surely nothing he'd heard. Inside the suit hood, even such sounds as carried through the thin air were stilled. Well, then. He opened the mask, and he did hear. Maybe it was some vibration of the Thing's tread through the rock that had warned him first. Well, he would not give himself away by the same carelessness. He knew he was very close to It now. He moved so carefully after that, it seemed agonizingly as if he were once more crawling belly-flat. But he knew he was gainfhg on them. The Thing was really slow! He was close. Fool! he thought angrily, as he switched his light off. Creep up on the Thing with a searchlight to flood the scene in advance! The suit had an infrascope in the visor. He'd have had to close it soon anyhow. Five minutes was about maximum breathing without a tank; unless you cared to drag yourself flat as he'd done earlier. The black-light scope came on. Charles paused with a new certainty under an overhang of rock at the next bend. And saw the Thing. And his wife. and extremely calm way, that what happened next all happened in seconds. Maybe a minute at most. No more, because with the sharp self-awareness exploding inside him, he could count his breaths while he did all the rest. He inhaled exactly three times -- deeply, evenly -- while it occurred. Before the first breath, there was again the ice-fingered grip of fear twisting his gut, squeezing the strength and air out of him. He inhaled then. And let the retinal image go to his brain, instead of his belly. It was twice the height of a man, weirdly elongated, the tripod base all ropy tendon, thin and hard. The trunk -- thorax? -- chest? -- well, whatever, shelled or spacesuited or something, but shiny-hard -- bulked enormous, four feet around surely at the center. At least four. And the Thing's head was turned just far enough to the side so that Charles could see clearly that his wife's face was in the gaping, reptilian maw of the Thing. It held her under one arm. Her feet kicked at its side. It seemed not to notice. Her arm, with the bright metal cosmetic case clutched in her hand, swung wide, reaching to hit the canyon wall whenever it could. Her head was half into the creature's mouth, firmly held, chin and forehead, by its enormous stretched lips. While he drew in the first breath, he saw all this clearly and knew he dared not act in such a way as to make It bite down -- from fear or anger, made no difference. Charles could not see inside the great maw. What kind of teeth, what harm had been done, what could be done, he did not know... and knew he could not risk. He thought through and rejected five separate plans, while his hands found the items he'd need. He drew a new breath, and his legs moved beneath him. He could not shoot first. And he could not simply follow and learn more about the Thing. Because another image came through from somewhere -- the same eyes that watched every move of the Thing? Unlikely, but it had to be -- of the gleaming column of metal too close ahead. A Thing-ship. So: no time. He leaped, knife in hand. Pricked the creature, and jumped back. It worked, as he'd prayed; no; as he had known, not just hoped or prayed, that it must. The Thing jumped, turned to look -- and released his wife's head. He did not waste effort in looking, but saw anyhow that her face was unharmed. He jumped again, drawing the third breath, and pricked at the arm that held her. She squirmed and pushed, exactly on time, like a part of himself -- which she was -- and her body was clear of his as he emptied the pistol at Its head. He reached for the torch. By that time he could not stop himself. He would have avoided the torch if he could. As it was he thundered at Ruth, above the explosion: "Down! Keep down, babe!" And the blue flame of released oxygen missed her head by a foot... He carried her back to the copter with strength he had not believed he could find. Nobody pursued.  lights brightened slowly, and the white wall turned serenely opaque. She looked across at Gordon, and her face glowed with pleasure. she said, laughing. "Was it?" "Not at all," Gordon said. She sat politely, waiting. Gordon stood up, grinned down at her, and offered his hand. "I think they must be done in there," he told her, nodding in the direction of the screenwall. "I imagine you'd like..." He let it trail off. "You're a smart old thing, aren't you?" She took the hand and came to her feet. Then, on impulse, astonished at herself, she stood on tiptoe and placed a quick kiss on his cheek. "What's more, you're a doll." She turned and ran, glad but embarrassed. The door closed behind her. A mirrored door on the opposite wall opened, and a young man entered. Gordon greeted him warmly. "Well -- what did you think?" His own enthusiasm was unmistakeable. "Outside of it being a great racket? Do they all react that way?" "Well, not all. Matter of fact, this pair is practically classical. You don't often get a mesh like this one -- you saw hers, didn't you?" "I don't think so," the other said. "Unless it was one of the bunch you ran for us last night?" "Could be. She worked out a sort of a junior-size Tyrannosaur. Out of Professor Challenger maybe? Future-past uncertainty, here on Earth. Had it threaten the children, and just when she was about to sacrifice herself to save them, old Charlie showed up in the nick of time to do the slaying." The other nodded. "It's a fascinating technique," he said. "Damn glad to have this chance to see it work. One thing I don't follow -- why do you show them each other's? That's pretty much against basic theory on . joint therapy, isn't it?" Gordon was smiling again. "Well," he said slowly. "This pair didn't really take the runs for therapy." He had a surprise to spring, and he was enjoying it. "You've heard about the new screening technique for colonists? You know the last expedition had only one broken couple and two psychotic collapses, out of fifty-six?" The younger man whistled. Then he understood. "This is how you're doing it? Let them fantasy their own reactions? Well, hell. Sure! What's surprising is, nobody thought of using it before!" "Of course not. It was right under our noses," Gordon said. They both laughed. "In this case," he added, "we've got everything. His sequence stressed readiness, thoughtful preparation, careful action. You saw that. Hers was strongest on instinct, physical wisdom, that whole set. He was moved to do things he couldn't possibly do -- and knows he can't, by the way -- in real life, because she was in danger. Her stimulus was a threat to home and children. And even then, she made sure he did the actual dragon-slaying job." He flicked a switch. Through the wall, now, they saw Ruth and Charles, standing, holding hands, smiling and squeezing a little. That was all. The two doctors smiled as the paleskinned, ninety-five-pound, five-foot product of slum-crowded Earth threw a proud arm around his wife's narrow shoulder, and led her out. "Doesn't look like much of a dragon-slayer," the younger one said. "No. But as long as he is... He paused, looked the visitor over with care, and said. "You asked about showing them to each other? Ever think how much more therapy there might be for him in knowing she knows he can handle a dragon? Or for her, knowing that he really can?" Anderson. Doubleday  Co. most noted author after Mark Twain to mix medievalism and advanced technology. Anderson's latest seriously challenges the eminence of Divide and Rule, de Camp's famous opus major. When Sir Roger de Tourneville was engaged in gathering an army to fight in France for his king, back in #, interstellar invaders had the poor luck to land their giant ship and attempt his subjugation. In the close fighting that ensued, the English mastery of man-toman cutlery insured their victory. With the star ship at his command and a prisoner to operate it, logistics were no longer a problem. The entire English town could embark on a Crusade against the paynims of the Holy Land instead of the intended local action against the French. Best-laid plans go notoriously astray, however, particularly when entrusted to a double-dealing ET. The ship, with its complement of armored knights, bowmen, pikemen, women, children, hogs, etc., makes instead a forced flight to the star empire of the invaders. Characters are well-drawn; the tragic triangle of the principles reminiscent of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot The book is definitely a can't-be-put-down enthraller. Rating:  ert Silverberg. Avalon. first contact between alien civilizations, although not fresh or new, is nonetheless entertaining and deft. Earth's extrasolar empire is limited in its expansion by the speed of light. Excitement runs high on the return of Earth's first faster-than-light ship with the unwelcome news of an alien civilization of at least equal scientific attainments -- and unknown intentions. How does one negotiate a treaty to divide the universe into spheres of influence when even basic communication is impossible? Silverberg's solutions are glib but, as noted, his story benefits from his sure control of pace. Rating:  Doubleday  Co. tion of short stories from Galaxy. Frederik Pohl. Doubleday and Co. the creme de la creme from the top of his Star Science Fiction series. In so doing, he has given the poor reviewer an almost hopeless task, comparable to selecting the tastiest raisin in the fruit cake. However, and not in order of excellence, here are the superduper topnotchers: Gerald Kersh, "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?;" Alfred Bester, Morrison, "Country Doctor;" Arthur C. Clarke, "The Deep Range;" H. L. Gold, "The Man with English;" Fritz Leiber, "Space-Time for Springers;" Jerome Bixby, "It's a Good Life." This list has the unfortunate result of excluding yarns by Kuttner, Bloch, Kornbluth, Mathat would ordinarily rate high in any other company. But such is the fate of excellent when confronted with superlative. Rating:  Charles Eric Maine. Avalon Books. tern for almost every type of science-fiction yam, including the prototype for Maine's story: the awakening of a long-dead individual to an inimical future over which he exercises complete economic control yet in which he is a helpless tool. Maine's Sleeper is the first astronaut, unsuccessful in his attempt to orbit the moon. After # years of burial in space in his rocket tomb, he is returned to life by Martians, descendants of colonizing terrestrial scientists, now at war with Mother Earth. The story is quite uneven, Rating  G. P. Putnam's Sons. man's extremely winning story rests on a firm foundation; though short on science, it is long on story. Barzman employs the wellworn device of a sister-world (populated with Terran counterparts, but diverging in development after World War I) as a mirror to point up our savagery and stupidity. The scientific partnership of an English girl, orphaned by Nazi bombs, and a Rumanian refugee whose child and Jewish wife were extermisible the contact with the people of the utopian planet. They have developed far beyond us technically but particularly in their ability to coexist. The appeal of the story lies in its main characters. Rating:  ## Norton. Harcourt, Brace  Co. the top when it comes to penning science-adventure. That she also does exceptional historical fiction is attested to by such books as Scarface and Sword in Sheath. Of equal status is her latest book, a novel of the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt, the interim period between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties. Miss Norton has done an admirable job of recreating the distant past and has made one of history's earliest recorded fights against oppression ring with an urgency that entirely captivates the sympathy of her audience. Rating: i # Joseph E. Kelleam. Avalon Books. Little Men suffers from the same ills as its predecessor. Too much is happening for the author to bother with such trifles as credibility, characterization or motivation. Rating:  ton Mifflin Co. eer Asimov turns from the "Realm of Numbers" to the theories and practices of measurement in his latest tome directed at a teenage audience. He traces its development from the use of portions of the human anatomy as standards to the abstract concepts that permitted testing of such theories as e  MC # . Dr. Asimov's pet peeve is the inertia that prevented the universal acceptance of the metric system, mankind's attempt to standardize the entire framework of measure. But no matter what his point, he is always informative and frequently downright entertaining in getting it across. by Clyde B. Clason. G. P. Putnam's Sons. ted book is devoted to prominent personalities and events in astronomical history. The remaining concerns present knowledge and some fascinating conjectures about the heavenly objects and universal theory. by Gordon R. Dickson. Holt, Rinehart  Winston. juvenile is a jet-propelled wingding that crams all its action into two days of a boy's life. The boy's parents are both marine biologists engaged in studying Martian water creatures brought back from ice caves within the red planet. Also the boy has an intelligent pet dolphin that helps him thwart the villains. Conflict is provided by socalled Vandals, a cult of misguided bigots, who fear and attempt to destroy the monstrous Martians and by a savage killer whale who has the same idea. Action far outpaces plot but the sustained velocity of the former ensures a Rating for youngsters:  and # other Novelets from Galaxy One of the best collections of Science Fiction Stories edited by Horace Gold, published by Doubleday  Co. Priced at #. We have # copies available at # while they last. Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc., #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. I enclose # for each copy. (We pay postage.) copies at I .# . total. Name, .  Address City  Zone State Thissell was all set. He would capture the wanted man the second he showed his face. Trouble was, he wouldn't show it! T HE houseboat had been The bow bulged like a swan's built to the most exacting breast, the stem rising high, then standards of Sirenese crooking forward to support an craftsmanship -- which is to say, iron lantern. The doors were as close to the absolute as human carved from slabs of a mottled eye could detect. The planking black-green wood. The windows of waxy dark wood showed no were many-sectioned, paned with joints. The fastenings were platisquares of mica that were stained num rivets countersunk and rose, blue, pale green and violet, polished flat. In style, the boat The bow was given to service was massive, broad-beamed, facilities and quarters for the steady as the shore itself, without slaves; amidships were a pair of ponderosity or slackness of line, sleeping cabins, a dining saloon and a parlor saloon, opening upon an observation deck at the stern. Such was Edwer Thissell's houseboat, but ownership of it brought him neither pleasure nor pride. The houseboat had become shabby. The carpeting had lost its pile; the carved screens were shipped; the iron lantern at the bow sagged with rust. Seventy years ago the first owner, on accepting the boat, had honored the builder and had been likewise honored. The transaction (for the process represented a great deal more than simple giving and taking) had augmented the prestige of both. That time was far gone. The houseboat now commanded no prestige whatever. Edwer Thissell, resident on Sirene only three months, recognized the lack but could do nothing about it: this particular houseboat was the best he could get. He sat on the rear deck practising the ganga, a zither-like instrument not much larger than his hand. A hundred yards inshore surf defined a strip of white beach. Beyond rose jungle, with the silhouette of craggy black hills against the sky. Mireille shone hazy and white overhead, as if through a tangle of spider-web; the face of the ocean pooled and puddled with mother-of-pearl luster. The scene had become as familiar, though not as boring, as the ganga, at which he had worked two hours, twanging out the Sirenese scales, forming chords, traversing simple progressions. Now he put down the ganga for the zachinko, this a small soundbox studded with keys, played with the right hand. Pressure on the keys forced air through reeds in the keys themselves, producing a concertina-like tone. Thissell ran off a dozen quick scales, making very few mistakes. Of the six instruments he had set himself to learn, the zachinko had proved the least refractory (with the exception, of course, of the hymerkin, that clacking, slapping, clattering device of wood and stone used exclusively with the slaves.) ten minutes, then put aside the zachinko. He flexed his arms, wrung his aching fingers. Every waking moment since his arrival had been given to the instruments: the hymerkin, the ganga, the zachinko, the kiv, the strapan, the gomapard. He had practiced scales in twenty-four keys and four modes, chords without number, intervals never imagined on the Home Planets. Trills, arpeggios, slurs; click-stops and nasalization; damping and augmentation of overtones, vibratos and wolf-tones; concavities and convexities. He practiced with a dogged, deadly diligence, in which his original concept of music as a source of pleasure had long become lost. Looking over the instruments Thissell resisted an urge to fling all six into the Titanic. He rose to his feet, went forward through the parlor saloon, the dining saloon, along a corridor past the galley and came out on the fore-deck. He bent over the rail, peered down into the underwater pens where Toby and Rex, the slaves, were harnessing the dray-fish for the weekly trip to Fan, eight miles north. The youngest fish, either playful or captious, ducked and plunged. Its streaming black muzzle broke water, and Thissell, looking into its face felt a peculiar qualm: the fish wore no mask! Thissell laughed uneasily, fingering his own mask, which was in the design of the Moon-Moth. No question about it, he was becoming acclimated to Sirene! A significant stage had been reached when the naked face of a fish caused him shock! The fish were finally harnessed; Toby and Rex climbed aboard, red bodies glistening, black cloth masks clinging to their faces. Ignoring Thissell they stowed the pen and hoisted anchor. The dray-fish strained, the harness tautened, the houseboat moved north. Returning to the after-deck, Thissell took up the strapan -- this a circular sound-box eight inches in diameter. Forty-six wires radiated from a central hub to the circumference, where they connected to either a bell or a tinkle-bar. When plucked, the bells rang and the bars chimed; when strummed, the instrument gave off a twanging, jingling sound. When played with competence, the pleasantly acid dissonances produced an expressive effect; in an unskilled hand, the results were less felicitous, and might even approach random noise. The strapan was Thissell's weakest instrument. He practiced with concentration during the entire trip north. In due course the houseboat approached the floating city. The dray-fish were curbed, the houseboat warped to a mooring. Along the dock a line of idlers weighed and gauged every aspect of the houseboat, the slaves and Thissell himself, according to Sirenese habit. Thissell, not yet accustomed to such penetrating inspection, found the scrutiny unsettling, all the more so for the immobility of the masks. Selfconsciously adjusting his own Moon-Moth, he climbed the ladder to the dock. had been squatting, touched knuckles to the black cloth at his forehead, and sang on a threetone phrase of interrogation: "The Moon-Moth before me possibly expresses the identity of Ser Edwer Thissell?" Thissell tapped the hymerkin which hung at his belt and sang: "I am Ser Thissell." "I have been honored by a trust," sang the slave. "Three days from dawn to dusk I have waited on the dock; three nights from dusk to dawn I have crouched on a raft below this same dock listening to the feet of the Night-men. At last I behold the mask of Ser Thissell." Thissell evoked an impatient clatter from the hymerkin. "What is the nature of this trust?" "I carry a message, Ser Thissell. It is intended for you." Thissell held out his left hand, playing the hymerkin with his right. "Give me the message." "Instantly, Ser Thisssell." The message bore a heavy superscription: Thissell ripped open the envelope. The message was signed by Castel Cromartin, Chief Executive of the Interworld Policies Board. After the formal salutation, it read: the following orders be executed! Aboard Carina Cruzeiro, destination Fan, date of arrival January # U.T., is notorious assassin, Haxo Angmark. Meet landing with adequate authority, effect detention and incarceration of this man. These instructions must be successfully implemented. Failure is unacceptable. is superlatively dangerous. Kill him without hesitation at any show of resistance. Thissell considered the message with dismay. In coming to Fan as Consular Representative he had expected nothing like this. He felt neither inclination nor competence in the matter of dealing with dangerous assassins. Thoughtfully he rubbed the fuzzy gray cheek of his mask. The situation was not completely dark; Esteban Rolver, Director of the Space-Port, would doubtless cooperate, and perhaps furnish a platoon of slaves. More hopefully, Thissell reread the message. January #, Universal Time. He consulted a conversion calendar. Today, #th in the Season of Bitter Nectar -- Thissell ran his finger down the column, stopped. January # was today! A distant rumble caught his attention. Dropping from the mist came a dull shape: the lighter returning from contact with the Carina Cruzeiro. Thissell once more re-read the note, raised his head, studied the descending lighter. Aboard would be Haxo Angmark. In five minutes he would emerge upon the soil of Sirene. Landing formalities would detain him possibly twenty minutes. The landing field lay a mile and a half distant, joined to Fan by a winding path through the hills. "When did this message arrive?" The slave leaned forward uncomprehendingly. Thissell reiterated his question, singing to the clack of the hymerkin: "This message, you have enjoyed the honor of its custody how long?" The slave sang: "Long days have I waited on the wharf, retreating only to the raft at the onset of dusk. Now my vigil is rewarded; I behold Ser Thissell." Thissell turned away and walked furiously up the dock. Ineffective, inefficient Sirenese! Why had they not delivered the message to his houseboat? Twenty-five minutes -- twentytwo now... At the esplanade Thissell stopped and looked right and left, hoping for a miracle -- perhaps some sort of air-transport to whisk him to the space-port, where, with Rolver's aid, Haxo Angmark might still be detained. Or, better yet, a second message canceling the first. Something, anything... But air-cars were not to be found on Sirene, and no second message appeared. Across the esplanade rose a meager row of permanent structures, built of stone and iron and so proof against the efforts of the Night-men. A hostler occupied one of these structures, and as Thissell watched a man in a splendid pearl and silver mask emerged riding one of the lizardlike mounts of Sirene. Thissell sprang forward. There was still time; with luck he might yet intercept Haxo Angmark. He hurried across the esplanade. Before the line of stalls stood the hostler, inspecting his stock with solicitude, occasionally burnishing a scale or whisking away an insect. There were five of the beasts in prime condition, each as tall as a man's shoulder, with massive legs, thick bodies, heavy wedge-shaped heads. From their fore-fangs, which had been artificially lengthened and curved into near-circles, gold rings depended. Their scales had been stained in diaper-pattern: purple and green, orange and black, red and blue, brown and pink, yellow and silver. Thissell came to a breathless halt in front of the hostler. He reached for his kiv, then hesitated. The kiv -- five banks of resilient metal strips, fourteen to the bank, played by touching, twisting, twanging -- might not be appropriate. Could this be considered a casual personal encounter? The zachinko perhaps? But the statement of his needs hardly seemed to demand the formal approach. Better the kiv after all. He struck a chord, but by error found himself stroking the ganga. Beneath his mask Thissell grinned apologetically. His relationship with this hostler was by no means on an intimate basis. He hoped that the hostler was of sanguine disposition, and in any event the urgency of the occasion allowed no time to select an exactly appropriate instrument. He struck a second chord and, playing as well as agitation, breathlessness and lack of skill allowed, sang out a request: "Ser Hostler, I have immediate need of a swift mount. Allow me to select from your herd." r  "HE hostler wore a mask of considerable complexity which Thissell could not identify: a construction of varnished brown cloth, pleated gray leather and high on the forehead two large green and scarlet globes, minutely segmented like insect eyes. He inspected Thissell a long moment. Then, rather ostentatiously selecting his stimic, he of trills and rounds. Thissell failed to grasp the import. The stimic -- three flutelike tubes equipped with plungers; thumb and forefinger squeezing a bag to force air across the mouthpieces, second, third and fourth fingers manipulating the slide -- was an instrument well adapted to the sentiments of cool withdrawal, or even disapproval; but how cool Thissell was not sure. The hostler sang: "Ser Moon-Moth, I fear that my steeds are unsuitable to a person of your distinction." Thissell earnestly twanged at the ganga. "By no means! They all seem adequate. I am in great haste and will gladly accept any of the group." The hostler played a brittle cascading crescendo. "Ser MoonMoth," he sang, "the steeds are ill and dirty. I am flattered that you consider them adequate to your use, but I cannot accept the merit you offer me. And -- " here, switching instruments, he struck a cool tinkle from his krodatch -- "somehow I fail to recognize the boon companion and co-craftsman who accosts me so familiarly with his ganga." The implications were clear. The use of the krodatch alone made its point, for the small, square sound-box strung with resined gut, in playing which the musician scratched the strings with his fingernail, or stroked them with his fingertips, produced quietly formal sounds. The krodatch was an instrument of rejection or even of insult. Thissell would receive no mount. He turned and set off at a run for the landing field. Behind him sounded the clatter of the hostler's hymerkin -- whether directed at himself or at the hostler's slaves Thissell did not pause to learn. II T HE previous Consular Representative of the Home Planets on Sirene had been killed at Zundar. Masked as a Tavern Bravo he had accosted a girl beribboned for the Equinoctial Attitudes, a solecism for which he had been instantly beheaded by a Red Demiurge, a Sun Sprite and a Magic Hornet. Edwer Thissell, recently graduated from the Institute, had been named his successor, and allowed three days to prepare himself. Normally of a contemplative, even cautious, disposition. Thissell had regarded the appointment as a challenge. He learned the Sirenese language by subcerebral techniques, and found it uncomplicated. Then, in the Journal of Universal Anthropology, he read: The population of the Titanic littoral is highly individualistic, possibly in response to a bountiful environment which puts no premium upon group activity. The language, reflecting this trait, expresses the individual's mood, and his emotional attitude toward a given situation. Factual information is regarded as a secondary concomitant. Moreover, the language is sung, characteristically to the accompaniment of a small instrument. As a result, there is great difficulty in ascertaining fact from a native of Fan, or the forbidden city Zundar. One will be regaled with elegant arias and demonstrations of astonishing virtuosity upon one or another of the numerous musical instruments. The visitor to this fascinating world, unless he cares to be treated with the most consummate contempt, must therefore learn to express himself after the approved local fashion. Thissell made a note in his memorandum book: Procure small musical instrument, together with directions as to use. He read on. There is everywhere and at all times a plenitude, not to say a superfluity, of food, and the climate is benign. With a fund of racial energy and a great deal of leisure time, the population occupies itself with intricacy. Intricacy in all things: intricate craftmanship, such as the carved panels which adorn the houseboats; intricate symbolism, as exemplified in the masks worn by everyone; the intricate halfmusical language which admirably expresses subtle moods and emotions; and, above all, the fantastic intricacy of interpersonal relationships. Prestige, face, mana, repute, glory: the Sirenese word is strakh. Every man has his characteristic strakh, which determines whether, when he needs a houseboat, he will be urged to avail himself of a floating palace, rich with gems, alabaster lanterns, peacock faience and carved wood, or grudgingly permitted an abandoned shack on a raft. There is no medium of exchange on Sirene; the single and sole currency is strakh. Thissell rubbed his chin and read further. Masks are worn at all times, in accordance with the philosophy that a man should not be compelled to use a similitude foisted upon him by factors beyond his control. In the Sirenese view, he should be at liberty to choose that semblance most consonant with his strakh. In the civilized areas of Sirene -- which is to say the Titanic littoral -- a man literally never shows his face. It is his basic secret. Gambling, by this token, is unknown on Sirene. It would be catastrophic to Sirenese self-respect to gain advantage by means other than the exercise of strakh. The word "luck" has no counterpart in the Sirenese language. Thissell made another note: Get mask. Museum? Drama guild? He finished the article, hastened forth to complete his preparations, and the next day embarked aboard the Robart Astroguard for the first leg of the passage to Sirene. T HE lighter settled upon the Sirenese space-port, a topaz disk isolated among the black, green and purple hills. The lighter grounded, and Edwer Thissell stepped forth. He was met by Esteban Rolver, the local agent for Spaceways. Rolver threw up his hands, and stepped back. "Your mask," he cried huskily. "Where is your mask?" Thissell held it up rather selfconsciously. "I wasn't sure -- " "Put it on," said Rolver, turning away. He himself wore a fabrication of dull green scales on blue-lacquered wood. Black quills protruded at the cheeks, and under his chin hung a black and white checked pom-pom, the total effect creating a sense of sardonic supple personality. Thissell adjusted the mask to his face, undecided whether to make a joke about the situation or to maintain a reserve suitable to the dignity of his post. "Are you masked?" Rolver inquired over his shoulder. Thissell replied in the affirmative and Rolver turned. The mask hid the expression of his face, but his hand unconsciously flicked a set of keys strapped to his thigh. The instrument sounded a trill of shock and polite consternation. "You can't wear that mask!" sang Rolver. "In fact -- how did you get it?" "It's copied from a mask owned by the Polypolis museum," said Thissell stiffly. "I'm sure it's authentic." Rolver nodded, his own mask more sardonic-seeming than ever. "It's authentic enough. It's a variant of the type known as the Sea-Dragon Conqueror, and is worn on ceremonial occasions by persons of enormous prestige: princes, heroes, master craftsmen, great musicians." "I wasn't aware -- " Rolver made a gesture of languid understanding. "It's something you'll learn in due course. Notice my mask. Today I'm wearing a Tarn-Bird. Persons of minimal prestige -- such as you, I, any other out-worlder -- wear this sort of thing." "Odd," said Thissell as they started across the field toward a low concrete blockhouse. "I assumed .that a person wore whatever mask he liked." "Certainly," said Rolver. "Wear any mask you like -- if you can make it stick. This TarnBird for instance. I wear it to indicate that I presume nothing. I make no claims to wisdom, ferocity, versatility, musicianship, truculence or any of a dozen other Sirenese virtues." "For the sake of argument," said Thissell, "what would happen if I walked through the streets of Zundar in this mask?" sound behind his mask. "If you walked along the docks of Zundar -- there are no streets -- in any mask, you'd be killed within the hour. That's what happened to Benko, your predecessor. He didn't know how to act. None of us out-worlders know how to act. In Fan we're tolerated -- so long as we keep our place. But you couldn't even walk around Fan in that regalia you're sporting now. Somebody wearing a Fire-Snake or a Thunder Goblin mask would step up to you. He'd play his krodatch, and if you failed to challenge his audacity with a passage on the skaranyi, a devilish instrument, like a baby bagpipe, he'd play his hymerkin -- the instrument we use with the slaves. That's the ultimate expression of contempt. Or he might ring his dueling-gong and attack you then and there." "I had no idea that people here were quite so irascible," said Thissell in a subdued voice. Rolver shrugged and swung open the massive steel door into his office. "Certain acts may not be committed even on the Concourse at Polypolis without incurring criticism." "Yes, that's quite true," said Thissell. He looked around the office. "Why all the concrete and steel?" "Protection against the savages," said Rolver. "They come down from the mountains at night, steal what's available, kill anyone they find ashore." He went to a closet and brought forth a mask. "Here. Use this MoonMoth; it won't get you in trouble." Thissell unenthusiastically inspected the mask. It was constructed of mouse-colored fur. There was a tuft of hair at each side of the mouth-hole, a pair of feather-like antennae at the forehead. White lace flaps dangled beside the temples, and under the eyes hung a series of red folds, creating an effect at once lugubrious and comic. Thissell asked, "Does this mask signify any degree of prestige?" "Not a great deal." "After all, I'm Consular Representative," said Thissell. "I represent the Home Planets, a "If the Home Planets want their representative to wear a Sea Dragon Conqueror mask, they'd better send out a Sea Dragon Conqueror man." "I see," said Thissell in a subdued voice. gaze while Thissell doffed the Sea Dragon Conqueror and slipped the more modest MoonMoth over his head. "I suppose I can find something just a bit more suitable in one of the shops," Thissell said. "I'm told a person simply goes in and takes what he needs, correct?" Rolver surveyed Thissell critically. "That mask -- temporarily, at least -- is perfectly suitable. It's rather important not to take anything from the shops until you know the strakh value of the article you want. The owner loses prestige if a person of low strakh makes free with his best work." Thissell shook his head in exasperation. "Nothing of this was explained to me! I knew of the masks, of course, and the painstaking integrity of the craftsmen, but this insistence on prestige -- strakh, whatever the word is..." "No matter," said Rolver. "After a year or two you'll begin to learn your way around. I suppose you speak the language?" "Oh, indeed. Certainly." ' "And what instruments do you play?" "Well -- I was given to understand that any small instrument was adequate, or that I could merely sing." "Very inaccurate. Only slaves sing without accompaniment. I suggest that you learn the following instruments as quickly as possible: the hymerkin for your slaves. The ganga for conversation between intimates or one a trifle lower than yourself in strakh. The kiv for casual polite intercourse. The zachinko for more formal dealings. The strapan or the krodatch for your social inferiors -- in your case, to insult someone, since you have no inferiors. The gomapard or the double-kamanthil for ceremonials." The gomapard was one of the few electric instruments used on Sirene. An oscillator produced an oboe-like tone, modulated, choked, vibrated, raised and lowered in pitch by four keys. The double-kamanthil was similar to the ganga, except the tones were produced by twisting and inclining a disk of resined leather against one or more of the forty-six strings. Rolver considered a moment. "The crebarin, the water-lute and the slobo are highly useful also -- but perhaps you'd better learn the other instruments first. They should provide at least a rudimentary means of communication." "Aren't you exaggerating?" suggested Thissell. "Or joking?" Rolver laughed his saturnine laugh. "Not at all. Also you'll need a houseboat and slaves." the landing field to the docks of Fan, a walk of an hour and a half along a pleasant path under enormous trees loaded with fruit, cereal pods, sacs of sugary sap. "At the moment," said Rolver, "there are only four out-worlders in Fan, counting yourself. I'll take you to Welibus, our Commercial Factor. I think he's got an old houseboat he might let you use." Comely Welibus had resided fifteen years in Fan, acquiring sufficient strakh to wear his South Wind mask with authority. This consisted of a blue disk inlaid with cabochons of lapis-lazuli, surrounded by an aureole of shimmering snake-skin. Heartier and more cordial than Rolver, he not only provided Thissell with a houseboat, but also a score of various musical instruments and a pair of slaves. Embarrassed by the largesse, Thissell stammered something about payment, but Welibus cut him off with an expansive gesture. "My dear fellow, this is Sirene. Such trifles cost nothing." "But a houseboat -- " Welibus played a courtly little flourish on his kiv. "I'll be frank, Ser Thissell. The boat is old and a trifle shabby. I can't afford to use it; my status would suffer." A graceful melody accompanied his words. "Status as yet need not concern you. You require merely shelter, comfort and safety from the Night-men." "Night-men?" "The cannibals who roam the shore after dark." "Oh yes. Ser Rolver mentioned them." "Horrible things. We don't discuss them." A shuddering little trill issured from his kiv. "Now, as to slaves." He tapped the blue disk of his mask with a thoughtful forefinger. "Rex and Toby should serve you well." He raised his voice, played a swift clatter on the hymerkin. "Avan esx trobu!" A female slave appeared wearing a dozen tight bands of pink cloth, and a dainty black mask sparkling with mother-of-pearl sequins. "Fascu etz Rex ae Toby." Rex and Toby appeared, wearing loose masks of black cloth, russet jerkins. Welibus addressed them with a resonant clatter of hymerkin, enjoining them to the service of their new master, on pain of return to their native islands. They prostrated themselves, sang pledges of servitude to Thissell in soft husky voices. Thissell laughed nervously and essayed a sentence in the Sirenese language. "Go to the houseboat, Ill clean it well, bring aboard a supply of food." Toby and Rex stared blankly through the holes in their masks. Welibus repeated the orders with hymerkin accompaniment. The slaves bowed and departed without farewells. Thissell surveyed the musical instruments with dismay. "I haven't the slightest idea how to go about learning how to play these things." Welibus turned to Rolver. "What about Kershaul? Could he be persuaded to give Ser Thissell some basic instruction?" Rolver nodded judicially. "Kershaul might undertake the job." Thissell asked, "Who is Kershaul?" "The third of our little group of expatriates," replied Welibus, "An anthropologist. You've read Zundar the Splendid? Rituals of Sirene? The Faceless Folk? No? A pity. All excellent works. Kershaul is high in prestige, and I believe visits Zundar from time to time. Wears a Cave-Owl, sometimes a Star Wanderer or even a Wise Arbiter." "He's taken to an Equatorial Serpent," said Rolver. 'The variant with the gilt tusks." "Indeed!" marveled Welibus. "Well, I must say he's earned it. A fine fellow, good chap indeed." And he strummed his zachinko thoughtfully. the tutelage of Mathew Kershaul, Thissell practiced the hymerkin, the ganga, the strapan, the kiv, the gomapard, and the zachinko. The others could wait, said Kershaul, until Thissel had mastered the six basic instruments. He lent Thissell recordings of noteworthy Sirenese conversing in various moods and to various accompaniments, so that Thissell might learn the melodic conventions currently in vogue, and perfect himself in the niceties of intonation, the various rhythms, cross-rhythms, compound rhythms, implied rhythms and suppressed rhythms. Kershaul professed to find Sirenese music a fascinating study, and Thissell admitted that it was a subject not readily exhausted. The quarter-tone tuning of the instruments admitted the use of twenty-four tonalities which, multiplied by the five modes in general use, resulted in one hundred and twenty separate scales. Kershaul, however, advised that Thissell primarily concentrate on learning each instrument in its fundamental tonality, using only two of the modes. With no immediate business at Fan except the weekly visits to Mathew Kershaul, Thissell took his houseboat eight miles south and moored it in the lee of a rocky promontory. Here, if it had not been for the incessant practicing, Thissell lived an idyllic life. The sea was calm and crystal-clear; the beach, fringed by the gray, green and purple foliage of the forest, lay close at hand if he wanted to stretch his legs. Toby and Rex occupied a pair of cubicles forward. Thissell had the after-cabins to himself. From time to time he toyed with the idea of a third slave, possibly a young female, to contribute an element of charm and gaiety to the menage... But Kershaul advised against the step, fearing . that the intensity of Thissell's concentration might somehow be diminished. Thissell acquiesced and devoted himself to the study of the six instruments. The days passed quickly. Thissell never became bored with the pageantry of dawn and sunset; the white clouds and blue sea of noon; the night sky blazing with the twenty-nine stars of Cluster SI #-#. The weekly trip to Fan broke the tedium. Toby and Rex foraged for food; Thissell visited the luxurious houseboat of Mathew Kershaul for instruction and advice. Then, three months after Thissell's arrival, came the message completely disorganizing the routine: Haxo Angmark, assassin, agent provocateur, ruthless and crafty criminal, had come to Sirene. "Effect detention and incarceration of this man!" read the orders. "Attention! Haxo Angmark is superlatively dangerous. Kill without hesitation!" of condition. He trotted fifty yards until his breath came in gasps, then walked -- through low hills crowned with white bamboo and black tree-ferns; across meadows yellow with grass-nuts, through orchards and wild vineyards. Twenty minutes passed, twenty-five minutes. With a heavy sensation in his stomach Thissell knew that he was too late. Haxo Angmark had landed, and might be traversing this very road toward Fan. But along the way Thissell met only four persons: a boy-child in a mock-fierce Alk-Islander mask; two young women wearing the Red-bird and the Green-bird; a man masked as a Forest Goblin. Coming upon the man, Thissell stopped short. Could this be Angmark? Thissell essayed a strategem. He went boldly to the man, stared into the hideous mask. "Angmark," he called in the language of the Home Planets, "you are under arrest!" The Forest Goblin stared uncomprehendingly, then started forward along the track. Thissell put himself in the way. He reached for his ganga, then recalling the hostler's reaction, instead struck a chord on the zachinko. "You travel the road from the space-port," he sang. "What have you seen there?" The Forest Goblin grasped his hand-bugle, an instrument used to deride opponents on the field of battle, to summon animals or occasionally to evince a rough and ready truculence. "Where I travel and what I see are the concern solely of myself. Stand back or I walk upon your face." He marched forward. Had not Thissell leapt aside the Forest Goblin might well have made good his threat. Thissell stood gazing after the retreating back. Angmark? Not likely, with so sure a touch on the hand-bugle. Thissell hesitated, then turned and continued on his way. Arriving at the space-port, he went directly to the office. The heavy door stood ajar; as Thissell approaehed, a man appeared in the doorway. He wore a mask of dull green scales, mica plates, blue-lacquered wood and black quills -- the Tarn-Bird. "Ser Rolver," Thissell called out anxiously, "who came down from the Carina Cruzeiro?" long moment, "Why do you ask?" "Why do I ask?" demanded Thissell. "You must have seen the space-gram I received from Castel Cromartin!" "Oh, yes," said Rolver. "Of course. Naturally." "It was delivered only half an hour ago," said Thissell bitterly. "I rushed out as fast as I could. Where is Angmark?" "In Fan, I assume," said Rolver. Thissell cursed softly. "Why didn't you delay him?" Rolver shrugged. "I had neither authority, inclination nor the capability to stop him." Thissell fought back his annoyance. In a voice of studied calm he said, "On the way I passed a man in rather a ghastly mask -- saucer eyes, red wattles." "A Forest Goblin," said Rolver. "Angmark brought the mask with him." "But he played the handbugle," Thissell protested. "How could Angmark -- " "He's well-acquainted with Sirene. He spent five years here in Fan." Thissell grunted in annoyance. "Cromartin made no mention of this." "It's common knowledge," said Rolver with a shrug. "He was Commercial Representative before Welibus took over, a long time ago." "Were he and Welibus acquainted?" Rolver laughed shortly. "Naturally. But don't suspect poor Welibus of anything more venial than juggling his accounts. I assure you he's no consort of assassins." "Speaking of assassins," said Thissell, "do you have a weapon I might borrow?" Rolver inspected him in wonder. "You came out here to take Angmark bare-handed?" "I had no choice," said Thissell. "When Cromartin gives orders he expects results. In any event you were here with your slaves." "Don't count on me for help," Rolver said testily. "I wear the Tarn-Bird and make no pretensions of valor. But I can lend you a power-pistol. I haven't used it recently; I won't guarantee its charge." "Anything is better than nothing," said Thissell. Rolver went into the office and a moment later returned with the gun. "What will you do now?" Thissell shook his head wearily. "I'll try to find Angmark in Fan. Or might he head for Zundar?" Rolver considered. "Angmark might be able to survive in Zundar. But he'd want to brush up on his musicianship. I imagine he'll stay in Fan a few day's." "But how can I find him? Where should I look?" "That I can't say," replied Rolver. "You might be safer not finding him. Angmark is a dangerous man." " the way he had come. Where the path swung down from the hills into the esplanade a thick-walled pise-de-terre building had been constructed. The door was carved from a solid black plank; the windows were guarded by enfoliated bands of iron. This was the office of Comely Welibus, Commercial Factor, Importer and Exporter. Thissell found Welibus sitting at his ease on the tiled verandah, wearing a modest adaptation of the Waldemar mask. He seemed lost in thought. He might or might not have recognized Thissell's Moon-Moth; in any event he gave no signal of greeting. Thissell approached the porch. "Good morning, Ser Welibus." Welibus nodded abstractedly and said in a flat voice, plucking lazily at his kradatch, "Good morning." Thissell was rather taken aback. This was hardly the instrument to use toward a friend and fellow-out-worlder, even if he did wear the Moon-Moth. Thissell said coldly, "May I ask how long you have been sitting here?" Welibus considered half a minute. When he spoke he accompanied himself on the more cordial crebarin. But the recollection of the krodatch chord still rankled in Thissell's mind. "I've been here fifteen or twenty minutes. Why do you ask?" "I wonder if you noticed a Forest Goblin pass?" Welibus nodded. "He went on down the esplanade -- turned into that first mask shop, I believe." Thissell hissed between his teeth. This would naturally be Angmark's first move. "I'll never find him once he changes masks," he muttered. "Who is this Forest Goblin?" asked Welibus, with no more than casual interest. Thissell could see no reason to conceal the name. "A notorious criminal: Haxo Angmark." "Haxo Angmark!" croaked Welibus, leaning back in his chair. "You're sure he's here?" "Reasonably sure." Welibus rubbed his shaking hands together. "This is bad news -- bad news indeed! He's an unscrupulous scoundrel." "You knew him well?" "As well as anyone." Welibus was now accompanying himself with the kiv. "He held the post I now occupy. I came out as an inspector and found that he was embezzling some four thousand no great gratitude toward me." Welibus glanced nervously up the esplanade. "I hope you catch him." "I'm doing my best. He went into the mask shop, you say?" "I'm sure of it." Thissell turned away. As he went down the path he heard the black plank door thud shut behind him. H E walked down the esplanade to the mask-maker's shop, and paused outside as if admiring the display: a hundred miniature masks, carved from rare woods and minerals, dressed with emerald flakes, spiderweb silk, wasp wings, petrified fish scales and the like. The shop was empty except for the mask-maker, a gnarled knotty man in a yellow robe, wearing a deceptively simple Universal Expert mask, fabricated from over two thousand bits of articulated wood. Thissell considered what he would say and how he would accompany himself, then entered. The mask-maker, noting the Moon-Moth and Thissell's diffident manner, continued with his work. Thissell, selecting the easiest of his instruments, stroked his strapan -- possibly not the most felicitous choice, for it conveyed a certain degree of condescension. Thissell tried to counteract this flavor by singing in warm, almost effusive, tones, shaking the strapan whimsically when he struck a wrong note: "A stranger is an interesting person to deal with; his habits are unfamiliar, he excites curiosity. Not twenty minutes ago a stranger entered this fascinating shop, to exchange his drab Forest Goblin for one of the remarkable and adventurous creations assembled on the premises." The mask-maker turned Thissell a side glance. Without words he played a progression of chords on an instrument Thissell had never seen before: a flexible sac gripped in the palm with three short tubes leading between the fingers. When the tubes were squeezed almost shut and air forced through the slit, an oboelike tone ensued. To Thissell's developing ear the instrument seemed difficult, the mask-maker expert; the music conveyed a profound sense of disinterest. Thissell tried again, laboriously manipulating the strapan. He sang, "To an out-worlder on a foreign planet, the voice of one from his home is like water to a wilting plant. A person who could unite two such persons might find satisfaction in such an act of mercy." Even to his own ears the notes rang false. The mask-maker casually fingered his own strapan, and drew forth a set of rippling scales, his fingers moving faster than the eyes could follow. He sang in the formal style: "An artist values his moments of concentration. He does not care to spend time exchanging banalities with persons of at best average prestige." Thissell attempted to insert a counter melody, but the maskmaker struck a new set of complex chords whose portent evaded Thissell's understanding, and continued: "Into the shop comes a person who evidently has picked up for the first time an instrument of unparalleled complication, for the execution of his music is open to criticism. He sings of homesickness and longing for the sight of others like himself. He dissembles his enormous strakh behind a MoonMoth, for he plays the strapan to a Master Craftsman, and sings in a voice of contemptuous raillery. The refined and creative artist ignores the provocation. He plays a polite instrument, remains noncommittal, and trusts that the stranger will tire of his sport and depart." "The noble mask-maker completely misunderstands me -- " He was interrupted by staccato rasping of the mask-maker's strapan. "The stranger now sees fit to ridicule the artist's comprehension." Thissell scratched furiously at his strapan: "To protect myself from the heat, I wander into a small and unpretentious maskshop. The artisan, though still distracted by the novelty of his tools, gives promise of development. He works zealously to perfect his skill, so much so that he refuses to converse with strangers, no matter what their need." The mask-maker carefully laid down his carving tool. He rose to his feet, went behind a screen, and shortly returned wearing a mask of gold and iron, with simulated flames licking up from the scalp. In one hand he carried a skaranyi, in the other a scimitar. wild tones, and sang. "Even the most accomplished artist can sea-monsters, Night-men and importunate idlers. Such an occasion is at hand. The artist delays his attack exactly ten seconds, because the offender wears a Moon-Moth." He twirled his scimitar and spun it in the air. Thissell desperately pounded the strapan. "Did a Forest Goblin enter the shop? Did he depart with a new mask?" "Five seconds have elapsed," sang the mask-maker in steady ominous rhythm. Thissell departed in frustrated rage. He crossed the square and stood looking up and down the esplanade. Hundreds of men and women sauntered along the docks, or stood on the decks of their houseboats, each wearing a mask chosen to express his mood, prestige and special attributes, and everywhere sounded the twitter of musical instruments. Thissell stood at a loss. The Forest Goblin had disappeared. Haxo Angmark walked at liberty in Fan, and Thissell had failed the urgent instructions of Castel Cromartin. Behind him sounded the casual notes of a kiv. "Ser MoonMoth Thissell, you stand engrossed in thought." side him a Cave-Owl, in a somber cloak of black and gray. Thissell recognized the mask, which symbolized erudition and patient exploration of abstract ideas. Mathew Kershaul had worn it on the occasion of their meeting a week before. "Good morning, Ser Kershaul," muttered Thissell. "And how are the studies coming? Have you mastered the C-Sharp Plus scale on the gomapard? As I recall, you were finding those inverse intervals puzzling." "I've worked on them," said Thissell in a gloomy voice. "However, since I'll probably be recalled to Polypolis, it may be all time wasted." "Eh? What's this?" Thissell explained the situation in regard to Haxo Angmark. Kershaul nodded gravely. "I recall Angmark. Not a gracious personality, but an excellent musician, with quick fingers and a real talent for new instruments." Thoughtfully he twisted the goatee of his Cave Owl mask. "What are your plans?" "They're non-existent," said Thissell, playing a doleful phrase on the kiv. "I haven't any idea what masks he'll be wearing. And if I don't know what he looks like, how can I find him?" Kershaul tugged at his goatee. "In the old days he favored the Exo-Cambian Cycle, and I believe he used an entire set of Nether Denizens. Now of course his tastes may have changed." "Exactly," Thissell complained. "He might be twenty feet away and I'd never know it." He glanced bitterly across the esplanade toward the mask-maker's shop. "No one will tell me anything. I doubt if they care that a murderer is walking their docks." "Quite correct," Kershaul agreed. "Sirenese standards are different from ours." "They have no sense of responsibility," declared Thissell. "I doubt if they'd throw a rope to a drowning man." "It's true that they dislike interference," Kershaul agreed. "They emphasize individual responsiblity and self-sufficiency." "Interesting," said Thissell, "but I'm still in the dark about Angmark." Kershaul surveyed him gravely. "And should you locate Angmark, what will you do then?" "I'll carry out the orders of my superior," said Thissell doggedly. "Angmark is a dangerous man," mused Kershaul. "He's got a number of advantages over you." "I can't take that into account. It's my duty to send him back to Polypolis. He's probably safe, since I haven't the remotest idea how to find him." out-worlder can't hide behind a mask, not from the Sirenese at least. There are four of us here at Fan -- Rolver, Welibus, you and me. If another outworlder tries to set up housekeeping the news will get around in short order." "What if he heads for Zundar?" Kershaul shrugged. "I doubt if he'd dare. On the other hand -- " Kershaul paused, then noting Thissell's sudden inattention, turned to follow Thissell's gaze. A man in a Forest Goblin mask came swaggering toward them along the esplanade. Kershaul laid a restraining hand on Thissell's arm, but Thissell stepped out into the path of the Forest Goblin, his borrowed gun ready. "Haxo Angmark," he cried, "don't make a move, or I'll kill you. You're under arrest." "Are you sure this is Angmark?" asked Kershaul in a worried voice. "I'll find out," said Thissell. "Angmark, turn around, hold up your hands." The Forest Goblin stood rigid with surprise and puzzlement. He reached to his zachinko, played an interrogatory arpeggio and sang, "Why do you molest me, Moon-Moth?" Kershaul stepped forward and played a placatory phrase on his slobo. "I fear that a case of confused identity exists, Ser Forest Goblin. Ser Moon-Moth seeks an out-worlder in a Forest Goblin mask." The Forest Goblin's music became irritated, and he suddenly switched to his stimic. "He asserts that I am an out-worlder? Let him prove his case, or he has my retaliation to face." Kershaul glanced in embarrassment around the crowd which had gathered and once more struck up an ingratiating melody. "I am positive that Ser MoonMoth -- " The Forest Goblin interrupted with a fanfare of skaranyi tones. "Let him demonstrate his case or prepare for the flow of blood." Thissell said, "Very well, I'll prove my case." He stepped forward, grasped the Forest Goblin's mask. "Let's see your face, that'll demonstrate your identity!" The Forest Goblin sprang back in amazement. The crowd gasped, then set up an ominous strumming and toning of various instruments. The Forest Goblin reached to the nape of his neck, jerked the cord to his duel-gong, and with his other hand snatched forth his scimitar. Kershaul stepped forward, playing the slobo with great agitation. Thissell, now abashed, moved aside, conscious of the ugly sound of the crowd. Kershaul sang explanations and apologies; the Forest Goblin answered; Kershaul spoke over his shoulder to Thissell: "Run for it, or you'll be killed! Hurry!" est Goblin put up his hand to thrust Kershaul aside. "Run!" screamed Kershaul. "To Welibus's office. Lock yourself in!" Thissell took to his heels. The Forest Goblin pursued him a few yards, then stamped his feet and sent after him a set of raucous and derisive blasts of the handbugle, while the crowd produced a contemptuous counterpoint of clacking .hymerkins. There was no further pursuit. Instead of taking refuge in the Import-Export office, Thissell turned aside and after cautious reconnaissance proceeded to the dock where his houseboat was moored. The hour was not far short of dusk when he finally returned aboard. Toby and Rex squatted on the forward deck, surrounded by the provisions they had brought back; reed baskets of fruit and cereal, blue-glass jugs containing wine, oil and pungent sap, three young pigs in a wicker pen. They were cracking nuts between their teeth and spitting the shells over the side. They looked up at Thissell, and it seemed that they rose to their feet with a new casualness. Toby muttered something under his breath; Rex smothered a chuckle. Thissell clacked his hymerkin angrily. He sang, "Take the boat off-shore; tonight we remain at Fan." In the privacy of his cabin he removed the Moon-Moth and stared into a mirror at his almost unfamiliar features. He picked up the Moon-Moth, examined the detested lineaments: the furry gray skin, the blue spines, the ridiculous lace flaps. Har-dly a dignified presence for the Consular Representative of the Home Planets. If, in fact, he still held the position when Cromartin learned of Angmark's winning free! Thissell flung himself into a chair and stared moodily into space. Today he'd suffered a series of setbacks. But he wasn't defeated yet, not by any means. Tomorrow he'd visit Mathew Kershaul; they'd discuss how best to locate Angmark. As Kershaul had pointed out, another out-world establishment could not be camouflaged. Haxo Angmark's identity would soon become evident. Also, tomorrow he must procure another mask. Nothing extreme or vainglorious, but a mask which expressed a modicum of dignity and self-respect. At this moment one of the slaves tapped on the door-panel, and Thissell hastily pulled the hated Moon-Moth back over his head. IV the dawn-light had left the sky, the slaves sculled the houseboat back to that section of the dock set aside for the use of out-worlders. Neither Rolver nor Welibus nor Kershaul had yet arrived. Thissell waited impatiently. An hour passed, and Welibus brought his boat to the dock. Not wishing to speak to Welibus, Thissell remained inside his cabin. A few moments later Rolver's boat likewise pulled in alongside the dock. Through the window Thissell saw Rolver, wearing his usual Tarn-Bird, climb to the dock. Here he was met by a man in a yellow-tufted Sand Tiger mask, who played a formal accompaniment on his gomapard to whatever message he brought Rolver. Rolver seemed surprised and disturbed. After a moment's thought he manipulated his own gomapard and, as he sang, he indicated Thissell's houseboat. Then, bowing, he went on his way. The man in the Sand Tiger mask climbed with rather heavy dignity to the float and rapped on the bulwark of Thissell's houseboat. Thissell presented himself. Sirenese etiquette did not demand that he invite a casual visitor aboard, so he merely struck an interrogation on his zachinko. The Sand Tiger played his gomapard and sang, "Dawn over the bay of Fan is customarily a splendid occasion. The sky is white with yellow and green colors. When Mireille rises, the mists burn and writhe like flames. He who sings derives a greater enjoyment from the hour when the floating corpse of an outworlder does not appear to mar the serenity of the view." Thissell's zachinko gave off a startled interrogation almost of its own accord. The Sand Tiger bowed with dignity. "The singer acknowledges no peer in steadfastness of disposition; however, he does not care to be plagued by the antics of a dissatisfied ghost. He therefore has ordered his slaves to attach a thong to the ankle of the corpse, and while we have conversed they have linked the corpse to the stern of your houseboat. You will wish to administer whatever rites are prescribed in the out-world. He who sings wishes you a good morning and now departs." Thissell rushed to the stern of his houseboat. There, near naked and maskless, floated the body of a mature man, supported by air trapped in his pantaloons. Thissell studied the dead face, which seemed characterless and vapid -- perhaps in direct consequence of the mask-wearing habit. The body appeared of medium stature and weight. Thissell estimated the age as between fortyfive and fifty. The hair was nondescript brown, the features bloated by the water. There was nothing to indicate how the man had died. This must be Haxo Angmark, thought Thissell. Who else could it be? Mathew Kershaul? Why not? Thissell asked himself uneasily. Rolver and Welibus had already disembarked and gone about their business. He searched across the bay to locate Kershaul's houseboat, and discovered it already tying up to the dock. Even as he watched Kershaul jumped ashore, wearing his CaveOwl mask. He seemed in an abstracted mood, for he passed Thissell's houseboat without lifting his eyes from the dock. Thissell turned back to the corpse: Angmark, then, beyond a doubt. Had not three men disembarked from the houseboats of Rolver, Welibus and Kershaul, wearing masks characteristic of these men? Obviously, the corpse of Angmark... The easy solution refused to sit quiet in Thissell's mind. Kershaul had pointed out that another outworlder would be quickly identified. How else could Angmark maintain himself? Unless... Thissell brushed the thought aside. The corpse was obviously Angmark. And yet... Thissell summoned his slaves, gave orders that a suitable container be brought to the dock, that the corpse be transferred therein, and conveyed to a suitable place of repose. The slaves showed no enthusiasm for the task and Thissell was forced to thunder forcefully, if not skillfully, on the hymerkin to emphasize his orders. He walked along the dock, turned up the esplanade, passed the office of Comely Welibus and set out along the pleasant little lane to the landing field. that Rolver had not yet made an appearance. An overslave, given status by a yellow rosette on his black cloth mask, asked how he might be of service. Thissell stated that he wished to dispatch a message to Polypolis. There was no difficulty here, declared the slave. If Thissell would set forth his message in clear block-print it would be despatched immediately. Thissell wrote: He addressed the message to Castel Cromartin at Polypolis and handed it to the over-slave. A moment later he heard the characteristic sputter of transspace discharge. An hour passed. Rolver made no appearance. Thissell paced restlessly back and forth in front of the office. There was no telling how long he would have to wait. Trans-space transmission time varied unpredictably. Sometimes the message snapped through in microseconds; sometimes it wandered through unknowable regions for hours; and there were several authenticated examples of messages being received before they had been transmitted. Another half-hour passed, and Rolver finally arrived, wearing his customary Tarn-Bird. Coincidentally Thissell heard the hiss of the incoming message. Rolver seemed surprised to see Thissell. "What brings you out so early?" Thissell explained. "It concerns the body which you referred to me this morning. I'm communicating with my superiors about it." Rolver raised his head and listened to the sound of the incoming message. "You seem to be getting an answer. I'd better attend to it." "Why bother?" asked Thissell. "Your slave seems to be efficient." "It's my job," declared Rolver. "I'm responsible for the accurate transmission and receipt of all space-grams." "I'll come with you," said Thissell. "I've always wanted to watch the operation of the equipment." "I'm afraid that's irregular," said Rolver. He went to the door which led into the inner compartment. "I'll have your message in a moment." Thissell protested, but Rolver ignored him and went into the inner office. Five minutes later he reappeared, carrying a small yellow envelope. "Not too good news," he announced with unconvincing commiseration. Thissell glumly opened the envelope. The message read: Thissell put the message in his pocket. "Incidentally, may I inquire the color of your hair?" Rolver played a surprised little trill on his kiv. "I'm quite blond. Why do you ask?" "Mere curiosity." Rolver played another rim on the kiv. "Now I understand. My dear fellow, what a suspicious nature you have! Look!" He turned and parted the folds of his mask at the nape of his neck. Thissell saw that Rolver was blond indeed. "Are you reassured?" asked Rolver jocularly. "Oh, indeed," said Thissell. "Incidentally, have you another mask you could lend me? I'm sick of this Moon-Moth." "I'm afraid not," said Rolver. "But you need merely go into a mask-maker's shop and make a selection." "Yes, of course," said Thissell. He took leave of Rolver and returned along the trail to Fan. hesitated, then turned in. Today Welibus wore a dazzling confection of green glass prisms and silver beads, a mask Thissell had never seen before. Welibus greeted him cautiously to the accompaniment of a kiv. "Good morning, Ser MoonMoth." "I won't take too much of your time," said Thissell, "but I have a rather personal question to put to you. What color is your hair?" Welibus hesitated a fraction of a second, then turned his back, lifted the flap of his mask. Thissell saw heavy black ringlets. "Does that answer your question?" inquired Welibus. "Completely," said Thissell. He crossed the esplanade, went out on the dock to Kershaul's houseboat. Kershaul greeted him without enthusiasm, and invited him aboard with a resigned wave of the hand. "A question I'd like to ask," said Thissell. "What color is your hair?" Kershaul laughed woefully. "What little remains is black. Why do you ask?" "Curiosity." "Come, come," said Kershaul with an unaccustomed bluffness. "There's more to it than that." Thissell, feeling the need of counsel, admitted as much. "Here's the situation. A dead outworlder was found in the harbor this morning. His hair was brown. I'm not entirely certain, but the chances are -- let me see, yes, two out of three that Angmark's hair is black." Kershaul pulled at the CaveOwl's goatee. "How do you arrive at that probability?" "The information came to me through Rolver's hands. He has blond hair. If Angmark has assumed Rolver's identity, he would naturally alter the information which came to me this morning. Both you and Welibus admit to black hair." "Hm," said Kershaul. "Let me see if I follow your line of reasoning. You feel that Haxo Angmark has killed either Rolver, Welibus or myself and assumed the dead man's identity. Right?" Thissell looked at him in surprise. "You yourself emphasized that Angmark could not set up another out-world establishment without revealing himself! Don't you remember?" "Oh, certainly. To continue. Rolver delivered a message to you stating that Angmark was dark, and announced himself to be blond." "Yes. Can you verify this? I mean for the old Rolver?" "No," said Kershaul sadly. "I've seen neither Rolver nor Welibus without their masks." #TF Rolver is not Angmark," Thissell mused, "if Angmark indeed has black hair, then both you and Welibus come under suspicion." "Very interesting," said Kershaul. He examined Thissell warily. "For that matter, you yourself might be Angmark. What color is your hair?" "Brown," said Thissell curtly. He lifted the gray fur of the Moon-Moth mask at the back of his head. "But you might be deceiving me as to the text of the message," Kershaul put forward. "I'm not," said Thissell wearily. "You can check with Rolver if you care to." Kershaul shook his head. "Unnecessary. I believe you. But another matter: what of voices? You've heard all of us before and after Angmark arrived. Isn't there some indication there?" "No. I'm so alert for any evidence of change that you all sound rather different. And the masks muffle your voices." Kershaul tugged the goatee. "I don't see any immediate solution to the problem." He chuckled. "In any event, need there be? Before Angmark's advent, there were Rolver, Welibus, Kershaul and Thissell. Now -- for all practical purposes -- there are still Rolver, Welibus, Kershaul and Thissell. Who is to say that the new member may not be an improvement upon the old?" "An interesting thought," agreed Thissell, "but it so happens that I have a personal interest in identifying Angmark. My career is at stake." "I see," murmured Kershaul. "The situation then becomes an issue between yourself and Angmark." "You won't help me?" "Not actively. I've become pervaded with Sirenese individualism. I think you'll find that Rolver and Welibus will respond similarly." He sighed. "All of us have been here too long." Thissell stood deep in thought. Kershaul waited patiently a moment, then said, "Do you have any further questions?" "No," said Thissell. I have merely a favor to ask you. "I'll oblige if I possibly can," Kershaul replied courteously. "Give me, or lend me, one of your slaves, for a week or two." Kershaul played an exclamation of amusement on the ganga. "I hardly like to part with my slaves. They know me and my ways -- " "As soon as I catch Angmark you'll have him back." "Very well," said Kershaul. He rattled a summons on his hymerkin, and a slave appeared. "Anthony," sang Kershaul, "you are to go with Ser Thissell and serve him for a short period." The slave bowed without pleasure. his houseboat, and questioned him at length, noting certain of the responses upon a chart. He then enjoined Anthony to say nothing of what had passed, and consigned him to the care of Toby and Rex. He gave further instructions to move the houseboat away from the dock and allow no one aboard until his return. He set forth once more along the way to the landing field, and found Rolver at a lunch of spiced fish, shredded bark of the salad tree, and a bowl of native currants. Rolver clapped an order on the hymerkin, and a slave set a place for Thissell. "And how are the investigations proceeding?" "I'd hardly like to claim any progress," said Thissell. "I assume that I can count on your help?" Rolver laughed briefly. "You have my good wishes." "More concretely," said Thissell, "I'd like to borrow a slave from you. Temporarily." Rolver paused in his eating. "Whatever for?" "I'd rather not explain," said Thissell. "But you can be sure that I make no idle request." Without graciousness Rolver summoned a slave and consigned him to Thissell's service. On the way back to his houseboat, Thissell stopped at Welibus' office. Welibus looked up from his work. "Good afternoon, Ser Thissell." Thissell came directly to the point. "Ser Welibus, will you lend me a slave for a few days?" Welibus hesitated, then shrugged. "Why not?" He clacked his hymerkin; a slave appeared. "Is he satisfactory? Or would you prefer a young female?" He chuckled -- rather offensively, to Thissell's way of thinking. "He'll do very well. I'll return him in a few days." "No hurry." Welibus made an easy gesture and returned to his work. Thissell continued to his houseboat, where he separately interviewed each of his two new slaves and made notes upon his chart. Dusk came soft over the Titanic Ocean. Toby and Rex sculled the houseboat away from the dock, out across the silken waters. Thissell sat on the deck listening to the sound of soft voices, the flutter and tinkle of musical instruments. Lights from the floating houseboats glowed yellow and wan watermelon-red. The shore was dark; the Nightmen would presently come slinking to paw through refuse and stare jealously across the water. In nine days the Buenaventura came past Sirene on its regular schedule; Thissell had his orders to return to Polypolis. In nine days, could he locate Angmark? Nine days weren't too many, Thissell decided, but they might possibly be enough. V and four and five. Every day Thissell went ashore and at least once a day visited Rolver, Welibus and Kershaul. Each reacted differently to his presence. Rolver was sardonic and irritable; Welibus formal and at least superficially affable; Kershaul mild and suave, but ostentatiously impersonal and detached in his conversation. Thissell remained equally bland to Rolver's dour jibes, Welibus's jocundity, Kershaul's withdrawal. And every day, returning to his houseboat, he made marks on his chart. The sixth, the seventh, the eighth day came and passed. Rolver, with rather brutal directness, inquired if Thissell wished to arrange for passage on the Buenaventura. Thissell considered, and said, "Yes, you had better reserve passage for one." "Back to the world of faces," shuddered Rolver. "Faces! Everywhere pallid, fish-eyed faces. Mouths like pulp, noses knotted and punctured; flat flabby faces. I don't think I could stand it after living here. Luckily you haven't become a real Sirenese." "But I won't be going back," said Thissell. "I thought you wanted me to reserve passage." "I do -- for Haxo Angmark. He'll be returning to Polypolis, in the brig." "Well, well," said Rolver. "So you've picked him out." "Of course," said Thissell. "Haven't you?" Rolver shrugged. "He's either Welibus or Kershaul, that's as close as I can make it. So long as he wears his mask and calls himself either Welibus or Kershaul, it means nothing to me." "It means a great deal to me," said Thissell. "What time tomorrow does the lighter go up?" "Eleven twenty-two sharp. If Haxo Angmark's leaving, tell him to be on time." "He'll be here," said Thissell. He made his usual call upon Welibus and Kershaul. Then, returning to his houseboat, he put three final marks on his chart. The evidence was here, plain and convincing. Not absolutely incontrovertible evidence, but enough to warrant a definite move. He checked over his gun. Tomorrow was the day of decision. He could afford no errors. 'T'HE day dawned bright white, the sky like the inside of an oyster shell. Mireille rose through iridescent mists. Toby and Rex sculled the houseboat to the dock. The remaining three out-world houseboats floated somnolently on the slow swells. One boat Thissell watched in particular, that whose owner Haxo Angmark had killed and dropped into the harbor. This boat presently moved toward the shore, and Haxo Angmark himself stood on the front deck, wearing a mask Thissell had never seen before: a construction of scarlet feathers, black glass and spiked green hair. It was most impressive. Thissell was forced to admire his poise. A clever scheme, cleverly planned and executed -- but marred by an insurmountable difficulty. Angmark returned within. The houseboat reached the dock. Slaves flung out mooring lines and lowered the gangplank. Thissell, his gun ready in the pocket flap of his robes, walked down the dock, went aboard. He pushed open the door to the saloon. The man at the table raised his red, black and green mask in surprise. Thissell said, "Angmark, please don't argue or make any -- " Something hard and heavy tackled him from behind; he was flung to the floor, his gun wrested expertly away. Behind him the hymerkin clattered; a voice sang, "Bind the fool's arms." The man sitting at the table rose to his feet, removed the red, black and green mask to reveal the black cloth of a slave. Thissell twisted his head. Over him stood Haxo Angmark, wearing a mask Thissell recognized as a Dragon-Tamer, fabricated from black metal, with a knife-blade nose, socketed eyelids, and three crests running back over the scalp. The mask's expression was unreadable, but Angmark's voice was triumphant. "I trapped you very easily." "So you did," said Thissell. The slave finished knotting his wrists together. A clatter of Angmark's hymerkin sent him away. "Get to your feet," said Angmark. "Sit in that chair." "What are we waiting for?" inquired Thissell. "Two of our fellows still remain out on the water. We won't need them for what I have in mind." "Which is?" "You'll learn in due course," said Angmark. "We have an hour or so on our hands." Thissell tested his bonds. They were undoubtedly secure. '"How did you fix on me? I admit to being curious... Come, come," he chided as Thissell sat silently. "Can't you recognize that I have defeated you? Don't make affairs unpleasant for yourself." Thissell shrugged. "I operated on a basic principle. A man can mask his face, but he can't mask his personality." "Aha," said Angmark. "Interesting. Proceed." "I borrowed a slave from you and the other two out-worlders, and I questioned them carefully. What masks had their masters worn during the month before your arrival? I prepared a chart and plotted their responses. Rolver wore the Tarn Bird about eighty percent of the time, the remaining twenty percent divided between the Sophist Abstraction and the Black Intricate. Welibus had a taste for the heroes of Kan-Dachan Cycle. He wore the Chalekun, the Prince Intrepid, the Seavain most of the time: six days out of eight. The other two days he wore his South-Wind or his Gay Companion. Kershaul, more conservative, preferred the Cave-Owl, the Star Wanderer, and two or three other masks he wore at odd intervals. "As I say, I acquired this information from possibly its most accurate source, the slaves. My next step was to keep watch upon the three of you. Every day I noted what masks you wore and compared it with my chart. Rolver wore his Tarn-Bird six times, his Black Intricate twice. Kershaul wore his Cave-Owl five times, his Star Wanderer once, his Quincunx once and his Ideal of Perfection once. Welibus wore the Emerald Mountain twice, the Triple Phoenix three times, the Prince Intrepid once and the Shark-God twice." Angmark nodded thoughtfully. "I see my error. I selected from Welibus's mask, but to my own taste -- and, as you point out, I revealed myself. But only to you." He rose and went to the window. "Kershaul and Rolver are now coming ashore. They'll soon be past and about their business -- though I doubt if they'd interfere in any case. They've both become good Sirenese." Thissell waited in silence. Ten minutes passed. Then Angmark reached to a shelf and picked up a knife. He looked at Thissell. "Stand up." Thissell slowly rose to his feet. Angmark approached from the side, reached out, lifted the MoonMoth from Thissell's head. Thissell gasped and made a vain attempt to seize it. Too late; his face was bare and naked. moved his own mask, donned the Moon-Moth. He struck a call on his hymerkirt. Two slaves entered, stopped in shock at the sight of Thissell. Angmark played a brisk tattoo, sang, "Carry this man up to the dock." "Angmark," cried Thissell. "I'm maskless!" The slaves seized him and, in spite of Thissell's desperate struggles, conveyed him out on the deck, along the float and up on the dock. Angmark fixed a rope around Thissell's neck. He said, "You are now Haxo Angmark, and I am Edwer Thissell. Welibus is dead. Y ou shall soon be dead. I can handle your job without difficulty. I'll play musical instruments like a Night-man and sing like a crow. I'll wear the Moon-Moth till it rots and then I'll get another. The report will go to Polypolis, Haxo Angmark is dead. Everything will be serene." Thissell barely heard. "You can't do this," he whispered. "My mask, my face..." A large woman in a blue and pink flower mask walked down the dock. She saw Thissell and, emitting a piercing shriek, flung herself prone on the dock. "Come along," said Angmark brightly. He tugged at the rope and pulled Thissell down the dock. A man in a Pirate Captain mask coming up from his houseboat stood rigid in amazement. Angmark played the zachinko and sang, "Behold the notorious criminal Haxo Angmark. Through all the outer-worlds his name is reviled. Now he is captured and led in shame to his death. Behold Haxo Angmark!" They turned into the esplanade. A child screamed in fright. A man called hoarsely. Thissell stumbled; tears tumbled from his eyes; he could see only disorganized shapes and colors. Angmark's voice belled out richly: "Everyone behold the criminal of the out-worlds, Haxo Angmark! Approach and observe his execution!" Thissell feebly cried out, "I'm not Angmark. I'm Edwer Thissell; he's Angmark." But no one listened to him. There were only cries of dismay, shock, disgust at the sight of his face. He called to Angmark, "Give me my mask, a slave-cloth..." Angmark sang jubilantly. "In shame he lived, in maskless shame he dies." A Forest Goblin .stood before Angmark. "Moon-Moth, we meet once more." Angmark sang, "Stand aside, friend Goblin. I must execute this criminal. In shame he lived, in shame he dies!" A crowd had formed around the group; masks stared in morbid titillation at Thissell. The Forest Goblin jerked the rope from Angmark's hand and threw it to the ground. The crowd roared. Voices cried, "No duel, no duel! Execute the monster!" Thissell's head. Thissell awaited the thrust of a blade. But instead his bonds were cut. Hastily he adjusted the cloth, hiding his face, peering between the folds. Four men clutched Haxo Angmark. The Forest Goblin confronted him, playing the skaranyi. "A week ago you reached to divest me of my mask. You have now achieved your perverse aim!" "But he is a criminal," cried Angmark. "He is notorious, infamous!" "What are his misdeeds?" sang the Forest Goblin. "He has murdered, betrayed; he has wrecked ships; he has tortured, blackmailed, robbed, sold children into slavery; he has -- " The Forest Goblin stopped him. "Your religious convictions are of no importance. We can vouch however for your present crimes!" The hostler stepped forward. He sang fiercely, "This insolent Moon-Moth nine days ago sought to pre-empt my choicest mount!" Another man pushed close. He wore a Universal Expert, and sang, "I am a Master Mask-maker; I recognize this Moon-Moth out-worlder! Only recently he entered my shop and derided my skill. He deserves death!" "Death to the out-world monster!" cried the crowd. A wave of men surged forward. Steel blades rose and fell. The deed was done. Thissell watched, unable to move. The Forest Goblin approached, and playing the stimic sang sternly, "For you we have pity, but also contempt. A true man would never suffer such indignities!" Thissell took a deep breath. He reached to his belt and found his zachinko. He sang, "My friend, you malign me! Can you not appreciate true courage? Would you prefer to die in combat or walk maskless along the esplanade?" The Forest Goblin sang, "There is only one answer. First I would die in combat; I could not bear such shame." Thissell sang, "I had such a choice. I could fight with my hands tied, and so die -- or I could suffer shame, and through this shame conquer my enemy. You admit that you lack sufficient strakh to achieve this deed. I have proved myself a hero of bravery! I ask, who here has courage to do what I have done?" "Courage?" demanded the Forest Goblin. "I fear nothing, up to and beyond death at the hands of the Night-men!" "Then answer." r T'HE Forest Goblin stood back. He played his double-kamanthil. "Bravery indeed, if such were your motives." The hostler struck a series of subdued gomapard chords and sang, "Not a man among us would dare what this maskless man has done." The crowd muttered approval. The mask-maker approached Thissell, obsequiously stroking his double-kamanthil. "Pray, Lord Hero, step into my nearby shop, exchange this vile rag for a mask befitting your quality." Another mask-maker sang, "Before you choose, Lord Hero, examine my magnificent creations!" A man in a Bright Sky Bird mask approached Thissell reverently. "I have only just completed a sumptuous houseboat; seventeen years of toil have gone into its fabrication. Grant me the good fortune of accepting and using this splendid craft. Aboard waiting to serve you are alert slaves and pleasant maidens; there is ample wine in storage and soft silken carpets on the decks." "Thank you," said Thissell, striking the zachinko with vigor and confidence. "I accept with pleasure. But first a mask." The mask-maker struck an interrogative trill on the gomapard. "Would the Lord Hero consider a Sea-Dragon Conqueror beneath his dignity?" "By no means," sang Thissell. "I consider it suitable and satisfactory. We shall go now to exatnine it."      if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run outthe mail never does (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. 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City J by Cordwainer Smith # by Jack Sharkey # by Frederik Pohl # by Donald E. Westlake # by Robert Bloch # by George O. Smith # by Frank Herbert # by Fritz Leiber # by Willy Ley # by Floyd C. Gale # The Man Made Land #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. T ET's think about education for a while. How much do we need? And what do we need it for? By the age of thirteen or fourteen a child is supposed to have learned a few simple arts and skills -- the rudiments of geography, as much simple arithmetic as he will ever need and a beginning in algebra; English, grammar and spelling sufficient to write a letter or read a mass-circulation magazine; and a smattering of other odds and ends. At eighteen, leaving high school, he will have added a halfbaked acquaintance with the less useful forms of another language; and a few excursions into geometry and intermediate algebra. He will perform experiments involving most of the simpler discoveries of #th century science. He will have tasted the less controversial delights of literature, and memorized enough historical dates to understand, at least, what the major holidays commemorate. Four college years later, his bachelor's degree in his hand, he will be presumed to have "completed" his education... in every respect save one. If he is to be a chemist, he will have learned as much about French essays as he will ever be required to know. If he is to be a teacher of social studies, he will have completed his learning of mathematics. He will, in short, have learned all he needs to know -- about every subject about which he really needs to know nothing. It is in the next two, four or ten years -- whether in school or serving his apprenticeship outside of school -- that he will at last learn his own work. It is in this "post graduate" period that the chemist learns chemistry and the social studies teacher learns what the Lynds were up to when they wrote Middletown. In any branch of learning, then, in which a body of knowledge already exists, the practitioner is in his thirties before he really knows what can be taught him. And what can be "taught"? He knows what Michelson did in #. But he doesn't know what Fred Hoyle is doing in #. He knows what Galileo deduced about gravitation and mass in #, but he doesn't know what some isolated worker has just learned this week. Only dead knowledge is entombed in texts. For what is going on now, where the work is to be done, only day-by-day continuing study can keep a man abreast of his own field. TT is a two-headed problem, you see. Head one: Too much time is spent learning what isn't needed. (Not needed the job, anyway. Naturally the more everyone knows about everything, the more understanding we'll have in the world. The question is really how pay to have a "well-rounded" population.) Head two: There is too much information in every area for any one person to digest. There is a solution at least to the problem propounded by the second head. Algis Budrys once wrote a story in which people kept their memories in little computer-storage boxes which they carried around with them. Want to know Uncle Charlie's birthday? Plug in the appropriate area of the little black box, and the stored information comes promptly to mind. Well, the story is fiction, of course. We don't have any such little black box on the market. Do we? What Budrys was suggesting was an idea, not a box. Maybe, after all, we're not so far from the idea. Data is now being made available in highly compressed form. # pages of French atomic-energy data is to be had by anyone with the price in the form of a batch of microcards not much larger than a canasta deck. They can be flicked out by sorters without much difficulty by simple edge-coding. You don't read French? No problem. Machine translation of foreign languages is already a practical reality. (An awkward, unpolished, idiosyncratic reality -- "Le chat est noir" is likely to come out "Thethis catmasculine (is?) blackblackly" -- but a reality all the same.) It is a question of accessibility. The most accessible place for information is right in the front of your own brain -- "at the tip of your fingers," as we say -- but surely an acceptable second-best would be to have it really "at the tips of your fingers" -- i.e., at the other end of a computerized teletype setup. It would be a pretty big box to carry around, but it can be built: A computer, linked with sufficient storage capacity (which doesn't have to be in one place; International Tel  Tel will gladly give you a circuit from almost anywhere to almost everywhere), so that the man working on the angular momentum of galaxies in Pasadena can get the latest spectroscopic data from France, England, Australia and Capetown simply by pushing the combination of buttons that translates as: "Galaxies, spectroscopic, internal Doppler shifts of." A ND what about the other head of the problem? What about the task of merely acquiring a basis of embalmed knowledge -- i.e., "education?" There's no doubt, as we said, that knowledge is a desideratum. But there are kinds and kinds of knowledge. It isn't going to help a layman (won't for that matter even help a mathematician particularly!) to know that the six #. Surely it is enough for him to know a few simple rules: that the distribution of primes is such that in the first hundred million integers about one out of twenty is a prime; or to know, if a number like #I comes up, that it is not a prime. (All he has to know is the simple rule that if the sum of the digits in a number is divisible by three, the number itself is divisible by three, and thus by definition not a prime.) By the same token, it isn't particularly important to memorize the date of the Battle of New Orleans or the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The sequence of events surrounding each of these occasions may be worth remembering: for New Orleans, because it occurred after the War of #, of which it was a part, was actually over (the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, but the combatants didn't know about it); for the Emancipation Proclamation, because its timing offers an interesting and useful glimpse into the thinking of one of our greatest presidents (it waited on the Union victory at Antietam, because Lincoln, a master politician, held it up until a Northern victory would give it extra meaning.) Actually, a good answer to most school test questions would be: "I can look it up for you, if you want me to." Unfortunately, that's not a passing answer! But perhaps it isn't the answer that's wrong; perhaps it's the system of examining on details instead of on understanding. What's the answer to the problem of education? Well, it's not the business of a science-fiction magazine to say. We supply questions, not answers. Hugo Gernsback says that that's the hard part of the creative process: It's easy to work out the answers, once the questions are known. Well, let's work on these for a while! A He had committed the most dreadful of crimes -- but what sort of punishment was this , when even his jailers pitied him? difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer's treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food. "Scream good and loud," said one rat-faced steward, "and then we'll know it's you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor's birthday." The other, fat steward ran the tip of his wet red tongue over his thick purple-red lips one time and said, "Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die. Something pretty good must happen, along with the -- whatchamacallit. Maybe you turn into a woman. Maybe you turn into two people. Listen, cousin, if it's real crazy fun, let me know..." Mercer said nothing. Mercer had enough troubles of his own not to wonder about the daydreams of nasty men. At the ferry it was different. The biopharmaceutical staff was deft, impersonal, quick in removing his shackles. They took off all his prison clothes and left them on the liner. When he boarded the ferry, naked, they looked him over as if he were a rare plant or a body on the operating table. They were almost kind in the clinical deftness of their touch. They did not treat him as a criminal, but as a specimen. Men and women, clad in their medical smocks, they looked at him as though he were already dead. He tried to speak. A man, older and more authoritative than the others, said firmly and clearly, "Do not worry about talking. I will talk to you myself in a very little time. What we are having now are the preliminaries, to determine your physical condition. Turn around, please." Mercer turned around. An orderly rubbed his back with a very strong antiseptic. "This is going to sting," said one of the technicians, "but it is nothing serious or painful. We are determining the toughness of the different layers of your skin." Mercer, annoyed by this impersonal approach, spoke up just as a sharp little sting burned him above the sixth lumbar vertebra. "Don't you know who I am?" "Of course we know who you are," said a woman's voice. "We have it all in a file in the corner. The chief doctor will talk about your crime later, if you want to talk about it. Keep quiet now. We are making a skin test, and you will feel much better if you do not make us prolong it." Honesty forced her to add another sentence: "And we will get better results as well." They had lost no time at all in getting to work. He peered at them sidewise to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the antechambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name. They changed from one routine to another. A woman, wearing a surgical mask, waved her hand at a white table. "Climb up on that, please." No one had said "please" to Mercer since the guards had seized him at the edge of the palace. He started to obey her and then he saw that there were padded handcuffs at the head of the table. He stopped. "Get along, please," she demanded. Two or three of the others turned around to look at both of them. The second "please" shook him. He had to speak. These were people, and he was a person again. He felt his voice rising, almost cracking into shrillness as he asked her, "Please ma'am, is the punishment going to begin?" here," said the woman. "This is the satellite. Get on the table. We're going to give you your first skin-toughening before you talk to the head doctor. Then you can tell him all about your crime -- " "You know my crime?" he said, greeting it almost like a neighbor. "Of course not," said she, "but all the people who come through here are believed to have committed crimes. Somebody thinks so or they wouldn't be here. Most of them want to talk about their personal crimes. But don't slow me down. I'm a skin technician, and down on the surface of Shayol you're going to need the very best work that any of us can do for you. Now get on that table. And when you are ready to talk to the chief you'll have something to talk about beside your crime." He complied. Another masked person, probably a girl, took his hands in cool, gentle fingers and fitted them to the padded cuffs in a way he had never sensed before. By now he thought he knew every interrogation machine in the whole empire, but this was nothing like any of them. The orderly stepped back. "All clear, sir and doctor." "Which do you prefer?" said the skin technician. "A great deal of pain or a couple of hour's unconsciousness?" "Why should I want pain?" said Mercer. "Some specimens do," said the technician, "by the time they arrive here. I suppose it depends on what people have done to them before they got here. I take it you did not get any of the dream-punishments." "No," said Mercer. "I missed those." He thought to himself, I didn't know that I missed anything at all. He remembered his last trial, himself wired and plugged in to the witness stand. The room had been high and dark. Bright blue light shone on the panel of judges, their judicial caps a fantastic parody of the episcopal mitres of long, long ago. The judges were talking, but he could not hear them. Momentarily the insulation slipped and he heard one of them say, "Look at that white, devilish face. A man like that is guilty of everything. I vote for Pain Terminal." "Not Planet Shayol?" said a second voice. "The dromozoa place," said a third voice. "That should suit him," said the first voice. One of the judicial engineers must then have noticed that the prisoner was listening illegally. He was cut off. Mercer then thought that he had gone through everything which the cruelty and intelligence of mankind could devise. But this woman said he had missed the dream-punishments. Could there be people in the universe even worse off than himself? There must be a lot of people down on Shayol. They never came back. He was going to be one of them; would they boast to him of what they had done, before they were made to come to this place? "You asked for it," said the woman technician. "It is just an ordinary anesthetic. Don't panic when you awaken. Your skin is going to be thickened and strengthened chemically and biologically." "Does it hurt?" "Of course," said she. "But get this out of your head. We're not punishing you. The pain here is just ordinary medical pain. Anybody might get it if they needed a lot of surgery. The punishment, if that's what you want to call it, is down on Shayol. Our only job is to make sure that you are fit to survive after you are landed. In a way, we are saving your life ahead of time. You can be grateful for that if you want to be. Meanwhile, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that your nerve endings will all respond to the change in the skin. You had better expect to be very uncomfortable when you recover. But then, we can help that, too." She brought down an enormous lever and Mercer blacked out. in an ordinary hospital room, but he did not notice it. He seemed bedded in fire. He lifted his hand to see if there were flames on it. It looked the way it always had, except that it was a little red and a little swollen. He tried to turn in the bed. The fire became a scorching blast which stopped him in mid-turn. Uncontrollably, he moaned. A voice spoke, "You are ready for some pain-killer." It was a girl nurse. "Hold your head still," she said, "and I will give you half an amp of pleasure. Your skin won't bother you then." She slipped a soft cap on his head. It looked like metal but it felt like silk. He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from threshing about on the bed. "Scream if you want to," she said. "A lot of them do. It will just be a minute or two before the cap finds the right lobe in your brain." She stepped to the corner and did something which he could not see. There was the flick of a switch. The fire did not vanish from his skin. He still felt it; but suddenly it did not matter. His mind was full of delicious pleasure which throbbed outward from his head and seemed to pulse down through his nerves. He had visited the pleasure palaces, but he had never felt anything like this before. He wanted to thank the girl, and he twisted around in the bed to see her. He could feel his whole body flash with pain as he did so, but the pain was far away. And the pulsating pleasure which coursed out of his head, down his spinal cord and into his nerves was so intense that the pain got through only as a remote, unimportant signal. She was standing very still in the corner. "Thank you, nurse," said he. She said nothing. He looked more closely, though it was hard to look while enormous pleasure pulsed through his body like a symphony written in nerve-messages. He focused his eyes on her and saw that she too wore a soft metallic cap. He pointed at it. She blushed all the way down to her throat. She spoke dreamily, "You looked like a nice man to me. I didn't think you'd tell on me..." He gave her what he thought was a friendly smile, but with the pain in his skin and the pleasure bursting out of his head, he really had no idea of what his actual expression might be. "It's against the law," he said. "It's terribly against the law. But it is nice." "How do you think we stand it here?" said the nurse. "You specimens come in here talking like ordinary people and then you go down to Shayol. Terrible things happen to you on Shayol. Then the surface station sends up parts of you, over and over again. I may see your head ten times, quick-frozen and ready for cutting up, before my two years are up. You prisoners ought to know how we suffer," she crooned, the pleasure-charge still keeping her relaxed and happy, "you ought to die as soon as you get down there and not pester us with your torments. We can hear you screaming, you know. You keep on sounding like people even after Shayol begins to work on you. Why do you do it, Mr. Specimen?" She feelings so. No wonder a girl like me has to have a little jolt now and then. It's real, real dreamy and I don't mind getting you ready to go down on Shayol." She staggered over to his bed. "Pull this cap off me, will you? I haven't got enough will power left to raise my hands." ble as he reached for the cap. His fingers touched the girl's soft hair through the cap. As he tried to get his thumb under the edge of the cap, in order to pull it off, he realized that this was the loveliest girl he had ever touched. He felt that he had always loved her, that he always would. He cap came off. She stood erect, staggering a little before she found a chair to hold to. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. "Just a minute," she said in her normal voice. "I'll be with you in just a minute. The only time I can get a jolt of this is when one of you visitors gets a dose to get over the skin trouble." She turned to the room mirror to adjust her hair. Speaking with her back to him, she said, "I hope I didn't say anything about downstairs." Mercer still had the cap on. He loved this beautiful girl who had put it on him. He was ready to weep at the thought that she had had the same kind of pleasure which he still enjoyed. Not for the world would he say anything which could hurt her feelings. He was sure she wanted to be told that she had not said anything about "downstairs" -- probably shop talk for the surface of Shayol -- so he assured her warmly, "You said nothing. Nothing at all." She came over to the bed, leaned, kissed him on the lips. The kiss was as far away as the pain; he felt nothing; the Niagara of throbbing pleasure which poured through his head left no room for more sensation. But he liked the friendliness of it. A grim, sane corner of his mind whispered to him that this was probably the last time he would ever kiss a woman, but it did not seem to matter. With skilled fingers she adjusted the cap on his head. "There, now. You're a sweet guy. I'm going to pretend-forget and leave the cap on you till the doctor comes." With a bright smile she squeezed his shoulder. She hastened out of the room. The white of her skirt flashed prettily as she went out the door. He saw that she had very shapely legs indeed. She was nice, but the cap... ah, it was the cap that mattered! He closed his eyes and let the cap go on stimulating the pleasure centers of his brain. The pain in his skin was still there, but it did not matter any more than did the chair standing in the corner. The pain was just something that happened to be in the room. made him open his eyes. The older, authoritative-looking man was standing beside the bed, looking down at him with a quizzical smile. "She did it again," said the old man. Mercer shook his head, trying to indicate that the young nurse had done nothing wrong. "I'm Doctor Vomact," said the older man, "and I am going to take this cap off you. You will then experience the pain again, but I think it will not be so bad. You can have the cap several more times before you leave here." With a swift, firm gesture he snatched the cap off Mercer's head. Mercer promptly doubled up with the inrush of fire from his skin. He started to scream and then saw that Doctor Vomact was watching him calmly. Mercer gasped, "It is -- easier now." "I knew it would be," said the doctor. "I had to take the cap off to talk to you. You have a few choices to make." "Yes, doctor," gasped Mercer. "You have committed a serious crime and you are going down to the surface of Shayol." "Yes," said Mercer. "Do you want to tell me your crime?" Mercer thought of the white palace walls in perpetual sunlight, and the soft mewing of the little things when he reached them. He tightened his arms, legs, back and jaw. "No," he said, "I don't want to talk about it. It's the crime without a name. Against the Imperial family..." "Fine," said the doctor, "that's a healthy attitude. The crime is past. Your future is ahead. Now, I can destroy your mind before you go down -- if you want me to." "That's against the law," said Mercer. Doctor Vomact smiled warmly and confidently. "Of course it is. A lot of things are against human law. But there are laws of science, too. Your body, down on Shayol, is going to serve science. It doesn't matter to me whether that body has Mercer's mind or the mind of a low-grade shellfish. I have to leave enough mind in you to keep the body going, but I can wipe out the historic you and give your body a better chance of being happy. It's your choice, Mercer. Do you want to be you or not?" Mercer shook his head back and forth, "I don't know." "I'm taking a chance," said Doctor Vomact, "in giving you this much leeway. I'd have it done if I were in your position. It's pretty bad down there." Mercer looked at the full, broad face. He did not trust the comfortable smile. Perhaps this was a trick to increase his punishment. The cruelty of the Emperor was proverbial. Look at what he had done to the widow of his predecessor, the Dowager Lady Da. She was younger than the Erpperor himself, and he had sent her to a place worse than death. If he had been sentenced to Shayol, why was this doctor trying to interfere with the rules? Maybe the doctor himself had been conditioned, and did not know what he was offering. Doctor Vomact read Mercer's face. "All right. You refuse. You want to take your mind down with you. It's all right with me. I don't have you on my conscience. I suppose you'll refuse the next offer too. Do you want me to take your eyes out before you go down? You'll be much more comfortable without vision. I know that, from the voices that we record for the warning broadcasts. I can sear the optic nerves so that there will be no chance of your getting vision again." Mercer rocked back and forth. The fiery pain had become a universal itch, but the soreness of his spirit was greater than the discomfort of his skin. "You refuse that, too?" said the doctor. "I suppose so," said Mercer. "Then all I have to do is to get ready. You can have the cap for a while, if you want." the cap on, can you tell me what happens down there?" "Some of it," said the doctor. "There is an attendant. He is a man, but not a human being. He is a homunculus fashioned out of cattle material. He is intelligent and very conscientious. You specimens are turned loose on the surface of Shayol. The dromozoa are a special life-form there. When they settle in your body, B'dikkat -- that's the attendant -- carves them out with an anesthetic and sends them up here. We freeze the tissue cultures, and they are compatible with almost any kind of oxygenbased life. Half the surgical repair you see in the whole universe comes out of buds that we ship from here. Shayol is a very healthy place, so far as survival is concerned. You won't die." "You mean," said Mercer, "that I am getting perpetual punishment." "I didn't say that," said Doctor Vomact. "Or if I did, I was wrong. You won't die soon. I don't know how long you will live down there. Remember, no matter how uncomfortable you get, the samples which B'dikkat sends up will help thousands of people in all the inhabited worlds. Now take the cap." "I'd rather talk," said Mercer. "It may be my last chance." The doctor looked at him strangely. "If you can stand that pain, go ahead and talk." "Can I commit suicide down there?" "I don't know," said the doctor. "It's never happened. And to judge by the voices, you'd think they wanted to." "Has anybody ever come back from Shayol?" "Not since it was put off limits about four hundred years ago." "Can I talk to other people down there?" "Yes," said the doctor. "Who punishes me down there?" "Nobody does, you fool," cried Doctor Vomact. "It's not punishment. People don't like it down on Shayol, and it's better, I guess, to get convicts instead of volunteers. But there isn't anybody against you at all." "No jailers?" asked Mercer, with a whine in his voice. "No jailers, no rules, no prohibitions. Just Shayol, and B'dikkat to take care of you. Do you still want your mind and your eyes?" "I'll keep them," said Mercer. "I've gone this far and I might as well go the rest of the way." "Then let me put the cap on you for your second dose," said Doctor Vomact. The doctor adjusted the cap just as lightly and delicately as had the nurse; he was quicker about it. There was no sign of his picking out another cap for himself. The inrush of pleasure was like a wild intoxication. His burning skin receded into distance. The doctor was near in space, but even the doctor did not matter. Mercer was not afraid of Shayol. The pulsation of happiness out of his brain was too great to leave room for fear or pain. Doctor Vomact was holding out his hand. Mercer wondered why, and then realized that the wonderful, kindly cap-giving man was offering to shake hands. He lifted his own. It was heavy, but his arm was happy, too. They shook hands. It was curious, thought Mercer, to feel the handshake beyond the double level of cerebral pleasure and dermal pain. "Good-by, Mr. Mercer," said the doctor. "Goodby and a good good night..." II r T'HE ferry satellite was a hospitable place. The hundreds of hours that followed were like a long, weird dream. Twice again the young nurse sneaked into his bedroom with him when he was being given the cap and had a cap with him. There were baths which calloused his whole body. Under strong local anesthetics, his teeth were taken out and stainless steel took their place. There were irradiations under blazing lights which took away the pain of his skin. There were special treatments for his fingernails and toenails. Gradually they changed into formidable claws; he found himself stropping them on the aluminum bed one night and saw that they left deep marks. His mind never became completely clear. Sometimes he thought that he was home with his mother, that he was little again, and in pain. Other times, under the cap, he laughed in his bed to think that people were sent to this place for punishment when it was all so terribly much fun. There were no trials, no questions, no judges. Food was good, but he did not think about it much; the cap was better. Even when he was awake, he was drowsy. At last, with the cap on him, they put him into a adiabatic pod -- a one-body missile which could be dropped from the ferry to the planet below. He was all closed in, except for his face. Doctor Vomact seemed to swim into the room. "You are strong, Mercer," the doctor shouted, "you are very strong! Can you hear me?" Mercer nodded. "We wish you well, Mercer. No matter what happens, remember you are helping other people up here." "Can I take the cap with me?" said Mercer. For an answer, Doctor Vomact removed the cap himself. Two men closed the lid of the pod, leaving Mercer in total darkness. His mind started to clear, and he panicked against his wrappings. There was the roar of thunder and the taste of blood. next thing that Mercer A knew, he was in a cool, cool bedrooms and operating rooms of the satellite. Someone was lifting him gently onto a table. He opened his eyes. An enormous face, four times the size of any human face Mercer had ever seen, was looking down at him. Huge brown eyes, cowlike in their gentle inoffensiveness, moved back and forth as the big face examined Mercer's wrappings. The face was that of a handsome man of middle years, clean-shaven, hair chestnut-brown, with sensual full lips and gigantic but healthy yellow teeth exposed in a half smile. The face saw Mercer's eyes open, and spoke with a deep friendly roar. "I'm your best friend. My name is B'dikkat, but you don't have to use that here. Just call me Friend, and I will always help you." "I hurt," said Mercer. "Of course you do. You hurt all over. That's a big drop," said B'dikkat. "Can I have a cap, please," begged Mercer. It was not a question; it was a demand; Mercer felt that his private inward eternity depended on it. B'dikkat laughed. "I haven't any caps down here. I might use them myself. Or so they think. I have other things, much better. No fear, fellow, I'll fix you up." Mercer looked doubtful. If the cap had brought him happiness on the ferry, it would take at least electrical stimulation of the brain to undo whatever torments the surface of Shayol had to offer. B'dikkat's laughter filled the room like a bursting pillow. "Have you ever heard of condamine?" "No," said Mercer. "It's a narcotic so powerful that the pharmacopeias are not allowed to mention it." "You have that?" said Mercer hopefully. "Something better. I have super-condamine. It's named after the New French town where they developed it. The chemists hooked in one more hydrogen molecule. That gave it a real jolt. If you took it in your present shape, you'd be dead in three minutes, but those three minutes would seem like ten thousand years of happiness to the inside of your mind." B'dikkat rolled his brown cow eyes expressively and smacked his rich red lips with a tongue of enormous extent. "What's the use of it, then?" "You can take it," said B'dikkat. "You can take it after you have been exposed to the dromozoa outside this cabin. You get all the good effects and none of the bad. You want to see something?" What answer is there except yes, thought Mercer grimly; does he think I have an urgent invitation to a tea party? "Look out the window," said B'dikkat, "and tell me what you see." The atmosphere was clear. The surface was like a desert, ginger-yellow with streaks of green where lichen and low shrubs grew, obviously stunted and tormented by high, dry winds. The landscape was monotonous. Two or three hundred yards away there was a herd of bright pink objects which seemed alive, but Mercer could not see them well enough to describe them clearly. Further away, on the extreme right of his frame of vision, there was the statue of an enormous human foot, the height of a sixstory building. Mercer could not see what the foot was connected to. "I see a big foot," said he, "but -- " "But what?" said B'dikkat, like an enormous child hiding the denouement of a hugely private joke. Large as he was, he would have been dwarfed by any one of the toes on that tremendous foot. "But it can't be a real foot," said Mercer. "It is," said B'dikkat. "That's Go-Captain Alvarez, the man who found this planet. After six hundred years he's still in fine shape. Of course, he's mostly dromozootic by now, but I think there is some human consciousness inside him. You know what I do?" "What?" said Mercer. "I give him six cubic centimeters of super-condamine and he snorts for me. Real happy little snorts. A stranger might think it was a volcano. That's what super-condamine can do. And you're going to get plenty of it. You're a lucky, lucky man, Mercer. You have me for a friend, and you have my needle for a treat. I do all the work and you get all the fun. Isn't that a nice surprise?" Mercer thought, You're lying! Lying! Where do the screams come from that we have all heard broadcast as a warning on Punishment Day? Why did the doctor offer to cancel my brain or to take out my eyes? The cow-man watched him sadly, a hurt expression on his face. "You don't believe me," he said, very sadly. "It's not quite that," said Mercer, with an attempt at heartiness, "but I think you're leaving something out." "Nothing much," said B'dikkat. "You jump when the dromozoa hit you. You'll be upset when you start growing new parts -- heads, kidneys, hands. I had one fellow in here who grew thirty-eight hands in a single session outside. I took them all off, froze them and sent them upstairs. I take good care of everybody. You'll probably yell for a while. But remember, just call me Friend, and I have the nicest treat in the universe waiting for you. Now, would you like some fried eggs? I don't eat eggs myself, but most true men like them." "Eggs?" said Mercer. "What have eggs got to do with it?" "Nothing much. It's just a treat for you people. Get something in your stomach before you go outside. You'll get through the first day better." Mercer, unbelieving, watched as the big man took two precious eggs from a cold chest, expertly broke them into a little pan and put the pan in the heatfield at the center of the table Mercer had awakened on. "Friend, eh?" B'dikkat grinned. "You'll see I'm a good friend. When you go outside, remember that." A N hour later, Mercer did go outside. Strangely at peace with himself, he stood at the door. B'dikkat pushed him in a brotherly way, giving him a shove which was gentle enough to be an encouragement. "Don't make me put on my lead suit, fellow." Mercer had seen a suit, fully the size of an ordinary space-ship cabin, hanging on the wall of an adjacent room. "When I close this door, the outer one will open. Just walk on out." "But what will happen?" said Mercer, the fear turning around in his stomach and making little grabs at his throat from the inside. "Don't start that again," said B'dikkat. For an hour he had fended off Mercer's questions about the outside. A map? B'dikkat had laughed at the thought. Food? He said not to worry. Other people? They'd be there. Weapons? What for, B'dikkat had replied. Over and over again, B'dikkat had insisted that he was Mercer's friend. What would happen to Mercer? The same that happened to every body else. Mercer stepped out. Nothing happened. The day was cool. The wind moved gently against his toughened skin. Mercer looked around apprehensively. The mountainous body of Captain Alvarez occupied a good part of the landscape to the right. Mercer had no wish to get mixed up with that. He glanced back at the cabin. B'dikkat was not looking out the window. Mercer walked slowly, straight ahead. There was a flash on the ground, no brighter than the glitter of sunlight on a fragment of glass. Mercer felt a sting in the thigh, as though a sharp instrument had touched him lightly. He brushed the place with his hand. It was as though the sky fell in. A pain -- it was more than a pain: it was a living throb -- ran from his hip to his foot on the right side. The throb reached up to his chest, robbing him of breath. He fell, and the ground hurt him. Nothing in the hospital-satellite had been like this. He lay in the open air, trying not to breathe, but he did breathe anyhow. Each time he breathed, the throb moved with his thorax. He lay on his back, looking at the sun. At last he noticed that the sun was violetwhite. It was no use even thinking of calling. He had no voice. Tendrils of discomfort twisted within him. Since he could not stop breathing, he concentrated on taking air in the way that hurt him least. Gasps were too much work. Little tiny sips of air hurt him least. The desert around him was empty. He could not turn his head to look at the cabin. Is this it? he thought. Is an eternity of this the punishment of Shayol? There were voices near him. Two faces, grotesquely pink, looked down at him. They might have been human. The man looked normal enough, except for having two noses side by side. The woman was a caricature beyond belief. She had grown a breast on each cheek and a cluster of naked baby-like fingers hung limp from her forehead. "It's a beauty," said the woman, "a new one." "Come along," said the man. They lifted him to his feet. He did not have strength enough to resist. When he tried to speak to them a harsh cawing sound, like the cry of an ugly bird, came from his mouth. They moved with him efficiently. He saw that he was being dragged to the herd of pink things. As they approached, he saw that they were people. Better, he saw that they had once been people. A man with the beak of a flamingo was picking at his own body. A woman lay on the ground; she had a single head, but beside what seemed to be her original body, she had a boy's naked body growing sidewise from her neck. The boybody, clean, new, paralytically helpless, made no movement other than shallow breathing. Mercer looked around. The only one of the group who was wearing clothing was a man with his overcoat on sidewise. Mercer stared at him, finally realizing that the man had two -- or was it three? -- stomachs growing on the outside of his abdomen. The coat held them in place. The transparent peritoneal wall looked fragile. "New one," said his female captor. She and the two-nosed man put him down. ground. Mercer lay in a state of stupor among them. An old man's voice said, "I'm afraid they're going to feed us pretty soon." "Oh, no!" "It's too early!" "Not again!" Protests echoed from the group. The old man's voice went on, "Look, near the big toe of the mountain!" The desolate murmur in the group attested their confirmation of what he had seen. Mercer tried to ask what it was all about, but produced only a caw. A woman -- was it a woman? -- crawled over to him on her hands and knees. Beside her ordinary hands, she was covered with hands all over her trunk and halfway down her thighs. Some of the hands looked old and withered. Others were as fresh and pink as the baby-fingers on his captress' face. The woman shouted at him, though it was not necessary to shout. "The dromozoa are coming. This time it hurts. When you get used to the place, you can dig in -- " She waved at a group of mounds which surrounded the herd of people. "They're dug in," she said. Mercer cawed again. "Don't you worry," said the hand-covered woman, and gasped as a flash of light touched her. The lights reached Mercer too. The pain was like the first contact but more probing. Mercer felt his eyes widen as odd sensations within his body led to an inescapable conclusion: these lights, these things, these whatever-they-were, were feeding him and building him up. Their intelligence, if they had it, was not human, but their motives were clear. In between the stabs of pain he felt them fill his stomach, put water in his blood, draw water from his kidneys and bladder, massage his heart, move his lungs for him. Every single thing they did was well meant and beneficent in intent. And every single action hurt. Abruptly, like the lifting of a cloud of insects, they were gone. Mercer was aware of a noise somewhere outside -- a brainless, bawling cascade of ugly noise. He started to look around. And the noise stopped. It had been himself, screaming. Screaming the ugly screams of a psychotic, a terrified drunk, an animal driven out of understanding or reason. When he stopped, he found he had his speaking voice again. A man came to him, naked like the others. There was a spike sticking through his head. The skin had healed around it on both sides. "Hello, fellow," said the man with the spike. "Hello," said Mercer. It was a foolishly commonplace thing to say in a place like this. "You can't kill yourself," said the man with the spike through his head. "Yes, you can," said the woman, covered with hands. Mercer found that his first pain had disappeared. "What's happening to me?" "You got a part," said the man with the spike. "They're always putting parts on us. After a while B'dikkat comes and cuts most of them off, except for the ones that ought to grow a little more. Like her," he added, nodding at the woman who lay with the boy-body growing from her neck. "And that's all?" said Mercer. "The stabs for the new parts and the stinging for the feeding." "No," said the man. "Sometimes they think we're too cold and they fill our insides with fire. Or they think we're too hot and they freeze us, nerve by nerve." The woman with the boybody called over, "And sometimes they think we're unhappy, so they try to force us to be happy. # think that's the worst of all." Mercer stammered, "Are you people -- I mean -- are you the only herd?" The man with the spike coughed instead of laughing. "Herd! That's funny. The land is full of people. Most of them dig in. We're the ones who can still talk; we stay together for company. We get more turns with B'dikkat that way." Mercer started to ask another question, but he felt the strength run out of him. The day had been too much. The ground rocked like a ship on water. The sky turned black. He felt someone catch him as he fell. He felt himself being stretched out on the ground. And then, mercifully and magically, he slept. Ill know the group well. They were an absent-minded bunch of people. Not one of them ever knew when a dromozoon might flash by and add another part. Mercer was not stung again, but the incision he had obtained just outside the cabin was hardening. Spike-head looked at it when Mercer modestly undid his belt and lowered the edge of his trouser-top so they could see the wound. "You've got a head," he said. "A whole baby head. They'll be glad to get that one upstairs when B'dikkat cuts it off you." The group even tried to arrange his social life. They introduced him to the girl of the herd. She had grown one body after another, pelvis turning into shoulders and the pelvis below that turning into shoulders again until she' was five people long. Her face was unmarred. She tried to be friendly to Mercer. He was so shocked by her that he dug himself into the soft dry crumbly earth and stayed there for what seemed like a hundred years. He found later that it was less than a full day. When he came out, the long many-bodied girl was waiting for him. "You didn't have to come out just for me," said she. Mercer shook the dirt off himself. He looked around. The violet sun was going down, and the sky was streaked with blues, deeper blues and trails of orange sunset. He looked back at her. "I didn't get up for you. It's no use lying there, waiting for the next time." "I want to show you something," she said. She pointed to a low hummock. "Dig that up." Mercer looked at her. She seemed friendly. He shrugged and attacked the soil with his powerful claws. With tough skin and heavy digging-nails on the ends of his fingers, he found it was easy to dig like a dog. The earth cascaded beneath his busy hands. Something pink appeared down in the hole he had dug. He proceeded more carefully. He knew what it would be. It was. It was a man, sleeping. Extra arms grew down one side of his body in an orderly series. The other side looked normal. Mercer turned back to the many-bodied girl, who had writhed closer. "That's what I think it is, isn't it?" "Yes," she said. "Doctor Vomact burned his brain out for him. And took his eyes out, too." Mercer sat back on the ground and looked at the girl. "You told me to do it. Now tell me what for." "To let you see. To let you know. To let you think." "That's all?" said Mercer. The girl twisted with startling suddenness. All the way down her series of bodies, her chests heaved. Mercer wondered how the air got into all of them. He did not feel sorry for her; he did not feel sorry for anyone except himself. When the spasm passed the girl smiled at him apologetically. "They just gave me a new plant." Mercer nodded grimly. "What now, a hand? It seems you have enough." "Oh, those," she said, looking back at her many torsos. "I promised B'dikkat that I'd let them grow. He's good. But that man, stranger. Look at that man you dug up. Who's better off, he or we?" Mercer stared at her. "Is that what you had me dig him up for?" "Yes," said the girl. "Do you expect me to answer?" "No," said the girl, "not now." "Who are you?" said Mercer. "We never ask that here. It doesn't matter. But since you're new, I'll tell you. I used to be the Lady Da -- the Emperor's stepmother." "You!" he exclaimed. She smiled, ruefully. "You're still so fresh you think it matters! But I have something more important to tell you." She stopped and bit her lip. "What?" he urged. "Better tell me before I get another bite. I won't be able to think or talk then, not for a long time. Tell me now." She brought her face close to his. It was still a lovely face, even in the dying orange of this violet-sunned sunset. "People never live forever." "Yes," said Mercer. "I knew that." " Believe it," ordered the Lady Da. Lights flashed across the dark plain, still in the distance. Said she, "Dig in, dig in for the night. They may miss you." Mercer started digging. He glanced over at the man he had dug up. The brainless body, with motions as soft as those of a starfish under water, was pushing its way back into the earth. there was a shouting through the herd. Mercer had come to know a half-man, the lower part of whose body was gone and whose viscera were kept in place with what resembled a translucent plastic bandage. The half-man had shown him how to lie still when the dromozoa came with their inescapable errands of doing good. Said the half-man, "You can't fight them. They made Alvarez as big as a mountain, so that he never stirs. Now they're trying to make us happy. They feed us and clean us and sweeten us up. Lie still. Don't worry about screaming. We all do." "When do we get the drug?" said Mercer. "When B'dikkat comes." B'dikkat came that day, pushing a sort of wheeled sled ahead of him. The runners carried it over the hillocks; the wheels worked on the surface. Even before he arrived, the herd sprang into furious action. Everywhere, people were digging up the sleepers. By the time B'dikkat reached their waiting place, the herd must have uncovered twice their own number of sleeping pink bodies -- men and woman, young and old. The sleepers looked no better and no worse than the waking ones. "Hurry!" said the Lady Da. "He never gives any of us a shot until we're all ready." B'dikkat wore his heavy lead suit. He lifted an arm in friendly greeting, like a father returning home with treats for his children. The herd clustered around him but did not crowd him. He reached into the sled. There was a harnessed bottle which he threw over his shoulders. He snapped the locks on the straps. From the bottle there hung a tube. Midway down the tube there was a small pressurepump. At the end of the tube there was a glistening hypodermic needle. When ready, B'dikkat gestured for them to come closer. They approached him with radiant happiness. He stepped through their ranks and past them, to the girl who had the boy growing from her neck. His mechanical voice boomed through the loudspeaker set in the top of his suit. "Good girl. Good, good girl. You get a big, big present." He thrust the hypodermic into her so long that Mercer could see an air bubble travel from the pump up to the bottle. Then he moved back to the others, booming a word now and then, moving with improbable grace and speed amid the people. His needle flashed as he gave them hypodermics under pressure. The people dropped to sitting position or lay down on the ground as though half-asleep. low. Now you can have the fun. It would have killed you in the cabin. Do you have anything for me?" Mercer stammered, not knowing what B'dikkat meant, and the two-nosed man answered for him, "I think he has a nice baby head, but it isn't big enough for you to take yet." Mercer never noticed the needle touch his arm. B'dikkat had turned to the next knot of people when the super-condamine hit Mercer. He tried to run after B'dikkat, to hug the lead space suit, to tell B'dikkat that he loved him. He stumbled and fell, but it did not hurt. The many-bodied girl lay near him. Mercer spoke to her. "Isn't it wonderful? You're beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I'm so happy to be here." The woman covered with growing hands came and sat beside them. She radiated warmth and good fellowship. Mercer thought that she looked very distinguished and charming. He struggled out of his clothes. It was foolish and snobbish to wear clothing when none of these nice people did. The two women babbled and crooned at him. With one corner of his mind he knew that they were saying nothing, just expressing the euphoria of a drug so powerful that the known universe had forbidden it. With most of his mind he was happy. He wondered how anyone could have the good luck to visit a planet as nice as this. He tried to tell the Lady Da, but the words weren't quite straight. A painful stab hit him in the abdomen. The drug went after the pain and swallowed it. It was like the cap in the hospital, only a thousand times better. The pain was gone, though it had been crippling the first time. He forced himself to be deliberate. He rammed his mind into focus and said to the two ladies who lay pinkly nude beside him in the desert, "That was a good bite. Maybe I will grow another head. That would make B'dikkat happy!" The Lady Da forced the foremost of her bodies in an upright position. Said she, "I'm strong, too. I can talk. Remember, man, remember. People never live forever. We can die, too, we can die like real people. I do so believe in death!" Mercer smiled at her through his happiness. "Of course you can. But isn't this nice..." With this he felt his lips thicken and his mind go slack. He was wide awake, but he did not feel like doing anything. In that beautiful place, among all those companionable and attractive people, he sat and smiled. B'dikkat was sterilizing his knives. the super-condamine had lasted him. He endured the ministrations of the dromozoa without screams or movement. The agonies of nerves and itching of skin were phenomena which happened somewhere near him, but meant nothing. He watched his own body with remote, casual interest. The Lady Da and the hand-covered woman stayed near him. After a long time the half-man dragged himself over to the group with his powerful arms. Having arrived he blinked sleepily and friendlily at them, and lapsed back into the restful stupor from which he had emerged. Mercer saw the sun rise on occasion, closed his eyes briefly, and opened them to see stars shining. Time had no meaning. The dromozoa fed him in their mysterious way; the drug canceled out his needs for cycles of the body. At last he noticed a return of the inwardness of pain. The pains themselves had not changed; he had. He knew all the events which could take place on Shayol. He remembered them well from his happy period. Formerly he had noticed them -- now he felt them. He tried to ask the Lady Da how long they had had the drug, and how much longer they would have to wait before they had it again. She smiled at him with benign, remote happiness; apparently her many torsos, stretched out along the ground, had a greater capacity for retaining the drug than did his body. She meant him well, but was in no condition for articulate speech. The half-man lay on the ground, arteries pulsating prettily behind the half-transparent film which protected his abdominal cavity. Mercer squeezed the man's shoulder. The half-man woke, recognized Mercer and gave him a healthily sleepy grin. " 'A good morrow to you, my boy.' That's out of a play. Did you ever see a play?" "You mean a game with cards?" "No," said the half-man, "a sort of eye-machine with real people doing the figures." "I never saw that," said Mercer, "but I -- " "But you want to ask me when B'dikkat is going to come back with the needle." "Yes," said Mercer, a little ashamed of his obviousness. "Soon," said the half-man. "That's why I think of plays. We all know what is going to happen. We all know when it is going to happen. We all know what the dummies will do -- " he gestured at the hummocks in which the decorticated men were cradled -- "and we all know what the new people will ask. But we never know how long a scene is going to take." "What's a 'scene'?" asked Mercer. "Is that the name for the needle?" The half-man laughed with something close to real humor. "No, no, no. You've got the lovelies on the brain. A scene is just a part of a play. I mean we know the order in which things happen, but we have no clocks and nobody cares enough to count days or to make calendars and there's not much climate here, so none of us know how long anything takes. The pain seems short and the pleasure seems long. I'm inclined to think that they are about two Earthweeks each." Mercer did not know what an "Earth-week" was, since he had not been a well-read man before his conviction, but he got nothing more from the half-man at that time. The half-man received a dromozootic implant, turned red in the face, shouted senselessly at Mercer, "Take it out, you fool! Take it out of me!" When Mercer looked on helplessly, the half-man twisted over on his side, his pink dusty back turned to Mercer, and wept hoarsely and quietly to himself. tell how long it was before B'dikkat came back. It might have been several days. It might have been several months. Once again B'dikkat moved among them like a father; once again they clustered like children. This time B'dikkat smiled pleasantly at the little head which had grown out of Mercer's thigh -- a sleeping child's head, covered with light hair on top and with dainty eyebrows over the resting eyes. Mercer got the blissful needle. When B'dikkat cut the head from Mercer's thigh, he felt the knife grinding against the cartilage which held the head to his own body. He saw the childface grimace as the head was cut; he felt the far, cool flash of unimportant pain, as B'dikkat dabbed the wound with a corrosive antiseptic which stopped all bleeding immediately. The next time it was two legs growing from his chest. Then there had been another head beside his own. Or was that after the torso and legs, waist to toe-tips, of the little girl which had grown from his side? He forgot the order. He did not count time. Lady Da smiled at him often, but there was no love in this place. She had lost the extra torsos. In between teratologies, she was a pretty and shapely woman; but the nicest thing about their relationship was her whisper to him, repeated some thousands of time, repeated with smiles and hope, "People never live forever." She found this immensely comforting, even though Mercer did not make much sense out of it. Thus events occurred, and victims changed in appearance, and new ones arrived. Sometimes B'dikkat took the new ones, resting in the everlasting sleep of their burned-out brains, in a ground-truck to be added to other herds. The bodies in the truck threshed and bawled without human speech when the dromozoa struck them. Finally, Mercer did manage to follow B'dikkat to the door of the cabin. He had to fight the bliss of super-condamine to do it. Only the memory of previous hurt, bewilderment and perplexity made him sure that if he did not ask B'dikkat when he, Mercer, was happy, the answer would no longer be available when he needed it. Fighting pleasure itself, he begged B'dikkat to check the records and to tell him how long he had been there. B'dikkat grudgingly agreed, but he did not come out of the doorway. He spoke through the public address box built into the cabin, and his gigantic voice roared out over the empty plain, so that the pink herd of talking people stirred gently in their happiness and wondered what their friend B'dikkat might be wanting to tell them. When he said it, they thought it exceedingly profound, though none of them understood it, since it was simply the amount of time that Mercer had been on Shayol: "Standard years -- eightyfour years, seven months, three days, two hours, eleven and one half minutes. Good luck, fellow." Mercer turned away. The secret little corner of his mind, which stayed sane through happiness and pain, made him wonder about B'dikkat. What persuaded the cow-man to remain on Shayol? What kept him happy without super-condamine? Was B'dikkat a crazy slave to his own duty or was he a man who had hopes of going back to his own planet some day, surrounded by a family of little cow-people resembling himself? Mercer, despite his happiness, wept a little at the strange fate of B'dikkat. His own fate he accepted. He remembered the last time he had eaten -- actual eggs from an actual pan. The dromozoa kept him alive, but he did not know how they did it. He staggered back to the group. The Lady Da, naked in the dusty plain, waved a hospitable hand and showed that there was a place for him to sit beside her. There were unclaimed square miles of seating space around them, but he appreciated the kindliness of her gesture none the less. IV r T , HE years, if they were years, went by. The land of Shayol did not change. Sometimes the bubbling sound of geysers came faintly across the plain to the herd of men; those who could talk declared it to be the breathing of Captain Alvarez. There was night and day, but no setting of crops, no change of season, no generations of men. Time stood still for these people, and their load of pleasure was so commingled with the shocks and pains of the dromozoa that the words of the Lady Da took on very remote meaning. "People never live forever." Her statement was a hope, not a truth in which they could believe. They did not have the wit to follow the stars in their courses, to exchange names with each other, to harvest the experience of each for the wisdom of all. There was no dream of escape for these people. Though they saw the old-style chemical rockets lift up from the field beyond B'dikkat's cabin, they did not make plans to hide among the frozen crop of transmuted flesh. Far long ago, some other prisoner than one of these had tried to write a letter. His handwriting was on a rock. Mercer read it, and so had a few of the others, but they could not tell which man had done it. Nor did they care. The letter, scraped on stone, had been a message home. They could still read the opening: "Once, I was like you, stepping out of my window at the end of day, and letting the winds blow me gently toward the place I lived in. Once, like you, I had one head, two hands, ten fingers on my hands. The front part of my head was called a face, and I could talk with it. Now I can only write, and that only when I get out of pain. Once, like you, I ate foods, drank liquid, had a name. I cannot remember the name I had. You can stand up, you who get this letter. I cannot even stand up. I just wait for the lights to put my food in me molecule by molecule, and to take it out again. Don't think that I am punished any more. This place is not a punishment. It is something else." Among the pink herd, none of them ever decided what was "something else." Curiosity had died among them long ago. little people. It was a time -- not an hour, not a year: a duration somewhere between them -- when the Lady Da and Mercer sat wordless with happiness and filled with the joy of super-condamine. They had nothing to say to one another; the drug said all things for them. A disagreeable roar . from B'dikkat's cabin made them stir mildly. Those two, and one or two others, looked toward the speaker of the public address system. The Lady Da brought herself to speak, though the matter was unimportant beyond words. "I do believe," said she, "that we used that call that the War Alarm." They drowsed back into their happiness. A man with two rudimentary heads growing beside his own crawled over to them. All three heads looked very happy, and Mercer thought it delightful of him to appear in such a whimsical shape. Under the pulsing glow of super-condamine, Mercer regretted that he had not used times when his mind was clear to ask him who he had once been. He answered it for them. Forcing his eyelids open by sheer will power, he gave the Lady Da and Mercer the lazy ghost of a military salute and said, "Suzdal, ma'am and sir, former cruiser commander. They are sounding the alert. Wish to report that I am... I am... I am not quite ready for battle." He dropped off to sleep. The gentle peremptories of the Lady Da brought his eyes open again. "Commander, why are they sounding it here? Why did you come to us?" "You, ma'am, and the gentleman with the ears seem to think best of our group. I thought you might have orders." Mercer looked around for the gentleman with the ears. It was himself. In that time his face was almost wholly obscured with a crop of fresh little ears, but he paid no attention to them, other than expecting that B'dikkat would cut them all off in due course and that the dromozoa would give him something else. The noise from the cabin rose to a higher, ear-splitting intensity. Among the herd, many people stirred. Some opened their eyes, looked around, murmured, "It's a noise," and went back to the happy drowsing with super-condamine. The cabin door opened. B'dikkat rushed out, without his suit. They had never seen him on the outside without his protective metal suit. He rushed up to them, looked wildly around, recognized the Lady Da and Mercer, picked them up, one under each arm, and raced with them back to the cabin. He flung them into the double door. They landed with bone-splitting crashes, and found it amusing to hit the ground so hard. The floor tilted them into the room. Moments later, B'dikkat followed. He roared at them, "You're people, or you were. You understand people; I only obey them. But this I will not obey. Look at that!" Four beautiful human children lay on the floor. The two smallest seemed to be twins, about two years of age. There was a girl of five and a boy of seven or so. All of them had slack eyelids. All of them had thin red lines around their temples and their hair, shaved away, showed how their brains had been removed. B'dikkat, heedless of danger from dromozoa, stood beside the Lady Da and Mercer, shouting. "You're real people. I'm just a cow. I do my duty. My duty does not include this. These are children." Mercer's mind registered shock and disbelief. It was hard to sustain the emotion, because the super-condamine washed at his consciousness like a great tide, making everything seem lovely. The forefront of his mind, rich with the drug, told him, "Won't it be nice to have some children with us!" But the undestroyed interior of his mind, keeping the honor he knew before he came to Shayol, whispered, "This is a crime worse than any crime we have committed! And the Empire has done it." "What have you done?" said the Lady Da. "What can we do?" "I tried to call the satellite. When they knew what I was talking about, they cut me off. After all, I'm not people. The head doctor told me to do my work." "Was it Doctor Vomact?" Mercer asked. "Vomact?" said B'dikkat. "He died a hundred years ago, of old age. No, a new doctor cut me off. I don't have people-feeling, but I am Earth-born, of Earth blood. I have emotions myself. Pure cattle emotions! This I cannot permit." "What have you done?" B'dikkat lifted his eyes to the window. His face was illuminated by a determination which, even beyond the edges of the drug which made them love him, made him seem like the father of this world -- responsible, honorable, unselfish. He smiled. "They will kill me for it, I think. But I have put in the Galactic Alert -- all ships here" The Lady Da, sitting back on the floor, declared, "But that's only for new invaders! It is a false alarm." She pulled herself together and rose to her feet. "Can you cut these things off me, right now, in case people come? And get me a dress. And do you have anything which will counteract the effects of the super-condamine?" "That's what I wanted!" cried B'dikkat. "I will not take these children. You give me leadership." There and then, on the floor of the cabin, he trimmed her down to the normal proportions of mankind. The corrosive antiseptic rose like smoke in the air of the cabin. Mercer thought it all very dramatic and pleasant, and dropped off in catnaps part of the time. Then he felt B'dikkat trimming him too. B'dikkat opened a long, long drawer and put the specimens in; from the cold in the room it must have been a refrigerated locker. He sat them both up against the wall. "I've been thinking," he said. "There is no antidote for supercondamine. Who would want one? But I can give you the hypos from my rescue boat. They are supposed to bring a person back, no matter what has happened to that person out in space." There was a whining over the cabin roof. B'dikkat knocked a window out with his fist, stuck his head out of the window and looked up. "Come on in," he shouted. landing craft touching ground quickly. Doors whirred. Mercer wondered, mildly, why people dared to land on Shayol. When they came in he saw that they were not people; they were Customs Robots, who could travel at velocities which people could never match. One wore the insigne of an inspector. "Where are the invaders?" "There are no -- " began B'dikkat. The Lady Da, imperial in her posture though she was completely nude, said in a voice of complete clarity, "I am a former Empress, the Lady Da. Do you know me?" "No, ma'am," said the robot inspector. He looked as uncomfortable as a robot could look. The drug made Mercer think that it would be nice to have robots for company, out on the surface of Shayol. "I declare this Top Emergency, in the ancient words. Do you understand? Connect me with the Instrumentality." "We can't -- " said the inspector. "You can ask," said the Lady Da. The inspector complied. The Lady Da turned to B'dikkat. "Give Mercer and me those shots now. Then put us outside the door so the dromozoa can repair these scars. Bring us in as soon as a connection is made. Wrap us in cloth if you do not have clothes for us. Mercer can stand the pain." "Yes," said B'dikkat, keeping his eyes away from the four soft children and their collapsed eyes. The injection burned like no fire ever had. It must have been capable of fighting the super-condamine, because B'dikkat put them through the open window, so as to save time going through the door. The dromozoa, sensing that they needed repair, flashed upon them. This time the supercondamine had something else fighting it. Mercer did not scream but he lay against the wall and wept for ten thousand years; in objective time, it must have been several hours. The Customs robots were taking pictures. The dromozoa were flashing against them too, sometimes in whole swarms, but nothing happened. Mercer heard the voice of the communicator inside the cabin calling loudly for B'dikkat. "Surgery Satellite calling Shayol. B'dikkat, get on the line!" He obviously was not replying. There were soft cries coming from the other communicator, the one which the customs officials had brought into the room. Mercer was sure that the eye-machine was on and that people in other worlds were looking at Shayol for the first time. B'dikkat came through the door. He had torn navigation charts out of his lifeboat. With these he cloaked them. Mercer noted that the Lady Da changed the arrangement of the cloak in a few minor ways and suddenly looked like a person of great importance. They re-entered the cabin door. B'dikkat whispered, as if filled with awe, "The Instrumentality has been reached, and a Lord of the Instrumentality is about to talk to you." There was nothing for Mercer to do, so he sat back in a corner of the room and watched. The Lady Da, her skin healed, stood pale and nervous in the middle of the floor. The room filled with an odorless intangible smoke. The smoke clouded. The full communicator was on. A human figure appeared. form of radically conservative cut, faced the Lady Da. "This is Shayol. You are the Lady Da. You called me." The Lady Da pointed to the children on the floor. "This must not happen," she said. "This is a place of punishments, agreed upon between the Instrumentality and the Empire. No one said anything about children." The woman on the screen looked down at the children. "This is the work of insane people!" she cried. She looked accusingly at the Lady Da, "Are you imperial?" "I was an Empress, madam," said the Lady Da. "And you permit this!" "Permit it?" cried the Lady Da. "I had nothing to do with it." Her eyes widened. "I am a prisoner here myself. Don't you understand?" The image-woman snapped, "No, I don't." "I," said the Lady Da, "am a specimen. Look at the herd out there. I came from them a few hours ago." "Adjust me," said the image woman to B'dikkat. "Let me see that herd." Her body, standing upright, soared through the wall in a flashing arc and was placed in the very center of the herd. The Lady Da and Mercer watched her. They saw even the image lose its stiffness and dignity. The image-woman waved an arm to show that she should be brought back into the cabin. B'dikkat tuned her back into the room. "I owe you an apology," said the image. "I am the Lady Johanna Gnade, one of the Lords of the Instrumentality." Mercer bowed, lost his balance and had to scramble up from the floor. The Lady Da acknowledged the introduction with a royal nod. The two women looked at each other. "You will investigate," said the Lady Da, "and when you have investigated, please put us all to death. You know about the drug?" "Don't mention it," said B'dikkat, "don't even say the name into a communicator. It is a secret of the Instrumentality!" "I am the Instrumentality," said the Lady Johanna. "Are you in pain? I did not think that any of you were alive. I had heard of the surgery banks on your offlimits planet, but I thought that robots tended parts of people and sent up the new grafts by rocket. Are there any people with you? Who is in charge? Who did this to the children?" B'dikkat stepped in front of the image. He did not bow. "I'm in charge." "You're underpeople!" cried the Lady Johanna. "You're a cow!" "A bull, ma'am. My family is frozen back on earth itself, and with a thousand years' service I am earning their freedom and my own. Your other questions, ma'am. I do all the work. The dromozoa do not affect me much, though T have to cut a part off myself now and then. I throw those away. They don't go into the bank. Do you know the secret rules of this place?" The Lady Johanna talked to someone behind her on another world. Then she looked at B'dikkat and commanded, "Just don't name the drug or talk too much about it. Tell me the rest."  very formally, "thirteen hundred and twenty-one people here who can still be counted on to supply parts when the dromozoa implant them. There are about seven hundred more, including Go-Captain Alvarez, who have been so thoroughly absorbed by the planet that it is no use trimming them. The Empire set up this place as a point of uttermost punishment. But the Instrumentality gave secret orders for medicine -- " he accented the word strangely, meaning super-condamine -- "to be issued so that the punishment would be counteracted. The Empire supplies our convicts; The Instrumentality distributes the surgical material." The Lady Johanna lifted her right hand in a gesture of silence and compassion. She looked around the room. Her eyes came back to the Lady Da. Perhaps she guessed what effort the Lady Da had made in order to remain standing erect while the two drugs, the super-condamine and the lifeboat drug, fought within her veins. "You people can rest. I will tell you now that all things possible will be done for you. The Empire is finished. The Fundamental Agreement, by which the Instrumentality surrendered to the Empire a thousand years ago, has been set aside. We did not know that you people existed. We would have found out in time, but I am sorry we did not find out sooner. Is there anything we can do for you right away?" "Time is what we all have," said the Lady Da. "Perhaps we cannot ever leave Shayol, because the dromozoa and the medicine. The one could be dangerous. The other must never be permitted to be known." The Lady Johanna Gnade looked around the room. When her glance reached him, B'dikkat fell to his knees and lifted his enormous hands in complete supplication. "What do you want?" said she. "These," said B'dikkat, pointed to the mutilated children. "Order a stop on children. Stop it now!" He commanded her with the last cry, and she accepted his command. "And lady -- " He stopped, as if shy. "Yes? Go on." "Lady, I am unable to kill. It is not in my nature. To work, to help, but not to kill. What do I do with these?" He gestured at the four motionless children on the floor. "Keep them," she said. "Just keep them." "I can't," he said. "There's no way to get off this planet alive. I do not have food for them in the cabin. They will die in a few hours. And governments," he added wisely, "take a long, long time to do things." "Can you give them the medicine?  "No, it would kill them if I give them that stuff first before the dromozoa have fortified their bodily processes." The Lady Johanna Gnade filled the room with tinkling laughter that was very close to weeping. "Fools, poor fools, and the more fool I! If super-condamine works only after the dromozoa, what is the purpose of the secret?" B'dikkat rose to his feet, offended. He frowned, but he could not get the words with which to defend himself. The Lady Da, ex-empress of a fallen empire, addressed the other lady with ceremony and force: "Put them outside, so they will be touched. They will hurt. Have B'dikkat give them the drug as soon as he thinks it safe. I beg your leave, my lady..." Mercer had to catch her before she fell. #'V#'OU'VE all had enough," said the Lady Johanna. "A storm ship with heavily armed troops is on its way to your ferry satellite. They will seize the medical personnel and find out who committed this crime against children." Mercer dared to speak. "Will you punish the guilty doctor?" "You speak of punishment," she cried. "You!" "It's fair. I was punished for doing wrong. Why shouldn't he be?" "Punish -- punish!" she said to him. "We will cure that doctor. And we will cure you too, if we can." Mercer began to weep. He thought of the oceans of happiness which super-condamine had brought him, forgetting the hideous pain and the deformities on Shayol. Would there be no next needle? He could not guess what life would be like off Shayol. Was there to be no more tender, fatherly B'dikkat coming with his knives? He lifted his tear-stained face to the Lady Johanna Gnade and choked out the words, "Lady, we are all insane in this place. I do not think we want to leave." She turned her face away, moved by enormous compassion. Her next words were to B'dikkat. "You are wise and good, even if you are not a human being. Give them all of the drug they can take. The Instrumentality will decide what to do with all of you. I will survey your planet with robot soldiers. Will the robots be safe, cowman?" B'dikkat did not like the thoughtless name she called him, but he held no offense. "The robots will be all right, ma'am, but the dromozoa will be excited if they cannot feed them and heal them. Send as few as you can. We do not know how the dromozoa live or die." "As few as I can," she murmured. She lifted her hand in command to some technician unimaginable distances away. The odorless smoke rose about her and the image was gone. A shrill cheerful voice spoke up. "I fixed your window," said the customs robot. B'dikkat thanked him absentmindedly. He helped Mercer and the Lady Da into the doorway. When they had gotten outside, they were promptly stung by the dromozoa. It did not matter. B'dikkat himself emerged, carrying the four children in his two gigantic, tender hands. He lay the slack bodies on the ground near the cabin. He watched as the bodies went into spasm with the onset of the dromozoa. Mercer and the Lady Da saw that his brown cow eyes were rimmed with red and that his huge cheeks were dampened by tears. Hours or centuries. Who could tell them apart? The herd went back to its usual life, except that the intervals between needles were much shorter. The once-commander, Suzdal, refused the needle when he heard the news. Whenever he could walk, he followed the customs robot around as they photographed, took soil samples, and made a count of the bodies. They were particularly interested in the mountain of the Go-Captain Alvarez and professed themselves uncertain as to whether there was organic life there or not. The mountain did appear to react to super-condamine, but they could find no blood, no heart-beat. Moisture, moved by the dromozoa, seemed to have replaced the once-human bodily processes. V A ND then, early one morning, the sky opened. Ship after ship landed. People emerged, wearing clothes. The dromozoa ignored the newcomers. Mercer, who was in a state of bliss, confusedly tried to think this through until he realized that the ships were loaded to their skins with communications machines; the "people" were either robots or images of persons in other places. The robots swiftly gathered together the herd. Using wheelbarrows, they brought the hundreds of mindless people to the landing area. Mercer heard a voice he knew. It was the Lady Johanna Gnade. "Set me high," she commanded. Her form rose until she seemed one-fourth the size of Alvarez. Her voice took on more volume. "Wake them all," she commanded. Robots moved among them, spraying them with a gas which was both sickening and sweet. Mercer felt his mind go clear. The super-condamine still operated in his nerves and veins, but his cortical area was free of it. He thought clearly. "I bring you," cried the compassionate feminine voice of the gigantic Lady Johanna, "the judgment of the Instrumentality on the planet Shayol. "Item: the surgical supplies will be maintained and the dromozoa will not be molested. Portions of human bodies will be left here to grow, and the grafts will be collected by robots. Neither man nor homunculus will live here again. "Item: the underman B'dikkat, of cattle extraction, will be rewarded by an immediate return to earth. He will be paid twice his expected thousand years of earnings." The voice of B'dikkat, without amplification, was almost as loud as hers through the amplifier. He shouted his protest, "Lady, Lady!" She looked down at him, his enormous body reaching to ankle height on her swirling gown, and said in a very informal tone, "What do you want?" "Let me finish my work first," he cried, so that all could hear. "Let me finish taking care of these people." The specimens who had minds all listened attentively. The brainless ones were trying to dig themselves back into the soft earth of Shayol, using their powerful claws for the purpose. Whenever one began to disapComplete Sets for Sole Amazing Quarterly: #-#; # issues in all including the only annual; condition good to very good: # Amazing Monthly: April # (Vol. I No. #) to April # complete; very good to fine except #st issue: # Wonder: June # (Vol. I No. #) to March # complete, very good o fine: # Same, through to April #I : # Quarterlies for same, # issues #, very good to fine: # Astounding: # issues, March # through December #, condition good: # Galaxy: Complete from Vol. I No. I October # through #: # All orders promptly shipped F.O.B. Brooklyn. Many other fine items. Send your want list. Specialist in Stf for a Quarter Century #I #Hi Avenue Brooklyn #, Now York pear, a robot seized him by a limb and pulled him out again. "Item: cephalectomies will be performed on all persons with irrecoverable minds. Their bodies will be left here. Their heads will be taken away and killed as pleasantly as we can manage, probably by an overdosage of super-condamine." "The last big jolt," murmured Commander Suzdal, who stood near Mercer. "That's fair enough." "Item: the children have been found to be the last heirs of the Empire. An over-zealous official sent them here to prevent their committing treason when they grew up. The doctor obeyed orders without questioning them. Both the official and the doctor have been cured and their memories of this have been erased, so that they need have no shame or grief for what they have done." "It's unfair," cried the halfman. "They should be punished as we were!" The Lady Johanna Gnade looked down at him. "Punishment is ended. We will give you anything you wish, but not the pain of another. I shall continue. "Item: since none of you wish to resume the lives which you led previously, we are moving you to another planet nearby. It is similar to Shayol, but much more beautiful. There are no dromozoa." A T this an uproar seized the herd. They shouted, wept, cursed, appealed. They all wanted the needle, and if they had to stay on Shayol to get it, they would stay. "Item," said the gigantic image of the lady, overriding their babble with her great but feminine voice, "you will not have super-condamine on the new planet, since without dromozoa it would kill you. But there will be caps. Remember the caps. We will try to cure you and to make people of you again. But if you give up, we will not force you. Caps are very powerful; with medical help you can live under them many years." A hush fell on the group. In their various ways, they were trying to compare the electrical caps which had stimulated their pleasure-lobes with the drug which had drowned them a thousand times in pleasure. Their murmur sounded like assent. "Do you have any questions?" said the Lady Johanna. "When do we get the caps?" said several. They were human enough that they laughed at their own impatience. "Soon," said she reassuringly, "very soon." "Very soon," echoed B'dikkat, reassuring his charges even though he was no longer in control. "Question," cried the Lady Da. "My Lady...?" said the Lady Johanna, giving the ex-empress her due courtesy. "Will we be permitted marriage?" The Lady Johanna looked astonished. "I don't know." She smiled. "I don't know any reason why not -- "' "I claim this man Mercer," said the Lady Da. "When the drugs were deepest, and the pain was greatest, he was the one who always tried to think. May I have him?" Mercer thought the procedure arbitrary but he was so happy that he said nothing. The Lady Johanna scrutinized him and then she nodded. She lifted her arms in a gesture of blessing and farewell. The robots began to gather the pink herd into two groups. One group was to whisper in a ship over to a new world, new problems and new lives. The other group, no matter how much its members tried to scuttle into the dirt, was gathered for the last honor which humanity could pay their manhood. B'dikkat, leaving everyone else, jogged with his bottle across the plain to give the mountainman Alvarez an especially large gift of delight. For that real deep-down badness, nothing beats the Good Old Days. Stephen's father. "It's I A a phase they all go through. He'll snap out of it." Stephen didn't really believe he was ever going to snap out of it, but he was grateful that his folks let him alone. He wasn't worried what they thought, just as long as they allowed him to watch the viddies. Because his father was rich and connected with the university labs, Stephen had his own viddie set. While his parents indulged their normal tastes and watched the adult mush on the wall downstairs, Stephen stayed in his room and his own world. It was a wonderful world for any thirteen-year-old -- the world called the Good Old Days. There were all kinds of viddie shows about the golden pioneer era of seventy-five years ago, the marvelous time when heroes like Dion O'Bannion and Hymie Weiss walked the Earth. Stephen watched a show called Big Jim -- about Big Jim Colosimo and his lovable friends. He watched The Enforcer; that was the one about Frank Nitti. He was a man of action, like the heroes of Johnny Torrio and Legs Diamond. The Legs Diamond show was very exciting, because Legs was the one who always danced his way around the bullets in a gang war. That was how he got his name. Stephen learned a lot about the people who had lived in the romantic past. He knew about flashy gambling men like fancy Arnold Rothstein, who was so suave, and wild rascals like Bugs Moran. There was a new show and that was pretty good. But the best of all was Stephen's favorite -- Scarf ace Al. No wonder it was right up there on top with all the kids; its hero was Scarface Al Capone, the Robin Hood of Chicago, who took from the rich and gave to the poor. Lots of times Stephen found himself humming the theme song, which went: Al Capone, Al Capone, A mighty man who walked alone -- Wherever daring deeds are known, Men sing the praise of Al Capone. Stephen liked the way the machine guns came in on the end of the last line. But then he liked everything about Al Capone; the way he got his scar -- defending his sister from the crooked prohibition agents; the way he disguised himself as "Mr. Brown" when he was fighting the wicked cops and the thieving politicians of Chicago. Stephen knew all about Al Capone, riding in from his hideout in Cicero to bring justice to Chicago and save pretty girls from the evil Vice Squad men. Stephen joined the "Scarface Al Club" and ate enough cereal to get himself the complete prize outfit -- the artificial scar to wear, the bulletproof vest and everything. He might have been a very happy boy if he hadn't found his uncle's subjectivity reactor. bling nothing quite so much as the genetic control, which his uncle had also invented. The genetic control was a large box in which a woman could sit and be bombarded by radiations which would eradicate recessive and undesirable traits in her ova, thus leading to the reproduction of healthy offspring. This apparatus, marketed under the popular name of "Heir Conditioner," was an immediate success because it was a failure. Nothing really happened, but the woman who used it felt better; in that respect it resembled a face cream and had the additional advantage of being much more expensive. The machine which Stephen found -- the subjectivity reactor -- was a failure because it was a success. Not an immediate failure, for it was never manufactured or marketed, but a gradual failure. His uncle had devised it while still a young man, many years ago, and it too was a large box which contained a variety of mechanisms. Under their stimulus, the subject became capable of materializing, in tangible threedimensional form, his immediate thought patterns. The gradual failure came about because his uncle had experimented upon himself, and pretty soon his home was overflowing with tangible three-dimensional forms to which his wife objected; most particularly to the redheads. Consequently the subjectivity reactor was carted off to the storage building behind the university labs where Stephen's uncle and father both worked, and no one ever mentioned that it was also capable, by virtue of the same principle of materializing thought, of acting as a time machine. Stephen himself found it out by accident one day when he was playing around, exploring the deserted warehouse premises. He noticed the boxlike apparatus and crawled inside, pretending for the moment that he was a hero like Pretty-Boy Floyd, hiding out from the dirty old Feds. He didn't pay much attention to the blinking lights and whirling mirrors which became self-activating the moment he stepped inside and closed the door; he was wishing he had a gat to protect himself in case that archfiend J. Edgar Hoover showed up. He'd show him! "All right, copper -- you asked for it." And he'd reach in his pocket and pull out his gat, like this, and -- Stephen felt the weight before he saw it. And then he did pull his hand out of his pocket and he was holding a gat. A real roscoe, a genuine equalizer. Stephen stared at it, his thoughts whirling faster than the mirrors. The gun -- where did it come from? He'd just thought about it and it was here; how could that be? Actually, he hadn't even thought, just wished. The way he wished he had been around back in the Good Old Days, the way he was wishing now. He'd give anything to see real live American History in the making, like that morning of St. Valentine's Day in the garage on Clark Street... and suddenly they disappeared. Everything disappeared. It was like a viddie dissolve, so Stephen wasn't frightened. He knew the next scene would come up right after the commercial. Only this wasn't viddie and there was no commercial. The next scene came up when the blurring stopped and he found himself sitting in the same box, the mirrors still whirring and he heard the noise outside. Stephen blinked, tugged at the door of the compartment, opened it, and saw the machine guns spit. He knew where he was now. He'd seen it a dozen times on viddie, imagined it a thousand more. The garage, at eleven o'clock in the morning; the two executioners disguised in the uniforms of the hated police were mowing down the seven finks. Stephen, in the subjectivity reactor, had materialized at the very instant the firing started. For thirty seconds Stephen stared at the finks as they writhed and fell. And during those thirty seconds the finks became men. Men who wriggled and flopped after the bullets struck, until the two swarthy hoods in uniform stepped up and completed their work with revolvers. There was blood on the wall and floor, and a terrible, acrid odor. The two men noticed it, too, and commented harshly in Italian. One of them laughed and spat on the floor. Stephen wasn't laughing and he felt that unless he got out of here right away he'd do more than spit. He started to close the door and it was then that the executioners looked up and saw him. "What the hell -- " said the short one, and raised his revolver. His taller companion slapped it out of his hand. "Wait," he said He stooped, picked up the machine gun, and faced Stephen in the doorway of the compartment "Awright, kid, how you get in here? Where you come from?" He raised the muzzle of his weapon. "C'mon, talk!" Stephen talked. It was hard to, with the choking in his throat as he watched the machine gun muzzle that was like a cruel mouth -- almost as cruel as the mouth of the man who held it. It was hard to explain, too, and he wasn't sure he understood the situation himself. Certainly the shorter assassin didn't understand, because he nudged his companion and said, "He's nuts! Hurry up and give it to him -- we gotta get outa here!" The big man with the machine gun shook his head. "Shaddup and listen. Dincha hear? This thing goes through time. It's a time machine. Aincha never heard?" "Porko Dio! No such thing -- " "No such thing now." The big man nodded. "But maybe they invent it later on. That's where this kid comes from. How else you figure he got here if not like that?" "So?" "So you wanna get outa here, right?" "Sure, to St. Louis. That's where AI said we'd get the payoff -- " "You know what kinda payoff we end up with." The big man made a nasty noise in his throat. "But suppose we really get out. Suppose we go back with the kid here." He took a step forward. "Awright, kid, whaddya say?" He stared at Stephen.  face and the face of his companion. Here was his chance to take two real live gangsters back into his own world, his own time. It was something he'd always dreamed of. Only he had never dreamed they really looked and talked like this. And he had never dreamed the reality he glimpsed over their shoulders; the torn, huddled, oozing reality on the garage floor. Now he knew all there was to knQw about the Good Old Days. The big man raised his weapon. "Hurry up! We ain't got all day. Whaddya say?" Stephen knew he himself didn't have all day, or even another minute. Fortunately, thanks to the viddies, he knew what to say and how to say it. His hand squeezed the trigger inside his coat pocket. First the small man went down and then the big man. As the big man fell there was a short, staccato burst from the machine gun. Several bullets punctured the shell of the compartment. But by this time Stephen had slammed the door of the subjectivity reactor and hurled himself to the floor in quivering panic, wishing with all his being that he was back where he belonged... He might have had a hard time explaining the presence of the gat if he hadn't wished so strongly that it would disappear. As it was, he emerged from the subjectivity reactor completely unscathed. To all intents and appearances, Stephen was unchanged by his experience. The thing of it was that from then on he never watched Scarface AI any more. "He's growing up," his mother said proudly. "What did I tell you?" his father said. "I knew he'd get over it. All it takes is time." When he said, "All it takes is time," he suddenly remembered Stephen's visit to the old storage building. That night he made a trip there himself to confirm his suspicions. And there, as he expected, he found the subjectivity reactor -- and the telltale impressions left by the machine-gun bullets. Funny thing, they didn't penetrate with half the force of the old Colt .#s. Stephen's father stopped until he found the holes near the bottom of the machine. Stephen's father remembered the day those shots had been fired. Sometime he'd have to tell Stephen. Tell him how it was when he was a boy, when the machine had first been invented. Like father, like son. Stephen's father gazed at the Colt bullet holes and smiled reminiscently. He too had had his viddie heroes in his youth. Only his personal favorite happened to be the real # Wyatt Earp. Your favorite authors and their greatest stories! Satisfaction guaranteed or money back within ten days. I I Galaxy Publishing Corporation  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. each. i Name  Address  City Zone State j I The creature from Venus didn't know right from left -- and life and death hung in the balance! IT IN my office. He looked distraught. By some trick of selection, Paul Wallach, the director of Project Tunnel, was one of the two men in the place who did not have a string of doctor's and scholar's degrees to tack behind their names. The other was I. "Trouble, Paul?" I asked. He nodded, saying, "The tunnel car is working." "It should. It's been tested enough." "Holly Carter drew the short straw." "Er -- " I started and then stopped short as the implication became clear. "She's -- she's -- not -- ?" "Holly made it to Venus all right," he said. "Trouble is we can't get her back." "Can't get her back?" He nodded again. "You know, we've never really known very much about the atmosphere of Venus." "Yes." "Well, from what little came through just before Holly blacked out, it seems that there must be one of the cyanogens in the atmosphere in a concentration high enough to effect nervous paralysis." "Meaning?" "Meaning," said Paul Wallach in a flat tone, "that Holly Carter stopped breathing shortly after she cracked the airlock. And her heart stopped beating a minute or so later." "Holly -- dead?" "Not yet, Tom," he said. "If we can get her back in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, modern medicine can bring her back." "But there'll be brain damage!" "Oh, there may be some temporary impairment. Nothing that retraining can't restore. The big problem is to bring her back." "We should have built two tunnel cars." "We should have done all sorts of things. But when the terminal rocket landed on Venus, everybody in the place was too anxious to try it out. Lord knows, I tried to proceed at a less headlong pace. But issuing orders to you people is a waste of time and paper." I looked at him. "Doc," I asked, giving him the honorary title out miles from here. We haven't another tunnel car, and no rocket could make it in time to do any good. So how can we hope to rescue Holly?" "That's the point," said Wallach. "Venus, it appears, is inhabited." "Oh?" "That's what got Holly caught in the first place. She landed, then saw this creature approaching. Believing that no life could exist in an atmosphere dangerous to life, she opened the airlock and discovered otherwise." "So?" "So now all we have to do is to devise some way of explaining to a Venusian the difference between left and right. I thought you might help." "But I'm just a computer programmer." "That's the point. We all figured that you have developed a form of communication to that machine of yours. The rest of the crew, as you know, have a bit of difficulty in communicating among themselves in their own jargon, let alone getting through to normal civilians. When it comes to a Venusian, they're licked." I said, "I'll try." ware phase of a program started a number of years ago when somebody took a joke seriously. In a discussion of how the tunnel diode works, one of the scientists pointed out that if an electron could be brought to absolute rest, its position according to Heisenberg Uncertainty would be completely ambiguous. Hence it had as high a possibility of being found on Venus as it had of being found on Earth or anywhere else. Now, the tunnel diode makes use of this effect by a voltage bias across the diode junction. Between narrow limits, the voltage bias is correct to upset the ambiguity of Mr. Heisenberg, making the electron nominally found on one side of the junction more likely to be found on the other. Nobody could deny the operability of the tunnel diode. Project Tunnel was a serious attempt to employ the tunnel effect in gross matter. The terminal rocket mentioned by Paul Wallach carried the equipment needed to establish the voltage bias between Venus and the Earth. Once established, Project Tunnel was in a state that caused it to maroon the most wonderful girl in the world. Since the latter statement is my own personal opinion, my pace from the office to the laboratory was almost a dead run. The laboratory was a madhouse. People stood in little knots, arguing. Those who weren't talking were shaking their heads in violent negation. The only one who appeared unupset was Teresa Dwight, our psi-girl. And here I must confess an error. When I said that Paul Wallach and I were the only ones without a string of professorial degrees, I missed Teresa Dwight. I must be forgiven. Teresa had a completely bland personality, zero drive, and a completely unstartling appearance. Teresa was only fourteen. But she'd discovered that her psi-power could get her anything she really wanted. Being human, therefore, she did not want much. So forgive me for passing her by. But now I had to notice her. As I came in, she looked up and said, "Harla wants to know why can't he just try." that Venusian thing 'NO!' as loud as you can." Teresa concentrated, then asked, "But why?" "Does this Harla understand the Heisenberg Effect?" She said after a moment, "Harla says he has heard of it as a theory. But he is not quite prepared to believe that it does indeed exist as anything but an abstract physical concept." "Tell Harla that Doctor Carter's awkward position is a direct result of our ability to reduce the tunnel effect to operate on gross matter." "He realizes that. But now he wants to know why you didn't fire one of the lower animals as a test." "Tell him that using animals for laboratory experiments is only possible in a police state where the anti-vivisection league can be exiled to Siberia. Mink coats and all. And let his Venusian mind make what it can of that. Now, Teresa -- " "Yes?" "Tell Harla, very carefully, that pressing the left-hand button will flash the tunnel car back here as soon as he closes the airlock. But tell him that pushing the right-hand button will create another bias voltage -- whereupon another mass of matter will cross the junction. In effect, it will rip a hole out of this laboratory near the terminal, over there, and try to make it occupy the same space as the tunnel car on Venus. None of us can predict what might happen when two masses attempt to occupy the same space. But the chances are that some of the holocaust will backfire across the gap and be as violent at this end, too." "Harla says that he will touch nothing until he has been assured that it is safe." "Good. Now, Tom," he said, addressing me, "how can we tell right from left?" "Didn't you label 'em?" "They're colored red on the right and green on the left." "Is Harla color-blind?" "No, but from what I gather Harla sees with a different spectrum than we do. So far as he is concerned both buttons look alike." "You could have engraved 'em Frank Crandall snorted. "Maybe you can deliver an 'English, Self-Taught' course through Teresa to the Venusian?" I looked at Crandall. I didn't much care for him. It seemed that every time Holly Carter came down out of her fog of theoretical physics long enough to notice a simpleton who had to have a machine to perform routine calculations, we were joined by Frank Crandall who carted her off and away from me. If this be rank jealousy, make the most of it. I'm human. "Crandall," I said, "even to a Hottentot I could point out that the engraved legend 'GO' contains two squiggly symbols, contains 'many'." tension by saying, "So we didn't anticipate alien life. But now we've got the problem of communicating with it." Crandall didn't appear to notice my stiff reply. He said, "Confound it, what's missing?" "What's missing," I told him, "is some common point of reference." "Meaning?" "Meaning that I could define left from right to any semi-intelligent human being who was aware of the environment in which we live." "For example?" I groped for an example and said, lamely, "Well, there's the weather rule, valid for the northern hemisphere. When the wind is blowing on your back, the left hand points to the low pressure center." "Okay. But how about Venus? Astronomical information, I mean." I shook my head. "Why not?" he demanded. "If we face north, the sun rises on our right, doesn't it?" "Yes. Even in the southern hemisphere." "Well, then. So it doesn't make any difference which hemisphere they're in." "You're correct. But you're also making the assumptions that Venus rotates on its axis, that the axis is aligned parallel to the Earth's and that the direction of rotation is the same." 'We know that Venus rotates!" 'We have every reason to believe so," I agreed. "But only because thermocouples measure a temperature on the darkside that is too high to support the theory that the diurnal period of Venus is equal to the year. I think the latest figures say something between a couple of weeks and a few months. Next, the axis needn't be parallel to anything. Shucks, Crandall, you know darned well that the solar system is a finely made clock with no two shafts aligned, and elliptical gears that change speed as they turn."  in the solar system rotates in the same direction." I looked at him. "Would you like to take a chance that Venus agrees with that statement? You've got a fifty percent chance that you'll be right. Guess wrong and we have a metric ton of hardware trying to occupy the same space as another metric ton of matter." "But -- " "And furthermore," I went on, "we're just lucky that Polaris happens to be a pole star right now. The poles of Mars point to nothing that bright. Even then, we can hardly expect the Venusian to have divided the circumpolar sky into the same zoo full of mythical animals as our forebears -- and if we use the commonplace expression, maybe the Venusian never paused to take a longhandled dipper of water from a well. Call them stewpots and the term is still insular. Sure, there's lots of pointers, but they have to be identified. My mother always insisted that the Pleiades were. -- er -- was the Little Dipper." Teresa Dwight spoke up, possible for the second or third time in her life without being spoken to first. She said, "Harla has been listening to you through me. Of astronomy he has but a rudimentary idea. He is gratified to learn from you that there is a 'sun' that provides the heat and light. This has been a theory based upon common sense; something had to do it. But the light comes and goes so slowly that it is difficult to determine which direction the sun rises from. The existence of other celestial bodies than Venus is also based on logic. If, they claim, they exist, and their planet exists, then there probably are other planets with people who cannot see them, either." "Quoth Pliny the Elder," mumbled Paul Wallach. I looked at him. "Pliny was lecturing about Pythagoras' theory that the Earth is round. A heckler asked him why the people on the other side didn't fall off. Pliny replied that on the other side there were undoubtedly fools who were asking their wise men why we didn't fall off." "It's hardly germane," I said. "I'm sorry. Yes. And time is running out." to admit a newcomer, Lou Graham, head of the electronics crew. He said, "I've got it!" The chattering noise level died out about three decibels at a time. Lou said, "When a steel magnet is etched in acid, the north pole shows selective etching!" I shook my head. "Lou," I said, "we don't know whether Venus has a magnetic field, whether it is aligned to agree with the Earth's -- nor even whether the Venusians have discovered the magnetic compass." "Oh, that isn't the reference point," said Lou Graham. "I'm quite aware of the ambiguity. The magnetic field does have a vector, but the arrow that goes on the end is strictly from human agreement." "So how do you tell which is the north pole?" "By making an electromagnet! Then using Ampere's Right Hand Rule. You grasp the electromagnet in the right hand so that the fingers point along the winding in the direction of the current flow. The thumb then points to the north pole." "Oh, fine! Isn't that just the same eonfounded problem? Now we've got to find out whether Harla is equipped with a right hand complete with fingers and thumbs -- so that we can tell him which his right hand is!" "No, no," he said. "You don't understand, Tom. We don't need the right hand. Let's wind our electromagnet like this: We place the steel bar horizontally in front of us. The wire from 'Start' leaves us, passes over the top of the bar, drops below the bar on the far side, comes toward us on the under side, rises above the bar on the side toward us, and so on around and around until we've got our electromagnet wound. Now if the 'start' is positive and the 'end' is negative, the north pole will be at the left. It will show the selective etching in acid." I looked at him. "Lou," I said slowly, "if you can define positive and negative in un-ambiguous terms as well as you wound that electromagnet, we can get Holly home. Can you?" Lou turned to Teresa Dwight. "Has this Harla fellow followed me so far?" She nodded. "Can you speak for him?" "You talk, I hear, he reads me. I read him and I can speak." ham. "Now we build a Le Clanche cell. Ask Harla does he recognize carbon. A black or lightabsorbing element. Carbon is extremely common, it is the basis of life chemistry. It is element number six in the periodic chart. Does Harla know carbon?" "Harla knows carbon." "Now we add zinc. Zinc is a light metal easily extracted from the ore. It is fairly abundant, and it is used by early civilizations for making brass or bronze long before the culture has advanced enough to recognize zinc as an element. Does Harla know zinc?" "He may," said Teresa very haltingly. "What happens if Harla gets the wrong metal?" "Not very much," said Lou. "Any of the light, fairly plentiful metals that are easily extracted from the ore will suffice. Say tin, magnesium, sodium, cadmium, so on." "Harla says go on." "Now we make an electrolyte. Preferably an alkaline salt." "Be careful," I said. "Or you'll be asking Harla to identify stuff from a litmus paper." "No," said Lou. He faced Teresa and said, "An alkaline substance burns the flesh badly." "So do acids," I objected. "Alkaline substances are found in nature," he reminded me. "Acids aren't often natural. The point is that an acid will work. Even salt water will work. But an alkaline salt works better. At any rate, tell Harla that the stuff, like zinc, was known to civilized peoples many centuries before chemistry became a science. Acids, on the other hand, are fairly recent." "Harla understands." "Now," said Lou Graham triumphantly, "we make our battery by immersing the carbon and the zinc in the electrolyte. The carbon is the positive electrode and should be connected to the start of our electromagnet, whereas the end of the winding must go to the zinc. This will place the north pole to the left hand." "Harla understands," said Teresa. "So far, Harla can perform this experiment in his mind. But now we must identify which end of the steel bar is north-pole magnetic." "If we make the bar magnetic and then immerse it in acid, the north magnetic pole will be selectively etched." "Harla says that this he does not know about. He has never heard of it, although he is quite familiar with electromagnets, batteries, and the like." I looked at Lou Graham. "Did you cook this out of your head, or did you use a handbook?" He looked downcast. "I did use a handbook," he admitted. "But -- " "Lou," I said unhappily, "I've never said that we couldn't establish a common frame of reference. What we lack is one that can be established in minutes. Something physical -- " I stopped short as a shadowy thought began to form. as though he'd like to speak but didn't want to interrupt my train of thoughts. When he could contain himself no longer, he said, "Out with it, Tom." "Maybe," I muttered. "Surely there must be something physical." "How so?" "The tunnel car must be full of it," I said. "Screws?" I turned to Saul Graben. Saul is our mechanical genius; give him a sketch made on used Kleenex with a blunt lipstick and he will bring you back a gleaming mechanism that runs like a hundred-dollar wrist watch. But not this time. Saul shook his head. 'What's permanent is welded and what's temporary is snapped in with plug buttons," he said. "Good Lord," I said. "There simply must be something!" There probably is," said Saul. "But this Harla chap would have to use an acetylene torch to get at it." I turned to Teresa. "Can this psi-man Harla penetrate metal?" "Can anyone?" she replied quietly. Wallach touched my arm. "You're making the standard, erroneous assumption that a sense of perception will give its owner a blueprint-clear grasp of the mechanical details of some machinery. It doesn't. Perception, as I understand it, is not even similar to eyesight." "But -- " I fumbled on -- "surely there must be some common reference there, even granting that perception isn't eyesight. So how does perception work?" "Tom, if you were blind from birth, I could tell you that I have eyesight that permits me to see the details of things that you can determine only by feeling them. This you might understand basically. But you could never be made to understand the true definition of the word 'picture' nor grasp the mental impression that is generated by eyesight." "Well," I persisted, "can he penetrate flesh?" "Flesh?" "Holly's heart has stopped," I said. "But it hasn't been removed. If Harla can perceive through human flesh, he might be able to perceive the large, single organ in the chest cavity near the spine." Teresa said, "Harla's perception gives him a blurry, incomplete impression," She looked at me. "It is something like a badly out-of-focus, grossly under-exposed x-ray solid." "X-ray solid?" I asked. "It's the closest thing that you might be able to understand," she said lamely. I dropped it right there. Teresa had probably been groping in the dark for some simile that would convey the nearest possible impression. I felt that this was going to be the nearest that I would ever get to understanding the sense of perception. "Can't he get a clear view?" "He has not the right." "Right!" I exploded. "Why -- " Wallach held up his hand to stop me. "Don't make Teresa fumble for words, Tom. Harla has not the right to invade the person of Holly Carter. Therefore he can not get a clearer perception of her insides." "Hell!" I roared. "Give Harla the right." "No one has authority." "Authority be dammed!" I bellowed angrily. "That girl's life is at stake!"   "Were this a medical emergency, a surgeon might close his eyes to the laws that require authorization to operate. But even if he saved the patient's life, he is laying himself open to a lawsuit. But this is different, Tom. As you may know, the ability of any psiperson is measured by their welcome to the information. Thus communicate, are able." "But can't Harla understand that the entire bunch of us are peek?" "Confound it, Tom, it isn't a matter of our permission! It's a matter of fact. It would ease things if Holly were married to one of us, but even so it wouldn't be entirely clear. It has to do with the invasion of privacy." "Privacy? In this case the very idea is ridiculous." "Maybe so," said Paul Wallach. "But I don't make the rules. They're natural laws. As immutable as the laws of gravity or the refraction of light. And Tom, even if I were making the laws I might not change things. Not even to save Holly Carter's life. Because, Tom, if telepathy and perception were as free and unbounded as some of their early proponents claimed, life would be a sheer, naked hell on earth." "But what has privacy to do with it? This Harla isn't at all humanoid. A cat can look at a king -- " "Sure, Tom. But how long would the cat be permitted to read the king's mind?" I grunted. "Has this Harla any mental block about examining the outside?" He looked at me thoughtfully. "You're thinking about a scar or some sort of blemish?" "Yes. Birthmark, maybe. No one is perfect." "You know of any?" I thought. It was not hard for me to conjure up a picture of Holly Carter. Unfortunately, I looked at Holly Carter through the eyes of love, which rendered her perfect. If she had bridgework, I hadn't found it out. Her features were regular and her hair fell loose without a part. Her complexion was flawless... at least the complexion that could be examined whilst Holly sunned herself on a deck chair beside the swimming pool. I shook my head. Then I faced an unhappy fact. It hurt, because I wanted my goddess to be perfect, and if she were made of weak, mortal flesh, I did not want to find it out by asking the man who knew her better than I did. Still, I wanted her alive. So I turned to Frank Crandall. "Do you?" I asked. "Do I what?" "Know of any scars or birthmarks?" "Such as?" "Oh, hell," I snapped. "Such as an appendix scar that might be used to tell left from right." "Look, Tom, I'm not her physician, you know. I can only give you the old answer: 'Not until they wear briefer swim suits.' " My heart bounced lightly. That Holly was still in mortal danger was not enough to stop my elation at hearing Frank Crandall admit that he was not Holly's lover, nor even on much better terms than I. It might have been better to face the knowledge that Holly was all woman and all human even though the information had to come from someone who knew her well enough to get her home. Then I came back to earth. I had my perfect goddess -- in deadly peril -- instead of a human woman who really did not belong to any man. leave, but he must have been gone because now he opened the door and came back. He was carrying a heavy rim gyroscope that was spinning in a set of frictionless gymbals. He looked most confused. He said, "I've spent what seems like an hour. You can't tell me that this gizmo is inseparable from the selfish, insular intellect of terrestrial so-called homo sapiens." He turned the base and we all watched the gymbal rings rotate to keep the gyro wheel in the same plane. "It should be cosmic," he said. "But every time I start, I find myself biting myself on the back of the neck. Look. If you make the axle horizontal in front of you and rotate the gyro with the top edge going away from you, you can define a common reference. But motion beyond that cannot be explained. If the axle is depressed on the right side, the gyro will turn so the far edge looks to the right. But that's defining A in terms of A. So I'm licked." Frank Crandall shook his head. "There's probably an absolute to that thing somewhere, but I'm sure none of us know it. We haven't time to find it. In fact, I think the cause is lost. Maybe we'd better spend our time figuring out a plausible explanation." "Explanation?" blurted Wallach. "Let's face it," said Crandall. "Holly Carter's life is slipping away. No one has yet come close to finding a common reference to describe right from left to this Harla creature." "So what's your point?" "Death is for the dying," Crandall said in a monotone. "Let them have their hour in peace and dignity. Life is for the living, and for the living there is no peace. We who remain must make the best of it. So now in about five minutes Holly will be at peace. The rest of us have got to answer for her." "How do you mean?" "How do you propose to explain this unfortunate incident?" asked Crandall. "Someone will want to know what happened to the remains of Holly Carter. I can see hell breaking loose. And I can see the whole lot of us getting laughed right off the Earth because we couldn't tell right from left. And I can see us all clobbered for letting the affair take place." "You seem to be more worried about your professional reputation than about Holly Carter's life!" "I have a future," he said. "Holly doesn't seem to. Hell," he groaned, "we can't even gamble on it." "Gamble?" "How successful do you think you'd be in getting this Venusian to risk his life by closing his eyes and making a fifty-fifty stab in the dark at one of those buttons?" "Well -- " started Wallach -- "we'd be gambling too, you know. But -- " got a sort of half-cracked theory. May I try?" "Of course." "Not 'of course.' I'll have to have quiet, with just Teresa to communicate through." "If you have any ideas, try them," said Wallach. "Do you really know what you're doing?" demanded Frank Crandall. "I think so," I replied. "If it works, it'll be because I happen to feel close to Holly." "Could be," he said with a shrug. I almost flipped. Duels have been fought over less. But instead of taking offense, Crandall topped it off by adding, "You could have been a lot closer if you'd tried. She always said you had the alert, pixie-type mind that was pure relaxation instead of a dead let-down after a period of deep concentration. But you were always scuttling off somewhere. Well, go ahead and try, Tom. And good luck!" I took a deep breath. "Teresa?" I asked. "Yes, Mr. Lincoln?" "Tell Harla to concentrate on the buttons." "He is." "There is a subtle difference between them." "This he knows, but he does not know what it is." "There is a delicate difference in warmth. One button will be faintly warmer than the other." "Harla has felt them." I dropped the third-person address and spoke to Teresa as if she were but one end of a telephone line. "Harla," I said, "only part of the difference lies in the warmth to physical touch. There should be another kind of warmth. Are you not affected by a feeling that one is better than the other?" Harla's reply came direct through Teresa: "Why yes, I am indeed drawn to the warmer of the two. Were this a game I would wager on it. But that is emotion and hardly suitable as a guide." "Ah, but it is!" I replied quickly. "This is our frame of reference. Press the warmer of the but -- " I was violently interrupted. Wallach shook me violently and hurled me away from Teresa. Frank Crandall was facing the girl, shouting, "No! No! The warm one will be the red one! You must press the green -- " And then he, too, was interrupted. Displaced air made a nearexplosive woosh! and the tunnel car was there on its pad. In it was a nightmare horror holding a limp Holly Carter across its snakelike tentacles. A free tentacle opened the door. "Take her while I hold my breath," said Harla, still talking through Teresa. "I'll return the tunnel car empty. I can, now that I know that warmth is where the hearth is." Harla dropped the unconscious girl in my arms and snapped back into the car. It disappeared, then returned empty just as the doctor was bending over Holly. CO now I have my Holly, but -'every now and then I lie awake beside her in a cold sweat. Harla could have guessed wrong. Just as Wallach and Crandall had been wrong in assuming the red button would be warmer than the green. Their reaction was as emotional as Harla's. I hope Harla either forgives me or never finds out that I had to sound sure of myself, and that I had to play on his emotions simply to get him to take the fifty-fifty chance on his -- hers -- our lives. And I get to sleep only after I've convinced myself that it was more than chance... that somehow our feelings and emotions guided Harla where logic and definition fail. For right and left do not exist until terrestrial man defines them.      You Still Have Time... (if you were properly prompt in picking up this issue!) to get in your reservation for the World Science Fiction Convention. The place: Seattle, Washington. The date: Labor Day Weekend. The address to mail your # registration fee to: P. O. Box I #, Broadway Station, Seattle #, Washington. It's your chance to meet, greet and vote for your favorites in the sciencefiction field. Everyone is welcome. See you there? An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility.  # # # I n   s n    n m I  # S m o  s Every army has one like him. He doesn't win wars -- but he can make sure the right people lose them! O NE night when I was C.Q. at the #th, the Officer of the Day came in, swearing, with a tall, dark-skinned private wandering sullenly along behind him. We were up to our eyeballs in frantic work; Trenton had just been evacuated. "Get me the M.P. barracks," yelled the O.D. "What do you think? This rat's been selling rations to the civilians." That was Lt. Lauchheimer, who was a pale young man with enormous integrity. He looked at the prisoner as if he wanted to kick him. I could understand that. The prisoner looked back at him calmly, without very much interest at all. He leaned back against the wall, put one elbow on the hammering teletype and sighed. Behind him was a poster of a great green bug being bayoneted by an American infantryman, captioned: "Sit down," snapped Lt. Lauchheimer, " -- you. Whatever the hell you said your name was." "He's Private Postal, sir," I said reluctantly. "Pinkman W. Postal." The prisoner looked at me for the first time. The orderly room was full and bustling, so it wasn't surprising he hadn't noticed me. "Oh. Hello, Harry." I dialed the M.P. barracks without answering him, but it was already too late. When I handed the phone to Lt. Lauchheimer he glared at me. I said, "We took basic together, Lieutenant. We, uh -- We weren't very close buddies." "Sergeant, I didn't ask you." I listened while he was talking on the phone, although I was supposed to be checking casualty reports resulting from the morning's assault on the Sirian bubble. It seemed that Pinky had been given a truckload of supplies for evacuees and told to deliver it to a relief center in Bound Brook. They'd picked him up in New Brunswick with the supplies gone and a pocketful of cash. It was about what I would have expected. The M.P. jeep was there in less than five minutes, and Lt. Lauchheimer escorted Pinky out without another word to me. But he didn't forget. Two weeks later, when we were packing up for the move to Staten Island, he was in charge of my section and he put me on every rough detail he could think of. I guess I didn't blame him. I would have done the same. He didn't know me very well, but he knew I knew Pinky Postal. Lauchheimer didn't get off my back until the Boston Retreat, when we were bombed-in together for twelve hours and had a chance to talk things over. After that we were pretty close. He asked me to come along when he volunteered for the Worcester booby-trapping mission that almost worked, which I did, so in a way you might say that Pinky Postal was responsible for my getting the Congressional Medal of Honor. I'm glad I got it. There were fifteen awarded that day, including mine and Lauchheimer's. They lined us up alphabetically, and my name begins with a "W". So, although my Medal looks like all the others, it's pretty special. It was the last one issued. After that the Sirians englobed Washington.  ' bright notion of selling GI canned milk in New Brunswick he was twenty-three years old. He had been drafted at nineteen, out of Cincinnati. He hated it -- hated both. He hated being drafted; and he hated Cincinnati. He had never done a day's work. He liked to drive around down in Kentucky and try to pick up girls, but he was a poor man's son. The girls were not usually impreseed by his wobbly old Ford. In basic training his unmade bed cost the whole platoon a weekend pass at Saturday inspection, so the platoon gave him a bit of a hazing. He wasn't hurt. But the next day He got as far as the railroad station. He spent the rest of the eight-week training cycle cleaning latrines after duty hours, and our platoon had the dirtiest latrines on the post. By the time the Sirians landed three years later Postal should have been out of the Army, except that he never stopped trying. He fought the Army with everything he had. A warrant officer called him a Dutch mudheel -- well, something like that -- and Pinky hit him. That was three months in the guardhouse with forfeiture of pay. A mess sergeant got somehow in the way of a toppling vat of boiling dried Iimas after a few words with Pinky, who had been on KP. The court-martial called it deliberate assault with intent to maim. While he was awaiting trial for that he got out of the stockade add it up yourself; he had enough bad time to keep him in as long as they wanted him; and he was still trying to make it up when the Sirians blew their bubble around Wilmington. Pinky couldn't have cared less. They weren't shooting at him, were they? So what difference did it make to Pinky? What was there to choose between a hopelessly inimical government of human beings, whose rules were beyond him, and a hopelessly alien government of green-chitoned bugs, whose rules were never explained? The difference was too small for Pinky to bother with. Pinky was as much an alien as the Sirians, in his unattractive, angleshooting way. But the Army still thought of him as a soldier, after all. In the massive redeployment that tried to put an armed perimeter around the bubble, Pinky found himself put to work. He hated that most of all. We were throwing everything we had at the Sirians. The troops in Delaware and Maryland lived in lead suits for a month because we tried to break in with hydrogen bombs. All we accomplished was to kill off every green thing and wild animal for forty miles south of Wilmington. The bubble didn't even bend, and the troops got plenty of chance to become pretty foul inside those suits. I remember it very well; I was one of them. So was Pinky but, heavens knows how, he managed to get sent north. He was supposed to be driving a truck again in the evacuation of Philadelphia. The place he was evacuating was Bryn Mawr, and probably he mistook the girls' panic for another kind of excitement. They screamed to the colonel. Pinky wound up in a punishment battalion once more, and there he met the missionary from inside the bubble, an exile from Eden. IT to me straight, Rocco. What's it like in the bubble?" "Go to hell." "Come on, Rocco! Look, you don't like working in the boiler room, do you? Maybe I know how we can cut out of here." "Shut up, Postal. The sergeant's looking at us." Vindictively Pinky turned the steam valve a moment before Rocco was ready for it. The hightemperature jet barely missed boiling his fingers. "What the hell did you do that for? Get off my back, Postal!" "Come on. What's it like?" "Shut up, you two! Drag tail!" Pinky sulked. The job of delousing refugee clothing took two men, one to lift the hundredpound bundles in and out of the steam boiler, one to turn the valve. Pinky was twice the size of the little ex-prisoner of the Sirians, but it was Pinky who sat at ease with one gloved hand on the valve. "Don't you want to get out of here?" "Look, Postal. They won't take me back. Now leave me alone, will you?" "... Well, what's it like? Do they feed you?" "Sure." "Work you hard?" The little man said dreamily, "There's a stud farm down in Delaware. Fifteen hundred women, they say. Only a couple dozen men. For breeding, see?" "Breeding? You mean -- " "They're growing slaves, I guess. Well, I was working on a farm and they closed that up. I got friendly with the overseer and he put me in for the breeding farm. Plenty of food. Nothing else to do. I -- " "I'm warnin' you two! For the last time." But then, after the last smelly, flea-ridden bale had come out of the sterilizer, Pinky had a chance for one more word with the missionary. Why couldn't he go back? "Postal, I don't want to talk about it. They threw me out. I was all set, passed the overseers, right up to one of the bugs. He -- He said I was too little. They don't want anybody under six feet tall." Back in the barracks, Pinky slipped out of his dirty GI shoes and painstakingly marked his height off on the wall. The tape measure showed that nothing had changed. He was exactly six feet, one and a quarter inches tall. II "-Sirian ships that landed on the Earth -- two in Russia, one in the United States, one in Canada, one in India and, the first one of all, one in New South Wales. The first we heard of them was when the Russian radio satellite began a frantic emergency message in clear, and then went dead before it finished. Then all the other space stations went dead. Then the ship came down on Australia and, pop, up went the pale green bubble. The bubbles were like a wall, except more flexible and beautifully controlled. The rule was: What the Sirians wanted to pass could pass; everything else could not. Time passed; the other ships landed; there were more bubbles. Then the bubbles grew bubbles. They clustered in groups, expanding. Sometimes the new bubbles were big, sometimes small. Sometimes a couple of months would go by without much expansion, sometimes half a dozen little buds would pop up in a week. No metallic object could get through them at all after the first week. Evidently the Sirians had decided that was their simplest defense. We tried non-metallic attacks, of course. We drifted poison gas and bacteria through them easily enough. But nothing happened as far as we could see... as far as we could see was, after all, only the outermost skin of the bubble. A man could walk through -- or most of the time he could -- without feeling a thing, as long as he had taken off his wrist watch and laid down his gun. Not always. I was in Camden when the #th Mountain Division sent in an attack with wooden spears and pottery grenades. Fifty men got through but the fifty-first bounced back, knocked unconscious, as though he'd hit a stone wall. I don't know what happened to the fifty men who got through. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that they didn't much worry the bugs. Some people did come back. The Sirians threw them out, like Pinky's missionary, Rocco. Probably the Sirians had chosen types who would have little of importance to tell, except how much they liked living under the Sirians. That's what they told, every one of them. They were a problem to the Army. Most of them were soldiers, as it happened. The Army didn't much like the idea of sending them back to their units, whose morale was already hanging low, so they put the missionaries in special battalions, along with the goof-offs and low-grade criminals, like Pinky Postal. Pinky heard the message of the missionaries loud and clear. He didn't like the punishment battalion at all. He got his chance when he was handing out tetanus shots for a line of children and a jeep skidded in the slush, side-swiping the medics' personnel carrier. The kids scattered like screaming geese. By the time the medic corporal got his detail rounded up again he had only five men instead of six. Pinky was in the back of a truck, heading south along the old Turnpike. Snow was driving down on him, but he was very happy. He had outsmarted the Army. They would look for him, but they would look North. It is always easy to desert in the direction of the enemy in wartime; the traffic is all the other way. He walked the last mile to the edge of the bubble, looming over him in the darkness like a green glass cliff. The snow was easing off and it was almost daylight as he stepped through. f T'HE Sirians never intended to destroy the Earth, only to own it. Pinky's missionary was quite right. Almost at once they began breeding slaves. It was exactly the sort of job that Pinky would seek. He was not a bookish man, but he was immensely erudite on prurience. He knew very well what a breeding farm was like. There were the dozens of helpless, tamable does; and there was the big stud stallion, himself. What would be closer to the heart of any redblooded boy? He made his way there, finally, very much elated. There were fifteen others in the shipment, all tall, heavy, muscular men, all extremely cheerful. They rode in the back of an old Ford pickup truck, in warm sunshine. They didn't mind that it had a purplish tinge (green, Pinky would have thought, if he had thought about it at all; but the bubble reflected the green bands of the spectrum and what came through left the sun looking like a violet spotlight in the sky.) There were lavender clouds in a mauve sky, and all around them the bugs were busy with their reconstruction. Snow-white machines on wire-mesh treads were neatly paving over the rubble that had been a small Maryland town. "Bring on the girls," bellowed Pinky, waving a bottle in one hand. It was only California sherry, but it was all he'd been able to find in the abandoned supermarket where they'd spent che night. "Man!" cried one of the other eager breeders. "Women!" Pinky. dropped the bottle in his excitement, staring. They were women, all right. They were flat on their backs on a grassy meadow, their legs in the air, pumping invisible bicycle pedals under the direction of a husky blonde girl. "Vun, two. T'ree, four! Vun, two. T'ree, four! All right, ladies. Now some bending and stretching, hurry up, yoomp!" As the breeding stock clambered to its legs, Pinky observed that they had in fact already been bred, some months before. It was only mildly disappointing. Where these were, there were bound to be others. The truck slowed and stopped, and Pinky saw his first Sirian. The creature was twelve feet high but flimsily constructed. It had a green carapace like a June bug's, jointed in the center. It was not paying any attention to the snorting volunteer stallions. It stood on four hind legs, holding in its front pair of legs an instrument like a theodolite. (It had two smaller pairs of legs clasped across its olive-colored belly plate.) "Out! Everybody out!" bawled a man in a green brassard, circling respectfully around the Sirian toward the truck. "Nip along, you!" Pinky was first off, and first to reach the man in the green brassard. He had at'that time been in the bubble for less than thirty-six hours, but he knew who to butter up. Green brassards were overseers. They were the human straw-bosses for the Sirians. "Excuse me, sir. Say. I happened to get some good cigars last night, and I wondered if you... ?" r HE Sirians were not hard masters, but they were firm. They knew what they wanted in the way of a slave population -- strength, size, stupidity -- and it was only a detail that they found it necessary to kill some of those who gave them trouble. The trouble did not have to arise from viciousness. As Pinky Postal was entrenching himself with the man in the green brassard, one of the other candidate breeders made the mistake of gawking too close to the Sirian, who moved, which startled the captive, who brushed against the horny edge of green chiton at the Sirian's tail. It was like green fire. The man did not even make a sound. Washed in a green blaze of light, he froze, straightened and fell dead. At about that time the first dead Sirian fell into our hands -- partly because of Lt. Lauchheimer and myself -- and we had a chance to discover what the green fire was. Not that it helped us. It was a natural defense, like the shock of an electric eel; electromagnetic, at neural frequencies, it paralyzed life. Nothing else. It would not set off a match or stir a cobweb, but it would kill. Pinky did not know this, but he knew what he had already known, that the Sirians were deadly. Shaken, he waited for the physical examination. The overseer was not kind to Pinky because of the gift of cigars. He knew that kindness was not involved; it was a simple bribe. But as he shared Pinky's code he repaid the bribe. He did not volunteer information, but he answered questions. Would all of them be kept for breeding stock? "God, no. Six jobs want to be filled, the rest of you go back." Was there any special trick to passing the examination? The overseer jerked his thumb at a door labeled: Dr. Lessard. "Up to the doc." And was it really what they said, inside, all girls and fun? The overseer laughed and walked away. There had only been two cigars. The doctor had overheard part of the conversation. He was human, a dark little man with a dark little mustache. "I give you one piece of advice," he said you were talking to. He's been working for the bugs since they landed in Australia." Pinky said, "But aren't you working for them?" The doctor did not answer, unless the extra, unnecessary twist of the bloodsampling needle was an answer. There were a lot like the doctor in the bubbles -- policemen, doctors, a few elected officials of towns, who saw only one duty and that was to continue at their jobs. They worked for the bugs, but Twenty minutes later the doctor had completed his blood tests. "Do I pass?" Pinky demanded eagerly. "You know, do I get to breed?" The doctor looked at him thoughtfully. Abruptly he laughed. He erased a little mark on the paper and substituted another. "I think you do," he said. Pinky didn't understand the doctor's laughter for several hours. Then the five of the lot who had been selected were led into a long, narrow, white room with a bank of refrigerators against one wall and a remarkable quantity of test-tubes, flasks, glass tubing and other chemical-looking instruments on benches against the other. The five potent studs stared at each other, until a sourfaced human male, wearing a laboratory smock, came reluctantly in to start them on their duties. There was a storm of questions; the man said, "Oh, shut up, all of you. I hate this job." on, and we were losing it. I don't know all the battles that were fought, I only know we didn't win them. I saw the atomic cannon on Cape Cod, I heard about the George Washington's attempt to penetrate the Atlantic Coast bubble, which resulted in its flooding and sinking in a hundred fathoms of water. We heard that the Russians had managed to penetrate with a plywood missile, built with a ceramic skin and guided by a human kamikaze volunteer. There was a latrine rumor that the Canadians got through with a whole squadron of gliders. But whatever results were achieved were invisible from outside the bubbles. The one small victory that went to the human race came through Lt. Lauchheimer and myself. We buried ourselves in a little cave off a railroad tunnel, just outside Worcester, Massachusetts. We were there four weeks before the Sirians got around to expanding the bubble to include us. They finally did; and the gamble paid off. We were inside the bubble with a live bomb. According to Intelligence, its information derived from correlating the accounts of returned missionaries, our target was a Sirian scout vessel in the mathematical center of the sphere; blow that gm Ifc   up, and the bubble would burst. We did. It did. We traveled at night and never saw a Sirian. At night the bubble was a wet-looking, faintly luminous lavender shroud. Lauchheimer had a portable electronic gizmo which triangulated the center for us. We found the center, located the ship, fused the bomb, had an hour to get away, did... and saw, in the first rays of the morning sun, a great mushrooming cloud that rose into a blue, bubble-free sky. Paratroopers captured four live Sirians; eight others were found dead from the blast. That was what gave Lauchheimer and me our Congressional Medals. The hostages didn't stay with us very long. They were brought to Washington too, for study. Ten minutes after we got our Medals -- flicker, whine -- there was a sudden surge of color and a distant sound; the sun outside the White House window went purple and we were all caught. Some months after that I found myself sharing a kennel with Pinky Postal. Ill there, though I suppose I could have guessed it. I knew more than he, though. I knew that the Sirians' idea of breeding was by no means the joyous sport that had inspired troubadors and axeAfter all, we use artificial insemination on our domestic animals, why should the Sirians be less efficient? I knew enough, in fact, to have tried to avoid the breeding farm, for more reasons than one. Destiny makes games of our intentions; I was selected out of a thousand casual laborers in the work camp near Bethesda, and trucked to the farm overnight. Pinky was thin, pale, trembling. He recognized me at once. "Help me, Harry! I got to get out of this place." I looked around the place. It had been the Bethesda Naval Hospital at one time, with changes made by the bugs. It was now one enormous lying-in home, with beds for eighteen hundred women, dormitories for thousands more in the grounds around, and a special small detention home for we fortunate donors. "You got what you wanted, didn't you?" I said. Pinky had lost forty pounds, and there was no more flesh on his arms than on a spider crab's, but he surprised me. Without a word he jumped at my throat. I beat him off with difficulty. "All right! It was a joke." He slumped in a heap, whining, "Oh, Harry! I been here fourteen months and one of the bug boys tells me I have a hundred and twenty-three kids already, and more on the way, and -- And, I swear, the closest I've been to a woman is looking at them out the window. You know what? They've got some of my -- They've got samples, you know, in the deep freeze. They could kill me tomorrow and I'd go right on having kids for maybe twenty years. Harry! I didn't know it would be like this at all." I left him and looked out the window. There was an exercise yard, a mess hall, a community shower -- and a wall. Donors were not allowed outside of it. I said, "You ought to feel honored. There are only ten of these stud farms in the world." "And they're all the same -- all this artificial insemination?" "All exactly the same, Pinky. I'm sorry." That was a lie, of course -- about being sorry; why would anyone waste compassion on Pinky Postal? But I was committed to telling lies. I could not trust him with the truth. "Maybe it will work out all right," I said vaguely, reassuring not him but myself. It had to. Something had to. Of the twenty-five of us who were abruptly sworn in as intelligence officers when the bubble closed in over Washington -- the last real hope of any organized effort against the bugs -- I was pretty sure that I was the only survivor. ing anything against the Sirians lay in the possibility of destroying their central high command which was not a Sirian, or at any rate not an organic Sirian, but a machine. A computer. It did not rue them, but it detailed their plans. There was a chance, said the general who swore us in, that if we destroyed the computer they would be confused and weakened, then we might get at them with conventional arms. I followed Pinky's example and made friends with the man had no cigars. "I want to help you," I told him. "My oath." He sat down with contempt and lit a cigarette with loathing. "You chaps get queerer every day." ' I wheedled, "You never know, stud any day." "Too true." But it had shaken him. "And what can you do to stop them?" I built a dream castle for him. "I have something they want, Billings. I can tell you about something the bugs will want to know." Scornfully:"Hell! There isn't anything they want to know. They've a shootin' big machine that tells them everything they need." "But the machine only knows what it's told. There's something the bugs have never known to tell it." He looked impresed for a moment. "Dinkum? But -- " Then he shook his head. Casually he flicked ashes on my shoe. "I know what you're up to. You fellows are always coming to me with crook stories about how this is going to help me and that's going to save my life. It's no good. You can't fool me, cobber. And if you could, I can't fool them." I said persuasively, "Let me try, won't you? It's a matter of human nature." "What is?" "What information they've given the computer. You were caught in the first landing, weren't you? Don't you remember what happened? They took a hundred men and women and subjected them to tests; the results made up a profile of human psychology for their computer." He nodded, watching me. "But they didn't have a Pinky Postal." don't know what the hell you're talking about." But gradually I worked him over. I had to. Pinky was my ticket to the Sirian central headquarters. What I could accomplish there I did not know, but I knew that nothing at all could be accomplished on the stud farm. Besides, the argument was plauswould be to a Sirian. For what I had said was true. Their data was biased in favor of decent human beings, for their first captives were those who stood and fought. "Sure you know what you're talking about, pal?" "I'm sure." "You're not just sore because they wouldn't let you in with the sheilas?" "I'm looking for a way out of it over. You'll see I'm right. They'll reward you." He looked at me with contemptuous eyes. "You don't know much about them, do you? But probably they won't hurt me. Worth a try, no doubt..." He said thoughtfully: "They'll be wild as cut snakes if this isn't right. And I'll be wild at you." But he finally gave in. Pinky was pathetic in his gratitude. I was his only friend. He would never forget me; and, say, come to think of it, I was getting a break out of this too, wasn't I? How about giving him first pick of the food, for instance, or would I rather that he told the Sirians he couldn't react properly to their tests with me along? He was reacting exactly properly, of course. But the trouble was the Sirians had their own to the big barn where the only Sirian for miles around sometimes stopped by to check performance at the stud farm and, after waiting for some hours, the Sirian apto explain what it was I had said. The Sirian grasped the idea very quickly; my promise was kept; the Sirian took the bait. He said something into a small spherical contraption he wore dangling from one middle leg and in a moment there was a Sirian plane, herded into it. Just them. Not me. For me it was back to the stud farm. Pinky had been my ticket to the headquarters and the ticket had just been punched. r pHE main Sirian headquarters on North America was in Maryland, on the site of what had once been the Bowie race track. Off to the south lay the horse barns. Where the grandstand and track itself had been, now tracelessly slagged over, stood the Sirian construction that they had flung up around their ship. The building looked like a castle, worked like a palace. A palace is more than a home; it is workshop and office, an administrative center; so was this. But it did have a resemblance to a medieval castle, at least from a great enough distance in the air. There were things like towers and things like battlements. Closer up the resemblance was gone. The lobed wall that surrounded it was not for defense, as in a castle; it was the Sirian equivalent of a garage, where their ground and air vehicles were kept. The towers were viewless, except at the very top, where sweeping silvery needles performed a function like radar's. Pinky and the Aussie came to it with suspicion and delight. Anything was better than the stud farm. Or almost anything. But undeniably this was queer. They were sent to a hexagonal greenon-green room, small, bedless. saw it. But even that satisfaction was denied him. The floor shimmered, the saliva collected in quicksilvery beads and trembled toward an almost invisible slit, where it vanished. Pinky said, "You don't like the accommodations?" "It ain't Darling Point," said I wish that pal of yours was here. I've a notion of something I want to say to him." strawboss at the stud farm, Pinky had actually been one of the studs. "It's not so bad," he said with cheerful confidence, "and anyway we'll make out. Or I will." He hesitated and said: "You won't believe this, but I wish there were some women here." The Sirians wasted no time. Considering the limitations placed on their researches by the lack of unimpeded communication (no human ever learned the Sirian speech, and they could manage human tongues only through a sort of vodor), they were thorough and complete. None of it made much sense to Pinky, of course. All he knew was that he and persecuted for twelve hours at a time with endless nibbling nuisances. Word associations, reflex tests, interpretive depth studies much like a Rorschach -- the works. "There's not much in being a guinea pig," sighed Billings, exhausted and angry. "Would you rather be a stud?" asked Pinky, very cheerfully. He was quite happy. He had discovered an angle to shoot. IV quarters was a room thirty feet tall, a hundred feet square, lighted with a sourceless green glow and inhabited at all times by several dozen of the bugs. Pinky had seen the room from a gallery above it. The results of into receptors in a little room just off the great one. It was there, banked like a horseshoe along three walls, that the central computer whispered and glowed. The Sirians did not trouble with electricity in its grosser forms. The computers operated on what seemed to be neural impulses, projecting their data on soft green-ivory breast-shaped bosses in letters of light. There is very much about those computers which is mysterious, but some things are sure: For one, at least a hundred problems could be worked and answered simultaneously, so that the feat of juggling Pinky's personality quirks into the standard human profile could go on whenever convenient to the bugs, without interrupting the calculation of Hohmann trajectories for the remainder of their fleet (then approaching Orbit Pluto), the logistics of their Canadian enterprise, the setting of breeding quotas and the computation of field strengths for each bubble in their chain. Not all of the answers were expressed numerically; some were translated directly into action in their factories; some were expressed visually. In the center of the room, for instance, was what (although Pinky could not have recognized it) was a situation map. The chart was of North America, but as the human convention of portraying bodies of water as featureless plains was not followed by the Sirians, Pinky could make of it nothing but a scramble of topography, as meaningless to him as the chart of the back side of the Moon. If Pinky had had the wit to understand what he saw even he might have been shocked. The circles of Sirian bubbles were etched in fire. They had grown -- how they had grown! All the Eastern seaboard was a string of fat Sirian beads now, and a beaded limb swung west as far as the featureless plain of Ohio. The last quick sproutings of bubbles had taken in and neutralized four bases, the manufacturing centers of most of the eastern half of the continent and every center of population of importance north of Savannah and east of the Great Lakes. There was very little left. Pinky Postal saw all that without comprehending. Or caring. What he comprehended very clearly was that in the hours when he was not under scrutiny he was allowed to do as he liked. The Sirians were not careless, they were merely confident. They had every reason to be. The few hundred humans at liberty within the headquarters had no weapons. All of them combined were no match for a single bug, who could effortlessly destroy them one after another at will. There was little prospect of effective sabotage in the areas available to the captives. Most rooms were featureless dormitories, halls, exercise areas, yards. The workshops and armories were closed to humans. The few chambers which had any strategic importance -- principally the computer room -- were never left untended. Pinky restlessly prowled the headquarters and the abandoned human buildings surrounding it. He found treasures -- in the old jockey's quarters, a wicker basket of champagne; in the Steward's office, a tin box full of money. He waved the hundred-dollar sie only snarled, "What's the use of that?" "Oh, cheer up," said Pinky dispassionately. "What's the use of anything? But money's always good. You'll see." "I'll see we'll spend the rest of our lives whingeing about here," very morose. He almost stopped eating and, as days passed, stopped speaking. In the tests he failed to cooperate. Not Pinky. Pinky was a model of cooperation. He had learned that the way to get along with the bugs was to do what they wanted, and he was not surprised when one night as the tests were conPinky walked slowly toward their room, and did not even look back when from behind him he caught a flash of silent green light and heard a sharp, panicky sound bad. But Pinky had his plans. around Frederick, Maryland, with the freedom forces. Well, we called ourselves that, for morale mostly; but actually my work lay mostly in nursemaiding chitinous young Waldo, our ace of trumps. I had not escaped from the breeding farm, I had been liberated. A fire and noise woke us donors one night; we saw human figures dancing around the flame of burning buildings, and in the confusion the raiders broke into our close-penned corral and led us away. It was none too soon for me, and I was not only grateful, I was astonished. For these were free men and women living under the bubbles! It was inconceivable, but there they were. Undoubtedly the Sirians could have hunted us down, but they didn't bother. Probably there were too many humans loose under their screens, like silverfish in an old house. They had ways of locating weapons as long as there was a metallic component like the barrel of a gun or shaft of a knife -- magnetic or electronic detectors, no doubt -- but while we kept free of metal they never troubled us. So our weapon was the torch. We killed bugs, too. We fried a dozen one night in firing a stand of yellow pine where they were -- I don't know; perhaps camping. We clubbed a few, killed some from a distance with bow and arrow. Strike and run, we must have destroyed fifty of them in six months. That was not a small number. It was more than one per cent of all the Sirians on Earth. It was relatively easy for us to move about because the expanding bubbles had swept so much of the human race ahead of them. The towns were deserted. The bug centers were easy to avoid. All of North America was now under the green umbrella; a mauve sun sailed over all of Europe and most of Asia. We learned, through such sparse communications facilities as were left to us, that Africa and South America were largely bug-free. Evidently the warmer parts of the Earth were not attractive to the Sirians. They were now a sort of game preserve, nearly all that survived of humanity packed into those two continents, almost the malarial Amazon basin and the hot savannahs of the Congo. So we crept about under their feet and stung them when we could. We became ingenious in setting snares. With the highoctane gasoline from an abandoned storage tank we washed one of their landing strips one night, and set it ablaze just as one of their gull-winged flyers came in. The intention was to incinerate them all, and then for us to vanish tracelessly; but the Sirian pilot saw danger at the last moment and almost soared free. The flames caught him, and the ship pinwheeled into the side of a hill. And that was very fortunate for us, because that was how we captured Waldo. green creature the size of a puppy, newly hatched and not very dangerous. He was our first living Sirian captive. We dared take time to poke about in the wreck of the plane, knowing that there would be investigation, and we found that only two of its crew were adult Sirians; the others were eggs or hatchlings. The crash had killed them handsomely. All but one. John Gaffney found the one; rummaging through the dark he suddenly screamed: "The little louse! He bit me!" But it wasn't a bite, it was a neural shock. It was Waldo. He was alive. As he was only a newborn, his shock was painful but not deadly. We roped him and dragged him out onto the side of the hill. burning gallons of gasoline, pinned on his back with ten legs waving, he did not seem dangerous, only comic. "Kill him," said Gaffney, rubbing his leg. "No." I had a better idea. "They'll never miss him. Why don't we keep him? He can be -- We can use him for -- " "What?" demanded Gaffney. "No, kill him!" But I had my way finally. We had no plan for a captive Sirian, because it had never occurred to us we might catch one. But surely something would turn up! So we swung him in a hammock and lashed him tight, and we got out of there minutes before the Sirian rescue parties were circling the sea of flame. It was months before we had any idea of what to do with him. As I had insisted on kidnapping him, he was given me to raise. This was not pleasant. He was a painful pet, and difficult to handle. I mention only the difficulty of feeding him. Infant Sirians were nurtured on a sort of nectar, probably once secreted by Sirian adults but now, in their dwellings, synthesized in quantity. We had none. We tried everything. Honey was good but hard to come by. Molasses made him drunk. Simple sugar solution he refused to touch. We finally settled on maple syrup with, after experimenting, a few drops of whiskey. On this he thrived. I determined to try to teach him English. I could not hope that he would ever speak it, but neither can a dog. He was much brighter than a dog. "Walk," "sit," "come" -- he learned those before he was a month old. He showed that he could learn much more. In the winter evenings he would cuddle in my lap and we would look at the pictures in magazines together, I pointing out "car" and "house" and "washing machine" and Waldo reaching out with a jointed, taloned leg to scratch at the picture on the page. He made a faint humming sound, and his hardening chiton was rather warm. I grew almost fond of him, he was so eager to learn. Yet I was kept from oversentimentality by the potent sting he carried with him always. He would fall asleep in my lap. Just as a human child will restlessly turn over a time or two before drifting off, so Waldo would emit one sleepy shock before the black, hard eyes unfocused and he went into the catalepsy that was their sleep. As he grew larger (and he grew astonishingly fast), those light love-pats in good night became more and more agonizing. Twice I was knocked unconscious. We tried insulation. We wrapped him in rubber sheets, shrouded him in layer on layer of quilts. We tried keeping him off my lap, merely close by on a couch. Nothing worked. Always he drowsily reached out with one leg or an eyestalk or the corner of his backplate, just before he drifted off. And I leaped half out of my skin. second year of the Sirian conquest, Gaffney brought us a new recruit. I was not present when she arrived -- I was out exercising Waldo, under the shelter of an overgrown old apple orchard -- and I missed the questioning. By the time I got back to our camp she was asleep, worn out, but Gaffney was bubbling with news. "She was actually in their headquarters! She drew us a plan of the whole thing, Harry -- look!" It was crude, but if the girl was reliable it was all the information we had hoped for. We located the computer room, the Sirian sleeping quarters, the defensive installations, the shops, the laboratories. Slave quarters ringed one floor. Surveillance of half a continent was carried on in an observatory near the top. "And look here," said Gaffney in excitement, "see this line? The inner part of the headquarters is almost independent of the rest. Double walls, limited access, construction heavier, stronger inside. What does that suggest?" I opened my mouth. "A ship!" he cried, not giving me a chance, "the central part of the building is a ship!" More than that, the girl had told him that that ship housed all the brains of the Sirian expedition. They had but one computer; it had landed with the first touchdown on Australia, but had been moved to the United States. If we could destroy that ship... "But that's the part that worries me," admitted Gaffney, downcast. "How do we get in? They let her wander about pretty much as she wanted, see -- all the humans do. Fact, the humans are pretty much independent, long as they do what the bugs want. Even have their own, well, boss, a fellow who -- Never mind. What I started out to say, the bugs can afford to let the humans roam around, because the corridors are booby-trapped. It's something like Waldo's shock. There are places where this girl couldn't go, because she would die, unless a Sirian was with her. It didn't bother Sirians." We puzzled that over for a while. Waldo, beside me, rested one talon gently in my hand -- he was very well behaved and quite trustworthy except, as I said, just as he was drifting off to sleep. He loomed over us (being now more than nine feet tall), staring at the scribbled map with polite curiosity. I turned and stared at him abruptly. "Waldo! He could help us!" Quickly I explained. If Sirians could pass the booby-traps, why, we had our own Sirian! I said, "We'll have to ask the girl. Did they carry anything special? But she would have said so, and I think not. I think probably their own neural shock emanations screened off the radiations from the booby traps, and if that's the case -- " "Don't guess," said Gaffney. "We've woke her up with all our noise. Here she comes now." And there was the girl, coming drowsily into the room. She glanced toward me, stopped stark, her hand flew to her mouth, she screamed. I threw a look at Waldo beside me. "Oh, you saw him? Don't worry about him, young lady! He's perfectly tame. But no doubt he reminded you of the horrors you suffered while the captive of the Sirians..." She simmered down slowly, shaking her head. "No -- no. I'm sorry to be such a fool. It isn't the bug I was worried about. It's just that seeing you standing there that way, so close to him -- well. You scared me half to death. For a minute," she said with apologetic embarrassment, "for a minute I thought you were the boss. Mr. Postal." V quered in all of its important parts. We knew that the great colonizing fleet that would follow the first wave had long been orbiting the sun, reducing its velocity, knocking off miles-per-second to match speed with the Earth and to land. What we did not know was how tedious life had become for the conquerors. Pinky Postal, however, had them right under his eye. He saw how little there was for them to do. These were soldiers, not intellectuals, not artists, not even home-builders; their work was to fight, and they were fought out. They had won. killed, Pinky caught a glimpse of what might be. He found five quarts of champagne and got quite drunk. In his intoxication he blundered where he knew he should not go -- into Sirian quarters -- and it was only the providence of drunks that kept him from a booby trap, but somehow he found himself in a small room, where something heaved under a tarpaulin. It was a queer sight, and he kicked it. The tarpaulin flung free. There was a high-pitched Sirian chirp, and three great insect bodies bounded up from the floor, where they had been huddled. Gravely, drunkenly, Pinky realized that he was about to die. He had caught them at something, heaven knew what. And they would surely smite him low. As he was drunk, he merely stood there, weaving slightly, breathing calm alcoholic defiance at the Sirian who bent dangerously toward him. -- But he did not die. He did not die, and the next morning, through the pounding haze of his hangover, he wondered why. There were blanks in his recollection. But he remembered standing there, and he rememthe Sirian had never come. He puzzled over it for a whole day. Then, that evening, a Sirian came toward him and bent low. Pinky was not drunk this time, and he was terrified. He tried to run, fell, squirmed and lay flat on his back while the great flat Junebug face swooped down at him. Again the bolt did not strike. The face hung there, for seconds and then for minutes. And by and by Pinky saw that the Sirian was twitching. It twitched and stirred. Then it definitely staggered. It stumbled, caught itself, almost fell athwart him, caught itself again. The faint cricket-chirp sounded, ragged and... and... drunken. Drunken! And Pinky, sleepless that night, staring at the black ceiling of his green-on-green cubicle, realized that he had found what he wanted. He became a pusher. Of himself. "VF course the Sirians had their vices. What creature does not? Carbon dioxide was their liquor. Their respiratory systems being what they were, it was only infrequently that their own waste gases reached their intake orifices; but the concentrated breath of a mammal could send them reeling; a few minutes inhaling a man's direct breath would stiffen them in a giggling paralysis. But on their planet of Sirius, they had no mammals. They did what they could with what they had to work with. Their most secret vice was bundling -- two (or, rarely and most despicably, three or more) of the Sirians furtively huddled under an airtight sheet, exuding COo and intoxicating one another. It was a fearful vice. It was also a dangerous one. It could not be practiced openly. And when done in secret there was always the risk that the drunks would pass out and ultimately die of hyperintoxication. They were not merely drupks, they were alcoholics, a racial characteristic; for once they had tasted the happy-gas exuded by gross mammalian chemistry they were addicts. Pinky collected his first addict by chance, but he was courageous enough and thoughtful enough to make more. It took courage. It took exposing himself to a chance bolt from a new contact, but once the first few moments were past, so was the danger. A new habit had been formed; the pusher had hooked a new customer. It was the sort of industrious empire-building to which Pinky was best fitted, for he was perceptive to all weaknesses of the flesh -- even chitinous flesh hatched under alien, blue-white stars. Pinky was supply enough for whole roomfuls of Sirians, such clouds of intoxicant wafted from him. As days and weeks passed, more and more the work of the Sirian headquarters came to revolve around him. The business of occupying Earth tended itself well enough. The quasi-radars kept their vigil and marked their targets, the computers never stopped monitoring the approach of the fleet and correcting its course. They gave him a vodor, so that he could talk to them direct; he talked in commands. They obeyed his commands, for he was intelligent enough to bait them. He sent them on scrounging expeditions to find choice food -- a good bargain for them for, as with Earthly topers, it was not the simple chemical paralysis that pleased them best but the subtle bouquet and tang of contaminants. What bliss in the reek of green onions on his breath! What tingling thrill in the stale scent of tobacco! They sent parties rummaging through the nearby abandoned towns, for canned cheese and garlic, for spearmint chewing gum and cinnamon drops. Food and drink supplied, he next demanded control over the other humans in the Sirian headquarters. This too they gave him -- why not? It was Pinky, after all, who knew how to brew those rare blends of flavor that made all the difference. If Pinky chose to exercise the human crew in ways of his own, he never failed to share their breath with his employers. For this reason the other humans grew to hate, fear and despise him, but they feared the Sirians even more. Pinky was perfectly happy for the first time in his life. He was not a king, he was more. The Sirians ruled the world. And, in all but name, he ruled the Sirians. It was into this earthly paradise of Pinky's that we snakes wriggled, bringing destruction. boldened by the increasing laxity of the Sirians, we attacked their headquarters; how Waldo, a happy child with no consciousness that he was betraying his race, led us through the trapped corridors into the Sirian fortress; how we were found out by that most Sirian of tyrants, Pinky Postal. For it was he who spotted us. He and his humans had ministered to the whole headquarters detachment, leaving them in a happy stupor, when the alarm bells rang, and though Pinky roused one of the bugs enough to locate us, the creature was far too tipsy to do anything about it. It was the end of the world for Pinky Postal. His paradise was over. He confronted us at the entrance passage, wild with fear and hate. "Harry!" he bawled, screeching with rage. "You louse! You rat! You human!" "Shut up," said I, and in truth I paid him little attention. I was wondering where the Sirians were. We didn't then know that they were all dead drunk, or almost all; we thought they might come ravening down among us with murderous shocks blazing left and right. Pinky danced before us, almost weeping; but when we deployed left and right, as we had rehearsed it so many times, he bolted away and, crash, a steel door slammed behind him. We invested the outer shell of the Sirian structure with no trouble at all. It was all too easy, in fact. It turned out to be costly. Fifteen of us died in the Sirian takeoff. Yes, the Sirian takeoff -- which so many have wondered at -- now the truth can be told. Two of Pinky Postal's retinue at the last, when they saw what was happening, fled with only seconds to spare back to the Earth Pinky was spurning. They told us how Pinky, raving, strove to arouse the bugs to destroy us; failing, tried to get them to lock us out; failing even in that, managed at the last only to sober one Sirian just enough to pull the master switches that blasted their ship loose from its shell, sending it screaming up, out and away, Sirians, computer, Pinky and all. Fifteen of our raiding party died in its rocket-flames. It was a cheap price, of course. But how are we to explain to history that the Sirian conquest of humanity was defeated not by our strength but by our vices? A ND when it comes to that, Jwhat can I say to the President? He is very sunburned and healthy looking from his summer on the Orinoco. He is a titan at the tasks of reconstruction. Life is almost normal again; and he assures me that, with what we have learned from the works the Sirians left behind, we shall have no trouble in fighting off their invasion if they dared to attempt it again. They left a hundred bubble generators, and now we know how to pierce any bubble. We have already mopped up their survivors. Young Waldo is busy every day, trying to learn to talk to his own kind and tell them that they have lost a war. Naturally, the President wants to reward the man who made all this possible -- at, says the President with sorrow and pride, the cost of his own dear life. I wish I could stop it, but I don't know how. I don't mind, really, that mine should not be the last Congressional Medal of Honor after all. But I resent it most keenly that the next should go in absentia to Pinky Postal! for information spent two days of sightseeing in London, a man who showed me around one morning proudly said: "My people built this city." Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament looked very beautiful in the morning sunlight of that clear day and I fully understood how he felt. But aside from that he was simply speaking the truth, cities don't happen by themselves. I heard a similar statement many years later near Phoenix, Arizona, when I was shown areas made fertile by irrigation. The man said: "We made this desert into land." But a Dutchman -- and only a Dutchman -- could go farther. He could point to an endless meadow, or even just to a map of his country, and declare: "We made this land!" He could even add: "And we'll make more." The Kingdom of The Netherlands, to give it its proper name, has an area of # square miles, as any almanac will tell you. What the almanac usually does not say is that if The Netherlands were "untouched by human hands" some # square miles would be under water at high tide, and would thus be uninhabitable because the salty water of the North Sea, if nothing else, would ruin all edible crops. The Dutch have literally made half of their land themselves. Though the history of The Netherlands has its share of wars, the main enemy since # A.D. has been the North Sea. The main battleground was the area of the two provinces of North Holland and South Holland. North Holland is the area to the north of the old university town of Leiden (after which the Leiden, or Leyden, jars are named), with Amsterdam in its approximate center. The next largest Dutch city, Rotterdam, is the approximate center of South Holland. To the south of South Holland we have the Province of Zeeland, consisting almost exclusively of islands. (The Dutch captain Abel Janszoon Tasman bestowed the name of his native province on islands about as far away from Zeeland as one can be, when staying on the same planet. This is how New Zealand got its name.) Zeeland is the current battleground, as we'll see; the battle of Holland is all but won. It merely needs consolidation. THE watery geography of the I provinces of Holland and Zeeland is determined by three rivers, all of which have their sources outside the country. The northernmost of the three is the Rhine which, as it enters Dutch territory, changes its name to Waal for a distance of about # miles. After that it is called by its original name, but in Dutch spelling: Rijn. (Remember Rembrandt van Rijn?) Another arm of the Rhine is called the Lek; but the portion of the Lek near its mouth is called the Nieuw Meuse. (Presumably due to an old misunderstanding, for the Meuse, or Maas, is the river to the south of the Rhine which widens into the Hollandsch Diep before it empties itself into the North Sea.) The third river is the Schelde, which begins to widen just as soon as it has passed Antwerp. At one time all this was under Roman occupation, of course. It would be most interesting if some Roman had drawn us a map of the country as it looked when he was commander of a legion. Actually Roman writers say very little about the country... most likely because it wasn't worth anything in its natural state. Only three classical sources are known to me, Tacitus (in his Germania ), Pomponius Mela (in his De Chorographia ) and, of course, Cajus Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) in his "Natural History". Pomponius Mela has just one sentence for the current Holland: "Then it (meaning the Rhine) is no longer a river but an enormous lake covering a large area, called Fie vo." (... "sed ingens lacus, ubi campos implevit, Flevo dicitur," if you want the original wording.) The most accurate, as usual, is Pliny. He states that the Rhine in that area has three arms, named Helium (the westernmost), Rhenus (the center arm) and Flevum (the arm that goes to the north.) "In the north the Rhine widens into the lake. In the west it empties into the Meuse." One of the commentators of Pliny added that in # B.C. the Roman general Drusus Germanicus (also known as Drusus Senior) "connected Flevo lake with the Rhine, probably following the bed of the river Yssel" (in Dutch IJssel.) All this is not too helpful now, but a few facts emerge. River water made a very large lake, probably in the southern part of what later became the Zuider Zee, while at least one arm of the Rhine seems to have merged inland with the Meuse. The overall picture is that of an area where a canoe was far more useful than a horse -- and which, consequently, did not interest the Romans. They liked firm ground and were partial to paved highways. Since two Dutch words will crop up all the time in what is to follow they might as well be explained in advance. The word Zee (pronounced Zay) refers to a body of salt water, while the word Meer (pronounced like "mare") means a body of fresh water. This is somewhat confusing, because two German words which look almost the same and sound the same happen to have almost the opposite meanings. A German See is a fresh-water lake, if used with the masculine article, and a body of salt water if used with the feminine article. And the German word Meer means the ocean. One sometimes feels that a good synonym for "language" would be "chaos." At any event, the Dutch The Kingdom of The Netherlands prior to the Zuider Zee plan. wrested land both from the salty Zee and from freshwater Meet by ing. But, in spite of hard work through many generations, the overall balance did not look so good. A Dutch government pamphlet states that between # and about # A. D. the Dutch made land to the following extent: # acres along the seashore # acres by draining lakes # acres. But during the same time they lost # acres! The name of that loss was Zuider Zee. r  "HE formation of the Zuider Zee is easy to explain. The whole area was below sea level all along, with its deepest portion filled by Flevo lake. But a great deal of the Zuider Zee area remained dry land simply because higher land near the shore protected it from the North Sea. The catastrophe which flooded the low-lying basin with salt water announced itself with a stormy spring tide on All Saint's Day of # A. D. On that day the North Sea tore two pieces of land from the North Holland province, creating the two islands of Wieringen and Texel. Just about a century later, on Christmas Day, #, the North Sea finally broke through, flooding the whole area and producing the Zuider Zee. In # nobody could even think of doing anything about it. But a few centuries later, presumably encouraged by successful dike building on a smaller scale, some Dutchman began to wonder whether the work of the North Sea might not be undone. A study by Hendrik Stevin, published in # under the title "How the Fury of the North Sea may be stopped and Holland may be protected against it" may not have been the very first study to consider draining of the Zuider Zee, but it was the first to see print. During the following # years the idea of reclaiming the area covered by the Zuider Zee was expounded quite often in the Netherlands (some Germans also gave good advice across the border) but it got to be a theme like the railway tunnel from Calais to Dover: much literature and no action. The reason why there was no action was very simple: any Zuider Zee plan would require a colossal investment. If the plan succeeded this investment would be recovered and, in time, large profits would be made. But if it failed for any one of a dozen different reasons the investment would be a total loss. In the meantime another project simply had to be tackled. There were two bodies of fresh water which offered a threat to Amsterdam, the capital. One of them was the IJ (the Dutch treat "ij" as one letter, hence the apparent double capital in words like IJssel; the pronunciation is simply a long I) which had an open connection to the Zuider Zee. The other was the H aarlemmermeer. To get rid of the menace, the sum of # guilders was earmarked in #. Work began three years later and lasted a dozen years. The Dutch government somewhat ruefully stated that it had cost # guilders. But it had been a success, even though another # years of work were needed to change the newly won land into fruitful soil. The Dutch name for reclaimed land is "polder". Reclaiming land is therefore called by a term which can be Anglicized as "inpoldering." While the IJ polder and the Haarlemmermeer polder were still wet, three scientists and engineers, van Diggelen, Kloppenburg and Faddegon, published a similar scheme for the Zuider Zee. An enormous dike was to close the mouth of the big bay, the trapped water was slowly to be pumped out and the two rivers emptying themselves into the Zuider Zee, the IJssel and the Amstel, were to be diverted to go into the North Sea directly. The cost estimate was # million guilders. were published or submitted to the government in the form of memoranda, the government felt that there should be a body of experts which could judge the feasibility of the various plans. Thus an evaluation group, the Zuiderzeevereeniging, was established. To see what they would get if they did inpolder the Zuider Zee (One source says # test drillings were made.) It became clear that about three-fourths of the area of the Zuider Zee could be made into valuable land. Especially three men were the driving spirits: van Diggelen, Dr. Cornelis Lely and the head of the evaluation group, Dr. Buma. A complete plan was finished in #. But it took time. The turning point was probably the speech made by Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands on the occasion of the opening of parliament in September, #. The speech contained the sentences: "I consider the time has come to undertake the enclosure and reclamation of the Zuider Zee. The result will be improved water control conditions in the adjacent provinces, extension of territory and a permanent increase in the opportunities of employment." If times had been normal, the Queen's words would probably have caused quick action. But times were not normal. The First World War was brewing. The act of parliament which decided to attack the Zuider Zee was passed on June #, #. The scheme to be followed was that of Dr. Cornells Lely. It differed from other and earlier schemes in preserving a body of water in the Zuider Zee area. The older schemes had simply wanted to close up the whole of the bay and to re-route the rivers going into the Zuider Zee so that they would go into the North Sea directly. Dr. Lely pointed out that this might lead to floods farther inland if, as can happen, a storm-driven flood raises the level of the North Sea for a few days above the level of the rivers. This does not mean, of course, that the level of the whole North Sea would be above that of the rivers; it would only be the level of the sea near the coast. But that is reason for disaster enough. Moreover, Dr. Lely did not want to kill off the Zuider Zee fisheries. Finally, he wanted the newly won land to be accessible by water. In short: instead of just drying up the whole bottom of the bay, a number of very large islands were to be created in its area. The overall scheme, then, envisaged first the construction of the main dike, from the island of Wieringen to Friesland at the eastern shore of the Zuider Zee. Then two large polders were to be started, one going south from the island of Wieringen, # acres in extent. This was first called the northwest polder, but later the name was changed to Wieringermeer polder. The other polder was to be to the South of Friesland, the northeast polder, # acres in extent. It is, incidentally, the only one which has retained its original and purely geographical name. Then the southeast polder, the biggest of them all (# acres) was to be tackled. Since then the name has ben changed into Flevoland, since this is the probable area of Flevo Lacus of the Romans. Also, the job has been subdivided into two phases, East Flevoland and South Flevoland, though this is going to be one polder when finished. The last of the projected polders was the southwest polder (# acres), now called Markerwaard. The remaining body of water would then have an area of nearly # acres. It had to be fairly large to receive the waters of the IJssel and other smaller rivers, and because of the peculiar and probably unique circumstance that the salt water outside the main dike would often have a higher level than the water inside the dike. No water could then be discharged into the North Sea. And under bad flood conditions this might go on for some time, so there had to be a basin to hold the river water until it could be discharged. But in the course of time this basin would become fresh water, hence it should no longer be called by the old name: No longer Zuiderzee (the Dutch run words together) but Ijsselmeer.  things were tackled simultaneously, the main dike, the Wieringermeer polder and a #acre trial polder which was named Andijk. The purpose of the trial polder was to have an experimental area for finding out how the land had to be treated after it had been inpoldered. Obviously you can't go ahead and try to sow wheat or plant beets on land which had been soaking in salt water for six hundred years. Incidentally, the polders to be started later would benefit from the gradual sweetening of the Ijsselmeer, since that would leach out salt. By # the test polder was dry. The next task was to make it into soil which could be useful. At the German end of the North Sea land had been reclaimed from the sea in the past, too, by inpoldering. There it had been a rule of thumb among the peasants that a new polder, if kept well drained, would become useful in six or seven years time. In half a dozen years enough rain fell on a polder to wash the salt away. The Dutch presumably had done the same in the past, but now they were looking for methods to speed up the natural process. Gypsum was added to the soil, then fertilizers, different fertilizers in different parts of the test polder. Then they experimented with various vegetables to see which would succeed. The test polder ceased to exist as such on November #, #. It had done its job as an experimental farm. Now it became just a farm. By that time the main dam was finished, too. The island of Wieringen served as an anchor. It had been connected to the mainland with a comparatively short dam in #. The big job was the dam from Wieringen to Friesland, # miles of dam to be built right through the sea. The bulk of the dam is sand and earth dredged from the sea bottom. On the inland side the dam has a heavy stone facing. On the seaward side there is a bulge of boulder clay. On top of this clay bulge brushwood mattresses were laid, made by twisting brushwood into heavy rope-like shapes and then weaving these "ropes" into mattresses. On top of the mattresses they dumped heavy boulders, field stones, pieces of old concrete, anything that would weigh a lot and withstand the pounding of the waves for an indefinite length of time. At first this was just hard work, in the sense that large quantities of clay and rocks had to be moved and put into position. But as the building of the dam progressed, the space through which the tide could flow in and out of the Zuider Zee became narrower and narrower and the current in the remaining gap became more and more violent. The man who furnished the necessary calculations of what to expect of this current was Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Nobel Prize winner in Physics in #. As the critical period of closing the final gap approached, the expenditure in men and equipment began to resemble that for a real battle. Ten thousand people were on the dam. There were # large dredges in action, # floating cranes, # barges and # tugs. The closing of the dam was timed like an attack. At such and such a time the current would be near a standstill, then were so and so many hours for plugging the dam. When the tide returned it had to find a solid obstacle. The dam was finished on May #, #. the south of the island of Wieringer, the Wieringermeer polder, was ready to receive its first crop. Since the area was somewhat protected by the island (and by the beginnings of the big dam), this polder had been finished in #. The experience gained on the test polder enabled the Dutch experts to make the land arable within only two years of its being dry. On this polder -- as well as on the ones finished later -- the system was to divide it into plots of roughly # acres. Each one of these plots had a paved road in front and a large canal in the back, making it accessible both by land and by water. Just in case the main dam might give way, a most unlikely thing, a terp (artiyorth Se Ce ficial hill) was built in the center of the polder. It is high enough to be several feet above the highest recorded flood level of the North Sea, and large enough to , protect everything on the polder than can move and climb it. (Somebody calculated that the ; whole population of Amsterdam would have standing room on top ( of the terp.) i Two years after finishing the ( big dam work began on northeast polder, which was ready to bear crops ten years later, in #. Naturally the soil of such a polder is not uniform. As anyi where else the quality varies from i area to area. The best land of a polder is used for vegetables, the next best for grain (mainly rye),  while the poorest sections are ; forested. The largest of the polders, i formerly the southeast polder, i now Flevoland, has been divided  into two phases. East Flevoland was ready in #, South Flevo land is expected to be ready in #. The Markerwaard polder is i expected to be ready in #.  When the Dutch started on this enormous project in #  they probably expected, or at i least hoped, that they could re claim their Zuider Zee area in i about half a century without hav' How the Dutch made North Holland. The polders prior to the attack on the Zuider Zee. ing to worry about many other things. But two major catastrophes happened. The first was the German occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War which, naturally, brought everything to a near standstill, though the Germans, at first, did not interfere directly. In fact quite a number of German engineers looked very carefully, if unofficially, at the Wieringermeer polder, because they had had a similar project in mind since about #. There had been talk about inpoldering a bay called the Frische Haff (to the east of Danzig) and they wanted to see how it was done. The Frische Haff project would have been easier than the Zuider Zee for several reasons. To begin with, the bay is nearly fresh water naturally, and because of the geometry of the land only an eight-mile dam would be needed. This project, incidentally, is now dead because the area became Polish after the war. Of course it may be revived as a Polish project. But near the end of the war the Germans wrecked dikes deliberately to protect their own retreat, especially in the area of the Province of Zeeland. But the dikes wrecked by the retreating German armies were repaired and Zeeland lived up to its Latin motto luctoT et emergo, "I struggle and emerge." repaired most Dutchmen, including the Zeelanders, would concede that such things could and would happen during a war, but thought that everything was fine with the dikes and the coexistence of the North Sea and the Kingdom of The Netherlands otherwise. The day and night which taught them differently was the first day of February, #. Storm conditions were unusual and intense, the dikes of Zeeland were breached in # places, # acres of land were flooded, # buildings destroyed and # more damaged. The death toll was # people. The overall damage was estiA Dutch agency, the Rijkswaterstaat (we would call an equivalent agency, if we had one, the Federal Water Administration), had been worried all along, and had drafted memoranda about things that really should be done. But their warnings had appeared unnecessary. But after the February flood of # every Dutchman suddenly realized what he had merely learned in school, namely that # per cent of the kingdom's population live and work below sea level. And the Rijkswaterstaafs plan was quickly accepted. Zeeland, as a look at the map will show, consists of half a dozen large and a few small islands, grouped around four major outlets for river water into the sea. But under bad storm conditions these become four major inlets for the sea. To keep the islands of Zeeland safe as they now are, some # miles of dikes would have to be raised by six to seven feet, involving the reconstruction of about a hundred locks, culverts, pumping stations and so forth. The alternative, the Delta Plan, is just to tie the whole complex of islands together into one land by building a total of about # miles of dikes, as sturdy as the main dam, across the mouth of the Zuider Zee. The first step of the Delta Plan -- now under way -- is the socalled three-island plan, a name which is based on the fact that once Walcheren, North Beveland and South Beveland were three islands. Earlier work has already connected Walcheren and South Beveland. Then the northernmost of those outlets, called Haringsvliet, is to be dammed. The target date is #. Then the second outlet, called the Brouwershavensche Gat, is to be dammed; this dam should be completed in #. The next dam, and incidentally the longest one in the Delta Plan, will go across the outlet called the Easter Schelde. (It is called that not with the religious holiday in mind but in contrast to the Wester Schelde.) It will seal it off by #. The southernmost of the outlets, the Wester Schelde, must be left open; there is heavy traffic up and down the Wester Schelde to Antwerp, which is not a Dutch city. Here the dike along the southern shore of Walcheren and South Beveland will have to be raised and strengthened. The same is true to the north of Zeeland. The deep channel between Rotterdam and the sea, the socalled Rotterdamsche Waterweg, also cannot be interfered with, so that a protecting dike at or near the southern shore of the Waterweg is indicated. One of the reasons why the Delta Plan was accepted so fast and is pursued energetically is that the storm conditions of # have been carefully examined. It turned out, to everybody's horror, that the # situation still contained mitigating factors. The flood could have been four feet higher than it was! The Delta Plan is mainly defensive. It is not aimed at producing much new land. But it has the secondary aim of producing a large fresh water reservoir. The interconnected bodies of water behind the Delta Plan dams are already referred to collectively as the Zeeuwse Meet, the Zeeland lake. The fact is that The Netherlands, which are always plagued by too much sea water and are seasonally plagued by too much river water too, do need more fresh water in midsummer. The Zeeuwse Meer will be the irrigation reservoir for these periods.  dams, from Duiveland to Overflakkee and from there to the mainland. Later on they will carry highways, but their primary purpose is to influence the currents in such a way that the main dams will be easier to build. Another part of the Delta Plan is a most interesting construction to the east of Rotterdam. There is a river coming in from the east called the Hollandsche I Jssel. Though the name is the same it has nothing to do with the IJssel which puts fresh water into the Ijsselmeer. (The latter is sometimes called the Geldersche IJssel, to avoid confusion between the two rivers.) What is wrong with the Hollandsche IJssel is that it could be a very vulnerable point in case of a bad flood. The sea, racing up in a tidal wave through Cross section through the big dam across the mouth of the (former) Zuider Zee. the Rotterdamsche Waterweg could enter the Hollandsche IJssel and pour into the low-lying land to the East of Rotterdam. What has been built is actually an enormous guillotine, a steel blade as wide as the river, resting in two massive towers. If a wave should come up the Waterweg the steel blade can be lowered within minutes, literally cutting off the flood. The construction is now being finished, but as far as I know it hasn't been needed yet. As has been mentioned, the purpose of the Delta Plan is not to make more land, but to make the existing land safe. However, between # and # acres of new land will be a by-product. Have the Dutch reached the limit of the new land they can make with the Delta Plan? By no means. There is another scheme m the future. Dutch government sources are careful to point out that this is in the more distant future -- partly, no doubt, to calm the feelings of Dutch tax payers, partly because the Delta Plan should be hurried with all available means, since nobody can tell when the next big flood will build up. But that "future plan" is obvious from a glance at the map. There is rather shallow water to the north of the big Zuider Zee dam. The Dutch call it the Waddenzee. To the north of the Waddenzee you have a chain of islands, obviously indicating the original coastline. A dam from North Holland to the island of Texel would not be longer than the average Delta Plan dam, though it may be more difficult to build. The same statement holds true for the dams between the islands all the way to the island of Ameland, and a dam from Ameland to the mainland would be only about half the length of the Zuider Zee dam. One Dutch expert, Prof. Thyse, said, "It will be done not later than the year #." that it will be long finished when that oft-used date comes around. Mating Call It's a new thrill, no doubt. But do you think it'll ever replace old-fashioned sex? I ' F you get caught we'll have to throw you to the wolves," said Dr. Fladdis. "You understand, of course." Laoconia Wilkinson, senior field agent of the Social Anthropological Service, nodded her narrow head. "Of course," she barked. She rustled the travel and order papers in her lap. "It was very difficult to get High Council approval for this expedition after the... ah... unfortunate incident on Monligol," said Dr. Fladdis. "That's why your operating restrictions are so severe." "I'm permitted to take only this -- " she glanced at her papers -- "Marie Medill?" "Well, the basic plan of action was her idea," said Dr. Fladdis. "And we have no one else in the department with her qualifications in music." "I'm not sure I approve of her plan," muttered Laoconia. "Ah," said Dr. Fladdis, "but it goes right to the heart of the situation on Rukuchp, and the beauty of it is that it breaks no law. That's a legal quibble, I agree. But what I mean is you'll be within the letter of the law." "And outside its intent," muttered Laoconia. "Not that I agree with the law. Still -- " she shrugged -- "music!" Dr. Fladdis chose to misunderstand. "Miss Medill has her doctorate in music, yes," he said. "A highly educated young woman." "If it weren't for the fact that this may be our last opportunity to discover how those creatures reproduce -- " said Laoconia. She shook her head. "What we really should be doing is going in there with a full staff, capturing representative specimens, putting them through -- " "You will note the prohibition in Section D of the High Council's mandate," said Dr. Fladdis. "'The Field Agent may not enclose, restrain or otherwise restrict the freedom of any Rukuchp native ' " "How bad is their birthrate situation?" asked Laoconia. "We have only the word of the Rukuchp special spokesman. This Gafka. He said it was critical. That, of course, was the determining factor with the High Council. Rukuchp appealed to us for help." Laoconia got to her feet. "You know what I think of this music idea. But if that's the way we're going to attack it, why don't we just break the law all the way -- take in musical recordings, players..." "Please!" snapped Dr. Fladdis. Laoconia stared at him. She had never before seen the Area Director so agitated. "The Rukuchp natives say that introduction of foreign music has disrupted some valence of their reproductive cycle," said Dr. Fladdis. "At least, that's how we've translated their explanation. This is the reason for the law prohibiting any traffic in music devices." "I'm not a child!" snapped Laoconia. "You don't have to explain all..." "We cannot be too careful," said Dr. Fladdis. "With the memory of Monligol still fresh in all minds." He shuddered. "We must return to the spirit of the SocAnth motto: 'For the Greater Good of the Universe.' We've been warned." "I don't see how music can be anything but a secondary stimulant," said Laoconia. "However, I shall keep an open mind." up from her notes, said: "Marie, was that a noise outside?" She pushed a strand of gray hair from her forehead. Marie Medill stood at the opposite side of the field hut, staring out one of the two windows. "I only hear the leaves," she said. "They're awfully loud in that wind." "You're sure it wasn't Gafka?" Marie sighed and said, "No, it wasn't his namesong." "Stop calling that monster a him!" snapped Laoconia. Marie's shoulders stiffened. Laoconia observed the reflex and thought how wise the Service had been to put a mature, veteran anthropologist in command here. A hex-dome hut was too small to confine brittle tempers. And the two women had been confined here for # weeks already. Laoconia stared at her companion -- such a young romantic, that one. Marie's pose reflected boredom... worry... Laoconia glanced around the hut's crowded interior. Servo-recorders, night cameras, field computers, mealmech, collapsible floaters, a desk, two chairs, folding bunks, three wall sections taken up by the transceiver linking them with the mother ship circling in satellite orbit overhead. Everything in its place and a place for everything. "Somehow, I just can't help calling Gafka a him," said Marie. She shrugged. "I know it's nonsense. Still... when Gafka sings..." Laoconia studied the younger woman. A blonde girl in a onepiece green uniform; heavy peasant figure, good strong legs, an oval face with high forehead and dreaming blue eyes. "Speaking of singing," said Laoconia, "I don't know what I shall do if Gafka doesn't bring permission for us to attend their Big Sing. We can't solve this mess without the facts." "No doubt," said Marie. She spoke snappishly, trying to keep her attention away from Laoconia. The older woman just sat there. She was always just sitting there -- so efficient, so driving, a tall gawk with windburned face, nose too big, mouth too big, chin too big, eyes too small. "With every day that passes I'm more convinced that this music thing is a blind alley," said Laoconia. "The Rukuchp birthrate keeps going down no matter how much of our music you teach them." "But Gafka agrees," protested Marie. "Everything points to it. Our discovery of this planet brought the Rukuchps into contact with the first alien music they've ever known. Somehow, that's disrupted their breeding cycle. I'm sure of it." "Breeding cycle," sniffed Laoconia. "For all we know, these creatures could be ambulatory vegetables without even the most rudimentary..." "I'm so worried," said Marie. "It's music at the root of the problem, I'm sure, but if it ever got out that we smuggled in those education tapes and taught Gafka all our musical forms..." "We did not smuggle anything!" barked Laoconia. "The law is quite clear. It only prohibits any form of mechanical reproducer of actual musical sounds. Our tapes are all completely visual." "I keep thinking of Monligol," said Marie. "I couldn't live with the knowledge that I'd contributed to the extinction of a sentient species. Even indirectly. If our foreign music really has disrupted..." "We don't even know if they breed!" "But Gafka says..." "Gafka says! A dumb vegetable. Gafka says!" "Not so dumb," countered Marie. "He learned to speak our language in less than three weeks, but we have only the barest rudiments of songspeech." "Gafka's an idiot-savant," said Laoconia. "And I'm not certain I'd call what that creature does speaking." "It is too bad that you're tone deaf," said Marie sweetly. Laoconia frowned. She leveled a finger at Marie. "The thing I note is that we only have their word that their birthrate is declining. They called on us for help, and now they obstruct every attempt at field observation." "They're so shy," said Marie. "They're going to be shy one SocAnth field expedition if they don't invite us to that Big Sing," said Laoconia. "Oh! If the Council had only authorized a full field expedition with armed support!" "They couldn't!" protested Marie. "After Monligol, practically every sentient race in the universe is looking on Rukuchp as a final test case. If we mess up another race with our meddling..." "Meddling!" barked Laoconia. "Young woman, the Social Anthropological Service is a holy calling! Erasing ignorance, helping the backward races!" "And we're the only judges of what's backward," said Marie. "How convenient. Now, you take Monligol. Everyone knows that insects carry disease. So we move in with our insecticides and kill off the symbiotic partner essential to Monligolian reproduction. How uplifting." "They should have told us," said Laoconia. "They couldn't," said Marie. "It was a social taboo." "Well..." Laoconia shrugged. "That doesn't apply here." "How do you know?" "I've had enough of this silly argument," barked Laoconia. "See if Gafka's coming. He's overdue." breath, stamped across to the field hut's lone door and banged it open. Immediately the tinkle of glazeforest leaves grew louder. The wind brought an odor of peppermint from the stubble plain to her left. She looked across the plain at the orange ball of Almac sinking toward a flat horizon, swung her glance to the right where the wall of the glazeforest loomed overhead. Rainbow-streaked batwing leaves clashed in the wind, shifting in subtle competition for the last of the day's orange light. "Do you see if?" demanded Laoconia. Marie dropped her attention to the foot of the forest wall, where stubble spikes crowded against great glasswood trunks. "No." "What is keeping that creature?" Marie shook her head, setting blonde curls dancing across her uniform collar. "It'll be dark soon," she said. "He said he'd return before it got fully dark." Laoconia scowled, pushed aside her notes. Always calling it a him! They're nothing but animated Easter eggs! If only... She broke the train of thought, attention caught by a distant sound. "There!" Marie peered down the length of glazeforest wall. A fluting passage of melody hung on the air. It was the meister-song of a delicate wind instrument. As they listened, the tones deepened to an organ throb while a section of cello strings held the melody. Glazeforest leaves began to tinkle in sympathetic harmony. Slowly, the music faded. "It's Gafka," whispered Marie. She cleared her throat, spoke louder, self-consciously: "He's coming out of the forest quite a ways down." "I can't tell one from the other," said Laoconia. "They all look alike and sound alike. Monsters." "They do look alike," agreed Marie, "but the sound is quite individual." "Let's not harp on my tone deafness!" snapped Laoconia. She joined Marie at the door. "If they'll only let us attend their Sing..." A six-foot Easter egg ambled toward them on four of its five prehensile feet. The crystal glistening of its vision cap, tipped slightly toward the field hut, was semi-lidded by inner cloud-pigment in the direction of the setting sun. Blue and white greeting colors edged a great bellows muscle around the torso. The bell extension of a mouthear -- normally visible in a red-yellow body beneath the vision cap -- had been retracted to a multi-creased pucker. "What ugly brutes," said Laoconia. "Shhhh!" said Marie. "You don't know how far away he can hear you." She waved an arm. "Gaaafkaa!" Then: "Damn!" "What's wrong?" "I only made eight notes out of his name instead of nine." Gafka came up to the door, picking a way through the stubble spikes. The orange mouthear extended, sang a #-note harmonica passage: "Maarrriee Mmmmmmsonnnn!" "How lovely!" said Marie. "I wish you'd talk straight out the way we taught you," said Laoconia. "That singing is difficult to follow." ward her. The voice shifted to a sing-song waver: "But polite sing greeting." "Of course," said Laoconia. "Now." She took a deep breath. "Do we have permission to attend your Big Sing?" Gafka's vision cap tipped toward Marie, back to Laoconia. "Please, Gafka?" said Marie. "Difficulty," wavered Gafka. "Not know how say. Not have knowledge your kind people. Is subject not want for talking." "I see," said Laoconia, recognizing the metaphorical formula. "It has to do with your breeding habits." Gafka's vision cap clouded over with milky pigment, a sign the two women had come to recognize as embarrassment. "Now, Gafka," said Laoconia. "None of that. We've explained about science and professional ethics, the desire to be of real help to one another. You must understand that both Marie and I are here for the good of your people." A crystal moon unclouded in the part of the vision cap facing Laoconia. "If we could only get them to speak straight out," said Laoconia. Marie said: "Please, Gafka. We only want to help." "Understand I," said Gafka. "How else talk this I?" More of the vision cap unclouded. "But must ask question. Friends perhaps not like." "We are scientists," said Laoconia. "You may ask any question you wish." "You are too old for... breeding?" asked Gafka. Again the vision cap clouded over, sparing Gafka the sight of Laoconia shocked speechless. Marie stepped into the breech. "Gafka! Your people and my people are... well, we're just too different. We couldn't. There's no way... that is..." "Impossible!" barked Laoconia. "Are you implying that we might be sexually attacked if we attended your Big Sing?" Gafka's vision cap unclouded, tipped toward Laoconia. Purple color bands ran up and down the bellows muscle, a sign of confusion. "Not understand I about sex thing," said Gafka. "My people never hurt other creature." The purple bands slowed their upward-downward chasing, relaxed into an indecisive green. The vision cap tipped toward Marie. "Is true all life kinds start egg young same?" This time the clouding of the vision cap was only a momentary glimmerwhite. "Essentially, that is so," agreed Laoconia. "We all do start with an egg. However, the fertilization process is different with different peoples." Aside to Marie, she said: "Make a note of that point about eggs. It bears out that they may be oviparian as I suspected." Then: "Now, I must know what you meant by your question." Gafka's vision cap rocked left, right, settled on a point between the two women. The sing-song voice intoned: "No.t understand I about different ways. But know I you see many thing my people not see. If breeding (glimmerwhite) different, or you too old for breeding (glimmerwhite) my people say you come Big Sing. Not want we make embarrass for you." # # E are scientists," said Laoconia. "It's quite all right. Now, may we bring our cameras and recording equipment?" "Bring you much of things?" asked Gafka. "We'll only be taking one large floater to carry our equipment," said Laoconia. "How long must we be prepared to stay?" "One night," said Gafka. "I bring worker friends to help with floater. Go I now. Soon be dark. Come moonrise I return, take to Big Sing place you." The trumpet mouth fluted three minor notes of farewell, pulled back to an orange pucker. Gafka turned, glided into the forest. Soon he had vanished among reflections of glasswood boles. "A break at last!" barked Laoconia. She strode into the hut, speaking over her shoulder. "Call the ship. Have them monitor our equipment. Tell them to get duplicate recordings. While we're starting to analyze the soundsight record down here they can be transmitting a copy to the master computers at Kampichi. We want as many minds on this as possible. We may never get another chance like this one!" Marie said: "I don't -- " "Snap to it!" barked Laoconia. "Shall I talk to Dr. Baxter?" asked Marie. "Talk to Helen?" demanded Laoconia. "Why would you want to bother Helen with a routine question like this?" "I just want to discuss..." "That transceiver is for official use only," said Laoconia. "Transmit the message as I've directed. We're here to solve the Rukuchp breeding problem, not to chitchat." "I feel suddenly so uneasy," said Marie. "There's something about this situation that worries me." "Uneasy?" "I think we've missed the point of Gafka's warning." "Stop worrying," said Laoconia. "The natives won't give us any trouble. Gafka was looking for a last excuse to keep us from attending their Big Sing. You've seen how stupidly shy they are." "But what if -- " "I've had a great deal of experience in handling native peoples," said Laoconia. "You never have trouble as long as you keep a firm, calm grip on the situation at all times." "Maybe so. But..." "Think of it!" said Laoconia. "The first humans ever to attend a Rukuchp Big Sing. Unique! You mustn't let the magnitude of our achievement dull your mind. Stay cool and detached as I do. Now get that call off to the ship!" TT was a circular clearing perhaps two kilometers in diameter, dark with moonshadows under the giant glaze trees. High up around the rim of the clearing, moonlight painted prismatic rainbows along every leaf edge. A glint of silver far above the center of the open area betrayed the presence of a tiny remote-control floater carrying night cameras and microphones. Except for a space near the forest edge occupied by Laoconia and Marie, the clearing was packed with silent shadowy humps of Rukuchp natives. Vision caps glinted like inverted bowls in the moonlight. Seated on a portable chair beside the big pack-floater, Laoconia adjusted the position of the tiny remote unit high above them. In the monitor screen before her she could see what the floater lenses covered -- the clearing with its sequin glitter of Rukuchp vision caps and . the faintest gleam of red and green instrument lights between herself and Marie seated on the other side of the floater. Marie was monitoring the night lenses that would make the scene appear as bright as day on the recording wire. Marie straightened, rubbed the small of her back. "This clearing must be at least two kilometers across," she whispered, impressed. Laoconia adjusted her earphones, tested a relay. Her feet ached. It had been at least a fourhour walk in here to this clearing. She began to feel latent qualms about what might be ahead in the nine hours left of the Rukuchp night. That stupid warning... "I said it's a big clearing," whispered Marie. Laoconia cast an apprehensive glance at the silent Rukuchp figures packed closely around. "I didn't realize there'd be so many," she whispered. "It doesn't look to me as though they're dying out. What does your monitor screen show?" "They fill the clearing," whispered Marie. "And I think they extend back under the trees. I wish I knew which one was Gafka. I should've watched when he left us." "Didn't he say where he was going?" "He just asked if this spot was all right for us and if we were ready to help them." "Well, I'm sure everything's going to be all right," said Laoconia. She didn't sound very convincing, even to herself. "Isn't it time to contact the ship?" asked Marie. "They'll be calling any -- " A light flashed red on the panel in front of Laoconia. "Here they are now."  into her cheek microphone. "Yes?" The metallic chattering in Laoconia's earphones only made Marie feel more lonely. The ship was so far away above them. "That's right," said Laoconia. "Transmit your record immediately and ask Kampichi to make an independent study. We'll compare notes later." Silence while she listened, then: "I'm sure there's no danger. You can keep an eye on us through the overhead lenses. But there's never been a report of a Rukuchp native offering violence to anyone... Well, I don't see what we can do about it now. We're here and that's that. I'm signing off now." She flipped the switch. "Was that Dr. Baxter?" asked Marie. I # "Yes. Helen's monitoring us herself, though I don't see what she can do. Medical people are very peculiar sometimes. Has the situation changed with the natives?" "They haven't moved that I can see." "Why couldn't Gafka have given us a preliminary briefing?" asked Laoconia. "I detest this flying blind." "I think it still embarrasses him to talk about breeding," said Marie. "Everything's too quiet," hissed Laoconia. "I don't like it." "They're sure to do something soon," whispered Marie. As though her words were the signal, an almost inaudible vibration began to throb in the clearing. Glaze leaves started their sympathetic tinkle-chiming. The vibration grew, became an organ rumble with abrupt piping obligatto that danced along its edges. A cello insertion pulled a melody from the sound, swung it over the clearing while the glazeforest chimed louder and louder. "How exquisite," breathed Marie. She forced her attention onto the instruments in front of her. Everything was functioning. The melody broke to a single clear high note of harmonic brilliance -- a flute sound that shifted to a second phase with expanded orchestration. The music picked up element after element while low-register tympani built a stately rhythm into it, and zither tinkles laid a counter-point on the rhythm. "Pay attention to your instruments," hissed Laoconia. Marie nodded, swallowing. The music was like a song heard before, but never before played with this perfection. She wanted to close her eyes; she wanted to submit entirely to the ecstasy of sound. Around them, the Rukuchp natives remained stationary, a rhythmic expansion and contraction of bellows muscles their only movement. And the rapture of music intensified. side to side, mouth open. The sound was an infinity of angel choirs -- every sublimity of music ever conceived -- now concentrated into one exquisite distillation. She felt that it could not possibly grow more beautiful. But it did. There came a lifting-expanding-floating... a long gliding suspenseful timelessness. Silence. Marie felt herself drifting back to awareness, found her hands limply fumbling with dials. Some element of habit assured her that she had carried out her part of the job, but that music... She shivered. "They sang for # minutes," hissed Laoconia. She glanced around. "Now what happens?" Marie rubbed her throat, forced her attention onto the luminous dials, the floater, the clearing. A suspicion was forming in the back of her mind. "I wish I knew which one of these creatures was Gafka," whispered Laoconia. "Do we dare arouse one of them, ask after Gafka?" "We'd better not," said Marie. "These creatures did nothing but sing," said Laoconia. "I'm more certain than ever that the music is stimulative and nothing more." "I hope you're right," whispered Marie. Her suspicion was taking on more definite shape... music, controlled sound, ecstasy of controlled sound... Thoughts tumbled over each other in her mind. Time dragged out in silence. "What do you suppose they're doing?" hissed Laoconia. "They've been sitting like this for # minutes." Marie glanced around at the ring of Rukuchp natives hemming in the little open space, black mounds topped by dim silver. The stillness was like a charged vacuum. More time passed. "Forty minutes!" whispered Laoconia. "Do they expect us to sit here all night?" Marie chewed her lower lip. Ecstasy of sound, she thought. And she thought of sea urchins and the parthenogenetic rabbits of Calibeau. A stirring movement passed through the Rukuchp ranks. Presently, shadowy forms began moving away into the glazeforest's blackness. "Where are they going?" hissed Laoconia. "Do you see Gafka?" "No." The transmission-receive light flashed in front of Laoconia. She flipped the switch, pressed an earphone against her head. "They just seem to be leaving,"  she whispered into the cheek microphone. "You see the same thing we do. There's been no movement against us. Let me call you back later. I want to observe this." A Rukuchp figure came up beside Marie. "Gafka?" said Marie. "Gafka," intoned the figure. The voice sounded sleepy. Laoconia leaned across the instrument-packed floater. "What are they doing now, Gafka?" she demanded. "All new song we make from music you give," said Gafka. "Is the sing all ended?" asked Marie. "Same," breathed Gafka. "What's this about a new song?" demanded Laoconia. "Not have your kind song before correct," said Gafka. "In it too much new. Not understand we how song make you. But now you teach, make right you." "What is all this nonsense?" asked Laoconia. "Gafka, where are your people all going?" "Going," sighed Gafka. Laoconia looked around her. "But they're departing singly... or... well, there don't seem to be any mated pairs. What are they doing?" "Go each to wait," said Gafka. And Marie thought of caryocinesis and daughter nuclei. "I don't understand," complained Laoconia. "You teach . how new song sing," sighed Gafka. "New song best all time. We keep this song. Better much than old song. Make better -- " the women detected the faint glimmer-haze lidding of Gafka's vision cap -- "make better young. Strong more." "Gafka," said Marie, "is the song all you do? I mean, there isn't anything else?" "All," breathed Gafka. "Best song ever." Laoconia said: "I think we'd better follow some of these..." "That's not necessary," said Marie. "Did you enjoy their music, Dr. Wilkinson?" "Well..." There appeared to be embarrassment in the way the older woman turned her head away. "It was very beautiful." "And you enjoyed it?" persisted Marie. "I don't see what..." "You're tone deaf," said Marie. "It's obviously a stimulant of some sort!" snapped Laoconia. "I don't understand now why they won't let us..." "They let us," said Marie.  "I must insist, Gafka, that we be permitted to study all phases of your breeding process. Otherwise we can be of no help to you." "You best help ever," said Gafka. "Birthrate all good now. You teach way out from mixing of music." A shudder passed upward through Gafka's bellows muscles. "Do you make sense out of this?" demanded Laoconia. "I'm afraid I do," said Marie. "Aren't you tired, Gafka?" "Same," sighed Gafka. "Laoconia, Dr. Wilkinson, we'd better get back to the hut," said Marie. "We can improvise what we'll need for the Schafter test." "But the Schafter's for determining human pregnancy!" protested Laoconia. The red light glowed in front of Laoconia. She flipped the switch. "Yes?" Scratching sounds from the earphones broke the silence. Marie felt that she did not want to hear the voice from the ship. Laoconia said: "Of course I know you're monitoring the test of... Why should I tell Marie you've already given Schafter tests to yourself..." Laoconia's can't be ser... That's impossible! But, Helen, we... they... you... we... Of course I... Where could we have... Every woman on the ship..." There was a long silence while Marie watched Laoconia listening to the earphones, nodding. Presently, Laoconia lifted the earphones off her head and put them down gently. Her voice came out listlessly. "Dr. Bax... Helen suspected that... she administered Schafter tests to herself and some of the others." "She listened to that music?" asked Marie. "The whole universe listened to that music," said Laoconia. "Some smuggler monitored the ship's official transmission of our recordings. Rebroadcast stations took it. Everyone's going crazy about our beautiful music." "Oh, no," breathed Marie. Laoconia said: "Everyone on the ship listened to our recordings. Helen said she suspected immediately after the broadcast, but she waited the full half hour before giving the Schafter test." Laoconia glanced at the silent hump of Gafka standing beside Marie. "Every woman on that ship who could become pregnant is pregnant." "It's obvious, isn't it?" asked Marie. "Gafka's people have developed a form of group parthenogenesis. Their Big Sing sets off the blastomeric reaction." "But we're humans!" protested Laoconia. "How can..." "And parts of us are still very primitive," said Marie. "This shouldn't surprise us. Sound's been used before to induce the first mitotic cleavage in an egg. Gafka's people merely have this as their sole breeding method -- with corresponding perfection of technique." Laoconia blinked, said: "I wonder how this ever got started?" "And when they first encountered our foreign music," said Marie, "it confused them, mixed up their musical relationships. They were fascinated by the new musical forms. They experimented for new sensations... and their birthrate fell off. Naturally." "Then you came along," said Laoconia, "and taught them how to master the new music." "Exactly." "Marie!" hissed Laoconia. "Yes?" "We were right here during that entire... You don't suppose that we... that I..." "I don't know about you," said Marie, "but I've never felt more certain of anything in my life."  fought back tears. "I'm going to have a baby. Female. It'll have only half the normal number of chromosomes. And it'll be sterile. And I..." "Say I to you," chanted Gafka. There was an air of sadness in the singsong voice. "Say I to you: all life kinds start egg young same. Not want I to cause troubles. But you say different you." "Parthenogenesis," said Laoconia with a show of her old energy. "That means, of course, that the human reproductive process need not... that is, uh... we'll not have to... I mean to say that men won't be..." "The babies will be drones," said Marie. "You know that. Unfertile drones. This may have its vogue, but it surely can't last." "Perhaps," said Laoconia. "But I keep thinking of all those rebroadcasts of our recordings. I wonder if these Rukuchp creatures ever had two sexes?" She turned toward Gafka. "Gafka, do you know if..." "Sorry cause troubles," intoned Gafka. The singsong voice sounded weaker. "Must say farewell now. Time for birthing me." "You are going to give birth?" asked Laoconia. "Same," breathed Gafka. "Feel pain on eye-top." Gafka's prehensile legs went into a flurry of digging in the ground beside the floater. "Well, you were right about one thing, Dr. Wilkinson," said Marie. "She-he is not a him" Gafka's legs bent, lowered the ovoid body into the freshly dug concavity in the ground. Immediately, the legs began to shrink back into the body. A crack appeared across the vision cap, struck vertically down through the bellows muscles. Presently, there were two Gafkas, each half the size of the original. As the women watched, the two half-sized Gafkas began extruding new legs to regain the normal symmetry. "Oh, no," whispered Marie. She had a headache. Trial-and-error familiarization with "y" be impractical on a far nTsTngle man constitutes, in effect, Lr rf m-Sb o, that Planet's Earth-population. This is the "why" of the Space Zoologist... c a result of a government men on board had been mere y lines # f so il and air, some photoaccomplished without incident... that occa sioned the discovery of the It was the second Mars landing that ocean koalas  quilties. These furry beasts, somewhere e wee tangles of fur, were appearance save for overall bright orang  , th ew me mbers as found to be friendly, and to Ambulant rag-toys cut mascots and pets. The amma s '  d d da erve the nickname of "quilties". that endeared them to all the men "  a  d b k to Eart h along with the  s rSi!" "y S s r rCrt. There were no subsequent meSSa Mars Flight Three found the remains of the crew where the quilties had left them. found that the biology On investigation  t a nd they considered man of the quilty was similar t tke relative position of a as they would anything warm an y beasts minute hairlike caterpillar. During the cuddling with the the flesh r: BTthe Mowing morning, the men had been eaten to death from within by the grubs of gestating bay qmlto. mentioned All of this, of course, is common knowledge : t oday c  astr# . here solely to demonstrate to you the  " ol Contact, and the t had  " d eZtTSrlTerran folisation would be next to impossible. Indigenous Hazards by Lt. Commander Lloyd Rayburn, U. S. Naval Space Corps A man who lived three lives? A piker! Jerry Norcriss lived hundreds -- all over the Galaxy! criss stood at the edge of the wide green clearing, sniffing contentedly of the notunpleasant air of Arcturus Beta. Three hundred yards behind him, crewmen and officers alike labored to unload the equipment necessary for setting up camp for this, their first night on the planet. No one had asked him to lend his strong back to the proceedings. Space Zoologists were never required to do anything which might sap, even slightly, any of their physical energies. Moreover, they were under oath not to take any orders to the contrary. Now and then, a hot-shot pilot would feel resentment at the zoologist's standoffish position, and take out his feelings with a remark like, "Would you pass the sugar, if you don't think it would sprain your wrist, sir?" Such incidents, if reported back to Earth, inevitably resulted in the breaking of the pilot, and his immediate removal from command. It was seldom the zoologist himself who made the report. Any crew member who overheard such statements would make the report as soon as possible, no matter what feelings of loyalty they might otherwise have for the pilot or person who had spoken. From the moment of landing, the lives of every man aboard a ship were in the hands of the Space Zoologist. From Captain Daniel Peters, the pilot, down to Ollie Gibbs, the mess boy, there was nothing but respect for Jerry Norcriss, and no envy whatsoever for the job he would soon be doing. That is not to say they were on friendly terms with him, either. It was the next thing to impossible to call a Space Zoologist "friend." Even amongst themselves, the zoologists were distracted, bemused, withdrawn from their surroundings. After their first Contact, they never were able to join in amiable camaraderie with other men. Such social contact was not forbidden them. It was merely no longer a part of their inclination. In their eyes a cool, silvery light shimmered, an inner light that marked them for the ultimate adventurers they were. No person would ever suffice them. They lived only for the job they did. Without it, few lived longer than a terrestrial year. Even with it, there was often sudden death. Jerry was barely thirty, but his thick shock of hair was almost totally white and his mouth a firm line which never curled in a smile nor twisted in a frown. At the edge of the clearing, his bronzed flesh glowing ruddily in the failing sunset light of Arcturus, he stood and waited. Off in the distance behind him, Daniel Peters started across the clearing from the sunset-red gleaming of the sleek metal spaceship. He drew abreast of the solitary figure, and said respectfully, "All in readiness, sir." The words reached Jerry as from across a void. He turned slowly to face the other man, focusing his will with the effort it always took just to use his voice. "Thank you, Captain," he said. That was all he said, but as he followed Peters across the clearing toward the scorched circle where the great ship had descended on its column of fire, the pilot could not suppress a shudder. Jerry's voice was oddly disconcerting to the nervous system of the listener. It seemed like the "ghost-voice" of a medium at a seance. The mind that was Jerry Norcriss was only utilizing a body for the purpose of speaking. It did not actually belong there. And that was true enough. Jerry and the others of his kind no longer lived in their bodies. They merely existed there, waiting painfully for the next occasion of Contact. hooked to an external poweroutlet beneath a metal flap on one towering tailfin, was the couch and the helmet Jerry Norcriss would use. Jerry lay back with the ease of long habit and adjusted the helmet-strap beneath his chin, as Peters read to him mechanically. The data came from the translated resume of the roborocket that had gathered data on Arcturus Beta for the six months prior to the landing of the spaceship. "... three uncatalogued species," his voice droned on. "An underground life-pulse in the swamplands near the equator; the creature could not be spotted from the air... A basically feline creature, also near the equator, but in a desert region, metabolism unknown... And pulses of intelligent life, and of some unfamiliar lower animal life, on the northern seas... All other life-forms on the planet conform to previously discovered patterns, and can be dealt with in the prescribed manners." A small section of Jerry Norcriss's mind found itself mildly amused, as always, by this bit of formality. The outlining of the planetary reconnaissance to a Space Zoologist was mere protocol, a holdover from the ancient custom of briefing a man who was about to undergo a mission of importance. Vainly did the zoologists try to convince authority that this briefing was futile. A man in Contact was no longer a man. He was the creature whose mind he inhabited, save for a miniscule remnant of personal identity. His job was to Learn the creature from the inside out. As his mind, off in the alien body, Learned, the information was relayed via the Contact helmet to an electronic brain on the ship, to be later translated into code-cards for the roborockets. Man's expansion throughout the universe was progressing faster than his mind could memorize or categorize. The roborockets obviated his need to learn. For every known kind of alien-species problem, there was a solution. The scannerbeams of the rocket would sense each life-form over which they passed, in the rocket's sixmonth orbit about the planet. If all species conformed to already known types, then a signal would fly by ultrawave across the void to Earth, declaring the planet fit for immediate colonization. But if new species were encountered, the beam to Earth carried a hurried call to the Naval Space Corps, with a request for the next available zoologist. Zoologists spent their Earthside time at Corps Headquarters, in the Comprehension Chamber. cards at fingertip control, they lay back upon their couches and learned, through dreamlike vicarious playbacks, about the species Contacted by their confreres. Any Space Zoologist with even five years' service had more accumulated knowledge in his brain than any dozen ordinary zoologists. And more intimate knowledge, too. A man who has been an animal has infinitely more knowledge of that animal than a man who has merely dissected one.  ears record the voice of the pilot but closing his conscious mind to the import of the words. It never did any good to know that the creature you were about to be was unknown. And no comment on what sort of animal it might be could be half so informative as actually being what it was. Jerry repressed an urge to fidget. This was almost the worst part of Contact: The wait, while the senseless briefing took place. Soon enough he would know more of the species under observation than could be held on ten reams of briefing-sheets. Soon enough he would be sent, for an irreducible forty minutes, into the mind of each of the creatures to be learned. The irreducible time-extent of Contact was its primary hazard. When the Contact helmet had been developed, it had been found that approximately forty minutes -- forty-point-oh-three minutes, to be exact -- had to be spent in the creature's mind. No amount of redesigning, fiddling or tinkering could change that time. The Zoologist could spend neither more nor less than that amount in a creature's mind. Since all creatures have natural enemies, Contact called for more than simply curling up and relaxing inside the alien mind. The zoologist's host-alien might have a metabolism which called for it to drink a pint of water every fifteen minutes or shrivel. In which case the zoologist would shrivel with it, his punishment for not sufficiently Learning his host. This, then, was the reason those irreducible forty minutes were a hazard. Should the creature being Contacted die, the zoologist died with it. There was no avoiding death if it came to the inhabited creature. A good zoologist Learned fast, or perished. Which is why there is no such thing as a bad Space Zoologist. You're either a good one or a dead one. Peters' voice came to a halt and he closed the plastic folder over the briefing-sheet. "That's about the size of it, sir," he said. "We've focused the Contact-beams toward the indicated areas and made a final check of all the wiring, tubes and powersources." Jerry sighed contentedly and shut his eyes. "Whenever you're ready, then, Captain," he whispered, and relaxed his body in preparation for his first Contact. His mind and imagination toyed a moment with brief fancies about his forthcoming existences in swamp, desert and sea, then he pushed the thoughts away and let his mind go empty. Faintly, he heard Peters calling an order to the technician within the spaceship -- Then silent lightning flashed across his consciousness. II eyes. In two rows of three eyes each. He did not, however, see six images. The widespread belief in the multitudinous images seen by the faceted eyes of a housefly had been debunked the first time a helmeted biochemist had intruded upon that insect's puny brain. As with human eyes, the images were fused into a whole when they reached the mind. Save for the disconcerting sensation of possessing a horizontal and vertical peripheral vision of approximately three hundred degrees sight was comfortably normal. Jerry looked over his surroundings and noted one slightly annoying side-effect of his hexafocal outlook. As a human will see -- as when looking at the tip of a pencil pointed at the face -- two images at the far end of any object looked upon, so Jerry, while able to zero in anywhere he chose, could see six ghost-images corresponding in their angle of perspective to the positions of his six eyes. Had he a pencil-tip to stare at, it would have appeared, beyond the tip, to be vaguely like a badminton bird seen head on, with images of the pencil-body comprising the "feathers." A few moments of glancing about soon took care of the primary irritation of this unfamiliar sensation, and Jerry began to study his surroundings carefully. He was inside a circular cavity of some sort, facing toward brightness at the opening ahead of him. The walls of the cavity were dark, sandy-smooth and slightly moist, so he reasoned he was in some sort of burrow in the soil. Beyond the opening, there was light and warmth and a hint of greenery which his host's eyes could not bring into sharp focus. "I wish I knew my size," he thought. "Am I some small insect awaiting a victim, or a rabbitsouled mammal hiding from a predator, or a lion-sized carnivore sleeping off a heavy meal?" Attempts to turn his head for a look at his host's body availed him nothing. Jerry relaxed for a moment, and tried to sense his body by feel. He had, he knew in a moment, no neck. Head and torso were a one-piece unit, or at least inflexibly joined. Carefully, Jerry moved his right "hand" out before his face for a look. He saw a thin, fleshcovered bony limb, with a double "elbow," terminating in a semicircular pad which seemed suited for nothing but support. No claw, talon or digit on the pad; just a tesselated rubbery bottom, the tesselations apparently acting as treads do on a tire. "Whatever I am," Jerry sighed, "I'm non-skid." He considered a moment, then added, "I can't be an insect, then. Insects can't rely on weight to keep them rightside up, and need gripping mechanisms. Okay, insect-size is out." him and cautiously leaned his weight on it, then removed it back beneath his torso and studied the earth where it had rested. There was a concavity there, corresponding to the pad. It was not especially deep. "Well, that lets out elephantsize," he reasoned, "and most oversize forms. I must be somewhere between a mouse and a middle-sized wolf. But what am I?" Jerry tried breathing. Nothing happened; there was no sense of dilation anywhere in his body. "Odd," he thought. "Unless I get oxygen -- or whatever gases this creature breathes -- through my food... Or maybe I have airtubes like an insect's... No, I'd have to shift my body now and then for air circulation, and I feel no discomfort remaining still. Besides, I have flesh, and that tube arrangement only functions well in a body with an endoskeleton. Must be dependent on food intake, then. Stores its oxygen or whatever." He extended the tesselated pad, and rubbed it cautiously against the soil. There was a dim sensation of touch in the pad. But it was subordinate to a soma-centric sense of location. His pad "knew" where it was in relation to his body, but had no great tactile capacity for his surroundings. "Well," Jerry thought, "that lets out feeling my body to determine shape or function." As it sometimes did when he was enhosted, his mind went back to old Peters, his instructor, who had taught "Project C" to the eager young zoologists. Project Contact had been mostly devoted to giving the student an open mind on metabolism and adaptability to environment. A Learner had to be able to reason out -- and quickly -- the metabolism of his host. It was little use knowing a Terran life-ecology; man lives on combustibles and oxygen, the oxygen combining with combustibles to provide heat, and plants live on carbon dioxide and water and sunlight, renewing the atmospheric oxygen. So old Peters had always stressed the student's learning their Basic Combinations. Basic Combinations prepared the student -- or so the school board hoped -- for a wide variety of chemical relationships between a host and its environment. The students had to know what to do to survive should the host, for instance, live in a chlorine atmosphere, and need large amounts of antimony in its diet for proper combustion and survival. There were a good many chemical elements in the universe; the student had to know how to deal with any combination of them in a host's metabolism. For the most part, the instincts of the host would carry a Learner through the Contact period. A species tended to keep its physical needs not only in its mind, but in its body as well. Mr. Peters had a saying he'd been fond of emphasizing to the students: "When in doubt, black out." The saying became a cliche to the student body, but they had the sense not to disregard it. A cliche is, after all, only a truth which has become trite because it is vitally necessary to use it often. "When in doubt, black out," meant simply that if a situation arose which seemed impossible to handle rationally, the enhosted Learner's last resort was reliance upon the instinctive behavior of the host. The only thing to be done was to pull the mind into a tiny knot bobbing in the host's own brain, and let the host itself, once more in control, take the Learner instinctively to environmental victory. Or defeat. A Learner enhosted in a chicken, for instance, would be a fool to trust the chicken's instincts regarding, say, a snake. A chicken confronted by' a snake tends to become hypnotized by its deadly adversary, and to stand stupidly in place until it is killed. In cases of that sort, the Learner would be safer taking control and going clucking off to the nearest high ground. On the other hand, a Learner inhabiting something with the hairtrigger instincts of a bat would be much better off letting the animal's instincts take over in moments of grave risk, such as flying through the blades of a revolving fan. A bat could get through without a second thought about those whirling metal scythes, but a man's mind could not think fast enough to avoid a grim death by all-over amputation. "Maybe," Jerry thought hopefully, "I've got an easy one." It was possible, of course. His host might be in the midst of an afternoon siesta, and Jerry could relax and "sit out" his forty minutes of Contact. But such cases were few. At any moment a predator might come down into that orifice in the soil, and Jerry would have to fight for his host's life to preserve his own. Relaxed Learning was seldom feasible. "I'd better see what sort of fighting equipment I have," he decided, wishing vainly that he could just turn his head and look his body over. This proceeding by feel was a slow, tortuous, and sometimes deceptive process. Hollow fangs that seemed capable of injecting venom into an enemy might -- as in the case of the Venusian Sea Vampires -- turn out to be an organ for drinking water, the sacs above the fangs being for digesting liquids and not for storing poisons. Jerry stimulated what should be his tongue into action, checking for the presence of fangs. Within the mouth of the creature, which felt large in relation to its head, he sensed a rasping movement, a kind of dull dry rustling, but could feel nothing with the tongue itself. "Best have a look at it," he decided suddenly, and, opening his jaws, extended the tongue. by the thing that skewed and writhed forward from beneath his eyes. His sensation was not unlike that of a man who opens his mouth and finds a snake in it. And Jerry further realized that he was now seeing with another sextet of eyes, at the end of the tongue. He was not one alien -- he was two! His primary six eyes took in the pink-and-gray horror extending ahead of him. The tongue was almost like another animal, serpentine in construction, and had two horny -- what? -- arms? -- pincer-jaws? -- at either side of the "head". They were tubular, like a cow's horns, and lay at either side of a wide slit-mouth in the tongue itself. On impulse, Jerry Swiveled the tip of the tongue back upon itself, and gazed through the six eyes around the tongue-slit-and-jaws arms at the main body of his host. Then, suddenly feeling ill, he snapped the tongue back into his mouth and shut his jaws. It had been a horrible sight. Where he'd expected to see the abdominal region of his host, just behind the thoracic section, there lay a wet, red concavity, in the midst of gaping jaws. Jerry himself was enhosted in a "tongue" of some still larger creature within that soft earthen burrow! And some remaining fragment of his host's awareness told him that the creature of whom he was the tongue was itself the tongue of yet another creature. He was a segment of some gigantic segmented worm-creature whose origin lay who-knowshow-far beneath the earth. feeling akin to mal de mer, he reprotruded his tongue and looked more carefully at it. Sure enough, just behind the "head" of the thing were two stubby growths, not yet mature. In time, Jerry realized, those growths would develop into a pair of double-elbowed front "arms" with semi-tactile tesselated pads at the base, and the curving jawsarms would drop off or be resorbed, while that "tongue" extended a "tongue" of its own. "And then what happens to my segment?" he wondered. "Do I simply lie here forever with jaws agape?" As he pondered this, there came a movement in the greenery just beyond the burrow orifice. A squiggly thing with an ill-assorted tangle of under-appendages came prancing with almost laughable ill-balance into view. Jerry, intent on observing this creature -- very like a landbound jellyfish walking clumsily upon its dangling arms -- relaxed his vigil as regards control of the host. Before he realized it, his jaws were flung wide, and that selfdetermined tongue was leaping for its prey. The horny jaws arms clamped into the viscous body of the passing creature, and the slitmouth extended upper and lower lips like pseudopods to cover the writhing, squealing victim. Then a huge lump appeared in the tongue, just behind its "head." Jerry waited with a distinct lack of relish for the still squirming "meal" to make its alimentary way back into his own esophagous. However, it did not. Just short of his lips, it halted. And after a few moments, it ceased to struggle. Annoyed, but uncertain just why he was, Jerry attempted to re-mouth his tongue. It did not come back. His jaws lay open wide, and his tongue remained where it had shot forward to grasp the tentacled creature. Something clicked in Jerry's mind, and he once more tried "seeing" out of the tongue's six eyes. He found that he still could, but dimly. It took him about three seconds to figure out his peril. own would never re-swallow his segment, which had been its tongue. It couldn't. It was dead. For the time-period in which his own segment had existed as the third segment's tongue, it had some control over it. It could extend the tongue, and could see through the eyes in the tongue. But then Jerry's segment had fed, had grown, and the parentsegment had died, as had its parent-segments before it. The thing, whatever it was, grew fast, too. That was the frightening part. Even while he thought this, he saw that the lump was gone from his tongue. But his tongue was twice the size it had been! Repeated efforts on his part to withdraw it back within his jaws met with failure. Again he tried looking through its eyes, and found his tongue-vision even dimmer. Then with a tremor of shock, he realized that his own vision was dimmer, too. His host was dying. It was no longer needed to house the tongue. Up ahead of him, the tonguepart was digging busily with those pincers, erecting for itself an extension of the burrow. Like a mole in reverse, it did not make a mound by tunneling through the soil, but by lying atop the soil and erecting itself a circular tunnel in which to await victims. Jerry's mind brought to him a vision of what this section of this unknown morass must look like, with miles and miles of curving tunnels, each housing a hideous worm-creature, of whom all segments were dead except the front one, which would in turn be dead as soon as its tongue had fed a bit and grown to mature size. Shivering within his mind, Jerry wondered how much of the forty-minute period had gone by. He had no way of estimating. His personal time-sense was overpowered by that of his host. A man within a gnat, with the lifespan of a day, would feel subjectively that he had lived a lifetime within it, although only those same forty minutes would pass by until his return to his own body, helmeted upon the couch. Each new segment might take a day to grow, or it might take a few minutes. Jerry could not tell. He could only wait until he was sent to his next Contact. There was no method of self-release from Contact. That was why survival was imperative. A flicker of movement caught his dimming vision, and he realized that his tongue had snared yet another of the jellyfish-things. The second lump was quickly absorbed as he watched, and he found he could no longer make contact at all with the six eyes of the tongue-tip. His own six were blurring, with a rapidity he was able to observe, and he knew that the life of the host could not last very long. Vaguely, he was aware that the stubby growths of his tongue had now sprouted into appendages such as his own. The tongue could no longer be called that, because it was nearly a full-grown segment. Within it, he imagined, it was growing a new tongue of its own, the faster to hasten its own eventual demise. #T'VE got to stop it," he thought. "But how can I? It won't withdraw, no matter how hard I try. And if it would, it's grown too large to fit inside my jaws any more, even if I tried cramming it in with these stupid pads of mine..." He stopped the pointless line of reasoning and lifted his pair of double-elbowed "arms" before his failing sextet of eyes. "They look strong enough, but are they?" He could feel his control slipping. His life would hang upon the success or failure of 'his experiment, but there was no time to try and reason out a better attempt at survival. Swiftly, ignoring the wriggling protests of the segment before his own, he encircled it tightly with those two-jointed "arms" and held it tight and painfully taut. It was still soft, still relatively raw from its rapid growth, and was not equipped to fend off attack from the rear. Jerry, straining terribly, ignoring the searing pain that licked his consciousness, cruelly and methodically tore out what had been his tongue. The dripping end of the thing flopped once, then lay still. And Jerry's vision, after swimming in gray haze for a moment, coalesced once more into sharp focus and he knew his host was alive again. "Whew!" he gasped, grateful to shut the great jaws once more. "It'll be tough, but I know how to survive, now. My segment's low enough on the evolutionary scale to regenerate lost parts; it will grow itself a new tongue. If I don't get lifted to a new Contact in the meantime, I'll simply tear that one out, too, and hang on until I get out of this damned thing!" Then the segment ahead of him moved, and Jerry knew cold fear. At the mouth of the burrow, one of the squiggly jellyfish-things had inserted a tentacle into the burrow and was busily ingesting the torn-out segment into a gaping hole in its underside amongst the shiny, wiggling arms. Even as he watched, it had completed its meal, and with a shiver of gustatory pleasure, readjusted its relative dimensions until it was three times its former size. "This," said Jerry, bitterly, "is one hell of an ecology. Each creature is the other's chief natural enemy!" Then his fright grew as he saw that the jellyfish -- he could no longer think of it as anything else -- was methodically ripping down the walls of the burrow, and coming for him. Frantically, Jerry tried getting at the thing with his tongue, but the raw stump within his jaws was still in the process of generating a new head-and-eyes part. A mere stub shot forward to wag futilely at the approaching enemy. Jerry shot his tesselated pads forward, trying to push and pummel the thing away, but the few blows that landed rebounded from that shiny body like pithballs bouncing from an electrostatic plate. Then the jellyfish grappled with, and held onto, one of Jerry's arms, and began calmly to tuck it into its digestive cavity. If the pad had been only lightly tactile before, it became supersensitive now, as the creature's digestive juices began to erode it into its component chemicals. Jerry felt as if he'd rammed his hand into an open wood fire. He tried to scream; nothing emerged between his jaws except that futile tongue-stump. The jellyfish, climbing in a leisurely fashion down the limb it was ingesting, flicked out a tentacle and began doing something horrible to Jerry's upper right eye. It sent waves of pain into his mind, and almost blotted out all thought, except for a maniac notion that urged Jerry to laugh at the creature's ambition. For its highly maneuverable tentacle-tip was diligently attempting to unscrew the eye. Jerry's right arm was gone. Tentacles flipped and floundered all about his head-section. The digestive cavity of the jellyfish was widening, trying to take in Jerry's head at a single swallow. He saw, with the five usable eyes remaining, a crystally concavity, the sides glinting with digestive fluid tinted beautiful emerald by the foliage out beyond its semitransparent body. Then the thing closed over his head, and the last of the eyes began to sear and sting. Jerry's mind cried out in anguish... and lightning flashed across his consciousness. White, silent lightning. Pain ceased. The time of Contact had passed. Ill agitatedly back and forth before the couch holding that still figure in its bulky helmet. The last glow of the sunset had vanished behind the trees around the clearing minutes before. Peters took three puffs from a just-ignited cigarette, then crushed the white cylinder under his heel. "Sir?" said a man at the airlock of the ship. Peters looked up swiftly, and identified the speaker as the technician for the Contact mechanism. "How's it going?" he asked, trying to keep his voice matter-offact. "First report's just come in," said the man, with a brief smile. "Information's being coded onto a new card for the roborocket index. I guess Norcriss came through the Contact all right. His life-pulse still shows on the panel. It was flickering badly for a few minutes, though. Think I should terminate?" Peters hesitated, then shook his head. "No, I guess not. They tell me there are no after-effects to even a hazardous Contact. Norcriss'll be wanting to get on with it... poor devil," he added, with a wry smile that touched only his lips, didn't reach his eyes. "Proceed, seaman." The other man nodded, and vanished within the ship... IV ' stone stretched in all direction to the horizon, pockmarked with rimless craters, seething with red liquid which flickered with dusty blue fingers of fire here and there on its surface. Every so often a pale plume of steamy white rose toward the coppery overturned bowl that was the sky. Cautiously Jerry sniffed the air. Sulphur. That was the red liquid burning in those many pits: Yellow sulphur melted into gluey scarlet pools amid the nearly invisible shimmer of its consuming fires. "Sulphur doesn't steam," Jerry thought idly, still sniffing at the fumes. "So the white plumes mean there is water, or some volatile liquid, mingled with the deposits in these pits." After a moment, he realized that he was no longer taking random sniffs of the fumes, but was actually indulging himself in a regular orgy of breathing. The smell of the sulphur was as strong and piercing as he'd ever known it, but absent was the almost simultaneous effect of raw throat, streaming eyes, and hacking cough. "The desert air must be nearly all sulphur gases," he realized. That would explain the hue of the sky, and the not-unpleasant silvery haziness of the atmosphere. "And I, if I don't keel over in a few more moments, must be a sulphur-breathing creature." Sunlight, from nearly directly overhead, was warm and comfortable upon his head, back and hindquarters. An unusually flexible feeling in the caudal region of his spine told him that he had a tail, even before he swung his huge head about for a glance at it. The body, as bronzed as the rock on which it stood, was something like a lion's, although the taloned feet, from heel to the first leg-joint, were horny and rough in appearance. They were not unlike those of a barnyard fowl, if considerably thicker and decidedly more lethal. That, save for a hard-to-see fringe of darker fur that ran up his neck toward where he felt his ears to be, was all of his body that he could view. "I wonder," he mused, "what my head looks like?" A brief turning of the problem in his mind gave him the solution to it. It wasn't the best possible way of getting an idea of his latest cranial conformations, but -- unless there was a looking-glass lying about -- it was the only way at hand. Jerry tilted his head until his eyes fell upon his shadow on the brown rock beneath him. By tilting it from one side to the other, and joining the various silhouettes in his mind by a simple application of basic gestalt, he knew what his head looked like. Very like a lion's, except that it seemed to have no external ear. A single slender silhouette that fell from the forehead region, stiletto-pointed, must be a sort of horn, unless it deciduated periodically, like a deer's antlers. appearance was interrupted by the appearance of another creature, trotting like a terrier between the fuming sulphur-pits, coming his way. It could be a twin to what he now knew he looked like, but it seemed just a bit smaller, somehow. And it was carrying something carefully in its teeth. "Should I run, fight or just ignore it?" Jerry wondered. "It doesn't seem menacing. But neither does a Pekinese till you try to pet it." He allowed his mind to retreat a fractional bit from control of his host, and watched its reactions to the newcomer. Jerry felt a surge of emotion, a sort of fond, proud, doting feeling, and knew that this approaching creature was his cub. "That's a help," he thought, relieved, and resumed control of the animal. The cub halted a short distance away, and gently set its burden upon the rock, placing a forefootful of talons upon the thing before letting go with its jaws. Under the talons, the thing moved. Jerry saw that it was a sort of squirrel, except that it had well-developed forepaws, the pads of which hinted that it undoubtedly ran quadripedally instead of climbing trees. Then the memory of the sort of terrain he was in re-crossed his mind, and Jerry felt foolish. Naturally it didn't climb trees in a region that was devoid of any vegetation whatsoever. Jerry noticed that the cub seemed to be waiting for something. He wished he could speak. He had the goofy feeling that he was supposed to say, like a man confronted by a bottle of Chateau Neuf in the hopeful hands of a wine steward, "That'll do nicely, thank you." A nod was almost universally a sign of acquiescence, so he tried that instead. The cub seemed pleased, and immediately, by lowering that forehead-horn between a pair of the talons enfolding the struggling land-squirrel, snuffed out its life with a thrust through its neck. Then it removed the talons from its prey, and took a backward step. Apparently, as the sire, Jerry was to get first bite. "Now don't go all picayune," he cautioned his digestive tract. "Come on, Jerry boy. You eat oysters while they're alive. You should be able to eat a squirrel when it's dead. Besides, if you like the smell of this lion-creature's atmosphere, you'll probably like the taste of its food. Eat hearty." With that, Jerry lowered his head and let his sharp teeth snap off a haunch of the squirrel-thing. He went to ohew it, then realized that -- unlike his prior Contact's over-equipage -- he had no tongue. This was strictly a boltyour-food host. So he tossed his head back, and managed, with a spasmodic effort of his thick muscular throat, to get the morsel into his stomach. The cub stepped forward then, bit off a chunk for itself and got it down with less apparent effort. "Well, he's had more practice at tongueless eating," Jerry consoled himself. Then, noting that the cub was standing patiently awaiting something, he swayed his head from side to side, trying to convey, "No thanks, it's all yours, kid." But the cub, its head tipped perplexedly to one side, was still watching him, waiting for something, a sort of puzzled anxiety in its gaze. Jerry reasoned that if he simply backed off, the cub would take that as a gesture of refusal to eat any more, so he took a few steps away from the squirrel-thing. A ND the cub, an almost human look of bafflement on its face, gurgled a whine from its throat. It began to bounce about on its legs like a housebroken dog that very urgently wants out. Jerry thought hard. The frantic desire of the cub for him to do something was more than mere pettishness on its part. There was real panic in its eyes, now. Jerry felt the first thrill of danger. What was he doing wrong? Or what wasn't he doing right? Mere after-you-Pop protocol could not explain the glint of fright in his cub's eyes. Or could it? Jerry tried to remain calm and think reasonably. The sire-andcub relationship was throwing him. Most animals -- in the narrow group that remained linked by relationship and affection even after the cubs matured -- ran along opposite lines. The parent went out and got food for the kids, and not vice-versa. On this planet, apparently, having a cub was the nearest thing to Social Security. "Remember, you idiot," Jerry snapped at himself, "this is a species. It is no beast rational mind you are dealing with, but an animal mind. That means that the cub's apparent protocol is instinctive, and not a matter of etiquette. And an instinct has a reason behind it, doesn't it? Only man can skip over protocol. You have to do something before the cub feels that it can do it -- and whatever it is you're not doing, it's driving the cub to distraction. You'd better go for a second helping of squirrel, and fast, or you're going to have your kid in a mental institution!" Not exactly relishing completing the meal, Jerry stepped back to the furry little corpse on the rock, and only as he came near enough to bite into it was he suddenly aware of another odor mingling with that of the sulphur fumes. Unbelieving, he stared at the spreading pool of putrescence that ringed the remains of his cub's prey. He stared, silent and amazed, as flesh and bone crumbled and dissolved there on the ground, until there was nothing there but the noissome liquid and a few tiny teeth. "Incredible!" thought Jerry. "To decompose so damned fast! But it certainly explains why Junior brought me that thing still alive and kicking. It didn't last more than a few minutes after it died -- Ugh!" The sickly retch boiled out from his stomach with a painful expansion, and he scented the same foul odor on his breath as arose from the liquid that now lay drying in the burning sunlight. "The damn thing's going rotten inside me!" he said to himself, feeling the first wave of illness shake him from horn to tail-tip. His flesh, beneath its bronzecolored fur, felt suddenly cold and greasy. Jerry knew that feeling well, from one summer when he'd eaten a sandwich with mayonnaise that had lain too long outside the refrigerator. It was the onset of ptomaine. He and the cub could be dead, in a very ugly manner, within less time than he had to await his next Contact. Or was it less time? It was subjective, wasn't it? Maybe this period would be over more quickly than the last one. Or maybe more slowly... cub. Its eyes were glazing. It was breathing in gasps through its open mouth, staggering as it tried to remain on its feet. "We're poisoned," Jerry groaned. "And it's not on purpose. That cub didn't trot here with that squirrel just to knock off its old man! There's something else has to be done, something I've overlooked. And my stupidWeakly, almost automatically, Jerry's conscious mind did the only thing possible under the circumstances. Cliche of old Peters or not, "When in doubt, black out" was the only solution. Jerry swiftly relinquished his grip on the controls, and let the lion-thing take over its own destiny. The first thing it did was rush toward the scarlet surface of the boiling sulphur pit near the cub. The muscles relaxed and showed no sign of relaxing in that flame-bound gallop, and Jerry grabbed at its mind and got back in control just as its forefeet stood on the brink of that blue-flaming red pool. "Oh, damn!" he groaned, agonized by both his fear of fire and the growing discomfort within his stomach. "Of all the creatures in the universe, I have to hit one with the lemming-instinct. This damn thing's bent on boiling itself alive if I let go. And if I stay in control, I die of ptomaine!" Jerry Norcriss wasted nearly thirty seconds feeling sorry for himself. And then he remembered something about lemmings. And also something about cubs. Lemmings, those strange little rodents that take it periodically in their heads to all go rushing into the ocean and drown, are not suicide-bent. Their ancestry is older than the continent on which they live. At one time the spot wherein they plunge into the ocean was linked with the next continent over. The migration -- for that's what it is with lemmings -- had at one time been perfectly safe. So safe that the migration of the lemmings became instinctive. And, after the continents separated, or the band of land joining them sank beneath the sea, the lemmings blithely continued their trek, and perished. Lemmings might die, but the ages-old instinct of the specie wouldn't. No animal, Jerry realized, is deliberately self-destructive. No animal but man -- who is more than animal, and can decide upon his own destiny despite what his instincts buck for. And cubs, Jerry recalled with chagrin, are not always born knowing survival-tactics. Some cubs have to be taught how to survive. And this one is still in the process of learning, and only senses that -- since it is becoming deathly ill -- something is horribly wrong. It wants its sire to show it survival, and its sire is in the hands of a nincompoop like me... the cub, his thoughts on cubs and lemmings lasted only a fractional second, so all-inclusive is the mind's apprehension of a situation. And then Jerry, feeling greatly relieved, let go of the controls once more and let the lion-thing bend and drink from the blazing sulphur-pool at its feet. Of what the host was constructed, Jerry had no idea. Its cell-structure might be high in silicates, or possibly be akin to asbestos. Whatever it was, the blazing red sulphur went down its gullet like sweet warm wine, and the decaying squirrel-thing was transformed into chemicals that were comfortably digestible. Jerry was glad to see that the cub, standing on shaky legs, was drinking, too. It seemed likely to survive its brush with death. Not a bad life, he thought. Catch a meal, take a swig of wine and then just loaf around in the sun. Nice planet... if you like sulphur, and have a bright-eyed young kid who won't make a move without your approval and example -- Jerry's ruminations were cut short by a sound of leathery wings, high in the coppery sky. Abruptly alert, he lifted his shaggy head and saw an ominous formation of Vs in the sky. They grew in size, and became the forms of gigantic airborne things, a cross between the ancient Terran pterodactyl and a sort of saber-toothed ape. Something told him these approaching things were not friendly. He turned his head to the cub, but this, apparently, was a lesson already learned, because all he saw of his scion was a disappearing blur of buttocks and tail as the cub scurried in a clumsy gallop across the plains of sunburnt rock. In another instant, Jerry was scurrying right after him, for reasons above and beyond Togetherness. The paws wouldn't manage right, so he finally dropped back a bit and let the lion-thing's brain take over the job of escape, his own mind merely going along for the ride. "But where can we hide?" he wondered, fascinated despite his fear. "Can we pull the hollow reed routine under the surface of a sulphur-pit? Or are there caves someplace in the vicinity? Or do we just run until either our legs or those simianipters' wings give out?" Then his mind got entangled with the purely empirical cogitation about the validity of coining a word like simianipters (which seemed to mean "apewinged" when the coinage he desired was "winged-apes") and his mind was bouncing so busily between this knotty problem and the chances of escape from those creatures and the puzzle of just what constituted safety from the flying things that he barely noticed the white flash of silent lightning that heralded cessation of Contact. V the technician to Peters, in the purple twilight slowly deepening to black starry night. "Slight dimming of Norcriss's life-pulse this time, not so bad as last time." Peters nodded as he ripped open a fresh packet of cigarettes. "Machine functioning properly?" "Yes, sir," the technician nodded. "Norcriss could go on at least three more Contacts with the power we have left. Shall I activate him again, sir?" "Go ahead," murmured Peters, his eyes fastened on the pallid face of the young man on the couch... VI ' Metal meant refined ores, and that in turn meant intelligence. Yet he couldn't inhabit an intelligent mind! Jerry opened his eyes and took in the scene before him. His vista was oddly diverted into vertical panels, and then, as his mind settled into full control, he knew that the panels were spaces between bars. The thought crossed his mind that bars must be vertical everywhere in the universe. Horizontal ones would hold a prisoner as well, but the origin of bars lay in primitive stockades, stakes plunged into the ground about a prisoner. Primordial tribal habits were not easily broken, even after attainment of civilization. Through the bars he saw -- well -- men. They were at least bipedal, and walked upright, and had two upper limbs with facile digits at the ends, all in keeping with the nearly universal rule of bilateral identity. Beyond that, the resemblance to man ceased. The creatures he saw were clothed in satiny uniforms, yet something about the material told him it would hold up under heavy stress. Wherever their actual bodies showed -- head and hands, mostly, though a man of apparently lesser rank was bared to the waist, working on a machine set against one wall -- they were covered with short (or cropped) white down. Jerry could detect on the heads no sign of ears or nose, but in the midst of the furry expanse of face, tiny green-glinting beads of jet were eyes, and a thin, wide blue-gray slit further down was the mouth. The hands, he noted with interest, were furred even within the palms. Or so he thought until one of the creatures, idly flexing a hand, showed Jerry that the fingers bent on double joints in either direction. There were no nails as such, but each digit on those deceptively soft-looking hands terminated in a tapering cone of some hard black material, as shiny as the eyes in those coconut-frosted faces. Jerry once more had cause to regret the impossibility of Contact within a mind of an intelligent creature. Intelligence equated with impenetrability, so far as Contact went. You could learn of an intelligent race only so much as their words and gestures and behavior cared to let you know. Jerry knew he was in a searegion, but whether over it, on it, or under it -- No. The room, so far as he could see, was windowless. It could mean that the vehicle was carrying its own atmosphere, in order to keep the riders alive, whether the outside surface of the ship were within inimical gases or liquids, or the deadly nothingness between planets. Then again, he might simply be within a fortress, or below sea-level in a ship. Jerry gave it up, and concentrated on himself, and his barred container. one-fourth the height of any of the men before it, so Jerry reckoned his own size as about one-sixth. If they were all sixfooters, then he must be about rabbit-sized. He glanced down his body and saw hard gray scales over a curving belly, with a pair of hind feet that seemed to be all phalanges and no metatarsals. From "heel" to foottip, Jerry had three long, hardlooking black spikes. "Something like a swan's foot with the webbing removed," he mused. A look at his forepaws before his face showed him three similar phalanges, though only twothirds the length of the hind ones, and having in addition a sort of stubby rudimentary thumb. His forearms were scaly, too, and possessed a wicked spur of the same black material jutting downward from the elbow. Happily, three sides of his cage were polished metal walls, so he was able to get an inkling of his facial characteristics in the warped uncertain mirror of the surfaces. He saw startled-looking eyes, round as quarters, with red irises that dilated greatly with each tilt of his head toward the shadowy rear of the cage, and narrowed the orifice about the pupil to a pinprick when he turned near the front. He seemed to be noseless, also. When he tried to sniff, nothing happened. The attempt made his head feel stuffed up, but he knew that the feeling was only inside his mind, and not an actual sensation. Jerry looked at his mouth. It was just a wide slit in his round, earless head -- no, not earless; there were auricular holes under a flange of gray scale -- just a wide slit with a glint of sharppointed bright orange teeth. "Well," he thought, "I'm at least a carnivore, possibly an omnivore, with teeth like that. The light in this room is apparently not intolerable to those fur-faces out there. So -- if the slight shooting pains in my head plus the shutting of the irises when I face into the room are any criteria -- I must be a nocturnal beast of some kind. Eyes like this would be blinded by sunlight." He decided he was, in the ecology of the fur-faces, something along the lines of a raccoon, even if his flesh were scaly as a pangolin's. "Maybe I'm a pet," he hoped. "But there's something about the atmosphere of this room -- " Something rustled and clacked against the wall of his cage. Jerry withdrew his control a fraction to let the host's mind tell him what it might be. The mind of his host was atingle with antagonism. Yet, as Jerry heard a similar movement somewhere off to the far side, the mind of his host grew suddenly tender and excited. Jerry re-assumed control, having the information he needed. His cage was one of at least three, possibly many more, housing animals like the one enhosting him. The nearby cage contained an animal of his own sex, the other contained an animal of the opposite sex, possibly a mate. Whether male or female, Jerry had no idea. He had in any Contact -- barring a procreative arrangement beyond the simple bisexual -- a fifty-fifty chance of being male. The worm had been self-generating, the unicornate lion-thing had been male. What Jerry's present sex was, he had no idea. Even on Earth, scaly creatures tended to baffle all but the experts as to sex. Jerry inspected the mind of his host for a few moments, but could find out only that it yearned for that other one in the other cage. The intensity of the yearning gave no clue if the urge were man-for-woman, woman-for-man, mother-for-child, child-for-parent or -- it was barely possible -- friend for friend. Jerry decided to ignore the yearning by taking full control of the host once more. He took stock of his circumstances. Here he was, a nocturnal carnivore, caged with many of his own kind in a vehicle moving through space or water. He was not just there for the ride, that was certain. Being delivered somewhere? No, the room beyond the bars looked little like a storage hold. Of course, these fur-faces might have alien ideas about the way a storage hold should look. Still, they seemed to be bosses of some kind. There was no mistaking the dressy look of their uniforms. A high-ranking officer might go into a storage hold, but it would be for an inspection only, and these creatures were busily doing something in the center of the room. discounting the bare-to-thewaist man working on that oddlooking machine. They stood by some waist-high object -- two with their backs to Jerry, one in profile -- very intently absorbed in something on that surface. Jerry twisted his head about, but could make out no relevant details on that surface. "They could be studying a map laid out on a table," he pondered, curiously. "Or maybe they are shooting dice at a crap table, or -- " Further conjecture was suddenly, and horribly, obviated. The man at the wall straightened up from his labors and announced something, unintelligible to Jerry (the voice was an unbroken hum that rose and fell in pitch, unarticulated into consonants or vowels), which undoubtedly meant, "She's all fixed." The fur-face in profile turned with quick attention and stepped to the machine. He pulled from its slot a thing like the cable-supported arm of a small crane terminating in a cone-shaped flexible surface, and arranged it over the thing on the table which his movement to the machine had exposed to Jerry's gaze. The thing on the table was the face of another of the whitefurred men, and Jerry suddenly knew that this was an operating room. These men were doctors, involved in surgery. The machine, so hastily repaired, was some sort of anesthetizing gadget They'd had to wait for it before proceeding. All this information Jerry worked out with only a small part of his mind; the majority of his concentration was focused upon the other thing he'd seen upon the table, strapped wide-eyed into position beside the patient. It had scales, sharp orange teeth, and might have been a rabbit-sized cross between a raccoon and a pangolin, and the wide eyes were tightly irised into discs of coppery red, with no visible pupils, under the light that overhung the operating table. "What the hell is going on here?" Jerry thought, with dismay. "Surgery? In the same room with cages full of animals? What about sanitation? What about infection? The doctors are maskless. The room is only passably clean -- certainly not scoured with green soap, alcohol or live steam. And that repairman is standing beside the table scratching his stomach!" Bewildered, yet drawn to watch with morbid fascination, Jerry ignored the pain that staring into the room brought to his eyes, and gave full attention to the proceedings. pangolin's viewpoint -- pretty ghastly. The men, muttering to each other as medics the universe over must while engaged in surgery, started snipping and plucking and sawing and clamping with lackadaisical facility upon the two bodies strapped to the table. One medic concentrated upon the man, the other upon the animal, while the anesthetist merely held the cone lightly upon the patient's face, and glanced now and then at dials upon the machine proper, as if for reassurance, or possibly to show that they were efficient and well-trained. They did not trouble to anesthetize the animal. As they shifted about in their work, Jerry got a better look at the patient. All along his chest and belly, the white fur was gone. From the edges of the empty region, Jerry could see that the fur had been scorched away. The surviving fur in the periphery was stunted and slightly carbonized. The "flesh" beneath that exposed region was smooth, excepting a few blistered spots near the center. It resembled thin, flexible green plastic, of the sort that seems to be translucent, but is actually transparent, the darkness of the color tending to make it seem opaque unless light could be placed directly behind it. Into this surface went the scalpels and clamps and pins of the medics, until they had a triangular flap lying back to expose the organs within. Jerry, well-versed in all the metabolisms available to the scientists of Earth, was completely baffled by this one. None of the internal organs was fastened to anything. The abdominal hollow of the creature was filled with a clear lemon-colored liquid. The organs just floated within the liquid. They were, Jerry noticed with amazement, not even juxtaposed with any sort of permanence. Even as the medic reached for them, they bobbed and moved about each other in the yellow fluid, as impermanent of locale as apples in a rainbarrel. Then Jerry had it. "They're colloidal!" he gasped within his mind. "A tough, flexible outer shell! The whole thing hollow from cranium to fingertip to toe, containing a liquid that acts as reagent, catalyst, suspensor and electrolyte for the mineral crystals, cell globules and chemical coagulates. These fur-faced creatures are nothing more than ambulant, intelligent hunks of protein! The whole setup's there. The lemoncolored fluid is the dispersion medium, and those 'organs' they're lifting out are the disperse-phase. But... what do they need the raccoonpangolin for?" 't'M 'ir# a". r k His fellow-creature, hissing in agony, was already a glittering, almost formless thing under the grisly tools of the medic standing over it. It was, Jerry realized, being laid belly-open with no more regard than is given a lobster's tail-muscle by the gourmet with his tiny three-pronged fork. Jerry could only watch and wonder and wait to see the use to which the animal would be put. He had not long to wait. internal fluid, a pale gray solution, was sucked out into a bulb-headed tube, much as a housewife gets the turkey-drippings from under the bird for basting. The fluid was dribbled into a row of transparent jars with calibrated sides, some getting more, some getting less. Then a drop of liquid -- a brown liquid for this one, a red for that one, and so on -- was added to each. While Jerry gazed at the scene, fighting the headache that began to grow with the brightness of the lights over the operating table, the medic captured each jar and gave it a sharp, practiced shake. And then the whole picture was clear to Jerry. "Crystal-clear," he said, with bitter humor. For that was the answer. The fur-faces were colloidal, the raccoon pangolins were crystalloid. Whatever fluid lay within the bellies of the animals, it was a super-saturate, needing but the right chemical additive before coming out of its liquid state to form the right crystals. In each jar, almost instantly after shaking, bright crystals had begun to form within the liquid. Within but a few moments, the jars were being uncapped and the medics, with neat little tongs, were lifting the crystals from the solutions and placing them within the abdominal cavity of their anesthetized patient. The flap was fastened down into place with a gadget that seemed to work on the principle of a soldering iron. As it slid along the angled edges of the incision the sides met and fused, leaving only a tiny ridge to attest to the fact of the operation. One of the medics nodded to the bare-to-the-waist creature still standing by. The man shoved over a wheeled cart, slipped the patient onto it and wheeled him out of the room through an archway barely within Jerry's field of vision. Jerry's main concern, however, was for the fate of the crystalloid creature, lying so still upon the table. One of the medics undid the straps across the body, lifted it by a hind leg and shoved it through a hinged metal flap against the wall, then stabbed a button... A red flare went off beyond the still oscillating metal flap, and Jerry had all the information he needed. A nice little incinerator, for hollowed-out corpses. "I wonder," Jerry thought dismally, "how long my forty minutes will take in this Contact!" His headache was growing worse, and it wasn't just from the lights. At that moment, a sudden lurch sent him crashing against the wall of the cage. A clamor of alarm bells began throughout the vessel. One of the medics yelled something, and threw a switch against the wall opposite that housing the anesthetizing machine. A panel slid away, revealing a large mosaic of closepacked little spheroids. As the medic twisted a dial at the base of this arrangement, some of the spheroids began to flicker whitely, while others remained dark. Then Jerry recognized it for what it was. A form of television screen, composed of individual lights instead of phosphorescing dots activated by magnetically guided electrons from a cathode. The effect was the same. A picture, sharply etched by the alternation and varying intensities of the bulbs, appeared on the mosaic-screen. Across the dream-like surging of the blackgray-and-white heavy seas in the foreground, Jerry made out an armada of strange-looking vessels coming across theocean toward wherever the pickup camera lay. Unlike Earth-vessels, they tapered inward as the sides of the vessels rose from the waters, then were abruptly truncated near what would have been a peak by a railinged area that was the deck. "Unless I'm much mistaken," thought Jerry, grimly, "I am on a ship which -- be it alone or one of many in a convoy -- is about to be attacked by those vessels out there." was right. From the approaching fleet there had come no sign of armament, no flash or flame or belch of smoke or blaze of ray, but the room he was in jolted violently, then canted crazily for a sick moment before righting itself. The alarm bells grew louder in their metallic clangor. Footsteps pounded down the corridor. The bare-to-the-waist man or another like him -- Jerry could not distinguish between the creatures -- came into the room shouting something. The surgeons shouted back and then the man raced out again. Another jolt made the room tremble, but this time it felt different, as though the room were built to take that sort of stress. Jerry recognized that his ship was in the process of firing back, with whatever strange weapons these fur-faces employed. Even as he reasoned this out, one of the enemy vessels on the screen shuddered, split into almost-matching halves and plunged beneath the waves amid much flame and confusion. The medics were not watching. One of . them had moved out of Jerry's view and now stepped back into it, carrying the wriggling form of one of the animals from the cages. As Jerry watched, the animal, its orange teeth snapping vainly at those hard black fingertips on the medic's white-furred hands, was lashed to the table in the graysmeared spot where its predecessor had perished. Then the bare-chested man was coming back into the room, wheeling a man on a cart. This one was missing fur from an arm and part of the chest area. Jerry was able to confirm his earlier theory that the hollowness of the creatures was extended throughout the flexible green body-sheaths. "Sonics," thought Jerry, all at once. "They're using sonic rays on each other. A good dose of heavy infravibration could ruin a collodial creature! The loss of the fur through subsonic friction is only a side-effect. The main damage is the breakdown of those colloid organs when the beam focuses on a man." That would explain the way the other ship had simply sundered. Artificially induced metalfatigue, by the application of controlled vibration. "Damn," thought Jerry, "this is dangerous!" Other alien vessels were visible now on that granulated "screen," heading away from the camera. At least Jerry's ship was not alone in the face of that armada. His ship was one of at least a dozen -- with more, possibly, outside the pickup range of the camera -- involved on his side of the battle. Some of them shattered silently apart and boiled into the churning waters with a violence so great that Jerry could "feel" the sound with his eyes. Apparently the medics, while anxious about the course of the fray, did not want their surgical endeavors bothered with the actual noise of the battle. Or perhaps the technology which had evolved this type of TV screen had never stumbled upon the familiar-to-Earth methods of transmitting sound by electromagnetic radiation. last?" Jerry wondered in growing concern. By his own time-sense, warped by the lifespan of his host, he felt he'd been present in that room well over an hour. And still he was captive to the environment of the scaly crystalloid raccoon pangolin creature, and doubly imperiled of survival. Even if "his" side took the lead in the struggle, many fur-faces would need this treatment -- which destroyed one of his species with each operation. Jerry did not know whether or not the animals were chosen in any special order. But his mind told him that even were his host the last so chosen, his odds for survival were dwindling fast. Assuming the wall against which his cage was stacked with the others were the same size as the wall opposite his cage -- and symmetrical construction of rooms seemed a strong likelihood -- then, judging by his cage-size, the maximum number of cages that could be so stacked was six high and four across, or twenty-four cages. Figuring one animal per cage, that left some twenty-one animals ahead of him. Possibly -- barely possibly -- this tier of cages might not be against a wall. It might be the forefront of hundreds of rows of similar stacked cages. But no medic hurrying to save a life would walk to Row ## when Row # I was still undepleted. "So if I just sit here," he thought, gloomily, "I'm bound to end up alongside a fur-face on that table. My life gone so that his may survive. 'It is a far, far better thing I do' and so on, but I don't know as I'm ready to lay down my life for a fur-face without even being given the choice, damn it! Let's figure a way out of this mess!" The ship went whooomp, suddenly. The room gave a crazy tilt again before -- rather sluggishly, Jerry noted with alarm -- righting itself. At the same moment the TV screen blanked out. "Well, there goes the camera," he thought, his insides feeling oddly cold and upset. "That may mean that if I don't die on the operating table, I may well be forced to succumb to a watery grave. Damn! When will those forty minutes be up?" He was jerked from his thoughts by the appearance of a huge white-furred hand fumbling with the catch on his cage. Hard, pointed black fingertips reached in through the opened door for him. Jerry snapped and clacked his teeth upon them in vain, as he was carried toward the strap-sided concavity beside a new fur-scorched patient on the operating table. "Use your head!" he screamed at himself. "These fur-faces aren't expecting an intelligent attack from a lab-animal! The other crystalloid creatures have the paltry instinctive self-preservation mechanism to bite at the objects gripping them, those impervious black fingertips. But you know better, right?" And with that thought, Jerry tilted his head just a bit further forward, and let his orange fangs crackle through the thin chitinous green "flesh" beneath the stiff white fur on the alien's wrist... A spurted with a satisfactory gush from the scalloped gap in the alien's forearm. Jerry landed nimbly on his hind feet on the metal floor as the shrieking medic dashed to a confrere for whatever first aid is given when a colloidal creaout. While a minor part of his mind wondered idly if they'd employ a tourniquet or just a cork, the rest of his mind concentrated on directing those forepaw-and-foot phalanges to carry him swiftly up the face of the stacked cages. There were twenty-four of them, all right, against the wall. He perched precariously on the top, in the cageroof-to-ceiling space that was too small for another layer of the same. As the fur-face medic fiddled around with the wrist of the man Jerry had bitten (it was the raccoonpangolin medic, of course), the anesthetist dragged a small stool over to the base of the stacked cages and began climbing up after him. "Oh, hell," thought Jerry, cowering weakly against the wall. "If I had a piece of chalk or a charcoal stick I could write something. Or draw a picture, maybe, on the ceiling. Then they'd know I was intelligent, and -- They'd probably use me anyhow. The middle of a battle is no time for writing learned scientific papers about new zoological 'finds.' " Those black fingertips were coming for him, too carefully for a repeat wrist-crunching performance. If he were taken this time the bearer would handle with care. Jerry skittered and scrabbled for the corner near the wall, hoping to engage the anesthetist in a game of you-climb-up-atfhis-point-and-I-run-back-to-fhafpoint. But the fur-face had too long a reach to make it practical. As Jerry cowered helplessly, those black fingertips gripped him about the throat with strangling force. It apparently made no difference if he died on the top of the cages or under the scalpel. He could only fend feebly with his paws at the creature as he was lifted down to the table and set into the concavity, dizzy and sick. "White lightning?" he begged. "Come on, white lightning! Please, test, be over. How long can forty minutes last?" Then the room gave a horrible shudder and all the lights went out. Jerry, not yet strapped in place, heard the cries of the medics, and then the terrifying sound of rushing seas in the invisible corridor as the room canted swiftly onto its side. This time it did not right itself. A thick, falling-elevator feeling bunched up inside Jerry. He knew that the warship was plunging beneath the heaving surge outside. He scrambled about on the floor -- no, it was the wall now -- almost brained by the crashing bulk of the operating table. He kept jumping futilely upward, hoping somehow to escape to the corridor and get outside the ship before all that water got inside this room. Then icy tons of fluid crashed down upon him, flattening him against the wall beneath his feet. The cries of the medics were suddenly gurgles, then a brief, faintly heard sound of bubbling. Jerry, trying to swim against the swirling pressures of the flood that now lifted him from against the wall and spun him end over end, could hold his breath no longer. In despair, he felt his jaws widen and take in the chill liquid in which he was whirled. It went in without gagging him, and did not come out. Not through his mouth, at any rate. It came out through long slots just in front of those auricular vents in his head. Gills! Jerry was an amphibian. Webbing, hitherto folded away, appeared on his feet. "I'll be damned," he sighed, with weary relief. Then he paddled determinedly about in the utter blackness until he found a cage lying on its side, the door sprung open. Jerry got inside, closed the door until it caught as well as its broken catch would allow and settled himself for a nice wait. "At least I won't have to worry about getting gobbled by a natural underwater enemy," he figured. He had to wait another subjective hour before the silent flash of white lightning lifted him out of his third, and last, Contact on Arcturus Beta. ters, removing the bulky helmet with care. Jerry sat up and nodded, blinking his eyes as he adjusted to his body once more. He was hard-pressed not to start testing his own joints and lungs and limbs for knowledge, and had to forcibly remind himself that this frail shell was his "normal" body. Now to await the technician's analysis of the data. Jerry, waving off Peters' hand, outstretched in automatic offer of assistance, sat up wearily on the edge of the couch. After a deep breath he got to his feet. Within the ship, the data-analyzer clattered busily. "Some hot coffee, sir?" asked Peters, helpfully. Jerry was annoyed at the effort it cost him just to talk. "That will go nicely, Captain," he managed. The technician leaned out the airlock door, his homely face split in a grin. "No problem with the aliens, sir," he said to Peters. "Amiability indeterminate, but their basic weapon is infrasonics. They're built like hard bubbles, sure suckers for bayonets or bullets. I don't think, with sonicshields, we'll have much trouble with them." Peters, in the process of pouring Jerry's coffee, shrugged. "Well, we're not here to make trouble, either. The roborocket reported that the aliens live either at sea or at least always in coastal regions. They shouldn't object to our starting a settlement this far inland." "And," said Jerry, suddenly, as he took the coffee and sipped at the hot brown liquid, "I suppose those worm-creatures and the horned lions are to be eliminated?" The technician dropped his eyes. "We can't have new colonists getting pulled into those burrows, or impaled on those horns, sir." He handed the report, translated by the machine into readable English, to Peters. The pilot scanned the sheets, and nodded. "Seems easy enough," he said agreeably. "Those jellyfish-things, and the flying apes are similar to species encountered before. They'll respond to simple gunfire. Removal of the worm-things will be automatic, once their source of sustenance is destroyed." Jerry continued to sip his coffee and made no comment. "As for the lion-things," Peters continued, "I doubt we'll have to attack them directly, since their digestive mechanism calls for sulphur from those pits. When we cap off the pits, or dry them up, to clear the air for the incoming colonial wave, that should starve them out within a week." "Less than that," Jerry remarked emotionlessly. "Being hungry they'll eat, regardless. Then, unable to go on to the next step in the process -- the ingestion of the sulphur -- they'll die of food-poisoning. Simple, neat and efficient." Peters smiled and gripped Jerry's hand with his own. "We have you to thank for the information, sir," he said, in obvious admiration. "At least we know we won't have to fight the intelligent aliens. We'll have the central regions; they'll have the coasts and seas." "And -- " Jerry pointedly withdrew his strong fingers from the pilot's hand -- "what happens when Mankind decides to spread out? When the colony grows awhile, it's bound to want some of the coastal regions. Then what?" ble, then said, "I don't think that's likely to happen, sir. Not for some time, at any rate." "But it will happen," said Jerry, somberly. "It always happens. Earthmen meet new races, arbitrate a hit, sign pacts and move in. Then, when they're settled pretty well, they ask the other race to move out. It's almost a truism, Captain, that Earth can't comprehend anyone but an Earthman having any rights to survival." The tight-lipped technician exchanged a look with Peters, then ducked back inside the ship. Adverse commentary about a Space Zoologist was dangerous. But no one had yet been broken in rank or discharged for a facial expression. "Well, sir, you're entitled to your opinion, of course," said Peters, wishing he had the moral courage to duck inside after the technician and avoid conversing with Norcriss. The job was done; why not forget it? Jerry, sensing the other man's discomfort, dropped the topic, and contented himself with sitting there in the increasing darkness, sipping his coffee. After a minute or two, Peters gratefully mumbled his excuses and went into the ship. Jerry sighed, finished his coffee, then began to walk toward the edge of the clearing, to watch the stars glow more brightly than they could in the interference of the ship's lights illuminating the camp. When he reached the rim of the wooded area, he stopped, then lay on his back in the cool grass and watched the night sky, his thoughts rueful ones and his inner amusement ironic. People always were puzzled about how a Space Zoologist could stand being a creature other than a human being. And Space Zoologists always were puzzled about how a human being could stand being part of that conquering race called man. The twinkling stars distracted Jerry. Lying there watching them, he wondered to which of their planets he would be sent next, and to what dangers he might -- in his new bodies -- be subjected. Neither he nor any of his fellow zoologists had any real apprehensions about death in an alien body. Fear of death, yes. That was normal enough, and inescapable in any creature. But he had no fear of perishing as a crawling thing, or multilegged thing, or soaring winged thing. To Jerry Norcriss -- indeed, to any Space Zoologist -- to die like a man was a dubious honor at best. The Pick of Galaxy's Best Here are five anthologies selected from Galaxy's top stories. Take your pick from: The World That Couldn't Be (# novelettes by Matheson, Knight, deCamp, Simak, etc.); Bodyguard and Others (Grimm, Simak, Wallace, Galouye, Pohl); Five Galaxy Short Novels; The Third Galaxy Reader; The Fourth Galaxy Reader. # each. Galaxy, #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Send me postpaid the books I have checked at # each:  The World That Couldn't Be  Bodyguard and Others  Five Galaxy Short Novels  #d Galaxy Reader  #th Galaxy Reader Name Address City Zone State I enclose  They lived in spaceborne bubbles and feared the Earth -- but not as much as old Earth feared them! V  I m mm ram arrived, Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts. The Big Igloo, as the large living-Globe was more often called, was not really made of glass. It was sealingsilk, a cheap flexible material almost as transparent as fused silica and ten thousand times tougher -- quite tough enough to hold a breathable pressure of air in the hard vacuum of space. Beyond the spherical wall loomed the other and somewhat smaller balloons of the Beat Cluster, connected to each other and to the Big Igloo by three-footdiameter cylindrical tunnels of triple-strength tinted sealingsilk. In them floated or swam about an assemblage of persons of both sexes in informal dress and undress and engaged in activities suitable to freefall: sleeping, sunbathing, algae tending ("rocking" spongy cradles of water, fertilizer and the green scummy "guk"), yeast culture (a rather similar business), reading, studying, arguing, stargazing, meditation, spacesquash (played inside the globular court of a stripped balloon), dancing, artistic creation in numerous media and the production of sweet sound (few musical instruments except the piano depend in any way on gravity). Attached to the Beat Cluster by two somewhat larger sealingsilk tunnels and blocking off a good eighth of the inky, starspeckled sky, was the vast trim aluminum bulk of Research Satellite One, dazzling now in the untempered sunlight. It was mostly this sunlight reflected by the parent satellite, however, that now illuminated Fats Jordan and the other "floaters" of the Beat Cluster. A huge sun-quilt was untidily spread (staying approximately where it was put, like all objects in freefall) against most of the inside pf the Big Igloo away from the satellite. The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side, as turnedover edges and corners showed. Similar "Hollywood Blankets" protected the other igloos from the undesirable heating effects of too much sunlight and, of course, blocked off the sun's disk from view. Fats, acting as Big Daddy of the Space Beats, received the eviction order with thoughtful sadness. "So we all of us gotta go down there?" Earth, which looked about as big as a basketball held at armslength, poised midway between the different silvers of the sunquilt margin and the satellite. Dirty old Terra was in half phase: wavery blues and browns toward the sun, black away from it except for the tiny nebulous glows of a few big cities. "That is correct," the proctor of the new Resident Civilian Administrator replied through thin lips. The new proctor was a lean man in silvery gray blouse, Bermuda shorts and sockassins. His hair was precision clipped -- a quarter-inch blond lawn. He looked almost unbearably neat and hygienic contrasted with the sloppy long-haired floaters around him. He almost added, "and high time, too," but he remembered that the Administrator had enjoined him to be tactful -- "firm, but tactful." He did not take this suggestion as including his nose, which had been wrinkled ever since he had entered the igloos. It was all he could do not to hold it shut with his fingers. Between the overcrowding and the loathsome Chinese gardening, the Beat Cluster stank. And it was dirty. Even the satellite's precipitrons, working over the air withdrawn from the Beat Cluster via the exhaust tunnel, couldn't keep pace with the new dust. Here and there a film of dirt on the sealingsilk blurred the starfields. And once the proctor thought he saw the film crawl. Furthermore, at the moment Fats Jordan was upside-down to the proctor, which added to the latter's sense of the unfitness of things. Really, he thought, these beat types were the curse of space. The sooner they were out of it the better. "Man," Fats said mournfully, "I never thought they were going to enforce those old orders." "The new Administrator has made it his first official act," the proctor said, smiling leanly. He went on, "The supply rocket was due to make the down-jump empty this morning, but the Administrator is holding it. There is room for fifty of your people. We will expect that first contingent at the boarding tube an hour before nightfall." Fats shook his head mournfully and said, "Gonna be a pang, leavin' space." His remark was taken up and echoed by various individuals spotted about in the Big Igloo. #T T'S going to be a dark time," said Knave Grayson, merchant spaceman and sun-worshipper. Red beard and sheathknife at his belt made him look like a pirate. "Do you realize the nights average twelve hours down there instead of two? And there are days when you never see Sol?" "Gravity yoga will be a trial after freefall yoga," Guru Ishpingham opined, shifting from padmasana to a position that put his knees behind his ears I in a fashion that made the proctor look away. The tall, though presently much folded and intertwined, Briton was as thin as Fats Jordan was stout. (In space the number of thins and fats tends to increase sharply, as neither overweight nor under-musculature carries the penalties it does on the surface of a planet.) "And mobiles will be trivial after space stabiles," Erica Janes threw under her shoulder. The husky sculptress had just put the finishing touches to one of her three-dimensional free montages -- an arrangement of gold, blue and red balls -- and was snapping a stereophoto of it. "What really hurts," she added, "is that our kids will have to try to comprehend Newton's Three Laws of Motion in an environment limited by a gravity field. Elementary physics should never be taught anywhere except in freefall." "No more space diving, no more water sculpture, no more vacuum chemistry," chanted the Brain, fourteen-year-old fugitive from a down below. "No more space pong, no more space pool," chimed in the Brainess, his sister. (Space pool, on the inner surface of a stripped balloon. The balls, when properly cued, follow it by reason of their slight centrifugal force.) "Ah well, we all knew this bubble would someday burst," Gussy Friml summed up, pinwheeling lazily in her black leotards. (There is something particularly beautiful about girls in space, where gravity doesn't tug at their curves. Even fat folk don't sag in freefall. Luscious curves become truly remarkable.) "Yes!" Knave Grayson agreed savagely. He'd seemed lost in brooding since his first remarks. Now as if he'd abruptly reached conclusions, he whipped out his knife and drove it through the taut sealingsilk at his elbow. The proctor knew he shouldn't have winced so convulsively. There was only the briefest whistle of escaping air before the edgetension in the sealingsilk closed the hole with an audible snap. "-proctor. "Just testing," he explained. "I knew a roustabout who lost a foot stepping through sealingsilk. Edge-tension cut it off clean at the ankle. The foot's still orbiting around the satellite, in a brown boot with needle-sharp hobnails. This is one spot where a boy's got to remember not to put his finger in the dike." At that moment Fats Jordan, who'd seemed lost in brooding tative chord on his guitar. "Gonna be a pang "Leavin' space," (he sang) "Gonna be a pang!" The proctor couldn't help wincing again. "That's all very well," he said sharply, "and I'm glad you're taking this realistically. But hadn't you better be getting a move on?" Fats Jordan paused with his hand above the strings. "How do you mean, Mister Proctor?" he asked. "I mean getting your first fifty ready for the down jump!" "Oh, that," Fats said and paused reflectively. "Well, now, Mr. Proctor, thafs going to take a little time." The proctor snorted. "Two hours!" he said sharply and, grabbing at the nylon line he'd had the foresight to trail into the Beat Cluster behind him (rather like Theseus venturing into the Minotaur's probably equally smelly labyrinth), he swiftly made his way out of the Big Igloo, hand over hand, by way of the green tunnel. The Brainess giggled. Fats frowned at her solemnly. The giggling was cut off. To cover her embarrassment the Brainess began to hum the tune to one of her semi-private songs: "Eskimos of space are we "In our igloos falling free. "We are space's Esquimaux, "Fearless vacuum-chewing hawks." Fats tossed Gussy his guitar, which set him spinning very slowly. As he rotated, precessing a little, he ticked off points to his comrades on his stubby, ripebanana-clustered fingers. "Somebody gonna have to tell the research boys we're callin' off the art show an' the ballet an' terminatin' jazz Fridays. Likewise the Great Books course an' Saturday poker. Might as well inform our friends of Edison and Convair at the same time that they're gonna have to hold the #D chess and #D go tournaments at their place, unless they can get the new Administrator to donate them our quarters when we leave -- which I doubt. I imagine he'll tote the Cluster off a ways and use the igloos for target practice. With the self-sealin' they should hold shape a long time. "But don't exactly tell the research boys when we're goin' or why. Play it mysterioso. "Meanwhile the gals gotta start sewin' us some ground clothes. Warm and decent. And we all gotta get our papers ready for the customs men, though I'm afraid most of us ain't kept nothin' but Davis passports. Heck, some of you are probably here on Nansen passports. "An' we better pool our credits to buy wheelchairs and dollies groundside for such of us as are gonna need 'em." Fats looked back and forth dolefully from Guru Ishpingham's interwoven emaciation to his own hyper-portliness. had approached the Big Igloo from the direction of the satellite, entered the folds of a limp blister, zipped it shut behind him and unzipped the slit leading inside. The blister filled with a dull pop and the diver pushed inside through the lips. With a sharp effort he zipped them shut behind him, then threw back his helmet. "Condition Red!" he cried. "The new Administrator's planning to ship us all groundside! I got it straight from the Police Chief. The new A's taking those old deportation orders seriously and he's holding the -- " "We know all about that, Trace Davis," Fats interrupted him. "The new A's proctor's been here." "Well, what are you going to do about it?" the other demanded. "Nothin'," Fats serenely informed the flushed and shockheaded diver. "We're comply in'. You, Trace -- " he pointed a finger -- "get out of that suit. We're auctionin' it off 'long with all the rest of our unworldly goods. The research boys'll be eager to bid on it. For fun-diving our spacesuits are the pinnacle." A carrot-topped head thrust out of the blue tunnel. "Hey, Fats, we're broadcasting," its freckled owner called accusingly. "You're on in thirty seconds!" "Baby, I clean forgot," Fats said. He sighed and shrugged. "Guess I gotta tell our downside fans the inglorious news. Remember all my special instructions, chillun. Share 'em out among you." He grabbed Gussy Friml's black ankle as it swung past him and shoved off on it, coasting toward the blue tunnel at about one fifth the velocity with which Gussy receded from him in the opposite direction. "Hey, Fats," Gussy called to him as she bounced gently off the sun-quilt, "you got any general message for us?" "Yeah," Fats replied, still rotating as he coasted and smiling as he rotated. "Make more guk, chillun. Yeah," he repeated as he disappeared into the blue tunnel, "take off the growth checks an' make mo' guk."  floating beside the spherical mike of the Beat Cluster's shortwave station. The bright instruments and heads of the Small Jazz Ensemble were all clustered in, sounding a last chord, while their foreshortened feet waved around the periphery. The half dozen of them, counting Fats, were like friendly fish nosing up to the single black olive of the mike. Fats had his eyes on the Earth, a little more than half night now and about as big as the snare drum standing out from the percussion rack Jordy had his legs scissored around. It was good, Fats thought, to see who you were talking to. "Greetings, groundsiders," he said softly when the last echo had come back from the sealingsilk and died in the sun-quilt. "This is that ever-hateful voice from outer space, the voice of your old tormentor Fats Jordan, advertising no pickle juice." Fats actually said "advertising," not "advertisin' " -- his diction always improved when he was on vacuum. "And for a change, folks, I'm going to take this space to tell you something about us. No jokes this time, just tedious talk. I got a reason, a real serious reason, but I ain't saying what it is for a minute." He continued, "You look mighty cozy down there, mighty cozy from where we're floating. Because we're way out here, you know. Out of this world, to quote the man. A good twenty thousand miles out, Captain Nemo. "Or we're up here, if it sounds better to you that way. Way over your head. Up here with the stars and the flaming sun and the hotcold vacuum, orbiting around Earth in our crazy balloons that look like a cluster of dingy glass grapes." The band had begun to blow softly again, weaving a cool background to Fat's lazy phrases. "Yes, the boys and girls are in space now, groundsiders. We've found the cheap way here, the back door. The wild ones who yesterday Would have headed for the Village or the Quarter or Big Sur, the Left Bank or North Beach, or just packed up their Zen Buddhism and hit the road, are out here now, digging cool sounds as they fall round and round Dear Old Dirty. And folks, ain't you just a little glad we're gone?" THE band coasted into a phrase that was like the lazy swing of a hammock. "Our cold-water flats have climbed. Our lofts have gone aloft. We've cut our pads loose from the cities and floated them above the stratosphere. It was a stiff drag for our motorcycles, Dad, but we made it. And ain't you a mite delighted to be rid of us? I know we're not all up here. But the worst of us are. "You know, people once pictured the conquest of space entirely in terms of military outposts and machine precision." Here Burr's trumpet blew a crooked little battle cry. "They didn't leave any room in their pictures for the drifters and dreamers, the rebels and no-goods (like me, folks!) who are up here J r i 'right now, orbiting with  few  pounds of oxygen and"'aT couple of gobs of guk (and a few cockroaches, sure, and maybe even a few mice, though we keep a cat) inside a cluster of smelly old balloons. "That's a laugh in itself: the antique vehicle that first took man off the ground also being the first to give him cheap living quarters outside the atmosphere. Primitive balloons floated free in the grip of the wind; we fall free in the clutch of gravity. A balloon's a symbol, you know, folks. A symbol of dreams and hopes and easily-punctured illusions. Because a balloon's a kind of bubble. But bubbles can be tough." Led by Jordy's drums, the band worked into the Blue Ox theme from the Paul Bunyan Suite. "Tough the same way the hemlock tents and sod huts of the American settlers were tough. We got out into space, a lot of us did, the same way the Irish and Finns got west. They built the long railroads. We built the big satellites." Here the band shifted to the Axe theme; "I was a welder myself. I came into space with a bunch of other galoots to help stitch together Research Satellite One. I didn't like the barracks they put us in, so I. made myself a little private home ; f sealingsilk, a material whicl was used only for storing liquids and gases -- nobody'd even thought of it for human habitation. I started to meditate there in my bubble and I came to grips with a few half-ultimates and I got to like it real well in space. Same thing happened to a few of the other galoots. You know, folks, a guy who's wacky enough to wrestle sheet aluminum in vacuum in a spider suit may very well be wacky enough to get to really like stars and weightlessness and all the rest of it. "When the construction job was done and the big research outfits moved in, we balloon men stayed on. It took some wangling but we managed. We weren't costing the Government much. And it was mighty convenient for them to have us around for odd jobs. squatter cluster. The space roustabouts and roughnecks came first. The artists and oddballs, who have a different kind of toughness, followed. They got wind of what our life was like and they bought, bummed or conned their way up here. Some got space research jobs and shifted over to us at the ends of their stints. Others came up on awards trips and managed to get lost from their parties and accidentally find us. They brought their tapes and instruments with them, their sketchbooks and typers; some even smuggled up their own balloons. Most of them learned to do some sort of space work -- it's good insurance on staying aloft. But don't get me wrong. We're none of us workcrazy. Actually we're the laziest cats in the cosmos: the ones who couldn't bear the thought of carrying their own weight around every day of their lives! We mostly only toil when we have to have money for extras or when there's a job that's just got to be done. We're the dreamers and funsters, the singers and studiers. We leave the 'to the stars by hard ways' business to our friends the space marines. When we use the 'ad astra per aspera' motto (was it your high school's too?) we change the last word to asparagus -- maybe partly to honor the green guk we grow to get us oxygen (so we won't be chiseling too much gas from the Government) and to commemorate the foodyeasts and the other stuff we grow from our garbage. "What sort of life do we have up here? How can we stand it cooped up in a lot of stinking balloons? Man, we're free out here, really free for the first time. We're floating, literally. Gravity can't bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it's only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else -- it's the right environment for them. "Anybody can get into space if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream. "That's our story, folks. We took the space road because it was the only frontier left. We had to come out, just because space was here, like the man who climbed the mountain, like the first man who skin-dove into the green deeps. Like the first man who envied a bird or a shooting star." The music had softly soared with Fat's words. Now it died with them and when he spoke again it was without accompaniment, just a flat lonely voice. "But that isn't quite the end of the story, folks. I told you I had something serious to impart -- serious to us anyway. It looks like we're not going to be able to stay in space, folks. We've been told to get out. Because we're the wrong sort of people. Because we don't have the legal right to stay here, only the right that's conveyed by a dream. "Maybe there's real justice in it. Maybe we've sat too long in the starbird seat. Maybe the beat generation doesn't belong in space. Maybe space belongs to soldiers and the civil service, with a slice of it for the research boys. Maybe there's somebody who wants to be in space more than we do. Maybe we deserve our comedownance. I wouldn't know. "So get ready for a jolt, folks. We're coming back! If you don't want to see us, or if you think we ought to be kept safely cooped up here for any reason, you just might let the President know. "This is the Beat Cluster, folks, signing off." away from each other, Fats saw that the little local audience in the sending balloon had grown and that not all new arrivals were fellow floaters. "Fats, what's this nonsense about you people privatizing your activities and excluding research personnel?" a grizzle-haired stringbean demanded. "You can't cut off recreation that way. I depend on the Cluster to keep my electron bugs happily abnormal. We even mention it downside in recruiting personnel -- though we don't put it in print." "I'm sorry, Mr. Thoms," Fats said. "No offense meant to you or to General Electric. But I got no time to explain. Ask somebody else." "Whatdya mean, no offense?" the other demanded, grabbing at the purple shorts. "What are you trying to do, segregate the squares in space? What's wrong with research? Aren't we good enough for you?" "Yes," put in Rumpleman of Convair, "and while you're doing that would you kindly throw some light on this directive we just received from the new A -- that the Cluster's off-bounds to us and that all dating between research personnel and Cluster girls must stop? Did you put the new A up to that, Fats?" "Not exactly," Fats said. "Look, boys, let up on me. I got work to do." "Work!" Rumpleman snorted. "Don't think you're going to get away with it," Thoms warned Fats. "We're going to protest. Why, the Old Man is frantic about the #D chess tournament. He says the Brain's the only real competition he has up here." (The Old Man was Hubert Willis, guiding genius of the open bevatron on the other side of the satellite.) "The other research outfits are kicking up a fuss too," Trace Davis put in. "We spread the news like you said, and they say we can't walk out on them this way." "Allied Microbiotics," Gussy Friml said, "wants to know who's going to take over the experiments on unshielded guk societies in freefall that we've been running for them in the Cluster." Two of the newcomers had slightly more confidential messages for Fats. Allison of Convair said, "I wouldn't tell you, except I think you've guessed, that I've been using the Beat Cluster as a pilot study in the psychology of anarchic human societies in freefall. If you cut yourself off from us, I'm in a hole." "It's mighty friendly of you to feel that way," Fats said, "but right now I got to rush."  bert, satellite police chief, drew Fats aside and said, "I don't know why you're giving research a false impression of what's happening, but they'll find out the truth soon enough and I suppose you have your own sweet insidious reasons. Meanwhile I'm here to tell you that I can't spare the men to police your exodus. As you know, you old corner-cutter, this place is run more like a national park than a military post, in spite of its theoretical high security status. I'm going to have to ask you to handle the show yourself, using your best judgment." "We'll certainly work hard at it, Chief," Fats said. "Hey, everybody, get cracking!" "Understand," Gombert continued, his expression very fierce, "I'm wholly on the side of officialdom. I'll be officially overjoyed to see the last of you floaters. It just so happens that at the moment I'm short-handed." "I understand," Fats said softly, then bellowed, "On the jump, everybody!" But at sunset the new A's proctor was again facing him, rightside-up this time, in the Big Igloo. "Your first fifty were due at the boarding tube an hour ago," the proctor began ominously. "That's right," Fats assured him. "It just turns out we're going to need a little more time." "What's holding you up?" "We're getting ready, Mr. Proctor," Fats said. "See how busy everybody is?" A half dozen figures were rhythmically diving around the Big Igloo, folding the sun-quilt. The sun's disk had dipped behind the Earth and only its wild corona showed, pale hair streaming across the star-fields. The Earth had gone into its dark phase, except for the faint unbalanced halo of sunlight bent by the atmosphere and for the faint dot-dot-dot of glows that were the Los Angeles-Chicago-New York line. Soft yellow lights sprang up here and there in the Cluster as it prepared for its short night. The transparent balloons seemed to vanish, leaving a band of people camped among the stars. The proctor said, "We know you've been getting some unofficial sympathy from research and even the MPs. Don't depend on it. The new Administrator can create special deputies to enforce the deportation orders." "He certainly can," Fats agreed earnestly, "but he don't need to. We're going ahead with it all, Mr. Proctor, as fast as we're able. F'rinstance, our groundclothes ain't sewed yet. You wouldn't want us arriving downside half naked an' givin' the sat' a bad reputation. So just let us work an' don't joggle our elbow." The proctor snorted. He said, "Let's not waste each other's time. You know, if you force us to do it, we can cut off your oxygen." lence. Then from the side Trace Davis said loudly, "Listen to that! Listen to a man who'd solve the groundside housing problem by cutting off the water to the slums." But Fats frowned at Trace and said quietly only, "If Mr. Proctor shut down on our air, he'd only be doing the satellite a disservice. Right now our algae are producing a shade more oxy than we burn. We've upped the guk production. If you don't believe me, Mr. Proctor, you can ask the atmosphere boys to check." "Even if you do have enough oxygen," the proctor retorted, "you need our forced ventilation to keep your air moving. Lacking gravity convection, you'd suffocate in your own exhaled breath." "We got our fans ready, battery driven," Fats told him. "You've got no place to mount them, no rigid framework," the proctor objected. "They'll mount on harnesses near each tunnel mouth," Fats said imperturbably. "Without gravity they'll climb away from the tunnel mouths and ride the taut harness. Besides, we're not above hand labor if it's necessary. We could use punkahs." "Air's not the only problem," the proctor interjected. "We can cut off your food. You've been living on handouts." "Right now," Fats said softly, "we're living half on yeasts grown from our own personal garbage. Living well, as you can see by a look at me. And if necessary we can do as much better than half as we have to. We're farmers, man." "We can seal off the Cluster," the proctor snapped back, "and set you adrift. The orders allow it." Fats replied, "Why not? It would make a very interesting day-to-day drama for the groundside public and for the food chemists -- seeing just how long we can maintain a flourishing ecology." The proctor grabbed at his nylon line. "I'm going to report your attitude to the new Administrator as hostile," he sputtered. "You'll hear from us again shortly." "Give him our greetings when you do," Fats said. "We haven't had opportunity to offer them. And there's one other thing," he called after the proctor, "I notice you hold your nose mighty rigid in here. It's a waste of energy. If you'd just steel yourself and take three deep breaths you'd never notice our stink again." r ' , HE proctor bumped into the tunnel side in his haste to be gone. Nobody laughed, which doubled the embarrassment. If they'd have laughed he could have cursed. Now he had to bottle up his indignation until he could discharge it in his report to the new Administrator. But even this outlet was denied him. "Don't tell me a word," the new Administrator snapped at his proctor as the latter zipped into the aluminum office. "The deportation is canceled. I'll tell you about it, but if you tell anybody else I'll downjump you. In the last twenty minutes I've had messages direct from the Space Marshal and the President We must not disturb the Beat Cluster because of public opinion and because, although they don't know it, they're a pilot experiment in the free migration of people into space." ("Where else, Joel," the President had said, "do you think we're going to get Earth and achieve a balanced existence, using their own waste products? Besides, they're a floating labor pool for the satellites. And Joel, do you realize Jordan's broadcast is getting as much attention as the Russian landings on Ganymede?") The new Administrator groaned softly and asked the Unseen, "Why don't they tell a new man these things before he makes a fool of himself?" Back in the Beat Cluster, Fats struck the last chord of "Glow Little Glow Worm." Slowly the full moon rose over the satellite, dimming the soft yellow lights that seemed to float in free space. The immemorial white globe of Luna was a little bit bigger than when viewed from Earth and its surface markings were more sharply etched. The craters of Tycho and Copernicus stood out by reason of the bright ray systems shooting out from them and the little dark smudge of the Mare Crisium looked like a curled black kitten. Fats led those around him into a new song: "Gonna be a pang "Leavin' space, "Gonna be a pang! "Gonna be a pang "Leavin' space, "So we won't go!"      The big news for December is Poul Anderson, beginning a major science-fiction novel that we're proud to present, uncut, as a two-part serial: The Day After Doomsday. It's Anderson's latest, and not far from being his best ever -- which, as every science-fiction reader well knows, is very good indeed. But there's more. Three fine novelettes, including Algis Budrys with Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night and Margaret St. Clair with a classificationdefying exercise in wit and whimsy. An Old Fashioned Bird Christmas. Plus Willy Ley... plus the usual lineup of shorts... plus (we hope; if the type will stretch to hold it) an unusual article. It's going to be a memorable issue, and that's a promise. Say, isn't this a good time to subscribe? again that there is no substitute for scientific knowhow, hence this column devoted entirely to Junior Education: Caidin. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc. The limited payloads of our rockets have necessitated the Mercury Project approach to our first spaceflight. Despite safeguards and fail-safe devices, our attempts are marginal. Caidin's copiously illustrated book fills in the information gap about America's seven astronauts, the men who hold the key to our chances. They are so remarkably able that the results of the tests awed the medical and technical testers. "Some of them actually kept up with (the tests) and they aren't designed to be kept up with!" ence Kay. Harper  Brothers. Behind each invention or achievement are countless hours of tedious preparation. Newton "stood on the shoulders of giants." Einstein theorized about data observed by others. Our seven astronauts will go into space armed with equipment and knowledge garnered by hundreds of "space volunteers" like Col. Stapp of rocket sled fame; Capt. Simons of the #-mile-high balloon flight and scores of anonymous test pilots, centrifuge riders, ejection seat testers, etc., etc. Kay's informative book is about unsung men who make the headlines possible. by Jules Bergman. Hanover House. The book, an extravagantly illustrated account of the X-# and its predecessors, refers in title to the total powered flight time of the rocket craft. It is also the story of the men who fly in (and occasionally die in) these barriershattering flying laboratories. As an inspirational story of hard work, research, experimentation and pure bravery, this book is tough to beat. Shelton. Little, Brown  Co. "The story of Cape Canaveral," reads the subtitle of this book which chronicles the growth of America's prime rocket-launch area from a snake's paradise to the most exciting piece of realestate in the western hemisphere. It is also the life story of many rockets -- accident-prone Vanguard, reliable Jupiter, Thor, Atlas, Titan, Polaris. The Life and Time author, witness to almost all of the shoots, has written a breezy, interest-sustaining story. Prentice Hall, Inc. Marine Lt. Col. Rankin made headlines when he bailed out of a supersonic jet ten miles up without a pressure suit and then descended through a thunderstorm. The return to earth took forty minutes instead of ten, but a frail human being survived the unbelievable violence of the thunder, lightning and deluge. makes one speculate upon what extremes of physical anguish the new breed of spacemen will have to endure. Brace  Co. Firing a rocket # miles from a submerged nuclear submarine to a pinpointed target seems a near-impossibility. So it is -- but it only took the Navy # V # years to accomplish the impossible. Of prime importance was a shrewd decision to switch in midstream from the liquid fuel Army Jupiter missile to the solid fuel Polaris. The authors present a segment of missile history that should serve as inspiration to all good damn-the-red-taper-ers. Richardson. McGraw Hill Book Co., Inc. Dr. Richardson, formerly of Palomar and Mt. Wilson, employing the question-and-answer technique, poses questions that laymen ask most: "What makes the sun shine?" "What created the planets?" "What is the farthest the eye can see?" The good doctor has written an eminently readable and informative book. Leonard de Vries. The Macmillan Co. Author de Vries's bated-breath treatment of his subject enhances its already enormous appeal. These chapter headings convey the tone: "A Horrible Suspicion;" "The Greatest Race of All Time;" "Leviathan in Chains;" "A Cracker Full of Surprises." Pollack. E. P. Dutton  Co., Inc. The stupendous strides of technology have made necessary this revision of a # career guide. Industries and products undreamt of # years ago have opened up job opportunities equally new. Pollack's fine book details opportunities each field offers, some background fill-in, necessary training and remunerative averages. One message comes in loud and clear -- advanced study, to and including Ph.D., pays off! by Andrew Bluemle. E. P. Dutton  Co. Westinghouse sponsors the annual Science Talent Search. It also offers a program for all honor high school students in the Pittsburgh area, a series of lectures by members of the Westinghouse Research Labs which were adapted for this excellent, provocative book. The biographical vignettes heading each chapter should also serve as inspiration for aspiration and emulation. by R. W. Chambers and A. S. Payne. Chas. Scribner's Sons. Biochemistry, the chemistry of living things, is a young science. Why? Because man had to get over the fever of discovery of the vast new world of micro-organisms before he could begin to ask for answers to: Why and how do the chemical compounds called Life react and reproduce? The book is a fine combination of provocative subject and intelligent presentation. don Irwin. The Viking Press. Irwin's special interest is the English system; its origins, changes and present complexity. He presents the beautiful simplicity of decimal-system measurement in Anglo-Saxon England a millenium ago and the succeeding chaos created by Norman conquest and foreign trade. In his fascinating book, Irwin, like Asimov, proves that the subject of weights and measures can be as engrossing as any facet of human development. C. M. Franzero. The John Day Co., Inc. That the Etruscans are a people of mystery is peculiar because Etruria, even more than Greece, is the cornerstone of Roman civilization. Rome took over intact the Etruscan system of government, army organization, civil engineering. The founder of the Tarquinian dynasty of Roman kings was Etruscan. However, the infamous "Rape of Lucrece" touched off the destruction, in repugnance, by the Romans of every available Etruscan relic. Franzero's minutely detailed book makes the utmost of myth and conjecture. Leonard Cottrell. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Archeology being scientific detection raised to the heights, it is hardly surprising that Cottrell's exciting book reads like a detective story. Instead of tracking down culprits, however, Egyptologists uncover cadavers buried for millenia. In one fantastic discovery, over thirty Pharaohs were found in a common tomb where they had been hastily reburied more than # years ago to save them from the ravages of tomb robbers! Jacques Piccard and Robert S. Dietz. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Auguste Piccard, inventor of the bathyscaph, wrote phlegmatically in Earth, Sea and Sky of his adventures in stratosphere and abyss. His son, Jacques, pilot on the deep dives undertaken by Trieste, is much more demonstrative in his account, particularly of touchdown in the deepest hole on earth, # feet down in Challenger Deep. Adventure lies in Inner as well as Outer Space. Methodical Tom Edison made notes on every experiment he ever conducted. During his life-time, he filled # notebooks of # pages each! In this fascinating book prepared by the Edison Foundation, the reader can follow the footsteps of the great man, in some cases from actual facsimiles of the original notes, and using simple materials. tin Gardner. The Viking Press. First impression is that Gardner has written an ordinary book of stunts. However, each puzzler is just that; it makes the reader ponder even though no special experimental equipment is needed. Chemistry, astronomy, topology, psychology, etc. are contributors to the mind-teasers. Hoffman. Westminster Press. An indisputably fit subject for a science-fiction juvenile is the planning, building and firing of a home-made, six-foot, solid-propellant rocket by an untutored backwoods boy. These basic facts are mere background however, for Mrs. Hoffman's warm, tender story of the guts and sheer determination of the orphaned, loveless youth and the understanding he encounters. Rating (#-#):  I  # ami Raymond Ahrashkin. Whittlesey House. Danny's adventures are always based on a solid science foundation, once the authors' usually wild main premise is digested. Currently Danny, in cooking a plastic mixture of Professor Bullfinch's, employer of Danny's widowed mother, achieves a transparent plastic of super-strength -- but through the sheer neglect of his duties. In short order, jovial Prof. Bullfinch, acidulous Dr. Grimes, Danny and friends Irene and Joe are off to explore the ocean bottom in a transparent, super-strength bathyscaphe. Rating (#-#) i # tie spy #I Til He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent -- including my date with my girl! come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency -- well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say. It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken. But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it -- to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning -- right after the egg yolk -- and invited myself down to her place. "Ten o'clock," she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an oresled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up. Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened -- I'd broken a shoe lace -- she refused to speak to me for four days. And then the elevator didn't come.  somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg -- I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry -- and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window -- one hundred and fiftythree stories straight down to slag -- I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one. I had a Whimsical Approach: "Honey, I see there's a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three." And I had a Romantic Approach: "Darling, I can't live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?" I even had a Straightforward Approach: "Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend that time with than you." Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P -- Non-Permanent, No Progeny. So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more than a blurted, "Will you marry me?" and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning aircons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten. Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time. But then the elevator didn't come. I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't understand it. The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixtyseventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour. I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late. It didn't arrive. I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late? Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted. Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late. No matter. It didn't arrive. I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three. I got some more letters that got through to a hurried-looking female receptionist. "My name is Rice!" I bellowed. "Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and -- " "The-elevator-is-disconnected." She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it. It only stopped me for a second. "Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don't get disconnected!" I told her. "We will resume service as soonaspossible," she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen. I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, 'Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?" "I-am-sorry-sir-but-that -- " "Stop," I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses. But now she was actually looking at me. I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, "I would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life." She blinked, open-mouthed. "Ruined your life?" "Precisely." I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. "I was on my way," I explained, "to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?" She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time. "In every way but one," I continued. "She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o'clock. Tm late " I shook my fist at the screen. "Do you realize what you've done, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she marry me, she won't even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!" "Sir," she said tremulously, "please don't shout." "I'm not shouting!" "Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your -- " "You understand?" I trembled with speechless fury. She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. "We're not supposed to give this information out, sir," she said, her voice low, "but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is -- " she leaned even closer to the screen -- "there's a spy in the elevator." II I just gaped at her. "A -- a what?" "A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out." "Well -- but why should there be any problem about getting him out?" "He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them." That sounded impossible. "He aims the elevator?" "He runs it up and down the shaft," she explained, "trying to crush anybody who goes after him." "Oh," I said. "So it might take a while." She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, "They're afraid they'll have to starve him out." "Oh, no!" She nodded solemnly. "I'm terribly sorry, sir," she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said, "We-will-resume-service-as-soonas-possible." Click. Blank screen. For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked! What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected? Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me -- or for most other people either, I suspected -- than occasional ore-sleds that didn't return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what manly Gentleman's War. Project History, when I was fifteen years old -- had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as World Wars One, Two, and Three. The rise of the Projects, acresult of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before #, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By #, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects (also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, babysitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot oresleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion. And the Treaty of Oslo. It seems there was a powerstruggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed. Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles. However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask. And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that. -the elevator. When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them. I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda. I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late. He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out. I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway. I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old. Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was the use of stairs? (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them. And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps. Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open. It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty. I read them. They said: I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught be spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed. As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun. Ill one else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft. Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed. Unfortunately, he recovered first. He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. "Don't move!" he whispered harshly. "Don't make a sound!" I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him. He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thinlipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment. His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, "Where do they go?" I had to clear my throat before I could speak. "All the way down," I said. "Good," he said -- just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army! But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, "Where do you live?" "One fifty-three," I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him. "All right," he whispered. "Go on." He prodded me with the gun. And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, "I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?" I nodded. "All right. Let's go." We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside. Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips. I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, "Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to "kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you." "You'll never get away," I told him. "The whole Project is alerted." "You let me worry about that," he said. He licked his lips. "You got any chico coffee?" "Yes." "Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water." "I only have my day's allotment," I protested. "Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner." "Two cups is fine," he said. "One for each of us." grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains. As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then, 'What do you do for a living?" I thought fast. "I'm an ore-sled dispatcher," I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it. Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati -- talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came. He was quiet for a moment. "What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?" I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much. 'When they come back," he said. "How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?" "Of course not," I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. "All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building." "I know that," he said impatiently. "But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?" "No. Why should we?" "To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped." "For what? Who cares about that?" He frowned bitterly. "The same answer," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your, caves and you're ready to stay in them forever." I looked around at my apartment. "Rather a well-appointed cave," I told him. "But a cave nevertheless." He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. "Don't you ever wish to get Outside?" Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. "Outside? Of course not!" "The same thing," he grumbled, "over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millenia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?" "I have no idea," I told him. "I'll tell you this," he said belligerently. "A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again." He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. "Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not." He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. "Listen, you," he snapped. "Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it." He glared as though daring me to doubt it.-doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely. "So what happened?" he demanded, and immediately answered himself. "I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. That's what he did!" To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, "Here's your coffee." "Put it on the table," he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy. I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, "What did they tell you I was? A spy?" "Of course," I said. He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. "Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?" He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the, maniac would return. "I -- I wouldn't know, exactly," I stammered. "Military equipment, I suppose." "Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it." "The defenses -- " I started. "The defenses," he interrupted me, "are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None." "If you say so," I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy. "Your people send out spies, too, don't they?" he demanded. "Well, of course." "And what are they supposed to spy on?" "Well -- " It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. "They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects." "And do they find any indications, ever?" "I'm sure I don't know," I told him frostily. "That would be classified information." "You bet it would," he said, with malicious glee. "All right, if that's what your spies are doing, and if I'm a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?" "I don't follow you," I admitted. "If I'm a spy," he said impatiently, "then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project." I shrugged. "If that's your job," I said, "then that's your job." He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. "That's not my job, you blatant idiot!" he shouted. "I'm not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!" r HE maniac had returned, in full force. "All right," I said hastily. "All right, whatever you say." He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, "Bah!" and dropped back into the chair. He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. "All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I had found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?" I stared at him. "That's impossible!" I cried. "We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!" "How do I know that?" he demanded. "It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?" "Ah hah!" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. "Now, then," he said. "If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you?" I shook my head, dumbfounded. "I can't answer a question like that," I said. "How do I know what they're thinking?" "They're human beings, aren't they?" he cried. "Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?" "Now, wait a minute -- " "No!" he shouted. "You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm not a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am." I waited, looking as attentive as possible. "I come," he said, "from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me." The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic. "The radiation level," he went on, "is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least." He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. "The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects." And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all. "I'm a trained atomic engineer," he went on. "In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it. the test anyway, and I was caught at it. For my punishment, I was banned from the Project. They kicked me out, telling me if I thought it was safe Outside I could live Outside. And if it really was safe, I could come back and tell them. Except that they also made it clear that I would be shot if I tried to get back in, because I would be carrying deadly radiation." He smiled bitterly. "They had it all their own way," he said. "But it is safe out there, I'm living proof of it. I lived Outside for five months. And gradually I realized I had to tell others. I had to spread the word that Man could have his world back. I didn't dare try to get back into my own Project; I would have been recognized and shot before I could say a word. So I came here." He paused to finish the cup of chico that I should have had with lunch. "I knew better," he continued, "than to simply walk into the building and announce that I came from Outside. Man has an instinctive distrust for strangers anyway; the Projects only intensify it. Once again, I would have been shot. So I've been working in a more devious way. I snuck into the Project -- not a difficult thing for a man with no metal on his person, no radiation shield cocooning him -- and for the last two months I've been wandering around the building, talking with people. I strike up a conversation. I try to plant a few seeds of doubt about the deadliness of Outside, and I hope that at least a few of the people I talk to will begin to wonder, as I once did." Two months! This spy, by his own admission, had been in the Project two months before being detected. I'd never heard of such a thing, and I hoped I'd never hear of such a thing again. "Things worked out pretty well," he said, "until today. I said something wrong -- I'm still not sure what -- and the man I was talking to hollered for Army, shouted I was a spy." He pounded the chair arm. "But I'm not a spy! And it's the truth, Outside is safe!" He glared suddenly at the window. "Why've you got that drape up there?" "The window broke down," I explained. "It's stuck at transparent." "Transparent? Fine!" He got up from the chair, strode across the room, and ripped the drape down from the window. I cowered away from the sunglare, turning my back to the window. "Come over here!" he shouted. When I didn't move, he snarled, "Get up and come over here, or I swear I'll shoot!" And he would have, it was plain in his voice. I got to my feet, hesitant, and walked trembling to the window, squinting against the glare. "Look out there," he ordered. "Look!" I looked. IV and nausea. Far and away and far, nothing and nothing. Only the glare, and the high blue, and the far far horizon, and the broken gray slag stretching out, way down below. "Do you see?" he demanded. "Look down there! We're so high up, it's hard to see, but look for it. Do you see it? Do you see the green? Do you know what that means? There are green things growing again Outside! Not much yet. It's only just started back, but it's begun. The radiation is down. Plants are growing again." The power of suggestion. And, of course, the heightened sensitivity caused by the double threat of a man beside me carrying a gun that yawning aching expanse of nothing beyond the window. I nearly fancied that I did see faint specks of green. "Do you see it?" he asked me. "Wait," I said. I leaned closer to the window, though every nerve in me wanted to leap the other way. "Yes!" I said. "Yes, I see it! Green!" He sighed, a long painful sigh of thanksgiving. "Then now you know," he said. "I've been telling you the truth. It is safe Outside." And my lie worked. For the first time, his guard was completely down. I moved like a whirlwind. I leaped, and twisted his arm in a hard hammerlock, which caused him to cry out and drop the gun. That was wrestling. Then I turned and twisted and dipped, causing him to fly over my head and crash to the floor. That was judo. Then I jabbed one rigid forefinger against a certain spot on the side of his neck, causing the blood in his veins to forever stop its motion. That was karati.   men had finished questioning me, it was three o'clock in the afternoon, and I was five hours late. The Army men corroborated my belief that the man had been a spy, who had apparently lost his mind when cornered in the elevator. Outside was still dangerous, of course, they assured me of that. And he'd been lying about having been here two months. He'd been in the Project less than two days. Not only that, the Army men told me they'd found the radiation-proof car he'd driven, and in which he had hoped to drive back to his own Project once he'd discovered all our defenses. Despite the fact that I had the most legitimate excuse for tardiness under the roof, Linda refused to forgive me for not making our ten o'clock meeting. When I asked her to marry me she refused, at length and descriptively. But I was surprised and relieved to discover how rapidly I got over my heartbreak. This was aided by the fact that once the news of my exploit spread, there were any number of girls more than anxious to get to know me better, including the well-cleavaged young lady from the Transit Staff. After all, I was a hero. They even gave me a medal. -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field -- Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # .  Name... j Address Zone State  You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the Vte'A-kns Trad Mark (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-Aon i v Lens, #x# inch Art Board, # tubes Oil ifl. # # Paint, Oil, Turpentine, # Brushes, # page In struction Book. Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Vis-a-lens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna.    Galaxy #I  #  The Day After Doomsday great new novel by poul anderson You can paint an original picture like this, using real artists' oil paints... the Vte'A-kns m  m Trade Mark (overlay) way your side, this entirely new and original method shows you in actual size and color how and what to do. You compare your progress, step-by-step, with the easybefore you realize it, you are actually painting. A choice of subjects available -- get yours now -- Price includes Vis-ALens, #x# inch Art Board, # tubes Oil Paint, Oil, Turpentine, # Brushes, # page Instruction Book. only .# Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck  Co. and leading department stores, coast to coast. If your local stores do not have it, ask them to order an assortment. Address inquiries to: Visalens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. i be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands ofmenand woraenwho privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness , of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe L.N . R. ! Scribe L N.R. i San Jose, California J Please send me the free book, The Mastery I i of Life, which explains how I may learn to  i use my faculties and powers of mind. I I I Name i I , Address i WSe Rosicrucians City Galaxy by Poul Anderson M-#I in Canes Venatici. This galaxy, as large as our own, is so distant that its light reach us. by Algis Budrys by Margaret St. Clair by Miriam Allen deFord by Joy Leache by R. A. Lafferty by Theodore L. Thomas by Willy Ley Publisher Managing Editor Science Editor Art Director bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) S# per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. w -- our cover, our new Poul Anderson serial and even the time of year -- make us take a look at the sky. Anderson has the remarkable capacity to think like a scientist and write like a poet. What interests him he can manage to translate so as to evoke interest in the reader; and what interests him in The Day Alter Doomsday is the incredible size of our galactic lens. Start with a single statistic: There are some # stars in our galaxy alone. people owned the stars and divided them share-and-sharealike, each man, woman and child would possess nearly thirty. We can see, under the best conditions, some two or three thousand of them with the naked eye; for every star we can see, more than visible -- by reason of distance, by reason of intervening opaque clouds of gas or by reason of sheer numbers, so that they are lost in the general brightness we call the Milky Way. With all those nearby companions (we haven't even touched other galaxies, farther away), it seems a sure bet that we have neighbors in the universe. Almost certainly many of these stars have planets; we have hope that at least a few of these planets may harbor life... intelligent life, life of something resembling our own kind. And even a "few" might mean many thousands. A LL in all, the inhabited, civilized worlds in our own galaxy may well be numbered in the So why, one asks at once, haven't any of the neighbors dropped in for a call? Well, perhaps they have. The Earth is old, and organized record-keeping goes back only a few moments of its long day. Quite a sizable settlement of Sirians or Arcturans could have been built on North America between glaciations, not so very many thousand years ago. There wasn't a human eye on the continent to see it, and its physical traces might easily have been buried under the debris of the Ice  much doubt that we are being visited even now, for that matter. Yet we're easy enough to overlook. Earth is, after all, only one tiny planet circling one insignificant sun far out on one of the gassy, pinwheel arms of the galaxy. Sol is itself an outpost. Were we in the dense star clusters around the center we might have had visitors every second Sunday afternoon. The Day After Doomsday gives us a view of what our galaxy may be like, from the point of view of the races who live in it: countless worlds, more interested in their own immediate problems than in fruitless wanderings into remote skies. There isn't any reason why they should exert themselves to visit Earth, after all. And even if we assume them as curious as the Polynesians or as trade-hungry as a Marco Polo, exploration between stars is a slow, tedious task. The distances are not merely linear. It is only some six-hundred-odd light-years from here to Rigel; but the volume of space a Rigellian would have to survey to stand an even chance of running into Earth light-years, encompassing many thousands of stars. From the vicinity of Rigel, indeed, hardly any of the stars in our sky are visible at all to the eye. Our own sun is at best a telescopic object, and even Sirius is no longer within the capabilities of the unaided eye. And yet Rigel is a near neighbor! There's plenty of room in our galaxy for many races, no doubt about it. In all that space, the vainest human peacock can hardly imagine himself to be unique. So, as Anderson says, we're in all likelihood not alone. We are merely out of touch... this is a good season for planet-watching. Of the five bright planets Saturn is one of the more difficult to spot by accident. Hanging in the same part of the sky for years on end, it doesn't betray its presence -- as the faster, closer-tothe-sun planets do -- by popping from constellation to constellation. It moves, all right. But it moves slowly. For the past three and a half years Saturn has been in the constellation Sagittarius. About a year ago it was joined there by Jupiter himself. Slowly as Jupiter rolls, he still overtakes Saturn; Jupiter is catching up and in another few months will pass. Meanwhile the presence of these two bright objects in the same part of the sky makes it easy to locate them. There aren't any bright stars anywhere near them. If you look to the south and west, not long after dark, not very high in the sky, you'll have no trouble picking them out. The brighter of the two is Jupiter, hugest of planets, monarch of more than a dozen moons. The less bright, but still brighter than any star nearby, is ringed Saturn, a few degrees to Jupiter's west. Give them a few more months and Saturn will have moved over into the next constellation, Capricornus, Jupiter close behind. Around February they will almost seem to touch. Meanwhile the faster planets -- Venus and Mars -- will have skipped through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpius to catch up with the slow giants. In February all four of them will be in the same part of the sky. A brilliant spectacle... but, unfortunately, not for us Earthmen to see. The trouble is that a still brighter object will be in the same point on the ecliptic -- namely the sun itself. It will take a spaceship to see this particular four-planet conjunction... So don't wait till February. If you want a good look at, at least, Jupiter and Saturn, your chance is now. ""I K#, the #th son of two very ordinary white laboratory rats, surveyed his world. He was no more able than any other rat to possess articulate speech, or to use his paws as hands. All he had was a brain which, relative to its size, was superior to any rat's that had hitherto appeared on Earth. It was enough. In the first week of gestation his embryo had been removed to a more suitable receptacle than the maternal womb, and his brain had been stimulated with orthedrin, maxiton and glutamic Wf Orthedrin, maxiton and glutamic acid -- they were the prescription that made him king of his world! s mgr acid. It had been continuously irrigated with blood. One hemisphere had been activated far in excess of the other, since previous experiments had shown that increased lack of symmetry between the hemispheres produced superior mentality. The end-result was an enormous increase in brain-cells in both hemispheres. His brain showed also a marked increase in cholinesterase over that of other rats. SK#, in other words, was a super-rat. The same processes had been applied to all his brothers and sisters. Most of them had died. The few who did not, failed to show the desired results, or showed them in so lopsided and partial a manner that it was necessary to destroy them. All of this, of course had been mere preparation and experimentation with a view to later developments in human subjects. What SK#'s gods had not anticipated was that they would produce a creature mentally the superior, not only of his fellowrats, but also, in some respects, of themselves. He was a super-rat: but he was still a rat. His world of dreams and aspirations was not human, but murine. What would you do if you super-rat, caged in a laboratory? SK# did it. What human beings desired was health, freedom, wealth, love, and power. So did SK#. But to him health was taken for granted; freedom was freedom from cages, traps, cats, and dogs; wealth meant shelter from cold and rain and plenty to eat; love meant a constant supply of available females. But power! It was in his longing for power that he most revealingly displayed his status as super-rat. Therefore, once he had learned how to open his cage, he was carefully selective of the companions -- actually, the followers -- whom he would release to join his midnight hegira from the laboratory. Only the meekest and most subservient of the males -- intelligent but not too intelligent -- and the most desirable and amiable of the females were invited. Once free of the cages, SK# had no difficulty in leading his troop out of the building. The door of the laboratory was locked, but a window was slightly open from the top. Rats can climb up or down. Like a silver ribbon they flowed along the dark street, SK#, looking exactly like all the rest, at their head. Only one person in the deserted streets seems to have noticed them, and he did not understand the nature of the phenomenon. Vinson started housekeeping in what had once been a mansion. It was now a rundown eyesore. It had belonged to Norah Vinson's great-aunt Martha, who had left it to her in her will. The estate was in litigation, but the executor had permitted the Vinsons to settle down in the house, though they weren't allowed yet to sell it. It had no modern conveniences, and was full of rooms they couldn't use and heavy oldfashioned furniture; but it was solidly built and near the laboratory where he worked as a technician, and they could live rentfree until they could sell the house and use the money to buy a real home. "Something funny happened in the lab last night," Philip reported, watching Norah struggle with dinner on the massive coal-stove. "Somebody broke in and stole about half our experimental animals. And they got our pride and joy." "The famous SK#?" Norah asked. "The same. Actually, it wasn't a break-in. It must have been an inside job. The cages were open but there were no signs of breaking and entering. We're all under suspicion till they find out whodunit." Norah looked alarmed. "You too? What on earth would anybody want with a lot of laboratory rats? They aren't worth anything, are they -- financially, I mean?" "Not a cent. That's why I'm sure one of the clean-up kids must have done it. Probably wanted them for pets. They're all tame, of course, not like wild rats -- though they can bite like wild rats if they want to. Some of the ones missing are treated, and some are controls. It would just be a nuisance if they hadn't taken SK#. Now they've got to find him, or do about five years' work over again, without any assurance of as great a success. To say nothing of letting our super-rat loose on the world." "What on earth could, even a super-rat do that would matter -- to human beings, I mean?" "Nobody knows. Maybe that's what we're going to find out." J denly with a loud scream. Philip got the gas lighted -- there was no electricity in the old house -- and held her shaking body in his arms. She found her breath at last long enough to sob: "It was a rat! A rat ran right over my face!" "You're dreaming, darling. It's because I told you about the theft at the lab. There couldn't be rats in this place. It's too solidly built, from the basement up." He finally got her to sleep again, but he lay awake for a long time, listening. Nothing happened. Rats can't talk, but they can communicate. About the time Norah Vinson dropped off after her frightened wakening, SK# was confronting a culprit. The culprit was one of the liberated males. His beady eyes tried to gaze into the implacable ones of SK#, but his tail twitched nervously and if he bared his teeth it was more in terror than in fight. They all knew that strict orders had been given not to disturb the humans in the house until SK# had all his preparations made. A little more of that silent communication, and the rat who had run over Nor ah's face knew he had only two choices -- have his throat slit or get out. He got. "What do you know?" Philip said that evening. "One of our rats came back." "By itself?" "Yeah. I never heard of such a thing. It was one of the experimental ones, so it was smarter than most, though not such an awful lot. I never heard of a rat with homing instinct before. But when we opened up this morning, there he was, sitting in his cage, ready for breakfast." "Speaking of breakfast, I thought I asked you to buy a big box of oatmeal on your way home yesterday. It's about the only thing in the way of cereal I can manage on that old stove." "I did buy it. Don't you remember? I left it in the kitchen." "Well, it wasn't there this morning. All I know is that you're going to have nothing but toast and coffee tomorrow. We seem to be out of eggs, too. And bacon. And I thought we had half a pound left of that cheese, but that's gone too." "Good Lord, Norah, if you've got that much marketing to do, can't you do it yourself?" "Sure, if you leave the car. I'm not going to walk all that way and back." So of course Philip did do the shopping the next day. Besides, Norah had just remembered she had a date at the hairdresser's. " was still uncurled and she was in hysterics. One of the many amenities great-aunt Martha's house lacked was a telephone; anyway, Norah couldn't have been coherent over one. She cast herself, shuddering and crying, into Philip's arms, and it was a long time before he got her soothed enough for her to gasp: "Philip! They wouldn't let me out!" "They? Who? What do you mean?" "The -- the rats! The white rats. Theymade a ring around me at the front door so I couldn't open it. I ran to the back and they beat me there and did the same thing. I even tried the windows but it was no use. And their teeth -- they all -- I guess I went to pieces. I started throwing things at them and they just dodged. I yelled for help but there's nobody near enough to hear. Then I gave up and ran in our bedroom and slammed the door on them, but they left guards outside. I heard them squeaking till you drove up, then I heard them run away." Philip stared at her, scared to death. His wife had lost her mind. "Now, now, sweetheart," he said soothingly, "let's get this straight. They fired a lab boy today. They found four of our rats in his home. He told some idiotic story of having 'found' them, with the others missing, running loose on the street that night, but of course he stole them. He must have sold the rest of them to other kids; they're working on that now." Norah blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She had regained her usual calm. "Philip Vinson," she said coldly, "are you accusing me of lying, or just of being crazy? I'm neither. I saw and heard those rats. They're here now. What's more, I guess I know where that oatmeal went, and the eggs and bacon too, and the cheese. I'm -- I'm a hostage! "I don't suppose," she added sarcastically, "that your SK# was one of the ones they found in the boy's home?" "No, it wasn't," he acknowledged uneasily. A nasty little icy trickle stole down his spine. "All right, Norah, I give in. You take the poker and I'll take the hammer, and we'll search this house from cellar to attic." "You won't find them," said Norah bitterly. "SK#'s too smart. They'll stay inside the walls and keep quiet." "Then we'll find the holes they went through and rout them out." They didn't, of course. There wasn't a sign of a rathole, or of a rat. They got through dinner and the evening somehow. Norah put all the food not in cans inside the old-fashioned icebox which took the place of a refrigerator. Philip thought he was too disturbed to be able to sleep, but he did, and Norah, exhausted, was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow. His last doubt of his wife's sanity vanished when, the next morning, they found the icebox door open and half the food gone. announced. "Come on, Norah, put your coat on. You're coming with me to the lab and we'll report what's happened. They'll find those creatures if they have to tear the house apart to do it. That boy must have been telling the truth." "You couldn't keep me away," Norah responded. "I'll never spend another minute alone in this house while those dreadful things are in it." But of course when they got to the front door, there they were, circling them, their teeth bared. The same with the back door and all the first floor windows. "That's SK# all right, leading them," Philip whispered through clenched jaws. He could smash them all, he supposed, in time, with what weapons he had. But he worked in the laboratory. He knew their value to science, especially SK#'s. Rats couldn't talk, he knew, and they couldn't understand human speech. Nevertheless, some kind of communication might establish itself. SK#'s eyes were too intelligent not to believe that he was getting the gist of talk directed to him. "This is utterly ridiculous," Philip grated. "If you won't let us out, how can we keep bringing food into the house for you? We'll all starve, you and we together." He could have sworn SK# was considering. But he guessed the implicit answer. Let either one of them out, now they knew the rats were there, and men from the laboratory would come quickly and overwhelm and carry off the besiegers. It was a true impasse. "Philip," Norah reminded him, "if you don't go to work, they know we haven't a phone, and somebody will be here pretty soon to find out if anything's wrong." But that wouldn't help, Philip reflected gloomily; they'd let anyone in, and keep him there. And he thought to himself, and was careful not to say it aloud: rats are rats. Even if they are #th generation laboratory-born. When the other food was gone there would be human meat. He did not want to look at them any more. He took Norah's arm and turned away into their bedroom. They stayed there all day, too upset to think of eating, talking and talking to no conclusion. As dusk came on they did not light the gas. Exhausted, they lay down on the bed without undressing. After a while there was a quiet scratching at the door. "Don't let them in!" Norah whispered. Her teeth were chattering. "I must, dear," he whispered back. "It isn't 'them,' I'm sure of it -- it's just SK# himself. I've been expecting him. We've got to reach some kind of understanding." "With a rat?" "With a super-rat. We have no choice." Philip was right. SK# alone stood there and sidled in as the door closed solidly again behind him. How could one communicate with a rat? Philip could think of no way except to pick him up, place him where they were face to face, and talk. "Are your -- followers outside?" he asked. A rodent's face can have no expression, but Philip caught a glance of contempt in the beady eyes. The slaves were doubtless bedded down in their hideaway, with strict orders to stay there and keep quiet. "You know," Philip Vinson went on, "I could kill you, very easily." The words would mean nothing to SK#; the tone might. He watched the beady eyes; there was nothing in them but intelligent attention, no flicker of fear. "Or I could tie you up and take you to the laboratory and let them decide whether to keep you or kill you. We are all much bigger and stronger than you. Without your army you can't intimidate us." There was, of course, no answer. But SK# did a startling and touching thing. He reached out one front paw, as if in appeal. Norah caught her breath in astonishment. free," she said in a choked whisper. "You mean you're not afraid of him any more?" "You said yourself he couldn't intimidate us without his army." Philip thought a minute. Then he said slowly: "I wonder if we had the right to do this to him in the first place. He would have been an ordinary laboratory rat, mindless and contented; we've made him into a neurotic alien in his world." "You're not responsible, darling; you're a technician, not a biochemist." "I share the responsibility. We all do." "So what? The fact remains that it was done, and here he is -- and here we are." The doorbell rang. Philip and Norah exchanged glances. SK# watched them. "It's probably Kelly, from the lab," Philip said, "trying to find out why I wasn't there today. It's just about quitting time, and he lives nearest us." Norah astonished him. She picked up SK# from the bedside table where Philip had placed him, and hid him under her pillow. "Get rid of whoever it is," she said defensively. Philip stared for an instant, then walked briskly r downstairs. He was back in a few minutes. "It was Kelly, all right," he told her. "I said you were sick and I couldn't leave you to phone. I said I'd be there tomorrow. Now what?" SK#'s white whiskers emerged from under the pillow, and he jumped over to the table again. Norah's cheeks were pink. 'When it came to the point, I just couldn't," she explained shamefacedly. "I suddenly realized that he's a person. I couldn't let him be taken back to prison." "Aren't you frightened any more?" 'Not of him." She faced the super-rat squarely. "Look," she said, "if we take care of you, will you get rid of that gang of yours, so we can be free too?" "That's nonsense, Norah," Philip objected. "He can't possibly understand you." "Dogs and cats learn to understand enough, and he's smarter than any dog or cat that ever lived." "But -- " The words froze on his lips. SK# had jumped to the floor and run to the door. There he stood and looked back at them, his tail twitching. "He wants us to follow him," Norah murmured. There was no sign of a hole in the back wall of the disused pantry. But behind it they could hear squeaks and rustlings. SK# scratched delicately at almost invisible cracks. A section of the wall, two by four inches, fell out on the floor. "So that's where some of the oatmeal went," Norah commented. "Made into paste." "Sh!" SK# vanished through the hole. They waited, listening to incomprehensible sounds. Outside it had grown dark. stood to one side of the long line that pattered through the hole. The two humans stared, fascinated, as the line made straight for the back door and under it. SK# stayed where he was. 'Will they go back to the lab?" Norah asked. Philip shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Some of them may... I feel like a traitor." "I don't. I feel like one of those people who hid escaped war prisoners in Europe." When the rats were all gone, they turned to SK#. But without a glance at them he reentered the hiding-place. In a minute he returned, herding two white rats before him. He stood still, obviously expectant Philip squatted on his heels. He picked up the two refugees and looked them over. "Both females," he announced briefly. "And both pregnant." "Is he the father?" "Who else? He'd see to that." "And will they inherit his -- his -- " "His 'super-ratism'? That's the whole point. That's the object of the entire experiment. They were going to try it soon." The three white rats had scarcely moved. The two mothers-to-be had apparently fallen asleep. Only SK# stood quietly eying the humans. When they left him to find a place where they could talk in private he did not follow them. "It comes down to this," Philip said at the end of half an hour's fruitless discussion. 'We promised him, or as good as. He believed us and trusted us. "But if we keep to our promise we're really traitors -- to the human race." "You mean, if the offspring should inherit his brain-power, they might overrun us all?" "Not might. Would." "So -- " "So it's an insoluble problem, on our terms. We have to think of this as a war, and of them as our enemies. What is our word of honor to a rat?" "But to a super-rat -- to SK# -- " As if called, SK# appeared. Had he been listening? Had he understood? Neither of them dared to voice the question aloud in his presence. "Later," Philip murmured. "We must eat," said Norah. "Let's see what's left in the way of food." they weren't very hungry after all. There was enough left over to feed the three rats. But they had evidently helped themselves earlier; they left the scraps untasted. Neither of the humans guessed what else had vanished from the pantry shelves -- what, when he had heard enough, SK# had slipped away and sprinkled on the remaining contents of the icebox, wherever the white powder would not show. They did not know until it was too late -- until both of them lay writhing in their last spasms on their bedroom floor. By the time the house was broken into and their bodies found, SK# and his two wives were far away, and safe... And this, children, is the true account, handed down by tradition from the days of our great Founder, of how the human race ceased to exist and we took over the world. for your information tence to a letter I recently came across while sorting out old papers. It came to me from China fourteen years ago (and a date stamp shows that I answered it then.) The letter also bears the notation "check Konrad Kyeser," but because of a move from Washington, D. C., to New Jersey which took place soon after I never got around to that... until now. The letter was written by a Russian by the name of G. Larikov. By way of introduction he told me that he was a graduate of the Imperial Russian Artillery School and that he fled Russia after the revolution and made his home in China. There he became a civilian employee of the Chinese Ordnance Department during the Second World War. After this introduction G. Larikov proceeded to the reason for writing his letter: "During my stay in Szechwan Province during the first half of the recent war," he wrote, "I lived for several years in a deep valley, something like your canyons, where our arsenal was located for protection against Japanese bombers. Soon after our arrival in that valley the guards started to send reports that from time to time mysterious lights appeared floating far above our arsenal. Our men were greatly alarmed and immediately decided that it was some kind of Japanese deviltry. I tried to reassure them that those lights, after all, did not cause us any harm. But they also reported the story to the local Chinese police and insisted on a thorough investigation. At long last it was found that the farmers who lived in the mountains around our valley had the custom of sending into the night air paper balloons with small oil lamps attached to them when somebody was sick or when they wished to send a message to their dead ancestors. We have found later that this custom, like all Chinese customs, is very old, dating back not hundreds but thousands of years and so well forgotten in other, less remote, parts of China that even very few Chinese ever heard of it." Considering that mountainous Szechwan is a remote place, where one would hardly expect the farmers to construct hot-air ballons of the Montgolfier type as a pastime, the anxiety of the guards and the surprise of their superiors both become understandable. But the fact is that the farmers did. And that raises the inevitable question of how they learned it and from whom. (That the custom is "thousands of years old" is a statement that can safely be disregarded. The Chinese were in the habit of claiming every one of their institutions to be thousands of years old.) My correspondent did not try to answer that question, but said that possibly "in former .years, some missionaries brought the idea of hot-air balloons from China to Europe, where it was adapted by the brothers Montgolfier for their flying experiments." I probably answered at the time that I felt sure that missionaries -- more specifically French missionaries -- were involved, but that the idea of the hot-air balloon probably traveled the other way. So that the "thousand-yearold" custom would perhaps date back to around the year #. M Y reasons for passing judgment like that were the following: If, at a time when nothing in Europe took to the air but birds and insects, hot-air balloons from China had become known via a returning missionary, that fact would have been written up at great length. Nor would their Chinese origin have been concealed in any way. Just at that time Europeans were very much interested in things Chinese. On the other hand, the Montgolfiers' hot-air paper balloons did cause an enormous stir and everything connected with them was written down by somebody. Because of that we know precisely how the invention came about. The brothers Montgolfier (Jacques Etien and Joseph) began by wondering what kept the clouds up. And they saw, of course, that smoke from a chimney rose and formed "clouds," too. Was smoke powerful enough to carry something up with it? Well, sometimes you could see a halfburned piece of paper rising. So they first built a kind of inverted paper bag to catch the smoke, and they saw to it that the fire was quite smoky by throwing wet straw into it. In spite of all their mistakes it worked. They knew -- or found out for the purpose -- that the sphere was the body combining largest volume with smallest surface. They learned that smoke was not indispensable. And on June #, #, they made their first public demonstration, with an unmanned paper balloon about # feet in diameter. One year later the first hydrogen balloon was built, though not by the Montgolfiers. How quickly the news got around is shown by the fact that on December #, #, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote to a friend about the attempts of the Court Apothecary Buchholz in Weimar "to master the art of Montgolfier." One on still see the smile on his face when reading his description. "Buchholz tortures the air but without success. The spheres refuse to rise. One of them hastily rose to the ceiling, but only once." Interestingly Goethe continued that he "had resolved to progress slowly, and hope to be the first to chase an enormous paper ball into the air." History does not know anything about a hot-air balloon built and launched by Goethe. Either somebody succeeded before him in his area, or else he was simply too busy to bother. What is even more interesting is a sketch for an article (dated April #, #) which he intended to write but never did. Its theme was that he was very lucky to have lived through the second half of the #th century and to have seen how such a large number of inventions and discoveries was made. He then listed the discoveries and inventions. After the word "Balloons" he wrote, "How close I was to making this discovery. Some misgivings that I didn't do it myself. But consoled myself soon." Nobody knows just what he meant by these words. Possibly, as a young man, he had also watched smoke rising and had wondered whether it might carry something. ' solve to "check Konrad Kyeser." When I read Mr. Larikov's letter suggesting that the Montgolfier brothers were not the original inventors of the hot-air balloon. I remembered that somebody else had said the same thing. This somebody else had been a Swiss engineer by the name of Franz Marie Feldhaus, who later became famous as a historian of technology. (When I met him about thirty years ago he told me how this had come about. In principle it was quite simple. He did not have a job. While waiting for one to come along he went to the University library, asking the librarian for books on the history of inventions. Finding these books most inadequate he resolved to write better books himself. And did.) But Feldhaus (I don't know just what kind of engineering was his specialty) had one weak spot: aviation in any form or shape. In a book which he wrote in # he still maintained stoutly that airplanes were a very unlikely invention. If they could be built at all they would have no practical value as a means of transportation but would be the aerial equivalent of a racing yacht. Helicopters, the same book says, were a senseless project. And as late as # space travel was just a fantastic dream to F. M. Feldhaus. Well it was Feldhaus who pointed his finger at a device which he said employed Montgolfier's principle long before Montgolfier. This device was the so-called Dragon Standard (see figure), which must have existed around the year #. No such dragon standard has been preserved anywhere, for reasons which will become apparent very soon. We know about them through a book called Bellitortis, written by Konrad Kyeser von Eichstaedt and finished during the last week of August, #. Several manuscripts are known. The one from w hich this picture of the dragon standard is copied is considered to be the original. It is not, the bibliographical experts believe, in Konrad's handwriting; but it is called "the original" because it was written down under Konrad's supervision. Of course, the Latin text calls the standard draco volans (flying dragon) and tells that the head is made of parchment, the body of linen and the tail of silk, each of a different color. The purpose of the gay monster was twofold. It was to signal to your allies where you were, and it also was to frighten the enemy (who, like enemies at any place and any time, was supposed to be not only evil but also somewhat stupid). At night a lamp was to illuminate it from within. Konrad Kyeser wrote that this lamp should have a wick soaked in Oleum benedictum. The latter was his term for "kerosene" and it seems as if he wasn't too sure just what that was. added that one could use a rocket for illumination and said that this rocket should be put in the dragon's tail. Feldhaus, after examining the picture and a few similar ones from later hand-written copies of the Bellifortis (it never was printed), came to the conclusion that these dragon standards had been early hot-air balloons. Possibly -- no, very likely -- the artisans who made them knew nothing about the lifting capacity of hot air, Feldhaus said, but as soon as they started using these devices during the night and had to put lamps into them to make them visible they must have noticed that the dragon standards no longer needed to be lifted but had to be tethered instead... as can clearly be seen in the picture. When I read this for the first time I thought "how interesting." It did not occur to me to make a calculation. But if you do, you realize very quickly that a little calculating is what Feldhaus should have done Dragon Standard of # A.D. before he proclaimed the dragon standards to be the forerunners of the hot-air balloon. Unlike the sphere, this dragon shape has litle volume and lots of surface. And because of its shape it cannot be a simple cloth bag, it needs reinforcements in various places. In short, the amount of buoyancy which hot air could produce would be far less than the weight of the standard. What it really is is a so-called fish kite. But if it were a kite shouldn't it be shown trailing the rider? Yes, it should be. The reason why it doesn't is probably that the artist wanted a nice composition on the manuscript page. It is also possible that the artist had never seen one of these kite standards demonstrated. And it is just as possible that the artist was just careless. Paintings of sailing ships with the sails billowing one way and the flags streaming the other are no rarity. If one of these kite standards had been preserved we could see with our own eyes that it was a kite and not a hot-air balloon. But none has been preserved, I suspect because of the wick soaked in Oleum benedictum. They probably all burned up in action. This is going to be about a fosPreliminary Reconstruction of the North Bergen Fossil. The North Bergen Fossil (Courtesy: American Museum of Natural History.) sil, and I should wait until the formal scientific description has been published before I write about it. But the case is not only unique but so surprising in many respects that I prefer telling an incomplete story to waiting. The fossil in question is from the black shale of an abandoned quarry in North Bergen in New Jersey. That black shale is rather reliably dated as being # million years old, which means it was formed during the latter part of the Triassic period. The area then was a large freshwater lake, well populated with small coelacanth fishes. Among more or less well preserved coelacanth fossils three young men in the upper teens, Alfred Siefker, Joe Geiler and Mike Bandrowski, found a fossil ## inch lizard-like reptile, which they later handed over to Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, head of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology of the American Museum of Natural History. It turned out to be the earliest known "flying reptile." Since the scientific description isn't out yet I don't know what its name will be. Following normal scientific usage the name could be Pamprotopteryx, but there are a few drawbacks to that name, aside from the layman's customary complaint that it would be hard to pronounce. In the first place, naming a new genus is the privilege of the discoverer or of the man who produces the first scientific description. In the second place the name is slightly wrong. The Greek root words would mean "first of all to fly" but the root word for the last part of the name pteron means "wing" or "fin" and can be stretched to mean "paddle." At any event, it implies something active. But the reptile from North Bergen did not fly actively. It did not have wings. It had what is best called a parachute; and for very good reasons there is neither a classical Greek nor a classical Latin word for parachute. The fact that it did not have wings is the big surprise. A winged reptile from the late Triassic period would have been a novelty but it would have been quite logical. The two periods which followed after the Triassic were the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods, and we know winged reptiles from both of htem. In fact, we know two types, a short-tailed version, the pterodactyls, and a long-tailed version, Rhamphorhynchus -- the latter known so far only from the upper (which means more recent) Jurassic of Bavaria. The short-tailed pterodactyls are known to have lived from the very early part of the Jurassic period until the end of the Cretaceous period, when they became extinct. Flying Reptile Pterodactylus from the Jurassic of Bavaria Since even the earliest Jurassic pterosaurs (to use the all-inclusive term for the extinct winged reptiles) are rather definite types, it is obvious that there must have been earlier forms. These earlier forerunners of the Jurassic types are to be sought in Triassic rocks. They couldn't be anywhere else. Hence the discovery of early Triassic pterosaurs, though it hasn't happened yet, is something to be expected. But the fossil I misnamed Pamprotopteryx above resembles in construction something which has been in the books, as a living reptile, for around # years. It is a tree lizard from Java and adjacent islands with an overall length of about # inches, of which the slender tail accounts for # inches. Carolus Linnaeus named it Draco volans (I can't seem to get away from "flying dragons" in this column!) and zoological handbooks state that there are about # different species of them. Nobody is too specific about the number of species. Some of them may be mistakes because the coloration of the incidentally very beautiful "flying dragon" varies considerably from one specimen to the next. Now Draco volans has a "parachute" spread on each side of its body by a number of "false ribs" -- six of them, in the most common species. The North Bergen fossil shows the same arrangement, but with fourteen rib extensions. Its "parachute" is larger than that of Draco volans; the rib extensions are five inches long on either side. The living Draco volans has been observed to cover distances up to twenty yards. One observer swore that it can avoid obstacles while gliding. When it reaches the tree trunk where it wants to land it lowers its tail -- held stretched out while gliding -- and seems to throw its head back, obviously getting the "parachute" surface into a braking position. As a glider, the performance of the North Bergen reptile must have been at least as good as that of the living Draco volans. As the pictures show, there can be no direct connection between the Triassic parachute reptile from North Bergen and the pterosaurs of the Jurassic. The latter had developed a real wing, a skin stretched by one enormously elongated finger -- the one anatoOne of the Species of "flying dragon". mists call the fourth finger and which women refer to as the "ring finger." (The bat's wing, to get rid # f a possible misunderstanding, is stretched by all four fingers, with the thumb forming a free hook.) As for the ancestry of the pterosaurs, we know that they sprang from a group of usually fairly small reptiles, probably largely tree-dwelling, which bear the scientific name of Pseudosuchia. There is not much sense in translating a label like this, but one might refer to them as the pseudocrocodiles. During the period preceding the Triassic, namely the Permian, they had come from an older group of reptiles which had split into two groups. The pseudosuchians are one of these two. The other group is labelled parasuchians and there isn't much to be told about them. But the pseudosuchians had gone on to glory. From them sprang the pterosaurs, the dinosaurs, the crocodilians and even the birds. It would be most interesting if it turns out that the North Bergen fossil is a pseudosuchian too. If so, this group would have invented flying three times, once in a gliding form constructed like the living Draco volans (as far as the gliding mechanism is concerned), once in the shape of the pterosaurs and finally in the form of the birds. I wish I could tell now what forms led to the living Draco volans but this is, unfortunately, not known. The living form decidedly belongs to the lizards -- which did not become important until fairly recent geological times, namely the Tertiary. But Draco volans is now an isolated form. It has no near living relatives and no fossil ancestors are known. I did not get many good questions this month, but one which came from a reader in Salt Lake City will probably use up what space I have left. The gentleman made a trip to Russia last year and, like all tourists who come to Moscow, he was taken to Red Square and shown the "Czar Pushka." ( pushka is just the Russian word for "cannon.") During the return trip another passenger told him that one of the Sultans had an even bigger cannon built. The question is, simply, about the dimensions of the Czar Pushka and whether there have been bigger guns. The dimensions of the highly ornamented bronze pushka are: length of barrel # feet, caliber # V # inches, weight of barrel # pounds. Apparently the piece was considered more a work of art from the outset, for it was literally never fired (Voltaire made a crack about it, saying that the two outstanding items of the Kremlin are a bell which was never rung and a cannon which was never fired) and has been on public display since the year it was cast, which was #. The other big gun which was mentioned by the fellow passenger of my reader was probably the Mohammed II, built for that Sultan by a man called "Urban the Hungarian" in about #. It weighed about # pounds and its bore was #I inches. The barrel was # feet long. It was in every dimension a bit smaller than the Russian piece, but, to make up for it, it was fired. As Gibbon tells the story in ChapFall of the Roman Empire: "The stone bullet weighed about six hundred pounds. A vacant place before the new palace was chosen for the first experiment; but, to prevent the sudden and mischievous effects of astonishment and fear, a proclamation was issued that the cannon would be discharged the ensuing day. The explosion was felt or heard in a circuit of a hundred furlongs. The ball, by the force of the gunpowder, was driven above a mile; and on the spot where it fell it buried itself a fathom deep in the ground. For the conveyance of this destructive engine, a frame or carriage of thirty wagons was linked together and drawn along by a team of sixty oxen. Two hundred men on both sides were stationed to poise and support the rolling weight; two hundred and fifty workmen marched before to smooth the way and repair the bridges; and near two months were employed in a laborious journey of one hundred and fifty miles." It is likely that the gun did go into action, but it cannot be proved. The contemporary writers were careless or ill-informed. They confused several big guns used at the time, and even Mr. Gibbon did not succeed in disentangling their chaotic accounts. The next big gun was British. It was a siege mortar designed by a Mr. Robert Mallet. The bore of these mortars (two were built) was # inches. The barrel length was eighty inches above a # inch long conical powder chamber, with an average diameter of # inches. The projectiles were cast iron balls # inches in diameter which came in three weights: #, # and # pounds. They had room for a bursting charge weighing # pounds. One of the two mortars was never test-fired. The other fired a number of rounds during the fall and winter of #. The two mortars were meant to be used in the Crimean war but never left England. Two large guns which really saw action both are German, one for each of the two World Wars. The "big gun" of the first World War was the "Paris Gun" -- also called (by the German press) "Kaiser Wilhelm Gun" and miscalled (by the French press) "Big Bertha." Its caliber, as the official desig(# inches.) The length of the barrel was # feet; the shell weighed # pounds; the range was # miles. The gun itself weighed # tons and the cradle # tons. The barrel stood only about # rounds. Using up a total of six barrels, the gun fired a total of # rounds, all into Paris. For the second World War the Germans rebuilt one of these guns, and in #I it was assigned to Battery #. But even official German sources do not know whether it was used. A German gunnery expert who tried to find out received the answer, "Since the Army had the piece they probably fired it. But there are no records." But the "big gun" of the Second World War was the one called meters (# inches.) The length of the barrel was # feet, the weight # tons (short tons of # lbs. each) and the range # miles. The shell was #V calibers long, weighed # (short) tons and required a propelling charge of # lbs. It could fire three times per hour. To build the firing position for Dora took # men and five weeks. Firing the gun required only # men. Dora pulverized the fortifications of Sevastopol and was then brought to Leningrad (needing three trains just for the gun), but did not see action again. By then the German High Command had come to the conclusion that Dora was too big. Two other guns of the same type that had been built were not even sent to the front Complete Sets for Sale Amazing Quarterly: #-#; # issues in all including the only annual; condition good to very good: # Amazing Monthly: April # (Vol. I No. #) to April # complete; very good to fine except #st issue: # Wonder: June # (Vol. I No. #) to March # complete, very good to fine: # Same, through to April #I : # Quarterlies for same, # issues #, very good to fine: # Astounding: # issues, March # through December #, condition good: # Galaxy: Complete from Vol. I No. I October # through #: # All orders promptly shipped F.O.B. Brooklyn. Many other fine items. Send your want list. Specialist in Stf for a Quarter Century #I #th Avenue Brooklyn #, New York Interstellar trouble-shooting is the easiest work there is. All you need is brains, energy -- and a steno with nice legs! trying to think of two things at once, and it wasn't working out. An inspirational message (delivered by Crumbly, president of Planetary Promotions, Inc.) was mixing itself up in his mind with the probable difficulties of his first company assignment. He hoped he was thinking, and not worrying. Crumbly said worry was fatal in the promotion business. It was fervor, not fret, Crumbly said, that had made Planetary Promotions, Inc., what it was today. And it was work, not worry, that would make it what it was destined to be tomorrow. Andy Stephens stared at the farthest corner of his office (about four feet from his nose) and sighed. He didn't have a slogan in his body, let alone on (or off) the top of his head. His assignment was an easy one, Crumbly had assured him. Planetary Promotions always started new men off with easy ones. Only fair. Andy squared his narrowish shoulders in as close an imitation of Crumbly's desk-side manner as he could, and picked up the dope sheet. It seemed there was a planet, Felix II, somewhere near the edge of nowhere. It wanted to join the Galactic Federation. By A laudable desire, Andy thought, but strictly a political matter, having nothing to do with Planetary Promotions, or Andrew Stephens. However, it also seemed that a planet had to demonstrate that it would be contributing something to the Federation before it was allowed to join. In other words, Andy thought, you have to have something they want, or they won't let you in. A buzzer squawked out of the dun-colored box on his desk. Andy jumped, and flipped the lever. "The bus to the port will be at the door in seven minutes," the grim voice of the Lower Office Co-ordinator told him. "A stenographer will meet you on the ship." "Thank you, Miss Ellis," Andy said meekly. He stuffed the dope sheet into his jacket and left the Main Office for Felix II. nine voice. "Are you with Planetary Promotions?" Andy looked up. A sandyhaired girl with a passable figure and nice legs was looking down at him. "Yes," he said. "I'm Andy Stephens." The girl looked relieved. "I'm Edith Featherpenny from the steno pool," she said. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find you." "Sit down," Andy invited. He moved, and Miss Featherpenny moved. Between them, they unsettled a large woman eating an orange. When the juice had been mopped up and the woman apologized to, Miss Featherpenny squeezed in beside Andy. "Is that the information on the case?" She indicated the dope sheet crumpled under Andy's arm. "Yes." Andy tried to pull it out. "Were you issued one?" He moved his elbow and tried again. The orange woman glared at him. Miss Featherpenny shook her head. "Miss Ellis told me you'd tell me everything I needed to know." Andy felt obscurely flattered. "It doesn't look too promising," he admitted. Miss Featherpenny glanced at the dope sheet and found a ray of hope. "The Federation only requires that the Felician exports are nearly as valuable as their imports," she pointed out. " 'Nearly' is a nice vague, maneuverable word." "But," said Andy, "if the Felicians can't think of anything to sell, how do they expect me to?" "Maybe they're too isolated to know what's in demand," Miss Featherpenny comforted him. "It says they won't authorize ships to land on the planet except by invitation." "It might be isolation, I suppose," Andy doubted. He felt an urge to confide in Miss Featherpenny. She did, after all, look as if there might be something besides fluff in her head. "Look," he said. "This is my first assignment, on my fourth job, on my second career. I've got to make good. My father is beginning to get impatient." Miss Featherpenny's eyes grew softer. "Fathers are usually more patient than their children think," she encouraged. "But," Andy added morosely, "I have a brother, a salesman with Universal Products. He keeps getting promoted, and I keep getting fired. Dad must be conscious of the contrast." "Maybe," Miss Featherpenny suggested, "your brother's been lucky. You know, being assigned jobs that were easier than they sound." Andy glanced at her to see if he was being humored. He decided he was not, or not much. "I've tried to believe that," he admitted. "Unfortunately, Lloyd keeps proving me wrong. He got his last promotion for selling fancy food products to the Mahridgians." Miss Featherpenny had obviously never even heard of Mahridge. "They have a strong taboo against eating," Andy explained. "They swallow concentrates to jjeep alive, but it's still not quite Recent. On Mahridge, it's the dinj n g room, not the bathroom, that has a door with a lock on it for privacy. "Is he married?" asked Miss Featherpenny, who didn't intend t# be a steno all her life. "I mean," she added quickly, "his wife would get anxious about his selling something like that, that could get him put in prison, or killed. How did he do it?" There was a certain coolness in Andy's voice. "He took a lead from the dope peddlers. He converted the adolescent Mahridgians first. It's all right to eat on Mahridge now." Miss Featherpenny diplomatized. "I don't think that's ethical. Convincing people to do what they think is wrong." Andy was still suspicious. He said, "Ethical or not, he got the promotion." only launching pad on Felix II, and surveyed the landscape. Thirty feet away, there was a bamsized stone building with a weedy roof. Aside from some rounded blue hills in the distance, and a Felician leaning against the building, there was not much to detain the eye. Miss Featherpenny giggled softly in surprise. "He looks like a leprechaun," she said. "The sheet didn't say that." "Tourist trade," Andy breathed, his eyes gleaming with the solution of his problem. Since the two-foot-tall welcoming committee showed no signs of moving, they started toward him. "My name," Andy said in Galactic, "is Andrew Stephens. I'm here from Planetary Promotions." "I know," the Felician muttered ungraciously. "I came out from town to meet you. My name is Blahrog. Who's this?" "My steno, Miss Featherpenny." "Urk." Obviously Blahrog had never heard the term "steno" and was interpreting it freely. "I'm in charge of our admission to the Federation. That means I'm in charge of you." He eyed Andy unenthusiastically. "You haven't had much experience with this kind of thing, have you?" Andy had a wild rush of hope. If the Felician government rejected him as a representative, he could go home without a failure on his record, and pray for a simpler assignment. Even P. P. didn't consider an agent responsible for the unpredictable whims of aliens. "No, I haven't," he replied E E D # cheerfully. "I was hoping maybe you had." Miss Featherpenny, who hadn't read the contract, gasped. Blahrog, who had read the contract, replied, "I haven't. Let's get on into town where we can discuss the possibilities in comfort." They set out, walking unequally through the thick white dust that passed for paving on Felix II. "Don't you use ground cars?" Miss Featherpenny choked at the end of the first half-mile. "Don't have technology," Blahrog growled, stumping grimly along. "The Everking has a car, but he doesn't use it much. No fuel." As he walked, Andy composed a speech on the merits of the tourist business, to be delivered to the Everking. Miss Featherpenny grew visibly more depressed with each mile. She uttered an involuntary cry when the guard of the city gate appeared with a slender mug in each hand. "Felician ladies don't drink," Blahrog said gruffly. "I can fetch you a glass of water," the guard offered, without enthusiasm. "Thank you," said Miss Featherpenny, with an attempt at sincerity. The contents of his mug made Andy choke. "Tastes like cider," he gasped. Blahrog downed his without a wink. "It's customary to give a guest a mug of Throatduster as a sign of gratitude because he walked so far in the dust." "In this dust," Miss Feather penny murmured to her second glass of water, "any distance is far." "Thoughtful custom," Andy said quickly. "Could you export the beverage?" "Sell Throatduster?" Blahrog was indignant. "It would be a breach of hospitality. Besides, Felix II can't produce enough second-rate stuff, let alone firstrate. Sometimes, in a bad year, we have to greet guests with water." "What a pity," said Miss Featherpenny.  sympathetic as Andy swallowed another Throatduster at the door of the Palace (a onestory building similar to a small barn), and yet another in the presence of the Everking (an eighteen-inch Felician with a beard-warmed paunch). Andy watched the Everking dim and blur on his wooden throne. Swaying slightly, he fluttered, "I wonder what proof this stuff is?" "In short, Mr. Stephens," Blahro g was translating, "we cannot think of a single product which w e could sell. Have you any immediate suggestions?" Blahrog's expression indicated that he ought to say something, hut Andy couldn't think of a thing, except that he didn't need a ny more Throatduster. "No," he said firmly, if faintly. "Thank you very much, but no." He passed out cold. "I'm afraid the journey was too much for him," Miss Featherpenny put in. "Ah, yes," Blahrog translated for the Everking. "Throatduster has that effect on some life forms. Perhaps he had better retire, and discuss the situation more fully tomorrow." The Everking motioned to a pair of stout-looking guards (thirty inches tall, at least). They towed Miss Featherpenny's immediate superior out of the royal presence. "They will show him to his room," Blahrog explained. The Everking let loose a quick stream of Felician. "Would you," Blahrog addressed Miss Featherpenny, "enjoy meeting my daughter? The Everking suggests it, since our affairs could hardly be of interest to you." "I'd be very pleased." The words were not empty ones. Edith Featherpenny's education in coping with men had not extended to Felician males. Blahrog frightened her with a feeling of superior and incomprehensible intelligence. Hrom, although seventeen inches tall and weighing perhaps eleven pounds, was definitely feminine and comprehensible. "Why don't women drink Throatduster?" Miss Featherpenny asked, on the strength of a two-hour acquaintance. "The men grow the grain here," Hrom explained, "and it's theirs as long as it's in the fields. However, we consider harvesting women's work. We also make the Throatduster. Then we sell it to the men. We don't drink because it is uneconomical." "Does everyone grow his own grain?" "Not any more. Town women have other sources of dress money. The custom started that way, that's all." "If you'll forgive my saying so," Miss Featherpenny remarked, "that dress you are wearing must have taken a big chunk out of your pocket." Hrom sighed. "In my mother's time, I would have thought nothing of it. Now, one such gown is all I can afford." "I would have thought your father was one of the wealthier men on Felix II," Miss Featherpenny remarked. "He is the wealthiest," Hrom said. "The richest man is always Minister of Finance. It's only reasonable." Her tone changed. "We're all poor now, since the tourist industry failed. It took every dnot we had to pay for the contract." Invisible antennae shot from Miss Featherpenny's forehead. "You must be quite sure that Planetary Promotions won't fail you." She tried her best to sound casual. Hrom smiled faintly. "Have another of these seed cakes," she said. "Thank you. They are delicious." Miss Featherpenny took one, regardless of calories. "Of course, there is the guarantee clause: 'Double your money back.' " Hrom busily fluffed a cushion. "One must have some insurance," she said, having her turn at sounding casual. "Tell me, are they wearing large or small hats on Earth this season?" Miss Featherpenny conceded defeat. "It's all bonnets for summer," she said. Andy that she thought the Felicians had bought the guarantee clause, not the contract. It died at her first sight of the morning-after Andy. The situation must be pretty desperate, she rationalized, when the wealthiest' girl on the planet has only one ' dress. This is probably their last chance. Andy tried to conceal his headache by being brisk and efficient "Have you considered your natural resources?" Blahrog, slow and shrewdly inefficient, said, "We mine soft coal. Enough for our own fires and to spare." "No one within a hundred light-years of Felix II uses coal for fuel anymore," Andy said gently. "Do you have enough for the plastic industries?" "We have four freighters surplus every season." Blahrog was evidently banking heavily on the coal. Andy wondered if coal were the only surplus on Felix II. "What are you doing with your surplus at present?" he inquired tactfully, hoping that Elahrog would realize, without being told, the impossibility of supporting the population of Felix II on four freighters of soft coal. "We store it up," was the crafty answer, "and sell it to the synthetics plants on Darius IV when the Ionian miners go on strike." "How long since the Ionians struck?" If this economic event occurred regularly, the coal surplus could assist in meeting the Federation's requirements. "Twenty seasons or so." Blahrog's tone was off-handed, but his eyes slid guiltily toward Andy and away again. Andy sighed. "Any other resources?" They went quickly through minerals, agricultural products and animal skins; established that Felicians could not teleport, levitate or read minds. They were technologically uneducated, and had no industry on the factorysystem level. "It is coal or nothing, Mr. Stephens," Blahrog said with finality. "Isn't there some way to make the Federation believe that our coal is superior to other coal, and worth more?" "Do you, perchance, own a sizeable proportion of Felician coal reserves?" Blahrog nodded, guilty looking again. "Well, forget it. There isn't enough." 'T'HE Everking, who had been holding Andy's translator to his ear in silence, burst into speech. "His Foreverness says," Blahrog remarked cannily, "that it appears impossible for Felix II to join the Federation." "We aren't through yet," Andy said quickly. "What about the tourist industry? If you'd allow visitors and advertise a little..." "No," the Everking shouted, i n Galactic. "We tried that during the last reign," Blahrog said. "It didn't work." "You're pretty far off the ship, ping lanes, I'll admit," Andy said, "but surely you could attract enough tourists from somewhere to show a profit." "We showed a profit," Blahrog said morosely. He translated a remark of the Everking's. "We made money hand over fist." "Then why did you quit?" Andy was baffled. "Why did you restrict the planet?" "Because of the way we happen to look." "Like leprechauns," Miss Featherpenny explained. "And Hrom looks exactly like a little Christmas fairy." Blahrog winced. "The tourists found us amusing. We weren't real to them. It became difficult for us to seem real to ourselves. Most of my generation couldn't grow up. The birth rate dropped. We closed the planet to keep the race alive. That's all there is to it." "Surely," Andy protested, "if you handled it differently..." "Tourists," Blahrog translated for the Everking, "are out of the question." "I remember hearing about an intelligent life form that resemb jed teddy bears," Miss Featherpenny said thoughtfully. "Everybody loved them on sight." "What happened to them?" Blahrog asked with interest. "They became extinct." he accomplish anything with a stupid steno butting in? She looked away, guilty. "It's such a simple solution," he said. "It fits your situation perfectly." "That's what we thought, until we tried it," Blahrog said, grinning sidelong at Miss Featherpenny. "If you won't try tourists," Andy snapped at both of them, "I don't see exactly what you can do." "Maybe you didn't cover everything in the special abilities list," Miss Featherpenny suggested softly. Andy glared at her again. "All right, Blahrog. Can you think of anything you can do that most other species can't?" Blahrog looked at the floor and considered. "We can walk a long way without getting tired," he offered. Andy sighed, and wrote "Endurance?" on his scratch pad. It was scarcely saleable. "Is there anything else? Anything you know how to make? Besides Throatduster." "We make good shoes," Blahrog said hopefully. "The tourists used to buy lots of them." "Hum," Andy cogitated. "Here we have something for which a market already exists. If we can expand the market and the production facilities..." He nailed Blahrog with a finger, in conscious imitation of Crumbly. "How many pairs of shoes can Felix II produce in a single season?" "If the reserves were called in to the Cobbler's, Guild, it would be almost half the manpower of the planet..." Blahrog paused, doing mental arithmetic. "Four less." He sounded as though he were surprised. "That ought to do it," Andy said gleefully. "But where will we find that many pairs of feet?" Blahrog asked. that many pairs of feet in the Federation," Andy said. "Leave the advertising to Planetary Promotions." "It seems sort of poetic," Miss Featherpenny romanced. "Leprechauns are supposed to be cobblers." Blahrog snorted. Andy turned and addressed her from the full distance between a promoter third class and a girl from the steno pool. "Miss Featherpenny, I will ask for your opinion when I want it." Miss Featherpenny answered from her side of the gulf. "Yes, sir." Andy had always despised rank-pullers. He turned to Blahrog. "I'll have to send the dope back to the Home Office so they can put it through the computer and send me the ad-intensity index." Blahrog looked a polite enquiry. "That will tell us how effective the ad campaign will have to be to make a go of this. What's the fastest way to send a message to Earth?" "Radiogram the satellite station," Blahrog answered. "They'll relay it to the next ship within range, and the ship will relay it to the next planet it nears with the radiogram facilities to send it to Earth." "How long will it take to get an answer?" Andy asked. "About twelve days." while they waited for the answer. Blahrog called the members of the Cobbler's Guild together, and delivered a series of lectures on their importance to the future of Felix II. Foreseeing a return to political and economic power, the reserve members dusted off their lasts I and aprons and got back into I practice. For the first time in nearly thirty seasons, the applications for apprenticeship were too numerous to handle. New lif e showed on their faces. The Master Cobblers (including the Everking and Blahrog) worked around the clock, fabricating plastic lasts. Miss Featherpenny and Hrom dug pictures and descriptions of the various types of Galactic feet that habitually or occasionally wore shoes out of old periodicals, located by members of the newlyorganized ladies' auxiliary. Felix II was humming, if not absolutely singing, with industry and good humor. Some of it rubbed off on Andy. He relented toward Miss Featherpenny to the extent of presenting her with a pair of Felician shoes, fabricated by the Everking. They were of the sensible walking variety, and not Miss Featherpenny's style. Nevertheless, she was extremely pleased with the gift. Like all Felician shoes, they fit her perfectly. The Everking, backed by his Debators and ministers, issued public thanks to one Andrew Stephens, restorer of hope, and propagator of economic equality. The ladies' auxiliary gave a tea in Miss Featherpenny's honor. They were both showered with gifts from a grateful and admiring populace. The reply to the message was signed by Crumbly himself. "Forlorn hope," it said unsympathetically. "Try something else. Computer indicates ad intensity of #." An ad intensity of #I means you sell someone something he wants anyway. An intensity of # means you have to make the consumer love something he thinks he hates. '-the run for Blahrog, and retired to the storeroom of Blahrog's dwelling, which housed two fair-sized plastic barrels of Throatduster. "But you have to try," Blahrog insisted, finishing his second mug of hospitality. "Snow good," Andy said, deep into his fifth. "Even Gray Flannel, ad man in legend, only got to #. Simpossible." Blahrog, who knew little about advertising or computers, repeated, "You must try. No member of the Cobbler's Guild has ever quit without trying." Andy had been accepted as an apprentice of the Guild the night before. "Dunno," he said. "Tell you simpossible." Blahrog climbed off the barrel of Throatduster. "I'll go get Miss Featherpenny," he said. "Perhaps she can help you." "Miss Featherpenny. Bah," Andy snorted. "What good would she be? Dumb steno." He tried to be fair. "Nice legs, I admit. But no brains." "I'll go get Miss Featherpenny," Blahrog repeated firmly, closing the door behind him... "What frame of mind is he in?" Miss Featherpenny looked uncertainly at the heavy door to Andy's store room. "Drunk," Blahrog informed her coldly. It takes an enormous quantity of Throatduster to intoxicate a Felician. Intoxication is therefore considered bad form. "And belligerent," the Minister of Finance added. "Oh, dear." Miss Featherpenny looked at the door again. "But what can I do?" she asked in a helpless voice. "I'm not a promoter." "He said," Blahrog indicated the door, "that you were a dumb steno." "Well!" Hrom exclaimed. Miss Featherpenny's hackles invisibly rose. Her mouth visibly tightened. She turned away from the door. Hrom said, "You ought to try to show him." Miss Featherpenny looked at them, and at the surrounding examples of Felician landscape ED and architecture. "Mr. Blahrog," she said suddenly, "you don't mind looking like a leprechaun, do you? As long as you don't have to meet people?" Blahrog's silence was more than dignified. "What do you mean?" Hrom asked. "You wouldn't mind if we used a picture of a Master Cobbler in the ad, would you?" Blahrog thawed abruptly. "You have an idea?" "If you don't mind the picture." "He doesn't mind," Hrom said, adding in Felician, "After all, Papa, we don't have to let any ships but the freighters land." "Go ahead, then," Blahrog consented. "Good luck," Hrom added. Andy welcomed her. A "Bah." He shut his eyes. Most of him was sprawled out on the floor. "Yes, me," Miss Featherpenny agreed, repressing an inclination to kick him. She sat down on one of the kegs, and opened her stenographer's book. "I came to take down the ad for the shoes, she announced. "What ad?" Andy moaned. "The newest, biggest, brightest ads can't get over an #. How can I manage an #? You're crazy." He opened his eyes. "But you do have nice legs." "Felix II is sort of quaint," Miss Featherpenny suggested. "Why not use an old ad?" "An idea," Andy enunciated, without hope. "It's sort of pretty too," Miss Featherpenny nudged. "We could use a color picture of it," Andy said, kicking thoughtfully at an overturned stool. "The Felicians are quaint looking, too." "Sure," Andy said. "Put a Felician in the foreground, cobbling." He tried to sit up. "I've seen ads like that in history books," Miss Featherpenny said, exuding admiration. "It's so old it's new," Andy said, lying down again. "Old English lettering over the top. A rea cliche." He considered Miss Featherpenny's ankle. "Peaceful scenery, Felician shoes?" "Not quite," said Miss Featherpenny. "Quiet field, Felician shoes?" "Nope," said Miss Featherpenny. "You're an aggravating woman," Andy said sweetly, but you do have nice legs." "What about Elysian fields?" Miss Featherpenny suggested. Andy tasted it. "Elysian fields, Felician shoes." He tried to sit up again. "You got all that down?" he demanded. "Yes," Miss Featherpenny lied, ghe had it in her head, but not on the steno pad. "Then get somebody to send it off so we can find out if it's good enough. And come back soori." jje wobbled on his elbow. "You do have..." "I think I'd better attend to sending it personally." Miss Featherpenny opened the door. "You rest until you feel better." Blahrog had gone, but Hrom was waiting for her. She looked more like a Christmas fairy than usual. A mischievous one. "Did you manage?" she whispered. "Barely." Miss Featherpenny looked grim. "Drink this," Hrom ordered, holding out a mug of Throatduster. Miss Featherpenny was surprised. "I thought ladies didn't drink on Felix II." "There are," Hrom said, "exceptions." fTHE next twelve days of waiting for computer results were not as hopefully active as the first twelve. The Felicians finished setting up their manufacturing and storing systems, but they didn't start making shoes. The cattle drovers forbore to slaughter the beasts who provided the leather. The Everking and his Debaters all developed severe cases of beard-itch, a Felician nervous disorder. Since it is even more unseemly to scratch on Felix II than it is on Earth, they retired temporarily from public life. Andy also retired from public life, biting his fingernails, an Earther nervous disorder. Blahrog joined him in the illness, which was new to Felicians. By the time the answer from Planetary Promotions came it was the most fashionable habit on the planet, in spite of the fact that Felicians have extremely tough nails, and a pair of bony ridges rather than true teeth. The second message was also direct from Crumbly. It read: "Computer rates ad campaign at intensity #. P. P. in action by the time you receive this. Stephens ordered back to Home Office; promoted to first class." Four Earth months later, Miss Featherpenny entered Andy's ten by twelve office, her high heels clicking on the plastic tiles, and laid a memorandum on the new steel desk. "They've been admitted," she announced. 'What? Who?" Andy said irritably. There were times when he thought her position as his private secretary had gone to her head. "Felix II has been admitted to the Federation. The contract has been fulfilled." She smiled brightly. "Shall I mark the file closed?" "Can't yet," Andy said. "Felix II won't be a permanent member of the Federation until they've been self-surporting for ten years." "Why?" asked Miss Featherpenny. "It's a precautionary measure," Andy began to explain. "Oh, let's go get some lunch and forget Felix II." "Yes, Mr. Stephens," Miss Featherpenny said meekly. He followed her out the door, admiring the effect of her glastic skirt. She did have nice legs... therpenny was forced to remember Felix II. There was a communication on her mockbaroque desk. Felician shoes weren't selling. Felix II wasn't making enough money. The Galactic Federation was threatening to take steps. She glanced at the impressive door 'to the inner office. Andy, she knew, was engaged in reading a letter from his brother Lloyd, who had just been promoted to vice-president of Universal Products. She judiciously forged his initials on an order to put data on the Felix II failure through the computer. In an hour and a half she had the answer. The Felicians hadn't changed the styles, and their shoes didn't wear out. Everybody had a pair. She considered the door again. There was really little sense in disturbing Andy over such a simple matter. She forged his name on a message to Blahrog. "Change the styles of your shoes." She then picked up some carefully selected problem sheets from the top of the filing cabinet, and went through the impressive door. The next morning, Blahrog's answer was on her desk. "Felician shoes are of the cut most suited to the feet that wear them. To change them would be both foolish and unethical." It was a good thing, Miss Featherpenny thought, that Andy was feeling better today. She went into his office, padding softly over the carpet to his contemporary prestwood desk. "Good morning, Edie," Andy said cheerfully. "What happened? Lightning strike you?" "Practically," Miss Featherpenny said. "It's Felix II again." She handed over the sheaf of papers. "Why didn't you tell me about this yesterday?" Andy muttered, reading them. "I thought I could handle it." Miss Featherpenny made a face. "Until I got that answer this morning." "It sounds like typical Felician thinking," Andy said. "There's no sense trying to argue by mail." He sighed. "You'd better reserve a first-class passage for me on the first ship out." "Can't I go?" Miss Featherpenny asked. "Who'd run the office?" 'The stenos can stack stuff until we get back." Miss Featherpenny looked wistful. "I was in on the beginning of it. I want to see it through. Besides, I'd like to see Hrom again." "Oh, all right," Andy agreed. "Make it two first class." long porch of the space port dining room. "Have a nice trip?" he asked. "What's all this about not changing the shoe styles?" Andy countered. "As I told you in the message," Blahrog said impatiently, "We make our shoes in the best possible shapes for the feet that will wear them. There isn't any good reason to change them." "You can't sell people two pairs of identical shoes," Andy insisted. "You might be able to sell them if you changed them," Miss Featherpenny added, sounding reasonable. "Save your arguments for the Everking," Blahrog said. "Come on to the car." "Car?" Miss Featherpenny exclaimed. "The Everking's?" "No, mine." Blahrog couldn't keep the pride out of his voice. "There are nearly two hundred cars on Felix II." Andy went over the same ground in the presence of the Everking. It didn't help. The Everking, his minister and his Debators were solidly against changing the shoes. The ethics of the Cobblers' Guild were involved. "If you won't follow Planetary Promotions' advice," he said at last, "the company can't be responsible for the outcome." He glared at the assembly. "In other words, the guarantee clause is cancelled." There was an indignant and concerned buzz from the audience. Blahrog got up. "Your Foreverness," he said, "honorable members of the government, Mr. Stephens. Three Earth years ago, Felix II gathered together all the money the government could find, and bought a contract with Planetary Promotions." He paused and shuffled his feet. "We did not expect the contract to be fulfilled. We needed money, and two for one would keep us going while we attempted to educate the young to be immune to the tourists. Of course, if Planetary Promotions found a way for us to be selfsurporting without tourists, we would be equally pleased." "I thought so," Miss Featherpenny murmured. "Really," Andy said. "Why didn't you let me in on it?" Blahrog cleared his throat to indicate that he wasn't through. "Since a way was found," he continued, "Felician self respect and content has increased along with Felician prosperity." He glanced uneasily at Andy. "We would like to continue as we are going." "Unless you change the styles," Andy said flatly, "that is impossible." that they were starting over the same ground, slipped out the door and walked over to visit Hrom. "So Papa admitted it," Hrom said, after Miss Featherpenny had admired the baby, and been shown over the house. "I almost told you myself, when I first met you." "You told me enough to let me guess the rest," Miss Featherpenny said. "Have some olgan seed cakes," Hrom offered. "Why didn't you tell Mr. Stephens?" Miss Featherpenny took a cake. "Partly because of his almighty attitude, and partly because I was on your... Ow!" ' face. "I've hardly been out of the She clapped a hand hastily to her I house since the baby was born. jaw. "What's wrong?" Hrom asked, alarmed. "Broke a tooth," Miss Featherpenny muttered, her face contorted. "Does it hurt much?" Hrom's question was part sympathy and part curiosity. Miss Featherpenny nodded. "I'll have to find a dentist right away." "What's a dentist?" "Man who fixes your teeth." "But we don't have teeth," Hrom said. "I forgot," Miss Featherpenny moaned. "Oh, Lord, I guess I'll have to go all the way back to Earth." Hrom shook her head. "There are a lot of Earthers living on Darius IV. They must have a dentist. There's a ship every morning." "Fine," Miss Featherpenny gasped. "Can I get you something for the pain? Would an aspirtran help?" "I'd better have two. Thanks." "Here. Take the bottle with you." Hrom was frowning worriedly. "My, Fm glad we don't have teeth." "I'll have to tell Andy -- Mr. Stephens -- that I'm leaving." Inspiration dawned on Hrom's I'll leave him with my husband's mother and go with you." "I'd be glad of the company," Miss Featherpenny admitted. "Good. I'll find out what time the ship leaves, and tell Mother Klagom about the treat she's got coming. You go tell Mr. Stephens and then come back here for the night." Miss Featherpenny heard them shouting before she opened the council chamber door. "I suggest," Andy was saying, "that you either change the styles or go back to the tourist business." She pushed the door open. "Mr. Stephens," Blahrog said mildly, "the last time calamity was upon us, you solved the problem by drinking Throatduster until you got an idea. May I suggest that you try again?" "Andy," Miss Featherpenny whispered. "Well?" he snapped. I broke a tooth. I'm going over to Darius IV tomorrow, with Hrom, to have it fixed." "Why Darius IV?" Andy demanded. "What's the matter with Felician dentists?" "What's Hrom going to do with boy?" Blahrog demanded. "Hrom's leaving the baby with Mrs. Klagom," Miss Featherpenny answered, "and there aren't any Felician dentists." "Mrs. Klagom is a silly woman," Blahrog disapproved. "She would do better to leave him with me." "If you must, I suppose you must," Andy admitted grudgingly. "Where are you going now?" "Back to Hrom's house to lie down." "Tell her I'll mind the baby," Blahrog called after her. As she closed the door, she heard Andy say, "Gentlemen, if you'll supply the Throatduster, I'll give it a try." #TT'S awfully quiet," Hrom said doubtfully, looking around at the Felician spaceport. "Look at the tannery chimneys. No smoke." Miss Featherpenny, her mouth in good repair, glanced into the bar as they passed it. "Only two shippers," she said. "There are usually dozens." "They must have stopped production entirely," Hrom said. "Maybe Andy thought of something." ' "I wonder if Papa brought the car down for us." He hadn't. They walked into town. Blahrog was in conference with the Everking. "I'd better wait for him," Miss Featherpenny said. "I want to find out what's going on before I talk to Andy." E D "I'd better rescue Mother Klagom from the baby." Blahrog was as long-winded as usual. "Where is Mr. Stephens?" Miss Featherpenny demanded, as soon as she saw him coming down the hall. "In his old store-room," Blahrog said moodily. "He's quite drunk, I believe, but he doesn't seem to be getting any ideas." "Then why did you stop cobbling?" Blahrog did a Felician shrug. 'We're waiting to see what happens. There's no sense making shoes any more if they aren't wanted." "I have to talk to him," Miss Featherpenny said. "Do you have an idea?" "No," Miss Featherpenny lied. "But you'd let him drink himself to death, if he didn't think of anything." "You want a lift in the car?" Blahrog asked, uninsulted. "I'd be pleased, if you don't mind. I just walked in from the port." suggested, very drunk. He was only hung over. "Get your tooth fixed?" he asked cheerlessly. "Yes." "Good dentist?" Miss Featherpenny nodded. "He had some entirely new equipment. Extremely powerful, and quite precise." "Oh?" Andy straightened in the old arm chair. "I've been trying to think. And drinking. Throatduster isn't working this time." He paused to reconsider. "Except that it makes me drunk. Everything keeps getting fuzzy, and my head is wider than my shoulders." "The dentist said," Miss Featherpenny persisted, "that he could pull a whale's tooth as easily and smoothly as he pulled mine." "You had to have it pulled? Too bad." Andy made a face at the full mug of Throatduster on the barrel beside him. "The Felicians won't change their minds about the shoes, and they won't try tourists again. I can't think of anything else. And they can claim the guarantee. I was bluffing." "I know," Miss Featherpenny said. She tried again. "The dentist claims even the tiniest species could do dental work on the biggest species." She paused, hoping it would sink in. "Providing the tiny species had sufficient dexterity." "Blasted Felicians," Andy muttered. "Stubborn little pigs." "That's part of their trouble, I think," Miss Featherpenny said. "Being little, I mean. But it doesn't always work against them. When they're doing delicate work... "Like those shoes," Andy agreed. " 'Best possible shapes already,'" he imitated Blahrog. "They're one of the smallest intelligent species," Miss Featherpenny said in desperation. "And their manual dexterity rating is one of the highest. Why, a Felician could get both hands inside an Earther's mouth." Andy started. 'Wait a minute. You've given me an idea." Miss Featherpenny breathed relief. "I have? What is it?" "Dentists! They can all be dentists." "All?" 'Well, enough of them to provide for the planet's income." 'Why, that's marvelous," Miss Featherpenny said. "It won't matter that other species think they're cute. Everybody takes dentists seriously." "Their appearance will work for them," Andy said. "Think of children's dentistry." "Let's go tell them right away," Miss Featherpenny said, feeling like a Bobbsey twin. Andy swayed upward. "Sit still," Miss Featherpenny commanded "I'll bring you some coffee." gestion with Felician phlegm and ministerial greed. "We'll have to change the tax system, since most of our working population will be living off-planet." "Maybe you could work out a rotation system, Papa." Hrom had sneaked into the council chamber. 'Wait a minute," Andy said uneasily. "How are you going to educate these dentists?" Blahrog stopped and thought. "We'll use the hotels for schools," he said slowly. His face wrinkled with sly pleasure. "And we can sell the coal surplus to pay teachers and buy equipment." The Everking made a wickedsounding comment in Felician. The entire assembly burst into loud, beard-wagging laughter. It had a nasty ring to it. 'What did he say?" Andy demanded. "He said," Hrom giggled, "'Let them try to treat us like stuffed toys now.' " "Disgusting," said Miss Featherpenny. "Indecent, Edie," Andy agreed. "But never mind. Let's go home and get married." "You're a little sudden." Andy grinned. "I'll have a raise coming for this, and I'd like to keep you in the family. I can't seem to think unless you're around." "Took you long enough to notice," said Miss Featherpenny. But she didn't say it out loud. ' E E D # mourning dove, the telephone sounded at Rufus Sollenar's desk. Sollenar himself was standing fifty paces away, his leonine head cocked, his hands flat in his hip pockets, watching the nighted world through the crystal wall that faced out over Manhattan Island. The window was so high that some of what he saw was dimmed by low cloud hovering over the rivers. Above him were stars; below him the city was traced out in light and brimming with light. A falling star -- an interplanetary rocket -- streaked down toward Long Island Facility like a scratch across the soot on the doors of Hell. Sollenar's eyes took it in, but he was watching the total scene, not any particular part of it. His eyes were shining. When he heard the telephone, he raised his left hand to his lips. "Yes?" The hand glittered with utilijem rings; the effect was that of an attempt at the sort of copper-binding that was once used to reinforce the ribbing of wooden warships. His personal receptionist's voice moved from the air near 'his desk to the air near his ear. Seated at the monitor board in her office, wherever in this building her office was, the receptionist told him: "Mr. Ermine says he has an appointment." "No." Sollenar dropped his hand and returned to his panorama. When he had been twenty years younger -- managing the modest optical factory that had provided the support of three generations of Sollenars -- he had very much wanted to be able to stand in a place like this, and feel as he imagined men felt in such circumstances. But he felt unimaginable, now. To be here was one thing. To have almost lost the right, and regained it at the last moment, was another. Now he knew that not only could he be here today but that tomorrow, and tomorrow, he could still be here. He had won. His gamble had given him EmpaVid -- and EmpaVid would give him all. The city was not merely a prize set down before his eyes. It was a dynamic system he had proved he could manipulate. He and the city were one. It buoyed and sustained him; it supported him, here in the air, with stars above and light-thickened mist below. The telephone mourned: "Mr. Ermine states he has a firm appointment." "I've never heard of him." And the left hand's utilijems fell from Sollenar's Tips again. He enjoyed such toys. He raised his right hand, sheathed in insubstantial midnight-blue silk in which the silver threads of metallic wiring ran subtly toward the fingertips. He raised the hand, and touched two fingers together: music began to play behind and before him. He made contact between another combination of finger circuits, and a soft, feminine laugh came from the terrace at the other side of the room, where connecting doors had opened. He moved toward it. One layer of translucent drapery remained across the doorway, billowing lightly in the breeze from the terrace. Through it, he saw the taboret with its candle lit; the iced wine in the stand beside it; the two fragile chairs; Bess Allardyce, slender and regal, waiting in one of them -- all these, through the misty curtain, like either the beginning or the end of a dream. "Mr. Ermine reminds you the appointment was made for him at the Annual Business Dinner of the International Association of Broadcasters, in #." Sollenar completed his latest step, then stopped. He frowned down at his left hand. "Is Mr. Public Relations Office?" "Yes," the voice said after a pause. The fingers of Sollenar's right r hand shrank into a cone. The connecting door closed. The girl disappeared. The music stopped. "All right. You can tell Mr. Ermine to come up." Sollenar went to sit behind his desk. rpHE office door chimed. Soll en ar crooked a finger of his left hand, and the door opened. With another gesture, he kindled the overhead lights near the door and sat in shadow as Ermine came in. Ermine was dressed in rustcolored garments. His figure was spare, and his hands were empty. His face was round and soft, with long dark sideburns. His scalp was bald. He stood just inside Sollenar's office and said: "I would like some light to see you by, Mr. Sollenar." Sollenar crooked his little finger. The overhead lights came to soft light all over the office. The crystal wall became a mirror, with only the strongest city lights glimmering through it. "I only wanted to see you first," said Sollenar; "I thought perhaps we'd met before." "No," Ermine said, walking across the office. "It's not likely you've ever seen me." He took a card case out of his pocket and showed Sollenar proper identification. "I'm not a very forward person." "Please sit down," Sollenar said. "What may I do for you?" "At the moment, Mr. Sollenar, I'm doing something for you." Sollenar sat back in his chair. "Are you? Are you, now?" He frowned at Ermine. "When I became a party to the By-Laws passed at the '# Dinner, I thought a Special Public Relations Office would make a valuable asset to the organization. Consequently, I voted for it, and for the powers it was given. But I never expected to have any personal dealings with it. I barely remembered you people had carte "Well, of course, it's been a while since '#," Ermine said. "I imagine some legends have grown up around us. Industry gossip -- that sort of thing." "Yes." "But we don't restrict ourselves to an enforcement function, Mr. Sollenar. You haven't broken any By-Laws, to our knowledge." "Or mine. But nobody feels one hundred per cent secure. Not under these circumstances." Nor did Sollenar yet relax his face into its magnificent smile. "I'm sure you've found that out." "I have a somewhat less ambitious older brother who's with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When I embarked on my own career, he told me I could expect everyone in the world to react like a criminal, yes," Ermine said, paying no attention to Sollenar's involuntary blink. "It's one of the complicating factors in a profession like my brother's, or mine. But I'm here to advise you, Mr. Sollenar. Only that." "In what matter, Mr. Ermine?" "Well, your corporation recently came into control of the patents for a new video system. I understand that this in effect makes your corporation the licensor for an extremely valuable sales and entertainment medium. Fantastically valuable." "Various subliminal stimuli are broadcast with and keyed to the overt subject matter. The home receiving unit contains feedback sensors which determine the viewer's reaction to these stimuli, and intensify some while playing down others in order to create complete emotional rapport between the viewer and the subject matter. EmpaVid, in other words, is a system for orchestrating the viewer's emotions. The home unit is self-contained, semiportable and not significantly bulkier than the standard TV receiver. EmpaVid is compatible with standard TV receivers -- except, of course, that the subject matter seems thin and vaguely unsatisfactory on a standard receiver. So the consumer shortly purchases an EV unit." It pleased ' Sollenar to spell out the nature of his prize. "At a very reasonable price. I Quite so, Mr. Sollenar. But you had several difficulties in finding potential licensees for this system, among the networks." Sollenar's lips pinched out. Mr. Ermine raised one finger. "First, there was the matter of acquiring the patents from the original inventor, who was also approached by Cortwright Burr." "Yes, he was," Sollenar said in a completely new voice. "Competition between Mr. Burr and yourself is long-standing and intense." "Quite intense," Sollenar said, looking directly ahead of him at the one blank wall of the office. Burr's offices were several blocks downtown, in that direction. "Well, I have no wish to enlarge on that point, Mr. Burr being an as yours, Mr. Sollenar. There was, in any case, a further difficulty in licensing EV,due to the very heavy cost involved in equipping broadcasting stations and network relay equipment for this sort of transmission." "Yes, there was." "Ultimately, however, you succeeded. You pointed out, quite rightly, that if just one station made the change, and if just a few EV receivers were put into public places within the area served by that station, normal TV outlets could not possibly compete for advertising revenue." "Yes." "And so your last difficulties w ere resolved a few days ago, when your EmpaVid Unlimited . -- pardon me; when EmpaVid, a subsidiary of the Sollenar Corporation -- became a major stockholder in the Transworld TV Network."-Ermine," Sollenar said. "Why are you recounting this? Are you trying to demonstrate the power of your knowledge? All these transactions are already matters files, in accordance with the ByLaws." Ermine held up another finger. "You're forgetting I'm only here to advise you. I have two things to say. They are: "These transactions are on file members, and an increasingly large amount of capital. Also, Transworld's exclusivity, under only until thirty-three per cent market saturation has been reached. If EV is as good as it looks, that will be quite soon. After that, under the By-Laws, Transworld will be restrained from making effective defenses against patent infringement by membership and much of their capital will be involved with EV. Much of that capital is already in anticipatory motion. So a highly complex structure now ultimately depends on the integrity of the Sollenar Corporation. If Sollenar stock falls in value, not will be greatly embarrassed. Which is another way of saying EV must succeed." "I know all that! What of it? There's no risk. I've had every related patent on Earth checked. There will be no catastrophic obsolescence of the EV system." Ermine said: "There are engineers on Mars. Martian engineers. They're a dying race, but no one knows what they can still do." Sollenar raised his massive head. Ermine said: "Late this evening, my office learned that Cortwright Burr has been in close consultation with the Martians for several weeks. They have made some sort of machine for him. He was on the flight that landed at the Facility a few moments ago." Sollenar's fists clenched. The lights crashed off and on, and the room wailed. From the terrace came a startled cry, and a sound of smashed glass. Mr. Ermine nodded, excused himself and left. -- A few moments later, Mr. Ermine stepped out at the pedestrian level of the Sollenar Building. He strolled through the landscaped garden, and across the frothing brook toward the central walkway down the Avenue. He paused at a hedge to pluck a blossom and inhale its odor. He walked away, holding it in his naked fingers. II D rifting slowly on the thread of his spinneret, Rufus Sollenar came gliding down the wind above Cortwright Burr's building. The building, like a spider, touched the ground at only the points of its legs. It held its wide, low bulk spread like a parasol over several downtown blocks. Sollenar, manipulating the helium-filled plastic drifter far above him, steered himself with jets of compressed gas from plastic bottles in the drifter's structure. Only Sollenar himself, in all this system, was not effectively transparent to the municipal antiplane radar. And he himself was wrapped in long, fluttering streamers of dull black, metallic sheeting. To the eye, he was amorphous and non-reflective. To electronic sensors, he was a drift of static much like a sheet of foil picked by the wind from some careless trash heap. To all of the senses of all interested parties he was hardly there at all -- and, thus, in an excellent position for murder. He fluttered against Burr's window. There was the man, crouched over his desk. What was that in his hands -- a pomander? Sollenar clipped his harness to the edges of the cornice. Swayed out against it, his sponge-soled boots pressed to the glass, he touched his left hand to the window and described a circle. He pushed; there was a thud on the carpeting in Burr's office, and now there was no barrier to Sollenar. Doubling his knees against his chest, he catapulted forward, the riot pistol in his right hand. He stumbled and fell to his knees, but the gun was up. Burr jolted up behind his desk. The little sphere of orange-gold metal, streaked with darker bronze, its surface vermicular with encrustations, was still in his hands. "Him!" Burr cried out as Sollenar fired. Gasping, Sollenar watched the charge strike Burr. It threw his torso backward faster than his limbs and head could follow without dangling. The choked-down pistol was nearly silent. Burr crashed backward to end, transfixed, against the wall.  to take the golden ball. He wondered where Shakespeare could have seen an example such as this, to know an old man could have so much blood in him. Burr held the prize out to him. Staring with eyes distended by hydrostatic pressure, his clothing raddled and his torso grinding its broken bones, Burr stalked away from the wall and moved as if to embrace Sollenar. It was queer, but he was not dead. Shuddering, Sollenar fired again. Again Burr was thrown back. The ball spun from his splayed fingers as he once more marked the wall with his body. Pomander, orange, whatever -- it looked valuable. Sollenar ran after the rolling ball. And Burr moved to intercept him, nearly faceless, hunched under a great invisible weight that slowly yielded as his back groaned. Sollenar took a single backward step. Burr took a step toward him. The golden ball lay in a far corner. Sollenar raised the pistol despairingly and fired again. Burr tripped backward on tiptoe, his arms like windmills, and fell atop the prize. Tears ran down Sollenar's cheeks. He pushed one foot forward... and Burr, in his corner, lifted his head and began to gather his body for the effort of rising. Sollenar retreated to the window, the pistol sledging backward against his wrist and elbow as he fired the remaining shots in the magazine. Panting, he climbed up into the window frame and clipped the harness to his body, craning to look over his shoulder... as Burr -- shredded; leaking blood and worse than blood -- advanced across the office. He cast off his holds on the window frame and clumsily worked the drifter controls. Far above him, volatile ballast spilled out and dispersed in the air long before it touched ground. Sollenar rose, sobbing -- And Burr stood in the window, his shattered hands on the edges of the cut circle, raising his distended eyes steadily to watch Sollenar in flight across the enigmatic sky. " roof of a building in his possession, Sollenar had a disposal unit for his gun and his other trappings. He deferred for a time the question of why Burr had failed at once to die. Emptyhanded, he returned uptown. He entered his office, called and told his attorneys the exact times of departure and return and knew the question of dealing with municipal authorities was thereby resolved. That was simple enough, with no witnesses to complicate the matter. He began to wish he hadn't been so irresolute as to leave Burr without the thing he was after. Surely, if the pistol hadn't killed the man -- an old man, with thin limbs and spotted skin -- he could have wrestled that thin-limbed, bloody old man aside -- that spotted old man -- and dragged himself and his prize back to the window, for all that the old man would have clung to him, and clutched at his legs, and fumbled for a handhold on his somber disguise of wrappings -- that broken, immortal old man. Sollenar raised his hand. The great window to the city grew opaque. Bess Allardyce knocked softly on the door from the terrace. He would have thought she'd returned to her own apartments many hours ago. Tortuously pleased, he opened the door and smiled at her, feeling the dried tears crack on the skin of his cheeks. He took her proffered hands. "You waited for me," he sighed. "A long time for anyone as beautiful as you to wait." She smiled back at him. "Let's go out and look at the stars." "Isn't it chilly?" "I made spiced hot cider for us. We can sip it and think." He let her draw him out onto the terrace. He leaned on the parapet, his arm around her pulsing waist, his cape drawn around both their shoulders. "Bess, I won't ask if you'd stay with me no matter what the circumstances. But it might be a time will come when I couldn't bear to live in this city. What about that?" "I don't know," she answered honestly. And Cortwright Burr put his hand up over the edge of the parapet, between them. straining knuckles, holding the entire weight of the man dangling against the sheer face of the building. There was a sliding, rustling noise, and the other hand came up, searched blindly for a hold and found it, hooked over the stone. The fingers tensed and rose, their tips flattening at the pressure as Burr tried to pull his head and shoulders up to the level of the parapet. Bess breathed:' "Oh, look at them! He must have torn them terribly climbing up!" Then she pulled away from Sollenar and stood staring at him, her hand to her mouth. "But he couldn't have climbed! We're so high!" Sollenar beat at the hands with the heels of his palms, using the direct, trained blows he had learned at his athletic club. Bone splintered against the stone. When the knuckles were broken the hands instantaneously disappeared, leaving only streaks behind them. Sollenar looked over the parapet. A bundle shrank from sight, silhouetted against the lights of the pedestrian level and the Avenue. It contracted to a pinpoint. Then, when it reached the brook and water flew in all directions, it disappeared in a final sunburst, endowed with glory by the many lights which found momentary reflection down there. "Bess, leave me! Leave me, please!" Rufus Sollenar cried out. Ill -fice, his hands held safely still in front of him, their fingers spread and rigid. The telephone sounded, and his secretary said to him: "Mr. Sollenar, you are ten minutes from Ball. This is a First Class obligation." Sollenar laughed. "I thought it was, when I originally classified it." "Are you now planning to renege, Mr. Sollenar?" the secretary inquired politely. Certainly, Sollenar thought. He could as easily renege on the Ball as a king could on his coronation. "Burr, you scum, what have you done to me?" he asked the air, and the telephone said: "Beg pardon?" "Tell my valet," Sollenar said. "I'm going." He dismissed the phone. His hands cupped in front of his chest. A firm grip on emptiness might be stronger than any prize in a broken hand. Carrying in his chest something  he refused to admit was terror, Sollenar made ready for the Ball. But only a few moments after the first dance set had ended. station executive staff looked over Sollenar's shoulder and remarked: "Oh, there's Cort Burr, dressed like a gallows bird." Sollenar, glittering in the costume of the Medici, did not turn his head. "Is he? What would he want here?" Levier's eyebrows arched. "He holds a little stock. He has entree. But he's late." Levier's lips quirked. "It must have taken him some time to get that makeup on." "Not in good taste, is it?" "Look for yourself." "Oh, I'll do better than that," Sollenar said. "I'll go and talk to him a while. Excuse me, Levier." And only then did he turn around, already started on his first pace toward the man. TUT Cortwright Burr was only a pasteboard imitation of himself as Sollenar had come to know him. He stood to one side of the doorway, dressed in black and crimson robes, with black leather gauntlets on his hands, carrying a staff of weathered, natural wood. His face was shadowed by a sackcloth hood, the eyes well hidden. His face was powdered gray, and some blend of livid colors hollowed his cheeks. He stood motionless as Sollenar came up to him. As he had crossed the floor, each step regular, the eyes of bystanders had followed Sollenar, until, anticipating his course, they found Burr waiting. The noise level of the Ball shrank perceptibly, for the lesser revelers who chanced to be present were sustaining it all alone. The people who really mattered here were silent and watchful. The thought was that Burr, defeated in business, had come here in some insane reproach to his adversary, in this lugubrious, distasteful clothing. Why, he looked like a corpse. Or worse. The question was, what would Sollenar say to him? The wish was that Burr would take himself away, back to his estates or to some other city. New York was no longer for Cortwright Burr. But what would Sollenar say to him now, to drive him back to where he hadn't the grace to go willingly? "Cortwright," Sollenar said in a voice confined to the two of them. "So your Martian immortality works." Burr said nothing. "You got that in addition, didn't you? You knew how I'd react. You knew you'd need protection. Paid the Martians to make you physically invulnerable? It's a good system. Very impressive. Who would have thought the Martians knew so much? But who here is going to pay attention to you now? Get out of town, Cortwright. You're past your chance. You're dead as far as these people are concerned -- all you have left is your skin." Burr repched up and surreptitiously lifted a corner of his fleshed mask. And there he was, under it. The hood retreated an inch, and the light reached his eyes; and Sollenar had been wrong, Burr had less left than he thought. "Oh, no, no, Cortwright," Sollenar said softly. "No, you're right -- I can't stand up to that." He turned and bowed to the assembled company. "Good night!" he cried, and walked out of the ballroom. Someone followed him down the corridor to the elevators. Sollenar did not look behind him. "I have another appointment with you now," Ermine said at his elbow. level. Sollenar said: "There's a cafe. We can talk there." "Too public, Mr. Sollenar. Let's simply stroll and converse." Ermine lightly took his arm and guided him along the walkway. Sollenar noticed then that Ermine was costumed so cunningly that no one could have guessed the appearance of the man. "Very well," Sollenar said. "Of course." They walked together, casually. Ermine said: "Burr's driving you to your death. Is it because you tried to kill him earlier? Did you get his Martian secret?" Sollenar shook his head. "You didn't get it." Ermine sighed. "That's unfortunate. I'll have to take steps." "Under the By-Laws," Sollenar said, "I cry laissez faire." Ermine looked up, his eyes twinkling. "Laissez faire? Mr. Sollenar, do you have any idea how many of our members are involved in your fortunes? They will cry laissez faire, Mr. Sollenar, but clearly you persist in dragging them down with you. No, sir, Mr. Sollenar, my office now forwards an immediate recommendation to the Technical Advisory Burr probably has a system superior to yours, and that stock in Sollenar, Incorporated, had best be disposed of." "There's a bench," Sollenar said. "Let's sit down." "As you wish." Ermine moved beside Sollenar to the bench, but remained standing. "What is it, Mr. Sollenar?" "I want your help. You advised me on what Burr had. It's still in his office building, somewhere. You have resoures. We can get it." "Laissez faire, Mr. Sollenar. I visited you in an advisory capacity. I can do no more." "For a partnership in my affairs could you do more?" "Money?" Ermine tittered. "For me? Do you know the conditions of my employment?" TF HE had thought, Sollenar would have remembered. He reached out tentatively. Ermine anticipated him. Ermine bared his left arm and sank his teeth into it. He displayed the arm. There was no quiver of pain in voice or stance. "It's not a legend, Mr. Sollenar. It's quite true. We of our office must spend a year, after the nerve surgery, learning to walk without the feel of our feet, to handle objects without crushing them or letting them slip, or damaging ourselves. Our mundane pleasures are auditory, olfactory, and visual. Easily gratified at little expense. Our dreams are totally interior, Mr. Sollenar. The operation is irreversible. What would you buy for me with your money?" "What would I buy for myself?" Sollenar's head sank down between his shoulders. Ermine bent over him. "Your despair is your own, Mr. Sollenar. I have official business with you." He lifted Sollenar's chin with a forefinger. "I judge physical interference to be unwarranted at this time. But matters must involved with you can recover the value of their investments in EV. Is that perfectly clear, Mr. Sollenar? You are hereby enjoined under the By-Laws, as enforced by the Special Public Relations Office." He glanced at his watch. "Notice was served at #:# AM, City time." "#:#," Sollenar said. "City time." He sprang to his feet and raced down a companionway to the taxi level. Mr. Ermine watched him quizzically. He opened his costume, took out his omnipresent medical kit, and sprayed coagulant over the wound in his forearm. Replacing the kit, he adjusted his clothing and strolled down the same companionway Sollenar had run. He raised an arm, and a taxi flittered down beside him. He showed the driver a card, and the cab lifted off with him, its lights glaring in a Priority pattern, far faster than Sollenar's ordinary legal limit allowed. IV at the stars in great kangarooleaps of arch and cantilever span, jeweled in glass and metal as if the entire port were a mechanism for navigating interplanetary space. Rufus Sollenar paced its esplanades, measuring his steps, holding his arms still, for the short time until he could board the Mars rocket. Erect and majestic, he took a place in the lounge and carefully sipped liqueur, once the liner had boosted away from Earth and coupled in its Faraday main drives. Mr. Ermine settled into the place beside him. Sollenar looked over at him calmly. "I thought so." Ermine nodded. "Of course you did. But I didn't almost miss you. I was here ahead of you. I have no objection to your going to Mars, Mr. Sollenar. Laissez faire. Provided I can go along." "Well," Rufus Sollenar said. "Liqueur?" He gestured with his glass. Ermine shook his head. "No, thank you," he said delicately. Sollenar said: "Even your tongue?" "Of course my tongue, Mr. Sollenar. I taste nothing. I touch nothing." Ermine smiled. "But I feel no pressure." "All right, then," Rufus Sollenar said crisply. "We have several hours to landing time. You sit and dream your interior dreams, and I'll dream mine." He faced around in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. "Mr. Sollenar," Ermine said gently. "Yes?" "I am once again with you by appointment as provided under the By-Laws." "State your business, Mr. Ermine." "You are not permitted to lie in an unknown grave, Mr. Sollenar. Insurance policies on your life have been taken out at a high concerned cannot wait the statutory seven years to have you declared dead. Do what you will, Mr. Sollenar, but I must take care I witness your death. From now on, I am with you wherever you go." Sollenar smiled. "I don't intend to die. Why should I die, Mr. Ermine?" "I have no idea, Mr. Sollenar. But I know Cortwright Burr's character. And isn't that he, seated there in the corner? The light is poor, but I think he's recognizable." Across the lounge, Burr raised his head and looked into Sollenar's eyes. He raised a hand near his face, perhaps merely to signify greeting. Rufus Sollenar faced front. "A worthy opponent, Mr. Sollenar," Ermine said. "A persevering, unforgiving, ingenious man. And yet -- " Ermine seemed a little touched by bafflement. "And yet it seems to me, Mr. Sollenar, that he got you running rather easily. What did happen between you, after my advisory call?" Sollenar turned a terrible smile on Ermine. "I shot him to pieces. If you'd peel his face, you'd see." Ermine sighed. "Up to this moment, I had thought perhaps you might still salvage your affairs." "Pity, Mr. Ermine? Pity for the insane?" "Interest. I can take no part in your world. Be grateful, Mr. Sollenar. I am not the same gullible man I was when I signed my conago." Sollenar laughed. Then he stole a glance at Burr's corner. nathy Field, in Aresia, the Terrestrial city. Industralized, prefabricated, jerry-built and clamorous, the storm-proofed buildings huddled, but huddled proudly, at the desert's edge. Low on the horizon was the Martian settlement -- the buildings so skillfully blended with the landscape, so eroded, so much abandoned that the uninformed eye saw nothing. Sollenar had been to Mars -- on a tour. He had seen the natives in their nameless dwelling place; arrogant, venomous and weak. He had been told, by the paid guide, they trafficked with Earthmen as much as they cared to, and kept to their place on the rim of Earth's encroachment, observing. "Tell me, Ermine," Sollenar said quietly as they walked across the terminal lobby. "You're to kill me, aren't you, if I try to go on without you?" "A matter of procedure, Mr. Sollenar," Ermine said evenly. "We cannot risk the investment Sollenar sighed. "If I were any other member, how I would commend you, Mr. Ermine! Can we hire a car for ourselves, then, somewhere nearby?" "Going out to see the engineers?" Ermine asked. "Who would have thought they'd have something valuable for sale?" "I want to show them something," Sollenar said. "What thing, Mr. Sollenar?" They turned the corner of a corridor, with branching hallways here and there, not all of them busy. "Come here," Sollenar said, nodding toward one of them. They stopped out of sight of the lobby and the main corridor. "Come on," Sollenar said. "A little further." "No," Ermine said. "This is farther than I really wish. It's dark here." "Wise too late, Mr. Ermine," Sollenar said, his arms flashing out. One palm impacted against Ermine's solar plexus, and the other against the muscle at the side of his neck, but not hard enough to kill. Ermine collapsed, starved for oxygen, while Sollenar silently cursed having been cured of murder. Then Sollenar turned and ran. Behind him Ermine's body struggled to draw breath by reflex alone. Moving as fast as he dared, Sollenar walked back and reached the taxi lock, pulling a respirator from a wall rack as he went. He flagged a car and gave his destination, looking behind him. He had seen nothing of Cortwright Burr since setting foot on Mars. But he knew that soon or late, Burr would find him. A few moments later Ermine got to his feet. Sollenar's car was well away. Ermine shrugged and went to the local broadcasting station. He commandeered a private desk, a firearm and immediate to Earth. When his call acknowledgement had come back to him from his office there, he reported: "Sollenar is enroute to the Martian city. He wants a duplicate of Burr's device, of course, since he smashed the original when he killed Burr. I'll follow and make final disposition. The disorientation I reported previously is progressing rapidly. Almost all his responses now are inappropriate. On the flight out, he seemed to be staring at something in an empty seat. Quite often when spoken to he obviously hears something else entirely. I expect to catch one of the next few flights back." There was no point in waiting for comment to wend its way back from Earth. Ermine left. He went to a cab rank and paid the exorbitant fee for transportation outside Aresian city limits.  city was like a welter of broken pots. Shards of wall and roof joined at savage angles and pointed to nothing. Underfoot, drifts of vitreous material, shaped to fit no sane configuration, and broken to fit such a mosaic as no church would contain, rocked and slid under Sollenar's hurrying feet. What from Aresia had been a solid front of dun color was here a facade of red, green and blue splashed about centuries ago and since then weathered only enough to show how bitter the colors had once been. The plum-colored sky stretched over all this like a frigid membrane, and the wind blew and blew. Here and there, as he progressed, Sollenar saw Martian arms and heads protruding from the rubble. Sculptures. He was moving toward the heart of the city, where some few unbroken structures persisted. At the top of a heap of shards he turned to look behind him. There was the dust-plume of his cab, returning to the city. He expected to walk back -- perhaps to meet someone on the road, all alone on the Martian plain if only Ermine would forebear from interfering. Searching the flat, thin-aired landscape, he tried to pick out the plodding dot of Cortwright Burr. But not yet. He turned and ran down the untrustworthy slope. He reached the edge of the maintained area. Here the rubble was gone, the ancient walks swept, the statues kept upright on their pediments. But only broken walls suggested the fronts of the houses that had stood here. Knifing their sides up through the wind-rippled sand that only constant care kept off the street, the shadow-houses fenced his way and the sculptures were motionless as hope. Ahead of him, he saw the buildings of the engineers. There was no heap to climb and look to see if Ermine followed close behind. Sucking his respirator, he reached the building of the Martian engineers. A sounding strip ran down the doorjamb. He scratched his fingernails sharply along it, and the magnified vibration, ducted throughout the hollow walls, rattled his plea for entrance. V T'HE door opened, and Martians stood looking. They were spindly-limbed and slight, their faces framed by folds of leathery tissue. Their mouths were lipped with horn as hard as dentures, and pursed, forever ready to masticate. They were pleasant neither to look at nor, Sollenar knew, to deal with. But Cortwright Burr had done it. And Sollenar needed to do it. "Does anyone here speak English?" he asked. "I," said the central Martian, his mouth opening to the sound, closing to end the reply. "I would like to deal with you." "Whenever," the Martian said, and the group at the doorway parted deliberately to let Sollenar in. Before the door closed behind him, Sollenar looked back. But the rubble of the abandoned sectors blocked his line of sight into the desert. "What can you offer? And what do you want?" the Martian asked. Sollenar stood half-ringed by them, in a room whose corners he could not see in the uncertain light. "I offer you Terrestrial currency." The English-speaking Martian -- the Martian who had admitted to speaking English -- turned his head slightly and spoke to his fellows. There were clacking sounds as his lips met. The others reacted variously, one of them suddenly gesturing with what seemed a disgusted flip of his arm before he turned without further word and stalked away, his shoulders looking like the shawled back of a very old and very hungry woman. "What did Burr give you?" Sollenar asked. "Burr." The Martian cocked his head. His eyes were not multi-faceted, but gave that impression. "He was here and he dealt with you. Not long ago. On what basis?" "Burr. Yes. Burr gave us currency. We will take currency from you. For the same thing we gave him?" "For immortality, yes." "Im -- This is a new word." "Is it? For the secret of not dying?" "Not dying? You think we have not-dying for sale here?" The Martian spoke to the others again. Their lips clattered. Others left, like the first one had, moving with great precision and very slow step, and no remaining tolerance for Sollenar. Sollenar cried out: "What did you sell him, then?" The principal engineer said: "We made an entertainment device for him." "A little thing. This size." Sollenar cupped his hands. "You have seen it, then." "Yes. And nothing more? That was all he bought here?" "It was all we had to sell -- or give. We don't yet know whether Earthmen will give us things in exchange for currency. We'll see, when we next need something from Aresia." Sollenar demanded: "How did it work? This thing you sold him." "Oh, it lets people tell stories to themselves." Sollenar looked closely at the Martian. "What kind of stories?" "Any kind," the Martian said blandly. "Burr told us what he wanted. He had drawings with him of an Earthman device that used pictures on a screen, and broadcast sounds, to carry the details of the story told to the auditor." "He stole those patents! He couldn't have used them on Earth." Ci A ND why should he? Our device needs to convey no precise details. Any mind can make its own. It only needs to be put into a situation, and from there it can do all the work. If an auditor wishes a story of contact with other sexes, for example, the projector simply makes it seem to him, the next time he is with the object of his desire, that he is getting positive feedback -- that he is arousing a similar response in that object. Once that has been established for him, the auditor may then leave the machine, move about normally, conduct his life as usual -- but always in accordance with the basic situation. It is, you see, in the end a means of introducing system into his view of reality. Of course, his society must understand that he is not in accord with reality, for some of what he does cannot seem rational from an outside view of him. So some care must be taken, but not much. If many such devices were to enter his society, soon the circumstances would become commonplace, and the society would surely readjust to allow for it," said the English-speaking Martian. "The machine creates any desired situation in the auditor's mind?" "Certainly. There are simple predisposing tapes that can be inserted as desired. Love, adventure, cerebration -- it makes no difference." Several of the bystanders clacked sounds out to each other. Sollenar looked at them narrowly. It was obvious there had to be more than one English-speaker among these people. "And the device you gave Burr," he asked the engineer, neither calmly nor hopefully. "What sort of stories could its auditors tell themselves?" THE Martian cocked his head again. It gave him the look of an owl at a bedroom window. "Oh, there was one situation we were particularly instructed to include. Burr said he was thinking ahead to showing it to an acquaintance of his. "It was a situation of adventure; of adventure with the fearful. And it was to end in loss and bitterness." The Martian looked even more closely at Sollenar. "Of course, the device does not specify details. No one but the auditor can know what fearful thing inhabits his story, or precisely how the end of it would come. You would, I believe, be Rufus Sollenar? Burr spoke of you and made the noise of laughing." Sollenar opened his mouth. But there was nothing to say. "You want such a device?" the Martian asked. "We've prepared several since Burr left. He spoke of machines that would manufacture them in astronomical numbers. We, of course, have done our best with our poor hands." Sollenar said: "I would like to look out your door." "Pleasure." Sollenar opened the door slightly. Mr. Ermine stood in the cleared street, motionless as the shadow buildings behind him. He raised one hand in a gesture of unfelt greeting as he saw Sollenar, then put it back on the stock of his rifle. Sollenar closed the door, and turned to the Martian. "How much currency do you want?" "Oh, all you have with you. You people always have a good deal with you when you travel." Sollenar plunged his hands into his pockets and pulled out his billfold, his change, his keys, his jeweled radio; whatever was there, he rummaged out onto the floor, listening to the sound of rolling coins. "I wish I had more here," he laughed. "I wish I had the amount that man out there is going to recover when he shoots me." The Martian engineer cocked Wall of crystal, eye of night his head. "But your dream is over, Mr. Sollenar," he clacked drily. "Isn't it?" "Quite so. But you to your purposes and I to mine. Now give me one of those projectors. And set it to predispose a situation I am about to specify to you. Take however long it needs. The audience is a patient one." He laughed, and tears gathered in his eyes. T"R. Ermine waited, isolated from the cold, listening to hear whether the rifle stock was slipping out of his fingers. He had no desire to go into the Martian building after Sollenar and involve third parties. All he wanted was to put Sollenar's body under a dated marker, with as little trouble as possible. Now and then he walked a few paces backward and forward, to keep from losing muscular control at his extremities because of low skin temperature. Sollenar must come out soon enough. He had no food supply with him, and though Ermine did not like the risk of engaging a man like Sollenar in a starvation contest, there was no doubt that a man with no taste for fuel could outlast one with the acquired reflexes of eating. The door opened and Sollenar came out. He was carrying something. Perhaps a weapon. Ermine let him come closer while he raised and carefully sighted his rifle. Sollenar might have some Martian weapon or he might not. Ermine did not particularly care. If Ermine died, he would hardly notice it -- far less than he would notice a botched ending to a job of work already roiled by Sollenar's break away at the space field. If Ermine would be assigned almost immediately. No matter what happened, he ever reached Abernathy Field. So there was plenty of time to aim an unhurried, clean shot. Sollenar was closer, now. He seemed to be in a very agitated frame of mind. He held out whatever he had in his hand. It was another one of the Martian entertainment machines. Sollenar seemed to be offering it as a token to Ermine. Ermine smiled. "What can you offer me, Mr. Sollenar?" he said, and shot. The golden ball rolled away over the sand. "There, now," Ermine said. "Now, wouldn't you sooner be me than you? And where is the thing that made the difference between us?" He shivered. He was chilly. Sand was blowing against his tender face, which had been somewhat abraded during his long wait. He stopped, transfixed. He lifted his head. Then, with a great swing of his arms, he sent the rifle whirling away. "The wind!" he sighed into the thin air. "I feel the wind." He leapt into the air, and sand flew away from his feet as he landed. He whispered to himself: "I feel the ground!" He stared in tremblant joy at Sollenar's empty body. "What have you given me?" Full of his own rebirth, he swung his head up at the sky again, and cried in the direction of the Sun: "Oh, you squeezing, nibbling people who made me incorruptible and thought that was the end of me!" With love he buried Sollenar, and with reverence he put up the marker, but he had plans for what he might accomplish with the facts of this transaction, and the myriad others he was privy to. A sharp bit of pottery had penetrated the sole of his shoe and gashed his foot, but he, not having seen it, hadn't felt it. Nor would he see it or feel it even when he changed his stockings; for he had not noticed the wound when it was made. It didn't matter. In a few days it would heal, though not as rapidly as if it had been properly attended to. Vaguely, he heard the sound of Martians clacking behind their closed door as he hurried out of the city, full of revenge, and reverence for his savior. Your favorite authors and their greatest stories! Satisfaction guaranteed or money back within ten days. Galaxy Publishing Corporation #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. each. Name Address City Zone State Meet Higgston Rainbird, who invented steamboating and the nuclear pile -- remember? truly tabulated the name of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, would surely be without peer. Yet today he is known (and only to a few specialists, at that) for an improved blacksmith's bellows in the year #, for a certain modification (not fundamental) in the moldboard plow about #, for a better (but not good) method of reefing the lateen sail, for a chestnut roaster, for the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs, and for a nutmeg grater embodying a '  new safety feature; this last was either in the year # or #. He is known for such, and for no more. Were this all that he had achieved his name would still be secure. And it is secure, in a limited way, and to those who hobby in technological history. But the glory of which history has cheated him, or of which he cheated himself, is otherwise. In a different sense, it is without parallel, absolutely unique. For he pioneered the dynamo, the steam automobile, the steel industry, ferro-concrete construction, the internal combustion engine, electric illumination and power, the wireless, the televox, the petroleum and petro-chemical industries, monorail transportation, air travel, world-wide monitoring, fissionable power, space travel, group telepathy, political and economic balance; he built a retrogressor; and he made great advances towards corporeal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind. It would seem unfair that all this is unknown of him. Even the once-solid facts -- that he wired Philadelphia for light and power in #, Boston the following year and New York two years later -- are no longer solid. In a sense they are no longer facts. For all this there must be an explanation; and if not that, then an account at least; and if not that, well -- something anyhow. made a certain decision on a June afternoon in # when he was quite a young man, and by this decision he confirmed his inventive bent. He was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain. He flew his falcon (actually a tercel hawk) down through the white clouds, and to him it was the highest sport in the world. The bird came back, climbing the blue air, and brought a passenger pigeon from below the clouds. And Higgston was almost perfectly happy as he hooded the hawk. He could stay there all day and hawk from above the clouds. Or he could go down the mountain and work on his sparker in his shed. He sighed as he made the decision, for no man can have everything. There was a fascination about hawking. But there was also a fascination about the copper-strip sparker. And he went down the mountain to work on it. Thereafter he hawked less. After several years he was forced to give it up altogether. He had chosen his life, the dedicated career of an inventor, and he stayed with it for sixty-five years. His sparker was not a success. It would be expensive, its spark was uncertain and it had almost no advantage over flint. People could always start a fire. If not, they could borrow a brand from a neighbor. There was no market for the sparker. But it was a nice machine, hammered copper strips wrapped around iron teased with lodestone, and the thing turned with a hand crank. He never gave it up entirely. He based other things upon it; and the retrogressor of his last years could not have been built without it. But the main thing was steam, iron, and tools. He made the finest lathes. He revolutionized smelting and mining. He brought new things to power, and started the smoke to rolling. He made mistakes, he ran into dead ends, ho wasted whole decades. But one man can only do so much. He married a shrew, Audrey, knowing that a man cannot achieve without a goad as well as a goal. But he was without issue or disciple, and this worried him. He built steamboat and steamtrain. His was the first steam thresher. He cleared the forests with wood-burning giants, and designed towns. He destroyed southern slavery with a steamPowered cotton picker, and power and wealth followed him. For better or worse he brought the country up a long road, so there was hardly a custom of his boyhood that still continued. Probably no one man had ever changed a country so much in his lifetime. He fathered a true machinetool industry, and brought rubber from the tropics and plastic from the laboratory. He pumped petroleum, and used natural gas for illumination and steam power. He was honored and enriched; and, looking back, he had no reason to regard his life as wasted. "Yet I've missed so much. I tar-heeled and wasted a lot of time. If only I could have avoided the blind alleys, I could have done many times as much. I brought machine-tooling to its apex. But I neglected the finest tool of all, the mind. I used it as it is, but I had no time to study it, much less modify it. Others after me will do it all. But I rather wanted to do it all myself. Now it is too late." his old sparker and its descendants, now that he was old. He built toys along the line of it that need not always have remained toys. He made a televox, but the only practical application was that now Audrey could rail at him over a greater distance. He fired up a little steam dynamo in his house, ran wires and made it burn lights in his barn. And he built a retrogressor. "I would do much more along this line had I the time. But I'm pepper-bellied pretty near the end of the road. It is like finally coming to a gate and seeing a whole greater world beyond it, and being too old and too feeble to enter." He kicked a chair and broke it. "I never even made a better chair. Never got around to it. There are so clod-hopping many things I meant to do. I have maybe pushed the country ahead a couple of decades faster than it would otherwise have gone. But what couldn't I have done if it weren't for the blind alleys! Ten years lost in one of them, twelve in one. If only there had been a way to tell the true from the false, and to leave to others what they could do, and to do myself only what nobody else could do. To see a link (however unlikely) and go out and get it and set it in its place. O the waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in! If I had only had a mentor! If I had had a map, a clue, a hatful of clues. I was born shrewd, and I shrewdly cut a path and went a grand ways. But always there was a clearer path and a faster way that I did not see till later. As my name is Rainbird, if I had it to do over, I'd do it infinitely better." He began to write a list of the things that he'd have done better. Then he stopped and threw away his pen in disgust. "Never did even invent a decent ink-pen. Never got around to it. Dog-eared damnation, there's so much I didn't do!" He poured himself a jolt, but he made a face as he drank it. a really better whisky. Had some good ideas along that line too. So many things I never did do. Well, I can't improve things by talking to myself here about it." Then he sat and thought. "But I burr-tailed can improve things by talking to myself there about it." He turned on his retrogressor, and went back sixty-five years and up two thousand feet. hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain one June afternoon in #. He flew his bird down through the whitefleece clouds, and to him it was sport indeed. Then it came back, climbing the shimmering air, and brought a pigeon to him. "It's fun," said the old man, "but the bird is tough, and you have a lot to do. Sit down and listen, Higgston." "How do you know the bird is tough? Who are you, and how did an old man like you climb up here without my seeing you. And how in hellpepper did you know that my name was Higgston?" "I ate the bird and I remember that it was tough. I am just an old man who would tell you a few things to avoid in your life, and I came up here by means of an invention of my own. And I know your name is Higgston, as it is also my name; you being named after me, or I after you, I forget which. Which one of us is the oldest anyhow?" "I had thought that you were, old man. I am a little interested in inventions myself. How does the one that carried you Up here work?" "It begins, well it begins with something like your sparker, Higgston. And as the years go by you adapt and add. But it is all tinkering with a force field till you are able to warp it a little. Now then, you are an ewereared galoot and not as handsome as I remembered you; but I happen to know that you have the makings of a fine man. Listen now as hard as evqr you listened in your life. I doubt that I will be able to repeat. I will save you years and decades; I will tell you the best road to take over a journey which it was once said that a man could travel but once. Man, I'll pave a path for you over the hard places and strew palms before your feet." "Talk, you addle-pated old gaff. No man ever listened so hard before." T HE old man talked to the young one for five hours. Not a word was wasted: they were neither of them given to wasting words. He told him that steam wasn't everything -- this before he knew that it was anything. It was a giant power, but it was limited. Other powers, perhaps, were not. He instructed him to explore the possibilities of amplification and feedback, and to use always the lightest medium of transmission of power: wire rather than mule-drawn coal cart, air rather than wire, ether rather than air. He warned against time wasted in shoring up the obsolete, and of the bottomless quicksand of cliche, both of word and of thought. He admonished him not to waste precious months in trying to devise the perfect apple-corer; there will never be a perfect apple-corer. He begged him not to build a better bob-sled. There would be things far swifter than the bob-sled. Let others make the new hidescrapers and tanning salts. Let others aid the carter and the candle-molder and the cooper in their arts. There was need for a better halm, a better horse-block, a better stile, a better whetstone. Well, let others fill those needs. If our button-hooks, our fire-dogs, our whiffle-trees, our bootjacks, our cheese-presses are all badly designed and a disgrace, then let someone else remove that disgrace. Let others aid the cordwainer and the cobbler. Let Higgston do only the high work that nobody else would be able to do. There would come a time when the farrier himself would disappear, as the fletcher had all but disappeared. But new trades would open for a man with an open mind. Then the old man got specific. He showed young Higgston a design for a lathe-dog that would save time. He told him how to draw, rather than hammer wire; and advised him of the virtues of mica as insulator until better materials should come to hand. "And here there are some things that you will have to take on faith," said the old man, "things of which we learn the 'what' before we fathom the 'why.' " He explained to him the shuttle armature and the self-exciting field and commutation; and the possibilities that alternation carried to its ultimate might open up. He told him a bejammed lot of things about a confounded huge variety of subjects. "And a little mathematics never hurt a practical man," said the old gaffer. "I was self-taught, and it slowed me down." They hunkered down there, and the old man cyphered it all out in the dust on the top of Devil's Head Mountain. He showed him natural logarithms and rotating vectors and the calculi and such; but he didn't push it too far, as even a smart boy can learn only so much in a few minutes. He then gave him a little advice on the treatment of Audrey, knowing it would be useless, for the art of living with a shrew is a thing that cannot be explained to another. "Now hood your hawk and go down the mountain and go to work," the old man said. And that is what young Higgston Rainbird did. T HE career of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, was meteoric. The wise men of Greece were little boys to him, the Renaissance giants had only knocked at the door but had not tried the knob. And it was unlocked all the time. The milestones that Higgston left are breathtaking. He built a short high dam on the flank of Devil's Head Mountain, and had hydroelectric power for his own shop in that same year (#). He had an arc light burning in Horse-Head Lighthouse in #. He read by true incandescent light in #, and lighted his native village, Knobknocker, three years later. He drove a charcoal-fueled automobile in #, switched to a distillate of whale oil in #, and used true rock-oil in #. His gasoline powered combination reaperthresher was in commercial production in #, the same year that he wired Centerville for light and power. His first diesel locomotive made its trial run in #, in which year he also converted one of his earlier coalburning steam ships to liquid fuel. In # he had wired Philadelphia for light and power, a major breakthrough, for the big cities had manfully resisted the innovations. On the night of the turn of the century he unhooded a whole clutch of new things, wireless telegraphy, the televox, radio transmission and reception, motile and audible theatrical reproductions, a machine to transmit the human voice into print, and a method of sterilizing and Wrapping meat to permit its indefinite preservation at any temperature. And in the spring of that new year he first flew a heavier-thanair vehicle. "He has made all the basic inventions," said the manytongued people. "Now there remains only their refinement and proper utilization." "Horse hockey," said Higgston Rainbird. He made a rocket that could carry freight to England in thirteen minutes at seven cents a hundredweight. This was in #. He had fissionable power in #, and within four years had the price down where it could be used for desalting seawater to the eventual irrigation remarkably dry land. He built a Think Machine to work out the problems that he was too busy to solve, and a Prediction Machine to pose him new problems and new areas of breakthrough. In #, on his birthday, he hit the moon with a marker. He bet a crony that he would be able to go up personally one year later and retrieve it. And he won the bet. In # he first put on the market his Red Ball Pipe Tobacco, an aromatic and expensive crimp cut made of Martian lichen. In # he founded the Institute for the Atmospheric Rehabilitation of Venus, for he found that place to be worse than a smoke-house. It was there that he developed that hacking cough Rainbird that stayed with him till the end of his days. He synthesized a man of his own age and disreputude who would sit drinking with him in the after-midnight hours and say, "You're so right, Higgston, so incontestably right." His plain for the Simplification and Eventual Elimination of Government was adopted (in modified form) in #, a fruit of his Political and Economic Balance Institute. Yet, for all his seemingly successful penetration of the field, he realized that man was the one truly cantankerous animal, and that Human Engineering would remain one of the nevercompletely-resolved fields. He made a partial breakthrough in telepathy, starting with the personal knowledge that shrews are always able .to read the minds of their spouses. He knew that the secret was not in sympathetic reception, but in arrogant break-in. With the polite it is forever impossible, but he disguised this discovery as politely as he could. And he worked toward corporeal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind, that cantankerous animal. He designed a fabric that would embulk itself on a temperature drop, and thin to an airy sheen in summery weather. The weather itself he disdained to modify, but he did evolve infallible prediction of exact daily rainfall and temperature for decades in advance. And he built a retrogressor. " ror and frowned. "I never did get around to making a better mirror. This one is hideous. However (to consider every possibility) let us weigh the thesis that it is the image and not the mirror that is hideous." He called up an acquaintence. "Say, Ulois, what year is this anyhow?" "#." "Are you sure?" "Reasonably sure." "How old am I?" "Eighty-five, I think, Higgston." "How long have I been an old man?" "Quite a while, Higgston, quite a while." Higgston Rainbird hung up rudely. "I wonder how I ever let a thing like that slip up on me?" he said to himself. "I should have gone on corporeal immortality a little earlier. I've bungled the whole business now." He fiddled with his Prediction Machine and saw that he was to die that very year. He did not seek a finer reading. "What a saddle-galled splayfooted situation to find myself in! I never got around to a tenth of the things I really wanted to do. O, I was smart enough; I just ran up too many blind alleys. Never found the answers to half the old riddles. Should have built the Prediction Machine at the beginning instead of the end. But I didn't know how to build it at the beginning. There ought to be a way to get more done. Never got any advice in my life worth taking except from that nutty old man on the mountain when I was a young man. There's a lot of things I've only started on. Well, every man doesn't hang, but every man does come to the end of his rope. I never did get around to making that rope extensible. And I can't improve things by talking to myself here about it." He filled his pipe with Red Ball crimpcut and thought a while. "But I hill-hopping can improve things talking to myself there about it." Then he turned on his retrogressor and went back and up. was hawking from the top of Devil's Head Mountain on a June afternoon in #. He flew his hawk down through the white clouds, and decided that he was the finest fellow in the world and master of the finest sport. If there was earth below the clouds it was far away and unimportant. The hunting bird came back, climbing the tall air, with a pigeon from the lower regions. "Forget the bird," said the old man, "and give a listen with those outsized ears of yours. I have a lot to tell you in a very little while, and then you must devote yourself to a concentrated life of work. Hood the bird and clip him to the stake. Is that bridleclip of your own invention? Ah yes, I remember now that it is." "I'll just fly him down once more, old man, and then I'll have a look at what you're selling." "No, no. Hood him at once. This is your moment of decision. That is a boyishness that you must give up. Listen to me, Higgston, and I will orient your life for you." "I rather intended to orient it myself. How did you get up here, old man, without me seeing you? How, in fact, did you get up here at all? It's a hard climb." "Yes, I remember that it is. I came up here on the wings of an invention of my own. Now pay attention for a few hours. It will take all your considerable wit." "A few hours and a perfect hawking afternoon will be gone. This may be the finest day ever made." "I also once felt that it was, but I manfully gave it up. So must you." "Let me fly the hawk down again and I will listen to you while it is gone." "But you will only be listening with half a mind, and the rest will be with the hawk." But young Higgston flew the bird down through the shining white clouds, and the old man began his rigmarole sadly. Yet it was a rang-dang-do of a spiel, a mummywhammy of admonition and exposition, and young Higgston listened entranced and almost forgot his hawk. The old man told him that he must stride half a dozen roads at once, and yet never take a wrong one; that he must do some things earlier that on the alternative had been done quite late; that he must point his technique at the Think Machine and the Prediction Machine, and at the unsolved problem of corporeal immortality. "In no other way can you really acquire elbow-room, ample working time. Time runs out and life is too short if you let it take its natural course. Are you listening to me, Higgston?" But the hawk came back, climbing the steep air, and it had a gray dove. The old man sighed at the interruption, for he knew that his project was in peril. "Hood the hawk. It's a sport for boys. Now listen to me, you spraddling jack. I am telling you things that nobody else would ever be able to tell you! I will show you how to fly falcons to the stars, not just down to the meadows and birch groves at the foot of this mountain." "There is no prey up there," said young Higgston. "There is. Gamier prey than you ever dreamed of. Hood the bird and snaffle him." "I'll just fly him down one more time and listen to you till he comes back." The hawk went down through the clouds like a golden bolt of summer lightning. cosmos, peeled it open layer by layer like an onion, and told young Higgston how it worked. Afterwards he returned ,to the technological beginning and he lined out the workings of steam and petro and electro-magnetism, and explained that these simple powers must be used for a short interval in the invention of greats er power. He told him of waves and resonance and airy transmission, and fission and flight and over-flight. And that none of the doors required keys, only a resolute man to turn the knob and push them open. Young Higgston was impressed. Then the hawk came back, climbing the towering air, and it had a mainbird. The old man had lively eyes, but now they took on a new light. "Nobody ever gives up pleasis always the sneaking feeling that the bargain may not have been perfect. This is one of the things I have missed. I haven't hawked for sixty-five years. Let me fly him this time, Higgston." "You know how?" "I am an adept. And I once intended to make a better gauntlet for hawkers. This hasn't been improved since Nimrod's time." "I have an idea for a better gauntlet myself, old man." "Yes. I know what your idea is. Go ahead with it. It's practical." "Fly him if you want to, old man." And old Higgston flew the tercel hawk down through the gleaming clouds, and he and youngHiggston watched from the top of the world. And then young Higgston Rainbird was standing alone on the top of Devil's Head Mountain, and the old man was gone. "I wonder where he went? And where in apple-knockers' heaven did he come from? Or was he ever here at all? That's a danged funny machine he came in, if he did come in it. All the wheels are on the inside. But I can use the gears from it, and the clock, and the copper wire. It must have taken weeks to hammer that much wire out that fine. I wish I'd paid more attention to what he was saying, but he poured it on a little thick. I'd have gone along with him on it if only he'd have found a good stopping place a little sooner, and hadn't been so insistent on giving up hawking. Well, I'll just hawk here till dark, and if it dawns clear I'll be up again in the morning. And Sunday, if I have a little time, I may work on my sparker or my chestnut roaster."  long and successful life. Locally he was known best as a hawker and horse racer. But as an inventor he was recognized as far as Boston. He is still known, in a limited way, to specialists in the field and the period: known as contributor to the development of the moldboard plow, as the designer of the Nonpareil Nutmeg Grater with the safety feature, for a bellows, for a sparker for starting fires (little used) and for the Devil's Claw Wedge for splitting logs. He is known for such, and for no more. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Houghton Mifflin Co. is reminiscent in many respects of Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. Both are crammed full of new ideas yet weary with old. Both have sparks of humor that turn to ash. A weird triangle is the hub of the story. The husband, a brave, wise, charming aristocrat, was dematerialized on an exploration into a space hazard between planets. He becomes a sort of ghost who materializes for an hour once every fifty-five days. A side result of his tragedy is an ability to see both past and future. As a most peculiar step toward establishing peace and brotherhood, he engineers the impregnation of his wife, an immaculate patrician, by a piggish wastrel. The plot, is tangled, intricate and tortuous and the author manufactures mystery and suspense by the deliberate use of time jump and flashback. Yet the book, though exasperating, is a joy of inventiveness. Rating: y # galaxy Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Thomas Bouregy  Co. far and away the finest team of fantasy collaborators. In their present misadventure, Shea and his Faerie wife, Belphebe, become involved in the land of the Finnish Kalevala and the Ireland of the hero, Cuchulainn. If de Camp's and Pratt's heroes and villains alike are usually ineffectual and usually likeable, their stories are always chucklefilled delights. Rating: y # Asimov. Two volumes. Basic Books, Inc. been science popularization's gain. Dr. Asimov's style is eminently readable. His knack makes even difficult concepts easily digestible. By far his most ambitious Project to date, the set is divided into two halves, Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences. The section titles convey some idea of the scope of his work: The Universe; The Earth; The Atmosphere; The Elements; The Particles; The Waves; The Machine; The Reactor. The Biological Sciences contains: The Molecule; The Proteins; The Cell; The Microorganism; The Body; The Species; The Mind. Robert P. Mills. Doubleday  Co., Inc. Editor Mills has selected nothing but full-cut gems from the McComas-Boucher diamond mine. The novelettes: Poul Anderson's "The Sky People," a wellexecuted, profound yet actioncrammed study of civilization's slow resurgence from Atomic aftermath; "Jordan," also in Zenna Henderson's Pilgrimage; J. Francis McComas's "Shock Treatment," the acid test of an enlightened penal code in the first murder case on a raw planetary frontier; "To Fell a Tree," by Robert F. Young, an alien planet's last # foot tree and its felling. Better by far than any of its annual predecessors, (not even one Ferdinand Feghoot!) this is a top collection by any standard. Rating:  Bertram Chandler. Thomas Bouregy  Co. sire of the Rim Worlds on the periphery of the Galactic Lens for self-determination as moving force of his book. Their commerce is coverup for a buildup of strength. Their merchant fleet consists of obsolete tubs manned by a lost legion of human retreads, themselves rejects from the plush liners of Inner World commerce. All the elements of the salty sea are in Chandler's deep space thriller: the grand-daddy of hurricanes, drunken brawling in a portside joint, burial at space, shipwreck and salvage. Art it may not be, but likeable it certainly is. Rating: y # by Erik Bergaust. Doubleday  Co. extremely controversial figure. Despite his stature in our space program, many Americans have never become reconciled to the presence of a former enemy and self-admitted Nazi in a most sensitive field. Be that as it may, he has obviously been forgiven by the top brass and today his enormous energy, knowledge and resourcefulness are being put to use. Because of von Braun's singlepurposefulness, the book is more than just his biography. It is also the history of modem rocketry. derson. Doubleday  Co., Inc. son's first novel, Pilgrimage is actually a compilation of stories from FSF tied loosely together. "The People" are hunted and haunted possessors of superhuman powers. Each novelette expands on the theme, "Different is dead." The protagonists involved eventually find emancipation with The Group, hidden in desert country where wild talents can remain unobserved. Rating:  Stanton A. Coblentz. Avalon Books. mined to exhume the remains of all of Coblentz's ponderous satires. Number four thus disturbed from well-earned oblivion, Runaway World plotwise is also stamped from the same heavyduty die. Rating:  Council of Four. lock's claim to fame has never been in doubt. Avid groups of fans and writers have given him a degree of contemporaneity never achieved by any other fictional character. In the above volume, Conan Doyle's oversight in never penning a science-fictional adventure for his human deduction machine has been righted by August Derleth, Anthony Boucher, Mack Reynolds, Gordon R. Dickson, Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire. The book's appeal is limited, but its special audience will derive intense satisfaction. Rating:  ing Adler. The John Day Co. word "Computer" conjures up a vision of a vast electronic monster busily tended by a horde of human ministrators. This was largely true until the recent past but miniaturization and simplification have reaped such rewards that room-sized and even desksized computers are now extant. The layman, however, still would like two questions answered: What does it do and How does it do it? Adler's book answers these questions in comparatively simple form -- for someone with a good high school math background. Sinclair. Simon  Schuster. to develop an undescribed weapon sufficiently powerful to act as an utter deterrent to would-be aggressor nations. The book delves into the character of the weapon's prime architects and their movements and actions on the night preceding the final test. It is a bitter indictment of the idiocy that places the means for utter destruction in the hands of a few and makes it possible for a highly placed psychotic to become mankind's executioner. Rating: y # Otis Adelbert Kline. Avalon Books. Argosy's heyday, Kline's serials were usually divided into six parts. There could easily have been twice as many divisions because Kline's heroes fluctuated between soup and frying pan. A non sequitur sequel to The Swordsman of Mars, the new hero travels back through space and years ago and finds a culturally paradoxical mighty civilization. Rating (for an old-fashioned fairy tale ) :    The preacher wasn't what he seemed -- and the girl seemed what she wasn't -- but the birds... they were dangerously, terrifyingly reall Att lit if as lmnu Itr b T HE Reverend Clem Adelburg had come out to cut some mistletoe. He tucked the hatchet tightly in the band of his trousers and shinned up the knobby trunk of the apple tree. When he got high enough, he saw that two ravens were seated on the apple tree branches, eating the mistletoe berries. There were always ravens around the cabin nowadays; he chased them away indignantly, with many loud whooshes. Then he felt a twinge of remorse. "O Lord," he prayed among the branches, his face upturned toward the dramatic cloudscape of an Arizona winter, "O Lord, bless this little experiment of thy servant. O Lord, grant that I wasn't wrong to chase away those darned ravens. Yes, Lord." He sighted up at the branches. He chopped with the hatchet. Three branches of mistletoe fell down on the sheets of newspaper he had previously placed at the foot of the tree. He climbed down. It was beginning to get dark. Mazda would have supper ready. There was a premonitory rumble and then the sound of Silent Night, played on an electric xylophone, filled the sky. The Reverend Adelburg frowned. The noise must be coming from Parker; the municipal Christmas tree there would be thirty-five feet tall this year, and already he could see the red glow of Parker's municipal Christmas street-decoration project in the southern sky. Well. If the Lord continued to bless him, and if his next few sermons had the effect he hoped they'd have, he might be able to change the character of Parker's Christmas celebration. The Forthright Temple, in Los Angeles, was a long way from Parker, but his broadcasts were receivable here, too. He went in the kitchen. Mazda was cooking something on the oil stove, an oil lamp burning dimly on the table beside her. The kitchen smelled good. "Hello, Clem," she said, turning to face him. She smiled at him. "Did you get the berries for the tea?" "Yes, dear." He handed her the three branches of mistletoe. "Make it good and strong this time, dear. I just want to see if there's anything in my little idea." "About mistletoe being the common element in all religions? Sure." fill the teakettle at the sink. She was a tall woman, with masses of puffy ginger hair and a very fair skin. Her figure was excellent, though rangy, and he always enjoyed watching her. Most of the time Mazda's being in the cabin seemed so ordinary, so fitting (she was remarkably domestic, when you got to know her), that he simply didn't think about it. But there were moments, like the present, when her physical immediacy seemed to catch him in the solar plexus. Then he could only stand and look at her and draw deep, surprised breaths. It wasn't so much his living with her, in the technical sense, that troubled him. He hadn't even tried to feel guilty about that. It seemed at once so extraordinary and so perfectly natural, that it wasn't something his conscience could get a grip on. No, it was Mazda's being in the cabin at all that was the surprising thing. Where had she come from, anyhow? He'd gone outside one morning early in September, meaning to walk up and down in the sand while he put the finishing touches on his sermon for next week, and there she had been, sitting quietly under a Joshua tree. She couldn't have been there for more than ten minutes. Her skin, as he had come to know later, was extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight, and she was wearing the skimpiest Bikini imaginable. She'd have been sunburned all over if she'd been there for any length of time. And how had she got there? There'd been no sign of a car in any direction, and he hadn't even heard the noise of a plane or a copter in the sky. Had she walked over from Parker? In a Bikini? Five miles? He knew so little about her -- no more now, really, than he had known on that first day when she had said, "Hi," and gone in the house. It wasn't that she was close-mouthed or sullen. She just didn't talk about herself. Once only, when he had been elaborating his idea that the use of mistletoe might be the common element behind all religion, had she come out with anything that might be a personal remark. He'd spoken of the use of mistletoe in classical paganism, in' druidism, in Christian festival, in the old Norse religion, in Zoroastrism -- Her lower lip had begun to protrude defiantly. "There's no mistletoe in Zoroastrism," she had cut in sharply. "I know." Well? It wasn't much for the fruit of more than three months. He couldn't help wondering about Mazda sometimes, though he didn't want to fail in Christian charity. But he knew he had his enemies. Could she possibly be a Retail Merchants Association spy? t "HE teakettle was beginning to hum. Mazda gave the pot of string beans on the stove a stir with a wooden spoon. "How did you come out with your sermon, Clem?" she asked. "Eh? Oh, splendidly. The ending, I really think, will have an effect. There are some striking passages. The ravens were quite impressed." He smiled at his little joke. "Ravens?" She turned to face him. "Were there ravens outside when you were rehearsing your speech?" "Yes, indeed. We have ravens all the time here now. There were even ravens in the apple tree when I was cutting the mistletoe." Her eyes widened. "Oh..." she said thoughtfully. "I fear I chased them away a little too vehemently," he said, becoming serious. "Ravens, after all, are the Lord's creatures too." "Not those ravens," Mazda said. There was a very brief pause. Mazda fingered the wooden bracelet on her left wrist. Then she said, "Listen, Clem, I know you've talked about it, but I guess I'm just dumb. Why are you so down on modern Christmases, anyway?" "My dear, if you'd ever attend the Temple services -- " the Reverend Adelburg said in gentle reproof. "But I'll try to make my point of view, which I humbly trust is also the Lord's point of view, clear to you." He began to talk. He was an excellent talker. f Phrases like "star in the darkness," "the silent night of Bethlehem," "pagan glitter," "corruption," "perversion," "true values,"  "an old-time America," "myrrh," "frankincense" and "#," seemed to shimmer in the air between them. Mazda listened, nodding from time to time or prodding the potatoes in the saucepan with a two-tined kitchen fork. on the cheek and then -- she had seductive shoulders, despite her ranginess -- on the upper arm. "Mmmmmmmm," Mazda said. When he had gone into the pantry to wash, she looked after him slantingly. Her caramelcolored eyebrows drew together in a frown. She had already scalded out the teapot. Now she reached into the drawer of the kitchen table and drew out a handful of what looked like small mushrooms. They were, as a matter of fact, mescal buttons, and she had gathered them last week from the top of a plant of II  paring knife and dropped them into the teapot. She put the mistletoe berries in on top of the mescal buttons. Then she filled the teapot with boiling water. When the Reverend got back from his washing, the teapot was steaming domestically on the table beside the string beans. He said grace and poured himself a cup of the tea. "Goodness, but it's bitter," he observed, sipping. "Not at all like it was the first time. What a difference putting in more mistletoe has made!" Mazda looked down. She passed him the sugar bowl. He sweetened the tea lavishly. "You A T last he appeared to have finished. Mazda nodded for the last time;. "Um-hum," she said. "But you know what I think, Clem? I think you just don't like lights. When it's dark, you want it to be dark. It's reasonable enough -- you're a different guy once the sun goes down." "I don't like the false lights of modernity," the Reverend said with a touch of stiffness. "As I intend to make abundantly clear in my sermon tomorrow." "Um-hum. You're a wonderful talker. I never thought I'd get fond of somebody who didn't like light." "I like some kinds of light," said the Reverend Adelburg. "I like fires." Mazda drew a deep breath. "You'd better wash up before supper, Clem," she said. "You've got rosin on you from the apple tree." "All right, dear." He kissed her haven't set a cup for yourself, dear," he said, suddenly solicitous. "There isn't much tea. You said to make it strong." "Yes, honey, but if there's any good in the tea, I want you to share it. Get another cup." He looked across the table at her, brightly and affectionately. There was a faint flush in Mazda's cheeks as she obeyed. Supper was over and Mazda was washing the dishes when the Reverend Clem said suddenly, "How fast you're moving, Mazda! I never saw anything like the way you're getting through those dishes. I can hardly see your hands, they're moving so fast." "Fast?" Mazda echoed. She sounded bewildered. She held up a spoon and polished its bowl languidly in the light of the oil lamp. "Why, I'm not moving fast. I've been standing here by the sink for hours and hours, washing one dish. I don't know what's the matter with me. I wish I could move fast." There was a silence. Mazda had finished the dishes. She took off her apron and sat down on the floor, her feet out straight in front of her. Almost immediately the Reverend Adelburg slid off the chair where he had been sitting, and flopped down on the floor parallel to her. Both their legs were stretched out. "What lovely hands you have, Mazda," he said. He picked up one of them from her lap, where it was languidly lying, and turned it about admiringly. "Your fingers remind me of the verse in the Canticles -- 'Fair are my love's palms as an eel that feedeth hath a most vehement flame.' They're even colored like eels, purple and gold and silver. Your nails are little dark rainbows. The Lord bless you, Mazda. I love you very much." He put his arm around her. She let her head decline on his shoulder, and they both leaned back against the wall. "Are you happy, dear?" he asked her anxiously. "As happy as I am? Do you have a dim sweet bird sense of blessings hovering over you?" "Um-hum," Mazda answered. It was obviously difficult for her to talk. "Never felt better." A grin zig-zagged across her face. "Mu's' be the mistletoe." r T'HE effects of peyote -- mescal button -- intoxication are predictable. They run a definite course. None the less, the response to a drug is always somewhat idiosyncratic. Thus it was that the Reverend Clem Adelburg, who had drunk enough peyote infusion to keep a cart horse seeing beatific visions for twenty-four hours, reached, about six o'clock in the morning, the state of intense wakefulness that succeeds to the drug trance. By the time the copter came from Los Angeles to take him to the Temple, a little after eight, he had bathed, shaved and dressed, and was reading over his sermon notes. He went into the bedroom where Mazda was lying to bid her good-by. (Sometime during the night they had managed to get to bed.) He bent over and kissed her tenderly on her loosened mouth. "Good-by, dear. Our little experiment certainly had results, didn't it? But I feel no ill after-effect, and I trust that you will not, either. I'll be back about eleven tonight." Once more he kissed her. Mazda made a desperate effort to rouse herself from the rose and opal-hued heaven she was currently floating in. She licked her lips. "Clem..." she said. "Yes, dear?" "Be careful." "Certainly, dear. I always am. Yes." He patted her on the shoulder. He went out. Even in her paradise, which was at the moment blue and silver, she could hear the noise of the copter as it bore him away. Mazda's drug dreams came to an end with a bump about twelve o'clock. She sprang out of bed and ran to the window. The Reverend Adelburg was gone, of course. And there wasn't a raven in sight. erend's sermon was going swimmingly. From his first words, which had been the arresting sentence, "The lights are going out again all over the world," he had riveted the attention of his listeners as if with stainless steel rivets. Even the two troops of Archer Eagle Scouts in the front rows, who, with their scoutmaster Joe Buell, were today's Honor Guests, had been so fascinated that they had stopped twanging their bowstrings. The Reverend had swung thunderously from climax to climax; by now at least half his audience had resolved to disconnect its radio when it got home, and throw away the electric lights on its Christmas tree. Now the Reverend was approaching the climax of climaxes. "In the sweet night of the spirit, bless us, O Lord! Yes, Lord, it's good to be dark -- in the sweet silence of the stable let the little flame of -- bless us, Lord! -- let the little flame -- My Gosh! Good Lord!" Forthright Temple is ventilated, and partly lighted, by a clerestory in the middle part of the building. Through this clerestory eight large black birds flew rapidly. Two of them headed straight for the Reverend Adelburg's eyes. Four of them attacked the Temple's not very bright electric lights. The other two made dive after dive on the helpless congregation's head. Women were screaming. Handkerchiefs waved. Hymnbooks rocked and fluttered through the air. The organist burst into a Bach chorale. The bewildered choir began singing two different songs. When the ravens had first swooped down upon him, the Reverend Adelburg had dived under the lectern. From thence -- he was a man who was used to authority -- he began shouting orders to the troops of Archer Eagle Scouts in a clarion, stentorian voice. "Young men! Listen! Shoot at the birds! Shoot -- at -- the -- birds!" There was a very slight hiatus. Then bowstrings began to twang and arrows to thud. Eight pagan ravens are no match at all for the legitimate weapons of two troops of Archer Eagle Scouts. The ravens dived valiantly, they cawed and shrieked. In vain. Inside five minutes after the shooting started, there remained no trace of the birds' incursus except a black tail feather floating in an updraft, eight or ten hymnbooks with ruffled pages and some arrows on the floor. For a few moments the scouts scurried about collecting arrows. Then the Reverend Adelburg summoned them up to the lectern, where he was standing. He finished his sermon with a troop of Archer Scouts drawn up on either side of him, like a body guard. "That was a wonderful sermon, wasn't it," said the lady from Iowa as she and her husband walked toward their parked car. "I never heard anything like it before. He really spoke better after the birds came in than he did earlier... I think tomorrow I'll go down town and see if I can get some little oil lamps to burn in the patio." "Wonder what sort of birds those were," her husband said idly. "They were mighty big for crows." "Crows! Why, they were ravens; haven't you ever seen pictures of ravens? I wonder what made them go in the Temple. Ravens always seem such oldfashioned birds." Ill #T betrayed my Company for you," Mazda said. She hiccoughed with emotion. "I'm a rat. As far as that goes, you're a rat too. We're both rats." "What company is that?" the Reverend asked with innocent curiosity. He yawned. They had been sitting in the tiny living room, arguing, for hours, ever since he got back from the Temple, and by now it was nearly two o'clock in the morning. "The PEG. Why? Did you ever suspect?" "I thought perhaps the Retail Merchants Association sent you. I never understood how you happened to be sitting under that Joshua tree." Mazda laughed scornfully. "The Retail Merchants? Those boffs? Why, I don't suppose they have more than three secret agents in the whole Los Angeles metropolitan area. They couldn't stop a baby from crossing a street on a kiddy car. Their idea of hot tactics is to hire a big newspaper ad. "No, I'm a PEG girl. I've been one of their top people for years. That's why I know what you're up against." She took an earnest step toward him. "Clem, I don't think you have any idea of how serious this is," she said. "But they'll stop at nothing. They can't possibly let you get away with it. Why, last December after your oldfashioned Christmas sermons, power consumption was off # all along the whole Pacific slope, and it didn't get back to normal until late February. People just didn't use much electricity. The Company didn't pay any dividends at all on its common stock, and if the same thing happens this year, they'll have to skippayments on the preferred! That's why I was sent to stop you at all costs." "How were you supposed to stop me?" the Reverend inquired. He put the tips of his outstretched fingers together thoughtfully. "I was supposed to seduce you, and then call the broadcasters in. You know, moral turpitude. But I convinced them that it wouldn't work. Congregations aren't so touchy about things like that nowadays. It wouldn't have worked." "Mazda, how could you?" #T don't know how I could," Mazda replied with spirit. "I could have had a nice cleancut electronics engineer... or one of those cute linemen up on a pole... and then I had to fall for a Reverend with his collar on backwards. Somebody ought to examine my head." The Reverend Adelburg let this pass without comment. "What was the alternate plan?" he asked. "I promised them I'd keep you from delivering any more oldfashioned Christmas sermons. That's what the peyote was for." "Peyote? When?" She told him. "Oh. Then it wasn't the mistletoe," he said when she had finished. He sounded rather annoyed. "No, it wasn't the mistletoe. But I guess I didn't give you enough peyote. You delivered the sermon anyway. "Clem, you think that because the ravens made that silly attack on you in the Temple, that that's the sort of thing the Company has up its sleeve. It's not. The ravens were acting on their own responsibility, and they're not awfully bright birds. The Company can do lots better than that when they want to." "What do you think they'll try next?" the Reverend inquired. His jaw had begun to jut out. "Well, they might try to get you for moral turpitude after all, or stick an income tax evasion charge on you or accuse you of dope smuggling. I don't think they will. They don't want to give you any more publicity. I think they'll just quietly try to wipe you out." For a moment Mazda's self command deserted her. She wrung her hands. "What'm I to cfo?" she whimpered. "I've got to save you, and you're as stubborn as a mule. I don't know any magic -- or at least not nearly enough magic. The whole Company will be against me as soon as the ravens are sure I ratted on them. And there's just no place in the world today for anybody who's in conflict with the PEG. "I wish I hadn't been such a dope as to fall in love with you." r T'HE Reverend Clem Adelburg got up from the chair where he had been sitting and put his arm around her. "Cheer up, my dear," he told her solemnly. "We will defeat the company. Right is on our side." Mazda gave a heroic sniffle. She smiled at him mistily. "It's not just the PEG, of course," she said. "Sometimes I think they have agents everywhere." "Not the PEG?" the Reverend cried. He let his arm fall from around her. He had a sudden nightmare vision of a whole world united against him -- a world in which the clouds semaphored secrets about him to the dolphins in the Pacific waves. "What is it, then?" "Why, it's Nous." "I never heard of it." "Very few people have. But Nous, Infinite, is the company from which the PEG gets its power. "Nous is a very strange outfit. It operates on the far side of # A.D., and selling power is only one of the things it does. When you're a top agent for the Cornpany, like I was, you hear all sorts of stories about it -- for instance, that it's responsible for maintaining the difference in potential between the earth and the ionosphere, or that the weather on Venus is a minor Nous project -- stuff like that. I've even heard agents say that Nous is G -- but I don't believe that. I know about Mithras, myself." "I thought the PEG made its own power," said the Reverend. He was still struggling with the first part of Mazda's remarks. Mazda laughed. "I don't mean any disrespect to the Company, but what makes you think that? The Company's a bad opponent, but outside of that, witchcraft, or sorcery, or ravens, is all they're capable of. "All the really hot developments in power, the electronic stuff, comes from after # A.D. Nobody in the present has brains enough to work out a germanium transistor, for example. Nous helps them. People nowadays are dopes. They can't work buttons on pants, or open a package of chewing gum unless there's a paper ribbon to help them. "That's beside the point, really. The thing I'm trying to make clear, Clem, is that Nous is a bad outfit to come up against. "I was supposed to go outside at one-thirty this morning and have the ravens pick me up under the Joshua tree. They were going to take me back to headquarters by air raft. If it -- " #TS that how you got here in the first place?" the Reverend inquired. "By air raft?" "Yes. As I was saying, if I'd done that, the Company would have accepted that my failure with the peyote was just a mistake. But I didn't do it. I couldn't bear to leave a chump like you all alone to face the Company, and by now they must be beginning to realize that I've ratted on them. It won't be very long before the real trouble begins. "Now, listen. There are two things you can do. The best one would be for you to go outside and talk to the ravens. If you promise them on your word of honor as a Christian gentlemen that you won't deliver any more anti-light sermons -- I can't see why you don't like light, anyhow; light's wonderful -- if you promise them that, they'll let you go." She paused hopefully. The Reverend gave her a look. "Well," said Mazda. "Then we'll have to make a break for it. "While you were in the washroom, I called the Temple copter." She indicated the short-wave radio on the other side of the little stone fireplace. "It'll be here any minute. I think -- well, we'll try to get through," she said without much hope. The Reverend looked at her in silence for a moment. Fatigue had made shadows under her eyes, but they only made her look glamorous and desirable. She had never been more beautiful. She had betrayed her company for him; he loved her more than ever. He gave her a hug. "Nix, my dear," he said. "Nix." "N-n-n-n-?" "Nix. Never." His voice rang out, booming and resonant. "Run away from those devils and their ravens? Flee from those pagan night-lighters? Never! I will not." He advanced toward the radio. "What are you going to do?" Mazda squeaked. he said without turning. "You have to fight fire with fire." "Public power?" Mazda breathed. Her face was white. "Public power! Their line will be open all night." He turned his face toward the rafters. "O Lord," he boomed reverently, "bless this radio message. Please, Lord, grant that in contacting a radical outfit like the IV hthe noise of prayer died away in the ceiling. He pressed a key and turned a switch. For a moment the room was utterly quiet. Then there was a soft flurry and plop at the window. The ravens, after all, were not deaf. They too had heard the Reverend's prayers. Mazda spun round toward the sound. Before she could decide what to do, there was a series of tinkles from the chimney. It ended in a glassy crash. Something had broken on the stone hearth. Mazda screamed. "Keep back!" she yelled at the Reverend, who had turned from the radio and was leaning forward interestedly. "Keep back! Don't breathe! Damn those birds!" She was fumbling wildly with the wooden bracelet on her left wrist. 'What is it?" he asked. He advanced a step toward the shards of glass on the hearth. "Get back. It's a germ culture bomb. Parrot fever. I'm going to purify it. Stand back!" The Reverend Adelburg discounted most of this warning as due to feminine hysteria. He drew back a fraction of an inch, but still remained leaning forward. his eyes fixed on the glass. Mazda gave a moan of desperation. "I've got to do it!" she yelled. She slid her bracelet toward her elbow and gave it a violent twist. A strictly vertical flash of lightning appeared between the ceiling and the hearth. It was very , bright, and accompanied by a sizzling noise. A second later a sharp chlorine-like smell filled the air. Mazda's artificial lightning died away. The room returned to its ' normal dim illumination. A faint  curl of smoke floated above the pieces of broken glass on the hearth of the fireplace. There was no doubt that Mazda had purified the germ culture effectively. But the Reverend Clem Adelburg was stretched out on the floor flat on his back. open his white shirt front and laid her head on his chest. His heart was still beating, and his hands and feet were warm. But he was completely out -- outer than any of the neon lights he had been trying to put out. Mazda got up, rubbing her hands. She couldn't move him, and she didn't know what she ought to do for him. She hoped he'd be all right. She knew he had a strong constitution. She went into the kitchen and got a towel. She came back with it and tied it to the poker. Carrying this home-made flag of truce in front of her, she opened the door and went out into the night. It was a dark night. From under the Joshua tree a darker shadow detached itself. " 'Llo, Mazda," a harsh voice said. "Hello," she replied. There was a glitter of beady eyes in the darkness around her. "Listen here, you birds," Mazda said slowly, "we've always been on good terms, haven't we? We've always got on together well. Are you really trying to do me and my boy friend in?" A bird cleared its throat. There was a noise of talons being shifted uneasily. "Well... no, Mazda. We like you too," somebody said. "Oh, yes? Is that why you dropped the parrot-fever bomb? Were you going to drop a dead parrot down the chimney and make it look as if we'd died a natural death? I wouldn't call that bomb exactly a friendly thing." "The bomb was just a warning," said the harsh voice that had spoken first. "We knew you'd purify it. We have confidence in you. We don't want to do you any harm personally. You can always get another boy friend." "I want this one." "You've had better ones." "Yes, I know. But this is the one I want." There was a silence. Then a bird said, "We're sorry, Mazda. We only do what we're sent out to do." Mazda drew a sharp breath. "Hell's Canyon," she said deliberately. "Rural electrification cooperatives. Public power." body's tail feathers being plucked distractedly. "Mazda, I wish you wouldn't," said the chief raven in a wincing voice. "I will, though. I'll get in touch with the public power people. I don't care about the ethics of it. I'm in love." "Haw!" the raven jeered harshly. It seemed to have regained its aplomb. "That lightning flash of yours burned out every tube in the radio. You couldn't send a message to Parker to ask for a stick of chewing gum. You're through. "We'll give you half an hour. During any of that time you can come out unhurt. But after that you're in for it too. This time we're serious." 'What are you going to do?" Mazda cried. "You'll find out." Mazda went back to the house. The clock on the mantlepiece read twenty minutes to three. The ravens would probably give her a few minutes' grace, so she had until ten or twelve minutes after the hour. Mazda knelt down by her consort and began to chafe his hands. When that didn't help, she ran to the kitchen, got a handful of red feathers from the chicken they had had for lunch yesterday, and began burning them under the Reverend's nose. At seven minutes to three the Reverend's eyelids fluttered and the noise of a copter was heard in the sky. Mazda listened with strained attention, her eyes fixed on her consort. She longed to run to the window, but she was afraid of alerting the ravens. She could only wait. The copter appeared to be having difficulties. The whoosh of its helix changed pitch, the motor stuttered and coughed. Once the noise seemed to recede; Mazda was afraid the plane was going away entirely. She fingered her wooden blast bracelet nervously. But the copter returned. It landed with a thump that was almost a crash. The copter door opened and somebody jumped out. There was a sound of squawks, caws and rapid fluttering. A vigorous male voice said, "Ouch! Ouch! Birds! What the bloody hell!" More fluttering. Then sandaled feet thudded rapidly along the path. Somebody pounded at the door. man who stumbled across the threshold was a dark, stocky Indian who wore white duck pants and red glasses, and carried a three-foot bow slung across his back. He was bleeding freely from half a dozen peck marks on his shoulders and breast. "Lord Mithras," Mazda said prayerfully, "it's Joe Buell! Joe!" "Mazda! Why didn't you show a light? What are you doing here? What is all this?" Mazda told him. Joe listened intently, frowning more and more. "My word, what a mess," he said when she had finished. He pushed his red glasses up on his nose. "Has the Reverend come to yet?" They turned around. Clem's eyes were open, but he was still lying on the floor. As they watched, he slowly closed his eyes again. "I guess he's not ready yet," Mazda said. She looked at the clock. It showed two minutes to three. "Let's get him up and walk him," she said harriedly. "It might help him to get back to normal. Oh, Mithras, how late it is!" The Reverend Adelburg was limp and slippery, but they managed to get him to his feet. As they guided his rubbery footsteps about the room, Mazda said, "I haven't seen you since you were in Canada, Joe. Those nights in Saskatchewan! I didn't know you were one of the Reverend's men." "Since #," Joe answered briefly. "How come? I thought you danced Shalako at the pueblo one year." "I did. But you should see Halonawa now. There's a red and purple neon sign twenty feet high over the plaza. It reads, "Welcome to Halonawa, Home of the Shalako.' After that I joined up with the Rev. A nice dark Christmas seems a wizard idea." He plainly didn't want to pursue the subject further. Mazda said, "If the Reverend revives in time, what'll we do?" "Can you pilot a copter?" "I can drive a car." "A copter's really easier." He gave her directions. "The motor's missing a little, but I don't think you'll have any trouble. Orient yourself by Parker and the dam. The dam's just north of us. "If the Rev comes to in time, make a break for it with him in the plane. I'll create a diversion by climbing out the window and shooting at those bloody birds. I owe them some arrows, at that." "I wish I knew what they had in mind," Mazda said. V A T five minutes after three the Reverend's willow-withy body stiffened. His eyes opened. He raised his head and looked about him. "What a lovely day," he said in a pleasant, conversational voice. Mazda's face puckered. For a moment she seemed about to burst into wild tears. Then she blinked her eyes and shook her head defiantly. "He hurt his head when he fell, that's all. He'll be all right later. He's got to be all right. And he may really be easier to handle this way than if he wasn't goofed. He's a stubborn man." I Joe had gone over to the table and was putting out the lamp. He handed his red glasses to Mazda. "Makes piloting easier," he said. Then he opened the window on the left and swung himself out of it. He gave a high, passionate battle cry. There was a rush of feathers and some frenzied squawking. Joe's bow began to twang. Mazda grabbed the Reverend by the hand. "Nice Christmas," she hissed. "Come along." Bent forward, one arm raised to shield her eyes, she pulled him after her at a run toward the door. The night had grown darker. The sky was heavily overcast. None the less, she could make out the improbable shape of the copter. "Hurry!" she said to Clem Adelburg. "Run!" Wings buffeted around her. Claws struck at her face, her cheeks, her hair. The Reverend Adelburg gave a cry of pain; Mazda had to use her free arm to wipe her own blood from her eyes. Then they were in the copter and the door was slammed. She turned the switch. The motor gave a cough and started. Mazda was trembling with excitement, but she followed Joe's instructions. Slowly the copter rose. She had put on the red glasses before they left the house. As her eyes grew used to the darkness, she made out the glimmer of the river in front of her and the flat surface of Parker dam. She wanted to go west, toward Los Angeles. The copter climbed a little. She tried to turn. Wings whizzed by her. Mazda grinned. She twisted the blast bracelet on her wrist. The tiny receptor within it vibrated. There was a flash of light, and the bird plummeted to the ground. When it hit the sand there was a faint concussion. The floor of the copter shuddered. After a second the smell of almond extract tinged the air. The bird had been carrying a cyanide bomb. Mazda sent the copter a little higher. Her mind was a kaleidoscope of tumbling fears. The possibility of more bombs, of explosive bombs, of a kamekazi attack on the copter's propeller, played leap-frog in her brain. And what about Joe? Dear Joe, he'd been wonderful in Saskatchewan. Had they got him yet? She looked back anxiously at the cabin. Joe had vaulted up on the roof and was standing with one foot planted on either side of the ridge pole, like a Zuni Heracles. The thick clouds behind him had begun to be tinged with light from the rising moon; she could see that though his bow was ready and he had an arrow drawn nearly back to his ear he wasn't shooting. His eyes were fixed intently on the sky. She followed the direction of his gaze. Very high up, so high that they looked no bigger than crows, seven of the big black birds were flapping rapidly northward in single file. fOR the next five minutes or so nothing at all happened. The copter plodded steadily westward toward Los Angeles, down low, along the line of the aqueduct. This apparent quiescence on the part of her opponents unnerved Mazda more than a direct attack would have done. She couldn't believe that the PEG would let her and Clem escape so easily. Suddenly along the sky in front of her there passed a vast flash of light. For an instant the desert was as bright and white as day. Then the darkness closed down again and thunder crashed. Mazda's hands shook on the controls. The storm that was coming up might, of course, be merely a storm. Or it might have been sent by the Company. But if Nous... but if Nous... but if Nous, that enormous and somehow enigmatic power that operated from the far side of # A.D... if Nous had decided to stretch out its arm against her and Clem, there wasn't a chance in the world that she and the Reverend would continue to live. There was another prodigious lightning flash. The desert, the aqueduct, a line of power poles, a small square building, burned themselves on Mazda's eyes. When darkness came back the Reverend, who had been sitting quite calmly and quietly beside Mazda all this time, stirred. "Wonderful fireworks," he said approvingly. Mazda's eyes rolled. "Clem, baby," she said despairingly, "what'll I do?" She looked around as if hunting an answer. Then the bottom of the heavens dropped out. The heaviest precipitation recorded to date in a cloudburst is two and a half inches in three minutes. What fell on the copter now was heavier. Inside of two seconds after the avalanche of water had begun to pour from the sky the copter was down flat on the ground, as if it had been pushed into the sand by a giant hand. The noise inside the cabin was deafening. It was like being a dried pea shaken within a drum. It beat along the body like hammers. Mazda, looking up openmouthed, saw that the copter ceiling was beginning to bulge. The downpour -- the cataract -- stopped as suddenly as it had begun. There was a minute of dazed silence in the cabin. Then Mazda, pushing hard against the door in the warped copter body, got it open and scrambled out. THE copter was deep in the sand. One blade of the propeller had been broken off entirely. The other hung limply parallel to the shaft. Mazda stood shivering. She took off her red glasses absently and dropped them on the sand. The sky had cleared. The moon was almost up. She reached inside the cabin and caught Clem Adelburg by the wrist. "C'mon," she said. She had seen a building, just before the cloudburst. They might be able to take cover in that. She struggled over the sand with the Reverend following docilely at her heels. The building, once reached, turned out to be a Company substation, and Mazda felt a touch of hope. She could get in, despite the Danger and No admittance signs, and the ravens might be deterred, even if only slightly, by their respect for Company property. The substation door would open to a verbal signal. Mazda twisted her blast bracelet twice on her arm, inhaled, and swallowed. "Alameda, Alpine, Amador, Butte," she said carefully. Nothing happened. She cleared her throat and began again, a couple of notes lower. "Alameda, Alpine, Amador, Butte." There was a faint click. "Calaveras, Colusa, Contra Costa, Del Norte, Fresno -- " The door swung wide. Mazda's enumeration of the counties of California had worked. She took the Reverend by the hand and led him through the opening. "Stanislaus, Sutter, Tulare, Tuolomne, Ventura, Yuba, Yolo," she said. The door closed. It was much darker inside the substation than it had been outside on the white desert, and the air was filled with a high humming that sounded, and actually was exceedingly dangerous. Mazda put her arm around Clem's shoulders. "Don't move, baby," she said pleadingly. "Don't touch anything. Stay close to Mazda and be quiet." The Reverend coughed. "Certainly, my dear," he said in quite a normal voice, "but would you mind telling me where we are? And what has been happening?" had been coshed on the head. She clung to him and babbled with relief, while the Reverend stroked her soothingly on the hair and tried to make sense out of her babbling. "Yes, my dear," he said when she had finally finished. "Do you hear a noise outside?" "What sort of a noise?" "A sort of whoosh." Mazda drew in her breath. "Shin up to the window and look out," she ordered. "Look out especially for birds." He was at the high, narrow window only an instant before he let himself down. "There was only one raven," he reported, "but there were a number of birds like hawks, with short wings. There seemed to be humps on their backs." Even in the poor light of the substation Mazda visibly turned green. "Goshawks!" she gasped. Then she began taking off her clothes. Dress, slip, panties went on the floor. She stood on one foot and removed her sandals alternately. She began going through her hair and pulling out bobby pins. She took off her blast bracelet and added it to the heap. "What are you doing that for?" the Reverend inquired. It seemed to him a singularly ill-chosen time. "I'm trying to set up a countercharm, and I have to be naked to do it." Her voice was wobbling badly. "Those birds -- those birds are goshawks. I've never known the Company to send them out but once before. Those lumps on their backs are portable nous projectors. They're trying to teleport us." "Teleport us? Where to?" "To -- to the Company's cellars. Where -- they attend to people who believe in public power. They -- oh -- I can't talk about it, Clem." She crouched down at his feet and picked up a bobby pin. "Don't move," she said without looking up. "Try not to think." around him on the floor with the pin. He coughed. "Don't cough," she cautioned him. "It might be better to hold your breath." The Reverend's lungs were aching before she got the diagram done. She eyed it a moment and then spat carefully at four points within the hexagram. A faint bluish glow sprang up along the lines she had traced on the floor. Mazda rose to her feet. "It'll hold them for a few minutes," she said. "After that..." The Reverend raised his eyes to the rafters. "I'm going to pray," he announced. He filled his lungs. "O Lord," he boomed powerfully, "we beg thy blessing to preserve me and Mazda from the power of the ravens. We beg thy blessing to help us stay here and not be transported to the PEG's cellars. Bless us, O Lord. Preserve us. And help us to make thine old-fashioned Christmas a living reality. Amen, O Lord. Amen!" Mazda, too, was praying. Hands clasped over her diaphragm, head bowed, lips moving silently, she besought her bright divinity. "Mithras, lord of the morning, slayer of the bull of darkness, preserve my love and me. Mithras, lord!" Prayer is a force. So is magic. So is the energy from nous projectors. These varying forces met and collided in mid air. The collision made a sort of vortex, a small but uncomfortable knot in the vast, conscious field potential that is the Infinite part of Nous. There was momently an intense, horrible sense of pressure and tension in the very air. The substation hummed ominously. Then, with a burst of energy that blew out every generator from Tacoma to San Diego, the roof came off. (The PEG crews worked overtime on the repairs, but there were too many wrecked generators. All along the Pacific slope, and as far inland as Provo, Utah, it was as dark a Christmas as even the Reverend would have wished.) There was a pause. The noise of breaking timbers died away. The Reverend Adelburg and Mazda were looking upward frozenly, mouths open, necks outstretched. Then a gigantic hand reached in through the hole in the roof. A gigantic voice, even bigger than the hand, said in enormous and somehow Oxonian accents, "Very well. Take your old-fashioned Christmas, then." TT was just before sunrise on December #st. The Christians, who would be strangled at dawn the next day and then burned in honor of the solstice, were gibbering away in their wicker cages. There were three cages full of them. Great progress was being made in stamping out the new heresy. The Christians would make a fine bright blaze. The druid looked up at the cages, which were hanging from the boughs of three enormous oak trees, and nodded with satisfaction. His consort, Mahurzda, would find it a hard job strangling so many pedple. He'd have to help her. It would be a pleasant task. Once more he nodded. He tested the edge of the sickle he was carrying. Then the druid who had been -- would be -- would will have been -- the Reverend Clem Adelburg hoisted up his long white robe and clambered up in the nearest of the oak trees to cut the sacred mistletoe. This isn't fiction. It concerns the legends all of us have heard about the uncanny predictions of J. Verne, Esq. Most of them are! Leagues under the Sea was published in #. Since then we have heard a great deal about the excellence of the science, speculation and prediction it contains. People seem to feel that Verne's sound scientific speculation makes the novel good science fiction, even though they may not care much for it as a straight story. But these days the waters are ginning to know, is made by taking the first letter in each word of the phrase "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.") down into water as deep as three hundred feet in lakes, oceans, streams, rivers, bays, quarries and caves all over the world. There is a rash of books on the subject, fairly well-versed in the history of man's descent beneath the water. critical look at # Leagues under the Sea, a new interpretation of the novel emerges. The novel isn't at all what literary critics have said it is. The diving gear and the diving scenes are technically pretty bad, behind the times even for #. The submarine Nautilus itself is out of date for #, with the sole exception that electricity is the source of power. In none of these technical situation did Verne take advantage of knowledge readily available to him at the time. It is as if he sat in his chair and dashed off his concepts without bothering to get up and check facts that must have been in books in the same room with him. He spun his yarn from the material in his head. And there you have a clue to the real value of the novel. Verne was a mighty story-teller. His science was bad, his speculation absurd, and even his plot and his characters might be poor. No matter. Put them all together with the magic of Verne's story-telling ability, and something flames up. A story emerges that sweeps incredulity before it. TT is a very difficult thing to read this novel in a hostile frame of mind, looking for the blunders, noting all the scientific misinformation. For one thing, Verne uses a nifty device for presenting much of the so-called scientific data in the novel. He will have one of the characters, say the narrator, Professor Aronnax, poised on the brink of some exciting event, and then he will ladle in the scientific nonsense. In this posture of the story, who stops to think about science? Verne can get away with almost anything, and he does. The power of Verne's storytelling ability shows up in another odd way. After reading the novel, people remember things from it that are not there. The impression that the novel contains valid scientific prediction seems to grow as the years roll by. Recently, a United States Patent Office official received an interesting inquiry. Was it true that a patent examiner had rejected the patent application of an inventor of a new periscope because of the periscope described by Jules Verne in # Leagues under the Sea? Well, the fact is that Verne is totally silent on the subject of periscopes in the novel. The Nautilus had no periscope. Another mis-remembered description concerns the storage batteries used aboard the Nautilus. There are none. The only time Verne specifically mentions a battery is in connection with diving dress; Captain Nemo says the battery makes electricity out of sodium instead of the usual bichromate of potash. The novel leaves readers with the impression that it is a storehouse of advanced technology, and the impression grows as the reader ages. (It would be interesting to find out how many adults reread it after having read it in their teens. Libraries tend to carry it in the section for younger readers.) Probably the best parts of the novel are those which describe the activities of the characters as they roam on the bottom of the sea in concerned with many of the dangers guarded against by modern bolism, nitrogen narcosis and the bends. That's all right. Diving was not sufficiently far advanced for these things to be of concern. It wasn't until the #s that the Frenchman Paul Bert completed the # work of the Englishman Robert Boyle. Bert put out a book on diving physiology describing how nitrogen can bubble out of a diver's blood when the diver comes up too fast. Bert was the man who pointed out the ways to avoid the bends. The diver could recompress in a chamber at the surface in order to relieve the pressure slowly and at will, or the diver could come up slowly and in stages. Both of these systems allowed the excess nitrogen in the blood to be thrown off in the exhaled air. Verne could not possibly know about such things, and the lack of discussion of such diving dangers in the novel cannot be held against him. Nemo and his crew has long been held up as a good example of Verne's ability to forecast scientifically. Even Verne himself in his later years forgot that Captain Nemo says, when he first describes the diving apparatus to Professor Aronnax, "It is to use the Rouquayrol apparatus, invented by two of your own countrymen, which I have brought to perfection for my own use." The two "countrymen" are Rouquayrol, a mining engineer, and Denayrouze, a Navy officer. Their four years before Verne published his novel. In the actual gear, an air hose ran from a compressor on the surface down to a tank carried on the driver's back. A second hose ran from the tank to a mouthpiece through which the diver breathed. Some kind of valve on the tank fed the compressed air to the mouthpiece at a pressure about equal to the pressure of the water at that depth. Once the diver's tank was charged, the diver could unplug the hose that ran to the surface and freely walk around a bit using the air in his tank. He could then return to the hose and plug in again for another charge of air. Apparently Verne had heard about the gear, although toward the end of his life he insisted he had dreamed about it. For use in the novel, he made some changes in the gear without bothering to check the gear itself, or even to think much about it. For one thing, Captain Nemo says, "I, in encountering great pressures at the bottom of the sea, was obliged to shut my head, like that of a diver, in a ball of copper." This was nothing new, either. The closed-helmet diving dress had been in steady use since its invention by Augustus Siebe in #... a diving dress so good that nothing more than refinements have been added to it to this very day. Verne adds an innovation to the helmet in the novel. "In the Rouquayrol apparatus such as we use, two india-rubber pipes leave this box and join a sort of tent which holds the nose and mouth; one is to introduce fresh air, and the other to let out the foul, and the tongue closes one or the other according to the wants of the respirator." Apparently Verne was not aware of the existence of check valves, so he requires that the diver use his tongue to control the incoming and outgoing air. Yet check valves were in use in the Siebe diving helmet # years earlier, in #. Verne simply did not bother to get out of his chair and check. On top of that, he forcheck valves. On that first walk on the bottom of the sea, Professor Aronnax, Captain Nemo, Conseil and one of the crew were out under the water for a total of ten hours. Toward the end of that walk they all get sleepy and take a little nap. Things have been happening so fast and furiously that both Verne and the reader gear demands that the tongue alternately pop into and out of the two breathing tubes, a good trick when one is asleep. consumption. The modem breath into the water, except in the rarely-used rebreather types of diving gear. Verne properly saw that air does not last very long when you breathe it once and blow it out into the water, so he said that his divers would breathe the same air over and over. Each diver would carry a tank of air charged by "the pumps of the Nautilus" to a pressure of "fifty atmospheres." The # cubic foot tank of a modern pressure of # atmospheres, and most of us run in a little more. Such a charge will last for # minutes at a depth of # feet. Verne needed to keep his divers going for ten hours. Early in the novel Professor Aronnax points out that a man "consumes, in one hour, the oxygen contained in more than # pints of air, and this air, charged (as then) with a nearly equal quantity of carbonic acid, becomes unbreathable." (The French version of the novel states the quantity of air as # liters; this accounts for the odd precision of the equivalent in British pints.) In ten hours, Verne's divers would each need # pints of air. This converts into #I cubic feet of air at the specified # atmospheres, assuming air to be a perfect gas, and is a nice convenient quantity to carry on one's back. It weighs about # pounds, and it contains only about # pounds of oxygen. Professor Aronnax also says about the air they will breathe during the dive, "when it only contains fifteen per cent of oxygen, it is no longer fit to breathe." This leaves a total of # pounds of consumable oxygen for each man for a ten-hour period, about one-tenth the oxygen needed by a #-pound man engaged in very mild exercise at atmospheric pressure. This man would also generate # pounds of carbon dioxide in a ten-hour period, producing with the # pints of air an atmosphere containing about # per cent carbon dioxide. This would swiftly kill him. If the # pounds of oxygen available in the tank were converted to carbon dioxide, the diver's atmosphere would still contain # per cent carbon dioxide, enough to kill quickly. A carbon dioxide concentration of # per cent causes distress, and # per cent produces unconsciousness. There are other interesting details about the breathing arrangements of Verne's divers. Exhaled air goes back into the portable tank on the diver's back so it can be used again. But the tank is stated to be maintained at a pressure of # atmospheres. We are not told how a human being could possibly exhale into a chamber maintained at such a high pressure. In any case, one passage of air through human lungs reduces the oxygen content to about # per cent, at which point Verne says, pretty correctly, it is no longer fit to breathe. ' water pressure throughout the novel. If you look for it, it becomes apparent that Verne has no clear idea of the effects of water pressure on immersed objects, or even how diving gear of any kind works. The diving dress for his divers is "made of indiarubber without seam, and constructed expressly to resist considerable pressure. One would have thought it a suit of armor, both supple and resisting." Verne therefore does not know that the air pressure inside the suit balances the water pressure outside the suit, and that the suit does not have to resist "considerable pressure" at all. In fact, the suit is quite flexible, which Verne realizes in a vague sort of way. Not understanding this principle of the balancing of pressures, he feels compelled to offer some explanation of how a diver can exist under great water pressure in a flexible suit. So he talks about the suit's "resisting." In one scene Professor Aronnax is looking out the great window in the saloon of the Nautilus. The Nautilus is deep, and the Professor sees a sunken ship suspended in mid-water. It had sunk to a depth where its density equaled the water density, and there it hung, according to Verne. The good Professor says, "we often saw the hulls of shipwrecked vessels that were rotting in the depths, and, deeper down, cannons, bullets, anchors, chains and a thousand other iron materials eaten up by rust." What he means is, heavier objects come to rest suspended in water at depths deeper than light objects. Verne believes that sinking objects all seek their own levels in the depths, each according to its density, and there they hover. As a matter of fact, water is incompressible for all practical purposes; its density does not change much in the oceans. At the deepest parts of the oceans, at depths of some # feet -- almost # atmospheres -- the enormous pressure increases the density only by some six per cent. Verne's false idea of the effect of the depth on the density of water shows up in the novel every so often. At one point Professor Aronnax notes that the trans-Atlantic cable rests on the bottom in deep water "without anchorage". Whenever the Nautilus is to make an unusually deep dive, "the screw set to work at its maximum speed" in order to drive the Nautilus down into that "dense" water. Once down, all the Nautilus has to do to reach the surface again is to shut off its screw and tip its vanes upwards. It shoots to the surface, squeezed up like a slug of toothpaste from a toothpaste tube. In describing the strength of any animals living in water strata miles beneath the surface, Professor Aronnax says, "it requires incalculable strength to keep one's self in these strata and resist their pressure." Scientists knew better in those days. The Nautilus itself, as a submarine, does not represent anything new in the submarine' art, with the exception of the idea of using electricity for power. Captain Nemo says that he extracts sodium from sea water and makes electricity out of it. Everything aboard is run by electricity. But even this speculation is not significant, since the work of men like Volta, Ampere, Cavendish, Henry, Joule, Ohm, Davy, Coulomb, Faraday, Watt and others was completed years before #. An American inventor, Thomas Davenport, patented the first electric motor. He ran a railroad car with it in #. So the use of electricity aboard the Nautilus did not call for the exercise of the imagination. after Robert Fulton's Nautilus, built in # in France, and it was more than named after it. Fulton's Nautilus had an observation dome protruding from the upper deck, just like the one on Verne's Nautilus # years later. In # a German named Wilhelm Bauer launched a submarine fifty-seven feet long. It was named the Sea Devil, and it carried a crew of thirteen. It was built to dive to # feet, and it had an oxygen-regenerating system, an observation dome at the bow, and an air lock so that a diver could enter and leave under water. All this was fourteen years before Verne's Nautilus. Once a day it was necessary for Verne's Nautilus to surface to replenish her air. She carried pressure tanks for air storage, but no air-regenerating system. Early in the novel Captain Nemo takes Professor Aronnax on a tour of the Nautilus. At the end of this tour the reader supposes he has learned something about how the Nautilus operates. This isn't true. We learn, "This engine room, clearly lighted, did not measure less than sixty-five feet in length. It was divided into two parts; the first contained the materials for producing electricity, and the second the machinery that connected it with the screw." Then Captain Nemo tells us, "I use Bunsen's contributions, not Ruhmkorff's. Bunsen's are fewer in number, but strong and large, which experience proves to be best. The electricity produced passes forward, where it works by electro-magnets of great size, on a system of levers and cogwheels that transmit the movement to the axle of the screw." And we never again hear anything about the front part of the room where the electricity is produced. In fact, the only feature we learn about the back room is that the system of levers and cogwheels turns the screw a hundred and twenty revolutions in a second, which gives the Nautilus a speed of fifty miles per hour -- as you might well imagine. This "Bunsen and Ruhmkorff" business seems to be thrown in for the distinction gained from the use of a couple of shining scientific names. Bunsen, among many other things, invented an electric cell that used plates of gas coke instead of platinum, but Captain Nemo does not seem to be talking about batteries here. Ruhmkorff invented an induction coil in #. Anyhow, this is all we find out about the mechanism that drives this most famous of submarines. It isn't much. Yet, thinking back to the description after the lapse of a few years, it seems rosily complete. tain Nemo and Professor Aronnax sit down in the saloon while the captain describes more details of the Nautilus's construction. Most of these involve dimensions of the ship. It is here that we learn the secret of the enormous strength of the Nautilus's hull, a strength that allows the vessel to dive to depths of several miles once it gets up enough power. The hull is double. "Indeed, owing to this cellular arrangement it resists like a block, as if it were solid. Its side cannot yield; it coheres spontaneously, and not by the closeness of its rivets; and the homogeneity of its construction, due to the perfect union of the materials, enables it to defy the roughest seas." So, for those reasons, the double hull accounts for the great strength of the Nautilus... apparently on the theory that if one shell is good, two must be better. Captain Nemo continues to give figures, physical dimensions and properties of materials, which again seem to impart something scientific. Here there occurs the remark, "steel plates, whose density is from .# to .# that of water." One translation has ".# to .# that of water." A non-technical reader might see nothing wrong, and even a technical reader might slip over the grossly understated density of steel. Verne doesn't really mean it, either; he is not giving us a science-fiction description of lighter-than-water steel. In these paragraphs he also states the weight and dimension of the outer shell, so it is pretty easy to calculate the density of his steel for ourselves. It works out to be the normal heavy steel we are used to, and not the light stuff he says it is. While discussing the strength of the hull, Captain Nemo mentions that at a depth of # feet of water, the walls of the Nautilus bear a pressure of # atmosdiver knows, water pressure increases an additional atmosphere for every # feet of depth, not every # feet. So at # feet of water the pressure on the hull of the Nautilus would be a total of # atmospheres, not #. This same sort of mistake occurs during that first walk on the bottom of the ocean. Professor Aronnax tells us, "We were at a depth of a hundred and five yards and twenty inches, undergoing a pressure of six atmospheres." But this depth of # feet produces a total pressure of # atmospheres. In this instance Verne thinks every # feet of depth produces an additional atmosphere of water pressure, while previously he thought every # feet did so. Yet in the opening pages of the novel Professor Aronnax explains to Ned Land, "the pressure of the atmosphere is represented by the weight of a column of water thirty-two feet high." This is just about right; Verne has the correct datum, but he doesn't bother to use it later. The book frequently reports popular fallacy as if it were scientific fact. For instance, Professor Aronnax muses that the huge mass of wooden material, including wrecked ships, floating in the central point of the Sargasso Sea "will become petrified by the action of the water, and will then form inexhaustable coal mines." A clue as to why such nonsense should be in the novel can be found about halfway through. Professor Aronnax knocks on the door of Captain Nemo's room. He is invited in. He enters and "found Captain Nemo deep in algebraic calculations of x and other quantities." Now, nobody with even a smattering of mathematics would put it that way. People don't sit around calculating "x and other quantities" as an end in itself. Such a remark could only be made by a man with no mathematical background whatsoever. Verne trained as a lawyer, and then for awhile he thought about going into the banking business. Any knowledge of science he had must have rubbed off on him, and very thinly at that. #WE have been talking about " Verne's physical science. There is good reason to suspect that his biological science is just as bad. It doesn't have the right flavor. The crew of the Nautilus throw out a net, say in the Indian Ocean, and haul it back loaded. Professor Aronnax looks in the net and says something like, "I saw in the net..." and there will follow a listing of the sea creatures in the net, anywhere from one paragraph to three pages long. It is as if Verne pulled toward him a text on marine biology, turned to the listing "Flora and Fauna of the Indian Ocean." This sort of thing goes on frequently in various bodies of water. Verne has his man look in the net and rattle off what he sees there. Sometimes, as a variation, Professor Aronnax stands at the window while the Nautilus cruises beneath the surface, and calls off the contents of the sea they are passing through. All through the novel occur remarks that show a lack of information on a particular subject -- information, that is, which could have been obtained easily enough by asking or looking. One mile visibility under water. Good natural light at # fathoms. # fathom depth of water in the Indian Ocean. It goes on and on. It is time to emphasize again that Verne is a great story-teller despite his scientific and speculative nonsense. The novel is sprinkled with arresting thoughts. Professor Aronnax wonders if some day there will be cities at the bottom of the oceans, cities that rise to the surface once a day to replenish their air as the Nautilus does. Later on, in a conversation between Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax, they discuss the possibility of excavating the portion of the bottom of the Red Sea where the Pharaoh's army perished while pursuing Moses and the Israelites; such an excavation ought to "bring to light a large number of arms and instruments of Egyptian origin." What a lovely concept! As a novel, # Leagues Under the Sea is a good story. But there is not a single bit of valid speculation in it; none of its predictions has come true. The purported science in it is not semiscience or even pseudo-science. It is non-science. You could say Jonesey andor I were not all there , but I don't see it that way. How much of Stanley was or wasn't there? down there on skid row? Oh, sure, every city has one and no doubt you have given it one of those look-away-quick side glances. That isn't what I mean. What I mean is, have you ever Probably not. And, if you haven't, I could make a suggesbeen really down there? tion. Don't go. Skid row is a far, remote way and there are all kinds of horrors down there, the seen and the unseen. To each his own, as they say, and everyone there has his own personal collection. All right. General opinion is to let them be there and the hell with them, people and horrors too, if there is a distinction. Unfortunate, but what can you do? Nothing. Look the other way. That's all right with me. I don't know anything better to do about the horrors that are, or that may be on skid row than to hope they will stay there where they belong -- and let me forget them. That's why I'm writing this. I want to do the story of what I saw, and what I think I saw or felt, and what I didn't see, to get it off my mind. Then I am going to do my damnedest not to think of the whole thing. Me, I know about skid row because I was there. That's my personal problem and another story, before this one, and the hell with that, too. I once had a wife and a couple of kids. I had a lot of problems and then no wife and no kids and I made it to skid row. It was easy. For a while I was there, all the way down, where the gutter was something I could look up to. Well, turned out I had friends who wouldn't quit. By their efforts plus, as they say, the grace of God, I came off it; most of the way off it, at least. No credit to me, but not too many ever manage to make a round trip of it. Who are the misfits and derelicts on skid row? Anybody; nobody. Individuals, if they are individuals, come and go. The group, with few exceptions, is always the same. It is built of the world's rejects -- lost souls, bad dreams; shadowy, indistinct shapes, not a part of life nor yet quite altogether out of it, either. I was down there. I left. But I kept passing by every once in a while to pay a little visit. For that I had two reasons. One, I could sometimes pick up a lead on something for a Sunday feature for my paper. The other -- just taking another look now and then at where and what I had been was a sort of insurance for me. from time to time I would  stop by The Yard for an evening. I would spring for a jug. I was welcome. Those in the regular group knew me and they held me in no more than the same contempt they had for each other and themselves. Being no stranger -- or, perhaps, not too much less strange -- I fitted well enough with the misfits of that half-world where the individual rarely stands out enough to be noticeable. Wino Jones, though, and his friend Stanley were, each in his own way, quite noticeable. I first ran across Wino Jones and Stanley one early spring evening. It was a Thursday. I was beat. It had been a tough week -- a political scandal, a couple of fires and a big "Missing Kid -- Fiend" scare. Turned out the kid had skipped school to catch a triple-feature horror show and was scared to go home when she came out late, so she went to hide out at Grandma's. The suspect fiend was a cockfight sportsman from the Caribbean colony smuggling home his loser under his leather jacket. But it had been a rough week with a lot of chasing around and getting no place that left me in one of those hell-with-it moods. Like, maybe, I ought to take a week or so off and -- and the hell with that. It was time for me to pay a little remembranceofthingsnotsofarpast visit down on the row. I left the city room, tired, dirty, needing a shave. Where I was headed, this would put me ahead of the fashion parade, but it would serve. I stopped for a bowl of chili at Mad Miguel's and then wandered down to those four blocks on South River Street, known as Bug Alley, that make up the hard-core skid-row section of our city. Across from St. Vincent's in Scott Square, called the Yard, by the old wall, there was a group of six or eight passing the time and a nearly dead jug. I shambled over and squatted down. Got a hard, bloodshot look or two, but not because the jug in the public park was against the law. Even if I was the law, so what? These, they made the jail now and then, if there were too many complaints, if they made a disturbance. But not even the jail wanted them. The hard looks wondered only if the jug should be passed to me or by me. I lit a cigarette, took a couple of drags and handed it on. Bootnose Bailey, big, old, bald, with the cast-iron stomach and leather liver, settled the jug question by handing it to me. I lifted it, letting only the smallest trickle of the sticky sweet cheap wine past. It is not for me; no more. It is sickening stuff. But, as always, the effort of holding back left me shaking. All right; with shaking, I had plenty of company. The next man looked pleased at the two gulps left in the bottle and drained it. "Ed?" Bootnose asked in his hoarse canned-heat whisper. "You gonna spring for a jug?" I squatted a minute or so and then stood and started fumbling around through all my pockets. This is local protocol. Coin by coin, I spread a dollar and a half in silver out on the flat collection stone in front of me. A huge, powerful-looking colored man, new to me, hunkered down against the wall, smiled gently and added a quarter. Bootnose scooped it up and went to make the run for the jug. ground rules a little by the way I stared at the big fellow. But he surprised me mildly. For one thing, he looked in good shape; strong, no shakes, no fevered ghosts back of the bloodshot curtain of the eyes. And, apart from that, you don't find very many Negroes on skid row, at least in our area. I don't know why. "Jones," he said, softly, politely, "Wino Jones. You're Ed? Ed, this here is my friend Stanley." He waved a big hand at a wispy little man beside him. Funny I hadn't seen Stanley before, but there he was. That I want to make clear. Stanley was there; no question about it. Only he was such a totally remote, insignificant, unobtrusive little man, it is hard for me to remember him even now. Hard to remember what he was like, that is. He wasn't colored. He was small. His eyes, his hair, I don't know. He must have had some or I would have noticed. And he had a sort of sour, distant, hurt bitterness about him, I recall, and that is about all I can recall ever seeing in Stanley. Except for the last time I saw him -- he looked mean then. This time, I smiled and nodded. "Wino Jones, Stanley, welcome to our city, our little garden spot." "There now, Stanley," Jones beamed, "he can see you well enough. You're doing fine, Stanley, getting better all the time. You do see him plain, don't you, Ed?" "Huh? Yeah, sure I see him. Why not? Does he think he's invi -- " Jones interrupted me, "Look, there comes Mr. Bailey back already." Well, it was a little odd. But then, down there the odd is normal, the normal odd. I didn't think anything of it. I sat a couple of hours. One jug went and then another. Jt did seem to me that Wino Jones missed by a lot on proving out his nickname. At least he didn't love up the passing bottle as though it might be the last one in the world -- which, as every skid-row pro desperately fears, it might very well turn out to be.  Stanley's drinking? I didn't notice. After a while I wandered off. My appreciation of the fact that I was able to wander off was shored up again and I was glad enough to get back to work the next day without thinking anything much more about it. I didn't think about Wino Jones or Stanley again till the first of the next week. Then I was on early shift at the paper, due in at six A.M. At quarter to, I yawned my way out of Mad Miguel's after coffee, an egg and hotcakes. Mig's hotcakes were hot, too; made them with chili. Hard on the stomach, but they popped the old eyelids open in the morning. As I stood a minute in the doorway, my watering eyes spotted Wino Jones coming out of the alley that led around to Mig's kitchen side. He saw me but, thoughtfully, didn't crack till I gave him a, considering the time, reasonably bright hello. "How's it, Ed? You going on early, uh?" "Yeah, Wino -- ah -- Jonesy. Mind if I call you Jonesy?" He didn't. "What's with you? Been washing a dish for the Mig?" He nodded. Some of the upper-level boys from the row worked off and on at odd jobs like that. It didn't make Jones unique, but it made him stand out a little. "Me and Stanley, we like a little change in our pockets. Right, Stanley?" He looked down and a little to one side, just as though he were asking agreement from someone. Only there wasn't anyone there. There wasn't anyone in sight on the block but Jones and me. TUT Jones smiled and nodded warmly at the short vacancy beside him and then looked back at me. "Stanley here, he come by to meet me after work. Mr. Mig, he let me fix us a bite of breakfast when I finish up the night." I looked again at where Stanley was supposed to be standing and then, blankly, back at Jones. He shrugged almost unnoticeably and, I thought, barely shook his head. "Well-I -- " he said, "I expect me and Stanley better drift back on down to the Yard before some fuzz comes along and fans us down." "Yeah?" I said. "Yeah. So long, Jonesy -- Stanley." I don't know why I added the "Stanley" but, obscurely, it seemed to please Jones. He gave me a big smile and then walked off down the street, chatting companionably to -- no one. I didn't get it. Well, Stanley present or absent rated very low on the list of the problems I was going to worry about. I went to work. I ran into Jones every morning during the week I was on early; Jones, coming off work, with Stanley -- who wasn't there. Odd, sure. But if Jones was stringing a way-out gag or playing with a mild hallucination, still it was nothing to me. I did mention it to Mig, who only said, "Si, these one big hombre eat big. He like two plate eat for breakfast, plate he wash, bueno, what for I complain?" So that was all. Nothing. Toward the end of the next week, I wandered down to the Yard again and joined the little group of exponents of gracious almost-living by the wall. Jones wasn't there. But as I was settling down I glanced over at the Broad Street side of the square and I saw him strolling along toward us. He was smiling, talking, gesturing. He was alone. I looked twice. There was no one with Jones. I settled down, took a drag or two on a smoke and passed it along. Lifted a jug. Got back the old lost, gone, miserable feel of the thing again. I looked up then at Jones who was just coming around the mangy clump of bushes by the path. With him was a sour, whispy, scarcely noticeable little man. Stanley. "Evening, Jonesy," I said, "and Stanley. Good to see you again." I meant it even though, come to think, it didn't really clear anything up. Jones gave me his smile and Stanley nodded suspiciously. They moved in and joined the group. Somebody made a run; a couple. The talk staggered around as usual. Topics: booze; money, yesterday's and tomorrow's; booze; women -- only occasionally and with mild, decayed interest; booze. Jones put in a soft word or two from time to time until he finally stood up, stretched and said he was going up to Mig's. Stanley stayed. I know he did. I watched him. Afterward, I tried to remember if he said anything, but that I couldn't recall. I went on home myself a while after Jones left. Stanley was still there, though, when I glanced back from Broad Street, I couldn't pick him out in the dim moon and street light. Still nothing much, eh? work at ten and I didn't see Jones -- or not see Stanley -- all week. Friday, I was back down at the Yard. That was out of my pattern. Usually one visit in a month or so was plenty. But now, for whatever reason, I was getting kind of interested in Jones -- and Stanley. This time Jones was there hunkered down against the wall when I wandered up. Coaster Joe squatted on one side of him. On the other side, no one. I looked; I looked close. There was no one there. Still, when I nodded around, I nodded at the empty space. Noticed that Bootnose Bailey was missing. A mild surprise. Bootnose and a bottle were nearly as much Yard fixtures as Gen. Scott in bronze and pigeons. I settled in. A little time and a jug went by. I still didn't see Stanley. My curiosity finally insisted on a remark. "Jonesy, I -- haven't seen Stanley tonight." Jones smiled, not quite as easy and relaxed as usual. "Stanley isn't around tonight. He went someplace." "Oh? Well, that's good." It seemed a safe statement. If Stanley had been in jail, Jones would have said so. Any other place was bound to be better. I was being unjustifiably nosy, but curiosity wouldn't let me drop it. "Where did he go?" Jones shrugged. Then, seriously, "To tell the truth, Ed, I don't rightly know. Fact is, I been a mite worried about old Stanley lately." No one else was paying any attention to us. "So? How's that?" "Well -- " He shrugged again and then made a decision. "You know, Ed, it's a sort of a odd thing about Stanley. If you have a little time... ?" "Time is what I have." Jones sighed. "It might turn out to be a problem, I think. Bothers me some. It would be a kindness if you would let me talk to you about it." I stood up. Jones, making a gesture that clearly set him apart, put a quarter on the flat collection stone as he got up to join me. We strolled off through the dusk in the park, quietly. Jones, even in a state of some unease, was a comfortable presence. Over on the Broad Street side of the Yard, we sat down on a bench. "Don't rightly know how to begin," Jones said, scratching his head with a fielder's-mitt-sized hand, "but -- Ed, I expect you noticed something funny about Stanley? Or maybe about me?" "I noticed that sometimes I see Stanley and sometimes I don't. And that sometimes you act as though you see him when he positively is not there." "Um, yes. Makes you kind of unusual too, Ed. Because with Stanley it is mostly like this -- when he is around, I mean. There are people who see him; a few. But most people, they can't see Stanley at all. With you, seems like it changes. Uptown you can't see him; down here you can." "What?" "Now me, I see him most all the time. All the time when he's around, that is; when he hasn't gone off someplace, like tonight. But most people, what you might call really normal people -- no offense, Ed -- they can't ever see Stanley." said it with a calm conviction that carried weight. If I couldn't believe it exactly, I didn't disbelieve him either. You hear plenty of queer stories on skid row -- dreams, nightmares, nonsense. There used to be one crummy, rummy old bum around called Gov'nor who used to claim he really had been a governor. He drank down some office duplicator fluid and died. Police routine checked. He was an ex-governor. Probabilities eliminate no remote possibilities; if you flip a coin long enough, someday it will stand on edge. "How do you figure that?" I asked Jones. "I don't want to sound like I think I am a brain," Jones said. "I only read some. But these men down here -- you might say, couldn't you, that they are maybe men who don't have much of a hold on the world any more?" "True." "And the world holds them mighty lightly. They are nothing. Nobody pays them attention. They are outside of everything. They are pretty much outside the world, even. Now you, Ed -- you are mostly a part of the normal world. But one time you were all the way on down here, right? So you -- " "I have a feeling for it? Something like that?" "Something like that. And so down here you are like the others; you can see Stanley. Uptown, you couldn't see him." "Sounds nuts. But how? Why?" "That goes back, way back. Stanley and me, we were kids together. Stanley, his people were what down there they call 'trash.' Fourteen, fifteen kids. Who was whose pa, who would know? Or care? And Stanley, he was kind of the runt of the whole litter. Nobody paid him any mind. He never talked much 'cause nobody listened. Got to be a real dopy, dreamy, moody kid. Not ever sick, but sickly. He was more like nothing than any kid I ever did see. "Me, I lived down the road a piece from Stanley. I don't know why, but he took to following me around. Mostly because everyone else ran him off, I expect. I don't guess I was real good to poor Stanley, but I let him tag along. You would hardly know he was there; no trouble. And he struck me so sort of lost and pitiful, you know? I never had the heart to chase him. After a while, it got to where he even took to trailing along after me to school. "Now that was a funny thing; kind of got me to wondering. There was a white kid down in that part of the country, running along after a colored boy to a colored school. You would expect that to attract a good deal of attention, wouldn't you? Maybe stir up a big storm in the county. But nobody ever hardly seemed to notice Stanley at all. There wasn't anything ever said about it. "Well, you know, Ed, any kid, even Stanley, he wants some attention, some affection from someone. Stanley, all he ever had was me and I never more than about put up with him when we were kids. And any kid likes to feel kind of important sometime. Be noticed. Be king of the hill at recess. Win a spelling bee. Whup somebody, or even be the kid that gets made to stay after school the most. He wants to feel like he is somebody. Only Stanley, he never could. Seemed like the more he wanted to push out into things, the more he would get shy and not able to, and he would pull away back inside even more. He never could talk much hardly, even to me. Got so I would scarcely know he was around myself." world?" I put in. "Well, that happens. There are oddballs all over, you know." "Oh, sure -- sure there are, Ed," said Jones. "But Stanley wasn't like that, not exactly; or only. Seemed like it was as much the world lost touch with Stanley as it was the other way. He always did feel a resentment about it, too, and I believe it turned him pretty bitter way down someplace. 'Course he never did say much, but I could tell. I got the feeling." "So? How did you come here?" "Well, my mammy, she passed on and there wasn't anything to hold me back there around home, so I left. Stanley, he tagged right along after me. Like a shadow. You might say he was a sort of a shadow's shadow, huh? We bummed around. I worked here and there. Then I found out -- we found out -- that most people couldn't even see Stanley at all any more." "He got so far out he was really gone?" "Only it was kind of pitiful the way it made Stanley mad. Me, I got vagged a few times. Only Stanley, he could be right beside me and spit in the sheriff's face and they wouldn't touch him. They wouldn't even know he was there. When I was locked up, he could walk in and out to visit me. Nobody ever stopped him. Nobody saw him -- except, we found out then, that some of the prisoners could see Stanley plain enough." "Oh?" I said. "Yes. And that's the way it has been. Seems like the only people who can see Stanley are people like, well, like the ones down here around the Yard. The ones who are -- how would you say it? -- in the world but not of it, huh? I read that somewhere. People who are far enough out can see Stanley; only he is farther out than any of them." "Hm-m. Well, the world being what it is, maybe Stanley is lucky." "Ed, you don't really mean that." He was right, of course. This world positively was not built according to any specifications of mine, but still it is my world and I guess I am pretty fond of it at that. Couldn't ever have managed to leave skid row if I weren't. "So," Jones said, "poor Stanley, he always has been mighty dependent on me; more, maybe, since we been moving around. Until just lately." "Kind of a damn nuisance, huh?" "It never bothered me too much. Of course it keeps me down around this part of every town we make and maybe this isn't the kind of life I would have picked for myself. But Stanley has made me feel sort of responsible. And some kind of responsibility is good for a man, wouldn't you say?" I couldn't argue with it; not me. Anyway, it proved what I had felt from the start -- Wino Jones wasn't a real or a natural skid-row type; he was forcing himself. "Well, Ed, Stanley has been trailing me around all the years -- only somehow I don't believe Stanley ever did really like me much. He followed me because he couldn't do anything else, but he never took to me. I guess maybe I couldn't ever quite look up to him the way he wanted. So I suppose he has always been looking for something else. Well, before we came here, we were stopping in a mission one evening and I looked around when I finished my soup and I couldn't see Stanley. It gave me a turn. But after a little while, there he was again. I asked him where he went. He couldn't or wouldn't ever tell me much, only that there was someplace he was trying to get to and friends he wanted to meet. " 'I can almost get there,' Stanley told me. 'There's the border and over there on the other side, they want me. I can feel they want me. They understand that I am important to them. They want me to come. If I could just find the way across to -- ' "He never told me who it was wanted him, or where, or what for. But ever since then, every once in a while I would look around and Stanley would be gone. First part of this last week he was gone again -- and when he came back, he was changed. He was kind of superior-acting. Not pleasant. Wherever he was trying to get, he had got there. 'Now,' he told me, 'I have friends who know I am somebody.' He was real set up over it. Tonight he went back again." "Where?" I wanted to know. told him, 'Stanley, we been together a long time. You got friends besides me, I'm glad Only, you know, I kind of feel responsible. Maybe I ought to meet your friends, huh? Why don't you take me to meet them?' " 'No,' says Stanley. 'Oh, no.' He wouldn't hear of it. I got to stay here and wait for him, he tells me." "Well, sure," I told Jones. "How could you go with a man into his dream?" "Yeah -- only Stanley did take old Mr. Bootnose Bailey with him." "What?" I exclaimed. "Uh-huh. Stanley said he was going to prove it to me. He said he would take somebody along with him to this place and then he would bring one of his friends back here to visit. He said that would show me, would show everybody. And you know, Ed, I don't believe I much liked the way poor Stanley looked when he said that. He looked kind of mean." "But they went? Both of them? And that's why old Bootnose isn't around?" Jones nodded. "Yeah. Stanley promised Mr. Bootnose something would give him a real boot. They went. Stanley, last thing he said before I watched the two of them just sort of fade out, he said he would be back tomorrow evening. He wanted me to be sure to wait for him in the Yard. And fact is, Ed, I'm kind of uneasy about it all," he added. There it was, Jonesy's story. A nonsense story? Sure. But it left me feeling a little uneasy too. We talked it back and forth a while longer, Jones and me, and the more we talked the more uneasy I got. Foolish or not, Jones himself believed it. He wasn't trying to con me into anything. There was no other point to it. And -- well, maybe it was simply the fact that Jones was a good deal of man. What he said had a real conviction to it. Even if the story was hard to believe, still there was what I had seen -- and not seen -- of Stanley. And even if there was nothing that seemed particularly threatening about the business, it made the two of us uneasy. There was nothing for us to do about it, though. I went on home to my apartment after I promised Jones I would be around the next night when Stanley, alone or with company, was due back. I don't know what Jones expected. I don't know what I expected. But Stanley's friend, no; we didn't expect that. on the desk, but my mind must have been fumbling around with Stanley's other world. I fumbled all day and finished by crossing up a couple of headlines. So I left the office with the managing editor's curses ringing in my ears, even though he had to admit that the "Present Stench -- Future Disaster" line from the sewer gas story did fit very nicely over the item on the mayoralty campaign. I was down at the Yard a little after five. Jones came along a few minutes later. The group was there. It always is, except when there is a city clean-up. Then it moves over behind the church. Today there was a tension. Jones was smiling, gentle and friendly as always, but there were nerves back of it. Probably the others were mostly just suffering dry nerves. But I was rattled enough so I fumbled a five out and put it on the rock. That, naturally, meant that Coaster Joe and Feeny, who moved the quickest, went to make a run and didn't come back. With the right change for the jug, the wino never skips; with change to bring back, always. " painfully dredged up, mostly by Jones, and somebody else went. The wine went around and I admit that this time I took a swallow or two on my turn. I noticed Jones did too. Not much; a little. We were cold sober. Too cold, actually. I needed the little wine I had in me and a lot more. That bottle and another went around. So did the talk. I was leaning on the wall next to Jones. Neither of us had much to say. Finally, it was just coming on dusk, I asked him, "You're sure he'll come here? Are you sure he'll show at all?" "He'll be here. Most any time now, Ed. I can feel it. Can't you?" I could feel something, but it was only a contagion of tension, I told myself. Then Jones said, "Look there," and pointed. I followed the line of his big, pink-nailed, black finger off along the path through the park from Broad Street, a little hazy in the summer evening. There was nothing. Then there was a darker spot in the haze and then, not more than about twenty feet away, just about to pass back of the row of bushes along the path, I saw Stanley. Tonight he seemed, spmehow, a more positive presence, even at that distance. There was a cocky bounce in his walk and a tilt to his chin that announced "Here is someone to reckon with." Other eyes in our little circle turned his way as he passed behind the bushes. A couple of seconds more and he came around the near side and moved in to join us. "Hello there, Wino," he said r i a # Tovjet Tii to Jones and there was condescension in it. "Fellows, I want" -- proudly -- "you should meet a friend of mine." Around the bushes came a shape, a dark shape; Stanley's friend, from some other place or world. In our group, Saint Betty, a retired queen, choked on the jug and handed it to me. I shoved it along to Jones. The paralyzing effect of Stanley's friend can be measured in the fact that the jug went three times around that thirsty circle -- and no one even lifted it to his lips till it fell in the dust at my feet. Stanley's friend was there all right; really there. What did I say he was like? A dark shape? Yes. But that dark shape and the detail of that shape came through as clear as a hot blue flame to me. You weren't ever down that way, right? Not to stay, at least. Well, one thing people there have in common is the horrors. Not just the ordinary day-to-day horrors of a hard life but the big horrors. The D.T.s. How do they go? The detail varies. With everyone, there is something that really panics him, gives him that sense of unreasoning, helpless, screaming fear. With a lot of people ' it is snakes. That's the traditional. With others, it can be heights, or closed rooms; rats, maybe. With me, it has always been spiders, ugly, hairy-legged, bloat-bellied. The horrors. The height man, when he gets them, will have the sensation of falling, helplessly, endlessly. Once I had spiders. great, stickily scrabbling, poisonous spiders crawling, crawling all over me, over everything -- until I woke wrapped up like an iced tamale in the cold wet sheet that is called "calming restraint" in psycho wards. Stanley's friend? Well, it's an ugly thought, but consider those spiders of mine. And consider people. People, mostly, have religion. "God made man in his image," they say, except God, of course, is the infinitely greater. Now suppose that spiders had a god. A spider god. "God made spiders in his image," the spiders might say, right? So such a spider god, that almighty apotheosis of spiderdom -- that was Stanley's friend as I saw him. see a thing like that. Maybe I didn't see it, exactly. But absolutely, in some way, by whatever means, the positive perception of such a thing burned itself into my eyes and mind. The other fellows? No one screamed aloud, although my mind was screaming. Horrors were not less horrible to us, only less unfamiliar than to other people. One by one, the others quivered to shaky feet and they stumbled off through the evening. The jug, three-quarters full yet, stayed there in the dust of the Yard, forgotten. How long it was, I don't know. Not long -- and then only Jones and I were left with Stanley and Stanley's friend. The rest of the park was empty. Across Bug Alley in front of the church an old woman carrying a sack of rubbish was impelled to look our way. She screeched in a high, disappearing pitch and crumpled to the walk. The church was dark and silent. Jones stood there, big, powerful, leaning against the wall. He smiled at Stanley, but it was a weak, sick smile. How he managed that much, I'll never know. Weak, trembling, stomach churning, I dragged myself up. "Uh -- well," I mumbled, "f'you fellows will excuse me -- guess I better be moving along." Stanley's lip curled. He was irritated. I couldn't help that. "You see?" It wasn't speech, but the thought came plainly from Stanley's friend, out of a churning of black, hungry thoughts, "You see how it is? Even now, not even such as these will welcome us as friends and equals." "Yes," snapped Stanley, "I see. I should have known. All right then, we'll do it your way. We will show them all." I stumbled a step or two toward the path. "Wino," said Stanley, "Wino Jones. We are going over to the other side now. But we will be back, you hear me? You just wait." "Sure, Stanley," said Jones, still gentle, kind. "Only, Stanley, are you sure?" "I'm sure," said Stanley. He turned to his friend. "Come on. Let's go." They moved together toward the bushes. Stanley looked back over his shoulder at Jones. "We'll be back," he said, "we'll be back, Wino. You be looking for us." Then they were gone. Thank the good Lord, they were gone. "Well," I quavered at Jones, "you did say you were kind of uneasy about him, didn't you?" "Yes," said Jones, "that's right. You going on home now, Ed?" "You bet!" "I don't like to impose, but would you mind if I kind of tagged along? I don't feel too good -- after that thing with Stanley, built of all those thousands of hissing, wiggling snakes." With Jones, it had been snakes, not spiders. The others -- to each his own? Somehow that  made it seem even worse. Jones wanted to come along with me? I was glad and grateful. I don't know that I could have stood being alone that night.  TP IN MY apartment, we  turned on all the lights. Had a couple of nightcaps. Sat up all night in my luxurious eight-byten living-dining-kitchen area for modern living. We talked a little, but not about Stanley and his friend. It was too fresh and we were too shaken. It seemed safer not to mention it. I suppose we must have dozed off and on. In the morning, I woke up. I still had the shakes. No hangover, but the shakes. "Jonesy," I said. "Jonesy, I guess maybe I ought to be getting along to work. What are you going to do?" He woke up, full awake, like that. "I'm not going back," he said. "You know?" "Yeah." "I got a feeling. I got kind of a feeling that maybe I am sort of Stanley's doorway or gate back here, if you know what I mean. He was always nearer to me than anyone. You notice he kept telling me to wait for him?  I think maybe he needs to feel around and find me to make his way back across from wherever he went. So, if I'm not there, if he can't locate me, could be he won't be able to make his way back -- with his friends. I think I better stay as far away from down there as I can get. You reckon there might be some kind of job I could do on that paper you work for?" "Sure," I said. I knew they needed some men in the circulation department. "That isn't so very far away, though, is it?" I had a sense that he was right about Stanley. "Not miles. Distance, like that, I don't think it makes much difference where Stanley is. It's the Yard and all that, huh? Seems to be like if I get a steady job, get to be a real, steady, normal citizen, that's what would make me hard for Stanley to find." "Yes," I said, "I see. The more you are a full part of this world, the farther away you will be from that other one -- and Stanley." "That's it." "I hope so. Lord, I hope so. You come along down with me this morning. We'll get you a job if we have to kill someone to make a vacancy... Jonesy, that -- that thing, spiders, snakes -- you are sure it was real? It was actually here, I mean? And might come back if Stanley can make the way -- in force?" "Yes, Ed. You didn't really have to ask, did you?" "No," I said. And that's it and that's all.,  is working for the paper. He got to be assistant circulation manager in less than a year. He is as respectable and non-skidrow a citizen as there is in town. Has a girl; getting married next month. Me? I'm the same, maybe a little better. I go every other week to visit my kids and Jennie, my ex, has taken to staying around now. We even talk a little bit and, last time, I took her some flowers and she blushed like a bride. Something might even come of it -- given enough time. I have checked back on the Yard a few times but so far, at least, nothing more than the standard rack-up of ordinary horrors. I am not going to check any more. What for? Such a thing as Stanley's friend, you couldn't fight, and I wouldn't know what direction to run. If those things ever find a way over here, where would they be coming from? I don't know. From inside, maybe, Jones says. How do you run from that? Best, I think, forget it. I intend to try. And, so help me, I am through with skid row. Who wouldn't be?      We begin the new year for Galaxy with the end of an old tradition. The first time the Frederik Pohl-C.M. Kornbluth byline appeared it was in Galaxy, on the famous Gravy Planet (which as The Space Merchants has been republished in one form or another every year since, somewhere in the world -- this year in Brazil, Japan and Czechoslovakia.) The last time will be in our next issue, with a complete novella called Critical Mass. Since Kornbluth's untimely death a few years ago, Pohl has completed several projects then unfinished; this is the last of them. Naturally we'll also have Poul Anderson, completing his The Day least one novelette, shorts to fit... and another item worth mentioning. It is called The Martian Star-Gazers -- not a story but an article -- and it will be the subject of our February cover. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales lax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! Name Address... City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfej Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! One of his greatest novels, Masters of Space, written in collaboration with E. Everett Evans -- never before published anywhere -- starts in November IF. the next # t  galaxy If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IFi Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers -- challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space Itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! ; if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. ' Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose I #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish (JoUr Rotate! Only one power controls your destiny -- a strange force sleeping in your mind. Awaken it ! Command it to obey you! Push obstacles aside and attain your fondest hopes and ideals. Let the Rosicrucians show you how this can be done. Learn why many of history's great masters were Rosicrucians such as Leonardo de Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, etc. Each of these men learned how to control their fate, to develop mind E ower, to attain success and appiness. The knowledge that helped these men of history is now helping thousands of thinking men and women throughout the world climb to new heights they, at one time, thought impossible. And they are no different than you ! Why not discover for yourself how you can take advantage of this priceless knowledge The Rosicrucians have preserved through the ages. If you are sincere in wanting greater success, security and happiness send book, "The Mastery of Life." There is no obligation and it may mean the turning point in your life, toward achievements you've never believed possible. "Why not do it Scribe W.Z.E. galaxy by Jack Sharkey by J. F. Bone A Galaxy in Coma Berenices. Our own Galaxy, seen edge-on, looks just like this. Earth lies outside the central bulge, in the spiral arms, seen here as a line. Publisher Managing Editor Science Editor by Avram Davidson by Magnus Ludens by Allen Kim Lang by Arthur C. Clarke by Willy Ley by the Editor Next issue (June) on Sale April #th Art Director bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices; #I Hudson Street. New York #, N. Y. #C per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright. New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. going-over at the hands of Theodore L. Thomas in these pages a few months ago, is not without friends. If you doubt it, you should see our mail. Thomas's article was a thoughtful second look at Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from the vantage point of what we have since its writing learned about underwater facts of life. The article was entitled The Watery Wonders of Captain Nemo, and it pointed out that many of the "astonishingly detailed predictions" Verne made in this first of submarine stories -- just ain't so. For instance, there's the hoary old fabrication about how the first man who actually built a submarine periscope was refused a patent because Verne had already "invented" the device in his novel. This is a most appetizing fable for sciencefiction readers like ourselves to enjoy; your editor has heard it broadcast at least twice in speeches at sciencefiction conventions. But it's not true, sad to say. Verne not only didn't describe the periscope "accurately" -- his Nautilus didn't have any periscope at all'. This struck us as so astonishing that we went down to the library and reread the old classic to see with our own eyes. True enough. The closest Verne came to it was a "glazed enclosure" -- evidently a sort of retractable pilothouse -- which is a horse of a quite different breed. Still, nobody can deny that Verne's crystal ball gave a very good picture on at least some of its channels. As Samuel A. Peeples (himself a writer of considerable attainments -- as those who watch the credits of their favorite television shows know well) writes us, in Verne's novel "there is depicted the practical use of the following items (none of which existed as a functioning practicality at the time the story was written):" #. An operating submarine. #. Electric lights with controlled degrees of light. #. Electric diving motors. #. Electric hoists. #. Electric elevators (the conning tower rose and lowered.) #. Double-hulled steel vessel for strength and safety against damage. #. The manufacture of food and other articles from seaweed, etc. #. Luminescent lighting (panels in ceiling.) #. Artificial manufacture of air (which Captain Nemo felt unnecessary.) #. Electric centrifugal pumps. #. Electric clocks (unknown in # ) even to a full description of their accuracy. #. Underwater speedometer. #. Electric stove for cooking. #. Electric water heater. #. Streamlined ship hull to reduce friction. #. Electric floodlights. #. Neon lights (electricity through glass tubes filled with gas for even white light.) #. Pneumatic underwater rifle. #. Auto-loading rifle. #. Airlock, complete to electrical piunps. #. Electric fence -- to shock trespassers. We're grateful to Sam Peeples for the list -- even if, maybe, one or two of the items aren't entirely beyond argument. (The Japanese particularly were gettingNemo-like food from the sea long before #. An "operating submarine" existed as early as the War of the American Revolution, and again in the Civil War.) But we still say that periscope just isn't there'. W E appreciate hearing from all of you, you know. Galaxy doesn't run a letter column, but that doesn't mean that your letters aren't read -- and much appreciated. They furnish the only day-byday guide we have to help us make the magazine what you like best. If it's humanlypossible, we'll usually try to do what you want... that's what we're in business for'. We have at least one reader who we don't seem to have convinced of that. A young lady from the state of Washington writes that she wants us to publish a letter column; what's more, she writes, "I am beginning to get angry; either publish the letter column (which is what we want) or kindly admit that it is your magazine and you don't give a hollow hoot what your readers want... There is a comparatively recent word in the English language that fits this situation: Boycott. This is a group action, but just in case you didn't ow there is a group that just might be prepared to take this action... However... it's doubtful if enough readers could be persuaded to boycott to do any good; Galaxy is too good a magazine, and I'm afraid that backsliding would be rife." Dear reader, we appreciate the compliments and weigh your request. If there is any such large group of readers who want a letter column, we'd be pleased to hear from them. But you have to excuse us for doubting they exist. You point out that other science-fiction magazines have letter columns, which is true enough; but it hasn't ever been Galaxy's policy to be just like all other science-fiction magazines . Galaxy' s policy is very simple. We try to put out the best science-fiction magazine we possibly can. Does that mean we should print letters in every issue? Our best guess at this moment is no. In a postscript to your letter you add: "Bet most of your letters are on this subject. Embarrassing, what?" We're afraid you lose that bet; of all the letters Galaxy received on the last three or four issues, at least, there was exactly one letter asking for a letter column. Yours. A Y oung man wanted, to travel sixty light-years and judge the life or death of a dozen worlds. Must have one hundred years experience in the quarantine service, and psionic classification five or better. Pay -- well, an enterprising deputy warden with planets to sell could set his own price. The memo from the district office was not quite so bald, but those were the terms in which Wain Scarlet summed up the situation for his own benefit. He had spent a tedious century at the regional headquarters on Denebola IV, waiting for just such an opening. He jumped at it. The jump wasn't easy. His own face was the first great barrier. He was a scrawny, redfreckled runt, in a world where such needless ugliness was shocking. His half-conditioned parents had refused to meddle with nature. Then, before he himself was old enough to arrange his own aesthetic surgery, he had come to enjoy a cruel satisfaction in the pain he could inflict upon the beautiful beings around him, with, "the bulge of his low forehead and the jut of his rodent teeth and the defiant stare of his yellow eyes. The other barriers he had built upon that one, within his own mind. A habit of suspicion. ft seemed that half the Galaxy was interested in Earth. The criminals sought to loot it; the better eiass merely wanted it destroyed by tire! A pattern of unprovoked aggression and unnecessary flight. Although he had used the timecontracting neutrionic ships of the service to put a dozen different worlds behind him forever, he had not escaped his gnawing need to strike and run again. This time he was going to strike harder, and run farther. His goal was the galactic frontier, the fast-expanding bubble of new planetary systems claimed and conquered. Out there, a thousand Or ten thousand light-years beyond the utmost outposts of the service, all men were human. Perhaps, with the price of planets to spend, he could buy one last escape from eveiything he feared. If his plans seemed somewhat large for a common clerk in regional personnel, they had been growing for a hundred years, while he patiently endured all the incessant psionic indoctrination in the glorious traditions and the lofty obligations of the service, and carefully concealed his rankling resentment of all the handsome men around him. When chance struck, he was ready. instrument of luck was Warden Thomwall, an innocent dark youth whom he secretly despised for his dark beauty and his frank friendship and his wellconditioned intelligence. "Wain, here's a case that ought to interest you." The warden tossed a little packet of documents into the action basket on his desk. "A savage planet out the far side of nowhere, about to .reach a contact crisis. The natives are playing with rockets and atomic theory. Our watchers report that they will soon discover us. That means the end of our rights and duties imder the Covenants of Non-Contact. If the natives really qualify, we'll have to usher them into civilization." "I won't hold my breath till they do." Scarlet made a painful effort to reflect Thomwall's open smile. "I've seen contact crises before. The new races usually need several generations of supervised psionic training before we can certify human status." The lovely youngster nodded, unaware of Scarlet's veiled aversion. "You'll find all the old arguments for extending the quarantine and for lifting it today -- advanced by fussy old zoo-keepers and by pirates who want an open planet to loot and by social workers who need a new world to save. But this case gives us a novel complication." Scarlet looked hastily down at the documents, trying to hide the eyes. Cunning enough to know his own mental handicaps, he did his best to hide them from the rest of the world. "You'll see a notice from the signal service," the warden explained. "They wanj to use Sol for the first unit of their new intergalactic blinker. They're asking us to evacuate all human beings from its vicinity, before they begin transmission." "Must they use Sol?" Scarlet peered up at Thomwall, privately wondering how the demolition of a solar system might be turned into personal profit. "Aren't there desert suns enough?" "Sol is a desert sun." The beautiful man smiled serenely. "Even after five thousand years under our sujjervision, the native anthropoids have failed to qualify for galactic citizenship. Their progress reports arouse doubts that they ever will." "Yet they're alive." "Any star you point at has half a dozen planets with life of some sort. The signal people have made a scientific survey of the stars available for their initial project. They need eight thousand stars of the right spectral type, located here at the Center. Sol is first on their list." "There will be protests." Scarlet squinted shrewdly. "Even from old hands in the service." "I knew the case would interest you." Thomwall glowed with executive assurance. "Why don't you look over the memo? I'll have to check with the record section, but I believe you're in line for the assignment if you want it." lite words of praise for his rivals in the office, but he knew what the records section would say. Once, sixty years before, another beautiful and innocent young warden had gone stm-diving, tmsting Scarlet with the records. Since then the records said what Scarlet wanted them to. He fumbled quickly through the documents, trying to cover the sudden flare of triumph in his yellow eyes. "You'll have three possible decisions," Thomwall went on. "You may decide that the inhabited planet needs a few more centuries to mature its native culture, under our care. If so, you may act within the limits of the Covenants to delay the contact and extend the quarantine." Scarlet nodded, without much interest. Such a decision might please the cautious old heads in the service, but it offered no profit to him. "On the other hand, you may find that the natives are ready for admission ito civilization," the warden said. "In that case, you may open the planet to traffic with the stars imder any supervision you see fit to impose." Scarlet brightened, scenting money. Every contact crisis brought outsiders swarming from all the worlds around, drawn by a himdred motives to welcome the new race into the dangerous freedoms of galactic civilization. Surely somebody would pay what he wanted! "Or, finally, you may decide that the anthropoids will never qualify," Thorhwall finished. "If so, you may overrule the protests against the blinker project and order the evacuation of every galactic citizen within a light-year of Sol." Scarlet frowned, considering that. The signal service was unlikely to offer bribes. But there were many ways that a clever man might take toward the freeliving frontiers. The first flash of the intergalactic beacon might be the signal of his fortune. His tawny eyes flared again. "I thought you would be interested," the warden said. "Let me speak to the director." Even after that assurance, the actual orders seemed a long time coming. Scarlet sat for three days grimly pretending to work, fighting a cold fear that his tampering with the records had been discovered. When at last Thomwall came up and clapped him on the back, he gasped with terror in spite of himself. "Uh -- " He caught a quick breath and captured control of himself. "Yes, sir?" "The director wants to see you." A luminous smile reassured him. "You're going to get the break I SFoke of. About time, too!" Y'ET his knees were trembling when he walked in to face the director, whose muscular perfection gleamed through a film of steely dust. He wanted to sit down, but the sleek metallic god kept him standing half a minute, probing him with keen gray eyes which glinted with the passionless authority of perfect psionic conditioning. He couldn't help cringing. "Nervous, Scarlet?" He nodded, grinning stiffly through his secret misery. "Not that I blame you." With a cool steel smile, the giant allowed him to sit. "After all your years in this easy berth, you must dread being uprooted." His greater fear was that he might appear too eager. "I have been very happy here, sir," he agreed, in a voice which he tried to make regretful. "I hate to leave my marriage group, and I've a number of hobbies that I don't like to interrupt." The metal god nodded sympathetically. "Sun-diving, for one." Actually, he detested the sport because his imperfect integration had left him dangerously inept with the psionic diving gear. But a nervous compulsion drove him on. "Just bought an outfit from a friend who got transferred. He's been diving into sunspots, looking for the famous living lights. He had a theory they're intelligent -- " "Perhaps they are." The director's nod froze his apologetic grin. "I don't know how any complex of ions and electromagnetic energy can support intelligence, but I've brought back some queer psiographs from my own dives." "Anyhow, I'll be selling my gear." Alarmed, Scarlet retreated as hastily as if the director had suddenly become a hissing solar fireball. "I wasn't quite prepared for such a mission. But the service comes first." "We're living for the worlds we watch." The steel man intoned that old slogan so solemnly that Scarlet felt an imcomfortable prickling at the back of his neck. "We left our own worlds behind once and for all when we took the service oath." "I'm not looking back, sir." His palms-were clammy from a sudden fear that he had overdone his appearance of reluctance, but his eyes were on the new worlds ahead. "Though I suppose I've been here a little too long. I had almost forgotten how it feels to board a neutrionic flyer to skip down across a dozen or a hundred years, knowing that you can't come back." "That's our destiny." The magnificent man paused to study the records Scarlet had altered, so closely that he shuddered. "A bad Frankly, Scarlet, I was hesitant to send a man of your incomplete conditioning. Especially one without field experience. But we've too many planets to watch, and too few dedicated men."  not to trust his voice. He sat sweating, trying not to think of the rivals who should have ranked above him. "I'm a little surprised that we've kept you here so long." The director gave him a quicksilver smile. "But this situation is apt to call for all you've learned in these hundred years." Scarlet scanned the little stack of psionic dispatches that he pushed across the desk, trying to absorb them as swiftly as if he really rated five. Thomwall's briefing helped him decide upon a troubled frown. already fifty years old." His concern grew swiftly genuine. "I'll be at least that long getting there by the regular routes. What can I expect to find?" "Your problem. Warden." The director was already turning, reaching for another stack of dispatches. "The finite speed of our communications is all that makes your mission necessary. In a contact crisis, we must have a responsible man on the spot." "Trust me, sir." Scarlet spoke with a pious gratitude for that finite limite upon the velocity of every sort of signal, even upon the flash of the intergalactic blinker. By the time any report of his decision could come back here, he would be so far beyond Sol that no possible pursuit could ever overtake him. "I'll be on guard." "You'll need to be," the steel man admonished him. "A contact crisis draws all sorts of people. Some pure as light. Some more savage than the savages we guard." He boarded the supply ship next morning, carrying most of his material possessions in one small bag. The true rewards of the service were the joys of service itself. So they said. Certainly he had received very little besides. He was glad enough to abandon what he had to leave behind, the too-risky sun-diving and the dabbling in psionic art and the aimless multiculture with which he had tried to kill the idle years. He couldn't help feeling a secret relief even at the separation from his marriage group, although he tried to make a convincing display of regret. He even asked Glade to come with him. She was the sultry if somewhat shallow blonde who had always insisted that she was simply fascinated with his phenomenal ugliness, but now he was not surprised when she chose to remain with her more handsome husbands and the civilized amenities of the station. T he flyer caught the neutrionic streams, the vast winds of invisible neutrinos that burst from the novas and blow through the galaxies at almost the speed of light. Velocity foreshortened time. A long quarter-century on the planets ahead and behind was only a few weeks for Scarlet. He was still elated with the wine of one more triumphant escape from all the perfection he hated, when the flyer touched at Procyon Station. In the spaceport bar, he bought a drink for a service courier from the Regulus region and asked for news of Earth. "Light's so damned slow," he grumbled, disguising the casual boast about his mission. "A contact crisis comes up on a world like Earth, and it's out of hand before you can get there to do anything about it. What about Earth?" The courier looked blank. "Oh, we touched there." The courier grinned maliciously. "Better take along a durable woman and a good library, if you're waiting for those quarrelsome apes to civilize themselves." "Huh?" Scarlet downed his drink uncomfortably. "Aren't they near contact?" "Not that I heard about." "They were firing military rockets a hundred years ago." he protested hopefully. "They'll be getting into space." "But not for any peaceful purpose. They were groping toward fusion bombs, when we picked up those dispatches. They'll soon be blowing the crust off their grubby little planet. Even if they do blunder into our outpost, it doesn't mean that thes're fit for civilized society. "Time for another?" Scarlet blinked at his time ring. "Thanks, but my ship will be lifting." He hurried back aboard, frowning gloomily. After a few worried weeks of ship .time, he watched Sirius flare out ahead like a natural nova. years fresher, but still distressing. "Larger tribes are fighting bigger wars with better weapons." The post communications officer grinned sardonically. "If they do make contact, thesl probably attack us with fusion bombs. We're the ones who need protection!" "They may be troublesome." Slowly tightening muscles accented the ugliness of Scarlet's pinched and chinless face, imtil the better-integrated man looked uncomfortably away. "But I'll civilize them," he muttered defiantly. "If they are human at all!" Perhaps they were not, he reflected silently. Perhaps he would have to approve the blinker project, after all. But, before he decided to let the supernova flash, he intended to be well paid for his decision. His first concern was the source of his payment. II money when the flyer touched at Proxima Station. He got off to sniff for it, and caught only the odor of trouble. The restless anthropoids had fired rockets into space, but the radiation zones had slowed their efforts to reach the satellite of Earth. Wandering unhappily back to the flyer, he foimd a girl at the lock ahead of him. A deck officer had blocked her way. She was protesting in some liquid-toned tongue he had never heard before, so vehemently that he snapped on his psionic translator. " -- unconditioned blunder!" The sense of her ringing words came suddenly through. "You can see that my passage was cleared through your own transportation office." "You may come." The officer nodded grudgingly. "But not your rubbish." Scarlet heard the indignant catch of her breath, as the officer gestured stubbornly at a mountain of packing cases stacked beside the ramp. In response to his glance, their blank labels flashed with words that he could read as if in his native tongue: The labels faded as his eyes went back to Coral Fell. "It isn't rubbish and it isn't mine," she was warmly informing the officer. "It belongs to the contact crisis. The moment the quarantine is raised, they'll need help. I'm going out there to open a psionic training center, to help them make the difficult jump to civilization. All this is just the barest essential equipment for our first clinic -- " "No matter if it's a captive living light, this is not a common carrier," the officer snapped. "Our limited cargo space is already filled with supplies for Sol Station. Wait for a freighter." "But there won't be any frefreighters." A sob shattered her well-conditioned confidence. "Not till the quarantine is raised. Nor another supply ship for three whole years -- " "Too bad." He shrugged unsympathetically. "But we're lifting off." "Wait!" Her desperate voice fell, but the translator still caught her words. "I've funds of my own. Maybe we can reach some private understanding." "I'm the wrong man to bribe!" The officer recoiled in indignation. "I can see to it that you aren't allowed off any ship at Sol Station!" HE turned, and Scarlet shrank from her angry loveliness. Her long hair shone with blue psionic moons, and her mouth was a quivering golden slash across her exquisite lean face. With tears burning in her violet eyes, she stalked toward him blindly. 'Warden Scarlet!" The deck officer moved to meet him with an unexpected graciousness. "So you're already seen the sights of Proxima -- " "You're a service executive?" Suddenly she saw him -- but somehow not his ugliness. Her smile illuminated him. "Could you help me?" "Perhaps I can." He turned briskly to the officer. "When the quarantine is lifted, the natives will need all the help they can get. We're taking Coral Fell and all her cargo. In my own suite, if necessary." "Yes, sir." The officer had become somewhat purple, but he nodded stiffly. "I'll arrange the space, sir." "Thank you. Warden!" Her kiss took his breath, before he had time to reflect that she must have come from a world of more casual conventions than his own. "How can I ever repay you?" "I wish no pay." Uncomfortably, he disengaged himself. In his judiciary position, he could hardly ask outright for the bribe the deck officer had refused. Dealing with her was going to require a delicate tact. "But -- uh -- shall we meet aboard for dinner?" She met him for dinner, wondrous in a gown of woven psionic filaments that reflected all his thoughts and moods in their flow of patterned color, and always amplified his responses to her beauty. She was far more, he soon discovered, than merely a dedicated missionary. He cringed from her shimmering perfection, with his old uneasy defiance, but she was somehow neither fascinated nor repelled by his total ugliness. She simply failed to notice. Perhaps, he thought, she had lived on some frontier where aesthetic surgery was not the fashion. Or perhaps his very deformity appealed to the same generosity that had brought her to aid the natives of Earth. "So the whole future of these planets is yours to decide?" Her warm admiration overwhelmed his remaining defenses. "Isn't that an awfully important decision to be left to just one man?" He caught his breath to assure her that he had been long trained for his task, and his fitness carefully tested. But when he remembered how he had secretly insured his own selection, a wave of shame submerged him. Fortunately, their food was being served. There were dishes he had never seen before, and by the time she had informed him that these were multicultured bioforms from Proxima II, he had begun to recover from his unexpected confusion. organization," he muttered awkwardly. "Though of course we do have official status. Our trouble is that so few people ever volunteer to leave their own times and planets, to go voyaging down through strange worlds and ages, giving their lives to guard ignorant savages. We never have men enough. But we do what we can." "We are volunteers, ourselves." She nodded sympathetically. "I joined the mission because of my father. A galactic buccaneer, my mother used to call him. He owned a great fleet of neutrionic flyers. He used to operate out toward the Edge, looting new worlds of everything portable, using his profits to build more flyers and loot more worlds. All legal enough, but Mother taught me not to like it. When I inherited his fortune, I came back to these forgotten worlds at the Center, to return what he had taken." Inwardly elated at this news of all she had to give away. Scarlet began cautiously trying to convey the idea that he would be receptive. He admitted over the wine that he had long ago lost the youthful illusions that led him to volunteer. "I can remember when the feeling of it made me tingle all over," he told her. "Skipping down the centuries, watching over all the retarded worlds as they clamber up out of the jungle. The trouble is, they take too long. They stumble too often, and fall back too far. We've been guarding Earth for five thousand years." He tingled again, in her admiring glow. "Frankly, Coral, I have decided to leave the service as soon as I can afford it. I'm sick of the discipline, the long monotony, all the sacrifices. I want a decent living and a permanent family." As she smiled, the psionic fibers of her gown made a veil of rosy flame in which their reflected pleasures in each other flowed into a mingled radiance. He thought for an instant that he had made his point. "To your new future!" She clinked her glass against his. "I think you're wise to resign, because I've never agreed with the quarantine philosophy. It seems almost criminal to let a world like Earth stumble in the dark for five thousand years, when psionic training could civilize it in two or three generations." "To your mission on Earth!" He drained the wine, trying not to think of all the young civilizations that had been destroyed by premature contact. "If I can lift the quarantine." That was as plain as he dared to be, but still she failed to understand. His own dismay quenched all the burning glory of her gown, leaving her nearly nude beneath the dead gray filaments, as she leaned to kiss his glass again with her own. "To our new Earth!" she breathed. "Let's make it that! You'll find yourself again, in the exciting work of civilizing the planet. You and I, together -- " Panic shook him. "Wait for my decision!" he muttered desperately. "You're forgetfied for civilization. Unless I find groimds for granting galactic citizenship, the planet will be incinerated." Ill glowing gown faded pale with shock, when he told her about the blinker project. "Wain, how can you consider that?" Her widened eyes were black. "The murder of a world? times!" "The extinction of the native culture may appear deplorable," he told her. "But it won't be murder, really. Not unless the natives are granted human status." "But they are people, Wain!" Her face glowed again, with a pleading urgency. "One social worker from our mission spent months there, bundled up in their horrid fiber clothing, disguised as a medical student. He examined hundreds of them. Physically, they're as fully human as we are." "Human status depends on mental attainments," he reminded her craftily. "Or, to be more accurate, it depends in this particular case upon my own considered judicial decree." Even then, she didn't understand. To her well-conditioned innocence, a deputy warden stood far above any possibility of corruption. Her pure illusions were immune to the boldest hints he dared to make, as red Proxima dimmed behind and died. The bribe he wanted, she might never pay. But all her innocence failed to restrain her from using the arts of psionics to press upon him another kind of bribe, which included herself. She seemed to mind neither the jut of his rodent teeth nor the squint of his yellow eyes nor even his own sadly botched conditioning. All the way to Sol, she talked of her magnificent plans for Earth. The equipment he had rescued would barely fit out the first psionic training center. But she had funds to purchase more. Her staff would be pitifully inadequate at first, even if he decided to join her mission, but the natives they trained would soon be scattering out to open new centers in every jungle village. At the end of the flight, they were sitting together in the ocular dome when the airless satellite eclipsed the driving glare of Sol. Earth still burned in the black space ahead: a thin, green-veined crescent, one horn tipped with a dazzle of ice. Watching, Coral caught her breath with a tiny gasp of pure delight. "So beautiful!" she breathed. "So wonderful and new! Every opportunity I've come so far to find!" Scarlet nodded, but his eyes hardly left her. With an ultimate missionary zeal, she had rinsed her hair with a psionic wash that came to flaming life with h'er joy, and powdered her body with a dust that caught and amplified all his feelings of desire in a glitter of diamond points. "Say you'll stay. Wain!" She caught his hand. "In a couple of hundred years, we'll have civilization blooming here!" "But I'm not -- uh -- completely conditioned," he reminded her uncomfortably. "In that time, I'd be getting into -- uh -- middle age." Watching her hair turn dull with his own discomfort, he muttered bleakly, "I'm getting out where life is worth living, as soon as my duty here is done." "But, Wain!" The psionic dust turned cold and blue upon her, reflecting her distress. "I can't just abandon the mission. And you know that our work here will take a good two or three hundred years." "Your work," he said unhappilyseem to those without it, psionic training required toil and time. To become fully effective, the pre-conditioning had to begin at the instant of conception, guided by pre-conditioned parents. The first generations were always awkward half-things, lost between worlds, as he himself had been. He wanted no more of their hop)eless yearnings and inevitable defeats. "Stay!" She leaned toward him, bathed in a sudden glow of devotion. "We'll be married the day you leave the service. My own conditioning will help complete yours. And you will find our work worth everything. A thousand years on Earth won't be too long, now that we're in love." In spite of himself, he almost took her in his arms. Less than half conditioned, he had little immunity to her psionic lure. Yearning to kiss the cold green blaze of her mouth, he shivered with despair. He thought everything was lost. But darkness fell across the dome. He looked out to see the black-toothed rim of the moon rising to gnaw the jeweled Earth away, as the flyer fell to land. Grateful for the interruption, he squirmed desperately away. "What's wrong. Wain?" Her wounded voice tore at him, but he refused to look back at her psionic charms. He stood watching the crescent Earth until its last glitter was gone. "Tell me, dear," she begged him. 'Whatever's wrong, I want so to help you. But your late conditioning disturbs your reactions. You're hard for me to understand." He felt grimly thankful for that dark veil across his mind. He couldn't tell her, but he was getting back his balance. She had swayed him dangerously, but he would surely find other lovely women glad enough to overlook his ugliness after he was rich. He had already squandered far too much of his short life for the hollow rewards of the service; he didn't intend to give up the rest of his youth for her. Surely, somebody else would pay him to raise the quarantine. "Darling -- " Alarm caught her voice. "Don't ever think I feel above you!" "Of course I don't." He stared into the dark, afraid to look at her. "But we're landing now. I've -- I've just recalled my duty." "I don't see -- " "I am a deputy warden." He was deliberately gruff. "I have come here to decide the future of a planet. The rules and traditions of the service do not allow me to become intimate with anyone who has a special interest in my decision." "Is that all?" She laughed breathlessly. "You silly dear! You don't know how much you need re-conditioning. But I do respect your principles. I'll stop pestering you until Earth has been admitted to civilization." He gave her an uneasy glance, and fovmd her only normally alluring. The flyer lurched and swayed, settling upon the satellite. They turned together to look for Sol Station. Here it was night. As his eyes adjusted to the cold starlight, apprehension touched him.  small hummocks of naked stone stood clustered around a cruel black peak. Far away, a curving wall of ragged rock closed them in. He saw nothing else. "It's all magnificent!" she whispered, before her first delight was clouded with bewilderment. "But where is the station?" "Still camouflaged." He pointed. "Those rock hummocks are painted membranes, if you know how to look, inflated to hide the neutrionic flyers on the field. The main installations are in that peak, and imderneath. See!" He nodded toward a glint of moving metal in a dummy craterlet. A hidden airlock opened. Belted spacemen rose into view, riding the arms of a multiple crane, hoisting billowing membranes. "What are they doing?" "Rigging a screen to hide us," he told her. 'We'll be getting off as soon as it's inflated." She said she had to go below to finish packing, and then lingered in the dome, watching him so sharply that he stiffened. Although he understood that advanced conditioning included a taboo against uninvited mental prying, he couldn't help an uneasy resentment of her psionic superiority. "Go ahead," he snapped. "I'll meet you down at the lock." "You're worried. Wain." Her warm concern assured him that she had not been picking any guilty secrets from his mind. "Why?" "That camouflage." He gestured at the hummocks clumped below the mountain. "It's too good. The station is still concealed. I see no native rockets. I'm afraid we're here too soon." When he walked down the ramp from the lock, a few minutes later, into the cavernous tent that had been rigged to hide the flyer, the station commandant was waiting to greet him with the formalities due his rank and mission. Commander Newbolt was a lean blond giant, who enhanced his virile presence with a liberal use of psionic cosmetics. Scarlet heard the sharp intake of Coral's breath when she first saw the shining mantle of magnified masculinity that revealed his muscular beauty, and hated him instantly. Had Earth made contact? Scarlet was asking that urgent question, with every anxious glance at everything around him. but he refused to speak it. He answered each austere formality in kind, until Newbolt had completed the ritual. "Your accommodations are ready, sir. Down in Tunnel Seven. I hope you find them adequate, because I believe you're going to be here for some time." "The crisis?" He couldn't stop the question now. "Have the natives arrived?" "Not yet, sir." "Why not?" He tried to gulp his panic down. "They were reported entering a contact crisis a hundred years ago. I expected to find their rockets here." and contempt for his judgment was thinly veiled behind the smug satisfaction of Newbolt's thin-lipped smile. "I'm afraid you'll discover that my predecessor was badly mistaken when he prepared for such an early crisis here. I urged him at the time not to send for you." Scarlet glared up at the towering commander, bracing himself for trouble. He could already see that Newbolt was stupid enough to take a very dangerous attitude toward bribery. "How's that?" he rapped. 'Weren't the natives about to reach this satellite." "They have jjrashed their clumsy litle rockets here." Newbolt f nodded contemptuously. "But even if they ever lived to discover us, they aren't fit for civilization. Their culture is sick with a pathological militarism." "I'll give due weight to your opinion," Scarlet jabbed. "When I come to judge their fitness." Newbolt remained undevastated. 'We have been assembling evidence for Your Equity's consideration. When your flyer was sighted, I ordered all human beings in the solar system to gather for your inquiry." "Thank you." "My own recommendation will be that you approve the signal project," Newbolt added. "I'm convinced that our long vigil here has been a waste of time. The natives have been growing more numerous and more destructive, but hardly more human." "I'll ask for your advice when I require it," Scarlet told him. "Please have my luggage taken to my quarters. Arrange for the hearing to begin without delay." "Yes, Your Equity." "Wain!" Coral Fell came floating toward them in a pink glow of admiration, her wide eyes fixed on Newbolt. "I want to meet the commander." "I don't think you'll like him," Scarlet warned her. "He is advising me to approve the blinker project." "Is he, though?" Unhappily, Scarlet introduced them. Her psionic powder shone like galactic dust, reflecting her delight and Newbolt's manly pleasure. When she asked to go with them fo the hearing, Newbolt agreed without waiting for Scarlet's permission. A crude mechanical elevator dropped them from the lock tower into the moon, so fast that Scarlet, not yet used to the light gravitation, had to snatch at a hand rail to keep his feet on the floor. A mile below, Newbolt escorted them briskly through a long gallery that was a museum of the guarded planet. Crystal cases stood filled with stone axes, rusteaten blades and primitive robot missiles. "Our newest exhibit." Newbolt paused at a niche where a sleek aluminum rocket hung against star-dusted emptiness above the ice-gemmed splendor of the crescent planet, "The first space ship from Earth." "How'd you get it here?" "We followed it out from Earth. The natives were trying for the moon, but they ran into a burst of solar radiation too hot for their shielding. After they were dead, we salvaged their equipment." He chuckled. "If they had known how closely we were watching -- " "'You let them die?" Scarlet interrupted. "Out here in space?" " Y ou know the Covenants." Newbolt shrugged, not very respectfully. "They had failed to make contact. Consequently, we couldn't interfere." IV zens had responded to his call. Most of them were attached to the quarantine service, but others had sought these wilderness worlds for ends as varied as their interstellar culture. A trio of prospectors had been sifting through the asteroids. A primitive artist had been recording an epic fantasy of a wrecked flyer down on a rocky moon of Saturn, surrounded by the "phantom lights" of space legend. A mystic on Pluto had interrupted a hundred years of solitary contemplation, to attend the hearing. An archeologist had abandoned a dig on Mars. Half a dozen outside agents had hastily discarded their disguises as inhabitants of Earth. Waiting under the old stone dome of the little auditorium, these legally human beingshad sorted themselves into three contending factions. "Beasts of prey!" Newbolt gave the nearest group a snarl of contempt. "Rumors of the crisis have been spreading out through space for a century now. These wolves have come swarming in, howling for leave to loot the planet." He chuckled. "The signal project serves them properly!" Scarlet made no answer. Robed in his blue official light, he mounted to his bench and waited sternly for Newbolt to silence the chapiber. His feral eyes narrow with his most judicial scowl, he studied the three hostile factions. Newbolt was marching toward the neatly seated contingent from the quarantine station. Coral shimmered beside him, clad in golden dust and the cascade of psionic fire falling from her waist. Scarlet tightened his bony jaws, turning painfully away from her magnified allure. The hermit, his detached head blind and cadaverous in its crystal cell, had wheeled himself to join the three lean young men in the plain space dress of the signal service. Scarlet frowned disapprovingly at their contented poverty, and looked for the beasts of prey. The straggling group down at his left included the bearded artist and the spaceworn prospectors, among half a dozen others. They looked like feeble beasts. He saw no evidence of the wealth he wanted. bench, he droned the official formula which invoked the olden justice of man. His voice was as ugly as his knobby angularity, slurred and harsh and high. "A routine affair," he rasped, and paused again to savor the pain of the beautiful men. "We'll dispense with formality, to get at the facts. I'll summarize the briefs. ported near contact crisis. Social workers are waiting to usher them into civilization. Their qualifications for human status have been challenged, however, and the signal service has filed notice of intention to appropriate Sol for use as an intergalactic beacon." Looking sourly for Coral, he found her now at the back of the room, glowing over a stooped little stranger. "A few individuals have seen fit to protest -- " "Certainly we protest!" She started toward the bench, towing the stranger. "Because Sol is not a barren star. Earth has three billion native inhabitants, whose human rights must be protected." "Human?" He let his voice grate unpleasantly. "I understand that all human beings on these threatened planets were ordered to assemble here. I don't count "Of course they can't obey psionic orders, because they don't know psionics! But now I know they're human." She hauled the wispy stranger toward him. "This is Mark Whitherly, the anthropologist. He found on Mars -- " "Please, Miss Fell!" Newbolt intercepted her. "You're here as a guest. You can't interrupt the proceedings." "Never mind. Commander." Scarlet smiled to welcome a possible bribe. "I won't be bound by any red tape. I intend to explore every source of evidence." Newbolt muttered and sat down. Scarlet waited, watching Coral and her discovery. The anthropologist, with his shuffling gait and his trembling hands and his dry yellow skin drawn tight over fine old bones, looked a good five hundred years overdue for euthanasia. The dull blue dust of his scholarly robe reflected nothing of Coral's bright excitement. "Listen, Wain!" she was bubbling. "Mark has found evidence -- proof you can't ignore! Now you will have to lift the quarantine at once. And you will disapprove the blinker project." "I'll listen." Scarlet frowned doubtfully. "To any actual evidence." DO have evidence." The old scholar spoke slowly but clearly, in a child's high voice. "Your Equity, I have been watching this planet at intervals for two thousand years. It is my great experiment." "What sort of experiment?" "A study in cultural collision." The dull dust brightened now with an eagerness that made the old man seem oddly boyish. "You hear a lot of theories about what happens when our galactic civilization impinges upon primitive societies. You hear that the primitives are usually benefited, and you hear that they are usually destroyed. I have been waiting for this crisis, preparing to settle that question scientifically. Now that the moment has come -- " "Has it come?" "It has!" A single comic lock of yellow hair waved above old Whitherly's bobbing head. "I have been watching the natives fumble closer to contact. They have observed our psionic monitors -- which they call dirigible dishes. They have written books about us. Their rockets have reached this satellite. All they lack is your formal recognition of their human status." "Your Equity, I object!" The signal officer was alertly on his feet, tanned and handsome even though he wore no cosmetics, almost insolent. "I must inform you that our corps did not select suns at random for the intergalactic beacon. We traced the records of early migration, and chose a sector which was evidently bypassed. If Whitherly is a real authority, I challenge him to show you one shard of evidence that human colonistsever landed anywhere on Earth." Scarlet looked inquiringly at the worn old man. "I can't do that," Whitherly said. "Then how can you claim human status for these filthy anthropoids?" Smugly confident, the tall signalman turned to Scarlet. "Your Equity, since Whitherly admits that he has discovered no evidence of biological relationship, which is the first essential qualification for human status, I move that this inquiry be closed with a formal order approving our signal project." "Wain, wait!" Blue alarm shivered around Coral. "You haven't heard about Mark's great discovScarlet looked impatiently back at the lean old man, noting sourly that he looked too poor to pay for the least satellite of these worlds he wished to save. "Penwright jumped to a false conclusion." Whitherly nodded feebly toward the signal officer. "I do have proof that the natives of Earth are our human kin. If no colonists ever landed here, that is simply because the movement was in the other direction." through the chamber. "Listen, Wain!" Coral breathed. "The first civilized observers here noted the odd fact that all life on Earth appears to have sprung from a single family tree," Whitherly's high voice resumed. "Now I know why. All my evidence supports the obvious explanation that this world is where human life evolved." Swaying unsteadily, he paused for breath. "Tell them!" Flickering with a purple urgency. Coral caught his sticklike arm. "Tell them what you found on Mars." "In the last few centuries," he labored slowly on, "I have extended my search to the desert planets. On Mars I found a buried human site, dating from more than twenty thousand years ago. My excavations reveal that primitive neutrionic flyers landed at the site. Some of them remained there, abandoned. But some of them went on, after they had been refitted to cross interstellar distances." The blue dust glowed around him. 'The first neutrionic ships!" he whispered thinly. 'They had brought primitive men from Earth to Mars. They carried our ancestors out to claim the galaxy." Unsteadily defiant, Whitherly blinked at Penwright. "You can't be allowed to murder our mother world!" 'That is loaded language." Penwright chuckled tolerantly. "Your Equity, I submit that every planet within two hundred lightyears has been claimed as the original cradle of mankind. On none of them, unfortunately, has any reliable evidence survived. The wave of migration has left these Center worlds too far behind. The few that were ever civilized have been abandoned for twenty thousand years." "I know galactic history," Scarlet reminded him frostily. "I am competent to rule upon the evidence." "You will act promptly?" Old Whitherly peered up anxiously. "You can see that my own time is running out. My younger associates scattered when they heard of the blinker project. If there is any long delay, my chance to observe the crisis will be lost." "Your own misfortunes are irrelevant." "But, Wain! Why wait?" Coral's urgency washed her with rainbow opalescence. "Since the natives are our proven kinsmen, and since they are already landing their rockets on the moon, can't you end the quarantine now?" Sadly, Scarlet shook his head. Whitherly's sociological research, like her own educational program and Penwright's signal project, seemed inconsistent with bribery. Their noble claims might make a useful cover for him when he came to pronounce his decision, gg?a '?esOT'.k. I 'mm L? "Wi but that would have to wait until he had found a purchaser for Earth. "No." He frowned severely at Coral. "Not yet." "Not for a thousand years, my dear." Newbolt's smile beamed through rosy sparks of virile confidence. "Never, in my own opinion. If the blinker project is not approved, we shall have long centuries here to while away -- " "Wrong, Newbolt!" That loud hail boomed from the back of the dome, and Scarlet swung to see a big stranger stalking in. "I'm just up from Earth, with news about the crisis." He paused, staring boldly up at Scarlet. "Your Equity, I have come to inform you that the natives are about to make a contact that can't be ignored. They'll be here in exactly twenty hours!" V at the stranger, captured by an unrepaired ugliness more violent than his own. Longchinned and broken-nosed, the man was bald as a boulder, burned dark as weathered copper, splotched with livid scars where wounds must have been sewed up by savage surgeons. Sheer muscular bulk made him look grotesquely short. Almost nude, he required no psionic cosmetics to amplify his powerful animal vitality. Beckoning Newbolt to the bench. Scarlet whispered, 'Who is he?" "Nobody with any right to waste our time." The commander gave the stranger one contemptuous glance. "Another of these beasts of prey waiting for the quarantine to end -- and alarmed now because the blinker project is about to vaporize the planet he came to devour." Scarlet nodded silently, fascinated by the barbaric blaze of priceless natural diamonds at the stranger's dark throat and on his gigantic hands. "An insterstellar pirate, who calls himself a trader." Although the man was coming near, Newbolt refused to lower his .scornful voice. "Dirk Flintledge. A loudmouthed nuisance, but I'll soon dispose of him!" 'Wait! If he has news about the crisis -- " "He's lying." The commander glared at Flintledge, who had been intercepted by Coral Fell, her makeup all aglow with pink admiration. "My agents have infiltrated the native centers of space research. They report no new flight attempts since the loss of the rocket we salvaged." "But this man has been on Sol "Unfortunately, yes." Indignantly, he turned his back on Coral and the trader. "Though not through any fault of mine. He arrived here before I relieved Commander Rivers, and was permitted to begin an imdercover commercial survey of the planet. A glaring indiscretion, I believe. I don't trust such men to respect the Covenants." "Let me talk to him." 'Wain, this is wonderful news!" Haloed with glowing elation. Coral led the trader toward the bench. "Dirk says there is a native rocket coming to this very spot!" "Commander Newbolt questions that information." "His own information is incomplete." Flintledge turned a hideous grin upon the startled commander. "This new rocket was built at a secret military installation which his quarantine agents had failed to penetrate. It was laimched before I left the planet. It is already halfway to the moon. Its arrival will present you with a full-blown contact crisis." lips. "You see, some of the savage tribes are fighting what they call a cool war, which is forcing the development of space weapons. Native spies have been feeding each faction disturbing reports about the progress of the others. One tribe was told that it was in danger from an enemy space base on the moon. This rocket is the reply to that report." His grin grew frightening. "Unfortunately for Newbolt's policies, their planned impact point coincides with the location of this station." "He's lying!" Newbolt turned pale before his vicious ugliness. "He's attempting to influence Your Equity." "Wait and see." The scarred man remained aS cheerfully monstrous as a black stone god rotting in some jungle temple. "But I must inform you that the savages have armed their space ship with what they classify as fifty-megaton fusion missiles." Newbolt's bright attire flickered. "A moment. Your Equity." He bent over his wrist communicator. "Let me check my monitors." Scarlet waited, watching the trader, weighing his wealth, xmtil Newbolt spoke stiffly through a haze of angry blue. "Our monitors have detected an object moving indicate both nuclear devices and living bodies. Its trajectory will bring it toward this side of the satellite." "Toward contact!" Eager sparks swirled aroimd Coral. "This is the crisis!" "A false contact!" Newbolt glared at the trader. "These natives had failed to find their own way through the radiation zones. They must have received own location here." The blue dust glittered frostily. "Your Equity, I accuse Dirk Flintledge of a criminal violation of the Covenants." "Now, sir." Flintledge remained undismayed. "Why should you suspect me?" "Because you want to force a crisis," Newbolt rapped. "Because you have been down on the planet, among the builders of this rocket. Because I have received reports of your illegal methods in previous collisions with the quarantine service." "Such circumstances are not proof -- " "I'll find proof." Newbolt blazed balefully. "Your Equity, I intend to convict and punish this criminal." "He hasn't much time to assemble his evidence." Flintledge smirked insolently at Scarlet "The natives will be here in twenty hours, with missiles that he can't ignore. If he decides to intercept them in space, that act itself will be contact." "I'll rule on what is contact." Scarlet tried to match the savage ugliness of Flintledge with the harshness of his own slurred and strident voice. "I'll decide whether this man has violated the Covenants." "But, Your Equity -- " Stem on the bench. Scarlet silenced Newbolt. He sat scowling judicially, wondering how to negotiate with Flintledge without exciting dangerous suspicions. Tension was breathing under the dome. Glowing with a delicious violet alarm. Coral wanted to know how the station could be protected from the savage attack -- unless he recognized the contact and lifted the quarantine. inquiry, announcing that he wanted time to consider his ruling on the incident. He ordered Newbolt to monitor the savage rocket, but not to interfere with its flight Ignoring the startled murmur in the chamber, he asked Newbolt about the trader's background. "He's unconditioned." Newbolt dropped his eyes from Scarlet's own unconditioned ugliness, and hurried on. "Unconditioned and desperate. You see, he has made an unwise gamble on an early end of the quarantine. Now he is about to lose eveiything." Watching from their small cell of silence. Scarlet saw Coral talking to Whitherly, whose aged admiration seemed still warm enough to light her psionic lures. Flintledge and the signal officer were both waiting for her, as if her green-lipped smile mattered more than the intergalactic beasons or the fate of Earth. "Is Flintledge wealthy?" Scarlet asked. "I suppose he has been." Newbolt shrugged disapprovingly. "Made a fortune cheating savages, I suppose, and lost most of it as they picked up enough psionics to match his tricks. When he learned that Sol in was getting ripe, he mortgaged his ship for the capital to pluck it. I learned that from the competent young man who has followed him from the Bank of Vega to collect the loan. The money is due in just ten years. He'd need that time to dig it out of the natives, even if you lifted the quarantine today. If' you approve the blinker project, he'll have no time to look for another plum. He'll be erased." "I see." Scarlet scowled to hide his elation. "Now please show me to my quarters." He stopped outside the barrier to ask Coral to join him for dinner. Responsive colors lit her psionic snares, but she already had a dinner date with Penwright. When he turned hopefully to look for Flintledge, the trader had already gone. Disappointed, he let Newbolt take him down to his quarters. The bare little cell, two miles below the lock tower, was adequate enough. The service cherished a tradition of austere simplicity; he was used to nothing better. Yfet the thought of lonely centuries here, waiting for this world to fumble its own way toward a real contact, was enough to make him shiver. The signalmen were welcome to broil the planet -- unless Flintledge would pay to save it. Too cautious to make the first overture. Scarlet killed time with his bath and depilation. He deliberately spun a new official robe. Still waiting, he hesitated over his own meager stock of psionic scents and pKJwders, and decided once more that he needed the more powerful lure of wealth. Disappointed when Flintledge did not call, he went dully up to eat alone. Mark Whitherly waylaid him outside the dining lounge. While he ate, the shriveled little anthropologist tried to brief him on the native culture, and tried to find out how soon he meant to lift the quarantine. even though he could see that the aged man was too highminded to think of bribery. "I may be compelled to approve the signal project." "You can't!" Whitherly's yelp held a satisfying anguish. "You can't let these rash young fools bum the mother world and all its people -- just to generate one flash of light!" "I'm aware of my duty in this situation." Scarlet drew himself up stiffly, concealing an inward grin. "Ill yield to no improper pressures." "I'm not tryng to bribe you." Whitherly flushed and trembled with an agitation that alarmed Scarlet for his heart. "But I must remind you that your own superiors have approved my plan to observe this contact crisis." "What sort of monster are you?" Certain now that the old scholar would never offer him money, Scarlet let indignation into his voice. 'Would you risk destroying these people with a premature contact, simply for the opportunity to observe it?" "Certainly." Whitherly gasped for his breath. "But I'm no monster. I'm simply a scientist, trained to exclude all emotional considerations from the field of research. I refuse to price truth in terms of anything material. Even if you can't understand that kind of idealism, perhaps you can understand in practical terms that what we learn from the sacrifice of this world can help us save a thousand others." "I understand you," Scarlet said. "But the Covenants apply." "You -- " Breathing unevenly, the old man contained whatever reckless words he had almost uttered. Scarlet crouched apprehensively. but Whitherly had been conditioned above any crude display of physical violence. Muttering something about the mother world, he shuffled unsteadily away. Left alone. Scarlet sat fingering the blank disk of his wrist transceiver, anxious to call Flintledge, but yet afraid. He gasped when the crystal lit with the trader's image under his fingers, a bald and hideous doll. "I suppose I shouldn't interrupt your delberations." The black beads of eyes glittered sardonically. 'What with Penwright so anxious to light his blinker, and Coral Fell so eager to enlighten the native anthropoids, and old Whitherly dying to observe his contact crisis, your decision is already difficult enough." "I am pleased that you called," Scarlet answered carefully. "I have been considering your own interest in the outcome of the crisis." "If you care to come aboard for a drink," Flintledge suggested smoothly, "we might consider it together -- unless you fear that contact with me might tarnish your equity." "Uh, thanks." Scarlet could not help stiffening against the trader's familiarity, but he managed to put down his righteous resentment. "I should like very much to come." Newbolt would disapprove, he knew, but then his whole object was to escape the disapproval of such people forever. "My call must be brief," he added. "I'm resuming the hearing in two hours." He put on a space belt in the lock tower, and hurried out to the flyer. He found Flintledge beneath the air lock, waving his arms and blustering at the men who had come with camouflage screens to turn the ship into a lunar peak. "That fool Newbolt thinks we can hide here," he growled. "I know better. I don't intend for those attacking savages to catch me sitting -- unless Your Equity can reassure me." Scarlet followed him through the lock. The rich immensity of the interstellar vessel had taken his breath at first, but now it began whetting a resolution to ask for more than he had dared. VI TN the wanton luxury of the trader's stateroom, a dancing figurine caught his dazzled eye. Poised upon the gem-stone inlay that topped a dark block of polished wood, the tiny nude was featureless at first, an anonymous symbol of all feminine enchantment, cut with an exquisite economy from some limpid crystal. But it came to life as he looked, reflecting all his own images of woman's loveliness, refined and transfigured through the perceptions of the artist who had fashioned its psionic matrix. Suddenly it was Coral Fell, but younger and more tender than the actual Coral, not quite so firm about the mouth, smiling adoringly. Its stark beauty stabbed through him, leaving a haunting ache of imquenchable desire. "Like it?" Flintledge's question startled him. He tore his attention from the figurine, flushing self-consciously, before he could remind himself that its resjxjnse to his mind had been a private thing. Even though he might suspect that Coral's charms had begun to color its reaction to the trader, too, they had not met to quarrel over her. "Look around." Flintledge squinted at him frightfully. "Anything you want, just let me know." He certainly wanted a great deal more than a psionic figurine. Looking appraisingly around the magnificent stateroom, he found two pictures that arrested him. Stereos, in twin crystal plaques, they were also psionic. His reflected thoughts brushed them with life and meaning, instantly. Two men... They made him shiver. One was winning, one hideous. One was lean and young, a dashing smile on his hard brown face. The other was older, puffy, with sly cunning peering evilly through a pallor of fear. Yet somehow they were twins. Both of them were he. Shrinking in confusion, he turned to find the trader watching with an insolent amusement which angered him. "Uh -- what are they?" "Perhaps I should apologize." The trader's chuckle was not apologetic. "Psionic mirrors, you might call them. They are matrixed to reflect the self you wish to show the world, and the one you don't. I like to watch my friends react." Scarlet managed, with some effort, not to inquire how Flintledge saw himself. "I like -- like your reaction." The trader bellowed with coarse laughter. "But sit down." He struggled to contain his amusement. "I see that you need that drink." came with a strange bottle and two glasses of ice on a tray. Silently responsive to the trader's wishes, it poured a fuming distillation over the ice. Scarlet sat back to taste it cautiously. Recovering now from his surge of imconditioned resentment, he began to observe that Flintledge was no better conditioned than he himself was. The bottle had come from Sol and there was nothing like it anywhere. As the trader declaimed about its rare aroma. Scarlet saw the glass shaking in his scarred, enormous fist. Gulping it too fast, he strangled. "Won -- Wonderful stuff!" Wheezing, he wiped at his eyes. "From a wonderful planet. I had discovered that, before our friends from the signal service got here with their incinerator. Wonderful wealth, that has never been touched!" Scarlet sipped the burning liquid, waiting impatiently for their game to reach the monetary moves. Flintledge coughed and recovered his voice, but his loud enthusiasm had a hollow ring. ' "Whole continents rich enough to mill!" His restless eyes stabbed at Scarlet, blades thrust through his jovial mask. "Oceans to export! We can scrape the planet a hundred miles deep!" "I have studied some of the old surveys." Scarlet nodded cautiously. "I'm sure the natural resources are still untouched. We've been on guard. But don't they belong to the natives?" "A miserable lot." Flintledge shrugged. "Too backward to make any trouble. We can soon dispose of their nuclear weapons. The survivors may even be useful around our new installations, after Coral has tamed them with a pinch of psionics." "They are -- uh -- my responsibility."Scarlet scowled sternly. "You must convince me that this contact is the culmination of their unaided progress toward civilization." "I was waiting for that one." Flintledge laughed too heartily again. "You knew that I'd infiltrated that tribal group, and you're acute enough to infer that I'd guided them toward this contact." "So you admit that you have forced a premature contact?" "On the contrary." The trader's unnatural merriment subsided; he sat blinking at Scarlet with bold black eyes. "But even if I should, my own testimony would be irrelevant. As Your Equity is certainly aware, this contact is what you say it is." Scarlet merely nodded, watching him. Dull beads of sweat had come out on his unperfected face, betraying his incomplete integration. His battered fists clenched and trembled. He reached suddenly for another whiskey. "Here, Your Equity!" Hastily draining the drink, he opened a file of bright psionic films. "I want to show you my plans to develop the planet." designs for enormous installations to harvest the guarded wealth of Earth. Dams to divert the excess oceans into export tanks. Mills to devour, continents. A heat-exchanging neutrionic net, to cool the deeper crust for the processing machines. Compressing stations, for the surplus atmosphere. Ports for the trading fleets that would drain the plunder into space. "Competent engineering." Scarlet nodded casually. "You ought to make some money." "I expect to." His hoarse voice quivered with a tension that he could not completely contain. "In fact, I must. I have a large investment, in my flyer and my trade cargo and my terraforming machinery, which I must protect." "I see." Scarlet turned cheerfully to a new survey of that wealthy room. "I suppose that any long delay would be expensive to you." "It would kill me!" His harsh and sudden violence was startling, but then he grinned bleakly at the way Scarlet cringed. "I was talking to Coral," he added. "She tells me that you spoke of leaving the service." "A foolish dream of my youth." Wistfully grave. Scarlet shook his head. "An old dream of a new life, out among the new stars of the galactic frontier. If I had the means for a new start there, I'd quit the service today." "Good." The trader's flinty grin began to soften. "I see that we can do business. With your service background, you're just the man I need to handle my affairs with these anthropoids. If you'll sign a contract with me for just a hundred years -- " "I won't," Scarlet said. "I've already thrown too many centuries away, pampering savages." "What else do you want?" "I -- uh -- " Scarlet checked himself, to peer imeasily at the strange luxury around him. His throat felt dry. His temples throbbed. For a moment he wished that he had been more securely integrated -- but then, of course, his psionic maladjustment was his secret strength. "We have privacy." Flintledge winked appallingly. "Neither of us is likely to violate it." He gestured for the robot. "Have another drink, and tell me what you want." Weakly, Scarlet waved the robot away. "I want the flyer." He gasped for his breath, blinking at his own audacity. "The flyer and half your cargo." "If that is meant to be a joke -- " "That's my price." The trader's dark face turned yellow. Wheezing alarmingly, he gulped another whiskey. His great, dark hands spread into grasping talons, reached out savagely, and slowly sank. "You're an unconditioned fool!" he breathed at last. "Why should I pay you such a price?" "If I had been better conditioned, I'd have nothing for sale," Scarlet reminded him. "As things stand, I have nine planets on the block, one of them half-terraformed and inhabited. I am offering you a bargain." "If I refuse -- " "I'll approve the blinker project." Scarlet laughed as unpleasantly as possible. "You can look for another world to loot -- if your Vegan bankers care to give you tim" trader!" Flintledge grinned, briefly revealing a pained admiration. "As two misfits, striving to heal our psionic scars with money, we ought to strike a reasonable bargain. But you know I can't give up this flyer." "With planets to sell, you can buy a better one." "You're unintegrated!" The trader's voice lifted vehemently. "You don't realize all the scheming, the waiting, the daring, the borrowing, the begging pretty men -- " "But I do realize." Scarlet rose. "That's how I know that you can't afford to let me approve the blinker." "Sit down!" Flintledge yelped. "Let's have another drink, over a reasonable arrangement!" 'We have just concluded a reasonable arrangement," Scarlet said. "I am going back to reconvene the inquiry now. For the sake of appearances, I shall have to skim through the evidence, but I shall be forced to rule on the crisis before that savage ship arrives." "Listen, Your Equity!" Flintledge was weeping. "Listen to reason!" "If you want a favorable ruling," Scarlet interrupted him, "send your banker to the hearing. Let him bring formal legal conveyances to the ship, half the trade goods and half the terraforming gear. He can pass the documents up to me as a final packet of evidence." "You have thought of everything!" "I hope!" A pale smile showed Scarlet's rodent teeth. "I believe we understand each other. My ruling in your favor will not become final until I have actual possession of the flyer and my share of the cargo, with time for a start toward the stars." "If Your Equity is absolutely unconditioned -- " "That's our bargain." Scarlet let his voice grate painfully. "Send me your banker." He nodded curtly at the dancing figurine. "By the way, I'm keeping her." "Fll leave the others, too." Flintledge glanced sardonically at the two crystal plaques where Scarlet had seen his public and his private selves. "You will be needing them!" Silently, avoiding those disturbing mirrors. Scarlet turned to go. "I'll prepare the documents." Flintledge followed him anxiously toward the air lock. "I trust Your Equity to anticipate whatever difficulties may be created for us by Newbolt and old Whitherly and the signal crew -- " Clothed in the cold blue purity of his judicial light. Scarlet spun a sound barrier to shut out the trader's whining voice. He was drunk with elation, too drunk to fret with petty detail. The frontier stars were in his grasp. ""HE hearing dome was crowded again, the contending groups as breathlessly tense as if they had never been conditioned. Even the signal officer wore a restless look. Coral flashed Scarlet a green, uneasy smile. Newbolt rose ominously to report that his monitors were still tracking the savage attacker, which was no more than halfway to the moon. Concealing his elation, Scarlet resumed the inquiry with a request for additional relevant evidence. Newbolt quickly offered a psionic tape recording the consebetween a disguised quarantine officer and an unsuspecting native named Lenin. Scanning the tape in his most severe judicial manner, Scarlet found his wandering thoughts drawn imexpectedly back from the freedom of the frontier stars. In the unconditioned native, he somehow saw himself. "Your Equity," Newbolt urged him, "this record shows the unreadiness of these savages for any kind of contact with civilization. A native boy talks briefly with a civilized outsider. Neither intends any harm. But the native picks up ideas more dangerous than atomic theory to his fellow savages!" "I'll weigh the evidence." Scarlet paused to scowl. "Are there other exhibits?" "Your Equity, please!" Coral fluttered brightly to the bench, bringing a tape from the frail ivory hands of old Mark Whitherly. "There have been other contacts, with less harmful results. Here is the record of a case which proves that the natives are as highly civilized as you are." Scarlet scanned the report of another accidental contact. A royal yacht from Altair II had been wrecked in space. One passenger had found his way to Earth. Alone among the savages, he had learned to like them. When a rescue expedition reached him, he refused to leave his native friends. "A touching display of sentimental primitivism!" Penwright scoffed. "But the outcome is not surprising when you consider the dubiously human status of Altair II -- which itself very narrowly escaped our signal project." Lazily insolent, he brought another exhibit to the bench. "Here, Your Equity, is evidence that contact with these verminous animals is full of unpredictable dangers -- not only to them, but also to us!" The tape recorded the fate of a big-nosed peddler from the frontier worlds, who came to Earth to satisfy an unconditioned thirst for whiskey, and died there of something called a cold. "These sub-human worlds here at the Center face us with mysteries greater than the flying lights, and enemies deadlier than we have met on the frontier planets." The signalman radiated his cool, complacent beauty. "Your Equity must consider that the first flash of our beacon will sterilize all the malignant mutant micro-organisms that have been breeding here for thirty thousand years." "ni consider ever # rthing." impatient frown upon old Mark Whitherly, who was wildly waving another psionic tape. Hiding his own growing concern about Flintledge, he watched Coral gliding to help the old man toward the bench. A sudden stir among the worried quarantine people huddled at the door gave him a moment of hope that the trader or his banker had arrived at last, but the man who entered was only Newbolt, bringing a curt report that the savage rocket was drawing near the moon. "We have your decision now." The commander's muscular shoulders lifted majestically, as if tossing off his tattered respect for Scarlet. "For our own safety. Your Equity, we must either recognize this contact and welcome our visitors into universal civilization -- or else deny their human status and allow the blinker projest to proceed." "I'll decide," Scarlet rasped. "When I have weighed all the evidence." He looked again for Flintledge, and decided that the trader was waiting to drive a harder bargain in another private meeting. "The inquiry is recessed," he rapped abruptly. "Clear the chamber." 'Wait, Wain!" Coral snatched Whitherly's tape and rippled toward the bench. "Scan this before you decide." Bright excitement cascaded from the psionic moons in her hair. "It's more than proof that these people are human. It is proof that they are our own ancestral race. It's the clue that led Mark to the side of that prehistoric space port on Mars. Please take time to scan it!" Ignoring the signals of contempt and alarm that were flickering between the cool signal officer and the boiling commander. Scarlet took the tape from Coral. It told of an old explorer who had gone down among the unsuspecting natives to search their history for the first decisive spark of human civilization. Fighting a skeptical quarantine inspector no better conditioned than Scarlet himself, the explorer had pierced the lost past far enough to glimpse the birth of the human mind, the invention of the scientific method, and the laimching of the first neutrionic flyer. "That was -- us!" Coral whispered, when he looked up from the tape. "This is our home planet; the people on that flyer were our forefathers. You can't let anybody murder our mother race!" 'Tlease, Miss Fell!" Penwright reproved her with a hard bronze grin, and turned smoothly to the bench. "If Your Equity feel that we still have time for such entertainments, I have another exhibit to submit." Scarlet glanced again at the empty doorway. "Very well," he muttered. T he tape reported the case of a native who had been illegally removed from Earth for exhibition in a galactic zoo. Inadequately adjusted, even by savage standards, he had violently destroyed the expensive reconstruction of his primitive habitat in which he had been displayed. Scarlet followed him to his fate with a reluctant and imcomfortable "fascination, as if the unconditioned anthropoid had also been himself. 'Well?" Pbnwright leered at Coral. "Are you sure you can make civilized men out of such untamable animals?" "That one was sick," she protested. "He was not typical." "But what about this one?" Newbolt looked suddenly up from his wrist transceiver, glowering at the bench. "Your Equity, my monitors have just intercepted an electromagnetic signal from the savage rocket, beamed directly at this station. The sender appears as violent as that captive animal." "Please translate the message." "I shall. Your Equity." Sound boomed into the dome, amplified through Newbolt's wrist instrument. For a moment it was utterly strange; then Scarlet distinguished a savage voice beneath the metallic distortion of the crude transmission system. In another moment, the psionic translator had given meaning to the roaring syllables. "United States Aerospace Force Rocket Ship Four One, Major Tom Scoggins in command, calling unidentified base on lunar equator." Scarlet heard a tremor in the voice and a breath quickly drawn; he caught a vivid sensation of the frightened but determined savage in the rocket, fl # ung his crude craft toward a world unknown to him, crouching desperately over his battery of weapons, preparing to face hostility as violent as his own. Even though the savage was completely imconditioned. Scarlet felt a thrill of unexpected admiration. "Identify yourselves!" The strained voice rang again through the crackle of static. "Establish your friendly intentions at once. Otherwise we shall be forced to take action to insure the safety of the United States!" Coral's voice lilted joyously. "You can tell that Major Tom Scoggins is desperately afraid, but this message proves that he is human. How can we wait?" "We -- uh -- we can't." Disturbed by a wave of unexpected emotion in himself, Scarlet turned uncertainly to Newbolt. "I -- uh -- I'm forced to instruct you to reply -- " "Your Equity!" The shout drew his eyes to the doorway. The dapper young Vegan banker came bursting into the dome, waving a sheaf of psionic documents. Sight of them turned Scarlet giddy. Here was his long dream realized. Here was his escape forever from all the wounds and sneers that he had suffered from the beautiful people, escape from their false sympathy and their shallow pretense that he could ever be one of them. Here was glorious revenge for his unconditioned ugliness. He shut his eyes for an instant, trying to recover his mask of judicial severity. "Your Equity!" The banker's urgent voice seemed far away. "Captain Flintledge wishes me to present these new exhibits in evidence. We are confident that they will persuade you to recognize the contact, disapprove the blinker project and open Earth to galactic commerce." Hands trembling. Scarlet accepted the documents. Though his eyes were blurring, he quickly satisfied himself that they were what he had demanded -- the neutrionic flyer and a fair half of its load of trade goods and terraforming machinery, legally conveyed to him. "What kind of unconditioned aberration can delay your decision now?" Newbolt's contemptuous indignation reached him faintly. "May I remind Your Equity that our anthropoid attacker is already arming his fusion missiles?" "I -- I'm aware of the facts." Scarlet rose unsteadily, gasping for his breath. The important facts were those in his hands. Even though his decision sacrificed one worn-out world, it would enable him to claim and colonize a hundred new ones when he reached the galactic frontier. For his own profit, perhaps; but also for the expanding community of human civilization. Such facts were all that mattered. But others kept buzzing insanely in his mind. Louder than Newbolt's angry shout the earnest voice of the young savage Lenin echoed from the tape. The decision of the shipwrecked prince flamed brighter than the moons in Coral's hair. The breathless desperation of Major Tom Scoggins was somehow suddenly his own. Stiffly, he gestured for silence in the chambers. r I "I -- uh -- I have weighed the evidence." Grinning at the splendid people waiting, he let his rodent teeth jut. He widened his yellow eyes. He was glad of his bent little body and the bulge of his low forehead and the red freckles splotched along his receeding jaw. Proud of all his unconditioned ugliness, he let them wait. "I have -- uh -- given due consideration to all the claims which have been presented here." He let his slow voice rasp and whine offensively. "I have reviewed the Covenants of Non-Contact, and all the body of galactic law and custom relating to contact crises. I am ready -- uh -- to rule." Snarling hideously, he let them wait again. "I rule that no contact exists!"  Whitherly swayed and fell. The banker bellowed. Newbolt and the signal officer shouted their startled approval. The uproar drowned his voice. In the breathless hush that followed that surprised outburst, he let them wait again. He picked his pointed noise, deliberately savoring their pain. "The evidence convinces me that this native culture could not survive an uncontrolled contact." Ignoring the baleful rage of the banker, he studied the smug elation of Newbolt and Penwright, and paused again to relish what he meant to do to them. "However, I am equally convinced that they are human beings." He let his voice drag and grate. "Aware of my sworn duty under the Covenants, I therefore disapprove the signal project. I order Commander Newbolt and his successors to continue the quarantine of Earth until its native culture is declared ready for contact." He stopped again to enjoy the sputtering deflation of the signal officer. "Pursuant to that directive, I order Newbolt to intercept the savage Tom Scoggins without needless injury to him or his crew. I suggest that they be enlisted in the quarantine service, as undercover agents acting to prevent any future expeditions from Earth into space." "Why, Wain? Why?" Coral stared up at him, the blue flame pale and cold and flickering furiously around her. 'Why have you done this?" his offensive teeth, imtil she hissed and ran from the dome. Newbolt and the banker stalked after her. The signal officer turned to follow, but swimg abruptly back. "Your Equity?" His cold voice was ominous and slow. "May I ask why?" "You have no right to ask." Scarlet paused to survey the signs of strain that marred his bronze mask of calm perfection. "I don't mind telling you, however, that I came here prepared to make a different decision. You yourself helped to change my first intention, with the evidence you offered about the people of Earth. Even the stories of their imperfections helped to persuade me that they are as human as I am. You seem surprised by my ruling. Perhaps I am, too. Surprised -- and pleased!" Penwright was no longer listening. His wrist screen had flashed. He scanned it, whispering. When at last he looked up again at Scarlet, his bronze mask was beautiful again. "Your Ekiuity," he murmured gently, "I have another surprise for you. I believe it means that your astonishing verdict will soon be reversed by a higher authority, in favor of our signal project." "Careful!" Scarlet rapped. "You'll find yourself in contempt." "I am in contempt." Penwright nodded serenely. "I can be candid about that, because we have just received a message from a passenger on another incoming service flyer. He's an old associate of yours, from the quarantine office on Denebola IV. Remember Warden Thomwall?" "Why is he here?" "There's something in your past." Penwright chuckled discreetly. "Some tampering with official records. Somebody discovered that you were inadequately conditioned for your mission here. The regional director sent Thomwall to replace you." ly, speechless, with all his new resolutions shattering into panic. Following too close to the limiting velocity of light, his pasthad overtaken him. His gesture of help toward the people of Earth had cost him everything. "Thomwall is an old school friend of mine." Penwright glowed with reminiscent pleasure. "Once I saved his life, when we were sundiving after the flying lights and he had got himself trapped in one of their magnetic nests. I think I can tmst him to approve the blinker project." "Perhaps he will," Scarlet rasped. "When he arrives!" Still robed defiantly in his judicial light, he abandoned the bench and darted down to Mark Whitherly, who sat like a white and silent mummy wrapped in rhill gray dust, alive only in his bright and bitter eyes. "Where is Coral?" Scarlet shouted. "Where did she go?" "Do you know what you have done?" The fading wisp of Whitherly ignored his own hoarse demand. "With your imconditioned blindness, you have killed jny great chance to observe a contact crisis. You have killed me. I am asking for euthanasia." "I'll approve it gladly," Scarlet snarled. "But what became of Coral Fell?" "You will find her with Flintledge," Whitherly whispered through the frosty dust. "If you find her at all!" Feeling as cold and futile as the dying scientist. Scarlet mshed from the dome to the surface level. When he burst out of the lock tower in a space belt, Sol was already rising over the bleak moonscape. But how could it be Sol? Bewilderment froze him. That blinding point of hot blue light was too small for Sol, rising too far north and three days early. Perhaps it was another star! But he had no time for riddles now. Setting the belt to filter out its burning glare, he ran on to search for his neutrionic flyer. Perhaps, he supposed, Newbolt had been panicked into an unduly violent interception of the rocket from Earth. Perhaps Tom Scoggins's fusion missiles had been detonated. But then, if that were true, the fire in space should have been fading. Instead, it was visibly growing. He had to turn his filters up again. Although the savage blaze hid the constellations, he thought it must be in the direction of Denebola. It must be -- An artificial nova! That jolted him. Even since he knew Penwright, the demolition of a star seemed incredible insolence. But he caught his breath and hurried on. Which star had the signalmen chosen to bum for the first intergalactic flash? He found the Vegan banker vmhappily surveying a gray crater of deflated camouflage fabric around the empty pad where the neutrionic flyer had stood. Shivering with a sense of chill desolation, he whispered hoarsely: "Coral? Have you seen her?" "Gone with Flintledge." The banker waved stiffly at the blazing sky. "Gone out where you yourself were planning to go." Scarlet recovered his breath and buried his dreams. He offered mechanically at last to surrender the documents that had made him legal owner of the flyer. "Worthless waste tape!" The banker laughed. "Riding the neutrionic wind from that new nova, the flyer will come close enough to the speed of light. Flintledge and Coral can't be overtaken. They can choose their own worlds to civilize, out on the galactic frontier -- wherever it is when they overtake it." "I can't understand it." Scarlet stood scowling with a puzzled indignation. "What had Coral in common with that monster?" "Enough." The banker grinned. "They were both searching for more primitive creatures to exploit, each in his own way. They found each other. But I believe Your Equity has more urgent problems now." A raw edge of malice cut through the Vegan's well-conditioned courtesy. "Although I am in no position to press any charges against you, I was pleased to learn that Commander Newbolt has ordered your arrest." "I'm immune from arrest," Scarlet muttered desperately. "So long as I wear my light of office." "You won't wear it long," the banker promised unpleasantly. 'Warden Thornwall will soon be landing, with all the unfortunate facts you thought you had buried on Denebola IV."  pale halo of his authority. Scarlet was waiting with Newbolt and Penwright and the banker when the arriving quarantine flyer came down out of the savage glare of the nova. Newbolt marched quickly to meet Thornwall at the lock. "Here's your man, sir." He nodded contemptuously toward Scarlet. "I attempted to arrest him. But he has the face to claim judicial immunity." "Hello, Wain!" Thornwall looked older, his dark beauty oddly dulled, as if the long lightyears had somehow overtaken him. Yet his worn smile seemed strangely benign. He walked past Newbolt, in order to grasp Scarlet's hand. "Forgive my bringing up your past sins." Oddly, he was grinning. "When I sent the message, I understood from Newbolt that you were about to make a more serious sort of blunder. Fortunately, your ruling on the crisis here was a magnificent vindication." "What's all this?" Newbolt followed from the lock, glaring furiously. 'Warden Thornwall, aren't you going to nullify the decisions of this criminal?" "On the contrary." A stem smile flickered through the shadow on Thornwall's face. "Commander, I am afraid that you have forgotten one of the first traditions of the service. We allow our people to learn from their mistakes. Although Scarlet was not aware of it, his unconditioned behavior back on Denebola IV was observed and reported at the time. The regional director offered me a bet that he would make the right decision, before we sent him here." Scarlet blinked his yellow eyes. "But if -- if you know what I have done, aren't you going to break me?" "Don't be an utterly unconditioned fool!" Thornwall clapped him warmly on the back. "I refused to accept that bet. We're few of us perfect. And those few are seldom successful in the service, because they share too little with the people we guard. Wain, I'm going to recommend you for promotion." Scarlet gulped and tried to wet his quivering lips. "But he ought to be cashiered!" Newbolt stormed. "I can prove that he accepted a bribe. His decision to extend the quarantine ignored competent evidence that Earth is not human. I will advise the signal service to appeal!" "Your advice will carry little weight," Thornwall softly intermpted him. "Because you have been relieved of your duties here. You are being reassigned to the signal service -- which is now facing an extraordinary emergency." Ignoring Newbolt's indignant roar, Thornwall turned briskly back to Scarlet. "Wain, you are replacing Newbolt as commander of the station here. For the next few centuries, you will be shepherding the people of Earth along toward tmly human status. That will be a difficult and lonely task, which you can hope to accomplish only by making the best use of subordinates who are no better conditioned than you are." Newbolt had moved apart, muttering with Penwright. 'We won't take this!" he shouted suddenly. "The blinker project must be accelerated now, to integrate this natural nova into our intergalactic signal. The condemnation of the planets of Sol was supported by adequate evidence, which Scarlet chose to ignore. The signal service is going to appeal to your regional headquarters on Denebola IV!" Thornwall's worn smile checked him. "We no longer have any headquarters on Denebola IV." He nodded soberly toward that terrible new luminary blazing over the blue moonscape. "Because that nova is Denebola." "Denebola -- a nova?" "But not a natural nova." ' at Penwright. "It can't -- " Violently, the signal officer shook his head. "It can't be artificial! Sol was to be the first. Denebola is no part of our signal project." "Not of yours," Thornwall said. "But there is another." "Whose -- ?" "Interpreting the signal will be part of your duty now." Thornwall smiled bleakly. "I had my first hint of the thing years ago, when I was sun-diving in Denebola, investigating the radiations of the energy complexes that we used to call the flying lights. On several occasions, I detected neutrionic components in their emissions. "Since, I have been gathering the reports of other expeditions into other stars. Several divers have detected focused neutrionic beams, of the same type that you meant to use to ignite your own supernovas. A mass flight of the lights from the surface of Denebola, which I observed not long before I left, led me to suspect that our galactic civilization is just reaching contact with another culture more highly advanced than we can easily imagine." Thomwall chuckled at Penwright's pale amazement. "I should imagine that your blinker project will have to be abandoned now." The flicker of amusement faded from his voice. "Because these electronic beings have apparently selected the suns for their signal project with no more regard for us than you had for the anthropoids of Earth. I doubt that Denebola will be the last of their synthetic supernovas -- unless you can persuade them to grant us status in their culture." "How -- how can we hope to do that?" "It's your crisis now." Scarlet turned slowly away from Penwright's hoarse consternation. He glanced into the burning sky, wondering which direction Coral and the trader had taken. Then his mind came quickly back to the more important problem. He would have to return Major Tom Scoggins to Earth with a warning for the natives -- tell them that the radiation from the nova would force a halt to all their plans for the exploration of space. Then -- to shepherd its people through the years of growth -- until Earth could rejoin its proud, prodigal children! Not all aliens come from distant stars. These are all around us -- and our very homes are theirs! The TallTied Kings E brought Them water, one by one. "The water is sweet, One-Eye," said a Mother. "Very sweet." "Many bring Us water," a second Mother said, "but the water you bring is sweet." "Because his breath is sweet," said a third Mother. The One-Eye paused, about to leave. "I would tell you of a good thing," a Father said, "which none others know, only We. I may tell him, softly, in his ear, may I not?" In his comer. Keeper stirred. A Mother and a Father raised their voices. "It is colder now," They said. "Outside: frost. A white thing on the ground, and burns. We have heard. Frost." Keeper grunted, did not move. "Colder, less food, less water. We have heard, but for Us always food, always water, water, food, food..." They went on. Keeper did not move. "Come closer," said the Father, softly. "I will tell you of a good thing, while Keeper sleeps." The Father's voice was deep and rich. "Come to my mouth. A secret thing. One-Eye." "I may not come. Father," said the One-Eye, imcertainly. "Only to bring water." "You may come," said a Mother. Her voice was like milk, her voice was good. "Your breath is sweet. Come, listen. Come." Another Father said, "You will be cold, alone. Come among Us OTd be warm." The One-Eye moved his head from side to side, and he muttered. "There is food here and you will eat," the other Father said. The One-Eye moved a few steps, then hesitated. "Come and mate with me," said the milk-voiced Mother. "It is my time. Come." The One-Eye perceived that it was indeed her time and he darted forward, but the Keeper blocked his way. "Go, bring water for Them to drink," said Keeper. He was huge. "He has water for Us now," a Mother said, plaintively. "Stupid Keeper. We are thirsty. Why do you stop him?" A Father said, "He has water in his mouth which he has brought for Us. Step aside and let him pass. Oh, it is an ugly, stupid Keeper!" "I have water in my mouth which I have brought for Them," the One-Eye said. "Step aside and -- " He stopped, as they burst into jeers and titters. The Keeper was not even angry. "There was nothing in your mouth but a lie. Now, go." Too late, the One-Eye perceived his mistake. "I may sleep," he muttered. "Sleep, then. But go." Keeper bared his teeth. The One-Eye shrank back, and turned and slunk away. Behind him he heard the Mother in her milk-voice say, "It was a stupid One-Eye, Father." "And now," the Father said. The One-Eye heard their mating as he went S ometimes he had tried to run away, but'eversrwhere there were others who stopped him. "It is a One-Eye, and too far away. Go to your place, One-Eye. Go to your duty, bring water for the Mothers and Fathers, take Their food to the Keeper, go back, go back, One-Eye, go back," they cried, surrounding him, driving him from the way he would go. "I will not be a One-Eye any longer," he protested. They jeered and mocked. "Will you grow another eye, then? Back, back; it is The Race which orders you!" And they had nipped him and forced him back. Once, he had said, "I will see the goldshining!" There was an old one who said, "Return, then, One-Eye and I will show you the goldshining on the way." And the old one lifted a round thing and it glittered gold. He cried out with surprise and pleasure. Then, "I thought it would be bigger," he said. "Return, One-Eye, or you will be killed," the old one said. "Outside is not for you. Return... Not that way! That way is a death thing. Mark it well. This way. Go. And be quick -- there may be dogs." There was some times a new one to instruct, blood wet in the socket, at the place of water, to drink his fill and then fill his mouth and go to the Fathers and Mothers, not to swallow a drop, to learn the long way and the turnings, down and down in the darkness, past the Keeper, mouth to mouth to the Fathers and Mothers. Again and again. "Why are They bound?" a new one asked. "Why are we half-blinded? It is The Race which orders. It is The Race which collects the food that other One-Eyes bring to Keeper, and he stores it and feeds Them." 'Why?" They paused, water dripping from above into the pool. Why? To eat and drink must be or else death. But why does The Race order Fathers and Mothers to be bound so that they cannot find their own food and water? "I am only a stupid One-Eye. But I think the Fathers and Mothers would tell me... There was mention of a' secret thing... The Keeper would not let me listen after that..." "That is a big Keeper, and his teeth are sharp!" Water fell in gouts from overhead and splashed into the pool. They filled their mouths and started down. When he had emp)tied the last drop in his mouth he whispered, "Mother, I would hear the secret thing." She stiffened. Then she clutched at him. The other Fathers and Mothers ceased speaking and moving. At the entrance e Keeper sat up. 'What is it?" he called. There was alarm in his voice, and it quavered. "A strange sound," said a Father. "Keeper, listen!" Then -- "Slaves?" he whispered. The Keeper moved his head from side to side. The Fathers and Mothers were all quite still. "I hear nothing," Keeper said, uncertainly. "Keeper, you are old, your senses are dulled," the deepvoiced Father said. 'We say there is a strange noise! There is danger! Go and see -- go now!" The Keeper became agitated. "I may not leave," he protested. "It is The Race which orders me to stay here -- " Fathers and Mothers together cried out at him. "The Race! The Race! We are The Race! Go and find out the danger to Us!" "The One-Eye -- where is the One-Eye? I will send him!" But they cried that the One-Eye had left (as, indeed, one of them had), and so, finally, gibbering and muttering, he lumbered up the passageway. As soon as he had left, the milkvoiced Mother began to caress and stroke the One-Eye, saying that he'Was clever and good, that his breath was sweet, that -- "There is no time for that. Mother," she was interrupted. "Tell him the secret. Quick! Quick!" "Before you were made a OneEye and were set apart to serve Us, with whom did you first mate?" she asked. "With the sisters in my own litter, of course." "Of course... for they were nearest. And after that, with the mother of your own litter. Your sire was perhaps an older brother. After that you would have mated with daughters, with aunts..." "Of course." The Mother asked if he did not know that this incessant inbreeding could eventually weaken The Race. "I did not know." She lifted her head, listened. "The stupid Keeper is not returning yet. Good... It is so, One-Eye. Blindness, deafness, deformation, aborting, madness, still-births. All these occur from time to time in every litter. And when flaw mates with flaw and no new blood enters the line. The Race weakens. Is it not so. Fathers and Mothers?" They answered, "Mother, it is so." The One-Eye asked, "Is this, then, the secret? A Father told me that the secret was a good thing, and this is a bad thing." Be silent. They told him, and listen. In her milk-rich voice the Mother went on, "But We are not bom of the same litter. We are not sib, not even near kin. From time to time there is a choosing made of the strongest and cleverest of many litters. And out of these further selections. And then a final choosing -- eight, perhaps, or ten, or twelve. With two, or at most, three males to be Fathers, and the rest females. And these, the chosen of the best of the young, are taken to a place very far from the outside, very safe from danger, and a Keeper set to guard them, and One-Eyes set apart to bring them food and Water..." A Father continued the story. "It is of Ourselves that We are talking. They bound Us together, tied Us tightly with many knots, tail to tail together, so that it was impossible to mn away. We had no need to face danger above, no need to forage. We had only to eat, to drink, to grow strong -- and you see that we are far larger than you -- and to mate. All this as The Race has ordered." "I see... I did not know. This is a good thing, yes. It is wise." The Mothers and Fathers cried out at this. "It is not good!" They declared. "It is not wise! It is not right! To bind Us together when We were young and unknowing was well, yes. But to keep Us bound now is not well. We, too, would walk freely about! We would see the goldshining and the slaves, not to stay bound in the dimness here!" "One-Eye!" They cried. "You were set apart to serve Us -- " "Yes," he muttered. "I will bring water." But this was not what They wanted of him. "One-Eye," They whispered, "good, handsome, clever, yoimg, sweet-breathed One-Eye. Set Us free! Unloose the knots! We cannot reach them, you can reach them -- " He protested. "I dare not!" Their voices rose angrily. "You must! It is The Race which orders! We would rule and We will rule and you will rule with Us!" "... mate with Us!" In his ear, a Mother's voice. He shivered. Again, they spoke in whispers, hissing. "See, One-Eye, you must know where there are death places and food set out which must not be eaten. Bring such food here, set it down. We will know. We will see that Keeper eats it, when he returns. Then, One-Eye, then -- " Suddenly, silence. All heads were raised. A Father's deep voice was shrill with fear. "That is smoke!" But another Father said, "The Race will see that no harm comes to Us." And the others all repeated his assurance. They moved to and fro, in Their odd, circumscribed way, a few paces to each side, and around, and over each other, and back. They were waiting. It seemed to the One-Eye that the smoke grew thicker. And a Mother said, "While We wait, let Us listen for Keeper and for the steps of those The Race will send to rescue Us. Meanwhile, you, One-Eye, try the knots. Test the knots, see if you can set Us free." "What is this talk of 'try' and 'test' and 'see'?" a Father then demanded. "He has only to act and it is done! Have We not discussed this amongst Ourselves, always, always? Are We not agreed?" A second Mother said, "It is so. The One-Eye has freedom, full freedom of movement, while We have not; he can reach the knots and We can not. Come, One-Eye. Act. And while you set Us free. We will listen, and when We are free, We will not need to wait longer for Keeper and the others. Why do they not come?" she concluded, querulous and uncertain. And they cried to him to untie Them, set Them free, and great things would be his with Them; and, "If not," They shrilled, "We will kill you!" They pushed him off and ordered him to begin. The smell of the smoke was strong. Presently he said, "I can do nothing. The knots are too tight." "We will kill you!" they clamored. "It is not so! We are agreed it is not!" And again and again he tried, but could do nothing. "Listen, Mothers and Fathers," the milk-voiced one said. "There is not time. No one comes. The Race has abandoned Us. There must be danger to them; rather than risk, they will let Us die and then they will make another choosing for new Mothers and Fathers." Silence. They listened, strained, snuffed the heavy air. Then, screaming, terrified, the others leaped up, fell back, tumbling over each other. A Mother's voice -- soft, warm, rich, sweet -- spoke. "There is one thing alone. Since the knots will not loose, they must be severed. One-Eye! Your teeth. Quickly! Now!" The others crouched and cringed, panting. The One-Eye sank his teeth into the living knot, and, instantly a Father screamed and lunged forward, cried stop. "That is pain!" he whimpered. "I have not felt pain before, I cannot bear it. Keeper will come, the others will save Us, The Race -- " And none would listen to the Mother. "Mother, I am afraid," the OneEye said. "The smoke is thicker." "Go, then, save yourself," she said. "I will not leave without you." "I? I am part of the whole. Go. Save yourself." But still he would not, and again he crept up to her. They came at last to the end of the passage. They could not count the full number of the dead. The smoke was gone now. The Mother clung to him with her fore limbs. Her hind limbs dragged. She was weak, weak from the unaccustomed labor of walking, weak from the trail of thick, red blood she left behind from the wound which set her free. "Is this outside?" she asked. "I think so. Yes, it must be. See! Overhead -- the goldshining! The rest I do not know," the One-Eye answered. "So that is the goldshining. I have heard -- Yes, and the rest, I have heard, too. Those are the houses of the slaves and there are the fields the slaves tend, and from which they make the food which they store up for Us. Come, help me, for I must go slowly; and we will find a place for Us. We will mate, for We are now The Race." Her voice was like milk. "And our numbers will not end." He said, "Yes, Mother. Our numbers will not end." With his single eye he scanned i Outside -- the Upper World of the ; slaves who thought themselves masters, who, with trap and terrier and ferret and poison and smoke, warred incessantly against The Race. Did they think that even this great slaughter was victory? If so, they were deceived. It had only been a skirmish. The slaves were slaves still; the tail-tied ones were kings. "Come, Mother," he said. And, slowly and painfully, and with absolute certainty, he and his new mate set out to take possession of the world. I starcrossed lover She was a wonderful wife -- sweet, pretty, loving -- but she would keep littering up the house with her old, used-up bodies! a fiend, a monstrous murderer or a Bluebeard. I am not, truly, even a mad scientist enstein's. My knowledge of science ends with the Sunday magazine section of the paper. As for the bodies of all those women the front pages claim I butchered and buried somewhat carelessly out by the garage, all that is just -- well, just an illusion of sorts. Equally illusory, I am hoping, is my reservation for a sure seat, next performance, in the electric chair which now seems so. certain after the merest formality of a trial. Actually I am, or was, nothing but a very normal, average -- upper middle average, that is -- sort of a guy. I have always been friendly, sociable, kindly, lovable to a fault. So how did lovable, kindly old I happen to get into such a bloody mess? I simply helped a little old lady cross the street. That's all. All right, I admit I was old for Boy Scout work. But the poor old bat did look mighty confused and baffled, standing there on the corner of York and Grand Avenue, looking vaguely around. So, "What the hell," I said to myself; and, to her, "Can I help you, Madam?" I had to cross the street anyway. Traffic being what it was, I figured I'd feel a little safer with her for company. It was silly, of course, to think that a poor old lady on my arm would ever inhibit the Grand Avenue traffic but I tried it. Good job I did, too. It was an early fall afternoon, a bit before rush hour. I had knocked off work early. It was too nice a day for work and besides the managing editor had fired me again. I had nothing better to doj so I thought I'd wander over to Maxim's for a drink or two. Then, on the corner, I found the old lady. She was a pretty sad-looking old lady. Matter of fact she was -- just standing there, not even trying -- the worst-looking old lady I ever saw. She looked, to put it kindly, like a three-day corpse that had made it the hard way after a century of poor health. First I thought, hell, I'll give the old bag of misery a boost, shove her under a bus or something. It would be the decent, kindly thing to do. I spoke, tentatively. She halfturned and looked up at me from her witch's crouch. The eyes in the beak-nosed, ravaged ruin of a face were big, luminous, a glowing green. They clearly belonged elsewhere and there was a lost, appealing look in them. There was a demand there, too. "I -- uh -- that is, would you care to cross with me. Madam?" I asked her. She took my arm. There was a moment's lull in the wake of a screaming prowl car. I muttered a word of prayer and we were off the curb. The old hag was surprisingly quick. It looked as though we were going to make it. Then, three-quarters across, I came down with a rubber heel in an oil slick just as a roaring, grinding cement-mixer truck was coming down on me like an avalanche. My feet went up. I gave the old witch a shove clear and shut my eyes for fear the coming sight of smeared blood and guts -- my own -- would make me sick. A ND then, instead of a prone, cringing heap on the pavement sweating out the ten-to-one odds against all those wheels missing me, I was airborne. Cablestrong arms caught and lifted me. We were racing down field, elusive, unstoppable, all the way -- touchdown. So there we were, safe on the sidewalk. Traffic on the freeway, gaping at us, was chaos as the frail, doddering little old lady put me down. Me, I was never any extra large size. But still, a touch under six feet, maybe a little too friendly with beer and rich desserts -- say, # pounds -- I had considered myself a little big for convenient carrying about. This was something new in little old ladies. I stared down at her. She wasn't even breathing hard. In fact I couldn't tell if she was breathing at all. "Madam," I said, "my sincere thanks and admiration. I wonder now. If you're not late for practice with the Bears or something, perhaps we could go someplace and talk?" I couldn't guess what, but there was for sure some sort of a story here. If I could get something hot for the Sunday magazine, I'd have my job back. The old crone looked up at me with those oddly out of place, compelling eyes of hers. "You will listen to me? You will help?" "Madam, help you don't need. But listen, yes. This is my great talent. I will be happy to listen to you." I thought a quiet booth and a couple of cold ones in Maxim's would be nice. No. She wondered in a different, quavering old voice, if greater privacy might not be better. "What I have to tell you, young man, may be difficult for you to grasp. It may be necessary to show you some things." "Uh." She wasn't the type of doll I favored taking home for a sociable evening but it wouldn't have seemed mannerly to say no to the look of appeal in her eyes. "All right." We went on over to the parking lot and I drove her to the very comfortable home out in Oakdale that Uncle John and Aunt Belle turned over to me when they rolled off to see the world from their house trailer a year and a half back. Of course they dropped anchor in Petersburg and haven't budged since, but I guess it gives them the footloose feeling they were looking for. And I have the house, which is quite a pleasant little place. I think Aunt Belle figured giving me the house would offset my own dubious attributes so that some nice girl might just possibly marry and make something of me. But I kept a picture on my bureau of Uncle John, standing by the sink in his apron, and was still holding out. Well, the old bat didn't clue me in on anything on the drive out there in my car. We chatted along the way, mostly her asking the questions, me answering. She was just a visitor to the town, she said. She wanted to find out all about it -- with ten thousand nonsensical questions. I parked in the drive and we went in. While she settled down on the sofa I went to the bar, my addition to the, home furnishings. to fix  drink; wondered if there flight still be any tea knocking around; thought better of that and mixed two drinks. Then I turned back toward her. "Now," I said, "tell me." "Well," announced that ravaged wreck of an old woman, "the fact is that I am from another world." "Oh, hell," I said, "how did you come in? By saucer or by broom?" It was a mean remark, I suppose. Not kindly. Even so, the way she took it seemed all out of proportion. The old bat's face suddenly went slack. She slumped over sideways on the sofa, those big, green eyes open, staring, empty. There was no need to go check for a pulse or heartbeat. She was plainly, revoltingly dead. "Ugh!" I said and tossed off one of the two drinks I was holding. It seemed the thing to do. #irio not be alarmed," said an apparent voice. "I am really perfectly all right. I have simply left that poor vehicle I was using. I had thought, wrongly it now seems, that communication with you chemically powered life forms might be easier if I too were concealed within one such structure." The voice actually wasn't so much a voice as a voice impression. It came from a point in the air above the body on the sofa. And it did make an impression. It came through in a rush of meanings, too loud somehow, almost overpowering. I looked toward the point of origin. That's what it was, as near as anything, a tiny pinpoint of intense, green-gold light. It was too intense; I had to turn my eyes away. My head started to ache. I felt and knew that, whatever species this might be, my visitor was a female of it. She was, at the moment, horribly overbearing. She was communicating effectively, enthusiastically, but unclearly and it wasn't easy. Not on me, anyway. My mind was swamped with a mass of concepts, jabber and ideas, like all the women's clubs of the world talking at once. I groaned and staggered back against the bar. "All right," I yelled, "all right, I believe you. You come from another world. You are an amazing, wonderful girl and I am proud to entertain you. But please -- go back to being an old woman, or something I can handle." The ravaged old crone's eyes glowed again. She blinked and sat up. "Please don't shout so. I can hear you," she remarked primly. I drained the other drink and put both glasses back on the bar. "Ugh. Uh, that's better. But who -- where -- what -- ?" "Please do stop and think a minute," the old witch told me. "If you will simply use that electro-chemical mental equipment of yours, you will find that I have already given you the answers to those questions about who and what I am and where I come from." "Nonsense." But then it came to me that she had. I just hadn't taken time to sort any of it out. I tried sorting. Much of it remained fuzzy, I suppose because some aspects were so far outside the range of anything known to me. She was, the way I got it, a life form based on something approximating atomic energy. She came from a dwarf star out someplace, I couldn't quite place it, out Orion way I think. Sure, the entire concept was beyond me and completely alien. And yet, oddly, in a lot of ways it was like old home week. This was a kind of life totally different from ours in all structure and development; and yet their kind of thought, their relationship to their world and their social organization, seemed weirdly familiar. They had work, recreation, social organization. They reproduced by some sort of polarity business I didn't get then and still don't; but it required mating and it certainly seemed a fair approximation of sex. They had arts based on forms and shaped patterns of energy. I don't get it. She said it  compared to our literature, music and painting and I take her work for it. "Only," as she later explained a touch wistfully, "terribly, terribly decadent in the present era."  T here was their problem. Their social structure and individuals alike seemed, at last, to be losing all vitality. The birth rate dropped. Culture declined. They had, fairly recently by their standards, discovered the possibility of freeing themselves from their sun and travelling through space. But, while they found planets with chemical life forms like us not uncommon in space, they had found no form comparable to their own. Outside contacts, they had thought, might stimulate and revitalize their society. But, of course, where there is life there is politics. They had developed many and bitter differences of opinion regarding the feasibility or value of any attempt to communicate with chemical life forms. There was a party for, a party against and several favoring an agonizing reappraisal of the position whatever it might turn out to be. Nothing was done. And that, in due course, had brought me my lone lady visitor. The "communication" party decided to take action in spite of r the absence of official sanction. They worked cautiously, in secret. Specially selected representI atives with certain exceptional  kinds and degrees of sensitivity I ere made ready. Necessary energy supplies for distant space travel were carefully hoarded. Chances of anything coming of I it were considered slim but... I there was the horrible old hag sitting on my sofa, looking hopefully up at me out of great, I youthfully glowing green eyes. I Anyway, that's the way the r thing shaped up in my mind. And it seemed plenty hard to believe. "Must I come out and show you again?" "No," I said quickly. "Oh, no, please don't. I'm convinced." "Or will be," she remarked cryptically. "Good. This now ( proves that at least one level of communication between us is possible. This is promising. It could mark the beginning of a relationship which may be most stimulating for both life forms." Well, it was startling at least, I would have to admit that. I "Speaking of forms," I said, "You I sure picked an ugly one there. Why?" "Oh? But I am only now beginning to understand your standards of attraction. I took this structure -- " she pwinted one gnarled, knotty hand at herself -- "because in my own form no accept me logically. They only yelled that I was an A-bomb or a short circuit or lightning, or else simply pretended they didn't see me at all. So I took this body, making only a few small internal repairs and improvements. But then, until you came along, no one would stop long enough to listen to me." "Hum. Where'd you get it?" "I picked it up at one of your places for them to die. What you call the cold room at the County Hospital. There was, I admit, some confusion." That I could believe. "You are not nearly as different from us in mental processes and customs as I should have thought. Such an intriguing life form, with such amusing complications. Just strange enough to be exciting. Come over here and sit by me." She beckoned coyly, like a flirtatious girl, and winked one youthfully glowing eye at me. The effect, in that ruin of a face, was appalling. I stayed where I was. "Oh," she said in a hurt tone, "you don't like me? And you seemed so attractively receptive at first. How can we communicate completely on your plane if you are to be so aloof?" She stopped and seemed to concentrate a moment. I felt as if something gave my thoughts a brisk stirring with a long swizzle stick. "Damn it," I snapped, "quit that, you hear me? You've got to stop messing around in my mind. It's an outrageous invasion of -- " "All right, all right," she said. "I won't do it again, I promise. Unless -- well, never mind." A t#T#ically feminine-type promise. "But now I see that it is simply this body that offends you. Except for this, you are quite ready to love me." That was putting it a little strongly. I had to admit though, that she was a pretty interesting proposition. "It is odd to attach such importance to form. A chemical life characteristic, I suppose. I do note that your own structure has its -- well. There is no reason for this present form of mine being a problem between us. I shall simply change it." "Oh?" Like changing a dress, she made it sound. It wasn't quite that easy. "You must make it clear to me what sort of body you prefer. Oh, I see. That tall, widely curved one with the red hair. Yes, I see the image... my... and so lightly clad. Very well. I will have this body for you." She was reading my mind again, the back corner section where I was keeping a few brightly descriptive memos on Venus de Lite, that luscious, languorous. long-legged new stripper-exotic dancer downtown at the Roma. "That," I told her, not without a touch of wistful regret, "is a live body. You cannot take live bodies. And stop reading my mind." "I'm sorry. I won't do it again." She kept saying that; and doing it just the same. "I shall not have to take the original body. I can simply duplicate it." "How could you do that?" "It should not be difficult. The elements in the structure are common enough here and in readily modified forms. The body organization is complex, true, and not particularly efficient in many respects. However, the patterns can be readily traced and duplicated. It is a simple question of the application of energy to chemical matter. So now you must take me to observe this body which has such attraction for you." II the toughest part. I did what I could, trying to fix the horrible old witch up in an outfit from one of Aunt Belle's old trunks and a few rather elementary cosmetics. The end result was that, instead of looking like a plain old witch, she seemed a scandalously depraved, probably drunken old r witch. The Roma, in a long history dating back to prohibition days, has seen all kinds and conjjitions. But I don't doubt we ere one of the damnedest looking couples on record. "This -- uh -- this is my Grandma," I told the few, nastily grinning acquaintances I couldn't duck on our way into the joint. "Grandma is just up on a little visit from Lower Dogpatch. Excuse us, would you? Grandma needs a double shot quick." That seemed unarguable. We finally settled at a small table off by the swinging doors to the kitchen and sat there through one floor show. "All right," said, my old witch, as Venus closed the set with her final frenzy in the blue spotlight, "I have the pattern. There are a number of differences there from the picture in your mind. The age, the chemicals applied." Venus went off to vigorous applause. The club lights came up and the M.C. stumbled out to favor us with his version of The Gent's Room Joe Miller. I considered. The more beautifullooking the doll, I suppose, the greater the probable degree of illusion. "Where you find discrepancies," I told my old witch, "be guided by my imagination. Right?" "All rightie," she remarked i brightly, patting my hand on the table as she favored me with what I would estimate as one of history's lewdest winks. I noted a mutter of contempt from surrounding tables. "Shall I go ahead? Perhaps you'd better close your eyes," she said, "I -- " "No, not here!" I grabbed her arm and dragged her to her feet. Neighbor tables gave us their full attention and the muttering took on an ominous tone. "Come on. For pity's sake, let's get on home." I wasn't exactly convinced this proposition was going to work out; but a crowded nightclub was no place for her to try it. "Graverobber!" was one of the indignant remarks that caught my ear as I dragged the harridan out. She giggled. The female, species immaterial, seems to have a sense of humor ranging from the Pollyanna-like to the graveyard ghoulish -- missing nearly every point between. She was quiet and thoughtful on the ride back home. So was I, pondering the doubtful status of my reputation around town and my sanity. and businesslike. She got me to help her stack a bunch of canned goods and junk from the refrigerator on the kitchen table -- "Just for convenience." She remarked domestically, "It would have saved your fuel and power if I had made the change at the other place. I must draw heavily on the power that runs into this house. I must, you understand, conserve my own supply." "Perfectly all right. Be my guest." The whole thing had a sort of dream quality to it by then. You know how it is in dreams sometimes? The action and story lines are fantastic. You know the whole thing must be nonsense. You could, by an effort of will, wake up and end it. And yet you go along with the thing just to see how the foolishness will turn out. That is the way I felt then. "Oh yes, one more detail," said my witch. "What about the eyes? I found nothing about the color of the eyes in your largely imaginary mental picture of the cheap floozy in that second-rate saloon." Already she was not only speaking the language but thinking the thoughts like a native female. The eyes. Hmm. I guess my mental film strips of Venus had kind of skipped past facial closeups. "Why don't you just keep the same eyes you have now?" I suggested. "Good," she said. "They are my own design. Here goes. Close your eyes; there may be some glare." I closed my eyes. For a moment there was nothing. Then, for about a second, say, there was an intense, flaring glare that shone reddish through my closed lids. Then it was dark. "All righty," said a sweet-soft voice, ending in a little, halfbreathless giggle. "Now you can look." I looked. Trouble was, it was still dark. No lights. All I could see by "the faint light of a half moon filtering in the kitchen window was a dim figure standing by the table. Fact was, I found later, a sudden power surge on the main line outside the house blew a transformer and blacked out the whole blinking suburb. I snapped out my lighter and flicked it on. Well now, indeed! There, half shy, half not so shy and wearing the same negligible costume as in her final number at the Roma, was Venus, constructed just exactly the way she should have been. "The way I built me," she said, and giggled, "to your very explicit order. So now what are you going to -- " I wouldn't say that I am notably more impetuous than the next man. That was just an impetuous situation. I let the lighter go and grabbed her. "Ah," I remember her saying softly, "now we can truly begin to communicate."  V ,v)  ' iri  i I # i.-j . I can say with every reasonable assurance that we did so most effectively. Alien she was, but she was also a lovely girl, my own dream girl. Or girls. What man of any imagination at all is a totally monogamous dreamer? Ansrway, she was unarguably lovely, loving, uniquely adaptable, generally sweet. And if, once her frequently unfathomable mind was made up, she had the determination of seven dedicated devils -- well, she was female and probably no worse than atom-powered space girl had a lot more built-in compensating factors. But that's as it developed. That night, naturally, was largely devoted to communication. Luckily, having been fired, I didn't need to worry about getting up to go to work. A long about eleven or so the next morning she bounced out of bed, bright, beautiful and lively. I dragged on down to the kitchen with her to see if we could put together a breakfast from whatever staples she hadn't found it necessary to incorporate into new construction. By the kitchen table I stumbled over the most ravaged, deadest looking corpse I ever hope to see. It was, of course, the unlamented body of the original witch, lying just where it had dropped the evening before. "Look, hon, what about this?" She shrugged quite charmingly, in spite of the tentlike dimensions of Aunt Belle's nightgown. "What about it?" 'Well, why didn't you use the -- uh -- material there, instead of all the groceries?" Another shrug. "I wanted something fresh." She had a point. I couldn't argue. I never could, when she turned those big green eyes of hers on me, full power. "Yeah," I said. "Only what are we going to do with it?" j "What do your kind do with old bodies here?" "Mostly we bury them." "All right then." That was unassailable feminine logic. All right. So I'd bury it. That night, by the eerie light of the waning moon, I went at it with Uncle John's pick and shovel and buried the old witch's body next to Aunt Belle's rose bushes by the garage. My bright, new-incarnation girl lounged around and chatted sociably. Everything still had quite a dreamlike quality; the corpse was a final, nightmare touch. But even so, I was beginning to wonder a bit about things; such things as, specifically, where we went from there. "Star-doll-baby -- " well, hell, w V there are times when a man has  to use terms like that to coml municate with the female -- "you aren't going to vanish all of a sudden and leave me now, are you? Ugh!" That was a heavy shovel and thick clay. "What are our plans?" "Sil-ly. I understand your custom now. We are going to be married, of course. Then we shall see. There is no hurry. I have, by your standards, plenty of time. I must assimilate and learn to understand you and your fascinating life-form. We shall live together and be man and wife. As I have said, your species and mine may derive much benefit from this intermingling." That, if I understood her correctly, sounded fine to me. It was the best proposal I'd had yet. And surely it would have been poor hospitality to a lonely little girl some light-years away from home for me to have refused. "This is terribly sudden," I told her. "Uf! That ought to be enough of a hole for as wizened up a little old body as that... yes, darling, I will marry you. Who's going to earn us a living?" Ill and kissed her and, in time, we did manage to get the old woman buried. The next day we applied for our license. Three days later we were married -- so far as I know, an interstellar first. The job or money problem, as it turned out, was no problem. Her first thought was the direct, female approach to the problem. She could simply make it out of old newspapers whenever we needed some, as she had the body. She made some to show me. "Well now," I told her, "it does seem the simplest way, I admit. But the government is pretty jealous of its ability to print money. It likes to think that nobody else can do the job just right." I was afraid this might be one of her stubborn points but it wasn't. Government restrictions, bureaucracy and red tape were things she had no trouble understanding. "It is the same way back home with power and energy rations," she told me. "You have no idea the difficulty we had in building up the capital supply necessary for my trip here. So I suppose we must find another way. Don't you already have some of this money? Or couldn't you manage to borrow some?" I had # in my checking account, but the house was in my name. I borrowed five grand. I invested. I was probably the most successful' investor since old I ing temperishly about out there. I When there was a sudden flash I and the lights blinked out, the idea hit me. I was scared. What if she had gone back, left me? I dashed to the kitchen. Just through the swinging door, I tripped over a body and fell into the kitchen table. Had she -- ? Then I heard a charming, slightly accented little giggle. I didn't bother with my lighter. I reached out, caught her, pulled i my sweet little dark-haired baby to me and kissed her. "HoneyI doll, believe me -- I do love you. No matter who you are, I love you!" I meant every word of it, too. I That was a brand of accomodation you will never get from any , local girl. King Midas developed his touch. If I sank a buck in land, oil would turn up within the week, and if it turned out to be a geologically inexplicable tiny pocket the next week -- that would be after I had unloaded. Stocks, commodities, it made no difference. The money rolled in. We had the touch. Paid our taxes, too, but she had a way with tax loopholes that gave the district collector a nervous breakdown. We traveled, but we kept the old house. We always came back to it for sentimental reasons. We spent a lot of time in libraries, museums. We went to shows and concerts. An#rthing that was going, we went to ,it. She had a contagious interest that she communicated to -- not to say forced on -- me; and if some of the operas and symphonies we caught seemed to my elemental musical taste to run a little long and loud, I had my conipensations. And a lot more than most; our adjustments were not all onesided. Example: We made a tour of Europe. Now, I always was a fine, loving husband to her. Completely faithful. But -- well, there was a dark-haired, laughing, buttoncute little chick who sang Spanish songs in English with an Italian accent in a little place on the Riviera. I didn't make a pass. I didn't even speak to her. But I have to admit that, as a strictly idle fancy, she did cross my mind once or twice. "Hah!" my tall, statuesque, beautiful red-haired wife snorted at me one evening after we were back home. She was sitting listening to hi-fi, some of the very long-hair music that she called "the second most fascinating development of ydur kind." I was just sitting, maybe dozing a bit. "So!" She gave it full-force, wifely indignation. "You sit there and you smile on me -- and all the time you are thinking of this cheap, female, singing bullfighter you have seen two times. You have two times me in your mind!" Already she was talking with just the accent that chick had used. "Now look here," I protested, "you promised not to go prowling through my mind. A man is entitled to a little privacy!" "How can you think so of this ' other woman? You don't -- " sob -- "love me any more!" Women! That's the way trsdng  to argue with them goes. You are always on the defensive... "Aw now, Star-hon-baby," I j said, "honestly, it was just a passing thought. I only -- " i "I know what sort of thought it was! Very well." She got up and stalked off to the kitchen. I didn't get what she was up to, not even when I heard her bangHE next night I had to dig a new grave out by the garage -- a bigger one this time, for a big, beautiful, long-legged, redhaired body. Funny thing. Contrary to general belief, none of this ever seemed to do anshing for the roses by the garage. They had done poorly ever since Aunt Belle left and they kept on doing poorly. Well, no matter. Six months later it was the little brimette's turn to go and we went back to red hair. When I say my wife was all women to me, I mean it. The last model was medium height, Titian shade hair, not spectacular but cute, very companionable, very lovable, beautifully built, built to last. She was some builder, my wife, and she did a lot of fine construction work for me. One night, back along about the third week of our marriage, I got to feeling lousy -- sniffles, headache, no appetite. It was no dramatic plague; just a tsqjical, nasty case of flu. I used to get them every fall and winter. I mixed myself a couple of hot lemon and's, and explained it to my (tall, red headed) wife. "Oh, yes," she said. "I see." I had an idea she took another quick prowl through my mind but I felt too sick to complain. "I'm going to bed," I told her. I went. Oddly enough, instead of putting in a restless night, I slept like a log. When I woke up the next morning, I felt great. In fact, as I burst into a spontaneous and very tuneful chorus of Body and Soul in the shower, it came to me that I had never in my life felt so well. When I looked in the mirror to shave, it seemed to me I was even looking better. Later that day I was up on the roof putting up a TV aerial. I hadn't ever bothered with TV, but she wanted to learn all about even that. I put up the aerial. Then I fell off the roof. I dropped twelve feet, landing on my left arm and shoulder on hard-packed lawn. Then I got up and dusted myself off. No damage. I was all right. "Clumsy," she said to me from the porch. "No," I said. "Damn it, there was this loose shingle up there. It slipped right out from under me and -- anyway, you might at least be a little sympathetic. It's a wonder I didn't break my arm. In fact, I can't understand why I didn't." "Nothing broke because of the improvements I made in you last night." "What?" "Darling," she said, "I made a few improvements. Of course, you were very attractive, lover. Perfectly charming. But structurally, really, you were a most imperfect mechanism. So now that I have made a study of these bodies your people use, I... rebuilt you." "Oh? Oh! Now, look here! Who in hell said you could?" I T did, at the time, seem pretty damned officious. I was sore. However, I had to admit that the changes she made worked out rather well. A strong, light metallic alloy seems to make much better bones than can be rnade of calcium. General immunity to disease was desirable, I couldn't deny. My re-wired nervous system and modified muscular structure were as pleasant to work with as they were efficient. I was a new man. Of course, every woman always wants to make a finer specimen of whatever slob she marries. Only I had the luck to get the one who knew how to do the job properly -- from the inside out, rather than by simply peck, peck, pecking away at the outside. It was all as near perfect as a marriage can be. I have no. complaints now -- and very few even then. She had built me to last a couple of centuries. I was with her all the way. But it never does work out that way, does it? What happened to us, as it does to most, was that at the end of the third year she got pregnant. A very ordinary female trait, you may say, and not ordinarily surprising. No. Except that she was no ordinary female. We were in bed one night -- out last night as it turned out -- when she told me. "Darling," she said, and kissed me. "I have something to tell you." "Haw?" I was sort of sleepy. "I've been hoping and hoping it would happen, but I wasn t sure it could." "Ha? Whatsat?" "Darling, we -- are going to become parents." "What?" I was awake then. "We're going to have a baby? Why, that's great. Wonderful! Do you think he'll take after me?" As I thought it over, it seemed something of a problem. What would the heredity be? In fact, how could it be? "Never mind, darling," she said quietly -- sadly, I like to think, as I look back on it "That's woman's work, you know. Just leave the details to me." I kissed her. We were very loving and tender. I went to sleep, and dreamed all night long that I was Siamese twins in a fratricidal finish fight over my model wife. IV T woke up by daylight to a horrible, icy, lost and separated feeling, as though part of me had really died. I reached out my hand for reassurance -- and I yelled. That sweet, soft-curved body in the bed next to me was cold and dead. "Please! don't be frightened. It's all right. Really, it's all right." That was a voice that wasn't a voice again, as back in the beginning. It was familiar and at the same time new. It wasn't all right! I looked up, over the bed. There were not one but two tiny. blinding-bright pinpoints of light. "What? Who?" "Father," they said, "we are your children." They were certainly not my idea of it. "No. Oh, no! Star-baby, where are you?" "Here. We were she. Now she plus you has become us. She has divided and now we are two, the children of you and she." "Nonsense. Quit the double talk and give it to me straight!" Double talk it was. But if it was nonsense, it was an unhappy sort of nonsense I couldn't get around. Coming slightly out of shock, I tried arguing and got nowhere. I never won any arguments from their mother either. I was convinced in spite of myself that this was the simple, brutal truth. It was the way of reproduction of her form of life. My alien wife had divided, to become two halfalien offspring. I felt lousy. I didn't want two bright, pin-point kids. I wanted my wife. "But look, why couldn't one of you -- " "Why, father!" I got it in a tone of shocked horror. "Such a thing would be positively incestuous. No. We must go now. This is what mother-we came here for -- to mix and to re-vitalize her-our people by the addition of a fresh, new stream of life force." "You mean me?" It was flattering to think my stock would invigorate the population of a sun, but it was no cure for the loneliness in which I was lost. "You are going back across space -- and leave me here alone?" "Yes, father. We must leave at onee." "Oh, now, wait just one radiating little minute! You say I'm your father. Well, I forbid -- " Weary patience. "Now, father, please." "But -- will you come back sometime?" "Certainly. With the success of her-our mission, we hope the factions back home will imite in a policy of further interchange. We and others of our family will come. Soon, we hope. It could even prove possible to find a way of converting you to our own form, so that later you may return with us." "But look -- " But that was it. A few more words and, "Goodby, father," they said, putting a reasonable amount of regret into it -- even though I know damned well they were itching to get going. "And do take care of yourself." They were gone. I was alone. No big, lush and lovely wife; no button-cute little brunette wife; no gay, lively, companionable, , loving Titian-haired wife. No wife at all. , I had never been so alone. Nothing but me. What was I to do? Well, there was only one possible thing to do, and I did it. I got drunk. I hung one on. It was a beauty. Sometime in the course of the following night I held a tearful wake' out by the garage and I buried my wife's last body. That, I recognize, was thoughtless. I could and should have called doctors and undertakers to tell me there was no life left in the body, and then let them do the digging for me in a more formal, costly manner. But, for one thing, I was drunk. For another, I guess I'd just sort of gotten into the habit of doing it the other way. -- like about #:# in the afternoon -- the doorbell rang. I was totally despondent, nursing my sorrow and a fat hangover with a cold beer and some of my Star-baby's more heavily long-hair, hi-fi selections. I let the bell ring for a while. Then I let somebody pound on the door for a bit. But that got to be hard on my headache so I went to the door. There was Mrs. Schmerler, from next door, who used to be a real biddy-buddy of my Aunt Belle's. There were a couple of hard-eyed cops with her, too. They all pushed right on in. "Celebrating something, Mac?" inquired cop number one, while Mrs. Schmerler and the other glared suspiciously about. "No," I said, too miserable to think. "Not celebrating, mourning. Just lost my wife, and kids, too." "He never had any children!" said Mrs. Schmerler. "Only women. And a great deal too many of the cheap tarts. What his poor, dear Aunt Belle, as saintly a woman as ever lived, would say'... Why don't you ask him what he ws digging for -- digging and yowling Star dust -- out there by his garage last night? And not the first time, neither!" The sudden realization of what , could be turned up out there by the garage -- and how that would look to the unsympathetic and non-credulous eyes of the law -- hit me. I opened and closed my mouth three or four times like an unwell goldfish. Nothing came out except a miasma of alcohol. Mrs. Schmerler gaped at me with delighted shock, indignation and horror. It was the great moment of her life. The cops stepped in -- not aggressively, more big-brotherly -- and took a good, firm grip on my arm. I won't go into the rest of all that. They got a squad and they dug. They took me in. I wouldn't talk. They locked me up. Cell block bookies quoted #-#, no takers, I would make the death cell. The way I felt, I didn't care. The newspapers went wild. Things had been slow since the election. All my old pals from my working days on the paper were making a buck with special "Even then there was something frighteningly different about him" feature stories. The next day, as my hangover faded and I got to thinking things over, my outlook changed. It was no time for me to give up. I would get a lawyer. I walked over to rattle my cell door for a bit. "Hey! Hey there, guard. Come here a minute, huh?" y He came. "So? Is our Bluebeard softening up? Want to make a statement?" "Uh-uh. Not me. I just want to ask a question. Those bodies, are they going to autopsy them?" "Not yet. Today." "Well, look -- " I had a little trouble persuading him, but I got him to take down all the data I could remember on the first one, the old hag. There would be records on her at the County Hospital. They'd never make any charge worse than bod # -snatching stick on that one. The others? I chuckled. I was imagining the medical officers' expressions when they ran inp those stainless-steel bones, plastic circulatory system, metallic wiring and Ae assorted other little innovations that my wife -- my late wife -- had installed in her body-building exercises. That would give them something to think about. So -- that's my story; all of it up to now. I'm still here in my cool little cell, and I am damned lonesome. But I am not scared. I figure I have about four different kinds of insurance. I N the first place, the way I am built now, with all the improvements in structure and durability she put into me, I doubt they could electrocute me. I'd probably just short the equipment out. A thing like that would make me quite a scientific curiosity, no doubt; but not, at least, a dead one. Second, there are my investments and the way the money has piled up. You know and I know perfectly well that they just don't to any electric chair. Besides, third place, while I have no doubt I can be convicted of something, I don't see how it could be murder. I wouldn't be surprised to see me get sent to the loony bin. I won't much mind that. I have nothing to do but wait anyway. And, in the fourth place, which is what I am waiting for, there are my children -- hers and mine. They are coming back. Soon, I hope. Not alone, I hope. "Tell them back there," was the last thing I said before they left, "tell them I want a girl just like the girl that married your dear old dad." I admit it's a poor thing for a man to have to send his kids to do his courting for him -- but at least mine are pretty exceptional children. Much better informed than most, too. They should bring me back a new bride. They've got to. Somehow I kind of have a feeling now that a blonde -- maybe a tall, willowy, statuesquely stacked type -- might be nice for a while. After that, I don't know. I'll have to think it over. The waiting is what is going to be tough. Kids aren't really undependable today. Are they? The Shape of Shells to Come. readers have the normal reader's habits, I am quite sure you have all looked at the photograph on the following page before you started reading. To begin with, the other gentleman is Mr. Earl Buchanan, Deputy Chief of the Armor-Defeat Ammunition Unit, at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. And the device we are holding is the prototype of a new anti-tank shell; #I call it Projectile P, with the "P" standFis #. Earl H. Buchanan (left) and Willy Ley  -- U. S. Army photograph ing for Picatinny. When introduced into active service it will probably get a different name, but for the moment Projectile P will do. The first point I have to make, after stating that I got to see it as a result of a kind invitation by Major General W. K. Ghormley to pay a visit to the Arsenal, is that this is the complete projectile. I trust that it wasn't loaded, but otherwise nothing is missing, except for one little item which I'll mention later. But the missing little item is not, repeat not, the nose cone. Projectile P is, as has been mentioned, an anti-tank weapon, meant to be fired by other tanks. The very fact that it is to be carried by another tank produces a number of problems. It mustn t weigh too much. More importantly, it must not take up too much space. And it must be capable of punching a hole through another tank's skin, no matter how tough and how thick that skin might be. NE might say that the problem began in #. At that time chemists almost anywhere were, if the term can be used in this case, knee-deep in high-explosives research. Only a few useful high explosives were known: guncotton, discovered accidentally by Christian Friedrich Schonbein in #, and dynamite, discovered equally accidentally by Alfred Nobel in #. Of course nitroglycerin was known since it is the basis of dynamite. But nitroglycerin was so untrustworthy that several countries had passed laws simply forbidding its manufacture. As for guncotton, military engineers distinguished two kinds. One contained more than twelve per cent of water and was therefore referred to as "wet' guncotton. It was perfectly safe to handle but very hard to explode. The other kind of guncotton was logically known as "dry" guncotton (# per cent water or less) and it was easy to explode, but by the same token it was unreliable. As for Nobel's dynamite it was safe, but nobody, Nobel himself included, had yet succeeded in inventing a really reliable igniting cap for it. Moreover most experts felt -- correctly, it must be added -- that dynamite was fine for construction and mining purposes but was not suited for military applications. Military engineers and ordnance men hoped for an explosive which could not only be handled safely but could even be mistreated with impunity -- but which would explode with great power if the proper fuze was applied to it. (To avoid receiving letters about that "misspelled" word I wish to point out that, during World War II, the Chief of Ordnance laid down a rule: fuzes used in ammunition of any kind are spelled with a "z", while a Fig. #. Nose of grenade M#AI (U.S.) with shaped charge. "fuse" is something you replace after you had a short circuit.) One of the researchers was an American, Professor Charles E. Munroe. The aspect of his work which interests us here had to do with the damage which is inflicted on steel plate by a nearby explosion. His tests were conducted on an old bank safe with various kinds of explosive substances, standard as well as experimental. Fairly small samples of the explosives were attached to the safe and then exploded. One of the samples was a disk of compressed guncotton, with the letters U. S. N. and the year # indented on its face, indicating year of manufacture and ownership. After this disk had been exploded, Professor Munroe inspected the steel plate for damage. It was negligible, just as he had expected; but to his intense surprise he now saw the letters U. S. N. and the date # indented in the steel. Nobody had ever seen anything like that and there was no explanation. Professor Munroe wondered whether the fact that the "bottom" of each indented letter had been a short distance from the metal could have anything to do with it. At first glance this did not seem likely; Munroe himself had exploded charges Vi inch, Vz inch and as much one inch away from the metal plate to see what would happen. Nothing had. But then he reasoned that he did not deal with a short distance away from the metal only. It was a combination of two things; a short airspace between plate and high explosive under the indented letters; but this short airspace was surrounded by high explosive fitting against the metal. To test his idea he took a small bundle of sticks of dynamite, pulled the stick in the center back for about an inch, then tied the bundle tightly and placed it against the steel plate. The explosion promptly punched a hole into the "burglarprooP safe. The same quantity of dynamite, exploded against the steel in open air, had hardly even dented it. I F the date of the experiment had been # instead of #, Professor Munroe's journal would have been stamped was #, Professor Munroe described what had happened in an article in Scribner's Magazine (March issue of #), wrote a technical article about it for Pronal oi Science ('Wave-like effects produced by the detonation of guncotton," vol. #, #) and, at a later date (#) rewrote this article in popular form for Fig. #. Prototype of new anti-tank shell, fin-stabilized and with shaped charge. the magazine Popular Science Monthly. Other researchers repeated the experiment in various forms, found it correct and began speaking about the "Munroe effect". They all agreed that the Munroe effect consisted in focusing an explosion. The gases develop)ed by the high explosive around the cavity ran into each other and, so to speak, compromised on a concentrated blast in a specific direction. In Germany one researcher. Dr. Egon Neumann, spent a good deal of time investigating the Munroe effect and developed arrangements and shapes which produced it best. He reported on his work in # in a German scientific journal under the title "New types of hollow bodies made of explosive substances". Thereafter Germans talked about the "Neumann Effekt." In the meantime a German explosives letters stand for WestphalischAnhaltische SprengstoS Aktiengesellschait or Westphalian-Anhaltian Explosives, Inc.), had taken out several patents for such shaped charges. They were used to replace the rock drill in ore mines. The shaped charges punched deep and narrow holes into the rock, then dynamite sticks were inserted into these holes for blasting. This went on all through the first World War... and nobody ever conceived the idea that something that punches holes through armor plate might have a military application! After the first World War a Russian, M. Kukharevsky, began to look at the Munroe-Neumann effect and wrote (in the journal Technology of the Red Army) about "Researches concerning the question of whether there is a possibility of increasing the effect of high explosives by the method of the accumulation wave." But in spite of all the learned treatises in German and in Russian the Munroe effect was finally used for military purposes in the country of its discovery. The first weapon to carry a shaped charge was the famous bazooka of World War II. It had been learned in the meantime -- I don't know when and by whom that the punch of a shaped charge was very noticeably increased if the cavity of the high explosive was lined with thin metal. Wartime research also established that not every metal was equally effective as a liner. Lead and aluminum liners did not add much. A steel liner did and, surprisingly, a zinc liner was quite effective. What was used in the bazooka was simply steel; what is in use how is, naturally, classified. The reason why such a metal liner increases the force is easy to understand. The explosion tears the liner into tiny particles which are added to the blast and probably act somewhat like an abrasive. The bazooka which carried the first shaped charges into battle was a rocket, a rather slow one. It was easy to follow its flight .all the way from launching tube to target. Then shaped charges were used in slightly larger rockets (airborne), in grenades and, I believe, in mortar shells. None of these types of ammunition spins in flight. If you visualize the action of the Munroe effect carefully you'll realize that it would be diluted by a spinning projectile. But bazooka-type rockets and rifle grenades do not have much range. Moreover, they are not very accurate. They lack both in range and in accuracy because of the fact that they are not very fast. They are much slower by far than an artillery projectile. T his is what led up to Projeo tile P. If you could fire a shaped charge from a long -- barreled high velocity artillery piece you would get the velocity and with it range and accuracy. But you also get spin. Could one fire a shell without causing it to spin? Well, yes, but it must be stabilized in flight somehow. Bombardment rockets are stabilized by fins at their rear ends and so are mortar shells. Why not a fin-stabilized artillery projectile? There are some problems, one of which is the fact that any projectile is in a very curious situation immediately after leaving the muzzle. Since a few figures are needed at this point I'll quote those for the German infantry rifle, model #, which 'may safely be considered to be public property. When this rifle was fired with its normal cartridge, the bullet left the muzzle with a velocity of # feet per second. When the same rifle was fired with the same cartridge but with the bullet removed, the combustion gases left the muzzle with a velocity of nearly # feet per second. The point is that they still did this, even if they had propelled the bullet -- which means that the bullet, immediately after leaving the muzzle, fovmd itself in a strong "wind" of hot combustion gases which were faster than the bullet and blew against its stern. For a sj)herical bullet this doesn't matter much. For an elongated bullet it does. And for a fin-stabilized bullet it could cause trouble. (Needless to say, the condition of the hot powder gases blowing from the rear holds true for any firearm of any size or construction.) Normally a designer would help himself with a long nose cone and fins on a rather long spike. But a shorter projectile has advantages too, not even counting the problem of storage space. In the case of Projectile P, the fuze had to stick out in front on a spike so that the shaped charge would explode before it had been squashed flat by the impact. It then turned out that the shock wave caused by the spike acted very nearly like the nose cone of another projectile. It did not spread out fast enough, so that it  still hit the body of the projectile. But by adding a little collar to the spike this problem could be solved. That's the reason why Projectile P does not have the normal ogive in front. Since the front end could be shortened, the tail end could be shortened too; the fins are closer to the body than one would expect. Fine, but now the armorpunching projectile has to be fired from the gun which is mounted in the tank turret. That gun has a rifled barrel and should not be made unusable for its normal ammunition. Well, sometimes a problem can be solved by putting the cart before the horse. Normal ammunition has driving bands which are forced into the groves between the lands of the gun barrel and which spin the shell. Projectile P has a rotating band, a band which is forced into the rifling, making a gastight seal. But here only the band rotates. The projectile is left alone,, to be stabilized in flight by its tail fins. The whole cartridge, roughly three feet in length, hardly looks different from an artillery cartridge of about the same size. Compared to a cartridge for an anti-aircraft gun the shell looks very short. And, of course, the nose cone seems to be missing. My father, who was bom and grew up in Hamburg used to tell me that it is possible to see stars in full daylight, provided that you look up through a tall opening such as a mine shaft or tall factory chimney. I have recently been able to test his story but the result was negative. Could this be due to the fact that Hamburg is about # farther North than Chicago? Karl Wechselmann Chicago #, #. No, this is due to the fact that this legend is rather wide-spread in Germany but not in the United States. I have recently re-read the third volume of Baron Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos -- for an entirely different reason, of course -- and found that the famous traveler had been annoyed by the same story. Being Humboldt, he had traced the whole history of the idea. He had heard it when a boy and had, naturally, tried it and failed. This failure annoyed him and he never missed an opportimity during his long life to check back on it. He found that the oldest mention is in Aristotle's works, "in a place where one would never have looked for it," namely in the book on animals. Aristotle says that stars can be seen in daylight from dark "cisterns" and Humboldt explained that these "cisterns" are subterranean caves with fresh water springs. In order to provide some illumination a shaft was dug from the roof of the cistern to the surface. Alexander von Humboldt then reminded his readers that he, in his young days, had been the supervisor of mining in a German duchy, having therefore many opportunities to test the story. But he had never succeeded. The Swiss "natural philosopher" Horace Benedict de Saussure reported that his guides at the Montblanc swore they could see stars when looking up from the bottom of a nearly vertical mountain side. Humboldt pointed out that de Saussure himself did not see stars and that two other Swiss, the brothers Hermann and Adolph Schlagintweit, also did not succeed and that, finally, he himself had spent years in the high mountains of South America and had never succeeded, even though he could see Jupiter and Venus when the sun was in the No. Name Year and Date Discoverer Visual Magnitude when closest to earth Ceres #, Jan. I Piazzi # Pallas #, Mar. # Olbers # Juno #, Sept. I Harding # Vesta #, Mar. # Olbers # Astraea #, Dec. # Hencke # Hebe #, July I Hencke # Iris #, Aug. # Hind # Flora #, Oct. # Hind # Metis #, Apr. # Graham # Hygeia #, Apr. # de Gasparis # Parthenope #, May #I de Gasparis # Victoria #, Sept. # Hind # Egeria #, Nov. # Hind # Irene #, May # de Gasparis # Eunomia #, July # de Gasparis # Psyche #, Mar. I # de Gasparis # Thetis #, Apr. # Luther #.I Melpomene #, June # Hind # Fortuna #, Aug. # Hind # Massalia #, Sept. # de Gasparis # Lutetia #, Nov. # Goldschmidt #.I Kalliope #, Nov. # Hind # Thalia #, Dec. # Hind # Themis #, Apr. # de Gasparis # Phocaea #, Apr. # Chacornac # Proserpina #, May # Luther # Euterpe #, Nov. # Hind # Bellona #, Mar. I Luther #.I Amphitrite #, Mar. I Marth # Urania #, July # Hind # Euphrosine #, Sept. # Ferguson # Pomona #, Oct. # Goldschmidt # Polyhymnia #, Oct. # Chacornac # Circe (Kirkeia) #, Apr. # Chacornac # Leukothea #, Apr. # Luther # sky. Humboldt was a most methodical man. But then Sir John Herschel, in his Outlines of Astronomy would write: "We have ourselves heard it stated by a celebrated Optician, that the earliest circumstance which drew his attention to astronomy, was the regular appearance, at a certain hour, for several successive days, of a considerable star, through the shaft of a chimney." Humboldt quickly struck up ephemeral friendships with professional chimney-sweeps, who all assured him that they had never seen stars through their chimneys in daytime. But it seemed to them that the stars seen through a chimney at night seemed to be enlarged. In short, there is nothing to the story. It is, of course, possible that Jupiter or Venus happen to be in the piece of sky visible through a slanting mineshaft. But if they are visible under these conditions they would also be visible from the top of this shaft, provided you know where to look for them. I have been trying to find a list of the larger asteroids but my local librarian has not been able to help me. One other question: does any asteroid ever become a naked-eye object? (Mrs.) Diana Fields Trenton, New Jersey Well, I can oblige you with a list of the first # asteroids, which is sure to include most of the largest of them. (Some of the Trojan asteroids, in the orbit of Jupiter, are quite large but are not in this list because they were discovered quite late.) No asteroid ever reaches visual magnitude #, which is usually considered to be the smallest magnitude visible to the naked eye. I may add here that the well known astronomer Dr. Bobrovnikoff once told me that he found many people, among his students, I presume, which could see stars of magnitude # imder fine conditions. But for normal eyesight, or eyesight corrected to normal by glasses, and under normal conditions you can't hope to see an asteroid without the aid of a telescope. In a newspaper article about life forms of other planets it was mentioned that there are life forms which do not feed on organic substances like animals and do not need sunlight, like plants. Can you tell me more about them, if they really exist? Dave McGuire Rutherford, New Jersey Yes, they do exist, but one could say that they do depend on plant life even though they do not eat vegetable matter. Plants, remember, use a process called photosynthesis. They can convert simple chemical compounds into complicated so-called organic compounds, provided liquid water is present and there is sunlight as an energy source. The byproduct of photosynthesis is free oxygen. The life forms which do not live on vegetable matter but do not need sunlight either utilize a process called chemosynthesis. They are a special group of bacteria which have names like nitrogen bacteria, methane bacteria, and sulphur bacteria. They can build up complex molecules from simple molecules without needing sunlight, but they do need oxygen. As a rule one does not consider oxygen a "vegetable matter" since it is a chemical element. But in the ecology of a whole planet it is practical to remember that free oxygen would not exist if the plants did not keep making it; without a steady production of more oxygen, the oxygen that happens to be in a planetary atmosphere would quickly be used up by oxidizing whatever can be oxidized.      Each year the World Science Fiction Convention awards trophies to the best science fiction of the year in several categories. As a service to readers who would like to nominate their favorites for this honor, we publish the following ballot. This is for nomination only. A later vote on the five highest in each category will determine the award winners. nominations In the following categories. I feel this is the best science fiction published during #I and should be considered for recognition at the Annual Hugo Awards Banquet on September #. #. Novel #. Short Fiction #. Dramatic Presentation #. Professional Artist #. Professional Magazine #. Amateur Magazine To become a valid nomination, this blank must be signed with name and, address and postmarked by midnight April #. Only Convention members will receive a voting ballot, distributed June # with the #th Issue of the Progress Report; a # membership fee, payable to George W. Price, Treasurer, will Insure your vote and enter your subscription for the Progress Reports. Name Address City Zone State I already hold convention membership # It was one of those days -- perhaps you've had them -- when everything went right!  siLi Powers-of-pearl. "Let's give an earthman his wish for a day. We haven't played that game in ages." "How do we pick him?" Firepride asked indulgently. "Phone book?" "Intensity's more fun. But no more nomads, I got so bored putting connoisseur features on synthetic camels!" Peter Stone put on his hat and started for the station. Every third step he inhaled and told himself: "It isn't that bad." Peter bad a good job, a good wife, and commuting was wearing him down to a twitch. Sooty teethrattling train, Penn Station's steaming caverns, a soggy lurching bus, lunch down in sun-seared, exhaust-ventilated streets and the ride home... as the hated maroon dot of his train appeared, a convulsion of revulsion shook him. "I wish it weren't that bad!" he thought with every fiber. And Powers-of-pearl, suffused with the glow of challenge, laughed. Peter Stone, fighting at the newsstand, noted with annoyance that a crew of maintenance men swarmed about the train. "Broke down again," he thought bitterly. Halfway down his car two men ran a vacuum cleaner over the tired plush. Keeping pace behind them, two others aimed widemouth silver hoses upwards, spreading thick sheets of foam on the ceiling. It wasn't xmtil Peter Stone unfolded his newspaper that he noticed how quiet had spread with that foam. Next, his ears registered with surprise the purr of freshly-oiled machinery, and his eyes the sight of a tree, for once without its double window screen of hair-oil and dried grime droplets. When he boarded his bus, a maintenance man was just hanging a sign over the gagged fare box: Due to Tax Readjustment, Urban Transportation Free. The driver, liberate from change-making and police duties, smiled a greeting at him. No crush in the bus, perhaps because there seemed so many about. The silver one coming towards him had a big green and white sign: the first readable bus sign he remembered seeing. Whenever the light turned red, he found, squads of maintenance men darted about the stopped cars and trucks, slapping silver cylinders over each exhaust pipe. He could hear snatches of explanations: "City ordinance," "Free service." As soon as a cylinder was in place, smoke and noise stopped coming out of the exhaust. wards the hook. Peter Stone realized that, incredibly, he wasn't tired. Work flowed through his fingers, his secretary smiled, his boss looked in once and whistled. At noon only the thought of paraffined carton coffee restrained him from staying in. "Coming right up, Seventeen!" said the new silver grille next to the elevator button. Cheered, he clove the mindless rush downstairs and pushed inside a luncheonette where maintenance men were finishing the removal of every second stool and the reupholstery of the remainder with foam cushions. A smiling waitress brought him a menu and a pencil. OppHDsite each item was a small circle, and a line at the top exServed incredibly fast, Peter Stone ate in blissful peace. On his way out he saw that the cashier's cage had been replaced with three silver cabinets with hoppers for Menuchecks and money, recessed cups for change and a turnstile each. When he walked through he found that he still had forty minutes of his lunch hour left. Forty minutes! He could walk to a bookshop, or the park... walk, through exhaust fumes and the belches of airconditioner waste? But silver mesh covered the noissome vents. A cautious sniff assured him it worked. He decided to walk to the Library newsstands for a foreign magazine. As he reached #nd and Fifth an army of workmen were putting the last touches on a structure of dull silver that spanned the four sides of the intersection. Airy and elegant, with faint echoes of Library style, the quadruple arch provided the perfect finishing touch for the square. Each side was composed of three escalators and moving platforms in both directions, with a set of stairs and a promenade. Timidly, he set foot, on the silver filigree. He was wafted up, across and down. Beneath him cars. Fascinated, he took the trip back, then stood on the promenade watching the pattern, breathing in incredulous lungfuls of clean air. The afternoon fled on newly silent feet. Once more he put on his hat to face the ride home. H IS small, air-conditioned silver bus reached Penn Station ten minutes earlier than usual. By now Peter Stone was not overly surprised to see silver moving ways disappearing into the Station's maw, nor, once inside, to feel breezes that blew silently from silver gadgets like jet engines. He also accepted the waiting passengers dancing in the great lobby -- the piped music there had long been excellent. A low, pleasant voice announced his train in diamond-cut syllables that floated from silverdollar speakers spangling the walls. Silver escalators swept to a bright platform covered in springy non-skid green plastic. One wall of his train was made Up of clear plastic sliding doors. Inside, there were deep pile carpets, reclining chairs, low blue overheads and movable reading lights. As the doors slid softly shut, Peter Stone remembered as usual the letter he'd forgotten to mail for his wife; but this time he could see a stamp machine and mail box at the end of the car. When he got up he saw that there were also milk, coffee, soda, fruit, cigarette, aspirin and newspaper vending machines, and three telephone booths. The train glided to a hushed halt three minutes after a speaker at his elbow had murmured the name of his station. Before his wife's goggling eyes, Peter Stone bonded down the steps and ran to their car. She remembered that evening the rest of her life. Powers-of-pearl let the silver evaporate, and with it the memory of it. "The best game yet," she smiled, leaning in happy exhaustion against Firepride's shoulder. "You were magnificent," laughed Fire-pride. "One step ahead of an entire city!" Powersof-pearl blushed radiantly. No trace of their game remained. But for some obscure reason, Peter Stone decided that one day he would run for Mayor. Monthly at New York, N. Y., for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Managing editor Fred Pohl; Business manager None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y., Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. #. The known bondholder, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: ( ther are none, so state . ) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required by the act of June #, # to be included in all statements regardless of frequency of issue.) #. Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of October, #. Jacques N. Glick, Notary Public, State of New York, No. #-#CK). (alified in Bronx County. Cert, filed in New York County. (Commission expires March #, #) The baby was lonesome, helpless and afraid. It wasn't his fault he was seven hundred feet tall! r T he dancing green blip traced an erratic course upon the glossy gray screen, the jagged-line pattern repeated over and over, its outline going from dim to sharply emerald brightness to dim again before fading. The technician cut the switch. There was a sustained whir of reorganization within the machine as the data-cards were refiled. "Care to see it again, sir?" asked the technician. His fingers hovered over the dials, his body in an attitude of impending motion. Jerry Norcriss tilted his head in a brief, authoritative nod. The technician started the machine again. With a soft humming, the gray circular screen began to pulse once more with that dancing line of brightness. "Now, here, sir," said the tech. "is where the scanner beam first caught the pulse of the creature." Jerry nodded, his eyes riveted to that zigzag phosphor pattern upon the screen. He noted the soaring peaks and plunging valleys with something like dismay. "It's a powerful one," he marveled. It was one of his rare comments. Space Zoologists rarely spoke at all, to any but their own kind, and even then were typically terse of speech. The tech, almost as impressed by this -- for Jerry -- long speech as he had been by the first warning from Naval Space Corps Headquarters on Earth, could only nod grimly. His own eyes were as intent upon the screen as Jerry's. "Here -- " the line was glowing its brightest now -- "here's where the creature passed directly beneath the scanner-beam. That's the full strength of its life-pulse." The line lost clarity and strength, faded. "And here's where it was lost again, sir." "Time of focus?" snapped Jerry, trying to keep his voice calm. "Nearly a full minute," said the tech, still blinking at the screen. It was now devoid of impulse, barren once more. "That means that whatever the thing is, it's big, sir. Damned big, to stay at maximum pulse that long." "I know very well what it means!" Jerry grated. "The thing's so -- " The tech smiled bleakly. " -- incredible, sir?" Jerry's nod was thoughtful. "The only word for it. Ensign." His inner eye kept repeating for him that impossible green pattern he'd seen. The strong, flat muscles of his shoulders and neck knotted into what could easily become a villainous tension-headache. Jerry realized suddenly that he was badly scared... the tech said suddenly,  "I was under the impression that the roborocket scanners couldn't miss a life-pulse on a planet. I mean, making a complete circuit of the planet every ninety minutes, for a period of six months... It's impossible for them to miss an uncatalogued life-form." "I know it is," said Jerry Norcriss, pushing blunt fingers through his shock of prematurely white hair. "Save for two precedents, I cannot conceive of any way in which this pulse could have been overlooked." "Two precedents, sir?" said the tech, intrigued both by the unsuspected fallibility of the scanner and by this unusual loquacity from the zoologist. Jerry removed his gaze from the screen and regarded the young man standing beside it. He made as if to reply, then thought better of it. Any out-going on his part was an effort. A big effort. And a danger. Only another Space Zoologist would understand the danger of speech, of letting loose, of relaxing for a moment that terrible vigil over one's personal psychic barricades. "Skip it," he said abruptly. The young ensign's smile tightened to obedience at the words. "Yes, sir," said the tech, with strained cordiality. "Will that be all, sir?" "Yes," said Jerry. Then, as the tech started out of the compartment, "No, wait. Tell Ollie Gibbs in the Ward Room to bring up a pot of coffee. Black." The man nodded, and went out the door, dogging it after him. Jerry listened to the booted feet clanking on their magnetic soles up the passageway of the spaceship, and sighed. The situation, in Jerry's experience, was fantastic. Only twice, in the history of Space Zoology, had there been oversights on the part of the scanners. One, almost comically, had been on Earth, when the scanners were first being tested. The chunky roborocket -- its angles and bulges and tapering pickup-heads unsuitable for flight in any medium but airless space -- had swept giddily about the planet, the sensitive pickup-heads recording and filing on microtape the patterns of the life-pulses of all sentient life below. And when the tape had been translated onto the through the translation chambers, to get their incomprehensible sine-patterns changed into readable English, it was found that there was an animal missing. Six months of circling the planet had still left the index blank on that animal's expected check-pattern. The animal was the brown bear, of north central America. And only after agonizing hours of theorizing and worrying did someone come up with the answer to the dilemma: It had been a long, hard winter. The bears were in extended hibernation. Somehow, the fleeting flicker of their subdued life-pulses had never managed to correspond with the inquisitive sweep of the scanner-beams from the blackness of space overhead. And so, they'd been left off, as though they did not even exist. A lot of sweat was dabbed from relieved foreheads in the Corps when a secondary roborocket, sent into a short one-week orbit, had picked up the animals' pulses with ease as soon as springtime was upon the land. The odds against their being thus missed were fantastic, astronomically unlikely. But it had happened, despite the odds against it, and the Corps was forcibly reminded that in a universe of planets, there is infinite room for even the unlikely to occur. The only other oversight had been years later, when a justsettling colony had been half-destroyed by a herd of immense beasts similar to the buffalo of Earth, but viciously carnivorous. There had been no indication, in the six-month, scanning period, #  that such a species even existed on the planet, the third planet of Syrinx Gamma, the sun of a newly discovered system beyond the Coalsack. The reason was maddeningly simple. The herds were migratory. Their migrations had corresponded in scope around the oceanless planet with the sweep of the scanner-beam in such a way that the roborocket was scanning either where the herd had just been or where it had not yet arrived. Again, the odds were fantastic against the occurrence. Yet, again, it had happened. Other than these two events, though, there had been no further error on the part of scanners for nearly a decade. Precautions had been taken against recurrence. Roborockets were now sent to scan a planet only at a time when there would be an overlap of seasonal climes, so that the beam would inspect the surface throughout both the mild and the rigorous weathers, thus obviating a repeat of the brown bear incident. And the sweep of the beam had been extended, so that no animal with migratory movement at speeds less than that of a supersonic plane could have avoided being duly detected and catalogued. That, they thought, should prevent any more such incidents. All that Jerry knew. A ND yet, here he was, descending through the black vacuum of space toward an already-colonized planet, the second planet of Sirius, a planet supposedly already scanned, catalogued, and long-since ready for inhabitation. And now, after the colonials had been there for nearly five years, something was starting to wipe them out. Some unsuspected alien thing was present on the planet, a thing that a hastily lofted roborocket had located in a matter of hours, and yet had missed in its original six-month orbital check, before the settlers came. It was impossible. Incredible. And yet, again, it had happened -- was happening -- and had to be stopped. A frantic appeal had been beamed to Earth through subspace, an appeal for a Space Zoologist to find the alien. Learn its weaknesses, and recommend its mode of destruction. "Some day," Jerry mused, waiting impatiently for Ollie Gibbs with the coffee, "I'll come upon an invincible alien. What recommendation then!" He could just imagine himself telling a secondgeneration village of hardshell settlers that they'd best just pack up and get out... Jerry's ruminations were interrupted by the soft tap on the door that meant Ollie had arrived. He grunted an answer, and the ship's mess boy came in, his face rigid in an expression of polite decorum as he set the steaming pot and drab plastic cup down on the swing-out table at Jerry's elbow. Jerry sensed the man's eyes flickering onto him each time the mess boy felt the zoologist wasn't looking his way. He finally turned and caught the youth in midstare. 'What is it, Ollie?" said Jerry, not unkindly. "You'll burst if you don't talk. Go ahead, spit it out." Ollie flashed a brief grin, a dazzle of white teeth that was all the brighter in his bronze face. "If I'm bursting with anything, sir, it's just plain nosiness." the wall clock -- spaceship clocks were always set at Eastern Standard Earth Time -- and sighed. He was cutting it terribly close this time. Suddenly, he wanted very much to have someone to talk to. It didn't matter, all at once, that he'd be exposing himself to danger by relaxing his mental grip on himself. If the ship were not landed and his job begun within two hours he'd be no worse off speaking than if he'd kept still. "Sit down, Ollie," he said abruptly. The mess boy's eyebrows rose at this unheard-of request, but he perched obediently in a chair, almost poised for flight on the edge of the seat. To have a chat with a Space Zoologist was without precedent in Ollie's experience. Jerry carefully poured himself a cup of coffee, took a sip and settled back comfortably in his chair. "What's on your mind, Ollie?" "Like I said, sir, just plain nosiness. I -- I can't get over you Learners, sir, that's all. I always wonder what gets you into the business. Why you stay in it so long, why you die so quick if you quit the Corps, or -- Well, like that, sir." "Just general curiosity about my raison d'etre, huh?" said Jerry. He wasn't trying to floor the mess boy with a four-dollar word; even the lowliest crewman on a spaceship had been chosen for brainpower, long before brawn came into consideration at all. "That's about it, sir." Ollie nodded. "I mean, I watch you, sir, when you come out on these trips. You get all keyed up and worried and sick-looking, and I keep wondering, 'Why does he do it? Why doesn't he get out of it if it affects him like that?"' Jerry stared ruefully at the wall before him, and didn't meet the mess boy's eyes as he replied. "Every man gets keyed up and scared when he has an important jy. Space nerves or something of the sort, I guess." "Sure, sir." The mess boy turned and continued down the passageway. Jerry shut the door slowly, then sat down in his chair once more. undertaking at hand. It's just worry, plain and simple. The thought of failure keeps' me all tightened up." Jerry paused, awaiting a response. When none was forthcoming, he turned his gaze slowly to meet that of the mess boy, hoping he was doing it casually enough to allay an#rthing like suspicion in the other man. But the smile he met was, affectionately, the smile of a man who hasn't been fooled. "That's not it, sir," said Ollie. "I know it's not. Because you're keyed up the wrong way. You're keyed up with worry that you won't have a job to do. Your big upset's a lot like a -- Well, like a junky waiting for his next fix... If you'll pardon the expression, sir." #iT will not pardon it!" Jerry bawled, then gripped the arms of his chair and shook his head in instant apology as the other man's face went slack with surprise. "No, Ollie, no. I take that back. I asked you to sit there, told you to let me know what was on your mind. I can't very well blow up just because you followed my lead." "Everyone blows up, now and then, sir," Ollie said. Jerry nodded glumly. Ollie got up. "I'll be in the ward room, sir, if you need anything else," he said. "Unless you'd like me to stick around awhile?" Jerry considered the offer, then shook his head. "No... I'd better not, Ollie." The barest ghost of humof glowed a moment on the zoologist's face. "You're too damned easy to talk to." "Yes, sir," Ollie grinned, then went out and closed the door after him. Jerry sat in the chair a second longer, then jumped up and pulled the door open again. Ollie, a few steps down the passageway, turned about in curious surprise. "Sir?" "Tell Captain -- " Jerry began, then realized his voice was nearly a ragged shout, and lowered it. 'Would you please tell the captain to speed things up if he can, Ollie?" Ollie hesitated. "The vector -- " he started, then stiffened militarily and replied, "Yes, sir. At once, sir." "No," Jerry groaned, closing his eyes and hanging onto the metal edge of the doorframe. "Forget it. He's got a course to follow in. He can't get there any faster." Ollie, knowing this already, just stood there'. "Just go have a cup of coffee," Jerry added, lamely. "And about what I said -- " "You know I wouldn't say anything about it, sir," Ollie said. "I know," Jerry admitted. "Sorand stared at the clock, and sipped the hot coffee, and fought the cold needle-pricks of fear in every muscle and joint of his body... II rpHE colony on the second planet of Sirius existed solely due to one of those vicious circles of progress. Just as iron is needed to make the steel to build the tools and equipment necessary to mine the raw iron ore, so this colony was needed to mine the precious mineral that made such colonies possible in the first place. The mineral was called Praesodynimium, a polysyllabic mouthful which meant simply that it was an unstable crystalline isotope of sodium that broke down eventually into ordinary sodium (hence "prae-":before; "sod-":sodium), which was possessed of extreme kinetic potentials ("dyn-":power), and was first extracted from sodium compounds by a Canadian scientist (imium" instead of the more American "-inum" or even "-um"). This crystal had the happy habit of electrical allergy. When subjected to even a mild electric current, it avoided the consequent shakeup of its electronic juxtaposition by simply vanishing from normal space until the power was turned off. The nice part about its disappearance -- from an astronaut's point of view -- was that the crystal took not only itself, but objects within a certain radius along with it. It turned out that a crystal of Praesodynimium the moderate size of a sixteen-inch softball would warp a ninety-foot spaceship into hyperspace without even breathing hard. Of course, it would warp anything else within a fifty-foot radius, too; so it was only turned on after the ship had ascended beyond planetary atmosphere, lest a large scoop of landing-field, not to mention a few members of the ground crew, be carried away with the ship. In her eagerness to investigate the now-attainable stars. Earth had soon exhausted her sources of the mineral. Worse, the crystal, being unstable, had a half-life of only twenty-five years. That meant that a ship using it had a full-range radial margin of about five years before the crystal ceased warping the ship-inclusive area. Until some way was discovered to get into hyperspace without using Praesodynimium -- and its actual function was as much a mystery to scientists as an automobile's cause-and-effect is to a lot of drivers; very few people can describe the esoteric relationships between the turning of the ignition key and the turning of the rear wheels -- the mineral was worth ten times its weight in uranium #. Sirius II had been found to be as rife with the mineral as a candy store is with calories. Hence the colony. For so long as the ore held out the planet would be regarded with fond respect and esteem by any and all persons who had investments, relatives or even just interest in the Space Age and its contingent programs. S O it was with considerable trepidation that Earth received the news that the mines on Sirius were no longer being worked. Oh, yes, there was still ore -- enough to keep the planet profitable for another century. The trouble was the miners. They weren't coming out of the mines anymore. And no one who went inside to look for them was ever seen again, either. Naturally, mining slacked off. The men refused to set foot in the mines until somebody found out what had happened to their predecessors. So the officials of the colony resurrected a scanner-beam and roborocket from the cellar of the spacefield warehouse and storage depot. They sent the rocket into an orbit matching planetary rotation. In effect it simply hovered over the mines while it scanned the area for uncatalogued alien life. And when they brought the rocket down and checked the microtape against the file of known species on the planet, they found that no such beast had ever been catalogued. Its life-pulse gave a reading of point-nine-ninenine. Since lifepulses are catalogued on a decimal scale based on the numeral one (with Man rated at point-oh-five-oh), the colonial administration staff immediately ordered the mines officially closed and off-limits. This brought no results on Sirius II which had not been already achieved, but the declaration made the miners feel a little less guilty over their dereliction of duty. Earth, explaining the situation in detail and requesting instructions. Earth sent word to hang on, keep calm and leave the mines closed until an investigation could be made -- all of which the colony was trying to do anyway. A duplicate of the microtape had been transmitted along with pattern against every known species filed in U.S. Naval Space Corps Alien-Contact Library, a collection of the vast alien multitude gathered by Space Zoologists in the methodical colonization and exploration of the universe. It was found to be not only unknown anywhere in the thus-far-explored cosmos, but totally unlike any life-pulse previously encountered. Earth decided the only way to get any satisfaction would be by the unorthodox method of sending in a Space Zoologist to Contact the alien, though this would be the first time in the history of Contact that this had ever been done on an already-settled planet. And so the badly frightened colony lingered behind bolted doors, and peered through locked windows at the sky -- awaiting the arrival of Jerry Norcriss, and praying he'd locate the alien and tell them how it might be dealt with... egging your pardon, sir," grinned the tech, doing some last-minute fiddling with the machine, "but you never had it so good." Jerry dabbed at the cold sweat-film on his forehead and upper lip, and nodded silently. In all his previous Contacts, done before any colonization was even attempted, things were a bit more rustic. His present environs were luxury compared to those setups. If the six-month orbit of the roborocket found the planet safe for humans, well and good; Jerry did not have to go. But if a new life-form were spotted -- one that did not correspond in life-pulse to any known species -- then it was Jerry's job to land on the planet and Learn the beast, to determine its probable menace, if any, to man. The tech was referring to the fact that Jerry's usual base of operations was out on the sward beside the tailfin of the rocket, the only power-source on a noncolonized planet. There, in his Contact helmet, relaxed upon his padded couch, he would let his mind be sent right into that of the alien, to Learn it from the inside out. Here, though, on a settled world, his accommodations were pleasantly out of the ordinary. He was in the solarium of the town's research laboratory-hospital. He gazed up through quartz panes at soothing blue skies, in air-conditioned comfort spoiled only by a fugitive scent of disinfectant lingering in the building. Some half-dozen curious members of the building's staff were gathered in the room. None of them had ever seen a man go into Contact before. In vain the tech had assured them, before Jerr # r's arrival, that there was nothing to be seen. Jerry would lie on the couch and adjust the helmet upon his head, and then the tech would throw a switch. And for forty minutes there would be nothing to see except Jerry's silent supine body. Later, of course, the inforination transmitted by Jerry's mind through the helmet pickups to the machine would be translated into English. Then they could all read about the new animal. That would be the interesting part, for them; not this senseless staring at the young man, white-haired at thirty-plus, who would, so far as they'd be able to tell, merely doze off for an uneventful fortyminute nap. For Jerry, however, things would be anything but dull for those forty minutes. Once the process was begun, there was no way known even to the discoverer of the Contact principle to extend or reduce the time-period. When Jerry's mind had traveled to that of the alien, he would remain there for the full time. Anything that happened to the alien in that period would also happen to Jerry. Including death. If the alien somehow perished with Jerry "aboard," as it were, the group in the solarium would wait in vain for him ever to bestir himself and rise from the couch again. Jerry, fighting the waves of nausea that burned in the pit of his stomach, lay there in his helmet and waited for the tech to , finish adjusting the machine. A scanner-beam, sent toward the suspected locale from the solarium, had instantly retriggered that same green blip in response, as jagged and powerful as before. Jerry would soon be sent right into the center of the response-area, and his mind imbedded in the brain of the alien. "Hurry it up, will you?" Jerry called over to the tech, trying not to shout. "Ready, sir," the other man said abruptly. "Are you all set?" "All set. Ensign," Jerry replied, then shut his eyes to the clear blue sky and the stares of the curious and let his mind relax for the brief shock of transport... A flare of lightning, silent, white and cold in his mind -- and Jerry Norcriss was in Contact... O NE of the nurses, crisp and efficient in white starched cotton, took a hesitant step toward the figure on the couch, then spoke to the tech without looking at him, intensely. "What are his chances? It's so important that he succeed!" About to brush her off with a noncommittal reply, the tech turned his gaze from the control panel to meet, turning to face him, a pair of the deepest blue eyes he'd ever seen, and a smoothskinned serious face beneath a short-cropped tangle of bright yellow hair. The eyes were troubled. His manner softened instantly. Trying not to show the sudden warmth he felt, he pointed with offhand authority at the tall metal machine, its face alive with leaping lights and quivering indicator needles. "This'll tell the story, one way or the other," he said. "A Space Zoologist's chances are always fifty-fifty. He either succeeds and returns in perfect health, or he fails and doesn't return at aU. But whatever data he picks up in Contact will be punched onto the microtape. It may help us deal with the menace. Or it may not. She looked surprised. "Then this is simply a recorder? I'd thought it was the thing that sent his mind out to the mine area..." She faltered on the last few words, and looked more concerned than ever. The tech was tempted to ask her about it, but decided to stay on the neutral ground of simple mechanics for a while. "No, his mind sends itself. That is, the helmet triggers a certain braincenter; his mind follows a scanner-beam directed toward the alien and he Contacts. After that, this machine could be turned off, so far as maintaining Contact goes. After a forty-minute interim. his mind would return to his body by itself. The brain-center gets triggered sort of like a muscle reacts to a blow. It gets paralyzed for a certain time. Forty minutes. Beyond that limit, or short of it, no Contact or breaking of Contact is possible..." His voice trailed off as he realized her responsive nods were abstracted and vague, her thoughts elsewhere. "Look," he said awkwardly, "I'm no psyche-man, but maybe it'd help if you talked about it." A faint smile touched her mouth. "I didn't realize it showed." He grinned and shrugged. "My name's Jana," she said. "Jana Corby." She was trying to ease some of the natural tension between strangers. "Bob Ryder," said the tech. He stood and waited for her to make the next move. "My father -- " she said, and for the first time, some of the tension behind her eyes flowed over into her voice. "My father was one of the miners. He was on the morning shift. The day the men didn't come home was the day before my wedding." Bob frowned. "I don't understand." S HE blinked at the moisture that had come to her eyes, and flashed him a sad little smile. "I'm sorry. I was telescoping events. You see, with Dad missing, I postponed the ceremony, naturally, till I could learn what had happened. Jim -- that's Jim Herrick, my fiance -- was wonderfully understanding about it. He's a miner, too. On the nightshift, thank God. But if Lieutenant Norcriss doesn't succeed -- if he can't find a way to destroy this beast, whatever it is -- we can't get married, ever." Bob shook his head slowly. "You can't? I don't follow." "You're in the Space Corps," she said. "Maybe you don't know about interstellar colonies. It costs plenty to send people to the stars. The investors want some kind of guarantees for their money. So we're all signed to a ten-year contract. If we fail to fulfill the terms we're sent back to Earth on the next ship going that way." "Well -- I know you're still within the limit," said Bob, "but how does this upset your marriage plans?" 'We go where we're sent," she said simply. "If this colony fails, we'll be sent to a new planet. It may not be the same one. I'll be sent where they need nurses, Jim where they need miners." Bob felt funny, talking against the colonial program, but the weary despair in the girl's eyes outweighed economic considerations. "You could both renege on your contracts." "And go back to Earth together?" Jana shook her head. "I couldn't do that, for Jim's sake. He's spent his life at mining, and this is the kind of mining he knows best: Praesodynimium. And there just is no more on Earth." "He could get something else," said Bob. "I know. But he might not be happy. After a while, he might blame me for it. Or I'd blame myself. Either way, things just wouldn't be the same. I -- I suppose you think I'm foolish, feeling so strongly about him?" Bob said softly, "Honey, any guy would cut his arm off to get a girl like you. Myself included." Embarrassed, she looked once more toward the silent figure upon the couch. "You're very kind." "Not kind," said the tech. 'Wistful." Behind them, a myriad banks of lights and switches flickered shifted with electric monotony, slowly recording the details, down to the most minute sensory awareness, of the Contact between Jerry Norcriss and the alien... Ill of warm sunlight on his flesh, then a pimgent scent of crushed foliage, green and heady very strong and familiar. As his mind took hold, a whisper of wind hummed into his consciousness and a shimmering golden brightness began to grow upon his closed eyelids. Abruptly, unity of sensation was achieved. Jerry Norcriss "was" in a sunlit part of the woods near the mines, feeling the alien's perceptions as though they were his own. He crinkled his eyes against the glare, then slowly opened them. As he blinked his eyes to focus the golden glare, he spotted a strange little cluster of tiny sticks, with miniature leaves sprouting greenly on thread-like branches. Halfway between his face and this fragile copse slithered a brilliant blue line, ribbon-thin, through a serpentine gouge along the earth. On the far side of this trickle lay a rich tumble of soft green velvet, ending at a group of more of those twig-copses. Puzzled, Jerry turned his gaze skyward. Within the warm blue canopy overhead he saw clouds... but clouds unlike any he'd ever seen for size. None of them could have been more than a foot in diameter. They hung against the sky like cotton-covered basketballs. He returned his gaze groundward, and for the first time saw the scuffed grayish area of earth between himself and the trickle. A wiry network of metal glittered there, the wires in pairs, and the pairs disappearing into small square punctures against a wall of banked soil. Then Jerry gasped. His mind had apprehended the implications of his vista so suddenly that he was staggered. All the facts sprang into proper perspective. The twigs were actually tall trees, the tumble of velvet a wide stretch of grassy sward, the trickle was a rushing blue river, and the tiny wire-network in the grayish area was the tracks for the mine-cars, leading down into the planet through those tiny square adits. Jerry had unconsciously been receiving sensations in terms of his host's size. A quick calculation showed him that his head must be easily five hundred feet in the air. Cautiously, he glanced for the first time toward the body of his host, to see what sort of creature he was in Contact with. There was nothing whatever to be seen. Yet when he closed his eyelids once again, golden opacity returned. He reopened them thoughtfully. The alien, apparently, could cut off its vision. Yet the eyes of a creature so high must be many feet in diameter. And, at this height, twin opacities would be spotted even from the nearby town. But so such sight had been reported. Therefore, the lids were opaque only from the inside. Which was ridiculous. Yet it was happening. Jerry's thoughts were interrupted by a giddy realization. He, in this alien body, was not standing. He was seated cross-legged on the ground. That meant a height of not five hundred feet, but nearer seven hundred. hand toward one of the tiny mine-cars. He had a little difficulty directing a hand and arm he could not see; but, by feeling along the earth, he got hold of the dull gray object and tried to lift it. It came up with featherweight ease. Then, halfway to his eyes, it began to glow, to smoke, to grow terribly hot. And as Jerry released it with a reflex of pain, it biust into white flame and hit the ground as a shapeless gobbet of molten slag. Jerry's hand came to his mouth automatically. He sucked and licked at the sore surfaces of his finger and thumb, trying to drain some of the hurt out of them. Then he froze. After a heartbeat, he felt carefully about the interior of his mouth with a forefinger. Gums. Warm, wet, soft-boned toothless gums. Whatever the alien looked like -- it was still only a baby. Which meant -- Quickly Jerry looked at the sky again. Not a cloud had moved. Their rotund fleeciness might have been carven there. He gave himself a mental kick. Hadn't one of his first alien awarenesses been the sound of wind? And yet the grass lay still. The trees stood silent. And the clouds, so nearly over his head that he could have touched one, hung quietly against a perfectly calm sky. It was not the wind he had heard. It was air. Just molecules of air, as they shifted and flew about at incredible speeds. The alien-baby's time-sense was occluded, as that of any Earth-baby, by shortness of life. It was the paradox of relative lifetime. A lifetime. Old Peters had said, training the eager young men who were to become graduate Space Zoologists, is a lifetime. He'd written it on the blackboard so they might understand he was not speaking in circles. "A lifetime," he'd said, "is the time one spends from birth until any present moment. A lifetime is the actual count of moments of existence from birth. When a baby has been born for an hour, its lifetime is sixty minutes. And to the baby, that sixty minutes is a lifetime." He'd written the two words on the board, and would point from one to the other as he spoke, so the class could understand the distinction visually, and not have to rely on his inflection to tell which term he'd used. "A lifetime," he'd continued, "is subjective; a lifetime is objective. The first deals in one's personal sense of time passed. The second is simply readings from a clock. When a man turns ninety, he is usually surprised to find how short a life he's seemed to have had. His ninety years seem hardly longer to him than a single day seemed when he was a baby. "It is a lucky thing that we cannot penetrate the mind of an intelligent creature. If any of us got into the mind of a baby, we'd soon start going out of our minds with the maddening length of a day's time, seen from a baby's viewpoint. Remember, when you are in Contact with an alien mind, for that immutable forty minutes your sensation of elapsed time will be subject to that of your host. To a baby, forty minutes is forever." A ND here Jerry Norcriss was, in a baby's mind. No wonder no tree had rippled, no cloud had blown. The babysenses were geared to a near-eternal forty minutes. For all pracical purposes, Jerry was stuck in one frame of a movie trapped for who-knows-how-long till the next frame came by. "That's why the car melted!" he realized. "The movement of the car toward me, in my hand, must have been infinitely shorter than the few seconds it seemed to take. I tried to make the mine car move more than five hundred feet, in an actual time less than a thousandth of a second!" Jerry wasn't overly concerned about the duration itself. He'd been in subjectively-slow creatures before. If things got too boring, he could always doze off; that usually served to pass the time. Even a baby's time-sense jumps long gaps when it sleeps. The thing that puzzled him was this: If the rhine car had burnt up from moving too far too fast, why hadn't the baby's hand and arm been scorched by the motion? The heat of the car had affected it, so that let out inborn heat-resistance... His hands once again went to his face. He felt not only the features -- familiar features, eerily like a human babsr's -- but the skull-size. When he'd finished, he no longer had reason to doubt that the baby was of an intelligentspecies. Too much cranial allotment to think any differently...# The whole situation, Jerry mused with grim humor, was screwy. The six-month roborocket could not have missed a creature with such an intense life-pulse, but it had. Contact could not be achieved with an intelligent mind, but it had been. Invisibility -- except for certain species of underwaters creatures -- was supposedto be impossible for a living organism. Yet here it was. Three separate impossibles... all accomplished. "Still," said Jerry to himself, "that's not the main puzzle. The vanishing of those two shifts of miners is still beyond me. They could, of course, have simply walked head-on into this invisible leviathan. But how fast can a man walk? And would they all have done it? Now, if this kid happened to pick one of them up -- " Jerry gave a shudder at the thought of what had happened to that metal mine car. "Still," he sighed, baffled, "a man who bursts into flame is no more fun to hold than a hot mine car. After maybe two or three deaths at the outside, the kid would've learned not to touch them." Then he had an even eerier thought. If this creature were a baby -- where did its mother and father lurk? The thought of two more invisible giants at large on the planet was unbearable. ing control over the alien mind, to let its own instincts come to the fore. There was' the possibility that it knew where its folks were, and would try moving in that direction. Or it might cry for its mother, and she'd hurry back. If there were invisible giants, the sooner the colony was informed the better. As Jerry's control of his host grew tenuous, he could feel the baby's mind taking over once again. Feeble pulsations reached him -- nothing like solid thought, but mere urgencies about comfort, food and affection. Jerry waited, in the background of the unformed mind, for something to happen. Then, suddenly, there was a shifting, something like a metal earthquake. A cold hard light of awareness focused on him, where he'd thought he was safely hidden in the background. "Who are you?" asked the awareness. It is not in so many words, of course. A mind speaks to another mind in incredibly swift shorthand. The actual thought-impulse that came to Jerry was a thick wave of curiosity, its stress laid upon identity. "I am a Learner," Jerry's thought replied. It was a self-sufficient response, since Jerry's concept of all that a Learner was was incorporated in the thought. "I see," said the alien. "You have memories of antagonism which are now gone from your intent. Explain." "I came to find a menace. I found a helpless child." "I see," came the cold, thoughtful reply. "Yes, that is how I sensed it." "Is your mother around? asked Jerry. "Or father?" "Dead," said the awareness. I am alone." At the thought, the intense thought of loneliness, a kindred spark flared in Jerry's own mind. The alien caught at the spark, recognized it. "Strange," it said. "Y ou, too, are alone. But it is a different aloneness." . Jerry's thoughts were whirling in confusion. To be read so easily by a baby was incredible to him. Yet the situation was without precedent. Perhaps a baby's mind was brighter than science gave credit. Since a mind needed no words or manual skills, the mind of a baby might be open to learn the thousand things necessary for adult survival. Maybe as a man learned to use his body, he forgot in proportion how to use his mind. "How can you know my aloneness?" asked Jerry. "I see it, there in your mind. It is plain to me. You have been misled. You are a helpless pawn of a singularly wicked scheme. The victim of a lie." J his conversation with Ollie Gibbs, to the things he had wanted to tell the other man but was unable to put into words. All the heaviness he had borne alone these many years was apparent to this mind he enhosted. The alien mind knew. Knew! "I see," it said again, though Jerry was unaware of expressing any conscious thought. "It is clear to me now. You have suffered much -- will suffer much. No hope for you, is there?" There was warmth in the words -- warmth, friendship and compassionate understanding. Suddenly, to this mind of an alien in its incongruous, invisible baby's body, Jerry found himself blurting the things he had never told to any man. Things which no Space Zoologist had ever discussed even with another member of that hapless clan. "They never told us," he said to the alien. "I don't hold any rancor because of it; they dared not tell us, lest we refuse to become one with them. They were fair, though. Long before we were indoctrinated, long before we'd been allowed to attempt our first Contact, we were told that there were dangers. Not the dangers we no had heard about, such as the imminent peril of dying if the host died while we were in Contact. Another danger was implied, one which we could only learn of by actually becoming Learners, and one which -- once we had learned of it -- would be impossible to escape. "With a little thought along the proper lines, we might almost have guessed it. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One of Newton's laws, applied in an area he did not even suspect existed. "Oh, we were a brave, adventurous lot, all of us. We would be Learners; no alien mind but we could enter it, and actually become the alien for the period of Contact. Thrills, danger and hairsbreadth escapes would be ours. Ultimate adventurers, they called us. And all along, we were fools." The alien refrained from comment, although Jerry could feel its mind waiting, listening, assimilating. "Contact had a drawback. A basic one which we might have guessed, if we hadn't been going around with stars in our eyes and a delightful feeling of superiority over the men who rould never know the interior on any minds but their own. In Contact, just as in simbathing, there is a delayed reaction, a kickback." "Sunbathing?" thought the alien. Jerry's mind swiftly opened for the alien's inspection his full storehouse of information on the subject. In an instant, the alien apprehended the fate that lay in wait for the careless Space Zoologist -- Bob, running a finger around inside his sweat-dampened uniform collar. "You have to be careful," said Jana, indicating the quartz panes that formed the ceiling and three walls of the solarium. "The quartz passes ultraviolet, unlike glass. You can pick up a severe burn if you sit out here too long without some sort of protection for your skin." The tech nodded. "The insidious thing about sunburn is that you only turn a little pink as long as you're out in the sunlight. It's when you've gone indoors, or the sun has set, or you put your clothes back on that the red-hot bum begins to show up on your flesh." "It's the light-pressure," said Jana. "As long as there's an influx of ultraviolet, the flesh continues to absorb it without showing much reaction. But as soon as you get away from the rays -- the bums show up... I wonder how Norcriss is making out. IV mean, then," said the  alien to Jerry, "that all the experiences you undergo in Contact are held back under the surface of your mind, waiting there until you let up on the incoming Contact experiences?" 'That's it," said Jerry, miserably. "In some of my Contacts, I've undergone pretty painful experiences. I've had an eye twisted out, an arm eaten and digested, been poisoned, nearly strangled -- you name a neardeath; I've been through it." "And your reaction?" thought the mind. "Nil," said Jerry, ruefully. "When I awakened from a Contact, my memory of my experiences was strictly a mental one. Like something I'd read in a book. There was no emotional reaction whatsoever. My heart beat its normal amount, my glands excreted normal perspiration, my muscles were relaxed. Not a trace of shock or any other after effect." "And later?" the mind asked gently. "Back on Earth," said Jerry, "the Space Zoologists have a thing we call the Comprehension Chamber. It's a room filled with couches and helmets, in which we can listen -- through replayed microtapes -- to all the Contacts our confreres have ever made. Perhaps 'listen' is a weak word. For all practical purposes, we are in Contact, so long as the tape runs. I thought this room was a wonderful adjunct to my education, but nothing more. I went there a lot at first. It was even more fun than the real thing because there was no danger of perishing. Tapes of zoologists who died while in Contact are never used in the Chamber." The mind waited, listening patiently. "So one week -- " Jerry's mind gave a' mental twinge akin to a physical shudder -- "one week I got bored. I decided not to go to the Comprehensive Chamber. I went out on a few dates, instead. Tennis, the movies, like that. And on the third day, I woke in the morning with a heart trying to pound its way through my ribs, with my bedsheets dripping with cold .perspiration, and lancing agony in my eye, my hand knotted into a fist of pain, lungs burning for air..." "Delayed reaction," said the mind. "Yes," said Jerry. "That was it. I recognized the pains right away, having been through them personally in Contact only a month before them. I had a horrible inkling of what was occurring. I called the medics at Space Corps Headquarters before I passed out. T They came, shot me full of morphine and stuck me into a helmet for twenty-four hours straight, to cram my reactive agonies back beneath an overload of vicarious Contacts. It worked pretty well. The pain was' gone when I awakened. But my nerves weren't the same afterward. I used to look forward to Contacts because I enjoyed them. Now I look forward to them because I dread what will happen if I don't have another one in time." "In time?" Contact -- real or vicarious -- at least once in forty-eight hours. I'Ve been trapped by my job. I'm doomed to do this job or die horribly. Some men, desperate for escape from this treadmill, have quit the Corps, tried to battle this kickback-effect. None of them have made it. They were found, all of them, in various states of agony. Dead, broken, burnt, tom..." "Psychosomatic pressures?" asked the mind. "Yes. Their minds, overborne by their emotions, self-hypnotized them into re-undergoing their experiences. And their bodies, duped by their minds, reacted. On a normal man, a hypnotically suggested burn can raise an actual blister. On a man who's opened his mind to the Contact-power -- his body can break, burn, dissolve or even evaporate.'" "Poor Jerry," said the alien mind, soothingly. A tingle formed slowly in Jerry's mind, a growing warmth, a vibration of utter affection. He was being consoled, being loved by the alien. It knew his troubles. It understood the sorrow of his life. It wanted only to keep him close, to tell him not to be afraid, to make him happy, comfortable, safe... Safe, and secure, and -- The glare of silent lightning leaped through Jerry's consciousness, jerking him back from the unnervingly delightful torpor he'd been letting overcome his thoughts. Something hard bumped against his forehead. He realized that he'd just sat up on the couch, knocking the helmet from his head with the shock of the breaking Contact. "Sir!" said the tech, pausing only to snap off the circuit switch before dashing to his side. "What the hell happened? I never saw you break Contact like that! Did you see the alien? Can it be destroyed?" Jerry groaned, tried to speak, then fell back onto the thick padding, unconscious. "What's the matter with him?" cried Jana, sensing the fright in the tech's attitude. "I don't know," he whispered. "I've never seen him act this way before. Whatever's out there, it's unlike anything we've ever encountered before! Here, you get some of your medics up here to see to him. I'm going to process this damned tape and see what's what!" Her face pale, Jana hurried off to do his bidding. The tech began to reset the machine so that the coded information on the tape might be translated into legible words. And Jerry Norcriss lay on the couch, sobbing and groaning like a man on the rack, although his mind was blanked by merciful unconsciousness. A baby?" choked the tech. "That thing out there is a baby?" "Does the tajje ever lie?" sighed Jerry, relaxing against the plump white pillows Jana had arranged under his back and shoulders. "Well, no," faltered the tech. "But a baby! Five hundred feet high -- and invisible -- and able to carry on an intelligent conversation?" "Which reminds me," said Jerry, sternly. "I am going to ask you to edit both the tape and that typewritten translation of that conversation. It's just as well too many people don't get the inside story on my job, and its rather rugged drawback. And as for yourself... Well, I can't order you to forget what you've read there." "I won't talk about it, sir, if that's what you mean," said the tech. "It's not such a hard secret to keep. All the crewman on the ship know there's something pretty awful about yotir job. I just happen to know what. All I'd would be, 'Oh, is that what it is!' Hardly worth it." "That's hardly a noble reason to keep a secret," Jerry murmured, looking narrow-eyed at the tech. The man grinned, then shrugged. "Makes my life easy, too. Now when you flare up at me. I'll know why, and skip it." "Thanks a hell of a lot," Jerry muttered. The tech laughed aloud. "But," the zoologist added soberly, "we did learn one surprising lesson today. The forty-minute Contact period can be broken, under certain stresses." The smile left the tech's face, and he looked earnestly puzzled. "I don't follow you, sir. There was nothing on the tape about -- " "Tape?" said Jerry. "You saw how quickly I came out, didn't you? What's that got to do with the tape?" "Sir," the tech said hesitantly, "you were under the helmet for the full forty." Jerry flopped back upon the pillows, staring at the other man as if he'd suddenly gone berserk. "That can't be," he said slowly. "I was in a long-life host. The clouds weren't even moving. That baby was living many subjective days in the forty-minute period." "Begging your pardon, sir," said the tech, "but you must be mistaken. You were gone the full forty." "That's impossible," said Jerry. Jana, who'd been standing back from the two men, stepped forward cautiously, apprehensive at butting into something that was not really her affair. "Excuse me. Lieutenant Norcriss," she said softly, "but Bob's right. You were gone as long as he says." "You don't understand, either of you!" Jerry snapped. "My timeawareness in a host is subject to the host's time-awareness. So far as this host was concerned, a day was a confoundedly long period. But I could tell the elapsed time by watching the clouds, the height of the sun. They didn't move, either of them, visibly..." "How's that again, sir? asked the tech. "How long did you seem to spend?" "Possibly an hour." 'Well, then." The tech shrugged. "But this had nothing to do with the host's subjective sense of time, Ensign. It was my own knowledge of objective time through watching the sun, the trees, the clouds. None of them moved during my subjective hour in the host-alien. So no time -- or very little time; barely a few minutes -- could have passed while I was enhosted, do you see?" "Lieutenant Norcriss," said Jana, abruptly. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but did you say clouds?" "Yes," said Jerry, puzzled by her intensity. "Why?" "There hasn't been a cloud in the sky today," she said awkwardly. "I mean -- Well, look for yourself!" Jerry turned his gaze upward through the quartz ceiling of the solarium. The sky, a fich turquoise, was smooth and unbroken save for the glaring gold orb of the sun, Sirius. He sat up then, looking out through the likewise transparent walls. As far as he could see, over storetops, cottage roofs, and distant green glades, the sky was that same unbroken blue. "But that's crazy!" he said, siiiking back against the pillows. "It couldn't have been like that all the time I was in Contact. Could it?" Jana and Bob exchanged an uncomfortable look. 'Well, sir," the tech said, "we weren't exactly watching the sky, if you know what I mean. But it was clear when you went into Contact. And it's clear now." His voice trailed off, uncertainly, but Jerry gave a slow thoughtful nod. "You're right. Ensign. It is, and it was. The likelihood of its clouding up for forty minutes, and then clearing again is so ridiculous I can't even consider it... And yet, I saw -- " Jerry stopped speaking, and shook his head. Then he waved a hand at the tech, abstractedly. "Get me some coffee. Ensign. I have to think, hard." " the planet in dark purple folds, Jerry was still gazing intently at nothingness, racking his brain for an answer. Bob, meantime, had checked the card against the ship's files on dealing with alien menaces, and had found -- much as both he and Jerry had suspected -- that there was no recommendation available. The menace was new. It would have to be approached strictly ad libidum. Whatever method served to rid the planet of the menace would then, not before, be incorporated into the electronic memory of the brain on the ship, to serve future colonies who might meet a similar alien species. "Any ideas, sir?" asked the tech, after a long silence from his superior. "None," Jerry admitted, not turning his head. "It's pretty damned difficult to find a solution to a problem until you're sure what the problem is." "Well," said the tech, "we played the radar all over the area where the tape said the thing was located. We got nothing. Maybe the kid's mother came back." "Just a second -- " said Jerry. "Ensign, could you rig the machine to give us, not a written transcript of that alien's description, but a drawing of it?" "Jeepers, sir!" choked the tech, taken aback. "I don't know. I'd have to talk with the engineers." "It should be possible. Hell, it's got to be. When I was enhosted, my mind transmitted back every bit of info on that body. A man who only knew mechanical drawing could sketch that shape, simply by following the measurement specifications as my mind recorded them. Go on. Ensign, get with it. One way or the other, I want a look at what we're dealing with." It was nearly midnight when Bob shook Jerry gently awake and handed him a small glossy rectangle of paper. Jerry, blinking his eyes against the sudden onslaught of light in the room as the tech threw the wall switch, stared blearily at the paper for a moment, blank and disoriented. "It's the picture, sir," Bob said, recognizing the bafflement on his superior's face for what it was. "I finally had the bright idea of turning the problem over to the brain, aboard the ship. It followed the specifications from the tape by drawing the picture in periods." "In what periods?" Jerry mumbled, still trying to come awake. "Not time-periods, sir. Pimctuation. Then, when it had the thing done, on a ten-by-fourteen-inch sheet of feed-paper from its roller, I had the ship's photographer take a snapshot and reduce it in size, so it looks at least as good as the average newspaper halftone job." Jerry nodded, absorbing the information even as his eyes crept over the image in his hands. "Looks strangely familiar," he said, studying it closely. "If you'll pardon what soimds like a gag, sir," began the tech, "I think that the picture -- in fact, we all think -- " "Yes?" said Jerry, looking at the man. "Well, the consensus among the crew was that this baby here looks a hell of a lot like you, sir." Jerry sat where he was, his eyes on Bob's face, for a long moment, as fingers of ice took hold of his spine. Then, with unreasoning apprehension, he turned his gaze back upon the near-photographic likeness he held. "Ensign," he said. after a minute. "This is a picture of me." "But sir, it can't be," said the tech. "You're wrong," said Jerry, letting the paper drop to the floor. "It can be, because it is. And all at once I think I know why." Without warning, Jerry swung , his legs over the side of the couch and jumped to his feet. "Listen," he said urgently, "there's no time to lose. Get the hospital staff together, fast, and bring me back their best psycheman. I need a hspnotist." "A h-hyp -- ?" the tech blurted, confused, then gave an obedient nod and hurried out, shaking his head all the way to the switchboard. ' Can you do it? That's all I care to knew," Jerry's voice crackled, his eyes flashing with authority. "Y-Yes, I think so," quavered the other man. "If you can be hypnotized, I mean." "All Space Zoologists have the brainpower necessary to be perfect subjects," Jerry snapped. "Quickly, now, Doctor. I've wasted one Contact already." "Very well, sir," said the man. "If you'll lie back, now, and make your mind blank -- " "I know, I know! Get on with it, will you!" Bob and Jana stood back in the shadows beside the towering metal control board, listening in silence as the hypnotist put Jerry under, deeper and deeper, until his mind was readily suggestible. Then he made the statements Jerry had told him to make, and with a snap of his fingers brought the zoologist out of hypnosis. "You heard. Ensign?" asked Jerry. "Did he do exactly as I tbld him to?" "Sir!" protested the doctor. "I mean no offense," said Jerry. "But if your words left my mind too free, too human somehow, the alien would sense it. And a ruse like this one might not work on a second attempt, once the alien had been apprised of our intent." "He did, sir," said Bob. "Word for word, as you told it to him." "Good," Jerry said. "Thank you. Doctor. And good night." Uh -- yes," said the man, finally realizing he was being peremptorily dismissed after coming all the way across the town from his warm bed in the black morning hours. "Good night to you,  Sir. H e fumbled his way out the door, and Jana, after a glance at Bob, shut it after him. Bob stood beside the control board, waiting as Jerry once more adjusted the helmet upon his head and lay back on the couch. "All right?" he called to the tech, as Jana, now walking nervously on tiptoe, though there'd been no injunction against noise, hurried to Bob's side and took his arm. "Ready, sir," Bob said, keeping his voice steady. "You've set the stopwatch?" warned Jerry. "I depress the starter the same instant I turn on the machine," said Bob. "All right, then," said Jerry. Bob's right hand threw a switch. Even as it snapped home, his left thumb had jabbed down upon the stopwatch button. The long red sweephand began clicking with relentless eagerness about the dial. On the couch Jerry stiffened, then relaxed. "You'd better stay with him," Bob cautioned Jana. "The machine's on automatic. If I'm not back on time, it'll take care of itself." "Back on time?" she gasped. "But you can't be. Bob. If what he said about the timing -- " Bob shut his eyes and gripped his forehead between thumb and fingers. "Yes, of course. I'm being an idiot. This maneuver is something new. But -- " he withdrew his hand from his face and smiled at the girl -- "you stay with him anyhow. I'd feel better -- safer -- if you weren't with me and the others." "Yes, Bob," she said, in a faint shadow of her normal voice. "Be careful." Bob grinned with more confidence than he felt, turned and hurried from the room. Jana moved slowly across the floor to the couch where Jerry Norcriss lay in unnatural slumber, and stood staring down at his strange, young-old face, and her eyes were bright with quiet wonder... V ;#TIAT'S this, what's this?"  rasped Jerry's mind. "Where have I gotten to, now?" "It's all right," said a soothing voice. "You're with me, now." "Oh? Oh?" Jerry's mind said, snickering. "And who might you be?" It was dark as he looked out through the alien eyes, but a quick patting of his paw across his face reassured him that his sharp white incisors, muzzle and stiff gray whiskers were intact and healthy. "How can I be you?" asked Jerry. "If I'm a gray rat and you're a gray rat, what am I doing here?" "You've come to spy on me, I know," said the soothing voice. "But see? You have nothing to fear, nothing at all. I'm not going to htirt you. You find no menace in me. Do you?" "No. No menace. No danger. I'm safe, I'm secure, I'm warm and loved..." "Relax," said the alien. "Relax, and let. me have full control again. You can sleep if you do. You can rest. I'll take care of you, thrust in that." "Yes. Sleep. Rest. No more running, hiding, fearing..." said Jerry Norcriss, the gray rat-mind in the invisible body of another rat much like himself... "Come on with that flashlight, damn it!" Bob raged, leading the other three crewmen through the woods. Two of them carried rifles, one had a flamethrower, and Bob himself carried one of the new bazookas with a potent shortrange atomic warhead. Ollie, the man with the light, hurried up to him with a quick apology. "Okay, okay," Bob said. "But I've got to see this dial -- Ah, yes. This is the way, all right. Come on. Ollie, keep that beam so it spills on the tracking-cone dial as well as on the earth. We don't dare risk losing our way. There are only seven minutes left until Contact is broken." "Yes, sir. I'll keep it right on there," Ollie said. "But about the lieutenant -- are you sure he won't -- " "That's what the stopwatch is for. We must strike just as Contact is being broken. Any sooner, and we kill Lieutenant "Norcriss with the alien. Any later, and the alien kills us. The sameway it did the others who came upon it." "But what does it do? What does it look like?" Ollie persisted. "Damn it, there's no time to talk now! Just keep that light steady, and hurry!" The men plunged onward through the woods, the white circle of light from the arc-torch splashing the cold leaves and damp, colorless grass with sickly, stark illumination. your hold," the alien was saying. Then its mind-voice stopped. Jerry, too, had seen the dancing white freckles that spattered the boles and branches of the nearby trees. The darkness of the woods was rent by streamers of ruler-straight light beams. They began to radiate like luminous wheel-spokes through the tangled leaves of the woods. "Men!" cried the alien mind. "Men are coming here. Men, our enemies!" Jerry, still in partial control of the invisible rat-body, fought the flight-impulse that began to stir beneath the unseen skin. "Run!" shrieked the alien mind. "You fool, can't you see that we must flee this place? Quickly, or we are done for!" "Run -- Flee -- " Jerry said dully, within the alien mind. 'Yes. Run from men... the eternal enemy, men. Run, hide,a dark corner, under a bush, behind a tree..." He felt his own mind joining that of the alien in the preliminary tension that comes before flight... Then the glaring beam of the arc-torch was full in his eyes, and the hypnotic illusion, at this, the trigger of his psyche, was shattered. And Jerry once again knew himself to be a man. A man in the body of a rat -- the animal which Jerry Norcriss loathed most of all creatures! "Run!" screamed the alien. "Why don't you -- !" Its commands ceased as it realized the difference within the mind that had invaded its body. "You again!" it cried, trying wildly to reassume the placid plump image of that unseen baby once more. "You're too late," said Jerry, fighting its will with his own as the crewmen broke from the underbrush into the clearing, and the tech, pointing straight at him, yelled a caution to the man with the flame thrower. The man bringing, up the terrible gaping mouth of that weapon halted, waiting, as the tech stared at the stopwatch in his hand. "Five seconds!" cried the tech. "Four... three... two... one... Get it, quick!" Jerry, still within the mind and watching with the same horrified fascination as his host, saw the puff of flame within the flametube of the weapon, then saw the insane red flower blossoming with its smoking yellow tendrils toward his face -- And the silent white lightning flared -- And he sat up on the couch, back in the solarium. "Did it work? Did it work, sir?" she cried. "Is Bob -- " Jerry patted her hand. "Bob's all right. He was on time. Just on time." "i still don't understand, sir," said the nurse, sinking onto the couch beside him without waiting for an invitation. "I don't understand any of this!" For an instant, Jerry resented this familiarity, then felt slightly overstuffed, and slipped an arm paternally across her slim shoulders. "I'll explain," he said. "It'll pass the time till he gets back." Jana nodded. "The alien," Jerry said softly, "was a mimic. A perfect mimic. It was, while non-intelligent, of an abnormally well developed mind in one function: telepathy. That's how it could carry on apparently intelligent mental conversation with me, during my first contact. It could sense my questions, then probe my mind for the answers I wanted most to hear -- and play them back to me. For my forty minutes of contact, it told me only what I wanted to know, like a selective echo. It needed no understanding of my questions, nor of the answers it plucked from my mind. It had one instinct: selfpreservation. It could sense my question, select an uncontroversial answer from my mind and feed it back to me, without really understanding how it warded me off as a menace to it, any more than a dog understands why lowering its ears and hanging its head as it whines can fend off the wrath of its master. It works; that's all the creature cares about." "But how did you know -- ?" Jana asked. "I didn't," Jerry replied. "It fooled me completely. Until the Ensign -- Bob told me that my full forty minutes in Contact had elapsed, despite my knowledge that the sun and clouds had remained motionless during my Contact. That threw me. I'll admit, for quite a while. It just didn't make sense." Jana's eyes widened as she suddenly understood. "And then you realized that you had seen the sun and clouds motionless because that was what you expected to experience when enhosted in a baby!" "That's it," Jerry nodded. "It made an error with the baby, though. It was able to duplicate it in almost every respect except two: Size and appearance." "Why?" asked Jana. "And why appear as a baby at all?" Jerry. "The size was off because the first thing I saw when I blinked open my eyes was a distant copse of trees, which I took to be an upright pile of leafy twigs. Since my mind possessed information regarding the relative size of babies and twigs, the alien immediately made sure my mind saw other things in the same perspective. By the time it realized it had made an error, it was too late to normalize the baby's dimensions; that would have given its fakery away." "But why did the thing choose a baby?" "Because that was the thing's protection! It had a powerful hypnotic power, one that worked on its victims minds directly through its telepathic interference with sensory perception. It always appeared as the thing the victim would be least likely to harm. In my case, a baby. But it made a slight error there, too. I'm a bachelor, Jana. There's only one baby with whom I ever had any great amount of experience: my self." "And the invisibility?" "I have no recollection, even now, of my body when I was a baby. I may have stared at my toes, played with my fingers, but they just never registered on my consciousness as being part of myself. So the thing was stuck when it came to reproducing me visually, since it depended upon my own memory for details. But it was able to supply the way I'd felt as a baby. Every baby has an acute awareness of its own skin; it will cry if any particle of its flesh is bothered in the slightest. So the alien fed the 'feel' of my baby-body back to me, if not the view. Which is why the electronic brain on the ship was able to duplicate the detail into an almost perfect replica of my babyhood likeness." Jana nodded, as she finally understood the meaning of that strange illusion. "And this time? That post-hypnotic suggestion you had the doctor give you, I mean: that you'd think you were a gray rat until such time as the light of the arc-torch caught you directly in the eyes..." "Duplicity, Jana. It had to be that way. The alien was very sure of its powers. If I returned, and it were a baby again, I couldn't attack it or thwart its ends. And such an attack was necessary. I had to be able to fight it, to hold it in place for that last moment before it was destroyed. Which is why I chose a gray rat, an animal I cannot bear the sight of. When the light struck my eyes and I became myself again, I caught the alien unawares. Then, before it could change to a baby, and start lulling me back into camaraderie, it was too late. Bob had given the order to fire. And here I am." in the corridor. The door burst open and Bob rushed in, his face anxious and creased with worry until he saw Jerry sitting on the couch, alive and well. "Whoosh!" The tech expelled a mingled chuckle and sigh as he sank into a chair opposite the zoologist. "Well, sir, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you. I couldn't be sure you'd gotten out of that thing alive until I got back here. Glad you made it, sir. Damn glad!" "That 'thing' you mentioned," said Jerry. "What did it actually look like?" Bob jerked his head toward the corridor. "The other guys are bringing it along. I kind of thought you'd want a peep at it." As more footfalls were heard from the corridor. Bob bounced to his feet again, and stepped to the door. "Hold it a minute, guys," he said, then turned back into the room. "Jana, I don't think you'd better stick around for this. It's not very pretty." The girl hesitated, then flashed him a smile and shook her head. "I'll stay. It can't look as ugly as a bad case of peritonitis on the surgeon's table. If I can take that without upchucking, I can take anything." Bob shrugged. "Suit yourself, honey. Just remember you got fair warning." He leaned back out the door. "Okay. Bring it in." The crewmen, looking a little ill, came slowly into the room, bearing a bloated, scorched object on a stretcher thejr'd contrived from two long poles and their jackets. They set it onto the tiled floor before the zoologist, then stepped away, all of them wiping their hands hard against their trousers in ludicrous unison, though their grip on the poles had not brought them into actual contact with the alien's corpse. "There it is, sir," said Ollie Gibbs. "And you are very welcome to it." Jana, to her credit, had not upchucked, but she went a shade paler, and her mouth grew tight. Jerry studied the burnt husk, from its sharp-fanged mouth -- easily eighteen inches from side to side -- to its stubby centipedal cilia under the grossly swollen body. "Damn thing's all bloat, slime and mouth," said the tech, suddenly shuddering. "I wonder if its victims felt those jaws rending them open, or if it kept their minds fooled through to the end?" "I don't think we'll ever know that. Ensign," said Jerry. "Unless you feel like going out there and playing victim to one of this thing's confreres?" "No thanks, sir," said Bob, so swiftly that Jana laughed. 'Td rather fall out an airlock in hyperspace." here's what we do to " get rid of this thing, then," said Jerry. "Since it assumes a form that's the least likely to be harmed by whatever presence stimulates its mimetic senses, we'll have to trick it. Before this thing decomposes too far, rig it up with an electrical charge, and stimulate its nerve-centers artificially. That ought to give you an accurate microtape of its lifepulse. Then hook the tape to a scanner-beam, and send the lifepulse into the mine-area. When the fellows of this creature react to it, they'll assume the safest possible form: their own." "I get you, sir!" said Bob. "Then all the miners have to do is see it for what it is, and shoot it." Jerry nodded. "It'll mean all miners will have to go armed for awhile. But that's better than getting eaten alive by one of these." "You sure their presence won't trigger the thing's mimetic power?" asked Bob, uneasily. "Not if you give full power to the scanner-beam," Jerry replied. "It'll muffle their life-pulse radiations under the brunt of the artificial one." "Good enough, sir," said Bob. "I'll rig it right away." Jerry shook his head. "No need. You could use some rest, I'm sure. The morning'll be soon enough. Meantime, you can see this young lady home. The rest of you," he said to the hovering crewmen, "are dismissed, too." The men, eager to be away from the thing, saluted smartly and hurried out of the solarium, buzzing with wordy relief. Jana paused a moment, staring at the creature whose strange powers had destroyed her father. Then she turned to Bob. "I think I'll go to Jim's place," she said. "I want him to know." She moved her gaze to Jerry. "I owe you a lot," she said. "We all owe you a lot" Embarrassed by the warmth of her praise, Jerry could only mumble something diffident and look the other way. He was taken quite by surprise by the pressure of cool moist lips against the side of his face. When he looked back at the pair, Bob and Jana were on their way out the door. Only when he heard the elevator doors at the end of the corridor close behind them did he move to the still-warm corpse of his onetime adversary, with a look of deepest compassion on his face. "Well," he said gently, "you've lost. The planet goes back to the invaders. Once again. Earth has successfully obliterated the opposition." He reached out a hand and touched the hulking thing on the floor. "Good-by," he said. "And I'm sorry." Jerry Norcriss wasn't thinking about the deadliness of the thing, nor of the deaths of the hapless lars he'd saved the investors holding Praesodynimium stock. He was thinking of a voice that -- even unintelligently, even in the course of deception -- had said, 'Toor Jerry. Rest... Relax. You're safe... Secure..." "You really had me going for a while, baby," he said, then blinked at the sudden sharp sting in his eyes, and hurried from the room. pink against the black eastern sky, and the air was cool and fresh in his nostrils. As he crossed the street from the hospital, heading toward the landing field and his shipboard bunk, a hurrying figure from the end of the block caught up with him and began to pace his stride, panting slightly. "Talk about happy," said Bob, glumly. 'When Jana told her boy friend the news, they went into such a clinch I didn't even stick around to be introduced. Seemed a nice enough guy, I guess. Hope she'll be happy with him." Jerry recognized the gloominess of the tech's mood, and its cause, so didn't say anything. After a moment. Bob seemed to recover himself a little. "Sir," he said, "there's one thing still bugs me about this alien." "Oh?" said Jerry, halting. "What's that. Ensign?" "How'd the initial roborocket miss the thing and its kind when it circled the planet before colonization began?" "That's a moot question," said Jerry. "But my conjecture is that the scanner always caught it when it was assuming some other form. Since its victims were always indigenous to this planet, the things familiar to them were also of this planet, and the scanner-beam couldn't detect any lifepulses which were dissimilar to already-known species." "I'll be damned," said Bob. "It's almost childishly simple when you explain it." Then, as Jerry went to start off again. Bob stopped him with an exclamation. "What about that melting mine car I read about on the translation sheets? Was that for real, or wasn't it?" Jerry shook his head. "Part of the general mimetic illusion, like the motionless clouds and unmoving trees. It let me see what I expected to see. In reality, I was just in the woods near the mine area, where you came upon the creature to destroy it." Jerry started slowly moving away once more. A few steps further, and Bob halted again. "One final point, sir. That life-pulsing reading of point-nine-nine-nine. If the thing's pulsation was that powerful, I should think it would've been a lot harder to knock off than it was." "You're right," said Jerry. "It would have been. But its life-pulse wasn't nearly that high." "But the scanner-beam -- " Bob protested. "When the colony sent up that roborocket, after those miners vanished, it reported an unknown life-pulse of point-ninenine-nine. If that wasn't the alien's life-pulse, what the devil was it?" Jerry patted Bob on the shoulder. "You're forgetting the mimicry. The roborocket they sent up caught the alien off-guard, in its own shape, not imitating some other life-form's pulsations. It detected the beam, since a scanner picks up mental pulses, and it instantly assumed the life-pulse of a creature it assumed no roborocket would worry about." "What? What life-pulse, sir? What kind of life?" "Atomic life. Ensign," said Jerry. "That bright green blip you and I studied So assiduously was the life-pulse of an atom-powered creature. It was another roborocket." And as Bob stared after him, stupefied, Jerry Norcriss made his way across the landing field toward a well-earned bed -- and oblivion. #. # bound volumes excerpts, novels, novelettes, short stories. Taken from Popular, Argosy, All-Story, Munsey, Air Aces, etc., -- many covers included. Dated #'s to #'s; many impossible to obtain in any form. # per volume. As one unit, cpmplete set # #. Complete Science Wonder, Air Wonder -- June # to Winter # -- includes # bound volumes, good to fine condition. # #. Complete set Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels -- # to #I -- fine condition, # Many other complete sets. Send your want list. Prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N. Y. #I #th Avenue Brooklyn A, New York This was the endless problem of all spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men tomorrow on what they had eaten todayl ballgame and a long way off from the girls, men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion can never replace practice in an art Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of seafaring can be read from a commissary list. In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers, celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The Limey sailor got the name of the antiscorbutic citrus squeezed into his dieta fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age only # S garnish for our groimdside gin-and-tonic. And today our And today we I are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the Chlorella and Scenedesmus algae that, by the road to the larger Space without. Should any groimdsman dispute the importance of bellyfurniture in history -- whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire -- he is referred to the hundredand-first chapter of Moby Dick, a book spooled in the amusentent tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space. The Pequotfs crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won their war on canned pork and beans. The Triton made her underwater periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and concentrated applejuice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the skies, a decline set in. The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.  Med School, itching to look at black sky through a viewport, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah #:#, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's tablescraps and jakes-water. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount. Slimeheads remember the H. M. S. Aiax fiasco, for example, in which a galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the Ajax in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think of the Ben jo Maru incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing Saccharomycodes yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at Piano West after a twentyweek drunk: the alien yeast had got into the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent bite he ate to a superior grade of sake. And for a third footnote to the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks," Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the Charles Partlow Sale. The Sale blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed -- these to be planted in the maria to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann, the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was Robert Bailey. Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half T pounds of dry food. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a statement of the least fuel a man can run on. Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would hav filled the cargo compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the C. P. Sale no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat, protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the algae fed us. All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble from our # shaves and the clippings from our # haircuts en route and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in essential amino acids. The algae -- dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a hundred ways -- served hs a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of squeamishness. Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-cardpuncher extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer, guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder. Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim is the Cook. This trip, the-man-youlove-to-hate was our Captain. If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties of his office, Winkelmarm supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-byjowl every day in a nacelle the size of a Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social hemorrhoid. The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook. It was Winkelmann who saw humerous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey, Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our imfortunate shipmate "BellyRobber." It was Winkelmann who discussed haut cuisine and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any other name than The Kitchen Cabinet. Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste of synthetic methionine -- an essential amino acid not synthesized by Chlorella -- by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink, textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mockmeat. For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not. "BellyRobber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea, "you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun in my home country: Mensch ist was er isst. It means, you are what you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this Schweinerei you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin with his napkin, heaved his bulk you set a table second to none." Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies, we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings." "You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up the good work, though, and you'll keep our nine heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The piece de resistance was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really steak." Bailey stared across the diningcubby toward Winkelmann, silently imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed. "Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me this pondscum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and cycler-salt." seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow. Captain," I said. I gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding. "Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and grasshoppers, to stay alive." "Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded. "Only good food,' Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This -- the brain that guides the ship -- carmot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me, Belly-Robber?" Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really don't know what I can do to please you." "You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban Hausfrau with the vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums or weeping. Only -- can you understand this, so simple? -- food that will keep my belly content and my brain alive." "Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British term Dumb Insolence. Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilotcubicle. I followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard. You're asking him to make bricks without straw." Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think. Doctor, that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged man?" "Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said. "You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without up from the table, and climbed up the ladder from the diningcubby. ##C, do you like Winkel-'mann?" the Cook asked me. "Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship." "I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!" "His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in my time, and I'll testify that Captain fat." Bailey nodded from his oneman cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook waved my gift aside. "Not now. Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about tomorrow's menu." The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of straw," Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment, to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks." "You're driving him too hard. Sir," I said. "He'll crack." "Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys many discomforts. That will be all. Doctor Vilanova." "Crew morale on the ship..." I began. "That will be all. Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated. we threaded our way along the elliptical path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would cheerlessly appear in the diningcubby, to have his culinary genius acidly called in question again. I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher manship. We were served, for instance, an ersatz hot turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae a lipid buttersubstitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said. "We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second helping of the pseudoturkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics student. That will be all, Bailey." The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having .eaten enough on their last few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed, seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside, and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.  allowed ten kilograms of personal effects besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of books. playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a fact, had used up his weightallowance in bringing aboard a case of spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice, and a dozen others. Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd exercised his option of returning his personaleffects weight allowance to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram. To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come aboard their ship mothernaked. But this was not the case with WinkelmannT His personal-effects baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet on the mysterious box as he sat to eat. "What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today, Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook. Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd had much practice. "I've been working on the. problem of steak, Sir," he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?" "I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest niess should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like babyfood. Right?" "Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the steak-substrate -- Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special seasonings -- through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out. Voila! I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine meat." "Remarkable, Bailey," I said. "It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I never cared to see the ugly , beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils the meal." Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates. "Try it," he urged the Captain.  off a corner of his algaeal steak. The color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "No too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a more reasonable man. "But it still needs something... something," Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella. "Aha! I have it!" "Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked. "This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the messtable and ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's masterpiece. "The scarlet burialshroud for the failures of Cooks." Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth, Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled. "Damn you!" Bailey shouted. Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook. "... Sir," Bailed added. "That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a bottle on the "table for all my future meals, BellyRobber." "But, Sir..." Bailey began. "You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded. "I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, squareheaded, slave-driving..." "Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous." "Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion. "Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said. "Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers and the men have been more than satisfied with his work." "That only suggests atrophy of their tastebuds," Winkelmann said. "Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added. the mess compartment together. I steered him to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said. "No, dammit!" he shouted. "Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it. After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said. "You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to be ashamed of." "He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut and Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art out of an algae tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet of the Friends of Escoffier!" "Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to stat;jt that restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman." "I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be an apt confederate of vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed. For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in horribleness, a pottage or boiled Chlorella vulgaris that looked and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey, red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "BellyRobber, you're improving a little at last." Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you. Sir," he said. I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was a price destroyed the Willy Winkelmann theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I thought. Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were vehement in their protests, blaming the Cajtain, in his absence, for the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates. in the Safe's mess compartment, we ate our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier, of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it. Doc!" one of the firstshift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"  "Then he's beat, the Captain  at his game," I said. f "The Dutchman won't want to I mess ketchup on these steaks," I the crewman said. I sat, imfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of ' us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine I with my fork. But they were ' drenched in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was j gone. Bailey appeared in the galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey," I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is actually good." "Thanks, Doc," Bailey said. I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph; you couldn't have done it without him." "You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?" Bailey asked. "He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our Captain may be a hard A man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum performance out of his Ship's Cook." Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked. I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job. He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked, spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll have to admit that I do." Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warmingpan onto my plate. "Then have another piece," he said. I "W "E need data," I said as I manipulated the scanner and surveyed our little domain of rocks and vegetation. "The animate life we have collected so far is of a low order." "There is nothing here with intelligence," Ven agreed, gesturing at the specimens in front of us. "Although they're obviously related to our race, they're quite incapable of constructing those artifacts we saw on our way down." "Or of building electone communications or even airboats," I added. "I expect that there is only one way to get what we want -- and that's to go looking for it," Ven said as she smoothed her antennae with a primary digit. "I also expect," she added acidly, "that there might have been other places from which it wouldn't be creatures were huge, hairy, surly -- and males were always chasing the females. But what else could you expect of mammals? so hard to start looking. Or did you have to set us down in this isolated spot?" I glared at her and she flushed a delicate lavender. "Do you think I landed here because I wanted to?" I asked with some bitterness, inflating my cheek pouches to better express my disgust. "There were less than two vards of useful fuel left on the reels when I cut the drives. There isn't enough to take us across this valley. We came close to not making planetfall here at all." "Oh," Ven said in a small voice, vocalizing as she always does when she is embarrassed. Like most females, she finds it difficult to project normally when she is under emotional stress. Afraid or angry she can blow a hole in subspace; but embarrassed, her projections are so faint that I have to strain my antennae to receive them. Her aura turned a shamefaced nacreous lavender. I couldn t stay angry with her. She was lovely, and I was proud to be her mate. The Eugenics Council had made an unusually good match when they brought us together. The months we had spent aboard ship on our sabbatical had produced no serious personality conflicts. We fitted well, and I was more happy than any Thalassan had a right to be. "We shall have to try other measures," I said. "Although there aren't very many natives hereabouts, we had better start looking for them rather than wait for them to look for us." I felt disappointed. I was certain that we made enough disturbance coming down for them to be here in droves, which was why I had the robots camouflage the ship to look like the surrounding rocks. There could be such a thing as too much attention. "They could have mistaken us for a meteor," Ven said. "Probably," I agreed. "But it would have saved a great deal of trouble if one of them had come to us." I sighed. "Oh well," I added, "it was only a hope, at best." "I could explore," Ven offered. "I was about to suggest that," I said. "After all, the atmosphere is breathable although somewhat rich in oxygen, and the gravity is not too severe. It would be best to wait until dark before starting out. There may be danger. After all, this is an alien world, and Authority knows what's out there." Her antennae dropped, her aura dimmed to gray and her integument turned a greenish black. "It doesn't sound pleasant," she said. npHE sun dipped below the hori- zon with an indecently gaudy display of color. After the last shades of violet had faded, I opened the airlock and watched Ven, a darker blot in the darkness of the night, slip away into the shadows. She went unarmed. I wanted her to take a blaster, but she refused, saying that she had never fired one, wouldn't know what to do with one -- and that its weight would hold her back. I didn't like it. But I was unable to go with her, and it was better that she did as she wished at this time. I sat for a while in the entrance port watching the slow wheel of the stars across the heavens, and for a moment I wished that I were a female with the rugged physique to withstand this gravity. As it was, the beauty of the night was lost on me. I breathed uncomfortably as the pressure crushed my body and made every joint and muscle ache. Males, I reflected gloomily, ' weren't what they were in the old days. Too much emphasis on mind, and not enough on body, had made us a sex of physical weaklings. I wondered bitterly if a brain was as worthwhile as the Council insisted. The next few hours were miserable. I worried about Ven, imagining a number of unpleasant things which might have happened to her. I dragged myself into the control room and fiddled with the scanners, trying the infra and ultra bands as well as the normal visible spectrum in the hopes of seeing something. And just as I was beginning to feel the twinges of genuine fear, I heard Ven. Her projection was faint. "Help me, Eu! Help me!" I stumbled to the entrance port, dragging a blaster with me. "Where are you?" I projected. I couldn't see her, but I could sense her presence. "Here, Eu. Just below you. Help me. I can't make it any farther!" Somehow I managed it. I don't know from where the strength came, but I was on the ground lifting her, pushing her onto the flat surface of the airlock -- clambering up -- dragging her in and closing the lock behind us. I looked down at her with pride. Who would have thought that I, a male, could lift a mature female into a ship's airlock even against normal gravity? I chuckled shakily. Strange things happen to a body when its owner is stressed and its suprarenals are stimulated. She looked up at me. "Thank you," she said simply. But there was more behind the words than the bare bones of customary gratitude. T helped her into the refresher and as she restored her tired body I pelted her with numerous questions. "Did you succeed?" I asked. "Better than I expected." "Did you find a native?" "Two of them." The cubicle glowed a pale green as her strength came back. "Where?" "Two vursts from here -- down the hill. They're camped near a road. They have a big ground car with them." "Did you see them?" "Yes." "What did they look like." The radiance in the cubicle flicked out. "They're horrible!" Ven said. "Monstrous! Four or five times our size! I never saw anything so hideous!" "Did they see you?" "No, I don't think so. They weren't looking in my direction at first. And I don't think they can sense, because I was frightened and they didn't respond to my projection." She was beginning to recover. "You couldn't have been too frightened," I said. "I didn't hear you -- and you can reach farther than two vursts." "Mostly I was repelled," Ven admitted. "Why?" "I don't know. They smelled bad, but it was more than that. There was something about them that made my antennae lie flat against my ears. Anyway -- I did a foolish thing." The cubicle turned a pale embarrassed lavender. "What did you do?" I demanded. "I ran away," Ven said. "And I made a lot of noise." "All right -- all right," I said impatiently. "Go ahead and tell the rest of it." "By the time I stopped running I was down at the bottom of the hill," Ven said. "I was dead tired -- and with all that rock to climb to get back to the ship. I didn't really think I'd make it." "But you did," I said proudly. "You're a real Thalassan -- pure green." The cubicle slowly brightened again. "Can you find them again?" I asked. "Of course. I wasn't lost at any time. If I hadn't panicked. I'd have been back a whole lot sooner." "Can you go now?" S HE shivered with distaste. "I can," she said, "but I don't want to." "That's nonsense. We can't let a little physical revulsion stop us. After all, there are some pretty grim things to be seen in this universe." "But nothing like this! I tell you, Eu, they're horrible! That's the only word that can describe them." "Take a stat projector -- " I began. "Aren't you coming?" she asked. "Two vursts on this planet? What do you think I am?" Her face hardened. "I don't know," she said coldly, "but I do know this -- if you don't come, I won't go." I groaned. From her aura I could tell she meant every word. It angered me, too, because Thalassan females usually don't defy a male. "Remember," I said icily, "that you're not the only female on Thalassa." "We're not on Thalassa," she said. Her aura was a curious leaden color, shot through with sullen red flares and blotches. "I have no right to force you," she went on stubbornly, "but I can't handle them alone. You simply have to come." "But Ven -- I'm a physical cipher. This gravity flattens me. I won't make it." "You will," she said. "I'll help you. But this job needs a male mind." It was deliberate flattery, I suppose. But there was an element of truth in it. Ven obviously couldn't do it, and obviously she thought I could. I couldn't help feeling pride in her need for me. I liked the feeling. For, after all, we hadn't been mated so long that there was too great an amount of familiarity in our relationship. The Eugenics Council had taken care of that very effec-. tively when we announced our plans for our sabbatical. "All right -- I'll go," I repeated. With a quick light movement she touched my antennae with her primary digits. The shock ran through me clear to my pads. "You're good," she said -- and the way she said it was an accolade. II ting a faint yellow aura that lighted the area around her. "Follow me." She staggered a little under the weight of the equipment she was carrying. I wished that we had enough power to energize an air sled -- but we had none to spare. The robots had used up most of our scanty power metal reserves in camouflaging the ship and the adaptor had taken the rest. This was going to be a miserable trip. It was going to be painful, uncomfortable and perhaps even dangerous. It was. We went across rocks, through sharp-twigged brush -- across the saw-edged grass of the meadow below us, over more rocks, and down-hill along a faint double trail that never seemed to end. I was nearly dead with weariness when Ven's aura flicked off and the dark closed in. My proprioceptors were screaming as I sank to the ground and panted the rich air of this world in and out of my aching chest. "They're just ahead," Ven whispered. "Around that next group of rocks. Be careful." We moved forward cautiously. "There was a fire," Ven whispered. "There isn't now," I said. "I can't sense any heat." The night air blew a rank odor to my nostrils. My spines stiffened! I knew what Ven meant when she said that these natives repelled her. I had smelled that scent before -- the scent of our ancestral enemies! So these were the natives, the dominant life on this planet! I gagged, my tongue thick in my throat. "You see?" Ven asked. I nodded. "It's pretty bad," I said. "It reminds me of a zoo," Ven answered softly. I nodded. It did and it was thoroughly unpleasant. I strained my perception to its limits, pushing it through the gelid darkness, searching until I found the natives. "They're asleep," I said. "What's that?" "Suspension of consciousness. Something like estivation." "Oh. Then we can approach safely?" "If we are quiet," I replied. "Sleep is broken easily and consciousness returns quickly." The trail deepened beyond the rocks -- two rutted tracks about three vards apart. We moved forward cautiously, our senses keyed to their highest pitch. The night was oppressively still and every movement rasped loudly. My breath came fast and shallow. My heart pounded and my musk glands were actively secreting as I parted the opening to their cloth shelter, and sensed the dim forms within. "Stat," I projected and Ven handed me the weapon. It was almost more than I could manage in my weakened condition, but I aimed it and fired a full intensity blast at the nearest lumpy figure. It jerked and flopped inside its coverings, and the second form sat up with horrid speed! A roar of soimd came from it as the air was filled with its fetid odor. In panic I triggered a blast at the menacing figure, and it, too, flopped and laid still. I ran my tongue over the roof of my dry mouth and called to Ven. "They're quiet now. Come in and see what we've got." "Ugh!" Ven snorted as she entered the tent at my heels. "It stinks!" "They're not the sweetest life form in the universe," I said as I prodded the huge mound beside me, looking for reflexes that would indicate returning consciousness. "What are they?" Ven asked. "Mammals," I said. "No wonder I thought of a zoo," Ven said. "But they're so big!" "Not on all planets," I said. "Obviously," Ven commented. "Well -- what's next? Let's get this done. I'm suffocating!" "Hand me the probe kit," I said. I selected two of the longest probes and made my way up to the head of the nearest monster. I scanned its braincase until I found the area I wanted and inserted the probes, driving them through the heavy bone and into the brain beneath. I clipped on the short antennae and stepped back. "Turn the control to low," I said. "Place the clips on your antennae. Now think of rising." The bulk beside me stirred and Ven gave a squeak of terror. "It's all right," I assured her. "Turn the control back to zero. This one's secure." I went to the second and treated it like the first, and felt a justifiable pride as it reacted. Not many men could implant neuroprobes correctly on the first attempt. "All right, Ven. You can go out now. Take the controls with you. I'll see what I can do to get these brutes out of their coverings." The tent opening swayed as Ven passed through and I bent over the nearest form. The covering was a heavy sack closed with a slide fastener much like the ones we used. I pulled and it opened, sending a flood of rank scent into the fetid air. I coughed, my eyes smarting, and found the fastener of the other sack. Retching with nausea I staggered out of the tent. Ven sprang forward, caught me as I was about to fall, and lowered me gently to the ground. "What are we going to do?" Ven asked as I lay panting at her feet. "We're going to get them out of there," I said, "and take them back to the ship. I didn't come all this way for nothing." I drew one of the controls toward me, fastened the clips to my antennae, advanced the gain and thought into it. There was a stir of movement inside and a huge form came stumbling out. It stood there clad in loose cloth coverings, reeking with halogen. I looked up at the dark bulk and shivered. "That smell!" Ven said. # VI can help it a bit," I  replied and turned to the control. With its massive forelimbs the brute ripped the cloth from its body as it moved downwind. I made it stand and took the other control. "Let me do it," Ven said. "You can't handle both of them in your condition." "All right," I said, "but be careful." "I will. Now what do I do?" "Advance the intensity knob and think what you want it to do." There was a flurry of movement inside the tent, the thrashing of a huge body, and the second mammal burst through the opening and staggered clumsily to a stop. "Reduce the intensity," I said. "You're projecting too strong a stimulus. Now uncover it and send it over with the other one to cool off. They're more bearable when they're cold. They exude the scent from their skin glands to compensate for temperature." "I know," Ven said. "I studied biology." She did as I instructed and then dropped beside me. We relaxed, gathering our strength for the climb ahead. But I didn't recover rapidly. I could move, but the exertion made me dizzy. The excitement was over and reaction had set in. "I'll never make it," I said dully. "I can help," Ven said -- "a little." "It won't be enough. You don't have the strength to carry me." I looked at the huge bodies of the mammals gleaming pallidly in the darkness, and suddenly I had an idea. The Slaads on Valga domesticated mammals. They were quadrupedal, true enough, but they were still mammals. Why couldn't I ride one of these as they did? Those great masses of muscle should carry me easily. "I think I have a solution," I said. "What?" "I'll have one of them carry me." "You can't!" "Why not? They're controlled. And they're the only way I'll be able to get back to the ship." I picked up the nearest controller. "Let's see what happens." Ven squeaked as the monster lifted me in the air and set me across its neck. I crossed my pads and hung on. The ground seemed terribly far away. "How is it up there?" Ven asked. "A little unstable," I said, "but I'll manage. Shall we go?" We moved up the trail to the rocky abutment and turned up the hill. The brute beneath me climbed strongly and easily. "Wait a minute," Ven said as she turned the corner behind me, "you're going too fast." "Why don't you ride?" I called down to her. "This one moves easily enough. It's much better than walking." "I think I will," Ven replied. is all right," Ven said as we moved side by side up the hill. "The fibrils on top of its head -- " "Hair," I corrected. "The hair of this one is longer than yours. I can hold on nicely." The big bodies of the natives moved smoothly and powerfully, their giant strides eating up the distance we had so painfully covered some time before. Presently we came out onto the lower edge of the meadow below our ship. Ven looked at me, her aura glowing pink with excitement. "I'll race you to the ship," she jT c- cried, snd dashed off with a burst of speed. Somehow I couldn't resist the challenge in her voice. I advanced the control knob and thought strongly. The brute jumped as though it had been whipped and leaped into a plunging nm. I clung desperately for a moment and then relaxed as I caught the rhythm of the driving strides. My heart pounded, but not with 'fear. I had never known such exhilaration! Machines were pale compared to it. The mammal could run like a frightened skent -- and it was faster than Yen's! I caught her halfway up the meadow, and pulled away, exulting in the powerful muscles moving underneath me. I charged up to the grove of trees that concealed our camouflaged ship, and brought the mammal to a halt. It was 'panting, trembling, drenched with stinking sweat, but I didn't mind. I was part of it. There was a certain amount of feedback in a bipolar control circuit and I could feel the heat of its body, the beat of the great heart, the rise and fall of the broad chest, the pulse of the blood vessels in the thick neck. It was magnificent! I laughed. I had never before felt the ecstasy of physical strength! I turned and looked back, still tasting the pleasure of the great body connected to my mind. Yen drew up beside me. "Hai Yee!" she exclaimed. "What a sensation!" "You liked it?" I asked. "Liked it? Liked it? I loved it! Didn't you?" "I think so," I said truthfully. "I'm going across the meadow again," Yen said as she turned her mammal around. "No," I said. "We have use for these two and we have no knowledge of how much they can stand. There's no sense damaging them." I frowned as I noticed the bloody scratches on the legs and body of her mammal. Yen noted the direction of my gaze. "They're not as tough as I thought," she said with sudden contrition. "But they're not too badly damaged, are they?" "No." I said. I ordered the mammal to set me down. Dawn was breaking and I could see better what we had captured. They were a male and a female. On the whole, except for their mammalian ancestry, they conformed to dominant-race criteria, being erect, bipedal, predatory types with binocular vision. Their upper extremities were evolved into manipulative organs similar to our primary digits. The most outstanding difference was the extreme sex dimorphism, which was obviously apparent in the brightening light. The physical differences were carried to such lengths that it was hard to believe that they were members of the same species. there was something disturbing about them. Perhaps it was the rank halogen odor of their skin glands that were still secreting despite the coolness of the air. Or perhaps it was merely that they were intelligent mammals. It was as though Authority had, in a moment of cosmic humor, drawn oversized caricatures of Thalassans and endowed them with life. I felt a subtle insult in their presence. I suppose it showed in my aura because Yen came quickly to my side. "I told you they were disturbing," she said as we looked up at their monstrous forms towering over us. "I'm glad they're not uncontrolled," I answered, shivering a little as I looked at them. "I suppose it's just species antipathy, but they make me uncomfortable." "Mammals were exterminated on Thalassa long ago, weren't they?" "Yes," I said. "They ate our eggs." Yen walked forward and ran her primary digits over the female's legs. "They're quite well evolved," she said. "The skin hasn't a vestige of scales." "Neither does yours except at the tip of your tail," I said tartly. "Don't get the idea that they're a primitive life form. Actually they are a later evolutionary type than we! If our ancestors had not developed intelligence enough to realize their peril we would be extinct -- and something like them would rule Thalassa today." Yen shivered, "How horrible! I don't like thinking about it." "Don't," I advised. "What are we going to do with them?" Yen asked. "I was going to analyze them and construct a proxy, but they're far too big to duplicate with our limited resources. I suppose the only thing we can do is to insert control circuits and use them as they are." "Won't that be painful?" "Only psychically. Physically they shouldn't suffer a bit. The brain, you know, feels no pain. It merely interprets stimuli from elsewhere." "In mammals too?" I shrugged. "I suppose so. Be. sides, what difference does it make? Once we're through with them we can destroy them if they're too badly damaged." "That seems unfair." "It's not a question of fairness. It's survival. If they don't perform properly, we shall have to dispose of them or they'll be back here with a whole herd. Of course, if they operate under control, we'll turn them loose when we're through with them. I doubt that their technology is advanced enough to recognize a bio-circuit if they saw one. And if it is, they will have learned nothing new." "But why can't we keep them -- take them back to Thalassa? They'd make an unusual contribution to the Central Zoo." "I'm afraid not," I said. "I doubt if they'd survive space. The only part of the ship large enough to hold them would be the cargo storage compartment, and that's not shielded. A hyperjump would kill them. You wouldn't want even them to die that way, would you?" Her aura turned gray. "No, I suppose not." "There isn't a chance," I said, seizing her thought before it was uttered. "It would take ten of our lifetimes to reach our nearest outpost on normal spacedrive. Forget it." "But" "Come along," I said, "I'll need your help to modify these brutes." job. Their brains were well developed and nicely compartmentalized. With our probes and instruments it was a simple enough matter to implant the necessary organic extensions of our instruments. "That should do it," I murmured as I disconnected the leads I had jury-rigged into the analyzer. "They're clean as a Fardel's tooth." I was tired, but I had the pleasant feeling of accomplishment that comes from working with organic matter. Possibly if I were not so interested in History, I'd have become a medic. I do have a certain talent along that line. At any rate, we now had a pair of proxies. With only normal fortune they would be completely undetectable. "Is it all done?" Ven asked as she looked over my shoulder. "Yes," I said. "But leave the probes in place until we test them." I dragged my weary body once again into the control room and tried the headgear and circuits. They functioned absolutely perfectly. "What do we do now?" Yen's projection came to me. "Remove the probes and send them back to their camp. There's no sense in leaving them here." "But Eu -- " "No," I said. "They are not toys. They're tools. They're to do a job for us. Now stop acting like a child. When they bring us metal you can play games with them -- but not now. They're stressed, tired, and need rest. And they're going to get it." "Yes, Eu." Her projection was submissive. "But don't worry," I added kindly. "You can monitor them. I installed two extra circuits, one to the hypothalamus and the other to the tactile centers. You will be able to feel every sensation they experience. It will be just like having an extra body." "Can I try it now?" she asked eagerly as she came into the control room. "Go ahead," I said. "Put on a helmet and use the double control. Take them back to their camp and then neutralize the controller. As for me, I'm going to the refresher. I need it." Ill T awoke from partial estivation with Yen's projection vibrating my antennae. "Eu! Come quickly! They're awake!" I groaned. What did she expect? But it might be interesting to see how they behaved. And if they panicked, someone should be there to assume control. I checked the chronometer. I had rested for eight satts which should be enough. I felt as well as could be expected, so with only a few choice Low-Thalassic expletives to help me I managed to clamber out of the tank and stagger into the control room. Yen already had one of the helmets on. I picked up the other and flicked the switch to "on." It was the male's -- and he was talking. The words were gibberish, but the thoughts behind them were easy to read. I was part of an entity called Donald G. Carlton, a male mammal of the human species. He was a "writer" and was mated to the female, who was called Edith and who worked in "motion pictures." They lived in a place called Holl#Twood, in a family unit structure faintly similar to a children's creche. Custom on this world dictated that the female take one name of her mate, which indicated that the sex was even more subservient than female Thalassans. The male's body ached, but not as badly as I would have expected. And, as I expected, there was no sensitivity in the brain. "Hey! Edith!" Donald said. "Get up!" "Leave me alone, Don. I'm miserable," a lighter voice answered from the lumpy sack beside him. "I had the most awful dream." "It must be the mountain air," he replied. "I did too." "Whatever made me think this would be fun!" Edith said. "You and your meteor-hunting!" The sack heaved and twisted and her head appeared at one end. "I feel like I've been worked over with a baseball bat. Oh! My legs!" "You're not alone," he said. "I guess it's the hard ground and these strait-jackets they laughingly call sleeping bags." "About that dream," Edith said. "It was horrible. There was this little green and yellow thing that looked like a cross between a lizard and a human being. It was sitting on my shoulders and I was naked -- carrying it around, doing what it wanted me to do! I wanted to throw it off and stamp on it but I couldn't. I just ran and ran and all the time that little monster sat with its legs around my neck, hooting like an owl. Now, wasn't that something?" Donald was very quiet. "You know," he said slowly, "essentially that was the same dream I had." "But that can't be! People don't have the same nightmares." "We did." "Then maybe -- maybe it wasn't a nightmare!" "Nonsense. We're here. We're all right. But I think perhaps we'd better get out of here -- oh, Keerist! I'm one solid bruise." He twisted around until he found the fastenings and opened the bag. With a groan he stood up. Edith looked at him, her eyes wide with sudden terror. "Don," she said in a brittle voice, didn't you wear pajamas when you went to bed last night?" "Yes." "Well, you're not wearing them now." An expression of horror crossed her face. "And neither am I," she added in a small voice. T could feel the shock in Donald's brain as he looked down at himself. "That's not all I'm not wearing," he said dully. "I'm shaved!" There was a brief flurry inside the other sleeping bag. "So am I!" Edith's voice was a whisper of fright. "That was no dream! I remember this. The lizard gave me something that I rubbed all over myself -- and my hair came off. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help myself." Her hands went to her head and she sighed, "Well, that's all there. For a moment I thought -- " "My skin is different," Donald interrupted thoughtfully as he inspected himself. "It feels thicker. And I don't feel cold, although I'll bet it's nearly freezing outside." "Don! Don't you understand? That dream was real!" Edith said. "Of course it was, -- unless this is a dream. We could be having a nightmare about a nightmare... I looked at Ven. "Just what did you do to them?" I asked. She glowed guiltily. "I didn't know it would take their hair off," she said. "I was worried about their scratches, and the insects were biting them. So I made them rub on some of our skin conditioner." I raised my digits toward the sky. "There is an Authority that looks over fools and Thalassan females," I said. "What made you so sure our conditioner would work on them? It might have been poisonous." "I tried it on the male first," Ven said. "Genius," I breathed with icy sarcasm, "sheer genius!" "Well," she said, "it worked!" The eternal pragmatist had applied her sole criterion. "And what's more they looked and smelled lots better after they used it." I shrugged, gave it up and turned my attention back to the mammals. Edith had emerged from her sack and was standing before the male. "Do I look like a nightmare?" she demanded. "No. More like a skinned rabbit -- ouch! What did you do that for?" He rubbed his face where she struck him with her digits. "There!" Edith said. "Now do you think it's a dream?" "I never did," he replied mildly. "I've never dreamed in my life. I was just breaking it to you easy. It was real enough -- even the blank spaces. I wonder -- " "You wonder what?" "What their reason was for capturing us and then letting us go. It doesn't make sense. They wouldn't grab us just for fun. They're obviously intelligent, and probably thought we would be useful to them. But they turned us loose. So we couldn't be useful except maybe for amusement -- but that doesn't jell. No. They've done something to us. They've let us go for a reason."  "Why don't you just get scared, like I am!" "I am," he said, "but I like to figure things out. If I know what frightens me, it doesn't bother me so much." "Do that while we're on the way home. Get your clothes on and let's get out of here! Right away!" "We have to pack." "Oh, leave it! Let's get out while we can!" "I don't think we're in any danger," he said. "Well -- I don't want to stay here a minute longer!" "All right. We'll go. But we'll pack first. Look at it logically. They had us cold. We didn't escape. We were let go. So why, if they didn't want us then, should they want us now?" "Unless they can get us any time they want us." "You have a point there, but if that's the case, they can get us anyway. So let's pack." "You can pack if you want to. I'm leaving!" Edith pulled the opening to the tent and slipped out. "Edith!" Donald cried. "Wait!" I touched Ven. "Stop her," I said. Edith's voice came from outside. "Don!" she called in a tight voice. "Don! Help me! I can'# move!" "Try coming back here and see what happens," Donald said slowly. Edith's head appeared in the entrance. "I'm back," she said in a small voice. '"I thought you would be. Now let's pack and perhaps they'l let us go. It's obvious that we can't run away." "But why? What's happened to us?" "If I told you, you'd think I'm crazy." "Tell me anyway. It can't be any worse than this." T think," Donald said slowly as he began to roll up his sleeping bag, "that we were kidnapped by extraterrestrials." "Martians?" "Not necessarily," he said. "But if I remember my nightmare correctly, they aren't human -- and they are obviously smart. So they aren't of this earth. We don't have intelligent reptiles here. And with their ability to control our actions, I'd say that they were from a considerably higher culture than ours. They've done things to us -- but I don't think they did them just for fun. They want us to do something." "What?" "I don't know. Right now I'd guess they want us to pack our things. Let's do it and get out of here. This place smells like the reptile house in the zoo!" T was amazed. The native's analysis was as logical as my own would have been under similar circumstances. There was nothing wrong with his mind or with his courage. That big braincase held a smoothly functioning mind and a cold courage I could almost envy. In a similar fix I wasn't sure that I could be so calm. My respect for him mounted. If there were others like him on this world, his race could be a potential danger spot for the whole Galaxy. And, with the natural antipathy between our races, these creatures could be trouble if they ever reached space. I wondered for a moment if Authority had known this when It brought me here. There must be some design that ! should land here when this race was still capable of being frustrated. For the sake of civilization I would have to learn more about these mammals. Much more. But since the male had deduced so much, there was only one logical course of action. I adjusted the filters ort my helmet to allow the passage of surface thoughts, twisted the dials on the controller until the meters balanced and projected gently. "Donald -- listen to me," I said... He stiffened. "I thought you would be somewhere around," he said. "Who are you?" "My name is Eu Kor, and I am a native of Thalassa." "Where's that?" "A good many spatial units from here -- a good many of your light years," I amended. "I mean you no harm, but I need your cooperation. My spaceship is crippled. Our fuel has deteriorated. We need more and I want you to get it for us. We captured you because we need your help. Being a native you would not make a ripple in this society. And we would create whirlpools." "What is this material you want?" "A metal. Atomic number #, a white metal used as an alloy component of primitive metallic cultures," I said. "It shouldn't be too hard to get." I didn't realize how hard it was to describe what I wanted. I wasn't getting through, and it bothered me. The culture barrier was almost as bad as though we couldn't contact mind to mind. "I think you mean tin," he said. I grasped the concept and it seemed right. "Bring me some and I will run tests," I said. "And what do I get in return?" T thought quickly. If he wanted to bargain perhaps we could reach an agreement. It's always better to have a cooperative proxy. They don't cause nearly the trouble in management. And I had other things to do than monitor natives. There was a great deal of repair work to be done on the ship before she would fly again. The subspace radio power bank had to be rebuilt and the circuits should be checked. "I can give you knowledge that you wouldn't have for decades -- maybe centuries," I said. "And I can adjust your bodies for a longer and happier life." I shot a glance at Ven still immersed in her helmet. In fact, I have made a few adjustments already." "So I noticed," Donald thought dryly. "Although whether they're an improvement or not I couldn t say. But did you have to go to all this trouble?" "Think of us -- and discount the fact that you carried us because our bodies are too weak for your heavy world." I said. "Did you like us?" "No," he said. "You repelled me. I disliked you on sight, more than I can say." "The emotion is mutual," I said. "Yet I can endure you. But with your glandular outlook you could only think of destroying us." "That is true. But you treated us like animals." "You are animals," I said logically. "We are masters of this world. We recognize no higher authority. We are free people -- not slaves. And unless we are treated as free agents you will get no cooperation from us." "I can force you to do as I wish," I said. "Prove it!" I took over. And while Donald watched with helpless horror his hand picked up a knife and drew it across his arm. The keen edge split the tissues neatly and the blood flowed. "Don! What are you doing!" Edith screamed and then stiffened as Ven took control. "Observe," I said as I released control. "Why, you -- " Donald began -- and then continued in a tone of wonder. "Why -- the cut's closing! There's no more blood -- It's gone!" "It's just one of the improvements I mentioned," I said smugly. "You also had a patch of scar tissue on your left lung and infected kidneys. You do not have them now. Had you not met us you would have been dead within five of your years." H e was shaken. I could feel it. "I do have Bright's disease," he said thoughtfully. "You had it," I corrected. "All right," he said suddenly, "I'll bargain with you. You've done me a good turn and it deserves a payment. I'll help you get your metal." He grinned ruefully. "I guess I couldn't do anything else." "It makes it easier this way," I said. I smiled to myself. I was telling him the truth, but not all of it. Nor did I trust him. There was fear and hatred in his lower centers, and a formless feeling in his upjjer levels that he could outsmart any damn lizard that ever lived. He didn't realize i that I could read his surface thoughts. "Just remember," I said, "I can control you completely, if necessary, and pick your brain for data whether you wish it or not. And forget those ideas of informing your authorities about us. Except with your mate you cannot communicate to anyone about us. There's a basic block in your brain that will result in irreversible mental damage if you try." This last was not quite the "truth. But I hoped that by establishing fear I would prevent talk. "Now find us samples of the metal I want." I withdrew and went back to scanning. "What was going on there?" Edith said. "You were talking to empty air. And why did you cut yourself?" "It was one of our reptilian friends," Don said. "Like I thought, they're right with us -- every way. He's a weird sort. ; Wants to trade health and knowl edge for tin." "Tin?" "Yeah. At least I think it's tin.  His description of the metal fits. They use it instead of rocket juice." "But that knife -- your arm?" "Look. No cut -- no blood. That's one of the things they did to us. We've got puncture-proof skin." "Is that good?" "It isn't bad. And I don't think I'll ever have to shave again. As I remember I put that stuff on my face. Anyway, we now have a couple of fairy godmothers who ride around in spaceships instead of pumpkin coaches." "You're mixing your stories," Edith said. "Cinderella travelled in the pumpkin coach, not her fairy godmother. And besides, it's not funny. We're more like those poor souls in the Middle Ages who were possessed by devils -- incubuses, I think they called them." "It makes no difference what you call them," Donald said indifferently. "Whatever they are, we've got them and they're not going to leave until they're damn good and ready. Incidentally, yoiirs is a female, so she's probably a succubus. Now don't start screaming. You'll probably be paralyzed if you do." "I won't scream," Edith said dully. "I'm too numb to scream." IV "VE had surprisingly little " trouble with the two natives once they realized we could control them if we wished. Of the two, Edith was the worst. She refused to cooperate and had to be forced into the simplest actions. "We're going to have trouble with that one," I observed as Ven looked at me with faint exasperation in her yellow eyes. "Oh, I don't think so," she said. "Not really. This is a normal female reaction. It's a phase. Like the way I felt when the Eugenics Council selected me to be your mate." "Did you feel like that?" I asked with surprise. "Of course. I wanted to make my own choice." "But you never told me." "There was no need. I came around to the Council's view before I met you. And Edith will come around to mine. Don't worry. I know how to handle this." And she did. I helped a little by altering a few reflex arcs and basic attitudes, but Ven wouldn't allow me to modify the higher centers. "There's no need to make her a mindless idiot," Ven said. "You didn't do that to Donald." "Yes, but Donald controls his emotions. He doesn't like me any better than Edith likes you, but he doesn't work himself into an emotional homogenate every time I make a suggestion. We argue it out like rational intelligences. Often I can use his experience and viewpoint. And when I can't agree, he will cooperate rather than operate under control. He's not like that bundle of glands and emotions you are trying to make into a useful proxy." "She is a problem," Ven admitted, "but if I had her here "That can be arranged," I said. "I'll give you two weeks. And if that doesn't work you let me perform a prefrontal block." "That isn't very long." "That's all we can afford, I told her. "All right, I can try. In a month I know I could do it." Donald protested violently when I told him what we planned for Edith, but when I gave him the alternative, he reluctantly agreed. He passed a story that Edith would be visiting friends, and brought her to the ship. At once Ven went systematically to work to reduce the mammal to an acquiescent state that would permit control. Since sleep is unknown to our race but necessary for mammals, the task of breaking down the female's resistance was simplified by physical exhaustion. Ven also found that the mammal's sleeping time could be used to strengthen the new reflex channels built during her waking periods. The results were amazing, even to me, and I'm fairly well trained in neuromanipulation. Halfway through the second week the mammal's surrender was complete. go back," Ven said. "I can finish her training at long range. Now that I have the channels established, I don't think she'll be any further trouble." I took the helmet and scanned Edith. "Hmm," I said. "Do you know what you've done? You've built yourself into an Authority image." "I know," Ven said smugly. "She is essentially a dependent type. Her mate was her decision maker. That's why I had to get her alone. It wasn't too hard once I knew where to look. As a girl, her mother made the decisions for her. As a woman, Donald has done it. And when I faced her with situations where she had to decide and where the decisions were invariably wrong, she transferred the decision-making power to me." I looked at her sharply. "I had no idea that you intended to make a pet out of her," I said. "Otherwise I wouldn't have permitted this." "Well, it's too late now. And besides, it was the only way I could do it in the time you allotted. But don't worry. She'll be as good a tool as your precious Donald -- maybe even a better one -- because she'll do things to please me and not merely because they're expedient." Ven had a point there. But it isn't a good policy to get emotionally involved with alien races. However, the deed was done, and as long as Ven was happy I didn't care. I only hoped that she wouldn't become too attached to the creature. Donald I was much more cooperative and much tougher. He had realized from the start that there was no profit in objecting to my demands. But, unlike Edith, he gave me no handle for leverage. He arranged his life to include the unpleasant fact of my existence, and that was that. Where Ven achieved a form of mastery, I never received anything more than acquiescence. There were levels in Donald I could not touch. At first it irked me, but then I realized that I was the greater gainer. For Donald was a constant challenge, a delight to the mind, an outward collaborator and an inward enemy. Our relationship had all the elements of an armed truce. And I often thought that if I did not have the crushing advantage of control, our contest might have been more even. Although in time Donald's hatred became modified to a grim sort of tolerance, and his repulsion into something that closely resembled admiration, he never lost the basic species antipathy which separated us. And in that regard our feelings were mutual. The ancient Thalassan proverb that familiarity breeds friendship simply didn't apply. We held a mutual respect for each other, and in a fashion we cooperated, but I never could pierce the armor of resentment that shielded him. I tried, but finally I gave up. There would never be friendship between us. We. were too different -- And too alike. I'N the days that followed the first contact, I proceeded according to approved methods of investigating alien civilizations. At my request, Donald went to the local book repository and we went through a number of works on law, government, social structure, and finance. I felt that I should have some knowledge of this mammalian culture before attempting to refuel the ship. There was no sense in calling attention to myself any more than necessary. If I could obtain what I wanted and leave quietly, I would be perfectly happy. This world was of interest -- but it was too disturbing to contemplate for an extended period of time. "You were right, Eu Kor," Ven said to me as we scanned the pattern of the mammals' culture. "If you had picked any place less isolated than this, we might have been engulfed in that maelStrom." I nodded. "It was more luck than design," I said, "but I am happy that we are no closer. This world is not for us. It is too strange, too alien with its uncontrolled emotionalism and frightening energy." "It reminds me of a malignant neoplasm," Ven said, "growing uncontrolled, destroying the body from which it draws sustenance. Have you ever seen such a seething flux of people -- such growth -- such appalling waste and carelessness?" I shook my head. "The only parallel that comes to mind is Sennor." "But that's a dead world -- killed by a suicidal race that achieved technology before it had attained culture." "Which is precisely the situation we have here. Or have you observed their social inequities and history? Periodically these mammals erupt in merciless riots and slaughters over things that cotild be settled by reason. And oddly enough, these 'wars' as humans call them have the effect of stimulating technology. This is a race that apparently loves death and battle. A barbaric horde of cultural morons, with a civilized technology geared to mutual destruction." "Frankly, I've been scanning through Edith. I've seen only the technical excellence of their entertainment industry, and the enormous waste which goes into the making of one of their productions." "We must have a synthesis," I said, "and pool our observations." Ven nodded. "I'm not at all happy about this place," I continued. "It makes me uncomfortable." "Could we modify it?" Ven asked. I shook my head. "It would take an entire task force to do that. Reeducation of this culture would have to begin at birth after appropriate culling. We would have to start from the beginning. I fear that the council would never authorize such an action on behalf of mammals. We are altruistic...  but not that altruistic." "Then they will destroy themselves?" "I fear so. This culture has a poor prognosis. But it is perhaps better so. Or would you like to see them roaming through the Galaxy?" Ven shuddered. "Not as they are now. Not these fierce, combative stupid brutes. Individuals perhaps, but not the race. They would have to learn the rules of civilization first." "Yet they show no sign of learning. If they can't even cooperate with their own species, how in Authority's name could they ever get along with the dissimilar races of this island universe?" "They couldn't. We would have to quarantine them." "So isn't it better to save the expense and let them quarantine themselves?" "I suppose so." Ven's aura was a dull gray and mine matched the gloom of hers. It is hard to stand aloof and watch a race condemn itself to death. VjE fed our observations into the analyzer, together with all extraneous data we could lay our digits on via our proxies -- not to prove our conclusions but to determine the means by which we could obtain the power metal with the least possible repercussions in this society. We both realized it would be fatal to expose ourselves. The mammalian technology was sufficiently advanced for them to duplicate the essential portions of our ship, and chaos could result if they secured a road to the stars. Generations of effort would be required to confine them again to their homeworld. Thinking in this manner caused me to take certain precautions with the drive mechanism that would ensure no trace of our craft remaining if I projected a certain impulse at a given strength. Ven, of course, was appalled at my action, although she realized its grim necessity. And in the meantime we worked with our proxies, I attempting to establish some means of quietly obtaining the metal we needed, and Ven doing nothing so far as I could determine that would further our mission. At that, Edith was in no position to obtain metal, and Ven was too young and inexperienced in contact work to attempt a mission of such delicacy. Since Edith amused her, I was content to leave them both to their own devices while I workedwith Donald to speed our departure. "In this society," I said to Donald, "it seems that one can accomplish anything with this medium of exchange you call money." "That's close to a fundamental truth," Donald replied. "And you are not too well supplied with it?" I asked. "Those four ingots I brought you last week put a vicious dent in our savings account." "Isn't your trade as an author profitable?" "Only in spurts. It's a feastfamine existence. But it's the only one I care to lead." "But popular fiction makes money -- and you can write." "I wish you'd tell that to my agent. He seems to have other ideas." "I have recently read some of your fiction," I said, "and have noticed that it has certain basics that could easily be applied to an analyzer. There is no reason why we could not cooperate and produce a work that would yield a great deal of money." Donald laughed. "Now I've heard everything!" he said. "You mean to tell me you could write a book humans would buy?" "No, you would write the book. I would merely furnish the idea, the research data, the plot, and the general story outline. In your popular fiction," I continued, "there are four basic elements and a plot that can be varied about twenty-five ways. There is small need for philosophy and little need for abstract thought. In fact, there is no need at all for anything but glandular excitation. All that is really necessary is plenty of action, enough understanding of the locale and events to avoid anachronism -- and the basics."  Donald said. "As a writer I'd like to know them." "There are four," I ticked them off on my digits. "First, violation of the ethical or moral code of your race; second, adequate amounts of cohabitation L between the characters; third,  brutality; and fourth -- murderous assault." "Hmm. Sin, sex, sadism and ( I slaughter," Donald commented. "You know, you might have j something there." j "I have prepared an outline and a synopsis of such a book," ! I said. "It is a historical novel. It should sell. Most historical I novels do." "You've done what?" Donald I gasped. Then he laughed. "Of all the insufferable egoists I've ever seen!" "Listen," I said, ordering him to silence while I outlined the opening chapter. "I can't stop you," Donald said. "But why should this happen to me? Isn't it bad enough to be  bossed around by you lizards without having to be forced to ghost-write your amateur literary efforts?" "It is laid in the period of your history called the Renaissance," I continued, "and deals with a ; young man of a noble but im; poverished house who rose to j power by cleverness, amorality and skill with the sword." "I suppose the girl is the daughter of the local duke." "No," I said, "she is the favorite wife of a Saracen corsair." "Well, that's a switch," Donald said. "Tell me more." So I did. I outlined the opening and told him the major points of the whole story... as the computer had synthesized it out of seven excellent novels of the period and a four-volume set of Renaissance history. Donald was enthralled. "You're right," he said. "It will sell. It's lousy literature, but it's got appeal. With this story and my writing we can out-Spillane Mickey." He was more enthusiastic than I had ever seen him appear before. "Who is Spillane?" I asked. Donald looked at me as though he thought I was crazy and shook his head. "I can get to work on it as soon as I get home," Donald said. "And if I keep at it, it'll be ready for mailing in a couple of weeks. I'll get it off to my agent and we'll see. I hate to admit it, but I think you're right about the yarn. It should sell like hotcakes." "That is fine. It should provide us with the medium of exchange, which is necessary in this society." "It's not necessary," Donald grinned. "It's essential." V a good one. The book sold -- and sold well. Despite the outright plagiarism of ideasand source material it was hailed as a new novel -- one that stimulated thought with its realistic approach to the life of the times. And we prospered amazingly. With the advance money, I had Donald buy the land on which the ship was resting, together with the valley and rimrock. Having thus secured our landing site I felt a bit more comfortable. The comfort was even greater when, at Donald's suggestion, a fence was placed around the property and electronic telltales were installed. The remainder of the royalties were used to purchase tin and supplies. But despite our prosperity and the regular supply of tin that came to me as a result of my adventure in fiction, and the certainty that Ven and I would be leaving, Donald was not happy. As a successful new author he had to travel to meetings in various cities. He had to speak at public gatherings. He had to meet with publishers eager to receive rights to his next book. And Edith did not go with him. Ven was adamant on this point. "It's bad enough that she is working on this motion picture," she said, "but I'm not going to have her traveling all over the face of this planet. She's the only amusement I have since we must stay cooped up in this place. I'm not going to let her go." Donald was upset about it He was so angry that he came to visit me voluntarily, and the sight of Edith's little car parked under the trees below the ship infuriated him even more. It took the controller to make him keep his distance as he stood in front of the airlock and hated me. "Damn you!" he swore. "You can't do this to me! Edith's my wife and I don't like this relationship between her and that -- that dinosaur! It isn't healthy." "It's out of rhy hands," I said. "Edith is Yen's responsibility." "It's not only that," he raged. "Ever since you lizards butted into our lives Edith looks at me like I was a stranger." His face twisted. "I'll admit she has her reasons. But that gives her no call to ask Yen's advice rather than mine. When I told her I wanted her to come with me, the first thing she said was that she'd ask Ven. She doesn't do one damn thing without that cold-blooded little monster's consent! She even asks advice on what clothes she should wear!" He laughed harshly. "The blind asking advice from the blind!" T couldn't help chuckling. Ven, like all Thalassans, had never worn anything in her life except a utility belt. Clothing has never been a feature of our culture. Since it isn't necessary on Thalassa, it was never developed, and since our sex impulses are periodic it has never been useful to attract either males or females. "I can see your point," I said. "Yen's ideas along that line would be zero." "Not quite," Donald said angrily. "She likes moccasins. Apparently they make feet look more like your pads." "Well?" "But that's it! Edith's idea of what a well-dressed housewife should wear is -- moccasins! She damn near caused a riot the other day when our TV repairman called to fix the set. We'll be lucky if we're not forced to move because of that little incident!" "I'll speak to Ven," I said. "And if that doesn't work. I'll insert a block against such a thing happening again. I don't want special attention called to you. That sort of thing will stop right now." "Thanks," Donald said. "But I should be the one to stop it." "Face it," I replied, "you aren't. Not now. But you will be once we're gone." "Which can't be too soon to suit me," he said. "I spend every spare moment collecting tin for you. Edie doesn't. She wants Ven to stay." "They seem to be happy with each other. Edith comes up here regularly." "I know," he said bitterly. "She's here more often than she's home. I can't see what fun she gets out of running around these hills stripped to the skin carrying your mate on her shoulders." "I wouldn't know," I said. "Certainly you never seem to enjoy performing that service for me." "I don't even like the thought of it. I'm not an animal, after all." "But you are," I said. "So am I. The only difference is that I am a superior animal and you, being inferior, conform to my wishes. It is a law of nature that the superior type will inevitably rule. The inferior either conforms or dies. And you have no desire to die." He shook his head. "But I can still object," he said. "At that?" I asked pointing across the meadow with a primary digit. Edith was running, her long yellow hair floating free behind her. Ven, high on her shoulders in a seat the two of them had contrived, waved gaily at us as they came up. Edith was flushed and laughing. Her eyes sparkled and her smooth bronze body gleamed in the sunlight. She lowered Ven to the ground, slipped the harness off her smooth shoulders and stood behind my mate, breathing deeply but not at all distressed. Donald!" she said. "We had a wonderful climb -- clear up to the top of the ridge! And coming down was almost like flying! I'll tell you all about it in a minute, right after I take a dip in the pool. Ven doesn't like it when I sweat." She turned and ran down to the little pool in the meadow. "See what I mean!" Donald gritted. "She seems happy. She's not hurt. And Yen's little weight doesn't seem to bother her. What are you complaining about?" Donald growled something unintelligible, turned on his heel and walked away. I let him go. There was no sense in making him angrier than he was. After a moment the snarl of his car's engine rose to a crescendo then faded away into the distance. A few minutes later Edith came back to the ship. "Why did Don leave?" she asked. "Perhaps he had something to do," Ven said. She pouted. "He's always so busy nowadays," she said sulkily. "He isn't nice like he used to be. Do you think he's tired of me?" "No, I don't think so. He just doesn't like you spending so much time up here," I said. "But it's fun -- and Ven likes it," she said. "I like it too. And since he isn't home much any more, it's the only place where I can relax and be myself." She brushed the drops of water from her body and shook out her damp hair. "It's wonderful up here -- so quiet and peaceful -- and Yen's so nice." My mate's aura glowed a pleased pink as I turned an embarrassed lavender. It was almost criminal, I thought, what Ven had done to the girl. Donald might be my servant, but I had never attempted to condition him into liking it. As much as possible we operated as equals, rather than in this sickening relationship which Ven had imposed upon Edith. To avoid showing my displeasure I went up to the control room, donned my helmet and went into rapport with Donald. "I'm sorry," I said. "I hadn't realized the true situation. The best thing for both of us is for Ven and me to leave as quickly as possible." "How quick is that?" he shot back angrily. "Four thousand pounds more," I said. 'Whew! That can must drink tin." "It takes a great deal to leave a planet," I said. "And hyperspace demands a great deal more. Once we develop an inertialess drive it will be easier. But we've only been working on it a thousand years. These things take time." "I imagine. Well, are you going to do anything about Edith?" "No," I said. "It would only make things worse. The relationship has gone too far. Ven has become an Authority-image." "You could break it." "But I won't. I'm fond of Ven." "You're a damned little tyrant," Donald said. "You like to see a human squirm." # jD E thankful that I'm the worst tyrant you'll see," I answered sharply. "You could really learn about them if the Slaads knew you existed. They're more advanced than you. And, unlike us, they're warlike and predatory. They breed mammals for food. However, I'll put up a marker on your moon before I leave. They respect Thalassa and won't preempt our claims." "You mean you're going to lay claim to Earth?" "Only technically. We'll exercise it only if the Governing Council decides it will be to our advantage." "What would you do if you took over?" Don asked curiously. "Clean things up," I said. "Stop wars, stabilize the population, increase production and distribution, give you an effective central government and an understandable legal code, and eliminate the unfit. In three generations you'd be Class VI all over your planet." "It sounds good. What's the catch." "The catch," I said, "is that you wouldn't like it. You mammals are erratic, emotional and uncontrolled. You do not reason well, and you have no race discipline." "What's that?" "The capability of sacrificing units for the benefit of the whole. Eugenics control, culling the unfit." "You're talking about human beings!" Donald exploded. "And what makes a human being different from any other animal?" I asked. "Would you hesitate to dispose of an animal that was unfit to breed?" He sighed. "No," he said. "But that's not the same." "What's the difference? And realize, it's done for your betterment." "Just a bunch of murderous little altruists," Donald sneered. "Out of the kindness of your cold-blooded hearts -- " "That's the trouble with you lower orders," I interrupted. "You get emotional. Your observations have no basis in logic. Actually, the Galaxy wouldn't even quiver if the lot of you disappeared tomorrow. Yet you think the universe rotates about your heads." "I didn't -- " "Don't interrupt," I snapped. "You -- your race -- your whole pitiful little civilization is ready mentally and almost ready technologically to commit suicide. If we came and saved you, you would owe us eternal gratitude, but I doubt if we'd get it." "You wouldn't," Donald assured me. "There wouldn't be a human alive who wouldn't hate you." "I realize that -- and that is one of the reasons I should report your world imfavorably to the council. We could hardly take on an altruism mission like this unless we felt that our work would be appreciated. It would be better to let you kill yourselves." "Altruism!" "In a sense. At least your race would be the greater gainers. All we'd get would be your excess population." "And what would you want them for -- slaves?" "Authority, no!" I said, shocked in spite of myself. "We'd merely process them for food." He was silent after that. a publisher's meeting. Our new book laid in Restoration England was going to be an even greater success than the first if the advance notices were any criterion. Edith was at a studio party celebrating the completion of the picture in which she was working. And Ven was bored. For awhile she sat in on Donald's conference in a city called New York, but that proved to be uninteresting. I was busy with a faulty fuel feed in the drive chamber. The sun was hot, and the day was promising to be extremely warm even though it was not yet noon. It was one of those days when nothing happens, and I was grateful for it. I had had enough of emotional tangles to last me for some time. It was almost soothing to work with the robots on insensate machinery rather than supervise a pair of highly charged mammals and a hardly less unstable mate. The association with these entities hadn't done Ven a great deal of good. In fact, I could notice a deterioration of her character that bothered me. She no longer looked at me with respect. Indeed, her yellow eyes at times held a pitying amusement that I should be so weak as to argue with Donald. I didn't bother to point out that the three tons of power metal had virtually all been brought aboard through Donald's efforts, and that our conveniences, our defenses, our robots and our very lives were diie to the working arrangements I had established. The only useful thing Edith had done in the past month was to help me change the tube liners in the steering jets. Her size and strength had made the job easy -- and it was normally a hard one, since the robots didn't have the flexibility or balance that Edith, with her dancer's body, possessed. The job had taken two days. It would have taken better than a week if I had to use robots. The mammals, I thought, would be of distinct value as members of spaceport maintenance crews. Their combination of immense strength and high intelligence would be useful to our society. I made a note of it and added it to the data I was assembling for the Council. It was foolish, perhaps, but I couldn't help feeling an interest in these creatures. I looked across the little valley that was our domain. It was an idyllic life we were leading. Unhurried -- peaceful -- the sort of life I thoroughly enjoyed. It would have been perfect if it wasn't for the insane and dangerous world on which it was being lived. Of course it was too good to last. Idylls invariably are. The peace of ours was shattered abruptly when Ven came into the drive room and disturbed my work. Her aura blazed a rich violet. "Eu," she said. "Come up to the control room. Something's wrong!" "What," I asked. "It's Edith. I can't do a thing with her." "You're not supposed to. She's working now." "She is not! Her studio has finished the picture and they're having a party." "That's nice. I hope you're letting her have a good time." "I told her to. But I never imagined what they'd be doing!" Ven's voice was anguished. "Well, what are they doing?" "Ingesting ethanol to excess!" "Ethanol!" I gasped. "Oh no!" I hadn't realized that normal mammals consumed excess amounts of the stuff, although there were references to it in the literature. I thought that was merely literary exaggeration. After all, we had been here scarcely half a year, and we hadn't really learned too much about the details of mammalian society. Donald's kidneys had forced him to lead a quiet life, and the passing of Edith from his control to Ven's had caused no remarkable alterations in her doings. I should have paid more attention to their customs. But I had been too busy. I swore as I reached for my control helmet. I'd have to stop this before it became serious. Donald would be of no help to me. He was several thousand vursts away, and even under the best circumstances couldn't be expected back for a day. I didn't bother to call him, but instead adjusted the controls to Edith's setting. VI A horde of gaily dressed mammals surrounded me, their faces and bodies oddly fuzzy and distorted. Edith's voice was equally fuzzy. There was something wrong with her centers. I tapped the helmet and checked the controller just in case it was on our end, but they were functioning perfectly. There was nothing wrong -- merely the fact that ethanol was disturbing the biocircuits I had implanted in her brain. I swore a few choice expletives of Low Thalassan and tried to get through by increasing the power. It did no good. "I c'n still feel that li'l lizard in m' head," Edith announced. "Gimme another drink. I wanna wash her out. Darn li'l lizard makes me do things I dowanna do. It wants me to quit, but I wanna get drunk." "Take it easy," a fuzzy male face said. "You're loaded. Why does a nice chick like you hafta be loaded? Whyncha get outa here? I gotta nice place over in Santa Monica where -- " The face disappeared. "Hey! Alice! Golly, I almos' din't reckanize you. Howya doin?" "Better than you, Edith. You're drunk. And from the looks of you, you're going to be sick if you don't get some fresh air." "Gotta go spit in the eye of my li'l lizard," Edith said. "Y'wanna come with me? I got Don's car. We c'n get outa here an' get some fresh air -- an' I c'n tell that li'l lizard what I think of her." "What are you talking about?" "You wanna see my li'l lizard. She's got yella eyes, and a li'l tail, and she turns all kindsa colors, and she lives in a rock with a door in it, an she makes me do things I dowanna do. It ain't so bad though. Mosta the time I like it. Not alia time though. That's why I wanna spit in her eye. She c'n tell me all she wants -- but she's gotta leave me'n Don alone. I love that guy." Edith started sobbing -- why, I couldn't understand. "She's maudlin," I said to Ven. "No one's going to believe a thing she is saying. But this should be a warning to us. We'll have to put in a block against drinking ethanol. I didn't realize how badly it can affect the biocircuits." I handed the helmet back to Ven. "You can watch this mess if you want to. I'm going to our quarters." I slipped out of the control chair and walked across the room. I was stronger now, more accustomed to the gravity, and it didn't bother me unless I had to stand for long periods of time. I turned in the doorway to look at Ven. She had the helmet on again and her aura was a crackling red. I shook my head. Edith was du'e for a bad time when the effects of that hydrocarbon wore off. I had hardly fallen into light estivation when Yen's projection crashed through my antennae. "Eu! Get up! Come here quickly!" With a groan I came slowly back to full facility and ran to the control room. Yen's face was filled with panic. "They're coming up here," she said. "A whole earful of them!" "Who?" "Edith's drunken friends! Somehow she's collected six of them and they're driving up here to spit in my eye!" Despite myself, I laughed. Ven looked so outraged I couldn't help it. "We can close the airlock," I said, "and they can't tell us from a rock." "I won't! I'm going to teach that girl a lesson she won't forget in a hurry! I've listened to myself being insulted for two hours -- and she's still going strong. When she gets up here I'll show her whose eye she'll spit in!" lEN was raging. I'd never seen ' her so emotional before. Her aura swelled and ebbed in ruddy shades as her breath came and went in short gasps. "And how do you propose to do that?" I asked. "I'll stat her!" Ven raged. "I'll stat every one of them!" I blinked. "I wouldn't do that," I said mildly. "What can we do with them? The two we have are bad enough. And if you stat them, we'll have to kill or condition them. We couldn't let them go home with a story like the one they'd tell." "I don't care," Ven said. "You can do what you like about the rest of them, but thaf Edith is going to learn a lesson." She was being emotional and quite unshe was larger and stronger than I. Despite my protests, she jerked a stat projector from the rack and strode toward the open airlock. "Thalassa!" she exclaimed. "They're coming through the gate! They'll be here in a minute." I could hear the roar of a protesting engine groaning up the trail to the lower meadow as I hurried aftef Ven. As I reached the airlock, the gray body of Donald's station wagon poked its nose around the trees below our ship. Ven stood rigidly in the airlock, waiting, her lips tight and her eyes narrow. She took a firmer grip on the stat as the car stopped and the giggling, half-sober humans tumbled out. I was in a quandary. I didn't want Ven to shoot, but I couldn't close the airlock with her inside it. So I stood, hesitating while the group of gaily dressed mammals came toward us through the trees, their high voices loud in the stillness. "Gotta find that li'l lizard an tell her to stop meddling with my life," Edith's voice came to my ears. Ven stiffened beside me as the group broke out of the trees in front of the ship. "Why, Edie, it's beautiful!" a voice said. "It's a fairy glen! No wonder you'd never tell us where you got that suntan! And that big rock -- it's just like you said -- And -- uh!" The voice never finished as Ven pressed the trigger. I looked down at the six crumpled mammalian bodies and the lone standing figure that looked stupidly up at us. "Well," I said. "You've done it this time. Now are you satisfied? "No," Ven said. "Not half." Her voice was tight with anger. She looked down at Edith. "Come here!" she said. "Dowanna," Edith replied uncertainly. "You've made Don leave me. I don't like you."But habit was stronger than alcohol and under the furious lash of Yen's voice she came unsteadily forward. "Do you understand me, you little sarf!" Ven snapped icily. "I said come here!" She took the control box from her waist and viciously twisted the intensity dial to maximum. At this range its force was irresistible, even with alcohol-deadened synapses. Edith shuddered and moved to, ward us, her hands clumsily tearing at the fabric that covered her. "I'm cornin'! You don' hafta shout. I ain't deaf. I ain't done nothin'!" She sat down beside the airlock and struggled out of her clothing, ripping the thin fabric under the last of Yen's anger until she was completely naked. Then she stood up and reached her hands toward Ven. "You're not going to try to ride her while she's in that condition?" I said. "This is my affair," Ven replied grimly. "I'm going to get this settled." I shrugged. T here was no sense reasoning with her while she was in that mood. And if she wanted to kill herself that was her concern. I watched her drop onto Edith's shoulders, wind one hand viciously into the mammal's long blonde hair and guide the gross body into a shambling walk toward the meadow. Edith swayed dangerously, but somehow she managed to stay on her feet as they disappeared into the trees. I walked over to the six bodies, gave each of them a light stat to make sure they would remain quiet and sat down beside the nearest one to think. Yen's anger had left me a sizeable problem. What on earth could I do with six human females? I needed them like I needed a broken digit. Time passed and the sun rose toward the zenith, and finally I came to a decision. Since we had them on our hands, we might as well make dangerous. And presently Edith came through the trees, a sick, tired, sober Edith whose face was dirty and tear streaked, carrying a grim Yen whose aura smoldered a reddish brown. "What did you do to her?" I asked. "None of your business," Yen snapped. "She's all right now. Aren't you, Edith?" "Yes, Yen -- and I won't do it again. Honest I won't." "You'd better not," Yen said grimly. "Now I suppose we have some work to do." "You certainly have," I said. "If it wasn't for your temper we wouldn't have this mess on our hands. Now get moving! Have Edith carry these girls to the ship." I gestured at the prone bodies. "And you, get inside and bring out the control equipment and connect the leads to the computer." I was angry, too. Under the force of my superior will, the two females scurried to obey. "I'm disgusted with you. Yen," I said angrily. "Just because your pet went to a party, you don't have to act childish. Did you expect she'd behave like a Thalassan?" "I trusted her," Yen said. "It just goes to show that you can't trust an animal too far," I said. "Now get moving. Bring the probes first. We have a lot of work to do before evening." I T was finished sooner than I expected. The sun was still in the sky, but close to the edge of the hills. The row of mammalian bodies slumbered peacefully beside the airlock. Yen looked down at them speculatively. "No," I said. "You have one, and that's enough." "But," Yen said. "I've humored you," I said. "I've let you act like a lower order. Now I want to see you behave like a civilized being. For unless you do, I shall have to take steps. I'm tired of this childishness." "I'll be all right now," Yen replied. "We've come to an understanding." She gestured at Edith with her primary digit and the big mammal shivered. I wondered what Yen had done to her. Edith was thoroughly cowed -- actually afraid of little Yen, who was less than one fifth her size. In a way, I felt an odd sort of pride in my mate that she should achieve mastery over such an intelligent and potentially dangerous brute. I knew perfectly well that I'd never dare attempt such dominance over Donald unless I was prepared to rob him of the mentality that made him useful. But I consoled myself with the thought that this female was peculiarly susceptible to domination. "We'd better get that car out of sight," Yen said. She nodded to Edith. The human obediently trotted off in the direction of the car. A few moments later the sound of the motor rose and fell as she concealed it in the trees. As soon as I could, I contacted Donald and told him what had happened. Fortunately he was alone, so his exclamation of surprise and consternation didn't arouse any suspicion. "Ethanol, eh?" he said speculatively. It was easy to follow the trend of his thoughts. "Don't get any ideas," I warned in my best TY villain manner. "I have Edith up here with me. If you want to see her again, you'd better stay sober." "I wouldn't think of crossing you," he assured me insincerely. "I'm too close to being rid of you." "Well -- what do we do?" I asked. "You're the expert on this insane society of yours." "You've done it," he said. "I don't think it was smart of you, but under the circumstances, I can't see how you could have done anything else. I warned you about Yen and Edith," he added -- rather gloatingly, I thought. "Now you're in for it." His voice was almost gay. "How?" "Six women vanishing all at once is going to cause a stir even in Los Angeles," he said. "After an ethanol party?" I asked curiously. "Six dancers out of a production that used a hundred? Your city will never miss them." "But their families will." Families! I hadn't thought of that. Mammals had strong family ties -- probably due to their method of reproduction. We Thalassans, coming as we did from eggs, had none of this. The state inculiators and the creches were our only contact with parenthood. We had no families. "Hmm," I said. "I hadn't thought of that." "Well, you'd better start. I hope it gives you a headache." "You get nastier every time I talk with you," I complained. "I have my reasons," he said bitterly. "Now, if you're through with me, little master, I think I'd like to get some sleep. In the meantime you'd better get them back to their homes before they're missed." "I can't," I confessed. "The controller isn't big enough to handle eight of you -- not as individuals." Donald chuckled grimly. "That's your worry. Remember, unless you find out which of them will be missed and act accordingly, you're going to be very much in the public eye." I didn't feel too happy as I cut off, but Donald had given me an idea. One by one I checked the new proxies. Of the six, two were living together. They had the casual emotional involvement with males so characteristic of this species, but they could remain here for several days without causing comment. Of the reremaining four, one had a roommate and would be difficult to extract; another was living alone; still another was mated and had an offspring, but she was not living with her mate -- a legal action having separated her much as it separates incompatible Thalassans. The offspring, however, was living with her when she wasn't working, a not unusual situation on this world, but one which could have some complications unless she was returned to it very shortly. The last was living with her parents and was seriously involved emotionally with a male. She was planning to be officially mated in the near future, although it would be legal fiction rather than fact since she was already nurturing a living embryo of some three weeks development. I debated whether to remove it, a simple enough manipulation, but decided against it. It would be interesting to observe a mammalian reproduction. But to remove her from her family and her unofficial mate was a task that might be difficult. I needed help. I projected a call for Ven, phrasing it imperatively so she could have no doubt about its urgency. Her answer was quick and clear. "I'm coming," she said. "Good. I need you. And bring Edith. We have a problem that will require her talents." "She'll be happy to cooperate." Ven's projection was cheerfully confident. "You did her no permanent damage, I hope." "Not a bit. In fact, you'd never know she's been disciplined." "Well, get in here, both of you. We have work to do." Edith had trouble squeezing into the control room and, despite her skin conditioning, the place quickly filled with her scent. But Ven and I were old hands now and took it in stride. She grasped the problem instantly. "The only one who might be any trouble is Alice. Her family and her boy friend can be difficult. The others won't need much effort, except for Grace. She'd better be returned to her baby as soon as possible." "How soon?" I asked. "The baby isn't living with her," Edith added, "not while she's working, but she sees it regularly. Every day or two, T believe." I sighed. That solved the biggest problem. "We had better start at once," Ven said. T ignored her and looked inquiringly at Edith. "What would you do?" I asked, flashing a cold projection at Ven to stay out of this. "Well -- if I had to do it, I'd send Alice and Grace home. I wouldn't do anything to Alice except block her from talking about this place and what happened. Grace I'd put under full control, have her pick up her baby, go home and pack to leave. As soon as .,she's ready to go, bring her out here." "The infant, too?" "Of course. A baby's no bother." This, I thought, was something of an understatement. "And what of the others?" I asked.  "Velma has a nosey roommate. Have her start a fight and leave angry. She hasn't much baggage, and it won't be any trouble for her to collect it. As for the other three, I think Joan's being kept. She can't afford a single apartment on her salary. Loleta and Marian are always out, sometimes for days. Their landlady won't think a thing of it. If they never return, she'll just pack their things and rent the room to someone else. I know that old witch. I'd just keep those three here and not worry about them. Nobody's going to make any fuss about three chorines disappearing. Later on you can make them write letters enclosing money to send their clothes to another city. Then they can be picked up and stored. That should give us a year before anyone gets suspicious enough to look for them." "Edith," I said, "you're a genius." "I got you into this mess," Edith said. "So, perhaps I'd better get you out." "But your fellow mamrhals -- " "You haven't hurt me -- not much, anyway," Edith said. "So I don't suppose you'll hurt them. And, besides, I don't want Ven mad at me like she was this afternoon. Anyway -- you'll be gone soon." "I think I shall regret leaving," I said honestly. "There is a great deal about you mammals I am beginning to suspect I do not know." "You aren't kidding," she said with faint bitterness so similar to Donald's that my antennae quivered. "But it's been quite an experience. I'll tell my kids when I have them -- but they're not going to believe me." "I hope you have those children -- and raise them to maturity," I said. The tone of my voice caused her to look at me with sudden fear on her face. But at the sight of my impassive features it died away. "You scared me for a moment," she said. "Did I? I didn't mean to." tHE next week kept us busy following Edith's instructions. I didn't see how they would apply to Alice, but Edith knew her species better than I. Alice's silence and the prying inquisitiveness of her parents and her boyfriend worked like magic. Alice finally became angry and after a stormy scene left the house, swearing never to return. Edith picked her up as she walked away; Ven turned on the control and turned the threat to fact. Later I took a leaf from Edith's book and sent Alice to San Francisco, where I had her write a pair of bitter letters to her parents and her extralegal mate. After that I felt more secure. The others worked out exactly as Edith predicted. No trouble at all. By the time Donald returned from the East with a ton of tin ingots in a small truck our training schedule was well set up. The robots and I had managed to build a multiplex controller similar to those we used on Thalassa on the state farms, but much smaller. It could handle the proxies en masse or as individuals. While far less sensitive than the one in the ship, it was effective enough for our rather elementary purposes. Edith, who was running the group under Ven's supervision. had them lined up in a row to greet Donald as he came up the hill toward the ship. "The place looks like a nudist colony," Donald grumbled. "You haven't improved it any." He eyed the file of mammals trooping down to the truck to unload the tin ingots. "I have another ton lined up for delivery as soon as you get this processed," he said. "Good," I replied. "We'll leave as soon as it's aboard. I don't like the looks of your recent actions." "Mine?" I shook my head. "Oh, you mean the world situation." I nodded. "You shouldn't worry about it. You should have seen it this time last year." I shrugged. I would never really understand these creatures. Their brains functioned differently. "You frighten me with your wild displays of emotion. Someday one of you is going to start something and your world is going to go up in fire." "I don't think so," he said. "I have some ideas about that. With the money from your stories and with what you have taught me, I think there will be some changes." There was a peculiar expression in his eyes that I couldn't identify. It made me vaguely uneasy. "I've been doing a lot of thinking since you met up with Edie and me. What this world needs is someone who can run it." "That's obvious," I said. "Until your society catches up with your technology you will be in constant danger. You mammals will have to learn to discipline your emotions." His face twisted. "I've had a good practical course in that," he said. "Now I'm getting postgraduate training." He gestured at the women coming up the hill carrying the silver tin ingots. "Just how long do you think I can endure something like this?" "Like what?" I asked. "Do I have to draw you a diagram?" he asked. "Ever since you lizards came into my life I haven't been able to touch a woman. Not even Edith -- and she's my wife. Just how much of this do you think I can take?" I exclaimed with 'dawning comprehension. "I think I see." The situation would have been amusing if it wasn't so stupid. I was surprised that I hadn't realized it before. There was, I knew, a certain amount of feedback in a bipolar control circuit. Obviously enough of Ven's conditioning, and mine, had seeped through to affect Donald and Edith's normal relationships. Manimals were far more preoccupied with sex than we were. Their books, magazines, television and motion pictures reeked of it. It was present in almost every piece of advertising, and four of our six new proxies were living histories of it. Yet Donald and Edith, because of our feedback, had been kept as continent as novitiates for the priesthood of Authority! "I'm a perfectly normal male," Donald said. "Just what do you think you've been doing to me? I can't drink. I can't make love. I can't do anything except collect tin for you lizards. Just why do you think I hate you? Now you surround me with a whole damned untouchable harern! Are you trying to drive me insane?" I laughed, and Donald recognize the sound for what it was. "Oh, damn you!" he said bitterly. "How would you like to be married for eight months and for six of them be unable to touch your wife? Just why do you think Edith tried to get drunk? I could kill you cheerfully for what you've done to us!" "Oh!" I said. There was a world of understanding opening in front of me. Of course, it would do no good to tell him that Ven and I had remained in enforced continence for five years. It was just the Eugenics council working through us -- entirely involuntarily. What was bothering Donald and Edith was so absurdly simple that neither Ven nor I would have thought to ask. And the mammals with their peculiar customs and habits would never have told us unless -- as had happened -- the pressure became too great. What our mammals needed was a good dose of Va Krul's basic therapy. If Edith were fertilized as a result of it, so much the better. It would keep her attention where it more properly belonged. The thought would never have occurred to me in my present state. Since I was content, I had erroneously assumed that everything was in harmony. "You might as well go home," I said. "Take Edith with you. We won't need you for several days." "Why?" "You'll find things a little different. I'll make a few adjustments on the controller." my surprise Don didn't appear happy at all. "Does that mean what I think it does?" he demanded. "Do you think I'll get any satisfaction out of being controlled even there?"' "I don't know about the pleasure," I. said coldly, "but I do know that it will improve your attitude." Donald raged at me, his brain white with anger. "So help me God, Eu Kor, someday I'm going to kill you for this! It's the ultimate insult." "You're not going to do anything," I said calmly. His voice dissolved into obscenity. For a moment I felt sorry for him until I remembered the basic truth that none of us are free -- and the most intelligent, naturally, are the least free of all. They are bound by their commitments, their duties, their responsibilities, and by their intelligence itself. If a superior intelligence occasionally exhibits petty lapses -- which amuse him or relieve his boredom -- it is not the place of the less endowed to construe it as a sign of equality. Some -- like Ven and me -- have known their place from birth. Others, like Edith and Alice, learn easily with a minimum amount of pain. Some like Grace learn hard; and some -- like Donald -- do not learn at all. Donald was the eternal rebel, complying because he must, yet seething with resentment because he did. He was the personification of drive without innate control, ambition without humility, intelligence without wisdom. As he had been, he was not quite enqugh. At best he would have been a minor author and a petty domestic tyrant. He would never have been a threat simply because he didn't have the ability or training. But I had given him what he lacked. The knowledge I had impressed upon his mind would give him a tremendous advantage over his fellow mammals, and his tendencies toward domestic tyranny would expand to include others. His glandular attitude would pervert his knowledge to the detriment of humankind. He could become a thing so dangerous that it could destroy this precariously balanced world. T went into the ship and set up a world matrix on the computer, using all the data I had accumulated, secured the answer, and then inserted Donald's potential into the matrix. I then ordered a probability extrapolation for both matrices, equating the solutions with survival. The answers confirmed my thoughts. With the matrix as it stood, the twenty year survival prediction was # per cent, which wasn't too bad since few advanced-technology worlds have better than an # per cent survival probability. But with Donald in the matrix, the survival prediction was zero! I knew what I must do. I could not leave him behind as I had planned. Nor could I inflict the senseless cruelty of brainblotting. He would have to be mercifully destroyed. Although I was fond of Donald, and his death would leave me sick for weeks, it would not be right to let my creation live and condemn the mammal race to death. I could not exterminate a race Authority had created. The guilt syndrome would be shattering. Of course, if they killed each qther that was not my concern. But until we left I would give him all the freedom he could use. Outside of the minimum of control, he would be free to do and act as he pleased. I didn't owe it to him, yet it was not his fault that he had come into my hands. And when I returned to Thalassa I would tell the Council what I had done and ask for justice. Perhaps we could save this world from itself even as we had saved others. The question of gratitude would be immaterial. With a firm hand to set them on the track, the mammals might learn the values of intelligence and cooperation before it was too late. They might understand the realities of existence rather than fall victim to their glandular fancies. They might. But if they did, one thing would be certain -- they would learn it the hard way. Donald was proof of that. I went to our living quarters, and presently Ven joined me. "They're all in for the night, Eu," she said. "That's good. How are they coming along?" "Splendidly. Another week should see the end of the training. Edith was a good experience for rtie in handling these. I'm not making the mistakes I did. I'm finding the blocks and removing them. One of them, the one called Grace, should be even better than Edith." "As a mount?" I asked with faint humor. "Or as a working proxy?" "Both," Ven said promptly. "She's stronger and more intelligent. Yet even so I think I shall always like Edith best." #NE'S first dependent is al'ways one's fondest memory," I replied sententiously, "But you'll forget them all when we're back on Thalassa." "I won't," Ven said. "I'll never forget Edith." "Never is a long time," I said gently. "I shall even forget the "Then you've decided to eliminate him?" Ven said. I nodded. "It's necessary," I said. "This world wouldn't be safe with him alive." "Poor Edith. She's fond of the brute," Ven said. She moved toward the doorway. "Where are you going?" I asked. "I want to talk to Edith. Perhaps I can prepare her." "No. Don't," I said. "Contact her if you wish, but tell her nothing." "Very well," she said. I smiled as she disappeared. Ven was going to miss her pet once we had left. It was obvious. "Eu! Quick!" Ven's projection crackled in my brain. "They're fighting! Edith's being hurt, and I can't touch them! They've set up a block!" I ran for the control room, slapped the helmet on my head, reached for the controls -- and stopped, laughing. "Stop them!" Ven screamed. and her projection nearly knocked me down. She reached for the control switch, but I slapped her hand away. "Quiet!" I snapped. "They're not fighting, you little fool! Turn on your audio and listen and stop acting silly!" Ven did as I told her and her aura changed to a fiery pink. "Oh!" she said in a small voice, "but they never -- " I must have made some mistake in revising the controllers -- or feedback was stronger than I suspected -- for the Va Krul syndrome came back along our lines of contact with explosive force! Desperately I reached for the switch -- but my hand froze in midair as an intolerable wave of emotion drove Ven and me together like two pieces of iron F O U N D I N T A T H E R with opposite magnetic charge! The last thing I remember was being enveloped in the flaring golden glow of Ven's aura. T came to my senses in our living quarters. I was stunned -- exhausted -- limp and gasping. "Thalassa!" I said weakly, "we've really done it now!" Ven smiled a pale blue radiance at me. "You have become strong, living on this heavy world," she said. "I like it." "But -- but!" I sputtered. "It was so -- it can't -- it couldn't -- " "But it did," Ven said softly. "And I'm glad it did." "I don't mean that. What I mean to say was that it was so -- " "Unexpected?" "No! So utterly -- " "Satisfying?" she asked. "Stop interrupting! It was all of that and more. But what I want to say is that we've violated the prime restriction for space travellers. How could we do it?" "You're forgetting that for some time we have been living upon this emotion-charged world," Ven said. "The steady erosion was more than our conditioning could take. The feedback was merely the last in a whole series of disruptive stimuli. It was the trigger, but our defenses had been weakened long before. Not that I'm sorry," she added quickly. "For weeks I've been wondering what sort of a mate you'd be when this trip was over. I'm not unhappy with the preview." She smiled at me and the whole of our living quarters was filled with a bright tender blue. "The natives," I said worriedly. "We were in contact with them." Ven's aura darkened. "I had forgotten them," she said. "I hope that the feedback wasn't intensified and returned to them. I'd better look." She started for the control room and I followed more slowly. "There's no damage," she said from beneath the helmet. "Edith feels just as I do." I took my helmet and coded Don's pattern on the selector. Peculiar, I thought with vague wonder. Most peculiar. For the first time Donald and I were in true rapport. His mind was slow, lazy, sluggish -- even his ambition was sated for the moment. Could it be, I wondered, that we could find agreement through our emotions? Was it frustration that drove him? Whatever the block had been it was gone now. This was a true empathic meeting -- something far more satisfying than our previous conflict. I relaxed in it, feeling the slow langorous questings of his mind even as he felt mine. There was a sense of brotherhood that transcended differences in race and culture. We were down to basics, on the oldest meeting ground of life. He was wondering idly what the outcome of this might be -- conscious of me, but careless. It jolted me. He might be uncertain, but I knew Ven was from good family stock, and "good" to a Thalassan meant something entirely different than it commonly did to the natives of this planet! I disengaged hurriedly and shook Ven out of her rapport with Edith. "We've no time to lose," I said. "We must leave at once! You know what's going to happen!" "I know," Ven said. "I feel the changes already." "That's just in your mind," I snapped. "We're not going home," she said. There was a note of prophecy in her voice. "We'll never make it." "We can't stay here!" "I know." "Then what are we going to do?" VE couldn't stay here. But we couldn't go home either. The trip would take weeks, and hyperspace is fatal to a gravid Thalassan female. That was something we learned long ago, and the principal reason for continence-conditioning for couples in space. What was more, I knew that where Ven stayed, I would stay. "Remember the fourth planet of this system?" Ven asked. "Yes. Ideal gravity, adequate oxygen, but too cold." "And with no intelligent life," Ven added. "That's an advantage -- and we can beat the cold. It wouldn't be too hard to build domes. We have plenty of power metal, and a matricizer. We could hatch our clutch there. With the mammals to help us, we should be able to make a comfortable enough life for the forty years it'll take to bring our offspring to maturity. We should be able to do this easily, and still get home before we're strangers." Hmm," I said. "It's possible. And we can use this world for a supply base. But would you care to live on that cold barren planet?" "There are worse places," she said matter-of-factly. "And we'd be close to everything we'd need." It did have possibilities. And the mammals could be adapted. They were a more advanced evolutionary form than we, but lower on the adaptive scale -- nonspecialized -- more so than any other intelligent race I had encountered. Ven said, "We would actually be doing their race a favor, if the computation of this world's future is correct Some of them would still survive if this planet commits suicide. And if the prediction is wrong, we would have done no harm. If they reach space, they'll merely find that they've already arrived when they reach the fourth planet." "Which might be something of a surprise to their explorers," I said with a chuckle. "All right. We'll play it your way." I was pretty sure how Donald would take this. He was going to be ftirious, but after all one doesn't make a pet of a wolf and then turn it loose. It's too hard on the livestock. But I didn't think he'd be too unhappy. He'd be the principal human on Mars; and after we left he'd be ruler of a world. And in the meantime he could be a domestic tyrant. It was fortunate, I thought with a smile, that mammals were essentially polygamous. Donald would make some nasty comments about being a herd sire -- but I didn't think his comments would be too sincere. After all, it's not every man that has a chance to become a founding father. I was still smiling as I turned the dials on the controller and flipped the switch. Founding father -- the title was as much mine as his! The first Laika visited space and died. The second Laika reversed that order -- to save a man's life! frantic barking, my first reaction was one of annoyance. I turned over in my bunk and murmured sleepily "Shut up, you silly bitch." That dreamy interlude lasted only a fraction of a second. Then consciousness returned -- and with it, fear. Fear of loneliness, and fear of madness. For a moment I dared not oj)en my eyes. I was afraid of what I might see. Reason told me that no dog had ever set foot upon this world, that Laika was separated miles of space -- and, far more irrevocably, by five years of time. "You've been dreaming," I told myself angrily. "Stop being a fool -- open your eyes! You won't see anything except the glow of the wall-paint." That was right, of course. The tiny cabin was empty, the door tightly closed. I was alone with my memories, overwhelmed by the transcendental sadness that often comes when some bright dream fades into drab reality. The sense of loss was so desolating that I longed to return to sleep. It was well that I failed to do so, for at that moment sleep would have been death. But I did not know this for another five seconds, and during that eternity I was back on Earth, seeking what comfort I could from the unforgotten past. ## one ever discovered Laika's origin, though the Observatory staff made a few inquiries and I inserted several advertisements in the Pasadena newspapers. I found her, a lost and lonely ball of fluff, huddled by the roadside one summer evening when I was driving up to Palomar. Though I have never liked dogs, or indeed any animals, it was impossible to leave this helpless little creature to the mercy of the passing cars. With some qualms, wishing that I had a pair of gloves, I picked her up and dumped her in the baggage compartment. I was not going to hazard the upholstery of my new '# Vik, and felt that she could do little damage there. In this, I was not altogether correct. When I had parked the car at the Monastery -- the astronomers' residential quarters, where I'd be living for the next week -- I inspected my find without much enthusiasm. I had intended to hand the puppy over to the janitor. But then it whimpered and opened its eyes. There was such an expression of helpless trust in them that -- well, I kept it. Sometimes I regretted that decision. But never for long. I had no idea how much trouble a growing dog could cause, deliberately and otherwise. My cleaning and repair bills soared. I could never be sure of finding an unravaged pair of socks or an unchewed copy of the Astrophyaical Journal. But eventually Laika was both house-trained and Observatory-trained; she must have been the only dog ever to be allowed inside the #-inch dome. She would lie there quietly in the shadows for hours, while I was up in the cage making adjustments, quite content if she could hear my voice from time to time. The other astronomers became equally fond of her (it was old Dr. Anderson who suggested her name) but from the beginning she was my dog. She would obey no one else. Not that she would always obey me. She was a beautiful animal, about # Alsatian. It was that missing #, I imagine, that led to her being abandoned. (I still feel a surge of anger when I think of it, but as I shall never know the facts I may be jumping to false conclusions.) Apart from two dark patches over the eyes, most of her body was a smoky gray. Her coat was soft as silk. When her ears were pricked up, she looked incredibly intelligent and alert. Sometimes I would be discussing spectral types or stellar evolution with my colleagues, and it would be hard to believe that she was not understanding us. Even now, I cannot understand why she bdcame so attached to me, for I have made very few friends among human beings. Yet when I returned to the Observatory after an absence, she would go almost frantic with delight, boimcing round on her hindlegs and putting her paws on my shoulders -- which she could reach quite easily -- all the while uttering small squeaks of joy which seemed highly inappropriate from so large a dog. I hated to leave her for more than a few days at a time. I could not take her with me on overseas trips, but she accompanied me on most of my shorter journeys. She was with me when I drove north to attend that ill-fated seminar at Berkeley. HE had been very good com pany on the long drive. We were staying with university acquaintances on Telegraph Hill; they had been polite about it, but obviously did not look forward to having a monster in the house. However, I assured them that Laika never gave the slightest trouble. Rather reluctantly, they let her sleep in the living room. "You needn't worry about burglars tonight," I said. "We don't have any in Berkeley," they answered, rather coldly. In the middle of the night it seemed that they were wrong. I was awakened by an hysterical, high-pitched barking from Laika which I had heard only once before -- when she had first seen a cow, and did not know what on earth to make of it. Cursing, I threw off the sheets and stumbled out into the darkness of the unfamiliar house. My main thought was to silence Laika before she roused my hosts -- assuming that this was not already far too late. If there had been an intruder, he would certainly have taken flight by now. Indeed, I rather hoped that he had. For a moment I stood beside the switch at the top of the stairs, wondering whether to throw it. Then I growled, "Shut up, Laika!" and irritably flooded the place with light. She was scratching frantically at the door, pausing from time to time to give that hysterical yelp. "If you want out," I said angrily, "there's no need for all that fuss." I went down and shot the bolt. She took off into the night like a rocket. It was very calm and still, with a waning moon struggling to pierce the San Francisco fog. I stood in the luminous haze, looking out across the water to the lights of the city, waiting for Laika to come back so that I could chastise her suitably. I was still waiting when, for the secpnd time in the Twentieth Century, the San Andreas Fault woke from its sleep. Oddly enough, I was not frightened -- at first. I can remember that two thoughts passed through my mind, in the moment before I realized the danger. Surely, I told myself, the geophysicists could have given us some warning. And then I found myself thinking, with great surprise, "I'd no idea that earthquakes make so much noisel" It was about then that I knew that this was no ordinary quake. What happened afterward I would prefer to forget. The Red Cross did not take me off until quite late the next morning, because I refused to leave Laika. As I looked at the shattered house containing the bodies of my friends, I knew that I owed my life to her; but the helicopter pilots could not be expected to imderstand that, and I cannot blame them for thinking that I was crazy, like so many of the others they had foimd wandering among the fires and the debris. we were ever apart for more than a few hours. I have been told -- and I can well believe it -- that I became less and less interested in human company, without being actively unsocial or misanthropic. Between them, the stars and Laika filled all my needs. We used to go for long walks together over the mountains; it was the happiest time I have ever known. There was only one flaw. I knew, though Laika could not, how soon it must end. We had been planning the move for more than a decade. As far back as the #'s, it was realized that Earth was no place for an astronomical observatory. Even the small pilot instruments on the Moon had far out-performed all the telescopes peering through the murk and haze of the terrestrial atmosphere. The story of Mount Wilson, Palomar, Greenwich and the other great names was coming to an end. They would still be used for training purposes, but the research frontier must move out into space. I had to move with it. Indeed, I had already been offered the post of Deputy Director, Farside Observatory. In a few months, I could hope to solve problems I had been working on for years. Beyond the atmosphere, I would be like a blind man who had suddenly been given sight. It was utterly impossible, of course, to take Laika with me. The only animals on the Moon were those needed for experimental purposes. It might be another generation before pets were allowed, and even then it would cost a fortune to carry them there and to keep them alive. Providing Laika with her usual two pounds of meat a day would take several times my quite comfortable salary. The choice was simple and straightforward. I could stay on Earth and abandon my career. Or  I could go to the Moon and abandon Laika. After all, she was only a dog. In a dozen years, she would be dead, while I should be reaching the peak of my profession. No sane man would have hesitated over the matter. Yet I did hesitate, and if by now you do not imderstand why, no further words of mine can help. In the end, I let matters go by default. Up to the very week I was due to leave, I had still made no plans for Laika. When Dr. Anderson volunteered to look after her, I accepted numbly, with scarcely a word of thanks. The old physicist and his wife had always been fond of her, and I am afraid that they considered me indifferent and heartless. The truth was just the opposite. We went for one more walk together over the hills; then I delivered her silently to the Andersons, and did not see her again. twenty-four hours until a major flare-storm had cleared the Earth's orbit. Even so, the Van Allen belts were still so active that we had to make our exit through the North Polar Gap. It was a miserable flight. Apart from the usual trouble with weightlessness, we were all groggy with anti-radiation drugs. The ship was already over Farside before I took much interest in the proceedings, so I missed the sight of Earth dropping below the horizon. Nor was I really sorry. I wanted no reminders, and intended to think only of the future. Yet I could not shake off that feeling of guilt; I had deserted someone who loved and trusted me, and was no better than those who had abandoned Laika when she was a puppy, beside the dusty road to Palomar. The news that she was dead reached me a month later. There was no reason that anyone knew; the Andersons had done their best, and were very upset. She had just lost interest in living, it seemed. For a while, I think I did the same; but work is a wonderful anodsme, and my program was just getting under way. Though I never forgot Laika, in a little while the memory ceased to hurt. Then why had it come back to haunt me, five years later, on the far side of the Moon? I was searching my mind for the reason. when the metal building around me quivered as if under the impact of a heavy blow. I reacted without thinking. I was already closing the helmet of my emergency suit when the foundations slipped and the wall tore open with a short-lived scream of escaping air. Because I had automatically pressed the General Alarm button we lost only two men, despite the fact that the tremor -- the worst ever recorded on Farside -- cracked all three of the Observatory's pressure-domes. It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural. Everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology. In the Second San Francisco earthquake, Laika was not the only dog to sense approaching disaster. Many such cases were reported. And on Farside, my own memories must have given me that heightened awareness, when my never-sleeping subconscious detected the first faint vibrations from within the Moon. The human mind has strange and labyrinthine ways of going about its business. It knew the signal that would most swiftly rouse me to the knowledge of danger. There is nothing more to it than that; though in a sense one could say that Laika woke me on both occasions, there is no mystery about it, no miraculous warning across the gulf that neither man nor dog can ever bridge. Of that I am sure, if I am sure of anything. Yet sometimes I wake now, in the silence of the Moon, and wish that the dream could have lasted a few seconds longer -- so that I could have looked just once more into those luminous brown eyes, brimming with an unselfish, undemanding love I have found nowhere else on this world, or on any other.      Instead of a single issue, let's take a long-range view. On hand right now, scheduled soon, are lead stories by Leiber, Blish, Pohl, Aldiss, Budrys, etc.; shorts by Edward Wellen, Judith Merril, Jack Sharkey, Avram Davidson and a dozen more; the long-awaited Theodore Sturgeon sequel to Tandy's Story -- and more! 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Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power any accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass feat and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe eX.E. I Scribe E.C.E.  I Sao Jose, California i  Please send me the rw book, TAr j I oZ-rtf, which explains how I may learn to  I use my faculties and powers of mind.  t I ' Name j ! Address  eaiaxy by Robert Silverberg by Algis Budrys by James and Virginia Blish by Richard Sabia by Wallace West M-#I in Andromeda. # light-years away, this galaxy, nearly identical to our own, is the farthest object visible to the naked eye. It appears as a faint smudge of light south of Cassiopeia. Publisher Managing Editor Science Editor Art Director by R. A. Lafferty by Edward Wellen by Willy Ley by Floyd C. Gale Next issue (August) on sale June #th. bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson street. New York #, N. Y. SOb' per copy. Subscription: (# copies) S# per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright, New Yorx #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. Ail rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Snodgrass, inventor. He built a time machine. He built a time machine and in it he went back some two thousand years, to about the time of the birth of Christ. He made himself known to the Emperor Augustus, his Lady Livia and other rich and powerful Romans of the day and, quickly making friends, secured their cooperation in bringing about a rapid transformation of Year One living habits. (He stole the idea from a sciencefiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp, called Lest Darkness Fall . ) His time machine wasn't very big, but his heart was, so Snodgrass selected his cargo with the plan of providing the maximum immediate help for the world's people. The principal features of ancient Rome were dirt and disease, pain and death. Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through #th century medicine. Everything else could take care of itself, once the human race was free of its terrible plagues and early deaths. and aureomycin and painless dentistry. He ground lenses for spectacles and explained the surgical techniques for removing cataracts. He taught anesthesia and the germ theory of disease, and showed how to purify drinking water. He built Kleenex factories and taught the Romans to cover their mouths when they coughed. He demanded, and got, covers for the open Roman sewers, and he pioneered the practice of the balanced diet. Snodgrass brought health to the ancient world, and kept his own health, too. He lived to more than a hundred years. He died, in fact, in the year # A.D., a very contented man. When Snodgrass arrived in Augustus's great palace on the Palatine Hill, there were some # human beings alive in the world. He persuaded the principate to share his blessings with all the world, benefiting not of the Empire, but the other hunHemisphere and all the Pacific islands. Everybody got healthy. Infant mortality dropped at once, from ninety deaths in a hundred to fewer than two. Life expectancies doubled immediately. Everyone was well, and demonstrated their health by having more children, who grew in health to maturity and had more. It is a feeble population that cannot double itself every generation if it tries. These Romans, Goths and Mongols were tough. Every thirty years the population of the world increased by a factor of two. In the year # A.D. the world the time Snodgrass passed away, a happy man, it was as large as it is today. TT IS too bad that Snodgrass did not have room in his time machine for the blueprints of cargo ships, the texts on metallurgy to build the tools that would make the reapers that would harvest the fields -- for the triple-expansion steam turbines that would generate the electricity that would power the machines that would run the cities -- for all the technology that two thousand subsequent years had brought about. But he didn't. Consequently by the time of his death conditions were no longer quite perfect. A good many people were hungry. A great many were badly housed. On the whole, Snodgrass was pleased, for all these things could surely take care of themselves. With a healthy world population, the increase of numbers would be a mere spur to research. Boundless nature, once its ways were studied, would surely provide for any number of human beings. Indeed it did. Steam engines on the Newcomen design were lifting water to irrigate fields to grow food long before his death. The Nile was dammed at Aswan in the year #. Battery-powered street cars replaced oxcarts in Rome and Alexandria before # A.D., and the galley slaves were freed by huge, clumsy Diesel outboards that drove the food ships across the Mediterreanean a few years later. In the year # A.D. the world had now something over twenty running neck-and-neck with expansion. Nuclear-driven plows had cleared the Teutoburg Wald, where Varus's bones were still moldering, and fertilizer made from ion-exchange mining of the sea produced fantastic crops of hybrid grains. In # A.D. the world population stood at a fusion produced fabulous quantities of energy from the sea; atomic transmutation converted any matter into food. This was necessary, because there was no longer any room for farms. The Earth was getting crowded. By the middle of the #th century the # square miles of land surface on the Earth was so well covered that no human being standing anywhere on dry land could stretch out his arms in any direction without touching another human being standing beside him. But everyone was healthy, and science marched on. The seas were drained, which immediately tripled the available land area. (In fifty years the sea bottoms were also full.) Energy which had come from the fusion of marine hydrogen now came by the tapping of the full energy output of the Sun, through gigantic "mirrors" composed of pure force. The other planets froze, of course; but this no longer mattered, since in the decades that followed they were disintegrated for the sake of the energy at their cores. So was the Sun. Maintaining life on Earth on such artificial standards was prodigal of energy consumption; in time every star in the Galaxy was transmitting its total power output to the Earth, and plans were afoot to tap Andromeda, which would care for all necessary expansion for -- thirty years. At this point a calculation was made. Taking the weight of the average man at about a hundred and thirty pounds -- in round numbers, # X # grams -- and allowing for a continued doubling of population every thirty years (although there was no such thing as a "year" any more, since the Sun had been disintegrated; now a lonely Earth floated aimlessly toward Vega), it was discovered that by the year # the total mass of human flesh, bone and blood would be # X grams. This presented a problem. The total mass of the Earth itself was only # x #" grams. Already humanity lived in burrows penetrating crust and basalt and quarrying into the congealed nickeliron core; by # all the core itself would have been transmuted into living men and women, and their galleries would have to be tunneled through masses of their own bodies, a writhing, squeezed ball of living corpses drifting through space. Moreover simple arithmetic showed that this was not the end. In finite time the mass of human beings would equal the total mass of the Galaxy; and in some further time it would equal and exceed the total mass of all galaxies everywhere. This state of affairs could no longer be tolerated, and so a project was launched. With some difficulty resources were diverted to permit the construction of a small but important device. It was a time machine. With one volunteer aboard (seapplied) it went back to the year #. Its cargo was only a hunting rifle with one cartridge, and with that cartridge the volunteer assassinated Snodgrass as he trudged up the Palatine. To the great (if only potential) to-be-born persons. Darkness blessedly fell. story. Not from this end, anyway. But... a population doubling every thirty years is close to the average of "new" nations; even the United States does it in fifty... so come back two thousand years from now and let's see! Collectors or anybody else who wishes to look up any story published in Galaxy from its first issue through #I can secure a complete duplicated index. Lists all stories by title and by author. Includes complete listing by subject of Willy Ley columns. Only # copies available. Price, #. Order from David F. Nolan, # Dresden Street, Kensington, Maryland -- not from Galaxy! The aliens gave Earth's might the supreme humiliation -- they ignored it -- and humanity replied with blazing, unconquerable hatred. For men will do miracles for revenge... or like to look at General Compton. Compton the lean, keen, slash-gesturing semidemagogue of a few years ago had been much easier to live with than Compton as he was now, and Runner had never had much stomach for him even then. So Runner kept his eyes firmly fixed on the device he was showing. Keeping his eyes where they were was not as easy as it might have been. The speckled, bulbous distortion in front of him was what Headquarters, several hundred miles away under The Great Salt Lake, was pleased to refer to as an Invisible Weapons Carrier. It was hard to see -- because it was designed to be hard to see. But Malachi Runner was going to have to take this thing up across several hundred miles of terrain, and he was standing too close to it not to see it. The Invisible Weapons Carrier was, in fact, a half-tone of reality. It was large enough inside to contain a man and a fusion bomb, together with the power supply for its engine and its light amplifiers. It bristled with a stiff mat of flexible-plastic light-conducting rods, whose stub ends, clustered together in a tight mosaic pointing outward in every conceivable direction, contrived to bend light around its bulk. It was presently conducting, toward Runner, a picture of the carved rock directly behind it. The rock, here in this chamber cut under the eastern face of the Medicine Bow Mountains, was reasonably featureless; and the light-amplifiers carefully controlled the intensity of the picture. So the illusion was marred by only two things: the improbable angle of the pictured floor it was also showing him, and the fact that for every rod conducting light from the wall, another rod was conducting light from Runner's direction, so that to his eyes the ends of half the rods were dead black. "Invisibility," Compton said scornfully from behind and to one side of Runner. Or, rather, he whispered and an amplifier took up the strain in raising his voice to a normal level. "But it's not bad camouflage. You might make it. Colonel." "I have orders to try." Runner would not give Compton the satisfaction of knowing that his impatience was with the means provided, not with the opportunity. The war could not possibly be permitted to continue the thirty years more given to it by Compton's schedule. Compton himself was proof of that. Not that proof required Compton. He was only one. There were many. cadet officer who had guided him from the tramway stop to this chamber here, in one of the side passages of the siege bore that was being driven under the Medicine Bows in the direction of the alien spaceship that had dominated the world for fifty years. The boy -- none of these underofficers were older than seventeen -- had a face that looked as if it had been made from wet paper and then baked dry. His eyesockets were black pits from which his red eyes stared, and his hands were like chicken's feet. His bloated stomach pushed against the wide white plastic of his sidearm belt. He looked, in short, like most of the other people Runner had seen here since getting off the tram. As he was only seventeen, he had probably been born underground, somewhere along the advancing bore, and had never so much as seen sunlight, much less eaten anything grown under it. He had been bred and educated -- or mis-educated; show him something not printed in Military Alphabet and you showed him the Mayan Codex -- trained and assigned to duty in a tunnel in the rock; and never in his life had he been away from the sound of the biting drills. "You're not eager to go, Colonel?" Compton's amplified whisper said. "You're Special Division, so of course this isn't quite your line of work. I know your ideals, you Special Division men. Find some way to keep the race from dehumanizing itself." And now he chose to make a laugh, remembering to whisper it. "One way to do that would be to end the war before another generation goes by." Runner wondered, not for the first time, if Compton would find some way to stop him without actually disobeying the Headquarters directive ordering him to cooperate. Runner wondered, too, what Compton would say if he knew just how eager he was for the mission -- and why. Runner could answer the questions for himself by getting to know Compton better, of course. There was the rub. Runner did not think he could ever have felt particularly civilized toward anyone who had married his fiancee. That was understandable. It was even welcome. Runner perversely cherished his failings. Not too perversely, at that -- Runner consciously cherished every human thing remaining to the race. Runner could understand why a woman would choose to marry the famous Corps of Engineers general who had already chivvied and bullied the Army -- the organizing force of the world -- into devoting its major resources to this project he had fostered. There was no difficulty in seeing why Norma Brand might turn away from Malachi Runner in favor of a man who was not only the picture of efficiency and successful intellect but was thought likely to be the savior of Humanity. But Compton several years later was -- Runner turned and looked; he couldn't spend the rest of the day avoiding it. Compton, several years later, was precisely what a man of his time could become if he was engaged in pushing a three hundred mile tunnel through the rock of a mountain chain, never knowing how much his enemy might know about it, and if he proposed to continue that excavation to its end, thirty years from now, whether the flesh or not. Compton's leonine head pron truded from what was very like a steam cabinet on wheels. In that cabinet were devices to assist his silicotic lungs, his sclerotic blood vessels, and a nervous system so badly deranged that even several years ago Runner had detected the great man in fits of spastic trembling. And God knew what else might be going wrong with Compton's body that Compton's will would not admit.  most simultaneously, a bell chimed softly in the control panel on the back of the cabinet. The cadet aide sprang forward, read the warning in some dial or other and made an adjustment in the settings of the control knobs. Compton craned his neck in its collar of loose gray plastic sheeting and extended his grin to the boy. "Thank you. Cadet. I thought I was starting to feel a little dizzy." "Yes, sir." The aide went back to his rest position. "All right. Colonel," Compton said to Runner as though nothing had happened. "I've been curious to see this gimmick of yours in operation ever since it was delivered here. Thank you. You can turn it off now. And after that. I'll show you something you've never seen." Runner frowned for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. He crawled under the weapons carrier. From that close it was no longer "invisible," only vaguely dizzying to the eye. He opened the hatch and turned off the main switch. Compton could only have meant he was going to show him the ship. Of course, he had seen films of it often enough. Who had not? The Army had managed to keep spy-drones flying above the Mississippi plain. The ship ignored them unless they took on aggressive trajectories. Presumably there was some limit to the power the ship felt able to expend. Or perhaps the ship simply did not care what Earthmen might learn from watching it; perhaps it underestimated them. This latest in the long chain of Compton's command bunkers, creeping mole-like toward the ship, was lighted a sickly orangeyellow. Runner seemed to recall a minor scandal in the Quartermaster Corps. Something about a contractor who had bribed or cozened a Corps officer into believing that yellow light duplicated natural sunlight. Contractor and misled officer were no doubt long dead in one of the labor battalions at the bore face, but some use for the useless lights had had to be found. And so here they were, casting their pall, just as if two lives and two careers had not already gone toward settling the account. But, of course, nothing settles an account as derelict as Earth's was. In that light, Compton's cabinet rolled forward to the bank of hooded television screens juryrigged against a somewhat waterproofed wall. A row of technicians perched on stools watched what the drones were showing them. "Lights," Compton said, and the aide made the room dark. "Here, Colonel -- try this one." He pointed his chin toward a particular screen, and Runner stepped closer. For the first time in his life, he saw something only a few hundred people of his time had seen in an undelayed picture; he saw the ship. It was two hundred miles away from his present location, and two hundred fifty miles high. II landed butt-down in the northwest quadrant of the central plain of the United States. Sternfirst, she had put one of her four landing jacks straight down to bedrock through the town of Scott's Bluff, Nebraska, and the diagonally opposite leg seventyfive miles away near Julesburg, Colorado. Her shadow swept fifty thousand square miles. A tower of pitted dull green and brown-gold metal, her forepeak narrowing in perspective into a needle raking unseen through the thinnest last margins of the atmosphere, she had neither parleyed nor even communicated with anything on or of Earth. No one had ever seen anything of what her crew might look like. To this day, she still neither spoke to Earth nor listened to whatever Terrestrials might want to say to her. She was neither an embassy nor an invader. For fifty years she had been broadcasting the same code group into space, hour after hour, but she had neither made nor received any beam transmissions along any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The presumption was she had a distress beacon out on general principles, but had no hope of communicating with a particular source of rescue. She had come down a little erratically; there was some suggestion of jury-rigging in the plates over an apparently buckled section of the hull shrouding her stern tubes; there seemed to be some abnormal erosion at one segment of the lip around the main jet. Over the years. Headquarters Intelligence had reached the decision that she was down on Earth for a self-refit. Landing, she had immediately put out surface parties and air patrols -- there were turretmounted weapons all along her flanks; she was clearly a warship of some kind -- in a display of resources that badly upset the Terrestrial military forces observing her. The surface parties were squat-profiled, tracked, armored amphibious machines with sixteen-foot bogeys and a track-toturtledeck height of seventy-five feet. They had fanned out over the surrounding states and, without regard to road, river, fence or farmhouse, had foraged for minerals. It had finally been concluded that the vehicles, equipped with power shovels, claws, drills, ore buckets and whatever other mining tools were necessary, were remote-controlled from the ship on the basis of local topography but not with any reference to the works of Man. Or to the presence of Man. The undeviating tracks made as much of a hayrick as they did of a company of antitank infantry or a battalion of what the Army in those days was pleased to call "armor." Whatever had hurt her, there was no point in Earthmen speculating on it. No missile could reach her. She had antimissile missiles and barrage patterns that, in operation, had made the Mississippi plain uninhabitable. An attempt was made to strike her foraging parties, with some immediate success. She then extended her air cover to the entire civilized world, and began methodically smashing down every military installation and every industrial complex capable of supporting one. It was a tribute to the energy and perseverance of Twentieth Century Man. And it was the cause of Twenty-First Century man's finding himself broken into isolated enclaves, almost all of them either underground or so geographically remote as to be valueless, and each also nearly incapable of physical communication with any other. It did not take a great deal of Terrestrial surface activity to attract one of the ship's nearly invulnerable aircraft. Runner's journey between Salt Lake and the tunnel pit head had been long, complicated by the need to establish no beaten path, and anxious. Only the broken terrain, full of hiding places, had made it possible at all. But the balance between birth and death rates was once more favorable, and things were no longer going all the ship's way -- whether the ship knew it or not. Still, it would be another thirty years before this siege bore Compton was driving could reach, undermine and finally topple the ship. ner and the other members of Special Division knew, the biped, spindling, red-eyed creatures emerging from the ground to loot that broken ship and repay themselves for this nightmare campaign would be only externally human -- some of them. Some would be far less. Special Division's hope -- its prospects were not good enough to call it a task -- was to attempt to shorten that time while Humanity was still human. And if the human race did not topple the ship, or if the ship completed its refit and left before they could reach it, then all this fifty years of incalculable material and psychic expenditure was irretrievably lost. Humanity would be bankrupt. They were all living now on the physical and emotional credit embodied in that tower of alien resources. From it, they could strip a technology to make the world new again -- nothing less could accomplish that; in its conquest, there was a triumph to renew the most exhausted heart. Or almost any such heart. Runner could only speculate on how many of the victors would, like Compton, be unable to dance upon the broken corpse. If anyone on Earth doubted, no one dared to dwell aloud on the enfeebling thought. They had to have the ship. "She's got some kind of forcefield running over her structure," Compton remarked, looking at the image on the screen. "We know that much. Something that keeps the crystals in her metal from deforming and sliding. She'd collapse. If we had something like that field, we could build to her size, too." "Is there that much metal in the world?" Compton looked sideward at Runner. "A damned sight more. But if we had her, we wouldn't need it." Yes, Runner thought, keeping himself from looking at the screen now as faithfully as he had prevented himself from looking at Compton earlier. Yes, if we had the ship we wouldn't need this, and we wouldn't need that, or the other thing. We could even engineer such wonderful cabinets like the one in which Compton dwelt that none of us would have to fear a stop to our ambitions, and we could roll along on the wonderfully smooth corridor floors we could carve away from the places where storms and lightning strike. For how could you live, Compton, out there where I have to go tomorrow? Compton, looking up at him, shrewdly said: "Do you know I approve of the Special Division? I think you people serve a very necessary function. I need the pressure of rivals." Runner thought; You are ugly. had said and left Compton to his screens and schedules. But he did not take the lift down to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters where he had been given an accommodation -- a two-man cubicle for himself alone; the aide, never having experienced solitude, as Runner had, had been envious. Instead, he puzzled his way through another of the branching temporary passageways that were crudely chopped out for living space near the advancing bore. He searched until he found the proper door. The letter Norma had sent him did not contain the most exact directions. It had spoken in local terms: "Follow the first parallel until you reach the fourth gallery," and so forth. He knocked, and the gas-tight door opened. "I heard you would be here today," Norma said in a choked voice, and there was much for him to read in the waxiness of her skin and the deep wrinkles that ran from the corners of her nose to the corners of her bloodless mouth. He took the hands she offered, and stepped inside. There was one large room; that is, a room large enough for a freestanding single cot, rather than a bunk, and a cleared area, faintly marked by black rubber wheelmarks, large enough for a cabinet to turn around in. A Comptonsized cabinet. "How are you, Norma?" he said as if he could not guess, and she did not trouble to answer him. She shut the door and leaned against it as if they had both just fled in here. "Are you going out in the morning?" Runner nodded. It seemed to him he had time at least to say a few conventional things to the girl who had been his fiancee, and then Compton's wife. But she apparently thought otherwise. "Are you going to make it?" "I don't know. It's a gamble." "Do you think you'll make it?" "No." It had never seemed reasonable that he would. In the Technical Section of the Special Division there were men -- fully his equals -- who were convinced he could succeed. They said they had calculated the ship's weaknesses, and he believed they had figures and evaluations, right enough. He in his own turn believed there were do whether they seemed reasonable or not, simply because they seemed necessary. So neither fact nor opinion could modify his taking the weapons carrier out against the ship tomorrow. "But I hope I'll make it," he said. hope you'll make it," Norma said tonelessly. She reached out quickly and took his hands again. "What a forlorn thing to tell me! You know I won't be able to stand it down here much longer. How do we know the ship doesn't have seismic detectors? How do we know it isn't just letting us concentrate ourselves here so it can smash us before we become dangerous?" "Well, we don't know, but it seems unlikely. They have geological probes, of course. The gamble is that they're only probes and not detectors." "If they don't smash us, there's only one reason -- they know they'll be finished and gone before we can reach them!" This was all wrong; he could not talk to her about anything important before he had calmed her. He said, searching for some way to reach her: "But we have to go on as if they won't. Nothing else we've tried has worked. At least Compton's project hasn't failed." "Now you're on his side! You!" She was nothing like the way she had been with him. She would never have been like this. The way she was now, she and Malachi Runner could not meet. He understood, now, that in the years since she had left Headquarters with Compton she had come to think back on Malachi Runner not as a man but as an embodiment of that safe life. It was not him she was shouting out to. It was to all those days gone forever. And so I must be those days of life in a place where shafts lead to the wine-rich air of the surface, and there is no sound of metal twisting in the rock. I am not Malachi Runner now. I hoped I could be. I should have read that letter as it was, not as I hoped it was. Good-by, Runner, you aren't needed here. "No, I'm not on his side. But I wouldn't dare stop him if I could. I wouldn't dare shut off any hope that things will end and the world can go back to living." "End? Where can they end? He goes on; he can't move an arm or a finger, but he goes on. He doesn't need anything but that box that keeps him alive and this tunnel and that ship. Where can I touch him?" outstretched hands, and Runner watched her as intently as though he had been ordered to make a report on her. "I thought I could help him, but now he's in that box!" Yes, Runner thought, now he's in that box. He will not let death rob him of seeing the end of his plans. And you love him, but he's gone where you can't follow. Can you? He considered what he saw in her now, and he knew she was lost. But he thought that if the war would only end, there would be ways to reach her. He could not reach her now; nothing could reach her. He knew insanity was incurable, but he thought that perhaps she was not yet insane; if he could at least keep her within this world's bounds, there might be time, and ways, to bring her back. If not to him, then at least to the remembered days of Headquarters. "Norma!" he said, driven by what he foresaw and feared. He pulled her close and caught her eyes in his own. "Norma, you have got to promise me that no matter what happens, you won't get into another one of those boxes so you can be with him." The thought was entirely new to her. Her voice was much lower. She frowned as if to see him better and said: "Get into one of those boxes? Oh, no -- no, I'm not sick, yet. I only have to have shots for my nerves. A corpsman comes and gives them to me. He'll be here soon. It's only if you can't not-care; I mean, if you have to stay involved, like he does, that you need the interrupter circuits instead of the tranquilizer shots. You don't get into one of those boxes just for fear," she said. He had forgotten that; he had more than forgotten it -- there were apparently things in the world that had made him be sure, for a moment, that it really was fear. He did not like hallucinating. He did not have any way of depending on himself if he had lapses like that. "Norma, how do I look to you?" he said rapidly. She was still frowning at him in that way. "You look about the same as always," she said. He left her quickly -- he had never thought, in conniving for this assignment with the letter crackling in his pocket, that he would leave her so quickly. And he went to his accommodation, crossing the raw, still untracked and unsheathed echoing shaft of the tunnel this near the face, with the labor battalion squads filing back and forth and the rubble carts rumbling. And in the morning he set out. He crawled into the weapons carrier, and was lifted up to a hidden opening that had been made for it during the night. He started the engine and, lying flat on his stomach in the tiny cockpit, peering through the cat's-eye viewports, he slid out onto the surface of the mountain and so became the first of his generation to advance into this territory that did not any more belong to Man. Ill THE interior of the weapons carrier was padded to protect him from the inevitable jounces and collisions. So it was hot. And the controls were crude; the carrier moved from one foot to another, like a turtle, and there were levers for each of his hands and feet to control. He sweated and panted for breath. No other machine could possibly have climbed down the face of that mountain and then begun its heaving, staggering progress toward the spaceship's nearest leg. It could not afford to leave tracks. And it would, when it had covered the long miles of open country that separated it from its first destination, have to begin another inching, creeping journey of fiftyfive miles, diagonally up the broadening, extensible pillar of the leg. It stumbled forward on pseudopods -- enormous hollow pads of tough, transparent plastic, molded full of stress-channels that curled them to fit the terrain, when they were stiffened in turn by compressed colorless fluid. Shifting its weight from one of these to another, the carrier duck-walked from one shadow to another as Runner, writhing with muscle cramps, guided it at approximately the pace of a drunken man. But it moved forward. After the first day Runner was ready to believe that the ship's radar systems were not designed to track something that moved so close to the ground and so slowly. The optical detection system -- which Intelligence respected far more than it did radar; there were dozens of countered radar-proof missiles to confirm them -- also did not seem to have picked him up. He began to feel he might see Norma again. Thinking of that babbling stranger in Compton's accommodation, he began to feel he might someday see Norma again. When he was three days out, he passed within a hundred yards of a cluster of mining-machines. They paid him no attention, and he laughed, cackling inside his egg. He knew that if he had safely come so close to an extension of the ship -- an extension that could have stepped over and crushed him with almost no extra expenditure -- then his chances were very good. He knew he cackled. But he knew the Army's drones were watching, unobtrusively, for signs of his extinction or breakdown. Not finding them, they were therefore giving Compton and Headquarters the nega tive good news that he had not yet failed. At Headquarters, other Special Division personnel would be beginning to hope. They had been the minority party in the conflicts there for as long as they had been in existence at all. But it did not matter, he thought as he lay up that night and sipped warm water from the carrier's tank. It didn't matter what party was winning. Surely even Compton would not be infuriated by a premature end to the war. And there were plenty of people at Headquarters who had fought for Compton not because they were convinced his was the only way, but only because his was a way that seemed sure. If slow. Or as sure as any way could be. It came to Runner, for the first time in his life, that any to expend so much of its resources on what was really not a surety at all, must be desperate beyond all reason. He cackled again. He knew he cackled. He smiled at himself for it. I 'HE ship's leg was sunken through the ground down to its anchorage among the deep rock layers sloping away from the mountains. It was, at ground level, so far across that he could not see past it. It was a wall of streaked and overgrown metal curving away from him, and only by shifting to one of the side viewports could he make out its apparent limits from where he now was. Looking overhead, he saw it rise away from him, an inverted pylon thrust into the ground at an angle, and far, far above him, in the air toward which that angle pointed, something large and vague rested on that pylon. Obscured by mist and cloud, distorted by the curvature of the tiny lens through which he was forced to look at it, it was nothing meaningful. He reasoned the pylon led up to the ship. He could not see the ship; he concentrated on the pylon. Gingerly, he extended a pseudopod. It touched the metal of the ship, through which the stabilizing field ran. There was an unknown danger here, but it hadn't seemed likely to Intelligence that the field would affect non-metallic substances. It didn't. The pseudopod touched the metal of the ship, and nothing uptoward happened. He drew it back, and cycled an entirely new fluid through the pseudopods. Hairline excretory channels opened on their soles, blown clean by the pressure. The pads flattened and increased in area. He moved forward toward the pylon again, and this time he began to climb it, held by air pressure on the pads and the surface tension on their wet soles. He began, then, at the end of a week's journey, to climb upon the ship no other aggression of Man's had ever reached. By the time he was a thousand feet up, he dared look only through the fore ports. Now he moved in a universe of sound. The leg thrummed and quivered, so gently that he doubted anyone in the ship could feel it. But he was not in the ship; he was where the thrumming was. It invaded his gritted teeth and put an intolerable itching deep into his ears. This fifty-five miles had to be made without stop for rest; he could not, in fact, take his hands from the controls. He was not sure but what he shouldn't be grateful -- he would have gouged his ears with his nails, surely, if he had been free to work at them. He was past laughter of any kind now -- but exultation sustained him even when, near the very peak of his climb, he came to the rat guard. with a model. No one had tried to tell him what it might be like to solve it at this altitude, with the wind and mist upon him. The rat guard was a collar of metal, cone-shaped and inverted downward, circling the leg. The leg here was several miles in diameter; the rat guard was a canopy several yards thick and several hundred feet wide from its joining at the leg to its lip. It was designed to prevent exactly what was happening --  the attempted entry of a pest. Runner extended the carrier's pseudopoda as far and wide as they would go. He pumped more coagulant into the fluid that leaked almost imperceptibly out of their soles, and began to make his way, head-downward, along the descending slope of the rat guard's outer face. The carrier swayed and stretched at the plastic membranes. He neutralized the coagulant in each foot in turn, slid it forward, fastened it again, and proceeded. After three hours he was at the lip, and dangling by the carrier's forelegs until he had succeeded in billowing one of rear pads onto the lip as well. And when he had, by this patient trial and error, scrambled successfully onto the rat guard's welcome upward face, he found that he was not past laughing after all. He shouted it; the carrier's interior frothed with it, and even the itching in his ears was lost. Then he began to move upward again. Not too far away, the leg entered the ship's hull. There was a opening at least as large as the carrier needed. It was only a well; up here, the gleaming pistons that controlled the extension of the leg hung burnished in the gloom, but there was no entry to the ship itself. Nor did he need or want it. He had reasoned long ago that whatever inhabited this ship must be as tired, as anxious, as beset as any human being. He needed no new miseries to borrow. He wanted only to find a good place to attach his bomb, set the fuse and go. Before the leg, its muscles cut, collapsed upon the aliens' hope of ever returning to whatever peace they dreamed of. When he climbed out of the carrier, as he had to, to attach the bomb, he heard one noise that was not wind-thrum or the throb of internal machinery. It was a persistent, nerve-torn ululation, faint but clear, deep inside the endurance. He hurried back down the leg; he had only four days to get clear -- that is, to have a hope of getting clear -- and he hurried too much. At the rat guard's lip, he had to hang by his heels and cast the fore pads under. He thought he had a grip, but he had only half a one. The carrier slipped, jerked and hung dangling by one pad. It began to slide back down the short distance to the lip of the guard, rippling and twisting as parts of its sole lost contact and other parts had to take up the sudden drag. pad, and stopped the awful series of sticks and slips. He slapped the other pads up into place and levered forward, forgetting how firmly that one pad had been set in his panic. He felt resistance, and then remembered, but by then the pull of the other three pads had torn the carrier forward and there was a long rip through which stress fluid and coagulant dripped in a turgid stream. He came down the last ten miles of the leg like a runaway toboggan on a poorly surfaced slide, the almost flaccid pads turning brown and burnt, their plastic soft as jelly. He left behind him a long, slowly evaporating smear of fluid and, since no one had thought to put individual shutoffs in the cross-valving system between the pads, he came down with no hope of ever using the carrier to get back to the mountains. It was worse than that. In the end, he crashed into the indented ground at the base of the leg and, for all the interior padding, the drive levers bludgeoned him and broke bones for him. He lay in the wreck with only a faint awareness of anything but his pain. He could not even know whether the carrier, with its silent power supply, still as much as half hid him or whether that had broken, too. It hadn't broken, but he was still there when the bomb exploded; it was only a few hours afterward that he came out of his latest delirium and found that the ground had been stirred and the carrier was lying in a new position. He pried open the hatch -- not easily or painlessly -- and looked out. The ship hadn't fallen. The leg had twitched in the ground -- it was displaced by several hundred yards, and raw earth clung to it far overhead. It had changed its angle several degrees toward vertical and was much less deeply sunken into the ground. But the ship had not fallen. He fell back into the carrier and cried because the ship hadn't come down and crushed him. IV  j 'HE carrier had to be abandoned. Even if the pads had been usable, it was three-quarters buried in the upheaval the leg had made when it stirred. The machine. Runner thought contemptuously, had failed, while a man could be holed and broken and heal himself nevertheless. He had very good proof of that, creeping back toward the mountains. Broken badly enough, a man might not heal himself into what he had been. But he would heal into something. For a time he had to be very wary of the mining machines, for there had been a frenzied increase in their activity. And there was the problem of food and water. But he was in well-watered country. The comings and goings of the machines had churned the banks of the Platte River into a series of sinks and swamps without making it impossible for a thirsty, crawling man to drink. And he had his rations from the carrier while the worst of the healing took place. After that, when he could already scuttle on his hands and one knee, he was able to range about. In crawling, he had discovered the great variety of burrowing animals that live beneath the eye of ordinary man; once he had learned which ones made bolt-holes and which could be scooped out of the traps of their own burrows he began to supply himself with a fair amount of protein. The ship, and its extensions, did him no harm. Some of this was luck, when he was in the zones traversed by the machines as they went to and from the ship. But after he had taken up a systematic trek back along the North Platte, and presumably ought to have stopped being registered in the ship's detectors as an aimless animal, he was apparently protected by his coloration, which was that of the ground, and again by his slow speed and ability to hug the terrain. Even without psuedopods and a fusion bomb to carry, his speed was no better than that. When several months had passed he was able to move in a half-upright walk that was an unrelenting parody of a skip and a jump, and he was making fair time. But by then he was well up into the beginnings of the Medicine Bows. He thought that even though the ship still stood, if he could reach Norma soon enough she might still not be too lost. Not only the ship but the Army drones had missed him, until he was almost back to the now refilled exit from which he and the carrier had launched themselves. The passages were hurriedly unblocked -- every cubic yard of rubble that did not have to be dispersed and camouflaged at the pithead represented an enormous saving of expenditure -- and he was hauled back into the company of his fellow creatures.-able. He lay on a bed in the Aid Station and listened to Compton's delight. "They went wild when I told them at Headquarters, Colonel. You'd already been given a posthumous Medal of Honor. I don't know what they'll do now you're available for parades. And you certainly deserve them. I had never had such a moment in my life as when I saw what you'd done to the ship." And while Compton talked, Norma -- Norma with no attention to spare for Runner; a Norma bent forward, peering at the dials of Compton's cabinet, one hand continually twitching toward the controls -- that Norma reached with her free hand, took a photograph out of a file folder clipped to the side of the cabinet and held the picture, unseeing, for Runner to look at while she continued her stewardship of Compton's dials. The cadet had been replaced. The wife was homemaking in the only way she could. The ship no longer pointed directly away from the ground, nor was she equally balanced on the quadruped of her landing jacks. The bombed leg dangled useless, its end trailing in the ground, and the ship leaned away from it. "When the bomb went off," Compton was explaining, "she did the only thing she could to save herself for the time being. She partially retracted the opposite leg to balance herself." Norma reached out and adjusted one of the controls. The flush paled out of Compton's face, and his voice sank toward the toneless whisper Runner remembered. "I was always afraid she would do that. But the way she is now, I know -- I know that when I undermine another leg, she'll fall! And she can't get away from me. She'll never take off with that leg dragging. I never had a moment in my life like the moment I had when I saw her tilt. Now I know there's an end in sight. All of us here know there's an end in sight, don't you, Norma? The ship'll puzzle out how you did it. Runner, and she'll defend against another such attempt, but she can't defend against the ground opening up under her. We'll run the tunnel right through the rock layers she rests on, get underneath, mine out a pit for the leg to stumble into and blow the rock -- she'll go down like a tree in the wind. Runner. Thirty years -- well, possibly forty, now that we've got to reach a farther leg -- and we'll have her! We'll swallow her up. Runner!" Runner was watching Norma. Her eyes darted over the dials and not once, though most of the gestures were abortive, did her hands stop their twitching toward the controls. When she did touch them, her hands were sure; she seemed quite practiced; Runner could calculate that she had probably displaced the cadet very soon after he had bombed the ship. "You were right. General," he said. "I never got the proper perspective to see all that. It was acute of you to bring me that drone's photograph. I never knew what an effect I'd produced until I got back here." "Yes!" Compton laughed into Runner's eyes, and Norma tenderly adjusted the controls to keep years too soon. "It's all a matter of perspective!" with the thought that the aliens in the ship had also gone mad. And he thought it was a very human thing to do -- he thought, with some pride, that it was perhaps the last human thing -- for him to refuse the doctors who offered to give him artificial replacements for the hopelessly twisted legs he had come back with. "You will not!" he snapped, while up in the bunker, all unimaginable to him, Norma kissed Compton's face and said: "You will get her -- you will!"  The golden guardians denied mankind the stars. They were irresistible in their might , , , and they were something more! #W#HY did you come creeping into the house last night like a thief?" Mrs. Sanchez asked her son. Lithe, dark Roberto set down his breakfast coffee and smiled up at her. "Ah, Mama, you are the owl. I was certain I moved quiet as moonlight." "I always hear the sounds of my children. Even the little one when he stirs in his grave. It is the way of a mother." She drew a cup of coffee and sat with them at the table in the small kitchen patio. "The hour was late," Roberto said, "and I did not wish to disturb you with greetings that would keep until morning. You sleep little enough as it is. Though the hard days are gone, the sun still rises after you." Roberto's father looked up from his newspaper. "She will always be full of the old ways," he said with fond gruffness. "For her there is no change. Our children have grown proud and fine and freed us from bondage to the soil. Yet she still behaves as a peon. To her we still toil in the fields of the patron, bent with exhaustion over the planting or harvesting consoles, struggling to control the many field machines. She bakes her own bread. The market vegetables do not please her so she chafes her hands with the buttons and switches of a garden. And a robot to scrub the floors she will not hear of. Perhaps she thinks it would be prettier than she and I might run off with it to Mexico City." "Foolish old man," Mrs. Sanchez said with mock severity, "you have lost even the memory of what it is to run." "Mama," Roberto said, "I have a present for you." Something of an eager little girl looked out of the wise eyes. "I have no need of a present," she said but her eyes searched the leafy little patio. "All I ask as a gift is for you to come out of the sky for a little while and marry." Roberto smiled. "Have not my brothers and sisters given you grandchildren enough? And what woman will marry the captain of a space vessel? With my journeys to Jupiter and Saturn and outermost Nyx I would forever be a stranger to my children and an occasional guest to my wife." From under his napkin he drew forth a small silvery box. "Mama, your present." She gasped with delight when she opened it. In a black velvet womb nested a strange glittering jewel suspended on a delicate, spider-strand, silver chain. "Roberto!" she exclaimed with a feeble remonstrance. "Like the others I have brought it is not expensive," Roberto said. "The stone is a common one on Nyx. But it is very beautiful and when I found it I thought of you." kitchen console. Mrs. Sanchez went to it as a shallow dish slid from the oven. She set it, sizzling softly, on the table. "And a present for you," she said. "Your favorite, quinquanos. Fresh from Venus yesterday, or so the vendor tells me." She shrugged dubiously. "In this sinful age even the machines lie." "But, Mama, the money I send is not to be wasted on me! These are so expensive." "And small," Mrs. Sanchez said. "Why is there not a garden manufactured that can be programmed for quinquanos so that I might grow my own?" "Because five fortunes could not pay for it," Mr. Sanchez said. "Try as they might, such delicacies come only through the grace of God and not General Electric." He set aside his newspaper and accepted another coffee. "Does this not complete your collection?" he asked his wife. "Roberto has brought for you a stone from every planet he has touched. Even the moon and the grand asteroids." "I know not how many worlds there are in the sun's family. But if it is done, then it is done." She tried to make her words unconcerned but there was a shadow of regret across them. "The stones are beautiful. But they are frivolous and the end to them is not to be mourned." "Ha!" Mr. Sanchez snorted. "She pretends, the sly one, she does not care. But I know how she delights in them, these gifts from her son. I have seen her in a stolen moment open the box and gaze with pleasure upon them. And when we go to the opera in Mexico City it is one of your single-stoned necklaces which adorns her simple black dress. She will have no other ornarnent." "I no longer have a husband in this house," Mrs. Sanchez said, "only an old woman whose mouth talks away the day." "Old woman, eh?" Mr. Sanchez leered and playfully slapped his wife on her backside. She pretended to be shocked. "In front of the child! But what can one expect from an evil old lecher?" The three of them laughed and basked in the warmth of their blood bonds. Mr. Sanchez resumed his coffee. "Is it really done, Roberto? Have you taken cargoes from all twelve planets?" "Yes." "Even the one just beyond Pluto? Is it Oceanus or Atlas? I can never remember which it is... but for a long while you were missing one of them." "I have them all. I am still a young man and yet I have taken my ship to all the planets in many voyages. But of course that is not unusual," he lectured, for he knew that was what they wanted, "for in the thousand years since man first stepped forth on the moon the solar commerce has so increased that there are hardly enough suitable men for the ships that bridge the now familiar worlds. So familiar, I could fly to the rings of Saturn or to dark Nyx in my slumber." "Then you also must also feel a sadness because there will be no more stones to pluck from a new planet," Mr. Sanchez said. "Perhaps there is a thirteenth yet to be found." "No, Papa. It is certain. There are no more children of our sun. But I am not sad. The stones are not finished. Mama shall have other pretty baubles to be caged in fine silver or gold and hung about her neck." ming a day of cooking and baking on the autochef. At her son's words her hands poised in mid-flight over the console. She did not quite comprehend but an intuitive wisp of alarm darkened her face. She turned to her husband, as if for some reassurance that her dread was of no substance. Mr. Sanchez said in perplexity, "I do not understand, Roberto. If there are no more planets -- " "In this system!" Roberto said. Neither of his parents said a word. They stared at him and waited. "In a few days it will be officially announced," Roberto said. "With the perfection of the new Korenyik propulsion, a starship will be built. A starship! And I have been selected to take it through the other space to Alpha Centauri." Mr. Sanchez embraced his son. "Roberto, I am so proud." He turned to his wife. "Is it not a great -- " He stopped at the look of her. "This Alpha Centauri," she said, pronouncing it badly, "it is a planet?" "It is a star. Mama. Like our sun. It may have a family of planets. It will be exciting to discover them." "Why?" she asked with a mother's quiet challenge. The word echoed in Roberto's mind -- why? The very core of his being strained to shout out why. Space was why! Each blazing star was a compelling, beckoning finger. Every constellation a covenant with his heart. And somewhere out in the majestic, wheeling Galaxy his soul wandered, waiting for him to come. "Mama, I will show you why," he replied as quietly. "As I promised Papa the last time, I have borrowed from the company a star projector. This time you must put aside the household and watch and listen and learn something about the universe out of which my life and my dreams are made. Of all your children I am the only stranger to you. And before I go out to the stars I want you to know something of that which fills my heart." He went to his room and returned with a foot-square case which he set on a table in the living area. He pressed a stud. A transparent globe inflated over it to a four foot diameter. He dimmed the lights, manipulated the controls and a tiny sun burned in the center of the globe. Another adjustment brought into view the solar planets orbiting around it. The device was an educational tool; it projected as desired, within the envelope of gas, three-dimensional mockups of the solar system, star clusters and galaxies that moved almost as incandescently beautiful as the originals. Mrs. Sanchez was delighted with the views of the solar system and the surface scenes of the various planets. She had as much general knowledge of the planets as she had of India or France -- which had all come to her through the distorting medium of television dramas. The moon had observatories and mad scientists; India had elephants and sinister maharajas; Mars had deserts and fragile ghost people; Venus had quinquanos and swamp dragons; and France was overflowing with sin. Roberto did not utilize the projector narrative. He explained with his own intense words as he took his parents across the gulf to the constellations. He skipped about the Galaxy, astounding stars. He insinuated the possibilplanets and then he flung them across the abyss of space to view the Local Group of the Milky Way, its sister Andromeda and the satellite galaxies. Then he plunged them into infinity for a other galaxies thus far discovered. ' 'HE globe deflated, the lights went on and Roberto leaned toward his mother. "Does not the thought of all this catch at your heart a little?" There was an uncertainty in her voice that Roberto missed because he was so intent upon her answer. "All those stars," she said. "Something like that I saw once on the television -- about strange people who lived on those stars. I did not like it very much. Perhaps because it is not true." "Not true?" Roberto echoed. "Yesterday, yes. Today, not quite. Tomorrow... your own son is going to the stars!" "It is beyond my understanding why men cannot be content to remain where they were meant to be." "But the stars were meant for us. They are our destiny!" Roberto realized he was speaking too loudly. Mrs. Sanchez looked squarely at her son. Her words were measured and solemn like some solitary, tolling bell. "If God meant us to be on those stars he would have put us there. Roberto, take care. Listen to the word of your mother. I have not the cleverness of my children but I know things here." She touched her hand over her heart. "It may be as you say, they are God's high places and I tell you, my son, whoever dares violate them will be struck down." "But, Mama! In ancient times, when man first took to the air, there were those who proclaimed man presumed too much and would be punished. And a thousand years ago there were people who spoke as you do when man first went into space. They too said God gave us the earth and to covet the moon and the planets was a grievous sin." Mrs. Sanchez shrugged. "There are always the fanatics. Your mama is not one of them. God gave men the sun and the moon and the planets and set them apart from the stars for him to work out his salvation. It is natural and right." "And he did not give us the stars also?" "In the sky He put them as a testament to His glory. You have shaken my poor head with the measure of their distance. But it serves to show that they would not have been placed out of reach if they were intended for us to have." "But Mama, soon they will no longer be out of reach. Your own son will go to the first one in a great new ship." Mrs. Sanchez turned troubled eyes on her son. "I will pray for you." She averted her faceand would no longer look directly at him. Roberto angrily snatched up the star projector and went to his room. His father followed. "You must understand," he said, "your mother is a simple woman. She would rather think of the stars as the lamps of the angels than the huge blazing spheres that they are." "I do understand," Roberto said bitterly. "I have heard her words a thousand times from as many mouths. They have sounded through history and are chains meant to bind man to his few worlds. It is the eternal voice of the heavy, peasant mind which tries to shout down every soaring dream of mankind." "Your words are too hard," his father said. Roberto's lips curled to say something cruel but he refrained, not wanting to hurt this fine, little man whose blood was his own. "Yes," Roberto said, softening, "for after all there are always the minds which struggle free and lift us up. They have carried us to the threshold of the stars. And the time will come, a thousand years perhaps, when we will be ready to try for our sister Galaxy, Andfomeda." Roberto smiled. "Of course it is certain we will still have our simple folk who will warn us and tell us to beware; that it is not the will of the Almighty that we leave the Milky Way; that we presume too much and we will be struck down. And -- " Roberto stopped in mild surprise. He saw in his father's expression the reflection of his mother's apprehension. Roberto turned away sadly and began to pack away the star projector. Someday, he thought, in spite of the little minds, we will have one of these that will show the other space as commonly as our own. And all their phantom angels and devils shall not bar man from the universe. passed. The ship was launched. Six long years, Roberto thought. Long years of preparation, testing and training. Hard, bone-wearying hours of familiarization and shakedown with nerve-straining, experimental jumps into the other space. Now at last they were in that other space -- that strange, blazing white elsewhere that Korenyik had given to mankind as the trail to the stars -- the Horsehead Nebula clear before them. Six years of frantic activity... and now he was launched and there was nothing to do in transit but wait. Six years since he had been to the little sun-faded stone house near Mexico City and felt the warm blood-tug of his parents. Papa now dead and Mama with her dark forebodings of angels and God. He gazed at the dark screens in the starship and wondered what he might see if they were on. under the vault of heaven the two great creatures, their golden coruscating substance flung across the white space, sensed their coming. My-Ky-El limned the ship with a golden halo and knew the creatures within. He linked with Ra-Fa-El and they communed in thought. -- they are come from the Black Space, Hell, the brood of Satan has broken its bonds and penetrated the barrier! -- how is it so? the Fallen were shrivelled of substance and energy; shorn of motion and thrust down into the Black Space with no memory of their origin -- nevertheless they are here in a devious shape and White Space is once again threatened The Klaxon howled out the alarm. The control board erupted into a swiftly spreading plague of red warning lights, indicating the Korenyik Matrix Units were being subjected to incredible strain. Roberto punched a row of screen tabs. The normal-space view screens showed nothing. He punched in the E-screens. He gasped at the sight, struck with an awful dread. Great golden mists were clustering, bursting, swirling and spiralling in the blinding whiteness. They wreathed the ship, and the KM units sobbed as they strained against the rending golden energies. Roberto fought against odd, thick fear that tried to prostrate him on the deck and make him grovel in utter, abject terror. This icy dread that freezes my blood is not of my making, Roberto thought. With a desperate effort of will he hurled his leaden fingers at the keys and punched in the Omega beams. Eyes burning, he saw ashen whorls spin through the golden mists and crystal screams seemed to splinter in his mind. For a fragment of time the KM units ceased their belabored sobbing and the fear drained from Roberto. In the instant he slammed the jump bar and they were in their own Black Space. "We'll never get home this way," the navigator said. He was trembling with shock. Roberto struggled to keep his own body from quivering. "I will take us home. We will dodge in and out of the two spaces. The danger seems unable to follow. Can you navigate such a course?" r I 'HE navigator was trembling violently and he began to sob. "What were they? So ma -- magnificent... and... terrifying... like great golden angels..." berto screamed, his control shattering. He leaned to the limit of his pad straps and struck once and again at the navigator. Roberto pulled his hands back and crowded his anger and fear to the back of his mind. "Can you skip us home?" he again demanded of the navigator. The man's voice was steadier. "I'll need three minutes in black each time to compute position and plot the next jump. But, yes, I can do it." "I make you a gift of three hours right now." And perhaps more we will need, Roberto thought, to recover the courage lor venturing again into the White Space. And my navigator spoke of angels but where were the faces and wings? And why did I also think of angels almost as if I felt a nebulous ancient memory of them? And do the others feel as my navigator and I? They did! Roberto had gone around the ship carefully questioning his men. No matter how delicately he inquired, whenever he touched upon what they might have seen on the E-screen the fear would come into their eyes. Some spoke directly of heavenly creatures, others embarrassedly admitted such impressions and a few averted their eyes and denied such thoughts. But the words of them all were edged with terror and awe. Roberto and his shaken crew were slowly regaining confidence. They had made a jump into the White Space and remained there for some hours before being frightened back into the Black by a vague alarm. Nothing more than a quivering needle and a lighter patch on an E-screen; but they had remained hidden in Black for many hours and now they were ready to make another jump. Roberto pressed the jump bar, throwing them into White Space... and the golden fury blazed red. There were screams On the intercom. There was heat and savage bucking with a crashing and screeching tear of ultrasteel. The E-screens flared with a terrible molten dancing of golden fire. Roberto punched in the Omega beams in a shell pattern, cut them and snapped on the force shield in full crackling power. It flared greenly against the golden furies. The reactive thrust slammed hard against the hull and the ship went hurtling end over end. Roberto slapped the jump bar but the ship remained trapped in the White Space. Blue energy licked along the heaving bulkheads and decks. There were niore cries and an odor of Scorched flesh, and the corpse of his first officer went spinning limply through the control cabin. Something wrenched loose and Crunched heavily on Roberto's leg before bouncing away. Too niuch red! Roberto cried within, looking from his crimsoning leg to the carmine lights of the board. Re pounded his fists on the unresponsive jump bar. "Mama," he Whisijered in agony, and suddenly Something connected, and the tortured ship tumbled shudderingly into Black Space. light with the darkened house at her back and unmovingly faced the mountains. She heard the jet whine of the taxi helicopter but could not see it because it landed in front #f the house. She listened as the whine faded. And in the silence she heard an odd step that she could not recognize. "Mama." The voice was different. There was no longer a smile under it. But it was Roberto's. She did not answer, but as she stood the noise of her chair brought him limping toward her. She started to move to him but he stopped abruptly and she suddenly felt a new bitter distance between them that mere steps could never cross. In the dusk she stared at his twisted leg. "Roberto," she whispered sadly. "Call me Jacob," he said harshly. "I have wrestled with angels." He thrust out his crippled leg. "... and behold a man wrestled with him till morning. And when he saw that he could not overcome him he touched the sinew of his thigh and forthwith it shrank!" With no triumph, but only a mother's distressed remonstrance, Mrs. Sanchez softly wailed, "O Roberto, Roberto, I warned you. I told you." "Yes, Mama, you told me," he said. "But you did not tell me the thing most important. You did not tell me that we are devils!" She stared at him, uncomprehending. "Yes, my fine, good Mama! With all your thoughts of heaven, we are a world of devils. How or why or from whence I do not yet know. But I am going back to the White Space to seek and I only come now to see you once more and say good-by... and..." Roberto faltered and leaned toward her as if straining to see her face in the evening gloom that had almost deepened into night. "... and... ask your blessing." The words were hardly more than a whisper. "Going back?" she said incredulously. "I must." Anger was in her voice as she pointed to his leg. "Even with the mark of wrath you carry? You dare make more sacrilege?" She turned to go into the house. Roberto limped a few steps after her. "Mama, as you love me, your blessing! For your son." She turned in the doorway, her face hard. "I can only pray for you." Roberto watched her go inside. No light appeared and he knew she would be kneeling before the shelf of holy things in the small flickering light of the votive candle. He made his way to the front of the house to the waiting helitaxi. He looked back at the house. This is no longer my home, he thought. And then, a moment later: Was it ever? He looked up at the stars and White Space and the magnificent golden creatures. Why the sweet anguish in the depths of my being when I think of them and the white place? Why in spite of my fear am I drawn to it more than I am to this house which is my home? Home? Roberto climbed into the machine and it moved upward a little closer to the stars before turning south. #. # issues. #. #. Complete set of the "impossible" #. #. #. Over # issues, very good condition. #. #-#, very good condition, #. issues, fine condition, #. Many other complete sets. Send your want list. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N. Y. #I #th Ave. Brooklyn #, N. Y. mtimws irnsixtm ' I 'HE story I have in mind is probably being told in Los Angeles with the Griffith Observatory as its locale, in Chicago with reference to the Adler Planetarium and in any other city with reference to visitor's night at the nearby astronomical observatory. I heard it for the first time at the Treptow Observatory east of Berlin. It goes like this: the visitor looks through the telescope at the moon, then at Jupiter. Then two or three well known stars are picked out to prove that a true star, even when seen through a telescope, still shows just as a pinpoint of light. The astronomer may say that Mars, unfortunately, can't be observed right now but will reappear in a suitable location in the sky next November. And then the visitor says to another visitor: "I think I can understand how they measure the distance to Jupiter and how they find out how big it is. I can imagine how they make calculations telling them when a planet will be visible. What I don't understand is how they find out their names!" If you change the joke to the serious question of how a name is established you not only have a legitimate question but you also have a problem. The answer is, of course, that somebody, at some time, gave a name to a star or to something more local, like a crater on the moon. But the names sometimes took hold and sometimes did not. There are even a few cases where everybody would the name favored by the discoverer, provided we could be sure that we know which astronomical object he had in mind. Conversely, with some star names of Arab origin we know which star is meant but we cannot interpret the name. The names in the sky fall into two main categories: traditional names like those for the constellations, for a number of conspicuous stars and for the naked-eye planets; and names which have been bestowed more recently by their discoverers, the names of a few planets, the names of the asteroids and the names of visible features on the moon and on Mars. But even with the recent names some confusion is possible... and therefore exists. Let us begin with the simplest case, the names of comets. A good number of them do not have a "real" name at all. The "Comet of #" is just that; no name was given to it. If they do have names it is that of the discoverer. Biela's comet is Biela's comet because it was first observed by Wilhelm von Biela back in #. There is just one comet which has a name other than that of its discoverer and it happens to be the most famous of all of them: Halley's comet. Dr. Edmond Halley did not discover it. He had compared the orbits of earlier comets, arrived at the conclusion that several observations seemed to refer to the same comet and he predicted its return. While big comets are rare -- we haven't had a good one since the last passage of Halley's comet in # -- comets of smaller size are not. Since several of them appear every year a special system was devised for them. At first they are listed as #a, #b, #c and so forth, in order of their discovery. Early in the following year the list is then rearranged to read # I, # II, perihelion passages. Of course the name of the discoverer is attached too, and since one astronomer may discover more than one comet you might have a designation like Whipple IV, which means that it was the fourth comet discovered by Fred L. Whipple. (Actually he discovered seven, last time I checked.) There is also a system for the naming of asteroids, the planet fragments which normally orbit the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The first of them had been discovered during the New Year's Night #-#I by Father Giuseppe Piazzi, S.J. He first thought it was a comet; it turned out to be a small planet in what up to that time had been considered a "gap" in the solar system. In fact, some two hundred years earlier Johannes Kepler had been so annoyed by the gap, which ruined his mathematical explanations, that he wrote Inter Jovetn et Martem planetam interposui, "between Jupiter and Mars I put a planet". Now it had been found by Piazzi and was named Ceres. As will be explained later, astronomers had reasons to use names of the highest classical purity. The sequel to the story was that Ceres was lost for a while, but the observed positions enabled Carl Friedrich Gauss to calculate (by means of a new method which he invented for the purpose) an ephemeris for the new planet. With the aid of the position predicted by Gauss, Heinrich Wilhelm Gibers, M. D., in Bremen, re-discovered Ceres during the New Year's Night from #I to #! Soon after Gibers discovered another small planet in the same former gap which was named Pallas. Two years later Karl Harding came up with a third one, which was named Juno, and in # Gibers followed up with a fourth, to be named Vesta. By then the pattern was established. Asteroids received classical female names. This would have been most satisfactory as a system if there had been not more than, say, five dozen asteroids. At first Greek and Latin classical names were easy. Number # became Iris, number # was still Euterpe and number # Mnemosyne. But soon both Homer's Odyssey and Pliny's Historia naturalis were exhausted. Gh, well, the Saga of Gudrun and the Nibelungenlied could be considered classical, too. Names like Gudrun and Kriemhild began to invade the area populated by Leukothea and Klytemnaistra and Polyhymnia. Right now there is probably an actual need for female names, even though all common modern names in all languages, from Anna via Gertrud to Marlene and Natasha have been used. If a philologist would prove tomorrow that there was a Carthaginian goddess Ilu, her name would be attached to an asteroid the day after tomorrow. There was some slight relief in # when it was found that a newly discovered asteroid orbited partly inside the orbit of Mars. It was named Eros, a male name, to indicate that it differed from those in the by then very crowded "gap," and it quickly became customary to name all asteroids which crossed the orbits of either Mars or Jupiter, or orbited outside the orbit of Jupiter or inside the orbit of Mars, after males. In that sub-section of asteroid names all names are still strictly classical. There is a large supply of classical male names still available. ""HE names of the satellites of our solar system are now rather orderly but it wasn't always thus. Classical times, of course, knew only one satellite, that of Earth: Selene to the Greeks, Luna to the Romans. (The latter is the name for the moon in quite of a number of modern languages, including Russian.) Our word moon is from the Anglo-Saxon mona (hence; month, in German Monat ) and the other Germanic languages derive their names from the same root, e.g. Maan in Dutch and Mond in German. When Galileo Galilei discovered the four large moons of Jupiter two problems came up simultaneously. In the first place, since there was now not only the moon but moons, a general term for "moons" was desirable. Johannes Kepler supplied this by coining the word "satellite" (from satellos, which means attendant.) But, Galilei felt, the moons of Jupiter should also have individual names. He wrote to Cosmo de Medici, Fourth Grand Duke of Tuscany, that they should be called the Medicea Sidera, the Medicean Stars, and suggested the specific names of members of the Medici family for them. To astronomers who were not Italians the name Medici simply did not have the exalted ring it had to Galilei and they kept silent on the proposal -- except Herr Mayr in Kulmbach who called himself Simon Marius and who, being court astronomer to the Margrave of Brandenburg, suggested Sidera Brandenburgica. Marius, who claimed to have seen the moons of Jupiter earlier than Galilei -- and who did discover the Great Nebula in Andromeda -- realized after a discussion with Kepler that classical names were at least neutral, if not superior, and suggested naming the four major moons after four love affairs of Jove: lo, Europa, Ganymed and Callisto. With a long delay his suggestion was accepted even though, to this day, astronomers J-IV. Galilei had started that by writing J. , J , J... and J . The system began to get into some trouble when E. E. Barnard, in #, discovered a fifth satellite of Jupiter which happened to orbit inside the four Galileian satellites. Barnard stuck to the designation J-V even though many names were proposed. Camille Flammarion in France suggested Amalthea (Jupiter's nursemaid in mythology) which is slowly coming into use, but usually with the parenthetical remark that it is "not official." (Because it was suggested by somebody other than the discoverer and not accepted by the discoverer.) Barnard's insistence on the designation J-V did have the result that the additional moons of Jupiter were not given any names but are referred to as J-VI, The outcome is that any list of Jupiter's satellites looks wrong. If you arrange it in the numerical order, which is the order of discovery, the satellites form no pattern as regard to distance from the planet. If you arrange them in order of distance from the planet, the numerals are out of sequence. the confusion became such that finally names had to be called in. The first of them to be discovered, by Christiaan Huyghens in #, was Titan, but its discoverer simply called it Luna Saturni, Saturn's Moon. But then Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovered four more moons of Saturn. Collectively he wanted them to be known as the Sydera Lodoiindividually he numbered them, in the order of distance from the planet. This made Huyghen's moon S-#. The end of discoveries, Herschel discovered two more, both closer to Saturn than the known ones. How to number now? Call them S-# and S-#, as Herschel suggested (with S-# being incongruously the closest to the planet) or should everything be re-numbered? And if that were done, who could guarantee that any additional discoveries would kindly orbit Saturn at a greater distance than those already numschel's son, Sir John Herschel, who suggested to use the names of the mythological sisters and brothers of Saturn. This is the list -- Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion and Japetus -- which is now generally used. Pickering added another moon and another sister of Saturn to the list: Phoebe. Sir John Herschel also named the satellites of Uranus. His father had thought that he had discovered six satellites of Uranus. Four of them turned out to be mistakes, but two were real. William Lassell, in #, added two more so that four satellites were known. Sir John Herschel's proposed names Ariel, Urnbriel, Titania, and Oberon were accepted largely because Lassell, who had discovered two of them, accepted the names. (Oberon and Titania are, of course, the king and queen of the fairies in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel is a spirit in The Tempest while Urnbriel is a gnome and Ariel a sylph in Pope's Rape of the Lock . ) Still, it is interesting that a full dozen satellite names originated with a man who had not discovered a single one of them. When Gerard P. Kuiper discovered a fifth satellite of Uranus (closer to it than any of the others) he called it Miranda to stay within the mythology. Neptune's major satellite was sell (in #) and Camille Flammarion suggested "Triton," Neptune's companion, as a name. Like Amalthea it is "not official" and for the same reason. But it is in use now, largely because Kuiper, when discovering a second satellite of Neptune in #, named it "Nereid" which he, as the discoverer, had the right to do. The two moons of Mars, discovered by Asaph Hall in #, are, of course, Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Terror,) the attendants of Mars in the ninth book of the Iliad. The names of the five nakedeye planets are fairly easy. Still, it may be useful to mention first that the word "planet" comes from the Greek planetes (the wanderers) because they do not stand still in the sky like the "fixed" stars. The word "comet", incidentally, comes from the Latin word coma ("head of hair") and not from the Greek word which sounds the same (and should be spelled "koma") and which means "deep sleep." Now Mercury, the innermost of the planets, is the fastest moving, in reality as well as to the naked eye. Hence it became, in Greek, Hermes (properly Hermeias) the swift-moving messenger of the gods. The Latin name Mercurius also bears the connotation of swift movement but is derived from mercis, which means "wares." Hence Mercurius became the god of the traders and merchants but also the god of the thieves -- for which latter fact one may harbor two different opinions; one is unflattering to merchants, the other merely points out that a thief has to move even faster than a trader. The names for Mercury in the eastern languages usually are the word for "arrow," or a name derived from that word. ' became female with all nations except in India. The Chinese called Venus Tai-pe, "the beautiful white one." to the Germanic tribes the planet was Frigga; to the Babylonians Ishtar; to the Romans Venus. Venus was originally the Spring Goddess and only later the goddess of love, equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite. Since Venus can appear either as morning or as evening star, the Greeks originally had two names for the planet, Hesperos and Phosphoros. Pythagoras of Samos is credited with having identified them as the same planet. As unanimously as white Venus became a beautiful woman, red Mars became a warrior. The Persians called Mars Pahlavani Siphir, the Celestial Warrior. To the Chaldeans he was Nergal, the god of battle, to the Greeks Ares, also the god of war, regardless of whether the name is derived from aro (to kill) or from ara (disaster.) The Germans also identified the planet with their god of war, and Roman Mars is, of course, the god of war too. As for Jupiter it probably was given the name of the chief deity of the Romans -- the name is stated to be derived from lovis pater -- because of its steady light, being the brightest of the planets except Venus. Of course Jupiter is the equivalent of Zeus. And it is also quite possible that the naming went the other way round, that the god was given the name of the serenely shining planet, for when you said in Latin sub love it meant "under the open sky." Saturn, in Latin Saturnus, was, mythologically speaking, the god of agriculture and the husband of Ops, the goddess of wealth. The name is related to the verb serere, "to sow". The Greek equivalent was Kronos. Why the name of the god of agriculture was bestowed upon the planet is something that I would have considered a mystery until about three months ago, when I found an interesting reference in a very modern book on the planet Saturn by the British astronomer A. F. O'D. Alexander. He states that the name most often used for Saturn by the Assyrians was lubadsagush which, since lubad meant "old sheep," has to be translated as "the oldest of the old sheep," another agricultural comparison. Alexander thinks that the name was due to the fact that Saturn moves so slowly among the stars. Possibly Saturn's slow movement accounts for its Latin name too, reminding the skywatchers of the slow gait of ploughing oxen. For the remaining three planets there is no mystery about their discovered Uranus he first proposed the name of Georgium Siside of Great Britain nobody was pleased with this suggestion, which revived what Galilei and then Cassini had tried to do. Joseph Jerome Lalande in Paris suggested that the newly discovered planet should be known as Herschel's Planet, in the same manner in which one speaks of Halley's Comet. But there was no enthusiasm for this innovation. Other astronomers felt that it was enough to be able to attach one's name to a comet (or to have a lunar crater named after one -- posthumously, that is) and when Johann Elert Bode, the director of the Berlin observatory, suggested Uranus most astronomers agreed rapidly. It was actually the offshoot of the Herschel-Lalande-Bode controversy which produced the severely classical names for the first asteroids some dozen years later. The word Uranus is just the Latin version of the Greek Ouranos which means heaven or sky. I'HE pattern repeated sixty-five years later when Galle in Berlin discovered Neptune close to the point where Leverrier in Paris had said it should be located. Leverrier had calculated its existence and position from the perturbations of the orbit of Uranus. The French scientist Francois Arago -- who had a political in addition to a scientific career and was, among other things, responsible for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies -- revived the suggestion to name Uranus "Herschel's Planet" so that the new one could become "Leverrier's Planet." It did not go very far, for the French Bureau des Longitudes decided that Neptune was a fine name for a far distant greenish planet and Leverrier himself agreed. The name Neptunus is that of the Latin god of the seas, equivalent to the Greek Poseidon, but neither Romans nor classical Greeks ever had an opportunity to attach it to a planet. Pluto, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in #, was named for what might be called a personal reason. Just as Leverrier, and also John Couch Adams in England, had calculated Neptune's existence from irregularities in the motions of Uranus, Percival Lowell had tried to calculate the existence and position of one more planet from the same source. He had called it Planet X but after the discovery of a planet which is (for about two thirds of its orbit) farther from the sun than Neptune, it became obvious that that name could not be used permanently. But the discovery had been made at Lowell's observatory, though long after his death, and since the name Pluto begins with P-L it was chosen. It was correct mythologically too, for Pluto, the lord of the infernal region, was a brother of both Zeus (Jupiter) and Poseidon (Neptune.) Before going on to the names of stars the names of two sets of features must be mentioned. It has already been said that an astronomer's name might be selected posthumously for a crater on the moon. Two people are responsible for this custom: Langrenus of Brussels and Riccioli of Bologna. Langrenus made the suggestion of naming lunar features after famous people, especially astronomers, around #. Johannes Hevelius of Danzig, five years later, opposed it and transferred terrestrial geographical names to the moon, which is the reason why we speak of the Lunar Alps, the Lunar Caucasus, etc. But Giovanni Batista Riccioli, five years after Hevelius's lunar map with terrestrial names, accepted Langrenus's suggestion. He even had a kind of a system. He named a large crater Plato, then attached the names of Eudoxus, Aristotle, Thales, Strabo, etc., to craters not far from Plato. Riccioli admired Tycho Brahe; therefore the most conspicuous crater was named Tycho. Since Copernicus did not agree with Tycho Brahe, the lunar crater Copernicus is far away from the crater Tycho. But since Kepler agreed with Copernicus, the crater Kepler is near the crater Copernicus. '"HE visible features of the planet Mars went through a number of linguistic transformations. It was only just about a century ago that telescopes became powerful enough to show surface features on Mars and, logically, observers in different countries began making drawings of Mars. And they started naming things, in their own tongues. Thus a map of Mars drawn by Richard Anthony Proctor in #, following Riccioli's practice, is full of names of astronomers. There is a Herschel I Continent, a Herschel II Strait, Fontana Land. Laplace Land, Tycho Sea and so forth, all in English, of course. On a map drawn by Camille Flammarion some of the names are the same, like the Herschel I Continent, but others are changed. What Proctor had called the Kaiser Sea (after the Dutch astronomer Kaiser) appeared on Flammarion's map as Mer du Sablier. What Proctor had called Dawes Continent (afcame the Continent Beer (after the German Beer, the brother of the composer Meyerbeer.) What Proctor had named Maedler Land, after a German astronomer, became, on Flammarion's map Terre de Laplace; he named something else after Maedler. Of course, the whole map was in French. Well, the third to draw a map was Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli in Italy. What Flammarion had called Mer Terhy appeared on Schiaparelli's map as Solis Lacus; what had been the Kaiser Sea or the Mer du Sablier, respectively, appeared as Syrtis Major. The light area around Lacus Solis, Terre de Kepler on Flammarion's map, became Thaumasia. The Mer de Fontana became Elysium and the Mer Oudemann became Trivium Charontis. By the grace of God Schiaparelli's system won out in all countries, and most of his names are still in use. By being Latin they are the same in all languages, because they are nobody's language. We now come to the names of constellations and of some conspicuous stars, but for practical reasons the evolution of the current system has to be discussed first. Hipparch's star catalogue, as preserved for us in the Almagest, listed a total of # stars which, of course, are all naked-eye stars, leaving out a number of faint ones and, naturally, neglecting the southern hemisphere almost completely. (At a later date the French astronomer Houzeau stated that a man with perfect vision, if he first counted from a rather northern latitude and then continued from a southern latitude, would reach a total of # stars.) Now all stars were sorted into six classes according to their apparent brightness. The brightest ones were in the first class (later called the first magnitude) and the just visible ones formed the sixth class. So far there was no special problem, but this soon ceased to be the case if a specific star was to be picked out. The invention of the constellations helped. A total of forty-eight are listed in the Almagest: the twelve signs of the zodiac, twenty-one constellations north of the zodiac and fifteen to the south of the zodiac. (The names of almost all of them are still in use.) A constellation was useful for stating which star one had in mind, in that it limited the area of the sky. In fact, this is the main reason why the names of constellations are still used, and at the Astronomical Congress at Leyden (The Netherlands) in # the limits of the constellations were carefully established. Modern star charts have the eighty-eight constellations agreed upon during that congress. But to go back to the Greek astronomers. The star he had in mind (Aldebaran) was in the constellation Taurus and had to be described as "the bright star in the southern eye of the bull." Or another star (Rigel) had to be designated as "the bright star in Orion's left foot." One wonders why the Greeks did not think of the simple device of just numbering the stars in a constellation after they had once been carefully described in the elaborate manner just quoted. But they didn't. Alessandro Piccolomini, in #, took the first step in that direction. He omitted the usually rather elaborate m # rthological pictures, also all the faint stars, but he gave a map showing the positions of the larger stars and labeled them with the Latin alphabet. A German lawyer who was an ardent astronomer, Johannes Bayer, did what we do now. He labeled the stars in each constellation with Greek letters, switching to the Latin alphabet only when there were more stars in a constellation that the Greek alphabet has letters. In his book, the Uranometria, which appeared for the first time in #, he said that it was his system to call the brightest star of each constellation alpha, the next brightest beta, the third brightest gamma, the fourth delta and so on. Of course, he made a number of mistakes. His alpha is not always the brightest star; but that his idea was good is proved by the simple fact that we still use it. Thus we say that the first photographs of Pluto were found on a plate centered on delta GeminoTum, the fourth brightest star in the constellation Gemini. Bayer's system is such a space-saving device; Aldebaran becomes alpha Tauri, Capella alpha Aurigae, Castor and Pollux alpha and beta Geminorum and Sirius alpha Cams majoris. (If you have the Greek letters and enter them in a chart of the constellation so that its name does not need to be repeated there is a real time and space saver.)  I 'O tell the story of the names of the constellations and how they were devised would take this whole issue of Galaxy. It would take more than the whole issue if we knew in all cases how the Just peel off protective backing. Sticks to any smooth surface sstfunpemks An assortment of humorous Bumper Signs created to Day-Glo letters for long range visibility. HHiSini I'r you can read this  y   Q. S m n     O  n m X n m  # S m O   O o z   name came about. Most of them we don't know. But I do want to mention that in the course of time stars at the border of one constellation have often been shifted into the neighboring constellation, sometimes deliberately, more often by mistake. Even the famous zodiac did not remain unaffected. The Greeks had only eleven zodiacal signs for several centuries. Libra, in that zodiac, had turned into the pincers of the neighboring constellation Scorpio. Tracing the shifts of this type is a whole subbranch of the history of astronomy which has the special name of Astrognosis. This is the area where astronomy and archeology (plus "ordinary history") touch and overlap. Many of the individual names of stars are Arabic but they are not always "pure." In addition to truly old Arabic names there are many which are pseudo-Arabic, being Arabic adaptations of names from other languages. And later on many of them went through another transformation, usually Latinization, to make them pronounceable for European tongues. Aldebaran is a case in point. The Arabic form addabaran was produced by translating a Greek sentence. An expert on Arabic astronomy. Dr. Paul Kunitzsch, a German living in Cairo, says that Arab scholars themselves are uncertain what the word really means but think the root word is dbr which means "to be behind something" or "to follow something." The meaning, astrognostically speaking, would then be "the star which follows the Hyades." What name could sound more "Arabic" than Algol? Well, it is Arabic all right, but not originally so. The star Algol, beta Persei on charts, was the Gorgon's head. This designation, in Arabic, became ra's al-gul, the head of the Gul, a demon in Arabic mythology. As for Deneb, alpha Cygni, the current name is an abbreviation. The Arabic original is danab ad-dagaga, "tail of the chicken." I have mentioned earlier that the star beta Orionis was described by the Greeks as the "bright star in Orion's left foot". The Arabic version was rigl alyusra, "Orion's foot," and the star is called Rigel to this day -- though nobody is quite certain how it should be pronounced. While it is interesting to find out why a number of bright stars bears the names they do, individual star names are slowly coming out of use. Which, considering everything, is probably a logical development. As distinct from the names of the constellations, which are useful as area designations, there is little need for individual If for any reason you ore not completely satisfied with your very first issue, we will send you a complete refund immediately. If, at any later time, you wish to stop your subscription to Space World, we will make a full refund of the unused portion of your subscription with no questions asked. is meant for you. Here, in a magazine edited by two great names in the world of science fiction, Willy Ley and Otto Binder, is the whole dynamic story of spacemen and their spacecraft... from the tense moments during a countdown at Canaveral through the triumph of zooming into orbit around the earth, and on to the moon and the planets. With Space World, you're part of everything that happens. An Atlas streaks down the Atlantic Missile Range... you're in the tracking station. Project Saturn is completed... you're there for the test shot. A soft landed load is placed on the moon... you're at the receivers getting the first information that comes across the vastness of space. The first man crosses the threshold to explore hidden mysteries of other worlds... and you're beside him. Space World brings this all to you every month... under the expert guidance of Willy Ley and Otto Binder, who know how to tell this dramatic story in clear, simple, exciting terms that anyone can understand. I # West #th Street, New York #, N. Y,  I year (# issues) #. (# issues if payment enclosed)   Payment enclosed  Bill me I (Please print) I TT had been John Brest's custom to hike long distances every Sunday as far back as he could remember. This Sunday was like any other. By stages, Brest had walked all the patterned superhighways that crisscross the state, enjoying the fecal odor of marsh gas and the arsenical exhalations of the coke plants. At dusk, before the mosquitoes rose, he entered any town that offered itself and bussed it back to the larger city where he made his living. There was no one to make anything of his entrances and exits,., no one to bother him with Where are you going? and Why? He hovered this Sunday before the wings of an intersection intricate beyond anything encountered before. There was an unfamiliar city on the horizon with a towering smokestack that poured clouds of white smoke into the humid air -- not in a steady stream, but in unlikely pulses. He knew he had never seen it before. After so long, he was lost. He trudged down the cement incline and began to follow, dutifully, the frozen dance-figure of the intricate cloverleaf. It was growing dark by the time he reached the bottommost level, with layers of bridges and ramps He was innocent -- tragically innocent -- in a place where only the guilty were secure! piled above. The disused tunnel before which he was standing carried no traffic; but he had come to terms with the meadows for the day. He must risk traversing this deserted tube, without knowing whether it led him to the unknown city or nowhere. He was heartened at once by an enthusiastically obscene suggestion crayoned in red on the near wall. Someone had been there before him, breathing exhaust and methane and hydrogen sulfide and thinking of his private pleasures. In the exhaust-filled air breathing was becoming difficult, when there was a sudden meowing of rubber on concrete, right over the tunnel's mouth. Here was his chance to get directions. Brest ran. The car had swerved to a stop on the sloping overpass to Brest's right. Its nose pointed directly at him. He had the uneasy conviction that he had faced it before, and that it meant to plunge through the guard-rails if he made a wrong move. He backed off, still staring at the car, which seemed to stare in return. Its high headlamps winked on for a moment, blinding him but reassuring him. It had never been like that. In none of his Sunday hikes had he traversed this tunnel before, nor had he ever seen this low-slung, foreign-looking car that menaced him from behind the rails of the overpass. Never turning his back to it, he went sideways along the chute, scrambling over two railings where they were level with each other, until his feet touched the higher roadbed. An ominous thrumming came from the odd car, but there was nobody at the wheel. Brest went to the near railing. He was now high enough out of the pit to see a little way over the meadows again. The smokestack pulsed on the horizon. He caught a movement, or the afterripple in the air of a movement, down among the twists and turns he had just scaled. "Hey! Hi! Come back!" cried Brest. The squat figure, only its rotund torso visible and that decked out in some outlandish sporting costume, mostly red, stumbled when he called; flung out one arm as if to wave, or keep its balance; leaped behind a pillar and disappeared. Brest ran a little way, peering fruitlessly. The man couldn't have been going for gas; the car was still running. What then? "Clown!" He turned back to the strange car and circled it warily. It had no license plates, nor any mounting brackets. There were dials on the dashboard, but with mounting irritation he found he could not read them. He opened the righthand door where the wheel was and slid tentatively onto the cushion. His elbow touched the horn button. The car responded with a five-note call so wild that he spread-eagled against the plush. TUT nobody came. The car continued to throb, quite gently, now he was inside it. He fiddled with the levers and pedals, thinking he just might point the car in a safer direction. The moment his foot touched the gas, the whole car purred like a cheetah, ran itself up into the high thousands. If he was stymied, the car was ready. Cautiously he shifted it into reverse and let the clutch up. It backed so smoothly away from the railing that he hardly had time to turn it to facethe right way. Or was it the right way? For him, perhaps it was. Throngs of mosquitoes had risen on the flats by now. He could simply drive the car to the strange city and turn it over to the police, since the owner was so obstinately missing. The suspicion of stealing touched him. He hesitated. He looked through the car for some hint of identity. There was nothing but a crumpled pink blanket in the back seat. He knelt and reached over for it, feeling something roll free as he pulled. There was an amazing amount of the fabric. It filled the floorwell right up to seat level by the time he had got it all off. The object left behind on the seat was a red thermos. That was hardly a clue. It would be a break, though, if the thing contained hot coffee... but it did not. It contained only a sticky, sweet odor, compounded of violets, alcohol and something that rankly suggested beef blood. He tossed it over the rim of the window without having meant to, and heard it shatter with a gratitude all the more intense for its senselessness. The overcast sky between the loops of the cloverleaf was losing its dun rose to the night-city's skyglare, faintly lurid and anonymously red. The car hummed, waiting for him to decide. He shrugged convulsively, released the brake and stepped on the gas. The overpass did not go down, after all. The foreign car, thrumming like a plague of grasshoppers, carried Brest through dips and darknesses as breathtaking as a rollercoaster and then began to climb again. He was pleased to see the light patterns of traffic. With misgivings he realized that it was all below him now. He was so high in the air he grew alarmed. The car bored on over the high hump and began to descend, its mushroom-like radiator cap singing abstractedly just under his nose. It went faster and faster, although he let up on the gas pedal at every faint relaxation of the endless curve. Screaming over onto two wheels, the car took the tight bind of a ramp and hurtled onto a narrow pitted road. Light poles blossomed, for it was full dark suddenly, and they brought everything into relief like toys. The great knot of the intersection, pricked out in yellow, dwindled and tightened in the rear-view mirror. It was beginning to rain. Inside the car it was hot, and the windshield fogged. He decided he must wriggle out of his shirt to wipe it clear. The car did not waver or weave; it seemed almost to be driving itself as he pulled his cuff-buttons loose and freed his back and belt of the soggy cloth. The car's obedience to his no-hands control made him smile. After a while he became aware that the smile had fixed itself and he sucked his cheeks back into place. The rain fell harder and there really seemed to be nothing to smile about. For one thing, he was driving without lights. The first button lit a tiny rectangle which turned out to be a radio; there was a cozy, unintelligible murmuring in the car from the little speaker. That was all right, but he was frantic for his brights. Finally he felt a cold dot at his fingertip, pushed it and saw the dimpled road come lemon-alive, squirming with rain. Safe? No, but a collision now wouldn't be his fault. He turned up the volume on the radio and settled back to listen as he drove. The voice was his. He froze on the wheel and began to sweat again. his own voice said. "It was raining, and I was in a hurry. It didn't seem like much of a speed -- the car was old, and  -- " "Much of a speed!" The new voice was as pleasant and as cold as enamel. A man's voice, but not one he had ever heard before. "Sixty's a fair speed, I'd say. And those Daimlers can be cranked up to a hundred without much difficulty." There was a glare of lightning, and the radio chuckled and strangled the next words. The rain hammered the car's top. When Brest could hear again, the glazed voice was saying, "... so decrepit to me. You could talk as if it had been about to fall apart under you. How could you be so familiar with a stolen car, anyhow?" A studio organ played an ominous gliss. This was too much. Better to walk in the torrent -- there wouldn't be any mosquitoes in this rain anyhow. He put his foot hard on the brake pedal and it went all the way to the floor without any compression. He yanked at the handle of the emergency brake. It came up so easily he knew it was connected to no cable any more. The radio would not click off. He could only turn the volume back down to that muted insect hum he had found so cheering initially. He took his foot off the gas. The car bored purposefully on through the rain. He was afraid to let go of the wheel. It would be the final admission that the car had run away with him. Suddenly he said to himself, I'm dreaming, and the words were so great a tension that he felt his head swimming. With a gasp, he let go of the wheel and put his clammy shirt back on. Let the damned car drive itself if it liked. It would probably plunge him over a cliff or something like that at any moment and let him back into his bed at the rooming house. He conceived a cunning plan for cheating the dream. He knelt up on the seat to crawl over and go to sleep in the back; sleep within sleep, and the crumpled pink blanket to comfort him. Let the car go to hell, then, unwatched. The car pitched around a corner and braked, throwing Brest's head sharply against the wheel, and that klaxon began to sound its wild call over and over. The hard tires screamed, and then there was a hollow denting noise and the fragmenting of glass. His head was so full of pain that he did not realize for a while after he sat up again that the car had stopped. Outside, in the whisper of rain, there was a sucking sound of footsteps coming toward him. "Hey, you." Brest took his ringing head out of his hands. II him through the near window was male, young and beautiful. It regarded him out of black eyes as shining and smoky as prize marbles. Then there were two such faces, both topped by black hair combed, neatly, straight back. "Get out." "Did I hit you?" he said. "Anybody hurt? I'm damned sorry if I did. It was accidental. This hack ran away with me." "Yeah," one of the young men said. "Get out of there before we come in and beat the living kek out of you." "Now wait a minute," Brest said, beginning to tremble. "I'm trying to be decent about this. I've got insurance -- " He realized suddenly that he had, in effect, stolen the foreign car. "What I mean is, there's no sense in pickany damage. I lost control of m-my car, and I was lost, anyhow. By the way, what city is this?" One of the young men took the car door by the handle and tore it open with a wailing of metal. He had actually pulled one hinge loose. Brest goggled. When they began to slide onto the seat he grappled for the other door. The young man on the seat reached out a deliberate hand and took him by the wrist. His fingers were supple and hot, but hard. "Now?" he said. "He's just asking for it." "No, let him go." "I don't want to." "Let him go, I said. Can't you see the car isn't his? He has a long run ahead if it isn't. Or would you like a dose of the law yourself?" The other voice seemed eager. The flat fingers released Brest's wrist. He sat in acute tetany for an instant, and then tumbled out the other side of the car into the mud. Inside the foreign car, the two young men argued with each other in low, precise voices. One of them said, "You're such a child. If you kill them on sight..." Cautiously, sprawling, Brest wriggled away. The other voice said: "... of chasing. Someday you'll learn love better. A fine day that'll be, too. Full of screams." "Yours, I warn you." "Yes, mine. For joy, you . There was silence. Brest got to his hands and knees, his belly already as wet as if he had been sprayed. From that position he saw the machine his own car had wrecked. It was a slabsided sedan at least thirty years old, which had simply fallen apart on contact. The four wheels stood firmly on cobbles, but the frame was askew and canted above them, and all the high rusty fenders had fallen off. The car had been fit only for a circus stunt in the first place; the owner of the foreign car could claim far more expensive damages than the total wreck of this caricature had involved. But the continuing argument did not move him to stay around and press claims. He crawled quietly to the wooden pavement. It was getting brighter still. He got around the corner of a windowless concrete building without incident, and had just noticed that here the street was in much better condition, when there was a catamount scream behind him. listen, but nothing came through except a sort of yowling. Then one of the voices said, very high and clear: "Now you'll behave." There was another moan. "Yes, you will. You're in a minority, sweetheart, that I promise you; you'll learn. You can't take one of them where you find them. You have to whip up a chase, and have the stupes chasing with you. Even then you have to show innocence, if you can. But the stupes will always chase with you, and when you catch one, then he's yours. If you take them where you find them -- " "Rrr," the other voice said, almost inaudible. "I'll find yours, damn you, I swear I will." "But that's for jail, believe me," the first voice said. "We'll have no one but each other when the last pinch comes. Don't think it won't be fun, darling; I have plans for you. Right now we've got every jam that keeps on the white line. It won't last, but it's worth prolonging. Don't you know a good thing when you've got it? Hell, of course you don't. What a sweetheart! You should live where they make the laws. But this one won't last; it's a shorty. You've got to chase for it, or the stupes will catch on. That'll be a hassel, believe me." There was a feeble sound of applause. Brest listened, wondering. "All right," said the young man who had screamed. "Where'd he get to, anyhow? You and your plays to the gallery!" "Around the corner flapping his ears, or I miss my guess. He's a sturdy boy. Let's go." Sweating ice, Brest ran. Despite the uncertainty of his knees, he ran with fair confidence. His walking had settled him a little, but it had kept up his wind and his patience. Besides, he knew that he was in a hurry and did not put more energy into bouncing up and down than into going forward. He ran on his toes and for stride. But when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the young men -- there were four of them now, three of them absolutely alike, the fourth chubby and comical -- flying down the broad, deserted street with huge zigzag bounds that covered at least ten feet each. Brest had once seen a deer or some such animal run like that, but never a human being. He estimated that he was making about a nine-foot stride and the advantage the young men had was partly lost through the eccentricity of their leaps. His stride-rate was a fraction faster than theirs. He looked back again. The chubby young man took the lead, striking cement and sailing with an effortlessness that was not grace, but something to which grace was irrelevant, like the skipping of a flat stone on water. Ahead, the street gleamed with the merciless clarity of early dawn. Several of the flatfaced white buildings had thin gutters of sunlight along their parapets. Brest found himself wondering why the sun should be rising on the right, not the left. He realized that he had no idea which way was East anyhow. Also, it was too soon; the ride in the runaway car had lasted forever, but not all night. No people on the street, no fronts to the shops -- if they were shops -- no cross-streets or alleyways. Could it be that the roadway itself, despite its broadness, was really an alley and that the buildings had their backs to him? Still, most buildings have back entrances. These had none. One white concrete fagade had a small window in it, two or three stories up. As he drew abreast of it, he opened his mouth to shout, though he had no idea what he would say -- "Help!", perhaps -- for the window had a figure in it, a woman leaning on her palms looking blindly out into the sun. Before he could make a sound, however, the woman's righthand dropped away from her chin and dipped below the level of the sill. It came up again with some small object, which it hurled with blurring speed squarely at Brest's head. He ducked, and it missed him, but he heard it singing as it went by. He was sure that it would have brained him, and had been intended for nothing else. woman in a dun-colored, nostyle robe, had never looked at him. It had been as if the hand had sought and flung its missile automatically -- as if, and this to a man unused to being stoned by young women was possible, it were the law in this city that a running man must be stoned. But a message, now? He twisted to look back, but the object had been a stone and nothing else. At the same time Brest saw that his pursuers had halved the interval. Now he could see their expressions: they were all smiling, quietly, the kind of smile that young noblemen wear in noble old oil-paintings, and they did not seem to be breathing. Brest's own lungs were twin sacs of acid. He faced front desperately. The street began to curve gradually. As he went around the broad sweep, the buildings were discontinued without notice. He saw, across an impressive and treeless public square, the chimney of the power plant. It was so close at hand that he was afraid to look up; he would surely have fallen down. He turned toward it and ran harder. It seemed hardly likely that there was any safety in the place, but it was at least familiar, he had seen it before. His guess that it was a power plant gave it a meaning where all other meaning was lacking. It was hard to tell how close he was, because he had no idea of how high the chimney actually was. For all he knew, it was big enough to be like a mountain, which looks changelessly near for a long time before it is ready to fall upon the traveler. No, it was not so distant; he could see the bricks in its base. Immediately behind his back, he could head the light impacts of his hunters' feet as they bounded in his spoor. While he listened, the sound changed to an even lighter trotting, and one by one all four of the young men pulled up alongside him, moving easily, matching his own steps. They did not speak to him, nor attempt to seize him. All five sped abreast. With difficulty, because he had already resigned himself to running forever, he slowed down, scuffing his soles against the flags, and stopped. In the silence his lungs whooped raucously, raling for rest and air. The four young men scattered and came back, posting themselves at the compass-points, and looked at him. They were all smiling beneficently still, but their eyes were smoke. Brest waited until he was breathing at a reasonable rate, realizing that he could do nothing about his heart. Then he said, "I don't know what your game is. You won't tell me. But the first one of you that takes a step my way -- " He stopped; he had no reserves left. But at once a fresh wave of terror passed through his guts, and left him something he could use. It was black, bare and cruel: a knowledge of teeth and fingernails, and of the vulnerability of these men's pretty faces. The epiphany made him smile, and the feeling of his mouth-muscles drawing out his lips was pleasantly nauseating. The four young men seemed to see it. They stopped smiling their own smiles and moved, each one taking one step backward. They said nothing. Brest kept his head swiveling gently, in order to see all of them. The chimney towered. He said: "What do you want?" The buildings bounding the square echoed every word solemnly. There was no answer. They watched him. They had the advantage, as they surely knew. An attack of his own was being forced upon him -- but he had done nothing to provoke their enmity, except for the collision. which had not been his fault. That semblance of guiltlessness was worth defending. "Are you going to stand there forever?" he said hoarsely. "If you want something, open up and say so. I've done no harm!" One of the slender young men smiled again and Brest jerked toward him, every cell quivering with alertness. During the same motion the young man at the next compass-point stepped and dropkicked, with superb control, directly into Brest's groin. The public square exploded, he fell, fighting only to scream, and eight knees pinned him neatly to the flagstones. Ill  I 'HE four young men stood on the left side of the room, with the chubby one at the end of the line, and Brest stood on the right, the sweat stinging his eyes and his kidneys burning. At the big scarred desk between them there was a man who looked with tired hatred on all of them and wiped a bald head. After a while he said, in a dry, almost soundless voice like fingertaps on cork; "The claim." "Theft, sir," one of the young men said. "What of?" "A car, sir," the young man said silkily. The judge turned to look at Brest again with bored, disinterested eyes. "Did you steal a car?" "No," Brest said, with a forcefulness he could hardly have anticipated even had he not felt sick and full of pain. "No, what?" "No, I didn't steal a car," Brest said, his indignation growing with every breath. "If you want me to say 'sir' to you, you'll have to tell me why. I don't know who you are, or where I am, or by what right these nances drag me in here. I'm a citizen and I'm -- " There had been a stir among the young men; the judge stared at them and then back at Brest. "Be quiet," he said. "You have no rights here; you're reported to me as a thief. You say you didn't steal the car." "No, I didn't." "Is the car your car?" "No," Brest admitted readily enough. "The people who own it abandoned it, and I couldn't find them. I thought I'd drive it to the nearest city and turn it over to the police." "At way over the limit," the chubby man said pleasantly. "He hit our car and knocked it to bits." "I'll ask you to testify when I need you," the judge said, without turning. "Were you, in fact, speeding, Mr. -- " "Brest," Brest said. "John Brest. I was making about sixty. It was raining and I was in a hurry. It didn't seem like much of a speed -- the car was old, and -- " "Much of a speed!" the chubby man said. "Sixty's a fair speed, I'd say. And those Daimlers can be cranked up to a hundred without much difficulty." The judge looked at Brest, as if waiting. "I wasn't making anything like a hundred," he responded stiffly. "The car couldn't have taken it." The judge opened his dry mouth, but Brest never heard what came from between the shrunken colorless lips. In the bright morning light there was a long burst of thunder, with a sharp edge to it, more like an artillery bombardment than a storm. As the sound finally died, Brest heard the chubby man's enameled voice: " -- so decrepit to me. You talk as if it had been about to fall apart under you. How could you be so familiar with a stolen car, anyhow?" Somewhere an electric organ played an ominous gliss. The judge cried out like a demented chubby man stepped out of line and struck an attitude and waved his nancy fingers, "Oh, you're a thin figure of a thief!" There was a confused hubbub among the four young men, and the judge rose to his feet, his mouth making a vicious square for a moment. Brest could not hear what the judge was saying. He could not hear what anyone was saying. The sense of having lived through these moments before had gripped him in a new paralysis, worse than his first sight of the foreign car. His hearing returned. The judge was saying: "Take it from '... anything to say, Mr. Brest?' " Brest started and swallowed. "I didn't steal the car," he said. "I can see that nobody here is going to believe a word I say. I was taking the car to the police, so its owners could be located. I got lost. The car was hard to control, and I hit somebody before I even saw them... That's all." The judge sighed, and at the sound, the four young men leaned forward slightly. "Ignorance of the law..." the judge said, looking up at the ceiling. "Do you press the claim?" "Certainly," snapped one of the slim young men. "He's as guilty an innocent as I've ever defended." "Perhaps so. This time, nevertheless, I'm not going to free the man." "I object," the chubby young man said coldly. "For the record." "When was anything ever said off the record? Take Mr. Brest to the Policy Chambers. Maybe they'll give him over to you there. It's a foregone conclusion, I suppose; but I won't. Clear out." Brest said, astonished, "Is this what you call a fair trial?" "Trial?" the judge said. "Who said you were on trial? You're fair game here, Mr. Brest; you're lucky that you broke a law at all, or you'd have been condemned quite a while back. Your runaway car saved you, for a while, anyhow. These gentlemen here have made a good case for you. They've shown, insofar as it can be shown, that you have a real status as a criminal -- though actually they meant to show nothing more than that you're suspect, which is something else again. That status, thanks to my ruling, will keep you unharmed much longer than mere innocence. If Policy takes any interest in you, you may even be jailed. You'll learn to pray for that, I promise you." "I'd rather go home," Brest said. The judge smiled as if he were about to throw up and said, "Will you get out?" "We'll see," the chubby man said. "We'll see. Come along, you." It took Brest a moment to understand that the order was meant for him. The four young men took him gently, tenderly, by the elbows and shoulders. The judge continued to stare at the far high corner of the room, as if he had been turned to marble in the white sunlight some time back. IV place where the young men marched him was so obviously a broadcasting station that there was no connecting it with any governmental function. Past every open door were banks of tubes and control boards, or little knots of actors raving silently under glass. There had also been a theater, with fans of light from baby spots, all amber, and people screaming, screaming; during the next leg of his journey his head had whooped with that sound. The sign on the stage had said: The young men did not speak to him, but they did not forbid him his hasty glances into the studios and equipment-nests. He stopped a moment where there was a multitude of beautiful women, all expensively clothed with high fashion figures beneath the drapes, and the faces of bisque china dolls. Their glass eyes met his without recognition that they were alive, even that he was alive. "Baloney," said Brest. Two of the young men hit him simultaneously, one fist per ear. He stumbled and the other two to regret the comment, but he still did not feel intimidated; he would say what he damn pleased, and once he saw someone in authority they'd hear him talk, plenty. They arrived at lavishly furnished rooms studded with television screens. Here the air was especially mild and grateful to Brest's grime-ground skin. The women were more expensive, lovely and repellent than ever, the couches and carpets deeper, the modulations of polite talk around him gentler and emptier. And the fright more intense. No one really looked at the screens. The little human figures went through motions like some subdued form of dancing, or as if some one had just set the clockwork going again after a long stasis. The four young men slowed in indecision, and muttered among themselves. Their voices rose almost to the point where Brest could hear what they were saying. They thrust him at once into a blue velvet armchair and turned their backs. Shivering, he looked with cynical hopelessness for an out. He saw, several, all marked The four young men turned and looked at him. Then they turned away again. It took nothing more to convince Brest that he was not going to run, that running was the last thing he wanted to do. So they wanted him to run, did they? All right then, hell would freeze over before he'd take a step. One of the expensive women came up quietly from behind the chair and sat down upon its arm. When Brest looked up, she bent, smiling, and touched his shirt pocket, with two fingertips which burned like dry ice. He wanted to throw the hand off, but he was afraid to touch it. He tried to shrink into the farthest corner of the cushions. The woman smiled again and took her hand away to adjust her skirt. When he made no further I move, she arose and went away, walking with the profound grace of murder for its own sake, like a half-grown leopard. Brest cradled his frozen ribs in both hands and watched her go. Nothing in his experience could match that stab of demanding coldness. The young men went on arguing. Brest's frozen breast warmed gradually and painfully, and after a while he noticed that there was a thin rill of cold moving over his chest, as if the damaged breast were secreting a milk, or bleeding. He touched his shirt tentatively. It was damp, but he was afraid to explore further -- any noticeable movement would surely be rewarded. TUT nothing happened. The young men's argument went on and on like the life stories of drunks. Cupping his frost-bitten heart with newly automatic caution, Brest put his head back against the velvet and gave the nearest screen his attention. A psychologist was interviewing a child novelist. The child looked as though it had been costumed for a Dickens film, and the psychologist was as bearded as the experts who testify for mouthwash ads. They were exploring the situation which might have led to the writing of the novel. Something called a "lodge" played a big part in the story, and it seemed that the child, in order to help himself visualize the place, had built with his own hands a full-sized replica of the "lodge." It seemed an unlikely proposition, for the child did not look to be more than nine years old. The screen was showing, now, what the model lodge looked like. It was a low, disorderly structure, set in a patently fake forest. "And the High Hunter?" the psychologist's voice was saying, while the camera prowled about the lodge, exposing wings set on at random, and the crude-hewn ends of logs. "I would suggest that your father-image may have religious significance as well; do you agree?" "I think it does," the child's voice said. "I saw the High Hunter as a -- a spirit that kept an eye on everything that happened, and was sometimes cruel without wanting to be or not wanting to. An opposite for the Clown, who is cruel just to be cruel." While they spoke, two figures walked across the screen; one a gigantic stony man bound in leaves; the other a squat, rednosed creature, dressed in red, who reminded Brest simultaneously of -- was it St. Nick and W. C. Fields? Of the two, he rather preferred the Clown -- whom he knew he had seen somewhere before. The apocryphal stalkers faded and the child and the psychologist faced each other again. "Ah, the Clown. You will excuse me -- " a fatherly smile -- "if I say that the Clown seems out of true with the rest of the book. Cruel to be cruel, you say. A symbol of evil, then?" The child stirred and showed its first sign of discomfiture. "No, sir, that's not what I meant. It's -- well, the High Hunter isn't human. The Clown is." "He is? Even with his magics and all the rest?" "Don't forget he's the only human in the book, so naturally he has magics. I don't think -- well, look. The High Hunter is cruel because he has to be -- " "Out of principle?" "Yes, sir. That's right. And the Clown is only cruel because he enjoys it. You know that about the Clown; you expect it. You understand that that's the way he is, and he's not a bad fellow in most other ways. But with the High Hunter, you never know. He's cruel out of principle, that's just it -- " riHE child was obviously warming up to his subject. "For one thing," he said, "he has thousands of wards, and he has to take care of them all, all the time. One of the Hunted -- the Mouse, say -- may have to be killed by the Owl so that the Trout can escape the Otter. How would the Mouse know that? And would he like it any better if he did know it? He's more important to himself than the Trout. You can't ever know the kind of good the High Hunter is after. And so he's the only one who can be satisfied with it. The Hunted who have been good will have their skins nailed on the walls of the Lodge. The Hunted who haven't been good will have their skins nailed on the walls of the Lodge. There is a difference, but how can the Hunted see it?" "But what about the Clown?" "Well, the Clown is cruel for pleasure. He would like all the Hunted to survive the Hunt, so they can be hunted again. He magics and does favors and tries to be a good fellow because he himself isn't ever hunted, which makes him look like he must be a Hunter. The Clown does hunt, of course, but he hunts only a certain kind of pain. He doesn't kill, and he doesn't create, either. In that way, he's human. But the High Hunter -- " And a lot more. Brest cupped his aching heart, and began to be aware how tired he was, and hungry. And guilty; away out on the edges of his failing consciousness, he felt that he should be doing something before something happened for which he would be blamed. He was almost asleep when a sharp finger made a glissando over his collapsed ribcage. "Hey, sissy!" The four young men, unsmiling, stood over him, waiting tensely for his response to be delayed further, perhaps long enough to herd him with a blow. "Get up, sweetheart." Brest got up, dizzily. The sound of the young men's voices filled him with sick fury. He said, "In your eye, Junior." The fight was short, but he loved every second of it. He felt each blow as a compliment and a vindication, and he fouled with aseptic joy. All four of them tumbled with him in a stunning hailstorm of knuckles and shoes on the yielding, bristly carpet. Brest caught one throat against the heel of his hand, and when the rest hauled him battered and twitching away, he saw the body remain, with darkening arterial foam soaking into the nap, silent, motionless and beautiful. While his muscles shivered and his stomach buckled inside his belly, the opposite walls of his per could not be tied. Brest had killed; he had given an account of himself. It seemed undignified that his own aching body should be dragging its feet. V I 'HE young men released his arms with abrupt unanimity and he staggered, bringing up against the Lodge itself, startlingly erected in the center of the square before the chimney. No trees; just as he had thought, the background had been faked. Or this Lodge was a copy. Either way, it was useless to question -- but could he somehow flail his way into the rheumless glance of the camera and scream to the unknown audience for help? A kind of cloud where his memory had been kept him from it, not any fear of the young men: this huge solid station had never broadcast so much as a racetrack bulletin in the world where he had lived up to now. There was no way of knowing if the broadcasts had an audience at all, really. The Lodge door opened, as a bank of lights flared amber at the base of the tower. It was toward the lights his pursuers and captors were staring. Brest staggered forward and through the opening. The door closed silently behind him. There was a giant fireplace -- impossible to believe the ringletted child had lifted or laid that fieldstone! -- and piled helterskelter a miscellany of items easily ascribed to a nine-yearold's collecting instinct. Bags, boxes, a tandem bicycle, broken toys and carpenter's tools, and food. Brest palmed a nibbled cinnamon bun and dispatched it in two bites. There was a sink, too, its faucet dripping steadily on an open and remarkably complete chemistry set. Brest put out a trembling hand to extract a small beaker from the soggy box. He filled it with water and sipped it thirstily, so fast that a dribble ran down his chin and wetted his front. There was a polite knock. "Hey, sissy!" Brest snatched up the nearest item in the rubble -- an open, three-quarters full sack of flour. Enough had spilled so that there was slack at the neck of the bag and he could swing it like a blackjack. He put one hand on the doorknob and faltered, "What? What do you want?" "If you're quite done, doll, Hosmin's ready. Let's get it rolling, shall we?" The speaker shoved the door open and reached in, his foot braced on the doorsill as if he dared not cross it. He caught Brest by the shoulder and yanked him into the square again. There was a desk now between him and the huge smokestack, but it seemed to Brest that the sets were becoming more and more makeshift. No walls, no bookshelves, not even a clothestree; just a desk, and a mqn sitting behind it. The three young men shoved Brest to within respectful distance, and stood back. Even close to, the man named Hosmin was small. His hair was gray, with a richly silver grayness, obviously a premature defection of heredity; and his face, too, suggested youth of a kind. It was narrow, womanishly delicate, with straight lips, high cheekbones and a nose as straight as that of a Pharaoh. It had, however, no expression. The eyes -- wonderful dark eyes, except for this -- stared as if sightless; nor did they blink, ever. The hands upon the desk were off-white as linen, and 'bore uselessly long, thin fingers which danced constantly on the glass. "This is John Brest," said the voice of the chubby young man. "Judge Trafling remanded him to Policy, Mr. Hosmin." "How do you do," Hosmin said. His voice was soft, almost blurry, as if he were trying not to think about something else. The masklike stare did not shift. Making an aborted gesture with the flour sack which still hung from his clenched hand, Brest said. "How do you do," although he had meant to say something explosive and self-righteous. "I'm surprised to see you. Have you committed a crime?" warning that his offenses, accidental, imaginary or deliberate, might be his only protection. Even so, he could not admit to having 'committed' anything. The verb implied retribution. He said, "Everybody seems to think so. But I don't even know where I am. "You're trembling. Sit down." Hosmin warped his gaze beyond the chubby one. "Is this only a request for a ruling? You are not expected to bring the game here. You've mistreated him?" "No and yes. He wrecked our car and resisted arrest. We had to manhandle him a little. Later he attacked us and we think he's killed one of us. Naturally we had to act accordingly." "Naturally," Hosmin said. He lit a cigarette and pulled its coal down nearly to his lips in a single concentrated drag that made V Brest's own lungs ache. As Hosmin laid it in a brimming and smoldering ashtray, Brest now saw that the man was dusty with flocculent gray powder which made even his skin look granular. "But," said Hosmin, "you have not answered me." There was a brief silence. Finally the young man said, "No." Hosmin swiveled so that his attention was focused near Brest. very closely to your story, Mr. Brest. I can see that you are disturbed. We have a difficult situation here, kept only delicately in balance, and our methods are arbitrary most of the time because we have no choice. Now tell me all about it." The blurry, eminently reasonable voice commanded him absolutely. Numbly, Brest told everything, extruding the scalding words one and two at a time. Behind him, the three young men sat on a curb, bunched, their backs turned, transferring a word syllable by syllable in muffled voices that only Brest could hear: Tat. Tie. Tale...Tat. Tie. Tale. "I think I did kill the tall one," Brest added. "I was trying to, anyhow. I don't know what kind of operation you've got here -- I can see that you make your own laws -- but by my lights I was treated unjustly for something that wasn't my fault. That makes us even. All I want to do is go home. If I'm in your way here, all you have to do is show me how to get out of it." "Well, Mr. Brest," Hosmin said, "you are not in our way, as you put it. And as a matter of fact you are not our first visitor. These violent people arrive, now and then it cannot be helped, they bring with them their own kinds of self-righteousness. Privately, Mr. Brest, privately I thought it possible; I am interested that it is, but the wages of sin -- with luck; do you understand me? -- are written down in double columns here, too. To release you is unthinkable, there is no precedent for that."  lose, but he said stubbornly, "Why?" "Because you would suffer incredibly," Hosmin said. "Judge Trailing remanded you because you have status. Were I to turn you loose, or were you to attempt to escape, that status would then vanish, and you would become the object of what we call a chase sequence, a live doll to be filmed and dubbed later into some program which we may or may not broadcast. It would never end. We never stop chases, it is not economical. The subjects are chosen by lot when they reach technical obsolescence in the kind of operation we conduct here. To sentence a human being to a chase would be unthinkable." "I don't understand what the hell you're talking about," Brest said. "Look. You seem to be the big boss here. Is that right?" "Well," said Hosmin, "no. Or do you mean within this area? Of course, my orders are final within this operation, which is, indeed, quite extensive. But this is only a communications enterprise, and does not make overall policy. That comes down from, ah, upstairs. We transmit in accordance with the decisions of others, which establish beforehand what should and should not be transmitted. About that I have no say whatsoever." "That's not what I mean. You run this part of it. Why can't you just order me back to where I came from? I live in -- " "I know where you live," Hosmin said. "You do not. You know nothing but a name. Would you be able to tell me how you would find where you lived if you were freed -- and freed also of the penalties we have for freedom -- at this moment?" "Naturally I can't answer that. Are you pretending that you can't?" "No, Hosmin said. "We have card files, of course, on that kind of information. My point is that the information concerns fictions. You cannot go back. You are now years away from your set, in any event. Every second takes you farther, every step many years farther away. I can do nothing for you now but order that you die. In your case it will be a little premature and nothing more. To preserve your life from this point on would be an impossible cruelty." Brest hunched down into the chair. He had given up understanding long ago. He said, with a bitter stubbornness, "I want to live. I want to go home." "You cannot," Hosmin said in a low colorless voice. "You have left your home. It was an illusion, which, somehow, you saw through; we cannot now return you to it. It is impossible. Not illegal, or unsuitable, or immoral: physically impossible. As for living, I could not be so unjust. I must proceed as inevitably I proceed, without consent or indeed any request for your consent." A faint buzzing interrupted Hosmin. The mask remained as if by necessity rigid and unsurprised. Only Brest was startled when Hosmin said, "Hosmin here." The air quivered. There was no other voice; only a sort of itchy electricity. When it stopped, Hosmin said, "I am often wrong. It appears that you will live. Don't sit forward, Mr. Brest. I have tried to tell you that the life you have requested is an eternity in boiling oil. Now that I have been told, in effect, who you are -- my dear and only friend -- " "I don't -- " beautiful voice had spoken that phrase with so sudden a warmth and unmistakable bottomless shallow cardiac-respiratory shuddering happiness that Brest's own diaphragm leaped and stopped. The masked eyes made coals; what was it, what was happening? He saw the trembling fingers snub the cigarette, and was unable to move or feel. What? He felt intolerably lonely. He had been condemned, and yet was suddenly the object of some intimate and umistakable king-making which made him tremble. "Yes?" ff "Wait. I was speaking. I repeal nothing. But escape is, after all, possible. I ask you to request death." "Instead?" Hosmin sat, motionless except for the slight never-ending telegraphy of his hands, while behind him on a sudden monitor colored shadows went through their subdued ritual. The entire set was silent. Brest, convinced that the world had been cut adrift upon his question, was too frozen even to tremble. But then there was unmistakably boots-and-overshoes music, a long-drawn sigh of many distant people and the sliding of many hurried feet. Slurred steps came up behind Brest and died ostentatiously, as if waiting to be buried. Hosmin raised the burden of his hooded eyes to Brest's. "Sir," someone behind Brest urgently said. "There's something wrong; a scramble in the tapes, or bad editing: something's being dubbed in under the board." Hosmin turned in his chair, which turned with him, and the thing squealed with a long and unbearable  torture. The whole hollow square squealed back, unalive and protesting. Hosmin was looking at the screen, and Brest tried to look too. It was the chimney, and it was pulsing too fast. It looked as though it were demented. "We're trying to kill it," that breathless voice said. Hosmin snapped, "You can't kill it, from here or anywhere else. Send down for a new script." The pressure of someone-behind-Brest let up without an identifiable sound, and the remote camera which was scanning the chimney soared until the public square had become included; the chimney, steaming away into a corner of the screen, was now in the foreground and not the center of interest. It could be seen that it was built of yellow bricks and had staples driven into it. A man came running -- man came running. He ran too fast. There was a river of black figures pouring out after him. Far behind Brest there was a composite sigh; "A chase!" The blurred man darted across the square, his legs twinkling, while the black river divided into wavefronts and made to surround him. The man twisted, darted, dodged into the inevitable cul-desac, and the crowd surged in after him. "Sound!" Hosmin cried. Immediately it came through, high and shrill and terrifying. Brest, like a bubble, having fought its oily way to the surface, had had enough, and popped through the tension holding him, freeing himself into flight. He crossed the square, not hearing any pursuit, not looking to see if it by now was him they flowed upon, and hurled himself at the yellow brick wall, straight up, lunging staple by staple toward the smoky mouthpiece. There was a crowd shout behind him: "An escape!" Tall on its flared rim, swaying in the smoke, he risked looking down, peering awkwardly past the flour sack still clutched in his hand. He heard the mob roar, thin and eerie as the high whooping of terns, and saw the first figures swarming up the base of the chimney. He sobbed once, "Coming, Mother," and flung the sack over the lip and into the pulsing chimney. He flung his arms wide, shouted his defiant acquiescence to the High Hunter, and fell headlong toward the peopled square. Inside, the stack temperature licked the wrapping off the floury powder as he fell and fell, and he heard the beginnings of the explosion so that it was no surprise when the great chimney erupted and fell with him. It crumbled at the base and came down quite majestically, remaining almost at the vertical throughout. The last third toppled and hit the ground all at once. Bang and bang. Brest bounced to his or somebody's feet, nodding and smiling, although the brick dust obscured every thing and every body. The band played Billboard. Amid first and last things he could hear the Machine, thrumming, thrumming, and reached out blindly and painfully to open the door. In the clearer air inside, he saw the Clown at the wheel, but as he slid onto the yielding cushion there was no one there but himself. He locked the door, the secret and sacramental door. He reached behind him for the blanket, which was there, and shook it out, grabbing for the thermos. The cap was loose this time and screwed off, easy in his fingers. He smelled the bitter milky odor, shook out two white drops, and laid it deeply safe back in the blanket. He released the brake, clutching and shifting this time with practiced ease. His crowd seethed beyond the door, and through the windows he could just make out the smiling flower-faces of girls, applauding his aplomb, admiring his -- Escape. He smoothed his red trousers over his stocky muscled legs, settled the red jacket over his heavied torso, explored his face with one sure hand for the surely putty nose. The other skin, already in the obliquity of justice, was on the Lodge again, all shed tatters until another time. All the lights turned green. The giggling girls waved a promise and withdrew, and Brest, knowing the car could take it, started off in second with a roar. Music. It would be his custom as far as he could foresee to ride long distances every Funday, and this Funday was unlike any other. Applause.      In August we have another complete short novel, and one of the finest science-fiction stories that has lately crossed our desk. The time is the far future; the place a star cluster, very far from Earth; the people Earthmen... and others. The author is Jack Vance, and the name of the story is A lean wind wails through the age-old avenues of Dawningsburgh. Mornings, it brings sand from surrounding hills and scrubs at fresh paint, neon signs endlessly proclaiming the city's synthetic name and street markers in seven languages. At sunrise it prepares the dunes for footprints of scurrying guided tourists. When icy night clamps down and the intruders scamper to their hotels, the wind howls as it flings after them a day's collection of paper cups, bottle caps and other picnic offal.  II (Q # (B #  QiUzzo :iD! Tour Scarlet dine on exotic dance' deserts Foods Mm iFim ySAfi TO IliUdl Your travel A # V Nearest lEPiCE isrowi Betsy O'Reilly as she tossed on the lumpy bed of her third class room and recalled the sky poster that had hypnotized her. Now, Betsy was disappointed and bored. Slim, pretty, freckled and pert, but ten years older than she wished, she had mortgaged her secretarial salary to engage once more in The Eternal Quest. And, as always, the quest was proving futile. Eligible bachelors shunned Dawningsburgh as they did other expensive tourist traps. The "new friends" she had made were either loudmouthed, hairy miners en route to or from the orichalcum diggings, or middleaged couples on tragic second honeymoons, or self-styled emigre artists and novelists intent on cadging free meals and any other favors that lonely females might grant. But maybe, Betsy tried to console herself, there was something real here; something glamorous that she could find and cling to during the long months back in New York when she would have to subsist on soups and salads in order to pay her debt to TransPlan. Mars had been great, the guides insisted. Once, they said, it had even colonized Atlantis. Perhaps, under the sham and away from those awful conducted tours, something was still left that could make her feel a trifle less forlorn. Betsy jumped out of bed and rummaged in a closet. There it was! A heated emergency garment equipped with plastic helmet, air pack and a searchlight. Required by law but seldom used, since tourists were told to stay off the # below zero streets at night. Wriggling into the clumsy thing, she tested valves and switches as she had been instructed. Then she tiptoed out of her cubbyhole, down a corridor and into the hotel lobby. The room clerk did not greet her with its usual trill. A robot, built on Earth as a "stand-in" for one of the vanished Martians, it had turned itself off when the last tourists left the dining room for their beds. But how lifelike it still looked, balancing on a perch behind the ornate plastic desk. And how human too, despite the obviously avian ancestory of the race it mimicked. What was it the guides had said about the way in which all intelligent lifeforms so far discovered closely resembled one another? Why, even artificial Martians made the average human look drab and clumsy. Betsy circled the overdecorated room like a shadow and pushed against the street door. Escaping air whistled through the crack. "Miss!" squawked the clerk, triggered alive by the noise. "Don't... She was outside by then and running through the crazy halflight thrown by Mars's nearer and farther moons. Wind howled and tugged at her. Cold turned the breath from her helmet vent into snow. she stopped, gasping, before one of the open-air shops she had toured that afternoon. Five "Martians" bent stiffly over lathes and other machines, just where they had stopped after the last visitor departed. Hoarfrost mottled their leather harness, their downy red skins and the scars on their shoulders where atrophied wings had supposedly been amputated. No breath came from their nostrils. How cold and small they looked! On impulse, she approached briskly. "Yes, Miss?" The , robot proprietor unkinked as its automatic relays turned it on. It came forward with a grimace meant to represent a smile. "You're out very late. What may I show you?" Its voice was like a rusted bird song. "Tell me," said she, "what the Martians really made here." "Why, we design jewelry. Miss. I have some nice..." "No, no!" she interrupted. "What did the real Martians make here? Surely not junk jewelry for tasteless tourists. Something beautiful, it must have been. Wind bells? Dreams? Snowflakes? Please tell me." The robot twittered and flinched like a badly made toy. "I d-do not understand," it ventured at last. "I am not programmed to answer such questions. Perhaps the guides can do so. Now may I show you..." "Thank you, no." She touched the thing's cold, six-fingered hand with quick compassion. "But I'll ask the guides. Good night." Back in the street, she began to retrace her tour of the afternoon. Here was what the guide had called a "typical home." This time she did not disturb the mother, father and one furry child with budding wings who clustered about what experts thought must have been a telepathic amplifier. It did not work any longer -- none but the coarsest Martian machines did -- yet the frostrimed robots sat stiffly enchanted before it, as they would do until the sun rose and tourists resumed their endless tramp. (The day's last, she noted, had left an empty pop bottle in the mother's lap.) Farther on she met a "policeman", resplendent in metal harness, leaning forlornly against an anachronistic lamppost. Some late-prowling jokester had stuck a cigarette between its still lips. Surely not policemen here? She looked up at the fairy towers that laced the stars. Surely not in this grave place. It must be one of those human touches introduced by Trans-Planetary to make tourists smile and feel superior. Nevertheless, she removed the cigarette and ground it under her heel. After walking half a mile through the sand-whipped night, Betsy paused before a structure of translucent spires and flying buttresses where a library had once been housed. No robots were on duty there and no serious attempt had been made at restoration. No Champollion had appeared in the early days of exploration to decipher some Martian Rosetta stone, and by now the historical record had been hopelessly scrambled by souvenir hunters. But that didn't matter really, they said. Outside of the tourist trade the only really valuable things on the dying planet were extensive deposits of orichalcum, an ore rich in pure radium. Thanks to the impartial mining monopoly established by TransPlanetary twenty years ago, orichalcum supplied the nations of Earth with sinews of war which they had not yet dared use, and fuel for ships that were questing greedily farther and farther out into the darkness of space. So metal-paged books had long vanished from the library's stacks and its sand-strewn halls were littered with broken rolls of tape. How long would it be, she wondered as she passed on with a sigh, before the guides realized that even those mute tapes could be sold as souvenirs? turned on the searchlight, checked her air tank -- the gauge showed enough reserve for another hour -- and defiantly opened the face plate of her helmet. The atmosphere was cold; cold as a naked blade. It had a heady tang and she stood taking in great gulps of it until a warning dizziness forced her to close the plate. The guides were wrong again! A human could learn to breathe this air! Leaving the gutted library, Betsy breasted the wind as she ploughed through shifting dunes toward a structure shimmering on the other side of the plaza. This, the guides pattered, was a cathedral. When the place now called Dawningsburgh had been alive, they said, its inhabitants gathered at the shrine each evening to sip one ceremonial drink of precious water, shed two ceremonial tears for the days when Mars had been young and worship a flock of atavistic winged princesses who performed ceremonial flights under a pressurized, transparent dome in the rays of the setting sun. This showplace had, of course, been restored right down to its last perch, and had been equipped with a full complement of "worshippers." At the climax of each day's final guided tour, visitors jammed themselves into the nave, sipped cocktails, "ohed", "ahed" and even shed tears along with the robots as they gawked at mannequins flying above them on invisible wires in the best Peter Pan tradition. Ducking under the electric eye that would have started a performance, Betsy tiptoed into the structure. It was quieter than any grave. Several hundred robots huddled there on their perches, drinks in hand, ready to go into their act. At the far end of the transept a soaring mural, gleaming phosphorescently, hinted at the lakes, seas and forests of Mars's prehistory. Under the dome a single flyer dangled, its plumes trailing. For long minutes Betsy stood in the dimness, seeking to capture the mystery and wonder of this place. In ruins, it would have swept her with ecstasy, as had her moonlit view of the Parthenon. Restored and "repopulated," it made her sick and ashamed of her race... no, not of her race. exactly, but of the few hucksters who debased its thirst for knowledge and beauty. Then a bird started to sing! A bird? On Mars? This must be a tape, triggered on somehow despite her care in avoiding the electric eye. Any moment now, the robots would begin their mindless worship. She shuddered and turned to escape. But something held her. She crept instead, step by soundless step, toward the source of that exquisite music. An almost naked male robot had materialized before the mural. It was singing, far better than any nightingale, its strange hands outstretched to the radiance. Such notes could not... should not... spring from the throat of a machine. Heart in mouth, Betsy advanced with infinite care. By the mural's light she saw that the newcomer had no hoarfrost coating. And the moisture of its breath condensed and fell to the floor like a blessing. She reached out a small hand to touch its scarred shoulder, then jerked back. The shoulder was warm! brain whispered to her. "You're out late. Just let me finish this thing and we'll have a chat." The music soared, uninterrupted, to a climax sparkling with grace notes and glittering with chromatic trills. "Now," fluted the creature, turning and fixing her with golden, freewheeling eyes, "what brings a tourist" (the word was a curse) "here at this hour?" "L-love," she gulped, hardly knowing what she said. "I-I mean, I wanted to find out if anything real was left. And, well, I ran away from the hotel. They'll be coming after me, I suppose." "Don't fret. Martians can play tricks with time. I'll return you to your room well before they get here." "You -- you're not just another, fancier, robot?" "I'm alive enough." He bowed with a sweep that seemed to invest him with wings. "Pitaret Mura, at your service. A princeling of sorts. An iconoclast. And an atavist like you." "There are others here?" Her eyes grew round. "Most of the others have finished with this outgrown eyrie and are away on larger affairs. Only I return with a few friends once each year to sing of past glories and weep over present desecrations." "Two ceremonial tears?" she asked with a return of bitterness. There was something in his attitude that she found disquieting. "Many more than two. But..." he shrugged angrily, "I grow tired of weeping. On this visit I plan to wipe out you little humans who foul the nest of my ancestors." "How?" She gripped his arm, fear racing through her. "Tomorrow all this junk -- " he nodded his handsome head at the robots -- "will have been replaced by real Martians... youngsters out for a lark with me. We'll tend shop, make jewelry and all that until I give a signal. Perhaps this shrine would be the best place. When it's crowded, just at sunset. Then we pounce!" Mura ruffled himself up and sprang at her so convincingly that she shrieked. "How juvenile!" she managed to laugh shakily. "What did you say, human?" The Pitaret was taken aback by this unexpected thrust. "I said your plan is childish!" She stamped her foot. "So you cut the throats of a few stupid people. Then Earth sends up cobalt bombs and blows this cradle of Martian civilization to smithereens. The others won't like that, even if they are occupied with larger affairs. You would be in real trouble." "Hmmm!" He looked at her with new respect and a faint tinge of uncertainty. "But some punishment is justified. Even you can see that." "Yes," she admitted, wrinkling her nose at him, now that the worst was over. "This place is a horror. And we tourists are horrors too, for having let ourselves be taken in by it. But death isn't punishment, just an ending." "I hadn't thought of it that way." Mura slipped an arm around her shoulders and looked down at her impishly. "You suggest a fitting punishment then." could keep the hold that she had somehow gained over this immature superman, horrible things might be averted. Her thoughts raced in circles. "Martians can play tricks with time?" she asked at last. "Oh, yes. Time is like this mural. Let me show you: Aim your light at the left-hand corner of the picture. See the sun and its planets forming out of cosmic dust? Now move the beam toward the right. Slowly... Slowly! Notice how Martian oceans form and living things crawl out of them. "Now continue. There you see the winged Martians with their cities that long have crumbled to dust. Next, water grows scarce and canals are built. Here all but a few of us have lost our wings. "Here we colonize Earth... to our eternal regret. Finally, you see us abandon Mars rather than risk another test of strength with you pushing troglodytes." "I-I don't understand," she whispered, strangely moved. "That searchlight beam represents the living present. Where it shines, life pulses briefly on a vast mural that is painted across time, from its beginning to its end. Martians manipulate the light of the present as we please, living when we please, so long as we please." "How dreadful... Wonderful, I mean." She gazed at him worshipfully. "And you can do this for humans too?" "For short periods, yes. But stop fluttering your lovely eyelashes at me. Punished you are going to be. If you can suggest nothing better than my plan. I'll go back to it and take the consequences. Otherwise I'll be tbe laughing stock of my friends." "And you couldn't stand that, could you, poor boy?" She patted his hand before he snatched it away. "How is this, then, for an alternative? Tonight, when I couldn't sleep, I got to thinking that there could be no more fitting punishment for tourists than to be forced to live, for years and years, in a plush hotel at Atlantic City, Las Vegas... or Dawningsburgh. Think how miserable they would become if they had to take the same tours over and over with the same guides; stuff themselves on the same meals; dance to the same orchestras with the same new friends. Can you hold your The Complete Guide To # Jusf published ! The most complete up-todate understandable Each individual satellite is beautifully illustrated in orbit. In simple terms. Series I explains the significance of each satellite and describes its role in the development of global systems for By use of a loose-leaf method this book can be kept current by periodic editions from Space Products as new satellites are orbited. Essential for students and teachers of science and astronautics in organizing and keeping up with our rapidly expanding satellite program. j I # East #th St., New York #, N.Y. I Enclosed is  for copies of The Complete . I Guide To Orbiting Satellites  # per copy;  I Name I I Address I I City...Zone State   Add # outside U.S. ond Canado  time spotlight still here for, say, ten years?" "Of course," Mura crowed as he swept her into his downy arms and danced her about among the robot perches. "A wonderful idea. You're a genius. Even the others may come back, now, to watch humans squirm, yawn -- and perhaps learn to respect their elders. How can I repay you?" iiT ET ME GO back to New York," she said, feeling like a traitor. "That wouldn't be fair. You're a tourist. You came here to prove to yourself that, as your Bible puts it, 'a living dog is better than a dead lion.' You must learn your lessons along with others." "I suppose you're right." She felt cleaner now, even though the prospect of a decade at Dawningsburgh, with The Quest unfinished, appalled her. To be forty-one and still single when she returned to Earth! Two tears trickled down her freckled nose. "That's better," the Pitaret sang happily. "You're already beginning to understand the meaning of our ancient ceremonial. Give me ten years and I'll make a real Martian of you!" Outside, the lean wind echoed his glee as it tossed a hatful of Good Humor sticks and sandcoated lollipops against the catheWe plumb again the Origins of Almost Everything -- and meet the great philosopher who first learned Nothing! omaiNS OF O N # day, # U.E., the Radiation Disposal Corporation spacetug Oebouk, Sirius I registry, was in deep space jettisoning radioactive wastes. It was engaging in the questionable practice of dumping the stuff in packets at meaningful intervals. Captain Goshall Rovwymu -- as he tells us in his unblushing memoirs My Nine Lives -- having accepted an under-the-table proposition. These faint chalkings on the blackboard of nothingness were to spell out in dots of computer morse a subliminal message urging prospects to buy Shuvh Transmutating Metal Polish. "I wouldn't give a plugged dysaub for a shipload of Shuvh," the captain tells us. But this was his first dealing with the mighty Ad Astra Agency, which handled the Shuvh account, and he meant to turn in a neat job. The craft was parsecs out in reaches where the pull of stars would not blur the message. But when Goshall took off his captain cap and put on his astrogator cap he spotted at once that the line of message was bellying out of true. He traced the influence to an asteroid where no asteroid should be. He put on his captain cap and ordered the launch out to investigate. The launch sniffed around and determined that under the encrusting and pitting the object was no asteroid but a vast ship. The launch matched the spin of the ship, clanged airlock to airlock, and knocked. The tapping evoked no response. Sensing Captain Goshall on remote breathing down its eye, the launch forced the spaceship's lock. It poked its scanner down a dusty passage. It found no sign of sentient life, but found in its sampling of hydroponics-fed air no danger to life. Capt. Goshall thought salvage and his mind teemed with astronomical figures. He recalled the launch, put on his boarding party cap, strapped on his freezer and sent himself to the derelict. The air seemed moldy but he let his chest inflate. Now and again he had to back through a creeping of hydroponics jungle but deck after deck was jammed full of perfectly sound equipment. Out-of-date, of course, but there were a myriad primitive planets to unload it on. After a particularly ferocious snarl of jungle he was glad to come on a smile of clearing. A park, he guessed, for beside a bench-rimmed, dust-covered pool stood what he saw as a surrealistic statue. He laughed. "I wonder what you stand for," he said, and switched on his nonwipe timestream tape to record his claim to the ship. He froze. He thought he had heard a voice saying, "I stand for the purpose of greeting you. That and nothing more." The statue was moving squeakily. Not a statue but a robot. ally to his freezer. If he had heard aright the robot knew lingua galactica. "Hello, there. I am -- " "Yes. I see you, therefore you are." Capt. Goshall didn't like this talk from robots. "Where's your master?" "Determinism is all about us." Goshall glanced uneasily around. He looked more closely at the robot. There was no expression to read but the left eye seemed remarkably real. With a chill of insight Capt. Goshall had a vision of a knight in armor. "You mean there's someone inside you? I mean, you're inside that?" The robot tapped itself, had a spell of coughing, then said, "In a material sense, this is me. I'm Lutil. I came into being -- fleshand-blood being -- on Atik I. I'm one of the last surviving memCapt. Goshall introduced himself, then said, "What happened to the others?" "Time. Come, I'll show you." Lutil started down a spongy path. Capt. Goshall followed down a companionway. Lutil indicated cubicles. "Observe. Here, in what we liked to term our 'logic-tight compartments,' we lived and contemplated, separately concentrating." He stopped suddenly; Capt. Goshall stopped and looked around, hand on freezer. "Or should I say 'concentrating separately?' " He got under way again. "We're coming to the premises for female aides." Capt. Goshall reached for his boarding party cap, to give it an elbow-brushing, and discovered that in his initial excitement, back aboard the Oebouk, he had forgotten to remove his astrogator and captain caps. But they were moving past tenantless rooms. Another companionway brought them to a compartment containing a bulkhead-to-bulkhead computer. "Observe." They stood watching its crystals pulse feebly. "Very nice," Capt. Goshall said at last, "but where are the other survivors?" Lutil patted the computer. "This is the other survivor." The crystals brightened. "Hello, Lutil. Say, I've hit on four identical bars in Verdi's Otello, a Dwenolhep commercial, and Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.' Lutil patted the computer. "Fine, fine." He touched Capt. Goshall's arm. When they were out of photoelectricshot Lutil said, "Poor thing. We tried musical therapy. Now all it does is that sort of business." "Oh?" "Yes, we asked too much of it. But it was no more than we asked of ourselves. To you it may seem vanity, but our aim was nothing less than to grasp the universe whole. Is this my compartment?" They had returned to the cubicles and Lutil ushered Goshall into one and gestured him to a chair. "It makes no difference now. I was saying, we philosophers of the various worlds agreed on one thing -- that different points of view led to different images of the structure of reality. We sought a unifying vision, hoping to obtain a functional view of reality. To accomplish collectively what we could not attain individually in the turbulence of life, we planned a Symposium on Metagalactic Philosophy. With backing from foundations we bought and equipped this spaceship and hired maintenance personnel. This was to be our ivory tower, a place where, away from violence and corruption, we could placidly deliberate. Beginning circa # hopped, gathering savants. I myself came aboard in #." Lutil was pacing. Capt. Goshall saw that over the centuries Lutil had paced grooves of thought in the flooring. The span of years -- # to # -- suddenly struck him. "How do you account for your senior-citizenship?" "By the fact that it is not quite my own." "You've lost me." "I see you, albeit blurredly, so I take that to be an idiom expressing perplexity." "Yeah." "Well, then, the others of the contingent knew me to be the last surviving adherent of the Observationist school. I maintained nothing can exist unless there's an observer to observe it. In spite of their disbelief, everyone was most kind to me. They did their utmost to prolong my existence, giving me first draw prosthetics bank. As you see, I'm largely patchwork. I believe it was for my sake -- to strengthen my belief -- rather than as a self-preservative measure on their part that they did this. If so, it's sufficient reason to feel grateful that they haven't lived to learn I've grown zealproof, doctrine-proof, and ultimately almost -- " he curtailed a cynical laugh -- "proof-proof. Inwardly, captain, I am smiling bitterly." "You were saying -- " yes. About the ingathering. It was not without misadventure. I am in mind of Ojuras, the renowned promulgator of Upspiraling Awareness. to pick up Ojuras. The registrar at first thought Ojuras was a noshow. She got no response when she called Ojuras's home. On an off-chance, she searched the ship itself. In the hold, atop a heap of Ojuras's effects, a portly svatii sat -- amid the clangor and turmoil of servicing, loading and refueling -- with eyes closed as in deep meditation. Smiling, the registrar trundled him bodily to the assigned cubicle. "Falirj wakened from a dream of repast. Through the port he saw stars. He sprang to his feet. The door opened and a serving tray wheeled itself in and arranged itself temptingly. A lesser being, without stopping to think, might have opened his mouth to shout his identity; it should not be too late to shoot him home. Falirj opened his mouth to devour the meal. The registrar followed, hastily informed Falirj she wasn't the dessert, and asked if he were comfortable. Falirj was already nodding off. Pleased, the registrar tiptoed out and left the savant to his meditating. "When next Falirj wakened a welcoming delegation was waiting on him. Falirj looked about at a wisp of beards -- a field day for Occam's razor -- and his heart failed him. He started to tell them he was not the person they thought him. Their head silenced him. Sat. Rang. A banquet table entered. Falirj found it useless -- with his mouth full -- to protest. They thought he was being modest. They presignia -- glasses to wear pushed up on the brow. Speeches. When next he wakened he found himself alone. "He shuddered to think what the effect would be on their feelings when they learned he wasn't the great Ojuras. His serving tray wheeled in. So it went. Now and again a savant had the wish to consult him on finer points of his forte. But the others looked daggers of the mind at any who would disturb the great Ojuras. And so, save for his own profound snoring, an almost tangible hush insulated Falirj. "Some thought they saw what the great Ojuras was getting at. Ultimate Awareness. His very example was a teaching that sleep, instead of being a mere means of restoring vitality to the individual, was an end. 'Dreams' were the 'real" life. Whereas most mortals compromise their 'dreams' in order to meet the 'realities,' the indomitable Ojuras compromised 'reality' in order to meet his 'dream.' His strict observance of his discipline won many philosophers over to his doctrine, though none could excel him, by the time the ship stationed itself hereabouts. "And when in fullness of time he went to his eternal dream his name carried glory, even after it came out that he was Falirj, a porter. As it did when the ship received a plaintive message from the true Ojuras, who -- concentrating on being aware, on being aware of being aware, on being aware of being aware of being aware... -- had been unaware till too late that the ship had long since arrived and departed." that he knew the ship was not a derelict, ending all hope of salvage, there seemed no percentage in remaining aboard. "Speaking of going -- " "Ah, yes, captain. Dear old Falirj was not the first to go. That was the distinguished philosopher Oxnovomri, Intensional Entropist of Alcyone IV. How often I saw this parrotoid run screaming through the ship, terrified by the ultimate annihilation of space-time. At length it collapsed of exhaustion. But Oxnovomri did not die of exhaustion. While the parrotoid was recuperating the medical officer found a throbbing cyst on its person. The medical officer prepared to excise it. The cyst grew strangely calm, as though watching with detached interest its own impending doom. After the operation, the parrotoid resumed its running about with all its old vigor. It screamed the same warning, but it was not the same. And then we learned philosopher Oxnovomri had been the cyst. It came of a parasitic line, each being essentially a wen on and using the vocal apparatus of its host parrotoid." Capt. Goshall edged away. Lutil took his arm. "Shall we stretch our legs? No, not that way, I don't want to set the poor computer off again. Oh, forgive me, you're no doubt impatient to hear what set it off in the first place. It's gestalt-oriented, you know, trained to discover similarities, analogies in masses of data, to correlate cycles, and the like. With its help we hoped to achieve our unifying vision. "Each of us philosophers reduced his theory to holes punched in tape. The computer swallowed all this. We then fed it the basis theorem and the decomposition theorem for ideals of a cumulative field with ascending chain condition. We crowded around, watching the pulsing. Chill of anticipation. We knew the computer should be able to comprehend the universe as a single coherent function. We stared. We knew it had the answer. We asked it to tell us. It moved to answer. Then we saw it was mad, quite mad. "After that, most of us resigned ourselves to the reality that in the last analysis the real is unrealizable. Oh, but not Czomec. was the father of FixedIntrospectionism. I can see him now, discoursing, turning his eye patches on his hearers. 'Finite mind can't cope with infinite universe? Can.' Czomec believed the world of perception, the internal world of the mind, was not simply a correlate of the external world but was part of the external world. He believed any sampling of the universe would give insight into the essential nature of the whole. He believed it followed that his mind would reflect not merely subjectively but also objectively the reality of nature. "And so Czomec turned his mind's eye in upon itself. At last in fear and trembling he announced he could see the universe steady and see it whole. He would map it for us. We crowded around Czomec and watched while he traced his inner vision on #D paper. Finally he let his pen drop and fell back faint. "We stared, amazed. Was that what the continuum came to in the end? It had a spongy look. One likened it to moss. A closer look showed it to be replete with folds -- seeming to give substance to ancient conjectures of time andor space warps. Then one diffidently mentioned the thought it had much the aspect of a nerve-ganglion. And at that we saw it steady and saw it whole. We saw it as the concatenation of Czomec's own brain cells." "Whether or not it was in reaction to this, many turned to the quest of unreality. Camestres of Sol II loudly demanded that we condense the ship's atmosphere to thick fog to give an air of unreality to the place. Wiser lungs prevailed. "The problem remained. 'Where does Truth lie?' The cold light of reason should have helped to determine that. But, as the computer and Czomec both had shown, the cold light of reason was as the light of a dead star. My adherence to Observationism began to weaken. If the universe began to take on a new look at about that time perhaps it was not simply because I was seeing it with a new eye. "At many a get-together over our cups we sought the solution, the animating principle, with such good fellowship and such careful and precise talk that we often thought we had found the answer. It would be later, when we listened soberly to the playback of our discussion, that we would realize what we had taken for meaningful universals were drunken maunderings." before Capt. Goshall saw the start of a tear at the right eye. UiY. vm  "Now I am not sure that we were not closer to the True Spirit. But at the time I agreed with the majority that reason must prevail. Among the measures we took to minimize the possibility of irrational thinking was that of putting up a shield against cosmic rays. This because of the assumption that their bombarding touched off random thoughts and actions. This had to overcome fierce opposition from Dwal Eglan of Beid I. "Dwal nominally held to the meaningful maxim of the Ambiguist school. 'Nothing is meaningless.' None of the Ambiguists would or could give a straight answer as to its meaning. To me, it implies that any meaningless noise is potentially meaningful -- just as weeds are plants whose virtues have not yet been discovered. I'm not sure whether Dwal himself took it as stating the rationality of the absurd or, contrariwise, the absurdity of the rational. At any rate, he appeared to believe that in an infinity of universes there must be a universe without purpose. And he seemed to have concluded that from an empirical point of view this was it. Ever since I had known Dwal, which was ever since he had come aboard, he had deliberately spoken gibberish. I inferred that he aimed at all costs to avoid meaning, that he hoped thereby to come nearer apprehending this absurd bit of space-time. "At first mention of the proposal to screen out the bombarding rays Dwal went around muttering his usual deliberate nonsense with extra emphasis. 'Uv-uzl-uzl!' As the proposal gained in favor his nonsense gained in fervor. 'Za-zeq-zeq! Ijinz-inz!' You will forgive possible distortions in my rendering? As he strove never to repeat himself his was no mean feat. He must have known better than we the danger he ran of finding himself out of nonsense. But he muttered bravely, 'Tu-tyk-tyk! De-diu-diu!' And some of us wavered. The staunchest of us looked desperately for signs that Dwal was nearing the end, signs of logical rigor. But he had nonsense in reserve. 'Op-otf-otf!' It was his last trumpet-call. It was clear that if he spoke he would have to speak meaningfully. Frustration struck him speechless and his nay-saying had to manifest itself in glaring. That no doubt hastened his end. I'm sure it would've pleased him that owing to some malfunctioning of thrust the coffin-rocket headed his corpse toward an anti-matter galaxy." THE clearing. They had come full circle. Goshall with a sigh forbore to protest as Lutil seated him beside the pool. Lutil bent to pluck a butterwort, then had compunction and straightened stiffly. "Oh, vanity, vanity. With your sigh, captain, you have expressed it admirably, beyond the power of words." He gazed into the pool. "Ah, yes. By this pool the Psychosocial philosopher Gurngev of Dhalim I spent years meditating on the best way of conducting one's life. For the better part of those years he never lost sight of his objctive. He kept his thoughts moving in a virtuous circle. Then unrest beset him. Although he kept brushing the thought away it came back, nagging him that he had forgotten something vital that he should have remembered. "One ship's day, for the exercise, he made for the stock room instead of dialing his want. Pigeonholes. Reigning categorists and dogmatists. Titanic Teutonic piling up of reference materials. He was lost. Then he saw Raie, the supply clerk, moving supply toward him through the stacks. He told her he was looking for categorical imperatives. Vivaciously Raie set about helping him hunt. After a vigorous but vain while he said, 'You do know what I mean?' Raie said, 'To be honest, I don't.' And she laughed gaily. 'Let's be honest, after all, shall weP' Shaken by he knew not what wind of emotion Gurngev grabbed a microvolume at random, smiled his thanks, and returned here. "He sat down to meditate. His thoughts strayed and he brought them back to the fold with difficulty. Abstractedly he smoothed his elliptical mustache. He found himself gazing into the pool. He saw with a shock how gray his hair had grown. That evening he proposed to Raie and she, loving impulsiveness, accepted. And so they affaired. "They had seven charming girls. Indeed, all offspring aboard ship were females. When it was too late to test, the theory occurred to us that screening out cosmic rays might have engendered this state of affairs. In any case, this factor and the prevalence of platonic love were the major reasons for the dying out "Of course all was not platonic love. Of course all was not harmony. Of course there were disputes. I am smiling inwardly, captain, as one such comes to mind. In this corner was the JimHis method of philosophizing was to contort his face and furrow his brow in imitation of thinking, on James's principle that emotion follows bodily change. In the other corner was the Biliarist, Dsulrul of Gomeisa II. Her method of philosophizing was to furrow her brow and contort her face in outward expression of inward struggle. "They clashed not on the issue of whether thought was a mode of emotional disturbance but on which came first, appearance or reality. When I attempted to bring this to their attention both turned on me and I desisted. Though their confrontations ajpeared extremely fierce the discussion between them never grew heated. Indeed, on the principle that hate is akin to love they set up housekeeping together. Tegmine IX came another couple, though whether loving or hating I never knew, Uain and his mate Yemr. Projective Stoics, each watched to see if the other was failing to bear up under pain or pleasure. But never once did either's face give ansrthing away. At the banquet celebrating their #th mating anniversary each extolled the other in measured terms, for nothing had moved either -- not fear, rage, jealousy, lust, revenge, love, hatred. "It was a moving occasion but neither showed signs of emotion -- till, proud of having stifled her feelings for so long, Yemr involuntarily gave a groan of pleasure. She clapped her hands to her mouth and her face teetered on the fulcrum of nose, disclosing that she wore a mask. In putting his hands protectively over his face Uaim unmasked himself. Having lost face, neither could bear to meet the other again. "Now I am frowning sadly, captain, for I call to mind another contretemps which had truly serious consequences. A shocking event, terrible at the time and disturbing even to recall -- " "If you'd rather not -- " "It involved on the one hand Fwyslanwushstadalq of Pollux I. Owing to the pervasive luminosity of his home planet all substance there was without shadow. This gave rise to a sense of unsubstantiality. Fwyslanwushstadalq's Interstitch philosophy epitomized this world-view, I can sum up his philosophy by saying that he held all nets are as much complexes of nots as of knots. His doctrine called for at once countering a positive statement with its negative. "And on the other hand it involved Radu of Nodus Secundus IX. At first meeting and for some time thereafter, old Fwyslanwushstadalq thought Radu was of a mind with him. The excessive libration of Radu's home planet induced a permanent wobbling in the inhabitants -- not noticeable till they left the planet. When Radu came aboard, his way of shaking no and saying yes, and vice versa, at once warmed Fwyslanwushstadalq to him. "But this wobbling couldn't have been more misleading. Radu couldn't stand ambiguity; he was partial to the all-inclusive. Fwyslanwushstadalq would say, 'The obsolete absolute presupposes a fixed indeterminacy' -- or something to that effect -- and that would cause Radu to catch him up, saying, 'But now you're contradicting yourself.' And Fwyslanwushstadalq, thinking Radu was nodding approvingly, would say, 'I thank you.' And if Radu had not been wobbling he would have been trembling with fury. "But once the venerable Fwyslanwushstadalq learned that every nod was part of an all-inclusive repudiating the fury was all his. The sage mustered his strength, took up a bust of Plato and, wielding it as a mace, came at Radu. Radu's wobbling frustrated Fwyslanwushstadalq, who sought to pepper Radu with blows but landed not one. Further hampering Fwyslanwushstasignia slipped down his brow and covered his eyes. assault flailed on, but Radu was safe so long as he made no move. But when, through failure of nerve or through seeking to get in a gingerly lick of his own, he made a move, the backswing of a blow Fwyslanwushstadalq had aimed at his own shadow clove Radu's skull. It quickly proved the end for both. As Fwyslanwushstadalq bent mourning over his dead foe, he too received a fatal blow. Radu had lashed out in tricky rigor mortis." Lutil tenoned Capt. Goshall with an eye. "There's an important issue here. You're not to confuse Fwyslanwushstadalq's doctrine with the #-ism of Zvypalz, the pre-eminent Vectoring his disciples would distort his teachings, taught the opposite of what he actually believed and wanted." "No. I mean yes." "Looking back, captain, I feel much as Spage must have felt. He was the supreme exponent of Retrogradism, you know. As he would say, 'A fly in amber can't.' That was his way of declaring that to comprehend the present, which in his view wasa synthesis of past and future, it was necessary to wait till it was past. "Retrogradism itself was an outgrowth of Quotidianism. As an antidote to giving way to a sense of crisis and foreboding the Quotidianists read the paper daily -- but it was the paper of that day of a preceding year, all the crises of the year before having resolved themselves one way or the other. "Spage came aboard with microfiles of Dhalim I newspapers spanning the past ten years and with a mind blank to the happenings of those years. He began his studies. He rigidly refrained from peeking ahead. To back his won'tpower the tamperproof viewer would not advance faster than the regulation issue per day. So it went. Then tragedy threatened. You no doubt recall the disaster that befell Spage's home planet?"  "Uh -- " "So naturally no new issues would be forthcoming. We shrank from thought of telling Spage and equally from thought of letting him learn abruptly. Meanwhile the microfiles were running out, nearing the issue of the day Spage supplement to bring him up to antedate did not and would not arrive. " what to do, the viewer, with its built-in dread of idleness, took it on itself to splice the end of the last issue to the beginning of the first. Those of us in the know held our breath, hoping Spage wouldn't jump on encountering the abrupt transition. He did jump -- but for joy. The return of the good old days confirmed his second-guessing that history ran in cycles. "Oh, to think we dreamed of becoming the Platonic essence of Philosophy, the eternal Philosophy in heaven! Vanity." Lutil squeaked to an edge of the clearing and several steps through underbrush. He swept growth aside to uncover a port. He stared out, gazing thoughtfully at space-time and at his own image faintly imposed on it. Capt. Goshall started. Not only no salvage here, but he now saw he had wastefully left the precious nonwipe timestream tape -- on which he had meant to stake his claim to the derelict -- running all along. He would have hurled his caps down and jumped on them, his way of taking it philosophically, if Lutil's thoughtful stance had not shamed him. Later Capt. Goshall was to splice this interview in his memoirs and so give our present-day philosophers to think. But at the moment his only thought was to make up for lost space-time. "Nice talking to you, but I've got to go." He made as if to return to the Oebouk. Lutil coughed. "Er -- " He rubbed a discolored metallic jaw awkwardly. Capt. Goshall stopped. "Yes?" "I wonder if you know where I can get some Shuvh." was unusual that he should feel depressed in the morning. He tried to account for it, and could not. He was a healthy man, so he ate a healthy breakfast. He was not too depressed for that. And he listened unconsciously to the dark girl with the musical voice. Often she ate at Cahill's in the mornings with her girl friend. Grape juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, apple juice... why did people look at him suspiciously just because he took four or five sorts of juice for breakfast? "Agnes, it was ghastly. I was built like a sack. A sackful of It was the awfullest dream in the world, no doubt about it. In fact, it seemed to be the only dream there was! skunk cabbage, I swear. And I was a green-brown color and had hair like a latrine mop. Agnes, I was sick with rnisery. It just isn't possible for anybody to feel so low. I can't shake it at all. And the whole world was like the underside of a log. It wasn't that, though. It wasn't just one bunch of things. It was everything. It was a world where things just weren't worth living. I can't come out of it..." "Teresa, it was only a dream." Sausage, only four little links for an order. Did people think he was a glutton because he had four orders of sausage? It didn't seem like very much. "My mother was a monster. She was a wart-hoggish animal. And yet she was still recognizable. How could my mother look like a wart-hog and still look like my mother? Mama's pretty!" "Teresa, it was only a dream. Forget it." The stares a man must suffer just to get a dozen pancakes on his plate! What was the matter with people who called four pancakes a tall stack? And what was odd about ordering a quarter of a pound of butter? It was better than having twenty of those little pats each on its coaster. "Agnes, we all of us had eyes that bugged out. And we stank! We were bloated, and all the time it rained a dirty green rain that smelled like a four letter word. Good grief, girl! We had hair all over us where we weren't warts. And we talked like cracked crows. We had crawlers. I itch just from thinking about it. And the dirty parts of the dream I won't even tell you. I've never felt so blue in my life. I just don't know how I'll make the day through." "Teresa, doll, how could a dream upset you so much?" ordering three eggs sunnyside up, and three over easy, and three poached ever so soft, and six of them scrambled. What law says a man should have all of his eggs fixed alike? Nor is there anything wrong with ordering five cups of coffee. That way the girl doesn't have to keep running over with refills. Bascomb Swicegood liked to have bacon and waffles after the egg interlude and the earlier courses. But he was nearly at the end of his breakfast when he jump)ed up. "What did she say?" He was surprised at the violence of his own voice. "What did who say, Mr. Swicegood?" "The girl that was just here, that just left with the other girl." "That was Teresa, and the other girl was Agnes. Or else that was Agnes and the other girl was Teresa. It depends on which girl you mean. I don't know what either of them said." Bascomb ran out into the street. "Girl, the girl who said it rained dirty green all the time, what's your name?" "My name is Teresa. You've met me four times. Every morning you look like you never saw me before." "I'm Agnes," said Agnes. "What did you mean it rained dirty green all the time? Tell me all about it." "I will not, Mr. Swicegood. I was just telling a dream I had to Agnes. It isn't any of your business." "Well, I have to hear all of it. Tell me everything you dreamed." "I will not. It was a dirty dream. It isn't any of your business. If you weren't a friend of my Uncle Ed Kelly, I'd call a policeman for your bothering me." "Did you have things like live rats in your stomach to digest for you? Did they -- " "Oh! How did you know? Get away from me. I will call a policeman. Mr. McCarty, this man is annoying me." "The devil he is. Miss Ananias. Old Bascomb just doesn't have it in him any more. There's no more harm in him than a lamp post." "Did the lamp posts have hair on them, Miss Teresa? Did they pant and swell and smell green -- " "Oh! You couldn't know! You awful man!" "I'm Agnes," said Agnes; but Teresa dragged Agnes away with her. "What is the lamp-post jag, Bascomb?" asked Officer Mossback McCarty. "Ah -- I know what it is like to be in hell, Mossback. I dreamed of it last night." "And well you should, a man who neglects his Easter duty year after year. But the lamp-post jag? If it concerns anything on my beat, I have to know about it." "It seems that I had the same depressing dream as the young lady, identical in every detail." IOT knowing what dreams are " (and we do not know) we should not find it strange that two people might have the same dream. There may not be enough of them to go around, and most dreams are forgotten in the morning. Bascomb Swicegood had forgotten his dismal dream. He could not account for his state of depression until he heard Teresa Ananias telling pieces of her own dream to Agnes Schoenapfel. Even then it came back to him slowly at first, but afterwards with a rush. The oddity wasn't that two people should have the same dream, but that they should discover the coincidence, what with the thousands of people running around and most of the dreams forgotten. Yet, if it were a coincidence, it was a multiplex one. On the night when it was first made manifest it must have been dreamed by quite a number of people in one medium-large city. There was a small piece in an afternoon paper. One doctor had five different worried patients who had had dreams of rats in their stomachs, and hair growing on the insides of their mouths. This was the first publication of the shared-dream phenomenon. The squib did not mention the foul-green-rain background, but later investigation uncovered that this and other details were common to the dreams. But it was a reporter named Willy Wagoner who really put the town on the map. Until he did the job, the incidents and notices had been isolated. Doctor Herome Judas had been putting together some notes on the Green-Rain Syndrome. Doctor Florenz Appian had been working up his evidence on the Surex Ventriculus Trauma, and Professor Gideon Greathouse had come to some learned conclusions on the inner meaning of warts. But it was Willy Wagoner who went to the people for it, and then gave his conclusions back to the people. Willy said that he had interviewed a thousand people at random. (He hadn't really; he had talked to about twenty. It takes longer than you might think to interview a thousand people.) He reported that slightly more than sixty-seven per cent had had a dream of the same repulsive world. He reported that more than forty-four per cent had had the dream more than once, thirtytwo per cent more than twice, twenty-seven per cent more than three times. Many had had it every damned night. And many refused frostily to answer questions on the subject at all. This was ten days after Bascomb Swicegood had heard Teresa Ananias tell her dream to Agnes. Willy published the opinions of the three learned gentlemen above, and the theories and comments of many more. He also appended a hatful of answers he had received that were sheer levity. But the phenomenon was not local. Wagoner's article was the first comprehensive (or at least wordy) treatment of it, but only by hours. Similar things were in other papers that very afternoon, and the next day. It was more than a fad. Those who called it a fad fell silent after they themselves experienced the dream. The suicide index arose around the country and the world. The thing was now international. The cacaphonous ditty Green Rain was on all the jukes, as was The Wart-Hog Song. People began to loathe themselves and each other. Women feared that they would give birth to monsters. There were new perversions committed in the name of the thing, and several orgiastic societies were formed with the stomach rat as a symbol. All entertainment was forgotten, and this was the only topic. Nervous disorders took a fearful rise as people tried to stay awake to avoid the abomination, and as they slept in spite of themselves and suffered the degradation. TT is no joke to experience the same loathsome dream all night every night. It had actually come to that. All the people were dreaming it all night every night. It had passed from being a joke to being a universal menace. Even rushed their cures to the market were not happy. They also suffered whenever they slept, and they knew" that their cures were not cures. There were large amounts posted for anyone who could cure the populace of the wart-hogpeople dreams. There was presidential edict and dictator decree, and military teams attacked the thing as a military problem, but they were not able to subdue it. Then one night a nervous lady heard a voice in her noisome dream. It was one of the repulsive cracked wart-hog voices. "You are not dreaming" said the voice. "This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming. That barefaced world is not a world at all. It is only a dream. This is the real world." The lady awoke howling. And she had not howled before, for she was a demure lady. Nor was she the only one who awoke howling. There were hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The voice spoke to all and engendered a doubt. Which was the real world? Almost equal time was now spent in each, for the people had come to need more sleep and most of them had arrived at spending a full twelve hours or more in the nightmarish world. "It could be" was the title of a headlined article on the subject by the same Progressor Greathouse mentioned above. It could be, he said, that the world on which the green rain fell incessantly was the real world. It could be that the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream. It could be that rats in the stomach were normal, and other methods of digestion were chimerical. And then a very great man went on the air in worldwide broadcast with a speech that was a ringing call for collective sanity. It was the hour of decision, he said. The decision would be made. Things were at an exact balance, and the balance would be tipped. "But we can decide. One way or the other, we will decide. I implore you all in the name of sanity that you decide right. One world or the other will be the world of tomorrow. One of them is real and one of them is a dream. Both are with us now, and the favor can go to either. But listen to me here: whichever one wins, the other will have always been a dream, a momentary madness soon forgotten. I urge you to the sanity which in a measure I have lost myself. Yet in our darkened dilemma I feel that we yet have a choice. Choose! " And perhaps that was the turning point. The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks. morning type, felt excellent this morning. He breakfasted at Cahill's, and he ordered heavily as always. And he listened with half an ear to the conversation of two girls at the table next to his. "But I should know you," he said. "Of course. I'm Teresa." "I'm Agnes," said Agnes. "Mr. Swicegood, how could you forget? It was when the dreams first came, and you overheard me telling mine to Agnes. Then you ran after us in the street because you had had the same dream, and I wanted to have you arrested. Weren't they horrible dreams? And have they ever found out what caused them?" "They were horrible, and they have not found out. They ascribe it to group mania, which is meaningless. And now there are those who say that the dreams never came at all, and soon they will be nearly forgotten. But the horror of them! The loneliness!" "Yes, we hadn't even pediculi to curry our body hair. We almost hadn't any body hair." Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. "Like a sackful of skunk cabbage," Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase. Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and bumps. "Like a latrine mop!" sighed Bascomb with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa's voice was music in the early morning. All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near-absence of entrancing odor. Bascomb attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly. They were Earth's castoffs, doomed to live and die on a planet of Vega -- spreading humanity, even at the cost of their own! . tC. THE day was warm, bright, sky blue, thermometer in the high sixties; a completely perfect October day in New York, needing no modification by the Weather Control Bureau. At the Weather Station in Scarsdale, glum-faced weather-adjustment men were piling into their planes and taking off for Wisconsin, where a cold front was barreling in from Canada, and where their expert services would be needed. Twenty thousand miles above Fond du Lac, the orbiting Weather Control Satellite beamed messages down. In Australia, technicians were completing the countdown on a starship about to blast off for a distant world with a cargo of one hundred reluctant colonists. In Chicago, where the morning mail had just arrived, a wealthy playboy stared at a blue slip of paper with wide-eyed horror. In London, where the mail had arrived several hours before, a shopgirl's face was pale with fear; she, too, had received her notice from the Colonization Bureau. Around the world, it was an ordinary day, the ninth of October, # A.D. Nothing unusual was happening. Nothing but the usual round of birth, death...and, occasionally. Selection. And in New York, on that perfeet October day, District Chairman David Mulholland of the Colonization Bureau reached his office at # sharp, ready if not precisely eager to perform his routine functions. Before he left his office at # hours, he knew, he would have authorized the uprooting of one hundred lives. He tried not to think of it that way. He focused his mind on the slogan emblazoned on blue-and-yellow bunting wherever you looked, the slogan of the Colonization Bureau Do. Your Share for Mankind's Destiny. But the trouble was, as Mulholland could never forget, that mankind's destiny was of only trifling interest to the vast mass of men. He entered his office, drawing warm smiles from the clerks and typists and secretaries as he passed their cubicles. In the office, everyone treated Chairman Mulholland with exaggerated affection. Most of the Bureau employees were sufficiently naive to believe that Chairman Mulholland, if he felt so inclined, could arrange their exemption from the world-wide lottery.-No one who met the qualifications was exempt. If you were between the ages of nineteen and forty, had a Health Rating of Plus Five or better, could pass a Feldman fertility test, and were not disqualified by one of the various social regulations, you went when you were called, in the name of Mankind's Destiny. There was no way to wriggle off the hook once you were caught -- unless, of course, you could prove that you were disqualified by some technicality that the Computer had overlooked. The remaining child in a family which had lost four or more children to Selection was exempt. Mothers of children under two years of age were exempt. Even mothers of children under ten years of age were exempt, if their husbands had been Selected and if they had not remarried. A man whose wife was pregnant was entitled to a single ten-month delay in departure. There were half a dozen more such technicalities. But, whatever the situation, sixty ships, six thousand people, left Earth every day in the week. Someone had to be aboard those ships. Somewhat more than two ward each year. lion. The chance that the dark finger would fall upon your shoulder was inconceivably remote. Even with the figure winnowed down to the mere three percentage taken each year was slight: one out of every # persons. Do Your Share for Mankind's Destiny, said the blue-and-yellow sign that hung behind Chairman Mulholland's desk. He looked at it unseeingly and sat down. Papers had already begun to accumulate. Another day was under way. His so-efficient secretary had already adjusted his calendar, dusted his desk, tidied his papers. Mulholland was not fooled. Miss Thorne was trying to make herself indispensable to the Chairman, as a hedge against the always-to-be-dreaded day when the Computer's beam lingered over her number. In moments of cruelty he thought idly of telling her that no mortal, not even a District Chairman, had enough pull with fate to assure an exemption. It was entirely in the hands of Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Clotho put your number in the Computer. Lachesis riffled the cards. Atropos selected, and selected inflexibly. The Fates could not be swayed. Mulholland lifted the top sheet from the stack on his desk. It was the daily Requisition Form. Five of the sixty starships that left Earth each day were manned by Americans, and one of the five American ships each day was stocked with Selectees drawn by Mulholland's office. He read the Requisition Form for the next assignment with care. # October #, notices to be sent. #, from Bangor Star field. Required: fifty couples selected by Board One. The form differed only in detail from hundreds of forms that Mulholland had found on his desk at the beginnings of hundreds of days past. He tried not to let himself think of days past. He had been Chairman for three years, now. It was of the essence that the high-ranking members of a Selection Board should not themselves be subject to Selection, and Mulholland had received his present job a few weeks after his reaching the age of forty had removed his name from the rolls of eligibility.""According to the pollsters, his party was due to succumb to a Conservative uprising in the elections next month. Mulholland faced his party's debacle with remarkably little apprehension. Come January, he thought. President Dawson would be back in St. Louis practicing law, and a few thousand loyal Liberal party hacks throughout the country would lose their jobs, being replaced by a few thousand loyal Conservative party hacks. Which meant, Mulholland thought, that come January someone from the other side of the fence could sit in this chair handing out Selection warrants, while David Mulholland could slip back into the obscurity of academic life and give his conscience a wellneeded rest. It was a mere seventy days to the end of President Dawson's term. Mulholland shut his eyes tiredly. Barring a political upset at the polls, he would only have to pass sentence on seven thousand more human beings. He buzzed for his secretary. She came at a gallop: a bony, horse-faced woman of thirty who ran the office with formidable energy and who never tired of quoting the Bureau slogan to visitors. She probably believed the gospel of Mankind's Destiny implicitly, Mulholland thought. Which didn't give her much comfort when she pondered the ten years that lay between her and freedom from Selection. "Good morning, Mr. Mulholland." "Morning, Jessie. Type out an Authorization." "Certainly, Mr. Mulholland." Her agile fingers clattered over the machine. In a moment or two she placed the document on his desk. It was strict formality for him to request and for her to type the paper; mechanically, Mulholland scanned it. This had to go to the Computer, and any typing error would result in loud and unpleasant repercussions. As Chairman of the District One Board of Selection of the Colonization Bureau, I hereby authorize the selection of one hundred ten names from the roll of those eligible, on this ninth day of October, #I I #, in order to fulfil a departure quota of one hundred blasting # October #. David Mulholland, Chairman District Board One. Mulholland nodded; it was in order. He signed it in the space indicated, then provided crosscheck by pressing his thumb down against the photosensitive spot in the lower right-hand corner. The Authorization was complete. He handed the form to Jessie Thorne, who deftly rolled it and stuffed it into a pneumatic tube. Mulholland took the tube from her, affixed his personal seal, and popped it in the open pneumotube vent under his desk. The little morning ritual was over. He buzzed Miss Thorne again. "I've got the cards, Jessie. Do we have any Volunteers today?" "One." She gave him the card. Noonan, Cyril F. Age thirty, unmarried. Mulholland read through the rest of the data, nodded, tossed Noonan's card in a basket on the right side of his desk, and made a sharp downstroke on a blank tally sheet in front of him. Now there were only forty-nine men to pick for the voyage of the Gegenschein. Volunteers were rare, but they did turn up from time to time. the men first. He picked out his forty-nine without any trouble, and stacked the six leftover cards in his reserve basket. Those six names would be held aside until it was determined whether or not the other fortynine were still eligible. If Mulholland could fill his quota without recourse to the reserve basket, the six men would automatically become first on the next day's Selection list. Mulholland had no one left over from the day before, as it happened; there had tober # quota, and he had used up his reserves completely yesterday. With the men's half at least tentatively finished, he skimmed through the fifty female names. Here, occasionally, the computer tripped up. Mulholland winnowed one name out immediately; Mrs. Mary Jensen, #, mother of four children ages one to nine. She had as much business being in the list of eligibles as the President's grandmother. Muholland initialed her card and buzzed for Miss Thorne again. "Have her name pulled from the list," he ordered crisply. "She's got a child born in #." Fate had been kind to Mrs. Jensen. Mulholland prepared the rest of the list. Fifty men, fifty women, with a reserve list of six men and four women. In the afternoon, the notices would go out. They would be received tomorrow morning, and by nightfall, he knew, the useless appeals would come flooding in. None of the appeals ever reached Mulholland's office. They were screened off by underlings, who were trained in the art of giving gentle Nos. Mulholland himself had held such a job until getting his promotion to the top. He looked down the list he had compiled. A college student from Cincinnati, an office worker in San Francisco, a lawyer from Los Angeles. A girl who gave her occupation as "entertainer," from New York. It was a cross-section'. Mulholland privately felt that this was a flaw in the Selection system, because very often a group was sent out without a medical man, without any kind of religious counsellor, without any expert engineer or scientist. But there was no helping it. For one thing, it would be grossly unfair to see to it that the Computer picked one doctor for each hundred colonists. Generally it worked out that way, but not always. It was a sink-or-swim proposistars waited in the infinite heavens. The stellar colonization was a far-sighted enterprise, and, like most far-sighted enterprises, was cruel in the short run. But, centuries hence, a far-flung galaxy would shine with the worlds of man. It was the only way. Even though the ships existed to take man to the stars, only a handful of people would consider uprooting themselves to go out into the dark. If the colonization of the stars had been left on a volunteer basis, barely a dozen worlds would be settled now, instead of the thousands that already bore man's imprint. They were small colonies, to be sure; but they grew. Only a handful out of the thousands had failed to take root. And, thought Mulholland, a week from tomorrow the starship Gegenschein would take ninetynine conscripts and a lone Volunteer to the stars. He looked through his cards. Herrick, Carol. Dawes, Michael. Haas, Philip. Matthews, David. And eight dozen others. Tonight they laughed, played, sang, made love. Tomorrow they would no longer belong to Earth. The inflexible sword of Colonization would cut them loose. Mulholland shrugged. He was making his old mistake, thinking of the conscripts as people instead of as names on green cards. That way lay crackup. He had to remember that he was only doing a job, that if he didn't take care of it someone else would. And it was for Mankind's Destiny. But he was weary of wielding the sword. It was less than a month till Election Day, and he prayed devoutly that his party would be turned out of office. It was no way for a loyal party hack to be thinking, but Mulholland didn't care. It would be an admission of weakness to resign. An electoral defeat would get him out of the job much more gracefully. II Ohio during the night. For once, it had been natural rain. The Weather Control people engineered the weather with great care during the summer, when thirsty fields cried out for rain, and in the winter, when unchecked snow might throttle civilization. But in October the fields lay empty. There was no need for no artificial rain. The rain that fell in the early hours of morning over Central Ohio was God's rain, not man's, sent by the cold front sweeping southward out of Canada. In his furnished room just off #th Avenue, not very far from the University, Mike Dawes pulled the covers up over his head, retreating symbolically to the womb in hope of finding warmth and security. But it was no good. He was half awake, awake enough to realize he was awake, but still too drowsy to want to get out of bed. He could hear the pattering of the rain. It was a dark morning. The lumo-dial of his clock read # hours. He knew it was time to get out of bed. This was Wednesday, his busiest day of the academic week. At # there was old Shepperd's Zoology lecture, and German at # hours. And I forgot to review those verbs, Mike Dawes thought in irritation. If Klaus calls on me, I'm sunk. He thought about getting out of bed for a few minutes; finally, he rationed himself to sixty more seconds of warmth. Counting off a-thousand-one, a-thousand-two, he sprang out of bed faithfully on the count of a-thousand-sixty, and shivered in the bleak morning coldness. Routine took hold of him. He stripped off his pajamas and tossed them onto the bed; he groped for a towel and his robe, found them, and made his way down the hall to the shower. He spent three minutes under the cold spray. When he returned to his room, the clock said # hours. Dawes smiled. He was right on schedule. If only he hadn't forgotten about those verbs! But it was too late to fret about that. He'd have to hope for the best. It looked as though this semester was going to be one long dreary grind, he thought as he pulled clothes from the rickety old dresser and started to climb into them. He was twenty; this was his third year at Ohio State. If all went well, he would graduate the following year and move on to medical school for four years. If all went well. At #I hours he was ready to leave: teeth brushed, hair combed, shirt buttoned, shoelaces tied. The books he would need for his morning classes were waiting on the edge of the dresser. He would have time for some orange juice, toast, and coffee at the Student's Union. The probability of a surprise Zoo quiz was too great to allow for skipping breakfast; he needed all the energy he could muster. He was skinny, in the first place, stretching # pounds out for six feet and an inch. In in the second place, he liked to have breakfast. Dawes started downstairs. It was still raining slightly, but not hard enough to be troublesome. Anyway, it was only a four-block walk from the rooming house where he lived to the Union. First, though, came one morning ritual. He stopped downstairs in the hallway, where the mailboxes were. His hand quivered a little as he pressed his thumb against the opener-plate. The scanner recorded his print and obediently opened the mailbox. He took out the letter. than usual, with an official penalty-for-private-use imprint where the stamp was supposed to be. Dawes' eyes travelled over the return address almost casually. Colonization Bureau, District Board Number One, New Y ork. His stomach felt queasy as he ripped the envelope hastily open. It was addressed to him, all right. The letter, typed neatly in dark red on the standard blue paper, came quickly to the point. You have been selected to be a member of the colonizing expedition departing on # October from Bangor, Maine, aboard the must report at once to your nearest Colonization Bureau registry center. You are now subject to the provisions of the Interstellar Colonization Act of #, and any violation of these provisions wilt meet with severe punishment. By order of D. L. Mulholland, District Chairman. Mike Dawes read the contents of the slip of blue paper four times, one after another, and with each reading the numbness grew in him. He was finding it hard to believe that he had really been called. After all, the chance was one in thousands, he thought. Why, in all his life he had only known two or three people to be called. There had been Mr. Cutley, who ran the grocery store, and Teddy Nathan, who lived on the next block. And Judy Wellington also, Dawes thought. And now me. "Dammit, it isn't fair!" he muttered. "What isn't?" a casual voice asked behind him. Dawes turned. He saw Lon Rybeck there -- a senior who lived on the first floor. Rybeck still wore a dressing gown; he had no early classes, but came out to look at the mail anyway. Mutely Dawes held up the blue slip. Rybeck's eyes narrowed and his tongue flicked briefly across his lips. "They picked you?" he asked hoarsely. Dawes nodded. "It just came. I have to report to the nearest registry center right away." "That's a lousy break, Dawes!" "Damn right it is! Why'd they have to grab me? I'm only twenty! I haven't even finished college! I -- " He quit, realizing that he sounded foolish. Rybeck was trying to look sympathetic, but behind the expression of concern was a deeper amusement -- and relief. Probability dictated that the invisible hand would not reach into this house a second time; Dawes' Selection meant Rybeck could breathe more freely. "It's rough," Rybeck said gently. "The morning mail comes and all your plans explode like bubbles. Where are they sending you, do you know?" Dawes shook his head. "It just says I'll be leaving next Wednesday from the Bangor starfield. Doesn't give the destination." decided that mankind's destiny was in the stars. Mike Dawes had been a gurgling baby when the decision was made that, twenty years hence, would rip him from the fabric of existence on Earth. Get out to the stars, that was the cry that swept newlyunited Earth. Settle other worlds. Spread Earthmen through the universe. It had been a noble aim. Dawes thought. Except that nobody seemed very anxious to go. Let the other guy colonize the stars. Me, I'll stay here and read about it. So there was a conscription. And now, Dawes thought, I've been caught... report at once to your nearest Colonization Bureau registry center... When they said "at once," they meant it, Dawes knew. They meant get there within the hour. And woe betide if they discovered he had done anything to himself to make himself ineligible. There had been cases of women slashing at their ovaries with knittingneedles to disqualify themselves; naturally, only fertile colonists were wanted. But the penalty for intentional self-sterilization was a lifetime at hard labor. It wasn't worth it. Twice he reached for the phone, to call his parents in Cincinnati and let them know. Twice, he drew back. They would have to be told sooner or later, he knew. But he steered away from bringing the bad news himself. Then he pictured how it would be if he remained silent and let the Bureau send them its official notice. He picked up the phone again. His father answered. Mike felt a pang of regret as he heard the voice of his father, the newsstand proprietor who had scraped for years so his favorite boy could study to be a doctor. "Yes? Who is this?" "Dad, this is Mike." "Is everything all right?" said the immediately suspicious voice. "You got our letter? You didn't run out of money so soon, did you?" "No, Dad. I -- they've -- " "Speak up, Mike. We must have a bad connection. I can hardly hear you." "I've been Selected, Dad!" indrawing of breath. Dawes heard indistinct muttering; no doubt his father had his hand over the mouthpiece and was telling his mother about it. Dawes was grateful, for the first time, that he had never been able to afford a visual attachment for the phone. Right now he did not want to see their faces. "When did you get the notice, boy?" "J-just now. I have to report to the registry center right away. I leave next Wednesday." "Next Wednesday," his father repeated musingly. Dawes heard his mother sobbing in the background. She cried out suddenly, "We won't let them take him! We won't!" "There's no helping it, Ethel," said his father quietly. "Boy, can you hear me?" "Yes, Dad." "Report where you're supposed to. Don't do anything wrong, do you hear?" "I won't. Dad." "Will we see you again?" "I -- I suppose so. At least they ought to let us say goodbye." "And there isn't any way you can get out of this? I mean, once they call you, you can't appeal?" "No, Dad. Nobody can appeal." "Oh. I see." There was another long pause. Dawes waited, not knowing what to say. He felt strangely guilty, as if he were at fault somehow for having brought this sorrow upon his parents. His father said finally, "So long, boy. Take care of yourself. And let us know, soon as you know anything about where you're going." "Sure, Dad. Tell Mom not to worry. So long." He hung up the phone. After a moment, he walked to the window. The rain had stopped; it was nearly nine, and the slackers were hustling to get to classes on time. Out there on campus, life was going on as usual. The football coach was sweating out tactics for Saturday's game, Shepperd was clearing his throat and stepping forward to deliver his Zoology lecture, Klaus was belaboring hapless freshmen over irregular German verbs. Life went on. The world revolved serenely around the sun. But, a week from now, Mike Dawes would be no longer part of this world. He felt a quiet, seething anger at the injustice of it. He hadn't asked to be part of Mankind's Destiny. He had no itch to conquer other worlds. He wanted to stay on Earth, marry some reasonably pretty Ohio girl, raise some reasonably normal Ohio children. There was nothing left for him to do now but to walk down to the registry center and hand himself in, like a wanted criminal. He locked his room, wondering if he would ever come back here to collect his few belongings, and trotted downstairs and into the street. It seemed to him that everyone on the street turned to look at him, as if they could see the words written in scarlet on The registry center was in a loft over the movie theater. Only four days ago he had taken a girl to a movie there. They had cuddled in the balcony, ignoring the film on the tridim screen, and he had groped haphazardly for tempting areas of her body and wondered about those aspects of life that were still mysteries to him. When you were Selected, he thought, you also get a wife. They send out fifty men, fifty women. If you happen to be married already but have no children, you can accompany your spouse as a Volunteer. If you're married and do have children, and your mate is Selected, you stay behind to take care of the children. Unless you and your wife go to space together, you are given one of the other colonists as a mate, and any Earthside relationship you may have had was considered terminated. So he would be married soon -- to someone. He took the stairs leading to the registry center two at a time. A few boys were waiting on a bench along the wall; they peered curiously at him as he came in. They had just turned nineteen, and were waiting to register. Dawes had registered here just a year ago. Everyone had to register at the age of nineteen; if you failed to register, you were automatically Selected. So he had come in and filled out the forms, and they had put him through the diagnosing machines and then given him the quick and efficient and somewhat embarrassing fertility test. And, a few weeks later, he had received a card telling him that he had passed. He had shrugged and put the card in his wallet, thinking that Selection was something that happened to other people. But it had happened to him. Now. He put his blue slip down on the reception desk and the clerk looked at it, nodding. Behind him, Dawes heard the waiting boys muttering. As a Selectee, he had a certain new notoriety. "Come this way, please," she said solemnly to him, giving him a you-are-doing-your-share-formankind's-destiny look. She led him into an inner office, where a tall, balding man in his late forties sat initialing some papers. "Mr. Brewer, this is Michael Dawes, who was Selected by the New York board today." Brewer rose and extended a hand. "Congratulations, Dawes. Maybe you can't see it right now, but you're about to take part in mankind's greatest adventure. Thank you. Miss Donaldson." lYflSS Donaldson left. Brewer sat down again, gesturing Dawes toward a comfortable pneumochair. "Well?" Brewer asked. "You're sore as hell, aren't you?" "Am I supposed to be happy?" Brewer shrugged. "If you wanted to go to the stars, you'd have volunteered. It's a rough break, youngster. How old are you?" "Twenty." "You're still young enough to adjust. Some mornings I have men in their thirties come in, men with families. You'd be surprised how many of them want to blow me up. You aren't married, are you?" "No, sir." "Parents?" "They live in Cincinnati. I've phoned them already." "You don't figure you have any grounds for disqualification, then." Dawes shook his head. In a quiet voice he said, "I can't get out of it. I'm resigned to going. But that isn't going to make me like it." "We assume that," Brewer said. "But we also assume that you won't spend all your time sulking when you ought to be colonizing. You don't sulk for long on an alien world and stay alive." He shook his head. "If you think you've got troubles, think about the last man Selected in this district. Father of three children. Age thirty-nine years, eleven months, three weeks. One week to go and he'd be ineligible, but the Computer picked him. He said it was a frame-up. But he went, he did." "Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Dawes asked. "I don't know," said Brewer, sighing. "They tell me misery loves company. You probably feel awfully sorry for yourself, and I don't blame you." "Will I be allowed to see my parents again?" "You can fly to Cincy this afternoon, if you like. For the next week you'll be accompanied by a Bureau guard. As a precaution, you understand. Naturally, he'll give you as much privacy as you want -- in case there may be a young lady you would like to pay a farewell visit to, or -- " "Just my parents," Dawes said. "All right. Whatever. You have seven days. Make the most of them. You'll get a full physical next door right now. Maybe you're no longer eligible." "Small chance of that!" "We can always hope, eh, Mike?" "Why do that? What do you care whether I go or not? Do you know what it's like to be ripped up and tossed out into space? You're over age; you're safe." Brewer smiled sadly. "I don't have a good heart; I never was eligible. But that doesn't mean I don't know what you're going through now. My wife was Selected ten years ago. Come with me, Mike. The doctor will have a look at you." Ill all at once. In automatic need she reached out to her left, but the place next to her in bed was empty, still faintly warm; Charlie was gone. She could see a crisp ten-dollar bill wedged into the corner of her mirror. Rising, she unhooked the bill and slipped it into her dresser drawer. The apartment was a mess. Two empty bottles sat on the floor near the bed; cigarette ashes were sprinkled everywhere. Charlie had brought last night's newspaper in with him, probably to study the racing news, and now the pages were scattered all over the place. Well, it had been a pleasant night. Thank goodness for small blessings. In these tough times, it was good to know that somebody enjoyed your company. Cherry thought. She lugged the Cleanall out of the closet, plugged it in, and set it to work gobbling up the scattered ashes while she herself showered. The gentle cleansing spray felt good as it peeled away the night's grime. After ten minutes under the water she stepped out, stretched, yawned, did her calisthenics. Musn't let the middle start to sag, dearie. You're only as good as your body is. Morning duties over. Cherry flipped the switch on the radio; music streamed into the apartment. She jabbed down on the window-opaquer and the polarity of the glass shifted, letting in the morning sunlight. It looked as if New York would have another perfect day. The wall clock said # hours, # October #. She knew there wasn't much time. At # she was due downtown for an audition; one of the big sensie-theaters needed usherettes. It was cheap work for a girl who had once stripped in the best establishments of three continents, but time moved along; she was thirty-three, no longer in the first golden bloom of youth, and these days the strip managers seemed to have a cradle-fetish: the younger the better. Next year. Cherry thought sourly, somebody would come up with the ultimate in that line -- the ten-year-old stripper. She punched out breakfast on the autocook. Cherry's apartment was automatic in almost every respect. She had always dreamed of living surrounded by the latest gadgets, and, one year when she'd really been taking in the cash, she had bought herself all the gadgets there were. An automatic backscratcher that came out of the bed's headboard when she wanted it; an autocook; automatically opaquing windows; light-dimmers; a Cleanall. Her apartment was a nest for electronic wizardry of all kinds. In these latter days, when to fill out a skimpy income she had taken to bringing men up for an evening, there were plenty of wise remarks about the wealth of gadgetry in the place. It got so she could practically anticipate the gags. Breakfast was just something that had to be eaten, not any source ofpleasure. She was tense about the audition at #. An usherette had to prance up and down the aisles in nothing more than a bit of hip-length translucent fluff. She was suie she still had the figure for the job, but her confidence was low. In the past year she had been gaining weight, slowly, inexorably, unstoppably. It wasn't like this when Dan was here, she thought. Dan had been the world to her: manager, trainer, coach, fatherconfessor, agent. Dan had found her when she was a pickup girl in Philadelphia, and before Dan had finished with her she was the toast of Las Vegas, Paris, Bucharest. Dan had slimmed her down, taught her poise, forced her to fight the temptations of food and sex, found her the best jobs and compelled her to turn down everything but the very best. But Dan was gone. They had Selected him, four years ago. And nothing had been the same since. And the worst of it was. Cherry thought, rubbing the old wound that she could have gone with him, if she had wanted to. "You can always become a Volunteer," Dan had told her as she wept hysterically that morning. "You can come with me wherever I'm going, if it means that much to you." And he had knotted his hands in his thick dark hair and waited for her answer, and she had refused to say anything. do? she demanded fiercely of nobody in particular. She had been twenty-nine, rolling in money, the toast of the entertainment world. He was ten years older than she. Sure, she had thought she loved him, but how can anyone be sure of that? It seemed like so much to ask, for her to give up her limousine and her apartment and her pet ocelot and her cozy, luxurious, pampered life to follow him out to the stars. So she had finally said No, she would stay here, and Dan had shrugged calmly, telling her that it was better that way, that she was probably not fitted for the rugged frontier life anyway. And he had gone, leaving her behind. And then the anguish began for her in earnest. She had sold the fancy cars and given away the ocelot; she still had the apartment, but very little else. She had lost her cozy, luxurious life, and she had lost Dan. There had been the quick, crazy, bad marriage the year after Dan was taken, a marriage that lasted only a couple of months, and after that the long, slow, gentle slide downward. The slide hadn't ended yet. Every morning she realized that more clearly. But I was selfish. I stayed behind. And what did I get for it? put her coffee cup into the autowash, and took a Cheeriup pill from the medicine cabinet. The pill took effect practically at once: a fine, false buoyant feeling of optimism and good cheer replaced the introspective mood of gloom. She punched the dial three more times and three more little yellow pills popped out. One every four hours would see her through the day without a moment of depression; maybe the good mood was phony, but it was better than brooding about Dan all day. One last check in the mirror: makeup was okay, hair wellgroomed, face scrubbed. Thanks to the Cheeriup, she looked happy, enthusiastic, eager. The auditioners would never be able to see the core of misery deep beneath the surface. "Good morning. Miss Thomas," said the elevator's voice as she stepped in. A photoscanner in the elevator's roof was rigged to recognize all of the building's tenants and give them a personal greeting. "Good morning," she said. "Nice day." There was no reply. The elevator's brain-center was programmed only for one sentence. But she believed in returning the greeting, anyway. It was the least she could do. The elevator deposited her in the glittering chrome-and-greenglass lobby. She started to break the photobeam that controlled the front door; then, as an afterthought, she decided to see if there had been any mail for her. That was when she found the Selection notice from the Colonization Bureau. Her Mirror-bright fingernails slashed the blue envelope open. She read the message carefully, slowly; reading had never been one of her strong points. When she had gone through the brief notice the first time, she doubled back and read it again. Yes; no doubt of it. It was a Selection notice. "Well, I'll be a -- So they got me too!" You have been selected to be a member of the colonizing expedition departing on # October from Bangor, Maine, aboard the must report at once to your nearest Colonization Bureau registry center. You are now subject to the provisions of the Interstellar Colonization Act of #, and any violation of these provisions will meet with severe punishment. By order of D. L. Mulholland, District Chairman. Her first reaction was an outraged one: Who the hell are they that they can grab hold of Cherry Thomas and say that she has to go out and go to the stars? They can't push me around like that! But after the first wild flare of defiance came a quieter, more sobering thought: Maybe it won't be so bad. I could use a change of air. I'm not going anyplace here on Earth. In ten years I'll be a two-bit floozie. So why not go where they want me to go? And then came the last thought, the clincher: Maybe you can pick the place where you're going! Maybe I can find Dan! She hurried upstairs. According to the notice, she had to report to the nearest registry center at once. The phone directory told her that there was a center ten blocks away. To blazes with that audition! For the first time in years she felt genuine enthusiasm.  center -- no need to worry about economizing now. She practically ran up the stairs and into the big office. A receptionist blinked at her and Cherry shoved the blue slip forward. "Here. I just got this. I've been Selected. Where do I go?" "I'll take you to the Director." The Director was a blank-faced man in his fifties who turned on a smile when Cherry entered. She said at once, "I'm Cherry Thomas. I just got Selected." "Won't you have a seat? I'm Mr. Stewart. I realize this day is an unhappy one for you, but may I assure you -- " She cut him off. "Look, Mr. Stewart, I want you to do me a favor. I don't mind getting Selected, I suppose. But I want you to send me to the same planet where they sent Dan Cirillo in #. I don't know the name of the planet, but you ought to be able to look it up somewhere for me, and -- " Mr. Stewart's blank moon-face was furrowed by a frown. "You don't seem to understand. Miss Thomas. You're not being sent to a planet that's already been colonized. You'll be going to a completely untamed world, a virgin planet." "But I want to be near Dan! Listen, he was everything to me, we were practically getting married, and then you came along and Selected him. So he went out there. Well, now it's my turn, and I want to go to him! Can't you see how important it is? Damn it, don't you have any heart?" Mr. Stewart shrugged gently. "I'm afraid it's utterly impossible for you to follow him now. For one thing, don't you see that he's been married up there for four years?" "Dan -- married?" Cherry shook her head. Stupid of me not to think of that! Of course, when they sent you up there you had to be coupled off! Slowly her fluttering nervous system calmed. "I -- hadn't figured on that," she said in a soft voice. "Sure. He got married up there." She felt a lump sprouting at the base of her throat. Mr. Stewart leaned forward, smiling now. "So you see, we couldn't send you to him. Not now." "But I could have gone four years ago! All I had to do was come here and say the word, and you would have sent me! And I'd be up there with him now! I'd be bis wife!" Her voice reached a pitch of near hysteria. She burst into sudden tears and put her head in her hands. The peak of emotion passed in a moment or two. When she looked up, she saw Mr. Stewart watching her calmly, as if he went through this sort of thing every day. "So I'm going to some other planet?" she asked quietly. "Which one?" "Only the higher authorities know that. Miss Thomas. Does it really matter?" "No -- no, I suppose it doesn't." He fussed uncomfortably with papers on his desk. "I've sent for your records, but it'll take a little while. You didn't register at this office." "I registered in Philadelphia," she said. "Fourteen years ago." It seemed like an eternity. And now, at last, her number had come up. In her mind's eye she pictured the Cherry Thomas of #, timidly a scared kid of nineteen, then. A lot had happened in fourteen years. Mr. Stewart said, "I take it you're not currently married. Miss Thomas?" iiivro. I was -- three years ago. Not now." "I see. And -- and there isn't anyone who might possibly care to volunteer to accompany you?" Cherry thought down the list of the men she knew. No, none of them had the stuff of a Volunteer in them. She shook her head silently. "May I ask your profession?" Mr. Stewart said. "I'm -- an entertainer." Mr. Stewart moistened his thin, pale lips. "Do you plan to appeal your Selection?" "What good would that do?" "With your psychological background, you might stand a chance of getting out." "What does that mean?" "If you can prove a history of nymphomania, say." Mr. Stewart reddened uncomfortably. "It isn't generally known, but compulsive promiscuity can get you disqualified from eligibility. You can see that an uncontrolled woman could do great harm in the small community that an interstellar colony is at the beginning." Cherry peered at him gravely. "You mean I could get turned down because I like -- because I was -- " "It's a possibility, I say. The ideal colonial woman is one who can adjust to marriage, take whatever man she happens to be mated with and live with him happily, raising as many children as her constitution can manage. Do you think you're psychologically suited for that sort of life?" Cherry frowned uncertainly. Once, so far back she had trouble remembering it, she had been like other girls, wanting a home, a man, children. Somewhere along the way those desires had got lost in the shuffle. She smiled ironically. Ever since they had taken Dan away, she had started every day by cursing Selection and the men who ran it. But now that she herself was meshed in the net, she saw that Selection was the thing she had waited for without knowing. It offered escape -- escape from the harsh tinsel world she lived in, escape from the jeering men who grudgingly paid her price now and who in a few years would bargain and haggle with her, escape from the enclosing wall of loneliness and fear. A new world; a husband; children. Her eyes felt misty with unaccustomed moisture. "Look," she said. "I ain't appealing. You see they don't turn me down, hear?" IV one side when they saw Ky Noonan coming toward them down the street. It was not only on account of his size; there are big men whose very size serves only to emphasize their essential innocuousness. But about Noonan there was that intangible air of authority, of quiet self-confidence, that silently admonished other people: Better watch out and get out of my way. Ky Noonan is coming through! At thirty, he was just ripening into his physical prime. He was flamboyantly big, six feet four, a two hundred pounder who carried no fat. His jet-black hair swept backward in an untamed but somehow orderly mass that added seeming inches to his already impressive height. He had a voice to match his height, a heavy growling rumble that could be heard blocks away when he troubled to project it. His shoulders were broad, his legs long and sturdy, his skin tanned until it looked like fine cordovan or expensive morocco leather. He had come to an important decision today. The decision had been a couple of years in the bud, years that he had spent hauling freight in Jamaica and policing the troubled frontier of South Africa. His police term had expired more than a month ago, and he had not put in an application for re-enlistment. He was restless on Earth. He had matured early, left an unmourned home at fourteen, held a hundred jobs in twenty countries since then. Earth hemmed him in. The prison of the blue sky irked him. He wanted to leave. They had let him have a tour of duty under the Venus dome in #I , but that was not what he wanted, either. No place in the Solar System suited him. In the System, a man either lived on Earth or he lived under a dome. Venus, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Pluto -- six human settlements, plus one on Luna. But man was bound there, bound by the glimmering wall of duroplast that held away the encroaching poison  from outside. He had spent his year on Venus gloweringly performing routine activities under the dome, while staring with undisguised anger at the red and green and blue and violet world outside, the world of formaldehyde and foul gases and weird waxen plants, the world where no man dared go without a breathing-suit and full shielding. He did not need to visit the other Solar System settlements to know that it would be the same. On Mars you looked out on dead red desert; on Ganymede you squinted past eye-searing white fields of snow to the giant unapproachable glory of Jupiter swelling in the sky. What good was it if, bound as you were to the need for oxygen and water, you left Earth only to be penned beneath a plastic dome? No. The only world of the Solar System that allowed a man to range freely over its surface unencumbered by apparatus for survival was Earth, and Earth no longer held any fascination for Ky Noonan. He longed for the stars. tered for Selection when he turned nineteen. At nineteen he was belligerent, bellicose, loudly warning the terrified technicians that they had better find him ineligible for Selection, or else. But they had ignored his threats and passed him as being fit and fertile, and for a day or two he had stormed and raged at the intolerable invasion of his private rights that Selection constituted. And now he stood on a dingy, deteriorated street in Old Baltimore on a mild October afternoon, outside an office on whose door was inscribed in golden ##. A few simple words and he would place his private rights forever out of his own reach. At the moment of decision he hung back, an act not characteristic of him. But he hesitated only a handful of moments. He had come this far; he realized that there could be no turning back now. The office door was the oldfashioned kind, manually operated. He grasped the handle and pulled it open. He stepped inside. A dozen teenagers, boys and girls, stood at a table to the left of the door, frowning busily over the registry questionnaire. To the right, several others stood on line, waiting to be admitted to the medical office for their physical examinations. All of them looked scared. Noonan smiled inwardly, knowing that by his action today he was permitting some frightened, reluctant little person to spend twenty-four extra hours on Earth. He strode to the reception desk and said, clearly, so that everyone in the room could hear him, "My name is Noonan. I want to volunteer for Selection -- the sooner the better." A dozen heads swivelled round to peer at him. There was a silence in the room. The receptionist muttered something automatic and conducted him inside, to an office whose door bore the label Mr. Harness. Mr. Harness was a timorouslooking, clerkish, dried-out little man with a pretentiously solemn manner. He offered Noonan a chair and said, "Do I understand that you wish to volunteer for Selection?" "You understand right." Mr. Harness steepled his fingers in a thoughtful way. "We don't get many Volunteers these days, as you can imagine. You're the first in more than a month." Noonan shrugged. "Do I get a medal?" Mr. Harness looked uncomfortable. "Not exactly. But you do get certain privileges that the ordinary conscripts won't be entitled to. You're aware of that, aren't you?" "I know that Volunteers get their first pick of the women," Noonan said bluntly. "Maybe they get better food on the starship going out, too. But the women angle is the only privilege I'm interested in." "Ah -- yes. Of course, Mr. -- Mr. -- " "Noonan. Ky Noonan." t"HE Bureau man reached for a data blank and a pen. "We might as well get the details down, Mr. Noonan. Would you spell that first name, please?" Noonan's lips twitched with sudden annoyance. "Cyril. C-YR-I-L. Cyril Franklin Noonan. I call myself Ky." The effete first name had been his mother's idea; he detested it, but all his official records bore that name, and he was too proud a man to apply for an authorized legal name-change. He called himself Ky, and let it go at that. "Date of birth?" "# January #." "Making you -- ah --  thirty. Your occupation, please?" "Most recently, I was a policeman. A lot of other things before that." "Any special training? Medicine, the law, science, engineering?" "I know how to use these -- " Noonan held out his big hands -- "and I know how to use this." He touched his forehead. "But no professional training, no." Harness looked up. "May I ask why you're volunteering, Mr. Noonan? You're not required to answer, of course, but for my own personal curiosity -- " Noonan smiled. A Volunteer had certain special privileges, and reticence was one of them. So long as he was deemed psychologically and physiologically fit for colonization, and so long as he was not rendered ineligible by the existence of young children who would be orphaned by his volunteering, and so long as he had not committed any serious crime, he was not required to explain. But old-maidish men like Harness wanted to know all the gossip, Noonan thought. He said, "For your own personal curiosity. I'm volunteering because I'm tired of staying on Earth and want to try someplace else. I'm not in debt and I haven't ruined any innocent wenches lately and I'm not volunteering to escape from a dominating mother. I'm just signing up because I want to see what it's like out there." Harness seemed terrified by the booming outburst. He shrank back in his chair and said, "Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Noonan. I wasn't implying -- now, if you'll simply fill out the rest of this data blank -- " Noonan filled it out. When it came to the section that asked. How much time will you need to settle your affairs?, he wrote in ing the sheet, he handed it back to Harness, who skimmed through it and lifted his eyebrows prissily when he came to the final entry. mediately, Mr. Noonan?" "Why not? My affairs are in order. I don't have much property and I don't have much money, and I don't have anybody to give it to. So I'll just hand over everything I own to charity. I won't be needing money where I'm going." "Very well," Harness said crisply. "Today is October #. Will you report back here in three days?" "Three days? Why?" "According to law, you have three days to reconsider your decision. If you still want to volunteer at the end of the week, come back here and we'll finish processing your application." Noonan shook his head. "I ain't gonna do any reconsidering. I made my mind up before I came in here." V I really have to go next week?" Carol Herrick asked hopefully. She sat tensely rigid, back straight, knees pressed tightly together, staring across the wide uncluttered desk at the elderly man who seemed, at the moment, to have absolute control over her destiny. "I mean, isn't there some way I can get excused from having to go?" The Colonization Bureau man shook his head solemnly from side to side. "None?" Carol asked. "If you qualify, you have to go. That's the law, and there's no way around it." Even delivered as gently as they were, they were stern words. Carol fought desperately to hold back the tears. She wanted to let go, to throw herself at this man's feet, to soak his knees with her tears. How could they send her to some other world? It wasn't right, she thought. She belonged here in San Francisco, with the fog and the bridges and the Sunday afternoon strolls in Golden Gate Park, not out on some strange alien planet. She said in a soft, confused voice, "But -- why send me? I don't know anything about space -- about the stars. I can't even cook very well. I'm not the sort of person they want up there." "They want all kinds of people, child. You'll learn how to cook, to sew, to skin wild animals. Space will turn you into a regular pioneer wife." The redness came back into her face. "That's another thing. They are going to make me get married, aren't they? All the colonists have to marry." "Of course. And to bear children. We start each world with only fifty couples -- but for the colony to survive, it has to multiply. Don't you want to get married, Carol? And have children?" "Yes, I do, certainly. But -- " "But what?" "I was waiting -- waiting so long for the right one to come along. Turning down fellows, waiting to see what the next one would be like. And now it's too late, isn't it? I could have been married, maybe had a baby by now, and then I wouldn't have to go -- out there." "I'm sorry. I'm supposed to give you the standard speeches about mankind's destiny. Miss Herrick -- Carol -- but I suppose you wouldn't appreciate them. All I can say is, I'm sorry -- but you'll have to accept your lot." She stared dreamily past the man behind the desk, past the banner with its meaningless slogan, past the wall itself into a gray void. She said half to herself, "I waited so long -- and now they'll marry me to the first one who comes along. Won't they?" "There's a certain amount of choice, Carol. You're not required to accept if you don't like the man who selects you, you know. You can say no." "But I'll have to marry one of them. I can't say no to all of them." "Yes. You'll have to marry one of them." put through the examination, unprotestingly, understanding littie, filled with a vague regret and with the mild resentment that was the only anger she was really capable of. Carol Herrick had never really given much thought to the entire immense question of Selection. Three years ago, on her nineteenth birthday, she had gone downtown to this registry center, because the law required her to. She had given her name, and the doctors had examined her and a week or so later she had received the little card telling her that she had qualified, that her name was on file with the big Computer and that she was subject to Selection until she turned forty. She had figured out on a scrap of paper that she would not be forty until #, and that was so ridiculously far in the future that she could hardly visualize the stretch of years that lay between. So, because her mind could deal neither with the concept of Selection nor with an interval of twenty years, she simply forgot the entire matter. She was subject to Selection, she knew. Well, what of it? Only the little blue slip in the mailbox had finished all that. VI one hundred ten names for the # October blasting of the Gegenschein, District Chairman Mulholland turned his attention to the next item on his daily routine: finalization, as they so barbarously called it in Scheduling, of the previous day's list. The October # ship was the Skyrover, departing from the Cape Canaveral base. Mulholland had prepared the usual quota of names; during the early hours of the morning, while he had been assembling the Gegenschein list, word was coming in from the local boards on the previous day's Selections. Mulholland scanned the long yellow sheets. The Skyrover list would present no difficulties, he saw. There were fifty-one eligible males, fifty-two eligible women. He deleted the three surplus names, entered them on the proper form, and gave the deletion list to Miss Thorne. During the day three people somewhere in the United States would learn that they had received a minute reprieve: instead of departing as they had been told on the October # ship, they would be held over until October #, and, if not needed to fill vacancies on the Gegenschein list, would certainly be included on the list of whatever ship was scheduled for departure on the #th. His job, Mulholland thought, was like a kind of cosmic jigsaw puzzle: a puzzle in which he used human pieces, scooping up a hundred at a time, discarding those which might be bent or broken and unsuitable for the pattern, fitting the rest into place. Each day another pattern had to be created; sometimes there were too many pieces, and some were put aside for another day. He completed the Skyrover list and sent it down the pneumotube to Brevoort, twenty stories below. Brevoort would phone Cape Canaveral and advise them verbally of the completion of the list; the list itself woufil be sent to Florida by fax at the same time. With the Skyrover under control, Mulholland was finished for the day. The time was # hours. At the Bangor starfield that moment, the Enterprise Three was blasting off, with one hundred colonists aboard, people who had been Selected a week before. It went on constantly, day and night -- people registering for Selection, people being Selected, people reporting for blastoff, ships departing. Five ships leaving a day from the United States alone, sixty from the world, four hundred twenty ships a week. And, so immense were the heavens, it would be untold centuries before the last habitable planet had been colonized by men of Earth. # hours. The end of the day. Mulholland tidied his desk and said his goodbyes -- most of the clerical workers had two hours more before their day ended -- and left. As he stepped outside, into the bracing October wind, he tried to shrug off his day's labor like an otter coming to shore and shaking itself dry. Once # hours came, he could stop being District Chairman Mulholland, wielder of the sacred staff; he could go back to being plain Dave Mulholland of White Plains, a short, reddish-haired, sadly stoutening man of #, who twelve years ago had left his post of Assistant Professor of Political Science at C.C.N.Y. to go into the practice of Liberal Party politics, and who as his reward for loyal service to the Cause was entitled to condemn one hundred people a day to Selection, so long as his party happened to remain in power. A T # the next morning, Mulholland was at his office. The Requisition Form was waiting for him, as always; fifty couples were needed for the starship Aaron Burr, leaving Canaveral on the #th of October. He went through the standard morning routine, authorizing the selection of one hundred ten names for the Aaron Burr. Two hours later, the first replies began to come in from the local boards on the Gegenschein Selectees. Mulholland put each form in the "Hold" basket and forgot about them until it was time to get back to the Gegenschein list. He had already forgotten about the Skyrover; now that its list was complete, it faded into the long blur of unremembered ships whose passengers Mulholland had authorized. After lunch -- a tense affair as always; he never digested well on a working day -- he turned his attention to the Gegenschein. His notes told him that one slot had already been filled; Noonan, the Volunteer sent through from Baltimore Board ##. Mulholland needed forty-nine men, fifty women to make up the complement. Most of the East Coast and Midwest reports had come in already. The western people, naturally, would take longer; in most cases the mail was just being delivered now, out on the Coast. But there were enough early returns to begin working with. Mulholland began to sort through them, checking them off against his master file. Columbus, Ohio Board ##: We have examined registrant Michael Dawes and find him acceptable for Selection... New York Board ##: We have examined registrant Cherry Thomas and find her acceptable for Selection... Philadelphia Board ##: We have examined registrant Lawrence T. Fowler and find him acceptable for Selection... And, mixed with the rest, a red slip that signified a turndown: Atlanta Board ##: We have examined registrant Louetta Johnson and find her not acceptable for Selection for the reasons detailed below... Mulholland paused, turned the red slip over, and read it. Louetta Johnson had been found after due medical examination to be in her twelfth week of pregnancy, this fact being unknown to Miss Johnson, who therefore had not notified the registry center of this change in her status. Mulholland managed a wan smile. Louetta Johnson's lamentable lapse of virtue had saved her from Selection, whatever other consequences it might have for her in the future. He put her slip aside and crossed her name from his list. Within the next hour, he lost two more of his possibles; the #rd Board, in Troy, New York, reported that Elgin MacNamara had been the victim of a fatal auto accident the very day of his Selection; the #th Board, in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, regretfully informed the District Chairman that registrant Thomas Buckley had been taken into custody after allegedly shooting his wife and another man, and would not be eligible for a berth on the Gegenschein. UT, despite these minor setbacks, the list slowly filled. By # hours, Mulholland's tally showed forty-three men and thirty-nine women assigned to the Gegenschein, with five of his original hundred and ten disqualified and twenty-three yet to be heard from. Not long after that, the first reports began to come in from the Far West: San Francisco Board ##: We have examined registrant Carol Herrick and find her acceptable for Selection... Los Angeles Board ##: We have examined registrant Philip Haas and find him acceptable lor Selection... A red slip from Seattle Board ##: Registrant Ethel Pines declared ineligible on medical grounds; registrant Pines has cancer. Mulholland removed the name of Ethel Pines from his list. By # hours, he was nearing completion. A quick check indicated that he had forty-eight men, forty-six women. Ten of his original hundred and ten were scratched, ineligible. One Volunteer. Seven reports were yet to come in. Ten minutes later, they were in: five acceptables, two rejects. Mulholland drew a line under the column of male names quickly counted upward: fifty names in all, headed by Cyril Noonan, Volunteer. He was short one woman. Now he reached into his replacement basket and drew out the three cards that had been left over from the Skyrover quota. One man, two women. Muholland put the man's card aside. He flipped the other two cards into the air. One landed face up; he snatched at it -- the card of a woman named Marya Brannick. Marya Brannick's name was entered in the fiftieth slot on the distaff side of the Gegenschein list. Carefully putting the completed Gegenschein list to one side, Mulholland took tomorrow's Aaron Burr list from its pigeonhole and inscribed the names of Irwin Halsey and Maribeth Jansen at the heads of the two columns. He buzzed for Miss Thorne. "Jessie, I've assigned the three leftovers from the Skyrover list. Brannick goes into the Gegenschein, Halsey and Jansen are being held over till tomorrow for the Aaron Burr." Miss Thorne nodded efficiently. "I'll see that the notification goes out to the local boards. Anything else, Mr. Mulholland?" "I don't think so. Everything's under control." She gave him a toothy smile and scuttled back to her adjoining cubicle. Sighing, Mulholland checked the clock. # hours. Astonishing how smoothly the Selection mechanism works, he thought. The list gets filled as if by clockwork. A ND it had been clockwork, he realized, with himself doing nothing that a robot was unable to do. He wondered what a film of himself at work on a typical day would look like, speeded up a little. Even more ridiculous than the ancient fast-camera films, no doubt. He would emerge on the screen as an inane fat little bureaucrat, busily pulling lists in and out of pigeonholes, inscribing names, juggling surpluses, carrying forth extra Selectees until they were needed, signing documents, self-importantly buzzing for his secretary -- It was an unflattering picture. Mulholland tried to blank it out, but the image refused to quit his mind. Thank God it was quitting time, he thought! He studied the completed Gegenschein list again. It looked all right: the hundred names, fifty in each column, each on its appointed line. He skimmed down the men's list: Noonan, Cyril. Dawes, Michael. Fowler, Lawrence. Matthews, David. And right along to the names at the bottom: Nolan, Sidney. Sanderson, Edward. He checked out the women's column next. Thomas, Cherry. Martino, Louise. Goldstein, Erna. And down to the last, the ink not yet dry on her name: Brannick, Mary a. Mulholland nodded. Fifty here, fifty there. The list was okay. He scrawled his signature in the proper place. Another day, another shipload, he thought. Another cargo for his conscience. The long list of names wavered, blurred; he closed his tired eyes. But that was a mistake. His imagination responded by conjuring up images of people; names took on flesh, faces hovered accusingly in the air. Edward Sanderson, he thought -- and pictured, for no particular reason, a short, slim, narrow-shouldered man with thinning brown hair. Erna Goldstein -- she might be a dark-haired girl with large eyes, who majored in dramatics in college and had hopes of writing a play, someday. Sidney Nolan -- Muholland shook his head to clear it. He had managed to keep this from happening all day, this sudden taking on of flesh on the part of the names on his list. So long as he thought of them simply as names, as strings of syllables, everything was all right. But once they began asserting their humanity, he crumbled beneath the assault. Hastily he pressed his thumb against the sensitized spot, rolled up the sheet, stuffed it in its little cylinder, and sent it rocketing down the pneumotube to the waiting Brevoort. The Gegenschein had her cargo, barring accidents and possible suicides between now and the seventeenth of the month. The clock said # hours. The day was over. Mulholland rose, sticky with sweat, eyes aching, mind numb. He was free to go home. At least you only get Selected once, he thought. I have to go through this every day. three ships of colonists departed every week, covered sixteen square miles of what had once been virgin forest in northern Maine. The lofty firs were gone, now; the area had been cleared and levelled and surrounded by a fence labelled at thousand-yard intervals, NO ADorder of Colonization Bureau. Within the fenced-off area there was surprisingly little in the way of construction. Since the starfield was for government use only, not commercial, there was no need for the usual array of terminals, passenger buildings. waiting rooms, and concessions that cluttered every commercial spaceport. The buildings at the Bangor field were few: a moderately elaborate barracks for the permanent staff, a more sketchily constructed housing unit for transients, a couple of staff amusement centers, and a small administration building. All these were huddled together in a compact group in the center of the cleared area. Fanning off in three directions were the blastoff fields themselves, kept widely separated because a starship likes a mile or two of headroom when it can get it. On the morning of # October, #, two of Bangor Starfield's three blastoff areas were occupied. On Field One stood the Andrew Johnson, solemnly alone with a mile of heat-fused sterile brown earth on each side: a tall steelblue needle that towered erect on its landing-jacks and retractile atmospheric fins. The Andrew Johnson was scheduled for departure on the #th of the month; tomorrow the service crews would swarm out to Field One to begin the three-day countdown that prefaced every departure of a starship. At present the service technicians were busily running the final tests on the Gegenschein, which stood in the center of Field Three, slim and straight, glinting golden in the morning sunlight. The Gegenschein was due for blastoff at # hours that afternoon, and with the countdown in its final six hours the service crews scuttled like busy insects through the ship, making certain that everything was in perfect order. Only once, twelve years before, had there been a major starship accident, but it was hoped that there would never be another. Field Two remained empty. A returning starship, the Wanderer, was due back late that evening, and Field Two was being held open for it. A small service crew was on duty at the Field Two blockhouse, running final checks on the guidance system that would monitor the Wanderer into its landing orbit later in the day. Nothing could be left to chance, starship. From the upper floor of the housing unit for transients, looking out past the squat yellowbrick edifice that served as the permanent staff residence barracks, both the Andrew Johnson and the Gegenschein could be seen, one at the western end of the field, the other far to the east. Mike Dawes, who had arrived at the Bangor starfield at # hours after an early-morning flight from New York, peered out the window of the small room to which he had been assigned, looking first at the distant blue-tinted Andrew Johnson, then, turning eastward, at the much closer Gegenschein.' he asked. "The gold-colored one," said the uniformed Colonization Bureau guard who had shown him to his temporary room. "It's on Field Three, over there." Dawes nodded. "Yes. I see it." "You've got an hour or so to rest here and relax. At # hours there's a preliminary briefing session downstairs in the central hall. You won't be able to miss it, just turn to your left when you leave the elevator. The briefing lasts about an hour. Then you'll be given lunch." "I'm not going to be very hungry," Dawes said. The guard smiled. "Most of them never are. But the meal is always a good one." At # hours Dawes followed the flickering neon signs down the hall to the elevator, and from there to Room #. Room #I was a huge auditorium in the center of the compound; several men in blue-and-yellow uniforms bustled about on a dais, adjusting a microphone, while pale, tensefaced civilians filtered in and took seats as far away from each other as possible. Dawes slipped into an empty row near the back and looked around, seeing his fellow Selectees for the first time. One hundred people were spread thinly about in an auditorium big enough for ten times that number. He managed an ironic smile at the way each Selectee had managed to place himself on a little island, insulated by five or six empty seats on each side from his nearest neighbor, as if afraid of impinging on the final hours of anyone's privacy. They seemed to be ordinary people; Dawes noticed that most of them appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties, and a few were older than that. He wondered whether the colonies were portioned out strictly at random, or whether perhaps some degree of external control was exerted. It was perfectly within the range of probability for the Computer to select fifty men of twenty and fifty women of forty to comprise a colony, but it seemed unlikely that such a group would ever be allowed to go out. Behind him, the auditorium doors closed. An officer with an array of ribbons and medals on his uniform front stepped up to the dais, frowned at the microphone, raised it a fraction of an inch, and said, "Welcome to Bangor Starfield. I'm Commander Leswick, and your welfare will be my responsibility until you blast off at # hours. I know this has been a trying week for you, perhaps virtually a tragic week for some, and I don't intend to repeat the catch-phrases and slogans that you've been handed for the past seven days. You've been Selected; you're going to leave Earth, and you'll never return. I put it bluntly like this because it's too late for illusion and self-deception and consolation. You've been picked for the most important job in the history of humanity, and I'm not going to pretend that you're going out on an easy assignment. You're not. You're faced with the tremendous challenge of planting a of miles from here. I know, right now you feel frightened and lonely and wretched. But never forget this: each and every one of you is an Earthman. You're a representative of the highest form of life in the known galaxy. You've got a reputation to live up to, out there. And you'll be building a world. To the future generations on that world, you'll be the George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons and John Hancocks. "The planet you're going to is the ninth out of sixteen planets revolving around the star Vega. Vega is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and also one of the closest to Earth -- # light-years away. You're lucky in one respect: there are two colonizable planets in the Vega system, your world and the eighth planet, which is not yet settled. That means you'll eventually have a planetary neighbor, unlike most other colonies which are situated on the only habitable world in their system. The name of your planet, by the way, is Osiris, from Egyptian mythology -- but you can call it anything you like, once you get there. trip will take about four weeks, even by Einstein drive. That'll allow you plenty of time to get to know each other before you reach your new planet. Captain McKenzie and his crew have made several dozen successful interstellar flights, and I can assure you you'll be in the best possible hands. "The name of your ship, as you know, is the Gegenschein. We draw the names of our ships from three sources: astronomical terms, historical figures, and traditional ship names. Gegenschein is an astronomical term referring to the faint luminosity extending along the plane of the ecliptic in the direction diametrically opposite to the sun -- the sun's reflection, actually, bouncing back from an immense cloud of stellar debris. "I think that covers all the essential points you'll need to know at the outset. We're going to adjourn to the mess hall now for a most significant occasion: the last meal you're ever going to eat on the planet Earth, and also the first meal you will eat with each other. I hope you all have good appetites, because the meal is a special one. "Before we go in, though, I'm going to call the roll. When you hear your name, I want you to stand up and make a complete three hundred sixty-degree revolution, letting everyone get a look at you. This is as good a time as any to start getting to know each other." He picked up a list. "Cyril Noonan." A rangy, powerful-looking man in a front row rose and said, in a booming voice that filled the auditorium easily, "The name I use is Ky Noonan." Commander Leswick smiled. "Ky Noonan, then. Incidentally, Ky Noonan happens to be a Volunteer." Noonan sat down. Commander Leswick said, "Michael Dawes." Dawes rose, blushing unaccountably, and stood awkwardly at attention. Since he was at the back of the auditorium, there was no need for him to turn around. A hundred heads craned backward to see him, and he sat. "Lawrence Fowler." A chunky man in the middle of the auditorium came to his feet, spun round, smiled nervously, and sat down. Leswick called the next name, and the next, until all fifty men had been called. He began on the women after that. Dawes watched closely as the woman rose. Most of them, he saw, were eight to ten years older than he. But he paid careful attention. There was one girl named Herrick who interested him. She was young and looked attractive, in a widfe-eyed, innocent way. Carol Herrick, he thought. He wondered what she was like. TT was probably an excellent meal. Dawes did not appreciate it, though. He ate listlessly, picking at his food, unable to enjoy the white, tender turkey, the dressing and trimmings, the cold white wine. Although he had overcome his initial bitterness over Selection, a lingering tension remained. He had no appetite. It was an inconvience shared by most of his fellow Selectees, evidently, judging by the way they toyed with their food. The Selectees had been distributed at ten tables. Dawes was dismayed to find, when he took his seat, that he could not recall the names of any of the other nine Selectees at his table. But his embarrassment was short-lived. A round-faced, balding man to his left said, "I'll confess I didn't catch too many names during rollcall. Maybe we ought to introduce ourselves all over again. I'm Ed Sanderson from Milwaukee. I used to be an accountant." It went around the table. "Mary Elliot, St. Louis," said a plump woman with streaks of gray in her hair. "Just a housewife before my number came up." "Phil Haas, from Los Angeles," said a lean-faced man in his late thirties. "I was a lawyer." "Louise Martino, Brooklyn," said a dark-haired girl of twentyfive or twenty-six, in a faltering, husky voice. "I was a salesgirl at Macy's." "Mike Dawes, Cincinatti. Junior at Ohio State, pre-med student." "Rina Morris, from Denver," said a good-looking redhead. "Department-store buyer." "Howard Stoker, Kansas City," rumbled a heavy-set man with a stubbled chin and thick, dirty fingers. "Construction worker." "Claire Lubetkin, Pittsfield, Massachusetts." She was a blandfaced blonde with a nervous tic under her left eye. "Clerk in a video shop." "Sid Nolan, Tulsa. Electrical engineer." He was a thin, darkhaired, fidgety man who toyed constantly with his silverware. "Helen Chambers, Detroit," said a tired-looking woman in her thirties, with dark rings under her eyes. "Housewife." Ed Sanderson chuckled uncomfortably. "Well, now we know everyone else, I hope. Housewives, engineer, college student, lawyer -- " "How come there ain't any rich people Selected?" Howard Stoker demanded suddenly. "They just take guys like us. The rich ones buy themselves off." "That isn't so," Phil Haas objected. "It just happens that most of the wealthy executives and industrialists don't get to be wealthy until they're past the age of Selection. But don't you remember a couple of months ago, when they Selected that oilman from Texas -- " "Sure," Sid Nolan broke in. "Dick Morrison. And none of his out."  unintelligible and subsided. Conversation seemed to die away. Dawes looked down at his plate, still largely untouched. He had nothing to say to these people with whom he had been thrown by the random hand of Selection. They were just people. Strangers. Some of them were fifteen years older than he was. He had only just stopped thinking of himself as a boy a few years before, and now he was expected to live among them as an equal, as an adult. I didn't want to grow up so soon, he thought. But now I don't have any choice, I guess. The meal dragged on to its finish around # hours. Commander Leswick appeared to announce a ninety-minute rest and recreation period. Boarding of the ship would commence at # hours, sixty minutes before actual blastoff time. They filed out of the mess hall -- a hundred miscellaneous people, each carrying his own burden of fear and regret and resentment. Dawes walked along silently beside Phil Haas, the lawyer from Los Angeles. As they reached the door, Haas smiled and said, "Did you leave a girl friend behind, Mike?" Dawes was startled by the sudden intrusion on his reverie. "Oh -- ah -- no, I guess not. There wasn't anybody special. I figured I couldn't afford to get very deeply involved, not with four years of medical school ahead of me. Not to mention interning and all the rest." "I know what you mean. I got married during my senior year at U.C.L.A. We had a hard time of it while I was going to law school." "You -- were married?" Haas nodded. They stepped out into the open air. There was no lawn, just bare brown earth running to the borders of the starport. "I have -- had -- two children," he said. "The boy's going to be seven, the girl five." "At least now your wife's not eligible for Selection herself," Dawes said. "Only if she doesn't remarry. And I asked her to remarry, you see. She's not the sort of woman who can get along without a man around." A momentary cloud passed over Haas' bony face. "Another two years and I would have been safe. Well, that's the way it goes, I guess. Take it easy, Mike. I suppose I'll see you at # hours." Haas clapped Dawes genially on the shoulder and strode away. At # hours, the gong in the hall rang again. The crisp voice out of the speaker said, "Attention. Attention. All Selectees are to report to the front of the barracks for boarding ship. All Selectees are to report to the front of the barracks for boarding ship, at once." Elliot; the older woman smiled at him, and he returned the smile tensely. Several Selectees whom Dawes did not know joined them at the elevator, and they rode down together. "Well, this is it," Mary Elliot said. "Goodbye to Earth. I thought this week would never end!" "So did II" exclaimed a willowy thirtyish brunette behind Dawes. "But it ended all right. So -- so long to Earth." Three motor-coaches waited outside the barracks. Guards in blue-and-yellow uniforms efficiently herded the Selectees into the first coach until it was full, then began channelling people toward the second. Dawes boarded the third coach; by that time, the first one was halfway across the immense spacefield. The uniformed men did their job with a calm impersonality that seemed faintly inhuman to Dawes. But, he reflected, they had to do this three times a week. All over the world, now, people were being herded into starships. By nightfall six thousand Earthmen would be on their way to an uncertain destination. Close up, the Gegenschein seemed immense. Standing upright on its tail, it reared two hundred feet above the bare brown soil. Its hull was plated with a molecule-thick sheath of gold, by way of ornament; each of the starships had its own distinctive color. The hatch was sixty feet above the ground. To gain entry, you had to ride up a gantry lift that held five people at a time. A catwalk was available for those who wanted to climb. Dawes was in no hurry. He waited in line for his turn to enter the lift. Turning, he took his last look at Earth, sucked in his last planetside breath of Earth's air. It was mid-afternoon. In the quiet isolation of the starfield the air had a clear, transparent quality. There was a tangy nip in it; it smelled of distant fir and spruce. The sun was low in the October sky, and a brisk breeze swept in from the north. Now, at the moment of shipboarding, Dawes began to think of all he would never see again. Never another sunset on Earth, never the moon full and pale in the sky, never the familiar constellations. Never again the glory of autumn-tinted maples, never the sight of football players racing down a field, never again a hot dog or a hamburger or a vanilla sundae. Little things; but little things added up to a world, and it was a world he was leaving forever behind. "Next five," came the guard's voice. Dawes shuffled forward and onto the metal platform. The lift rose with a groaning of winches. Now that he was close to the ship's skin, he could see the tiny pittings and indentations that told of previous service. The Gegenschein looked newly-minted at a distance, but at close range the appearance was far different. The lift halted at the lip of the entry hatch. Hands gathered them in, and behind Dawes the lift began to descend for its next load. Within, fluorescent lights cast their cold beams on a circular room which opened onto a spiral companionway at either end. "Men go up, women down," chanted a space-tanned young man in starman's uniform. "Men to the fore compartment, women aft." der that lined the companionway atthe top of the circular room. He realized that, in flight, gyroscopic balancers would keep the ship forever upright -- but it was difficult to visualize the way the compartments would be oriented. At the top of the ladder another crewman waited. "Men's dorm is straight ahead," he was told. Dawes found himself in a compartment large enough for twenty-five persons. There was nothing luxurious about the compartment: no money had been expended on plush carpeting, mosaic tile walls, or the other trimmings customary in commercial spacecraft. The walls were bare metal, unpainted, unornamented. Dawes recognized Sid Nolan, the engineer from Tulsa, already sprawled out in one of the acceleration cradles. Dawes nodded hello and said, "What are we supposed to do, now that we're here?" "Just pick out a cradle and sit down. Once everybody's aboard they'll tell us what happens next." "Mind if I take this one?" Dawes asked, indicating the cradle that adjoined Nolan's. "Why should I mind? Suit yourself." Dawes lowered himself into the cradle. It was like an oversize lounge chair, suspended on shockproof cables. At right and left there dangled safety straps to be buckled before blastoff. The chamber filled quickly. Dawes recognized Ky Noonan, the husky Volunteer, who entered, picked out a cradle, and immediately strapped himself in with an expert hand. Ed Sanderson, the accountant from Milwaukee, was three cradles to Dawes' left. Dawes' watch said # hours when the chamber was filled. A loudspeaker overhead crackled into life. "Settlers of the planet Osiris, welcome aboard the starship Geenschein," a deep, pleasantly resonant voice said. "I'm Captain McKenzie, and for the next four weeks I'll be in command of your ship. The compartments you now are in will be your residences for the entire journey -- but you won't be as cooped up as it may seem now. There are two lounges, one fore and one aft, and a galley where you'll take your meals. "The Gegenschein carries a crew of nine, and you'll meet them all soon enough. But I'll have to point out now that this isn't exactly a luxury liner. My crewmen have their own jobs to do, such as navigating, controlling the fuel flow, servicing the ship in flight. You'll be responsible for the tidiness of your own cabins, and each day ten of you will serve with the crew to help prepare meals and clean the ship. "Blastoff will take place, as you know, at # hours. We will travel on rocket drive for eightythree minutes. At # hours the rocket drive will cease to be operative, and we will make the Einsteinian conversion to nospace at # hours. At # hours dinner will be served in the galley. "We'll continue on Einstein drive for the next four weeks. In case any of you intend to get a last look at Earth as we blast off, please be informed now that there are no vision outlets or pickups anywhere in the ship but in the main control cabin. The reason for this is simple: any kind of porthole constitutes a structural weakness in the hull, and since better than # of the trip is going to be spent in nospace, where there's nothing to see anyway, the designing engineers have eliminated the visual outlets. "Let me ask you now simply to relax, lie back, and get to know your neighbor. Blastoff time is thirty-five minutes from now. Thank you." The speaker clicked off. Minutes ticked away. Dawes tried to freeze in his mind the image of the moon full in the night sky, the Big Dipper, the belt of Orion. Less than ten minutes remained now. He tried to picture the layout of the ship. At the very top, at the rounded nose, the control cabin and crew quarters were probably located. Then, he thought, below that were the two male dormitories, one on each side of the ship. Then the central lounge, and below that the two female dorms. In the rear, the other lounge, and the galley. And behind them, the rocket combustion chambers and the mysterious compartment housing the Einstein Drive. He knew very little about the Einstein Drive. Only that its core was a thermonuclear generator that, by establishing a controlled field of greater than solar intensity, created a stress-pattern in the fabric of space. And that the ship would nose through the stress-pattern like a seal gliding through a cleft in the Arctic ice, and the ship would enter the realm termed nospace. And then? Somehow, travelling faster than the normal universe's limiting velocity, that of light, the Gegenschein would breast the gulf of light-years and emerge from nospace in the vicinity of Vega, to make a landing on Osiris by conventional chemical-rocket propulsion. Far beneath him, Dawes sensed the rumbling of the giant rocket engines. There was a thunderous roar; a massive fist pushed down, against his chest, as the ship lifted. His heart pounded furiously under the strain of acceleration. He closed his eyes. He felt the pang of separation. His last bond with Earth, the bond of gravity, had been severed. IX weeks could move so slowly. The novelty of being spaceborne wore off almost at the beginning. In nospace, there was no sense of motion, no rocket vibration, no feeling of acceleration. The ship hung motionless. And the hundred passengers, crammed mercilessly into their tiny vessel, began to feel like prisoners in a large cell. As "day" dragged into "day" and week into week, Dawes found himself going stale with the monotony and constant discomfort. He counted days, then hours, until landing. He slept as much as he could, sometimes fifteen and sixteen hours a day. until he could manage to sleep no more. Little cliques were forming aboard the ship as the weeks passed. Groups of six or eight took shape: people from the same geographical area, or people of the same general age and intelligence groups, who saw something to share in their common misfortune. Dawes joined none of these groups. He was the youngest member of the colony, at twenty -- by some fluke of the Computer, none of the other men was less than twenty-five, and most were in their early thirties  -- and he stood to one side, unable to mingle at ease with the older people. Many of them had lost wives, families, homes that had been built and furnished with care and expense, jobs that had cost them outlay of energy and vigorous exertion. He felt guilty, in a way, that he had lost nothing more serious than his education and his chosen profession. Conscious that the other Selectees were adults and he himself something less than that, though more than a boy, Dawes established and observed the gulf between them, and made few friends. In the third week an election was held; Phil Haas was chosen Colony Director, running unopposed. He announced that he would serve for one year and then would hold new elections. The colonists assembled granted him the right to rule by decree until a constitution could be adopted, and some sort of colonial council established. Dawes wondered about the unanimity of the election. Certainly there were other men among the fifty who yearned for power. Why had they kept politely silent while Haas was being acclaimed? Men like Dave Matthews, Lee Donaldson: strong men, capable men, outspoken men. Perhaps they were just biding their time, Devers thought. Waiting, letting Haas handle the difficult task of getting the colony in motion, then making their bids. Dawes shrugged. He had no interest in playing politics. He kept to himself, intending to do his job as a colonist as best he could, without looking for trouble. Let others fight among themselves for responsibilities; he was content to drift passively along. After all, he thought, he hadn't asked to be sent here. Nor was he going to ask for any great share in the responsibilities. A T the end of the fourth week, finally -- it seemed like the fourth century since blasting off from Earth -- a shipwide announcement sent the Osiris colonists scuttling back to their protective cradles. "The time is # hours, ship time. In exactly twelve minutes, at #, we're going to make a transition out of nospace and back to rocket drive. We'll enter the atmosphere of Osiris at # hours and take three hours to complete our landing orbit. We'll touch down on the day-side of Osiris at # hours, which will be exactly noonday down below. Everybody strap down now." Dawes' fingers quivered nervously as he lashed himself into the acceleration cradle. This was it! Landing in less than five hours! He wondered about Osiris. The Colonization Bureau had prepared a couple of mimeographed sheets about the planet for distribution to the colonists, but the information on them was scanty. He knew that the planet was roughly Earthsize -- # miles in diameter -- and that the soil was arable; that the air was like the air of Earth, only with a trifle less oxygen, a trifle more nitrogen, not enough of a difference to matter; that the planet had seven continents, of which two were polar and thus uninhabitable. Survey team reports were never tremendously reliable: the survey teams moved with desperate haste, often scouting an entire solar system in a day or two, and once they found a world to be reasonably suitable they rarely bothered to look for drawbacks. According to the survey team report, there was no intelligent life on Osiris, at least not on the temperate northern continent that had been chosen for the colony. It was an easy statement to make; so far intelligent life had been discovered nowhere else in the universe. Many planets had species no more than a hundred thousand years away from intelligence, but nowhere but on Earth was there a culture, a civilization, as much as a language. Or so the findings had been so far. At # hours came the shock of transition. The Einstein generator lashed out, smashing a gap in the fabric of nospace, and the Gegenschein slipped through the aperture and back into the universe of real things. Instantly the rocket engines came into play, guiding the ship into orbit round the planet below. In a series of ever-narrowing spirals the Gegenschein would glide downward, matching velocities with Osiris, until its path grazed the skin of the planet and the ship came to rest at last. Lying pinioned in his acceleration cradle, Mike Dawes clenched his teeth against the pounding of the rockets. The Gegenschein was not insulated very well against engine vibration; it was strictly functional, a tube designed to transport people from one world to another, without pretensions to comfort. He regretted the lack of a vision screen. It might have been inspiring to see Osiris growing steadily ahead as the Gegenschein landed. Much more inspiring than lying on your back in a badly ventilated compartment, Dawes thought, lying in the half-darkness. Somewhere ahead in the night was Osiris, Vega IX, four brightest star in Earth's sky. Would Sol be visible in Osiris' night sky? Probably -- as an insignificant white dot of negligible magnitude.  ' schein plunged planetward. Each man in the compartment was alone with his dreams and memories now. The minutes passed; at # hours Captain McKenzie announced that the ship had entered Osiris' atmosphere at last. The actual landing was still three hours away, as the ship swung round the planet, coming closer and closer to the surface -- # hours. Within his cradle Mike Dawes struggled to keep his stomach under control. The last hour had been a bumpy, bouncing ride downward through thickening layers of atmosphere. Atmospheric eddies jounced the golden ship; a storm layer buffeted it. But the journey was ending. The Gegenschein hung low over Osiris' northern temperate continent, dropping, dropping -- Landing. The impact shuddered through the ship. The Gegenschein wobbled only an instant before the landing-jacks took effect, digging into the ground. Captain McKenzie said, "We've landed right on the nose. Welcome to Osiris, ladies and gentlemen." We're here, Dawes thought. He longed to burrow through the ship's wall and see the new planet. But an hour more passed before the colonists could leave the ship. First, the routine atmospheric tests ("as if they'll take us all back home if they discover that the air's pure helium," Sid Nolan grumbled). Then, the cooling-off period of fifteen minutes while nozzles beneath the ship's belly sluiced decontaminating fluids onto the landing area to deal with the radiation products and chemical poisons of the rocket exhaust. After that, the opening of the hatch, the lowering of the catwalk. No gantry lift waiting for them; descent from the ship would be by ladder only. Phil Haas and Mary Elliot were the first people out; after them came the others, filing in slow shuffle along the companionway until they reached the passenger exit hatch. Dawes was the twentieth to leave the ship. He stepped out onto the lip of the hatch. Osiris lay before him. The ship had landed in a clearing at the shore of a glittering blue lake. Beyond the expanse of pinkishred sand, the soil became more fertile; not far away loomed a dark, ominous-looking forest, and high beyond rose arching black cliffs. Gray clouds lay heavily in the dark-blue sky like greasy puffs of wool. High overhead burned giant Vega, with its disc the apparent size of the sun of Earth, even at a air smelled subtly different -- thin, with a salt tang to it that was nothing like the tang of the open ocean. And it was cold. The temperature was about fifty, but an icy wind came sleeting down out of the forest, cutting into him as he stood staring sixty feet above the ground. TE hadn't expected it to be this cold. For no specific reason he had anticipated tropic heat. But Osiris, at least this continent at this time of year, seemed bleak, inhospitable, uninviting. "Come on, kid," someone said behind him. "Don't stand there all day. Get down the ladder." Dawes reddened and scrambled hastily down the catwalk. The others were waiting below. The pinkish sand crunched underfoot. Feeling for the first time, Dawes thought with awe and wonder, the touch of a human foot. Chill winds swept down on him as he stood huddling into himself for warmth, waiting for Haas to organize things, to take charge. As the colonists filed out of the ship, they wandered about aimlessly on the beach, moving without direction or purpose or words, all of them struggling to minimize the shock of concrete realization that they were alone on an alien planet, never to see Earth again. At last all hundred had disembarked, as well as Captain McKenzie and his crew. Haas had obtained a whistle from somewhere. He blew it now. "Attention! Attention, everybody!" The wanderers returned to the group. Silence fell. The wind hooted through the distant forest. Haas said, "Captain McKenzie tells me that he intends to blast off for Earth as soon as possible. Our first job, then, is to unload the ship. We'll do it in bucketbrigade fashion. Noonan, pick a team of five men and go with Captain McKenzie: you'll be the ones to get the crates out of the ship. Sanderson, choose three and arrange yourselves near the ship to take the crates as they come out. We'll pass them along until they've been placed over there, at the end of the beach, beyond the five hundred yard safety zone the Gegenschein is going to need." Haas paused. "Matthews, take four colonists and go scouting around the area. Look around for any lurking wildlife, and yell if you see anything. The rest of you just stay in the area; no wandering off." Dawes was passed over by the heads of the teams; he shrugged, thrust his hands in his pockets, and stood to one side. The cargo hatch in the belly of the ship was lowered open, and Noonan and his team entered, while the Gegenschein crew clambered back up the catwalk to ready their ship for departure. In a few minutes, crates began appearing, heavy wire-bound wooden crates that contained all of Earth that there had been room to bring along. across the clearing, out of the way of the ship's rocket-blast area. The job took nearly an hour. Haas inventoried each crate as it appeared, checking it off against a master list. When half had appeared, he whistled again and rotated the teams, letting the tired men rest and putting fresh ones to work. Dawes took his place in the second team, hauling the crates away from the ship and over to the supply dump. The cargo hold was nearly empty when Dave Matthews came trotting out of the forest, shouting for Haas. The Colony Director turned. "What is it, Dave?" Matthews raced up, panting. Dawes and a few others stopped work to listen to him. Matthews gasped, "Aliens! I saw aliens!" Haas frowned. "What?" "Skulking around in the edge of the forest. Dark shadowy things. They looked like men, or apes, or something." A twinge of fear went through Dawes. But Haas smiled. "Are you sure, Dave?" "How can I be sure? They ran away as soon as I went toward them." "Did anyone else in your team see them?" Haas asked, looking at the other four members of the scouting patrol. "Not me," Sid Nolan said. "Me neither," Paul Wilson agreed. "We came running when Matthews shouted, but we didn't see anything." "And the survey team said there was no intelligent life on Osiris," Nolan pointed out. Haas shrugged the matter off. "We'll check later. You might have been mistaken, Dave." "I hope so. But I wasn't." The affair was allowed to drop there. At the moment, it was more urgent to empty out the Gegenschein. The work made Dawes perspire, and then he felt colder when a gust of wind came. But he enjoyed the mere activity of moving around, of using his muscles after four weeks of dreary confinement. At last the ship was unloaded. An assortment of packing-crates and smaller cases sat in disorder five hundred yards from the ship. The crewmen bustled busily about, checking off items on a vastly accelerated count-down. It took two days to prepare a ship for blastoff when it was laden with colonists and cargo; empty, it could be readied in only a few hours. While the crewmen worked, the hundred colonists boarded the ship for the last time, to prepare a meal in the galley. It would be their third meal of the day. But it was only, midday on Osiris, and Haas had ordered that work would continue until sundown, six or seven hours hence, so they would be adjusted to the new time-schedule from the very start. Dawes was on the cleanup crew after the meal. When he emerged from the ship, finally, he saw Haas and Captain McKenzie in conference. Haas was counting, to make certain everyone was off the ship. There was always the chance of a stowaway. He blew his whistle. "Attention, all! The Gegenschein is about to blast off! Everyone over by the cargo, right away! The Gegenschein is leaving!" Final preparations took twenty minutes. Mike Dawes, standing in the safe zone with the other colonists, felt a sharp inward tug as he saw the ship seem to draw back on its haunches, retracting its landing jacks in the last few moments before blastoff. This was the last link with Earth, the golden ship at the edge of the lake. The warning honk died away and the ship sprang suddenly up from the ground, hovering on its blazing pillar of flame for a moment as it fought with Osiris' pull, then, breaking loose, shot upward to the cloud-muddied sky. For half a minute, perhaps, the retreating rocket-blast added a second sun to the sky. A strange luminous glow cast double shadows over the ground, but faded rapidly. The Gegenschein was gone. A life hardly begun was finished now, Dawes realized. X  ing-crate at the far end of the clearing and blew his whistle. It was time to get things set up. Dawes joined the gatheringgroup. "We're on our own now," Haas said, speaking loudly to fight the insistent whistling of the wind. "That ship is gone and it isn't ever coming back. We've got plenty to do how. The first thing is to set up the stockade and inflate the domes." A voice from the back of the group -- Dave Matthews' voice -- called out. "Phil, what about those aliens I saw? I think we ought to have a permanent security patrol, just in case they come back." Haas' lean face darkened. "The important thing is to get the stockade built immediately." "But the aliens -- " "There's some doubt as to whether you actually did see aliens, Dave. Remember, the survey team didn't find any such creatures here -- " "How long did they look? Half an hour? Haas said with a trace of impatience, "Dave, if you want to discuss this further, take it up in private with me. We can't spare men for a patrol until the stockade's been built. Besides which, your aliens, if they exist, are probably more afraid of us than we are of them." Haas chuckled. "Let's get busy. We've got plenty more things to do by nightfall -- important things -- including the marrying." Dawes moistened his lips. Yes, the marrying! He had pushed the thought into the back of his mind, but now there was no avoiding it. He drew his jacket tighter around himself. Like most thin people, he had little use for cold weather; the wind seemed to cut right through his jacket and between his ribs. The survey-team report had said Osiris was Earthtype, uninhabited, and fairly fertile, but they hadn't said anything about that damned nor'wester that ripped down constantly from the forest. Haas stepped down from his packing-crate and called over Noonan, Stoker, Donaldson, and several of the other stronger men of the group, to discuss plans for setting up the colony. According to the booklets that had been distributed before landing, there was a fixed and time-tested procedure for setting up a new colony -- a procedure that had worked well on the hundreds of worlds to which humanity had already spread. The first step was to establish a stockade, to mark the original boundaries of the colony and to provide a tangible measure of the colony's foothold, as well as to serve in keeping stray alien creatures away. Once the stockade was up, the bubble-houses went up, the homes of the colonists. No more the painstaking hewing of logs for cabins; the new bubble-houses sprouted simply and easily from the extrusion nozzles. A gallon of the self-polymerizing fluid could serve to create homes for thousands of colonists; once it was gone, the science of architecture would begin on the new world. settled, the next matter was that of being fruitful and multiplying. Since the colonists were screened for fertility, it was reasonable to expect thirty or forty offspring in the first year of the colony, twenty or thirty in each succeeding year. By the time ten years had passed, the older children would be able to care for the new crop of babies. After fifteen years, the total population of the colony might be as much as five hundred -- and the first second-generation marriages would be taking place. Given unlimited space and no economic problems, breeding could be unlimited for several generations. Population would expand: eight hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred. It leaped upward by exponential bounds in each generation. And the colony spread outward into the alien wilds, until the raw settlement became a village, a town, a city, a city among other cities. One by one, a series of new Earths would thus be carved across the reaches of space by grumbling, miserable, conscripted pioneers. Haas took a while to formulate his plans for the first day's work. Dawes waited at the edge of the clearing. The idle colonists, in no hurry to receive their orders, had formed into the shipboard cliques again. Eight or nine women stood in one bleakfaced little clump not far away, their faces reflecting their realization of where they were and how dead their past lives were. Further away Dawes saw a circle composed of the younger unmarried men, joking tensely, nudging each other in the ribs. The four married couples -- the Wilsons, Zacharies, Frys and Nortons -- remained apart, as if emphasizing the fact that they would not be concerned with the mass mating soon to take place. Dawes stole a look at the little group of women. At least half of them were far too old for him to begin to consider as a potential mate. If he had last choice, he might indeed have one of them thrust at him, but he hoped not. A strange uneasiness stole over Dawes and he turned his attention away from the women. One of them would be his wife, on this bitter, wind-tossed world. He would know which one soon enough. He did not dare speculate on which. Haas had finished working out his plans. He whistled once again for attention. "The order of business right now is to get the stockade up. You've been divided into six work gangs. Gangs one, two, and three will be led by Ky Noonan, Howard Stoker, and myself. We'll distribute blasters to those three gangs and you'll gather treetrunks for the backbone of the stockade. Work gang four will be under Sid Nolan, and that gang will be in charge of placing the trunks in the ground. Work gang five, under Lee Donaldson, will bind the trunks together with permospray. Work gang six, under Mary Elliot, will unpack the crates and provisions." TT was neatly arranged. Most of the men were assigned to the three logging groups. Dawes and sixteen others went into Nolan's group, which did the actual building of the stockade. The women were split between Donaldson's group and Mary Elliot's. The work went off smoothly enough, thanks to the tools supplied by Earth. The forest was thick with barkless trees twenty feet high and six or eight inches in diameter; the three logging groups made swift work of burning them down, trimming away the limbs and the fragrant needly foliage, and sizing the trees to a uniform twenty-foot length. It took only a few minutes to prepare each tree; within half an hour, several dozen were stacked at the border between the forest and the clearing. At that point, Nolan's group went into action. They had already laid out their boundaries, and now it was a simple matter of scooping out a pit with the vacuum extractor, shoving the sharpened point of the trunk some four feet into the ground, and tamping down the ground. Dawes hove to with the rest, feeling a pleasant thrill at the thought that the colony was under way, that his hands were helping to shape its walls. As the row of stakes grew, placed regularly in the ground three feet apart, Donaldson followed along with the extrusion machines, spewing out a binding layer of plastic between each wooden rib. And within the stockade boundaries the women worked, ripping into the sealed crates and laying bare their contents. After nearly two hours of steady work, the stockade had taken definite shape on three sides. After three hours, it was practically finished, and Haas and his crew, no longer required to supply more logs, were fashioning the gate and bolt for the stockade's entrance. Already the place seemed snug, the winds less cruel, Dawes thought. He felt exhausted from his work, the constant hoisting of logs and placing them in the ground, but it was a good kind of exhaustion, the warm feeling of constructive exertion. Nightfall came. Giant Vega had dipped far below the horizon, and a sprinkling of unfamiliar constellations brightened the darkening sky. No moon had risen. But, by floodlights, the work had gone on. The stockade was nearly perfect, having sprung up miraculously in only a few hours. And the bubble-houses had been blown: fifty of them, small opaque blue domes that glinted dully in the floodlights' glare. A fifty-first dome, larger than the rest, stood in the very center of the stockade. It would be the central gathering-place of the colony in the early days. Dawes hunkered down on his heels, resting. He was tired; his muscles would ache in the morning. But the colony was off to a flying start. The stockade was built and the homes were erected. "Swell job, everyone," Haas congratulated them. "We're right on schedule. And it's wonderful the way you all pitched in and did your share." "What about wives?" Noonan asked. His voice echoed loudly inside the stockade. A tense, apprehensive giggle began among the women, and rapidly spread through the group. Haas held up his hand for silence. "I was just getting to that part of it now. It's the one remaining item of business." felt strange, and his hands were colder than they ought to be. Wives. The moment had come. In a few hours, he was going to have a woman for the first time. He wondered what it would be like -- whether it would be the way he expected it to be. Probably not. Somehow, nothing ever was. The women looked strained, oddly tense, as Haas organized them into a group for the matepicking. Dawes studied their faces. Cherry Thomas was smiling, openly expectant; she wanted a mate, and it didn't seem to matter to her who she got. Some of the other women looked worried, pale, tense. Those were the ones who had never been married, who had dreamed of a different sort of wedding-night, before their number came up. Others, those who had left husbands behind on Earth, were obviously thinking of their loved ones trillions of miles away. Haas unfolded a sheet of paper and frowned. "The time has come to couple off. The instructions I have suggest the following recommended procedure for handling this. As a Volunteer, Ky Noonan has the right to take first pick. As Colony Director, I get second pick. After that, we proceed in order of Computer Registration Number -- an order known only to me, at the moment. I think that way is better than any other system, and unless I hear any strong objections that'll be the method we'll use." No one spoke. Dawes privately wished that someone would speak up in favor of a more gradual system -- say, letting things take their natural course, couples forming as the days went by. But colonies were warned against such arrangements. It was far safer to establish couplings right at the start, having everyone in the small community settled at once. "Very well," Haas said. "We'll go down the list. Each man will select a woman, but she has the right of refusal. In case your choice refuses you, you don't get to pick again until every other man has spoken. If anyone remains uncoupled after three runthroughs, I'll make assignments myself. Okay. Noonan, as a Volunteer you've earned the privilege of picking first. Step forward and name your choice." Noonan came forward, smiling calmly. He was the biggest, most aggressive male in the group, and he gloried in the confident knowledge of his own superiority. He ran his eyes insouciantly down the row of waiting women. A strange mixture of emotions appeared on fifty feminine faces. Some of the women seemed fearful of being picked by him, others openly hostile, others pleadingly anxious. After a moment of hushed silence, Noonan said, "All right. I pick Cherry Thomas." Dawes let his breath out explosively. He had been certain that Noonan would pick Carol Herrick -- but he had bypassed her in favor of the older woman, for some reason. Haas said, "Miss Thomas, is this choice agreeable?" Cherry Thomas stared levelly at Noonan, appraising him frankly. There were wrinkles creasing the skin around her eyes, and her flashily metallic smile seemed insincere and false. "I guess so," she said. "If Noonan wants me. I'll go with him." list. "So be it. You can have your pick of any of the bubblehouses. Suppose I say now that any marriage can be dissolved on Osiris by approval of the Council, once we have a Council. Until then, let's try not to have any split-ups." Dawes watched Noonan and Cherry stroll away to take their pick of house-site. No ceremony? He wondered. It didn't seem so. The simple act of picking solemnized the marriage. Well, Dawes thought, it's a brand-new world. Perhaps it's better this way. Haas was next, and to no one's surprise picked Mary Elliot, who accepted. That was a foregone conclusion, of course. The Colony Director looked down at his list again, and announced that Lee Donaldson had next pick. Donaldson, a strong, commanding-looking man, strode forward and announced his choice loudly: "Claire Lubetkin." Claire reddened, fidgeted, nibbled her lower lip. Haas put the question to her. She wavered indecisively, glanced around at the other men, and finally nodded. "I accept the choice." After Donaldson came Howard Stoker. He came forward in his bear-like, rumbling walk, with the dirt of his day's labor still clinging to him. He eyed the women as if making up his mind at the last moment and said, "Rina Morris." Ninety-odd pairs of eyes focused on Rina Morris. The redhaired girl drew herself up stiffly. She looked at the thickset, ugly Stoker with an expression that was anything but friendly. "Sorry. I'll wait a turn." Stoker scowled at her angrily. "Okay. If you're going to be that way, to hell with you. I pick Carol Herrick instead." Dawes whitened at the thought of Stoker pawing over Carol. He wanted to shout out, to protest. But Haas said, "Sorry, Howard. I told you before that regulations don't give you a second choice until everyone else has spoken." "But -- " "You heard me. Stoker." "Dammit, I'm not going to wait at the end of the line! Just because that slut is too proud to have me, I -- " Haas said in a voice that suddenly crackled with authority, "You'll do whatever I tell you to do, Howard. Get back in line and wait your turn. Mike Dawes has next choice." Stoker grumbled something, spat ostentatiously, and walked to the rear of the group. Dawes stumbled forth red-faced, still astonished at the sudden reprieve. Carol had been picked by Stoker, and Haas had refused to allow the choice, and now it was his choice -- A row of faces confronted him. Kindly maternal faces; frightened faces; amused faces. And one face above all others. Dawes searched for the words. "I p-pick -- I pick Carol Herrick," he stuttered, not daring to look at her. Haas smiled. "Miss Herrick?" Dawes waited for an agonizing span of time. He could not look at Carol's face. He stared away, at the ground, too tense to draw a breath. Finally she said, in a voice so soft it could barely be heard, "I accept." XI clearing together, walking rapidly away without speaking, virtually without looking at each other. He said to her finally, as they approached the circular row of bubble-houses, "We'd better pick one out." "Pick any one you like -- Mike." He glanced at them. The domes were empty, merely arching shelters against the downslanting winds, but they did provide a place to sleep if you didn't mind the ground. Colonists were not supposed to mind little things like having to sleep on the ground until there was time to build beds. He pointed at the bubble-house that adjoined Noonan's. It might be a good idea to have Noonan as a neighbor, Dawes thought. Just in case of trouble. "Let's take that one," Dawes said. They walked toward it, Dawes carrying his own suitcase and hers, each with its twenty pounds of personal possessions. At the entrance to the dome he paused, wondering vaguely whether he should bother with the old ritual of carrying his wife across the threshold. He nearly put down the suitcases to turn to her; then, changing his mind, he simply walked inside the dome. She followed him in. Within, the dome covered an area of perhaps two hundred square feet. There would be room for a bed and perhaps a clothes cabinet of some sort, not much else. Plumbing would come a while later; until that time, they would have to make do with the nearby lake for washing and drinking. "It isn't very impressive, is it?" he asked. "No. Not very." "We'll fix it up. These domes are just temporary, just places to stay until we can begin building homes. We'll have a swell place some day, Carol." He smiled encouragingly at her. But she could not keep up the pretense; she sank down onto her suitcase and stared bleakly off into nowhere. Dawes began to wonder about the sleeping arrangements for the night. They would have to spread out all their clothes, he thought, and huddle together under layers of them for warmth -- "I hadn't expected it to be like this," she said suddenly in a toneless voice. "I mean, my life, and all. I never really thought much about what I was going to do with myself. But I didn't figure I'd end up in a little bubble on some other world." "Neither did I. Neither did any of us, Carol." "But we're here, aren't we?" He nodded. After a moment he said, "What did you do, on Earth?" "Do? Oh -- I was a stenographer. Typist, mostly. For a construction firm in Oakland. I guess I was just waiting around to get married, when the time came. Well, I guess the time did come -- sort of." had never asked her before -- he had never dared to speak much with her on the ship -- but he had privately hoped she had been an actress, a writer, perhaps a singer. Someone with a talent, someone he could be proud of, someone who would stand out from all the other women. He decided he would have to be content with her slim prettiness, and let all else go. She was, it seemed, just an ordinary girl, shyly innocent. "I was going to college," he said. "Pre-Med. Ohio State. Well, that's all finished too. We have to start all over, here on Osiris." "It's like a blind date," Carol said quietly, when a few moments had passed. "You and me, put together like this. A blind date that's for keeps." "Why did you say yes when I picked you?" "What else could I do? I didn't want any of the others, the older men. You looked like somebody I could talk to, somebody I'd be happy with. Even if you are a little younger than me. It's better than going with one of those older ones." "I hope we're happy together, Carol." "I hope so too. But -- Mike, I'm afraid -- " There were tears in the edges of her eyes. Dawes realized that she was rapidly losing her nerve and might well go off into wild hysterics any moment. That was not the way he cared to spend his wedding night. And he wouldn't know how to handle her if she burst out in tears. He said as firmly as he could, "We're going to have to make the most of things, Carol. You know what I mean. It's going to be this way, now that our number came up. You and me, together on Osiris, and no turning back. Not ever." She nodded. And then, after a frozen moment of silence, he found himself moving toward her, putting his arms round her thin shoulders, kissing her. It was a tender, tremulous sort of kiss, a tentative contact of dry lips, and it had hardly begun when it was interrupted suddenly by a harsh yell coming from the general direction of Noonan's bubble at the left. He pulled back from her. "Did you hear something -- a shout?" "It sounded like it was Noonan. Do you think he's having trouble with Cherry?" "I don't know. But -- " The shouts came again. And this time the words were unmistakable. Noonan was bellowing, "Hey! Dawes! Dawes! Help!"   outside their dome. They were surrounded by dark shapes, black forms against the blackness. Noonan was flailing at the shapes and shouting. "Get away from me!" the big man cried. "Hey, Dawes! Run! Get help!" Dawes froze, not knowing which way to turn. He heard Carol catch her breath sharply. His eyes, growing more accustomed to the dark, picked out the scene clearly now. Six or seven dark stubby figures -- unhuman figures -- clustered around the struggling forms of Noonan and Cherry Thomas. Dawes saw hunched, neckless heads, thick shoulders, corded arms. He was too sick to run. He stood where he was, listening to Noonan's cursing. Cherry's fearsharpened voice, and the occasional croaking grunt of a smitten attacker. Then he felt something cold and hairy touch him, and he heard Carol scream. Other colonists were coming. Dawes fought, fought for the first time since forgotten childhood. He fought with arms and legs, whirled and butted with his shoulders, kicked out at chunky, heavily furred figures he could only partially see. His nails clawed into a musky-smelling hide. He squirmed, wriggled, kicked again. And then he could fight no more. He was held tight, solidly clamped by thick alien arms. "Mike!" Carol whimpered. He felt a pang of inadequacy. "I can't do anything, Carol. Not a thing. They've got me too." "It's the aliens," came Noonan's angry voice. "The ones Matthews saw. Hostile aliens." His booming cry seemed to carry all over the colony ground. "Aliens!" Dawes felt himself being hoisted from the ground. Two powerful hands gripped his ankles, two his shoulders. He tried once again to resist, but it was like trying to break loose from the grip of a hydraulic press. He swayed. He realized he was moving. Dark shapes, and darker jungle. He was being carried toward the forest. He could see nothing, neither Carol nor Noonan nor Cherry. After a while, he stopped trying to break free. The aliens were handling him gently enough. He simply could not move, but they were carrying him along at a steady pace. Too bad there was no moon, he thought. He could make out the shadowy shapes of trees bending above him, but all else was indistinct. He heard night-birds crowing harshly, mocking him from the treetops. Fear enshrouded him; he was too frightened even to be afraid, any more. Carried along in the soft alien grip, he offered himself up to fate, knowing he had no alternative. HE journey went on for more than an hour. Perhaps it was two hours; it might just as well have been two months. Dawes lost all sense of the passage of time. The forest was surprisingly thick, for such a cold continent; dangling vines brushed his face, one of them leaving a nauseous trail of slime. His hands were in alien control; he could not even wipe his face. After a while the trail of slime, running down the left side of his face from eyebrow to the corner of his mouth, began to burn -- whether for imaginary reasons or because of some chemically corrosive effect, Dawes could not tell. He twisted his head around and managed to rub some of the slime off on the shoulder of his shirt. But an inch or two remained, just to the left of his eye, tormenting him by its inaccessibility. He wondered if it would leave some sort of mark, perhaps a white scar or a puckering of the skin. At last the trek through the forest came to its end. The aliens broke from the thicket and Dawes could see the bald, bare faces of the jutting cliffs, the upthrust fangs of black rock that had looked so forbiddingly Gothic when he had first viewed them from the lip of the Gegenschein's hatch. He began to feel the ascent. Going up the side of the mountain was a terrifying experience -- the most terrifying since the actual kidnapping. The aliens, his night-sharpened eyes perceived, had thick bluish pads on their palms and on the soles of their blunt feet. Suction pads. The aliens gripped him firmly, at shoulders and feet, and started to ascend the naked face of the cliff. Dawes swung dizzyingly back and forth as they rose. They were climbing the unvegetated rock as if it were a ladder, and with each new upward thrust he canted out over the emptiness, wisely refusing to look down. Then the upwardness ended, just when Dawes thought his mind would snap from the constant danger of the climb, and the aliens proceeded inward. Into a cave of some sort, that appeared to be hewn out of the face of the rock cliff. Dawes' fertile imagination worked overtime. He pictured strange alien sacrificial rites taking place in this Haggardesque cave. Or vampire bats lurking in the darkness ahead, grateful for the sacrifice being brought to them. But none of the dire perils he conceived came immediately to pass. The aliens simply left him in the cave. They put him down with surprising gentleness, leaving him to lie in cold, moist sand, turned their backs on him, walked away. In the utter darkness he could see nothing at all. He sensed other aliens moving about; he thought he could tell them by their ape-like shuffle. He wondered if the whole colony were to be carried off and deposited here in this cave. The survey-team said the planet was I uninhabited, he thought reproachfully. But Dave Matthews was right after all. The sound of sobbing was coming from a point somewhere to his right. As background noise he could hear the gentle murmuring sound of flowing water, as if there were a stream bubbling inside the borders of the cave. "Who's there?" he asked. "Who are you?" "It's Carol. Is that you, Mike?" Some of his fear ebbed away. At least, he thought, he was not alone! "Yes. Where are you, Carol?" "Sitting in sand, someplace. I can't see. What's going to happen to us?" "I don't know," Dawes said. "Don't move. Stay right where you are and I'll try to find you. Damn this darkness, anyway!" He looked around, trying to gauge the direction from which Carol's voice had come. But he knew that no vector would be accurate in here. The walls of the caves would have a distorting effect. A voice he recognized as Noonan's broke in, saying, "Dawes, is that you?" It came from someplace deeper in the cave, behind him, highlighted by resonating echoes. "Yes," Dawes said loudly. "And Carol's here too. Is anyone else there?" "I am," said Cherry Thomas. Her declaration echoed around the cavern. No other voices entered in. Staring unseeingly ahead of him, Dawes waited a moment, then said flatly when the echoes died, "I guess it's just the four of us, then, up here in this cave. What the hell do they want with us?" Nobody answered. Outside the cavern mouth, somewhere to his right, the endless wind whipped around the mountains, whistling, moaning. Dawes shivered. In the darkness he could just barely see his own hand held before his face -- and even then he could not really be sure whether or not it was imagination, not actual sight, that had put the image of the hand there. He had never experienced a darkness of such intensity before. And he saw another darkness more clearly now -- the darkness of a life that yanked a person out of his rightful place and threw him onto a strange world, and then when he had begun to carve some meaning and familiarity into the strangeness yanked him out again and tossed him in a windswept cave. He felt very alone, very young, more than a little frightened, just a little sick. He started to crawl across the cold wet sands that formed the floor of the cave. Evidently the brook he heard fan not too deep under the sand, close enough to the surface to impart a chill, and came bubbling out a few hundred yards deeper in the cave. No one spoke. There was steady sobbing, but he had little hint of direction. He had no idea even of how large the cave was. "Carol! Carol!" he called out. On hands and knees he groped in the blackness. After minutes of uncertain s' arrying, he felt a warm hand graze his, startling him a little. The hand found his wrist and tightened comfortingly. "Thank God," he murmured. Blindly he reached out and touched a yielding body. Arms gathered him in. He almost felt like sobbing, out of gratitude, out of shared terror. When morning flooded brightly into the cavern, Dawes woke reluctantly, groggily, from a bizarre dream of alien worlds. He looked around. With a dull sense of shock and anguish he made the discovery that he had spent his wedding night in the arms of Cherry Thomas. THE coming of daylight revealed Carol's location to him. She was lying about a hundred feet up-cavern, a pathetic little bundle sprawled on the sand. She was still asleep, her knees drawn up into her body, her hands tucked under one cheek. And, at his side, he saw that Cherry also slept -- her clothes disheveled, her bright blonde hair streaming every which way (the hair I fondled lovingly last night, Dawes thought in guilty self-condemnation), her mouth, vacuously open, lips drooping apart. Dawes felt as if he had soiled himself. His body ached; every muscle throbbed, his bones were chilled by the damp and cold, and he felt a general lassitude, the weariness of a body not yet accustomed to the exertions of love. Noonan was awake already. Dawes saw him far back in the cavern, over to the left on the side away from Carol. He was sitting up, arms clasped in front of him across his knees, looking amusedly at Dawes. "Morning," the big man said with a grin. "Good morning," Dawes said with a trace of primness that annoyed him as he detected it. "Seems you got mixed up a little last night," Noonan remarked wryly. He didn't look concerned by the switch. "This is your gal up here, you know." Dawes reddened. "I -- it was so dark -- I didn't know -- " He paused. There was something he had to know, but he could find no way of putting the question to Noonan. He said at last, "Tell me -- did you -- did you -- " He left the question unspoken. But Noonan grinned and said, "No, I didn't touch your sweetie. Couldn't manage to find her, to tell you the truth. But I'm not put out because of you and Cherry. Mistakes can happen. And you weren't the first with her, and I'm not going to be the last, either." With one easy gesture Noonan pushed himself to his feet and ambled downcavern toward Dawes, who stood waiting, contemplating the shattered ruin of his values as he glanced down at the sleeping Cherry. "These women will sleep through anything," Noonan chuckled. His eyes narrowed as he saw Dawes more closely. "Christ, you look awful. Green in the face." "I'm -- pretty tired out." "You getting sick?" Dawes shook his head. "I just feel washed out." "You look sicker than just being washed out." "How am I supposed to feel?" Dawes demanded. "Who knows where the hell we are? What are these aliens planning to do to us? We may be stew by lunchtime, Noonan." Dawes' voice sounded thin and high in his ears. "I doubt it," Noonan said casually. "But let's take a look." Together they strolled forward to the lip of the cavern. Dawes gasped. feet above the flat, dullbrown surface of Osiris. The cave was inset in an almost vertical rise of cliff. Above and below them were flat walls of black stone, gleaming faintly in the morning sun. And down below, on the distant ground, a few of the aliens moved in aimless patterns as if standing guard. Dawes pointed out past the thickly forested area. "Look there. That must be the colony, in that clearing all the way out there!" Noonan nodded. "A good ten miles or so. And we can see it easily. This is the damnedest flat world I ever saw, except for these cliffs." He gestured downward, at the aliens. "Nasty bunch down there." Dawes looked out and down. The aliens, at this distance, appeared to be nothing but yellowbrown splotches against the deeper brown of the soil. They were heavily furred, he saw, neckless, thick-bodied. He thought he could make out the bluish-purpleness of the suctionpads on the palms of their broad hands. Dawes stepped back from the rim of the cave-mouth, remarking with a levity he hardly felt, "It's a long drop." He glanced at the bigger man, who grinned and said, "Damned right it is. I'd say we were stuck here a while. We'll just have to make the most of it." Dawes quivered a little at Noonan's words, which uncomfortably echoed the words he'd spoken consolingly to Carol just before the alien attack. The reminder of his unconsummated marriage was painful. He turned away, to survey the interior of the cave. The cavern was long and deep, deeper than it was wide; it slanted back downward, vanishing into a wall of rock at the rear beyond the penetrating range of the sunlight. Far to the back of the cave the little stream gushed forth out of the live rock, coursed along the cave floor for a space, and dropped below the surface again, puddling up into a small fast-flowing narrow lake. The morning air was cold and brisk; the wind wailed past the open mouth of the cavern in relentless pursuit of itself. They were a hundred fifty feet above ground, in a cold little alcove in the side of a steep cliff. They had fresh water. They could survive here indefinitely, if -- Hunger gnawed at Dawes' middle. He said to Noonan, "Suppose we're left here to starve to death? What if they don't bring us food?" "We'll eat each other," Noonan said amiably. "Women and children first." He yawned, showing sharp, strong white teeth, and Dawes half-thought he might be serious. There was never any telling what idea Noonan might put forth as a serious suggestion. Yet he was glad Noonan was here. The older man radiated strength and competence and courage, all of them attributes that Dawes knew he himself conspicuously lacked. Noonan was an adventurer. He had been a Volunteer. That took a kind of courage Dawes could hardly begin to understand, and he respected Noonan for it. "Let's go wake up the womenfolk," Noonan suggested. "We might as well," Dawes agreed. YE headed to the back of the cavern, where Carol slept. Looking back, he saw Noonan stooping over Cherry, shaking her urgently from side to side. Carol still lay curled in her quasi-fetal position. She seemed so soundly asleep that Dawes regretted having to wake her. He knelt by her side, listened for a moment to the untroubled rhythm of her breathing, and wondered how she could be so calmly asleep in a place like this. He put his hand lightly to her shoulder. "Carol. Wake up, Carol." She stirred, but her eyes remained shut -- as if she did not want to wake, Dawes thought. As if she preferred the security of her dream. He shook her more energetically, and she began to awaken. "Carol? Are you up?" "What -- oh -- Mama, yes -- I must have overslept -- " Her eyes opened and she sat up. For an instant she stared at Dawes, at the cave, with blank incomprehension. Then her dream of home faded and reality returned. "Oh -- I was dreaming. I slept so soundly all night -- I thought you were going to come to me, but you didn't, did you? You -- " "Come," he said quietly. "Let's go down to the others. It's morning." Cherry had awakened by this time; she stood stretching, knuckling her eyes, adjusting her clothing. Noonan, nearby, stood with arms folded. Dawes and Carol went toward them, and Cherry nodded at Carol, smiled ironically at Dawes as if to reestablish the rapport that had existed between them in the darkness of the vanished night. For a long moment the four of them stood apart and looked at each other. Just looked. And Dawes saw suddenly that life in the cave was going to be complicated. He knew Noonan and Cherry, certainly, grasped the general picture. At the moment, he had no way of telling whether or not Carol realized what he had done the night before, or, if she did, whether she understood the implications of his act. That moment of love, in his blind, groping, panicky need in the darkness of the night, drew the four of them together in a way Dawes only partly understood. Inwardly he could be certain only that he had betrayed Carol. The four of them just looked at each other. Noonan was eyeing Carol's trim figure and high, full breasts with unconcealed curiosity. Cherry seemed divided: she was glaring at Noonan in a wifely, almost henpecking manner, and yet at the same time frankly studying Dawes in a way both maternal and openly possessive. She wanted everyone, it seemed. Dawes himself felt terribly unsure of his emotions. By the laws of the colony, Carol was legally his wife. But he had never touched her, except for one fleeting interrupted kiss. And he had spent their wedding night with Cherry. #'E'RE not going to have much privacy in here," Noonan said at last, breaking a silence so taut it creaked. "You can say that again," Cherry offered. "I won't. But some of us are going to have to change their ideas a little. And I don't know how long we're going to be stuck up here, either -- but I'd guess we don't get out until someone gets us out." "You don't figure there's any way we can get out ourselves?" Dawes asked. Noonan hunched his shoulders into a somber shrug. "I don't have any snap ideas. It's a long way down, that's all." "Those aliens," Carol said in a hesitant voice. "They're down there just watching us?" Noonan nodded. "There's a bunch of them outside, in the valley at the foot of the cliff. We're penned up here, and they can come get us any time they want. But there's no way for us to get out." "And I don't suppose the colony is going to come rescue us," Cherry Thomas said. "They won't give much of a damn about US. Chalk us off as lost, I guess. They'll be too busy defending their stockade." "There isn't any defense," Carol said. "If they can walk up the side of a cliff, they can climb over a twenty-foot fence, can't they?" Dawes said, "The colonists won't rescue us. They can't. They don't even know where we are. If there still is a surviving colony, that is." Noonan shook his head in agreement. "That's a point. The aliens may have everybody cooped up, four to a cave. Or they may have just snatched the four of us. There's no way of telling." "Well, we're stuck here," Cherry said. "But what are we going to do about food?" Noonan shrugged. "We can't eat sand. Maybe the aliens will be nice about it and bring us something we can eat. Or maybe they won't." "Suppose they don't?" Carol asked. "Then there are three things we can do. We can sit around in here and wait to starve to death, or we can take turns eating each other, or we can simply jump out the front of the cave." Noonan laughed cavernously. "I'd recommend the last idea. It makes for a quicker death, that way." the cavern and peered down the vertiginous height. He was stunned to see alien faces peering upward at him. There were about twenty of the aliens halfway up the side of the cliff, making no attempt to move closer, looking upward at him. Their blunt heads were almost entirely covered with short bristly yellow-brown fur, from which dark blue eyes, piercingly intense, stared out. Dawes turned away. Suddenly, he heard a thump behind him. Surprised, he whirled and caught a glimpse of the purple suction-pad of an alien as it flashed and disappeared. A bundle lay at the mouth of the cave. Dawes ran to the edge of the cave and looked out. An alien was scampering down the side of the cliff to rejoin his fellows below. Dawes returned to the bundle. It was a package about the size of a man, wrapped in a reddishyellow animal hide that was shaggy and rank. Frowning, Dawes undid the coarse twine that held the uncured hide together and lay back the wrapping. His eyes widened. Rising, he cupped one hand to his mouth and called out to the others. "Hey, food! Come here, all of you! The aliens brought us food!" As Noonan and Cherry and Carol came crowding around to see, Dawes spread out the provisions. The largest item in the bundle was a freshly-killed animal, small, foreshortened, vaguely pig-like, with a hairless black skin. A stiff little tail about six inches long thrust out sharply at them. There was a deep gash in the animal's throat, but otherwise it was whole, from its tail to its flattened snout and glassy yellow buttons of eyes. Strapped to the beast by a crude length of twine was a short, sharp knife made of some shiny gray material very much like obsidian. The bundle also included several clusters of milk-white fruits the size of large grapes, and some oblong blue gourd-like vegetables with coarse, knobby skins. Dawes' mouth watered. "So it looks like they intend to feed us," Noonan said. "That may be good, or maybe it isn't. I hope they're not fattening us for a sacrifice." "We'll find that out soon enough," said Dawes. "We'll know whenever we get fed again. If they don't throw us any more for a week, we can figure that the fattening idea is wrong." "How did the bundle get here?" Cherry asked. "An alien climbed up the side of the cliff and tossed it in the entrance," Dawes said. "Then he beat it. He looked like a big brown spider skittering down the rock wall." Using the blade, Noonan sliced into the animal, while Dawes and the women watched. Dawes was fascinated with Noonan's surgical precision. The roughly-flaked stone knife was razor-sharp, and the big man had a ready way with the beast; he carved with the skill of a professional butcher. He laid the animal open speedily, pulling back flaps of its dark red underbelly-skin, and scooped out the warm entrails. He dumped them to one side. "At least," Noonan said, "the alien blood is the right color." He efficiently carved chunks of meat from the small creature. "Maybe this meat is poison and maybe it isn't, but at least the blood's right." Carol shuddered. "I've never eaten raw meat. Isn't there some way we can make a fire?" Noonan paused to glance up at her. "No, there isn't," he said emphatically. "I know you didn't want to come on this trip, girly. But you're here, now. You'd better be ready to eat plenty of raw meat -- and worse things." silent, almost shamefaced meal. The veneer of civilization that still clung to all of them, even Noonan, dampened their spirits as they ate the bloody meat. Dawes was voraciously hungry, and it wasn't as hard for him to overcome his conditioning against eating raw meat as he thought it would be. Still, something about the sticky blood that ran between his fingers, pasting them together, made him queasy. And he could see that Carol had to make a visible effort to choke the meat down. Noonan ate without inhibitions; Cherry put away her share with a certain reserve, but with no outward show of revulsion. The meat had an odd, pungent taste about it, even raw, that made it more appealing than it might otherwise have been. There were ten of the blue gourds. After the meat course, Noonan doled out one gourd to each of them and put the remaining six aside. "In case we don't get fed again too soon," he explained. "These things will keep. The meat won't." The gourds tasted sour, strongly acidified; they had a stringy, unpleasant texture, and needed plenty of chewing. But they were nourishing, and filled up the stomach well. Dawes finished his gourd quickly and turned his attention to the white grapes. These were doughy in consistency, dry, and not very good. When everyone was through eating, Noonan gathered together the remnants of the meal, the bones of the small animal and the shells of the gourds, and hurled them from the cavemouth. After a distinct pause came the thudding sounds of landing. "Why'd you do that?" Dawes asked. "To show them that we appreciated the stuff. There's no better way than to toss back a carcass that's been cleaned of flesh. Anyway, we can't have that junk sitting around in here." Noonan pointed upcavern, where the little stream split the cavern floor into two roughly equal sectors. "Look here, Dawes. Suppose you and Carol take the far corner up there, on the right." "And you?" "Cherry and I'll stay on the left, a little ways lower down toward the cavemouth. That's for sleeping. It's the best arrangement we can make." "It'll be something like living in a goldfish bowl," Cherry said. Dawes shrugged. "We'll have to manage." He rose, walked to the front of the cave, and peered out. Seven or eight aliens squatted on the ground a hundred fifty feet below, looking up. "More like a goldfish bowl than you think," he said, turning around. "They're watching us from down there. Just watching. As if -- as if we were really fish in a bowl, or pets in a cage." "Maybe we are," Noonan said. He scooped up a handful of moist sand, compressed it in his clenched fist until it was a hard ball, and angrily hurled it down at the staring aliens. It broke apart in midflight and showered harmlessly down as a spray of sand. Noonan turned away, cursing softly. day dragged along horribly. Four people in an escape-proof cell a hundred yards long and perhaps seventy feet wide, without fire, without anything but themselves. And they hadn't learned yet to like each other much. Dawes felt his nerves tightening like the tuned strings of a fiddle. There was nothing to do in the cave but stare at each other, talk, tell jokes. And there was so little to talk about. Noonan was monolithic; he spoke only when he chose, never speaking just for the mere sake of making noise. Carol's conversation seemed to be limited to expressions of faint hopes and fears; Cherry's, to jokes and acid-tipped reminiscences... It was Noonan who broke the hypnosis. He snapped to his feet out of a cross legged position without using his hands. "I've got an idea," he said. "Maybe it isn't worth much, but at least I can try it." He began to strip off his shirt, kicking off his shoes at the same time. "What are you going to do?" Dawes asked. Noonan unsnapped his trousers. "Take a look at that underground stream up back. I'm going to get in there and wander around a little. Maybe the stream comes out somewhere. Maybe we can all get out the other side." He picked up his clothes, stuffed them under his arm, and, wearing only briefs, walked upcavern to the place where the stream broke the surface of the cavern floor. Looking back he called, "Come on up here with me, Dawes. If you hear me yell, come on in after me." Dawes joined him. Noonan tossed down the bundle of his clothes, stepped out of his briefs, and, naked, entered the water. It swirled knee-deep as he waded farther upcavern, then abruptly grew deeper. As it approached the height of his chest, Dawes said uneasily, "It's dangerous to try this, Noonan. You may get trapped underneath, somewhere. I won't be able to hear you if you yell." Noonan turned to glance back. His lips were blue, and despite himself he was shivering, but he smiled. "So? What of it? At least I tried." He turned again and advanced toward the point at which the stream dipped below ground level again and swept back into the mountain. Dawes heard Noonan suck breath in gaspingly, and then Noonan went under. Tensely Dawes began to count off the seconds. "Where did he go?" Dawes heard Cherry ask. He turned and saw both women standing behind him. That annoyed him; he did not want Carol to see Noonan's naked body when and if he came out of the stream. He realized it was a foolish, prudish sort of thing, but the real reason, he knew, lay deep in his own shyness. "He went under," Dawes said simply. "He's been gone half a minute," Dawes said a few seconds later. "He ought to be up soon." "Suppose he doesn't come up?" Carol asked. he kicked off his shoes, knowing he'd be expected t# go in after Noonan and try to find him. He started to shiver a little, and his hands went tentatively to his belt. How long could a man stay under water? Even a man like Noonan? "You oughta go in and look for him," Cherry said. "He may be drowning." "Yeah. I know." The counting mechanism in his mind functioning automatically now, ticking away the seconds. With a cold hand Dawes started to strip off his trousers, not worrying about modesty in the face of the cold stream that awaited him. Suddenly Noonan broke surface, head first -- leaping up high above the water, gasping loudly for breath, plunging back down like a sounding whale. Choking, retching, he came up again, battled the swift current for an instant or two, and managed to pull himself to the edge of the water. Dawes waded in a couple of feet, grabbed his arm, and tugged him up on the sand. Noonan was blue all over; goosebumps of enormous size covered him. He lay there, sprawled out with his face down in the sand, drawing in breath with great hoarse sobbing sighs. Finally he looked up. "Cold," he said. "Cold!" "You find anything?" Dawes asked. Weakly Noonan shook his head. "No. Not a damned thing. I followed the stream as far as I could. Nothing. Came back and couldn't find the outlet. Thought I'd -- thought I'd drown. Then I broke through." He shivered convulsively. Dawes had never seen a man look so cold and completely exhausted before. Noonan continued to sob for breath. "He'll freeze to death," Carol said anxiously. "He's all wet and the sand's sticking to him. We ought to warm him up somehow." Dawes felt irritated by her show of sympathy. Noonan's wild swim, he thought, had been nothing but a grandstand play; showboating for the benefit of the women, and nothing more. "He'll warm up by himself," Dawes grunted. Cherry glared at him. "The hell he will. You leave him like that, he'll catch pneumonia or something. But I'll take care of him." Dawes looked at her, startled. As she spoke, the blonde had wriggled out of most of her clothing, and wore only a bra and sheer white panties now. He glanced away, reddening, but caught a peripheral sight of Cherry throwing down her remaining clothes defiantly. Whitely nude, she lay down in the sand next to the still gasping Noonan. She put her arms around him. "You two go away," she said without looking up. "I'll keep him warm." TO more food came that day. " The aliens obviously planned to give them just one meal a day -- if that. "We need a hostage," Noonan said, talking more to himself than to any of the others. "It's the only way to get anywhere. Tomorrow we hang around the cavemouth until they bring the food -- if they bring the food. When the alien shows up, we grab him." "What good is that going to do." Dawes wanted to know. "I don't know," Noonan said. "But at least it's something, dammit! A sign that we're doing something to get out. You want to sit on your can in here forever, kid?" "We probably will," said Cherry. "Like goddam pets. Birds in a gilded cave. Why couldn't the bastards have picked someone else? Why us?" Night was falling. Outside, in the valley, a red alien bonfire flickered. "They're watching us," Dawes said. "Watching all the time. They want to see what we'll do. They want to see how long it takes before we start fighting, before we hate each other's guts, before we start jumping off this damned cliff to get free." "Shut up," Noonan snapped. Dawes ignored him. "I mean it! It's like a lab experiment. I had experiments like this in psych class, in college. You take four rats, see, and you stick them in a cage. Or you put them on a treadmill, and toss them some food when they look bushed. That's what we are, rats on a treadmill. The experimenter waits and watches, taking notes, looking to see how long it is until the rats start snapping at each other, until they drop from exhaustion." "I told you to shut up." Noonan rumbled threateningly. "We can take it." "Don't kid yourself, Noonan," said Cherry, half to herself. "The crackup's coming. It won't take long." TN the darkness of that second night, Dawes cradled Carol in his arms. His wife. Hollow mockery of a honeymoon. Beneath the constant bubbling of the stream came the sound of Noonan's harsh laughter, and Cherry's answering giggle. Noonan and Cherry had settled down for the night somewhere downcaveriTi In the utter darkness, there was no knowing where. Carol was warm, pliable, with a tense reserve of tightstrung nervousness. They were silent a long while, holding each other for warmth, and then out of nowhere she asked, "You slept with Cherry last night, didn't you?" Even in the darkness, Dawes reddened. "Does it really matter?" "I -- suppose not." "I didn't know what I was doing. The kidnapping, and all, upset me. Cherry tricked me. She let me think it was you, last night." "Oh," Carol said. The whispered conversation died again. Noonan and Cherry were still noisily merry at their end of the cave. Dawes listened to his own breathing for a while, longing to possess Carol but waiting for some sort of cue. After a while the girl said, "How long can we stay living like this? The four of us. I thought you and Noonan were going to fight today." "Noonan can kill me with his pinky and thumb. It wouldn't have been much of a fight. But I was asking for it. I started to crack up." Her lips grazed his, then pulled away. "That was your first time last night, wasn't it?" she asked. "Yes." Hesitantly. Better not to lie about it, Dawes thought. "Tonight's mine," she said. TN three days, Dawes was beginning to think that cave life might almost become bearable. It was possible for human beings to adapt to almost any kind of situation, he told himself. Even living in a cold, windy cave on an alien planet. Food came regularly, about noon each day -- the same assortment each time, a newlykilled beast, white grapes, gourds. Noonan's plan of catching an alien and holding him as a hostage proved about as practicable as flying out of the cave, or walking insectlike down the sheer face of the cliff. Each day the alien messenger would fling the food package into the cave and vanish before the watching men could move. They kept guard for two days, but without even coming close to success. The alien would climb the cliff, hurl the bundle in, and scamper away again. After two days Noonan and Dawes completely abandoned the idea of being able to catch one. The blowup came on the fourth day, when Dawes and Carol were bathing. Carol had stripped, and crouched naked at the water's edge, cupping up handfuls and rubbing her face and body to break the shock of climbing in. A sort of convention had sprung up in the cave: when one couple bathed, the others busied themselves elsewhere, to provide at least the impression of privacy. But as he prepared to undress and join Carol in the water, Dawes glanced around and saw Noonan leaning against the cave wall not far from the mouth, watching them. For a surprised second or two, Dawes had no idea of what to say. The convention in the cave had always been a completely unspoken one, and he knew Noonan cared very little about his own privacy or anybody else's. But still, thought Dawes in angry annoyance, there was such a thing as common decency, even here in the cave. While he stared silently at Noonan, the big man smiled coldly and said, "Something wrong?" "What are you looking at?" Dawes demanded. "You want me to tell you?" "Just suppose you keep your eyes where they belong!" Dawes was angered by the big man's casual amorality. It was just as easy for Noonan to look the other way and avoid such frictions. "Mike," Carol whispered warningly. "Don't mate trouble with him. Don't start a ruckus. Why can't you just ignore him?" "No," he said. "There are some things you just don't do. He isn't going to get away with this." He became uncomfortably aware of Cherry's mocking eyes on him, and Noonan's. Carol stood at the water's edge with her hands uncertainly shielding her body from view. "Get into the water," he ordered the girl brusquely. "I don't want him looking at you that way."  Dawes walked downcavern to where Noonan waited, still leaning against the wall. The older man seemed to tower two or three feet above him, even leaning. Dawes said sharply, "Are you trying to make it worse in here? You didn't have to look at her that way when she got undressed. There was no call for that." "I'll put my eyes wherever I damned please, sonny-boy. And I'm tired of your niceness. This isn't any private hotel we got here." "You don't have to go out of your way to make life tough here," Dawes returned. "I don't want you watching Carol when we bathe, from now on, Noonan. Do you understand that? We can at least pretend we're civilized -- even if some of us don't happen to be." Noonan hit him. This time, Dawes expected the blow, and was ready for it. He rolled agilely to one side and in the same motion directed an open-handed slap at Noonan's face, trying to catch him off-balance. The big man took it like the brush of a gnat's wing, laughed, and tapped Dawes sharply in the pit of the stomach. Dawes felt his knees start to buckle. He caught himself, sucked in his breath. He swung wildly at Noonan, missed his face by a foot, and swung again. This time Noonan opened one big hand, grabbed Dawes' flailing arm, and twisted it. Yelling, Dawes tried to break loose. He succeeded in clawing at Noonan's throat with his free arm, distracting the big man's attention for a moment. Dawes ripped loose from Noonan. He danced back a couple of feet, panting, feeling the excitement of combat even though he knew he was yet to score a telling point in the contest. He darted forward and flicked out a fist. Noonan clubbed his hand aside, stepped forward, hit Dawes almost gently on the point of his right shoulder. The impact stunned him; he felt the surge of pain ripple down his arm to his fingers. Desperately he tried to land a blow, but once again Noonan caught his wrist. This time there was no breaking loose. Noonan inexorably forced him to the ground. "I'm gonna put my eyes wherever I please," Noonan said quietly. There was no malice in his voice, nor anger; just a level affirmation of victory. "You hear that, Dawes? You ain't giving any orders inside here. If I want to look at your girl. I'll look at her, and you ain't gonna tell me I can't do it. Understand that, Dawes?" He walked away. Carol had remained upcavern by the stream during the entire fight. Now she came over to him. She was wet and still naked, but her nakedness didn't seem to bother her now. After the fight, any pretense toward modesty in the cave would be irrelevant. She looked down at him without speaking, without smiling, without offering a word of sympathy. Dawes could not tell whether the grave look in her eyes was one of pity or of contempt. After a while she walked away, back to the stream, and began to dress. Dawes elbowed himself' to a sitting position and massaged his wrists. Downcavern he saw that Noonan had stretched out for a nap. Cherry was drawing sketches in the sand. The cave was very silent. He walked slowly back to the stream, knelt by it, and sloshed water over his face; the shock of the sudden coldness eased some of the pain of Noonan's slaps. Shaking himself dry, Dawes went downcavern, past Cherry and Noonan, to stare out the mouth of the cave. The clearing below was packed with aliens. He wondered if they had enjoyed the performance. XV strange realignment of the tense relationships between the four prisoners in the cave. The incident of the beating was a sort of dividing-point, separating what had been from what now was. Dawes suffered the most; he had acted foolishly, rashly, in deliberately inviting Noonan to trounce him, and he had lost status in Carol's eyes. That was clear. The only sort of respect she could have for him would be based on his intelligence -- and hehadn't acted intelligently toward Noonan. Further, Carol really wanted a man who could take care of her, who could protect her from the tensions and rigors of existence in a frightening world -- and Dawes had not at all proved himself that kind of person. But sympathy came from an unexpected quarter -- from Cherry, who glared at the invincibly self-sufficient Noonan, and offered soothing words to Dawes. Noonan glared back at her angrily. His possessiveness was obviously beginning to irritate Cherry. Dawes wondered when the open split between them would come. The swirl of conflicting emotions tightened. Both women halfloved and half-pitied Dawes. Cherry was physically drawn to Noonan, but was repelled by his dominating ways, his assertion of ownership. Noonan claimed Cherry as his own property, but quite clearly he was interested in Carol as well. Around and around it went, while the aliens gathered outside, and the hours slid toward sundown and the moonless darkness of Osiris' night. Dawes sat bitterly by himself, feeling that he had fallen into total disgrace. Cherry softly sang her old night-club songs, muffling their stridencies to avoid touching off some new dispute in the cave. Carol did nothing. As for Noonan, he bathed, slept for a while, woke, and went to the front of the cave, flattening himself strangely at the mouth, poking his head out and staring down for a long time as if measuring some distance. After a time he came back and spoke with Cherry for a few moments. Then, moving on, he went to Carol as she sat quietly against the cave wall, and nudged her. Dawes glanced up from his brooding. Noonan was saying something to her. He strained his ears to catch their words; but the expression on Noonan's face told him all he really needed to know. Cherry crossed the cave, taking a seat at Dawes' side and putting her hand on his wrist as he began to clench his fists. "Don't pay any attention to it," she murmured. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. Don't make him have to hit you again." "Is she going to listen to him?" know. But she may. You never can tell." "I hate him," Dawes said darkly. "I hate both of them. If he wasn't twice my size -- " "Well, he is," Cherry said. "So you might as well just relax." She shook out her long blonde hair. It was getting stringy from lack of combing, and it seemed to Dawes that it was darkening at the roots. It didn't surprise him much to find that Cherry's blondeness was synthetic. He tried to relax, to ignore the fact that elsewhere in the cave Noonan was successfully taking Carol away from him. After a long silence Cherry said, "You know, Noonan thinks he knows a way out of here." "What?" "Shh. He told me about it just a while ago. He says there's a little ledge down the side of the cliff a way. Thinks we could manage to reach it with a rope ladder made out of our clothes. But he won't say anything about it to you because he doesn't want to help you." Dawes scowled. "He's got no right to keep something like that to himself -- " "Noonan never worried about rights. Besides, he doesn't really think his idea could work. We might be able to get down, all right, but then the aliens would just bring us right back up here." Dawes had to acknowledge the truth of that. He slumped back, the momentary spark of hope dying. The waiting jailers below would never let them escape so openly, he thought. Shadows deepened in the cave as the angle of sunlight sharpened. Four days, Dawes thought leadenly. Four days of just Noonan and Carol and Cherry, and the captivity might well go on forever. The sun dropped almost out of sight; no more remained to the day but a few dim red flickers. The eternal wind howled wildly. In the dark, Dawes heard Carol's laugh. And the invisible threads of hatred coiled a little tighter around the four in the cave. Carol was unaccountably redeyed and sullen, after her night with Noonan. She bathed alone. Dawes watched her, from the distance, without getting up. Carol had a lovely white body, lean, beautiful. It was a magnificent woman's body. But she wasn't the right woman to be wearing such a body. She was like a little child in so many ways -- helpless, frightened, selfish. When Carol was through washing, Noonan bathed, and after him Dawes made his slow way to the rear of the cavern and plunged into the little stream, enjoying the sharp pain of the icecold water against his skin. At noon, the food-bundle was hurled into the cave right on schedule. They ate silently, Noonan dividing the food as usual and doing a reasonably fair job of it. Not a word had been spoken in the cave since dawn. Dawes looked out and saw the aliens massed below, in greater numbers than ever before. He knelt and peered down the face of the cliff, trying to see Noonan's ridge. Yes, there it was, a narrow, precipitous shelf of rock projecting no more than a few inches from the cliffside. Turning, Dawes said to Noonan, "I understand you know how to get us out of here. Why the hell haven't you spoken up about it?" "Who in blazes told you that? It's not true!" "The ledge down there," Cherry said. "Yesterday you told me that -- " Noonan slapped her viciously. Glaring at Dawes, he said, "Okay, so there's a ledge down there. But my idea won't work, anyway. Even if we got out, the aliens would just grab us and put us right back in the cave. Well, won't they?" "Maybe not," Dawes said. "Maybe not! Maybe not!" Noonan roared with laughter. "You can bet your pink bottom they will! You think they'll just sit down there and let us traipse past them?" "Maybe. I know how to beat the aliens," Dawes said in a level voice. Suddenly Carol started to laugh -- a high, keening, mad shriek of a laugh, a sharply indrawn "Hoo-ha.' Hoo-ha.'" repeated over and over. It wasn't hysteria, but the nearest approach to hysteria. Moments later Cherry was giggling, calmly, cynically. "Keep quiet!" Dawes shouted. "Let me talk!" "We don't want to hear any crazy nonsense out of you," Noonan snapped. "Shut your mouth." Dawes grinned oddly and took two unhesitant steps forward. There was only one way he could make Noonan listen to him. With careful aim he jabbed the big man sharply in the ribs.  the assault. He glared at Dawes in amazement for an instant, and rumbled into action. His fists shot out blindly, crashing into Dawes' stomach, pounding him under the heart. Dawes fought back grimly. He landed a solid blow on Noonan's lip; then Noonan snarled angrily and cracked him backward with two fast punches in the midsection. Dawes landed hard, feeling pain lance through his body. He gasped for breath. Noonan stood over him, dispassionately kicking him. Each blow was a new agony. Finally it was over. Dawes lay crumpled on the ground, shielding his face. Noonan stood over him, and a strange expression of guilt was beginning to cross his features. His lower lip was swelling. Sitting up, Dawes put his hands to his ribs; nothing was broken. He said hoarsely to Noonan, "Okay. You were spoiling to kick me around again, and now you did it. You got it all out of your system. I hope you did, anyway." Noonan looked completely drained of fight. He didn't speak. Dawes mopped a trickle of blood away from his lips and went on. "Noonan, you're a strong man, and in some ways you're a clever man. But you couldn't figure a way out of here, and you were damned if you'd let me have a go at it without beating me up first. Okay. I got beat up." "Listen -- " Noonan began unsteadily. Dawes cut him off. Despite the pain of the beating, he felt a kind of exhilaration. "You listen to me. We can get out of here, if we only cooperate. All four of us. "I don't know what kind of things those aliens are -- but they aren't as primitive as they look. We've been writing them off as ugly ape-things, but they're a lot subtler and smarter than that. I think they grabbed us out of the colony and stuck us up here so they could listen in on our emotions, soak them up, feed on them. They took four of us. Four people who hardly knew one another. They threw us here and left us alone. They knew damned well what would happen. They knew we'd start hating each other, that we'd fight and quarrel and build walls around ourselves. That's what they wanted us to do. It would be a sort of circus for them -- a purge, maybe. A kind of entertainment. Okay. They were right. We put on a good show for them. And I'll bet they've been out there drinking up every bit of friction and hate and fighting that's gone on in this cave since we got here." Dawes paused. The words were flowing smoothly, now that he had been granted the floor, but he wanted to allow time for his ideas to sink into the other three minds. "Go on," Noonan said quietly. "Finish telling us what you have to say." "We don't have to hate each other, that's what I'm trying to get across. Sure, we get on each others' nerves. Four saints in a cage like this would drive each other batty. But we can turn the hate outward. Hate them. And the best way we can show our hate for them is by loving each other instead of fighting. We're playing into their hands by bickering and brawling. Let's work together and try to understand each other. I'll admit up to now I've been as selfish as any of you. We're all equally to blame. But if we start cooperating now -- hell, we'll be of no more use to them than fighting cocks without any fight. And we can build that rope ladder and they'll let us go." No one spoke when Dawes had finished. He let them think it over, and finally Cherry said, "They're like parasites, then. Getting their kicks from our hate?" "You've got the idea." Dawes looked at the big man. "Noonan, what do you say? You think what I said is worth anything?" Slowly, Noonan began to smile despite the swollen lip. "Yeah. Maybe you've got something. I guess we could try it." THE rope ladder took nearly every stitch of clothes they had. There was nothing else to use. "Okay," Noonan said at last. "Maybe this'll do. Let's test it. Dawes, get yourself on the other end of this thing and pull hard." Dawes took a double grip on the rope and pulled, as hard as he could, digging his feet into the sand to keep from being dragged toward Noonan. The line held. "Good," Noonan grunted. "She's tight." He anchored the end of the line to a jutting rock near the mouth of the cave, hurled the free end out, and let it dangle. Leaning over the rim, Noonan squinted speculatively and said, "We're still a couple of feet short. Let's have underclothes." No one protested. Noonan hauled the line in and tied the garments on. Dawes grinned and said, "Coming out of the cave is like being born. We come out naked." He shivered from the cold, but the new camaraderie in the group warmed him. Noonan said, "I'm going to climb down to the ledge. Carol and Cherry will follow me. And then you, Dawes. All clear?" Noonan grasped the line, tugged it to make sure it was fast, and lowered himself over the edge. Just before he disappeared below the floor level of the cave, he grinned, and Dawes grinned back. "Good luck, Noonan." "Thanks. I'll probably need it." Dawes watched tensely as Noonan descended, hand under hand, swaying in the wind. He dangled at the very end of the line, his hands grasping the rope only an inch or two from its end, and still his feet were a couple of feet short of the ledge. He let go; his feet scrabbled for purchase, his arms flailed wildly to balance him, and then he stood solid, looking up at them and smiling. "Okay," Noonan called. "Carol, you come down next. Keep your feet clamped onto the rope and hold on tight." Pale, frightened beyond the point of feeling fear, Carol took hold of the rope. She paused for an instant. "Go on," Dawes said softly. "It's safe. Just hold on let yourself down hand by hand." The girl grasped the rope with her small hands, wrapped her legs round it, and started to descend. Dawes held his breath. The rope seemed tremendously long. Was she going to make it all the way? Or would she fatigue and topple off, still eighty feet above the ground -- with the unforgiving rock below?' She made it. She dangled in mid-air a few feet above Noonan; he stretched out his arms for her, urged her to let go, and finally she did. He caught her and put her safely down on the ledge. Cherry was next. She showed no outward sign of fear, and she negotiated the descent quickly and skilfully. Dawes waited until she stood by Carol's side on the ledge. Then, taking a last look at the cave, he grabbed hold of the rope himself. climbing in high school, in an ultimately fruitless attempt to put some muscle on his skinny body. But those had been fifteen or twenty-foot ropes. This one dangled for a hundred feet, and no protective mat waited beneath it. Positioning one hand beneath the other, he let himself down, feeling the savage bite of the wind against his bare skin. He knew the others were waiting for him, watching him, maybe praying. Once, he glanced down, and saw he still had nearly half the distance to go. His muscles were quivering and his arms felt as if they were about to part company with their sockets. But he made it. He hovered above the shelf and Noonan caught him around the waist and pulled him down to safety. The line swung out over the valley and flapped back against the side of the cliff. Dawes caught his breath and looked downward from the ledge. "We're still at least forty feet from the ground. What now?" "I'm going to try to yank the line loose," Noonan said. "All of you hold on to me. "If I can pull it down, we tie it on here and climb down to the ground." "And if we can't pull it down?" Dawes asked. Noonan glared for a moment. "You still haven't lost your old habits. You ask too many damfool questions. Come on -- anchor me." They held him, while he tugged at the line, grunting bitterly. Muscles corded and bunched along Noonan's back and shoulders, and tendons stood out sharply in the hollow of his elbow. The line was tied too securely at the top, though. It would not come. Noonan pulled harder -- The rope snapped loose with an impact that nearly threw the four of them off the ledge. Noonan looked at the end he held in his hands, then up at the dangling line still fastened at the cavemouth. The rope had snapped in half. Noonan cursed eloquently. "I hadn't figured on that. But it could have been worse, I guess." "How much rope do we have?" Dawes asked. "Look for yourself." Noonan let the line out over the side of the ledge. It stopped short nearly fifteen feet from the ground. And, Dawes thought, a fifteen-foot jump was an invitation for broken ankles or worse -- and they still had a trek of perhaps ten miles back to the colony. He looked quizzically at Noonan. The big man said, "We can still manage it. But it's going to take teamwork. Real teamwork. I'll go down the rope. Dawes, you follow, go right on down me and hang to my ankles. The girls will do the same, and jump when they reach your ankles. It can't be more than a six or seven-foot drop from there."  nan scrambled down the truncated rope as far as he could go, and hung there, waiting. Dawes went next, descending the rope until his feet touched Noonan's shoulders, then carefully clambering down Noonan's body until he grasped the big man's feet. "Okay, come on!" Noonan shouted. "We can't hang this way forever!" Dawes strained to hold on. His toes were about eight feet above the ground. Carol came down the rope; he could feel every impact as she descended. Looking up, he saw her coming down past Noonan's shoulders, then reaching his own shoulders. Her face was white with tension. She clung for an instant to Dawes' hips, slid down his legs, and let go. He glanced down; she had landed in a crumpled heap, but she was getting up. Cherry came next. Dawes' arms ached mercilessly. He tightened his grip on Noonan's ankles. But it was no use; he could not hold on. As Cherry's foot grazed his shoulder, he let go and dropped to the ground. He folded up as he hit, but was able to rise without difficulty. Cherry still dangled from Noonan. "Go ahead," Dawes called to her. "Let go and I'll catch you." She released her hold; Dawes braced himself and broke her fall, but the weight of her dropping on him knocked him over again. A moment later, Noonan landed on top of them. After some instants of confusion, they struggled to their feet and began to laugh. Cherry was the first to start, and then Noonan and Dawes and Carol took it up, and they laughed for nearly a minute at the ridiculous spectacle they must have made, solemnly clambering down each other and landing in a confused heap of arms and legs. "Damndest silly  way to get down a mountainside I ever saw," Noonan said, still laughing. "Maybe so," Dawes said. "But it worked, didn't it? It worked!" They huddled together nakedly at the base of the cliff. Above them, two lengths of rope dangled in the wind. Cherry said, "And there isn't an alien in sight. Not anywhere." Dawes looked rapidly around, as if expecting to see the thickbodied ape-like beings clustered behind trees observing them. Perhaps they were. But certainly they were keeping well out of sight. "You see?" Dawes said triumphantly. "They aren't interested in us any more. We don't have anything to offer them, now that we've stopped fighting with each other. They don't care what we do now." "I'm cold," Carol said suddenly"We all are," said Cherry. "We better get a move on. Back to the colony, before the aliens decide they don't want to let us go after all." Dawes nodded. He pointed toward the forest. "Standing with our backs to the cliff, the colony ought to be straight out that way. What do you think, Noonan?" The big man frowned and said. "That's about right. We ought to find our way back there through the forest without much trouble. If we start out now." "Right. We want to get there before nightfall," Dawes said. "We've still got a few hours left. We'd better start out now." Noonan leading, followed by Carol, then Cherry and Dawes. Even though the sun was bright in the sky, the day was cold; the temperature was barely above fifty, Dawes estimated. No temperature at all for people to be walking about in naked. He was thankful that they had kept their shoes, even if their stockings all had gone to reinforce the rope. The forest floor was covered with the dried prickly cast-off needles of the conifer trees that abounded there. The wind whipped through the forest, but the trees served as shielding for them against the coldest blasts. It had taken about two hours to go through the forest the first time, in the hands of the aliens. By Dawes' reckoning, nightfall was not due for at least three hours more. With luck, if they followed a true path, they would make it back to the colony before dark. Once night fell, of course, they would simply have to squat down and wait for morning before going on with the search for the colony. But Noonan led the way with such a confident air that Dawes did not worry. The big man strode along with springing step, looking back every few moments to make sure no one had fallen behind, and seemingly felt no discomfort from the cold or from his own nakedness. Dawes realized that a few months ago it would have been inconceivable for him to walk casually through a forest wearing nothing but a pair of battered shoes, in the company of two women and another man. Now, it hardly mattered. A new world, new values, he thought. After the days in the cave, modesty was irrelevant. He knew the three bodies ahead of him as well as he knew his own. After an hour of walking, they stopped; Carol was exhausted. Noonan eyed the angle of the sun, wrinkled up his face, and announced that they had at least two and a half hours before sunset. "Plenty of time to make it," the big man added. "If we don't waste any time en route." "I'm cold," Carol said. "Hungry. Tired. I can't keep walking like this." Dawes looked at her pityingly. She looked drawn and exhausted. She had lost weight; her ribs lay close to the surface of her skin. now, and her thighs were puckered where the fat had gone, leaving pouches of skin. Carol had taken the days in the cave worse than any of them. Noonan hardly showed a trace of his captivity; Cherry looked unkempt but healthy, with a sleek leanness that she had not had before. Dawes ached all over, but he felt splendid. "Come on," he said gently to Carol. "We're almost there. Another hour's walk, that's all." Noonan lifted her to her feet and pointed her in the right direction. They resumed their hike. well-worn through the thick forest. Looking back, Dawes could see the black bulk of the cliffs -- and, he thought, the two strands of rope, red and yellow and brown and green. As the sun dropped, the forest became colder. Birds hooted in the trees; small shiny-skinned animals that looked like lizards sprang up on rocks, chittered derisively at the group for an instant, and went hustling off into the safety of the woods. They plodded on. Dawes was beginning to feel the effects of his hunger -- only one meal a day for the last five, and that nothing very nourishing. He longed to stop and try to shy a rock at one of the curious little forest beasts, but he told himself that if they ever stopped they might not get started again. He forced himself to drag one foot in front of the other. His legs ached. His feet, bare inside his shoes, were slowly being rubbed raw by the leather scraping his heel. But Noonan strutted jauntily along in the lead. They were on their way back to the colony. Something strange and mysterious had happened to them, but it was over, and they were on their way back. Dawes comforted himself with that thought. In a little while, they would be seeing other people again. Haas and Dave Matthews and Ed Sanderson and Sid Nolan and all the others. They were really strangers to him, but at the moment Dawes thought of them as old friends, friends for whose companionship he had longed for months and years. They stopped again a short time later. Again, it was Carol. She threw herself down on the ground, sobbing, muttering little senseless sounds. Noonan scooped her up. Dawes hung back, even though technically she was his wife. She would have to be carried, and he had barely enough strength to carry himself along. Therefore, Noonan would have to carry her. It was as simple as that. Dawes made no protest as Noonan picked her up and cradled her roughly in his arms. "We're almost there," Noonan told them. "I'll carry her the rest of the way. You two all right?" "I'll make it," Cherry said. "If I don't freeze first, that is." "You, Dawes?" "I'm okay." "Let's go, then." Step after step after step; and every step, Dawes told himself sternly, brought him that much closer to the colony, to food and warmth and clothing. Unless, of course, Noonan had been leading them in the wrong direction all this time. That might be. No, Dawes argued; the cliffs were still at their backs, and so they had to be going in the right direction. His tired mind thought up cold fantasies: suppose the aliens had been following them all this time, maliciously feeding on their suffering, and planned to massacre them as they stood within sight of the stockade? Or perhaps the stockade itself would be empty, all of the colonists dead or captured, leaving Dawes and Carol, Noonan and Cherry as the sole population of Osiris? He shook away the thoughts and kept going. Abruptly they emerged into a clearing. "Take a look," Noonan said exultantly. The stockade was a hundred yards ahead of them. greeted them as they appeared, footsore, dirty, chilled, at the colony stockades. The gunbarrels came snaking out of spyholes in the wall; the colonists were on guard now against any shapes of the forest, it seemed. "Take it easy," Noonan called out. "We're friends. Humans." A voice said distinctly behind the stockade, "Christ! Those aren't aliens! It's -- " "They've come back!" someone else yelled. The gunsnouts disappeared. The stockade gate creaked open and people came rushing out, familiar people, friends. Dawes recognized Sid Nolan, Dave Matthews, Matt Zachary, and Lee Donaldson. There were a few others whose names he could not at all remember. They dragged the four returnees within, slammed the stockade gate shut. As the colonists gathered to greet them, Dawes for the first time became uncomfortably aware of his nakedness. But only for a moment; for Marya Brannick appeared with blankets, and the wanderers were quickly clad. Inquisitive eyes goggled at the four weary ones. Questions bubbled up. "Where were you?" "What happened?" "How did you get free?" Dawes shook all the questioners off. "Where's Haas?" he asked. "We'd better talk to him first." Dave Matthews shook his head gravely. "Haas -- isn't here any more." "Did the aliens get him?" asked Noonan. "No. Not the aliens." "Where is he, then?" Dawes demanded. Matthews shrugged. "We had some trouble here, after the aliens broke in and kidnapped you. Howard Stoker and a couple of his buddies thought Haas ought to quit as Colony Director. He -- got killed." "Killed? So Stoker's in charge now?" Matthews smiled gloomily. "No. There was a -- well, a counter-revolution, you might call it. In the name of law and order we executed Stoker, Harris, and Hawes. Lee Donaldson's the Director now." "What's happening to the four surplus women, if those men are dead?" "We're having trouble over that," Matthews admitted. "The colony's kind of split on the subject of polygamy right now. But we -- " "Let our troubles wait till later," Lee Donaldson broke in brusquely. "I want to hear about these people. Where were you?" "We were taken to a cave in one of the cliffs beyond the forest," Dawes said. "We were prisoners. The aliens were keeping us. But we escaped." He grinned. He felt very tired after the forest trek, but yet invigorated. Tougher, harder. And he was saddened to learn that there had been dissension in the colony. "Did they hurt you?" Donaldson asked. Dawes thought about that for a moment. "No," he said finally. "Not -- not physically." hadn't been much progress in the colony in his absence. It still looked bare and hardly begun. He saw troubled faces. There had been bitter quarrelling here, he realized. "What about the aliens?" he asked. "Did they make any further attacks?" "No," Matthews said. "We've seen them skulking around, outside the stockade. But they haven't tried to break in again. We keep a constant patrol, now." "And there's been trouble here, hasn't there?" "Trouble?" Dawes nodded. "Argurnents. Dissension." Lee Donaldson tightened his jaw-muscles tensely. "We've had some difficulties. Haas was our best leader, and he's dead. It hasn't been so easy to make the people work together since Stoker got his big idea. We do more arguing than working these days." Dawes sighed. He wanted to tell Matthews and Donaldson what they had learned in the cave, how the aliens thrived vicariously on strife, how the colonists would never be completely free of the shadowy neckless beings until they learned to function like parts of a well-machined instrument, as a colony must if it is to survive. But there was time for that later, he thought. You didn't make people see things in a minute, or in ten minutes. It could take days -- or forever. But there was time to begin healing the colony's wounds later. In a way, Dawes thought, it was a good thing that the colony had something like the aliens waiting outside to feed on their hate. It would be like having a perpetual visible conscience; hate would not enter the colony for fear of the aliens without. He turned away. Suddenly he wanted to be alone with himself -- with the new self that had come out of the cave. Something had grown with him in those five days, and it hadn't been just the silky beard stubbling his cheeks. It was something else. He understood now why Selection was necessary, why the seed of Earth had to be carried from world to world. It was because the stars were there, and because it was in the nature of man to climb outward, transcending himself, changing himself. As he had changed; for he had changed, in those few catalytic days in the cave. They had been days of hardening for him. No longer was he filled with vague angry resentment; no longer did he hate Selection and all its minions, local chairman Brewer and district chairman Mulholland. He forgave them. More; he admired them, and pitied them because they had to stay behind in this greatest of all human adventures. TN the twilight Dawes walked away from the group, down toward the bubble-home he had chosen and from which he had been taken by the aliens. His suitcase and Carol's still lay halfopen on the ground. The bubble hadn't been entered since the night of the kidnapping. Shrugging out of the blanket, he took spare clothing from his suitcase and dressed slowly. He stood for a long time, thinking. They would none of them be the same any more -- not Noonan, who for the first time in his life had run into a problem he could not solve with his fists, or' Carol, who had gone into the cave a virgin and 'come out otherwise, or Cherry, whose metal shell had broken open to give him a moment of tenderness that he had mistaken for a betrayal. But Dawes knew that he had changed most of all, and yet not changed. The thing that was inside him, the curiosity, the seeking mind -- now, it was alive and truly working for the first time. How wrong it had been to dream of that cozy, dead existence in his nice Ohio home with his nice Ohio wife and his nice Ohio children! He realized now that he wanted to get out into the wilderness and see the aliens again, find out why they were the way they were, what they had wanted from the prisoners in the cave, how they had taken it, what they were mysteries. And through the miracle of Selection he had been put here to solve them. I'm different now. It was a hard fact to assimilate. He realized with a jolt, looking at Carol's suitcase, that she was still his wife. He didn't want her any more. The boy Mike Dawes had been taken by her innocence and shyness, but that boy no longer existed. And he needed someone more solid, someone who could share problems with him instead of simply clinging dependently. Someone was knocking outside the bubble. "Come on in," Dawes said. It was Cherry. She looked flustered and confused. "You just walked away from everybody like that," she said. "You feeling okay, Mike?" "I just wanted to think. I had to be by myself for a little while. I'm okay." She was looking at him earnestly; glancing away, she saw the two suitcases. "Carol's with Noonan," she said. "I figured as much," said Dawes without a trace of a quiver in his voice. "I don't care. Really, I don't." TT was funny, he thought, how lousy deals turned out to be the biggest things in your life. Being picked by the lottery, and then being grabbed by the aliens on top of that. And losing your girl to a man like Noonan. And none of it mattered -- each loss was a find, each finish a beginning. An animal honked in the forest, and Dawes grinned. A whole world lay out there beyond the stockade, waiting to have its secrets pried open in the years to come. And he'd do it. He said, "If Noonan's with Carol -- where are you going to stay. Cherry?" "I haven't figured that out yet." He smiled. Carol had left her suitcase here, but nothing else. If Noonan could be happy with her, let him be. Cherry stepped forward awkwardly. Dawes wanted to tell her that he forgave her and loved her and needed her, and that he saw through her toughness and through the scars life had left on her. But he couldn't say any of those things out loud, and he realized he wasn't finished growing up, quite yet. She would help him, though. And he would help her. Funny. Getting picked in the lottery had seemed like the end of the world to him, once. But he couldn't have been wronger., He smiled at Cherry. The girl before him was like a stranger, even after the days in the cave. Everything was oddly brand new. He tipped her face up the inch or two that separated them in height, and kissed her, listening to the wind of the alien world -- his world. "Hello," she said tenderly. "Hello," he said.      science fiction back in #... "Doc" Smith's history-making Skylark of Space was the marvelous epic that ensnared me... I have seen the transition of SF from the original crude gimmick yarn to today's polished story of ideas. I have seen countless new authors appear and prolific authors vanish from the field without trace. (Recent reprinting of Drums of Tapajos solved the mysterious disappearance of Capt. S. P. Meek.) Individual stories have exploded like H-bombs inducing radical mutations in story genes by their fallout. A few of the many prime examples: Skylark; Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey; Charles Cloukey's Paradox; Stuart-Campbell's Forgetfulness; Leinster's Sidewise in Time; Van Vogt's Sian; Pohl-Kornbluth's Gravy Planet, alias The Space Merchants. Horizons have broadened, frontiers have disappeared. Thirty-odd years ago, Hugo Gernsback felt there was a need for Air Wonder Stories. Today's super-sonic jets and X-#s leave little to expect from really radical changes in powered flight within our atmosphere. But thirty years ago, the deep of Ocean was, and remains still, a frontier of mystery and peril. Although we are plumbing its depths with super-subs and bathyscaphes, and descending ourselves unarmored except for scuba gear, the human mind still remains horrified by the fear of gradual suffocation or slow death in an alien environment. It is one of the strange quirks of human psychology that an intense empathy is aroused by a tragedy of duration. Unfortunately, this sense of oneness is unaffected by large scale misfortune. It becomes activated by an entrapment, usually of a child in a well, a Floyd Collins in a Kentucky cave, a miner deep in a shaft, and is usually limited in scope. The strange emotion is barely aroused by, say, the plight concentration camps or political prisoners anywhere in the world. moment-to-moment efforts of rescuers to free a single individual. In this mood, one of the real pros of our league, Arthur C. Clarke, has penned a yarn so persuasive and convincing that reader identification is inescapable. The yarn is emotionally gripping, astute in choice of locale, solution of technical and emotional problems... and so historically correct that it measures up to the very highest standard of his previous efforts. No praise can be higher. It demonstrates his skill at capturing a fantastic situation realistically. Arthur C. Clarke. Harcourt, Brace and World. the moon seems grade-A fantasy. Clarke, though, has developed a scientifically conceivable situation; a tourist boat, propelled by "fans," a-sail on a surface of impalpable dust so fine that it has most of the characteristics (all the bad ones) of a liquid. What would happen if said boat foundered? asks Clarke; and proceeds to introduce all sorts of fascinating and deadly problems. Though the dust can flow like water to seek its own level, its resistance is so high that it cannot be pumped, effectively eliminating escape-hatch and spacesuit rescue. What about survival problems of the trapped victims: oxygen, water and food, morale? The tremendous technical dilemmas facing the rescuers who at first can't even locate the wreck with their enormously efficient instruments? Clarke has done his job so well that his reader had best refresh amply before reading -- since he will prove unable to stop until finished. Rating:  G. P. Putnam's Sons. made his living from the future but his occupation is not complete preoccupation. He has become increasingly concerned with the state of the world today and has exercised author's privilege in mounting degree to expound from his lectern. In his just-previous Starship Troopers, he expressed his dissatisfaction with our present system of strewing the rights and privileges of citizenship indiscriminately with a corresponding cheapening of its value. The story's proposed solution was to make citizenship contingent upon an honorable tour of duty in the armed forces. Theoretically, after the hardships of service life, it would .sc'em that intellectual and political maturity would be a natural rsult. But such a happy conclusion is highly problematical, considering the orientation of our iresMit crop of Big Brass. In that book, plot-stopping political harangues did fairly little damage, because the story's essential interest and action far outbalanced the dead weight. Stranger in a Strange Land is an entirely different colored horse. Being social satire with most action on a cerebral level, it has a heavy load to carry. Still, Heinlein is too much a pro to write a real stinkeroo. His monstrously wealthy bastard hero, marooned on Mars for all his twenty-one years, is sole heir of all the dead crew of the first Martian expedition and, through legal mumbo-jumbo, legal offspring of three of them. According to a legal precedent, he is also sole owner of Mars. Returned unwillingly to Earth, and then only on direct order of the utterly alien Martian Old Ones by whom he was reared. Smith, the Man from Mars, constitutes a fundamental threat to the stability of the World Federation of Free States merely by the fact of his existence. Placed in dubious protective custody by direct order of the Secretary-General, he is whisked to safety by an idealistic and gorgeously endowed nurse and proceeds to become a pawn in power politics. His haven is the weird domicile of an Old School rugged individual, a doctor-lawyer-writer and his trio of luscious secretary-cook-companions. Heinlein expounds his philosophy through the mouth of the legal-medical-literary pundit who pontificates in a too-cute way; impudent, brash, irritating but detestably lovable... in the manner of a gruff old dog who gums you to death. Smith, as completely ignorant of human customs as an utter alien, must be taught everything, from tying shoelaces to the joys of sexual union. Needless to say, the quartet of beauties are allaround teachers. His Martian teachers, however, had taught him levitation, telepathy, slowing of the time sense, teleportation, disco'rporation of enemies, articles or self and also that food must not be wasted. People are protein, protein is food; and with the severe shortage on Mars, bodies of the Old Ones are shared by their friends in a ritual of love and devotion. Smith, therefore is a human superman with a completely alien outlook and set of mores. His champion, detestably lovable Harshaw, is such a wing-ding in everything he does that the legalistic battle between him and the Secretary-General is hardly fair; he can't lose. His legal maneuverings are amusing, but the subsequent incognito wanderings of Smith to savor our culture are peculiarly uninspired and lacking in interest. Harshaw's previous C#mical comments have caused Heinlein to gloss over an opportunity to observe and evaluate our society through Smith's eyes. Smith's solution to our problems is the elimination of jealousy by formation of a quasi-religious order that emphasizes the sharing of self. Hence the scathing denunciation by many "mainstream" reviewers -- notably the New York Times -- of the book's accent on sex. Of course, the Times cannot be expected to remember the recent past when space ships needed no sanitary facilities and science-fictional characters owned no sexual organs. However, the book's shortcomings lie not so much in its emancipation as in the fact that Heinlein has bitten off too large a chewing portion. But kudos to him for the decision to write what he thinks. Rating: ## horror and loathing to many people, it is no surprise that masters of the macabre, including Lovecraft and Kuttner, have woven tales of pure shiver about them. Davies, an Oxford don, has written an understated and genteel yarn that carries a shock. Rating:     s. # transistors -- separate circuits, # speeds big set quality and performance. The smallest and lightest portable radio-phonograph only #"x#"x#". Weight: only # lbs. Wheel drive takes place of turntable. Plays #", #" and #" records, # rpm and # rpm. Powered by four standard # volt flashlight batteries. Handsome carrying case takes it anywhere with ease. Sapphire needle for longer wear. #I Hudson Si, New York #, H. Y. Portable Phono Radio (Icnl lemon, rush me PuM.riie I aid  # ea. -- Check enclosed.   Paid ! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The desijns shown above are the only ones we offer i -galaxy Three Portraits And A Prayer frederik pohl jack Sharkey  Jim Harmon  Willy Lei -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy , per # lssues foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City Address Zone State Do You Laugh Your Greatest Powers Away? You have heard the phrase, "Laugh, clown, laugh." Well, that fits me perfectly. I'd fret, worry and try to reason my way out of difficulties -- all to no avail; then I'd have a hunch, a something within that would tell me to do a certain thing. I'd laugh it off with a shrug. I knew too much, I thought, to heed. these impressions. Well, it's different now -- I've learned to use this inner power and I no longer make the mistakes I did, because I do the right thing at the right time. What Your Mind Can Do( Here is how I got started right. I had heard about hypnosis revealing past lives. I began to think there must be some inner intelligence with which we were born. In fact, I often heard it said there was; but how could I use it, how could I make it work for me daily? That was my problem. I wanted to learn to direct this inner voice, master it if I could. Finally, I wrote to the Rosicrucians, a world-wide fraternity of progressive men and women, who offered to send me, without obligation, a free book entitled The Mastery of Life. That book opened a new world to me. I advise you to write today and ask for your copy. It will prove to you what your mind can demonstrate. Don't go through life laughing your mental powers away. Simply write: Scribe J.F.W. (Not a Religious Organization) San Jose, California, U. S. A. galaxy by Jack Vance by John Jakes by Frank Banta by Jack Sharkey by Frederik Pohl M-# in Triangulum. Is this a younger galaxy than our own? It has many bright, blue-white stars -- too hot to live long, and thus recently formed. The spiral shape seems just to be taking form. Publisher Editor Science Editor Art Director by Jim Harmon by George #. Smith by Willy Ley by Floyd C. Gale Next issue (October) on sale August #th bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. Ail stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off.L" our time contain built-in hypotheses which seldom get questioned -- because most people engaging in the debates don't know they are there. One common one has to do with "progress." We assume that "progress" is another word for "change" -- that is, willy-nilly, the human race is on its way up, and everything that is different is better. There isn't any doubt that there has been progress in the history of mankind. We are a long way from the Sumerians, in so many things that it is almost impossible to count them. Everyone would agree to that. But what are we all agreeing to? What, specifically, are the things that have shown improvement? As a starter, let's say the prolongation of the average life span. Certainly we have done a great deal there. Probably it has been tripled in historic time, and if you define progress in terms of longevity we are home free before the argument really gets started. But -- "progress" implies a goal. What's the goal here, immortality? Obviously there is no great merit in that if it is unaccompanied by other far-reaching changes. Never mind how much you would like to live forever; do you want the human race to stop evolving because there is no room for new generations? Or -- the only alternative in the long run -- do you want the population so to increase that we all starve? (Or to succumb to population-pressure psychoses, as recent animal experiments suggest may happen?) "Progress" in this case, then, indicates a change in a direction which ultimately changes its sign and becomes "regression." Since we can't locate the point at which the change occurs, let's see if we can find aneasier measure of our accomplishments. Shall we speak of progress in providing material comforts for the average man? That's an easy concession too... provided we know what we mean by "material comforts." The early cultures did not give every man a TV set, that's sure; they didn't have them to give. Nor did they provide automobiles, for the same reason. But let's not pretend that all of the gadgets and contraptions we carry on our fiscal backs are pure joy! The average man's budget of major machines and appliances totals maybe fifty items, from hifi sets to typewriters, and of the fifty perhaps ten are in some way or another broken and another two or three never worked exactly right even when he got them from the store. As all suburbanites know, there is no "convenience" quite so inconvenient as a fully automated household when a storm or other difficulty cuts off the power supply. We might, if we wished, measure "progress" in terms of diet or food production or energy consumption. Here we find surprises. The world average diet, except for the rich nations, is hardly one calorie higher per capita than it was five thousand years ago; that is to say, it is at the minimum level that will make survival and reproduction possible. The production of food per acre of land has shown improvement where fertilizers and irrigation have been applied -- that's a plus -- but has actually shown decrease where agricultural machinery has That's a minus, and a big one. It is true that we now produce more food per man-hour expended in farming; but man-hours are always available, we create more of them every time a child is born; and the arable land of the Earth is a remorselessly fixed quantity. Energy consumption, then? The world average is about # kilowatt hours per year. This is far greater than during the Middle Ages, say. But it is far less than that of interglacial man, # years ago, who burned up twice that much each year! (Wastefully, it is true. Most of it was in the form of great watchfires to keep animals away. But Wastefulness is not a sin peculiar to primitive man, as we drivers of automobiles which convert something under # of the original heat energy of the petroleum into mechanical motion should admit.) Indeed, we can hardly rely even on the arrow of evolution to point always "up." We pride ourselves on our great brains, our delicately featured faces and other marks that distinguish us from the apes -- but Boskop man had a larger brain and a far more "human" face; and the last Boskopoid died a hundred centuries ago. must not pretend to have said the final word. There has been progress, and we all know it. But let's be sure we know what "progress" we mean -- and, more important, let's think about what we want "progress" in the future to be like. Without such thought humanity becomes a race of fanatics. (Under the definition of "fanatic" that goes: "One who redoubles his efforts once he has lost sight of his goal.") George Orwell made a penetrating and relevant observation in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier. The time was the #s; he had been traveling in the ugly industrial towns of northern England, visiting working-class homes where a dozen families might use the same communal outside lavatory; where eight persons slept in one room, five in a bed; where every green thing had been systematically rooted out and it was impossible to heat the tiny houses to a point where sickness could be avoided. Orwell questioned one of the men whose'families lived in these "beastly" homes: I asked him when the housing shortage first became acute in his district; he answered, "When we were told about it," meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. "When we were told about it." Man can reconcile himself to almost anything. He will seek a better life if he can -- but only if he can see the direction in which improvement lies. It is in helping us to find these directions that science-fiction stories may serve a useful purpose. We need to look somewhat farther ahead than our grandfathers did. The pace of events is very quick now. If we want "progress" to lead us in a direction we will like, we need to know what the possible directions are. For that we need a perspective, an opportunity to look at ourselves from outside... And for that we need scienceStarfirealLs MmMever Me race of Man was growing old.  But it was not ready to die not while it had foes to kill first! l V I beck, carved deep from the heart of a limestone crag, consisted of five principal chambers, on five different levels. At the top were the reliquarium and a formal council chamber: the first a room of somber magnificence housing the various archives, trophies and mementos of the Banbecks; the second a long narrow hall, with dark wainscoting chest-high and a white plaster vault above, extending the entire width of the crag, so that balconies overlooked Banbeck Vale at one end and Kergan's Way at the other. Below were Joaz Banbeck's private quarters: a parlor and bed-chamber, then next his study and finally, at the bottom, a workroom where Joaz permitted none but himself. Entry to the apartments was through the study, a large Lshaped room with an elaborate groined ceiling, from which depended four garnet-encrusted chandeliers. These were now dark. Into the room came only a watery gray light from four honed-glass plates on which, in the manner of a camera obscura, were focused views across Banbeck Vale. The walls were paneled with lignified reed. A rug patterned in angles, squares and circles of maroon, brown and black covered the floor. In the middle of the study stood a naked man. His only covering was the long, fine, brown hair which flowed down his back, the golden tore which clasped his neck. His features were sharp and angular, his body thin. He appeared to be listening, or perhaps meditating. Occasionally he glanced at a yellow marble globe on a nearby shelf, whereupon his lips would move, as if he were committing to memory some phrase or sequence of ideas. At the far end of the study a heavy door eased open. A flower-faced young woman peered through, her expression mischievous, arch. At the sight of the naked man, she clapped her hands to her mouth, stifling a gasp. The naked man turned -- but the heavy door had already swung shut. For a moment he stood deep in frowning reflection, then slowly went to the wall on the inside leg of the L. He swung out a section of the bookcase and passed through the opening. Behind him the bookcase thudded shut. Descending a spiral staircase he came out into a chamber rough-hewn from the rock: Joaz Banbeck's private work-room. A bench supported tools, metal shapes and fragments, a bank of electromotive cells, oddments of circuitry: the current objects of Joaz Banbeck's curiosity. The naked man glanced at the bench. He picked up one of the devices and inspected it with something like condescension, though his gaze was as clear and wondering as that of a child. Muffled voices from the study penetrated to the work-room. The naked man raised his head to listen, then stooped under the bench. He lifted a block of stone, slipped through the gap into a dark void. Replacing the stone, he took up a luminous wand, and set off down a narrow tunnel, which presently dipped to join a natural cavern. At irregular intervals luminous tubes exuded a wan light, barely enough to pierce the murk. The naked man jogged forward swiftly, the silken hair flowing like a nimbus behind him. strel-maiden Phade and an elderly seneschal were at odds. "Indeed I saw him!" Phade insisted. "With these two eyes of mine, one of the sacerdotes, standing thus and so, as I have described." She tugged angrily at his elbow. "Do you think me bereft of my wits, or hysterical?" Rife the seneschal shrugged, committing himself neither one way nor the other. "I do not see him now." He climbed the staircase, peered into the sleeping parlor. "Empty. The doors above are bolted." He peered owlishly at Phade. "And I sat at my post in the entry." "You sat sleeping. Even when I came past you snored!" "You are mistaken; I did but cough." "With your eyes closed, your head lolling back?" Rife shrugged once more. "Asleep or awake, it is all the same. Admitting that the creature gained access, how did he leave? I was wakeful after you summoned me, as you must agree." "Then remain on guard, while I find Joaz Banbeck." Phade ran down the passage which presently joined Bird Walk, so called for the series of fabulous birds of lapis, gold, cinnabar, malachite and marcasite inlaid into the marble. Through an arcade of green and gray jade in spiral columns she passed out into Kergan's Way, a natural defile which formed the main thoroughfare of Banbeck Village. Reaching the portal, she summoned a pair of lads from the fields. "Run to the brooder, find Joaz Banbeck! Hasten, bring him here; I must speak with him." The boys ran off toward a low cylinder of black brick a mile to the north. Phade waited. With the sun Skene at its nooning, the air was warm. The fields of vetch, bellegarde and spharganum gave off a pleasant odor. Phade went to lean against a fence. Now she began to wonder about the urgency of her news, even its basic reality. "No!" she told herself fiercely. "I saw! I saw!" At either side tall white cliffs rose to Banbeck Verge, with mountains and crags beyond, and, spanning all, the dark sky flecked with feathers of cirrus. Skene glittered dazzling bright, a minusPhade sighed, half-convinced of her own mistake. Once more, less vehemently, she reassured herself. Never before had she seen a sacerdote; why should she imagine one now? The boys, reaching the brooder, had disappeared into the dust of the exercise pens. Scales gleamed and winked; grooms, dragon-masters, armorers in black leather moved about their work. After a moment Joaz Banbeck came into view. Spider, urged it to the full extent of its head-jerking lope, pounded down the track toward Banbeck Village. Phade's uncertainty grew. Might Joaz become exasperated, would he dismiss her news with an unbelieving stare? Uneasily she watched his approach. Coming to Banbeck Vale only a month before, she still felt unsure of her status. Her preceptors had trained her diligently in the barren little valley to the south where she had been born, but the disparity between teaching and practical reality at times bewildered her. She had learned that all men obeyed a small and identical group of behaviors. Joaz Banbeck, however, observed no such limits, and Phade found him completely unpredictable. She knew him to be a relatively young man, though his appearance provided no guide to his age. He had a pale austere face in which gray eyes shone like crystals, a long thin mouth which suggested flexibility, yet never curved far from a straight line. He moved languidly; his voice carried no vehemence; he made no pretense of skill with either saber or pistol; he seemed deliberately to shun any gesture which might win the admiration or affection of his subjects. Yet he had both. Phade originally had thought him cold, but presently changed her mind. He was, so she decided, a man bored and lonely, with a quiet humor which at times seemed rather grim. But he treated her without discourtesy, and Phade, testing him with all her hundred and one coquetries, not infrequently thought to detect a spark of response. Joaz Banbeck dismounted from the Spider, ordered it back to its quarters. Phade came diffidently forward, and Joaz turned her a quizzical look. "What requires so urgent a summons? Have you remembered the nineteenth location?" Phade flushed in confusion. Artlessly she had described the painstaking rigors of her training; Joaz now referred to an item in one of the classifications which had slipped her mind. Phade spoke rapidly, excited once more. "I opened the door into your study, softly, gently. And what did I see? A sacerdote, naked in his hair! He did not hear me. I shut the door, I ran to fetch Rife. When we returned -- the chamber was empty!" Joaz's eyebrows contracted a trifle; he looked up the valley. "Odd." After a moment he asked, "You are sure that he saw nothing of you?" "No. I think not. Yet, when I returned with stupid old Rife he had disappeared! Is it true that they know magic?" "As to that, I cannot say," replied Joaz. Way, traversed tunnels and rock-walled corridors, finally came to the entry chamber. Rife once more dozed at his desk. Joaz signaled Phade back and, going quietly forward, thrust aside the door to his study. He glanced here and there, nostrils twitching. The room was empty. He climbed the stairs, investigated the sleeping-parlor, returned to the study. Unless magic were indeed involved, the sacerdote had provided himself a secret entrance. With this thought in mind, he swung back the bookcase door, descended to the workshop and again tested the air for the sour-sweet odor of the sacerdotes. A trace? Possibly. Joaz examined the room inch by inch, peering from every angle. At last, along the wall below the bench, he discovered a barely perceptible crack, marking out an oblong. Joaz nodded with dour satisfaction. He rose to his feet and returned to his study. He considered his shelves: what was here to interest a sacerdote? Books, folios, pamphlets? Had they even mastered the art of reading? When next I meet a sacerdote I must inquire, thought Joaz vaguely; at least he will tell me the truth. On second thought, he knew the question to be ludicrous; the sacerdotes, for all their nakedness, were by no means barbarians, and in fact had provided him his four vision-panes -- a technical engineering feat of no small skill. He inspected the yellowed marble globe which he considered his most valued possession: a representation of mythical Eden. Apparently it had not been disturbed. Another shelf displayed models of the Banbeck dragons: the rust-red Termagant; the Long-horned Murderer and its cousin the Striding Murderer; the Blue Horror; the Fiend, low to the ground, immensely strong, tail tipped with a steel barbell; the ponderous Jugger, skullcap polished and white as an egg. A little apart stood the progenitor of the entire group: a pearl-pallid creature upright on two legs, with two versatile central members, a pair of multi-articulated brachs at the neck. Beautifully detailed though these models might be, why should they pique the curiosity of a sacerdote? No reason whatever, when most of the originals could be studied daily without hindrance. What of the workshop, then? Joaz rubbed his long pale chin. He had no illusions about the value of his work. It was idle tinkering and no more. Joaz put aside conjecture. Most likely the sacerdote had come upon no specific mission, the visit perhaps being part of a continued inspection. But why? A pounding at the door: old Rife's irreverent fist. Joaz opened to him. "Joaz Banbeck, a notice from Ervis Carcolo of Happy Valley. He wishes to confer with you, and at this moment awaits your response on Banbeck Verge." "Very well," said Joaz. "I will confer with Ervis Carcolo." "Here? Or on Banbeck Verge?" "On the Verge, in half an hour." II f'T'EN miles from Banbeck Vale, across a wind-scoured wilderness of ridges, crags, spines of stone, amazing crevasses, barren fells and fields of tumbled boulders, lay Happy Valley. As wide as Banbeck Vale but only half as long and half as deep, its bed of wind-deposited soil was only half as thick and correspondingly less productive. The Chief Councillor of Happy Valley was Ervis Carcolo, a thick-bodied short legged man with a vehement face, a heavy mouth, a disposition by turns jocose and wrathful. Unlike Joaz Banbeck, Carcolo enjoyed nothing more than his visits to the dragon barracks, where he treated dragon-masters, grooms and dragons alike to a spate of bawled invective. Ervis Carcolo was an energetic man, intent upon restoring Happy Valley to the ascendancy it had enjoyed some twelve generations before. During those harsh times, before the advent of the dragons, men fought their own battles. The men of Happy Valley had been notably daring, deft and ruthless. Banbeck Vale, the Great Northern Rift, Clewhaven, Sadro Valley, Phosphor Gulch: all acknowledged the authority of the Carcolos. Then down from space came a ship of the Basics, or grephs, as they were known at that time. The ship killed or took prisoner the entire population of Clewhaven. It attempted as much in the Great Northern Rift, but only partially succeeded; then bombarded the remaining settlements with explosive pellets. When the survivors crept back to their devastated valleys, the dominance of Happy Valley was a fiction. A generation later, during the Age of Wet Iron, even the fiction collapsed. In a climactic battle Goss Carcolo was captured by Kergan Banbeck and forced to emasculate himself with his own knife. Five years of peace elapsed, and then the Basics returned. After depopulating Sadro Valley, the great black ship landed in Banbeck Vale, but the inhabitants had taken warning and had fled into the mountains. Toward nightfall twenty-three of the Basics sallied forth behind their precisely trained warriors: several platoons of Heavy Troops, a squad of Weaponeers -- these hardly distinguishable from the men of Aerlith -- and a squad of Trackers: these emphatically different. The sunset storm broke over the Vale, rendering the flyers from the ship useless, which allowed Kergan Banbeck to perform the amazing feat which made his name a legend on Aerlith. Rather than joining the terrified flight of his people to the High Jambles, he assembled sixty warriors and shamed them to courage with jeers and taunts. It was a suicidal venture -- fitting the circumstances. Leaping from ambush they hacked to pieces one platoon of the Heavy Troops, routed the others, and captured the twentythree Basics almost before they realized that anything was amiss. The Weaponeers stood back, frantic with frustration, unable to use their weapons for fear of destroying their masters. The Heavy Troopers blundered forward to attack, halting only when Kergen Banbeck performed an unmistakable pantomime to make it clear that the Basics would be the first to die. Confused, the Heavy Troopers drew back. Kergan Banbeck, his men and the twenty-three captives escaped into the darkness. The dawn storm swept out of the east, thundered overhead, retreated majestically into the west; Skene rose like a blazing atom. Three men emerged from the Basic ship; a Weaponeer and a pair of Trackers. They climbed the cliffs to Banbeck Verge, while above flitted a small Basic flyer, no more than a buoyant platform, diving and veering in the wind like a poorly balanced kite. The three men trudged south toward the High Jambles, a region of chaotic shadows and lights, splintered rock and fallen crags, boulders heaped on boulders. It was the traditional refuge of hunted men. Halting in front of the Jambles, the Weaponeer called out for Kergan Banbeck, asking him to parley. Kergan Banbeck came forth. There ensued the strangest colloquy in the history of Aerlith. The Weaponeer spoke the language of men with difficulty, his lips, tongue and glottal passages more adapted to the language of the Basics. "You are restraining twentythree of our Revered. It is necessary that you usher them forth, in all humility." He spoke soberly, with an air of gentle melancholy, neither asserting, commanding nor urging. As his linguistic habits had been shaped to Basic patterns, so had his mental processes. Kergan Banbeck, a tall spare man with varnished black eyebrows, black hair shaped and varnished into a crest of five tall spikes, gave a bark of humorless laughter. "What of the Aerlith folk killed, what of the folk seized aboard your ship?" The Weaponeer bent forward earnestly, himself an impressive man with a noble aquiline head. He was hairless except for small rolls of wispy yellow fleece. His skin shone as if burnished. His ears, where he differed most noticeably from the unadapted men of Aerlith, were small, fragile flaps. He wore a simple garment of dark blue and white, carried no weapons save a small multi-purpose ejector. With complete poise and quiet reasonableness he responded to Kergan Banbeck's question: "The Aerlith folk who have been killed are dead. Those aboard the ship will be merged into the under-stratum, where the infusion of fresh blood is of value." Kergan Banbeck inspected the Weaponeer with contemptuous deliberation. In some respects, thought Kergan Banbeck, this modified and carefully inbred man resembled the sacerdotes of his own planet, notably in the clear fair skin, the strongly modeled features, the long legs and arms. Perhaps telepathy was at work, or perhaps a trace of the characteristic sour-sweet odor had been carried to him: turning his head he noticed a sacerdote standing among the rocks not fifty feet way -- a man naked except for his golden tore and long brown hair blowing behind him like a pennant. By the ancient etiquette, Kergan Banbeck looked through him, pretended that he had no existence. The Weaponeer after a swift glance did likewise. "I demand that you release the folk of Aerlith from your ship," said Kergan Banbeck in a flat voice. The Weaponeer smilingly shook his head, bent his best efforts to the task of making himself intelligible. "These persons are not under discussion. Their -- " he paused, seeking words -- "their destiny is... parceled, quantum-type, ordained. Established. Nothing can be said more." came a cynical grimace. He stood aloof and silent while the Weaponeer croaked on. The sacerdote came slowly forward, a few steps at a time. "You will understand," said the Weaponeer, "that a pattern for events exists. It is the function of such as myself to shape events so that they will fit the pattern." He bent, with a graceful sweep of arm, and seized a small jagged pebble. "Just as I can grind this bit of rock to fit a round aperture." Kergan Banbeck reached forward, took the pebble, tossed it high over the tumbled boulders. "That bit of rock you shall never shape to fit a round hole." The Weaponeer shook his head in mild deprecation. "There is always more rock." "And there are always more holes," declared Kergan Banbeck. "To business then," said the Weaponeer. "I propose to shape this situation to its correct arrangement." "What do you offer in exchange for the twenty-three grephs?" The Weaponeer gave his shoulder an uneasy shake. The ideas of this man were as wild, barbaric and arbitrary as the varnished spikes of his hair-dress. "If you desire I will give you instruction and advice, so that -- " Kergan Banbeck made a sudden sharp gesture. "I make three conditions." The sacerdote now stood only ten feet away, face blind, gaze vague. "First," said Kergan Banbeck, "a guarantee against future attacks upon the men of Aerlith. Five grephs must always remain in our custody as hostages. Second -- further to secure the perpetual validity of the guarantee -- you must deliver me a space-ship, equipped, energized and armed. And you must instruct me in its use." The Weaponeer threw back his head and made a series of bleating sounds through his nose. "Third," continued Kergan Banbeck, "you must release all the men and women presently aboard your ship." The Weaponeer blinked, spoke rapid hoarse words of amazement to the Trackers. They stirred, uneasy and impatient, watching Kergan Banbeck sidelong as if he were not only savage, but mad. Overhead hovered the flyer; the Weaponeer looked up and seemed to derive encouragement from the sight. Turning back to Kergan Banbeck with a firm fresh attitude, he spoke as if the previous interchange had never occurred. "I have come to instruct you that the twentythree Revered must be instantly released." Kergan Banbeck repeated his own demands. "You must furnish me a space-ship, you must raid no more, you must release the captives. Do you agree, yes or no?" The ' Weaponeer seemed confused. "This is a peculiar situation -- indefinite, unquantizable." "Can you not understand me?" barked Kergan Banbeck in exasperation. He glanced at the sacerdote, an act of questionable decorum, then performed in manner completely unconventional: "Sacerdote, how can I deal with this blockhead? He does not seem to hear me." rpHE sacerdote moved a step nearer, his face as bland and blank as before. Living by a doctrine which proscribed active or intentional interference in the affairs of other men, he could make to any question only a specific and limited answer. "He hears you, but there is no meeting of ideas between you. His thought structure is derived from that of his masters. It is incommensurable with yours. As to how you must deal with him, I cannot say." Kergan Banbeck looked back to the Weaponeer. "Have you heard what I asked of you? Did you understand my conditions for the release of the grephs?" "I heard you distinctly," replied the Weaponeer. "Your words have no meaning, they are absurdities, paradoxes. Listen to me carefully. It is ordained, complete, a quantum of destiny, that you deliver to us the Revered. It is irregular, it is not ordainment that you should have a ship, or that your other demands be met." Kergan Banbeck's face became red. He half-turned toward his men but, restraining his anger, spoke slowly and with careful clarity. "I have something you want. You have something I want. Let us trade." For twenty seconds the two men stared eye to eye. Then the Weaponeer drew a deep breath. "I will explain in your words, so that you will comprehend. Certainties -- no, not certainties: definites... Definites exist. These are units of certainty, quanta of necessity and order. Existence is the steady succession of these units, one after the other. The activity of the universe can be expressed by reference to these units. Irregularity, absurdity -- these are like -- half of a man, with half of a brain, half of a heart, half of all his vital organs. Neither are allowed to exist. That you hold twenty-three Revered as captives is such an absurdity: an outrage to the rational flow of the universe." Kergan Banbeck threw up his hands, turned once more to the sacerdote. "How can I halt his nonsense? How can I make him see reason?" The sacerdote reflected. "He speaks not nonsense, but rather a language you fail to understand. You can make him understand your language by erasing all knowledge and training from his mind, and replacing it with patterns of your own." Kergan Banbeck fought back an unsettling sense of frustration and unreality. In order to elicit exact answers from a sacerdote, an exact question was required; indeed it was remarkable that this sacerdote stayed to be questioned. Thinking carefuly, he asked, "How do you suggest that I deal with this man?" "Release the twenty-three grephs." The sacerdote touched the twin knobs at the front of his golden tore: a ritual gesture indicating that, no matter how reluctantly, he had performed an act which conceivably might alter the course of the future. Again he tapped his tore and intoned, "Release the grephs; he will then depart." Kergan Banbeck cried out in unrestrained anger. "Who then do you serve? Man or greph? Let us have the truth! Speak!" "By my faith, by my creed, by the truth of my tand, I serve no one but myself." The sacerdote turned his face toward the great crag of Mount Gethron and moved slowly off. The wind blew his long fine hair to the side.- him go, then with cold decisiveness turned back to the Weaponeer. "Your discussion of certainties and absurdities is interesting. I feel that you have confused the two. Here is certainty from my viewpoint: I will not release the twenty-three grephs unless you meet my terms. If you attack us further, I will cut them in half, to illustrate and realize your figure of speech, and perhaps convince you that absurdities are possible. I say no more." The Weaponeer shook his head slowly, pityingly. "Listen, I will explain. Certain conditions are unthinkable. They are unquantized, un-destined -- " "Go," thundered Kergan Banbeck. "Otherwise you will join your twenty-three revered grephs, and I will teach you how real the unthinkable can become!" The Weaponeer and the two Trackers, croaking and muttering, turned, retreated from the Jambles to Banbeck Verge, descended into the valley. Over them the flyer fluttered like a falling leaf. Watching from their retreat among the crags, the men of Banbeck Vale presently witnessed a remarkable scene. Half an hour after the Weaponeer had returned to the ship, he came leaping forth once again: dancing, cavorting. Others followed him -- Weaponeers, Trackers, Heavy Troopers and eight more grephs -- all jerking, jumping, running back and forth in distracted steps. The ports of the ship flashed lights of various colors, and there came a slow rising sound of tortured machinery. "They have gone mad!" muttered Kergan Banbeck. He hesitated an instant, then gave an order. "Assemble every man! We attack while they are helpless!" Down from the High Jambles rushed the men of Banbeck Vale. As they descended the cliffs, a few of the captured men and women from Sadro Valley came timidly forth from the ship, and meeting no restraint fled to freedom across Banbeck Vale. Others followed -- and now the Banbeck warriors reached the valley floor. Beside the ship the insanity had quieted. The out-worlders huddled quietly beside the hull. There came a sudden mind-shattering explosion: a blankness of yellow and white fire. The ship disintegrated. A great crater marred the valley floor; fragments of metal began to fall among the attacking Banbeck warrior's. Kergan Banbeck stared at the scene of destruction. Slowly, his shoulders sagging, he summoned his people and led them back to their ruined valley. At the rear, marching single-file, tied together with ropes, came the twenty-three grephs, dull eyed, pliant, already remote from their previous existence. The texture of Destiny was inevitable. The present circumstances could not apply to twenty-three of the Revered. The mechanism must therefore adjust to insure the halcyon progression of events. The twenty-three, hence, were something other than the Revered: a different order of creature entirely. If this were true, what were they? Asking each other the question in sad, croaking undertones, they marched down the cliff into Banbeck Vale. Ill the fortunes of Happy Valley and Banbeck Vale fluctuated with the capabilities of the opposing Carcolos and Banbecks. Golden Banbeck, Joaz's grandfather, was forced to release Happy Valley from clientship when Uttern Carcolo, an accomplished dragon-breeder, produced the first Fiends. Golden Banbeck, in his turn, developed the Juggers, but allowed an uneasy truce to continue. Further years passed. Ilden Banbeck, the son of Golden, a frail ineffectual man, was killed in a fall from a mutinous Spider. With Joaz yet an ailing child, Grode Carcolo decided to try his chances against Banbeck Vale. He failed to reckon with old Handel Banbeck, grand-uncle to Joaz and Chief Dragon-master. The Happy Valley forces were routed on Starbreak Fell. Grode Carcolo was killed and young Ervis gored by a Murderer. For various reasons, including Hendel's age and Joaz's youth, the Banbeck army failed to press to a decisive advantage. Ervis Carcolo, though exhausted by loss of blood and pain, withdrew in some degree of order, and for further years a suspicious truce held between the neighboring valleys. Joaz matured into a saturnine young man who, if he excited no enthusiastic affection from his people, at least aroused no violent dislike. He and Ervis Carcolo were united in a mutual contempt. At the mention of Joaz's study, with its books, scrolls, models and plans, its complicated viewing-system across Banbeck Vale (the optics furnished, it was rumored, by the sacerdotes), Carcolo would throw up his hands in disgust. "Learning? Pah! What avails all this rolling in bygone vomit? Where does it lead? He should have been born a sacerdote. He is the same sort of sour-mouthed cloud-minded weakling!" An itinerant named Dae Alvonso, who combined the trades of minstrel, child-buyer, psychiatrist and chiropractor, reported Carcolo's obloquies to Joaz, who shrugged. "Ervis Carcolo should breed himself to one of his own Juggers," said Joaz. "He would thereby produce an impregnable creature with the Jugger's armor and his own unflinching stupidity." The remark in due course returned to Ervis Carcolo, and by coincidence touched him in a particularly sore spot. Secretly he had been attempting an innovation at his brooders: a dragon almost as massive as the Jugger, with the savage intelligence and agility of the Blue Horror. But Ervis Carcolo worked with an intuitive and over-optimistic approach, ignoring the advice of Bast Givven, his Chief Dragonmaster. The eggs hatched; a dozen spratlings survived. Ervis Carcolo nurtured them with alternate doses of tenderness and objurgation. Eventually the dragons matured. Carcolo's hoped-for combination of fury and impregnability was realized in four sluggish, irritable creatures, with bloated torsos, spindly legs, insatiable appetites. ("As if one can breed a dragon by commanding it: 'Exist!' " sneered Bast Givven to his helpers, and advised them: "Be wary of the beasts; they are competent only at luring you within reach of their brachs.") T HE time, effort, facilities and provender wasted upon the useless hybrid had weakened Carcolo's army. Of the fecund Termagants he had no lack. There was a sufficiency of Longhorned Murderers and Striding Murderers; but the heavier and more specialized types, especially Juggers, were far from adequate to his plans. The memory of Happy Valley's ancient glory haunted his dreams. First he would subdue Banbeck Vale; and often he planned the ceremony whereby he would reduce Joaz Banbeck to the office of apprentice barracks-boy. Ervis Carcolo's ambitions were complicated by a set of basic difficulties. Happy Valley's population had doubled but, rather than extending the city by breaching new pinnacles or driving tunnels, Carcolo constructed three new dragon brooders, a dozen barracks and an enormous training compound. The folk of the valley could choose either to cram the fetid existing tunnels or build ramshackle dwellings along the base of the cliff. Brooders, barracks, training compound and huts encroached on Happy Valley's already inadequate fields. Water was diverted from the pond to maintain the brooders. Enormous quantities of produce went to feed dragons. The folk of Happy Valley, under-nourished, sickly, miserable, shared none of Carcolo's aspirations, and their lack of enthusiasm infuriated him. In any event, when the itinerant Dae Alvonso repeated Joaz Banbeck's recommendation that Ervis Carcolo breed himself to a Jugger, Carcolo seethed with choler. "Bah! What does Joaz Banbeck know about dragonbreeding? I doubt if he understands his own dragon-talk." He referred to the means by which orders and instructions were transmitted to the dragons: a secret jargon distinctive to every army. To learn an opponent's dragon-talk was the prime goal of every Dragon-master, for he thereby gained a degree of control over his enemies' forces. "I am a practical man, worth two of him," Carcolo went on. "Can he design, nurture, rear and teach dragons? Can he impose discipline, teach ferocity? No. He leaves all this to his Dragonmasters, while he lolls on a couch eating sweetmeats, campaigning only against the patience of his minstrel-maidens. They say that by astrological divination he predicts the return of the Basics, that he walks with his neck cocked, watching the sky. Is such a man deserving of power and a prosperous life? I say no! Is Ervis Carcolo of Happy Valley such a man? I say yes, and this I will demonstrate!" #TAE Alvonso judiciously held up his hand. "Not so fast. He is more alert than you think. His dragons are in prime condition; he visits them often. And as for the Basics -- " "Do not speak to me of Basics," stormed Carcolo. "I am no child to be frightened by bugbears!" Again Dae Alvonso held up his hand. "Listen. I am serious, and you can profit by my news. Joaz Banbeck took me into his private study -- " "The famous study, indeed!" "From a cabinet he brought out a ball of crystal mounted on a black box." "Aha!" jeered Carcolo. "A crystal ball!" Dae Alvonso went on placidly, ignoring the interruption. "I examined this globe, and indeed it seemed to hold all of space. Within it floated stars and planets, all the bodies of the cluster. 'Look well,' said Joaz Banbeck, 'you will never see the like of this anywhere. It was built by the olden men and brought to Aerlith when our people first arrived.' " 'Indeed,' I said. 'And what is this object?' " 'It is a celestial armamentarium,' said Joaz. 'It depicts all the nearby stars, and their positions at any time I choose to specify. Now -- ' here he pointed -- 'see this white dot? This is our sun. See this red star? In the old almanacs it is named Coralyne. It swings near us at irregular intervals, for such is the flow of stars in this cluster. These intervals have always coincided with the attacks of the Basics.' Here I expressed astonishment; Joaz assured me regarding the matter. 'The history of men on Aerlith records six attacks by the Basics, or grephs as they were originally known. Apparently as Coralyne swings through space the Basics scour nearby worlds for hidden dens of humanity. The last of these was long ago during the time of Kergan Banbeck, with the results you know about. At that time Coralyne passed close in the heavens. For the first time since then, Coralyne is once more close at hand.' This," Alvonso told Carcolo, "is what Joaz Banbeck told me, and this is what I saw." Carcolo was impressed in spite of himself. "Do you mean to tell me," demanded Carcolo, "that within this globe swim all the stars of space?" "As to that, I cannot vouch," replied Dae Alvonso. "The globe is set in a black box, and I suspect that an inner mechanism projects images or perhaps luminous spots which simulate the stars. Either way it is a marvelous device, one which I would be proud to own. I offered Joaz several precious objects in exchange. But he would have none of them." Carcolo curled his lip in disgust. "You and your stolen children. Have you no shame?" "No more than my customers," said Dae Alvonso stoutly. "As I recall, I have dealt profitably with you on several occasions." Ervis Carcolo turned away, pretended to watch a pair of Termagants exercising with wooden scimitars. The two men stood by a stone fence, behind which scores of dragons practiced evolutions, dueled with spears and swords, strengthened their muscles. Scales flashed. Dust rose up under splayed stamping feet. The acrid odor of dragonsweat permeated the air. Carcolo muttered. "He is crafty, that Joaz. He knew you would report to me in detail." D AE Alvonso nodded. "Precisely. His words were -- but perhaps I should be discreet." He glanced slyly toward Carcolo from under shaggy white eyebrows. "Speak," said Ervis Carcolo gruffly. "Very well. Mind you, I quote Joaz Banbeck. 'Tell blundering old Carcolo that he is in great danger. If the Basics return to Aerlith, as well they may, Happy Valley is absolutely vulnerable and will be ruined. Where can his people hide? They will be herded into the black ship and transported to a cold new planet. If Carcolo is not completely heartless he will drive new tunnels, prepare hidden avenues. Otherwise -- ' " "Otherwise what?" demanded Carcolo. "Otherwise there will be no more Happy Valley, and no more Ervis Carcolo.' " "Bah," said Carcolo in a subdued voice. "The young jackanapes barks in shrill tones." "Perhaps he extends an honest warning. His further words -- but I fear to offend Your Dignity." "Continue! Speak!" "These are his words -- but no. I dare not repeat them. Essentially he considers your efforts to create an army ludicrous. He contrasts your intelligence unfavorably to his own. He predicts -- " "Enough!" roared Ervis Carcolo, waving his fists. "He is a subtle adversary, but why do you lend yourself to his tricks?" Dae Alvonso shook his frosty old head. "I merely repeat, with reluctance, that which you demand to hear. Now then, since you have wrung me dry, do me some profit. Will you buy drugs, elixirs, wambles or potions? I have here a salve of eternal youth which I stole from the Demie Sacerdote's personal coffer. In my train are both boy and girl children, obsequious and handsome, at a fair price. I will listen to your woes, cure your lisp, guarantee a placidity of disposition. Or perhaps you would buy dragon eggs?" "I need none of those," grunted Carcolo. "Especially dragon's eggs which hatch to lizards. As for children, Happy Valley seethes with them. Bring me a dozen sound Juggers and you may depart with a hundred children of your choice." Dae Alvonso shook his head sadly and lurched away. Carcolo slumped against the fence, staring across the dragon pens. The sun hung low over the crags of Mount Despoire. Evening was close at hand. This was the most pleasant time of the Aerlith day, when the winds ceased, leaving a vast velvet quiet. Skene's blaze softened to a smoky yellow, with a bronze aureole. The clouds of the approaching evening storm gathered, rose, fell, shifted, swirled; glowing and changing in every tone of gold, orange-brown, goldbrown and dusty violet. Skene sank; the golds and oranges became oak-brown and purple. Lightning threaded the clouds, and the rain fell in a black curtain. In the barracks men moved with vigilance, for now the dragons became unpredictable: by turns watchful, torpid, quarrelsome. With the passing of the rain, evening became night, and a cool quiet breeze drifted through the valleys. The dark sky began to burn and dazzle with the stars of the cluster. One of the most effulgent twinkled red, green, white, red, green. Ervis Carcolo studied this star thoughtfully. One idea led to another, and presently to a course of action which seemed todissolve the entire tangle of uncertainties and dissatisfactions which marred his life. Carcolo twisted his mouth into a sour grimace. He must make overtures to that popinjay Joaz Banbeck. But, if this were unavoidable so be it! Hence, the following morning, shortly after Phade the minstrelmaiden discovered the sacerdote in Joaz's study, a messenger appeared in the Vale, inviting Joaz Banbeck up to Banbeck Verge for a conference with Ervis Carcolo. IV beck Verge with Chief Dragon-master Bast Givven and a pair of young fuglemen. Behind, in a row, stood their mounts: four glistening Spiders, brachs folded, legs splayed at exactly identical angles. These were Carcolo's newest breed. He was immoderately proud of them. The barbs surrounding the horny visages were clasped with cinnabar cabochons; a round target enameled black and studded with a central spike covered each chest. The men wore the traditional black leather breeches, with short maroon cloaks and black leather helmets, with long flaps slanting back across the ears and down to the shoulders. The four men waited, patient or restless as their natures dictated, surveying the well-tended length of Banbeck Vale. To the south stretched fields of various food-stuffs: vetch, bellegarde, moss-cake, a loquat grove. Directly opposite, near the mouth of Clybourne Crevasse, the shape of the crater created by the explosion of the Basic ship could still be seen. North lay more fields, then the dragon compounds, consisting of black-brick barracks, a brooder, an exercise field. Beyond lay Banbeck Jambles -- an area of wasteland, where ages previously a section of the cliff had fallen, creating a wilderness of tumbled rock, similar to the High Jambles under Mount Gethron, but smaller in compass. One of the young fuglemen rather tactlessly commented upon the evident prosperity of Banbeck Vale. Ervis Carcolo listened glumly a moment or two, then ' turned a haughty stare toward the offender. "Notice the dam," said the fugleman. "We waste half our water in seepage." "True," said the other. "The rock facing is a good idea. I wonder why we don't do something similar." Carcolo started to speak, but thought better of it. With a growling sound in his throat, he turned away. Bast Givven made a sign; the fuglemen hastily fell silent. A few moments later Givven announced: "Joaz Banbeck has set forth." Carcolo peered down toward Kergan's Way. "Where is his company? Does he choose to ride alone?" "So it seems." A few minutes later Joaz Banbeck appeared on Banbeck Verge riding a Spider caparisoned in gray and red velvet. Joaz wore a loose lounge cloak of soft brown cloth over a gray shirt and gray trousers, with a long-billed hat of blue velvet. He held up his hand in casual greeting. Brusquely Ervis Carcolo returned the salute, and with a jerk of his head sent Givven and the fuglemen off out of ear-shot.  sent me a message by old Alvonso." Joaz nodded. "I trust he rendered my remarks accurately?" Carcolo grinned wolfishly. "At times he felt obliged to paraphrase." "Tactful old Dae Alvonso." "I am given to understand," said Carcolo, "that you consider me rash, ineffectual, callous to the best interests of Happy Valley. Alvonso admitted that you used the word 'blunderer' in reference to me." Joaz smiled politely. "Sentiments of this sort are best transmitted through intermediaries." Carcolo made a great show of dignified forbearance. "Apparently you feel that another Basic attack is imminent." "Just so," agreed Joaz, "if my theory, which puts their home by the star Coralyne, is correct. In which case, as I pointed out to Alvonso, Happy Valley is seriously vulnerable." "And why not Banbeck Vale as well?" barked Carcolo. Joaz stared at him in surprise. "Is it not obvious? I have taken precautions. My people are housed in tunnels, rather than huts. We have several escape routes, should this prove necessary, both to the High Jambles and to Banbeck Jambles." "Very interesting." Carcolo made an effort to soften his' voice. "If your theory is accurate -- and I pass no immediate judgment -- then perhaps I would be wise to take similar measures. But I think in different terms. I prefer attack to passive defense." "Admirable," said Joaz Banbeck. "Important deeds are done by men such as you." Carcolo became a trifle pink in the face. "This is neither here nor there," he said. "I have come to propose a joint project. It is entirely novel, but carefully thought out. I have considered various aspects of this matter for several years." "I attend you with great interest," said Joaz. Carcolo blew out his cheeks. "You know the legends as well as I, perhaps better. Our people came to Aerlith as exiles during the War of the Ten Stars. The Nightmare Coalition apparently had defeated the Old Rule, but how the war ended -- " he threw up his hands -- "who can say?" "There is a significant indication," said Joaz. "The Basics revisit Aerlith and ravage us at their pleasure. We have seen no men visiting except those who serve the Basics." "Men?" Carcolo demanded scornfully. "I call them something else. Nevertheless, this is no more than a deduction, and we are ignorant as to the course of history. Perhaps Basics rule the cluster; perhaps they plague us only because we are weak and weaponless. Perhaps we are the last men. Perhaps the Old Rule is resurgent. And never forget that many years have elapsed since the Basics last appeared on Aerlith." "Many years have elapsed since Aerlith and Coralyne were in such convenient apposition."  gesture. "A supposition, which may or may not be relevant. Let me explain the basic axiom of my proposal. It is simple enough. I feel that Banbeck Vale and Happy Valley are too small a compass for men such as ourselves. We deserve larger scope." Joaz agreed. "I wish it were possible to ignore the practical difficulties involved." "I am able to suggest a method to counter these difficulties," asserted Carcolo. "In that case," said Joaz, "power, glory and wealth are as good as ours." Carcolo glanced at him sharply, slapped his breeches with the gold-beaded tassel to his scabbard. "Reflect," he said. "The sacerdotes inhabited Aerlith before us. How long no one can say. It is a mystery. In fact, what do we know of the sacerdotes? Next to nothing. They trade their metal and glass for our food. They live in deep caverns. Their creed is disassociation, reverie, detachment, whatever one may wish to call it -- totally incomprehensible to one such as myself." He challenged Joaz with a look; Joaz merely fingered his long chin. "They put themselves forward as simple metaphysical cultists. Actually they are a very mysterious people. Has anyone yet seen a sacerdote woman? What of the blue lights? What of the lightning towers, what of the sacerdote magic? What of weird comings and going by night, what of strange shapes moving across the sky, perhaps to other planets?" "The tales exist, certainly," said Joaz. "As to the degree of credence to be placed in them -- " "Now we reach the meat of my proposal!" declared Ervis Carcolo. "The creed of the sacerdotes apparently forbids shame or regard for consequence. Hence, they are forced to answer any question put to them. Nevertheless, creed or no creed, they completely befog any information an assiduous man is able to wheedle from them." Joaz inspected him curiously. "Evidently you have made the attempt." Ervis Carcolo nodded. "Why should I deny it? I have questioned three sacerdotes with determination and persistence. They answered all my questions with gravity and calm reflection, but told me nothing." He shook his head in vexation. "Therefore, I suggest that we apply coercion." "You are a brave man." Carcolo shook his head modestly. "I would dare no direct measures. But they must eat. If Banbeck Vale and Happy Valley cooperate, we can apply the very cogent persuasion of hunger. Presently their words may be more to the point." Joaz considered a moment or two. Ervis Carcolo twitched his scabbard tassel. "Your plan," said Joaz at last, "is not a frivolous one, and is ingenious -- at least at first glance. What sort of information do you hope to secure? In short, what are your ultimate aims?" ded Joaz with his forefinger. "We know nothing of the outer worlds. We are marooned on this miserable planet of stone and wind while life passes us by. You assume that Basics rule the cluster. But suppose you are wrong? Suppose the Old Rule has returned? Think of the rich cities, the gay resorts, the palaces, the pleasure-islands! Look up into the night sky. Ponder the bounties which might be ours! You ask how can we implement these desires? I respond, the process may be so simple that the sacerdotes will reveal it without reluctance." "You mean -- " "Communication with the worlds of men! Deliverance from this lonely little world at the edge of the universe!" Joaz Banbeck nodded dubiously. "A fine vision. But the evidence suggests a situation far different, namely the destruction of man and the Human Empire." Carcolo held out his hands in gesture of open-minded tolerance. "Perhaps you are right. But why should we not make inquiries of the sacerdotes? Concretely I propose as follows: that you and I agree to the mutual cause I have outlined. Next, we request an audience with the Demie Sacerdote. We put our questions. If he responds freely, well and good. If he evades, then we act together. No more food to the sacerdotes until they tell us plainly what we want to hear." "Other valleys exist," said Joaz thoughtfully. Carcolo made a brisk gesture. "We can deter any such trade by persuasion or by the power of our dragons." "The essence of your idea appeals to me," said Joaz. "But I fear that all is not so simple." Carcolo rapped his thigh smartly with the tassel. "And why not?" "In the first place, Coralyne shines bright in the sky. This is our first concern. Should Coralyne pass and the Basics not attack -- then is the time to pursue this matter. Again -- and perhaps more to the point -- I doubt that we can starve the sacerdotes into submission. In fact, I consider it impossible." Carcolo blinked. "In what wise?" "They walk naked through sleet and storm; do you think they fear hunger? And there is wild lichen to be gathered. How could we forbid this? You might dare some sort of coercion, but not I. The tales told of the sacerdotes may be superstition -- or they may be understatement." Ervis Carcolo heaved a deep disgusted sigh. "Joaz Banbeck, I took you for a man of decision. But you merely pick flaws." "These are not flaws. They are major errors which would lead to disaster." "Well, then. Do you have any suggestions of your own?" alyne recedes and we are still on Aerlith -- rather than in the hold of the Basic ship -- then let us plan to plunder the secrets of the sacerdotes. In the meantime I strongly recommend that you prepare Happy Valley against a new raid. You are over-extended, with your new brooders and barracks. Let them rest, while you dig yourself secure tunnels!" Ervis Carcolo stared straight across Banbeck Vale. "I am not a man to defend. I attack!" "You will attack heat-beams and ion-rays with your dragons?" Ervis Carcolo turned his gaze back to Joaz Banbeck. "Can I consider us allies in the plan I have proposed?" "In its broadest principles, certainly. However I don't care to cooperate in starving or otherwise coercing the sacerdotes. It might be dangerous, as well as futile." For an instant Carcolo could not control his detestation of Joaz Banbeck. His lip curled, his hands clenched. "Danger? Pah! What danger from a handful of naked pacifists?" "We do not know that they are pacifists. We do know that they are men." Carcolo once more became brightly cordial. "Perhaps you are right. But essentially at least we are allies." "To a degree." "Good. I suggest that in the case of the attack you fear, we act together, with a common strategy." Joaz nodded distantly. "This might be effective." "Let us coordinate our plans. Let us assume that the Basics drop down into Banbeck Vale. I suggest that your folk take refuge in Happy Valley, while the Happy Valley army joins with yours to cover their retreat. And likewise, should they attack Happy Valley, my people will take temporary refuge with you in Banbeck Vale." Joaz laughed in sheer amusement. "Ervis Carcolo, what sort of lunatic do you take me for? Return to your valley, put aside your foolish grandiosities, dig yourself protection. And fast! Coralyne is bright!" Carcolo stood stiffly. "Do I understand they you reject my offer of alliance?" "Not at all. But I cannot undertake to protect you and your people if you will not help yourselves. Meet my requirements, satisfy me that you are a fit ally -- then we shall speak further of alliance." Ervis Carcolo whirled on his heel, signaled to Bast Givven and the two young fuglemen. With no further word or glance he mounted his splendid Spider, goaded him into a sudden leaping run across the Verge and up the slope toward Starbreak Fell. His men followed, somewhat less precipitously. Joaz watched them go, shaking his head in sad wonder. Then, mounting his own Spider, he returned down the trail to the floor of Banbeck Vale. V T HE long Aerlith day, equivalent to six of the old Diurnal Units, passed. In Happy Valley there was grim activity, a sense of purpose and impending decision. The dragons exercised in tighter formation. The fuglemen and cornets called orders with harsher voices. In the armory bullets were cast, powder was mixed, swords were ground and honed. Ervis Carcolo drove himself with dramatic bravado, wearing out Spider after Spider as he sent his dragons through various evolutions. In the case of the Happy Valley forces, these were for the most part Termagants -- small active dragons with rust-red scales, narrow darting heads, chisel-sharp fangs. Their brachs were strong and well-developed. They used lance, cutlass or mace with equal skill. A man pitted against a Termagant stood no chance, for the scales warded off bullets as well as any blow the man might have strength enough to deal. On the other hand a single slash of fang, the rip of a scythe-like claw, meant death to the man. The Termagants were fecund and hardy and throve even under the conditions which existed in the Happy Valley brooders; hence their predominance in Carcolo's army. This was a situation not to the liking of Bast Givven, Chief Dragon-master, a spare wiry man with a flat crookednosed face, eyes black and blank as drops of ink on a plate. Habitually terse and tight-lipped, he waxed almost eloquent in opposition to the attack upon Banbeck Vale. "Look you, Ervis Carcolo. We are able to deploy a horde of Termagants, with sufficient Striding Murderers and Long-horned Murderers. But Blue Horrors, Fiends and Juggers -- no! We are lost if they trap us on the fells!" "I do not plan to fight on the fells," said Carcolo. "I will force battle upon Joaz Banbeck. His Juggers and Fiends are useless on the cliffs. And in the matter of Blue Horrors we are almost his equal." "You overlook a single difficulty," said Bast Givven. "And what is this?" "The improbability that Joaz Banbeck plans to permit all this. I allow him greater intelligence than that." "Show me evidence!" charged Carcolo. "What I know of him suggests vacillation and stupidity! So we will strike -- hard!" Carcolo smacked fist into palm. "Thus we will finish the haughty Banbecks!" Bast Givven turned to go. CarScRjdiNc; cnuRDeReR colo wrathfully called him back. "You show no enthusiasm for this campaign!" "I know what our army can do and what it cannot do," said Givven bluntly. "If Joaz Banbeck is the man you think he is, we might scceed. If he has even the sagacity of a pair of grooms I listened to ten minutes ago, we face disaster." In a voice thick with rage, Carcolo said, "Return to your Fiends and Juggers. I want them quick as Termagants." Bast Givven went his way. Carcolo jumped on a nearby Spider, kicked it with his heels. The creature sprang forward, halted sharply, twisted its long neck about to look Carcolo in the face. Carcolo cried, "Hust, hust! Forward at speed, smartly now! Show these louts what snap and spirit mean!" The Spider jumped ahead with such vehemence that Carcolo tumbled over backward, landing on his neck, where he lay groaning. Grooms came running and assisted him to a bench where he sat cursing in a steady low voice. A surgeon examined, pressed, prodded, recommended that Carcolo take to his couch and administered a sedative potion.  apartments beneath the west wall of Happy Valley and placed I under the care of his wives. He slept for twenty hours. When he awoke the day was half gone. He wished to arise, but found himself too stiff to move and, groaning, lay back. Presently he called for Bast Givven, who appeared and listened without comment to Carcolo's adjurations. Evening arrived. The dragons returned to the barracks. There was nothing to do now but wait for daybreak. During the long night Carcolo underwent a variety of treatments: massage, hot baths, infusions and poultices. He exercised with diligence, and as the night reached its end he declared himself fit. Overhead the star Coralyne vibrated poisonous colors -- red, green, white -- by far the brightest star of the cluster. Carcolo refused to look up at the star, but its radiance struck through the corners of his eyes whenever he walked on the valley floor. Dawn approached. Carcolo planned to march at the earliest moment the dragons were manageable. A flickering to the east told of the oncoming dawn storm, still invisible across the horizon. With great caution the dragons were mustered from their barracks and ordered into a marching column. There were almost three hundred Termagants; eighty-five Striding Murderers, as many Long-horned Murderers; a hundred Blue Horrors; fifty-two squat, immensely powerful Fiends, their tails tipped with spiked steel balls; eighteen Juggers. They growled and muttered evilly among themselves, watching an opportunity to kick each other or to snip a leg from an unwary groom. Darkness stimulated their latent hatred for humanity -- though they had been taught nothing of their past, nor the circumstances by which they had become enslaved. The dawn lightning blazed, outlining the vertical steeples and astonishing peaks of the Malheur Mountains. Overhead passed the storm, with wailing gusts of wind and thrashing banks of rain, moving on toward Banbeck Vale. The east glowed with a gray-green pallor, and Carcolo gave the signal to march. Still stiff and sore he hobbled to his Spider, mounted, ordered the creature into a special and dramatic curvet. Carcolo had miscalculated. Malice of the night still gripped the mind of the dragon. It ended its curvet with a lash of the neck which once again dashed Carcolo to the ground, where he lay half-mad with pain and frustration. He tried to rise; collapsed; tried again; fainted. Five minutes he lay unconscious, then seemed to rouse himself by sheer force of will. "Lift me," he whispered huskily. "Tie me into the saddle. We must march." This being manifestly impossible, no one made a move, Carcolo raged, finally called hoarsely for Blast Givven. "Proceed; we cannot stop now. You must lead the troops."  was an honor for which he had no stomach. "You know the battle-plan," wheezed Carcolo. "Circle north of the Fang, cross the Skanse with all speed, swing north around Blue Crevasse, then south along Banbeck Verge. There Joaz Banbeck may be expected to discover you. You must deploy so that when he brings up his juggers you can topple them back with Fiends. Avoid committing our Juggers. Harry him with Termagants; reserve the Murderers to strike wherever he reaches the edge. Do you understand me?" "As you explain it, victory is certain," muttered Bast Givven. "And so it is, unless you blunder grievously. Ah, my back! I can't move. While the great battle rages I must sit by the brooder and watch eggs hatch! Now go! Strike hard for Happy Valley!" Givven gave an order. The troops set forth. Termagants darted into the lead, followed by silken Striding Murderers and the heavier Longhorned Murderers, their fantastic chest-spike tipped with steel. Behind came the ponderous Juggers, grunting, gurgling, teeth clashing together with the vibration of their steps. Flanking the Juggers marched the Fiends, carrying heavy cutlasses, flourishing their terminal steel balls as a scorpion carries his sting. Then at the rear came the Blue Horrors, who were both massive and quick, good climbers, no less intelligent than the Termagants. To the flanks rode a hundred men: dragon-masters, knights, fuglemen and cornets. They were armed with swords, pistols and large-bore blunderbusses. Carcolo watched from a stretcher till the last of his forces had passed from view, then commanded himself carried back to the portal which led into the Happy Valley caves. Never before had the caves seemed so dingy and shallow. Sourly he eyed the straggle of huts along the cliff, built of rock, slabs of resin-impregnated lichen, canes bound with tar. With the Banbeck campaign at an end, he would set about cutting new chambers and halls into the cliff. The splendid decorations of Banbeck Village were well-known. Happy Valley would be even more magnificent. The halls would glow with opal and nacre, silver and gold... And yet, to what end? If events went as planned, there was his great dream in prospect. And then, what consequence a few paltry decorations in the tunnels of Happy Valley? Groaning, he allowed himself to be laid on his couch and entertained himself picturing the progress of his troops. By now they should be working down from Dangle Ridge, circling the mile-high Fang. He tentatively stretched his arms, worked his legs. His muscles protested. Pain shot back and forth along his body -- but it seemed as if the injuries were less than before... By now the army would be mounting the ramparts which rimmed that wide area of upland fell known as the Skanse... The surgeon brought Carcolo a potion. He drank and slept, to awake with a start. What was the time? His troops might well have joined battle! He ordered himself carried to the outer portal; then, still dissatisfied, commanded his servants to transport him across the valley to the new dragon brooder, the walkway of which commanded a view up and down the valley. Despite the protests of his wives, here he was conveyed, and made as comfortable as bruises and sprains permitted. He settled himself for an indeterminate wait. But news was not long in coming. a cornet on a foam-bearded Spider. Carcolo sent a groom to intercept him and, heedless of aches and pains, raised himself from his couch. The cornet threw himself off his mount, staggered up the ramp, sagged exhausted against the rail. "Ambush!" he panted. "Bloody disaster!" "Ambush?" groaned Carcolo in a hollow voice. "Where?" "As we mounted the Skanse Ramparts. They waited till our Termagants and Murderers were over, then charged with Horrors, Fiends and Juggers. They cut us apart, drove us back, then rolled boulders on our Juggers! Our army is broken!" Carcolo sank back on the couch, lay staring at the sky. "How many are lost?" "I do not know. Givven called the retreat. We withdrew in the best style possible." Carcolo lay as if comatose. The cornet flung himself down on a bench. A column of dust appeared tp the north, which presently dissolved and separated to reveal a number of Happy Valley dragons. All were wounded. They marched, hopped, limped, dragged themselves at random, croaking, glaring, bugling. First came a group of Termagants, darting ugly heads from side to side; then a pair of Blue Horrors, brachs twisting and clasping almost like human arms; then a Jugger, massive, toad-like, legs splayed out in weariness. Even as it neared the barracks it toppled, fell with a thud and lay still, legs and talons jutting into the air. Down from the North Trail rode Bast Givven, dust-stained and haggard. He dismounted from his drooping Spider, mounted the ramp. With a wrenching effort, Carcolo once more raised himself on the couch. Givven reported in a voice so even and light as to seem careless, but even the insensitive Carcolo was not deceived. He asked in puzzlement: "Exactly where did the ambush occur?" "We mounted the Ramparts by way of Chloris Ravine. Where the Skanse falls off into the ravine a porphyry outcrop juts up and over. Here they awaited us." Carcolo hissed through his teeth. "Amazing." Bast Givven gave the faintest of nods. Carcolo said, "Assume that Joaz Banbeck set forth during the dawn-storm, an hour earlier than I would think possible. Assume that he forced his troops at a run. How could he reach the Skanse Ramparts before us even ) s or "By my reckoning," said Givven, "ambush was no threat until we had crossed the Skanse. I had planned to patrol Barchback, all the way down Blue Fell and across Blue Crevasse." Carcolo gave somber agreement. "How then did Joaz Banbeck bring his troops to the Ramparts so soon?" Givven turned, looked up the valley, where wounded dragons and men still straggled down the North Trail. "I have no idea." "A drug?" puzzled Carcolo. "A potion to pacify the dragons? Could he have made bivouac on the Skanse the whole night long?" "The last is possible," admitted Givven grudgingly. "Under Barch Spike are empty caves. If he quartered his troops here during the night, then he had only to march across the Skanse to waylay us." Carcolo grunted. "Perhaps we have underestimated Joaz Banbeck." He sank back on his couch with a groan. "Well, then, what are our losses?" I I 'HE reckoning made dreary news. Of the already inadequate squad of Juggers, only six remained. From a force of fiftytwo Fiends, forty survived and of these five were sorely wounded. Termagants, Blue Horrors and Murderers had suffered greatly. A large number had been torn apart in the first onslaught. Many others had been toppled down the Ramparts to strew their armored husks through the detritus. Of the hundred men, twelve had been killed by bullets, another fourteen by dragon attack. A score more were wounded in various degree. Carcolo lay back, his eyes closed and his mouth working feebly. "The terrain alone saved us," said Givven. "Joaz Banbeck refused to commit his troops to the ravine. If there were any tactical error on either side, it was his. He brought an insufficiency of Termagants and Blue Horrors." "Small comfort," growled Carcolo. "Where is the balance of the army?" "We have good position on Dangle Ridge. We have seen none of Banbeck's scouts, either man or Termagant. He may conceivably believe we have retreated to the valley. In any event his main forces were still collected on the Skanse." Carcolo, by an enormous effort, raised himself to his feet. He tottered across the walkway to look down into the dispensary. Five Fiends crouched in vats of balsam, muttering and sighing. A Blue Horror hung in a sling, whining as surgeons cut broken fragments of armor from VI its gray flesh. As Carcolo watched, one of the Fiends raised itself high on its anterior legs, foam gushing from its gills. It cried out in a peculiar, poignant tone and fell back dead into the vat of balsam. Carcolo turned back to Givven. "This is what you must do. Joaz Banbeck surely has sent forth patrols. Retire along Dangle Ridge. Then, taking all concealment from the patrols, swing up into one of the Despoire Cols. Tourmaline Col will serve. This is my reasoning. Banbeck will assume that you are retiring to Happy Valley, so he will hurry south behind the Fang, to attack as you come down off Dangle Ridge. As he passes below Tourmalone Col, you have the advantage. You may well destroy Joaz Banbeck there with all his troops." Bast Givven shook his head decisively. "What if his patrols locate us in spite of our precautions? He need only follow our tracks to bottle us into Tourmaline Col, with no escape except over Mount Despoire or out on Starbreak Fell. And if we venture out on Starbreak Fell his Juggers will destroy us in minutes." Ervis Carcolo sagged back down upon the couch. "Bring the troops back to Happy Valley. We will regroup and await another occasion." UT into the cliff south of the  crag which housed Joaz's apartments was a large chamber known as Kergan's Hall. The proportions of the room, the simplicity and lack of ornament, the massive antique furniture contributed to the sense of lingering personality, as well as an odor unique to the room. This odor exhaled from naked stone walls, the petrified moss parquetry, old wood -- a rough ripe redolence which Joaz had always disliked, together with every other aspect of the room. The dimensions seemed arrogant in their extent. The lack of ornament impressed him as rude, if not brutal. One day it occurred to Joaz that he disliked not the room but Kergan Banbeck himself, together with the entire system of overblown legends which surrounded him. The room nevertheless in many respects was pleasant. Three tall groined windows overlooked the vale. The casements were set with small square panes of green-blue glass in muntins of black ironwood. The ceiling likewise was paneled in wood, and here a certain amount of the typical Banbeck intricacy had been permitted. There were mock pilaster capitals with gargoyle heads, a frieze carved with conventionalized fern-fronds. The f furniture consisted of three pieces: two tall carved chairs and a massive table, all polished dark wood, all of enormous antiquity. Joaz had found a use for the room. The table supported a carefully detailed relief map of the district, on a scale of three inches to the mile. At the center was Banbeck Vale, on the right hand Happy Valley, separated by a turmoil of crags and chasms, cliffs, spikes, walls and five titanic peaks: Mount Gethron to the south, Mount Despoire in the center, Barch Spike, the Fang and Mount Halcyon to the north. At the front of Mount Gethron lay the High Jambles, then Starbreak Fell extended to Mount  Despoire and Barch Spike. Beyond Mount Despoire, between the Skanse Ramparts and Barchback, the Skanse reached all the way to the tormented basalt ravines and bluffs at the foot of Mount Halcyon. As Joaz stood studying the map, into the room came Phade. She was mischievously quiet. But Joaz sensed her nearness by the scent of incense, in the smoke of which she had steeped herself before seeking out Joaz. She wore a traditional holiday costume of Banbeck maidens: a tight-fitting sheath of dragon intestine, with muffs of brown fur at neck, elbows and knees. A tall cylindrical hat, notched around the upper edge, perched on her rich brown curls, and from the top of this hat soared a red plume. Joaz feigned unconsciousness of her presence. She came up behind him to tickle his neck with the fur of her neck-piece. Joaz pretended stolid indifference. Phade not at all deceived, put on a face of woeful concern. "Must we all be slain? How goes the war?" "For Banbeck Vale the war goes well. For poor Ervis Carcolo and Happy Valley the war goes ill indeed." "You plan his destruction," Phade intoned in a voice of hushed accusation. "You will kill him! Poor Ervis Carcolo!" "He deserves no better." "But what will befall Happy. Valley?" Joaz Banbeck shrugged idly. "Changes for the better." "Will you seek to rule?" "Not I." "Think!" whispered Phade. "Joaz Banbeck, Tyrant of Banbeck Vale, Happy Valley, Phosphor Gulch, Glore, the Tarn, Clewhaven and the Great Northern Rift." "Not I," said Joaz. "Perhaps you would rule in my stead?" "Oh! Indeed! What changes there would be! I'd dress the sacerdotes in red and yellow ribbons. I'd order them to sing and dance and drink May wine. The dragons I'd send south to Arcady, except for a few gentle Termagants to nursemaid the children. And no more of these furious battles. I'd burn the armor and break the swords; I'd -- " #fY dear little flutterbug," said Joaz with a laugh. "What a swift reign you'd have indeed!" 'Why swift? Why not forever? If men had no means to fight -- " "And when the Basics came down -- you'd throw garlands around their necks?" "Pah. They shall never be seen again. What do they gain by molesting a few remote valleys?" "Who knows what they gain? We are free men. Perhaps the last free men in the universe. Who knows? And will they be back? Coralyne is bright in the sky!" Phade became suddenly interested in the relief map. "And your current war -- dreadful. Will you attack, will you defend?" "This depends on Ervis Carcolo," said Joaz. "I need only wait till he exposes himself." Looking down at the map he added thoughtfully, "He is clever enough to do me damage, unless I move with care." "And what if the Basics come while you bicker with Carcolo?" Joaz smiled. "Perhaps we shall all flee to the Jambles. Perhaps we shall all fight." "I will fight beside you," declared Phade, striking a brave attitude. "We will attack the great Basic space-ship, braving the heat-rays, fending off the powerbolts. We will storm to the very portal. We will pull the nose of the first marauder who shows himself!" "At one point your otherwise sage strategy falls short," said Joaz. "How does one find the nose of a Basic?" "In that case," said Phade, "we shall seize their -- " She turned her head at a sound in the hall. Joaz strode across the room, flung back the door. Old Rife the porter sidled forward. "You told me to call when the bottle either overturned or broke. Well, it's done both." Joaz pushed past Rife, ran down the corridor. "What means this?" demanded Phade. "Rife, what have you said to disturb him?" Rife shook his head fretfully. "I am as perplexed at you. A bottle is pointed out to me. Watch this bottle day and night' -- so I am commanded. And also, When the bottle breaks or tips, call me at once.' I tell myself that here in all truth is a sinecure. And I wonder, does Joaz consider me so senile that I will rest content with a make-work task such as watching a bottle? I am old, my jaws tremble, but I am not witless. To my surprise the bottle breaks! The explanation admittedly is simple. It fell to the floor. Nevertheless, without knowledge of what it all means, I obey orders and notify Joaz Banbeck." Phade had been squirming impatiently. "Where then is this bottle?" "In the studio of Joaz Banbeck." Phade ran off as swiftly as the tight sheath about her thighs permitted: through a transverse tunnel, across Kergan's Way by a covered bridge, then up at a slant toward Joaz's apartments. Down the long hall ran Phade, through the anteroom where a bottle lay shattered on the floor, into the studio, where she halted in astonishment. No one was to be seen. She noticed a section of shelving which stood at an angle. Quietly, timorously, she stole across the room, peered down into the workshop. rpHE scene was an odd one. Joaz stood negligently, smiling a cool smile, as across the room a naked sacerdote gravely sought to shift a barrier which had sprung down across an area of the wall. But the gate was cunningly locked in place, and the sacerdote's efforts were to no avail. He turned, glanced briefly at Joaz, then started for the exit into the studio. Phade sucked in her breath and backed away. The sacerdote came out into the studio, started for the door. "Just a moment," said Joaz. "I wish to speak to you." The sacerdote paused, turned his head in mild inquiry. He was a young man, his face bland, blank, almost beautiful. Fine transparent skin stretched over his pale bones. His eyes -- wide, blue, innocent -- seemed to stare without focus. He was delicate of frame and sparsely fleshed. His hands were thin, with fingers trembling in some kind of nervous imbalance. Down his back, almost to his waist, hung the mane of long light-brown hair. Joaz seated himself with ostentatious deliberation, never taking his eyes from the sacerdote. Presently he spoke in a voice pitched at an ominous level. "I find your conduct far from ingratiating." This was a declaration requiring no response, and the sacerdote made none. "Please sit," said Joaz. He indicated a bench. "You have a great deal of explaining to do." Was it Phade's imagination? Or did a spark of something like wild amusement flicker and die almost instantaneously in the sacerdote's eyes? But again he made no response. Joaz, adapting to the peculiar rules by which communication with the sacerdotes must be conducted, asked, "Do you care to sit?" "It is immaterial," said the sacerdote. "Since I am standing now, I will stand." Joaz rose to his feet and performed an act without precedent. He pushed the bench behind the sacerdote, rapped the back of the knobby knees, thrust the sacerdote firmly down upon the bench. "Since you are sitting now," said Joaz, "you might as well sit." With gentle dignity the sacerdote regained his feet. "I shall stand." Joaz shrugged. "As you wish. I intend to ask you some questions. I hope that you will cooperate and answer with precision." The sacerdote blinked owlishly"Will you do so?" "Certainly. I prefer, however, to return the way I came." Joaz ignored the remark. "First," he asked, "why do you come to my study?" The sacerdote spoke carefully, in the voice of one talking to a child. "Your language is vague. I am confused and must not respond, since I am vowed to give only truth to anyone who requires it." Joaz settled himself in his chair. "There is no hurry. I am ready for a long discussion. Let me ask you then: did you have impulses which you can explain to me, which persuaded or impelled you to come to my studio?" "Yes.""How many of these impulses did you recognize?" "I don't know." "More than one?" "Perhaps." "Less than ten?" "I don't know." "Hmm... Why ar.e you uncertain?" "I am not uncertain." "Then why can't you specify the number as I requested?" "There is no such number." "I see... You mean, possibly, that there are several elements of a single motive which directed your brain to signal your muscles in order that they might carry you here?" "Possibly." Joaz's thin lips twisted in a faint smile of triumph. "Can you describe an element of the eventual motive?" "Yes." "Do so, then." against which the sacerdote was proof. Any form of coercion known to Joaz -- fire, sword, thirst, mutilation -- these to a sacerdote were no more than inconveniences; he ignored them as if they did not exist. His personal inner world was the single world # f reality. Either acting upon or reacting against the affairs of the Utter Men demeaned him. Absolute passivity and absolute candor were his necessary courses of action. Understanding something of this, Joaz rephrased his command: "Can you think of an element of the motive which impelled you to come here?" "Yes." "What is it?" "A desire to wander about." "Can you think of another?" "Yes." "What is it?" "A desire to exercise myself by walking." "I see... Incidentally, are you trying to evade answering my question?" "I answer such questions as you put to me. So long as I do so, so long as I open my mind to all who seek knowledge -- for this is our creed -- there can be no question of evasion." "So you say. However, you have not provided me an answer that I find satisfactory." The sacerdote's reply to the comment was an almost imperceptible widening of the pupils. "Very well then," said Joaz Banbeck. "Can you think of another element to this complex motive we have been discussing?" "Yes." "What is it?" "I am interested in antiques. I came to your study to admire your relics of the old worlds." "Indeed?" Joaz raised his eyebrows. "I am lucky to possess such fascinating treasures. Which of my antiques interests you particularly?" "Your books. Your maps. Your great globe of the Arch-world." "The Arch-world? Eden?" "This is one of its names." Joaz pursed his lips. "So you come here to study my antiques. Well then, what other elements to this motive exist?" The sacerdote hesitated an instant. "It was suggested to me that I come here." "By whom?" "By the Demie." "Why did he so suggest?" "I am uncertain." "Can you conjecture?" "Yes." "What are these conjectures?" The sacerdote made a small bland gesture with the fingers of one hand. "The Demie might wish to become an Utter Man, and so seeks to learn the principles of your existence. Or the Demie might wish to change the trade articles. The Demie might be fascinated by my descriptions of your antiques. Or the Demie might be curious regarding the focus of your vision-panels. Or -- " "Enough. Which of these conjectures, and of other conjectures you have not yet divulged, do you consider most probable?" "None." more. "How do you justify this?" "Since any desired number of conjectures can be formed, the denominator of any probabilityratio is variable and the entire concept becomes arithmetically meaningless." Joaz grinned wearily. "Of the conjectures which to this moment have occurred to you, which do you regard as the most likely?" "I suspect that the Demie might think it desirable that I come here to stand." "What do you achieve by standing?" "Nothing." "Then the Demie does not send you here to stand." To Joaz's assertion, the sacerdote made no comment. Joaz framed a question with great care. "What do you believe that the Demie hopes you will achieve by coming here to stand?" "I believe that he wishes me to learn how Utter Men think." "And you learn how I think by coming here?" "I am learning a great deal." "How does it help you?" "I don't know." "How many times have you visited my study?" "Seven times." "Why were you chosen specially to come?" "The synod has approved my tand. I may well be the next Demie." Joaz spoke over his shoulder to Phade. "Brew tea." He turned back to the sacerdote. "What is a tand?" The sacerdote took a deep breath. "My tand is the representation of my soul." "Hmm. What does it look like?" The sacerdote's expression was unfathomable. "It cannot be described." "Do I have one?" "No." Joaz shrugged. "Then you can read my thoughts." Silence. "Can you read my thoughts?" "Not well." "Why should you wish to read my thoughts?" "We are alive in the universe together. Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know." Joaz smiled skeptically. "How does knowledge help you, if you will not act upon it?" "Events follow the Rationale, as water drains into a hollow and forms a pool." "Bah!" said Joaz, in sudden irstation. "Your doctrine commits you to non-interference in our affairs, nevertheless you allow your 'Rationale' to creat conditions by which events are influenced. Is this correct?" "I am not sure. We are a passive people." "Still, your Demie must have had a plan in mind when he sent you here. Is this not correct?" "I cannot say." Joaz veered to a new line of questioning. "Where does the tunnel behind my workshop lead?" "Into a cavern." Joaz. He poured and sipped reflectively. Of contests there were numberless varieties. He and the sacerdote were engaged in a hide-and-seek game of words and ideas. The sacerdote was schooled in patience and supple evasions, to counter which Joaz could bring pride and determination. The sacerdote was handicapped by an innate necessity to speak truth. Joaz, on the other hand, must grope like a man blindfolded, unacquainted with the goal he sought, ignorant of the prize to be won. Very well, thought Joaz, let us continue. We shall see whose nerves fray first. He offered tea to the sacerdote, who refused with a shake of the head so quick and of such small compass as to seem a shudder. Joaz made a gesture signifying it was all the same to him. "Should you desire sustenance or drink," he said, "please let it be known. I enjoy our conversation so inordinately that I fear I may prolong it to the limits of your patience. Surely you would prefer to sit?" "No." "As you wish. Well, then, back to our discussion. This cavern you mentioned: is it inhabited by sacerdotes?" "I fail to understand your question." "Do sacerdotes use the cavern?" "Yes." Eventually, fragment by fragment, Joaz extracted the information that the cavern connected with a series of chambers, in which the sacerdotes smelted metal, boiled glass, ate, slept, performed their rituals. At one time there had been an opening into Banbeck Vale, but long ago this had been blocked. Why? There were wars throughout the cluster; bands of defeated men were taking refuge upon Aerlith, settling in rifts and valleys. The sacerdotes preferred a detached existence and had shut their caverns away from sight. Where was this opening? The sacerdote seemed vague. To the north end of the valley. Behind Banbeck Jambles? Possibly. But trading between men and sacerdotes was conducted at a cave entrance below Mount Gethron. Why? A matter of usage, declared the sacerdote. In addition this location was more readily accessible to Happy Valley and Phosphor Gulch. How many sacerdotes lived in these caves? Uncertainty. Some might have died, others might have been born. Approximately how many this morning? Perhaps five hundred. At this juncture the sacerdote was swaying and Joaz was hoarse. "Back to your motive -- or the elements of your motives -- for coming to my studio. Are they connected in any manner with the star Coralyne, and a possible new coming of the Basics, or the grephs, as they were formerly called?" Again the sacerdote seemed to hesitate. Then: "Yes." "Will the sacerdotes help us against the Basics, should they come?" "No." This answer was terse and definite. "But I assume that the sacerdotes wish the Basics driven off?" No answer. Joaz rephrased his words. "Do the sacerdotes wish the Basics repelled from Aerlith?" "The Rationale bids us stand aloof from affairs of men and non-men alike." Joaz curled his lip. "Suppose the Basics invaded your cave and dragged you off to the Coralyne planet. Then what?" r T , HE sacerdote almost seemed to laugh. "The question cannot be answered." "Would you resist the Basics if they made the attempt?" "I cannot answer your question." Joaz laughed. "But the answer is not no?" The sacerdote assented. "Do you have weapons, then?" The sacerdote's mild blue eyes seemed to droop. Secrecy? Fatigue? Joaz repeated the question. "Yes," said the sacerdote. His knees sagged, but he snapped them tight. "What kind of weapons?" "Numberless varieties. Projectiles, such as rocks. Piercing weapons, such as broken sticks. Cutting and slashing weapons, such as cooking utensils." His voice began to fade as if he were moving away. "Poisons: arsenic, sulfur, triventidum, acid, black-spore. Burning weapons, such as torches and lenses to focus the sunlight. Weapons to suffocate: ropes, nooses, slings and cords. Cisterns, to drown the enemy..." "Sit down. Rest," Joaz urged him. "Your inventory interests me, but its total effect seems inadequate. Have you other weapons which might decisively repel t he Basics should they attack your The question, by design or chance, was never answered. The sacerdote sank to his knees, slowly, as if praying. He fell forward on his face, then sprawled to the side. Joaz sprang forward, yanked up the drooping head by its hair. The eyes, half-open, revealed a hideous white expanse. "Speak!" croaked Joaz. "Answer my last question! Do you have weapons . -- or a weapon -- to repel a Basic attack?" The pallid lips moved. "I don't know." Joaz frowned, peered into the waxen face, drew back in bewilderment. "The man is dead," he whispered. ing on a couch, face pink, hair tossed. "You have killed him!" she cried in a voice of hushed horror. "No. He has died -- or caused himself to die." Phade staggered blinking across the room, sidled close to Joaz, who pushed her absently away. Phade scowled, shrugged and then, as Joaz paid her no heed, marched from the room. Joaz sat back, staring at the limp body. "He did not tire," muttered Joaz, "until I verged upon secrets." Presently he jumped to his feet, went to the entry hall, sent Rife to fetch a barber. An hour later the corpse, stripped of hair, lay on a wooden pallet covered by a sheet, and Joaz held in his hands a rude wig fashioned from the long hair. The barber departed. Servants carried away the corpse. Joaz stood alone in his studio, tense and light-headed. He removed his garments, to stand naked as the sacerdote. Gingerly he drew the wig across his scalp and examined himself in a mirror. To a casual eye, where the difference? Something was lacking: the tore. Joaz fitted it about his neck. Once more he examined his reflection, with dubious satisfaction. He entered the workshop, hesitated, disengaged the trap, cautiously pulled away the stone slab. On hands and knees he peered into the tunnel and, since it was dark, held forward a glass vial of luminescent algae. In the faint light the tunnel seemed empty. Irrevocably putting down his fears, Joaz clambered through the opening. The tunnel was narrow and low. Joaz moved forward tenwariness. He stopped often to j listen, but heard nothing but the whisper of his own pulse. After perhaps a hundred yards the tunnel broke out into a natural cavern. Joaz stopped and stood indecisively straining his ears through the gloom. Luminescent vials fixed to the walls at irregular intervals provided a measure of light, enough to delineate the direction of the cavern. It seemed to be north, parallel to the length of the valley. Joaz set forth once again, halting to listen every few yards. To the best of his knowledge the sacerdotes were a mild unaggressive folk, but they were also intensely secretive. How would they respond to the presence of an interloper? Joaz could not be sure, and proceeded with great caution. The cavern rose, fell, widened, narrowed. Joaz presently came upon evidences of use: small cubicles, hollowed into the walls, lit by candelabra holding tall vials of luminous stuff. In two of the cubicles Joaz came upon sacerdotes, the first asleep on a reed rug, the second sitting crosslegged, gazing fixedly at a contrivance of twisted metal rods. They gave Joaz no attention; he continued with a more confident step. rpHE cave sloped downward, widened like a cornucopia and suddenly broke into a cavern so enormous that Joaz thought for a startled instant that he had stepped out into the starless night. The ceiling reached beyond the flicker of the myriad lamps, fires and glowing vials. Ahead and to the left smelters and forges were in operation; then a twist in the cavern wall obscured something of the view. Joaz glimpsed a tiered, tubular construction which seemed to be some sort of workshop, for a large number of sacerdotes were occupied at complicated tasks. To the right was a stack of bales, a row of bins containing goods of unknown nature. Joaz for the first time saw sacerdote women: neither the nymphs nor the half-human witches of popular legend. Like the men they seemed pallid and frail, with sharply defined features; like the man they moved with care and deliberation; like the men they wore only their waist-long hair. There was little conversation and no laughter. Rather there was an atmosphere of not unhappy placidity and concentration. The cavern exuded a sense of time, use and custom. The stone floor was polished by endless padding of bare feet. The exhalations of many generations had stained the walls. No one heeded Joaz. He moved slowly forward, keeping to the shadows, and paused under the stack of bales. To the right the cavern dwindled by irregular proportions into a vast horizontal funnel, receding, twisting, telescoping, losing all reality in the dim light. Joaz searched the entire sweep of vast cavern. Where would be the armory, with the weapons whose existence the sacerdote, by the very act of dying, had promised him? Joaz turned his attention once more to the left, straining to see detail in the odd tiered workshop which rose fifty feet from the stone floor. A strange edifice, thought Joaz, craning his neck; one whose nature he could not entirely comprehend. But every aspect of the great cavern -- so close beside Banbeck Vale, and so remote -- was strange and marvelous. Weapons? They might be anywhere. Certainly he dared seek no further for them. There was nothing more he could learn without risk of discovery. He turned back the way he had come: up the dim passage, past the occasional side cubicles, where the two sacerdotes remained as he had found them before: the one asleep, the other intent on the contrivance of twisted metal. He plodded on and on. Had he come so far? Where was the fissure which led to his own apartments? Had he passed it by, must he search? Panic rose in his throat, but he continued, watching carefully. There, he had not gone wrong. There it opened to his right, a fissure almost dear and familiar. He plunged into it, walked with long loping strides, like a man under water, holding his luminous tube ahead. An apparition rose before him, a tall white shape. Joaz stood rigid. The gaunt figure bore down upon him. Joaz pressed against the wall. The figure stalked forward, and suddenly shrank to human scale. It was the young sacerdote whom Joaz had shorn and left for dead. He confronted Joaz, mild blue eyes bright with reproach and contempt. "Give me my tore."  removed the golden collar. The sacerdote took it, but made no move to clasp it upon himself. He looked at the hair which weighed heavy upon Joaz's scalp. With a foolish grimace Joaz doffed the disheveled wig, proffered it. The sacerdote sprang back as if Joaz had become a cave-goblin. Sidling past, as far from Joaz as the wall of the passage allowed, he paced swiftly off down the tunnel. Joaz dropped the wig to the floor, stared down at the unkempt pile of hair. He turned and looked after the sacerdote, a pallid figure which soon became one with the murk. Slowly Joaz continued up the tunnel. There. An oblong blank of light, the opening to his workshop. He crawled through, back to the real world. Savagely, with all his strength, he thrust the slab back in the hole and slammed down the gate which originally had trapped the sacerdote. Joaz's garments lay where he had tossed them. Wrapping himself in a cloak, he went to the outer door and looked forth into the anteroom, where Rife sat dozing. Joaz snapped his fingers. "Fetch masons, with mortar, steel and stone." Joaz bathed with diligence, rubbing himself time after time with emulsion, rinsing and rerinsing himself. Emerging from the bath he took the waiting masons into his workshop and ordered the sealing of the hole. Then he took himself to his couch. Sipping a cup of wine, he let his mind rove and wander... Recollection became reverie. Reverie became dream. Joaz once again traversed the tunnel, on feet light as thistledown, down the long cavern, and the sacerdotes in their cubicles now raised their heads to look after him. At last he stood in the entrance to the great underground void, and once more looked right and left in awe. Now he drifted across the floor, past sacerdotes laboring earnestly over fires and anvils. Sparks rose from retorts, blue gas flickered above melting metal. Joaz moved beyond to a small chamber cut into the stone. Here sat an old man, thin as a pole, his waist-long mane of hair snowwhite. The man examined Joaz with fathomless blue eyes, and spoke, but his voice was muffled, inaudible. He spoke again; the words rang loud in Joaz's mind. you, lest you do us harm, and with no profit to yourself. The weapon you seek is both non-existent and beyond your imagination. Put it outside your ambition." By great effort Joaz managed to stammer, "The young sacerdote made no denial. This weapon must exist!" "Only with the narrow limits of special interpretation. The lad can speak no more than the literal truth, nor can he act with other than grace. How can you wonder why we hold ourselves apart? You Utter folk find purity incomprehensible; you thought to advantage yourself, but achieved nothing but an exercise in rat-like stealth. Lest you try again with greater boldness I must abase myself to set matters correct. I assure you, this socalled weapon is absolutely beyond your control." First shame, then indignation came over Joaz. He cried out, "You do not understand my urgencies! Why should I act differently? Coralyne is close; the Basics are at hand. Are you not men? Why will you not help us defend the planet?" The Demie shook his head, and the white hair rippled with hypnotic slowness. "I quote you the Rationale; passivity, complete and absolute. This implies solitude, sanctity, quiescence, peace. Can you imagine the anguish I risk in speaking to you? I intervene, I interfere, at vast pain of the spirit. Let there be an end to it. We have made free with your studio, doing you no harm, offering you no indignity. You have paid a visit to our hall, demeaning a noble young man in the process. Let us be quits! Let there be no further spying on either side. Do you agree?" Joaz heard his voice respond, quite without his conscious prompting. It sounded more nasal and shrill than he liked. "You offer this agreement now when you have learned your fill of my secrets, but I know none of yours." The Demie's face seemed to recede and quiver. Joaz read contempt, and in his sleep he tossed and twitched. He made an effort to speak in a voice of calm reason: "Come, we are men together. Why should we be at odds? Let us share our secrets, let each help the other. Examine my archives at your leisure, and then allow me to study this existent but non-existent weapon. I swear it shall be used, only against the Basics, for the protection of both of us." The Demie's eyes sparkled. "No." "Why not?" argued Joaz. "Surely you wish us no harm?" "We are detached and passionless. We await your extinction. You are the Utter men, the last of humanity. And when you are gone, your dark thoughts and grim plots will be gone. Murder and pain and malice will be gone." "I cannot believe this," said Joaz. "There may be no men in the cluster, but what of the universe? The Old Rule reached far! Sooner or later men will return to Aerlith." The Demie's voice became plangent. "Do you think we speak only from faith? Do you doubt our knowledge?" "The universe is large. The Old Rule reached far." "The last men dwell on Aerlith," said the Demie. "The Utter men and the Sacerdotes. You shall pass; we will carry forth the Rationale like a banner of glory, through all the worlds of the sky." "And how will you transport yourselves on this mission?" Joaz asked cunningly. "Can you fly to the stars as naked as you walk the fells?" "There will be a means. Time is long." "For your purposes, Time needs to be long. Even on the Coralyne planets there are men. Enslaved, reshaped in body and mind, but men. What of them? It seems that you are wrong, that you are guided by faith indeed." T HE Demie fell silent. His face seemed to stiffen. "Are these not facts?" asked Joaz. "How do you reconcile them with your faith?" The Demie said mildly, "Facts can never be reconciled with faith. By our faith, these men, if they exist, will also pass. Time is long. O the worlds of brightness: they await us!" "It is clear," said Joaz, "that you ally yourselves with the Basics and hope for our destruction. This can only change our attitudes toward you. I fear that Ervis Carcolo was right and I wrong." "We remain passive," said the Demie. His face wavered, seemed to swim with mottled colors. "Without emotion, we will stand witness to the passing of the Utter men, neither helping nor hindering." Joaz spoke in fury. "Your faith, your Rationale -- whatever you call it -- misleads you. I make you this threat: if you fail to help us, you will suffer as we suffer." "We are passive. We are indifferent." "What of your children? The Basics make no difference between us. They will herd you to their pens as readily as they do us. Why should we fight to protect you?" The Demie's face faded, became splotched with transparent mist. His eyes glowed like rotten meat. "We need no protection," he howled. "We are secure." "You will suffer our fate," cried Joaz, "I promise you this!" The Demie collapsed suddenly into a small dry husk, like a dead mosquito. With incredible speed, Joaz fled back through the caves, the tunnels, up through his workroom, his studio, into his bed chamber where now he jerked upright, eyes starting, throat distended, mouth dry. The door opened; Rife's head appeared. "Did you call, sir?" Joaz raised himself on his elbows and looked around the room. "No. I did not call." Rife withdrew. Joaz settled back on the couch, lay staring at the ceiling. He had dreamed a most peculiar dream. Dream? A synthesis of his own imaginings? Or, in all verity, a confrontation and exchange between two minds? Impossible to decide, and perhaps irrelevant. The event carried its own conviction. Joaz swung his legs over the side of the couch and blinked at the floor. Dream or colloquy, it was all the same. He rose to his feet, donned sandals and a robe of yellow fur, limped morosely up to the Council Room and stepped out on a sunny balcony. The day was two-thirds over. Shadows hung dense along the western cliffs. Right and left stretched Banbeck Vale. Never had it seemed more prosperous or more fruitful, and never before unreal: as if he were a stranger to the planet. He looked north along the great bulwark of stone which rose sheer to Banbeck Verge. This too was unreal, a facade behind which lived the sacerdotes. He gauged the rock face, superimposing a mental projection of the great cavern. The cliff toward the north end of the vale must be scarcely more than a shell! Joaz turned his attention to the exercise field, where Juggers were thudding briskly through defensive evolutions. How strange was the quality of life, which had produced Basic and Jugger, sacerdote and himself. He thought of Ervis Carcolo, and wrestled with sudden exasperation. Carcolo was a distraction most unwelcome at the present time. There would be no tolerance when Carcolo was finally brought to account. A light step behind him, the pressure of fur, the touch of gay hands, the scent of incense. Joaz's tensions melted. If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them. in a cubicle lit by a twelvevial candelabra, a naked whitehaired man sat quietly. On a pedestal at the level of his eyes rested his tand, an intricate construction of gold rods and silver wire, woven and bent seemingly at random. The fortuitousness of the design, however, was only apparent. Each curve symbolized an aspect of Final Sentience. The shadow cast upon the wall represented the Rationale, ever-shifting, always the same. The object was sacred to the sacerdotes, and served as a source of revelation. There was never an end to the study of the tand. New intuitions were continually derived from some heretofore-overlooked relationship of angle and curve. The nomenclature was elaborate: each part, juncture, sweep and twist had its name; each aspect of the relationships between the various parts was likewise categorized. Such was the cult of the tand: abstruse, exacting, without compromise. At his puberty rites the young sacerdote might study the original tand for as long as he chose. Then each must construct a duplicate tand, relying upon memory alone. Then occurred the most significant event of his lifetime: the viewing of his tand by a synod of elders. In awesome stillness, for hours at a time they would ponder his creation, weigh the infinitesimal variations of proportion, radius, sweep and angle. So they would infer the initiate's quality, judge his personal attributes, determine his understanding of Final Sentience, the Rationale and the Basis. Occasionally the testimony of the tand revealed a character so tainted as to be reckoned intolerable. The vile tand would be cast into a furnace, the molten metal consigned to a latrine, the unlucky initiate expelled to the face of the planet, to live on his own terms. The naked white-haired Demie, contemplating his own beautiful tand, sighed, moved restlessly. He had been visited by an influence so ardent, so passionate, so simultaneously cruel and tender, that his mind was oppressed. Unbidden, into his mind, came a dark seep of doubt. Can it be, he asked himself, that we have insensibly wandered from the true Rationale? Do we study our tands with blinded eyes?... How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real... Twenty miles over the mountains, in the long pale light of the Aerlith afternoon, Ervis Carcolo planned his own plans. "By daring, by striking hard, by cutting deep can I defeat him! In resolve, courage and endurance, I am more than his equal. Not again will he trick me, to slaughter my dragons and kill my men! Oh, Joaz Banbeck, how I will pay you for your deceit!" He raised his arms in wrath. "Oh Joaz Banbeck, you whey-faced sheep!" Carcolo smote the air with his fist. "I will crush you like a clod of dry moss!" He frowned and rubbed his round red chin. But how? Where? He had every advantage! Carcolo pondered his possible strategems. "He will expect me to strike. So much is certain. Doubtless he will again wait in ambush. So I will patrol every inch, but this too he will expect and so be wary lest I thunder upon him from above. Will he hide behind Despoire, or along Northguard, to catch me as I cross the Skanse? If so, I must approach by another route -- through Maudlin Pass and under Mount Gethron? Then, if he is tardy in his march I will meet him on Banbeck Verge. And if he is early, I stalk him through the peaks and chasms..." pelting down upon them, with the trail illuminated only by lightning-glare, Ervis Carcolo, his dragons and his men set forth. When the first sparkle of sunlight struck Mount Despoire, they had already traversed Maudlin Pass. So far, so good, exulted Ervis Carcolo. He stood high in his stirrups to scan Starbreak Fell. No sign of the Banbeck forces. He waited, scanning the far edge of Northguard Ridge, black against the sky. A minute passed. Two minutes. The men beat their hands together, the dragons rumbled and muttered fretfully. Impatience began to prickle along Carcolo's ribs. He fidgeted and cursed. Could not the simplest of plans be carried through without mistake? But now the flicker of a heliograph from Barch Spike, and another to the southeast from the slopes of Mount Gethron. Carcolo waved forward his army; the way lay clear across Starbreak Fell. Down from Maudlin Pass surged the Happy Valley army: first the Long-horned Murderers, steelspiked and crested with steel prongs; then the rolling red seethe of the Termagants, darting their heads as they ran; and, behind, the balance of the forces. Starbreak Fell spread wide before them, a rolling slope strewn with flinty meteoric fragments which glinted like flowers on the gray-green moss. To all sides rose majestic peaks, snow blazing white in the clear morning light: Mount Gethron, Mount Despoire, Barch Spike and, far to the south, Clew Taw. The scouts converged from left and right. They brought identical reports: no sign of Joaz Banbeck or his troops. Carcolo began to toy with a new possibility. Perhaps Joaz Banbeck had not deigned to take the field. The idea enraged him and filled him with a great joy: if so, Joaz would pay dearly for his neglect. Halfway across Starbreak Fell they came upon a pen occupied by two hundred of Joaz Banbeck's spratling Fiends. Two old men and a boy tended the pen, and watched the Happy Valley horde advance with manifest terror. But Carcolo rode past leaving t j,e pen unmolested. If he won the day, it would become part of his spoils. If he lost, the spratling Fiends could do him no harm. The old men and the boy stood on the roof of their turf hut, w atching Carcolo and his troops pass: the men in black uniforms and black peaked caps with backslanting ear-flaps; the dragons bounding, crawling, loping, plodding, according to their kind, scales glinting: the dull red and maroon of Termagants; the poisonous shine of the Blue Horrors; the black-green Fiends; the gray and brown Juggers and Murderers. Ervis Carcolo rode on the right flank, Bast Givven rode to the rear. And now Carcolo hastened the pace, haunted by the anxiety that Joaz Banbeck might bring his Fiends and Juggers up Banbeck Scarp before he arrived to thrust him back -- assuming that Joaz Banbeck had been caught napping. But Carcolo reached Banbeck Verge without challenge. He shouted out in triumph, waved his cap high. "Joaz Banbeck the sluggard! Let him try now the ascent of Banbeck Scarp!" And Ervis Carcolo surveyed Banbeck Vale with the eye of a conqueror. none of Carcolo's triumph, and kept an uneasy watch to north and south and to the rear. Carcolo observed him peevishly from the corner of his eye and presently called out, "Ho, ho, then! What's amiss?" "Perhaps much. Perhaps nothing," said Bast Givven, searching the landscape. Carcolo blew out his mustaches. Givven went on, in the cool voice which so completely irritated Carcolo. "Joaz Banbeck seems to be tricking us as before." "Why do you say this?" "Judge for yourself. Would he allow us advantage without claiming a miser's price?" "Nonsense!" muttered Carcolo. "The sluggard is fat with his last victory." But he rubbed his chin and peered uneasily down into Banbeck Vale. From here it seemed curiously quiet. There was a strange inactivity in the fields and barracks. A chill began to grip Carcolo's heart -- then he cried out. "Look at the brooder: there are the Banbeck dragons!" Givven squinted down into the vale, glanced sidewise at Carcolo. "Three Termagants, in egg." He straightened, abandoned all interest in the vale and scrutinized the peaks and ridges to the north and east. "Assume that Joaz Banbeck set out before dawn, came up to the Verge, by the Slickenslides, crossed Blue Fell in strength -- " "What of Blue Crevasse?" "He avoids Blue Crevasse to the north, comes over Barchback, steals across the Skanse and around Barch Spike... Carcolo studied Northguard Ridge with new and startled awareness. A quiver of movement, the glint of scales? "Retreat!" roared Carcolo. "Make for Barch Spike! They're behind us!" Startled, his army broke ranks, fled across Banbeck Verge, up into the harsh spurs of Barch Spike. Joaz, his strategy discovered, launched squads of Murderers to intercept the Happy Valley army, to engage and delay and, if possible, deny them the broken slopes of Barch Spike. Carcolo calculated swiftly. His own Murderers he considered his finest troops, and held them in great pride. Purposely now he delayed, hoping to engage the Banbeck skirmishers, quickly destroy them and still gain the protection of the Barch declivities. The Banbeck Murderers, however, refused to close, and scrambled for height up Barch Spike. Carcolo sent forward his Termagants and Blue Horrors. With a horrid snarling the two lines met. The Banbeck Termagants rushed up, to be met by Carcolo's Striding Murderers and forced into humping pounding flight. The main body of Carcolo's troops, excited at the sight of retreating foes, could not be restrained. They veered off from Barch Spike, plunged down upon Starbreak Fell. The Striding Murderers overtook the Banbeck Termagants, climbed up their backs, toppled them over squealing and kicking, then knifed open the exposed pink bellies. Banbeck's Long-horned Murderers came circling, struck from the flank into Carcolo's Striding Murderers, goring with steeltipped horns, impaling on lances. Somehow they overlooked Carcolo's Blue Horrors who sprang down upon them. With axes and maces they laid the Murderers low, performing the rather grisly entertainment of clambering on a subdued Murderer, seizing the horn, stripping back horn, skin and scales, from head to tail. So Joaz Banbeck lost thirty Termagants and perhaps two dozen Murderers. Nevertheless, the attack served its purpose, allowing him to bring his knights, Fiends and Juggers down from Northguard before Carcolo could gain the heights of Barch Spike. Carcolo retreated in a slantwise line up the pocked slopes, and meanwhile sent six men across the fell to the pen where the spratling Fiends milled in fear at the battle. The men broke the gates, struck down the two old men, herded the young Fiends across the fell toward the Banbeck troops. The hysterical spratlings obeyed their instincts. They clasped themselves to the neck of whatever dragon they first encountered, which thereupon became sorely hampered, for its own instincts prevented it from detaching the spratling by force. sation, created enormous disorder among the Banbeck troops. Ervis Carcolo now charged with all his power directly into the Banbeck center. Two squads of Termagants fanned out to harass the men. His Murderers -- the only category in which he outnumbered Joaz Banbeck -- were sent to engage Fiends, while Carcolo's own Fiends, pampered, strong, glistening with oily strength, snaked in toward the Juggers. Under the great brown hulks they darted, lashing the fifty-pound steel ball at the tip of their tails against the inner side of the Jugger's legs. A roaring melee ensued. Battle-lines were uncertain. Both men and dragons were crushed, torn apart, hacked to bits. The air sang with bullets, whistled with Steel, reverberated to trumpeting, whistles, shouts, screams and bellows. The reckless abandon of Carcolo's tactics achieved results out of proportion to his numbers. His Fiends burrowed ever deeper into the crazed and almost helpless Banbeck Juggers, while the Carcolo Murderers and Blue Horrors held back the Banbeck Fiends. Joaz Banbeck himself, assailed by Termagants, escaped with his life only by fleeing around behind the battle, where he picked up the support of a squad of Blue Horrors. In a fury he blew a withdrawal signal, and his army backed off down the slopes, leaving the ground littered with struggling and kicking bodies. Carcolo, throwing aside all restraint, rose in his saddle and signaled to commit his own Juggers, which so far he had treasured like his own children. bered down into the seethe, tearing away great mouthfuls of flesh to right and left, ripping apart lesser dragons with their brachs, treading on Termagants, seizing Blue Horrors and Murderers, flinging them wailing and clawing through the air. Six Banbeck knights sought to stem the charge, firing their muskets pointblank into the demoniac faces; they went down and were seen no more. Down on Starbreak Fell tumbled the battle. The nucleus of the fighting became less concentrated, the Happy Valley advantage dissipated. Carcolo hesitated, a long heady instant. He and his troops alike were afire; the intoxication of unexpected success tingled in their brains -- but here on Starbreak Fell, could they counter the odds posed by the greater Banbeck forces? Caution dictated that Carcolo withdraw up Barch Spike, to make the most of his limited victory. Already a strong platoon of Fiends had grouped and were maneuvering to charge his meager force of Juggers. Bast Givven approached, clearly expecting the word to retreat. But Carcolo still waited, reveling in the havoc being wrought by his paltry six Juggers. Bast Givven's saturnine face was stern. "Withdraw, withdraw! It's annihilation when their flanks bear in on us!" Carcolo seized his elboe. "Look! See where those Fiends gather, see where Joaz Banbeck rides! As soon as they charge, send six Striding Murderers from either side; close in on him, kill him!" Givven opened his mouth to protest, looked where Carcolo pointed, rode to obey the orders. Fiends, moving with stealthy certainty toward the Happy Valley Juggers. Joaz, raising in his saddle, watched their progress. Suddenly from either side the Striding Murderers were on him. Four of his knights and six young cornets, screaming alarm, dashed back to protect him; there was clanging of steel on steel and steel on scale. The Murderers fought with sword and mace. The knights, their muskets useless, countered with cutlasses, one by one going under. Rearing on hind legs the Murderer corporal hacked down at Joaz, who desperately fended off the blow. The Murderer raised sword and mace together -- and from fifty yards a musket pellet smashed into its ear. Crazy with pain, it dropped its weapons, fell forward upon Joaz, writhing and kicking. Banbeck Blue Horrors came to attack; the Murderers darted back and forth over the thrashing corporal, stabbing down at Joaz, kicking at him, finally fleeing the Blue Horrors. Ervis Carcolo groaned in disappointment. By a half-second only had he fallen short of victory. Joaz Banbeck, bruised, mauled, perhaps wounded, had escaped with his life. Over the crest of the hill came a rider: an unarmed youth whipping a staggering Spider. Bast Givven pointed him out to Carcolo. "A messenger from the Valley, in urgency." The lad careened down the fell toward Carcolo, shouting ahead, but his message was lost in the din of battle. At last he drew close. "The Basics, the Basics!" Carcolo slumped like a halfempty bladder. "Where?" "A great black ship, half the valley wide. I was up on the heath, I managed to escape." He pointed, whimpered. "Speak, boy!" husked Carcolo. "What do they do?" "I did not see; I ran to you." Carcolo gazed across the battle-field; the Banbeck Fiends had almost reached his Juggers, who were backing slowly, with heads lowered, fangs fully extended. Carcolo threw up his hands in despair. He ordered Givven, "Blow a retreat, break clear!" Waving a white kerchief he rode around the battle to where Joaz Banbeck still lay on the ground, the quivering Murderer only just now being lifted from his legs. Joaz stared up, his face white as Carcolo's kerchief. At the sight of Carcolo his eyes grew wide and dark, his mouth became still. Carcolo blurted, "The Basics have come once more; they have dropped into Happy Valley, they are destroying my people." knights, gained his feet. He stood swaying, arms limp, looking silently into Carcolo's face. Carcolo spoke once more. "We must call truce. This battle is waste! With all our forces let us march to Happy Valley and attack the monsters before they destroy all of us! Ah, think what we could have achieved with the weapons of the sacerdotes!" Joaz stood silent. Another ten seconds passed. Carcolo cried angrily, "Come now, what do you say?" In a hoarse voice Joaz spoke, "I say no truce. You rejected my warning. Youthought to loot Banbeck Vale. I will show you no mercy." Carcolo gaped, his mouth a red hole under the sweep of his mustaches. "But the Basics -- " "Return to your troops. You as well as the Basics are my enemy. Why should I choose between you? Prepare to fight for your life; I give you no truce." Carcolo drew back face as pale as Joaz's own. "Never shall you rest! Even though you win this battle here on Starbreak Fell, yet you shall never know victory. I will persecute you until you cry. for relief." Banbeck motioned to his knights. "Whip this dog back to his own." Carcolo backed his Spider from the threatening flails, turned, loped away. The tide of battle had turned. The Banbeck Fiends now had broken past his Blue Horrors. One of his Juggers was gone; another, facing three sidling Fiends, snapped its great jaws, waved its monstrous sword. The Fiends flicked and feinted with their steel balls, scuttled forward. The Jugger chopped, shattered its sword on the rock-hard armor of  the Fiends; they were underneath, slamming their steel balls into the monstrous legs. It tried to hop clear, toppled majesticall ly. The Fiends slit its belly, and now Carcolo had only five Juggers left. "Back!" he cried. "Disengage!" l Up Barch Spike toiled his troops, the battle-front a roaring seethe of scales, armor, flickering  metal. Luckily for Carcolo his j rear was to the high ground, and I after ten terrible minutes he was l able to establish an orderly retreat. Two more Juggers had fallen. The three remaining scrambled ' free. Seizing boulders, they hurled them down into the at tackers, who, after a series of i sallies and lunges, were well content to break clear. In any event Joaz, after hearing Carcolo's news, was of no disposition to spend further troops. Carcolo, waving his sword in desperate defiance, led his troops back around Barch Spike, presently down across the dreary Skanse. Joaz turned back to Banbeck Vale. The news of the Basic raid had spread to all ears. The men rode sober and quiet, looking behind and overhead. Even the dragons seemed infected, and muttered restlessly among themselves. As they crossed Blue Fell the almost omnipresent wind died. The stillness added to the oppression. Termagants, like the men, began to watch the sky. Joaz wondered, how could they know, how could they sense the Basics? He himself searched the sky, and as his army passed down over the scarp he thought to see high over Mount Gethron, a flitting little black rectangle, which presently disappeared behind a crag. IX nants of his army raced pellmell down from the Skanse, through the wilderness of ravines and gulches at the base of Mount Despoire, out on the barrens to the west of Happy Valley. All pretense of military precision had been abandoned. Carcolo led the way, his Spider sobbing with fatigue. Behind in disarray pounded first Murderers and Blue Horrors, with Termagants hurrying along behind. Then the Fiends, racing low to the i ground, steel balls grinding on rocks, sending up sparks. Far in the rear lumbered the Juggers and their attendants. Down to the verge of Happy Valley plunged the army and pulled up short, stamping and squealing. Carcolo jumped from his Spider, ran to the brink, stood looking down into the valley. He had expected to see the ship, yet the actuality of the thing was so immediate and intense as to shock him. It was a tapered cylinder, glossy and black, resting in a field of legumes not far from ramshackle Happy Town. Polished metal disks at either end shimmered and glistened with fleeting films of color. There were three entrance ports -- forward, central and aft -- and from the central port a ramp had been extended to the ground. The Basics had worked with ferocious efficiency. From the town straggled a line of people, herded by Heavy Troopers. Approaching the ship they passed through an inspection apparatus controlled by a pair of Basics. A series of instruments and the eyes of the Basics appraised each man, woman and child, classified them by some system not instantly obvious, whereupon the captives were either hustled up the ramp into the ship or prodded into a nearby booth. Peculiarly, no matter how many persons entered, the booth never seemed to fill. Carcolo rubbed his forehead with trembling fingers, turned his eyes to the ground. When once more he looked up, Bast Givven stood beside him, and together they stared down into the valley. From behind came a cry of alarm. Starting around, Carcolo saw a black rectangular flyer sliding silently down from above Mount Gethron. Waving his arms Carcolo ran for the rocks, bellowing orders to take cover. Dragons and men scuttled up the gulch. Overhead slid the flyer. A hatch opened, releasing a load of explosive pellets. They struck with a great rattling volley, and up into the air flew pebbles, rock splinters, fragments of bone, scales, skin and flesh. All who failed to reach cover were shredded. The Termagants fared relatively well. The Fiends, though battered and scraped, had all survived. Two of the Juggers had been blinded, and could fight no more till they had grown new eyes. The flyer slid back once more. Several of the men fired their muskets -- an act of apparently futile defiance, but the flyer was struck and damaged. It twisted, veered, soared up in a roaring curve, swooped over its back, plunged toward the mountaingush of fire. Carcolo shouted in maniac glee, jumped up and down, ran to the verge of the cliff, shook his fist at the ship below. He quickly quieted, to stand glum and shivering. Then, turning to the ragged cluster of men and dragons who once more had crept down from the gulch. Carcolo cried hoarsely, "What do you say? Shall we fight? Shall we charge down upon them?" Bast Givven replied in a colorless voice, "We are helpless. We can accomplish nothing. Why commit suicide?" Carcolo turned away, heart too full for words. Givven spoke the obvious truth. They would either be killed or dragged aboard the ship; and then, on a world too strange for imagining, be put to uses too dismal to be borne. Carcolo clenched his fists and looked westward with bitter hatred. "Joaz Banbeck, you brought me to this! When I might yet have fought for my people you detained me!" "The Basics were here already," said Givven with unwelcome rationality. "We could have done nothing since we had nothing to do with." "We could have fought!" bellowed Carcolo. "We might have swept down the Crotch and come upon them with all force! A hundred warriors and four hundred dragons -- are these to be despised?" Bast Givven judged further argument to be pointless. He pointed. "They now examine our brooders." Carcolo turned to look, gave a wild laugh. "They are astonished! They are awed! And well have they a right to be." Givven agreed. "I imagine the sight of a Fiend or a Blue Horror -- not to mention a Jugger -- gives them pause for reflection." Down in the valley the grim business had ended. The Heavy Troopers marched back into the ship. A pair of enormous men twelve feet high came forth, lifted the booth, carried it up the ramp into the ship. Carcolo and his men watched with protruding eyes. "Giants!" Bast Givven chuckled dryly. "The Basics stare at our Juggers, we ponder their Giants." The Basics presently returned to the ship. The ramp was drawn up, the ports closed. From a turret in the bow came a shaft of energy, touching each of the three brooders in succession, and each exploded with great eruption of black bricks. Carcolo moaned softly under his breath, but said nothing. The ship trembled, floated. Carcolo bellowed an order; men and dragons rushed for cover. Flattened behind boulders they watched the black cylinder rise from the valley, drift to the west. "They make for Banbeck Vale," said Bast Givven. Carcolo laughed, a cackle of mirthless glee. Bast Givven looked at him sidelong. Had Ervis Carcolo become addled? He turned away. A matter of no great moment. Carcolo came to a sudden resolve. He stalked to one of the Spiders, mounted, swung around to face his men. "I ride to Banbeck Vale. Joaz Banbeck has done his best to despoil me; I shall do my best against him. I give no orders: come or stay as you wish. Only remember! Joaz Banbeck would not allow us to fight the Basics!" He rode off. The men stared into the plundered valley, turned to look after Carcolo. The black ship was just now slipping over Mount Despoire. There was nothing for them in the valley. Grumbling and muttering, they summoned the bone-tired dragons and set off up the dreary mountainside. at a plunging run across the Skanse. Tremendous crags soared to either side, the blazing sun hung halfway up the black sky. Behind, the Skanse Ramparts; ahead, Barchback, Barch Spike and Northguard Ridge. Oblivious to the fatigue of his Spider, Carcolo whipped it on. Gray-green moss pounded back from its wild feet, the narrow head hung low, foam trailed from its gill-vents. Carcolo cared nothing. His mind was empty of all but hate -- for the Basics, for Joaz Banbeck, for Aerlith, for man, for human history. Approaching Northguard the Spider staggered and fell. It lay moaning, neck outstretched, legs trailing back. Carcolo dismounted in disgust. He looked back down the long rolling slope of the Skanse to see how many of his troops had followed him. A man riding a Spider at a modest lope turned out to be Bast Givven, who presently came up beside him and inspected the fallen Spider. "Loosen the surcingle. He will recover the sooner." Carcolo glared, thinking to hear a new note in Giwen's voice. Nevertheless he bent over the foundered dragon and slipped loose the broad bronze buckle. Givven dismounted, stretched his arms, massaged his thin legs. He pointed. "The Basic ship descends into Banbeck Vale." Carcolo nodded grimly. "I would be an audience to the landing." He kicked the Spider. "Come, get up, have you not rested enough? Do you wish me to walk?" The Spider whimpered its fatigue, but nevertheless struggled to its feet. Carcolo started to mount, but Bast Givven laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. Carcolo looked back in outrage: here was impertinence! Givven said calmly, "Tighten the surcingle, otherwise you will fall on the rocks and once more break your bones." Uttering a spiteful phrase under his breath, Carcolo clasped the buckle back into position. The Spider cried out in despair. Paying no heed, Carcolo mounted, and the Spider moved off with trembling steps. Barch Spike rose ahead like the prow of a white ship, dividing Northguard Ridge from Barchback. Carcolo paused to consider the landscape, tugging his mustaches. Carcolo looked back down the Skanse to the listless straggle of his army, then set off to the left. Passing close under Mount Gethron, skirting the High Jambles, they descended an ancient water-course to Banbeck Verge. Though perforce they had come without great speed, the Basic ship had moved no faster. It had only started to settle into the vale, the disks at bow and stern swirling with furious colors. Carcolo grunted bitterly. "Trust Joaz Banbeck to scratch his own itch. Not a soul in sight! He's taken to his tunnels, dragons and all." Pursing his mouth he rendered a mincing parody of Joaz's voice: " 'Ervis Carcolo, my dear friend, there is but one answer to attack: dig tunnels!' And I replied to him, 'Am I a sacerdote to live underground? Burrow and delve, Joaz Banbeck, do as you will. I am but an old-time man; I go under the cliffs only when I must.' " Givven gave the faintest of shrugs. Carcolo went on, "Tunnels or not, they'll winkle him out. If need be they'll blast open the entire valley. They've no lack of tricks." Givven grinned sardonically. "Joaz Banbeck knows a trick or two -- as we know to our sorrow." "Let him capture two dozen Basics today," snapped Carcolo. "Then I'll concede him a clever man." He stalked away to the very brink of the cliff, standing in full view of the Basic ship. Givven watched without expression. Carcolo pointed. "Aha! Look there!" "Not I," said Givven. "I respect the Basic weapons too greatly." "Pah!" spat Carcolo. Nevertheless he moved a trifle back from the brink. "There are dragons in Kergan's Way. For all Joaz Banbeck's talk of tunnels." He gazed north along the valley a moment or two, then threw up his hands in frustration. "Joaz Banbeck will not come up here to me. There is nothing I can do. Unless I walk down into the village, seek him out and strike him down, he will escape me." "Unless the Basics captured the two of you and confined you in the same pen," said Givven. "Bah!" muttered Carcolo, and moved off to one side. X lowed Joaz Banbeck to observe the length and breadth of Banbeck Vale for the first time were being put to practical use. He had evolved the scheme while playing with a set of old lenses, and dismissed it as quickly. Then one day, while trading with the sacerdotes in the cavern under Mount Gethron, he had proposed that they design and supply the optics for such a system. The blind old sacerdote who conducted the trading gave an ambiguous reply. The possibility of such a project, under certain circumstances, might well deserve consideration. Three months passed. The scheme receded to the back of Joaz Banbeck's mind. Then the sacerdote in the trading-cave inquired if Joaz still planned to install the viewing system. If so he might take immediate delivery of the optics. Joaz agreed to the barter price, returned to Banbeck Vale with four heavy crates. He ordered the necessary tunnels driven, installed the lenses, and found that with the study darkened he could command all quarters of Banbeck Vale. Now, with the Basic ship darkening the sky, Joaz Banbeck stood in his study, watching the descent of the great black hulk. At the back of the chamber maroon portieres parted. Clutching the cloth with taut fingers stood the minstrel-maiden Phade. Her face was pale, her eyes bright as opals. In a husky voice she called, "The ship of death. It has come to gather souls!" Joaz turned her a stony glance and turned back to the honedglass screen. "The ship is clearly visible." Phade ran forward, clasped Joaz's arm, swung around to look into his face. "Let us try to escape into the High Jambles. Don't let them take us so soon!" "No one deters you," said Joaz indifferently. "Escape in any direction you choose." Phade stared at him blankly, then turned her head and watched the screen. The great black ship sank with sinister deliberation, the disks at bow and stern now shimmering mother-ofpearl. Phade looked back to Joaz, licked her lips. "Are you not afraid?" Joaz smiled thinly. "What good to run? Their Trackers are swifter than Murderers, more vicious than Termagants. They can smell you a mile away, take you from the very center of the Jambles." Phade shivered with superstitious horror. She whispered, "Let them take me dead, then. I can't go with them alive." Joaz suddenly cursed. "Look where they land! In our best field of bellegarde!" "What is the difference? " 'Difference'? Must we stop eating because they pay their visit?" daze, beyond comprehension. She sank slowly to her knees and began to perform the ritual gestures of the Theurgic cult. Hands palm down to either side, slowly up till the back of the hand touched the ears, and the simultaneous protrusion of the tongue; over and over again, eyes staring with hypnotic intensity into emptiness. Joaz ignored the gesticulations, until Phade, her face screwed up into a fantastic mask, began to sigh and whimper. Then he swung the flaps of his jacket into her face. "Give over your folly!" Phade collapsed moaning to the floor. Joaz's lips twitched in annoyance. Impatiently he hoisted her erect. "Look you, these Basics are neither ghouls nor angels of death. They are no more than pallid Termagants, the basic stock of our dragons. So now, give over your idiocy, or I'll have Rife take you away." "Why do you not make ready? You watch and do nothing." "There is nothing more that I can do." Phade drew a deep shuddering sigh, stared dully at the screen. "Will you fight them?" "Naturally." "How can you hope to counter such miraculous power?" "We will do what we can. They have not yet met our dragons." The ship came to rest in a purple and green vine-field across the valley, near the mouth of Clybourne Crevasse. The port slid back and a ramp rolled forth. "Look," said Joaz, "there you see them." Phade stared at the queer pale shapes who had come tentatively out on the ramp. "They seem strange and twisted, like silver puzzles for children." "They are the Basics. From their eggs came our dragons. They have done as well with men: look, here are their Heavy Troops." Down the ramp, four abreast, in exact cadence, marched the Heavy Troops, to halt fifty yards in front of the ship. There were three squads of twenty: short squat men with massive shoulders, thick necks and stern, downdrawn faces. They wore armor fashioned from overlapping scales of black and blue metal, a wide belt slung with pistol and sword. Black epaulets, extending past their shoulders, supported a short ceremonial flap of black cloth ranging down their backs. Their helmets bore a crest of sharp spikes. Their knee-high boots were armed with kickknives. A number of Basics now rode forth. Their mounts were creatures only remotely resembling men. They ran on hands and feet, backs high off the ground. Their heads were long and hairless, with quivering loose lips. The Basics controlled them with negligent touches of a quirt, and once on the ground set them cantering smartly through the bellegarde. Meanwhile a team of Heavy Troopers rolled a threewheeled mechanism down the ramp, directed its complex snout toward the village. "Never before have they prepared so carefully," muttered Joaz. "Here come the Trackers." He counted. "Only two dozen? Perhaps they are hard to breed. Generations pass slowly with men; dragons lay a clutch of eggs every year... r I "HE Trackers moved to the side and stood in a loose restless group: gaunt creatures seven feet tall, with bulging black eyes, beaked noses, small undershot mouths pursed as if for kissing. From narrow shoulders long arms dangled and swung like ropes. As they waited they flexed their knees, staring sharply up and down the valley, in constant restless motion. After them came a group of Weaponeers -- unmodified men wearing loose cloth smocks and cloth hats of green and yellow. They brought with them two more threewheeled contrivances which they at once began to adjust and test. The entire group became still and tense. The Heavy Troopers stepped forward with a stumping, heavylegged gait, hands ready at pistols and swords. "Here they come," said Joaz. Phade made a quiet desperate sound, knelt and once more began to perform Theurgic gesticulations. Joaz in disgust ordered her from the study. He went to a panel equipped with a bank of six direct-wire communications, the construction of which he had personally supervised. He spoke into three of the telephones, assuring himself that his defenses were alert, then returned the honed glass screens. Across the field of bellegarde came the Heavy Troopers, faces heavy, hard, marked with downveering creases. Upon either flank the Weaponeers trundled their three-wheeled mechanisms, but the Trackers waited beside the ship. About a dozen Basics rode behind the Heavy Troopers, carrying bulbous weapons on their backs. A hundred yards from the portal into Kergan's Way, beyond the range of the Banbeck muskets, the invaders halted. A Heavy Trooper ran to one of the Weaponeers' carts, thrust his !; shoulders under a harness and stood erect. He now carried a gray machine, from which extended a pair of black globes. The Trooper scuttled toward the village like an enormous rat, while from the black globes streamed a flux, intended to interfere with the neural currents of the Banbeck defenders, and so immobilize them. Explosions sounded. Puffs of smoke appeared from nooks and vantages through the crags. Bullets spat into the ground beside the Trooper. Several caromed off his armor. At once heat-beams from the ship stabbed against the cliff walls. In hisstudy Joaz Banbeck smiled. The smoke puffs were decoys. The actual shots came from other areas. The Trooper, dodging and jerking, avoided a rain of bullets and ran under the portal, above which two men waited. Affected by the flux, they tottered, stiffened, but nevertheless dropped a great stone which struck the Trooper where the neck joined his shoulders and hurled him to the ground. He thrashed his arms and legs up and down, rolled over and over. Then, bouncing to his feet, he raced back into the valley, soaring and bounding, finally to stumble, plunge headlong to the ground and lay kicking and quivering. The Basic army watched with no apparent concern or interest. activity. Then from the ship came an invisible field of vibration, traveling across the face of the cliff. Where the focus struck, puffs of dust arose and loose rock became dislodged. A man, lying on a ledge, sprang to his feet, dancing and twisting, plunged two hundred feet to his death. Passing across one of Joaz Banbeck's spy-holes, the vibration was carried into the study where it set up a nerve-grinding howl. The vibration passed along the cliff. Joaz rubbed his aching head. Meanwhile the Weaponeers discharged one of their instruments. First there came a muffled explosion, then through the air curved a wobbling gray sphere. Inaccurately aimed, it struck the cliff and burst in a great gush of yellow-white gas. The mechanism exploded once more, and this time lobbed the bomb accurately into Kergan's Way -- which was now deserted. The bomb produced no effect. In his study Joaz waited grimly. To now the Basics had taken only tentative, almost playful, steps. More serious efforts would surely follow. Wind dispersed the gas; the situation remained as before. The casualties so far had been one Heavy Trooper and one Banbeck rifleman. From the ship now came a stab of red flame, harsh, decisive. The rock at the portal shattered. Slivers sang and spun; the Heavy Troopers jogged forward. Joaz spoke into his telephone, bidding his captains caution, lest in counter-attacking against a feint they expose themselves to a new gas bomb. But the Heavy Troopers stormed into Kergan's Way -- in Joaz's mind an act of contemptuous recklessness. He gave a curt order. Out from passages and areas swarmed his dragons: Blue Horrors, Fiends, Termagants. The squat Troopers stared with sagging jaws. Here were unexpected antagonists! Kergan's Way resounded with their calls and orders. First they fell back, then, with the courage of desperation, fought furiously. Up and down Kergan's Way raged the battle. Certain relationships quickly became evident In the narrow defile neither the Trooper pistols nor the steel-weighted tails of the Fiends could be used effectively. Cutlasses were useless against dragon-scale, but the pincers of the Blue Horrors, the Termagant daggers, the axes, swords, fangs and claws of the Fiends, did bloody work against the Heavy Troopers. A single Trooper and a single Termagant were approximately a match; though the Trooper, gripping the dragon with massive arms, tearing away its brachs, breaking back its neck, won more often than the Termagant. But if two or three Termagants confronted a single Trooper, he was doomed. As soon as he committed himself to one, another would crush his legs, blind him or hack open his throat. So the Troopers fell back to the valley floor, leaving twenty of their fellows dead in Kergan's Way. The Banbeck men once more opened fire, but once more with minor effect. wondering as to the next Basic tactic. Enlightenment was not long in coming. The Heavy Troopers regrouped and stood panting, while the Basics rode back and forth receiving information, admonishing, advising, chiding. From the black ship came a gush of energy, to strike the cliff above Kergan's Way. The study rocked with the concussion. Joaz backed away from the vision-plates. What if a ray struck one of his collecting lenses? Might not the energy be guided and reflected directly toward him? He departed his study as it shook to a new explosion. He ran through a passage, descended a staircase, emerged into one of the central galleries, to find apparent confusion. Whitefaced women and children, retiring deeper into the mountain, pushed past dragons and men in battle-gear entering one of the new tunnels. Joaz watched for a moment or two to satisfy himself that the confusion held no panic, then joined his warriors in the tunnel leading north. In some past era an entire section of the cliff at the head of the valley had sloughed off. creating a jungle of piled rock and boulders: the Banbeck Jambles. Here, through a fissure, the new tunnel opened; and here Joaz went with his warriors. Behind them, down the valley, sounded the rumble of explosions as the black ship began to demolish Banbeck Village. Joaz, peering around a boulder, watched in a fury, as great slabs of rock began to scale away from the cliff. Then he stared in astonishment, for to the Basic troops had come an extraordinary reinforcement: eight Giants twice an ordinary man's stature -- barrelchested monsters, gnarled of arm and legs, with pale eyes, shocks of tawny hair. They wore brown and red armor with black epaulettes, and carried swords, maces and blast-cannon slung over their backs. Joaz considered. The presence of the Giants gave him no reason to alter his central strategy, which in any event was vague and intuitive. He must be prepared to suffer losses, and could only hope to inflict greater losses Basic on mount; ft I, on the Basics. But what did they care for the lives of their troops? Less than he cared for his dragons. And if they destroyed Banbeck Village, ruined the Vale, how could he do corresponding damage to them? He looked over his shoulder at the tall white cliffs, wondering how closely he had estimated the position of the sacerdote's hall. And now he must act; the time had come. He signaled to a small boy, one of his own sons, who took a deep breath, hurled himself blindly away from the shelter of the rocks, ran helter-skelter out to the valley floor. A moment later his mother ran forth to snatch him up and dash back into the Jambles. "Done well," Joaz commended them. "Done well indeed." Cautiously he again looked forth through the rocks. The Basics were gazing intently in his direction. R a long moment, while Joaz tingled with suspense, it seemed that they had ignored his ploy. They conferred, came to a decision, flicked the leathery buttocks of their mounts with their quirts. The creatures pranced sidewise, then loped north up the valley. The Trackers fell in behind, then came the Heavy Troopers moving at a humping quick-step. The Weaponeers followed with their three-wheeled mechanisms, and ponderously at the rear came the eight Giants. Across the fields of bellegarde and vetch, over vines, hedges, beds of berries and stands of oilpod tramped the raiders, destroying with a certain morose satisfaction. The Basics prudently halted before the Banbeck Jambles, while the Trackers ran ahead like dogs, clambering over the first boulders, rearing high to test the air for odor, peering, listening, pointing, twittering doubtfully to each other. The Heavy Troopers moved in carefully, and their near presence spurred on the Trackers. Abandoning caution, they bounded into the heart of the Jambles, emitting squeals of horrified consternation when a dozen Blue Horrors dropped among them. They clawed out heat-guns, in their excitement burning friend and foe alike. With silken ferocity the Blue Horrors ripped them apart. Screaming for aid, kicking, flailing, thrashing, those who were able fled as precipitously as they had come. Only twelve from the original twenty-four regained the valley floor; and even as they did so, even as they cried out in relief at winning free from death, a squad of Long-homed Murderers burst out upon them, and these surviving Trackers were knocked down, gored, hacked. The Heavy Troopers charged forward with hoarse calls of rage, aiming pistols, swinging swords; but the Murderers retreated to the shelter of the boulders. Within the Jambles the Banbeck men had appropriated the heat-guns dropped by the Trackers. Warily coming forward, they tried to burn the Basics. But, unfamiliar with the weapons, the men neglected either to focus or condense the flame. The Basics were no more than mildly singed. Hastily they whipped their mounts back out of range. The Heavy Troopers, halting not a hundred feet in front of the Jambles, sent in a volley of explosive pellets, which killed two of the Banbeck knights aijd forced the others back. XI AT A discreet distance the Basics appraised the situation. The Weaponeers came up and, while awaiting instructions, conferred in low tones with the mounts. One of these Weaponeers was now summoned and given orders. He divested himself of all his weapons and holding his empty hands in the air marched forward to the edge of the Jambles. Choosing a gap between a pair of ten-foot boulders, he resolutely entered the rock-maze. A Banbeck knight escorted him to Joaz. Here, by chance, were also half a dozen Termagants. The Weaponeer paused uncertainly, made a mental readjustment, approached the Termagants. Bowing respectfully he started to speak. The Termagants listened without interest, and presently one of the knights directed him to Joaz. "Dragons do not rule men on Aerlith," said Joaz dryly. "What is your message?" The Weaponeer looked dubiously toward the Termagants, then somberly back to Joaz. "You are authorized to act for the entire warren?" He spoke slowly in a dry bland voice, selecting his words with conscientious care. Joaz repeated shortly, "What is your message?" "I bring an integration from my masters." " 'Integration'? I do not understand you." "An integration of the instantaneous vectors of destiny. An interpretation of the future. They wish the sense conveyed to you in the following terms: 'Do not waste lives, both ours and your own. You are valuable to us and will be given treatment in accordance with this value. Surrender to the Rule. Cease the wasteful destruction of enterprise. Joaz frowned. "Destruction of 'enterprise'?" "The reference is to the content of your genes. The message is at its end. I advise you to accede. Why waste your blood, why destroy yourselves? Come forth now with me. All will be for the best." Joaz gave a brittle laugh. "You are a slave. How can you judge what is best for us?" The Weaponeer blinked. "What choice is there for you? All residual pockets of disorganized life are to be expunged. The way of facility is best." He inclined his head respectfully toward the Termagants. "If you doubt me, consult your own Revered Ones. They will advise you." "There are no Revered Ones here," said Joaz. "The dragons fight with us and for us; they are our fellow-warriors. But I have an alternate proposal. Why do not you and your fellows join us? Throw off your slavery, become free men! We will take the ship and go searching for the old worlds of men." The Weaponeer exhibited only polite interest. " 'Worlds of men'? There are none of them. A few residuals such as yourself remain in the desolate regions. All are to be expunged. Would you not prefer to serve the Rule?" "Would you not prefer to be a free man?" The Weaponeer's face showed mild bewilderment. "You do not understand me. If you choose -- " "Listen carefully," said Joaz. "You and your fellows can be your own masters, live among other men." The Weaponeer frowned. "Who would wish to be a wild savage? To whom would we look for law, control, direction, order?" gust, but made one last attempt. "I will provide all these; I will undertake such a responsibility. Go back, kill all the Basics -- the Revered Ones, as you call them. These are my first orders." "Kill them?" The Weaponeer's voice was soft with horror. "Kill them." Joaz spoke as if to a child. "Then we men will possess the ship. We will go to find the worlds where men are powerful -- " "There are no such worlds." "Ah, but there must be! At one time men roamed every star in the sky." "No longer." "What of Eden?" "I know nothing of it." Joaz threw up his hands. "Will you join us?" "What would be the meaning of such an act?" said the Weaponeer gently. "Come then. Lay down your arms, submit to the Rule." He glanced doubtfully toward the Termagants. "Your own Revered Ones will receive fitting treatment. Have no fear on this account." "You fool! These 'Revered Ones' are slaves, just as you are a slave to the Basics! We breed them to serve us, just as you are bred! Have at least the grace to recognize your own degradation!" The Weaponeer blinked. "You speak in terms I do not completely understand. You will not surrender then?" "No. We will kill all of you, if our strength holds out." The Weaponeer bowed, turned, departed through the rocks. Joaz followed, peered out over the valley floor. The Weaponeer made his report to the Basics, who listened with characteristic detachment. They gave an order, and the Heavy Troopers, spreading out in a skirmish line, moved slowly in toward the rocks. Behind lumbered the Giants, blasters slung forward at the ready, and about twenty Trackers, survivors of the first foray. The Heavy Troopers reached the rocks, peered in. The Trackers clambered above, searching for ambushes, and finding none, signaled back. With great caution the Heavy Troopers entered the Jambles, necessarily breaking formation. Twenty feet they advanced, fifty feet, a hundred feet. Emboldened, the vengeful Trackers sprang forward over the rocks... and up surged the Termagants. Screaming and cursing the Trackers scrambled back, pursued by the dragons. The Heavy Troopers recoiled, then swung up their weapons, fired. Two Termagants were struck under the lower armpits, their most vulnerable spot. Floundering, they tumbled down among the rocks. Others, maddened, jumped squarely down upon the Troopers. There was roaring, squealing, cries of shock and pain. The Giants lumbered up, and grinning vastly plucked away the Termagants, wrenched off their heads, flung them high over the rocks. Those Termagants who were able scuttled back, leaving half a dozen Heavy Troopers wounded, two with their throats torn open. moved forward, with the Trackers reconnoitering above, but more warily. The Trackers froze, yelled a warning. The Heavy Troopers stopped short, calling to each other, swinging their guns nervously. Overhead the Trackers scrambled back, and through the rocks, over the rocks, came dozens of Fiends and Blue Horrors. The Heavy Troopers, grimacing dourly, fired their pistols; and the air reeked with the stench of burning scale, exploded viscera. The dragons surged in upon the men, and now began a terrible battle among the rocks, with the pistols, the maces, even the swords useless for lack of room. The Giants lumbered forward and in turn were attacked by Fiends. Astonished, the idiotic grins faded from their faces; they hopped awkwardly back from the steel-weighted tails, but among the rocks the Fiends were also at a disadvantage, their steel balls clattering and jarring away from rock more often than flesh. The Giants, recovering, discharged their chest-projectors into the melee. Fiends were torn apart as well as Blue Horrors and Heavy Troopers, the Giants making no distinction. Over the rocks came another wave of dragons: Blue Horrors. They slid down on the heads of the Giants, clawing, stabbing, tearing. In a frenzy the Giants tore at the creatures, flung them to the ground, stamped on them, and the Heavy Troopers burnt them with their pistols. From nowhere, for no reason, there came a lull. Ten seconds, fifteen seconds passed, with no sound but whimpering and moaning from wounded dragons and men. A sense of imminence weighted the air, and here came the Juggers, looming through the passages. For a brief period Giants and Juggers looked each other face to face. Then Giants groped for their blast-projectors, while Blue Horrors sprang down once more, grappling the Giant arms. The Juggers stumped quickly forward. Dragon-brachs grappled Giant arms; bludgeons and maces swung, dragon armor and man armor crushed and ground apart. Man and dragon tumbled over and over, ignoring pain, shock, mutilation. The struggle became quiet. Sobbing and wheezing replaced the roars, and presently eight Juggers, superior in mass and natural armament, staggered away from eight destroyed Giants. The Troopers meanwhile had drawn together, standing back to back in clots. Step by step, burning with heat-beams the screaming Horrors, Termagants and Fiends who lunged after them, they retreated toward the valley floor, and finally won free of the rocks. The pursuing Fiends, anxious to fight in the open, sprang into their midst, while from the flanks came Long-horned Murderers and Striding Murderers. In a spirit of reckless jubilation, a dozen men riding Spiders, carrying blast-cannon taken from the fallen Giants, charged the Basics and Weaponeers, who waited beside the rather casual emplacement of three-wheeled weapons. The Basics, without shame, jerked their man-mounts around and fled toward the black ship. The Weaponeers swiveled their mechanisms, aimed, discharged bursts of energy. One man fell, two men, three men -- then the others were among the Weaponeers, who were soon hacked to pieces... including the persuasive individual who had served as envoy. Several of the men, whooping and hooting, set out in chase of the Basics. But the human mounts, springing along like monstrous rabbits, carried the Basics as fast as the Spiders carried the men. From the Jambles came a horn signal. The mounted men halted, wheeled back; the entire Banbeck force turned and retreated full speed into the Jambles. The Troopers stumbled a few defiant steps in pursuit, then halted in sheer fatigue. Of the original three squads, not enough men to make up a single squad survived. The eight Giants had perished, all Weaponeers and almost the entire group of Trackers. The Banbeck forces gained the Jambles with seconds only to spare. From the black ship came a volley of explosive pellets, to shatter the rocks at the spot where they had disappeared. "'kN A wind-polished cape of " rock above Banbeck Vale Ervis Carcolo and Bast Givven had watched the battle. The rocks hid the greater part of the fighting. The cries and clangor rose faint and tinny, like insect noise. There would be the glint of dragon scale, glimpses of running men, the shadow and flicker of movement, but not until the mangled forces of the Basics staggered forth did the outcome of the battle reveal itself. Carcolo shook his head in sour bewilderment. "The crafty devil, Joaz Banbeck! He's turned them back. He's slaughtered their best!" "It would appear," said Bast Givven, "that dragons armed with fangs, swords and steel balls are more effective than men with guns and heat-beams -- at least in close quarters." Carcolo grunted. "I might have done as well myself, under like circumstances." He turned Bast Givven a waspish glance. "Do you not agree?" "Certainly. Beyond question." "Of course," Carcolo went on, "I had not the advantage of preparation. The Basics surprised me, but Joaz Banbeck labored under no such handicap." He looked back down into Banbeck Vale, where the Basic ship was bombarding the Jambles, shattering rocks into splinters. "Do they plan to blast the Jambles out of the valley? In which case, of course, Joaz Banbeck would have no further refuge. Their strategy is clear. And as I suspected: reserve forces!" Another thirty Troopers had marched down the ramp to stand immobile in the trampled field before the ship. Carcolo pounded his fist into his palm. "Bast Givven, listen now, listen carefully! For it is in our power to do a great deed, to reserve our fortunes! Notice Clybourne Crevasse, how it opens into the Vale, directly bebehind the Basic ship." "Your ambition will yet cost us our lives." Carcolo laughed. "Come, Givven, how many times does a man die? What better way to lose a life than in the pursuit of glory?" Bast Givven turned, surveyed the meager remnants of the Happy Valley army. "We could win glory by trouncing a dozen sacerdotes. Flinging ourselves upon a Basic ship is hardly needful." "Nevertheless," said Ervis Carcolo, "that is how it must be. I ride ahead, you marshal the forces and follow. We meet at the head of Clybourne Crevasse, on the west edge of the Vale!"  ing nervous curses, Ervis Carcolo waited at the head of Clybourne Crevasse. Unlucky chance after chance paraded before his imagination. The Basics might surrender to the difficulties of Banbeck Vale and depart. Joaz Banbeck might attack across the open fields to save Banbeck Village from destruction and so destroy himself. Bast Givven might be unable to control the disheartened men and mutinous dragons of Happy Valley. Any of these situations might occur; any would expunge Carcolo's dreams of glory and leave him a broken man. Back and forth he paced the scarred granite. Every few seconds he peered down into Banbeck Vale. Every few seconds he turned to scan the bleak skylines for the dark shapes of his dragons, the taller silhouettes of his men. Beside the Basic ship waited a scanty two squads of Heavy Troopers: those who had survived the original attack and the reserves. They squatted in silent groups, watching the leisurely destruction of Banbeck Village. Fragment by fragment, the spires, towers and cliffs which had housed the Banbeck folk cracked off, slumped down into an ever-growing mound of rubble. An even heavier barrage poured against the Jambles. Boulders broke like eggs. Rock splinters drifted down the valley. A half hour passed. Ervis Carcolo seated himself glumly on a rock. A jingle, the pad of feet: Carcolo bounded to his feet. Winding across the skyline came the sorry remnants of his forces, the men dispirited, the Termagants surly and petulant, a mere handful each of Fiends, Blue Horrors and Murderers. Carcolo's shoulders sagged. What could be accomplished with a force so futile as this? He took a deep breath. Show a brave front! Never say die! He assumed his bluffest mien. Stepping forward, he cried out, "Men, dragons! Today we have known defeat, but the day is not over. The time of redemption is at hand; we shall revenge ourselves on both the Basics and Joaz Banbeck!" He searched the faces of his men, hoping for enthusiasm. They looked back at him without interest. The dragons, their understanding less complete, snorted softly, hissed and whispered. "Men and dragons!" bawled Carcolo. "You ask me, how shall we achieve these glories? I answer, follow where I lead! Fight where I fight! What is death to us, with our valley despoiled?" Again he inspected his troops, once more finding only listlessness and apathy. Carcolo stifled the roar of frustration which rose into his throat, and turned away. "Advance!" he called gruffly over his shoulder. Mounting his drooping Spider, he set off down Clyboume Crevasse. THE Basic ship pounded the Jambles and Banbeck Village with equal vehemence. From a vantage on the west rim of the valley Joaz Banbeck watched the blasting of corridor after familiar corridor. Apartments and halls hewn earnestly from the rock, carved, tooled, polished across the generations -- all opened, destroyed, pulverized. Now the target became that spire which contained Joaz Banbeck's private apartments, with his study, his  workroom, the Banbeck reliquarium. Joaz clenched and unclenched his fists, furious at his own helplessness. The goal of the Basics was clear. They intended to destroy Banbeck Vale, to exterminate as completely as possible the men of Aerlith -- and what could prevent them? Joaz studied the Jambles. The old talus had been splintered away almost to the sheer face of the cliff. Where was the opening into the Great Hall of the sacerdotes? His far-fetched hypotheses were diminishing to futility. Another hour would see the utter devastation of Banbeck Village. Joaz tried to control a sickening sense of frustration. How to stop the destruction? He forced himself to calculate. Clearly, an attack across the valley floor was equivalent to suicide. But behind the black ship opened a ravine i similar to that in which Joaz i stood concealed: Clybourne Crevasse. The ship's entry gaped wide, Heavy Troopers squatted listlessly to the side. Joaz shook his head with a sour grimace. Inconceivable that the Basics could neglect so obvious a threat. Still -- in their arrogance might they not overlook the possibility of so insolent an act? Indecision tugged Joaz forward and backward. And now a barrage of explosive pellets split open the spire which housed his apartments. The reliquarium, the ancient trove of the Banbeck's, was about to be destroyed... Joaz made a blind gesture, jumped to his feet, called the closest of his dragon-masters. "Assemble the Murderers, ' three squads of Termagants, two dozen Blue Horrors, ten Fiends, all the riders. We climb to Banbeck Verge. We descend Clybourne Crevasse. We attack the ship!" The dragon-master departed. Joaz gave himself to gloomy contemplation. If the Basics intended to draw him into a trap, they were about to succeed. The dragon-master returned. "The force is assembled." "We ride." Up the ravine surged men and dragons, emerging upon Banbeck Verge. Swinging south, they came to the head of Clybourne Crevasse. A knight at the head of the column suddenly signaled a halt. When Joaz approached he pointed out marks on the floor of the crevasse. "Dragons and men have passed here recently." Joaz studied the tracks. "Heading down the crevasse." "Yes." Joaz dispatched a party of scouts who presently came galloping wildly back. "Ervis Carcolo, with men and dragons, is attacking the ship!" Joaz wheeled his Spider and plunged headlong down the dim passage, followed by his army. battle reached their ears as they approached the mouth of the crevasse. Bursting out on the valley floor Joaz came upon a scene of desperate carnage, with dragon and Heavy Trooper hacking, stabbing, burning, blasting. Where was Ervis Carcolo?? Joaz recklessly rode to look into the entry port. It hung wide! Ervis Carcolo then had forced his way into the ship! A trap? Or had he effectuated Joaz's own plan of seizing the ship? What of the Heavy Troopers? Would the Basics sacrifice forty warriors to capture a handful of men? Unreasonable -- but now the Heavy Troopers were holding their own. They had formed a phalanx, they now concentrated the energy of their weapons on those dragons who yet opposed them. A trap? If so, it was sprung -- unless Ervis Carcolo already had captured the ship. Joaz rose in his saddle, signaled his company. "Attack!" The Heavy Troopers were doomed. Striding Murderers hewed from above, Long-horned Murderers thrust from below, Blue Horrors pinched, clipped, dismembered. The battle was done, but Joaz, with men and Termagants, had already charged up the ramp. From within came the hum and throb of power, and also human sounds -- cries and shouts of fury. The sheer ponderous bulk struck at Joaz. He stopped short, peered uncertainly into the ship. Behind him his men waited, muttering under their breath. Joaz asked himself, "Am I as brave as Ervis Carcolo? What is bravery, in any case? I am completely afraid: I dare not enter, I dare not stay outside." He put aside all caution and rushed forward, followed by his men and a horde of scuttling Termagants. Even as Joaz entered the ship he knew Ervis Carcolo had not succeeded. Above him the guns still sang and hissed. Joaz's apartments splintered apart. Another tremendous volley struck into the Jambles, laying bare the naked stone of cliff, and what was hitherto hidden: the edge of a tall opening. Joaz, inside the ship, found himself in an ante-chamber. The inner port was closed. He sidled forward, peered through a rectangular pane into what seemed a lobby or staging chamber. Ervis Carcolo and his knights crouched against the far wall, casually guarded by about twenty Weaponeers. A group of Basics rested in an alcove to the side, relaxed, quiet, their attitude one of contemplation. Carcolo and his men were not completely subdued. As Joaz watched Carcolo lunged furiously forward. A purple crackle of energy punished him, hurled him back against the wall. From the alcove one of the Basics, staring across the inner chamber, took note of Joaz Banbeck. He flicked out with his brach, touched a rod. An alarm whistle sounded, the outer port slid shut. A trap? An emergency process? The result was the same. Joaz motioned to four men, heavily burdened. They came forward, kneeled, placed on the deck four of the blast cannon which the Giants had carried into the Jambles. Joaz swung his arm. Cannon belched; metal creaked, melted; acrid odors permeated the room. The hole was still too small. "Again!" The cannon flamed; the inner port vanished. Into the gap sprang Weaponeers, firing their energy guns. Purple fire cut into the Banbeck ranks. Men curled, twisted, wilted, fell with clenched fingers and contorted faces. Before the cannon could respond, red-scaled shapes scuttled forward: Termagants. Hissing and wailing, they swarmed over the Weaponeers, on into the staging chamber. In front of the alcove occupied by the Basics they stopped short, as if in astonishment. The men crowding after fell silent. Even Carcolo watched in fascination. Basic stock confronted its derivative, each seeing in the other its caricature. The Termagants crept forward with sinister deliberation. The Basics waved their brachs, whistled, fluted. The Termagants scuttled forward, sprang into the alcove. There was a horrid tumbling and croaking. Joaz, sickened at some elementary level, was forced tp look away. The struggle was soon over. There was silence in the alcove. Joaz turned to examine Ervis Carcolo, who stared back, rendered inarticulate by anger, humiliation, pain and fright. Carcolo made an awkward gesture of menace and fury. "Be off with you," he croaked. "I claim this ship. Unless you would lie in your own blood, leave me to my conquest!" Joaz snorted contemptuously, turned his back on Carcolo, who sucked in his breath, and with a whispered curse, lurched forward. Bast Givven seized him, drew him back. Carcolo struggled. Givven talked earnestly into his ear, and Carcolo at last relaxed, half-weeping. Joaz meanwhile examined the chamber. The walls were blank, gray; the deck was covered with resilient black foam. There was no obvious illumination, but light was everywhere, exuding from the walls. The air chilled the skin, and smelled unpleasantly acrid: an odor which Joaz had not previously noticed. He coughed. His ear-drums rang. A frightening suspicion became certainty. On heavy legs he lunged for the port, beckoning to his troops. "Outside, they poison us!" He stumbled out on the ramp, gulped fresh air. His men and Termagants followed, and then in a stumbling rush came Ervis Carcolo and his men. Under the hulk of the great ship the group stood gasping, tottering on limp legs, eyes dim and swimming. Above them, oblivious or careless of their presence, the ship's guns sent forth another barrage. The spire housing Joaz's apartments tottered, collapsed. The Jambles were no more than a heap of rock splinters drifting into a high arched opening. Inside the opening Joaz glimpsed a dark shape, a glint, a shine, a structure -- then he was distracted by an ominous sound at his back. From a port at the other end of the ship, a new force of Heavy Troopers had alighted. Three new squads of twenty men each, accompanied by a dozen Weaponeers with four of the rolling projectors. Joaz sagged back in dismay. He glanced along his troops. They were in no condition either to attack or defend. A single alternative remained: flight. "Make for Clybourne Crevasse," he called thickly. Stumbling, lurching, the remnants of the two armies fled under the brow of the great black ship. Behind them Heavy Troopers swung smartly forward, but without haste. Rounding the ship, Joaz stopped short. In the mouth of Clybourne Crevasse waited a fourth squad of Heavy Troopers, with another Weaponeer and his weapon. up and down the valley. Which way to run, where to turn? The Jambles? They were nonexistent. Motion, slow and ponderous in the opening previously concealed by tumbled rock caught his attention. A dark object moved forth. A shutter drew back, a bright disk glittered. Almost instantly a pencil of milky blue radiance lanced at, into, through the end-disk of the Basic ship. Within, tortured machinery whined, simultaneously up and down the scale, to inaudibility at either end. The luster of the enddisks vanished. They became gray, dull; the whisper of power and life previously pervading the ship gave way to dead quiet. The ship itself was dead, and its mass, suddenly unsupported, crushed groaning into the ground. The Heavy Troopers gazed up in consternation at the hulk which had brought them to Aerlith. Joaz, taking advantage of their indecision, called, "Retreat! North -- up the valley!" The Heavy Troopers doggedly followed. The Weaponeers however cried out an order to halt. They emplaced their weapons, brought them to bear on the cavern behind the Jambles. Within the opening naked shapes moved with frantic haste. There was slow shifting of massive machinery, a change of lights and shadows, and the milky blue shaft of radiance struck forth once more. It flicked down. Weaponeers, weapons, twothirds of the Heavy Troopers vanished like moths in a furnace. The surviving Heavy Troopers halted, retreated uncertainly toward the ship. In the mouth of Clybourne Crevasse waited the remaining squad of Heavy Troopers. The single Weaponeer crouched over his three-wheeled mechanism. With fateful care he made his adjustments. Within the dark opening the naked sacerdotes worked furiously, thrusting, wedging, the strain of their sinews and hearts and minds communicating itself to every man in the valley. The shaft of milky-blue light sprang forth, but too soon: it melted the rock a hundred yards south of Clybourne Crevasse, and now from the Weaponeer's gun came a splash of orange and green flame. Seconds later the mouth of the sacerdote's cavern erupted. Rocks, bodies, fragments of metal, glass, rubber arched through the air. The sound of the explosion reverberated through the valley. And the dark object in the cavern was destroyed, was no more than tatters and shreds of metal. Joaz took three deep breaths, throwing off the effects of the narcotic gas by sheer power of will. He signaled to his Murderers. "Charge! Kill!" The Murderers loped forward. The Heavy Troopers threw themselves flat, aimed their weapons, but soon died. In the mouth of Clybourne Crevasse the final squad of Troopers charged wildly forth, to be instantly attacked by Termagants and Blue Horrors who had sidled along the face of the cliff. The Weaponeer was gored by a Murderer. There was no further resistance in the valley, arid the ship lay open to attack. Joaz led the way back up the ramp, through the entry into the now dim staging-chamber. The blast-cannon captured from the Giants lay where his men had dropped them. Three portals led from the chamber, and these were swiftly burned down. The first revealed a spiral ramp. The second, a long empty hall lined with tiers of bunks. The third, a similar hall in which the bunks were occupied. Pale faces peered from the tiers, pallid hands flickered. Up and down the central corridor marched squat matrons in gray gowns. Ervis Carcolo rushed forward, buffeting the matrons to the deck, peering into the bunks. "Outside," he bellowed. "You are rescued, you are saved. Outside quickly, while there is opportunity." But there was only meager resistance to overcome from a halfdozen Weaponeers and Trackers, none whatever from twenty Mechanics -- these, short thin men with sharp features and dark hair -- and none from the sixteen remaining Basics. All were marched off the ship as prisoners. the silence of exhaustion. Men and dragons sprawled in the trampled fields. The captives stood in a dejected huddle beside the ship. Occasionally an isolated sound came to emphasize the silence: the creak of cooling metal within the ship, the fall of a loose rock from the shattered cliffs; an occasional murmur from the liberated Happy Valley folk, who sat in a group apart from the surviving warriors. Ervis Carcolo alone seemed restless. For a space he stood with his back to Joaz, slapping his thigh with his scabbard tassel. He contemplated the sky where Skene, a dazzling atom, hung close over the western cliffs, then turned, studied the shattered gap at the north of the valley, filled with the twisted remains of the sacerdotes' construction. He gave his thigh a final slap, looked toward Joaz Banbeck, turned to stalk through the huddle of Happy Valley folk, making brusque motions of no particular significance, pausing here and there to harangue or cajole, apparently attempting to instill spirit and purpose into his defeated people. In this purpose he was unsuccessful. Presently he swung sharply about and marched across the field to where Joaz Banbeck lay outstretched. Carcolo stared down. "Well, then," he said bluffly. "The battle is over, the ship is won." Joaz raised himself up on one elbow. "True." "Let us have no misunderstanding on one point," said Carcolo. "Ship and contents are mine. An ancient rule defines the rights of him who is first to attack. On this rule I base my claim." Joaz looked up in surprise, and seemed almost amused. "By a rule even more ancient, I have already assumed possession." "I dispute this assertion," said Carcolo hotly. "Who -- " Joaz held up his hand wearily. "Silence, Carcolo! You are alive now only because I am sick of blood and violence. Do not test my patience!" Carcolo turned away, twitching his scabbard tassel with restrained fury. He looked up the valley, turned back to Joaz. "Here come the sacerdotes, who in fact demolished the ship. I remind you of my proposal, by which we might have prevented this destruction and slaughter." Joaz smiled. "You made your proposal only two days ago. Further, the sacerdotes possess no weapons." Carcolo stared as if Joaz had taken leave of his wits. "Then how did they destroy the ship?" Joaz shrugged. "I can only make conjectures." Carcolo asked sarcastically, "And what direction do these conjectures lead?" "I wonder if they had constructed the frame of a spaceship. I wonder if they turned the propulsion beam against the Basic ship." Carcolo pursed his mouth dubiously. "Why should the sacerdotes build themselves a spaceship?" "The Demie approaches. Why do you not put your question to him?" "I will do so," said Carcolo with dignity. But the Demie, followed by four younger sacerdotes and walking with the air of a man in a dream, passed without speaking. watched after him. The Demie apparently planned to mount the ramp and enter the ship. Joaz jumped to his feet, followed, barred the way to the ramp. Politely he asked, 'What do you seek, Demie?" "I seek to board the ship." "To what end? I ask, of course, from sheer curiosity." The Demie inspected him a moment without reply. His face was haggard and tight. His eyes gleamed like frost-stars. Finally he replied, in a voice hoarse with emotion. "I wish to determine if the ship can be repaired." Joaz considered a moment, then spoke in a gentle rational voice. "The information can be of little interest to you. Would the sacerdotes place themselves so completely under my command?" "We obey no one." "In that case, I can hardly take you with me when I leave." The Demie swung around, and Your favorite authors and their greatest stories! Satisfaction guaranteed or money back within ten days. I t P EB B LE IN T H E S KY, I saac As i mo v I I Galaxy Publishing Corporation  #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. each. Name Address City Zone State for a moment seemed as if he would walk away. His eyes fell on the shattered opening at the end of the vale, and he turned back. He spoke, not in the measured voice of a sacerdote, but in a burst of grief and fury. "This is your doing! You preen yourself, you count yourself resourceful and clever. You forced us to act, and thereby violate ourselves and our dedication!" Joaz nodded, with a faint grim smile. "I knew the opening must lie behind the Jambles. I wondered if you might be building a space-ship; I hoped that you might protect yourselves against the Basics, and so serve my purposes. I admit your charges. I used you and your construction as a weapon, to save myself and my people. Did I do wrong?" "Right or wrong -- who can weigh? You wasted our effort across more than eight hundred Aerlith years! You destroyed more than you can ever replace." "I destroyed nothing, Demie. The Basics destroyed your ship. If you had cooperated with us in the defense of Banbeck Vale this disaster would have never occurred. You choose neutrality. You thought yourselves immune from our grief and pain. As you see, such is not the case." "And meanwhile our labor of eight hundred and twelve years goes to naught," the Demie said. Joaz asked with feigned innocence, "Why did you need a space-ship? Where do you plan to travel?" f  'HE Demie's eyes burst with flames as intense as those of Skene. "When the race of men is gone, then we go abroad. We move across the galaxy. We repopulate the terrible old worlds, and the new universal history starts from that day, with the past wiped clean as if it never existed. If the grephs destroy you, what is it to us? We await only the death of the last man in the universe." "Do you not consider yourselves men?" "We are as you know us -- above-men." At Joaz's shoulder someone laughed coarsely. Joaz turned his head to see Ervis Carcolo. " 'Overmen'?" mocked Carcolo. "Poor naked waifs of the caves! What can you display to prove your superiority?" The Demie's mouth drooped, the lines of his face deepened. "We have our tands. We have our knowledge. We have our strength." Carcolo turned away with another coarse laugh. Joaz said in a subdued voice, "I feel more pity for you than you ever felt for us." Carcolo returned. "And where did you learn to build a spaceship? From your own efforts? Or from the work of men before you, men of the old times?" "We are the ultimate men," said the Demie. "We know all that men have ever thought, spoken or devised. We are the last and the first. And when the under-folk are gone, we shall renew the cosmos as innocent and fresh as rain." "But men have never gone and will never go," said Joaz. "A setback, yes. But is not the universe wide? Somewhere are the worlds of men. With the help of the Basics and their Mechanics, I will repair the ship and go forth to find these worlds." "You will seek in vain," said the Demie. "These worlds do not exist?" "The Human Empire is dissolved. Men exist only in feeble groups." "What of Eden, old Eden?" "A myth, no more." "My marble globe, what of that?" "A toy. An imaginative fabrication." "How can you be sure?" asked Joaz, troubled in spite of himself. "Have I not said that we know all of history? We can look into our tands and see deep into the past, until the recollections are dim and misty, and never do we remember planet Eden." Joaz shook his head stubbornly. "There must be an original world from which men came. Call it Earth or Tempe or Eden; somewhere it exists." The Demie started to speak, then in a rare show of irresolution held his tongue. Joaz said, "Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we are the last men. But I shall go forth to look." "I shall come with you," said Ervis Carcolo. "You will be fortunate to find yourself alive tomorrow," said Joaz. Carcolo drew himself up. "Do not dismiss my claim to the ship so carelessly!" Joaz struggled for words, but could find none. What to do with the unruly Carcolo? He could not find in himself enough harshness to do what he knew should be done. He temporized, turned his back on Carcolo. "Now you know my plans," he told the Demie. "If you do not interfere with me, I shall not interfere with you." The Demie moved slowly back. "Go then. We are a passive race. We despise ourselves for our activity of today. Perhaps it was our greatest mistake... But go, seek your forgotten world. You will only perish somewhere among the stars. We will wait, as I already we have waited." He turned and walked away, followed by the four younger sacerdotes, who had all the time stood gravely to the side. Joaz called after him. "And if the Basics come again? Will you fight with us? Or against us?" The Demie made no response, but walked to the north, the long white hair swinging down his thin shoulder-blades. Joaz watched him a moment, gazed up and down the ruined valley, shook his head in wonder and puzzlement, turned back to study the great black ship.  cliffs. There was an instant dimming of light, a sudden chill. Carcolo approached him. "Tonight I shall hold my folk here in Banbeck Vale, and send them home on the morrow. Meanwhile, I suggest that you board the ship with me and make a preliminary survey." Joaz took a deep breath. Why could it not come easier for him? Carcolo had twice sought his life, and, had positions been reversed, would have shown him no mercy. He forced himself to act. His duty to himself, to his people, to his ultimate goal, was clear. He called to those of his knights who carried the captured heat-guns. They approached. Joaz said, "Take Carcolo into Clybourne Crevasse. Execute him at once." Protesting, bellowing, Carcolo .was dragged off. Joaz turned away with a heavy heart, and sought Bast Givven. "I take you for a sensible man." "I regard myself so." "I set you in charge of Happy Valley. Take your folk home, before darkness falls." Bast Givven silently went to his people. They stirred, and presently departed Banbeck Vale. Joaz crossed the valley floor to the tumble of rubble which choked Kergan's Way. He choked with fury as he looked upon the destruction, and for a moment almost wavered in his resolve. Might it not be fit to fly the black ship to Coralyne and take revenge on the Basics? He walked around to stand under the spire which had housed his apartments, and by some strange freak of chance came upon a rounded fragment of yellow marble. Weighing this in his palm he looked up into the sky where Coralyne already twinkled red, and tried to bring order to his mind. The Banbeck folk had emerged from the deep tunnels. Phade the minstrel-maiden came to find him. "What a terrible day," she murmured. "What awful events. What a great victory." Joaz tossed the bit of yellow marble back into the rubble. "I feel much the same way. And .where it all ends, no one knows      In October Galaxy we begin a two-part serial called Plague of Pyfhons -- the by-line is Frederik Pohl -- and add to it at least a pair of first-class novelettes: The Ballad of Lost C'Mell, by Cordwainer Smith, and Who Dares a Bulbur Eat? by Gordon R. Dickson. We say "at least a pair;" actually, Theodore Sturgeon is hard at work on the final draft of one that we plan to rush into print if we get it in time -- and that one is going to be worth reading! -- but it remains to be seen if it'll be in the next issue or later. Anyway, there'll be shorts, a particularly interesting Willy Ley column, etc. Don't miss the October Galaxy; it's a good one! door with the steak cuber. Or was it the cube steaker? No matter. The door was a good, hardwood door and resisted his onslaught well. But time was on his side. He had the energy and the time, he knew, and sooner or later "the door would be kindling. It was the door to his room. It was evident to him that he did not need the door to his room and that he did need heat. In fact he had better get some heat pretty soon -- although he was keeping warm enough for the present by beating on the door. So he would beat this door to kindling, and then he would build a nice, cozy fire in the hall that would keep him warm for a long time... if he was stingy with his fuel. The carpenter came by. The carpenter was always coming by, except when you wanted him, Jim realized. The carpenter was a mighty, mighty busy fellow. The carpenter stopped short when he saw Jim demolishing the door. In fact he came to a grinding halt. "Jim, why didn't you tell me!" "Carpenter, how was I to know where you were? Who can ever find you?" "I know Jim. Jim, you work so hard!" "Yes!" he said, pounding. "Take this hatchet, Jim. A hatchet is what you demolish doors with! Good-by." The carpenter departed. James Ypsilanti swung on the door with his newly acquired hatchet. Soon he was ready for his fire. He struck a match, and in no time had the pile of varnished kindling blazing smokily in the hall. He held his hands over the blaze. "Ah, good, good. Good." He closed his eyes. "What could be better than this?" Then he opened them again regretfully. "It's dinner time. I'd better fix it while I have my fire going." He hurried to the kitchen and chose a can of eggs-bacon-and-pancakes from the massive stores. " heated it over his hall fire. Then he dumped the contents on his tin plate and ate. "Murder," he thought somberly. "That's what I'm in for. Practically murder with consent. She said she couldn't live without me. Margie begged me to kill her, you might as well say. Good old Margie; a good kid, but I killed her. And now... Well, that's life!" He speared a pancake. "Damn, but it's cold!" He threw an armload of wood on the fire and it blazed up. "Sure wish these carpenters had feelings. My lord, they got no feelings at all!" The carpenter arrived with a new hardwood door. Whistling cheerily, he began to install it where the other one had just been hatcheted away. "Carpenter, that door won't be staying there long. I'm almost out of fuel." "I hope you don't expect me to be surprised, Jim, if this door doesn't last very long. The previous twenty-two doors at this location, Jim, did not last very long either." Still whistling to himself, he installed the last of the hinge screws. "Why don't you just give me the doors, instead of causing yourself all this work?" demanded James Ypsilanti. " 'Inmates will not be issued materials,' Jim. I've quoted that section of the rules to you many times, Jim." "But couldn't you just lean the door up against the door jamb and leave it?" argued the inmate. "You go to a ridiculous amount of trouble." "It is not ridiculous, Jim. I am a carpenter, Jim. Good-by." After lunch, James Ypsilanti crawled into his escape tunnel. He liked to go in there every day and daydream. The tunnel ended abortively at the wall of the prison, for the prison wall extended down into solid bed rock for a meter, and it was fabricated of one-meter thick compressed steel. It was the nearest thing to an exit that the prison had. Officials had always come and gone through the massive, englobing wall by matter transmitters. "Smarties couldn't find me though, when I was in my escape tunnel." he chortled, as he stretched out in the cave under the concrete. "They can walk through walls, but they couldn't find me." Then his tone became baleful. "The smarties'll never find me." on the door next day, the carpenter stood cheerily watching. "Carpenter, why don't you fix the damn heating plant? Then I wouldn't have to be chopping up your doors all the time to keep warm." "I am a carpenter, Jim, not a heat-plant fixer, as you well know from our previous negotiations on the subject." "What will you do, carpenter, when I have used up all your doors?" the convict jibed. 'Why, Jim, we will have to send out for some more," the carpenter answered condescendingly. "Still, I wish you would let me work on that het plant," urged Ypsilanti. "I might fix it." " 'Inmates will not be permitted to disassemble or otherwise interfere with the machinery of the institution,' " quoted the carpenter. "Need I say more, Jim?" "Okay," said James Ypsilanti, resuming his destructive work on the new door. "Scram, stupid." The carpenter departed. "That dope," Jim said between blows, "is even foggier in the head than my lousy lawyer was, and that's going some." "Jim," said the carpenter, returning and sounding very pleased with himself, "look here at what I have found, Jim." James Ypsilanti turned to look at what the carpenter held in his hand. It was a carpenter's square sheathed in plastic. "Found enough of them to last me a lifetime, Jim," said the carpenter complacently. "I'll never have to buy any." "No, you won't," agreed James Ypsilanti bitterly. "Can't you get it into your head that you and I are the only ones left on Earth? After the war the rest left. They couldn't find us when they evacuated this atomic-explosion wrecked planet, because we were in this escape-proof jug. So they went away and left us!" "I know, Jim." Ypsilanti studied the mobile features of the carpenter, searching intently for a sign. But the carpenter robot strolled away, whistling.  dents and lecture audiences on numerous occasions, "is a selfcorrecting process. It never stands still, mainly because new material is constantly being added." This column is just one more illustration for this statement. When I reported on Commander Bodler's encounter with a gigantic luminous, rotating "pinwheel" in the waters of the Gulf of Oman I had only vaguely heard of such a phenomenon before. (If you keep a file of Galaxy, please reread his report in the December # issue.) A reader then called my attention to a chapter in one of Charles Fort's books and I was able to quote half a dozen more cases ( Galaxy , June #.) While I was still brooding about the phenomenon I received an airmail letter from Arthur C. Clarke telling me that, according to a British scientific journal, a German publication contained a whole collection of such cases. Since these enormous, rotating, luminous wheels are such a breathtakingly unusual phenomenon -- even sober logbook entries abound in terms like "weird," "most awe inspiring," "an effect of great eerieness," unheimlich (German for fear-inspiring) and angstwekkende indruk (Dutch for fear-inspiring) -- the source for what is to follow should be stated first. The journal in question is the Deutsche Hydro graph(April #), published in Hamburg by the German Hydrographic Institute. Incidentally, about three quarters of this article is in English. The author is Professor Dr. Kurt Kalle. Dr. Kalle's sources, in turn, are mainly The Marine Observer, published by Her Britannic Majesty's Stationery Office, and some logbooks of German and Dutch vessels. None of the cases quoted in Dr. Kalle's report are identical with the ones I reported in Galaxy. In the tabulation later in this column I have added the cases from the U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings and from Fort's book. r  "HE total number of observations quoted by Dr. Kalle is seventy, but not all of them are about rotating luminous wheels. In going through all the reports of highly unusual phosphorence in the sea that he could find he established several categories. At first these categories were merely to aid in sorting out, and were based on the described appearance of the phenomenon. Later, he found a very interesting and probably significant corollary. His first section, comprising six reports, he labelled "general and superficial descriptions," a somewhat harsh term, for some of them are impressive indeed. Besides I would have put three of these reports into the second section, which in Dr. Kalle's article consists of # reports. These reports are all alike in that they describe what looks almost like an explosion. "Balls of light" suddenly appear at the ocean's surface, spreading out with utmost rapidity to cover an area of a hundred square yards or more. Here are a few examples of these reports: View of three revolving phenomena from board of the S. S. Arracan. Observed December #, #, northern part of the Andaman Sea. The cargo ship Stephan was, on September #, #, at #' northern latitude and #' western longitude, which is in the Atlantic Ocean to the west of the Bay of Biscay. The sea phosphoresced ant patch would seem to bubble up from the bottom of the sea, burst into vivid light and spread rapidly over the surface before gradually fading away." The captain of the S.S. Omar had a very similar story to tell. His ship was at #' #' N., #' #' E., which is in the Indian Ocean to the South of Ceylon; the date was October #, #. "These patches of light, whilst expandafter about two minutes died away. They commenced with a diameter of about one foot and expanded to at least # yards." Two years later, on August #, #, the officer of the watch (not named) of the German passenger liner Preussen produced the following description: "From right next to the ship and up to the limit of vision luminous balls rose from the lower strata of the ocean. Their distances from each other varied from # to # feet. The time interval between appearances varied between # and # seconds. The balls seemed to rise with a speed of about half a yard per second and had an estimated diameter of # inches. Just below the surface they expanded to a diameter of about half a yard. When reaching the surface these spheres expanded and flattened. It looked as if they were bursting. The area occupied by such a phantom body was ellipsoid in shape, with a major axis from # to # feet and a minor axis of # to # feet. The larger ones of them retained their intense silvery-greenish luminosity with a shivering motion until we lost sight of them." The location of the Preussen was also in the Indian Ocean, but to the west of that of the Omar, the precise position being #' N., #' East. A little more than a year later, on October #, #, S. S. Somersetshire, being in the same general area as the Omar and the Preussen (#' #' N, #' #' E.) saw the same thing. P. H. Potter, the second officer, described it as shoot from the depth, burst on nearing the surface, irradiate and cover an area, seemingly of a couple of hundred square yards." ploding" balls of light come from the Indian Ocean, being strung out roughly along the #th parallel of northern latitude from the African east coast to Ceylon's west coast. Before I mention the interesting fact discovered by Dr. Kalle Talma. Observed December #, #, northern part of the Andaman Sea. I have to explain briefly the other categories established by him. His category (C) consists of reports -- eleven of them -- which describe waves of light, apparently parallel and not curved, which move rapidly across the surface of the sea. Category (D) comprises seven reports about waves of light which have a motion as if they were rotating around a common center, the center, however, being not visible to the observer who reported it. The final category, twenty-four reports, deals with rotating wheels which have a clearly visible center. When dealing with reports of this kind, the obvious first step is to take a map of the world and enter the various observations according to their geographical locations. Naturally Dr. Kalle did this. He found that all the reports, except three, came from the Indian Ocean. Of the three which were not from the Indian Ocean two were from the Atlantic. One of them was that of the Stephan quoted above; the other one came from the John Holt, February #, #, from the vicinity of the Cape Verde Islands, also in the Atlantic. The third came from the S. S. Tasmania (May #, #), which was at sea to the west of the North Island of New Zealand. After Dr. Kalle had drawn his map he naturally entered the depth of the ocean at the places of the observation. The surprise came then. The average depth of the ocean for all cases of "exploding" light balls was over # feet. The least was about # feet while one could not be judged properly. The location was just where the continental shelf slopes into the abyss. Since the ship's position was not given within, say, # yards, the depth of water under the keel could have been anything from # to # feet. But the average depth for the waves of light, whether seemingly parallel or rotating was less than # feet, again with two exceptions due to the nearness of the edge of the continental shelf. The only definite exception as regards the freshly established rule of shallow water for parallel or rotating light beams was the S. S. Somersetshire on August #, #. The position was #" #' N., #" #' E, which is not very far from the east coast of Africa. As a matter of fact I do not consider the report made by P. Hawkins, the second officer, very typical for the parallel light waves, since he wrote: "A white line seemed to be coming toward the ship at a tremendous speed from the eastward, which had the appearance of breakers. Very shortly after, the whole sea was quite white, with now and again circular and streaky black patches, and the whole surroundings were brilliantly lightened up." But Hawkins added a very interesting comment: "During this time (#:# P.M. till #:# P.M.) the atmospheric conditions were extraordinary. No sound was heard, not even the wind nor the breaking of the sea. No swell was visible; and the vessel, which had previously been rolling heavily, had practically no movement on her. In fact, one could almost have been in dock." the parallel waves was delivered by D. Brown, the second officer of the S.S. City of Khios on July #, #. The ship was at #" #' N., #" #' E in the northernmost part of the Arabian Sea, with a depth of water of about # feet. "Shafts of pale white light were observed moving swiftly NE-SW. They appeared to be just above the surface of the sea and parallel with each other. They were passing the ship at the rate of about one per second. They appeared to stretch as far as the eye could see on each side of the vessel and did not at any time appear to curve. After about # minutes the phenomenon disappeared." While the experience of the S. S. Somersetshire must have been awe-inspiring, the case does not necessarily belong into this collection. If it be discarded as being "something else," whatever that may be, there is no exception to the rule found by Dr. Kalle that the exploding balls are a deep-water phenomenon, while the light beams appear only over the continental shelf. He himself wrote that "this result reinforces the supposition that the distinction into 'exploding' and 'rotating' types, which was based on the differences in appearance and behavior, is essentially correct." This fact is not very helpful in explaining either one of these phenomena. But in a field where observations (or at any event re# # #  #  #   o Suez r-, r -- I  " c: F IH  r-l r-, i  ffAkaba  T ?eTSSCCT m Jjmm. Karachi  C Cnlrnttn. Chittagong Hanoi Amoy Canton  ' r ' i a I Bj  boutiIAs y t  B # , c  A A  B lB # y # VAttFV # B #V# BM#  D V Bombay V.# A ( ,...,# bxiw y gov. y vot j. # XI. #   bA) ; ? m  Bangkok V MV  Hainan V' ( I 'i I M  ObbiaJ  l ."V  ## H.# #IX.#. All. # B  rll. # p v fa j Jl.#-UiA '#-# m.'#? (. #X# Ceylon 'Cmombo BX#I ALI sr iaw ijr m-f IT... Pf # i LQ jy   V  l v' y r I Borneo r  r k i i  o e . A i StH r o : r . t fyU Sum;  Ira -  v f-O'. Jav BaIiXpapany f  Cta ,   C Courtesy: German Hydrographic Institute Professor Kalle's map sketch of seventy observed phenomena. Each sighting is indicated by afsign. The letter indicates the type of phenomenon. Roman numerals indicate month of the year seen, followed by the year (all sightings on this map are after #.) Key to letters: A, unusual but non-specific phosphorescence; B, "exploding" light balls; C, apparently parallel light waves; D, rotating phenomenon, center invisible to observer; E, rotating phenomenon, center visible to observer. ports) have become reasonably frequent only during the last three decades, any definite fact is welcome. It may become important at a later date when more is known. After quoting one more case of parallel light beams, because it contains an interesting guess, we can go onto the rotating beams. That case was reported by Captain Bradley of the S. S. Aristo. It was seen in July, # (no date given) and the position of the vessel was #" #' N., # ' #' E., quite close to the position of the City of Khios. "The beams," Captain Bradley wrote, "traveled in the reverse direction of the wind, sea and swell... The rapidly moving beams of luminosity may have been caused by minute phosphorescent organisms turning in a certain direction. Not that they moved rapidly from place to place, but that they remained practically stationary and only altered position to expose their luminous sides. Whatever the cause, the phenomenon was most awe-inspiring. No wonder that the mariners of old were so prone to superstition and returned to their native shores full of weird and wonderful tales of the sea." The oldest report of rotating beams quoted by Dr. Kalle is dated May #, # and comes from the Gulf of Oman. The most interesting aspect is that it was observed from shore. The observer, a German by the name of A. Stiirken, said that he was standing on board a ship which had made fast on a pier near Bender Abbas. The geographical position of the pier is given as #" N., #" E. "The southern horizon was a luminous ribbon which looked precisely as if there were a heavy surf out there. The intensely bright luminescence approached us rapidly, shooting sharply defined light rays to the West in rapid succession, looking like the beam from the searchlight of a warship. Then the whole luminous flood -- always below the water's surface -- approached our ship. Wide waves of fire, # to # yards long, came in endless succession and passed under our keel for a period of about three minutes. Then the picture changed suddenly. To the left of us, about # yards away, a gigantic fiery wheel formed itself with spokes that reached as far as one could see. The whole wheel whirled around for two or three minutes: Then all of the luminescence moved away, as fast as it had arrived. For a moment it was visible near the horizon and then the apparition was over." (The word used by Stiirken which I translated as "apparition" is Spuk, normally used for alleged supernatural phenomena, like seeing a ghost or witnessing Walpurgis Night.) phenomenon when it is, if this phrase is applicable here, in full bloom. Most of the time the ship runs into a rotating wheel, or sees it some distance away. But the crew of the S.S. Aeneas saw it develop. The date was December #, #; the place #" #' N., #" #' E., in the Strait of Malacca, between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. The report was written by J. M. Anderson, who was second officer of the ship. The phenomenon began at # minutes after midnight: "Commencing with but a few isolated points and patches of sparkling and pulsating light, the display developed until the surface of the sea from horizon to horizon had the appearance of being lit up from below, by thousands of beams of light which independently flashed and were eclipsed with great regularity, at intervals of about one second. This phosphorescence increased distinct systems of light waves or phosphorescent wheels were observed, one to port and one to starboard. These light waves were observed to be traveling clockwise over the surface of the sea, appearing to issue from a focus around which they rotated, locity of rotation until #:# A.M. The phosphorescent points and patches previously described were as the illuminated beams swept over them and to decrease in intensity during the passage of the successive dark spaces, and this phenomenon was quite noticeable even when the light waves, toward the end of the display, became quite faint. At #:# A.M. the light waves were no longer visible, and at #:# A.M. the last traces of phosphorescence were observed." The crew of the S. S. Arracan, on December #, #, being in the same general area ( # #' N., #' #' E.) also watched the development of a rather short-lived phenomenon. At # A.M. the vessel passed "through small clusters of phosphorescent light." Very soon after, "these clusters of light expanded into bars and commenced to revolve in an anticlockwise direction, and appeared to pass the bridge, from where they were observed, at the rate of one every half second. This phenomenon was in the form of a Catherine wheel, the hub of which could be observed plainly about two hundred yards to the westward of the ship's course. At #:# A.M. the phosphorescent light failed, and then became brighter, and on this occasion the spokes or beams of light revolved in the opposite direction, i. e. clockwise. At #:# A.M. this phenomenon disappeared. On each occasion the hub of the Catherine wheel was clearly visible to the westward of the ship." Quite close to the position of the S. S. Arracan, namely at #" #' N, #" #' E., and almost precisely two years later, namely on December #, #, the S.S. Talma also observed a rotating wheel. The "spokes" were curved (see Fig. #) and about # feet wide when they hit the ship. The "spokes" followed each other at intervals of half a second. The hub of the wheel, which could not be seen very clearly, seemed to be about five miles from the ship. The duration of the whole was # minutes. This report has an interesting postscript: "It was later reported from the engine room that at this time the revolutions of the engine dropped considerably and the main engines were straining. As this straining of the engines appeared to me to point to the possibility of a marine volcanic disturbance I considered it advisable to send out a wireless warning." TT would serve little purpose to quote more reports. They all read more or less alike and all stress the weird impressiveness of the sight -- quite naturally, since for each observer it was the first time that he saw it. One exception to that rule is the experience of Captain R. W. White and his second officer, C. Jackman, who saw it three times, on September #, October # and December #, #. The location for all three observations was the Andaman Sea and Second Officer Jackman, on the third occasion, merely entered: "Experienced the same phenomenon, duration # minutes." Well, one can also get used even to being under artillery bombardment, as many soldiers can testify. Geographically the phenomenon of the rotating lights clearly centers around two areas. The first one is the Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, plus the coastline to the East of the Gulf of Oman to about Bombay. The other area is the sea around the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Sea, the Strait of Malacca and the Borneo Sea. For simplicity's sake I referred to these two areas as the Western and the Eastern Phenomenon and, trying to see whether the seasons (admittedly not too noticeable in these tropical seas) had anything to do with the frequency of occurrence, I tabulated all reports as to their dates. (See table.) Number of Observations: first half --  -- second half -- first half second half -- first half second half -- first half  second half first half second half first half second half first half -- second half first half second half --  -- first half second half -- first half second half -- first half second half first half second half -- It can be seen that the Western Phenomenon shows a rather faint clustering for the period from late March to the end of July, while the Eastern Phenomenon shows a somewhat more pronounced clustering for the period from October through December. But, since neither clustering is very pronounced, it might be argued that the apparent concentration during the last three months of the year for the Eastern Phenomenon is caused by the simple fact that the number of reports is not large enough to be meaningful. Dr. Kalle has a total of only five reports for the years from # to #. Then there is a complete absence of reports for the years # to #, caused, no doubt, by the first World War. There is the same absence of reports for the years from # to #, caused by the second World War and its aftermath. No doubt quite a number of reports from those years do exist but, since they formed part of otherwise classified material, were never published.And so far the collection is somewhat limited also to nationality. Reports from British vessels seem to be known more or less completely, thanks to The Marine Observer, and some reports from Dutch vessels have appeared in the Dutch marine publication De Zee. Nobody, so far, has gone over the material that might be hiding in French and Portuguese publications. I expect the latter especially to yield much material because the sea route from Portugal to Goa went through the waters which are prone to produce the phenomenon. After the reports which were classified because of wartime, and the French and Portuguese reports, have been added to the material the seasonal statistics may look different. N OW for an attempt to explain all this. Before I give Dr. Kalle's explanation I have to quote a sentence he wrote in the introductory paragraph of his paper: "A definitive explanation of this natural phenomenon, which occurs at night and at sea in a surprising manner, tempting observers to think of cosmic or supernatural causes, does not yet exist." The tentative explanation which is then advanced by Dr. Kalle is based on the known fact that luminescent marine organisms do not luminesce all the time. If they did, we would have phosphorescence all the time. But when the sea does phosphoresce it can clearly be seen that the organisms respond to physical stimuli. No captain of a sailing vessel ever produced as bright a wake as do the propellers of a steamer or motor ship. And if you stand in shallow water when there is phosphorescence you can produce an extra bright flash by the simple expedient of striking the surface with your outstretched hand. The small organisms -- they are not actually microscopic, as one can read in many places, since the most common one diameter -- definitely respond to the shock wave produced by the blow on the surface. That they also seem to respond to something we don't even feel is shown by the report of the ship's master of the M. S. British tions. #. #. #. a. More titles in the works. Maid of Mars; Chessmen of Mars; Master Mind of Mars. Ready now! #. #, #I full years. Good to very good Many other complete sets, special collections, etc. Send your want list. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N. Y. #I #th Ave. Brooklyn #, N. Y. Premier (Nov. #, #; location: southern portion of the Persian Gulf): "The ship's radar apparatus had been switched on with a view to checking her position, when, in the same instant this gear became operative, most of phosphorescent light appeared in the sea, gyrating in a clockwise direction to starboard and anticlockwise to port, but all sweeping inward toward the ship." Now since the luminescence can be excited by a stimulus it is, as Captain Bradley of the Aristo pointed out, not necessary that the organisms themselves move rapidly. A rapidly moving stimulus would produce the same appearance. Professor Kalle thinks that shock waves provide this stimulus, the shock waves themselves being caused by submarine earthquakes. The rotating wheels, according to the same theory, might be caused by the interference of shock waves from two different sources, of which the second might be a reflection of the first. Dr. Kalle places some emphasis on this thought. The validity of the whole explanation depends on a rapid "lights on, lights off" of the organisms involved. If they, once stimulated, continue to luminesce for a few minutes, one would only get a generally luminous sea from seismic shock waves but no definite figures. So the next point of the investigation lies in the field of marine biology. First it has to be established just what organism, or organisms account for most of the phosphorescence in the areas involved. Then it has to be established whether they respond to shock waves, which offhand seems likely but may require the presence of another condition. Finally it has to be established whether they "switch off" again quickly, so that the luminescence lasts only for the duration of being hit with the shockwave. (A small time lag of half a second or so would be acceptable.) Once the answer to all three of these questions has been found to be yes, a mathematical analysis of the agreement or disagreement between observations and velocities of shockwaves under water could be undertaken. I have one more question in my mind: Has there ever been a naval battle at night in one of these areas? And did the shell splashes cause light waves, wheels and counter-wheels? If so, shouldn't it be possible to produce a rotating wheel by means of underwater explosions... so that it does not come as a surprise but can be set off when everything is ready for its study? Monthly at New York, N. Y... for October I #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher Robert M. Guinn #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Editor Frederik Pohl. #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Managing Editor, None; Business manager. None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stodk. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y., Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. #. The known bondholder, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: ( there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting: also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fied owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required by the act of June #, # to be included in all statements regardless of frequency of issue.) #. Sworn to and subscribed before me this #st day of September, #. Jacques N. Glick, Notary Public, State of New York, No. #-#. Qualified in Bronx County. Cert, filed in New York County. (Commission expires March #, #) First Contact was always dangerous -- but usually only to the man involved! A  B- idian resembled a great B green moss-covered tennis ball. When the spaceship had arrowed even closer to the lush jungle that was the surface of the #-mile sphere, there was still no visible break in the green cloak of the planet Even when they dipped almost below their margin of safety -- spaceships were poorly built for extended flight within the atmosphere -- it took nearly a complete circuit of the planet before a triangle of emptiness was spotted. It was in the midst of the tangled canopy of treetops, themselves interwoven inextricably with coarse-leaved ropy vines that sprawled and coiled about the upthrust branches like underfed anacondas. Into the center of this triangle the ship was lowered on sputtering blue pillars of crackling energy, to come to rest on the soft loamy earth. A bare instant after setdown, crewmen exploded from the airlock and dashed into the jungle shadows with high-pressure tanks of gushing spume. Their job was to coat, cool and throttle the hungry fires trickling in bright orange fingers through the heat-blackened grasses. Higher in the trees, a few vines smoldered fitfully where the fires had brushed them, then hissed into smoky wet ash as their own glutinous sap smothered the urgent embers. But the fire was going out. "Under control, sir," reported a returning crewman. Lieutenant Jerry Norcriss emerged into the green gloaming that cloaked the base of the ship with a net of harlequin diamonds. Jerry nodded abstractedly as other crewmen laid a lightweight form-fitting couch alongside the tailfins near the airlock. On this couch Jerry reclined. Remaining crew members turned their firefighting gear over to companions and stood guard in a rough semicircle with loaded rifles, their backs to the figure on the couch, facing the jungle and whatever predatory dangers it might hold. Ensign Bob Ryder, the technician who had the much softer job of simply controlling and coordinating any information relayed by Jerry, leaned out through the open circle in the hull. "All set, sir," said the tech. Jerry nodded and settled a heavily wired helmet onto his head, while Bob made a hookup between the helmet and the power outlet that was concealed under a flap of metal on the tailfin. Helmet secured, Jerry lay back upon the couch and closed his eyes. "Any time you're ready, Ensign." Bob hurried back inside, found the panel he sought among the jumble of high-poWered machinery there, and placed a spool of microtape on a spindle inside it. He shut the panel and thumbed the button that started an impulse radiating from the tape into the jungle. The impulse had been detected and taped by a roborocket which had circled the planet for months before their arrival. It was one of the two Viridian species whose types were as yet uncatalogued by the Space Corps, in its vast files of alien life. Jerry's job, as a Space Zoologist, was to complete those files, planet by planet throughout the spreading wave of slowly colonized universe. Bob made sure the tape was functioning. Then he clicked the switch that would stimulate the Contact center in Jerry's brain and release his mind into that of the taped alien for an immutable forty minutes. Outside the ship, recumbent in the warm green-gold shadows, Jerry's consciousness was dwarfed for an instant by a white lightning-flash of energy. And then his body went limp as his mind sprang with thought-speed into Contact... dizzying view of the dull brown jungle floor. He blinked a moment, then looked toward his feet. He saw two sets of thin knobby Vs, extending forward and partly around the tiny limb he stood upon, their chitinous surface shiny with the wetness of the jungle air. Slowly working his jaws, he heard the extremely gentle "click" as they came together. The endoskeleton must exist all over his host's body. After making certain it would not disturb his balance on the limb, he attempted bringing whatever on the alien passed for hands before his face. Sometimes aliens had no hands, nor any comparable organisms. Then Jerry would have to soft-pedal the mental nagging of being "amputated," an unavoidable carryover from his subconscious "wrong-feeling" about armlessness. But this time the effort moved up multi-jointed limbs, spindly as a cat's whiskers, terminating in a perpetually coiling soft prehensile tip. He tried feeling along his torso to determine its size and shape. But the wormlike tips were tactilely insensitive. Hoping to deduce his shape from his shadow, he inched sideways along the limb on those inadequate-looking two-pronged feet toward a blob of yellow sunlight nearer the trunk. The silhouette on the branch showed him a stubby cigarshaped torso. "I seem to be a semi-tentacled no-hop grasshopper," he mused to himself, vainly trying to turn his head on his neck. "Head, thorax and abdomen all one piece." He tried flexing what would be, in a man, the region of the shoulderblades. He was rewarded by the appearance of long, narrow wings -- two sets of them, like a dragonfly's -- from beneath two flaps of chitin on his back. He tried an experimental flapping. The pair of wings -- white and stiff like starched tissue paper, not veinous as in Earthinsects -- dissolved in a buzzing blur of motion. The limb fell away from under his tiny Vshaped feet. And then he was up above the blinding green blanket of jungle treetops, his shadow pacing his forward movement along the close-packed quilt of wide leaves below. "I'd better be careful," thought Jerry. "There may be avian life here that considers my species the piece de resistance of the pteroid set..." Slowing his rapid wingbeat, he let himself drop down toward the nearest mattress-sized leaf. He folded his out-thrust feet in midair and dropped the last few inches to a cushiony rest. ness gripped his mind. Perhaps the "skull" of this creature was ill-equipped to ward off the hot rays of the tropic sunlight. Lest his brain be fried in its own casing, Jerry scuttled along the velvet top of the leaf, and ducked quickly beneath its nearest overlapping companion. The wave of vertigo passed quickly, there in the deep shadow. Under the canopy of leaves Jerry crawled back to a limb near the top of the tree. A few feet from where he stood, something moved. Jerry turned that way. Another creature of the same species was balancing lightly on a green limb of wire-thickness, its gaze fixed steadily toward the jungle flooring, as Jerry's own had been on entering the alien body. Watching out for predators? Or for victims? He could, he knew, pull his consciousness back enough to let the creature's own consciousness carry it through its daily cycle of eating, avoiding destruction, and the manifold businesses of being an ambient creature. But he decided to keep control. It would be easier to figure out his host's ecological status in the planet's natural lifebalance by observing the other one for awhile. Jerry always felt more comfortable when he was in full control. You never knew when an alien might stupidly stumble into a fatality that any intelligent mind could easily have avoided. Idly, as he watched his fellow creature down near the inner part of the branch, he wondered how much more time he would be in Contact. Subjectively he'd seemed to be enhosted for about ten minutes. But one of the drawbacks of Contact was the subjugation of personal time-sense to that of the host. Depending on the species he enhosted, the fortyminute Contact period could be an eternity, or the blink of an eye... " be occurring. Jerry reluctantly withdrew some of his control from the insect-mind to see what would happen. Immediately it inched forward until it was in the same position it had been in when Jerry made Contact: V-shaped feet forward and slightly around the narrow branch, eyes fixed upon the brownish jungle floor, body motionless with folded wings. For awhile, Jerry tried "listening" to .its mind, but received no readable thoughts. Only a sense of imminence... Of patience... Of waiting... It didn't take long for Jerry to grow bored with this near-mindless outlook. He reassumed full control. Guiding the fragile feet carefully along the branch, he made his way to his fellow watcher, and tried out the creature's communication system. His mind B strove to activate something on the order of a larynx; the insect's nervous system received this impulse, changed in inter-species translation, as a broad request for getting a message to its fellow. Its body responded by lifting the multi-jointed "arms" forward. It clapped the hard inner surfaces of the "wrists" together so fast that they blurred into invisibility as the wings had done. A thin, ratchetty sound came , forth from that hardshell contact. The other insect looked up in annoyance, then returned its gaze to the ground again. Aural conversation thus obviated, Jerry tried for physical attention-getting. He reached out a vermiform forelimb-tip and tugged urgently at the other insect's nearest hind leg. An angry movement gave out the unmistakeable pantomimic message: "For pete's sake, get off my back! I'm busyl" The other insect spread its thin double wings and went buzzing off a few trees away, then settled on a limb there and took up its earthward vigil once more. "Well, they're not gregarious, that's for sure," said Jerry to himself. "I wish I knew what the hell we were waiting for!" He decided he was sick of ground-watching, and turned his attention to his immediate vicinity. His gaze wandered along all the twists, juts and thrusts of branch and vine beneath the sunblocking leaves. And all at once he realized he was staring at another of his kind. So still had its dull green-brown body been that he'd taken it for a ripple of bark along a branch. Carefully,he looked further on. Beyond the small still figure he soon located another like it, and then another. Within a short space of time, he had found three dozen of the insects sitting silently around him in a spherical area barely ten feet in diameter. more spread his stiff white wings and fluttered away through the treetops, careful to avoid coming out in direct sunlight this time. He flew until a resurgence of giddiness told him he was overstraining the creature's stamina. He dropped onto a limb and looked about once more. Within a very short time, he had spotted dozens more of the grasshopperthings. All were the same, sitting in camouflaged silence, steadily eyeing the ground. "Damn," thought Jerry. "They don't seem interested in eating, mating or fighting. All they want to do is sit -- sit and wait. But what are they waiting for?" There was, of course, the possibility that he'd caught them in an off-period. If the species were nocturnal, then he wouldn't get any action from them till after sunset. That, he realized gloomily, meant a re-Contact later on. One way or another, he would have to determine the functions, capabilities and menace -- if any -- of the species with regard to the influx of colonists, who would come to Viridian only if his report pronounced it safe. Once again, he let the insect's mind take over. Again that overpowering feeling of imminence... He was irritated. It couldn't just be looking forward to nightfall! There were too many things tied in with the imminence feeling: the necessity for quiet, for motionlessness, for careful watching. The more he thought on it, the more had the distinct intuition that it would sit and stare at the soft, mulch-covered jungle floor, be it bright daylight or blackest gloom, waiting, and waiting, and waiting... Then, suddenly, the slight feel of imminence became almost unbearable apprehension. The change in intensity was due to a soft, cautious shuffling sound from down in the greengold twilight Something was coming through the jungle. Something that moved on careful feet along the springy, moist brown surface below the trees. Far below, a shadow detached itself slowly from the deeper shadows of the trees, and a form began to emerge into the wan ffl. tered sunlight. It -- An all-encompassing lance of silent white lightning. Contact was over... Jerry sat up on the couch, angry. He pulled the helmet off his head as Bob Ryder leaned out the airlock once more. "How'd it go, sir?" "Lousy. I'll have to re-establish. Didn't have time to Learn it sufficiently." A slight expression of disappointment on the tech's face made him add, "Don't tell me you have the other tape in place already?" "Sorry," Bob said. "You usually do a complete Learning in one Contact." "Oh -- " Jerry shrugged and reached for the helmet again. "Never mind, I'll take on the second alien long as it's, already set up. I may just have hit the first one in an off-period. The delay in re-Contact may be just what I need to catch it in action." Settling the helmet snugly on his head once more, he leaned back onto the couch and waited. He heard the tech's feet clanking along the metal plates inside the ship, then the soft clang of an  opening door in the power room, and --  Whiteness, writhing electric whiteness and cold silence. And he was in Contact. D arkness, and musky warmth. Then a slot of light appeared, a thin fuzzy line of yellow striped with spiky green. Jerry had time, in the brief flicker, to observe thick bearlike forelimbs holding up a squarish trapdoor fastened with cross-twigs for support. Then the powerful forepaws let the door drop back into place, and it was dark again. He hadn't liked those forepaws. Though thick as and pawed like a bear's, they were devoid of hair. They had skin thin as a caterpillar's, a mottled pink with sick-looking areas of deathly white. Skin like that would be a pushover to actinic rays for any long exposure. Probably the thing lived underground here, almost permanently. His eyes had detected a rude assortment of thick wooden limbs curving in and out at regular intervals in the vertical wall of soil that was the end of this tunnel, just below the trapdoor. Tree roots. But formed, by some odd natural quirk, into a utile ladder. But why had the thing peered out, then dropped the door to wait? Did every species on this planet hang around expectantly and nothing else? And what was the waiting for? Then he felt the urge within the creature, the urge to scurry up that ladder into the light. But there was, simultaneously, a counter-urge in the thing, telling it to please wait a little longer... Jerry recognized the urge by quick anthropomorphosis. It was the goofy urge. The crazy urge. Like one gets on the brinks of awesome heights, or on subway platforms as the train roars in: The impulsive urge to self-destruction, so swiftly frightening and so swiftly suppressed... Yet, it had lifted and dropped that lid too briefly to have seen anything outside. Could it be listening for something? Carefully, he relinquished his control of the beast, fraction by fraction, to see what it would do. It rose on tiptoe at once, and again lifted that earthen door. It squinted at the profusion of green-yellow sunlight that stung its eyes. Then it rose on powerful hind limbs and clambered just high enough on that "ladder" to see over the grassy rim of the trapdoor-hole. Jerry then heard the soft shuffling sound that had re-alerted it, and saw the source. Out on the matted brown jungle flooring, beneath the towering trees, another of the bearthings was moving forward from an open turf-door, emitting low, whimpering snorts as it inched along through the dappling yellow sunlight. Obviously it was following that manic-destruction impulse that he just felt and managed to suppress. It must have been almost a hundred degrees out there. And the damned thing was shivering. suddenly, other half-opened trapdoors were framing other bear-things' heads. The air was taut with electric tension, the tension of a slow trigger-squeeze that toward the instant explosion... The soft shuffling sounds of the animal's movement jogged Jerry's memory then, and he knew it for the sound he had heard when enhosted in the grasshopper-thing. Was a bear-thing what they'd been waiting in the trees so silently for? And what would be the culmination of that vigil? Then the bear-thing he was in Contact with hitched itself up another root-rung. Jerry saw the thing toward which the quaking creature was headed, in a hunched crawl, its whimpers more anguished by the moment. Pendant in the green gloaming, about four feet above the spongy brown jungle floor, hung a thick yellow-gray gourd at the tip of a long vine. Its sides glittered stickily with condensed moisture that mingled with the effluvium of the gourd itself. The odor was both noisome and compelling, powerful as a bushel of rotting roses. It sickened as it lured, teased the nostrils as it cloyed within the lungs. To this dangling obscenity the bear-thing moved. Its eyes were no longer afraid, but glazed and dulled by the strength of that musky lure. Its movements were fluid and trancelike. It arose on sturdy hind limbs and struck at the gourd with a gentle paw, sending it jouncing to one side on its long green vine. As it bobbed back, the creature struck it off in the opposite direction with a sharper blow. Jerry watched in fascination. The gourd swung faster; the mottled pink-white alien creature swayed and wove its forelimbs and thick body in a ritual dance matching the tempo of the arcing gourd. Then Jerry noted that the vine was unlike earth-vines which parasitically employ treetops as limp extension of the tip of a tree branch itself. So were all the other vines in that green matting overhead. gaze back to the dazed creature and the gourd again. A ragged tear had riven the I side of the gourd. Tiny coils of green were dribbling out in batches, like watchsprings spilled from a paper bag. They struck with a bounce and wriggle on the resilient brown mulch. And then, as they straightened themselves, Jerry knew them for what they were: Miniature versions of the grasshopper-things, shaped precisely like the adults, but only a third as large. The bear-thing's movements had gone from graceful fluidity to frenzy now. A loud whistle of fright escaped it as the last of the twitching green things flopped from its vegetable coccoon, whirred white wings to dry them and flew off. And the lumbering creature had reason for its fright. The instant the last coil of wiggly green life was a vanishing blur in the green shadows, a cloud of darker green descended upon the pink form of the beast from the trees. The grasshopper-things were waiting no longer. Thousands swarmed on the writhing form, until the bear-thing was a lumpy green parody of itself. As quickly as the cloud had plunged and clustered, it fell away. The earth was teeming with the flip-flopping forms of dying insects, white wings going dark brown and curling like cellophane in open flame. The bearthing itself was no longer recognizable, its flesh a myriad egg-like white lumps. It swayed in agony for a moment, then toppled. Instantly the other creatures -- his host with them -- were racing forward to the site of the encounter. Jerry felt his host's long gummy tongue flick out and snare one -- just one -- of the dead adult insects. It was ingested whole by a deft backflip of tongue to gullet. As his host turned tail and scurried for the tunnel once more, Jerry swiftly took control again, and halted it to observe any further developments. a one-insect gulp, was just vanishing back underground. The turf-tops were dropping neatly into almost undetectable place hiding the tunnels. The sunlight nipped at his pale flesh, but Jerry held off from a return to the underground sanctuary, still watching that lump-covered corpse on the earth. Then... The vine, its burden gone, began to drip a thick ichor from its ragged end upon the dead animal beneath it. And as the ichor touched upon a white lump, the lump would swell, wriggle, and change color. Jerry watched with awe as the color became a mottled pink, and the surface of the lumps cracked and shriveled away, and tiny forms plopped out onto the ground: miniature bear-things, tiny throats emitting eager mouse-squeaks of hunger. They rushed upon the body in which they'd been so violently incubated and swiftly, systematically devoured it, blood, bone and sinew. And when not even a memory of the dead beast was left upon the soil, the tiny pink-white things began to burrow downward into the ground. Soon there was nothing left in the area but a dried fragment of vine, a few loose mounds of soil and a vast silence. "I'll be a monkey's uncle!" said Jerry... forgetting in his excitement that this phrase was nearly a concise parody of the Space Zoologists' final oath of duty, and kiddingly used as such by the older members of the group. The whole damned planet was symbiotic! After witnessing those alien life-death rites, it didn't take him long to figure out the screwball connections between the species. Insects, once born of vinegourds and fully grown, then propagated their species by a strange means: laying bear-eggs in a bearthing and dying. And dying, eaten by the surviving bears, they turned to seeds which -- left in the tunnels by the bearthings as droppings -- in turn took root and became trees. And the trees, under the onslaught of another bear-thing on a dangling pod, would produce new insects, then drip its ichor to fertilize the eggs in the newly dead bear-thing... Jerry found his mind tangling as he attempted a better pinpointing of the plant-animal-insect relationship. A dead adult insect, plus a trip through a bear-thing's alimentary canal, produced a tree. A tree-pod, with the swatting stimulus of a bear-thing's paws, gave birth to new insects. And insect eggs in animal flesh, stimulated by the tree-ichor, gestated swiftly into young animals... That meant, simply, that insect plus bear equals tree, tree plus bear equals insect, and insect plus tree equals bear. With three systems, each relied on the non-inclusive member for the breedingground. Insect-plus-ichor produced small animals in the animal flesh. Dead-insect-plus-bear produced tree in the tree-flesh (if one considered dead tree leaves and bark and such as the makeup of the soil.) Bear-swats-plus-tree produced insects... "Damn," said Jerry to himself, "but not in the insect-flesh. The thing won't round off..." He tried again, thinking hard. In effect, the trees were parents to the insects, insects parents to the bears, and bears parents to the trees... Though in another sense, bear-flesh gave birth to new bears, digested insects gave birth (through the tree-medium) to new insects, and trees (through the insect-medium) gave birth to new trees... Jerry's head spun pleasantly as he tried vainly to solve the confusion. Men of science, he realized, would spend decades trying to figure out which species were responsible for which. It made the ancient chicken-or-egg question beneath consideration. And a lot of diehard evolutionists were going to be bedded down with severe migraines when his report went into circulation... A dazzle of silent lightning, and Contact was over. again," Bob Ryder said as Jerry removed the Contact helmet and brushed his snow-white hair back from his tanned, youth.ful face. "Or do you want a breather first?" Jerry shook his head. "I won't need to re-Contact that other species, Ensign. I got its life-relation ships from the second Contact." "Really, sir?" said Bob. "That's pretty unusual, isn't it?" "The whole damned planet's unusual," said Jerry, rising from his supine position and stretching luxuriously in the warm jungle air. "You'll see what I mean when you process the second tape." Bob decided that Jerry -- running pretty true to form for a Space Zoologist -- wasn't in a particularly talkative mood, so he had to satisfy himself with waiting for the transcription of the Contact to get the details. Later that day, an hour after takeoff, with Viridian already vanished behind them as the great ship plowed through hyperspace toward Earth and home, Bob finished reading the report. Then he went down the passageway to the ward room for coffee. Jerry was seated there already. the polished percolator, slid into a seat across the table from his superior and asked the question that had been bugging him since seeing the report. "Sir -- on that second Contact. Has it occurred to you that you'd relinquished control to the host before you saw that other creature move out and start swatting the gourd-thing?" "You mean was I taking a chance on being destroyed in the host if the creature I was Contacting gave in to the urge to do the swatting?" "Yes, sir," said Bob. "I mean, I know you can take control any time, if things get dangerous. But wasn't that cutting it kind of thin?" Jerry shook his head and sipped his coffee. "Wrong urge, Ensign. You'll note I recognized it as the goofy urge, the impulse to die followed instantly by a violent surge of self-preservation. It wasn't the death-wish at all. Myself and the creatures who remained safely at the tunnelmouths had a milder form of what was affecting the creature that did start swatting the gourd." "Then what was the difference, sir? Why did that one particular creature get the full self-destruction urge and no other?" Jerry wrinkled his face in thought. "I wish I didn't suspect the answer to that, Ensign. The only thing I hope it isn't is the thing I have the strongest inkling it is: Rotation. Something in their biology has set them up in a certain order for destruction. And that rite I saw performed was so un-animal, so formalized -- " Bob's eyes widened as he caught the inference. "You think they have an inbuilt protocol? That if one particular creature missed its cue, somehow, the designated subsequent creature would simply wait forever, never jumping its turn?" "That's what I mean," nodded Jerry. "I hope I'm wrong." "But the right creature made it," said Bob, blinking. "We can't have upset the ecology, can we?" "Things develop fast on Viridian," mused Jerry. "If I figure the time-relationship between their egg-hatching rate and growth rate, those trees must mature in growth in about a month. And we managed to shrivel a half dozen vines with our rocket fires when we landed, and probably that many again when we blasted off... " "We dropped CO# bombs after we cleared the trees," offered the tech, uneasily. "The fire was out in seconds." "That wouldn't help an already-shriveled vine, though, now would it!" sighed Jerry. "And if my hunch about protocol is correct -- " "The life-cycle would interrupt?" gasped the tech. "We'll see," said Jerry. "It'll take us a month to get back, and there'll be another six months before the first wave of engineers is sent to begin the homesteads and industry sites We'll see. Ensign." TT took two months for the engineers to go out and return. They hadn't landed. A few orbits about the planet had shown them nothing but a vast dead ball of dust and rotted vegetation, totally unfit for human habitation. They brought back photographs taken of the dead planet that no longer deserved the name it had rated in life. But Jerry Norcriss, Space Zoologist, made it a special point to avoid looking at any of them. The Complete Guide to The most up-to-date understandable book available on orbiting satellites. Bound in loose-leaf form so that you can add new editions as satellites are launched. The Complete Guide to Series I explains the significance of each satellite and describes its role in the developEach satellite is beautifully illustrated in orbit with a description of its location in the heavens. Simple drawings and diagrams show how the satellite systems would work. Essential for students of astronautics and space science. Ideal for those having a general interest in our swiftly moving satellite program. # East #th St., New York # , N.Y. copy. Doctors hear everyone's secrets. Sometimes they're not pleasant -- and the worst may be their own! A Howard Chandler Christy: The Lovely Young Girl " was put under my care I was enlarged with pride. Dr. Cooperstock was a hero to me. I don't mean a George Washington, all virtue and no fire, I mean he was a dragon killer. He had carried human knowledge far into the tiny spaces of an atomic nucleus. He was a very great man. And I was his doctor and he was dying. Dr. Cooperstock was dying in the finest suite in the Morgan Pavilion and with all the best doctors. (I am not modest.) We couldn't keep him alive for more than a matter of months, and we couldn't cure him at all. But we could make him comfortable. If round-the-clock nurses and color television constitute comfort. I don't ask you to understand technical medical terms. He was an old man, his blood vessels deteriorating, and clots formed, impeding the circulation. One day a clot would form in heart, brain or lungs and he would die. If it was in the lung it would be painful and slow. In the heart, painful and fast. In the brain most painful of all, but so fast that it would be a mercy. Meanwhile we fed him heparin and sometimes coumarol and attempted by massages and heat and diet to stave off the end. Although, in fact, he was all but dead anyway, so little freedom of movement we allowed him. "Martin, the leg hurts. You'd better leave a pill," he would say to me once or twice a week, and I would hesitate. "I don't know if I can make it to the bathroom tonight, Martin," he would say, his tone cheerfully resigned. Then he would call for the bedpan while I was there, or mention casually that some invisible wrinkle in the sheet caused him pain and stand by bravely while the bed was remade, and say at last, self-deprecating, "I think I will need that pill, Martin." So I would allow myself to be persuaded and let him have a red-and-white capsule and in the morning it would be gone. I never told him that they contained only aspirin and he never admitted to me that he did not take the pills at all but was laboriously building up a hoard against the day when the pain would be really serious and he would take them all at once. Dr. Cooperstock knew the lethal dose as well as I did. As he knew the names of all his veins and arteries and the chemistry of his disease. A man like Rhine Cooperstock, even at seventy, can learn enough medicine for that in a week.  He acquired eleven of the little capsules in one month at the Pavilion; I know, because i counted them after he left. That would have been enough for suicide, if they had not been aspirin. I suppose he would have stopped there, perhaps beginning to take a few, now and then, both to keep me from getting suspicious and for the relief of the real pain he must have felt. But he did leave. Nan Halloran came and got him. She invaded the Pavilion like a queen. Expensive, celebrated hospital, we were used to the famous; but this was Nan Halloran, blue-eyed, black-haired, a face like a lovely child and a voice like the sway of hips. She was a most remarkable woman. I called her a queen, but she was not that, she was a goddess, virgin and fertile. I speak subjectively, of course, for in medical fact she was surely not one and may not have been either. She breezed into the room, wrinkling her nose. "Coopie," she said, "What is that awful smell? Will you do me a favor, dear? I need it very much." You would not think that a man like Dr. Cooperstock would have much to do with a television star; but he knew her; years before, when he was still teaching sometimes, she had somehow wandered into his class. "Hello, Nan," he said, looking quite astonished and pleased. "I'll do anything I can for you, of course. That smell," he apologized, touching the leg with its bright spots of color and degenerated tissues, "is me." "Poor Coopie." She looked around at me and smiled. Although I am fat and not attractive and know in my heart that, whatever long-term wonders I may mind and the cleverness of my speech, no woman will ever lust for me on sight, I tingled. I looked away. She said sweetly, "It's about that fusion power thing, Coopie. You know Wayne Donner, of course? He and I are good friends. He has these utility company interests, and he wants to convert them to fusion power, and I told him you were the only man who could help him." Dr. Cooperstock began to laugh, and laughed until he was choking and gagging. I laughed too, although I think that in all the world Dr. Cooperstock and I must be two of the very few men who would laugh at the name of Wayne Donner. "Nan," he said when he could, "you're amazing... It's utterly impossible, I'm afraid."  with a rustle of petticoats. She had lovely legs. "Oh, did that hurt you? But I didn't even touch your leg, dear. Would you please get up and come now, because the driver's waiting?" "Nan!" he cried. "Security regulations. Death. Lack of proper engineering! Did you ever think of any of those things? And they're only a beginning." "If you're going to make objections we'll be here all day, darling. As far as security is concerned," she said, "this is for the peaceful use of atomic power, isn't it? I promise you that Wayne has enough friends in the Senate that there will be no problem. And the engineering's all right, because Wayne has all those people already, of course. This isn't any little Manhattan Project, honey. Wayne spends money." Dr. Cooperstock shook his head and, although he was smiling, he was interested, too. "What about death, Nan?" he said gently. "Oh, I know, Coopie. It's terrible. But you can't lick this thing. So won't you do it for me? Wayne only needs you for a few weeks and he already talked to some doctors. They said it would be all right." "Miss Halloran," I said. I admit I was furious. "Dr. Cooperstock is my patient. As long as that is so, I will decide what is or is not all right." She looked at me again, sweetly and attentively. I have now and had then no doubt at all; I was absolutely right in my position. Yet I felt as though I had committed the act of a clumsy fool. She was clean and lovely, her neck so slim that the dress she wore seemed too large for her, like an adorable child's. She was no child , I knew that she had had a hundred lovers because everyone knows that, even doctors who are fat and a little ugly and take it all out in intelligence. Yet she possessed an innocence I could not withstand. I wanted to take her sweetly by the hand and shelter her, and walk with her beside a brook and then that night crush her and caress her again and again with such violence and snorting passion that she would Awaken and then, with growing abandon, Respond. I did know it was all foolishness. I did. But when she mentioned the names of five or six doctors on Donner's payroll who would care for Dr. Cooperstock and suggested like a child that with them in charge it would really be all right, I agreed. I even apologized. Truth to tell, they were excellent men, those doctors. But if she had named six chiropractors and an unfrocked abortionist I still would have shrugged and shuffled and stammered, "Oh, well, I suppose, Miss Halloran, yes, it will be all right." So we called the nurses in and very carefully dressed the old man and wheeled him out into the hall. I said something else that was foolish in the elevator. I said, because I had assumed that it was so, that she probably had a cab waiting and a cab would not do to transport a man as sick as Dr. Cooperstock. But she had been more sure of herself than that. The driver who was waiting was at the wheel of a private ambulance. attributed to Artzybasheff, with mosaic of dollar signs. Cooperstock for five weeks. Then I was telephoned to come and get him, for he was ready to return to the Pavilion to die. It was Wayne Donner himself who called me. I agreed to come to one of Donner's New York offices to meet him, for in truth I was curious. I knew all about him, of course -- rather, I knew as much as he wished anyone to know. I have seen enough of the world's household names in the Pavilion to know what their public relations men can do. The facts that were on record about Wayne Donner were that he was very rich. He had gone from a lucky strike in oil and the twenty-seven and a half per cent depletion allowance to aluminum. And thence to electric power. He was almost the wealthiest man in the world, and I know his secret. He could afford anything, anything at all, because he had schooled himself to purchase only bargains. For example, I knew that he was Nan Halloran's lover and, although I do not know her price, I know that it was what he would have given her that thin, bright smile that meant the parley was over, there would be no contract signed that day, and gone on to another incredible beauty more modest in her bargaining. Donner allowed himself to want only what he could get. I think he was the only terrible man I have ever seen. And he had nearly been President of the United States! Except that Governor Hewlett of Ohio spoke so honestly and so truthfully about him in the primaries that not all of Donner's newspapers could get him the vote; what was terrible was not that he then destroyed Hewlett, but that Hewlett was not destroyed for revenge. Donner hated too deeply to be satisfied with revenge, I think; he was too contemptuous of his enemies to trouble to crush them. He would not give them that satisfaction. Hewlett was blotted out only incidentally. Because Donner's papers had built the campaign against him to such a pitch that it was actually selling papers, and thus it was profitable to go on to ruin the man. When I saw Donner he had Hewlett's picture framed in gilt in his waiting room. I wondered how many of his visitors understood the message. For that matter I wondered how many needed it. When I was admitted, Dr. Cooperstock was on a relaxing couch. "Hello, Martin," he said over the little drone of its motor. "This is Wayne Donner. Dr. Finneman. Dr. Grace." I shook hands with the doctors first, pettishly enough but I felt obliged to show where I stood, and then with Donner. He .was very courteous. He had discovered what bargains could be bought with that coin too. He said, "Dr. Finneman here has a good deal of respect for you, Doctor. I'm sure you're well placed at the Pavilion. But if you ever consider leaving I'd like to talk to you." I thanked him and refused. I was flattered, though. I thought of how his fusion-power nonsense might have killed Dr. Cooperstock before he was ready to die, and I thought of him with Nan Halloran, sweat on that perfect face. And I am not impressed by money. Yet I was flattered that he would take the trouble and time, and God knows how much an hour of his time was worth, to himself offer me a job. I was flattered even though I knew that the courtesy was for his benefit, not mine. He wanted the best he chose to afford -- in the way of a doctor, in my case, but the best of anything else too. If he hired a gardener he would want the man to be a very good gardener. Aware as he was of the dignities assumed by a professional man, he had budgeted the time to give me a personal invitation instead of letting his housekeeper or general manager attend to it. It was only another installment of expense he chose to afford and yet I was glad to get out of there. I was almost afraid I would reconsider and say yes, and I hated that man very much. " back and bedded and checked over I examined the records Dr. Finneman had sent. He had furnished complete tests and a politely guarded prognosis, and of course he was right; Cooperstock was sinking, but not fast; he was good for another month or two with luck. I told him as much, snappishly. "Don't be angry with me, Martin," he said, "you'd have done the same thing for Nan if she asked you." "Probably, but I'm not dying." "Don't be vulgar, Martin." "I'm not a nuclear physicist, either." "It's only to make a few dollars for the man, Martin. Heavens. What difference can another billion or two make to Donner? Besides," he said strongly, "you know I've always opposed this fetish of security. Think of Oppenheimer, not allowed to read his own papers! Think of the waste, the same work done in a dozen different places, because in Irkutsk they aren't allowed to know what's going on in Denver and in Omaha somebody forgot to tell them." "Think of Wayne Donner with all the power in the world," I said. He said, "I guess Nan hit you harder than I thought, to make you so mad." Although I watched the papers I did not see anything about converting Donner's power stations to fusion energy. In fact, I didn't see much of Donner's name at all, which caused me to wonder. Normally he would have been spotted in the Stork or cruising off Bimini or in some other way photographed and written about a couple of times a week. His publicity men must have been laboring extra hard. Nan Halloran came to see Dr. Cooperstock but I did not join them. I spent my time with him when there was no one else, after my evening rounds. Sometimes we played cards but more often I listened to him talk. The physics of the atomic nucleus was poetry when he talked of it. He told me about Gamow's primordial atom from which all the stars and dust clouds had exploded. He explained Fred Hoyle to me, and Heisenberg. But he was tiring early now. Behind the drawer of his night table, in a used cigarette package thumbtacked to the wood, his store of red-and-white capsules was growing again. They were still aspirin. But I think I would not have denied him the real thing if he had known the deception and asked. We took off two toes in March and it was only a miracle that we saved the leg. By Gilbert Stuart. His late period. Size #' x #'; heroic. newspaper stories again began to appear about Donner, but I could not understand them. The stories were datelined Washington. Donner was reported in toplevel conferences, deeply classified. There were no leaks, no one knew what the talks were about. But the presidential press secretary was irritable with the reporters who asked questions, and the cabinet members were either visibly worried or visibly under orders to keep their mouths shut. And worried. I showed one or two of the stories to Dr. Cooperstock, but he was too tired to guess at implications. He was hanging on, but it would not be for long. Any night I expected the call from his nurses, and we would not be able to save him again. Then I was called to my office. I was lecturing to fourth-year men when the annunciator spoke my name; and when I got to my office Governor Hewlett was there. "I need to see Dr. Cooperstock," he said. "I'm afraid it may excite him. The resident thought you should be present." I said, "I suppose you know that any shock may kill him. I hope it's important." "It is important. Yes." The Governor limped ahead of me to the elevator, his bald head gleaming, smiling at the nurses with his bad teeth and his wonderful eyes. Dr. Cooperstock was a hero to me. Governor Hewlett was something less, perhaps a saint or a martyr. He was what St. George would have been if in the battle he had been killed as well as the dragon; Hewlett had spent himself against Donner in the campaign and now he lingered on to serve out his punishment for his daring, the weasels always chipping away at him, a constant witness before commissions and committees with slanders thick in the air, a subject for jokes and political cartoons. A few senators and others of his own party still listened to him, but they could not save him from the committees. The Governor did not waste words. "Dr. Cooperstock, what have you done? What is Wayne Donner up to?" Cooperstock had been dozing. Elaborately he sat up. "I don't see, sir, that it is -- " "Will you answer me, please? I'm afraid this is quite serious. The Secretary of Defense, who was with me in the House fifteen years ago, told me something I did not suspect. Do you know that he may be asked to resign and that Wayne Donner may get his job?" Dr. Cooperstock said angrily, "That's nonsense. Donner's just a businesman now. Anyway, what conceivable difference can -- " "It makes a difference, Dr. Cooperstock, because the rest of the cabinet is to be changed around at the same time. Every post of importance is to go to a man of Donner's. You recall that he wanted to be President. Perhaps this time he does not want to bother with a vote. What weapon have you given him to make him so strong, Dr. Cooperstock?" "Weapon? Weapon?" Cooperstock stopped and began to gasp, lying back on his pillow, but he thrust me away when I came to him. "I didn't give him any weapon," he said thoughtfully, after staring at the Governor's face for a moment, forcing his lungs to work more easily. "At least, J don't think I did. It was only a commercial matter. You see Governor, I have never believed in over-classification. Knowledge should be free. The basic theory -- " "Donner doesn't intend to make it free, Dr. Cooperstock, he plans to keep it for himself. Please tell me what you know." " Cooperstock said. "The hydrogen bomb?" "Oh, for God's sake, Governor! It is fusion of hydrogen, yes, but not in any sense a bomb. The selfsupporting reaction takes place in a magnetic bottle. It will not explode, even if the bottle fails; you would have to coax it to make it blow up. Only heat comes out, with which Donner is going to drive steam generators, perfectly normal. I assure you there is no danger of accident." "I was not thinking of an accident," said the Governor after a moment. "Well -- In that event -- I mean, it is true," said Cooperstock with some difficulty, "that, yes, as the reactor is set up, it would be possible to remove the safeguards. This is only the pilot model. The thing could be done." "By remote control, as I understand," said Hewlett wearily. "And in that event each of Donner's power stations would become a hydrogen bomb. Did you know that he has twenty-four of them under construction, all over the nation?' Cooperstock said indignantly. "He could not possibly have twenty-four installations completed in this time. I can hardly believe he has even one! In the New York plant on the river we designed only the fusion chamber itself. The hardware involved in generating power will take months." "But I don't think he bothered with the hardware for generating power, you see," said the Governor. Dr. Cooperstock began to gasp again. The Governor sat watching him for a moment, his face sagging with a painful fatigue, and then he roused himself and said at last, "Well, you shouldn't have done this, Dr. Cooperstock, but God bless you, you're a great man. We all owe you a debt. Only we'll have to do something about this now." In my office the Governor took me aside. "I am sorry to have disturbed your patient. But it was important, as you see." "Donner is a terrible man." "Yes, I think that describes him. Well. It's all up to us now," said the Governor, looking very gray. "I confess I don't know what we can do." "Surely the government can handle -- " "Doctor," he said, "I apologize for troubling you with my reflections, I've not much chance to talk them out with anyone, but I assure you I have thought of everything the government can do. Donner has eight oil senators in his pocket, you know. They would be delighted to filibuster any legislation. For more direct action, I'm afraid we can't get what we need without a greater risk than I can lightly contemplate. Donner has threatened to blow up every city of over eight hundred thousand, you see. I now find that this threat is not empty. Thank you, Doctor," he said, getting up. "I hope I haven't distressed your patient as much as he has distressed me." He limped to the door, shook hands and was gone. Half an hour later it was time for my rounds. I had spent the time sitting, doing nothing, almost not even thinking. But I managed to go around, and then Dr. Cooperstock's nurse signaled me. He had asked her to phone Nan Halloran for him, and should she do it? There was a message: "I have something else for Wayne." you will understand, I was in an emotionally numb state; it was difficult to guess at what it meant. I told the nurse she could transmit the message. But when Nan Halloran arrived, an hour or two later, I waited in the hall outside Dr. Cooperstock's room until she came out. "Why, Doctor," she said, looking very lovely. I took her by the arm. It was the first time I had touched that flesh, we had not even shaken hands before; I took her to my office. She seemed eager to go along with me. She asked no questions. In the office, the door closed, I was extremely conscious of being alone in a room with her. She knew that, of course. She took a cigarette out of her purse, sat down and crossed her legs. Gallant, I stumbled to my desk and found a match to light her cigarette. "You've been worrying Coopie," she said reproachfully. "You and that Hewlett. Can't he stay out of a simple business matter?" She surprised me; it was such a foolish thing to say and she was not foolish. I told her very briefly what Hewlett had said. No one had told me to be silent. She touched my hand, laughing. "Would it make so very much difference... Martin? (May I?) Donner's not a monster." "I don't know that." She said impishly, "I do. He's a man like other men, Martin And really he's not so young, even with all the treatments. What would you give him, with all his treatments? Twenty more years tops?" "A dictatorship even for twenty minutes is an evil thing, Miss Halloran," I said, wondering if j had always sounded so completely pompous. "Oh, but bad words don't make bad things. Sakes! Think what they could call me, dear! Donner's only throwing his weight around, and doesn't everyone? As much weight as he has?" "Treason -- " I began, but she hardly let me get even the one word out. "No bad words, Martin. You'd be astonished if you knew what wonderful things Wayne wants to do. It takes a man like him to take care of some problems. He'll get rid of slums, juvenile delinquents, gangsters..." "Some problems are better not solved. Hitler solved the Jewish question in Europe." She said sweetly, "I respect you, Martin. So does Wayne. You have no idea how much he and Dr. Cooperstock think of you, and so do I, so please don't do anything impulsive." She walked out the room and left it very empty. I felt turgid, drained and a little bit stupid. I had never wanted . anything as much as I had wanted her. It was several minutes before I began to wonder why she had taken the trouble to entice me in a pointless conversation. I knew that Nan Halloran was her own bank account, spent as thriftily what it was that I had had that the small change of a few words and a glimpse of her knees and the scent of her perfume. Before I had quite come to puzzle the question through, while I was still regretting I had had no higher-priced commodity for her, my phone rang. It was Dr. Cooperstock's nurse, hysterical. Nan Halloran's conversation had not been pointless. While we were talking two ambulance attendants had come to assist Dr. Cooperstock into a wheelchair, and he was gone. To Whom all things concern Cooperstock defected and in the morning of the fifth Governor Hewlett telephoned me. "He's not back?" he said, and I said he wasn't, and Hewlett, pausing only a second, said, "Well. We can't wait any longer. The Army is moving in." I went from my office to the operating room and I was shaking as I scrubbed in. It was a splenectomy, but the woman was grossly fat, with a mild myocarditis that required external circulation. It took all of my attention, for which I was grateful. We were five hours in the room, but it was successful and it was not until I was smoking a cigarette in the little O.R. lounge that I began to shake. Twenty-four nuclear bombs in twenty-four cities. And of course one of them, the one that we knew was ready to go off, was in the city I was in. I remembered the power plant, off in the Hudson River under the bridge, yellow brick and green glass. It was not more than a mile away. And yet I was alive. The city was not destroyed. There had been no awful blast of heat and concussion. I walked into the recovery room to look at the splenectomy. She was all right, but the nurse stared at me, so I went back to my office, realizing that I was crying. And Nan Halloran was there waiting for me, looking like a drunken doll. She pulled herself together as I came in. Her lipstick was smeared, and she shook. "You win, Martin," she said, with a little laugh. "Who would have thought old Coopie was such a lion? He gave me something for you." I poured her a drink. "What happened?" "Oh," said she. She drank the whiskey, politely enough, but showing she needed it. "Coopie came to Wayne and made a deal. Politics, he said, is out of my line, but you owe me something, I've helped you, I'll help you more, only you must promise that research will be free and well endowed. He had it very carefully worked out, the man is a genius." She giggled and held out her glass. "Funny. Of course he's a genius. So Wayne took the hook and said it was a deal, what was Coopie going to do for him next? And Coopie offered to show him how to convert the power plant to a different kind of bomb. Neutrons, he said." So Dr. Cooperdown into the guarded room and, explaining how it was possible to change the type of nuclear reaction from a simple hot explothat would leave the city unharmed, if dead, he had diverted the hydrogen fuel supply, starved the reaction and shut off the magnetic field that contained it. And then he had told Donner all deals were off. There was nothing hard about rebuilding the field and restarting the reaction, of course. It only took a few days; but Donner no longer had days. "I told Wayne," said Nan Halloran gravely, draining her glass, "I told him he should wait until he had all the bombs ready, but he's -- he was -- he's still, but I think not for long, hard-headed. I have to go now, my plump friend, and I do thank you for the drink. I believe they're going to arrest me." She got up and picked up her white gloves, and at the door she paused and said, "Did I tell you? I've got so many things on my mind. Coopie's dead. He wouldn't let Wayne's doctors touch him." A But by and by, everything calming down, they let her go again. She's even starring in the movies again, you can see her whenever you like. I've never gone. The letter in the envelope was from Dr. Cooperstock and it said: I've pulled their fuses, Martin, for you and the Governor, and if it kills me, as you should know it must, please don't think that I mind dying. Or that I am afraid to live, either. This is not suicide. Though I confess that I cannot choose between the fear of living in this world and the fear of what may lie beyond it. The leg is very bad. You would not even let me wear elastic socks, and for the past hour I have been crawling around the inside of Donner's stainless-steel plumbing. It was really a job for a younger man, but I couldn't find one in time. So I suppose these are my last words, and I wish I could make them meaningful. I expect there is a meaning to this. Science, as one of my predecessors once said -- Teller, was it? -- has become simpler and more beautiful. And surely it has become more wonderful and strange. If gravity itself grows old and thin, so that the straggling galaxies themselves weaken as they clutch each other, it seems somehow a much lesser thing that we too should grow feeble. Yet I do hate it. I am able to bear it at all, indeed, only through a Hope which I never dared confess even to you, Martin, before this. When I was young I went to church and dreaded dying for the fear of hellfire. When I was older I dreaded nothing; and when I was older still I began to dread again. The hours, my friends, in which I held imaginary conversations with the God I denied -- proving to Him, Martin, that He did not exist -- were endless. And then, past Jehovah and prophets, I found another God, harsher, more awful and more remote. I could not pray to Him, Creator of the Big Bang, He Who Came Before the Monobloc. But I could fear Him. Now I am not afraid of Him. has given me courage. If there was no monobloc there can have been no God Who made it. I live in the hope of the glorious steady state! It was weak and wicked of me to give Donner a gun to point at the world, therefore, and I expect it is fair if I die taking it back; but it is not to save the world that I do it but to save my own soul in the galaxies yet to be born. For if the steady state is true there is no end to time. And infinity is not bounded, in any way. Everything must happen in infinity. Everything must happen... an infinity of times. So Martin, in those times to come, when these atoms that compose us come together again, under what cis-Andromedan star I cannot imagine, we will meet -- if there is infinity it is sure -- and I can hope. In that day may we be put together more cleanly, Martin. And may we meet again, all of us, in shapes of pleasing strength and health, members of a race that is, I pray, a little wiser and more kind. That was the letter from Dr. Rhine Cooperstock. I folded it away. I called my secretary on the intercom to tell her that his suite would now be free for another patient; and I went out into the spring day, to the great black headlines with Donner's name over all the papers and to the life that Cooperstock had given back You too can be a Qurono. All you need do is geoplanct. All you need know is when to stop! right into the middle of them. He covertly watched the crew close in around him and he never twitched an eyelash. Officers must never panic, he reminded himself, and manipulated the morning sighting on the nearest sun through the Fitzgerald lens. It was exactly #:#:#, Galactic Time. He jotted the reading in, satisfied. The warm breath tickling the back of his neck was unnerving. If he showed fear and grabbed a blaster from the locker he could probably control them, but he was devastingly aware that a captain must never show fear. "Captain Barnhart," Simmons, the mate, drawled politely, "do you still plan on making the jump at # thirty?" The captain removed his eyeglasses and polished the lenses. "Simmons," he said in comforting, confiding tones, "you are well aware that regulations clearly state that a spaceship that phases in on a star in major trans-spot activity is required to re-phase within twenty-four hours to avoid being caught in turbulence." "Yes, sir," Simmons said. "But, as I have stated before, it is my belief that regulation means that a ship should phase to avoid the possibility of being caught in an energy storm. We landed right in the middle of one. As you are aware, sir, if we phase now there is an excellent chance we will warp right into the sun!" Barnhart shook his lean, bronze head wearily. "Simmons, the Admiralty has gone through this thousands of times. Obviously they know our danger is greater by staying where we are. Why, Ignatz #Y out there may nova! We'll have to take our chances." "No, sir." Simmons thrust his pale, blue-veined jaw at him, his light eyes Nordicly cold below a blond cropping. "The storm spots are dying down. We aren't phasing yet." Barnhart drew himself up and looked down at the mate. Behind Simmons, York moved closer. The captain was suddenly aware of York's low forehead and muscular, free-swinging arms. It was probably sheer bias, but he had frequently entertained the idea that Englishmen were closer to our apelike ancestor than most people... the way they ran around painted blue when everybody was civilly wearing clothes and all. Obviously York was incapable of thinking for himself Simmons commanded him to do. It became transparent to Barnhart that they were going to mutiny to avoid following their duty as clearly outlined in regulations. Judging from York's twitching knuckles, they were going to resist by strangling him. Barnhart wondered if this was the time to show fear and unlock a weapon to defend himself. York clamped onto him before he could decide on the proper interpretation of the regulations and just as his mind settled on the irresolvable question: If a captain must never show fear, why was he given the key to a hand weapons locker to use when in fear of his life? purple clearing with clouded eyes. He trembled in near traumatic shook. It was almost too much to bear. Regulations clearly stated that no officer was to be marooned on a .# Earth-type planet at fourteenforty Galactic Time, early evening local. Or (he brushed at his forehead) he was damned certain they at least strongly implied it. But fear was such a foreign element to his daily routine he discarded it. The scene took him back to his boyhood. He sorted out the survival supplies, lifting even the portable nuclear generator effortlessly under the .# gravity, and remembered how he used to go camping regularly every month when he was a Boy Scout. He had been a bookish child, too obsessed with reading, they told him. So he had put himself on a regular schedule for play. Still, it never seemed to make people like him much better. After he established his routine he didn't try to change it -- he probably couldn't make things better and he certainly couldn't stand them any worse. Barnhart paused in his labors and stripped off his soaked uniform shirt, deciding to break out his fatigues. As the wet sleeve turned wrong side out he noticed his wristwatch showed fifteen hundred hours. As usual he fetched his toothbrush from the personals kit and started to scrub his teeth. This was when he saw his first qurono in the act of geoplancting. It a deeply disturbing experience. slick-bodied alien ignored each other every morning while the marooned captain had his coffee and the native chronoped; each afternoon while Barnhart laid down for a nap and the other xenogutted; and of course before retiring while Barnhart brushed his teeth and the alien did his regular stint of geoplancting. The captain sat about arranging living quarters on the planet. The crew of the Quincey had provided him with every necessity except communications gear. Still he was confident he would find a way back and see that Simmons and the rest got the punishment clearly called for in Regulation C-#, Clause II. This driving need to have the regulation obeyed was as close as he could get to anger. His lot was a rough and primitive one, but he sat down to doing the best with things that he could. Using the nuclear reactor, he synthesized a crude seven-room cottage. He employed an unorthodox three-story architecture. This gave him a kind of observation tower from which he could watch to see if the natives started to get restless. Traditionally, this would be a bad sign. Humming to himself, he was idly adding some rococo work around the front door when thirteen-hundred-thirty came up and he stopped for his nap. At the edge of the now somewhat larger clearing the alien was xenogutting in the indigo shadows of a drooping bush-tree. Since he hadn't furnished the house yet, Barnhart stretched out on the grass. Suddenly he sat upright and shot a glance at the alien. Could this sort of thing be regarded as restless activity? He was safe so long as the aliens maintained their regular routine but if they started to deviate from it he was in trouble. He tossed around on the velvet blades for some minutes. He got to his feet. The nap would have to be bypassed. As much as he resented the intrusion on his regular routine he would have to find some other natives. He had to know if all the aliens on the planet xenogutted each afternoon as he was having his nap. The though crossed his mind that he might not wake up some afternoon if his presence was causing the aliens to deviate dangerously from their norm. r T , HE most unnerving thing about the village was that there were exactly ten houses and precisely one hundred inhabitants. Each house was # feet on a side. The surfaces were handhewn planking or flat-sided logs. There were four openings: each opposing two were alternately one foot and an alarming ten feet high. Barnhart couldn't see the roof. The buildings appeared square, so he supposed the houses were # feet tall. At the end of the single packed, violet-earthed street facing up the road was a large sign of some unidentifiable metal bearing the legend in standard Galactic: Barnhart received the information unenthusiastically. He had never before encountered the term. The sign might as well have told him the place was a town of jabberwockies. The single scarlet sun with its corona of spectrum frost was drawing low on the forest-covered horizon. Barnhart, dry of mouth and sore of foot, had not encountered yet a single one of the hundred inhabitants. He had missed his nap and his dinner, and now (he ran his tongue over his thickfeeling teeth) he was about to miss his nightly brushing of his teeth. He had taken only a minimum survival kit with him -- which did not include a smaller personals kit. His wristwatch, still on good, reliable ship's time, recorded nearly fifteen hundred hours straight up. His body chemistry was still operating on the Captain's Shift, whereby he spent part of the time with both the day and night shifts. It was nearly time for him to go to bed. Fortunately it was almost night on the planet. He was searching out his portable force field projector from some loose coins and keys when the one hundred quronos came out of their houses and began geoplancting. Fifth Day Marooned The Journal of Captain T. P. Barnhart, Late of the U.C.S. Quincey It becomes apparent that I may never leave alive this planet whose name and co-ordinates have been kept from me. By reason, justice and regulations, the men who put me here must pay (see formal attached warrant against First Mate O. D. Simmons and the remainder of my crew). For this reason and in the interest of science I am beginning this journal, to which I hope to continue contributing from time to time, barring sudden death. At this writing I am in a village of ten houses identified as a settlement of quronos. These tall, hairless humanoids have performed an intricate series of indescribable actions since I first encountered them. My problem, as is apparent, is to decide whether these actions constitute their normal daily routine or whether I have instigated this series of actions. If the latter is the case: where will it all end? #: Fifth day Barnhart was not used to being ignored. It was certainly not a part of his normal routine. Often in his life he had been scorned and ridiculed. Later, when he earned a captaincy in the exploration service, the men around him had to at least make a show of respect and paying attention to him. Being ignored was a new experience for him. While it was a strange thing to say of an explorer, Barnhart didn't particularly like new experiences... or rather he only liked the same kind of new experiences. He kicked the wine-colored soil in red-faced impotence the first few dozen times quronos went silently past him on the way to gather fruit from the forest, or hew logs to keep the buildings in repairs (which seemed to be a constant occupation.) However, when the twenty-fifth alien shouldered past him the morning after he first discovered the village, Barnhart caught him by the shoulder, swung him half around and slugged him off his feet with a stabbing right cross. The alien shook his head foggily a few times and slowly climbed to his feet. Barnhart bit at his under lip. That hadn't been a wise thing to do at all. He should know that unorthodox moves like that led only to certain disaster. He fumbled for his force-field projector, and with a flush of adrenalin discovered he had lost it. Now, he thought, the alien will signal the rest of them. And they, all one hundred of them (now does that include the one I first saw in the clearing or not?) they will converge on me and -- The qurono marched off into the forest. Everyone was still ignoring Barnhart. steak sandwich listlessly and watched the aliens through the faint haze of the force field. He had found the projector half stamped into the earth and he was testing it. But even a test was foolish. None of them was close enough to him to harm him with so much as a communicable disease. He might as well quit roughing it and get back to the cottage. In the last few days he had had time to think. He took up his journal. Eighth Day I can only suppose that these actions of the aliens represent some kind of religious ritual. Again I am presented with the problem of whether these rituals are a part of their normal, daily life, or are they a special series instigated by my presence? Yesterday I observed two of the quronos repairing one of the village houses. The native lumber seems to be ill-suited to construction purposes. Several times I have noticed logs tearing themselves free and crawling back into the virgin forest. Due to the instability of their building materials the aliens are constantly having to repair their houses. In watching the two quronos at work I observed something highly significant. The humanoids worked smoothly as a team, splitting and planing down the reluctant logs with double-bladed axes. Then, putting the lumber in place, they fastened it down with triangular wooden pegs. They pounded these pegs home awkwardly with the flat side of the axes. The axes are crude and obviously indigenous to the culture. I view this with considerable alarm. Obviously any culture that can produce an axe is capable of inventing the hammer. The quronos are not using their hammers in front of me. I am producing a change in their routine. Where will it end? What are they saving their hammers for? #: Eighth Day Barnhart had written that just before dawn, but as usual the aliens had continued to ignore ' I him. For all he knew the ritual might go on for years -- before they used their hammers. Or whatever they were planning. It was drawing near time for his nap, but he felt completely wide awake even inside the safety of the force field. His throat hurt and the backs of his legs ached with the waiting, the waiting for the natives to come out and begin xenogutting. He wiped his hands together and forced a smile. Why should he worry what the natives did? He was completely safe. He could live out his life in immutable security. But this wasn't his world. No part of it was his... or at least only the part he had brought with him. Sanity lay in holding to what was left of his own world. But sanity didn't always mean survival. What if he could make the quronos' world his own? Barnhart wiped at the tiny stings against his face and his fingertips came away moist with beads of perspiration. The aliens began marching out of the houses, in twos from the ten-foot doors, singly from the foot-square openings of every other facing wall. It wasn't his world of fireworks-streaked Ohio summers and bold green hills, this planet cowled with nun-like secrecy, looking acrid, tasting violet and transmitting a beauty and confusion only a trio of physical scientists could solve. But there was only one thing to do. Barnhart let down his force field and went out. The human body wasn't welladapted for it but Barnhart did his best to join the quronos in xenogutting. Instantly the cry welled up. "Master." Barnhart stood up and faced the aliens, deeply disturbed. when, later, he wrote again in his journal: Ninth day "Qurono," I have learned from the Leader, is a term referring to a particular type of subhuman android. The synthetic process used in manufacturing these men does not allow them to develop beyond a certain point -- a built-in safety factor of their creators, I can only suppose. Thus they were given the concept of the axe and have re, tained it, but they were able only to devise the idea of using the axe to hammer things with and are not capable of thinking of a special hammering tool. With almost complete lack of creative ability they are bound to the same routine, to which they adhere with an almost religious fanaticism. Since last night I have been treated as virtually a god. I have been given one of their buildings entirely for my own use. I find this turn of events obsolutely surprising. I intend to discuss this with the Leader today. (Note to any ethnologist who may see these papers: Since all quronos are built to the same standards none is superior to another. But, recognizing the need for one director, each of the one hundred has an alternate term as Leader.) #: Ninth day Despite the upsetting turn of events Barnhart decided he was more comfortable in his familiar role of command. He glanced at his wristwatch and was surprised to note that he had overslept. The time for both breakfast and chronopting was past. He made himself ready and left the building. The alien was waiting just outside the door. He looked as if he hadn't moved all night. Yet, Barnhart thought, he seemed a trifle shorter. "Are you the Leader?" Barnhart asked. "I am the Leader. But you are the Master." As an officer of a close-confines spaceship that sounded a little stuffy even to Barnhart. The fellow still looked shorter. Maybe they had changed Leaders the way he had been told the night before. Or maybe quronos shrank when left out in the night air. "Let's go someplace where we can sit down. And, incidentally, just call me 'sir' or 'captain.' " "Yes, sir." Barnhart nodded. He had been expecting: Yes, Master, I will call you 'captain.' But the alien didn't move. He finally decided that the Leader thought they could sit on the ground where they were standing. Barnhart squatted. The Leader squatted. Before they could speak a muffled explosion vibrated the ground and Barnhart caught a fleeting glimpse of an unstable chemical rocket tearing jerkily into the maroon sky. "Celebration for my arrival?" Barnhart asked. "Perhaps so. We are putting the un-needed ones in status." He decided to let that ride for the moment. "Tell me, why didn't you recognize me before I joined you in your -- ritual, Leader?" The alien tilted his head. "What was there to recognize? We thought you were some new variety of animal. Before you xenogutted how were we to know you were rational life?" Barnhart nodded. "But how did you so cleverly deduce that I was your Master?" "There are one hundred of us. You were the one hundred and first. You had to be the Master returned." The Master had been some friendly lifeform in the Federation, obviously. Otherwise the qurono androids wouldn't speak Galactic. Barnhart nibbled on his under lip. "I want to find out how much you still know after the Master has been away so long," the captain said. "Tell me, how do you communicate with the Master?" "What for?" The Leader began to look at Barnhart oddly. "For anything. Where's the subspace radio?" The direct approach produced a rather ironic expression on the qurono's narrow face but no answer. But if there was a radio on the planet Barnhart meant to find it. Spacemen forced to abandon their craft were required to report to the nearest Federation base as quickly as possible. Besides, he meant to see that Simmons and his Anglo stooge and all the others paid for their mutiny. But, he decided, perhaps he had better not press the matter at the moment. Another rocket punctuated the moment of silence. "Take me to your launching area," Barnhart said. The android stood up and walked. But he walked at Barnhart's side, forcing the captain to catch his stride a half-step to let the alien lead him. He wasn't sure if it was a mark of respect not to get ahead of the Master or an attempt to see if he knew where the launching site was located. The quronos were limited, but just how limited Barnhart was beginning to wonder. of drooping lavender trees and Barnhart saw the eight men laying on the ground in the transparent casings. Not men, but quronos, he corrected himself; in a molded clear membrane of some sort. "They are in status," the Leader explained, answering the captain's unasked question. "This is how you keep your population at one hundred," Barnhart thought aloud, removing his glasses to rest his eyes and to get a better look at the bodies. Despite regulations he could still see better without his spectacles. "It is how you arranged it, Master. But as you know we are now ninety and one." The captain put his glasses back on. "I'll test you. Why are you now ninety and one?" "Naturally," the Leader said emotionlessly, "you required a whole shelter unit to yourself. We had to dispose of the ten who previously had the unit." Barnhart swallowed. "Couldn't you think of anything less drastic? Next time just build a new unit." "But master," the alien protested, "it takes a great deal of work to construct our units. Our lumber escapes so badly no matter how often we beat it into submission. Our work capacity is limited, as you are aware. Is it really desirable to overwork us so much?" The captain was a little shocked. Was this humorless, methodical android really protesting a command from his Master? "How do you suppose the ten you are putting in status feel about it?" he managed. "They would doubtlessly prefer not to be overworked. Our fatigue channels can only stand so much." But it wasn't the work, Barnhart suddenly knew. It was the idea that there could be eleven houses, instead of ten. The concept of only ninety quronos and a master must be only slightly less hideous to them. They couldn't really be so overjoyed to see him. A third rocket jarred off, rising unsteadily but surely in the low gravity. It was a fairly primitive device -- evidently all they retained from the original model supplied them by the Master. Barnhart looked at the figures on the ground. Only seven. "The ones in status go into the rockets!" Barnhart gasped. "And circle in the proper orbits," the Leader agreed. This time he saw the quronos lifting a stiff form and taking it to the crude rocket. It looked entirely too much like a human body. Barnhart looked away. But at the edge of his peripheral vision he saw the quronos halt and stand up their fellow in status. He glanced at his wrist. Fifteen hundred hours. The aliens began geoplancting. Barnhart ran his tongue over his teeth, noting that they needed brushing. He came to himself with a start. Of course. He had almost forgot. Barnhart faced the others and joined them in geoplancting. A hideous cry built from one plateau of fury to another. "He's no better than us!" the Leader screamed. Ninth day I have made a serious mistake. While it was necessary for me to conform to the quronos' ritual to get myself recognized, I should not have continued to adhere to it. Apparently by these creatures' warped reasoning I established myself as a reasoning creature by first joining them in their routine; but when I continued to act in accord with them I proved myself no better than they are. As Master I am supposed to be superior and above their mundane routine. At the moment they are milling belligerently outside my force-field screen. As I look into their stupid, imaginationless faces I can only think that somewhere in the past they were invented by some unorthodox Terran scientist, probably of English descent. They -- Wait. The force field. It's wavering. It must have been damaged when it got tramped underfoot. They are going to get in to me. It -- Barnhart watched them prepare the rocket that would blast him into an orbit circling the planet. He could see and even hear the sound that vibrated through the thin membrane in which he was encased, but he could not move a nerve-end. Fortunately his eyes were focused on infinity, so he could see everything at least blurrily. The Leader, who seemed to have grown a few inches, wasted no time. He gave the orders and the quronos lifted him into the rocket. The hatch closed down on the indigo day and he was alone. The blast of takeoff almost deafened him but he didn't feel the jar -- only because, he realized, he could feel nothing. A few weeks later the centrifugal force of the spinning rocket finally nudged the latch and the hatch swung open. Barnhart was exposed to naked fire-bright blackness itself. After a day or two he stopped worrying about that, as he had stopped fretting about breathing. He grew accustomed to the regular turn around the planet every fourteen hours. For two out of every three seconds he faced out into space and that was. always changing. Yet, all poetry aside, the change was always the same. He didn't have to worry about keeping on a schedule. He kept on one automatically. And he didn't like it. So he kept retreating further and further from it... ((, W E couldn't leave him W there!" What? Who? Barnhart thought along with at least seven other double-yous. He returned to himself and found that he was standing in the airlock of a spaceship, faced by his first mate Simmons and his stooge York. "We couldn't leave him there," Simmons repeated with feeling. "That would be the nastiest kind of murder. We might maroon him. But none of us are killers." "It's not the punishment we will get for the mutiny," York complained. "It's having to go back to his old routine. That time-schedule mind of his was derailing mine. He was driving the whole crew cockeyed. Even if he wasn't going to kill us all by the rule book, I think we would have had to maroon him just to get rid of him." Simmons fingered a thin-bladed tool knife. "I wonder how he got up there in that rocket and in this transparent shroud? I'm sure he's alive, but this is the most unorthodox Susp-An I've ever seen. Almost makes you believe in destiny, the way we lost our coordinate settings and had to backtrack -- and then found him out there. ("I'll bet he jimmied the calculator," York grouched.) You know, York, it's almost as if the world down there marooned him right back at us." The first mate inserted the knife blade. The membrane withered and Barnhart lived. "Now the arrest," York murmured. "What are you muttering about, York?" Captain Barnhart demanded. "What are we standing around here for? You can't expect me to waste a whole afternoon on inspection. We have to get back on schedule." He looked to his wrist. "Fifteen hundred hours." "He doesn't remember," York said behind him. "He remembers the same old routine," Simmons said. "Here we go again." Barnhart didn't say anything. In the close confines of a spaceship there was bound to be a certain degree of informality. He stepped inside his cabin at the end of the corridor and did what he always did at fifteen hundred hours. York and the first mate were deeply disturbed. Barnhart looked out at them sharply. "Well, spacemen, I run a taut ship here. I expect everyone to hit the mark. Adhere to the line. Follow my example. Snap to it!" Simmons looked at York and his shoulders sagged. They couldn't go through the whole thing again, the marooning, the rescue, then this. That routine would drive them crazy. Even this was preferable. They joined Barnhart in geo     Going to the World SF Convention this year? The time is Labor Day weekend; the place is Chicago. Theodore Sturgeon is Guest of Honor, and your favorite writers, editors, etc. will be there. Write Chicon, PO Box #, OF Earth's near neighbors in space are a most convenient size -- for us. Otherwise, astronomy would be a far more difficult science! r T"HE human being, we are told, lies about halfway in the scale between the size of nuclear particles and the vastness of the great universe they comprise. This is a meaningless concept, because neither of these extremes can be appreciated. They can only be expressed in figures that require a special mathematical notation -- because they are too little on one end and too large on the other for the kind of numbers we use in our daily lives. But it can be argued that the size of the Earth and its distance from the Sun are approximately ideal for the development of life. And once this point is established, it can be argued further that the size and distance relationships between Earth, Moon, Sun and stars are just about right to arouse the curiosity of the first glimmer of intelligence, and to place it on the long road toward knowledge. Taking first things first, we start with the proposition that water-based hydrocarbon life is by far the most likely to succeed. Let us thus take a couple of new looks at Mother Earth. The spectral class of any sun will define the planetary temperatures for any orbital distance we may want to calculate. For the Sun -- i.e., Sol -- a planet inside of the orbit of Venus will be too hot to permit the formation of ice. And outside of the orbit of Mars it will be too cold to permit the formation of water vapor. Since water-based hydrocarbon life depends upon an environment in which the solid, liquid and vapor phases of hydrogen-oxide can exist in equilibrium, the solar radiation alone places a minimum and maximum limit of planetary distance for life to exist. The Earth lies just about in the center of Old Sol's "life-belt." As far as distance is concerned, this is indeed the best of all possible worlds. Now about the size. We could go smaller, but not by much. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth; since mass is a function of the cube of the diameter, the mass of Mars is about one-eighth of the Earth. As a consequence, Mars hasn't enough gravity to hang onto a decent atmosphere, to say nothing of hanging onto its water. For, you see, the molecular weight of water is only #, whereas the weight of the oxygen molecule is #, nitrogen is #, and carbon dioxide is a whopping #. Move Mars in to the orbit of the Earth, and the additional heat would boil away what little water Mars has managed to retain. T'HE upper limit is more flexible. If we consider an Earth the size of Jupiter we get into some interesting trouble. The first thing that comes to mind is the # Vi gravities increase. This is enough to provide Jupiter with a dense, thick atmosphere that probably reaches critical pressure high above the actual surface of the planet itself. "Critical pressure" describes a gas so highly compressed that it behaves as a liquid. This leads to the speculation that Jupiter might not have a true surface but rather a transition zone that passes from gas to liquid to solid with no defined phases. Further evidence is the rotation of the planet. The equatorial zones rotate at a different speed than the temperate zones, which rotate at a different speed than the polar zones. But that is only first thought. If we examine the picture more carefully, we get a shock. To support life, Jupiter must be transplanted to an orbit within the life-belt. But if you do this Jupiter will begin to evaporate. For Jupiter is one of the ice-giants. That is, Jupiter and the huge outer planets are strongly suspected of being composed mostly of ice. This speculation has good foundation. The preponderance of hydrogen and oxygen in the universe suggests that hydrogenoxide is a plentiful substance indeed. The density of Jupiter is slightly higher than that of water. What could be better than to make a tremendous planet with the density of water out of the most plentiful stuff in the universe? Well, there's always good old ammonia, NH # ; which, by the way, has the same molecular weight as good old H l .O. There are few other plentiful substances with the same physical characteristics. Jupiter is ten times the diameter of Earth and would therefore be a thousand times the mass if the big fellow were composed of rock and metal and other stuff as the Earth is. Instead, Jupiter is just a big fellow with one thousand times the volume of Earth -- which by some odd circumstance is just about the same proportion as the water-making elements bear to the rest of the periodic chart found in the universe. Or maybe it isn't really so odd. But since a real honest-to-goodness rock-and-iron Jupiter would have a surface gravity about # V # times that of the Earth, let's take a look at something more reasonable. Let's add more earth to the Earth until we're living on something which is built of the same stuff but two times the former diameter. This double-Earth will have eight times the volume and mass, and the surface will be two times as far from the center. The first fact increases the gravity by eight. The second diminishes the gravity by the inverse square of two, which is one-fourth. This gives the double-Earth a surface gravity of #, which provides meat for two pertinent observations: First, that the surface gravity of a planet is proportional to its diameter and to its density. (A fuller exposition of this statement, plus a table of its workings in our Solar System, is appended.) Second, the size limits for life aren't as wide as we'd have expected. Mars, at one-half the diameter of Earth, can't hold a satisfactory atmosphere and even less water. The hypothetical double-Earth is too close for comfort to the conditions that prevail upon Jupiter. One is therefore tempted to set the size limits between three-quarters and one and one-half times the diameter of Earth. vot of celestial real estate, of critical size and distance from its primary, it remains for curiosity and intelligence to appreciate it. First, the Earth and Moon are unique in being more of a double planet that a planet and satellite system. From the Earth, the Moon subtends about a half-degree diameter circle in the sky. Since its orbit is fairly eccentric as orbits go, the apparent diameter of the Moon varies between Surface Gravity as a Product of Diameter Times Density Resolved: That the surface gravity of a planet is proportional to its diameter and its density. Premise: This is a restricted way of applying Newton's Laws in which a statement of the planet's diameter defines at once the distance from surface to center and also the volume. By including the density, the planetary mass emerges automatically since mass is a function of density times volume. Argument I : Given two planets of equal density, one twice the diameter of the other, Planet A will have eight times the volume and hence eight times the mass of Planet B, and will exert eight times the attraction at a given distance. But the surface of Planet B is twice removed, the square of which is four, and thus the attraction is diminished by one-fourth; hence the surface gravity of Planet A is twice the surface gravity of Planet B. Conclusion #: For equal densities, the surface gravity of a planet is directly proportional to its diameter. Argument #: Given two planets of equal diameter, one twice the density of the other, the first will have twice the surface gravity of the second since their volumes are equal, the distance to the surfaces are equal and their masses are proportional to their densities. Argument #: If Planet A, above, with twice the diameter and hence twice the surface gravity of Planet B, is now increased in density by two-to-one, its surface gravity will also be increased by two-to-one according to Argument #, and its surface gravity wiil then be four times the surface gravity of Planet B. Conclusion: That the surface gravity of a planet is directly proportional to its diameter and its density. The following is a table of calculations made from figures in Willy Ley's Conquest of Space in which the diameters have been rounded. The surface gravity was calculated by the conventional method of planetary radius versus mass. Columns #, # and # are my calculations, made to #-inch sliderule accuracy. Agreement in surface gravity between the two methods is as close as the other figures are known. Planet Density Diameter Surface G Density Diameter Surface G Mercury # # # # # # Venus # # # # # # Earth # # # # #. # # Mars # # # # # # Jupiter # # # # # # Saturn #I # # # # # Uranus # # # # # # Neptune # # # # # # Pluto # ? #? # ? # ? #? #? slightly larger and slightly smaller than the Sun. This provides the denizens of Tellus with the gorgeous spectacles of total and annular eclipses of Sol. A total ! eclipse would not be possible with a smaller Moon; no annular eclipse would occur with a larger one. Perhaps no celestial event has caused so much fear, awe, religion, fol-de-rol and scientific interest, and few natural events have awakened such an interest in recording the date and time as the solar eclipse. Thales of Miletus is supposed to have stopped a war between the Lydians and the Medes by predicting a solar eclipse and attributing it as a warning from unpleased gods. A couple of thousand years later The Connecticut Yankee saved his hide by the same process of doing more powerful medicine than Merlin. Both stories are -- stories. Thales could not have predicted time and place for a solar eclipse; he hadn't enough knowledge. Of course, he undoubtedly knew the Babylonian "Secret of the Saros" in which the motion of the Moon and the pattern of lunar eclipses are repeated every seventeen years. (Actually, every # lunations.) Thales was also aware of what made eclipses. He might have been able to predict an eclipse of the Moon, since this event takes place over several hours and is visible from the entire hemisphere that faces the Moon at the time. But, for a specific location, eclipses of the Sun are rare -- although hardly a year goes by without at least one solar eclipse visible from some spot, and some years have two. So the closest that Thales could have come was to predict the possibility that such an event could take place at or near such and such a date. No moonlet such as Deimos would create much stir. There would be no great spectacle to fear, revere or study. Kings would not bother to hire Royal Astronomers to predict the unimportant event of a minuscule speck crossing the face of the Sun, and scientists would have dismissed it as useless until recently when the value of timing transits became known. Now, the fact that the king used these predictions to threaten his enemies or to prove his wisdom, or to bamboozle his people into thinking he had a direct contact with Jove, Wotan, Baal and Co., is not important. The side-benefit is. When the king appointed you to the post of Royal Astronomer, with a certain chance of being relieved of office by the Lord High Executioner for flubbing, you darned well studied astronomy and learned how to predict eclipses. Nor would a minute moonlet I l  j'V , A  ) AT M-l AT M-# ab Figure #: Aristarchus's measurements. show phases, which is a feature that led to early conjecture that the celestial bodies were spherical. menae who demonstrated with a candle and a ball that the puzzling phases of the Moon could be explained by suggesting that the Moon was spherical and illuminated by the moving Sun. This demonstration caused conjecture about the rest of the celestial bodies, mainly the five naked-eye planets which tend to wax and wane and disappear. Such phases or partial phases had to wait for Hans Lippershey to tell Galileo about the telescope, although some of the sharp-eyed Greeks claimed to have seen crescent phases in Venus. (This is unfortunately too much like reporting a vision or relating ex post facto a forecast of doom. One can claim to see the crescent phase of Venus with the naked eye... but it isn't likely.) One thing is certain. The Greeks had some very sharp-eyed observers. For a concrete example of observing something that lies on the slender edge of non-visibility, take the measurement of the Earth-Sun-Moon relationship performed by Aristarchus of Samos. Aristarchus argued that when the Sun and the Moon were at right angles, the terminator line on the Moon would be curved as shown in Figure #, at M-l. Then when the Moon had moved to where the terminator line is straight, position M-#, then a right angle would exist between the Sun and the Earth with the Moon at the corner. For a pair of long, skinny triangles such as those shown, E, T M-l, M-# is similar to S, M-#, E; that is, the triangles are the same shape but different in size. Once this layout is measured by its angles alone, determing any of the linear distances will reveal the whole shooting match by the application of some simple trigonometry. Now comes the gimmick. The next time you have a chance to look at the Moon in either the first or last quarter, take a good look at the terminator. Watch it closely for about ten minutes. Observe the change in the curvature of the terminator line in those ten minutes, for that is about what it takes for the Moon to move from M-l, geocentric quadrature, to M-#, lunacentric quadrature. This, by the way, represents a true movement of about five miles over the center of the face of the Moon from curved terminator to straight. Aristarchus flubbed, and so did Hipparchus, Posidonius and Ptolemy one after another. None of them believed in the vastness of the vast, so they all shaded their figures low. Their error wasn't so great; but the important thing is that they did get figures for this split-hair experiment. One can, in a conjecture of this kind, argue that a larger Moon, or more comparable distances, might have made their work a lot easier. But by placing this triangulation on the very extreme limit of detectability, another near-impossible measurement is made feasible. The same Aristarchus of Samos is given first credit for proposing the heliocentric solar system. He ran into two violent objections, neither of them religious. The first is the apparent absence of aberration and the second is the apparent absence of parallax. Both, said the other philosophers, must be present if the Earth is in motion about the Sun. Let's take them in order: Aberration is defined as a form of distortion in which things do not appear as they really are. For example, it is raining gently with no wind so that the drops are coming straight down. Now if you don your sou'wester and go for a drive in your chariot, you'll observe that the down-falling raindrops are apparently coming at a slant, and that the amount of slant depends upon how fast you are going. Related to astronomy, it would appear that the source is forward of its true position; if we are in motion with respect to an orthogonal flow, the cloud or the star that emits the light must appear to be displaced forward along the line of our motion. Thus, they argued, stars lying along the axis of this supposed orbit should describe circles, revolving once each year; stars lying along the plane of this supposed orbit would move back and forth each year; and stars between the axis and the plane should make ellipses with an eccentricity proportional to the angle between these extremes. r T , HE lack of aberration can be explained in any one of three ways: #) the speed of light is infinite; #) the stars are so far away that the aberration can't be detected; or #) the Earth is exactly where we always claimed, immobile and at the center of the universe. So there! The truth, of course, is #) and considering the Greek ability to measure the speed of light, we might well toss #) in as a total loss. If it looks like a dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog and acts like a dog -- confound it, it is a dog. If you can't see something it's invisible, and if you can't measure something it might as well be infinite! It turns out that the Constant of Aberration is # seconds of arc. Divide the diameter of the Moon into # equal parts, draw a circle the size of one part and you'll have the displacement that the Greeks couldn't observe. We all know about parallax. Thales seems to have discovered it in his studies in geometry; he used it to measure the distance from shore to a ship at sea. This was the first optical range-finder system and it lasted about # years, until' radar displaced it during the late unpleasantness. With parallax in mind, the proponents of the geocentric theory scoffed at a mobile Earth. When parallax is mentioned, the star #I Cygni comes to mind because it was the first to be measured. Um -- the heliocentric parallax of #I Cygni is listed at # seconds of arc. This isn't simply splitting hairs, friend. It's dividing hairs into umpteen hundred equal slices. And that ain't all. #I Cygni has a proper motion. That is, it moves as all celestial bodies move; #I Cygni moves across the sky at the rate of # seconds of arc per year. So whither #I Cygni? With a declination of about # degrees, its aberration will make an apparent ellipse about twice as long as it is wide; its dimensions will be the Constant of Aberration, # seconds. This ellipse will flow across the sky doing # seconds linear motion per year. The ellipse will be distorted by heliocentric parallax of # seconds. The only thing that keeps heliocentric parallax from being completely smothered is that we don't measure it by sighting the star and then reading the setting circles on the telescope. It is done by comparison against the background of stars, all of which undergo equal aberration, cancelling it. What remains is the proper motion and parallax which combine to produce a wavy line # seconds between peaks and # seconds amplitude. In passing, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, has a parallax of only # seconds and a proper motion of # seconds. Neither of these make a whale of a lot of improvement over #I Cygni. larger orbit, which would provide a longer heliocentric baseline. It would be colder, but if we'd evolved on an Earth-sized planet along the orbit of Mars we'd have had enough air to breathe and we'd have become accustomed to the chilly temperature. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is still a subject for argument. The best estimates place the error at plus or minus about # miles. Move Earth out farther and solar parallax diminishes accordingly. Solar parallax is so nearly a straight line that it becomes difficult to assay, using the diameter of the Earth as a baseline. For the Sun can't be compared in position against the starry background like measuring the parallax of a star. During total eclipse? Fine, but could you trust your figures, realizing that the gravitational field of Old Sol will diffract light rays just as A. Einstein said it would? Make the Earth bigger? That means a more dense atmosphere and greater diffraction. Since geocentric parallax requires measurements made from the widest separation, the geometry places the observed object low near the horizon whether it is sighted simultaneously by two stations a hemisphere apart or by one station with a twelve-hour wait between sightings. Refraction gets worse as the object approaches the horizon. What is gained by distance is lost by distortion. Make the Earth larger by the acceptable physical limit and -- again, what is gained by distance is lost by distortion. City hall isn't the only thing that can't be licked. s July isssue of IF -- still on sale -- contains a complete short novel by Allen Kim Lang which Galaxy readers will enjoy. It is The Chemically Pure Warriors ; it's a sequel to his World in a Bottle which appeared here. Also stories by Keith Laumer, Cordwainer Smith, Bryce Walton, etc. Get your copy today! mornings. This was one of the latter. Rotten clear ( through. Isaac Nels Rhinelander knew very well the cause of the dark brown taste in his mouth the moment he awoke. In characteristic fashion he charged his happiness deficit to other accounts. For example, the violent argument at breakfast with his brother-in-law, Atwater Pope. Ten minutes after it was over, Rhinelander couldn't even remember the topic. How cumulus clouds formed. The dimension of a gnat's wing. Some other equally HU The paintings were outrageous and wild. Rhinelander would have given everything he owned to find the painter -- and, a little while later, to lose him again! inane subject from the filler slugs of the morning news sheet that unreeled from the printer in the breakfast atrium of Rhinelander's (actually his wife Iris's -- ugh) villa. Watty sat there, cool and educated and superior, adjusting the chinstrap of his bumishfed steel crash helmet (He was flying his vertiracer in a rally at noon.) To every argument Rhineland put forth, Watty replied in metaphor and epigram and little rapier thrusts of logic. Finally Rhinelander just screamed. Lost the argument, of course. Watty chuckled, activated his sportsmodel personnel jets and went flying out of the atrium the winner. As always. That was enough to make Rhinelander feel rotten through and through. But it wasn't the true cause of the rotten feeling. Rhinelander found still other events to blame. Such as: The unaccountable breakdown of his Chrome De Luxe Executive Limoubus, whose magnetic pilot jumped the aerialway guidestrip on the two hundred and sixty mile trip from the suburbs into New York, and crashed in an undignified although harmless way into the thick foamex median. Other conveyances whizzed by. Their occupants cheerfully smoked or read morning tickers, unable to stop. Rhinelander had to trudge in the hot sun to a call box. He had to suffer the sneers of the mechanics who came, raised the forward deck of the Limoubus by means of magnetic cranes and then took care of his difficulty. Actually, it required only one mechanic to solve the trouble. He just reconnected a short spring which held two motor rods together in a most untechnical way. Rhinelander stumped from one foot to the other, beet red. He saw that the mechanics were exchanging sidelong glances of derision at his expense while they totaled up their bill. They let him go easily, however: eighty-five dollars. But that didn't relieve the mounting rottenness of the day. As the Limoubus whisked on toward the slender gleaming pylons of the megalopolis eighty miles ahead, Rhinelander once more felt the sting of the true cause of his anger and frustration. Hot stabs of jealousy, of virulent envy, shot through him. He refused to acknowledge them, waiting, just waiting, for the next mess. That mess was not long in coming. TT happened ten seconds after he walked through the electronic doors of The Rhinelander Galleries, which occupied the entire first floor of The General Matter Building on Park Mall. In the lift-tube up from the garage, Rhinelander had halfway composed himself. After all, he was about to enter his own personal domain, as he did on the three working days of each week. He pulled his corpulent frame up to its full height of five feet three. His cheeks stopped flapping. His protuberant blue eyes receded into their sockets. Like an emperor he breezed through the doors, rubbing his plump little hands. And stopped. Under the multicolored beams which bathed the central display pedestal in the gallery's marble foyer, several of his employees, including his assistant Phenley, were wringing their hands and gazing at a litter of striated copper-shot stone on the floor. Phenley rushed forward. "The workmen," he gargled. "Teamsters. Hook slippage during erection." Gazing at the wreckage of Jan van der Maarsch's rendering of The Culture of the Womb, Rhinelander shrieked, "Get out of my sight, Phenley, before I kill you! Two hundred thousand I pay for that, and you let the boobs break it before we even get the critics in! Call the insurance people and stay away for two weeks or I won't answer for your safety!" "Oh, sir, I'm so terribly sorry, so terribly sorry," Phenley kept saying. Then Phenley's voice was silenced by another sound. One of the gallery functionaries poked at a last piece of the sculpture teetering on the pedestal. This piece, of course, crashed to the floor just a second before Rhinelander stepped into his private office. By now his cheeks were flapping and bulging again. His eyes stuck out to amazing dimensions. Groping for the spigot of the TrankwilSoda dispenser in the bottom drawer of his desk, Rhinelander heard the taped metallic voice of his automatic secretary: "Please call Mr. Kuprin. Mr. Kuprin communicated at two minutes past nine, eight minutes past nine, fourteen minutes past nine and twenty-eight min -- " "Ah, God!" breathed Rhinelander, slamming his hand on the stud that shut off the wretched voice. He swilled a tumbler of TrankwilSoda. It did no good whatever. He buried his head on his arms and tried to shut off his mind. Impossible. Argument with Watty, wrecked Limoubus, smashed sculpture -- all paled. He was face to face with the actual cause of his frustration. touch with Kuprin. The ethics of the business demanded it. If he didn't there would be talk. Talk could hurt. But perhaps the opening had flopped. Even as he reached for the hand microphone, he knew the opening had not flopped. He pressed the stud combination for Kuprin's studio. A section of desktop lifted. A screen swam and blurred. Presently a thin, wildhaired man in a smock, his face smeared with daubs of ochre, appeared. "Good morning, Nels. Seen the reviews?" "No, I have not. You know I wouldn't concern myself with such trash. Who is this Caul anyhow? Who's heard of him?" "The whole art world, by now," said Kuprin with a nasty little smile. "Why are you badgering me? Just because I shaved the price on that lousy gesso item you flimflammed me into buying in August?" "I merely thought you'd be interested in the opening of the Caul show!" Kuprin pulled some gobs of paint off his nose. "You really must see it, Nels." "Go to Swallows's? I never go to other galleries." "For this you must. The canvases -- well, have you ever looked at hell?" "Several good facsimilies," said Rhinelander, thinking of his wife and Watty. "They're really remarkable. When the rest of us are polite, full of form and balance -- " Kuprin swayed a little, weaving illusions with his paint-smeared hands -- "this man, whoever he is, wherever he is, has visions of nightmares. Ugly. Terrible. Horrid. No landscapes like his exist on earth any more, with everything so beautiful and aseptic. But somewhere this Caul saw such scenes. I'm a little sick." From behind his immense spectacles, Kuprin glanced sidewise at Rhinelander through the screen. "Certainly this makes Swallows the pre-eminent gallery in the city, perhaps even in the world. Jealousy wrenched Rhinelander's gut. "The stuff's really that good, eh?" "Marvelous, marvelous." "I haven't got time." "Don't be petty, Nels. It's a shame you couldn't have snared Caul." "Caul, who the hell is Caul?" Rhinelander shouted. "Whoever heard of him before?" "Apparently Swallows did, one way or another. I understand there are even lines around the block. Can you imagine? Lines, for an exhibit of paintings! Well..." Kuprin waved in a vague , way. "I suppose I might as well go back to work, although I doubt there'll be much market for my stuff in the next few months. Not at the best galleries, certainly. Swallows doesn't need me. I'll show you what I'm doing, when it's further along." Kuprin promptly switched off, leaving Rhinelander to fume before the blank screen. He knew at last that he could no longer dodge the source of his feelings on this rottenest of all rotten mornings. For weeks the art world had buzzed with rumors of the new show soon to open at Swallows's. Rhinelander, not wanting to believe, had tortured himself into believing. And it had all come true. But who was Joe Caul? Who'd ever heard of Joe Caul? Rhinelander sent for biographical tapes. No painter named Joe Caul existed. Then Rhinelander sent for the morning reviews. They made him foam. Rhinelander, finally, sent for his Limoubus. He would, to torture himself further, have a look at Joe Caul's hell. II T ET it be said in Rhinelander's favor that Joe Caul overwhelmed him. A thin drizzle was falling when Rhinelander reached the ivory and platinum front of The Frederic Swallows Gallery. Doubtless the weather service felt it was time for a little rain, but the rain made Rhinelander mad, especially since he had to wait in a damp, shuffling line of customers that stretched half way around the square. Most of the students in line had come with portable rain-deflectors. They were in a holiday mood, buzzing with talk about the Caul canvases which they would soon be privileged to view. Rhinelander felt his dignity violated by this forced mingling with members of the public. And then, just as his section of the line reached the great Swallows doors, the tower blowers came on and all the artificial rain clouds were swept away, leaving the streets gold and gleaming in the sudden overwhelming sun. Feeling spongy, Rhinelander would have hated Michelangelo himself. So it was a strong reflection on Rhinelander's character and Joe Caul's brush technique when he was overwhelmed in spite of the fact that the gallery attendant hadn't even honored his trade courtesy card, but had made him pay admission just like anybody else. Rhinelander was not only overwhelmed, he was awed and frightened too. Caul's canvases brought the stink of animal fear, raw as a piece of decomposing liver, into the refinement of Swallows's main hall. Few spoke while viewing the Caul works. Swallows had, by design, reduced the lighting so that only the canvases themselves, huge panels a uniform twenty by ten, stood out against ebony drapes. Knots of art-lovers huddled together, soaked and struck dumb, under each of the five works. Their faces held none of the joy or exhilaration some sensitive souls show when gazing upon a new or revolutionary work. Instead, eyes gleamed wetly. Mouths hung loose and even a little moronically. For in each of the five works, signed in block .letters and black oil, Joe Caul, and labelled crudely Pictur #, Pictur #, through Pictur #, those who looked saw no heightened reality or beauty. They saw nothing they could measure by any customary yardstick. They saw instead, a heightening of sickness. They saw insanity made two-dimensional. "Evil filth," Rhinelander whispered. But he couldn't tear his eyes away from Pictur I to gaze at Pictur #, the first was so powerful. " knew the description was far too simple. Hell, as all the sophisticated spectators knew, was a fictitious place, like Amusement Land on the West Coast. The writhing purple and green and orange creatures, only dimly human, shrouded in pestilential vapors and frozen like hideous Laocoons, had a peculiar realism that made Rhinelander think to himself, This is ghastly; then, This is beautiful; then This is totally, utterly real -- whatever it is. Under the spell of the canvases which seemed merely different views of the same subject (whatever that was, besides reality) Rhinelander found himself both repelled and fascinated. Repelled by the labyrinthine weaving of shape and color, suggesting ever so many indecent images. Fascinated by the sledgehammer realization that, although he didn't quite understand, he was face to face with total truth. Let it further be said in Rhinelander's favor that he gazed at each of the pictures for at least twenty minutes without once feeling envy. At last, however, business concerns became too great. He tottered out of the exhibit hall, looking back as though expecting one of Caul's creatures to be roosting on his shoulder. Finally free of the grip of the paintings, he ended up in the office of Frederic Swallows, with Mr. Swallows on page by his autosecretary. Fortunately Swallow's office was along an outer wall. Sunlight poured in and helped dispel the obscene guilt which Rhinelander had been feeling. It took only a moment for his regular nature to assert itself. He started pawing through papers and memoranda on top of Swallows' ornate desk, searching for a clue to the elusive Caul. His cheeks puffed suddenly. He'd found something. Caul, the slip said. Plus Geneva Credit Depository. #-#-#. One of those numbered bank accounts? Rhinelander wondered. He heard footfalls in the outer corridor. Hastily he stuffed the slip back under a pile in its original place. He was lighting up a dollar Nirvanatella when Frederic Swallows whisked in like corn husks rustling on a stalk. Nels," Swallows said. His hair was white, his face still whiter, his hands laced with blue veins. He was ninety-six years old, kept alive by nutrient cosmetics and injections of hormones. Swallows dry-washed his hands briskly and pursed his lips. "You are not noted for your magnanimity, old friend. One would have thought you would have stayed away." "From -- from that?" Rhinelander waved outward. "Impossible. All I've heard about Joe Caul is absolutely true. I congratulate you, Frederic." Swallows nodded. "You're right, you're right. Once, in my youth, when I was taking drugs and painting in Tahiti, I saw one or two visions something like those pictures. I was so appalled I committed myself to a sanitarium. When I was cured, I thought about trying to recapture a little of what I'd seen. The prospect was so grisly that I remained drunk for three months. I've never had the impulse again." Swallows began to bustle and pry among the papers on the desktop. "Yes, I'm flattered that Caul, whoever he is, chose to send his paintings to me. He must have picked my name from the gallery directory. That was a lucky chance, eh, Nels?" From under the litter of memoranda, he drew out the slip at which Rhinelander had been peeking. "Excuse me." Since Swallows's eyesight was so weak, he had to turn his back to the window and hold the paper to the tip of his nose, in the sun's beam. At that moment a windowwasher's platform slid into view on the face of the building. The washer was scribbing busily. He had an immense fan beard of red and wore a hearing apparatus. Rhinelander tried to remember when, if ever, he had seen a window-washer. When he was a child? Swallows forced the papers against his eyes, then tittered. "Ah, yes, this is the one. Excuse me, excuse me." The window-washer's platform vanished upward out of sight. Rhinelander was no longer paying attention, for his brains had suddenly fastened on a remark the old man had made a minute before. He watched Swallows waggle one foot in the air, make a few quick passes with his left hand, open the visual safe and pop the slip inside. Casual, now, Rhinelander thought. Very casual. He cleared his throat. "Frederic, did you say you don't know this Caul personally?" Swallows, meaning, old enemy. "He selected your gallery at random?" Swallows lifted 'a shoulderblade. "I suppose so. How else to explain the sudden arrival of five massive crates one day last month? A day later came a note, with ten cents postage due. Ludicrously written. This Caul can barely spell. Witness 'pictur'. In that something made him want to show his works, and if I deemed them of any value I should deposit funds in one of those secret Swiss bank accounts, whose number he conveniently provided. The numbers were so miserably written I had to try seven accounts before hitting the correct one. Some clever advisor has doubtless told this Caul, wherever and whoever he may be, about numbered accounts. His own hand -- I had it analyzed -- proves he's something above an imbecile, but only a little something. Very strange, very peculiar." "Have you heard from Caul again?" Rhinelander asked. He felt better now, almost wolfish as his mind repeated, to fix it firm, # # # . "No, but I certainly hope I shall. If I never sell another canvas in my lifetime, Caul's five pictures will make me comfortable. I might even say wealthy." Swallows ruffled a few more paper and chits. "I do appreciate your stopping, Nels. Drop in again whenever you wish. But I have at least a hundred letters from various museums requesting chromostats of one or all of the Caul canvases, plus proofs of a critique I've just written, and -- oh." Swallows blinked again, as though he had just remembered a formality of the profession. "How's your business?" "Very brisk," Rhinelander said with a smile, hate boiling his guts. "Too bad you couldn't have gotten Caul. Pure chance, though. Well, good day." "Yes, too bad," Rhinelander echoed. He shook the old man's spidery hand and passed out of the office thinking, # # # . With a shudder he walked beneath Picturs I through # and didn't look up. He didn't want to be unnerved again. He was feeling too rich, too hot-headed, too sure and exhilarated. "Too bad," he said again as he shoved his way through the crowds still waiting outside. At the end of the building he paused, looked both ways, spat on the platinum gallery name-plate. "F orty three, twelve eighty nine, sixty-six, you old bastard. I haven't got him now. But I soon will have." Ill A T the evening dinner Rhinelander's wife Iris had one of her shrieking spells. The meal began cordially enough. Artificial sunset filtered through the pergola that overlooked the pool, where mechanical swans floated in geometric patterns. Iris, Rhinelander and Watty reclined on their couches, eating roast duckling with orange sauce. Iris brought up the subject of a party she was giving in a few weeks. She planned to turn the entire house and estate, including Rhinelander's wing, into an extinct Asian commune. Watty, wearing only shorts and several bandages from the race, sucked on gobbets of duckling and appeared indifferent. Rhinelander struggled up from his couch to protest the party. In the phony sunset light Iris looked disgusting to Rhinelander. No longer a young woman, she insisted on dyeing her hair a different shade each month. This month it was pea-green. She wore tight scarlet trousers woven with platinum threads and a blouse which revealed her large flabby bosom. Her nails were three inches long. Rhinelander cared for her only occasionally. Tonight was not one of the occasions. "I won't have my house tricked out to resemble some socialistic experiment, Iris." Iris clamped her sharp little teeth on her lower lip and tried to show patience. "Darling, can't you at least look at the clever plans?" As if on signal, a young creature in pink drawers and a cosmetic suntan burst in at the pergola entrance. He began to unroll sheafs of brownprints. The sight of Yoggemeyer, Iris's personal decorator, infuriated Rhinelander even more. "I refuse to look at them!" He kicked over a platter of duckling. Yoggemeyer minced aside, nearly getting his lacquered toes slopping up with orange sauce. " fingers. "Obstinate tonight, aren't we, Nels?" "You keep out of this, playboy!" Rhinelander snarled. "Dear Nels," Watty said, propping up on one elbow. "I should to do that. But you make it impossible. A moment ago you said you wouldn't have 'y ur ' house redesigned to accommodate my sister's desires, but you really don't have much choice. Let's not have a scene, please. I had a hard day." "Vertiracing?" Rhinelander sneered. "Pah. Playing games." "Facing more reality that you possibly could," Watty said. "Anyway," Rhinelander said, "we've gone this route before. The house and estate are registered in my name, and therefore -- " "Please," Yoggemeyer cooed, "if you'd just glance at these cunning plans -- " "Get the hell out of here!" Rhinelander threw half of the duckling at the decorator. Yoggemeyer squealed, his head covered with ooze and raisins, and disappeared sobbing behind the hedges. This set Iris to flexing her claws. She paced back and forth, a raw edge on her never very soothing voice: "Isaac Nels Rhinelander, we certainly have discussed the registration before, and need I remind you that it's my money, and my brother's, which enables you to live in such luxury? I'll decorate, and I'll decorate any way I damned please!" "There," Watty chortled. "Now can you confront reality or not, dear Nels?" For a moment Rhinelander's eyes threatened to explode out of his head. His cheeks worked like bellows. He glared at the pair with hate brimming inside him. He wanted to smash their heads. He wanted to kill. To shut them up. To kill. To kill. To kill -- But he managed to get control of his emotions. After all, he had Caul to consider. And the numbered bank account. He lowered his sweating body back to the couch as Iris paced to the other side of the pergola, beating her fists against her thighs. Rather nonsensically, too, Rhinelander thought. Ah, things were calming down. A T that moment Watty noisily sucked some meat from a duckling leg. "You can't face reality, Nels. Really you can't. Few can. Care to debate?" And, unreasonably, Rhinelander exploded again: "Yes, damn it, Watty. I'll debate with you, you smug wastrel." "You see?" Watty pointed with the bone. "I, at least, know where I'm going. Nowhere. Whereas you, destined for the same goal, think you're going somewhere. That is precisely what I mean about reality. Take this morning. "Two vertiracers collided at the rally. Bloody goo all over the firing pad. A crowd gathered, bugeyed. Why? Because, Nels, no one could actually believe that two human beings had been jellied. The people stared at the remains until they convinced themselves of it. Then they went away. In an hour I'll wager every one of them was certain again that he could never be jellied because those two wretches weren't jellied either -- it was all some sort of dismal dream. The mind simply refuses to accept some things, and invents all sorts of clever excuses for not doing so. Your mind, for example, refuses to accept two basic facts. One, that you have flimsy artistic tastes. Two, that you have no real business instinct. Therefore your gallery is, and always will be, a monumental flop, sustained by the funds that Iris pours in." "And do I pour them in!" Iris shrieked. "Oh, my God, do I!" "I could kill you," Rhinelander said. "I could, Watty." "Do you think that that surprises me?" Rhinelander stormed to his feet, bent toward Watty. "What if I admitted all you said? That so far I've never amounted to anything much? What if I said, all right, I know I exhibit second-rate items but now I'm on to something of quality. Now I'm going to fight and scheme until I get my hands on it?" "Something of quality?" Watty was skeptical. "What might that be?" "More paintings by Joe Caul." Never before had Rhinelander seen Watty show astonishment. "I've heard of the Caul things. Are there more than five?" "There may be, if I can unlock a numbered bank account in Switzerland." "Impossible, Nels, old boy." "All right," Rhinelander said tightly. "I agree. See, I'm realistic. But you have the right connections, Watty. And enough money. You could unlock the personnel dossier behind that account. If you wanted to do it badly enough. If you wanted to see whether or not I'd fail." Rhinelander's eyes narrowed now as he tried to gauge the effectiveness of his goad, his dare. "Would you like to gamble on my ineptitude, Watty? If you would, unlockthe account. That's all I ask." "It might be amusing to watch you fail." "Take a chance, Watty?" Watty threw back his head and laughed. "Give me the number in the morning." Rhinelander. "Thank you, Watty," he said as his mind ticked over a hundred cruel tortures he would enjoy inflicting on his brother-in-law in return for this particular bit of groveling. Emotions and luck had thrown Watty's help his way. Rhinelander felt a little stronger for having chanced and won. But he was deeply ashamed, too, because his emotions had been laid bare. Chewing on a piece of duckling as the rheostats began to fade out the sunsets, he heard Iris approach, her heels ticking on the paving. His eyes were large, wet, carefully empty of emotion. "There will be a party, Nels," Iris said. "It's my money." "There had better not be." "There will be, there will be, the will be," he whispered, almost like a prayer. Rhinelander stuck his fingers in the pneumatic tubes of the sanitary unit next to his couch. Liquid jets and brushes cleaned off the duckling grease. He somehow felt a thousand miles away from this witch with green hair. "I don't wish to talk about it any more." But even as he promised himself that one day he would kill Iris and Watty, he also realized he would never have the courage to do it. Small triumph only, he thought. Better than none, though. Watty think's I'll fail. Reality? I can face it well enough. He'll see. Still, the mixture of hate and doubt assailed him. Iris went shrieking off to consult Yoggemeyer, Watty to shoot As the last of the festering light died behind the lattices Rhinelander lay panting on the couch, rationalizing himself into believing that more Caul canvases would be worth all this. TN the exalted orbits of leisure and finance in which Atwater Pope revolved, bribery was not bribery. It was a cordial cocktail at a wheel lounge spinning in space five hundred miles above Cape Fear. It was an exploratory luncheon at an inn among pine trees just outside Olde Manhattan Metropolis National Forest. It was a process in which the briber (never called that, of course) made a polite request, and the briber sent four or five dozen messages via the communications mirrors whizzing around Earth, then suggested certain discreet investments. After a short interval, which allowed the bribee to get answers and the briber to gather up a small sinking fund of several millions, a yachting party was arranged in the ionosphere. Matters were brought to fruition over iced tonics on the infrared deck. Although the proceedings were wholly dishonest from start to finish, at least they were genteel. It took Watty eight and a half weeks to unlock the secret of #-#. And in those fifty-nine days the printing presses of the world hammered out matte finish reproductions of Picturs I through #, in twelve colors, on press runs upA news service ran a simulpix of a Tibetan monk examining a print of Pictur # which had found its way into the crystal fastness on the back of a steel packass in the summer supply caravan. Aborigines (what few were left) and intelligent school boys (even fewer) carried Joe Caul prints around with them, dreadfully fascinated. Earth crowned a new god of canvas, one whose work it could not quite understand. Editorials and clerical proclamations decried the veiled horror of the new messiah of art. But not a single voice denied the awful something that was the truth of the pictures, pictures which pirate lithograph houses had to spew out by the bale in order to keep up with the demand. No one seemed to know the whereabouts of Joe Caul, at least publicly. This was due to the remarkable circumstance that no one, apparently, wished to find Joe Caul. If he were anything like his works, the unspoken feeling ran, best that he be left alone. people there is bound to be at least one Isaac Nels Rhinelander. He'd waited eight and a half weeks. He'd groveled before that. Now he was on the trail. IV r T'HE State of Industrial Jersey had an output amounting to dent population of twenty-eight. Rhinelander had to hire a lowpaid ranger from the forestry service at Olde Central to lead him into the wilderness of towering automated factories, all alike except for their name signs and their products which went shooting, cased, to every land via underground pneumatic systems. Industrial Jersey sprawled out beneath a depressing blanket of smog and drizzle. Even the ranger got lost twice in the empty cement canyons before he brought Rhinelander to Yummydinners Ltd. The one clear, traceable name written by Joe Caul when he had filled out the personnel dossier for Geneva Credit Depository six months ago was the name Hubert Elk. This appeared in a column headed Personal References. Beside the name, Caul had scrawled: lended me  for paints. Other vital sections -- Current Address, Current Employer, Current Cable Code -- Caul had left blank, shunning public attention. Well, now he had public attention, and Rhinelander had Hubert Elk, a portly man who shut off one lever marked Broasted Gooselet in Artichokes Yummydinner and yanked another stencilled Tomato Surprise Under Glass Yummydinner. Fidgety with impatience -- Elk refused to be hurried -- Rhinelander watched the processes underway along the two-mile floor of the food works, six stories below the small bubble of an office. At one side of the vast cavern mammoth dump bins poured soya pods into funnels which led to hooded conveyors whose escape valves squirted occasional puffs of red steam. On the opposite side of the cavern, claw forks stacked bright cartons of Gooselet Yummydinners onto skids which were then blasted down distribution tubes with small rocket charges. When Elk switched from production of one Yummydinner to another the dump-bins continued to pour out soya pods but the packaged goods which emerged had become Tomato Surprises, plastic glass bells included. "About Joe Caul" Rhinelander dragged his gaze away from the belches of red steam which reminded him of Pictur #. "You are the Hubert Elk with whom Joe Caul was once -- ah -- associated?" "Right, that's me." Elk picked his teeth. "Owner and sole operator of Yummydinners. Caul used to work for me." He glanced at Rhinelander's enameled card again. "Art dealer, huh? I heard something about Caul and his pictures. He used to paint around here, too. Why?" "As an art dealer, I wish to develop -- ah -- greater public appreciation of his remarkable talents. I wish to locate him. So that I can purchase more of his pictures." t'LK guffawed. From behind a bank of instruments he dragged a small canvas whose subject was a water spaniel, done with syrupy realism in garish tones of yellow and rust. Rhinelander recoiled from its wetterthan-life tongue. "Oh, come now, Mr. Elk. Caul didn't paint that." "He certainly did," Elk said testily. "I watched him do it. After all, he worked for me, didn't he? Plus eight or nine other factories." "Not as an artist, surely?" "Nope. Janitor. Swept out the office here." Elk waved at the clanking conveyors far below. "What else could he do in a place like this?" "Y ou seriously expect me to believe Joe Caul painted works of this sort?" "If you don't believe me, here's the signature. You have to look close. Down in the corner. 'Joe Caul.' " Aghast, Rhinelander saw that it was so. Elk turned smug. "Didn't I tell you? He painted dogs, mostly. When it wasn't dogs, it was angels and martyrs. Caul wasn't too bright, you understand. How could a man be, and be a regular resident of this place? I haven't seen any of his pictures all the papers are talking about, except for one they ran in black and white. Didn't look like Joe Caul's stuff to me, at least not the Joe Caul I knew before the accident." "Accident?" Rhinelander's cheeks quivered. "What sort of accident? When?" "Sub-reactor on the synthesizer belt vibrated its shield bolts loose. Caul had swept up here and was on his way over to Blumenthal Better Ball Bearings to do the same. He got burned in the atom shower. Of course we rushed him to the autodoctor to get the charge neutralized. Only trouble was, I found out later the machine was due for overhaul that next week. Some of its tapes were a mite worn. Caul didn't seem bad off after the accident, but he had trouble sleeping nights. Slept like a top before. I was going to cash his compensation for him, send him to a clinic to check the work the autodoc had done -- hell of a bother, but it's these Goddamn bureaucratic laws we got -- but by then Caul was committed." "Committed?" Rhinelander's eyes began to bulge. His nostrils grew big as dimes. You don't mean to some sort of therapeutic farm?" "None other than Thlex," said Elk, with another smug nod. "Narcotics? Caul was on narcotics?" (That would explain some of the visions. Some, but by no means all.) "How did you find this out?" "Why, Caul told me. He had dreams, he said. Couldn't sleep, but he had dreams. Imagine that. So he robbed one of those robopushers always parked around the turnpike entrances, and got hooked. That was two years ago." TLK rose and peered at a pressure gauge imbedded in a wall bank. "Hell, I was glad to see him leave Industrial Jersey. He wasn't the only one had insomnia. Soon as I brought him back from the autodoc I couldn't get more than two hours a night myself. Toss, turn, thinking of my inlaws, production problems, worry, worry, worry. Must of felt responsible for Caul's trouble. Anyway, when he committed himself to try and shake the habit, I began to sleep sound, again. Shows you how the Goddamn spenders who run this country can make a man feel guilty if he doesn't wipe the nose of any stumblebum who sweeps up his shop. Caul's probably still in Thlex for all I know. Good riddance. After he was burned, I couldn't even stand to look at him." For a moment Elk's eyes looked far beyond Rhinelander to something ghastly. Then the mood passed. "Excuse me now, mister. Time for the three o'clock changeover." Rhinelander attempted to thank Elk but the latter was occupied with another lever labeled Grape Aphrodisia Gelatin Yummydinner, With Extra Vine Leaves Included. Rhinelander let himself out of the office bubble. He ran down the automatic stairs to the exit where the ranger was waiting for him in the rain. As they walked along the ranger said, "Find what you were after?" "I most certainly did." In his mind, Rhinelander saw himself delivering punches to Watty Pope's groin. "Let's hurry. I must catch a flight for Kentucky as soon as possible. I -- good heavens! Look at that!" On a corner between automated factories a man with a huge red beard was selling newssheets from a portable stand. Not actually selling them. Merely standing there holding an ear trumpet to the right side of his head while the rain turned the newssheets spongy. All at once the bearded man caught sight of Rhinelander and the ranger. He scuttled out of sight around the corner of a factory, kicking over his stand as he went. The ranger shook his head. "Crazy. Who reads papers out here, I wonder?" "These aren't even papers," Rhinelander said, stooping to pick up the top sheet. All the letters including the masthead were greeked. The reverse side of the page was blank. The bundle underneath was compressed excelsior. Rhinelander felt a shiver of fright chase down his spine. He looked around the corner. The red-bearded man had vanished into the rain and the empty concrete distances. Thlex who had time to talk with Rhinelander was a Second Assistant Staff Recreationist named Dr. T. T. Wu. And he clearly demonstrated that he was none too happy about the assignment by reminding Rhinelander two seconds after they met that Thlex received a minimum of ten thousand patients a week. Rhinelander could well believe it. At Central Administration in Lexington City he had made a generous donation of some of Iris's money. It had then taken him two hours by rotor to reach Dr. Wu's section, five counties away, because nearly three-quarters of the state was occupied by the national narcotics hospital. The gently rolling landscape, all sunlit green hills and long grass, swarmed with thousands of figures in white gowns wandering to and fro like extras in some epic from Hollywood-on-the-Tiber. Dr. Wu's irritation showed on his young, lemon-colored face. He and Rhinelander had to walk two miles before they found an unoccupied bench, where they could chat. "I can give you only ten minutes, please, Mr. Rhinelander," Wu said. "At ten I am directing six hundred of our inmates in a Shakespearian therapy." Wu pinched his upper nose. "Going badly, too. Our lumber mill was supposed to have delivered the Birnam Wood costumes last Tuesday. All I get is excuses, excuses, excuses. Let's see." Wu dug into his smock for a card. "Hmmm. Quite a substantial donation. I'm no public relations man, but I suppose I must cooperate." Rhinelander said irritably, "I had hoped the donation might facilitate -- " "When we release a thousand patients a week only to get ten thousand?" Wu's little chestnut eyes snapped in the Kentucky sun. "God pity our staff if we ever have a depression, Mr. Rhinelander. Then we'll really be jammed. Now we have only the social cases. Those in the exurbs who try it for kicks and then -- but time is wasting." Another glance at the card. "Caul, was it? Ah, yes, Caul, Caul. Low status, I recall. No education, no money, no children, no mistresses. No reason to become addicted. Here three weeks. Had to release him." "Cured?" Rhinelander was disappointed. A confirmed addiction might explain the haunting, evil quality of the Picturs, but a reconstructed addiction -- Wu shook his head. "Totally hopeless. Besides, he caused riots." Rhinelander's eyebrows shot up. "Riots?" "Yes, riots. Among his village mates. When Caul arrived they began to complain of sleeplessness. As did Caul himself. Caul was completely uncooperative. Stayed up all night painting. Big, psychotic pictures. Three of them while he was here. One of our inmates looked at Caul's work and went into a screaming fit. 'I know what that is!' he screamed. Two nights later he murdered three matrons and escaped over the Ohio. He drowned trying to swim to a roadside fix stand on the other side. "The man had been partially cured, too," Wu added snappishly. "Well, I simply don't have time to stand for such regressive nonsense. So after the patients began to riot -- the first riot broke out one night when Caul displayed his canvases after mess -- I obtained an executive order. I crated his nightmarish work and shipped it, and Caul as well, to the place we send all our incurables."- a bee which was buzzing and looping around his nose. His whole body erupted in perspiration. His heart jackhammered under layers of fat. Dr. Wu fidgeted, stared at his sandals, at the sky, at his nails, at several inmates acting out their hostilities by playing freeway drivers in a nearby glade. Rhinelander thought: What luck! A physician too idealistic by half, too caught up and concerned with his charges to know, even now, what a find he once had in the person and the paintings of Joe Caul. Carefully Rhinelander said: "To what place do you send your incurables, Dr. Wu?" Wu stood up. "Denver. The Monastery of Positive Thinking. It's for incipient and developed insanity. Caul reached the latter state shortly upon arrival. If you'll pardon me, I must check up on Birnam Wood. Your donation is appreciated, but it still hardly makes a dent. Send me a new lumber-mill foreman instead." Off he went into the dappled sunlight falling through the magnolias. Starting up a hillside toward the rotor park, Rhinelander got a jolt. Stenciled against the sky, an attendant wheeled an empty patient's chair. The attendant had something resembling a jeweler's loupe screwed into his left eye. His reddish beard flapped in the hot wind. Rhinelander began to run. "Wait, you! Wait just a moment! Stand still, I tell you." But the bearded man was younger and more agile than Rhinelander. He tipped over his chair, flung off his white smock and jackrabbited away over another hill. Rhinelander puffed after him, but got only as far as the chair whose wheel revolved lazily and caught the sun in chrome glints. He was panting too hard to run further. Leaves stirred in the woods into which the figure had vanished. Rhinelander wished he were nearer an analytical lab that could, for a fee, get hold of the perspiration index left on the chair's handgrips. Who was that damned spook with the red beard? Some flunky Watty had hired to check on the success or failure of Rhinelander's search? Yes, that must be! Rhinelander mopped his face and pursed his lips in a little smile. He could feel his blood pressure mounting as he thought of Watty and Iris but he calmed himself by thinking: Denver. Denver. When he shook a fist at the blue sky, it was the fist of a victor. V victory was so complete he couldn't resist sending Watty a message before he took off from Thlex. He reported his destination, reported that he had located Joe Caul, reported that within a day he would most certainly have Joe Caul signed to the exclusive management and representation of The Rhinelander Galleries. See how Watty liked that. As the sonicliner whined down over Denver through a sundown sky all gold and royal purple, Rhinelander munched a Digest-otab provided by the stewardesses to help get rid of the sixteen courses of the flight meal. He reflected that soon he would prove once and for all that he was really a clever and resourceful person. A short twelve miles by limoubus from Denver and he reached the sprawling onion towers of the Monastery of Positive Thinking. It was twilight. Motorized doves wheeled above the chapel. The carillon rang out the strains of Smiles. As Rhinelander entered the gate he saw a platoon of the brothers marching briskly through a cloister. Barefoot, each wore impeccable flannel habilaments. Each was whistling in an optimistic way. Rhinelander had heard about the order. Its brethren were mainly hopelessly insane advertising executives. Their tranquility was achieved through the use of drugs. Nevertheless, the entire scene had a refreshing spiritual air which Rhinelander enjoyed. A novice asked him to wait in the garden until Evening Plansboard was finished. Rhinelander sat on a marble bench in the piney mountain evening at the foot of a bronze statue of the great hospitaler himself, J. Walter Thorngate. The hands of the figure were widespread in a gesture of invitation to the figure of an ailing consumer lying at his feet. Before he knew it Rhinelander was joined by a stately monk with a crew cut and horn-rims. He introduced himself in a cheerful way as Brother Buzz, the Vice President in Charge of Intravenous Equipment. "Your inquiry isn't precisely in my bailiwick," said Brother Buzz with a warm smile, "but since we're a team here, all involved in caring for the incurable and so forth, I'm sure I can help put a little zing back in your swing." "Thank you, thank you," Rhinelander replied. "I'd like to talk with one of your patients. I believe his name is Caul." "Joe? A swell guy. But then they're all swell guys." Brother Buzz, however, could not suppress a gentle frown. "Unfortunately he's our unhappiest ward. Complains constantly that the fellows on the team think pure white thoughts. But of course we do." Brother Buzz laid his arm across Rhinelander's shoulders. "We've zeroed in on the great truths, my friend. When we send positive thinking up the flagpole, every man on the team salutes. Actually you won't be able to see Joe until after the morning meal. The patients have retired for the night." "Oh. But he's here, isn't he?" "Of course."  ' careful. "Brother Buzz, may I ask what may seem a question. Do you and your brothers have any contact with the outside world? That is to say, I mean specifically the world of art. You see, I'm an art dealer." "The world of art? No, we're totally divorced from the world outside. We have no paintings here except for an original Rockwell in the narthex. However -- " Brother Buzz shook his head -- "I'm sorry you have made the trip for nothing, because that work is not for sale at any price." Rhinelander suppressed a giggle. "All I want is to talk to Caul, please." "Then you shall." Brother Buzz stood up and fished among the folds of his robe. "I'll show you where you can sleep. I regret the surroundings are modest, but our order believes that existence should be one single, harmonious ball of wax. In the meantime, you may be interested in this message. Our supply rotor dropped it along with our consignment of Gruel Yummydinners shortly after six." Rhinelander did not untold tne slip until Brother Buzz had led him to the guest cell, and drawn Rhinelander's Gruel Yummydinner from the dumbwaiter. A beam of red sunlight came through the bars of the cell and lit up the letters of the message like flame: "God damn," Rhinelander said. Then more vehemently, "Oh, God damn her." The arrogant message triggered him like a bomb. He raged and stamped up and down his cell with his mind a turmoil of humiliation and rage. Redecorate his house, would she? Against his wishes, would she? Bitch! Flagrant, arrogant bitch. Her money, her money, her money, he sneered to himself. Oh, yes -- but not for long. Not when I sign Caul tomorrow! TN a spasm of fury, Rhinelander kicked over the plastic wash stand with its metal bowl, towel, straight razor and bar of shaving soap. Then he stamped on the bowl until he bent it totally out of shape. And Watty, he thought. Still thinks I'll fail. Still, still, still. Rhinelander hurled the closed razor at the wall with a low scream of rage. Only the sound of the carillon pealing out Happy Days Are Here Again over the mountains prevented Rhinelander's noise from upsetting the entire monastery. At last, sobbing, he sank down on his pallet and blew out the single candle. But he could not sleep. He wanted to sleep. Something seemed to be sucking at his mind as he lay in the cool dark. Pulling and sucking and draining, until he could hardly move. He felt limp, exhausted. But his mind refused to accept this exhaustion. Instead, it conjured up tortures and indecencies and obscenities and cruelties committed upon the persons of Iris and Watty, tortures and indecencies and obscenities and cruelties of a magnitude which startled even Rhinelander's own soggy, hate-purpled self. At last, snuffling and weeping, he fell into a fitful light sleep. Yet in that stage, foggy demons flew around inside his head. "You," the voice was whispering. A wet, loose-lipped sound. "You, you." Rhinelander sat bolt upright. He was bathed in cold sweat. Through the cell window a shaft of icy moonlight fell on the cell floor. Rhinelander tottered toward the door. There was a horrid crawling on his spine. His hand trembled as he reached for the latchstring. When Rhinelander opened the door and shrank back, his visitor shambled inside. The visitor stood in the moonbeam, spittle gleaming on his lips. Rhinelander's legs turned to jelly. The visitor was a bent, flaccid man in his middle forties, pale with a face like suet. He stood looking foolishly at Rhinelander. His big eyes seemed to have caverns behind them. His feet, sticking out of shabby gray work trousers, were dirty, as if he were too imbecilic to give himself good care. Then Rhinelander saw the fresh daubs of color on the toes, on the trousers, on the tattered shirt. Finally, he saw what the man held, as the man brought it forward like a Mongoloid child displaying a bauble. "Joe Caul," Rhinelander said. "Thankee," said Joe Caul. "Ye helped me paint again. Many thanks." And he showed the small canvas. face and fell shrieking against the cold stone wall. "Turn it around, for Christ's sake. It's filthy." Joe Caul blinked. "That's queer. A man calling himself dirt." "What do you -- no, don't come any closer! What do you mean?" "I painted what I seed in your head tonight. I don't see things in the heads of them monks. They got pure white heads. Drugs or suthin'. What's wrong with a feller paintin' what he sees, huh?" "What do you mean, you saw that?" Rhinelander howled. Caul blinked innocently. "Why just like it always is, since the burn back when I was with Elk. I can't sleep no more. But when I close my eyes, I see. Finally I figured out what I seen. It must be inside heads. It must be," Caul repeated in his pleading whine. "Don't noplace in the world have crawly sights like that. One of the fellers at Thlex unnerstood. He unnerstood why I had to have drugs. Only way I know to get rid of this." Caul wagged the picture again. Rhinelander retched. "Only way's to paint it. Jesus -- " Caul was nearly weeping in the steel-blue moonlight now -- "wisht I could paint a dog again. All I can see is this here. Awful. Take it!" Caul thrust the painting forward at Rhinelander. His voice shrilled up a note. "Jesus, take it, mister. I don' want it, I can't stand it. That's why I sended the big ones to a name I seen in a directory book. The feller at Thlex, my friend, he said I could get money. I filled out some papers, he showed me how, except he was so high, I don't guess we did a very good job. Guess I got a bank somewhere. Don't know where, though. Money. I guess so, too. Except the feller unnerstood and swum all the way to Ohio and got killed hunting a new fix. He couldn't stand it either." A LL at once Caul's mind ran down like a broken clock. He stood, just stood. His arms dangled. His lower lip made a plateau from which saliva dripped, evil and iridescent under the weird mountain moon. "I see," Rhinelander choked, talking half to himself. "The burns -- the incomplete treatment -- you look inside heads -- " A stupid, pleading smile twitched Caul's lips. "You unnerstand. You a friend?" "No, I'm not your friend. Christ, no!" "I can't he'p what I see," Caul mumbled. "I see it, I got to purge it out or I'd kill myself." Caul looked down at his most recent work. "Thankee. I wanted to paint again because some of what I seen was still inside my head, but -- I guess -- it takes a dirty head to get it really stirred again. Wasn't bad enough until you come. Just bad, not bad enough." "A dirty head," Rhinelander said, with a witless giggle. He could hardly speak. "You -- that's why -- the Picturs -- they look so familiar, but -- dirty heads. They're -- all of us?" "Please," said Caul, holding up the painting. "Give me that thing," Rhinelander screamed. He snatched the canvas from Caul's hands, scrabbled on the stone floor, opened the razor and began to slash, crisscross, with great outraged strokes. Slash, slash, slash. Anything to eradicate the putrescent vision of his own mind which Joe Caul had somehow seen tonight, seen and sucked out and transferred to virulent, shadowy life on his little scrap of canvas. Slash, slash, slash. Rhinelander struck back and forth like a demon. "What you doin', mister?" Caul caught Rhinelander by the shoulder with one loose hand. "Hey, there! What -- " Unable to control himself, Rhinelander spun around. His arm whipped back and forth in a continuation of the hysterical attack upon the canvas. The razor gleamed cold as death and sliced clean through Joe Caul's jugular. Caul screamed. He lurched into a corner of the cell, kneeling in his own bubbling blood. Something blue-white exploded from the corridor. Rhinelander grew conscious of a babble of voices he had heard for some time. Then a louder voice exclaimed: "A wright, awright, how was I to know he'd kill him? I got the shot, you can go in now an' -- quit shoving, dammit! I'm a representative of the press." Rhinelander staggered to another corner, unable to look at the twitching, bleeding thing he had killed. Through his blurred eyesight swam the face of Brother Buzz. Then another face with a red fan beard. Monks were tussling with the intruder, who had a camera and was shouting about being manhandled: "Sigma. Charley Sigma, Topflite Press Service. Legit? Sure I'm legit! Been following this bird for days. Mystery of Joe Caul. Got a tip in Geneva about a cracked numbered account. What a story. 'The cesspool of the human mind on canvas.' Awright, awright, quit shoving. I know my constitutional rights. Where's the communication center in this dump?" Mine, Rhinelander thought hideously. He had slashed the canvas but could not slash its image out of his thoughts. Purple, whirling, obscene. Mine! "A little tranquility, brothers," said the voice of Brother Buzz with conference-room authority. Rhinelander felt the blessed needle pierce his arm to bring the blessed dark. VI Watty seldom went to the observatory in the villa because none of them were interested in astronomy. But the observatory sat upon the highest point of their property, overlooking a distant highway, so tonight the three of them stood by the balustrade, watching. Far off, lights by the thousands burned in a crawling pattern along the highway. Rhinelander turned his back, feeling chilly, although the evening temperature was over seventy. He didn't care to watch. Iris had insisted, however, The psychomentalist who cleared Rhinelander of accidental homoslaughter at his hearing had also insisted. Watty, never at a loss, chuckled. "Did you see the sheets tonight, Nels old boy? Five hundred thousand copies of Professor Hatlo's new edition of A Bioglossary of Great Artists destroyed at the end of the press run? Poor Hatlo only finished revising it three weeks ago to include Joe Caul. And the reviews! What an about-face." "Vile," Iris breathed. "Those -- pictures." Her sticky lips twisted with loathing. "They couldn't come from any one of us." "Oh, no?" Watty laughed again. He lifted his hand to indicate the moving chain of lights. "My dear, they're from all of us. Or were." "When is Swallows's funeral?" Rhinelander asked. Swallows had hung himselff "Tomorrow," said Watty. "What fools we were," Rhinelander said with another long shudder. "Amen," Iris said. "For once we agree, darling." "Oh, no," said Watty. "A week ago we weren't fools. We were sensitive men and women. Tonight we've become fools again. Incidentally, Nels. Although you did find your friend Caul, I still consider that you failed to win our little challenge. Nels? Ah, well." Rhinelander stood rigid, smiling a little now. The procession of lights had come to a halt. A red smear leaked up on the horizon. It grew redder and taller. Soon it revealed the fifty thousand who had marched out of the city to burn the five Picturs of Joe Caul. # Star Shelf York Times published a fine article by Isaac Asimov recapitulating the role of science fiction of the recent past in the development of our present technology. The question that Asimov raised was, with so many of its basic plot concepts translated into reality, where does SF go from here? To an aficianado, the answer is obvious. The sky is not the limit. The tremendous breakthroughs in all branches of investigation are opening up fictional vistas that are positively staggering in their potential. The impact of all these innovations on social, political and economic levels presents a huge challenge to the author brave enough to attempt a picture of future life in a world formed in the mold of new scientific achievement. Of course, to us this is nothing new. Such trailblazers as Asimov's own Caves of Steel, Pohl-Kornbluth's Gravy Planet, Bester's Demolished Man set a pattern for exploring fantastic environments from the viewpoint of day-to-day living. However, another interesting point raised by Asimov: Just as we watched the science fiction stories of our fathers become matter-of-fact, so we can see our own favorite SF themes graduate into the realm of everyday reality. The rocket is fast following the path of the flying machine, the horseless carriage and the submersible boat. The sober space timetable issued by ground of recent super-imaginative fiction: two-man orbital flight, three-man flight, spaceship construction in earth orbit, orbital moon flight, moon landings. And all this projected only slightly more than a half decade into the future! Living proof of this is a new series of boys' books by Donald A. Wollheim. Just a short span of years ago, the words "American Rocket Society" conjured up a picture in the public eye of a group of wildeyed, half loony visionaries, completely out of touch with reality, living in a dream world of their own. Now along comes this series, replete with ideas, concepts and themes which were utterly laughable then to Mr. Averageman and they read like, not today's, but yesterday's newspaper. Sic transit yesterday's science fiction. Mike Mars has already receded from the future to the past, alongside Tom Swift, The Rover Boys and the long list of Verne heroes. all by Donald A. Wollheim, Doubleday  Co. Inc. have qualified as adult SF fare in subject matter if not in treatment five years ago, are carefully geared to reality. Wollheim's intensive research has lent an air of authenticity to the stories that should impart considerable knowledge to young, would-be astronauts -- of both sexes. One beneficial result of the Russian lead in the space-race has been the elimination of the swarthy, bearded foreigner as the engineer of plot conflict. Wollheim has substituted a moneyand power-hungry father and publicity-hungry son as the villainous team. Not much more edible, perhaps, but slightly more credible. The individual titles are indicative of content and each volume is complete, although there is a crude tie-in at the end of each. Rating: y # Another example of fiction outmoded by actuality is the following item, penned in # but just now available here. by Paul Berna. Abelard-Schuman. ioned the French as winners of the space contest. He thus joins the ranks of a host of other foggy crystal ball owners. The story action is viewed through the eyes of a twelve-yearold, son of a remote-control expert, cloistered along with a thousand others in a secret base. Security is strict but youngsters bent on exploration can slip mouselike through the tightest checkpoints. Berna's concept of a burgeoning space project is, to say the least, naive, as are his estimates of costs. But this is easily forgiven. Eight years of hindsight can make an Einstein of anyone. The story, outdated though it is, is written with Gallic verve and sparkles with a spirit of adventure and wonder. Young readers will find the outlook of the French adult a refreshing contrast to that of the usual American. Rating: Then there is the ageless story, in which the author places the action so far in the future that there is little danger of scientific developments catching up with the yarn for quite some time. ton Lesser. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. this category. And even though there is a continuing revolution in computer design and techniques, there is likewise little danger of any foreseeable parallel of Lesser's basic gimmick', a planetsize, self-operative computer of advanced design. A joint project of a Galactic confederation similar to the UN, the Star Brain was built to settle all disputes between worlds. To supply the background for the story, it has ruled against Earth in a dispute with an alien race. Without going into story detail, suffice it to report that it is a study of the contrast between the good and the bad inherent in human conduct and how such a contrast might baffle alien intelligences. Rating    Vi Books for youngsters are among the best gauges of technological advancement. Dikty's collection, believe it or not, contains not a single story that was written for a juvenile audience. All, without exception, were written with the highly informed adult reader in mind. Such is the pace of our scientific progress. ited by T. E. Dikty. Frederick Fell, Inc. odd assemblage of real McCoy and real McCorn. Of course, back in the '#s, such as Manly Wade Wellman's Men Against the Stars read like pure heart rather than # hokum. However, most of the others are excellent. Kornbluth's That Share of Glory, Correy's... And a Star to Steer Her By, Abernathy's startling concept of The Canal Builders and Jameson's Blind Man's Buff are all typical of the unlimited horizon of SF. Rating:  Asimov himself is a master of the timeless story. Of his dozen or so novels, none is in any danger of immediate obsolescence. He is his own best example of what an unfettered imagination can create from trends or developments that are barely emerging in our own time. None of his novels is more recent than half a decade past, yet each is a fresh-cut gem. Doubleday  Co., Inc. present crop of SF devotees an enormous service by reissuing three of Asimov's most popular novels: The Currents of Space, The Stars Like Dust and Pebble in the Sky. All are big novels, with Galactic Empires as backdrops and inventions beyond imagination as commonplaces yet the emphasis is on little, ordinary people. Rating: Don't miss them. Doubleday  Co., Inc. an admirable example of fact encroaching on fiction in our specialized field. I'd be a wealthy man if I had a dollar for every fictional hole in the Earth's crust, from Verne's and Burroughs's to the shiveringly ingenious one being drilled from below by Arthur C. Clarke. But, frankly, I don't recall any fictional excavations of real depth beneath the ocean floor. Quite a few books, from Coblentz's Sunken World to the aquatic series, have envisioned limited penetration of the undersea crust but all have fallen short of the audacity of planning exhibited by the "Mohole Project". (Mohorivicic Discontinuity, or "Moho" for short, "Hole"  Mohole.) The project proposes to drill a midocean hole some # feet down through solid rock to reach earth's mantle. Won't opening such a hole create a volcano or cause earthquakes? Of course not, the author says, and proves his point. He also on land and water and offers sucha plethora of fascinating geological information that even a casual reader will soon find himself completely absorbed in an enthralling book. This is author Bascom's own do-it-yourself, since he is also Director of the Mohole Project. He has managed to pour his own knowledge and enthusiasm in such great measure into his book that it qualifies unqualifiedly as un-down-puttable. Robert P. Mills. Doubleday  Co., Inc. a collection from last year's crop of FSF yarns that is as well balanced as a circus aerialist. Almost all of the seventeen items are topnotch, with the following as tip toppers: Robert F. Young's Nikita Eisenhower Jones, a starstruck Polynesian; Richard McKenna's Mine Own Ways, supercivilization's field anthropologists survive or die in primitive manhood rituals: The Rainbow Gold, Jane Rice's superbly comic backwoods pot-o'-gold story and Ward Moore's The Fellow Who Married the Max ill Girl, a sensitive account of the plight of a dimwitted (by his race's standards) alien, his green thumb and his exile on Earth. Rating:  by Harry Harrison. Pyramid Books. highly polished as his striking title, envisions a society in which crime literally does not pay. Only the lone-wolf super-criminal can buck the superbly equipped and organized law-enforcement agencies with success. And thereby hangs his tale: set a thief to catch a thief. The top-secret Special Corps does just that, since the devious workings of the criminal mind differ from that of the conscientious cop. Harrison's clever yarn explores a fascinating facet of the future, crime detection and prevention, and though pure entertainment, underlines SF's role in providing speculative thought about potential problems. Rating:  If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers -- chal'egng ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! ; if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. ' Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose ! #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer?  Ti , I  V Ray Bradbury returns will by.Cordwainr S mith m . If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" In your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space Itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! j if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # hig issues of IF! I enclose S#. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address. City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter If yen wish by Frederik Pohl by Donald E. Westlake by Cordwainer Smith by Gordon R. Dickson by Ray Bradbury by Bill Doede by Jim Harmon by Margaret St. Clair by Sydney Van Scyoc by Willy Ley by the Editor by Floyd C. Gale Next issue (December) on sale October #th The Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregularly shaped galaxy which is a satellite of our own. The Cloud contains the star S Doradus, some # times brighter than the Sun, the hottest star known. Publisher Editor Science Editor Art Director bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. # per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. nual prizes for worthy contributions to science fiction will be awarded. One of them will, as usual, go to somebody for the category called "best dramatic performance on television or motion pictures." If past performance is any criterion, it will go to a television show that about one voter out of four has seen, and fewer than half of those really care for. The unhappy fact is that for this prize there is very little competition. Science fiction on television is bad enough -- if there is an area of TV where Commissioner Minow's term "wasteland" indubitably applies, it is in its science-fiction dramas -- and as for good science-fiction movies, there just ain't no sich animal. What was the last good one you saw? Most science-fiction readers have trouble naming anything more recent than The Forbidden Planet... and that was half a dozen years ago. Yet there are plenty of sciencefiction stories in print that seem admirably adapted to motion pictures. Why in the world doesn't some smart Hollywood producer make a few of them? question, and we've gone to some trouble to learn a few of them. The first answer is a single word: Money. There are two kinds of motion pictures being made today, the very big ones and the very little. The very big ones represent such a titanic investment of capital and effort that the producers will not bet except on a fixed race. That is why there are Starting in November  be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of tie book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe L.B.W. ! Scribe L.B.W. i San Jose, California  Please send me the free book. The Mastery J I of Life, which explains how I may learn to j i use my faculties and powers of mind. ' i ' Name i J Address  !City ! # remakes of ancient stories; the producers reason that if it made money once it will make money again, and let the other fellow take a chance on something new. The trouble with that, from our point of view, is that few really big sf movies have ever been made. Thus there isn't much to look for in the way of remakes. So barring an occasional courageous (and thus, in the judgment of his peers, crazy) experimenter, we can't hope for a great deal in the way of high-budget science-fiction movies. That leaves us the Grade B artists. To produce a quickie for distribution as the second half of a drive-in's double bill (and ultimate consumption on The Late, Late Show) costs not much more than fifty thousand dollars. Some of them have been made for even less. This is practically petty cash by Hollywood standards (it represents about a week's pay for an Elizabeth Taylor), and to make it possible every cost is pared to the bone. Shooting time is held to a single week. Rehearsals are very few. Costumes are picked up at Army #s Navy surplus stores; sets are stark, cheap and flimsy. If something goes wrong in a take it may not even be shot over again. The writer (who is often the producer, as well as the director) hastily tinkers up the script to allow the boner, and shooting goes on. In spite of all this it is astonishing how competently the actors act, the directors direct, the photographers shoot and the special-effects men create plausible gadgets. These men and women are highly skilled professionals. They do everything they can. What makes the average cheapie as terribly bad as it is is not the low cost of its production. The trouble is that whatever money does get spent is spent on the wrong story. Ten years or so ago -- in the remote Eocene of television -- we were privileged to sit in on some of the science-fiction programs of that era, Captain Video, Tales of Tomorrow and a couple of others. The average budget of these enterprises was a closely guarded secret, but it was at least an order of magnitude smaller than today's cheapest motion picture. The principal staple of scenery was painted canvas. Stone walls rippled to the touch. Ten dollars' worth of electrical parts had to do as a # synchrotron. Yet there was hardly one of those old TV programs that was not better than most of the lowbudget motion pictures of today! The reason they were good is that the producers had the wit to make an unusual decision. When they wanted science-fiction stories written they took their courage in their hands and employed science-fiction writers write them. Often it was the science-fiction writers themselves -- Sheckley, Sturgeon, Kornbluth and many others -- who prepared the actual shooting script. When the producers could not do that, they employed other script writers, but took the trouble to have them understand what the original story was all about and to convert that story to dramatic presentation... instead of the present custom of throwing everything but the name of one character out of the window and remaking Buck Rogers. stories often rely on rather sophisticated ideas -- "sophisticated" in the sense that they are developed from previous ideas -- and it is not always easy to get everything possible out of them unless the audience has had some background in the field. It does not, however, follow from that that the only way to handle science fiction is to extract its ideas and destroy them. Even if some nuances are missed by the non-specialist public, there's plenty left to provide entertainment and pleasure. There are dozens of good, sound, enjoyable science-fiction stories already in print in science-fiction books and magazines that need hardly the changing of a word, and that would still be # intelligible to anyone capable of reading without moving his lips. Maybe better times are ahead. Right at this moment there are a number of fine science-fiction writers who have turned to TV and motion pictures -- Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Jerome Bixby, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and half a dozen others are in some way or another involved -- and from their efforts we may yet see great things. We also may not, because the producers not only seem to make it a point to have non-sf writers write their science-fiction, but when a science-fiction writer comes along they seem to make it their business to put him to work on a mystery or a Western -- instead of what he can do best of all. Science-fiction doesn't have to be relegated to the part of the drive-in program where the customers quit watching the screen -- but it is likely to go on that way, until some producer discovers that it really has things to say that cannot be said in any Her ancestors were cats. Her heart was human, though, and she gave it once and for all.  were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won. It had never happened before, and it is sure never to happen again, but she did win. She was not even of human extraction. She was catderived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name. Her father's name was C'mackintosh and her name was C'mell. She won her trick against the lawful and assembled Lords of the Instrumentality. It all happened at Earthport, greatest of buildings, smallest of cities, standing twenty-five kilometers high at the Western edge of the Smaller Sea of Earth. Jestocost had an office outside the fourth valve. I sunshine, while most of the other Lords of the Instrumentality did not, so that he had no trouble in keeping the office and the apartments which he had selected. His main office was ninety meters deep, twenty She got the which of the what-she-did, Hid the bell with a blot, she did, But she fell in love with a hominid. Where is the which of the what-she-did? L meters high, twenty meters broad. Behind it was the "fourth valve," almost a thousand hectares in extent. It was shaped helically, like an enormous snail. Jestocost's apartment, big as it was, was merely one of the pigeonholes in the muffler on the rim of Earthport. Earthport stood like an enormous wineglass, reaching from the magma to the high atmosphere. Earthport had been built during mankind's biggest mechanical splurge. Though men had had nuclear rockets since the beginning of consecutive history, they had used chemical rockets to load the interplanetary ion-drive and nuclear-drive vehicles or to assemble the photonic sail-ships for interstellar cruises. Impatient with the troubles of taking things bit by bit into the sky, they had worked find that it ruined whatever countryside it touched in landing. The Daimoni -- people of Earth extraction, who came back from somewhere beyond the stars -- had helped men build it of weatherproof, rustproof, timeproof, stressproof material. Then they had gone away and had never come back. Jestocost often looked around his apartment and wondered what it might have been like when white-hot gas, muted to a whisper, surged out of the valve into his own chamber and the sixty-four other chambers like it. Now he had a back wall of heavy timber, and the valve itself was a great hollow cave where a few wild things lived. Nobody needed that much space any more. The chambers were useful, but the valve did nothing. Pianoforming ships whispered in from the stars; they landed at Earthport as a matter of legal convenience, but they made no noise and they certainly had no hot gases. Jestocost looked at the high clouds far below him and talked to himself, "Nice day. Good air. No trouble. Better eat." Jestocost often talked like that to himself. He was an individual, almost an eccentric. One of the top council of mankind, he had problems, but they were not personal problems. He had a Rembrandt hanging above his bed -- the only Rembrandt known in the world, just as he was possibly the only person who could appreciate a Rembrandt. He had the tapestries of a forgotten empire hanging from his back wall. Every morning the sun played a grand opera for him, muting and lighting and shifting the colors so that he could almost imagine that the old days of quarrel, murder and high drama had come back to Earth again. He had a copy of Shakespeare, a copy of Colegrove and two pages of the Book of Ecclesiates in a locked box beside his bed. Only forty-two people in the universe could read Ancient English, and he was one of them. He drank wine, which he had made by his own robots in his own vineyards on the Sunset coast. He was a man, in short, who had arranged his own life to live comfortably, selfishly and well on the personal side, so that he could give generously and impartially of his talents on the official side. When he awoke on this particular morning, he had no idea that a beautiful girl was about to fall hopelessly in love with him -- that he would find, after a hundred years and more of experience in government, another government on earth just as strong and almost as ancient as fling himself into conspiracy and danger for a cause which he only half understood. All these things were mercifully hidden from him by time, so that his only question on arising was, should he or should he not have a small cup of white wine with his breakfast. On the #rd day of each year, he always made a point of eating eggs. They were a rare treat, and he did not want to spoil himself by having too many, nor to deprive himself and forget a treat by having none at all. He puttered around the room, muttering, "White wine? White wine?" life, but he did not know it. She was fated to win; that part, she herself did not know. Ever since mankind had gone through the Rediscovery of Man, bringing back governments, money, newspapers, national languages, sickness and occasional death, there had been the problem of the underpeople -- people who were not human, but merely humanly shaped from the stock of Earth animals. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, love and die; but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as "homunculi" and gave them a legal status close to animals or robots. Real people from off-world were always called "hominids." Most of the underpeople did their jobs and accepted their half-slave status without question. Some became famous -- C'mackintosh had been the first earthbeing to manage a thousandmeter broad-jump under normal gravity. His picture was seen in a thousand worlds. His daughter, C'mell, was a girly girl, earning her living by welcoming human beings and hominids from the outworlds and making them feel at home when they reached Earth. She had the privilege of working at Earthport, but she had the duty of working very hard for a living which did not pay well. Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the Lords of the Instrumentality had decreed that underpeople -- derived from animal stock -- should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their possessions and the education of their children. If they became bankrupt, they went to the Poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas. It was evident that humanity, having settled all of its own basic problems, was not quite ready to let Earth animals, no matter how much they might be changed, assume a full equality with man. The Lord Jestocost, seventh of that name, opposed the policy. He was a man who had little love, no fear, freedom from ambition and a dedication to his job: but there are passions of government as deep and challenging as the emotions of love. Two hundred years of thinking himself right and of being outvoted had instilled in Jestocost a furious desire to get things done his own way. Jestocost was one of the few true men who believed in the rights of the underpeople. He did not think that mankind would ever get around to correcting ancient wrongs unless the underpeople themselves had some of the tools of power -- weapons, conspiracy, wealth and (above all) organization with which to challenge man. He was not afraid of revolt, but he thirsted for justice with an obsessive yearning which overrode all other considerations. When the Lords of the Instrumentality heard that there was the rumor of a conspiracy among the underpeople, they left it to the robot police to ferret out. Jestocost did not. He set up his own police, using underpeople themselves for the purpose, hoping to recruit enemies who would realize that he was a friendly enemy and who would in course of time bring him into touch with the leaders of the underpeople. If those leaders existed, they were clever. What sign did a girly girl like C'mell ever give that she was the spearhead of a criss-cross of agents who had penetrated Earthport itself? They must, if they existed, be very, very careful. The telepathic monitors, both robotic and human, kept every thought-band under surveillance by random sampling. Even the computers showed nothing more significant than improbable amounts of happiness in minds which had no objective reason for being happy. The death of her father, the most famous cat-athlete which the underpeople had ever produced, gave Jestocost his first definite clue. self, where the body was packed in an ice-rocket to be shot into space. The mourners were thoroughly mixed with the curiosity-seekers. Sport is international, inter-race, inter-world, interspecies. Hominids were there: true men, # human, they looked weird and horrible because they or their ancestors had undergone bodily modifications to meet the life conditions of a thousand worlds. Underpeople, the animal-derived "homunculi," were there, most of them in their work clothes, and they looked more human than did the human beings from the outer worlds. None were allowed to grow up if they were less than half the size of man, or more than six times the size of man. They all had to have human features and acceptable human voices. The punishment for failure in their elementary schools was death. Jestocost looked over the crowd and wondered to himself, "We have set up the standards of the toughest kind of survival for these people and we give them the most terrible incentive, life itself, as the condition of absolute progress. What fools we are to think that they will not overtake us!" The true people in the group did not seem to think as he did. They tapped the underpeople peremptorily with their canes, even though this was an underperson's funeral, and the bear-men, bull-men, cat-men and others yielded immediately and with a babble of apology. C'mell was close to her father's icy coffin. Jestocost not only watched her; she was pretty to watch. He committed an act which was an indecency in an ordinary citizen but lawful for a Lord of the Instrumentality: he peeped her mind. And then he found something which he did not expect. As the coffin left, she cried, "Ee-telly-kelly, help me! help me!" She had thought phonetically, not in script, and he had only the raw sound on which to base a search. Jestocost had not become a Lord of the Instrumentality without applying daring. His mind was quick, too quick to be deeply intelligent. He thought by gestalt, not by logic. He determined to force his friendship on the girl. He decided to await a propitious occasion, and then changed his mind about the time. As she went home from the funeral, he intruded upon the circle of her grimfaced friends, underpeople who were trying to shield her from the condolences of ill-mannered but well-meaning sports enthusiasts. She recognized him, and showed him the proper respect. "My Lord, I did not expect you here. You knew my father?" He nodded gravely and addressed sonorous words of consolation and sorrow, words which brought a murmur of approval from humans and underpeople alike. But with his left hand hanging slack at his side, he made the perpetual signal of alarm! alarm! used within the Earthport staff -- a repeated tapping of the thumb against the third finger -- when they had to set one another on guard without alerting the offworld transients. She was so upset that she almost spoiled it all. While he was still doing his pious doubletalk, she cried in a loud clear voice: "You mean me?" And he went on with his condolences: "... and I do mean you, C'mell, to be the worthiest carrier of your father's name. You are the one to whom we turn in this time of common sorrow. Who could I mean but you if I say that C'mackintosh never did things by halves, and died young as a result of his own zealous conscience? Good-by, C'mell, I go back to ray office." She arrived forty minutes after he did. II studying her face. "This is an important day in your life." "Yes, my Lord, a sad one." "I do not," he said, "mean your father's death and burial. I speak of the future to which we all must turn. Right now, it's you and me." Her eyes widened. She had not thought that he was that kind of man at all. He was an official who moved freely around Earthport, often greeting important offworld visitors and keeping an eye on the bureau of ceremonies. She was a part of the reception team, when a girly girl was needed to calm down a frustrated arrival or to postpone a quarrel. Like the geisha of ancient Japan, she had an honorable profession; she was not a bad girl but a professionally flirtatious hostess. She stared at the Lord Jestocost. He did not look as though he meant anything improperly personal. But, thought she, you can never tell about men. "You know men," he said, passing the initiative to her. "I guess so," she said. Her face looked odd. She started to give him smile ## (extremely adhesive ) which she had learned in the girly-girl school. Realizing it was wrong, she tried to give him an ordinary smile. She felt she had made a face at him. "Look at me," he said, "and see if you can trust me. I am going to take both our lives in my hands." She looked at him. What imaginable subject could involve him, a Lord of the Instrumentality, with herself, an undergirl? They never had anything in common. They never would. But she stared at him. "I want to help the underpeople." He made her blink. That was a crude approach, usually followed by a very raw kind of pass indeed. But his face was illuminated by seriousness. She waited. "Your people do not have enough political power even to talk to us. I will not commit treason to the true-human race, but advantage. If you bargain better with us, it will make all forms of life safer in the long run." C'mell stared at the floor, her red hair soft as the fur of a Persian cat. It made her head seemed bathed in flames. Her eyes looked human, except that they had the capacity of reflecting when light struck them; the irises were the rich green of the ancient cat. When she looked right at him, looking up from the floor, her glance had the impact of a blow. "What do you want from me?" He stared right back. "Watch me. Look at my face. Are you sure, sure that I want nothing from you personally?" CE looked bewildered. "What  else is there to want from me except personal things? I am a girly girl. I'm not a person of any importance at all, and I do not have much of an education. You know more, sir, than I will ever know." "Possibly," he said, watching her. She stopped feeling like a girly girl and felt like a citizen. It made her uncomfortable. "Who," he said, in a voice of great solemnity, "is your own leader?" "Commissioner Teadrinker, sir. He's in charge of all outworld visitors." She watched Jestocost carefully; he still did not look as if he were playing tricks. He looked a little cross. "I don't mean him. He's part of my own staff. Who's your leader among the underpeople?" "My father was, but he died." Jestocost said. "Forgive me. Please have a seat. But I don't mean that." She was so tired that she sat down into the chair with an innocent voluptuousness which would have disorganized any ordinary man's day. She wore girly girl clothes, which were close enough to the everyday fashion to seem agreeably modish when she stood up. In line with her profession, her clothes were designed to be unexpectedly and provocatively revealing when she sat down -- not revealing enough to shock the man with their brazenness, but so slit, tripped and cut that he got far more visual stimulation than he expected. "I must ask you to pull your clothing together a little," said Jestocost in a clinical turn of voice. "I am a man, even if I am an official, and this interview is more important to you and to me than any distraction would be." She was a little frightened by his tone. She had meant no challenge. With the funeral that day, she meant nothing at all; these clothes were the only kind she had. He read all this in her face. Relentlessly, he pursued the subject. "Young lady, I asked about your leader. You name your boss and you name your father. I want your leader." "I don't understand," she said, on the edge of a sob, "I don't understand." Then, he thought to himself, I've got to take a gamble. He thrust the mental dagger home, almost drive his words like steel straight into her face. "Who..." he said, slowly and icily, "is... Ee... telly... kelly?" The girl's face had been creamcolored, pale with sorrow. Now she went white. She twisted away from him. Her eyes glowed like twin fires. Her eyes... like twin fires. (No undergirl, thought Jestocost as he reeled, could hypnotize me.) Her eyes... were like cold fires. The room faded around him. The girl disappeared. Her eyes became a single white, cold fire. Within this fire stood the figure of a man. His arms were wings, but he had human hands growing at the elbows of his wings. His face was clear, white, cold as the marble of an ancient statue; his eyes were opaque white. "I am the E-telekeli. You will believe in me. You may speak to my daughter C'mell." The image faded. Jestocost saw the girl staring as she sat awkwardly on the chair, looking blindly through him. He was on the edge of making a joke about her hypnotic capacity when he saw that she was still deeply hypnotized, even after he had been released. She had stiffened and again her clothing had fallen into its planned disarray. The effect was not stimulating; it was pathetic beyond words, as though an accident had happened to a pretty child. He spoke to her. expecting an answer. "Who are you?" he said to her, testing her hypnosis. "I am"he whose name is never said aloud," said the girl in a sharp whisper, "I am he whose secret you have penetrated. I have printed my image and my name in your mind." Jestocost did not quarrel with ghosts like this. He snapped out a decision. "If I open my mind, will you search it while I watch you? Are you good enough to do that?" "I am very good," hissed the voice in the girl's mouth. C'mell arose and put her two hands on his shoulders. She looked into his eyes. He looked back. A strong telepath himself, Jestocost was not prepared for the enormous thought-voltage which poured out of her. Look in my mind, he commanded, for the subject of underpeople only. I see it, thought the mind behind C'mell. Do you see what I mean to do for the underpeople? Jestocost heard the girl breathing hard as her mind served as a relay to his. He tried to remain calm so that he could see which part of his mind was being searched. Very good so far, he thought to himself. An intelligence like that on Earth itself, he thought -- and we of the Lords not knowing it! The girl hacked out a dry little laugh. Jestocost thought at the mind, Sorry. Go ahead. This plan of yours -- thought the strange mind -- may I see more of it? That's all there is. Oh, said the strange mind, you want me to think for you. Can you give me the keys in the Bank and Bell which pertain to destroying underpeople? You can have the information keys if I can ever get them, thought Jestocost, but not the control keys and not the master switch of the Bell. Fair enough, thought the other mind, and what do I pay for them? You support me in my policies before the instrumentality. You keep the underpeople reasonable, if you can, when the time comes to negotiate. You maintain honor and good faith in all subsequent agreements. But how can I get the keys? It would take me a year to figure them out myself. Let the girl look once, thought the strange mind, and I will be behind her. Fair? Fair, thought Jestocost. Break? thought the mind. How do we re-connect? thought Jestocost back. As before. Through the girl. Never say my name. Don't think it if you can help it. Break? Break! thought Jestocost. The girl, who had been holding his shoulders, drew his face down and kissed him firmly and warmly. He had never touched an underperson before, and it never had occurred to him that he might kiss one. It was pleasant, but he took her arms away from his neck, half-turned her around, and let her lean against him. "Daddy!" she sighed happily. Suddenly she stiffened, looked at his face, and sprang for the door. "Jestocost!" she cried. "Lord Jestocost! What am I doing here?" "Your duty is done, my girl. You may go." She staggered back into the room. "I am going to be sick," she said. She vomited on his floor. He pushed a button for a cleaning robot and slapped his desktop for coffee. She relaxed and talked about his hopes for the underpeople. She stayed an hour. By the time she left they had a plan. Neither of them had mentioned E-telekeli, neither had put purposes in the open. If the monitors had been listening, they would have found no single sentence or paragraph which was suspicious. When she had gone, Jestocost looked out of his window. He saw the clouds far below and he knew the world below him was in twilight. He had planned to help the underpeople, and he had met , powers of which organized mankind had no conception or perception. He was righter than he had thought. He had to go on through. But as partner -- C'mell herself! Was there ever an odder diplomat in the history of worlds? Ill decided what to do. It was the Council of the Lords of the Instrumentality at which they would work -- the brain center itself. The risk was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Bell itself. This is the sort of thing which interested Jestocost. He did not know that C'mell watched him with two different facets of her mind. One side of her was alertly and wholeheartedly his fellow-conspirator, utterly in sympathy with the revolutionary aims to which they were both committed. The other side of her -- was feminine. She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the woman by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study to her. She was a girl by profession; she was a human by assimilation; she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature. Now she was falling in love with Jestocost, and she knew it. Even she did not realize that the romance would sometime leak cut into rumor, be magnified into legend, distilled into romance. She had no idea of the ballad about herself that would open with the lines which became famous much later: She got the which of the what-she-did, Hid the bell with a blot, she did, But she fell in love with a hominid. Where is the which of the what-she-did? All this lay in the future, and she did not know it. She knew her own past. She remembered the off-Earth prince who had rested his head in her lap and had said, sipping his glass of motl by way of farewell: "Funny, C'mell, you're not even a person and you're the most intelligent human being I've met in this place. Do you know it made my planet poor to send me here? And what did I get out of them? Nothing, nothing, and a thousand times nothing. But you, now. If you'd been running the government of Earth, I'd have gotten what my people need, and this world would be richer too. Manhome, they call it. Manhome, my eye! The only smart person on it is a female cat." He ran his fingers around her ankle. She did not stir. That was part of hospitality, and she had her own ways of making sure that hospitality did not go too far. Earth police were watching her; to them, she was a convenience maintained for outworld people, something like a soft chair in the Earthport lobbies or a drinking fountain with acid-tasting water for strangers who could not tolerate the insipid water of Earth. She was not expected to have feelings or to get involved. If she had ever caused an incident, they would have punished her fiercely, as they often punished animals or underpeople, or else (after a short formal hearing with no appeal) they would have destroyed her, as the law allowed and custom encouraged. She had kissed a thousand men, maybe fifteen hundred. She had made them feel welcome and she had gotten their complaints or their secrets out of them as they left. It was a living, emotionally tiring but intellectually very stimulating. Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did. to read over the record of two pioneers from New Mars. C'mell had been given the job of keeping in very close touch with them. When the policewoman got through reading the report she looked at C'mell and her face was distorted with jealousy and prudish rage. "Cat, you call yourself. Cat! You're a pig, you're a dog, you're an animal. You may be working for Earth but don't ever get the idea that you're as good as a person. I think if s a crime that the Instrumentality lets monsters like you greet real human beings from outside! I can't stop it. But may the Bell help you, girl, if you ever touch a real Earth man! If you ever get near one! If you ever try tricks here! Do you understand me?" "Yes, ma'am," C'mell had said. To herself she thought, "That poor thing doesn't know how to select her own clothes or how to do her own hair. No wonder she resents somebody who manages to be pretty." Perhaps the policewoman thought that raw hatred would be shocking to C'mell. It wasn't. Underpeople were used to hatred, and it was not any worse raw than it was when cooked with politeness and served like poison. They had to live with it. But now, it was all changed. She had fallen in love with Jestocost. Did he love her? Impossible. No, not impossible. Unlawful, unlikely, indecent -- yes, all these, but not impossible. Surely he felt something of her love. If he did, he gave no signof it. People and underpeople had fallen in love many times before. The underpeople were always destroyed and the real people brainwashed. There were laws against that kind of thing. The scientists among people had created the underpeople, had given them capacities which real people did not have (the thousand-yard jump, the telepath two miles underground, the turtle-man waiting a thousand years next to an emergency door, the cow-man guarding a gate without reward), and the scientists had also given many of the underpeople the human shape. It was handier that way. The human eye, the five-fingered hand, the human size  -- these were convenient for engineering reasons. By making underpeople the same size and shape as people, more or less, the scientists eliminated the need for two or three or a dozen different sets of furniture. The human form was good enough for all of them. But they had forgotten the human heart. And now she, C'mell, had fallen in love with a man, a true man old enough to have been her own father's grandfather. But she didn't feel daughterly about him at all. She remembered that with her own father there was an easy comradeship, an innocent and forthcoming affection, which masked the fact that he was considerably more cat-like than she was. Between them there was an aching void of foreverunspoken words -- things that couldn't quite be said by either of them, perhaps things that couldn't be said at all. They were so close to each other that they could get no closer. This created enormous distance, which was heartbreaking but unutterable. Her father had died, and now this true man was here, with all the kindness -- "That's it," she whispered to herself, "with all the kindness that none of these passing men have ever really shown. With all the depth which my poor underpeople can never get. Not that it's not in them. But they're born like dirt, treated like dirt, put away like dirt when we die. How can any of my own men develop real kindness? There's a special sort of majesty to kindness. It's the best part there is to being people. And he has whole oceans of it in him. And it's strange, strange, strange that he's never given his real love to any human woman." She stopped, cold. Then she consoled herself and whispered on, "Or if he did, it's so long ago that it doesn't matter now. He's got me. Does he know it?" IV r T'HE Lord Jestocost did know, and yet he didn't. He was used to getting loyalty from people, because he offered loyalty and honor in his daily work. He was even familiar with loyalty becoming obsessive and seeking physical form, particularly from women, children and underpeople. He had always coped with it before. He was gambling on the fact that C'mell was a wonderfully intelligent person, and that as a girly girl, working on the hospitality staff of the Earthport police, she must have learned to control her personal feelings. "We're born in the wrong age," he thought, "when I meet the most intelligent and beautiful female I've ever met, and then have to put business first. But this stuff about people and underpeople is sticky. Sticky. We've got to keep personalities out of it." So he thought. Perhaps he was right. If the nameless one, whom he did not dare to remember, commanded an attack on the Bell itself, that was worth their lives. Their emotions could not come into it. The Bell mattered: justice mattered: the perpetual return of mankind to progress mattered. He did not matter, because he had already done most of his work. C'mell did not matter, because their failure would leave her with mere underpeople forever. The Bell did count. The price of what he proposed to do was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Bell itself. The Bell, of course, was not a Bell. It was a three-dimensional situation table, three times the height of a man. It was set one story below the meeting room, and shaped roughly like an ancient bell. The meeting table of the Lords of the Instrumentality had a circle cut out of it, so that the Lords could look down into the Bell at whatever situation one of them called up either manually or telepathically. The Bank below it, hidden by the floor, was the key memory-bank of the entire system. Duplicates existed at thirty-odd other places on Earth. Two duplicates lay hidden in interstellar space, one of them becolored ship left over from the War against Raumsog and the other masked as an asteroid. Most of the Lords were offworld on the business of the Instrumentality. Only three beside Jestocost were present -- the Lady Johanna Gnade, the Lord Issan Olascoaga here. (The Not-from-heres were a great Norstrilian family which had migrated back to Earth many generations before.) The E-telekeli told Jestocost the rudiments of a plan. He was to bring C'mell into the chambers on a summons. The summons was to be serious. They should avoid her summary death by automatic justice, if the relays began to trip. C'mell would go into partial trance in the chamber. He was then to call the items in the Bell which E-telekeli wanted traced. A single call would be enough. E-telekeli would take the responsibility for tracing them. The other Lords would be distracted by him, E-telekeli. It was simple in appearance. The complication came in action. The plan seemed flimsy, but there was nothing which Jestocost could do at this time. He began to curse himself for letting his passion for policy involve him in the intrigue. It was too late to back out with honor; besides, he had given his word; besides, he liked C'mell -- as a being, not as a girly girl -- and he would hate to see her marked with disappointment for life. He knew how the underpeople cherished their identities and their status. With heavy heart but quick mind he went to the council chamber. A dog-girl, one of the routine messengers whom he had seen many months outside the door, gave him the minutes. He wondered how C'mell or E-telekeli would reach him, once he was inside the chamber with its tight net of telepathic intercepts. He sat wearily at the table -- And almost jumped out of his chair. r T , HE conspirators had forged the minutes themselves, and the top item was: "C'mell daughter to C'mackintosh, cat-stock (pmre) lot #, confession of. Subject: conspiracy to export homuncular material. Reference: planet De Prinsensmacht." The Lady Johanna Gnade had already pushed the buttons for the planet concerned. The people there, Earth by origin, were enormously strong but they had gone to great pains to maintain the original Earth appearance. One of their first-men was at the moment on Earth. He bore the title of the Twilight Prince (Prins van de Schemering) and he was on a mixed diplomatic and trading mission. Since Jestocost was a little late, C'mell was being brought into the room as he glanced over the minutes. The Lord Not-from-here asked Jestocost if he would preside. "I beg you, sir and scholar," he said, "to join me in asking the Lord Issan to preside this time." The presidency was a formality. Jestocost could watch the Bell and Bank better if he did not have to chair the meeting too. C'mell wore the clothing of a prisoner. On her it looked good. He had never seen her wearing anything but girly-girl clothes before. The pale-blue prison tunic made her look very young, very human, very tender and very frightened. The cat family showed only in the fiery cascade of her mi   IlK h hair and the lithe power of her body as she sat, demure and erect. Lord Issan asked her: "You have confessed. Confess again." "This man," and she pointed at a picture of the Twilight Prince, "wanted to go to the place where they torment human children for a show." "What!" cried three of the Lords together. "What place?" said the Lady Johanna, who was bitterly in favor of kindness. "It's run by a man who looks like this gentleman here," said C'mell, pointing at Jestocost. Quickly, so that nobody could stop her, but modestly, so that none of them thought to doubt her, she circled the room and touched Jestocost's shoulder. He felt a thrill of contact-telepathy and heard bird-crackle in her brain. Then he knew that the Etelekeli was in touch with her. "The man who has the place," said C'mell, "is five pounds lighter than this gentleman, two inches shorter, and he has red hair. His place is at the Cold Sunset corner of Earthport, down the boulevard and under the boulevard. Underpeople, some of them with bad reputations, live in that neighborhood." The Bell went milky, flashing through hundreds of combinations of bad underpeople in that part of the city. Jestocost felt himself staring at the casual milkiness with unwanted concentration. The Bell cleared. It showed the vague image of a room in which children were playing Hallowe'en tricks. The Lady Johanna laughed, "Those aren't people. They're robots. It's just a dull old play." "Then," added C'mell, "he take home. Real ones. There was a robot who had found some." "What are those?" said Lord Issan. "Ancient money -- the real money of old America and old "I have copies, but there are no originals outside the state museum." He was an ardent, passionate collector of coins. "The robot found them in an old hiding place right under Earth port." at the Bell. "Run through every hiding place and get me that money." The Bell clouded. In finding the bad neighborhoods it had flashed every police point in the Northwest sector of the tower. Now it scanned all the police points under the tower, and ran dizzily through thousands of combinations before it settled on an old toolroom. A robot was polishing circular pieces of metal. polishing, he was furious. "Get that here," he shouted. "I want to buy those myself!" "All right," said Lord Issan. "It's a little irregular, but all right." The machine showed the key search devices and brought the robot to the escalator. The Lord Issan said, "This isn't much of a case." C'mell sniveled. She was a good actress. "Then he wanted me to get a homunculus egg. One of the E-type, derived from birds, for him to take home." Issan put on the search device. "Maybe," said C'mell, "somebody has already put it in the disposal series." The Bell and the Bank ran through all the disposal devices at high speed. Jestocost felt his nerves go on edge. No human being could have memorized these thousands of patterns as they flashed across the Bell too fast for human eyes, but the brain reading the Bell through his eyes was not human. It might even be locked into a computer of its own. It was, thought Jestocost, an indignity for a Lord of the Instrumentality to be used as a human spy-glass. The machine blotted up. "You're a fraud," cried the Lord Issan. "There's no evidence." "Maybe the offworlder tried," said the Lady Johanna. "Shadow him," said Lord William. "If he would steal ancient coins he would steal anything." The Lady Johanna turned to C'mell. "You're a silly thing. You have wasted our time and you have kept us from serious interworld business." "It is inter-world business," wept C'mell. She let her hand slip from Jestocost's shoulder, where it had rested all the time. The body-to-body relay broke and the telepathic link broke with it. "We should judge that," said Lord Issan. "You might have been punished," said Lady Johanna. The Lord Jestocost had said nothing, but there was a glow of happiness in him. If the E-telekeli was half as good as he seemed, the underpeople had a list of checkpoints and escape routes which would make it easier to hide from the capricious sentence of painless death which human authorities meted out. V ridors that night. Underpeople burst into happiness for no visible reason. C'mell danced a wild cat dance for the next customer who came in from outworld stations, that very evening. When she got home to bed, she knelt before the picture of her father C'mackintosh and thanked the E-telekeli for what Jestocost had done. But the story became known a few generations later, when the Lord Jestocost had won acclaim for being the champion of the underpeople and when the authorities, still unaware of E-telekeli, accepted the elected representatives of the underpeople as negotiators for better terms of life; and C'mell had died long since. She had first had a long, good life. She became a female chef when she was too old to be a girly girl. Her food was famous. Jestocost once visited her. At the end of the meal he had asked, "There's a silly rhyme among the underpeople. No human beings know it except me." "I don't care about rhymes," she said. "This is called 'The what-shedid.' " C'mell blushed all the way down to the neckline of her capacious blouse. She had filled out a lot in middle age. Running the restaurant had helped. "Oh, that rhyme!" she said. "It's silly." "It says you were in love with a hominid." "No," she said. "I wasn't." Her green eyes, as beautiful as ever, stared deeply into his. Jestocost felt uncomfortable. This was getting personal. He liked political relationships; personal things made him uncomfortable. The light in the room shifted and her cat eyes blazed at him, she looked like the magical firehaired girl he had known. "I wasn't in love. You couldn't call it that..." Her heart cried out, It was you, it was you, it was you. "But the rhyme," insisted Jestocost, "says it was a hominid. It wasn't that Prins van de Schemering?"  "Who was he?" C'mell asked the question quietly, but her emotions cried out, Darling, will you never, never know? "The strong man." "Oh, him. I've forgotten him." Jestocost rose from the table. "You've had a good life, C'mell. You've been a citizen, a committeewoman, a leader. And do you even know how many children you have had?" "Seventy-three," she snapped at him. "Just because they're multiple doesn't mean we don't know them." His playfulness left him. His face was grave, his voice kindly. "I meant no harm, C'mell." He never knew that when he left she went back to the kitchen and cried for a while. It was Jestocost whom she had vainly loved ever since they had been comrades, many long years ago.  Even after she died, at the full age of five-score and three, he kept seeing her about the corridors and shafts of Earthport. Many of her great-granddaughters looked just like her and several of them practised the girlygirl business with huge success. They were not half-slaves. They were citizens (reserved grade) and they had photopasses which protected their property, their identity and their rights. Jestocost was the godfather to them all; he was often embarrassed when the most voluptuous creatures in the universe threw playful kisses at him. All he asked was fulfillment of his political passions, not his personal ones. He had always been in love, madly in love -- With justice itself. and he knew that he was dying, and he was not sorry. He had had a wife, hundreds of years ago, and had loved her well; their children had passed into the generations of man. In the ending, he wanted to know something, and he called to a nameless one (or to his successor) far beneath the ground. He called with his mind till it was a scream. I have helped your people. "Yes," came back the faintest of faraway whispers, inside his head. I am dying. I must know. Did she love me? "She went on without you, so much did she love you. She let you go, for your sake, not for hers. She really loved you. More than death. More than life. More than time. You will never be apart." Never apart? "Not, not in the memory of man," said the voice, and was then still. Jestocost lay back on his pillow and waited for the day to end. Boys! You can raise Giant Mushrooms in your cellar and that's by no means all! Saturday's commotions, and lay eyes shut, savoring each in its turn. Below, bacon in a skillet; Cynthia waking him with fine cookings instead of cries. Across the hall, Tom actually taking a shower. Far off in the bumble-bee dragon-fly light, whose voice was already damning the weather, the time, and the tides? Mrs. Goodbody? Yes. That Christian giantess, six foot tall with her shoes off, the gardener extraordinary, the octogenarian-dietitian and town philosopher. He rose, unhooked the screen and leaned out to hear her cry: "There! Take that! This'll fix you! Hah!" "Happy Saturday, Mrs. Goodbody!" The old woman froze in clouds of bug-spray pumped from an immense gun. "Nonsense!" she shouted. "With these fiends and pests to watch for?" "What kind this time?" called Fortnum. "I don't want to shout it to the jaybirds, but -- " she glanced suspiciously around -- "what would you say if I told you I was the first line of defense concerning Flying Saucers?" "Fine," replied Fortnum. "There'll be rockets between the worlds any year now." "There already are!" She pumped, aiming the spray under the hedge. "There! Take that!" He pulled his head back in from the fresh day, somehow not as high-spirited as his first response had indicated. Poor soul, Mrs. Goodbody. Always the very essence of reason. And now what? Old age? The doorbell rang. was half down the stairs when he heard a voice say, "Special Delivery. Fortnum?" and saw Cynthia turn from the front door, a small packet in her hand. He put his hand out, but she shook her head. "Special Delivery Air-Mail for your son." Tom was downstairs like a centipede. "Wow! That must be from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse!" "I wish I were as excited about ordinary mail," observed Fortnum. "Ordinary?!" Tom ripped the cord and paper wildly. "Don't you read the back pages of Popular Mechanics? Well, here they are!" Everyone peered into the small open box. "Here," said Fortnum, "what are?" "The Sylvan Glade JumboGiant Guaranteed Growth RaiseThem-in-Y our Cellar f or Big Profit Mushrooms!" "Oh, of course," said Fortnum. "How silly of me." Cynthia squinted. "Those little teeny bits -- ?" "Fabulous growth in # hours," Tom quoted from memory. "Plant them in your own cellar -- ' " Fortnum and wife exchanged glances. "Well," she admitted, "it's better than frogs and greensnakes." "Sure is!" Tom ran. "Oh, Tom," said Fortnum, lightly. Tom paused at the cellar door. "Tom," said his father. "Next time, fourth class mail would do fine." "Heck," said Tom. "They must've made a mistake, thought I was some rich company. Airmail special, who can afford that?" The cellar door slammed. Fortnum, bemused, scanned the wrapper a moment, then dropped it into the wastebasket. On his way to the kitchen, he opened the cellar door. Tom was already on his knees, digging with a handrake in the dirt of the back part of the cellar. He felt his wife beside him, breathing softly, looking down into the cool dimness. "Those are mushrooms, I hope. Not...  toadstools?" Fortnum laughed. "Happy harvest, farmer!" Tom glanced up and waved. Fortnum shut the door, took his wife's arm, and walked her out to the kitchen, feeling fine. was driving toward the nearest market when he saw Roger teacher of biology at the town high school, waving urgently from the sidewalk. Fortnum pulled his car up and opened the door. "Hi, Roger, .give you a lift?" ly, jumping in and slamming the door. "Just the man I want to see. I've put off calling for days. Could you play psychiatrist for five minutes, God help you?" Fortnum examined his friend for a moment as he drove quietly on. "God help you, yes. Shoot." fingernails. "Let's just drive a moment. There. Okay. Here's what I want to say: something's wrong with the world." Fortnum laughed easily. "Hasn't there always been?" "No, no, I mean... something strange -- something unseen -- is happening." "Mrs. Goodbody," said Fortnum, half to himself, and stopped. "Mrs. Goodbody?" "This morning. Gave me a talk on flying saucers." his forefinger nervously. "Nothing like saucers. At least I don't think. Tell me, what is intuition?" "The conscious recognition of something that's been subconscious for a long time. But don't quote this amateur psychologist!" He laughed again. his face lighting. He readjusted himself in the seat. "That's it! Over a long period, things gather, right? All of a sudden, you have to spit, but you don't remember saliva collecting. Your hands are dirty, but you don't know how they got that way. Dust falls on you every day and you don't feel it. But when you get enough dust collected up, there it is, you see and name it. That's intuition, as far as I'm concerned. Well, what kind of dust has been falling on me? A few meteors in the sky at night? Funny weather just before dawn? I don't know. Certain colors, smells, the way the house creaks at three in the morning? I Hair prickling on my arms? All I know is, the damn dust has collected. Quite suddenly I know." "Yes," said Fortnum, disquieted. "But what is it you know?" his lap. "I'm afraid. I'm not afraid. Then I'm afraid again, in the middle of the day. Doctor's checked me. I'm A-l. No family problems. Joe's a fine boy, a good son. Dorothy? She's remarkable. With her, I'm not afraid of growing old or dying." "Lucky man." "But beyond my luck now. Scared stiff, really, for myself, my family; even, right now, for you." "Me?" said Fortnum. empty lot near the market. There was a moment of great stillness, in which Fortnum turnvoice had suddenly made him cold. "I'm afraid for everybody," and their friends, on out of sight. Pretty silly, eh?" and peered in at Fortnum. Fortnum felt he had to speak. "Well -- what do we do about it?" burning blind in the great, remote sky. "Be aware," he said, slowly. "Watch everything for a few days." "Everything?" "We don't use half what God gave us, ten per cent of the time. We ought to hear more, feel more, smell more, taste more. Maybe there's something wrong with the way the wind blows these weeds there in the lot. Maybe it's the sun up on those telephone wires or the cicadas singing in the elm trees. If only we could stop, look, listen, a few days, a few nights, and compare notes. Tell me to shut up then, and I will." "Good enough," said Fortnum, playing it lighter then he felt. "I'll look around. But how do I know the thing I'm looking for when I see it?" cerely. "You'll know. You've got to know. Or we're done for, all of us," he said quietly. Fortnum shut the door, and didn't know what to say. He felt a flush of embarrassment creepthis. "Hugh, do you think I'm -- off my rocker?" "Nonsense!" said Fortnum, too quickly. "You're just nervous, is all. You should take a couple of weeks off." day night?" "Any time. Drop around." "I hope I will, Hugh. I really hope I will. ing across the dry weed-grown lot, toward the side entrance of the market. denly did not want to move. He discovered that very slowly he was taking deep breaths, weighing the silence. He licked his lips, tasting the salt. He looked at his arm on the door-sill, the sunlight burning the golden hairs. In the empty lot the wind moved all alone to itself. He leaned out to look at the sun which stared back with one massive stunning blow of intense power that made him jerk his head in. He exhaled. Then he laughed out loud. Then he drove away. I'T'HE lemonade glass was cool and deliciously sweaty. The ice made music inside the glass, and the lemonade was just sour enough, just sweet enough on his tongue. He sipped, he savored, he tilted back in the wicker rocking chair on the twilight front porch, his eyes closed. The crickets were Ghirping out on the lawn. Cynthia, knitting across from him on the porch, eyed him curiously. He could feel the pressure of her attention. "What are you up to?" she said at last. "Cynthia," he said, "is your intuition in running order? Is this earthquake weather? Is the land going to sink? Will war be declared? Or is it only that our delphinium will die of the blight?" "Hold on. Let me feel my bones." ' He opened his eyes and watched Cynthia in turn closing hers and sitting absolutely statue-still, her hands on her knees. Finally she shook her head and smiled. "No. No war declared. No land sinking. Not even a blight. Why?" "I've met a lot of Doom Talkers today. Well, two, anyway, and -- " The screen door burst wide. Fortnum's body jerked as if he had been struck. "What!" Tom, a gardener's wooden flat in his arms, stepped out on the porch. "Sorry," he said. "What's wrong, dad?" "Nothing." Fortnum stood up, glad to be moving. "Is that the crop?" Tom moved foreward, eagerly. "Part of it. Boy, they're doing great. In just seven hours, with lots of water, look how big the darn things are!" He set the flat on the table between his parents. The crop was indeed plentiful. Hundreds of small grayish brown mushrooms were sprouting up in the damp soil. "I'll be damned," said Fortnum, impressed. Cynthia put out her hand to touch the flat, then took it away uneasily. "I hate to be a spoilsport, but... there's no way for these to be anything else but mushrooms, is there?" Tom looked as if he had been insulted. "What do you think I'm going to feed you? Poison fungoids?" "That's just it," said Cynthia quickly. "How do you tell them apart?" "Eat 'em," said Tom. "If you live, they're mushrooms. If you drop dead -- well!" He gave a great guffaw, which amused Fortnum, but only made his mother wince. She sat back in her chair. "I -- I don't like them," she said. "Boy, oh, boy." Tom seized the flat angrily. "When are we going to have the next Wet Blanket Sale in this house!?" He shuffled morosely away. "Tom -- " said Fortnum. "Never mind," said Tom. "Everyone figures they'll be ruined by the boy entrepeneur. To heck with it!" Fortnum got inside just as Tom heaved the mushrooms, flat and all, down the cellar stairs. He slammed the cellar ! door and ran angrily out the back door. Fortnum turned back to his wife, who, stricken, glanced away. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know why. I just had to say that j to Tom." The phone rang. Fortnum brought the phone outside on its I extension cord. "Hugh?" It was Dorothy ( denly very old and very frightened. "Hugh... Roger isn't there,  is he?" "Dorothy? No." "He's gone!" said Dorothy. "All his clothes were taken from the closet." She began to cry softly. "Dorothy, hold on, I'll be I there in a minute." "You must help, oh, you must. Something's happened to him, I know it," she wailed. "Unless you I do something, we'll never see him alive again." Very slowly, he put the receiver back on its hook, her voice weeping inside it. The night crickets, quite suddenly, were very loud. He felt the hairs, one by one, go up on the back of his I neck. Hair can't do that, he thought. Silly, silly. It can't do that, not in real life, it can't! But, one by slow prickling one, his hair did. T HE wire hangers were indeed empty. With a clatter, Fortnum shoved them aside and down along the rod, then turned and looked out of the closet at "I was just walking by," said Joe, "and saw the closet empty, all Dad's clothes gone!" "Everything was fine," said Dorothy. "We've had a wonderful lifeI don't understand it, I don't, I don't!" She began to cry again, putting her hands to her face. Fortnum stepped out of the closet. "You didn't hear him leave the house?" "We were playing catch out front," said Joe. "Dad said he had to go in for a minute. I went around back. Then -- he was gone!" "He must have packed quickly and walked wherever he was going, so we wouldn't hear a cab pull up in front of the house." They were moving out through the hall now. "I'll check the train depot and the airport." Fortnum hesitated. "Dorothy, is there anything in Roger's background -- " "It wasn't insanity took him." She hesitated. "I feel -- somehow -- he was kidnapped." Fortnum shook his head. "It doesn't seem reasonable he would arrange to pack, walk out of the house and go meet his alfr ductors." Dorothy opened the door as if to let the night or the night wind move down the hall as she turned to stare back through the rooms, her voice wandering. "No. Somehow they came into the house. Right in front of us, they stole him away." And then: "... a terrible thing has happened." Fortnum stepped out into the night of crickets and rustling trees. The Doom Talkers, he thought, talking their Dooms. Mrs. Goodbody. Roger. And now Roger's wife. Something terrible has happened. But what, in God's name? And how? He looked from Dorothy to her son. Joe, blinking the wetness from his eyes, took a long time to turn, walk along the hall and stop, fingering the knob of the cellar door. Fortnum felt his eyelids twitch, his iris flex, as if he were snapping a picture of something he wanted to remember. Joe pulled the cellar door wide, stepped down out of sight, gone. The door tapped shut. Fortnum opened his mouth to speak, but Dorothy's hand was taking his now, he had to look at her. "Please," she said. "Find him for me." He kissed her cheek. "If it's humanly possible... " If it's humanly possible. Good Lord, why had he picked those words? He walked off into the summer night. J-an exhalation, an asthmatic insuck, a vaporing sneeze. Someone dying in the dark? No. Just Mrs. Goodbody, unseen beyond the hedge, working late, her hand-pump aimed, her bony elbow thrusting. The sick-sweet smell of bug-spray enveloped Fortnum heavily as he reached his house. "Mrs. Goodbody? Still at it?!" From the black hedge, her voice leapt: "Damn it, yes! Aphids, waterbugs, woodworms and now the marasmius oreades. Lord, it grows fast!" "What does?" "The marasmius oreades, of course! It's me against them, and I intend to win. There! There! There!" He left the hedge, the gasping pump, the wheezing voice, and found his wife waiting for him on the porch almost as if she were going to take up where Dorothy had left off at her door a few minutes ago. Fortnum was about to speak, when a shadow moved inside. There was a creaking noise. A' knob rattled. Tom vanished into the basement. Fortnum felt as if someone had set off an explosion in his face. He reeled. Everything had the numbed familiarity of those : waking dreams where all motions j are remembered before they ocj cur, all dialogue known before it j fell from the lips. He found himself staring at ' the shut basement door. Cynthia ! took him inside, amused "What? Tom? Oh, I relented. I The darn mushrooms meant so I much to him. Besides, when he i threw them into the cellar, they I did nicely, just lying in the dirt." "Did they?" Fortnum heard ' himself say. Cynthiq, took his arm. "What about Roger?" "He's gone, yes." "Men, men, men," she said. "No, you're wrong," he said. "I I saw Roger every day for the last ten years. When you know a man ' that well, you can tell how things are at home, whether things are j in the oven or the mixmaster. i Death hadn't breathed down his l neck yet. He wasn't running scared after his immortal youth, picking peaches in someone else's orchards. No, no, I swear, I'd bet my last dollar on it, Roger -- " The doorbell rang behind him. j The delivery boy had come up I quietly onto the porch and was standing there with a telegram in his hand. "Fortnum?" Cynthia snapped on the hall light as he ripped the envelope open and smoothed it out for reading. Cynthia glanced up from the paper. "I don't understand. What does he mean?" But Fortnum was already at the telephone, dialing swiftly, once. "Operator? The police, and hurry!" A T ten-fifteen that night, the phone rang for the sixth time during the evening. Fortnum got it, and immediately gasped. "Roger! Where are you?!" "Where am I, hell," said Roger lightly, almost amused. "You know very well where I am. You're responsible for this. I should be angry!" Cynthia, at his nod, had hurried to take the extension phone in the kitchen. When he heard the soft click, he went on. "Roger, I swear I don't know. I got that telegram from you -- " "What telegram?" said Roger, jovially. "I sent no telegram. Now, of a sudden, the police come pouring onto the southbound train, pull me off in some jerkwater, and I'm calling you to get them off my neck. Hugh, if this is some joke -- " "But, Roger, you just vanished!" "On a business trip. If you can call that vanishing. I told Dorothy about this, and Joe." "This is all very confusing, Roger. You're in no danger? Nobody's blackmailing you, forcing you into this speech?" "I'm fine, healthy, free and unafraid." "But, Roger, your premonitions... ?" "Poppycock! Now, look, I'm being very good about this, aren't I?" "Sure, Roger." "Then play the good father and give me permission to go. Call Dorothy and tell her I'll be back in five days. How could she have forgotten?" "She did, Roger. See you in five days, then?" ' "Five days, I swear." The voice was indeed winning and warm, the old Roger again. Fortnum shook his head, more bewildered than before. "Roger," he said, "this is the craziest day I've ever spent. You're not running off from Dorothy? Good Lord, you can tell me." "I love her with all my heart. Now, here's Lieutenant Parker of the Ridgetown police. Good-by, Hugh." "Good -- " But the lieutenant was on the line, talking angrily. What had Fortnum meant putting them to this trouble? What was going on? Who did he think he was? Did or didn't he want this so-called friend Lfcld or released? "Released," Fortnum managed to say somewhere along the way, and hung up the phone and imagined he heard a voice call all aboard and the massive thunder of the train leaving the station two hundred miles south in the somehow increasingly dark night.  into the parlor. "I feel so foolish," she said. "How do think I feel?" 'Who could have sent that telegram? And why?" He poured himself some scotch and stood in the middle of the room looking at it. "I'm glad Roger is all right," his wife said, at last. "He isn't," said Fortnum. "But you just said -- " "I said nothing. After all, we couldn't very well drag him off that train and truss him up and send him home, could we, if he insisted he was okay? No. He sent that telegram, but he changed his mind after sending it. Why, why, why?" Fortnum paced the room, sipping the drink. 'Why warn us against special delivery packages? The only package we've got this year which fits that description is the one Tom got this morning -- " His voice trailed off. Before he could move, Cynthia was at the wastepaper basket taking out the crumpled wrapping paper with the special-delivery stamps on it. Cynthia looked up from it. "New Orleans. Isn't that where Roger is heading right now?" A doorknob rattled, a door opened and closed in Fortnum's mind. Another doorknob rattled, another door swung wide and then shut. There was a smell of damp earth. He found his hand dialing the phone. After a long while, Dorend. He could imagine her sitting alone in a house with too many lights on. He talked quietly with her awhile, then cleared his throat and said, "Dorothy, look. I know it sounds silly. Did any special delivery airmail packages arrive at your house the last few days?" Her voice was faint. "No." Then: "No, wait. Three days ago. But I thought you knew! All the boys on the block are going in for it." Fortnum measured his words carefully. "Going in for what?" "But why ask?" she said. "There's nothing wrong with raising mushrooms, is there?" Fortnum closed his eyes. "Hugh? Are you still there?" asked Dorothy. "I said: there's nothing wrong with -- " " -- raising mushrooms?" said Fortnum, at last. "No. Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong." And slowly he put down the phone. The curtains blew like veils of moonlight. The clock ticked. The after-midnight world flowed into and filled the bedroom. He heard Mrs. Goodbody's clear voice on gone now. He heard Roger putting a cloud over the sun at noon. He heard the police damning him by phone from downstate. Then Roger's voice again, with the locomotive thunder hurrying him away and away, fading. And finally, Mrs. Goodbody's voice behind the hedge: "Lord, it grows fast!" "What does?" "Marasmium oreades!" He snapped his eyes open. He sat up. Downstairs, a moment later, he flicked through the unabridged dictionary. His forefinger underlined the words: "Marasmius oreades: a mushroom commonly found on lawns in summer and early autumn." He let the book fall shut. night, he lit a cigarette and smoked quietly. A meteor fell across space, burning itself out quickly. The trees rustled softly. The front door tapped shut. Cynthia moved toward him in her robe. "Can't sleep?" "Too warm, I guess." "It's not warm." "No," he said, feeling his arms. "In fact, it's cold." He sucked on the cigarette twice, then, not looking at her, said, "Cynthia... What if... ?" He snorted and had to stop. "Well, what if Roger was right this morning? Mrs. Goodbody, what if she's right, too? Something terrible is happening. Like -- well -- " he nodded -- "Earth being invaded by things from other worlds, maybe." "Hugh!" "No, let me run wild." "It's quite obvious we're notbeing invaded or we'd notice." "Let's say we've only halfnoticed, become uneasy about something. What? How could we be invaded? By what means would creatures invade?" Cynthia looked at the sky and was about to try something when he interrupted. "No, not meteors or flying saucers. Not things we can see. What about bacteria? That comes from outer space, too, doesn't it?" "I read once, yes -- " "Spores, seeds, pollens, viruses probably bombard our atmosyears. Right now we're sitting out under an invisible rain. It falls all over the country, the cities, the towns, and right now... our lawn." " Out lawn?" "And Mrs. Goodbody's. But people like her are always pulling weeds, spraying poison, kicking toadstools off their grass. It would be hard for any strange life form to survive in cities. Weather's a problem, too. Best climate might be South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana. Back in the damp bayous, they could grow to a fine size." But Cynthia was beginning to laugh now. "Oh, really, you don't believe, do you, that this Great Bayou or Whatever Greenhouse Novelty Company that sent Tom his package is owned and operated by six foot tall mushrooms from another planet?" "If you put it that way, it sounds funny," he admitted. "Funny! It's hilarious!" She threw her head back deliciously. denly irritated. "Something's going on! Mrs. Goodbody mium oreades. What is marasmium oreades? A certain kind of mushroom. Simultaneously, and I suppose you'll call it coincidence, by special delivery, what arrives the same day? Mushrooms for Tom! What else happens? Roger fears he may soon cease to be! Within hours, he vanishes, then telegraphs us, warning us not to accept what? The special-delivery mushrooms for Tom! Has Roger's son got a similar package in the last few days? He has! Where do the packages come from? New Orleans! And where is Roger going when he vanishes? New Orleans! Do you see, Cynthia, do you see? I wouldn't be upset if all these separate things didn't lock together! Roger, Tom, Joe, mushrooms, Mrs. Goodbody, packages, destinations, everything in one pattern!" She was watching his face now, quieter, but still amused. "Don't get angry." "I'm not!" Fortnum almost shouted. And then he simply could not go on. He was afraid that if he did, he would find himself shouting with laughter, too, and somehow he did not want that. He stared at the surrounding houses up and down the block and thought of the dark cellars and the neighbor boys who read Popular Mechanics and sent raise the mushrooms hidden away. Just as he, when a boy, had mailed off for chemicals, seeds, turtles, numberless salves and sickish ointments. In how rousing up under the ministrations of the innocent? "Hugh?" His wife was touching his arm now. "Mushrooms, even big ones, can't think. They can't move. They don't have arms and legs. How could they run a mailorder service and 'take over' the world? Come on, now. Let's look at your terrible fiends and monsters!" She pulled him toward the door. Inside, she headed for the cellar, but he stopped, shaking his head, a foolish smile shaping itself somehow to his mouth. "No, no, I know what we'll find. You win. The whole thing's silly. Roger will be back next week and we'll all get drunk together. Go on up to bed now and I'll drink a glass of warm milk and be with you in a minute... well, a couple of minutes..." "That's better!" She kissed him on both cheeks, squeezed him and went away up the stairs. In the kitchen, he took out a glass, opened the refrigerator and was pouring the milk when he stopped suddenly. Near the front of the top shelf was a small yellow dish. It was not the dish that held his attention, however. It was what lay in the dish. The fresh-cut mushrooms. for half a minute, his breath frosting the refrigerated air, before he reached out, took hold of the dish, sniffed it, felt the mushrooms, then at last, carrying the dish, went out into the hall. He looked up the stairs, hearing Cynthia moving about in the bedroom, and was about to call up to her, "Cynthia, did you put these in the refrigerator!?" Then he stopped. He knew her answer. She had not. He put the dish of mushrooms on the newel-upright at the bottom of the stairs and stood looking at them. He imagined himself, in bed later, looking at the walls, the open windows, watching the moonlight sift patterns on the ceiling. He heard himself saying, Cynthia? And her answering, yes? And him saying, there is a way for mushrooms to grow arms and legs... What? she would say, silly, silly man, what? And he would gather courage against her hilarious reaction and go on, what if a man wandered through the swamp picked the mushrooms, and ate them... ? No response from Cynthia. Once inside the man, would the mushrooms spread through his blood, take over every cell, and change the man from a man to a -- Martian? Given this theory, would the mushroom need its own arms and legs? No, not when it could borrow people, live inside and become them. Roger ate mushrooms given him by his son. Roger became "something else." He kidnaped himself. And in one last flash of sanity, of being "himself" he telegraphed us, warning us not to accept the special-delivery mushrooms. The "Roger" that telephoned later was no longer Roger but a captive of what he had eaten! Doesn't that figure, Cynthia? Doesn't it, doesn't it? No, said the imagined Cynthia, no, it doesn't figure, no, no, no... There was the faintest whisper, rustle, stir from the cellar. Taking his eyes from the bowl, Fortnum walked to the cellar door and put his ear to it. "Tom?" No answer. "Tom, are you down there?" No answer. "Tom?" After a long while, Tom's voice came up from below. "Yes, Dad?" "It's after midnight," said Fortnum, fighting to keep his voice from going high. "What are you doing down there?" No answer. "I said -- " "Tending to my crop," said the boy at last, his voice cold and faint. "Well, get the hell out of there! You hear me!?" Silence. "Tom? Listen! Did you put some mushrooms in the refrigerator tonight? If so, why?" Ten seconds must have ticked by before the boy replied from below. "For you and Mom to eat, of course." Fortnum heard his heart moving swiftly, and had to take three deep breaths before he could go on. "Tom? You didn't... that is... you haven't by any chance eaten some of the mushroom yourself, have you?" "Funny you ask that," said Tom. "Yes. Tonight. On a sandwich after supper. Why?" A knob. Now it was his turn not to answer. He felt his knees beginning to melt and he fought t he whole silly senseless fool thingNo reason, he tried to say, but his lips wouldn't move. "Dad?" called Tom softly from the cellar. "Come on down." Another pause. "I want you to see the harvest." Fortnum felt the knob slip in his sweaty hand. The knob rattled. He gasped.  "Dad?" called Tom softly. Fortnum opened the door. The cellar was completely black below. He stretched his hand in toward the light switch. As if sensing this intrusion, from somewhere Tom said: "Don't. Light's bad for the mushrooms." Fortnum took his hand off the switch. He swallowed. He looked back at the stair leading up to his wife. I suppose, he thought, I should go say good-by to Cynthia. But why should I think that! Why should I think that at all? No reason, is there? None. "Tom?" he said, affecting a jaunty air. "Ready or not, here I come!" And stepping down in darkness, he shut the door. Starting in November  Mighty Earth was master of all the stars. Trouble was -- nobody had told some of the inhabited worlds l H elmut glorring, Commander-in-Chief of rence, Vice-Marshal in the Imperial Fleet, Primate Representative of the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, D.A.S. (Hon.), D.I.L. (Hon.), D.Lib.A. (Hon.), smiled and took the hand of Marine Captain Rink. He then turned, twisted, lifted and hurled Captain Rink over his head and into the wall. The captain screamed, and when he rolled away from the wall his left arm was twisted. The assembled officers dutifully cheered, beating their palms together. Glorring grinned and nodded, flexing his muscles as his two dressers hurried forward with towels and patted him dry. Rink, weaving a bit, got to his feet and staggered away to the infirmary. "Still the best," muttered Glorring in satisfaction. The dressers chorused, "Yes, sir!" Still the best, he thought. The shape he was in, he could even take the Triumvirate, one at a time. But he knew better than to voice that thought aloud. He still wasn't sure which of his officers was the Loyalty Sneak. As the last of them trailed out of the gym, headed for their duties in other parts of the ship, Chief Astrogator Koll came in, burgh. "Sir," said Koll, jabbing a thumb at Ehlenburgh, "the Scientist here says we're passing near a Sol-star. He says the charts don't list it, and it might have planets." Lawrence had been out from Earth over three years now. Seven Lost Colonies had been found and brought -- forcibly, unfortunately but unavoidably -- back into the fold. And Glorring had more or less decided to skip this time the token search for a habitable yet uninhabited planet which was, in the popular mind at home, the primary purpose for the Fleet. He was anxious to return to Earth -- it wasn't politically safe to be too long away. He turned to the Scientist. "How good are the chances?" he demanded. Ehlenburgh, a narrow elderly shoulders. "You can never tell. The star is of the right type, but anything as small as planetary mass. Statistically, our chances are good. On the other hand, there are such stars Without planets, or without planets on which humans can live. This may be one." "In other words," said Glorring, "you won't make a definite statement one way or the other." "I can't," Ehlenburgh told him. j "If we're going to stop," said  Astrogator Koll, "we'll have to do it within ten minutes, Excellency." A commander must make his decisions rapidly and confidently. "We'll stop," said Glorring. Without turning around, he barked, "Strull!" Captain Strull, adjutant, hurried forward and bowed. "Excellency." "Staff in the Ready Room in ten minutes," Glorring told him. "Very good, Excellency." Strull bowed again and turned toward the door. "Strull!" The adjutant stopped, looking apprehensively at Glorring. "Excellency?" Glorring studied the adjutant a long silent moment, raking him with his eyes. Strull was short, broad-framed, naturally prone to overweight. He had grown lax recently -- was probably avoiding the exercise sessions in the gym and certainly hadn't engaged in any wrestling matches for months now. His potential for fat had become kinetic. Strull bulged within his scarlet uniform, and his chin had multiplied. His voice deceptively soft, Glorring purred, "Just how much do you weigh, Strull, if you please?" "Excellency," quavered Strull, "one hundred ninety pounds. If your Excellency pleases." "You're tat!" barked Glorring. "The men of the Fleet must be lean! Must be hard! Could you wrestle me, Strull, one bonebreak?" "Oh, no, Excellency," said Strull fearfully. "You are much stronger than I, Excellency." "You have seven days to weigh one-sixty," Glorring told him, "or I'll have the excess carved from you and served to the enlisted men for breakfast. Do I make myself clear?" "Quite clear, Excellency," said Strull miserably. "Seven days, Excellency." "I'll be out for the briefing in ten minutes," said Glorring. "I'll want the staff ready." "Yes, Excellency. Ten minutes, Excellency." Strull bowed again, more deeply than before, and, maintaining the bow, backed out of the room. Glorring nodded in satisfaction and turned away, in search of a mirror. At decreasing multiples of the speed of light, the Lawrence approached the Sol-star. On block one, in the most forward section of the ship, Glorring preened before his mirror while the muttering and helplessly indignant Strull padded about, rounding up the staff. On block four, the six -- Scientific Survey Staff -- checked their equipment and prepared for observation and measurement, or at least five of them did so. One, the psysociohistorian, named Cahann, had nothing to do in this situation. His field was human groupings, not the physical universe of stars and planets. So Cahann, a thin and bitter man, sat morosely in his cubicle and thought his seditious thoughts. Below, on block six, the Marines made fast, preparing for the tranN # sition to normal speed. Among them was a twenty-year-old Spaceman Third named Elan, indistinguishable from the rest. mentary feeling of bodilessness always upset him, irrationally frightening him, as though he were afraid each time that he wouldn't come back together again. It happened as usual this time. Cahann, swallowing repeatedly and trying to ignore his nausea, reached for a book -- any book -- and tried to read. The other five Scientists, he knew, would be on their way up to the Ready Room now with their preliminary reports. He could go up with them and hear the news. But he was completely disinterested. This was not a Lost Colony for which they were stopping, and he was just as pleased. He enjoyed his work. But he hated its consequences. He longed for his pipe. Most of the time, he could get along somehow without it, but when faced with speed transition he sorely missed its warm comfort. Well, he reflected, at least this was an unpopulated system, and he could have no false hopes dashed by a weakling Colony. One would think, he told himself for the thousandth time, that at least one of the Lost Colonies would have advanced to the point where it could stand up to the Empire and defend itself. But it just didn't work out that way. True, Earth had fallen back from the Old Empire into the barbarism of the Dark Ages; but the records had still been there, waiting for men to be ready to use them again. And the colonies, at the time of the collapse of the Old Empire, had been small units, dependent on Earth for most of their technological knowledge and materiel. Only tiny areas of their worlds were tamed. In the time that Earth had rebuilt her Empire, the colonies had had to devote themselves to maintaining the shaky status quo on alien and often dangerous worlds, progressing only slowly. A brisk rap at the cubicle door was immediately followed by the head of Strull, saying, "His Excellency wants you in the Ready Room. At once." Cahann looked up. "What for?" "Don't question his Excellency," snapped Strull. "I'm not. I'm questioning you." "And I'm not answering," Strull told him triumphantly, and marched away down the corridor. Cahann surged out of his chair, knowing exactly what Strull intended to do next. He raced down the corridor, Strull trundling ahead of him, and managed to get to the elevator before Strull could close its door in his face. Cahann grinned. "You'll have to take some of that tonnage off before you can outrace me, Strull," he said. The barb seemed to strike far deeper than was warranted. Strull got red-faced and beetle-browed and sank into a burning silence. Cahann shrugged. The Ready Room was filled with an excited buzzing. Glorring in the savage splendor of his golden uniform, prowled across the room to Cahann, smirking happily. "Good news, Cahann!" he announced. "Not only a habitable planet, but populated! There'll be work for you. Sit down, and we'll start the briefing." He turned away, crying, "Ehlenburgh!" Stunned, Cahann found a seat in the crowded Ready Room. He wondered if he'd heard aright. A populated world, not on the charts? Impossible! Unconsciously, his hand came up to his mouth, cupped as though holding a pipe-bowl, as he listened to the other Scientists describe the world this ambulatory boil had so unexpectedly discovered. TT sounded a strange world indeed. Not physically, but in reference to the human population. Physically, it was nearly ideal. It was a rather close approximation of Earth. Somewhat less of it was under water, the climate was generally a few degrees warmer at all latitudes, and the oxygen content of the air was a trifle higher. Gravity was six per cent lighter, and in shape it was a bit more flattened at the poles. Its day was three minutes shorter than that of Earth, and its equator was an impassable jungle belt, devoid of settlements. All of the settlements, in fact, were in the northern hemisphere, in the middle latitudes. And it was here that the strangeness set in. These settlements showed no signs of civilization whatever. No use of artificial illumination at night had been sighted, nor were there evidently airships of any kind. The instruments had failed to detect any use of atomic energy. There were no metropolitan centers. And large segments of land were obviously in cultivation, apparently for food... more primitive than which it was impossible to imagine. A bucolic world, on the face of it. A primitive paradise which had reverted to a pre-civilized agricultural level. Pity they couldn't have been left to stagnate in peace. Why the world had been left off the charts no one present could guess. The charts, carefully assembled, translated and transcribed after the New Empire had been built up from the rubble of the Dark Ages following the collapse of the Old Empire, had always been assumed to be correct. The Old Empire had burned itself out in its attempt to seed the stars with humanity, finally bringing about its own collapse and the Dark Ages that had followed by so doing. And during those Dark Ages, contact with the far-flung colonies had been lost. It was only now, five hundred years after the dissolution of the Old Empire, that once again Earth was master of space. Now once again the Protectorate was being expanded, and the Lost Colonies were being rediscovered and reintegrated into the Empire. The other five Scientists monotoned slowly through their reports, and then Glorring turned inquisitively to Cahann. "You've heard," he said. "What do you think? Are these people peaceful, or are they warlike?" Cahann shook his head. "I have no idea," he said. "I can't tell much about their social structure from what I've just heard. They're pre-industrial, obviously, and it doesn't seem as though their number can be very large. But we don't have any records. We don't know who founded the colony, how long ago, under what kind of charter, or with what sort of original population. In this situation, there's only one way for me to learn anything, and that's to go down and take a look." Glorring considered, his bullet head bowed in thought. At last, he said, "You have to see these natives in person, is that it?" Cahann nodded. "Very well. We will land near one of the larger settlements, and you will leave the ship. You will spend one hour studying the natives, and then you will return. If you have not returned in that time, we will make every effort to rescue you." "Thank you," murmured Cahann. Strull was suddenly active, whispering into His Excellency's ear. Glorring nodded. "You will have an enlisted man with you," he told Cahann. "To protect you," he lied blandly. "Thank you," said Cahann, deadpan, not looking at Strull. II in their cubicle on block six. They had felt the speed-transition, and knew now that the ship was moving in normal speed. But that was all they knew. It didn't seem as though they had come they hadn't been put on battle standby, and of course conflicting rumors were spreading throughr out the block, and of course none of the Marines actually had any idea at all what was going on. All they could do now was wait.  Elan was using this time to good advantage, shining his combat boots. At twenty, he was tall and slender. Marine life had made him lean and physically hard. It had also taught him the knack of the impassive face, and it had trained him in patience. He had, like everyone else on Earth, been taken into the service on his sixteenth birthday. After one year of training and an additional year of garrison duty on Earth, he had been assigned to the Lawrence for the rest of his twelve-year tour. He had had trouble adapting to the military life at first. Having been born and raised in the Adirondacks of North America, still the most backward area of Earth, the tight quarters which had seemed so natural to the men from more metropolitan regions had depressed him for a long while, though he had gradually grown used to them. Brent broke a rather lengthy silence between them by saying, "You never know. It might be a Lost Colony after all. I sure hope so." "It might be," said Elan noncommitally. He didn't sound as pleased as Brent, but then he wasn't a reconvert, and reconverts were always pleased, always happy. Reconvert: Former enemy impressed into the service to bring the force back up to strength after a military engagement. Surgical and psychological reconversion, taking five days, was necessary to make such a former enemy a willing and malleable Marine. There was, of course, a good deal lost insofar as initiative, intelligence and personality were concerned, but the remainder was a good Marine. "I sure hope it's a Lost Colony," said Brent. "I'd be glad to get back into action." Elan looked at his friend. Brent's squarish face had the bland smile and smooth complexion of the reconvert, and he sat stolidly on his bunk, body completely at rest. In the year and a half that Brent had been on the ship, Elan had never seen any other expression or any other emotion on Brent's face. The reconverts could only be happy. A trace of wistfulness came into Elan's voice: "You know, Brent, in a way you're lucky." "Sure I'm lucky," said Brent, happily but without surprise. "Good ship, good outfit, good chow. And every once in a while a chance to see some good action." "That isn't what I meant," said Elan. "I meant -- " he groped for words -- "you don't ever worry, ever feel sad or lonely or afraid." N #I "Sure," smiled Brent. "It's a great life, Elan." "I could volunteer," said Elan softly, as though talking to himself. "They'd reconvert me if I asked. But I'd lose an awful lot, wouldn't I?" "Still be the same great outfit," said Brent. "We'd still be here, buddy." "But I wouldn't be the same." Elan looked down at himself, wearing off-duty uniform, and then gazed out the open side of the cubicle at the other Marines he could see. All alike, every one of them. Only the faces were different. And even there the differences were small, minimized by the deadpan encouraged by the officers. The thing that he had, that was him, that made him unique and different from anyone else -- was there any real reason to keep it, if it only gave him pain? There was only one answer to that. While he gloomily studied it S#nd Carr, the flight leader, stuck his head into the cubicle and barked, "Elan! Dress uniform on the double and report to Personnel Hatch." Elan looked up, astonished. "Sir?" "Don't ask me, all I know is you're going outside. On the double. No weapons." "Outside," said Elan. "Maybe there won't be any fight," said Brent, and it was clear that upset him, but he was still smiling happily. wall by the open personnel hatch, and pointedly ignored Strull. At the last moment, it had been decided to send the adjutant along. Neither one of them was happy about it. In a way, Cahann reflected, it didn't matter whether Strull and the enlisted man came along or not. He could still make every effort to explain the situation to the natives, to try to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, convince them that capitulation was their only defense. The enlisted men's elevator slid open and the Marine who was to accompany them stepped out. Cahann glanced at him, recognized him as only one of the blank-faced enlisted men, and looked over at Strull. "Spaceman!" called Strull abruptly. The Marine marched rigidly over to stand in front of Strull and raise both hands high over his head in salute, parroting, "Spaceman Third Class Elan reporting as ordered, sir." Strull returned the salute halfheartedly, barely raising his hands above his shoulders. The Marine's arms snapped down to his sides. Strull said, "You will accompany us, keeping your eyes open for any danger. You will speak only when spoken to or if necessary to give warning of danger. You will not speak to any native under any circumstances. Is that clear?" "Yes, sir," snapped the boy. "Very well. You will proceed. Cahann, second." Of course, thought Cahann grimly. Inverse order of rank, when the probability of attack is unknown. The three of them went out and down the ramp, the Marine first in the dull gray of his dress uniform, Cahann second in the paler gray of his civilian garb, and Strull third, wearing his scarlet uniform. And the man at the foot of the ramp wore a white shirt and tan knee-length trousers and was barefooted. And smiling. Cahann stopped abruptly when he. saw the native, then started moving again, since the Marine was still descending ahead of him, and Strull was coming along in the rear. The Marine reached the foot of the ramp. The native stepped aside to allow him to pass. Then he stepped back into Cahann's path and said, in perfect Terran, "Wondered when you people would make up your minds to land and come out of that silly tin can of yours. The name's Harvey. Welcome to Cockaigne." Cahann could only gape. Perfect Terran? No variations at all in five hundred years? "Well, well, come along," said Harvey with brisk cheeriness. "Got to meet the others, you know." Strull pushed past Cahann and announced, "I am Adjutant Captain Strull. I greet you on behalf of the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, and on behalf of Vice-Marshal Helmut Glorring." Harvey glanced at Strull, nodded, said, "Greetings yourself," and turned away in obvious dismissal. Linking his arm through Cahann's, he said, "It's just over this way. Come along." Ill  growing indignation, stung by the native's snub and impatient for a chance to do something about it. The ship had landed in the middle of a large squarish meadow, with forest backed up against low broad hills on three sides. The settlement -- the largest one on the planet and still tiny by Earth standards -- was on the fourth side. It was toward this settlement that they were walking. The Settlement, when they finally came to it, was certainly nothing to crow about, not in Strull's considered opinion. It was about as primitive as one could get and still survive. There wasn't even a transparent dome over the settlement. And these people were surely not advanced enough to have complete weather control; which could only mean that they were, from time to time, actually rained upon! Strull glanced upward apprehensively, wondering if anything of the kind were about to happen now. But the sky was clear blue, with only a few small fluffy clouds. Strull was pessimistically surprised. The way things were going today, he wouldn't have been a bit surprised if he'd walked directly into a thunderstorm. Strull looked again at the settlement. Buildings of various sizes and shapes and colors -- though none of them more than one story high -- were spotted haphazardly here and there, with no order or precision to them at all. Nor was there any sort of pavement or streets, only narrow brown paths worn into the grass, leading hither and yon. "The meeting hall," Strull heard the native say to Cahann, "is just over this way. We're all anxious to get to know you people better." When they arrived at the entrance of the meeting hall Strull said coldly, "All right, Cahann, I'll take over." He stepped ahead, following the native inside. There was just the one room within, and the walls were only the one thickness of planed lumber. At this latitude, it would never get cold enough to make more than that really necessary, though there was a rough stone fireplace in one wall. An amateurish platform, a foot high, was at the far end, with three small stools on it. Other stools were scattered here and there, not in rows or any sort of order at all. And people were sitting on them, dressed somewhat like the first native, though there was no uniform pattern to their clothing except its rustic simplicity. The native led the way to the platform and turned to Strull to say, "I imagine you want to make some sort of speech now. Want me to introduce you? Or would you rather just begin on your own?" "I can handle it myself, thank you," Strull told him, with frosty dignity. back to sit on one of the stools. Cahann was already seated on the second, and the enlisted man was glancing at the third as though he wasn't quite sure whether he should take it or not. Strull gave him a one-second glower, to let him know he shouldn't, and then turned to the audience. "My name," he boomed, "is Strull, Captain Adjutant to Vice(ED) Lawrence. I greet you of the planet, uh -- " What the dickens had that native called this place? The native in question leaned forward to stage-whisper, "Cockaigne." "Cockaigne, yes. Thank you. I greet you, citizens of the planet Cockaigne, on behalf of the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, and additionally on behalf of Vice-Marshal Glorring, Primate Representative. I congratulate you on your rediscovery by the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, and I welcome you as a Confederated State in good standing within the Protectorate and beneath the benign and omnipotent protection of the Empire of Earth." Strull inhaled, having just barely begun his speech, but he noticed that a bearded native toward the back of the room had risen to his feet and was waving a hand for attention. Strull frowned, paused, and in a lower voice than previously said, "You had a question?" "That I did," said the man. While somewhat older and more hairy than the first native, he shared with him an identical expression of lazy insolence. "I was just wondering," he said, "how you can manage to rediscover us for your Empire when we were never a part of your Empire to begin with." Strull allowed a smile of superior knowledge to curve his lips. "Ah," he said, "but you were in the Empire at one time, over five hundred years ago. I assume all records of a time that far back have been lost, but I can assure you that it is so. Surprising as it may seem to you, humanity is not native to this world. You are descendants of the original colonists sent here by the Old Empire, which collapsed five hundred years ago and which only now has been fully restored." "Sorry," said the native, not looking at all sorry, "but you've got your history a little confused. This world wasn't settled five hundred years ago by the Old Empire, it was settled seven hundred years ago by the United States of America." Strull had never heard the term. He blinked rapidly, saying, "What? What, what?" And that blasted Cahann spoke up, not bothering at all to hide his dislike for Strull. Didn't he realize that they should show these yokels a united front? N # say, "Regional government on Earth. One of the last. There've been some indications in the old manuscripts that it did do some small-scale colonizing of its own, shortly before the Empire took over. We've always assumed that their efforts were unsuccessful." "Nonsense," said Strull. "Nonsense." The bearded native shook his head. "Not at all," he insisted. "We beat your Empire by a good two hundred years." "This planet," said Strull desperately, "is part of the Protectorate of the Empire of Earth, as of this moment, and that's all there is to it! No questions!" "I've got a question anyway," said a rather attractive young woman toward the front of the hall. "What if we don't want to be part of your silly Empire?" "That," Strull told her happily, on familiar ground again, "would be tantamount to revolution. And we would be regrettably forced to put down any revolution." "We certainly wouldn't want that," said the young woman. A number of the other natives nodded in agreement, but they all seemed to have faint smiles drifting about their lips, as though they thought the whole discussion rather funny. The native who had first met them got to his feet and said, "We'll have to talk this over some, and decide what to do about you people. You can go on back to your tin can now. Tell your boss we'll let him know our decision in a day or two." Strull was just as pleased. He'd come, seen that the natives were anything but dangerous, had said his piece, and now he was more than ready to return to the ship. "Come along," he said to Cahann and the enlisted man. "These two can stay here," said the native. "We may have some questions to ask them." "Definitely not!" cried Strull. There was no telling what a seditionist like Cahann might say if left alone with these people. "They'll be perfectly safe here," said the native unnecessarily. "Go on back to the ship." Well, in that case -- "I will come back with his Excellency in an hour," said Strull. He was halfway back to the ship before he began to wonder just what the dickens had happened there. He hadn't intended to leave Cahann and the enlisted man, not under any circumstances. But the native had said something -- he couldn't precisely remember what any more -- and for some reason that had seemed to change things. Why? He was somehow confused, he couldn't for the life of him figure out exactly what had happened toward the end there. It was all that had happened to him today, that's what it was. Glorring being such a nasty martinet about his weight, and Cahann baiting him, and the native being so insolent, and all the rest of it. No wonder he was a little confused. But his face was still puckered in a bewildered frown as he continued back to the ship.  natives, who had burst into laughter the minute Strull left the hall. It was his job, as psysociohistorian, to understand and categorize human societies, from the most complex industrial world to the smallest family group. Human social groupings, that was his subject matter, seen in historical context, the sociologist's what? complemented by the psychologist's why? In essence, his job was even simpler than that. Every human grouping, from the smallest family to the largest industrial complex, had some sort of loophole in it, some spot for the Empire to insert itself and thus make the grouping at last only another part of the Empire. It was his job to find the loophole. He did the job well, because he enjoyed it in the abstract. He understood that he was making quite a large contribution to the Empire's subjugation of more and more human beings, but he didn't suppose he had any choice in the matter. His work fascinated him, and he could only perform that work in the service of the Empire. His refusal to work would not have changed the course of events one iota. Another psysociohistorian would simply have taken his place, leaping at the opportunity to get away for even a little while from the rigid anti-intellectualism of the college campus. Since he enjoyed his work, and since he had the curious facility to separate it from its end product, and since he was additionally a highly intelligent man, he was one of the best psysociohistorians in the business. He had progressed to the point where his understanding of new societies and new cultures was so rapid as to be almost intuitive. This was the first time he had ever been baffled. All right, these people were not the descendants of Old Empire colonists, they were the descendants of even earlier colonists than that. But they were people, nevertheless. They were an aggregate group. They should certainly have reacted in one of a limited number of predictable ways. They hadn't. Throughout his contact with  them so far, they had behaved in no known manner whatsoever. Making fun of Strait -- he liked to do that himself, but that was because he knew the little blimp, and he hadn't done it on first meeting him anyway -- and acting as though the threat of the ship and its complement of Marines were no threat at all. And then all at once bursting into laughter for no reason that Cahann could see. r  "HE laughter having finally subsided, Harvey came over to Cahann and said, "You have a lot of questions to ask. That's only natural. Where do you want to begin?" "I'm not sure," admitted Cahann. He looked at them, and they were all attentive now, more serious than they had been up to now. "I think I'd better begin with basics," he said. "Government, for instance." "Democratic anarchy," said Harvey promptly. "The will of the minority." He laughed at the expression on Cahann's face. "Not what you're thinking," he said. "Not a ruling minority in your Empire sense." He motioned at the others in the hall. "We're a minority," he said, "of the people on Cockaigne. Every settlement is a minority. If you disagree with us, you can go find a settlement where people agree with you. If  there is no such place, you can either change your thinking or be a hermit, it's up to you." 'What about criminals?" Cahann asked him. "What do you do with them?" "Hermits," said Harvey succinctly. "All right, what about money?" Harvey shook his head. "I know what you mean," he said, "but we don't use it. A society has to be more complex and sophisticated than ours to need money. Value symbols -- and that's what money is, after all -- are usually the result of expanding travel, trade over larger and larger areas. We rarely travel, and we neither import nor export, so simple barter is gOod enough for us." "What about war between the settlements?" Cahann asked him. "None," said Harvey. "Controlled population growth is a better answer. We don't need more land than we have." "You've never had a war?" "Never." "So you don't have much by way of military armaments." "Nothing at all." "Then why," Cahann demanded, "are you so sure you won't be conquered by that shipload of Marines out there?" That set them all laughing again, though Cahann couldn't see that he'd said anything particularly funny. He glanced at the ana saw only me normal blank expression. The Marine waS staring straight ahead, at nothingThe laughter stopped abruptly, and Harvey said, "I'm sorry, Cahann. You don't understand the situation here yet." "I'm well aware of that," said Cahann stiffly. 'You aren't going to understand by asking questions," Harvey told him. He got to his feet and said, "I can show you more easily than I can explain to you. Do you want to come along with me?" Cahann hesitated, then stood. The Marine did likewise, but Harvey said, 'You stay here, Elan, if you please. Harriet there wants to talk to you while we're gone." He gestured at the young woman who had spoken to Strull, and who was now coming forward, smiling pleasantly. Cahann said hesitating, "I'm not sure -- " " -- you should separate?" finished Harvey, smiling again. "Face it, Cahann, the two of you together with a roomful of us are no safer than you would be separated. Come along." Cahann paused again, then shrugged and said, "You're right." With a backward glance at the Marine, whose expressionless face was beginning to crack under an onslaught of frightened bewilderment, he followed Harvey out of the meeting hall. Outside, Harvey gestured away to the right, deeper into the settlement. "This way," he said. Something in the man's tone, or in his expression, or perhaps just in the posture of his body, made Cahann suddenly apprehensive. Just what was this he was walking into? "You want to know, don't you?" Harvey asked him, challenging him. "Yes," said Cahann. "Yes, I want to know." He stepped out firmly in the direction the other man had indicated. IV scared out of his wits. The girl who'd been called Harriet came up on the platform, smiling at him in a useless attempt at reassurance. "Please don't be frightened, Elan," she said. "We just want to get to know you, that's all." He looked at them, too frightened at being alone to be able to read their expressions. Harriet sat down beside him. "Don't be upset, Elan. Just talk to us. Tell us about yourself." He mumbled, "I don't know what to say." "Tell us about your life on the ship," she suggested. His mind filled with memories of the rigid military discipline of the ship, but he knew better than to give information to potential enemies and so said only, "Life on the ship is just ordinary. Like garrison duty anywhere. That's all." Unexpectedly, that seemed to satisfy them, and the girl Harriet said, "Tell us about Earth, then. Tell us about your home on Earth." Earth. Home! Oh, but that was something else again. His home section, peaceful and beautiful. Harriet said, surprise plain in her face and voice, "Is all of Earth like that?" He stared at her, and felt a moment of complete panic. He hadn't said anything! She seemed to understand. She laughed, a bit shakily, and patted his hand. "Don't go so goggle-eyed," she told him. "The expression on your face told volumes. It's clear you love your own home section, but what of the rest of Earth? Tell us about the big cities." He made as though to rise. "I -- I have to go back -- " "No, no, they'll come for you. They said it was all right for you to stay here." She held his hand, gazing at him with an expression he couldn't define. "Little rabbit," she said soothingly. "Poor little rabbit No one will frighten you any more." to loinpiece and was wrestling with Chief Astrogator Koll when Strull returned. Seeing the adjutant enter the ready room, Glorring quit fooling around. He kneed the astrogator, kidney, punched him and gave him an elbow in the eye. Koll staggered back across the ready room, while the other officers shouted appreciation. Glorring signaled the end of the match. Immediately, his dressers came forward to towel him dry and put his golden uniform back on him. Glorring gazed bleakly at Strull. "Took you long enough," he snapped. "Report." "Yes, sir. We encountered the natives and -- " "Where's Cahann?" Glorring interrupted. "I left him there," said Strull promptly. "He -- " "You what?" "I left the enlisted man with him," explained Strull. "There's nothing to worry about, Excellency." "Oh, there isn't, eh?" Glorring couldn't stand a weakling, and Strull was by far the weakest boob on the ship. It was about time, Glorring decided, to make a man out of that wart. "You go right on, Captain Strull," he said. "You go right on and tell me all about it." "Yes, sir," said Strull briskly, n d then seemed to falter. He Rooked completely confused for a second, and then said, "Well, uh, aS I said, we encountered the natives. I spoke to a group of them in their meeting hall, telling them who we were and the purpose of our coming here. They claimed, by the way, that they w eren't Old Empire colonists after all, but colonists from an even earlier time than that. I forget the name of the government that sent them, but they claimed it was seven hundred years ago." Koll, somewhat recovered, chimed in, "So that's why they weren't on the charts." "It would seem so," said Glorring. "Go on, Captain Strull. We haven't come to the interesting part yet. The part where you left Cahann and the Marine and returned to the ship alone." "Yes, sir." Strull gnawed a lower lip for a second, as though gathering his thoughts, and then went on in a rush. "Well, sir, after I spoke to these natives, I got suspicious. They're as backward a bunch as you'll ever see. Not a bit of mechanization around them at all. But they talk as though they don't even consider us a threat. Apparently, they feel as though they have some sort of secret weapon or something. So I ordered Cahann to stay behind, because he's particularly qualified for that sort of thing, and see what he could find out from the natives. And I ordered the Marine to stay and keep an eye on Cahann." heavy sarcasm. "Absolutely brilliant, Captain Strull." "Of course," said Strull hastily, "there was another reason, too. It was impossible in the short time I was there to get any idea of their system of government. And of course mine was just first contact, and I had no wish, your Excellency, to usurp your prerogative of direct negotiation with the local governmental leaders. So Cahann is to find out just who heads the local government and where he can be found, so you'll be able to go directly to him when the time comes and not have to waste time asking directions of underlings." Glorring raised an eyebrow. That made sense, surprisingly. Of course, Strull was only currying favor by doing this, but nevertheless it was sensible for Glorring to be able to go directly to the local authority. "Very well," he said. "You did better than I expected, Strull. Very good." Strull bowed, relief plain on his face. "Thank you, Excellency." "Very well," said Glorring, to the room in general. "We will give Cahann an hour to find out all he can. In one hour, I shall leave the ship. We shall be escorted by one flight of Marines on foot, the other three flights to be at combat-ready stations. One hour."  just happened. It was calling to him, because it loved him, and he went to it, because he returned that love, because he loved it as much as it loved him, because to love it and to be loved by it was greater and more wonderful and more right than anything else in all of life. They had left the meeting hall, he and Harvey. They had walked, almost aimlessly, among the scattered unordered buildings of the settlement and slowly it had grown upon him, this acquisition of love, this new understanding of the meaning and depth of love, this new completion which was possible only with the loved one, close to the loved one, blending with the loved one... It was in this direction. Not far away now, closer and closer. They had walked aimlessly, almost as though Harvey were allowing Cahann to choose his own direction. Then Cahann had chosen his direction, and it was this way, this way toward love and toward fulfillment and toward completion, this way toward It which desired him above all things. Before, just after they'd left the meeting hall, Cahann had been full of questions, had tried to ask them at once, but Harvey had raised a hand to stop him, saying,  "Not yet. I'll answer all your I questions, I promise that, but not just yet. Let me show you this! first." "What is it?" Cahann had asked him. "I don't think I could explain it to you," Harvey had said. "When you see it, you'll understand why. When you see it, you'll understand a lot of things that are puzzling you now." "This thing, whatever it is you want to show me," Cahann had said, "this is what you think will protect you from the Empire, is that it?" "Not precisely," Harvey had said. "Please, don't try to guess. That won't do any good. Just come along. Once you've seen it, you'll understand; and that will be that." So they had fallen silent. And they had walked aimlessly, back and forth, and Cahann had just about come to the conclusion that he was being given arunaround, that they were simply retracing their steps among the buildings of the settlement and not really getting anywhere at all, when the first faint touches of it had reached him. Desire. Love. Warmth and compassion and understanding. A need for him, for him and alone of all the creatures of universe, all the creatures that had ever lived or ever would live, frt no one and nothing but him. It had come upon him almost annoticeably, like an aroma creeping into a room, and it is strong in the room before you even notice it. And so it was with this, it was only a faint unnoticed sensation until suddenly it had been there for a long time and had grown strong and was now all-pervasive in his mind. This way, it called. This way. A message of love, a message of desire and understanding and fulfillment; and he had followed it,, he had turned in the path it had pointed out, and now Harvey trailed him, unnoticed and unneeded, and he hurried toward his beloved, who hungered for him. He felt like running, but there was really no reason to run. They would have all eternity together, now that they had found one another at last. And so he walked through the settlement, striding certainly forward, eyes bright with love and hope. He reached the last of the houses of the settlement and the edge of the woods beyond, and stepped unhesitatingly into the woods, for the loved one was in there, beckoning to him, calling for him, needing him. And Harvey trailed along behind him, two or three paces behind him. closer, so close he could feel his skin tingling with anticipation, so close that the sweat broke out all over his body and his mouth hung open and his eyes stared for a sight of the beloved. And then, at last, he came to it, where it stood in its own small clearing. It was the head of Medusa, a thick green plant with many sinuous waving arms reaching up and out from the single stubby base, the whole nearly eight feet high and five feet in diameter. The rubbery green branches, or arms, swayed slowly, as though from a breeze, and at their tips were great scarlet flowers with thick petals, the flowers as big as a man's head. The arms swayed voluptuously, and the petals of the flowers, which looked like great rough tongues, scraped together with a sound like the smacking of dry lips. This was It, the beloved, the purpose of all life. This was his destination and his ending and his fulfillment. For what greater purpose could any creature have than the satisfaction of the hungers of It? What was there in life more wonderful than the feeding of It? How grand and blessed and wonderful it was that he had been chosen, he of all the beings that lived and moved, he had been chosen to give himself to the beloved, to feed it and so to become a part of it forever. To throw himself at its base and give himself to its hunger. But as he stepped forward into the clearing, and the great scarlet flowers beckoned and bowed to him, he was suddenly stopped. Some petty creature was clutching at him, trying to hold him back, trying to keep him from his proper completion. He pushed the creature aside. But it came back, and again, grabbing at him, clutching at him, pulling him away, keeping him always just out of reach of the beckoning scarlet flowers which hungered for him. And then more of the foul filthy creatures arrived and overpowered him. And though he fought against them, though It gave him the strength of fury and of love, he was borne down and back, carried bodily away from the clearing and away from the sight of his beloved. And still he fought, and the creatures dragged him back and back, out of the woods and among constructions which were of no moment to him, for the beloved was there, back there, still calling to him. And when at last he knew that it was hopeless, that the creatures were not going to release him ever, that he would never be able to complete himself at the base of I his beloved, he shrieked with the ; torment of the greatest loss and ' the greatest sorrow that any be, ing had ever known. He shrieked and shrieked, till one of the creatures struck him. And then blackness rushed in, and he knew no  more. V Every thought! Elan sat on the platform in terror of his life. That was their secret, and he knew it now, and the nature of their secret was such that they must know he knew it. The girl Harriet's slip when she had asked him to describe his home had been the first indication, but it had seemed too fantastic to be believed, and he had chosen to accept her flimsy excuse. But gradually, as the questioning had gone on, he had seen that the people in the room were listening attentively not to the evasions and generalizations he was saying but to the truths he was thinking. The play of expression on an unguarded face, a look passing between two people, things which could have been produced only by his thoughts, and not by his words. Until finally there just wasn't any choice any more, there  I weren't any other possible answers. But still they played out the game with him, Harriet asking the questions and he stumbling through the useless answers. At one point, a kind of wave seemed to go through them all, they looking at one another with suddenly widened eyes, and five men at the back of the room got to their feet and hurried outside. He tried to recall what his thoughts had been at that second, but it didn't seem as though their strange apprehension had anything to do with him. The scientist, Cahann? Harriet patted his hand again, saying, "Be easy, Elan. You have nothing to fear." He stared at her. "You know what I'm thinking," he whispered. "You're reading my mind." "Be easy, Elan," she said softly. "Don't always expect the worst of humanity. Not all of mankind has chosen the path of Earth." Then they were silent. He looked from face to face, and knew that they were talking to one another without words, deciding what to do with him and with Cahann and with all the people on the ship. The silence was suddenly shattered by a shriek from outside the building, and a second shriek on the heels of the first. "Cahann!" he cried, leaping to his feet. Jumping from the platform, he raced through the natives to the door and outside. He ran around the corner of the building, and stopped dead. A little distance away was the man named Harvey, and with him were the five men who had left the meeting hall so hurriedly a few minutes before. And at their feet lay the body of Cahann. r T , HE small band marching out from the ship in the sunlight looked hard and lean and impressive. In the lead, herculean in his golden uniform, marched Glorring. Directly behind him Strull, and next back two officers marching abreast, Majors Londin and Corse, respectively in green and black. Behind them, Captains Rink (his left arm in a sling) and Stimmel and Pleque, in blue and maroon and pale rose. Next, Lieutenants Braldor, Chip, Sassen, Kommel and Roll, in the multicolored uniforms preferred by most junior officers. And, bringing up the rear, the flight of Marines in dress gray, Slst Loretta two paces ahead of them and S#nd Kallett at the head of the middle squad. There was no music, there were no flags. These were considered frills, and an Exploration  Discovery ship was notoriously devoid of frills. But they were impressive anyr f " wayS rim The Marines looked deadly a nd the officers in their . jj t colors hearkened back to the bright-plumed or feather-decorated or body-painted warriors of the dim past. These were the warriors of the Empire, respecting no one but themselves, desiring nothing but conquest, owing allegiance only to the Empire which equipped them and sent them on their missions. Glorring, in the lead, breathed the sweet air and cast an eye of ownership over his world. And it was his world, much more so than any other Lost Colony he had bagged for the Empire. Here was a verdant globe, already stocked with colonists, its existence unsuspected at home. Glory came to the men who shepherded the stray Colonies back to the flock. How much more glory for the man who discovered a brand new stray! Perhaps he might bring a few specimens of the local colony back with him. Say ten of them. Unusual, of course, but this was an unusual world, an unknown world. Yes, he would bring ten of the natives back to Earth with him. As they came closer to the settlement, Glorring spied Cahann and the enlisted man, waiting near the closest of the buildings. They were too far away for the vice-marshal to be able to read their expressions, but he knew what they must be. Admiring envy on the part of Cahann. Military pride on the part of the Marine. And, on the faces of the group of natives waiting with them, could there be any expression possible other than a wonderful awe? Beneath the silver skirts, he all at once executed a little hop, the time-honored method for changing step. Simultaneously, all the marchers behind him did exactly the same thing. He didn't pay any attention to that at all.  somewhat greenish, but not with envy. It was more the greenish tinge of seasickness. He had a lot to recover from. His memory of -- the thing, it, the beloved, whatever it had been -- was dim and blurred, and he had the feeling he didn't want to remember it any more clearly than he did. There had been an urge, a compulsion, that had seemed at the time to be right and proper and natural, and that had also seemed to come from within, to be his own invention and own decision. He remembered the urge, remembered with a shudder what the urge had been, even remembered to some extent the all-incluI # sive compulsion of the thing.But his memory was pedantic and unreal, as though he were remembering a particularly vicious torture which he had never seen practiced on anyone but about which he had read graphic and detailed accounts. They were second-hand memories; he was buffered to some extent from their impact. On regaining consciousness, the first thing he had seen had been Harvey's face, almost comically worried. And through a surrealistic damping, he had vaguely heard Harvey's voice: "Cahann! Come out of it, Cahann, it's all over! Come on, man, it's over now, the thing doesn't want you any more." The last phrase had done it. He had sat bolt upright, prepared to scream, and Harvey's hand had clapped tight to his mouth, holding him rigid until the need to scream had passed. Then the hand had fallen away. Harvey, hunkered down beside him, said, "I'm sorry, Cahann, more sorry than you know. I hope you can forgive me." "Forgive you?" Cahann raised a shaking hand to wipe his forehead. "I don't know yet what you did to me," he confessed. "I had no idea," Harvey told him, "just how strong the enticer could be for somebody who didn't have any preparation. No wonder it killed so many in the first fel generations." "What was it?" Cahann asked him. He felt stronger now, but his limbs ached as though he'd been tensing them too hard for too long. "What in time was it?" "Our ancestors called it 'enticer,"' Harvey told him. "When they came here, the plant infested the whole planet. There's only a few left now, except around the jungle belt of the equator. We haven't bothered to clean them out down there. We can't use the land anyway, and their range isn't very far." "But what is it?" "It's an enticer," said Harvey. "It entices animal food, broadcasting a kind of telepathic beam that attracts anything that moves. We think the beam is connected with the flowers' smell, but we've never proved it one way or the other." "All right," said Cahann shakily. "It got to me, so it does work. But why doesn't it go after you people? Why only me?" "It does go after us," Harvey told him. "It goes after every living thing that gets close enough." "You mean you've built up resistance to it? I don't see how you get the chance." #TT doesn't work quite that way." Harvey seemed to consider for a moment, and then he said, "Have you ever heard of m ental telepathy?" "Of course." "What do you think of it, as a possibility?" "j think it's nonsense," said Cahann promptly. So did Harvey, saying it right with him word for word. Cahann frowned. "What was that all about?" he asked, and Harvey asked the question in harmony with him. Cahann pondered, then nodded his head, saying, "Oh, I get it. But that doesn't -- " He stopped, rather precipitately. Because every one of the twenty or twenty-five natives around him had been saying exactly the same words, in chorus with him. Harvey smiled slightly. "You think that doesn't prove anything," he said, "because those are the words you might have been expected to say. All right, say something unexpected." Cahann looked at him, thinking furiously. He glanced at the enlisted man, who was gaping at everything with such a complete look of blank astonishment that Cahann at once felt better. At least there was one person present who was more baffled than he. Cahann gnawed on the inside of his cheek, trying to think. Telepathy? The word was known, the field existed, but the researchers in the field were, so far as Cahann had ever known, exclusively crackpots and panacea-peddlers. Could the thing really exist? All he had to do was open his mouth and say one word, any word at all, and he would know. He wasn't quite sure he wanted to know. Mind-readers. Peeping toms. No privacy at all. "It isn't as bad as all that," Harvey told him. "Shields do develop. Go ahead, say something." Cahann took a deep breath and said: "Canteloupe!" Twenty-five voices bellowed it with him: "Canteloupe!" Harvey smiled. "Okay?" VI Too much too soon. He wiped his forehead with his palm. He was still sitting on the ground, Harvey squatting beside him and the others, with the goggle-eyed Marine, standing around in front of him. He leaned forward, arms lax, and gazed bleakly at the ground between his knees. "All right," he said dully. "Tell me about it." "I don't know what the colonization methods of the Old Empire were," Harvey told him, "but our ancestors were on a one-way street. They got on their ship, left Earth, traveled until they found a place where they could land and live, and that was it. There was no contact with Earth, and no way to get back to Earth. Nor was there any way to leave their new home once they'd chosen it. The ship needed a complex launching pad they weren't equipped to build. "So they came here," he went on, motioning at the world around them. "They landed, stripped down the ship for parts, planted, started to build shelters... and then the enticer went to work on them." "The way it did on me," said Cahann. "Exactly. Now, here's the point. Telepathic ability is dormant, to a greater or lesser extent, in every human being who ever lived. Back on Earth, there were countless cases of individuals whose ability was advanced almost to the threshold of self-awareness. You see, the capability is greater in some people than in others. Just as some people have better memories than others, some are better at mathematics than others, and so on." Cahann nodded. "To get back to the original settlers of Cockaigne," said Harvey. "They were stranded here, five thousand of them. And they were being picked off by the enticer, which struck them telepathically, and below the level of conscious resistance. Do you see what that! meant?" "I think so," said Cahann. "Jt meant that the people with the greatest telepathic capacity would be the ones most likely to survive. The ones who could catch what the enticer was doing ' in time to get back out of range."  "Of course," said Harvey. "On this planet, for the first time i n man's history, telepathic ability was the primary survival characteristic. This world forced man to breed for telepathy. The survivors of each generation were just a little bit more advanced toward full use of the ability than the generation before them." "Until now," Cahann finished for him, "you are all fully telepathic." "Exactly. And with, in addition, the complementary abilities that go along with it. Such as the shield. And such as, for instance -- well, for instance, what's your name?" He looked at Harvey blankly. Why ask that? "Come on," said Harvey. "Tell me your name." "My name's... He didn't know. He thought desperately, trying to remember, and it just wasn't there. He didn't know his own name! It was as though he had never had a name, as though a name had never been given him. "Your name's Cahann," Harvey told him gently. Of course! How stupid to forget it! Cahann looked sharply at Harve y, in sudden understanding. "You made me forget it." Harvey nodded. It was as though a dull weight were pressing on Cahann's soul, "js there no limit to what you people can do?" he asked. "There are limits," Harvey told him, "but they're nothing to worry about." "What are you going to do with USr "We've been trying to decide. At first, when you'd just landed here, we thought the best thing to do was make you take off again at once, and give you the idea the planet was uninhabitable. It's unlikely any other Earth ship will ever stumble across us." "I wish you had done that," Cahann told him. when we're finished with you," he said. He motioned at the Marine, still goggle-eyed in the background. "See Elan there? He's an intelligent boy. He's also a latent telepath of a very high order. Harriet tells me she thinks she could bring the ability out completely in less than a year. But do you know what Earth has done to that boy?" Cahann looked. at the Marine, not understanding. He hadn't ever really paid any attention to him, he was simply an impassive face and a uniform, one of the depersonalized enlisted men from block six. "Of course," said Harvey. "That's what you think of him. That's what everybody thinks of him. They've told him so long and so often that he doesn't count as a person, as an individual, that he believes it himself by now. Do you know that he has seriously considered requesting reconversion, to kill off the individuality which was only worthless and which brought him only selfdoubt and worry? Do you know that four per cent of Earth's Marines every year volunteer for reconversion? That's how little life and individual worth have come to mean with you people." "I didn't know the figures," said Cahann distractedly. He was gazing at the Marine, trying to see him as a person, trying to see him the way Harvey saw him. It wasn't easy to do. "Your Empire," Harvey told him, steel now coming into his voice, "is an open sore. It's a gaping wound on the face of the universe. We wouldn't feel right if we let it go on," "No," said Cahann. "With all of your powers, you can't do that. You can't fight the Empire. One ship, yes, you could beat one ship. But not the Empire." "Don't be so sure." A native came strolling up at that point, casually saying, "Group of them forming outside the ship. They're going to come this way." "All right." Harvey got to his feet, saying, "Come along, Cahann, We can talk while waiting for them." Cahann stood up, awkwardly. He was stiff and aching in every joint. He limped along beside Harvey, the Marine and the other natives following. Harvey said, "We're going to roughs. Bound in heavy paper covers with very fine duality paper. Regular book size. Contains Thuvia, Maid of Mars; Master Mind of Mars; The Chessman of Mars -- with # illustrations by J. Allan St. John. # pages. Price #. Ready now. due December #. # each. See our ad In IF for additional Burroughs titles now ready or due soon! Specialist in complete sets of back-number sf magazines. Send your want list. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N. Y. #I #th Ave. Brooklyn #, N. Y. have to make you forget most of this, but only temporarily. We'd rather not give the Empire any warning. Ten of us are going to go back to Earth with you people, on your ship." "Ten of you? You can't possibly -- " "Don't worry about it, Cahann," said Harvey. "Your commander is deciding right now to bring us along." They stopped at the edge of the meadow. In the distance, the procession was moving toward them. How pompous they looked! Cahann had never noticed that before, how silly and pompous they all looked. Nor how completely defenseless. "You can do it," he said in a low voice. He felt sick and frightened, but at the same time he was beginning to feel a kind of exultation. They would do it, they really would. And was there any doubt the Earth would be a better world when they were finished with what they would do to it? "Earth is out of step," said Harvey, "out of step with life. Like this group coming toward us. They're all out of step. We have to change that." In the distance, the marching group all hopped at once, changing step. for your information A FE W years ago Arthur C. Clarke, having flown into New York from the West Coast by sleeper plane, said to me: "When I woke up this morning it suddenly occurred to me that I belong to the only generation of men who will take a real sleeper plane. The generation before us did not fly and the generation after us will fly so fast that there won't be any time for sleep." It was a very interesting observation, which was wrong only in the respect of speaking of generations; it can all happen in the lifetime of one man. If somebody was born in # he was walking around before anybody flew, except in balloons. This man might have flown in one of the early passenger planes which made it all the way from New York to Chicago in just a little over eight hours. He can now be flying in the Los Angeles-New York jet, which takes four hours and twenty minutes from lift-off in Los Angeles to touchdown on Idlewild airport. And the same man won't be too old, say five or six years from now, to board the successor to the jets. The term "successor to the jets" must not be misunderstood. It does not mean that new types of transportation will make the jets disappear. Nothing ever seems to disappear completely. Soldiers not only carry bayonets but use them occasionally, whether there are transcontinental missiles or not. types of devices which might be considered successors to the jets for passenger transportation. One is the ramjet, now in use for the propulsion of several different missiles. The other is the passenger-carrying rocket. Since we do have winged missiles which use ramjets for propulsion it would seem, at first glance, that the ramjet-powered passenger liner, flying at an average of twice the speed of sound, would be closer to the present. In a manner of speaking it is, but there is a problem -- which is either interesting or infuriating, depending on how you look at it -- in the fact that a ramjet will not work unless it is moving with a fairly high speed. In the case of ramjet-powered missiles this is easily overcome by catapulting the missile into the air, either with a real catapult or else by the use of several high-power, short duration solid fuel rockets. As I said, this is being done with a missile; but when it comes to passenger carrying aircraft the passengers are likely to say something about this. In fact, the passenger's strongest argument would be to say nothing at all and book passage with another airline. But the takeoff is not the only problem. The landing is another one. When an airliner approaches the airport area its speed is very considerably reduced. The final approach to the runway is made at about the speed where the wings will still keep it airborne. If such a plane were ramjet-propelled the ramjets just would not play any more. The best statement about this problem I have ever heard was given after a lecture at New York University, right after the war, by Air Commodore Whittle, the pjan who designed the first British j et engines. When somebody f ro m the audience asked him whether he thought the then new ramjet might ever be used for piloted aircraft (the questioner probably had military aircraft in mind) Commodore Whittle said that as an engineer he considered this an interesting problem. "But as a pilot," he continued, "I would hate to approach a runway with dead engines. This is the moment where I want to have all the power I might need -- and if possible a little more." Any ramjet-powered airliner would, therefore, need two sets of engines, adding turbojets for the take-off run and for getting the plane up to the speed it needs for the ramjets to take over. And the turbojets would be needed again for the landing. And whenever you approach an engineer with the request of designing an airplane for two different sets of engines he will probably lean back as if in thought. He will be in thought, as a matter of fact, but he won't think about the problem. He'll think of a way of getting rid of you, and he may also consider whether there is anybody he dislikes enough to recommend for this job. Even though a ramjet-powered airliner may look easier it is quite possible that a rocket-powered passenger liner is the more likely successor to today's jets. Years ago Dr. Walter Dornberger and Krafft A. Ehricke designed such an airliner -- or more precisely they thought about the problem of how it could be made to work. In principle, the flight of such a rocket-powered airliner would be the same as the flight of a ballistic missile (in other words: it would not be really a "flight" in the proper meaning of the word most of the time) but with a landing at the end instead of an impact. When I mentioned this possibility at the time, the reaction of the listener usually was that he would let anybody else use this device. But now, after successful manned orbits of the earth, the idea may slowly become more palatable. As the diagram (Fig. I ) shows, the rocket-propelled passenger liner would be a two-stage device. Both stages would have wings and both stages would be piloted. But the wings of both stages would be used mainly for the landing. The passengers would be in the second stage. almost vertical, with all eight rocket motors burning (five in the first stage and three in the Fig. #. Design for a two-stage, passenger-carrying rocket (both stages piloted). second stage) to produce a maximum of thrust. But the three rocket motors of the second stage would not burn fuel from the tanks of the second stage during takeoff. They would take fuel from the first stage. The fuel supply of the first stage would be nearly exhausted after # seconds. Then the two stages would separate. The large, but by then very light, first stage would drop behind the second stage... which keeps going, this time using its own fuel. The job of the pilot of the first stage would be to fly his stage on the momentum it has and ease it around so that it will return to the airport from which it took off. Possibly he might fly it to another conveniently located airport; but the ideal would be to return to the original airport, so that the first stage, after inspection and refueling, can be used to push another second stage into its trajectory. The second stage would meanwhile have gone into a ballistic trajectory, far flatter than the ballistic trajectories of missiles. The highest point of the flight would be around # miles up. It would actually be a flight in the upper stratosphere. For the sake of the passengers, one of the three rocket motors of the second stage would be kept burning at very much reduced thrust. The purpose is not to accelerate the ship any farther; the purpose is to spare the passengers from experiencing the zero-g condition, which is in itself harmless but might frighten inexperienced people. The low thrust of the rocket motor that is kept in operation would also help to overcome the residual air resistance which would still be encountered # miles up. Each of the two stages would have some fuel left, to be used during the final approach to the M #O I way for corrections and for an emergency pull-out in case a sudden obstruction appears on th e runway. The flying time from Los Ang e les to New York would be only a few minutes more than # ne hour, or about one quarter of the time now needed by a turbojet. The real problem here is the question "will it pay?" in all its ramifications. Will it pay for enough passengers to make a certain trip in one quarter of the time it normally takes them now? In the beginning the picture will no doubt be falsified by curiosity travelers, people who don't have to make the trip but have the money to pay for the ticket and make the trip for the sole purpose of bragging about it afterwards. Now, whether it will pay for the "real" travelers to quarter the travel time will depend, in a large measure, on the price of the ticket. Obviously if the ticket price is only # per cent higher than the jet fare, the quartering of the travel time will pay for many more people than it will if the ticket price is, say, double the jet fare. The ticket price will depend, in turn, on the fuel consumption (and the price of the fuel) and on the number of trips a ship can make without needing a major overhaul. All these questions cannot be answered right now. The development cost of the ship itself will be influenced by how much it will differ from ships which the government will have to develop for space operations such as the job of supplying the space station or, possibly, the servicing of very large communications satellites. But passenger travel by rocket is possible. And it will come if the financial problems can economically be solved. Let me point out first that I have nothing against readers who ask me questions. But I do feel pleased when, once in a while, a reader tells me something. And I am especially pleased when a reader, as in this case Dr. Pedro Wygodzinsky, tells me something which I, without his kind intervention, would almost certainly have missed. The case is the discovery of an insect which most certainly deserves the designation "living fossil" in northern California. The specific place, geographically speaking, was the northern California Coast Range in Mendocino County, near Piercy. The specific place, ecologically speaking, was under the decaying bark and in the rotten logs of fallen Douglas firs in this area. The small insect that turned up in the collections made by Dr. W. Gertsch and V. Roth would have been recognized, in a general way, even by many city people. A "silverfish" they would have said, probably wondering what a silverfish was doing in a forest. As far as they are concerned, silverfish turn up in littleused closets, in old-fashioned pantries and sometimes in books -- old books, that is. The reason why the book must be old is that the modern plastic glues now used in bookbinding hold no attraction for silverfish. They are interested in books bound with the aid of old-fashioned library paste, and in wallpaper stuck on with boiled flour paste. Now the silverfish which the city man would have recognized has the scientific name of Lepisma saccharins, given by old Carolus Linnaeus himself. The first part of the name comes from the Greek lepisma, which means "scale" or else something that has scaled off. The second part of the name was to indicate that it loves sugar. Linnaeus probably was quite used to the spectacle of half a dozen silverfish darting off in as many directions when he reached for his sugar bowl. They are primitive insects that do not have wings and do not Fig. #. Tricholepidion gertschi. From California. Photograph by Dr. Pedro Wygodzinsky. go through a metamorphosis. Their young look like the adults; they are merely smaller. The name of the order of insects to which the silverfish belong is Thysanura or Bristletails. A total of about # species is known and there are, of course, several families. And to an expert who knows what to look for they do not look alike. When Dr. Wygodzinsky -- who at the time was on leave from his normal position in the Department of Zoology, University of Buenos Aires -- looked at the insects brought back by Dr. Gertsch, he saw at once that they were Thysanura. But he also saw that they were not Lepisma but belonged to a different group. He did not write me in so many words that he grew suspicious, but that must have been the case for he set out on a collecting trip of his own for additional specie mens. He was successful, too. It looked like a new genus. But there was something familiar. Dr. Wygodzinsky remembered what it was, an insect very closely related to the one he had alive was known, but as a fossil. It was known as an inclusion in Baltic amber and had been described by F. Silvestri in #. The scientific name of the form preserved in amber became Lepidothrix, and the family of which it was the type was called Lepidotrichidae. But these were fossils from the early part of the Oligocene period. The new insect from northern California was, therefore, a surviving representative of an otherwise extinct family of insects. It must be added here that, while the Thysanura as a whole are primitive insects, the Lepidotrichidae are the most archaic of the Thysanura. That a genus of these archaic insects should have survived at all is remarkable. That it was found alive in California, while the extinct relatives were found in East Prussia, is almost to be expected. Old forms of animal and plant life very often turn up in widely separated places. The best known example is that of our opossum, a marsupial. Marsupials "normally" belong in Australia, but we have one in North America. The customary explanation for this phenomenon is that a group of animals (it applies to plants, too, of course) will, at one time in its history, occur over a very wide range and possibly be of worldwide distribution. But then the climate turns unfavorable in one area. The animal type disappears from that area -- not necessarily because it is directly affected by the changing climate; it may be its food which disappears first. In another area natural enemies may become victorious, and as a consequence the type disappears from that area too. The final result is that the animal survives in a few spots... which might be at the extremes of its original range. The very fact that occurrence is so scattered means something to the expert. If one should learn that a certain animal type is found on one of the northern Japanese islands, near Cape Town and in southern Sweden it is safe to bet that this is likely to be an old form. That the new -- or very old -- insect from northern California should have extinct relatives in the Baltic amber was quite logical. Zoologists speak about a "relic fauna" when they come across such a case. The scientific name given to the new discovery is Tricholepidion gertschi, the second part of the name honoring its discoverer. The insect is, like all Thysanura, not large. Its body when fully grown. The antennae meters. The total length, from the tip of the antennae to the tip of the appendages is, therefore, # Of course there is no "practical" value to the discovery. But there is a strange feeling of wonder that one finds around such a case. I don't know how many people walk around in the forests of the California Coast Range. But even if it is not a place where hikers are common thousands of people must have wandered around there, completely unaware of what was hiding under the bark of the fallen logs on which they may have sat to rest. When hearing of such a case the next thought is always what else might be in hiding -- or not even really hiding, but protected by not being recognized as something unusual by most people. And the thought after that is that such a relic might easily become extinct without even having been "discovered." In a recent issue you supplied a list of the earliest known and therefore presumably largest asteroids. This list made me wonder about the nearest stars. I know, of course, that Alpha Centauri is the nearest star but it is not visible from New Jersey where I live. Which is the nearest star I can see from my home in New Jersey? Dorothy Steinfeld, East Orange, N. J. The nearest star you can see from New Jersey is the one commonly known as the Sun. Alpha Centauri is only the second nearest star, after our sun. Having gotten this customary correction off my chest I can proceed to answer what you really meant. The nearest naked-eye star that can be seen from the northern hemisphere also happens to be the brightest: Sirius. It is very interesting that many of the brightest stars are quite a distance away from us: Pollux # light years, Capella # light years, Aldebaran # light years, Arcturus # light years and Regulus # light years. On the other hand the nearest stars are by no means the brightest, as the following table shows: Name or Designation Distance in Light Years Magnitude proxima Centauri # Alpha Centauri #.I Barnard's Star # Wolf # # Luyten #-# # Lalande Catalogue No. # # Sirius# Procyon # As you can see, only three (Alpha Centauri, Sirius and Procyon) of the eight nearest stars are even visible with the naked eye. But these three happen to be quite bright. Please tell me why we need communications satellites. We have long-range radio, we have cables, we even have telephone cables. What can these communications satellites do that radio, cables and telephone cables cannot do? Andrew Pessowski Chicago #, #. Offhand the communications satellites, especially the first series of them, will not be able to do anything that cables, especially telephone cables, can not do. They can do better than longrange radio, which is sometimes disturbed by the cosmic events which are usually dubbed "magnetic storms." The wavelengths used by the satellites will not be subject to such disturbances. But even the first batch of "comsats," as they are now called, will do something all businessmen are looking forward to. They will add new channels. Consider: if a New York company has a branch office in London, or vice versa, their office hours overlap by just two hours. All business which concerns both must be transacted in these two hours, and everybody scrambles for this two-hour slot. If the English firm has a branch office in your city, Chicago, the office hour overlap will be just one hour. There is one more factor which nobody mentions much because it is difficult to give figures, but "comsats" will be cheapen then additional cables. Besides cables don't go everywhere. The satellite sliortwave does. I read just recently that some of our artificial satellites are expected to stay in orbit for # or # or even more years. How is this possible? Aren't they all inside Roche's limit? Why don't they break up? Or has Roche's limit been disproved? Arthur T. A. Wallace The Bronx #, N. Y. There is hardly any concept that has been as much misunderstood than "Roche's Limit" and is as popular at the same time. I get an average of one letter per week which either asks about it or else quotes it. Roche's limit is always interpreted to mean that no satellite can exist inside this limit which Edouard Roche, Professor of Mathematics at Montpellier, France, placed at # planet radii, counting from the center of the planet. In the case of the earth this means that Roche's limit is about # miles from sea level. This means, j n turn, that all artificial satellites are well inside Roche's limit. Then why don't they break up, as reader Wallace asks? Awfully simple; Professor Roche specified that his "limit" applied to fluid satellites, satellites of zero tensile strength. Any solid body, like a large meteoroid, or any structure, like any artificial satellite, is not troubled by Roche's limit at all.      present to all of us we've lined up some old favorites among the authors to bring us new favorite stories. Next issue we have a novella by a fellow who has been with us since Volume I Number #, and almost two dozen times since. The name is Fritz Leiber. The story is The Creature from Cleveland Depths. Like all of Leiber's best work, this one is bright and witty, with savage undertones. It has to do with shelters and cybernetics, but most of all it has to do with people -- people who are capable of smashing themselves against their own dangerous ingenuity; people who can then pick up the pieces and build something better... people you will be glad to meet. f Starting in November  doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native. At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed. He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god -- but far from sacred! colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated. He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him. He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings. Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state ofpreservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs. T HE native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. "Mr. Earthgod" he cried. "It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!' The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man. "You never told us about this old dead city," Michaelson said, chidingly. "Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?" "Yes, beautiful. You will leave now." "Leave?" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. "I just got here a  few hours ago." "You must go." "Why? Who are you?" "I am keeper of the city." "You?" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, "What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?" "The spirits may return." Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. "See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear." "The spirits are angry." "Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it." "Leave!" The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious. "Look," he said. "No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt." He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following. "Mr. Earthgod!" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped. "You must not touch, n# t walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed." H E turned and walked off, not lookipg back. Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that. Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools. Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street. He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun. There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him. His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought. "You did not leave, as I asked you." Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, "You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that." "You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must..." He made a clucking sound deep in the throat. "The spirits are angry." "Nonsense, Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function." "What rooms?" "Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms." "I do not know." The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least. "You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a timepiece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?" "I insist that you go." The webfoot held something in his hand. "No." Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been. native said in his ear. "It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets." "Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs -- none can hold a candle to this." "Mr. Earthgod..." "Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it." The old man shrugged. "It ; s not an item worthy of dispute Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?" He chuckled. "In a way, y es What is your name?" "Maota." "You must help me, Maota, These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize..." Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet. "You will leave now." "Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us." "Do you mean," the old man asked, aghast, "that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!" "N" Michaelson was adamant. , e rock of Gibraltar. Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city. The weapon he had used was a n ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street. ness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now. The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back. The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up. It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing. Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands. "God. in heaven!" he exclaimed. He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again. "Good God!" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time. A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand. I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes. And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years! He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the "clock" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine. The clock was warm. He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voics, for here was a thing that years -- and here was warmth! He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head. Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense. He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.  ' red against thin clouds in the east. Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson. Michaelson asked, "Did you sleep well?" "No." I'm sorry to hear that." "How do you feel?" "Fine, but my head little." "Sorry," Maota said. "For what?" "For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you." Michaelson relaxed somewhat. "What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize." "I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright." He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon. It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon. "Well," he said, "before you kill me, tell me about the book." He held it up for Maota to see. "What about the book?" "What kind of book is it?" "What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks." "No, no. I mean, what's in it?" "Poetry." "Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book." Maota shook his head. "One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest." The old man raised the gun. " also have a weapon." He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. "I can move faster than you can fire the gun." Maota nodded. "I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway." "I suggest we negotiate." "No." "Why not?" Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent. "Why not?" Michaelson repeated. "Why not what?" Maota dragged his eyes back. "Negotiate." "No." Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes. "All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that." Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun. "Wait!" "Now what?" "At least read some of the book to me before I die, then." The gun wavered. "I am not an unreasonable man," the webfoot said. Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book. "No, stay where you are. Throw it." "This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around." "It won't break. Throw it." Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong. Maota read, Michaelson  listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations. The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages. "See?" he said. "The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk." Michaelson laughed. "You certainly have an imagination." "What difference does it make?" Maota cried, suddenly angry. "You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove." The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved. Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man. He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet. They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lip s drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought. Then quite suddenly a finger or hand -- neither knew whose finger or hand -- touched the firing stud. There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused. "It only hit the ground," Michaelson said. A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and -- they could not see how deep -- stared at them. Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. "The book!" he cried. "The book is gone!" "No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought." sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care. Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been. "We killed it," the old man moaned. # U  ' "It was just a book. Not alive, y ou know." "How do you know?" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. "It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it." "There are other books. We'll get another." Maota shook his head. "There are no more." "But I've seen them. Down there in the square building." "Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs." "I'm sorry." "You killed it!" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage. When he could talk again, Maota said, "I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself." "Don't be sorry." Michaelson helped him to his feet. "We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either." "Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever." "I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?" "You are a god," Maota said. "One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them." "That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?" "Of course you are." Maota looked up, very sure. "Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook." "No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that." quickly. "You lie." "No." "If I had this machine, could I travel as you?" "Yes." "Then I'll kill you and take yours." "It would not work for you." "Why?" "Each machine is tailored for each person." The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book. "Look," Michaelson said. "I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?" He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. "When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I." He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly. Michaelson caught up to him. "Are you leaving the city?" "No." "Where are you going?" "Away. Far away." Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant. "Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?" "There are many directions. You would not understand." "East. West. North. South. Up. Down." "No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see." Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building. Michaelson said, "This is where you live?" "Yes." Maota went inside, Michaelson I stood in the entrance and looked j around. The room was clean, f Ur   nished with hand made chairs and ' a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, li v .  ing alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a "clock" was fastened to the wall. Michaelson remembered his fright -- thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be. Maota pointed to it. "You asked about this machine," he said. "Now I will tell you." He laid his hand against it. "Here is power to follow another direction." the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. "Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I." "Of course." Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. "What do you suppose happened to this race?" "You tell me." "They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race # U v n ot die out, as a species becomes extinct." Michaelson was amused, but interested. "Something like a fourth dimension?" "I don't know. I only know that w jth this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, w ho explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and..." "And what?" "I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so." Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A highpitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly. The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it. The old man was dead. Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll. Here he buried him. But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death. In the days that followed he gave much thought to the "clock." He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument. Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him. And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button. The high-pitched whine started. Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere. "Look!" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. "Think of the city and you will see it." Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body. Maota's chuckle again. "The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all." "Neither did you." "But this existence has compensations," Maota said. "You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth." Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force -- he didn't stop to define it -- in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state? "I don't like your thoughts," Maota said. "No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back." Michaelson decided he would I try. #VO!" Maota's thought was " prickled with fear and anger. Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command. At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up! The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the "clock" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place. To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence. "You devil!" Maota's thoughtscream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable. "I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I, said you were a god... !" Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to stop l alone. In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate ness to the point of madness, see how long it would take to start slavering and clawing pin-ups from the magazines, begin teaching himself classes philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one. He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations. But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it. Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way. Lately she was winking back at him. Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity. No one on Earth was as lonely lonely on Mars. Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station #-#'s own human. All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically COn trolled, entirely automatic. one was needed here -- no human being, at least. The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization. They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential. But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities. portunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst land## on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy. tion, but in an existence with a fl the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries # f the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror. So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship. He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship s cabin but a Northwoods cabin. The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall. "Need a fresher?" the host inquired. Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. "No, no, I'm fine." He let the word hang there for examination. "Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?" The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. "Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me." "Trader Tom? Service?" "Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service -- Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets." Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. "The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen," he exploded. "Ah," Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. "Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise." "No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations." "But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's wellknown. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami? My businessmen have gone back Jo the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals." "I don't believe you," Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. "What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey." "Do you find it good whiskey?" "Very good." "Excellent?" "Excellent, if you prefer." "I only meant -- but never mind. We give you what y #u want. As for paying for it -- w jj forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card." "And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?" Manet demanded. "That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it." "That's it precisely!" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. "You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from you r estate." "But I may leave no estate!" Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. "All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry." whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. "What do you have to offer?" "Whatever you want?" Irritably, "How do I know what I want until I know what you have?" "You know." "I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale." "Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell. I am a trader -- Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example... extraterrestrials." "Folk legend!" "On the contrary, mon cher, t he only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could n# longer justify their disposition # f the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation w ithout representation. Come, tell me what you want." Manet gave in to it. "I want to be not alone," he said. "Of course," Trader Tom replied, "I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much." Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand. Good for Anything A-I ######## WM. MoNeT (Sign Here)  -- fader  -- om Trader Tom When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him. The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood -- only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said: The Socialization Kit "It is commercialized," Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin. "It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer -- but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it." "What's the cost?" Manet asked. "Before I accept it, I have to know the charges." "You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan." "Well, is it guaranteed?" "There are no guarantees," Trader Tom admitted. "But I've never had any complaints yet." "Suppose I'm the first?" Manet suggested reasonably. "You won't be," Trader Tom said. "I won't pass this way again." He let it fade quietly in the near a transparent wall. Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad. Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad. So he went to open the box. The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed. The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime. On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends. Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplied: The Making of Friends and Others. There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: "A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit." At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: The unnumbered first chapter was headed Your First Friend. Before you go further, first find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital. He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion... Then The Final Model. Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants. Manet flipped back to page one. First find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital to your entire experiment in socialization. The Modifier is Part #A-I on the Master Chart. He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself. He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand. The toe bone was connected to the foot bone... T HE Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner. The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration. The Red King crabbed sideways one square. The Black King pounced forward one space. The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy. The Black King shuffled sideways. The Red King followed... Uselessly. "Tie game," Ronald said. "Tie game," Manet said. "Let's talk," Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful. Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Cooperative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible. "The Korean-American War  was the greatest of all wars," I Ronald said pontifically. "Only in the air," Manet corj rected him. Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder. "There were no dogfights in Korea," Ronald said. "I know." "The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One." "I know." "Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic." "I know." heard it all before, fie was so damned sick of hearjj,g about Korean air battles, paniel Boone, the literary qualifies of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad n auseum. What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being? Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy. Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties -- Lt. "Hoot" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers -- when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these. He yearned for someone to challenge him -- to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review, there had been a magazine for you. Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk. "Ronald," Manet said "you are a terrific jerk." Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right. Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross. Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel. The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again. Ronald leaped forward and lead with his right. Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw. Ronald pinwheeled to the floor. He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth. "Had enough?" he asked Manet. Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. "Yes." Ronald hopped up lightly. "Another checkers, Billy Boy?" "No." "Okay. Anything you want, Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury. Ronald was maddeningly cooperative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid. Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard. But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie? r  "HE calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission. The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time. Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent wall. By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand. And several hundred miles of desert could see him. For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn. Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication. He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway. As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch. "Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!" Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shove Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since. In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission. "Hello, Overseers," the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions ass'gnment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing. "We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations," said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. "As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule -- " there was of course no "K" sound in the word -- "for atmosphere seeding. "The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was # years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may reca ll that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat # years." A very flat # years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder. He sat there thinking about eighteen years. He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns. Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside. One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier. The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off. If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for # flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever. Manet selected the ripplefinished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years. Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in' that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations. Manet opened the book to the chapter headed: The Making of a Girl. T Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth. Daniel Boone," she sighed huskily, "only killed three Indians in his life." "I know." Manet folded his arms stoically and added: "Please don't talk." She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat. "I need a shave," he observed. Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance. Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion. She made her return. "Not now," he instructed her. "Whenever you say." He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise. "Now?" she asked. "I'll tell you." "If you were a jet pilot," Veronica said wistfully, "you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one." "I'm not a jet pilot," Manet said. "There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations." "Don't be silly," Veronica said. "Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?" "Veronica," he said carefully, "the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots." "Don't be silly," she snapped. "If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?" She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate "feminine" characteristics. "I suppose," he said heavily, "that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?" "Oh, yes." "Veronica, your stupidity is hideous." She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. "That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you." An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. "Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?" He stepped forward and backhanded her across the jaw. It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago. Veronica sprang forward and led with a right. as Manet marched Veronica through the corridor. "Hear that?" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth. "No, darling." Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders. "Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald," the voice carried through sepulchrally. "Shut up!" Manet yelled. The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off. A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it. Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station. Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch. Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months. Ronald didn't say anything to Manet. But he looked offended. "You," Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back, "inside, inside." Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl. "Do you know what I'm going to do with you? Manet demanded. "I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?" "If you think it's the right thing, dear," Veronica said hesitantly. "You know best, Willy," Ronald said uncertainly. Manet slammed the hatch in disgust. Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen. As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: "In my us out." "I," Veronica said, "honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill, dearest." Manet giggled. "What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?" He went down the corridor, giggling. He giggled and thought: This will never do. through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around. The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit. He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier. He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit. Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit. But Trader Tom would not be. back. He came this way only once. Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet. He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model. There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could. He read the unfolding p a g es 'critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers... Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back. Victor was finished. Perfect. Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose. "Move!" Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers. As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a fleshsprayer but the Modifier. "It's finished!" were Victor's first words. "It's done!" Manet stared at the tiny wreck. "To say the least." Victor stepped out of the oblong box. "There is something you should understand. I am different from the others." "They all say that." "I am not your friend." "No?" "No. You have made yourself an enemy." Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation. "It completes the final course in socialization," Victor continued. "I am your adversary. I will no do everything I can to defeat you. j have a ll your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of t he things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you." "When do you start?" "I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier." "What's so bad about that?" Manet asked with some interest. "You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends." HE prospect was frightful. Victor smiled. "Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?" "Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?" "Yes. Yes." "Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?" "Yes." "No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me." "Of course not!" Victor stormed. "Fundamental safety cut-off!" "Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function." "Stop talking and just think about your miserable life," Victor said meanly. "Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you," Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. "I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!" The pythons had entered int # Mankind. No man knew at what moment he might be Possessed! held Chandler's trial in the all-purpose room of the high school. It smelled of leather and stale sweat. He walked up the three steps to the stage, with the bailiff's hand on his elbow, and took his place at the defendant's table. Chandler's lawyef looked at him without emotion. He was appointed by the court. He was didn't require him to like his client. All he said was, "Stand up. The judge is coming in." Chandler got to his feet and leaned on the table while the bailiff chanted his call and the chaplain read some verses from John. He did not listen. The Bible verse came too late to hqlp him, and besides he ached. When the police arrested him they had not been gentle. There were four of them. They were from the plant's own security force and carried no guns. They didn't need any; Chandler had put up no resistance after the first few moments -- that is, he stopped as soon as he could stop -- but the police hadn't stopped. He remembered that very clearly. He remembered the nightstick across the sfde of his head that left his ear squashed and puffy, he remembered the kick in the gut that still made walking painful. He even remembered the series of blows about the skull that had knocked him out. The bruises along his rib cage and left arm, though, he did not remember getting. Obviously the police had been mad enough to keep right on subduing him after he was already unconscious. Chandler did not blame them -- exactly. He supposed he would have done the same thing. The judge was having a long mumble with the court stenographer apparently about something which had happened in the Union House the night before. Chandler knew Judge Ellithorp slightly. He did not expect to get a fair trial. The previous December the judge himself, while possessed, had smashed the transmitter of the town's radio station, which he owned, and set fire to the building it occupied. His sonin-law had been killed in the fire. Laughing, the judge waved the reporter back to his seat and glanced around the courtroom. His gaze touched Chandler lightly, like the flick of the hanging strands of cord that precede a railroad tunnel. The touch carried the same warning. What lay ahead for Chandler was destruction. "Read the charge," ordered Judge Ellithorp. He spoke very loudly. There were more than six hundred persons in the auditorium; the judge didn't want any of them to miss a word. The bailiff ordered Chandler to stand and informed him that he was accused of having, on the seventeenth day of June last, committed on the person of Margaret Flershem, a minor, an act of rape -- "Louder!" ordered the judge testily. "Yes, Your Honor," said the bailiff, and inflated his chest. "An Act of Rape under Threat of Bodily Violence," he cried; "and Did Further Commit on the Person of Said Margaret Flershem an Act of Aggravated Assault -- " Chandler rubbed his aching side, looking at the ceiling. He remembered the look in Peggy Flershem's eyes as he forced himself on her. She was only sixteen years old, and at that time he hadn't even known her name. The bailiff boomed on: " -- and Did Further Commit on that Same Seventeenth Day of June Last on the Person of Ingovar Porter an Act of Assault with Intent to Rape, the Foregoing Being a True Bill Handed Down by the Grand Jury of Sepulpas County in Extraordinary Session Assembled, the Eighteenth Day of June Last." Judge Ellithorp looked satisfied as the bailiff sat down, quite winded. While the judge hunted through the papers on his desk the crowd in the auditorium stirred and murmured. A child began to cry. pounded his gavel. "What is it? What's the matter with him? You, Dundon!" The court attendant the judge was looking at hurried over and spoke to the child's mother, then reported to the judge. "I dunno, Your Honor. All he says is something scared him." The judge was enraged. "Well, that's just fine! Now we have to take up the time of all these good people, probably for no reason, and hold up the business of this court, just because of a child. Bailiff! I want you to clear this courtroom of all children under -- " he hesitated, calculating voting blocks in his head -- "all children under the age of six. Dr. Palmer, are you there? Well, you better go ahead with the -- prayer." The judge could not make himself say "the exorcism." "I'm sorry, madam," he added to the mother of the crying twoyear-old. "If you have someone to leave the child with, I'll instruct the attendants to save your place for you." She was also a voter. Dr. Palmer rose, very grave, as he was embarrassed. He glared around the all-purpose room, defying anyone to smile, as he chanted: "Domina Pythonis, I command you, leave! Leave, Hel! Leave, Heloym! Leave, Sother and Thetragrammaton, leave, all unclean ones! I command you! In the name of God, in all of His manifestations!" He sat down again, still very grave. He knew that he did not make nearly as fine a showing as Father Lon, with his resonant in nomina Jesu Christi et Sancti Ubaldi and his censer, but the post of exorcist was filled in strict rotation, one month to a denomination, ever since the troubles started. Dr. Palmer was a Unitarian. Exorcisms had not been in the curriculum at the seminary and he had been forced to invent his own. Chandler's lawyer tapped him on the shoulder. "Last chance to change your mind," he said. "No. I'm not guilty, and that's the way I want to plead." The lawyer shrugged and stood up, waiting for the judge to notice him. Chandler, for the first time, allowed himself to meet the eyes of the crowd. He studied the jury first. He knew some of them casually -- it was not a big enough town to command a jury of total strangers for any defendant, and Chandler had lived there most of his life. He recognized Pop Matheson, old and very stiff, who ran the railroad station cigar stand. Two of the other men were familiar as faces passed in the street. The forewoman, though, was a stranger. She sat there very composed and frowning, and all he knew about her was that she wore funny hats. Yesterday's had been red roses when she was selected from the panel; today's was, of all things, a stuffed bird. He did not think that any of them were possessed. He was not so sure of the audience. He saw girls he had dated in high school, long before he met Margot; men he worked with at the plant. They all glanced at him, but he was not sure who was looking out through some of those familiar eyes. The visitors reliably watched all large gatherings, at least momentarily; it would be surprising if none of them were here. "All right, how do you plead," said Judge Ellithorp at last. Chandler's lawyer straightened up. "Not guilty, Your Honor, by reason of temporary pandemic insanity." The judge looked pleased. The crowd murmured, but they were pleased too. They had him dead to rights and it would have been a disappointment if Chandler had pleaded guilty. They wanted to see one of the vilest criminals in contemporary human society caught, exposed, convicted and punished; they did not want to miss a step of the process. Already in the playground behind the school three deputies from the sheriff's office were loading their rifles, while the school janitor chalked lines around the handball court to mark where the crowd witnessing the execution would be permitted to stand. its case very quickly. Mrs. Porter testified that she worked at McKelvey Bros., the antibiotics plant, where the defendant also worked. Yes, that was him. She had been attracted by the noise from the culture room last -- let's see -- "Was it the seventeenth day of June last?" prompted the prosecutor, and Chandler's attorney instinctively gathered his muscles to rise, hesitated, glanced at his client and shrugged. That was right, it was the seventeenth. Incautiously she went right into the room. She should have known better, she admitted. She should have called the plant police right away, but, well, they hadn't had any trouble at the plant, you know, and -- well, she didn't. She was a stupid woman, for all that she was rather good-looking, and insatiably curious. She had seen Peggy Flershem on the floor. "She was all blood. And her clothes were -- And she was, I mean her -- her body was -- " With relentless tact the prosecutor allowed her to stammer out her observation that the girl had clearly been raped. And she had seen Chandler laughing and breaking up the place, throwing racks of cultures through the windows, upsetting trays. Of course she had crossed herself and tried a quick exorcism but there was no visible effect; then Chandler had leaped at her. "He was hateful! He was just foul!" But as he began to attack her the plant police came, drawn by her screams. Chandler's attorney did not question. Peggy Flershem's deposition was introduced without objection from the defense. But she had little to say anyway, having been dazed at first and unconscious later. The plant police testified to having arrested Chandler; a doctor described in chaste medical words the derangements Chandler had worked on Peggy Flershem's virgin anatomy. There was no question from Chandler's lawyer -- and, for that matter, nothing to question. Chandler did not hope to pretend that he had not ravished and nearly killed one girl, then done his best to repeat the process on another. Sitting there as the doctor testified, Chandler was able to tally every break and bruise against the memory of what his own body had done. He had been a spectator then, too, as remote from the event as he was now; but that was why they had him on trial. That was what they did not believe. At twelve-thirty the prosecution rested its case, Judge Ellithorp looking very pleased. He recessed the court for one hour for lunch, and the guards took Chandler back to the detention cell in the basement of the school. Two Swiss cheese sandwiches and a wax-paper carton of chocolate milk were on the desk. They were Chandler's lunch. As they had been standing, the sandwiches were crusty and the milk lukewarm. He ate them anyway. He knew what the judge looked pleased about. At one-thirty Chandler's lawyer would put him on the stand, and no one would pay very much attention to what he had to say, and the jury would be out at most twenty minutes, and the verdict would be guilty. The judge was pleased because he would be able to pronounce sentence no later than four o'clock, no matter what. They had formed the habit of holding the executions at sundown. As, at that time of year, sundown was after seven, it would all go very well -- for everyone but Chandler. For Chandler it would be the end. II ler's dilemma was not merely that he was innocent -- in a way, that is -- but that many who were guilty (in a way; as guilty as he himself, at any rate) were free and honored citizens. Chandler himself was a widower because his own wife had been murdered. He had seen the murderer leaving the scene of the crime, and the man he had seen was in the courtroom today, watching Chandler's own trial. Of the six hundred or so in the court, at least fifty were known to have taken part in one or more provable acts of murder, rape, arson, theft, sodomy, vandalism, assault and battery or a dozen other offenses indictable under the laws of the state. Of course, that could be said of almost any community in the world in those years; Chandler's was not unique. What had put Chandler in the dock was not what his body had been seen to do, but the place in which it had been seen to do it. For everybody knew that medicine and agriculture were never molested by the demons. Chandler's own lawyer had pointed that out to him the day before the trial. "If it was anywhere but at the McKelvey plant, all right, but there's never been any trouble there. You know that. The trouble with you laymen is you think of lawyers in terms of Perry Mason, right? Rabbit out of the hat stuff. Well, I can't do that. I can only present your case, whatever it is, the best way possible. And the best thing I can do for your case right now is tell you you haven't got one." At that time the lawyer was still trying to be fair. He was even casting around for some thought he could use to convince himself that his client was innocent, though he had frankly admitted as soon as he introduced himself that he didn't have much hope there. Chandler protested that he didn't have to commit rape. He'd been a widower for a year, but -- "Wait a minute," said the lawyer. "Listen. You can't make an ordinary claim of possession stick, but what about good oldfashioned insanity?" Chandler looked puzzled, so the lawyer explained. Wasn't it possible that Chandler was -- consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously, call it what you will -- trying to get revenge for what had happened to his own wife? No, said Chandler, certainly not! But then he had to stop and think. After all, he had never been possessed before; in fact, he had always retained a certain skepticism about "possession" -- it seemed like such a convenient thing he chose -- until the moment when he looked up to see Peggy Flershem walking into the culture room with a tray of agar disks, and was astonished to find himself striking her with the wrench in his hand and ripping at her absurdly floral-printed . slacks. Maybe his case was different. Maybe it wasn't the sort of possession that struck at random; maybe he was just off his rocker. Margot, his wife, had been cut up cruelly. He had seen his friend, Jack Souther, leaving his home hurriedly as he approached; and although he had thought that the stains on his clothes looked queerly like blood, nothing in that prepared him for what he found in the rumpus room. It had taken him some time to identify the spread-out dissection on the floor with his wife Margot... "No," he told his lawyer, "I was shaken up, of course. The worst time was the next night, when there was a knock on the door and I opened it and it was Jack. He'd come to apologize. I -- fell apart; but I got over it. I tell you I was possessed, that's all." "And I tell you that defense will put you right in front of a firing squad," "And that's all." said his lawyer. executed for hoaxing; Chandler was familiar with the ritual. He even understood it, in a way. The world had gone to pot in the previous two years. The real enemy was out of reach; when any citizen might run wild and, when caught, relapse into his own self, terrified and sick, there was a need to strike back. But the enemy was invisible. The hoaxers were only whipping boys -- but they were the only targets vengeance had. The real enemy had struck the entire world in a single night. One day the people of the world went about their business in the gloomy knowledge that they were likely to make mistakes but with, at least, the comfort that the mistakes would be their own. The next day had no such comfort. The next day anyone, anywhere, was likely to find himself seized, possessed, working evil or whimsy without intention and helplessly. Chandler stood up, kicked the balled-up wax paper from his sandwiches across the floor and swore violently. He was beginning to wake from the shock that had gripped him. "Damn fool," he said to himself. He had no particular reason. Like the world, he needed a whipping boy too, if only himself. "Damn fool, you know they're going to shoot you!" He stretched and twisted his body violently, alone in the middle of the room, in silence. He had to wake up. He had to start thinking. In a quarter of an hour or less the court would reconvene, and from then it was only a steady, quick slide to the grave. It was better to do anything than to do nothing. He examined the windows of his improvised cell. They were above his head and barred; standing on the table, he could see feet walking outside, in the paved play-yard of the school. He discarded the thought of escaping that way; there was no one to smuggle him a file, and there was no time. He studied the door 'to the hall. It was not impossible that when the guard opened it he could jump him, knock him out, run... run where? The room had been a storage place for athletic equipment at the end of a hall; the hall led only to the stairs and the stairs emerged into the courtroom. It was quite likely, he thought, that the hall had another flight of stairs somewhere farther along, or through another room. What had he spent his taxes on these years, if not for schools designed with more than one exit in case of fire? But as he had not thought to mark an escape route when he Was brought in, it did him no g #( j The guard, however, had a gun. Chandler lifted up an edge of the table and tried to shake one of the legs. They did not shake; that part of his taxes had been well enough spent, he thought wryly. The chair? Could he smash the chair to get a club which would give him a weapon to get the guard's gun?... Before he reached the chair the door opened and his lawyer came in. "Sorry I'm late," he said briskly. "Well. As your attorney I have to tell you they've presented a damaging case. As I see it -- " "What case?" Chandler demanded. "I never denied the acts. What else did they prove?" "Oh, God!" said his lawyer, not quite loudly enough to be insulting. "Do we have to go over that again? Your claim of possession would make a defense if it had happened anywhere else. We know that these cases exist, but we also know that they follow a pattern. Some areas seem to be immune -- medical establishments, pharmaceutical plants among them. So they proved that all this happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I advise you to plead guilty." Chandler sat down on the edge of the table, controlling himself very well, he thought, jje only asked: "Would that do me any good at all?" The lawyer reflected, gazing at the ceiling... No. I guess it vvouldn t. Chandler nodded. "So what else shall we talk about? Want to compare notes about where you were and I was the night the President went possessed?" The lawyer was irritated. He kept his mouth shut for a moment until he thought he could keep from showing it. Outside a vendor was hawking amulets: "St. Ann beads! Witch knots! Fresh garlic, local grown, best in town!" The lawyer shook his head. "All right," he said, "it's your life. We'll do it your way. Anyway, time's up; Sergeant Grantz will be banging on the door any minute." He zipped up his briefcase. Chandler did not move. "They don't give us much time anyway," the lawyer added, angry at Chandler and at hoaxers in gen"Grantz is a stickler for promptness." Chandler found a crumb of cheese by his hand and absently ate it. The lawyer watched him and glanced at his watch. "Oh, hell," he said, picked up his briefcase and kicked the base of the door. "Grantz! What's the matter with you? You asleep out there?" his name, admitted the truth of everything the previous witnesses had said. The faces were still aimed at him, every one. He could not read them at all any more, could not tell if they were friendly or hating, there were too many and they all had eyes. The jurors sat on their funeral-parlor chairs like cadavers, embalmed and propped, the dead witnessing a wake for the living. Only the forewoman in the funny hat showed signs of life, looking alertly at Chandler, at the judge, at the man next to her, around the auditorium. Maybe it was a good sign. At least she did not have the frozen in concrete, guilty-as-hell look of the others. His attorney asked him the question he had been waiting for: "Tell us, in your own words, what happened." Chandler opened his mouth, and paused. Curiously, he had forgotten what he wanted to say. He had rehearsed this moment again and again; but all that came out was: "I didn't do it. I mean, I did the acts, but I was possessed. That's all. Others have done worse, under the same circumstances, and been let off. Just as Fisher was acquitted for murdering the Leamards, as Draper got off after what he did to the Cline boy. As Jack Souther over there was let off after he murdered my own wife. They should be. They couldn't help themselves. Whatever this thing is that takes control, I know it can't be fought. My God, you can't even try to fight it!" He was not getting through. The faces had not changed. The forewoman of the jury was now searching systematically through her pocketbook, taking each item out and examining it, putting it back and taking out another. But between times she looked at him and at least her expression wasn't hostile. He said, addressing her: "That's all there is to it. It wasn't me running my body. It was someone else. I swear it before all of you, and before God." The prosecutor did not bother to question him. Chandler went back to his seat and sat down and watched the next twenty minutes go by in the wink of an eye, rapid, rapid, they were in a hurry to shoot him. He could hardly believe that Judge Ellithorp could speak so fast, the jurymen rise and file out at a gallop, zip, whisk, and they were back again. Too fast! he cried silently, time had gone into high gear; but he knew that it was only his imagination. The twenty minutes had been a full twelve hundred seconds. And then time, as if to make ame ' ' came to a stop, abrupt, brak on. The judge asked the j Ury f" their verdict and it was an nity before the forewoman arosT She was beginning to i #Q , rather disheveled. Beaming at Chandler -- surely the woman was rather odd, it couldn't be just his imagination -- she f Uln bled in her pocketbook for the slip of paper with the verdict But she wore an expression # f suppressed laughter. "I knew I had it," she cried triumphantly and waved the slip above her head. "Now, let's see." She held it before her eyes and squinted. "Oh, yes. Judge, we the jury, and so forth and so on ." She paused to wink at Judge Ellithorp. An uncertain worried murmur welled up in the auditorium. "All that junk, Judge," she explained, "anyway, we unanimously -- but unanimously , love! -- find this son of a bitch innocent. Why," she giggled, "we think he ought to get a medal, you know? I tell you what you do, love, you go right over and give him a big wet kiss and say you're sorry." She kept on talking, but no one heard. The murmur because a mass scream. "Stop, stop her!" bawled the judge, dropping his glasses. "Bailiff!" The scream became a word, in many voices chorused: Possessed! And beyond doubt the w oman was. The men around her hurled themselves away, as from leprosy among them, and then washed back like a lynch mob. She was giggling as they fell on her. "Got a cigarette? No cigarettes in this lousy bag -- oh." She screamed as they touched her, went limp and screamed again. It was a different note this time, pure hysteria: "I couldn't stop. Oh, God."  by the arm and jerked him away from staring at the scene. All of a sudden he was alive again. "You, damn it. Listen! The jury acquitted me, right?" The lawyer was startled. "Don't be ridiculous. It's a clear case of -- " "Be a lawyer, man! You live on technicalities, don't you? Make this one work for me!" The attorney gave him a queer, thoughtful look, hesitated, shrugged and got to his feet. He had to shout to be heard. "Your honor! I take it my client is free to go." He made almost as much of a stir as the sobbing woman, but he outshouted the storm. "The jury's verdict is on record. Granted there was an apparent case of possession. Nevertheless -- " Judge Ellithorp yelled back: "No nonsense, you! Listen to me, young man -- " The lawyer snapped, "Permission to approach the bench." "Granted." Chandler sat unable to move, watching the brief, stormy conference. It was painful to be coming back to life. It was agony to hope. At least, he thought detachedly, his lawyer was fighting for him; the prosecutor's face was a thundercloud. The lawyer came back, with the expression of a man who has won a victory he did not expect, and did not want. "Your last chance, Chandler. Change your plea to guilty." "But -- " "Don't push your luck, boy! The judge has agreed to accept a plea. They'll throw you out of town, of course. But you'll be alive." Chandler hesitated. "Make up your mind! The best I can do otherwise is a mistrial, and that means you'll get convicted by another jury next week." Chandler said, testing his luck: "You're sure they'll keep their end of the bargain?" The lawyer shook his head, his expression that of a man who smells something unpleasant. "Your honor! I ask you to discharge the jury. My client wishes to change his plea."... In the school's chemistry lab, an hour later, Chandler discovered that the lawyer had left out one little detail. Outside there was a sound of motors idling, the police car that would dump him at the town's limits; inside was a thin, hollow hiss. It was the sound of a Bunsen burner, and in its blue flame a crudely shaped iron changed slowly from cherry to orange to glowing straw. It had the .shape of a letter "H". "H" for "hoaxer." The mark they were about to put on his forehead would be with him wherever he went and as long as he lived, which would probably not be long. "H" for "hoaxer," so that a glance would show that he had been convicted of the worst offense of all. No one spoke to him as the sheriff's man took the iron out of the fire, but three husky policemen held his arms while he screamed. Ill T HE pain was still burning when Chandler awoke the next day. He wished he had a bandage, but he didn't, and that was that. He was in a freight car -- had hopped it on the run at the yards, daring to sneak back into town long enough for that. He could not hope to hitchhike, with that mark on him. Anyway, hitchhiking was an invitation to trouble. The railroads were safer -- . far safer than either cars or air transport, notoriously a lightningrod attracting possession. Chandler was surprised when the train came crashing to a stop, each freight car smashing against the couplings of the one ahead, the engine jolting forward and stopping again. Then there was silence. It endured. Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong. It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-morning, time for work to be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spells -- certainly they had not kept him from a brutal ra pe -- but he felt uneasy without them... The train still was not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine. He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out. The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet about the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted uncertainly, then stopped again. Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all. From Chandler's car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brakeman running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days. The engineer was possessed. It had to be that. Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen this car with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with. Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-delis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof. It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. The train was halted a quartermile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain. By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or so -- the corner of a roof, a glassedin porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung. Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else again. Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw H on his forehead and began to climb the mountain. door he came to, a great old three-story house with well tended gardens. There was a wait. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle ancl mown grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again, peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had been right inside, listening. A man stared at him. "Stranger, what do you want?" He was short, plump, with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne. Chandler said glibly: "Good morning. I'm working my W ay east. I need something to eat The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was one curious thing -- a lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a rainbow, lettered:  He puzzled over it and dismissed it. The entrance room, apart from the sign, had a knickknack shelf of Japanese carved ivory and an old-fashioned umbrella rack, but that added nothing to his knowledge. He had already guessed that the owners of this home were well off. Also it had been recently painted; so they were not demoralized, as so much of the world had been demoralized, by the coming of the possessors. Even the elaborate sculpturing of its hedges had been maintained. The man came back and with him was a girl of fifteen or so. She was tall, slim and rather homely, with a large jaw and an oval face. "Guy, he's not much to look at," she said to the pockmarked man. "Meggie, shall I let him in?" he asked. "Guy, you might as well," she shrugged, staring at Chandler with interest but not sympathy. "Stranger, come along," said the man named Guy, and led him through a short hall into an enormous living room, a room two stories high with a ten-foot fireplace. Chandler's first thought was that he had stumbled in upon a wake. The room was neatly laid out in rows of folding chairs, more than half of them occupied. He entered from the side, but all the occupants of the chairs were looking toward him. He returned their stares; he had had a good deal of practice lately in looking back at staring faces, he reflected. "Stranger, go on," said the man who had let him in, nudging him, "and meet the people of Orphalese." Chandler hardly heard him. He had not expected anything like this. It was a meeting, a Daumier caricature of a Thursday Afternoon Literary Circle, old men with faces like moons, young women with faces like hags. They were strained, haggard and fearful, and a surprising number of them showed some sort of physical defect, a bandaged leg, an arm in a sling or merely the marks of pain on the features. "Stranger, go in," repeated the man, and it was only then that Chandler noticed the man was holding a pistol, pointed at his head.  the room, watching. There must be thousands of little colonies like this, he reflected; with the breakdown of long-distance communication the world had been atomized. There was a real fear, well justified, of living" i n large groups, for they too were lightning rods for possession. The world was stumbling along, but it was lame in all its members; a planetary lobotomy had stolen from it its wisdom and plan. If, he reflected dryly, it had ever had any. But of course things were better in the old days. The world had seemed on the brink of blowing itself up, but at least it was by its own hand. Then came Christmas. It had happened at Christmas, and the first sign was on nationwide television. The old President, balding, grave and plump, was making a special address to the nation, urging good will to men and, please, artificial trees because of the fire danger in the event of H-bomb raids; in the middle of a sentence twenty million viewers had seen him stop, look dazedly around and say, in a breathless mumble, what sounded like: "Disht dvornyet ilgt." He had then picked up the Bible on the desk before him and thrown it at the television camera. The last the televiewers had seen was the fluttering pages of the Book, growing larger as it crashed against the lens, then a flicker and a blinding shot of the studio lights as the cameraman jumped away and the instrument swiveled to stare mindlessly upward. Twenty minutes later the President was dead, as his Secretary of Health and Welfare, hurrying with him back to the White House, calmly took a hand grenade from a Marine guard at the gate and blew the President's party to fragments. For the President's seizure was only the first and most conspicuous. "Disht dvornyet ilgt." C.I.A. specialists were playing the tapes of the broadcast feverishly, electronically cleaning the mumble and stir from the studio away from the words to try to learn, first, the language and second what the devil it meant; but the President who ordered it was dead before the first reel spun, and his successor was not quite sworn in when it became his time to die. The ceremony was interrupted for an emergency call from the War Room, where a very nearly hysterical four-star general was trying to explain why he had ordered the immediate firing of every live missile in his command against Washington, D. C. Over five hundred missiles were involved. In most of the sites the order was disobeyed, but insix of them, unfortunately, unquestioning discipline won out, thus ending not only the swearing in, the general's weeping explanation, the spinning of tapes, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and (through malfunctioning relays on two missiles) Pennsylvania and Vermont. But it was only the beginning. possession seen by the world in some five hundred years, since the great casting out of devils of the Middle Ages. A thousand more occurred in the next few days, a hundred in the next hours. The timetable was made up out of scattered reports in the wireservice newsrooms, while they still had facilities for spot coverage in any part of the world. (That lasted almost a week.) They identified # cases of possession by noon of the next day. Disregarding the dubious items -- the Yankee pitcher who leaped from the Manhattan bridge (he had Bright's disease), the warden of San Quentin who seated himself in the gas chamber and, literally, kicked the bucket (did he know the Grand Jury was subpoenaing his books?) -- disregarding these, the chronology of major cases that evening was: #:# PM, E.S.T.: President has attack on television. #:# PM, E.S.T.: Prime Minister of England orders bombing raid against Israel, alleging secret plot (order not carried out). #:# PM, E.S.T.: Captain of Montauk Point, orders crash dive and course change, proceeding submerged at flank speed to New York Harbor. #:# PM, E.S.T.: Eastern Airlines six-engine jet makes wheelsup landing on roof of Pentagon, breaking some # windows but causing no other major damage (except to the people aboard the jet); record of this incident fragmentary because entire site charred black in fusion attack two hours later. #:# PM, E.S.T.: Rosalie Pan, musical-comedy star, jumps off stage, runs up center aisle and vanishes in cab, wearing beaded bra, G-string and # headdress. Her movements are traced to Newark airport where she never seen again. #:# PM, E.S.T.: Entire S.A.C. fleet of # jet bombers takes off for rendezvous over Newfoundland, where # are compelled to ditch as tankers fail to keep refueling rendezvous. (Orders committing the aircraft originate with S.A.C. commander found to be a suicide.) # PM, E.S.T.: Submarine fusion explosion destroys # Q f New York City. Analysis of fallout indicates U.S. Navy Polaris missiles were detonated underwater in bay; by elimination it is deduced that the submarine was the Ethan Allen. #:# PM, E.S.T.: President's party assassinated by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Secretary then dies on bayonet of Marine guard who furnished the grenade. #:# PM, E.S.T. Satellite stations observe great nuclear explosions in China and Tibet. #:# PM, E.S.T.: Heavily loaded munitions barges exploded near North Sea dikes of Holland; dikes breached, # square miles of reclaimed land flooded out... And so on. The incidents were countless. But before long, before even the C.I.A. had finished the first playthrough of the tapes, before their successors in the task identified Disht dvornyet ilgt as a Ukrainian dialect rendering of, My God, it works! -- before all this, one fact was already apparent. There were many incidents scattered around the world, but not one of them took place in Russia itself. pockmarked with blasts, East Berlin demolished along with its western sector, in eight rounds fired from a U.S. Army nuclear cannon. But the U.S.S.R. had not suffered at all, as far as could be told by the prying eyes in orbit; and that fact was reason enough for it to suffer very greatly very soon. Within minutes of this discovery what remained of the military strength of the Western world was roaring through airless space toward the most likely targets of the East. One unscathed missile base in Alaska completed a full shoot, seven missiles with fusion warheads. The three American bases that survived at all in the Mediterranean fired what they had. Even Britain, which had already watched the fire-tails of the American missiles departing on suicide missions, managed to resurrect its own two prototype Blue Streaks from their racks, where they had moldered since the cancellation of the British missile program. One of these museum-pieces destroyed itself in launching, but the other chugged painfully across the sky, the tortoise following the flight of the hares. It arrived a full half-hour after the newer, hotter missiles. It might as well not have bothered. There was not much left to destroy. It was fortunate for the Communists that most of the Western arsenal had already spent itself in suicide. What was left wiped out Moscow, Leningrad and nine other cities. It was even fortunate for the whole world, for this was the Apocalypse they had dreaded, every possible nuclear weapon committed. But the circumstances were such -- hasty orders, often at once recalled; confusion; panic -- that most were unfused, many others merely tore great craters in the quickly healing surface of the sea. The fallout was locally murderous but quite spotty. And the conventional forces invading Russia found nothing to fight. The Russians were as confused as they. There were not many survivors of the very top brass, and no one seemed to know just what had happened. Was the Secretary of the C.P., U.S.S.R. behind that terrible brief agony? As he was dead before it was over, there was no way to tell. More than a quarter room-shaped clouds, and nearly half of them were Russian, Latvian, Tatar and Kalmuck. The Peace Commission squabbled for a month, until the breakdown of communications cut them off from their governments and each other; and in that way, for a time, there was peace. was left, thought Chandler looking around at the queer faces and queerer surroundings, the peace of medieval baronies, cut off from the world, untouched where the rain of fallout had passed by but hardly civilized any more. Even his own home town, trying to take his life in a form of law, reduced at last to torture and exile to cast him out, was not the civilization he had grown up in but something new and ugly. There was a great deal of talk he did not understand because he could not quite hear it, though they looked at him. Then Guy, with the gun, led him up to the front of the room. They had constructed an improvised platform out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist's chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak. "Stranger, get up there," said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl. "People of Orphalese," cried the teen-age cutie named Meggie, "we have two more brands to save from the imps!" The men and women in  audience cackled or shrilled "Save them! Save them!" They all had a look of invisible uniforms, Chandler saw, like baseball players in the lobby of a hotel or soldiers in a diner outside the gate of their post; they were all of a type. Their type was something strange. Some were tall, some short; there were old, fat, lean and young around them; but they all wore about them a look of glowing excitement, muted by an aura of suffering and pain. They wore, in a word, the look of bigots. The bound girl was not one of them. She might have been twenty years old or as much as thirty. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell; she wore no makeup, her hair strung raggedly to her neck, and her face was drawn into a tight, lean line. It was her eyes that were alive. She saw Chandler and she was sorry for him. And he saw, as he turned to look at her, that she was manacled to the dentist's chair. "People of Orphalese," chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, "the meeting of the Orphalese Self-Preservation Society will now come to order." There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience. "Well, people of Orphalese," Guy went on in his singsong, "the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we Orphalese on McGuire's Mountain." ("All saved, all of us saved," rolled a murmur from the congregation.") A lean, red-headed man bounded to the platform and fussed wi(h the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler. "People of Orphalese, as we are saved, do I have your consent to pass on and proceed to the next order of business?" ("Consent, consent, consent," rolled the echo.) "And then the second item of business is to welcome and bring to grace these two newly found and adopted souls." The congregation shouted variously: "Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!" Evidently Guy was satisfied. He nodded and became more chatty. "Okay, people of Orphalese, let's get down to it. We got two new ones, like I say. Their spirits have gone wandering on the wind, or anyway one of them has, and you all know the et cetera. They have committed a wrong unto others and therefore unto themselves. Herself, I mean. Course, the other one could have a flame spirit in him too." He stared severely at Chandler. "Boys, keep an eye on him, why don't you?" he said to two men in the front row, surrendering his gun. "Meggie, you tell about the female one." The teen-aged girl stepped forward and said, in a conversational tone but with modest pride, "People of Orph'lese, well, I was walking down the cut and I heard this car coming. Well, I was pretty surprised, you know. I had to figure what to do. You all know what the trouble is with cars." "The imps!" cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish. The girl nodded. "Most prob'ly. Well, I -- I mean, people of Orph'lese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chevvy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curve -- me out of sight, you know -- and I rolled the chevvyfreeze out nice and it caught the wheels. Right over!" she cried gleefully. "Off the shoulder, people of Orph'lese, and into the ditch and over, and I didn't give it a chance to burn. I cut the switch and I had her! I put a knife into her back, just a little, about a quarter of an inch, maybe. Her pain was the breakin' of the shell that enclosed her understanding, like it says. I figured she was all right then because she yelled but I brought her along that way. Then Guy took care of her until we got the synod. Oh," she remembered, "and her tongue staggered a little without purpose while he was putting it on, didn't it, Guy?" The bearded man nodded, grinning, and lifted up the girl's foot. Incredulously, Chandler saw that it was bound tight with a three-foot length of barbed wire, wound and twisted like a tourniquet, the blood black and congealed around it. He lifted his shocked eyes to meet the girl's. She only looked at him, with pity and understanding. Guy patted the foot and let it go. "I didn't have any more Cclamps, people of Orphalese," he apologized, "but it looks all right at that. Well, let's see. We got to make up our minds about these two, I guess -- no, wait!" He held up his hand as a murmur began. "First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two." He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read: "Some of you say, 'It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.' "And I say, Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread. "And when his work was done he laughed in the forest." Gently he closed the book, looking thoughtfully at the wall at the back of the room. He scratched his head. "Well, people of Orphalese," he said slowly "they're laughing in the forest all right, I guarantee, but we've got one here that may be honest in the flesh, probably is, though she was a thief in the spirit. Right? Well, do we take her in or reject her, O people of Orphalese?" The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out: "Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!" "Fine," said the teen-ager, rubbing her hands and looking at the bearded man. "Guy, let her go." He began to release her from the chair. "You, girl stranger, what's your name?" The girl said faintly, "Ellen Braisted." " 'Meggie, my name is Ellen Braisted,' " corrected the teenager. "Always say the name of the person you're talkin' to in Orph'lese, that way we know it's you talkin', not a flame spirit or wanderer. Okay, go sit down." Ellen limped wordlessly down into the audience. "Oh, and people of Orph'lese," said Meggie, "the car's still there if we need it for anything. It didn't burn. Guy, you go on with this other fellow." Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. "Okay," he said. "People of Orphalese, the third order of business is to welcome or reject this other brand saved from the imps, as may be your pasure." Chandler sat up straighter now that all of them were looking at him again; but it wasn't quite his turn, at that, because there was an interruption. Guy never finished. From the valley, far below, there was a sudden mighty thunder, rolling among the mountains. The windows blew in with a crystalline crash. ; fusion, the audience leaping from their seats, running to the broad windows, Guy and the teenage girl seizing rifles, everyone in motion at once. Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The red-headed man guarding him was looking away. It would be quite possible to grab his gun, run, get away from these maniacs. Yet he had nowhere to go. They might be crazy, but they seemed to have organization. They seemed, in fact, to have worked out, on whatever crazed foundation of philosophy, some practical methods for coping with possession. He decided to stay, wait and see. And at once he found himself leaping for the gun. No. Chandler didn't find himself attacking the red-headed man. He found his body doing it; Chandler had nothing to do with it. It was the helpless compulsion he had felt before, that had nearly cost him his life; his body active and urgent and his mind completely cut off from it. He felt his own muscles move in ways he had not planned, observed himself leap forward, felt his own fist strike at the back of the redheaded man's ear. The man went spinning, the gun went flying, Chandler's body leaped after it, with Chandler a prisoner in his own brain, watching, horrified and helpless. And he had the gun! He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire  from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teen-aged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting No! His fingers never pulled the trigger. He caught a second's glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler's head, with a face like an eagle's, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down. He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl's face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness. It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other. IV  jerking his hand away. She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. "Does it hurt?" she demanded tautly. Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage: "God damn it, yes! What did you expect?" "I expected it to hurt," she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning. A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once. "Sorry," she said. "I had to do that. Please trust me." "Why did you have to burn my hand?" "House rules," she said. "Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They can't stand pain." She took her hand off the knife warily. "It still hurts, doesn't it?" "It still does, yes," nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room. Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair on the floor. Some of the others might have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air. The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teen-ager, who wore a smile of triumph -- and, Chandler noticed for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it. "Whopped 'em," she said with glee, and pointed a .# rifle at Chandler. Ellen Braisted said, "Oh, he -- Meggie, I mean, he's all right." I She pointed at his burned palm. I Meg approached him with comI petent care, the rifle resting on I her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his burn. She pursed her lips and looked at his face. "All right, Ellen, I guess he's clean. But you want to burn 'em deeper'n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we'll have to do something else to 'im tomorrow." "The hell you will," thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do. "Ellen, show him around," ordered the teen-ager. "I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, cause the whitehanded aren't clean, you know." She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much. barbed-wire bracelet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and Chandler's first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home. Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probable fair game anywhere else. Of course, there was one likely reason for travel. She didn't like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teen-ager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another's will. She had had a dozen submachine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire's Mountain. Chandler said, with some effort, "I must have been -- " "Ellen, I must have been," she corrected. "Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun." "Of course. First time?" He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb. "Well, then you know. Look out here, now." They were at the great pier windows that looked out over the valley. Down below was the river, an arc of the railroad tracks, the wooded mountainside he had scaled. "Over there, Chandler." She was pointing to the railroad bridge. Wispy gray smoke drifted off southward toward the stream. The freight train Chandler had ridden on had been stopped, all that time, in the middle of the bridge. The explosion that blew out their windows had occurred when another train plowed into it -- evidently at high speed. It seemed that one of the trains had carried some sort of chemicals. The bridge was a twisted mess. "A diversion, Chandler," said Ellen Braisted. "They wanted us looking that way. Then they attacked from up the mountain." "Who?" Ellen looked surprised. "The men that crashed the trains... if they are men. The ones who possessed me -- and you -- and the hunters. They don't like these Orphalese, I think. Maybe they're a little afraid of them. I think the Orphalese have a pretty good idea of how to fight them." Chandler felt a sudden flash of sensation along his nerves. For a moment he thought he had been possessed again, and then he knew it for what it was. It was hope. "Ellen, I never thought of fighting them. I thought that was given up two years ago." "So maybe you agree with me? Maybe you think it's worth while sticking with the Orphalese?" Chandler allowed himself the contemplation of what hope meant. To find someone in this world who had a plan! Whatever the plan was. Even if it was a bad plan. He didn't think specific, ally of himself, or the brand on his forehead or the memory # f the body of his wife. What he thought of was the prospect # f thwarting -- not even defeating, merely hampering or annoying was enough! -- the imps, the "flame creatures," the pythons devils, incubi or demons who had destroyed a world he had thought very fair. "If they'll have me," he said, "I'll stick with them, all right. Where do I go to join?" TT was not hard to join at all. Meg chattily informed him that he was already practically a member. "Chandler, we got to watch everybody strange, you know. See why, don't you? Might have a flame spirit in 'em, no fault of theirs, but look how they could mess us up. But now we know you don't, so -- What do you mean, how do we know? Cause you did have one when you busted loose in there. Can't have two at a time, you know. Think we couldn't tell the difference?" The interrupted meeting was resumed after the place had been tidied up and the dead buried. There had been four of the hunters, and even without their submachine guns they had succeeded was not all loss to the Orphalese, because two of the hunters were  still alive, though wounded, and under the rules of this chessboard the captured enemy became a friend. Guy had suffered a broken jaw in the scuffle and another man  presided, a fat youth who favored a bandaged leg. He limped to his f feet, grimacing and patting his leg. "O Orphalese and brothers," he said, "we have lost friends, but we have won a test. Praise the Prophet, we will be spared to win again, and to drive the imps of fire out of our world. Meggie, you going to tie these folks up?" The girl proudly ordered one of the hunters into the spotlighted dentist's chair, another into a wing chair that was hastily moved onto the platform. The men were bleeding and hurt, but they had clearly been abandoned by their possessors. They watched with puzzlement and fear. "Walter, they're okay now," Meg reported as others finished tying up the hunters. "Oh, wait a minute." She advanced on Chandler. "Chandler, I'm sorry. You sit down there, hear?" Chandler suffered himself to be bound to a camp chair on the platform and Walter took a drink of wine and opened the ornate book that was before him on the rostrum. "Meg, thanks. Guy, I hope I do this as good as you do. Let me read you a little. Let's see." He put on his steel-rimmed glasses and read: "Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening." He closed the book, looked with satisfaction at Guy and said : "Do you understand that, new friends? They are the words of the Prophet, who men call Kahlil Gibran. For the benefit of the new folks I ought to say that he died this fleshly life quite a good number of years ago, but his vision was unclouded. Like we say, we are the sinews that batter the flame spirits but he is our soul." There was an antiphonal murmur from the audience and Walter flipped the pages again rapidly, obviously looking for a familiar passage. "People of Orphalese, here we are now. This's what he says. What is this that has torn our world apart? The Prophet says: "It is life in quest of life, in bodies that fear the grave." Now, honestly, nothing could be clearer than that, people of Orphalese and friends! We got something taking possession of us, see? What is it? Well, he says here, people of Orphalese and friends, 'It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of itself.' Now, what the heck! Nobody can blame us for what a flame spirit in us does! So the first thing we got to learn, friends -- and people of Orphalese -- is, we aren't to blame. And the second thing is, we are to blame!" He turned and grinned at Chandler kindly, while the chorus of responses came from the room, "Like here," he said, . "people of Orphalese, the Prophet says everybody is guilty. 'The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, and the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.' You see what he's getting at? We all got to take the responsibility for everything -- and that means we got to suffer -- but we don't have to worry about any special things we did when some flame spirit or wanderer, like, took us over. "But we do have to suffer, people of Orphalese." His expression became grim. "Our beloved founder, Guy, who's sitting there doing a little extra suffering now, was favored enough to understand these things in the very beginning, when he himself was seized by these imps. And it is all in this book! Like it says, 'Your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.' Ponder on that, people of Orphalese -- and friends. No, I mean really ponder," he ex plained, glancing at the bound "friends" on the platform. "w e always do that for a minute. Ada there will play us some music so we can ponder."  fortably, while an old woman crippled by arthritis began fumbling a tune out of an electric organ. The burn Ellen Braisted had given him was beginning to hurt badly. If only these people were not such obvious nuts, he thought, he would feel a lot better about casting his lot in with them. But maybe it took lunatics to do the job. Sane people hadn't accomplished much. And anyway he had very little choice... "Ada, that's enough," ordered the fat youth. "Meg, come on up here. People of Orphalese, now you can listen again while Meg explains to the new folks how all this got started, seeing Guy's in no condition to do it." The teen-ager marched up to the platform and took the paraderest position learned in some high-school debating society -- in the days when there were debating societies and high schools. "Ladies and gentlemen, well, let's start at the beginning. Guy tells this better'n I do, of course, but I guess I remember it all pretty well too. I ought to. I was in on it and all." She grimaced and said, "Well, anyway, ladies and gentlemen -- people of Orph'lese . -- the way Guy organized this Orphalese self-protection society was, like Walter says, he was possessed. The only difference between Guy and you and me was that ha knew what to do about it, because he read the book, you see. Not that that helped him at first, when he was took over. He was really seized. Yes, people of Orph'lese, he was taken and while his whole soul and brain and body was under the influence of some foul wanderer fiend from hell he did things that, ladies and gentlemen of Orph'lese, I wouldn't want to tell you. He was a harp in the hand of the mighty, as it says. Couldn't help it, not however much he tried. Only while he was doing -- the things -- he happened to catch his hand in a gas flame and, well, you can see it was pretty bad." With a deprecatory smile Guy held up a twisted hand. "And, do you know, he was free of his imp right then and there! Now, Guy is a scientist, people of Orph'lese, he worked for the telephone company, and he not only had that training in the company school but he had read the book, you see, and he put two and two together. Oh, and he's my uncle, of course. I'm proud of him. I've always loved him, and even when he -- when he was not one with himself, you know, when he was doing those terrible things to me, I knew it wasn't Uncle Guy that was doing them, but something else. I didn't know what, though. And when he told me he had figured out the Basic Rule, I went along with him every bit. I knew Guy wasn't wrong, and what he said was from Scripture. Imps fear pain! So we got to love it. That one I know by heart, all right: 'Could you keep your heart from wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.' That's what it says, right? So that's why we got to hurt ourselves, people of Orph'lese -- and new brothers -- because the wanderers don't like it when we hurt and they leave us alone. Simple's that. "Well -- " the girl's face stiffened momentarily -- "I knew I wasn't going to be seized. So Guy and I got Else, that's the other girl he'd been doing things to, and we knew she wasn't going to be taken either. Not if the imps feared pain like Guy said, because," she said solemnly, "I want to tell you Guy hurt us pretty bad. "And then we came out here, and found this place, and ever since then we've been adding brothers and sisters. It's been slow, of course, because not many people come this way any more, and we've had to kill a lot. Yes, we have. Sometimes the possessed just can't be saved, but -- " Abruptly her face changed. Suddenly alert, her face years older, she glanced around the room. Then she relaxed... And screamed. leaped up. Hoarsely, his voice almost inarticulate as he tried to talk with his broken jaw, he cried, "Wha... Wha's... matter, Meg? "Uncle Guy!" she wailed. She plunged off the platform and flung herself into his arms, crying hysterically. "Wha?" She sobbed, "I could feel it! They took me. Guy, you promised me they couldn't!" He shook his head, dazed, staring at her as though she were indeed possessed -- still possessed, and telling him some fearful great lie to destroy his hopes. He seemed unable to comprehend what she had said. One of the hunters bellowed in stark fear: "For God's sake, untie us! Give us a chance, anyway!" Chandler yelled agreement. In one split second everyone in the room had been transmuted by terror into something less than human. No one seemed capable of any action. Slowly the plump youth who had presided moved over to the hunter bound in the dentist's chair and began to fumble blindly at the knots. Ellen Braisted dropped her head into her hands and began to shake. The cruelty of the moment was that they had all tasted hope. Chandler writhed wildly against his ropes, his mind racing out of control. The world had become a hell for everyone, but a bearable hell until the promise of a chance to end it gave them a full sight of what their lives had been. Now that that was dashed they were far worse off than before. Walter finished with the hunter and lethargically began to pick at Chandler's bonds. His face was slack and unseeing. Then it, too, changed. The plump youth stood up sharply, glanced about, and walked off the platform. Ellen Braisted raised her face from her hands and, her eyes streaming, quietly stood up and followed. The old lady with the arthritis about-faced and limped with them. Chandler stared, puzzled, and then comprehended. They were marching toward the corner of the room where the rifles were stacked. "Possessed!" Chandler bellowed, the words tasting of acid as they ripped out of his throat. "Stop them! You -- Guy -- look!" He flailed wildly at his loosened bonds, lunged, tottered and toppled, chair and all, crashingly off the platform. The three possessed ones did not need to hurry. They had all the time in the world. They were already reaching out for the rifles when Chandler shouted. Economically they turned, raising the butts to their shoulders, and began to fire at the Orphalese. It was a queerly frightening sight to see the arthritic organist, with a face like a relaxed executioner, take quick aim at Guy and, with a thirty-thirty shell, blow his throat out. Three shots, and the nearest three of the congregation were dead. Three more, and others went down, while the remainder turned and tried to run. It was like a slaughter of vermin. They never had a chance. When every Orphalese except themselves was down on the floor, dead, wounded or, like Chandler, overlooked, the arthritic lady took careful aim at Ellen Braisted and the plump youth and shot them neatly in the temples.They didn't try to prevent her. With expressions that seemed almost impatient they presented their profiles to her aim. Then the arthritic lady glanced leisurely about, fired into the stomach of a wounded man who was trying to rise, reloaded her rifle for insurance and began to search the bodies of the nearest dead. She was looking for matches. When she found them, she tugged weakly at the upholstery on a couch, swore and began methodically to rip and crumple pages out of Kahlil Gibran. When she had a heap of loose papers piled against the dais she pitched the remainder of the book out of the window, knelt and ignited the crumpled heap. She stood watching the fire, her expression angry and impatient, tapping her foot. The crumpled pages burned briskly. Before they died the wooden dais was beginning to catch. Laboriously the old lady toted folding chairs to pile on the blaze until it was roaring handsomely. She watched it for several minutes, until it was a great orange pillar of fire sweeping to the ceiling, until the drapes on the wall behind were burning and the platform was a holocaust, until the noise of crackling flame and the beginning of plaster falling from the high ceiling proved that there was no likelihood of the fire going out and, indeed, no way to put it out without a complete fire department arriving on the scene at once. The old lady's expression cleared. She nodded to herself. She then put the muzzle of the rifle in her mouth and, with her thumb, pulled the trigger that blew the top of her head off. The body fell into the flames, but it was by then already dead.  but he was very near to roasting. Walter had released one hand and, while the possessed woman's attention was elsewhere, Chandler had worked on the other knots. When he saw her commit suicide he redoubled his efforts. It was incredible to him that his life had been saved, and he knew that if he escaped the flames he still had nothing to live for -- that blasted brief hope had broken his spirit -- but his fingers had a will of their own. He lay there, struggling, while great black clouds of smoke, orange painted from the flames, gathered under the high ceiling, while the thunder of falling lumps of plaster sounded like a child heaving volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica down a flight of stairs, while the heat and shortage of oxygen made him breathe in violent spasms. Then he cried out sharply and stumbled to his feet. It was only a matter of moments before he was out of the house, but it was very nearly not time enough. Behind him was a great, sustained crash. He thought it must have been the furniture on the upper floor toppling through the burned-out ceiling of the hall. He turned and looked. It was dark, and now every window on the side of the house facing him was lighted. It was as though some mad householder had decided to equip his rooms only with orange lights, orange lights that flickered and moved. For a second Chandler thought there were still living people in the rooms -- shapes moved and cavorted at the windows, as though they were gathering up possessions or waving wildly for help. But it was only the drapes, aflame, tossed about in the fierce heat. Chandler sighed and turned away. Pain was not a sure defense after all. Evidently it was only an annoyance to the possessors... whoever, or whatever, they might be. As soon as they had become suspicious they had exerted themselves and destroyed the Orphalese. He listened and looked about, but no one else moved. He had not expected anyone. He had been sure that he was the only survivor. He began to walk down the hill toward the wrecked railway bridge, turning only when a roar told him that the roof of the house had fallen in. A tulip of flame a hundred feet tall rose above the standing walls, and above that a shower of floating red-orange sparks, heat-borne, drifting up and away and beginning to settle all over the mountainside. Many were still red when Ilf! they landed, a few still flaming. It was a distinct risk that the trees would begin to burn, and then he would be in fresh danger. So great was his stupor that he did not even hurry. By a plowed field he flung himself to the ground. He could go no farther because he had nowhere to go. He had had two homes and he had been driven from both of them, He had had hope twice, and twice he had been damned. He lay on his back, with the burning house mumbling and crackling in the distance, and stared up at the orange-lit tops of the trees and, past them, the stars. Over his left shoulder Deneb chased Vega across the sky; toward his feet something moved between the bright rosy dot that was Antares and another, the same brightness and hue -- Mars? He spent several moments wondering if Mars were in that part of the heavens. Then he looked again for the tiny moving point that had crossed the claws of the Scorpion, but it was gone. A satellite, maybe. Although there were few of them left that the naked eye could hope to see. And there would never be any more, because the sort of accumulated wealth of nations that threw rockets into the sky was forever spent. It was probably an airplane, he thought drowsily, and drifted off to sleep without realizing how remote even that possibility had become... He woke up to find that he was getting to his feet. Once again an interloper tenanted his brain. He tried to interfere, for he could not help it, although he knew how useless it was, but his own neck muscles turned his head from side to side, his own eyes looked this way and that, his own hand reached down for a dead branch that lay on the ground, then hesitated and withdrew. His body stood motionless for a second, the lips moving, the larynx mumbling to itself. He could almost hear words. Chandler felt like a fly in amber, prisoned in his own brainbox. He was not surprised when his legs moved to carry him back toward the destroyed building, now a fakir's bed of white-hot coals with brush fires spattered around it. He thought he knew why. It seemed very likely that what possessor had him was a sort of clean-up squad, tidying up the loose ends of the slaughter; he expected that his body's errand was to destroy itself, and thus him, as all the Orphalese had been destroyed. V  him rapidly toward the house. Now and then it paused and glanced about. It seemed to be weighing some shortcut in its errand; but always it resumed its climb. Chandler could sympathize with it, in a way. He still felt every pain from burn, brand and wound; as they neared the embers of the building the heat it threw off intensified them all. He could not be a comfortable body to inhabit for long. He was almost sympathetic because his tenant could not find a convenient weapon with which to fulfill his purpose. When it seemed they could get no closer without the skin of his face crackling and bursting into flame his body halted. Chandler could feel his muscles gathering for what would be the final leap into the auto-da-fe. His feet took a short step -- and slipped. His body stumbled and recovered itself; his mouth swore thickly in a language he did not know. Then his body hesitated, glanced at the ground, paused again and bent down. It had tripped on a book. It picked the book up, and Chandler saw that it was the Orphalese copy of Gibran's The Prophet. Chandler's body stood poised for a moment, in an attitude of thought. Then it sat down, in the play of heat from the coals. It was a moment before Chandler realized he was free. He tested his legs; they worked; he got up, turned and began to walk away. He had traveled no more than a few yards when he stumbled slightly, as though shifting gears, and felt the tenant in his mind again. He continued to walk away from the building, down toward the road. Once his arm raised the book he still carried and his eyes glanced down, as if for reassurance that it was the same book. That was the only clue he was given as to what had happened and it was not much. It was as though his occupying power, whatever it was, had gone -- somewhere -- to think things over, perhaps to ask a question of an unimaginable companion, and then returned with an altered purpose. As time passed, Chandler began to receive additional clues, but he was in little shape to fit them together, for his body was near exhaustion. He walked to the road, and waited, rigid, until a panel truck came bouncing along. He hailed it, his arms making a sign he did not understand, and when it stopped he addressed the driver in a language he did not speak. "Shto," said the driver, a somberfaced Mexican in dungarees. "Ja nie jestem Ruska. Czego pragniesh?" "Czy ty jedziesz to Los Angeles?" asked Chandler's mouth. "Nyet. Acapulco." Chandler's voice argued, 'Wes na Los Angeles." "Nyet." The voices droned on. Chandler lost interest in the argument and was only relieved when it seemed somehow to be settled and he was herded into the back of the truck. The somber Mexican locked him in; he felt the truck begin to move; his tenant left him, and he was at once asleep. He woke long enough to find himself standing in the mist of early dawn at a crossroads. In a few minutes another car came by, and his voice talked earnestly with the driver for a moment. Chandler got in, was released, slept again and woke to find himself free and abandoned, sprawled across the back seat of the car, which was parked in front of a building marked Los Angeles International Airport.  and strolled around, stretching. He realized he was very hungry. No one was in sight. The field showed clear signs of having been through the same sort of destruction that had visited every major communications facility in the world. Part of the building before him was smashed flat and showed signs of having been burned. He saw projecting aluminum members, twisted and scorched but still visibly aircraft parts. Apparently a transport had crashed into the building. Burned-out cars littered the parking lot and what had once been a green lawn. They seemed to have been bulldozed out of the way, but not an inch farther than was necessary to clear the approach roads. To his right, as he stared out onto the field, was a strangelooking construction on three legs, several stories high. It did not seem to serve any useful purpose. Perhaps it had been a sort of luxury restaurant at one time, like the Space Needle from the old Seattle Fair, but now it too was burned out and glassless in its windows. The field itself was swept bare except for two or three parked planes in the bays, but he could see wrecked transports lining the approach strips. All in all, Los Angeles International Airport appeared to be serviceable, but only just. He wondered where all the people were. Distant truck noises answered part of the question. An Army six by six came bumping across a bridge that led from the takeoff strips to this parking area of the airport. Five men got out next to one of the ships. They glanced at him but did not speak as they began loading crates of some sort of goods from the truck into the aircraft, a four-engine, sweptwing jet of what looked to Chandler like an obsolete model. Perhaps it was one of the early Boeings. There hadn't been many of those in use at the time the troubles began, too big and fast for short hops, too slow to compete over long distances with the rockets. But, of course, with all the destruction, and with no new aircraft being built anywhere in the world any more, no doubt they were as good as could be found. The truckmen did not seem to be possessed; they worked with the normal amount of grunting and swearing, pausing to wipe sweat away or to scratch an itch. They showed neither the intense malevolent concentration nor the wide-eyed idiot curiosity of those whose bodies were no longer their own. Chandler settled the woolen cap over the brand on his forehead, to avoid unpleasantness, and drifted over toward them. They stopped work and regarded him. One of them said something to another, who nodded and walked toward Chandler. "What do you want?" he demanded warily. "I don't know. I was going to ask you the same question, I guess." The man scowled. "Didn't your exec tell you what to do?" "My what?" The man paused, scratched and shook his head. "Well, stay away from us. This is an important shipment, see? I guess you're all right or you couldn't've got past the guards, but I don't want you messing us up. Got enough trouble already. I don't know why," he said in the tones of an old grievance, "we can't get the execs to let us know when they're going to bring somebody in. It wouldn't hurt them! Now here we got to load and fuel this ship and, for all I know, you've got half a ton of junk around somewhere that you're going to load onto it. How do I know how much fuel it'll take? No weather, naturally. So if there's headwinds it'll take full tanks, but if there's extra cargo I -- " "The only cargo I brought with me that I can think of is a book," said Chandler. "Weighs maybe a pound. You think I'm supposed to get on that plane?" The man grunted non-committally. "All right, suit yourself. Listen, is there any place I can get something to eat?" The man considered. "Well, I guess we can spare you a sandwich. But you wait here. I'll bring it to you." He went back to the truck. A moment later one of the others brought Chandler two cold hamburgers wrapped in waxed paper, but would answer no questions. Sought and found a washroom in the wrecked building, came out again and sat in the sun, watching the loading crew. He had become quite a fatalist. It did not seem that it was intended he should die immediately, so he might as well live. There were large gaps in his understanding, but it seemed clear to Chandler that these men, though not possessed, were in some way working for the possessors. It was a distasteful concept; but on second thought it had reassuring elements. It was evidence that whatever the "execs" were, they were very possibly human beings -- or, if not precisely human, at least shared the human trait of working by some sort of organized effort toward some sort of a goal. It was the first non-random phenomenon he had seen in connection with the possessors, barring the shortterm tactical matters of mass slaughter and destruction. It made him feel -- what he tried at once to suppress, for he feared another destroying frustration -- a touch of hope. The men finished their work but did not leave. Nor did they approach Chandler, but sat in the shade of their truck, waiting for something. He drowsed and was awakened by a distant sputter of a single-engined Aerocoupe that hopped across the building behind him, turned sharply and came down with a brisk little run in the parking bay itself. From one side the pilot climbed down and from the other two men lifted, with great care, a wooden crate, small but apparently heavy. They stowed it in the jet while the pilot stood watching; then the pilot and one of the other men got into the crew compartment. Chandler could not be sure, but he "had the impression that the truckman who entered the plane was no longer his own master. His movements seemed more sure and confident, but above all it was the mute, angry eyes with which his fellows regarded him that gave Chandler grounds for suspicion. He had no time to worry about that; foi; in the same breath he felt himself occupied once more. He did not rise. His own voice said to him, "You. Votever you name, you fellow vit de book! You go get de book verever. you pud it and get on dat ship dere, you see?" His eyes turned toward the waiting aircraft. "And don't forget de book!" He was released. "I won't," he said automatically, and then realized that there was no longer anyone there to hear his answer. When he retrieved the Gibran volume from the car and approached the plane the loading  crew said nothing. Evidently they knew what he was doing -- either because they too had been given  instructions, or because they r r were used to such things. He paused at the wheeled stairs. "Listen," he said, "can you at least tell me where I'm going?" The four remaining men looked at him silently, with the same t angry, worried expression he had i seen on their faces before. They I did not answer, but after a moment one of them raised his arm t and pointed. West. Out toward the Pacific. square miles of nearly empty sea. their destination Chandler had reasoned what it must be. He was correct: It was the islands of Hawaii. Chandler knew that the pilot and his coopted partner were up forward, in the crew compartment, but the door was locked and he never saw them again. Apart from them he was the only living person on the plane. The plane was lightly loaded with cargo of unidentifiable sorts. In the rear section, where once tourist-class passengers had eaten their complimentary tray meals and planned their vacations, the seats had been removed and a thin scatter of crates and boxes were strapped to the floor. In the luxury of the forward section Chandler sat, stared at the water and drowsed. He seemed to be always sleepy. Perhaps it was the consequence of his exertions; more likely it was a psychological phenomenon. He was beyond worry. He had reached that point in emotional fatigue when the sudden rattle of cannonfire or the enemy's banzai charge can no longer flood the blood with adrenalin. The glands are dry. The emotions have been triggered too often. Battle fatigue takes men in many different ways, but in Chandler it was only apathy. He not only could not worry, he could not even rouse himself to feel hunger, although the pricking of habit made him get up and search the flight kitchen, unsuccessfully, for food. He had no idea how much time had passed when the hiss of the jets changed key. The horizon dipped below the wingtip and straightened again, and he beheld land. He never saw the airfield, only water, then beach, then water again, then a few buildings. Then there was a roar of jets, with their clamshells deflecting their thrust forward to brake their speed, and then the wheels were on the ground. As the plane stopped he felt himself once more possessed. It "was no longer terrifying -- though Chandler was sure he was doomed. Without knowing where he was going or why he picked up the ripped book, opened the cabin exit and stepped down onto the rolling steps that had immediately been brought into place. He was conscious of a horde of men swarming around the plane, stripping it of its cargo, and wondered briefly at the rush; but he could not stop to watch them, his legs carried him swiftly across a paved strip to where a police car was cruising. Chandler cringed inside, instinctively, but his body did not falter as it stepped into the path of the car and raised its hand. The police car jammed on its brakes. The policeman at the wheel, Chandler thought inside himself, looked startled, but he also looked resigned. "To de South Gate, qvickly," said Chandler's lips, and he felt his legs carry him around to the door on the other side. There was another policeman on the seat next to the driver. He leaped like a hare to get the door open and get out before Chandler's body got there. He made it with nothing to stare. "Jack, you go on, I'll tell Headquarters," he said hurriedly. The driver nodded without speaking. His lips were white. He reached over Chandler to close the door and made a sharp U-turn. As soon as the car was moving Chandler felt himself able to move his lips again. "I -- " he said. "I don't know " "Friend," said the policeman, "kindly keep your mouth shut. 'South Gate,' the exec said, and South Gate is where I'm going." Chandler shrugged and looked out the window... just in time to see the jet that had brought him to the islands once more lumbering into life. It crept, wobbling its wingtips, over the ground, picked up speed, roared across taxi strips and over rough ground and at last piled up against an ungainly looking foreign airplane, a Russian jet by its markings, in a thunderous crash and ball of flame as its fuel exploded. No one got out. It seemed that traffic to Hawaii was all one way. VI town Honolulu with the siren blaring and cars scattering out of the way. At seventy miles an hour they raced down a road by the sea. Chandler caught a glimpse of a sign that said "Hilo," but where or what "Hilo" might be he had no idea. Soon there were fewer cars; then there were none but their own. The road was a surburban highway lined with housing developments, shopping centers, palm groves and the occasional center of a small municipality, scattering helterskelter together. There was a road like this extending in every direction from every city in the United States, Chandler thought; but this one was somewhat altered. Something had been there before them. About a mile outside Honolulu's outer fringe, life was cut off as with a knife. There were no people on foot, and the only cars were rusted wrecks lining the roads. The lawns were ragged stands of weeds in front of the ranch-type homes. It was evidently not allowed to live here. Chandler craned his neck. His curiosity was becoming almost unbearable. He opened his mouth, but, f T said, "Shut up.' " rumbled the cop without looking at him. There was a note in the policeman's voice that impressed Chandler. He did not quite know what it was, but it made him obey. They drove for another fifteen minutes in silence, then drew up before a barricade across the road. Chandler got out. The policeman slammed the door behind him, ripping rubber off his tires with the speed of his U-turn and acceleration back toward Honolulu. He did not look at Chandler. Chandler stood staring off after him, in bright warm sunlight with a reek of hibiscus and rotting palms in his nostril. It was very quiet there, except for a soft scratchy sound of footsteps on gravel. As Chandler turned to face the man who was coming toward him, he realized he had learned one fact from the policeman after all. The cop was scared clear through. Chandler said, "Hello," to the man who was approaching. He too wore a uniform, but not that of the Honolulu city police. It was like U.S. Army suntans, but without insignia. Behind him were half a dozen others in the same dress, smoking, chatting, leaning against whatever was handy. The barricades themselves were impressively thorough. Barbed wire ran down the beach and out into the ocean; on the other side of the road, barbed wire ran clear out of sight along the middle of a side road. The gate itself was bracketed with machine-gun emplacements. The guard waited until he was close to Chandler before speaking. "What do you want?" he asked without greeting. Chandler shrugged. "All right, just wait here," said the guard, and began to walk away again. "Wait a minute! What am I waiting for?" The guard shook his head without stopping or turning. He did not seem very interested, and he certainly was not helpful. Chandler put down the copy of The Prophet which he had carried so far and sat on the ground, but again he had no long time to wait. One of the guards came toward him, with the purposeful movements Chandler had learned to recognize. Without speaking the guard dug into a pocket. Chandler jumped up instinctively, but it was only a set of car keys. As Chandler took them the look in the guard's eyes showed the quick release of tension that meant he was free again; and in that same moment Chandler's own body was occupied once more. He reached down and picked up the book. Quickly, but a little clumsily, his fingers selected a key, and his legs carried him toward a little French car parked just the other side of the barrier.  last the skills of allowing his body to have its own way. He couldn't help it in any event, so he was consciously disciplining himself to withdraw his attention from his muscles and senses. It involved queerly vertiginous problems. A hundred times a minute there was some unexpected body sway or movement of the hand, and his lagging, i m  prisoned mind would wrench at its unresponsive nerves to put out the elbow that would brace him, or to catch itself with a step. He had learned to ignore these things. The mind that inhabited his body had ways not his own of maintaining balance and reaching an objective, but they were equally sure. He watched his own hands shifting the gears of the car. It was a make he had never driven, with a clutchless drive he did not understand, but the mind in his brain evidently understood it well enough. They picked up speed in great, gasoline-wasting surges. Chandler began to form a picture of that mind. It belonged to an older man, from the hesitancy of its walk, and a testy one, from the heedless crash of the gears as it shifted. It drove with careless slapdash speed. Chandler's mind yelled and flinched in his brain as they rounded blind curves, where any casual other motorist would have been a catastrophe; but the hand on the wheel and the foot on the accelerator did not hesitate. Beyond the South Gate the island of Oahu became abruptly wild. There were beautiful homes, but there were also great, gaptoothed spaces where homes had once been and were no longer. It seemed that some monstrous Zoning Commissar had stalked through the island with an eraser, rubbing out the small homes, the cheap ones, the old ones; rubbing out the stores, rubbing out the factories. This whole section of the island had been turned into an exclusive residential park. It was not uninhabited. Chandler thought he glimpsed a few people, though since the direction of his eyes was not his to control it was hard to be sure. And then the Renault turned into a lane, paved but narrow. Hardwood trees with some sort of blossoms, Chandler could not tell what, overhung it on both sides.  It meandered for a mile or so, turned and opened into a great vacant parking lot. The Renault stopped with a squeal of brakes in front of a door that was Flight Message Center. Chandler caught sight of a skeletal towering form overhead, like a radio transmitter antenna, as his body marched him inside, up a motionless escalator, along a hall and into a room. His muscles relaxed. He glanced around and, from a huge couch beside a desk, a huge soft body stirred and, gasping, sat up. It was a very fat old man, almost bald, wearing a coronet of silvery spikes. He looked at Chandler without much interest. "Vot's your name?" he wheezed. He had a heavy, ineradicable accent, like a Hapsburg or a Russian diplomat. Chandler recognized it readily. He had heard it often enough, from his own lips. 'T'HE man's name was Koitska, he said in his accented wheeze. If he had another name he did not waste it on Chandler. He took as few words as possible to order Chandler to be seated and to be still. Koitska squinted at the copy of Gibran's The Prophet. He did not glance at Chandler, but Chandler felt himself propelled out of his seat, to hand the book to Koitska, then returning. Koitska turned its remaining pages with an expression of bored repugnance, like a man picking off his arm. He seemed to be waiting for something. A door closed on the floor below, and in a moment a girl came into the room. She was tall, dark and not quite young. Chandler, struck by her beauty, was sure that he had seen her, somewhere, but could not place her face. She wore a coronet like the fat man's, intertwined in a complicated hairdo, and she got right down to business. "Chandler, is it? All right, love, what we want to know is what this is all about." She indicated the book. A relief that was like pain crossed Chandler's mind. So that was why he was here! Whoever these people were, however they managed to rule men's minds, they were not quite certain of their perfect power. To them the sad, futile Orphalese represented a sort of annoyance -- not important enough to be a threat -- but something which had proved inconvenient at one time and therefore needed investigating. As Chandler was the only survivor they had deemed it worth their godlike whiles to transport him four thousand miles so that he might satisfy their curiosity. Chandler did not hesitate in telling them all about the people of Orphalese. There was nothing worth concealing, he was quite sure. No debts are owed to the dead; and the Orphalese had proved on their own heads, at the last, that their ritual of pain was only an annoyance to the possessors, not a tactic that could long be used against them. It took hardly five minutes to say everything that needed saying about Guy, Meggie and the other doomed and suffering inhabitants of the old house on the mountain. Koitska hardly spoke. The girl was his interrogator, and sometimes translator as well, when his English was not sufficient to comprehend a point. With patient detachment she kept the story moving until Koitska with a bored shrug indicated he was through. Then she smiled at Chandler and said, "Thanks, love. Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" "I don't know. I thought the same thing about you." "Oh, everybody's seen me. Lots of me. But -- well, no matter. Good luck, love. Be nice to Koitska and perhaps he'll do as much for you." And she was gone. Koitska lay unmoving on his couch for a few moments, rubbing a fat nose with a plump finger. "Hah," he said at last. Then, abruptly, "And now, de qvestion is, vot to do vit you, eh? I do not t'ink you can cook, eh?"  Chandler realized he was on trial for his life. "Cook? No, I'm afraid not. I mean, I can boil eggs," he said. "Nothing fancy." "Hah," grumbled Koitska. "Vel. Ve need a couple, three doctors, but I do not t'ink you vould do." Chandler shook his head. "I'm an electrical engineer," he said. "Or was."  "Vas?" "I haven't had much practice. There has not been a great deal of call for engineers, the last year or two." "Hah." Koitska seemed to consider. "Vel," he said, "it could be... yes, it could be dat ve have a job for you. You go back downstairs and -- no, vait." The fat man closed his eyes and Chandler felt himself seized and propelled down the stairs to what had once been a bay of a built-in garage. Now it was fitted up with workbenches and the gear of a radio ham's dreams. Chandler walked woodenly to one of the benches. His own voice spoke to him. "Ve got here someplace -- da, here is cirguit diagrams and de specs for a sqvare-vave generator. You know vot dat is? Write down de answer." Chandler, released with a pencil in his hand and a pad before him, wrote Yes. "Okay. Den you build vun for me. I areddy got vun but I vant another. You do dis in de city, not here. Go to ' Tripler, dey tells you dere vere you can work, vere to get parts, all dat. Couple days you come out here again, I see if I like how you build." Clutching the thick sheaf of diagrams, Chandler felt himself propelled outside and back into the little car. The interview was over. He wondered if he would be able to find his way back to Honolulu, but that problem was then postponed as he discovered he could not start the car. His own hands had already done so, of course, but it had been so quick and sure that he had not paid attention; now he found that the ignition key was marked only in French, which he could not speak. After trial and error he discovered the combination that would start the engine and unlock the steering wheel, and then gingerly he toured the perimeter of the lot until he found an exit road. It was close to midnight, he judged. Stars were shining overhead; there was a rising moon. He then remembered, somewhat tardily, that he should not be seeing stars. The lane he had come in on had been overhung on both sides with trees. A few minutes later he realized he was quite lost. Chandler stopped the car, swore feelingly, got out and looked around. There was nothing much to see. The roads bore no markers that made sense to him. He shrugged and rummaged through the glove compartment on the chance of a map; there was none, but he did find what he had almost forgotten, a half-empty pack of cigarettes. It had been -- he counted -- nearly a week since he had smoked. He lit up. TT was a pleasant evening, too. He felt almost relaxed. He stood there, wondering just what might be about to happen next -- with curiosity more than fear -- and then he felt a light touch at his mind. It was nothing, really. Or nothing that he could quite identify. It was though he had been nudged. It seemed that someone was about to usurp his body again, but that did not develop. As he had about decided to forget it and get back in the car he saw headlights approaching. A low, lean sports car slowed as it came near, stopping beside him, and a girl leaned out, almost invisible in the darkness. "There you are, love," she said cheerfully. "Thought I spotted someone. Lost?" She had a coronet, and Chandler recognized her. It was the girl who had interrogated him. "I guess I am," he admitted. The girl leaned forward. "Come in, dear. Oh, that thing? Leave it here, the silly little bug." She giggled as they drove away from the Renault. "Koitska wouldn't like you wandering around. I guess he decided to give you a job?" "How did you know?" She said softly, "Well, love, you're here, you know. Otherwise -- never mind. What are you supposed to be doing?" "Going to Tripler, whatever that is. In Honolulu, I guess. TO BE CC Then I have to build some radio equipment." "Tripler's actually on the other side of the city. I'll take you to the gate; then you tell them where you want to go. They'll take care of it." "I don't have any money for fare." She laughed. After a moment she said, "Koitska's not the worst. But I'd mind my step if I were you, love. Do what he says, the best you can. You never know. You might find yourself very fortunate... "I already think that. I'm alive." "Why, love, that point of view will take you far." The sports car slid smoothly to a stop at the barricade and, in the floodlights above the machine-gun nests, she looked more closely at Chandler. "What's that on your forehead, dear?" Somehow the woolen cap had been lost. "A brand," he said shortly. " 'H' for 'hoaxer.' I did something when one of you people had me, and they thought I'd done it on my own." "Why -- why, this is wonderful!" the girl said excitedly. "No wonder I thought I'd seen you before. Don't you remember? I was in the forewoman at your trial!" Robert was always there. He had to be. He didn't have anywhere else to go. clouds and said, reproachfully, "You're far too aggressive, dear." "I know," Roberta answered in a small voice. "It shows in everything you do," Robert continued. "Your voice, the way you walk, everything. You'd better watch out for it. It will get you in trouble some day... besides spoiling the illusion." Roberta drew breath in a little gasp. Robert smiled. "What's the matter, anyhow?" he asked. "Are you still envious of other women, Roberta? You oughtn't to be. Now that we're, well, married. And everything." "Are we really married?" Roberta wanted to know. "It seems to me... sometimes... that I used to be happier." "Hush. Be quiet." Robert seemed about to chin himself on a cloud and then thought better of it. "Of course you're happy." He leaned his elbows on the pinkest of the cloud bands and smiled at Roberta benevolently. He looked, Roberta thought, like a picture Roberta had had taken when Roberta was little, as a little Roberta cherub. Ever so pretty. (Are cherubs boys or girls?) The buzzer on the vizi-screen at the foot of the big sunken tub . (Robert always seemed to show up when Roberta was taking a bath) rang harshly. Roberta clambered out of the tub, picked up a towel with one hand, and with the other pressed a switch. The face of the receptionist on duty at the desk in the lobby became visible. "A Mr. Rodvorello Dlag to see you, Miss Prentice," said the receptionist. "R-o-d-v-o-r-e-l-l-o D-l-a-g. He says he knows you. Shall I send him up?" Roberta's eyebrows arched doubtfully. "Rov -- ? Rob -- ?" But a glance at the ceiling showed that Robert had gone. He might have gone into one of the closets, which was a good place for a skeleton to hide itself. More likely he had pulled a cloud in after him. Cuckoo Robert. Like a cuckoo in a clock. "Oh, have him come on up," Roberta told the image of the receptionist's face. "In about twenty minutes. Even if I don't remember him." waltzing around and around, with Roberta's long pink tulle skirt whirling out behind, when Mr. Dlag knocked. Robert went away. Roberta went to the door. Mr. Dlag was an extraordinary looking man. Roberta, peering at him, tried to remember where people who looked like that came from. He was wearing a buttonhole flower made of brown feathers, extremely large synthetic opal cufflinks, and a suit of unusually garish iridi-tweed. His manners, though, were excellent. "And how are you now, ah, Miss Prentice?" he asked yhen they were both seated. "Quite recovered from your operation? Well and happy, I trust?" "Yes, I'm feeling well," Roberta admitted. "Good! I'm glad to hear it," Mr. Dlag declared. His eyes, coalblack against the deep whiteness of his skin, twinkled. "It wasn't any' trouble for me. Just a question of exerting a little influence in the right quarters. And if it made you happy -- well! Any time I'm too busy to help out a friend, I'll leave Earth." "Awfully good of you," murmured Roberta, who hadn't the foggiest idea what he was talking about. Mr. Dlag nodded. "I came to bring you your ticket," he said. "You remember our little agreement, of course. Here it is." He extended an envelope. Roberta opened it. Inside there was a very long ticket for Vega. One way, on the S.S. Thor, Amsonia Star Lines. Vega. So that was where Mr. Dlag was from. Vega. Why hadn't Roberta realized it before? And was he, like other Vegans, a passionate collector? Was his collection what he went on living for? "How's your collection, Mr. Dlag?" Roberta asked brightly. Mr. Dlag frowned. "Dear Miss Prentice," he said, "I thought you understood. You won't be subject to annoyance in any way. You're to stay on Needr -- that's the Vegan planet -- only a couple of months. You will be a part of my collection, of course. But you won't be aware of it." "You must have a very unusual collection, Mr. Dlag," Roberta said. Mr. Dlag seemed to expand with pleasure. "I flatter myself, it is an unusual idea," he cried. "Other Vegans collect postage stamps, or coins, or obsolete radio sets. I collect imitation things. "That was what interested me most, you know, when I came to Earth -- realizing how many Earth things were imitations. Insects that imitate other insects. Plants that imitate other plants. Animals that imitate plants. Plants that imitate rocks. And half your artifacts imitate other things. It's amazing. There are almost no imitation things on Needr, my home." ticket and was putting it away in a handbag. At the bottom of the handbag there was a little gun. It had been Robert's birthday gift. (How had he got it? Sliver guns were strictly illegal. But Robert could do all sorts of things.) "That's very interesting," Roberta murmured. "I'm not quite clear, though, Mr. Rov -- Rob -- Mr. Dlag, how I fit into your collection." Once more Mr. Dlag frowned. "I thought you understood. Well -- " he smiled deprecatingly -- "you see, Miss Prentice, you're by way of being an imitation yourself." "An imitation?" Roberta echoed. It was odd, at that word, how much Mr. Dlag had begun to resemble Robert. Robert, who usually sat in the sky on a pink cloud. "Yes. Because of your operation, you know. You're an imitation woman now, Miss Prentice. That's why I helped you with getting it." Roberta pulled the sliver gun out of the handbag and shot Vegan-Robert in the forehead with it. Since the forehead is in close proximity to the brain, Robert died almost immediately. Roberta's mouth could not help coming open. Oh, dear. Robert was about as naughty a thing as it was possible to do. Naughty, naughty. Naughty. Left Roberta hand slapped right Roberta hand -- the one with the sliver gun -- hard and repeatedly. Naughty hand. It deserved to be hurt. But now what was to be done? The big mahogany chest in the bedroom was empty, except for the plasti-mink coat Roberta had ben planning to wear when the weather got cold. Roberta took the coat out and hung it on a hanger in the closet. Then, catching Vegan-Robert by the back of the jacket collar and the seat of his synthi-tweed pants, Roberta tugged him over to the chest and tumbled him in. The lid closed down on him with a neat bang. There. Having killed Robert was very naughty, certainly. But now that he was dead -- well, it was rather nice to have him gone permanently. Something seemed to have happened to time. It alternately caught and then went forward in big jerks, like a tape that sticks in the machine. Roberta put on makeup; it took hours, though it was only five minutes by the clock. Then it was after eleven, with nothing happening in between at all, and time for the injection. And bed. inge in alcohol; it was easier than boiling it in water. The needle went into the tip of the sterile ampoule and sucked up fluid. Cotton scoured a spot on one plump thigh. "Theelin," Robert said from a purplish cloud bank. "An extract of the female hormones. Your regular glandular therapy, designed to make you a little more... what you're trying to be." Roberta's heart gave a terrific bound. "Go away. Go away. You're in the chest. You can't be here. You're dead." "There's somebody in the chest, certainly," Robert said with a judicial air. "Who it is is another matter. I rather doubt it's me. "You may be able to get away with it. Lewd Vegan, corruptor of innocent terrestrial youth, slain by heartbroken victim -- that sort of thing. 'M, yes. But for God's sake, Roberta, don't kill anybody else. Mind, now." He disappeared. Time gave another jerk and it was morning. Roberta couldn't be said not to have slept, since there had been no time to sleep in. But what had been on the agenda at midnight was still there now that it was morning -- how to make Robert go away and stay away. Well. If there weren't any Robert, there wouldn't be any Roberta. Would there, now? Sleeping pills? There weren't nearly enough of them. There wasn't any gas in the kitchenette. The bridges were a long way off to jump from. And a hanging weight would break down the chandelier. But in the drawer in the kitchen there was a knife. Roberta drew the paring knife lightly over one wrist. It hurt. It would hurt an awful lot, really. But it might hurt... somebody else worse. Roberta was making a second attempt when the buzzer on the vizi-screen rang. The noise was startlingly loud and harsh. Roberta jumped so hard that the paring knife shot out of the inflicting hand, into the sink and down into the garbage reduction unit, which happened -- but how odd! -- which somehow happened to be turned on. The knife was chewed up almost immediately. The buzzer went on ringing. XT was the clerk at the desk in the lobby again, and she had another caller for Miss Prentice. Clement Thomas was a small, slight man, quite ordinary except for his eyes, which were green, bright and interesting. He said he wanted to see Miss Prentice for a few moments about a personal matter. They talked about the weather for a while, and then Mr. Thomas (like what's-his-name yesterday) said he hoped Miss Prentice was feeling well and happy. "Yes," said Roberta. "That's good news," said Mr. Thomas. He cleared his throat. "You know, Miss Ptentice, there's been a recession -- depression whatever they're calling it now. Times have been rather bad for me professionally." "Bad for other people too," said Roberta, thinking of Mr. Dlag in the chest. "Yes, I suppose." Once more Mr. Thomas cleared his throat. "And of course I've been somewhat distressed by thinking about our professional, hum, association. As you know, the operation I p#rformed on you was strictly illegal, though it was performed at your urgent request. If I were to go to the authorities, I could clear my conscience... and no doubt get off with a light sentence. But that would mean trouble for you." Mr. Thomas cocked his head and simI pered engagingly. Oper -- ? "There's nothing so terrible about an abortion," Roberta answered. "Abortions?" Mr. Thomas seemed startled. His simper disappeared. It looked, Roberta thought, as if the mask he had on over his face was getting thin. He laughed. "An abortion, my dear, is something you'll never need. Never in this world." He started to laugh again, and checked himself. "Don't you remember?" he said to Roberta, who was fidgeting with the clasp of the handbag and wondering who Mr.  Thomas really was, under his mask. "Honestly, don't you remember? You came to me six months or so ago, recommended by a certain, hum, alien, and asked for my professional services. Your name was Robert Bayliss then. You had me perform a sexreversal op -- " This time there was no possible doubt. He wasn't Clement Thomas, he was Robert. The person sitting opposite surgeon-Robert shot him in the throat. Since the throat is further from the brain than the forehead is, it took Robert No. # quite a lot longer to die than it had taken Mr. Dlag, yesterday. Sliver-gun darts act directly on the nervous system. Robert tied himself up in convulsion after convulsion, horrid masculine knots, before he relaxed finally. But there. He was dead. Roberta put Robert in the chest beside yesterday's Robert. It was a tight fit. There was trouble with the lid. The bodies were still being wrestled with when, on a bank of black clouds very low down on the ceiling, Robert appeared. He looked angry. "I told you not to," he said. Roberta, trying yet again to make Mr. Dlag's left arm bend backwards, made no reply. Robert, chewing on his lower lip, ascended slowly to the zenith of the ceiling. "Don't waste time with that," he said at last. "You can't possibly get away with it. Get your suitcases, Roberta, and start packing. Hurry up." "But, Robert -- " "Yes?" "Why do I have to go away? I like this place." "What are you using for a brain? If we want to go on living even a little longer, we're going to have to run. And run." He disappeared, drawing the black cloud in after him. Roberta remained staring up at the ceiling, head thrown back, Adam's apple prominent. any longer? No matter where they went -- Venus, Vega, Arcturus, even M #I -- it would be the same. Robert would go along with Roberta. Roberta's jaw set. No, that wasn't quite true. After Mr. Dlag had died, Robert had been dead for a little while. It might be a matter of keeping on trying. If you killed people enough, you would -- it was reasonable, wasn't it? -- you would get through all the masks they wore to the person behind them. At last. To the one you had always tried to destroy. To him. "I'll kill you yet, Robert," Roberta said between his teeth. Bimmie says people are stupid. Bimmie says he can help them -- but they're not really worth his trouble , Bimmie says! June #, # Bimmie said to do this, keep a diary. I said, Cows? He said, You deaf, woman? A book! Then I remembered, only I haven't seen one. It's for when he's famous. Then we can have it published anytime we need money. I'd better tell about us. I'm short, sort of cute, and I cook good. Bimmie's tall and skinny, he likes to eat. He's #, I'm #. We got married # days ago. Instead of a fancy wedding, Bimmie told my folks, Give us money. He needed the money for his laboratory. It's in the basement. It's what'll make him famous. June #, # We got a cat and dog. They're black and two months old. I wanted red collars. Bimmie said, Don't waste my money, woman. ,, Bimmie wanted them down in his laboratory. He said that'd be . proper conditions. I said, No, I'll leave if you do and you'll have to ' eat capsules. The cat's he, the dog's she. Bimmie doesn't want them out-JR :  side, ever. July #, # We thought Bimmie's folks'd change their minds. But they said, Finally and conclusively, we won't. Bimmie says he doesn't want to go to college if they're stingy because we got married. He already knows everything important.  ' s' # He wants me to finish school. I can finish in December. I thought when you got married you didn't have to, just slept late and fixed your hair. July #, # The puppy's Susta, the cat's Sup. Susta's jealous because Sup jumps on the couch, and she can't. Bimmie'll have to make pills for Susta. She hides from his needle. She'll be small. That's good, Bimmie says. August #, # He just married me to cook! Every night he's in his laboratory. I'm always in this stupid, ugly house. August #, # Susta won't change for a long time. Bimmie has pills now. September #, # School started. Frankie's still stuck on me. He says I'm sexy, that's why Bimmie married me. I said, He married me for my cooking. He laughed. September #, # I felt funny again. I stopped by Momma's. She bets she knows what it is. She knew after ten days. September #, # I had to ask the school nurse if it was that. She said, Yes, two weeks. I hope she's wrong. Babies are work. She said, But the fulfillment. I said, Chang'Sygsgi :  " :  ing soppy diapers is what you call fulfillment? It doesn't show. Frankie winked at me. September #, # The cat climbed those lace curtains Bimmie's mother gave us. Bimmie said it was my job to watch him. I said, That's a stupid way to spend my life. He said, I didn't marry you to have you sit around and do nothing. Susta watched Sup and whined. She wants to be a cat. September #, # Bimmie read my diary. He said there wasn't a June #. He says to tell more about his work. It won't make money if he's not in it. I told him about the baby. He said, Whoopee! He got some obstetrics books. October #, # Bimmie expects the baby to kick already. I'm glad it doesn't! He made the puppy's pills tonight. October #, # I let them outside. The smell in the house turns my stomach. I'm afraid to take the pills Bimmie made me. October #, # I let them out again. There's a black dog next door with a long nose, ears like rosebuds and white feet. Susta was scared. Sup hissed. October #, # Bimmie's so nice. He took me to a tridiversion. He hates them. He said, They're for the cloddy-minded masses. I said, Well, what are we? I want a tridiversion wall. Bimmie says, No. We had a fight. October #, # I took a pill Bimmie made. I felt good. I let them out. It beats cleaning up. Susta played with that dog. November #, # I went to Dr. Brantly. He hypnotized me. I don't remember it.  December #, # Susta's leaving spots. I thought, She's hurt. Bimmie explained and said, Don't let her out. He wants to wait till next time to have puppies. He said, The treatment must take full effect first. He explained but I didn't understand. January #, # I'm out of school. It's boring. Momma says I'm too young to settle down. She's crazy. I'm sixteen. January #, # Bimmie's reading more obstetrics books. Hypnotism too. He tried to hypnotize me, but I went to sleep. January #, # I wish Momma would stop. She said, Where're you going to put a baby, with only one bedroom. She cried and called me Baby. Gosh! She said, You shouldn't have cats around babies, you'll have to give him away. Bimmie heard, from the bedroom. He came out. He said, I am conducting an important scientific experiment with the cat and dog. I would as soon give away the baby. Momma got white under her plasti-skin. She said, Bimmie, you're a monster for experimenting on dumb animals. And for rejecting your own child. Then Sup climbed the curtains Momma gave us. She shrieked, You're ungrateful! and huffed out. She came back later, asking us to forgive her. She said she wanted to help, since we're both still children. Well! I do wonder where we'll put the baby. Maybe on the couch. February #, # I had to tell Bimmie I was letting them out. Sup fought with the dog next door. Bimmie got mad. He told me, They must have a controlled environment. I said, It's hard for me to bend over to clean up. Finally he said he'd clean up and wasn't it funny Sup and that dog knew they were rivals. I didn't know myself. March #, # I saw Dr. Brantly today. He says I'm fine. I tried to remember him putting me in the trance, but I couldn't. April #, # Saw Dr. Brantly. Sup pulled the curtains down. Susta isn't jealous any more, she's playing with a string. May #, # I'm writing this next day. Last night I had this sharp pain. I said, Bimmie, call Dr. Brantly. I remember him looking at me funny. That's all I remember until I woke up in the hospital. Bimmie was sitting beside me, looking proud. I asked him, What's happened? He grinned. We have a nine-pound son, he said. I named him after the man who delivered him. I said, Did I faint? That wasn't the way it was explained, just that Dr. Brantly would put me in a trance. Bimmie was too busy grinning to say, then he had to go to work. The doctor came in. I said, It wasn't bad, I only felt one pain. He frowned. I said, Can I see the baby? He said, Later. He went out too. I thought I must have cussed. I didn't understand until the nurse brought the baby. He had a little plastic bracelet that said Bimford Fost, Jr. He was red and squalling. I felt like doing the same, because I knew why Bimmie had been studying those obstetrics books. He has to try everything! May #, # I'm seventeen today. Bimmie says to write more. He thinks that's all I have to do. The baby sleeps all the time he isn't crying. I like him, only I'm tired of diapers. Susta gets three pills every day. She plays with them, then eats them. Bimmie said last night, It won't be long until my experiment bears fruit. He said to write that here. June #, # Susta tried to climb the curtains. June #, # Bimmie wanted to give the baby some pills he made. I said, No. He said, They'll make him smarter, woman. I said, He's enough trouble dumb. Today was our first anniversary. Bimmie wouldn't buy me anything. June #, # We fought about a dryer. After he left I said, For that I'll let your animals out. The dog next door came up. Susta arched her back. June #, # I've been putting them out every day. June #, # Bimmie says to write every day, his experiment is coming to a head. I can't see anything happening. Susta gets six pills now. June #, # The dog's that way again. Bimmie said, At last my experiment shall be carried to completion. Not that I care for fame and riches, no, I care only for the accomplishment of something man has never before achieved. I said he didn't sound natural. He said, Put it down that way, woman. June #, # Bimmie wanted to feed the baby. I caught him before he gave him a pill. We fought. He said, Who delivered him? I said, I made him, and pointed to my stomach. I said, I won't have you using him like a guinea pig. July #, # Bimmie says tomorrow we'll shut them up in the basement. July #, # The funniest thing. Bimmie said, You put them in the basement. Then he left. I thought, I'll just take them out while I hang diapers. But when we went out, three dogs came up. I said, Scat! I couldn't chase them because I had my arms full of diapers, because Bimmie won't buy me a basket. They came closer, edging around. I stomped my feet and yelled. The dog next door came and growled. Then Sup hissed at him. This was the first the other three saw Sup. He hunched up, spitting and intending to chase them off. Only they took out after him instead. He ran off with four dogs after him. I couldn't do anything, my arms were full. July #, # Bimmie didn't think it was funny. He yelled, What are you, stupid? Didn't you know dogs would come around? Didn't you know dogs chase cats? He took the car and called, Kitty, kitty, all over town. No luck. I said, Get another cat. He said, This one is used to Susta. I said, There'll be another time. He stared at me and said Susta's system would tolerate only so much of the stuff he's been giving her. He can't give her any more after next month. He'll have to wait another year. Then he went looking again. That was last night. Maybe he'll come home tonight. July #, # He hasn't. Bimmie's biting his fingernails. He'd bite harder if he knew what happened today. I thought Susta was asleep when I went to hang diapers. I had my arms clear full. When I opened the door, Susta shot past me. I yelled at her, but she went flying down the street, and I saw that dog next door take off behind her. I thought first thing, It's Bimmie's fault for not buying a dryer. I hung the clothes fast. After all, nothing could happen in such a short time. Then I started up the street calling, Here Susta! But the baby was alone, I had to hurry home. She came back in half an hour. I didn't tell Bimmie yet. July #, # I didn't tell him, still. He was mad because he had to pay to get Sup out of the pound. Bimmie salved his ears, they were tom, and put them in the basement. He said, Now! July #, # Bimmie says to write every day. It's dull, them in the basement. They come up tomorrow. July #, # Susta acts funnier than ever. She rubs my legs when I'm cooking. She keeps wetting her paws and rubbing her face. August #, # Today I caught Susta sharpening her claws on the couch. I said, Bimmie, look at the crazy dog, thinks she's a cat. He frowned. He only has one pimple now, he's kind of handsome. I said, Isn't it cute? Bimmie went downstairs. I think he was worried. August #, # Susta's getting big. I let her sleep with the baby. Bimmie says, Whoopee! It worked! I'm scared to tell him now. August #, # Susta rubs my leg when she's hungry. Then she sits and switches her tail for a long time. August #, # Susta meowed today. I was fixing dinner. She looked up and said, Meow. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Bimmie's afraid she'll have kittens. That isn't what he's trying to do. September #, # Susta wanted to go down in the basement this afternoon. When I called her for supper she came up with her stomach flat. Bimmie and I went down. Susta ducked back in a hole in the wall. There's a sort of little cave. We said, They must be in there. We got a flash, and we could see little black balls. Bimmie couldn't reach them. Bimmie kept talking about how his experiment is going to revolutionize agriculture. September #, # I can hear her meowing to them. We can see them with the flash. We can't tell anything yet. September #, # He'll buy a typewriter but not a dryer! He's going to write a book about his experiment. He expects me to type it. September #, # She still won't bring them out. She purred today, rusty-like. Bimmie says, sometimes, It had to work. Other times he bites his nails. He gave me ten pages to type. I thought I'd better. September #, # I went down to call Susta and I saw them. There were five, wobbling everywhere. They're the cutest fat things. I picked one up, and then I felt sick. He had a long nose and little rosebud ears and white feet. He looked like the dog next door. All of them do. They're all puppies. Nothing else, just puppies. I put them in a box and took them upstairs. Bimmie's working tonight. I'll go to bed before he comes' home. September #, # He raved all morning and tromped around. I said, Shut up or I'll leave and you'll have to eat capsules. He said, I could eat dog food! Then he wanted to see my diary. I said, No. But he yanked out all the drawers and found it. I took the baby and went to Momma's. It was suppertime when I came home. He was on the couch with Sup and Susta and the puppies. He didn't act mad, just nastynice. So you came home, he said. I never realized how limited you were, Listie. Your diary's shown me a lot. Can you at least find homes for the puppies? I said, I guess. I put the baby down. He hadn't thrown anything or burned my diary. He said, Good, then. I've fixed supper. He had hamburger, frozen pie and hot chocolate. Some of it tasted bad. I didn't say anything. September #, # I asked Bimmie, Should I quit my diary? He said, Yes. Then, No, keep on. I asked, was he doing another experiment? He said, Not yet. I said, Bim better not start talking early. He said, You don't think I'd experiment with my own child? I didn't know. He said, Bim might be smart anyway. I said, He might be, he's your son. It was a good compliment. September #, # Bimmie wants to learn cooking. He said, You have to work hard, hanging diapers. It will help if I can cook. I'll teach him hot chocolate first. His fixing tastes awful. October #, # I have little to report. Bimford, Jr. is flourishing. The puppies are adorable. Susta and Sup tend them jointly. Bimmie has no new project. He has thrown all his energies into cooking. He does quite well, except for hot chocolate, which still tastes of chemicals. I never, until yesterday, realized the intellectual and sensual joy to be derived from delving into Greek drama. November #, # Bimford, Jr. is six months old today. Since I gave up the last puppy, the house seems barnlike in its emptiness. I mentioned the fact to Bimford. His glance was speculative. "I have some money saved. Want a tridiversion wall?" I was horrified. "Whatever for?" He shrugged. "Maybe you'd like to go to the library. Get something to read." I considered. "Perhaps I will," I said. "There isn't much for me to do, hang diapers and push buttons. Automation has almost completely eliminated the housewife's traditional chores." I left Bimford, Jr. with Mother and walked to the library. I asked the librarian to show me about. "What are you interested in?" she inquired. "I don't know," I replied. "Do you have any good recent works on chemistry or perhaps nuclear physics?" She raised her eyebrows but conducted me to the proper shelf. After finding several interesting volumes, I also checked out a volume on cookery for Bimford. His hot chocolate doesn't improve, despite nightly practice. He tells me he is working on a new project. A Aliens needn't look like men. They can come in any shape, size -- or flavor! I UVfE!" said Lucy. "At an Ambassadorial Banquet!" "Don't be like that now," said Tom, pausing in the night shadow of a ten-foot-high alien plant, something in the shape of a beartrap. He took a last couple of drags from his cigaret and ground it out underfoot, on the footpath of terrazzo tile. "How should I be?" "Nonchalant," said Tom. "You do this sort of thing every day. Ho-hum." "But certainly the Jaktal Ambassador knows you're only a third assistant secretary in the Foreign Office's Department of New Governments -- " "We hope they won't know me at all. Heh-heh." "You sound nervous, honey." "I am not nervous." "Then why are you biting your nails?" "I am not biting my nails. I never bite my nails. I just thought I had something stuck between my front teeth, that's all. I don't know why you always keep talking about me biting my nails, when you know as well as I do... Ah, good evening, Spandul. My card. I am Thomas Whitworth Reasoner, and this is my mate, Lucy Sue Reasoner. Beware the zzatz." "You are welcome, sorr!" hissed the Spandul, which was about three feet high, black, lean as a toothpick, and had a mouth full of vicious looking needlesharp teeth. It stood just within the golden glow of the light from the high arched doorway to the Jaktal Embassy in Washington. Its large eyes glittered at Lucy. "Welcome alssso, Lady. Enter please. Here you will be safe from zzatz." It took their cloaks and they proceeded on through the entrance into a long, high-ceilinged hall, already well-filled with humans and aliens of all varieties, all in evening dress. "What's 'zzatz'?" muttered Lucy in Tom's ear. "Means 'a most unfortunate fate'," muttered Tom back. "Ah, good evening, Monsieur Pourtoit," he said in French, "I don't believe you've met my wife." And he introduced Lucy to a tall thin gentleman with a sad face and a broad red ribbon crossing his white dress shirt under a dinner jacket. The gentleman acknowledged the introduction gracefully"Elle est charmante," he said, bowing to Lucy. "Why, thank you, Mr. Ambassador!" said Lucy. "I can see -- " "However if you'll excuse us," said Tom, catching Lucy by the hand, "we must be going." "Of course," said M. Pourloit. Tom towed Lucy off. "Well, all I was going to say was -- " whispered Lucy. "Ah, Brakt Kul Djok! May I present my wife, Mrs. Lucy Sue Reasoner?" "Well, well, honored I am positive!" boomed a large alien, looking something like a walrus with a stocking cap on. "A fine young lady, I can see at a glance, hey, boy?" The walrus-sized elbow joggled Tom almost off his feet. "See you coming up in the world, hey? Hey? Wonder what type entertainment and food this Jaktal puts out, hah? Never tell about these new alien types, hey, ho?" nnOM laughed heartily and they moved on, Tom introducing Lucy every few feet to some new human or alien of the diplomatic circle in Washington. Finally they found themselves at the punchbowl, and were able to fill a couple of glasses and find a small alcove out of the crowd. "What I don't understand," said Lucy, "is how they can have a banquet for so many different kinds of people and aliens. I should think -- " "Well, they do have a number of different foods for those who can't eat anything but their own special diet. And of course it's necessary to stay clear of what might offend anyone," said Tom, after a large swallow of the punch. "But you'd be surprised how much in common tastes are among different intelligent, animal life forms. It's all flesh and plant food, in every case." "But don't some of them taste...?" said Lucy. "Some, of course," said Tqm. "But a lot of alien foods are quite tasty. I've liked all sorts of diverse items I've run into." "Oh!" said Lucy. "What's wrong?" "What do you think's in this punch?" said Lucy, examining her glass with suspicion. "Fruit juice and alcohol. Now," said Tom, "let's just run over the schedule for the evening. First, we'll be having entertainment." "Oh, Tom, wait a minute," said Lucy, interrupting. "Listen. How sad!" "What?" he said -- and then he heard it. A voice, around the corner from their alcove and through an archway leading back, was pouring out a thin, sad thread of song. He stiffened suddenly. "Wait a minute. I'll see." He got up and went around the corner. Through the archway he could see a farther doorway from which light was showing. He went forward and looked into the lighted room beyond. At this moment Lucy bumped into him from behind. he whispered angrily at her. "You did not. You said, 'wait a minute'. Anyway," said Lucy, "there's nothing here but that great big jelly mold on the table." And she pointed to an enormous three-tiered mass of what seemed to be pink, green and yellow gelatine on a silver box set on a white tablecloth. The tablecloth was on a table which was the only furniture in the room. "You know what I meant!" said Tom. "And somebody was singing here." "It was I," said the jelly mold in sweet and flawless tones of English. Lucy stared at it. Tom was the first to recover. "May I present my wife?" he said. "Mrs. Lucy Sue Reasoner. I am James Whitworth Reasoner, Third Assistant Secretary in the Foreign Office Earth Department of New Governments." "I'm awfully pleased to meet you," said the jelly mold. "I am Kotnick, a Bulbur." "Was it a Bulbur song you were singing?" asked Lucy. "Alas," said Kotnick, "it is a Jaktal song. A little thing I composed myself but sung, of course, in Jaktal -- though unfortunately with a heavy Bulbur accent." "But you sing so beautifully!" said Lucy. "What would it sound like if you sang it in Bulbur?" "Alas," said Kotnick, "there is no Bulbur to sing it in. There is only Jaktal." Lucy looked bewildered. "You don't understand," Tom said to her. "There are a number of intelligent races on the Jaktal planets. But the Jaktal are the ruling ones. The language and everything takes its name from the rulers." "Indeed, yes," said the Bulbur. "And properly so." "I knew about Spanduls, and Gloks, and Naffings," said Tom, looking at it. "But we haven't heard much about you Bulburs compared to the rest of the inferior races of the Jaktal." The Bulbur turned pink all over. "Pardon my immodesty," it said, "but I have come especially for the occasion." "Ah?" said Tom. He stepped closer to the Bulbur and lowered his voice. "Perhaps, then, you can tell me -- " "Did the sorr and lady wisssh somesing?" interrupted a ' sharp, hissing voice. The two humans turned abruptly to see a Spandul like the one that had admitted them to the embassy. It was standing in the doorway. Beside it was a sort of four-foot worm with fang-like teeth curving down from its upper lip. "Oh!" said Tom. "No. Nothing. Nothing at all. We heard this Bulbur singing and wandered in to meet it." "It ssshould not sssing!" hissed the Spandul, looking at the Bulbur, which quivered and went almost colorless. singing. Sort of just humming. Well, we'll have to be getting back to the punch bowl. Glad to have met you, Kotnick." Still talking, Tom herded Lucy before him past the Spandul and the worm-like being and out into the shadowy area giving on the hall. The worm-like being slithered past them into the room and the Spandul fell in beside the humans, its needly teeth glittering at them. "Guestsss," it hissed, "will find it mossst comfortable in main hall area." "I imagine you're right," said Tom. "We'll trot on back. Nice of you to show us the way. See you later, then. May there be no zzatz beneath this roof tonight." "There will be no zzatz beneasss ssis roof tonight," replied the Spandul, fixing them with its glittering eyes as they moved out into the hall. "Well," said Tom. "How about another glass of punch, Lucy?" "I should say not," said Lucy. She took hold of his sleeve and led him back around to the priL II vacy of their alcove. "Now, suppose you tell me what's going on." "Going on?" said Tom. "Yes, going on," said Lucy. "And you might as well tell me now because I'm going to keep after you until you do tell me. I thought we were just going to a banquet. You didn't give me any notion that it was something undercover or something like that. Now I want you to tell me right now -- " she broke off. "What are you making faces like that for?" Tom, besides making faces, was scribbling on a piece of paper torn from his checkpocket. He passed it to her. Will you keep quiet? the paper read. The walls have ears. I can't tell you. It's top secret. "Oh!" gasped Lucy. Tom took the paper from her hands and held it up to her lips. "Eat it!" he whispered. "I certainly will not!" whispered back Lucy, revolted. "Then I'll have to." said Tom. He took it, and he did. "Oh!" said Lucy, impressed. Tom was looking at her in an unusual way. She shrank back a little. "Shall we dance?" said Tom. "D-dance?" His eyebrows wigwagged angrily at her. "Oh, dance!" she said. "Of course!" TOM led her out across the hall and into a sort of garden area where a band was playing. When they were well out into the middle of the dance floor, he put his lips close to her ear and murmured into it. "You might be able to help after all." "Yes?" whispered Lucy. "The Office Upstairs," whispered Tom, "is very concerned about this Jaktal race. Six months ago, we didn't even know they existed. Now we suddenly discover they have a spatial empire at least as large as ours. Not only that, but the Jaktal themselves -- I mean the dominant race -- seem to have a conqueror psychology, judging by their expansion and the intelligent races like the Spanduls, Naffings, and Gloks." "Was that one of them -- that worm-like thing with the fangs?" Lucy asked. "A Naffing," said Tom. "They are not much more intelligent than an adult chimp. But dangerous. But to get back to the important part of the business, recent information seems to indicate that even with our alien allies, we'd be at the mercy of the Jaktal empire, if they decided to move against us right now." "Would they?" Lucy shivered. "We don't know. That's it.  Their ambassador talks peaceful relations; but we can't make this match up with the character he and his subservient races show. You'll see what I mean when you get a look at Bu Hjark, the Ambassador." "But what's it all got to do with us -- with you?" "Well, you remember how they thought we did a good job with that Oprinkian? Well, there's a new addition to the Embassy here. That Bulbur we just saw. He -- or it, we don't even know that much yet -- seems entirely different from the rest of the crew here. So what does it mean? What's his place in the organization? What does his showing up here mean in terms of the Jaktal attitude toward us and our alien allies?" "I see what you mean," whispered Lucy. "Ouch!" "What happened?" "You just stepped on my toe." "Oh. Sorry." "It's all right. Go on." #TT'S hard to concentrate on two things at once. As I was saying, the Office Upstairs thought I might be able to get the information where somebody better known in our diplomatic January # corps might fail. Easier for me to be inconspicuous. Of course, that's why I brought you along, too." "Well, I like that!" "I'm sorry. But that's the way diplomacy is. Now, we've had one stroke of luck already. We've found out where the Bulbur is, and we know he's off without a crowd around him. The next step is up to me. I have to have a chance to talk to him alone." "Oh, I see." "Yes," said Tom, "and I think that's where you can help." "Oh, good." "Do you think you can get that Spandul out of the way while I have a talk with the Bulbur? I can gas the Naffing. It can't talk and report what's been done to it. But the Spandul could, if I gassed him." "Well," said Lucy, biting her lower lip, "I don't know. It isn't as if he was a man, or something. What'll I do?" "He has to be polite to you -- especially if you can get him out where people can see him. You'll think of something." "I hope," said Lucy. "Sure you will. Let's go," Tom started to lead the way off the dance floor and suddenly noticed that she was limping. "Ohmigosh, I didn't realize I'd stepped on you that hard!" "It's all right," said Lucy, bravely. "Maybe I can use it as an excuse to make him stay with me." "That's an idea," said Tom. They were off the dance floor now and he lowered his voice. "I'll tell him I want him to take care of you while I go for a doctor to make your foot more comfortable. Then, when I leave you with him, you get him away from the entrance there any way you can." He broke off suddenly. A fanfare of something like trumpets had just silenced all the talk in the room. The crowd was splitting apart down the middle, leaving the center of the floor clear. Luckily, Tom and Lucy were already on the side of the room they wished to reach. "I wonder what's happening?" said Lucy. "Oh, dear. I wish we had Rex with us." "Rex!" said Tom. "What good would it do to have that moose of a dog along?" "He could keep us in touch with each other." "How? Just because we picked up enough telepathic sense from that Oprinkian to understand Rex doesn't mean he'd be any use to us now. What I wish is that we'd been able to go one step further and understand people's thoughts. Even each other's thoughts. That's what we need now." #TF Rex was with you and trouble came, he'd start broadcasting excited thoughts, and then I'd know you were in trouble." "What good would that do? You couldn't do anything about it. No, believe me, Rex would be just what we needed to bollix things up," said Tom. "Besides I'm happy to have a rest from those inane canine thoughts of his. 'Good Tom,' 'Good Lucy,' 'play ball?' -- all day long." Tom broke off suddenly. The trumpets had sounded again, a wild, violent shout of metal throats. Now, bounding down through the open lane in the middle they could see an alien fully eight feet tall, approaching and bellowing greetings to people in the crowd. "It's him," said Tom. "Him, the Jaktal Ambassador, Bu Hjark. Just look at him!" Bu Hjark was a huge lizardlike alien, with a heavy, powerful tail. Elbows out, huge hands half-clenched, he danced down the open space like a boxer ribbons and medals covered his silver tunic and shorts. Into a gem-studded belt was fastened a heavy, curve-bladed sword. "Ho! Ho! Welcome! Welcome!" he roared. "Great pleasure to have you all here! Great pleasure. Greetings, Brakt Dul Jokt. Evening, Mr. Vice-President! Great evening, isn't it?. Find yourself seats, respected entities, and let me show you how the Jaktal entertain." "What does he need a sword for?" whispered Lucy, staring. "With those teeth and nails?" "And that tail," said Tom. "Just part of his costume, no doubt. Wait until the entertainment starts. Then we can slip off while everybody's watching." "Positions, everybody!" shouted Bu Hjark, and added something in Jaktal. A crowd of apelike beings in full metal armor trotted in and formed a protective wall in front of the audience. Laughing hugely, Bu Hjark took off his sword-belt and tossed it to one of these. "Gloks," explained Tom in answer to Lucy's inquiring gaze, nodding at the beings in armor. "A little brighter than the Naffings, not so bright as the Spanduls. Sort of high-grade morons. But extremely strong for their size." "First," Bu Hjark was crying, "let in the Bashtash!" then a gasp from the far end of the room, drowned out by a sudden bestial bellow. Something the general shape of a rhinoceros but not so large, charged down the aisle full tilt at Bu Hark, who met it with flailing hands and tail, and a deep-chested shout. Amid roarings and snarlings, they rolled on the floor together. "I can't look," said Lucy, hiding her eyes. "It's all right, it's all over," said Tom, a few moments later. "He wrung its neck. See, some Gloks are carrying it off." "Now, for the armed Wlackins!" shouted Bu Hjark. And a moment later, a herd of five small, centaur-like creatures, clutching sharpened stakes, galloped down upon Bu Hjark, who joined battle with them gleefully. "Let's get going," whispered Tom. "Yes, let's," said Lucy with, a shudder. They threaded their way through the staring crowd to the shadowy corner which led back to the room where they had discovered the Bulbur. "Limp more!" said Tom. He guided her toward the lighted doorway. "Hey! Spandul?" The Spandul they had seen earlier emerged from the room. Its eyes glittered suspiciously upon them. "What iss the masser?" it hissed. "Guests will be more comfortable in main hall." "My mate has hurt herself. I insist you give me a hand here," said Tom. "I need help." "Help?" "I must get a doctor. Right now!" said Tom. "You understand? Find her a chair. Look after her while I find a doctor!" "Doctor?" hissed the Spandul. It glanced back into the room behind it, and then out again at Tom and Lucy. "A chair," moaned Lucy, clinging to Tom. "What're you waiting for?" snapped Tom. "Is this the way you do things here at the embassy? I'll speak to the Ambassador himself about this!" "Yesss, yesss. I help," said the Spandul, gliding forward. It took hold of the arm of Lucy which Tom was not holding. "Chair. Thisss way." "Good. Stay with her," said Tom. "I'll go after a doctor." He turned and plunged back into the crowd. As soon as he was out of sight, however, he stopped, waited for a moment and then slowly began to work his way back. Ill " at the shadowy entrance, it was empty. He slipped quickly back to the doorway, taking what appeared to be an lifetime fountain pen from his pocket as he approached the doorway. Holding it, he peered inside. The Naffing, curled up in a corner, reared up at the sight of him. He pointed the pen at it and pressed the clip. There was an almost inaudible pop. The Naffing wavered a minute and then sank down to lie still on the floor. "What is it?" fluted the jelly on the table, paling to near transparency. "Have you come to kill me: "No," said Tom. He glanced behind him and saw the entrance still deserted, the crowd still occupied with the combat going on. He slipped into the room. "I want to talk to you." "Take my worthless life, then," keened the jelly. "I have nothing worth talking about. "Yes, you have," said Tom. "You can tell me about yourself." "Myself?" A little color began to flow back into the Bulbur. "Ah, I see. It is not me. It is the high role I have been chosen to play that makes me an object of interest to you." "Oh? Oh yes, that of course," said Tom. "Let me hear you describe it in your own words." The Bulbur turned pink. "I am not worthy," it murmured. "Tell me," said Tom. The Bulbur turned flame-colored. "I am... it began and then its voice almost failed it, "the... most important item..." At that its voice did fail it. "Go on," said Tom, drawing close to it. "I cannot. The emotion involved is too strong." The Bulbur had deepened its red color until it was almost black. Its voice seemed strangled and unnatural. Tom cast another glance at the doorway. "All right," he said. "Let's talk about things you can talk about for a moment. Tell me about yourself -- aside from what you're supposed to do here." "But I am nothing," sang the Bulbur, paling relievedly. "I am a mere blob. A shameful blob." "Shameful?" said Tom. "Oh, yes," said the Bulbur, earnestly. "A shameful quiver of emotions. A useless creature, possessing only a voice and the power of putting forth weak pseudopods to get about. A pusillanimous peace-worshipper in a universe at war." "Peace?" Tom stiffened. "Did you say peaceworshipper?" "Oh, yes. Yes," fluted the Bulbur. "It is the main cause of my shame. Ah, if only the worlds of the universe were oriented to my desires!" Its voice sank, and took on a note of sad reasonableness, not untouched with humor. "But obviously, if it had been meant to be that way, all life forms would be cast in the shape of Bulburs -- and this, manifestly, is not the case." "Look," said Tom with another glance out the doorway, to see that the way was still clear, "I'm afraid I don't understand you. What do you mean, peaceworshipper?" "If you will permit me," said the Bulbur humbly. "I might sing you a little melody?" "Well, if it'll help," said Tom. "Go ahead." r T , HE Bulbur turned a pale, happy pink. A thread of melody began to pour forth from it. Up until now, Tom had been too concerned to figure out how a three-layer aspic, even one of large size, could manage to talk and sing. But now, looking closer, he perceived, palely moving and pulsating within the body of the Bulbur, almost transparent organs and parts -- heart, lungs, and throat among others, with a clear channel leading to a small mouth in the very top of the being. He was also suddenly aware of pale, almost transparent eyes ringing the upper tier like decorations on a wedding cake in jelly form. But almost as soon as he had seen this, he began to forget all about it. The melody he was listening to began to pass beyond mere sound, began to pass beyond mere music. It moved completely inside him and became a heart-twisting voice speaking of peace, beyond any other voice that could possibly speak in opposition. He felt himself swept away. It was only with a sudden, convulsive effort that he broke loose from the hold of that voice upon him. "Wait! Hold it!" he gasped. "I get it. I understand." The Bulbur broke off suddenly, with a sound very much like a sob. "Excuse me," it whispered. "It's shameful, I know, but I was carried away." "Well, it's not shameful, exactly," said Tom, clearing his throat. "I mean -- there's more to life than that, of course. But I don't see why you think you have to be ashamed of it." "Because," said the Bulbur, going a sad, translucent blue, "it is my mark -- the mark of my difference from all the rest of you. I cannot stand to force my opinion on anyone else. I have no virtues. It is quite right that I should suffer." "Suffer?" "Ah, indeed -- suffer. Oh," said the Bulbur, pinkening again, "it's a great honor, I know. I should be rejoicing. But I'm a failure at rejoicing, too." And now it did sob, quite distinctly. "Wait a minute, now," said Tom. "You seem to have things all twisted up. What gives you the idea nobody but you prefers peace to fighting?" The Bulbur turned completely transparent. "You mean you also find peace to be a pleasant and desirable thing?" "Of course," said Tom. "Oh -- you poor creature," breathed the Bulbur. "How you must suffer." "Suffer? Certainly not!" said Tom. "We like it peaceful. We keep it peaceful." "You keep it peaceful?" "Well -- most of the time," said Tom, a little guiltily. "But what do you do with such as the Jaktals, the Spanduls, the Gloks and the Naffings?" "We -- well, we stop them," said Tom. "By force, if necessary." "But force? Isn't that coercion?" said the Bulbur, turning pink, chartreuse and mauve in that order. "Isn't that fighting fire with fire?" "Why not? said Tom. r T'HE Bulbur went slowly, completely transparent again. "Oh, I couldn't!" it said at last. "Certainly. That singing of yours is a strong argument. I'd think you'd use it." "Oh, no," said the Bulbur. "What if I was successful? That would make me a dominator of the Jaktals -- and the Spanduls." "To say nothing," said Tom, "of the Gloks, Naffings and so forth." He stopped suddenly, wondering what had just alarmed him. Then he noticed that the sound of battle from the main hall had suddenly ceased. "Why shouldn't you have things peaceful if you want them?" "Why, it's not natural," said the Bulbur. "Look at the matter logically. If beings had been intended to live in peace -- " "Good-by!" interrupted Tom, sprinting out the door. He had just noticed the crowd stirring and opening in the direction of the shadowy entrance and this room. He made it to the fringes of the crowd in the main hall just as a lane parted through them and a platoon of Gloks appeared, marching toward the room. Tom slipped down the open space behind them to the edge of the open area in the center of the floor. A table had just been set up in the middle of the floor. A Naffing, operating a sort of vacuum cleaner, was busy cleaning up a few last spots of pale blood. Bu Hjark, wearing a few neat bandages, his sword replaced, was standing by the table directing the Naffing. Tom gained a ringside position, and all but bumped into Lucy, limping around the ring in the opposite direction. "That Spandul finally insisted on going to get a doctor, himself. I came to warn you to get out," she said. "What happened?" Before Tom could answer, there was a fanfare of trumpets. The crowd opened up again alongside them and the platoon of Gloks, now bearing the Bulbur on its silver stand, marched out to the table and set stand and Bulbur up in the middle of it. Bu Hjark raised his hand for silence and barked at the Naffing with the vacuum cleaner, which scurried off. "Respected Entities!" boomed Bu Hjark. "I now bring you the climax to the evening's entertainment and the commencement of the banquet itself. I have no doubt, respected Entities, that you have on occasion tasted rare and fine dishes. However, tonight I mean to provide you not merely with the finest-tasting food you have ever encountered -- a food which all beings who have yet tried it rate better than any other thing they have tasted -- but with certain preliminaries and appetizers. After which I shall, with my own hand, prepare and serve the dish to you." He drew his sword and stepped a little aside from the table. "And now," he said to the Bulbur. "Commence!" "R-respected Entities,." the Bulbur began with a slight quaver. It turned remarkably transparent, then washed back to blue again. "It is a great honor, I assure you, to be the appetizer to your banquet tonight. We Bulburs are a worthless lot, fit only for pleasing the worthwhile palates of our betters. It is our one pride and pleasure, to know that you find us good to -- " the Bulbur swallowed audibly and then took up its speech a little more rapidly as Bu Hjark scowled at it -- "eat. I cannot express the intense enjoyment -- " it said rapidly " -- that it gives me to be here tonight, awaiting my supreme fulfillment as appetizer to the banquet you will shortly be having. To ensure your unalloyed enjoyment of me, I will now," it said, speeding up even more under Bu Hjark's steely, lizard-like eye, "sing you a mouth-watering song to increase your appreciation of my truly unique flavor." It broke off and visibly took a deep breath, turned pale, but came steadily back to a solid blue color. "Tom!" Lucy clutched Tom's elbow with fingers that dug in. "It can't mean we're going to eat it? Tom, do something!" "What?" said Tom as a small beginning thread of golden melody began to emerge, growing in volume as it continued, from the mouth of the Bulbur. "I don't know. But stop it!" around him for inspiration. He thought of how he had almost begun to convince the Bulbur that its attitudes were not unique in the universe. He thought of how effective the Bulbur's gift of song had proved in the room when the Bulbur sang to him. What we need is another Bulbur to sing it into resisting the Jaktal, he thought -- and, with that, inspiration came to him. He opened his mouth and, in his best bathroom baritone, burst into song: "Allons, enfants de la patrie -- " he sang. Almost with the first word, Lucy chimed in with him. Her untrained but clear soprano picked up the second line. " -- Le jour de gloire -- Sing!" she cried to Monsieur Pourtoit, who was standing across the open space from them. He bowed to her gravely. He looked a little puzzled, but after all he was a Frenchman. He opened his mouth and joined a resonant, trained voice to her tones and Tom's. "What is this?" roared Bu Hjark, spinning around to face Tom. His lizard face was agape, showing great dog teeth. He lifted the sword ominously in his hand. Tom swallowed, but continued to sing. The Marseillaise, the anthem of France, was beginning to sound its battle cry against tyranny from other confused but cooperative lips. The sword swung up. The Gloks turned as one man toward Tom. Suddenly a clear, pure note, two octaves above high F, trilled through all the sound of the room, striking them motionless. The whole room turned toward the table. proceeding from the Bulbur. It had stretched upward until it was almost twice its original height. From what well of knowledge it had picked up the necessary information Tom was never to discover, but it had changed color. Its lowest tier was now red, its second tier blue, its top tier white. As they all stood, as if attention, it broke magnificently into the French anthem to liberty: "Against us long, a tyranny," it sang in wild, masterful accents. "A bloody sword has waved on high!" It was pitching its notes directly at Bu Hjark. Those assembled saw the full power of the Bulbur's melody-bom emotional might driving through the savage ego of the Jaktal like a metal blade through the tender body of a Bulbur. Now it caught the whole assemblage up in its song. Spellbound, a chorus of diplomatic and government personnel harking from old Sol to the furthest of the Pleiades, roared to the tune of the Marseillaise: Too long have you kept us subject, With your Spanduls, your Naffings and your Gloks! Why shouldn't peace be sweet? Who dares a Bulbur eat? Have done! Have done! Let there be an end! From this hour on, my friend! And, as the last great chord of voices crashed into silence, the huge figure of the Jaktal Ambassador could be seen to shiver XJ L E AT ? through all its length and, leaning more and more at an angle with eyes glazed, topple at last to thunder upon the floor like .some mighty ruined tower. And the voices of the Spanduls and Gloks present rose in one great wail, crying, "Zzatz! Zzatz! Zzatz... When their cries at last died away into silence, the Bulbur on the table could be seen to have taken on an all-over shade of perky pink. "Jaktals," it mentioned, in mild but audible tones as it leaned above the fallen Bu Hjark, "are also supposed to be very good eating." # A ND that remark," said Tom-the evening of the next day, after he had finished work, waded through the softball game in the street before their house, patted Rex, the Great Dane, and kissed Lucy, "will undoubtedly go down in the history books as the harshest statement ever made by an adult Bulbur." "But what's going to happen to the Bulburs now?" asked Lucy, as she gave Tom a Martini and Rex a bowl of Scotch and milk. "Well, this one told us his race doesn't want anything to do with running the Jaktal empire. He turned the authority over to us humans. All other Bulburs, he said, would ratify that move, if they were contacted by us -- if for no other reason than that they wouldn't want to hurt his feelings by disagreeing with him." "They must be so sensitive!" said Lucy. "Sensitive," said Tom, taking a glum sip from his Martini, "but shrewd. The Bulbur knew very well he was turning the authority over to people who'd regard it as a sacred trust. 'Greater love hath no being than to take on authority as a duty rather than a privilege,' he said." "You must admit it was quite a compliment," said Lucy. "Yeah," said Tom, gloomily. "We're in for one hell of an expansion. They're going to make me a First Assistant Secretary with a full department under me. Twice the work -- and a ten per cent raise in pay." "But imagine," said Lucy radiantly. "Me! The wife of a First Assistant Foreign Secretary!" Tom sighed heavily. Rex licked his hand. In the pause in the conversation the yells from the softball game outside penetrated through the living-room walls, in spite of their being set on full sound-block. It sounded to Tom a little like Glok and Spandul voices in the distance, faintly and forebodingly crying "Zzatz! Zzatz!" Glenn's historic round and round trip, a prominent official called attention to the problem that he felt loomed largest... if not most immediately urgent. It is becoming obvious even to officialdom that we may not be alone -- out there -- and that raises the aforementioned problem: Communication. As we in SF are well aware, the problem is enormous. Innumerable author-hours have been devoted to it. We have trouble communicating with fellow products of our own cultural environment, and present experience with electronic language translators has demonstrated how tricky translating thoroughly known languages can be. Explorers throughout the centuries have literally wound up in the soup through failure to recognize or comprehend unfamiliar customs. How, then, can we expect to tackle completely alien concepts? A good question, to which many people wish we had a good answer. Unfortunately, we have no indigenous, non-human, civilized races to practice on. However, we may have a good substitute much closer at hand than we suspect. C. Lilley, M.D. Doubleday  Co., Inc. One of the most thoroughly overworked words in the reviewer's vocabulary, the adjective "fascinating," must be pressed into service to describe the subject matter of this book. Dr. Lilly opens with these words: "Within the next decade or two the human species will establish communication with another species: nonhuman, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine, but definitely intelligent, perhaps even intellectual. If no one among us pursues the matter before inter-species communication is forced upon Homo Sapiens by an alien species, this book will have failed in its purpose." Provocative introduction, yes? Lilly himself is fully engaged in the research that he has so urgently recommended. It is from that research that his book has taken shape. It is a fact that Man is not supreme in brain size. Elephants and whales have brains four to six times as big as ours. However, Lilly has ruled out experimentation with these species because of the great disparity in strength. (We are far too vulnerable.) There is one species, however, that owns a brain comparable in size to ours and possesses the ability to vocalize. Neither is it too difficult to manage. The common, bottle-nosed dolphin of Marineland fame fills the bill. Says Lilly: "There are many obstacles to mutual understanding. They have no written records and make no artifacts. They have no hands and build nothing. They can swim at # knots and in a few days cover thousands of sea miles in search for food or more desirable water temperatures. They have no need for clothing or shelter. Because they do not have to resist gravity, they do not need to sleep... "Dolphins are socially, mutually interdependent. A baby is not weaned for # to #I months. During this period, he is apparently taught many things by the mother on a purely experiential and possibly vocal basis... dolphins help one another in distress. Sometimes complex and concerted action is taken after complex vocalization." Libby, finding that dolphins can mimic human sounds, is attempting to teach them our language. One dolphin experimented with him to determine our range of audibility. (Ours ranges from #-# kc, theirs from #-# kc.) Despite his obvious compassion and concern, all six of his first test subjects died. Lilly is pioneering in virgin territory. He has to invent experimental procedures as he progresses and failures must outnumber successes. However, as any SFeer can tell him, there is a most uncomfortable parallel between his investigation and the plot of many terror-provoking yarns. The theme, humans as experimental subjects of an alien species, has created acres of gooseflesh. Despite Dr. Lilly's obvious solicitude, the role of the intelligent dolphins evokes empathy, sympathy and pity. Lilly concludes: "Even if we are successful, we shall still not be fully prepared to encounter intelligent life forms not of this earth. At most we shall have graduated from the kindergarten of inter-species communication." Books The dolphin figures prominently in Aldiss's all-stops-removed fantasy of a far future and a non-revolving earth. Mankind has survived also, as a greenskinned, tree-dwelling, two-tov,. high creature totally intent on mere survival in a world in which the vegetable has almost totally supplanted the animal, whether walker, crawler, flyer, burrower or predator. It has even produced keen intelligence in the form of a fungus-like, symbiotic morel. Aldiss's completely engrossing yarn is far too involved to excerpt, but the problem of interspecies communication is ignored: All his intelligences speak colloquial English. Despite this, and occasional cuteness, Aldiss's book is a tour-de-toTce guaranteed to startle the most blase SF buff. Rating:     V # Doubletlay  Co. Clifton envisions a normal bureaucratic snafu summoning the wrong Ralph Kennedy, Mr. instead of Dr., to Washington to serve as Staff Psychologist of the Dept, of Extraterrestrial Life Research, Space Navy, specializing in the Adaptation of Extraterrestrial Beings to Earth Ecology. Ironically, when ET's do land on Earth, Mr. Ralph Kennedy turns out to be the one human capable of dealing with them. Bureaucratic Washington is hard put to survive Clifton's vitriolic pen and all mankind rates low on his scale. The Invaders, because they discover our mass mentality to be so low, are convinced that our scientific achievements are the efforts of another race strangely absent. To match our mental level, they materialize as the incarnation of all bad TV Space Cadet programs; broad-shouldered, six-five, modest (Shucks, Ma'm) and with charming Texas drawls. And that takes care of the communication problem. Rating :    V # gis Budrys. Pyramid Books The yarn itself is a crackling good one. The inept, not-toobright son of Earth's presidentin-exile, parachuted with weapons to enable the guerrillas to mount an all-out offensive against the infinitely superior enemy, is plunged beyond his depth. Rating:  by C. S. Lewis. Collier Books but shady, scientist and his financial partner shanghai a philologist friend to serve as a sacrifice to weird creatures of Malacandra (Mars). (Of course, this description does no justice whatsoever to Lewis's evocative and provocative allegory.) The author's choice of a philologist hero neatly solves the communication problem by providing the training necessary to achieve a working knowledge of the alien language. Jr. Gnome Press, Inc. "Skylark" Smith's only real competitor for the super-science heavyweight title of yore was the esteemed editor of Analog. In fact, this #-year-old story of time-travel, planet smashing and Campbell no place to go -- except to rebel against this type of .yarn with his Don A. Stuart stories that completely altered the course of modern SF. Campbell brushes off communication by employing thought transference via "Ortolian headset" or by the "Venerian telepathic method." And so much for that subterfuge. The communication problem may never arise. We may be alone, which is unthinkable, or our nearest neighbors might be too far away to drop in on us. But should they, Dr. Lilly's work will be the foundation on which our attempt at intercourse will I. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! 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Address inquiries tO: Vis-a-Iens, Inc., # E. Bainbridge St., Elizabethtown, Penna. Qdidxy by Fritz Leiber by Kris Neviile by Avram Davidson by Frank Santa by R. A. Lafferty . # . # ,# Publisher Editor Science Editor Art Director Advertising Director by Helen M. Urban by Frederik Pohl by George Peterson Field by Willy Ley by Floyd C. Gale bl-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. sop per copy. Subscrifh tion; (# copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and Holyoke, Mass. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights. Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Cover by Dember illustrating For Your Information Next issue (February) on sale December #th. Printed In the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N, Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off.  But No One Was Home  earliest stages of Seattle's Century #I World's Fair, the management took notice of the fact that when you speak of Century #I you are automatically speaking of science fiction, whether you know it or not, and scheduled a panel discussion on the subject. The principal guests were Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. Since this was proposed as a full-scale kulturfest (admission S#, put on in a hall that seats # people) we thought it worth your while and ours to ask Our Man in Seattle, F. M. Busby, to attend and relay the information. We did; he did; here is his report: The panel was eventually anannounced as Science Fiction, Ghosts and Freud in Novels, Television, Stage and Films in the Space Age. The moderator Coast editor for a book publishing firm. Mr. Kelley began by stating that he knew nothing about science fiction and did not know what he was doing here. The first panelist to be introduced was Mr. Lowell Hawley, Chief Writer for the Walt Disney Studios. Mr. Hawley began by stating that he knew nothing about science fiction and didn't know what he was doing here; that made two honest men so far. (At this point a muted chorus was heard from scattered points in the crowd: "What are we doing here?" No answer was forthcoming.) It must be said for Mr. Hawley that he gave lucid answers concerning movies with which he was familiar, and that when he had nothing to say he refrained from saying it When asked a general question along the lines of, "What do you think the future will be like?" Mr, Hawley stated that in his opinion, "People in the future will still be interested in the same basic things, though perhaps from a new perspective"... a position hard to fault, and quite in keeping with the motif of the occasion. Next came the meat course. Mr. Ray Bradbury is an excellent speaker and a provocative thinker, and he was by no means having an off day. First he stirred up the animals with: "I know the least science of any science-fiction writer and I'm proud of it." Tenyear-olds, he says, tell him: "You know that last story of yours? The way that spaceship in it works? UH-uh!" But, he says, he isn't about to rewrite for tenyear-olds! Then he got down to business. The space age, he said, is the single most important step ever taken by mankind. The next fifty years will change the pattern of our lives more than did the Renaissance. The movement to space is "a religious movement in the truest sense of the world... Man will pass the gift of life on to other planets, and so will achieve continuity." Mr. Rod Serling, the final member of the panel, is a very personable young man who has a warm way with an audience. He has not been around science fiction very long and is the first to admit it After discouraging his hearers with a standard "science fiction today is science tomorrow" gambit, Mr. Serling won them back by telling Mr. Bradbury: "You wrote this stuff and developed it before it became popular. Johnny-come-latelies like me have a lot to thank you for." Further than that, Mr. Serling displayed a fine, friendly touch for audience empathy and a familiarity with the sciencefiction field comparable to Hugo Gernsback's. In fact, Mr. Serling's views of science fiction were very much in accord with those expressed by Mr. Gemsback over many years, with emphasis on prophecy, education and inspiration of the reader. He was gratified to be able to say that science fiction is at last becoming "respectable." Cheers did not drown him out, but his heart is obviously in the right place... namely inside his ribcage, where it's safe. there was a sort of discussion among panelists and moderator, from which some (approximate! -- taken by pencil in the dark) notes follow: Moderator'. What is there now to write about in science fiction? Bradbury: The space age is only beginning. The distance to the sun is less than that from one ear to the other; this is what we will always be exploring. Serling: TV has not even scratched the surface. Hawley: Do you write to entertain -- to educate -- what's your purpose? Mr. Serling allowed that entertainment is a package deal, which can educate or have a point of view... or not. Mr. Bradbury cited Verne as inspiring inventions (submarine) and explorers (Admiral Byrd), and noted how space technology had come to involve religious matters, proving space travel in #. Bradbury: America is the most blasphemous nation in all history. We not only question the natural order of things, we change it and set it aside... I think that we are direct extrusions of God, who wants to perceive Himself through us. Moderator: What about censorship in science fiction? Bradbury: You can get away with murder. Even in TV, with a purely science-fiction story you have very little interference. They don't know what you're talking about. Serling: Social commentary can go into science fiction that no one would dare to try straight. From the audience: Is mankind prepared to go into space and meet nonhuman intelligences which might be housed in revolting shapes? Bradbury: Humanity is a concept. It has nothing to do with appearance. Kelley: We're not ready. Until we get this world straightened up, why go anywhere?... We are sick. Take an example of one of our jokes: "I have this Father Damien doll. You wind it up and set it on the table -- and it rots." Bradbury: We are never ready. We go anyway, as soon as we are able. With all due respect to Mr. Kelley and Mr. Hawley, it is interesting to speculate what the results might have been if Mr. Bradbury had been placed on a panel (at # a head admission!) composed exclusively of people who knew what he was talking about. Mr. Serling showed up well for a self-admitted Johnny-come-lately... but considering all the West Coast talent that could have been available, the heart drips green for the audience that expected four distinct and informed points of view of science fiction to be presented. Doubtless the producer was most sincere in feeling that a Disney writer and a book editor would draw the "general public" be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. T'hey now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe S.C.X. I Scribe S.C.X.  I San Jose, California  I Please send me the free hook.Tft Mastery  I which explains how I may learn (o  I use my faculties and powers of mind. , ' I ' Name   Addrw I Uhe Rosicrucians into attendance to this crackpot "Science Fiction Panel" that he had somehow agreed to produce. They never seem to learn do  exceptions... they never do. We agree to this with a certain amount of emotion. One of the peripheral duties of a writer andor editor is making an occasional public appearance via We have often noted the embarrassed half-smile which is the standard expression on the face of the program chairman or program host who doesn't quite know what to say to, or about, these nuts who write this Buck Rogers stuff. You can see on his face what is passing through his mind: Obviously there must be something about what this fellow does that will interest at least some of the audience, but what in the world can it be? So let's play it safe. We'll ask the six standard questions and crack the six standard jokes... and by then maybe the program will be over. The trouble with science fiction (as we have said here in other connections) is that too many of its manifestations are under the control of people who don't know anything about it. As aficanados know, it won't fit a mold -- especially not the Buck Rogers mold of dis-rays on Martian seabottoms. They never seem to learn, do      To begin # we offer New Year's Greetings to another star-class wordsmith who has somehow evaded Goox's shanghai squads up to this time. The man's name is Brian W. Aldiss; the story, a novella entitled Comc Inferno. In the same issue we have another novella, this one by Gordon R. Dickson -- Home from the Shore -- and at least one novelette, Cordwainer Smith's Think Blue, Count Two. Also shorts, features, Willy Ley -- o full-sized portion of the best science-fiction reading we can find. Care to look a little farther ahead? Damon Knight returns in the following issue with a long complete story called The Visitor at the Zoo -- after that, the beginning of a two-part serial by Jack Vance (remember The Dragon Masters?) called The Star King -- after that... well, wait and see! Here is a modern tale of an innerdireeted sorcerer and an outer-directed sorcerer's apprentice... a tale of ##ME on, Gussy," Fay prod ded quietly, quit stalking around like a neurotic bear and suggest something for my invention team to work on. I enjoy visiting you and Daisy, but I can't stay aboveground all night" "If being outside the shelters makes you nervous, don't come around any more," Gusterson told him, continuing to stalk. "Why doesn't your invention team think of something to invent? Why don't you? Hah!" In the "Hah!" lay triumphant condemnation of a whole way of life. "We do," Fay responded imperturbably, "but a fresh viewpoint sometimes helps." "I'll say it does! Fay, you burglar, ni bet you've got twenty people like myself you milk for free ideas. First you irritate their bark and then you make the rounds every so often to draw off the latex or the maple gloop." Fay smiled. "It ought to please you that society still has a use for you outre inner-directed types. It takes something to make a junior executive stay aboveground after dark, when the missiles are on the prowl." "Society can't have much use for use or it'd pay us something " Gusterson sourly asserted, staring blankly at the tankless TV and kicking it lightly as he passed on. "No, you're wrong about that, Gussy. Money's not the key goad with you inner-directeds. I got that straight from our Motivations chief." "Did he tell you what we should use instead to pay the grocer? A deep inner sense of achievement, maybe? Fay, why should I do any free thinking for Micro Systems?" "I'll tell you why. Gussy. Simply because you get a kick out of insulting us with sardonic ideas. If we take one of them seriously, you think we're degrading ourselves, and that pleases you even more Like making someone laugh at a lousy pun." roaming and grinned. "That the reason, huh? I suppose my suggestions would have to be something in the line of ultra-subminiaturized computers, where one sinister fine-etched molecule does the work of three big bumbling brain cells?" "Not necessarily. Micro Systems is branching out. Wheel as free as a rogue star. But I'll pass along to Promotion your one molecule-three brain cell sparkler. It's a slight exaggeration, but it's catchy." "I'll have my kids watch your ads to see if you use it and then I'll sue the whole underworld." Gusterson frowned as he resumed his stalking. He stared puzzledly at the antique TV. "How about inventing a plutonium termite?" he said suddenly. "It would get rid of those stockpiles that are worrying you moles to death." Fay grimaced noncommittally and cocked his head. "Well, then, how about a beauty mask? How about that, hey? I don't mean one to repair a woman's complexion, but one she'd wear all the time that'd make her look like a #-year-old sexpot. That'd end her worries." "Hey, that's for me," Daisy called from the kitchen. "I'll make Gusterson suffer. I'll make him crawl around on his hands and knees begging my immature favors." "No, you won't," Gusterson called back. "You having a face like that would scare the kids. Better cancel that one. Fay. Half the adult race looking like Vina Vidarsson is too awful a thought." "Yah, you're just scared of jeered. "I sure am," Gusterson said solemnly, scanning the fuzzy floor from one murky glass wall to the other, hesitating at the TV. "How about something homey now, like a flock of little prickly cylinders that roll around the floor collecting lint and flub? They'd work by electricity, or at a pinch cats could bat 'em around. Every so often they'd be automatically herded together and the lint cleaned off the bristles." "No good," Fay said. "There's no lint underground and cats are verboten. And the aboveground market doesn't amount to more moneywise than the state of grander. Gussy, and more impractical -- you can't sell people merely useful ideas." From his hassock in the center of the room he looked uneasily around. "Say, did that violet tone in the glass come from the high Cleveland hydrogen bomb or is it just age and ultraviolet, like desert glass?" liked it that color," Gusterson informed him with happy bitterness. "I like it too -- the glass, I mean, not the tint. People who live in glass houses can see the stars -- especially when there's a window-washing streak in their germ-plasm." "Gussy, why don't you move underground?" Fay asked, his voice taking on a missionary note. "It's a lot easier living in one room, believe me. You don't have to tramp from room to room hunting things." "I like the exercise," Gusterson said stoutly. "But I bet Daisy'd prefer it underground. And your kids wouldn't have to explain why their father lives like a Red Indian. Not to mention the safety factor and insurance savings and a crypt church within easy slidewalk distance. Incidentally, we see the stars all the time, better than you do -- by repeater." "Stars by repeater," Gusterson murmured to the ceiling, pausing for God to comment. Then, "No, Fay, even if I could afford it -- and stand it -- I'm such a bad-luck Harry that just when I got us all safely stowed at the N minus I sublevel, the Soviets would discover an earthquake bomb that struck from below, and I'd have to follow everybody back to the treetops. Hey! How about bubble homes in orbit around earth? Micro Systems could subdivide the world's most spacious suburb and all you moles could go ellipsing. Space is as safe as there is: no air, no shock waves. Free fall's the ultimate in restfulness -- great health benefits. Commute by rocket -- or better yet stay home and do all your business by TV-telephone, or by waldo if it were that sort of thing. Even pet your girl by remote control -- she in her bubble, you in yours, whizzing through vacuum. Oh, damn damn damn damn He was glaring at the blank screen of the TV, his big hands clenching and unclenching. "Don't let Fay give you apoplexy -- he's not worth it," Daisy said, sticking her trim head in from the kitchen, while Fay inquired anxiously, "Gussy, what's the matter?" "Nothing, you worm!" Gusterson roared, "Except that an hour ago I forgot to tune in on the only TV program I've wanted to hear this year -- Finnegans Wake scored for English, Gaelic and "Too bad," Fay said lightly. "I didn't know they were releasing it on flat TV too." # YfLL, they were! Some things are too damn big to keep completely underground. And I had to forget! I'm always doing it -- I miss everything! Look here, you rat," he blatted suddenly at Fay, shaking his finger under the latter's chin, "I'll tell you what you can have that ignorant team of yours invent. They can fix me up a mechanical secretary that I can feed orders into and that'll remind me when the exact moment comes to listen to TV or phone somebody or mail in a story or write a letter or pick up a magazine or look at an eclipse or a new orbiting station or fetch the kids from school or buy Daisy a bunch of flowers or whatever it is. It's got to be something that's always with me, not something I have to go and consult or that I can get sick of and put down somewhere. And it's got to remind me forcibly enough so that I take notice and don't just shrug it aside, like I sometimes do even when Daisy reminds me of things. That's what your stupid team can invent for me! If they do a good job, I'll pay 'em as much as fifty dollars!" "That doesn't sound like anything so very original to me," Fay commented coolly, leaning back from the wagging finger. "I think all senior executives have something of that sort At least, their secretary keeps some kind of file..." "I'm not looking for something with spiked falsies and nylons up to the neck," interjected Gusterson, whose ideas about secretaries were a trifle lurid. "I just want a mech reminder -- that's all!" "Well, I'll keep the idea in mind," Fay assured him, "along with the bubble homes and beauty masks. If we ever develop anything along those lines, I'll let you know. If it's a beauty mask, I'll bring Daisy a pilot model -- to use to scare strange kids." He put his watch to his ear. "Good lord, I'm going to have to cut to make it underground before the main doors close. Just ten minutes to Second Curfew! 'By, Gus. 'By, Daze." Two minutes later, living room lights out, they watched Fay's foreshortened antlike figure scurrying across the balding ill-lit park toward the nearest escalator. Gusterson said, "Weird to think of that big bright spacepoor glamor basement stretching around everywhere underneath. Did you remind Smitty to put a new bulb in the elevator?" "The Smiths moved out this morning," Daisy said tonelessly. "They went underneath." "Like cockroaches," Gusterson said. "Cockroaches leavin' a sinkin' apartment building. Next the ghosts'll be retreatin' to the shelters." "Anyhow, from now on we're our own janitors," Daisy said. He nodded. "Just leaves three families besides us loyal to this glass death trap. Not countin' ghosts." He sighed. Then, "You like to move below, Daisy?" he asked softly, putting his arm lightly across her shoulders. "Get a woozy eyeful of the bright lights and all for a change? Be a rat for a while? Maybe we're getting too old to be bats. I could scrounge me a company job and have a thinking closet all to myself and two secretaries with stainless steel breasts. Life'd be easier for you and a lot cleaner. And you'd sleep safer." "That's true," she answered and paused. She ran her fingertip slowly across the murky glass, its violet tint barely perceptible against a cold dim light across the park. "But somehow," she said, snaking her arm around his waist, "I don't think I'd sleep happier -- or one bit excited." II ping in again, handed to Daisy the larger of the two rather small packages he was carrying. "It's a so-called beauty mask," he told her, "complete with wig, eyelashes, and wettable velvet lips. It even breathes -- pinholed elastiskin with a static adherencecharge. But Micro Systems had nothing to do with it, thank God. Beauty Trix put it on the market ten days ago and it's already started a teen-age craze. Some boys are wearing them too, and the police are yipping at Trix for encouraging transvestism with psychic repercussions." "Didn't I hear somewhere that Trix is a secret subsidiary of Micro?" Gusterson demanded, rearing up from his ancient electric typewriter. "No, you're not stopping me writing, Fay -- it's the gut of evening. If I do any more I won't have any juice to start with tomorrow. I got another of my insanity thrillers moving. A real id-teaser. In this one not only all the characters are crazy but the robot psychiatrist too." "The vending machines are jumping with insanity novels," Fay commented. "Odd they're so popular." Gusterson chortled. "The only way you outer-directed moles will accept individuality any more even in a fictional character, without your superegos getting seasick, is for them to be crazy. Hey, Daisy! Lemme see that beauty mask!" But his wife, backing out of the room, hugged the package to her bosom and solemnly shook her head. "A hell of a thing," Gusterson complained, "not even to be able to see what my stolen ideas look like." "I got a present for you too," Fay said. "Something you might think of as a royalty on all the inventions someone thought of a little ahead of you. Fifty dollars by your own evaluation." He held out the smaller package. "Your tickler." "My what?" Gusterson demanded suspiciously. "Your tickler. The mech reminder you wanted. It turns out that the file a secretary keeps to remind her boss to do certain things at certain times is called a tickler file. So we named this a tickler. Here." Gusterson still didn't touch the package. "You mean you actually put your invention team to work on that nonsense?" "Well, what do you think? Don't be scared of it. Here, I'll show you." As he unwrapped the package. Fay said, "It hasn't been decided yet whether we'll manufacture it commercially. If we do. I'll put through a voucher for you -- for 'development consultation' or something like that. Sorry no royalty's possible. Davidson's squad had started to work up the identical idea three years ago, but it got shelved. I found it on a snoop through the closets. There! Looks rich, doesn't it?" top was a dully gleaming silvery object about the size and shape of a cupped hand with fingers merging. A tiny pellet on a short near-invisible wire led off from it. On the back was a punctured area suggesting the face of a microphone; there was also a window with a date and time in hours and minutes showing through and next to that four little buttons in a row. The concave underside of the silvery "hand" was smooth except for a central area where what looked like two little rollers came through. "It goes on your shoulder under your shirt," Fay explained, "and you tuck the pellet in your ear. We might work up bone conduction on a commercial model. Inside is an ultra-slow fine-wire recorder holding a spool that runs for a week. The clock lets you go to any place on the #-day wire and record a message. The buttons give you variable speed in going there, so you don't waste too much time making a setting. There's a knack in fingering them efficiently, but it's easily acquired." Fay picked up the tickler. "For instance, suppose there's a TV show you want to catch tomorrow night at twenty-two hundred." He touched the buttons. There was the faintest whirring. The clock face blurred briefly three times before showing the setting he'd mentioned. Then Fay spoke into the punctured area: "Turn on TV Channel Two, you big dummy!" He grinned over at Gusterson. "When you've got all your instructions to yourself loaded in, you synchronize with the present moment and let her roll. Fit it on your shoulder and forget it. Oh, yes, and it literally does tickle you every time it delivers an instruction. That's what the little rollers are for. Believe me, you can't ignore it. Come on. Gussy, take off your shirt and try it out. We'll feed in some instructions for the next ten minutes so you get the feel of how it works." "I don't want to," Gusterson said. "Not right now. I want to sniff around it first. My God, it's small! Besides everything else it does, does it think?" "Don't pretend to be an idiot. Gussy! You know very well that even with ultra-sub-micro nothing quite this small can possibly have enough elements to do any thinking." Gusterson shrugged. "I don't know about that. I think bugs think." IAY groaned faintly. "Bugs operate by instinct, Gussy," he said. "A patterned routine. They do not scan situations and consequences and then make decisions." "I don't expect bugs to make decisions," Gusterson said. "For that matter I don't like people who go around alia time making decisions." "Well, you can take it from me, Gussy, that this tickler is just a miniaturized wire recorder and clock . , . and a tickler. It doesn't do anything else." "Not yet, maybe," Gusterson said darkly. "Not this model. Fay, I'm serious about bugs thinking. Or if they don't exactly think, they feel. They've got an interior drama. An inner glow. They're conscious. For that matter. Fay, I think all your really complex electronic computers are conscious too." "Quit kidding. Gussy." "Who's kidding?" "You are. Computers simply aren't alive." "What's alive? A word. I think computers are conscious, at least while they're operating. They've got that inner glow of awareness. They sort of... well... meditate." "Gussy, computers haven't got any circuits for meditating. They're not programmed for mystical lucubrations. They've just got circuits for solving the problems they're on." "Okay, you admit they've got problem-solving circuits -- like a man has. I say if they've got the equipment for being conscious, they're conscious. What has wings, flies." "Including stuffed owls and gilt eagles and dodoes -- and wood-burning airplanes?" "Maybe, under some circumstances. There was a wood-burning airplane. Fay," Gusterson continued, wagging his wrists for emphasis, "I really think computers are conscious. They just don't have any way of telling us that they are. Or maybe they don't have any reason to tell us, like the little Scotch boy who didn't say a word until he was fifteen and was supposed to be deaf and dumb." "Why didn't he say a word?" "Because he'd never had anything to say. Or take those Hindu fakirs, Fay, who sit still and don't say a word for thirty years or until their fingernails grow to the next village. If Hindu fakirscan do that, computers can!" Looking as if he were masticating a lemon, Fay asked quietly, "Gussy, did you say you're working on an insanity novel?" "Now you're kidding," he accused Fay. "The dirty kind of kidding, too." "I'm sorry," Fay said with light contrition. "Well, now you've sniffed at it, how about trying on Tickler?" He picked up the gleaming blunted crescent and jogged it temptingly under Gusterson's chin. "Why should I?" Gusterson asked, stepping back. "Fay, I'm up to my ears writing a book. The last thing I want is something interrupting me to make me listen to a lot of junk and do a lot of useless things." "But, dammit, Gussy! It was all your idea in the first place!" Fay blatted. Then, catching himself, he added, "I mean, you were one of the first people to think of this particular sort of instrument" "Maybe so, but I've done some more thinking since then." Gusterson's voice grew a trifle solemn. "Inner-directed worthwhile thinkin'. Fay, when a man forgets to do something, it's because he really doesn't want to do it or because he's all roiled up down in his unconscious. He ought to take it as a danger signal and investigate the roiling, not hire himself a human or mech reminder." "Bushwa," Fay retorted. "In that case you shouldn't write memorandums or even take notes." "Maybe I shouldn't," Gusterson agreed lamely. "I'd have to think that over too." "Ha!" Fay jeered. "No, I'll tell you what your trouble is, Gussy. You're simply scared of this contraption. You've loaded your skull with horror-story nonsense about machines sprouting minds and taking over the world -- until you're even scared of a simple miniaturized and clocked recorder." He thrust it out. "Maybe I am," Gusterson admitted, controlling a flinch. "Honestly, Fay, that thing's got a gleam in its eye as if it had ideas of its own. Nasty ideas." "Gussy, you nut, it hasn't ot an eye." "Not now, no, but it's got the gleam -- the eye may come. It's the Chesire cat in reverse. If you'd step over here and look at yourself holding it, you could see what I mean. But I don't think computers sprout minds. Fay. I just think they've ot minds, because they've got the mind elements." "Ho, ho!" Fay mocked. "Everything that has a material side has a mental side," he chanted. "Everything that's a body is also a spirit. Gussy, that dubious old metaphysical dualism went out centuries ago." "Maybe so," Gusterson said, "but we still haven't anything but that dubious dualism to explain the human mind, have we? It's a jelly of nerve cells and it's a vision of the cosmos. If that isn't dualism, what is?" "I give up. Gussy, are you going to try out this tickler?" "No!" "But dammit. Gussy, we made it just for you! -- practically." "Sorry, but I'm not coming near the thing." " 'Zen come near me," a husky voice intoned behind them. "Tonight I vant a man." standing in the door was  something slim in a short silver sheath. It had golden bangs and the haughtiest snub-nosed face in the world. It slunk toward them. "My God, Vina Vidarsson!" Gusterson yelled. "Daisy, that's terrific," Fay applauded, going up to her. She bumped him aside with a swing of her hips, continuing to advance. "Not you. Ratty," she said throatily. "I vant a real man." "Fay, I suggested Vina Vidarsson's face for the beauty mask," Gusterson said, walking around his wife and shaking a finger. "Don't tell me Trix just happened to think of that too." "What else could they think of?" Fay laughed. "This season sex means VV and nobody else." An odd little grin flicked his lips, a tic traveled up his face and his body twitched slightly. "Say, folks, I'm going to have to be leaving. It's exactly fifteen minutes to Second Curfew. Last time I had to run and I got heartburn. When are you people going to move downstairs? I'll leave Tickler, Gussy. Play around with it and get used to it. 'By now." "Hey, Fay," Gusterson called curiously, "have you developed absolute time sense?" Fay grinned a big grin from the doorway -- almost too big a grin for so small a man. "I didn't need to," he said softly, patting his right shoulder. "My tickler told me." He closed the door behind him. As side-by-side they watched him strut sedately across the murky chilly-looking park, Gusterson mused, "So the little devil had one of those nonsense-gadgets on all the time and I never noticed. Can you beat that?" Something drew across the violet-tinged stars a short bright line that quickly faded. "What's that?" Gusterson asked gloomily. "Next to last stage of missile-here?" "Won't you settle for an oldfashioned shooting star?" Daisy asked softly. The (wettable) velvet lips of the mask made even her natural voice sound different. She reached a hand back of her neck to pull the thing off. "Hey, don't do that," Gusterson protested in a hurt voice. "Not for a while anyway." "Hokay!" she said harshly, turning on him. "Zen down on your knees, dog!" Ill son was loping down the home stretch on his #-word insanity novel before Fay dropped in again, this time promptly at high noon. Normally Fay cringed his shoulders a trifle and was inclined to slither, but now he strode aggressively, his legs scissoring in a fast, low goosestep. He whipped off the sunglasses that all moles wore topside by day and began to pound Gusterson on the back while calling boisterously, "How are you, Gussy Old Boy, Old Boy?" Daisy came in from the kitchen to see why Gusterson was choking. She was instantly grabbed and violently bussed to the accompaniment of, "Hiya, Gorgeous! Yum-yum! How about adlibbing that some weekend?" She stared at Fay dazedly, rasping the back of her hand across her mouth, while Gusterson yelled, "Quit that! What's got into you, Fay? Have they transferred you out of R  D to Company Morale? Do they line up all the secretaries at roll call and make you give them an eighthour energizing kiss?" "Ha, wouldn't you like to know? Fay retorted. He grinned, twitched jumpingly, held still a moment, then hustled over to the far wall. "Look out there," he rapped, pointing through the violet glass at a gap between the two nearest old skyscraper apartments. "In thirty seconds you'll see them test the new needle bomb at the other end of Lake Erie. It's educational." He began to count off seconds, vigorously semaphoring his arm. "... Two... three... Gussy, I've put through a voucher for two yards for you. Budgeting squawked, but I pressured 'em." Daisy squealed, "Yards! -- are those dollar thousands?" while Gusterson was asking, "Then you're marketing the tickler?" "Yes. Yes," Fay replied to them in turn. "... Nine... ten..." Again he grinned and twitched. "Time for noon Cornstaff," he announced staccato. "Pardon the hush box." He whipped a pancake phone from under his coat, clapped it over his face and spoke fiercely but inaudibly into it, continuing to semaphore. Suddenly he thrust the phone away. "Twenty-nine... thirty... Thar she blows!" An incandescent streak shot up the sky from a little above the far horizon and a doubly dazzling point of light appeared just above the top of it, with the effect of God dotting an "i". "Ha, that'll skewer espionage satellites like swatting flies!" Fay proclaimed as the portent faded. "Bracing! Gussy, where's your tickler? I've got a new spool for it that'll razzle-dazzle you." "I'll bet," Gusterson said drily. "Daisy?" ' "You gave it to the kids and they got to fooling with it and broke it." "No matter," Fay told them with a large sidewise sweep of his hand. "Better you wait for the new model. It's a six-way improvement." "So I gather," Gusterson said, eyeing him speculatively. "Does it automatically inject you with cocaine? A fix every hour on the second?" "Ha-ha, joke. Gussy, it achieves the same effect without using any dope at all. Listen: a tickler reminds you of your duties and opportunities -- your chances for happiness and success! What's the obvious next step?" By the way, how do you do that when you're underground?" "We have hi-speed garbage boosts. The obvious next step is you give the tickler a heart It not only tells you, it warmly persuades you. It doesn't just say, "Tum on the TV Channel Two, Joyce program,' it brills at you, 'Kid, Old Kid, race for the TV and flip that Two Switch! There's a great show coming through the pipes this second plus ten -- you'll enjoy the hell out of yourself! Grab a ticket to ecstacyl' " "My God," Gusterson gasped, "are those the kind of jolts it's giving you now?" "Don't you get it. Gussy? You never load your tickler except when you're feeling buoyantly enthusiastic. You don't just tell yourself what to do hour by hour next week, you sell yourself on it. That way you not only make doubly sure you'll obey instructions but you constantly reinoculate yourself with your own enthusiasm." "I can't stand myself when I'm that enthusiastic," Gusterson said. "I feel ashamed for hours afterwards." "You're warped -- all this lonely sky-life. What's more, Gussy, think how still more persuasive some of those instructions would be if they came to a man in his best girl's most bedroomy voice, or his doctor's or psycher's if it's that sort of thing -- or Vina Vidarsson's! By the way. Daze, don't wear that beauty mask outside. It's a grand misdemeanor ever since ten thousand teen-agers rioted through Tunnel-Mart wearing them. And VV's sueing Trix." "No chance of that," Daisy said. "Gusterson got excited and bit off the nose." She pinched her own delicately. "I'd no more obey my enthusiastic self," Gusterson was brooding, "than I'd obey a Napoleon drunk on his own brandy or a hopped-up SL Francis. Reinoculated with my own enthusiasm? I'd die just like from snake-bite!" "Warped, I said," Fay dogmatized, stamping around. "Gussy, having the instructions persuasive instead of neutral turned out to be only the opening wedge. The next step wasn't so obvious, but I saw it. Using subliminal verbal stimuli in his tickler, a man can be given constant supportive euphoric therapy # hours a day! And it makes use of all that empty wire. We've revived the ideas of a pioneer dynamic psycher named Dr. Coue. For instance, right now my tickler is saying to me -- in tones too soft to reach my conscious mind, but do they stab into the unconscious! -- 'Day by day in every way I'm getting sharper and sharper.' It alternates that with 'gutsier and gutsier' and... well, forget that. Coue mostly used 'better and better' but that seems too general. And every hundredth time it says them out loud and the tickler give me a brush -- just a faint cootch -- to make sure I'm keeping in touch." "That third word-pair," Daisy wondered, feeling her mouth reminiscently. "Could I guess?" growing wider and wider. "Fay," he said, "I could no more use my mind for anything if I knew all that was going on in my inner ear than if I were being brushed down with brooms by three witches. Look here," he said with loud authority, "you got to stop all this -- it's crazy. Fay, if Micro'll junk the tickler. I'll think you up something else to invent -- something real good." "Your inventing days are over," Fay brilled gleefully. "I mean, you'll never equal your masterpiece." "How about," Gusterson bellowed, "an anti-individual guided missile? The physicists have got small-scale antigravity good enough to float and fly something the size of a hand grenade. I can smell that even though it's a back-of-the-safe military secret. Well, how about keying such a missile to a man's finger-prints -- or brainwaves, maybe, or his unique smell! -- so it can spot and follow him around the target in on him, without harming anyone else? Long-distance assassination -- and the stinkingest gets it! Or you could simply load it with some disgusting goo and key it to teen-agers as a group -- that'd take care of them. Fay, doesn't it give you a rich, warm kick to think of my midget missiles buzzing around in your tunnels, seeking out evil-doers, like a swarm of angry wasps or angelic bumblebees?" "You're not luring me down any side trails," Fay said laughingly. He grinned and twitched. then hurried toward the opposite wall, motioning them to follow. Outside, about a hundred yards beyond the purple glass, rose another ancient glass-walled apartment skyscraper. Beyond, Lake Erie rippled glintingly. "Another bomb-test?" Gusterson asked. Fay pointed at the building. "Tomorrow," he announced, "a modern factory, devoted solely to the manufacture of ticklers, will be erected on that site." "You mean one of those windowless phallic eyesores?" Gusterson demanded. "Fay, you people aren't even consistent. You've got all your homes underground. Why not your factories?" "Sh! Not enough room. And night missiles are scarier." "I know that building's been empty for a year," Daisy said uneasily, "but how -- ?" "Sh! Watch! Now!" The looming building seemed to blur or fuzz for a moment. Then it was as if the lake's bright ripples had invaded the old glass a hundred yards away. Wavelets chased themselves up and down the gleaming walls, became higher, higher... and then suddenly the glass cracked all over to tiny fragments and fell away, to be followed quickly by fragmented concrete and plastic and plastic piping, until all that was left was the nude steel framework, vibrating so rapidly as to be almost invisible against the gleaming lake. but there was no explosion, only a long-drawn-out low crash as the fragments hit twenty floors below and dust whooshed out sideways. "Spectacular!" Fay summed up. "Knew you'd enjoy it. That little trick was first conceived by the great Tesla during his last fruity years. Research discovered it in his biog -- we just made the dream come true. A tiny resonance device you could carry in your belt-bag attunes itself to the natural harmonic of a structure and then increases amplitude by tiny pushes exactly in time. Just like soldiers marching in step can break down a bridge, only this is as if it were being done by one marching ant." He pointed at the naked framework appearing out of its own blur and said, "We'll be able to hang the factory on that. If not, we'll whip a megacurrent through it and vaporize it. No question the micro-resonator is the neatest sweetest wrecking device going. You can expect a lot more of this sort of efficiency now that mankind has the tickler to enable him to use his full potential. What's the matter, folks?" Daisy was staring around the violet-walled room with dumb mistrust. Her hands were trembling. "You don't have to worry," Fay assured her with an understanding laugh. "This building's safe for a month more at least." Suddenly he grimaced and leaped a foot in the air. He raised a clawed hand to scratch his shoulder but managed to check the movement. "Got to beat it, folks," he announced tersely. "My tickler gave me the grand cootch." "Don't go yet," Gusterson called, rousing himself with a shudder which he immediately explained: "I just had the illusion that if I shook myself all my flesh and guts would fall off my shimmying skeleton. Brr! Fay, before you and Micro go off half cocked, I want you to know there's one insuperable objection to the tickler as a mass-market item. The average man or woman won't go to the considerable time and trouble it must take to load a tickler. He simply hasn't got the compulsive orderliness and quires." "We thought of that weeks ago," Fay rapped, his hand on the door. "Every tickler spool that goes to market is patterned like wallpaper with one of five designs of suitable subliminal supportive euphoric material. 'Ittier and ittier,' 'viriler and viriler' -- you know. The buyer is robotinterviewed for an hour, his personalized daily routine laid out and thereafter templated on his weekly spool. He's strongly urged next to take his tickler to his doctor and psycher for further instruction-imposition. We've been working with the medical profession from the start. They love the tickler because it'll remind people to take their medicine on the dot... and rest and eat and go to sleep just when and how doc says. This is a big operation. Daisy hurried to the wall to watch him cross the park. Deep down she was a wee bit worried that he might linger to attach a micro-resonator to this building and she wanted to time him. But Gusterson settled down to his typewriter and began to bat away, "I want to have another novel started," he explained to her, "before the ant marches across this building in about four and a half tle gutsy guys come swarming out of the ground and heave it into Lake Erie." IV dowless walls began to crawl up the stripped skyscraper between them and the lake. Daisy pulled the black-out curtains on that side. For a day or two longer their thoughts and conversations were haunted by Gusterson's vague sardonic visions of a horde of tickler-energized moles pouring up out of the tunnels to tear down the remaining trees, tank the atmosphere and perhaps somehow dismantle the stars -- at least on this side of the world -- but then they both settled back into their customary easygoing routines. Gusterson typed. Daisy made her daily shopping trip to a little topside daytime store and started painting a mural on the floor of the empty apartment next theirs but one. "We ought to lasso some neighbors," she suggested once. "I need somebody to hold my brushes and admire. How about you making a trip below at the cocktail hours, Gusterson, and picking up a couple of girls for a starter? Flash the old viriler charm, cootch them up a bit, emphasize the delights of high living, but make sure they're compatible roommates. You could pick up that two-yard check from Micro at the same time." "You're an immoral moneyravenous wench," Gusterson said absently, trying to dream of an insanity beyond insanity that would make his next novel a real id-rousing best-vender. "If that's your vision of me, you shouldn't have chewed up the VV mask." "I'd really prefer you with green stripes," he told her. "But stripes, spots, or sun-bathing, you're better than those cocktail moles." Actually both of them acutely disliked going below. They much preferred to perch in their eyrie and watch the people of Cleveland Depths, as they privately called the local sub-suburb, rush up out of the shelters at dawn to work in the concrete fields and windowless factories, make their daytime jet trips and freeway jaunts, do their noon-hour and coffee-break guerrilla practice, and then go scurrying back at twilight to the atomic-proof, brightly lit, vastly exciting, claustrophobic caves. Fay and his projects began once more to seem dreamlike, though Gusterson did run across a cryptic advertisement for ticklers in The Manchester Guardian, which he got daily by facsimile. Their three children reported similar ads, of no interest to young fry, on the TV and one afternoon they came home with the startling news that the monitors at their subsurface school had been issued ticklers. On sharp interrogation by Gusterson, however, it appeared that these last were not ticklers but merely two-way radios linked to the school police station transmitter. "Which is bad enough," Gusterson commented later to Daisy. "But it'd be even dirtier to think of those clock-watching superegos being strapped to kids' shoulders. Can you imagine Huck Finn with a tickler, tellin' him when to tie up the raft to a towhead and when to take a swim?" "I bet Fay could," Daisy countered. "When's he going to bring you that check, anyhow? lago wants a jetcycle and I promised Imogene a Vina Kit and then Claudius'll have to have something." Gusterson scowled thoughtfully. "You know, Daze," he said, "I got a feeling Fay's in the hospital, all narcotized up and being fed intravenously. The way he was jumping around last time, that tickler was going to cootch him to pieces in a week." A S IF TO refute this intuition, Fay turned up that very evening. The lights were dim. Something had gone wrong with the building's old transformer and, pending repairs, the two remaining occupied apartments were making do with batteries, which turned bright globes to mysterious amber candles and made Gusterson's ancient typewriter operate sluggishly. Fay's manner was subdued or at least closely controlled and for a moment Gusterson thought he'd shed his tickler. Then the little man came out of the shadows and Gusterson saw the large bulge on his right shoulder. "Yes, we had to up it a bit sizewise," Fay explained in clipped tones. "Additional supercessful on the whole, the subliminal euphorics were a shade too effective. Several hundred users went hoppity manic. We gentled the cootch and qualified the subliminals -- you know, 'Day by day in every way I'm getting sharper and more serene' -- but a stabilizing influence was still needed, so after a top-level conference we decided to combine Tickler with Moodmaster." "My God," Gusterson interjected, "do they have a machine now that does that?" "Of course. They've been using them on ex-mental patients for years." "I just don't keep up with progress," Gusterson said, shaking his head bleakly. "I'm falling behind on all fronts." "You ought to have your tickler remind you to read Science Service releases," Fay told him. "Or simply instruct it to scan the releases and -- no, that's still in research." He looked at Gusterson's shoulder and his eyes widened. "You're not wearing the new-model tickler I sent you," he said accusingly. "I never got it," Gusterson assured him. "Postmen deliver top-side mail and parcels by throwing them on the high-speed garbage boosts and hoping a tornado will blow them to the right addresses." Then he added helpfully, "Maybe the Russians stole it while it was riding the whirlwinds." "That's not a suitable topic for jesting," Fay frowned. "We're hoping that Tickler will mobilize the full potential of the Free World for the first time in history. Gusterson, you are going to have to wear a ticky-tick. It's becoming impossible for a man to get through modern life without one." "Maybe I will," Gusterson said appeasingly, "but right now tell me about Moodmaster. I want to put it in my new insanity novel." Fay shook his head. "Your readers will just think you're behind the times. If you use it, underplay it. But anyhow, Moodmaster is a simple physiotherapy engine that monitors bloodstream chemicals and body electricity. It ties directly into the bloodstream, keeping blood, sugar, et cetera, at optimum levels and injecting euphrin or depressin as necessary -- and occasionally a touch of extra adrenaline, as during work emergencies." "Is it painful?" Daisy called from the bedroom. "Excruciating," Gusterson called back. "Excuse it, please," he grinned at Fay. "Hey, didn't I suggest cocaine injections last time I saw you?" "So you did," Fay agreed flatly. "Oh by the way. Gussy, here's that check for a yard I promised you. Micro doesn't muzzle the ox." "Hooray!" Daisy cheered faintlygoing to be for two." Gusterson complained. "Budgeting always forces a last-minute compromise," Fay shrugged. "You have to learn to accept those things." "I love accepting money and I'm glad any time for three feet," Daisy called agreeably. "Six feet might make me wonder if I weren't an insect, but getting a yard just makes me feel like a gangster's moll." "Want to come out and gloat over the yard paper. Toots, and stuff it in your diamond-embroidered net stocking top?" Gusterson called back. "No, I'm doing something to that portion of me just now. But hang onto the yard, Gusterson." "Aye-aye, Cap'n," he assured her. Then, turning back to Fay, "So you've taken the Dr. Coue repeating out of the tickler?" "Oh, no. Just balanced it off with depressin. The subliminals are still a prime sales-point. All the tickler features are cumulative, Gussy. You're still underestimating the scope of the device." "I guess I am. What's this 'work-emergencies' business? If you're using the tickler to inject drugs into workers to keep them going, that's really just my cocaine suggestion modernized and I'm putting in for another thou. Hundreds of years ago the South American Indians chewed coca leaves to kill fatigue sensations." "That so? Interesting -- and it proves priority for the Indians, doesn't it? I'll make a try for you, Gussy, but don't expect anything." He cleared his throat, his eyes grew distant and, turning his head a little to the right, he enunciated sharply, "Pooh-Bah. Time: Inst oh five. One oh five seven. Oh oh. Record: Gussy coca thou budget. Cut." He explained, "We got a voice-cued setter now on the deluxe models. You can record a memo to yourself without taking off your shirt. Incidentally, I use the ends of the hours for trifle-memos. I've already used up the fifty-nines and eights for tomorrow and started on the fifty-sevens." "I understood most of your memo," Gusterson told him gruffly. "The last 'Oh oh' was for seconds, wasn't it? Now I call that crude -- why not microseconds too? But how do you remember where you've made a memo so you don't rerecord over it? After all, you're rerecording over the wallpaper all the time." "Tickler beeps and then hunts for the nearest information-free space." "I see. And what's the PoohBah for?" Fay smiled. "Cut. My password for activating the setter, so it won't respond to chance numerals it overhears." "But why Pooh-Bah?" Fay grinned. "Cut. And you a writer. It's a literary reference, Gussy. Pooh-Bah (cut!) was Lord High Everything Else in The Mikado. He had a little list and nothing on it would ever be missed." membered, glowering. "As I recall it, all that went on that list was the names of people who were slated to have their heads chopped off by Ko-Ko. Better watch your step, Shorty. It may be a back-handed omen. Maybe all those workers you're puttin' ticklers on to pump them full of adrenaline so they'll overwork without noticin' it will revolt and come out some day choppin' for your head." "Spare me the Marxist mythology," Fay protested. "Gussy, you've got a completely wrong slant on Tickler. It's true that most of our mass sales so far, bar government and army, have been to large companies purchasing for their employees -- " "Ah-ha!" " -- but that's because there's nothing like a tickler for teaching a new man his job. It tells him from instant to instant what he must do -- while he's already on the job and without disturbing other workers. Magnetizing a wire with a job pattern is the easiest thing going. And you'd be astonished what the subliminals do for employee morale. It's this way, Gussy: most people are too improvident and unimaginative to see in advance the advantages of ticklers. They buy one because the company strongly suggests it and payment is on easy installments withheld from salary. They find a tickler makes the work day go easier. The little fellow perched on your shoulder is a friend exuding comfort and good advice. The first thing he's set to say is 'Take it easy, pal.' "Within a week they're wearing their tickler # hours a day -- and buying a tickler for the wife, so she'll remember to comb her hair and smile real pretty and cook favorite dishes." "I get it, Fay," Gusterson cut in. "The tickler is the newest fad for increasing worker efficiency. Once, I read somewheres, it was salt tablets. They had salt-tablet dispensers everywhere, even in air-conditioned offices where there wasn't a moist armpit twice a year and the gals sweat only champagne. A decade later people wondered what all those dusty white pills were for. Sometimes they were mistook for tranquilizers. It'll be the same way with ticklers. Somebody'll open a musty closet and see jumbled heaps of these gripping-hand silvery gadgets gathering dust curls and -- " "They will not!" Fay protested vehemently. "Ticklers are not a fad -- they're history-changers, they're Free-World revolutionary! Why, before Micro Systems put a single one on the market, we'd made it a rule that every Micro employee had to wear one! If that's not having supreme confidence in a product -- " "Every employee except the top executives, of course," Gusterson interrupted jeeringly. "And that's not demoting you. Fay. As the R  D chief most closely involved, you'd naturally have to show special enthusiasm." "But you're wrong there, Gussy," Fay crowed. "Man for man, our top executives have been more enthusiastic about their personal ticklers than any other class of worker in the whole outfit." Gusterson slumped and shook his head. "If that's the case," he said darkly, "maybe mankind deserves the tickler." agreed loudly without thinking. Then, "Oh, can the carping, Gussy. Tickler's a great invention. Don't deprecate it just because you had something to do with its genesis. You're going to have to get in the swim and wear one." "Maybe I'd rather drown horribly." "Can the gloom-talk too! Gussy, I said it before and I say it again, you're just scared of this new thing. Why, you've even got the drapes pulled so you won't have to look at the tickler factory." "Yes, I am scared," Gusterson Fay whirled around. Daisy was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing the short silver sheath. This time there was no mask, but her bobbed hair was glitteringly silvered, while her legs, arms, hands, neck, face -- every bit of her exposed skin -- was painted with beautifully even vertical green stripes. "I did it as a surprise for Gusterson," she explained to Fay. "He says he likes me this way. The green glop's supposed to be smudgeproof." Gusterson did not comment. His face had a rapt expression. "I'll tell you why your tickler's so popular. Fay," he said softly. "It's not because it backstops the memory or because it boosts the ego with subliminals. It's because it takes the hook out of a guy, it takes over the job of withstanding the pressure of living. See, Fay, here are all these little guys in this subterranean rat race with atomic-death squares and chromium-plated reward squares and enough money if you pass Go almost to get to Go again -- and game to keep in mind. Well, here's this one little guy and every morning he wakes up there's all these things he's got to keep in mind to do or he'll lose his turn three times in a row and maybe a terrible black rook in iron armor'll loom up and bang him off the chessboard. But now, look, now he's got his tickler and he tells his sweet silver tickler all these things and the tickler's got to remember them. Of course he'll have to do them eventually but meanwhile the pressure's off him, the hook's out of his short hairs. He's shifted the responsibility..." "Well, what's so bad about that?" Fay broke in loudly. "What's wrong with taking the pressure off little guys? Why shouldn't Tickler be a super-ego surrogate? Micro's Motivations chief noticed that positive feature straight off and scored it three pluses. Besides, it's nothing but a gaudy way of saying that Tickler backstops the memory. Seriously, Gussy, what's so bad about it?" "I don't know," Gusterson said slowly, his eyes still far away. "I just know it feels bad to me." He crinkled his big forehead. "Well for one thing," he said, "it means that a man's taking orders from something else. He's got a kind of master. He's sinking back into a slave psychology." "He's only taking orders from himself," Fay countered disgustedly. "Tickler's just a mech reminder, a notebook, in essence no more than the back of an old envelope. It's no master." "Are you absolutely sure of that?" Gusterson asked quietly. "Why, Gussy, you big oaf -- " Fay began heatedly. Suddenly his features quirked and he twitched. " 'Scuse me, folks," he said rapidly, heading for the door, "but my tickler told me I gotta go." "Hey Fay, don't you mean you told your tickler to tell you when it was time to go?" Gusterson called after him. Fay looked back in the doorway. He wet his lips, his eyes moved from side to side. "I'm not quite sure," he said in an odd strained voice and darted out. seconds at the pattern of emptiness Fay had left. Then he shivered. Then he shrugged. "I must be slipping," he muttered. "I never even suggested something for him to invent." Then he looked around at Daisy, who was still standing poker-faced in her doorway. "Hey, you look like something out of the Arabian Nights," he told her. "Are you supposed to be anything special? How far do those stripes go, anyway?" "You could probably find out," she told him coolly. "All you have to do is kill me a dragon or two first." He studied her. "My God," he said reverently, "I really have all the fun in life. What do I do to deserve this?" "You've got a big gun," she told him, "and you go out in the world with it and hold up big companies and take yards and yards of money away from them in rolls like ribbon and bring it all home to me." "Don't say that about the gun again," he said. "Don't whisper it, don't even think it. I've got one, dammit -- thirty-eight caliber, yet -- and I don't want some psionic monitor with two-way clairaudience they haven't told me about catching the whisper and coming to take the gun away from us. It's one of the few individuality symbols we've got left." Suddenly Daisy whirled away from the door, spun three times so that her silvered hair stood out like a metal coolie hat, and sank to a curtsey in the middle of the room. "I've just thought of what I am," she announced, fluttering her eyelashes at him. "I'm a sweet silver tickler with green stripes." V ' Micro check for ten hundred silver smackers, which she hid in a broken radionic coffee urn. Gusterson sold his insanity novel and started a new one about a mad medic with a hiccupy hysterical chuckle, who gimmicked Moodmasters to turn mental patients into nymphomaniacs, mass murderers and compulsive saints. But this time he couldn't get Fay out of his the nervous little man had spoken. For that matter, he couldn't blank the underground out of his mind as effectively as usually. He had the feeling that a new kind of mole was loose in the burrows and that the ground at the foot of their skyscraper might start humping up any minute. Toward the end of one afternoon he tucked a half dozen newly typed sheets in his pocket, shrouded his typer, went to the hatrack and took down his prize: a miner's hard-top cap with electric headlamp. "Coin below, Cap'n," he shouted toward the kitchen. "Be back for second dog watch," Daisy replied. "Remember what I told you about lassoing me some art-conscious girl neighbors." "Only if I meet a piebald one with a taste for Scotch -- or maybe a pearl gray biped jaguar with violet spots," Gusterson told her, clapping on the cap with a WeWho Are-About-To-Die gesture. Halfway across the park to the escalator bunker Gusterson's heart began to tick. He resolutely switched on his headlamp. As he'd known it would, the hatch robot whirred an extra and higher-pitched ten seconds when it came to his topside address, but it ultimately dilated the hatch for him, first handing him a claim check for his ID card. Gusterson's heart was ticking like a sledgehammer by now. He hopped clumsily onto the escalator, clutched the moving guard rail to either side, then shut his eyes as the steps went over the edge and became what felt like vertical. An instant later he forced his eyes open, undipped a hand from the rail and touched the second switch beside his headlamp, which instantly began to blink whitely, as if he were a civilian plane flying into a nest of military jobs. With a further effort he kept his eyes open and flinchingly surveyed the scene around him. After zigging through a bombproof half-furlong of roof, he was dropping into a large twilit cave. The blue-black ceiling twinkled with stars. The walls were pierced at floor level by a dozen archways with busy niche stores and glowing advertisements crowded between them. From the archways some three dozen slidewalks curved out, tangenting off each other in a bewildering multiple cloverleaf. The slidewalks were packed with people, traveling motionless like purposeful statues or pivoting with practiced grace from one slidewalk to another, like a thousand toreros doing veronicas. slidewalks were moving faster than he recalled from his last venture underground and at the same time the whole pedestrian concourse was quieter than he remembered. It was as if the five thousand or so moles in view were all listening -- for what? But there was something else that had changed about them -- a change that he couldn't for a moment define, or unconsciously didn't want to. Clothing style? No... My God, they weren't all wearing identical monster masks? No... Hair color?... Well... He was studying them so intently that he forgot his escalator was landing. He came off it with a heel-jarring stumble and bumped into a knot of four men on the tiny triangular hold-still. These four at least sported a new stylewrinkle: ribbed gray shouldercapes that made them look as if their heads were poking up out of the center of bulgy umbrellas or giant mushrooms. One of them grabbed hold of Gusterson and saved him from staggering onto a slidewalk that might have carried him to Toledo. "Gussy, you dog, you must have esped I wanted to see you," Fay cried, patting him on the elbows. "Meet Davidson and Kester and Hazen, colleagues of mine. We're all Micro-men." Fay's companions were staring strangely at Gusterson's blinking headlamp. Fay explained rapidly, "Mr. Gusterson is an insanity novelist. You know, I-D." "Inner-directed spells id," Gusterson said absently, still staring at the interweaving crowd beyond them, trying to figure out what made them different from last trip. "Creativity fuel. Cranky. Explodes through the parietal fissure if you look at it cross-eyed." "Ha-ha," Fay laughed. "Well, boys, I've found my man. How's the new novel perking, Gussy?" "Got my climax, I think," Gusterson mumbled, still peering puzzledly around Fay at the slidestanders. "Moodmaster's going to come alive. Ever occur to you that 'mood' is 'doom' spelled backwards? And then..." He let his voice trail off as he realized that Kester and Davidson and Hazen had made their farewells and were sliding into the distance. He reminded himself wryly that nobody ever wants to hear an author talk -- he's much too good a listener to be wasted that way. Let's see, was it that everybody in the crowd had the same facial expression...? Or showed symptoms of the same disease... ,? "I was coming to visit you, but now you can pay me a call," Fay was saying. "There are two matters I want to -- " Gusterson stiffened. "My Cod, theyre all hunchbacked!" he yelled. "Shh! Of course they are," Fay whispered reprovingly. "They're all wearing their ticklers. But you don't need to be insulting about it." "'m ettin out o' here." Gusterson turned to flee as if from five thousand Richard the Thirds. "Oh no you're not," Fay amended, drawing him back with one hand. Somehow, underground, the little man seemed to carry more weight. "You're having cocktails in my thinking box. Besides, climbing a down escaladder will give you a heart attack." was about as easy to handle as a rogue rhinoceros, but away from it -- and especially if underground -- he became more like a pliable elephant. All his bones dropped out through his feet, as he described it to Daisy. So now he submitted miserably as Fay surveyed him up and down, switched off his blinking headlamp ("That coalminer caper is corny, Gussy.") and then -- surprisingly -- rapidly stuffed his belt-bag under the right shoulder of Gusterson's coat and buttoned the latter to hold it in place. "So you won't stand out," he explained. Another swift survey. "You'll do. Come on. Gussy. I got lots to brief you on." Three rapid paces and then Gusterson's feet would have gone out from under him except that Fay gave him a mighty shove. The small man sprang onto the slidewalk after him and then they were skimming effortlessly side by side. Gusterson felt frightened and twice as hunchbacked as the slidestanders around him -- morally as well as physically. Nevertheless he countered bravely, "I got things to brief you on. I got six pages of cautions on ti -- " "Shh!" Fay stopped him. "Let's use my hushbox." He drew out his pancake phone and stretched it so that it covered both their lower faces, like a double yashmak. Gusterson, his neck pushing into the ribbed bulge of the shoulder cape so he could be cheek to cheek with Fay, felt horribly conspicuous, but then he noticed that none of the slidestanders were paying them the least attention. The reason for their abstraction occurred to him. They were listening to their ticklers! He shuddered. "I got six pages of caution on ticklers," he repeated into the hot, moist quiet of the pancake phone. "I typed 'em so I wouldn't forget 'em in the heat of polemicking. I want you to read every word. Fay, I've had it on my mind ever since I started wondering whether it was you or your tickler made you duck out of our place last time you were there. I want you to -- " "Ha-ha! All in good time." In the pancake phone Fay's laugh was brassy. "But I'm glad you've decided to lend a hand, Gussy. This thing is moving faaaasst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization is # per cent complete." "I don't believe that," Gusterson protested while glaring at the hunchbacks around them. The slidewalk was gliding down a low glow-ceiling tunnel lined with doors and advertisements. Rapteyed people were pirouetting on and off. "A thing just can't develop that fast, Fay. It's against nature." "Ha, but we're not in nature, we're in culture. The progress of an industrial scientific culture is geometric. It goes n-times as many jumps as it takes. More than geometric -- exponential. Confidentially, Micro's Math chief tells me we're currently on a fourth-power progress curve trending into a fifth." "You mean we're goin' so fast we got to watch out we don't bump ourselves in the rear when we come around again?" Gusterson asked, scanning the tunnel ahead for curves. "Or just shoot straight up to infinity?" "Exactly! Of course most of the last power and a half is due to Tickler itself. Gussy, the tickler's already eliminated absenteeism, alcoholism and aboulia in numerous urban areas -- and that's just one letter of the alphabet! If Tickler doesn't turn us into a nation of photo-memory constantcreative-flow geniuses in six months, I'll come live topside." ii'Y'OU mean because a lot of people are standing around glassy-eyed listening to something mumbling in their ear that it's a good thing?" "Gussy, you don't know progress when you see it. Tickler is the greatest invention since language. Bar none, it's the greatest instrument ever devised for integrating a man into all phases of his environment. Under the present routine a newly purchased tickler first goes to government and civilian defense for primary patterning, then to the purchaser's employer, then to his doctorpsycher, then to his local bunker captain, then to him. Everything that's needful for a man's welfare gets on the spools. Efficiency cubed! Incidentally, Russia's got the tickler now. Our dip-satellites have photographed it. It's like ours except the Commies wear it on the left shoulder... but they're two weeks behind us developmentwise and they'll never close the gap!" Gusterson reared up out of the pancake phone to take a deep breath. A sulky-lipped sylph-figured girl two feet from him twitched -- medium cootch, he judged -- then fumbled in her belt-bag for a pill and popped it in her mouth. "Hell, the tickler's not even efficient yet about little things," Gusterson blatted, diving back into the privacy-yashmak he was sharing with Fay. "Whyn't that girl's doctor have the Moodmaster component of her tickler inject her with medicine?" "Her doctor probably wants her to have the discipline of pilltaking -- or the exercise," Fay answered glibly. "Look sharp now. Here's where we fork. I'm taking you through Micro's postern." A ribbon of slidewalk split itself from the main band and angled off into a short alley. Gusterson hardly felt the constant-speed juncture as they crossed it. Then the secondary ribbon speeded up, carrying them at about # feet a second toward the blank concrete wall in which the alley ended. Gusterson prepared to jump, but Fay grabbed him with one hand and with the other held up toward the wall a badge and a button. When they were about ten feet away the wall whipped aside, then whipped shut behind them so fast that Gusterson wondered momentarily if he still had his heels and the seat of his pants. Fay, tucking away his badge and pancake phone, dropped the button in Gusterson's vest pocket. "Use it when you leave," he said casually. "That is, if you leave." Gusterson, who was trying to read the Do and Don't posters papering the walls they were passing, started to probe that last sinister supposition, but just then the ribbon slowed, a swinging door opened and closed behind them and they found themselves in a luxuriously furnished thinking box measuring at least eight feet by five. Gusterson said appreciatively to show he wasn't an utter yokel. Then, drawing on research he'd done for period novels, "Why, it's as big as a Pullman car compartment, or a first mate's cabin in the War of #. You really must rate." Fay nodded, smiled wanly and sat down with a sigh on a compact overstuffed swivel chair. He let his arms dangle and his head sink into his puffed shoulder cape. Gusterson stared at him. It was the first time he could ever recall the little man showing fatigue. "Tickler currently does have one serious drawback," Fay volunteered. "It weighs # pounds. You feel it when you've been on your feet a couple of hours. No question we're going to give the next model that antigravity feature you mentioned for pursuit grenades. We'd have had it in this model except there were so many other things to be incorporated." He sighed again. "Why, the scanning and and decision-making elements alone tripled the mass." "Hey," Gusterson protested, thinking especially of the sulkylipped girl, "do you mean to tell me all those other people were toting two stone?" Fay shook his head heavily. "They were all wearing Mark # or #. I'm wearing Mark #," he said, as one might say, "I'm carrying the genuine Cross, not one of the balsa ones." But then his face brightened a little and he went on. "Of course the new improved features make it more than worth it... and you hardly feel it at all at night when you're lying down... and if you remember to talcum under it twice a day, no sores develop... at least not very big ones..." Backing away involuntarily, Gusterson felt something prod his right shoulderblade. Ripping open his coat, he convulsively plunged his hand under it and tore out Fay's belt-bag... and then set it down very gently on the top of a shallow cabinet and relaxed with the sigh of one who has escaped a great, if symbolic, danger. Then he remembered something Fay had mentioned. He straightened again. "Hey, you said it's got scanning and decision-making elements. That means your tickler thinks, even by your fancy standards. And if it thinks, it's conscious." "Gussy," Fay said wearily, frowning, "all sorts of things nowadays have SfisDM elements. Mail sorters, missiles, robot medics, high-style mannequins, just to name some of the Ms. They 'think,' to use that archiac word, but it's neither here nor there. And they're certainly not conscious." "Your tickler thinks," Gusterson repeated stubbornly, "just like I warned you it would. It sits on your shoulder, ridin' you like you was a pony or a starved St. Bernard, and now it thinks." "Suppose it does?" Fayyawned. "What of it?" He gave a rapid sinuous one-sided shrug that made it look for a moment as if his left arm had three elbows. It stuck in Gusterson's mind, for he had never seen Fay use such a gesture and he wondered where he'd picked it up. Maybe imitating a double-jointed Micro Finance chief? Fay yawned again and said, "Please, Gussy, don't disturb me for a minute or so." His eyes half closed. Gusterson studied Fay's sunken-cheeked face and the great puff of his shoulder cape. "Say, Fay," he asked in a soft voice after about five minutes, "are you meditating?" "Why, no," Fay responded, starting up and then stifling another yawn. "Just resting a bit. I seem to get more tired these days, somehow. You'll have to excuse me, Gussy. But what made you think of meditation?" "Oh, I just got to wonderin' in that direction," Gusterson said. "You see, when you first started to develop Tickler, it occurred to me that there was one thing about it that might be real good even if you did give it SDM elements. It's this: having a mech secretary to take charge of his obligations and routine in the real world might allow a man to slide into the other world, the world of thoughts and feelings and intuitions, and sort of ooze around in there and accomplish things. Know any of the people using Tickler that way, hey?" "Of course not," Fay denied with a bright incredulous laugh. "Who'd want to loaf around in an imaginary world and take a chance of missing out on what his tickler's doing? -- I mean, on what his tickler has in store for him -- what he's told his tickler to have in store for him." Ignoring Gusterson's shiver. Fay straightened up and seemed to brisken himself. "Ha, that little slump did me good. A tickler makes you rest, you know -- it's one of the great things about it. Pooh-Bah's kinder to me than I ever was to myself." He buttoned open a tiny refrigerator and took out two waxed cardboard cubes and handed one to Gusterson. "Martini? Hope you don't mind drinking from the carton. Cheers. Now, Gussy old pal, there are two matters I want to take up with you -- " "Hold it," Gusterson said with something of his old authority. "There's something I got to get off my mind first." He pulled the typed pages out of his inside pocket and straightened them. "I told you about these," he said. "I want you to read them before you do anything else. Here." Fay looked toward the pages and nodded, but did not take them yet. He lifted his hands to his throat and unhooked the clasp of his cape, then hesitated. "You wear that thing to hide the hump your tickler makes?" Gusterson filled in. "You got better taste than those other moles." "Not to hide it, exactly," Fay protested, "but just so the others won't be jealous. I wouldn't feel comfortable parading a freescanning decision-capable Mark # tickler in front of people who can't buy it -- until it goes on open sale at twenty-two fifteen tonight. Lot of shelterfolk won't be sleeping tonight. They'll be queued up to trade in their old tickler for a Mark # almost as good as Pooh-Bah." He started to jerk his hands apart, hesitated again with an oddly apprehensive look at the big man, then whirled off the cape. VI big gasp that he hiccuped. The right shoulder of Fay's jacket and shirt had been cut away. Thrusting up through the neatly hemmed hole was a silvery gray hump with a one-eyed turret atop it and two multi-jointed metal arms ending in little claws. It looked like the top half of a pseudo-science robot -- a squat evil child robot, Gusterson told himself, which had lost its legs in a railway accident -- and it seemed to him that a red fleck was moving around imperceptibly in the huge single eye. "I'll take that memo now," Fay said coolly, reaching out his hand. He caught the rustling sheets as they slipped from Gusterson's fingers, evened them up very precisely by tapping them on his knee... and then handed them over his shoulder to his tickler, which clicked its claws around either margin and then began rather swiftly to lift the top sheet past its single eye at a distance of about six inches. "The first matter I want to take up with you, Gussy," Fay began, paying no attention whatsoever to the little scene on his shoulder, " -- or warn you about, rather -- is the imminent ticklerization of schoolchildren, geriatrics, convicts and topsiders. At three zero zero tomorrow ticklers become mandatory for all adult shelterfolk. The mop-up operations won't be long in coming -- in fact, these days we find that the square root of the estimated time of a new development is generally the best time estimate. Gussy, I strongly advise you to start wearing a tickler now. And Daisy and your moppets. If you heed my advice, your kids will have the jump on your class. Transition and conditioning are easy, since Tickler itself sees to it." Pooh-Bah leafed the first page to the back of the packet and began lifting the second past his eye -- a little more swiftly than the first. "I've got a Mark # tickler all warmed up for you," Fay pressed, "and a shoulder cape. You won't feel one bit conspicuous." He noticed the direction of Gusterson's gaze and remarked, "Fascinating mechanism, isn't it? Of course # pounds are a bit oppressive, but then you have to remember it's only a way-station to free-floating Mark # or #." Pooh-Bah finished page two and began to race through page three. "But I wanted you to read it," Gusterson said bemusedly, staring. "Pooh-Bah will do a better job than I could," Fay assured him. "Get the gist without losing the chaff." "But dammit, it's all about him' Gusterson said a little more strongly. "He won't be objective about it." "A better job," Fay reiterated, "and more fully objective. PoohBah's set for full precis. Stop worrying about it. He's a dispassionate machine, not a fallible, emotionally disturbed human misled by the will-o'-the-wisp of consciousness. Second matter : Micro Systems is impressed by your contributions to Tickler and will recruit you as a senior consultant with a salary and thinking box as big as my own, family quarters to match. It's an unheard-of high start. Gussy, I think you'd be a fool -- " for silence, and his eyes got a listening look. Pooh-Bah had finished page six and was holding the packet motionless. After about ten seconds Fay's face broke into a big fake smile. He stood up, suppressing a wince, and held out his hand. "Gussy," he said loudly, "I am happy to inform you that all your fears about Tickler are so much thistledown. My word on it. There's nothing to them at all. PoohBah's precis, which he's just given to me, proves it." "Look," Gusterson said solemnly, "there's one thing I want you to do. Purely to humor an old friend. But I want you to do it. Read that memo yourself" "Certainly I will, Gussy," Fay continued in the same ebullient tones. "I'll read it -- " he twitched and his smile disappeared -- "a little later." "Sure," Gusterson said dully, holding his hand to his stomach. "And now if you don't mind. Fay, I'm goin' home. I feel just a bit sick. Maybe the ozone and the other additives in your shelter air are too heady for me. It's been years since I tramped through a pine forest." "But Gussy! You've hardly got here. You haven't even sat down. Have another martini. Have a seltzer pill. Have a whiff of oxy. Have a -- " "No, Fay, I'm going home right away. I'll think about the job offer. Remember to read that memo" "I will, Gussy, I certainly will. You know your way? The button takes you through the wall. By, now." He sat down abruptly and looked away. Gusterson pushed through the swinging door. He tensed himself for the step across onto the slowly-moving reverse ribbon. Then on a impulse he pushed ajar the swinging door and looked back inside. Fay was sitting as he'd left him, apparently lost in listless brooding. On his shoulder PoohBah was rapidly crossing and uncrossing its little metal arms, tearing the memo to smaller and smaller shreds. It let the scraps drift slowly toward the floor and oddly writhed its three-elbowed left arm... and then Gusterson knew from whom, or rather from what. Fay had copied his new shrug. toward the end of the second dog watch, he slipped aside from Daisy's questions and set the children laughing with a graphic enactment of his slidestanding technique and a story about getting his head caught in a thinking box built for a midget physicist. After supper he played with Imogene, lago and Claudius until it was their bedtime and thereafter was unusually attentive to Daisy, admiring her fading green stripes, though he did spend a while in the next apartment, where they stored their outdoor camping equipment. But the next morning he announced to the children that it was a holiday -- the Feast of St. Gusterson -- and then took Daisy into the bedroom and told her everything. When he'd finished she said, "This is something I've got to see for myself." Gusterson shrugged. "If you think you've got to. I say we should head for the hills right now. One thing I'm standing on: the kids aren't going back to school." "Agreed," Daisy said. "But, Gusterson, we've lived through a lot of things without leaving home altogether. We lived through the Everybody-Six-FeetUnderground-by-Christmas campaign and the Robot Watchdog craze, when you got your left foot half chewed off. We lived through the Venomous Bats and Indoctrinated Saboteur Rats and the Hypnotized Monkey Paratrooper scares. We lived through the Voice of Safety and Anti-Communist Somno-Instruction and Rightest Pills and Jet-Propelled Vigilantes. We lived through the Cold-Out, when you weren't supposed to turn on a toaster for fear its heat would be a target for prowl missiles and when people with fevers were unpopular. We lived through -- " Gusterson patted her hand. "You go below," he said. "Come back when you've decided this is different. Come back as soon as you can anyway. I'll be worried about you every minute you're down there." When she was gone -- in a green suit and hat to minimize or at least justify the effect of the faded stripes -- Gusterson doled out to the children provender and equipment for a camping expedition to the next floor. lago led them off in stealthy Indian file. Leaving the hall door open Gusterson got out his .# and cleaned and loaded it, meanwhile concentrating on a chess problem with the idea of confusing a hypothetical psionic monitor. By the time he had hid the revolver again he heard the elevator creaking back up. out her hat, looking as if she'd been concentrating on a chess problem for hours herself and just now given up. Her stripes seemed to have vanished; then Gusterson decided this was because her whole complexion was a touch green. She sat down on the edge of the couch and said without looking at him, "Did you tell me, Gusterson, that everybody was quiet and abstracted and orderly down below, especially the ones wearing ticklers, meaning pretty much everybody?" "I did," he said. "I take it that's no longer the case. What are the new symptoms?" She gave no indication. After some time she said, "Gusterson, do you remember the Dore illustrations to the Inierno? Can you visualize the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch with the hordes of proto-Freudian devils tormenting people all over the farmyard and city square? Did you ever see the Disney animations of Moussorgsky's witches' sabbath music? Back in the foolish days before you married me, did that drug-addict girl friend of yours ever take you to genuine orgy?" "As bad as that, hey?" She nodded emphatically and all of a sudden shivered violently. "Several shades worse," she said. "If they decide to come topside -- " She shot up. "Where are the kids?" "Upstairs campin' in the mysterious wilderness of the #st floor," Gusterson reassured her. 'X.et's leave 'em there until we're ready to -- " He broke off. They both heard the faint sound of thudding footsteps. "They're on the stairs," Daisy whispered, starting to move toward the open door. "But are they coming from up or down?" "It's just one person," judged Gusterson, moving after his wife. "Too heavy for one of the kids." The footsteps doubled in volume and came rapidly closer. Along with them there was an agonized gasping. Daisy stopped, staring fearfully at the open doorway. Gusterson moved past her. Then he stopped too. Fay stumbled into view and would have fallen on his face except he clutched both sides of the doorway halfway up. He was stripped to the waist. There was a little blood on his shoulder. His narrow chest was arching convulsively, the ribs standing out starkly, as he sucked in oxygen to replace what he'd burned up running up twenty flights. His eyes were wild. "They've taken over," he panted. Another gobbling breath, "Gone crazy." Two more gasps. "Gotta stop 'em." His eyes filmed. He swayed forward. Then Gusterson's big arms were around him and he was carrying him to the couch.  kitchen with a damp cool towel. Gusterson took it from her and began to mop Fay off. He sucked in his own breath as he saw that Fay's right ear was raw and torn. He whispered to Daisy, "Look at where the thing savaged him." The blood on Fay's shoulder came from his ear. Some of it stained a flush-skin plastic fitting that had two small valved holes in it and that puzzled Gusterson until he remembered that Moodmaster tied into the bloodstream. For a second he thought he was going to vomit. The dazed look slid aside from Fay's eyes. He was gasping less painfully now. He sat up, pushing the towel away, buried his face in his hands for a few seconds, then looked over the fingers at the two of them. "I've been living in a nightmare for the last week," he said in a taut small voice, "knowing the thing had come alive and trying to pretend to myself that it hadn't. Knowing it vas taking charge of me more and more. Having it whisper in my ear, over and over again, in a cracked little rhyme that I could only hear every hundredth time, 'Day by day, in every way, you're learning to listen... and obey. Day by day -- ' " His voice started to go high. He pulled it down and continued harshly, "I ditched it this morning when I showered. It let me break contact to do that. It must have figured it had complete control of me, mounted or dismounted. I think it's telepathic, and then it did some, well, rather unpleasant things to me late last night. But I pulled together my fears and my will and I ran for it. The slidewalks were chaos. The Mark # ticklers showed some purpose, though I couldn't tell you what, but as far as I could see the Mark #s and #s were just cootching their mounts to death -- Chinese feather torture. Giggling, gasping, choking... gales of mirth. People are dying of laughter... ticklers!... the irony of it! It was the complete lack of order and sanity and that let me get topside. There were things I saw -- " Once again his voice went shrill. He clapped his hand to his mouth and rocked back and forth on the couch. Gusterson gently but firmly laid a hand on his good shoulder. "Steady," he said. "Here, swallow this." Fay shoved aside the short brown drink. "We've got to stop them," he cried. "Mobilize the topsiders -- contact the wilderness patrols and manned satellites -- pour ether in the tunnel airpumps -- invent and crashmanufacture missiles that will home on ticklers without harmVenus -- dope the shelter water supply -- do something! Gussy, you don't realize what people are going through down there every second." "I think they're experiencing the ultimate in outer-directedness," Gusterson said gruffly. "Have you no heart?" Gay demanded. His eyes widened, as if he were seeing Gusterson for the first time. Then, accusingly, pointing a shaking finger: "You invented the tickler, George Gusterson! It's all your fault! You've got to do something about it!" Before Gusterson could retort to that, or begin to think of a reply, or even assimilate the full enormity of Fay's statement, he was grabbed from behind and frog-marched away from Fay and something that felt remarkably like the muzzle of a large-caliber gun was shoved in the small of his back.  burst a huge crowd of people had entered the room from the hall -- eight, to be exact. But the weirdest thing about them to Gusterson was that from the first instant he had the impression that only one mind had entered the room and that it did not reside in any of the eight persons, even though he recognized three of them, but in something that they were carrying. Several things contributed to this impression. The eight people all had the same blank expression -- watchful yet empty-eyed. They all moved in the same slithery crouch. And they had all taken off their shoes. Perhaps, Gusterson thought wildly, they believed he and Daisy ran a Japanese flat. Gusterson was being held by two burly women, one of them quite pimply. He considered stamping on her toes, but just at that moment the gun dug in his back with a corkscrew movement. The man holding the gun on him was Fay's colleague Davidson. Some yards beyond Fay's couch, Kester was holding a gun on Daisy, without digging it into her, while the single strange man holding Daisy herself was doing so quite decorously -- a circumstance which afforded Gusterson minor relief, since it made him feel less guilty about not going berserk. Two more strange men, one of them in purple lounging pajamas, the other in the gray uniform of a slidewalk inspector, had grabbed Fay's skinny upper arms, one on either side, and were lifting him to his feet, while Fay was struggling with such desperate futility and gibbering so pitifully that Gusterson momentarily had second thoughts about the moral imperative to go berserk when menaced by hostile force. But again the gun dug into him with a twist. Approaching Fay face-on was the third Micro-man Gusterson had met yesterday -- Hazen. It was Hazen who was carrying -- quite reverently or solemnly -- or at any rate very carefully the object that seemed to Gusterson to be the mind of the little storm troop presently desecrating the sanctity of his own individual home. All of them were wearing ticklers, of course -- the three Micromen the heavy emergent Mark #s with their clawed and jointed arms and monocular cephalic turrets, the rest lower-numbered Marks of the sort that merely made Richard-the-Third humps under clothing. The object that Hazen was carrying was the Mark # tickler Gusterson had seen Fay wearing yesterday. Gusterson was sure it was Pooh-Bah because of its air of command, and because he would have sworn on a mountain of Bibles that he recognized the red fleck lurking in the back of its single eye. And Pooh-Bah alone had the aura of full conscious thought. Pooh-Bah alone had mana. legless child robot with dangling straps bossing -- apparently by telepathic power -- not only three objects of its own kind and five close primitive relatives, but also eight human beings... and in addition throwing into a state of twitching terror one miserable, thin-chested, half-crazy research-and-development director. Pooh-Bah pointed a claw at Fay. Fay's handlers dragged him forward, still resisting but more feebly now, as if half-hypnotized or at least cowed. Gusterson grunted an outraged, "Hey!" and automatically struggled a bit, but once more the gun dug in. Daisy shut her eyes, then firmed her mouth and opened them again to look. Seating the tickler on Fay's shoulder took a little time, because two blunt spikes in its bottom had to be fitted into the valved holes in the flush-skin plastic disk. When at last they plunged home Gusterson felt very sick indeed -- and then even more so, as the tickler itself poked a tiny pellet on a fine wire into Fay's ear. The next moment Fay had straightened up and motioned his handlers aside. He tightened the straps of his tickler around his chest and under his armpits. He held out a hand and someone gave him a shoulderless shirt and coat. He slipped into them smoothly, Pooh-Bah dexterously using its little claws to help put its turret and body through the neatly hemmed holes. The small storm troop looked at Fay with deferential expectation. He held still for a moment, as if thinking, and then walked over to Gusterson and looked him in the face and again held still. Fay's expression was jaunty on the surface, agonized underneath. Gusterson knew that he wasn't thinking at all, but only listening for instructions from something that was whispering on the very threshold of his inner ear. "Gussy, old boy," Fay said, twitching a depthless grin, "I'd be very much obliged if you'd answer a few simple questions." His voice was hoarse at first but he swallowed twice and corrected that. "What exactly did you have in mind when you invented ticklers? What exactly are they supposed to be?" "Why, you miserable -- " Gusterson began in a kind of confused horror, then got hold of himself and said curtly, "They were supposed to be mech reminders. They were supposed to record memoranda and -- " Fay held up a palm and shook his head and again listened for a space. Then, "That's how ticklers were supposed to be of use to humans," he said. "I don't mean that at all. I mean how ticklers were supposed to be of use to themselves. Surely you had some notion." Fay wet his lips. "If it's any help," he added, "keep in mind that it's not Fay who's asking this question, but Pooh-Bah." Gusterson hesitated. He had the feeling that every one of the eight dual beings in the room was hanging on his answer and that something was boring into his mind and turning over his next thoughts and peering at and under them before he had a chance to scan them himself. Pooh-Bah's eye was like a red searchlight. "Go on," Fay prompted. "What were ticklers supposed to be -- for themselves?" "Nothin'," Gusterson said softly. "Nothin' at all." pointment well up in the room -- and with it a touch of something like panic. This time Fay listened for quite a long while. "I hope you don't mean that, Gussy," he said at last very earnestly. "I mean, I hope you hunt deep and find some ideas you forgot, or maybe never realized you had at the time. Let me put it to you differently. What's the place of ticklers in the natural scheme of things? What's their aim in life? Their special reason? Their genius? Their final cause? What gods should ticklers worship?" But Gunderson was already shaking his head. He said, "I don't know anything about that at all." Fay sighed and gave simultaneously with Pooh-Bah the now-familiar triple-joined shrug. Then the man briskened himself. "I guess that's as far as we can get right now," he said. "Keep thinking, Gussy. Try to remember something. You won't be able to leave your apartment -- I'm setting guards. If you want to see me, tell them. Or just think -- In due course you'll be questioned further in any case. Perhaps by special methods. Perhaps you'll be ticklerized. That's all. Come on, everybody, let's get going." The pimply woman and her pal let go of Gusterson, Daisy's man loosed his decorous hold, Davidson and Kester sidled away with an eye behind them and the little storm troop trudged out. Fay looked back in the doorway. "I'm sorry. Gussy," he said and for a moment his old self looked out of his eyes. "I wish I could -- " A claw reached for his ear, a spasm of pain crossed his face, he stiffened and marched off. The door shut. Gusterson took two deep breaths that were close to angry sobs. Then, still breathing stentorously, he stamped into the bedroom. "What -- ?" Daisy asked, looking after him. He came back carrying his .# and headed for the door. "What are you up to?" she demanded, knowing very well. "I'm going to blast that iron monkey off Fay's back if it's the last thing I do!" She threw her arms around him. "Now lemme go," Gusterson growled. "I gotta be a man one time anyway." As they struggled for the gun, the door opened noiselessly, Davidson slipped in and deftly snatched the weapon out of their hands before they realized he was there. He said nothing, only smiled at them and shook his head in sad reproof as he went out. knew they were all psionic," he said softly. "I just got out of control now -- that last look Fay gave us." He touched Daisy's arm. "Thanks, kid." He walked to the glass wall and looked out desultorily. After a while he turned and said, "Maybe you better be with the kids, hey? I imagine the guards'll let you through." Daisy shook her head. "The kids never come home until supper. For the next few hours they'll be safer without me." Gusterson nodded vaguely, sat down on the couch and propped his chin on the base of his palm. After a while his brow smoothed and Daisy knew that the wheels had started to turn inside and the electrons to jump around -- except that she reminded herself to permanently cross out those particular figures of speech from her vocabulary. After about half an hour Gusterson said softly, "I think the ticklers are so psionic that it's as if they just had one mind. If I were with them very long I'd start to be part of that mind. Say something to one of them and you say it to all." Fifteen minutes later: "They're not crazy, they're just newborn. The ones that were creating a cootching chaos downstairs were like babies kickin' their legs and wavin' their eyes, tryin' to see what their bodies could do. Too bad their bodies are us." Ten minutes more: "I gotta do something about it. Fay's right. It's all my fault. He's just the apprentice; I'm the old sorcerer himself." Five minutes more, gloomily: "Maybe it's man's destiny to build live machines and then bow out of the cosmic picture. Except the ticklers need us, dammit, just like nomads need horses," Another five minutes: "Maybe somebody could dream up a purpose in life for ticklers. Even a religion -- the First Church of Pooh-Bah Tickler. But I hate selling other people spiritual ideas and that'd still leave ticklers parasitic on humans..." As he murmured those last words Gusterson's eyes got wide as a maniac's and a big smile reached for his ears. He stood up and faced himself toward the door. "What are you intending to do now?" Daisy asked flatly. "I'm merely goin' out an' save the world," he told her. "I may be back for supper and I may not."  the wall against which he'd been resting himself and his twostone tickler and moved to block the hall. But Gusterson simply walked up to him. He shook his hand warmly and looked his tickler full in the eye and said in a ringing voice, "Ticklers should have bodies of their own!" He paused and then added casually, "Come on, let's visit your boss." Davidson listened for instructions and then nodded. But he watched Gusterson warily as they walked down the hall. In the elevator Gusterson repeated his message to the second guard, who turned out to be the pimply woman, now wearing shoes. This time he added, "Ticklers shouldn't be tied to the frail bodies of humans, which need a lot of thoughtful supervision and drug-injecting and can't even fly." Crossing the park, Gusterson stopped a hump-backed soldier and informed him, "Ticklers gotta cut the apron string and snap the silver cord and go out in the universe and find their own purposes." Davidson and the pimply woman didn't interfere. They merely waited and watched and then led Gusterson on. On the escaladder he told someone, "It's cruel to tie ticklers to slow-witted snaily humans when ticklers can think and live... ten thousand times as fast," he finished, plucking the figure from the murk of his unconscious. By the time they got to the bottom, the message had become, "Ticklers should have a planet of their own!" They never did catch up with Fay, although they spent two hours skimming around on slidewalks, under the subterranean stars, pursuing rumors of his presence. Clearly the boss tickler (which was how they thought of Pooh-bah) led an energetic life. Gusterson continued to deliver his message to all and sundry at #-second intervals. Toward the end he found himself doing it in a dreamy and forgetful way. His mind, he decided, was becoming assimilated to the communal telepathic mind of the ticklers. It did not seem to matter at the time. After two hours Gusterson realized that he and his guides were becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly purposeful -- at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest of a mind far above. The flow was topside. All the slidewalks seemed to lead to the concourses and the escaladders. Gusterson found himself part of a human stream moving into the tickler factory adjacent to his apartment -- or another factory very much like it. warenesses were dimmed. It was as if a bigger mind were doing the remembering for him and it were permissible and even mandatory for him to dream his way along. He knew vaguely that days were passing. He knew he had work of a sort: at one time he was bringing food to gaunteyed tickler-mounted humans working feverishly in a production line -- human hands and tickler claws working together in a blur of rapidity on silvery mechanisms that moved along jumpily on a great belt; at another he was sweeping piles of metal scraps and garbage down a gray corridor. Two scenes stood out a little more vividly. A windowless wall had been knocked out for twenty feet. There was blue sky outside, its light almost hurtful, and a drop of many stories. A file of humans were being processed. When one of them got to the head of the file his (or her) tickler was ceremoniously unstrapped from his shoulder and welded onto a silvery cask with smoothly pointed ends. The result was something that looked -- at least in the case of the Mark # ticklers -- like a stubby silver submarine, child size. It would hum gently, lift off the floor and then fly slowly out through the big blue gap. Then the next tickler-ridden human would step forward for processing. The second scene was in a park, the sky again blue, but big and high with an argosy of white clouds. Gusterson was lined up in a crowd of humans that stretched as far as he could see, row on irregular row. Martial music was playing. Overhead hovered a flock of little silver submarines, lined up rather more orderly in the air than the humans were on the ground. The music rose to a heart-quickening climax. The tickler nearest Gusterson gave (as if to say, "And now -- who knows?") a triple-jointed shrug that stung his memory. Then the ticklers took off straight up on their new and shining bodies. They became a flight of silver geese... of silver midges... and the humans around Gusterson lifted a ragged cheer... That scene marked the beginning of the return of Gusterson's mind and memory. He shuffled around for a bit, spoke vaguely to three or four people he recalled from the dream days, and then headed for home and supper -- three weeks late, and as disoriented and emaciated as a bear coming out of hibernation,  having dinner with Daisy and Gusterson. The cocktails had been poured and the children were playing in the next apartment. The transparent violet walls brightened, then gloomed, as the sun dipped below the horizon. Gusterson said, "I see where a spaceship out beyond the orbit of Mars was holed by a tickler. I wonder where the little guys are headed now?" Fay started to give a writhing left-armed shrug, but stopped himself with a grimace. "Maybe out of the solar system altogether," suggested Daisy, who'd recently dyed her hair fireengine red and was wearing red leotards. "They got a weary trip ahead of them," Gusterson said, "unless they work out a hyper-Einsteinian drive on the way." Fay grimaced again. He was still looking rather peaked. He said plaintively, "Haven't we heard enough about ticklers for a while?" "I guess so," Gusterson agreed, "but I get to wondering about the little guys. They were so serious and intense about everything. I never did solve their problem, you know. I just shifted it onto other shoulders than ours. No joke intended," he hurried to add. Fay forbore to comment. "By the way, Gussy," he said, "have you heard anything from the Red Cross about that world-saving medal I nominated you for? I know you think the whole concept of world-saving medals is ridiculous, especially when they started giving them to all heads of state who didn't start atomic wars while in office, but -- " "Nary a peep," Gusterson told him. "I'm not proud. Fay. I could use a few world-savin' medals. I'd start a flurry in the old-gold market. But I don't worry about those things. I don't have time to. I'm busy these days thinkin' up a bunch of new inventions." "Gussy!" Fay said sharply, his face tightening in alarm, "Have you forgotten your promise?" " 'Course not, Fay. My new inventions aren't for Micro or any other firm. They're just a legitimate part of my literary endeavors. Happens my next insanity novel is goin' to be about a mad inventor." Coming soon -- First in a new series of paperbound science-fiction books. Two by Lester Dei Rey A double portion of first-rate adventure science fiction by one of the greatest writers in the field -- never before in print in paperbound book form -- watch your newsstands! fearsome the aliens were. Terrible was his plight. But Dr. Gofdpepper fought on, confident in the ultimate triumph of American Dental Sciencef Dandy paced the floor of the office of his ranch at Tishomingo, the showplace of the State of Texas (and hence not to be confused with any ranch which might be located in or at Tishomingo, Oklahoma), in a manner which can only be described as restless. From time to time he sought, like Boethius, the consolations of philosophy -- using this word in its former interpretation as meaning "science" -- from his bookshelf. But for once, the writings of Crowe, Holwager, Barrett, Shields Oliver -- for once the writings of these great scientific pioneers failed either to console or to absorb him. His burden was heavy. His need was great. His pace was restless. Some distance away, exactly how much is unnecessary to state in terms of exact precision, all things (as the great Einstein has taught us) being relative: what counts as a long way in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations is a mere jaunt in Texas... some distance away, to continue, a pretty and personable young person of the female persuasion was weeping bitterly. Great tears rolled from her large eyes and down her soft cheeks. "But Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" she pled and implored. "None of that is Xittle JimmyV fault. Why can't we get married, Daddy, Daddy, please?" Her name was Mary Jane Crawford. The man whom she addressed in terms of filial allegiance was her father, Dr. Clement (or "Clem") Crawford, a landowner and husbandman; in other words, a rancher; besides holding the eclat of a degree in Dental Medicine. The question instantly and quite properly arises, why was this last fact not mentioned first, and the answer is that Dr. "Clem" Crawford -- or "Doc," a familiarity and diminutive which would give justified offense in large centers of populous habitation such as cities, but which in rural areas may be, and often is, used without offense -- "Doc Clem" Crawford had for some years given over and retired from active practice of this highly important profession, and had since devoted his time to agriculture and its allied crafts. "Mary Jane," he said, somewhat testily, "I wish you'd quit all that bawling. I didn't say you couldn't marry 'Little Jimmy', I only said you couldn't marry him now. It's not his fault that 'Big Jimmy' got himself into this pickle. But all he's got in this world is his share of whatever his daddy's got, and it looks like there's a powerful big chance his daddy might lose whatever he's got. I just couldn't hardly bear to think of my little girl having to rough it, cooped up in some little old ten-room house. 'Course, you could go right on living here and 'Little Jimmy' could work for me. But no. He's just as bullheaded as his daddy." Mary Jane went off, disconsolate and unhappy. Her father continued to sit in his chair, as if brooding over his daughter's affairs, but the fact is that he had unwelcome worries of his own. TN the vast kitchen of the Crawford ranch-house a comely woman of middle age was engaged in baking pies of fruits and other delicious comestibles. This was Mrs. Doothit, the housekeeper, a widow-woman, as the local vernacular idiom has it. There had been a time when she felt that she had reason to believe an interest in her existed on the part of her employer. Dr. Clement ("Clem") Crawford -- who was a widower -- which was separate and apart from such considerations as her flaky and juicy pies, her toothsome steaks, her savory coffee, and delicious roasts... though by no means diminished by them. During this time she thought she was aware of a certain look in her employer's eye, and a certain tone in his voice. But that time had passed, and with it had passed much of Mrs. Doothit's interest in her work. She had even been considering taking a position as housemother in an establishment for underprivileged girls that was maintained in a suburb of Dallas by the Southern Baptist Convention. But she put off making this decision from day to day. Upstairs, in the spacious suite of rooms generously put at his disposal by his host, Cle(Ret), was yet another of the dramatis personae, or cast of characters, of the narration which we now peruse, namely and videlicet one Morris Goldpepper, Doctor of Dental Surgery, inventor of the Goldpepper Bridge and the Goldpepper Crown, and perfector of the Semi-Retractable Clasp which bears his name. He is as it were, the Livy, Macrobius or Gibbon of this annal. (Modesty, epitomized by my automatic shrinking from the spotlight, obliges me -- with this one exception -- to cleave to the Third Person previously and henceforth.) The suite of rooms was a veritable apartment of its own, consisting of a sleeping chamber, a lounge, an office, a kitchen, a bar (which Dr. Goldpepper's wellknown temperate habits rendered about as useful as certain mammalian appurtenances on a boar). a games-room and what had previously been another sleeping chamber but which had been converted at no small cost and effort into a laboratory for the fabrication and synthesis of dental prosthetic devices. All this had been done out of pure generosity, affection and respect by Dr. Crawford on behalf of his old Navy Dental Corps "buddy". Dr. Goldpepper. It is not to be thought that Dr. Goldpepper had surrendered occupancy of his bachelor apartment in the Hotel Davenport, nor yet of his laboratory on Broadway in the Upper West #s, in order to live the life of a country squire in the sylvan or (considering the sparseness of trees) semi-sylvan fastnesses of John C. Calhoun County, Texas. The facts of the matter, not altogether pleasant, are that he was undergoing the long and delicate process of recuperation intendant upon the aftermaths of his rescue from the grasp and clutches of the malevolent inhabitants of a distant planet in another part of the Galaxy, the captivation and captivity whereon has already been recorded in these pages; anent which, enough -- no point in chewing a twice-told tale. At any rate. Dr. Goldpepper rested in his luxuriously appointed guest quarters. He took long walks around the ranch, delighted in the verdant greenery of its crops and the rolling undulation of its hills. And, for the first time since his boyhood, he recommenced the gentle piscatorial craft or pastime of angling. The M Bar L Ranch (named after the Honorable Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, sometime President of the Republic of Texas, and a boyhood idol of "Doc Clem") was located on the Little Comanche River. To those used to the Majestic Hudson and the navigable East, the application "river" to what others might well deem a mere creek is at first difficult. However that may be, the waters of the Little Comanche teemed with trout, bass and other edible species of fish. Dr. Goldpepper considered himself too impatient to undertake mastery of dryor even wet-fly fishing, but his efficient host kept his bait box supplied with worms of a most surprising stature or length, and, thus aided, the guest seldom failed to come home with something in his creel besides air. our story opened that Dr. Goldpepper returned from a circumambulation of the scenery and was told by his host that someone was waiting to see him. "Waiting to see me." was his surprised rejoinder. "Who?" " don't know, 'Morry,' " said Doctor "Clem." "Some little old man." Put completely off guard by his awareness of the Texan habit of placing the words little and old before almost any odd noun -- a "little old baby," "a little old elephant" or "brontosaurus" -- Dr. Goldpepper was therefore astonished to see that the personage waiting for him was literally little and -- to all outward presages -- old. But in another fraction of a second he recognized the typical blue gums in the individual's mouth, open in a fawning sort of false, deceitful smile, and recognized himself to be in the presence of a member of the hideous captive he had been on far-off Upsilon Centauri (as he had with wry humor denominated it to himself, to avoid becoming embittered.) Startled, Dr. Goldpepper uttered a cry of surprise. Inadvertently he stepped behind "Doc" Crawford, who inquired, " 'Morry,' what in the Hell is the matter?" Goldpepper lashed out fearlessly at the invader with his fishing-rod, but the diminutive alien evaded the blow and groveled on the floor, crying, "Have kindness. Merciful Goldpepper!" and attempted to place his head beneath Goldpepper's foot. Once it was realized that this was a sign of submission, indeed of homage or obeisance, and not some sort of wrestling hold, the latter at once became calm. "What is the meaning of this outrageous intrusion?" Dr. Goldpepper demanded, sternly and outraged. "Is it your intention to abduct me yet another time, as if I hadn't had enough tsuris already?" "Assist, assist. Benevolent Goldpepper!" the alien wailed as he writhed on a floor-rug made from the pelts of fifty-four coyotes shot by the owner of the M Bar L. "Forgive, Great Dentist of the Ages!" Seizing the unwelcome one by the scruff of his collar while he was still attempting his act of vasselage. Dr. Crawford inquired, in some amazement, "Do you mean to tell me, 'Morry,' that this little old thing was one of the gang that kidnapped you?" "It was not by violence, but by subterfuge," said the erstwhile victim, wearily. "And I don't care to dwell on the subject. Ask him to leave." " 'Ask' him?!" Dr. Crawford exclaimed with an oath, opening the door and flinging the intruder out with some measure of violence. He then summoned one of his employees, a tall, dark and ugly man with only one eye, known as 'Ojito' Gonzales, and on whose head there was declared to be in the State of Chihuahua (or it might be Sonora) an unofficial reward of ten thousand pesos. He enjoined the Mexican not to allow the extraterrestrial upon the premises again under pain of severe displeasure. Much shaken by these events, Dr. Goldfellow allowed himself to be persuaded to take a small glass of Bourbon whiskey, and Mrs. Doothit made him some strong coffee. by these untoward events had yet to die down, a sound of an automobile was heard outside in the driveway. Looking out the window, those inside perceived the well-known palomino Cadillac of James E. (for Elphonsus) "Big Jimmy" Dandy. Seated with him was his son "Little Jimmy," a perfect example of hyperbole, or exaggeration not intended to deceive, for it was obvious to the naked eye that "Little" Jimmy was at least six feet six inches tall, and had an open and pleasant face. It was a source of sorrow to Dr. Morris Goldpepper that circumstances beyond his control were providing impediments to the marriage of this young man to Mary Jane Crawford, of whom he was very fond (in an avuncular way, she referring to him as "Uncle Morry" on occasions of conversational intimacy.) The young man waved to them and then walked off with his fiancee, who had run out to meet him. His father looked at them, shook his head and walked slowly into the house. "Howdy, 'Clem,' " he said, in greeting. "Howdy, 'Doc' " -- referring to guest, not host. "Anything new, 'Jimmy?' " Dr. Crawford inquired. As Mr. Dandy slowly shook his head, Dr. Crawford pressed his lips together. Then he rose. "I've got to tend to some business down at the south forty," he said. "You and Morry entertain one another, now. 'Jimmy,' you and your boy stay for dinner, now, hear?" And he disappeared. Plainly, he did not desire an occasion to arise for him and his friend to be alone together, doubtless for fear the subject of the postponed nuptials would be broached. Doing his best to make conversation, Dr. Goldpepper inquired, "I wonder why people always talk about the south forty. How is it that a person seldom if ever hears mention of the north forty?" But Mr. Dandy didn't rise to this intriguing ethno-ecological problem. He merely shook his head in a bemused fashion and said, "G -- damn if I know, 'Doc.' " And then he sighed. He was a typical Texas-type rancher: tall, reddened face, boots. Stetson. He sighed again, looking at a mounted portion of a white-tailed deer which Dr. Crawford had, in rather questionable humor, placed over the mantle of the giant fireplace. "Mr. Dandy -- " " 'Jimmy,' 'Doc.' " " 'Jimmy' -- forgive me for intruding on your own personal emotional difficulties, but if you won't mind -- after all, although not a physician in the common sense of the word -- let alone a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychoanalyst (whether Freudianly oriented or otherwise), still, in the long years of professional duty before I commenced the more solitary work of dental prosthesis, in my civilian practice as well as the United States Navy Dental Corps, I have had patients confide in me all manner of difficulties, and -- " Mr. Dandy groaned aloud. " 'Doc,' " he said, "do you know anybody who wants to buy fifteen iod of silence. Dr. Morris Goldpepper was convinced that the man's mind had snapped, thus causing a mental abberation of no mean proportion. "How do you mean, 'fifteen million earthworms' ? " he inquired, cautiously. Delusions of the most multifarious kinds he had met with before, but this was something new. "It's all the fault of that G -- damn Federal Government," said Mr. Dandy. "If it wasn't for Them, I'd never of gotten in this here predicament. The least they could do is buy 'm off me. They buy surplus wheat, don't they? Butter? Cotton? Goober peas? Why, do you know that last year the Federal Government spent over up the price of lard?" "What!" exclaimed Dr. Goldpepper, stung to the quick. "With my money?" Mr. "Big Jimmy" Dandy smacked his right fist into his left palm. "Yes, sir, with your money! And with my money! But can I get some of it back when I need it? No, sir. Them and their G -- damn flood control! Why, when I think of it -- " Wistfully, Dr. Morris Goldpepper thought of the perfectly equipped laboratory upstairs, with its neat array of wires of teeth, shellac trays, plaster, dental stone, denture trays, casting ovens and machines, Baldor lathes and Bunsen burners. Here he could have been at work on his favorite project, developing the Goldpepper Cap, instead of listening to the disjointing babblings of some backwoods anti-Federalist. He sighed. "What is the precise or even approximate connection," he inquired, "between governmental projects for flood control, and the sale or purchase of earthworms?" The rawboned, rugged rancher looked at him ruefully. 'That's right," he said. "You're not from around here. You wouldn't know. Well, 'Doc,' the Federal Government was supposed to start this here flood control project of building dams along the Little Comanche, Big Comanche, Middle Comanche, Muddy Tom, Clear Tom and Bullhead River Valleys, which would provide twentyseven new lakes. Now, you know, 'Doc,' lakes are pretty scarce in this part of Texas. I don't suppose there's more than one or two a man couldn't, uh, spit across, with a favorable wind behind him. "So you can imagine what twenty-seven new lakes would mean. Twenty-seven lakes!" "Hmm," said Dr. Morris Goldpepper thoughtfully. Every fisherman in Texas, Mr. "Big Jimmy" declared enthusiastically, would flock to the new Lakes Area, to say nothing of multitudes from other states. It would be the biggest thing since the discovery of oil. "So naturally," he said, "I looked to increase my stock." "Your stock?" "Yes. On my ranch." Dr. Goldpepper, who had been thinking in terms of mutual funds, common and preferred, a subject about which he knew little or nothing, not being a speculator by nature, chuckled gently. "I see," he said. "Black Angus? Santa Gertrudis? Brahmas?" -- terms he had acquired from his host. Clement ("Clem") Crawford, D.D.M. (Ret). "You planned to sell meat to these visiting tourists? Barbecue? Hamburgers?" Mr. Dandy cast a most peculiar look upon him. "Do you mean to say, 'Doc,' " he inquired, "that you don't know what kind of critters I raise on my ranch?" In the embarrassed silence which followed they could hear the two young people who were walking by outside. Mary Jane was sobbing all over "Little Jimmy's" silk shirt and had soaked it to a transparency. He was patting her shoulders with his huge hands and saying, "Now, Honey. Now, Honey." "Er -- what kind?" "In Texas, 'Doc,' when they say 'Jim Dandy,' they mean earthworms. And when they say 'earthworms,' they mean 'Jim Dandy.' Simultaneous terms, sir. Simultaneous terms. I started out with one worm tub twenty-five years ago and now I've got the largest worm ranch in the State of Texas! And that means in the world. One square mile of worm pits, 'Doc' -- think of that. One square mile of worm sheds, worm tanks and worm boxes." He gazed into the far distances, a proud and dreamy look on his seamed face. "Earl B. Shields -- you've heard of Earl B. Shields, everybody's heard of Earl B. Shields -- Earl B. Shields devotes two whole chapters to me in Commercial Earthworm Raising. George H. Holwager's Bigger and Better Red Worms has fifteen illustrations of my ranch. Calls me 'a model for all progressive worm ranchers to follow!' What do you think of that? Barrett, Oliver, they all refer to me, yes, sir." Then the look of exaltation vanished from his rugged features. "But I raised my sights too far," he said. "It was the mere thought of them twenty-seven lakes and the folks flocking to all ofm that set me off. What a market for bait worms! And me setting right here in the middle of it, astride the main highway! I advertised, took whole pages in the National Worm Rancher, offered top prices -- eight dollars per five hundred for Giants, five dollars per five hundred for Mediums and four dollars per five hundred for Run-of-the Pits. Offered purchase agreement guarantees for three years ahead..." In order to house his new stock, the enthusiastic rancher had erected new buildings. In order to pay for them, he had borrowed. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! (As Samuel Johnson, L#.D. (Oxon.) called it.) Alas for ambition! The Federal Government, in the name of Economy, had canceled the flood control project for the area including the Little Comanche, Big Comanche, Middle Comanche, Muddy Tom, Clear Tom and Bullhead riverine regions -- thus leaving "Big Jimmy" Dandy of the Jim Dandy Earthworm Ranch holding, as it were, the bag. What right (he demanded) had the Federal Government to come messing things up in Texas with Economy? If Texans had wanted Economy (he declared) they'd have stayed a Republic. "And so here I am," he asseverin my pits, and my fegular markets can't take no more than before you a ruined man. My hopes are blasted, my lands are mortgaged and it looks as if 'Little Jimmy' and Mary Jane won't be able to get married for years and years, because I just know my boy wouldn't break his daddy's heart by taking on the responsibility and expense of a wife before his daddy's debts were paid off down to the last copper penny. I'd blow my brains out if I thought otherwise, and he knows it; yes, he does. "Just the thought of all them hungry beauties crawling and wigling in my worm pits, and no market a-tall for'm, makes me feel raw and miserable in the pit of my stomach. I wonder if Miz Doothit baked any sweet potato pie lately. Though I'll take rhubarb-pecan if she hasn't." Doctor Morris Goldpepper declined an invitation to join the rancher in the kitchen, and, on the terminologically inexact plea of a headache, withdrew to take another long walk in the country. Goldpepper mused upon the problem of the Goldpepper Cap, for so many long years his perpetual Work In Progress -- should it be, for example, reticulated or non-reticulated? -- while simultaneously with another part of his mind he brooded over the question of "Big Jimmy," "Little Jimmy" and Mary Jane. Almost before he realized it he found himself upon a sort of a high mound or hillock, from whence he had a view of much of the property belonging to his friend Dr. Crawford. Everywhere the green verdure grew -- except on the hillock, which was dusty and arid and nourished (if that is not too strong a word) only a handful of sickly and economically valueless weeds. A scrabbling sort of noise caught his attention, and he turned to observe the identical alien from Upsilon Centauri who had earlier been ejected from the property, in the current act of kneeling and pouring handfuls of dust on his head with both hands. "Abject I am, Great Goldpepper," he wined. "Abasing myself before you in humility I am. On behalf of my people apology offering, I am. Forgive, forgive. Compassionate Goldpepper!" At first Doctor Morris Goldpepper resolved to sell his life dearly. But the thought occurred to him that this creature from another galactic quadrant might just conceivably be telling the truth. Furthermore, his curiosity was piqued. "What are you doing here?" he inquired. "On the terms of the peace treaty signed between your planet, the American Dental Association and the Waterfront Workers Union (acting through their representative, Mr. Albert Annapollo, and the Longshoremen's Dental Health Plan -- who acted as our shock troops -- I was to be released from the captivity wherein I toiled making false teeth to enable your naturally toothless race to pose as Earthmen; and those of you on this planet were to leave instanta, on pain of having your planet's water fluoridated without mercy! Therefore I must beg to inquire what you think you are doing here?" "The slightest trace of fluorine to us instant death is, Life-loving Goldpepper," the alien sniveled. "Have ruth!" Touched despite himself, Dr. Goldpepper magnanimously directed him to speak without fear. This the non-terrestrian lifeform (his race had two hearts, and six distinct and articulate digits on each hand and foot) proceeded to do. "Since you from us taken were, great calamity upon us has come, Auspicious Goldpepper," he moaned. "Assist, assist!" "What seems to be the trouble?" "Overpopulation." Somewhat stiffly, Dr. Goldpepper pointed out that he was not Margaret Sanger. "Malnutrition! The soil of our home world for cycles, sickening has been. Woe, woe, woe! Our stricken planet aid. Scientific Goldpepper!" In a precis, or nutshell, the story he told was that, as a result of some curious condition of their planet's soil itself, the slith crop, source of their staple gelatinous food, had failed by forty per cent, and was still failing. Purts, the prime source of gruel, had dropped to a mere twenty per cent of normal; and as for sneet, kutch and zooky, the nutritive elements of which were scantier, it was doubtful if the crops would reach maturity. The soil chemists of Upsilon Centauri, who were as advanced, probably, as our own, had pronounced themselves baffled. Large areas had been sprayed with Kz. Pf. Kz. to no avail, and larger ones irrigated with snurg without the slightest results. "Once our whole planet like that looked," the spokesman wailed. "Now, like this it is." He gestured from the greenery on all sides to the sterility of the hill, or undulation, on which they stood; and he stooped to cast more dust on his head. As Doctor Goldpepper followed his gestures, he observed one of the ranch-hands coming their way, and indicated, by waving his hand, that he desired this man to come up. " 'Doc,' seens you're here," the man said, coming up to him, "I got thishyere tush that's been givin me Hell, my face is all swoll up, and I been livin mostly on beans an beer. See?" And he obtruded a dusty finger into his mouth to indicate the offending canine. "Come to the ranch-house when you can, where I have my instruments, and I'll take a look at it," said Dr. Goldpepper. "Meanwhile, if you will pardon my curiosity, why is this particular hill so desolate, compared to what I might call the lushness of the rest of the ranch?" The man withdrew his finger, sucked meditatively on the tooth and then said, "Why, how the land looks hyere, that's how all thishyear land use ta look, twell we got in them Jim Dandy Giant GoldenRed Hybrids. Now, evva othuh bit a land hyere is green an growin. We keeps thishyear little old hill seprut just fer showin whut it oe'ul use ta look like; will it hurt much, 'Doc?' " And in this wise was Dr. Morris Goldpepper reminded of the singular and curious ability of the common earthworm -- let alone the Jim Dandy Giant Golden-Red Hybrid earthworm -- to rejuvenate a piece of ground by moving through it, and by moving it through them, "Disgusting subject," some might say, but to Dental Science nothing natural is disgusting; thus cogitating, he returned to the ranch-house, followed by the Upsilon Centaurian, just in time to catch "Big Jimmy." rancher was loath to believe that the alien was from another planet, but, upon being assured and reassured that he was not, at any rate, from the Soviet Union, ness to do business. After all, it is not every day in the week that one finds a customer for fifteen However, the term "customer" implies not only sale, but purchase as well. Purchase may be by cash, goods or service. Cash, it was obvious, the Upsilonians did not have. The only service of which they were possessed which was at all likely to be of use was that of teleportation (matterporting, according to another usage); and it was agreed that this was something for which the world was not yet prepared. Which left "goods." The Upsilonian offered, when the crops of his native world should be restored to their former yield, to pay for the worms, pound for pound, in slith, purts, sneet, kutch andor zooky. But on being informed by Doctor Morris Goldpepper (who had lived on these substances and their derivatives for months) that the best of them tasted like old library paste, Mr. Dandy declined. He also eructated. "Pardon me, folks," he said, abashed and discomfited. "It's a sort of nervous indigestion, which I get every now and... What in thee Hell are these?" "These" were a number of objects in a small box offered by the alien Upsilonian, apparently the same bulk as a five-grain aspirin tablet, but shaped rather like tiny pretzels. "Minor medications of my planet, they are," he said. "For ailments of stomach, colon, freest and grunk, good they are. Take, take, Worm-Raising Dandy." He took, and while he was swallowing, Doctor Crawford asked, "They good for anything else?" The Upsilonian reflected. "Arthritis," he said, after cogitating thoughtfully. Doctor "Clem" avowed himself an irregular victim to what he thought might be arthritis, in his left knee, and swallowed one of the pillular pretzels before his colleague could point out to him that this was all a highly non-scientific approach to a highly scientific problem. It was at this point that "Little Jimmy" came in and reminded his father that they had fifteen million worms to take care of and hence for that reason couldn't stay there all day and all night, much as he ("Little Jimmy") would personally prefer to do. The muffled sound of Mary Jane sobbing outside was audibly heard when he paused, reluctantlyHis father rose. "Boy's right," he posited. "Well, I guess I'll have to come back tomorrow and continue the discussion. I sure do hope we can think of something. Bye." And they drove off in the palomino Cadillac, and then Doctor Goldpepper had to treat the ranch-hand with the infected tooth. It was a root-canal job, but, with the able if reluctant assistance of his colleague, was successfully accomplished. Everyone retired to bed rather early, including the Upsilonian. "I believe I'll take another one of those doo-hickeys," the host observed, as he prepared to go upstairs. "Has your arthritis been bothering you?" Dr. Goldpepper inquired solicitously. "No; but why take chances?" was the rejoinder. "Night, 'Morry.' Night, Mary Jane. Night, urn." Mary Jane sniffled. T he next morning found Doctor Morris Goldpepper sipping his pink grapefruit juice (for which fruit Texas should be more famous than it is) with only Mary Jane for company; and she had nothing to say except an occasional semi-stifled sob. Before he had finished the job, the Dandys drove up, Mr. Dandy, Senior, bounding into the breakfast-nook (it was as big as the Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Davenport) with his red face full of beaming joy. "It worked!" he cried -- a noise which produced the Upsilonian on the scene. "Big Jimmy" picked him from his feet and danced around the room with him. "It worked! Settled my stomach like it never was settled before! It's just ot to be good for arthritis, too! I figure half the population of the Cnited States has got nervous stomachs, and the other half has arthritis! Mr. Upsilonian (say, are you Armenian? I've known some real fine Armenians!), I'll take seven and a worm for a pill. A deal?" The alien was too startled to do more than nod. Dr. Crawford came down at that moment. "Mary Jane, honey," he observed, "you trot right out and give your sweetheart a real big good-morning kiss, hear? And tell him that the wedding is on!" The delighted girl rushed, squealing merrily, from the room, and her father, in a lowered tone of voice, winked and dug the other Earthmen in the ribs with his elbows, as he observed, "I found something else that those pills are good for! Why, good moTnin, Lilybelle!" Doctor Goldpepper, on the point of asking what else, looked up to see who "Lilybelle" might be, and lo and behold, it was no other one but the comely housekeeper, whom he had never heard "Clem" address other than as "Mrs. Doothit, ma'am," before. She blushed, and her eyes, before she cast them down, sparkled. "Hmm," observed "Big Jimmy," adding, "Well I guess now we know what 'freest' means. Or maybe it's 'grunk.' Tell them factories to start gearing for increased production! Yip-pay!" "Ee-yih-hoo!" cried Doctor Crawford. The alien said nothing, 'but genuflected and kissed the cuffs of Doctor Goldpepper's trousers. How Upsilon Centauri was saved from soil sickness and famine, how the Jim Dandy Ethical Drug Company of Texas, Inc., moved with the speed of light into the ranks of the great corporations along with its sister-syndicate, the Jim Dandy Giant Golden-Red Hybrid Earthworm Company; how James E. (for Elphonsus) Dandy, Jr., married Mary Jane Crawford at the same double ceremony which united her father in matrimony to Mrs. Lilybelle Doothit, are matters too profuse in content to be recorded here by Doctor Morris Goldpepper, now restored once again to health and duty; who, desiring only the good and welfare of the American Dental profession and the human race, is glad to go down to posterity merely as the inventor of the Goldpepper Bridge and the Goldpepper Crown, and perfector of the Semi-Retractable Clasp which bears his name. girl friend, Judy Stokes, thought it was the lamest excuse she had ever heard. If your ballpoint pen won't write as you want it to, your life doesn't stop, she probably was thinking. You just get yourself another pen -- You don't call off a marriage... Skeptically the girl with the long, golden red hair pointed at his breast pocket. "This Droozle I must see. And who's that other member of the partnership there beside him? An Eversharp pencil named Blackie?" "No, that is the other end of Droozle. Permit me to introduce you." Blandly the tall, young artist slid Droozle from his breast Droozle was probably the greatest writer in the world -- any world! pocket, straightened him from his U-shape and handed his twelveinch pen to her. "A snake!" she shrieked. "What else?" 'Why, I thought those ruby eyes were jewels! I must have squeezed right up against him when I kissed you," she cried indignantly. Tfou did. I felt him squirm a little." "Oh! And here I thought it was your heart beating wildly." Well, maybe it was. It does that sometimes." "Let's try again. And this time hold your snake behind you." The long-legged girl stood on tiptoe to reach him. "It was your heart beating wildly," she decided a moment later. "Which makes me think you might not just be trying to get rid of me by a silly excuse." "Believe me, I'm not," he urged. "Droozle is the key to all my fortunes." "All right, tell me about it. But first tell me where in the universe you got him." "Oh, that was just after I graduated from art school. I was on my grand tour. We had an unexpected stopover at the Coffin planetary system. I discovered ballpoint snakes are the chief export of Coffin Two. When we lifted ship, I had acquired my little puppy snake, Droozle." "Is a puppy snake like a puppy dog?" she asked, fascinated. "I mean, do they have their little domestic troubles, such as the calls of nature?" "Oh, he was thoroughly pocketbroken before I acquired him. But he did like his little jokes, and I learned to leave him curled up in a circular ashtray until maturity sobered him." drew sketches with him, didn't you tell me?" He nodded. "At first he only had one color of ink -- red -- and if I sketched with him all day he would commence to look wretchedly anemic. He took two days to refill, normally. But I could use him again in only one day's time provided I didn't mind the top three-fourths of my pen laying on my arm." "I hope his weight didn't get tiresome," she commiserated, holding in her amusement. "I coped somehow," he answered sturdily. 'Xater he learned -- after I squeezed him on the liver a few times just to show him how -- to switch to a lovely shade of ochre, which was delightful on pale green or pink paper. Why, what's the matter, Judy?" "Go on," she choked. "Go go go!" He beamed. "I write my letters with him too. Every day I wrote with him, first in red, and then in ochre to give him a rest. He seemed to love to write more than to sketch. He would jump into my hand with tail happily pointed downward as I sat down to my writing desk. And when I later saw his dark green stripes turning pastel and knew that anemia was imminent, and started to lay him down for a earned rest, he would stiffen himself as if to say, 'Oh, come, come! I'm good for half a page yet!' " "It sounds as though he was a see why his malfunction makes our marriage impossible." "I haven't gotten to his career as a novelist yet. There lies the heart of the tragedy." "Please proceed to the heart of the tragedy." iiTT all began when I found him arched up one morning, writing by himself -- with difficulty, it is true. His first message to the world was, # hold that the supine viewpoint is seldom downward! ' " "I don't see how he could stand up on end to write for very long, even with such a magnificent philosophy to bolster him." "What a terrible pun," Jean groaned. "He couldn't stand up very long at first. But I saw he had talent. I gladly learned the skill of holding him upright in a relaxed manner so that he could express himself on paper. In no time at all, he had written what was to be his first, sensational, best-selling shocker, Naked Bellies in the Grass.' "That does sound sensational." "Not for snakes. He neglected to mention his characters were snakes. I Fang You Very Much followed swiftly afterward and was just as successful. Mothers were amused with its lispy title and got it for the children." "Sounds like a story with some meat in it." "Yes! Something you can get your teeth into. However, his next offering, A Snake Pit Full of Love, was by far the topper. It was banned in Boston." "You haven't mentioned anything tragic so far," she observed. "In fact, you have made a pot of money," "Right. After my snake had filed his income tax returns, we still had enough money to purchase this house and to support us for a couple of years. The only trouble is, his royalties have stopped coming in and that money is all used up. I still haven't been able to sell any of my landscape paintings. So we haven't any income, and that's why you and I can't marry for a long time yet -- if ever!" Her exquisite brows wrinkled with concentration. "I don't understand. Has Droozle written himself out?" "Far from it," answered Jean, seating himself and parking Droozle on his knee. "He's writing more than ever." "The quality is gone, then?" Jean shook his head. "No, he's writing superlatively." "Then what is the problem?" she asked, now thoroughly mystified. "He's writing classics!" burst out Jean in baffled irritation. "He won't write anything else! Easily seeing the approaching catastrophe, I wrote long persuading essays to him. It was pathetically useless. Proudly he continued to write his Rise and Fall of the Western Plainsman in a lucid, passionate prose which would evoke an imperishable picture -- but in three thousand pages." "I think classics are nice," protested Judy, "and one of these days I'm going to read another one." Huskily Jean told her the worst. "Writing classics consumes paper by the ton. And if you ever get your # word story finished, you must then start shrinking it back to an acceptable # words. This is a nearly hopeless task. Of course if you can get it back to # words the digest magazines will have no trouble shrinking it to # words or fifteen pictures, and you then get your fingers in the till." He paused and all hope fled from his face. "Droozle won't live nearly long enough to get all of that shrinking done. And in the meantime that scribbling snake is writing me out of house and home!" "Are you going to let him get away with it?" the girl challenged. or not," replied the young artist, looking worried. "I thought I had the problem solved at first. He got so sassy when we were arguing about him writing classics that I had no hesitation about applying a pinch of glue to his glittering little extremity. That put him out of the writing business until he came to terms." 'Well, now. You were enterprising!" she approved. "It didn't do any good though," Jean grumbled despondently, bowing his head. "He wouldn't bargain?" she asked incredulously. "He didn't have to. He knew right where the cheese grater was." "Ooh!" "My sentiments exactly. But I don't know what to do with him now." "You're all out of ideas?" "Oh we could sell this house and move down to skid row where the rents are cheap," he flung out airily, but quite plainly worried sick. "I've got a much better idea than that," she said cheerily, getting a pad and pencil from her red handbag. "How about giving Droozle this ultimatum?" As she wrote, Jean read over her shoulder, "'Suggest you begin writing fiction pleasing both to you and your master, or we shall be forced to hand you over to the dog catcher!' " Jean drew back amazed. 'Why, we would do no such thing!" "I know it, silly. I'm just negotiating." "No," he grumped, ready to be angry with her. He got up and strode around the studio. "The dog catcher! We will not lie to that snake!" Judy dropped the idea. "I've just now thought of another one. Here's an ultimatum we could give him and mean it, too. No more writing until we reach an agreement, or we will take away all his writing paper and reading matter for good!" "I'd thought of doing that," Jean conceded. "But isn't that a monstrous way to treat a literary genius?" "Not at all!" she protested. "By taking on a work that will require more time than his lifetime, he is defeating himself." "There's that way of looking at it," agreed the artist. "All right, Droozle," he called. "You heard us talking and you know we mean it. No more writing until we reach an agreement -- or else!" Droozle quit writing at once. While the girl and the young artist watched anxiously, Droozle first wandered about uncertainly for a few minutes and then curled up on a newspaper and went to sleep. He slept all evening. has beaten us again," Jean Lanni told Judy Stokes resignedly when she arrived at his studio the following evening. He watched Droozle fascinatedly as the snake moved his restless tail over the margins of newspapers spread on the floor. "He doesn't know yet that I know. I discovered the fraud only by the merest accident." "He isn't writing?" she asked, perusing the newspapers for signs of Droozle's elegant script. "He most certainly is." "Where?" "Look at him!" Jean exclaimed, ignoring her question. "He's doing it again!" Droozle had ceased wriggling for the moment and lay there shaking violently, as though he had malaria. Then the paroxysm passed and he took up his restless movements again. "The poor genius," mourned Judy. "He must be sick with frustration." "Sick, my eye! That snake has learned to centrifuge part of his blood while it is in his body, so that the hemoglobin is separated out. The result is -- invisible ink!" "Why, I'll tell that Droozle off!" raved Judy. "Here I sat feeling sorry for the little crumb!" Droozle did not mind. While she ranted, he brazenly began writing in visible ink once more. "How did you catch him at it?" she asked. "I used a piece of his newspaper to pick up a hot saw blade. The heat turned the invisible ink brown." "Droozle," said the girl passionately, looking down at the writer, "you know your master is in great need of funds. Where is your sense of loyalty and self-sacrifice for the one who has cared for you?" Droozle wrote poetically, "Is there Joy or any other good thing in Abnegation? Is there Beauty in Sacrifice? What Handsome purpose do these serve a being in his race with Time? His Days will soon be spent and they will come no more; thus my Criterion: Is This the most Joy gathering, Awareness touching. Beauty sensing act of which he is capable? None other is worthy of his time!" "Men are not so selfish," objected Jean. "I am not a man," wrote Droozle simply. Jean turned staunchly to the girl. "Judy, he has convinced me. I have been wrong about him. From now on he can write whatever he likes!" "Good-by to our hopes then?" "For the present, yes" assented Jean stoically, as he brought fresh sheets of paper from his desk for Droozle. "My landscapes might begin to sell after a while," he added without conviction. "Rotten little crumb," Judy fumed, glaring balefully at the snake. But Droozle wrote serenely on, his ruby eyes glowing enigmatically. Jean interposed magnanimously, "I see now that I have been inexcusably selfish with Droozle. I've kept him cooped up here, not wanting to bother with him while I was out on my painting trips. True, he was busy writing. But most of his knowledge of Earth has come from books; he can't write classics about living things unless he sees living things." A S she picked up his trend of thought, Judy's face lost its resentful expression, and something like seraphic righteousness spread over it. "I see what you mean. Just how did you plan to make up for this shut-in feeling that poor Droozle must have been suffering so much from for all these years?" "Oh, Judy, I'm so glad you asked me!" He threw wide his arms to the world. "Out into the wind and the rain we shall go, and there I will draw my pictures while he observes; then into the roaring, brawling taverns we shall go, where life thrives in all its abundance. I've been robbing him by shutting him up here." "Jean, look at Droozle," the girl exclaimed, pointing. "He has stopped in the middle of a page and is starting on a fresh one." Droozle wrote, "Please not out into the wind and the rain. Please not into the roaring, brawling taverns where life thrives in all its abundance. I loathe shudder and tilt." "Loathing is no reason to turn away from reality, Droozle," admonished the artist. "Things are not nearly so bad as they used to be anyway. In all justice, shudder and tilt requires far less bodyEnglish than its ancestor, rock and roll." Droozle argued carefully, "You will recall I heard some of it once when you took me into a particularly dirty bar over in the west end of town. I feel, as a result, that I have observed this type of data to the extent that I can write of it competently without further Study." "Oh, but that was months ago," enthused Jean. "The tunes have all changed by now. New pows appear on the tapes every week. You have missed countless sockeroos already, being cooped up here. You will bless me, once you get accustomed to the realities of life -- see if you don't. Heigh-ho the wind and the rain!" The snake shuddered. "Careful, you'll centrifuge," Judy warned. Jean added reflectively, studying the ceiling, "Day by day, month by month, year by year, the reality of everyday existence etches deeply into our consciousness, if we will but have the fortitude to expose ourselves to it." Droozle unavoidably centrifuged this time, but did manage, with laborious lateral movements. to mix the hemoglobin back with the plasma again. He complained, "It is cruel of you to condemn me to this ugliness. I want only to read my books and hear a few simple fugues by Bach." "It is not cruel. You will have exactly the same existence I have chosen for myself as an artist. It is fundamental that if you are to write serious literature, you must rub your nose against the realities of life." Droozle wriggled unhappily for a moment. Finally he wrote, "Actually my writing may not be as serious as the title implies. Misunderstandings conceivably arise over titles. Instead of The Rise and Fall of the Western Plainsman, how about changing it to Those Lowdown Scaly Rustlers?' "That's really getting down to earth," cried Jean, concealing his elation. "But if you aren't going to write serious literature, who will I get to go on my painting trips with me?" "Take that female of yours," suggested Droozle. "If she refuses to go, inform her that we shall be forced to hand her over to the dog catcher." "Do you suppose he means that?" wondered Jean. "Of course not, silly," said Judy, bright-eyed. "He's only negotiating." Pluto has always been a puzzle to astronomers and here is one answer! of the solar system, was named after that dark, mysterious stranger, the Greek god of hell. The name is apt, for this dark, mysterious planet has had the astronomers living in their own private purgatory ever since its existence was first deduced. The astronomers have been able to obtain a few facts about the planet, but what is frustrating them is that by using these hard-won facts they can easily prove that such a planet cannot exist! But, despite all their theories, that baleful yellowish speck of light continues to glare down the telescope at them as if to say, "Wrong! Guess again." Copyright #I by George Peterson Field It all started back in the #'s when it was found that Uranus was not following a smooth elliptical orbit, but was staggering through the sky like a drunk. It was finally guessed that the erratic behavior was due to another planet still further out. Two mathematicians tackled the problem and independently calculated the orbit, position and mass of the hypothetical planet. With the position in the sky known, it was a simple matter for the astronomers to find the new planet, Neptune, which till then had been overlooked. As soon as Neptune was discovered, the orbit of Uranus was recalculated and this time the observations fitted perfectly -- almost. There were still small differences between the predicted and the actual positions. Spurred by the success of the previous work. Professor Percival Lowell thought that there might be another planet still further out. He calculated that it miles out from the sun, moving in an unusually elliptic orbit with a period of # years, and it should have a mass six times that of the earth. The same figures were later obtained by another prominent astronomer, Professor W. H. Pickering. An object this large should be easy to find, so in #, Professor Lowell sat down at his moderate sized, but adequate, telescope and started looking. He died without finding it. It was there, but it was much fainter than it had a right to be and he had missed it. The astronomers' private purgatory had started. Later searches with photographic plates also missed it, although it was photographed twice. Once it was masked by a bright star, and the other time the image fell on a flaw in the negative! TT wasn't until # that Pluto  was found. The radius, eccentricity and period of the orbit were almost exactly as Lowell had predicted. Because the orbital calculations were so closely verified, there was no reason to doubt Lowell's prediction that Pluto had a mass of six times the earth's mass, except that the size of the planet was impossibly small. It was so small that it still looked like a point through the telescope. It wasn't until #, using the #-inch Palomar telescope, that Pluto's diameter was measured. It was roughly # miles, or about as big as Mercury. This would make the density of the planet hundreds of times greater than water! The earth is only # times denser than water and osmium, the densest known material, is only # times denser. Thus Pluto seems to be made of collapsed matter, except such matter should only be stable in the interior of dwarf stars. Such a planet should not exist. But it does! The astronomers have tried everything in an attempt to make sense out of what they know, including fudging the numbers a little. There have been suggestions that Pluto is a very smooth sphere covered by large methane oceans, and the small observed diameter may be due to specular reflection. (There was a similar effect present with the Echo ballon.) But there are slow variations in the intensity, indicating that Pluto is rotating with a day of # hours, and one would expect rather sudden changes in intensity from the specular reflections. The other unusual thing about Pluto is its orbit. The orbit is so egg-shaped that it actually passes inside the orbit of Neptune, so that they would at various times in the past and future pass very close to each other. The astronomers feel that, due to perturbations from the other planets, it is improbable that Pluto has been in its present orbit for more than a small fraction of the age of the solar system; so apparently Pluto is a stranger which arrived in its present orbit from other regions of space. There is one other nagging feature and that is the breakdown of Bode's Law for Neptune and Pluto. Bode's Law is an empirical formula for the orbits of the planets and the reason for its acceptance is best shown by the following table: Radius Actual UslDg Orbital Bode's Radius Law In A. U. Mercury # # Venus # # Earth # # Mars # # Asteroids # # Jupiter # # Saturn # # Uranus # # Neptune -- # Pluto # # (Note: Bode's Law does not predict a planet in Neptune's orbit.) There is obviously something wrong out past Uranus. It is as if Pluto had come along, interacted with Neptune and pushed it into an inner orbit, usurping its proper place in Bode's Law. A very weird planet indeed. What we actually know about Pluto is very little. But this little bit that we know points out that it may be very profitable to learn more about it. In the coming decades, as the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory is put into operation and man ventures to the outer planets, we will get to know it better. But until then it is interesting to speculate. NE of the most spectacular possible solutions to the mystery is to assume that it really is a visitor from outside the solar system. Not just a wandering frozen planet that happened to be collected by the sun long ago in its wanderings through space, but a device, a "gravity catapult" made by intelligent beings and placed in orbit around the sun... a "gravity catapult" being a generator of gravitational fields that is used to accelerate spaceships to velocities near the speed of light. It has only been recently realized that such a "gravity catapult" could exist. We can describe how it should be made, but we couldn't even begin to construct it with our present technology. It has long been known that Einstein's theory of gravity predicts many unusual properties of gravitation. These effects are not well known since they are unobservable with our presently available instruments. So there was little reason to talk about them. The most interesting effect is that a rotating mass, such as a planet, not only attracts an object toward it with its regular gravitational field, but it also "drags" the object around it in the same direction as its rotation. Thus a spaceship in orbit near the earth is helped along in its orbit by the earth's rotation. In order to have any appreciable dragging effect on a space ship, a rotating planet has to be very heavy, and rotating rapidly; also the spaceship should be as close as possible to the planet's center. This calls for planets with high density, since they have all their mass concentrated in a small radius and the spaceship can get close to the center without hitting the surface. Using these ideas of Einstein, we can envision how such a gravitational catapult could be made. It would require a large, very dense body with a mass larger than the earth, made of collapsed matter many times heavier than water. It would have to be whirling in space like a gigantic, fat smoke ring, constantly turning from inside out. The forces it would exert on a nearby object, such as a spaceship, would tend to drag the ship around to one side, where it would be pulled right through the center of the ring under terrific acceleration and expelled from the other side. If the acceleration were of the order of # g's, then after the minute or so that it would take to pass through, the velocity of the ship on the other side would be near that of light. The amazing thing is that because these are gravitational forces, a person in the space ship would feel nothing. He would actually be in free fall all the time! This is because gravitational forces act independently on each atom of the body at the same time and give each atom the same acceleration. Because there are no differences in motion of different parts of the body, there is no feeling of weight. A network of these devices in orbit around interesting stars would allow an advanced race to have an energetically economical method of space travel. Because, even though the ring would whirl a little slower after the spaceship had taken away some of its energy, it would gain that energy back when it decelerated an incoming ship. There, of course, would be no way to aim such a massive object, so to make sure that it can be used for more than one direction, it would be set to cartwheeling slowly (say with a # hour period?) so as to cover all parts of the sky. Such a device could even be made elsewhere by some unimaginable technology and shot through space by a much larger device. It could halt itself by pushing against a massive planet (such as Neptune?). Maybe when we get to Pluto, we will find a small artificial satellite around it. Inside will be a message from the Galactic Federation welcoming us to its membership now that we had interplanetary flight, and presenting us with the gravity catapult for our use until we know enough to make one ourselves -- a sort of "coming out" present! great new novel of interplanetary adventure Podkayne of Mars Now running serially in IF -- don't miss it! Also in the November IF: Poul Anderson's The Critique of Impure Reason, Keith Laumer's The Desert and the Stars, short stories, features by Theodore Sturgeon, etc. November issue still on sale. Get your copy today! mMM To spread Mankind to the stars carries a high cost in tives -- and not atl of them are human landing had been made on a flat plateau among steep, foreboding mountains which seemed to float through briefly cleared air. In the distance a sharp rock formation stood revealed like an etching: a castle of iron-gray stone whose form had been carved by alien winds and eroded by acid tears from acid clouds. Far above was a halo where the sun should be. The sun was an orange star only slightly larger than Sol and as near to Miracastle as Sol to Earth. The orange rays splintered against the fog and gloom was perpetually upon the dark face of existence. This was the first two-stage planet man had ever attempted to colonize. Miracastle was so far from Earth that the long ships were destroyed twice to reach it. technicians came, commanded by General Max Shorter, sixty-three years old. Men wearing the circle whose diameter was etched in ruby steel enclosing a background of gleaming ebon -- the emblem was a silver D over a sunburst of hammered gold. The surface of Miracastle roiled with unfamiliar storms and tornados and hurricanes. Before these, the films of lichen evaporated into dust, and the sparse and stunted vegetation with ochre foliage turned sear and was powdered by the fury in the air. Earth equipment, alien to the orange sun, hammered into the heart of Miracastle. Night and day it converted the pulverized substance of the planet in the white-hot core of its atomic furnaces. Acid rivers snapped at the wind and changed to salt deposits and super-heated steam. In the gaseous atmosphere, neutral crystals formed and fell like powdered rain. Miracastle heated and cooled and shivered with the virus of man-made chemical reactions, and the storms screamed and tore at the age-old mountains. Inside the eternal, self-renewing Richardson domes, the technicians worked and waited and superintended the computers which controlled the processes raging beyond them. The long ship lifted steadily and majestically through the battering storm and the driving rain of dust and crystals. Out beyond the dense space that surrounds all stars, the long ship probed the ever-shifting currents in the fourdimensional universe. The long ship found a low-density flaw, where space could hardly be said to exist at all. The long ship, described mathematically, was half as long as the continuum -- the length being inversely proportional and related only to mass. Time was but a moth's wing between twin cliffs of eternity. Inside Miracastle's orange sun, at its very core, an atom of hydrogen was destroyed completely; and in the inconceivable distance, an atom of hydrogen appeared. The pulsing, steadystate equation of the universe maintained its knife-edge and inevitable thermo-dynamic balance. Inside the long ship, a pilotmachine ordered the destruction of a vastly greater collection of matter. The atoms of the ship and the sailors -- fixed in relationship, each to each -- imploded into nothingness. And the long ship and the men aboard it were born again at a years away -- halfway to Earth, Born and were destroyed again, in the blink of an eye. Beyond the ship now lay Sol, pulsing in its own warmth and warming its children embedded in the cold and distant texture of the universe. The sailors were ghosts come home. Miracastle was alone with her conquerors. a few weeks later, began writing a diary. "I have been Destroyed thirtyseven times during forty years' service with the long ships," he wrote. He wrote with a pen, using a metal straight edge as a line rule. "I have served faithfully and I believe as well as any man the Corps, the planet and mankind. It is perhaps appropriate at this time, as I approach the end of my long service, to record a few observations which have occurred to me during the course of it as well as to record the day-today details of my present command." The general wrote: "A man is given a job to do. And when all is said and done, that is the most important thing in his life: to do his job." It took perhaps ten seconds for the soft knock to penetrate his concentration. He adjusted himself to the moment and closed the diary softly. He deposited it in the upper right-hand drawer of the writing desk and locked the drawer. The knock came again. He arranged his tie. "Come in," General Shorter said. The agitation of the man in the doorway was announced by the paleness of his face. "Come in, David," General Shorter said, rising politely from the writing desk. "Be seated, please." "General, weVe had a... a very unfortunate thing happen on the shift." The general sank back into his chair. Light from the desk lamp framed his expressionless and immobile face, half in light, half in shadow. He fingered the straightedge on the desk top. "Sit down, David, and then tell me about it." Shift-Captain Arnold moved uncertainly. "Sit down, sit down," General Shorter repeated impatiently. Captain Arnold seated himself on the edge of the chair. "One of the men," he said, "just committed suicide. He was in charge of the air changing monitor this shift. He went outside without a suit." The general blinked as though to remove an irritation from his eye. His hand lay still and hard upon the straight-edge. "What was his name?" he asked in a voice that was vaguely puzzled. "Schuster. Sergeant Schuster, sir." "Yes, I remember him," the general said. "He came to us about a week before the lift. I think he was from Colorado. He had very broad shoulders. Short and broad. Neat appearing. Uniform always in good order." General Shorter ran his thumb and forefinger up the bridge of his nose and then, with a very small sigh, placed his palm over his eyes. "Draw up the report," he said. "Was there a final message?" The question was uttered without hesitation and was followed by a moment of silence. "No, sir." General Shorter's breath was audible. "Please feel free to smoke, David." "Thank you, sir, I don't smoke." "No, of course not. I'd forgotten." General Shorter half turned and placed his hands on the desk. He stood under their pressure. "What would you say to a brandy?" "I should return to duty, sir." "A few minutes more," the general said. "The brandy is good." He moved into the shadow and sorted bottles at his tiny cupboard. "Here." He held the glass to the light. Amber liquid flowed softly and the general handed across the half-filled glass. "Sit back," he said. "I'll join you." Glass in hand, the general stood with his back to the light. He seemed surrounded by cold fire, and the glass sparkled as he lifted it. He sipped. "Try it, it's good." "It's very good, sir." IOR a moment neither spoke. Then the general said, "This isn't my first command, you know. I've seen men die. I've had to take chances with them occasionally. You could say, I suppose, that I ordered some men to their deaths. But still, the men came aboard knowing the risks. In the final sense, they, not I, made the decision. I never sent a -- " The sentence ended as the glass slipped and fell. "I'm sorry," he said, looking down at the sparkling fragments at his feet. The dark liquid -- the light gave it a reddish cast -- puddled and flowed and its aroma filled the room. "No, no. Let it be, David. I'll get it later." The general went to the cupboard and poured into a new glass. Again he was light and shadow. The spilled liquid approached the shadow and was devoured in it as though it had never been, but still the aroma stood on the air. The general said: "Imagine, if you can, David, that Earth were attacked, and the attack destroyed many of the military installations. After you struck back, David, what would you do next?" "I don't know, sir. I'm not a strategist, I'm afraid." "What about your cities? The out supplies -- over-running the countryside, looting, plundering in search of food. Carrying pestilence and disease and terror. What would you do, David?" "Well, I guess I'd try to organize some relief organization or something." "But David. Anything you diverted to care for these people would limit your ability to fight back, wouldn't it? They would be cluttering up all your transportation, frustrating effective retaliation. Your second move would be to take the bombs which destroy people and not property and... use them on your own cities." Captain Arnold drained his glass. "That would be..." He did not finish. "Insane, David? No. Rational. Field Commanders must be realists. The job comes first. In this case, the job of defeating the enemy ,... But what does that have to do with us? Nothing, eh? You're right. Sometimes I like to talk, and I suppose that's one of my privileges. I'm not the idealist I used to be, I guess. I remember when I was your age. I saw things differently than I do now. What used to seem important no longer does. Each stage of development has its unique biological imperatives: a child, a youth, a mature man, look out on the world from a body held in focus to different chemistries. But the job remains." General Shorter held up his glass. "Cheers." He drained it. Again there was silence. "David, do you think I'm in much trouble?" "I'm afraid so. General. The Committee is due to arrive tomorrow." "I know," the general said. "This suicide isn't going to help us. Tomorrow. Is it that soon? I thought... yes, I guess it is tomorrow... Well, we've been here long enough to lose our immunity, so we'll all catch colds." Captain Arnold stood. "I better get started on my report." "Poor Sergeant Schuster," General Shorter said. "If anyone's to blame, it must be me." "He obeyed the orders." "What did you say?" "I said he obeyed the orders, sir." "Of course he obeyed the orders," the general said. "What else could he have done?" II long ship hung in orbit above Miracastle and discharged its passengers. The Scout Ball could handle them: saving energy, which along with time itself, is the ultimate precious commodity of the universe governed by the laws of entropy. The Scout Ball settled through the dark turbulence undisturbed by the hissing winds. It hovered momentarily in the invisible beacon above the Richardson dome as if both attracted and repelled. It moved horizontally and settled. Suited figures on the surface wrestled with its flexible exittube against the storm, fighting to couple it to the lock of the Richardson dome. The exit-tube moved rhythmically until the Scout Ball inched away, drawing it taut. Pumps whirred. The suited figures entered the forward lock of the Scout Ball. Inside, General Shorter divested himself of the helmet. The suit hung upon him like ancient, wrinkled skin. He asked, "What time is it?" Upon being told, he nodded with satisfaction. "Seventeen minutes, total. Good job. Who's in charge?" "A Mr. Tucker, sir." "Tucker? Jim Tucker, by any chance?" "Yes, sir." General Shorter grunted. "Served with him once. He's probably forgotten... That's all right. I'll keep the suit on." "I don't think they're expecting you with the surface party. General." "Probably not or they'd be here. Earth crew?" "They've been out ten months or so, sir." "We will have colds, then. Would you take me to Mr. Tucker, please?" To the other suited men he said, "Good, fast job." General Shorter followed the crewman up the spiral staircase and along the corridor. His hand touched a frictionless wall. "New plastic?" "This is one of the most recent balls, sir." "How does it handle?" "Quite well, sir." "I miss the Model Ten," he said. "There's only a few left now, I guess." "I haven't seen one in years." The crewman stopped before a numberless panel. He knocked politely. "Mr. Tucker? I have General Shorter here. He came out with the surface party." Mr. Tucker's voice, the edge of surprise partly lost through the partition, came: "Just a moment." In silence they waited. General Shorter moved restlessly. Several minutes passed. The panel opened. tund man. His close-cropped hair was graying, although his face was unlined, with the smooth complexion of a child. His irises were gray and gold. General Shorter stepped forward and introduced himself. "Come in." The panel closed. The two men stood. General Shorter glanced around for a chair. "Small quarters," Mr. Tucker said. "If you like, sit there. I'll sit on the bed." They arranged themselves. "Perhaps you don't remember me?" the general said. "We served together -- what, ten years ago? -- for about two weeks on Avalon, I believe it was." "Yes, I thought that was the case. You have a good memory. General." "Please," the general said, "just call me Max." Mr. Tucker considered, without committing himself. He proffered a cigar. The general declined. Mr. Tucker lighted the cigar carefully, moving the flame several times across the blunt end. He regarded the results without expression. "A cigar should be properly lit. General," he said. "Yes, yes, I suppose so," the general said. He paused to worry at a wrinkle on his suit. "Good trip out?" "Routine." "New ship? I notice this is one of the new Balls." "Mark Six." "Ah, those. I've always liked the Mark Six. Solid construction. I've been Destroyed maybe half the time in the Mark Sixes. Each one of the Marks has its own personality -- I've always thought so. I don't suppose you remember the old Mark Two? That was a long time ago. I've been around. We got lost in one once. It picked a pseudo-fault line and... well, never mind. Earth the same, I guess?" "Hasn't changed." "I don't know when I'll get back," the general said. The statement seemed to dangle as though it were an unfinished question. "The new detectors have put Miracastle on the fringe of things." "I've followed the work," the general said. "I try to keep up. It involves a new concept of mass variation, doesn't it?" "It just about makes it uneconomical to colonize a two-stage planet any more. Or to keep one going." The general's eyelids flickered. His body moved beneath the wrinkled folds of the surface suit. Cigar smoke curled in the still air. Mr. Tucker said, "You must have been aware that it would not have been a great loss to have evacuated Miracastle." The general shuffled in silence. "Yes, sir, I knew the background. It's part of my job to know things like that. You'll find, sir, that I have a strong sense of responsibility. If it's part of my job, I'll know about it." General Max Shorter abruptly stood and for a moment was motionless, a man deformed and diminished in stature by the ill-fitting surface suit. Kxpressionless, he looked down, without psychological advantage, at the seated civilian holding the partially smoked cigar. Later the same day, Mr. Tucker and two of the three other members of the Committee donned surface suits and, together with Captain Meford, the cartographer assigned to Miracastle, they boarded the surface scout. They arranged themselves in the uncomfortable bucket seats and strapped in. "Little early for an easy ride," Mr. Tucker commented. "I've been out before," Captain Meford said laconically. It was his usual manner. "How long do you think it will take us to get there?" "Between fifteen and twenty minutes, if I don't hit too much cross wind." Mr. Ryan, one of the other two civilians, commented, "A long time between cigars, eh, Jim?" The question was out of place and was ignored without hostility. Mr. Ryan twisted uncomfortable. At length he said, apologetically, "Dirty, filthy business. I wish it were over with." "So do I," Mr. Tucker said. Captain Meford activated the ramp and eased the scout out. It was immediately buffeted by the winds. "Sorry," he said. "It'll take a minute. Hold tight." The scout moved in three dimensions, erratically. "Wow! Let's set it at about twenty-six inches. Sorry. This will slow us down, but it will ease the bumps on down draft. There. That's better. We're okay now, I think. I guess we can settle back." Thirty-five minutes later, they came to what was left of the alien city. General Shorter had coffee, in his quarters, with the remaining man on the Committee, a Mr. Flison. They were going through the ritual of conversation. "This is the first time you've been Destroyed then, sir," the general said. "My first time was so long ago I've forgotten what it feels like." "I was uneasy in advance," Mr. Flison said. "You read various descriptions about the physical sensations. Intellectually, of course, you draw a distinction, but emotionally you know that the only word which applies is death -- pure and simple. But there's no sensation. It happens too fast. You don't even notice it." Politely attentive, the general had leaned forward. "I don't think it could be put better, he contributed. "That's very apt. You don't even notice it." Mr. Flison's eyes narrowed in speculation. They maintained the general's own in unwavering focus. He did not acknowledge the compliment. The general's eyes broke to one side. He moved nervously as though physically to dismiss the tactical error of underestimating his opponent. "Since this is your first planet," the general said, "perhaps you'd like to see something of the operation? Basically, we have nine Richardson Domes here on Miracastle. Two are the living quarters -- the other similar to this. Right now domes Seven and Nine are the more important. They contain the air-changing equipment. We are holding tightly to our completion date, and these two -- Seven and Nine -- will be pulled out in fifteen days. That is to say, they will, barring any serious interruptions in our work. On schedule, I should point out." The general poured coffee for himself. Mr. Flison politely declined. "When you've been in the Corps as long as I have," the general resumed, "the schedule becomes a part of you. Everything -- " he held his hands before him, fingers spread, palms facing, and drew them together -- "converges on that. It's that simple. Other planets are waiting. In a society and I mean this literally, sir -- a viewed if the schedule falls behind. Delay of a critical item of equipment can necessitate an unbelievably vast reassignment of personnel and supply patterns. A small cause reverberates throughout the whole fabric of the space technology." "General Shorter, I think perhaps you're being carried away a little. I'm sure we have adequate procedures to accommodate minor variations in equipment delivery dates. If we don't, the Lord help us: we'd have been dead long ago." The general was in the process of forming an immediate reply, but he reconsidered. When he reached for the coffee, which by now was cool and bitter, his hand was trembling. The general licked his lips. "More coffee? No? Well, I didn't intend to get off on this. I really wanted to ask if you'd like to inspect our operations." He glanced at his time piece. "I could show you the present shift operation in Dome Nine." Mr. Flison rose. "No, General, I don't want to be of any bother. I wouldn't want to interfere with your -- work." Ill  scriptive: perhaps less so than the application of Euclidean axioms to advanced geometry. Physically, it was this: #. Three dozen stone arches whose keystones were inverted bowls. #. A smooth-walled recess in the sheer face of a cliff. #. A level lip of rock, as precisely flat as though honed, from which the arches seemed to grow. "Is this all?" Mr. Tucker asked. "Yes, sir," Captain Meford said. Mr. Ryan came to the viewing section. "It looks," he said, "as though the cliff were split down to here and then hewn away to leave the structures there and the apron." "We found no tools, sir. There were no tools here, nor with them." "Nothing else at all?" "They left behind some four hundred chips of stone, apparently numbered. We have them in the dome. And there's a two-line inscription on one of the arches. There's nothing else." High above the men and the ship, the new wind sang in one of the inverted bowls and fluttered lightly over the inscription. It, like the face of the cliff, was oxidizing. Dust filtered down before the recess, alien symbols falling. Life is the recording angel of time. Without life, all ceases. "Dust," Mr. Tucker said. "Dust... dust... more dust. Soon the dust will be over everything. When the wind is gone, it will be there to hold our footprints." Inside the air-conditioned scout, the men shivered. "How did you come to find them?" Mr. Ryan asked. "I saw the constructions from the photos, sir. This had been missed by the mapping party. It's easy enough to see why when you see the pictures." "This the only one?" "Yes, sir." "How can you be sure of that. Captain Meford? It's a large planet." "I had one of the machines scan the remaining maps for geometrical patterns, sir." "Isn't that done routinely?" Mr. Tucker asked rather sharply. "Yes, sir. But you see, we've always expected that if we were ever going to encounter intelligent life on a planet, it would be rather widespread. Accordingly -- and this is the routine procedure, sir, used, as far as I know, by all contact parties -- we ran through a statistically significant sample of the terrain. There was nothing on Miracastle out of the ordinary. There was the typical, low-order vegetable matter, about what we always find. It was a very typical planet, sir." The third man from the Earth Committee, Mr. Wallace, seldom spoke. When he did, his voice was mild, and there was a sense of child-like wonder in his tone. "The natives?" he asked. "They... had fled when we discovered the city." "Where did they flee to?" Mr. Wallace asked.  upward. Other eyes followed to end just below the edge of the view screen. Above stood the sheer face of the cliff. Clouds roiled below the summit, obscuring it from view. "There is a long sloping plateau up there, and a series of natural caves back in the next cliff face," Captain Meford said. This did not seem adequate. He continued: "Most of the air-changing activity starts in the low-lying areas, at first around the dome positions. It advances along an elevation front, gradually drifting up. Little tongues are carried up in advance by the heated currents. The aliens retreated before it. On the plateau you can see the sentries. I guess they posted themselves there, at intervals, between the edge and the new caves, to define the limits of safety. They died there. Six of them. The rest, several hundred, reached the caves. They are dead, too." "I see," Mr. Wallace said. "When you first discovered them -- ?" Mr. Ryan asked after a moment. Captain Meford hesitated. Mr. Tucker said: "I believe one of your men killed himself last night -- wasn't it? A technician? I was told he felt you could reverse the air-changing equipment in time to save the aliens. I understand that was very much on his mind for the last week or so." "I'm not too familiar with the man, sir. He was on Captain Arnold's shift, I believe." "Captain Meford," Mr. Ryan insisted, "when did you say you first discovered the aliens?" Captain Meford hesitated. The others waited. "They were then scaling the cliff, sir." "And General Shorter, was he told of this immediately?" Mr. Ryan asked. "I don't know when the general was told." "You discovered them?" "Yes, sir. I... you see, at the time the winds completely prohibited air traffic. As you know, the air scouts are not stable enough until... later. Later, I... Yes, sir. I discovered them." "Did you then inform the general?" "No, sir. I informed the duty officer." "Did he inform the general?" "I don't know." "Why didn't you tell the general?" Mr. Tucker asked. "I was then in communication with Captain Geiger, and I felt he..." The sentence trailed away. "Would tell the general?" Mr. Tucker prompted. "Well, did he?" "I believe he did, sir," Captain Meford said. He let out a long breath. "May we see the aliens?" Mr. Ryan asked. "I wouldn't advise it, sir," Captain Meford said. "High flights are still very risky because of the wind velocities." eral Shorter called Captain Arnold aside. "Mind if I go over to Nine with you?" he asked. "The air around here is -- well, the fact of the matter is. I'd like to get away from them for awhile." "Of course not, sir," Captain Arnold said. "We'll call it an inspection. Which might be a good idea at that. With these people running around trying to interfere with my schedule. Poking around. Asking questions. Taking men away from their work, basically." He tapped his teeth with his right thumb in reflection. "I'd better check up on all the domes tonight, just to be sure." "Yes, sir." "I wouldn't want anything to go wrong because they're here." In the dressing quarters, they donned surface suits and exited through the locks to Miracastle. In the area immediately beyond the Dome, the solidly positioned connection rails radiated away. The general gestured for the captain to lead. The wind buffeted them. Inside the surface suits it was quiet. "David?" the general asked. "Yes, sir?" Captain Arnold said. He was fastening his safety line in the keyed slot. He fumbled with it for a moment before the wind. "You on suit communications?" "Yes, sir." Captain Arnold straightened and moved forward. The general replaced him and dropped his safety line in place with practiced efficiency. Captain Arnold, surrounded by dust devils, became a distant, indistinct bulk. His motions were ponderous. The general could no longer see his face or his expression. "I do not entirely understand this, David," the general said conversationally. "The investigation. I thought I had powerful friends in the Corps. Though a man makes enemies." The general lurched awkwardly over the broken surface of Miracastle, drawing the safety line taut. He moved toward the connection rail again. "A general is separated from much of his command. Some of the technical refinements are too involved -- and, of course, men hide their feelings," Once again he struggled with the wind, turning slowly at the end of the safety line: held from the devouring anger of the planet only by the slender umbilical cord from the stars. "General Grisley, now. I think he's sixteen star, in headquarters. He was a politician. He came up fast. In fact, he was my adjutant a few years ago. He was always a man to hold a grudge." Captain Arnold made no reply. "You know how politics is in the Corps." Dome Nine rose from the swirling mist before them. The wind seemed to increase in fury. And still, inside the suits, there was the sound only of labored breathing and the general's voice. "These natives," the general said. "They were very primitive, David." Neither could see the other's face. "I can't think of them as intelligent at all. I feel they were very low on the evolutionary ladder. I wouldn't call it a city, as I've heard it called. Natural formation, more likely. Nature plays strange tricks." Dome Nine. Inside, the general removed his helmet. "David," he said, "I've been meaning to talk to you for some time now. You've got a good career in front of you in the Corps. You're going to move up. With a few breaks, right to the top. I'm just now writing up my evaluation for your files. I plan to give you a very fine recommendation, Captain. Normally, I don't talk about this sort of thing, but I thought you might like to know." "Thank you, sir," Captain Arnold said uneasily, opening his surface suit. "Well, let's inspect the area, Captain." The inspection was perfunctory. As he always did, the general paused at the pile monitor and watched, in the Dante screen, the virtually indescribable reactions being sustained far beneath the surface: molten rock flowing and smoking. Orange, blue and white flames danced as though in agony in the great, expanding cavern, danced and merged and vanished and reappeared in an ever-changing pattern. Back at the locks, the general bid Captain Arnold good-by and turned to leave. Then, as if an afterthought came forward, he turned back. "David, oh, David!" "Yes, sir." "Perhaps you remember a conversation we had a few weeks ago? I called on you for some technical advice." He held his helmet in his hands. "When was that, sir?" "Oh, it was about the technical feasibility of reversing the airchanging equipment, I believe. As you know, I can't be up on all the technical, purely detailed procedure, for all phases of the operation. That's what we have experts for." The last statement was unusually jovial. "I believe you told me, David, that the process was too far along at that time. Perhaps you remember?" "General Shorter, when was that?" "I thought you would remember, David. I'm sure it was you. Yes, I'm almost positive it was. But if you say... Well, David, it wasn't quite so much as exactly a statement like that. But that was the general meaning of it, you know, stripped of all the technical language. You have to take it in the over-all context. That was the meaning I got." He laughed tactfully. "You're like lawyers, all you technicians. You answer everything yes and no at the same time. I hoped you'd remember the conversation. I got that idea from it." The general waited. "Well, David -- don't look like that -- it's not at all important. Just trying to refresh my own memory. It's not important, really... Good night, David." He placed the helmet over his head. "Good night, General." Methodically the general completed his rounds. He laughed often and joked with the men and seemed in exceptionally good spirits. Back in his own quarters, he brought out his diary. With a weary sigh, he sat down to it. He glanced at his timepiece. The day extended backward almost beyond memory but it was not yet late. After thumbing the diary listlessly for several minutes -- pausing now and then at a paragraph -- he began to write. He put the events of the day down precisely in their logical sequence. IV Committee took over the dining area when the general left for his tour of inspection. While the steward's department was preparing coffee for the interviewees, now assembling in the corridor, the four members of the Committee arranged themselves at the larger of the tables. Notepaper lay before them. Mr. Tucker lighted a cigar and fingered it. "A rather good meal," he said. The others nodded. "I may as well start off, while we're waiting," Mr. Wallace said. "I'll summarize my somewhat contradictory observations. "Superficially, the cultural level of the natives appeared quite primitive. The absence of tools would normally be indicative. On the other hand, the city was carved from rock in a way so as to suggest a very sophisticated technology. And writing, while apparently not practiced to any considerable extent, was known -- or, if not writing as we understand it, some advanced decorative technique. We've found two tines of it, at least. "Again superficially, the city would suggest a nomadic tradition, but for its craftsmanship. It seems independent of any obvious supply of food and their equivalent of water, if any. Nor were any provisions in evidence for the disposal of waste products. Yet the city had the appearance of age and continual usage. If you notice, the floor of the recess was worn unevenly toward the center by what I should guess to be the traffic of several centuries. "The thought naturally occurs that the aliens were the rather decadent relics of a highly developed technological civilization existing on the planet in the not too distant past. Yet Miracastle offers no evidence for the existence of a prior technology -- no ruins, no residual radioactivity from atomic operations. In short, the city has no apparent genesis in the past. "The alternative arises: perhaps the natives were not natives at all, but immigrants or colonists like ourselves. Yet the age of the city contradicts this. "Perhaps there is a simple explanation, although it does not occur to me. But I do have this feeling. The city was utilitarian. To me, it calls to mind one of those exquisite etchings of Picasso. The severe economy of line suggests simplicity. Yet, on further inspection, you see that each line contributes to a rather bewildering variety of perspectives. I strongly suspect that the city and the people of Miracastle will remain one of the great, unsolved mysteries of the universe." Mr. Wallace was finished with his remarks. Mr. Ryan nodded. "Perhaps I'm deficient in sensibilities, but I find that the most... agonizing... thing of all is not ever to be able to know what these people were like. It's almost as if some part of us had been lopped off, isn't it? What did the people of Miracastle think about? What was their philosophy of life? What was their social organization? What was their ultimate goals? When you realize how much we learned of ourselves from an examination of our own primitive cultures, the sense of loss really comes home. Think how much more we could have learned of ourselves by acquiring the perspective of a truly alien culture. It's almost as if we could really understand ourselves at last if we could only understand a totally alien culture... "Well, that's gone," Mr. Tucker said. The words were brittle and discrete. They hung in memory and the listeners waited as though for an echo of something shouted into a canyon. The echo did not come. They were silent. Grief is the final knowledge of time. When one first learns that it can never be turned backward upon itself to permit the correction of past sins and the rightings of wrongs transfixed and forever unalterable. Grief is the frantic, futile beating of hands against a barrier without substance, both obscenely unreal and yet the only reality. Grief is the knowledge that we cannot step backwards before the death of loved ones and see those precious half-forgotten dream faces once again. Grief is the knowledge that time is immutable. Outside the Richardson Dome, the wind was changing. It could now neither support the life that was nor the life that would be, and it howled in melancholy and insensate anguish its loneliness and longing to the eternal and ever-changing pattern of the stars. HE Committee concluded their interviews with an oldline corporal. He had just short of thirty years service and had several times traveled the twoway escalator of non-commissioned rank from master sergeant to private. He was perhaps typical of many of the older soldiers. His love of the Corps was expressed by his loyalty to it; his hatred of the Corps was expressed by his inability to abide by its regulations. "You knew Sergeant Schuster very well?" Mr. Tucker asked. "He was a new man," the corporal said. "He got on just before lift-off. A week, two weeks, something like that. I knew him, I guess. He was one of them kind that was always thinking. And like you know, sir, thinking ain't too good for a soldier. I've known a lot of guys like that in my time. You know what I mean? They're not cut out for the Corps." "He talked to you quite a bit?" The corporal turned to face Mr. Ryan. "He was always talking, sir. He was a regular nut. I thought for a while he was queer. He had all those crazy ideas." "Like what, Corporal?" "Oh, like -- well, you know." The corporal hesitated and rummaged his memory without conspicuous success. "Sunsets," he said rather emphatically. "Talked about sunsets. Talked about just anything. Called me out back on Earth to look at a sunset once, I remember." "What did he think about killing the natives?" Mr. Wallace asked. The question alerted the mechanism which produced the almost-Pavlovian loyalty response. "We didn't kill no natives," the corporal said. "They just died when we changed the air. Tough." He looked at Mr. Wallace and then into the silence around him. "Well... well, let's see. I guess you'd say that sort of got to him. I mean, you know, he thought it was -- " the voice became distant, as though describing a fantastic event which he could not relate to anything in a rational environment -- "he thought it was his fault. You know how some of these guys are. I used to have a platoon once, you know. And they say -- " He twisted his mouth and changed his voice to a childish whine. "What ior?" The voice reverted to normal. "They don't ask for any reason. They just ask. I say to them, I say, 'God damn it' -- excuse me, sir -- 'I told you to do it, ain't that enough?' Well, this Schuster, sir, he worried all the time. He got so he cut himself shaving. Damnedest thing. Oh, hell, maybe for the last week, every morning, he came out a bloody mess. Patches of toilet paper all over his face. 'I can't shave,' he'd say. 'My God, I can't shave.' He wasn't nervous, either. His hands were okay. They didn't shake. It's just that he couldn't shave. Like I say, he was a nut." No one spoke for a moment, and the corporal twisted uncomfortably. Then Mr. Tucker said, "Well, Corporal, tell me this, please." "Yes, sir." "What's your own personal impression of General Shorter?" "The old man?" the corporal asked in surprise. "He's okay." "Feel free to discuss this," Mr. Flison said. 'We'd like to know, really, what your opinion is." "Like I say, he's okay. He's got a job to do. You know, he busted me once. General Shorter personally, I mean. Hell, I don't hold it against him, though. He's got his job to do, I got mine. I wouldn't say anything against General Shorter, no, sir. He's a soldier. I mean, you know... he's a soldier." After the corporal was dismissed, Mr. Tucker said, "Well, gentlemen, I guess we've about wrapped it up here. I think this is enough. Anybody's mind changed? I don't think we need any more, do you?" Mr. Wallace sighed heavily. He looked down at his hands. still at his writing desk when he was notified that Mr. Tucker would like to see him first thing in the morning. "Another day of it, eh?" the general asked the sergeant who brought the message. "No, sir. From the other crew, I hear they're planning to leave tomorrow." The general's face relaxed. His smile reflected weary tolerance. "Had enough in one day, have they? It's about time they let us get back to work." After the sergeant left, the general wrote a final paragraph: "I've just been informed the 'investigation' is completed. In record time, it seems. They finished up in the mess tonight, talking to some of the men. So what did it all really accomplish? They took a long ship that could better have been used somewhere else. Half my men are down with the virus. They almost cost me my schedule. And to what end? Just another piece of paper somewhere. Put Miracastle on the scale against some nice, heavy report and see which way the scale tips." The general closed the diary. It was late now. He was very tired. knocked on the general's door. "Come in," General Shorter called. The civilian entered. The general dismissed the orderly with a nod. "And I'll need some clean towels for tonight," he called. His voice was hoarse. "Yes, sir." The door closed. The two of them were alone. "Sit down. Excuse the cold. Got it last night. What do you say to a brandy?" "Don't let me stop you." "I never drink alone." "Perhaps you'd better," Mr. Tucker said. The general had paused just short of the cupboard. He turned slowly. "In that case, I'll make an exception, this once." He poured. "Just what did you mean by that, sir? Let's get to the point." "General Shorter, we're going to have to ask you to come back with us." The general bent slightly forward. His lips were partly open, as though he were listening to hear a second time. "Why," he said, "I've too much work to do, sir. I'm afraid that's out of the question. It's just not possible at all." Mr. Tucker waited. General Shorter poured himself another brandy. His back was to the civilian. "There's nothing more important, right now, than my job here," he said. He drank the brandy in a single gulp. "I don't see how it can wait. General," Mr. Tucker said. The general's lips were dry. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment against the alcohol and the cold. He licked his lips. "What's the formal charge?" Mr. Tucker bent forward. His voice was soft and curious, as though the question were his final effort to understand something that puzzled him for a long time. "What do you think it is. General?" "What could it be?" the general said sharply. "I follow orders, sir. I was sent out here to make this planet suitable for human habitation. This is exactly what I have been doing." His voice was growing progressively more angry and with an effort he curbed himself. "Put yourself in my position. I did what any field commander would have done. It was too late to stop it. I've got -- It's a question of the limits of normal prudence. A matter of interpretation, sir." The general was in the process of pouring still another drink. The slender brandy glass broke under the force of his anger. He opened his palm. Blood trickled from between his fingers. The general looked up from the hand and fleeting annoyance came and went before he was recalled to present reality. His eyes met Mr. Tucker's. Mr. Tucker suddenly shivered as if touched by a wind from beyond the most distant stars, a wind which whispered: The aliens are among us. "General," Mr. Tucker said, "the formal charge is murder." The place called Sodom was bad enough. But right down the road was the other town -- oncf that was even worsel Sodom and lomorrah, Texas shouldn't have been as a census taker, qualified. He couldn't map. He didn't know what was. He only grinned when told him that North was at the top. He knew better. But he did write a nice round hand, like a boy's hand. He knew Spanish, and enough English. For the sector that was assigned to him he would not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better than any mapmaker. Besides, he was poor and needed the money. They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had instructed him. They couldn't be sure. "Count everyone? All right. Fill in everyone? I need more papers." "We will give you more if you need more. But there aren't so many in your sector." "Lots of them. Lobos, tejones, zorros, even people." "Only the people, Manuel! Do not take the animals. How would you write up the animals? They have no names." "Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all." "Only people, Manuel." "Mulos?" "No." "Cone;os." "No, Manuel, no. Only the people." "No trouble. Might as well take them all." "Only people -- God give me strength! -- only people, Manuel." "How about little people?" "Children, yes. That has been explained to you." "Little people. Not children, little people." "If they are people, take them." "How big they have to be?" "It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people, take them." That is where the damage was done. The official had given a snap judgement, and it led to disaster. It was not his fault. The instructions are not clear. Nowhere in all the verbiage does it say how big they have to be to be counted as people. to work. His sector was the Santa Magdalena, a scrap of baldheaded and desolate mountains, steep but not high, and so torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimes began to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone. In the center valley there were flve thousand acres of slag and vitrified rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hills and destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. This was called Sodom. It was strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water. Away from the dead center the ravines were body-deep in chaparral, and the hillsides stood graygreen with old cactus. The stunted trees were lower than the giant bushes and yucca. Manuel went with Mula, a round easy man and a sparse gaunt mule. Mula was a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa Magdalena of a genus less certain. Yet even about Mula there was an oddity in her ancestry. Her paternal grandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this, but Mr. Marshal had not accepted it. "She is a mule. Therefore, her father was a jack. Therefore his father was also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way." Manuel often wondered about that, for he had raised the whole strain of animals, and he remembered who had been with whom. "A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall and with a beard and horns. I always thought that he was a goat." Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be no travel in the hot afternoon. But Manuel had a job to do, and he did it. He took the forms from one of the packs that he had unslung from Mula, and counted out nine of them. He wrote down all the data on nine people. He knew all there was to know about them, their nativities and their antecedents. He knew that there were only nine regular people in the nine hundred square miles of the Santa Magdalena. But he was systematic, so he checked the list over again and again. There seemed to be somebody missing. Oh, yes, himself. He got another form and filled out all the data on himself. Now, in one way of looking at it, his part in the census was finished. If only he had looked at it that way, he would have saved worry and trouble for everyone, and also ten thousand lives. But the instructions they had given him were ambiguous, for all that they had tried to make them clear. So very early the next morning he rose and cooked beans, and said, "Might as well take them all." He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing, gave her salt and loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census, but in fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was also a dread of it that his superiors did not understand. There was reason also why Mula was loaded so she could hardly walk with packs of census forms. Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above Lost Souls Creek, "ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora -- " the very gulches stood angry and stark in the early morning -- "y en la bora de neustra muerte." dwarf staggered into the outskirts of High Plains, Texas, followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did not look like a wolf. A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids who might have killed them, and the two as yet unclassified things were taken to the station house. The dwarf was three foot high, a skeleton stretched over with brown-burnt leather. The other was an un-canine looking dogsized beast, so full of burrs and thorns that it might have been a porcupine. It was a nightmare replica of a shrunken mule. The midget was mad. The animal had more presence of mind: she lay down quietly and died, which was the best she could do, considering the state that she was in. "Who is census chief now?" asked the mad midget. "Is Mr. Marshal's boy the census chief?" "Mr. Marshal is, yes. Who are you? How do you know Marshal? And what is that which you are pulling out of your pants, if they are pants?" "Census list. Names of everybody in the Santa Magdalena. I had to steal it." "It looks like microfilm, the writing is so small. And the roll goes on and on. There must be a "Little bit more, little bit more. I get two bits a name." They got Marshal there. He was very busy, but he came. He had been given a deadline by the mayor and the citizen's group. He had to produce a population of ten thousand people for High Plains, Texas; and this was diffi cult, for there weren't that many people in the town. He had been working hard on it, though; but he came when the police called him, "You Marshal's little boy? You look just like your father," said the midget. "That voice, I should know that voice even if it's cracked to pieces. That has to be Manuel's voice." "Sure, I'm Manuel. Just like I left, thirty-five years ago." "You can't be Manuel, shrunk three feet and two hundred "You look here at my census slip. It says I'm Manuel. And here are nine more of the regular little people. I couldn't get them on the right forms, though. I had to steal their list." "You can't be Manuel," said Marshal. "He can't be Manuel," said the big policemen and the little policeman. "Maybe not, then," the dwarf conceded. "I thought I was, but I wasn't sure. Who am I then? Let's look at the other papers and see which one I am." "No, you can't be any of them either, Manuel. And you surely can't be Manuel," "Give him a name anyhow and get him counted. We got to get to that ten thousand mark." "Tell us what happened, Manuel -- if you are. Which you aren't. But tell us." "After I counted the regular people I went to count the little people. I took a spade and spaded off the top of their town to get in. But they put an encanto on me, and made me and Mula run a treadmill for thirty-five years." "Where was this?" "At the little people town, Nuevo Danae, But after thirty-five years the encanto wore off and Mula and I stole the list of names and ran away." "But where did you really get this list of so many names written so small?" "Suffering saddle sores. Marshal, don't ask the little bug so many questions. You got a million names in your hand. Certify them! Send them in! There's enough of us here right now. We declare that place annexed forthwith. This will make High Plains the biggest town in the whole state of Texas." CO Marshal certified them and  sent them into Washington. This gave High Plains the largest percentage increase of any city in the nation, but it was challenged. There were some soreheads in Houston who said that it wasn't possible. They said High Plains had nowhere near that many people and there must have been a miscount. And in the days that the argument was going on, they cleaned up and fed Manuel, if it were he, and tried to get from him a cogent story. "How do you know it was thirty-five years you were on the treadmill, Manuel?" "Well, it seemed like thirty-five years." "It could have only been about three days." "Then how come I'm so old?" "We don't know that, Manuel, we sure don't know that. How big were these people?" "Who knows? A finger long, maybe two?" "And what is their town?" "It is an old prairie-dog town that they fixed up. You have to dig down with a spade to get to the streets." "Maybe they were really all prairie dogs, Manuel. Maybe the heat got you and you only dreamed that they were little people." "Prairie dogs can't write as good as on that list. Prairie dogs can't write hardly at all." "That's true. The list is hard to explain. And such odd names on it too." "Where is Mula? I don't see Mula since I came back." "Mula just lay down and died, Manuel." "Gave me the slip. Why didn't I think of that? Well, I'll do it too. I'm too worn out for anything else." "Before you do, Manuel, just a couple of last questions." "Make them real fast then. I'm on my way." "Did you know these little people were there before?" "Oh, sure. There a long time." "Did anybody else ever see them?" "Oh, sure. Everybody in the Santa Magdalena see them. Eight, nine people see them." "And Manuel, how do we get to the place? Can you show us on a map?" Manuel made a grimace, and died quietly as Mula had done. He didn't understand those maps at all, and took the easy way out. They buried him, not knowing for sure whether he was Manuel come back, or what he was. There wasn't much of him to bury. TT was the same night, very late and after he had been asleep, that Marshal was awakened by the ring of an authoritative voice. He was being harangued by a four-inch tall man on his bedside table, a man of dominating presence and acid voice. "Come out of that cot, you clown! Give me your name and station!" "I'm Marshal, and I suspect that you are a late pig sandwich, or caused by one. I shouldn't eat so late." "Say 'sir' when you reply to me. I am no pig sandwich and I do not commonly call on fools. Get on your feet, you clod." And wonderingly Marshal did. "I want the list that was stolen. Don't gape! Get it!" "What list?" "Don't stall, don't stutter. Get me our tax list that was stolen. It isn't words that I want from you." "Listen, you cicada. I'll take you and -- " "You will not. You will notice that you are paralyzed from the neck down. I suspect that you were always so from there up. Where is the list?" "S-sent it to Washington." "You bug-eyed behemoth! Do you realize what a trip that will be? You grandfather of inanities, it will be a pleasure to destroy you!" "I don't know what you are, or if you are really. I don't believe that you even belong on the world." "Not belong on the world! We own the world. We can show written title to the world. Can you?" "I doubt it. Where did you get the title?" "None of your business. I'd rather not say. Oh, well, we got it from a promoter of sorts. A con man, really. I'll have to admit that we were taken, but we were in a spot and needed a world. He said that the larger bifurcates were too stupid to be a nuisance. We should have known that the stupider a creature, the more of a nuisance it is." "I had about decided the same thing about the smaller a creature. We may have to fumigate that old mountain mess." "Oh, you can't harm us. We're too powerful. But we can obliterate you in an instant." "Hah!" "Say Hah, sir' when you address me. Do you know the place in the mountain that is called Sodom?" "I know the place. It was caused by a large meteor." "It was caused by one of these." What he held up was the size of a grain of sand. Marshal could not see it in detail. "There was another city of you bug-eyed beasts there," said the small martinet. "You wouldn't no know about it. It's been a few hundred years. We decided it was too close. Now I have decided that you are too close." "A thing that size couldn't crack a walnut." "You floundering fop, it will blast this town flat!" "What will happen to you?" "Nothing. I don't even blink for things like that." "How do you trigger it off." "You gaping goof, I don't have time to explain that to you. I have to get to Washington." It may be that Marshal did not believe himself quite awake. He certainly did not take the threat seriously enough. For the little man did trigger it off. "VTEN the final count was in, High Plains did not have the highest percentage gain in population in the nation. Actually it showed the sharpest decline, from # to nothing. They were going to make a forest preserve out of the place, except that it has no trees worthy of the name. Now it is proposed to make it the Sodom and Gomorrah State Park from the two mysterious scenes of desolation there, just seven miles apart. It is an interesting place, as wild a region as you will ever find, and is recommended for the man who has seen everything. tllustrateil by Mabton Blaine S#S each. books now ready at # each. ready at # each. these # books due November # at # each. books due December # at # each. roughs. Bound in heavy paper covers with very fine quality paper. Regular book size. Contains by J. Allen St. John. # pages. # Specialist in complete sets. Send your want lists. All prices F.O.B. Brooklyn, N. Y. #I #th Avenue Brooklyn # , N. Y. He brought them life and hope. Why woufdn't the fools take it from him? axy: The more complicated the machine, the bigger mess it can make. Like the time the planetary computer for Buughabyta flipped its complete grain-futures series. The computer ordered only # acres, and Buughabytians had to live for a full year off the government's stored surplus -- thus pounding down the surplus, forcing up the price, eliminating the subsidy and balancing the Buughabytian budget for fifteen years -- an unprecedented bit of nonsense that almost had permanent effects. But a career economist with an eye for flubup and complication managed to restore balanced disorder, bringing Buughabyta right back to normalcy. Or like the time a matter-dupliOH, to turn out a magnificently busted blonde sphygmomanohmplacement, putting a strain on girls dedicated to Doyle Oglevie worship. Doyle-she insisted she was Doyle-he, as it took quite a while for her hormones to overcome the memory of his easy, eyelash-flapping, tone-torturing microphone conquests. Put a strain on his wardrobe, too. No machine, of course, can compare for complexity with any group of humans who have been collected into machine-like precision of operation. Take one time when an Ipplinger Cultural Contact Group was handed a Boswellister with V.I.P. connections and orders to put him to an assignment -- for his maturity. ly. He squirmed emotionally up and down his backbone, but he affected a disdainful appearance of patience in view of the importance of his and his poppa's positions compared with the pawn-like minusculity of the audience's. The Blond Terror strode majestically down the aisle of the open air sports arena, preceded by twenty-four harem-darling dancing girls. The orchestra wailed an oriental sinuosity of woodwinds and drums, accompanying the hip-twitching, nearly naked, sloe(by benefit of makeup) eyed, black-haired beauties. Fifteen heavyweights, draped in leopard skins, had preceded the dancers to set up the Blond Terror's tub on a polar bear rug in the center of the ring. A dozen luscious watercarriers had emptied their jars into the tub. Soap and towels, oils and perfumes, mirror and comb were arranged on top of a lushly ornamented box that stood by one of the corner posts. The Blond Terror vaulted the ropes and stood in the ring, popping his muscles, waiting for his handmaidens to remove the five layers of elaborately decorated robes that were draped over his super-manly body. Boswellister cringed slightly (inwardly), speculating that the Blond Terror really was a muscled man. All that man -- nearly seven feet tall, bronzed, developed, imperious, condescending to notice just slightly the adulations of the women in the packed arena. The Blond Terror stepped into the tub, carrying out his advertised boast of being the cleanest wrestler in the ring, a boast he was unable to prove with ring action through the exigencies of type-casting, for the Blond Terror was the villain. The Blond Terror muscled down into the tub. He was scrubbed, then rinsed. He stood out onto the white fur rug and sneeringly allowed his handmaidens to pat him dry and powder him down. They held up the large hand mirror and allowed him to view his handsomeness while his short-cropped, blond curls were carefully combed. "Now." Boswellister spoke the order into the lapel receiver. On the Ipplinger starship a communications tech slapped home a switch and the solido-vision circle settled over the Blond Terror's head, a halo of solid light for a complex Ipplinger signal-reaction device. "Hail Ippling!" Boswellister shouted. Boswellister strained forward, clutching the seat arms. It had to work! His equation must be right! The symbol had the proper cultural connotations. It was bound to capture the audience, put them in the right mood of awe-struck superstitious reverence, make the revelation of the great circle of the Ipplinger starship overhead a thing of wonderment and devotion-focus. The Blond Terror should now look upwards, guide the eyes of the audience, bring them to the recognition. After all, as a Boswellister... and according to his great grandfather, and his poppa too... But the Blond Terror gazed appreciatively into the mirror, smiling slyly at the audience. The crowd roared its applause for the trick lighting effect. You could depend on the Blond Terror. No matter how many times you'd seen his act, he always managed to come up with something new. Now, for the opening of the levard Open Air Sports Arena, the Blond Terror had done it again. Boswellister shouted. He pointed. He stared upwards, trying to draw the crowd with his vehemence. But he couldn't capture one gaze, no matter what he did. He poked the man seated next to him, but the surly fool snarled, "Shuddup! The Hatchet Man's goin' into his act!" There it was, sailing in the night sky, illuminated with soft etherealness to give the proper effect to these superstition-ridden people. All they had to do was glance up and accord to Ippling the superiority that was Ippling's, and they would be brought gently, delicately into galactic contact, opening out their narrow ways into the broad ways of the galactic universal worlds. With Boswellister to lead them. But he couldn't make the play. Not a head would tilt up. The TV cameras that should be scanning the great lighted circle of the Ipplinger starship had swung to the entrance, waiting for the Hatchet Man. And here he came, down the aisle like a bolt of Chinese lightning. He vaulted the ropes, leaped to the tub, overturned it and was gone back up the aisle before the Blond Terror could retaliate. Bath water sopped the piles of robes and made a mess out of the bearskin rug; but the ring attendants carted everything off, removed the waterproof canvas from the ring mat and prepared to get the match underway. The Blond Terror paced in his corner, waving his hand mirror, challenging the Hatchet Man to quick, bloody death. And every few moments he'd stop to gaze admiringly into the mirror, running his hand along the edge of the solid band of light, grabbing all the credit for Ipplinger electronic science. He turned on cue to give the TV audience a fullface closeup. Boswellister cursed himself for choosing the Blond Terror. That cynical, egocentric muscle artist was too pleased with himself to have any room in his thoughts for proper superstitious awe, and too stupid to recognize the superior science in back of the halo device. "Remove the device," Boswellister ordered. There was no point in allowing it to stay, and that band of solid light, immovably in place on the wrestler's head, made a perfect battering ram for headbutting mayhem. Boswellister paid no attention to the gladiators-at-mat; he left his seat as soon as the device was removed and walked out onto Ventura Boulevard. He went over his cultural equation, trying to find the flaw. In the year he had spent on the preliminary survey, he had assessed this cultural equation to the last decimal point of surety. He had absolute faith in these people's superstitions. He knew what to expect; but somewhere the equation had been off. He should have chosen a quieter event, he guessed. The audience had been too well schooled in the acceptance of the spectacular. What was needed was a more acute contrast, and suddenly he had it: the burlesque runway. He had watched it many times... and there was one girl, a bigbodied, blonde with mild eyes. He checked his watch and hurried his pace. It was about time for Dodie's turn on the runway that extended out from the front of the gambling house. With satisfaction, Boswellister called up the memory of Dodie's peel act. This would be a natural, and he couldn't think why he hadn't decided on it right away. TN many ways Dodie was a big girl. In clothes she could never be the fashion ideal, but she certainly made a good thing out of nakedness. Her soft, heavy, white breasts made old men blanch and young men start to grab. She was tall, with a narrow waist, flaring hips, long curvy legs and arms; with those big, innocent blue eyes, wearing high heels and an ounce of flimsy, up there on the burlesque runway... mmm... Boswellister groaned. She wouldn't date Boswellister a second time no matter what he Give the gift you'd like to receive We admit it -- we're pushovers for the Xmas spirit. "Don't do it," our accountant pleads. "We can't afford to sell subscriptions at those prices!" But our eye goes past his piteous figure to the distant corners of the land. "Readers straining budgets to introduce Galaxy to friends and relatives, and have enough scratch left over for their own subscriptions. We can't leave the job to them!" we thunder. "Galaxy must bear its share of the burden! And not only that -- by the Lord Harry, we'll even include handsome Gift Card Announcements with their names as donors!" Out slouches our accountant, muttering, "All right, but they'd better get their orders in before December #. --  -- so rush in your order today. Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson St., New York #, N.Y. Please enter Special Gift Subscriptions to the following and send gift card announcements. I enclose Nimt Nam# Addreii Address City State City State Otter # Price Offer # Price... Sitn Card Sign Card . Name Address Name Cit State Otter # Sign Card Sign Card promised, and his promises had included many things she'd never before heard of. Boswellister squirmed momentarily. It was too bad there wasn't a better crowd. Most of the Boulevard's regulars were at the Arena opening, but there were a few loiterers, standing along the curb, watching the free show. And all he had to do was make a beginning, Boswellister felt. He was sure that everything would roll by itself after that. He had faith in his superstition equation. Dodie peeled. She seemed headed for complete nakedness at any moment, but to Boswellister's surprise, the revealing costume contained more pieces than he had remembered. "Any moment now," he whispered to the solido-tech. "Now, wait... there... that should be the last piece. Settle the device around her head," he ordered. Then he groaned and countermanded the order. He had remembered Dodie's details, not her act. For at the last moment she slipped to the wings, dropping the last swatch of lace to slide down one long, white, outthrust leg. Oh, blessed Ippling! There was his ship, floating majestically overhead, but no one would give it a glance. He pointed to it. These men must follow his excited gestures and look up; but they were busy calling suggestions to the line of ponies who had taken over the runway. Boswellister felt as if he were standing in a desert, surrounded by a mob of phantoms from his own imagination. The crying voice of the gambling-house barker rode in over the clang and brass of jazzy music, but he couldn't turn the tip. As soon as the line-girls left the overthe-sidewalk runway, the idlers moved on down the street to take in the next spot's free outdoor lure show. Boswellister leaned against the wall and watched the barker wipe his sweat-soaked forehead. He felt kinship with the man in his failure. The manager came out and talked to the barker for a moment. Boswellister overheard: "Dodie didn't draw one customer. A buck ain't to be made these days." The barker replied, shaking his head, "They're oversold, Marve. The give-away is all they want." Boswellister turned away and walked towards his motel. They wanted the give-away, but the glory of Ippling he had to give made no impression. He felt desperate. He had to make one more try. His family position demanded obedience from the starship officers and crew. He stopped for a moment and gave a swift command into the lapel pick-up, then went on to his motel room. next morning, full of confidence after a good breakfast, he headed for the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevards. There he would make his stand. The boulevard swarmed with women shoppers. Cars and trucks roared by. The spectacular signs and free lure show runways were closed down, for ballyhoo of a different character had taken their place for the daytime. Boswellister stopped for a moment to watch a demonstrator work before a huge, block-long, glittering drugstore. The demonstrator went into his pitch: " -- money back. Now watch! Into a wet glass I pour a small amount of medically tested Calsobisidine. See how the Calsobisidine clings to the sides of the wet glass." The pitchman smiled with flawless teeth and the women smiled back at him. His shoes were waxed and buffed; his hair fell in a black curl across his high forehead; his gardenia dripped dew like the ones in the box by his elbow. Each bottle of Calsobisidine came complete with an intimate smile from the pitchman, a fresh gardenia pinned on the breast by his clever fingers and a trial sample bottle. Just for six ninety-five, plus tax. "In the exact same manner, Calsobisidine clings to the lining of your stomach and intestines, giving positive relief from burning pain and acid indigestion." This puzzled Boswellister, and he remarked in a voice that seemed overloud, "But who has glass insides?" The women giggled and turned away. The pitchman's scowl was a menace; his voice bitter: "Go on, scram. You queered my tip." Boswellister slipped away while the pitchman started to collect a new crowd. He popped into the entrance of the drugstore, and as always stood momentarily amazed by the bewildering variety of merchandise. Gardening implements, paper goods, dishes and gHssware, whiskey, Calsobisidine, a huge display of baby dolls that performed every human function but reproduction... Then he gasped and walked towards the inside demonstration. There, presided over by a fake medical man, dressed in operating room regalia, including mask, rubber gloves and stethescope; there, right in the middle of the block-long drugstore, a demonstration of the newest educational doll was taking place. The doll, stretched out on a miniature hospital delivery table, was being delivered of a replica new-born infant. Again and again the "doctor" performed the delivery, alternately inserting the doll-baby into the doll-mamma and removing it. Boswellister flushed and walked quickly away. He had no doubt of the toy's educational value, but nevertheless -- he sighed deeply. When Boswellister reached the corner of Ventura and Laurel Canyon, he made his stand on the southeast corner, facing the hills over which the Ipplinger starship would come to hover over the intersection and be revealed by him. He contacted control and ordered the halo focus for his head. He reached up and felt the circle, planted firmly over his brow. He smiled to himself and went into his pitch. in a quavering voice, then he remembered the Calsobisidine demonstrator, firmed up his tones and started again. "People of Earth! Listen to the message from the stars!" "Selling horoscopes," a woman answered her child's question. "What's a horrorscope, mamma?" "A bunch of hooey," she snapped in reply, scowled at Boswellister and jerked her child complainingly down the street behind her. "People of Earth!" Boswellister stated commandingly. He grasped a man's arm, saying, "Stand still a moment, friend, and hear the promise of Ippling. Glory beyond your imagination can be yours with the ascendancy of Ippling in this world of tears and sorrows." The man jerked away. "What the hell, Mac!" He looked searchingly at Boswellister and muttered, "Geez, a nut." He stood back from Boswellister to listen, smilingly superior, tolerantly waiting to be entertained. A woman dragging a toddler stopped, then several other people stopped to see until Boswellister had about ten people standing around him. "People of Earth!" he started in again, but he was interrupted by a cackling voice from the rear. "Where else?" The small crowd laughed and started to move away, but Boswellister stood straight and commanded them. "Listen! Wait for a moment and learn your glorious destiny. "Now," he said quietly into the lapel pickup, and the great doughnut circle of the Ipplinger starship sailed in close over the hills. A line of brush fire followed the starship. Boswellister held up his hands and pointed. "Behold the glory of Ippling that can be yours!" He held onto the halo, trying to get them to follow the symbolism. "Look upwards!" He screamed at them, but they watched the brush fire that swept the hill top. It was a goodie. It would wipe out a number of homes. He grabbed a boy by the arm and demanded, "Look at the Ipplinger starship. Behold the glory of Ippling!" The ten-year-old sneered. "Yah! That's the new # Lockheed X#-P# experimental ship. I got a model last week." "No, no, lad! The Ipplinger starship, come to Earth to bring the blessings of Ippling's culture to his backwards planet. Ippling will save you from wars and ills, from poverty and hatred. Ippling will be your destiny. Follow me, Boswellister! Ippling will lead you to the stars! Glory for all!" Boswellister patted the boy on the head. "Keep your hands off me, you big stiff!" Boswellister gulped and pointed upwards. "See the Ipplinger starship!" "Aah! Shuddup!" His mother jerked his arm in reproof. "How many times I've gotta tell you not to say, shuddup. "Aah!" the boy said in disgust. "Everybody knows starships are big rockets!" He'd said the final word; he had no more interest in Boswellister, for the fire engines were coming. and turned up Laurel Canyon, their heavy motors, air horns and sirens drowning out Boswellister's speech. Cars had piled up at the intersection to wait for the fire engines to make their swing, and Boswellister leaped to the middle of the intersection as soon as the trucks had turned. He held up his arms and went into his People of Earth spiel again. But angry, blasting horns cut his voice to nothing. The drivers pressed close in on him, pinpointing him in the middle of the intersection. Shouts and jeers and horns; the roaring scream of fire engines; people running and shouting; Ventura at Laurel Canyon was a cacophonous maelstrom. A traffic officer screeched his copcycle to a halt and made his way to the center of the mass of tangled traffic. He blew his whistle and waved his arms, ordering Boswellister to the sidewalk, but Boswellister refused to move. He had his mission on Earth. Boswellister shouted over the piled-up noise, waving his hand to the sky, calling to them to follow his lead to the glory of Ippling. The officer grabbed his coat collar and hustled him to the sidewalk. "You're under arrest!" "You can't arrest me!" Boswellister squirmed and jerked away. He shouted, "Follow me!" and ran north, a good part of the crowd after him. He shrieked an order into the pickup while he ran over the bridge towards Moorpark. A woman spotted the Ipplinger starship that followed overhead. "Free samples!" she screamed, and those who had lagged behind fell into a run with the crowd following Boswellister. The northwest corner of Laurel Canyon and Moorpark had been cleared of houses for the erection center, and the ground was smooth and bare. Here, in the center of the five-acre construction site, the Ipplinger starship settled to Earth. The Ipplinger Supreme Starship Commander was panicstricken. He had to rescue Boswellister from that sample-seeking mob. If Boswellister should be trampled and injured! Each screamed demand, picked up by Boswellister's lapel microphone, sent the Supreme Commander's blood pressure up another notch, and the moment the ramp was unshipped he hit the ground. Officers and crewmen quickly lined up to pipe Boswellister aboard. But the crowd pushed in close, forcing Boswellister to the rear as they screamed for their free samples. Two bulky crewmen stood embattled by the entrance port, strongarming the kids who tried to storm through the port and inside. "Space Angel's inside!" That was their battle cry as they tried to wriggle under the legs of the crewmen. "Ya sellin' Oatbombs?" one screamed in the commander's ear, then reached up to snatch off a shoulder patch. Boswellister stood in the rear of the crowd and wrung his hands while the crowd clamored for their samples. "Give us the pitch, then pass out the stuff!" "Lookit that ship! Ain't it a dilly! Whatcha sellin'. Wheatsnaps?" "Bring on the dames!" starship, running their hands over the slick metal surface. "Boy, what a prop! Bet it cost mister?" "Sanity!" Boswellister shouted from the rear. His men tried to hold their ranks, but the crowd broke the lines, jerking the medals off their chests for souvenirs. Boswellister was almost babbling by the time the commander and his men battled their way to him. "You saw it all! You know!" Boswellister protested. "That Blond Terror and his harem darlings, and those violence-avid ruffians in the audience! Dodie, the stripper, with her lip-licking ogglers! That Calsobisidine pitchman, oozing allure and implied invitation! My equation! My precious equation, buried under a mass of pills, lotions, toys, food, clothes and everything sold with a bump and grind!" They fought to the ship with him, while the crowd opposed each step, yelling for entertainment, for TV cameras, for samples of anything. "How could I have missed it?" Boswellister moaned. "I should have sold them with sex, right from the beginning." "What do you do, handsome? Sing?" A bundle-clutching housewife breathed into his face, stepping on the commander's foot as she shoved in close to Boswellister. "Take me home!" Boswellister beseeched the commander. The officers and crew, tattered, demedaled, bruised and completely defeated in morale, formed a flying wedge and drove for the safety of the ship. The ramp retracted. The port closed, then opened briefly to eject a nosey boy, closing finally on the demands and the mocking laughter and the clangor of arriving police cars. "Raise ship!" the commander ordered. He sopped at the blood from his gashed arm and said to his first officer, "Somebody in that mob used a knife to go after those service stripes." The first shuddered. "Ugly brutes." Boswellister leaned against the corridor bulkhead and sighed as the Ipplinger starship rose from the ground. How could he explain to his poppa? All his brothers had won their worlds. He would do it. He squared his shoulders. After all, he was a Boswellister. Boswelhroldshan IX himself, the Prince Prince of the Central Ippling. He walked resolutely to the control room, riding the crest of his refurbished dignity. "Put me down on that planet we spotted last year," he ordered. "What was that star map number?" "G.S.R. #-F. R. A. #-R.U. #," his alert assistant astronomical officer answered, reading the number from a prepared memorandum. Boswellister hesitated. Should he reprimand the officer for anticipating his failure or compliment him for his efficiency? Boswellister backed water and went to his room to learn the language he'd need, while the officers pulled their own demoralized spirits together so they could go to work on the crew when the news broke that they weren't going home. their destination, and Boswellister -- well rested, well fed, hypnotically tutored, supplied with communicators, a synthesizer for his food and a portable equation writer strapped to his back, and his irrepressible, dauntless belief in himself in triumphant operation -- stepped from the ramp onto this newest world of his Princely destiny. "Circle in orbit," he ordered. "I'll call you when I need you." Boswellister walked confidently down the road to town. He congratulated himself on having learned, also on his wise humility in admitting the fact of his having learned. He smiled now at the naivete with which he had approached his first try at establishing a realm for his Ipplinger Princedom rights. He had been so full of illusions that he had landed openly, had stepped right up and announced that he had come to establish his household and rear his own Princes, who would, in their maturity, leave to win their own worlds. In addition to their being smallminded on that first world about his needing five wives for his household, they had nearly managed to commit him to a lunatic asylum, for he had overlooked, in his equation, the fact that his first planet, with its two suns and perpetual daylight, had never known about the stars. There had been no way to break through their wall of stupidity, and he had left, the planet's sanity-police close on his heels. Had he used money it would have been a cinch, he had realized as soon as he was safely in the ship. That hard-earned lesson he had applied to his second planet, but there superstition meant more than money, though money had seemed on the surface to be the answer to everything. On that second planet he had made the error of buying his way into the half-political, half-religious temple setup and had tried to bring the local superstitions into line with Ipplinger Reality Philosophy. They had lost an officer and three men when they rescued him from the temple's torture chamber; and none too soon, for he had been taking quite a stretching when his rescue had arrived. Applied on Earth, the superstition equation had not paid off. He had failed to notice that they didn't really believe in their religions and superstitions, though they showed every indication of being extremely devout and credulous. He should have sold Earth, and sold it with sex. Well, he had learned, all right, and here, on this new world, in this fresh start, he would show how well he had learned. In the idiom of Ventura Boulevard, he'd hit 'em with the whole deck, deuces wild. He'd give 'em sex and money and suFerstition and to hell with fact and logic. These primitive worlds had to be brought slowly into a respect for logic; for Ipplinger logic, the only valid system of logic in the whole universe. In the hovering ship, the commander turned to the astrogator and said, with the bitterness of yesterday's conflict with the mutinous crew evident in his voice, "Well, our little vaporized circuit is off again." He motioned to the image of Boswellister in the forward viewscreen. It was a sight that tended to increase the tremor in the astrogator's hands. He replied, "I only hope we can pull the crew through another pickup. Home and family! Do they think I want mine any less?" Boswellister marched confidently down the road. He would succeed, for didn't he have the well oiled machinery of the whole Ipplinger starship crew of cultural contact specialists to back him up? VfTniLE he walked, he prac ticed the strident-voiced delivery of extravagant lies he had learned so well and had so magnificently imitated from the Ventura Boulevard pitch artists. He practiced the leering insinuendo of the barker outside the gambling hall; he gave it the Calsobisidine con come-on; he sold it solid, dripping with sex, twitching with lure. He knew that here, finally, he would succeed. Prince of Ippling, smiled his confidence in his sex-money-superstition equation as he walked briskly down the road to begin his contact with a world that had substituted vat-culture procreation for sex; that had abolished money in favor of a complicated system of verbal, personal-honor swapping credits; that had no religions of superstitions. A world of people who considered the most sweetly distilled essence of living to be the minute investigation of the fine points of logical discourse, engaged in on the basis of an incredibly multiplied logic structure composed of thirtyseven separate systems of discursive regulations, the very first of which was based on a planetary absolute, the rejection and ridicule of all persuasive techniques and those who used them. iACasr been asked most frequently of me after seminars and lectures during the last five months or so was "Are we going to build a space station?" Or: "Has the space-station project been given up?" or even, "Do we still need a space station?" At first I merely answered the question, asserting that a space station is still considered useful and that it will be built when the Fig. #. Noordung's Space Station (#) The word Treppenschacht means "stairweli", Aufzugschacht means "eievator shaft", Verdampfungsrohr means "boiier tube" and Kondensatorrohre means "condenser tubes". time is ripe. After a while I began to wonder why this question came up with such monotonous regularity and I began to ask back. It turned out that not everybody who asked that question had the same reasons. One would be motivated by the belief that rocket engineers had changed their plans and wanted to do everything with direct takeoff from Earth. Somebody else had swallowed the statement, made by some people, that "instruments are much lighter than men and can do things no man could do, like detecting X-rays." And others just read a meaning into what might be called an absence of publicity; since the newspapers and magazines had talked about nothing but boosters, instrumented satellites and Mercury capsules for more than a year, the space-station project had most likely been given up. Of course it isn't so. papers, magazines, radio and TV, is talking mainly about instrumented satellites and boosters and so forth, it is talking merely about the things now at hand. Instrumented satellites are being sent up at fairly regular rate. By December #, #I there had been a total of # successful sateland # shots to and past the moon have been made by both sides and the program to make the big Saturn booster operational is under way. The space station is still a few years in the future. And before we can go ahead and build it a few other things have to be done first. that must be done before the space station project can become active. One is to have a large reliable booster, namely the Saturn. On its first test flight the Saturn, since all the upper stages were merely dummies, carried # pounds of water ballast -- which gives a fine indication of what it can lift. As now planned, the Saturn will be able to put # pounds into a #-mile orbit. But if the upper stages which are now under development should turn out a little better than expected -- let's say, if they turn out as well as hoped -- that payload may turn out to be ten per cent higher. This will take care of the necessary loadcarrying capacity. The second thing that must be done before the space station can be tackled is the solution of the so-called rendezvous problem. The space station, once it exists, cannot survive unless the rendezvous problem has been solved, even if the whole station was carried into orbit in one piece. A space station is, by definition, a manned satellite. The crew inside must be both relieved and supplied. Even if he had a rather small space station with a crew of only eight men in mind, these men must be relieved from time to time. Let us say that a stretch of duty would be six weeks; we need a supply ship which can carry four men plus supplies every three weeks. The rendezvous problem, which is the physical contact between two vessels both of which are orbiting the earth, is going to be attacked during #. (At the moment of writing no date has been set.) But it is very likely that the Gemini capsule for two astronauts will play a role in the rendezvous problem. The two unfinished items -- the big booster for carrying heavy loads, and the rendezvous program, for equipping, supplying and maintaining the space sta tion -- are the reason why the space station isn't much in the news right now. But that does not mean that nobody is thinking about it. In fact we are now in the fourth phase of the thinking about the space station. The first phase was way back in #, when Professor Hermann Oberth introduced the concept into scientific literature. He did not describe a specific space station, however; he only suggested how it might be done. His idea ran as follows: put a very large rocket ship equipped with a "landing boat" into an orbit around the earth. Have the man who put the ship into orbit return to the ground with his landing boat. And then add to the space station with successive flights, until it has become an orbital base. The second phase followed five years later, when an Austrian retired officer, originally a captain Fig. #. #-foot model of an expandable space station (Courtesy Goodyear Aircraft Corp.) Fig. #. A non-rigid soiar coiiector with turbo-generator. (Courtesy: Goodyear Aircraft Corp.) in the Austrian army's Engineer Corps, published a book on space travel which was mainly devoted to a description of the space station as he conceived it. Captain Potocnik, who wrote under the pen name of Hermann Noordung, had a three-body space station in mind. There were two auxiliary bodies, the astronomical observatory and the power house, and the main one which he called the Wohnrad (Living Wheel). See Fig. #. It was a circular structure with living quarters in its rim. Of course it was supposed to rotate so that the crew would be under pseudo-gravity (actually centrifugal force) and because it rotated the wheel was to be entered by the hub. Curved mirrors for catching the sun's rays were to provide power. "Hermann Noordung" did not think of everything, and he also made a number of mistakes, but his was the first design for a permanent space station and his main suggestions have been in all subsequent designs. One interesting fact which might be useful to mention is that some of Noordung's concepts appeared in subsequent designs although the originators of these designs did not even know that his book existed. It just proves that solutions to given problems are bound to turn out to be similar. Fig. # Building of a large expandable space station. The two deltawinged ships are re-entry vehicles. (Courtesy: Goodyear Aircraft Corp.) THE third phase came in #, when Collier's Weekly decided to devote most of one issue to space travel. The central theme of the issue was Wernher von Braun's spacestation concept. One interesting result of the circumstances was that every one of the participating scientists was forced to think about things which he would normally have postponed. The scientific conference which Collier's Weekly had called at my suggestion had the primary purpose of producing something that the magazine could publish... which meant that many things that had been stated before in rather general terms had to be stated in definite terms for the purpose of being painted and described. I'll give just two examples: Wernher von Braun had stated earlier that the space station would derive the power needed by the concentration of solar radiation "fueling" a turbo-generator. Now he -- or rather we, the conference -- had to think of the shape and arrangement of the mirror so that Chesley Bonestell could paint it, and von Braun also had to make calculations so that the overall weight of the mirror and turbo-generator could be mentioned. I had stated (as had everybody else) that the crew of the space station would be relieved at intervals; now I had to think about a whole housekeeping schedule, from crew replacement to garbage removal, taking the assumed size of the station and the carrying capacity of von Braun's assumed cargo carriers as the starting point. The final outcome of all the deliberations was a ring-shaped station with a circular troughshaped mirror for collecting solar radiation. In these two respects it resembles Noordung's Wohnrad, but the concept contained many things that Noordung had never dreamed of. There was an automatic stabilizing system which operated by pumping water from one sector to another to offset the effects of crew members walking around. The skin of the station, automatically assumed to be metal by Noordung, had turned into a plastic, reinforced by nylon threads or stainless steel wires. This made it possible to collapse the sections for transporting them into orbit In addition to general refinement, a sheet-metal "meteor bumper" had been added to absorb the impact of micro-meteorites. The fourth phase is now. Now big rockets no longer need to be assumed, they exist. While the date of the first experimental space station is still in the future it is now a near future of less than half a dozen years. And now industry is thinking about the problem. One might say that the thinkers are no longer people of a theoretical bent who point out what should be possible. The thinkers are people who hope for a contract. Of course there are several designs around in the United States and there can be little doubt that there are similar designs around in the Soviet Union. Some of the current designs visualize a structure similar to that of a Zeppelin-type airship, consisting of circular girder type rings for the end of each section, spaced apart by lightweight metal beams. The airtight plastic cover is then to be draped over this metallic skeleton. But Goodyear Aircraft has evolved another design, one which seems an echo of the other type of lighter-thanairship we once had, the blimp. sonal interest in structures of this type, one which needs some backtracking in time to explain. One of my earliest memories is seeing one of the airships built by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin circling over Berlin. A few years later I was taken out to a remote suburb to see an airship on the ground. It was one that also bore the name of its designer: Major Parseval. Many years later I was one of the men who founded the rocket-proving ground in a nearby suburb of Berlin. It took me over a year to realize that the remote suburb of my childhood and the nearby suburb of my early manhood were one and the same, and that we were building our early liquid fuel rockets in a corner of the tract of fields and copses which had served Major Parseval. By that time I had also learned to what extremes Major Parseval had gone in his design. In a desire to produce an airship which could be loaded on a truck (and the trucks of that period were not very large) he had not only done without a skeleton, he had not only designed and built a collapsible gondola, he had even produced collapsible propellers. His propellers were strips of cloth attached to a hub. Their ends were curved pieces of steel, so that the propeller acquired its shape by the centrifugal force of these curved steel pieces, when the engine spun the propeller. (The only thing Major Parseval could not collapse, although he probably tried, was the engine.) I was reminded of all this by seeing that Goodyear's space station is not only completely collapsible -- they call it "expandable" -- but that even their solar reflectors are not rigid! The reason why these structures are called "expandable" instead of collapsible is that, at least in one version, they cannot be collapsed again once they have been expanded. The design works with quick-setting plastic foam which will be injected into the space between an inner and outer skin. Or else there may be hose-like "stiffeners". Work on a model of this type is now going on. Indubitably there will be changes as experimentation progresses. There might even be changes in concept in some areas of the design. If, for example, during the next two years -- while the Saturn is proved out as reliable and a rendezvous technique is being evolved -- an atomic reactor of high energy output, light overall weight and proven reliability is developed, the time-honored solar collector and turbo-generator system may be abandoned. But only if, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, the atomic reactor is considerably lighter. If it is only a little lighter the consideration that solar radiation comes free of charge while heavy isotopes cost money will still win out. The first experimental space station is likely to be rather small. But a larger one is in the future. The concept of the space station has not been given up. If "perigee" means the point of an orbit closest to Earth and "perihelion" means the point of an orbit closest to the sun (with "apogee" and "aphelion" being their opposites) what words should one use for the point closest to another planet? Selma Felicitas Montez Regina Nubili, Argentina When I taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey I used to say that my best students were married women who went to college because they wanted to, not because father said so. I'll now amend this statement to say that female students have a talent for asking especially difficult questions. When Johannes Kepler coined the word perihelion, etc., he used the Greek name (Helios) of the sun, not the Latin (Sol) or the German (Sonne); likewise for Earth he used the Greek gaia instead of the Latin terra. Now, after mulling over this letter, and even calling on friends for help, I know why. If you try to do it with the Latin names you get rather clumsy constructions. Before I go into the problem let me say that "perigee" should really be peri-gaion, and in some languages this form, or one close to it, is used. Likewise the term peri-astron (from Greek aster for star) for closest approach to a star, for example by a comet, is astronomical usage. Of course the term is rarely used. The concept is not needed often. Now let's go to work. If you use the Greek name for Mercury, Hermeias, you get a reasonable word for the equivalents of perigee and aprogee, namely peri-hermeion and apohermeion. The latter might be contracted to aphermeion, following the example of aphelion for apo-helion. The next planet, Venus, is a little more of a problem. Using the Latin name Venus always works out clumsily in English, partly because "of Venus" is veneris which is misleading, to say the least. But we have a choice of classical names for Venus. One of them is Hesperos which would produce peri-hesperon and apo-hesperon. Again the latter might be contracted into aphesperon. Our own moon poses a problem which is not only linguistically troublesome but fairly urgent. We'll need these terms soon! The Latin name is, course, Luna, the Greek is Selene (three syllables, please!) and the better choice again seems to be the Greek, giving us peri-seleneion (peri-selenon) and apo-seleneion (apo-selenon.) Mars (Greek: Ares) presents no difficulties. The terms would be peri-areion (peri-areon) and apo-areion (apo-areon.) As for the outer planets the terms may sound somewhat clumsy but do not present any special difficulties. For Saturn the Latin name works out better, e. g. peri-satumium. Uranus is Greek to begin with and the Greek ending would be preferable since the Latin form would be peri-uranium which might cause misunderstandings. In the case of Neptune one could use this Latin form, or else go to the Greek equivalent Poseidon. The reason I left out Jupiter is threefold. Neither the Latin Jupiter nor the Greek equivalent Zenus produce very elegant terms. Moreover, because of work on the orbits of Jupiter's numerous moons, a term for the closest approach is already being used. It is perijove, hardly pretty but, under the circumstances, the least of three possible evils. In reality future astronauts will probably say "my closest approach was so and so many miles." Or else, since on a chart the closest approach is always designated by the Greek letter pi, they may avoid words like peri-kythereion by saying that they are approaching the pi position. The world was smashed like a spoiled child's plaything -- now Chandler was in the very presence of the destroyers! On Christmas the world's freedom died. Every man, woman and child lay In the grip of fear, for no one knew at what moment his nearest friend or a casual stranger might suddenly be possessed by some brutal mind... and begin to murder and destroy. For Chandler it was worse than for most. He was both victim and executioner. He had suffered himself, ond he had committed a violent crime while under the strange domination. Accusing of hoaxing he was driven from his home. He wandered until he found himself in Hawaii and learned that this was the center of the plague -- and that he was helpless to do anything about it! Chandler off at Fort Street in downtown Honolulu and he walked a few blocks to the address he had been given. The name of the place was Parts 'n Plenty. He found it easily enough. It was a radio parts store; by the size of it, it had once been a big, well-stocked one; but now the counters were almost bare. A thin-faced man with khakicolored skin looked up and nodded. Chandler nodded back. He fingered a bin of tuning knobs, hefted a coil of two-strand antenna wire and said, "A fellow at Tripler told me to come here to pick up equipment, but I'm damned if I know what I'm supposed to do when I locate it. I don't have any money." The dark-skinned man got up and came over to him. "Figured you for a mainlander. No sweat. Have you got a list?" "I can make one." "All right. Catalogues on the table behind you, if you want them." He offered Chandler a cigarette and sat against the edge of the counter, reading over Chandler's shoulder. "Ho," he said suddenly. "Koitska's squarewave generator again, right?" Chandler admitted it, and the man grinned. "Every couple months he sends somebody along. He doesn't really need the generator, you know. He just wants to see how much you know about building it, Mr. -- ?" "Chandler." "Glad to know you. I'm John Hsi. But don't go easy on the job just because it's a waste of time, Chandler; it could be pretty important to you." Chandler absorbed the information silently and handed over his list. The man did not look at it. "Come back in about an hour," he said. "I won't have any money in an hour, either." "Oh, that's all right. I'll put it on Koitska's bill." Chandler said frankly, "Look, I don't know what's going on. Suppose I came in and picked up a thousand dollars worth of stuff, would you put that on the bill, too?" "Certainly," said Hsi optimistically. "You thinking about stealing them? What would you do with them?" "Well... Chandler puffed on his cigarette. "Well, I could -- " "No, you couldn't. Also, it wouldn't pay, believe me," Hsi said seriously. "If there is one thing that doesn't pay, it is cheating on the Exec." "Now, that's another good question," said Chandler. "Who is the Exec?" Hsi shook his head. "Sorry. I don't know you. Chandler." "You mean you're afraid even to answer a question?" "You're damned well told I am. Probably nobody would mind what I might tell you... but 'probably' isn't good enough." Exasperated, Chandler said, "How the devil am I supposed to know what to do next? So I take all this junk back to my room at Tripler and solder up the generator -- then what?" "Then Koitska will get in touch with you," Hsi said, not unkindly. "Play it as it comes to you, Chandler, that's the best advice I can offer." He hesitated. "Koitska's not the worst of them," he said; and then, daringly, "and maybe he's not the best, either. Just do whatever he told you. Keep on doing it until he tells you to do something else. That's all. I mean, that's all the advice I can give you. Whether it's going to be enough to satisfy Koitska is something else again." strange town when you have no money. Chandler's room at what once had been Tripler General Hospital was free; the bus was free; evidently all the radio parts he could want were also free. But he did not have the price of a cup of coffee or a haircut in the pockets of the suntan slacks the desk man at Tripler had issued him. He wandered around the streets of Honolulu, waiting for the hour to be up. At Tripler a doctor had also examined his scar and it was now concealed under a neat white bandage; he had been fed; he had bathed; he had been given new clothes. Tripler was a teeming metropolis in itself, a main building some ten stories high, a scattering of outbuildings connected to it by covered passages, with thousands of men and women busy about it. Chandler had spoken to a good many of them in the hour after waking up and before boarding the bus to Honolulu, and none of them had been free with information either. Honolulu had not suffered greatly under the rule of the Exec. Remembering the shattered stateside cities. Chandler thought that this one had been spared nearly all the suffering of the rule of the world by the Exec, whoever they were. Dawdling down King Street, in the aromatic reek of the fish markets, Chandler could have thought himself in any port city before the grisly events of that Christmas when the planet went possessed. Crabs waved sluggishly at him from bins. Great pink-scaled fish rested on nests of ice, waiting to be sold. Smells of frying food came from half a dozen restaurants. It was only the people who were different. There was a solid sprinkling of those who, like himself, were dressed in insigneless former Army uniforms -- obviously conscripts on Exec errands -- and a surprising minority who, from overheard snatches of conversation, had come from countries other than the U.S.A. Russian mostly, Chandler guessed; but Russian or U.S., wearing suntans or aloha shirts, everyone he saw was marked by the visible signs of strain. There was no laughter. Chandler saw a clock within the door of a restaurant; half an hour still to kill. He turned and wandered up, away from the water, toward the visible bulk of the hills; and in a moment he saw what made Honolulu's collective face wear its careworn frown. It was an open square -- perhaps it had once been a war memorial -- and in the center of it was a fenced-off paved area where people seemed to be resting. It struck Chandler as curious that so many persons should have decided to take a nap on what surely was an uncomfortable bed of flat concrete; he approached and saw that they were not resting. Not only his eyes but his ears conveyed the message -- and his nose, too, for the mild air was fetid with blood and rot. These were not sleeping men and women. Some were dead; some were unconscious; all were maimed. The pavement was slimed with their blood. None had the strength to scream, but several were moaning and even some of the unconscious ones gasped like the breathing of a man in diabetic coma. Passersby walked briskly around the metal fence, and if their glances were curious it was at Chandler they looked, not at the tortured wrecks before them. He understood that the sight of the dying men and women was familiar -- was painful -- and thus was ignored; it was himself who was the curiosity, for staring at them. He turned and vomit. trying not to returned to Parts 'n Plenty. The hour was up but Hsi shook his head. "Not yet. You can sit down over there if you like." Chandler slumped into the indicated swivel chair and stared blankly at the wall. This was far worse than anything he had seen stateside. The random terror of murders and bombs was at least a momentary thing, and when it was done it was done. This was sustained torture. He buried his head in his hands and did not look up until he heard the sound of a door opening. Hsi, his face somehow different, was manipulating a lever on the outside of a door while a man inside, becoming visible as the door opened, was doing the same from within. It looked as though the lock on the door would not work unless both levers operated; and the man on the inside, whom Chandler had not seen before, was dressed, oddly, only in bathing trunks. His face wore the same expression as Hsi's. Chandler guessed (with practice it was becoming easy!) that both were possessed. The man inside wheeled out two shopping carts loaded with electronic equipment of varying kinds, wordlessly received some empty ones from Hsi; and the door closed on him again. Hsi tugged the lever down, turned, blinked and said, "All right, Chandler. Your stuff's here." Chandler approached. "What was that all about?" "Go to hell!" Hsi said with sudden violence. "I -- Oh never mind. Sorry. But I told you already, ask somebody else your questions, not me." He gloomily began to pack the items on Chandler's list into a cardboard carton. Then he glanced at Chandlei and said, apologetically, "These are tough times, buddy. I guess there's no harm in answering some questions. You want to know why most of my stock's locked behind an armor-plate door? Well, you ought to be able to figure that out for yourself, anyway. The Exec doesn't like to have people playing with radios. Bert stays in the stockroom; I stay out here; twice a day the bosses open the door and we fill whatever orders they've approved. A little rough on Bert, of course. It's a ten-hour day in the stockroom for him, and nothing to do. But it could be worse. Oh, that's for sure, friend: It could be worse." "Why the bathing suit? Hot in there?" "Hot for Bert if they think he's smuggling stuff out," said Hsi. "You been here long enough to see the Monument yet?" Chandler shook his head, then grimaced. "You mean up about three blocks that way? Where the people -- ?" "That's right," said Hsi admiringly, "three blocks mauka from here, where the people -- Where the people are serving as a very good object lesson to you and me. About a dozen there, right? Small for this time of year. Chandler. Usually there are more. Notice anything special about them?" "They were butchered! Some of them looked like their legs had been burned right off. Their eyes gouged out, their faces -- " Chandler brought up sharply. It had been bad enough looking at those wretched, writhing semicadavers; he did not want to talk about them. The parts man nodded seriously. "Sometimes there are more, and sometimes they're worse hurt than that. Have you got any idea how they get that way? They do it to themselves, that's how. My own brother was out there for a week, last Statehood Day. He jumped feet first into a concrete mixer, and it took him seven days to die after I put him on my shoulder and carried him out there. I didn't like it, of course, but I didn't exactly have any choice; I wasn't running my own body at the time. Neither was he when he jumped. He was made to do it, because he used to have Bert's job and he thought he'd take a little short-wave set home. Like I said, you don't want to cheat on the Exec because it doesn't pay." "But what the devil am I supposed to -- " Hsi held up his hand. "Don't ask me how to keep out of that Monument bunch. Chandler. I don't know. Do what you're told and don't do anything you aren't told to do; that is the whole of the law. Now do me a favor and get out of here so I can pack up these other orders." He turned his back on Chandler.  day on the island of Oahu Chandler had learned enough of the ropes to have signed a moneychit at the Tripler currency office against Koitska's account. That was about all he had learned, except for a few practical matters like where meals were served and the location of the fresh-water swimming pool at the back of the grounds. He was killing time using the pool when, in the middle of a jacknife from the ten-foot board, he felt himself seized. He sprawled into the water with a hard splashing slap, threshed about and, as he came to the surface, found himself giggling. "Sorry, dear," he apologized to himself, "but we don't carry our weight in the same places, you know. Get that square-what'sit thingamajig, like an angel, and meet me in front by the flagpole in twenty minutes." He recognized the voice, even if his own vocal chords had made it. It was the girl who had driven him back from the interview with Koitska, the one who had casually announced she had saved his life at his hoaxing trial. Chandler swam to the side of the pool and toweled as he trotted toward his quarters. She was from Koitska now, of course; which meant that his "test" was about to be graded. Quickly though he dressed, she was there before him, standing beside a low-slung sports car and chatting with one of the groundskeepers. An armful of leis dangled beside her, and although she wore the coronet which was evidence of her status the gardener did not seem to fear her. "Come along, love," she called to Chandler. "Koitska wants your thingummy. Chuck it in the trunk if it'll fit, and we'll head waikiki wikiwiki. Don't I say that nicely? But I only fool the malihinis, like you." She chattered away as the little car dug its rear wheels into the drive and leaped around the green and out the gate. The wind howled by them, the sun was bright, the sky was piercingly blue. Riding next to this beautiful girl, it was hard for Chandler to remember that she was one of those who had destroyed his world. It was a terrible thing to have so much hatred and to feel it so diluted. Not even Koitska seemed a terrible enough enemy to accept such a load of detestation; it was hate without an object, and it recoiled on the hater, leaving him turgid and constrained. If he could not hate his onetime friend Jack Souther for defiling and destroying his wife, it was almost as hard to hate Souther's anonymous possessor. It could even have been Koitska. It could even have been this girl by his side. In the strange, cruel fantasies with which the Execs indulged themselves it was likely enough that they would sometimes assume the body, and the role, of the opposite sex. Why not? Strange, ruthless morality; it was impossible to evaluate it by any human standards. It was also impossible to think of hatred with her beside him. They soared around Honolulu on a broad expressway and paralleled the beach toward Waikiki. "Look, dear. Diamond Head! Mustn't ignore it -- very bad form -- like not going to see the night-blooming cereus at the Punahou School. You haven't missed that, have you?" "I'm afraid I have -- " "Rosalie. Call me Rosalie, dear." "I'm afraid I have, Rosalie." For some reason the name sounded familiar. "Shame, oh, shame! They say it was wonderful night before last Looks like cactus to me, but -- " Chandler's mental processes had worked to a conclusion. "Rosalie Pan!" he said. "Now I know!" "Know what? You mean -- " she swerved around a motionless Buick, parked arrogantly five feet from the curb -- "you mean you didn't know who I was? And to think I used to pay five thousand a year for publicity." Chandler said, smiling, and almost relaxed, "I'm sorry, but musical comedies weren't my strong point. I did see you once, though, on television. Then, let's see, wasn't there something about you disappearing -- " She nodded, glancing at him. "There sure was, dear. I almost froze to death getting out to that airport. Of course, it was worth it, I found out later. If I hadn't been took; as they say, I would've been dead, because you remember what happened to New York about an hour later." "You must have had some friends," Chandler began, and let it trail off. So did the girl. After a moment she began to talk about the scenery again, pointing out the brick-red and purple bougainvillea, describing how the shoreline had looked before they'd "cleaned it up." "Oh, thousands and thousands of the homeliest little houses. You'd have hated it. So we have done at least a few good things, anyway," she said complacently, and began gently to probe into his life story. But message center, a few moments later, she said, "Well, love, it's been fun. Go on in; Koitska's expecting you. I'll see you later." And her eyes added gently: I hope. turned... and felt himself taken. His voice said briskly, "Zdrastvoi, Rosie. Gd'yeh Koitska?" Unsurprised the girl pointed to the building. "Kto govorit?" Chandler's voice answered in English, with a faint Oxford ac cent: "It is I, Rosie, Kalman. Where's Koitska's tinkertoy? Oh, all right, thanks; I'll just pick it up and take it in. Hope it's all right. I must say one wearies of breaking in these new fellows." Chandler's body ambled around to the trunk of the car, took out the square-wave generator on its breadboard base and slouched into the building. It called ahead in the same language and was answered wheezily from above: Koitska. "Zdrastvoi. Iditye suda ko mneh. Kto, Kalman?" "Konyekhno!" cried Chandler's voice and he was carried in and up to where the fat man lounged in a leather-upholstered wheelchair. There was a conversation, long minutes of it, while the two men poked at the generator. Chandler did not understand a word until he spoke to himself: "You -- what's your name." "Chandler," Koitska filled in. "You, Chandler. D'you know meter microwaves? Tell Koitska." Briefly Chandler felt himself free -- long enough to nod; then he was possessed again, and Koitska repeated the nod. "Good, then. Tell Koitska what experience you've had." Again free, Chandler said, "Not a great deal of actual experience. I worked with a group at Caltech on spectroscopic measurements I didn't design any of the equipment, though I helped put it together." He recited his degrees until Koitska raised a languid hand. "Shto, I don't care. If ve gave you diagrams you could build?" "Certainly, if I had the equipment, I suppose I'd need -- " But Koitska stopped him again. "I know vot you need," he said damply. "Enough. Ve see." In a moment Chandler was taken again, and his voice and Koitska's debated the matter for a while, until Koitska shrugged, turned his head and seemed to go to sleep. Chandler marched himself out of the room and out into the driveway before his voice said to him: "You've secured a position, then. Go back to Tripler until we send for you. It'll be a few days, I expect." And Chandler was free again. He was also alone. The girl in the Porsche was gone. The door itself behind him. He stared around him, swore, shrugged and circled the building to the parking lot at back, on the chance that a car might be there for him to borrow. Luckily, there was. There were four, in fact, all with keys in them. He selected a Ford, puzzled out the likeliest road back to Honolulu and turned the key in the starter. It was fortunate, he thought, that there had been several cars; if there had been only one he would not have dared to take it, for fear of stranding Koitska or some other exec who might easily blot him out in annoyance. He did not wish to join the wretches at the Monument. It was astonishing how readily fear had become a part of his life. The trouble with this position he had somehow secured -- one of the troubles -- was that there was no union delegate to settle employee grievances. Like no transportation. Like no clear idea of working hours, or duties. Like no mention at all -- of course -- of wages. Chandler had no idea what his rights were, if any at all, or of what the penalties would be if he overstepped them. The maimed victims at the Monument supplied a clue, of course. He could not really believe that that sort of punishment would be applied for minor infractions. Death was so much less trouble. Even death was not really likely, he thought, for a simple lapse. He thought He could not be sure, of course. He could be sure of only one thing: He was now a slave, completely a slave, a slave until the day he died. Back on the mainland there was the statistical likelihood of occasional slavery-bypossssion, but there it was only the body that was enslaved, and only for moments. Here, in the shadow of the execs, it was all of him, forever, until death or a miracle turned him loose. he returned to his room at Tripler after breakfast, and found a Honolulu city policeman sitting hollow-eyed on the edge of his bed. The man stood up as Chandler came in. "So," he grumbled, "you take so long! Here. Is diagrams, specs, parts lists, all. You get everything three days from now, then we begin." The policeman, no longer Koitska, shook himself, glanced stolidly at Chandler and walked out, leaving a thick manila envelope on the pillow. On it was written, in a crabbed hand: All secref.' Do not show diagrams! Chandler opened the envelope and spilled its contents on the bed. An hour later he realized that sixty minutes had passed in which he had not been afraid. It was good to be working again, he thought, and then that thought faded away again as he returned to studying the sheaves of circuit diagrams and closely typed pages of specifications. It was not only work, it was hard work, and absorbing. Chandler knew enough about the very short wavelength radio spectrum to know that the device he was supposed to build was no proficiency test; this was for real. The more he puzzled over it the less he could understand of its purpose. There was a transmitter and there was a receiver. Astonishingly, neither was directional: that ruled out radar, for example. He rejected immediately the thought that the radiation was for spectrum analysis, as in the Caltech project -- unfortunate, because that was the only application with which he had first-hand familiarity; but impossible. The thing was too complicated. Nor could it be a simple message transmitter -- no, perhaps it could, assuming there was a reason for using the subconventional, far simpler shortwave spectrum. Could it? The of-sight, of course, but would ionosphere scatter make it possible for them to cover great distances? He could not remember. Or was that irrelevant, since perhaps they needed only to cover the distances between islands in their own archipelago? But then, why all the power? And in any case, what about this fantastic switching panel, hundreds of square feet of it even though it was transistorized and subminiaturized and involving at least a dozen sophisticated technical refinements he hadn't the training quite to understand? ATT could have handled every phone call in the United States with less switching than this -- in the days when telephone systems spanned a nation instead of a fraction of a city. He pushed the papers together in a pile and sat back, smoking a cigarette, trying to remember what he could of the ation. and up, the domain of quantum theory began to be invaded. Rotating gas molecules, constricted to a few energy states, responded directly to the radio waves. Chandler remembered late-night bull sessions in Pasadena during which it had been pointed out that the possibilities in the field were enormous -- although only possibilities, for there was no engineering way to reach them, and no clear theory to point the way -- suggesting such strange ultimate practical applications as the receiverless radio, for example. Was that what he had here? He gave up. It was a question that would burn at him until he found the answer, but just now he had work to do, and he'd better be doing it. Skipping lunch entirely, he carefully checked the components lists, made a copy of what he would need, checked the original envelope and its contents with the man at the main receiving desk for his safe, and caught the bus to Honolulu. At the Parts 'n Plenty store, Hsi read the list with a faint frown that turned into a puzzled scowl. When he put it down he looked at Chandler for a few moments without speaking. "Well, Hsi? Can you get all this for me?" The parts man shrugged and nodded. "Koitska said in three days." Hsi looked startled, then resigned. "That puts it right up to me, doesn't it? All right. Wait a moment." He disappeared in the back of the store, where Chandler heard him talking on what was evidently an intercom system. He came back in a few minutes and slipped Chandler's list into a slit in the locked door. "Tough for Bert," he said. "He'll be working all night, getting started -- but I can take it easy till tomorrow. By then he'll know what we don't have, and I'll find some way to get it." He shrugged again, but his face was lined. Chandler wondered how one went about finding, for example, a thirty megawatt klystron tube; but it was Hsi's problem. He said: "All right. I'll see you Monday." "Wait a minute, Chandler." Hsi eyed him. "You don't have anything special to do, do you? Well, come have dinner with me. Maybe I can get to know you. Then maybe I can answer some of your questions, if you like." olani Boulevard, then got out and walked a few blocks to a restaurant named Mother Chee's. Hsi was well known there, it seemed. He led Chandler to a booth at the back, nodded to the waiter, ordered without looking at the menu and sat back. "You malihinis don't know much about food," he said, humorously patronizing. "I think you'll like it. It's all fish, anyway." The man was annoying. Chandler was moved to say, "Too bad, I was hoping for duck in orange sauce, perhaps some snow peas -- " Hsi shook his head. "There's meat, all right, but not here. You'll only find it in the places where the execs sometimes go... Tell me something, Chandler. What's that scar on your forehead." Chandler touched it, almost with surprise. Since the medics had treated it he had almost forgotten it was there. He began to explain, then paused, looking at Hsi, and changed his mind. "What's the score? You testing me, too? Want to see if I'll lie about it?" Hsi grinned. "Sorry. I guess that's what I was doing. I do know what an H' stands for; we've seen them before. Not many. The ones that do get this far usually don't last long. Unless, of course, they are working for somebody whom it wouldn't do to offend," he explained. "So what you want to know, then, is whether I was really hoaxing or not. Does it make any difference?" "Damn right it does, man! We're slaves, but we're not animals!" Chandler had gotten to him; the parts man looked startled, then sallow, as he observed his own vehemence. "Sorry, Hsi. It makes a difference to me, too. Well, I wasn't hoaxing. I was possessed, just like any other everyday rapistmurderer, only I couldn't prove it. And it didn't look too good for me, because the damn thing happened in a pharmaceuticals plant. That was supposed to be about the only place in town where you could be sure you wouldn't be possessed, or so everybody thought. Including me. Up to the time I went ape." Hsi nodded. The waiter approached with their drinks. Hsi looked at him appraisingly, then did a curious thing. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, quickly, then released it again. The waiter did not appear to notice. Expertly he served the drinks, folded small pink floral napkins, dumped and wiped their ashtray in one motion -- and then, so quickly that Chandler was not quite sure he had seen it, caught Hsi's wrist in the same fleeting gesture just before he turned and walked away. Without comment Hsi turned back to Chandler. He said, "I believe you. Would you like to know why it happened? Because I think I can tell you. The execs have all the antibiotics they need now." "You mean -- " Chandler hesitated. "That's right. They did leave some areas alone, as long as they weren't fully stocked on everything they might want for the foreseeable future. Wouldn't you?" "I might," Chandler said cautiously, "if I knew what I was -- being an exec." Hsi said, "Eat your dinner. I'll take a chance and tell you what I know." He swallowed his whiskey-on-the-rocks with a quick backward jerk of the head. "They're mostly Russians -- you must know that much for yourself. The whole thing started in Russia." Chandler said, "Well, that's pretty obvious. But Russia was smashed up as much as anywhere else. The whole Russian government was killed -- wasn't it?" Hsi nodded. "They're not the government. Not the exec. Communism doesn't mean any more to them than the Declaration of Independence does -- which is nothing. It's very simple. Chandler: they're a project that got out of hand." in Russia, it started in the last days of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the Neo-Krushchevists took over power in the January Push. The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course. The "mystery wrapped in a riddle surrounded by an enigma" had become queerer and even more opaque after Kruschchev's death and the revival of such fine old Soviet institutions as the Gay Pay Oo. That was the development called the Freeze, when the Stalinites seized control in the name of the sacred Generalissimo of the Soviet Fatherland, a mighty-missile party, dedicated to bringing about the world revolution by force of sputnik. The neo-Krushchevists, on the other hand, believed that honey caught more flies than vinegar; and, although there were few visible adherents to that philosophy during the purges of the Freeze, they were not all dead. Then, out of the Donbas Electrical Workshop, came sudden support for their point of view. It was a weapon. It was more than a weapon, an irresistable tool -- more than that, the way to end all disputes forever. It was a simple radio transmitter (Hsi said) -- or so it seemed, but its frequencies were on an unusual band and its effects were remarkable. It controlled the minds of men. The "receiver" was the human brain. Through this little portable transmitter, surgically patch-wired to the brain of the person operating it, his entire personality was transmitted in a pattern of very short waves which could invade and modulate the personality of any other human being in the world. For that matter, of any animal, as long as the creature had enough "mind" to seize -- "What's the matter?" Hsi interrupted himself, staring at Chandler. Chandler had stopped eating, his hand frozen midway to his mouth. He shook his head. "Nothing. Go on." Hsi shrugged and continued. While the Western World was celebrating Christmas -- the Christmas before the first outbreak of possession in the outside world -- the man who invented the machine was secretly demonstrating it to another man. Both of them were now dead. The inventor had been a Pole, the other man a former Party leader who, four years before, had rescued the inventor's dying father from a Siberian work camp. The Party leader had reason to congratulate himself on that loaf cast on the water. There were only three working models of the transmitter -- what ultimately was refined into the coronet Chandler had seen on the heads of Koitska and the girl -- but that was enough for the January push. The Stalinites were out. The neo-Krushchevists were in. A whole factory in the Donbas was converted to manufacturing these little mental controllers as fast as they could be produced -- and that was fast, for they were simple in design to begin with and were quickly refined to a few circuits. Even the surgical wiring to the brain became unnecessary as induction coils tapped the encephalic rhythms. Only the great amplifying hookup was really complicated. Only one of those was necessary, for a single amplifier could serve as rebroadcaster -- modulator for thousands of the headsets. "Are you sure you're all right?" Hsi demanded. Chandler put down his fork, lit a cigarette and beckoned to the waiter. "I'm all right. I just want another drink." He needed the drink. For now he knew what he was building for Koitska. HE waiter brought two more drinks and carried away the uneaten food. "We don't know exactly who did what after that," Hsi said, "but somehow or other it got out of hand. I think it was the technical crew of the factory that took over. I suppose it was an inevitable danger." He grinned savagely. "I can just imagine the Party workers in the factory," he said, "trying to figure out how to keep them in line -- bribe them or terrify them? Give them dachas or send a quota to Siberia? Neither would work, of course, because there isn't any bribe you can give to a man who only has to stretch out his hand to take over the world, and you can't frighten a man who can make you slit your own throat. Anyway, the next thing that happened -- the following Christmas -- was when they took over the world. It wasn't a Party movement at all any more. A lot of the workers were Czechs and Hungarians and Poles, and the first thing they wanted to was to even a few scores. "So here they are! Before they let the whole world go bang they got out of range. They got themselves out of Russia on two Red Navy cruisers, about a thousand of them; then they systematically triggered off every ballistic missile they could find... and they could find all of them, sooner or later, it was just a matter of looking. As soon as it was safe they moved in here. Best place in the world for them. "There are only a thousand or so of them here on the Islands, and nobody outside the Islands even knows where they are. If they did, what good would it do them? They can kill anyone, anywhere. They kill for fun, but sometimes they kill for a reason too. When one of them goes wandering for kicks he makes it a point to mess up all the transport and communications facilities he comes across -- especially now, since they've stockpiled evrything they're likely to need for the next twenty years. We don't know what they're planning to do when the twenty years are up. Maybe they don't care. Would you?" Chandler drained his drink and shook his head. "One question," he said. "Who's 'we'?" Hsi carefully unwrapped a package of cigarettes, took one out and lit it. He looked at it as though he were not enjoying it; cigarettes had a way of tasting stale these days. As they were. "Just a minute," he said. Tardily Chandler remembered the quick grasp of the waiter's fingers on Hsi's wrist, and that the waiter had been hovering, inconspicuously close, all through their meal. Hsi was waiting for the man to return. In a moment the waiter was back, looking directly at Chandler. He looped his own wrist with his fingers and nodded. Hsi said softly, " 'We' " is the Society of Slaves. That's all of us -- slaves -- but only a few of us belong to the Society. We -- " There was a crash of glass. The waiter had dropped their tray. Across the table from Chandler, Hsi looked suddenly changed. His left hand lay on the table before him, his right hand poised over it. Apparently he had been about to show Chandler again the sign he had made. But he could not do it. His hand paused and fluttered, like a captured bird. Captured it was. Hsi was captured. Out of Hsi's mouth, with Hsi's voice, came the light, tonal rhythms of Rosalie Pan. "This is an unexpected pleasure, love! I never expected to see you here. Enjoying your meal?" IX  glass halfway to his lips, automatically, before he realized there was nothing in it to brace him. He said hoarsely, "Yes, thanks. Do you come here often?" It was like the banal talk of a language guide, wildly inappropriate to what had been going on a moment before. He was shaken. "Oh, I love it," cooed Hsi, investigating the dishes before him. "All finished, I see. Too bad. Your friend doesn't feel like he ate much, either." "I guess he wasn't hungry," Chandler managed. 'Well, I am." Hsi cocked his head and smiled like a female impersonator. "I know! Are you doing anything special right now, love? I know you've eaten, but -- well, I've been a good girl and I guess I can eat a real meal, I mean not with somebody else's teeth, and still keep the calories in line. Suppose I meet you down at the Beach? There's a place there where the luau is divine. I can be there in half an hour." Chandler's breathing was back to normal. Why not? "I'll be delighted." "Luigi the Wharf Rat, that's the name of it. They won't let you in, though, unless you tell them you're with me. It's special." Hsi's eye closed in Rosalie Pan's wink. "Half an hour," Hsi said, and was again himself. He began to shake. The waiter brought him straight whiskey and, pretense abandoned, stood by while Hsi drank it. After a moment he said, "Scares you. But -- I guess we're all right. She couldn't have heard much. You'd better go. Chandler. I'll talk to you again some other time." Chandler stood up. But he couldn't leave Hsi like that. "Are you all right?" Hsi almost managed control. "Oh -- I think so. Not the first time it's come close, you know. Sooner or later it'll come closer still, and that will be the end, but -- yes, I'm all right for now." Chandler tarried. "You were saying something about the Society of Slaves." "Damn it, go!" Hsi barked. "She'll be waiting for you... Sorry, I didn't mean to shout. But go." As Chandler turned, he said more quietly, "Come around to the store tomorrow. Maybe we can finish our talk then." actually on the beach but on the bank of a body of water called the Ala Wai Canal. Across the water were the snowtopped hills. A maitre-de escorted Chandler personally to a table on a balcony, and there he waited. Rosalie "half-hour" was nearly two; but then he heard her calling him from across the room, in the voice which had reached a thousand second balconies, and he rose as she came near. She said lightly, "Sorry. You ought to be flattered, though. It's a twenty-minute drive -- and an hour and a half to put on my face, so you won't be ashamed to be seen with me. Well, it's good to be out in my own skin for a change. Let's eat!" The talk with Hsi had left a mark on Chandler that not even this girl's pretty face could obscure. It was a pretty face, though, and she was obviously exerting herself to make him enjoy himself. He could not help responding to her mood. She talked of her life on the stage, the excitement of a performance, the entertainers she had known. Her conversation was one long name-drop, but it was not pretense: the world of the famous was the world she had lived in. It was not a world that Chandler had ever visited, but he recognized the names. Rosie had been married once to an English actor whose movies Chandler had made a point of watching on television. It was interesting, in a way, to know that the man snored and lived principally on vitamin pills. But it was a view of the man that Chandler had not sought. The restaurant drew its clientele mostly from the execs, young ones or young-acting ones, like the girl. The coronets were all over. There had been a sign on the door: to mark it off limits to anyone not an exec or a collaborator. Still, Chandler thought, who on the island was not a collaborator? The only effective resistance a man could make would be to kill everyone within reach and then himself, thus depriving them of slaves -- and that was, after all, only what the execs themselves had done in other places often enough. It would inconvenience them only slightly. The next few planeloads or shiploads of possessed warm bodies from the mainland would be permitted to live, instead of being required to dash themselves to destruction, like the crew of the airplane that had carried Chandler. Thus the domestic stocks would be replenished. An annoying feature of dining with Rosalie in the flesh, Chandler found, was that half a dozen times while they were talking he found himself taken, speaking words to Rosie that were not his own, usually in a language he did not understand. She took it as a matter of course. It was merely a friend, across the room or across the island, using Chandler as the casual convenience of a telephone. "Sorry," she apologized blithely after it happened for the third time, and then stopped. "You don't like that, love, do you?" "Can you blame me?" He stopped himself from saying more; he was astonished even so at his tone. She said it for him. "I know. It takes away your manhood, I suppose. Please don't let it do that to you, love. We're not so bad. Even -- " She hesitated, and did not go on. "You know," she said, "I came here the same way you did. Kidnaped off the stage of the Winter Garden. Of course, the difference was the one who kidnaped me was an old friend. Though I didn't know it at the time and it scared me half to death." Chandler must have looked startled. She nodded. "You've been thinking of us as another race, haven't you? Like the Neanderthals or -- well, worse than that, maybe." She smiled. "We're not. About half of us came from Russia in the first place, but the others are from all over. You'd be astonished, really." She mentioned several names, world-famous scientists, musicians, writers. "Of course, not everybody can qualify for the club, love. Wouldn't be exclusive otherwise. The chief rule is loyalty. I'm loyal," she added gently after a moment, "and don't you forget it. Have to be. Whoever becomes an exec has to be with us, all the way. There are tests. It has to be that way -- not only for our protection. For the world's." Chandler was genuinely startled at that. Rosie nodded seriously. "If one exec should give away something he's not supposed to it would upset the whole applecart. There are only a thousand of us, and I guess probably result would be complete destruction." Of the Executive Committee, Chandler thought she meant at first, but then he thought again. No. Of the world. For the thousand execs, outnumbered though could not fail to triumph. The contest would not be in doubt. If the whole thousand execs at once began systematically to kill and destroy, instead of merely playing at it as the spirit moved them, they could all but end the human race overnight. A man could be made to slash his throat in a quarter of a minute. An exec, pause, could destroy his own two day. And there were surer, faster ways. Chandler did not have to imagine them, he had seen them. The massacre of the Orphalese, the victims at the Monument -- they were only crumbs of destruction. What had happened to New York City showed what massproduction methods could do. No doubt there were bombs left, even if only chemical ones. Shoot, stab, crash, blow up; swallow poison, leap from window, slit throat. Every man a murderer, at the touch of a mind from Hawaii; and if no one else was near to murder, surely each man could find a victim in himself. In one ravaging day mankind would cease to exist as a major force. In a week the only survivors would be those in such faroff and hopelessly impotent places that they were not worth the trouble of tracking down. iVT'OU hate us, don't you?" Chandler paused and tried to find an answer. Rosie was not either belligerent or mocking. She was only sympathetically trying to reach his point of view. He shook his head silently. "Not meaning 'no' -- meaning 'no comment'? Well, I don't blame you, love. But do you see that we're not altogether a bad thing? It's bad that there should be so much violence. In a way. Hasn't there always been violence? And what were the alternatives? Until we came along the world was getting ready to kill itself anyway." "There's a difference," Chandler mumbled. He was thinking of his wife. He and Margot had loved each other as married couples do -- without any very great, searing compulsion; but with affection, with habit and with sporadic passion. Chandler had not given much thought to the whole, though he was aware of the parts, during the last years of his marriage. It was only after Margot's murder that he had come to know that the sum of those parts was a quite irreplaceable love. But Rosie was shaking her head. "The difference is all on our side. Suppose Koitska's boss had never discovered the coronets. At any moment one country might have got nervous and touched off the whole thing -- not carefully, the way we did it, with most of the really dirty missiles fused safe and others landing where they were supposed to go. I mean, touched off a war. The end, love. The bloody finis. The ones that were killed at once would have been the lucky ones. No, love," she said, in dead earnest, "we aren't the worst things that ever happened to the world. Once the -- well, the bad part -- is over, people will understand what we really are." "And what's that, exactly?" She hesitated, smiled and said modestly, "We're gods." It took Chandler's breath away -- not because it was untrue, but because it had never occurred to him that gods were aware of their deity. "We're gods, love, with the privilege of electing mortals to the club. Don't judge us by anything that has gone before. Don't judge us by anything. We are a New Thing. We don't have to conform to precedent because we upset all precedents. From now on, to the end of time, the rules will grow from us." She patted her lips briskly with a napkin and said, "Would you like to see something? Let's take a little walk." She took him by the hand and led him across the room, out to a sundeck on the other side of the restaurant. They were looking down on what had once been a garden. There were people in it; Chandler was conscious of sounds coming from them, and he was able to see that there were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, and that they all seemed to be wearing suntans like his own. "From Tripler?" he guessed. "No, love. They pick out those clothes themselves. Stand there a minute." The girl in the coronet walked out to the rail of the sundeck, where pink and amber spotlights were playing on nothing. As she came into the colored lights there was a sigh from the people in the garden. A man walked forward with an armload of leis and deposited them on the ground below the rail. They were adoring her. Rosalie stood gravely for a moment, then nodded and returned to Chandler. "They began doing that about a year ago," she whispered to him, as a murmur of disappointment came up from the crowd. "Their own idea. We didn't know what they wanted at first, but they weren't doing any harm. You see, love," she said softly, "we can make them do anything we like. But we don't make them do that." not sure just how, they were in a light plane flying high over the Pacific, clear out of sight of land. The moon was gold above them, the ocean black beneath. Chandler stared down as the girl circled the plane, slipping lower toward the water, silent and perplexed. But he was not afraid. He was almost content. Rosie was good company -- gay, cheerful -- and she had treasures to share. It had been an impulse of hers, a long drive in her sports car and a quick, comfortable flight over the ocean to cap the evening. It had been a pleasant impulse. He reflected gravely that he could understand now how generations of country maidens had been dazzled and despoiled. A touch of luxury was a great seducer. The coronet on the girl's body could catch his body at any moment. She had only to think herself into his mind, and her will, flashed to a relay station like the one he was building for Koitska, at loose in infinity, could sweep into him and make him a puppet. If she chose, he would open that door beside him and step out into a thousand feet of air and a meal for the sharks. But he did not think she would do it. He did not think anyone would, really, though with his own eyes he had seen some anyones do things as bad as that and sickeningly worse. There was no corrupt whim of the most diseased mind in history that some torpid exec had not visited on a helpless man, woman or child in the past years. Even as they flew here. Chandler knew, the gross bodies that lay in luxury in the island's villas were surging restlessly around the world; and death and horror remained where they had passed. It was a paradox too great to be reconciled, this girl and this vileness. He could not forget it, but he could not feel it in his glands. She was pretty. She was gay. He began to think thoughts that had left him alone for a long time. The dark bulk of the island showed ahead and they were sinking toward a landing. The girl landed skillfully on a runway that sprang into light as she approached -- electronic wizardry, or the coronet and some tethered serf at a switch? It didn't matter. Nothing mattered very greatly at that moment to Chandler. "Thank you, love," she said, laughing. "I liked that. It's all very well to use someone else's body for this sort of thing, but every now and then I want to keep my own in practice." She linked arms with him as they left the plane. "When I was first given the coronet here," she reminisced, amusement in her voice, "I got the habit real bad. I spent six awful months -- really, six months in bed! And by myself at that. Oh, I was all over the world, and skin-diving on the Barrier Reef and skiing in Norway and -- well," she said, squeezing his arm, "never mind what all. And then one day I got on the scales, just out of habit. Do you know what I weighed?' She closed her eyes in mock horror, but they were smiling when she opened them again, "I won't do that again, love. Of course, a lot of us do let ourselves go. Even Koitska. Especially Koitska. And some of the women -- But just between us, the ones who do really didn't have much to keep in shape in the first place." She led the way into a villa that smelled of jasmine and gardenias, snapped her fingers and subdued lights came on. "Like it? Oh, we've nothing but the best. What would you like to drink?" She fixed them both tall, cold glasses and vetoed Chandler's choice of a sprawling wicker chair to sit on. "Over here, love." She patted the couch beside her. She drew up her legs, leaning against him, very soft, warm and fragrant, and said dreamily, "Let me see. What's nice? What do you like in music, love?" "Oh... anything." "No, no! You're supposed to say, Why, the original-cast album from Hi There.' Or anything else I starred in." She shook her head reprovingly, and the points of her coronet caught golden reflections from the lights. "But since you're obviously a man of low taste I'll have to do the whole bit myself." She touched switches at a remotecontrol set by her end of the couch, and in a moment dreamy strings began to come from triaural speakers hidden around the room. It was not Hi There. "That's better," she said drowsily, and in a moment, "Wasn't it nice in the plane?" "It was fine," Chandler said. Gently -- but firmly -- he sat up and reached automatically into his pocket. The girl sighed and straightened. "Cigarette? They're on the table beside you. Hope you like the brand. They only keep one big factory going, not to count those terrible Russian things that're all air and no smoke." She touched his forehead with cool fingers. "You never told me about that, love." It was like an electric shock -- the touch of her fingers and the touch of reality at once. Chandler said stiffly, "My brand. But I thought you were there at the trial." "Oh, only now and then. I missed all the naughty parts -- though, to tell the truth, that's why I was hanging around. I do like to hear a little naughtiness now and then... but all I heard was that stupid lawyer and that stupid judge. Made me mad." She giggled. "Lucky for you. I was so irritated I decided to spoil their fun too."  long pull at his drinkCuriously, it seemed to sober him. He said: "It's nothing. I happened to rape and kill a young girl. Happens every day. Of course, it was one of your friends that was doing it for me, but I didn't miss any of what was going on, I can give you a blow-by-blow description if you like. The people in the town where I lived, at that time, thought I was doing it on my own, though, and they didn't approve. Hoaxing -- you know? They thought I was so perverse and cruel that I would do that sort of thing under my own power, instead of with some exec -- or, as they would have put it, being ignorant, some imp, or devil, or demon -- pulling the strings." He was shaking. He waited for what she had to say; but she only whispered, "I'm sorry, love," and looked so contrite and honest that, as rapidly as it had come upon him, his anger passed. He opened his mouth to say something to her. He didn't get it said. She was sitting there, looking at him, alone and soft and inviting. He kissed her; and as she returned the kiss, he kissed her again, and again. But less than an hour later he was in her Porsche, cold sober, raging, frustrated, miserable. He slammed it through the unfamiliar gears as he sped back to the city. She had left himThey had kissed with increasing passion, his hands playing about her, her body surging toward him, and then, just then, she whispered, "No, love-" He held her tighter and without another word she opened her eyes and looked at him. He knew what mind it was that caught him then. It was her mind. Stiffly, like wood, he released her, stood up, walked to the door and locked it behind him. The lights in the villa went out. He stood there, boiling, looking into the shadows through the great, wide, empty window. He could see her lying there on the couch, and as he watched he saw her body toss and stir; and as surely as he had ever known anything before he knew that somewhere in the world some woman -- or some man! -- lay locked with a lover, violent in love, and was unable to tell the other that a third party had invaded their bed. Chandler did not know it until he saw something glistening on his wrist, but he was weeping on the wild ride back to Honolulu in the car. Her car. Would there be trouble for his taking it? God, let there be trouble! He was in a mood for trouble. He was sick and wild with revulsion. Worse than her use of him, a casual stimulant, an aphrodisiac touch, was that she thought what she did was right. Chandler thought of the worshipping dozens under the sundeck of the exec restaurant, and Rosalie's gracious benediction as they made her their floral offerings. Blind, pathetic fools! Not only the deluded men and women in the garden were worshippers trapped in a vile religion, he thought. It was worse. The gods and goddesses worshipped at their own divinity as well! X voice, coming from Chandler's lips, summoned him out to Wise now in the ways of this world. Chandler commandeered a police car and was hurried out to the South Gate, where the guards allowed him a car of his own. The door of the building was unlocked and Chandler went right up. He was astonished. The fat man was actually sitting up. He was fully dressed -- more or less; incongruously he wore flowered shorts and a bright red. short-sleeve shirt, with rope sankopter? No? No difference. Help me." An arm like a mountain went over Chandler's shoulders. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds. Slowly, wheezing, he limped toward the back of the room and touched a button. A door opened. Chandler had not known before that there was an elevator in the building. That was one of the things the exec did not consider important for his slaves to know. It lowered them with great grace and delicacy to the first floor, where a large old Cadillac, ancient but immaculately kept, the kind that used to be called a "gangster's car," waited in a private parking bay. Chandler followed Koitska's directions and drove to an airfield where a small, Plexiglasnosed helicopter waited. More by the force of Chandler pushing him from behind than through his own fat thighs, Koitska puffed up the little staircase into the cabin. Originally the copter had been fitted for four passengers. Now there was the pilot's seat and a seat beside it, and in the back a wide, soft couch. Koitska collapsed onto it. His face blanked out -- he was, Chandler knew, somewhere else, just then. In a moment his eyes opened again. He looked at Chandler with no interest at all, and turned his face to the wall. After a moment he wheezed. "Sit down. At de controls." He breathed noisily for a while. Then, "It von't pay you to be interested in Rosalie," he said. Chandler was startled. He craned around in the seat but saw only Koitska's back. "I'm not! Or anyway -- " But he had no place to go in that sentence, and in any case Koitska no longer seemed interested. After a moment Koitska stirred, settled himself more comfortably, and Chandler felt himself taken. He turned to face the split wheel and the unfamiliar pedals and watched himself work the controls. It was an admirable performance. Whoever Chandler was just then -- he could not guess -- he was a first-class helicopter pilot. ocean and approached another island; from one quick glance at a navigation map that his eyes had taken, Chandler guessed it to be Hilo. He landed the craft expertly on the margin of a small airstrip, where two DC-#s were already parked and being unloaded, and felt himself free again. Two husky young men, apparently native Hawaiians by their size, rolled up a ramp and assisted Koitska down it and into a building. Chandler was left to his own devices. The building was rundown but sound. Around it stalky grass clumped, long uncut, and a few mauve and scarlet blossoms, almost hidden, showed where someone had once tended beds of bougainvillea and poinsettias. He could not guess what the building had been doing there, looking like a small officefactory combination out in the remote wilds, until he caught sight of a sign the winds had blown against a wall: Dole. Apparently this had been headquarters for one of the plantations. Now it was stripped almost clean inside, a welter of desks and rusted machines piled heedlessly where there once had been a parking lot New equipment was being loaded into it from the cargo planes. Chandler recognized some of it as from the list he had given the parts man, Hsi. There also seemed to be a gasoline-driven generator -- a large one -- but what the other things were he could not guess. Besides Koitska, there were at least five coronet-wearing execs visible around the place. Chandler was not surprised. It would have to be something big to winkle these torpid slugs out of their shells, but he knew what it was, and that it was big enough to them indeed; in fact, it was their lives. He deduced that Koitska's plans for his future comfort required a standby transmitter to service the coronets, in case something went wrong. And clearly it was this that they were to put together here. For ten hours, while the afternoon became dark night, they worked at a furious pace. When the sun set one of the execs gestured and the generator was started, rocking on its rubbertired wheels as its rotors spun and fumes chugged out, and they worked on by strings of incandescent lights. It was pick-andshovel work for Chandler, no engineering, just unloading and roughly grouping the equipment where it was ready to be assembled. The execs did not take part in the work. Nor were they idle. They busied themselves in one room of the building with some small device -- Chandler could not see what -- and when he looked again it was gone. He did not see them take it away and did not know where it was taken. Toward midnight he suddenly realized that it was likely some essential part which they would not permit anyone but themselves to handle, and that, no doubt, was why they had come in person, instead of working through proxies. Just before they left Koitska and two or three of the other execs quizzed him briefly. He was too tired to think beyond the questions, but they seemed to be trying to find out if he was able to do the simpler parts of the construction without supervision, and they seemed satisfied with the answers. He flew the helicopter home, with someone else guilding his arms and legs, but he was half asleep as he did it, and he never quite remembered how he managed to get back to his room at Tripler. back to Parts 'n Plenty with an additional list, covering replacement of some parts that had been damaged. Hsi glanced at it quickly and nodded. "All this stuff I have. You can pick it up this afternoon if you like." Chandler offered him a cigarette out of a stale pack. "About the other night -- " Hsi began to perspire, but he said, casually enough, "Interested in baseball?" "Baseball?" Hsi said, as though there had been nothing incongruous about the question, "There'll be a Little League game this afternoon. Back of the school on Punahou and Wilder. I thought I might stop by, then we can come back and pick up the rest of your gear. Two o'clock. Hope #I see you." Chandler walked away thoughtfully. He had no real intention of going there, but something in Hsi's attitude suggested more than a ball game; after a quick and poor lunch he decided to go. The field was a dirty playground, scuffed out of what had probably once been an attractive campus. The players were tenyear-olds, of the mixture of hair colors and complexions typical of the islands. Chandler was puzzled. Surely even the wildest baseball rooter wouldn't go far out of his way for this, and yet there was an audience of at least fifty adults watching the game. And none seemed to be related to the ballplayers. The Little Leaguers played grave, careful ball, and the audience watched them without a word of parental encouragement or joy. Hsi approached him from the shadow of the school building. "Glad you could make it, Chandler. No, no questions. Just watch." In the fifth inning, with the score aggregating around thirty, there was an interruption. A tall, red-headed man glanced at his watch, licked his lips, took a deep breath and walked out onto the diamond. He glanced at the crowd, while the kids suspended play without surprise. Then the red-headed man nodded to the umpire and stepped off the field. The ballplayers resumed their game, but now the whole attention of the audience was on the red-headed man. Suspicion crossed Chandler's mind. In a moment it was confirmed, as the red-headed man raised his hands waist high and clasped his right hand around his left wrist -- only for a moment, but that was enough. The ball game was a cover. Chandler was present at a meeting of what Hsi had called The Society of Slaves, the underground that dared to pit itself against the execs. Hsi cleared his throat and said, "This is the one. I vouch for him." And that was startling too. Chandler thought, because all these wrist-circled men and women were looking at him. # A LL right," said the redheaded man nervously, "let's get started then. First thing, anybody got any weapons? Sure? Take a look -- we don't want any slipups. Turn out your pockets." There was a flurry and a woman near Chandler held up a key ring with a tiny knife on it. "Penknife? Hell, yes; get rid of it Throw it in the outfield. You can pick it up after the meeting." A hundred eyes watched the pearly object fly. "We ought to be all right here," said the red-headed man. "The kids have been playing every day this week and nobody looked in. But watch your neighbor. See anything suspicious, don't wait. Don't take a chance. Holler TCill the umpire!' or an#Tthing you like, but holler. Good and loud." He paused, breathing hard. "All right, Hsi. Introduce him." The parts man took Chandler firmly by the shoulder. "This fellow has something for us," he said. "He's working for the exec Koitska, building what can't be anything else but a duplicate of the machine that they use to control us. He -- " "Wait a minute!" A bearded man came forward and peered furiously into Chandler's face. "Look at his head! Don't you see he's branded?" Chandler touched his scar as the man with the beard hissed, "Damned hoaxer! This is the lowest species of life on the face of the earth -- someone who pretended to be possessed in order to do some damned dirty act. What was it, hoaxer? Murder? Burning babies alive?" Hsi economically let go of Chandler's shoulder, half turned the bearded man with one hand and swung with the other. "Shut up, Linton. Wait till you hear what he's got for us." The bearded man, sprawling and groggy, slowly rose as Hsi explained tersely what he had guessed of Chandler's work -- as much as Chandler himself knew, it seemed. "Maybe this is only a duplicate. Maybe it won't be used. But maybe it will -- and Chandler's the man who can sabotage it! How would you like that? The execs switching over to this equipment while the other one is down for maintenance -- and their headsets don't work!" There was a terrible silence, except for the sounds of the children playing ball. Two runs had just scored. Chandler recognized the silence. It was hope. Linton broke it, his blue eyes gleaming above the beard. "No! Better than that. Why wait? We can use this fellow's machine. Set it up, get us some headsets -- and we can control the execs themselves!" THE silence was even longer; then there was a babble of discussion, but Chandler did not take part in it. He was thinking. It was a tremendous thought. Suppose a man like himself were actually able to do what they wanted of him. Never mind the practical difficulties -- learning how it worked, getting a headset, bypassing the traps Koitska would surely have set to prevent just that. Never mind the penalties for failure. Suppose he could make it work, and find fifty headsets, and fit them to the fifty men and women here in this clandestine meeting of the Society of Slaves... Would there, after all, be any change worth mentioning in the state of the world? Or was Lord Acton, always and everywhere, right? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power locked in the coronets of the exec was more than flesh and blood could stand; he could almost sense the rot in those near him at the mere thought. But Hsi was throwing cold water on the idea. "Sorry, but I know that much: One exec can't control another. The headpieces insulate against control. Well." He glanced at his watch. "We agreed on twenty minutes maximum for this meeting," he reminded the red-headed man, who nodded. "You're right." He glanced around the group. "I'll make the rest of it fast. News: You all know they got some more of us last week. Have you all been by the Monument? Three of our comrades were still there this morning. But I don't think they know we're organized, they think it's only individual acts of sabotage. In case any of you don't know, the execs can't read our minds. Not even when the#r're controlling us. Proof is we're all still alive. Hanrahan knew practically every one of us, and he's been lying out there for a week with a broken back, ever since they caught him trying to blow up the guard pits at East Gate. They had plenty of chance to pump him if they could. They can't. Next thing. No more individual attacks on one exec. Not unless it's a matter of life and death, and even then you're wasting your time unless you've got a gun. They can grab your mind faster than you can cut a throat. Third thing: Don't get the idea there are good execs and bad execs. Once they put that thing on their heads they're all the same. Fourth thing. You can't make deals. They aren't that worried. So if anybody's thinking of selling out -- I'm not saying anyone is -- forget it." He looked around. "Anything else?" 'What about germ warfare in the water supply?" somebody ventured. "Still looking into it. No report yet. All right, that's enough for now. Meeting's adjourned. Watch the ball game for a while, then drift away. One at a time. Hsi was the first to go, then a couple of women together, then a sprinkling of other men. Chandler was in no particular hurry, although it seemed time to leave anyway, because the ball game appeared to be over. A ten-yearold with freckles on his face was at the plate, but he was leaning on his bat, staring at Chandler with wide, serious eyes. Chandler felt a sudden chill. He turned, began to walk away -- and felt himself seized. schoolhouse, unable to look around. Behind him he heard a confused sob, tears and a child's voice trying to blubber through: "Something funny happened." If the child had been an adult it might have been warning enough. But the child had never experienced possession before, was not sure enough, was clear into the schoolhouse before the remaining members of the Society of Slaves awoke to their danger. He heard a quick cry of They got him! Then Chandler's legs stopped walking and he addressed himself savagely. A few yards away a stout Chinese lady was mopping the tiles; she looked up at him, startled, but no more startled than Chandler was himself. "You idiot!" Chandler blazed. "Why do you have to get mixed up in this? Don't you know it's wrong, love? Stay here!" Chandler commanded himself. "Don't you dare leave this building!" And he was free again, but there was a sudden burst of screams from outside. Bewildered, Chandler stood for a moment, as little able to move as though the girl still had him under control. Then he leaped through a classroom to a window, staring. Outside in the playground there was wild confusion. Half the spectators were on the ground, trying to rise. As he watched, a teen-age boy hurled himself at an elderly lady, the two of them falling. Another man flung himself to the ground. A woman swung her pocketbook into the face of the man next to her. One of the fallen ones rose, only to trip himself again. It was a mad spectacle, but Chandler understood it: What he was watching was a single member of the exec trying to keep a group of twenty ordinary, unarmed human beings in line. The exec was leaping from mind to mind; even so, the crowd was beginning to scatter. Without thought Chandler started to leap out to help them; but the possessor had anticipated that. He was caught at the door. He whirled and ran toward the woman with the mop; as he was released, the woman flung herself upon him, knocking him down. By the time he was able to get up again it was far too late to help... if there ever had been a time when he could have been of any real help. He heard shots. Two policeman had come running into the playground, with guns drawn. The exec who had looked at him out of the boy's eyes, who had penetrated this nest of enemies and extricated Chandler from it, had taken first things first. Help had been summoned. Quick as the coronets worked, it was no time at all until the nearest persons with weapons were located, commandeered and in action. Two minutes later there no longer was resistance. Obviously more execs had come to help, attracted by the commotion perhaps, or summoned at some stolen moment after the meeting had first been invaded. There were only five survivors on the field. Each was clearly controlled. They rose and stood patiently while the two police shot them, shot them, paused to reload and shot again. The last to die was the bearded man, Linton, and as he fell his eyes brushed Chandler's. Chandler leaned against a wall. It had been a terrible sight. The nearness of his own death had been almost the least of it. He had no doubt of the identity of the exec who had saved him and destroyed the others. Though he had heard the voice only as it came from his own mouth, he could not miss it. It was Rosalie Pan. He looked out at the red-headed man, sprawled across the foul line behind third base, and remembered what he had said. There weren't any good execs or bad execs. There were only execs. XI " might be worth, he knew he had given it away and the girl had given it back to him. He did not see her for several days, but the morning after the massacre he woke to find a note beside his bed table. No one had been in the room. It was his own sleeping hand that had written it, though the girl's mind had moved his fingers: If you get mixed up in anything like that again I won't be able to help you. So don't! Those people are just using you, you know. Don't throw away your chances. Do you like surfboarding? Rosie But by then there was no time for surfboarding, or for anything else but work. The construction job on Hilo had begun, and it was a nightmare. He was flown to the island with the last load of parts. No execs were present in the flesh, but in the first day Chandler lost count of how many different minds possessed his own. He began to be able to recognize them by a limp as he walked, by tags of German as he spoke, by a stutter, a distinctive gesture of annoyance, an expletive. As he was a trained engineer he was left to labor by himself for hours on end. It was worse for the others. There seemed to be a dozen execs hovering invisible around all the time; no sooner was a worker released by one than he was seized by another. The work progressed rapidly, but at the cost of utter exhaution. By the end of the fourth day Chandler had eaten only two meals and could not remember when he had slept last. He found himself staggering when free, and furious with the fatigue-clumsiness of his own body when possessed. At sundown on the fourth day he found himself free for a moment and, incredibly, without work of his own to do just then, until someone else completed a job of patchwiring. He stumbled out into the open air and had time only to gaze around for a moment before his eyes began to close. This must once have been a lovely island. Even unkempt as it was, the trees were tall and beautiful. Beyond them a wisp of smoke was pale against the dark-blue evening sky; the breeze was scented... He woke and found he was already back in the building, reaching for his soldering gun. There came a point at which even the will of the execs was unable to drive the flogged bodies farther, and then they were permitted to sleep for a few hours. At daybreak they were awake again. The sleep was not enough. The bodies were slow and inaccurate. Two of the Hawaiians, straining a hundred-pound component into place, staggered, slipped -- and dropped it. Appalled, Chandler waited for them to kill themselves. But it seemed that the execs were tiring too. One of the Hawaiians said irritably, with an accent Chandler did not recognize: "That's pau. All right, you morons, you've won yourselves a vacation; we'll have to fly you in replacements. Take the day off." And incredibly all eleven of the haggard wrecks stumbling around the building were free at once. The first thought of every man was to eat, to relieve himself, to remove a shoe and ease a blistered foot -- to do any of the things they had not been permitted to do. The second thought was sleep. Chandler dropped off at once, but he was overtired; he slept fitfully, and after an hour or two of turning on the hard ground sat up, blinking red-eyed around. He had been slow. The cushioned seats in the aircraft and cars were already taken. He stood up, stretched, scratched himself and wondered what to do next, and he remembered the thread of smoke he had seen -- when? three nights ago? -- against the evening sky. In all those hours he had not had time to think one obvious thought: There should have been no smoke there! The island was supposed to be deserted. He stood up, looked around to get his bearings, and started off in the direction he remembered. again, in poor condition as it was. It was delicious to be allowed to think consecutive thoughts. The chemistry of the human animal is such that it heals whatever thrusts it may receive from the outside world. Short of death, its only incapacitating wound comes from itself; from the outside it can survive astonishing blows, rise again and flourish. Chandler was not flourishing, but he had begun to rise. Time had been so compressed and blurred in the days since the slaughter at the Punahou School that he had not had time to grieve over the deaths of his briefly-met friends, or even to think of their quixotic plans against the execs. Now he began to wonder. He understood with what thrill of hope he had been received -- a man like themselves, not an exec, whose touch was at the very center of the exec power. But how firm was that touch? Was there really anything he could do? It seemed not. He barely understood the mechanics of what he was doing, far less the theory behind it. Conceivably knowing where this installation was he could somehow get back to it when it was completed. In theory it might be that there was a way to dispense with the headsets and exert power from the big board itself. A Cro-Magnard at the controls of a nuclear-laden jet bomber could destroy a city. Nothing stopped him. Nothing but his own invincible ignorance. Chandler was that Cro-Magnard; certainly power was here to grasp, but he had no way of knowing how to pick it up. Still -- where there was life there was hope. He decided he was wasting time that would not come again. He had been wandering along a road that led into a small town, quite deserted, but this was no time for wandering. His place was back at the installation, studying, scheming, trying to understand all he could. He began to turn, and stopped. "Great God," he said softly, looking at what he had just seen. The town was deserted of life, but not of death. where. They were long dead, perhaps years. They seemed natural and right as they lay there. It was not surprising they had escaped his notice at first. Little was left but bones and an occasional desiccated leathery rag that might have been a face. The clothing was faded and rotted away; but enough was left of the bodies and the clothes to make it clear that none of these people had died natural deaths. A rusted blade in a chest cage showed where a knife had pierced a heart; a small skull near his feet (with a scrap of faded blue rompers near it) was shattered. On a flagstone terrace a family group of bones lay radiating outward, like a rosette. Something had exploded there and caught them all as they turned to flee. There was a woman's face, grained like oak and eyeless, visible between the fender of a truck and a crushedin wall. Like exhumed Pompeii, the tragedy was so ancient that it aroused only wonder. The whole town had been blotted out. The execs did not take chances; apparently they had sterilized the whole island -- probably had sterilized all of them except Oahu itself, to make certain that their isolation was complete, except for the captive stock allowed to breed and serve them in and around Honolulu. Chandler prowled the town for a quarter of an hour, but one street was like another. The bodies did not seem to have been disturbed even by animals, but perhaps there were none big enough to show traces of such work. Something moved in a doorway. Chandler thought at once of the smoke he had seen, but no one answered his call and, though he searched, he could neither see nor hear anything alive. The search was a waste of time. It also wasted his best chance to study the thing he was building. As he returned to the cinder-block structure at the end of the airstrip he heard motors and looked up to see a plane circling in for a landing. He knew that he had only a few minutes. He spent those minutes as thriftily as he could, but long before he could even grasp the circuitry of the parts he had not himself worked on he felt a touch at his mind. The plane was rolling to a stop. He and all of them hurried over to begin imloading it. The plane was stopped with one wingtip almost touching the building, heading directly into it -- convenient for unloading, but a foolish nuisance when it came time to turn it and take off again, Chandler's mind thought while his body lugged cartons out of the plane. But he knew the answer to that. Takeoff would be no problem, any more than it would for the other small transports at the far end of the strip. These planes were not going to return, ever. work went on, and then it was done, or all but, and Chandler knew no more about it than when it was begun. The last little bit was a careful check of line voltages and a balancing of biases. Chandler could helo only up to a point, and then two execs, working through the bodies of one of the Hawaiians and the pilot of a Piper Tri-Pacer who had flown in some last-minute test equipment -- and remained as part of the labor pool -- laboriously worked on the flnal tests. Spent, the other men flopped to the ground, waiting. They were far gone. All of them, Chandler as much as the others. But one of them rolled over, grinned tightly at Chandler and said, "It's been fun. My name's Bradley. I always think people ought to know each other's names in cases like this. Imagine sharing a grave with some utter stranger!" "Grave?" Bradley nodded. "Like Pharaoh's slaves. The pyramid is just about finished, friend. You don't know what I'm talking about?" He sat up, plucked a blade of stemmy grass and put it between his teeth. "I guess you haven't seen the corpses in the woods." Chandler said, "I found a town half a mile or so over there, nothing in it but skeletons." "No, heavens, nothing that ancient. These are nice fresh corpses, out behind the junkheap there. Well, not fresh. They're a couple of weeks old. I thought it was neat of the execs to dispose of the used-up labor out of sight of the rest of us. So much better for morale... until Juan Simoa and I went back looking for a plain, simple electrical extension cord and found them." With icy calm Chandler realized that the man was talking sense. Used-up labor: the men who had unloaded the first planes, no doubt -- worked until they dropped, then efficiently disposed of, as they were so cheap a commodity that they were not worth the trouble of hauling back to Honolulu for salvage. "I see," he said. "Besides, dead men tell no tales." "And spread no disease. Probably that's why they did their ways the chance some exec might have to come down here to inspect in person. Rotting corpses just aren't sanitary." Bradley grinned again. "I used to be a doctor at Molokai." "Lep -- " began Chandler, but the doctor shook his head. "No, no, never say 'leprosy.' It's 'Hansen's disease.' Whatever it is, the execs were sure scared of it. They wiped out every patient we had, except a couple who got away by swimming; then for good measure they wiped out most of the medical staff too, except for a couple like me who were off-island and had the sense to keep quiet about where they'd worked. I used," he said, rolling over his back and putting his hands behind his head, "in the old days to work on pest-control for the Public Health Service. We sure knocked off a lot of rats and fleas. I never thought I'd be one of them." He was silent Chandler admired his courage very much. The man had fallen asleep. Chandler looked at the others. "You going to Jet them kill us without a struggle?" he demanded. The remaining Hawaiian was the only one to answer. He said, "You just don't know how much pilikia you're in. It isn't what we let them do." "We'll see," Chandler promised grimly. "They're only human. I haven't given up yet.'.' save himself; it was the girl who saved him. That night Chandler tossed in troubled sleep, and woke to find himself standing, walking toward the TriPacer. The sun was just beginning to pink the sky and no one else was moving. "Sorry, love," he apologized to himself. "You probably need to bathe and shave, but I don't know how. Shave, I mean." He giggled. "Anyway, you'll find everything you need at my house." He climbed into the plane. "Ever fly before?" he asked himself. "Well, you'll love it. Here we go. Close the door... snap the belt... turn the switch." He admired the practiced ease with which his body started the motor, raced it with a critical eye on the instruments, turned the plane and lifted it off, up, into the rising sun. "Oh, dear. You do need a bath," he told himself, wrinkling his nose humorously. "No harm. I've the nicest tub -- pink, deep -- and nine kinds of bath salts. But I wish you weren't so tired, love, because it's a long flight and you're wearing me out." He was silent as he bent to the correct compass heading and cranked a handle over his head to adjust the trim. "Koitska's going to be so huhu' he said, smiling. "Never fear, love, I can calm him down. But it's easier to do with you in one piece, you know, the other way's too late." He was silent for a long time, and then his voice began to sing. They were songs from Rosalie's own musical comedies. Even with so poor an instrument as Chandler's voice to work with, she sang well enough to keep both of them entertained while his body brought the plane in for a landing; and so Chandler went to live in the villa that belonged to Rosalie Pan. worse things in the world than keeping me amused when I'm not busy. We'll go to the beach again one day soon, I promise." And she was gone again. Chandler was a concubine -- not even that; he was a male geisha, convenient to play gin rummy with, or for company on the surfboards, or to make a drink. He did not quite know what to make of himself. In bad times one hopes for survival. He had hoped; and now he had survival, perfumed and cushioned, but on what mad terms! Rosalie was a pretty girl, and a good-humored one. She was right. There were worse things in the world than being her companion; but Chandler could not adjust himself to the role. It angered him when she got up from the garden swing and locked herself in her room -- for he knew that she was not sleeping as she lay there, though her eyes were closed and she was motionless. It infuriated him when she casually usurped his body to bring an ashtray to her side, or to stop him when his hands presumed. And it drove him nearly wild to be a puppet with her friends working his strings. He was that most of all. One exec who wished to communicate with another cast about for an available human proxy nearby. Chandler was that for Rosie Pan: her telephone, her social secretary, and on occasion he was the garment her dates put on. For Rosalie was one of the few execs who cared to conduct any major part of her life in her own skin. She liked dancing. She enjoyed dining out. It was her pleasure to display herself to the worshippers at Luigi the Wharf Rat's and to speed down the long combers on a surfboard. When another exec chose to accompany her it was Chandler's body which gave the remote "date" flesh. He ate very well indeed -- in surprising variety. He drank heavily sometimes and abstained others. Once, in the person of a Moroccan exec, he smoked an opium pipe; once he dined on roasted puppy. He saw many interesting things and, when Rosalie was occupied without him, he had the run of her house, her music library, her pantry and her books. He was not mistreated. He was pampered and praised, and every night she kissed him before she retired to her own room with the snap-lock on the door. He was miserable. He prowled the house in the nights after she had left him, unable to sleep. It had been bad enough on Hilo, under the hanging threat of death. But then, though he was only a slave, he was working at something that used his skill and training. Now? Now a Pekingese could do nearly all she wanted of him. He despised in himself the knowledge that with a Pekingese's cunning he was contriving to make himself indispensable to her -- her slippers fetched in his teeth, his silky mane by her hand to stroke -- if not these things in actuality, then their very near equivalents. But what else was there for him? There was nothing. She had spared his life from Koitska, and if he offended her Koitska's sentence would be carried out. Even dying might be better than this, he thought. Indeed, it might be better even to go back to Honolulu and life. find himself climbing the wide, carpeted steps to her room. She was not asleep; it was her mind that was guiding him. He opened the door. She lay with a feathery coverlet pulled up to her chin, eyes open, head propped on three pillows; as she looked at him he was free. "Something the matter, love? You fell asleep sitting up." "Sorry." She would not be put off. She made him tell her his resentments. She was very understanding and very sure as she said, "You're not a dog, love. I won't have you thinking that way. You're my friend. Don't you think I need a friend?" She leaned forward. Her nightgown was very sheer; but Chandler had tasted that trap before and he averted his eyes. "You think it's all fun for us. I understand. Tell me, if you thought I was doing important work -- oh, crucial work, love -- would you feel a little easier? Because I am. We've got the whole work of the island to do, and I do my share. We've got our plans to make and our future to provide for. There are so few of us. A single H-bomb could kill us all. Do you think it isn't work, keeping that bomb from ever coming here? There's all Honolulu to monitor, for they know about us there. We can't like some disgusting nitwits like your Society of Slaves destroy us. There's the problems of the world to see to. Why," she said with pride, "we've solved the whole Indian-Pakistani population problem in the last two months. They'll not have to worry about famine again for a dozen generations! We're working on China now; next Japan; next -- oh, all the world. We'll have three-quarters of the lumps gone soon, and the rest will have space to breathe in. It's work!" She saw his expression and said earnestly, "No, don't think that! You call it murder. It is, of course. But it's the surgeon's knife. We're quicker and less painful than starvation, love... and if some of us enjoy the work of weeding out the unfit, does that change anything? It does not! I admit some of us are, well, mean. But not all. And we're improving. The new people we take in are better than the old." She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she shook her head. "Never mind," she said -- apparently to herself. "Forget it, love. Go like an angel and fetch us both some coffee."  not, he thought bitterly, like a man. She was keeping something from him, and he was too stubborn to let her tease him out of his mood. "Everything's a secret," he complained, and she patted his cheek. "It has to be that way." She was quite serious. "This is the biggest thing in the world. I'm fond of you, love, but I can't let that interfere with my duty." "Shto, Rosie?" said Chandler's mouth thickly. "Oh, there you are, Andrei," she said, and spoke quickly in Russian. Chandler's brows knotted in a scowl and he barked: "Nyeh mozhet bit!" "Andrei..." she said gently. "Fa vas sprashnivayoo..." "Nyei!" "No Andrei..." Rumble, grumble; Chandler's body twitched and fumed. He heard his own name in the argument, but w'hat the subject matter was he could not tell. Rosalie was coaxing; Koitska was refusing. But he was weakening. After minutes Chandler's shoulders shrugged; he nodded; and he was free. "Have some more coffee, love," said Rosalie Pan with an air of triumph. Chandler waited. He did not understand what was going on. It was up to her to enlighten him, and finally she smiled and said: "Perhaps you can join us, love. Don't say yes or no. It isn't up to you... and besides you can't know whether you want it or not until you try. So be patient a moment." Chandler frowned; then felt his body taken. His lips barked: "Khorashaw!" His body got up and walked to the wall of Rosalie's room. A picture on the wall moved aside and there was a safe. Flick, flick, Chandler's own fingers dialed a combination so rapidly that he could not follow it. The door of the safe opened. And Chandler was free, and Rosalie excitedly leaping out of the bed behind him, careless of the wisp of nylon that was her only garment, crowding softly, warmly past him to reach inside the safe. She lifted out a coronet very like her own. She paused and looked at Chandler. "You can't do anything to harm us with this one, love," she warned. "Do you understand that? I mean, don't get the idea that you can tell anyone anything. Or do something violent. You can't I'll be right with you, and Koitska will be monitoring the transmitter." She handed him the coronet. "Now, when you see something interesting, you move right in. You'll see how. It's the easiest thing in the world, and -- Oh, here. Put it on." Chandler swallowed with difficulty. She was offering him the tool that had given the execs the world. A blunter, weaker tool than her own, no doubt. But still it was power beyond his imagining. He stood there frozen as she slipped it on his head. Sprung electrodes pressed gently against his temples and behind his ears. She touched something... Chandler stood motionless for a moment and then, without effort, floated free of his own body. fish floating. Trailing tentacles that whipped and curled, floating over the sandbound claws and chitin that clashed beneath, floating over the world's people, and them not even knowing, not even seeing... Chandler floated. He was up, out and away. He was drifting. Around him was no-color. He saw nothing of space or size, he only saw, or did not see but felt-smelled-tasted, peopie. They were the sandbound. They were the creatures that crawled and struggled below, and his tentacles lashed out at them. Beside him floated another. The girl? It had a shape, but not a human shape -- a pair of great projecting spheres, a cinctured area-rule shape. Female. Yes, undoubtedly the girl. It waved a member at him and he understood he was beckoned. He followed. Two of sandbound ones were ahead. The female shape slipped into one, he into the other. It was as easy to invest this form with his own will as it was to command the muscles of his hand. They looked at each other out of sandbound eyes. "You're a boy!" Chandler laughed. The girl laughed: "You're an old washerwoman!" They were in a kitchen where fish simmered on an electric stove. The boy-Rosie wrinkled his-her nose, blinked and was empty. Only the small almond-eyed boy was left, and he began to cry convulsively. Chandler understood. He floated out after her. This way, this way, she gestured. A crowd of mudbound figures. She slipped into one, he into another. They were in a bus now, rocking along an inland road, all men, all roughly dressed. Laborers going to clear a new section of Oahu of its split-level debris. Chandler thought, and looked for the girl in one of the men's eyes, could not find her, hesitated and -- floated. She was hovering impatiently. This way! He followed, and followed. They were a hundred people doing a hundred things. They lingered a few moments as a teen-age couple holding hands in the twilight of the beach. They fled from a room where Chandler was an old woman dying on a bed, and Rosalie a stolid, uncaring nurse beside her. They played follow-the-leader through the audience of a Honolulu movie theater, and sought each other, laughing, among the fish stalls of King Street. Then Chandler turned to Rosalie to speak and... it all went out... the scene disappeared... he opened his eyes, and he was back in his own flesh. He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie's bedroom. He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed. Rosalie was lying on the bed. In a moment she ojtened her eyes. "Well, love?" He said hoarsely, "What made it stop?" She shrugged. "Koitska turned you off. Tired of monitoring us, I expect -- it's been an hour. I'm surprised his patience lasted this long." She stretched luxuriously, but he was too full of what had hap pened even to see the white grace of her body. "Did you like it, love? Would you like to have it forever?" status remained in limbo. He spent that day in a state of numb bemusement, remembering the men and women he had worn like garments, appalled and exhilarated. He did not see Rosalie again that day, she kept to her room and he locked out. He was still a lapdog, but a lapdog with a dream dangling before him. He went to sleep that night thinking that he was a dog who might become a god, and he had eight days left. The next day Rosalie wheedled another hour of the coronet from Koitska. They explored the ice caves on Mount Rainier in the bodies of two sick, starving hermits and wandered arm in arm near the destroyed International Bridge at Niagara, breathing the spray of the unchanging Falls. He had seven days left. They passed like a dream. He saw a great deal of the inner workings of the exec, more than before. He had privileges. He was up for membership in the club. Rosalie had proposed him. He talked with two Czechoslovakian ballet dancers in their persons, and a succession of heavily accented Russians and Poles and Japanese through the mouth of the beach boy who came to tend Rosalie's garden. He thought they liked him and was pleased that he penetrated where he had not been allowed before... until he realized that these freedoms were in themselves a threat. They allowed him this contact so that they could look him over. If they rejected him they would have to kill him, because he had seen too much. But by then a week had passed, and another day, and though he did not know it he had only one day left. Rosalie did what she could to make the days of waiting easy for him. "Embarrassing, isn't it? I went through it myself, love. Come have a drink." "When will I know?" he demanded fretfully. "Well." She hesitated. "I don't suppose there's any harm in telling you, love, under the circumstances -- " He knew what the circumstances were. "I guess I can tell you. You need just over seven hundred votes to come in. You've got -- " Her eyes glazed for a moment.   m# , ' I ' I Uw r rt'  -'. '.N, She was looking through some clerk's eyes, somewhere on the island. "You've got about a hundred and fifty so far. Takes time, doesn't it? But it's worth it in the end." "How many 'no' votes?" 'None." She said gently, "You'll never have but one, love, because that's all it takes." He stared. The girl gook took up his hand and kissed it lightly. "One blackball's enough, yes, but never fear. Rosie's on your side." up and made himself another drink. His head was beginning to buzz. They had been drinking on her sun terrace since early afternoon. Rosalie came up beside him soothingly. "I know how you feel. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?" "Sure," he said, stirring the ice around in the glass and drinking it down. He made another drink absently, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome. "Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins." He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. "I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when -- " her face was strained. even after years, even now that she was herself one of the godlike ones -- "when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll booth I screamed but my -- friend -- let go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control... We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way." She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself slicing a lime for her drink. Now she was talking about her friend. "I hadn't seen him in six years. I was just a kid, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these." She touched her coronet. "So," she said brightly, "he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It's all very simple, except the waiting." Chandler pulled her down on the couch beside him and made a toast. "Your friend." "He's a nice guy," she said moodily, sipping her drink. "You know how careful I am about getting exercise and so on? It's partly because of him. You would have liked him, love, only -- well, it turned out that he liked me well enough, but he began to like what he could get through the coronet a lot more. He got fat. A lot of them are awfully fat, love," she said seriously. "That's why they need people like me. And you. Replacements. Heart trouble, liver trouble, what can they expect when they lie in bed day in and day out, taking their lives through other people's bodies? I won't let myself go that way... It's a temptation. You know, almost every day I find some poor woman on a diet and spend a solid hour eating creampuffs and gravies. How they must hate me!" She grinned, leaned back and kissed him. Chandler put his arms around the girl and returned the kiss, hard. She did not draw away. She clung to him, and he could feel in the warmth of her body, the sound of her breath that she was responding. The drink made him reckless; the last two weeks made him doubtful; he was torn. He could tell that there was no resistance in her body, but the coronet made it in doubt; she could fling him away from her with one touch of the mind. Yet she didn't do it -- "Vi myenya zvali?" his own voice demanded, harsh and mocking. away. Her eyes were bright and huge, staring at him. "Andrei!" "Da, Andrei! Kok eto dosadnor "Andrei, please. I know that you are -- " "Filthy!" screamed Chandler's voice. "How can you? I do not allow this carrion to touch you so -- not vot is mine -- I do not allow him to live!" And Chandler dropped her and leaped to his feet. He fought. He struggled; but only in his mind, and helplessly; his body carried him out of the room, running and stumbling, out into the drive, into her waiting car and away. He drove like a madman on roads he had never seen before. The car's gears bellowed pain at their abuse, the tires screamed. Chandler, prisoned inside himself, recognized that touch. Koitska! He knew who Rosalie Pan's lover had been. If he had been in doubt his own voice, raucous and hysterical with rage, told him the truth. All that long drive it screamed threats and obscenities at him, in Russian and tortured English. The car stopped in front of the his body hurried in, bruising itself deliberately against every doorpost and stick of furniture. "I could have smashed you in the car!" his voice screamed hoarsely. "It is too merciful. I could have thrown you into the sea! It is not painful enough." In the garage his body stopped and looked wildly around. "Knives, torches," his lips chanted. "Shall I gouge out eyes? Slit throat?" A jar of battery acid stood on a shelf, "Da, da!" screamed Chandler, stumbling toward it. "One drink eh? And I von't even stay vith you to feel it, the pain -- just a moment -- then it eats the gut, the long slow dying... And all the time the body that was Chandler's was clawing the cap off the jar, tilting it -- He dropped the jar, and leaped aside instinctively as it splintered at his feet. He was free! Before he could move he was seized again, stumbled, crashed into a wall -- And was free again. He stood waiting for a moment, unable to believe it; but he was still free. The alien invader did not seize his mind. There was no sound. No one moved. No gun fired at him, no danger threatened. He was free; he took a step, turned, shook his head and proved it. He was free and, in a moment, realized that he was in the building with the fat bloated body of the man who wanted to murder him, the body that in its own strength could scarcely stand erect. It was suicide to attempt to harm an exec. He would certainly lose his life -- except -- that was gone already anyhow; he had lost it. He had nothing left to lose.  the stairs to Koitska's suite. Halfway up he tripped and sprawled, half stunning himself against the stair rail. It had not been his own clumsiness, he was sure. Koitska had caught at his mind again, but only feebly. Chandler did not wait. Whatever was interfering with Koitska's control, some distraction or malfunction of the coronet or whatever, Chandler could not bank on its lasting. The door was locked. He found a heavy mahogany chair, with a back of solid carved wood. He flung it onto his shoulders, grunting, and ran with it into the door, a bull driven frantic, lunging out of its querencia to batter the wall of the arena. The door splintered. Chandler was gashed with long slivers of wood, but he was through the door. Koitska lay sprawled along his couch, eyes staring. Alive or dead? Chandler did not wait to find out but sprang at him hands outstreched. The staring eyes flickered; Chandler felt the pull at his mind. But Koitska's strength was almost gone. The eyes glazed, and Chandler was upon him. He ripped the coronet off and flung it aside, and the huge bulk of Koitska swung paralytically ofl the couch and fell to the floor. The man was helpless. He lay breathing like a steam engine, one eye pressed shut against the leg of a coffee table, the other looking up at Chandler. Chandler was panting almost as hard as the helpless mass at his feet. He was safe for a moment. At the most for a moment, for at any time one of the other execs might dart down out of the mind-world into the real, looking at the scene through Chandler's eyes and surely deducing what would be no more to his favor than the truth. He had to get away from there. If he seemed busy in another room perhaps they would go away again. Chandler turned his back on the paralyzed monster to flee. It would be even better to try to lose himself in Honolulu -- if he could get that far -- he did not in his own flesh know how to fly the helicopter that was parked in the yard or he would try to get farther still. But as he turned he was caught.  Koitska lying there, and screamed. His eyes were staring at Koitska. It was too late. He was possessed by someone, he did not know whom. Though it made little enough difference, he thought, watching his own hands reach out to touch the staring face. His body straightened, his eyes looked around the room, he went to the desk. "Love," he cried to himself, "what's the matter with Koitska? Write, for God's sake!" And he took a pencil in his hand and was free. He hesitated, then scribbled: I don't know. I think he had a stroke. Who are you? The other mind slipped tentatively into his, scanning the paper. "Rosie, you idiot, who did you think?" he said furiously. "What have you done?" Nothing, he began instinctively, then scratched the word out. Briskly and exactly he wrote: He was going to kill me, but he had some kind of an attack.  took his coronet away. I was going to run. "Oh, you fool," he told himself shrilly a moment later. Chandler's body knelt beside the wheezing fat lump, taking its pulse. The faint, fitful throb meant nothing to Chandler; probably meant nothing to Rosie either, for his body stood up, hesitated, shook its head. "You've done it now," he sobbed, and was surprised to find he was weeping real tears. "Oh, love, why? I could have taken care of Koitska -- somehow -- No, maybe I couldn't," he said frantically, breaking down. "I don't know what to do. Do you have any ideas -- outside of running?" It took him several seconds to write the one word, but it was really all he could find to write. No. His lips twisted as his eyes read the word. "Well," he said practically, "I guess that's the end, love. I mean, I give up." He got up, turned around the room. "I don't know," he told himself worriedly. "There might be a chance -- if we could hush this up. I'd better get a doctor. He'll have to use your body, so don't be surprised if there's someone and it isn't me. Maybe he can pull Andrei through. Maybe Andrei'll forgive you then -- Or if he dies," Chandler's voice schemed as his eyes stared at the rasping motionless hulk, "we can say you broke down the door to help him. Only you'll have to put his coronet back on, so it won't look suspicious. Besides that will keep anyone from occupying him. Do that, love. Hurry." And he was free. Gingerly Chandler crossed the floor. He did not like to touch the dying animal that wheezed before him, liked even less to give it back the weapon that, if it had only a few moments of sentience again, it would use to kill him. But the girl was right. Without the helmet any wandering curihimself. The helmet would shield him from -- Would shield anyone from -- Would shield Chandler himself from possession if he used it! He did not hesitate. He slipped the helmet on his head, snapped the switch and in a moment stood free of his own body, in the gray, luminous limbo, looking down at the pallid traceries that lay beneath. either. He did not pause to think or plan; it was as though he had planned every step, in long detail. over many years. Chandler for at least a few moments had the freedom to battle the execs on their own ground, the freedom that any mourning parent or husband in the outside world would know well how to use. Chandler also knew. He was a weapon. He might die -- but it was not a great thing to die, millions had done it for nothing under the rule of the execs, and he was privileged to be able to die trying to kill them. He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation. It had had to be there. It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec. He had only to pull one switch -- that one there -- and power would cease to flow. The coronets would be dead. The execs would be only humans. In five minutes he could destroy enough parts so that it would be at least a week's work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in Honolulu -- somehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of their chance -- could root out and destroy every exec on all the islands. Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to build. He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for starting that up by remote control. He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks of transistors, and paused to think. He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this installation -- not yet -- not until he had used it. He remembered to sit down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent himself out and up, to scan the nearby area. There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned to his own long enough to barricade the door -- it had a strong-looking lock, but he shouldered furniture against it too -- and then he went up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water, under a mind-controlled plane, to the island of Hilo. There had to be someone near the stand-by installation. He searched; but there was no one. No one in the building. No one near the ruined field. No one in the village of the dead nearby. He was desperate; he became frantic; he was on the point of giving up, and then he found -- someone? But it was a personal ity feebler than stricken Koitska's, a bare swamphre glow. No matter. He entered it. and left it again. He had never known such pain. A terrifying fire in the belly, a thunder past any migraine in the head, a thousand lesser aches and woes in every member. He could not imagine what person lived in such distress; but grimly he forced himself to enter again. Moaning -- it was astonishing how thick and animal-like the man's voice was -- Chandler forced his borrowed body stumbling through the jungle. Time was growing very short. He drove it gasping at an awkward run across the airfield, dodged around one wrecked plane and blundered through the door. The pain was intolerable. He was hardly able to maintain control. Chandler stretched out the borrowed hand to pick up a heavy wrench even while he thought. But the hand would not grasp. He brought it to the weak, watering eyes. The hand had no fingers. It ended in a ball of scar tissue. The left hand was nearly as misshapen. Panicked, Chandler retreated from the body in a flash, back to his own; and then he began to think. It was, it had to be, the creature he had seen in the village of the dead. A leper. One of the few who escaped from the colony at Molokai. Chandler drove himself back to that body and, though it could not work well, he could make it turn a frequency dial, using its clubbed hands like sticks. He could make it throw a switch. He then caused it to place the toothed edge of a rusting saw on the ground and strike at it with its throat in a sort of reverse guillotine. Chandler could not see that he had a choice; he dared not have that creature left where it might be seized the moment he quit its body. It was better dead. After that it all became easy. In his own body he destroyed the installation in Oahu. A few minutes at Koitska's work bench, and he had changed the frequency on his own coronet to transmit on the new band the leper's touch had given the Hilo equipment. He worked rapidly and without errors, one ear cocked for the sound of someone coming to threaten what he was doing (the sound never came), impatient to get the job done. He was very impatient, for when he was done he would be the only exec. And the execs would be only slaves. XV It was dawn. His job was done. He carried the coronet, the only working coronet in the world, in his hand. He had spent the night had washed away his passions; he was spent. He had killed every exec he could find, in widening circles from the building where his body lay. He had slit his dozen throats and fired bullets into his hundred hearts and hundred brains; he had entered bodies only long enough to feel for a coronet, and if it was there the body was doomed; and he stopped only when it occurred to him he wasn't even doing that much any more. He had probably killed some dozens of slaves, as well as all the execs in reach. And when he stopped the last search of the nearer portions of the island and found no one alive, and he had then realized that one of the closest execs had been Rosalie Pan. He knew that in a while he would feel very badly for having killed that girl (which could she have been? The one with the shotgun in the mouth? The one whose intestines he had spilled with a silver letteropener in a whim of hara-kiri?), but just now he was too worn. He was Chandler the giant killer, who had destroyed the creatures who had destroyed a world, but he was all tired out. He poked at the filigree of the coronet absently, as a man might caress the pretty rug which once had been the skin of a tiger that almost killed him. It was all that was left of the exec power. Who held this single coronet still held the world. Of course, said a sly and treasonable voice in a corner of his mind, the job was not really done. Not quite. Not all. The job would not be done until it was impossible for anyone to find enough of the installations to be able to reconstruct them. And then, said the voice, while Chandler stared at the dawn, listening, what about the good things the exec had done? Would he not be foolish to throw away so casually this one, unique chance to right every imaginable wrong the world might do him? Chandler went back into the building and brewed some strong black coffee. While it was bubbling on the stove he slipped the coronet back atop his head. Only for a while, he promised. A very little while. He pledged himself solemnly that it would be just long enough to clean up all loose ends -- not a moment longer, he pledged. And knew that he was # Star Shelf like fact merely by constant repetition. That this is startlingly true has been demonstrated by Isaac Asimov in his latest book, the title of which supplies the finest three-word description of science fiction that I have yet seen and just barely lacks the snappy oomph that would entice a prospective mag publisher to gobble it up as the title of a new SF entry. Fact and Fancy by Asimov, under Doubleday's imprint, is a collection of speculative essays. mainly from FiiSF, that represent his closest approach to the fictional sphere since he took up science popularization in earnest. Asimov has clearly had keen enjoyment from taking certain stock assumptions from the repertoire of the SF hack writer and subjecting them to keen scrutiny under the pitiless light of present scientific knowledge. For example, one of the most glamorous settings used for years has been, "The Planet of the Double Sun." How many stories have you and I read with this background? Now along comes Spoilsport Asimov and proceeds to knock this exotic picture out of our heads with hard facts. He takes as example Alpha Centauri A, which is Earth's twin in temperature, brightness and mass, and which actually is the major partner in an existing binary system. In terms of our solar system, Alpha Centauri B, the minor partner, revolves in the orbit of that even Saturn would be nearer to A than to B. And since A has eight times the gravitational attraction of B, no trouble should arise from that score. Since the diameter of B is # miles, this would seem to provide the Double Sun of the old-fashioned SF tale. But would B appear like another sun? It would not! Asimov does the arithmetic and finds that a diameter of # miles at a tends an angle of # seconds of arc. To the naked eye. Sun B would be just about the apparent size of Jupiter! The one small feature redeemed from this rude shattering of one of my favorite boyhood illusions is the fact that Sun B would be # times as bright as the full moon. But this is still only l#th as bright as Sun A. Q. How close would a star the size of our sun have to be to be seen as a disk? A. Not more that, even at the center of our galaxy, star distances average one light year, the possibility of double sun systems of dear memory is very dim indeed. Incidentally, how big is the apparent size of the moon as seen from the earth's surface? This has been tossed into many stories also. The usual answer is given linearly and is therefore meaningless. Astonishingly, a quarter dollar, which the mind conceives of as quite small, held at a distance of nine feet, will just overlap the full moon, the mental image of which is quite large. Bang! Another punctured illusion! Another startling demonstration of the tricks our senses play on us is the actual count of eyevisible stars in the jampacked firmament of a perfect night in lions!" shouts Averageman, ignorant of the fact that there are only # stars in both hemispheres of magnitude # or brighter, the faintest star that can be detected with the unaided eye. Getting back to the moon, if at any particular time it were to be removed from the sky, how many visible stars would it have been obscuring? The odds are # to I that removal would reveal not one star behind it! The next sacred cow slaughtered by Asimov's merciless pen is the "familiar constellations" bit so familiar in space operas of yore, including, I'll bet a ninefoot quarter, Dr. Asimov's own. In deep space, our astronauts will view over two and one half times as many naked-eye stars due to the elimination of atmospheric absorption of # of starlight. All fine details of the "familiar constellations" will be drowned out by the light of thousands of additional stars. In another chapter touchingly titled "The Sight of Home," Asimov calculates the maximum distance at which our future astronauts can lift their "tear-filled, homesick eyes to the alien heavens for a glimpse of home," This works out to sixty-five light years at the absolute threshhold of naked-eye visibility. In fact, the Alpha Centauri system, our closest neighbor in space, is the only one from which Sol can be seen as a first magnitude star! Thus, Sol can be seen at all from an absolute maximum of # near-by star systems. A lot, but certainly a tiny handful in comparison with our galaxy's total stars. Further speculation then leads Asimov to wonder just how bright our sun would have to be to be seen at increasingly greater distances. Sirius, far brighter than Sol, can be seen at a maximum distance of # light years and Capella # light years. Of the stars visible from Earth, though, the championship is held by Rigel, over # times as luminous as Sol. Rigel can be seen over a range of one-fifth the width of the galactic lens, more than # light years in any direction. Asimov's tear-filled Astronaut could say, "Oh, well, you can't see our Sun from here, but it's pretty close to Rigel, that star over there, the one you call Bjfxlpt." As can be gathered from the above, good Dr. Asimov has let down his hair as he has never done in his other books aimed at a more general audience. He is among his own science-fictional friends and his free-wheeling joy is apparent. In another chapter that hits close to the home of most of us in this field, he attempts to answer the question invariably put to him (and all other creators of SF or fantasy fiction): "Where do you get your crazy ideas?" He never succeeds in pinning down an answer but en route he develops some interesting thoughts on creativity and intellectual breakthroughs such as Darwin's. I can think of no one better supplied with such an assortment of numerous and amazing facts, nor one better qualified to leap lightly over the enchanted threshold dividing Fact from Fancy as the author of these seventeen "speculative essays'. Groff Conklin. Collier Books. has given us a fine example of flights of fancy by some of the most eminent dealers in fact of our time. It is more than a bit startling to see some of these names bydining a piece of fiction: J.B.S. Haldane, Norbert Weiner, Julien Huxley, Leo Szilard. Others have been top-ranking SF authors for years; Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Chan Davis, Chad Oliver, the late Miles J. Breuer. Still others, when shorn of their literary pseudonyms, are names of prestige in their particular fields; John R. Pierce, Willy Ley, R. S. Richardson, the late Eric Temple Bell. The most interesting thing about the scientists in this collection who are one-shot SF authors is that they all have one point in common; none of their stories are exalted flights of fancy. They have all resorted to the fictional approach to make some sharply pointed moral or ethical commentary on the abuse of knowledge. The little playlet, Pilot Lights oi the Apocalypse, by the noted nuclear physicist, the late Louis N. Ridenour, published only six months after Hiroshima, is one of the earliest and one of the most effective warnings against the possibility of push-button warfare that I've ever read. Both J.B.S. Haldane's The Gold-Makers and Julian Huxley's The Tissue-Culture King are chase thrillers in which important discoveries are prostituted to selfish ends. The Ultimate Catalyst by Eric Temple Bell (John Taine) is also, but it is an unashamedly commercial piece from the Thirties. The stories by the pros (Clarke, Asimov, Davis, Oliver) are polished jobs that are fairrepresentative but unexceptional. In fact. What ... by Isaac Asimov is more a piece of whimsical fantasy concerning alternate pasts than it is straight SF. Not so with John Szes Future, a previously unpublished story by "J. J. Coupling" who is John R. Pierce, Bell Telephone's Director of Research for Communications Principles. It is a wry little yarn about a nuclear physicist, convinced of the power of psi over matter, dredged by unhappy mistake from the twentieth century by a psychologically orientated future in which physical scientists are regarded with an aversion usually reserved for mad dogs. He remains oblivious to the true nature of the scientihc advances, attributing them to psi. There is a semantic mixup concerning psi and psy, and the future that his delighted preconceptions lead him to see is far removed from the drab and prosaic reality. The author of Learning Theory, James McConnell, is a research psychologist. In his story, he rips to shreds one of the most sacred tools of his profession, the teaching and testing of lower animals by rewards andor punishment. In his remarkably uncomfortable yarn that builds toward a high peak of frustration, he smashes the Learning Theory by casting his hero, himself a psychologist, in the role of the impotent lower animal under test. Conklin has come up with an engrossing "idea" anthology. Rating: Y# Gordon R. Dickson. Pyramid was a cracking good war story. So is Naked to the Stars. Cal Truant, combat lieutenant, rather than discover what happened during sixteen hours of amnesia during combat, resigns from active duty and enlists in the detested Contact Service, a maneuver that creates doubts concerning his courage. Contact Service, a branch of Earth's fighting Combat Service, is noncombatant and, more theoretically than actually, is responsible for initial (and preferably peaceful) alien contact. Dickson makes his reader absorbedly aware that service in an organization dedicated to peace can require far more courage than mere combat. Rating:  by John Brunner. Ace Books. century crusaders of Poul Anderson's delightfully tongue-in-cheek The High Crusade, are conquerors because of their employment of captured ships and weapons that are far beyond their true technological capabilities. Brunner's tale, however, is not a swashbuckler. He picks up the narrative thread some fifty years after Earth's defeat by the Vorrish and draws a picture of conqueror and conquered that is deliberately reminiscent of the roles of Roman conqueror and Greek slave of millenia past, or the Mongols and the superior civilization of the Chinese that ultimately engulfed the victors. Rating:  won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsli No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add stale sales tax, if any. No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above arc the only ones we oFferl its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! tegular price, plus #S for postage and handling. # Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately ! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. the demolished man rush me New York Q copies of #, The Original Edition -- Completo! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yel Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # Name Address. City.State. I Enclose.  Complete Short Novel # jy -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field -- Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy , per # lssues , foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City Address Zone State. galaxy by Damon Knight by Kris Neville Editor Science Editor Publisher Production Manager by Theodore L. Thomas by Magnus Ludens by J. F. Bone by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Floyd C. Gale Art Director Advertising bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #C per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. O NE OF the good things about being a science-fiction editor is that you get to meet an outsize share of the most argumentative, most individualistic and most personally rewarding humans alive: i.e., the science-fiction writers. There aren't very many of them. Perhaps there are two or three hundred in the world, at least on this side of the Iron Curtain. # t (We are told that there are at least ninety full-time sf writers in the U.S.S.R.; but none of them has as yet elected to offer his work to Galaxy.) What these men and women lack in numbers they make up in articulation. We recently had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion sponsored by Playboy, in which we endeavored to make ourselves heard in a congregation comprising Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Robert Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke. Playboy had the idea its readers would relish listening in on a tape-recorded bull session of these mighty minds, talking the shop-talk of their trade: What's next for the world? In its innocence Playboy provided a satchel full of tape on which to engrave the conversation that ensued; but when the talk stopped after four hours it was not because the science-fictionists had run out of conversation. Playboy had run out of tape. Science-fiction writers come in all shapes and sizes. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, th -- no, pass that one; doctor, lawyer... again no. We cannot think of either felon or Indian chief who writes science fiction, but almost every other occupation has its representatives in the ranks, from sober university professor (ret.) to short-order cook in a hamburger joint (also ret.) A doctor and a lawyer, come to think of it, are represented in the current issue. r  'he good doctor is J. F. Bone. If he chances to be a D.V.M. instead of an M.D., why, so much the better for the Pacific Northwest's livestock, and so much the worse for its human sufferers. One of our best-preserved memories of a Seattle visit a couple of years ago is of Jesse Bone explaining some medical complexities to a roomful of people, about half of whom were practicing M.D.s It may well be that a practice comprising everything from toads to Angus bulls may lead to contemplative ways of thought on the part of the practicioner; and thus from a consideration of the manifold blueprints by which our Earthly vertebrates are constructed to a guess at how Martian livestock may be put together... as in On the Fourth Planet. The lawyer, then? Why, that is Theodore L. Thomas. Here's a fellow with a flourishing patent practice in a big Eastern state. That's his profession. For a hobby, he works at skin-diving; was one of the pioneers in the sport and has crept along the bottom of every body of water within range of his station wagon. In what category he places his science-fiction writing we cannot guess. The fact is that he writes a good deal of it, though, and he writes it very well. There was his The Watery Wonders of Captain Nemo (which we were lucky enough to publish in Galaxy ) for one example; for another, there was his The Weather Man (which we weren't.) Frankly, this sort of behavior surprises us. We have long cherished a theory that lawyers are tone-deaf to style. It's against all their training, you see. A writer's job is to evoke images and suggest moods; a lawyer's is to nail down slippery facts, not merely so firmly that no one can misunderstand, but in such pettifogging detail that not even a contumacious imbecile can pretend he misunderstands. All those painfully detailed stipulations, that lumbering contractese that mumbles its way through thickets of andors and bogs of hereinafters: these are the death of art. A lawyer is permitted to imply nothing and to evoke nothing. He has to put the whole business in dull black and arid white. Yet strangely we find that here a lawyer can throw off his occupational disease; for no one with a tin ear could have written The Lonely Man. Then there is Damon Knight, for whom a dozen pages like this one could hardly do justice. Damon Knight is that rather rare specimen, the science-fiction writer who makes that his principal occupation. Of course, it is not always stories that he writes. His critical anthology, A Century of Science Fiction, is the closest thing to a handbook of the field that anyone has yet produced; and as a book reviewer, Knight has at least two distinctions -- the only critic to be given an award for his work, and the only critic to have had his opinions gathered into book form. Both distinctions are well earned. Yet if we had to choose between Knight the editor-critic and Knight the writer we would have no hesitation. Good as his first avatar is, it is as a writer that he triumphs. Everybody knows Damon Knight's biting short stories -- Not with a Bang, To novelettes, What Rough Beast and Cabin Boy... to name only a pair of each out of dozens. Damon Knight's great lack as a fiction writer has been in the novel; there haven't been enough of them. But he is beginning to repair that deficiency. In the present issue we have the longest story he has ever had in Galaxy... and, we think, his best. It is called The Visitor at the Zoo. A nd we haven't even mentioned that stocky and formidably talented Californian, Kris Neville, nor Magnus Ludens, who turns up at odd times, from odd parts of the world, with odd stories. An interesting and rewarding lot, science-fiction writers. We're glad to know them. And we're glad to be able to go on presenting the best part of them -- their be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe Y.A.L. ! Scribe Y.A.L. i San Jose, California ,  Please send me the free book. The Mastery  i of Life, which explains how I may learn to J i use my faculties and powers of mind.  ' l I Name I i i ; Address j ! Ciry ' by Damon Knight to slide away from the landing platform, the biped Fritz clutched the arms of his seat and looked nervously down through the transparent wall. He was unused to travel. Except for the trip by spaceship to Earth, which he hardly remembered, he had lived all his life in the Hamburg Zoo. Now -- although he was sure the suspended car would not fall -- being so high, and surrounded by nothing but glass, made him want to grip something for security. In the seat beside him, his keeper, a stupid man named Alleks, was unfolding the crisp parchment sheets of the Berliner The biped's home was eighteen light years away -- in space -- but remoter still in the distances of the mind! Zeitung. The breath whistled in his hairy nostrils as he gazed cow-eyed at the headlines. Down the aisle, the other passengers were all staring at Fritz, but being used to this, the biped hardly noticed it. Below, Berlin was spread out in the morning sun like a richly faded quilt. Looking back, as the car began to fall with increasing speed, Fritz could see the high platform where the Hamburg rocket-copter had landed, and the long spidery cables of the other Flugbahnen radiating outward to the four quarters of the city. The car swooped, rose, checked at a station platform. The doors opened and closed again, then they were falling once more. At the second stop, Alleks folded his paper and got up. "Come," he said. Fritz followed him onto the platform, then into an elevator that dropped, in a dizzying fashion, through a transparent spiral tube, down, down and down, while the sunlit streets flowed massively upward. They got off into a bewildering crowd and a sharp chemical odor. Alleks, with a firm grip on the biped's arm, propelled him down the street, through a tall open doorway, then into another elevator and finally into an office full of people. "My dear young sir," said a red-faced fat man, advancing jovially, "come in, come in. Allow me to introduce myself, I am Herr Doktor Griick. And you are our new biped? Welcome, welcome!" He took the biped's threefingered hand and shook it warmly, showing no distaste at the fact that it was covered with soft, feathery-feeling spines. Other people were crowding around, some aiming cameras. "Sign," said Alleks, holding out a dog-eared notebook. Dr. Griick took the notebook absently, scribbled, handed it back. Alleks turned indifferently and was gone. "Gentlemen and ladies," said Griick in a rich tenor, "I have the honor to introduce to you our newest acquisition, Fritz -- our second Brecht Biped -- and you see that he is a male!" The biped darted nervous glances around the oak-paneled room, at the whirring cameras, the bookshelves, the massive chandelier, the people with their naked pink faces. His body was slight and supple, like that of a cat or a rooster. The grayishgreen, cactus-like spines covered him all over, except for the pinkish sacs that swung between his thighs. His odd-shaped head was neither human, feline nor avian, but something like all three. Above the eyes, in the middle of his wide sloping forehead, was a round wrinkled organ of a dusty red-purple color, vaguely suggestive of a cock's comb, in shape more like a withered fruit. "A word for the newscast!" called some of the people with cameras. taught, the biped recited, "How do you do, gentlemen and ladies? Fritz, the biped, at your service. I am happy to be here and I hope you will come to see me often at the Berlin Zoo." He finished with a little bow. Three white-smocked men stepped forward; the first bowed, took the biped's hand. "Wenzl, Head Keeper." He was bony and pale, with a thin straight mouth. The next man advanced, bowed, shook hands. "Rausch, Dietitian." He was blonder and ruddier than Griick, with eyelashes almost white in a round, serious face. The third: "Prinzmetal, our veterinary surgeon." He was dark and had sunken cheeks. Dr. Griick beamed, his red face as stretched and shiny as if cooked in oil. His round skull was almost bald, but the blond hair, cut rather long, still curled crisply above his ears. His little blue eyes gleamed behind the rimless glasses. His body, round and firm as a rubber ball under the wide brown waistcoat and the gold watch-chain, radiated joy. "What a specimen!" he said, taking the biped's jaw in one hand to open the mouth. "See the dentition!" The biped's "teeth" were two solid pieces of cartilaginous tissue, with chiselshaped cutting edges. He broke free nervously after a moment, clacking his wide jaws and shaking his head. "Halt, Fritz!" said Griick, seizing him to turn him around. "See the musculature -- perfect! The integument! The color! Never, I promise you, even on Brecht's Planet, would you find such a biped. And he is already sexually mature," said Griick, probing with his fat hand between Fritz's legs. "Perfect! You would like to meet a female biped, would you not, Fritz?" The biped blinked and said haltingly, "My mother was a female biped, honored sir." "Ha ha!" said Griick, full of good humor. "So she was! Correct, Fritz!" Rausch smiled; Prinzmetal smiled; even Wenzl almost smiled. "Come then, first we will show you your quarters, and afterward -- perhaps a surprise!" Picking up his shiny new valise, the biped followed Griick and the others out of the office, along a high, glasswalled corridor that overlooked the grounds with their scattered cages. People walking on the gravel paths looked up and began to point excitedly. Griick, in the lead, bowed and waved benignly down to them. Inside, they emerged in an empty hall. Wenzl produced a magnetic key to open a heavy door with a small pane of wired glass set into it. Inside, they found themselves in a small but conveniently arranged room, with walls and floor of distempered concrete, a couch which could be used for sitting or sleeping, a chair and table, some utensils, a washbowl and toilet. "Here is the bedroom," said Dr. Griick with a sweeping gesture. "And here -- " he led the way through a doorless opening -- "your personal living room." The outer wall was of glass, through which, behind an iron railing, they saw a crowd of people. The room was larger and more nicely furnished than the one inside. The floor was tiled and polished. The walls were painted. There was a comfortable relaxing chair, a television, a little table with some magazines and newspapers on it, a large potted plant, even a shelf full of books. "And now for the surprise!" cried Dr. Griick. Brushing the others aside, he led the way again through the bedroom, to another doorless opening in the far wall. The room beyond was much larger, with a concrete floor on which, however, some rubber mats had been laid, and two desks with business machines, filing cabinets, wire baskets, telephones, a pencil sharpener, a pneumatic conveyor and piles of documents. Across the room, beside one of the filing cabinets which had an open drawer, someone turned and looked at them in surprise. It was another biped, smaller and more faintly colored than Fritz. Of the other differences, the most notable was the organ in the middle of her forehead, which, unlike Fritz's, was developed into a large, egg-shaped redpurple ball or knob. "Now the surprise!" cried Dr. Griick. "Fritz, here stands Emma, your little wife!" With a faint shriek, the other biped clapped her hands over her head and scurried out of the room, leaving a storm of dropped papers to settle behind her. staring disconsolately out through the glass at the darkening air of the Zoo grounds. It was late afternoon. The Zoo was about to close, and the paths were almost deserted. "That takes time," Dr. Griick had said heartily, patting him on the shoulder. "Rest, get acquainted, tomorrow is better. Fritz, good afternoon!" Left alone, curious and vaguely excited, he had poked all around the work room, examining papers and opening drawers, then had wandered over to the doorway of the room into which Emma had disappeared. But no sooner had he put his nose timidly inside than her voice piped, "Go away! Go away, go away, go away!" Since then there had been silence from the room next to his. At feeding time Wenzl had come in with a cart, had left one tray for him, another for Emma. But although he listened intently, he had not heard a sound of knife or fork, or a glass set down. It was exciting to think of having another biped to talk to. It was not right for her to refuse to talk to him. Why should she want to make him miserable? As he stared through the window, his eye met that of a darkhaired young man who had paused outside. The man was carrying a camera and looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps he had been one of the reporters. He was slight and stooped, with very pale, clear skin and large, soft eyes. As they looked wordlessly at each other, Fritz felt an abrupt slipping and sliding; the room whirled arpund him. He struggled to get up from the floor. He could not understand what had happened to him, why it was suddenly so dark, why the room had grown so large. Then he squirmed up to hands and knees, and discovered that he was looking across an iron railing, through a window into a little lighted room in which a biped lay half sprawled in a chair, looking back at him with glazed eyes and making feeble motions with his arms. The afternoon breeze was crisp and sibilant along the path. There were smells of damp earth and of animals. Gravel crunched beside him, and a courteous voice said, "Is anything wrong, good sir?" The biped in the lighted room was floundering across the floor. Now he was beating with both hands on the glass, and his mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. "You have dropped your camera," said the same voice. "Allow me." Someone's hands were patting him, with a curious muffled feeling, and he turned to glimpse a kindly, mustached face. Then something glittering was being thrust at him and he stared, with a kind of disbelieving wonder, as his hands closed automatically around the camera... his pink, hairy, five-fingered hands, with their pale fingernails. II office, with some preliminary budget figures spread out on his desk, and the greasy remains of a knackwurst dinner on a little table beside him. Wearing his reading spectacles, he looked like a rosy, good-humored old uncle out of Dickens. His little blue eyes blinked mildly behind the spectacles, and when he counted, his sausage-fat thumb and fingers went eins, zwei, drei. Humming, he turned a paper over. The melody he was humming was I Lost My Sock in Lauterbach. The paneled room was warm, comfortable and silent. "And without my sock, I won't go home," hummed the Director. The little desk visiphone flickered to life suddenly, and the tiny face in the screen said, "Doctor, if you please -- " Griick frowned slightly, and pressed the stud. "Yes, Freda?" "Herr Wenzl wishes to speak with you, he says it is urgent." "Well then, if it's urgent, Freda, put him on." "Thank you, Doctor." The screen flickered again. Wenzl's pale, fanatical face appeared. "Trouble with the new biped," he began immediately. Griick took his glasses off, with fingers that fumbled. "The mischief!" he said. "What sort of trouble, Wenzl?" "Ten minutes ago," said the head keeper precisely, "I was notified that Fritz was making a disturbance in his cage. I went there, and found he had been trying to break the window with a wooden chair." "Terrible, but why?" cried Dr. Griick, his jowls wobbling. "I endeavored to calm Fritz," continued Wenzl, "but he informed me that I was without authority over him, since he was not Fritz, but a journalist named Martin Naumchik." Griick pursed his lips several times, unconsciously forming the syllable "Num." He found some papers under his hand, looked at them in surprise, then pushed them aside with hasty, abstracted motions. "He also told me," said Wenzl, "that Fritz had gone off in his body, with his camera and all his clothes." Griick put both palms on his cheeks and stared at Wenzl's image. In the little screen, Wenzl looked like a portrait doll made by someone with an unpleasant turn of fantasy. Full-sized, Wenzl was really not so bad. He had a mole, there were hairs in his nostrils, one saw his adam's apple move when he spoke. But at the size of a doll, he was unbearable. "What steps have you taken?" Griick asked. "Restraint," said Wenzl. "And your opinion?" "The animal is psychotic." Griick closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and finger for a moment. He opened his eyes, settled himself before the desk. "Wenzl," he said, "the biped is not necessarily psychotic. In our ten years with Emma, we have also seen some little fits of nerves, not so? As for Fritz, possibly he is only frightened, being in a new Zoo. Perhaps he wants reassurance, to dramatize himself a little, who knows? Can you show me in the handbooks where it says a biped goes psychotic?" Wenzl was silent and did not change expression. "No," said Griick. "So let's not be hasty, Wenzl. Remember that Fritz at present is our most valuable animal. Kindness, that does more than harsh words and beatings. A little sympathy, perhaps a smile -- " He smiled, showing his small, blunt teeth as far back as the molars. "So, Wenzl? Yes?" "You are always right, Doctor," said the head keeper sourly. "Good, then we shall see. Go and talk to him reasonably, Wenzl; take off the jacket, and if he is calm, bring him to me." why I am Martin Naumchik," said the biped in a high, furious voice. His naked, greenspined body looked slender and fragile in the dark wooden chair. He leaned over the table toward Wenzl and Dr. Griick; his eyes were pink-rimmed, and the wide lipless mouth kept opening and closing. "First. I know Berlin, whereas your menagerie animal has never been here before, and certainly never had liberty to roam the streets. Ask me anything you like. Second. I can tell you the names of the editor, managing editor and all the rest of the staff of Paris-Soir, I can repeat my last dispatch to them word for word, or nearly. If you give me a typewriter I'll even write it out. Third." "But my dear Fritz -- " said Griick, spreading his fat pink hands, with an ingratiating smile. "Third," repeated the biped angrily. "My girl-friend, Julia Schorr, will vouch for me, she lives at number forty-one, Heinrichstrasse, flat seventeen, her visi number is UNter den Linden #-#, I can also tell you that she keeps a Siamese cat named Maggie and that she cooks very good spaghetti. My God, if it comes to that, I can tell you what kind of underclothing she wears. Fourth, you can examine me yourselves, I took a degree at the Sorbonne in # -- ask about literature, mathematics, history, whatever you like! Fifth and last, I am Martin Naumchik, I have always been Martin Naumchik, I never even saw this ridiculous biped of yours until today, and if you don't help me, I promise you, I'll make such a stench..." He fell silent. "Well?" Griick and Wenzl exchanged glances. "My dear young sir," said Griick, rumpling his untidy blond hair; his little eyes were squeezed together in a frown. "My dear young sir, you have convinced me, beyond any shadow of doubt -- " the biped started eagerly -- "that you believe yourself to be one Martin Naumchik, a human being, and a correspondent for Paris-Soir, and so on, and so on." The biped said in a choked voice, "Believe! But I've told you -- " "Please!" Griick held up his hand. "Have the politeness to listen. I say that there is no doubt, no possible doubt, that you believe in what you say. Very good! Now. Allow me to ask you this question." He folded his hands over his paunch, and his rosy lips shaped themselves into a smile. "Suppose that you are Martin Naumchik." He waved his hand generously. "Go on. Suppose it, I make no objection. Very well, now you are Martin Naumchik. What is the result?" He leaned forward and stared earnestly at the biped. Wenzl, beside him, was grimly silent. "Why, you release me," said the biped uncertainly. "You help me find that animal who has got into my body, and somehow -- in some way -- " "Yes?" said Dr. Griick encouragingly. "Somehow -- in some way -- " "There must be some way," said the biped miserably. Griick leaned back, shaking his head. "To make you change around again? My dear young sir, reflect a moment on what you are saying. To put a man's mind back in his body after it has gone into the body of an animal? Let's not be children! The thing is impossible, to begin with! You know it as well as I do! Supposing that it has actually happened once, still it's just as impossible as before! My dear young sir! To put a man's mind back in his body? How? With a funnel?" The biped was leaning his head on his green-spined hand. "If we could find out why it happened -- " he muttered. "Good, yes," said Griick sympathetically. "A very good suggestion: that is what we must do, by all means. Courage, Fritz, or Martin, as the case may be! This will take time, we must be prepared to wait. Patience and courage, eh, Fritz?" The biped nodded, looking exhausted. "Good, then it's understood," said Griick cheerfully, getting up. "We shall do everything we can, you may be quite sure of that, and in the meantime -- " he motioned toward Wenzl, who had also risen -- "a little cooperation, no trouble for poor Wenzl. Agreed, Fritz?" "You're going to keep me here? On display?" cried the biped, stiffening again with indignation. "For the present," said Griick soothingly. "After all, what choice have we got? To begin with, where would you go? How would you live? Slowly, we must go slowly, Fritz. Take an older man's advice, haste can be the ruin of everything. Slowly, slowly, Fritz, patience and courage -- " Wenzl took the biped's slender arm and began to guide him out of the room. "My name is Martin Naumchik," he muttered weakly as he disappeared. f'T'HE dim gray light of early morning flooded the outer rooms, illuminating everything but emphasizing nothing. For some reason -- the biped had noticed it before -- it made you see the undersides of things more than usual, the loose dingy cloth hanging under the seat of a chair, the grime and dust in corners, the ordinarily inconspicuous streaks, smears, scratches. He prowled restlessly down the corridor, past the closed doorway of the next room -- the female had apparently up-ended a table against it -- into the fluorescent-lit office space with its hooded machines, then back again. In his own inner room he caught sight of an ugly face in the mirror -- greenish and flatmuzzled, like an impossible hybrid of dog and cock -- and for a horrible instant did not realize it was his own. He clutched at the wall and began to weep. Strangled, inhuman sounds came out of his throat. Ten hours, ten hours or more, it must be. Just around supper time it had happened, and now it was past dawn. Ten hours, and he still wasn't used to it, it was harder to bear than ever. He had to get out. The biped's little valise was standing on the floor of the inner room near the washbowl. He pounced on it, ripped it open, flung the contents around. Toothbrush, chess set, some cheap writing paper, a dog-eared paperbound book called Brecht's Planet: Riddle of the Universe; nothing useful. Weeping, he ran into the office room and snatched up the telephone receiver. The line was still dead. Probably it was not linked into the zoo switchboard this early in the morning. What else? He caught sight of one of the typewriters, stopped in surprise, then sat down before it and took the cover off. There was paper in a drawer. He rolled a sheet into the platen, switched the machine on, and sat for a moment anxiously gripping his three-fingered hands together. The words took shape in his mind: My name is Martin Naumchik. I am being held prisoner in... His hands stabbed at the keyboard, and the type bars piled up against the guide with a clatter and a snarl; the carriage jumped over and the paper leaped up a space. The pain of realization was so great that he instinctively tried to bit his lip. He felt the stiff flesh move numbly, sliding against his teeth. Biting his lip was one of the things he could not do now. And typing was another. It was too much. He would never get used to it. He would always forget, and be snubbed up like an animal at the end of a chain... After a moment, half-blinded by tears, he pried at the jammed keys until they fell back. Then, painfully, picking out the letters with one finger, he began again: "My name is M..." In half an hour, he had finished his account of the facts. Next it would be necessary to establish his identity. Perhaps that should come first, or the story would never even be read. He took a fresh sheet, and wrote: M. Frederic Stein #, rue de la Victoire Paris #e (Seine) Dear Frederic: You will know the enclosed is really from me by the following: When I was last in Paris, you and I went to the Rocking Florse and got tanked on mint whistles. There were three greenies in the jug. You told me about certain troubles with your wife, and we discussed your taking a correspondent's job in the Low Countries. This is not a joke; I need your help -- in God's name, do whatever He paused, and over the machine's hum was lucky enough to hear the whisper of footsteps in the corridor. He had barely time to turn off the machine, cover it and hide the typed pages in a drawer. A young keeper with a sullen, pimpled face came in, wheeling a cart with two steaming trays. It was breakfast time. His first day as a caged animal was about to begin. Ill city, the streets were as bright as if it were day. Over the tesselated pavements people were wandering. Music drifted seductively from an open doorway; all the scarlet blossoms of the Antarean air-weed, clinging to the sides of the buildings, were open and exuding a fresh pungence. windows, as he passed, the young man saw a row of green creatures in glass cages -- sluggish globular animals about the size of a tomato, with threads of limbs and great dull green eyes. They floated on the green-scummed surface of the shallow water in the cages, or climbed feebly on bits of wet bark. Over them was He passed on. The people around him, moving in groups and couples for the most part, were a different sort than he was used to seeing at the Zoo in Hamburg. They were better dressed, better fed, their skins were clearer and redder and they laughed more. The women were confections of white-blonde hair and red cheeks, with sparkling white teeth and flashing nails, and they wore puffed, shining garments like the glittering paper around an expensive gift. The men were more austere in dark, dull reds and blues. Their feet were thinly shod in gleaming patent leather, and their hair shone with pomade. Their talk, in the unfamiliar Berlin accent, eddied around him: confident tones, good humor, barks of laughter. Very faintly, beneath his feet, the star mosaic of the pavement shook to the passage of an express car underneath. Here in the above-ground everyone was on foot. There was no wheeled vehicle in sight, not even an aircar: only the bright thread of one of the Flugbahnen visible in the distance. Around the corner, in a little square surrounding the heroic anodized aluminum figure of a man in spaceman's dress, helmet off, an exultant expression on his metal face, the young man saw a tall illuminated panel on the side of a building. Luminous words were shuddering slowly down the panel, line by line. The young man moved closer, through the loose crowd of bystanders, and read: Passenger list to follow "Will be brought to justice," vows Funk Vote is # for to # against Society for Spaceflight, I.C.S.S.A. lead advance The letters drifted down, like tongues of cold flame, and were followed by an advertisement for Heineken's beer. The young man turned away, having read all the headlines with appreciation but without any interest whatever; he walked further down the street and gazed in fascination at the marquee of a cinema, where through some illusion brightly-colored ten-foot figures of men and women seemed to be dancing. Even here he could not give his full attention. He was bothered, and increasingly so, by certain demands of his, body. tear off the muffling, unfamiliar garments he was wearing, but realized it would attract attention to himself, and besides, this bald body would probably be cold. He had not realized that a simple thing like this could become so difficult. At home in the zoo he had had his own little w.c., and that was that. People must have theirs, but where? What did people do who were strangers in Berlin? He looked around. He did not see a policeman, but a woman who was passing with her escort paused, looking at him, and on an impulse he stepped forward and said politely, "Pardon me, madam, but can you direct me to the w.c.?" Her face registered first surprise, then shock, and she turned to her companion saying angrily, "Come on, he's drunk." They walked rapidly away, the man's scowling face turned over his shoulder. The word "Disgraceful!" floated back. Surprised and hurt, the young man stood for a moment watching them out of sight; then he turned in the opposite direction. The place he was passing now was called "Konstantin's Cafe." The sight of people sitting at table, visible through the big window, reminded him that he was hungry and thirsty. After a moment's hesitation, he went in. A slender red-jacketed waiter met him alertly in the foyer. "Yes, sir? A table for one?" "Yes, if you like," said the young man. The waiter hesitated, glancing at him oddly, then turned through the archway. "Come this way, sir." The young man gave his surcoat and camera to a girl who asked for them. Inside, waiters in red jackets were moving like ants among the snowy tabletops; the room was crowded with rich silks and velvets of all colors, flushed clean faces, smiling mouths; unfamiliar smells of food swam in the air. The thick carpet muffled all footsteps, but there was a heavy burden of voices, clattering silverware, and music from some invisible source. A little intimidated by so much crowded luxury, the young man followed the waiter to a small table and sat down. The waiter opened a stiff pasteboard folder with a snap and presented it; the young man took it automatically, and in a moment perceived that it was a list of foods. "To begin with, an aperitif, sir?" asked the waiter. "Some hors-d'oeuvres? Or shall we say a salad?" The young man blinked at the menu, then set it down. "No," he replied, "but -- " "Just the dinner, then, sir," said the waiter briskly. "If the gentleman will permit, I recommend the truite au beurre canopeen, with a Moselle, very good, sir." "All right," the young man said hesitantly, "but first -- " "Ah, an aperitif, after all?" asked the waiter, smiling with annoyance. "Some hors-d'oeuvres? Or -- " "No, I don't wish any of those, thank you," said the young man, making a clumsy gesture and oversetting a goblet. "But then, what is it that the gentleman wishes?" The waiter righted the goblet, brushed at the tablecloth, stood back. The young man blinked slowly. "I wish for you to direct me to the w.c., if you would be so kind." react like the woman in the street, but the man's keen face only closed expressionlessly, and he leaned down to murmur, "The doorway behind the curtain at the rear, sir." "Thank you, you are very kind." "Not at all, sir." The waiter went away. The young man got up and went in the indicated direction. Although he tried to move carefully, he was still very clumsy in his body, and sometimes would forget and pause between steps to try and shake off one of his shoes. When he did this, he noticed that some of the diners l'ooked at him strangely. He determined to break the habas soon as possible. When he returned, after some trouble with the unfamiliar fastenings, the waiter was just removing from a little silver cart a covered platter, which he placed on the table and unveiled with a flourish. The young man sat down. The waiter took a slender bottle from the cart, uncorked it, poured a pale liquid into the goblet and stood back expectantly. The young man looked at his plate. The food steamed gently; there were five or six different things, each of its own color, beautifully arranged on the platter. He had never seen any of them before, except possibly in magazines, and all the smells were unfamiliar. Nevertheless, he picked up his fork and pried at the largest object, a roughly oval burnt-brown mass which came away flakily, running with juices. He put the fork in his mouth on the second try. The food was a moist, unpleasant lump on his tongue: the taste was so startling that he immediately turned his head and spat it out. The waiter looked down at the carpet, then at the young man. Then he went away. The young man was gingerly trying some light green strips, which he found unusual but palatable, when the waiter came back. "Sir, the manager would like to speak with you, if you please." He gestured toward the foyer. "Oh? With me?" The young man stood up agreeably, oversetting the goblet again. The pale liquid ran over the tablecloth and began to drip onto the carpet. "I am so sorry," he said, and began to mop at it with his napkin. "It's of no consequence," said the waiter grimly, and took the young man by the arm. "If you please, sir." In the foyer they met another waiter, who took his other arm. Someone handed him his surcoat and camera. Together the two waiters began to propel him toward the exit. The young man craned his head around. "The manager?" he asked. "The manager," said the first waiter, "wishes you to leave quietly, without disturbance, sir." "But I haven't yet paid for my food," said the young man. "There is no charge, sir," said the waiter, and they were at the door. The two gave him a last push. He was in the street. nig gallery, a little later (at least he was becoming adept at finding w.c.'s), the young man was examining the contents of his pockets. He discovered that he was Martin Naumchik, European citizen, born Asnieres (Seine) #, complexion fair, eyes brown, hair brown, no arrest record, no curtailment of citizenship, no identifying marks or scars, employed by Paris-Soir, # rue de la Victoire, Paris (#e); that he had a driver's license, a Cordon Bleu diner's card, a press card in five languages and a notebook full of penciled scribbling which he could not read. In his billfold were forty marks, and in the pockets of his trousers, jacket and surcoat some coins amounting to another two or three marks. That was all, except some ticket stubs, a key on a gold ring, tissues, pocket lint, a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and a crumpled envelope, addressed to Herr Martin Naumchik, #, Gastnerstrasse, Berlin. The young man had partially satisfied his hunger with two sausages on rolls, bought at a stall near the gallery, but he was tired, lonely and bewildered. At that moment he would have been glad to go back to the Zoo, but he had lost his directions and did not know where it was. He left the gallery and moved on down the street. The cinema beckoned to him with the open wings of its lobby and the gigantic displays on either side: figures of men and women, glossy leaves, planets floating in a violet-gray sky. Illuminated signs announced: Experience new sensations! Unprecedented excitement! Stella Pain -- Willem DeGroot "Indescribable!" -- Tageblatt. The price was two marks ten. The young man paid, took his ticket and went in. A few people were standing about in the anteroom, talking and smoking. There were exotic fruits and confections for sale at a long counter, and rows of automatic machines for drinks, candy, tissues. The young man gave his ticket to the turnstile machine at the door, got a stub back and found himself in a huge well of darkened seats, lit only by faint glimmers from the distant walls. Here and there around the vast bowl, clumps of people were sitting. Three-quarters of the seats were empty. There was very little noise, no one was talking or moving, evidently the show had not yet begun. The young man groped his way down the aisle, chose a seat and unfolded it. The instant he settled down and put his hands on the armrests, sound and motion exploded around him. to darkness and silence. The huge almost empty bowl of the theater was just as it had been before: the flashing phantom shapes he had seen were nowhere. After a moment, cautiously, he touched one of the armrests again. Nothing happened. The other armrest. Still nothing. Gingerly and with trepidation, he unfolded the seat and lowered himself into it. Again the sudden blast of light and sound. This time he glimpsed figures, heard words spoken before he leaped upright again. All around him, the people were sitting in eerie, intent silence. Then this must be how one saw a movie -- not projected on a wall, as he had always imagined, but somehow mysteriously existing when one sat in the chair. Shaking with nervousness, but determined not to be a coward, he sat down one more and gripped the armrests hard. Light and sensation surrounded him. He was seeing the upper portions of two gigantic humans, a female and a male, against a violet sky in which two moons shone dimly. Simultaneously there was a grinding, insistent roar of wind and the man's stentorian voice bellowed out, "Gerda, you are mine!" His face stared into hers, his strong brown hands gripped her bare arms while she replied, "I know it, Friedrich." The words crashed into the young man's eardrums like bombs. The two immense bodies were not far away, at the end of the theater, but loomed before him almost close enough to touch. They glowed with color, not a natural color but something altogether different and arresting, luminous pastel tones overlying shadows of glowing darkness, with a rather disturbing suggestion of dead black in all the outlines, almost like a colored engraving. They had depth but not reality, and yet they were incredibly more than mere pictures. The young man realized, with a shock of surprise, that he could smell the cold salt air, and that without knowing in the least how, he was aware of the very texture of the giant woman's skin -- smooth and waxy, like a soft artificial fruit -- and of the cat-smelling tawny softness of her long blonde . hair whipping in the wind, and the hard-edged glossy stiffness of the green leaves in the near background. "Gerda!" roared the man. "Friedrich!" she trumpeted sadlyThen without moving a muscle the two of them vertiginously receded, as if an invisible car were drawing them rapidly away, and as they dwindled, standing and staring at one another, greenleaved shrubs gathered in to fill the space, and the sky somehow grew bigger -- there were three moons drifting with a perceptible motion through the violet sky -- and at that moment with a thunderous rushing sound, the rain began. Dry as he sat there, the young man could feel the streaming wetness pelting the leaves; it was lukewarm. Music skirled up in wild dissonances, lightning cracked the sky apart and thunder boomed. It was too much. The young man stood up, trembling all over. Sight, touch and sound vanished instantly. He was alone in the vast theater with the silent, motionless people who sat in darkness. He moved shakily to the aisle and went out, grateful for the quiet and the sense of being alone in his skin again. He was sorry to have given up so quickly, but consoled himself with the thought that it was his first time. Later, perhaps, he would grow used to it. # T A kiosk in the middle of the street, newspapers and magazines were on sale in metal dispensers. Beside this stood a dirty small boy and an old gray woman, with a portable teleset tuned to a popular singer. The little boy was singing harmony with him, badly, in a strained soprano. There were coins scattered on the little folding table in front of the teleset. Further along, two drunken and disheveled men were scuffing ineffectually, grabbing at each other's surcoats for balance. A brightly painted woman giggled, but most people paid no attention. Three dark young men walked by abreast, scowling, with identical dark long surcoats and oiled forelocks. Tall cold-light signs over through the crowd, listening to the voices and the snatches of music from open doorways, looking at faces, pausing to stare at the glittering merchandise in shop windows. When he had been walking in the same direction for some time, he came upon a store which seemed to fill an entire square of its own, with many busy enlighted display windows. The name, in tall cold-light letters direction, the young man drifted in with the crowd. Inside, the store appeared to be one gigantic room, high-ceilinged, echoing, glittering everywhere with reflected lights. Banks of brightly illuminated display cases were ranged in parallel lines, leaving aisles between. In open spaces were statues, great flowering plants, constructions of golden and white metal. The murmuring of the crowd washed back from the distant ceiling: up there, the young man noticed, were fiery trails of light, red, green, blue, amber, that pulsed and seemed to travel along the ceiling like the exhausts of rockets. The air was heavy with women's mingled scents and with other, unidentifiable odors; there was quiet music in the background, and a faint, multiple clicking or clattering sound. The young man went in tentatively, listening and watching. A woman and an older man were standing by the entrance to one of the aisles, arguing vehemently in low, crisp voices; the young man caught the words, "Twenty child in a red coat was crying, being dragged along by an angry woman. A man in dark-blue uniform went hurrying by, the trousers snapping about his ankles. There were signs in colored lights on the ceiling; one red one trail went pulsing off from it; anThe young man followed the green trail, fascinated. Lines of people, most of them women, were moving slowly along the row of showcases. Here and there, the young man saw someone put money into one of the cases, open the glass front and take out a blouse or an undergarment, a pair of stockings, a scarf. The young man had never seen so many beautiful things in one place. Here he was now in a whole corridor lined with nothing but cameras, hundreds of cameras, all achingly polished and bright; the winking reflections from their round eyes of metal and glass followed him as he walked. He actually saw a man buy one: a huge thing, big as the man's head, with pale leather sides and a complexity of lens tubes, dials, meters. The man heldit reverently in his hands, staring at it as if at a loved one's face. As the glass door closed, a mechanism slowly revolved and another camera, just like the first, descended to fill the empty case. As the customer walked away, the young man looked at the price on the chrome rim of the showcase: it was # marks. He looked again at the beautiful camera behind the glass door, then at the one which hung around his neck. It was smaller and the metal was not so bright; the black sides were worn in places, and it did not look so beautiful as it had before. The young man walked on, looking down at himself, and was aware that his dark surcoat was worn thin at the cuffs, his shoes needed polishing, there was lint and dust on his trousers. So, then, it was not enough to be a human being! One must also have money. The young man vaguely supposed that if he had # marks, his head would not ache so, he would not have the uncomfortable feeling in his insides that was bothering him more and more, he would not be tired and irritable. But he had not the least idea how people got money. r T'# make himself feel better, he stopped in the next section and bought a wristwatch with an expanding platinum band. He put a ten-mark bill into the slot. The mechanism hummed and gripped the ten marks, pulling it gradually inside until it was all gone; then ther was a clatter in the receptacle underneath, and the glass door swung open. The young man took out his watch and admired it. The marvelous thing was already running, the second hand sweeping silently around the black dial. He put it on his wrist, first the wrong way around, then the right way. In the receptacle were twenty-seven pfennigs in silver and copper. He scooped them up. Above, the mechanism was revolving and another wristwatch came into view. The young man found that he could not resist it. He put another ten marks into the machine, receiving another wristwatch and another twentyseven pfennigs in change. He put the second watch on his other wrist. Now he felt rich and handsome. He held out his arms stiffly, to make the cuffs of his sleeves slide back so that he could admire his watches. Both showed the identical time: # hours # minutes. Now he would always be sure what time it was, because if the two watches showed different times he would know one was wrong, but if the same time, then they must be right. Feeling pleased to have worked this out for himself, and to have made so sound a purchase, he went on. In an open space at the end of the aisle, he saw curved escalators rising in spirals past the ceiling, and beyond them, banks of elevators with doors that constantly opened and shut: click, a door was open, someone stepped in, click, the door closed, and in an instant it had whisked its passenger off and was open again. Diagonally across the open space, he caught sight of another group of illuminated trails on the ceiling, and it seemed to him that one of them was labeled "Foods." He went that way eagerly, and nearly knocked down a hatless man in blue uniform, who frowned at him and said, "I beg your pardon, sir." "No, I beg your pardon." "Not at all, sir." "It's very kind of you." "An honor, sir." They both bowed and went on their way. The young man found that the sign did say "Foods." He followed its pink trail until he came to a sunken area full of people with metal carts, and the carts loaded with packages. He went down the five or six steps, sniffing the air, and found a new set of lighted trails that pointed to "Canned Goods," "Perishables," "Meats" and so on. Passing through "Canned Goods," he came upon a stout man in a plaid surcoat who was lifting a can out of an open case and putting it on top of three others just like it in a cart. The young man paused to watch. The mechanism inside the case slowly revolved; another large, odd-shaped can came down into view, and now the young man could see that it of a slab of pink meat. The cover of the display case was still open. As soon as the mechanism stopped, the stout man reached in, took out the canned ham, and put it in his cart along with the other four. The mechanism began to revolve again. The stout buyer glanced over his shoulder at the young man, hesitated, then took out a sixth ham and put it with the other five. The mechanism revolved again. As far as the young man could make out, the stout man had not put in any money. Each time he removed a ham, the door swung down but did not latch. Then the stout man lifted it up again and reached for the next ham. r i "he buyer looked around again, glanced from side to side, and muttered, "Go on, get away, can't you see I'm busy?" "I'm sorry," said the young man politely, "but I only wanted to be next for the hams." The stout customer growled something, trying to look at the next ham and at the young man simultaneously. "Pardon?" "I said devil's dirt," the stout man growled more distinctly. The mechanism stopped; he reached in and took the seventh ham. At that moment one of the blue-uniformed men appeared at the end of the aisle. The stout customer was holding the ham close to his chest. The blue-uniformed man turned toward them. The stout customer wheeled abruptly, thrust the ham into the ypung man's arms, said petulantly, "Here, then," and walked rapidly away. "One moment, please!" called the approaching blue-uniformed map. Still moving rapidly away, and without turning his head, the stout man said something that sounded like, "Run, you fool!" The man in the blue uniform took something out of his pocket. It was an electric bell, which began to ring insistently and loudly. Inside the display case, the mechanism was revolving, presenting another canned ham. The young man looked at it, then at the one he held, and felt a vague alarm. The stout man was moving faster; the one in blue uniform was waving and shouting. The young man turned and began to run, although he did not know why. At the front of the food section, another blue-uniformed man was coming toward him from the left. The young man scrambled up the five steps, holding the canned ham awkwardly to his chest. The stout man was nowhere in sight. "Stop!" called one of the blueuniformed men. But the young man's heart was beating in unreasonable panic. He ran across the open space, dodging back and forth between shoppers' carts, pursued by shouts and the ringing of the bell. Another bell began to ring, somewhere off to his right, then a third. Utterly terrified, unaware of what he was doing, the young man dropped the ham on the floor and ran at a woman with a full cart, who shrieked and pushed it into another cart, oversetting both and on the floor. The young man ran past her, nearly falling, and found himself between two advancing men in blue, while before him was only a decorative grille of arabesques in goldplated metal, which reached all the way to ' a balcony on the second level. With a gasp of fright, the young man flung himself at this grille and began to limb it. In spite of the clumsiness of his feet, which would not grip and could not even feel the metal, he was above the men's heads in a moment, and they shook their fists at him, shouting, "Despicable ruffian, come down here!" The young man kept on climbing. Shortly, the people on the floor below were colorful dolls, many with faces turned to look up at him. One of the blue-uniformed men had begun to climb the grille, but now the young man was almost at the top. He arrived at the top of the grille, and reaching up, found that he could grasp the railing of the balcony and swing himself up and over. Panting with exertion, he found himself in a narrow corridor, lined on the wall side with open doorways from which came the sounds of voices and the clicking of machines. A man stepped out of a doorway some distance down the corridor and craned his neck to listen to the sound of the bells. He turned, saw the young man. "Hi!" he called, starting forward. 'T'HE young man ran again. Faces turned, startled, inside the rooms as he passed; he caught glimpses of men and women in their blouse sleeves, of desks and office equipment. The next door was closed and was marked "Stair." The young man opened it, hesitated briefly between two narrow flights, then chose the up flight and went bounding up, three steps at a time, swinging around at each tiny landing until he grew dizzy. Below, voices echoed. He kept on going up past other landings and closed, dark doors, narrower and dingier, until he reached the top. The stairs ended at one last door, lit only by a grimy skylight through which filtered a dim violet glow. The young man paused to listen. Deep down, there were tiny voices, like the chirping of insects under layer after layer of earth. He opened the door and went in. He was on a floor of empty rooms, dark and gray with dust. Everything was much older and shabbier-looking than the glittering aisles downstairs. In the weak light from small pebble-glass windows, he saw goods piled in the corners of one room, a neglected huddle of filing cabinets in another. There was no one here. No one had come here for a long time. At the end of the hall, half hidden by an ancient wardrobe, was another door, another stair, the narrowest and darkest of all -- plain bare wood, that creaked under his steps as he went up. It was only one short flight, and at the top he found himself in a tiny room with slanting walls. Bundles of papers lay piled on the floor, yellow and brittle under their coating of dust. There was a length of rope, an old light bulb or two, some shredded bits of paper that might have been gnawed by small animals. All this he saw in the dim, cool light from a triangular window under the peak of the roof. It was a wide window, framed in old ornate moulding that filled almost the entire wall, and from it, when he had rubbed a clear space with his hand, he could see the city spread out below him. Silent and empty it lay under the violet sky, all the buildings peacefully ranked one beyond another out to the misty horizon. Some of the building faces were illuminated by the glow of the avenues, but no sound came up from those lower levels. It was like a deserted city, whose inhabitants had gone away leaving all the lights on. The luminous strand of a Flugbahn hung empty against the sky. In the twilight the letters of sky-signs stared The young man looked around him with calm satisfaction. He was still hungry and in bodily distress, but here he was safe and sheltered. With those papers he could make a bed, here by the window. He would look out at the world all day, as long as he wished, and no one would know he was here at all. He sat down and let his muscles relax. After all, to be free and to have a place of one's own were what mattered most. He had been terribly frightened, but now he could see that it was all coming right in the end. With a contented glance around at the dim, slanting walls, which already had the comforting familiarity of home, he lay down on the floor and let the slow waves of silence muffle him to sleep. IV out to be a steaming mess of something dark green and odorous, the consistency of mud, with chunks of fibrous substance mixed up in it. The biped was hungry, but repelled by the unappetizing appearance and smell of the stuff, and did not touch any. Next door he heard the scrape of a spoon on the metal plate: the female was eating hers, anyhow. The keeper had removed the table from her doorway and lectured her severely. He had not heard what she replied, if anything. The biped tried to sip water from the bowl on his tray, found that his stiff mouth would not permit it, and dashed the bowl to the floor with a sudden howl of fury. Immediately afterward he grew thirsty, and filled the bowl again from the washbowl faucet. He tried lapping the water with his tongue, and got some relief that way, but not enough water to swallow. He ended by pouring water into his open mouth, half choking himself before he discovered the trick of throwing his head back to swallow. His chest and legs were sodden, the feathery spines clumped together with moisture. He felt acutely uncomfortable until he had dried himself with a towel. For some reason, the trivial incident depressed him severely. He tried to cheer himself up by thinking of the unfinished letter hidden in the desk, but to his despair found that he no longer cared about it. He sat in the inner room and stared dully at the wall. He was roused from his torpor by footsteps in the office space, and Griick's cheerful voice calling, "Fritz! Emma!" The pimpled young "keeper came in, looked at his untouched tray and removed it without comment. The biped got up, simply because it would have required mpre resolution to stay where he was. He followed the keeper into the office space. The keeper was showing the tray to Griick and Wenzl, who stood side by side, Griick ample in brown broadcloth, Wenzl narrow in his white smock. "Nothing eaten, sirs." Wenzl glared, but Griick said expansively, "Never mind, never mind! Take it away, Rudi -- this morning our guest is not so hungry, it's natural! Now!" He rubbed his fat pink hands together, beaming. "But where is our beautiful Emma?" He turned. "Emma?" The female was in the doorway of her room, peeping out, only one side of her face visible. At Griick's command she advanced a few steps, then hesitated. Her arms were raised, both hands clasped tightly over her forehead, hiding the knob. "But, Emma," said Griick reproachfully, "is this our hospitality? When were we ever so impolite? And our friend's first day, too!" She made a wordless sound, looking at the biped. "You are alarmed, Emma, he frightens you?" Griick asked, looking from one to another. "Ah, loveling, there is nothing to be frightened of. You are going to be great friends -- yes, you will see! And besides, Emma, what about all the work that is here?" The female spoke up unexpectedly, in a thin, absurdly human voice. "Take him away, please, and I'll do it all myself, Herr Doktor." She glanced toward the biped, then ducked her head. "No, no, Emma, that is not right. But let me tell you something. Because you are so alarmed, so frightened, we want you to be happy, Emma, we are going to do something to relieve this fear. (Wenzl, some chalk.) Fritz shall stay and help you with the work -- " "No, no." "Yes, yes! And you will like it, wait and see. (The chalk, Wenzl -- ha!)" Wenzl had spoken sharply to Rudi, the pimpled young keeper, who, blushing, had fumbled in his pockets and produced a piece of pink chalk. Wenzl, snatching it, now handed it to Griick. "See here, Emma," said Griick soothingly, "we are going to draw a line on the floor. I draw it myself, because I want you to be happy -- so... Bending with a grunt, he began at the wall between the two bedroom doors and drew a wavering chalk line across the room, separating it into two roughly equal parts. "Now," he said from the far side, straightening up in panting triumph, "see here, Emma, on this side, Fritz stays. Correct, Fritz?" "Whatever you like," said the biped indifferently. "See, he gives me his promise," said Griick, with emphasis. "And my promise to you, Emma. So long as he stays on his side of the room, you will work on your side, and not be frightened. But if he should cross over the line, Emma, then you have my permission to be frightened again, and to run into your room and bar the door! Understood?" The female seemed impressed. "Very well then, Herr Doktor," she said at last. "Good!" ejaculated Griick. He rubbed his hands together, beaming. "Now, what else is left?" He looked around the room. "Wenzl, move one of those typewriters so that Fritz has one to use. And some of the work, also, on this side -- not too much for Fritz, I'm sure Emma works much faster! Good, good." He started to leave, followed by Wenzl and the young keeper. "Until next time, then, Emma, Fritz!" The door closed. F T'HE biped made as if to sit down at his desk. At his first movement Emma flinched back, jaw gaping in fright, hands over her knob. This startled the biped, who said irritably, "I'm not going to hurt you." "Don't speak to me," the female said faintly. She clutched her knob. Her body was trembling all over, slightly but perceptibly. The biped, trying to ignore her involuntary starts and shrieks, moved to the desk and sat down. He took the cover off his machine, looked at the heap of dictaphone spools in the in basket, then opened the desk drawer and quickly glanced inside to make sure his letter was there. By this time, the female was in the doorway of her room, poised for further flight. Under her horrified gaze, the biped did not dare take his unfinished letter out of the drawer. He picked up the first dictaphone spool, inserted it in the machine, put the earphones on his head and began to listen. A sudden loud noise in his ears made him jump and tear off the earphones. After a moment he turned down the volume and cautiously tried again. A voice was speaking faintly; he recognized it as Griick's, but could not make out the words. He turned the spool back to "start." The abrupt sound came again, and this time he realized that it was Griick clearing his throat. He turned up the volume. Griick's voice was saying, "Attention, Emma! Here is tape number two of Some Aspects of Extra-Terrestrial Biology. Begin. Bibliography. Birney, R. C. Bayee-air-en-eh-ipsilon, Emma. Phylum and genus in the Martian biota. Journal of comparative physiology, #, #, # to #. Bulev, M. I. Bay-oo-ell-eh-fow, Emma. Remember, not with vay again, as last time! A preliminary study of natator veneris schultzii. Dissertation abstracts, #, #, # to #. Cooper, J. G..." The biped irritably removed the earphones and switched off the machine. The earphones did not press hard on his small external ears, but they felt unfamiliar and made him nervous. The female had moved out a few steps from her doorway, but when he glanced up, she backed away hastily. The biped swore. After a moment, reluctantly, he turned the dictaphone spool back to the beginning and put the earphones on again. He rolled paper into the typewriter carriage, then switched on the dictaphone and began trying to type as he listened. But in the first few words he typed there were so many errors that he ripped the paper out and threw it in the wastebasket. There was a stifled shriek from the female, who had advanced halfway across the room. Clutching her knob, she retreated two steps. "Don't look at me!" she piped. "Then don't shriek," said the biped, annoyed. He rolled another sheet into the machine. "I wouldn't shriek, if you only wouldn't look at me." He glanced up. "How can I help looking at you if you shriek?" Except for another piping sound, more a gasp than a scream, she made no reply. The biped went back to work. Touching one key at a time with painful care, he managed to get through five entries in the bibliography before making an error. He threw the pages away and started over once more. T'lME passed. At length he was aware that the female had crossed the room to her desk. He concentrated on his work, and did not look up. After a few minutes, he heard the clatter of her machine. Her typing was smooth and rapid; the carriage banged against the stop, banged back, and reeled off another line. Angrily, the biped hit a key too hard and it repeated. He ripped the page out. "You are spoiling all your work," she said. He glanced up -- her hands leaped to her knob -- he looked down again. "I can't help it if I am," he said. "Weren't you taught to type properly?" "No. I mean yes." The biped clenched his three-fingered fists in frustration. "I know how to type, but this animal doesn't. I can't make his hands work." She stared at him with her mouth slightly open. It was plain that she did not understand a word. The biped growled angrily and went back to his work. After a moment he heard the clatter of Emma's machine begin again. For a long time neither spoke. Keeping at it grimly, in the next hour the biped managed to complete a page. He took it from the machine and put it into his out basket with a feeling of triumph. Glancing over at the female's desk, he was a little disj concerted to note that her out basket was heaped with typescript and dictaphone spools, : while her in basket was empty. His back and his hands ached from the unaccustomed work. He felt weary and dejected again. How was he going to finish the letter, the all-important letter, I while the female was constantly in the same room? Perhaps if he i deliberately frightened her once again... The thought ended as he heard the outer door open. Emma looked up expectantly. The clatj ter of her machine ceased. She covered the machine in two deft , movements and stood up. In walked Griick, beaming and nodding; then Wenzl, grim as ever; finally the pimply keeper with his cart. Griick's expression changed slightly when he glanced at the biped. "Please!" he ejaculated, making upward motions with his fat hands. Belatedly realizing what was meant, the biped got up and stood at attention beside his desk, as Emma was doing beside hers. "Good!" cried Griick happily. "Excellent! You see, Fritz, a little politeness, and everything is better." He turned to Emma, examined the contents of her out basket, beaming with approval. "Fine, Emma, good work. Emma shall have three bonbons with her dinner! You hear, Rudi?" "Very good, Herr Doktor," said the keeper, with a bow. He put three large lumps of some drylooking, pale green substance on a plate which already contained a sort of gray-brown stew, and carried it into Emma's room. When he returned, Griick was staring at the biped's out basket with an expression of hurt disbelief. "Fritz, can this be all?" asked Griick. "For a whole morning's work? Surely you can't be so lazy!" The biped muttered, "I did the best I could." Griick shook his head sadly. "No bonbons for Fritz today, Karl. What a shame, eh, Wenzl? Poor Fritz has earned no bonbons. We are sorry for Fritz. But to give him bonbons for such work would not be fair to Emma, who works hard! Correct, Wenzl?" Wenzl, fixing the biped with a cold and unregretful stare, said nothing. Griick went on, "But this afternoon, if there is an improvement -- well, we shall see! Until then -- " He picked up the single page in the biped's basket, glanced at it again, and clucked his tongue. "Not correct! Not correct!" he said, stabbing a blunt finger against the page. "Here are mistakes, Fritz! So little work, and also so bad! And where... where are the carbon copies?" "No one said anything to me about any carbon copies," the biped replied angrily. "As for the typewriting, I've told you, this animal's body is unfamiliar to me. Let me see you type with somebody else's fingers, and see if you do as well!" He felt a little dizzy, and went on shouting without caring much what happened. "You can take your whole damned Zoo, for all I care," he said, shaking his fist in Griick's face, "and slide down my -- " The room was tilting absurdly to the left, walls, Griick, Wenzl, keeper, Emma and all. He clutched at the desk to stop it, but the desk treacherously sprang up and struck him a dull blow across the face. He heard Griick and the keeper shouting, and Emma's voice piping in the background; then he lost interest and drifted away into grayness. #T IE still," said a fretfully  Li reassuring voice. The biped looked up and recognized the gigantic face of Prinzmetal, the surgeon. Prinzmetal's large brown eyes were swimming over him; Prinzmetal's soft mouth was twisted nervously. "Shock and strain," said Prinzmetal over his shoulder. The biped could make out two or three other persons standing farther back in the room. He was lying, he now realized, on the cot in the back room of his cage. He felt curiously limp and weak. "It's all right," said Prinzmetal soothingly. "You lost consciousness a moment, that's all. It could happen to any highly-strung creature. Lie still, Fritz, rest a little." His face turned, receded. Griick's voice asked a question. Prinzmetal replied, "Nothing -- he will be as good as new tomorrow." Feet shuffled on the concrete floor. The biped heard, more dimly: "It's a good thing it isn't something organic, Herr Doktor. What do we know about the internal constitution of these beasts, after all? Nothing whatever!" Wenzl's voice spoke briefly and dryly. "When we get a chance to dissect one -- " They were gone. The biped lay quietly, staring at the discolored ceiling. He heard the door close; then there was silence except for a faint, far-off strain of music from somewhere outside. No sound came from the inner office, or from Emma's room next door. At length the biped got up. He relieved himself in the little bathroom, and drank some water. He realized that he was hungry. His tray was on the folding table near the bed. The biped sat down and ate the brownish-gray stew, then picked up one of the two round lumps of dry greenish stuff which lay at the side of the tray -- the "bonbons" Griick had made so much of. The biped put the thing cautiously in his mouth, then paused incredulously. The lump, which was almost as dry to the tongue as its appearance suggested, had a subtle, delicious flavor which was utterly different from anything the biped had ever tasted before. It was not sweet, not salt, not bitter, not acid. His eyes closed involuntarily as he sucked at it, causing it to grow slowly moister and dissolve in his mouth. When it was gone he ate the other one, and then sat motionless, eyes still closed, savoring the wonder of this unexpected good thing that had happened to him. Tears welled in his eyes. How was it possible that even in his captivity, and his despair, there should be such joy? T HE central building of the Berlin Zoo, built in #I by the architect Herbert Medius, was a delightful specimen of late #th-century architecture but had several irremediable defects. For example, the garden-roof dining room, used on formal occasions by Griick and his staff, was roofed with a soaring transparent dome into which arcs of stained glass had been let, and at certain times of the year the long, varicolored streaks of light from this dome, instead of dripping diagonally down the lemonwood and ebony walls, lay directly on the diners' tables and colored what was in their plates. The canvas curtains which were supposed to cover the dome's interior had never worked properly and were now, as usual, awaiting repair. Consequently, although Herr Doktor Griick's bauernwurst and mashed potatoes had the rich brown and white tones with which they had come from the kitchen, Prinzmetal's boeuf au jus was a dark ruby, as if it had been plucked raw from the bleeding carcass; Rausch's plate was deep blue; and'Wenzl's was a pure, poisonous green. The visitors, of course, Umrath of Europa-News, Purser Bang of the Space Service and the trustee Neumann, had been placed in uncolored areas, except that a wedge of the red light that stained Prinzmetal's place occasionally glinted upon Neumann's elbow when he lifted his fork. Wenzl, as always, sat stiff and silent at his place. His sardonic eye? missed nothing, neither the strained reluctance with which Rausch lifted his gobbets of blue meat to his lips, nor the exaggerated motion of Prinzmetal's arm which lifted each forkful for an instant out of the sullen red light before he took it into his mouth. But Wenzl looked upon his dinner and found it green: he carved it methodically with his knife in his green hand, forked it up green and ate it green. Umrath, the Europa-News man, was square and red-faced, with shrewd little eyes and pale lashes. He said, "Not a bad dinner, this. Compliment the chef, Herr Doktor. If this is how you feed the animals down there, I must say they live well." "Feed the animals!" cried Griick merrily. "Ha, ha, my dear Umrath! No, indeed, we have our separate kitchen for that, I assure you! To feed more than five hundred different species, some of them not even Terrestrial, that is no joke, you can believe me! Take for instance the Brecht's Bipeds. Their food must be rich in sulfur and in beryllium salts. If we put that on the table here, you would soon be three sick gentlemen!" "Wenzl would eat it and not turn a hair," said Neumann, the aging trustee. He was quiet and dark, with a weary but businesslike air about him. "Ha! True!" cried Griick. "Our Wenzl is made of cast iron! But the bipeds, gentlemen, not so. They are delicate! They require constant care!" "And money," put in Neumann dryly, picking with his fork at the meat on his plate, which he had hardly touched. "It's true," said Griick soberly. "They are rarities, and they come from eighteen light-years away. One doesn't go eighteen lightyears for a picnic, eh, Purser Bang?" There was a rustling sound from the corner, which distracted the diners' attention for a moment. Heads turned. Out of the dimness scuttled something small and many-legged, with skin of a sparkling pale blue. It turned upon them the jeweled flash of its tiny red eyes, then was gone into a hole in the wainscoting. The diners looked after it without comment. The spaceman nodded. He was tall and taciturn, lanternjawed, and looked more like a doorkeeper than an intrepid adventurer. He cut precise cubes from the meat on his plate and chewed them thoroughly before swallowing. "Why spend so much for bipeds, then, Griick?" Umrath demanded. "They're amusing, I suppose, in their way, but are they worth it?" "My dear Umrath," said Griick, laying down his fork in turn, "I must tell you, the bipeds represent the dream of my life. Yes, I confess, it's true that I dream! After all, we are alive to do something in the world, to achieve something! That is why, dear Umrath, I schemed and wrote letters for five years, and why I traded two Altairan altar birds and how much money to boot I had better not mention -- " he glanced at Neumann, who smiled faintly -- "for our wonderful new biped Fritz. He is here, he is well, and he is a mature male. We already have our female biped Emma. No other zoo on Earth has more than one. Laugh at me if you will, but it shall be Griick, and his Berlin Zoo, who is remembered as the first man to breed bipeds in captivity!" "Some say it can't be done," put in Umrath. "Yes, I know it!" cried Griick gaily. "Never have bipeds been successfully bred in captivity, not even on Brecht's Planet! And why not? Because until now no one has successfully reproduced the essential conditions of their natural environment!" "And those conditions are -- ?" asked Neumann with weary courtesy. "That we shall discover!" said Griick. "Trust me, gentlemen, I have made already a collection of writings about Brecht's Planet and especially the bipeds. There is no larger one in the Galacticum, not even excepting the Berlin Archive!" He beamed. "And between ourselves, gentlemen, Purser Bang has a connection with a group on Brecht's Planet who are able to make physiological studies of the bipeds! Depend on it, they will give us valuable information -- by way of Purser I Bang, our good friend!" He reached over and patted Bang's sleeve affectionately. The spaceman half-smiled, blinked and went on eating. "Well then, here's to the bipeds!" said Umrath, lifting his wineglass.  Griick, Prinzmetal, Rausch and Bang drank; Neumann merely raised his glass and set it down again. Wenzl, coldly upright, went on methodically cutting and eating his green meat. "All the same," said Neumann after a moment, "it seems to me that a good deal depends on Fritz." V i"kN the morning of this eleventh  day in the store, the young man climbed down as usual, very early, when the great vault was almost empty. Once or twice someone glanced at him curiously as he passed down the aisles, but he kept walking, and no one spoke to him. The clerks were busy behind the walls of glass cases, inserting new merchandise, clicking the metal doors open and shut; the cleaners in their graystriped uniforms were pushing their whining machines along the floor. Voices echoed lonesomely under the distant ceiling. The young man quenched his thirst at the drinking fountain between the grocery and the art gallery. Then he went into the produce section, with its mountains of fruit under glass, for his breakfast. By this time the outside doors had been opened, the music was playing, and people were beginning to stream down the aisles. The young man spent seventy pfennigs for a transparent bag of oranges and a package of bananas. Alternately eating the bananas and sucking the oranges, he wandered through the store. When he finished a piece of fruit, he tucked the peel neatly into the bag under his arm. Once, on the evening of his second day, the young man had ventured out into the avenue again, but the crowds, the noise and the lights had disturbed him and he had gone back into the store almost immediately, afraid he would be outside when it ; closed its doors. To be inside was j much better. Here there was also noise, but it was of a different quality, not so alarming. The light i was even and cool, and did not ; hurt his eyes. And besides, in the ; store he found all he needed -- food, drink, entertainment. Sometimes he became lost, the store , was so large. But he could always find his way again by following the moving rocket-trails of light on the ceiling. Whenever he saw one of the blue-uniformed men, he looked straight ahead until he was past. He had learned that the men in blue would not pursue him unless he climbed the grille or took i something from a case without paying, and now he always made sure to pay. As for the grille, he climbed it every night, not being able to find any other way up. Twice more he had been noticed, and the men in blue had run and shouted, ringing their bells; but no one could climb after him. So he was not really very afraid of the blue-uniformed men. But he did not like to be near them, all the same. There were still some discomforts in his new body that constantly worried him and occasionally even alarmed him by their intensity. There was something his mouth and throat wanted to do, for example. He kept trying different kinds of food and drink, and the feeling always went away, but it came back afterward. Dark, curly hair was sprouting all over his cheeks and chin, and it made his face itch. Nevertheless, he was getting along much better than he had at first. He had found out that taking his clothes and shoes off at night made them easier to bear the next day. When his underclothes had become dirty yesterday, he had bought new ones out of a machine, and he discovered now that the smooth, clean fabric was unexpectedly pleasant against his bald skin. Without watching where his feet were leading him, he had wandered into the women's clothing section. In the middle of the central open space, a crowd had gathered around a platform. The young man went nearer. On the platform a perspiring darkskinned man was energetically looping a wide ribbon of violet cloth around a blonde young woman who stood passively, arms raised, and stared out into space. Both man and woman had the bright, unreal colors and the curious black outlines of the cinema he had seen on his first day, and he realized that this was another illusion. The man and woman were not really there. The cloth took shape, became a dress. The dark-skinned man ran a piece of metal up the woman's side, pinching out the cloth into a ridge and tightening the dress to her body. Then he did the same thing to the other side, touched the dress swiftly here and there, cut a slit halfway down the back and began to work the finished dress up over the woman's head. Underneath, her body was shapely and cream-skinned in two brief garments of dark blue lace. Looking at her made the young man feel peculiar, and one of his discomforts suddenly became much more acute. As he turned to work his way out of the crowd, he came face to face with a dark-haired, paleskinned young woman who first looked startled, then smiled happily. "Martin!" she said, taking his arm. The young man moved away nervously. "I don't know you, madam," he said. "What?" The woman's face changed. The young man kept on moving away. She took a step after him. "Martin Naumchik -- " Thoroughly alarmed, the young man turned and dived into the nearest hole in the crowd. He worked his way around the platform, turning his head frequently to see if he was being followed. Above him, the dark-skinned man was turning the dress inside out. When he finished, he poised it over the young woman's shoulders, then began to work it down over her body. Both seemed to revolve as he circled them. No matter how far around he got, he could never see their backs. The young man left the crowd cautiously on the opposite side, and looked around. The darkhaired woman was not in sight. Nevertheless, he took a complicated route out of that part of the store, glancing back many times. Crossing the elevator plaza, he saw people looking at him, and realized he had been shaking his head unconsciously as he walked. The encounter with the darkhaired woman had taken him completely by surprise. It had somehow never occurred to him before that as a human being he now had not only a name and clothing, personal possessions and so on, but also friends and acquaintances. The idea frightened the young man. What could he possibly say to these people? What would they expect of him? The comfort and safety of his refuge in the store began to seem illusory. For a moment he thought wistfully of his clean, bare little cubicle in the Hamburg Zoo. But the memory was already so faded and distant that it could not occupy his attention long. The reality was this gigantic, glittering room with its unending murmur of voices, its exciting smells, its clicking elevators, its rocket-trails of red, green, amber, blue that traveled in pulses across the ceiling. The best thing might be to go away, change his name perhaps, find a place to live in some other city where he was not known. But he had no confidence that he could manage such a trip properly. Were there stores such as this in other cities than Berlin? He was humiliated to realize that he did not know. He had lived in Hamburg for twelve years, but had no idea what lay beyond the Zoo grounds. Other cities were only names to him. A N hour later, up in the thirdfloor lunchroom, he was still thinking about it over buns and coffee. It was his first experiment with coffee. The flavor was unexpected and rather unpleasant, but he liked its sweetness and warmth. It was odd how differently he felt about foods now that he was a human being. He had been going cautiously, since his bad experience of the first night in the restaurant. He had eaten only fruits and bread, and sometimes a sausage on a roll. But in time he expected to do all things human beings did, even to eating the wet brown messes he saw on his neighbors' plates. He picked up his cup, experimentally flexed the muscles of his lips and drank. He was proud of this accomplishment, which had cost him much effort. The last few drops rattled noisily as they went in, and one or two people nearby glanced at him with raised eyebrows. Evidently this was not a sound that one made. He set down the cup in some embarrassment, and consulted his wristwatch: it was just eleven. He restrained himself from checking the time by his other wristwatch, which was in his pocket. He had observed that human beings did not wear two at once, perhaps because the watches were so accurate that no checking was required. A pattern of bright lights flashed for an instant on his section of the counter. He glanced upward automatically, as he had done the time before, and the time before that, and saw only a fading starflower of red sparks in the machine overhead. They dimmed and went out. A moment later they flashed on again, making him blink and jerk his head back. The bright chrome and glass ring of the revolving display case slowed, stopped. Directly in front of him, a square black hole appeared, and a transparency lighted up. The young cup and saucer, and the plate with the remnants of his buns, obediently into the hole, which closedon it with a metallic snap. The transparency blinked, shimmered, and lighted up again: With a warm feeling for the polite machine, the young man! stood up and left the lunchroom, As he passed the entrance, where a crowd was waiting to get in, he found himself once more face to face with the same dark-haired young woman. She stared at him, apparently! as shocked as he was. Neither moved for an instant. Then the young woman, without a word, raised her hand and slapped him in the face. The blow was so unexpected and painful that the young man was unable to move for a few moments longer, while the young woman turned and walked away People standing around wen staring at him; some where whis, pering to each other. No one had ever struck him before. With one hand to the curious numbness that was the pain in his cheek, the young man turned away. He spent the rest of the day wandering the store half-blindly, shivering a little. His pleasure in the bright colors and varied shapes around him was dimmed almost to extinction. He was waiting for it to be time for him to climb to his hideaway in the tower. Beyond that he did not think. teen-thirty. The crowds wen beginning to flow toward the exits. The young man moved across the elevator plaza, vaguely aware that the crowds were heavier and somehow more anxious than usual tonight. He passed a man with a camera, then another. Two in a row. He had sometimes amused himself by counting men with cameras, or fat woman, or crying children, but now he had no interest in games. There were a lot of uniforms in sight, too: not only the blue store police, but white uniforms, red ones, goldand-white ones... He passed two blue-uniformed men who were standing together, looking intently around them. One stepped forward, glancing at the young man, then at something he held in his hand. "One moment, sir." The young man sidestepped, anxious not to be touched again. "Stop!" cried the store policeman, reaching. The young man whirled and ran for the grille. Bells were ringing on all sides; footsteps pounding after him. He sprang, caught the grille, began to climb. Halfway up, he glanced back. No one was climbing after him, but there was a great deal of activity at the base of the grille. Blue-uniformed men were clustered around a bundle of something gray, unrolling it. There were others, in gleaming white uniforms, with feathers on their hats: but these were not doing anything, only standing with feet apart, staring up at him. He went on climbing. As he neared the top of the grille, two heads appeared over the edge, then a third. The young man paused. The three men wore blue uniform caps -- they were store police, not merely the clerks who lived in this upper level. While he was wondering what to do, the three heads ducked out of sight, then reappeared. The shoulders and arms of the three men came into view. Something cloudy and gray seemed to float down toward him. The young man ducked, but it was too late. The cloudy thing settled around him with a solid thump, and he discovered that it was a net of grayish cord. It pulled tight around him when he attempted to swing away to the side. There were ropes attached to the net, and the men above were holding them. Panicked, the young man tried to climb down. The ropes held him back, then slackened a little; but when he paused to try to remove the net with one hand, they tightened again. Down below, two men in graystriped uniforms were pushing up a sort of tall ladder on wheels. The plaza was full of motionless people now, and the men in white were keeping them back. G A L A XI The ladder was in position almost directly under him, and now a white-uniformed man began to climb it. The young man saw that in another moment all his chances would be gone. Taking a deep breath, he swung himself violently away from the grille, tearing with both hands at the net that held him. The great room revolved massively around him. His back struck the grille hard, knocking the breath out of him. He kicked himself away again, still tearing wildly at the meshes of the net. The man on the ladder was very near. The net gave a little; he had found an edge. His head was out, then his shoulders. The grille struck him again. The man on the ladder leaned out and reached for him. Then he was falling. VI his room, the biped read: "The bipeds of the Great Northern Plateau, although the most interesting life-form on Brecht's Planet, are a vanishing species. Their once numerous herds are no longer seen in the vicinity of the Earth settlements. Only scattered groups of three to five are occasionally met in the mountains and foothills to the north. These animals, prior to the development of Brecht's Planet by man, possessed a complex; herd organization and communicated by vocal signals. Their mating ceremonies, held in the spring of the year, are said to have involved barbaric cruelties to the females." He closed the book thoughtfully. That might account partly for Emma's attitude, he supposed -- if she had witnessed something of the kind before being captured and brought to Earth as an in-s fant. However -- He thumbed the book open at a different place. "The knob or; crest," he read, "appearing only! as a vestige in the male, is a con-j spicuous purplish-red ovoid in the female. The function of the crestl is unknown, but it is thought to be a secondary sexual characteristic. Erhardt (#) has suggested that it functions as an organ of display in the animals' natural state, but Zimmer (#) has pronounced it to be merely a hypertrophied pineal eye. The organ is vulnerable, as attested by the large number of older females who have lost it through accident or in conflict with other bipeds.' The biped closed the book again and tossed it irritably onto the floor. He was reading Brecht's Planet: Riddle of the Universe for the second time, out of sheet boredom, since it was the only book he had in the back room: but the parts that were full of footnote references reminded him too much of the work he copied every day for Griick and the other staff members. In another two hours or so it would be closing time, and he could go into the living room without exposing himself to all those meaty red faces. This time he would remember to bring some reading matter into the back room, enough to last him a few days. Actually, there was nothing to stop him from going out there now... there were some magazines in the rack, he remembered, with bright covers. He could scoop them up and come straight back in. But he hesitated to make the move. It was extraordinary how hateful a row of human faces could be, staring in at you over an iron railing, with their great fat jaws moving as they chewed. He stood up restlessly. Hell and damnation! There was nothing to do here except read Brecht's Planet again, and nothing to do in the office. His work was all cleaned up, and there was no point in trying to smuggle out another letter until he found out what had happened to the first one. Anxiety seized him again, and he began pacing back and forth. Surely nothing could have gone wrong? When the first batch of signed correspondence had come down from "upstairs" to be folded and sealed in envelopes, the biped had simply added his to the pile. Rudi, the pimply young keeper, had carried them out on his next trip. There was no reason to suppose that stamped, sealed letters were inspected by Griick or anyone. The keeper probably took them directly to the post box. But he had been waiting for a week. If Stein had received the letter, why hadn't something happened before now? next door he heard a faint creak, a pause, another creak. Probably she had got up from her chair for something, then sat down again... all in full view of the crowd, naturally. That decided him. He looked at the open doorway, then stiffened himself and walked through it, looking straight ahead. The first moment was even worse than he had expected. The room was enormous and empty; the window was crowded with faces. He tried to shut them out of his awareness, looking only at the magazines, which now seemed much less attractive than he had remembered them. After a moment it began to be easier to go on than to turn back, but his mouth was still dry and his heart thumped painfully. Outside, there was a steady movement along the railing as people who had been staring at Emma came over to stare at him. Walking stiffly, the biped reached the relaxing chair and leaned past it to get the magazines. Be natural, he ordered himself. Pick up the magazines, turn... Outside the wall of glass, people were waving to attract his attention. There were cries of "Ah, just look!" and "Fritz, hello!" A blond child, carried on his father's shoulder so as to see better, turned suddenly beet-red and began to cry. Several people were aiming cameras. Through the uproar, just as he turned away, the biped thought he heard his name called. He turned incredulously. In the front line of the crowd, wedged in between two fat matrons, was a medium-sized man in a gray surcoat with a wad of paper in his hand. His eyes, friendly and inquisitive, were looking straight into the biped's. His mouth moved, and once more the biped thought he heard his name spoken, but the noise was so great that he could not be sure. The man in gray smiled slightly, raised his wad of paper, then wrote something on it with careful, firm motions. He held the papei up. On it was lettered, The biped felt a rush of joy and gratitude that almost choked him. He fell against the glass, nodding vehemently and pointing to himself. "I am Naumchik!"! he shouted. The man in gray nodded reassuringly, folded up his paper and tucked it away. With a wave of his hand, he turned and began to struggle out of the crowd. "Fritz! Fritz!" yelled all the red faces. and down, for twenty minutes by the big office clock, and still nothing happened. He knew he should control his impatience, that the gray man might be upstairs at this moment, arguing for his release; but it was no use, he had to do something or burst. He eyed the telephone. He had been forbidden to use it except for routine calls in connection with his work. But to the devil with that! The biped strode to the phone, swung out the listening unit. The call light began to pulse. After a moment the voice of the switchboard girl spoke faintly from the instrument: "Please?" "This is Martin Naumchik," said the biped, feeling as he spoke that the words sounded subtly false. "I want to speak to Dr. Griick. Please connect me with him." "Who did you say you are?" "Martin -- " the biped began, and swallowed. "All right then, never mind, this is Fritz the biped. I want to speak -- " "Why didn't you say so in the first place? Is there anything wrong with the work?" "No, the work is finished. It's something quite urgent, so if you will kindly -- " "Is anything wrong in the cage?" "No, but I must speak to Griick. Look here, whatever your name is, kindly don't argue and just let me speak to -- " "My name is Fraiilein Muller," her voice broke in coldly, "and I have instructions not to let the animals make personal telephone calls. So if there is no emergency, and nothing wrong with your work -- " "I tell you it's urgent!" howled the biped. With mounting fury, he went on shouting into the mouthpiece. "You idiotic woman, if you prevent me from speaking to Griick, there will be an accounting, I promise you! Make that connection at once, or -- Hello? Do you hear me? Hello, The empty hum of the line answered him. With shaking fingers, the biped closed the instrument and then yanked it open again. The call light pulsed, and went on pulsing. The female's greenish, widejawed head was visible beyond her doorframe as the biped turned. "Well, what are you staring at?" he shouted. The head vanished. The biped sat down abruptly in his desk chair, kneading his three-fingered hands nervously together. It was intolerable to be shut up like this now, just when his freedom was perhaps so near. If something was about to happen, the least they could do was to let him know, not leave him in the dark like this. After all, whose life was at stake? But that was always the way with these inflated bureaucrats, they couldn't see past their own fat noses. Let the lower ranks wait and worry for nothing. What did they care? Oh, but just let him get out, and then! What an expose he would write! What a series! Shocking Inhumanity of Zoo Keepers! His nervousness, which had abated a little, increased again and he sprang to his feet. Let him once get out, that was all -- just let him get out! The rest would not matter so much, even if he were condemned... He paused to listen. Yes, there came the sound again. The door was opening. but it was not Griick or the man in gray, only Rudi with his little cart. "Oh, you," said the biped, turning away dully. "Yes, me," Rudi answered with spirit. "Who else should it be, I'd like to know? Who does all the hard work around here, and gets no thanks for it?" He pushed his cart into the office space, grumbling all the time, without looking at the biped. "Does Herr Doktor Griick feed the rhino, or the thunderbirds? Who pokes the meat down the boa constrictor's throat with a broomstick, Wenzl? Does Rausch swamp out the monkeys' cages, or is it me? You bipeds are not so bad, at least you clean up after yourselves, but some of these beasts, you wouldn't believe how filthy they are! They throw things on the floor, they let themselves go just where they feel like it... Well, that's life. Some live on the fat of the land, and others have to work up to their elbows in monkey dirt." With a scowl, he took a small object off his cart and threw it onto the nearest desk. "There's some soap for you. You're to clean yourself up and be interviewed, and the order is to hurry. So don't be late, mind, or I'll get the blame, not you." The biped's heart began pounding violently. "Did you say interviewed?" he stammered. "Who -- what?" "Interviewed, is all I know. ' Some newspaperman wants to write a story about you. All lies, I dare say, but that's his lookout." Rudi was wheeling his cart around, still without glancing at the biped. There was a sound behind them, and the biped turned in time to see Emma come darting nervously out of her doorway. "Rudi," she piped. "Oh, Rudi -- please wait!" But the keeper had disappeared into the passage, and eiI ther did not hear or did not choose to turn back. After a mo ment came the sound of the outer  door closing. Emma retreated toward her  room as the biped turned, her hands going to her head in the familiar gesture. But she paused when she saw him reach for the  small packet on the desk. "Is that soap?" she asked timidly. "I heard him say it was." The biped picked up the small paper-wrapped oblong. It had a faint aromatic scent which was oddly disturbing. "Soap, yes," he said abstractedly. "I've got to get cleaned up so that I can be interviewed." "I had some once," the female said, edging nearer. "It was a long time ago. They said it was bad for me." "I suppose so," the biped muttered, tearing at the paper with his blunt fingers. The paper ripped open, the soap shot out between his hands and clattered across the floor almost to Emma's feet. She bent slowly and picked it up. The fragrance had grown almost overpoweringly strong. "Give it to me, will you?" the biped asked impatiently, walking nearer. He was at the scuffed chalk line that divided his side of the room from hers, but she took no notice. With the soap clutched in both hands, she was intently sniffing. Her mouth was half open, her eyes turned up. The biped took a step across the line. Still she did not respond. Alarmed, the biped halted and stared at her. "Emma!" he said. Her head turned. "Yes?" she said in a dreamy voice. "What's the matter with you, Emma?" "Nothing matter," she replied, with a vacuous grin. "Well then, give me the soap if you please" "Good soap," she said, nodding, but she did not move to hand it over, and seemed almost unaware that she was still holding it close to her face. the point of crossing the  line to take it from her, the biped hesitated. It suddenly struck him as rather odd that Rudi should have given him soap to wash with at all. He had not seen any in his week's incarceration, and had not really missed it. Was soap good for this body, with its feathery spines? But if not, then why -- ? Shaking his head irritably, he moved backward, away from the fascinating smell that came from the thing Emma was holding. With that insistent odor in his nostrils it was hard to think connectedly. He concentrated. At last: "Why did they say soap was bad for you, Emma?" he demanded. "Bad for me," she agreed, swaying as if to inaudible music. "Soap bad for Emma. No more soap, too bad. Beautiful soap." As the biped stared at her silently, he heard the door opening again. His dulled brain began to work quickly once more. "Emma, listen to me," he whispered. "Take your soap and go into your own room. Understand? Go into your own room. Don't come out till I tell you!" "Emma not come out." With exasperating slowness, she moved toward the door as Rudi came back in, this time without his cart. "Ready, are you?" he asked, with a glance at Emma's disappearing figure. The biped turned to face him, trying to look as dreamy and distant as Emma had. "All ready," he said slowly. "Know who you are, do you?" "My name is Naum -- " "No, no," Rudi interrupted, "don't be stupid, your name is Fritz. Now say it after me. 'My name is Fritz.' " "Name is Fritz," said the biped agreeably. He kept his eyes rolled up, and swayed on his feet. His head was buzzing with angry surmise, but he kept his voice blurred and slow. "That's all right, then," Rudi said, satisfied. "How much is two and two, Fritz?" The biped pretended to consider the question at length. "Four?" he asked hesitantly. "Good fellow. Now how much is four and four and four and four?" The biped blinked slowly. "Four and four," he said. Rudi smiled. "All right then, come along. You're going upstairs to meet some nice gentlemen, Fritz, and if you behave yourself -- mind, I said if! -- I'll give you something tasty all for yourself." He took the biped's arm. walked along the glass-walled corridor overlooking the Zoo grounds. It was a sunny late afternoon, and the gravel paths were full of strolling people. A few faces tilted to watch them, but there was not much excitement. They entered the main building, Rudi opened a door, and the biped found himself being ushered into the same oakpaneled office where he had been received on the first day. Beside the desk, Griick, Wenzl and the man in the gray surcoat were waiting. "Ha!" said Griick jovially, "here is our Fritz at last. Now we shall see, my dear Tassen, how much truth there is in this fantastic story. We could have begun sooner, but our Fritz sometimes dirties himself, not so, Wenzl? Too bad, but what can one expect? So!" He rubbed his hands together. "Fritz, you are well?" "Very well, Herr Doktor," said the biped. "Excellent! And you have eaten a good supper, Fritz?" "Yes, Herr Doktor." Griick frowned slightly, glancing at Rudi, but in a moment collected himself and addressed the biped again: "Very good, Fritz. Now then, this gentleman is Herr Tassen of the Freie Presse. He will ask you some questions, and you will answer correctly. Understood? Then begin, Herr Tassen!" The man in the gray surcoat looked at the biped with a faintly uncertain expression. "Well then, Fritz -- " he began. The biped took a step forward, away from Rudi, and said quickly, "How long have you worked for the Freie Presse?" Tassen's eyebrows went up. "A little over a year, why?" "Do you know Zellini, the rewrite man?" "How is this?" cried Griick, coming forward, red-faced with astonishment and anger. "Fritz, your manners! Remember -- " "Yes, I know Zellini," said the newsman. He was scribbling rapidly on his wad of paper. "A little dark man, nearly bald. I sat next to him at the last European Journalists' Dinner. He -- " "Wenzl!" shouted Griick. The biped felt himself seized by Rudi from behind, while Wenzl, his face a white mask, came toward him around the desk. "They are holding me against my will!" shouted the biped, struggling. "My name is Martin Naumchik! They tried to drug me before they brought me up here!" Griick and Tassen were shouting. Wenzl had seized the biped's arm in one hand and was gripping his muzzle in the other, holding it closed. Between them, he and Rudi raised the biped off his feet and began carrying him out the door. "Outrageous!" Griick was trumpeting. "A trick!" The newsman, almost as redfaced as he, was shouting, "Bring him back at once!" The door swung closed, cutting off the din. Without bothering to set him on his feet, Wenzl and Rudi carried the now unresisting biped down the corridor toward the elevator. only been sniffing the soap all the time the biped had been gone but had eaten some as well. She was taken to the infirmary, unconscious, and remained there two days. Deliveries of work stopped. Rudi, the keeper, disappeared and his place was taken by a heavy slow man named Otto. No one else visited the cage. Exhausted and triumphant, the biped spent most of his time in the front room of the cage, sometimes reading or watching television, sometimes merely watching the crowds, to which he had slowly become accustomed. He hoped to see Tassen again, but the man did not reappear. On the day after the interview, however, a man outside took a folded newspaper from his surcoat and spread it out for the biped to see. He was just able to read the guard snatched the newspaper away and led the man off, lecturing him severely. The biped would have given a day's meals for that newspaper: but now at least he knew that Tassen had written the story and the city editor had printed it. Now he could wait. Once the truth was out, they would never be able to hush it up again, whatever they did. The biped schooled himself to patience. For a while he had toyed with the idea of lettering some messages on large pieces of cardboard and holding them up to the crowd. But he was afraid that if he did so he would be taken out of the front room, and then he could not watch for Tassen. On the third day, Emma was brought in after breakfast, looking feeble and wild-eyed, her spines draggled. She gave the biped a look as she passed which he could not interpret -- wistfulness, a reproach, an appeal of some kind? He found himself worrying about it and wanting to talk to her, but she did not emerge from her rooms. A little later, the outer door opened again and Otto came in. He stood in the doorway and growled, "Wanted upstairs. An interview. Come." The biped got to his feet, feeling his heart begin to pound. He asked wryly, "No soap this time?" But the keeper stared at him in brute incomprehension. This time, instead of going to Griick's office they passed it and entered a smaller room on the opposite side ofthe corridor. The room was empty except for a table and two chairs. Otto held the door without comment, waited until the biped was inside, then went out again,, closing the door. The biped looked around nervously, but there was nothing to see : only the three pieces of furniture, the scuffed black tiles of the floor and the mud-brown walls, which were dirty and in need of paint. After a long time, the door opened again and a large, oliveskinned man in a red surcoat appeared. Behind him the biped glimpsed the leviathan bulk of Griick, and heard his rich, fluting voice. "Of course, my dear Herr Opatescu, of course! We have always desired -- " "Don't think I am taken in by these games," said the visitor furiously, pausing in the doorway. "If I had not threatened to go to the Council -- " "You are mistaken, Herr Opatescu, I assure you! We only wished -- " "I know what you wished," said Opatescu with heavy sarcasm. "Go on, I've had enough of it." ened, and the visitor closed the door. He was carrying a pigskin briefcase, which he put down carefully on the table. Then, with a toothy smile, he advanced on the biped and shook his hand cordially. "We newsmen have to stick together when it comes to dealing with swine like that," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Opatescu. You have no idea the tricks they played to keep me out -- but here I am! Now then, Herr Naumchik... one moment." He busied himself with the briefcase, from which he produced a flat, clear crystic solid-state recorder and a microphone. "Here we are. Sit down, please -- so." He pushed the microphone toward the biped, adjusted the controls of the instrument and switched it on. The indicator began to crawl over the surface of the record block. Opatescu sat down opposite the biped, leaning forward on His arms, without bothering to remove his bulky surcoat. "This recording is being made in the Berlin Zoo, June seventeenth, #. Present are Martin Naumchik, otherwise known as the biped Fritz, and the reporter Opatescu." He settled himself more comfortably and began again. "Now, Herr Naumchik -- for I believe that you are in reality Martin Naumchik -- I want you to tell me, if you will, in your own words just how your amazing experience took place. Begin then, if you please." The biped did as he was asked tescu was a type he did not like -- glib, assertive, the sort of reporter you expected to find working on Central European scandal sheets. But since the man was on his side, and anyhow a recording was being made -- Opatescu listened rather restlessly but without interruption until the biped had brought his story up to date. Then, with a thoroughness which made the biped wonder if his first estimate had not been mistaken, Opatescu took him over the story all over again, asking questions, eliciting more details, getting him to repeat certain points several times in different words. When he was satisfied with this, he began questioning the biped about his past life, and particularly about sources of evidence that he was actually Naumchik. They went over this ground with equal thoroughness. When Opatescu finally turned off the recorder and began to pack it away, the biped watched him with grudging respect. "I must tell you I'm grateful to you for all this," he said. "I suppose you're a friend of Tassen's, the man who broke the story?" "Tassen, yes, I know Tassen," said Opatescu, busily fastening his briefcase. "He's written some follow-up yarns, good stuff, you'll see when you get out." The biped moistened his stiff lips. "I don't suppose you have any idea -- " "When that will be? Not long. You're going to have a press conference, a big one this time -- newspapers, sollies, TV. They can't hold you after that. The public wouldn't stand for it. Well, Naumchik, it's been a pleasure." He held out his meaty hand. "For me, too, Herr Opatescu. By the way, what paper did you say you were from?" "Pravda." Opatescu glanced at his watch, then swung his briefcase off the table and turned to go. "Do you happen to know Kyrill Reshevsky, the -- " "Yes, yes, but let's reminisce some other time, shall we?" He smiled, showing large gleaming teeth. "I've got a deadline. You understand. Goodbye, Herr Naumchik -- patience." Still smiling, he backed out and closed the door. The keeper Otto appeared almost at once to take the biped back. Though usually laconic, he spoke lip on the way down to the cages. "So now they are going to let you out, are they?" "So it seems," said the biped happily. "Well, well," said Otto, shaking I his head. "What next?" TT'OR the next two days the biped could not read or sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. He kept the television i turned on, and watched every I hourly news broadcast. Once, early on the first day, a commen! tator mentioned his story, and a ; brief glimpse of him on film -- evidently taken on the day of j his arrival at the Zoo -- was  flashed on the screen. After that, there was nothing. In between news broadcasts, he spent most of his time pacing up and down the office space, imI prisoning poor Emma, who no sooner put her head out of her  room than the biped, by some gesture or exclamation, frightened I her back in again. He gave the switchboard girl no rest, ringing , her up all day long and demandj ing to speak to Griick, to PrinzI metal, to anyone. On the afterI noon of the second day the phone went dead. The line had been disconnected. Shortly afterward, Otto en; tered. He had a bundle of newsr papers and magazines on his cart.  "They send you these," he said, i dumping the bundle onto a vaj cant desk. "Read, and don't bother Fraiilein Muller." He turned and left. The biped forgot him at once.  He snatched up the topmost paper -- it was the Frankfurter Morgenblatt -- and leafed through it with trembling fingers until he found a column headed, He read the story avidly, although it was evidently nothing more than a rehash of his interview with Tassen. Then, curbing his impatience, he began sorting out the papers in the stack by date and piling them on the floor. When he got to the bottom of the stack, to his delight, he found a scrapbook and a pair of shears. Squatting on the floor -- his old legs had never been so limber -- he began carefully cutting out the stories about himself and pressing them onto the adhesive pages of the scrapbook. The culled papers he put aside for later reading. As he worked, he discovered that the biped stories fell into three classes. First, straight and rather unimaginative reporting, like that of the Frankfurter Morgenblatt; second, sympathetic pieces, appearing usually in the Sunday feature sections and with feminine by-lines (an item heading, was typical of these); and finally, a trickle of heavily slanted stories and editorials, turning up in the later issues and in the newsmagazines. These he read with surprise and a growing fear. "Neurotic pseudohumanitarians," said Heute in a boxed editorial, "seek to degrade humanity to the level of animals, and in so doing, strike at the very root of our civilization. Make no mistake: these sick minds would have us recognize as human every slimy polyp, every acid-breathing toad that can parrot a few phrases in German or walk through a simple maze. The self-styled Martin Naumchik, an upstart member of a vicious, degraded species..." The biped crumpled the paper in a burst of anger. Rising, he circled the piles of newspaper, glaring at them. Then he squatted again, smoothed out the offending page and read the editorial to the end. But he was too agitated to go on working. He closed the scrapbook and went into his front room to stare out at the gray autumn day. The sky had turned cold and rainy, and few people were on the paths. He could no longer ignore the fact that people did not want to believe a biped's body could be inhabited by a human mind and soul. In a general way he could even sympathize with it. But surely they must see that this was a special, different case! He pressed his muzzle against the cold glass, down which scattered raindrops were slowly creeping. But what if they would not? He tried to imagine himself set free, recognized as Martin Naumchik, his rights as a citizen restored... What then? A grotesque vision of himself, a naked biped, in the city room of ParisSoir, talking to Ehrichs... then himself at a party, among fully dressed men and women with glasses in their hands. It was absurd, impossible. Where could he go? Who would accept him? Where could he get work, or even lodgings? The biped set his jaw stubbornly, gripping his three-fingered hands together. "I am Martin Naumchik!"' he muttered. But even in his own ears, the words sounded false. The biped woke himself up, tossing and muttering, from a peculiarly unpleasant dream. Something had happened to his body, his face had gone all soft and squashy, his limbs stiff... The horror of it was that everyone around him seemed to take this as entirely normal, and he could not tell then what was wrong. He came fully awake and sat up in bed, clanking his jaws and rumpling the feathery spines along his side with his fingers. He had been dreaming, he realized suddenly -- dreaming of himself as he had been before the change. He sat for a moment, dully thinking about it. He felt a dim sense of betrayal, as if he had somehow foresworn his loyalty to that human body, once so familiar, which now seemed like an improbable nightmare. It disturbed him a little that his feelings could change so radically, in a matter of weeks. If that could happen, where was there a bottom to anything? He got out of bed, feeling his good spirits return with the healthy responses of his body. After all, there was no use looking backward. He was himself, as determined as ever, and -- he stiffened with realization... how could he have forgotten? -- this was the morning of his final accounting with Griick. Yawning nervously, he went into the living room and switched on the wall television. It was not time for the news yet. He glanced out the window, past the temporary fence, a dozen yards away, that the workmen had put up yesterday. The lawns and paths were empty in the early sunlight; there was a flutter of wings in one of the distant aviaries, then stillness again. Now that the time was so near, he was beginning to feel anxious. He had half expected Griick to  try to drug him once more, and had slept every night with a barricade across the doorway; but except for the fence, which kept anyone from coming near the cage, nothing had been done to interfere with him. He dragged the table and bookcase out of the w ay and wandered into the office space. As he crossed the room, Emma's face appeared in her doorway. "Good morning," she said timidly. He turned on the television. It was not time for the news yet. As he entered the office area, Emma's face appeared in her doorway. "Good morning," she said timidly. "Good morning, Emma," the biped answered, mildly surprised. His attention was not on her. He was thinking about the pressconference to come. The female ventured a step or two out of the doorway. "Today is Wednesday," she observed. "That's right, Wednesday." "This is the day you are going to prove you are Herr Naumchik." "Yes," the biped said, surprised and pleased. "Then you will be going away." "I suppose I will, yes." What was the creature getting at? "I shall be all alone," Emma said. "Well," said the biped awkwardly, "I expect you'll get used to it." "I shall miss you," Emma said. "Good-by, Fritz." "Good-by." She turned and went back into her room. The biped stared after her, touched and vaguely disturbed. From the living room sounded a chime, then a hearty voice, "Eight hundred hours, time for the news! Good morning, this is Reporter Walter Szaborni, at your service. Seven hundred are known dead in a Calcutta earthquake! Two members of the Council of Bavaria have been accused of improper conduct! These and other stories -- " Hurrying into the living room, the biped picked up the control box that lay beside the chair and pressed the channel selector. In the wall screen, the ruddy-faced announcer vanished and was replaced by a beaming elderly lady, eccentrically dressed, who sat at the keyboard of a piano. "For my first selection this morning," she announced in a heavy Slavic accent, "I shall play Morgenstem's 'Dawn'..." Click! She gave way to a muscular young man in a cream-colored leotard, who sat on the floor rotating himself on one buttock. "Just ea-sily back," he said, "and then forward -- " Click! "... We bring you the latest development in a case that has all Berlin talking," said an invisible voice. r T'HE biped caught his breath: the screen showed a view of the Zoo grounds, moving at a walking pace toward the main building. With a curious shock, turning and looking out the window, past the incurious faces of a few people who stood at the railing, the biped realized what he was about to see. Out there in the early sunshine, walking slowly across the lawn, was a man with a tiny television camera. "... who claims to be Martin Naumchik, a reporter for ParisSoir," the voice was saying. At the same moment, the outer door rattled. The biped vacillated a moment, then left the screen and: hurried into the office space. It was the keeper with his cart. "Otto! Have you any message for me?" "No message. Eat," said Otto, unloading trays from his cart. "But, is the press conference really going to be held? Is anyone here yet?" "Plenty of people," Otto grunted. "All in good time. Eat." He walked away. But eating was out of the question; the biped pushed the food around with his fork, took a bite or two, then gave it up and walked restlessly back and forth in his inner room until, after what seemed hours, the door opened and Otto returned. As he ran into the office space, the biped caught sight of Emma peering out of her doorway again. Ignoring her, he demanded, "Are they ready for me now?" "Yes. Come," Otto said. The biped smoothed down his spines and followed. There were crowds outside the gallery, and in the corridors as well; the biped glimpsed Prinzmetal going by with a harried expression. Outside the penthouse dining room, there were men wearing earphones, crouching over metal boxes covered with switches and dials. A white-uniformed Berlin policeman stood guard by the entrance. Ignoring him, Otto opened the door and leaned in for a moment, blocking the way with his body. He spoke to someone inside, then closed the door again. "Wait," he told the biped. After a few moments the door opened again and a pale, sweaty face appeared. It was a young man the biped had never seen before. "All right, bring it in. Quickly, quickly!" "Always in a hurry, aren't you?" Otto grumbled. "Very well, go, then." He gave the biped a push. Inside, the pale young man seized the biped's arm. "Go straight in, don't keep them waiting!" Beyond him, past the backs of several men who were standing close together, the biped glimpsed Griick's rotund figure behind a table. "And now," the Director's voice said nervously, "I present to you the biped, Fritz!" The biped walked stiffly forward in the silence. The big room was packed with people, some standing with cameras, the rest seated at tables arranged in arcs all the way back to the far wall. Griick gave the biped an unreadable look as he approached. "Tell them your story, Fritz -- or shall I say Herr Naumchik?" He bowed and stepped back, leaving the biped alone. The biped cleared his throat with an unintended squawk, which caused a ripple of laughter around the room. Frightened and angry, he leaned forward and gripped the edge of the table. "My name is Martin Naumchik," he began in a loud voice. The room quieted almost at once as he spoke, and he could feel the listeners' respectful attention. Gaining confidence, he told his story clearly and directly, beginning from the moment he had seen the young man with the camera outside his cage. As he talked, he looked around the room, hoping to see familiar faces, but the lights were so arranged that he could barely make out the features of those who were looking at him. When he finished, there was a moment's silence, then a stir, and a forest of hands went up. "You, there," said the biped, pointing helplessly at random. A woman rose. "Who told you to say all this?" she demanded. She had a sharp, indignant face, glittering eyes. A groan of protest went up around her. "No one," said the biped firmly. "Next! You, there... yes, you, sir." "You say you took a degree at the Sorbonne in #. Who was the head of the German department there?" "Herr Winkler," the biped answered without hesitation, and pointed to another questioner. "Who was your superior on Paris-Soir when you worked at the home office?" "Claude JLhrichs." the same ones he had answered before, many of them several times, at previous interviews; repeating the same responses over again made him feel a trace of discouragement. When would there be an end? But the attitude of the listeners cheered him: they were respectfully attentive, even friendly. A tall, red-bearded man stood up. "Let me ask you this, Hen Naumchik. What is your explanation of this incredible thing? How do you account for it?" "I can't account for it," the biped said earnestly. "But I'm telling you the truth." There was a murmur of sympathy as the tall man sat down. The biped opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could do so the mellifluous voice of Dr. Griick was heard. "That ends our little question period, thank you very much, gentlemen and ladies." Griick came forward, followed by two keepers who quickly took the biped's arms and started to lead him away. The biped, at first taken by surprise, began to resist. "I'm not finished!" he shouted. "I appeal to you, make them release me!" In spite of his struggles, the keepers were dragging him farther away from the table. "Make them release me! I am Martin Naumchik!" They were at the door. Behind; them, an angry hum was arising from the audience. There were shouts of "Shame! Bring him back!" Over the growing uproar, Griick's voice was vainly repeating, "One moment, ladies and gentlemen! I beg your indulgence! One moment! One moment!" The keepers thrust the bipec outside; the door closed. The biped ceased to struggle. "Will you behave yourself?" demanded one of the keepers, straightening his collar. Otto appeared through the crowd, his face as stolid as ever. "Go on, if I want you I call you," he grunted. "Fritz, come." The biped followed him docilely, but his heart was thudding with excitement and indignation. "Did you hear it?" he demanded. "Did you hear how that man cut me off, just when -- ?" "Not me," said Otto. "I don't concern myself with such things. I was sitting down and having a smoke." Avoiding the crowd, he pushed the biped toward a rear stairway. They walked down two flights, then crossed a library exhibit, threading their way between the tables and brushing through red banners that urged, "Read a book about animals!" This part of the building was almost deserted; so was the gallery. As soon as Otto unlocked the outer door, the biped heard Griick's voice booming from within. His excitement increased again: he ran into the living room. In the television screen, Herr Doktor Griick's red, perspiring face stared wildly. "Gentlemen and ladies, if I may have your kind attention! Gentlemen and ladies!" The voice of an invisible commentayr cut in smoothly, "The hall is still in an uproar. The Herr Doktor is unable to make himself heard." The biped danced with excitement in front of the screen, clasping his hands together. Outside, beyond the fence, a crowd was gathering, but he ignored it. The sound from the television had a curious echoing quality, and he realized after a moment that Emma must have her set turned on next door, too. The noise was subsiding. Griick shouted, "Gentlemen and ladies -- you have heard the biped's statement! Now permit the Director of the Zoo to make a statement also!" There were scattered cheers. Silence fell, broken at first by coughs and the shuffling of feet'. When it was complete, Griick spoke again. "Let me ask you to think about one question," he said. "Where is Martin Naumchik?" He glanced from side to side. The silence deepened. "Where is Naumchik, this enterprising newspaperman, who has scored such a triumph?" A mutter arose; the camera swung to show restless movement in the room, one or two people rising; indistinct voices were heard. "Is he wandering the streets of Berlin, with an animal's soul inside his body?" Griick persisted. "Then why is he not seen? Isn't this a curious question, gentlemen and ladies? Doesn't this make you wonder, doesn't it arouse your interest? I ask again, where is this famous Martin Naumchik? Is he hiding?" He stared out at the camera, eyes gleaming behind his rimless glasses. The biped clenched his fists involuntarily. "Suppose that I now tell you we are all the victims of a clever hoax?" Griick demanded. There were hisses, groans of protest from the audience. "You don't believe it? You are too thoroughly convinced?" A deep voice echoed up from somewhere in the audience. After a moment the camera swung around: it was the tall, red-bearded man who had spoken before. His voice grew clearer. "... this farce. Why did you hurry the biped out of sight -- why isn't he here to speak for himself?" Cries of approval; the red-bearded man looked selfsatisfied, and folded his arms on his chest. Dr. Griick appeared again. "My dear Herr Wilenski -- that is your name, is it not? -- do you realize that if I am telling you the truth -- " he carefully smote his plump breast -- "this biped is a very valuable animal, very high-strung and nervous, which must be protected? Am I to endanger his health? Do you think I am such a fool?" A little laughter; scattered shouts of approval. The red-bearded man popped into view again, aiming his finger sternly. "What about the biped's charge that you drugged him? What have you to say to that?" Then Griick's earnest face, in close-up: "Somehow the animal got hold of a piece of soap, Herr Wilenski. The keeper who was responsible has been -- " ("Soap?" echoed Wilenski's voice.) "Yes, soap. The sodium and potassium salts in soap have a toxic effect on these bipeds. You must remember that they are not human beings, Herr Wilenski." He raised one plump hand. "Let me continue." Mutterings from the audience. "But first let me say this to you, Herr Wilenski, and to all of you -- if I shall not convince you that we have to do here with a hoax, a dirty publicity scheme -- if you shall have listened to me and still believe that in that poor biped's body there is the soul of a human being -- then I solemnly promise you that I will release Martin Naumchik!" Sensation in the hall. The biped closed his eyes and groped weakly behind him for the chair. His relief was so great that he did not hear the next few words j from the screen. " -- we here at the Zoo were ' just as much in the dark as you, you may believe me! How could such a thing occur? We did not believe the biped's story for a moment -- yet, what other explanation could be found? We were at our wits' end, gentlemen and ladies -- until we had the lucky inspiration to search the biped's cage! Then! Imagine our ( shock, our horror, when we found... this!" The camera drew back. Griick.  half turning, was extending his hand in a dramatic gesture toI ward a machine that lay on a ' little table behind him. An assistant wheeled it closer. It was, as far as the biped could make out, I nothing but a solid-state recorder, the same kind of machine Opatescu had used... A cold feeling took him in the chest. He leaned forward uneasily. "Under the blankets of the biped's bed," Griick's voice went on, "we found this recording machine concealed!" "How did it get there?" boomed Wilenski's voice. Griick's face turned; his expresion was solemn. "We are still investigpting this," he said. "And you may believe me, that when the guilty individuals are caught, they shall be punished with the full severity of the law! But at this moment, I can say only that we are highly interested in questioning the keeper who was discharged." He stepped closer to the small table, laid his hand on the recorder. "Now, I want you all to listen to what we found in this concealed machine! Listen carefully!" He switched on the recorder. After a moment, a man's deep voice spoke. "Listen and repeat after me. My name is Martin Naumchik... I was born at Asnieres in #...I am a newspaperman. I work for Paris-Soir. My superior there is Monsieur Claude Ehrichs..." A distant murmur came through the glass. The biped turned his head involuntarily, and saw a little knot of people clostered around the aerial of a portable TV. Fists were being shaken. Voices drifted over, faintly: "Charlatan! Hoaxer!" With a sense of doom, the biped turned back to the screen. The camera was panning now over the faces of the listeners. He saw shock and surprise give way to cynical understanding, disgust or anger. People were beginning to stand up here and there throughout the room; some were leaving. The biped saw the red-bearded man, shaking his head, move off toward the aisle. "Wait! Wait!" he called. But the man in the screen did not hear. The room was emptying. The monotonous voice of the recorder had stopped. Griick was standing idly looking out over the room, with a faint smile of satisfaction on his lips. Wenzl leaned over to speak to him; Griick nodded absently. His lips pursed: he was whistling. "And so," said the voice of the announcer breathlessly, "in this dramatic revelation, the mystery of the human biped is explained! All honor to Herr Doktor Griick for his dignified handling of this difficult situation! We now return you to our studios." The screen flickered, cleared. The biped hit the control button blindly with his fist; the image faded, dwindled and was gone. "Ssss! Fritz the faker! Ssss!" came the voices from outside. T HE uproar in the Aviary redoubled the moment Wenzl strode in. Toucans opened their gigantic beaks, Rapped their wings and screamed. The air was full of fluttering smaller birds, flash of tail feathers, red, yellow, blue. Macaws left off hitching themselves along their wooden perches, beak, claw, beak, claw, to flutter against the invisible air fence shrieking, "Rape! Rape!" Wenzl strode past them, his death's-head face like a pale shark swimming down the green corridor of the Aviary. At the far end of the building, two under-keepers stood to atten-I tion. All was in order here. Wenzl crossed the short open entranceway, making a path through the sluggish crowds, and went into the Primate House. Shrieks, roars and the thunder! of shaken bars greeted him as he stepped through the doorway. Capuchins hurtled forward over one another's backs, clustering at the bars, showing their sharp yellow teeth, shrieking their little lungs out. Proboscis monkeys dropped out of their tree-limb perches, blinking and chattering. The baboon, Hugo, leaped against his bars with a crash, shoved off and somersaulted in midair, flashing his blue behind; the two chimps rattled the bars and squealed together. Wenzl moved along the row ol cages, attentive and calm. He passed through another open en trance to the Reptile House. Here all was quiet. Wenzl': glance softened for the first time The Galapagos tortoise, big as i wheelbarrow, was slowly munch ing a head of lettuce in his crue jaws. The boa constrictor wa coiled sluggishly around a con spicuous lump in its gullet. Foul diamondbacks hissed, clatterei faintly, slithered off into thei rocky den. In its floodlighted cage, the grass snake hung in graceful festoons. Its tiny head swayed toward Wenzl; the pink tongue flickered out. Wenzl paused an instant to regard it with pleasure. Then he moved on. In the Terrestrial Mammal House, there was a crowd around the rhinoceros wallow, where Prinzmetal was giving the rhino an injection. Finished, he climbed over the rail and joined Wenzl, mopping his brow with a tissue. "Successful?" Wenzl demanded. "Oh, yes, I think so," said Prinzmetal in his soft, unassuming voice. "He will be all right." "It is necessary for him to be all right." "Oh, well, he will be." They walked through the exit together, turned right, opened a door marked "No Admittance." A slender, flaxen-haired young keeper was hurrying toward them, carrying a pail of fish. "Schildt, why are you not feeding the sea lions?" Wenzl demanded severely. "Just going now, sir!" said the unfortunate keeper, stiffening to attention. "Then what are you waiting for? Go!" "Yes, sir!" Wenzl, as he strode along beside Prinzmetal, took a tiny notebook from his breast pocket and with a tiny silver pencil, sharp as a bodkin, made a minuscule entry in it. Prinzmetal watched him with one soft brown eye, but made no comment. "Have you seen the papers?" Prinzmetal asked, as they rode up in the elevator. "Yes," said Wenzl. They got out. Wenzl hesitated, then followed Prinzmetal into the latter's washroom. "What papers did you mean, exactly?" he asked. Prinzmetal, looking surprised, straightened up from the basin where he had begun washing his hands. "Oh -- there it is, on the table. The Zeitung. On the third page. There's a story about a baby in Buenos Aires that understands what you say to it in French, Spanish and German. Three months old." "Yes." "And the curious thing -- what struck my attention -- " "Is that child's French nursemaid underwent an attack of amentia at the same time," said Wenzl, biting his words. "Yes," Prinzmetal said, forgetting to wash. "She is incontinent," said Wenzl. "Yes." "She understands nothing, must be fed, can only make childish sounds. But the child understands French, German and Spanish." "So, you saw the paper," said Prinzmetal. "And you, did you see this in the Tageblatt?" Wenzl asked, aled newspaper from his breast pocket. "A man and his wife in Tasmania each claims to be the other." "I heard also, on the television, that while laying a cornerstone in Aberdeen, the mayor changed into a naked young girl, who ran away crying," said Prinzmetal "But who knows what those fellows make up and what is true?' "Supposing it should all be true?" Wenzl asked, folding his paper neatly and putting it away. "It would be interesting," said Prinzmetal, turning his attention to his soft, hairy hands, which he began to scrub with care. "And?" "It is our duty to report to the Director anything that might he of importance to the work of the Zoo," said Prinzmetal, as if reciting a lesson. "On the other hand," said Wenzl deliberately, "It is useless, and even has a harmful effect, to take up the Herr Doktor's time with baseless newspaper scandal." The two men looked at each other for a moment with complete understanding in their eyes. "After all," said Prinzmetal, drying his hands, "what would be the good of it?" "Exactly," said Wenzl, and folding his newspaper precisely lengthwise, he dropped it into the waste can. " up, he was in a narrow bed in a white-tiled room. Wires that came out of the bed were stuck to his head, arms and legs with sticky elastic bands. He plucked at them irritably, but they would not come off. He looked around. There was a doorway, open, but no window. In the corner, behind a single wall that half concealed it, was a w.c. In the other corner was a flimsy plastic chair and a reading light, but nothing to read. The young man tried to get up, pulling at the wires, and discovered they had silvery joints that would break apart. He got out of bed, trailing the wires. After a moment a stout woman in nurse's uniform came in, and clucked her tongue at him. "Up, are you? Who told you you could?" "I want to use the w.c.," he told her plaintively. "Well, go ahead, then back into bed with you. Herr Doktor Holderlein hasn't seen you yet." To his mild surprise, she stood with hands folded in front of her and watched while he used the toilet. Then she pushed him back and made him lie down, while she snicked the silvery jonts of the wires together again, all around the bed. "Lie still," she told him. "No more nonsense. Here is the bell -- ring if you want anything." She showed him a plastic knob on the end of a flex cord, and went away, "Am I sick?" he called after her, but she did not come back. The young man tried once more to pull off the elastic bands, then gave it up. His last memories were confused. He could remember falling into the net, and being held down while he struggled. Then a feeling of being carried, a glimpse of many legs walking... Then nothing, until he found himself in a whitewalled tiny room with bars instead of a door. His clothes were gone, and he was wearing gray the visitor at the zoo pajamas. No one had come in answer to his calling, until he began to bang on the bars with a steel pot he found in the room, and then a man came and squirted water on him from a spray-gun. So he did not bang any more, but sat and shivered. He remembered falling asleep and waking up at least twice in that room. Once he had been fed. Then two men had come to fetch him, and they had given him his own clothes again, and coffee to drink, which he liked. Then they had taken him down a long corridor into a crowded room, and told him to wait. At the end of the room, behind a high counter, was a man in red robes, with a red floppy hat. The young man knew from his watching of television that this man was a judge, and that he was going to be sentenced... Now, here he was in still another place. Time passed. The young man was growing hungry, but did not dare ring the bell. At last an orderly came in with a cart, and he was allowed to sit up and eat. It was almost like the Zoo. Then the orderly came back for his plate, and hooked him up to the wires again; and for a long time nothing else happened. The young man was bewildered. Why was he here? What had the judge and that other man been whispering about, down at the end of the room, and why had the judge looked so annoyed when he glanced his way? This place was better than the jail, it would not do to complain -- but if he was not sick, then why was he here? Bells tinkled outside. Every now and then people passed his doorway, walking rapidly, with soft soles that swished and squeaked on the tile floor. Then the nurse came in again. "You are in luck," she told him. "Herr Doktor Holderlein says you may see Herr Doktor Boehmer today." She yanked his wires apart briskly, then helped him up. "Come, don't keep the doctor waiting!"  him down the hall, where messages in colored letters rippled silently along the walls, to an office where a man with a bushy mustache sat behind a desk. On the desk was a card that said "Hr. Dr. Boehmer." The doctor gave the young man a long measuring look, and unscrewed a thick old-fashioned tacrograph slowly. "Sit down, please." He began writing on a pad. "Now then. Can you tell me your name?" The young man hesitated only a moment. If he said "Fritz," he knew very well they would send him back to the Zoo. "Martin Naumchik, Herr Doktor," he said. "Occupation?" "Journalist." The doctor nodded slowly, writing. "And your address?" "Gastnerstrasse." "And the number?" The young man tried to remember, but could not. Doktor Boehmer pursed his heavy lips. "You seem a little confused. How long is it since you were in your apartment in Gastnerstrasse? " The young man shifted uncomfortably. "I think, three -- or, no, four days." "You really don't remember." Doktor Boehmer wrote something slowly, in his thick black handwriting, across the ruled pad. The young man watched him with apprehension. "Well then, perhaps you can tell me the date?" "June #th, Herr Doktor... or perhaps the #th." Boehmer's bushy eyebrows went up a trifle. "Very good. And who is the president of the High Council, can you tell me that?" "Herr Professor Onderdonck... is that right?" "No, not quite right. He was president last year." Bohmer wrote something else slowly on the pad. "Well now." He folded his heavy arms across the pad, holding the big black tacrograph as if it were a cigar. "Tell me, do you remember being in the department store?" "Oh, yes, Herr Doktor." "And hiding upstairs, and coming down during the day?" "Yes, Herr Doktor." "And why did you do that?" The young man hesitated, opening and closing his mouth several times. "You can tell me, Herr Naumchik. Go ahead. Why did you do it?" The young man said helplessly, "Because I had nowhere else to go, Herr Doktor." Boehmer slowly unfolded his arms and made another mark on the pad. He reached without looking and touched a bell-push at the corner of his desk. "I see. Well then, Herr Naumchik, tomorrow at the same time, is it agreed?" "Yes, Herr Doktor." The nurse entered and stood holding the door open. The young man rose docilely and went out. "Doctor says you can sleep without the wires tonight," said the nurse briskly as they entered his room again. Breathing heavily through her nose, she stood close to him and began peeling off the elastic bands. "Don't squirm," she said. "It hurts." "Nonsense, this takes only a moment. There." She wadded up the bands, wrapped the wires around them and turned to leave. "Lie down now, rest." "But nurse, why do I have to be here? Am I sick?" the young man asked. She turned and stared at him briefly. "Of course, you are sick. But you are getting much better. Now rest." She waddled out. supper, and then pills to swallow. When he woke up, it was morning again. "Good news!" cried the nurse, entering to plump up his pillows. "You have a visitor today!" "I have?" the young man asked. His heart began to beat faster. He could not imagine who it could be. Someone from the Zoo? "A young lady," said the nurse archly. "What's her name? I don't know any young lady." "All in good time. Eat your breakfast now, then comes the barber to shave you, and next you will see your friend." She left. The young man rubbed at the furry growth on his cheeks and chin. Shaving he knew, but not how it was done. It would be good to be shaved. After breakfast the barber came in, a short, dark man in a white coat, who plugged a buzzing machine into the wall and applied it, with a bored expressiorf, to the young man's whiskers. At first it pulled and hurt him, then it was better, and at last the hair was all gone. His skin stopped itching and felt delightfully smooth to the touch. He waited impatiently. An orderly came and gave him a comb, and he combed his hair in the mirror, several ways, until he thought it was correct. Then he still had to wait. At last the nurse came in again, looked at him critically, and said, "Very good! Follow me!" She took him to a little room with windows, rather bare and clean, with upholstered chairs and magazines in a rack. In the room stood a woman in a blue dress. There was a man in a white coat a little behind her. Glancing from one to the other, the young man recognized Herr Doktor Boehmer almost at once, but it was only when the woman stepped forward that he knew her. She was the woman in the store -- the one who had slapped him. "Oh, my poor Martin, what has happened to you?" she wailed, putting out her arms. The young man stepped back nervously. "They say I am sick," he muttered, watching her closely"You identify our young friend, then, Frau Schorr?" asked the doctor amiably. "He doesn't remember me," ghe said in a tight voice. "But it's Martin, of course it's Martin." "And you are his -- " The woman bit her lip. "His sister. Will they let me take him away, Herr Doktor, do you think?" "That depends on many things, Frau Schorr," said the doctor severely. "Come into my office when you are finished, and let us discuss it in detail." "Yes, in a moment," she said, turning back to the young man. "Martin, you would like to go with me?" He hesitated. It was true that she did not seem so excitable as before, but who knew when the mood might not take her again? "To get away from this place?" she asked. The young man made up his mind. "Yes, please, I would like it." She smiled at him and turned to the doctor. "Very good, Herr Doktor, now I am at your service. Until very soon, Martin..." They both went out. In a few moments the nurse came to lead him back to his cubicle. Then, although the young man waited expectantly, nothing happened except lunch. After the meal was cleared away he waited again, growing indignant, but hours went by and still no one came. The orderly brought his dinner. He began to feel frightened. Suppose something had gone wrong, and the woman was never coming back at all? The nurse would not answer his questions, but kept repeating stupid things like, "Wait and see. Don't be so impatient. Why are you in such a hurry?" She gave him pills to take, and insisted on hooking him up to the wires again. Then he woke up, and again it was morning. "Good news!" cried the nurse cheerily, entering the room. "They are going to release you today!" asked eagerly. He tried to clamber out of bed, but was brought up short. "Devil take them!" he shouted, tearing at the wires. "Nurse, get me my clothes!" "Temper, temper!" she said, raising her hands in mock dismay. "Can't you wait even till after breakfast? Such impatience!" She disconnected the wires at the joints and tucked them neatly away. "Nothing was ever done in a hurry," she went on. "There, go, wash yourself. All in good time." She bustled out. The young man cleaned himself and combed his hair again. It was hard to sit still. Breakfast came and he ate Some of it, thinking, "Now she is almost here." But more hours passed in the same endless way as before. What could have gone wrong? He stood in the doorway and waited for the nurse; at last she came. He held out his hand. "Nurse, when are they going to let me out?" "Soon, soon," she said, slipping past him. "Go and comb your hair -- don't worry. It won't be long." "But you said that this morning!" the young man shouted after her. It was no use. She was gone. When he had been sitting for a long time, staring blankly at the floor, an orderly came in. "Your hair is a fright," he said. The orderly himself had carefully waved hair, gleaming with oil. "Here, use my comb," he said. "When are they going to let me go?" "I don't know. Soon," the orderly said indifferently, and went away. Lunch time came. Now the young man realized that it was all a cruel joke. He lay down on the bed, leaving his dishes untouched. There was a clatter at the door. The orderly entered, pushing a metal rack on which some clothes were hung. Watching incredulously, the young man recognized the trousers and surcoat he had been wearing before; the coat was ripped up the side, and the r sleeve was grimy with sonp sticky, odorous mass. "Put them on,", said the ordei ly. "Orders." He went away agait The young man dressed hin self awkwardly. His heart wa beating very fast, and he ha trouble deciding which way sorp of the things went on. At last h was done, and he combed his hai carefully all over again. Then he waited. Footstep came and went hurriedly in thi corridor; whitejacketed figure passed and repassed. A bell jan gled, and a boy in a purple rob went by carrying a candle in glass bowl, followed by a man i black robes, head down, mun bling something to himself. Th bell dwindled in the distance. A burst of laughter sounds from somewhere not far awaj "Well, you know what I wouli have told him!" a hearty mal voice exclaimed. Then two voice began speaking together, in lowe tones, and the young man coul not make out any more of th words.  Footsteps approached the doo  again. In walked a woman. V J-nize her as Frau Schorr. Sit  was more formally dressed tha the day before, in a puffed skirt ' and overdress under which tb I shape of her body could hard I be made out. She looked pall t and nervous and did not meet his eyes. "Martin, they promised they would release you at nine-thirty this morning," she said at once, "and here it is almost -- " "Madame Schorr," the orderly interrupted, putting his head in at the door, "they are blinking for you to come down to the office at once." "Oh, my God!" said the woman and, turning around, she walked out again. The young man waited. At last Frau Schorr entered, walking rapidly. This time she looked flushed and energetic. "Come, quickly," she said, taking his arm, "before they change their minds." "I can go?" he asked. "Yes, it is all arranged. Hurry!" She led him down the white hall, past the blinking colored letters on the wall. There were potted plants at every intersection of corridors -- always the same plant, with shiny saw-toothed leaves. They got into a rapid elevator of the kind the young man had seen in the store. It opened for them, clicked shut and with a dizzy swoop they were hurtling downward; then another swoop in the reverse direction, a click, and they were standing on the gray tile floor of a large lobby, with enormous windows of clear glass through which the young man could see the central tower of the Flugbahn, glittering in the sunlight against a sky of pure blue. "Hurry!" said the woman, leadhim to another elevator. This one was the spiral kind. They drop, ped through a glass tube, past dark walls at first, then, startling, ly, into the daylight. What had happened to the building? The young man craned his neck, saw the titanic slab of masonry receding above his head, They had emerged from the bottom of the hospital, which was supported high in the air on conCrete legs. Around them bright green lawns and flowering shrubs were visible. Only one othei building could be seen in the middle distance, and that was a single, carelessly carved block of pink stone, without windows or visible entrances. Beyond, the rooftops of a few buildings showed over the treetops. The elevator went underground without pausing, and a moment later they were in the white, flat light of a subterranean tunnel. A' they left the elevator, an oval car drifted up on two fat wheels. K stopped, and the transparent top swung open. There was no driver The young man hung bad but Frau Schorr urged him in They sat down on the deep cush ions; the top hesitated, then slow ly dropped and latched with i click. The woman leaned forward. "Take us to the Fiedler platz exit, please." After a pause, a mechanical voice spoke from the grille facing them. "That will be two marks ten, please." The woman fumbled in her purse, found a piece of paper money and put it into a slot beside the grille. "Thank you," said the voice; coins clattered into a metal cup. The woman picked them out carefully and put them away as the car glided into motion. They did not seem to be moving fast, but the young man felt himself pressed back into the cushions, and the white lights of the tunnel whisked by at a dizzying rate. Other cars were visible far ahead and behind. Now the tunnel forked, the left-hand branch turning downward, the righthand one up. Their car whirled to the left without losing speed. At a second fork, they turned right, rising again. The car glided to a stop beside an elevator, identical to the one they had taken from the hospital. The top swung back. A little dizzy from so much rapid motion, the young man followed the woman into the elevator. As the car rose in the tube, another car with two men and a child in it whirled down past them in the counter-spiral. It made the young man feel ill to watch them, and he shut his eyes. jV"OW they were aboveground once more. The street was full of cool blue shadow, but over their heads the sun was still warm on the facades. Taking his arm again, the woman led him across the empty pavement to one of the entrances, over which the young man read the number "#" in silver letters. In the lobby, she paused, one gloved hand going to her mouth. "You have your key?" she asked. "Key?" The young man explored his pockets, brought up the key on the gold ring. "Is this it?" She took it with relief. "Yes, I'm quite sure. Come." They entered another elevator, an ordinary straight-up one this time, and the woman spoke to the grille, "Three." They emerged into a narrow hallway carpeted in beige and green. Frau Schorr led the way directly to a door numbered #C, opened it with the key. Inside, they found themselves in greenish dimness. The room was small, with a narrow bed, a table with some coffee things, a typewriter on a desk. There was no dust, but the air had a stale, bottled-up smell. The woman crossed to the windows and threw back the green draperies, letting in the sunlight. She touched a button on the control panel over the bed, and at once fresh air began to whisper into the room. "Well, here you are then!" said the woman happily. "Your own little room again..." She paused. "But you don't remember this, either?" The young man was looking around. He had never seen the room before, and did not much care for it. "Isn't there any television?" he asked. The woman studied him for a moment, then went to the control panel again, touched another button. A picture on the wall opened and folded back, revealing a TV screen, which instantly bloomed into life. A man's smiling face loomed toward them, gigantic, all-swallowing, while laughter roared from the wall. Then the sound died, the open-mouthed face shrank and disappeared as the woman touched the controls again. The halves of the picture jerked, flapped, slid together. "What's the matter?" asked the woman. "I didn't know it was going to do that," said the young man, quivering. She looked at him thoughtfully. "I see." She put the tips of her gloved fingers to her lips. "Martin, you know this is your own room. It doesn't remind you at all? I thought perhaps when you saw it -- no. I think it's better that you don't stay here, Martin, Come, help me." She crossed briskly to the opposite wall, slid back a panel, took out two pieces of luggage. She laid them open on the bed, then crossed the room again, pulled a drawer out of the wall, scooped up a pile of clothing. "Here, take these." She dumped the clothing into his arms. "You put everything on the bed, I'll pack." "But where are we going?" he asked, carrying his burden obediently across the room. "To my apartment," she said. She picked up the clothes, straightened them neatly, began to pack them into the larger of the two suitcases. "Go, get more." found another drawer under the first. There were nothing but socks in this one. He brought dutifully over to the bed. "And if Frau Biefleder doesn't like it, let her choke!" said the woman, punching shirts down into the open suitcase with brisk, angry motions. Understanding nothing, the young man did as he was told. All the clothing, including two sets of overgarments, went into the larger suitcase. The other case, which was very flat and narrow, was filled with papers from the desk. Frau Schorr took both suitcases, and the young man carried the typewriter in its case. They went down again in the elevator, across the street, down the other elevator, and got into a cab exactly like the one that had brought them. This time they emerged into a more populous street. Carrying their suitcases, they crossed the open area past a group of strolling girls, a tall boy on a unicycle, a flower vender. There were shops on either side, with interesting things displayed in their windows, but Frau Schorr would not let him linger. They turned the first corner to the left, entered a building faced with blue stone. In the lobby sat a little white-haired old lady with a face full of wrinkles. "Good afternoon, Frau Beifelder," said Frau Schorr stiffly. The old woman did not reply, but stared after them with tiny, redrimmed eyes. "It's good for her to be shocked a little, after all," muttered Frau Schorr as they crowded into the elevator. She looked distressed. The young man would have liked to comfort her, but did not understand what was the matter, so he said nothing. Upstairs, the hall was tiny, with only two red-enameled doors. "Well, here we are at last!" said the woman brightly, opening the first of these. Inside was a sunny and comfortable-looking room, with bright colors in the upholstery and rugs. As they entered, a tawny cat leaped down from the window seat and came toward them, pale blue eyes staring from a masked face. The young man looked at it in surprise. He had never seen a housecat before, except in pictures -- only the big ones in the Zoo, and those from a distance. "Is it fierce?" he asked. "Maggie?" said the woman, looking puzzled. "Whatever do you mean?" She stooped to pick up the cat, which was staring at the young man with its back arched, making a low wailing noise. When she lifted it, it hung limply from her hand for a moment like a furpiece, then writhed once and leaped to the floor. The wailing sound grew louder. The fur along the cat's back was ruffled. "Oh, dear!" said the woman. "Maggie, don't you remember Martin?" She turned to him in bewilderment. "She is upset. Sit down, dear, everything is going to be all right. Take off your surcoat and rest a little. You shall have some coffee and sandwiches in a moment." The cat was advancing, stiff-legged; she pushed it away with her foot. With an angry screech, it retreated to the windowseat again and tucked itself together into a ball. Its blue eyes grew narrow, but whenever the young man moved they widened and its mouth opened in a sharp-toothed smile. "I can't imagine what is the matter with her," said Frau Schorr from the next room. A cupboard door banged shut; a pot clattered. "She is such an affectionate creature, and she always liked you, Martin." Wanting to examine a picture on the opposite wall, the young man took one or two steps toward it, watching the cat out of the corner of his eye. The animal stared back at him and made a faint hissing noise, but did not move. Emboldened, the young man crossed the room and looked at the picture closely, but still could not decide what it represented. just as something squat and dirty-white waddled into view from the hall doorway. It looked up at him out of tiny red eyes and made a wheezing sound. Spittle hung from the loose lips of its enormously wide mouth, and two discolored fangs stuck up from the lower jaw. It stared at the young man in astonishment for a moment, then the gray-white hair on its shoulders rose stiffly and it made a menacing noise. The young man raised a hand. The animal began to bark, dancing about in the doorway, its eyes bulging insanely to show the yellowish, bloodshot whites. The young man backed away as far as he could go. "Churchill!" called the woman from the kitchen. The dog turned its head toward her voice, but went on barking. "Churchill!" she called again, and in a moment came hurriedly into the room, wiping her hands on her apron. "Shame!" she said, glancing at the young man. "Churchill, what is the matter with you?" The barking continued. "Now then!" said the woman, slapping the infuriated animal on the snout with her palm. The dog hiccoughed, shook its head and stared up at her with a surprised expression. It barked once more. The woman slapped it again, more gently. "No, Churchill -- shame! This is Martin, don't you remember? He has forgotten you," she said apologetically over her shoulder. "Go on now, back to your rug, Churchill. Bad dog, go on!" She herded the dog through the doorway. It moved stiffly backward, then turned reluctantly and disappeared, wheezing and snuffing. A final bark sounded from the next room. "Oh, dear," said the woman. "I'm so sorry, Martin. Excuse me a moment -- the coffee." She went back into the kitchen, and the young man, slightly unnerved, began trotting back and forth beside the low bookshelves, looking at the titles of the books. At the far corner of the room he came upon a tiny cage suspended from a polished brass stand. There was a beige cloth cover on the cage. Curious, he plucked up the edge of the cloth and peered inside. In the dimness, a tiny bird with green and violet feathers was perched on a miniature trapeze. One pin-sized golden eye blinked at him; the creature said, "Weep?" The young man closed the cover again. "It is just like the Zoo," he thought. The woman returned, looking flustered, with a tray in her hands. On the tray were sandwiches and coffee. She set it down on the table in front of the sofa. "Now come, eat, Martin, you must be hungry." She made him sit on the sofa, and while he dutifully ate the sandwiches and drank the good coffee, she sat opposite him in the upholstered chair, hands clasped in her lap, smiling faintly as she watched him eat. Her cheeks were flushed with' exertion. A few strands of dark hair had escaped from her coiffure and hung over her forehead. "Yes, eat, that is good," she said. "Would you like some music, Martin?" The young man nodded, with his mouth full. The woman rose, went to a machine in the corner and punched several buttons. After a moment the machine began to emit music, something slow and soothing, played by an orchestra with many violins. The young man listened with pleasure, waving his sandwich. The woman sighed, then smiled. "No. You don't remember, do you?" she asked. "Remember what?" "The music. We used often to dial it... never mind." She crossed to the machine again and touched it; the music stopped. "But it's really true, then, that you don't remember anything?" "I think I do," said the young man, lying cautiously. "You are my sister -- " "No!" said the woman vehemently. "That's not true at all. You don't remember." Her mouth was compressed and her eyes were closed. "But then why did you tell the doctor that you were my sister?" the young man demanded, bewildered. "Because I had to be a member of your family, or they would not have let me sign you out." The young man swallowed, thinking this over. He laid his sandwich down. "But if you are not my sister -- " "Yes?" "Then what are you?" The woman's face colored, and she glanced away. "Never mind, Martin... just a friend. We are just friends. Hand me those cigarettes, won't you, Martin?" He followed her glance; there was nothing on the low table beside him but an ashtray and an enameled box. He lifted the lid: Correct, there were cigarettes inside. She took one, lit it with a tiny rose-quartz lighter, tilted her head back to puff out a long streamer of smoke. With her left hand she was absently setting the black pieces in their places. "Don't you want one?" she asked. The young man looked dubiously at the white cylinders. He had never tried to smoke a cigarette, but doubtless it was one of the things he should learn. He put one gingerly between his lips, took it out again and looked at it, then replaced it and touched the other end with the lighter. He sucked cautiously; the cigarette glowed. Cool, bittertasting smoke ran into his mouth. Before he realized what he was doing, he breathed some of it into his lungs, where it felt astonishingly good. He took another pull at the cigarette. He realized with grateful delight that the smoke was somehow soothing one of the urgent discomforts he had been feeling all this time, ever since he had left the Zoo. "How good that is!" he said, staring at the burning cylinder. The woman's eyes filled with tears. She leaned forward and put put her cheek against his. Her arms went around him convulsively. "Oh, darling, had you forgotten that too?" she said weeping. IX was flooded with pale, colorless morning light. He got slowly out of bed, clacking his jaws. What day was this? He could not remember. But what did it matter, anyhow? He could hear Emma in the office space, already clattering away at the orthotyper. The biped got a drink of water, glanced into his outer room -- no one was at the railing as yet, the Zoo was not open so early -- then wandered into the office space and sat down at his desk. The basket was piled with work he had not finished yesterday, but it was only accounting forms. Nowadays they gave him nothing else to do. He picked up the top one, then set it down again without even trying to read it; it was too much trouble. The female said something in a low voice. In his surprise at hearing her speak, he missed the words. "What?" She said, without pausing or looking up from her work: "Do you think you are the only one who is unlucky? I don't." The biped gaped at her. "What do you mean by that?" "Some others, also, have a difficult life." She whipped the page neatly out of her machine, added it to the stack beside her. She inserted another page, spaced down, began typing again. The biped felt vaguely insulted. He snorted. "What do you know about it?" Before she could reply, the outer door clicked. Emma stopped typing. They both turned to watch Otto come in with his cart. "Breakfast," said the man gruffly. "Here, take it, eat, don't waste my time." He dumped a basket of work on the biped's desk, then another on Emma's. Blinking angrily, the biped picked up his covered plate and carried it into his own room. What did the creature mean by it? Who was she, to speak to him in that way? His anger grew; he could hardly eat. He put the plate aside half-finished, went back into the office space. Emma was not there. He walked aimlessly around for a while, kicking at the gray tiles. Here was the scuffed mark, almost invisible, where Griick had drawn a chalk line across the room. There was irony for you! To protect Emma from him, as if he were some sort of crude beast, whereas in reality it was just the other way around. He heard a noise, and turned to see the female coming out of her room. She paused. Her hands went to the knob on her head. "Look here, Emma," the biped began a little uncertainly. "You are on my side of the room," she piped. "Oh, hang that! What does it matter, any more?" The biped took a step toward her, growing excited. "Look here, just because you've lived in a Zoo all your life, I suppose you think -- " She snapped something, and moved past him to her desk. "What was that?" the biped demanded irritably. "Speak up." "I said, I have not lived in a Zoo all my life." The female put on her earphones, rolled paper into the machine, began to type. "Well, perhaps not in this Zoo, but you were born in a Zoo somewhere, weren't you?" Emma glanced up. "I was born on Brecht's Planet. They came and took me away when I was a baby." Her typing resumed. The biped felt he had somehow been put in the wrong. "Well, of course that's too bad and so forth, but don't you see the difference?" He began to speak more vehemently, warming to his subject. "My God, I should think it's obvious enough. Here are you, an animal that's spent most of its life in one Zoo or another -- you're used to it, you can put up with it. And here am I, a man shut up in an animal's body, kept in this stinking cage day after day!" While he was speaking, the female had stopped her work, and now sat looking quietly down at her three-fingered hands on the keyboard. After a moment, she got up from her chair and began to walk past him. Her eyes were closed. The biped saw that her throat was working convulsively. "Oh, now, wait a minute," he said, stricken. She kept on walking. When a desk got in her way, she maneuvered around it by using her hands. "Look here, Emma," the biped said, "I didn't want to hurt your feelings or anything. The fact is, I got carried away. I didn't mean the cage is actually stinking, it was just an expression." The female disappeared into her room. Irritated again, the biped followed as far as the doorway. "Come out, Emma!" he shouted. "Haven't I said I was sorry?" Emma did not reply. Although the biped hung sulkily around the office space for hours, she did not come out for the rest of the morning. saying at lunch that afternoon, under the shifting colored lights of the rotunda, "in all seriousness, my dear Griick, what was the truth of the matter? You managed it so cleverly that I am still confused. Is the biped really this Herr Naumchik, or not?" Herr Doktor Griick laid down his knife and fork, his eyes, turning sober behind their rimless glasses. "My dear Neumann," he said slowly, "what does it matter? In either case, the result is just the same -- we have, as before, two bipeds. One is male, the other female." "But if the male was a human being before?" "Still he is a biped now." The good doctor stuffed a bite of liver sausage into his mouth and chewed vigorously. "If I take any credit to myself in this whole affair, gentlemen, and really, allow me to say this in passing, my success has been due to the excellent cooperation of my staff -- " "Too modest," murmured Neumann. "Not at all!" cried Dr. Griick happily"But if, and I emphasize if, I take any credit to myself, it is precisely because I alone perceived this one small fact from the beginning. Who or what our Fritz was, before, is not of the slightest consequence. If we are to believe the Hindus, our Wenzl here might have been a beetle in some previous incarnation." Here Griick paused to let the laughter subside. "But this makes no difference. Beetle or no, at the present moment he is still Wenzl. Our Wenzl understands this, I am confident. As for our Fritz, he does not understand it as yet. But when he does, trust me, you will see a much healthier and more contented animal." A gawky young keeper appeared at his elbow, holding out a package. Griick turned in annoyance. "Yes? What is it?" "Pardon me, Herr Doktor," said the young fellow, blushing and stammering, "but Freda, that is, your honored secretary, asked me to bring this straight up. She said you would want to see it at once." Griick accepted the parcel with a humorous shrug and a glance around at the company, as if to say, "You see what my life is!" He turned the parcel over once or twice, glancing at the inscriptions. All at once he gave a start of interest. "By the packet from Xi Bootes Alpha! From Purser Bang! Excuse me, gentlemen, this really may be important." He began to tear open the wrappings impatiently. Inside was a sheaf of papers. Griick examined the first sheet intently. "Yes, the report of the research team on Brecht's Planet. Now we shall discover something!" He turned a page, then another. "Yes, they have dissected three bipeds, a male and two females..." He fell silent, reading one. After a moment, his jaw dropped in surprise. He glanced up at the" curious faces around the table. "But... it says that the males are females, and the females are males!" Griick frowned. "But it's impossible!" he muttered. "What's that you say?" Neumann demanded. "The females are males, and the males females? That doesn't make sense, Herr Doktor. What, are they hermaphrodites? Then why not say so?" "No... no..." answered Griick abstractedly, still reading. "My God, we have all made a serious mistake! Just look here, see what it says!" He held out a page, pointing to one paragraph with a thick, trembling finger. Neumann took the paper, held it to the light and read slowly, "The inguinal glands, previously thought to be male gonads, have been found to be without connection with the reproductive system, and their function remains unknown. It has been suggested that they are merely organs of display, analogous to the wattles and comb of the terrestrial cock. However, it must again be emphasized that the bearer of these organs is the female, not the male of the species. It is she who carries the young in a placental sac and gives live birth. Impregnation, however, is achieved by an extremely unusual method. The male gametes are carried in the purplish-red frontal organ which appears in developed form only in the adult male. During rut, the female...' Good heavens, Griick, just listen to this..." side by side in the cot in her inner room -- Emma tensely, with her hands tightly covering her knob, the biped leaning toward her, an arm around her body, speaking earnestly into her ear. "You know, Emma, that I didn't mean any harm. You do believe it, don't you?" "It isn't that," she said in a muffled voice. "It's the way they all treat me -- as if I were only an animal. They say I am not human, and so it is correct to keep me in a cage all my life." She looked up. "But what is it to be human? I think, I have feelings, I talk. I even type their letters for them, and still it's not enough." Her slender body shivered. "It's bad enough to hear them talk about me as if I were some creature that couldn't speak or hear. But when you -- " "Emma, don't, please," said the biped, overcome by tenderness and remorse. "Of course you're right, you're as human really as any of them. What does it matter if you have a different shape? It's the mind inside, the soul that counts, isn't it? Why can't they understand that?" She looked up again. "Do you really -- " "Of course," said the biped, hugging her closer. Warm, new emotions were coursing through him. "Some day they must all see it, Emma. We'll make them listen, you'll see. There, Emma. It's going to be all right. We're friends now, aren't we?" She looked up again, timidly. Her body stopped shivering. "Yes, Fritz," she said. The biped hugged her still closer. Along with the protectiveness he felt, there was a fierce joy, a sense of rightness. For some moments they did not speak. "Emma?" "Yes?" "We're really friends now? You're not afraid of me any more?" "No, not any more, Fritz." "Then why keep your hands over your knob? Isn't it uncomfortable? Don't you trust me?" She shook her head. "I don't know why... it's just -- Of course, I trust you, Fritz." "Well then." After a moment's hesitation, she dutifully lowered her hands to her lap. Her knob was large, purplish-red, and had a faint spicy scent. "Now isn't that better? Has anything dreadful happened because you uncovered it?" "No, Fritz," she said. She laid her muzzle against his shoulder. "I feel so much better now." "So do I, Emma. Oh, so do I." Bursting with emotion, the biped bent his head closer; and with an instinctive deftness which took thgm both by surprise, he bit her knob off. X ing a greenish glow. The young man became aware of his body, cramped into the cushioned seat. Around him in the great bowl, other figures were stirring. His buttocks were numb and his head ached. He struggled to his feet. It was hard to become used to the silence, and the smallness of things. Reeling, dizzy, he came out into the hot afternoon sunlight. He passed the bakery with its gigantic, fragrant stereo-loaf forever swelling over the doorway. Three dark-skinned men in funny little white hats and baggy white trousers came toward him, all talking at once in a foreign language. A cat ran across the plaza, pursued by something small and green, with many scuttling legs. The sun was hot on the paving stones; heat waves swam in the air. At the next corner, a crowd had gathered around a little man in green and a gigantic, barrelchested creature with sparse pinkish feathers, which the little man held by a leash. Coins tinkled in a cup. Prodded by its owner, the huge creature did a clumsy, shuffling dance. Its face was part human, part jelly-fish, moronic and blank. "Thank you, sir, thank you, lady," said the little man, tipping his cap. Tinkle. "Thank you, sir." The young man kept walking. After all, in the cinema one saw bigger monsters than that. He paused at the newsstand at the end of the plaza, bought the Berliner Zeitung and the Hamburger Tageblatt, folded the crisp sheets pleasurably under his arm. The next stall was a fruit stand. The young man passed it nearly every day, and sometimes bought bananas or oranges. But today it was different. In the middle of the stall was a mound of greenish-yellow ovoids, bigger than pears, with a sign: "Special! Just arrived from Brecht's Planet! Unusual! Try one!" The price was I mark #. The young man's mouth went dry with excitement. From Brecht's Planet! He fumbled in his pocket. He had just enough. The bored attendant took his money, handed him one of the greenish fruits. The young man held it carefully as he walked away. It was heavy, warm and waxy to the touch. A phrase from his lost book came back to him : "Certain greenish fruits, which the bipeds eat with avidity..." Never before had he felt so close to the planet of his birth. It had always been a little unreal to him, something one read about in books. Now, for the first time, he felt that it really existed, that it was made up of real stones and dirt, and had real trees on it bearing real fruit. Catching sight of Frau Beifelder in the building lobby, her little red eyes watchful and suspicious as always, the young man instinctively slipped the heavy fruit into his pocket, but he kept his hand on it. "Good afternoon, Frau Beifelder," he said politely, crossing to the elevator. The old woman did not reply but merely narrowed her eyes still further. The young man stopped the elevator at every floor, as usual, peering curiously at the closed red doors. Julia's door stood ajar, but instead of stopping, he went on up in the elevator, fourth floor, fifth, sixth. He got out, trotted over to the little stair, climbed to the roof. Berlin lay spread out around him in the hot summer sunlight. The curved threads of the Flugbahnen glittered against the blue. Over there, rising out of a cluster of lower rooftops, bulged the golden dome of the Konzertgebaude. , A cool breeze was blowing steadily across the roof, making the newspapers flap against his arm. The young man gripped them in annoyance, not wanting to relinquish the warm fruit in his hand. A few meters away, a ventilator was turning rapidly under its little black hood. The young man turned his attention to an airplane soaring over the blue-gray horizon. He sniffed the air with interest: Diesel fuel, ozone, hot concrete. On the parapet a large butterfly or moth was lying feebly moving its blue-and-purple wings. The young man examined it curiously. It did not seem able to fly. When he prodded it with his finger, it merely went on with the u slow, spasmodic movements of its wings. Something landed with a faint thud behind him, and he turned to see another butterfly, identical to the first. It lay quivering for a moment, then began the same slow, feeble motions. Suddenly the young man realized that the air was full of them: tiny dark shapes drifting down, landing on the rooftops all around. There were a half a dozen at his feet, then twice as many. One struck him a limp, soft blow on the neck before it dropped to the roof. Annoyed, the young man turned to leave; but although he picked his way carefully to the stair entrance, he could not avoid crushing several of the brittle bodies under his feet. floor again and opened the door cautiously. Julia kept it unlatched now, usually, because he had had so much trouble with keys. Inside, all was quiet. Maggie, the cat, strolled up to greet him with a querulous sound. The young man dropped to all fours to touch noses with her. Her nose was wet and cold. She rubbed her face against his, arching her back and twitching her tail. A moment later there was a sound from the bedroom and Churchill came out, looking dangerous. When he saw it was only the young man, the mad glare left his eyes. He waddled up and sniffed, then caressed the young man's face with his ill-smelling tongue. The young man got up and wiped his face with a tissue. "Martin?" came a sleepy voice from the bedroom. The young man went down the hall and peered in through the doorway. Julia was looking sleepily at him from the bed. "What time is it?" The young man glanced at his wristwatch. "Nearly three o'clock. Are you feeling better, Julia?" "Yes, I think so. Would you mind bringing me a drink of water?" "Not at all, dear Julia." The young man trotted into the kitchen and filled a glass. He sat on the bed to watch her drink it, feeling rather peculiar. It was the first time he had ever been invited into her bedroom. Once before, he had happened to look in while she was undressing, and had seen her naked breasts, which interested him very much, but made him feel so odd that he had run out of the apartment. Now he could see their round shapes under the thin white nightdress she wore, and out of curiosity he touched one. It was soft and swinging, but had a hard protrusion of another color in the middle. "Oh!" she said, looking startled; her hand went v.p to grasp his. "Did I hurt you?" "No... no, it's all right, Martin. Touch them if you like." She set the glass down and taking both his hands, guided them to her breasts. "Dear Martin," she said. He saw that her eyes were bright with tears. "Dear Julia." Leaning over, he kissed her. For a first attempt, it was not at all bad; the noses went to one side of each other, which he had always thought would be very difficult. The woman's breath caught; after a moment her arms went around him, held him tightly. The kiss continued, and after a short time, other interesting things began to happen. When it was over, the young man lay on his back, exhausted and astonished. Julia was sitting up, brushing her hair and humming quietly to herself. Suddenly the door-light flashed. They looked at each other. "Oh, dear, who can that be?" "I'll go and see." "Darling!" said the woman, holding out her hand to stop him, half weeping, half laughing: "First put your clothes back on." "Oh." The young man kissed her again, because she looked so rosy and contented, then got dressed. The door-light flashed repeatedly. "All right, I'm coming, I'm coming," he muttered. In the hall stood a mediumsized man in a gray summer surcoat, puffing a cigar. "Well, Naumchik?" he said smiling. "Yes?" asked the young man uncertainly. "Don't you know me? Tassen, of the Freie Presse -- remember?" "No. Herr Tassen? What do you want?" "I was passing by," said Tassen, looking him over with shrewd, friendly eyes. "So this is where you're holed up? Mind if I come in a moment?" "Well -- I suppose not." The young man backed away uncertainly, and Tassen followed him, looking around the apartment with interest. the bedroom, then the sound of claws scratching frantically against the closed door, followed by Julia's muffled voice: "Churchill, stop it! Bad dog!" Tassen cocked an eyebrow toward the sounds but made no comment. "Well, this is a cozy place, Naumchik. I won't keep you a moment. You won't mind if' I sit down, I suppose?" "Please." "Seen anything of Zellini lately?" "Please?" Tassen frowned, tapped his cigar into an ashtray. "Have you been back to Paris at all -- since the -- ?" He raised his eyebrows again. "To Paris?" asked the young man, confused. "No." "I suppose you know they've tied a rocket to you?" "Pardon?" "Discharged you -- given you the sack." "Oh. No, I didn't know it." Tassen drew on his cigar, staring at the young man. After a moment he asked, "Just what happened to you, anyhow, Naumchik? One moment, as far as I understand, you were a perfectly regular young newspaperman -- then that biped business, and next, you were swinging from the ceilings in Elektra. I gather you're all right now." "Oh, yes, perfectly." "Well?" "Well?" Tassen looked baffled and faintly annoyed. "Of course, if you don't want to discuss it with me -- " "But I don't remember." "Oh?" Tassen blinked. "What don't you remember?" "Anything -- before Elektra." "I see. So that's it. Then you're not likely to tell me what you were up to with that biped, are you?" "No." "I see that. Well, anyhow, Naumchik, it's good to know you're on your feet again. I take it you haven't been doing any journalistic work lately?" "No." "Want to do any?" "I hadn't thought about it," the young man said. "Not too easy for you to get a job on any of the Berlin papers, after that stunt, probably," said Tassen. "But you might get some free-lance work. Do a feature on your experiences in Elektra -- why not?" He stood up, took a card from his surcoat pocket. "Here's my address. If I can be any help -- " With a cheerful wave, he was gone. On the following day, the young man remembered the fruit from Brecht's Planet, and decided to open it before it should spoil. The greenish-yellow rind was quite thin; inside was a rather sickly-looking yellow pulp. Julia ate a slice and pronounced it interesting. The young man, however, took one bite and immediately spat it out: the pulp was soft and unpleasant, with a distinct rancid flavor. The disappointment was so acute that he mourned for days. The good weather lasted until October; then it turned blustery and cold, with snow and occasional flurries of sleet. On an evening in late November, the young man entered the bar of the Correspondents' Club. He stood for a moment, shaking melted snow from his hat. The long mahogany bar was half deserted; the hooded bar lights were reflected in the mirrors, and the little green telephone lights glowed down the bar. Emile, the bartender, a redfaced Saxon, raised an eyebrow in greeting as the young man approached. "Good evening, Herr Naumchik. We haven't seen you in some time." "No, I've been in Westphalia, Emile. Give me a double Long John." "Yes, sir." Emile reached behind him for the bottle, poured a glass brimming full. He leaned nearer to remark, "There was a call for you earlier, Herr Naumchik. A lady." "Oh? Did she give her name?" "No, sir. If she calls again, shall I say you are here?" The young man reflected. "Might as well. I wonder who it is, Nina? Olga? What sort of a looking woman was she, Emile?" he asked, but the stout bartender had already moved away and was cupping an ear toward another customer. "Hello, Naumchik, when did you get in?" A tall man wearing tweeds and a Tyrolean hat edged in beside him at the bar. He spoke in a thick English accent. By a short leash he held a slim, silkenhaired greyhound with great mournful eyes. The dog nudged his cold nose into the young man's palm. "Oh, hello, Potter." The young man slapped absently at the dog's muzzle. "Just this morning. Down, Bruno. Should have been two o'clock last night, but we were stacked up five hours over Templehof." "Terrible weather," said Potter. "Anything to that regeneration story?" "No, it was a frost, but I got a couple of columns out of it anyway. You look all right. I heard you'd broken your arm at Riga." "No, that was Merle," said the man, motioning with his chin to a corner table, where a blonde young woman sat with one arm in a sling. She lifted her glass and smiled. "Oh, too bad," said the young man, returning the gesture. "It's all right. Makes her more manageable. Sometimes I wish they'd all break their arms, or legs, or something." A perspiring young man in black came by and clutched the Englishman's arm. "Look here, Potter, do you know where I can find Johnny Ybarra?" "No, no idea -- have you tried the brothels?" "All of them?" asked the sweating man despairingly over his shoulder as he hurried out. "Hello, Naumchik," he added just before he disappeared. Emile, who had been speaking into the hooded telephone at the end of the bar, looked up and raised his eyebrows. The young man nodded. Emile pressed a key, and the handset in front of the young man lighted up. "Excuse me, Donald. Hello -- oh, it's you, Julia!" The tiny face in the screen looked up at him with a smile. "How lucky to catch you, Martin! I called just on the chance of finding -- Can you come for dinner?" "Let me think. Yes -- no, confound it, I've got to have dinner with Schenk. I'm sorry, Julia, I forgot." "It's a pity. I'd love to see you, Martin." She looked up at him wistfully. "So would I. Maybe I could meet you somewhere tomorrow for cocktails..." The young man reflected that although Julia was a bit old for him, and he had no intention of starting that up all over again, still there was no getting around the fact that he had many pleasant memories of that little flat on the Heinrichstrasse, where he had written his first story on Julia's little portable --  Was Elektra's Climbing Enigma, by Martin Naumchik. How proud they had both been when they saw it printed in the paper! Everything since had stemmed from that... "How is Churchill?" "I had to give him away, Martin. He was becoming so surly; he bit a good friend of mine." "Too bad. But you still have Maggie?" "Yes, Maggie is fine." Down the bar, three men in plastic surcoats were tossing coins into a metal tub which stood before a stereo of a plump young woman in Bavarian peasant costume. Each time a coin fell into the tub, the girl turned slowly around and lifted her skirts, displaying her bare bottom; each time this happened, the three men burst into roars of coarse laughter. Potter touched him on the shoulder and mouthed, "Goodby;" the young man turned, waved. "Well, Martin, do call me if you can." "Yes, I'll do that. Tomorrow, sometime in the afternoon. You're still at the Ministry?" "Still there." "Fine, I'll call you. Good-by." The pathetic face in the telephone screen winked out. Sighing with regret and relief, the young man replaced the handset. brown jacket took Potter's place at the bar. He had a bristly, unkempt mustache and protruding blue eyes, and somehow managed to look both innocent and dissolute. "Hello, Naumchik." "Hello, Wallenstein." The plump man signaled to the bartender. "Emile, a Black Wednesday. Listen, Naumchik, you may be just the man I want. You know Kohler, the fellow who runs that string of provincial weeklies?" "Yes, what about him?" "Well, it's ridiculous -- I owe the man a favor -- I promised I'd cover that Zoo story for him tomorrow. Then what should plush assignment in Oslo. Two months, all expenses, best hotels. Well, I mean to say! But I've got to leave in the morning or it's no go. You wouldn't mind, would you, Naumchik -- take you just half an hour -- I'd even throw in a bit out of my own pocket." "Hold on a minute, I've lost you. What Zoo story?" "Oh, one of their bipeds has given birth, and Kohler wants to play it up for the farm audience. What do you say?" "Well, I suppose there's no reason -- " the young man began, then suddenly stopped. What a curious sensation! Out of the depths of his memory floated the picture of a two-legged creature scrabbling against the glass wall of a cage, while he, outside in the cold air, looked with amazement at his pink, five-fingered hands. How odd. It was the first time in months he had even thought of it. "Well? It's agreed?" "No, on second thought, I don't believe it would be advisable," said the young man. "Not advisable? What do you mean? Come on, old fellow, I'll put in ten of my own on top of Kohler's twenty -- now how's that?" Naumchik drained his glass quickly, set it down. "No, I'm sorry," he said. "I've just remembered, I've got to be somewhere else tomorrow." He clapped the plump young man on the back. "Well, you'll find someone, I'm sure. So long, Wallenstein. The plump man pouted at him. "Well, then, if you want to be a bastard." "I do," said Martin Naumchik cheerfully. "Aren't we all? Keep it clean, old man." He walked out, whistling. On the threshold he paused to breathe deep. The snow had stopped. The stars were crystal bright over the roofHis colony was doomed, yet the people were unafraid. He could not understand -- and never would! I the hills and passed across the field. The white foliage rippled and swirled. Nathaniel Beverage stood waist deep in the midst of the gleaming, pointed leaves and watched the ebb and flow of the plant-waves. The setting sun was at his back, but the white leaves were blinding even through the dark green filter he wore. Round spots, slick and shiny, dotted the dead whiteness of the leaves. Whenever the sun caught one just right it flashed with the brightness of a speck of hellfire. Beverage squinted against He grunted. Soon the shiny spots on each leaf would grow and fuse together to cover the entire leaf, and it would be time for the harvest. He turned and looked into the sun. Far down the valley, as far as the eye could see, stretched the shimmering whiteness, reaching between the hills like a restless glacier. In the middle distance the whiteness took on a bluish cast from the ozone, and Beverage gauged its itensity with a practiced eye. He grunted again. The ozone was high, despite the wind. Must be six-seven the fields. The plants were ripening fast; harvest would be sooner than anyone had expected. He felt a rasping at the base of his throat, and instinctively he squeezed his mask. It was dry. He knew he ought not to be here in the croplands without a field mask. Some ozone was getting through. He turned and began to walk the half mile across the field, moving slowly, not breathing deeply. The irritation in his mind began to match the irritation in his throat. Tomorrow the rocket from Earth was due, and Radmuck would be on it. Beverage felt again the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he thought of Radmuck. Why was the man coming? Did he know something? He tried to turn his mind to more pleasant things, but he couldn't think of them. He knew how it would be when he got back to the Crushing Plant and told them that the harvest in this field would be sooner than expected. They would ask how he knew, and he would have to explain. Everywhere it was the same, back on Earth and here on Iros. A man could not merely do the right thing or say the right thing, he also had to explain it. People insisted on talking so much. Beverage was a man whose tongue could never keep up with his mind, and so he said what had to be said, and did not try to say any more. He knew that he was disliked for his reticence. of the field and climbed the gentle slope. At the door of the Crushing Plant he turned to look over the field. The ozone concentration where he stood was down to a normal # parts per million. He looked out over the gray and white landscape. Toward his left, along the forward slope of the hill, stretched a long row of processing domes, ending in the great Conveyor Dome from which the conveyor belt snaked up and over the crest of the hill toward the next valley where the landing field was. To his right stood the storage sheds flanked by row upon row of the huge harvesters. Beverage took a deep breath, and felt better. This was his doing, all this, and he was content. He had done the right thing in bringing all this about and neither Radmuck nor anyone else could change that. With a last proud look around Beverage turned and went through the outer door. Stepping up to the inner door he leaned against it to overcome the slight positive pressure inside the dome. The door suddenly gave way and he quickly walked through the outrushing current of air and allowed the door to slam shut behind him. He glanced at the big crusher rolls looming over him, and saw what was about to happen. The words formed in his mind, but he was unable to call out. So he stood, helplessly, and watched. Perched up on top of the highest roll, twenty feet from the floor, sat Hal Close, carefully repairing a crack in the roll. Frank Jepp crouched behind the control board, reaching around from behind it, constantly glancing up at Close to assure himself that he wasn't seen. Just as Beverage entered, Jepp got the safety latch off, leaped around in front of the board and, with a shout of "Watch yourself, Hal," spun the rheostat that started the rolls. Close, up on the top roll, barely had time to jump to his feet as the great rolls started to turn under him. He began to run to maintain his position. The rolls revolved faster. A high-pitched yell -- a residue of Close's Virginia upbringing -- burst from his throat and he began that mad ride down the top rolls that Beverage had heard about but never seen. Flat on his stomach now, Close swiftly flowed down the top of the huge crusher, bridging the gaps between the rolls with his outstretched hands, and now and then repeating that piercing rebel yell. A hundred yards down the machine, just beyond the last roll, was a transverse supporting bar. Close launched himself at it, dangled for a moment, dropped to the belt beneath him, and rolled off onto his feet on the floor. He ambled back to the head of the crusher and said to Jepp, "Well, now, that was right neighborly of you to give me a lift off." Jepp grinned up at Close. "Man, I never saw you move so fast in your life. You're coming along, boy. You're coming along. How about it, Doc?" This last to Beverage. "Think the squirt here is growing up?" The "squirt" stood six feet five in his stocking feet and was made out of whipcord and whalebone. Close happened to be the youngest man in the colony -- a bare twenty-two, twenty years younger than Beverage -- and the others never let him forget it. Close said, "Squirt, huh?" And he snapped out an open hand in a straight-arm lunge that caught Jepp on the shoulder. Jepp tumbled backwards to the floor. He slid to a halt and, from a position flat on his back, snapped out with both legs and landed lightly on his feet. He whirled, poised to leap at Close, a broad grin on his face. utter the words to call a halt to all this, but things had been happening too fast; he was not the kind of man who could yell. Even now, with the immediate prospect of a rough-and-tumble mock fight confronting him, he was unable to frame the words that would stop it. Instead he stepped between the two men and raised a hand, palm outward, toward each. Close and Jepp laughed, joyous laughs ringing with physical exuberance. They came down from the balls of their feet and walked over to Beverage. Close clapped him on the back with what was meant to be a light-hearted pat, but it almost knocked him down. Close said, "Okay, Doc. I'll fix him later. Everything under control?" Beverage had been trying to enunciate a protest against Close's blow, but the question reminded him why he had come in here in the first place. "Oh, yes," he said in his slow way. "Number two field is ripening ahead of schedule." He paused. "It ought to be ripe in a day or two. The crusher here -- " He waved at the towering machine. Before he could finish the sentence, Jepp broke in. "Ripe in a day or two, huh? What do you know. How'd you figure that, Doc?" Beverage was annoyed. He considered whether to finish his sentence or to reply to Jepp's question. At the same time another part of his mind raced on ahead, ticking off all the things that had to be done to insure a proper and speedy harvest. A myriad of details had to be watched over. The precipitation unit needed checking. There was premature precipitation. Probably inadvertent seeding; probably that lowest elbow in the feed line had collected a tiny nest of crystals, got to flush it out. Then there was... "Aw, Doc can tell just by looking at it." It was Close. "That's how you do it, isn't it, Doc? Just by looking at it?" Beverage shook his head. "No. No, I can tell from the ozone concentration in the air above the fields. It is quite a bit higher than normal." He prepared to explain that the normal blue cast to the atmosphere of Iros became even deeper as the photosynthetic process reached a maximum and the release of ozone by the plants increased, particularly in the vicinity of the fields. But even as his tongue began to form the words, Beverage knew he would never be able to make it. This inability to talk swiftly was what separated him from the others. These people seldom remained silent long enough to listen; they must always be talking or doing something violent. None had the patience to listen to a man whose speech was careful and methodical. He was apart. Close was talking, as Beverage knew he would. "Well, that's looking at it, or smelling it. Same thing really. That's 'bout the only way a man can tell." "Sure," said Jepp. He glanced at the mask at Beverage's belt. "He wasn't wearing a field mask out in the field. That's how he smelled it, right through the mask." There it was, and Beverage felt the familiar sense of frustration build up. They had caught him, again, not obeying the rules. They might not be particularly well-trained technically, but they certainly were quick witted. Young, strong, keen people in the odd atmosphere of Iros, and they seemed to grow younger, stronger and keener. There was a biological problem here that merited study some day. Possibly the breathing of so much ozone in lieu of oxygen... Close said, "Well, we don't worry none about Doc. He knows what he's doing. He wants to wear a general mask out in the fields, he wears it. Nobody's to tell him no." "Oh, sure," said Jepp. "He knows what he's doing." And the two young men stood nodding at each other. Beverage finally finished his sentence. "The crusher here ought to be ready to go by tomorrow morning." "Don't worry about a thing, Doc. It will be. Just so this midget here -- " Close nodded at the six-foot Jepp -- "doesn't try to run me through the rolls every five minutes. I'll get right back on it." He turned to leave, but then turned back and said, "Say, Doc. I almost forgot. They want you over at Extraction Number # dome. They got some kind of a meeting going on over there." Beverage said, "What is the meeting for?" "Doctor Radmuck called ahead and wants to talk to the whole colony as soon as he lands tomorrow. Everybody's wondering what's up." Beverage considered what might happen at the meeting, knowing that he could no nothing to stop any uproar. A wise man knows his own limitations, and Beverage was a wise man. In a rousing shouting-type argument he could never get a point across, never persuade. Slowly he turned to go to the meeting, wondering what he should do after he got there. IItaside from the path traversing the side of the hill, and headed for the crest. He felt the need for refreshment of the spirit, and he knew he could find it at the crest. On the crest he looked down into the next valley at the flat and packed gray soil of the landing field. Tomorrow there would be another glossy fused patch to join the others that marred the even gray surface. Beverage hoped it would not be the last. From that field had gone hundreds of shipments of the anticholesterol moiety. The drug fraction went back to Earth to be fed into the maws of the chemical reactors. Out of the reactors came the newest and best of the anti-cholesterol drugs, enough for the requisite one gram a month for every person on Earth over the age of twentyfive years. With it, the veins and arteries remained open and supple, free of the rigid deposits that had stiffened the vessel walls and throttled the vessel openings. The blood pulsed unimpeded to the brain and the muscles and the organs,easily supplying the four corners of the body with the stuff of tissues. To what end? Beverage shook his head. To the end that man might live longer. A man lived strong and fruitful for an average of # years. But all mortal things must die. There came a time in this extended existence when the human fat became so depleted that it could no longer serve as a storehouse for the anti-cholesterol drug. The guardian concentration in the bloodstream disappeared suddenly. The organs continued their unheeding production of cholesterol. Quickly the body became clotted and glutted with crystals of cholesterol, and it was over. So accurately predictable was the time of death that one could neatly arrange for a last round of farewell parties, parties at which the man of # and the man of # were physically indistinguishable, save, perhaps, for the air of detachment and reserve on the part of the older man. Beverage turned away from the landing field and stared out over the far-flung array of lowlying rounded hills. Everywhere the gray soil was dotted with grayish-white patches of natural vegetation. The setting sun was perched squarely on the horizon, yet the land was darker than one would expect. No sharp shadows appeared anywhere and there was none of the usual orange colors that went with sunset on Earth. The sight was stimulating to Beverage, and the familiar exultant feeling welled through him. In one movement he swept the mask from his face and shook his head to free it from the feeling of the straps. This was where men belonged, out on alien soil seeking new ways to adapt and change and expand throughout the Universe, not sitting on the home planet and breeding into stultification. Beverage felt the sting in his eyes and the bite in his nose and throat. He breathed shallowly to prevent the ozone from penetrating deep into his lungs. Often he had moments of doubt about how he had brought this about but when he stood here like this the doubt washed away. This was his doing, this colony. Men could live here and make their existence worth while, even enjoy it. And all because of the early work of the young chemist, Nathaniel Beverage. "I think you better try to hire him, even if he did just get out of school. Look here. His doctoral dissertation is entitled, Duplication of the Photosynthetic Process in toto. Make him an offer, anyway. His name is Nathaniel Beverage." "This fellow Beverage has certainly come up with some new ideas in three months time. Give him a couple of assistants so he can chase them down." "I don't care if he has only been on the project for six months. He's done more with those Iros specimens than anyone else around here in two years. Give him the title, too: manager of the Extraterrestrial Compound Division." "Come in, Doctor Radmuck. I have good news for you. You are being promoted to the Board of Directors of the National Space Survival Institute, effective immediately. I'm sure you will... What? Oh, the new project director here will be Doctor Beverage. Yes, I know he's young. Yes, I know he's only been on Project Longevity for a year and a half. Yes, I know he has trouble making speeches. Yes, but... just look at how much he has accomplished." "... and so we meet here in Stockholm on an exceedingly special occasion. For the first time since the institution of the Prizes, the awards for chemistry and for physiology and medicine are being given simultaneously to the same man. The human race need never again fear the effects of the anti-cholestrial drugs, thanks to Doctor Nathaniel Beverage. So it is with grateful hearts that we..." "I hate to see you do it, Nathaniel. I can't help feeling that we need you here on Earth. But on the other hand, you are right when you say that we can put the anti-cholesterol drug out sooner if you are with the new colony. Another thing, I am certain that I will have an easier job of persuading the United Nations to put up all that money if you are going to be in charge of the technology at the Iros colony. So I guess you're right; as long as we have to grow that fraction of the drug on Iros, we need you there. Bless you, and let me wish you..." crest of the hill, picking his footing carefully among the tough white shrubs that grew wild there. He walked beneath the giant solar mirror, and he paused to watch it as it extracted the last waning fragments of heat from the setting sun. The glow of the boiler faded as he watched. His feet moved slower and slower as he drew closer to Extraction Number # dome, and he reluctantly went through the outer door. Inside the pressure lock he stripped off his mask and stood motionless listening to the rumble of loud voices coming through the inner door. It was easy to tell that the discussion had already started; in fact it was in full swing. Briefly he considered replacing his mask and returning to his quarters, but he knew from experience that that was no solution; they would simply transfer the discussion to his quarters, and then he would never get them out. With a sigh that was too deep for the ozone-rich air -- it burned his throat -- he leaned his weight against the inner door and forced it open. The rumble of voices turned into a roar, but then all were suddenly silent as one voice called out, "Hey, here's Doc. Ask him. Go on, just ask him." Two figures detached themselves from the edge of the crowd and swung to Beverage's side. Gently but swiftly they hustled him into the center of the surging group, and one of them said, "You tell us, Doc. What's Radmuck got on his mind?" Beverage was amazed at their acuity. Not only did they sense that something was very wrong, but they came to him for an explanation. They had hit on the one person who could tell them of the probable disaster that would follow Radmuck's visit. But as long as there was any chance at all that Radmuck might be coming on an innocuous matter, Beverage had to keep silent. The man said again, "What's it all about, Doc?" Beverage said, "I don't know. I don't know." The man shrugged and turned away. "Well, if you're not worried, don't see why we should be. Guess there's no use getting all stewed up about nothing. Let's go back to work." He walked off. Beverage wondered if he should say something to prepare them for what might happen. But he didn't know what was best, and they were all walking away. A voice said beside him, "Are you sure there isn't something you should tell us, Nathaniel?" Beverage turned and saw Ursula Doddard. He started to say hello to her but he felt his face flush, and the words choked him. Then he realized she had asked a question. He shook his head. She said, "I see. Well, I hope everything is all right." She shook her head, tilting it back as she did so. She wore her hair long, unlike most of the other girls in the colony. It was a glowing brown, and as she shook her hair the red highlights in its flashed and gleamed in the light from the overhead bulb. Beverage was interested in the flashing effect. He had noted it before. He wondered what caused it. Possibly the natural hair oils tended to concentrate at a region a certain length from the follicle, resulting in areas of excess oil which naturally reflected... "Are you going to do anything to get ready for tomorrow?" asked Ursula Doddard. "What? Oh, yes." Suly Doddard was at it again. Always seemed to be suggesting things for him to do. She was a pretty girl, round where the others were lean, and she did not walk as much like a man. Beverage liked to be near her, except that she always seemed to suggest things for him to do. As if he did not know what had to be done. Furthermore, he always felt a little uncomfortable in her presence, except that now and then when she was quiet she seemed to understand that he wanted to think, and he was content. Now, though, he felt irritated; she was picking at him again. her arm and smoothed the hair at the back of her neck. The sleeves of her coverall were pushed up above the elbow. Her bare right forearm glowed in the light, and on the underside of her forearm Beverage could see a quarterinch brown wart. Instantly all his irritation vanished. One little blemish perched on an otherwise perfect and completely feminine forearm, and Beverage unaccountably felt his heart warm to her. Because of that minor imperfection he felt that he was on equal footing with her. He need not be concerned with his own shortcomings; after all, she too was marred. He felt expansive and completely at ease. "Suly," he said. "I don't know what will happen tomorrow, but whatever it is, we can't let it have any effect on the colony. This is a good life and we don't want to ruin it. Men belong on planets like this. Earth is beginning to stagnate. I'm convinced that the future of men lies in colonies like this one. If we continue to send the anti-cholesterol drug back to Earth we will be... By the way. The Main Valley will be ready to harvest in a day or two. It's running a good week ahead of schedule. Can't understand it, either, unless that new fertilizer I tried had something to do with it. Maybe that was a good idea at that. Used metal filings, you see, with sodium chloride. Small scale tests indicated that the ozone would form an active oxide which would react with sodium chloride and form a soluble metallic chloride. Then the sodium would keep the soil alkaline. By golly, that must be it." And Beverage plopped his right fist into his right hand, nodding, smiling. Gradually, he became conscious of the fact that Ursula was watching him, wide-eyed. He dropped his hands to his side and looked at her, and flushed. She said softly, "I love it when you talk like that, Nathaniel. Tell me some more about it, please." Beverage smiled and got ready to speak again. But then he remembered something. Ursula Doddard was a mechanic. She maintained the pumps used for the heated alkaline water sprays that removed the ozone from the domes. She was not a chemist. She could not understand what he was talking about. The realization threw him into confusion. He began to back away, saying as he went, "I've, uh, got to go. I, uh... Good-by." He turned and ran out the lock. He was twenty yards out into the atmosphere before the bite in his eyes and throat reminded him to put on his mask. Beverage stood still while he waited for the smarting in his eyes to go away. It was dark, and the landscape appeared ghostly in the dim starlight. The plantfilled valley below him looked more than ever like a rippling river of snow. Overhead the stars gleamed faintly against the black sky, waxing and waning in a period of twinkling appreciably greater than that seen from Earth. The gentle slope on which Beverage stood was a looming blackness broken with vague patches of gray where the white stands of vegetation grew. Higher on the slopes were the glowing domes, looking like taut bubbles about to burst and spew their contents into the atmosphere. Beverage felt at ease as he looked at them. He looked his fill, then he went up to his own dome to bed. and Beverage was soon up and out in it. At the Mess dome the talk was all about the early harvest in the main field and the ship arrival. People kept asking Beverage about the early harvest. He found himself constantly answering hosts of trivial questions: What made the field ripen so fast, Doc? How can you tell just by looking at it, Doc? Will it be a good crop, Doc? How do you know? Things began to happen fast after breakfast. The harvesting crews moved down into the main field with the great combines. Other crews moved to the landing field and began the job of bringing down the incoming ship. Beverage joined the later groups, and watched the ship come down. Bringing the ship in was a tricky operation on Iros. The technique called for the bare minimum of operational time for the braking jets, for the high ozone content of the atmosphere chewed away at the ceramic lining of the jet exhausts. The trick was to get the ship on the ground before the liners were consumed, otherwise the exposed metal quickly took fire and burned out. Every space ship required a new set of liners after every landing and take-off in the Irosian atmosphere. The ship put down safely. Radmuck was the first one out. He was a thin man with a little mustache, and he walked with his head thrust out in front of him. His eyes darted over the waiting people and he quickly spotted Beverage. He walked to him immediately and held out his hand and said loudly, "Well, Nathaniel, how have you been? Are you waiting anxiously to see what I have to tell you?" Radmuck deliberately asked two questions in the same breath. He knew Beverage well. Beverage considered which question to answer. He began to form the words regarding his health, but changed his mind when he realized that Radmuck did not really care. He then said, "No, I..." But Radmuck had turned away and was talking with Sanchez standing nearby. He heard Radmuck ask about the meeting, and he heard Sanchez explain that it had been called for right after lunch. Beverage shook hands with Captain Pike as he came off the ship, and then walked away to do the things that had to be done. The next few hours went by swiftly for Beverage. The earlyripening plants retained their juices more tenaciously than had the normal plants. As a result the crusher was not obtaining its normal yield of juice, and the residues were wetter than usual. Beverage solved the dilemma by adding # per cent of the butyronitrile solvent at the crusher instead of holding it all back for the extractor. The solvent-treated residues then went into the butyronitrile extraction units already wet with the solvent, and this increased extraction efficiency. Beverage was checking out the operation of the great extraction units when someone tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go to the meeting. when he entered and everybody was talking at once. Ursula Doddard pushed her way to his side and sat down. Hal Close burst in through the door behind Beverage, stood with his head thrown back, and emitted a piercing rebel yell. It was so loud inside the dome that it hurt Beverage's ears. Others responded to it with weaker imitations, some clapped hands, others laughed. Beverage felt sick, unable to respond to the holiday feeling generated by the gathering of the colony. The sick feeling became worse for Beverage as he realized his own incompetence and inability to deal with the developing situation. Ursula Doddard saw his face. She put a hand on his arm and asked, "What is the matter, Nathaniel? Are you all right?" Beverage nodded, not able to form words. Sanchez walked into the mess dome followed by Radmuck. Sanchez looked solemn. He walked to the center of the dome and stood motionless, obviously waiting for silence. The rumble of conversation in the dome cut off suddenly at the unusual conduct; Sanchez normally would have roared for silence, but he did not do so now. In the dead quiet Sanchez said, "Doctor Radmuck has something to say to us. I suggest you listen closely." Radmuck wasted no words. "We know just how to synthesize the anti-cholesterol fraction now. Earth doesn't need Iros any more. There won't be any more shipments from here; they'll make it on Earth." He looked around and smiled. The silence continued for a moment, and then after looking at each other, the seated people broke into a low buzz of conversation. Radmuck's eyes sought and found Beverage, and for a moment they stared at each other. It was Henry Jansen who raised his voice and asked the question: "Who was the bright boy that found out how to make it? Where's he been all these years?" Beverage picked up his coffee cup and drained it; he knew what was coming next. Radmuck stared at Beverage a moment longer and then said, still in that low voice. "The process for making the fraction has been known for a long time, only it was kept a secret." "What?" It was Sanchez. "You mean that somebody knew how to make the stuff all along, yet they let us come out here and set up a whole colony to grow it?" "Yes. Seems somebody left an envelope with the Boston Trust Company. On it was written 'To be opened in the event that the anti-cholesterol drug raised on the planet Iros becomes unavailable to Earth', or something like that. Inside was the complete description of how to synthesize the fraction. It was opened accidentally. It took a while to prove. But it's done now, and they don't need Iros any more." "Who was it?" Now that the time had come Beverage felt no sensation whatsoever. He was startled to find that his mind was clear and calm; there was none of the emotional upheaval he had expected. He could even be interested in what the response of his friends was going to be. Radmuck said, "Nathaniel Beverage," and there was no longer anything to be concerned about. B everage sat toying with his empty coffee cup. The silence, which had been heavy before, now became overpowering. There was no need for Beverage to look up; he felt all eyes on him as if he sat under the heat of a thousand spotlights. Although he felt no inner turmoil, he was disturbed by what he was convinced was the cold chill of hostility that filled the room. Radmuck went out the door. The dome stayed quiet. "Would you like some more coffee, Nathaniel?" said Ursula. "No, thank you." "I'll just get you some anyway. It'll be good for you." She went into the back, threading her way among the silent people, and soon she returned with a cup of steaming black coffee. "Now sip this, and you'll feel better." Beverage nodded and touched the scalding fluid to his lips. He put the cup down and said quietly, "Thank you, Suly. Thank you for behaving as if nothing has happened. "Why, there's nothing to thank me for, Nathaniel. I thought you might want Some one to talk to while you think about what you have to do to keep the colony going." Beverage stared at her. "Keep the colony going? Me?" "Certainly. You'll think of something. Now drink your coffee." Beverage did as he was told; the coffee scalded all the way down, and he choked on the heat of it. Ursula watched him, and he found that he was annoyed at her seeing him in such undignified straits. His face must have reflected his annoyance because she suddenly got up and said, "Well, you think about it, Nathaniel. I'll stop over and see you later." Beverage watched her walk out, feeling alone among all the others, wishing that he could call out and ask her to stay. She turned at the door to wave at him, and the simple gesture unaccountably made him feel warm and good. He waved back and watched her trim figure tighten as she tugged at the inner door. She flashed a smile just before the door slammed shut, and Beverage leaned back feeling at peace with the world. He sat wrapped in himself, estranged from his companions of many years, yet he felt pleased and at ease. Keep the colony going, she had said. Well, now, there was a problem. The only solution, obviously, was to find something that would keep the Earth ships coming to Iros, at least until the colony became self sufficient... Wups. How about that ozonized alloy? He had not thought about that in a couple of years, but it might be... He got up and walked past the quiet people and went straight to his laboratory and rummaged through his sample storage cabinets. He found a one foot square sheet of a thin metallic substance. He tucked it under one arm, and took the long walk to the space ship. He went up to the watch officer, handed him the sheet, and said, "Give this to Captain Pike. Tell him to test it, tensile strength, elongation, flexibility, abrasive resistance, everything. Give it the works. Understand?" The officer nodded. Beverage returned to his laboratory and began thumbing through his notebooks. He began to grow sleepy, so he stretched out on the cot and fell sound asleep. He slept all night, waking just before dawn. He continued working his way through the notebooks. He had not finished when Ursula came in. #T ET'S GO have some breakfast, Nathaniel," she said. 'This will be a big day, and you must have something to eat." He nodded absently. "Yes, by all means." She half led him out of the dome. He put on his mask automatically and trudged to the Mess dome like one asleep. He and Ursula sat at a table, and it took only a moment for him to realize that no one greeted him. The coldness hurt Beverage. Plaintively he looked around, but none would meet his eyes. The quietness distressed him now; he realized with surprise that he missed the usual hullaballoo that accompanied everything his friends did. He noticed Close and Jepp sitting side by side at the table across from him. He couldn't be certain, but it seemed as if Close were guardedly watching him while seeming not to. He nodded and smiled at Close, but Close took no notice. Dejectedly Beverage turned to the food Ursula had placed in front of him and began to eat. It was tasteless in his mouth. Halfway through the meal Captain Pike burst in and stood just inside the door and looked around the room. He saw Beverage and swooped toward him. "Nathaniel! Where did you get this?" He dropped in front of Beverage the remnants of the metallic sheet that Beverage had delivered to the watch officer. It was smaller; strips had been sawed from it and holes had been punched in it. Beverage looked up. "I made it." "You made... How?" "Put a silicon dioxide wash on a nickel steel, heated it to i n . candescence and air-quenched it." The captain stared at him. "Can you do it again?" "Certainly." "Do you know what you've got here?" Beverage permitted himself a smile. "Yes, I do." "Do you? Just listen to this." The captain pulled a sheet of paper out of a pocket and read, "Tensile strength at room temperature, # pounds per square inch; at # degrees C. it's # pounds per square inch. The stuff has a Young's modulus at # degrees C. of lus of rigidity is three-quarters of impact test and broke the hammer. The elastic ratio is one. Elongation at yield is # per cent. Good heavens, man, what is this stuff?" Beverage said, "It's a new alloy." The captain stared at him. Behind him Beverage was vaguely aware that Close had expelled his breath and said in a booming whisper to Jepp, "Great day in the morning, he's done it already. Pay me." And Jepp rammed an elbow into Close's ribs. The captain said, "Can you make a lot of this?" "I don't know why not. Any structural nickel steel having a yield point of about # pounds per square inch will do for a starting material. We've got lots of sand here, and lots of atmosphere. The solar mirror ought to supply plenty of heat. That's all we need." Sanchez appeared at the captain's side and said, "This something you think they can use on Earth, Harry?" "My god, yes! There's nothing like this on Earth. The technical boys will go wild. Only..." he turned to Beverage, "Why can't they make this on Earth if you tell them how? Or have you already told them?" Beverage considered which question he should answer first. "No, I haven't told them." He stopped to formulate his thoughts on the next question. The captain said, "But the steps you outlined are simple; they can carry them out on Earth too." Ursula said, "Will you be quiet and let him talk?" The captain's mouth fell open. Beverage took no notice of the exchange. He said, "You forget there is a difference between the air of Earth and the air of Iros." The captain's mouth stayed open. "Ozone," he said. Bqyerage nodded. "Yes, ozone, When we heat a silica-covered sheet of steel here, and airquench it, most of it burns away. What's left is a mixture of metallic silicates and oxides that I haven't been able to identify. The rate of heat loss on cooling is important too. I haven't been able to duplicate it in a chamber; only an open-air quench will do it. They might be able to duplicate the process on Earth, but I don't know how at the moment." "Then," said Sanchez loudly, "we're in business again." IV turmoil. Loud and piercing over the noise came the rebel yell, and Beverage revelled in it. Things were back to normal. Only the captain stood silent and morose in the midst of the racket, biting his lower lip. Gradually his somberness spread, and soon they were quiet again, looking at him. As soon as it was quiet enough to speak he said, "Look, I hate to throw cold water on this, but I don't see how it's going to work." "Why not?" said Sanchez. "The Doc says he can do it, and if he says so he can." The captain shook his head. "It's not that. It's the weight problem. This may be the hottest alloy ever seen, but it isn't a matwork long hours, we can do it.' ter of life and death the way the drug was. These ships can only carry about eleven tons of payload. The cost will be so high it won't be worth it, even for an alloy like this." Beverage started to say something, but Sanchez said, "Aw, come on, Harry. They won t pay for a thing like this?" Ursula said, "Will you two shut up and let Nathaniel speak?" This time Nathaniel fully realized that she had interceded for him. To his surprise he liked it. Right in front of everybody he said to her, "Thank you, Suly." She reached out and patted his hand, and he squeezed it. Then he turned to the captain and said, "Your ship is sheathed with half-inch nickel steel. If we take off the sheathing and treat it by this process and then put it back, you'll have one-sixth inch plates that are far stronger than your half inch plates now; that'll save a lot of weight. Also, you did not mention earlier that the density of this alloy is about # grams per cubic centimeter, just about half that of your present sheathing. The weight saving per ship is about # tons. The old sheathing weighed # tons while the new weighs only # tons. So you can take back to Earth # tons of the alloy as the sheathing. We ought to be able to find places aboard the ship to store the other # tons, plus the eleven tons payload you had in the first  place. It all comes down to the fact that you can carry # tons I of the alloy back with you; that's over # times your original payload. Think that might be economical?" The captain had followed Beverage's figures, and he replied by sticking out his hand and seizing Beverage's; he shook the hand and nodded his head at the same time. He stepped back, threw his arms up in the air and said, "That's it, man, that's it. That's the answer to all your problems. I'll put a call in to Earth and have the other ships come on here for the treatment. Can you handle them?" "Yes," said Beverage, "if everyloud noise from the assembled men and women in the dome. The captain said, "Why stop with the sheathing? Why can't you treat the entire framework -- right through the whole ship?" Beverage said, "We can, but the ship's design ought to be changed; there's no sense continuing a design meant for heavy sheathing and unyielding frames. I've got a design for a new kind of space ship that is lighter, stronger, and faster than any we have now. I don't see why we can't build them here. There's plenty of iron and nickel here, although it is deep underground. I think we can go into the business of building better space ships." "Well," said Sanchez. "That's what we've been... Very good, Doc. Let's plan on that." Beverage nodded and began to form some words, but Sanchez turned to the captain and opened his mouth to speak. Ursula said, "Just a minute. Nathaniel hasn't finished speaking yet." Sanchez turned back with a guilty look, and said, "Oh, I'm sorry Doc. Shoot." "It is possible," said Beverage, "that they will be able to duplicate this process on Earth in a few years. If that happens we will find ourselves in the same posture we were in this morning. So I have some suggestions to make for our future activities." He stopped to clear his throat, and there were no interruptions. He noted that Ursula was listening intently, and he felt very much at ease. "I've been able to make a heterocyclic compound of carbon and indium. The free valences of the indium atom enter readily into polymerization reactions. The resulting plastics and elastomers can be used to make vehicular tires that won't wear out in a lifetime -- the old lifetime, that is. They also make the bet potting materials for transistors I've ever seen -- high heat dissipation and excellent mechanical ruggedness. The high molecular weight polymers are rigid and very light, and might even make better space-ship sheathing than the new alloy; we'd have to look into that. The reactions are carried out in liquid ozone, so Earth might have trouble duplicating them. Another thing. It turns out that helium subjected to hot liquid ozone under pressure becomes activated. I've been able to make a reaction product of helium and silicon dioxide. It looks just like glass but it's stronger -- quite a bit stronger, I might say. Also it absorbs a broad band of heat radiation and reemits it as electrical energy at the edges. I suspect that a sheet of the material is a single crystal, so it doubtless has some other interesting properties. It might make a good self-powered dome to live in on planets like this; there's always thermal radiation around. If we make fibers out of it and weave it into cloth ye might have a better kind of clothing, too." He stopped and frowned at the table top. "There's another thing. I've been able to introduce amine groups into cellulose molecules with one of the high-pressure ozone methods. I made a draw-down of the material and the resulting film seems to survive on living flesh. I dont know, though." He pulled up the right sleeve of his coverall, held up his right arm, and critically inspected the forearm in the light, turning it this way and that. "I tried it on myself and it seems to be working out. It's been on about two months now. It's a little shiny and there's no hair growing on it, but we may be able to take care of that. It might do for skin grafts." sat quietly, pursing his lips, wondering which project to mention next. The silence was thunderous. Sanchez finally shook his head and looked appealingly at Ursula. She took no notice, since she, like everyone else, was staring open-mouthed at Beverage. Sanchez shook his head again and said, "Well, yes, Doc. That is... That ought to tide us over for awhile." Beverage looked up as if about to speak, but he did not. "Well," said the captain. "We've got a lot of work to do. I guess we better get at it. I'll get my crew ready." He left. Beverage stood up and said, "Yes, I have a lot to do, too." He turned to Ursula. "Would you come out with me, Ursula? I would like to talk to you." She nodded and got up and followed him to the door; the others all stepped back to let them pass. Beverage stepped through the inner door, held it momentarily for Ursula, and then stepped into the outer chamber ahead of her. He raised his mask to put it on, but a strap caught under his nose. He pushed the mask straight out in front of his face, and there reflected in the facepiece he saw a tableau taking place behind him. Ursula had paused in the inner doorway, air streaming around b er Her left hand was raised toward the group in the dome, and the point of her forefinger met the point of her thumb, forming a circle. The other three fingers of her hand stuck straight up, and her wrist was bent back. In the brief flash in which he saw the scene Beverage saw every person in the dome respond by making the same sign to Ursula, some of them wagging their hands. Then she stepped through the door and let it slam. Beverage briefly wondered what it was all about, but immediately forgot it in the press of thinking of what he wanted to say to Ursula. , Outside, he said to her, "Suly, I'd like to ask you something. But I'd like to ask you from the crest of the hill. Will you go up there with me?" "Yes, Nathaniel. Yes." And she slipped an arm through his and hugged it. Quietly they walked toward the crest of the hill together. 'Nathaniel," she said as they approached the top. "Were you going to say something else back in there?" Yes, I was, Suly. But it can wait. The fourth planet of this system -- you know, Sulphos -- has an atmosphere of almost pure carbon disulphide. We might be able to do some interesting things there. I was going to ask if some of our people here would go there with me sometime, but I was afraid they'd say no. Do you think they would?" Yes, she said, "I think they would." the lonely man C W#y Selene Everyone knows the Moon is dead. Everyone is quite correct -- now! see Hatter's head jerk loose from the carefully weakened strap. As Hatter slumped unconscious he touched the hidden switch. A shock, then darkness. What first came to him out of the humming blackout mist was his own name : Marcusson. AI Marcusson, just turned sixteen that Saturday in June, that green-leafed day his father had called him out to the back yard. They had sat on discount-house furniture under the heavy maple, AI who wore jeans and sneakers and a resigned expression, his father who wore glasses, a sport shirt, slacks, eyelet shoes and a curious reckless smile, a smile that didn't belong in the picture. "Now you're sixteen, Al, there's something I have to tell you," his father had begun. "My father told me when I turned sixteen, and his father told him. First, the name of our family isn't Marcusson. It's Marcopoulos. Your name's Alexander Marcopoulos." "What? Dad, you must be kidding! Look, all the records..." "The records don't go back far enough. Our name was changed four generations back, but the legal records disappeared in the usual convenient courthouse fire. As far as anyone knows, our family's name's always been Marcusson. My grandfather went to Minnesota and settled among the Swedes there. Unlike most foreigners he'd taken pains to learn good English beforehand. And Swedish. He was good at languages." For a moment the out-of-place smile came back. "All our family is. Languages, math, getting along with people, seldom getting lost or confused. You better pay attention, Al. This is the only time I'm going to speak of our family, like my father. We never bothered much, by the way, about how our name was written. You can believe me or think I sat in the sun too long, but I'll tell you how our most famous relatives spelled it: Marco Polo." "Oh, now..." "Never mind what you think now. Besides, I won't answer any questions, anyway. My father didn't and he was right. I found out some things by myself later; you'll probably find out more. For example, the best job for us is still exploring. That's why I became an oil geologist, and it paid off. Another thing: learning the legends of the place you're in, if you take up exploring, can mean the difference between success and a broken neck. That's I a H, boy. Guess I'll get your mother some peonies for the supper table." Al Marcusson had gone up quietly to his room. Later, his special gift for languages and math got him through college and engineering school; his sense of direction and lack of inner-ear trouble helped to get him chosen for Astronaut training while he was in the Air Force. While in training at the Cape he had met and married a luscious brunette librarian in one of the sponge-fishing towns, a brunette with a rather complicated last name that became forgotten as she turned into Mrs. Marcusson, and unbeatable recipes for the most bewitching cocktails since Circe held the shaker for Ulysses. Marcusson's hobbies included scuba diving, electronic tinkering and reading. His psychiatrists noted a tendency to reserve, even secrecy, which was not entirely bad in a man who worked with classified material and had to face long periods of time alone. Besides, his ability to get along with people largely compensated. sciousness the last months of training swam in Al Marcusson's mind. The orbital flight -- the only part of it he'd really enjoyed was the quarter-hour ic beacon, cut off from Control and even from the rescue team just over the horizon, alone with the music of wind and sea. For the moon shot he'd been responsible for communications, recording and sensing systems inside the capsule, as Hatter had for the life-support systems and their two back-up men for propulsion and ground systems coordination respectively. He relived the maddening, risky business of the master switch to be secretly connected with the capsule's several brains and camouflaged. The strap to be weakened. Then the blind terror of launch when his pulse had topped #; blurred vision, clenched teeth, the suit digging into him, the brief relief of weightlessness erased by the cramped, terrifying ride filled with new sensations and endless petty tasks. The camera eye pitilessly trained on his helmet. The way things had of staying there when you'd put them away. On Earth -- already it was "On Earth," as if Earth was a port he'd sailed from -- you put things out of your mind, but here they bobbed before you still, like the good luck charm in its little leather bag, for instance, the charm his wife had tied to one of his fastener tabs and that kept dancing in the air like a puppet, jerking every time he breathed. Every time he breathed in the familiar sweat-plastic-chemicals smell, familiar because he'd been smelling it in training, in the transfer truck, in the capsule mock-up for months. ' All that should be new and adventurous had become stale and automatic through relentless training. His eyes rested on the color-coded meters and switches that were associated with nausea in the centrifuge tumbler-trainer. The couch made him think of long hours in the chlorinated pool -- he always used to come out with his stomach rumbling and wrinkled white fingers, despite the tablets and the silicone creams. His skin itched beneath the adhesive pads that held the prying electrodes to his body, itched like the salt and sand itch he felt after swimming between training bouts. It was still Florida air he breathed, but filters had taken out its oilfouled hot smell, its whiffs of canteen cooking, fish, seaweed and raw concrete in the sun. Hatter's and his own sing-song bit talk, so deliciously new to television audiences, rang trite in his own ears: a makeshift vocabulary, primer sentences chosen for maximum transmission efficiency to Control. The Control center he remembered from having watched orbital flights himself. Machines that patiently followed pulse rate, breathing, temperature. Squiggly lines, awkward computer handwriting, screens where dots jumped, screens that showed instrument panels, screens where his own helmet showed, and inside it the squirming blob that was his own face, rendered as a kind of rubberized black-andwhite tragic mask. He felt the metal ears turning, questing for signals, the little black boxes, miniaturized colossi tracking, listening, spewing tape. On the capsule itself -- all folded in like Japanese water flowers -- sensors, cameras, listeners, analyzers should have burgeoned on impact, shot up, reached out, grasped, retracted, analyzed, counted, transmitted. But he'd cut the switch. " wake. He set about freeing himself, a task comparable to getting a butterfly alive out of a spider web. Every creak of his suit and of the moulded couch sound loud and flat in the newly silent capsule. His breathing soughed about him. But no signal went out from the electrodes taped to his chest to say that his heart beat had again topped a hundred, that he sweated, that his stomach contracted -- even though he was under no gravity strain, the emergency cooling worked, and his latest no-crumbs, low-residue meal had been welcomed by the same stomach an hour earlier. He sat up. The port gave off a pale creamy glow. He leaneo forward and could see nothing except for a creamor eggshellcolored mist, even and opaque. He undid his glove-rings and took off his gloves. By the gleam of his wrist-light he checked whether Hatter was breathing correctly from his suit, visor down, and not the capsule's air, then put his gloves on again and bled the air slowly out. They were not supposed to leave the capsule, of course. Still the possibility of having to check or repair something had had to be considered and it was theoretically possible. He began the nerve-rasping egress procedure, through the narrow igloo-lock that seemed to extend painful claws and knobs to catch at every loop and fold of his suit. At last he gave a frantic wiggle and rolled free. Because of the dead switch, turning antennae circled in vain, pens stopped reeling out ink, screens stayed blank. The men in the control room activated emergency signals but got no triggered responses. Meanwhile, television reporters sent frantic requests for background material fillers, their "and now back to's" falling thick and fast. AI Marcusson bounced on a kind of lumpy featherbed two or three times before coming to rest in the same eggshell soup. Dust. Moon dust that had no particular reason for dropping back now cocooned the ship. He stood up with great care and staggered straight out, putting his feet down slowly to minimize dust puffs. The mist thinned and he rubbed the gloves against his visor and goggled. Cliffs, craters, spines, crests and jags stood there as in the photographs except for a curious staginess he realized came from the harsh footlights effect of the twilight zone they'd landed in and from the shorter horizon with its backdrop of old black velvet dusty with stars. But the colors! Ruby cliffs, surfaces meteorpitted in places to a rosy bloom, rose to pinnacles of dull jade that fell again in raw emerald slopes; saffron splashes of small craters punctuated the violet sponge of scattered lava, topaz stalagmites reared against sapphire crests, amethyst spines pierced agate ridges... and on every ledge, in every hollow, pale moondust lay like a blessing. When you were a kid, did you ever wake up at night in a Pullman berth and hear the snoring and looked at the moonwashed countryside knowing you only were awake and hugging the knowledge to yourself? Did you ever set off alone at dawn to fish or hunt and watch the slow awakening of trees? Did you ever climb the wall into an abandoned estate and explore the park and suddenly come upon a statue half-hidden in honeysuckle, a statue with a secret smile? AI Marcusson sat by himself on the twilight zone of the Moon and watched the sun shining through cloudy glass arches and throwing on moondust the same colored shadows that it throws through the great stained-glass windows on the flagstones of Chartres cathedral. He looked up at Earth, now in "New Earth" position, a majestic ring of blue fire flushed with violet, red and gold at the crescent where clouds flashed white iridescence. He jerked free the little bag that held his good luck charm and waited. They came. etted against Earth, the long undulating V of them. Now he could discern their wings beating in the vacuum that couldn't support them and heard the wild lonely honking through the vacuum that couldn't transmit sound. White wings surged steadily nearer. Soon there was a tempest of white, a tempest that stirred no dust, and the swans settled about him. AI Marcusson stood up. "My Lady Selene," he began, speaking carefully although he knew that the sound could not be heard outside his helmet. "My Lady Luna, my Lady of the Swans, I greet you. I know of you through legends: I know you are Aphrodite the Swan-Rider, goddess of love that drives to suicide. I know you are the White Goddess, the ThreeWomen-in-One, who changes your slaves into swans. I know of your twin daughters, Helen the fair, bane of Troy, and dark Clytemnestra, Mycenae's destroyer. I know of your flight as the Wyrd of death who took great Beowulf of the Geats, of your quests as Diana of the cruel moonlit hunts; I remember your swan-wings shadowing the hosts of Prince Igor on the steppes, I have seen the rings of your sacred Hansa swans decorating the moon-shaped steps of temples in Ceylon, your flights of swans and geese on painted tombs beyond the Nile. The witches of my own Thessaly called upon you to work their spells. On the feast of Beltane, on the first of May, with hawthorn branches blooming white as your swans, the Celts did you honor. The folk on the Rhine brought you figurines of white clay and long remembered your wild Walpurgisnacht. But as other beliefs drove out the old, you went from the minds of men to those of children. Only in Andersen's tales do you still change your slaves into swans, only children understand the spells held in the foolish rhymes of Mother Goose. Children know of the lady who flies on goose's back, her cape dark behind her, and each generation in turn still listens to your spells, my Lady of the Swans. And sometimes poets, and sometimes hunters, and sometimes lovers look up at the moon and are afraid and acknowledge your power." AI Marcusson stopped. The birds ringed him in. He held up his good luck charm, a small, carved rock-crystal swan, such as are found in the very ancient tombs of the bronze-age sea kings of the Aegean. "My Lady Selene," he cried, "I bring an offering! I came alone, before the others, to tell you the new beliefs now come to your dwelling. I came to warn you, my Lady of the Swans, to beg you not to be wrathful against us, take up your dwelling in another place, but not to deprive us of poetry, of witching spells and dreams, and all that the Moon has meant to us." He threw the crystal swan before him. The plumes about him foamed and a snowy form emerged, a moonstone with black opal eyes who smiled and began to sing. Marcusson's knees gave and his eyes closed. Then she spread great swan wings and soared, circling far lest her shadow fall on the crumpled spacesuited figure. She rose. And her swans -- her thousand myriad swans -- rose after her out of cracks, caves and craters, from beneath overhangs, from 'ledges, hollows and rockfalls, their plumes at first stained with the colors of the stone. They winged away, V after sinuous V, across Earth and into space. When the last swan had left the Moon became just another piece of colored rock. eyes and made his way dully back into the dust cloud now shot with flashes of red-orange as Earth's laser beams searched for the capsule's nerve centers. He bumped against a strut and forced his way in. A hum filled the capsule. Ungainly jointed limbs, paddles, calyxes, sprouted from its outside walls. On Earth pens jiggled, tapes were punched, rows of figures in five columns appeared on blank pages, pulses jumped and two groggy, worn-out faces appeared on the control room screens. Hatter's eyes flickered over the boards and he opened his mouth. Some time later his disembodied voice came out of the monitor, reading dials, reporting on systems. Then the screens showed AI Marcusson's eyes opening in turn. Control could see him leaning forward towards the port, his face drawn in haggard lines and shadows, then letting his head fall back. "Hey," he said, "didn't Doc tell you guys dust gives me hay fever?" On Earth the men about the screens slapped each other's backs and grinned and wiped their eyes. Good old bellyaching Marcusson! Good old Al! The Moon was just another piece of rock, after all. But a star went nova in Cygnus, and lovers wished on it that sues; complete. # #. # issues, complete. # #. Complete bound set of SF DINo "Cosmos" chapters), #-#  # ton Smith. # #'s. contains some H. P. Lovecraft items), # issues for # plete. # # issues. # #. # #-#. # #I #th Ave., Brooklyn #, N. Y. for your information the flying saucer myth never passed through the iron curtain, except for being ridiculed in the official Russian press. But that does not mean that the Russians are not addicted to the hunting of spurious mysteries too. Contrary to a fairly widespread belief, Soviet censorship does not interfere in such matters as long as the mysteries, real or imagined, have nothing to do with political dogma. Authors can even quote the Bible, provided it is treated as a historical work without religious significance. For example the Literaturnaya Gazyeta ("Literary Gazette"), which once upon a time ran articles bitterly denouncing science fiction, printed an article in which the destruction of Sodom was "tentatively explained" as the result of a nuclear explosion, and the damage done Lot's wife was blindness from having watched the explosion at close range! The same article explained the socalled Baalbek Verandah in Lebanon -- a large area paved with big stone slabs -- as an ancient spaceport, used by cosmonauts from another planet. But the favorite exercise ground for untrammeled Russian imaginations is a place in the Soviet Union itself, an area in Central Siberia where a natural catastrophe took place in #. In astronomical literature this catastrophe goes under the name of the "Great Siberian Meteor of #", or the Podkamennaya Tunguska Meteorite. THE facts of the case can be quickly told: A few minutes after # AM on June #, #, observers in Central Siberia saw a fiery body come up over the southern horizon. It looked more blinding than the sun which was in the sky at the same time, and moved rapidly almost due North. Shortly thereafter a "pillar of fire" could be seen shooting upward. An enormous black cloud followed. A number of explosions were heard in quick succession, and at least one witness felt a shock wave in the ground which he described as being "like a single wave in the sea." Barographs as far west as London registered a shock wave in the atmosphere but seismographs outside of Russia did not register any ground shock. On the following day meteorologists in Asia and Europe noticed "noctilucent clouds", silvery-looking clouds at extreme altitudes. All of them were immediately reminded of the noctilucent clouds that had hovered in the upper atmosphere for several years after the explosion of the volcano Rakata on Krakatoa in #. But when Krakatoa blew up, shock waves in the air had circled the globe several times, a wave in the ocean had been detected on the coast of California and all seismographs had quivered. Here only a comparatively small aerial shockwave had preceded the noctilucent clouds. It could not have been a major volcanic catastrophe. At least one German meteorologist concluded that the "disturbance in the atmosphere", as he called it, had probably been caused by a large I meteorite. In Russia scientists seem to have concluded that there had been an earthquake in Central Siberia. Probably they were happy that it had struck in a virtually uninhabited area. Tentatively it was concluded that the earthquake had been near the small city of Kansk. There was no official action. It was not until # that a Russian scientist, professor L. A. Kulik, having convinced himself that the "earthquake" must have been a meteorite impact, tried to find the place where it had struck. His tiny and severely underfinanced expedition accomplished only two things. He proved that the meteorite had not landed near Kansk, and he collected a number of eyewitness reports from people old enough to remember the event. In the meantime an astronomer of the Irkutsk Observatory, A. V. Voznesensky, had concluded, from eyewitness stories and the few records there were, that the impact must have taken place near the sources of the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. The name means "stony Tunguska". It is the middle river of three more or less parallel rivers, all named Tunguska, which flow westward into the Yenisei. Kulik's next expedition, in #, did reach the impact area. He found a large circle of trees blown down, their trunks all pointing toward a central spot. Between the center and the fallen trees Kulik found a dead forest the trunks standing but all the tops broken off. Farther away trees were found showing traces of burns on the side of their trunks facing the center. Kulik also noticed that in every case where a tree top had been broken off, or branches had been broken off, the place of breakage showed burns. But Kulik could not find the large crater that could be expected in the center. There were a number of not very deep holes, all filled with water. And that was all. Since there was no main crater, Kulik concluded that the meteorite which had struck there was not a solid body but a "cloud" of meteoric fragments. Naturally he looked for such fragments but could not find any. He concluded that they had all disappeared from sight in the marshy ground. But subsequent expeditions returned with the same negative results. Gradually the Podkamennaya Tunguska meteorite became a mystery. Here you had an area which bore all the signs of a major impact, you had eyewitness stories corroborating this evidence. And you could not find a single trace of the meteorite itself! Since there was absolutely no (way of getting around the evidence only one conclusion was possible: the meteorite must have been of a kind which completely disappeared afterwards. Leonid Kulik, who personally believed that it had been an iron meteorite, made more expeditions into the roadless and swampy area, without great sucI cess. Still no main crater -- it is now definite that there is none -- ! and still no fragments of the meteorite. Only a story by one of the natives of the area, the Tunguses, that another native had told him i that a third one had shown him a piece of metal which looked like silver. By # the first aerial photographs were taken, but either the equipment was wrong ! for the purpose or the photographer had no experience in taking pictures from the air. The pictures were so poor that they j could be called worthless. Then came the second world war and investigation stopped. Moreover Kulik, who in spite of his age (he was then #) had volunteered for military duty, was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. He died in the prison camp. DY the time Kulik made his I - last expedition, #-#, at  least one new theory about the disappearing meteorite had been formed and was discussed for a while. If the meteorite had been contraterrene matter everything could be explained. (As Galaxy readers know, contraterrene matter is identical with ours except that the charges are reversed -- the electron being positive, the proton negative, etc.) Contraterrene matter would react violently with normal matter, liberating enormous amounts of energy by a mutual particle-for-particle annihilation. Since this reaction would, of course, start in the atmosphere the unusual brightness of the body would be accounted for. The mutual annihilation of matter would release enough energy to account for the observed devastation. And, of course, the meteorite would disappear down to its last atom, taking an equal mass of earth matter along. The site of the impact would be strongly radioactive afterwards -- but the impact had taken place in # and the first investigation was not until #. And Kulik's party had not carried any Geiger counters, so that they could not check on traces of radioactivity that might still have been there. By # another expedition to the Podkamennaya Tunguska was delayed by a most curious coincidence. In eastern Siberia, a few hundred miles north of Vladivostok, a large meteorite was seen to fall and all the scientific talent was rushed to the SikhoteAlin mountains. It was a large iron meteorite, all right. It had broken up during the passage through the atmosphere and produced over # craters of all sizes, the largest about # feet across. But there was no mystery about the Sikhote-Alin meteorite, through it delayed another expedition to the Tunguska. At that point a Russian engineer and science writer by the name of Aleksandr Kazantsev had entered the debate. His thesis was that the meteorite of # had not been a meteorite at all, but a spaceship. Kazantsev did not hesitate to elaborate. It had been a huge atomic-powered interstellar ship which had approached our solar system, first investigating the outer planets and finally approaching Earth, which clearly proved to be inhabited. The captain of the ship, circling the earth several times, decided to find an uninhabited area to land so as not to harm the inhabitants of Earth inadvertently. But as he entered the atmosphere for a landing in Siberia something went wrong. Possibly the aliens had misjudged the density of the earth's atmosphere. The ship heated up and became uncontrollable, and on touching the ground, or just above it, the atomic engine exploded, vaporizing the ship, flattening out the forest below and setting the taiga on fire. An atomic explosion of that type, Kazantsev maintained, would explain not only the observed phenomena but also the absence of any meteoritic material. Russian astronomers were presumably still shaking their heads when Kazantsev received the support of another science writer by the name of Boris Liapunov. Between them they seem to have succeeded in convincing a fair percentage of the Russian reading public that an interstellar expedition crashed in Siberia in #. By # a careful analysis of soil samples from the site, collected by Kulik, was carried out. Small globules of meteoric iron were discovered and found to contain # per cent of nickel, # per cent of cobalt and traces of germanium and copper. This is a rather typical composition of iron meteorites -- and it should be stated right here that this meteoric iron may well have no connection with the fall of # at all. Such tiny bits of meteoric iron can be found anywhere on Earth if you search long enough; the daily infall of meteoric matter is now estimated to be around # tons per day. The globules found may thus have fallen at any time in history. TUT Kazantsev, in a manner reminiscent of our flying saucer "researchers," pounced on the composition. Iron plus nickel plus cobalt? Obviously a piece of the alloy which formed the tough outer skin of the spaceship. Traces of copper? Surely they must have had electrical equipment on board, requiring copper wires. He could have said the same if the traces had been traces of silver. And germanium? Why not? Electronic gear requires semi-conductors which can be germanium compounds. The explosion, according to Kazantsev, took place before the ship touched the ground, therefore the trees directly below were merely stripped of their crowns (and ignited) while the trees farther away, struck by the blast at an angle, were knocked down. The "pillar of fire" topped by a large cloud could only have been an atomic explosion, Kazantsev declared. (This happens not to be the case. You can get very similar clouds from any large explosion.) And the silvery clouds noticed by the meteorologists were the explosion debris, luminous because atomic disintegration was still going on. (Yet the clouds caused by the Krakatoa catastrophe looked the same and Krakatoa's blow-up holds no atomic mystery.) To finish up his case, Kazantsev dragged in an alleged native legend, namely that the god Ogda burned Tunguses with "invisible fire." Obviously, he wrote, some natives approached the blast site so soon after the event that local atomic fallout burned and killed them. One more supporter of the spaceship theory who turned up in # was the airplane designer A. Y. Manotskov. Manotskov had checked on the eyewitness reports gathered mainly by Kulik in #I and # and tried to calculate both the flightpath and the velocity of the body. Eyewitness reports, if they state the position of the observer and cite landmarks, can give a fairly accurate picture of the direction of a flightpath but are absolutely valueless when it comes to speed of travel. The speed of a low-flying slow body and of a high-flying fast body can look exactly the same -- as anybody living near an airport can see for himself, when comparing the apparent speed of a small executive plane coming in for a landing and a jet passing overhead at # feet. Manotskov arrived at the conclusion that the "meteorite" moved at the rate of only about # miles per hour. But if it was so slow, the observed devastation required a very large body, one well over one kilometer (# miles) in diameter. A meteorite that size must have left debris. Since none has been found it had to be a spaceship. At about that time Kazantsev made an interesting about-face. Having read about contraterr.ene matter -- he called it "antimatter" -- he said that one did not need to assume that the ship's engine exploded. It was at least equally likely that the ship came from a planet consisting of antimatter, and that its captain and crew never guessed that the matter composing Earth was of the opposite kind. With that theory Kazantsev agreed with western ideas it could have been a contraterrene meteorite. He substituted a contraterrene spaceship for a natural body. Apparently he did not notice that his acceptance of contraterrene matter contradicted his earlier conclusions drawn from the composition of the meteoritic globules found on the site. If his alien ship had germanium semi-conductors that would have been contraterrene germanium and nothing would have been left to analyze. T HE Soviet Academy of Sciences paid for another expedition in #, headed by professor Kirill P. Florensky, who saw to it that there were Geiger counters among the equipment. The radioactivity of the soil was found to be perfectly normal -- which admittedly might well be the case after nearly half a century, especially since there were no figures about the radioactivity of that area before the catastrophe. And Florensky's expedition definitely established the absence of a major crater. Now everything was what it had been like thirty years earlier: all the evidence of a major impact, but no crater and rto meteoritic fragments. The only new item added was the proved absence of abovenormal radioactivity. While Florensky was still in Siberia, the astronomer and space travel expert Ariy Shternfeld made a few devastating comments about the professional ability of Kazantsev's spaceship captain. As our earth orbits the sun the area which has dawn is the "front side." Since the impact took place at # o'clock in the morning, Siberia was still on the "front side" of the moving earth. Hence Earth and spaceship collided head-on. Any spaceship captain worth his four stripes (or just one and a half of them) would trail a moving planet on which he wished to make planetfall, which means that he would land between, say, # and # P.M. of local time of the landing area. This simple fact had been overlooked by Kazantsev, by Liapunov, by Manotskov and by everybody else who had written and orated about the "spaceship crash of #." Well, is there an answer at all? Remember that the main and at first glance somewhat disturbing result of all the facts is that the meteorite had to "disappear" completely. This requirement, in fact, was the main reason why a contra-terrene meteorite was postulated by some. Anybody who wishes to believe this may safely do so. Nothing speaks against this possibility. But there are others. Supposing the meteorite had just been a hundred thousand tons of water and ice. It would have completely disappeared during the same summer and would have caused just as much devastation. But the pillar of fire and the burning of the taiga speaks against it. A sufficiently hard impact of a very large lump of ice would produce temperatures high enough to ignite wood; but it would also smother the fire at once. However, there is one type of cosmic body which would do everything the Tunguska meteorite did and would not necessarily smother a fire set by its impact, but it would completely disappear just the same. This body is a comet. Some thirty years ago the astronomical concept of a comet was that it consisted of a loose accumulation of cosmic matter holding a large amount of gases -- like ammonia, methane and ordinary water. Then Fred L. Whipple showed that things had to be the other way round. A loose cloud of meteoric matter could not hold enough gas. A comet had to consist in the main of frozen gases, probably holding some particles of cosmic dust imbedded in it. The impact of a small comet would produce all the phenomena observed in Siberia. And it would completely disappear: the ammonia and methane would mingle with the atmosphere (the methane probably burning up) while the water would also go into the atmosphere as more water vapor. The Russians have accepted this explanation -- the Russian astronomers, that is, not Kazantsev and company. The combustion of methane, of course, just produces carbon dioxide and water vapor (CHi#  C# #  #H#) which would be undistinguishable; but the other frozen gases of which a comet is likely to consist might leave a chemical residue in the soil. Russian chemists are busy with soil samples from the Tunguska area again, this time looking for something else. If they succeed the theory of collision with a small comet would be permanently vindicated. I know that the names of the days of the week were orginally the names of planets. That is, each planet had its special day. But they seem to use different planets in English and in French. And I cannot figure out why the names appear in the order in which they do appear. Is there any system or is it just accident? Gertrude Hoffner Chicago, #. The names of the planets were indeed used by the Romans, but the reference was more to the gods associated with the various planets. This accounts, as you'll see, for some of the differences between English and French and other languages as well. First you you have to realize that the names were given in pre-Copernican days, so that the sun and the moon appear as "planets." The (to us) strange sequence of the planets is the result of the ancient belief that the planets ruled one hour of each day in succession. The first hour of the first day indubitably was ruled by the outermost planet, Saturn; the second hour was then ruled by the next planet closer to the earth, namely Jupiter; the third hour by Mars, etc., etc. Now, if Saturn rules the first hour of the day, it logically also Dies Solis Sunday Sonntag Dimanche Domenica Dies Lunae Monday Montag Lundi Lunedi Dies Martis Tuesday Dienstag Mardi Martedi Dies Mercurii Wednesday Mittwoch Mercredi Mercoledi Dies Jovis Thursday Donnerstag Jeudi Jovedi Dies Veneris Friday Freitag Vendredi Venerdi Dies Saturni Saturday Sonnabend Samstag Samedi Sabbato rules the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-second hour. The twentythird hour of that day must then be ruled by Jupiter and the twenty-fourth hour by Mars. This means that the first hour of the next day is ruled by the sun. If you continue counting in this manner, you find that the first hour of each day (if we start with a day where the sun rules the first hour) is ruled by the planets in the following sequence: sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. The "ruler of the first hour" gave its name to the day. It happened to fit nicely that after one week the sun would again rule the first hour of the first day in the new week. (If it had not fitted, another system would probably have been evolved.) Now look at the table of names. The first column, the Latin, is perfectly clear. The day of the sun is followed by the day of the moon and so on through the sequence just cited. The second column, the English names, may be called an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Latin column. Again the day of the sun is followed by the day of the moon, but Mars has been replaced by the Germanic god of battles Tues. The next day is Woden's day; Woden (or Wotan, or Odin) is the "wanderer," like fast-moving Mercury. Jupiter's day becomes Thor's day, while beautiful Venus has been replaced by the equally beautiful Germanic goddess Frigga (or Freya). But Saturday is still Saturn's day, even in English. The third column, the German column, is the German version of the English column, as can easily be seen. The main exception is Wednesday. The German name has no relation to mythology of any kind; Mittwoch just means "Middle of the Week." For the following day Donar is substituted for Thor. German has two names for Saturday; the North German form Sonnabend means Sunday Eve, analogous to Christmas Eve, while the South German form Samstag probably was influenced by the French. The French and Italian names follow, as you can see, the Latin very closely, except for Sunday which in both languages becomes the Lord's Day. And in Italian the Saturday is Sabbato. I may add here that until, say, #, the word Sabbath was used in German too with the meaning of Saturday, if the speaker came from a religious family or if the theme under discussion was religious. Has there ever been a tribe of people, now or in the historical past, which had fur? I remember mention of "poodle men" in Russia, but consider this a hoax. Furthermore, is it known whether any prehistoric humans, like the Neanderthalers, had fur? Since my father is a minister who does not approve of evolution please don't print my name. sfe West Virginia. As for your father's disapproval of evolution I can only repeat what I once said before: if you fall out of a window on the #th floor it does not matter whether you " believe" in the law of gravity. It -- and evolution -- do not depend on anybody's approval. As for your question about a race of furred men the answer is no. No such race or tribe has ever turned up. The "Hairy Ainu" of Kamtchatka look as hairy as they are mainly because they never cut their head or body hair. (It may be worth mentioning that among the major racial groups the "whites" happen to be the hairiest.) However, there was a Russian by the name of Adrian Yeftikhev who did have a complete fur and was billed as the Poodle Man by a show manager. He lived around # and is said to have been just one of a family of hairy people. This indubitably was an individual case. I even hesitate to use the term atavism, because we simply do not know whether our ancestors had a fur and if so what type of fur. At about the time Yeftikhev was shown around the larger cities of Europe, a prehistoric picture was discovered in France. It showed a naked man, holding a stick (spear?) in one' hand. He was portrayed crawling, obviously hunting game, and all over his naked body there were short lines. At first glance it looked as if the prehistoric artist had intended to indicate hair, but a careful examination of these short lines showed that they did not follow the lie of a fur, hence they were accepted generally as mere fill-in lines. Of course our more remote proto-human ancestors probably had a fur of some kind, but we cannot be specific as to who and when. With all the talk of "putting a man on the moon" in #, or #, or whatever, don't people overlook the difficulty of landing a ship on its exhaust so that it comes to rest just at the moon's surface? Please tell me what has been done about the problem. John D. Macmillan Merion, Penna. Well, no. Nobody "overlooks" any difficulties; the reason why you don't read much about this at the present moment is probably due to the fact that several systems have been designed and are now under study. The principle is that a total velocity of about two miles per second has to be "killed". This velocity would be compounded of the gravitational pull of the moon, the motion of the moon plus any "surplus" velocity the ship itself might have. Now the problem is not to reduce a velocity of two miles per second to zero but reduce the velocity to zero at the moment the altitude above the lunar surface is zero. One suggestion that has been published runs as follows: the rocket will approach the moon tail first, of course. At a certain distance from the lunar surface, predetermined by calculation, the rocket motors will start working, reducing the velocity. The precalculation should be good enough to reduce the relative motions of the moon and the rocket to, say, # to # yards per second. By the time this is accomplished the distance of the rocket from the lunar surface will be on the order of one mile or so. Now a radar device takes over. Successive radar readings between ship and lunar surface will give both distance and relative velocity. Through a computing device these readings control the speed of the fuel pumps. If the rocket is still one mile above the lunar surface and the relative velocity is down to # yards per second the pumps will be made to run quite slowly. They may even shut off completely for, say, # seconds. On the other hand if the altitude is down to a hundred yards and the velocity is still around # yards per second, the pumps will work at full speed. This proposed system would become unreliable for the last # yards or so, since it is quite possible that the exhaust blast will then begin to kick up lunar dust and thereby confuse the radar readings. Another problem is that this device, as described, does not take a possible lateral drift into account. But the problems are known and being thought about. Moreover, the first manned landing will be preceded by a number of "softlanded" unmanned devices which will point out any inadequacies which may exist in the first experimental systems.      Clifford D. Simak has already written more than his share of the best science fiction published and, although it's obviously unfair for him to do so, the man goes right on writing it. Next issue we pridefully present Simak's newest science-fiction novel. Here Gather the Stars. It isn't only his newest. We think it is his best! In the same issue, Gordon R. Dickson with a fast and funny novelette, Keith Laumer with an exciting novella, plus Willy Ley's informative column, etc. It's a good issue... To Kworn the object was a roadblock, threatening his life. But it was also a high road to a magnificent future! T HE UL Kworn paused in his search for food, extended his eye and considered the thing that blocked his path. He hadn't notice the obstacle until he had almost touched it. His attention had been focused upon gleaning every feeder large enough to be edible from the lichens that covered his feeding strip. But the unexpected warmth radiating from the objecthad startled him. Sundown was at hand. There should be nothing living or non-living that radiated a fraction of the heat that was coming from the gleaming metal wall which lay before him. He expanded his mantle to trap the warmth as he pushed his eye upward to look over the top. It wasn't high, just high enough to be a nuisance. It curved away from him toward the boundaries of his strip, extending completely across the width of his land. A dim racial memory told him that this was an artefact, a product of the days when the Folk had leisure to dream and time to build. It had probably been built by his remote ancestors millennia ago and had just recently been uncovered from its hiding place beneath the sand. These metal objects kept appearing and disappearing as the sands shifted to the force of the wind. He had seen them before, but never a piece so large or so well preserved. It shone as though it had been made yesterday, gleaming with a soft silvery luster against the blue-black darkness of the sky. As his eye cleared the top of the wall, he quivered with shock and astonishment. For it was not a wall as he had thought. Instead, it was the edge of a huge metal disc fifty raads in diameter. And that wasn't all of it. Three thick columns of metal extended upward from the disc, leaning inward as they rose into the sky. High overhead, almost beyond the range of accurate vision, they converged to support an immense cylinder set vertically to the ground. The cylinder was almost as great in diameter as the disc upon whicji his eye first rested. It loomed overhead, and he had a queasy feeling that it was about to fall and crush him. Strange jointed excresences studded its surface, and in its side, some twothirds of the way up, two smaller cylinders projected from the bigger one. They were set a little distance apart, divided by a vertical row of four black designs, and pointed straight down his feeding strip. The UI Kworn eyed the giant structure with disgust and puzzlement. The storm that had uncovered it must have been a great one to have blown so much sand away. It was just his fortune to have the thing squatting in his path! His mantle darkened with anger. Why was it that everything happened to him? Why couldn't it have lain in someone else's way, upon the land of one of his neighbors? It blocked him from nearly three thousand square raads of life-sustaining soil. To cross it would require energy he could not spare. Why couldn't it have been on the Ul Caada's or the Ul Varsi's strip -- or any other of the numberless Folk? Why did he have to be faced with this roadblock? He couldn't go around it since it extended beyond his territory and, therefore, he'd have to waste precious energy propelling his mass up the wall and across the smooth shining surface of the disc -- all of which would have to be done without food, since his eye could see no lichen growing upon the shiny metal surface. r T'HE chill of evening had settied on the land. Most of the Folk were already wrapped in their mantles, conserving their energy until the dawn would warm them into life. But Kworn felt no need to estivate. It was warm enough beside the wall. The air shimmered as it cooled. Microcrystals of ice formed upon the legs of the structure, outlining them in shimmering contrast to the drab shadowy landscape, with its gray-green cover of lichens stippled with the purple balls of the lichen feeders I that clung to them. Beyond Kworn and his neighbors, spaced ' twenty raads apart, the mantled  bodies of the Folk stretched in a j long single line across the rolling ! landscape, vanishing into the darkness. Behind this line, a day's I travel to the rear, another line of the Folk was following. Behind I them was yet another. There were none ahead, for the Ul Kworn and the other Ul were the elders of the Folk and moved along in the first rank where their j maturity and ability to reproduce had placed them according to the Law. Caada and Varsi stirred restlessly, stimulated to movement by the heat radiating from the obstacle, but compelled by the Law to hold their place in the I ranks until the sun's return would stimulate the others. Their dark crimson mantles rippled over the soil as they sent restless I pseudopods to the boundaries of I their strips. They were anxious in their attempt to communicate with the I Ul Kworn. But Kworn wasn't ready to communicate. He held aloof as i he sent a thin pseudopod out toJ ward the gleaming wall in front j of him. He was squandering energy; but he reasoned that he had better learn all he could about this thing before he attempted to cross it tomorrow, regardless of what it cost. It was obvious that he would have to cross it, for the Law was specific about encroachment upon a neighbor's territory. No member oi the Folk shall trespass the feeding land of another during the Time of Travel except with published permission. Trespass shall be punished by the ejection of the offender from his place in rank. And that was equivalent to a death sentence. He could ask Caada or Varsi for permission, but he was virtually certain that he wouldn't get it. He wasn't on particularly good terms with his neighbors. Caada was querulous, old and selfish. He had not reproduced this season and his vitality was low. He was forever hungry and not averse to slipping a sly pseudopod across the boundaries of his land to poach upon that of his neighbor. Kworn had warned him some time ago that he would not tolerate encroachment and would call for a group judgment if there was any poaching. And since the Folk were physically incapable of lying to one another, Caada would be banished. After that Caada kept his peace, but his dislike for Kworn was always evident. TUT Varsi who held the land on Kworn's right was worse. He had advanced to UI status only a year ago. At that time there had been rumors among stealing of germ plasm from the smaller and weaker members of the race. But that could not be proved, and many young Folk died in the grim process of growing to maturity. Kworn shrugged. If Varsi was an example of the younger generation, society was heading hell-bent toward Emptiness. He had no love for the pushing, aggressive youngster who crowded out to the very borders of his domain, pressing against his neighbors, alert and aggressive toward the slightest accidental spillover into his territory. What was worse, Varsi had reproduced successfully this year and thus had rejuvenated. Kworn's own attempt had been only partially successful. His energy reserves hadn't been great enough to produce a viable offspring, and the rejuvenation process in his body had only gone to partial completion. It would be enough to get him to the winter feeding grounds. But as insurance he had taken a place beside Caada, who was certain to go into Emptiness if the feeding en route was bad. Still, he hadn't figured that he would have Varsi beside him. He consoled himself with the thought that others might have as bad neighbors as he. But he would never make the ultimate mistake of exchanging germ plasm with either of his neighbors, not even if his fertility and his position depended upon it. Cells like theirs would do nothing to improve the sense of discipline and order he had so carefully developed in his own. His offspring were courteous and honorable, a credit to the Folk and to the name of Kworn. A father should be proud of his offspring, so that when they developed to the point where they could have descendants, he would not be ashamed of what they would produce. An Ul, Kworn thought grimly, should have some sense of responsibility toward the all-important future of the race. His anger died as he exerted synergic control. Anger was a waster of energy, a luxury he couldn't afford. He had little enough as it was. It had been a bad year. Spring was late, and winter had come early. The summer had been dry and the lichens in the feeding grounds had grown poorly. The tiny, bulbous lichen feeders, the main source of food for the Folk, had failed to ripen to their usual succulent fullness. They had been poor, shrunken things, hardly worth ingesting. And those along the route to the winter feeding grounds were no better. Glumly he touched the wall before him with a tactile filament. It was uncomfortably warm, smooth and slippery to the touch. He felt it delicately, noting the almost microscopic horizontal ridges on the wall's surface. He palpated with relief. The thing was climbable. But even as he relaxed, he recoiled, the filament writhing in agony! The wall had burned his flesh! Faint threads of vapor rose from where he had touched the metal, freezing instantly in the chill air. He pinched off the filament in an automatic protective constriction of his cells. The pain ceased instantly, but the burning memory was so poignant that his mantle twitched and shuddered convulsively for some time before the reflexes died. ed his severed member. With a sense of numbing shock he realized that he would be unable to pass across the disc. The implications chilled him. If he could not pass, his land beyond the roadblock would be vacant and open to preemption by his neighbors. Nor could he wait until they had passed and rejoin them later. The Law was specific on that point. If one of the Folk lags behind in his rank, his land becomes vacant and open to his neighbors. Nor can one who has lagged behind reclaim his land by moving forward. He who abandons his position, abandons it permanently. Wryly, he reflected that it was this very Law that had impelled him to take a position beside the Ul Caada. And, of course, his neighbors knew the Law as well as he. It was a part of them, a part of their cells even before they split off from their parent. It would be the acme of folly to expect that neighbors like Varsi or Caada would allow him to pass over their land and hold his place in rank. Bitterness flooded him with a stimulation so piercing that Caada extended a communication filament to project a question. "What is this thing which lies upon your land and mine?" Caada asked. His projection was weak and feeble. It was obvious that he would not last for many more days unless feeding improved. "I do not know. It is something of metal, and it bars my land. I cannot cross it. It burns me when I touch it." A quick twinge of excitement rushed along Caada's filament. The old Ul broke the connection instantly, but not before Kworn read the flash of hope that Kworn had kindled. There was no help in this quarter, and the wild greed of Varsi was so well known that there was no sense even trying that side. A surge of hopelessness swept through him. Unless he could find some way to pass this barrier he was doomed. He didn't want to pass into Emptiness. He had seen too many others go that way to want to follow them. For a moment he thought desperately of begging Caada and Varsi for permission to cross into their land for the short time that would be necessary to pass the barrier, but reason asserted itself. Such an act was certain to draw a flat refusal and, after all, he was the UI Kworn and he had his pride. He would not beg when begging was useless. And there was a bare possibility that he might survive if he closed his mantle tightly about him and waited until all the ranks had passed. He could then bring up the rear... and, possibly, just possibly, there would be sufficient food left to enable him to reach the winter feeding grounds. And it might still be possible to cross the disc. There was enough warmth in it to keep him active. By working all night he might be able to build a path of sand across its surface and thus keep his tissues from being seared by the metal. He would be technically violating the law by moving ahead of the others, but if he did not feed ahead, no harm would be done. rier and began to pile sand against its base, sloping it to make a broad ramp to the top of the disc. The work was slow and the sand was slippery. The polished grains slipped away and the ramp crumbled time after time. But he worked on, piling up sand until it reached the top of the disc. He looked across the flat surface that stretched before him. Fifty raads! It might as well be fifty zets. He couldn't do it. Already his energy level was so low that he could hardly move, and to build a raad-wide path across this expanse of metal was a task beyond his strength. He drooped across the ramp, utterly exhausted. It was no use. What he ought to do was open his mantle to Emptiness. He hadn't felt the communication filaments of Caada and Varsi touch him. He had been too busy, but now with Caada's burst of glee, and Varsi's cynical, "A noble decision, UI Kworn. You should be commended," he realized that they knew everything. His body rippled hopelessly. He was tired, too tired for anger. His energy was low. He contemi plated Emptiness impassively. I Sooner or later it came to all Folk. He had lived longer than f most, and perhaps it was his time to go. He was finished. He accepted the fact with a cold fatalism that he never dreamed he possessed. Lying there on the , sand, his mantle spread wide, he waited for the end to come. It wouldn't come quickly, he thought. He was still far from the cellular disorganization that prej ceeded extinction. He was merely exhausted, and in need of food . to restore his energy. With food he might still have j an outside chance of building the path in time. But there was no I food. He had gleaned his area l completely before he had ever ! reached the roadblock. Lying limp and relaxed on the i ramp beside the barrier, he slowly became conscious that the meI tal wasn't dead. It was alive! Rhythmic vibrations passed through it and were transmitted ! to his body by the sand. A wild hope stirred within him. If the metal were alive it might  hear him if he tried to communij cate. He concentrated his remaining reserves of energy, j steeled himself against the pain and pressed a communication filament against the metal. "Help me!" he projected desperately. "You're blocking my strip! I can't pass!" Off to one side he sensed Varsi's laughter and on the other felt Caada's gloating greed. "I cannot wake this metal," he thought hopelessly as he tried again, harder than before, ignoring the pain of his burning flesh. Something clicked sharply within the metal, and the tempo of the sounds changed. "It's waking!" Kworn thought wildly. from above. A rod moved out from the cylinder and twisted into the ground in Varsi's territory, to the accompaniment of clicking, grinding noises. A square grid lifted from the top of the cylinder and began rotating. And Kworn shivered and jerked to the tremendous power of the words that flowed through him. They were words, but they had no meaning, waves of sound that hammered at his receptors in an unknown tongue he could not understand. The language of the Folk had changed since the days of the ancients, he thought despairingly. And then, with a mantle-shattering roar, the cylinders jutting overhead spouted flame and smoke. Two silvery balls trailing thin, dark filaments shot out of the great cylinder and buried themselves in the sand behind him. The filaments lay motionless in the sand as Kworn, wrapped defensively in his mantle, rolled off the ramp to the ground below. The silence that followed was so deep that it seemed like Emptiness had taken the entire land. Slowly Kworn loosened his mantle. "In the name of my first ancestor," he murmured shakily, "what was that?" His senses were shocked and disorganized by the violence of the sound. It was worse even than the roar and scream of the samshin that occasionally blew from the south, carrying dust, lichens, feeders and even Folk who had been too slow or too foolish to hide from the fury of the wind. Gingerly, Kworn inspected the damage to his mantle. It was minor. A tiny rip that could easily be repaired, a few grains of sand that could be extruded. He drew himself together to perform the repairs with the least possible loss of energy, and as he did, he was conscious of an emanation coming from the filaments that had been hurled from the cylinder. Food! And such food! It was the distilled quintessence of a thousand purple feeders! It came to his senses in a shimmering wave of ecstasy so great that his mantle glowed a bright crimson. He stretched a pseudopod toward its source, and as he touched the filament his whole body quivered with anticipation. The barrier was blotted from his thoughts by an orgy of shuddering delight almost too great for flesh to endure. Waves of pleasure ran through his body as he swiftly extended to cover  the filament. It could be a trap, he thought, but it made no difference. The demands of his depleted body and the sheer vacuole-constricting delight of this incredible foodstuff made a combination too potent for his will to resist, even if it had desired to do so. Waves of pleasure rippled through him as more of his absorptive surface contacted the filament. He snuggled against it, enfolding it completely, letting the peristaltic rushes sweep through him. He had never fed like this as long as he could recall. His energy levels swelled and pulsed as he sucked the last delight from the cord, and contemplated the further pleasure waiting for him in that other one lying scarcely twenty raads away. Sensuously, he extended a pseudopod from his upper surface and probed for the other filament. He was filled to the top of his primary vacuole but the desire for more was stronger than ever -- despite the fact that he knew the food in the other filament would bring him to critical level, would force him to reproduce. The thought amused him. As far back as he could remember, no member of the Folk had ever budded an offspring during the Time of Travel. It would be unheard of, something that would go down through the years in the annals of the Folk, and perhaps even cause a change in the Law. The pseudopod probed, reached and stopped short of its goal. There was nothing around it but empty air. thoughts from his mind. Absorbed in gluttony, he hadn't noticed that the filament had tightened and was slowly drawing back into the cylinder from whence it came. And now it was too late! He was already over the rim of the metal disc. Feverishly, he tried to disengage his absorptive surfaces from the filament and crawl down its length to safety, but he couldn't move. He was stuck to the dark cord by some strange adhesive that cemented his cells firmly to the cord. He could not break free. The line moved steadily upward, dragging him inexorably toward a dark opening in the cylinder overhead. Panic filled him! Desperately he tried to loosen his trapped surfaces. His pseudopod lashed futilely in the air, searching with panic for something to grip, something to clutch that would stop this slow movement to the hell of pain that waited for him in the metal high overhead. His searching flesh struck another's, and into his mind flooded the UI Caada's terrified thought. The old one had reacted quicker than he, perhaps because he was poaching, but like himself he was attached and could not break free. "Serves you right," Kworn projected grimly. "The thing was on my land. You had no right to feed upon it." "Get me loose!" Caada screamed. His body flopped at the end of a thick mass of digestive tissue, dangling from the line, writhing and struggling in mindless terror. It was strange, Kworn thought, that fear should be so much stronger in the old than in the young. "Cut loose, you fool," Kworn projected. "There isn't enough of you adhered to hurt if it were lost. A little body substance isn't worth your life. Hurry! You'll be too late if you don't. That metal is poisonous to our flesh." "But it will be pain to cut my absorbing surface," Caada protested. I "It will be death if you don't." "Then why don't you?" "I can't," Kworn said hopelessly. "All my surface is stuck to the filament. I can't cut free." He was calm now, resigned to the inevitable. His greed had brought him to this. Perhaps it was a fitting punishment. But Caada need not die if he would show courage. He rotated his eye to watch his struggling neighbor. Apparently Caada was going to take his advice. The tissue below the part of him stuck to the filament began to thin. His pseudopod broke contact. But his movements were slow and hesitant. Already his body mass was rising above the edge of the disc. "Quick, you fool!" Kworn projected. "Another moment and you're dead!" But Caada couldn't hear. Slowly his tissues separated as he reluctantly abandoned his absorptive surface. But he was already over the disc. The last cells pinched off and he fell, mantle flapping, full on the surface of the disc. For a moment he lay there quivering, and then his body was blotted from sight by a cloud of frozen steam, and his essence vanished screaming into Emptiness. terrible way to die. But his own fate would be no better. He wrapped his mantle tightly around him as his leading parts vanished into the dark hole in the cylinder. In a moment he would be following Caada on the journey from which no member of the Folk had ever returned. His body disappeared into the hole. -- and was plunged into paradise! His foreparts slipped into a warm, thick liquid that loosened the adhesive that bound him to the cord. As he slipped free, he slowly realized that he was not to die. He was bathed in liquid food! He was swimming in it! He was surrounded on all sides by incredible flavors so strange and delicious that his mind could not classify them! The filament had been good, but this -- this was indescribable! He relaxed, his mantle spreading through the food, savoring, absorbing, digesting, metabolizing, excreting. His energy levels peaked. The nuclei of his germ plasm swelled, their chromosomes split, and a great bud formed and separated from his body. He had reproduced! Through a deadening fog of somatic sensation, he realized dully that this was wrong, that the time wasn't right, that the space was limited, and that the natural reaction to abundant food supply was wrong. But for the moment he didn't care. For thousands of seasons he had traveled the paths between equator and pole in a ceaseless hunt for food, growing and rejuvenating in good seasons, shrinking and aging in bad. He had been bound to the soil, a slave to the harsh demands of life and Nature. And now the routine was broken. He luxuriated in his freedom. It must have been like this in the old days, when the waters were plentiful and things grew in them that could be eaten, and the Folk had time to dream young dreams and think young thoughts, and build their thoughts and dreams into the gleaming realities of cities and machines. Those were the days when the mind went above the soil into the air and beyond it to the moons, the sun and the evening stars. But that was long ago. He lay quietly, conscious of the change within him as his cells multiplied to replace those he had lost, and his body grew in weight and size. He was rejuvenated. The cells of his growing body, stimulated by the abundance of food, released memories he had forgotten he had ever possessed. His past ran in direct cellular continuity to the dawn of his race, and in him was every memory he had experienced since the beginning. Some were weak, others were stronger, but all were there awaiting an effort of recall. All that was required was enough stimulation to bring them out of hiding. And for the first time in millennia the stimulus was available. The stimulus was growth, the rapid growth that only an abundant food supply could give, the sort of growth that the shrunken environment outside could not supply. With sudden clarity he saw how the Folk had shrunk in mind and body as they slowly adapted to the ever-increasing rigor of life. The rushing torrent of memory and sensation that swept through him gave him a new awareness of what he had been once and what he had become. His eye was lifted from the dirt and lichens. " pity and contempt. Pity for what the Folk had become; contempt for their failure to recognize it. Yet he had been no better than the others. It was only through the accident of this artefact that he had learned. The Folk couldn't know what the slow dwindling of their food supply had done to them. Over the millennia they had adapted, changing to fit the changing conditions, surviving only because they were more intelligent and more tenacious than the other forms of life that had become extinct. A thousand thousand seasons had passed since the great war that had years of slow adaptation to the barren waste that had been formed when the ultimate products of Folk technology were loosed on their creators, had created a race tied to a subsistence level of existence, incapable of thinking beyond the basic necessities of life. The UI Kworn sighed. It would be better if he would not remember so much. But he could suppress neither the knowledge nor the memories. They crowded in upon him, stimulated by the food in which he floated. Beside him, his offspring was growing. A bud always grew rapidly in a favorable environment, and this one was ideal. Soon it would be as large as himself. Yet it would never develop beyond an infant. It could not mature without a transfer of germ plasm from other infants of the Folk. And there were no infants. It would grow and keep on growing because there would be no check of maturity upon its cells. It would remain a partly sentient lump of flesh that would never be complete. And in time it would be dangerous. When it had depleted the food supply it would turn on him in mindless hunger. It wouldn't realize that the UI Kworn was its father, or if it did, it wouldn't care. An infant is ultimately selfish, and its desires are the most important thing in its restricted universe. Kworn considered his situation dispassionately. It was obvious that he must escape from this trap before his offspring destroyed him. Yet he could think of no way to avoid the poison metal. He recognized it now, the element with the twelve protons in its nucleus, a light metal seldom used by the Folk even in the days of their greatness because of its ability to rapidly oxidize and its propensity to burst into brillant flame when heated. With sudden shock he realized that the artefact was nothing less than a gigantic torch! Why had it been built like this? What was its function? Where had it come from? Why hadn't it spoke since it had released that flood of unintelligible gibberish before it had drawn him inside? Ever since he had entered this food tank it had been quiet except for a clicking, chattering whir that came from somewhere above him. He had the odd impression that it was storing information about him and the way he reacted in the tank. And then, abruptly, it broke into voice. Cryptic words poured from it, piercing him with tiny knives of sound. The intensity and rapidity of the projections shocked him, left him quivering and shaking when they stopped as abruptly as they had begun. In the quiet that followed, Kworn tried to recall the sequence of the noise. The words were like nothing he had ever heard. They were not the language of the Folk either past or present. And they had a flow and sequence that was not organic. They were mechanical, the product of a metal intelligence that recorded and spoke but did not think. The Folk had machines like that once. How had it begun? There had been a faint preliminary, an almost soundless voice speaking a single word. Perhaps if he projected it, it would trigger a response. Pitching his voice in the same key and intensity he projected the word as best he could remember it. And the voice began again. citement. Something outside the artefact was forcing it to speak. He was certain of it. As certain as he was that the artefact was recording himself and his offspring. But who -- or what -- was receiving the record? And why? This could be a fascinating speculation, Kworn thought. But there would be time enough for that later. His immediate need was to get out. Already the food supply was running low, and his offspring was becoming enormous. He'd have to leave soon if he was ever going to. And he'd have to do something about his own growth. Already it was reaching dangerous levels. He was on the ragged edge of another reproduction, and he couldn't afford it. Regretfully, he began moving the cornified cells of his mantle and his under layer toward his inner surfaces, arranging them in a protective layer around his germ plasm and absorptive cells. There would be enough surface absorption to take care of his maintenance needs, and his body could retain its peak of cellular energy. Yet the desire to feed and bud was almost overpowering. His body screamed at him for denying it the right that food would give it, but Kworn resisted the demands of his flesh until the frantic cellular urges passed. Beside him his offspring pulsed with physical sensation. Kworn envied it even as he pitied it. The poor mindless thing could be used as a means to the end of his escape, but it was useless for anything else. It was far too large, and far too stupid, to survive in the outside world. Kworn extruded a net of hairlike pseudopods and sweptthe tank in which they lay. It was featureless, save for a hole where the filament had not completely withdrawn when it had pulled him into this place. A few places in the wall had a different texture than the others, probably the sense organs of the recorder. He rippled with satisfaction. There was a grille of poison metal in the top of the tank through which flowed a steady current of warm air. It would be pleasant to investigate this further, Kworn thought, but there was no time. His offspring had seen to that. He placed his eye on a thin pseudopod and thrust it through the hole in the wall of the tank. It was still night outside, but a faint line of brightness along the horizon indicated the coming of dawn. The artefact glittered icily beneath him, and he had a feeling of giddiness as he looked down the vertiginous drop to the disc below. The dark blotch of Caada's burned body was almost invisible against the faintly gleaming loom of the still-warm disc. Kworn shuddered. Caada hadn't deserved a death like that. Kworn looked down, estimating the chances with his new intelligence, and then slapped a thick communication fibril against his offspring's quivering flesh and hurled a projection at its recoiling mass. Considering the fact that its cells were direct derivations of his own, Kworn thought grimly, it was surprising how hard it was to establish control. The youngster had developed a surprising amount of individuality in its few xals of free existence. He felt a surge of thankfulness to the old UI Kworn as the youngster yielded to his firm projection. His precursor had always sought compliant germ plasm to produce what he had called "discipline and order." It was, in fact, weakness. It was detrimental to survival. But right now that weakness was essential.  projection the infant extruded a thick mass of tissue that met and interlocked with a similar mass of his own. As soon as the contact firmed, Kworn began flowing toward his eye, which was still in the half-open hole in the side of the tank. The outside cold struck his sense centers with spicules of ice as he flowed to the outside, clinging to his offspring's gradually extending pseudopod. Slowly he dropped below the cylinder. The infant was frantic. It disliked the cold and struggled to break free, but Kworn clung limpetlike to his offspring's flesh as it twisted and writhed in an effort to return to the warmth and comfort into which it was born. "Let go!" his offspring screamed. "I don't like this place." "In a moment," Kworn said as he turned the vague writhings into a swinging pendulum motion. "Help me move back and forth." "I can't. I'm cold. I hurt. Let me go!" "Help me," Kworn ordered grimly, "or hang out here and freeze." His offspring shuddered and twitched. The momentum of the swing increased. Kworn tightened his grip. "You promised to let go!" his offspring wailed. "You prom -- " The infant's projection was cut off as Kworn loosed himself at the upward arc of the swing, spread his mantle and plummeted toward the ground. Fear swept through him as his body curved through the thin air, missing the edge of the disc and landing on the ground with a sensejarring thud. Behind and above him up against the cylinder, the thick tendril of his offspring's flesh withdrew quickly from sight. For a moment the UI Kworn's gaze remained riveted on the row of odd markings on the metal surface, and then he turned his attention to life. There was no reason to waste the pain of regret upon that half sentient mass of tissue that was his offspring. The stupid flesh of his flesh would remain happy in the darkness with the dwindling food until its flesh grew great enough to touch the poison metal in the ceiling of the tank. And then -- With a harsh projection of horror, the UI Kworn moved, circling the artefact on Caada's vacated strip. And as he moved he concentrated energy into his high-level communication organs, and projected a warning of danger. "Move!" he screamed. "Move forward for your lives!" The line rippled. Reddish mantles unfolded as the Folk reacted. The nearest, shocked from estivation, were in motion even before they came to full awareness. Alarms like this weren't given without reason. Varsi's reaction, Kworn noted, was faster than any of his fellows. The young UI had some favorable self-preservation characteristics. He'd have to consider sharing some germ plasm with him at the next reproduction season, after all. In a giant arc, the Folk pressed forward under the white glow of emerging dawn. Behind them the artefact began to project again in its strange tongue. But in midcry it stopped abruptly. And from it came a wail of mindless agony that tore at Kwom's mind with regret more bitter because nothing could be done about it. His offspring had touched the poison metal. Kworn turned his eye backwards. The artefact was shaking on its broad base from the violence of his offspring's tortured writhings. As he watched a brilliant burst of light flared from its top. Heat swept across the land, searing the lichens and a scattered few of the Folk too slow to escape. The giant structure than the sun and left behind a great cloud of white vapor that hung on the air like the menacing cloud of a samshin. Beneath the cloud the land was bare save for a few twisted pieces of smoking metal. The roadblock was gone. ward, gleaning Caada's strip and half of his own which he shared with Varsi. He would need that young UI in the future. It was well to place him under an obligation. The new thoughts and old memories weren't dying. They remained, and were focused upon the idea of living better than at this subsistence level. It should be possible to grow lichens, and breed a more prolific type of lichen feeder. Water channeled from the canals would stimulate lichen growth a thousand-fold. And with a more abundant food supply, perhaps some of the Folk could be stimulated to think and apply ancient buried skills to circumvent Nature. It was theoretically possible. The new breed would have to be like Varsi, tough, driving and selfishly independent. In time they might inherit the world. Civilization could arise again. It was not impossible. His thoughts turned briefly back to the artefact. It still bothered him. He still knew far too little about it. It was a fascinating speculation to dream of what it might have been. At any rate, one thing was sure. It was not a structure of his race. If nothing else, those cabalistic markings on the side of the cylinder were utterly alien. Thoughtfully he traced them in the sand. What did they mean? authors of some thirty years ago only a tiny group is still active today. One of the real giants a special favorite of mine. Exactly three decades ago, I compiled a personal checklist of his works, up to and including his latest, "The Stone from the Green Star" (how many of you remember that one?) and discovered, with no surprise at all, that I had read every one. However, he had his greatest productive period still ahead of him. He had yet to write what must rank as his greatest popular successes: The Leion of Space, The Cometeers and The Leiort of Time. Although these are space opson was never more than the light-heavyweight king as compared to the co-holders of the super-dreadnaught class, "Doc" Smith and John W. Campbell, Jr. The old stories don't stand the difficult re-reading test too well; but it is very much to Williamson's credit that he has been able to make the exceedingly difficult adjustment of style and approach to the modern manner. His latest book exemplifies vividly the good and bad sides nally a group of shorter stories, they have been bound, unwisely, I think, into novel form by means of a most awkward as well as most indigestible central theme. Earth is under surveillance by an interstellar civilization that will determine whether Mankind is truly human and thus entitled to join the federation as an equal, or to be destroyed in the conversion of Sol into a navigational marker beacon. So far this is old umpth writer with this plot. What won't stay down, however, is his premise that his intragalactic civilization can function despite the Einsteinian limitations the plot places upon communication and travel. Terra's judge, whose decision is the sole determinant of Earth's fate, voyages fifty years, objective time, to sit in judgment because Man is about to make Contact. A Prince of a matriarchy takes a short interstellar trip while his infant fiancee ripens into maturity. Intriguing, no doubt, but the imagination boggles at the insurmountable problems of conducting the business of any civilization under such impossible disjointments. The individual stories, fortunately, are themselves good, standing out like sparkling gems in a tarnished setting. As individual novelettes they cannot be denied their well-deserved Rating: i  # ' I remember well my first introduction to the work of "World Wrecker" Edmond Hamilton. Although almost nothing of the story remains with me, the impact of the old Amazing Quarterly cover does (How long ago, thirty-three years?) with its turtle people, its predominantly yellow background and the magic of its title, The Other Side of the Moon. Hamilton, a prolific writer, knew his market well and wrote stories that sold. Certainly no one suspected that in the breast of the author of countless Capt. Future yarns beat a desire to write realism. (See last month's Five Star Shelf. What's It Like Out There, penned in the middle Thirties, earned horrified rejection slips and didn't see publication until the field finally caught up with it many years later.) mond Hamilton. Pyramid. This paperback reprint of a recent hard cover novel is an excellent example of Hamilton's metamorphosis from purveyor of commercial-type space opera to sensitive portrayer of recognizable people in strange situations and environments. yarns make for interesting conEarth as the long-forgotten cradle of Mankind, Hamilton visualizes Man as the foster-child of FosterMother Earth, abandoned descendant of an interstellar empire that was wiped from the spaceways some thirty thousand years ago as aftermath of a cataclysmic war with another species. The plot concerns the discovery of the thirty thousand year old wreckage of a star-ship on the Moon, decipherment of the ancient language and the building of a ship secret from the Russians. Hamilton then sends his somewhat less-thanshining heroes in search of our lost heritage on the Home World. The most noticeable feature of Hamilton's turnabout is the fact that almost all conflict stems from antagonisms within the exploratory group rather than from the machinations of the mysterious aliens, and this despite the fact that Hamilton has imbued them with powers even beyond those of his halcyon days of cosmic demolition. Hamilton was extra careful with his story ending and you should be, to. It's loaded. Rating: i  # by Frank Belknap Long. Pyramid. Although Long's span of productivity is equal to that of the others under discussion, he was never a writer of the Big Story. His output was limited mainly to shorts and novelettes of which none were memorable like those of Stanley G. Weinbaum, the early Heinleins, the first van Vogts or the Campbell -- Don A. Stuart stunners, even though he maintained a high standard of workmanship. However, in this novel, a transplanted Western, Long's hero is pinned with the silver wings (sheriff's badge) of the supreme law officer and brought to Mars to quell the bitter internecine warfare between two huge power combines (big-time ranching and homesteading). His method of defusing this explosive situation is to beat up the Bad Guy who heads one of the combines, aided by the Semi-Good Guy who heads up the other. The only two things that differentiate this from a standard Western are the wearing of a dark uniform by the hero and the "stream of consciousness" at New York, N. Y. for October #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher, Sol Cohen, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.: Editor, Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y.; Managing Editor, None; Business Manager, None. #. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y... Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. #. The known bondholder, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: ( there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting: also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and Securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was # (This information is required by the act of June #, # to be included in all statements regardless of frequency of issue.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this # day of September, # Jacques N. Glick, Notary Public (Commission expires March #, #) treatment that enables us to look inside him. He is beset by innumerable fears and human frailties but he jabbers so incessantly in run-on washerwoman fashion about them that one almost wishes that he come out second best in his solution to his problems. Rating  by Isaac Asimov. Doubleday. The amazing durability of some of these should-be crotchety old-timers is wonderfully illustrated by Asimov's collection of prize-winning stories chosen as best of their class at several recent World Science Fiction Conventions. Murray Leinster has been a household name in SF circles for so long that it almost seems as if "Will F. Jenkins" is his pseudonym instead of the other way around. It is hard to realize that his story The Runaway Skyscraper appeared in June, #, issue number three of Amazing Stories, the grandpappy of all SF mags. And it's therefore doubly astonishing that he should be able to adapt to the considerable change in the genre so successfully that his novelette, Colonial Survey, should waltz off with top honors. (On sober second thought, though, one remembers that his novella Sidewise in Time opened a whole new subdivision for exploit back in #.) Another umpty-genarian who is still knocking out topnotch stories is Clifford Simak who, although not as ancient as Leinster, first saw print in the old Wonder Stories with World of the Red Sun. Aside from such memorable novels as Time Quarry, Ring Around the Sun and the haunting "City" series, Simak has produced a number of puzzle stories that are as intriguing as anything being written. A prime example is his prizewinner, The Big Back Yard. This is a sure-fire collection of Can't Misses. Nine prize-winning stories selected by vote as bestof-the-year have to be something extra special, an anthologist's dream of Paradise. Lucky-stiff Asimov crows about his good fortune in some delightful comments that further enliven a delightful book. Younger authors represented: A. Clarke, W. M. Miller, Jr., E. F. Russell, A. Davidson, R. Block, D. Keyes, P. Anderson. Rating: (what else?)  To return to the incredible Mr. Leinster; for a chiller-thriller session, try The Forgotten Planet (Ace) on for size. Based on Mad Planet and Red Dust that first appeared in the Amazing Stories in # and #, it's quite a reading experience. by Clifford D. Simak. Doubleday. Coming back to Old Man Simak, here is an excellently representative volume of his work in short story and novelette length. The plots vary from a time travel project, Project Mastodon, to the sales resistance encountered on Garson IV by a joint robot and human sales team from Central Trading in Installment Plan. Or from the hunting of a deadly alien in a typical Midwestern town in Good Night, Mr. James to the equally deadly, but completely innocuous seeming alien life encountered by an exploratory team in Drop Dead. But, whatever the motivations, Simak's humans, robots and androids are just plain folks, completely credible and interesting. So are the stories and long may Simak wave. Rating     ## Have you seen the new Worlds of Tomorrow? First big issue contains Arthur C. Clarke, Keith Laumer, Murray Leinster, Robert Silverberg, etc. Don't miss it! On sale now. They would never live to see the trip's end. So they made a few changes in their way of life -- and many in their way of death! I L be here," a crewman said. "He ain't liable to say anything." "He shore better," the man in front of him said loudly. "Be still," his wife said. "People's lookin' at ya." "I don't care a smidgen," he said, "if en they ayre." "Please," she said. "Joanne Marie," he said, "you know that when I aims ta do somethin', I'm jest natcher'lly bound to do hit. An' iffen I aims ta talk..." "Here comes the priest. Now, be still." The man looked up. "So he do; an' I'll tell ya, hit shore is time he's a-gittin' hyere. I ain't got no all night fer ta sit." The crewman to his left bent over and whispered, "I'll bet he's gonna tell us it's gonna be another postponement." "Iffen he does, I'm jest a-gonna stand up an' yell right out that I ain't gonna stand fer hit no longer." "Now, dear," said Joanne Marie, "the captain can hear ya, if you're gonna talk so loud." "I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'." "You tell 'im!" someone said from two rows behind him. tion, sat very straight and tall. He was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with great dignity and scratched his right shoulderblade. Nestir, the priest, was dressed out in the full ceremonial costume of office. His high, strapless boots glistened with polish. His fez perched jauntily on his shiny, shaven head. The baldness was symbolic of diligent mental application to abstruse points of doctrine. Cotian exentiati pablum re overum est: "Grass grows not in the middle of a busy thoroughfare." The baldness was the result of the diligent application of an effective depilatory. His blood-red cloak had been freshly cleaned for the occasion, and it rustled around him in silky sibilants. "Men," he said. And then, more loudly, "Men!" The hiss and sputter of conversation guttered away. "Men," he said. "The other evening," he said, " -- Gelday it was, to be exact -- one of the crew came to me with a complaint." "Well, I'll be damned," Joanne Marie's husband said loudly. Nestir cleared his throat. "It was about the Casting Off. That's why I called you all together today." He stared away, at a point over the head and to the rear of the audience. "It puts me in mind of the parable of the six Vergios." Joanne Marie's husband sighed deeply. "Three, you will recall, were wise. When Prophet was at Meizque, they came to him and said, 'Prophet, we are afflicted. We have great sores upon our bodies.' The Prophet looked at them and did see that it was true. Then he blessed them and took out His knife and lay open their sores. For which the three wise Vergios were passing grateful. And within the last week, they were dead of infection. But three were foolish and hid their sores; and these three did live." The captain rubbed his nose. "Calex i pundendem hoy, my children. 'Secrecy makes for a long life,' as it says in the Jarcon." Nestir tugged behind him at his cloak. "I want you all to remember that little story. I want you all to take it away from here with you and think about it, tonight, in the privacy of your cabins. "And like the three wise Vergios who went to the Prophet, one of the crewmen came to me. He came to me, and he said: 'Father, I am weary of sailing.' "Yes, he said, 'I am weary of sailing.' "Now, don't you think I don't know that. Every one of you -- every blessed one of you -- is weary of sailing. I know that as well as I know my own name, yes. "But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,' I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are I weary of sailing.' "And then the captainsaid: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set the day for the Festival of the  Casting Off!' " i r  'HE little fellow was pleased  by the rustle of approval from the audience. "God damn, hit's about time!" Joanne Marie's husband said. Nestir cleared his throat again. "Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant," said Nestir. "I knowed there was a catch to hit,' I Joanne Marie's husband said. "I know you will have many questions; yes, I know you will have -- ah, ah -- well, many questions. You are thinking: 'What kind of a Festival can we have here on this ship?' You are ; thinking: 'What a fine thing -- ah, what a good thing, that is -- ah, how nice it would be to have the Casting Off at home, among friends.' " Nestir waved his hands. "Well, I just want to tell you: I come from Koltah. And you know that Koltah never let any city state outdo her in a Festival, uh-huh. "The arena in Koltah is the greatest arena in the whole system. We have as many as sixty thousand accepted applicants. All of them together in the arena is a -- uh, uh, well. -- a sight to behold. People come from all over to behold it. I never will forget the Festival at which my father was accepted. He... "Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any anywhere. "And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh -- this day was the real high point of your whole life!" Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to himself. Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in the front row that had very cute ankles. While they were still cheering and stomping and otherwise expressing their enthusiasm and approval, Nestir walked off the speaker's platform and into the officer's corridor. He wiped his forehead indecorously on the hem of his cloak and felt quite relieved that the announcement was over with and the public speaking done. II gala occasion aboard the ship. The steward ordered the holiday feast prepared in celebration of Nestir's announcement. And, for the officers, he broke out of the special cellar the last case allotment for Crew One of the delicate Colta Barauche ('#). He ordered the messman to put a bottle of it to the right of each plate. The captain came down from his stateroom after the meal had begun. He nodded curtly to the officers when he entered the mess hall, walked directly to his place at the head of the table, sat down and morosely began to work the cork out of his wine bottle with his teeth. "You'll spoil the flavor, shaking it that way," the third mate cautioned. He was particularly fond of that year. The captain twisted the bottle savagely, and the cork came free with a little pop. He removed the cork from between his teeth, placed it very carefully beside his fork, and poured himself a full glass of the wine. "Very probably," he said sadly. "I don't think hit'll do hit," the first mate said. "He hain't shook hard enough to matter." The captain picked up the glass, brought it toward his lips -- then, suddenly having thought of something, he put it back down and turned to Nestir. "I say. Have you decided on this Carstar thing yet, Father?" The little priest looked up. He laid his knife across the rim of his. plate. "It has ramifications," he said. When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little sigh of disapproval. "Well, what do you think your decision will be, Father?" the steward asked. Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat. "Hummmm," he said. "It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a core point, the principle of casta cum mae stotiti." The first mate nodded sagely. "The intent, of course, could actually be -- ah -- sub mailloux; and in that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't the time. I'll have to decide something." um had a very pretty wife," the third mate said. "Yes, very." Nestir agreed. "But as I was saying, if it could be proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be that no stigma would be attached." He speared his meat and chewed it thoughtfully. "But it wasn't at all bloody," the wife of the second mate said. "I scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast." Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of wine. "The problem, my dear Helen," he said, "is one of intent. To raise the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly he died as miserable a death as anyone could desire." "Yes," said the second mate's wife. "I remember that. I read about it in the newspapers." "But it was a case of obvious intent," continued Nestir, "and therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by hastening to his Reward." Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened. "That," he said to Nestir, "my dear Father, is the cardinal point of the whole game, y'know." He scratched the back of his left hand. "Duty. And I must say, I think you're being quite shortsighted about the Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of how we go, but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And that's equally important." "The Synod of Cathau -- " Nestir began. "Plague take it, Father! Really, now, I must say. The Synod Cathau! Certainly you've misinterpreted that. Anticipation can be a joy, y'know: almost equal to the very Reward. Anticipation should spur man in duty. It's all noble and self sacrificing." He scratched the back of his right hand. The second mate had been trying to get a word in edgewise for several minutes; he finally succeeded by utilizing the temporary silence following the captain's outburst. "You don't need to worry about your Casting Off, Captain. You can leave that to me. I assure you, I have in mind a most ingenious method." T HE captain was not visibly cheered; he was still brooding about the sad absence of a sense of duty on the part of Nestir. "I will welcome it," he said, "at the proper time, sir. And I certainly hope -- " His eyes swept the table. "I certainly hope to be Cast Off by an officer. It would be very humiliating, y'know, to have a crew member do it." "Oh, very," said the steward. "I don't know," the second mate's wife said, "whether you better count on my husband or not. I have my own plans for him." "This problem of Carstar interests me," the third mate said. "Did I ever tell you about my wife? She strangled our second baby." "He was a very annoying child," his wife said. "He probably wouldn't have lived, anyway," the third mate said. "Puny baby." "That," said Nestir, "is not at all like the Carstar case. Not at all. Yours is a question of saliex y cuminzund." The first mate nodded. "It seems to me that the whole thing would depend on the intent of the strangler." "Captain," the steward said, "you really must let me give you some of that salve." "That's very kind of you, but I... " "No bother at all," the steward said. "As I see it," Nestir said, "if the intent was the natural maternal instinct of the mother to release her child from its duty, then... "Oh, not at all," the third mate's wife said. "I did it to make him stop crying." "Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward." "I certainly hope so," the third mate said. "Jane worries about it all the time." "I do not," Jane contradicted. "Now, honey, you know you do so." At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the table toward the captain, "Well?" he asked. The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. "You were right, of course." The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. "There, I told you so." The first mate shrugged. "I never do say nothin' right," he said. "I hain't got no luck. I've spent more years un all ya, carpenterin' up a duty log that's better un even th' captain's. An' hit's Martha an' me that gotta wait an' help th' next crew. Lord above knows how long time hit'll be afore we uns'll got ta have a Festival." "Oh, really, now. Now. Duty, duty," the captain reprimanded him mildly. "Duty! Duty! Duty! You all ur in a conspiracy. You all want me ta die uv old age." "Nonsense," said the steward. "We don't want anything of the sort. After all, someone has to orient the new crew." "Quite right," said the captain. "You ought to be proud." napkin in the middle of his food and stalked out of the mess hall. "Quite touchy today," Nestir observed. "By the way," the third mate said. "Wanda gave me a petition to give to you, Father." "Wanda?" "Yes. She's sixteen, now." "Wanda who?" the steward asked. "Wanda Miller, the bosun's daughter." "I know her," Helen said. "She's the oldest child on the ship, and she wants you to sign her adult petition so she can be in the Festival, Father." "She's so young..." "Sixteen, Father." "After all, one must have done some duty," the captain said. "He wants you to sign it so he can take her in the Changing of the Wives," Jane said. Nestir fidgeted uncomfortably. "Well, I #I look at her record," he said. "It's an idea," the second mate said. "Otherwise, we'll be short one woman." "There wouldn't be one short if he had brought a wife," the first mate's wife said, looking squarely at the captain. "Now, Martha. I place duty above pleasure. You're just angry, y'know, because you have to stay with your husband." "All right, so I am. But it's true. And if Carstar hadn't been killed, there would have been two short." She shot a wicked glance at Nestir. "Why don't you and him share a woman -- " "Martha!" "Although the Prophet knows what woman in her right mind would consent to... " "Well," said Nestir hesitantly. "Listen," the third mate said, "the second's right. If you don't sign it, someone will have to do without a woman." Nestir blushed. "I'll look it over very carefully, but you must realize that the priestcraft..." "Actually, in a way, it would be her duty to, you see. Think of it like that: as her way to do her duty." "She's too young for you, dear," Jane said to her husband. "Oh, I don't know," the steward said. "Sometimes they're the best, I hear." Ill r I "HE third mate, whose name was Harry, stood before the mirror combing his hair. He had been combing his hair for the last fifteen minutes. "I suppose the crew is celebrating?" his wife said. "I suppose." She stood up and walked over to the dresser. Absently she began to finger the articles on it. "You really shouldn't have told them about little Glenn tonight." "Pish-tush." "No, Harry. I mean it. Helen looked at me strangely all through dinner. She has three children, you know." "You're imagining things." "But she does have three children." "I mean about her looking at you." "Oh." Harry fiddled with his tie without speaking. "I mean, as much as to say: 'Well, I raised all of mine.' " "But honey, about little Glenn. That was an accident, almost. You didn't really mean to choke him that hard." "But still... it... I mean, there was Helen, looking at me like I wasn't doing my duty. You know." "No," he said. "That's nonsense, Jane. Sheer nonsense. You know what the priest said." He polished one of his brass buttons with the sleeve of his coat. "Harry?" "Yes?" "I don't think all that is necessary just to go on duty." "Probably not." She walked to the bed and sat down. "Harry?" "Yes, dear?" "Don't you really think she's awful young?" "Huh-uh." "I mean, why don't you pick someone else? Like Mary? She's awful sweet. I'll bet she'd be better." "Probably." "She's a lot of fun." He brushed at his hair again. "Who do you want, Jane?" "Oh, I don't know." She looked down at her legs, raised them up from the floor and held them out in front of her. "I think I'd kind of like Nestir. With his funny bald head. I hope he asks me." "I'll mention it to him." "Would you really, Harry? That would be sweet." "Sure, honey." He looked down at his watch. "Harry? Are you going to meet Wanda in the control room?" "Uh-huh." "I thought so. Well, remember this, dear: It isn't the day of the Changing of the Wives yet. Don't forget." "Honey! You don't think for a minute that..." "No, dear. I know you wouldn't. But just don't, I mean." forehead and patted her cheek. "Course not," he said, comfortingly. He left her sitting on the bed and strolled down the officers' corridor, whistling. He made a mental note to have the bosun send some of the crew in tomorrow to wash down these bulkheads. They needed it. In one corner a spider spun its silver web.s, He jogged up the companionway, turned left and felt the air as fresh as spring when he stepped under the great ventilator. And beneath it lay one of the crew. He kicked the man several times in the ribs until he came to consciousness. "Can't sleep here, my man," Harry explained. "A www. Go way an' le' me 'lone, huh?" "Here. Here." He pulled the fellow erect and slapped him in the face briskly. "This is the officers' corridor." "Oh? Ish it? Schorry. Shore schorry, shir. So schorry." Harry assisted him to the crew's corridor where he sank to the floor and relapsed once more into a profound slumber. Harry continued on to the control room. When he entered it, the second mate was yawning. "Hi, John. Sleepy?" "Uh-huh. You're early." "Don't mind, do you?" "No... Quiet tonight. Had to cut the motors an hour ago. Control technician passed out." "Oh?" The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. "Can't blow the ship up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty." He blew a smoke ring. "Might even bar him from the Festival." "Yeah," said Harry, "the captain's funny that way." The second mate blew another smoke ring. "Well," Harry said. "Uh, Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?" "If Nestir lets me." "Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?" mate and put a hand on his shoulder. "Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir." He shrugged. "I don't exactly approve, of course, but... I'm sure if he doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer." "Aw, that's all right," John said. "Don't really matter. Say. By the way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well..." "Look. How about telling me another time?" "Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?" "I'm kind of expecting Wanda." "Oh. Sure. I should have known you weren't here early for nothing. In that case, I better be shoving off. Luck." "Thanks. See you at breakfast." "Right-o." After the second mate left, Harry walked over to the control panel. The jet lights were dead. He picked up the intercom and switched over the engine call bell. " 'Lo," he said into the microphone. "This is the bridge... Oh, hi, Barney. Harry... Have you got a sober control technician down there yet?... Fine. We'll start the jets again. If the captain comes in now -- well, you know how he is... Okay, thanks. Night." He replaced the microphone. He reached over and threw the forward firing lever. The jet lights came on and the ship began to brake acceleration again. Having done that, he switched on the space viewer. The steady buzz of the equipment warming sounded in his ears. Wanda would be sure to want to look at the stars. She was simple minded. "Hello." He swiveled around. "Oh, hello, Wanda, honey." "Hello, Haireee. Are you glad little ol' me could come, huh?" "Sure am." "Me, too. Can I look at the -- oh. It's already on." "Uh-huh. Look. Wanda." "Hum?" "I talked to Nestir today." "Goody. What did he say, huh? I can be an adult and get to play in the Festival, can I?" "I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?" "Them stars shore are purty." "Wanda, listen to me." "I'm a-listenin', Haireee." "You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you if you want to be an adult." TN Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a conference. "No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that," Nestir said. The captain said, "Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this is a ship, yTcnow. And I am, after all, the captain." Nestir shook his head. "The crew and the officers will participate together in the Festival. I will not put the officers' corridor off limits, and -- Oh! Yes? Come in!" The door opened. "Father?" "Yes, my son? Come in." "Thank you, Father. Good morning, Captain, sir." "Sit down, my son. Now, Captain, as I was saying: no segregation. It's contrary to the spirit, if not the wording, of the Jarcon." "But Father! A crewman! In the officers' corridor! Think!" "Before the Prophet, we are all equal. I'm sorry, Captain. Now on Koltah, we practiced it with very good results, and..." "I say, really -- " "Father?" said the crewman who had just entered. "Yes, my son. In one moment. Now, Captain. As I have been explaining: The arena method has advantages. In Koltah we always used it. But here -- due to the -- ah -- exigencies of deep space -- I feel convinced that ddeparture from normal procedure is warranted. It is not without precedent. Such things were fairly common, in astoli tavoro, up until centralization, three hundred years before Allth. Indeed, in my home city -- Koltah -- in the year of the seventh plague, a most unusual expedient was adopted. It seems..." "You're perfectly correct, of course," the captain said. "That's just what I wanted to see you about, Father," the crewman said. "Now, in my city state of Xi, for the Festivals, we..." "Shut up," said the captain softly. "Yes, sir." "Now, as I was saying, Captain, when the methods used in..." "If you'll excuse me, Father, I really should return to duty," said the crewman. "Quite all right, my son. Close the door after you." "I must say, fellow, your sense of duty is commendable." "Well, uh, thank you, sir. And thank you, Father, for your time." "Quite all right, my son. That's what I'm here for. Come in as often as you like." The crewman closed the door after him.  ment, scarcely time for Nestir to get properly launched on his account, when Harry, the third mate, knocked on the door and was admitted. "Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here." Then, to the priest: "I'll come back later, Father." "Nonsense," said the captain. "Come in." "Well, I had hoped to to see the Father for a minute on... private business." "I have to be toddling along," said the captain. "But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about..." "I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee," the captain said. "I'll call you when I'm through," said Harry. The captain left the room. "It's about Wanda, Father," said the third mate. The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. "Ah, yes. The young girl." "Well, I mean, it's not only about Wanda," said Harry. "You see, my wife, Jane, that is..." "Yes?" said the priest. He took his pen out of the holder. "I think, with the proper... ah... you know. What I mean is, I think she might look with favor on you in the Changing of the Wives, if I said a few well chosen words in your behalf." "That is very flattering, my son." He returned the pen to the holder. "Such bounty, as it says in the Jarcon, is cuff tensio." "And with your permission, Father..." "Ah... "She's a very pretty woman." "Ah... Quite so." "Well, about Wanda. I really shouldn't mention this. But Father, if we are short one woman..." "Hummmm." "I mean, the girls might think a man gets rusty." "I see what you mean." Nestir blinked his eyes. "It wouldn't be fair, all things considered." He stood up. "I may tell you, my son, that, in thinking this matter over last night, I decided that Wanda -- ah -- Miller, yes, has had sufficient duty to merit participation in the Festival." "Justice is a priestly virtue," Harry said. "And you really think your wife would...?" "Oh, yes, Father." "Well, ahem. But..." "Yes, Father?" "Ad dulce verboten." "Uh?" "That is to say, in order for a woman to join in the ritual of the Changing of the Wives, she must, ahem, be married." "I never thought of that," said the third mate disconsolately. "I think that can be arranged, however," said Nestir. "If you go by the mess hall on your way out, please tell the captain we can continue our discussion at his pleasure." IV  Nestir, when the captain entered. "No. Over there, in the comfortable chair. There. Are you comfortable, Captain?" "Of course I am." "Good. I have a question to ask you, Captain." "I say?" Nestir rubbed his bald head. "Sir," he said by way of preamble, "I know you have the greatest sensibility in questions of duty." "That's quite so, y'know. I pride myself upon it, if I do say so." "Exactly. Argot y calpex. No sacrifice is too great." "True; true." "Well, then, say the first day of Wenslaus, that would be -- ah, a Zentahday -- I may depend upon you to wed Wanda Miller, the bosun's daughter, yes?" "No," said the captain. "Come now, sir. I realize she is the daughter of a crewman, but -- " "Father," said the captain, "did I ever tell you about the time I led an expeditionary force against Zelthalta?" "I don't believe you have." "Then I will tell you. Came about this way. I was given command of fifty-three thousand Barains. Savage devils. Uncivilized, but fine fighters. I was to march them ninety-seven miles across the desert that..." "Captain! I fear I must be very severe with you. I will be forced to announce in the mess hall this evening that you have refused to do your duty when it was plainly and properly called to your attention." "Very well, Father," the captain said after several minutes. "I will do it." He was trembling slightly. time of the captain's wedding. He had insisted that it be done in privacy. For the ceremony, he refused to make the slightest change in his everyday uniform; nor would he consent to Nestir's suggestion that he carry a nosegay of hydroponic flowers. He had intended, after the ceremony, to go about his duty as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened; but after it was done with, the vast indignity of it came home to him even more poignantly than he had imagined it would. Without a word, he left the priest's stateroom and walked slowly, ponderously, with great dignity, to his own. It was a very fine stateroom. The finest, but for Nestir's, in the whole ship. The velvet and gold drapes (his single esthetic joy) were scented with exotic perfume. The carpet was an inch and a half thick. He walked through his office without breaking his stride. The bed was large and fluffy. An unbroken expanse of white coverlette jutting out from the far bulkhead. It looked as soft as feather down. Without even a sigh, he threw himself upon the bed and lay very, very quiet. His left leg was suspended in the air, intersecting, at the thigh, the plane of the coverlet at forty-five degrees; the number of degrees remained stiffly, unrelaxingly forty-five. Only after a long, long time did he roll over on his back and then it was merely to stare fixedly at the ceiling. It is entirely possible that he would have lain there until Doomsday had not his introspection been, around noon, interrupted by an apologetic tap on the door. "Come in," he whispered, hoping she would not hear him and go away. But she heard him. "Husband," Wanda said simply. She closed the door behind her and stood staring at him. "Madam," he said, "I hope you will have the kindness not to refer to me by that indecent appelaticm a second time." "Gee. You say the cutest things. I'm awful glad you had to marry me, huh." The captain stood up, adjusted his coat and his shoulders, and walked across the room to the dressing table. He opened the left-hand drawer, removed a bottle, poured himself half a waterglass full and drank it off. "Ah," he said. He returned to the bed and sat down. "Cantcha even say hello ta little ol' me, huh?" she asked. "Hello," he said. "Madam, sit down. I intend to give you an instructive lecture in the natural order of..." "Huh?" "Ah," he said. "Quite true, of course." She walked over to the chair and sat down. "I don't like them," she said. "Them cloth things over there." "Those, Madam," he said, "are priceless drapes I had imported from the province of San Xalthan. They have a long, strange history. "About three thousand years ago, a family by the name of Soong was forced to flee from the city of Xan because the eldest son of the family had become involved in a conspiracy against the illustrous King Fod. As the Soong family was traveling..." "I don't like 'em anyway," said Wanda. "Madam," said the captain, "kindly bring me that." "This?" "Yes. Thank you." He took the doll from her. He got up again, walked to the chest of drawers, searched around for a penknife. Finally he located it under a stack of socks. He returned to the bed. Sitting on the edge, he began to rip the doll along the seams with the penknife. Very carefully he emptied the sawdust out upon the carpet, and with equal deliberation, he cut up the canvas covering into small patches. Within fifteen minutes, for he worked very slowly, the doll was completely destroyed. He laid the penknife on the night stand by his bed. He took out a match and struck it across the bottom of his shoe; he bent over and ignited the remains of the doll. "You'll burn yer rug," Wanda said. "Yes," the captain said, "I will. Be so kind as to close the door when you leave." V T HE next day the captain appeared at mess. The third mate said, "I want to thank you for what you done for me, Captain." "Don't mention it," the captain said, bisecting a pilchard with his fork. "It's nice Wanda gets to be in the Festival," Jane said. "It pleases my husband so." "I'm very excited about it all," the steward said. The first mate turned his egg over with his fork and peered suspiciously at the underside of it. "Hit's all right fur you uns ta feel excited. Martha an' me are still purty bitter." "Yes," Martha said, "I don't see why the children couldn't take care of themselves." "Who'd get the new crew out of ice?" John, the second mate, said. "That," the first mate admitted, "is th' problem. Can'tcha even cook an aig?" he asked the steward. "What's the matter with the egg?" the third mate asked. "Hit hain't cooked right," the first mate insisted. "Helen," the captain said, "may I see you after the meal?" Helen looked demurely into her plate. "Certainly, captain. But if it's about the Changing of the Wives, I've already been asked for." "And," John said proudly, "I'll bet she was one of the first ones asked." "Nestir asked my wife almost a month ago," said Harry. "She was the very first." "Well," the captain said, "that's what I had in mind." He turned to survey the table. His eyes lit upon Mary, the steward's wife. She looked at him and shook her head. "John already asked me. "Well," the captain said, "I must say, this is a very fine breakfast, steward. I dearly love pilchards for breakfast. Convey my compliments to the cook." "Yes, sir."  was telling the men...' . just before you came... in about the great pageant of Koltah in the year of '#. At the time, in a special celebration -- annum mirabelei -- we decided to observe the ancient customs of Meizque. The customs are of some interest, and I thought we might apply several of them to our own Festival." "Whatever you wish," said the captain tiredly, stirring his coffee. Before Nestir could resume his account, John interrupted. "I want to mention this again. I have a very special treatment for you, Captain. You should be encouraged by that. No one will ever have a better Casting Off than you." "Thank you," said the captain. "I shall look forward to it." He laid down his spoon. "Oh, Anne. May I see you?" "I'm sorry," said the wife of Barney, the engineer. "Really and truly I am, but I've already been asked, too." "Oh," said the captain. He looked over at the last officer's wife, Leota. But he quickly looked away. "Well," he said, "this is a fine breakfast we have this morning steward." "Thank you, sir. I'll tell the cook." Jane said, in order to stave off the encroaching silence, "Nestir, how old are you?" "Going on forty -- Jane." "The prime of life," the steward said. "Ah," the captain said thoughtfully. "Leota..." She looked up and soundlessly her mouth formed the words, "Too late." The captain dropped the spoon to his plate. Silence fell. It grew prolonged and uncomfortable. Finally the first mate said, "Hit hain't the right way to cook aigs, damn hit." The captain said, "Father, I say. All the officers' wives have been asked." "Yes," said Nestir. "They have, haven't they?" "Do you suppose it would be all right if I just..." "You know the rules," Nestir said sternly. "That's what I was afraid you'd say," said the captain. He looked up at the ceiling; his face was placid. He reached up with his right hand and began to scratch his chin. He scratched his chin for a long time, scarcely breathing. The officers and their wives werj silent, waiting for him to speak. other cup of coffee," he said at last. "Yes, sir," said the steward, snapping his fingers for the waiter. Martha said: "You should have asked earlier." "I know," the captain said. "Father, I really don't see why I have to Change Wives." "But Harry will have yours that day. And you know the rules." "There are a lot of good-looking women in the crew," the steward said. "Quite a number," said the captain. He arose from the table and steadied himself a moment. "Never mind the coffee," he said. "I shouldn't drink over one cup for breakfast. I believe it aggravates my scrofula." He turned., arid walked out of the mess hall. He walked very straight and tall. He walked down the crew's corridor toward their quarters. Shortly he saw a woman coming out of one of the cabins. "Madam," he said. She came over to him. "Yes, sir?" "Madam," he said, "Madam, I..." "Would ja like to have a drink of water? It's right down this way, an' then ya turn ta the left." "No... uh. I... Madam, would you honor me by becoming my partner for the night of the Changing of the Wives?" She balanced on the balls of her feet and looked up at him. "Yur th' captain, ain'tcha?" "Yes," he said. "I am." "Sure, I'll do hit," she said. "I'd be mighty proud ta." The captain turned away and then turned back. "Madam," he said, "what is your name?" "Joanne Marie. Jest ask for me. Everybody down here knows me. "Joanne Marie, Joanne Marie," he repeated under his breath. He shuddered and turned to go. VI T HE day of the Changing of the Wives came to the ship. It was a very important ritualistic day, held, always, three weeks and one day before the Festival of the Casting Off. The morning of the day, Nestir spoke to the assembled complement. He explained its symbolic importance: he explained its historic development; he delivered, in cretia ultimatum est, an exegesis on the Jarcon. And then he took off the cloak of priestcraft and cast it to the floor. "For I am," he said, "Ah, a man as you are men." Then, being no longer empowered to pronounce a benediction (under normal conditions, the function of a younger priest), he left the cheering members of Flight Seventeen A and sped directly to his stateroom. The afternoon passed uneventfully. The complement of the ship moved about their routine chores tingling in anticipation of the evening. At the evening meal, a new seating arrangement was instituted at the insistence of the I steward and the third mate. The newly formed couples were to sit side by side. To accomplish this, it was nec essary to set two extra plates in the officers' mess. One, for Wanda, next to the third mate; and one, for Joanne Marie, beside the captain. "Please pass the meat," the third mate said. Nestir handed it across to him. '"Thank you, Father." "Today, in culpa res, I no longer have that honor," Nestir  reminded him. "The blood-red  cloak of priestcraft will never again touch my shoulders this side  of the Reward." "I'd be a little sad," said the steward. "Oh, I don't know," the third mate said. "It probably all depends," Helen, the wife of the second mate, agreed. "Hit's a far, far better thing I do," the first mate said sonorously. He was a little drunk. The captain speared one pea and ate it. "I envy you," he said, looking over at Joanne Marie. Wanda Miller, who had already upset her glass of water in the third mate's lap, said, "Pass the biscuits, hey...You uns have better'n we do." "No," said the steward, "not at all, my dear. We eat the same as the crew." "Yes; precisely so," the third mate said. "Except ours is fixed up a little differently," said Jane. "An' our cook can't fry an aig," the first mate said. "I wouldn't say that," said the captain. "Shucks," Joanne Marie said, "anybody can fry an aig." "On the contrary, Madam. I recall once, when I was a political adviser for the Kong regime..." "Do you mean mea-Kong?" the steward asked. "No, that was in Koltah." "Yes," Nestir said. "I am very familiar with them. They..." "That's not the one I meant," the captain snapped. Nestir leaped to his feet. "Well!" he said loudly. "I'm through eating." "Oh, come now, old man. There's no hurry, really, y'know," the captain insisted gently. "Ain't there?" Joanne Marie asked. "Gee. I can see you sure ain't like my husband. I mean my ex." She giggled. "Well, I guess I'm finished, too," Jane said. "Well. Good night, Harry." "Good night, dear." I N the mess hall, the lights were out. The figure of the captain loomed like a stark obelisk in the gloom. "Captain, sir, we uns uv been sittin' here at this table fur hours an' hours. I'm gettin' purty tired us sittin'." "It's not long until the Festival," he said. "When the mess boy cleared away all them dishes, I thought shore you'd leave, then." "Oh, no," said the captain. "This is very exciting." "It ain't, the way I see it," Joanne Marie said. "Different perspective, Madam. Doubtless you would not have considered it very exciting either, the time I ran a wagon train from Tamask-Cha. You see, the material was to be delivered on a mining contract. Madam, I can assure you it was hot. The only road was a narrow line across the Ubiq desert. And late the first evenmg... "I can see it warn't very exciting," Joanne Marie said. Silence returned. "I am getting sleepy," the captain said at length. "Oh, I'm usually awake this late. Shucks, I'm used to it. Sometimes I jest get ta sleep when it's time ta get up. But I do wish we'd go to bed." "Madam, your language!" "All I said was..." "I know; I know," the captain said. "Madam, come to my stateroom. You may sleep on the sofa." "Weeeel," Joanne Marie said, "I ain't a-sayin' that. I know my rights." "Let us not be difficult. I am certain, when I explain to you in a logical fashion the obvious impossibility of -- of -- " "You got no wife?" "No," he said. "Yeah. I thought not. That sure is swell." "Madam. Perhaps I can say it this way. I have certain perturbations, but I can assure you, whatever you attempt my aim is inflexible. For me, the Captain, to -- ah -- consort with a crew woman is preposterous." "Is that what you call it? Now that's a funny word. My husband calls it -- " "Madam!" Joanne Marie was cowed into silence. They walked directly to his stateroom. Once inside, Joanne Marie said, "Now ya jest sit down, comfortable like. I got somethin' I want to tell ya." "No," the captain said. "I ain't even told ja yet." "It won't matter," the captain said. "My husband don't like me," she said. He dropped his head into his hands and sighed deeply. Then he looked up, his face set in icy resignation. early the morning of the Festival. "Helen, honey," he said. "Wake up." She murmured sleepily. "Come on, now, wake up." She rolled over to her side of the bed. "All right," he said. He reached out, fumbled for and found his cigarettes. "You know what I'm going to do to the captain?" he asked. He lit a cigarette and lying on his back blew smoke rings at the ceiling. "Yes," his wife said, "you told me. "First, I'm going to take that saber I got on Queglat and scrape open his scrofula. Then, when he's bleeding nicely, all I have to do is pour a bottle of alcohol on him. Don't you think that will be nice?" "Yes, dear." "You know, I'm kinda sorry I went to all the trouble sharpening that saber. After all, it might be more painful if the saber was dull." "Yes, dear." "But then, on the other hand..." "Dear, will you hand me a cigarette?" "Sure." He shook out a cigarette, lit it off his and handed it to her. "So what do you think?" "It doesn't matter, dear," she said. "Oh, but it does matter," John insisted. "I think it's very important." He snubbed out his cigarette. "It's all the little details that one should take into account. Can't be too careful about something like that." He rolled over on his back again. "I'm hungry," he said. "I really thought they should have served breakfast," Helen said. "Well, it wouldn't be right to leave all those dirty dishes for the second crew." "I mean just sandwiches." "Yes," he said, "they could have made up some sandwiches. I think, though, I'd settle for a cup of tea." "I could brew you some on the hot plate." "It's too much bother," John said. "Are you sure you wouldn't mind?" "No. If you'll get up and put the water on." "All right," he said. He threw his legs over the side, fumbled with his feet for the house slippers, padded to the hot plate, put the water on, and came back to bed. "We've still got an hour before the bell," he said. "Are you going to shave?" "I don't think so; not today," he said. "By the way, honey; what's in that can over there?" "Fuel oil," she said. "What's it for?" "You'd be surprised," she said. After a while, the water began to sizzle against the sides of the pan. "Time to get up," she said. She crawled over her husband, slipped into a robe, and proceeded to brew the tea. "It's not much of a breakfast, John." "Say," he said, "where's my bottle of alcohol for the captain." "I set it over by the medicine cabinet, out of the way." "I wonder if it'll be enough?" he mused. "I hope so," she said. "Are you going to get up, or must I serve you this tea in bed? I will if you want me to." "I'll get up," he said. He got up. "Let's take it in the nook to drink," he said. "Can't." "Oh? Why not?" "One of the legs is off the table." "If you'd told me, I'd fixed it." "Never mind," she said. tea; and then each dressed for the Festival. After that, they sat in silence, awaiting the bell to signal the start of the Festival. "I'm going to hurry out," John said at length, "as soon as the bell rings, so I can stand outside the captain's door and get him when he comes out." "That's not fair, John," she said. "You're supposed to wait for the second bell before you can even start to Cast anyone Off." "I know," said John, "but this way, I'll be sure to get the captain." "Well," she said, "I'm certainly glad you have that attitude." He asked, after more silence, "What are you going to do?" "I think I'll stay here for a little while," she said. "Yes, that might -- " The bell rang soundingly throughout the ship. "Time to go," John said. He grabbed his saber. "Where's the alcohol?" "In there," she said. He skidded into the bathroom, pocketed the alcohol, and started for the door. "John!" "Huh?" "Aren't you even going to kiss me good-by?" "Oh, sure. Forgot." He crossed to her, bent down and kissed her. She put her left arm around his neck. With her right hand, she located the table leg she had placed behind her pillow. John drew away and half turned. "Good -- " She hit him in the left temple with the table leg. He went down like a poleaxed steer. She laughed happily.  the people to separate, preparatory to the hunt proper, the captain got up and buckled on his huge infantry sword. He had spent most of the night sharpening it. He had after long hours of considering, decided that there was only one honorable course left to him. He would defend himself. For if he were the Sole Survivor of the hunt, he would be Cast Off properly by the first mate. Otherwise... The possibility that it might be done by a crewman was staggeringly humiliating. He would salvage his honor from that final indignity at all costs. Of course, if he were captured by an officer, it would be a different matter entirely; he would surrender and submit like the gentleman he was. But a crewman... He took the sword out of the scabbard and rubbed his thumb along the side of it. He swung it, and it whistled in the air crisply, pleasingly. He grasped it firmly in his right hand and walked to the door. He threw open the door and jumped back and away. But it was safe; there was no one outside. He stepped into the corridor. Empty. He looked both ways. He listened. Then he began to run, swiftly, silently, on his toes. At the first intersection, he stopped and surveyed the crossing corridor. To his left, almost at the far bend, he saw a crewman; however, the man was not looking in his direction, and the captain felt that he could be reasonably safe from detection if he crossed quickly enough. He sprinted across the open space. On the other side, he stopped and waited. After several minutes of silence, he knew that he could safely continue. He ran for a long distance. Finally, safely down in the second level, he slowed to a walk. He was breathing heavily; it was very loud, and his footsteps echoed hollowly. He was alone down there. He could tell that. At the Jonson bend, he breathed a sigh of relief. Ahead was the empty corridor that led to the dead end, Forward. He could see down it, clear to the bulkhead. And as he knew it would be, it was devoid of life and movement. He sat down to wait out the long day. He scratched his chin. He would have nothing to do until the closing bell. At which time he would be forced to go to the assembly area. As would anyone else, according to the rules of the Festival as laid down by Nestir, who had not yet been sent to his Reward. That would be a dangerous time. For then there would be no esthetic consideration. It would be a fight amongst all assembling for the final honor of Sole Survivor. One could expect no mercy: clean, quick sword stroke, no more. No suffering at all. It was not a pleasant prospect. But to be the coveted Sole Survivor compensated for the risk. The captain laid the sword across his lap and petted it. He would fight. And no crew member need expect to be the man Cast Off by the first mate; that was to be the captain's fate. The second bell called to the ship shrilly. The hunt was on! assembled the children in the large, comfortable hospital. The steward's department had fixed them all a lunch. The children were silent, for the angry brow of the first mate was a complete damper on their usual animal spirits. There was no holiday happiness. The children moved around and fell into little, shifting groups. Several of them began to game at marbles, but the first mate broke it up before it degenerated into a fist fight. "Well, there goes the hunting bell," Martha said. "Yes," the mate said, "hit do, don't hit." "I think they could have a regular nurse for this sort of thing," Martha said. The mate grunted. "Humph. I shore hope they uns don't raise no ruckus. I've got me a splittin' haidache." "Shhhh. Listen. I thought I heard someone scream." "Yep," the mate said. "I was sure afraid uv hit; won't be able to heyar myself think all day long. I'm a-tellin' ya, Martha, if these young uns start a-actin' up, too, I'm jest a-gonna take a knife an' split this here haid open, Reward or no Reward." "That's not a nice way to talk," Martha said. "No, hit hain't. But I'm a-sayin' hit." "I'll tell you what I'll do," Martha said. "I'll call all the children together and tell them nursery stories. That oughta keep them quiet. And you go over there and lay down where there won't be anyone to bother you." "All right, Martha, an' I shore do thankee." The first mate made his way to the farthest bed, sat down, took off his shoes, and stretched out on it. He reached up and felt his head tenderly. "Children," Martha called. "Oh, children! I want you all to come over here." Reluctantly, the children obeyed her. "That's right," she said. "Now. You all sit down and make yourselves comfortable, and be still as mice so my husband can sleep, and I'll tell you stories. And then, after a while, we'll eat the nice lunch the steward fixed for us, and we'll all have the bestest time." "I don't like you," one of the little boys said. "Little boy," Martha said, "I don't like you, either." "Oh," the little boy said. "Now," Martha said, "I'm going to tell you the wonderful story about a very pretty Princess and a very pretty Prince: Once upon a time, there was a land called Zont. It sank long ago under the big, salty sea of Zub..." "My name's Joey," the little boy said. "Well, Joey," Martha said, "do you see that long, steel rod over there, where we hang clothing from?" "Uh-huh." "If you don't shut your little mouth, I'll hang you on it by your thumbs." ' "Betcha ya won't," one of the little girls said. said, "there was this handsome Prince and pretty Princess. But the father of the Princess, King Exaltanta, was a heathen and did not believe in the Prophet. Now. When a true believer, kind King Farko, captured King Exaltanta's kingdom, the deposed king hid his daughter in the deepest dungeon. "Now when the fair Prince, who was the son of King Farko, and of the Princess in the dungeon, he decided that he would rescue her and marry her. And after she had had one child by him, the two of them would travel to the Holy City of Meizque to participate in the Changing of the Wives and the Festival there. "Well, it so happened that King Farko got a special dispensation from the Great Priest to send the members of Exaltanta's family to their Reward without their consent. As he prepared the ceremonies -- they were to be very simple: for, after all, the royal household members weren't true believers, and would consequent(at least) as Outcasts before entering into their Reward, anyhow -- as he prepared the ceremonies... "But does everyone get a Reward? Even people who don't believe?" a little girl asked, wide eyed. "Nearly everyone, my child. The Prophet was not a cruel man. Of course, people who try to Cast themselves Off never, never, never get a Reward. But others, everybody else, all get theirs. It's only a question of how long they have to wait. Sometimes, as when they're unbelievers, it may be a long, long, long time, but..." "I know that," Joey said. Martha looked up at him and sighed; she stood up. "Come with me, dear," she said. At that moment, the door flew open with a loud bang. The first mate, who had been asleep, sat bolt upright on the bed. "God damn hit!" he screamed. "My haid!" "Oh," said a crew member, who was dragging a woman by the hair, "I'm terribly sorry. I didn't know you were in here. I just came in to Cast Mary Jane Off in privacy." He waved an odd-looking instrument at Martha by way of amplification. "Hello, mummy," one of the smaller girls said to the woman. "Oh, why, hello, honey. Are you having fun?" "Oh, yes, mummy." Mary Jane looked at the crewman. "Well, Bob," she said, "I' guess we'll just have to go some place else." "Well, git hout er come in, but shut that door! That noise out there is a-tearin' off my haid!" The crewman called Bob dragged the woman called Mary Jane out of the room. She pulled the door closed behind her. "Well, children," Martha said, "we ought to get back to my story. Now, King Farko, as you will remember, received a special dispensation..."L ' the separation bell sounded. Having done that, he proceeded to fix himself a meal. It was a simple one, consisting only of what material he had been able to steal from the steward's department the previous night. As he ate, he reflected upon his course of action. It was, he could see, going to be difficult to justify at the Reward. But he had been a priest, and because of that he was reasonably well grounded in theological dialectics. The Festival, of course, was a fine thing. But it had its weak points. Chief among them being that the Casting Off was left to inexperienced hands, and certainly, if there was ever a time when experience was required, then the Casting Off was that time. One should be Cast Off at leisure; suffering long and deliciously. A state hero, for instance, honored by being Cast Off by one of the King's Guards, certainly died the best death imaginable. In the present case, although the death as Sole Survivor was to come at the hands of the first mate (who really lacked the training for such a position of trust), it would be the best Casting Off available. For the first mate could follow instructions, and Nestir had written the instructions. "i Nestir intended to remain in the stateroom all day; the hunt would go merrily along without him. When the assembly bell rang, he would still remain in his stateroom. Then, late at night, he would leave. He would slip down to the first mate's stateroom and determine from him where the premature Sole Survivor slept. Then he would find him and Cast him Off in his sleep. And Nestir would be the actual Sole Survivor. Nestir could justify his conduct by virtue of the little known theological clause: ego bestum alpha todas. A decision handed down by the High Court of the Prophet (Malin vs the Estate of Kattoa: T  C, '#) nearly a hundred years previously. Nestir had, in his hip pocket, a small vial of slow-acting poison. He would drink it just before Casting the man Off. Then were he not handled the next day by the first mate, he would die the Outcast death, by his own hand. He did not doubt his ability to convince Them at the Reward. It would be difficult, but it was not beyond his ability. Certainly, if no one took the opportunity of Casting him Off as he sat behind the locked door of his room, it wasn't Nestir's fault. The bosun pushed the ventilator grill away and jumped out of the shaft even before it hit the carpet. He landed catlike, his knees bending springily to absorb the shock. He landed directly behind Nestir and pushed the little man against the wall. Nestir struggled out of the wreckage of the chair. "How... why... why... ?" he said "Ah-ha," the bosun said. "Fooled ja, didn't I?" The bosun was carrying a thin rapier. "Let's discuss this," Nestir said. "One must go about these things slowly." "Sorry," the bosun said. "My God," said Nestir, "you can't Cast me Off just like that: without any suffering!" "Sorry," the bosun said. "Don't have all day. Spend all day with you, and then what? The more people I can Cast Off before the assembly bell, the better chance I'll have to be the Sole Survivor." "Have you no compassion, man? Can you turn aside from the course of the gentle Prophet?" "Sorry," the bosun said again, sincerely. "I can't stand here all day discussing it." "Ah, me," said Nestir as the bosun drew back from the thrust, "who would have thought that I would be trapped by a religious fanatic?" "Must look out for myself, you know," said the bosun. IX I hit you too hard." "No," John said. "Fortunately not." He had just opened his eyes. He was strapped tightly to the bed. "I appreciate what you're doing," he said. "I know you want to be sure I'm Cast Off right. But honey, do you think it was fair to jump the bell on me like that?" "Well," she said, "that's what you intended to do to the captain." He grinned ruefully. "Darn it. I did look forward to Casting him Off." "Oh, well," his wife said, "I guess we can't have everything." "True, my dear," said John. "It was very thoughtful of you." "I wanted to be sure that my husband had the best." "I know you did." "Well," she'said. "I guess I may as well begin." "Yes," he said. "Have you any suggestions, honey?" "No," he said. "I'll leave it all up to you." "All right." She walked to the dresser and picked up a pair of pliers. She crossed to him. She had already removed his shoes while he was unconscious. "I think," she said, "I'll take the big toe first." "Whatever you like, my dear." After a moment, she said, "My, I didn't know it was going to be so hard to pull a few little old toenails." After she had finished with his left foot, she poured alcohol over it. Then she had to wait for him to regain consciousness. "Honey?" she asked. "Yes?" "You didn't scream very much." "That's all right," he said. "You're doing fine." "All right," she said. "If you're satisfied. I guess I may as well start on the other foot... Oh, John?" "Yes, dear?" "Would you like for me to fix you a cup of tea before we go on?" "I don't think so. But it's a nice thought." "Honey?" "Yes?" "You asked what that fuel oil was for, remember?" "Yes." "Well, when I finish this," she said, "I'm going to pour it over you and light it." "Helen," he said, "I married one of the... cleverest... women... in the... system." "There," she said, "I thought I'd never get that one." sitting there. It was late. He expected it was about time for the assembly bell to ring. He stood up. No one had come down his corridor all day, and he felt very pleased with his acumen in selecting it. There wasn't nearly as much noise as there had been earlier; people were thinning out. He hoped there wouldn't be many left in the fight for the assembly. He heard, interrupting his reverie, a thin, shrill shriek, drifting down the corridor from his left. Then, looking, he saw a crewman running toward him. He tightened his grip on his infantry sword. Then he relaxed. It was all right. The man had no arms. The crewman came to a stop in front of him. "Oh? Captain. Good afternoon, sir." "Good afternoon. Careful there. You'll get blood on my uniform." "Sorry, sir." "How are things going, back there?" "Pretty slow... last... couple hours." "Getting pretty weak, eh?" "Yes, sir. Mind if... I... sit down?" "Not at all. Make yourself at home." "Thank... you, sir." He sat down. "My," he said, "I'm tired." "Loss of blood, probably. Listen, old fellow. Do you think you've about quit suffering, now?" "Oh, yes," the crewman said. "Scarcely feel... a thing any more. Numb." "Well, in that case, no sense in keeping you from your Reward." "Not... a bit." The captain drew back his huge sword. "See... you... around," the crewman said. The sword whistled down. The captain wiped the sword on the crewman's blouse. His legs were still stiff. He needed a little exercise. He began to walk toward the dead end of the corridor, keeping a weather eye behind him. "... Bombs away!" The crewman hurtled onto his shoulders from the steampipe above. The captain fell flat, and his sword went skittering away, rattling loudly on the steel deck. "Umph!" he said. "Boy!" the crewman said, "I shore thought you'd never come back down here." The captain was stunned. He could feel the crewman lashing his hands together behind him. "What were you doing up there?" the captain said at length. "I dumb up there when I ahyeared ya a-comin' like a herd o' elephants. I thought ta come down here an' wait hit out 'til th' assembly bell." "My intentions exactly," the captain said, testing his bonds. There was no escape from them. "Your voice sounds familiar." "Yeah. Hit should. I'm Henderson, th' officers' messman." "Lord give me strength," the captain said. "Now, iffen you'll jest roll over on yer back, Captain." "What for, my boy?" "I kinda thought that first off I'd like ta pour this little bottle of hydrofluoric acid on ya." "That's very clever," the captain said. Then he reconsidered. "For a crewman, that is." X r T , HE first mate looked over atthe bosun. "Uncomfortable?" ( "Yes," the bosun said. "Fine, I thought you'd be." He took out his penknife and began  to whittle on a piece of wood. After a while he said, "You haint mindin' me puttin' hit off , this away?" "No," the bosun said, "suit ' yourself." The first mate sent a shaving skittering with his knife blade. "Shucks," he said, "there hain't really no hurry." The bosun raised his head from his chest and shook the hair out B of his face. "Not really, when you consider it," he said.  "Yep, that's right." The first a mate began to work on the point of the stick; he sharpened it down to needle fineness, and then he carefully cut in the barb. "Hain't very strong wood; them barbs are cut against the grain, an' they're liable ta split off when I try ta pull 'em out." "I hope not," the bosun said. The first mate said, "Yep, I'm shore afraid they're a-gonna do jest that little trick." "Look," said the bosun, "this hair's gettin' in my eyes. I wunder if you'd mind kinda snippin' it off?" "Not a-tall," the first mate said. He walked over to the bosun, grabbed a handful of hair and sawed it off with the penknife. "That better?" "It shore is. Thanks." "Not a-tall." The first mate threw down the stick on the table. "Really should uv cut that before." "I suppose so," the bosun said. " 'Course I warn't hable to see what uz in th' priest's mind." "No, that's true," the bosun agreed. The first mate walked over and picked up the typewritten instructions. "You're a-gonna get a fine Castin' Off," he said. "I should," the bosun said. "It ain't everybody can be th' Sole Survivor." "That's true," the first mate said. "Well," he said after a minute, "I jest guess I know them there instructions fine as anything. I suspect we may as well start, iffen hits agreeable ta you." "I'm ready," the bosun said. The first mate took his penknife and tested the edge with his thumb. "Shore is sharp," he said. "Ought ta be. I jest got done a-honin' hit." bosun was hanging. "Well," he said. "No time like the present." He raised the knife. "Jest a minute," he said. "I think I'll get me some music on the radio. You don't mind?" "No," said the bosun. "Not a bit." The first mate walked to the hyperspace radio and flicked on the dial. After fiddling with it for some time, he picked up a symphony being broadcast from Kque. "There," he said, "that's th' kind uv music I shore do like ta hear." The music welled out and filled the room with sound. "Shore is purty," the bosun said. The first mate walked back to him. "Guess I'll start on your back," he said. He reached up and ripped the bosun's shirt off. Then, when the back was laid bare, he made a very shallow cut running the length of the shoulders from armpit to armpit. "Be kinda hard ta get started," he said. He put the penknife in the incision and began to pry the skin loose. "Gonna take me a long time ta get a hand holt," he said. " 'Course onct I do, hit'll be as easy as skinnin' a skunk." "Take yer time," the bosun said. "Aim to." The music turned quiet and sounded of the rippling brooks on far Corazon; it reflected the vast meadows of Nid and the giant, silver-capped mountains of Muri. A cello picked up the theme and ran it, in rich notes, over the whole surface of the dead world, Astolath. A whining oboe piped of the sweet winds from Zoltah; and the brass beat out the finny rhythm of the water world of Du. " 'Scuse me," the first mate said. He laid down the penknife and walked to the radio. With a flick of his wrist, he cut it off. "What uz th' matter with hit?" the bosun asked. "Didn't ja notice?" said the first mate. "Th' third fiddle was sour." "Guess I wasn't listenin' close enough," said the bosun. The first mate returned to his work. "May as well get on with it," he said. He raised the penknife again. #YX "Here!" she said. She swung Joey around in front of her by the left ear. "I'm going to have to leave him in here with you, where he won't get into trouble." The first mate laid aside the penknife. "Martha," he said, "I jest plain don't like kids." "I'm sorry," she said, "But I just can't keep him with the rest of the children. I just can't." "Whatud he do?" the bosun asked. "Do? Let me tell you," Martha said. "First, he... " "I didn't," Joey said. "I haint got no all day ta listen ta ya, woman," the first mate said. "Well. The worst of it was with little Jane. Do you know what he tried to do to her?" "No, and I shore don't care," said the first mate testily: "Well, first he got her down under the table; and then he sat on her; and if I hadn't stopped him, he would have pounded her brains out against the deck." "My, my," said the bosun. "That hain't a-tall nice." "Grownups do it," Joey said. "That's entirely different," the bosun said. "No, it ain't. You just don't like me, that's all." "Little Jane wasn't ready," Martha said. "She hasn't had a chance to do her duty." "It don't matter," Joey said. "Little boy," said the bosun, "do you know where people go who talk that way?" "I don't care," Joey said. "You see? I'll simply have to leave him in here with you." "All right," the first mate agreed reluctantly. "Now, little boy," he said, "you hain't a-gonna bother me, hear? I'm very busy. You jest go over there and watch." "Yes," said the bosun. Martha said, "Well, I better get back to the other children." She left and the first mate turned back to his job. "What's he crying for?" Joey asked. " 'Cause it hurts," the first mate explained. "You missed somethin' there in th' back," Joey said. "Why did you try to choke that little girl?" the mate asked. " 'Cause I wanted to." "Well," the first mate said, "that's why I left that little patch o' skin." "Oh," said Joey. He stood up and walked around the bosun. "What're ya gonna do next?" he asked. "Be still," said the bosun. "I bet I know," Joey said. "I'll bet you're gonna take that little stick over there an' stick it in him." "That shore... is right," the bosun said proudly. "Can I, huh?" "No," the first mate said. "Why not? All ya gotta do is..." He picked up the stick and lunged at the bosun. r T'HE first mate tripped him and took the stick away from him. "Let him alone," the bosun said to Joey. "He's doin' jest fine." "Thankee," said the first mate. Martha came back. "Is he bothering you? We could put him in the ice with the new crew," she said. "Fine," the first mate said. "Oh, no," Joey said. "You gotta catch me first." He began to back away from Martha. She took a step toward him. He turned and started to run. "Thought so," she said. She had been holding one hand behind her. It contained a plastic ashtray. She caught him squarely between the ears with it, and he went down. "Good heave, Martha!" the first mate said. She walked over to Joey, picked him up and started to the door. At the door she paused. "What did you say you wanted for supper, Fontelroy?"  "Two aigs," he said. Do you need more money for yourself -- your family? Is your future in your present job uncertain? Would you like a job with more prestige? how to increase your earning power, in your spare time -- how to prepare for a new, wellpaid career with unlimited future. Arthur J. 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City  Zone St as a way to increased earnings K galaxy m You don't have to mail the coupon -- if you want to keep your covers intact -- but don't years... and sure to be one of its best! Every issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is packed with the best stories of your favorite writers. At almost one-third of newsstand price -- more outstanding stories. Either clip the coupon or send order on a plain sheet of paper... but don't wait! Do it today! r I Introductory Subscription Department J #I Hudson Street, New York City I #, New York j  introductory price! Start my subscription with Issue No. I j  No. # (circle which you prefer). I enclose check or money S I order for #. (Add # for postage outside of North I I and South America). I Name I j Address I j City Zone State I J Here's What Is in Store for You in You'll laugh with his The StarSent Knaves and be enthralled by his The Night of the Trolls. One of science fiction's finest women writers and anthologists brings you her unforgettable story. 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Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material, All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. You don't have to mail the coupon -- if you want to keep your covers intact -- but don't years... and sure to be one of its best! Every issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is packed with the best stories of your favorite writers. At almost one-third of newsstand price -- more outstanding stories. Either clip the coupon or send order on a plain sheet of paper... but don't wait! Do it today! n Introductory Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York City #, New York j introductory price! Start my subscription with Issue No. I I No. # (circle which you prefer). I enclose check or money j order for #. (Add # for postage outside of North  and South America). Name j Address j j City Zone State  J Here's What Is in Store for You in You'll laugh with his The Star Sent Knaves and be enthralled by his The Night of the Trolls. One of science fiction's finest women writers and anthologists brings you her unforgettable story. The Lonely. An all-time great writer with The Masked World. Celebrated author of The Visitor at the Zoo comes to The End of the Search. Hugo award-winner with an unforgettable novelette. The Impossible Star. Another Hugo winner with another memorable novelette, A Jury of Its Peers. All Your Favorites! Prize winners and the best of the newcomers, novelists and short-story writers -- all the writers who bring you the best of science fiction will be with subscription todayl brightest creature in the world, but he can be taught a few simple tricks. Perhaps "taught" is not the exact word. It is really conditioning, as with Pavlov's dogs. One of the few stimuli that really move a planarian to action is pain... or whatever it is that we can call a planarian's equivalent of pain when he is subjected to an electric shock. Sting him with a mild current, flash a light and ultimately -- given patience -- most of the time he will reward you by reacting to the light with the same faint contraction he originally displayed only for the shock. Now, once you've got your planarian cringing every time you flash a light on him, you may wonder what else you can do with him. Here's what: you can chop him up into fine pieces and feed him to other planarians. To planarians, say, which have never been conditioned at all. You will then find a very odd thing. The planarians who have feasted on their brother, although not themselves conditioned at all, act as though they had been -- a little bit They don't cringe at the light; but if you then begin the conditioning routine on them you will discover that they require far fewer repetitions before they respond strongly. It is as though the untutored worm, by eating part of his highly educated brother, absorbs enough education with his lunch to skip the first few grades of the Pavlovian course, entering at something like the high school level. can easily make a great leap from this observed fact into the glittering area of generalizations. Why, that's almost the same, you might say, as eating the heart of a slain enemy warrior in order to absorb his strength. If a worm can get education through his digestive tract, why can't a man acquire virtue the same way? And since this is what primitive savages hold to be true, doesn't this prove once again that modern science has gone all wrong and we ought to go back to the ways of our scienceless forebears? This perilous leap is taken pretty frequently. We learn that South American witch doctors used a precursor of quinine and Chinese prescribed molds that the leaper concludes that witch . doctors must have known plenty we ignorant moderns don't give them credit for. Astrologers foretold human affairs from the position of heavenly bodies, and now we predict radio transmission performance from the cycle of sunspots; astrology is thus shown to have been on the right track -- three milennia ago! It is an easy leap to take, but it lands you in a thicket of begged questions and dubious inferences every time. The generalizations simply don't work. The observed fact about planarian worms turns out to rest on an essential difference between worms and ourselves. We digest and break down our food. The planarian, a far simpler organism, seems to incorporate whole blocks of its food into its body -- and if the bits of what in a planarian pass for "nervous tissue" are conditioned, then part of the cannibal worm is also conditioned. Ancient medicine men did prescribe some potentially valuable drugs. But, look, they prescribed everything! -- at least, everything that they could force down a sufferer's throat without causing him at once to scream and drop dead; and likely enough they prescribed those things a time or two, too, until the relatives of their late patients began coming after them with spears. And astrology, whatever its (unproven) merits, certainly deserves no credit for predicting upper-atmosphere ionization patterns; the founders of astrology knew of the existence of neither ions nor ionosphere. One anomalous fact does not make a law. One good guess does not make a science. It does appear that planarian worms can swallow someone else's conditioning whole. But is that any reason why human beings should? These great minds were Rosicrucians Benjamin Frankli Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. copy of  'The Mastery of Life" -- ligation. A nonprofit organization. Address: Scribe Z.B.M. Scribe Z.B.M. San Jose, California, U.S. A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name AddressCityStateIt began on a battlefield a century ago -- and it ends tomorrow, with all the galaxy's stars locked in a great clash of conflicting, alien creeds! I The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog, above the tortured earth and the shattered fences, and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where men had fought. For endless time ' there had been belching thunder, rolling from horizon to horizon. The gouted earth spouted in the sky. Horses screamed, mixed with the hoarse bellowing of men; the whistling of metal and the thud when the whistle ended; the flash of searing fire and the brightness of the steel; the bravery of the colors snapping in the wind. Then it all had ended. There was a silence. But silence was an alien note upon this field, on this day. It was broken by the whimper of pain, the cry for water and the prayer for death -- the crying and the calling and the whimpering that would go on for hours beneath the summer sun. Later the huddled shapes would grow quiet and still and there would be an odor that would sicken all who passed and the graves would be shallow graves. There was wheat that never would be harvested. There were trees that would not bloom when spring came round again. On the slope of land that ran up to the ridge were the words unspoken and the deeds undone, and the sodden bundles that cried aloud the empty waste of death. There were proud names that were the prouder now, but now no more than names to echo down the ages -- the Iron Brigade, the #th New Hampshire, the #st Minnesota, the #nd Massachusetts, the #th Maine. And there was Enoch Wallace. He still held the shattered musket and there were blisters on his hands. His face was smudged with powder. His shoes were caked with dust and blood. He was still alive. rolled the pencil back and forth between his palms, an irritating business. He eyed the man across the desk from him with some calculation. "What I can't figure out," said Hardwicke, "is why you should come to us." "Well, you're the National Academy and I thought -- " "And you're Intelligence." "Look, doctor, if it suits you better, let's call this visit unofficial. Say I'm a puzzled citizen who dropped in to see if you could help." "It's not that I wouldn't like to help. I don't see how I can. The whole thing is so hazy and so hypothetical." "Damn it, man," Claude Lewis said, "you can't deny the proof -- the little that I have been able to put my hands on." "All right, then," said Hardwicke, "let's start over once again and take it piece by piece. You say you have this man:" "His name," said Lewis, "is Enoch Wallace. Chronologically, he is # years old. He was born on a farm a few miles from the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April #, #, and he is the only child of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace. He enlisted among the first when Abe Lincoln called for volunteers. He was with the Iron Brigade, which was virtually wiped out at Gettysburg in #. But Wallace somehow managed to get transferred to another fighting outfit and fought down across Virginia under Grant. He was in on the end of it at Appomattox." "You've run a check on him?" "I've looked up his records. The record of enlistment at the state capitol in Madison. The rest of it, including discharge, here in Washington." "You say he looks like thirty." "Not a day beyond it. Maybe even less." "But you haven't talked with him." Lewis shook his head. "He may not be the man. If you had fingerprints..." "At the time of the Civil war," said Lewis, "they'd not thought of fingerprints." "The last of the veterans of the Civil war," said Hardwicke, "died several years ago. A Confederate drummer boy, I think. There must be some mistake." Lewis shook his head. "I thought so myself, when I was assigned to it." "How come you were assigned? How does Intelligence get involved in a deal like this?" "I'll admit," said Lewis, "that it's a bit unusual. But there were so many implications..." "Immortality, you mean." haps. But only incidentally. There were other considerations. It was a strange setup that bore looking into." "But Intelligence..." Lewis grinned. "You are thinking, why not a scientific outfit? Logically, I suppose it should have been. But one of our men ran afoul of it. He was on vacation. Had relatives in Wisconsin. He heard a rumor -- just the vaguest casual gossip. So he nosed around a bit. He didn't find out too much, but enough to make him think there might be something to it." "That's the thing that puzzles me," said Hardwicke. "How could a man live for # years in one locality without becoming a celebrity that the world would hear about? Can you imagine what the newspapers could do with a thing like this?" Lewis said, "I shudder when I think about it." "You haven't told me how." "This," said Lewis, "is a bit hard to explain. You'd have to know the country and the people in it. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is bounded by two rivers, the Mississippi on the west, the Wisconsin on the north. Away from the rivers there is flat, broad prairie land, rich land, with prosperous farms and towns. But the land that runs down to the river is rough and rugged; high hills and bluffs and deep ravines and cliffs, and there are certain areas forming bays or pockets that are isolated. They are served by inadequate roads and the small, rough farms are inhabited by a people who are closer, perhaps, to the pioneer days of a hundred years ago than they are to the twentieth century. They have cars, of course, and radios, and someday soon, perhaps, even television. But in spirit they are conservative and clannish. Not all the people, of course. Not even many of them. But these little isolated neighborhoods. "At one time there were a lot of farms in these isolated pockets, but today a man can hardly make a living on a farm of that sort. Slowly the people are being squeezed out of the areas by economic circumstances. They sell their farms for whatever they can get for them and move somewhere else, to the cities mostly, where they can make a living." Hardwicke nodded. "And the ones that are left, of course, are the most conservative and clannish." "Right. Most of the land now is held by absentee owners who make no pretense of farming it. They may run a few head of cattle on it, but that is all. It's not too bad as a tax write-off for someone who needs that sort of thing. And in the land-bank days a lot of the land was put into the bank." "You're trying to tell me these backwoods people are engaged in a conspiracy of silence?" haps not anything as formal as that. It is just their way of doing things, a holdover from the old, stout pioneer philosophy. They minded their own business. They didn't want folks interfering with them and they interfered with no one else. If a man wanted to live to be a thousand, it might be a thing of wonder, but it was his own damn business. And if he wanted to live alone and be let alone while he was doing it, that was his business, too. They might talk about it among themselves, but to no one else. They'd resent it if some outsider tried to talk about it. "After a time, I suppose, they came to accept the fact that Wallace kept on being young while they were growing old. New generations accepted it because their elders saw in it nothing too unusual -- and, anyhow, no one saw much of Wallace. He kept strictly to himself. "And in the nearby areas the thing, when it was thought of at all, grew to be just another crazy tale that wasn't worth looking into. Maybe just a joke among those folks down Dark Hollow way. A man might look ridiculous if he went prying into it." "But your man looked into it." "Yes. Don't ask me why." "Yet he wasn't assigned to follow up the job." "He was needed somewhere else. And, besides, he was known back there." "And you?" "It took two years of work." "But now you know the story." "Not all of it. There are more questions now than there were to start with." "You've seen this man." "Many times," said Lewis. "But I've never talked with him. I don't think he's ever seen me. He takes a walk each day before he goes to get the mail. He never moves off the place, you see. The mailman brings out the little stuff he needs. A bag of flour, a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, cigars and sometimes liquor." "But that must be against the postal regulations." "Of course it is. But mailmen have been doing it for years. The mailmen probably are the only friends he has ever had." "I take it this Wallace doesn't do much farming." "None at all. He has a little vegetable garden, but that is all he does. The place has gone back pretty much to wilderness." "But he has to live. He must get money somewhere." "He does," said Lewis. "Every five or ten years or so he ships off a fist full of gems to an outfit in New York." "Legal?" "If you mean, is it hot, I don't think so. If someone wanted to make a case of it, I suppose there are illegalities." "And you don't mind?" said Lewis, "and they were rather nervous. For one thing, they'd been stealing Wallace blind. I told them to keep on buying. I told them that if anyone came around to check, to refer them straight to me. I told them to keep their mouths shut and not change anything." "You don't want anyone to scare him off," said Hardwicke. "You're damned right I don't. I want everything to stay just the way it is. And before you ask me where the stones come from, I'll tell you I don't know." "He maybe has a mine." "That would be quite a mine. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds, all out of the same mine." "I would suspect, even at the prices that he gets from them, he picks up a fair income." Lewis nodded. "Apparently he only sends a shipment in when he runs out of cash. He wouldn't need too much. He lives rather simply to judge from the grub he buys. But he subscribes to a lot of daily papers and news magazines and to dozens of scientific journals. He buys a lot of books." "Technical books?" "Some of .them, of course, but mostly keeping up with new developments. Physics and chemistry and biology -- all that sort of stuff." "But I don't..." "Of course you don't. Neither do I. He's no scientist. Or at least he has no formal education in the sciences. Back in the days when he went to school there wasn't much of it -- not in the sense of today's scientific education. And whatever he learned then would be fairly worthless now in any event. He went through grade school -- one of those one-room country schools -- and spent one winter at what was called an academy that operated for a year or two down in Millville village. In case you don't know, that was considerably better than par back in the #s. He was, apparently, a fairly bright young man." Hardwicke shook his head. "It sounds incredible. You've checked on all of this?" "As well as I could. I had to go at it gingerly. I wanted no one to catch on. And one thing I forgot -- he does a lot of writing. He buys these big bound record books, in lots of a dozen at the time. He buys ink by the pint." his desk and paced up and down the room. "Lewis," he said, "if you hadn't shown me your credentials and if I hadn't checked on them, I'd figure all of this to be a very tasteless joke." He went back and sat down again. He picked up the pencil and started rolling it between his palms once more. "You've been on the case two years," he said. "You have no ideas?" "Not a one," said Lewis. "I'm entirely baffled. That is why I'm here." "Tell me more of his history. After the war, that is." "His mother died," said Lewis, "while he was away. His father and the neighbors buried her right there on the farm. That was the way a lot of people did it then. Young Wallace got a furlough, but not in time to get home for the funeral. There wasn't much embalming done in those days and the traveling was slow. Then he went back to the war. So far as I can find, it was his only furlough. The old man lived alone and worked the farm, batching it and getting along all right. From what I can pick up, he was a good farmer, an exceptionally good farmer for his day. He subscribed to some farm journals and was progressive in his ideas. He paid attention to such things as crop rotation and the prevention of erosion. The farm wasn't much of a farm by modern standards, but it made him a living and a little extra he managed to lay by. "Then Enoch came home from the war and they farmed the place together for a year or so. The old man bought a mower -- one of those horse-drawn contraptions with a sickle bar to cut hay or grain. It was the progessive thing to do. It beat a scythe all hollow. "Then one afternoon the old man went out to mow a hayfield. The horses ran away. Something must have scared them. Enoch's father was thrown off the seat and forward, in front of the sickle bar. It was not a pretty way to die." Hardwicke made a grimace of distaste. "Horrible," he said. "Enoch went out and gathered up his father and got the body to the house. Then he took a gun and went hunting for the horses. He found them down in the corner of the pasture and he shot the two of them, and he left them. I mean exactly that. For years their skeletons lay there in the pasture, where he'd killed them. They were still hitched to the mower until the harness rotted. "Then he went back to the house and laid his father out. He washed him and he dressed him in the good black suit and laid him on a board, then went out to the barn and carpentered a coffin. And after that, he dug a grave beside his mother's grave. He finished it by lantern light, then went back to the house and sat up with his father. When morning came, he went to tell the nearest neighbor and that neighbor notified the others and someone went to get a preacher. Late in the afternoon they had the funeral and Enoch went back to the house. He has lived there ever since, but he never farmed the land. Except the garden, that is." pie wouldn't talk to strangers. You seem to have learned a good deal about their peculiar hermit." "It took two years to do it. I infiltrated them. I bought a beatup car and drifted into Millville and I let it out that I was a ginseng hunter." "A what?" "A ginseng hunter. Ginseng is a plant." "Yes, I know. But there's been no market for it for years." "A small market and an occasional one. Exporters will take on some of it. But I hunted other medicinal plants as well and pretended an extensive knowledge of them and their use. Pretended isn't actually the word; I boned up plenty on them." "The kind of simple soul," said Hardwicke, "those folks could understand. A sort of cultural throwback. And inoffensive, too. Perhaps not quite right in the head." Lewis nodded. "It worked even better than I thought. I just wandered around and people talked to me. I even found some ginseng. There was one family in particular -- the Fisher family. They live down in the river bottoms below the Wallace farm, which sits on the ridge above the bluffs. They've lived there almost as long as the Wallace family, but a different stripe entirely. The Fishers are a coon-hunting, catfishing, moonshine-cooking tribe. They found a kindred spirit in me. I was just as shiftless and no-account as they were. I helped them with their moonshine, both in the making and the drinking. And once in a while the peddling. I went fishing with them and hunting with them, and I sat around and talked and they showed me a place or two where I might find some ginseng. Sang is what they call it. I imagine a social scientist might find a gold mine in the Fishers. There is one girl -- a deaf-mute, but a pretty thing -- and she can charm off warts." "I recognize the type," said Hardwicke. "I was born and raised in the southern mountains." "They were the ones who told me about the team and mower. So one day I went up in that corner of the Wallace pasture and did some digging. I found a horse's skull and some other bones." "But no way of knowing if it was one of the Wallace horses." "Perhaps not," said Lewis. "But I found part of the mower as well. Not much left of it, but enough to identify." "Let's get back to the history," suggested Hardwicke. "After the father's death, Enoch stayed on at the farm. He never left it?" Lewis shook his head. "He lives in the same house. Not a thing's been changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man." "You've been in the house?" "Not in it. At it. I will tell you how it was." II had an hour, for he had timed Enoch Wallace during the last ten days. And from the time he left the house until he got back with his mail, it had never been less than an hour. Sometimes a little longer, when the mailman might be late, or they got to talking. But an hour, Lewis told himself, was all that he could count on. Wallace had disappeared down the slope of ridge, heading for the point of rocks that towered above the bluff face, with the Wisconsin river running there below. He would climb the rocks and stand there, with the rifle tucked beneath his arm, to gaze across the wilderness of the river valley. Then he would go back down the rocks again and trudge along the wooded path to where, in proper season, the pink lady slippers grew, and from there up the hill again to the spring that gushed out of the hillside just below the ancient field that had lain fallow for a century or more, and then along the slope until he hit the almost overgrown road and so down to the mailbox. In the ten days that Lewis had watched him, his route had never varied. It was likely, Lewis told himself, that it had not varied through the years. Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was. And he stopped along the way to renew acquaintances with old friends of his -- a tree, a squirrel, a flower. He was a rugged man and there still was much of the soldier in him -- old tricks and habits left from the bitter years of campaigning under many leaders. He walked with his head held high and his shoulders back, and he moved with the easy stride of one who had known hard marches. Lewis came out of the tangled mass of trees that once had been an orchard. A few trees, twisted and gnarled and gray with age, still bore their pitiful and bitter crop of apples. He stopped at the edge , of the copse and stood for a moment to stare up at the house on the ridge above. For an instant it seemed to him the house stood in a special light, as if a rare and more distilled essence of the sun had crossed the gulf of space to shine upon this house and to set it apart from all other houses in the world. Bathed in that light, the house was somehow unearthly, as if it, indeed, might be set apart as a very special thing. And then the light, if it ever had been there, was gone and the house shared the common sunlight of the fields and woods. Lewis shook his head and told himself that it had been foolishness, or, perhaps, a trick of seeing. For there was no such thing as special sunlight. The house was no more than a house, although wondrously preserved. did not see too often in these days. It was rectangular; long and narrow and high, with oldfashioned gingerbread along the eaves and gables. It had a certain gauntness that had nothing to do with age. It had been gaunt the day it was built. Gaunt and plain and strong, like the people that it sheltered. But gaunt as it might be, it stood prim and neat, with no peeling paint, with no sign of weathering, and no hint of decay. Against one end of it was a smaller building, no more than a shed, as if it were an alien structure that had been carted in from some other place and shoved against its end, covering the side door of the house. Perhaps the door, thought Lewis, that led into the kitchen. The shed undoubtedly had been used as a place to hang outdoor clothing and to leave overshoes and boots, with a bench for milk cans and buckets, and, perhaps, a basket in which to gather eggs. From the top of it extended three feet of stovepipe. Lewis went up to the house and around the shed. And there, in the side of it, was a door ajar. He stepped up on the stoop, pushed the door wide open and stared in amazement at the room. For it was not a simple shed. It, apparently, was the place where Wallace lived. The stove from which the stovepipe projected stood in one corner. It was an ancient cook stove, smaller than the old-fashioned kitchen range. Sitting on its top was a coffee pot, a frying pan and a griddle. Hung from hooks on a board behind it were other cooking implements. Opposite the stove, shoved against the wall, was a three-quarter size four-poster bed, covered with a lumpy quilt, quilted in one of the ornate patterns of many pieces of many-colored cloth that had been the delight of ladies of a century before. In another corner was a table and a chair. Above the table, against the wall, hung a small open cupboard in which were stacked some dishes. On the table stood a kerosene lantern, battered from much usage, but with its chimney clean, as if it had been washed and polished as recently as this morning, the wick neatly trimmed. There was no door into the house, no sign there had ever been a door. The clapboard of the house's outer wall ran unbroken to form the fourth wall of the shed. This was incredible, Lewis told himself -- that there should be no door, that Wallace should live here, in this shed, when there was a house to live in. As if there were some reason he should not occupy the house, and yet must stay close by it. Or perhaps as though he were living out a penance of some sort, living here in this shed as a medieval hermit might have lived in a woodland hut or in a desert cave. He stood in the center of the shed and looked around him, hoping that he might find some clue to this unusual circumstance. But there was nothing, beyond the bare, hard fact of living. Just the very basic necessities -- the stove to cook his food and heat the place, the bed to sleep on, the table to eat on and the lantern for its light. Not even so much as an extra hat (although, come to think of it, Wallace never wore a hat) or an extra coat. No sign of magazines or papers, and Wallace never came home from the mailbox emptyhanded. He subscribed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Star, as well as many scientific and technical journals. But there was no sign of them here, nor of the many books he bought. No sign, either, of the bound record books. Nothing at all on which a man could write, nor anything to write with. self, this shed, for some baffling reason, was no more than a show place, a place staged most carefully to make one think that this was where Wallace lived. Perhaps he lived in the house after all. Although, if that were the case, why all this effort, not too successful, to make one think he didn't? Lewis turned to the door and walked out of the shed. He went around the house until he reached the porch that led up to the front door. At the foot of the steps, he stopped and looked around. The place was quiet. The sun was mid-morning high and the day was warming up. This sheltered corner of the earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat. He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand, he grasped the knob and turned -- except he didn't turn it; the knob stayed exactly where it was. His clenched fingers went half around it in the motion of a turn. Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn't turn the knob. It was as if the knob were covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob. He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any evidence of coating. There was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly all right. Too all right, perhaps; for it was clean, as if someone had wiped and polished it. There was no dust upon it and no weather specks. He tried a thumbnail on it and the thumbnail slipped, but left no mark behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door. Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth -- so smooth that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it. He moved along the porch until he came to a window. And now, as he stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before, something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The windows were black. There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades. They were simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of the house. He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the sunlight. But even so he could not see into the room beyond. He stared, instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had no reflective qualities. He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of light once it had hit that window. He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured light and all the exterior was slick and hard. with his fist. It was like pounding a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed, and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces. But the hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness. An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone, just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance. Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on. He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge, he stopped and looked back and now the house was different. It was no longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look and there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out. Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees. There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He ducked the drooping branches and walked around a tree that had been uprooted in some windstorm of many years before. He reached up as he went along, picking an apple here and there, scrubby things and sour. He took a single bite out of each one of them, then threw them away; for there were none of them that was fit to eat, as if they might have taken from the neglected soil a certain basic bitterness. At the far side of the orchard he found the fence and the graves that it enclosed. Here the weeds and grass were not so high and the fence showed signs of repair made rather recently. At the foot of each grave, opposite the three crude native limestone headstones, was a peony bush, each of them a great straggling mass of plants that had grown undisciplined for years. Standing before the weathered picketing, he knew that he had stumbled on the Wallace family burial plot. But there should have been only the two stones. What about the third? He moved around the fence to the sagging gate and went into the plot. Standing at the foot of the graves, he read the legends on the stone. The carving was angular and rough, giving evidence of having been executed by unaccustomed hands. There were no pious phrases, no lines of verse, no carvings of angels or of lambs or of other symbolic figures such as had been in the vogue in the #s. There were just the names and dates. On the first stone: Amanda Wallace #-# And on the second stone : Jedediah Wallace #-# And on the third stone -- please," said Lewis. Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and handed it across. "Paper, too?" he asked. "If you please," said Lewis. He bent above the desk and drew rapidly. "Here," he said, handing back the paper. Hardwicke wrinkled his brow. "But it makes no sense," he said. "Except for that figure underneath." "The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for infinity." "But the rest of it?" "I don't know," said Lewis. "It is the inscription on the tombstone. I copied it... " "And you know it now by heart." "I should. I've studied it enough." "I've never seen anything like it in my life," said Hardwicke. "Not that I'm an authority. I really know little at all in this field." "You can put your mind at rest. It's nothing that anyone knows anything about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of them. I told them I'd found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had preColumbian settlements in America." Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper. "I can see what you mean," he said, "when you say you have more questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say you've never talked with Wallace?" "No one talks to him except the mailman. He goes out on his daily walks and he packs this gun." "People are afraid to talk with him?" "Because of the gun, you mean?" "Well, yes, I suppose that was in the back of my mind. I wondered why he carried it." don't know. I've tried to tie it in, to find some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far as I can find. But I don't think the rifle is the reason no one talks with him. He's an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears him, I am sure of that. He's been around too long for anyone to fear him. Too familiar. He's a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no one feels quite comfortable with him, either, I would imagine that most of them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable. For he's something they are not. Something greater than they are, and at the same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his own humanity. I think that secretly many of his neighbors may be a bit shamed by him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly, sidestepped growing old -- one of the penalties, but perhaps also one of the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in to talk about him to strangers like us." "You spent a good deal of time watching him?" "There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from and we keep shifting them around. There isn't an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn't under observation." "This business really has you people bugged." "I think with reason," Lewis said. "There is still one other thing." He bent over and picked up the briefcase he had placed beside his chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hardwicke. "What do you make of these?" he asked. Hardwicke picked them up. Suddenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at only the top one; not any of the others. Lewis saw the question in his face. "In the grave," he said. "The one beneath the headstone with the funny writing." led shrilly. Enoch Wallace put away the book in which he had been writing and got up from his desk. He walked across the room to the whistling machine. He punched a button and shoved a key and the whistling stopped. The machine built up its hum and the message began to form on the plate, faint at first and then becoming darker until to stood out clearly. It read: Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall. There was almost three hours to go. He touched a button and a thin sheet of metal, bearing the message, protruded from the side of the machine. Beneath it, the duplicate fed itself into the record file. The machine chuckled and the message plate was clear once more and waiting. Enoch pulled out the metal plate, threaded the holes in it through the double filing spindle and then dropped his fingers to the keyboard and typed: NO. came into being on the plate and he left it there. Thuban VI? Had there been, he wondered, one of them before? As soon as he got his chores done, he would go to the filing cabinet and check. It was a liquid-tank case and those, as a rule, were the most uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too difficult to handle. And, as often, too, their very thinking processes proved too divergent to provide much common ground for communication. Although, he recalled, that was not always true. There had been that tank traveler several years ago, from somewhere in Hydra (or had it been the Hyades?) he'd sat up the whole night with and almost failed of sending off on time, yarning through the hours, their communication (you couldn't call it words) tumbling over one another as they packed into the little time they had a lot of fellowship and, perhaps, some brotherhood. He, or she, or it -- they'd never got around to that -- had not come back again. And that was the way it was, thought Enoch. Very few came back. By far the greater part of them were just passing through. or it (whichever it might be) down in black and white. In fact he had all of them, every single blessed one of them, down in black and white. It had taken him, he remembered, almost the entire following day, crouched above his desk, to get it written down; all the stories he'd been told, all the glimpses he had caught of a far and beautiful and tantalizing land (tantalizing because there was so much of it he could not understand), all the warmth and comradeship that had flowed between himself and this misshapen, twisted, ugly living being from another world. And any time he wished, any day he wished, he could take down the journal from the row of journals and relive that night again. Although he never had. It was strange, he thought, how there was never time, or never seemed to be the time, to thumb through and re-read in part what he'd recorded through the years. He turned from the message machine and rolled a No. # liquid tank into place beneath the materializer, positioning it exactly and locking it in place. Then he pulled out the retracting hose and thumbed the selector over to No. #. He filled the tank and let the hose slide back into the wall. Back at the machine, he cleared the plate and sent off his confirmation that all was ready for the traveler from Thuban. He got back re-confirmation from the other end, then threw the machine to neutral, ready to receive again. He went from the machine to the filing cabinet that stood next to his desk and pulled out a drawer jammed with filing cards. He looked and Thuban VI was there, keyed to August #, #. He walked across the room to the wall filled with books and rows of magazines and journals, filled from floor to ceiling, and found the record book he wanted. Carrying it, he walked back to his desk. August #, #, he found, when he located the entry, had been one of his lighter days. There had been one traveler only, the one from Thuban VI. And although the entry for the day filled almost a page in his small, crabbed writing, he had devoted no more than one paragraph to the visitor. Came today, it read, a blob from Thuban VI. There is no other way in which one might describe it. It is simply a mass of matter, presumably of flesh, and this mass seems to go through some sort of rhythmic change in shape, for periodically it is globular, then begins to flatten out until it lies in the bottom of the tank, somewhat like a pancake. Then it begins to contract and to pull in upon itself, until finally it is a ball again. This change is rather slow and definitely rhythmic, but only in the sense that it follows the same pattern. It seems to have no relation to time. I tried timing it and could detect no time pattern. The shortest period needed to complete the cycle was seven minutes and the longest was eighteen. Perhaps over a longer period one might be able to detect a time rhythm, but I didn't have the time. The semantic translator did not work with it, but it did emit for me a series of sharp clicks, as if it might be clicking claws together, although it had no claws that I could see. When I looked this up in the pasimology manual I learned that what it was trying to say was that it was all right, that it needed no attention, and please leave it alone. Which I did thereafter. And at the end of the paragraph, jammed into the little space that had been left, was the notation: See Oct. #, #. he came to October # and that had been one of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station. His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be grasped, much less put to use, by human beings. "I shall call you Ulysses," Enoch recalled telling him, that first time they had met. "I need to call you something." "It is agreeable," said the then strange being (but no longer strange). "Might one ask why the name Ulysses?" "Because it is the name of a great man of my race." "I am glad you chose it," said the newly-christened being. "To my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years." And it had been many years, thought Wallace, with the record book open to that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it had all been laid out before him. And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone on. For many centuries more. For a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of that thousand years, what would he know then? Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important part of it. And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher. The fellow who posed as a ginseng hunter. Before too long whoever it might be might start closing in. What he'd do or how he'd meet the threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had been bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have happen all these years. There was reason to wonder that it had not happened sooner. He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they'd met. He'd been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now, he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday. IV and it was late afternoon. He was watching the great, white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the Iowa hills. The day was hot and sultry, without a breath of moving air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched listlessly, for the sake of going through the motions, it seemed, rather than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows' wings, as they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that bordered the field beyond the road, was harsh and dry sound, as if their feathers had grown stiff in the heat. And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was work to do. Corn to be plowed. Hay to be gotten in. Wheat soon to put in shock. For, despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to live. Days had to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness in the last few years. But war was somehow different than what had happened here. In war you knew it and expected it. You were ready when it happened; but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had returned. A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there really would be peace, fencing out the violence and the horror. Now he was alone, as he'd never been alone before. Now, if ever, could be a new beginning. Perhaps now there had to be a new beginning. But whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish. He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched the thunderheads piling in the west. It might mean rain. The land could use the rain. Or it might be nothing, for above the merging river valleys the air currents were erratic. There was no way a man could tell where those clouds might flow. He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate. He was tall and gangling, and his clothes were dusty. From the appearance of him he had walked a far way. He came up the path and Enoch sat waiting for him, watching him but not stirring from the steps. "Good day, sir," Enoch finally said. "It's a hot day to be walking. Why don't you sit a while?" stranger. "But first, I wonder, could I have a drink of water?" Enoch got up to his feet. "Come along. I'll pump a fresh one for you." He went down across the barnyard until he reached the pump. He unhooked the dipper from where it hung upon a bolt and handed it to the man. He grasped the handle of the pump and worked it up and down. "Let it run a while," he said. "It takes a time for it to get real cool." The water splashed out of the spout, running on the boards that formed the cover of the well. It came in spurts as Enoch worked the handle. "Do you think," the stranger asked, "that it is about to rain?" "A man can't tell," said Enoch. "We have to wait and see." this traveler that disturbed him. Nothing, actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that probably this stranger's ears were just a bit too pointed at the top. Then he put it down to his imagination, for when he looked again they seemed to be all right. "I think," said Enoch, "that the water should be cold by now." The traveler put down the dipper and waited for it to fill. He offered it to Enoch. Enoch shook his head. "You first. You need it worse than I do." The stranger drank greedily and with much slobbering. "Another one?" asked Enoch. "No, thank you," said the stranger. "But I'll catch another dipper full for you, if you wish me to." Enoch pumped and when the dipper was full, the stranger handed it to him. The water was V cold. Enoch, realizing for the first time that he had been thirsty, drank it almost to the bottom. He hung the dipper back on its bolt and said to the man: "Now, let's get in that sitting." The stranger grinned. "I could do with some of it," he said. Enoch pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. "The air gets close," he said, "just before a rain." And as he mopped his face, quite suddenly he knew what it was that had disturbed him about the traveler. Despite his bedraggled clothes and his dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this time-before-arain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime. Enoch put the bandanna back into his pocket. They walked back to the steps and sat there, side by side. "You've traveled a far way," said Enoch, gently prying. "Very far, indeed," the stranger told him. "I'm a right smart piece from home." "And you have a far way yet to go?" "No," the stranger said, "I believe that I have got to the place where I am going." "You mean..." asked Enoch, and left the question hanging. "I mean right here," said the stranger, "sitting on these steps. I have been looking for a man and I think that man is you. I did not know his name nor where to look for him, but yet I knew that one day I would find him, and now I have." tonished. "Why should you look for me?" "I was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what they were." "Yes," said Enoch, "that is something I have done. On many nights, camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky, looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they'd been put up there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have heard some way that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on Earth. But I don't know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too much about them." "There are some," the stranger said, "who know a deal about them." "You, perhaps," said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did not look like a man who'd know much of anything. "Yes, I," the stranger said. "Although I do not know as much as many others do." Enoch said, "I've sometimes wondered if the stars are other suns, might there not be other planets and other people, too." He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the other fellows to pass away the time. And once he'd mentioned this idea of maybe other people on other planets circling other suns. And the fellows all had jeered him and for days afterwards had made fun of him, so he had never mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in it himself. It had never been more than campfire speculation. And now he'd mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered why he had. "You believe that?" asked the stranger. Enoch said: "It was just an idle notion." "Not so idle," said the stranger. "There are other planets and there are other people. I am one of them." "But you..." cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence. For the stranger's face had split and began to fall away and beneath it he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face. And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of thunder seemed to shake the land, and from far off he heard the rushing of the rain as it charged across the hills. V Enoch though, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into solid fact. The Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star. Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people. He looked back at the entry for Oct. #, #I and ran through it swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence: Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy. It seems they have developed a numeration system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of statistics. He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans' work. Perhaps they did, he thought. Certainly some of the math they used was unconventional. He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer, bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system, testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were the ones he should be using. He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be certain! If he could only talk with someone. But that had been something that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the very nakedness of the human race. He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should have, through it all, remained a man of Earth. For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him. There were no others, unless one could count the watchers, and those he seldom saw -- only glimpses of them, only the places they had been. Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him. That was all of Earth he had. Old Winslowe and the shadow people and the homestead acres that lay outside the house -- but not the house itself, for the house was alien now. membered how the house had been in the olden days. There had been a kitchen, in this same area where he was sitting, with the iron cook stove, black and monstrous, in its corner, showing its row of fiery teeth along the slit made by the grate. Pushed against the wall had been the table where the three of them used to eat. He could remember how that table looked, with the vinegar cruet and the glass that held the spoons and the lazy Susan with the mustard, horseradish and chili sauce sitting in a group, a sort of centerpiece in the middle of the red checkered cloth that the table wore. There had been a winter night when he had been, it seemed, no more than three or four. His mother was busy at the stove with supper. He was sitting on the floor in the center of the kitchen, playing with some blocks, and outside he could hear the muffled howling of the wind as it prowled along the eaves. His father had come in from milking at the barn, and a gust of wind and a swirl of snow had come into room with him. Then he'd shut the door and the wind and snow were gone, shut outside this house, condemned to the outer darkness and the wilderness of night. His father had set the pail of milk that he had been carrying on the kitchen sink and Enoch saw that his beard and eyebrows were coated with snow and there was frost on the whiskers all around his mouth. He held that picture still, the three of them like historic mannikins posed in a cabinet in a museum -- his father with the frost upon his whiskers and the great felt boots that came up to his knees; his mother with her face flushed from working at the stove and the lace cap upon her head; and himself upon the floor, playing with the blocks. There was one other thing that he remembered, perhaps more clearly than all the rest of it. There was a great lamp sitting on the table. On the wall behind it hung a calendar and the glow of the lamp fell like a spotlight upon the picture on the calendar. There was Old Santa Claus, riding in his sleigh through a woodland track and all the little woodland people had turned out to watch him pass. A great moon hung above the trees and there was thick snow on the ground. A pair of rabbits sat there, gazing soulfully at Santa, and a deer beside the rabbits, with a raccoon just a little distance off, ringed tail wrapped about his feet, and a squirrel and chickadee side by side upon an overhanging branch. Old Santa had his whip raised high in greeting. His cheeks were red and his smile was merry, and the reindeer hitched to his sled were fresh and spirited and proud. Through all the years this midnineteenth century Santa had ridden down the snowy aisles of time, with his whip uplifted in happy greeting to the woodland creatures. And the golden lamplight had ridden with him, still bright upon the wall and the checkered table cloth. So, thought Enoch, some things do endure -- the memory of the snug warmness of a childhood kitchen on a stormy winter night. the spirit and the mind, for nothing else endured. There was no kitchen now, nor no sitting room with its old-fashioned sofa and the rocking chair; no back parlor with its stuffy elegance of brocade and silk, no guest bedroom on the first and no family bedrooms on the second floor. It all was gone. Only one room remained. The second story floor and all partitions had been stripped away. Now the house was one great room. One side of it was the galactic station. The other side the living space for the keeper of the station. There was a bed over in one corner, and a stove that worked on no principle known on Earth, and a refrigerator that was of alien make. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves, stacked with magazines and books and journals. There was just one thing left from the early days, the one thing Enoch had not allowed the alien crew that had set up the station to strip away -- the massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one wall of the sitting room. It still stood there, the one reminder of the days of old; the one thing left of Earth, with its great, scarred oak mantle that his father had carved out with a broadaxe from a massive log and smoothed by hand with plane and draw-shave. On the fireplace mantle and strewn on shelf and table were articles and artifacts that had no earthly origin and some no earthly names -- the steady accumulation through the years of the gifts from friendly travelers. Some of them were functional. Others were to look at only. And there were other things that were entirely useless, because they had little application to a member of the human race or were inoperable on Earth, and many others of the purpose of which he had no idea, accepting them, embarrassed, with many stumbling thanks, from the well-meaning folks who had brought them to him. And on the other side of the room stood the intricate mass of machinery, reaching well up into the open second story, that wafted passengers through the space that stretched from star to star. An inn, he thought. A stopping place. A galactic crossroads. He rolled up the chart and put it back into the desk. The record book he put away in its proper place among all the other record books upon the shelf. He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall, and it was time to go. against the desk and shrugged into the jacket that hung upon the chair back. He picked the rifle off the supports that held it on the wall. Then he faced the wall itself and said the single word that he had to say. The wall slid silently back. He stepped through it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings. Behind him the section of the wall slid closed and there was nothing there to indicate it was anything but a solid wall. Enoch stepped out of the shed. It was a beautiful late summer day. In a few weeks now, he thought, there'd be the signs of autumn and a strange chill in the air. The first goldenrods were blooming now, and he'd noticed, just the day before, that some of the early asters down in the ancient fence row had started to show color. He went around the corner of the house and headed toward the river, striding down the long deserted field that was overrun with hazel brush and occasional clumps of trees. This was the Earth, he thought -- a planet made for Man. But not for Man alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the air and earth and water. And not these natives alone, but for other beings that called other earths their home, other planets that, far light-years distant, were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all the rest of them who could live upon this planet, if need be, if they wished, with no discomfort and no artificial aids, as readily as they had been born here. Our horizons are so far, he thought, and we see so little of them. Even now, with flaming rockets striving from Canaveral to break the ancient bonds, we dream so little of them. The ache was there. The ache that had been growing, the ache to tell all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but the general things -- the unspecific, central fact that there was intelligence throughout the universe. That Man was not alone; that if he only found the way he need never be alone again. He went down across the field and through the strip of woods and came out on the great outthrust of rock that stood atop the cliff that faced the river. He stood there, as he had stood on thousands of other mornings, and stared out at the river, sweeping in majestic blue and silver through the wooded bottom-land. Old, ancient water, he said, talking silently to the river, you have seen it happen -- the milehigh faces of the glaciers that came and stayed and left, creeping back toward the pole inch by stubborn inch, carrying the melting water from those very glaciers in a flood that filled this valley with a tide such as now is never known; the mastodon and the sabre-tooth and the bearsized beaver that ranged these olden hills and made the night clamorous with trumpeting and screaming; the silent little bands of men who trotted in the woods or clambered up the cliffs or paddled on your surface, woodswise and water-wise, weak in body, strong in purpose, and persistent in a way no other thing ever was persistent, and just a little time ago that other breed of men who carried dreams within their skulls and cruelty in their hands and the awful sureness of an even greater purpose in their hearts. And before that, for this is ancient country beyond what is often found, the other kinds of life and the many turns of climate and the changes that came upon the Earth itself. And what think you of it? he asked the river. For yours is the memory and the perspective and the time. By now you should have the answers. Or at least some of the answers. As Man might have some of the answers had he lived for sevyears from this very summer morning, if he still should be around. I could help, thought Enoch. I could not give the answers, but I could help Man in his scramble after them. I could give him faith and hope and I could give purpose such as he has not had before. But he knew he dared not do it. lazy circles above the highI way of the river. The air was so  clear that Enoch imagined, if he I strained his eyes a little, he could ; see every feather in those outj spread wings. There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far look and the clear air. The ; feeling of detachment that I touched almost on greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count him self as lucky if he ever found it; I for there were those who sought and never found it. Worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it. He stood upon the rock and stared out across the river, watching the lazy hawk and the sweep of water and the green carpeting of trees. His mind went up and out to those other places until his mind was dizzy with the thought of it. And then he called it home. He turned slowly and went back down the rock and moved off among the trees, following the path he'd beaten through the years. He considered going down the hill a ways to look in on the patch of pink lady slippers, to see how they might be coming, to try to conjure up the beauty that would be his again in June, but decided that there'd be little point to it. They were well hidden in an isolated place. Nothing could have harmed them. There had been a time, a hundred years ago, when they had bloomed on every hill. Then he had come trailing home with great armloads of them, which his mother had put in the great brown jug she had and for a day or two the house had been filled with the heaviness of their rich perfume. But they were hard to come by now. The trampling of pastured cattle and flowerhunting humans had swept them from the hills. Some other day, he told himself, some day before first frost, he would visit them again to satisfy himself that they'd be there in spring. He stopped a while to watch a squirrel as it frolicked in an oak. He squatted down to follow a snail which had crossed his path. He stopped beside a massive tree and examined the pattern of the moss that grew upon its trunk. And he traced the wanderings of a silent, flitting songbird as it fluttered from tree to tree. He followed the path out of the woods and along the edge of field until he came to the spring that bubbled from the hillside. Sitting beside the spring was a woman. He recognized her as Lucy Fisher, the deaf-mute daughter of Hank Fisher who lived down in the river bottoms.her and thought how full she was of grace and beauty, the natural grace and beauty of a primitive and lonely creature. She was sitting by the spring with one hand uplifted. She held in it, at the tips of long and sensitive fingers, something that glowed with color. Her head was held alert and high, and her slender body had the same almost startled look of quiet alertness. Enoch moved slowly forward and stopped, not mofe than three feet behind her. The thing of color on her fingertips was one of those large gold and red butterflies that come with the end of summer. One wing of the insect stood erect and straight, but the other was bent and crumpled and had lost some of the dust that lent sparkle to the color. She was not actually holding the butterfly. It was standing on one fingertip, the one good wing I fluttering very slightly every now and then to maintain its balance. But perhaps he had been mistaken in thinking that the second wing was injured, for now he could see that somehow 'it had been simply bent and distorted. Now it was straightening slowly. The dust (if it ever had been gone) was back on it again, and it was standing up with the other wing. He stepped around the girl, and when she saw him there was no start of surprise. That would be quite natural. She must be accustomed to it -- someone coming up behind her and suddenly being there. Her eyes were radiant, as if she had experienced some ecstasy of the soul. And he found himself wondering again, as he did each time he saw her, what it must be like for her, living in a world of two-way silence, perhaps not entirely unable to communicate, but at least barred from that free flow of communication which was the birthright of the human animal. There had been, he knew, several attempts to establish her in a state school for the deaf, but each had been a failure. Once she'd run away and wandered days before being finally found and returned to her home. And on other occasions she had gone on disobedience strikes, refusing to co-operate in any of the teaching. " there with the butterfly, Enoch thought he knew the reason. She had a world of her very own. One to which she was accustomed and knew how to get along in. In that world she was no cripple, as she most surely would have been a cripple if she had been pushed, part way, into the normal human world. What good to her the hand alphabet or the reading of the lips if they should take away her inner serenity of spirit? She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them. She was, in some way, a part of them, one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it. And there she sat, alive, thought Enoch, as no other thing he knew had ever been alive. The butterfly spread its wings and floated off her finger. Unconcerned, unfrightened, it fluttered up across the wild grass and the goldenrod of the field. She pivoted to watch it until it disappeared, then turned to Enoch. She smiled and made a fluttery motion with her hands, like the fluttering of the red and golden wings. But there was something else in it, as well -- a sense of happiness and wellbeing, as if she might be saying that the world was going fine. If, Enoch thought, I could only teach her the pasimology of my galactic people. Then we could talk, the two of us, almost as well as with the flow of words on the human tongue. Given the time, he thought, it might not be too hard. There was a natural and a logical process to the galactic sign language that made it almost instinctive once one had caught the underlying principle. Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days, there had been sign languages. But Earth's best was only a crutch that allowed a man to hobble when he couldn't run. Whereas that of the galaxy was in itself a language, developed through millenia, with many different peoples making contributions. It had been refined and shaken down and polished until today it was a communications tool that stood on its own merits. There was need for such a tool, for the galaxy was Babel. Even the galactic science of pasimology could not surmount all the obstacles, could not guarantee, in certain cases, the basic minimum of communication. For not tongues, but those other languages as well which could not operate on the principle of sound because the races were incapable of sound. Even sound failed when the race talked in ultrasonics others could not hear. There was telepathy, of course; but for every telepath, there were a thousand races, that had telepathic blocks. There were many who got along on sign languages alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their bodies. And there was that sightless, deaf and speechless race from the mystery stars of the far side of the galaxy who used what was perhaps the most complicated of all the galactic languages -- a code of signals routed along their nervous systems. Enoch had been at the job almost a century. Even so, even with the aid of the universal sign language and the semantic translator, which was little more than a pitiful (although complicated) mechanical contrivance, he still was hard put at times to know what many of them said. cup fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark, dipped it in the spring and held it out to Enoch. He stepped close and knelt to drink from it. It was no t entirely watertight. Water ran from it down across his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket. He finished and handed back the cup. She took it in one hand and reached out the other, to brush across his forehead with the tip of gentle fingers. He did not speak to her. Long ago he had ceased talking to her, sensing that the movement of his mouth, making sounds she could not hear, might be embarrassing. Instead he put out a hand and laid his broad palm against her cheek for a moment. Then he got to his feet. For a moment their eyes looked into the other's eyes and then turned away. He crossed the little stream that ran down from the spring and took the trail that led from the forest's edge across the field, heading for the ridge. Halfway up the slope, he turned around and saw that she was watching him. He held up his hand in a gesture of farewell and her hand gestured in reply. It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had seen her, a little fairy person of ten or so, a wild thing running in the woods. They had become friends only after a long time, although he saw her often. She roamed the hills and valley as if they were a playground for her -- which, of course, they were. Through the years he had watched her grow, often meeting her on his daily walks. Between the two of them had grown up the understanding of the lonely and the outcast, or something more than that. Each had a world that was his own, a world that had given him an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of these private worlds. But the fact of the private worlds was there, providing a firm foundation for friendship. He recalled the day he'd found her at the place where the pink lady slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking any of them. He'd stopped beside her and been pleased she had not moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she, had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession. He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led down to the mailbox. And he'd not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly's wing had been torn and crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing. And then it had been whole again and had flown away. VI time. As Enoch reached the mailbox, he sighted the dust raised by his old jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought. Little rain, and the crops had suffered. Although, to tell the truth, there were few crops on the ridge these days. There had been a time when comfortable small farms had existed all along the road, with the bams all red and the houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned. The houses and the barns were no longer red or white, but the gray and weathered wood, with all the paint peeled off and the ridgepoles sagging and the people gone. It would not be long before Winslowe would arrive. Enoch settled down to wait. The mailman might be stopping at the Fisher box, just around the bend, although the Fishers, as a rule, got but little mail, mostly just the advertising sheets and other junk that was mailed out indiscriminately to the rural boxholders. Not that it mattered to the Fishers, for sometimes days went by in which they did not pick up their mail. If it were not for Lucy, they perhaps would never get it, for it was mostly Lucy who thought to pick it up. The Fishers were, for a fact, a truly shiftless outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon themselves. They raised a grubby patch of corn that was drowned out, more often than not, by a flood rise of the river. They mowed some hay off a bottom meadow and they had a couple of raw-boned horses and a half dozen scrawny cows and a flock of chickens. They had an old clunk of a car, and a still hid out somewhere in the river bottoms, and they hunted and fished and trapped and were generally no account. Still, when one considered it, they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business. They never bothered anyone except that periodically they went around, the whole tribe of them, distributing pamphlets and tracts through the neighborhood for some obscure fundamentalist sect that Ma Fisher had become a member of at a tent revival meeting down in Millville several years before. Winslowe didn't stop at the Fisher box, but came boiling around the bend in a cloud of dust. He braked the panting machine to a halt and turned off the engine. "Let her cool a while," he said. The block crackled as it started giving up its heat. "You made good time today," said Enoch. "Lots of people didn't have any mail today," said Winslowe. "Just went sailing past their boxes." He dipped into the pouch on the seat beside him and brought out a bundle tied together with a bit of string for Enoch -- several daily papers and two journals. "You get a lot of stuff," said Winslowe, "but hardly ever letters." "There is no one left who would want to write to me." "But," said Winslowe, "you got a letter this time." conceal surprise. He could see the end of an envelope peeping from between the journals. "A personal letter," said Winslowe, almost smacking his lips. "Not one of them advertising ones." Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock. "Probably won't amount to much," he said. "Maybe not," said Winslowe, a sly glitter in his eyes. He pulled a pipe and pouch from his pocket and slowly filled the pipe. The engine block continued its crackling and popping. The sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The vegetation alongside the road was coated with dust and an acrid smell rose from it. "Hear that ginseng fellow is back again," said Winslowe, conversationally, but unable to keep out a conspiratory tone. "Been gone for three, four days." "Maybe off to sell his sang." "You ask me," the mailman said, "he ain't hunting sang. He's hunting something else." "Been at it for a right smart time," Enoch said. "First of all," said Winslowe, "there's barely any market for the stuff and even if there was, there isn't any sang. Used to be a good market years ago. Chinese used it for medicine, I guess. But now there ain't no trade with China." He leaned back in the seat, puffing serenely at his pipe. "Funny goings-on," he said. "I never saw the man," said Enoch. "Sneaking through the woods," said Winslowe. "Digging up different kinds of plants. Got the idea myself he maybe is a sort of magic-man. Getting stuff to make up charms and such. Spends a lot of his time yarning with the Fisher tribe and drinking up their likker. You don't hear much of it these days, but I still hold with magic. Lots of things science can't explain. You take that Fisher girl, the dummy. She can charm off warts." "So I've heard," said Enoch. And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly. Winslowe hunched forward in his seat. "Almost forgot," he said. "I have something else for you." He lifted a brown paper parcel from the floor and handed it to Enoch. "This ain't mail," he said. "It's something that I made for you." "Why, thank you," Enoch said, taking it from him. "Go ahead," Winslowe said, "and open it up." Enoch hesitated. "Ah, hell," said Winslowe, "don't be bashful." and there it was, a full-figure wood carving of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun. He was walking, with his rifle tucked beneath his arm and a wind was blowing, for he was leaning slightly into it and there were wind-flutter ripples on his jacket and his trousers. Enoch gasped, then stood staring at it. '"Wins," he said, "that's the most beautiful piece of work I have ever seen." "Did it," said the mailman, "out of that piece of wood you gave me last winter. Best piece of whittling stuff I ever ran across. Hard, and without hardly any grain. No danger of splitting or nicking or shredding. When you make a cut, you make it where you want to and it stays the way you cut it. And it takes polish as you cut. Just rub it up a little is all you need to do." "You don't know," said Enoch, "how much this means to me." "Over the years," the mailman told him, "you've given me an awful lot of wood. Different kinds of wood no one's ever see before. All of it top-grade stuff and beautiful. It was time I was whittling something for you." "And you have done a lot for me, lugging things from town." "Enoch," Winslowe said, "I like you. I don't know what you are and I ain't about to ask, but, anyhow, I like you." "I wish that I could tell you what I am," said Enoch. "Well," said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, "it don't matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson in how to get along from some small neighborhood like the world would be a whole lot better." Enoch nodded gravely. "It doesn't look too good, does it?" "It sure don't," said the mailman, starting up the car. Enoch stood and watched the car move off, down the hill, building up its cloud of dust as it moved along. Then he looked again at the wooden statuette of himself. It was as if the wooden figure were walking on a hilltop, naked to the full force of the wind and bent against the gale. Why? He wondered. What was it the mailman had seen in him to portray him as walking in the wind? the mail upon a patch of dusty grass and carefully rewrapped the statuette in the piece of paper. He'd put it, he decided, on the mantlepiece. Or, perhaps better yet, on the coffee table that stood beside his favorite chair, in the corner by the desk. He wanted it, he admitted to himself, with some quiet embarrassment, where it was close at hand, where he could look at it or pick it up any time he wished. And he wondered at the deep, soul-satisfying pleasure that he got from the mailman's gift. It was not because he was seldom given gifts. Scarcely a week went past that the alien travelers did not leave several with him. The house was cluttered, and there was a wall of shelves down in the cavernous basement that were crammed with the stuff that had been given him. Perhaps it was, he told himself, because this was a gift from Earth. From one of his own kind. He tucked the wrapped statuette beneath his arm. Picking up the rifle and the mail, he headed back for home, following the brush-grown trail that once had been the wagon road leading to the farm. Grass had grown into thick turf between the ancient ruts, cut so deep into the clay by the iron tires of the old-time wagons that they still were no more than bare, impacted earth in which no plant as yet had gained a root-hold. But on each side the clumps of brush, creeping up the field from the forest's edge, grew man-high or better, so that now one moved down an aisle of green. But at certain points, quite unexplainably -- perhaps due to the character of the soil or to the mere vagaries of nature -- the growth of brush had faltered. Here were vistas where one might look out from the ridge top across the river valley. It was from one of these vantage points that Enoch caught the flash from a clump of trees at the edge of the old field, not too far from the spring where he had found Lucy. He frowned as he saw the flash and stood quietly on the path, waiting for a repetition. But it did not come again. It was one of the watchers, he knew, using a pair of binoculars to keep watch upon the station. The flash he had seen had been the reflection of the sun upon the glasses. " should they be watching? It had been going on for some time now but, strangely, there had been nothing but the watching. There had been no interference. No one had attempted to approach him, though such approach could have been quite simple and quite natural. If they -- whoever they might be -- had wished to talk with him, a casual meeting could have been accomplished during any one of his morning walks. But apparently as yet they did not wish to talk. Then what did they want? Keep track of him, perhaps. In that regard, he thought, with a wry inner twinge of humor, they could have learned the pattern of his living in their first ten days of watching. Or perhaps they might be waiting for a clue to what he might be doing. And in that direction there lay nothing but certain disappointment. They could watch for a thousand years and gain no hint of it. He turned from the vista and went plodding up the road, worried and puzzled by the watchers. Perhaps, he thought, they had not attempted to contact him because of certain stories that might be told about him. Stories that no one, not even Winslowe, would pass on to him. What kind of stories, he wondered, might the neighborhood by now have been able to fabricate about him -- fabulous folk tales to be told in bated breath about the chimney corner? It might be well, he thought, that he did not know the stories, although it would seem almost a certainty that they would exist. And it also might be as well that the watchers had not attempted contact with him. For so long as there was no contact, he still was fairly safe. So long as there were no questions, there need not be any answers. Are you really, they would ask, that same Enoch Wallace who marched off in #I to fight for Old Abe Lincoln? And there was one answer to that, there could only be one answer. Yes, he'd have to say, I am that same man. And of all the questions they might ask him that would be the only one of all he could answer truthfully. For all the others there would be silence or evasion. that he had not aged -- how he could stay young when all mankind grew old. And he could not tell them that he did not age inside the station, that he only aged when he stepped out of it, that he aged an hour each day on his daily walks, that he might age an hour or so working in his garden, that he could age for fifteen minutes sitting on the steps to watch a lovely sunset. But that when he went back indoors again the aging process was completely canceled out. He could not tell them that. And there was much else that he could not tell them. There might come a time, he knew, if they once contacted him, that he'd have to flee the questions and cut himself entirely from the world, remaining isolated within the station's walls. Such a course would constitute no hardship physically, for he could live within the station without any inconvenience. He would want for nothing, for the aliens would supply everything he needed to remain alive and well. He had bought human food at times, having Winslowe purchase it and haul it out from town, but only because he felt a craving for the food of his own planet, in particular those simple foods of his childhood and his campaigning days. But there was one thing the aliens could not provide -- the human contacts he'd maintained through Winslowe and the mail. Once shut inside the station, he'd be cut off completely from the world he knew, for the newspapers and the magazines were his only contact. The operation of a radio in the station was made impossible by the interference set up by the installations. He would not know what was happening in the world, would know no longer how the outside might be going. His chart would suffer from this and would become largely useless; although, he told himself, it was nearly useless now. he would miss this little outside world that he had grown to know so well, this little corner of the world encompassed by his walks. It was the walks, he thought, more than anything, perhaps, that had kept him human and a citizen of Earth. He wondered how important it might be that he remain, intellectually and emotionally, a citizen of Earth and a member of the human race. Perhaps there was no reason that he should. With the cosmopolitanism of the galaxy at his fingertips, it might even be provincial of him to be so intent upon continuing identification with the old home planet. He might be losing something by it. But it was not in himself to turn his back on Earth. It was a place he loved too well -- loving it even more, most likely, than those other humans who had not caught his glimpse of far and unguessed worlds. A man must belong to something, must have some loyalty and some identity. The galaxy was too big a place for any being to stand naked and alone. A lark sailed out of a grassy plot and soared high into the sky and seeing it, he waited for the trill of liquid song to spray out of its throat and drip out of the blue. But there was no song, as there would have been in spring. He plodded down the road and now, ahead of him, he saw the starkness of the station, reared upon its ridge. Funny, he thought, that he should think of it as station rather than as home. But it had been a station longer than it had been a home. There was about it a sort of ugly solidness, as if it might have planted itself upon that ridgetop and meant to stay forever. It would stay, of course, if one wanted it, as long as one wanted it. For there was nothing that could touch it. Even should he be forced some day to remain within its walls, the station still would stand against all of mankind's watching, all of mankind's prying. They could not chip it and they could not gouge it and they could not break it down. There was nothing they could do. All his watching, all his speculating, all his analyzing, .would gain Man nothing beyond the knowledge that a highly unusual building existed on that ridgetop. For it could survive anything except a thermonuclear explosion -- and maybe even that. He walked into the yard and turned around to look back toward the clump of trees from which the flash had come, but there was nothing now to indicate that anyone was there. sage machine was whistling plaintively. Enoch hung up his gun, dropped the mail and statuette upon his desk and strode across the room to the whistling machine. He pushed the button and punched the lever and the whistling stopped. Upon the message plate he Enoch grinned. Ulysses and his coffee! He was the only one of the aliens who had ever liked any of Earth's foods or drinks. There had been others who had tried them, but not more than once. Funny about Ulysses, he thought. They had liked each other from the very first, from that afternoon of the thunderstorm when they had been sitting on the steps and the mask of human form had peeled off the alien's face. It had been a grisly face, graceless and repulsive. The face of a cruel clown. Enoch wondered, even as he thought it, what had put that particular phrase into his head, for clowns were never cruel. But here was one that could be -- the colored patchwork of the face, the hard, tight set of jaw, the thin slash of the mouth. Then he saw the eyes and they canceled all the rest. They were large, with softness and a light of understanding in them. They reached out to him, as another being might hold out its hands in friendship. The rain had come hissing up the land to thrum across the machine-shed roof and then it was upon them, slanting sheets of rain that hammered angrily at the dust which lay across the yard, while chickens ran for cover. Enoch sprang to his feet and grasped the other's arm, pulling him to the shelter of the porch. They stood facing one another, and Ulysses had reached up and pulled the split and loosened mask away. It revealed a bullet head without a hair upon it -- and the painted face. A face like a wild and rampaging Indian, painted for the warpath, except that here and there were touches of the clown, as if the entire painting job had been meant to point up the inconsistent grotesqueries of war. But even as he stared, Enoch knew it was not paint, but the natural coloration of this thing which had come from somewhere among the stars. " there was, or whatever wonder, Enoch had no doubt at all that this strange being was not of the Earth. For it was not human. It might be in human form, with a pair of arms and legs, with a head and face. But there was about it an essence of inhumanity, almost a negation of humanity. In olden days, perhaps, it might have been a demon. But the days were past (although, in some areas of the country, not entirely past) when one believed in demons or in ghosts or in any of the other of that ghastly tribe which, in man's imagination, once had walked the Earth. From the stars, he'd said. And perhaps he was. Although it made no sense. It was nothing one ever had imagined even in the purest fantasy. There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing to hang on to. There was no yardstick for it and there were no rules. It left a sort of blank spot in one's thinking that might fill in, with time, but now was no more than a tunnel of great wonder that went on and on forever. "Take your time," the alien said. "I know it is not easy. And I do not know of a thing that I can do to make it easier. There is, after all, no way for me to prove I am from the stars." "But you talk so well." "In your tongue, you mean. It was not too difficult. If you only knew of all the languages in the galaxy, you would realize how little difficult. Your language is not hard. It is a basic one. And there are many concepts with which it need not deal." And, Enoch conceded, that could be true enough. "If you wish," the alien said, "I can walk off somewhere for a day or two. Give you time to think. Then I could come back. You'd have thought it out by then." Enoch smiled woodenly. The smile had an unnatural feel upon his face. "That would give me time," he said, "to spread alarm throughout the countryside. There might be an ambush waiting for you." The alien shook its head. "I am sure you wouldn't do it. I would take the chance if you want me to " "No," said Enoch, so calm he surprised himself. "No, when you have a thing to face, you face it. I learned that in the war." "You'll do," the alien said. "You will do all right. I did not misjudge you and it makes me proud." "Misjudge me?" came walking in here cold? I know about you, Enoch. Almost as much as you know about yourself. Probably even more." "You know my name?" "Of course I do." "Well, that is fine," said Enoch. "And what about your own?" "I am seized with great embarrassment," the alien told him. "For I have no name." Suddenly, for no reason, Enoch remembered that slouchy figure perching on the top rail of a fence, with a stick in one hand and a jack knife in the other, whittling placidly while the cannonballs whistled overhead and less than half a mile away the muskets snarled and crackled in the billowing powder smoke of the line. "Then you need a name to call you by," he said, "and it shall be Ulysses." "It is agreeable," said that strange one. "But might one ask why the name Ulysses?" "Because it is the name of a great' man of my race." It was a crazy thing. For there was no resemblance between the two of them -- that slouchy Union general whittling upon the fence and this other who stood upon the porch. "I am glad you chose it," said this Ulysses, standing on the porch. "To my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, as friends of the first names. For the two of us shall work together for many of your years." It was beginning to come straight now. The thought was staggering. Perhaps it was as well that Enoch had been so dazed it had not come on him all at once. "Perhaps," said Enoch, fighting back the realization that was crowding in on him, too fast, "I could offer you some victuals. I could cook up some coffee..." "Coffee," said Ulysses, smacking his thin lips. "Do you have the coffee?" "I'll make a big pot of it. I'll break in an egg so it will settle clear..." "Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best." and Enoch stirred up the coals in the kitchen range and then put in new wood. He took the coffee pot over to the sink and ladeled in some water from the water pail and put it on to boil. He went into the pantry to get some eggs and down into the cellar to bring up the ham. Ulysses sat stiffly in a kitchen chair and watched him as he worked. "You eat ham and eggs?" asked Enoch. "I eat anything," Ulysses said. "My race is most adaptable. That is the reason I was sent to this planet as a -- what do you call it? A looker-out, perhaps." "A scout," suggested Enoch. "That is it, a scout." He was an easy thing to talk with, Enoch told himself -- almost like another person. Although, God knows, he looked little like a person. He looked, instead, like some outrageous caricature. "You have lived here, in this house," Ulysses said, "for a long, long time. You feel affection for it." "It has been my home since the day that I was born. I was gone from it for almost four years, but it was always home." Ulysses told him, "I'll be glad to be getting home again myself. I've been away too long. On a mission such as this one, it always is too long." Enoch put down the knife he had been using to cut a slice of ham and sat down heavily in a chair. He stared at Ulysses, across the table from him. "You?" he asked. "You are going home?" "Why, of course," Ulysses told him. "My job is nearly done. I have a home. Did you think I hadn't?" "I don't know," said Enoch, weakly. "I had never thought of it." And that was it, he knew. It had not occurred to him to connect a being such as this with a thing like home. For it was only human beings that had a place called home. "Some day," Ulysses said, "I shall tell you about my home. Some day you may even visit me." "Out among the stars," said Enoch. "It seems strange to you now," Ulysses said. "It will take a while to get used to the idea. But as you come to know the whole kit and kaboodle of us you will understand. I hope you like us. We are not bad people, really -- not any of the many different kinds of us." self, were out there in the loneliness of space. How far they were he could not even guess, nor what they were, nor why. Another world, he thought. No, that was wrong; many other worlds. There were people there. Perhaps many other people; a different kind of people, probably, for every different star. And one of them sat here in this very kitchen, waiting for the coffee pot to boil and the ham and eggs to fry. "But why?" he asked. "But why?" Ulysses said, "Because we are a traveling people. We need a travel station here. We want to turn this house into a station and you to keep the station." "This house?" "We could not build a station, for then we'd have people asking who was building it and what it might be for. So we are forced to use an existing structure and change it for our needs. But the inside only. We leave the outside as it is, in appearance. For there must be no questions asked." "But traveling..." "From star to star," Ulysses said. "Quicker than the thought of it. Faster than a wink. There is what you would call machinery. But it is not machinery -- not the same as the machinery you think of." "You must excuse me," Enoch said, confused. "It seems so impossible." "You remember when the railroad came to Millville?" "Yes, I can remember that. I was just a kid." "Then think of it this way. This is just another railroad. The Earth is just another town and this house will be the station for this new and different railroad. The only difference is that no one on Earth but you will know the railroad's here. For it will be no more than a resting and a switching point. No one on the Earth can buy a ticket to travel on the railroad." Put that way, of course, it had a simple sound. But Enoch knew it was very far from simple. "Railroad cars in space?" he asked. "Not railroad cars," Ulysses told him. "It is something else. I do not know how to begin to tell you." "Perhaps you should pick someone else. Someone who would understand." "There is no one on this planet who could understand. We'll do with you as well as anyone." "But..." "What is it, Enoch?" "Nothing," Enoch said. For he remembered now how he had been sitting on the steps thinking how he was alone and about a new beginning, knowing that he could not escape a new beginning, that he must start from scratch and build his life anew. And here, suddenly, was that new beginning -- more wondrous and fearsome than anything he could have dreamed. and sent his confirmation: Clearing the machine, he walked over to the No. # liquid tank he'd prepared before he left. He checked the temperature and the level of the solution and made certain once again that the tank was securely positioned in relation to the materializer. From there he went to the other materializer, the official and emergency materializer, over in the corner, and checked it over closely. It was all right, as usual. It always was all right, but before each of Ulysses' visits he never failed to check it. There was nothing he could have done about it had there been something wrong, other than send an urgent message to Galactic Center. In which case someone would have come in on the regular materializer and put it iiito shape. For the official and emergency materializer was exactly what its name implied. It was used only for official visits by personnel of Galactic Center, or for possible emergencies. Its operation was entirely outside the operation of the local station. Ulysses, as an inspector for this and several other stations, could have used the official materializer at any time he wished without prior notice. But in all the years that he had been coming to the station he had never failed, Enoch remembered with a touch of pride, to message he was coming. Enoch knew that it was a courtesy which all the other stations on the great galactic network might not be accorded. Tonight, he thought, he probably should tell Ulysses about the watch that had been put upon the station. Perhaps he should have told him earlier. But he had been reluctant to admit that the human race might prove to be a problem to the galactic installation. It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither. Perhaps it was because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick, and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably on many other counts. But if they had the chance, Enoch told himself -- if they ever got a break, if they only could be told what was out in space -- then they'd get a grip upon themselves and they would measure up. And then, in the course of time, they would be admitted into the great confraternity of the people of the stars. Once admitted, they would prove their worth and pull their weight. For they were still a young race and full of energy -- at times maybe too much energy. Enoch shook his head and went across the room to sit down at his desk. Drawing the bundle of mail in front of him, he slid it out of the string which Winslowe had used to tie it all together. There were the daily papers, a news weekly, two journals -- Nature and Science -- and the letter. journals to one side and picked up the letter. It was an airmail sheet, postmarked London. The return address bore a name that was unfamiliar to him. He puzzled as to why an unknown person should be writing him from London. Although anyone who wrote him, from London or indeed from anywhere, would be an unknown person. He knew no one in the world outside this tiny community. He slit the air sheet open and spread it out on the desk in front of him, pulling the desk lamp close so the light would fall upon the writing. Dear sir, he read,  would suspect I am unknown to you. I am one of the editors of the British journal, Nature, to which you have been a subscriber for these many years. I do not use the journal's letterhead because this letter is personal and unofficial -- and perhaps not even in the best of taste. You are, it may interest you to know, our eldest subscriber. We have had you on our mailing lists for more than eighty years. While I am aware that it is no concern of mine, I have wondered if you, yourself, have subscribed to our publication for this length of time, or if it might be possible that your father or someone close to you may have been the original subscriber and you simply have allowed the subscription to continue in his name. My interest undoubtedly constitutes an unwarranted and inexcusable curiosity and if you, sir, choose to ignore the query it is entirely within your rights and proper that you do so. But if you should not mind replying, an answer would be appreciated. I can only say in my own defense that I have been associated for so long with our publication that I feel a certain sense of pride that someone has found it worth the having for more than eighty years. I doubt that many publications can boast such long time interest on the part of any man. May l assure you, sir, of my utmost respect. Sincerely yours. And then the signature. from him. There it was again, he told himself. Here was another watcher, although a discreet and most polite one, unlikely to cause trouble. But someone else had taken notice, had felt a twinge of wonder at the same man subscribing to a magazine for more than eighty years. As the years went on, there would be more and more. It was not only the watchers encamped outside the station with whom he must concern himself, but those potential others. A man could be as self-effacing as he could manage and still he could not hide. Soon or late, the world would catch up with him and would come crowding around his door, agog to know why he might be hiding. It was useless to hope for much further time. The world was closing in. Why can't they leave me alone, he thought. If he only could explain how the situation stood, they might leave him alone. But he couldn't explain. And even if he could, there would be some of them who'd still come crowding in. Across the room the materializer beeped for attention and Enoch swung around. The Thuban had arrived. He was in the tank, a shadowy, globular blob of substance. Above him, riding sluggishly in the solution, was a cube of something. Luggage, Enoch wondered. But the message had said there would be no luggage. Even as he hurried across the room, the clicking came to him. The Thuban was talking to him. Presentation to you, said the clicking. Deceased fibrous vegetation. Enoch peered at the cube floating in the liquid. Take him, clicked the Thuban. Bring him for you. Fumblingly Enoch clicked out his answer, using tapping fingers against the glass side of the tank:  thank you, gracious one. He wondered as he did it if he were using the proper form of address to this blob of matter. A man could get terribly tangled up on that particular point of etiquette. There were some of these beings that one addressed in flowery language (and even in those cases, the floweriness would vary) and others that one talked with in the simplest, bluntest, most forthright terms. He reached into the tank and lifted out the cube. It was a block of heavy wood, black as ebony and so close-grained it looked very much like stone. He chuckled inwardly, thinking how, in listening to Winslowe, he had grown to be an expert in the judging of artistic wood. He put the wood upon the floor and turned back to the tank. Would you mind, clicked the Thuban, revealing what you do with him? To us, very useless stuff. ing desperately through his memory. What, he wondered, was the code for "carve?" Well? the Thuban asked. You must pardon me, gracious one. I do not use this language often. I am not proficient. Drop, please, the gracious one.  am a common being. Shape it, Enoch tapped. Into another form. Are you a visual being? Then I show you one. Not visual, said the Thuban. Many other things, not visual. It had been a globe when it had arrived and now it was beginning to flatten out. You, the Thuban clicked, are a biped being. That is what I am. Your planet, It is a solid planet? Solid? Enoch wondered. Oh, yes, solid as opposed to liquid. One quarter solid, he tapped. The rest of it is liquid. Mine almost all liquid. Only little solid. Very restful world. One thing I want to ask you, Enoch tapped. Ask, the creature said. You are a mathematician. All you folks, I mean. Yes, the creature said. Excellent recreation. Occupies the mind. You mean you do not use it? Oh, yes, once use it. But no need for use any more. Got all we need to use, very long ago. Recreation now. I have heard of your system of numerical notation. Very different, clicked the Thuban. Very better concept. You can tell me of it? You know notation system No, I don't, tapped Enoch. Then no. use to tell you of our own. Must know Polaris first. So that was that, thought Enoch. He might have known. There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew. There were men on Earth who could make sense of it. Men who would give anything short of their very lives to know the little that he knew, and could put it all to use. Out among the stars lay a massive body of wisdom, some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man has not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own. Another hundred years, thought Enoch. How much would he learn in another hundred years? In another thousand? Would he learn enough? I rest now, said the Thuban. Nice to talk with you. for that matter -- could use at data upon which to base his premises. And human science had so far found nothing to suggest a faster speed than light. But the impulse patterns which carried creatures from star to star were almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance. It was hard to believe. Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station. The materializer had built up a pattern of it -- not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the body and the mind and memory and the life of that creature now lying dead many light years distant. And in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life had taken almost instant form. An entirely new being; but exactly like the old one, so that the identity continued and the consciousness (the very thought no more than momentarily interrupted), so that to all intent and purpose the being was the same. the impulse patterns, but they had nothing to do with speed. The impulses could cross the entank and picked up the block of wood. A little puddle of liquid had drained off it and lay glistening on the floor. He carried the block across the room to one of the windows and examined it. At one corner of it a bit of bark remained. It had been sawed; someone had cut it into a size that would fit the tank where the Thuban rested. He recalled an article he had read in one of the daily papers just a day or two before in which a scientist had contended that no great intelligence ever could develop on a liquid world. But that scientist was wrong, for the Thuban race had so developed. There were other liquid worlds which were members of the galactic confraternity. There were a lot of things that Man would have to unlearn, as well as learn, if he ever should become aware of the galactic culture. The limitation of the speed of light, for one thing. For if nothing moved faster than the speed of light, then the galactic transport system would be impossible. But one should not censure Man, he reminded himself, for setting the speed of light as a basic limitation. Observations were all that Man -- or anyone, tire galaxy with but little lag in time. But under certain conditions the patterns tended to break down. This was why there must be many stations -- many thousands of them. Clouds of dust or gas or areas of high ionization seemed to disrupt the patterns. In the sectors of the galaxy where these conditions were encountered, the distance jumps between the stations were considerably cut down to keep the pattern true. There were areas that had to be detoured because of high concentrations of the distorting gas and dust. Enoch wondered how many dead bodies of the creature that now rested in the tank had been left behind at other stations in the course of the journey it was making -- as this body in a few hours' time would lie dead within this tank when the creature's pattern was sent out again, riding on the impulse waves. A long trail of dead, left across the stars. Each to be destroyed by a wash of acid and flushed into deep-lying tanks, but with the creature itself going on and on until it reached its final destination, to carry out the purpose of its journey. And those purposes, Enoch wondered -- the many purposes of the many creatures who passed through the stations scattered wide in space? There had been certain instances when, chatting with the travelers, they had told their purpose. But with most of them he never learned the purpose. Nor had he any right to learn it. For he was the keeper only. Mine host, he thought. Although not every time, for there were many creatures that had no use for hosts. But the man, at any rate, who watched over the operation of the station and who kept it going, who made ready for the travelers and who sent them on their way again when that time should come. And who performed the little tasks and courtesies of which they might stand in need. He looked at the block of wood and thought how pleased Winslowe would be with it. It was very seldom that one came upon wood as black or fine-grained as this. What would Winslowe think, he wondered, if he could only know that the statuettes he carved were made of woods that had grown on unknown planets many light-years distant? Winslowe must have wondered many times where the wood came from. But he had never asked. And he knew as well, of course, that there was something very strange about this man who came out to the mail box every day to meet him. But he had never asked that, either. That was what he meant by friendship. his hands was another evidence of friendship -- the friendship of the stars for a very humble keeper of a remote and backwoods station stuck out in one of the spiral arms, far from the center of the galaxy. The word had spread, apparently, through the years and throughout space, that this certain keeper was a collector of exotic woods. And so the woods came in. Not only from those races he thought of as his friends, but from total strangers, like the blob that now rested in the tank. He put the wood down on a table top and went to the refrigerator. From it he took a slab of aged cheese that Winslowe had bought for him several days ago, and a small package of fruit that a traveler from Sirrah X had brought the day before. "Analyzed," it had told him, "and you can eat it without hurt. It will play no trouble with your metabolism. You've had it before, perhaps? So you haven't. I am sorry. It is most delicious. Next time, you like it, I shall bring you more." From the cupboard beside the refrigerator he took out a small, flat loaf of bread, part of the ration regularly provided him by Galactic Central. Made of a cereal unlike any known on Earth, it had a nutty flavor with the hint of some alien spice. He put the food on what he called the kitchen table, although there was no kitchen. Then he put the coffee maker on the stove and went back to his desk. The letter still laid there, spread out. He folded it together and put it in a drawer. He stripped the brown folders off the papers and put them in a pile. From the pile he selected The New York Times and moved to his favorite chair to read. off headline. The crisis had been boiling for a month or more, the newest of a long series of crises which had kept the world on edge for years. The worst of it was that the most of them were manufactured crises. One side or the other was merely pushing for advantage in the relentless chess game of power politics which had been underway since the end of World War II. The stories in The Times bearing on the conference had a rather desperate, almost fatalistic, ring, as if the writers of the stories, and perhaps the diplomats and all the rest involved, knew the conference would accomplish nothing -- if, in fact, it did not serve to make the crisis deeper. Observers in this capital, wrote on of The Times' Washington bureau staff, are not convinced the conference will serve, in this instance, as similar conferences sometimes have served in the past, either to delay a showdown on the issues or to advance the prospects for a settlement. There is scarcely concealed concern in many quarters that the conference will, instead, fan the flames of controversy higher without, by way of compensation, opening any avenues by which a compromise might seem possible. A conference is popularly supposed to provide a time and place for the sober weighing of the facts and points of argument. But there are few who see in the calling of this conference any indications that this may be the case. The coffee maker was going full blast now. Enoch threw the paper down and strode to the stove to snatch it off. From the cupboard he got a cup and went to the table with it. But before he began to eat, he went back to the desk and, opening a drawer, got out his chart and spread it on the table. Once again he wondered just how valid it might be. In certain parts of it, at times, it seemed to make a certain sort of sense. He had based it on the Mizar theory of statistics and had been forced, because of the nature of his subject, to shift some of the factors, to substitute some values. He wondered now, for the thousandth time, if he had made an error somewhere. Had his shifting and substitution destroyed the validity of the system? And if so, how could he correct the errors to restore validity? Here the factors were, he thought: the birth rate and the total population of the Earth, the death rate, the values of currencies, the spread of living costs, attendance of places of worship, medical advances, technological developments, industrial indices, the labor market, world trade trends -- and many others, including some that at first glance might not seem too relevant: the auction price of art objects, vacation preferences and movements, the speed of transportation, the incidence of insanity. The statistical method developed by the mathematicians of Mizar, he knew, would work anywhere, on anything, if applied correctly. But he had been forced to twist it in translating an alien planet's situation to fit the situation here on Earth. And in consequence of that twisting, did it still apply? He shuddered as he looked at it. For if he'd made no mistake, if he'd handled everything cor# rectly, if his translations had done n o violence to the concept, then the Earth was headed straight for another major war. the chart. It rolled itself back into a cylinder. He reached for one of the fruits the Sirrah being had brought him and bit into it. He rolled it on his tongue, savoring the delicacy of the taste. It was as good as that strange, bird-like being had guaranteed it would be. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had held some hope that the chart based on the Mizar theory might show, if not a way to end all war, at least a way to keep the peace. But the chart had never given any hint of the road to peace. Inexorably, relentlessly, it had led the way to war. How many other wars, he wondered, could the people of the Earth endure? No man could say, of course. But it might be just one more. For the weapons that would be used in the coming conflict had not as yet been measured. There was no man who could come close to actually estimating the results these weapons would produce. War had been bad enough when men faced one another with their weapons in their hands, but in any present war great payloads of destruction would go hurtling through the skies to engulf whole cities -- aimed not at military concentrations, but at total populations. He reached out his hand for the chart again, then pulled it back. There was no further need of looking at it. He knew it all by heart. There was no hope in it. He might study it and puzzle over it until the crack of doom and it would not change a whit. There was no hope at all. The world was thundering once again, in a blind red haze of fury and of helplessness, down the road to war. He went on with his eating and the fruit was even better than it had been at first bite. Next time, the being had said, I will bring you more. But it might be a long time before he came again, and he might never come. There were many of them who passed through only once, although there were a few who showed up every week or so -- old, regular travelers who had become close friends. And there had been, he recalled, that little group of Hazers who, years ago, had made arrangements for extra long stopovers at the station so they could sit around this very table and talk the hours away, arriving laden with hampers and with baskets of things to eat and drink, as if it were a picnic they had stopped for. But finally they had stopped their coming. It had been years since he'd seen any one of them. He regretted it, for they'd been the best of companions. He drank an extra cup of coffee, sitting idly in the chair, thinking about those good old days when the band of Hazers came. X rustling and he glanced quickly up to see her sitting on the sofa, dressed in the demure hoop skirts of the # s. "Mary!" he cried, surprised, rising to his feet. She was smiling at him in her very special way and she was beautiful, he thought, as no other woman ever had been beautiful. "Mary," he said, "it's so nice to have you here." And now, leaning on the mantlepiece, dressed in Union blue, with his belted sabre and his full black mustache, was another of his friends. "Hello, Enoch," David Ransome said. "I hope we don't intrude." "Never," Enoch told him. "How can two friends intrude?" He stood beside the table and the past was with him, the good and restful past, the rose-scented and unhaunted past that had never left him. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of fife and drum and the jangle of the battle harness as the boys marched off to war, with the colonel glorious in his full dress uniform upon the great black stallion, and the regimental flags snapping in the stiff June breeze. He walked across the room and over to the sofa. He made a little bow to Mary. "With your permission, ma'am," he said. "Please do," she said. "If you should happen to be busy we would understand..." "Not at all," he said. "I was hoping you would come." He sat down on the sofa, not too close to her. Her hands were folded very primly in her lap. He wanted to reach out and take her hands in his and hold them for a moment, but he knew he couldn't. For she wasn't really there. said Mary, "since I've seen you. How is your work going, Enoch?" He shook his head. "I still have all the problems. The watchers still are out there. And the chart says war." David left the mantle and came across the room. He sat down in a chair and arranged his sabre. "War, the way they fight it these days," he declared, "would be a sorry business. Not the way we fought it, Enoch." "No," said Enoch. "Not the way we fought it. A war would be bad enough, but there is something worse. If Earth fights another war, our people will be barred for many centuries from the confraternity of space." "Maybe that's not so bad," said David. "We may not be ready to join the ones in space." "Perhaps not," Enoch admitted. "I rather doubt we are. But we could be some day. And that day would be shoved far into the future if we fight another war. You have to make some pretense of being civilized to join those other races." "Maybe," Mary said, "they might never know. About a war, I mean. They go no place but this station." Enoch shook his head. "They would know. I think they're watching us. Anyhow, they would read the papers." "The papers you subscribe to?" "I save them for Ulysses. That pile over in the corner. He takes them back to Galactic Central every time he comes. He's very interested in Earth, you know, from the years he spent here. And from Galactic Central, once he's read them, I have a hunch the papers travel to the corners of the galaxy." "Can you imagine," David asked, "what the promotion departments of those newspapers might have to say about it if they only knew their depth of circulation?" Enoch grinned at the thought. "There's that paper down in Georgia," David said, "that covers Dixie like the dew. They'd have to think of something that goes with galaxy." "Glove," said Mary, quickly. "Covers the galaxy like a glove. What do you think of that?" "Excellent," said David. contrite. "Here we make our jokes and Enoch has his problems." "Not mine to solve, of course," Enoch told her. "I'm just worried by them. All I have to do is stay inside the station and there are no problems. Once you close the door here, the problems of the world are securely locked outside." "But you can't do that." "No, I can't," said Enoch. "I think you may be right," said David, "in thinking that these other races may be watching us. With an eye, perhaps, to some day inviting the human race to join them. Otherwise, why would they have wanted to set up a station here on Earth?" "They're expanding the network all the time," said Enoch. "They needed a station in this solar system to carry out their extension into this spiral arm." "Yes, that's true enough," said David, "but it need not have been the Earth. They could have built a station out on Mars and used an alien for a keeper and still have served their purpose." "I've often thought of that," said Mary. "They wanted a station on the Earth and an Earthman as its keeper. There must be a reason for it." "I had hoped there was," Enoch told her. "But I'm afraid they came too soon. It's too early for the human race. We aren't grown up. We still are juveniles." "It's a shame," said Mary. "We'd have so much to learn. They know so much more than we. Their concept of religion, for example." "I don't know," said Enoch, "whether it's actually a religion. It seems to have few of the trappings we associate with religion. And it is not based on faith. It doesn't have to be. It is based on knowledge. These people know, you see." "But don't you think," asked David, "that the human race may sense this? They don't know it, but they sense it. And are reaching out to touch it. They haven't got the knowledge, so they must do the best they can with faith. And that faith goes back a far way, perhaps deep into the prehistoric days." "I suppose so," Enoch said. "But it actually wasn't the spiritual force I was thinking of. There are all the other things, the material things, the methods, the philosophies that the human race could use. Name almost any branch of science and there is something there for us -- more than what we have." But his mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force. There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it. Talisman was the closest. But Talisman was too crude a word -- although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it. things, so many concepts, he thought, out in the galaxy which could not be adequately expressed in any tongue on Earth. The Talisman was more than a talisman and the machine which had been given the name was more than a mere machine. Involved in it, as well as certain mechanical concepts, was a psychic concept, perhaps some sort of psychic energy that was unknown on Earth. That and a great deal more. He had read some of the literature on the spiritual force and on the Talisman and had realized, he remembered, in the reading of it, how far short he fell  -- how far short the human race must fall -- in an understanding of it. The Talisman could be operated only by certain beings with certain types of minds and something else besides (could it be, he wondered, with certain kinds of souls?) Sensitives was the word he had used in his mental translation of the term for these kinds of people. But once again he could not be sure if the word came close to fitting. The Talisman was placed in the custody of the most capable, or the most efficient, or the most devoted (whichever it might be) of the galactic sensitives, who carried it from star to star in a sort of eternal progression. And on each planet the people came to make personal and individual contact with the spiritual force through the intervention and the agency of the Talisman and its custodian. He found that he was shivering at the thought of it -- the pure ecstasy of reaching out and touching the spirituality that flooded through the galaxy and, undoubtedly, through the universe. The assurance would be there that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence -- that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time. "What is the trouble, Enoch?" Mary asked. "Nothing," he said. David said, "You were talking about what we could find in the galaxy. There was, for one thing, that strange sort of math. You were telling us of it once -- " "The Arcturus math, you mean," said Enoch. "I know little more than when I told you of it. It is too involved. It is based on behavior symbolism." There was some doubt, he told himself, that you could even call it math. It was something that the scientists of Earth, no doubt, could use to make possible the engineering of the social sciences as logically and as efficiently as the common brand of math had been used to build the gadgets of the Earth. "And the biology of that race out in Andromeda," Mary said. "The ones who colonized all those crazy planets." "Yes, I know. But Earth would have to mature a bit in its intellectual and emotional outlook before we'd venture to use it as the Andromedans did. Still, I suppose that it would have its applications." as he thought of how the Andromedans used it. And that, he knew, was proof that he still was a man of Earth, kin to all the bias and the prejudice and the shibboleths of the human mind. For what the Andromedans had done was only common sense. If you cannot colonize a planet in your present shape, why, then you change your shape. You make yourself into the sort of being that can live upon the planet and then you take it over in that alien shape into which you have changed yourself. If you need to be a worm, then you become a worm. Or an insect. Or a shellfish, or whatever it may take. And you change not your body only, but your mind as well, into the kind of mind that will be necessary to live upon that planet. "There are all the drugs," said Mary, "and the medicines. The medical knowledge that could apply to Earth. There was that little package Galactic Central sent you." "A packet of drugs," said Enoch, "that could cure almost every ill on Earth. That, perhaps, hurts me most of all. To know they're up there in the cupboard, actually on this planet, where so many people need them." "You could mail out samples," David said, "to medical associations or to some drug concern." Enoch shook his head. "I thought of that, but I have the galaxy to consider. I have an obligation to Galactic Central. They have taken great precautions that the station not be known. I cannot wreck their plans. For when you think of it, Galactic Central and the work it's doing is more important than the Earth." "Divided loyalties," said David, with slight mockery in his tone. "That is it, exactly. There had been a time, many years ago, when I thought of writing papers for some of the scientific journals. Not the medical journals, naturally, for I know nothing about medicine. The drugs are there, of course, lying on the shelf, with directions for their use, but they are merely so many pills or powders or ointments, or whatever they may be. But there were other things I'd learned. Not too much about them, naturally, but at least some hints in some new directions. Enough that someone could pick them up and go on from there. Someone who might know what to do with them." "But,, look here," David said, "that wouldn't have worked out. You have no technical nor research background, no educational record. You're not tied up with any school or college. The journals just don't publish you unless you can prove yourself." That's why I never wrote the papers. I knew there was no use. You can't blame the journals. They must be responsible. Their pages aren't open to just anyone. And even if they had viewed the papers with enough respect to want to publish them, they would have had to find out who I was. And that would have led straight back to the station." "Even so," said David, "there'd be little you actually could tell them. What I mean is that generally you haven't got enough to go on. So much of this galactic knowledge is off the beaten track." "I know," said Enoch. "The mental engineering of MankaEarth could know of that, our people undoubtedly could find a clue to the treatment of the neurotic and the mentally disturbed. We could empty all the institutions and we could tear them down or use them for something else. There'd be no need of them. But no one other than the could ever tell us of it. I only know they are noted for their mental engineering, but that is all I know. I haven't the faintest inkling of what it's all about. It's something that you'd have to get from the people out there." "What you are really talking of," said Mary, "are all the nameless sciences -- the ones that no human has ever thought about." "Like us, perhaps," said David. "David!" Mary cried. "There js no sense," said David, angrily, "in pretending we are people." "But you are," said Enoch tensely. "You are people to me. You are the only people that I have. What is the matter, David? "I think," said David, "that the time has come to say what we really are. We are illusion. We are created and called up. We exist only for one purpose, to come and talk with you, to fill in for the real people that you cannot have." "Mary," Enoch cried, "you don't think that way, too! You can't think that way!" He reached out his arms to her and then he let them drop -- terrified at the realization of what he'd been about to do. It was the first time he'd ever tried to touch her. It was the first time, in all the years, that he had forgotten. #T am sorry, Mary. I should not have done that." Her eyes were bright with tears. "I wish you could," she said. "Oh, how I wish you could!" "David," he said, not turning his head. "David left," said Mary. "He won't be back," said Enoch. Mary shook her head. "What is the matter, Mary? What is it all about? What have I done!" "Nothing," Mary said, "except that you made us too much like people. So that we became more human, until we were entirely human. No longer puppets, no longer pretty dolls, but really actual people. I think David must resent it -- not that he is people, but that being people, he is still a shadow. It did not matter when we were dolls or puppets, for we were not human then. We had no human feelings." "Mary, please," he said. "Mary, please forgive me." She leaned toward him and her face was lighted by deep tenderness. "There is nothing to forgive," she said. "Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You created us out of a love of us and a need of us and it is wonderful to know that you are loved and needed." "But I don't create you any more," Enoch pleaded. "There was a time, long ago, I had to. But not any longer. Now you come to visit me of your own free will." How many years, he wondered. It must be all of fifty. And Mary had been the first, and David had been second. Of all the others of them, they had been the first and were the closest and the dearest. And before that, before he'd even tried, he'd spent other years in studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturThere had been a day and a state of mind when it would have been black magic, but it was not black magic. Rather, it was the orderly manipulation of certain natural aspects of the universe as yet quite unsuspected by the human race. Perhaps aspects that Man never would discover. For there was not, at least at the present moment, the necessary orientation of the scientific mind. "David felt," said Mary, "that we could not go on forever, playing out our little sedate visits. There had to be a time when we faced up to what we really are." "And the rest of them?" "I am sorry, Enoch. The rest of them as well." "But you? How about you, Mary?" "I don't know," she said. "It is different with me. I love you very much." "And I... " "No, that's not what I mean. Don't you understand? I'm in love with you." her. There was a great roaring in the world, as if he were standing still and the world and time were rushing swiftly past him. "If it only could have stayed," she said, "the way it was at first. Then we were glad of our existence. Our emotions were so shallow; we seemed to be so happy. Like little children, running in the sun. But then we all grew up. And I think I the most of all." She smiled at him and tears were in her eyes. "Don't take it so hard, Enoch. We can... " "My dear," he said, "I've been in love with you since the first day that I saw you. I think, maybe, even before that." He reached out a hand to her, then pulled it back, remembering. "I did not know," she said. "I should not have told you. You could live with it until you knew I loved you, too." He nodded, dumbly. She bowed her head. "Dear God, we don't deserve this. We have done nothing to deserve it." She raised her head and looked at him. "If I could only touch you." "We can go on," he said, "as we have always done. You can come to see me any time you want. We can . " She shook her head. "It wouldn't work," she said. "Neither of us could stand it." He knew that she was right. He knew that it was done. For fifty years she and the others had been dropping in to visit. And they'd come no more. For the fairyland was shattered and the magic spell was broken. He'd be left alone -- more alone than ever, more alone than before he'd ever known her. She would not come again and he could never bring himself to call her up again, even if he could. And his shadow world and his shadow love, the only love he'd ever really had, would be gone forever. "Good-by, my dear," he said. But it was too late. She was already gone. And from far off, it seemed, he heard the moaning whistle that said a message had come in. Here's what happens when two Master Spies tangle... and stay that way I ' upset about," Pashkov said soothingly, taking his friend's arm as they came out of the villa forty miles from Moscow. Pashkov looked like a roly-poly zoo attendant leading a tame bear. "Erase his memory, give him a new name and feed him more patriotism. Very simple." Medvedev raised his hand threateningly. "Don't come howling to me if everybody guesses he is nothing but a robot." Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of Dentist Amigovitch, this house had become known all over the world as Boris Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the clicking of a typewriter. "It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them," he said, climbing into his flier. "Petchareff will send you word when to announce his 'death'." "A question, brother." "No questions." "Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?" Pashkov frowned convincingly. "Comrade Petchareff has suspected even me." He took off for Moscow, poking his flier up through the clouds and flying close to them, as was his habit. Then he switched on the radio and got Petchareff's secretary. "Nadezhda?" "I know what you're up to, Seven One Three," Nadezhda Brunhildova said. "Don't try to fool me, you confidence man. You are coming in?" "In ten minutes. What have I done now?" "You were supposed to make funeral arrangements for Knackenpast, so what are you doing in Stockholm?" "Stockholm?" "You're lying and I'll kill you. Don't you think I know about Anastina, that she-nurse in the Stockholm National Hospital?" "Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's cross-eyed and bucktoothed." "Beast!" She switched him to Petchareff. "What's been keeping you, Pashkov?" "Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?" "Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?" "Hospital gown?" "Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James again. He looks like you now." Pashkov grunted. "I'll never understand," said Petchareff, "why all top secret agents have to look like bankers. Anastina says Colonel James was operated on by a Monsieur Fanti. What do you know about him?" "He's a theatrical surgeon." "You're not playing one of your jokes, Pashkov?" "Hardly." "You'd better be in my office in ten minutes. What size hospital gown?" "Short and fat," Pashkov said, and switched off. Most countries wanted to break his neck, and his own Motherland did not always trust him. But he enjoyed his work -- enjoyed it as much as his closest professional rival, Colonel James, U.S.A. of Intelligence in the northeast corner of the Kremlin, hitched up his pants and rode down. In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov came in. "Medvedev get my orders?" "He's preparing a new superpatriotic writer to replace Boris Knackenpast," Pashkov reported. "When you give the word, he will call Izvestia and tell them Boris is dead." Petchareff glanced at his calendar. "We have two other state funerals this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of Knackenpast's peace nonsense." "No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature," Pashkov promised, raising a chubby finger, "will be a pearl necklace of government slogans." Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. "The man from the Bolshoi Theater is here, Comrade." "Send him in." A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with trembling forepaws and bowed twice again. Petchareff tore open the package. "You got the real thing? No bad imitation?" "Exactly, exactly," the mouse piped. "No difference, Comrade." He held his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered. Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was printed in indelible ink: Stockholm national hospital courtesy of Coca-Cola Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. "This is what Colonel James is wearing," he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried out. "Try and split the allies," Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the gown. Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. "If Colonel James makes a monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to our Cultural Information Center in Chicago." Pashkov winced. "Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?" "I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with a kidnaping team?" "His team is more agile. On your way." In the front office, Pashkov stopped to kiss Nadezhda Brunhildova goodby. "I may not return from this dangerous mission. Give me a tender kiss." Nadezhda was a big girl with hefty arms, captain of her local broom brigade. "Monster!" She seized him by the collar. "Is Anastina dangerous?" "Darling!" "Bitter sweetness!" she howled, dropping him. "Go, love. Make me miserable." Central Intelligence. Nothing unusual going on in Stockholm: an industrial exhibit, the Swedish Academy in session, a sociology seminar on prison reform, a forty-man trade mission from India. An addendum to the Stockholm file listed two Cuban agents operating from Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings. They were buying small arms and ammunition. He thought a moment, impressed the Cubans' address on his memory, and went to his flier. He did not fly to Hotel Reisen at once. Zubov's kidnaping team could wait. Coming slowly over Stockholm he spotted the National Hospital and circled. A line of ambulance fliers was parked on the ground in the ambulance court. On the hospital roof, he noticed, apart from private fliers, stood a flier that resembled his own. He veered away, detoured around Riddarholmen, and five minutes later landed on the roof of Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings -- the Salvation Army flophouse. "My Cuban friends," Pashkov inquired in fluent English at the desk on the top floor. "Are they in?" The old desk clerk looked like a stork. "Yu, room six fifteen," he clacked. "Tree floors down. Aer yu Amerikan?" "Brazil." "Ah so? You sprikker goot Inglish laik me." "Very kind of you." He rode down three floors, found room #, and stopped as he heard voices within. "... dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete. By seven o'clock tonight, okay, Gringo?" "What do you expect for seven thousand bucks -- service? Look, boys, I'm just a honest businessman. I can't get it for you today. Have a seegar, Pablo." "Tfu!" "All rightie, your cause is my cause. Maybe I can get it for you tonight. But you'll have to pay in advance. What do you say, Francisco?" "I counted the money. It is waiting for you. You deliver, we pay." "But how can I trust you? I like you boys, I know you like me, but business is business. I gotta give something to my jobber, don't I?" "Gringo!" At that moment Pashkov knocked on the door. From within: "Shh! Alguien llama a la puerta." Pashkov knocked again and a v scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam of the closet door. "Yu?" "Buenas tardes," Pashkov said through the door. "Asuntos muy importantes." The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face peered out. "Eh?" "Gospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted." The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room. The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a revolver. "No gun-play, Caballeros," Pashkov went on in Spanish. "We are in the Salvation Army charity house, not in a two-peso thriller. Besides, I deliver before I ask payment." "Deliver what, senor?" "We favor any disturbance close to the United States. May I sit down?" Between two beds were stacked some dozen crates of explosives. A small table was littered with papers. Sitting down at the table, Pashkov's elbow rested on an invoice, and moments later the invoice was tucked in his pocket. "What kind of ammunition do you need, Caballeros?" The Cubans looked at each other. "Thirty-o-six caliber, twotwenty grain. How much can you deliver?" "Two thousand rounds." "Not much." "Maybe three thousand. I'll toss in a box of hand grenades and a can of lysergic acid diethylamide." "You have that? You have "I have that. When are you leaving Stockholm?" Again the young beards exchanged looks. "Maybe we stay till tomorrow if you have more business. Three thousand rounds is not much. How much payment, senor?" "Two thousand kronor," Pashkov said, taking an envelope on the table and addressing it to Nadezhda Brunhildova, Kremlin, Moscow. No return address. "Do you trust us to send the money?" "It is bad for you if I do not trust you," Pashkov said, smiling up at them. "You can trust us. We shall send the money. Please take a cigar." Pashkov took four Havanas from the box they held out to him, stuck three in his breast pocket, and lit one. "You come again, senor. We make much business." "Why not? Help retire LatinAmerican dictators to Siberia. More gold in Siberia than in Las Vegas." "Hyi, hyi, that is funny. You come again." On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted. It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting for him. naping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone. "Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow." "Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?" Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them on his superior. "With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for kidnaping of Colonel James all ready." "Here's a cigar for you." "Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six." Zubov counted on his long hard fingers. "Two watchmen, three nurses, one doctor." In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar. "Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon -- " Pashkov picked up the phone, dialed the Soviet embassy, and got the charge d'affaires. "How is your underdeveloped countries fund?" he asked. "Always depleted, always replenished." "I don't want any Russian brands." "Nothing but foreign," the charge buzzed. "We got almost everything now through an American surplus outlet in Hamburg. Nationals get caught with American goods, Americans get blamed. Wonderful confusion. What do you need?" "Thirty-o-six two-twenty, three thousand -- if you have it." "Most popular. What else?" "Pineapples -- one crate." "Only confiscated German potatoes. Will that do?" "Fine. And a small can of sentimental caviar." "Too risky." "It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow." Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect more -- make sure they stay in town. kidnaping plans. He said, "With your pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-oralive?" "Alive." Zubov pulled a long face. "Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin Pashkov. Fast, clean job." Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. "Have you had your eyes examined lately?" "No need," Zubov assured him with a smile. "I see more than most people." Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. "How many cigars in my hand?" "Two." At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun glasses. "What are you doing here?" cried Zubov. "Why aren't you observing the hospital?" "Dhh, you said to report... um... if something happened," the first ape said in a thick voice. "Well?" "Victim's room lights out," the ape said. "My assistants," Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. "Line up, line up, lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is Kolya. No, this is Kolya and this one is Petya." "Twins?" "Not exactly. Same genetic experiment. Good lads. Stand straight, Petya. Don't curl your feet like that, Kolya, I've told you before. Why didn't you shave your hands today?" Kolya looked guiltily at his hands. "They've made progress," Zubov assured Pashkov, pulling a small whip from his hip pocket. "Straight, lads, straight," he flicked the whip. "We have company." "Are their costumes your own idea?" "With your pardon, for purposes of concealment. What are your orders?" Pashkov told them to pick up the boxes of ammunition at the embassy and deliver them to the Cubans, and then to commandeer a private automobile. "We have autos at the embassy pool," Zubov suggested. "I want a vehicle off the street. Then report back here with your lads." Petya gave Kolya a box on the ear. "Boys, boys!" Zubov cracked the whip. "Out you go. A job for Gospodin Pashkov, lads. They don't get enough exercise," he grinned, backing out after them. "With your pardon, I'll thrash them later." And they were gone. Pashkov turned to the hospital maps and studied them before taking a nap. bov's team returned, their mission accomplished. "With your pardon, an excellent Mercedes," Zubov reported. Pashkov had changed into the hospital gown with the Coca-Cola legend on the back. He glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock in the morning. He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. "Take my flier back to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today." Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three leaning forward. In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the front seat of the stolen car, and followed. A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee. As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James' window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in after. Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed, his eyes blinking. Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment. "My dear Gospodin Pashkov!" Colonel James greeted him in Russian, yawning. "How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down." Not only was his Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice. "You're not really sick?" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed. "Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look in the mirror -- " The colonel shuddered. "I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?" Pashkov said. "That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now." "Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to talk very often." "And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?" "Gratefully accepted," Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster with a flourish. ##T)UR treatment is over, then?" Pashkov asked. "You are ready for your assignment?" "Ready." "And that is?" "Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morn W ing. "Shall I kidnap him now?" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his cigarette. "Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel -- do you want me to think I am falling into a trap?" "No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at seeing you again." The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's other side. "Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov." Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov. "Take him straight to Petchareff," Colonel James said to Zubov. "I'll report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to." Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards the window. "Hold your claws, Zubov lad," Pashkov said. "You have got the wrong man, can't you see? That is Colonel James." "Eh?" "Use your eyes, blockhead. I am Pashkov." Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. "Eh?" Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, "Carry him out." Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to the window. "You miserable idiot," Pashkov shouted. "You'll get a rest cure for this!" Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. "How can I tell you two apart just by looking!" he cried hysterically. "I'm not a learned man." "One small but decisive proof," Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital gown. "I have a mole." Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. "Send me to rest cures, will you?" Colonel James sighed. "I guess we have to keep up appearances," he muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov leaped in after, and they were off. the closet might have been Pashkov's own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in. Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze. He was awakened by the nurse, Anastina Bjorklund -- alias Anastasia Semionovna Bezumnaya, formerly of the Stakhanovite Booster's Committee, Moscow Third Worker's District. "Wonderful morning, Colonel James!" Petchareff seldom let one agent know what another was doing. She put a big breakfast tray on Pashkov's lap. "Cloudy, damp, and windy. London stock market caves in, race riots in South Africa, famine in India, earthquake in Japan, floods in the United States, general strike in France, new crisis in Berlin. I ask you, what more can an idealist want?" "Good morning, Miss Bjorklund." The breakfast tray was crammed with a liter of orange juice, four boiled eggs, six slices of bacon, four pancakes, two pork chops, four slices of toast, a tumbler of vodka, a pot of coffee and two cigars. "Ah, Colonel," Anastina said as Pashkov fell to, "why did you let them change your face? It does not become you at all." "Part of my job. Don't you think I am more handsome now?" Anastina laughed shrilly. "That bulbous nose handsome? What Woman could fall in love with a nose like that?" "It shows determination. I wish I had this nose permanently." "You mustn't talk like that. But I'll ignore your nose if you tell me more about White Sands Proving Grounds, as you promised." "With pleasure, with pleasure," he said, sinking his teeth into a pork chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. "But right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra shine, there's a good girl." "Oh, you and your secrets!" An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James' flier -- an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared at him, then smiled nervously. "They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel." "Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?" "Oh, no, sir." "Do I talk like Colonel James?" "You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov." "I am Gospodin Pashkov now, Captain. To everybody." "Of course, sir. I'll ring down you are coming." Pashkov glanced at his watch. Colonel James would be landing in Moscow about now and taken to Comrade Petchareff for questioning. A manservant in velvet cutaways, patent leather shoes and white gloves, escorted Pashkov through rooms hungs with chandeliers, tapestries, paintings. Pashkov entered the last room and stopped as the door clicked shut behind him. all of whom he recognized: Professor Kristin of the Swedish Academy, a white-haired old man with a kind, intelligent face; the king, Gustavus IX, a thin old man stroking his Vandyke, sitting under a portrait of Frederick the Great; and Monsieur Fanti, the make-up surgeon. Pashkov bowed his head. "Your majesty. Gentlemen." "Extraordinary!" Professor Kristin said. Pashkov turned to the surgeon. "Monsieur, should my face have such a frivolous expression?" M. Fanti raised his eyebrows, but did not answer. "I thought," said Pashkov, "that Gospodin Pashkov's face has a more brutal look." "Propaganda," said the artist. But' he came closer and looked at Pashkov's face with sudden interest. Professor Kristin said, "Colonel James, we presume you have studied the problem in detail. I'm afraid we have delayed announcing the Nobel prize for literature much too long. How soon can you bring Boris Knackenpast to Stockholm?" So there it was: Boris Knackenpast a supreme success, as Pashkov had suspected. It would be amusing to tell robotist Medvedev about it. "Delicate, very delicate," Pashkov said. "Everything depends on my not running into Gospodin Pashkov." "We can't wait any longer," Professor Kristin said. "Fortunately, we have an ally in the enemy camp. The robotist, Medvedev, is expecting you at Knackenpast's villa." "Bad show," M. Fanti said suddenly. "No good. His left cheekbone is at least four centimeters too high." The men looked at the surgeon, then at Pashkov. M. Fanti fingered Pashkov's cheekbone. "How could I have made such a mistake! Just look at him. People laugh at such faces." "How much time to correct the error then, Monsieur Fanti?" the king asked. "A week at least. His skin needs a rest. I must rework the whole left side of his face -- it's all lopsided." "But we can't spare a week," Professor Kristin said. "With your majesty's permission," Pashkov offered, "I am plans call for immediate departure." "It is a good thing you do for us, Colonel James," Gustavus IX said, "and a courageous thing. Please accept our thanks." Professor Kristin saw Pashkov to the door. "One suggestion, Colonel. Your r's are still too soft for a real Russian. Why do you Americans slur them like that? And I beg you, if you value your life, do not fail to watch your fricatives." 'T'HE roof captain saluted as Pashkov stepped out of the lift. His flier was serviced and ready. "What weather in Moscow, Captain?" "Ceiling four thousand. We're having patrols half way out to sea. They are instructed to let you pass." A small incident, the roof captain explained. A Swedish Red Cross flier was missing from the National Hospital. Two Cuban agents had been arrested and a cache of small arms and ammunition was found. But no trace of the ambulance. "I suppose the Cubans deny stealing the ambulance?" Pashkov asked. "They say they've been framed by a fat little Russian. But it's transparent, a clumsy job. Imagine, they left a stolen car in the ambulance court and in it an invoice for six cases of ammunition. It was traced to the Cubans in half an hour." Pashkov climbed into his flier. "Well, it's fashionable to blame the Russians for everything." He waved his chubby hand, and took off. Flying over the Baltic, he set the controls on the Moscow beam. Ten minutes west of Moscow he tuned the communicator in on Petchareff's office. "Seven One Three here, Nadezhda. Tell Petchareff -- no, let me talk to him." "Seven One... but that's impossible! Gospodin Pashkov is in conference with Comrade Petchareff." "Stupid!" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker clicked and went dead. Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop. Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear, was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And Zubov was probably getting a rest cure. Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris Knackenpast's villa. "You came fast, sir," the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. "We did not expect you for another fifteen minutes." Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time. "Listen carefully, lieutenant." Pashkov described the American agent. "But his left cheekbone is lower than mine -- about four centimeters. He may be armed, so be careful." The lieutenant stared. "Shall we kill him?" "No, no. Put him in a cage." As Pashkov ran up the steps to the villa, the curtain in the vestibule window stirred. But when he entered, the vestibule was empty. He looked in the dining room, the music room, the library. Nobody. The house was strangely quiet. He came to the door of the study and listened. Not a sound. He went in and there, behind the large writing desk, sat Boris Knackenpast. The robot was unscrewing screws imbedded in his neck. "My God, sir," said Pashkov, "what are you doing?" r T'HE robot's eyes, large disks I of glittering mirror, flashed as he looked up. "Ah, Colonel James," Boris said in a voice that seemed to come from a deep well. "Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin Pashkov." The door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels. Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. "Colonel James! What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on his way." Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face. The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's the trouble with us. "I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast," Pashkov said. "We must be off at once." "Too late!" the old valet said from the window. Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the guards closed a circle about him. "He'll keep," Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. "Let's be off, Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out." "Look!" The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff. Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova. "Pretend not to know me, will he?" she yelled at Colonel James, picking up a rock. "Hold it, citizenress," Colonel James said. "Citizenress, is it?" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov. "I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty," Petchareff roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the guards surrounded the house. "No alarm, no alarm," Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window. "Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for it. But get back into your robot costume." "I can't operate the machine." "I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff." As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face. The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping. Colonel James said, "There he is, the American spy." Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. "Not bad," Petchareff said. "We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?" "Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov." "Curse me," Nadezhda said, staring at him. "Another Pashkov." A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's face with their slouched hats. "Stand back!" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. "He is trying to say something!" "He's moving!" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair standing up like spikes. Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree. nel James. "Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself," Petchareff said. "Zubov!" "Hhng?" "Which one's the real Pashkov?" "Hhng?" But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at Petchareff and running. "Grenade!" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground. At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier, his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor. The guards scattered and dove for cover. "Down, lads! Grenade!" Pashkov yelled. The two apes took up the cry, "Grenade, grenade!" and flattened themselves behind the tree. Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet. Only Petchareff remained standing. "Stop the robot!" Nobody moved. Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the clouds towards Stockholm. Petchareff relit his cigar. "Tfui, tastes of monkey hair." Medvedev shambled over. "Was the grenade a dud?" "One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov," Petchareff spat. "Your deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity -- " "Darling!" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov. "Not in public," Pashkov said. "Wait a minute," Petchareff said. "Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot him summarily. He does look like Colonel James to me." "But if you're mistaken?" Medvedev put in nervously. "We all make mistakes," Petchareff said. "What would history be without mistakes?" "I don't trust him either," Nadezhda said. "But I know my Pashkov. If he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the mornfor your information reply to a reader's question that read about as follows: "Reading the daily papers and news magazines about rocket work I have come across many unfamiliar names, such as Strongarm, Journeyman, Javelin, Scout and so on. They seem to be solidfuel rockets, but that is all I could find out about them. Were these rockets developed in secrecy?" I started out by replying that the term "secrecy" was not quite right; "privacy" would be a better word. I had the privacy of a research laboratory in mind, where a group of men ponders a "mission" (a job to be performed) and tries to think of the most efficient and inexpensive way to perform it. To take an actual case, I continued, an instrument package weighing # pounds had to be carried into the lower portion of the inner Van Allen belt, to an altitude of # miles. Of course a Thor rocket could have done it, or a Jupiter, not to mention the Atlas. But none of these big liquid-fuel rockets can conceivably be called inexpensive. And they all need ground facilities for firing which exist in only a few places. To do it more cheaply -- and at the same time to avoid the need for extensive ground facilities -- it was decided to use a L Aerobee rocket with booster on transport cart. (Courtesy Aerojet-General.) rocket made up of existing hardware. An Honest John artillery rocket (minus its warhead, of course) was the first stage. The second stage consisted of a NikeAjax booster. The third stage was another Nike booster, and an Altair rocket the fourth stage. The whole was named Argo D-# or Javelin. And it did its job. The instruments were carried # miles up on July #, #. Having come to that point in my reply I decided that other readers might have the same or a similar question in their minds and that a column on sounding rockets might be of all-around interest. "sounding rocket" means. The word can be traced back to the French ballon sonde, which meant a small balloon carrying meteorological instruments. In English this became "sounding balloon", and an instrumentcarrying rocket logically became a "sounding rocket". They are fired more or less vertically. The deviation from the true vertical is introduced to make the burned-out rocket or rocket stages fall into the sea. Otherwise every empty stage would have to be supplied with a parachute for a soft landing, which would not only complicate the whole business but would also reduce the instrument load that can be carried. Parachutes are not devices of zero weight. In fact they are surprisingly heavy. Originally the term sounding rockets referred to such rockets, which would take over from the balloons at # miles -- the highest a balloon can go and still carry something -- and extend the region of atmosphere research to # miles. But by now # miles is not very difficult any more. For this reason an artificial distinction has been introduced. Up to # miles above sea level -- one earth radius -- instrument-carrying rockets are called sounding rockets. Beyond # miles they are called geoprobes. Beyond, say, # miles they become lunar probes or planetary probes, depending on their destination. The idea of the sounding rocket goes back to professor Robert H. Goddard who was the first (in #) to make detailed suggestions. During the period from # to # various experimenters, in the United States as well as in Germany and Russia, occasionally stuck a barometric instrument into the nose cone of their rockets. But that does not make them the first sounding rockets. In the first place, none of these experimental rockets ever carried a full set of the basic meteorological instruments, measuring atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity. In the second place, no rocket fired prior to # ever exceeded the altitude which could be investigated by balloons, too. The first rocket which deserves the designation sounding which was developed in California in # and #, and test-fired from the White Sands Proving Ground in October, #. The overall length of the diameter # inches, the diameter measured over the fins # inches and the takeoff weight # pounds. The empty weight of the rocket was # pounds, propellant weight (nitric acid and aniline) # pounds and the payload weight # pounds. Started by a solid-fuel booster, # miles. poral was cut short by the fact that seventy German V-# rockets became available very soon after the Corporal's first test flights. In poral did have a shortcoming. The payload weight of # pounds was enough for most experiments in upper-atmosphere exploration. But the payload space was generally considered too small. Scientific instruments at that time often did not weigh much, but they did take up a great deal of space. Miniaturization was still in the future. On the other hand, the V-#s, which were used because they were available, were generally speaking too big. They could carry a total of # pounds to an altitude of # miles. Of this total payload weight, # pounds were available for instruments. Nose cone and counterweight accounted for the other # pounds. But that much weight-carrying capacity was needed only in very rare cases -- for example in cosmic-ray research, where heavy lead shielding had to be carried. not quite what was wanted -- and since the V-#s, one day, would all be gone -- there was clearly a need for a new sounding rocket. One that was conceived and designed to be an instrument carrier before the first line was drawn on the drafting board. The Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University supplied the original design, the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance supplied the first funds, Douglas Aircraft Company and Aerojet, Inc. (now Aerojet-General) shared the work of building it. The rocket was the Aerobee, Corporal (overall length about # feet with a diameter of # inches) but using the same fuels. first test firing on November #, #, but the first flight was not an unqualified success. The rocket yawed and the fuel flow had to be stopped by radio command. For this reason it reached only an altitude of # feet. The second flight, made on March #, #,' came off as planned. The six-foot solid-fuel booster accelerated the rocket to about # feet per second and Aerobee takeoff at the moment of booster burnout. (Courtesy Cooper Development Corp.) then dropped off. At that instant the liquid-fuel motor took over and lifted the rocket (in # seconds of burning time) to an altitude of # feet. The velocity after the fuel was used up was # feet per second, and this resulted in a coasting flight to a peak altitude of # feet. The third Aerobee, fired on April #, #, reached about the same altitude, while the fourth, fired on July #, #, climbed to slightly Over # miles. A true sounding rocket had been created, with a vertical range of about # miles if the payload was # pounds. Heavier payloads could be carried if necessary, though of course this depressed the peak altitude. Naturally a payload weighing less than # pounds increased the peak altitude. While the Aerobee did the atmosphere-sounding jobs that had to be done, a number of other developments began. One was simply an improved Aerobee. Its manufacturer, Aerojet, told the Air Force and the Navy that a better rocket was possible if more magnesium alloy and a new type of stainless steel were used in the construction. Both Air Force and Navy were interested, and the new version was designed and built. It was called the Aerobee-Hi. The diameter was the same as that of the Aerobee, but the rocket was longer, the Air Force version about #I feet, the Navy version about # Vz feet. The altitude at which the liquid-fuel motor cut off was pushed nearly # feet higher than that of the Aerobee, and the peak altitude, with a #-pound payload, was calculated to be # miles. Four years elapsed from the first proposal for the Aerobee-Hi to the first firing at White Sands on May #, #. The first firing was disappointing, because only the booster ignited; the rocket fell back from an altitude of # feet and exploded on impact. The second and third firings also fell short of the goal, but on June #, #, an Aerobee-Hi carried a #-pound payload to # miles. By the end of May, #, a total of # Aerobees had been fired, # Aerobee-His and one experimental model called Astrobee. They had been the workhorses of upper-atmosphere research for about a decade. But there had been other developments too. T O explain one of the problems which faced designers of sounding rockets we have to discuss the problem of air resistance to some extent. Above an altitude of # feet air resistance becomes fairly negligible. Once a rocket has passed this critical altitude it can move as fast, and accelerate as sharply, as desired. But those first # feet are not easy. An old rule of thumb has it that air resistance increases with about the square of the velocity. If you move twice as fast, you find four times as much air resistance; if you move three times as fast, you have nine times the air resistance to contend with. Hence a rocket which becomes very fast very soon will spend a great deal of its energy just fighting air resistance. Well, this being the case, why don't we accelerate very gently to avoid excessive air resistance? But if we did this we would be wasting an awful lot of fuel. Remember, please, that a rocket will use up fuel not accelerating or climbing at all, but just hovering at a given altitude. The problem is to find an acceleration which does not waste fuel by being too gentle, but which also does not waste fuel by being too violent and thus creating excessive air resistance. For the large liquid-fuel rockets with long burning times this problem could be solved. Being very heavy at the outset, they climb slowly at first, increasing not only their velocity but also their acceleration as they reach areas of successively lesser atmospheric densities. For smaller rockets Professor Hermann Oberth had suggested Production line of Aerobee rockets at Azusa, Calif. a way out as early as #. He proposed to nestle the rocket in a launching ring. This was to be connected by long ropes to two small dirigibles which first climb as high as they can, then pull apart from each other to provide a space between them for the rocket to ascend. By that maneuver at least the very densest layers of the atmosphere -- say the first four miles -- could be avoided. Oberth's idea, in a modified form, was carried out by Dr. James A. Van Allen in #I and #. Since this was a combination of a rocket with a balloon the device was called a Rockoon. The balloon was a plastic balloon, the rocket the then new solid-fuel Deacon rocket. By present-day standards the Deacon is a small rocket, but it was astonishing how high it could go by just being spared the trouble of penetrating the densest layers of the atmosphere. # # r r ? u s --  #  -- # . i i l # # t # tvJ i -- #-I A Deacon fired from the ground reached about an altitude of # feet. But the same rocket lifted to # feet by means of a balloon and ignited at that altitude would go to # miles. Of course nothing is completely without drawbacks. The rockoon method cannot be used on windy days. Laying out a large plastic balloon for inflation is a delicate and difficult job, and if the wind velocity is above a certain mark it simply cannot be done. However, if a rockoon can be launched, no other method of getting instruments into the upper atmosphere can compete in inexpensiveness. Dr. Van Allen has pointed out that a payload of eight pounds can be flown to a peak altitude of # miles for a total cost of # -- which includes the price of the rocket, the balloon and the helium needed to inflate it. A payload of # pounds can be flown to # miles for #, and if obsolete military rockets can be used one can transport eight pounds to # miles for #. Small wonder that this method was used extensively during the International Geophysical Year; the United States alone made # rockoon flights. In the rockoon technique the rocket is suspended in such a way that the balloon is missed by the ascending rocket. This does not constitute a saving, for the balloon is lost just the same. Another method would be to have the rocket suspended vertically and to shoot through the balloon. (The rocket can tear through the thin plastic without an appreciable loss in velocity.) This has been done only once, during Project Farside in #. Project Farside was supposed to reach an altitude of # miles, but it was one of those projects where all kinds of unforeseen accidents happen; the best shot produced by Project Farside, out of six attempts, probably went to # miles. It is necessary to say "probably" because nobody can be certain; the transmitter failed at # miles while the rocket was still rising. Perhaps there would have been more, except for sputnik and the changes in policy that followed. balloon was one method of circumventing high air resistance in the lower atmosphere, delayed ignition of the upper stages proved to be another workable method. Solid-fuel rockets, which had been steadily improved since about # and had also steadily grown larger, do have higher accelerations than large liquid-fuel rockets. While nothing much can be done about this for each single rocket, excessive air resistance can be avoided by letting some time pass between the burnout of the first stage and the ignition of the second stage. The first sounding rockets to utilize ignition delay for reaching high altitudes were two rockets Nike). The characteristics of the Nike booster are listed in the table. The Deacon rocket was # inches long (without nose cone), and had a diameter of # inches and a gross weight at launching of # pounds. The burning time was only # seconds, the thrust around # pounds. alike, except that one carried # pounds of payload and the other one, the second, shot a payload of # pounds. The difference was due to a sphere which was ejected in flight. The purpose of the sphere ejection was that the falling of a sphere of known diameter and weight would give a clue to the density of the air through which it fell. Round No. I was fired on April #, #, Round No. # on June #, #, both from Wallops Island. Burning time of the Nike booster is # seconds. Then the two stages separated, both climbing. The ignition of the Deacon rocket was supposed to be delayed for # seconds, but the actual delay was # seconds in the first shot and # seconds in the second shot. The results of the two shots are summarized in the diagram. fired, then a new combination, using the same method, was introduced. This was the NikeCajun, with a Cajun rocket as the upper stage. The Cajun is slightly larger and somewhat more powerful. The first NikeCajun (fired July #, #) reached # feet. The shot labeled N-C #, fired November #, #, reached # feet. Several others went to around # feet. It was proved possible that high altitudes -- satellite altitudes, as we would say now -- could be reached by combinations of relatively inexpensive rockets, provided the payload did not weigh too much. Thus began the era of the solid-fuel sounding rockets. Not all of them were combinations of rockets. Some were single-stage devices. Two of these (Atmosphere Sounding Projectile) developed by Cooper Development Corporation in Monrodeveloped by Atlantic Research Corporation in Alexandria, Virletters of the words of a longer name -- but two different explanations are being offered. One is All-purpose Rocket for the Collection of Atmospheric Soundings; the other is Atlantic ReWeight Name Length (in.) Diameter (in.) Burning Time (sec.) (without payload) (lbs.) Thrust (sea level) (lbs.) Manufacturer Algol # # Aerojet-General Altair # Hercules Antares # # same Nike booster # # # same Castor # # Thiokol Recruit # # # same Cajun #. # # # same Lance #.I ca # # # Grand Central Meteor # # same Asp # ca # # Cooper search Corporation All-purpose Sounder. Without deciding which interpretation is correct I'll proceed to a description of the rocket. It is a very slender rocket, only # inches in diameter but with an overall length of # inches, if equipped with the standard #inch instrumentation nose. If the payload weighs # pounds, the takeoff weight is # pounds. In most solid-fuel rockets the propelling charge (it is called a "grain" even if weighs # pounds) has the shape of a cylinder, with a center hole which is often star-shaped. Ignition takes place in that center hole so that the grain burns from the inside out, lasting for only a few seconds but delivering a great deal of thrust. The "grain" of the its rear end forward; this kind has been called a "cigarette burner" since it burns like a cigarette. Of course, this method prolongs burns for # seconds with a thrust of # pounds. since # for routine meteorological work, by Air Force units as well as by airlines like Pan American. It has also been used for high-altitude research and for support operations in long-range ballistic-missile tests. By the end of November, #, had been fired. After the propellant grain has burned, a so-called "delay column" is ignited. This burns quietly for about # seconds, during which time the rocket coasts to its peak altitude, which lies between # and # feet, depending on the payload carried. Then, about # seconds after takeoff, the delay column ignites the separation charge. Payload is separated from the body of the rocket. The payload returns by parachute to be picked up while the rocket body simply falls to the ground. During the winter of #-# our research station at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica (of course they had summer then) used boosted research. The rocket is the same, but it has a short solid-fuel booster which increases the peak altitude to # feet. The other single-stage solidis not only an example of a successful development, but also one of Twentieth Century speed. The Navy's Bureau of Ships wanted such a rocket and sent the contract to Cooper Development Corporation on July #, #. "The rocket," a company spokesman reported later, "was designed, fabricated, modified, static-fired and flight-tested in less than six months after receipt of the contract. The first prototype rocket was launched successfully at the Naval Air Missile Test Center, Point Mugu, Calif., on December #, #." table) and is of the short duration with high thrust type. There are three versions which differ from each other as follows: Thrust, in pounds # # # Burning time, sec. # # # Propellant weight, pounds # # # Empty weight of case, pounds # # # When launched vertically the a #-pound payload, and # feet with a #-pound payload. Launched at an elevation of # feet (White Sands), the figures are # feet and # feet, respectively. But the figures are really impressive if the launch takes place # feet up, say from a Skyhook balloon. Then the #-pound payload will be carried to # feet and the #-pound payload to # feet. It can be .# is a fine upper stage for a heavier booster. And that brings me back to the combinations which caused the letter that caused this column, the rockets with names like Javelin, Journeyman and so forth. The makeup of the Javelin has already been explained. Others of the same kind are: Argo E-#, Jason: #st stage, Honest John; #nd stage, Nike booster; #rd stage, another Nike booster; #th stage, a Recruit rocket; #th stage, a Thiokol T-# rocket. Argo D-#, Journeyman: #st, Thiokol Sergeant rocket with two Recruit rockets burning simultaneously; #nd, Grand Central Lance rocket; #rd, another Lance; #th Altair. Trailblazer: #st, Honest John; #nd, Nike booster; #rd, Lance; #th, Thiokol T-#; #th, Thiokol T-#. Strongarm: #st, Honest John; #nd, Nike booster; #rd, another Nike booster; #th, a Yardbird rocket; #, scaled-down Sergeant rocket. It should be mentioned that in some cases the stages do not all fire on the upward leg of the trajectory. Often the arrangement is that the top two stages do not fire until the rocket begins to reenter the atmosphere. The purpose is, of course, to test re-entry conditions at speeds which correspond to the re-entry of a missile after a # mile journey through space. Finally, we have among these where the first stage is an Algol, the second a Castor, the third an Antares and the fourth an Altair. As befits this collection of abducted star names, the Scout has satellite capability. Several satellites now orbiting the earth were put into orbit by Scout rockets. And the Scout is also the only one which could be a geoprobe. Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory -- but for whom? I TN the dream I was swimming  in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake -- and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me. I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious. I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch -- the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldomused lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst... There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl .# G AL'.XY to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again... but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm -- well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining. As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool -- if I survived. I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work. I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition -- with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull -- I shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazhad I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here -- and it was headquarters. I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the "acknowledge" came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look. "Granthan!" he burst out. "Where are the others? What happened out there?" I turned him down to a mutter. "Hold on," I said. "I'll tell you. Recorders going?" I didn't wait for an answer -- not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on: "Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh -- I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me." I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off -- and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking. " -- your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?" "How the hell do I know?" I yelled -- or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning on: "... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of longrange telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack -- and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there. "This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of -- what's that term you use? -- hyper-cortical invasion. Y ou know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line. "I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk." "What do I do now?" I stormed. "Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!" Presently Kayle replied. "Yes," he said. "You'll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to... ah... restudy the situation." He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend -- right up until the warheads struck -- that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death. II think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders. I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psyaT. chodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was havwere mine, all mine... But how could I be sure of that? Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering -- not at a conscious level. But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind -- and I had been prepared for just such an attack. Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious -- and see again what had happened. I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence... Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirrorbright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper... T HE immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion. And found it. As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations. I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt. "It is a contact, Effulgent One!" "Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold... "It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough!" A part of my mind watched as the memory unrelled. I listened to the voices -- yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli -- then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me -- and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought -- and the world-ending impact as I fell. At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudopersonality lashed out again -- fighting the invader. "Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!" "Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force!" Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering -- at a conscious level. Watching the Gool mind, I learned. The insinuating probe -- a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized -- was no more than a pattern in emptiness... But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me. Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves. Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void -- and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape. There was a soundless shriek. "Effulgence! It reached out -- touched me!" grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia -- a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well. I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool. mind... I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from mense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position. I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals -- riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster -- those who remained of a once-great race -- at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy -- and beyond. But not if I could help it. The Gool had evolved a plan -- but they'd had a stroke of bad luck. In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage. Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mindfields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal. A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind. I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine. I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind. From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind. Matter across space. #'V#'OU'VE got to listen to me, Kayle," I shouted. "I know you think I'm a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil -- and a few other things... I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now. Kayle came back -- and his answer boiled down to "no." I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex. I might have saved my breath. "I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan," he snapped. "It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I'm sorry." I leaned back and chewed the inside pf my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand. I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radar-negative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring. And I had a few ideas. Ill alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was tact. "Z four-oh-two, I am reading preparatory to picking up approach orbit..." The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try. I closed my eyes, reached out -- as the Gool mind had reached out to me -- and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched keys, spoke into his microphone: "As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and letdown." I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear approaching atmosphere. "Z four-oh-two," the speaker crackled. "This is planetary control. I am picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down." There was a long pause. Then: "Z four-oh-two, countermand clearance countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!" It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it dumb, and hope for a little luck. "Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that, fellows. I'm a little banged up -- I guess I switched frequencies on you. What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?" "Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!" "Hey, you birds are mixed up," I protested. "I'm cleared all the It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out -- A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar screens blanked off... For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up, over, buffeting me against the restraining harness. I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on the water. I would have to risk calling Kayle now -- but by voluntarily giving my position away, I should convince him I was still on our side -- and I was badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key. "This is z four-oh-two," I said. "I have an urgent report for Colonel Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence." Kayle's face appeared. "Don't fight it, Granthan," he croaked. "You penetrated the planetary defenses -- God knows how. I -- " "Later," I snapped. "How about calling off your dogs now? And send somebody out here to pick me up, before I add seasickness to my other complaints." "We have you pinpointed," Kayle cut in. "It's no use fighting it, Granthan." T felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. "You've got to listen, Kayle," I shouted. "I suppose you've got missiles on the way already. Call them back! I have information that can win the war -- " "I'm sorry, Granthan," Kayle said. "It's too late -- even if I could take the chance you were right." A different face appeared on the screen. "Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and in the name of the President -- who has been apprised of this tragic situation -- it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor -- posthumously -- for your heroic effort. Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will, to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you." The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture. "Stow that, you pompous idiot!" I barked. "I'm no spy!" Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general. "Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand..." I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes. The missiles would be from Canaveral. I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out... I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked through the cluster of minds. " -- missile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot." I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers. He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam his hand against the destruct button. Men fell on him, dragged him back. " -- fool, why did you blow it?" I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel, detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew. I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now. I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next attacker. IV TT was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself. A few more minutes and you can lie down... rest... The shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside for a grip with my good hand. Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation. I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep -- I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between the cars. I caught the clear thought: "God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right -- " I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled steer. It was easy -- if I could only stay awake. I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide down into darkness. PT'HE car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation at the treatment it had received -- walking brace and all -- and the burned arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a badly embalmed mummy -- except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast. I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would have finished me -- and the hapless fisherman -- right then. We rode out a couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the air. At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car -- with driver. He dropped me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me. Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of the farce. I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages. I needed new clothes -- or at least different ones -- and something to cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had recognized me at a glance. I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly worried -- at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself. The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes and let my awareness stretch out. " -- lousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room... up in the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey..." I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign. I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped counter, a coarseskinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged. My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxedpaper-wrapped sandwiches under a glass cover. "I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water." "Better git out there and look after yer train," the girl said carelessly. "When'd you git so allfired hungry all of a sudden?" "Put it in a bag. Quick." "Look who's getting bossy -- " My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. "You git back around that counter!" She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear. "That'll be one eighty-five. Cash." My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it up and started out. "Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?" The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard him say: "Friend o' mine in there -- just passin through." I was discovering that it wasn't necessary to hold tight control over every move of a subject. Once given the impulse to act, he would rationalize his behavior, fill in the details -- and never know that the original idea hadn't been his own. I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked "U. S. Naval Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon". With any luck I'd reach New Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could wait. TT was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles in me. I had my supplies -- a few candy bars and some cigarettes -- stuffed in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right leg and the sling binding my arm. I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road, started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes. Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with black hair. "Want a lift?" he called. I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them. An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it. Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin tailor -- maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret. The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a fisherman -- I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house derelict. I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with a wart. "How much to the Delta National Laboratories?" He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick. "What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there." "I'm a tourist," I said. "They told me before I left home not to miss it." He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without looking. "How far is it?" I asked him. "It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter." "Pretty big place, I guess." He didn't answer. We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a ninefoot cyclone fence with a locked gate. "A buck ten," my driver said. I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low buildings. "What's this?" "This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buckten, mister." I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew. He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me. "You want I should drive in, sir?" "I'll get out here." He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good elbow. "I'll get your change, sir," he said, reaching for his hip. "Keep it." "Maybe I oughta stick around. You know." "I'll be all right." "I hope so," "he said. "A man like you -- you and me -- " he winked. "After all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing." "True," I said. "Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the sunrise and forget you ever saw me." and left. I turned and sized up the Delta Labs. There was nothing fancy about the place; it consisted of low brick and steel buildings, mud, a fence and a guard who was looking at me. I sauntered over. "I'm from Iowa City," I said. "Now, the rest of the group didn't come -- said they'd rather rest one day. But I like to see it all. After all, I paid -- " "Just a minute," the guard said, holding up a palm. "You must be lost, fella. This here ain't no tourist attraction. You can't come in here." "This is the cameo works?" I said anxiously. He shook his head. "Too bad you let your cab go. It's an hour yet till the bus comes." A dun-painted staff car came into view, slowed and swung wide to turn in. I fingered the driver's mind. The car swerved, braked to a halt. A portly man in the back seat leaned forward, frowning. I touched him. He relaxed. The driver leaned across and opened the door. I went around and got in. The guard was watching, open-mouthed. I gave him a two-finger salute, and the car pulled through the gate. "Stop in front of the electronics section," I said. The car pulled up. I got out, went up the steps and pushed through the double glass doors. The car sat for a moment, then moved slowly off. The passenger would be wondering why the driver had stopped -- but the driver wouldn't remember. I was inside the building now; that was a start. I didn't like robbery in broad daylight, but it was a lot easier this way. I wasn't equal to climbing any walls or breaking down any locked doors -- not until I'd had a transfusion, a skin graft and about three months' vacation on a warm beach somewhere. A man in a white smock emerged from a door. He started past me, spun -- "I'm here about the garbage," I said. "Damn fools will put the cans in with the edible. Are you the one called?" "How's that?" "I ain't got all the morning!" I shrilled. "You scientist fellers are all alike. Which way is the watchamacallit -- equipment lab?" "Right along there." He pointed. I didn't bother to thank him. It wouldn't have been in character. A thin man with a brush mustache eyed me sharply as I pushed through the door. I looked at him, nodding absently. "Carry on with your work," I said. "The audit will be carried out in such a way as to disturb you as little as possible. Just show me your voucher file, if you please." He sighed and waved toward a filing cabinet. I went to it and pulled a drawer open, glancing about the room. Full shelves were visible through an inner door. Twenty minutes later I left the building, carrying a sheet metal carton containing the electronic components I needed to build a matter transmitter -- except for the parts I'd have to fabricate myself from raw materials. The load was heavy -- too heavy for me to carry very far. I parked it at the door and waited until a pick-up truck came along. It pulled over. The driver climbed out and came up the walk to me. "Are you -- uh... ?" He scratched his head. "Right." I waved at my loot. "Put it in the back." He obliged. Together we rolled toward the gate. The guard held up his hand, came forward to check the truck. He looked surprised when he saw me. "Just who are you, fella?" he said. I didn't like tampering with people any more than I had to. It was a lot like stealing from a blind man: easy, But nothing taT' feel proud of. I gave him a light touch -- just the suggestion that what I would say would be full of deep meaning. "You know -- the regular Wednesday shipment," I said darkly. "Keep it quiet. We're all relying on you." "Sure thing," he said, stepping back. We gunned through the g#te. I glanced back to see him looking after the truck, thinking about the Wednesday shipment on a Friday. He decided it was logical, nodded his head and forgot the whole thing. V I 'D been riding high for a couple of hours, enjoying the success of the tricks I'd stolen from the Gool. Now I suddenly felt like something the student morticians had been practicing on. I guided my driver through a second-rate residential section, looking for an M.D. shingle on a front lawn. The one I found didn't inspire much confidence -- you could hardly see it for the weeds -- but I didn't want to make a big splash. I had to have an assist from my driver to make it to the front door. He got me inside, parked my box beside me and went off to finish his rounds, under the impression that it had been a dull morning. The doctor was a seedy, seventyish G.P. with a gross tremor of the hands that a good belt of Scotch would have helped. He looked at me as though I'd interrupted something that was either more fun or paid better than anything I was likely to come up with. "I need my dressing changed, Doc," I said. "And maybe a shot to keep me going." "I'm not a dope peddler," he snapped. "You've got the wrong place." "Just a little medication -- whatever's usual. It's a burn. "Who told you to come here?" I looked at him meaningfully. "The word gets around." He glared at me, gnashed his plates, then gestured toward a black-varnished door. "Go right in there." He gaped at my arm when the bandages were off. I took a quick glance and wished I hadn't. "How did you do this?" "Smoking in bed," I said. "Have you got... something that... He caught me before I hit the floor, got me into a chair. Then he had that Scotch he'd been wanting, gave me a shot as an afterthought, and looked at me narrowly. "I suppose you fell out of that same bed and broke your leg," he said. "Right. Hell of a dangerous bed." "I'll be right back." He turned to the door. "Don't go away. I'll just... get some gauze." "Better stay here, Doc. There's plenty of gauze right on that table." "See here -- " "Skip it, doc. I know all about you." "What?" "I said all about you." He set to work then; a guilty conscience is a tough argument to answer. He plastered my arm with something and rewrapped it, then looked the leg over and made a couple of adjustments to the brace. He clucked over the stitches in my scalp, dabbed something on them that hurt like hell, then shoved an old-fashioned stickpin needle into my good arm. "That's all I can do for you," he said. He handed me a bottle of pills. "Here are some tablets to take in an emergency. Now get out." "Call me a cab, Doc." T listened while he called, then lit a cigarette and watched through the curtains. The doc stood by, worrying his upper plate and eyeing me. So far I hadn't had to tinker with his mind, but it would be a good idea to check. I felt my way delicately. -- oh God, why did I... long time ago... Mary ever knew... go to Arizona, start again, too old... I saw the nest of fears that gnawed at him, the frustration and the faint flicker of hope but not quite dead. I touched his mind, wiped away scars... "Here's yourcar," he said. He opened the door, looking at me. I started past him. "Are you sure you're all right?" he said. "Sure, Pop. And don't worry. Everything's going to be okay." The driver put my boxes on the back seat. I got in beside him and told him to take me to a men's clothing store. He waited while I changed my hand-medowns for an off-the-hook suit, new shirt and underwear and a replacement beret. It was the only kind of hat that didn't hurt. My issue shoes were still good, but I traded them in on a new pair, added a light raincoat, and threw in a sturdy suitcase for good measure. The clerk said something about money and I dropped an idea into His mind, paused long enough to add a memory of a fabulous night with a redhead. He hardly noticed me leaving. I tried not to feel like a shoplifter. After all, it's not every day a man gets a chance to swap drygoods for dreams. In the cab, I transferred my belongings to the new suitcase, then told the driver to pull up at an anonymous-looking hotel. A four-star admiral with frayed cuffs helped me inside with my luggage. The hackie headed for the bay to get rid of the box under the impression I was a heavy tipper. I had a meal in my room, a hot bath, and treated myself to a three hour nap. I woke up feeling as though those student embalmers might graduate after all. I thumbed through the phone book and dialed a number. "I want a Cadillac or Lincoln," I said. "A new one -- not the one you rent for funerals -- and a driver who won't mind missing a couple nights' sleep. And put a bed pillow and a blanket in the car." I went down to the coffee room then for a light meal. I had just finished a cigarette when the car arrived -- a dark blue heavyweight with a high polish  and a low silhouette. "We're going to Denver," I told the driver. "We'll make one stop tomorrow -- I have a little shopping to do. I figure about twenty hours. Take a break every hundred miles, and hold it under seventy." He nodded. I got in the back and sank down in the smell of expensive upholstery. "I'll cross town and pick up U.S. # at -- " "I leave the details to you," I said. He pulled out into the traffic and I got the pillow settled under me and closed my eyes. I'd need all the rest I could get on this trip. I'd heard that compared with the Denver Records Center, Fort Knox was a cinch. I'd find out for sure when I got there. T HE plan I had in mind wasn't the best I could have concocted under more leisurely circumstances. But with every cop in the country under orders to shoot me on sight, I had to move fast. My scheme had the virtue of unlikeliness. Once I was safe in the Central Vault -- supposed to be the only H-bomb-proof structure ever built -- I'd put through a phone call to the outside, telling them to watch a certain spot; say the big desk in the President's office. Then I'd assemble my matter transmitter and drop some little item right in front of the assembled big shots. They'd have to admit I had something. And this time they'd have to start considering the possibility that I wasn't working for the enemy. It had been a smooth trip, and I'd caught up on my sleep. Now it was five A.M. and we were into the foothills, half an hour out of Denver. I ran over my lines, planning the trickiest part of the job ahead -- the initial approach. I'd listened to a couple of news promising an arrest within hours. I learned that I was lying up, or maybe dead, in the vicinity of Key West, and that the situation was under control. That was fine with me. Nobody would expect me to pop up in Denver, still operating under my own power -- and wearing a new suit at that. The Records Center was north of the city, dug into mountainside. I steered my chauffeur around the downtown section, out a street lined with dark hamburger joints and unlit gas stations to where a side road branched off. We pulled up. From here on, things might get dangerous -- if I was wrong about how easy it was all going to be. I brushed across the driver's mind. He set the brake and got out. "Don't know how I came to run out of gas, Mr. Brown," he said apologetically. "We just passed a station but it was closed. I guess I'll just have to hike back into town. I sure am sorry; I never did that before." I told him it was okay, watched as he strode off into the predawn gloom, then got into the front seat and started up. The gate of the Reservation surrounding the Record Center was only a mile away now. I drove slowly, feeling ahead for opposition. There didn't seem to be any. Things were quiet as a poker player with a pat hand. My timing was good. T stopped in front of the gate, under a floodlight and the watchful eye of an M.P. with a shiny black tommygun held at the ready. He didn't seem surprised to see me. I rolled down the window as he came over to the car. "I have an appointment inside, Corporal," I said. I touched his mind. "The password is 'hotpoint'." He nodded, stepped back, and motioned me in. I hesitated. This was almost too easy. I reached out again... "... middle of the night... password... nice car... I wish..." I pulled through the gate and headed for the big parking lot, picking a spot in front of a ramp that led down to a tall steel door. There was no one in sight. I got out, dragging my suitcase. It was heavier now, with the wire and magnets I'd added. I crossed the drive, went up to the doors. The silence was eerie. I swept the area, searching for minds, found nothing. The shielding, I decided, blanked out everything. There was a personnel door set in the big panel, with a massive combination lock. I leaned my head against the door and felt for the mechanism, turning the dial right, left, right... The lock opened. I stepped inside, alert. Silence, darkness. I reached out, sensed walls, slabs of steel, concrete, intricate mechanisms, tunnels deep in the ground... But no personnel. That was surprising -- but I wouldn't waste time questioning my good luck. I followed a corridor, opened another door, massive as a vault, passed more halls, more doors. My footsteps made muffled echoes. I passed a final door and came into the heart of the Records Center. There were lights in the chamber around the grim, featureless periphery of the Central Vault. I set the valise on the floor, sat on it and lit a cigarette. So far, so good. The Records Center, I saw, had been overrated. Even without my special knowledge, a clever locksmith could have come this far -- or almost. But the Big Vault was another matter. The great integrating lock that secured it would yield only to a complex command from the computer set in the wall opposite the vault door. I smoked my cigarette and, with eyes closed, studied the vault. I finished the cigarette, stepped on it, went to the console, began pressing keys, tapping out the necessary formulations. Half an hour later I finished. There was a whine from a servo motor; a crimson light flashed. I turned and saw the valve cycle open, showing a bright-lit tunnel within. I dragged my bag inside, threw the lever that closed the entry behind me. A green light went on. I walked along the narrow passage, lined with gray metal shelves stacked with gray steel tape drums, descended steps, came into a larger chamber fitted out with bunks, a tiny galley, toilet facilities, shelves stocked with food. There was a radio, a telephone and a second telephone, bright red. That would be the hot-line to Washington. This was the sanctum sanctorum, where the last survivors could wait out the final holocaust indefinitely... I opened the door of a steel cabinet. Radiation suits, tools, instruments. Another held bedding. I found a tape-player, tapes -- even a shelf of books. I found a first aid kit and gratefully gave myself a hypo-spray jolt of neurite. My pains receded. I went on to the next room; there were wash tubs, a garbage disposal unit, a drier. There was everything here I needed to keep me alive and even comfortable until I could convince someone up above that I shouldn t be shot on sight. A heavy door barred the way to the room beyond. I turned a wheel, swung the door back, saw more walls lined with filing cabinets, a blank facade of gray steel; and in the center of the room, alone on a squat table a yellow plastic case that any Sunday Supplement reader would have recognized. It was a Master Tape, the Utter Top Secret Programming document that would direct the terrestrial defense in case of a Gool invasion. It was almost shocking to see it lying there -- unprotected except for the flimsy case. The information it contained in micromicro dot form could put my world in the palm of the enemy s hand. The room with the tool kit would be the best place to work, I decided. I brought the suitcase containing the electronic gear back from the outer door where I'd left it, opened it and arranged its contents on the table. According to the Gool these simple components were all I needed. The trick was in knowing how to put them together. There was work ahead of me now. There were the coils to wind, the intricate antenna arrays to lay out; but before I started, I'd take time to call Kayle -- or whoever I could get at the other end of the hot-line. They'd be a little startled when I turned up at the heart of the defenses they . were trying to shield. I picked up the receiver and a voice spoke: "Well, Granthan. So you finally made it." VI ts tions," Kayle was saying. "Open the vault door. Come out -- stripped -- and go to the center of the parking lot. Stand there with your hands over your head. A single helicopter manned by a volunteer will approach and drop a gas canister. It won't be lethal, I promise you that. Once you're unconscious, I'll personally see to it that you're transported to the Institute in safety. Every effort will then be made to overcome the Gool conditioning. If we're successful, you'll be awakened. If not..." He let the sentence hang. It didn't need to be finished. I understood what he meant. I was listening. I was still not too worried. Here I was safe against anything until the food ran out -- and that wouldn't be for months. "You're bluffing, Kayle," I said. "You're trying to put the best face on something that you can't control. If you'd -- " "You were careless at Delta Labs, Granthan. There were too many people with odd blanks in their memories and too many unusual occurrences, all on the same day. You tipped your hand. Once we knew what we were up against, it was simply a matter of following you at an adequate distance. We have certain shielding materials, as you know. We tried them all. There's a new one that's quite effective. "But as I was saying, we've kept you under constant surveillance. When we saw which way you were heading, we just stayed out of sight and let you trap yourself." "You're lying. Why would you want me here?" "That's very simple," Kayle said harshly. "It's the finest trap ever built by man -- and you're safely in it." "Safely is right. I have everything I need here. And that brings me to my reason for being here -- in case you're curious. I'm going to build a matter transmitter. And to prove my good faith, I'll transmit the Master Tape to you. I'll show you that I could have stolen the damned thing if I'd wanted to." "Indeed? Tell me, Granthan, do you really think we'd be fools enough to leave the Master Tape behind when we evacuated the area?" "I don't know about that -- but it's here." "Sorry," Kayle said. "You're deluding yourself." His voice was suddenly softer, some of the triumph gone from it. "Don't bother struggling, Granthan. The finest brains in the country have combined to place you where you are. You haven't a chance, except to do as I say. Make it easy on yourself. I have no wish to extend your ordeal." "You can't touch me, Kayle. This vault is proof against a hellbomb, and it's stocked for a seige..." "That's right," Kayle said. His voice sounded tired. "It's proof against a hell-bomb. But what if the hell-bomb's in the vault with you?" working to defuse a blockbuster, who's suddenly heard a loud click! from the detonator. I dropped the phone, stared around the room. I saw nothing that could be a bomb. I ran to the next room, the one beyond. Nothing. I went back to the phone, grabbed it up. "You ought to know better than to bluff now, Kayle!" I yelled. "I wouldn't leave this spot now for half a dozen hypothetical hell-bombs!" "In the center room," Kayle said. "Lift the cover over the floor drain. You'll find it there. You know what they look like. Don't tamper with its mechanism; it's internally trapped. You'll have to take my word for it we didn't bother installing a dummy." I dropped the phone, hurried to the spot Kayle had described. The bomb casing was there -- a dull gray ovoid, with a lifting eye set in the top. It didn't look dangerous. It just lay quietly, waiting... Back at the telephone, I had trouble finding my voice. "How long?" I croaked. "It was triggered when you entered the vault," Kayle said. "There's a time mechanism. It's irreversible; you can't force anyone to cancel it. And it's no use your hiding in the outer passages. "The whole center will be destroyed in the blast. Even it can't stand against a bomb buried in its heart. But we'll gladly sacrifice the center to eliminate you." "How long!" "I suggest you come out quickly, so that a crew can enter the vault to disarm the bomb." "How long!" "When you're ready to emerge, call me." The line went dead. I put the phone back in its cradle carefully, like a rare and valuable egg. I tried to think. I'd been charging full speed ahead ever since I had decided on my scheme of action while I was still riding the surf off the Florida coast, and I'd stuck to it. Now it had hatched in my face -- and the thing that had crawled out wasn't the downy little chick of success. It had teeth and claws and was eyeing me like a basilisk... But I still had unplayed aces -- if there was time. I had meant to use the matter transmitter to stage a dramatic proof that I wasn't the tool of the enemy. The demonstration would be more dramatic than I'd planned. The bomb would fit the machine as easily as the tape. The wheels would be surprised when their firecracker went off -- right on schedule -- in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I set to work, my heart pounding. If I could bring this off -- if I had time -- if the transmitter worked as advertised... The stolen knowledge flowed smoothly, effortlessly. It was as though I had been assembling matter transmitters for years, knew every step by heart. First the moebius windings; yard after yard of heavy copper around a core of carbon; then the power supply, the first and second stage amplimitters . , . How long? In the sump in the next room, the bomb lay quietly ticking. How long... ? r I "HE main assembly was ready now. I laid out cables, tying my apparatus in to the atomic power-source buried under the vault. The demand, for one short instant, would tax even those mighty engines. I fixed hooks at the proper points in the room, wove soft aluminum wire in the correct pattern. I was almost finished now. How long? I made the last connections, cleared away the litter. The matter transmitter stood on the table, complete. At any instant, the bomb would reduce it -- and the secret of its construction -- to incandescent gas -- unless I transmitted the bomb out of range first. I turned toward the laundry room -- and the telephone rang. I hesitated, then crossed the room and snatched it up. "Listen to me," Kayle said grimly. "Give me straight, fast answers. You said the Master Tape was there, in the vault with you. Now tell me: What does it look like?" "What?" "The... ah... dummy tape. What is its appearance?" "It's a roughly square plastic container, bright yellow, about a foot thick. What about it?" Kayle's voice sounded strained. "I've made inquiries. No one here seems to know the exact present location of the Master Tape. Each department says that they were under the impression that another handled the matter. I'm unable to learn who, precisely, removed the Tape from the vault. Now you say there is a yellow plastic container -- " "I know what the Master Tape looks like," I said. "This is either it or a hell of a good copy." "Granthan," Kayle said. There was a note of desperation in his voice now. "There have been some blunders made. I knew you were under the influence of the Gool. It didn't occur to me that I might be too. Why did I make it possible for you to successfully penetrate to the Central Vault? There were a hundred simpler ways in which I could have dealt with the problem. We're in trouble, Granthan, serious trouble. The tape you have there is genuine. We've all played into the enemy's hands." "You're wasting valuable time, Kayle," I snapped. "When does the bomb go up?" "Granthan, there's little time left. Bring the Master Tape and leave the vault -- " "No dice, Kayle. I'm staying until I finish the transmitter, then -- " "Granthan! If there's anything to your mad idea of such a machine, destroy it! Quickly! Don't you see the Gool would only have given you the secret in order to enable you to steal the tape!" I cut him off. In the sudden silence, I heard a distant sound -- or had I sensed a thought? I strained outward... "... volunteered... damn fool . thing on my head is heavy... better work... now... okay... valve, gas...  kills in a split second... then get out... I stabbed out, pushed through the obscuring veil of masonry, sensed a man in the computer room, dressed in gray coveralls, a grotesque shield over his head and shoulders. He reached for a red-painted valve -- I struck at his mind, felt him stagger back, fall. I fumbled in his brain, stimulated the sleep center. He sank deep into unconsciousness. I leaned against the table, weak with the reaction. Kayle had almost tricked me that time. I reached out again, swept the area with desperate urgency. Far away, I sensed the hazy clutter of many minds, out of range. There was nothing more. The poisonous gas had been the only threat -- except the bomb itself. But I had to move fast, before my time ran out, to transmit the bomb to a desert area... I paused, stood frozen in midmove. A desert. What desert? The transmitter operated in accordance with as rigid a set of laws as did the planets swinging in their orbits; strange laws, but laws of nature none the less. No receiver was required. The destination of the mass under trans. mission was determined by the operator, holding in his mind the five-dimensional conceptualization of the target, guiding the action of the machine. And I had no target. I could no more direct the bomb to a desert without a fivefold grasp of its multi-ordinal spatial, temporal, and entropic co-ordinates than I could fire a rifle at a target in the dark. I was like a man with a grenade in his hand, pin pulled -- and locked in a cell. I swept the exocosm again, desperately. And caught a thin, live line. I traced it; it cut through the mountain, dived deep underground, crossed the boundless plain... Never branching, it bored on, turning upward now -- and ending. I rested, gathering strength, then probed, straining... There was a room, men. I recognized Kayle, gray-faced, haggard. A tall man in braided blue stood near him. Others stood silently by, tension on every face. Maps covered the wall behind them. I was looking into the War Room at the Pentagon in Washington. The line I had traced was the telephonic hot-line, the topsecurity link between the Record Center and the command level. It was a heavy cable, well protected and always open. It would free me from the trap. With Gooltutored skill I scanned the room, memorized its co-ordinates. Then I withdrew. Like a swimmer coming up from a long dive, I fought my way back to the level of immediate awareness. I sagged into a chair, blinking at the drab walls, the complexity of the transmitter. I must move fast now, place the bomb in the transmitter's field, direct it at the target. With an effort I got to my feet, went to the sump, lifted the cover. I grasped the lifting eye, strained -- and the bomb came up, out onto the floor. I dragged it to the transmitter... And only then realized what I'd been about to do. My target. The War Room -- the nervecenter of Earth's defenses. And I had been ready to dump the hell bomb there. In my frenzy to be rid of it I would have played into the hands of the Gool. "Kayle! I guess you've got a recorder on the line. I'll give you the details of the transmitter circuits. It's complicated, but fifteen minutes ought to -- " "No time," Kayle cut in. "I'm sorry about everything, Grantham. If you've finished the machine, it's a tragedy for humanity -- if it works. I can only ask you to try -- when the Gool command comes -- not to give them what they want. I'll tell you, now, Grantham. The bomb blows in -- " there was a pause -- "two minutes and twenty-one seconds. Try to hold them off. If you can stand against them for that long at least -- " I slammed the phone down, cold sweat popping out across my face. Two minutes... too late for anything. The men in the War Room would never know how close I had come to beating the Gool -- and them. But I could still save the Master Tape. I wrestled the yellow plastic case that housed the tape onto the table, into the machine. And the world vanished in a blaze of darkness, a clamor of silence. Like a bad dream coming back in daylight, I felt the obscene presence of massed Gool minds, attenuated by distance but terrible in their power, probing, thrusting. I fought back, struggling against paralysis, trying to gather my strength, use what I had learned... The paths closed before me. My mind writhed, twisted, darted here and there -- and met only the impenetrable shield of the Gool defenses. ceptualization drifted into my As from a distance, the monitor personality fraction watched the struggle. Kayle had been right. The Gool had waited -- and now their moment had come. Even my last impulse of defiance -- to place the tape in the machine -- had been at the Gool command. They had looked into my mind. They understand psychology as no human analyst ever could; and they had led me in the most effective way possible, by letting me believe I was the master. They had made use of my human ingenuity to carry out their wishes -- and Kayle had made it easy for them by evacuating a twenty-mile radius around me, leaving the field clear for the Gool. rang like a bell in my mind: Even as I fought against the impulse to comply, I felt my arm twitch toward the machine. voice thundered. I struggled, willed my arm to stay at my side. Only a minute longer, I thought. Only a minute more, and the bomb would save me... PT'HE Gool raged -- and I grasped for an elusive thought and held it. The bomb, only a few feet away. The waiting machine. And the Gool had given me the co-ordinates of their cavern... With infinite sluggishness, I moved. I found the bomb, fumbled for a grip. My breath choked off in my throat; a hideous pain coiled outward from my chest. But it was unimportant. Only the bomb mattered. I tottered, groping. There was the table; the transmitter... I lifted the bomb, felt the halfhealed skin of my burned arm crackle as I strained... I thrust the case containing the Master Tape out of the field of the transmitter, then pushed, half-rolled the bomb into position. I groped for the switch, found it. I tried to draw breath, felt only a surge of agony. Blackness was closing in... The co-ordinates... From the whirling fog of pain and darkness, I brought the target concept of the Gool cavern into view, clarified it, held it... Then I felt the Gool, their suspicions yielding to the panic in the mind of the Prime Overlord, link their power against me. I stood paralyzed, felt my identity dissolving like water pouring from a smashed pot. I tried to remember -- but it was too faint, too far away. Then from somewhere a voice seemed to cut in, the calm voice of an emergency reserve personality fraction. "You are under attack. Activate the reserve plan. Level Five. Use Level Five. Act now. Use Level Five... Through the miasma of Gool pressure, I felt the hairs stiffen on the back of my neck. All around me the Gool voices raged, a swelling symphony of discord. But they were nothing. Level Five... There was no turning back. The compulsions were there, acting even as I drew in a breath to howl my terror -- Level Five. Down past the shapes of dreams, the intense faces of hallucination; Level Three; Level Four and the silent ranked memories... And deeper still -- Into a region of looming gibbering horror, of shadowy moving shapes of evil, of dreaded presences that lurked at the edge of vision... Down amid the clamor of voiceless fears, the mounting hungers, the reaching claws of all that man had feared since the first tailless primate screamed out his terror in a tree-top: the fear of falling, the fear of heights. Down to Level Five. Nightmare level.  groped outward, found the plane of contact -- and hurled the weight of man's ancient fears at the waiting Gool -- and in their black confining caves deep in the rock of a far world, they felt the roaring tide of fear -- fear of the dark, and of living burial. The horrors in man's secret mind confronted the horrors of the Gool Brain Pit. And I felt them break, retreat in blind panic from me -- All but one. The Prime Overlord reeled back with the rest, but his was a mind of terrible power. I sensed for a moment his bloated immense form, the seething gnawing hungers, insatiable, never to be appeased. Then he rallied -- but he was alone now. I felt a knife at my heart. It fluttered -- and stopped. And in that instant, I broke past his control, threw the switch. There was the sharp crack of imploding air. Then I was floating down, ever down, and all sensation was far away. The pain cut off in an instant of profound silence and utter dark. Then sound roared in my ears, and I felt the harsh grate of the floor against my face as I fell, and then I knew nothing more. saying, "that you'll accept the decoration now, Mr. Granthan. It will be thfirst time in history that a civilian has been accorded this honor -- and you deserve it." I was lying in a clean white bed, propped up by big soft pillows, with a couple of good-looking nurses hovering a few feet away. I was in a mood to tolerate even Titus. "Thanks, General," I said. "I suggest you give the medal to the volunteer who came in to gas me. He knew what he was going up against; I didn't." "It's over, now, Granthan,' Kayle said. He attempted to beam, settled for a frosty smile. "You surely understand -- " "Understanding," I said. "That's all we need to turn this planet -- and a lot of other ones -- into the kind of worlds the human mind needs to expand into." "You're tired, Granthan," Kayle said. "You get some rest. In a few weeks you'll be back on the job, as good as new." "That's where the key is," I said. "In our minds; there's so much there, and we haven't even scratched the surface. To the mind nothing is impossible. Matter is an illusion, space and time are just convenient fictions -- " "I'll leave the medal here, Mr. Granthan. When you feel equal to it, we'll make the official presentation. Television... He faded off as I closed my eyes and thought about things that had been clamoring for attention ever since I'd met the Gool, but hadn't had time to explore. My arm... I felt my way along it -- from inside -- tracing the area of damage, watching as the bodily defenses worked away, toiling to renew, replace. It was a slow, mindless process. But if I helped a little... It was easy. The pattern was there. I felt the tissues renew themselves, the skin regenerate. The bone was more difficult. I searched out the necessary minerals, diverted blood; the broken ends knit... The nurse was bending over me, a bowl of soup in her hand. #V#"OU'VE been asleep for a long time, sir," she said, smiling. "How about some nice chicken broth now?" I ate the soup and asked for more. A doctor came and peeled back my bandages, did a doubletake, and rushed away. I looked. The skin was new and pink, like a baby's -- but it was all there. I flexed my right leg; there was no twinge of pain. I listened for a while as the doctors gabbled, clucked, probed and made pronouncements. Then I closed my eyes again. I thought about the matter transmitter. The government was sitting on it, of course. A military secret of the greatest importance, Titus called it. Maybe someday the public would hear about it; in the meantime -- "How about letting me out of here?" I said suddenly. A popeyed doctor with a fringe of gray hair blinked at me, went back to fingering my arm. Kayle hove into view. "I want out," I said. "I'm recovered, right? So now just give me my clothes." "Now, now, just relax, Granthan. You know it's not as simple as that. There are a lot of matters we must go over." "The war's over," I said. "You admitted that. I want out." "Sorry." Kayle shook his head. "That's out of the question." "Doc," I said. "Am I well?" "Yes," he said. "Amazing case. You're as fit as you'll ever be; I've never -- " "I'm afraid you'll have to resign yourself to being here for a while longer, Granthan," Kayle said. "After all, we can't -- " "Can't let the secret of matter transmission run around loose, hey? So until you figure out the angles, I'm a prisoner, right?" "I'd hardly call it that, Granthan. Still... I closed my eyes. The matter transmitter -- a strange device. A field, not distorting space, but accentuating certain characteristics of a matter field in spacetime, subtly shifting relationships... Just as the mind could compare unrelated data, draw from them new concepts, new parallels... The circuits of the matter transmitter... and the patterns of the mind... The exocosm and the endocosm, like the skin and the orange, everywhere in contact... Somewhere there was a beach of white sand, and dunes with graceful sea-oats that leaned in a gentle wind. There was blue water to the far horizon, and a blue sky, and nowhere were there any generals with medals and television cameras, or flinteyed bureaucrats with long schemes... And with this gentle folding... thus... And a pressure here... so... I opened my eyes, raised myself on one elbow -- and saw the sea. The sun was hot on my body, but not too hot, and the sand was white as sugar. Far away, a seagull tilted, circling. A wave rolled in, washed my foot in cool water. I lay on my back, and looked up at white clouds in a blue sky, and smiled -- then laughed aloud. Distantly the seagull's cry echoed my laughter. In the current issue of IF: A gripping complete short novel by Hal Clement, author of Mission of Gravity, Needle, etc. # Star Shelf Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ace Books. wrote the most famous and most enduring story about a hollow earth, he didn't hold a patent on this valuable hunk of real estate. Author Burroughs staked out his claim in this rip-snorting adventure set "At the Earth's Core". The entire adventure is strictly from accident. An aged inventor and his wealthy young backer seek merely to test out the invention, a mechanical mole that passes loose rock from the drill at the nose through a hollow double skin to the stern. Pellucidar, as Burroughs named his interior world, is the inverse image of the exterior in the matter of land and water distribution. Thus the total land area of this world within a world comes to pared to the surface's mere # "We have the strange anomaly of a larger world within a smaller one!" Pellucidar's perpetual noon is lighted by a tiny sun, suspended at the exact center of Earth's sphere. Burroughs polishes off the problem of gravitational attraction by placing the center of gravity midway through the # mile thick crust separating Pellucidar from the surface. The inner world, having cooled later, is much younger than ours, making for a hodge-podge ecology. Burroughs has much fun mixing perils of Pliocene, Pleistocene and Pauline. Mankind, two separate species, is subservient to the dominant race, rhamphorhynchus-like crearace, rhamphorhynchuslike creatures, deaf, but able to communicate, not by telepathy, but "by projecting their thoughts into the fourth dimension, when they become appreciable to the sixth sense of the listener." All are females, having discovered how to reproduce without male assistance. They are highly civilized, philosophical creatures who consider Man a lower order and debate pro and con his ability to reason, meanwhile employing him as slave, and clandestinely as food. Burroughs incorporates a ritual feeding scene that is a spellbinder of pure horror. In his world of eternal noon, duration is strictly relative and Time as we measure it does not exist. Even the dominant race takes no account of it, their literary works employing only the present tense. There are holes as big as Pellucidar itself in his theories, but Burroughs's concepts are intriguing and his combat scenes gripping. Although the reader must wade at least twenty-five pages into the book before he can cease to be annoyed by the author's stilted and florid style, by then he has reached the point of no return. Rice Burroughs. Ace Books. that boil down to, "If you've got hold of a good thing, milk it to death." Burroughs's hollow sphere Earth seemed so good to him that he applied it to the Moon, also. His story begins in # aboard a giant Chicago to Paris airliner that races along a thousand feet above the surface and is motivated by wireless energy from power plants thousands of miles distant. The narrator, ancestor of the actual protagonist, owes his memory of subsequent events to total recollection of several reincarnated existences. This simple literary device eliminates the need for such a crudity as a time machine and obviously opens the way for sequel after sequel. The descendent of the narrator, # years in the future, is the leader of a five man expedition to Mars, made possible by radio exchange of information with the Martians who have isolated the Eighth Barsoomian (Martian) Ray, along with the Eighth Rays of the other planets. This is also a literary rather than a scientific device, like the Cavorite of H. G. Wells's moon explorers, that might be called an enabling device, since without it there's no story and with it there's no explanation. The ship's engines are sabotaged by their inventor, the disgruntled second-in-command and is stranded on, or rather in, the moon. Its crust is riddled by thousands of craters that serve to supply both light and heat to the interior, although the primary source of light is the high radium content of the soil. Julian #th, separated early from his companions, is not reunited with them until after several captures by and escapes from primitive humanoid quadrupeds andor semi-civilized humans. ft Burroughs. Ace Books. Earth's Core," Burroughs chronicles the search of David Innes for his Stone Age mate, Dian. He has returned frdm the surface in the steel mole loaded with books and materials to further his plans to purge Pellucidar of the intelligent reptiles and create a human civilization based on the best of twentieth century technology, with himself as benevolently dictatorial emperor. Most of Burroughs's theories make for hard swallowing. The horizonless inner world diminishes upward into an indefinable dim distance. This I'd like to see, as well as his pendent world, hanging only a mile above the inner surface with its axis parallel to the surface. All its plains and forests, lakes and rivers become visible as it rotates, providing a clock for a world that otherwise has no way of determining time. One suspects that Burroughs planted it there like a big seed that was to germinate eventually in another sequel. But, argue as one might with his scientific theories, once Burroughs establishes his background, his reader has no time to quibble. Rice Burroughs. Ace Books. Maid" actually comprises two novels; "The Moon Men," which is the story of Julian #th in the # nd Century and "The Red Hawk," about Julian #th in the #th Century. The renegade villain of "Moon Maid", Orthis, is killed by Julian #th, but not until he assembles a horde of semi-savages from the Moon who conquer and lay Earth waste. "The Moon Men" is the account of Julian #th's solitary, hopeless struggle against the Kalkar conquerors and the complete collapse of civilization. In "The Red Hawk", the passage of centuries has seen the Kalkars pushed back to the seacoast. The Hawk, Julian #th, mounts the final offensive designed to push them into the sea. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ace Books. neophytic of readers must be aware that this is the fabled Burroughs of yore whose books were translated into some forty languages and sold an equal numtire generation has grown up inexplicably Burroughs-less. The great majority of his books have been out of print for a score of years, the only reminder of his former glory is the release of an occasional laughable Tarzan film. Burroughs antedated van Vogt's vision of a contradictory civilization, half barbaric, half technologically advanced, by some three decades. In the first three novels of the series, John Carter of Virginia settles just about all the major problems besetting wartorn Mars. His son, Carthoris, is the hero of "Thuvia" and the action arises from his supposed aerial abduction of Thuvia. By modern standards, Burroughs's science is pretty rudimentary, viz. the interplanetary ether, Eighth Rays, Hollow planets, etc. Bear in mind, however, that he wrote when many homes still used gas for lighting; sound pictures hadn't been invented, to say nothing of TV; aircraft were slow, clumsy crudities. In fact, Burroughs's airships really were ships of the air, with polished decks, rails, below-deck cabins and a top speed of a lumbering two hundred miles per hour. "Thuvia" is full of abductions, captures, escapes and recaptures in the best Burroughs tradition and it has something else for the devoted Burroughsiphile; the fondly remembered "giant bowmen of Lothar," materialized from Barsoom's dead past by the handful of Lothar's living defenders. Ratings? Let's not try. It's hard to evaluate them in terms of today. I'm afraid that, like so many others, my boyhood was too entangled with the Burroughs books for me to be objective. Frankly, even though I hadn't read any of his books for well over twenty years, these past weeks have been Ol' Nostalgia Month for me. The old boy has the power to send me still! He refused to believe -- until he looked beyond selling author, is a man with a passion for facts. He started out a confirmed skeptic -- were based on coincidence and fraud. But he discovered he was wrong! He met Jeane Dixon, whom Franklin D. Roosevelt invited to the White House to predict how much time he had to finish his work which she did correctly. Then, from Virginia Beach, came first-hand evidence about the fantastic feats of Edgar Cayce. And then came Peter Hurkos, who sensed past, present and future, as he broke two murder cases that had baffled police. Newspaperman Stearn could draw only one inescapable conclusion. The future can be foreseen. There is a "door to the future!" One of the most important revelations of our time proof of psychic power, and shows how we may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough in psychic science. It tells --  how a man's life was saved when his wife foresaw a plane crash;  how Universal Consciousness reveals past and future; The documented facts behind a prize-winning reporter's shattering discovery of the truth about and precognition  how the evidence for precognition supports reincarnation and survival;  how the Odic force reveals itself to psychic sensitives;  how you may discover psychic powers within yourself! Jess Stearn obtained the cooperation of psychics everywhere in America -- men and women who cooperated fully because they knewintuitively -- that his report would itself be an important breakthrough. That's why this is the one book that is convincing non-believers everywhere -- a record by an admitted cynic who learned that the door to the future is being opened wider every day by gifted psychics and mediums. It is definitely a book which you must read and own. Send your coupon today for a free examination copy! To your bookseller, or to: Dept. #-GA-#, Garden City, New York stand that I may return this book without obligation within two weeks and pay nothing. Otherwise, you will bill me for just # plus postage. postage. Same return privilege guaranteed! I sometimes," sighed Lucy Parent, as their Mordaunti spaceship descended on the world that was its midway stop to the Mordaunti capital world of Cayahno. Cayahno was something like six hundred light years in toward the center of the galaxy from Earth. The Mordaunti Ambassador, Arknok, had explained it would be necessary to let down here at Bug'raf to replate the drive chamber. "Think of what?" said Tom Parent. He was pacing up and down by their stateroom viewer. He alternated between casting glances at the glittering cityport toward which they were descending and glancing at the top-secret subspace communication that had C#Xe r Taitliful UJilf Parent was wily, deadly and brave. The trouble was -- he didn't know it! just reached him from his superiors back on Earth. The communication was, of course, in code. But Tom had had the keys to all recent codes hypnoed into him before they left Earth. Lucy sighed again. "About what it'd be like not being married, again." "Not married? What?" said Tom, stopping his pacing suddenly. "Why, of course not. Certainly not. What made you think of that?" "Oh, nothing," sighed Lucy. "If you don't mind," said Tom, "I have something urgent on my mind at the moment." "All men do," said Lucy, studying her fingernails. "I suppose it's only natural. Women aren't like that. Marriage means a lot to a woman." "Lucy, if you don't mind -- " Tom was suddenly interrupted by the gentle chiming of their stateroom door. "Come in." The door opened. A seven-foot humanoid looking like a satanic Tarzan in purple robes stepped into the room. A weapons harness covered the robes, various types of weapons depending from it. The humanoid touched pale green fingers to his winged skullcap. "Good morning, Mr. Ambassador," said Tom, touching his own brown crew-cut in similar fashion. "May the Mordaunti live forever." "And yourrr own rrrace also," replied the Ambassador, rolling his r's like a Scotsman. His black eyes glittered as he added affably, "I thocht I'd tell you therrres time for you to stroll about the Bug'raf capital below, if you wish. We'll be here at least half a day." "Stroll? Well! Well, that's just fine!" cried Tom, happily. "Yes. We will. Thank you so much, Mr. Ambassador." "Think nothing of it," replied the other. Touching his head again, he went out. "You go by yourself," said Lucy sadly. "I think I'll just stay here." "You will not!" Tom snapped. Lucy sat up and stared at him. was down, and Tom and Lucy strolled off the landing area into the winding, colorful streets that looked as if they had been lifted out of the illustrations of some old fairy-tale book. The streets were as warm with a hundred alien races. Once out of sight of the ship, Tom started walking at a pace that had Lucy almost trotting to keep up. "Tom!" She grabbed hold of his arm. "Slow down! I can't -- " "Just around this corner," said Tom, dragging her around it and down at seats of something like a sidewalk cafe. A robot rolled up. "Alcohol and cold distilled water, two," he said in the local lingua franca.The robot rolled away. "I couldn't talk on the ship. Something's come up." "But you're on vacation!" cried Lucy. "This is supposed to be our second honeymoon!" She broke off suddenly and eyed him sharply. The robot rolled up and deposited two squeeze-bulbs before them. Tom produced his identity papers with the Mordaunti seal. The robot punched a hole in them and went away. "Well -- " said Tom. "Or is it?" "Well," said Tom, avoiding her eye. "You told me -- you told me this was a vacation! I might have known there was something wrong the way you've been acting. So... So absentminded about things. Well," said Lucy, "it doesn't matter, of course. I don't mind. Go right ahead." She fumbled angrily in her wristpurse and produced a small lace handkerchief. "Good!" whispered Tom. Lucy checked herself, surprised, with the handkerchief half-raised. "Good?" "We're away from the ship but there still may be spies. That'll confuse them. Look, Lucy, I didn't know about this myself until I got the sub-space message just now. The Office Upstairs back on Earth just said they might have a little job for me on Cayahno. They didn't even let me in on it -- after all, I'm still only a First Assistant Secretary in the Foreign Office's Department of New Governments." "You let me think it was going to be a real vacation!" "Now, honey, be reasonable." "I won't!" "Our lives are in danger." "Oh!" Lucy closed the mouth she had just opened preparatory to saying some more, looked around and put the handkerchief away. She leaned toward Tom. "In danger?" she whispered. "That's what I've been trying to tell you," said Tom in a low voice, "and it's not my fault. The Office Upstairs just gave me the idea they wanted me to do some little red-tape thing, like make a duty call on one of the Mordaunti authorities. Now, this message lets me in on it. And it's so secret they couldn't even trust me with the knowledge before we left." "Tell me," said Lucy. "I'm not supposed to -- " "Oh!" gasped Lucy. "It's all right if my life is in danger; but I'm not supposed to know why!" " -- But," said Tom, "as I was going to say if you'd ever let me finish saying something, I'm going to. You may have to carry on if anything happens to me." "Tom!" Lucy's eyes grew suddenly large. ' said Tom bravely. "Well, here it is. On Cayahno -- the capital world of the Mordaunti to which we're headed -- there's going to be a gathering of representatives from the forty-three great interstellar powers in this section of the galaxy." "Forty-three?" squeaked Lucy. "The Oprinkians, the Mordaunti, us -- and who else?" Tom, said sadly, "We are not listed among the forty-three. The Jaktals were, of course. And everyone knows we've taken over their empire by now. But no invitation has been sent to us." "Why, that's terrible!" "More than terrible. Dangerous. It means the other forty-two great interstellar empires are thinking of dividing our own and the Jaktal territory between them. The Oprinkians are still our friends, of course. They suggested we secretly send a man and have him just walk in and take over the Jaktal chair at the meeting." "You?" said Lucy. "Me," said Tom. "The Office Upstairs thought a minor official like myself would never be suspected of being sent to speak for the whole human empire. Of course, I won't actually speak for us. I'll simply grab the Jaktal seat and hold it. Once I'm there, I'm safe. No one will act against me for fear of endangering his own immunity as Ambassador. But I've got to get there first." "Let's go back to the ship and lock ourselves in and throw away the key." "That might not be a bad idea. However -- " Tom broke off suddenly and looked up. A sudden hush had fallen over the street. Everyone seemed to have disappeared. Then, suddenly, around the corner floated a metal platform with two odd-looking aliens of different species on it. II dividual wearing a harness draped with guns, knives and other fierce gadgets. He wore nothing else. He appeared completely hairless, his skin a leathery brown. His face looked something like a bulldog's. The other alien beside him was about three feet tall, wearing a robe, a sort of magician's cone-shaped hat and a long white beard, above which showed a bulbous nose and two large, purple trusting eyes. "Greetings!" boomed the harnessed individual, in the local lingua franca, bringing the platform to a halt at their table. As it settled to the ground he took a device from his harness and looked through it at Tom. "Magnificent! Just as advertised! .# on the feGalaxy, October, # Galaxy, January, # rocity scale. Congratulations, my boy. I am Drakvil, Master Assassin -- and you are my apprentice." "Apprentice?" said Tom. "Hard to believe, I know. But you are. I just picked you." "Pardon me," said Tom. "But overwhelming as the honor is..." "Tut-tut," said Drakvil. "Say no more." " -- I must decline -- " Drakvil suddenly paled all over his body until he was almost white. Gradually his color came back. He slowly extended a hand and pointed at Lucy. "So," he said. "I think I see. Does that wilf belong to you?" "I certainly do!" said Lucy. Drakvil's arm dropped. "Wilf-ridden!" he breathed. "I get an apprentice with one of the finest aptitude ratings ever recorded; and it has a wilf! But don't worry, my boy." He got down and began to rummage inside the back edge of the platform. "I'll free you." "Tom!" said Lucy, clutching his arm. "Shh," hissed Tom. "It's all right -- " He was interrupted as the second alien on the platform suddenly begin to cry in a timid, despairing fashion. "What's wrong with you?" said Tom, turning on it. "Oh, sir," sobbed the smaller alien. "It would've been such an honor for a simple pjenik pjanik like me. No real Assassin would lower himself to slay a pjanik under the pjonik class. Of course I know your honor's still only an apprentice and it'd only be a practice assassination, but -- " "Wait a minute," said Tom. The pjanik wiped its eyes with its white beard and sniffed. "You mean," said Tom. "I'm supposed to practice assassinating on you?" Drakvil, coming up with a metal plate tucked under one arm. "Begin with live targets right away. The only way. I've got no patience with Master Assassins that start their apprentices out on simulacrums. No meat. No feel to it." He unhooked one of the gadgets from his harness. "Here," he said, "you can borrow my loset." He shoved it into Tom's hand. "Meanwhile, I will psychoanalyze you and rid you of this wilfish affliction." "You don't understand, I'm afraid, sir Assassin," said Tom in smooth, diplomatic tones. "I'm just ashore for a few hours from the Mordaunti ship at the spaceport." Drakvil shook his head. "Tuttut, delusions as well. Not surprising, I suppose. My lad, the Mordaunti ship took off just five minutes ago and, as you see, you are still here." "Took off? But it had to have its drive chamber replated!" "Come, come," said Drakvil. "To replate a drive chamber takes days. The ship needs to be completely torn down -- that's one reason we Assassins never use ships. To work, my boy. There's your pjanik, and you have the loset in hand." He glanced at the metal plate. "Meanwhile -- let me see -- I have some questions here. When you were an immature life form did you ever secretly like your primary immediate male ancestor?" Tom was exchanging glances with Lucy. He winked and whispered in English, "Play along." He handed the loset back to the Master Assassin, bowing. "Ordinarily," he said, "I'd be happy to assassinate this little fellow here -- " He put his hand on the shoulder of the pjanik. "Oh!" cried the pjanik in sudden accents of joy. "It touched me! Its honor touched me!" It fell at Tom's feet and began kissing the toes of Tom's shoes. "Oh, thank you, your nobleship, your kindnessness, little uncle." Drakvil had gone suddenly white again. Now he faded back to his normal color and boomed with laughter. "All right, you young rascal!" he said. "Caught me fairly that time. Takes some nerve to risk distracting a Master Assassin long enough to touch a piece of his property and adopt it. Well, you got away with it. Now, all that talk about the Mordaunti spaceship. Eyewash, right? You deliberately got off here to put yourself in a position where I could see you and take you on as an Apprentice, didn't you?" "Er, yes," said Tom. "Yes?" cried Lucy. "Playalong, playalong, we'restranded here without that ship," muttered Tom between his teeth in English, smiling brightly at Drakvil. 'Well, come along then," said Drakvil, remounting the platform. "Bring your newly adopted nephew-slave along with you. Does the wilf have to come, too?" "Just try to go without me!" said Lucy. "Blasted faithful wilfs!" muttered Drakvil, as Tom stepped up on the platform and helped Lucy up behind him. "Sap the backbone out of a being. Wouldn't have one myself for... Hang on, here we go, across the galaxy to Pjo." e?TJO?" said Tom. But already the city around them had vanished. The platform was now sitting in the midst of a featureless waste of sand, with what looked like a temple far off on the horizon. "Well," Tom said, blinking a little, "that's some transportation." "The only way to go," said Drakvil with satisfaction. "Why travel by slow phase-shifting when this is available? Of course there's always that statistical chance of coming out in the cenjbrcL-i! ter of some sun or other. But death is an Assassin's constant companion, anyway. Let's get down to business." He pointed at the distant temple-like building. "Scene of your first assignment. First I'd better brief you." He reached down and touched something on the platform at his feet. A golden light flickered suddenly around Tom, who went down like a pjanik shot by a loset, in a crumpled heap. "Tom!" cried Lucy frantically, kneeling by him. He sat up groggily and shook his head. "Who? What? Where -- oh, hello, wilf." "Wilf!" cried Lucy. "Tom, don't you know me?" "Of course I know you, wilf -- I mean, honey. Help me up." Lucy helped him to his feet. Tom shook his head a few more times. "Bit of a shock, acquiring all that information at once. I'm all right wi -- Lucy. Oh, is that my harness?" He reached out and took the cluster of weapons Drakvil was holding out to him. He put it on, checking its gadgets. "Let's see. Spengs. Losets. Oh, and a gornul. Latest model, I see." "Naturally," said Drakvil. "The workman is worthy of his tools." "Thanks." Tom looked off at the building. "Subject in there?" "Tom!" said Lucy, "what're you going to do?" Tom ignored her and went on talking to Drakvil. "Large establishment, I take it?" "A spranjik of the gark class," said Drakvil. "Probably has a gnruth of jilks for guard?" "Two gnruths. All porbornikjilks." "Tom!" cried Lucy. "You answer me! What're you going to do? What are gnruths?" "Bodyguard units of fifty jilks apiece," said Tom absently, staring at the building. "Tom, you aren't thinking of trying to assassinate someone who has a hundred bodyguards?" "You'll notice," said Drakvil to Tom, "the establishment is laid out for alnrits, both inside and out." Tom laughed scornfully. "Alnrits!" "Tom! What are alnrits? Will you pay some attention to me? "They're disintegrators," said Tom without looking around. "Don't bother me now, wilf." Lucy shouted, "I am not, not, not a wilf!" "Well, I'm off," said Tom. He reached down to do something to the platform, and disappeared. "Tom!" wailed Lucy. H E reappeared again, shoving one of the larger gadgets back into his holster on the weapons harness. "Well, that was easy enough," he said. Lucy gaped at him. "Tom, you didn't -- " she gasped. "Not yet," said Tom cheerfully. "I just went in for a reconnoitre. On accelerated time." "Report what you did, Assistant," Drakvil said. "Oh, I approached the gate and spenged one of jilks on outer guard there. When the rest turned to see what had happened, I slipped in. As I expected, I found myself in a mobius maze of corridors. I calculated my way through, spenged the three jilks I found at the inner entrance, and took cover when the alarm sounded and a platoon came up at the double with pobornik guns at the ready." "Did they suspect an Assassin was inside the gark?" asked Drakvil. "No sir," answered Tom. "I overheard them guessing that it was a dispossessed simulacrum -- a rogue lone. I ducked down a side street of the jilk quarters and found my way blocked by a fullarmed tank. Well, of course a monstrosity like that could never be knocked out by a mere speng. I knew that." "What -- what did you do?" Lucy asked. "Oh, I just stood still in the center of the street the way any ordinary dispossessed, mindless rogue simulacrum might. And when they were close enough, I gave the tank a pung from my class two loset." Drakvil beamed. "Very good. And then?" "I took the tank and drove it through the inner defenses as if I was the tank crew coming back off duty. Inside, I abandoned the tank and slipped into the ruler's personal family section of the gark. I set up a resolving point inside so the platform could be brought in, and came back to get the three of you." The pjanik squeaked with pleasure. "Me, too? Oh, little uncle!" "Yes," said Tom, giving Lucy a strange, meaningful glance that baffled her completely, "particularly you too." "You wanted me to see you in action. Very good," said Drakvil. He reached down and touched the platform, and they were all suddenly in a curtained alcove, dim-lit from above. "Now what?" "You can watch through the curtain," said Tom. "Now, I'm going to disguise myself and take on the nartled appearance of an illegal gossip-seller." He reached down and touched the platform. Lucy gave a small, stifled shriek. "It's still me," creaked the clawed and warty creature now standing before them. "Watch through the curtain." Ill parted the curtains and slid through. Lucy, Drakvil and the pjanik hurried to the parting and peered through. They saw a lofty hall with a guard of armed jilks, their eye-stalks stiff at attention. A jilk officer was pacing up and down. Tom, in his gossip-seller's guise, sidled up to the officer. "Juicy items," Lucy heard him whine, "rare tidbits from strange worlds -- " The officer backed away distastefully and snapped, "Filthy creature! Keep your nartled claws to yourself." "But commander! I must go inside the door. A certain female of the ranking family -- your freshness understands -- " "Your pass!" snapped the officer, extending a three-fingered hand. "But she gave me no pass," Tom whimpered. "She simply said to come to this entrance -- " He sidled closer. "Your freshness would not want me to compromise the good name of one of the inner gark by mentioning it in public? But if I could talk to you aside -- " "Stand back," said the officer. "Very well." He let Tom lead him away from the guard. To Lucy's horror they approached the alcove, stopping just outside the curtain. "Now," said the officer in a low, eager voice. Lucy was amazed to see his eyestalks wavering drunkenly. He panted. "I know you're lying. The female Orbash is the only one who could have called yoil, and she is elsewhere. So tell me! What have you got to sell?" Tom whispered, "I knew your freshness was an addict, the molie C Pjeni!t #  anib ment I saw the angle of your eyestalks! It'll cost you." "I am not an addict," panted the officer. "I like a little gossip like the next being, but I can take it or leave it alone. But price is no object. Quick, what've you got for sale?" "Bend down, listen -- " said Tom. The eyestalks dipped inward. Tom threw a sudden hook to the officer's midsection. The officer collapsed without a sound and Tom shoved him through the curtain at Lucy's feet, meanwhile immediately turning his appearance into a duplicate of the officer's. He marched across to the guard. "Attention!" he snapped. "Right face! Forward march." They marched off down the corridor. "Magnificent discipline these pobornik-jilks have," remarked Drakvil, as Tom, marching behind the guard, stepped back into the alcove. "However, it sometimes works  to their disadvantage." "I assumed so," said Tom, resuming his natural appearance, much to Lucy's relief. "Now, shall we enter the gark-ruler's inner sanctum?" fended door and opened it. They stepped through filmy hanging curtains to find themselves in a pleasant, sunlit room where a fountain played. A pjanik in purple robes turned to look at them. Tom's adopted nephew-slave immediately prostrated himself before his duplicate. "Rise, inferior," said the one in the purple robe. He helped Tom's pjanik to arise, and the two stood nose to nose, their white beards almost touching, their gentle eyes fastened in friendly fashion on each other. "To what do I owe the honor of this visit?" "Rejoice, noble sir," said Tom's pjanik. "You are about to be assassinated." "Hardly a cause for rejoicing, inferior," the other protested mildly. "It isn't, noble sir?" "Not for a pjonik pjanik, inferior. Possibly you're confusing my position with your own." Tom's pjanik immediately prostrated himself again. "No, I didn't mean that." He helped Tom's pjanik up again. "I just meant that we who are born to the purple don't consider being murdered quite such an honor as you lower classes." "Really?" "In fact," said the pjonik pjanik, turning to Tom, Lucy and Drakvil, "may I ask why I'm being assassinated?" "Why?" exploded Drakvil. "You ask why?" "A natural question, isn't it?" asked Tom innocently. "Why, I never heard of such a thing!" fumed Drakvil. "A subject asking why. What galactic nerve! If I hadn't promised you to my assistant here, and an Assassin's word wasn't as good as his bond -- " His fingers played angrily with the hilt of a hook-shaped knife attached to his harness. "I suppose you don't know why either, young Apprentice?" said the pjonik sadly to Tom. "Well, I suppose I'll die not knowing. Farewell, inferior." The large eyes of Tom's pjanik began to fill with sympathetic tears. "Go ahead," fussed Drakvil. "I can't. You must." "No," said Tom. "No?" said Drakvil, Lucy and the pjonik pjanik all at once. "No," said Tom calmly. "I cannot, because of my wilf." "I knew it!" bellowed Drakvil, turning chalk-white and staying that color. "That wilf! I knew it!" He turned on Lucy, who quickly got on the other side of Tom. Tom faced him and said, "Once I would have gornuled this subject on the spot, without a hesitation. In fact with keen enjoyment. But my wilf has had its effect on me. This is -- er -- a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. The quality of mercy is not strained and no man is an island unto himself. If I should gormul this subject, I should be diminished, even as an island diminishes part of the main. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, because it's already tolled for me." UYAD!" said Drakvil. "Stark, staring, raving mad. Poor, poor boy." His color came back. His tone became more gentle. "Before I gornul you myself, Apprentice, and put you out of your misery -- tell me. Why did you go this far before refusing to act?" "It was the least I could do for the Master to whom I'd been apprenticed," said Tom. "I suspected your honor had been impugned. I had to actually get face to face with the subject and you at the same time to make sure. Now I know beyond any doubt." "Honor?" said Drakvil, suddenly stiffening. "The honor of a Master Assassin impugned? Who would dare?" "Who indeed," said Tom, nudging Lucy, "but an amateur assassin?" "Amateur?" Drakvil went chalk-white once more. "Yes," said Tom. "I wouldn't have had the least suspicion of him, if it hadn't been for my wilf." He nudged Lucy again. "It noticed the difference in the way I was acting. Didn't you, wilf?" "Yes, I did," said Lucy. "It wanted to know what was disturbing me." "Yes, I did." "It warned me faithfully that this amateur was out to dispose of me." "Er -- " said Lucy, "yes, I did." "Its warnings did not register on me properly until you slapped me with that briefing ray just before I went into the gark. In that briefing was the information needed to complete the picture. This amateur arranged for me to be left behind on Bug'raf, just as he hired you through the Assassin's Guild to train me as an Apprentice. And he thoughtfully provided this innocent pjonik pjanik as a subject for me to practice on, at the regular rates." Drakvil said thoughtfully, his color returning. "What you say checks with my own knowledge, Apprentice. But nothing of it affects my honor." "I will explain." "Go ahead," said Drakvil, taking a long, sinister-looking gadget from his harness. "I have to reset my gornul anyway. Take a couple more moments if you like." "Thank you," said Tom. "Suppose you understand that what this amateur hoped and planned was that you would gornul me." "How could he be so sure of that?" "Because," said Tom, taking a deep breath, "he was prepared to violate your honor by forcing you to take on an Apprentice that he knew would never pass the test. You see, he knew I had a wilf." Drakvil's fingers stopped suddenly on the gornul. He looked up. "He knew my wilf would stick by me." "Yes, I would," said Lucy. "And that, faithful as it is to its principles and to me -- " "Yes, I am." -- it would, wilf-like, throw itself before my gornul when I attempted to assassinate the subject, thus creating a scandal that would reflect on you as my master, and cause you to destroy me on the spot."  "Y -- " began Lucy; and stopped dead, staring at Tom with eyes almost as big as a pjanik's. Drakvil had beaten his previous paleness of shade. He was now so white he was nearly transparent. "You see," said Tom to him, "he didn't care about the pjonik here, whom he had no reason to hire assassinated. He didn't care about the expense you might be put to in buying a practice pjanik for me. He didn't care about the scandal which would blacken your name in the Assassin's Guild. All he was interested was in using you to get rid of me." transparent, he was swelling like a balloon. "Pardon me, little uncle," said Tom's pjanik meekly, "but why didn't he just hire the noble Assassin to destroy you in the first place?" "Well, you see," said Tom in a kindly voice, "he couldn't. For the same reason I couldn't really adopt you. My race hasn't ever subscribed to the Assassin Conventions. In fact -- I'm on my way to Cayanho right now to discuss the Conventions and other things with the forty-three other dominant races' representatives." Drakvil had finally found his voice. "Where is he?" he wheezed. "Where is he?" "The Mordaunti Ambassador who marooned my wilf and I and hired you?" said Tom smoothly. "I imagine he's on Gayahno by now. Very probably -- " Tom glanced at his watch -- "he's already sitting down with the fortythree representatives in the OmniRaces Building board room." "Platform!" said Drakvil, touching a spot on his harness. The platform appeared. "On!" he ordered. Tom jumped up on it and pulled Lucy after him. Tom's pjanik started to scramble aboard also, then stopped, confused. "Stay here, inferior," said the pjonik pjanik. "I'll adopt you." "Oh, little father," said the pjanik, falling prostrate. Drakvil touched the platform. The room winked out around them and they winked in again in a long, halllike chamber, with a semi-circle #itL Officer of seats filled with a rainbow diversity of different beings. The Mordaunti Ambassador was standing in the open space before these seats, addressing the rest of the representatives. " -- our responsibility to the former Jaktal members, and those races formerly under their dominion -- " he was saying. He broke off abruptly as he saw the platform with its occupants. "Now!" boomed Drakvil. Tom caught the Assassin's hand as it was closing on the gornul. "Just a minute," said Tom. "He's mine." "Yours?" Drakvil turned on Tom. "Though only an Apprentice, I believe I have rights under the Guild," said Tom. "Yes," Drakvil admitted thickly"Then I believe I have the right of first offense from this being, and so may challenge him to a duel before you yourself take action?" Drakvil glowered. "I'm going to have to do some work on that briefing machine," he muttered. But he let go of the gornul. "Go ahead, then. I'll watch." The Mordaunti had buckled slightly at the knees on seeing Drakvil. But on hearing this, he straightened up again and his hands spread inward toward his own weapon harness. He smiled at Tom. "Though only an Apprentice," said Tom to Drakvil, "would you say I might prevail in a duel with this being?" Drakvil snorted. "Only!" he said. "Only an Apprentice! You've been briefed, haven't you? Naturally only another Guild member could hope to stand a chance with you, Apprentice or not." T HE Mordaunti's knees began to give again. He tried to smile but his satanic grimace was a little loose at the corners. "I just wondered," said Tom. "I wouldn't want the impression to get about the galaxy that I was trying to hide from the honorable Mordaunti representative." He got down off the platform and walked across to a vacant chair he had spotted in the lowest tier of seats. It was a little large for him, being built to hold Jaktals, but he seated himself in it. "Let me see," he said thoughtfully. "I will have to arrange for my wilf to be restrained so that it cannot prevent -- " "Hold!" cried the Mordaunti Ambassador in the lingua franca. Tom looked up, surprised. "No one could be more eager for a duel with the being from Earth than I," said the Mordaunti. His knees were quite straight again. "But there is a higher duty. The obligations of a Member of this meeting." "What?" said Tom. "I don't understand. You have to fight me." "Alas," said the Mordaunti. "Forgive me." "Forgive you? I insist you fight me. I insist -- " "Sadly, I must refuse. Sir, you have inadvertently seated yourself in the Jaktal chair, as a Member of this meeting." "What?" cried Tom, looking about him. "What'd I do? You mean, just by sitting down here for a moment, I -- " "You invested yourself with diplomatic immunity," said the Mordaunti. "Ambassadors may not duel with each other. That is a basic law of interracial politics. Otherwise our meetings would become disasters." "But I just sat down for a minute!" "I'm sorry. The rule is strict." "Curses!" said Tom. "We all sympathize." "Why am I so absentminded?" "We all understand, I'm sure. It could happen to any newcomer. Unfortunately ignorance of the rule is no excuse." "My courage," said Tom, "will be called in question. The courage of the whole human race will probably be called in question." "Not at all," said the Mordaunti smoothly, "I, myself, will be honored to introduce a resolution of confidence in your courage and that of every member of your race." "Well..." said Tom. But the Mordaunti had already turned to speak to the filled seats of the semi-circle about Tom. And three Earth minutes later the vote was unanimous in favor of Tom's and human courage, even Drakvil being read into the minutes unofficially as being in favor. IV A that night, as they were preparing to retire on a Mordaunti bed that was like a golden cloud twelve feet around, "did that briefing really make you so dangerous? In just a second, like that?" Tom climbed onto the bed. Lucy was still tying the top of her filmy blue nightgown. He bounced experimentally. "Some bed," he said. "Of course it didn't. I know all I need to know, but it'd take years of exercising to make my muscles respond as they need to for effective use of the knowledge. Drakvil, of course, wasn't going to admit I wasn't, though. His honor as an Assassin was at stake. That is why I think he was secretly pleased I didn't have to duel the Mordaunti, after all. -- Are you going to put the lights out?" "In a minute," said Lucy. She stood by the bed. "I want you to tell me something first." "What?" "I want to know exactly what a wilf is. And you tell me the truth." "Oh." "Yes, oh." "Well," said Tom, slowly, "they look a lot like women. At least an alien might think they did. But they're really a totally different race, monosexual. It's just that they go around becoming deeply attached to beings of other races. Once they make friends, their faithfulness is proverbial in the galaxy." "But why?" "Why?" "Why," said Lucy, "do they become attached? What do they want to make friends for? What's in it for them?" She looked narrowly at Tom. "They look so much like us and they go around attaching themselves. I want to know why!" "Oh," said Tom. "I see. I see. Well, it's not what you might think at all." "It isn't?" "No," said Tom. "Different race, and all that. It's just that wilfs have this strong moral sense. They have very high principles and their greatest joy is in converting some other being to these same principles. Naturally, there's not much opportunity for them to improve other wilfs, these being as good as they can get already. So they try to get close to beings of other races, in a strictly intellectual way. That's all." "Oh," said Lucy, "that's all right, then." She put out the lights and bounced into bed. "I've got plenty of low principles" she said. "You like me that way, don't you? You'd better say yes." "Yes," said Tom... He was the master spy. He could be anybody at all -- until they made him nobody! thirty minutes past nine, six July. It was time. From here on it was do the job right or be ruined. If not physically, then professionally. Finian. Smith dug for tools in the pouches of his imitation stomach. The left eye of the watch's moon face gave a ludicrous wink to complete the time signal. Finian hated the watch. He'd gotten used to the confines of the camouflaged polymer leech clinging to the keel of the hydrofoiler. He'd gotten used to performing necessary bodily functions in intimate contact with the leech's servomechanisms for thirty-six hours. But the watch -- never. It was effete, like his clothes. Effeteness was big this year. Next year it would be hand-loomed woolens. But he wasn't being paid to inherit the soul of the man he was impersonating, after all. He applied the first of his meson torches to the thick hull. His long, pleasantly ugly face began to bead with perspiration. He had precisely four minutes to cut through. His face was half shadowed by the hull as he worked, half washed in flickering sunlight through anemone and brain coral. He defused a large U-shaped section and replaced the torch with a pistol unit fitted with a round cup at the muzzle. This cup he applied to the hull. A blue whine of power -- he forced the hull inward far enough to accommodate entry to the fuel baffle chamber. He set a small black box to blow the polymer leech off the hull in fifty seconds, glad that he'd spent a full twenty nights under the hypnolearner. The penetration plan was drummed so deeply into his skull he could operate like an automaton. With a last tool he re-sealed the hull, touched a stud and watched the tool collapse to gritty pumice. Right now the leech should be quietly disintegrating, without so much as a radar. It took a lot of money to arrange this penetration, Finian thought. Knowing how much made him nervous. Finian hurried up a lonely companionway. Before stepping to the yacht's deck he dusted his pleatless puce satin pantaloons and also made sure the precision camera, a combined effort of GS dental technicians and optics men, was in place where his right front incisor had once been. The blade shutter's release was a knob on the tooth's inner surface, triggered by tongue pressure. Fake enamel would fly aside a microbe recorded for posterity, not to mention GS market analysts. identification badge. Beneath his picture it said Woodrow Howslip, Missoula, Mont., Upper North American Distributorship. Finian hoped Woodrow Howslip was still lost in the Mojave Desert. If so, the only thing Finian had to worry over was his old enemy. Every few yards along the deck have innumerable armed guards. So did GS for that matter. Finian often wondered why. No one got angry any more, why have armed guards? "Hi, there, I'm Woody Howslip." "Morning, sir." The guard stared into the Pacific's cobalt swell. "Say, fella. Last year when I came to see the new models innerduced, I ran into a hell of a swell person -- Spool or Stool. Sure like to buy him a drink. Is he on board?" "I don't believe so, sir." "Oh, too bad. Maybe he'll show up. They always have the top dogs at these distributor shows. I hear Stool's a top dog. Chief of company spies or something." The guard concealed irritation. "Sprool, sir. Chief of industrial investigation." Finian gigged the man's ribs. "Keeps those Goods Services jerks hopping, huh? Well, sorry Spool isn't around. Maybe later. See you in the videofunnies -- " Overdoing it, Finian thought as he hurried along. Still, it was reassuring to know the intelligence was correct: Sprool was in Bombay. Finian had run up against him most recently when for the mid-year hairdo changes during the #-# season. Finian joined a crowd of distributors hurrying into an auditorium beneath a banner reading: Things to Come Incorporated World Distributors "Last Year's Woman Is This Year's Consumer" As he took a seat in the shadowy hall he listened to voices all around: "It's rumored she's of the Grecian mode," said the European Common Market distributor. "What? Copy the tripe GS peddled two years ago?" That was the WhiteBlue Nile man. The Chinese distributor protested: "Last year, too severe. Humble per cent of market drop severely. Five thousand years in fields, China women do not desire box haircut, woolen socks." "Hope it's a real smasher this time," said the British Empire distributor, a seedy fellow wearing cologne. One rundown warehouse in Jamaica comprised the could buy or sell the Empire a thousand times. Or any other country. Finian was sweating. No wonder the stakes were so high. N AN austere platform up front sat three men. One was a florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed eyes. Another -- a spindly type with a flower at each cuff -- rose and was introduced by a loudspeaker as Corporate Director of Sales Northcote Hastings. "Thank you, thank you. I won't waste time, gentlemen. You've traveled thousands of miles in secrecy and we appreciate it. We trust you also appreciate why we must maintain the mobility of our personality design center. One never knows when the -- ah -- competition nlight infiltrate a permanent site. They can't match our sales in new personalities, so they try to outfight us with punches below the belt." He fingered his, of ermine, to illustrate. Finian joined the laughter, but meant his. "After luncheon, gentlemen, you're scheduled for individual sessions with o,ur designers, psychiatrists, plastic surgeons and sociability coordinators, not to mention apparel teams and accessory experts." Hastings glanced at the old gentleman with the vaguely crossed eyes. "Before we proceed, however, beloved chairman of the board, Mr. Alvah Loudermilk. Stand up, Mr. Loudermilk." The sales manager was plainly annoyed by having to make the introduction. The old dodderer took a step toward the podium. Hastings let a tolerant smile be seen by the distributors but did not relinquish the mike. "You can talk with Mr. Loudermilk personally later, gentlemen." The florid old gentleman sat down again, as though no one appreciated him. Smoothly Hastings continued, "Let me get on by bringing forward the great design chief of Things to Come Incorporated -- " He flung out a hand. "Dr. Gerhard Krumm." The famed Krumm, an obese toad with the inevitable disarrayed look of the corporate intellectual, walked to the podium. His apricot slippers, pantaloons and bolero jacket seemed to have come from a dustbin. Behind Krumm stage blowers whirred. They were readying curtains and screen. Finian slid his tongue near his tooth. "Gentlemen," Krumm said, "first the bad news." At the unhappy grumble he held up his hand. "Next year -- lutely and without qualification be ready to introduce the concept of the obsolescent male personality, exactly as we did in the female market ten years ago. I can only emphasize again the tremendous physical problems confronting us, and point to the lag in male fashion obsolescence that was not finally overcome until the late twentieth century, by the sheer weight of promotion. Men, unlike women, accept new decoralucrative share of the semi-annual male changeover, but we are years behind the female personality market. Next year we catch up." "May we see what you have for the girls, old chap?" someone asked. "Then we'll decide whether we're happy." "Very well." Krumm began to read from a promotion script: "This year we steal a leaf from yesterday's -- uh -- scented album." The lights dimmed artfully. Perfume sprayed the chamber from hidden ducts. A stereo orchestra swelled. The curtains parted. Finian's upper lip was rolled back as far as possible. A nostalgic solido view of New York when it was once populated by people flashed on the screen. "Remember the sweet, charming girl of yesteryear? We capture her for you -- warm, uncomplicated, revelling in -- uh, let's see -- sunlight and outdoor sports." A series of solido slides, illustrating Krumm's points with shots of nuclear ski lifts or the Seine, merged one into another. "Gone is the exaggerated I.Q. of this year, gone the modish clothing. A return to softness. A simple mind, clinging, sweet. The stuff of everyman's dreams. Gentlemen, I give you -- " Hidden kettledrums swelled. The name flashed on the screen: "Dream Desire! New Woman of the #-# market year!" Krumm continued: "At our thirty thousand personality alteration centers over the world, every woman will be able to change her body and mind, by means of surgical and psychologithe acknowledged master, to become Dream Desire. Backed by the most intensive promotion program in history, we promise that more women will become Dream Desire than have ever become one of our previous models. Because, gentlemen, no woman could possibly resist becoming -- this." Sitting forward with tooth ready to shoot, Finian was unprepared for the shock that awaited him. Onto the screen slid the naked figure of a girl. Only her back was exposed. Nothing could be seen of her face. Her hair was yellow, that was all. The flesh itself was tanned, in sharp contrast to the pale library look currently being merchandised. The proportions of the girl's buttocks had been surgically worked out to be almost the apex of voluptuousness. But what shook Finian to the soles of his mink slippers was a star-shaped raspberry mark on the new model's left rear. That isn't Dream Desire, he thought wildly. That's -- that's -- "We begin with the, uh, rear elevation," said Krumm. "In that marketing genius. That mark will stamp the woman who buys this new personality as a genuine Dream Desire, not a shoddy GS counterfeit. To be frank, adoption of this unique -- ah -- signature, was not planned. When we sought a girl for our prototype, we discovered the girl we chose was blessed with such a mark. It inspired serendipity. But this is just the beginning. See what we have done with the face." Only just in time did Finian remember to trigger his tooth and take a shot of the rear elevation before the front view flashed on. The girl, naked and coy on a diII van, had pink cheeks, red lips, china blue doll eyes. Pretty, in a cuddlesome, vapid way. Quickly he exposed two more frames. He was falling apart, muffing the job. Krumm's voice became a drone detailing the surgical and analytical procedures necessary for a woman to buy the appearance and personality of Dream Desire. Finian didn't hear a thing about price schedules or what lower-priced models were contemplated. He photographed each slide mechanically, thinking of the raspberry mark. It's not Dream Desire, he said to himself. My God -- it's Dolly Novotny. Not the face, not the breasts. But there, far down in the eyes. They weren't even brown any more. But colored contacts could change eyes so easily. Never had he been more profoundly shocked. His own sweet lost Dolly! A heavy hand seized his shoulder. "Here he is!" Finian was dragged from his seat. A searing light flashed in his face. "Well, well. Finian Smith. When you took hold of that rail coming into the hall, you should have recalled we have sweat prints for all you GS boys. Give me the camera and come along quietly," finished Sprool. Bombay," said Finian. "I got bum information." Sprool smiled somewhere in the depths of his almost colorless eyes. His pale, saturnine face, however, was devoid of humor. "Never trust Lyman Pushkyn for information, Fin. Since when is an advertising man qualified to supervise an industrial investigation program?" "You're right. I tried to get them to give me the post once." "Did you? I didn't realize that. When?" "Right after I was cashiered by case for GS." He couldn't repress a smile. "The time I stole your men's changeover layouts by disguising myself as part of the lavatory wall. When you still had the design center on land, out in California." Sprool chuckled flatly. "We've been friendly enemies quite a while, haven't we, Fin?" "You never put one over on me like this, though." "Shame you forgot sweat prints." "My own damned fault." Finian thrust out his jaw. "I'll take what's coming. I was counting on this play to cut through all that stupid bureacracy at the top of GS and maybe net me the chief investi' Qv, MM gator's post." Finian scowled out the office porthole to the heaving blue Pacific. Sprool smoothed thinning hair. "Might as well give me the camera." Finian made a show of dipping into his artificial paunch. He come up with a palm-sized micro # mm and snapped open the case release. He pulled the leader on the casette all the way out, exposing the film. Chuckling, Sprool picked up the cylinder. "Very nice, Finian. May I now have the real camera?" "Ah, you slick bastard," grumbled Finian. This time he took a piece of equipment from beneath his singlet. Sprool dropped it down a hissing disposal tube. "You look positively vengeful, Fin." "I could smash a few heads right now. That damn GS Comptroller Central makes investigators do their own penetration work-ups. They're nickle-nursers besides. I thought of sweat prints. They said the corrective was too expensive. I wasn't positive you had the index on file, so -- " "Fin, please don't bristle. Remember we have telephotos on you at this very moment. In that bust of Loewy, for instance. His collar button is watching you. Don't fight me and you won't get tion just like GS. Firm but paternalistic. When we dispose of an irritant, we do it with flexibility and permanence, but no physical pain." "That's nice to know, considering you'll probably ruin my career." "Were you ever really cut out for business, Fin?" "If I wasn't what the hell was I "See? That burst of temper is all too typical of you. People simply don't rock the boat these days, Fin. Why, if either GS or share of the renewal personality market -- plus or minus the # gain or lose as a result of spying, design leaks and so forth -- the U.N. would have its economic cycle theorists down on us instantly." "God, Sprool, I try and try. I guess I just wasn't meant to be a twenty-first century man. I never had the proper education, like those reading primers written by the market boys from -- to private school. On my Pop s knee." "Then your attitudes are understandable. How can you expect to be anything but yourself when your father was a Galbraither? Perhaps the last of that persuasion allowed to teach economics in public universities? Your father was dead set against the kind of obsolescence practiced by the corporations we both represent. The two largest corporations in the world!" "Pop wanted consumer money spent on libraries, schools, highways, pretty green roadside picnic parks." "None of which contributes very much to keeping the world plant running at top output. None jobs needed to give black and yellow and white alike ample opportunity for the good life. If you'd only understand yourself, how you fit the scheme of things." "I don't. That's the trouble. What the hell am I supposed to do, join the prisoners in New York? I keep quiet about what I think. I did it well enough to be an operative for the Department of Obsolescence Control. I was doing all right until -- " Memory clouded his brow. He wriggled deep down in the foam of his chain He wished he were free of this hellish interview, free to think on the problem of Dream Desire who was not Dream Desire at all but Dolly. "Until what? I never really knew." "Until I rocked the boat, God damn it! I was chief of the Indiana bureau. I tried to stop a car-smash rally a week before the new models came out. The district supervisor was there, making a speech. I thought I saw a kid inside one of the levacars the crowd was pushing into the Wabash River. I went to see, hold back the crowd. The district supervisor told me to stop. I hit him. # hit him. You know what happens when you hit an executive." Finian pinched the bridge of his nose to shut out the ugly memory. At length he added, "In case you never heard the rest of the story either, a wreck crew examined the levacar afterward. There was no kid inside. Only a big mechanical doll somebody had forgotten to take out before the smash." "Very touching," said Sprool emptily. "Come on, Sprool. Let's get this over." "Of course. But let me make one more point. Do you know why I'm here, not in Bombay?" nylon plant was a fake." "Not at all. The rioters were manning the controls of the motorized strikegangs day and night, from their homes. The motheir demand for two extra holidays, before and after Nehru's birthday, they gave up all their other requests -- for free anticigarette immunization and the like. People are soft, Fin. They cooperate. It must be so, or the plant would stop functioning. out of work -- disaster! Hunger, pestilence, real rioting. The people also have another role to fill, as consumers. If they're unhappy, they respond less adequately to advertising. The plant slows down. Why, until TTlC conceived the idea of introducing new female personalities every year, not just new clothes but complete new mental patterns, the world was headed for ruin. We ran out of new gadgets long ago." iiTON'T kid me," Finian said cynically. "Personality obsolescence was thought up by Old Man Pharoh of GS. His granddad told him a story about the Kennedy lady's mushroom hair changing the style overnight and it started him thinking." "He had considerable help from Alvah Loudermilk." "Who cares? All I say is, it's a hell of a shame the Triple Play War didn't end in something besides a stalemate. We wouldn't have had everybody palsy-walsy, black and white and yellow. And this damned population problem -- the first rockets rusting on the moon and nobody interested in following them in person. Everybody's a consumer and a worker and -- and damn it, soft as jello. And it's a miserable mess from top to bottom." Sprool was genuinely shocked. "Fin, are you seriously advocating periodic wars?" Finian shielded his eyes from the sun falling through the port. "Oh, no. I can't think of anything else, that's all. Fatness or fighting, fighting or fatness. In my book they're both lousy. I wish there were a third way. I can't think of one. Maybe if I were smart like you -- " Finian stopped, bitterly. Sprool dialed a magenta visorphone. "Really, Fin, this is becoming pointless temperament." Into the phone he said, "We're ready, Doctor." To Finian again: "Please don't try to reform our delicately balanced world, my friend. At least not until we scrub your mind clean of what you saw in the auditorium." A shiver crawled on Finian's spine. "Scrub -- ?" Too late. Pneumatic doors slid aside. Two unsavory specimens in white smocks bordered with lace wheeled a rubber-tired mechanism into the room. Before Finian could move they adjusted several wing nuts and lowered a bowl device over his head. He tried to stand up, cursing. He was quickly but painlessly pinioned by sleek tubular metal arms clasping him from the back of the chair. "The worst damage you did was on film," Sprool said, striding back and forth, dry-washing his hands. "I naturally assume that in your heightened nervous state, what you saw with your eyes didn't make much of an impression. But we'll be sure. Give him a mild jolt to start, boys." Several sinister cathode tubes began to hiss at various points on the machine. Finian felt a tingle on his scalp, similar to a healthful massage. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the rear elevation of Dream Desire. He panicked. Almost as though there were a mental vacuum cleaner in his head, certain synapses were blocked, certain memory receptors temporarily sucked dry. The technique was a portion of that employed in changing the female consumer's intelligence quotient from year to year to conform to the new personality design she purchased. It made Finian fume to think of them tampering with his skull. He was no rotten Metropolis wife merchandised into adopting the latest fashion trend. He writhed ferociously. Sprool looked on with disapproval. Try as he might, Finian could not remember what -- good lord! He'd forgotten the name! What did she look like? What ? He had a blurry recollection of colors on a screen, little else. The laboratory cretins unhooded him. The chair relaxed. Sprool assisted him to his feet. "Feeling better? Free of unpleasant memories?" "You've no business tampering -- " Dolly Novotny had a raspberry mark. So did Dream Desire. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." to keep from revealing that the mental dike had just burst. He wasn't really surprised. Dolly Novotny had once meant far more to him than assignment could. She would again, when he learned how and why she -- He laughed inwardly. Poor Sprool. He'd stolen a march. Two. Finian still had the tooth camera. And how could Sprool know Finian wanted to -- must -- remember Dolly Novotny, because she was the only creature he ever really loved? Dolly was the girl to whom he'd been engaged, before her parents broke it off after he was cashiered became an industrial investigator was little more than a lowlife spy in their estimations. Finian had been away so much, on assignment. Dolly had tried to resist her parents, but they held the cashbox for a modeling career. She tried; she loved him. But one day when he came back to Bala Cynwyd she was gone. The whole family had moved. Finian received one final letter. He thought from the words, or rather what was between them, really, that she still loved him. The words were obviously parentally ghosted. Blinking at Sprool now, scratching his scalp to relieve the prickle, Finian realized anew the rather disheartening truth. He was a maverick. Pop had made him so, against his mother's shrill protests. So be it. Especially since someone -- the system, maybe, he didn't know, cared less because a man couldn't really fight a system, not an ordinary man anyway -- had corrupted the flesh he loved so well. Finian was vaguely aware of Sprool, bland, pointing. "Up that stairway, Fin. Directly to the vertijet takeoff stage. Spare you the embarrassment of going on deck." He extended his hand. "Luck, Fin. I hope the sacking isn't too bad." Finian slipped the hand aside. He grinned. If you had to be a loony, why not enjoy it? "Thanks for nothing, pal." He marched defiantly up the stairs into sunlight. Who had Sprool been kidding about paternalism? Three hours later the vertijet hovered six inches from Lyman Pushkyn's green front door, the lawn of Panpublix on the outskirts of the Eastern metropolis. Finian was rudely pushed out. The vertijet climbed a white column of vapor into the sky. Finian picked fresh-cut grass from his pantaloons. Oh, that kind, gentle Sprool. On his instructions the vertijet pilot had beamed an anonymous message on the Panpublix band, announcing that Finian Smith was being returned to continental U.S. by a one ace to stave off financial disaster. Five minutes later he lost it. A squad of GS industrial guards boiled onto the lawn and hustled Finian to a cold tile room in the personnel wing. There, he discovered two astonishing things. One, the corporation was not quite so paternalistic as it masked itself to appear. The policeman roughed him as they stripped him. Two, the vast GS industrial police force was not the harmless, aimless body it looked to be from outside. Apparently the guards were paid so well because they had to move savagely if a bubble boiled up the bland surface of the world stew. In fact, their professionalism with the see-rays in the personnel lab relieved him, howling and kicking and pummeling, of the precious tooth-camera, just before he was hustled to Pushkyn's floor. Ill owned internal advertising agency for GS. The building loomed forty stories. Within its curtainwalls quite a few thousand communicators devoted themselves to the task of planning and executing campaigns to move the bodies, as the expression went. The fortieth, or solarium, floor belonged the agency's executive officer, Pushkyn, into whose presence Finian was unceremoniously thrust. "You miserable creep," Lyman said, as he shooed away his masseuse and beetled his thick Ukrainian brows. "You bumbler, you! We heard all about your incredible performance from Sprool's agents. You're fired. Blackballed. Eradicated. Kapoosht." Finian had a hard light in his eyes. He sat down, tilted his feet to the chaise footrest and dialed the arm for a Bcomplex cocktail. "Lyman, those goonies of yours messed me up. I never knew they were more than window dressing. I didn't know they were supposed to fight." Pudgy Pushkyn snapped the elastic of his old rose knickerbockers. His stomach, lumpy and white as the rest of him, hung out unglamorously. "Rock the boat some more, creepnik. You'll find out how they can fight." "Oh shut up. I delivered your pictures. Even if your men did take them by force." Pushkyn turned his back. "Peddle it another place, jerk. You're through." "You can't talk to me that way. If you hadn't chintzed about a lousy sweat-print job -- " Pushkyn squinted around. "So that's how. That Sprool, he's a regular fiend." "Damn it, Lyman -- " Extending a trembling sausage finger Pushkyn breathed, "You we ought to have psyched, deep and permanent. What a fool I was to string along with you for years! A stumblebum private cop dignifying himself by calling himself an industrial investigator. Come in here storming, cursing -- no out!" Momentarily bewildered, Finian countered, "Lyman, your own guards -- " "Quiet! We'll get a nice fat rap in the public image when the investigator trade journals pick up the story of how GS flopped." Glowering, Finian stalked him. "Regardless of that, I delivered. I want my fee." "I'll be damned if I -- " Conflict was temporarily forestalled by the arrival of a thin assistant art director, carrying a square item masked in gray silk. Finian stared moodily at the GS model announcement layouts in the wall display racks. The tradename of the new GS woman and her figure were greeked; but from the woodcut and steel-engraving technique of the gatefold and bleed comps, Finian suspected GS was going to market a bit of nostalgia even older than the kind dolins and stereopticons by gaslight? Finian had a prepossessing urge to throw up. "Want to see this, chief?" said the assistant art director. He whipped off the silk, revealing an oil painting in a platinum frame. "What the rinkydink hell is that?" Pushkyn cried. The art director blanched. "Why, chief, it's R. R. Pharoh "Of course, of course, jerkola. You think I don't know? I haven't seen the old smeller in three years maybe, but think I don't know the chairman of my own bread and butter? Why the fancy-fancy oil treatment? You do it?" "Spare time, only, chief," trembled the art director. "Got a memo. Salinghams -- you know, the audiotonal effects veep -- memoized Pharoh. Wanted a personal portrait of his leader. Pharoh memoized me, okaying having his picture done. I patched together this little work from the descriptive PR biog. There aren't any good portraits extant." n "W hy bring it to me?" "But chief! You memoized me when I memoized you that -- " "I did? Oh, yeah. Well, I'm busy. Take it to Salinghams." creation and disappeared down the tube. Pushkyn was about to speak to Finian when he noted the gray sweat patina on Finian's face. He demanded to know whether Finian was ill. "Nothing, nothing's wrong," said Finian, shivering, wildly curious. The image in the portrait burned into Finian's skull. It was that of a florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed eyes. Tightening his nerves, Finian said, "Pushkyn, let me lay it out. I got to have the fee. I need it to girl. I used to know her." A visorphone glowed. Pushkyn slapped the command button. A pale man danced up and down on the screen. "Chief, chief, it's a breakthrough, a breakthrough! We just an hour ago. Molecular triangulation. My God, sir, it's a miracle of deception. Manhattan! The prison! An old rundown distillery company building in the worst stews of -- " He consulted a paper. "Parkave, that's the place." Listening transfixed, Pushkyn started, slid his gaze to Finian and snarled at the screen, "Oh, boy, is your fat in the fire. Call me back." He shut off and squinted at Finian, whose mind churned. "You were talking?" Finian swallowed hard. "Pushkyn, I must find out what's happened to the girl they made into changed her they've done wrong. She was sweet and desirable. They've made her all soft and disgusting. Like marshallow." were hot for her once, that it?" "That's it. I was only holding back the camera so you'd pay me. Give me a chance!" "Think we run a sniveling charity?" Pushkyn's sweeping gesture encompassed the heavens and the pulsing, overpopulated smog banks beneath. "We gotta keep the plant running! Create demand every minute! Off with the old woman! On with the new! The old woman, she smells, she's out of date! We got a crusade here at Panpublix! We got a holy mission! You want the plant wheels to stop like they put sand in them? While we take care of your personal problems? Don't be a jerkola. Like to argue about the fee? I'll call up the guards again." Something akin to a cool rush of air swept Finian's brain. "Then I'll find her without the fee, Lyman." "Hah-hah, sure. Big independget psyched and lose those hostile tendencies. Don't rock the world, she don't rock so good. Everybody's happy, you be happy. Go grub and be happy." "I'm not happy. All of a sudden I'm not happy, if people like you made the only girl I ever fell in love with obsolete." "Get out, chummo. I don't like you any more. You're dangerous." Finian Smith nodded crisply. "I could very well be." And left. building he heard a menacing hiss. He tried to dodge the rainbow spray. Too late. His clothing was soon soaked with a noxious admixture of water, special nitrites and phosphorous compounds shot into the air by the underground sprinkler system. At the levacar station he finally controlled his anger. How petty they could be, to order the lawns sprinkled just then. Waiting passengers moved away and made rude remarks about his smell. Finian found himself sole occupant of the front car on the ride down the Philadelphia spur. The enforced loneliness gave him a chance to organize his muddled thoughts and decide what course of action he had to pursue concerning Dolly Novotny. Two facts he possessed. What they meant, he didn't know. A likely place to find her was tan, the prison island. Still, he was certain to have a rough time getting onto the island and into the plant after that. With few resources at his disposal it might be better to pursue the other thread a bit. Its significance left him even more muddled. Alvah Louderpeared at the dealer presentation, somewhat to the annoyance of his inferiors. And R. R. Pharoh, top GS executive, hadn't been acting quite sensibly either when he permitted an oil portrait of himself to be painted. Finian had never seen a public photo of either man. Both executives were practically legendary. Then why in the name of Galbraith did both look so much like each other? When Finian thought on it, one cold, unpleasant word gnawed his head. Conspiracy. A moment later his professional memory dredged up a source for proving or disproving his odd theory. What he intended to do with evidence, if any existed, he couldn't say. But he had a vague desire to be armed with a little more certainty before he sought Dolly. An achingly musical name. Dolly, Dolly -- He remembered her so well, from summer evenings on the back porch before Bala Cynwyd, like the other suburbs, was swallowed in the fester of the metropolis. Her dark hair. Her gentle eyes. Her animated mouth. And the raspberry mark, one night during an electrical storm. She'd tentatively shared Finian's inherited ideas about their constantly obsolete world, ideas long suppressed in him and now flooding back under the double stimulus of Sprool's lecture and Pushkyn's vindictive parsimony. Dolly hadn't exactly been sympathetic. The philosophy of enduring worth was too daring even then. (Today it was sheer lunacy.) But neitherhad she been as adamant as most citizens. As her parents, for example. They replaced their furniture monthly with the latest GS fiberboard laminate imitation Finnish modern modes. Good consumers, both. Then came his dismissal from up -- The levacar slowed for Bala Cynwyd. In the abstract, remodeling a woman's mind to make her the pattern to which nearly all other women in the world could conform was acceptable to Finian. When it came to the specific of changing Dolly to the marshmallow-trumpery creature looming on the screen behind Krumm, that was too much. A S HE stepped off at Bala Cynwyd, it began to rain. He hurried along beneath warped building fronts of chartreuse and electric blue extruded plastic. From a doorway a hapless bum in last year's pseudo-cotton sport clothes begged for three dollars for a tube of model cement to sniff. Finian shuddered and walked faster. He stopped at Abe Kane's Autosuiter, the last shop left open on the block, selected a few new clothes from the plastic catalogue sheets fastened to the walls, and fed his universal credit card into the slot after punching out his measurements. A red lucite sign blinked on: Credit N. G. Finian frowned, hit the cancel lever and tried again. The third time he tried, his card was not returned. Pushkyn! Damn the vindictive bastard. He trudged on through the rain, never having felt so alone in his life. It was a queer sensation, the total absence of credit. Once, he remembered dimly, Pop had brought home a suit of clothes purchased with. cash. It had caused a near-riot among Bala Cynwyd burghers. Reaching his shabby apartment, Finian changed from the effete suit, scrubbed up as best he could, packed his few belongings into a satchel and walked back into the rain. He passed a crowd of workers from the local GS visorphone plant. It specialized in treating receiver parts with reagents that would crack the plastic precisely eight months after installation. A little smog had mixed with the rain, turning the street ghostly. At a corner booth Finian used his last few coins to make a toll call to the House of Sinatra in Los Angeles. A sound truck rolled past, repeating over and over, "Gee-ess, Gee-ess, don't guess, it's bess -- Take free shuttle at Exit #-# to the GS Plaza -- Gee-ess, don't -- " A dapper young man appeared on the screen, snapping his fingers. "Hiyah. What can this gasser of a full-service bank do for you, Clyde?" Finian showed his bank identification card. "I'd like to withdraw my balance." The banker came back into view a moment later. "Get lost. Your balance is nonesville. Garnisheed at noon. Unperformance tract, with waiver of cooperation. You signed it, Charlie." "Damn it, I performed -- Finian began. The screen had already blacked. He staggered into the drifting smog. So Pushkyn had gone that far. Just for the sake of meanness. Well, Finian Smith would show the whole rotten bunch. They had angered him now. He wasn t quite witless, not yet. Gee-ess, Gee-ess, it's bess came a lonely bellow. The polluted smog made Finian cough. His eyes smarted as he turned his pockets inside out. A dollar left. Enough for a cup of coffee. No transportation. Just a single walking man in a cloud of industrial fumes and a long, empty night for thinking of Dolly. Resolutely Finian hefted his satchel and started out to walk to Missouri. IV staggered into the National Record Office in R'olla. Thirty-six frightening, alarming, eye-opening, solitary, transfiguring days they had been, too. Days of dodging robot levacars whose spot-beams hunted him in the shadows beneath the elevated turnpikes, seeking to arrest him for pedestrianship. Days of remembering his Pop. And nights too. Especially nights, thinking as he lay under a berry bush half-starved and chilly, how Pop had enjoyed prizefights, antisocial, uncooperative prizefights. How young Finian had been dragged to lonely boxcars or dim garages where furtive men watched the sport before it was finally stamped out in the name of bland humanity. The world too was one bland custard, blandly happy. Except not really, as Finian, horrified, discovered. No plant could function at total efficiency, at complete peak year after year. A low percentage of chronic unemployment had never been whipped by the cyclic theorists. Strange wild caravans of men and wives and children, human wolves almost, passed Finian occasionally on red-leafed backroads in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He almost fell into the hands of one such band. Thereupon he decided he must possess a weapon of self-defense at all costs. His belly he could protect by shoveling in wild berries and an occasional stolen chunk of honeycomb. But his life, against such a seething pack of wild creatures as he had fled from on that lonely road, needed more dependable protection. Difficult problem. Under law, weapons were prohibited except upon special occasions. What necessity for weapons when all was pleasant cooperation? Yet the GS guards carried ternal force. Finian was beginning to believe he knew why that might be so. Too early to tell, however. And the other problem pressed him to concentration upon it. Weapon-devotees were even more suspect than pedestrians in the lonely country between metropolises. Occasionally Finian glimpsed a wire compound, acres and acres, against the sunburnt horizon. Manhattan Prison was calcitrant Hoosier or Buckeye anti-obsols, so they were thrown into smaller country compounds, together with those few madmen who settled disputes with fists. Such compound inmates were described as juves, Finian remembered, passing one such wire enclosure on a white moonlit night and shuddering. He didn't recognize the term juve, but it obviously meant the middle-aged or geriatric specimens huddled within the cages, a few defiantly wearing ancient gaudy jackets with mottoes stitched on them, forgotten anarchist slogans like Pfluger's Idle Hour Pin Barons. Bend, Finian luckily came upon an obsolescence carnival. Several thousand people swarmed across a treeless terrain in a housing project smash. Motorized workgangs stood at the development's fringe, waiting to set up new prefab Moorish Manors to replace obsolete Five-Bedroom Geneva Chateaux. Finian infiltrated the wild carnival crowd, ripping draperies and smashing furniture with feigned laughter ringing from his lips. When the carnival wore itself out near dawn and the workgangs rolled in through clouds of soyfuel smoke, Finian filched a shiny flick-blade knife from a Boy Scout chopping up a last slab of plastic plaster and lath. The Scout shrieked for the and running through a hydroponic cornfield before he could be caught. Now, dressed in his only presentable suit, last year's GS Nubby Oppenheimer, he flashed his personal identification card before the computer grid in the empty green marble rotunda of the National Record Office. Personal identity was one quantity Pushkyn couldn't revoke. Finian felt his fingers tingle as the grid scanned the card. "Investigator Smith, Bond Number PA-#, you are recognized." "Permission to examine ownership statements for corporations "What year?" buzzed the mechanical voice. "Not certain," Finian replied. "Could be as far back as # or even #." "Second tier from lowest level. Tube nine, your left." It gave Finian a weird sensation, plummeting in the airtube and realizing he was dropping eighty stories into the depths of the nation's largest insane asylum. But legal transactions had proliferated so in the past decades, as had neurotic behavior, that only a combined institution and record office was feasible for saving space and offering a less-thanfatal end for hopeless maniacs. The reading room below ground smelled of mold. Gray block walls heightened the unpleasant mood. Finian sat at the callout console. He manipulated the controls and spoke into the unit: "Let me have the volume covering GoodsService corporation for -- ah -- #, please." Several minutes passed. A door slid aside. A white male, perhaps seventy, with yellow-rimmed lackluster eyes and a lantern jaw, shuffled in and waited with docile manner. The creature wore a seedy twill uniform, anciently cut. "What do you have on any asset transfers for GoodsServices, please?" Finian asked. The elderly gentleman did not so much as blink. He hesitated only a moment as the index system in his sick skull, instilled by hypnolearning, turned over record after invisible record. Finally he said vacantly, "No asset transfers." "Nothing in the way of stock, even?" "No asset transfers, no asset transfers." "Thank you, that's all." But the man had already departed, needing no thanks. Finian turned to the console again wondering whether he could endure as many days as it might take: "Let me have the volume covering GoodsServices corporation for #." went by, relieved only by three short naps aboveground, Finian sleeping in a magnolia bush on Rolla's outskirts, before he found what he wanted. He'd worked through Goods Services from its # inception to #, interviewing assorted madmen and women who shuffled in, reeled off figures and names or lack of them, then shuffled back out. Asset transfers exhausted itself as a lead. He tried register or directorship as well as deposition of tangible real-estate sale. Useless, useless. Only then did it slip back. In some dim time in the past -- Pushkyn had mentioned it once -- public stock of GS had been called off the market. Once more he began with a different set of volumes, working his way down the years. In # he located it: All certificates dedeemed. The scent overpowered the must of the underground box like the smell of blood. He called out the volume covering Things to Come Incorporated for the same year. It was a naturalized Japanese weighing close to three hundred pounds. One month after the GS redemption came a callback by the wished the poor Japanese could appreciate tea. He'd have bought him a bucket, had he the money. Tensely his fingers flew to the console. "Two volumes, please. For # and #. Covering Flotations without tangible assets." When # arrived (a mulatto with his face fixed in a perpetual grin) Finian was disappointed. Nothing. The volume for # (a strikingly voluptuous redhaired girl who had eyes that made him think hauntingly of Dolly) was another case entirely. Finian trembled: "Give me what you have on holding companies, please." The third was it, the redhead staring through him: "Holders Limited. Ten thousand shares privately issued." Finian was on his feet, sweating, his empty belly a-churn. "Officers, please." "Chairman of the board, Alvah Pharoh." "There must be some mistake. Uh -- recheck, please. What is the name?" "Full legal name Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh." A florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed -- by heaven! Finian almost forgot to return the volume to its detention cell after he got the names of the other registered corporate executives, which meant nothing to him. But Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh most certainly did. Finian wondered, as he left the National Record building and turned his face east again, what had possessed the old man to think it safe to occasionally appear as head of both companies. Not that he appeared often, mind you. The painting must have been a slip. So too the appearance on the hydrofoiler, displeasing his underlings. Senility? Senility and a strength that had refused to completely drain away, as the dewlaps lengthened? Hungry and tattered though he was, Finian felt renewed as he threw himself into the weary tramp back to Manhattan. The flick-blade knife armed him. So did the knowledge that even the most mighty, even those who kept the plant running at all costs, including the cost of sloth, could occasionally slip. And they still had Dolly. V twilight, giant rats were squealing after blood. Quickening his step, Finian unshipped the flick-knife. Making headway was hard. This particular section of the Hudson Bluffs National Dump was a miniature mountain range of discarded but eminently serviceable -- except for the usual 'engineered-to-fail tubes and cracked cabinets -- solido sets. To the east behind the rubble the towers of Manhattan Prison thrust into the darkening sky. Finian walked rapidly away from the squee-squee of the rats. He'd glimpsed a pack of them earlier, down by the Tunnel at the far end of the hundred-thousand-acre junk tract. They were nearly three feet long from drinking the waste spewed out by the pharmaceutical factories upriver. Hoping to avoid a meeting with needly fangs, Finian was suddenly arrested by a fresh sound. A human voice, in fright. He doubled back in his tracks, cold sweat all over him. The vitaminized beasts were attacking a real person! Finian rounded a solido heap. A little wisp-haired balloon of a man in a ragged gray smock was backed against a trash peak, trying vainly to swing at three of the rats, armed only with a plastic leg broken from a solido console. The man's left trouser leg was shredded, black-shining with blood. The blood maddened the rats. They danced and snapped and squee-squeed and made the little man even more pale. Finian snatched up a solido cabinet and heaved. One of the rats yipped, turned and scuttled at Finian like a small furry tank. Shaking, Finian stood his ground. He tried to dodge the creature's leap but was not agile enough. Hellish teeth sank into his arm. Finian jammed his flick-knife into the smelly hair at the base of the rat's brain. Squirting blood like a fountain, the rat flipped over in the air and gave a deathsquee. Its comrades received solid whacks between the eyes from the other man. They turned tail and vanished. "Let me see that arm," said the man, a filthy spe'cter with moist, disappointed eyes. "Oh, not good at all. Come along. I'm a doctor. Humphrey Cove." Finian gaped as he was lead along the bluff. "A doctor? In the National Dump?" "I live here. Never mind, I'll explain later. I have a shack. Hurry, we don't want those rat toxins to run through you. I think I have immunization. Oh, I was really done for until you came along." The small doctor giggled as he hustled Finian along. Finian was not too sure he approved of his would-be savior. In spite of Dr. Cove's rather pitiful mien, there was a certain unsteadiness in his wet eyes. He clucked and talked to himself as he led the way to a ramshackle structure nearly the size of a small private dwelling, constructed solely of panels from solido consoles jerryrigged together with wire and other scrap materials. "No one comes here. No humans. Only the littersweep convoys from up and down the coast, all mech-driven. The only people I ever talk with are the poor juves in the prison. What's your name? What are you doing here?" At the hovel entrance Cove suddenly halted, stared at Finian and turned pale. "Did you come to arrest -- ?" Finian shook his head. "I came to get into Manhattan." "Via the Dumps?" Cove blinked suspiciously. "There's the Tunnel." "To use the Tunnel, you have to be a priest going in for last rites. Or a coroner or a psychiatry stuwatched the Tunnel three hours." Suddenly Finian had an impulse to trust this odd little person: "I have no pass. I'll be entering the prison illegally." "Well, then! Come inside, do come inside!" Cove having forgotten he'd given his. From behind a triple stack of ancient medical texts Cove said he'd rescued from dump piles, the doctor produced a frowsy leather-plas diagnostic kit. He clamped the analyzer to Finian's upper arm and switched on the battery. A whir. A moment later the proper medication had been pressure-sprayed through Finian's epidermal cells. Cove watched with proud glowing eyes, saying as he unstrapped the unit: "A miracle I found this kit, I'll tell you. Three years ago. The only persons who use it are the poor juves. No regular medical help for them, I'm afraid. So I've a skiff. Actually an old levacar inverted. I paddle across once a month after dark." He giggled. would psych me if I got caught. But I feel I'm doing my bit to keep the anti-obsols content in their unhappiness." Through a rift in the wall Cove's moist eyes sought the darkening towers. His voice was quickly vengeful. "I'd like to see those buildings fall to ash. Margarita, ah poor Margarita." He whipped his head around eyes almost as vicious as those of the rats. "Who are you? If this is all a clever trap to smoke me out -- " "No trap," Finian assured him. "I'll tell you about it. But do you have any food?" Cove nodded and fetched a brown gallon pharmaceutical bottle, instructing Finian to drink. "Protein and vitamins. Distill it myself from the drug sludge in the river. After you drink I may or may not give you one of the soy bars I get from the juves. When their wives bear children, it's the only way they can pay, you know. They're very proud, always pay." Cove squatted with difficulty, an oddly savage little man in the fading light. "Whether I let you have a soy bar depends on your story. If you're an enemy, I can run away and leave you to wander the Dumps at night. You won't last long with the rats, being a stranger." "There's a woman over on that island I have to find," said Finian, and launched out. As he recounted his tale, careful not to become too emotional about it, he noticed a growing excitement in Cove's damp eyes. Finally, when he had concluded, Cove leaped up. "Capital, Smith, that's capital. Let me help. Let me ferry you across." Finian smiled grudgingly. "Okay. I was prepared to swim it." "The sludge would poison you before you got halfway." "What's your stake in this, Cove? I mean, this food pays me back for the rats." Cove's little eyes were miserable. "Margarita. My wife. She died over there." out, dredged from an unhappy past: Cove had been a plastic surgeon by specialty, in the employ Salon. But a quirk in his nature made him rebel against the work, permitted him to fall prey to dangerous Galbraither notions. His wife had informed on him. Cove discovered it before the fled to the outskirts of Bangor, hiding there in the woods while a few reluctant friends supplied police combed the woods with talk-horns, threatening to psych his' wife into anti-obsol attitudes if he didn't surrender. "The filth!" Cove rocked on his haunches. "I thought it was a trick, a lever. I ran away. Margarita, poor thing, was on their side. She couldn't help what she did. She came of a respected ment. But a year later I found out. They did it anyway. Oh, they smile and smile and treat the mob kindly. But underneath, when they're opposed -- I learned Margarita had been sentenced to Manhattan. It took me another nine months to get here and find means of crossing. By that time she'd died of pneumonia. No antibiotics allowed the juves, you see. Juves are worthless. She died." Cove rocked and rocked, wildeyed. "Died, died." "Doctor Cove, will you help me get across?" "Of course, of course. But to hunt that pilot plant, a knife won't be much good. The moment you're discovered they'll set on you like wild dogs." "Then I'll need something else." Finian's brain ran rapidly with his career with GS. He recalled I : Leveranz, an unfortunate operative charged with a dangerous ing Office in Beirut. "I knew a man once who was bombed. Is there anything here --  -- ?" Finian's gesture swept the shack and dump beyond. "Do you remember enough, even if we could find an explosive source, to bomb me?" The moist eyes of Cove widened with malicious delight. "Blow them up?" Now Finian himself felt hard and cold. "I just might, if they've hurt her." "Possibly we could use the charger pack from an old solido." Cove was warming to the challenge. "Yes, we very well might. Extremely miniaturized. I'd have to check the formula but I think I have a chem text in that pile. And a military medicine volume, too." He began to tear through the books. "No anesthesia, or precious little. Perhaps I could knock you out." "What for a trigger?" Finian questioned. He showed his mouth. "I have this empty socket where I carried a camera once." Chortling, Cove scuffled among his belongings and produced a cardboard carton full of ivory chips of all sizes. "Why, that ought to work, Smith. The miserable juves aren't fluoridated either. I do quite a few extractions. Imagine a plastic surgeon doing extractions! Let's see, give me a minute to find the chem text... Dr. Humphrey Cove unearthed the text in two minutes. The rest took four days. Finian suffered excruciatingly, especially during the operation. Cove kept smacking him on the head with a solido leg when the pain grew too hideous. Finian dug his nails into his palms and thought of murmurous summer evenings on the back porch in Bala Cynwyd, and vowed in his pain-streaked mind the hurt was worth it if only he had a means to strike at them if they'd hurt Dolly, his own Dolly. When he was ready to enter the prison, his left foot flesh carried a small capsule that would detonate an explosive force when the yellowing tooth in his dead socket was turned a proper one-half turn in its clumsily hand-chiseled housing. An old trick, bombing. A relic of the Triple Play War. But it gave Finian a little more courage to go hunting death. TN AN unpleasant mist-clammy midnight, Dr. Cove paddled the improvised skiff through the crust on the Hudson, to the dilapidated pier that once belonged to the Cunard division of GS. Off down black, ruined streets distant reddish lights pulsed. Cove shook his hand fervently. "I hope you kill them. I hope you don't cooperate and kill them all." Then the skiff slithered away into the smelly broth. Finian shivered and walked. Three blocks from the pier a ragged band of thirty-odd men and women, with a couple of malnourished youngsters hanging at the fringes, slipped out of an alley and closed around him. They hissed and backed a terrified Finian against a polybrick wall. The leader of the juve pack, an oldster of eighty in tapered blue denim trousers and an antiquarian jacket spangled with fake platinum stars and buckles swaggered up and down, thumbs hooked in a six-inch belt. these days, are they, sonny?" the hostile eyes for succor. There was none. son. They step off the guard post, we swallow 'em up and chew 'em to pieces, sonnyboy." nerful!" piped a seven-year-old. "Scream a little for us, will you please?" said the aging juve with a smile, shuffling forward. Finian thought of the flickknife and whipped it out. Another sibilant hiss ran from mouth to mouth as the blade caught the distant red glow. "Look, don't kill me. See this? It's a knife, a real knife. You people can recognize a genuine useful antique twentieth-century artifact, can't you? Non-obsolescent. Non-obsolescent, see? Still works?" A touched stud and the blade retracted. Another touch and it sprang out. this?" The juve leader had an almost religious expression on his face. His hand shook as he extended it. "Uh -- could you -- leave me see?" Finian thrust it into his hand. "Yours. Listen, take it." A dark, malicious streak forced out the next words. "Could you make more? Why don't you try? Now you have a pattern. Then you wouldn't have to wait for the Then a lot of you could pay them a visit." Whispering over their icon, the juves melted into the night. VI Finian crossed Bway several blocks above a strange complex of glittering red lights. Cove had told him it was the prison recreation area, a kind of open plaza known, unpronounceably, as Timesq. Hurrying on, he reached Parkave. Several blocks south he saw a white chain working its way across the ruined thoroughfare. Approaching in the cover of shadows, he gazed up at a glistening glass structure with windows painted over. Then he looked down to the street again. The white chain came apart into individual females, doubletiming along between a cordon of chain rushed west, another east, vanishing into the building. Finian skulked, grinning mirthlessly, estimating the time to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven at night. Protected, the pilot plant nursing staff was changing shift. Cove had told Finian about the nurses, and also what might be done. He hurried back toward Bway. The recreation area was curiously deserted of juves at this hour. Finian wondered whether the flick-knife was really that much of a talisman. It must be, since he'd seen no juves after the first encounter. Cove said there were several hundred thousand on the island. Perhaps they'd gone underground to the ruined transportation tubes. Timesq featured open shops subsidized out of national taxes as a sop to the theory of rehabilitation... antiques, genuine meatburgers, bizarre novelty stores where articles were actually displayed on open counters instead of behind automated windows. But the shops were actually intended to pander to the vices of the juves. Else why would Finian have been able to slip so easily into a deserted costumer's? Half-starved, his shanks frozen by wind whistling under the ancient white uniform and the musty gray wig prickling his ears, Finian dozed the daylight hours away in an alley, blearily on the alert for juves. He saw one large pack passing a block away, several hundred on the run. They didn't see him. Otherwise he was undisturbed until night fell again. Midway between the hotel which apparently served as nurse's quarters and the ruined liquor building, Finian ducked into one of the double-timing white chains as the eleven o'clock shift changed. He hoped his male shoes wouldn't be too noticeable. But the street was dark. The hundred or so nurses were on dangerous extra-pay duty from the way they rushed along between the guard cordons, not speaking, intent only on gaining the safety of the pilot plant. As in all hospitals, lights burned low in the marble mausoleum of a lobby as the nurses fanned out to the various tube banks. Finian spied a rest room next to a boarded-up newsstand, slipped inside and waited half an hour, out of sight. Then he returned to the lobby. A late nurse was hurrying to the cordons were no more. Finian ran up behind the nurse, thinking smugly that it had been easy so far. He'd remembered to touch no doors, in case there were a sweatprint check. r T'HE nurse gave a frightened A kkk sound as Finian looped his elbow around her neck. "Where's the prototype kept, lady? Tell me or I'll crack you in half." "Tw -- twelve," came the panicky answer. "I can't breathe!" "You won't ever again unless you take me up there." "It's not my floor -- " "With lights out who'll know? There's the tube. Inside! Don't speak to anyone. Don't even raise an eyebrow, or I'll throttle you." In the deserted tube the alarmed woman, elderly, eyed Finian's wig, all too obvious in the full illumination. "What are you, some kind of degenerate?" "Yes, but not the kind you think." Finian laughed, feeling frightened and brave all at once. On twelve, isolated pools of radiance interspersed vast islands of aseptic black. Three nurses clustered at a floor desk to the right. Finian's terrified victim led him to the left. Double doors loomed at the far corridor end. Why was it so easy? Finian felt vague alarm as he shoved the old lady through the doors. The isolation, that must be it, he reasoned. The improbable isolation here on Manhattan where no investigator would dream of looking for a pilot plant. Still, Pushkyn's people had discovered it by molecular-triangulation sonics. Were they penetrating even now? In the chamber a white blur stretched naked in the warm, purified air. Finian held tight to the old nurse's arm and approached the dreaming girl. The raspberry mark stood out black in the faint gleam from the halfopen door of an attached dispensary. There encephalographs and other equipment winked, chromed and cold. "Dolly?" Finian's lips felt like shreds of paper, crinkled, dry. "Dolly, hear me?" A vacous mewing sound came from the girl. She twisted deeper in silk coverlets. "Wake her," Finian ordered. "You're a madman! I don't know how. I'm on six, neurosearch." He shoved her rudely. "There must be a chart in the dispensary." Finian had to threaten to cuff her several times before she tremblingly translated the medical Latin in the last twelve thick casebooks on the dispensary shelf. From the section marked Emergency Antidotal Procedures she read out the correct mix of ampoules from the wall-wide freezer. Finian was acutely conscious of the silence of the great dark room, the whisper of Dolly's breathing from the bed, the rush of controlled air in and out of blowers. Time was moving inexorably. What he would do when and if he wakened Dolly he was not precisely sure. All he could tell was that he must talk to her. Talking to her once was what he had worked and tramped and almost died for. The pressuredermic barrel gleamed in the light. Finian snatched it from the nurse. "If you've tricked me -- I don't take to hurting women, but I will!" "I swear to Loudermilk I didn't. Only please don't hurt me." "In there," Finian instructed. He latched the dispensary door behind her. There was no visorphone inside. He would be safe a moment longer. near the raspberry mark, and plunged. Slowly, slowly, the naked girl rolled over, lids fluttering drowsily. Finian crouched by the bed. His hand knotted up in the silken sheets. He'd turned up a rheostat to provide a gleam for judging her eyes. Doll-blue, they flew open -- Blank, unknowing. "Why, hello there." The voice tormented him. It was so squeaking, so silly. "Whatever are you doing in Dream's bedroo -- Dream's bed -- " Like a broken mechanism the voice ran down. One of her voluptuous hands crept tentatively toward his. "Finian?" "Oh, my God, my God, Dolly." He buried his head on her shoulder, almost crying. When he had controlled himself sufficiently to talk, he asked her what it was like. "Not too terrible." Dolly's voice now, not her body but for the mark, only her voice trying painfully to re-form old associations. "When we moved... Well, it was luck and a little moral compromise that snared me a chance to be the prototype." "Do you remember anything? I mean, when you're under?" "A little. A very little. Far down in my head, like the bottom of a well. I won't in a week or two, so they say." "It's wrong, Dolly! It's wrong for them to change you!" She laughed tolerantly, not a little sadly. "Those wild old ideas of yours again." " I love you, Dolly. I want you the way you were." "Impossible, Fin. My body's changed." One hand lifted the hem of the sheet. "It's part of the price for being the prototype. I nearly died when my parents made us move. I wasn't strong. I'm not much stronger now. Tjhis -- " a gesture to the room -- "when they're finished with me, in a week or two, I'll never be able to go back. The prototype can't. Other women can, the change isn't so deep when it's purchased. But in return I'll receive more money than most women ever see. I wish you hadn't come here, Fin. I'd nearly gotten over you." "Take out the contacts, Dolly. Then tell me it's all over." "Fin, I can't. They're permanent." She clutched his arm. "If you're caught here -- " Rapidly he told her of what he'd learned at the National Record Office. "Some kind of conspiracy, Dolly. Awful, awful. Hell, I'm not bright enough to fathom what it means. Maybe Pop could have. I'm just certain I want you out before this crazy doublecross blows right up." Dolly hesitated. "I'm not sure. My mind's full of someone else -- " "Don't let him frighten you," said a voice. "He's done anyway." Caught, heartbeat wild and racing, Finian turne'd as all the lights blazed up in the room. Dolly shrieked and burrowed under the sheet. Outside the closing panel Finian glimpsed a phalanx of armed side moved swiftly toward him, Sprool and Pushkyn shoulder to shoulder, and shuffling behind, Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh with his dewlaps jiggling and his blue, vaguely crossed eyes filled with fright. " jerko," Pushkyn offered. "Be quiet." Sprool breathed tightly, thinking hard. "No one listens to me," Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh whined. "No one listens any more even though I'm the chief executive of Holders." "You simpleton!" Sprool spun on him, barely able to control his fury. "You incredible wreck! I wish Pushkyn and I had retired you to a senility farm long ago. If your addled brain could have understood it wasn't safe for you to go around making public appearances! Having your portrait painted!" "Holders is my firm!" "It was. Before your brains turned to mashed potatoes," said Pushkyn. "You wouldn't have penetrated the pilot plant, would you, Pushkyn?" Finian was suddenly enraged, and beginning to understand. "Even though you knew where it was." Pushkyn sneered. "Whaddya v think, put sand in the wheels? Always the funny finko, huh? If it wasn't for me. Sprool and a few others on both sides, running the show while this old bonebag sits on the Holders board -- " "He means to say," Sprool put in,  somewhat sadly, "we have done our best to keep the plant running. You, Fin, have done your best to stop it." "How did you find me?" Finian demanded. Sprool shrugged. "See-ray." "I never touched a doorknob anyplace!" "There is a false socket in your head. Every person entering or leaving this plant is rayed for dental coding. Yours failed to check. It took a few minutes to collect Pushkyn. And the old man. I want him to see the fruits of his senility. We vertijetted." "Ah, damn," said Finian, impotently. "I very nearly admire you," Sprool told him. "In proper circumstances you might have filled a responsible position with Holders. Do you realize what a difficult and exciting enterprise it is to run this world, Fin?" "I realize you sold everybody a bill of goods, kept them soft, sucked their guts out." "Would you rather have howling?" "Yes! Yes. I mean, no. I don't want people to starve, but this way -- I'd rather have some guts in life. Trouble and guts." "Trouble we have, Finian," Sprool returned with a sigh. "Do you know what we saw as we came over the Tunnel in the The juves are breaking out, Fin, actually breaking out. Most of them are dead, of course. But several hundred escaped. There's a pitched battle going on in Jersey this minute. The juves will die as soon as I give the mobilization order. A few may get away and start in other cities, inciting to riot, pulling down what we've built so carefully to insure everyGS are alerting industrial guards trained for trouble such as this. We'll also have to apply considmove. But we'll win. We gave up war long ago, Fin. We won't permit another to start." "The creeps had knives!" Pushkyn bellowed. "Real knives! You stupid, did you -- ?" "I think so," Finian looked up. "I hope so." sympathetically. "Fin, Fin. You seem to think we're evil men. We're not. We're businessmen. We didn't begin the system. We only inherited it. But you've never understood, have you? Always, I think, you resented us as a result of what your father taught you." Sprool was white now, impassioned. "We had no choice! Either we maintained calm or -- " "You changed Dolly! I don't understand your theories beyond that!" Sprool outshouted him: "The alternative to a rocked boat is chaos!" "There's got to be another way." "Go to the guard post! See the mangled bodies and then say that." "I don't care, Sprool! I'm taking Dolly off the island." "Creep, you won't set one foot from here." Finian peeled his lips back. "Look at the tooth, Lyman. You know what was there before." He waggled his left foot. "I'm bombed. The tooth will set it off. Either instantaneously or on timed delay. Stop me from walking out with Dolly and find out." "Salinghams wanted my portrait -- " the florid old gentleman began. "Bluffer! Lousy, rotten bluffer!" Screaming, Pushkyn rushed forward. Sprool's hand flew up. "Don't! I believe him." . For the first time Finian Smith saw Sprool perspiring. "He's the kind to do it, Pushkyn. I don't want slaughter here, too. So you keep quiet and remember who's senior troubleshooter." Cold, shrewd lights glittered in Sprool's eyes. "Fin, what guarantee can you offer if we release this woman to you, allow her to go with you under duress?" "No." Heads swung, startled. Dolly went on slowly: "I think -- I want -- " A disgusted sigh came from Sprool's lips. He controlled himself. "Very well, Fin. If we permit you to leave, what guarantees do you offer that you'll cause no further trouble? We'll have our hands full quelling the disturbances the juves will start. It hasn't gotten too far out of hand yet. But if I don't give the mobilization order, it could go nationwide. Even to other countries. I have to be around to stop it. It can be done, even though I don't much like removing the velvet glove." "Guarantees?" said Finian. "My word. That's all." Sprool walked quickly to the door and opened it. The threatening knot of industrial police still waited in the shadows. Finian bundled Dolly into the bedclothes and moved her toward the entrance as Sprool said, "Let him pass." "I won't stand for it!" Pushkyn leaped forward and landed a solid one that rocked Finian on his heels. Then Sprool snapped his the foam-lipped Pushkyn into the dispensary. T rembling, suddenly cold and trembling clear through, Finian made an effort to keep his face an inflexible mask as he guided Dolly through the aisle between the guards. He hoped she wouldn't question him, wouldn't relent until they were free. Sick fear engulfed him as he touched the tip of his tongue gingerly to the fake tooth while the tube shot down. Dolly leaned on his shoulder, her hair warm. She made frightened mewing sounds. Finian shepherded her into the night, began the long, terrible walk to the Tunnel, hoping she wouldn't come to her senses until they reached the opposite shore. In time she'd be herself again. That much he could give her even if his search had been all for nothing. entrance was afire. Juve corpses sprawled everywhere. Midway along the empty tunnel Finian halted. A figure capered toward them. "Capital, oh, marvelous!" Humphrey Cove trilled, stepping over head. "Three hundred of them got out, running for their lives. I think it will spread this time. The local camps, the jobless -- full-scale! There are so many really lovely pockets of resistance!" "Shut up and walk." Finian pushed Cove back toward the Jersey side. "What in heaven's name is wrong with you, Smith?" "Armed." Finian whispered it so Dolly couldn't hear. "A guy hit me, I'm armed. Can't have more than half an hour before I blow. Cove, don't you say anything. When we're outside, you take care of this girl, understand? Watch out for her until she recovers. She's free of them, I bought her that much." phone in a lighted kiosk at the was being scheduled for Philadelphia. Juve gangs were forming in the streets there, hand-made knives were appearing. The mask was off. Full mobilization of compolice was being ordered by Sprool. Cove clapped his hands. Rain was falling as Finian led Dolly, out of the Tunnel. Three were homing on Manhattan, agleam with emergency lights. Dolly murmured. Finian lifted her chin and stared into the dollblue eyes a moment, conscious of the bomb working, working toward detonation in the flesh of his foot. He couldn't even feel the death seed. Wasn't that a joke? "Cove'll take care of you," Finian said. He kissed her. Bewildered, Dolly called for him as he turned and walked rapidly away, not seeing the rain or the littered bodies. He had gone but a dozen steps when something felled him and brought the dark. first sensation. Then a warmth of flesh. Dolly bending over him. Through a slatted section of solido panel he saw vertijets winking over Manhattan. Finian wriggled, then struggled up, screaming: "My leg... what happened?" Crying, Dolly pressed him down. "Cove did it. Cove operated. He hates them, Fin. He hates He said you ought to live, even with -- I wish my mind would straighten out. I can't say things all right yet." Finian fought the terror, the dull-fire agony. "Where is he?" Dolly shuddered. "He packed it in a valise and ran for the Tunnel." In a burst of fire the center of Manhattan Prison blew up. When the reverberations and Dolly's screams had stopped, the two of them clung together, listening to the hysterical automatic sirens at both ends of the island wailing as they hadn't wailed since the Triple Play War. Confused, hurting, glad of life, guilty and fearsomely glad and yet sickened by the suddenly-swarming sky full of vertijets, their flaring emergency lights promising violence, violence across the land, violence maybe everywhere, Finian clutched the girl to his shoulder and stared at the inferno of the prison island. "My God, I think I started a war, Dolly. Sprool said -- I didn't mean to start -- " The words tore out of him, almost animal: "Is this the only way?" Dolly sobbed. There wasn't any other answer, except the sirens multiplying all around in the disrupted night.      Next issue's cover is a hot and lively spectacle by Dember. When you see it your first thought is likely to be, "Mercury?", and your second, "no, of course not -- not with an atmosphere!" Well, you shouldn't take anything for granted. It is Mercury. For the purposes of this story, anyway, it does have an atmosphere -- and if you want to know how come, we refer you to the story itself. The title is Hot Planet. The author is one who isn't in the habit of making technical blunders... and who, by the way, also wrote The Green World for the current issue of our companion magazine, f. His name: Hal Clement. This marks his return to Galaxy after an absence of more than a decade... one more milestone in our endless endeavor to bring back the best established writers and to locate the most promising new ones. Naturally there's more in the issue -- Willy Ley; the conclusion of Cliff Simak's fine Here Gather the Stars... and a little "non-fact" item that we think you'll like. The title is The Great Nebraska Sea. It isn't fact today -- but who knows whether it will be by the time our August issue goes on sale?if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field -- Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy per # issues ' foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues  # Name City Address Zone State r its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the book, you'll find it hard to believe that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. # Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Please #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, The Original Edition -- Complete ! Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #! Plus Postage # Name. Address. City...State. I Enclose. lik Ha! Clement Robert SHverbergD M """Learthbound  S Lester Del Rey  and Clifford D Simak #C -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field -- Bester, Fleinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues # Name City... Address Zone. galaxy by Hal Clement by Robert P. Hoskins by Lester del Rey by Robert Silverberg by Bill Doede by Allen Danzig by Clifford D. Simak by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Theodore Sturgeon Editor Science Editor Publisher Production Manager Art Director Advertising bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices; #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #( per copy. Subscription; (# copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. trial design course a few years ago? It was a simple term project, designing cars, clothes, houses and so on for an export market... except that the export market was a little remote, being a planet of the star Arcturus, and the customers were three-legged, light-framed, non-human -- and imaginary. Well, they've done it again. This time it's M.I.T.'s computer section that is borrowing from the science-fiction magazines. We dropped in not long ago to see what was going on and had the unanticipated pleasure of fighting a full-fledged space war. The hardware behind the game is a computer, programmed with all it needs to know about space navigation, rocket speeds, etc., so that when you operate a simple control you can send a little rocket ship across a cathode-screen readout. Swing your control to the left and the ship swerves to the left. Push the acceleration button and it zooms ahead. Put all controls neutral and it drifts. Fun? Sure, but that's only the beginning. Feed in a few more instructions and your rocket becomes a battleship equipped with a dozen space torpedoes. You can fire them at will, and whatever you hit with them on the screen goes up in a satisfying, soundless pyrotechnic flare. Another tape puts another ship on the screen, with its own controls and its own torpedoes. Go ahead: You be Dick Seaton and we'll be the Fenachrone, and may the best space warrior win... Want more excitement? Add another tape, and one of your controls will shoot you into hyperspace at a critical moment. Your ship disappears from the tube, and reappears, a random interval later, at a random point in space... It's a lovely game! -- And, no doubt, an educational one for the future computer designers who are thus learning what the darn things are capable of. But educational or not, we enjoyed it. Somebody up there likes us! Secrets entrusted to a few be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teaching. Write today for a free copy of me book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe E.Q.F. I Scribe E.Q.F. I I San Jose, California ,  Please send me the free book. The Mastery ' I ofUfe, which explains how I may learn to ! I use my faculties and powers of mind. , ' I I Name i I ! Address ' ' I Cit y I Mercury had no atmosphere -- everyone knew that. Why was it developing one now? I turned the Albireo's landing into a disaster instead of a mathematical exercise was still playing tunes about the fins and landing legs as Schlossberg made his way down to Deck Five. The noise didn't bother him particularly, though the endless seismic tremors made him dislike the ladders. But just now he was able to ignore both. He was curious -- though not hopeful. "Is there anything at all obvious on the last sets of tapes, Joe?" Mardikian, the geophysicist, shrugged. "Just what you'd expect... on a planet which has at least one quake in each fifty-milesquare area every five minutes. You know yourself we had a nice seismic program set up, but when we touched down we found we couldn't carry it out. We've done our best with the natural tremors -- incidentally stealing most of the record tapes the other projects would have used. We have a lot of nice information for the computers back home; but it will take all of them to make any sense out of it." Schlossberg nodded; the words had not been necessary. His astronomical program had been one of those sabotaged by the transfer of tapes to the seismic survey. "I just hoped," he said. "We each have an idea why Mercury developed an atmosphere during the last few decades, but I guess the high school kids on Earth will know whether it's right before we do. I'm resigned to living in a chess-type universe -- few and simple rules, but infinite combinations of them. But it would be nice to know an answer sometime." "So it would. As a matter of fact, I need to know a couple right now. From you. How close to finished are the other programs -- or what's left of them?" "I'm all set," replied Schlossberg. "I have a couple of instruments still monitoring the sun just in case, but everything in the revised program is on tape." "Good. Tom, any use asking you?" The biologist grimaced. "I've been shown two hundred and sixteen different samples of rock and dust. I hae examined in detail twelve crystal growths which looked vaguely like vegetation. Nothing was alive or contained living things by any standards I could conscientiously set." Mardikian's gesture might have meant sympathy. "Camille?" "I may as well stop now as any time. I'll never be through. Tape didn't make much difference to me, but I wish I knew what weight of specimens I could take home." "Eileen?" Mardikian's glance at the stratigrapher took the place of the actual question. "Cam speaks for me, except that I could have used any more tape you could have spared. What I have is gone." "All right, that leaves me, the tape-thief. The last spools are in the seismographs now, and will start running out in seventeen hours. The tractors will start out on their last rounds in sixteen, and should be back in roughly a week. Will, does that give you enough to figure the weights we rockhounds can have on the return trip?" ded. "Close enough. There really hasn't been much question since it became evident we'd find nothing for the mass tanks here. I'll have a really precise check in an hour, but I can tell right now that you have about one and a half metric tons to split up among the three of you. "Ideal departure time is three hundred ten hours away, as you all know. We can stay here until then, or go into a parking-andsurvey orbit at almost any time before then. You have all the survey you need, I should think, from the other time. But suit yourselves." "I'd just as soon be space-sick as seasick," remarked Camille Burkett. "I still hate to think that the entire planet is as shivery as the spot we picked." Willard Rowson smiled. "You researchers told me where to land after ten days in orbit mapping this rockball. I set you just where you asked. If you'd found even five tons of juice we could use in the reaction tanks I could still take you to another one  -- if you could agree which one. I hate to say 'Don't blame me,' but I can't think of anything else that fits." "So we sit until the last of the tractors is back with the precious seismo tapes, playing battleship while our back teeth are being shaken out by earthquakes -- excuse the word. What a thrill! Glorious adventure!" Zaino, the communications specialist who had been out of a job almost constantly since the landing, spoke sourly. The captain was the only one who saw fit to answer. "If you want adventure, you made a mistake exploring space. The only space adventures I've heard of are second-hand stories built on guesswork; the people who really had them weren't around to tell about it. Unless Dr. Marini discovers a set of Mercurian monsters at the last minute and they invade the ship or cut off one of the tractors, I'm afraid you'll have to do without adventures." Zaino grimaced. "That sounds funny coming from a spaceman. Captain. I didn't really mean adventure, though; all I want is something to do besides betting whether the next quake will come in one minute or five. I haven't even had to fix a suit-radio since we touched down. How about my going out with one of the tractors on this last trip, at least?" "It's all right with me," replied Rowson, "but Dr. Mardikian runs the professional part of this operation. I require that Spurr, Trackman, Hargedon and Aiello go as drivers, since without them even a minor mechanical problem would be more than an adventure. As I recall it. Dr. Harmon, Dr. Schlossberg, Dr. Marini and Dr. Mardikian are scheduled to go; but if any one of them is place, I certainly don't mind." The radioman looked around hopefully. The geologists and the biologist shook their heads negatively, firmly and unanimously; but the astronomer pondered for a moment. Zaino watched tensely. "It may be all right," Schlossberg said at last. "What I want to get is a set of wind, gas pressure, gas temperature and gas composition measures around the route. I didn't expect to be more meteorologist than astronomer when we left Earth, and didn't have exactly the right equipment. Hargedon and Aiello helped me improvise some, and this is the first chance to use it on Darkside. If you can learn what has to be done with it before starting time, though, you are welcome to my place." to his feet fast enough to leave the deck in Mercury's feeble gravity. "Lead me to it. Doc. I guess I can learn to read a home-made weathervane!" "Is that merely bragging, or a challenge?" drawled a voice which had not previously joined the discussion. Zaino flushed a bit. "Sorry, Luigi," he said hastily. "I didn't mean it just that way. But I still think I can run the stuff." "Likely enough," Aiello replied. grudges. Matter of fact, I'm even a little uneasy about having the girls along, though I'm no misogynist." "Girls? They're not -- " "There goes your foot again. Even Harmon is about ten years older than you, I suppose. But they're girls to me. What's more important, they no doubt think of themselves as girls." "Even Dr. Burkett? That is -- I mean -- " "Even Dr. Burkett. Here, get into your suit. And maybe you'd better take out the mike. It'll be enough if you can listen for the next hour or two." Zaino made no answer, suspecting with some justice that anything he said would be wrong. Each made final checks on the other's suit; then they descended one more level to the airlock. This occupied part of the same deck as the fusion plants, below the wings and reaction mass tanks but above the main engine. Its "Remember though, it wasn't made just for talking into." Schlossberg, now on his feet, cut in quickly. "Come on, Arnie. We'll have to suit up to see the equipment; it's outside." He shepherded the radioman to the hatch at one side of the deck and shooed him down toward the engine and air lock levels. Both were silent for some moments; but safely out of earshot of Deck Five the younger man looked up and spoke. "You needn't push. Doc. I wasn't going to make anything of it. Luigi was right, and I asked for it." The astronomer slowed a bit in his descent. "I wasn't really worried," he replied, "but we have several months yet before we can get away from each other, and I don't like talk that could set up outer door was just barely big enough to admit a spacesuited person. Even with the low air pressure carried by spaceships, a large door area meant large total force on jamb, hinges and locks. It opened onto a small balcony from which a ladder led to the ground. The two men paused on the balcony to look over the landscape. This hadn't changed noticeably since the last time either had been out, though there might have been some small difference in the volcanic cones a couple of miles away to the northeast. The furrows down the sides of these, which looked as though they had been cut by water but were actually bone-dry ash slides, were always undergoing alteration as gas from below kept blowing fresh scoria fragments out of the craters. fragments of rock which thrust upward from the plain beyond and to both sides of the cones -- seemed dead as ever. The level surface between the Albireo and the cones was more interesting. Mardikian and Schlossberg believed it to be a lava sheet dating from early in Mercury's history, when more volatile substances still existed in the surface rocks to cut down their viscosity when molten. They supposed that much -- perhaps most -- of the surface around the "twilight" belt had been flooded by this very liquid lava, which had cooled to a smoother surface than most Earthly lava flows. How long it had stayed cool they didn't guess. But both men felt sure that Mercury must have periodic upheavals as heat accumulated inside it -- heat coming not from radioactivity but from tidal energy. Mercury's orbit is lighly eccentric. At perihelion, tidal force tries to pull it apart along the planet-to-sun line, while at aphelion the tidal force is less and the little world's own gravity tries to bring it back to a spherical shape. The real change in form is not great, but a large force working through even a small amount of distance can mean a good deal of energy. If the energy can't leak out -- and Mercury's rocks conduct heat no better than those of Earth -- the temperature must rise. Sooner or later, the men argued, deeply buried rock must fuse to magma. Its liquefaction would let the bulk of the planet give farther under tidal stress, so heat would be generated even faster. Eventually a girdle of magma would have to form far below the crust all around the twilight strip, where the tidal strain would be greatest. Sooner or later this would melt its way to the surface, giving the zone a period of intense volcanic activity and, incidentally, giving the planet a temporary atmosphere. The idea was reasonable. It had, the astronomer admitted, been suggested long before to account for supposed vulcanism on the moon. It justified the careful examination that Schlossberg and Zaino gave the plain before they descended the ladder; for it made reasonable the occasional changes which were observed to occur in the pattern of cracks weaving over its surface. No one was certain just how permanent the local surface was -- though no one could really justify feeling safer on board the Albireo than outside on the lava. If anything really drastic happened, the ship would be no protection. The sun, hanging just above the horizon slightly to the Aatcher's right, cast long shadows which made the cracks stand out clearly; as far as either man could see, nothing had changed recently. They descended the ladder carefully -- even the best designed spacesuits are somewhat vulnerable -- and made their way to the spot where the tractors were parked. A sheet-metal fence a dozen feet high and four times as long provided shade, which was more than a luxury this close to the sun. The tractors were parked in this shadow, and beside and between them were piles of equipment and specimens. The apparatus Schlossberg had devised was beside the tractor at the north end of the line, just inside the shaded area. It was still just inside the shade when they finished, four hours later. Hargedon had joined them during the final hour and helped pack the equipment in the tractor he was to drive. Zaino had had no trouble in learning to make the observations Schlossberg wanted, and the youngster was almost unbearably cocky. Schlossberg hoped, as they returned to the Albireo, that no one would murder the communications expert in the next twelve hours. There would be nothing to worry about after the trip started; Hargedon was quite able to keep anyone in his place without being nasty about it. If Zaino had been going with Aiello or Harmon -- but he wasn't, and it was pointless to dream up trouble. And no trouble developed all by itself. II  but still reasonably popular when the first of the tractors set out, carrying Eileen Harmon and Eric Trackman, the Albireo's nuclear engineer. It started more than an hour before the others, since the "done" or not, took extra time. The tractor hummed off to the south, since both Darkside routes required a long detour to pass the chasm to the west. Routes had been worked out from the stereophotos taken during the orbital survey. Even Darkside had been covered fairly well with Uniquantum film under Venus light. The Harmon-Trackman vehicle was well out of sight when Mardikian and Aiello started out on one of the Brightside routes, and a few minutes later Marini set out on the other with the spacesuit technician, Mary Spurr, driving. Both vehicles disappeared quickly into a valley to the northeast, between the ash cones and a thousand-foot spine which rose just south of them. All the tractors were in good radio contact; Zaino made sure of that before he abandoned the radio watch to Rowson, suited up and joined Hargedon at the remaining one. They climbed in, and Hargedon set it in motion. At about the same time, the first tractor came into view again, now traveling north on the farther side of the chasm. Hargedon took this as evidence that the route thus far was unchanged, and kicked in highest speed. The cabin was pretty cramped, even though some of the equipment had been attached outside. The men could not expect much comfort for the next week. Hargedon was used to the trips, however. He disapproved on principle of people who complained about minor inconveniences such as having to sleep in spacesuits; fortunately, Zaino's interest and excitement overrode any thought he might have had about discomfort. This lasted through the time they spent doubling the vast crack in Mercury's crust, driving on a little to the north of the ship on the other side and then turning west toward the dark hemisphere. The route was identical to that of Harmon's machine for some time, though no trace of its passage showed on the hard surface. Then Hargedon angled off toward the southwest. He had driven this run often enough to know it well even without the markers which had been set out with the seismographs. The photographic maps were also aboard. With them, even Zaino had no trouble keeping track of their progress while they remained in sunlight. However, the sun sank as they traveled west. In two hours its lower rim would have been on the horizon, had they been able to see the horizon; as it was, more of the "sea level" lava plain was in shadow than not even near the ship, and their route now lay in semi-darkness. The light came from peaks projecting into the sunlight, from scattered sky-light which was growing rapidly fainter and from the brighter celestial objects such as Earth. Even with the tractor's lights it was getting harder to spot crevasses and seismometer markers. Zaino quickly found the fun wearing off... though his pride made him cover this fact as best he could. If Hargedon saw this, he said nothing. He set Zaino to picking up every other instrument, as any partner would have, making no allowance for the work the youngster was doing for Schlossberg. This might, of course, have had the purpose of keeping the radioman too busy to think about discomfort. Or it might merely have been Hargedon's idea of normal procedure. Whatever the cause, Zaino got little chance to use the radio once they had driven into the darkness. He managed only one or two brief talks with those left at the ship. helped his morale, since they certainly must have given the impression that nothing was going on in the ship while at least he had something to do in the tractor. However, this state of affairs did not last. Before the vehicle was four hours out of sight of the Albireo, a broadcast by Camille Burkett reached them. The mineralogist's voice contained at least as much professional enthusiasm as alarm, but everyone listening must have thought promptly of the dubious stability of Mercury's crust. The call was intended for her fellow geologists Mardikian and Harmon. But it interested Zaino at least as much. "Joe! Eileen! There's a column of what looks like black smoke rising over Northeast Spur. It can't be a real fire, of course; I can't see its point of origin, but if it's the convection current it seems to be the source must be pretty hot. It's the closest thing to a genuine volcano I've seen since we arrived; it's certainly not another of those ash mounds. I should think you'd still be close enough to make it out, Joe. Can you see anything?" The reply from Mardikian's tractor was inaudible to Zaino and Hargedon, but Burkett's answer made its general tenor plain. "I hadn't thought of that. Yes, I'd say it was pretty close to the Brightside route. It wouldn't be practical for you to stop your run now to come back to see. You couldn't do much about it anyway. I could go out to have a look and then report to you. If the way back is blocked there'll be plenty of time to work out another." Hargedon and Zaino passed questioning glances at each other during the shorter pause that followed. "I know there aren't," the voice then went on, responding to the words they could not hear, "but it's only two or three miles, I'd say. Two to the spur and not much farther to where I could see the other side. Enough of the way is in shade so I could make it in a suit easily enough. I can't see calling back either of the darkside tractors. Their work is just as important as the rest -- anyway, Eileen is probably out of range. She hasn't answered yet." Another pause. "That's true. Still, it would mean sacrificing that set of seismic records -- no, wait. We could go out later for those. And Mel could take his own weather measures on the later trip. There's plenty of time!" Pause, longer this time. "You're right, of course. I just wanted to get an early look at this volcano, if it is one. We'll let the others finish their runs, and when you get back you can check the thing from the other side yourself. If it is blocking your way there's time to find an alternate route. We could be doing that from the maps in the meantime, just in case." Zaino looked again at his companion. "Isn't that just my luck!" he exclaimed. "I jump at the first chance to get away from being bored to death. The minute I'm safely away, the only interesting thing of the whole operation happens -- back at the ship!" "Who asked to come on this trip?" "Oh, I'm not blaming anyone but myself. If I'd stayed back there the volcano would have popped out here somewhere, or else waited until we were gone." "If it is a volcano. Dr. Burkett didn't seem quite sure." "No, and I'll bet a nickel she's suiting up right now to go out and see. I hope she comes back with something while we're still near enough to hear about it." Hargedon shrugged. "I suppose it was also just your luck that sent you on a Darkside trip? You know the radio stuff. You knew we couldn't reach as far this way with the radios. Didn't you think of that in advance?" "I didn't think of it, any more than you would have. It was bad luck, but I'm not grousing about it. Let's get on with this job." Hargedon nodded with approval, and possibly with some surprise, and the tractor hummed on its way. The darkness deepened around the patches of lava shown by the driving lights; the sky darkened toward a midnight hue, with stars showing ever brighter through it; and radio reception from the AIbireo began to get spotty. Gas density at the ion layer was high enough so that recombination of molecules with their radiationfreed electrons was rapid. Only occasional streamers of ionized gas reached far over Darkside. As these thinned out, so did radio reception. Camille Burkett's next broadcast came through very poorly. There was enough in it, however, to seize the attention of the two men in the tractor.  right, and dangerous. It's the... thing I ever saw... kinds of lava from what looks like... same vent. There's high viscosity stuff building a spatter cone to end all spatter cones, and some very thin fluid from somewhere at the bottom. The flow has already blocked the valley used by the Brightside routes and is coming along it. A new return route will have to be found for the tractors that... was spreading fast when I saw it. I can't tell how much will come. But unless it stops there's nothing at all to keep the flow away from the ship. It isn't coming fast, but it's coming. I'd advise all tractors to turn back. Captain Rowson reminds me that only one takeoff is possible. If we leave this site, we're committed to leaving Mercury. Arnie and Ren, do you hear me?" Zaino responded at once. "We got most of it. Doctor. Do you really think the ship is in danger?" "I don't know. I can only say that if this flow continues the ship will have to leave, because this area will sooner or later be covered. I caii't guess how likely... check further to get some sort of estimate. It's different from any Earthly lava source -- maybe you heard -- should try to get Eileen and Eric back, too. I can't raise them. I suppose they're well out from under the ion layer by now. Maybe you're close enough to them to catch them with diffracted waves. Try, anyway. Whether you can raise them or not you'd better start back yourself." Hargedon cut in at this point. "What does Dr. Mardikian say about that? We still have most of the seismometers on this route to visit." "I think Captain Rowson has the deciding word here, but if it helps your decision Dr. Mardikian has already started back. He hasn't finished his route, either. So hop back here, Ren. And Arnie, put that technical skill you haven't had to use yet to work raising Eileen and Eric." "What I can do, I will," replied Zaino, "but you'd better tape a recall message and keep it going out on. Let's see -- band F." "All right. I'll be ready to check the volcano as soon as you get back. How long?" "Seven hours -- maybe six and a half," replied Hargedon. "We have to be careful." "Very well. Stay outside when you arrive; I'll want to go right out in the tractor to get a closer look." She cut off. "And that came through clearly enough!" remarked Hargedon as he swung the tractor around. "I've been awake for fourteen hours, driving off and on for ten of them; I'm about to drive for another six; and then I'm to stand by for more." "Would you like me to do some of the driving?" asked Zaino. "I guess you'll have to, whether I like it or not," was the rather lukewarm reply. "I'll keep on for awhile, though -- until we're back in better light. You get at your radio job." Ill  hour he juggled from one band to another. Once he had Hargedon stop while he went out to attach a makeshift antenna which, he hoped, would change his output from broadcast to some sort of beam; after this he kept probing the sky with the "beam," first listening to the Albireo's broadcast in an effort to find projecting wisps of ionosphere and then, whenever he thought he had one, switching on his transmitter and driving his own message at it. Not once did he complain about lack of equipment or remark how much better he could do once he was back at the ship. Hargedon's silence began to carry an undercurrent of approval not usual in people who spent much time with Zaino. The technician made no further reference to the suggestion of switching drivers. They came in sight of the Albireo and doubled the chasm with Hargedon still at the wheel, Zaino still at his radio and both of them still uncertain whether any of the calls had gotten through. Both had to admit, even before they could see the ship, that Burkett had had a right to be impressed. The smoke column showed starkly against the sky, blowing back over the tractor and blocking the sunlight which would otherwise have glared into the driver's eyes. Fine particles fell from it in a steady shower; looking back, the men could see tracks left by their vehicle in the deposit which had already fallen. As they approached the ship the dark pillar grew denser and narrower, while the particles raining from it became coarser. In some places the ash was drifting into fairly deep piles, giving Hargedon some anxiety about possible concealed cracks. The last part of the trip, along the edge of the great chasm and around its end, was really dangerous; cracks running from its sides were definitely spreading. The two men reached the Albireo later than Hargedon had promised, and found Burkett waiting impatiently with a pile of apparatus beside her. She didn't wait for them to get out before starting to organize. "There isn't much here. We'll take off just enough of what you're carrying to make room for this. No -- wait. I'll have to check some of your equipment; I'rh going to need one of Milt Schlossberg's gadget's, I think, so leave that on. We'll take -- " "Excuse me, Doctor," cut in Hargedon. "Our suits need servicing, or at least mine will if you want me to drive you. Perhaps Arnie can help you load for a while, if you don't think it's too important for him to get at the radio -- " "Of course. Excuse me. I should have had someone out here to help me with this. You two go on in. Ren, please get back as soon as you can. I can do the work here; none of this stuff is very heavy." Zaino hesitated as he swung out of the cab. True, there wasn't too much to be moved, and it wasn't very heavy in Mercury's gravity, and he really should be at the radio; but the thirty-nineyear-old mineralogist was a middle-aged lady by his standards, and shouldn't be allowed to carry heavy packages... "Get along, Arnie!" the middleaged lady interrupted this train of thought. "Eric and Eileen are getting farther away and harder to reach every second you dawdle!" help looking northeast as he went rather than where he was going. The towering menace in that direction would have claimed anyone's attention. The pillar of sable ash was rising straighter, as though the wind were having less effect on it. An equally black cone had risen into sight beyond Northeast Spur -- a cone that must have grown to some two thousand feet in roughly ten hours. It had far steeper sides than the cinder mounds near it; it couldn't be made of the same loose ash. Perhaps it consisted of half-melted particles which were fusing together as they fell -- that might be what Burkett had meant by "spatter-cone." Still, if that were the case, the material fountaining from the cone's top should be lighting the plain with its incandescence rather than casting an inky shadow for its entire height. Well, that was a problem for the geologists; Zaino climbed aboard and settled to his task. The trouble was that he could do very little more here than he could in the tractor. He could have improvised longer-wave transmitting coils whose radiations would have diffracted a little more effectively beyond the horizon, but the receiver on the missing vehicle would not have detected them. He had more power at his disposal, but could only beam it into empty space with his better antennae. He had better equipment for locating any projecting wisps of charged gaS which might reflect his waves, but he was already located under a solid roof of the stuff -- the Albireo was technically on Brightside. Bouncing his beam from this layer still didn't give him the range he needed, as he had found both by calculation and trial. What he really needed was a relay satellite. The target was simply too far around Mercury's sharp curve by now for anything less. Zaino's final gesture was to set his transmission beam on the lowest frequency the tractor would pick up, aim it as close to the vehicle's direction as he could calculate from map and itinerary and set the recorded return message going. He told Rowson as much. "Can't think of ansdhing else?" the captain asked. "Well, neither can I, but of course it's not my field. I'd give a year's pay if I could. How long before they should be back in range?" "About four days. A hundred hours, give or take a few. They'll be heading back anyway by that time." "Of course. Well, keep trying." "I am -- or rather, the equipment is. I don't see what else I can do unless a really bright idea should suddenly sprout. Is there anywhere else I could be useful? I'm as likely to have ideas working as just sitting." "We can keep you busy, all right. But how about taking a transmitter up one of those mountains? That would get your wave farther." "Not as far as it's going already. I'm bouncing it off the ion layer, which is higher than any mountain we've seen on Mercury even if it's nowhere near as high as Earth's." "Hmph. All right." "I could help Ren and Dr. Burkett. I could hang on outside the tractor -- " "They've already gone. You'd better call them, though, and keep a log of what they do." "All right." Zaino turned back to his board and with no trouble raised the tractor carrying Hargedon and the mineralogist. The latter had been trying to call the Albireo and had some acid comments about radio operators who slept on the job. and I've been trying to get the Darkside team," he pointed out. "Have you found anything new about this lava flood?" "Flow, not flood," corrected the professional automatically. "We're not in sight of it yet. We've just rounded the corner that takes us out of your sight. It's over a mile yet, and a couple of more corners, before we get to the spot where I left it. Of course, it will be closer than that by now. It was spreading at perhaps a hundred yards an hour then. That's one figure we must refine... Of course. I'll try to get samples, too. I wish there were some way to get samples of the central cone. The whole thing is the queerest volcano I've ever heard of. Have you gotten Eileen started back?" "Not as far as I can tell. As with your cone samples, there are practical difficulties," replied Zaino. "I haven't quit yet, though." "I should think not. If some of us were paid by the idea we'd be pretty poor, but the perspiration part of genius is open to all of us." "You mean I should charge a bonus for getting this call through?" retorted the operator. Whatever Burkett's reply to this might have been was never learned; her attention was diverted at that point. "We've just come in sight of the flow. It's about five hundred yards ahead. We'll get as close as seems safe, and I'll try to make sure whether it's really lava or just mud." "Mud? Is that possible? I thought there wasn't -- couldn't be -- any water on this planet!" "It is, and there probably isn't. The liquid phase of mud doesn't have to be water, even though it usually is on Earth. Here, for example, it might conceivably be sulfur." "But if it's just mud, it wouldn't hurt the ship, would it?" "Probably not." "Then why all this fuss about getting the tractors back in a hurry?" reminded him of another lady in his past, who had kept him after school for drawing pictures in math class. "Because in my judgment the flow is far more likely to be lava than mud, and if I must be wrong I'd rather my error were one that left us alive. I have no time at the moment to explain the basis of my judgment. I will be reporting our activities quite steadily from now on, and would prefer that you not interrupt unless a serious emergency demands it, or you get a call from Eileen. "We are about three hundred yards away now. The front is moving about as fast as before, which suggests that the flow is coming only along this valley. It's only three or four feet high, so viscosity is very low or density very high. Probably the former, considering where we are. It's as black as the smoke column." "Not glowing?" cut in Zaino , thoughtlessly. "Black, I said. Temperature will be easier to measure when we get closer. The front is nearly straight across the valley, with just a few lobes projecting ten or twelve yards and one notch where a small spine is being surrounded. By the way, I trust you're taping all this?" Again Zaino was reminded of the afternoon after school. "Yes, Ma'am," he replied. "On my one and only monitor tape." "Very well. We're stopping near the middle of the valley one hundreds yards from the front. I am getting out, and will walk as close as I can with a sampler and a radiometer. I assume that the radio equipment will continue to relay my suit broadcast back to you." Zaino cringed a little, certain as he was that the tractor's electronic apparatus was in perfect order. It struck him that Dr. Burkett was being more snappish than usual. It never crossed his mind that the wornan might be afraid. "Ren, don't get any closer with the tractor unless I call. I'll get a set of temperature readings as soon as I'm close enough. Then I'll try to get a sample. Then I'll come back with that to the tractor, leave it and the radiometer and get the markers to set out." "Couldn't I be putting out the markers while you get the sample, Doctor?" "You could, but I'd rather you stayed at the wheel." Hargedon made no answer, and Burkett resumed her description for the record. "I'm walking toward the front, a good deal faster than it's flowing toward me. I am now about twenty yards away, and am going to take a set of radiation-temperature measures." A brief pause. "Readings coming. Nine sixty. Nine eighty. Nine ninety -- that's from the bottom edge near the spine that's being surrounded. Nine eighty-five -- " The voice droned on until about two dozen readings had been taped. Then, "I'm going closer now. The sampler is just a ladle on a twelvefoot handle we improvised, so I'll have to get that close. The stuff is moving slowly; there should be no trouble. I'm in reach now. The lava is very liquid; there's no trouble getting the sampler in -- or out again -- it's not very dense, either. I'm heading back toward the tractor now. No, Ren, dop't come to meet me." There was a minute of silence, while Zaino pictured the spacesuited figure with its awkwardly Idng burden, walking away from the creeping menace to the relative safety of the tractor. "It's frozen solid already; we needn't perature is about -- five eighty. Give me the markers, please." Another pause, shorter this time. Zaino wondered how much of that could be laid to a faster walk without the ladle and how much to the lessening distance between flow and tractor. "I'm tossing the first marker close to the edge -- it's landed less than a foot from the lava. They're all on a light cord at ten-foot intervals; I'm paying out the cord as I go back to the tractor. Now we'll stand by and time the arrival at each marker as well as we can." "How close are you to the i main cone?" asked Zaino. f "Not close enough to see its ) base, I'm afraid. Or to get a sami pie of it, which is worse. We --  goodness, what was that?" j Zaino had just time to ask, J "What was what?" when he found j nut. rOR A moment, he thought that the Albireo had been flung j bodily into the air. Then he decided that the great metal pillar ; had merely fallen over. Finally i he realized that the ship was still j erect, but the ground under it had I just tried to leave. Everyone in the group had bef come so used to the almost perpe! tual ground tremors that they had j ceased to notice them; but this  one demanded attention. Rowson, J using language which suggested ' that his career might not have  been completely free of adventure after all, flashed through the communication level on his way down to the power section. Schlossberg and Babineau followed, the medic pausing to ask Zaino if he were all right. The radioman merely nodded affirmatively; his attention was already back at his job. Burkett was speaking a good deal faster than before. "Never mind if the sample isn't lashed tight yet -- if it falls off there'll be plenty more. There isn't time! Arnie, get in touch with Dr. Mardikian and Dr. Marini. Tell them that this volcano is explosive, that all estimates of what the flow may do are off until we can make more measures, and in any case the whole situation is unpredictable. Everyone should get back as soon as possible. Remember, we decided that those big craters Eileen checked were not meteor pits. I don't know whether this thing will let go in the next hour, the next year, or at all. Maybe what's happening now will act as a safety valve -- but let's get out. Ren, that flow is speeding up and getting higher, and the ash rain is getting a lot worse. Can you see to drive?" She fell silent. Zaino, in spite of her orders, left his set long enough to leap to the nearest port for a look at the volcano. He never regretted it. Across the riven plain, whose cracks were now nearly hidden under the new ash, the black cone towered above the nearer elevations. It was visibly taller than it had been only a few hours before. The fountain from its top was thicker, now jetting straight up as though wind no longer meant a thing to the fiercely driven column of gas and dust. The darkness was not so complete; patches of red and yellow incandescence showed briefly in the pillar, and glowing sparks rather than black cinders rained back on the steep slopes. Far above, a ring of smoke rolled and spread about the column, forming an ever-broadening blanket of opaque cloud above a landscape which had never before been shaded from the sun. Streamers of lightning leaped between cloud and pillar, pillar and mountain, even cloud and ground. Any thunder there might have been was drowned in the howl of the escaping gas, a roar which seemed to combine every possible note from the shrillest possible whistle to a bass felt by the chest rather than heard by the ears. Rowson's language had become inaudible almost before he had disappeared down the hatch. For long moments the radioman watched the spreading cloud, and wondered whether the Albireo could escape being struck by the flickering, ceaseless lightning. Far above the widening ring of cloud the smoke fountain drove, spreading slowly in the thinning atmosphere and beyond it. Zaino had had enough space experience to tell at a glance whether a smoke or dust cloud was in air or not. This wasn't, at least at the upper extremity... And then, quite calmly, he turned back to his desk, aimed the antenna straight up, and called Eileen Harmon. She answered promptly. tened without interruption to his report and the order to return. She conferred briefly with her companion, replied "We'll be back in twelve hours," and signed off. And that was that. Zaino settled back with a sign, and wondered whether it would be tactful to remind Rowson of his offer of a year's pay. All four vehicles were now homeward bound; all one had to worry about was whether any of them would make it. Hargedon and Burkett were fighting their way through an ever-increasing ash rain a scant two miles away -- ash which not only cut visibility but threatened to block the way with drifts too deep to negotiate. The wind, now blowing fiercely toward the volcano, blasted the gritty stuff against their front window as though it would erode through; and the lava flow, moving far faster than the gentle ooze they had never quite measured, surged -- and glowed -- grimly behind. A hundred miles or more to the east, the tractors containing Mardikian, Marini and their drivers headed southwest along the alternate route their maps had suggested; but Mardikian, some three hours in the lead, reported that he could see four other smoke columns in that general direction. Mercury seemed to be entering a new phase. The maps might well be out of date. Harmon and Trackman were having no trouble at the moment, but they would have to pass the great chasm. This had been shooting out daughter cracks when Zaino and Hargedon passed it hours before. No one could say what it might be like now, and no one was going out to make sure. "We can see you!" Burkett's voice came through suddenly. "Half a mile to go, and we're way ahead of the flow." "But it's coming?" Rowson asked tensely. He had returned from the power level at Zaino's phoned report of success. "It's coming." "How fast? When will it get here? Do you know whether the ship can stand contact with it?" "I don't know the speed exactly. There may be two hours, maybe five or six. The ship can't take it. Even the temperature measures I got were above the, softening point of the alloys, and it's hotter and much deeper now. Anyway, if the others aren't back before the flow reaches the ship they won't get through. The tractor wheels would char away, and I doubt that the bodies would float. You certainly can't wade through the stuff in a spacesuit, either." "And you think there can't be more than five or six hours before the flow arrives?" "I'd say that was a very optimistic guess. I'll stop and get a better speed estimate if you want, but won't swear to it." Rowson thought for a moment. "No," he said finally, "don't bother. Get back here as soon as you can. We need the tractor and human muscles more than we need even expert guesses." He turned to the operator. "Zaino, tell all the tractors there'll be no answer from the ship for a while, because no one will be aboard. Then suit up and come outside." He was gone. man beings and a tractor were assembled in the flame-lit neardarkness outside the ship. The cloud had spread to the horizon, and the sun was gone. Burkett and Hargedon had arrived, but Rowson wasted no time on congratulations. "We have work to do. It will be easy enough to keep the lava from the ship, since there seems to be a foot or more of ash on the ground and a touch of main drive would push it into a ringwall around us; but that's not the main problem. We have to keep it from reaching the chasm anywhere south of us, since that's the way the others will be coming. If they're cut off, they're dead. It will be brute work. We'll use the tractor any way we can think of. Unfortunately it has no plow attachment, and I can't think of anything aboard which could be turned into one. You have shovels, such as they are. The ash is light, especially here, but there's a mile and a half of dam to be built. I don't see how it can possibly be done... but it's going to be." "Come on, Arnie! You're young and strong," came the voice of the mineralogist. "You should be able to lift as much of this stuff as I can. I understand you were lucky enough to get hold of Eileen -- have you asked for the bonus yet? -- but your work isn't done." "It wasn't luck," Zaino retorted. Burkett, in spite of her voice, seened much less of a schoolmistress when encased in a spacesuit and carrying a shovel, so he was able to talk back to her. "I was simply alert enough to make use of existing conditions, which I had to observe for myself in spite of all the scientists around. I'm charging the achievement to my regular salary. I saw -- " He stopped suddenly, both with with tongue and shovel. Then, "Captain!" "What is it?" "The only reason we're starting this wall here is to keep well ahead of the flow so we can work as long as possible, isn't it?" "Yes, I suppose so. I never thought of trying anywhere else. The valley would mean a much shorter dam, but if the flow isn't through it by now it would be before we could get there -- oh! Wait a minute!" "Yes, sir. You can put the main switch anywhere in a D. C. circuit. Where are the seismology stores we never had to use?" Four minutes later the tractor set out from the Alhireo, carrying Rowson and Zaino. Six minutes after that it stopped at the base of the ash cone which formed the north side of the valley from which the lava was coming. They parked a quarter of the way around the cone's base from the emerging flood and started to climb on foot, both carrying burdens. Forty-seven minutes later they returned empty-handed to the vehicle, to find that it had been engulfed by the spreading liquid. With noticeable haste they floundered through the loose ash a few yards above the base until they had outdistanced the glowing menace, descended and started back across the plain to where they knew the ship to be, though she was invisible through the falling detritus. Once they had to detour around a crack. Once they encountered one which widened toward the chasm on their right, and they knew a detour would be impossible. Leaping it seemed impossible, too, but they did it. Thirty seconds after this, forty minutes after finding the tractor destroyed, the landscape was bathed in a magnesium-white glare as the two one-and-a-half kiloton charges planted just inside the crater rim let go.  see if it worked?" asked Zaino. "What's the use? The only other charges we had were in the tractor. Thank goodness they were nuclear instead of H. E. If it didn't work we'd have more trouble to get back than we're having now." "If it didn't work, is there any point in going back?" "Stop quibbling and keep walking. Dr. Burkett, are you listening?" "Yes, Captain." "We're fresh out of tractors, but if you want to try it on foot you might start a set of flow measures on the lava. Arnie wants to know whether our landslide slid properly." However, the two were able to tell for themselves before getting back to the Albireo. The flow didn't stop all at once, of course; but with the valley feeding it blocked off by a pile of volcanic ash fotir hundred feet high on one side, nearly fifty on the other and more than a quarter of a mile long, its enthusiasm quickly subsided. It was thin, fluid stuff, as Burkett had noted; but as it spread it cooled, and as it cooled it thickened. Six hours after the blast it had stopped with its nearest lobe almost a mile from the ship, less than two feet thick at the edge. When Mardikian's tractor arrived, Burkett was happily trying to analyze samples of the flow, and less happily sjjeculating on how long it would be before the entire area would be blown off the planet. When Marini's and Harmon's vehicles arrived, almost together, the specimens had been loaded and everything stowed for acceleration. Sixty seconds after the last person was aboard, the Albireo left Mercury's surface at two gravities. The haste, it turned out, wasn't really necessary. She had been in parking orbit nearly forty-five hours before the first of the giant volcanoes reached its climax, and the one beside their former site was not the first. It was the fourth. "And that seems to be that," said Camille Burkett rather tritely as they drifted a hundred miles above the little world's surface. "Just a belt of white-hot calderas all around the planet. Pretty, if you like symmetry." "I like being able to see it from this distance," replied Zaino, floating weightless beside her. "By the way, how much bonus should I ask for getting that idea of putting the seismic charges to use after all?" "I wouldn't mention it. Any one of us might have thought of that. We all knew about them." "Anyone might have. Let's speculate on how long it would have been before anyone did." "It's still not like the other idea, which involved your own specialty. I still don't see what made you suppose that the gas pillar from the volcano would be heavily charged enough to reflect your radio beam. How did that idea strike you?"  smiled a little as the picture of lightning blazing around pillar, cloud and mountain rose before his eyes. "You're not quite right," he said. "I was worried about it for a while, but it didn't actually strike me." It fell rather flat; Camille Burkett, Ph.D., had to have it explained to her. It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Barth -- and, sooner or iater, will happen again! gists, at any rate -- had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '#s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheepfarming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '#s there was grave concern about the level of the watertable throughout the entire area. tion to the problem began in the summer of #. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was -- no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs were going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault -- could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page # of the New York Times). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole busand plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government departments to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America -- probably the world -- has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen ansrthing like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By # September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leajjed #-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in milesquare gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all eastwest land communication was suspended, and the President declared a national emergency. Y # September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above #. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of # October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the southeast corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begin to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. # people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by # October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October holloweyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On # I October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. at better than # miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately #:# p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: # miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping # V # degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed.  carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Litlle Rock at almost # miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over # feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. T he cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering... But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up halfdrowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hairbreadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find -- "Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down oh them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water  raced north under the shadow of  the cliffs which occasionally j crumbled, roaring, into the roar. ing waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated ple had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and por tions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of  the North American continent ' forever. i G A L A X.Y birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented -- and happily unrepeated -- disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, #. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Twothirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the #mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The nowtemperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before #, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river ship)ping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway # looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new told property destroyed -- really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '#s or '#s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminuation. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west! # complete novels by Lester del Rey in one book -- at your favorite newsstand now! earthbound He wanted above anything else to go into space. He had been waiting for it -- a long timet official ceremony before Clifton could escape the crowd of planetlubbers with their babblings, their eligible daughters and their stupid self-admiration. They'd paid through the nose to get him here, and they meant to get their money's worth. The exit led only to a little balcony, but it seemed to be deserted. He took a deep breath of the night air and his eyes moved unconsciously toward the stars. Coming back to Earth had been a mistake, but he'd needed the money. Space Products Unlimited wanted a real deepspace hero to help celebrate its hundredth anniversary. He had just finished the Regulation of Rigel, so he'd been picked. Damn them and their silly speeches and awards -- and damn Earth! What was one planet when there were a biljion up there among the stars? From the other side of a potted plant there was a soft sigh. Clifton swung his head, then relaxed as he saw the other man was not looking at him. The eyes behind the dark glasses were directed toward the sky. "Aldebaran, Sirius, Deneb, Alpha Centauri," the voice whispered. It was a high-pitched voice with an odd accent, but there was the poetry of ancient yearning in it. He was a small, shriveled old man. His shoulders were bent. A long beard and the dark glasses covered most of his face, but could not entirely conceal the deep wrinkles, even in the moonlight. Clifton felt a sudden touch of pity and moved closer, without quite knowing why. "Didn't I see you on the platform?" "Your memory is very good. Captain. I was awarded publicly -- for fifty years of faithful service making space boots. Well, I was always a good cobbler, and perhaps my boots helped some men out there." The old man's hand swept toward the stars, then fell back to grip the railing tightly. "They gave me a gold watch, though time means nothing to me. And a cheap world cruise ticket. As if there were any spot on this world I could still want to see." He laughed harshly. "Forgive me if I sound bitter. But, you see, I've never been off Earth!" Clifton stared at him incredulously. "But everyone -- " "Everyone but me," the old man said. "Oh, I tried. I was utterly weary of Earth and I looked at the stars and dreamed. But I failed the early rigid physicals. Then, when things were easier, I tried again. A plague grounded the first ship. A strike delayed another. Then one exploded on the pad and only a few on board were saved. It was then I realized I was meant to wait here -- here on Earth, and nowhere else. So I stayed, making space boots." expected words to Clifton's lips. "I'm taking off for Rigel again in four hours, and there's a spare cabin on the Maryloo. You're coming with me." The old hand that gripped his arm was oddly gentle. "Bless you. Captain. But it would never work. I'm under orders to remain here." "Nobody can order a man grounded forever. You're coming with me if I have to drag you, Mr. -- " "Ahasuerus." The old man hesitated, as if expecting the name to mean something. Then he sighed and lifted his dark glasses. Clifton met the other's gaze for less than a second. Then his own eyes dropped, though memory of what he had seen was already fading. He vaulted over the balcony railing and began running away from Ahasuerus, toward his ship and the unconfined reaches of space. Behind him, the eternal wanderer tarried and waited. They had onty one mission in the Oalaxy, with its infinite problems -- make more of "emi then moved from mmti, tondin them rOUt. The jisen screamed again, touched their torches to Ih overhanging of the huts. then tore down the hangings and leaped througli the doors, torehfe flaming a path... The interiors of flie huts leaped to life. Forms hurtled by the men and into the night as the  pitch-caulked thatching blazed into an ipferoo. The rightful inhabitants of the huts crashed into the tall grass of the surrounding plains, the sounds of their passage quickly dying away as fear lent wing to their rapidly fleeing heels. The fires quickly burned through the thatching, sending little fingers of flame dancing along the lashed saplings that supported the roofs. Luke took one last look around the interior of his hut and started to leave, when he spotted something wriggling under a pile of skins. Crossing the room in three strides, he tore away the coverings and grabbed the native child by the scruff of its neck. He wheeled on one heel and retraced his passage. He got out of the door just as the saplings gave up the ghost and the fiery mass crashed to the ground. Luke whistled and wiped sweat from his brow. The bronze head of the axe caught and reflected the fires from its myriad beaten facets. Using the head, he beat out several sparks that had landed on his clothes, then turned his attention to the child who still dangled from his other hand. The child's eyes were rolled nearly into his head with his fright. Luke grinned, baring his teeth. He brought the child up until their noses were less than an inch apart. The fetid smell of the child's breath made him choke. Yelping, the child twisted free and ran after its alreadydeparted parents. Luke laughed and turned his attention to his team. The men were all out now, watching the huts crack under the intense heat within. One shuddered, then collapsed inj ward, sending up choking clouds  of dust as it smothered the j flames. After a moment, Luke j whistled. Half of the men melted  into the grass and followed the natives, while the others gathered  around him, squatting and resting their axes on the ground. Luke waited until the others returned to report no further sign of the villagers, then he squatted himself, and accepted a canteen from someone. He drank his fill, , gasped, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and handed the canteen back. "It's hot," he said, conversationally. "It'll be hotter before we're done," said one of the team. They were all dressed in rough-cured skins and leather moccasins. The axes were the only tool they carried. Faces thick with war paint and grime, it was impossible to tell them from natives. "Anybody hurt?" asked Luke. Disclaimers came from the various members of the group. "Good." He stood up and stretched. "Well, gentlemen, shall we be on our way?" "Might as well." Luke took his axe, twisted the unfinished handle a quarter-turn in his socket, then held the head to his lips. "Team B," he said. "Mission accomplished." He twisted the handle back and slipped the axe into his belt. A few moments later, the soft chatter of rotcfrs cut through the air, and a copter dropped into the clearing by the cooking fire. The team mounted by the dying glow of the fires. As soon as the last man was in, the door swung shut and the copter took off into the night. scratchy material of the ruffed collar away from his neck, then shot his cuffs to return them to the socially acceptable halfinch showing beyond his jacket sleeve. He sighed, placed his hands on his knees and glanced for the umpteenth time at the armored soldiers guarding the door between the anteroom and Prince Kahl's private chambers. The afternoon sun dipped below the level of the high windowslits, sending shadows scampering up the walls. Sam had been waiting since noon. His stomach was repeating its rumbled protests against that interrupted meal. Prince Kahl had sent word that Sam might wait upon his pleasure; quieting misgivings. Carter had rushed to do just that. He sighed again, and stifled a yawn. From the corner of his eye, he watched the shadow line marching up the wall. When it touched the cobwebby corner of the ceiling, a slave came in and lighted a pair of oil lamps. The soot-heavy smoke they gave off quickly had Sam wishing the room had been left in darkness. Another interminable hour passed, during which he several times repeated the operation with collar and cuffs, all the while envying the guards their ability to remain in one position like frozen statues, seemingly carved from the living rock of the palace. At last, just when he had resigned himself to the probability of spending the night in the anteroom, the inner door swung open and a chamberlain beckoned. "Prince Kahl will grant you a moment now." Sam bowed his thanks, and followed the man into Kahl's chambers. "Ah, my friend from the southern kingdoms!" Prince Kahl was a lean, saturnine individual, uncomfortably aware that the prime of life was slipping through his grasp while his father obstinately held onto the throne. It was Kahl's considered opinion that the old man had lived long enough. It rankled him to realize that he had held the same opinions as a youth barely out of his teens. The thirty intervening years had been spent devising and trying methods to assure his succession; unfortunately his father had twenty years before that to safeguard his own rule. "How go the southern kingdoms, my friend?" Kahl waved a particularly enticing fruit as Carter stopped short, a dozen paces away. "Tolerably well, your graciousness." He neglected to add that it had been nearly a year since he had visited the supposed lands of his birth. Kahl was fully aware how long Carter had been kept cooling his heels. Palace protocol dictated how long foreign visitors might be kept waiting. But even visiting royalty could not hope for an audience in less than a month's time. In his role as ambassador, Carter was happy that a year was all he had been kept waiting. i#V##UR lord and master's gifts were received," said Kahl. "You may inform him of my royal gratitude." "My humble thanks, your graciousness." Sam's mouth watered as Kahl polished off the one fruit and selected another from a platter born by a manservant. Despite his now-long stay on the planet, Sam still could not understand why women were given no r role at all in society, even as slaves. "Not at all, not at all," said ' Kahl. "Now tell me. What is it j that brought you so far from your home lands to grace my ; humble presence?" ' "The usual business of politic, your graciousness," said Sam, growing weary of the necessity to repeat the title with every reply to Kahl's words. He also wished for a chair, despite the fact that he had been sitting all afternoon. ' He felt like a naughty schoolchild, standing always in the man's presence. "Trade treaties, mutual armament pacts, the like." "Ummm, so. You've discussed them with my ministers?" "They have permitted me this honor and, if I may be so bold, found a great deal to our mutual liking. Our countries are indeed far separated, and the journey between arduous. I find much in your provinces in the way of technology and armaments that we totally lack. By the same  token, I have thought of a few inconsequential things which might serve to ease your royal , burdens, if but brought from my ! lands." "Possible, possible," said Kahl. "Of course, I have a large college of tinkerers and mechanics who probably would have produced the little toys you speak of in jfieir own good time. But why duplicate effort, eh? They are lazy dolts who grumble at my royal largesse as it is." He chortled lustily, although Sam could see nothing even remotely humorous in his statement. But he was well-schooled in the idiocies of diplomacy; he laughed dutifully"But come!" said Kahl. "Enough of childish prattle! You carry another load in your thoughts, my southern friend. Have out with it!" "Your graciousness?" "You needn't pretend," he said, chortling again. "My ministers are like the winds. They cannot keep a single thing to themselves, but instead need spread it over the far reaches of the entire world. You've been talking -- foolishly perhaps -- but I have perceived a certain sense within your nonsense, and I must confess that your words have aroused my interest. You have a plan to see me king. Now out with it, lest I make you a gift of you to my torturer. He can remove anything -- including stubborn vocal cords!" "You do me undeserved honor, graciousness," said Sam. "Undoubtedly. And you begin to weary me." "Very well." Sam sighed. "I must admit that my tongue is too loose for my own general welfare. It is true that I once thought of something mildly amusing while passing long evening hours with one of your ministers. But it was mere idle dreaming, no more." "You prattle long, southerner." Kahl's eyelids lowered suspiciously. He picked up a silver knife and began paring his nails, scattering the shavings suggestively in Sam's direction. "Perhaps you do not want to see me king?" "There is none so deserving of the honor as you," said Sam. "But while you laugh at the utter childishness of my ideas, please remember that you insisted... T he Ehrlan delegate to the Central Worlds Conference was well past the entrance to the Park when the pudgy little man caught up with him, sides heaving from the unaccustomed strain of running. "Citizen Lund!" he cried, panting. "Please wait!" Lund turned and eyed the little man suspiciously. The fellow was a stranger, and therefore automatically under suspicion. "Yes?" "A moment of your valuable time. Citizen. Please? I assure you, you have nothing to fear from me. I am not a Yanoian." The name spattered out acidly. "Indeed?" said Lund. "And just who, then, are you?" There was a vague sensation of familiarity troubling the back of his mind. The omnipresent watchdog in his subconscious pounced instantly on the feeling, magnifying it, turning it inside out and shaking it around, but drawing no satisfaction from the act. "A friend. Citizen. You must believe that. I can't explain further right now -- time is too precious." He grabbed Lund's arm and started tugging him back towards the Park entrance. "Please? I beg you, come." "Oh -- very well." He gave in ungraciously, following the man until they ere just inside the Park. Then Lund stopped, digging his heels into the gravel of the walk. The man looked back at him. "Please, Citizen!" he urged. "We don't have much time!" 'So far as I'm concerned, you don't have any time at all, unless you tell me right now who you are and what this is all about." "Not here!" he cried, aghast, as he glanced nervously around at the many people entering and leaving the Park. A pair of Conference monitors stopped just outside the gate, fingering their stun-beamers as they eyed the actions of the two men. They started to move into the violable hundred-foot circle this side of the gate. The little man moved quickly, grabbing Lund again and forcibly pulling him beyond the protection of the monitors. Their skins tingled as they went through the shimmering haze of the force screen. The ' monitors stopped just in time to ' avoid touching the screen, while  Lund and the little man hurried  down a path that wound into a , copse of widdy trees from Lund's own homeworld, Ehrla. The widdy tendrils stopped their aimless flowing through the trees and curved down and around the two men, tips melting i into the ground and tendrils broadening into wide blades that sheltered and shielded the pair from possible watchers. "Now!" said Lund, shaking the  other man's hand from his angi rily. "Perhaps you will do me the i honor of telling me who you are and just what in the name of the Seven Holy Suns this idiocy is i all about?" "A matter of the gravest urgency, Citizen! You must not  present your plans for redistribu' tion of Sector protectorates to j this Conference!" "What?" Lund stared at him in disbelief. "And just how did you learn of the plans I intend to present to the Conference -- I wi present, at this afternoon session? Something smacks of treachery!" "Never mind how I learned. Citizen. The important thing is the Yano delegation also knows! They plan to scuttle you before you have a chance to speak. After that, they'll cut you into little pieces and devour you!" "You're insane, man!" Lund started to reach for the widdy tendrils. "Don't! You must not present your plans to the Conference, Citizen." A new tone had crept into the man's voice: a strength that belied the pudginess and general clownishness of the figure. Lund turned slowly, and found himself staring at a stunner, the winking red of the telltale showing that it was set to lethal bands. "Wha... " He gulped his adam's apple back down into his throat. "How did you get that into the Park? The force screens aren't supposed to pass weapons." "There are ways. Citizen," the man said, grinning. No longer did he seem clownish. "Many socalled impossible things are quite simple, if only you have access to the proper people and controls." "What do you really want?" Lund tried to hide his fright, but he was uncomfortably certain that it was radiating out from him, broadcasting to the entire world that Citizen Lund was scared silly. "I told you. Citizen. You must not present your plans to the Conference." "But why?" he wailed, in frustration. "Give me a logical reason!" "The greater good. Citizen." With those cryptic words, the man pressed the stud of the beamer. Lund gasped, as a giant hand closed around his heart, then collapsed to the ground in a strange dying parody of slow motion. Just before the clouds of eternity shut away his vision, he at last recognized the man. Himself! II tensely tired, beyond any feeling of exhaustion he had ever known. The clock in his desk chimed once. He sighed and picked up his lecture notes, stuffing them into a scarred and battered case that he had been carrying since his student days at the Academy. He cast one weary glance around the cluttered office, then steeled himself into a passable imitation of military carriage as he left for the lecture hall. The Cadet Sergeant-Major outside his door leaped to attention only a little less quickly than his regular service counterpart. Reilly returned their salutes and fell in behind them. The lecture hall -- gymnasium, really; the Academy was perenially overcrowded -- was crowded, as usual. The eager young cadets filled the fifty rows of backless benches, while the overflow squatted and stood at the rear until it was impossible for a midget to find room to thread his way through the crowd. Reilly's class was welltended for its honest popularity, not just because it was compulsory. There were many "compulsory" lectures in the curriculum that counted themselves proud to find half their audience in attendance. Reilly stopped in the wings of the stage, listening for a moment to the comfortable discordances of the student band tuning their instruments. The regular service non-com peered through the hangings, catching the bandmaster's eye. The tuning stopped, and the band swung into a medley of old Academy drinking songs. Reilly smiled, as he remembered happier days when he had participated lustily in the drinking that went along with such music. From he drinking songs, the band struck up the National Anthem. The noise the cadets made in rising nearly drowned out the music. After the last strains had been permitted to fade away, the bandmaster raised his baton once more and the opening bars of Hail to the Chief! filled the hall. The Sergeants-Major stepped out onto the stage, Reilly following, case clasped loosely between elbow and side. They passed in front of the half-dozen visitors and moved to either side of the podium, turning until they were facing each other, the regular service man on the right. They snapped into a salute, followed by the entire audience. Reilly lay his case on the podium, turned and bowed to the visitors, then faced the audience again and returned the salute. Immediately two thousand arms dropped to their owners' sides and the cadets resumed their seats. Reilly unzipped his case and drew out his notes. He arranged them carefully oi the podium, although he knew that at no time during the next hour would he so much as glance at them again. The case stowed away under the podium, he took a deep breath and placed his hands flat on the podium's surface. Technicians in the control booth over the far end of the hall trained parabolic mikes on his lips, waiting for him to begin the lecture as he had begun hundreds of other preceding lectures, before audiences much like this. The faces might change; the uniforms were the same, and so were the underlying feelings of the galaxy wearers of the uniforms, year in and year out. "The greater good for the greater number!" The cadets let out a mutual sigh, none aware that breath had been held. "A motto, gentlemen: merely a motto. Like Ad Astra per Aspera, E Pluribus Unum or Through These Portals Pass the Most Wonderful Custonters in the Galaxy." An appreciative titter ran through the audience. "But what is a motto?" continued Reilly, warming to his subject, overly familiar though it was. "It's more than just a snappy way of stringing words together. It has a meaning. Often the meaning, such as in the commercial example I just gave, is on the frivolous side. But more often there is something intently serious behind a motto. Ad Astra -- 'To the Stars.' For centuries this has been almost a religion for men, as our ancestors broke the bonds of a single planet and spread out into the galaxy. Libraries have been written of the heartbreaks and joys, the sorrows and jubilations that have been found in the far reaches of space. "E Pluribus Unum -- 'United We Stand.' Even older and, if possible, dearer to the hearts of men. Our very government is based on the essential concept contained in these three words from the past. " 'The greater good for the greater number'. If government runs on one motto, then civilization is based on this!" T eam B was dead on its feet when the copter finally returned to Base with the first rosy glow of dawn lightening the horizon. They stumbled to the ground, as sorry a looking group as Luke Royceton had ever seen. Their masquerade of grime and war paints was nearly obscured by an honest layer of general dirt. They filed into wardrobe and stripped off their clothes, leaving them in ragged piles on the floor. Then they hit the showers, luxuriating under the needle sprays and the caress of soap sliding over their skin. The discarded costumes were gone when they emerged, feeling closer to human, twenty minutes later. In place of the animal hid'es were shorts, doublets and the calf-length boots of Base-centered personnel. All were more than happy to be back in uniform. Luke stopped outside wardrobe for a moment, then started towards Headquarters, a building distinguished from the dozen other prefabs of. Base only by the pennant flying from the peak. The buildings were arranged in an irregular circle around the copter field, nestled in the most hidden valley of the planet's single range of hills high enough to be graced with the name of mountains. The highest peak in the range, visible over the one directly behind Headquarters, toward barely a thousand feet. On a world less primitive, the range would never have served its present duty. The world was primitive, however. Man had advanced but a few faltering steps beyond the level of the cave. Ecology had estimated the native human popupeople over the entire globe, and cheerfully admitted that their estimate was made with every benefit of doubt given to the natives. Quite possibly not even half that number roamed the vast plains of the temperate zones, or breeded in the opulence of the equatorial jungles. As yet, population pressures had not driven men into the colder climes of the north and south. None had been spotted more than five hundred miles from the equator. Luke checked in with the Orderly Room before reporting on to the debriefing room. He slumped onto a couch and propped his feet on a low coffee table. The other four team commanders were there ahead of him. One brought him a cup of coffee. He accepted it with thanks, and inhaled the bitter smell of the brew before draining half of it. The fiery liquid burned into his stomach and scorched away some of the tensions built up during the night. "Rough night, Luke?" asked Andy Singer, sitting next to him. "The roughest. We hit seventeen villages between sunset and sunrise." "That is a load. My team only hit seven. But you were working the big river stretch, weren't you?" Luke nodded, as he sipped again at his coffee. "I thought so. We were lucky. We had the west plains. There isn't too much water over there, couple little creeks and a few holes. These locals don't stray too far from water." hit half a dozen goodsized places," said Luke. "One of them must have had thirty-five families. For a minute, I thought we were going to have to kill a few of them, but it ended up okay. Nobody hurt, except for one of my boys who stayed a second too long in a hut." He chuckled. "Got the seat of his pants burned off -- a new ' kid, just out from the Academy. The rest of the night, he was the fastest man I had." "Proves what I said about water. Biggest place I hit had seven houses, and most of them only had two or three." Luke started to say something more, but just then the door opened and the Base Commandant came in. The Team commanders stood up respectfully, but none had the energy to properly snap to attention. He smiled as he mounted the low platform to the front of the room. "At ease, gentlemen." Gratefully, the commanders sat back down and resumed their earlier positions of comfort. The Commandant poured himself a glass of water from a ready pitcher and drank it, then gave his full attention to the room. "First, gentlemen, let me congratulate you on a successful night's operation. I congratulate all of you, but particularly Commander Royceton and Team B. They rolled up the enviable total of seventeen villages destroyed." Luke flushed, feeling like a fresh-out-of-Academy Cadet as the others raised their coffee cups in his direction. "None of you spent the evening slacking, of course," continued the Commandant. He was a middle-aged man; the empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder told why he had been booted out of field duty while men twenty years his senior were still leading teams. "Total score for the night; fifty-seven villages. Commander Royceton merely had more fertile area to work in. As we move out from the Base I know you will all have equal opportunities to prove your prowess with the torch." An appreciative murmur ran through the little group. "Now I know you're all tired, gentlemen, and anxious to hit the sack. I won't keep you much longer. I just want to emphasize the importance of our mission on this world. Many of your men don't like making these raids on the natives. They would rather be roaming the far starlanes, putting down pirates and other glorious deeds of derring-do. But you men are not cadets; there isn't a one of you without twenty years field service time. You know the real glory comes from satisfaction in a job well done. It is up to you to transfer that feeling of satisfaction to the malcontents within your ranks. Tonight you go out again; and you will continue to do so until every single village on this planet has been razed to the ground! If so much as one single village is permitted to escape, then we have failed. I do not like failure; you do not like failure. Working together, we can see to it that failure as a word disappears from the language. I thank you, gentlemen. Dismissed." He stepped down and strode rapidly from the f ! I room. Behind him the audience rose and burst into talk. Ill  ly. He tried for the hundredth time since the journey began to shift his legs into a position where the insides would not be rubbed raw by the rough hair of his horse-like mount. He resolved for the dozenth time that one of the "inventions" he would import from the southern provinces would be a good, comfortable saddle. Another would be silk; the rough fabrics worn by Kahl's subjects were a fair substitute for the mount's hide. "Ho, southerner!" Prince Kahl wheeled his mount back from the head of the column and waited until Sam had caught up, then he fell in beside him. "How goes it? Does my second favorite mount suit you well?" "Very well indeed, graciousness," said Sam. "I cannot in honesty recall when I've had a more -- ouch ! -- instructive ride!" "Good!" Kahl leaned over and slapped him on the shoulder. "You'll be glad to know we've but three more hours to go before reaching the summer palaces." "Only, uh, three more hours?" The sinking sensation in Sam's stomach had nothing at all to do with the undulating motion of his beast. "Ah, that is good news, your graciousness. We'll be there almost before we know it." Sam wished Kahl would go away and leave him to his misery, but the prince seemed disposed to talk. "I. think there will be many surprised faces in my father's court tonight. Eh, southerner?" He chuckled, and then burst into raucous laughter as he considered the idea further. "And to think, it will all be perfectly legal! You have the papers safe, my friend?" "Yes, your graciousness," said Sam, sighing and patting his saddlebags. "Good! Don't lose them -- I'd hate to see you missing your head!" He laughed again, while Sam's stomach turned several more flipflops. "The sight of blood always did make me sick." There were sixteen men in the mounted party, including a dozen of Kahl's private guard, the captain of the troop and the High Priest of the Sun God, the nation's officially sponsored religion. The High Priest was a little old man, bent over more from age than from the discomforts of the journey. Originally Sam had planned for one more member, but that had become unnecessary when he learned that the High Priest was also President of the Royal College of Chirurgeons. The latter role was even more important to his plans than the former. Now all that worried Sam was the possibility that the priest might not live to the end of the journey. He was inflicted witth a hacking cough that sent chills racing up and down Sam's spine every time he went into a fit. Kahl grew weary of bantering small talk with a man really fit to come up with witty replies. He wheeled his horse again and dropped back to the end of the column for a moment, saying something to the High Priest, then he spurred his mount back to the head of the line, falling into his original position beside the Captain of the Guard. The two men were soon lost in reminiscences that had bored Sam to tears, every time he had been ably, while the sun mounted to the zenith and began the long summer afternoon drop back down to the horizon. The members of the Guard and Kahl pulled short , stubby loaves of bread and cheese from their saddle bags and munched as they road on, washing the food down with vigorous pulls at the wineskins that took the place of water canteens on the planet. Sam had first thought the constant imbibing of alcohol to be a national vice. Then he ran tests on half a dozen waterholes. Thereafter he drank wine himself. Now, however, he was completely without an appetite. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that the priest was in the same boat. Suddenly, without knowing why, he pulled his mount up and waited until the priest caught up with him, then fell in at the end of the column. "How goes it. Reverence?" The priest looked up, watery eyes registering surprise at his company. "Oh, southerner." He broke into one of his coughing spasms. "Ahhh, not well, southerner. Not well at all. The Sun God does not ride with me this day -- not that he's deserted me, you understand: he never rides with me. The Sun God has more sense than a foolish old man who should be staying home in the comfort of his apartments, not galivanting around the countryside like a frisky kitten." "I wish he had imparted some of his wisdom to me," said Sam. "I confess I feel as you look, Reverence. No disrespect intended, believe me. It's just that the ardors of this journey have taken much toll from both of us. And I swear, by the Sun God himself, you are bearing up much better than I." "A man who has traveled as long and as far as you talking this, southerner?" "It's the way you travel. Reverence. The greatest part of my journey was by ship." It had been; Sam merely neglected to specify that it was a spaceship. "Ocean travel has its own peculiar discomforts, but for myself. I'll take it every time." "Tell me, southerner," said the priest, "why do you make this trip?" "Prince Kahl wished it," he replied. "Ah, but there is more to this than lies on the surface. Why should Kahl bring you, a stranger and a subject of another house, along on a venture that may well 'cast the future course of events for this entire nation?" "Prince Kahl seems to feel that, ah, I might, because of my experiences in other lands, serve him in some minor capacity of usefulness." Sam chose his words with care. The old man was entirely too observant for his liking. "Kahl is an astute man," said the priest. "However, he is also a hungry man, and such a man on the verge of starvation will eat things that in more normal circumstances he would pass up without so much as a first look. Ideas are much like food, southerner." "The philosophers of my country have a saying. Reverence. 'Man does not live by bread alone.' " "Much wisdom is afloat in the world, disguised in strange ways." With that, the priest went into another coughing spell, after which he refused to pick up the threads of the conversation. Carter gave up, and spurred his mount back to his original place in the column. T he rest of the trip passed in, for Sam, self-commiseration. The lower the sun sank, the hotter the temperature seemed to climb. Several times he found himself with wineskin raised to lips. The native beverage was little stronger than the plain water he would have preferred, but even so he found himself more than a little tipsy by the time they crested a low range of hills and saw the summer palaces nestled by the side of a lake in the valley below. The column dismounted in an inner courtyard, and Kahl, Carter and the High Priest strode past the protesting chamberlain into the King's private apartments. The King was lying on a couch, eating fruits served by a manservant and listening to poetr ry being read to him. He looked up when the trio came in. "My son! This is indeed an unexpected honor. What brings you from the city on a day so hot as this one?" He smiled, but his eyes were sharp. "Greetings, Father," said Kahl, bowing low. "I bring you important news from the Council of Priests. Reverence!" "Y our Most Graciousness." The old man was already nearly doubled over. Vhen he bowed, Sam half expected to hear his forehead crack the tiles of the floor. "Well, Reverence?" The king accepted another fruit and sucked on it, keeping a watchful eye on his son. He suspects something! Sam thought. The High Priest produced a scroll from his robes and ceremoniously broke the seal. Unrolled, it was short for the dynamite it contained. "Your Most Gracious Person," he read. "The Council of Priests, meet and determined in the Holy Temple of the Sun God this fifth day of the seventh moon of the fifty-first year of the reign of Obar, King, announce to all and sundry within the domains of Obar, King, that he has incurred the wrath and displeasure of the Holy God, the Sun God, and henceforth from this day shall be no more be known as Obar, King, but as father of Kahl, King." He let the scroll snap back into its cylinder, bowed again, then handed the scroll to Obar. "Your graciousness." Then he turned to Kahl. "Your Most Graciousness." One final return to Obar. "One more message from the Council, your graciousness. They hope you will accept their eternal pleasure and gratitude for the excellence of your reign." A LL during the reading, Obar had been staring at the High Priest, a ghost smile half-crinkling the corners of his mouth. The half-eaten fruit now fell to the pavement with a sodden plop! He licked his lips. "This... This is some sort of a joke?" "No joke. Father," said Kahl, a little too heartily for Sam's liking. "But how?" Obar shook his head. "How dare you?" "I'm merely exercising my duty to our subjects. Father. You've grown old. You're no longer capable of carrying out the duties of king." "No." He refused to believe. "You... you have no right. I am king! How can you... How can you just walk in here and tell me that I'm not? What gives you this right?" "The same source that made you king in the first place," said Kahl. "The Sun God." "Nonsense! There is no Sun God!" The High Priest gasped and ; covered his eyes. "Blasphemy!" "Guards!" Obar pried himself up. "Guards! Arrest these maniacs!" Feet clumped outside, then turned into the chamber. Sam relaxed, unaware that he had been holding his breath, knowing that his plans were going through after all. The men who came in were the same who had escorted them from the city, Kahl's own private guards. The captain turned to Kahl and bowed low. "You called. Your Most Graciousness?" "Yes. Take this blithering idiot away." The captain bowed again, and gestured. Two of his men grabbed the former king by the arms and carried him away, screaming. "Ho, southerner!" Kahl sat down on his father's couch and gestured. The manservants had been cowering in the background; they came forward now and touched their foreheads to the ground. Kahl took a fruit and bit into it, letting the juice trickle down his chin. "It worked," said Kahl, swallowing. "By the Sun God, it worked!" He slapped his knee. "I confess, southerner, when first I heard your plans, I thought you daft indeed. But it worked! I'm king!" "I felt certain it would," said Sam, carefully omitting the title of respect. It passed unnoticed. More sure of himself, he continued, "After all, the idea was inherent in the very structure and strictures of your government. Your divine position comes from the Sun God. He should be able to remove it as easily as he grants it." "True," said Kahl. "Howsomever, there shall be some changes made in that respect, once I have consolidated my position. Oh, I delude myself not in thinking that the battle is over, my friend. But the hardest part has been won." "I've been thinking," said Sam, slowly. "Well, keep it not to yourself!" said Kahl. "If any more of your ideas prove as useful to me as the last, then you have a glorious future indeed." "My thoughts are, I'm afraid, roaming rather far afield. But take them for what they might be worth. You are king of this nation now, Kahl; and a very able king you shall be. Why limit the benefits of your rule to this one nation? Why not let the rest of the world know the joys of your rule?" "Ummm?" He squinted, one eye closed. "You think it might work out?" "Why not?" And the Sun God help us all! he added to himself. IV I 'HK chambers were crowded as the delegates, alternates and just plain onlookers poured in for the afternoon session of the Central Worlds Conference. Two hours before the meeting was due to begin, an astute member of the press, long used to such functions, observed that there would undoubtedly be 'a record broken before the day was over. And it was easy to see why: all eyes were trained on the spot low in the tiers with the Ehrlan pennant floating overhead. As yet, the central figure of all the interest had not arrived, although the rest of the Ehrlans were already in their seats and looking anxiously up the aisles towards the bank of elevators. An elevator would open from time to time, to disgorge a few late arrivals. But the man they expected was not yet among them. Below, on the chamber floor, the presiding secretary was mounting to the rostum and arranging his papers. "Where the devil can he be!" said Citizen Evrett to Citizen Sterm, the second ranking member of the delegation. "God only knows! You don't suppose something has... happened?" "How could it, here in the heart of the city? He only had to come one block from the hotel. You've been watching too many thrillers. Citizen -- I hope!" "Well, we have to do something. The session will be starting in a few minutes. If he isn't here, someone else will have to make the presentation." "Who?" "I don't know. How about you. Citizen?" "Now, wait a minute!" said Evrett. "What's the matter with you. Citizen? You're the logical choice. You rank second in the group." "I wouldn't dare," admitted Sterm. "What if I should bobble things? I'd never be able to live it down. I wouldn't even dare go home. My wife is Lund's halfsister, you know." "I'd forgotten. But somebody has to do it, if he doesn't get here. This is the only opportunity we'll have this decade. If we have to wait another ten years, we may as well forget the matter altogether." "We can't do that!" protested Sterm. "We've worked too long and too hard on this plan. It's the only fair solution anyway. The other worlds will never accept anything else." "Some of them may not want to accept this one, when they hear all of the details. You must admit, we haven't been too easy on some of your fellow members. They    Here comes Arko. jAayhe he found out something." A junior member of the delegation came panting down the aisle, shaking his head when he saw the others' eyes on him. "Sorry, Citizens," he said, as soon as he was within the Ehrlan area. "He left the hotel over an hour ago. No one has seen a sign of him since." "Well, that tears it," said Evrett, just as the presiding secretary struck his gavel on the little wooden block, announcing the opening of the session. "Who has the copy of the plans?" "Here," said Sterm, digging the papers from his case. "I'll make the presentation myself..." "Just a minute. Citizen!" said Arko. "Look! Here he comes now!" They all turned and looked at the pudgy figure ambling slowly down the aisle, nodding to greetings that came from all sides. The missing man smiled and shook .hands with a couple of the onlookers, before entering the area and taking his seat at the head of the delegation. "Citizen Lund!" cried Sterm, as though speaking to a wayward child. "Where in the name of the Seven Suns have you been?" "Why, it's a beautiful day. Citizens," explained Lund. "I thought I'd take a stroll in the Park. There's quite a large Ehrlan section, you know. Makes one quite homesick to hear the singing flowers serenading the passerby. I can't wait to get back home again." "If you hadn't shown up, none of use would have had the nerve to go home!" "Why, Citizen Sterm!" Lund seemed amused by some private joke. "Whatever made you think I wouldn't be here? This is an important day for Ehrla, remember?" "How could we forget?" said Evrett. The presiding secretary fiddled with his bank of microphones for a moment, in the manner of presiding secretaries throughout history since the invention of the public address system, then turned hopelessly to the technicians. A man came forward, made a simple adjustment, then retreated. The Secretary cleared his throat, sipped at a glass of water and spoke. "The fourth session of the Nineteenth Conference of the Central Worlds is open for business. The afternoon session will be devoted to the presentation and discussion of proposals by the membership. The Recording Secretary will call the roll of delegations." A short stubby man with five o'clock shadow came forward and leaned into the bank of microphones, and yelled: "Accryllia!" Across the chamber a man stood up, holding his delegation's microphone. "The grand and sovereign system of Accryllia, long known throughout the galaxy for the excellence of its citrus fruit, the beauty of its maidens, the virtue of its honorable young men... the grand and sovereign state of Accryllia passes." "Antares!" "Antares passes." "Bodancer!" "The system of Bodancer passes." "Buddington!" "Mr. Secretary, the proud system of Buddington yields to Ehrla!" "Ehrla!"  clipped the mike from the railing, smiled around at a few more wellwishers and launched into his speech. "Mr. Secretary! Ehrla wishes to thank the proud and ancient system of Buddington for relinquishing its rightful order in these proceedings, so that Ehrla may present a plan that the citizens of Ehrla feel certain will meet with the full approval of this meeting. "For hundreds of years, the various peoples represented here today have been rightly concerned with the problems of new star systems being developed, new races being assimilated into the federation of free and lawful worlds. These new worlds need guidance, a guidance that only long experience can provide." Evrett looked at Sterm, uneasily. "What is this?" he whispered. "He isn't presenting the plan like this, I hope? He'll alienate half the delegations." "I don't know what he's doing," said Sterm. "I only hope he knows." "In the past," continued Lund, "the various and varied members of this honored organization have provided the same guidance in wise and infinitely proper manner. It is the hope of Ehrla that they will continue to do so in the future. Therefore the ancient and honorable system of Ehrla proposes, to this effect, that the members of this organization continue as they have in the past." Pandemonium was breaking out in scattered sections of the chamber as various delegations realized that they were being snookered by the Ehrlans. Voices rose up here and there, trying to drown out Lund's words. Monitors moved up and down the aisles, trying to quell the disturbances. "Therefore," said Lund, "Ehrla, to the implementation of its plan. announces to this organization that this day they have annexed the systems of Phelimina, Trepidar and Scolatia." He sat down and turned to the rest of his delegation. "Gentlemen," he said, smiling, as he handed a sealed envelope to  Sterm, "my resignation." R eilly slumped in his chair with a sigh. The lecture had  gone well, but it had ended not a moment too soon to suit him. "I'm growing old," he said, unaware he was speaking out loud. "Pardon, sir?" The regular service Sergeant-Major closed the I door and brought over his cup of I coffee. "Did you say something, : sir?" I "What?" Reilly blinked. "Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Sergeant. I Just an old man muttering to himself." j "Begging the general's pardon, I sir, I don't think you're an old ' man at all. At least, no older I than myself." He cocked his j head. "Although, to be perfectly honest with both of us, sir, there are times when I just can't seem to keep up with these children they keep sending us nowadays." "We're both ready for retirement, Sergeant. Old work horses, ready to be turned out to pasture. I guess this will be the last class I see through these old doors. I've submitted my resignation, you know." Reilly moodily regarded his coffee. "Yessir, I knew. The rest of the faculty knows too. And if I might be so bold as to say so, sir, we'll all be sorry to see you go. It won't be the same Academy without General Reilly glarin' a bit at us all." "Glaring a bit, is it. Sergeant?" He glared now, then broke down into a smile. "I suppose I do at that. Do the cadets still call me Old Stoneface?" "Not within my heaf-ing, sir." He grinned. "But you know cadets. You were one yourself. I supose it'd be as difficult to stop cadets from tagging their teachers with nicknames as it'd be to ride a star bareback." Reilly sighed, and swiveled his chair until he could see through the one cluttered window. The parade ground stretched away beneath, the system pennant fluttered briskly in the stiff breeze. Into his view marched a battalion of Cadets. Much the same scene had repeated itself daily during the thirty years he had occupied the office. "The faces change." "Sir?" "The faces change. Sergeant. How many thousands of boys have come through these doors? The uniform never changes, though. And I suppose that's really the most important thing. in its essence -- the uniform and the tradition." "That it is, sir." Reilly chuckled. "You know, Sergeant, I never considered myself a particularly sentimental man. Still, the faster the years fly by, the dearer old memories become. The clearer, too. I can recall things that happened when I was a boy much easier than I can remember what I had for breakfast this morning.' And I know that's a sign of old age." He picked up his coffee and made a face when he found it cold. "Sergeant, as two old men sharing the past, how about having a cup of something a bit stronger than this watery brew with me?" "Sir! I really don't think..." "Oh, bother regulations. Sergeant! I'm speaking as a man now, not as a general. I'd deem it an honor." "Then I'd be proud to, sir." chair while Reilly opened the bottom drawer of his desk and drew out a bottle and two very dusty glasses. He blew into them, set them on the edge of the desk and poured generous measures of the amber liquid. The sergeant accepted his with a bow of his head. They raised their glasses. "To yesterday. Sergeant." "To yesterday, sir. And may these days be as memorable to those who will be remembering fifty years from now." "And those days fifty years further." They touched glasses, then tossed off the contents, wincing as the whiskey cut its way down. A soft ball of fire exploded in Reilly's midsection. He sighed, capped the bottle and stowed it and the glasses away. A short rat-a-tat-tat sounded on the door; the Cadet SergeantMajor opened it and stuck his head through. "Sir?" "Yes, Sergeant?" "Six gentlemen to see you, sir." "What?" He glanced at his memo pad. A notation warned him six prospective cadets were due to come in. It was not standard procedure for him to interview candidates, but all six were the sons of Academy graduates killed in the line of duty. "Give me five minutes. Sergeant, then show them in." "Very good, sir." He withdrew and closed the door. "Well, Sergeant," said Reilly, turning to the regular service man. "Perhaps these are the lads who will be doing that reminiscing fifty years from now." "Quite possible, sir." He stood up and came to attention. "Do I have the general's permission, sir?" "Dismissed, Sergeant." Sighing, Reilly swiveled his chair again and watched the drillers on the parade ground until the short rat-a-tat-tat sounded again. He turned around in time to face the gangling teenagers trooping through the door. rett, Gordon, Kaslov and Poirot, sir," announced the Cadet Sergeant-Major before withdrawing again. "Come in, gentlemen, come in." Reilly stood up. "Find yourselves a seat. Just pile those magazines on the chair, sir. I think three of you will fit admirably on that couch. You others can draw up those chairs by the water cooler. Yes, that's it." He shook hands all around, and then sat down again. "Now then, your names once more, please?" He fixed them firmly in his mind as each boy introduced himself in turn. "Ah, yes. And I, of course, am General Reilly, Commandant of the Academy." "Sir?" "Yes, Mr. Kaslov?" 'Would that be the General Reilly? Of the Deneb Crisis?" "I 'see my fame has proceeded me, gentlemen. Yes, I am that Reilly. Please, don't let the fact scare you. I assure you, I don't bite off the head of a boy until he is in uniform. Then, gentlemen, you are fair game from then on. "Now, then," he said. "Are there many other questions before I give you my sales pitch? Yes, Mr. Kaslov?" "Sir," the boy said, hesitantly, "I believe you knew my grandfather. Sub-Colonel Kaslov? He served with you during the Deneb Crisis." "Of course!" said Reilly. "Martin Kaslov; I should have recognized the name immediately. He was my Team leader. And his son was fresh out of the Academy; I remember very well. So you might become third generation Academy material, eh? Good, good. We're always glad to have someone whose roots are deep in Academy tradition. That's why I'm particularly happy to have all six of you gentlemen here this afternoon. I understand you attended my lecture?" A ll six nodded; one raised his hand. "Yes, Mr. Whyte?" "Sir, I heard your lecture, but, frankly, I didn't get very much out of it. I mean, you talked a great deal about the service and so forth, but it just didn't make much sense to me. It was just like Pop -- my dad used to talk when I was a kid. I don't suppose it made much sense then, but kids don't understand anyway. But now I'm old enough to enter the Academy myself. I think I should know more about it, what it means, what it stands for. Uh, do I make myself clear?" "As lucid as a mountain spring on a bright morning, Mr. Wh#rte. I only regret my own words were not as concise." He smiled. The other boys laughed while Whyte flushed. "But you have expressed a very important point," continued Reilly. "I don't want a man coming in here who doesn't know what the Academy stands for. We have a long tradition, but we niean more than just words carved over a marble arch. 'The Greater Good for the Greater Number.' There are hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands of lives lived and died behind those seven words. From Earth's first colony in the Centauri system to the latest native intelligence charted in the Crab Nebula, those seven words have wrapped up an entire philosophy and dictated the means of livine by it. "But what do the words actually mean? I think, Mr. Whyte, that is the crux of your question. Indeed, that is the crux of the structure on which the Academy is founded. Oh, it's easy to say that the words mean what they say, because they do. That and no more. But how to explain them so that someone who doesn't know will know? In a sense, I've been trying to do that ever since my first girl friend threw me over as an incurable romantic when she learned that I intended to enter the Academy. For many people, I'm afraid there is no explanation. They are incapable of understanding, no matter how hard we try. But I don't think you gentlemen are in that class. Otherwise you would not be here at all. "The obvious place to begin is the beginning. 'The greater good.' Not the greatest, mind you -- the greater. There are those who quibble over words; they are responsible for this particular delineation. It would be idealistic to try for the greatest in all things. Despite his thousands of years of development, man is still a long ways from being an ideal creature. There are certain things that remain beyond his capabilities. In certain isolated incidents, the course we follow does produce the greatest good possible. But they are isolated. "The same reasoning follows the choice of 'The Greater Number.' Only our limitations prevent us from seeing to it that every world in the galaxy is the best of all possible worlds, insofar as the peculiarities of a particular world permit. We do our best, and take pride in the fact that that best is better than anyone else's. "But so much for numerical values. You most want to hear what we do. And that can best be summed up in one word: everything, Everything, and yet that, too, has its limitations. Impossibilities are beyond even us. Improbabilities are given a fair chance. We are constantly seeking out courses of action that will benefit not the individual but the race. And in some instances, not even a race, when there are many races involved in a particular manner. The methods we follow, the actions we take in a particular instance, may sometimes seem cruel and unreasoning..." V T he families were on the move, away from their comfortable homes under the everlasting warmth of the sun. Luke Royceton shifted his weight in the copter and trained the glasses on a column of dust rising three miles to the west and ten thousand feet below. "It's okay, Harry," he said to the pilot. "They've swung back north again." "Right, Luke," the pilot replied. "Scout report just in says there's a real big outfit about eighty miles settling down around a lake. Shall we hit them?" "We the closest?" "Singer's forty miles the other side of them, but he's tied up chasing some mavericks." "Let's go then." Luke bolstered his glasses and slid down into the cargo hold. The rest of the team were taking advantage of the lull in activity to catch up on their relaxation. They had been constantly on the go since the migrations had begun in earnest two months earlier. Luke kibitzed a card game for a few minutes, then announced: "Action coming up in about twenty minutes. Grab something to eat and run a check on your costumes." The copter dropped to treetop level five miles from the lake and came to ground four miles further on. The team piled out, stretched the tensions of the long jide out of their bodies, then started out through head-high dwarf trees that separated their landing spot from the lake. They wound through the trees and over a low, rolling series of hills. The cover stopped suddenly, two hundred yards from the beach. "Big family is right!" said Luke softly, gripping his axe. There were nearly fifty huts in various stages of construction along the beach. Twice that number of adult males were working on them, while the women were bringing in armloads of grass for thatching. The children were waist-deep in the lake with fishing spears. A still wriggling pile on the beach testified to their prowess. Luke glanced over the dozen members of his team, shaking his head. "I don't know," he said. "Those are pretty hefty odds." "What's to worry about, Luke?" asked one of the men. "You don't expect those characters to put up a fight, do you?" "God only knows. They just might take it in their heads to do that. From looks of things, either this outfit has been traveling far or else several villages have combined forces. If it's the last, then I'm plenty worried." "So what do we do? Go back and yell for reinforcements?" "Not yet. Not until we try these babies ourselves. Everybody got his courage screwed up?" There were soft murmurs of assent from each man. "Make torches." Two men faded away and returned a moment later with arms full of the same grass the villagers were using. Half the team set to work, twisting them into torches and tying them with short lengths of a twine-like vine they had brought along from the equatorial jungles. The torches were passed out, and Luke took a deep breath: "Let's go!" 'THE team leaped to their feet and broke from the cover, screaming their banshee cry. The natives dropped what they were doing and wheeled around, then froze in their tracks at the sight of the wildly painted devils tearing down the beach. The two hundred yards separating them halved, then halved again before the natives broke out of their stupor. One of the workers placed his fingers between his teeth and whistled. The children ran in from the lake, tossing their spears to the nearest adult, man or woman. By the time the team was among them, axes whistling through the air and smashing the walls of the huts, the villagers were armed and fighting back. "We've got troubles!" yelled Luke, bringing his axe down to break several spears being jabbed at him. The spears were too short to make good throwing weapons, so the natives were using them just as they would in going after fish. One got through Luke's guard; he choked back a cry of pain as the broad stone head went into his flesh and was twisted. He pulled away, yanking the shaft out of the native's hand. Two of the team had managed to get close enough to the cooking fires to light their torches. They used them now as shields, until the grass burned down to the handles. One then tossed his into the large pile of thatching material, while the other stuck his into the unplastered wall of the nearest hut. The thatching blazed up quickly, forcing the natives away from the heat. Most of the team now had their backs to the nearest wall; none had escaped the jabbing spears. One man was completely encircled by the natives. Suddenly his axe was wrenched from his grasp. They picked him up, legs flailing wildly in the air, carried him over and threw him onto the fire. "Let's get out of here!" screammed Luke, surprising those around him by suddenly leaping forward and grabbing two of them, forcing them off balance. He called on every ounce of strength he possessed to run through the gauntlet of spears. From the corner of his eye, he could see one other man break loose, only to be recaptured a dozen feet farther on. By some miracle, Luke outdistanced those pursuing him, crashing into the cover. The natives followed a few yards, then gave up the chase, heading back to the easier sport on the beach. Luke tripped over an exposed root and crashed to the ground. He tried to get up again, but his injured arm refused to support him. Closing his eyes, he waited for the fatal blow to fall. Several minutes passed, during which Luke recited every prayer he had ever heard, to every conceivable deity in the pantheon. At the end of that time! he realized that he wasn't going to die after all -- at least, not here and now. Rolling over onto his good arm, he sat up and got his back against a tree. From the beach came screams of terror, growing fainter as he listened and finally dying away altogether. Bracing his good arm against a tree, he worked himself up, got himself oriented and started back towards the copter. The pilot threw away his cigarette and dropped out of the door to the cargo hold when Luke came limping into view. "My God, man! What happened?" "I... made a mistake." He let himself be helped into the copter and took the mike, reporting the disaster on the beach to the Commandant back at Base. Then he let the pilot bandage his wounds. said bitterly. "Don't take it so hard, Luke," said Andy Singer. The team Commanders were back in the debriefing room again. All had commiserated with Luke on the tragedy; none had been able to convince him that it had not been his fault. "Eleven men dead," he repeated, no matter what they said. The commandant came in and they rose. "At ease, gentlemen," he said, as he mounted the platform. He stared at them for a thirty-second eternity. "Ours is not an easy task." His words broke the tension; all sighed. "There has been a tragic accident, gentlemen. Good men have died. Men just as good have died on a thousand planets in a thousand different ways. Sometimes they died because of an error; sometimes the death was unavoidable. But for whatever reason, they did not die in vain! "This is a young planet," he continued. "In many ways, it's as near to paradise as any of us will ever see. Man is a young race here -- young in development. Yet almost before he has a chance to prove himself, he has found himself in a backwater, stymied as it were by the very paradise qualities which attract us. Life is easy here, too easy. He doesn't have to exert himself. He lives much like his ancestors did, ten thousand years ago. "There is no future in standing still. Whether he likes it or not, man must develop, must give the future generations a chance for their place in the sun. Despite sentimentality, anything that gives them that chance is good. Therefore, I repeat: eleven men died here yesterday. They did not die in vain!" "Time for a break, I think," said Reilly, pressing a button. The door opened and the cadet Sergeant-Major stuck his head in. "Sir?" "Coffee, Sergeant. That will be suitable, gentlemen?" The boys nodded and the cadet withdrew. "While we're waiting, are there any more questions?" One of the boys hesitantly raised his hand. "Sir, why is so much of the activity by the agents carried out in secrecy? It all seems rather underhanded to me." "By the very nature of themselves, what we do must be carried out secretly. Even when we act openly, it is in secret..." I N the distance a bell tolled the supper hour. In the palace, pageboys wandered the corridors, knocking on apartment doors rousing the occupants. Carter combed out his beard, frowning at the liberal sprinkling of gray hairs in it, donned his cloak and set out for the dining hall. He shivered as a chill wind swept down the drafty corridors, and reminded himself to speak to Kahl again about returning to  the capital city. Anything would be better than this. The dining hall was crowded, as usual, with supplicants who had bribed their way to the royal tables. Most of them had wasted their money. The chamberlain had stuck them away in far corners where they would be able to do nothing but stare at the man they wanted to see. Not that it would have done them any good to speak to the king. Kahl found the petty details of his office tiring. More and more he had been shoving them onto the The chamberlain met him at the door with a copy of the seating arrangements. Carter read down the list, pausing here and there at familiar names -- most of them pests who had long ago worn out his patience. He pursed his lips and touched a name with his finger. "This Ivra. Fisherman, it says. He the one with the daughter Kahl wants?" "Yes." Like most of the royal retinue, the chamberlain was uncomfortable in Carter's presence. The man had no title, no office. But he was undeniably the most powerful person in the realm after the king himself -- some placed his eminence even ahead of the king's. "Shall I place him at the royal table?" "No. It wouldn't do any good. But tell him to come see me tomorrow -- no. Make that three days from now. He can't have his daughter unviolated, but I think we can make him happy to have her at all." He handed the list back and made his way to the royal table, nodding to acquaintances and enemies. The problem of the fisherman bothered him. Carter was unaware of the fact, but he carried a strong puritanical conscience, the legacy of unknown forebears of years back. He disapproved of Kahl's unrestrained love life and did whatever he could to ease the disruptions it caused in the normal flow of subject-ruler relations. He stopped at the royal table and clapped a uniformed officer on the shoulder. "Marshal Zants! A pleasure to see you back at court. I read your report. I know His Most Graciousness will be pleased at your eastern successes." "Thank you, sir." The marshal inclined his head. "And I see you have had your own successes. Much has changed during the two years of my campaign." "We all live. Marshal," said Carter. "We all grow a little older. It's the natural course of life. A man who stands still in one position all the time wouldn't make a good runner, now would he?" "Indeed not. I suppose you wouldn't be interested in a commission under me? What things we could do together!" "I'm honored that you think of me so kindly, but I'm afraid my peculiar talents don't run in the military manner. Marshal." "Ah, but what a strategist you would make, sir." "Oh?" He grinned. "Then our enemies should be happy to have me in the capital, not on the field." H e reached his seat just in time to touch trousers to it and rise again when Kahl came in, whispering something in the ear of a courtesan. The girl laughed hysterically, then went to the woman's table as servants started bringing in the first course. Kahl grunted as he sat down and rubbed his belly. He leaned over towards Carter. "I'm getting fat, southerner. Fat and old." "A little exercise would do us all good." Kahl laughed. "That's what I like about you. Carter. Not for you the mealy-mouthed compliments. When you think something, you come right out and say it. I wish more of my ministers had your courage." "A few tried it," said Carter. "As I remember it, you had their ears cut off and made them eat them." "Yes, but I gave them a choice as to how they were prepared, didn't I?" He roared, and the rest of the room roared with him, although no one more than six feet from the head of the royal table could possibly have known the jest. Kahl fell to slurping his soup, while Carter did his best to hide his distaste at the man's table manners. For that matter, there was not a person in the hall he would have invited to the most informal dinner in his own apartments. Table manners were something else he had been trying to introduce, but as yet they were his most notorious failure. "Ahhh!" The king wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. While one servant removed the soup and another brought up the platter of meats and fish, he leaned over again. "Now, then, Carter. I've been meaning to speak to you all day. Been busy, though. Inhuman the number of demands on my time. Not that I mind of course. The penalties of the crown, and all that. But I really have been meaning to talk to you. How's that pet tinkerer of yours coming along." "Which one would that be? I've got most of the college working, you know." "The one working on that steam gadget you've been telling me about. You know, the one to make work easier. Not that I can see why a man should have his work made easy. Does the people good to sweat a bit." "Economically, though, to have one man able to do the work of half a dozen is very good. Just think of how it'll enrich the treasuries. Besides, the work isn't any easier on them: they just produce more." "Yes, yes. You've explained that all before. But how is it going?" "Quite well. I think another few weeks will bring very promising results. Some of the others are coming along well, too. The armory is turning out a hundred of the improved crossbows a day, now. I took Marshal Zants through the armory and his eyes positively glowed with excitement. He promises new and greater victories in his next campaign." Kahl was chewing on the leg of a bird. "He's been doing pretty good as it is, hasn't he?" "Much better than I would have thought," Carter admitted. "The problems of waging a war completely off from contact with home are great. Lines of supply, communication -- these are all vital to the successful campaign. I've got a few ideas on these subjects, too. After all, there is a limit to how much may be withdrawn from an occupied area -- if you still want to have that area useful to you in the future. A very wise man in my country once said that an army travels on its stomach. The plans Zants has been discussing with me for his next campaign call for a very large army." "You know," said Kahl, "at the rate we're going, it won't be long before your country is part of my country." "I'm afraid that'll take a while yet." He laughed. "Although there has never been a nation in history with so much territory under its direct rule. Your name will live as the monarch of this country alone, no matter what you might do on your own." Events were moving fast on the planet -- almost faster than Carter wanted. Already the lands under Kahl's rule amounted to nearly fifty per cent of the known areas of the world. At the rate things were snowballing, it wouldn't be long before his primary objective of planetary unification were achieved -- thousands of years ahead of time, if events had been permitted to follow their natural course. Of course, there would be delays and setbacks all along the way. Subsidiary objectives would always be getting in the way, must always be considered along with other plans. But even so, things were off to a good start. Although he might not live to see the complete fruition of all of his plans. Carter knew that this world was well on its way towards galactic citizenship. "There's a great deal of satisfaction in being a power behind the throne." Reilly grinned. "However, if any of you have a particular yen toward such power, it's only fair to tell you now that our screening is the most thorough ever devised. And it is constantly being improved. No man is ever placed in a position where his weaknesses might prove the better of him. "This is not to say that a man might not find himself in a position where he will be called on to do more than his utmost. It's surprising just how much a man can do, when he finds out he has no other choice..." VI tHE counterfeit Lund reached the bank of elevators a halfdozen running paces ahead of the just-coming-to-life audience. He gestured, and the operator closed the door in their faces. During the long descent to the street, Lund stripped off his clothes and did things to his face while the operator shoved the discarded costume into an access panel. Then he gave the now-slim little man a boost up through the roof of the cage and let himself be helped up. "Thank God for tradition," the man who had been known as Lund said when he helped the other man up. Stripping off his uniform jacket and reversing it changed the other's appearance. The elevator slowed automatically for the ground floor. Word had been flashed down from the Conference hall, but when the waiting monitors surged into the opening elevator before it had quite eased to a stop, they found nothing at all. Overhead, the two men threaded their way through a maze of cables and onto the roof of the next cab. It dropped under them, then stopped halfway between floors while they climbed down. The new operator eyed them, but said nothing while they brushed each other off. At a signal from the small man, the cab continued its interrupted drop, letting them out on the subsurface shopping level. The corridors of the level were full of running figures, most of them heading towards the elevator banks. No one paid the newly arrived pair any attention at all, although the powder-blue uniforms of the monitors predominated. The two men strode briskly down the corridor until they came to a side passage lined with small shops that featured the specialized products of the various members of the Conference. They stopped in front of one displaying gadgets from Ehrla, then entered while the counterfeit Lund purchased a perpetual razor, having it giftwrapped. Then they wandered further, acting now like the average sightseer, until they reached a florist's shop set in an alcove at the end of the passage. They entered, saw that there were no other customers, nodded to the salesman and continued on to the back. "Dale!" The waiting pair leaped to their feet and spoke as one. "We thought you weren't going to make it!" "I didn't think so myself," said Dale Vernon, the slim little man. "If Die hadn't been there right on schedule, there'd be nothing left of me but a few bloody shreds. Those people were mad!" His voice showed respect for the strength of their emotions, "What's the news?" "The Park monitors found the real Lund about twenty minutes ago." "Good timing. Any sooner, and the fun upstairs would have been different." "And you know who is screaming for the dissolving of the Conference." "So soon?" "They, uh, you might say had an inside lead as to what was going to happen." "It's a little early to tell," added the other man, "but apparently the operation was a success. The proper wheels have been set in motion, at least. We'll have to keep applying grease from time to time in the next forty-eight hours, but I think we can forget about the Ehrlan problem -- during this conference, at least. Ten years from now, they'll have an entirely different set of plans for the reformation of the galaxy. And we'll have to come up with an entirely different way of crossing them." "Do-gooders!" snorted the first man. "You must admit, they have the best of intentions," said Vernon. "But intentions aren't enough," added the other. "Man is an imperfect creature at best, and his best is a rare occurence indeed. We have to deal with practicalities. Perfection is beyond us, and we'd be idiots to try and enforce it. That's the basic difference between us and the Ehrlans -- we know what we can and can't do. They know only what they would like to do. And that makes them the most dangerous force loose in the galaxy today." sum it up," said Reilly,  getting up and going to the window, "ours is not a life of glory and fame." Another battalion marched out onto the field below and began the familiar maneuvers. "We work hard and receive little thanks -- if, indeed, we receive any thanks at all. The life is strenuous. The work is demanding. And over all of us rides the constant specter of failure, for we are not perfect. Nor do we want to be. "It is a lonely life for some: it is a short life for others. But for all of us, it's something more." He turned and faced the boys again. "It is the chance to be something more than just a man, for a man is a selfish creature. And it is the most rewarding life I know. "Any questions, gentlemen?" In the August issue of Worlds of Tomorrow: interplanetary life... by Philip K. Dick by Brian W. Aldiss -- and many more, including Daniel Keyes, J. T. McIntosh, Fritz Leiber and a highly provocative article. The New Science of Space Speech. Worlds of Tomorrow is the newest and most exciting science-fiction magazine in years -- don t miss it! August issue on sale today for your information distinct from the science-fiction reader -- has had a number of terminology problems during the past few years. His favorite newspapers and magazines, instead of talking about things one could understand like sad-eyed puppies and clean-cut little boys who, unfortunately, are too stupid to spell properly, has started talking of orbits, perigee and apogee, inclination to the equator and similar things. Quite a number of people are convinced that these are all brand new words, invented either in Washington or in Huntsville, Alabama. In reality they are standard astronomical terms that have been around since the early part of the seventeenth century. But recently talk about Lpoints has started and though this, too, is a standard astronomical term, I suspect that not even all science-fiction readers are quite sure just what an L-point is. To begin at the beginning, the L stands for Lagrange, full name Joseph Louis Lagrange, who lived from # to #. Lagrange was a mathematician with strong astronomical leanings, and as his name indicates he was a Frenchman. Frenchmen have the reputation of being people who stay home, or at least in France. If this is truly a national characteristic of the French, then Lagrange was an atypical Frenchman. To begin with, he was born in Torino, or Turin, in Italy and was educated there; he also had his first position in Italy, being appointed (at the age of nineteen!) professor of mathematics at the Artillery School at Torino. While engaged in the task of hammering some mathematics into the skulls of future artillery commanders he corresponded with the mathematician Leonhard Euler and laid the foundation for the branch of mathematics which later came to be called calculus of variations. At the age of # he published a mathematical treatise on the motion of the moon which was awarded a prize by the French Academy of Sciences. Two years later, he followed up with a theory of the motions of the satellites of Jupiter which made such an impression in Berlin that Frederick the Great of Prussia appointed him director of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Lagrange sp)ent the next twenty years of his life in Berlin until, finally, in vited him to come to Paris. There he spent the rest of his life, heading a commission for the reform of weights and measures, being professor at the Ecole Polytechnique and finally becoming a senator and elevated to Count by Napoleon I. During his investigation of the orbits of our own moon, as well as the orbits of Jupiter's satellites, Lagrange encountered a problem which he did not solve: the socalled three-body problem. ply this : Assume three bodies in space -- say a planet which has two very large moons in orbit around it. You know the mass of every one of these three bodies. You also know their relative positions, and you know their orbital veloci. Lg (# miles beyond the moon) Fig. #. The Lagrongian poinh in the earth-moon system. ties at this moment. Now find a set of simple and elegant equations which permit you to predict the future motions of these bodies, accounting for their mutual attractions all the time. Lagrange tried hard, but failed; and to this day nobody has been able to come up with such a set of equations. Of course we can and do calculate such cases -- for example, when it comes to predicting the motion of a comet. But it has to be done by way of endless stepby-step calculations which have to be checked against observations all the time. But, while Lagrange failed to find an overall solution of the three-body problem, he did find a number of special cases where there was a solution, provided the bodies were in certain relative positions to each other. In fact, there were five such positions... which later were called the Lagrangian points, or L-points, For an example of the Lagrangian points let us look at the earth-moon system. (Fig. #.) The earth and the moon are two of the three bodies. The third one would be a hypothetical satellite; and the problem would be to find a position in which it would have an easily predictable orbit. Two of these points are the ones known as equilaterals, positions L and Lr where the satellite would travel in the orbit of the moon and would, of course, have the same orbital period as the moon. But there are two more such points which lie on the line connecting the center of the earth with the center of the moon. One of these two is closer to us than the moon; the other is beyond the moon. Now, if our moon did not exist, a satellite moving at the distance of the Li point -- about # miles from the earth's center -- and another satellite moving at the distance of the Lo point -- about # miles from the earth's center -- would have different orbital periods. The Li satellite would need less time than our moon; the Lo satellite would need more time. But because our moon is there the satellites in these points would have the same orbital period as our moon. One may try to visualize this by imagining that our moon's gravitational force drags the Lj satellite along a bit faster than it would move normally, and keeps the Lj satellite back so that it does not move quite as fast as it would by itself. We now know that the L and Lr. positions are actually occupied by dust clouds. The Li point is not occupied, while an occupant of the Lo point could never be seen from earth. (In the future both the Li and Lo points may be occupied by radio relay satellites, if we get more than one human settlement on the moon. Because of the fairly strong curvature of the moon's surface, two distant lunar bases could not have direct radio contact. But they could talk to each other easily via relay satellites, located in the Ls point for bases on the far side of the moon, and in the Li point for bases on the lunar hemisphere which is visible from the earth.) and one possible misunderstanding have to be taken care of. The possible misunderstanding concerns the Li point. Everybody knows that, between the earth and the moon, there is a "neutral point", a point where the gravitational fields of earth and moon have the same strength. This neutral point is not the same as the Li point. In fact it is closer to the moon, roughly # miles from the lunar surface, or about # miles from the center of the moon. As for the "loose end", as I called it, it is the simple question "where is L#?" Well, Ls is also on the line connecting the earth and the moon. But it is on the other side of the earth, below the bottom of our diagram. Now, these Lagrangian points exist for every planet and its moons. They also exist if you consider the sun and a planet the two bodies. In other words, we could have equilaterals in the earth's orbit and in any other planetary orbit. In the case of Jupiter the equilateral points are known to be occupied, both the advance and the trailing position. Quite recently Dr. W. B, Klemperer has done some more work on the three-body problem. Like Lagrange he failed to find a general solution, but he succeeded in extending Lagrange's special cases, which always dealt with three bodies -- though of course all the L-points around one planet might be occupied -- to special cases of many bodies. You can have stable systems for three, four, five, six, eight and so forth bodies. They have to fulfill two conditions: they must orbit in the same plane; and they must, at any moment, form a regular polygon. Whether there is a major mass in the center of that polygon or not does not matter; the orbits would be stable with or without a central mass. One such possible arrangement is shown in the second diagram. Here we have four bodies, orbiting in the same plane and in elliptical orbits of the same size and eccentricity. The open circles show the four bodies at their extreme distances from the central mass (which needn't be there) and they form a square. Some time later, all four bodies have moved the same distance along their orbits, as indicated by the closed circles, and they still form a square. This system would be stable. So would the five-body system shown in Fig. #. And a M-body system, forming a #comered regular polygon, would be stable too. I said a short while ago that two conditions must be fulfilled: the bodies must form a regular polygon at any moment and they must move in the same plane. Do they also have to have equal masses, as indicated in the diagrams? The answer is that they do not have to have equal masses, provided another condition is fulfilled. If we had a six-body system, forming a regular hexagon, the bodies could be of two different masses, but then they would need a regular arrangement. The larger and the smaller bodies would have to alternate. In the hexagonal system, bodies #, # and # would have to have the same mass and bodies #, # and # also would have to have the same mass. But bodies #, # and # could be five times as massive as bodies #, # and #. These interesting arrangements would not last if an additional body wandered into the system from the outside. For this reason it is not very likely that such systems actually exist. But it would be careless to proclaim that they do not exist. When Lagrange theoretized equilaterals back in # no actual case was known, and because of such lack of confirmation in nature his "points" were very nearly forgotten. But then asteroid #TG was discovered by Max Wolf in February, #, and when the orbit was computed it was found to move in the orbit of Jupiter. Its running number and name became #-Achilles and it was the first equilateral found. Maybe a "Klemperer rosette" will turn up, tool      returns in September issue of If with a Out soon -- watch for it!      The Pain Peddlers Fame and fortune awaited the tueky people on television's top show -- and so did deathi -- Greek Proverb rop nudged the cut-in switch and heard Maurillo say, "We got a gangrene, chief. They're amputating tonight." Northrop's pulse quickened at the thought of action. 'What's the tab?" he asked. "Five thousand for all rights." "Anesthetic?" "Natch," Maurillo said. "I tried it the other way." 'What did you offer?" "Ten. It was no go." Northrop sighed. "I'll have to handle it myself, I guess. Where's the patient?" "Clinton General. In the wards." Northrop raised a heavy eye. brow and glowered into the screen. "In the wards?" he bel lowed. "And you couldn't get them to agree?" Maurillo seemed to shrink. "It was the relatives, chief. Thq were stubborn. The old man, he didn't seem to give a damn, but the relatives -- " "Okay. You stay there. coming over to close the deal," Northrop snapped. He cut the phone out and pulled a coup of blank waiver forms out of his desk, just in case the relativei backed down. Gangrene was gao grene, but ten grand was ten grand. And business was business. The networks were yelling. He had to supply the goods or get out. He thumbed the autosecretary. "I want my car ready in thirty seconds. South Street exit." "Yes, Mr. Northrop." "If anyone calls for me in the next half hour, record it, I'm going to Clinton General Hospital, but I don't want to be called there." "Yes, Mr. Northrop." "If Rayheld calls from the network office, tell him I'm getting him a dandy. Tell him -- oh, hell, tell him I'll call him back in an hour. That's all." "Yes, Mr. Northrop," Northrop scowled at the machine and left his office. The gravshaft took him down forty stories in almost literally no time flat. His car was waiting, as ordered, a long, sleek '# Frontenac with bubble top. Bullet-proof, of course. Network producers were vulnerable to crackpot attacks. He sat back, nestling into the plush upholstery. The car asked him where he was going, and he answered. "Let's have a pep pill," he said. A pill rolled out of the dispenser in front of him. He gulped it down. Maurillo, you make me sick, he thought. Why can't you close a deal without me? Just once? He made a mental not Maurillo had to go. The organi. zation couldn't tolerate ineffi. ciency. ' one. It was housed in one of the vulgar green-glass architect tural monstrosities so populaj sixty years before, a tasteless slabsided thing without character or grace. The main door irised and Northrop stepped through. The familiar hospital smell hit his nostrils. Most people found it unpleasant, but not Northrop. For him it was the smell of dollars. The hospital was so old that it still had nurses and orderlies. Oh, plenty of mechanicals skittered up and down the corridors, but here and there a middle-aged nurse, smugly clinging to her tenure, pushed a tray of mush along, or a doddering orderly propelled a broom. In his early days on video Northrop had done a documentary on these living fossils of the hospital corridors. He had won an award for the film. He remembered it for its crosscuts from baggy-faced nurses to gleaming mechanicals, its vivid presentation of the inhumanity of the new hospitals. It was a long time since Northrop had done a documentary of that sort. A different kind of show was the order of the day now, ever since the intensi-j fiers came in and telecasting Oiedicine became an art. A mechanical took him to Ward Seven, Maurillo was waiting there, a short, bouncy little man who wasn't bouncing much now. He knew he had fumbled. Maurillo grinned up at Northrop, a hollow grin, and said, "You sure made it fast, chief!" "How long would it take for the competition to cut in?" Northrop countered. "Where's the patient?" "Down by the end. You see where the curtain is? I had that put up. To get in good with the heirs. The relatives, I mean." "Fill me in," Northrop said. "Who's in charge?" "The oldest son, Harry. Watch out for him. Greedy." 'Who isn't?" Northrop sighed. They were at the curtain now. Maurillo parted it. All through the long ward, patients were stirring. Potential subjects for taping, all of them, Northrop thought. The world was so full of different kinds of sickness -- and one sickness fed on another. tain. There was a man in the bed, drawn and gaunt, his hollow face greenish, stubbly. A mechanical stood next to the bed, witH an intravenous tube running across and under the covers. The patient looked at least ninety. Knocking off ten years for the effects of illness still made him pretty old, Northrop thought. He confronted the relatives. There were eight of them. Five women, ranging from middle age down to teens. Three men, the oldest about fifty, the other two in their forties. Sons and nieces and granddaughters, Northrop figured. He said gravely, "I know what a terrible tragedy this must be for all of you. A man in the prime of his life -- head of a happy family -- " Northrop stared at the patient. "But I know he'll pull through. I can see the strength in him," The oldest relative said, "I'm Harry Gardner. I'm his son. You're from the network?" "I'm the producer," Northrop said. "I don't ordinarily come in person, but my assistant told me what a great human situation there was here, what a brave person your father was -- " The man in the bed slept on. He looked bad. Harry Gardner said, "We made an arrangement. Five thousand bucks. We wouldn't do it, except for the hospital bills. They can really wreck you," "I understand perfectly," Northrop said in his most unctuous tones. "That's why we're prepared to raise our offer. We're well aware of the disastrous effects of hospitalization on a small family, even today, in these times of protection. And so we can offer -- " "No! There's got to be anesthetic!" It was one of the daughters, a round, drab woman with colorless thin lips. "We ain't going to let you make him suffer!" Northrop smiled. "It would only be a moment of pain for him. Believe me. We'd begin the anesthesia immediately after the amputation. Just let us capture that single instant of -- " "It ain't right! He's old, he's got to be given the best treatment! The pain could kill him!" "On the contrary," Northrop said blandly. "Scientific research has shown that pain is often beneficial in amputation cases. It creates a nerve block, you see, that causes a kind of anesthesia of its own, without the harmful side effects of chemotherapy. And once the danger vectors are controlled, the normal anesthetic procedures can be invoked, and -- " he took a deep breath, and went rolling glibly on to the crusher -- "with the extra fee we'Il provide, you can give your dear one the absolute finest in medical care. There'll be no reason to stint." changed. Harry Gardner said, "How much are you offering for this absolute finest in medical care?" "May I see the leg?" Northrop answered. The coverlet was peeled back. Northrop stared. It was a nasty case. Northrop was no doctor, but he had been in this line of work for five years, and that was long enough to give him an amateur acquaintance with disease. He knew the old man was in bad shape. It looked as though there had been a severe bum, high up along the calf, which had probably been treated only with first aid. Then, in happy proletarian ignorance, the family had let the old man rot until he' was gangrenous. Now the leg was blackened, glossy, and swollen from mid-calf to the ends of the toes. Everything looked soft and decayed. Northrop had the feeling that he could reach out and break the puffy toes off, one at a time. The patient wasn't going to survive. Amputation or not, he was rotten to the core by this time. If the shock of amputation didn't do him in, general debilitation would. It was a good prospect for the show. It was the kind of stomachturning vicarious suffering that avidly. Northrop looked up and said, "Fifteen thousand if you'll allow a network-approved surgeon to amputate under our conditions. And we'll pay the surgeon's fee besides." "Well -- " "And we'll also underwrite the entire cost of post-operative care for your father," Northrop added smoothly. "Even if he stays in the hospital for six months, we'll pay every nickel, over and above the telecast fee." H e had them. He could see the greed shining in their eyes. They were faced with bankruptcy. He had come to rescue them; and did it matter all that much if the old man didn't have anesthetic when they sawed his leg off? Why, he was hardly conscious even now. He wouldn't really feel a thing. Not really. Northrop produced the documents, the waivers, the contracts covering residuals and LatinAmerican re-runs, the payment vouchers, all the paraphernalia. He sent Maurillo scuttling off for a secretary, and a few moments later a glistening mechanical was taking it all down. "If you'll put your name here, Mr. Gardner -- " Northrop handed the pen to the eldest son. Signed, sealed, delivered. "We'll operate tonight," Northsaid. "I'll send our surgeon over immediately. One of our best men. We'll give your father the care he deserves." He pocketed the documents. It was done. Maybe it was barbaric to operate on an old man that way, Northrop thought. Buthe didn't bear the responsibility, after all. He was just giving the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was spouting blood and tortured nerves. And what did it matter to the old man, really? Any experienced medic could tell you he was as good as dead. The operation wouldn't save him. Anesthesia wouldn't save him. If the gantive shock would do him in. At worst, he would suffer only a few minutes under the knife... but at least his family would be free from the fear of financial ruin. On the way out, Maurillo said, "Don't you think it's a little risky, chief? Offering to pay the hospitalization expenses, I mean?" "You've got to gamble a little sometimes to get what you want," Northrop said. "Yeah, but that could run to fifty, sixty thousand! What'll that do to the budget?" Northrop grinned. "We'll survive. Which is more than the old man will. He can't make it through the night. We haven't risked a penny, Maurillo. Not a stinking cent." Northrop turned the papers on the Gardner amputation over to his assistants, set the wheels in motion for the show and prepared to call it a day. There was only one bit of dirty work left to do. He had to fire Maurillo. It wasn't called firing, of course. Maurillo had tenure, just like the hospital orderlies and everyone else below executive rank. It would have to be more a kick upstairs than an # hing else. Northrop had been increasingly dissatisfied with the little man's work for months now. Today had been the clincher. Maurillo had no imagination. He didn't know how to close a deal. Why hadn't he thought of underwriting the hospitalization?  I cant delegate responsibility to him, Northrop told himself, I can't use him at all. There were plenty of other assistant producers in the outfit who'd be glad to step in. Northrop spoke to a couple of them. He made his choice: A young fellow named Barton, who'd been working on documentaries all year. Barton had done the plane-crash deal in London in the spring. He had a fine touch for the gruesome. He had been on hand at the Worlds' Fair fire last year at Juneau. Yes, Barton was the man. The next part was the sticky one. Things could go wrong. Northrop phoned Maurillo, even though Maurillo was even two rooms away -- these things were never done in person -- and said, "I've got some good news for you, Ted. We're shifting you to a new program." "Shifting -- ?" "That's right. We had a talk in here this afternoon, and we decided you were being wasted on the blood-and-guts show. You need more scope for your talents. So we're giving you a fat raise, boy, and we're moving you over to Kiddie Time. We think you'll really blossom there. You and Sam Kline and Ed Bragan ought to make a terrific team," Northrop saw Maurillo's pudgy face crumble. The arithmetic was getting home; over here, Maurillo was Number Two, and on the new show, a much less important one, he'd be Number Three. The pay meant nothing, of course; didn't Internal Revenue take it all anyway? It was a thiunping boot, and Maurillo knew it The mores of the situation called for Maurillo to pretend he was receiving a rare honor. He didn't play the game. He squinted and said, "Just because I didn't sign up that old man's amputation?" "What makes you think -- " "Three years I've been with you! Three years, and you kick me out just like that!" "I told you, Ted, we thought this would be a big opportunity for you. It's a step up the ladder. It's -- Maurillo's fleshy face puffed up with rage. "It's getting junked," he said bitterly. "Well, never mind, huh? It so happens Tve got another offer. I'm quitting before you can can me. You can take your tenure and -- " Northrop hastily blanked the screen. The idiot, he thought The fat little idiot. Well, to hell with him! He cleared his desk, and cleared his mind of Ted Maurillo and his problems. Life was real, life was earnest. Maurillo just couldn't take the pace, that was all. Northrop prepared to go home. It had been a long day. A t eight that evening came word that old Gardner was about to undergo the amputation. At ten, Northrop was phoned by the network's own head surgeon, Dr. Steele, with the news that the operation had failed. "We lost him," Steele said in a flat, unconcerned voice. "We did our best, but he was a mess. Fibrillation set in, and his heart just ran away. Not a damned thing we could do." "Did the leg come off?" "Oh, sure. All this was after the operation." "Did it get taped?" "Processing it now." "Okay," Northrop said. "Thanks for calling." "Sorry about the patient." "Don't worry yourself," Northrop said. "It happens to the best of us." The next morning, Northrop had a look at the rushes. The screening was in the #rd Floor studio, and a select audience was. on hand -- Northrop, his new assistant producer Barton, a handful of network executives, a couple of men from the cutting room. Slick, bosomy girls handed out intensifier helmets. No mechanicals doing the work here! Northrop slipped the helmet on over his head. He felt the familiar surge of excitement as the electrodes descended and contact was made. He closed his eyes. There was a thrum of power somewhere went into action. The screen brightened. There was the old man. There was the gangrenous leg. There was Dr. Steele, crisp and rugged and dimple-chinned, the network's star surgeon, # a year's worth of talent. There was the scalpel, gleaming in Steele's hand. Northrop began to sweat. The amplified brain waves were coming through the intensifier, and he felt the throbbing in the old man's leg, felt the dull haze of pain behind the old man's forehead, felt the weakness of being eighty years old and half dead. Steele was checking out the electronic scalpel, now, while the nurses fussed around, preparing the man for the amputation. In the finished tape, there would be music, narration, all the trimmings, but now there was just a soundless series of images, and, of course, the tapped brain-waves of the sick man. The leg was bare. The scalpel descended. Northrop winced as vicarious agony shot through him. He could feel the blazing pain, the brief searing hell as the scalpel slashed through diseased flesh and rotting bone. His whole body trembled, and he bit down hard on his lips and clenched his fists, and then it was over. There was a cessation of pain. A catharsis. The leg no longer sent its pulsating messages to the weary brain. Now there was shock, the anesthesia of hyped-up pain, and with the shock came calmness. Steele went about the mop-up operation. He tidied the stump, bound it. The rushes flickered out in anticlimax. Later, the production crew would tie up the program with interviews of the family, perhaps a shot of the funeral, a few observations on the problem of gangrene in the aged. Those things were the extras. What counted, what the viewers wanted, was the sheer nastiness of vicarious pain, and that they got in full measure. It was a gladiatorial contest without the gladiators, masochism concealed as medicine. It worked. It pulled in the Northrop patted sweat from his forehead. "Looks like we got ourselves quite a little show here, boys," he said in satisfaction. still on him as he left the building that day. All day he had worked hard, getting the show into its final shape, cutting and polishing. He enjoyed the element of craftsmanship. It helped him to forget some of the sordidness of the program. Night had fallen when he left. He stepped out of the main entrance and a figure strode forward, a bulky figure, medium height, tired face. A hand reached out, thrusting him roughly back into the lobby of the building At first Northrop didn't recognize the face of the man. It was a blank face, a nothing face, a middle-aged empty face. Then he placed it. Harry Gardner. The son of the dead man. "Murderer!" Gardner shrilled. "You killed him! He would have lived if you'd used anesthetics! You phony, you murdered him so people would have thrills on television!" Northrop glanced up the lobby. Someone was coming, around the the bend. Northrop felt calm. He could stare this nobody down until he fled in fear. "Listen," Northrop said, "we did the best medical science can do for your father. We gave him the ultimate in scientific care. We -- " "You murdered him!" "No," Northrop said, and then he said no more, because he saw the sudden flicker of a slice-gun in the blank-faced man's fat hand. He backed away. But it didn't help, because Gardner punched the trigger and an incandescent bolt flared out, and sliced across Northrop's belly just as efficiently as the surgeon's scalpel had cut through the gangrenous leg. Gardner raced away, feet clattering on the marble floor. Northrop dropped, clutching himself. His suit was seared. There was a slash through his abdomen, a bum an eighth of an inch wide and perhaps four inches deep, cutting through intestines, through organs, through flesh. The pain hadn't begun yet. His nerves weren't getting the message through to his stunned brain. But then they were; and Northrop coiled and twisted in agony that was anything but vicarious now. Footsteps approached. "Jeez," a voice said. Northrop forced an eye open. Maurillo. Of all people, Maurillo. "A doctor," Northrop wheezed. "Fast! Christ, the pain! Help me, Ted!" Maurillo looked down, and smiled. Without a word, he stepped to the telephone booth six feet away, dropped in a token, punched out a call. "Get a van over here, fast. I've got a subject, chief."  ment. Maurillo crouched next to him. "A doctor," Northrop murmured. "A needle, at least. Gimme a needle! The pain -- " "You want me to kill the pain?" Maurillo laughed. "Nothing doing. You just hang on. You stay alive till we get that hat on your head and tape the whole thing." "But you don't work for me -- you're off the program -- " "Sure," Maurillo said. "I'm with Transcontinental now. They're starting a blood-and-guts show too. Only they don't need waivers." Northrop gaped. Transcontinental? That bootleg outfit that peddled tapes in Afghanistan and Mexico and Ghana and God knew the pain peddlers where else? Not even a network show, he thought! No fee! Dying in agony for the benefit of a bunch of lousy tapeleggers. That was the worst part, Northrop thought Only Maurillo would pull a deal like that. "A needle! For God's sake, Maurillo, a needle!" "Nothing doing. The van'll be here any minute. They'll sew you up, and we'll tape it nice." Northrop closed his eyes. He felt the coiling intestines blazing within him. He willed himself to die, to cheat Maurillo. But it was no use. He remained alive and suffering. He lived for an hour. That was plenty of time to tape his dying agonies. The last thought he had was that it was a damned shame he couldn't star on his own show      For four years now we've missed the work of one of Galaxy's all-time fields. Now the news is good. Tenn is back! Our next issue leads off with a long and fast-moving yarn of his called The Men in the Walls. It's a complete short novel, on area in which we feel we've been pretty lucky, what with such recent items as Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters and Damon Knight's  The Visitor at the Zoo. One thing we know for sure: in that class. The Men in the Walls does nothing to lower our standards! While the October Galaxy is on the stands, Murray Leinster will be receiving his long-overdue just deserts by appearing as Science Fiction's!' Guest of Honor at the annual convention. To help celebrate the occasion! we re scheduling his newest Med Service novella for the issue. Its title is Med Ship Man... and it's a good one! He was mankind's only hope for a place among the races of the stars -- if he was still human! Enoch Wallace was a strange man living in a strange world. He had lived in it for mare than a century, since that first day when the alien creature who called himself Ulysses appeared to him and offered him the secret task of maintaining a transfer-point on Earth for the use of the galactic civilization. The offer had certain advantages. For one thing, it conferred nearimmortality. For another, it offered a chance to discover truths beyond the horizon of Earth. Enoch accepted, and began a life that shut him off from all his friends and neighbors -- but brought him new ones. First were the star travelers themselves, creatures of a thousand races who passed through the Earth station en route from one alien planet to another. Some were so strange and inhumon that Enoch could not communicate with them. Others were very like him... in every respect except appearance. Shrunken or huge, tentacled or shapeless, these visitors become friends, almost the only friends he had. His other friends were stranger still. They were ihe creatures of his mind -- the lovely woman named Mary, the dashing Civil War officer who was Enoch's imaginary ideal of a friend -- who were summoned out of his own subconscious to give him companionship, and given form through the arts of the galactic civilizotion. Enoch could no longer think of the place he lived in as "home"; it had been only "The Station" tor so many years, it too changed. Its outward appearance was the same as the century-old farmhouse in which He had spent his boyhood. But it had been altered inside, to provide the communications equipment and the matter-transmitting tanks that served its function; its outside too was changed, though imperceptibly, to make it the most secure fortress Earth had ever seen. No human thing could pierce those walls. No man or woman could open its doors except Enoch himself. His life of mystery was a challenge to the neighbors on the little farms nearby, especially to the family of the strange, mute girl named Lucy who wos almost his only contact with the outside world. Even more it challenged the men from the United States government who had come to investigate rumors of strange goings-on... and found mysteries far beyond the rumors. Every move Enoch made was watched. The world was closing in on him. And at the same time there was trouble in the galactic civilization itself, a trouble that centered around the queer, symbolic object called The Talisman. Enoch could not understand what was happening; he could only wonder, and retreat to the company of his own mind-companions... But even they seemed to be turning against him. They knew what they were: figments of his imagination, and nothing more. And they would not let him forget It. must face up to the kind of ing :y I H things they were. And what were they? Not what did he think they were, but what were they actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew much better than did he. Where had Mary gone? When she left this room, into what kind of limbo did she disappear? Did she still exist? And if so, what kind of an existence would it be? Would she be stored away somewhere as a little girl would store away her doll in a box pushed back into the closet with all the other dolls? He tried to imagine limbo. It was a nothingness; and if that were true, a being pushed into limbo would be an existence within a non-existence. There would be nothing -- not space nor time, nor light, nor air. No color and no vision; just a never-ending nothing, that must lie at some point outside the universe. He cried inside himself, Mary, what have I done to you! And the answer lay there, hard and naked. He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. The fact of here gather the stars the matter was that he had understood enough to make the concept work, but not enough to know its consequences. With creation went responsibility. He was not equipped to assume responsibility for what he had done. They hated him and resented him. He did not blame them. He'd led them out and shown them the promised land of humanity -- and then had led them back. He had given them everything that a human being had with one exception: the ability to exist within the human world. They all hated him but Mary, and for Mary it was worse than hate. For she was condemned to love the monster who had created her. Hate me, Mary! he pleaded. Hate me like the others! shadow people, but the label had been wrong. They were neither shadowy or ghost-like. To the eyes they were solid and substantial, as real as any people. It was only when you tried to touch them that they were not real -- for when you tried to touch them, there was nothing there. A figment of his mind, he'd thought at first, but now he was not sure. At first they'd come only when he'd called them up, using the knowledge and the techniques that he had acquired in his study of work done by the thaumaturrecent years he had not called them up. There had been no occasion to. They anticipated him, and came. David Ransome was himself, as he had dreamed himself to be, as he had wished himself to be -- but, of course, as he had never been. He was the dashing Union officer, of not so high a rank as to be stiff and stodgy, but a fair cut above the man of ordinary standing. He was trim and debonair and definitely dare-devilish, loved by all the women, admired by all the men. He was a bom leader and a good fellow all at once, at home alike in the field or drawing room. And Mary? Funny, he thought, he had never called her anything but Mary. There had never been a surname. She had been simply Mary. And she was at least two women, if not more than that. She was Sally Brown, who once had lived just down the road -- and how long had it been, he wondered, since he'd thought of Sally Brown? And she was as well a tall, stately daughter of the South, the woman he had seen for a few moments only as he marched a dusty road in the hot Virginia sun. There had been a mansion, one of those great plantation houses, set back from the road, and she had been standing on the portico, beside one of the great white pillars, watching the enemy march past. Her hair was black and her complexion whiter than the pillar and she had stood so straight and proud, so dehant and imperious that he had remembered her and thought of her, dreamed of her -- although he never spoke to her or knew her name. So Mary had been both of these -- Sally Brown and the unknown Virginia belle standing by the pillar to watch the troops march by -- the shadow of them and perhaps of many others as yet unrealized by him, a composite of all he had ever known or seen or admired in women. She had been an ideal and perfection. She had been his perfect woman, created in his mind. And now, like Sally Brown, resting in her grave; like the Virginia belle, lost in the mists of time; like all the others who may have contributed to his molding of her, she was gone from him. If he only could be sure, he thought, of where she might be now. If he only could be certain that she was in a semblance of death and untortured by her thoughts. To believe that she was sentient was more than one could bear. whistle that said a message waited and he took his head out of his hands. But he did not get up off the sofa. Numbly his hand reached out to the coffee table that stood before the sofa, its top covered with some of the more colorful of the geegaws and gimcracks that had been left as gifts by travelers. He picked up a cube of something that might have been some strange sort of glass or translucent stone -- he had never been able to decide which it was, if either -- and cupped it in his hands. Staring into it he saw a tiny picture, three dimensional and detailed, of a faery world. It was a prettily grotesque place, set inside what might have been a forest glade, surrounded by what appeared to be flowering toadstools. Drifting down through the air, as if it might have been a part of the air itself, came what looked for all the world like a shower of jeweled snow, sparkling and glinting in the violet light of a great blue sun. There were things dancing in the glade. They looked more like flowers than animals, but they moved with a grace and poetry that fired one's blood to watch. Then the faery place was wiped out and there was another place -- a wild and dismal place, with grim, gaunt, beetling cliffs rearing high against a red and angry gky, while great flying things that looked like flapping dishrags beat their way up and down the cliffs, and there were others of them roosting, most obscenely, upon the scraggly projections that must have been some sort of misshapen trees growing from the very wall of rock. And from far below, from some distance that one could only guess, came the lonesome thundering of a rushing river. He put the cube back upon the table. He wondered what it was that one saw within its depths. It was like turning the pages of a book, with each page a picture of a different place, but never anything to tell where that place might be. When he first had been given it, he had spent fascinated hours, watching the pictures change as he held it in his hands. There had never been a picture that looked even faintly like any other picture and there was no end to them. One got the feeling that these were not pictures, actually, but that one were looking at the scene itself and that at any moment one might lose his perch upon wherever he was roosting and plimge head-first down into the place itself. But it had finally palled upon him. It was a senseless business, gawking at a long series of places that had no identity. Senseless to him, of course, he thought; but not senseless, certainly, to that native of Enif V who had given it to him. It might, for all he knew, Enoch told himself, be of great significance and a treasure of great value. That was the way it was with so many of the things he had. Even the ones that had given pleasure, he knew, he might be using wrongly, or, at least, in a way that had not been intended. few, perhaps -- that did have a value he could understand and appreciate, although in many instances their functions were of little use to him. There was the tiny clock that gave the local times for all the sectors of the galaxy. There was the perfume mixer -- which was as close as he could come in naming it -- which allowed a person to create the specific scent desired. Just get the mixture that one wanted and turn it on, and the room took on that scent until one should turn it off. He'd had some fun with it; one bitter winter day when, after long experimenting, he had achieved the scent of apple blossoms, and had lived a day in spring while a blizzard howled outside. He reached out and picked up another piece -- a beautiful thing that always had intrigued him, but for which he had never found a use. If, indeed, it had a use. It might be no more than a piece of art, a pretty thing that was meant to look at only. But it had a certain feel (if that were the word) which had led him to believe that it might have some specific function. It was a pyramid of spheres, succeeding smaller spheres set on larger spheres. Some fourteen inches tall, it was a graceful piece, with each of the spheres a different color. Not just a color painted on; each color so deep and true that one knew instinctively the color was intrinsic to each sphere, that the entire sphere, from the center of it out to the surface, was all of its particular color. There was nothing to indicate that any glue-like medium had been used to mount the spheres and hold them in their places. It looked for all the world as if someone had simply piled the spheres, one atop the other... and they had stayed that way. Holding it in his hands, he tried to recall who had given it 'to him, but he had no memory of it. The whistle of the message machine still was calling and there was work to do. He could not sit here, he told himself, mooning the afternoon away. He put the pyramid of spheres back on the table top, and rising, went across the room. The message said; NO. # Enoch felt a glow of happiness, looking at the message. It would be good to have a Hazer once again. It had been a month or more since one had passed through the station. He could remember back to that first day he had ever met a Hazer, when the five of them had come. It must have been, he thought, back in # or, maybe, #. World War I, which everyone then was calling the Great War, was underway, he knew. The Hazer would be arriving at about the same time as Ulysses and the three of them could spend a pleasant evening. It was not often that two good friends visited here at once. He stood a bit aghast at thinking of the Hazer as a friend, for more than likely the being itself was one he had never met. But that made little difference. A Hazer, any Hazer, would turn out to be a friend. He got the cabinet in position beneath a materializer unit and double-checked to be sure that everything was exactly as it should be, then went back to the message machine and sent off the confirmation. And all the time his memory kept on nagging at him. Had it been #, or perhaps a little later? At the catalogue cabinet, he pulled out a drawer and found listed was July #, #. He found the record book on the shelf and pulled it out and brought it to the desk. He leafed through it rapidly until he found the date. J afternoon (#:# p.m.) five betheir kind to pass through this station. They are biped and humanoid, and one gains the impression that they are not made of flesh -- that flesh would be too gross for die kind of things they are. But, of course, they are made of flesh the same as anyone. They glow. Not with a visible light; but there is about them an aura that goes with them wherever they may be. They were, I gathered, a sexual unit, the five of them -- although I am not so certain I understand, for it is most confusing. They were happy and friendly. They carried with them an air of faint amusement, not at anything in particular, but at the universe itself, as if they might have enjoyed some sort of cosmic and very private joke that was known to no one else. They were on a holiday. They were en route to a festival (although that may not be the precise word for it) on another planet, where other life forms were gathering for a week of carnival. Just how or why they had been invited I was unable to determine. It must surely have been a great honor for them to be going there, but so far as I could see they did not seem to think so, but took it as their right. They were very happy and without a care and extremely self-assured and poised. But, thinking back on it, I would suppose that they are always that way. I found myself just a little envious at not being able to be as carefree and gay as they were, and trying to imagine how fresh life and the universe must seem to them. And a little resentful they could be, so unthinkingly, as happy as they were. I had, according to instructions, hung hammocks so that they could rest, but they did not use them. They brought with them hampers that were filled with food and drink and sat down at my table and began to talk and feast. They asked me to sit with them. They chose two dishes and a bottle, which they assured me would be safe for me to eat and drink, the rest of their fare being somewhat doubtful for a metabolism such as mine. The food was delicious and of a kind I had never tasted -- one dish being rather like the rarest and most delicate of old cheeses, and the other of a sweetness that was heavenly. The drink was somewhat like the finest of brandies, yellow in color and no heavier than water. self and about my planet and they were courteous and seemed genuinely interested. They were quick of understanding in the things I told them. They told me they were headed for a planet, the name of which I had not heard before, and they talked among themselves, gaily and happily, but in such a way that I did not seem to be left out. From their talk I gained the fact that some form of art was being presented at the festival on this planet. The art form was not alone of music or painting, but was composed of sound and color and emotion and form, and other qualities for which there seem to be no words in the language of the Earth, and which I do not entirely recognize, only gaining the very faintest inkling of what they were talking of in this particular regard. I gained the impression of a three-dimensional symphony -- although this is not entirely the right expression which had been composed, not by a single being, but by a team of beings. They talked of the art form enthusiastically. I seemed to understand that jt would not last for only several hours, but for days, and that it was an experience rather than a listening or seeing and that the spectators or audience did not merely sit and listen, but could, if they wished and must, to get the most out of it, be participants. But I could not understand how they participated and felt I should not ask. They talked of the people they would meet and when they had met them last and gossiped considerably about them, although in kindly fashion, leaving the impression that they and many other people went from planet to planet for some happy purpose. But whether there was any purpose other than enjoyment in their going, I could not determine. I gathered that there might be. They spoke of other festivals. Not all of them were concerned with the one art form, but with other more specialized aspects of the arts, of which I could gain no adequate idea. They seemed to find a great and exuberant happiness in the festivals. It seemed to me that some certain significances aside from the art itself contributed greatly to that happiness. I did not join in this part of dieir conversation, for, frankly, there was no opportunity. I would have liked to ask some questions, jjut I had no chance. I suppose that if I had, my questions must have sounded stupid to them; but given the chance, that would not have bothered me too much. And yet in spite of this, they managed somehow to make me feel I was included in their conversation. There was no obvious attempt to do this, and yet they made me feel I was one with them and not simply a station keeper they would spend a short time with. At times they spoke briefly in the language of their planet, which is one of the most beautiful I have ever heard, but for the most part they conversed in the vernacular used by a number of the humanoid races, a sort of pidginianguage made up for convenience. 'I suspect that this was done out of courtesy to me, and a great courtesy it was. I believe that they were truly the most civilized people I have ever met.  think by that I mean they owed in spirit. It seemed that Aey were accompanied, somehow, by a sparkling golden haze that made happy everything it touched -- almost as if they moved in some special world that no one else had found. Sitting at the table with them, I seemed to be included in this golden haze and I felt strange, quiet, deep currents of happiness flowing in my veins. I wondered by what route they and their world had arrived at this golden state and if my world could, in some distant time, attain it. But back of this happiness was a great vitality, the bubbling, effervescent spirit with an inner core of strength and a love of living that seemed to fill every pore of them and every instant of their time. They had only two hours' time. It passed so swiftly that I had to finally warn them it was time to go. Before they left, they placed two packages on the table and said they were for me. They thanked me for my table (what a strange way for them to put it). Then they said good-by and stepped into the cabinet (the extra large one), and I sent them on their way. Even after they were gone, the golden haze seemed to linger in the room. It was hours before all of it was gone. I wished that I might have gone with them to that other planet and its festival. One of the packages they left contained a dozen bottles of the brandy-like liquor. The bottles themselves were each a piece of here gather the stars art, no two of them alike, being formed of what I am convinced is diamond; but whether fabricated diamond or carved from some great stones, I have no idea. At any rate, I would estimate that each of them is priceless, and each carved in a disturbing variety of symbolisms, each of which, however, has a special beauty of its own. In the other box was a -- well, I suppose that, for lack of other name, you might call it a music box. The box itself is ivory, old yellow ivory that is as smooth as satin, covered by a mass of diagrammatic carving which must have some significance which I do not understand. On the top of it is a circle set inside a graduated scale. When I turned the circle to the first graduation there was music and through all the room an interplay of manycolored light, as if the entire room was filled with different kinds of color, and through it all a far-off suggestion of that golden haze. And from the box came, too, perfumes that filled the room, and feeling, emotion -- whatever one may call it -- but something that took hold of one and made one said or happy or whatever might go with the music and the color and perfume. Out of that box came a world in which one lived out the composition or whatever it might be -- living it with all that one had in him, all the enjo.' tion and belief and intellect of which one is capable. Here, I am quite certain, wag a recording of that art form of which they had been talking. And not one composition alone, but # of them, for that is the number of the graduation marks and for each mark there is a separate ! composition. In the days to come I shall play them all and make notes upon each of them and assign them names, perhaps, according to their characteristics, and from them, perhaps, can gain some knowledge as well as entertainment. ties, empty long ago, stood in a sparkling row upon the fireplace mantle. The music box, as one of his most choice possessions, was stored inside one of the cabinet where no harm could come to it Enoch thought, rather ruefully, that in all these years, despite regular use of it, he had not as yet played through the entire list of compositions. There were so many of the early ones that begged for a replaying that he was not a great deal more than halfway through the graduated markings. The Hazers had come back, the five of them, time and time again, for it seemed that they found in his station, perhaps even in the man who operated it, some quality that pleased them. They had helped him learn the Vegan language and had brought him scrolls of Vegan literature and many other things. They had been, without any doubt, the best friends among the aliens (other than Ulysses) that he had ever had. Then one day they came no more. He wondered why, asking after them when other Hazers showed up at the station. But he had never learned what had happened to them. That was the way it was with so many things. The galaxy was so large and so diverse and complex that you could never hope to keep in step with it. There was too much to know and too much to understand. And a large part of it was beyond human understanding. He knew far more now about the Hazers and their art forms, their traditions and their customs and their history, than he'd known that first day he'd written of them, back in #. But he still was far from grasping many of the concepts that were commonplace with them. There had been many of them since that day in # and there was one he remembered in particular -- the old, wise one, the philosopher, who had died on the floor beside the sofa. They had been sitting on the sofa, talking. He even could remember the subject of their talk. The old one had been telling of the perverse code of ethics, at once irrational and comic, which had been built up by that curious race of social vegetables he had encountered on one of his visits to an off-track planet on the other side of the galactic rim. The old Hazer had a drink or two beneath his belt and he was in splendid form, relating incident after incident with enthusiastic gusto. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, he stopped his talking, and slumped quietly forward. Enoch, startled, reached for him. But before he could lay a hand upon him, the old alien slid slowly to the floor. The golden haze faded from his body and slowly flickered out. The body lay there, angular and bony and obscene, a terribly alien thing there upon the floor, a thing that was at once pitiful and monstrous. More monstrous, it seemed to Enoch, than an # hing in alien form he had ever seen before. creature, but now, in death, it was an old bag of hideous bones with a scaly parchment stretched to hold the bones together. It was. the golden haze, Enoch told himself, gulping, in something near to horror, that had made the Hazer seem so wondrous and so beautiful, so vital, so alive and quick, so filled with dignity. The golden haze was the life of them. When the haze was gone they became mere repulsive horrors that one gagged to look upon. Could it be, he wondered, that the goldenness was the Hazers' life force and that they wore it like a cloak, as a sort of overall disguise? Did they wear their life force outside of them while all other creatures wore it on the inside? A piteous little wind was lamenting in the gingerbread high up in the gables. Through the windows he could see battalions of tattered clouds fleeing in ragged retreat across the moon, which had climbed halfway up the eastern sky. There was a coldness and a loneliness in the station -- a farreaching loneliness that stretched out and out, farther than mere Earth loneliness could go. Enoch turned from the body and walked stiffly across the room to the message machine. He put in a call for a connection direct with Galactic Central, then stood waiting, gripping the sides of the machine with both his hands. Central. Briefly, as objectively as he was able, Enoch reported what had happened. There was no hesitation and there were no questions from the other end. Just simple direction (as if this was something that hap. pened all the time) on how the situation should be handled. The Vegan must remain upon the planet of its death, its body to be disposed of according to the local customs obtaining on that planet. For that was the Vegan law, and, likewise, a point of honor. A Vegan, when he fell, must stay where he fell, and that place became There were such places, said Galactic Central, all through the galaxy. NO. know. chine and went back across the room. He stood above the Hazer, getting up his nerve to bend and lift the body to place it on the sofa. He shrank from touching it. It was so unclean and terrible, such a travesty on the shining creature that had sat there talking with him. Since he met the Hazers he had loved them and admired them, had looked forward to each visit by them -- by any one of them. And now he stood, a shivering coward who could not touch one dead. It was not the horror only. In his years as keeper of the station, he had seen much of pure visual horror as portrayed in alien bodies. He had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people. It was some other unknown factor quite apart from horror that he felt. And yet this thing, he reminded himself, was a friend of his. As a dead friend, it demanded honor from him. It demanded love and care... Blindly he drove himself to the task, stooped and lifted it. It had almost no weight at all, as if in death it had lost a dimension of itself, had somehow become a smaller thing and less significant. Could it be, he wondered, that the golden haze might have a weight all of its own? He laid the body on the sofa and straightened it as best he could. Then he went outside and, lighting the lantern in the shed, went down to the barn. It had been years since he had been there, but nothing much had changed. Protected by a tight roof from the weather, it had stayed snug and dry. There were cobwebs hanging from the beams and dust was everywhere. Straggling clumps of ancient hay, stored in the mow above, hung down through the cracks in the boards that floored the mow. The place had a dry, sweet, dusty smell about it, all the odors of animals and manure long gone. Enoch hung the lantern on the peg behind the row of stanchions and climbed the ladder to the mow. Working in the dark, for he dared not bring the lantern into this dust heap of dried-out hay, he found the pile of oaken boards far beneath the eaves. neath these slanting eaves, had been a pretended cave in which, as a boy, he had spent many happy rainy days when he could not be outdoors. He had been Robinson Crusoe in his desert island cave, or some now nameless outlaw hiding from a posse, or a man holed up against the threat of scalp-hunting Indians. He had had a wooden gun that he had sawed out of a board, working it down later with drawshave and knife and a piece of glass to scrape it smooth. It had been something he had cherished through all his boyhood days until that day, when he was twelve, that his father, returning home from a trip to town, had handed him a rifle for his very own. He explored the stack of boards in the dark, determining by feel the ones that he would need. These he carried to the ladder and carefully slid them down to the floor below. Climbing down the ladder, he went up the short flight of stairs to the granary, where the tools were stored. He opened the lid of the great tool chest and found that it was filled with longdeserted mice nests. Pulling out handfuls of the straw and hay and grass that the rodents had used to set up their one-time housekeeping, he uncovered the tools. The shine had gone from them, their surface grayed by the soft patina that came from long disuse. But there was no rust upon them and the cutting edges still were sharp. Selecting the tools he needed, he went back to the lower part of the barn and fell to work. A century ago, he thought, he had done as he was doing now, working by lantern light to construct a coffin. And that time it had been his father lying in the house. The oaken boards were dry and hard, but the tools still were in shape to handle them. He sawed and planed and hammered and there was the smell of sawdust. The barn was snug and silent, the depth of hay standing in the mow drowning out the noise of the complaining wind outside. He finished the coffin. It was heavier than he had figured, so he found the old wheelbarrow, canted against the wall back of the stalls that once had been used for horses, and loaded the coffin on it. Laboriously, stopping often to rest, he wheeled it down to the little cemetery inside the apple orchard. And here, beside his father's grave, he dug another grave, having brought a shovel and a pickaxe with him. he would have liked to dig not the full six feet that was decreed by custom, for he knew that if he dug it that deep he never would be able to get the coffin in. So he dug it slightly less than four, laboring in the light of the canted lantern, set atop the mound of dirt to cast its feeble glow. An owl came up from the woods and sat for a while, unseen, somewhere in the orchard, muttering and gurgling in between his hoots. The moon sank toward the west. The ragged clouds thinned out to let the stars shine through. Finally it was finished, with the grave completed and the casket in the grave and the lantern flickering, the kerosene almost gone, and the chimney blacked from the angle at which the lantern had been canted. Back at the station, Enoch hunted up a sheet in which to wrap the body. He put a Bible in his pocket and picked up the shrouded Vegan and, in the first faint' light that preceded dawn, marched down to the apple orchard. He put the Vegan in the coffin and nailed shut the lid, then climbed from the grave. Standing on the edge of it, he took the Bible from his pocket and found the place he wanted. He read aloud, scarcely needing to strain his eyes in the dim light to follow the text, for it was from a chapter that he had read many times: "n my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you..." Thinking, as he read it, how appropriate it was; how there must need be many mansions in which to house all the souls in the galaxy -- and of all the other galaxies that stretched, perhaps interminably, through space. Although if there were understanding, one might be enough. He finished reading and recited the burial service, from memory, as best he could, not being absolately sure of all the words. But sure enough, he told himself, to make sense out of it. Then he shoveled in the dirt The stars and moon were gone and the wind had died. In the quietness of the morning, the eastern sky was pearly pink. Enoch stood beside the grave, with the shovel in his hand. "Good-by, my friend," he said. Then he turned and, in the first flush of the morning, went back to the station. and carried the record book back to the shelf and slid it into place. He turned around and stood hesitantly. There were things that he should do. He should read his papers. He should be writing up his journal. There were a couple of papers in the latest issues of the Journal of Geophysical Research that he should be looking at. But he didn't feel like doing any of them. There was too much to think about, too much to worry over, too much to mourn. The watchers still were out there. He had lost his shadow people. And the world was edging in toward war. Perhaps he should not be worrying about what happened to the world. He could resign from the human race any time he wished. If he never went outside, if he never opened up the door, then it would make no difference to him what the world might do or what might happen to it. For he had a world. He had a greater world than anyone outside this station had ever dreamed about. He did not need the Earth. But, even as he thought it, he knew he could not make it stick. In a very strange and funny way, he still did need the Earth. He walked over to the door and spoke the phrase and the door came open. He walked into the shed and it closed behind him. He went around the corner of the house and sat down on the steps that led up to the porch. This, he thought, was where it all had started. He had been sitting here that summer day of long ago when the stars had reached out across vast gulfs of space and put a finger on him. The sun was far down the sky toward the west and soon it would be evening. Already the heat of the day was falling off, with a faint, cool breeze creeping up out of the hollow that ran down to the river valley. Down across the field, at the edge of the woods, crows were wheeling in the sky and cawing. It would be hard to shut the door, he knew, and keep it shut. Hard never to feel the sun or wind again, to never know the smell of the changing seasons as they came across the Earth. Man, he told himself, was not ready for that. He had not as yet become so totally a creature of his own created environment that he could divorce himself entirely from the physical characteristics of his native planet. He needed sun and soil and wind to remain a man. He should do this oftener, Enoch thought, come out here and sit, doing nothing, just looking, seeing the trees and the river to the west and the blue of the Iowa hills across the Mississippi, watching the crows wheeling in the skies and the pigeons strutting on ridgepole of the bam. It would be worthwhile each day to do it. What was another hour of aging? He did not need to save his hours -- not now, he didn't. There might come a time when he'd become very jealous of them. When that day came, he could hoard the hours and minutes, even the seconds, in as miserly a fashion as he could manage. He heard the sound of the running feet as they came around the farther comer of the house, a stumbling, exhausted running, as if the one who ran might have come a far way. He leaped to his feet and strode out into the yard to see who it might be and the runner came stumbling toward him, with her arms outstretched. He put out an arm and caught her as she came close to him, holding her close against him so she would not fall. "Lucy!" he cried. "Lucy! What has happened, child?" were warm and sticky and he took one of them away to see that it was smeared with blood. The back of her dress was soaked and dark. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her away from him so he could see her face. It was wet with crying. There was terror in the face -- and pleading with the terror. She pulled away from him and turned around. Her hands came up and slipped her dress off her shoulders and let it slide halfway down her back. The flesh of the shoulders were ribboned by long slashes that still were oozing blood. She pulled the dress up again and turned to face him. She made a pleading gesture and pointed backward down the hill, in the direction of the field that ran down to the woods. There was motion down there, someone coming through the woods, almost at the edge of the old, deserted field. She must have seen it, too, for she came close against him, shivering, seeking his protection. He bent and lifted her in his arms and ran for the shed. He spoke the phrase and the door came open and he stepped into the station. Behind him he heard the door go sliding shut. Once inside, he stood there, with Lucy Fisher cradled in his arms, and knew that what he'd done had been a great mistake. In a sober moment, he never would have done it; if he'd given it a second thought, he would not have done it. But he had acted on an impulse, with no thought at all. The girl had asked protection and here nothing in the world ever could get at her. But she was a human being. And no human being, other than himself, should have ever crossed the threshold. But it was done. Once across the threshold, there was no way to change it He carried her across the room and put her on the sofa, then stepped back. She sat there, looking up at him, smiling very faintly, as if she did not know if she were allowed to smile in a place like this. She lifted a hand and tried to brush away the tears that were upon her cheeks. She looked quickly around the room and her mouth made an O of wonder. He squatted down and patted the sofa and shook a hnger at her, hoping that she might understand that he meant she should stay there, that she must go nowhere else. He swept an arm in a motion to take in all the remainder of the station and shook his head as sternly as he could. She watched him, fascinated, then she smiled and nodded, as if she might have understood. He reached out and took one of her hands in his own and holding it, patted it as gently as he could, trying to reassure her, to make her understand that everything was all right if she only stayed exactly where she was. She was smiling now, no longer wondering, apparently, if there were any reason that she should not smile. She reached out her free hand and made a little fluttering gesture toward the coffee table, with its load of alien gadgets. He nodded and she picked up one of them, turning it admiringly in her hand. He got to his feet and went to the wall to take down the rifle. Then he went outside to face whatever had been pursuing her. the field toward the house and Enoch saw that one of them was Hank Fisher, Lucy's father. He had met the man, rather briefly, several years ago, on one of his walks. Hank had explained, rather sheepishly and when no explanation had been necessary, that he was hunting for a cow which had strayed away. But from his furtive manner, Enoch had deduced that his errand was something shadier than the hunting of a cow -- although he could not imagine what it might have been. The other man was younger. No more, perhaps, than sixteen or seventeen. More than likely, Enoch told himself, he was one of Lucy's brothers. Enoch stood by the porch and waited. Hank was carrying a coiled whip in his hand. Looking at it, Enoch understood those wounds on Lucy's shoulders. He felt a swift flash of anger, but tried to fight it down. He could deal better with Hank Fisher if he kept his temper. The two men stopped three paces or so away. "Good afternoon," said Enoch. "You seen my gal?" asked Hank. "And if I have?" asked Enoch. "I'll take the hide off of her," yelled Hank, flourishing the whip. "In such a case," said Enoch, "I don't believe I'll tell you anything." "You got her hid," charged Hank. "You can look around," said Enoch. Hank took a quick step forward, then thought better of it. "She got what she had coming to her," he yelled. "And I ain't finished with her yet. There ain't no one, not even my own flesh and blood, can put a hex on me." Enoch said nothing. Hank stood, undecided. "She meddled," he said. "She had no call to meddle. It was none of her damn business." The young man said: "I was just trying to train Butcher. Butcher," he explained to Enoch, "is a coon-hound pup." "That is right," said Hank. "He wasn't doing nothing wrong. The boys caught a young coon the other night. Took a lot of doing. Roy, here, had staked out the coon to a tree, and he had Butcher on a leash. He was letting Butcher fight the coon. Not hurting anything. He'd pull Butcher off before any damage could be done and let them rest a while. Then he'd let Butcher at the coon again." "It's the best way in the world," said Roy, "to train a dog." 'That is right," said Hank. "That is why they caught the coon." "We needed it," said Roy, "to train this Butcher pup." "and I am glad to hear it. But what has it got to do with Lucy -- and, for that matter, with me?" "She interfered," said Hank. "She tried to stop the training. She tried to grab Butcher away from Roy, here." "For a dummy," Roy said, "she is mite too uppity." "You hush your mouth," his father told him sternly, swinging around on him. Roy mumbled to himself, falling back a step. Hank turned back to Enoch. "Roy knocked her down," he said. "He shouldn't have done that. He should have been more careful." "I didn't mean to," Roy said. "I just swung my arm out to keep her away from Butcher." "That is right," said Hank. "He swung a bit too hard. But there wasn't any call for her doing what she did. She tied Butcher up in knots so he couldn't fight that coon. Without laying a finger on him, mind you, she tied him up in knots. He couldn't move a muscle. That made Roy mad." He appealed to Enoch earnestly. "Wouldn't that have made you mad?" "I don't think it would," said Enoch. "But then I'm not a coondog man." Hank stared in wonder at this lack of understanding, but he went on with his story. "Roy got real mad at her. He'd raised that Butcher. He thought a lot of him. He wasn't going to let no one, not even his own sister, tie that dog in knots. So he went after her and she tied him up in knots, just like she did to Butcher. I never seen a thing like it in all my bom days. Roy just stiffened up and then he fell down to the ground and his legs pulled up against his belly and he wrapped his arms around himself and he laid there on the ground, pulled into a ball. Him and Butcher, both. But she never touched that coon. She never tied him in no knots. Her own folks is all she touched." "It didn't hurt," said Roy. "It didn't hurt at all." "I was sitting there," said Hank, "braiding this here bull whip. Its end had frayed and I fixed a new one on it. And I seen it all, but I didn't do a thing until I saw Roy there, tied up on the ground. And I figured then it had gone far enough. I am a broad-minded man; I don't mind a little wart charming and other piddling things like that. There have been a lot of people who have been able to do that. It ain't no disgrace at all. But this thing of tying people into knots... "So you hit her writh the whip," said Enoch.-him, solemnly. "I ain't about to have no witch in any family of mine. I hit her a couple of licks, with her making that dumb show of hers to try to get me stopped. But I had my duty and I kept on hitting. If I did enough of it, I figured. I'd knock it out of her. That was when she put the hex on me. Just like she did on Roy and Butcher, but in a different way. She turned me blind! She blinded her own father! I couldn't see a thing. I just stumbled around the yard, yelling and clawing at my eyes. And then they got all right again, but she was gone. I saw her running ffirough the woods and up the hill. So Roy and me, we took out after her." "And you think I have her here?" "I know you have," said Hank. "Okay," said Enoch. "Have a look around." "You can bet I will," Hank told, grimly. "Roy, take the barn. She might be hiding there." Roy headed for the bam. Hank went into the shed, came out almost immediately, strode down to the sagging chicken house. Enoch stood and waited, the rifle cradled on his arm. He had trouble here, he knew -- more trouble than he'd ever had before. There was no such thing as reasoning with a man of Hank Fisher's stripe. There was no approach, right now, that he would understand. All that he could do was to wait until Hank's temper had cooled off. Then there might be an outside chance of talking sense to him. The two of them came back. "She ain't nowhere around," said Hank. "She is in the house." Enoch shook his head. "There can't anyone get into that house." "Roy," said Hank, "climb them there steps and open up that door." Roy looked fearfully at Enoch. "Go ahead," said Enoch. Roy moved forward slowly and went up the steps. He crossed the porch and put his hand upon the front doorknob and turned. He tried again. He turned around. "Pa," he said, "I can't turn it. I can't get it open." "Hell," said Hank, disgusted, "you can't do an # hing." Hank took the steps in two jumps, paced wrathfully across the porch. His'hand reached out and grasped the knob and wrenched at it powerfully. He tried again and yet again. He turned angrily to face Enoch. "What is going on here?" he yelled. "I told you," Enoch said, "that you can't get in." "The hell I can't!" roared Hank. TE tossed the whip to Roy and came down off the porch, striding over to the woodpile that stood beside the shed. He wrenched the heavy, double-bitted axe out of the chopping block. "Careful with that axe," warned Enoch. "I've had it for a long time and I set a store by it." Hank did not answer. He went up on the porch and squared off before the door. "Stand off," he said to Roy. "Give me elbow room." Roy backed away. "Wait a minute," Enoch said. "You mean to chop down that door?" "You're damned right I do." Enoch nodded gravely. "Well?" asked Hank. "It's all right with me if you want to try." Hank took his stance, gripping the handle of the axe. The steel flashed swiftly, up over h shoulder, then down in a driven blow. The edge of the steel struck the surface of the door and turned, deflected by the surface, changed its course, bouncing from the door. The blade came slicing down and back. It missed Hank's spraddled leg by no more than an inch and the momentum of it spun him half around. He stood there, foolishly, arms outstretched, hands still gripping the handle of the axe. He stared at Enoch. "Try again," invited Enoch. Rage flowed over Hank. His face was flushed with anger. "By God, I will!" he yelled. He squared off again and this time he swung the axe, not at the door, but at the window set beside the door. The blade struck and there was a high singing sound as pieces of sun-bright steel went flying through the air. Ducking away. Hank dropped the axe. It fell to the floor of the porch and bounced. One blade was broken, the metal sheared away in jagged breaks. The window was intact. There was not a scratch upon it. Hank stood there for a moment, staring at the broken axe, as if he could not quite believe what he saw. Silently he stretched out his hand and Roy put the bull whip in it. The two of them came down the stairs. They stopped at the bottom of them and looked at Enoch. Hank's hand twitched on the whip. "If I were you," said Enoch, "I wouldi't try it. Hank. I can move awfully fast." He patted the gun butt. "I'd have the hand off you before you could swing that whip." Hank breathed heavily. "There's the devil in you, Wallace," he said. "And there's the devil in her, too. You're working together, the two of you. Sneaking around in the woods, meeting one another." Enoch waited, watching the both of them. "God help me," cried Hank. "My own daughter is a witch!" "I think," said Enoch, "you should go back home. If I happen to find Lucy, I will bring her there." Neither of them made a move. "You haven't heard the last of this," yelled Hank. 'Y'ou have my daughter somewhere and I'll get you for it." "Any time you want," said Enoch, "but not now." He made an imperative gesture with the rifle barrel. "Get moving," he said. "And don't come back. Either one of you." They hesitated for a moment, looking at him, trying to gauge him, trying to guess what he might do next. Slowly they turned and, walking side by side, moved off down the hill. XV TE should have killed both of them, he thought. They were not fit to live. He glanced down at the rifle. His hands had such a grip on the gun that his fingers stood out white and stiff against the satin brown of the wood. He gasped a little in his effort to fight down the rage that boiled inside him, trying to explode. If they had stayed here any longer he'd have given in to that towering rage. Even as it stood, it would be bad. They would say he was a madman; that he had run them off at gunpoint. They might even say that he had kidnaped Lucy and was holding her against her will. They would stop at nothing to make him all the trouble that they could. He had no illusions about what they might do, for he knew the breed, vindictive in their smallness -- little vicious insects of the human race. He stood beside the porch and watched them down the hill, wondering how a girl so fine as Lucy could spring from such decadent stock. Perhaps her handicap had kept her from becoming another one of them. Perhaps if she could have talked with them or listened, she would in time have become as shiftless and as vicious as any one of them. It had been a great mistake to get mixed up in a thing like this. A man in his position had too much to lose. And yet what could he have done? Could he have refused to give Lucy his protection, with the blood soaking through her dress from the lashes that lay across here gather the stars her shoulders? Should he have ignored the frantic, helpless pleading in her face? He turned heavily around and went back inside the station. L ucy was still sitting on the sofa. She held a flashing object in her hand, staring at it raptly. Her face again held that same vibrant and alert expression he had seen that morning when she'd held the butterfly. He laid the rifle on the desk and stood quietly there, but she must have caught the motion of him. She looked quickly up. Then her eyes went back to the flashing thing in her hands. It was the pyramid of spheres. Now all the spheres were spinning slowly, in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motions. As they spun they shone and glittered, each in its own particular color, as if there might be, deep inside each one of them, a source of soft, warm light. Enoch caught his breath at the beauty and the wonder of it the old, hard wonder of what this thing might be and what it might be meant to do. He had puzzled at it a hundred times or more. He could find nothing significant. So far as he could see, it was only meant to look at, although there had been that persistent feeling of purpose -- that, perhaps, somehow, it was meant to operate. And now it was in operation. He had tried it a hundred times; Lucy had picked it up just once; and she had got it figured out. He noticed the rapture on her face. Was it possible that she knew its purpose? He went across the room and touched her arm. She lifted her face to look at him, and in her eyes he saw the gleam of happiness and excitement. He made a questioning gesture toward the pyramid, trying to ask if she knew what it might be. But she did not understand him. Or perhaps she knew, but knew as well how impossible it would be to explain its purpose. She made that happy, fluttery motion with her hand again, indicating the table with its load of gadgets. There was laughter in her face. Just a kid, Enoch told himself, with a box heaped high with new and wondrous toys. Was that all it was to her? Was she happy and excited merely because she suddenly had become aware of all the beauty and the novelty of the things stacked there on the table? He turned wearily and went back to the desk. He picked up the rifle and hung it on the pegs. S HE should not be in the station. No human being other than himself should ever be inside the station. Bringing her here, he had broken that unspoken understanding he had with the aliens who had installed him as a keeper. Although, of all humans, Lucy was the one who could possibly be exempt from the restriction. For she could never tell the things that she had seen. She could not remain. She must be taken home. Otherwise there would be a massive hunt for her, a lost girl -- a beautiful deaf-mute. A story like that would bring in newspapermen in a day or two. The woods would be swarming with searchers. Hank Fisher would tell how he'd tried to break into the house and couldn't. Then others would try to break in and there'd be hell to pay. Enoch sweated, thinking of it. All the years of keeping out of people's way would be for nothing then. This strange house on a lonely ridge would become an international mystery, and a chal; lenging target for all the crackpots of the world. He went to the medicine cabinet, to get the healing ointment that had been included in the drug packet provided by Galactic Central. He opened the little box. More than half of it remained. He'd used it through the years, but sparingly. There was, in fact, little need to use a great deal of it. He went across the room to Lucy, showed her what he had and made motions to show her what it was for. She slid her dress off her shoulders and he bent to look at the slashes. The bleeding had stopped, but the flesh was red and angry. Gently he rubbed pintment into the stripes that the whip had made. She had healed the butterfly, he thought; but she could not heal herself. On the table in front of her the pyramid of spheres still was flashing and glinting, throwing a flickering shadow of color all about the room. It was operating, but what could it be doing? deepening into night. Enoch and Lucy had just finished with their supper and were sitting at the table when Enoch heard his footsteps. The alien stood in shadow and he looked, Enoch thought, more than ever like the cruel clown. His lithe, flowing body had the look of smoked, tanned buckskin. The patchwork color of his hide seemed to shine faintly; the hard angles of his face, the bald head, the flat, pointed ears pasted tight against the skull, lent him a vicious fearsomeness. If one did not know him for the gentle character that he was, Enoch told himself, he would be enough to scare a man out of seven years of growth. "We had been expecting you," said Enoch. "The coffee pot is boiling." Ulysses took a slow step forward, then paused. "You have another with you. A human, I would say." "There is no danger," Enoch told him. "Of another gender. A female, is it not? You have found a mate?" "No," said Enoch. "She is not my mate." "You have acted wisely through the years," Ulysses told him. "In a position such as yours, a mate is not the best." "You need not worry. There is a malady upon her. She has no communication. She can neither hear nor speak." "A malady?" "Yes, from the moment she was bom. She has never heard or spoken. She can tell of nothing here." "Sign language?" "She knows no sign language. She refused to learn it." "She is a friend of yours." "For some years," said Enoch. "She came seeking my protection. Her father used a whip to beat her." "This father knows she's here?" "He thinks she is. But he cannot know." Ulysses came slowly out of the darkness and stood within the light. Lucy was watching him. There was no terror on her face. Her eyes were level and untroubled and she did not flinch. "She takes me well," Ulysses said. "She does not run or scream." "She could not scream," said Enoch, "even if she wished." Ulysses said, "at first sight to any human." "She does not see the outside only. She sees inside of you as well." 'Would she be frightened if I made a human bow to her?" "I think," said Enoch, "she might be very pleased." Ulysses made his bow, formal and exaggerated, with one hand upon his leathery belly, bowing from the waist. Lucy smiled and clapped her hands. "You see?" Ulysses cried, delighted. "I think that she may like me." 'Why don't you sit down, then," suggested Enoch, "and we all will have some coffee." "I had forgotten of the coffee. The sight of this other human drove coffee from my mind." He sat down at the place where the third cup had been set, waiting for him. Enoch started around the table, but Lucy rose and went to get the coffee. "She understands?" Ulysses asked. Enoch shook his head. "You sat down by the cup and the cup was empty." She poured the coffee, then went over to the sofa. "She will not stay with us?" Ulysses asked. "She's intrigued by that table full of trinkets. She set one of them to going." "You plan to keep her here?" "I can't keep her," Enoch said. "There'll be a hunt for her. I'll have to take her home." "I do not like it," Ulysses said. "Nor do I. Let's admit at once that I should not have brought her here. But at the time it seemed the only thing to do. I had no time to think it out." "You've done no wrong," said Ulysses, softly. "She cannot harm us," said Enoch. 'Without communication of any kind..." "It's not that," Ulysses told him. "She's just a complication and I do not like further complications. I came tonight to tell you, Enoch, that we are in trouble." "Trouble? But there's not been any trouble." Ulysses lifted his coffee cup and took a long drink of it. "That is good," he said. "I carry back the bean and make it at my home. But it does not taste the same." "This trouble?" "You remember the Vegan that died here several of your years ago." Enoch nodded. "The Hazer." "The being has a proper name of his own..." Enoch laughed. "You don't like our nicknames." "It is not our way," Ulysses said. "My name for them," said Enoch, "is a mark of my affection." "You buried this Vegan." "In my family plot," said Enoch. "As if he were my own. I read a verse above him." "That is well and good," Ulysses said. "That is as it should be. But the body's gone." cried Enoch. "It has been taken from the grave." "But you can't know," protested Enoch. "How could you know?" "Not I. The Vegans are the ones who know." "But they're light years distant from here... And then he was not too sure. For on that night the wise old one had died and he'd messaged Galactic Central he had been told that the Vegans had known the moment he had died. And there had been no need for a death certificate, for they knew of what he died. It seemed impossible, of course. But there were too many impossibilities in the galaxy -- which turned out, after all, to be entirely possible -- for a man to ever know when he stood on solid ground. Was it possible, he wondered, that each Vegan had some sort of mental contact with every other Vegan? Or that some central census bureau (to give a human designation to something that was scarcely understandable) might have some sort of official linkage with every living Vegan, knowing where it was and how it was and what it might be doing? Something of the sort, Enoch admitted, might indeed be possible. It was not beyond the astounding capabilities that one found on every hand throughout the galaxy. But to maintain a similar contact with the Vegan dead was something else again. "The body's gone," Ulysses said. "I can tell you that and know it is the truth. You're held accountable." "By the Vegans?" "By the Vegans, yes. And the galaxy." "I. did what I could!" said Enoch hotly. "I did what was required. I filled the letter of the Vegan law. I paid the dead my honor and the honor of my planet. It is not right that the responsibility should go on forever. Not that I can believe the body can be really gone. There is no one who would take it. No one knew of it!" "By human logic," Ulysses told him, "you, of course, are right But not by Vegan logic. And in this case Galactic Central would tend to support the Vegans." Enoch said testily, "The Vegans happen to be friends of mine. I have never met one of them that I didn't like or couldn't get along with. I can work it out with them." "If only the Vegans were concerned," said Ulysses, "I am quite sure you could. But the situation is complicated. The Vegans have known for some time that the body had been taken. They were disturbed, of course, but out of certain considerations, they kept their silence." "They needn't have. They could have come to me. I don't know what could have been done . but I would have tried to do mething." "Silent not because of you. Because of something else."  fee and poured himself another cup. He filled Enoch's halffilled cup and set the pot aside. Enoch waited. "You may not have been aware of it," said Ulysses, "but at the time this station was established, there was considerable opposition to it from a number of races in the galaxy. There were many leasons cited, as is the case in all such situations, but the underlying reason, when you get down to basics, rest squarely on the continual contest for racial or regional advantage." Enoch nodded. "I had a hint of this. I hadn't paid much attention to it." "It's largely a matter of direction," Ulysses said. "When Galactic Central began its expansion into this spiral arm, it meant there was no time or effort available for expansions in other directions. There is one large group of races which has held a dream for many centuries of expanding into some of the nearby globular clusters. It does make a dim sort of sense, of course. With the techniques that we have, the longer jump across space to some of the closer clusters is entirely possible. Another thing. The clusters seem to be extraordinarily free of dust and gas; so that once we got there, we could expand more rapidly throughout the cluster than we can in many parts of the galaxy. But, at best, it's a speculative business, for we don't know what we'll find there. After we've made all the effort and spent all the time we may find little or nothing, except, possibly, some more real estate. And we have plenty of that in the galaxy. But the clusters have a vast appeal for certain types of minds." Enoch nodded. "I can see that. It would be the first venturing out of the galaxy itself. It might be the first short step on the route that could lead us to other galaxies." Ulysses peered at him. "You, too," he said. "I might have known." Enoch said, smugly: "I am that type of mind." "there was this globularcluster faction -- I suppose you'd call it that -- which contended bitterly when we began our move in this direction. You understand that we've barely begun the expansion into this neighborhood. We have less than a dozen stations; we'll need a hundred. It will take centuries before the network is complete." "So this faction is still contending," Enoch said. "There still is time to stop this spiral-arm project." "That is right. And that's what worries me. For the faction is set to use this incident of the missing body as an emotion-charged argument against the extension of this network. It is being joined by other groups that are concerned with certain special interests. And these special interest groups see a better chance of getting what they want if they can wreck this project." "Wreck it?" "Yes, wreck it. They will start screaming, as soon as the body incident becomes open knowledge, that a planet so barbaric as the Earth is no fit location for a station. They will insist that this station be abandoned." "But they can't do that!" "They can," Ulysses said. "They will say it is degrading and unsafe to maintain a station so barbaric that even graves are rifled, on a planet where the honored dead cannot rest in peace. It is the kind of highly emotional argument that will gain wide acceptance and support in some sections of the galaxy. The Vegans tried their best. They tried to hush it up, for the sake of the project. They have never done a thing like that before. They are a proud people and they feel a slight to honor perhaps more deeply than many other races. Yet, for the greater good, honor. And would have if they could have kept it quiet. But the story leaked out somehow -- by good espionage, no doubt. And they cannot stand the loss of face in advertised dishonor. The Vegan who will be arriving here this evening is an official representative charged with delivering an official protest." "To me?" "To you, and through you to the Earth." "But the Earth is not concerned. The Earth doesn't even know." "Of course it doesn't. So far as Galactic Central is concerned, you are the Earth. You represent the Earth." Enoch shook his head. It was a crazy way of thinking. But, he told himself, he should not be surprised. It was the kind of thinking he should have expected. He was too hidebound, he thought, too narrow. "But even if you have to abandon Earth," he said, "you could go out to Mars and build a station there." "You don't understand," Ulysses told him. "This station is no more than a toehold. The aim is to wreck the project. If they can force us to abandon one station. then we stand discredited. Then all our judgments come up for review." #iUT even if the project-'should be wrecked," Enoch pointed out, "there is no surety that any group would gain. It would only throw the question of where the time and energy should be used into an open debate. You say that there are many specialinterest factions banding together to carry on the fight against us. Suppose they do win. Then they must turn around and start fighting among themselves.'" "Of course," Ulysses admitted, "but then each of them has a chance. The way it is they have no chance at all. There is one group on the far side of the galaxy that wants to move out into the thinly populated sections of one particular section of the rim. They still believe in an ancient legend which says that their race arose as the result of immigrants from another galaxy who landed on the rim and worked their way inward over many galactic years. They think that if they can get out to the rim they can turn that legend into history to their greater glory... Another group wants to go into a small spiral arm because of an obscure record that many eons ago their ancestors picked up some virtually undecipherable messages which they believed came from that direction. Through the years the story has grown, until today they are convinced a race of intellectual giants will be found in that spiral arm. And there is always pressure to probe deeper into the galactic core. You must realize that we have only started. The galaxy still is largely unexplored. The thousands of races who form Galactic Central still are pioneers." "You sound," said Enoch, "as if you have little hope of maintaining this station." "Almost no hope at all," Ulysses told him. "But so far as you yourself are concerned, there will be an option. You can stay here and live out an ordinary life on Earth or you can be assigned to another station. Galactic Central hopes that you would elect to continue on with us." Enoch sat numb and stricken. Bad news! It was worse than that. It was the crashing down of not only his own personal world, but of all the hopes of Earth. With the station gone. Earth once more would be left in the backwaters of the galaxy, with no hope of help, no chance of recognition, no realization of what lay waiting in the galaxy. Standing alone and naked, the human race would go on in its same old path, fumbling its uncertain way toward a blind, mad future. Hazer was elderly. The golden haze that enveloped him had lost the sparkle of its yoruthfulness. It was a mellow glow, deep and rich -- not the blinding haze of a younger being. He carried himself with a solid dignity and the flaring topknot that was neither hair nor feathers was a saintly white. His face was soft and tender, the softness and the tenderness which in a man might have been expressed in kindly wrinkles. "I am sorry," he told Enoch, "that our meeting must be such as this. Although, under any circumstances, I am glad to meet you. I have heard of you. It is not often that a being of an outside planet is the keeper of a station. Because of this, young beknow there were two of them. I only knew of one." "It's a friend of Enoch's," Ulysses said. "There has been contact, then; Contact with the planet." "No, there has been no contact." "Perhaps an indiscretion." "Perhaps," Ulysses said, "but under provocation that I doubt either you or I could have stood against." Lucy had risen to her feet and now she came across the room, moving quietly and slowly, as if she might be floating. The Hazer spoke to her in the common tongue. "I am very glad to meet you." "She cannot speak," Ulysses said. "She has no communication." "Compensation," said the Hazer. "You think so?" asked Ulysses. "I am sure of it." He walked slowly forward and Lucy waited. "It -- she, the female form, you called it -- she is not afraid." Ulysses chuckled. "Not even of me," he said. The Hazer reached out his hand to her and she stood quietly for a moment, then one hand came up and took the Hazer's fingers, more like tentacles than fingers, in her grasp. ing, I have been intrigued with you. I have wondered what sort of creature you might turn out to be." "You need have no apprehension of him," Ulysses said, a little sharply. "I will vouch for him. We have been friends for years." "Yes, I forgot," the Hazer said. 'You are his discoverer." He peered around the room. "Another one," he said. "I did not I T seemed to Enoch that the cloak of golden haze reached out to wrap the Earth girl in its glow. Enoch blinked and the illusion, if it had been illusion, was swept away; only the Hazer had the golden cloak. And how was it, Enoch wondered, that there was no fear in her, either of Ulysses or the Hazer? Was it because she could see beyond the outward guise to sense their basic humanity? (God help me, I cannot think, even now, except in human terms! ) And if that were true, was it because she, herself, was not entirely human? Lucy dropped the Hazer's hand and went back to the sofa. The Hazer said: "Enoch Wallace." "Yes." "She is of your race?" "Yes, of course." "She is most unlike you. Almost as if there were two races on your planet." "There is only one." "Are there many others like her?" "I would not know," said Enoch. "Coffee," said Ulysses to the Hazer. "Would you like some coffee?" "Coffee?" "A most delicious brew. Earth's one great accomplishment." "I am not acquainted with it," said the Hazer. "I don't believe I will." He turned ponderously to Enoch. "You know why I am here?" he asked. "It is a matter I regret, but I must... "If you'd rather," Enoch said, "we can consider that the protest has been made. I would so stipulate." "Why not?" Ulysses said. "There is no need, it seems to me, to have the three of us go through a somewhat painful scene." The Hazer hesitated. "If you feel you must," said Enoch. "No," the Hazer said. "I am satisfied if an unspoken protest be generously accepted." "Accepted," Enoch said, "on just one condition. That I satisfy myself that the charge is not unfounded. I must go out and see." "You do not believe me?" "It is not a matter of belief. It is something that can be checked. I cannot accept either for myself or for my planet until I have done that much." "Enoch," Ulysses said, "the Vegan has been gracious. Not only now, but before this happened. His race presses the charge most reluctantly. They suffered much to protect the Earth and you." "And the feeling is that I would be ungracious if I did not accept the protest and the charge on the Vegan statement." "I am sorry, Enoch," said Ulysses. "That is what I mean." years I've tried to understand and to conform to the ethics and ideas of all the people who have come through this station. I've pushed my own human instincts and training to one side. I've tried to understand other viewpoints and to evaluate other ways of thinking, many of which did violence to my own. I am glad of all of it, for it has given me a chance to go beyond the narrowness of Earth. I think I gained something from it all. But none of this touched Earth; only myself was involved. This business touches Earth and I must approach it from an Earthman's viewpoint. In this particular instance I am not simply the keeper of a galactic station." Neither of them said a word. Enoch stood waiting and still there was nothing said. Finally he turned and headed for the door. "I'll be back," he told them. He spoke the phrase and the door started to slide open. "If you'll have me," said Hazer, quietly, "I'd like to go with you." "Fine," said Enoch. "Come ahead." It was dark outside and Enoch lit the lantern. The Hazer watched him closely. "Fossil fuel," Enoch told him. "It burns at the tip of a saturated wick." The Hazer said, in horror: "But surely you have better." "Much better now. I am just old-fashioned." He led the way outside, the lantern throwing a small pool of light. The Hazer followed. "It is a wild planet," said the Hazer. "Wild here. There are parts of it are tame." "My own planet is controlled," the Hazer said. "Every foot of it is planned." "I know. I have talked to many Vegans. They described the planet to me." They headed for the barn. "You want to go back?" asked Enoch. "No," said the Hazer. "I find it exhilarating. Those are wild plants over there?" "We call them trees," said Enoch. "The wind blows as it wishes?" "That's right," said Enoch. "We do not as yet control the weather." The spade stood just inside the barn door and Enoch picked it up. He headed for the orchard. "You know, of course," the Hazer said, "the body will be gone." "I'm prepared to find it gone." "Then why?" the Hazer asked. "Because I must be sure. You can't understand that, can you?" "You said back there in the station," the Hazer said, "that you tried to understand the rest of us. Perhaps, for a change, at least one of us should try understanding you." path through the orchard. They came to the rude fence enclosing the burial plot. The sagging gate stood open. Enoch went through it and the Hazer followed. "This is where you buried him?" "This is my family plot. My mother and my father are here and I put him with them." He handed the lantern to the Vegan and, armed with the spade, walked up to the grave. He thrust the spade into the ground. "Would you hold the lantern a little closer, please?" The Hazer moved up a step or two. Enoch dropped to his knees and brushed away the leaves that had fallen on the ground. Underneath them was the soft, fresh earth that had been newly turned. There was a depression and a small hole at the bottom of the depression. As he brushed at the earth, he could hear the clods of displaced dirt falling through the hole and striking on something that was not the soil. The Hazer had moved the lantern again and he could not see. But he did not need to see. He knew there was no use of digging; he knew what he would find. He should have kept a watch. He should not have put up the stone to attract attention. But Galactic Central had said "as if he were your own," and that was the way he'd done it. He felt the damp of the earth soaking through his trousers. "No one told me," said the Hazer softly. "Told you what?" "The memorial. And what is written on it. I was not aware that you knew our language." "I learned it long ago. There were scrolls I wished to read. I'm afraid it's not too good." "Two misspelled words," the Hazer told him, "and one little awkwardness. But those are things which do not matter. What matters, very much, is that when you wrote you thought as one of us." Enoch rose and reached out for the lantern. "Let's go back," he said sharply. "I know now who did this. I have to hunt him out." THE treetops far above moaned in the rising wind. Ahead, the great clump of canoe birch showed whitely in the dim glow of the lantern's light. The birch clump, Enoch knew, grew on the lip of a small cliff that dropped twenty feet or more and here one turned to the right to get around it and continue down the hillside. Enoch turned slightly and glanced at Lucy, following close behind. She smiled at him. He gestured to indicate that they must turn to the right, that she must follow closely. Although it wasn't necessary; she knew the hillside better than he himself. He turned along the edge of the cliff, came to the break and clambered down to reach the slope below. Off to the left he could hear the swiftly-running creek that tumbled down the ravine from the spring below the field. The hillside plunged more steeply now and he led a way that angled across it. Even in the darkness he could recognize the white oak that twisted at a crazy angle above the hill; the small grove of massive red oaks that grew out of a dome of tumbled rock, so placed that no axeman had even tried to cut them down; the tiny swamp, filled with cattails, that fitted itself snugly into a little terrace carved into the hillside. Far below he caught the gleam of window light. They came to a rude fence of poles and crawled through it. Now the ground became more level. Somewhere a dog barked in the dark and another joined him. More joined in, and the pack came sweeping up toward them. They arrived in a rush of feet, veered around Enoch and the lantern to launch themselves at Lucy -- suddenly transformed, at the sight of her, into a welcoming committee rather than a company of guards. Enoch led the way across a vegetable garden carefully following a path between the rows. Then they were in the yard and the house stood before them, a tumbledown, sagging structure, its kitchen windows glowing with lamplight. T he door opened. Ma Fisher stood framed against the light, a great, tall, bony woman clothed in something that was more sack than dress. She stared at Enoch, half frightened, half belligerent. Then back of him she saw the girl. "Lucy!" she cried. The girl came forward with a rush and her mother caught her in her arms. Enoch set his lantern on the ground, tucked the rifle underneath his arm and stepped across the threshold. The family had been at supper, seated about a great round table set in the center of the kitchen. An ornate oil lamp stood in the center of the table. Hank had risen to his feet, but his three sons and the stranger still were seated. "So you brung her back," said Hank. "I found her," Enoch said. "We quit hunting for her just a while ago," Hank told him. "We was going out again." "You remember what you told me this afternoon?" asked Enoch. "I told you a lot of things." "You told me that I had the devil in me. Raise your hand against that girl once more and I promise you I'll show you just how much devil there is in me." "You can't bluff me," Hank blustered. But the man was frightened. It showed in the limpness of his face, the tightness of his body. "I mean it," Enoch said. "Just try me out and see." The two men stood for a moment, facing one another, then Hank sat down. "Would you join us in some victuals?" he inquired. Enoch shook his head. He looked at the stranger. "Are you the ginseng man?" he asked. The man nodded. "That is what they call me." "I want to talk with you. Outside." Claude Lewis stood up. "You don't have to go," said Hank. "He can't make you go. He can talk to you right here." "I don't mind," said Lewis. "In fact, I want to talk with him. You're Enoch Wallace, aren't you?" "That's who he is," said Hank. "Should of died of old age fifty years ago. But look at him. He's got the devil in him. I tell you, him and the devil has a deal." "Hank," Lewis said, "shut up." Lewis came around the table and went out the door. "Good night," Enoch said to the rest of them. "Mr. Wallace," said Ma Fisher, "thanks for bringing back my girl. Hank won't hit her again, I can promise you. I'll see to that." Enoch went outside and shut the door. He picked up the lantern. Lewis was out in the yard. Enoch went to him. "Let's walk off a ways," he said. the garden and turned to face one another. "You been watching me," said Enoch. Lewis nodded. "Official? Or just snooping?" "Official, I'm afraid. My name is Claude Lewis. There is no rea"I'm not a traitor or a spy," Enoch said. "No one thinks you are. We're just watching you. You can imagine why, I expect." "You know about the cemetery?" Lewis nodded. I "You took something from a i grave." I "Yes," said Lewis. "The one  with the funny headstone." , "Where is it?" I "You mean the body. It's in I Washington." "You shouldn't have taken it," i Enoch said, grimly. "You've caused a lot of trouble. You have to get it back as quickly as you can." "It will take a little time," said Lewis. "They'll have to fly it out. Twenty-four hours, maybe." "That's the fastest you can make it?" "I might do a little better." "Do the very best you can. It's important that you get that body back." "I will, Wallace. I didn't know it would be important." "And, Lewis." "Yes." "Don't try to play it smart. Don't add any frills. Just do what I tell you. I'm trying to be reasonI able because that's the only thing i to be. But you try one smart move..." He reached out a hand and grabbed Lewis' shirt front, twisting the fabric tight. "You understand me, Lewis?" Lewis was unmoved. He did not try to pull away. "I had a job," he said. "Yeah, a job. Watching me. Not robbing graves." He let loose of the shirt. "Tell me," said Lewis, "that thing in the grave. What was it?" "That's none of your damn business," Enoch told him, bitterly. "Getting back that body is. It's most important thing you've ever done. Don't forget that for a minute. It affects everyone on Earth. You and I and everyone. And if you fail, you'll answer to me for it." "Wallace, is there something you can tell me?" "Not a thing," said Enoch. He picked up the lantern, turned, went across the garden and started up the hill. In the yard, Lewis stood for a long time, watching the lantern bobbing out of sight. station when Enoch returned. He had sent the Thuban on his way and the Hazer back to Vega. A fresh pot of coffee was brewing and Ulysses was sprawled out on the sofa, doing nothing. Enoch hung up the rifle and blew out the lantern. Taking off his jacket, he threw it on the desk. He sat down in a chair across from the sofa. "The body will be back," he said, "by this time tomorrow." "I sincerely hope," Ulysses said, "that it will do some good. But I'm inclined to doubt it." Said Enoch bitterly, "Maybe I should not have bothered." "It will show good faith," Ulysses said. "It might have some mitigating effect in the final weighing." . "The Hazer could have told me," Enoch said, "where the body was. If he knew it had been taken from the grave, then he must have known where it could be found." "I would suspect he did," Ulysses said. "But, you see, he couldn't tell you. All that he could do was to make his protest. The rest was up to you." "Sometimes this business is enough to drive one crazy." "There may come a day," Ulysses said, "when it won't be like that. I can look ahead and see, in some thousands of years, the knitting of the galaxy together into one great culture, one huge area of understanding. The local and the racial variations still will exist, of course, and that is as it should be, but overriding all of these will be a tolerance that will make for what one might be tempted to call a brotherhood." Enoch said, "You sound almost like a human."  sounds. Enoch went to get it. Ulysses had pushed some of the trinkets on the coffee table to one side to make room for two coffee cups. Enoch filled them and set the pot upon the floor. Ulysses picked up his cup, held it for a moment in his hands, then put it back on the table top. "We're in bad shape," he said. "Not like in the old days. It has Galactic Central worried. All this squabbling and haggling among the races, all the pushing and the shoving." He looked at Enoch. "You thought it was all nice and cozy." "No," said Enoch, "not that. But I'm afraid I thought of the conflicts as being on a fairly lofty plane. Gentlemanly, you know. Good mannered." "That was the way it was at one time. There always have been differing opinions, but they were based on principles and ethics, not on special interests. You know about the spiritual force, of course. The universal spiritual force." Enoch nodded. "I've read some of the literature. I don't quite uncept it. There is a way, I know, to get in contact with the force." "The Talisman," said Ulysses. "That's it. The Talisman. A machine, of sorts." "I suppose," Ulysses agreed. "you could call it that. Although machine is a little awkward. More than sheer mechanics went into the making of it. There is just the one. Only one was ever made, by a being who lived ten thousand of your years ago. I wish I could tell you what it is or how it is constructed, but there is no one, I am afraid, who can tell you that. There have been others who have attempted to duplicate the : Talisman, but no one has suc' ceeded. The mystic who made it left no blueprints, no plans, no specifications, not a single note. There is no one who knows anything about it." "There is no reason, I suppose," I said Enoch, "that another should not be made. No sacred taboos, I mean. To make another one j would not be sacrilegious." "Not in the least," Ulysses told him. "In fact, we need another badly. For now we have no Talisman. It has disappeared." Enoch jerked upright in his chair. "Disappeared?" he asked. "Lost," said Ulysses. "Misplaced. Stolen. No one knows." "But I hadn't..." Ulysses smiled bleakly. "It's a ' strange business," he said. "The Talisman has been missing for several years or so, and no one knows about it -- except Galactic Central and the -- what would you call it? The hierarchy, I suppose. The organization of mystics. And yet, even with no one knowing, the galaxy is beginning to show wear. It's coming apart at the seams. In time to come, it may fall apart. As if the Talisman represented a force that all unknowingly held the races of the galaxy together, exerting its influence even when it remained unseen." "But even if it's lost, it's somewhere," Enoch pointed out. "It still would be exerting its influence. It couldn't have been destroyed." "You forget," Ulysses reminded him, "that without its proper custodian it is inoperative. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the force. It is an extension of the sensitive." moment, listening to the soft sound that the wind made as it blew through the gable gingerbread. "You really think relations in the galaxy are deteriorating because of this?" "Once," Ulysses said, "the races all were bound together. There were differences, naturally, but these differences were bridged. Both sides wanted them bridged, you see. There was a common purpose, the forging of a great confraternity of all intelligences. We realized that among us we had a staggering fund of knowledge and techniques. Working together, putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing. We had our troubles and our differences, but we were progressing. We brushed the small animosities and the petty differences underneath the rug and worked only on the big ones. We felt that if we could get the big ones settled, the small ones would become so small they would disappear. But it is becoming different now. There is a tendency to pull the pettiness from underneath the rug and blow it beyond its size." "It sounds like Earth," said Enoch. "In many ways," Ulysses said. "In principle, although the circumstances would diverge immensely." "You've been reading the papers I have been saving for you?" Ulysses nodded. "It doesn't look too happy." "It looks like war," said Enoch bluntly. Ulysses stirred uneasily. "You don't have wars," said Enoch. "The galaxy, you mean. No, as we are set up now we don't have wars." "Too civilized?" "Stop being bitter," Ulysses told him. "There has been a time or two when we came very close, but not in recent years. There are many races now in the confraternity that in their formative years had a history of war." "There is hope for us, then. It's something you outgrow." "In time, perhaps." "But not a certainty?" "No, I wouldn't say so." "I've been working on a chart," said Enoch. "Based on the Mizar system of statistics. The chart says there is going to be war." "You don't need the chart," Ulysses said, "to tell you that." "But there was something else. It was not just knowing if there'd be a war. I had hoped that the chart might show how to keep the peace. There must be a way. If we could only think of it or know where to look or whom to ask or..." "There is a way," Ulysses said "You mean you know..." "It's drastic. A last resort." "And we've not reached that last resort?" "Perhaps you have. The kind of war that Earth would fight could spell an end to everything but the feeble remnants of civilizations. It could, just possibly, eliminate life upon the planet." "This method of yours -- it has been used?" "A few times." "And worked?" "Oh, certainly. We'd not even consider it if it didn't work." I "It could be used on Earth?" "You could apply for it." "I?" "As a representative of the ' Earth. To gain a hearing, you must know about Galactic Central and you're the only man of Earth who does. BesideSj your record has been good. We would listen to you." "But one man alone! One man can't speak for an entire race. If I could consult some others -- " "Who would believe you?" "That's true," said Enoch. Of course it was. To him there was no longer any strangeness in the idea of a galactic confraternity, of a transportation network that spread among the stars -- but tell it to any other Earthman and it would sound like madness. "And this method?" he asked, almost afraid to ask it. "Stupidity," Ulysses said.  don't understand. We are stupid enough, in many ways, right now." "You're thinking of intellectual I stupidity. What I am talking I about is a mental incapacity. An j inability to understand the scilence and the technique that makes possible the kind of war that Earth would fight. An inability to operate the machines that are necessary to fight that kind of war. Turning the people back to a mental position where they would not be able to comprehend the mechanical and technological and scientific advances they have made. Those who know would forget. Those who didn't know could newer learn. Back to the simplicity of the wheel and lever. That would make your kind of war impossible." Enoch sat stiff and straight, unable to speak. "I told you it was drastic," Ulysses said. "I couldn't!" Enoch said. "No one could." "Perhaps you can't. But consider this : If there is a war..." "I know. If there is a war, it could be worse. But it wouldn't stop war. It's not the kind of thing I had in mind. People still could fight, still could kill." "With clubs," said Ulysses. "Maybe bows and arrows. Rifles, so long as they still had rifles, and until they ran out of ammunition. Then they wouldn't know how to make more powder or how to get the metal to make the bullets or even how to make the bullets. There might be fighting, but there'd be no holocaust. Cities would not be wiped out by nuclear warheads, for no one could fire a rocket or arm the warhead -- perhaps wouldn't even know what a rocket or a warhead was." "It would be terrible," Enoch said. "So is war," Ulysses said. "But how long?" asked Enoch. "How long would it last? We wouldn't have to go back to stupidity forever?" "Several generations," said Ulysses. "By that time the effect would gradually begin wearing off. The people slowly would shake off their moronic state and and begin their intellectual climb again. They'd be given a second chance." "They could," said Enoch, "m a few generations after that arrive at pxactly the same situation that we have today." "Possibly." "It's too much for one man... "Something hopeful," Ulysses said, "that you might consider. The method is offered only to those races which seem to us to be worth the saving." "You have to give me time," said Enoch. But he knew there was no time. himself, shook his head and reached for the rifle on the peg. He needed something to take his mind off what Ulysses had said. And he needed the targ practice. It had been too long since he'd been on the rifle range. He spoke the word, and watched the wall slide back, and clumped down the stairs to the basement. The basement was huge. It stretched out into a dim haze beyond the lights which he had turned on, a place of tunnels and rooms, carved deep into the rock that folded up to underlie the ridge. Here were the massive tanks filled with the various solutions for the tank travelers; here the pumps and the generators, which operated on a principle alien to the human manner of generating electric power, and far beneath the floor of the basement itself those great storage tanks which held the acids and the soupy matter which once had been the creatures which came traveling to the station, leaving behind them, as they went on to some other place, the useless bodies which then must be disposed of. Enoch moved across the floor, past the tanks and generators, imtil he came to a gallery that stretched out into the darkness. He found the panel and pressed it to bring on the lights, then walked down the gallery. On either side were metal shelves which had been installed to accommodate the overflow of gadgets, of artifacts, of all sorts of gifts which had been brought him by the travelers. From floor to ceiling the shelves were jammed with a junkyard accumulation from all the corners of the galaxy. And yet, thought Enoch, perhaps not actually a junkyard, for very little of this stuff was actual junk. All of it was serviceable and had some purpose, either practical or aesthetic, if only that purpose could be learned. Although perhaps not in every instance a purpose that would be applicable to humans. Down at the end of the shelves was one section of shelving into which the articles were packed more systematically and with greater care, each one tagged and numbered, with cross-filing to a card catalogue and certain journal dates. These were the articles of which he knew the purpose and, in certain instances, something of the principles involved. There were some that were innocent enough and others that held great potential value and still others that had, at the moment, no connection whatsoever with the human way of life -- and there were a few, tagged in red, that made one shudder to even think upon. He went down the gallery, his footsteps echoing loudly as he trod through this place of alien ghosts. Finally the gallery widened into an oval room. Here the walls i were padded with a thick gray substance that would entrap a bullet and prevent a ricochet. Enoch walked over to a panel set inside a deep recess, sunk into the wall. He reached in and thumbed up a tumbler, then stepped quickly out into the center of the room. Slowly the room began to darken. Then suddenly it seemed to flare -- and he was in the room no longer, but in another place, a place he had never seen before. In front of him the land sloped down to a sluggish river bordered by marsh. Between the .beginning of the marsh and the foot of the hillock stretched a sea of rough, tall grass. There was no wind, but the grass was rippling. He knew that the rippling motion was caused by many moving bodies, foraging in the grass. Out of it came a savage grunting, as if a thousand angry hogs were fighting for choice swill. And from somewhere farther off, perhaps from the river, came a deep, monotonous bellowing that sounded hoarse and tired. Enoch felt the hair crawling on his scalp "and he thrust the rifle out and ready. It was puzzling. He felt and knew the danger, though as yet there was no danger. Still, the very air of this place -- wherever it might be -- seemed to crawl with danger like a dank, miasmic fog. He spun around. Close behind him the thick, dark woods climbed down the range of river hills, stopping at the sea of grass which flowed around the hillock on which he found himself. Off beyond the hills loomed a range of mighty mountains that seemed to fade into the sky, purple to their peaks, with no sign of snow upon them. Two things came trotting from the woods and stopped at the edge of it. They sat down and grinned at him, with their tails wrapped neatly round their feet. They might have been wolves or dogs, but they were neither one. They were nothing he had ever seen or heard of. Their pelts glistened in the weak sunshine, as if they had been greased, but the pelts stopped at their necks, with their skulls and faces bare. Like evil old men, off on a masquerade, with their bodies draped in the hides of wolves. But the disguise was spoiled by the lolling tongues which spilled out of their mouths, glistening scarlet against the bonewhite of their faces. The wood was still. There were only the two gaunt beasts sitting on their haunches. They sat and grinned at him, a strangely toothless grin. The wood was dark and tangled, the foliage so dark green that it was almost black. All the leaves shone as if they had been polished. Enoch spun around again, to look back toward the river. Crouched at the edge of the grass was a line of toad-like monstrosities, six feet long and standing three feet high, their bodies the color of a dead fish belly, and each with a single eye, or what seemed to be an eye, which covered a great part of the area just above the snout. The eyes were faceted and glowed in the dim sunlight, as the eyes of a hunting cat will glow when caught in a beam of light. The hoarse bellowing still came from the river and in between the bellowing there was a faint, thin buzzing, angry and malicious, as if a giant mosquito might be hovering for attack. Enoch jerked up his head to look into the sky and far in the depths of it he saw a string of dots, so high that there was no way of knowing what kind of things they were. From the corner of his eye he caught the sense of flowing motion and swung back toward the woods. the skull-like heads were coming up the hill in a silent rush. They did not seem to run. There was no motion of their running. Rather they were moving as if they had been squirted from a tube. Enoch jerked up his rifle and it came into his shoulder, fitting as if it were a part of him. The bead settled in the rear-sight notch and blotted out the skull-like face of the leading beast. The gun bucked as he squeezed the trigger and, without waiting to see if the shot had downed the beast, the rifle barrel was swinging toward the second as his right fist worked the bolt. The rifle bucked again and the second wolf-like being somersaulted and slid forward for an instant, then began rolling down the hill, flopping limply as it rolled. Enoch worked the bolt again and the spent brass case glittered in the sun as he turned swiftly to face the other slope. The toad-like things were closer now. They had been creeping in, but as he turned they stopped and squatted, staring mindlessly at him. He reached a hand into his pocket and took out two cartridges, cramming them into the magazine to replace the shells he'd fired. The bellowing down by the river had stopped, but now there was a honking sound that he could not place. Turning cautiously, he tried to locate what might be making it, but there was nothing to be seen. The honking sound seemed to be coming from the forest, but there was nothing moving. In between the honking, he still could hear the buzzing and it seemed louder now. He glanced into the sky and the dots were larger and no longer in a line. They had formed into a circle and seemed to be spiraling downward, but they were still so high that he could not make out what kinds of things they were. He glanced back toward the toad-like monsters and they were closer than they had been before. They had crept up again. Enoch lifted the rifle and, before it reached his shoulder, pressed the trigger, shooting from the hip. The eye of one of the foremost of them exploded, like the splash a stone would make if thrown into water. The creature did not jump or flop. It simply settled down, flat upon the ground, as if someone had put his foot upon it and had exerted exactly force enough to squash it flat. It lay there, flat, a big round hole where the eye had been. The ropy yellow fluid that might have been the creature's blood. The others backed watchfully away, all the way off the hillock, and only stopped when they reached the grass edge. The honking was closer and the buzzing louder. There could be no doubt that the honking was coming from the hills. saw it, striding through the sky, coming down the ridge, stepping through the trees and honking dolefully. It was a round and black balloon that swelled and deflated with its honking. It jerked and swayed as it walked along, hung from the center of four stiff and spindly legs that arched above it to the joint that connected this upper portion of the leg arrangement with the downward-spraddling legs that raised it high above the forest. It was walking jerkily, lifting its legs high to clear the massive treetops before putting them down again. Each time it put down a foot, Enoch could hear the crunching of the branches and the crashing of the trees that it broke or brushed aside. Enoch felt the skin along his spine trying to roll up his back like a window shade, and the bristling of the hair along the base of his skull, obeying some primordial instinct in its striving to raise itself erect into a fighting ruff. But even as he stood there, almost stiff with fright, some part of his brain remembered that one shot he had fired. His fingers dug into his pocket for another cartridge to fill the magazine. The buzzing was much louder and the pitch had changed; now it was approaching at tremendous speed. Enoch jerked up his head. The dots no longer were circling in the sky, but were plunging down toward him, one behind the other. He flicked a glance toward the balloon, honking and jerking on its stilt-like legs. It still was coming on, but the plunging dots were faster and would reach the hillock first. He shifted the rifle forward, outstretched and ready to slap against his shoulder, and watched the falling creatures. They were dots no longer, but hideous streamlined bodies, each carrying a rapier that projected from its head. A bill of sorts, thought Enoch, for these things might be birds; but longer, thinner, larger, more deadly than any Earthly bird. The buzzing changed into a scream and the scream kept mounting up the scale until it set the teeth on edge. Through it, like a metronome measuring a beat, came the hooting of the black balloon that strode across the hills. Without knowing that he had moved his arms, Enoch had the rifle at his shoulder, waiting for that instant when the first of the plunging monsters was close enough to fire. They dropped like stones out of the sky. They were bigger than he had thought they were -- big and coming like arrows aimed directly at him. The rifle thudded against his shoulder. The first one crumpled, lost its arrow shape, folding up and falling, no longer on its course. He worked the bolt and fired again; and the second one in line lost its balance and began to tumble -- and the bolt was worked once more and the trigger pressed. The third skidded in the air and went off at a slant, limp and ragged, fluttering in the wind, falling toward the river. The rest broke off their dive. They made a shallow turn and beat their way up into the sky, great wings like windmill vanes threshing desperately, hillock and a mighty pillar came down from somewhere overhead, driving down to strike to one side of the hillock. The ground trembled at the tread, and the water that lay hidden by the grass squirted high into the air. The honking blotted out all else and the great balloon was zooming down on him, cradled on the enormous legs. Enoch saw the face, if an#dhing so grotesque and so obscene could be called a face. There was a beak and beneath it a sucking mouth and a dozen or so other organs that might have been the eyes. ' The legs were like inverted Vs, with the inner stroke somewhat shorter than the outer. And in the center of these inner joints hung the great balloon that was the body of the creature, with its face on the underside so that it could see all the hunting territory that might lie beneath it. But now auxiliary joints in the outer span of legs were bending to let the body of the creature down so it could seize its prey. Enoch was not conscious of putting up the rifle or of operating it, but it was hammering at his shoulder. It seemed to him that a second part of him stood off, apart, and watched the firing of the rifle -- as if the figure that held and fired the weapon might be a second man. Great gouts of flesh flew out of the black balloon. Jagged rents suddenly tore across it, and from these rents poured out a cloud of liquid that turned into a mist, with black droplets raining from it. The firing pin clicked on an empty breech and the gun was emprty, but there was no need of another shot. The great legs were folding, trembling as they folded. The shrunken body shivered convulsively in the heavy mist that was pouring out of it. There was no hooting now. Enoch could hear the patter of the black drops falling from that cloud, as they struck the short grass on the hill. There was a sickening odor. The drops where they fell on him were sticky, running like cold oil; and above him the great structure that had been the stilt-like creature was toppling to the ground. Then the world faded swiftly and was no longer there. Enoch stood in the oval room in the faint glow of the bulbs. There was the heavy smell of powder and all about his feet, glinting in the light, lay the spent and shining cases that had been kicked out of the gun. He was back in the basement once again. The target shoot was over. E noch lowered the rifle and drew in a slow and careful breath. It always was like this, he thought. As if it were necessary for him to ease himself, by slow degrees, back to this world after the season of unreality. He knew that it would be illusion when he kicked on the switch that set into motion whatever was to happen, and he knew it had been illusion when it all had ended. But during the time that it was happening it was not illusion. It was as real and as substantial as if it all were true. They had asked him, he remembered, when the station had been built, if he had a hobby -- if there was any sort of recreational facility they could build into the station for him. And he had said that he would like a rifle range, expecting no more than a shooting gallery with ducks moving on a chain or clay pipes rotating on a wheel. But that, of course, would have been too simple for the screwball architects who had designed, and the slaphappy crew of tentacled workmen who had built, the galactic way station. At first they had not been certain what he meant by a rifle range. He had to tell them how a rifle operated and for what it might be used. He had told them about hunting squirrels on sunny autumn mornings and shaking rabbits out of brushpiles with the first coming of the snow (although one did not use a rifle, but a shotgun, on the rabbits), about hunting coons of an autumn night, and waiting for the deer along the run that went down to the river. But he was dishonest. He did not tell them about that other use to which he'd put a rifle during four long years. He'd told them (since they were easy folks to talk with) about his youthful dream of some day going on a hunt in Africa, although even as he told them he well aware of how unattainable it was. But since that day he'd hunted (and been hunted by) beasts far stranger than anything that Africa could boast. From what these beasts might have been patterned, if indeed they came from anywhere other than the imagination of those aliens who had set up the tapes which produced the target scene, he had no idea. There had so far, in the thousands of times that he had used the range, not been a duplication either in the scene nor in the beasts which rampaged about the scene. Although, perhaps, he thought, there might, somewhere, be an end of them, and then the whole sequence might start over and run its course once more. But it would make little difference now, for if the tapes should start rerunning there'd be but little chance of his recalling in any considerable detail those adventures he had lived so many years ago. techniques or the principle which made possible this fantastic rifle range. Like many other things, he accepted it without the need of understanding. Although, some day, he thought, he might find the clue which in time would turn blind acceptance into understanding not only of the range. but of many other equally wonderful things. He had often wondered what the aliens might think about his fascination with the rifle range, with that primal force that drove a man to kill, not for the joy of danger, to meet force with a greater and more skillful force, cunning with more cunning. Had he, he wondered, given his alien friends concern in their assessrnent of the human character by his preoccupation with the rifle? For the understanding of an alien, how could one draw a line beown? Was there actually a difference that would stand up under logical examination between the sport of hunting and the sport of war? To an alien, perhaps, such # tlifferentiation would be rather difficult, for in many cases the hunted animal would be more closely allied to the human hunter in its form and characteristics than would many of the aliens. Was war an instinctive thing, for which each ordinary man was as much responsible as the policy makers and the so-called statesmen? It seemed impossible. Yet deep in every man was the combative instinct, the aggressive urge, the strange sense of competition all of which spelled conflict of one kind or another if here gather the stars carried to its logical, inevitable conclusion. He put the rifle underneath his arm and walked over to the panel. Sticking from a slot in the bottom of it was a piece of tape. He pulled it out and puzzled out the symbols. They were not reassuring. He had not done so well. He had missed that first shot he had fired at the charging worthing with the old man's face, and back there somewhere, in that dimension of unreality, it and its companion were snarling over the tangled, torn mass of ribboned flesh and broken bone that had been Enoch Wallace. XX gallery, with its gifts stacked there as other gifts, in regular human establishments, might be stacked away in dry and dusty attics. It was, he thought, the packrat instinct that he had which had never let him bring himself to throw them away. Although, even if he could, it would have been impossible to throw any of this collection of stuff away. It would never do to put in the reach of other humans any single item which rested on the shelves. The tape nagged at him, the little piece of tape which said that while he had made all his other shots, he had missed that first one back there on the hillock. It was not often that he missed. And his training had been for that very type of shooting -- the you-neverknow-what-will-happen-next, the totally unexpected, the kill-or-bekilled kind of shooting that thousands of expeditions into the target area had taught him. Perhaps he had not been as faithful in his practice lately as he should have been. Near the end of the gallery he saw the black bulk of a trunk projecting from beneath the lower shelf, too big to fit comfortably beneath it, jammed against the wall, but with a foot or two of it still projecting out beyond the shelf. He went on walking past it, then suddenly turned around. That trunk, he thought. That was the trunk which had belonged to the Hazer who had died upstairs. It was his legacy from that being whose stolen body would be brought back to its grave this evening. He walked over to the shelving and leaned his rifle against the wall. Stooping, he pulled the trunk clear of its resting place. Once before, prior to carrying it down the stairs and storing it here beneath the shelves, he had gone through its contents, but at the time he'd not been too interested. Now, suddenly, he felt an absorbing interest in what it might contain. He lifted the lid carefully and tilted it back against the shelves. Crouching above the open trunk, and without touching anything to start with, he tried to catalogue the upper layer of its contents. T here was a shimmering cloak, neatly folded. Perhaps it was some sort of ceremonial garment. Atop it lay a tiny bottle that was a blaze of reflected light, as if someone had taken d large diamond and hollowed it out to make a bottle of it. Beside the cloak lay a nest of balls, deep violet and dull, with no shine at all, looking for all the world like a bunch of table tennis balls that someone had cemented together to make a globe. But that was not the way it was, Enoch remembered; for that other time he had been entranced by them and had picked them up, to find that they were not cemented, but could be freely moved about, although never outside the context of their shape. One ball could not be broken from the mass, no matter how hard one might try, but would move about, as if buoyed in a fluid, among all the other balls. One could move any, or all, of the balls, but the mass remained the same. A calculator of some sort. Enoch wondered? But that seemed only barely possible, for one ball was entirely like another; there was no way in which they could be identified. Or, at least, no way to identify them so far as concerned the human eye. Was it possible that identification might be possible to a Hazer's eye? And if a calculator, what kind of a calculator? Mathematical? Or ethical? Or philosophical? Perhaps a sort of game -- a game of solitaire? Given time a man might finally get it figured out. But there was no time and no incentive at the moment to spend upon one particular item any great amount of time when theire were hundreds of other items equally fantastic and incomprehensible. For while one puzzled over a single item, the edges of his mind would always wonder if he might not be spending time on the most insignificant of the entire lot. He was a victim of museum fatigue, Enoch told himself, overwhelmed by the many pieces of the unknown scattered all about him. He reached out a hand, not for the globe of balls, but for the shining bottle that lay atop the cloak. As he picked it up and brought it closer, he saw that there was a line of writing engraved upon the glass (or diamond?) of the bottle. Slowly he studied out the meaning of the writing. long ago, when he had been able to read the Hazer language, if not fluently, at least well enough to get along. But he had not read it for some years now and he had lost a good deal of it and he stumbled haltingly from one symbol to another. Translated very freely, the inscription on the bottle read: To be taken when the first symptoms occur. A bottle of medicine! To be taken when the first symptoms occur. The symptoms, perhaps, that had come so quickly and built up so rapidly that the owner of this bottle could make no move to reach it and so had died, falling from the sofa. Almost reverently, he put the bottle back in its place atop the cloak, fitting it back into the faint impression it had made from lying there. So different from us in so many ways, thought Enoch, and then in other little ways so like us that it is frightening. For that bottle and the inscription on its face was an exact parallel of the prescription bottle from any corner drugstore. Beside the globe of balls was a box, wood, with a simple clasp to hold it shut.; He flipped back the lid and inside he saw the metallic sheen of the material the Hazers used as paper. Carefully he lifted out the first sheet, and saw that it was a long strip of the material folded in accordion fashion. Underneath it were more strips, apparently, of the same material. There was writing on it, faint and faded, and Enoch held it close to read it. To my -- , -- friend: (although it was not friend. Blood brother, perhaps, or colleague. And the adjectives which preceded it were such as to escape his sense entirely.) The writing was hard to read. It bore some resemblance to the formalized version of the language, but apparently bore the imprint of the writer's personality, expressed in curlicues and flourishes which obscured the form. Enoch worked his way slowly down the paper, missing much of what was there, but picking up the sense of much that had been written. The writer had been on a visit to some other planet. While there he had performed some sort of function (although exactly what was not entirely clear) which had to do with his approaching death. back over the phrase again. And while much of the rest of what was written was not clear, that part of it was. My approaching death, he had written, and there was no room for mistranslation. The words were clear. He urged that his good (friend?) do likewise. He said it was a comfort and made clear the road. There was no further explanation" no further reference. Just the calm declaration that he had done something which he felt must be arranged about his death. As if he knew that death was near and was not only unafraid, but almost unconcerned. The next passage (for there were no paragraphs) told about someone he had met and how they'd talked about a certain matter which made no sense at all to Enoch, lost in a terminology he did not recognize. And then : I am most concerned about the mediocrity (incompetence? inability? weakness?) of the recent custodian of (and then that cryptic symbol which could be translated, roughly, as the Talisman.) For (a word, which from context, seemed to mean a great length of time), ever since the death of the last custodian, the Talisman has been but poorly served. It has been, in all reality, (another long time term), since a true (sensitive?) I has been found to carry out' its purpose. Many have been tested  and none has qualified, and for the lack of such a one the galaxy has lost its close identification with the ruling principle of life. We here at the (temple? sanctuary?) all are greatly concerned that without a proper linkage between the people and (several words that were not decipherable ) the galaxy will go down in chaos (and another line that he could not puzzle out.) The next sentence introduced a new subject -- the plans that were going forward for some cultural festival which concerned a concept that, to Enoch, was hazy at the best. Enoch slowly folded up the letter and put it back into the box. He felt a faint uneasiness in reading what he had, as if he'd pried into a friendship that he had no right to know. We here at the temple, the letter had said. Perhaps the writer had been one of the Hazer mystics, writing to his old friend, the philosopher. And the other letters, quite possibly, were from that same mystic -- letters that the dead old Hazer had valued so highly that he took them along with him when he went traveling. A slight breeze seemed to be blowing across Enoch's shoulders; not actually a breeze, but a strange motion and a coldness to the air. He glanced back into the gallery and there was nothing stirring to account for it, nothing to be seen. The wind had quit its blowing, if it had ever blown. Here one moment, gone the next. Like a passing ghost, thought Enoch. Did the Hazer have a ghost? T he people back on Vega he had died and all the circumstances of his death. They had known again about the body disappearing. And the letter had spoken calmly, much more calmly than would have been in the capacity of most humans, about the writer's near approach to death. Was it possible that the Hazers knew more of life and death than most? Had it been spelled out in black and white in some depository in the galaxy? Was the answer there? he wondered. Squatting there, he thought that perhaps it might be, that someone already knew what life was for and what its destiny. There was a comfort in the thought, a strange sort of personal comfort in being able to believe that some intelligence might have solved the riddle of that mysterious equation of the universe. Ulysses, he thought, had not told him all the truth about the Talisman. He had told him that it had disappeared and that the galaxy was without it, but he had not told him that for many years its power and glory had been dimmed by the failure of its custodian to provide a proper linkage between the people and the force. And all that time the corrosion occasioned by that failure had eaten away at the bonds of the galactic confraternity. Whatever might be happening nohad not happened in the last few years; it had been building up for a longer time than most aliens would admit. Although, come to thing of it, most aliens probably did not know. Enoch closed the box lid and put it back into the trunk. Some day, he thought, when he was in the proper frame of mind, when the pressure of eventsmade him less emotional, when he could dull the guilt of prying, he would achieve a scholarly and conscientious translation of those letters. For in them, he felt certain, he might find further understanding of that intriguing race. He might, he thought, then be better able to gauge their humanity -- not humanity in the sense of being a member of the human race of Earth, but in the sense that certain rules of conduct must underlie all racial concepts even as the thing called humanity in its narrow sense underlay the human concept. He reached up to close the lid of the trunk and then he hesitated.  there might not be a some day. It was a state of mind to be always thinking some day, a state of mind made possible by the conditions inside this station. For I here there were endless days to I come, forever and forever there were days to come. A man's concept of time was twisted out of shape and reason and he could look ahead complacently down a I long, almost never-ending, avenue  of time. But that might be all I over now. Time might suddenly snap back into its rightful focus. Should he leave this station, the long procession of days to come would end. He pushed back the lid again until it rested against the shelves. Reaching in, he lifted out the box . and set it on the floor beside him. He'd take it upstairs, he told himself, and put it with the other stuff that he must be prepared immediately to take along with him if he should leave the station. If? he asked himself. Was there a question any longer? Had he, somehow, made that hard decision? Had it crept upon him unaware, so that he now was committed to it? And if he had actually arrived at that decision, then he must, also, have arrived at the other one. If he left the station, then he could no longer be in a position to appear before Galactic Central to plead that Earth be cured of war. You are the representative of the Earth, Ulysses had told him. You are the only one who can represent the Earth. But could he, in reality, represent the Earth? Was he any longer a true representative of the human race? He was a nineteenth century man; how could he represent the twentieth? How much, he wondered, does the human character change with each generation? And not only was he of the nineteenth century, but he had, as well, lived for almost a hundred years under a separate and a special circumstance, unlike any other human. He knelt there, regarding him-self with awe, and a little pky too, wondering what he was. Some strange sort of hybrid? A galactic halfbreed? Slowly he pulled the lid down and pushed it tight. Then he shoved the trunk back underneath the shelves. He tucked the box of letters underneath his arm and rose, picking up his rifle, and headed for the stairs. tons stacked in the kitchen corner, boxes that Winslowe had used to bring out from town the supplies that he had ordered, and began to pack. The journals, stacked neatly in order, filled one large box and a part of another. He took a stack of old newspapers and carefully wrapped the twelve diamond bottles off the mantle and packed them in another box, thickly padded, to guard against their breakage. Out of the cabinet he got the Vegan music box and wrapped it as carefully. He pulled out of another cabinet the alien literature that he had and piled it in the fourth box. He went through his desk, but there wasn't too much there, only odds and ends tucked here and there throughout the drawers. He found his chart and, crumpling it, threw it in the wastebasket that stood beside his desk. The already filled boxes he carried across the room and stacked beside the door for easy reaching. When Lewis came with the body he would have a truck. If he had the important stuff all packed he could have it waiting. The important stuff, he thought. Who could judge importance? It was all important; every item should be taken. And that might be possible. Given time and with no extra complications, it might be possible to haul it all away, all that was in this room and stored down in the basement. It all was his. He had a right to it, for it had been given him. But that did not mean that Galactic Central might not object most strenuously to his taking any of it. And if that should happen, it was vital that he should be able to get away with those most important items. He stood undecided, looking all about the room. There were all the items on the coffee table and those should be taken, too, including the little flashing pyramid of globes that Lucy had set to working. He saw that the Pet once again had crawled off the table and fallen on the floor. He stooped and picked it up and held it in his hands. It had grown an extra knob or two since the last time he had looked at it. It was now a faint and delicate pink, whereas the last time he had noticed it had been a cobalt blue. told himself, in calling it the Pet. It might not be alive. If it were, it was a sort of life he could not even guess at. It was not metallic and it was not stone, but very close to both. A file made no impression on it and he'd been tempted a time or two to whack it with a hammer to see what that to bet it would have no effect at all. It grew slowly, and it moved, L but there was no way of knowing how it moved. But leave it and come back and it would have moved -- a little. It knew when it was being watched and it would not move while watched. It did not eat so far as he could see and it seemed to have no wastes. It changed colors, but entirely without season and with no visible reason for the change. A being from somewhere in the I direction of Sagittarius had given it to him just a year or two ago. The creature had been something for the books. He probably wasn't actually a walking plant, but that was what he'd looked like -- a rather spindly plant that had been shorted on good water and cheated on good soil, but which had sprouted a crop of dime store bangles that rang like a thousand silver bells when he made any sort of motion. Enoch remembered that he had tried to ask the being what the gift might be, but the walking plant had simply clashed its bangles and filled the place with ringing sound and didn't try to answer. So he had put the gift on one end of the desk and hours later, after the being was long gone, he found that it had moved to the other end of the desk. But it had seemed too crazy to think that a thing like that could move, so he finally convinced himself that he was mistaken as to where he'd put it. It was not until days later that he was able to convince himself it moved. He'd have to take it when he left and Lucy's pyramid and the cube that showed you pictures of other worlds when you looked inside of it and a great deal of other stuff. He stood with the Pet held in his hand and now, for the first time, he wondered at why he might be packing. cided he would leave the station, as if he'd chosen Earth as against the galaxy. But when and how, he wondered, had he decided it? Decision should be based on weighing and on measuring and he had weighed and measured nothing. He had not posed the advantages and the disadvantages and tried to strike a balance. He had not thought it out. Somehow, somewhere, it had sneaked up on him -- this decision which had seemed impossible, but now had been reached so easily. Was it, he wondered, that he had absorbed, unconsciously, such an odd mixture of alien thought and ethics that he had evolved, unknown to himself, a new way in which to think? Perhaps some subconscious way of thought that had lain inoperative until now, when it had been needed. There was a box or two out in the shed. He'd go and get them and finish up the packing of what he'd pick out here. Then he'd go down into the basement and start lugging up the stuff that he had tagged. He glanced toward the window and realized, with some surprise, that he would have to hurry, for the sun was close to setting. It would be evening soon. He remembered that he'd forgotten lunch, but he had no time to eat. He could get something later. He turned to put the Pet back on the table and as he did a faint sound caught his ear and froze him where he stood. It was the slight chuckle of a materializer operating. He could not mistake it. He had heard the sound too often to be wrong about it now. And it must be, he knew, the official materializer, for no one could have traveled on the other without the sending of a message. Ulysses, he thought. Ulysses coming back again. Or, perhaps some other member of Galactic Central. For if Ulysses had been coming, he would have sent a message. He took a quick step forward so he could see the corner where the materializer stood and a dark and slender figure was stepping out from the target circle. "Ulysses!" Enoch cried, but even as spoke he realized it was not Ulysses. For an instant he had the impression of a top hat, of white tie and tails, of a jauntiness, and then he saw that the creature was a rat that walked erect, with sleek, dark fur covering its body and a sharp, axe-like rodent face. For an instant, as it turned its head toward him, he caught the red glitter of its eyes. Then it turned back toward the corner and he saw that its hand was lifted, was pulling out of a harnessed holster hung about its middle something that glinted with a metallic shimmer even in the shadow. wrong about it. The creature should have greeted him. It should have said hello and come out to meet him. But instead it had thrown him that one red-eyed glance and then turned back to the corner. The metallic object came out of the holster. It could only be a weapon. And was this the way, thought Enoch, that they would close the station? One quick shot, without a word, and the station keeper dead upon the floor. With someone other than Ulysses, because Ulysses could not be trusted to kill a long-time friend, even for the galactic confraternity. The rifle was lying across the desk top and there wasn't any time. But the rat-like creature was not turning toward the room. It still was facing toward the corner and its hand was coming up, with the weapon glinting in it. An alarm twanged within Enoch's brain. He swung his arm and yelled, hurling the Pet toward the creature in the corner, the yell jerked out of him, involuntarily, from the bottom of his lungs. For the creature, he realized, of the keeper, but the disruption of the station. The only thing there was to aim at in the corner was the control complex, the nerve center of the station's operation. If that should be knocked out, the station would be dead. To set it in operation once again it would be necessary to send a crew of technicians out in a spaceship from the nearest station -- a trip that would require many years to make. At Enoch's yell, the creature jerked around, dropping toward a crouch. The flying Pet, tumbling end for end, caught it in the belly and drove it back against the wall. Enoch charged, arms outspread to grapple with the creature. The gun flew from the creature's hand and pinwheeled across the floor. Then Enoch was upon the alien and even as he closed with it, his nostrils were assailed by its body stench -- a sickening wave of nastiness. He wrapped his arms about it and heaved. It was not heavy. He jerked it from the corner and swung it around and sent it skidding out across the floor. It crashed against a chair and came to a stop and then like a steel coil it rose off the floor and pounced for the gun. Enoch took two great strides and had it by the neck, lifting it and shaking it so savagely that the recovered gun flew from its hand again. The bag it carried on a thong across its shoulder pounded like a vibrating triphammer against its hairy ribs. The stench was so thick that one could almost see it; Enoch gagged on it as he shook the creature. And suddenly it was worse, much worse, like a fire raging in one's throat and a hammer in one's head. It was like a physical blow that hit one in the belly and shoved against the chest. Enoch let go his hold upon the creature and staggered back, doubled up and retching. He lifted his hands to his face and tried to push the stench away, to clear his nostrils and his mouth, to rub it from his eyes. Through a haze he saw the creature rise and, snatching up the gun, rush toward the door. He did not hear the phrase that the creature spoke, but the door came open and the creature spurted forward and was gone. And the door slammed shut again. room to the desk and caught at it for support. The stench was diminishing and his head was clearing. He scarcely could believe that it all had happened. It was incredible. The creature had traveled on the official materializer, and no one but a member of Galactic Central could travel by that route. And no member of Galactic Central, he was convinced, would have acted as the rat-like creature had. Likewise, the creature had known the phrase that would operate the door. No one but himself and Galactic Central would have known that phrase. He reached out and picked up his rifle and hefted it in his fist. It was all right, he thought. There was nothing harmed. Except that there was an alien loose upon the Earth and that was something that could not be allowed. The Earth was barred to aliens. As a planet which had not been recognized by the galactic confraternity, it was off limits. He stood with the rifle in his hand and knew what he must do. He must get that alien back. He  must get it off the Earth. He strode toward the door and out around the corner of the house. The alien was running across the field. It had almost reached the line of woods. Enoch ran desperately, but before he was halfway down the field, the rat-like quarry had plunged into the woods and disappeared. The woods were beginning to darken. The slanting rays of light from the setting sun still lighted the upper canopy of the foliage, but on the forest floor the shadows had begun to gather. As he ran into the, fringe of the woods, Enoch caught a glimpse of the creature angling down a small ravine and plunging up the other slope, racing through a heavy cover of ferns that reached almost to its middle. If it kept on in that direction, Enoch told himself, it might work out all right. The slope beyond the ravine ended in a clump of rocks under a cliff. It might be a little rough to dig the alien from the rocks if it took refuge there, but it could not get away. Although he could waste no time. The sun was setting; it would soon be dark. Running hard, Enoch crossed the area covered by the ferns and came out on the sharper slope some hundred yards below the boulders. Here the cover was not  so dense, spotty underbrush and I a scattering of trees. The soft loam of the forest floor gave way , to a footing of shattered rock j which through the years had been ' chipped off the boulders by the , winter's frost, rolling down the slope. They lay there now, cov' ered with thick moss, a treacherI ous place to walk. f alien. Then, out of the corner of his vision, he saw motion and t threw himself forward to the ground. Behind a patch of hazel brush he saw the alien outlined against the sky, its head pivoting back and forth to sweep the slop)e below, the weapon half lifted and set for instant use. Enoch lay frozen, with his outstretched hand gripping the rifle. There was a slash of pain across  one set of knuckles and he knew , that he had skinned them on the  rock as he had dived for cover. I The alien dropped from sight I behind the boulders and Enoch slowly pulled the rifle back to where he would be able to handle it should a shot present itself. Although, he wondered, would he dare to fire? Would he dare to kill an alien? II The alien could have killed B him back there at the station, H when he had been knocked silly by the dreadful stench. But it had not killed him; it had fled instead. Was the creature so badly frightened that all that it could think of had been to get away? Or had it been as reluctant to kill a station keeper as he was to kill an alien? He searched the rocks above him. There was no motion and not a thing to see. He must move up that slope, and quick. Time would work to the advantage of the alien. Darkness could not be more than thirty minutes off and before dark had fallen this issue must be settled. If the alien got away, there'd be little chance to find it. An alien could not be allowed upon the Earth. He shuddered as he imagined some of the complications which could arise from such a situation. And why, asked a second self, standing to one side, should you worry about alien complications? For are you not prepared, yourself, to hand Earth as much alien lore and learning as may be within your Fower? A rustle in the bushes to his left brought him around with the rifle up and ready. And there was Lucy Fisher, not more than twenty feet away. shouted, forgetting that she could not hear him. But she did not seem to notice. She motioned to the left and made a sweeping motion with her hand, toward the boulders. Go away, he said underneath his breath, and motioned her to go back. She shook her head and sprang away, in a running crouch, moving further to the left and up the slope. Enoch scrambled to his feet after her. And as he did the air behind him made a frying sound, and there was the sharp bite of ozone in the air. He hit the ground instinctively. Farther down the slope a square yard of ground boiled and steamed. A laser, Enoch thought. The alien's weapon was a laser, packing a terrific punch in a narrow beam of light. He gathered himself together and made a short rush up the hillside, throwing himself prone behind a twisted birch clump. The air made the frying sound again and there was an instant's blast of heat. Over on the reverse slope a patch of ground was steaming. Ash floated down and settled on Enoch's arms. He flashed a quick glance upward and saw that the top half of the birch clump was gone, sheared off by the laser and reduced to ash. Tiny coils of smoke rose lazily from the severed stumps. No matter what it might have done or failed to do at the station, the alien now meant business. It knew that it was cornered. Enoch huddled against the ground, worried about Lucy. He hoped she was safe. The little fool should have stayed out of it. This was no place for her. She'd have Old Hank out looking for her again, thinking she was kidnaped. The dusk was deepening. Only the far peak of the treetops caught the last rays of the sun. A coolness came stealing up the ravine from the valley far below and  there was a damp, lush smell from the ground. From some hidden hollow a whippoorwill called mournfully. Enoch darted out from behind the birch clump and rushed up the slope. He reached the fallen log he'd picked as a barricade and threw himself behind it. There was no sign of the alien and there was not another shot from the laser-gun. Enoch studied the ground ahead. Two more rushes, one to that small pile of rock and the next to the edge of the boulder area itself, and he'd be on top of the hiding alien. And once he got there, he wondered, what was he to do. Perhaps, here in the open air, it could not use its stench defense as effectively as it had in the confines of the station. That might make it easier. He examined the clump of boulders from one edge to the other and there was nothing that might help him to locate the alien. Slowly he began to snake around, getting ready for the next rush up the slope, moving carefully so that no sound would betray him. Out of the tail of his eye he caught the moving shadow that came flowing up the slope. Swiftly he sat up, swinging the rifle. But before he could bring the muzzle round, the shadow was upon him, bearing him back, flat upon the ground, with one great splayfingered hand clamjjed upon his mouth.  gled, but the fearsome shape only hissed at him in a warning sound. Slowly the weight shifted off him and the hand slid from his mouth. Ulysses gestured toward the boulder pile and Enoch nodded. Ulysses crept closer and lowered his head toward Enoch's. He whispered, with his mouth inches from the Earthman's ear: "The Talisman! He has the Talisman!" "The Talisman!" Enoch cried aloud, trying to strangle off the cry even as he made it, remembering that he should make no sound to let the watcher up above know where they might be in hiding. From the ridge above a loose stone rattled as it was dislodged and began to roll, bouncing down the slope. Enoch hunkered closer to the ground behind the fallen log. "Down!" he shouted to Ulysses. "Down! He has a gun." But Ulysses' hand gripped him by the shoulder. "Enoch!" he cried. "Enoch, look!" Enoch jerked himself erect and atop the pile of rock, dark against the skyline, were two grappling figures. "Lucy!" he shouted. For one of them was Lucy and the other was the alien. She sneaked up on him, he thought. The damn little fool, she sneaked up on him! While the alien had been distracted with watching the slope, she had slipped up close and then had tackled him. She had a club of some sort in her hand, an old dead branch, perhaps, and it was raised above her head, ready for a stroke, but the alien had a grip upon her arm and she could not strike. "Shoot," said Ulysses, in a flat, dead voice. Enoch raised the rifle and had trouble with the sights because of the deepening darkness. And they were so close together! They were too close together. "Shoot!" yelled Ulysses. "I can't," sobbed Enoch. "It's too dark to shoot." "You have to shoot," Ulysses said, his voice tense and hard. "You have to take the chance." Enoch raised the rifle once again and the sights seemed clearer now and he knew the trouble was not so much the darkness as that shot which he had missed back there in the world of the honking thing that had strode its world on stilts. If he had missed then, he could as well miss now. The bead came to rest upon the head of the rat-like creature, and then the head bobbed away, but was bobbing back again. "Shoot!" Ulysses yelled. Enoch squeezed the trigger and the rifle coughed. Up atop the rocks the creature stood for a second with only half a head and with tattered gouts of flesh flying briefly like dark insects, zooming against the half-light of the western sky. and sprawled upon the earth, clawing his fingers into the thin and mossy soil, sick with the thought of what could have happened, weak with the thankfulness that it had not happened, that the years on that fantastic rifle range had at last paid off. How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless. As game of cards -- designed for one thing only, to please the keeper of the station. And yet the hours he'd spent there had shaped toward this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of ground. The sickness drained away into the earth beneath him. Peace came stealing in upon him -- the peace of trees and woodland soil and the first faint hush of nightfall. As if the sky and stars and very space itself had leaned close above him and was whispering his essential oneness with them. And it seemed for a moment that he had grasped the edge of some great truth and with this truth had come a comfort and a greatness he'd never known before. "Enoch," Ulysses whispered. "Enoch, my brother..." There was something like a hidden sob in the alien's voice and he had never, until this moment, called the Earthman brother. Enoch pulled himself to his knees and up on the pile of tumbled boulders was a soft and wondrous light, as if a giant firefly had turned on its lamp and had not turned it off, but had left it burning. The light was moving down across the rocks toward them and he could see Lucy moving with the light, as if she were walking toward them with a lantern in her hand. Ulysses' hand reached out of the darkness and closed hard on Enoch's arm. "Do you see?" he asked. "Yes, I see. What is... "It is the Talisman," Ulysses said, enraptured, his breath rasping in his throat. "And she is our new custodian. The one we've hunted through the years." tomed to it, Enoch told himself as they tramped up through the woods. There was not a moment you were not aware of it. It was something that you wanted to hug close against yourself and hold there forever. Even when it was gone from you, you'd not forget it, ever. It was something that was past all description. A mother's love, a father's pride, the adoration of a sweetheart, the closeness of a comrade -- it was all of these, and more. It made the farthest distance near and turned the complex simple. It swept away all fear and sorrow, for all of there being a certain feeling of deep sorrow in it, as if one might feel that never in his lifetime would he know an instant like this, and that in another instant he would lose it and never would be able to hunt it out again. But that was not the way it was, for this ascendant instant kept going on and on. Lucy walked between them. She held the bag that contained the Talisman close against her breast, with her two arms clasped about it, and Enoch, looking at her, in the soft glow of its light, could not help but think of a little girl carrying her beloved pussy cat. "Never for a century," said Ulysses, "perhaps for many centuries, perhaps never, has it glowed so well. I, myself, cannot remember when it was like this. It is wonderful, is it not?" "Yes," said Enoch. "It is wonderful." "Now we shall be one again," Ulysses said. "Now we shall feel again. Now we shall be a people instead of many people." "But the creature that had it..." "A clever one," Ulysses said. "He was holding it for ransom." "It had been stolen, then." "We do not know all the circumstances," Ulysses told him. "We will find out, of course." They tramped on in silence through the woods and far in the east one could see, through the treetops, the first flush in the sky that foretold the rising moon. "There is something," Enoch said. "Ask me anything you like," said Ulysses. "How could that creature back there carry it and not feel -- feel no part of it? For if he could have, he would not have stolen it." can -- how do you say it? -- tune in on it, perhaps. To you and me it would be nothing. It would not respond to us. We could hold it in our hands forever and nothing would happen. But let that on it and it becomes alive. There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity -- I don't know how to say it -- that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature's mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us." A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool -- technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer -- and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking. Perhaps there was no limit. There might quite likely be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say this is as far as we can go, there is no use trying to go further. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, . so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There'd never be an end, he thought -- no end to anything. They reached the edge of the field and headed up across it toward the station. From its upper edge came the sound of running feet. "Enoch!" a voice shouted out of the darkness. "Enoch, is that you?" Enoch recognized the voice. "Yes, Winslowe. What is wrong?" The mailman burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting with his running, at the edge of light. "Enoch, they are coming! A couple of carloads of them. But I put a crimp in them. Where the road turns off into your lane -- that narrow place, you know. I dumped two pounds of roofing nails along the ruts. That'll hold them for a while. But not for long, Enoch!" "Roofing nails?" Ulysses asked. "It's a mob," Enoch told him. "They are after me. The nails..." "Oh, I see," Ulysses said. "The deflation of the tires." Winslowe took a slow step closer, his gaze riveted on the glow of the shielded Talisman. "That's Lucy Fisher, ain't it?" "Of course it is," said Enoch. "Her old man came roaring into town just a while ago and said she was gone again. Up until then everything had quieted down and it was all right. But old Hank, he got them stirred up again. So I went down to the hardware store and got them roofing nails and I beat them here." "This mob?" Ulysses asked. "I don't..." gasping in his eagerness to to tell all his information. "That ginseng man is up there, waiting at the house for you. He has a panel truck." "That," said Enoch, "would be Lewis with the Hazer's body." "He is some upset," said Winslowe. "He said you were expecting him." "Perhaps," suggested Ulysses, "we shouldn't just be standing here. It seems to my poor intellect that many things may be coming to a crisis." "Say," the mailman yelled. "What is going on here? What is that thing Lucy has and who's this fellow with you?" "Later," Enoch told him. "I'll tell you later. There's no time to tell you now." "But, Enoch, there's the mob." "I'll deal with them," said Enoch, grimly, "when I have to deal with them. Right now, there's something more important." They ran up the slope, the four of them, dodging through the waist-high clumps of weeds. Ahead of them the station reared dark and angular against the evening sky. "Tljey're down there at the turn-off," Winslowe gasped, wheezing with his running. "That flash of light down the ridge. That was the headlights of a car." They reached the edge of the yard and ran toward the house. The black bulk of the panel truck glimmered in the glow cast by the Talisman. A figure detached itself from the shadow of the truck and hurried out toward them. "Is that you, Wallace?" "Yes," said Enoch. "I'm sorry that I wasn't here." "I was a bit upset," said Lewis, "when I didn't find you waiting." "Something unforeseen," said Enoch. "Something that must be taken care of." "The body of the honored one?" Ulysses asked. "It is in the truck?" Lewis nodded. "I am happy that we can restore it. I'm sorry we caused a fuss." "We'll have to carry him down to the orchard," Enoch said. "You can't get a car in there." "The other time," Ulysses said, "you were the one who carried him." Enoch nodded. "My friend," the alien said, "I wonder if on this occasion I could be allowed the honor." "Why, yes, of course," said Enoch. "He would like it that way." And the words came to his tongue, but he choked them back, for it would not have done to say them -- the words of thanks for lifting from him the necessity of complete recompense, for the gesture which released him from the utter letter of the law. At his elbow, Winslowe said: "They are coming. I can hear them down the road." He was right. From down the road came the soft sound of footsteps padding in the dust, not hurrying, with no need to hurry, the insulting and deliberate treading of a monster so certain of its prey that it need not hurry. Enoch swung around and half lifted his rifle, training it toward the padding that came out of the dark. softly: "Perhaps it would be most proper to bear him to the grave in the full glory and unshielded light of our restored Talisman." "She can't hear you," Enoch said. "You must remember she is deaf. You will have to show her." But even as he said it, a blaze leaped out that was blinding in its brightness. With a strangled cry, Enoch half turned back to face the little group that stood beside the truck. The bag that had enclosed the Talisman lay at Lucy's feet. She held the glowing brightness high and proudly so that it spread its light across the yard and the ancient house, and some of it as well spilled out into the field. There was a quietness. As if the entire world had caught its breath and stood attentive and in awe, waiting for a sound that did not come, that would never come, but would always be expected. And with the quietness came an abiding sense of peace that seemed to seep into the very fiber of one's being. It was no synthetic thing -- not as if someone had invoked a peace and peace then was allowed to exist by suffrance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost-like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about you and there was the feeling that it was not only here, but that the i peace extended on and out in all directions, to the farthest reaches of infinity and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure I until the final gasp of all eternity. Slowly, remembering, Enoch turned back to face the field. The men were there, at the edge of the light cast by the Talisman, a gray, huddled group, like a pack of chastened wolves that slunk at the faint periphery of a campfire's light. And as he watched, they I melted back -- back into the deeper dark from which they had padded in the dust track of the road. Except for one who turned and bolted, plunging down the hill in the darkness toward the woods, howling in maddened terror like a frightened dog. "There goes Hank," said Wins! lowe. "That is Hank running I down the hill." j "I am sorry that we frightened I him," said Enoch soberly. "No ; man should be afraid of this." "It is himself that he is frightened of," the mailman said. "He lives with a terror in him." And that was true, thought Enoch. That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself. mounded. The five of them stood for a moment more, listening to the restless wind that stirred in the moon-drenched apple orchard, while from far away, down in the hollows above the river valley, the whippoorwills talked back and forth through the silver night. In the moonlight Enoch tried to read the graven line upon the rough-hewn tombstone, but there was not light enough. Although there was no need to read it; it was in his mind: Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe. When you wrote that, the Hazer diplomat had told him, just the night before, you wrote as one of us. And he had not said so, but the Vegan had been wrong. For it was not a Vegan sentiment alone; it was human, too. The words were chiseled awkwardly and there was a mistake or two in spelling, for the Hazer language was not an easy one to master. The stone was softer than the marble or granite most commonly used for gravestones. The lettering would not last In a few more years the weathering of sun and rain and frost would blur the characters. In some years after that they would be entirely gone, with no more than the roughness of the stone remaining to show that words had once been written there. But it did not matter, Enoch thought. The words were graven on more than stone alone. He looked across the grave at Lucy. The Talisman was in its bag once more and the glow was softer. She still held it clasped tight against herself and her face was still exalted and unnoticing -- as if she no longer lived in the present world, but had entered into some other place, some other far dimension where she dwelled alone and was forgetful of all past. "Do you think," Ulysses asked, "that she will go with us? Do you think that we can have her? Will the Earth..." "The Earth," said Enoch, "has not a thing to say. We Earth people are free agents. It is up to her." "You think that she will go?" "I think so," Enoch said. "I think this has been the moment she had sought for all her life." For she always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. You sensed it, but you could not name it; and she had fumbled with it, trying to use it and not knowing how, charming off warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen. "Her parent?" Ulysses asked. "The howling one that ran away from us?" "I'll handle him," said Lewis. "You want her to go back with you to Galactic Central?" Enoch asked. "If she will," Ulysses said. "Central must be told at once." ."And from there throughout the galaxy?" "Yes," Ulysses said. "We need her very badly." "Could we, I wonder, borrow her for a day or two." "Borrow her?" "Yes," said Enoch. "For we need her, too. We need her worst of all." "Of course," Ulysses said. "But I don't..." "Lewis," Enoch asked, "do you think our government -- the secretary of state, perhaps -- might be persuaded to appoint one Lucy Fisher as a member of our peace conference delegation?" Lewis stammered, made a full stop, then began again: "I think it could possibly be managed." "Can you imagine," Enoch asked, "the impact of this girl and the Talisman at the conference table?" "I think I can," said Lewis. "But the secretary undoubtedly would want to talk with you before he arrived at his decision." Enoch half turned toward Ulysses, but he did not need to phrase his question. "By all means," Ulysses said to Lewis. "Let me know and I'll sit in on the meeting. And you might tell the good secretary, too, that it would not be a bad idea to begin the formation of a world committee." "A world committee?" "To arrange," Ulysses said, "for the Earth becoming one of us. We I cannot accept a custodian, can (j we, from an outside planet?" boulder pile gleamed whitely, like the skeleton of some prehistoric beast. For here, near the edge of the cliff that towered above the river, the heavy trees thinned out and the rocky point stood open to the sky. Enoch stood beside one of the massive boulders and gazed down at the huddled figure that lay among the rocks. Poor, tattered I bungler, he thought, dead so far ; from home -- and to so little purpose. I In that brain, now broken beI yond recovery, must have lain a f scheme of greatness -- the kind ' of scheme that the brain of an earthly Alexander or Xerxes or Napoleon may have held, a dream of great power, cynically conceived, so grandiose that it canceled moral considerations. He tried momentarily to imagine what the scheme might be, but knew how foolish it was to try. It was ironic that the key of failure lay in the fact that the creature, in its fleeing, had carried the Talisman into the backyard of a sensitive, and on a planet, too, where no one would have thought to look for a sensitive. For there could be little doubt that Lucy had sensed the Talisman, drawn to it as truly as a magnet would attract a piece of steel. She had known nothing else, perhaps, than that the Talisman had been there and was something she must have, that it was something she had waited for in all her loneliness, without knowing what it was or without hope of finding it. Like a child who sees, quite suddenly, a shiny, glorious bauble on a Christmas tree and knows that it's the grandest thing on Earth and that it must be hers. This creature lying here, thought Enoch, must have been able and resourceful. For it would have taken great ability and resourcefulness to have stolen the Talisman to start with, to keep it hidden for years, to have penetrated into the secrets and the files of Galactic Central. Would it have been possible, he wondered, if the Talisman had been in effective operation? With an energetic Talisman would the moral laxity and the driving greed have been possible to motivate the deed? But that was ended now. The Talisman had been restored and a new custodian had been found -- a deaf-mute girl of Earth, the humblest of humans. And there would be peace on Earth and in time the Earth would join the confraternity of the galaxy. now, he thought. No decisions to be made. Lucy had taken the decisions from the hands of everyone. The station would remain. He could unpack the boxes he had packed and put the journals back on the shelves again. He could go back to the station once again and settle down and carry on his work. I am sorry, he told the huddled shape that lay among the boulders. I am sorry that mine was the hand that had to do it to you. He turned away and walked out to where the cliff dropped straight down to the river flowing at its foot. He raised the rifle and held it for a moment motionless and then he threw it out and watched it fall, spinning end for end, the moonlight glinting off the barrel, saw the tiny splash it made as it struck the water. And far below, he heard the smug, contented gurgling of the water as it flowed past this cliff and went on to the ends of Earth. There would be peace on Earth, but it was a long trail yet, a long and lonesome way. Until no man ran howling, wild with fear (any kind of fear), would there be actual peace. Until the last man threw away his weapon (any sort of weapon), the tribe of Man could not be at peace. A rifle was the least of the weapons of the Earth, the least of man's inhumanity to man -- and to others. He stood on the rim of the cliff and looked out across the river and the dark shadow of the wooded valley. His hands felt strangely empty with the rifle gone, but it seemed that somewhere, back there just a way, he had stepped into another field of time, as if an age or day had dropped away and he had come into a place that was shining and brand new and unsullied by any past mistakes. The river rolled below him and the river did not care. Nothing mattered to the river. It would take the tusk of mastodon, the skull of saber-tooth, the ribcage of a man, the dead and sunken tree, the thrown rock or rifle and would swallow each of them and cover them in mud or sand and roll gurgling over them, hiding them from sight. been no river here and in a million years to come there might years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself -- a thing that went on caring. He turned slowly from the cliff edge and clambered through the boulders, to go walking up the hill. He heard the tiny scurrying of small life rustling through the fallen leaves. Once there was the sleepy peeping of an awakened bird, and through the entire woods lay the peace and comfort of that glowing light. Not so intense, not so deep and bright and so wonderful as when it actually had been there, but a breath of it still left. He came to the edge of the woods and climbed the field. Ahead of him the station stood foursquare upon its ridgetop. And it seemed that it was no longer a station only, but his home as well. Many years ago it had been a home and nothing more and then it had become a way station to the galaxy. But now, although way station still, it was home again. just a little ghostly. A lamp burned on his desk and over on the coffee table the little pyramid of spheres was flashing, throwing its many colored lights, like the crystal balls they'd used in the Roaring Twenties to turn a dance hall into a place of magic. The tiny flickering colors went flitting all about the room, like the dance of a zany band of Technicolor fireflies. He stood for a moment, indecisive, not knowing what was missing. All at once he realized what it was. During all the years there'd been a rifle to hang upon its pegs or to lay across the desk. And now there was no rifle. He'd have to settle down, he told himself, and get back to work. He'd have to unpack and put the stuff away. He'd have to get the journals written and catch up with his reading. There was a lot to do. Ulysses and Lucy had left an hour or two before, bound for Galactic Central, but the feeling  of the Talisman still seemed to linger in the room. Perhaps not in the room at all, but inside himself. Perhaps it was a feeling that he'd carry with him no matter where he went. He walked slowly across the room and sat down on the sofa. In front of him the pyramid of spheres was splashing out its crystal shower of colors. He reached out a hand to pick it up, then drew it slowly back. What was the use, he asked himself, of examining it again? If he had not learned its secret the many times before, why should he expect to now? A pretty thing, he thought, but useless. He wondered how Lucy might be getting on and knew she was all right. She'd get along, he told himself, anywhere she went. Instead of sitting here, he should be getting back to work. From now on Earth would be pounding at the door. There would be conferences and meetings and a lot of other things and in a few hours more the newspapers might be here. But before it happened, Ulysses would be back to help him, and perhaps there would be others, too. In just a little while he'd rustle up some food. and then he'd get to work. If he worked far into the night, he could get a good deal done. Lonely nights were good for work. And it was lonely now. desk and picked up the stauette Winslowe had carved of him. He held it beneath the desk lamp and turned it slowly in his hands. There was loneliness in  that figure, too -- the essential f loneliness of a man who walked alone. But he'd had to walk alone. There'd been no other way. ! He set the statuette back on the desk and remembered that he had not given Winslowe the piece of wood the Thuban traveler had brought. Now he could tell Winslowe where all the wood had come from. They could go through the journals and find the dates and the origin of every stick of it. That would please Old Winslowe. He heard the silken rustle and swung swiftly round. "Mary!" he cried. She stood just at the edge of shadow. The flitting colors from the flashing pyramid made her seem like someone who had stepped from fairyland. And that was right, he was thinking wildly, for his lost fairyland was back. "I had to come," she said. "You were lonely, Enoch, and I could not stay away." She could hot stay away. That might be true, he thought. For within the conditioning he'd set up there might have been the inescapable compulsion to come whenever she was needed. It was a trap, he thought, from which neither could escape. There was no free will here, but instead the deadly precision of this blind mechanism he had shaped himself. She should not come to see him and perhaps knew this as well as he, but could not help herself. Would this be the way that it would be, forever and forever? He stood there, frozen, torn by the need of her and the emptiness of her unreality, and she was moving toward him. She was close to him. In a moment she would stop, for she knew the rules as well as he; she, no more than he, could admit illusion. But she did not stop. She came so close that he could smell the apple blossom fragrance of her. She put out a hand and laid it on his arm. It was no shadow touch and it was no shadow hand. He could feel the pressure of her fingers and the coolness of them. He stood rigid, with her hand upon his arm. The flashing light! he thought. The pyramid of spheres! who had given it to him. It was one of those aberrant races of the Alphard system. And it had been from the literature of that system that he had learned the art of fairyland. They had tried to help him by giving him the pyramid and he had not under There had been a failure of communication, an easy thing to happen in the Babel of the galaxy. For the pyramid of spheres was a wonderful and simple mechanism. It was the fixation agent that banished illusion. It made a fairyland real. You made something as you wanted it and then turned on the pyramid -- and you had what you had made, as real as if it had never been illusion. Except, he thought, in some things you couldn't fool yourself. You knew it was illusion, even if it should turn real. He reached out toward her tentatively, but her hand dropped from his arm and she took a slow step backward. In the terrible, lonely silence of the room they stood facing one another, while the colored lights ran like playing mice as the pyramid twirled its rainbow. "I am sorry," Mary said. "It isn't any good. We can't fool ourselves." He stood mute and shamed. "I waited for it," she said. "I . thought and dreamed about it." "So did I," said Enoch. "I never thought it would happen." And that was it, of course. So long as it could not happen, it was a thing to dream about, romantic and impossible. Perhaps it had. been romantic only because it had been so far-off and impossible. "As if a doll had come to life," she said, "or a beloved teddy bear. I am sorry, Enoch, but you could not love a doll or a teddy bear that had come to life. You always would remember them the way they were before. The doll with the silly, painted smile; the teddy bear with the stuffing coming out of it." "No!" cried Enoch. "No!" "Poor Enoch," she said. "It will be so bad for you. I wish that I could help. You'll have so long to live with it." "But you!" he cried. "But you? What can you do now?" It had been she, he thought, who had the courage that it took to face things as they were. How, he wondered, had she sensed it? How could she have known? "I shall go away," she said. "I shall not come back. Even when you need me, I shall not come back. There is no other way." "But you can't go away! You are trapped the same as I." She shook her head, moved swiftly and the pyramid of spheres was in her hand and lifted. "No, not that!" he shouted. "No, Mary!" The pyramid flashed, spinning in the air, and crashed against the fireplace. The flashing lights went out. Something -- glass? metal? stone? -- tinkled on the floor. "Mary!" Enoch cried, striding forward in the dark. But there was no one there. "Mary!" he whimpered. She was gone and she would not be back. Even when he needed her, she would not be back. He stood quietly in the dark and silence. The voice of a century of living seemed to speak to him. All things are hard, it said. Nothing is easy. There had been the farm girl living down the road, and the southern beauty who had watched him pass her gate, and now there was Mary, gone forever from him. He turned heavily in the room and moved forward, groping for the table. He found it and switched on the light. He stood beside the table and looked about the room. In this corner where he stood there once had been a kitchen, and there, where the fireplace stood, the living room, and it all had changed -- it had been changed for a long time now. But he still could see it as if it were only yesterday. All the days were gone and all the people in them. Only he was left. He had lost his world. He had left it behind him. But so, on this day, had all the other humans alive. They might not know it. But they, too, had left their world behind them. "Good-by, Mary," he said. "Forgive me. God keep you." He sat down at the table and pulled the journal that lay upon its top in front of him. He flipped it open, searching for the pages he must fill. He had work to do, and now he was ready for it. He had said his last good-by. begins in the July IF, along with stories by Keith Laumer, Brian W. Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, etc. July issue still on sale -- get your copy today! ' tion, "What is science fiction?", the most fascinating argument in the field is that concerning sf as literature, or, as some people prefer to call it, as Art. A great many of those who hold that the best of sf stands up with the best of any literature, seem to lose sight of the fact that it is perforce different from other fields. If it weren't there'd be no fen, no Cons, no Hugo. My own objections to the layman's attitude has come down to this: good sf out of the main stream, like On the Beach or Fail Safe, ought to be acknowledged as such. Likewise, good literature within our field ought to be recognized as such. What brings out these cogitations just now is the appearance of two remarkable books, wildly different one from the other, and from most of anything you have ever read, yet both works of real stature. L Harry Martinson is one of the Immortals of the Swedish Academy. In # he published a short volume of "songs" called Cicada, a version of which formed the libretto for an opera performed at the Edinburgh Festival in '# and at Covent Garden, London, in #. Aniara (Knopf, # pp., #) contains the # "songs" of Cicada and a great many more, to total #. Aniara is the story of a spaceship loaded with four thousand immigrants from Earth to Mars. It encounters asteroids, is flung off course and damaged so that it can't be turned. The whole book, then, is an examination of bottled-up humanity in an absolutely inescapable predicament which can end only in death. We see them in the sixth, the ninth and the twentieth years, in episodes of fad and fashion, of religion, of love and fear. I have read somewhere that Swedish is not a language that lends itself to literary excellence. Either this is not so, or the translators (Hugh Macdiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert) are people of unusual literary skill; for the language is simply beautiful. I nominate for anyone's high shelf of immortal lines-outof-context (like, "Forever shalt thou love, and she be fair," and "... a rose-red city, half as old as Time,") this from Aniara: She wounds, but as a rose may wound, not always, as expected, with its thorn. A rose will always wound you with its rose... Martinson's achievement here is an inexpressible, immeasurable sadness. It is something that transcends panic and terror and even despair, which is after all a roiling and acidulous condition. He leaves you in the quiet immensities, with the feeling that you have spent time, and have been permanently tinted, by and with an impersonal, larger-than-God force which is inimical exactly to the extent that you are alive and have being. I cannot and will not accept Martinson's profound disgust with humanity :... describe the men who there in beauty stitched the white shrouds of their race until God and Satan hand in hand from a defiled and poisoned land past plains and mountains fled the face of man; the King of Ashes. -- preferring to regard this and other documents, (like #, or Jean Genet's The Balcony) as terrifying and accurate projections of what might be, and therefore informative of how to change course actively and with purpose. Nevertheless I feel personally enriched and enlarged by this book, one which I shall surely always keep and read and ponder. who went on to hate middleaged ladies for a living, called his greatest book, Finnley Wren, "a novel in a new manner." It's a nice concept, and a challenging one -- to write a novel in a new manner. I know a guy who has done it twice. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., whose Sirens of Titan is a perfect example of the piece of fine literature denied the general public by its Buck Rogers syndrome, has done it again with Cat's Cradle (Holt, #I pp., #). The #I pages of this outrageous novel (on the dust jacket the word "novel" bears an asterisk for a footnote; the footnote reads "a harmless untruth") contain no less than # chapters. Some have such titles as Communists, Nazis, Royalists, Parachutists and Draft Dodgers and run all of nine short paragraphs; yet the author never deceives (not in this manner, anyhow) and you'll find the chapter does indeed deal with Communists, Nazis, etc., etc. Throughout the book are quotations from a skewed gospel called The Books of Bokonon, which may just possibly be Vonnegut's impertinent way of demanding who's to say whose gospels are skewed? "Live by the foma," says Bokonon, "that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." Foma are harmless untruths. The narrative on which the book's appalling, hilarious, shocking and infuriating events and characters are strung deals with a great scientist, now dead, the search for biographic material by a free-lance writer, his encounter with the scientist's past employers, acquaintances and fellowtownspeople, and his children: an angry midget, an ugly daughter who plays fabulous clarinet, and a moral degenerate who has become the weak power behind the meaningless throne of a tropical island called San Lorenzo. The writer goes to San Lorenzo spurred primarily by a Sunday supplement picture of the ward of the dictator, the most beautiful girl in the word. He finds himself affianced to her; and how would you feel if your beloved's idea of you-know-what was to take off your shoes, and you take off her shoes, and there you sit with the soles of your feet pressing together in ecstasy? Along with these highest of jinks goes the grim specter of Ice-nine, a scientific development of horrendous proportions, about which I will say not one more word. I will and must say, however, that this is an annoying book, and you must read it. And you better take it lightly, because if you don't you'll go off weeping and shoot yourself. Let us take over while you take it easy Brand new, ultra modern #-unit Congress Inn, located # miles south of city limits. Latest facilities. Every type of accommodations. TV, phones, with #-hour switchboard service, in all rooms. Lovely swimming pool. Free baby beds... valet  laundry service... delightful restaurant. Interstate Road No. # Gives details and rates of # Congress Motor Hotels, two-way radio motor tours, Congress "Car O' Fun" caravans include rooms, meals, gas, guide, insurance, radio, etc. Jfiey: oi "  '   , , ' y iriniE iDiiREjf c)r M  L J J L , ' # ' was going to die. He turned his back on his useless ship and went inside the bubble house that had been his home for ninety-nine days. Methodically he donned his all-weather clothes, his environment suit. He did not want to die in this place. Here was food and refrigeration for the days, warmth and comfort for the nights. He could not bring himself to put a gun to his head, or end it by any other direct, willful act. But out there in the desert, away from man-made helps for survival... there a man could get himself into circumstances where nature took care of it. That was his reason for being here on this lonely planet, in the first place -- the promise of finding intelligent life. For intelligence was rare in the universe, after all. A lone adventurer, a year before, forced down on this planet by a cosmic storm, had waited a week here for the storm to subside, then had landed on Earth with the feverish news of intelligent life. Ingomar Bjorgson had come to investigate. Birds, yet. T hey were only two. Two birds with minds like the edge of a razor, living alone on this planet that was one hundred per cent desert. He took one last look around the bubble, then walked out, leaving the door open. From ten feet away he watched the sand already blowing in through the doorway, and he felt very lonely and small. He knew that his death, like his life, would never be marked anywhere with any degree of permanence. He walked. There was no hurry, so he walked slowly, stopping occasionally to turn and stare at the tracks his feet had scuffed in the sand, watching sand drift into them. He smiled wryly. The universe was so eager to be rid of him -- as if he were a disease. He looked up again, studying the whole sky. But there was no movement of wings, no silver streak of a ship coming to pick him up. Only one spot marred the desert's domain -- the tiny bright reflection of the burning sun on the now distant bubble. The birds had promised him. They had been so sure of themselves. When he knew that the fierce sun and wind would kill him before he could get back to the bubble, he started removing his all-weather clothes. He flung them aside like a dancer. Coat to the left, trousers to the right. The hot wind threw the trousers back against his face. He tore them off with a curse. Shirt to the left. He kept the shoes on. out of respect for his feet. Then he trudged on, wondering vaguely how a half dressed man, dying on his feet, could make the same marks in the sand as a fully clothed, comfortable one. He stumbled on an outcropping of rock. He fell. He picked himself up again. It would be quick, after all. The sun was in league with the rest of the universe. He would die soon. He fell again. He had found the planet of Lorrane easily. The adventurer's charts were accurate. It was a dry, barren place, an old, wornout world where only wind and sand moved, where mountains shoved their eroded peaks into the impotent sky. But Ingomar found, upon emerging from his ship, that there was another movement. Two black dots appeared far away in the sky and rapidly grew larger. He had been told that the planet was populated by an intelligent form of bird life. Two were approaching now. He smiled to himself. "Imagine that," he said to himself, "A smart bird. How should you meet a smart bird? Should you shake hands?" The birds alighted in the sand before him. They eyed him with bright, intelligent eyes. They were quite large, standing at least two feet tall. Their gray feathers lay smooth and straight, immaculately cared for. Ingomar cast around in his mind for something to say, or some sign to make that indicated friendship. Then one of the birds looked at the other and said, "This one is larger." "Much," the other replied. Ingomar was astonished. "You can talk?" he asked, "In English?" "Certainly. Didn't the first man tell how he instructed us?" "Yes, yes, of course," Ingomar said, confused. "But I didn't remem... that is... Well, I didn't believe it." The birds eyed each other again. "I like him," one said. "If there's anything I hate, it's a completely honest person." The other gave him a vicious peck on his back. "Shut up!" it said, "Do you want him to think we condone dishonesty?" "Of course not," the other retorted hotly, "I just meant that, considering social protocol, it is sometimes kind to tell a very small lie." looked back at his ship, standing tall and straight, ready to blast itself into the sky again. He glanced around at the lonely landscape. Finally he said, "It is difficult to see a difference between you two. Do you have names that I might be able to use?" "Oh, yes. We beg your pardon. How uncivil of us. Our name, translated into your tongue, is Pisces." "The fish?" "Well," they said, "from our home planet the constellation does not look like a fish." "Oh. Well, are both of you named Pisces? Oh, I see. That is your species. I am called Man; you are called Pisces." "Of course not," they said, "You were right the first time. Pisces is our name. You can say, 'Pisces, get me that ship.' And we would do so." "How can both of you have the same name? Are you actually one intelligence? And see that you keep your hands... I mean, see that you leave my ship alone." One said, "We wouldn't think of touching your ship." The other said, "No, we are two separate entities." Ingomar passed a hand over his face, thinking. The two very Earth-looking birds stood quietly before him, their feet buried in the sand so that it looked like their legs were two stilts shoved into the ground. At last he said, "Well, I know what we'll do. I will call you Pisces I," he pointed to the bird on his left, "and your companion Pisces II." The identical birds glanced at each other, then leapt into the air. They circled high above his head. They swooped low. They engaged in marvelous aerial gymnastics wonderful to see. Ingomar made notes in his book concerning their agility. Finally they came to rest before him again, so suddenly that he stepped backward quickly, frightened. "Now," they said, "which one of us is Pisces I and which is Pisces II?" Puzzled, Ingomar studied them carefully. The one with the quick temper might show this characteristic in some way. He pointed to the bird on his right. "You," he said, "are Pisces I". They laughed. It was a verbal sound only. No expression showed in their eyes. # A LL right," Ingomar said, after some thought. "I can fix that." He entered his ship and rummaged around in his clothes locker, then emerged with a brilliant red ribbon of plastic. "I'll tie this to your leg. That way I'll know that you are Pisces I. If you promise not to move it from one to the other."  "We promise." He stooped over to tie the plastic on the leg of the one he thought was Pisces I, and was almost caught in the sudden flurry of slashing beaks and raking claws, like a mating fight in an aviary. "I am Pisces I," one screamed, administering a resounding peck on the other's back. "No, you're hot. I am." This one leapt into the air and landed on the other's back. He raked vicious, long talons across the well-groomed feathers. "I am more intelligent than you.  should be Pisces I." From a safe ten feet away, Ingomar threw the ribbon at them. "Stop it!" he yelled. They obeyed instantly, and stood quietly side by side facing him. Ingomar drew his hand gun and pointed it at them. "Now stop your fighting, or I'll blow you to kingdom come." "Fine," they said. "Anything to get off this miserable planet. How far is it?" Ingomar smiled, in spite of his anger. "It's an expression. It means I will destroy you." One of the birds quickly picked up the plastic ribbon and carried it to the other, and dropped it near the leg. Then both took it in their beaks and together they tied it around the leg. It was done so quickly that Ingomar stood there aghast, surprised into immobility. He had never before seen birds tie knots. "It would not be wise to destroy us," Pisces I said. 'We can help you." "How?" "You need help," Pisces II said. "A storm is coming." "A cosmic torm?" Ingomar asked. "I'm not worried about that. I'll stay here until it moves on." Pisces I shook his head. "A planetary storm." "When?" "Sometime tonight." "Okay," Ingomar said. "Thanks. I'll stay inside." "It's not so easy as that. You must blast off and put your ship in orbit for the night." "Why? Do you know how much fuel it takes to get into orbit? I have none to spare." Pisces II scratched in the sand with his claws, thinking. Then he said, "Only one alternative exists. If you remain, the storm will wreck your ship. Take us aboard now, and blast off for your home planet. To stay here means death." Ingomar snorted and turned back toward his ship. He thought, "Take them aboard my ship? their plan, now. They wanted to get into his ship. Then, by some means he could not now forsee, they would take the ship away from him. conclusion that he quickly retreated to safety, closing the airlock. The birds stayed outside. They were arguing between themselves. He could tell by the gesticulations they made with their heads. Once Pisces I attacked Pisces II viciously, raking him mercilessly with sharp talons. Pisces II fought back ferociously. They rolled over and over in the sand. Ingomar threw a switch that gave him communication outside, the ship, and yelled at them. They stopped fighting at once. He said, "Have you two lost your minds?" Pisces II laughed. "Now how could one lose his mind? It goes with him everywhere." "All right," Ingomar said. "I meant, have you become insane?" "Of course not," Pisces I said. "We are peaceful entities. We intentionally developed this argument to break the monotony of life here." "Is it so bad as that?" "It is terrible. Will you take us aboard?" Ingomar did not answer, but switched the communicator off and busied himself with recording his observations. He took advantage of their continued presence and took photographs. Finally, after several hours, they leapt into the air and flew away toward the distant mountains. Ingomar was sorry to see them leave, and more than once checked his instruments for signs of a coming storm in case they were right. But nothing outside had changed. After they had left he opened the ship and stepped outside, taking readings with instruments to record the character of the planet. He trudged through the eternally drifting sand, looking for some sign of life. No plants, insects, animals anywhere. Only the fine, mobile sand, occasionally an outcropping of rock not yet eroded away. And the heat! Ingomar was forced to turn the controls of his environment suit almost all the way up to keep comfortable. Then, when the sun receded behind the ghostly barren mountains, the cold came creeping in. Ingomar turned his controls in the other direction, while walking back to his ship. He was afraid he would not keep the cold outside. The landscape, with the sun's absence, was dark and. fearful. Shadows moved in the wind, shadows of drifting sand that took on the shapes of monsters lurking in the darkness. Ingomar was not one to frighten easily, but the night took on such ominous sighs and moans and movements that his imagination began to magnify them beyond recognition. When he finally saw the ship loom up before him he ran, stumbling toward it. He fumbled in the darkness for the control knob to open the lock and found it at last. He leapt inside, accompanied by a cold blast of wind and sand, and stood there panting, hearing his heart pound in his ears. The night was long and lonely. He was too far from civilization for his radio equipment to bring the comfort of familiar sounds. He tried to read, but found concentration impossible. He thought of the birds, wondering where they were now, how they kept from freezing to death at night. He rewrote his notes, adding remembered facts and impressions. Finally he decided sleep was the most painless way of spending the night, and swallowed a small capsule designed to induce total sleep for at least six hours. standing on his head. The bed, horizontal the night before, was now vertical. The whole room was vertical. Panic swept over him like a wave of burning fire. He scrambled to the airlock. It opened grotesquely. The ship, which last night had stood so proudly, now lay on its side. And in his drugged sleep he had not known when it fell. For Ingomar, the bottom dropped out of everything, and his heart dropped with it. There was no resetting of a ship once it had fallen. This took special equipment. Ingomar Bjornson was a doomed man, and he knew it. While he stood outside in the morning sun, staring at the horrible spectacle before him, the two birds alighted, one on each side. "Why didn't you listen to us?" Pisces I said in an accusing tone. "Yes," Pisces II echoed angrily. "You make me sick, thinking you're so smart, coming down here in your big ship and strutting around like you think you're a God, or something. Now, how big do you feel? Do you realize that this is our first opportunity to leave this planet? I've a good notion to peck your stupid eyes out right here and now." "Leave him be," Pisces I said. "He may not be so bright, but I think he would have taken us with him, after he got used to us and saw how harmless we are." Pisces II leapt at him, almost knocking Ingomar off his feet. "Shut up! I've a good notion to peck your eyes out, too." "Oh, stop it!" Ingomar said wearily. "We're all doomed to spend the rest of our lives here. How was I to know that the storm would be so bad? My instruments gave no indication whatever." "Actually, it was our fault," Pisces II said, more calmly. "We failed to mention the nature of the storm. We thought you knew. It was a magnetic storm. A shifting of magnetic currents surrounding the planet. We had no idea that you would think of the weather." They walked with him around the fallen ship. It was not injured, that much Ingomar could see. The soft bed of sand had cushioned its fall. If it could only be righted! Ingomar knew it was impossible. "It is pointed toward that knoll out there. See? Suppose we all got inside and blasted off. We would slide along and maybe when we reached the knoll we'd have enough speed to keep on going in a straight line until we could point her nose upward." Ingomar shook his head, but he appreciated the suggestion. It to try anything. He knew their motives were not entirely philanthropic, but he liked them more for it, anyway. He said, "There is only one way out, and that is for someone to come in and get us." "Well," Pisces II said, "What are you waiting for? Call them." "I can't. We are too far out for communication." The two gray birds eyed one another in disbelief. Pisces I scratched his breast impolitely. Then he said, "Are you telling us that you have come this far from your own solar system, knowing that you could not call for help, if necessary?" Ingomar nodded. beak, and scratched in the sand. "Stupidity," he said. "There is no other word for it." "Yes, there is," Pisces I answered, somewhat sharply. "In fact, there are several possible words. Bravery. Desperation. Actually I think it is a combination of both. I am sure that you are aware how rare intelligent life is in the universe. When you heard of us, you rushed out here at once. I would call it bravery to go beyond the sound of the voices of your kind. You are desperate because you are lonely in an almost empty universe." "We must help him," said Pisces II. "Of course. But first let's make him comfortable. It will be a long wait." "Thank you," Ingomar said, moved by their sympathy. "But you cannot help. Or do you have a way to send messages?" "Yes, in a way," Pisces II said, "You see..." Pisces I lifted a huge wing and knocked Pisces II in the sand. He turned to Ingomar. "Do you promise to take us with you, if we should succeed in getting help?" Ingomar did not think it over. "Yes," he said. "Then we will do it. But first we must make you comfortable. Do you have equipment for shelter, besides the ship?" "Yes, there is the bubble. It can be expanded to become a house." "Get it," Pisces II said. Ingomar did. He dragged it outside and began to unfold it, in preparation for inflation. But Pisces II stopped him. "Not here," he said. "It will be a long time. Our calculation is that it will take at least forty-five days to get help. The trip from your planet alone is at least forty days. You will not wish to stare at your toppled ship for so long. I suggest we go beyond the first knoll." Pisces I laughed and said to Ingomar, "For once he is using his brain. We will carry it." He grasped the bubble in his claws, flapped his enormous wings and sailed off. Soon he returned, and among the three of them all his food and books and any equipment he might need was carried over the knoll out of sight of the wrecked ship. "We will not return," they said, "until the rescue ship arrives. So make yourself comfortable. Do not stray too far from the ship. This is the most miserable planet in the universe. Give us plenty of time. We know we can summon help, but we do not know how long it will take. We may need as many as seventy-five days." Ingomar settled down to wait. T he fierce, burning sun had turned Ingomar's face and naked arms into fried areas of intense pain, but he regained consciousness when he felt the coolness of the ointment. It penetrated deep down, under the burned skin, into flesh and muscle, soothing injured cells. He opened his eyes. He moved his head. The eyes were burned and bloodshot, but he could see a ship standing a hundred feet away. It was not sleek and long, pointing its needle nose at the sky, though. It was round, dull white, like a giant egg laid by a giant bird. Bird? Ingomar chuckled, senses returning, thinking through his pain of Pisces I or Pisces II laying an egg. Then he laughed aloud. He stopped, quite abruptly, and looked again. The egg was still there, but it was not an egg. It was actually a ship and the airlock was open and Pisces II was backing out, dragging a sort of stretcher on wheels. "It's a... a... ship!" he exclaimed, tears running down his cheeks, over the ointment. "Whose ship is it?" "Ours," said Pisces I. "Yours?" Ingomar said, after a long pause while the pain raged over his skin. He tried to sit up, and Pisces I got behind him and pushed, nudging him upright. "Where did you get it?" "Oh," Pisces II interrupted. "We had it all the time." "Shut up!" Pisces I yelled. "He asked me." "Hold your tongue," Pisces II retorted hotly, "or I'll take off and leave you here. I've had enough of you in the past century to last a lifetime." Pisces I said to Ingomar, "Pay no attention to that peasant." He helped Pisces II push the stretcher next to Ingomar. Then he pushed a lever and the stretcher reduced itself to ground height. It was too short for Ingomar's body, having been designed for the body of a bird. "He's right, though," Pisces I continued, giving the stretcher a kick because it wasn't long enough. "We had the ship all along. It was despicable of us to deceive you, but our ship was defective, and we needed yours for parts." Ingomar shook his head. "There was no magnetic storm?" Pisces II nodded his head. "Oh, yes, there was a storm. But not a natural phenomenon, I'm sorry to say. Too bad. The natural storms are much more beautiful." "And you had the bubble set up away from 'the ship so I wouldn't see you steal the parts?" They hung their heads. "Despicable," they said. "A rotten thing to do." Ingomar was too ill for anger. "Let me understand this," he said. "You ruined my ship to get parts for yours. Why? Why not just take my ship?" "Too slow," Pisces II said. He took the container of ointment in his beak and set it beside Ingomar's hand. "Here, you can rub it on by yourself now. Get busy." Pisces I said. By your standards our planet is a terrible distance away. Your ship would take too long. Hurry, now. We've got to take you to... what do you call it. Earth? What an odd name! We're in sort of a hurry to get home, as you might imagine." Ingomar hurried. With the help of the mysterious, healing ointment he was soon able to get up and make his way to the ship. "One more question," he said. "Your ship was defective and you set down here and you've been here for a long time, and you're a long way from home. What were you doing so far from home, in the first place?" "What do you suppose?" said Pisces I irritably. "We were looking for intelligent life. Get a move on, now. If we don't waste too much time on this Earth, we may still find some!" If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers -- challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address City Zone State... 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If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" In your science-fietion stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed With new, fast taies of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak B och, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfej Dickson -- they're all in IF! ' if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. " IF! I enclose #. (Outside of N. and S. America add # postage.) Name Address City Use coupon or order by letter if you wish IF eaLAxy magazine the men in the walls by Cordwainer Smith by Chandler Elliott by Murray Leinster Editor Science Editor Publisher Production Manager Art Director Advertising by Robert F. Young by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Floyd C. Gale bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #C per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights. Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Oft. young children is "Slapjack". It is played with a # #card deck, but it doesn't have much in common with contract bridge or poker. You take a deck of cards, divide it more or less in half and turn the cards up one at a time. Every time a jack turns up, the players try to slap it. First player to get his palm over it wins that round. Tic-Tac-Toe represents a second stage in complexity. As a game for young children it has several merits, both as a way of passing a rainy day and as a sort of rough-hewn test of intelligence or of maturity, since the age at which the player learns that the outcome of the game can be controlled completely -- that chance has no part in it, and that all of its strategies can be learned and simply expressed -- is also about the age at which he learns that he need not always consider the ordinances of Mommy and Daddy to be Divine Law. Slightly later, and considerably more challenging, checkers gets added to the list. In the Games Theory view of checkers it can be considered as a zero-sum game with finite choices. That is, when one player wins, the other loses; and the number of possible respKnses to any move is rather easily calculated. Chess is still more complex, for, although the outcome is unquestionably controllable, in practice the human mind is not capable of memorizing all of the possible moves and their consequences, so that the expert player falls back on what is called "position evaluation." The strategy of a Botvinnik or a Capablanca is not aimed directly toward winning. It is aimed toward securing a board position and a favorable balance of forces such that winning then becomes inevitable. That may sound at first blush like a distinction without a difference; but in fact it is the difference between, say, the single combat of medieval knights and modern war. It doesn't much matter whether you play chess poorly or well; if you try to play it at all, you are a long way from Slapjack. T he history of man's attempt to control his environment -- by which we can include everything from pulling a branch over himself in a rainstorm to the framing of the law of conservation of parity -- passes through an evolution rather like the development of an individual's mastery of games. Paleolithic man was in the Slapjack period: If any feature of his environment gave him trouble, he whanged at it until one of two things happened. Either he suddenly discovered he had a pretty good obsidian knife, or he gave up. Modern man, or so we like to think, has pretty well caught the hang of the "chess" approach to solving his problems. He is still playing a game. But it is a larger game, in a different context. When we say that the jM'Ogress of scientific knowledge is measured by the enlargement of contexts, we are saying that we advance by learning truths which are more general than the truths we knew before. We frame empirical "laws" -- the law of Conservation of Energy -- and somebody draws from them still other laws (as did Carnot and the rest of the great mechanist-minded scientists)... until some other person, trying to understand why these laws should be so, frames a still more general law (as did Einstein) and we find, by gosh, that our first law isn't really a law at all. Energy can so be created -- by transformation from matter; and it can be destroyed by transformation in the other direction. This does not mean that the previous laws are false, thus destroying the deductions made from them: Carnot's model of a heat engine still works perfectly. The laws are still true, in terms of the contexts then existing; but now they are only special cases within larger laws. You can, if you like, compare this enlargement of contexts with a mastery of increasingly sophisticated games. Slapjack to Tic-TacToe: from the planless fumbling of primitive man to the learnedby-rote "medicine", say, of Hippocrates. Tic-Tac-Toe to checkers: from the Hippocratic empirical remedies to the experimentation and theorizing of Galen. Checkers to chess: from Galen's dissection of corpses to antibiotics and the All this is analogy and perhaps a little strained, for nothing is more deadly than to force conclusions from an analogy. But perhaps it is not just an analogy; for science is itself a sort of game. board, and think of a very large, very complex computer across the board from us as our Opponent. The Opponent never cheats. He plays according to our rules. He plays the games we teach him. If we are playing the game called Chemistry, he will go pokerfaced along with the rules -- all the rules -- including the rule that elements cannot be transmuted one to the other. If you want one of the moves in the game to be the change of uranium into lead, you have to change the game, to one variety or another of the game called Physics. If you are playing the game called Euclidean geometry, the Opponent won't let you trisect an angle. If you want to do that you must switch to the game called algebra, where you can trisect all the angles you like with a simple cubic equation. And behold! that which was impossible, and which everybody knew to be impossible, and which was proved to be impossible... is no longer impossible at all. All you have to do is change the game. It is this point that is so hard to get across to the sort of closed mind that says, "We know that proved that no material object can be accelerated past the velocity of light in a vacuum." In fact, we do not know anything of the kind. We only know that the rules of the games we're playing today say so; but we do not know, and can only with difficulty imagine, the rules of the games we may play tomorrow. That, of course, is the thing, or one of the things, that science fiction is all about. A science-fiction story we must admit is only a game, sugarcoated with adventure, touched with humor, scented with romance. Games they are -- but who is to say that some day soon we won't be playing some of them for keeps? be generally tolA -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of mans mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toaay. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe H.W.K. send this coupon i Scribe H.W.K.  I San Jose. California i  Please send me the reebook, TAeAftfrery j I of Ufe, which explains how I may learn to  I use my faculties and powers of mind.  I I I Name i ) Address  I City I The world was divided between the Men and the Monsters -- but which were Monsters and which were Men? y Illustrated I people. The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful initiates who served them. Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But tomorrow, tomorrow... This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for Mankind. When he returned -- and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was clever, he would return -- off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior. He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked, for as long as he liked, to approach them even -- He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption. And such women -- such splendid creatures! Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters she had had, two of them of maximum size. Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew how. A man could really strut with such a mate. But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status. Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper, who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full womanhood and recognized professional status. barely stated smiles from her before; especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached. He knew that if he were successful -- and he had to be successful: don't dare think of an#Tthing but success! -- she would look with favor on advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore, according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead. Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed. Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still, Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back. "Look at Eric!" he heard someone call out behind him. "He's already searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet First comes the stealing. Then comes the mating." Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips. The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity. "I know that," he began. "There is no mating until -- " "Until never for some people," one of the young men broke in. He rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. "After you steal, you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men have to do an awful lot of convincing. An awful lot, Eric-O." The ball of laughter bounced back, and forth again, heavier than before. Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind... He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right hand back along his uncle's spear. "At least," he said, slowly and definitely, "at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner. She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe." "You lousy little throwback!" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear tense in one hand. "You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her, you dirty singleton?" "She's had two litters, but not off you," Eric the Only spat, holding his spear out in the guard position. "If you're the father, then the chief's blonde hair is contagious -- like measles." Roy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of each other's sjjears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down the burrow to get out of their way. clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand, he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to fight all Mankind. But not Thomas the TrapSmasher. No, not that mad. All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men. Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place. "What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?" Thomas was asking behind him. "Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit? That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to five. Save your spear for Strangers, or -- if you feel vety brave -- for Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know what's good for you, hear me?" "I wasn't fighting a duel," the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own spear. "The kid got above himself. I was punishing him." "You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself." They went off obediently without looking back. The TrapSmasher's band was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin stealing! Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears. "Isn't it possible -- I mean, it is possible, isn't it -- that my father had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best thieves we ever had." The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently: "Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more. Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him, Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind. He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy. Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other." L' the bundle of armament that was his responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition. "Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two, three, even four litters by different women. Extralarge litters too. If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any more. I would not be Eric the Only." The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded voice. "We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the somethingelse, well then, it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should be thinking about all the time now -- your Theft. Eric, which category are you going to announce?" He hadn't thought about it very much. "The usual one I guess. The one that's picked for most initiations. First category." The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. "First category. Food. Well..." Eric felt he understood. "You mean, for someone like me -- an Only, who's really got to make a name for himself -- I ought to announce like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second category -- Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have done?" "Do you know what your father would have done?" "No. What?" Eric demanded eagerly. "He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what I want you to announce." "Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?" "Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the beginning of a new life for all of us." Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his attainment of full thieving manhood? "There are things going on in Mankind, these days," Thomas the Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. "Big things. And you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours -- if you handle it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off everything the chief has been sitting on." "The chief?" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow now without a glow lamp. "Whats the chief got to do with my Theft?" IS uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. "Eric, what's the most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life all about? What are we here for?" "That's easy," Eric chuckled. "That's the easiest question there is. A child could answer it: "Hit back at the Monsters," he quoted. "Drive them from the planet, if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters." "Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?" Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made a mistake in such a basic ritual. "We will do that," he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding into the singsong of childhood lessons, "by regaining the science and knowhow of our forefathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we need to hit back at the Monsters." "Now, Eric," his tmcle asked gently. "Please tell me this. What in hell is knowhow?" That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal progression of the catechism now. "Knowhow is -- knowhow is -- " he stumbled over the unfamiliar verbal terrain. "Well, it's what our ancestors knew. And what they did with it, I guess. Knowhow is what you need before you can make hydrogen bombs or economic warfare or guided missiles, any of those really big weapons like our ancestors had." "Did those weapons do them any good? Against the Monsters, I mean. Did they stop the Monsters?" Eric looked completely blank for a moment, then brightened. Oh! He knew the way now. He knew how to get back to the catechism: "The suddenness of the attack, the -- " "Stop it!" his uncle ordered. "Don't give me any of that garbage! The suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters -- does it sound like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it But if he really has more than you, he won't stay down. Right?" "I -- I guess so. I wouldn't know." "Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the first place. And that means -- " here he turned his head and looked directly into Eric's eyes -- "that means the science of our ancestors wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be worth one good damn to us!" Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it. IS uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a fierce whisper. "Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters, you told me what we ought to do. We haven't been doing a single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct the ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or knowhow -- whatever that is -- but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even if we had them. Because they failed once. They i failed completely and at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together again." And now Eric understood. He understood why his imcle had whispered, why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was involved here, bloodshed and death. "Uncle Thomas," he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite his efforts to keep it whole and steady, "how long have you been an Alien-Science man? When did you leave AncestorScience?" Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move instantaneously in any direction. He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening. "How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band; naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society had -- he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law, I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest traps -- and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me." Eric the Only backed away. "No!" he called out wildly. "Not my father and mother! They were decent people -- when they were killed a service was held in their name -- they went to add to the science of our ancestors -- " IS uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth. "Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best they could. They died for it." Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower half of his face. Alienscience people... serving their faith... do you think it was an ordinary robbery... they died lor it! He had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman taking her baby! As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. "What kind of Theft was it that my parents died in?" Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. "The kind you're going after," he said. "If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to continue the work he started. Are you?" Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle -- well, his uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and crafty. His father -- naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving his manhoood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and a heretical, blasphemous task at that... "I'll try. I don't know if I can." "You can," his uncle told him heartily. "It's been set up for you. It will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what. You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category." "But why the third?" Eric asked. "Why does it have to be Monster souvenirs?" "Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair." "But, listen, uncle -- " There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher nodded in the direction of the signal. "The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you hit any trouble with the chief. I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after all." He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the burrow where the other members of the band waited. II fHE tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone. Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold. On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of arm -- for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The Man. Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children, standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's. Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops. "In the name of our ancestors," he said, "and the science with which they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?" "I did." Thomas the TrapSmasher moved out of his band and stood before the chief. Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question: "And your reason?" "As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only." As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors, he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering revelations from his uncle -- he was finding it hard to think clearly. And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few questions had to be exactly right. T he chief was asking the first: "Eric the Only, do you apply for full manhood?" Eric breathed hard and nodded. "I do." "As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?" "I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power and well-being of Mankind." "And all this you swear to do?" "And all this I swear to do." The Chief turned to Eric's imcle. "As his sponsor, do you support his oath and swear that he is to be trusted?" With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the Trap-Smasher replied: "Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to be trusted." There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to the women on the other side of the burrow. "He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood." The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared him. The women's part. As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when the women came forward. Thomas the TrapSmasher led his band to the warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues, they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends cannot support him once the women approach. It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before they passed him. Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn. "Eric the Only," she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a name impossible to believe, "Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in you to make a man?" preciation from the children in the distance, and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of selfcontrol. "I think so," he managed to say after a long pause. "And I'm "Prove it, then!" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long, sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were hurting, not you at all. You, your rnind, your knowledge of self, were in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things being done to someone else. The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out. It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't raise a hand to protect himself. Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. "There is no man here yet," she said grudgingly. "But perhaps there is the beginnings of one." He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one, much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony. Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it almost gaily. Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp, prodded his mind into alertness. "Did that hurt?" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-yearold face, but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles. "A little," he said. "Not much." "The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever could." "I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking. The stealing is the most important thing a man can do." R ita the Record-Keeper nodded. "Because you steal things Mankind needs in order to live. You steal things that the Female Society can make into food, clothing and weapons for Mankind, so that Mankind can live and flourish." He saw the way, saw what was expected of him. "No," he contradicted her. "That's not why we steal. We live on what we steal, but we do not steal just to go on living." "Why?" she asked blandly, as if she didn't know the answer better than any other member of the tribe. "Why do we steal? What is more important than survival?" Here it was now. The catechism. "To hit back at the Monsters," he began. "To drive them from the planet, if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But, above all, hit back at the Monsters..." He ploughed through the long verbal ritual, pausing at the end of each part, so that the RecordKeeper could ask the proper question and initiate the next sequence. She tried to trip him once. She reversed the order of the fifth and sixth questions. Instead of "What will we do with the Monsters when we have regained the Earth from them?" she asked, "Why can't we use the Monsters' own Alien-Science to fight the Monsters?" Carried along by mental habit, Eric was well into the passage beginning "We will keep them as our ancestors kept all strange animals, in a place called a zoo, or we will drive them into our burrows and force them to live as ive have lived," before he realized the switch and stopped in confusion. Then he got a grip on himself, sought the right answer in his memory with calmness, as his uncle's wives had schooled him to do, and began again. "There are three reasons why we cannot ever use Alien-Science," he recited, holding up his hand with the thumb and little finger closed. "Alien-Science is non-human, Alien-Science is inhuman, Alien-Science is anti-human. First, since it is non-human," he closed his forefinger, "we cannot use it because we can never understand it. And because it is inhuman, we would never want to use it even if we could understand it. And because it is antihuman and can only be used to hurt and damage Mankind, we would not be able to use it so long as we remain human ourselves. Alien-Science is the opposite of Ancestor-Science in every way, ugly instead of beautiful, hurtful instead of helpful. When we die, Alien-Science would not bring us to the world of our ancestors, but to another world full of Monsters." A LL in all, it went very well, despite the trap into which he had almost fallen. But he couldn't help remembering the conversation with his uncle in the other burrow. As his mouth reeled off the familiar words and concepts, his mind kept wondering how the two fitted together. Hs uncle was AlienScience, and, according to his uncle, so had been his parents. Did that make them non-human, inhuman, anti-human? And what did it make him? He knew his religious duty well: he should at this moment be telling all Mankind about his uncle's horrible secret. The whole subject was far too complicated for someone with his limited experience. When he had completed the lengthy catechism, Rita the Record-Keeper said: "And this is what you say about the science of our ancestors. Now we will find out what the science of our ancestors says about you." She signaled over her shoulder, without turning her head, and two young girls -- female apprentices -- pulled forward the large record machine which was the very center of the tribe's religious life. They stepped back, both smiling shyly and encouragingly at Eric the Only. He knew the smiles meant little more than simple best wishes from apprentices of one sex to apprentices of the other, but even that was quite a bit at the moment. It meant that he was much closer to full status than they. It meant that, in the opinion of imprejudiced, disinterested observers, his examination was proceeding very well indeed. Singleton, he thought fiercely to himself. I'll show them what a singleton can do! Rita the Record-Keeper turned a knob at the top of the squat machine and it began to hum. She flung her arms up, quiveringly apart, and all, warriors, women, children, apprentices, even the chief himself, all bowed their heads. "Harken to the words of our ancestors," she chanted. "Watch closely the spectacle of their great achievements. When their end was upon them, and they knew that only we, their descendants, might regain the Earth they had lost, they made this machine for the future generations of Mankind as a guide to the science that once had been and must be again." The old woman lowered her arms. Simultaneously, heads went up all over the burrow and stared expectantly at the wall opposite the record machine, waiting for the magic message. "Eric the Only," Rita called, spinning the dial on the left of the machine with one hand and stabbing at it randomly with the forefinger of the other. "This is the sequence in the science of our ancestors that speaks for you alone. This is the appointed vision under which you will live and die." ing hard. Now he would find out what his life was to be about -- now! His uncle's vision at this moment, years ago, had suggested the nickname he came to bear: the Trap)-Smasher. At the last initiation ceremony, a youth had called forth a sequence in which two enormous airborne vehicles of the ancestors had collided. They'd tried to cheer the boy up, but he'd known his fate was upon him. Sure enough, he had been caught by a monster in the middle of his Theft and dashed to pieces against a wall. Even then, Eric decided, he'd rather have that kind of a sequence than the awful emptiness of a blank vision. When, every once in a while, the machine went on and showed nothing but a blinding white rectangle, the whole tribe knew that the youth being examined had no possibility of manhood in him at all. And the machine was never wrong. A boy who'd drawn a blank vision inevitably became more and more effeminate as he grew older without ever going out on his Theft. He tended to shun the company of warriors and to ask the women for minor tasks to perform. The machine of the ancestors looked at a boy and told exactly what he was and what he would become. It had been great, that science which had produced this machine, no doubt about it. There was a power source in it which was selfcontained, and which was supposed to be like the power behind all things. It would run almost forever, if the machine were not tampered with -- although who could dream of tampering with it? In its visions were locked, not only the secrets of every individual human being, but enormous mysteries which the whole of Mankind had to solve before it could work out its salvation through the rituals and powers of the ancestral science. Now, however, there was only one small part of Mankind that concerned Eric. Himself. His future. He waited, growing more and more tense as the power hum from the machine increased in pitch. And suddenly there was a grunt of awe from the entire burrow of people as a vision was thrown upon the wall. He hadn't drawn a blank. That was the most important thing. He had been given an authentic ancestral vision. "Scattergood's does it again!" a voice blared, as the picture projected on the wall showed people coming from all directions, wearing the strange body wrappings of the ancestors. They rushed. men, women, children, from the four comers of the glittering screen to some strange stmcture in the center and disappeared into its entrance. More and more poured in, more and more kept materializing at the edges and scrambling toward the structure in the center. "Scattergood's does it again!" the vision yelled out at them. "The sale of sales! The value of values! Only at Scattergood's three stores tomorrow. Binoculars, tape recorders, cameras, all at tremendous reductions, many below cost. Value, value, value!" Now the vision showed only objects. Strange, unfamiliar objects such as the ancestors used. And at each object appeared, the voice recited a charm over it. Powerful and ancient magic this, the forgotten lore of AncestorScience, "Krafft-Yahrmann Exposure Meters, the best there is, you've heard about them and now you can buy them, the light meter that's an eye-opener, a price to fit every pocketbook, eight dollars and ninety-five cents, tomorrow at Scattergood's, absolutely only one to a customer. meter Movie Cameras with an f # lens and an electric eye that does all the focusing and gives you a perfect exposure every single time. As low as three dolI lars a week. The supply is limited, so hurry, hurry, hurry!" fold, his hands squeezing each other, his eyes almost distended in reverence and concentration. This was the clue to his life, to what he might become. This was the sequence that the record machine of the ancestors, turned on at random, had vouchsafed as a prophecy of his future. All knowledge was in that machine -- and no possibility of error. But Eric was getting worried. The vision was so strange. Sometimes there would be a vision that baffled even the wisest women. And that meant the youth who had called it forth would always be a puzzle, to himself and all of Mankind. Let it not happen to him! O ancestors, O science, O record machine, let it not happen to him! Let him only have a clear and definite vision so that his personality could be clear and definite for the rest of his life! "Our special imported highpower precision binoculars," the voice roared on as a man appeared in the vision and brought one of the strange objects up to his eyes. "If we told you the manufacturer's name, you'd recognize it immediately. # x #, only fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents, with case. # x #, only fifteen dollars and ninety-five cents, with case. You see further, you see clearer, you pay less. You always pay less at Scattergood's. Rockbottom prices! Skyscraper values! Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, at Scattergood's annual weekafter-Hallowe'en Sale!" There was a click as the vision went off abruptly to be replaced by a white rectangle on the wall of the burrow. Eric realized that this was all the clue there was to be to his life. What did it mean? Could it be interpreted? Anxiously, now, he turned to Ottilie, the Chieftain's First Wife. He turned to her as everyone else in Mankind was now turning, Sarah the Sickness-Healer and Rita the Record-Keeper amongst them. Only Ottilie could read a vision, only short, squat, imperious Ottilie. The Chieftain's First Wife was her title of honor and her latest title, but long before she had acquired that, long before even she had become Head of the Female Society, she had been Ottilie the Augur, Ottilie the OmenTeller, Ottilie who could walk in her mind from the homey burrow of the present into the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the future, Ottilie who could read signs, Ottilie who could announce portents. that she could pick out the one new-born babe in a litter of three that had to be destroyed because, in some way or other, it would one day bring death to its people. It was as Ottilie the Augur that, upon the death of the old chief, she had chosen Franklin the Father of Many Thieves to take over the leadership of Mankind since he stimulated the most propitious omens. In everything she had been right. And now, once again it was as Ottilie the Augur that she threw her arms over her head and twisted and swayed and moaned as she sought deep inside herself for the meaning of Eric's vision, it was as Ottilie the Augur and not as Ottilie the Chieftain's First Wife, for that she had been only since Franklin had ascended the Throne Mound. The scratches and holes gouged in his body by Sarah the Sickness-Healer had begun to ache badly, but Eric shrugged off their annoyance. Could his vision be interpreted? And how would it be interpreted? Whatever Ottilie saw in the vision would stick to him for the rest of his life, much closer than the dried blood upon his arms and legs and chest. How could you possibly interpret such a vision? Eric the Scattergood? That was meaningless. Eric the Value? No, that was a little better, but it was dreadfully vague, almost as bad as a blank vision. He stared past Ottilia's writhing figure to where his uncle stood, surrounded by his band, a little to the left of the Throne Mound. Thomas the Trap-Smasher was watching Ottilie and grinning with all his teeth. What did he find so funny, Eric wondered desperately? Was there nothing holy to him? Didn't he realize how important it was to Eric's future that his vision be readable, that he get a name to be proud of? What was fimny in Ottilia's agony as she gave birth to Eric's future? He realized that Ottilie was beginning to make coherent sounds. He strained his ears to listen. This, this was it. Who he really was. Who he would be, for all his life. "Three times," Ottilie mumbled in a voice that steadily grew clearer and louder, "three times our ancestors gave Eric his name. Three repetitions they made. Three different ways they called on him to become what their science needed him to be. And all of you heard it, and I heard it, and Eric heard it too." Which, Eric puzzled, which among the many strange magical statements had contained his name and his life's-work? He waited for the Augur to come out with it. He had almost given up breathing. Her body relaxed now, her hands hanging at her sides, Ottilie was speaking to them in a sharp, authoritative voice as she stared at the wall of the burrow where the vision had appeared. " 'A light meter that's an eyeopener,' the ancestor-science said," she reminded them. "And 'an electric eye that does all the focusing.' And 'you see further, you see clearer, you pay less,' the Record-Machine told us of Eric. What the ancestors want of Eric is unmistakable, what he must be if we are to hit back at the Monsters and regain the Earth which is rightfully ours." thank each and every ancestor! At least the message had been unmistakable. But what precisely had it been? Ottilie the Augur, the OmenTeller, turned to face him now where he stood apart from the rest of eagerly-watching Mankind. He straightened up and stood stiffly to learn his fate. "Eric," she said. "Eric the Only, Eric the Singleton, you go out now to make your Theft. If you are successful and return alive, you will become a man. And as a man you will no longer be Eric the Only, you will be Eric the Eye. Eric the Eye, Eric the Espier, Eric who seeks out the path for Mankind. Eric who hits back at the Monsters with his eye, his open eye, his electric eye, his further-seeing, clearer-seeing, lesspaying eye. For this is the word of the ancestors, and all of you have heard it." At last Eric could take a deep breath, and he did so now, noisily, in common with the whole of Mankind who had been hanging on Ottilie's words. Eric the Eye -- that was what he was to be. If he was successful... and if he lived. Eric the Eye. Eric the Espier. Now he knew about himself. It was fixed, and for all time. It was a good name to bear, a fine personality to have. He had been very fortunate. Rita the Record-Keeper and her daughter Harriet the HistoryTeller, rolled the record machine back into its accustomed holy place, the niche in the wall behind the Throne Mound. Despite the sacred quality of the act in which she was engaged, the younger woman could not take her eyes off Eric. He was a person of consequence now, or at least would be when he returned. Other young and mating-aged women, he noticed, were looking at him the same way. He began to walk around in a little circle before Mankind, and, as he walked, he strutted. He waited until Ottilie, no longer the Augur now, no longer the OmenTeller, but once more the Chieftain's First Wife -- he waited until she had returned to her place at the head of the Female Society, before he began to sing. He threw back his head and spread out his arms and danced proudly, stampingly, before Mankind. He spun around in great dizzying circles and leaped in the air and came down with wrenching spasmodic twists of his legs and arms. And as he danced, he sang. He sang out of the pride that racked his chest like a soul coughing, out of the majesty of the warrior-that-was-to-be, out of his sure knowledge of self. And he sang his promise to his fellows: I am Eric the Eye, Eric the Open Eye, Eric the Electric Eye, Eric the Further Seeing, Clearer-Seeing, Less-Paying Eye. Eric the Espier -- Eric who finds and points out the way. Are you lost in a strange place? I will show you the path to your home. Does the burrow break off in too many branches? I will pick out the best one and Mankind shall walk through in safety. Are there enemies about, hidden traps, unthought-of dangers? I will see them and give warning of them in time. I will walk at the head of the line of warriors and see for them, And they shall be confident and they shall conquer -- For they have Eric the Espier to lead the way and point the path! QO he sang as he danced before  Mankind, under the enormous glow lamps of its great central burrow. He sang of his mission in life as just a few short auld lang synes ago he had heard Roy the Runner, at his initiation, sing of the fleetness and swiftness that he would soon be the master of; as his Uncle Thomas had sung long before that of his coming ability to detect and dismantle traps; as once his own father had sung of the robberies he was to commit, of the storerooms he would empty for the benefit of Mankind. He sang and he leaped and he whirled, and all the while the watching host of Mankind beat time with its feet and hands and played chorus in the litany of his triumph. Then came a loud grunt from Franklin the Father of Many Thieves. The noise stopped. Eric danced to a quivering halt, his body wet all over, his limbs still trembling. "That is what is to be," Franklin pointed out, "once the Theft has been made. But first, first comes the Theft. Always before manhood comes the Theft. Now let us speak of your Theft." "I will go into the very home of the Monsters," Eric announced proudly, his head thrown back before the chief. "I will go into their home alone, with no companion but my own weapons, as a warrior should. I will steal from them, no matter what the danger, no matter what the threat. And what I steal, I will bring back for the use and enjoyment of Mankind." Franklin nodded and made the formal reply. "That is good, and it is spoken like a warrior. What do you promise to steal from the Monsters? For your first Theft must be a promise made in advance and kept, kept exactly." Now they were at it. Eric glanced at his uncle for support. Thomas the Trap-Smasher was staring off in a different direction. Eric licked his lips. Well, maybe it wouldn't be too bad. After all, a youth going off on his first Theft had complete freedom of choice. "I promise to make my theft in the third category," he said, his voice trembling just a little. The results were much more than he had anticipated. Franklin the Father of Many Thieves yelped sharply. He leaped off the Royal Mound and stood gaping at Eric for a while. His great belly and fat arms quivered with disbelief. "The third category, did you say? The third?" Eric, thoroughly frightened now, nodded. Franklin turned to Chief Wife Ottilie. They both peered through the ranks of Mankind to where Thomas the Trap-Smasher stood in the midst of his band, seemingly unconcerned by the sensation that had just been created. "What is this, Thomas?" the chief demanded, all ceremony and formality gone from his speech. "What are you trying to pull? What's this third category stuff you're up to?" Thomas the Trap Smasher turned a bland eye upon him. "What am I up to? I'm not up to a damn thing. The boy's got a right to pick his category. If he wants to steal in the third category, well, that's his business. What have I got to do with it?" The chief stared at him for a few moments longer. Then he swung back to Eric and said shortly: "All right. You've chosen. The third category it is. Now let's get on with the feast."  for Eric. The initiation feast that preceded a first Theft -- how he had looked forward to it! But he was apparently involved in something going on in Mankind, something dangerous and unsavory. The chief obviously considered him an important factor in whatever difficulty had arisen. Usually, an initiate about to depart on a Theft was the focus of all conversation as Mankind ate in its central burrow, the women squatting on one side, the men on the other, the children at the far ends where light was dim. But at this meal, the chief made only the most necessary ritual remarks to Eric. His eyes kept wandering from him to Thomas the TrapSmasher. Once in a while, Franklin's eyes met those of Ottilie, his favored and first wife, across the feast that had been spread the length of the burrow. He seemed to be saying something to her, although neither of them moved their lips. Then they would nod at each other and look back to Eric's uncle. The rest of Mankind became aware of the strained atmosphere: there was little of the usual laughter and gaiety of an initiation feast. The TrapSmasher's band had pulled in tightly all around him; most of them were not even bothering to eat but sat watchful and alert. Other band captains -- men like Stephen the Strong-Armed and Harold the Hurler -- had worried looks on their faces as if they were calculating highly complex problems. Even the children were remarkably quiet. They served the food over which the women had said charms much earlier, then scurried to their places and ate with wide eyes aimed at their elders. All in all, Eric was distinctly relieved when Franklin the Father of Many Thieves belched commandingly, stretched, and lay back on the floor of the burrow. In a few minutes, he was asleep, snoring loudly. Night had officially begun. IV A T the end of the sleep period, as soon as the chief had awakened and yawned, thus proclaiming the dawn, Thomas the Trap-Smasher's band started on its trip. Eric, still officially surnamed the Only, carried the precious loin straps of manhood in the food knapsack the women had provided for a possible journey of several days. They should return before the next sleep period, but when one went on an expedition into Monster territory anything might happen. They stepped out in full military formation, a long, straggling single file, each man barely in f sight of the warrior immediately ahead. For the first time in his military career, Eric was wearing only one set of spears -- those for himself. Extra weapons for the band -- as well as extra supplies -- were on the back of a new apprentice, a stripling who marched a distance behind Eric, watching him with the same mixture of fright and exhilaration Eric himself had once accorded all other warriors. Ahead of Eric, momentarily disappearing as the dim corridor curved and branched, was Roy the Runner, his long, loose-jointed legs purposefully treading down the mileage. And all the way in the lead of the column, Eric knew, was his uncle. Thomas the Trap-Smasher would be striding cautiously yet without any unnecessary waste of time, the large glow lamp on his forehead constantly shifting from wall to wall of the uninhabited burrow and then straight ahead, the heavy spear in each brawny hand ready for instant action, his mouth set to call the warning behind him if danger materialized. To be a man -- this was what it was like! To go on expeditions like this for the rest of one's life, glorious, adventure-charged expeditions so that Mankind might eat well and have weapons and live as Mankind should. And when you returned, triumphant. victorious, the welcoming dance of the women as they threaded their way through the tired ranks, giving you refreshment and taking from you the supplies that only they could turn into usable articles. Then, after you had eaten and drunk and rested, your own dance, the dance of the men, where you sang and acted out for the tribe all the events of this particular expedition, the dangers you had overcome, the splendid courage you had shown, the strange and mysterious sights you had seen. The sights you had seen! As Eric the Eye, he would probably be entitled to a solo dance any time his band came across anything particularly curious. Oh, how high Eric the Eye would leap, how loudly, how proudly, how melodiously, he would sing of the wonders the expedition had encountered! "Eric the Eye," the women would murmur. "What a fine, fine figure of a man! What a mate for some lucky woman!" this morning, for example, before they started out. She had filled his canteen for him with fresh water as if he were already an accredited man instead of an initiate going out to face his ultimate trial. Before the eyes of all Mankind she had filled it and brought it to him, her eyes downcast and light purple blushes on the rosy skin of her face and body. She had treated him the way a wife treats a husband, and many warriors -- Eric thought gleefully -- many full warriors with their Thefts long behind them had observed that Eric was likely to join the ranks of the Male Society and the married men almost simultaneously. Of course, with her unlucky red hair, her bustling, domineering mother, Harriet was not exactly the most marriageable girl in Mankind. Still, there were many full warriors who had not yet been able to persuade a woman to mate with them, who watched Franklin and his three wives with unconcealed hunger and envy. How they would envy Eric, the newest warror of all, when he mated the same night he returned from his theft! Call him Only, then! Call him singleton, then! They would have litter after litter, he and Harriet, large litters, ample litters, four, five, even six at a time. People would forget he'd ever been the product of a singleton birth. Other women, mates of other warriors, would wriggle to attract his attention as they now wriggled when they caught the eye of Franklin the Father of Many Thieves. He would make the litters fathered by Franklin look puny in comparison, he would prove that the best hope for Mankind's increase lay in his loins and his loins alone. And when the time came to select another chief... "Hey, you damned day-dreaming singleton!" Roy the Runner was calling from the burrow ahead. "Will you wipe that haze out of your face and pay attention to signals? This is an expedition to Monster territory, not a stroll in the women's quarters. Stay alert, will you? The band captain's sent down a call for you." Amid the chuckles ahead and behind him -- damn it, even the new apprentice was laughing! -- Eric took a firmer grip on his glow torch and sprinted for the head of the column. As he passed each man, he was asked the name of the girl he'd been thinking about and pressed for interesting details. Since he kept his mouth tightly shut, some of the warriors hypothesized out loud. They were painfully close to the truth. His uncle wasn't much gentler with him. "Eric the Eye!" the Trap-Smasher growled. "Eric the Eyebrow, Eric the Closed Eyelash, you'll be known as, if you don't wake up! Now stay abreast of me and try to act like Eric the Eye. These are dangerous burrows and my vision isn't as sharp as yours. Besides, I have to fill you in on a couple of things." He turned. "Spread out a little farther back there," he called out to the men behind him. "Spread out! You should be a full spearcast from the backside of the man in front of you. Let me see a real strung-out column with plenty of distance between each warrior." Eric, he muttered, once the maneuver had been completed: "Good. Gives us a chance to talk without everyone in the band hearing us. You can trust my bunch, but still, why take chances?" Eric nodded, with no idea what he was talking about. His uncle had become slightly odd recently. Well, he was still the best band captain in all Mankind. They marched along together, the light from the strange glowing substance on Eric's torch and his uncle's forehead spreading a yellowish illumination some hundred feet ahead of them. On either side, underfoot, overhead, were the curved, featureless walls of the burrow. From the center of the corridor, where they inarched, the walls looked soft and spongy, but Eric knew what tremendous labor was involved in digging a niche or recess in them. It took several strong men at least two sleep periods to make a niche large enough to hold a handful of Mankind's store of artifacts. Where had the burrows come from? Some said they had been dug by the ancestors when they had first begun to hit back at the Monsters. Others claimed the burrows had always been there, waiting for Mankind to find them and be comfortable in them. In all directions the burrows stretched. On and on they went, interminably curving and branching and forking, dark and silent, until human beings stamped into them with glow lamp and glow torch. These particular corridors, Eric knew, led to Monster territory. He had been along them many times as a humble spear carrier when his uncle's band had been dispatched to bring back the necessities of life for Mankind. Other corridors went off to more exotic and even more dangerous places. But were there any places which had no burrows? What a thought! Even the Monsters lived in burrows, big as they were reputed to be. But there was a legend that Mankind had once lived outside burrows, outside the branching corridors. Then what had they lived in? Just trying to work it out made you dizzy. They came to a place where the burrow became two burrows, each curving away from the other in opposite directions. f "Which one?" his uncle demanded. Eric unhesitatingly pointed the right. Thomas the Trap-Smasher nodded. "You have a good memory," he said as he bore in the direction that Eric had indicated. "That's half of being an Eye. The other half is having a feeling, a knack, for the right way to go. You have that too. I've noticed it on every expedition where you've been along. That's what I told those women -- Rita, Ottilie -- I told them what your name had to be. Eric the Eye, I told them. Find a vision for the kind that corresponds to it." H e was so shocked that he almost came to a halt. "You picked my name? You told them what kind of vision... That's -- that's -- I never heard of such a thing!" His uncle laughed. "It's no different from Ottilie the OmenTeller making a deal with Franklin to have a vision showing him as the new chief. He gets to be chief, she becomes the Chieftain's First Wife and automatically takes over the Female Society. Religion and politics, they're always mixed up together these days, Eric. We're not living in the old times any more when Ancestor-science was real and holy and it worked." "It still works. Ancestor-science, doesn't it?" he pleaded. "Some of the tme?" "Everything works some of the time. Only Alien-science, though, works all of the time. It's working for Aliens, for the Monsters. It's got to begin working for us. That's where you come in." He had to remember that his uncle was an experienced captain, a knowledgeable warrior. Thomas the Trap-Smasher's protection and advice had brought him, a despised singleton, an orphaned child of parents that no one dared even talk about, to his present estate of almost full thieving status. It was very fortunate for him that neither of his uncle's wives had yet produced a son which survived into the initiate years. He still had a lot to learn from this man. "Now," the Trap-Smasher was saying, his eyes still on the dimly illuminated corridors ahead. "When we get to the Monster burrows, you go in. You go in alone, of course." Well, of course, Eric thought. What other way was there to make your Theft? The first time you stole for Mankind, you did it all alone, to prove your manhood, your courage, also the amount of personal luck you enjoyed. It was not like a regular band theft -- or organized stealing of a large amount of goods that would last Mankind many sleep-periods, almost a tenth of an auld lang syne. In a regular band theft, assigned to each band in rotation, a warrior had to be assured of the luck and skill of the warriors at his side. He had to know that each one of them had made his Theft -- and proved himself when completely alone. Stealing from the Monsters was dangerous enough under the best of conditions. You wanted only the cleverest, bravest, most fortunate warriors along with you. "Once you're inside, stay close to the wall. Don't look up at first or you're likely to freeze right where you are. Keep your eyes on the wall and move close to it. Move fast." Nothing new here. Every initiate learned over and over again, before he made his Theft, that it was terribly dangerous to look up when you first entered Monster territory. You had to keep your eyes on the wall and move in the protection of it, the wall touching your shoulder as you ran alongside it. Why this was so, Eric had no idea, but that it was so he had long ago learned to repeat as a fact. "All right," Thomas the TrapSmasher went on. "You turn right as you go in. Right, do you hear me, Eric? You turn right, without looking up, and run along the wall, letting it brush your shoulder every couple of steps. You run forty, fifty paces, and ' you come to a great big thing, a structure, that's almost touching the wall. You turn left along that, moving away from the wall, ' but still not looking up, until you pass an entrance in the structure. You don't go in that first entrance, Eric; you pass it by. About twenty, twenty-five paces further on, there'll be a second entrance, a bigger one. You go in that one." "I go in that one," Eric repeated carefully, memorizing his uncle's words. He was receiving directions for his Theft, the most important act of his life! Every single thing his uncle told him must be listened to carefully, must not be forgotten. "You'll be in something that looks like a burrow again, but it'll be darker, at first. The walls will soak up light from your glow lamp. After a while, the burrow will open out into a great big space, a real big and real dark space. Y ou go on in a straight ' line, looking over your shoulder at the light from the entrance and making sure it's always directly behind you. You'll hit another burrow, a low one this time. Turn right at the first fork as soon as you go in, and there you are." "Where? Where will I be? What happens then?" Eric demanded eagerly. "How do I make my Theft? Where do I find the third category?" Thomas the Trap-Smasher seemed to have trouble continuing. Incredible -- he was actually nervous! "There'll be a Stranger there. You tell him who you are, your name. He'll do the rest." T his time Eric came to a full stop. "A Stranger?" he asked in complete amazement. "Someone who's not of Mankind?" His uncle grabbed at his arm and pulled him along. "Well, you've seen Strangers before," he said with a weak laugh. "You know there are others in the burrows besides Mankind. You know that, don't you, boy?" Eric certainly did. From an early age he had accompanied his uncle and his uncle's band on warfare and trading expeditions to the burrows a bit further back. He knew that the people in these burrows looked down on the people in his, that they were more plentiful than his people, and led richer, safer lives -- but he still couldn't help feeling sorry for them. They were nothing but Strangers, after all. He was a member of Mankind. It wasn't just that Mankind lived in the front burrows, those closest to the Monster larder. This enormous convenience might be counterbalanced, he would readily admit, by the dangers associated with it -- although the constant exposure to dangers and death in every form were part of Mankind's greatness. They were great despite their inferior technology. So what if they were primarily a source of raw materials to the more populous but less hardy burrows in the rear? How long would the weaponsmiths, the potters and tanners and artificers of these burrows be able to go on with their buzzing, noisy industries once Mankind ceased to bring them the basic substances -- food, cloth, metal -- it had so gloriously stolen from fear-filled Monster territory? No, Mankind was the bravest, greatest, most important people in all the burrows. But that still wasn't the point, of it all. The point was that you had nothing more to do with Strangers than was absolutely necessary. They were Strangers. You were Mankind. You stayed proudly aloof from them at all times. Trading with them -- well, you traded with them. Mankind needed spear-points and sturdy spear-shifts, knapsacks and loinstraps, canteens and cooking vessels. You needed these articles r and got them in exchange for heavy backloads of shapeless, unprocessed stuff freshly stolen. Mating with them -- well, of course you mated with them. One was always on the lookout for extra women who could add to the knowledge and technical abilities of Mankind. But these women became a well-adjusted part of Mankind once they were stolen, just as Mankind's women were complete outsiders and Strangers the moment they had been carried off by a foreign raiding party. And fighting with them, warring with them -- next to stealing from the Monsters, that was the sweetest, most exciting part of a warrior's existence. You traded with Strangers, coldly, suspiciously, always alert for a better bargain; you stole Stranger women whenever you could, gleefully, proudly, because that diminished them and increased the numbers and wellbeing of Mankind; and you fought Stranger men whenever there was more to be gained that way than by simple trading -- and periodically they came upon you as you lay in your burrow unawares and fought you. But otherwise, for all normal social purposes, they were taboo. Almost as taboo and not-to-berelated-to as the Monsters on the other side of Mankind's burrows. When you came upon an individual Stranger wandering apart from his people, you killed him quickly and casually. You certainly didn't ask him for advice on your Theft. unprecedented nature of his uncle's instructions when they came to the end of their journey, a large, blind-alley burrow. There was a line cut deep into the blank wall here, a line that started at the floor, went up almost to the height of a man's head, and then curved down to the floor again. The door to Monster territory. Thomas the Trap-Smasher waited for a moment, listening. When his experienced ears had detected no unusual noises in the neighborhood, no hint of danger on the other side, he cupped his hands around his mouth, faced back the way he had come, and softly gave the ululating recognition-call of the band. The four other warriors and the apprentice came up swiftly and grouped themselves about him. Then, at a signal from their leader, all  squatted near the door... They ate first, rapidly and si lently, removing from their knapi sacks handfuls of food that the i women had prepared for them and stuffing their mouths full, the j beams from the glow lamps above their eyes darting incesi santly back and forth along the arched, empty corridor. This was the place of ultimate, awful danger. This was the place where anything might happen. Eric ate most sparingly of all as was correct for an initiate about to emerge upon his Theft. He knew he had to keep his springiness of body and watchfulness of mind at their highest possible pitch. He saw his uncle nodding approvingly as he returned the bulk of his food to the knapsack. The floor vibrated slightly underfoot; there was a regular, rhythmic gurgling. Eric knew that meant they were directly over a length of Monster plumbing: upon his return, before the band started homewards, Thomas the Trap-Smasher would make an opening in the plumbing and they would refill their canteens. The water here, nearest to Monster territory, was always the sweetest and best. Now his uncle got to his feet and called Roy the Runner to him. While the other warriors watched, tense and still, the two men walked to the curved line and laid their ears against it. Satisfied, finally, they inserted spear points into the door's outline on either side and carefully pried the slab back toward them. They laid it on the floor of the corridor, very gently. A shimmering blur of pure whiteness appeared where the door had been. Monster territory. The strange, alien light of Monster territory. Eric had seen many warriors disappear into it to fulfill their manhood tasks. Now it was his turn. Holding his heavy spear at the ready, Eric's uncle leaned forward into the whiteness. His body twisted as he looked up, down, around, on both sides. He withdrew and came back into the  burrow. j "No new traps," he said in a  soft voice. "The one I dismantled last expedition is still up there i on the wall. It hasn't been rei paired. Now Eric. Here you go, boy." Eric rose and walked with him ; to the doorway, remembering to keep his eyes on the floor. You can't look up, he had been told again and again, not right away, i not the first time you're in Monster territory. If you do, you  freeze, you're lost, you're done for completely. His uncle checked him carefully and fondly, making certain that his new loin straps were tight, that his knapsack and backsling were both in the right position on his shoulders. He took a heavy spear from Eric's right hand and replaced it with a light : one from the back-sling. "If you're j seen by a Monster," he whispered, "the heavy spear's not worth a damn. You scuttle into closest hiding-place and throw the light spear as far as you can. The Monster can't distinguish between you and the spear. It will follow the spear." Eric nodded mechanically, although this too he had been told many times, this too was a lesson he knew by heart. His mouth was so dry! He wished that it weren't unmanly to beg for water at such a moment. Thomas the Trap-Smasher took his torch from him and slipped a glow lamp about his forehead. Then he pushed him through the doorway. "Go make your Theft, Eric," he whispered. "Come back a man." V H e was on the other side. He was in Monster territory. He was surrounded by the strange Monster light, the incredible Monster world. The burrows. Mankind, everything familiar, lay behind him. Panic rose from his stomach and into his throat like vomit. Don't look up. Eyes down, eyes down or yotfre likely to freeze riht where you are. Stay close to the wall, keep your eyes on the wall and move along it. Turn right and move along the wall. Move fast. Eric turned. He felt the wall brush his right shoulder. He began to rim, keeping his eyes down, touching the wall with his shoulder at regular intervals. He ran as fast as he possibly could, urging his muscles fiercely on. As he ran, he counted the steps to himself. ' Twenty paces. Where did the light come from? It was everywhere; it glowed so; it was white, white. Twenty-five paces. Touch the wall with your shoulder. Don't -- above everything -- don't wander away from the wall. Thirty paces. In light like this you had no need of the glow lamp. It was almost too bright to see in. Thirtyfive paces. The floor was not like a burrow floor. It was flat and very hard. So was the wall. Flat and hard and straight. Forty paces. Run and keep your eyes down. Run. Keep touching the wall with your shoulder. Move fast. But keep your eyes down. Don't look up. Fortyfive paces. He almost smashed into the structure he had been told about, but his reflexes and the warnings he had received swung him to the left and along it just in time. It was a different color than the wall, he noted, and a differenttextured material. Keep your eyes down. Don't look up. He came to an entrance, like the beginning of a small burrow. Don't go in that first entrance. Eric; you pass it by. He began to count again as he ran. Twentythree paces more, and there was another entrance, a much higher, wider one. He darted inside. It'll be darker, at first. The walls will soak up light from your glow lamp. Eric paused, gasping. He was grateful for the sucking darkness. After that terrible, alien white light, the gloom was friendly, reminiscent of the familiar burrows now so horribly far away. He could afford to take a breath at this point, he knew. The first, the worst part was over. He wasn't out in the open any more. He had emerged into Monster territory. He had run fast, following instructions until he was safely under cover again. He was still alive. The worst was over. Nothing else would be as bad as this. Monster territory. It lay behind him, bathed in its own peculiar light. Now. Why not? Now, when he was in a place of comparative safety. He could take a chance. He wanted to take a chance. He turned, gingerly, fearfully. He raised his eyes. He looked. HE cry that tore from his lips was completely involuntary and frightened him almost as much as what he saw. He shut his eyes and threw himself down and sideways. He lay where he had fallen for a long while, almost paralyzed. It couldn't be. He hadn't seen it. Nothing was that high, nothing ran on and on for such incredible distances! After a time, he opened his eyes again, keeping them carefully focused on the dark near him. The gloom in this covered place had diminished somewhat as his eyes had grown more accustomed to it. Yellowish light from his glow lamp was providing illumination now: he could make out the walls, about as far apart from each other as those in a burrow, but -- unlike a burrow's walls -- oddly straight and at right angles to the floor and ceiling. Far off there was an immense patch of darkness. The burrow will open out into a great big space, a real big and real dark space. What was this place, he wondered? What was it to the Monsters? He had to take another look behind, into the open. One more quick look. He was going to be Eric the Eye. An Eye should be able tb look at anything. He had to take another look. But guardedly, guardedly. Eric turned again, opening his eyes a little at a time. He clamped his teeth together so as not to cry out. Even so, he almost did. He L shut his eyes quickly, waited, then opened them again. Bit by bit, effort by effort, he found he was able to look into the great open whiteness without losing control of himself. It was upsetting, overpowering, but if he didn't look too long at any one time, he could stand it. Distance. Enormous, elongated, unbelievable distance. Space upon space upon space -- that white light bathing it all. Space far ahead, space on all sides, space going on and on until it seemed to have no end to it at all. But there, fantastically far off, there was an end. There was a wall, a wall made by giants that finally sealed off the tremendous space. It rose hugely from the flat, huge floor and disappeared somewhere far overhead. And in between -- once you could stand to look at it this much -- in between, there were objects. Enormous objects, dwarfed only by the greatness of the space which surrounded them, enormous, terribly alien objects. Objects like nothing you had ever imagined. ##, that wasn't quite true. That ' thing over there. Eric recognized it. A great, squat thing like a full knapsack without the straps. Since early boyhood, many was the time he had heard it described by warriors back from an expedition into Monster territory. There was food in that sack and the others like it. Enough food in that one sack to feed the entire population of Mankind for unnumbered auld lang synes. A different kind of food in each sack. No sp)ear point possessed by Mankind would cut through the fabric of its container, not near the bottom where it was thickest. Warriors had to climb about halfway up the sack, Eric knew, before they could find a place thin enough to carve themselves an entrance. Then the lumps of food would be lowered from man to man all the way down the sack, warriors clinging to precarious handholds every few paces. Once the pile on the floor was great enough, they would clamber down and fill their specially large, food-expedition knapsacks. Then back to the burrows and to the women who alone possessed the lore of determining whether the food was fit for consumption and of preparing it if it were. That's where he would be at this moment, on that sack, cutting a hole in it, if he'd chosen a first category Theft like most other youths. He'd be cutting a hole, scooping out a handful of food -- any quantity, no matter how small, was acceptable on an initiatory Theft -- and ie preparing to go home to plaudits from the women and acceptance from the men. He'd be engaged in a normal, socially-acceptable endeavor. Instead of which... He found that he was able to stare at the Monster room now from under the cover of his hiding place with only a slight feeling of nausea. Well, that in itself was an achievement. After only a short time, here he was, able to look around and estimate the nature of Monster goods like the most experienced warrior. He couldn't look up too high as yet, but what warrior could? Well and good, but this wasn't getting him anywhere. He didn't have a normal Theft to make. His was third category. Monster souvenirs. Eric turned and faced the darkness again. He walked rapidly forward into the straight-walled burrow, the glow-lamp on his forehead lighting a yellow path. Ahead of him, the great black space grew steadily larger as he pushed towards it. Everything about his Theft, his initiation into manhood, was extraordinary. Thomas the TrapSmasher telling the women about his special talents, so that he would be accorded a vision and a name which would fit with them. Visions were supposed to come from the ancestors, through the ancestor-science of the record machine. Nobody was supposed to have the slightest idea in advance of what the vision would be. That was all up to the ancestors and their mysterious plans for their descendants. " ceivable, that all visions and names were pre-arranged, that the record machine was set in advance for every initiation? Where did that leave religion? If that were so, how could you continue to believe in logic, in cause and effect? And having someone -- a Stranger, at that! -- help you make your Theft. A Theft was supposed to be purely and simply a test of your male potential; by definition, it was something you did alone. i But if you could accept the concept of pre-arranged visions, why not pre-arranged Thefts? I Eric shook his head. He was  getting into very dark corridors mentally: his world was turning into sheer confusion. But one thing he knew. Making an arrangement with a Stranger, as his uncle had done, was definitely an act contrary to all the laws and practices of Mankind. Thomas's uncertain i speech had underlined that fact. It was -- well, it was wron. Yet his uncle was the greatest man in all Mankind, so far as Eric was concerned. Thomas the Trap-Smasher could do no wrong. But Thomas the Trap-Smasher was evidently leaning toward Alien-science.Alien-science was wrong. But again, on the other hand, his parents, according to the Trap-Smasher, his father and his mother had been Alien-sciencers. Too much. There was just too much to work out. There was too much he didn't know. He'd better concentrate on his Theft. The strange burrow had come to an end. The hairs rose on the back of his neck as he walked into the great dark area and sensed enormous black heights above him. He began to hurry, turning every once in a while to make certain that he was staying in a straight line with the light from the entrance. Here, his forehead glow lamp was almost no use at all. He didn't like this place. It felt almost like being out in the open. What, he wondered again feverishly, was this structure in the world of the Monsters? What function did it have? He was not sure he wanted to know. Eric was running by the time he came to the end of the open space. He hit the wall so hard that he was knocked over backwards. For a moment, he was badly frightened, then he realized what had happened. He hadn't taken his bearings for a while: he must have moved off at an angle. Groping along the wall with extended arms, he found the entrance to the low burrow at last. It was quite low -- he had to bend his knees and duck his head as he went up to. It was an unpleasantly narrow little corridor. But then there was an opening on his right -- the fork his uncle had told him about -- and he turned into it with relief. He had arrived. There was a burst of light from a group of glow lamps. And there were Strangers, there were several Strangers here. Three of them -- no, four -- no, five! They squatted in a corner of this large, square burrow, three of them talking earnestly, the other two engaged in some incomprehensible task with materials that were mostly unfamiliar. A LL OF them leaped to their feet as he trotted in and deployed instantly in a wide semi-circle facing him. Eric wished desperately he had been holding two heavy spears instead of the single light one. With two heavy spears you had both a shield and a dangerous offensive weapon. A light spear was good for a single cast, and that was that. He held it nevertheless in the throwing position above his shoulder and glared fiercely, as a warrior of Mankind should. If he had to throw, he decided, he would spring to one side immediately afterward and try to pluck the two heavy spears from  his backsling. But if they rushed him right now -- "Who are you?" asked a strong-faced, middle-aged man in the center of the semi-circle, his spear throbbing in an upraised arm. "What's your name -- what's your people?" "Eric the Only," Eric told him quickly. Then he remembered to add: "I'm destined to be Eric the Eye. My people are Mankind." "He's expected, one of us," the middle-aged man told the others who immediately relaxed, slung their spears and went back to what they had been doing. 'Welcome, Eric the Only of Mankind. Put up your spear and sit with us. I am Arthur the Organizer." Eric gingerly dropped his spear into the back-sling. He studied the Stranger. A man about as old as his uncle and not nearly as hefty, although well-muscled enough for normal warlike purposes. He wore the loin-straps of a full warrior, but -- as if these were not enough honor for a man -- he also wore straps laced about his chest and across his shoulders. though he was carrying no knapsack. This was the fashion of  many Strangers, Eric knew, as j was the strap at the back of the head that held the hair in a tight tail away from the eyes instead of letting it hang wild and free ! as the hair of a warrior should. And the straps were decorated with odd, incised designs -- another weak and unmanlike I Stranger fashion. Who but Strangers, Eric thought contemptuously, would group up so in an alien place without setting sentries at either end of their burrow? Truly Mankind had good reason to despise them! But this man was a leader, he realized, a bom leader, with an ; even more self-assured air than Thomas the Trap-Smasher, cap; tain of the best band in all Mankind. He was studying Eric in turn, with eyes that weighed carefully and then, having decided on the measure, made a definite placement, fitting Eric permanently into this plan or that plan. He looked like a man i whose head was full of many plans, each one evolving inexorably through action to a predetermined end. He took Eric's arm companionably and led him to where the others squatted and talked and worked. This was no tribal bur row of any sort: it was quite apparently a field headquarters -- and Arthur the Organizer was Commander-in-Chief. "I met your uncle," he told Eric, "about a dozen auld lang synes ago, when he came to us on a trading expedition -- back in our burrows, I mean. A fine man, your uncle, very progressive. He's attended our secret meetings regularly, and there's going to be an important place for him in the great burrows we will dig, in the new world we are making. He reminds me a lot of your father. But so do you, my boy, so do you." "Did you know my father?" A rthur the Organizer smiled and nodded. "Very well. He could have been a great man. He gave his life for the Cause. Who among us will ever forget Eric the -- the -- Eric the Storekeeper or something, wasn't it?" "The Storeroom-Stormer. His name was Eric the StoreroomStormer." "Yes, of course. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer. An unforgettable name with us, and an unforgettable man. But that's another story; we'll talk about it some other time. You'll have to be getting back to your uncle very soon." He picked up a flat board covered with odd markings and studied it with his glow lamp. "How do you like that?" one of the men working with the unfamiliar materials muttered to his neighbor. "You ask him his people, and he says, 'Mankind.' Mankind!" The other man chuckled. "A front-burrow tribe. What the hell do you expect -- sophistication? Each and every front-burrow tribe calls itself Mankind. As far as these primitives are concerned, the human race stops at their outermost burrow. Your tribe, my tribe -- you know what they call us? Strangers. In their eyes, there's not too much difference between us and the Monsters." "That's what I mean. They don't see us as fellow-men. They are narrow-minded savages. Who needs them?" Arthur the Organizer glanced at Eric's face. He turned sharply to the man who had spoken last. "I'll tell you who needs them, Walter," he said. "The Cause needs them. If the front-burrow tribes are with us, it means our main lines of supply to Monster territory are kept open. But we need every fighter we can get, no matter how primitive. Every single tribe has to be with us if Alien-science is to be the dominant religion of the burrows, if we're to avoid the fiasco of the last rising. We need front-burrow men for their hunting, foraging skills and back-burrow men for their civilized skills. We need everybody in this thing, especially now." The man called Walter put down his work and scowled at Eric dubiously. He seemed to be totally unconvinced. These arrogant back-burrowers with their ornamented straps and unmilitary manners! Men from different tribes sitting around and talking, when -- if they had any sense of propriety each other!  Suddenly, the floor shook under him. He almost fell. He staggered back and forth, trying to grab at the spears in his backsling. He finally got used to it, managed to find a solid footing in the upheaval. The spear he held vibrated in his hand. of ear-splitting thumps. The floor swung to their rhythm. "What is it?" he cried, turning to Arthur. "What's going on?" "You've never heard a Monster walking before?" the Organizer asked him unbelievingly. "That's right -- this is your Theft, your first time out. It's a Monster, boy. A Monster's moving around in the Monster larder, doing whatever Monsters do. They have a right, you know," he added with a smile. "It's their larder. We're just -- visitors." Eric noticed that none of the others seemed particularly concerned. He drew a deep breath and reslung his spear. How the floor and the walls shook! What a fantastic, enormous creature that must be! As an apprentice warrior, he had often stood with the rearguard on the other side of the doorway to Monster territory while the band went in to steal for Mankind. A few times there had been heavy, thumping noises off in the distance, and the walls of the burrow had quivered slightly. But not like this. It had never been remotely as awesome as this. He raised his eyes to the straight, flat ceiling of the burrow above them. He remembered the dark space further back stretching up limitlessly. "And this," he said aloud. "This structure we're in. What is this to them?" Arthur the Organizer shrugged. "A piece of Monster furniture. Something they use for something or other. We're in one of the open spaces they always leave in the bases of their furniture. Makes the furniture lighter, easier to move around, I guess." He listened for a moment as the thumps drifted further away and then died out. "Let's get down to business. Eric, this is Walter the Weapon-Seeker. Walter the Weapon-Seeker of the Miximilian people. Walter, what do you have for Eric's tribe -- for, uh, for Mankind?" "I hate to give anything even halfway good to a front-burrow tribe," the squatting man muttered. "No matter how much you explain it to them, they always use it wrong, they botch it up every single time. Let's see. This should be simple enough." He rummaged in the pile of strange stuff in front of him and picked up a small, red, jelly-like blob. "All you do," he explained, "is tear off a pinch with your fingers. Just a pinch at a time, no more. Then spit on it and throw it. After you spit on it, get it out of your hands fast. Throw it as fast and as far as you can. Do you think you can remember that?" "Yes." Eric took the red blob from him and stared at it in puzzlement. There was a strange, irritating odor: it made his nose itch slightly. "But what happens? What does it do?" "That's not your worry, boy," Arthur the Organizer told him. "Your uncle will know when to use it. You have your third category theft -- a Monster souvenir that no one in your tribe has ever seen before. It should make them sit up and take notice. And tell your uncle to bring his band to my burrow three days -- three sleep-periods -- from now. That will be the last time we meet before the rising. Tell him to bring them armed with every last spear they can carry." were so many complex, incomprehensible things going on! The world was a bigger, more active place than he had ever imagined. He watched Arthur the Organizer add a mark to the flat board on which many symbols were scratched. This was another Stranger practice -- made necessary, he knew, by the weak Stranger memory, so inferior to that of Mankind. The Weapon-Seeker leaped up and stopped him as he was about to put the red blob into knapsack. "Nothing wet in there?" Walter demanded, opening the bag and rummaging about in Eric's belongings. "No water? Remember, get this stuff wet and you're done for." "Mankind keeps its water in canteens," Eric explained irritably. "We keep it here," he pointed to the sloshing pouch at his hip, "not splashing around loosely with our provisions." He swung the full knapsack on his back and stepped away with stiff dignity. Arthur the Organizer accompanied him to the end of the burrow. "Don't mind Walter," he whispered. "He's always afraid that nobody but himself will be able to use the Monster weapKsns he digs up. He talks that way to everyone. Now, suppose I refresh your memory about the way back. We don't want you to get lost." "I won't get lost," Eric said coldly. "I have a good memory, and I know enough to perform a simple reversal of the directions on the way here. Besides, I am Eric the Espier, Eric the Eye of Mankind. I won't get lost." He was rather proud of himself as he trotted away, without turning his head. Let the Strangers know what you think of them. The snobs. The stuck-up bastards. But still, he felt damaged somehow, made less -- as when Roy the Runner had called him a singleton before the entire band. And the last comment he had heard behind him -- "These primitives: so damned touchy!" -- made it no better. He crossed the dark open space, still brooding, his eyes fixed on the patch of white light ahead, his mind engaged in a completely unaccustomed examination of values. Mankind's free simplicity against the Stranger multiplicity and intricacy. Mankind's knowledge of basics, the important foraging basics of dayto-day life, against the Stranger knowledge of so many things and techniques he had never even heard about. Surely Mankind's way was infinitely preferable, far superior? Then why did his uncle want to get mixed up with Stranger politics, he wondered, as he emerged from the structure? He turned left and, passing the small entrance he had ignored before, sped for the wall which separated him from the burrows. And why did all these Strangers, evidently each from a different tribe, agree in the contempt with which they held Mankind? He had just turned right along the wall, on the last stretch before the doorway, when the floor shook again, jarring him out of his thoughts. He bounced up and down, frozen with fear where he stood. He was out in the open while a Monster was abroad. A Monster had come into the larder again. VI  tance, he caught sight of the tremendously long gray body he had heard about since childhood, hgher than a hundred men standing on each other's shoulders, the thick gray legs each wider than two hefty men standing chest to chest. He caught just one wideI eyed, fear-soluble glimpse of the thing before he went into complete panic. His panic was redeemed by a single inhibition: he didn't spring forward and run away from the allBut that was only because it would have meant running directly toward the Monster. For one thoroughly insane moment, however, he thought of trying to claw his way through the wall against which his shoulders were pressed. Then -- because it was the direction he had been running in he remembered the doorway. He must be about thirty, thirtyfive paces from it. There lay safety: his uncle, the band. Mankind and the burrows -- the blessed, closed-in, narrow burrows! Eric leaped along the wall for the doorway. He ran as he'd never in his life run before, as he'd never imagined he could run. But even as he fled madly, almost weeping at the effort he was making, a few sane thoughts -- the result of long, tiresome drills as an initiate -- organized themselves in his screaming mind. He had been closer to the structure in which the Strangers were hiding, the structure which Arthur the Organizer explained was a piece of Monster furniture. He should have turned the other way. towards the structure, gotten between it and the wall. There, unless he'd been seen as the Monster entered the larder, he could have rested safely until it was possible to make his escape. He had gone too far to turn back now. But run silently, he reminded himself: run swiftly but make no noise, make no noise at all. According to the lessons that the warriors taught, at this distance Monster hearing was more to be feared than Monster vision. Run silently. Run for your life. He reached the door. It had been set back in place! In disbelief and utter horror he stared at the curved line in the wall that showed where the door had been replaced in its socket. But this was never done! This had never been heard of! Eric beat frantically on the door with his fists. Would his knuckles make enough noise to penetrate the heavy slab? Or just enough to attract the Monster's attention? He twisted his head quickly -- a look, a deliberately wasted moment, to estimate the closeness of his danger. The Monster's legs moved so slowly: its speed would have been laughable if the very size of those legs didn't serve to push it forward an incredible distance with each step. And there was nothing laughable  in that long, narrow neck, almost as long as the rest of the body, and the malevolent, relatively tiny head on the end of the neck. And those horrible pink things, all around the neck, just behind the head -- It was much nearer than it had been just seconds ago, but whether it had noticed him and was coming at him he had no idea. Beat at the door with the shaft of a spear? That should attract attention, that might be heard. Yes, by the Monster too. do. He stepped a few paces back from the wall. Then he leaped forward, smashing his shoulder into the door. He felt it give a little. Another try. The floor-shaking thumps of the Monster's steps were now so close as to be almost deafening. At any moment, a great gray foot might come down and grind out his life. Eric stepped back again, forcing himself not to look up. Another leap, another bruising collision with the door. It had definitely moved. An indentation showed all around it. Was he about to be stepped on -- to be squashed? Eric put his hands on the door. He pushed. Slowly, suckingly, it left the place out of which it had been carved long ago. Where was the Monster? How close? How Close? Suddenly, the door fell over into the burrow, and Eric spilled painfully on top of it. He scram, bled to his feet and darted down the corridor. He had no time to feel relief. His mind was repeating its lessons, reminding him what he had to do next in such a situation. Run a short distance down the burrow. Then stop and wait on the balls of your feet, ready to bolt. Get as much air into your lungs as possible. You may need it. If you hear a hissing, whistling sound, stop breathing and start running. Hold your breath for as long as you can -- as long as you possibly can -- then suck another chestful of air and keep running. Keep this up until you are far away. Far, far away. Eric waited, poised to run, his back to the doorway. Don't look around -- just face the direction yot?ll have to run. There's only one thing you have to worry about, only one thing you have to listen for. A hissing, whistling sound. When you hear it, hold your breath and run. He waited, his muscles contracted for instant action. Time went by. He remembered to count. If you counted up to five hundred, slowly, and nothing happened, you were likely to be all right. You could assume the jonster probably hadn't noticed you. So the experienced warriors said, the men who had lived through such an experience. Five hundred. He reached five hundred and, just to be on the safe side, still tense, still ready to run, counted another five hundred, up to the ultimate number conceived by man, a full thousand. No hissing, no whistling sounds. No suggestion of danger. He relaxed, and his muscles -- suddenly set free -- gave way. He fell to the floor of the burrow, whimpering with the release of tension. It was over. His Theft was over. He was a man. TE had been in the same place as a Monster, and lived through it. He had met Strangers and dealt with them as a representative of Mankind. Such things as he would have to tell his uncle! His uncle. Where was his uncle? Where was the band? Suddenly fully aware of how much was wrong, Eric scrambled to his feet and walked cautiously back to the open doorway. The burrow was empty. They hadn't waited for him. But that was another incredible thing! A band never gave an initiate up for lost until at least two full days had gone by. In the chief's absence, of course, this was measured by the sleep periods of the band captain. Any band would wait two days before giving up and turning homeward. And, Eric was positive, his uncle would have waited a bit longer than that for him. He'd been away for such a short time! Then what had happened? He crept to the doorway and peeped outside. There was almost no dizziness this time. His eyes adjusted quickly to the different scale of distance. The Monster was busy on the other side of the larder. It had merely been crossing the room, then, not pursuing and attacking. Apparently it hadn't noticed him at all. Fantastic. And with all the noise he had made! All that rushing back and forth, that batteringdown of the door! The Monster turned abruptly, walked a few gigantic steps and hurled itself at the structure in which Eric had met the Strangers. The walls, the floor, ever#dhing, shook mightily in sympathy to the impact of the great organism as it wriggled a bit and became still. Eric was startled until he realized that the creature had done no more than lie down in the structure. It was a piece of Monster furniture, after all. How had that felt to Arthur the Organizer and Walter the Weapon-Seeker and the others hidden in the base? Eric grinned. Those Strangers must be a little less haughty, a little more sober at this moment. Meanwhile, he had work to do, things to find out. He got his fingers under the slab of door and tugged it upright. It was heavy! He pushed against it, slowly, carefully, first one side and then the other, walking it back to the hole in the wall. A final push, and it slid into place tightly, only the thin, curved line suggesting its existence. Now he could look aroimd. There had been a fight here -- that much was certain. A brief, bitter battle. Examining the area closely, Eric saw unmistakable signs of conflict. A broken spear shaft. Some blood on the wall. Part of a tom knapsack. No bodies, of course. You were not likely to find bodies after a battle. Any people of the burrows knew that the one unavoidable imperative of victory was to drag the bodies away and dispose of them. No one might ever leave dead enemies to rot where they would foul the corridors. CO there had been a battle. He  had been right -- his uncle and his uncle's band had not just gone off and left him. There must have been an attack by a superior force. The band had stood its ground for a while, sustained some losses, and then been forced to retreat. But there were a few things which didn't make sense. First, it was very unusual for a war party of Strangers to come this close to Monster territory. The burrows which were inhabited by Mankind, the natural goal of a war party, were much further back. At this point, you would not expect to find any group larger than a foraging expedition -- a Stranger band at most. His uncle's men, fully armed, operating under battle alert, could easily cope with a single band of weavers, weaponsmiths or traders from the decadent back burrows. They would have driven them off, possibly taking a few prisoners, and continued to wait for him. That left only two possibilities. The unlikely war party -- a two or three-band attack -- and, even more unlikely, a band from another fierce, front-burrow people. But front-burrowers rarely went prowling at random near Monster territory. They would have their own door cut into it and would tend to feel hugely uncertain about one belonging to another people. They too would' head for the inhabited burrows if they were on any business other than the important one of stealing for their tribe's needs. And another thing. Unless his uncle's band had been wiped out to the very last man -- a thought Eric rejected as highly improbghle -- the survivors were honorbound, by their oath of manhood, after doing whatever the immediate military situation required, from pursuit to retreat, to return as soon as possible to the spot where an initiate was expected back from his Theft. No warrior would dare face the women if he failed to do this. Possibly the attack had just come. Possibly his uncle's band was a short distance away, still fighting their way from burrow's end to burrow's end; and, once they had gotten clear of the enemy, would make their way back to him. No. In that case, he should be able to hear the battle still going on. And the burrows were dreadfully still. Eric shivered. A warrior was not meant to be abroad without companions. He'd heard of tribeless Strangers -- once, as a child, he remembered enjoying the intricate execution of a man who'd been expelled from his own people for some major crime and who had wandered pathetically into the neighborhood of Mankind -- but these people were hardly to be considered human: tribes, bands, societies, were the surroundings of human creatures. It was awful to be alone. It was unthinkable. though he was quite hungry after his Theft, he began walking rapidly down the corridor. After a while, he broke into a trot. He wanted to get home as soon as possible -- to be among his own kind again. He reached into his back-sling and got a spear for each hand. A nervous business going through the corridors all by yourself. They were so empty and so quiet. They hadn't seemed this quiet when he'd been on expedition with the band. And so fearfully, frighteningly dim. Eric had never before realized how much difference there was between the light you got from one forehead glow-lamp and the usual band complement of a half-dozen. He found himself getting more and more wary of the unexpected shadows where the wall curved sharply: he picked up speed as he ran past the black hole of a branching burrow. At any one of those places, an enemy could be waiting for him, warned by the sound of his approaching footsteps. It could be the same enemy which had atatacked his uncle's band, a handful of cruel and murderous Strangers, or a horde of them. It could ' be something worse. Abruptly he remembered legends of unmentiohable creatures who lurked in the empty burrows, creatures who fled before the approach of a band of warriors, but who would come noiselessly upon a single man. Big creatures who engulfed you. Tiny creatures who came in their hundreds and nibbled you to pieces. Eric kept jerking his head around to look behind him : at least he could keep his doom from taking him by surprise. It was awful to be alone. And yet, in the midst of his fears, his mind returned again and again to the problem of his uncle's disappearance. Eric could not believe anything serious had happened to him. Thomas the TrapSmasher was a veteran of too many bloody adventures, too many battles against unequal odds. Then where had he gone? And where had he taken the band? And why was there no sound of him anywhere, no sign in all this infinity of gloomy, stretching, menace-filled tunnels? Fortunately, he was an Eye. He knew the way back and sped desperately along it without the slightest feeling of doubt. The Record Machine was right: he would never be lost. Let him just get safely back to the companionship of Mankind and he would be Eric the Eye. And there it was again: who had been right, the Record Machine or his uncle? The vision that named him had come from the Record Machine, but his uncle claimed that this was reli. gious claptrap. The vision had been selected and his name proposed to the women well in advance of the ceremony. And his uncle was an Alien-sciencer, in touch with Strangers who were also Alien-sciencers... So many things had happened in the last two days, Eric felt So much of his world had shifted. It was as if the walls of the burrows had moved outward and upward until they resembled Monster territory more than human areas. These corridors looked friendlier, more familiar. He made himself run faster, although he was almost at the point of exhaustion. He wanted to be home, to be officially Eric the Eye, to inform Mankind of what had happened so that a rescue and searching party could be sent out for his uncle. That doorway to Monster territory: who had replaced it? If a battle had been fought, and his uncle's band had retreated, still fighting, would the attacker have stopped to put the door neatly back in its socket? No. Could it be explained by a sudden onslaught and the complete extermination of his uncle's band? Then, before dragging the bodies away, the enemy would bave had time to put the door back. A doorway into Monster territory was a valuable human resource, after all, valuable to Mankind and Strangers alike -- why jeopardize it by leaving it visible and open? But who -- or what -- could have been capable of such a sudden onslaught, such a complete extermination of the best-led band in all Mankind? He'd have to get the answer from one of the other band captains or possibly a wise old crone in the Female Society. Definitely within the boundaries of Mankind now, Eric forced himself to slow to a Walk. He would be coming upon a sentry at any moment, and he had no desire at all to have a spear flung through him. A sentry would react violently to a man dashing out of the darkness. "Eric the Only," he called out, identifying himself with each step. "This is Eric the Only." Then he remembered his Theft proudly and changed the identification. "Eric the Eye. This is Eric the Eye, the Espier, the further-seeing, less-paying Eye.' Eric the Eye is coming back to Mankind!" Oddly, there was no returning call of recognition. Eric didn't understand that. Had Mankind itself been attacked and driven away from its burrow? A sentry should respond to a familiar name. Something was very, inexplicably wrong. Then he came around the last curve and saw the sentry at the other end. Rather, he saw what at first looked like three sentries. They were staring at him, and he recognized them. Stephen the Strong-Armed and two members of Stephen's band. Evidently he had arrived just at the moment when the sentry on duty was about to be relieved. That would account for Stephen and the other man. But why hadn't they replied to his shouts of identification? They stood there silently as he came up, their spears still at the ready, not going down in welcome. "Eric the Eye," he repeated, puzzled. "I've made my Theft, but something happened to the rest -- " His voice trailed off, as Stephen came up to him, his face grim, his powerful muscles taut. The band captain shoved a spear point hard against Eric's chest. "Don't move," he warned. "Barney. John. Tie him up. We've caught the little rat!" TIS spears taken from him, his arms bound securely behind his back by the thongs of his own knapsack, Eric was pushed and prodded into the great central burrow of Mankind. The place was almost unrecognizable. Under the direction of Ottilie, the Chieftain's First Wife, a horde of women -- what seemed at first like the entire membership of the Female Society -- was setting up a platform in front of the Royal Mound. With the great scarcity of any building materials that Mankind suffered from, a construction of this sort was startling and unusual, yet there was something about it that awoke highly unpleasant memories in Eric's mind. But he was pulled from place to place too fast and there were too many other unprecedented things going on for him to be able to identify the memory properly. Two women who were accredited members of the Female Society were not working under Ottilie's direction, he noticed. Bound hand and foot, they were lying against the far wall of the great central burrow. They were both covered with blood and showed every sign of having undergone prolonged and most vicious torture. He judged them to be barely this side of death. As he was jerked past, he ree ognized them. They were the two' wives of Thomas the Trap-Smash. er. ' Just wait until his uncle o! back! Someone would really pay for this, he thought, more in ah solute amazement than horror. He had the feeling that he must keep the horror away at all costs. Once let it in and it would soak through his thoughts right into the memory he was trying to avoid. The place was full of armed men, running back and forth from their band captains to unknown destinations in the outlying corridors. Between them and around them scuttled the children, fetch ing and carrying raw materials for the hard-working women, There was a steady buzz of com-j mands in the air... "Go to -- . "Bring some more -- " "Hurryl with the -- "... that mingled' with the smell of many people whose pores were sweating ur-i gency. And it wasn't just sweat that he smelled. Eric realized as he was dragged before the Royall Mound. It was anger. The anger and fear of all Mankind. Franklin the Father of Many Thieves stood on the mound, carrying unaccustomed spears in his fat hands, talking rapidly to a group of warriors, band captains and -- yes, actually! -- Strangers. Even now, Eric found he could still be astonished at this fantastic development. Strangers in the very midst of Mankind! Walking around freely and bearing arms! As the chief caught sight of Eric, his face broke into a looseskinned smile. He nudged a Stranger beside him and pointed at the prisoner. "That's him," he said. "That's the nephew. The one that asked for the third category Theft. Now we've got them all." The Stranger didn't smile. He looked briefly at Eric and turned away. "I'm glad you think so. From our point of view, you've just got one more." an uncertain grin. "Well, you know what I mean. And the damned fool came back by himself. It saved us a lot of trouble, I mean, didn't it?" Receiving no answer, he shrugged. He gestured with flabby imperiousness at Eric's guards. "You know where to put him. We'll be ready for them pretty soon." Again the point of a spear stabbed into Eric's back, and he was forced forward across the central space to a small burrow entrance. Before he could reach it, however, he heard Franklin the Father of Many Thieves call out to Mankind: "There goes Eric, my people. Eric the Only. Now we've got the last of the filthy gang!" For a moment, the activity stopf)ed and seemed to focus on him. Eric shivered as a low, drawn-out grunt of viciousness and hatred arose everywhere, but most of all from the women. Someone ran up to him. Harriet the History-Teller. The girl's face was absolutely contorted. She reached up to the crown of her head and pulled out the long pin held in place by a few knotted scarlet hairs. About her face and neck the hair danced like flames. "You Alien sciencer!" she shrieked, driving the pin straight at his eyes. "You filthy, filthy Alien-sciencer!" Eric whipped his head to one side; she was back at him in a moment. His guards leaped at the girl and grappled with her, but she was able to get in one ripping slash that opened up almost all of his right cheek before they drove her away. "Leave something for the rest of us," one of his guards pleaded the cause of reason as he strolled back to Eric. "After all, he belongs to the whole of Mankind." "He does not!" she yelled. "He belongs to me most of all. I was going to mate with him when he returned from his Theft, wasn't I, Mother?" "There wasn't Anything official," Eric heard Rita the RecordJCeeper admonishing as he tried to stanch the flow of blood by bringing his shoulder up and pressing it against the wound. "There couldn't be anything official about it until he'd achieved manhood. So you'll just have to wait your turn, Harriet, darling. You'll have to wait until your elders are finished with him. There'll be plenty left for you." "There won't be," the girl pouted. "I know what you're like. There won't be hardly anything left." Eric was shoved at the small burrow entrance again. The moment he was inside it, one of his guards planted a foot in his back, knocking the breath out of him. The kick propelled him forward, staggering wildly for balance, until he smashed into the opposite wall. As he fell, unable to use his arms to cushion himself, he heard laughter behind him in the great central burrow. He rolled on his side dizzily. There was a fresh flow of blood coming down from his cheek. This wasn't the homecoming he'd imagined after his Theft -- not in the slightest! What was going on? He knew where he was. A tiny, blind-alley burrow off Mankind's major meeting-place, a sort of little vault used mostly for storage. Excess food and goods stolen from Monster territory were kept here until there was enough accumulated for a trading expedition to the back burrows. Occasionally, also, a male Stranger, taken prisoner in battle, might be held in this place until Mankind found out if his tribe valued him enough to pay anything substantial for his recovery. And if they didn't... structure that the women had been building near the Royal Mound -- and shivered. The memory that he'd suppressed had now come alive in his mind. And it fitted with the way Harriet had acted -- and with what her mother, Rita the Record-Keeper, had said. They couldn't be planning that for himf He was a member of Mankind, almost a full warrior. They didn't even do that to Strangers captured in battle -- not normal Strangers. A warrior was always respected as a warrior. At the worst, he deserved a decent execution, quietly done. Except for -- Except for -- "TVo!" he screamed. "No" The single guard who'd been left on duty at the entrance turned around and regarded him humorously. "Oh, yes," he said. "Oh, definitely yes! We're going to have a lot of fun with both of you, as soon as the women say they're ready." He nodded with ominous, emphatic slowness and turned back to miss none of the preparations. Both of you? For the first time, Eric looked around the little storage burrow. The place was almost empty of goods, but off to one side, in the light of his forehead glow-lamp (how proud he had been when it had been bestowed on him at the doorway to Monster territory!) he now saw another man lying bound against the wall. His uncle. Eric brought his knees up and wriggled rapidly over to him. It was a painful business. His belly and sides were not calloused and inured to the rough burrow floor like his feet. But what did a few scratches more or less matter any more? The Trap-Smasher was barely conscious. He had been severely handled, and he looked almost as bad as his wives. There was a thick crust of dried blood on his hair. The haft of a spear, Eric guessed, had all but cracked his head open. And in several places on his body, his right shoulder, just above his left hip, deep in his thigh, were the oozing craters of serious spear wounds, raw and unbandaged. "Uncle Thomas," Eric urged. "What happened? Who did this to you?" '"HE wounded man opened his eyes and shuddered. He looked around stupidly as if he had expected to find the walls talking to him. And his powerful arms struggled with the knots that held them firmly behind his back. When he finally located Eric, he smiled. It was a bad thing to do. Someone had also smashed in most of his front teeth. "Hello, Eric," he mumbled. "What a fight, eh? How did the rest of the band do? Anybody get away?" "I don't know. That's what I'm asking you! I came back from my Theft -- you were gone -- the band was gone. I got here, and everyone's crazy! There are Strangers out there, walking around with weapons in our burrows. Who are they?" Thomas the Trap-Smasher's eyes had slowly darkened. They were fully in focus now, and long threads of agony swam in them. "Strangers?" he asked in a low voice. "Yes, there were Strangers fighting in Stephen the StrongArmed's band. Fighting against us. That chief of ours -- Franklin -- he got in touch with Strangers after we left. They compared notes. They must have been working together, been in touch with each other, for a long time. Mankind, Strangers, what difference does it make when their lousy Ancestor-science is threatened? I should have remembered." 'What?" Eric begged. "What should you have remembered?" "That's the way they put down Alien-science in the other rising, long ago. A chiefs a chief. He's got more in common with another chief -- even a chief of Strangers than with his own people. You attack Ancestor science, and you're attacking their power as chiefs. They'll work together then. They'll give each other men, weapons, information. They'll do eversdhing they can against the common enemy. Against the only people who really want to hit back at the Monsters. I should have remembered! Damn it all," the Trap Smasher groaned through his ruined mouth, "I saw that the chief and Ottilie were suspicious. I should have realized how they were going to handle it. They were going to call in Strangers, exchange information -- and unite against us!" Eric stared at his uncle, dimly understanding. Just as there was a secret organization of Aliensciencers that cut across tribal boimdaries, so there was a tacit, rarely-used understanding among the chiefs, based on the Ancestorscience religion that was the main prop of their power. And the power of the leaders of the Female Society, come to think of it. All special privileges were derived from their knowledge of ancestorscience. Take that away from them, and they'd be ordinary women with no more magical abilities than was necessary to tell edible food from Monster poison. Grunting with pain, Thomas the Trap-Smasher wormed his way up to a sitting position against the wall. He kept shaking his head as if to jar recollection loose. "They came up to us," he said heavily, "Stephen the StrongArmed and his band came up to us just after you'd gone into Monster territory. A band from Mankind with a message from the chief -- who suspected anything? They might be coming to tell us that the home burrows were under attack by Strangers. Strangers!" He gave a barking laugh, and some blood splashed out of his mouth. "They had Strangers with them, hidden all the way behind in the corridors. Mobs and mobs of Strangers." had happened. "Then, when they were among us, when most of us had reslung our spears, they hit us. Eric, they hit us real godd. They had us so much by surprise that they didn't even need outside help. I don't think there was much left of us by the time the Strangers came running up. I was don, fighting with my bare hands, and so was the rest of the band. The Strangers did the mopping up. I didn't see most of it. Somebody handed me one hell of a wallop -- I never expected to wake up alive." His voice got even lower and huskier. "I'd have been lucky not to." The Trap Smasher's chest heaved: a strange, long noise came out of it. "They brought me back here. My wives -- they were working on my wives. Those bitches from the Female Society -- Ottilie, Rita -- this part of it is their business -- they had my wives pegged out and they worked on them in front of me. I was blanking out and coming to, blanking out and coming to; I was conscious while they -- " He dropped to a bloody mumble again, his head falling forward loosely. His voice became clear for a moment, but not entirely rational. "They were good women," he muttered. "Both of them. Good, good girls. And they loved me. They had their chance to become more important. A dozen times Franklin must have offered to impregnate them, and they turned him down every time. They really loved me." Eric almost sobbed himself. He'd had little to do with them once he'd reached the age of the warrior initiate, but in his childhood, they'd given him all the mother love he ever remembered. They'd cuffed him and caressed him and wiped his nose. They'd told him stories and taught him the catechism of the ancestral science. Neither had sons of his age who had survived the various plagues and the Monster-inflicted calamities that periodically swept through Mankind's burrows. He'd been lucky. He'd received much of the care and affection that their own sons might have enjoyed. Their fidelity to the TrapSmasher had been a constant source of astonishment in Mankind. It had cost them more than the large, healthy litters for which the chief had a well proven capacity: such eccentric, almost non-womanly behavior had inevitably denied them the high positions in the Female Society they would otherwise have enjoyed. And now they were dead or dying, and their surviving babies had been apportioned to other women whose importance would thereby be substantially increased. "Tell me," he asked his uncle. "Why did the Female Society kill them? What did they do that was so awful?" He saw that Thomas had lifted his head again and was staring at him. With pity. He felt his own body turn completely cold even before the Trap-Smasher spoke. "You still won't let yourself think about it? I don't blame you, Eric. But it's there. It's being prepared for us outside." "What?" Eric demanded, although a distant part of him had already worked out the terrible answer and knew what it was. 'We've been declared outlaws, Eric. They say we're guilty of the ultimate sacrilege against Ancestor-Science. We don't belong to Mankind anymore -- you, me, my family, my band. We're outside Mankind, outside the law, outside religion. And you know what happens to outlaws, Eric, don't you? Anything goes. Anything." E ver since early childhood, Eric remembered looking forward to ceremonies of this sort. A Stranger would have been caught by one of the warrior bands, and it would be determined that he was an outlaw. Nine times out of ten, such a man was easy enough to identify. No one but an outlaw, for example, would be wandering the burrows by himself, without a band or at least a single companion to guard his back. The tenth time, when there was the slightest doubt, a request for ransom to his people would make the prisoner's position clear. There would be a story of some unforgivable sacrilege, some particularly monstrous crime that could be punished by nothing but complete anathema and the revocation of all privileges as a human being. The man had escaped the punishment being prepared for him. Do with him as you will, his people would say. He is no longer one of us; he is the same as a Monster; he is something non-human so far as we are concerned. Then a sort of holiday would be declared. Out of the bits and pieces of lumber stolen from Monster territory and set aside by the women for this purpose, the members of the Female Society would erect a structure whose specifications had been handed down from mother to daughter for countless generations -- all the way back to the ancestors who had built the Record-Machines. It was called a Stage or a Theater, although Eric had also heard it referred to as The Scaffold. In any case, whatever its true name, most of the details concerning it were part of the secret lore of the Female Society and, as such, were no proper concern of males. One thing about it, however, everyone knew. On it would be enacted a moving religious drama: the ultimate triumph of humanity over the wickedness of the Monsters. For this, the central character had to fulfill two requirements. He had to be an intelligent creature, as the Monsters were, so that he could be made to suffer as some day Mankind meant the Monsters to suffer; and he had to be non-human, as the Monsters were, so that every drop of fear, resentment and hatred distilled by the enormous swaggering aliens could be poured out upon his flesh without any inhibition of compunction or fellow-feeling. For this purpose, outlaws were absolutely ideal, since all agreed that such disgusting creatures had resigned their membership in the human race. VjiTTiEN an outlaw was caught, work stopped in the burrows, and Mankind's warrior bands were called home. It was a great time, a joyous time, a time of festival. Even the children -- doing whatever they could to prepare for the glorious event, running errands for the laboring women, fetching refreshment for the stalwart, guarding men -- even the children boasted to each other of how they would express their hatred upon this trapped representative of the non-human, this bound and shrieking protagonist of the utterly alien. Everyone had their chance. All, from the chief himself to the youngest child capable of reciting the catechism of ancestral science, all climbed in their turn upon the Stage -- or Theater --  or Scaffold -- that the women had erected. All were thrilled to vent a portion of Mankind's vengeance upon the creature who had been declared alien, as an earnest of what they would some day do collectively to the Monsters who had stolen their world. Sarah the Sickness-Healer had her turn early in the proceedings; thenceforth, she stood on the structure and carefully supervised the ceremony. It was her job to see that nobody went too far, that everyone had a fair and adequate turn, and that even at the end there was some life left in the victim. Because then, at the end, the structure had to be completely burned -- along with its bloody occupant -- as a symbol of how the Monsters must eventually be turned into ash and be blown away and vanish. "And Mankind will come into its own," she would chant, while the charred fragments were kicked out of the burrow contemptuously. "And the Monsters will be gone. They will be gone forever, and there will be nothing upon all the wide Earth but Mankind." Afterwards, there was feasting, there was dancing, there was singingMen and women chased each other into the dimmer side corridors; children whooped and yelled around the great central burrow; the few old folks went to sleep th broad, reminiscent smiles upon their faces. Everyone felt they had somehow struck back at the Monsters. Everyone felt a little like the lords of creation their ancestors had been. Eric remembered the things he himself had done -- the things he had seen others do -- on these occasions. A tremendous tic of fear rippled through his body. He had to draw his shoulders up to his neck in a tight hunch and tense the muscles of his arms and legs. Finally his nerves subsided. He could think again. Only he didn't want to think. Those others, those outlaws in previous ceremonies of this sort in auld lang synes long past -- was it possible that they had experienced the same sick, bewildered dread while waiting for the structure to be completed? Had they trembled like this, had they also felt wetness running down their backs, had they felt the same pleading squirm in their intestines, the same anticipatory twinges of soft, vulnerable flesh? THE thought had never crossed his mind before. He'd seen them as things completely outside humanity, the compressed symbol of all that was alien. One worried about their feelings no more than about those of the roaches scurrying madly about here in the storage burrow. One squashed them slowly or rapidly -- at one's pleasure. What difference did it make? You didn't sympathize with roaches. You didn't identify with them. But now that he was about to be squashed himself, he realized that it did make a difference. He was human. No matter what Mankind and its leaders now declared him to be, he was human. He felt human fears; he experienced a desperate human desire to live. Then so had the others been. The outlaws whom he'd helped tear to pieces. Human. Completely human. They'd sat here, just as he did now, they'd sat and waited for the festival and its agonies... Only twice in his memory had members of Mankind ever been declared outlaw. Both cases had occurred a long time ago, before he'd even been a warrior-initiate. Eric tried now to remember what they had been like as living people. He wanted to reach out and feel companionship, some sort of companionship, even that of the dead. The dead were better than this beaten, bloody man next to him who had subsided into halfinsane mumbles, his battered head on his torn and woundscribbled chest. What had they been like? It was no use. In the first case, memory brought back only a picture of a screaming hulk just before the fire was lit. No recollection of a man. No fellow-human in Mankind. And in the second case -- Eric sat bolt upright, straining against his bonds. The second man to be declared an outlaw had escaped ! How he had done it Eric had never found out: he remembered only that a guard was severely punished, and that bands of warriors had sniffed for him along far-distant corridors for a long time afterward. Escape. That was it. He had to escape. Once declared an outlaw, he could have no hope of mercy, no remission of sentence. The religious overtones of the ceremony being prepared were too highly charged to be halted for anything short of the disappearance of its chief protagonist. Yes, escape. But how? Even if he could get free of the knots which so expertly and so strongly tied his hands behind his back, he had no weapon to hand. The guard at the entrance would transfix him with a spear in a moment. And if he failed, there were others outside, almost the entire warrior strength of the people. How? How? He forced himselj to be calm, to go over every possible alternative in his mind. He knew there was not much time. In a little while,the structure would be finished and the leaders of the Female Society would come for him. knots behind him. He worked without much hope. If he could get his hands loose, perhaps he might squirm his way carefully to the entrance, leap up suddenly and break into a run. So what if they threw a spear through him -- wouldn't that be better and quicker than the other thing? But they wouldn't, he realized. Not unless he were very lucky and some warrior forgot to think straight. In cases like this, when it was a matter of keeping, not the legs. There were at least a dozen men in Mankind with skill great enough to bring him down even at twenty or twenty-five paces. And another dozen who might be able to catch him. He was no Roy the Runner, after all. Roy! He was dead and sewered by now. He found himself regretting the fight he'd had with Roy. A Stranger passed by the storage burrow entrance, glancing in with only a slight curiosity. He was followed in a moment by two more Strangers, going the same They were leaving, Eric guessed, before the ceremony began. They probably had ceremonies of their own to attend -- th their own people. Walter the Weapon-Seeker, Arthur the Organizer -- were they at this moment sitting in similar storage burrows awaiting the same slow death? Eric doubted it. Somehow he couldn't see these men caught as easily as he and his uncle had been. Arthur was too clever, he was certain of that, and Walter, well, Walter would come up with some fantastic weapon that no one had ever seen or heard of... Like the one he had in his knapsack right now -- that red blob the Weapon-Seeker had given him! Was it a weapon? He didn't know. But even if it wasn't, he had the impression it could create some kind of surprise. "It should make them sit up and take notice," Walter had said back in Monster territory. Any kind of surprise, any kind of upset and he might have a diversion under cover of which he and his uncle could escape. But that was the trouble. His uncle. With his hands bound as thoroughly as he could now ascertain they were, he needed his uncle's help to do anything at all. And the Trap-Smasher was obviously too far gone to be at all useful. He was talking to himself in a steady, monotonous, argumentative mutter, his upper body slumping further and further across his own lap. Every once in a while, the mutters would be broken by a sharp, almost surprised moan as his wounds woke into a clearer consciousness of themselves. Most other men in his condition, Eric judged, would have been dead by now. Only a body as powerful as the TrapSmasher's could have lasted this long. And -- who knew? -- if they could escape, it was possible that his uncle's wounds, given care and rest, might heal. If they could escape.  leaning toward him and whispering urgently. "I think I know a way out. I think I've figured out a way to escape." No response. The bloody head continued to talk in a low, toneless voice to the lap. Mutter, mutter, mutter. Moan. Mutter, mutter. "Your wives," Eric said desperately. "Your wives. Don't you want to get revenge for your wives? That seemed to be worth a flicker. "My wives," said the thick voice. "They were good women. Real good women. They never let Franklin near them. They were real good women." Then the flicker was over and the mutters returned. "Escape!" Eric whispered. "Don't you want to escape?" A thin, coagulating line of blood dripped out of his uncle's slowly working jaws. There was no other answer. Eric looked towards the entrance of the storage burrow. The guard posted there was no longer turning from time to time to glance at the prisoners. The structure outside was evidently nearing completion, and his interest in the final preparations had caused him to take a step or two away from the entrance. He was staring off to the left down the great central burrow in absolute fascination. Well, that was something. It gave them a chance. On the other hand, it also meant that they had scant moments left to their lives. Any time now, the leaders of the Female Society would be coming to drag them to the torture ceremony. With his eyes oh the guard, Eric leaned against the rough burrow wall and began scraping the imprisoning knapsack thongs against the sharpest edges he could find. It wouldn't be fast enough, he realized. If there were only a spear point in this place, something sharp. He looked around feverishly. No, nothing. A few tumbled bags of food over which lazy roaches wandered. Nothing he could use to help him get free. His uncle was his only hope. Somehow he had to rouse the man, get through to him. He squirmed up close, his mouth against the Trap-Smasher's battered ear. "This is Eric, Eric the Only. Do you remember me. Uncle? I went on the Theft, Uncle Thomas, I went on the Theft with you. Third category. Remember, I asked for a third category theft, just like you told me to? I did my Theft, I was successful, I made it. I did just what you told me to do. I'm Eric the Eye now, right? Tell me, am I Eric the Eye?" Mutters, mumbles and moans. The man seemed beyond intelligibility. "What about Franklin? He can't do this to us, can he. Uncle Thomas? Don't you want to escape? Don't you want revenge on Franklin, on Ottilie, for what they did to your wives? Don't you? Don't you?" He had to cut through his uncle's confused mist of gathering delirium. In complete desperation, he lowered his head and sank his teeth into a wounded shoulder. N othing, just the steady flow of argumentative gibberish. And the thin blood dripping from the mouth. "I saw Arthur the Organizer. He said he'd known you for a long time. When did you meet him, Uncle Thomas? When did you first meet Arthur the Organizer?" The head drooped lower, the shoulders slumped further forward. "Tell me about Alien-science. What is Alien-science?" Eric was almost gibbering himself now in his frantic efforts to find a key that would unlock his uncle's mind. "Are Arthur the Organizer and Walter the Weapon-Seeker very important men among the Alien-sciencers? Are they the chiefs? What was the name of the structure they were hiding in? What is it to the Monsters? They talked about other tribes, tribes I never heard of. How many other tribes are there? Are these other tribes -- " That was it. He had found the key. He had gotten through. Thomas the TrapSmasher's head came up waveringly, dimness swirling in his eyes. "Other tribes. Funny that you should ask about other tribes. That you should ask." "Why? What about them?" Eric fought to hold the key in place, to keep it turning. "Why shouldn't I ask about those other tribes?" "Your grandmother was from another tribe, a real strange tribe in a faroff burrow. I remember hearing about it when I was a little boy." Thomas the TrapSmasher nodded to himself. "Your grandfather's band went on a long journey, the longest they'd ever taken. And they caught your grandmother and brought her back." "My grandmother?" For the moment, Eric forgot what was being prepared for him outside. He'd known there was some peculiar secret about his grandmother. She had rarely been mentioned in Mankind. Up to now, he'd taken it for granted that this was because she'd had a son who was terribly unlucky -- almost the worst thing a person in the burrows could be. A one-child litter, after all, and being killed together with his wife in Monster territory. Very unlucky. # fY grandmother was from another tribe? Not from Mankind?" He knew, of course, that several of the women had been captmed from other peoples in neighboring burrows and had the good fortune now to be considered full-fledged members of Mankind. Sometimes one of their own women would be lost this way, when she strayed too far down an outlying burrow and stumbled into a band of Stranger warriors. If you stole a woman from another people, after all, you stole a substantial portion of their knowledge. But he'd never imagined -- "Dora the Dream-Singer." Thomas's head waggled loosely: he dribbled words mixed with red saliva. "Did you know why your grandmother was called the Dream-Singer, Eric? The women used to say that the things she talked about happened only in dreams, and that she couldn't talk straight like other people -- she could only sing about her dreams. But she taught your father a lot, and he was like her. Women were a little afraid to mate with him. My sister was the first to take a chance -- and everyone said she deserved what she got." Abruptly, Eric became conscious of a change in the sounds outside the burrow. More quiet. Were they coming for him now? "Uncle Thomas, listen! I have an idea. Those Strangers -- Walter, Arthur the Organizer -- they gave me a Monster souvenir. I don't know what it does, but I can't get at it. I'll turn around. You try to reach down into my knapsack with the tips of your fingers and -- " The Trap-Smasher paid no atattention to him. "She was an Alien-sciencer," he rambled on, mostly to himself. "Your grandmother was the first Aliensciencer we ever had in Mankind. I guess her tribe were all Aliensciencers. Imagine -- a whole tribe of Alien-sciencers!" Eric groaned. This half-alive, delirious man was his only hope of escaping. This bloody wreck who had once been the proudest, most alert band captain of them all. He turned for another look at the guard. The man was still staring down the length of the great central burrow. There was nothing to be heard now but a terrifying silence, as if dozens of pairs of eyes were glowing in anticipation. And footsteps -- were not those footsteps? He had to find a way to make his uncle cooperate. er!" he said sharply, barely managing to keep his voice low. "Listen to me. This is an order! There's something in my knapsack, a blob of sticky stuff. We're going to turn our backs to each other, and you're going to reach in with your fingers and fish it out. Do you hear me? That's an order -- a warrior's order!" His uncle nodded, completely docile. "I've been a warrior for over twenty auld lang synes," he mumbled, twisting around. "Six of them a band captain. I've given orders and taken them, given them and taken them. I've never disobeyed an order. What I always say is how can you expect to give orders if you don't -- " "Now," Eric told him, bringing their backs together and hunching down so that his knapsack would be just under his uncle's bound arms. "Reach in. Work that mass of sticky stuff out. It's right on top. And hurry!" Yes. Those were footsteps coming up outside. Several of them. The leaders of the Female Society, the chief, an escort of warriors. And the guard, watching that deadly procession, was liable to remember his duties and turn back to the prisoners. "Hurry, " he demanded. "I told you to hurry, dammit! That's an order, too. Get it out fast. Fast!" And, all this time, as the TrapSmasher's fumbling fingers wandered about in his knapsack, as he listened with fright and impatience to the sounds of the approaching execution party -- all this time, somewhere in his mind, there was wonderment at the orders he was rapping out to an experienced band captain and the incredible authority he had managed to get into his voice. "Now you're wondering where your grandmother's tribe have their burrow," Thomas began suddenly, reverting to an earlier topic as if they were having a pleasant conversation after a fine, full meal. "Forget it! Get that stuff out. Just get it out!" "It's hard to describe," the other man's voice wandered on. "A long way off, their burrow is, a long way off. You know the Strangers call us front-burrow people. You know that, don't you? The Strangers are backburrowers. Well, your grandmother's people are the bottommost burrowers of all." Eric sensed his fingers closing in the knapsack. The three women who ruled the Female Society came into the storage burrow. Ottilie the OmenTeller, Sarah the Sickness-Healer and Rita the RecordKeeper. With them was the chief and two band captains, heavily armed. IX Wife, was in the lead. She stopped, just inside the entrance to the burrow and the others came to a halt around her. "Look at them," she jeered. "They're trying to free each other! And what do they plan to do if they get themselves untied?" Franklin moved to her side and took a long, judicious look at the two men squatting back to back. "They'll try to escape," he explained, continuing his wife's joke. "They'll have their hands free, they figure, and surely Thomas the Trap-Smasher and his nephew are a match, even bare-handed, for the best spearmen in Mankind!" And then Eric felt the searching hands come up out of the knapsack to which his own arms were tied. Something fell to the floor of the burrow. It made an odd noise, halfway between a splash and a thud. He twisted around for it immediately with his mouth open, flexing his knees in a tight crouch underneath his body. "You've never seen anything like the burrows of your grandmother's people," his uncle was mumbling, as if what his hands had just done was no concern of the rest of him. "And neither have I, though I've listened to the tales." "He won't last long now," Sarah the Sickness-Healer commented. "We'll have to have our fun with the boy." All you do, Walter the Weapon-Seeker had said, is tear off a pinch with your fingers. Then spit on it and throw it. Throw it as fast and as far as you can. He couldn't use his fingers. But he leaned down to the red blob and nipped off a piece with his teeth. He brought his tongue against the strange soft substance. lashing saliva into it. And simultaneously he kicked at the burrow floor with curved toes, straightening his legs, jerking his thighs and body upward. Unable to use his arms for balance, he tottered erect and turned, swaying, to face the leaders of his people. After you spit on it, throw it fast. As fast and as far as you can. "I don't know what he's doing," someone said, "but I don't like it. Let me through." Stephen the Strong-Armed stepped ahead of the group and lifted a heavy spear, ready for throwing. Eric shut his eyes, bent his head far back on his neck and took a deep, deep breath. Then he snapped his head forward, flipping his tongue hard against the object in his mouth. He forced out his breath so abruptly that the exhalation became a wild, barking cough. The soft little mass flew out of his mouth, and he opened his eyes to watch its course. For a moment, he was unable to find it an#Twhere; then he located it by the odd expression on Stephen's face and the fearful upward roll of his eyes. There was a little red splotch in the middle of the band captain's forehead. What was supposed to happen, he wondered? He had followed directions as well as he could under the circumstances, but he had no idea what the scarlet stain, made loose and moist by his saliva, was supposed to accomplish. He watched it, hoping and waiting. Then Stephen the StrongArmed brought his free hand up slowly to wipe the stuff off. Eric stopped hoping. Nothing was going to happen. Strangers, he had begun to think despairingly, that's what comes of trusting Strangers -- T he blast of sound was so tremendous that for a moment he thought the roof of the burrow had fallen in. He was slammed backwards against the wall and fell as if he'd been walloped with a spear haft. He remembered the cough with which he'd expelled the bit of red blob from his mouth. Had there been a delayed echo to his cough, a gigantic, earsplitting echo? He lifted his head from the floor finally, when the reverberations in the little storage burrow had rumbled into a comparative silence. Someone was screaming. Someone was screaming over and over again. It was Sarah. She was looking at Stephen the Strong-Armed from the rear. She had been standing directly behind him. Now she was staring at him and screaming in sharp steady bursts. Her mouth was open so wide that it seemed she was about to tear her jaws apart. And with each scream she lifted her arm rigidly and pointed to the back of Stephen's neck. She kept lifting her arm and pointing as if she wanted everyone present to know beyond the least doubt why and how she came to be screaming. Stephen the Strong-Armed had no head. His body ended at the neck, and flaps of skin fell down to his chest in an irregular wavy pattern. A fountain of blood bubbled and spurted where his head had been. His body still stood upright, feet planted wide apart in a good warrior's stance, one arm holding the spear ready for action and the other congealed in its upward motion to wipe the red blob away. It stood, incredibly straight and tall and alive. Suddenly, it fell apart. First the spear slid slowly forward out of the right hand and clattered to the floor. Then the arms began to fall loosely to the sagging knees and the entire great, brawny body slumped as if its bones had left it. It dropped aimlessly to the floor, an arm poking out here, a leg twisting out there, in a pattern as meaningless as if an oddly shaped bag of skin had been flung to one side of the burrow. It continued to twitch for a moment or two, as the bubbling fountain of blood turned into a sluggishly flowing river. At last it lay still, a motionless heap of limbs and torso. Of the missing head there was no trace anywhere.  stopped screaming and turned, shaking, to her companions. Their protruding eyes left the body on the floor. Then they all reacted at once. They yelled madly, wildly, fearfully, as if they were a chorus and she the conductor. Still bellowing, they made for the narrow entrance behind them. They got through in a pushing, punching scramble that at one point looked like a composite monster with dozens of arms, legs and swinging, naked breasts. They carried the guard outside with them, and with them, too, they carried their uncontrollable panic, screaming it into existence all along the great central burrow. For a little while, Eric could hear feet pounding into the distant corridors. Then there was quiet. There was quiet everywhere, except for Thomas the Trap Smasher's interminable mumbling. Eric forced himself upright again. He was unable to imagine what had happened. That red blob -- the Stranger, Walter, had said it was a weapon, but it didn't operate like any weapon he had ever in his life heard of. Except possibly in the times of the ancestors: the ancestors were sup. posed to have had things which could blow an object apart and leave no trace. But this was an alien artifact, a possession of the Monsters which Walter the Weapon Seeker had somehow found and appropriated. What was it? How had it exploded the head of Stephen the StrongArmed? That was to be worked out another time. Meanwhile, he had his chance. It might not last long: he had no idea when the panic might subside and a patrol of warriors be sent back to investigate. He stepped carefully across the red stream flowing from the fallen man's neck. Squatting down in front of the dropped spear, he managed to get a grip on it with his bound hands and rose, holding it awkwardly behind him. No time to cut his bonds. Not here. "Uncle Thomas," he called. "We can get away. We have a chance now. Come on, get up!" The wounded band captain stared up at him without comprehension. " -- corridors like you've never seen or imagined," he continued in a low monotone. "Glow lamps that aren't on foreheads. Corridors filled with glow lamps. Corridors and corridors and corridors -- " For a moment, Eric considered. The man would be a heavy liability in fast travel. But he couldn't desert him. This was his last surviving relative, the only person who didn't consider him an outlaw and a thing. And, shattered as he was, also still his captain. "Get up!" he said again. "Thomas the Trap-Smasher, get up! That's an order, a warrior's order. Get up!" As he'd hoped, his uncle responded to the old command. He managed to get his legs under his body, and strained against them, but it was no use. He didn't have the energy to rise. over his shoulder at the entrance to the storage burrow, Eric ran to the struggling man. Working backwards, he managed to get one end of the spear under the crook of his uncle's arm. Then, using his own hip as a fulcrum, he levered hard at the other end. It was painful, slippery work, since he couldn't bring all of his muscles into play and it was difficult to see what he was doing. In between efforts, he gasped out orders to "Get up, get up, get up, damn you!" At last the end of the spear went all the way down. His uncle was on his feet, staggering, but at least on his feet. Dragging the spear awkwardly, Eric urged and butted him out of the place. The great central burrow was empty of people. Weapons, p)ots and miscellaneous possessions lay strewn about where they had been dropped. The finished structure of the Stage stood deserted in front of the royal mound. And some time before, the bodies of his uncle's wives had evidently been removed. The chief and the other leaders had bolted to the left once they had clawed their way out of the storage burrow. They had apparently run past the scaffold structure and picked up the rest of Mankind in their panic. Eric turned right. His uncle was a problem. Thomas the Trap-Smasher kept coming to a bewildered halt. Again and again he began the story of his long-ago journey to the burrows of the strange, distant tribe. Eric had to push against him to keep him moving. Once they were in the outlying corridors, he felt better. But not until they had made many turns, passed dozens of branches and were well into completely uninhabited burrows, did he feel he could stop and saw himself free of his bonds on the point of the spear. He did the same for his uncle. Then, throwing the TrapSmasher's left arm across his own shoulders and clutching him tightly about the waist, he started off again. It was slow going: his uncle was a heavy man, but the more distance they could put between themselves and Mankind, the better. But distance where? Where should they go? He pondered the problem as they tottered together down the silent, branching corridors. One place was as good as another. There was nowhere that they would be welcome. Just keep going. He may have muttered his questions aloud. To his surprise, Thomas the Trap-Smasher suddenly said in an entirely coherent but very weak voice: "The doorway to Monster territory, Eric. Make for the doorway to Monster territory where you went to make your Theft." "Why?" Eric asked. "What can we do there?" There was no answer. His uncle's head fell forward on his chest. He was evidently sliding into a stupor again. And yet, somehow, as long as Eric's encircling arm pulled at his body, the man's legs kept moving forward. There was some residual stamina and a warrior's determination in him yet. Monster territory. Was there more safety for them there now than they could find among human beings? Very well then. The doorway I to Monster territory. They would have to come around in a wide arc through many corridors to get to it, but Eric knew the way. He was Eric the Eye, after all, he told i himself: it was his business alj ways to know the way... But was it? He had not en joyed the formal initiation into manhood that was the usual aftermath of a successful Theft Without that, perhaps he was still Eric  the Only, still a boy and an initiate. No, he knew what he was. He was Eric the Outlaw, nothing else. j He was an outlaw, without a ; home and a people. And, except for the dying man he pulled ' along, everyone's hand was henceforth against him. X had been badly injured in the surprise attack that had wiped out his band. Ordinarily, he would have had his wounds carefully dressed by the cleverj ness and accumulated experience of Sarah the Sickness-Healer. Under the circumstances, however, Sarah had done the reverse. Now, the strain of escape and the forced headlong flight that j followed it had emptied his body of its last resources. His eyes were glazed and his strong shoulders hung slack. He was a somnambulist walking jerkily in the direction of death. When they stopped to rest, Eric -- after listening intently for any sounds of pursuit -- had washed his uncle's wounds carefully with water from the canteens and had bound the uglier gashes with strips torn from a knapsack. It was all he knew how to do: warrior's first aid. A woman's advanced therapeutic knowledge was needed for anything more complicated. Not that it would have made very much difference by this time. The Trap-Smasher was too far gone. Eric felt desperate at the thought of being left alone forever in the dark, uninhabited corridors. He tried to force water and bits of food upon his uncle. The man's head rolled back, nourishment dribbling carelessly down from both sides of his mouth. He was breathing lightly and very rapidly. His body had grown quite warm by the time they stopped. Eric himself ate ravenously: it was his first meal in a long, long while. He kept staring at his recumbent uncle and trying to work out a line of action that would do some good. In the end, he had thought of nothing better than to hitch the man's arm up over his shoulder again and to keep going in the direction of Monster territory. Once erect, the Trap-Smasher's feet began walking again, but with a dragging, soggy quality that became more and more pronounced. After a while, Eric had to come to a halt: he had the feeling that he was hauling dead weight. When he tried to lower his uncle to the floor of the burrow, he found that the body had become almost completely limp. Thomas lay on his back, his eyes staring without curiosity at the rounded ceiling upon which his forehead glow-lamp outlined a bright circular patch. The heartbeat was very, very faint. "Eric," he heard a weak voice say. He raised his eyes from his uncle's chest and looked at the painfully working mouth. "Yes, uncle?" "I'm sorry -- about -- what I got you into. I had -- no right. Your life -- after all -- your life. You -- my wives -- the band. I led -- death -- everyone. I'm sorry." Eric fought hard to hold back his tears. "It was for a reason. Uncle Thomas," he said. "We had a cause. It wasn't just you. The cause failed." There was a hideous cackle from the prone man. For a moment, Eric thought it was a death rattle. Then he realized that it had been a laugh, but such a laugh as he had never heard before. "A cause?" the Trap-Smasher gasped. "A cause? Do you know -- do you -- know what -- the cause was? I wanted -- wanted to be chief. Chief. The only -- only way I could -- do it. -- Alien-science -- the Strangers --  -- I wanted to -- to be chief. Chiei!" He went rigid as he coughed out the last word. Then slowly, like flesh turning into liquid, he relaxed. He was dead.  time. It didn't make any difference, he found. The numbness in his mind remained. There was a great paralyzed spot in the center of his brain that was unable to think or to feel. In the end, he shook himself, bent down and grabbed the body by the shoulders. Walking backwards, he dragged it in the direction of Monster territory. Something he had to do. The duty of anyone who lived in the burrows when death occurred in his neighborhood. Now it filled time and used up energies that he might otherwise have expended in thoughts which were agonizing. The energies which it demanded were almost more than he was capable of at this point. His uncle had been a heavy, well built man. Eric found that he had to stop at the end of almost every curving corridor and get his breath back. He finally arrived at the doorway, grateful for the fact that his uncle had died so relatively close to it. He also felt he understood why this had been suggested as their destination. Thomas the Trap-Smasher had known he had little time left. His nephew would have the responsibility of sewering him. He had tried to make it as easy for Eric as possible by going the greater part of the distance on his own feet. There was a fresh-water pipe in the wall near the doorway to Monster territory. And wherever there was a fresh-water pipe, the Monsters were likely to have laid a sewer pipe nearby. It was down this, probably, that the men killed in the battle with Stephen the Strong-Armed's band had been disposed of much earlier. And it was down this that Thomas had known his remains must also go -- the closest point at which his nephew could sewer him in comparative safety. This much, at least, he had done for Eric's benefit. Eric located the fresh-water pipe without much difficulty. There was a constant low rumbling and gurgling underfoot, and at the spot where it was most pronounced -- he found the slab in the floor cut at the cost of infinite labor by some past generation of Mankind. Near it, after the slab was lifted, was another, much thicker pipe, large enough to carry two men abreast. Like the other one, the hard stuff of the burrow floor had been scraped away so that a joint lay exposed. Opening the joint was another matter. Eric had seen it done many times by his elders, but this was his own first attempt. It was a tricky business of tugging a heavy covering plate first right, then left, and getting his fingers under the rim and pulling at just the right moment. HE joint opened at last, and the incredible stink of Monster sewage poured out as the liquid swirled darkly by. Death had always been associated in Eric's mind with this stink, since the pipe carried not only the Monster's waste matter but also that of Mankind, collected from its burrows every week by the old women who were too feeble for any other work. All that was not alive or useful was carried to the nearest Monster sewer pipe, all that might decay and foul the burrows. And that included, of course, the bodies of the dead. Eric stripped his uncle's body of all useful gear as he had seen the women do many times. Then he dragged it to the hole in the burrow floor and held it by one arm for a moment as the current of the sewage caught it. He repeated as much of the ceremony as he could remember, concluding with the words: "And therefore, O ancestors, I beg you to receive the body of this member of Mankind, Thomas the TrapSmasher, a warrior of the first rank, a band captain of renown and the father of nine." There was usually another line or so -- "Take him to you and keep him with you until the time when the Monsters have been destroyed utterly and the Earth is ours again. Then shall you and he and all human beings who have ever lived rise from the sewers and joyously walk the surface of our world forever." But this, after all, was a pure Ancestor-science passage; and his uncle had died fighting Ancestorscience. What was the Alien-science equivalent? And it likely to be any more potent, any less full of falsehood? In the end, Eric omitted those last two lines. He let go of the stiffening arm. The body shot away and down the pipe. Thomas the TrapSmasher was gone, he was gone for all time, the way Eric reasoned now. He was dead and sewered, and that was that. Eric closed the joint, pulled the slab down and stamped it into place. He was completely alone. An outlaw who could expect nothing from other human beings but death by slow torture. He had no companions, no home, no beliefs of any sort. His uncle's last words still lay, in all their stern ugliness, at the bottom of his mind. "I wanted to -- to be chief." TT was bad enough to discover that the religion on which he had been raised was a mere prop to the power of the chieftainship, that the mysterious Female Society was completely unable to see into a person's future. But to find out that his uncle's thoughtful antagonism to such nonsense was based on nothing more substantial than simple personal ambition, an ambition murdersacrifice anybody who trusted him -- well, what was there left to believe in, to base a life upon? Had his father and mother been any less gullible than the most naive child in the burrows? They had sacrificed themselves -- for what? For one superstition as opposed to another, for the secret political maneuvers of this person as opposed to that. Not for him. He would be free. He laughed, bitterly and selfconsciously. He had to be free. There was no choice: he was an outlaw. Eric walked a few steps and put his hands on the door to Monster territory. To shift it out of its socket was a hard job for one man. He strained and tore his fingers; finally he managed it. The door came away and he deposited it carefully on the floor of the burrow. He stared at it for a while, trying to figure out a way of getting it back after he'd passed through the doorway. No, a single man just couldn't do that from the other side. He'd have to leave the doorway open, an incredible social crime. Well, he couldn't commit a crime any more. He was beyond all rules made by human communities. Ahead lay the glaring white light that he and his kind feared so much. Into this he would go. Here, where there were no illusions to be found and no help to be expected, here he would make his solitary outlaw home. Behind him lay the dark, safe, intricate burrows. They were tunnels, Eric knew now, in the walls that surrounded Monster territory. Men lived in these walls, and shivered, and were ignorant, and made fools of each r Qjier. He could no longer do j,ese things; he had to face the ' Monsters. He wanted to face them and destroy them. It was like one of the roaches in the storage burrow declaring war on a cook who came in to niake the evening meal for Mankind. The cook would roar with laughter at such a thought. Who knew what went on in the mind of a roach -- and who cared? Yet the roach would enjoy two special advantages. He had once and for all stopped crawling greedily and aimlessly with his own kind; and the enemy he had selected could regard him with nothing more than heavy oblivious contempt. If he could ever for a moment find one usable weapon and one vital area on which that weapon could be used... He hefted his two special advantages grimly. Then Eric the Only, the Eye, the Outlaw, Eric the Self-Aware Individual Man, stepped through the doorway into Monster territory.      Last summer we printed what we said was going to be one of the best-liked science-fiction stories of the yearJack Vance's The Dragon Masters and, by gosh, we were right; your letters were enthusiastic, and both the story and the fine Gaughan illustrations that went with it went right on to pick up best-of-the-year nominations. Next issue Vance is back with a big one called The Star King, In The Dragon Masters Vance had one world under observation; here he shows us the baroque and fascinating life of a galaxy, bright with imaginIn the same issue a complete short novel by Fritz Leiber, No Great Magic, and as much more as the type will contain. Which will be somewhat more than heretofore, by the way. Next issue will show a slight change in format -- same overall size, same number of pages, same price, but a different method of printing and a slightly more compact typewhich will make it a bigger bargain than ever. (As you know. Galaxy already contains both more pages and more actual words of science fiction per issue than any other magazine in the world.) We'll tell you one thing for sure: this issue you won't want to missi Two Great Science-Fiction Novels Author of The Humanoids, Darker Than You Think, etc. He followed her through the ages, into a strange world of the future that might never come to be... A story of courage and dazzling science-fiction adventure in a strange world inhabited by stranger people... If you missed Magabook No. I -- The Sky Is Falling and Badge of Infamy, two complete sf novels by Lester del Rey -- send # to Galaxy Publishing Co., #I Hudson St., N. Y. #, N. Y. for your information TR those who know Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Ballet only from re.cords and have never seen it staged it may be necessary to explain that there is a Mouse King on stage. It has many heads -- mouse-heads, of course -- and for that reason it doesn't have much to do. But the choreographer's problems are beside the point here, as is the fact that the ballet is based on a French rewrite of a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, he of the Tales of Hoffmann. What is to the point is that the Mouse King of the ballet was a Rat King in the original story, and that there is a little known fact of Natural History hiding behind the fantasy. Quite a number of years ago, at a Christmas party where the hostess told me that she had taken her children to see the ballet, I tried to tell that fact, but was interrupted with the remark that this was "not a nice story." I just found out that Richard Lydekker, who edited the multi-volume Library of Natural History which was published in New York in #, also did not consider it a "nice story", for while he followed his original, Dr. Alfred Brehm's Tierleben, quite faithfully, he left out the three pages of the original which deal with the Rat King. A Rat King is not a separate species. One is tempted to say "on the contrary," for it consists of a number of rats which cannot be separated. The average number of rats forming a "king" is twelve, but larger and smaller numbers have been found. The tails of the animals are intertwined in such a manner that the individuals cannot pull free. The whole thing is about two feet in diameter. All the heads point outward, naturally, since the tails are stuck together. Being handicapped in this manner, the animals are not very mobile and in a few cases a dead and dried-out "king" has been found. Evidently the rats had starved to death. But in the majority of the cases the "king" when found was still alive. It often was found because the members composing it were squealing with hunger. dismissed the Rat King as "legendary" but that seems to be due to a confusion, just as the term Rat King itself is somewhat confused -- as I'll explain shortly. There is a European legend about a "king of the rats" which is old enough to be untraceable because its roots disappear in the time before printing. But the name was known to Konrad Gesner, the great Swiss zoologist of the sixteenth century. In his book on the four-footed animals, which was printed for the first time in #, he said in his chapter on the rat -- after remarking that rats do not need to be described because "to many they are better known than is pleasing" -- that "some say that the rat, in its old age, grows enormously large so that it can no longer move around and is fed by the younger rats; it is called a Rat King by our people." This is a reference to the legend which other writers expanded, saying that the younger rats steal red cloth to drape on their king. Many a young Swiss probably gripped his stick more tightly when opening the door of a long unused barn or basement. There might be an enormous rat inside, immobile because of age and size, maybe, but still equipped with long teeth and possibly defended by faithful retainers. Of course no rat king of that kind was ever found, though it made fine material for fairy tales. But once in a while peasant lads would find the nearly immobile assembly of rats with their tails stuck together. Was that the rat king's throne? Or did the king of the rats look different from the fairy tales? In the end linguistic usage decided that it was the Rat King. Two types of rats were common in Europe. In England they are distinguished simply by the color of their fur as Black and Brown rats. The latter goes under the name of Norway Rat in some books. Zoologists know that the, incidentally larger, brown rat is a fairly late immigrant to Europe. The same is believed of the black rat, but the date of immigration was early. The first mention of the black rat can be found in the works of Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albertus Magnus, who died in #. Whether they arrived, presumably from the East, a centdry or five centuries before Albertus is something nobody knows. But the arrival of the brown rat has even been observed. The German physician Peter Simon Pallas, who explored Russia for the Court in St. Petersburg, reported that large numbers of brown rats could be seen traveling westward after an earthquake in the area of the Caspian Sea. The date was early autumn of #. The brown rat appeared in East Prussia in #, in Paris in #, in South Germany in # and in Switzerland in #. But in the meantime brown rats from the East Indies had reached England by ship in # and had traveled from England to the United States in #. The brown rat is considerably larger than the black rat, and more destructive in the same ratio. It was only a minor consolation that the first victims of the brown rat's appetite were usually the black rats. inhabitants of Denmark, Germany and Switzerland still referred to the two rats as "basement rats" and "attic rats", the smaller black rat (Mus rattus) preferring the roof area, while the larger brown rat (Mus decumanus) preferred the basements. By the end of the nineteenth century the brown rat had won out. The black rat had become rare. And the Reverend J. G. Wood, who near the end of the nineteenth century wrote a book called Animate Creation, was more than slightly wrong in writing that the "conquest had been brought about not by war but by love", thinking that in interbreeding the characteristics of the brown rat had become dominant. It had been war, plain and simple. This excursion into the history of the two kinds of rats has been necessary for a specific reason. Whatever it is that causes a dozen or so rats to become a Rat King affects the black rat only, as far as we can tell from old descriptions. It does not seem to touch the brown rat. And since the black rat has become comparatively rare the chances for forming Rat Kings have diminished too. This must be the reason why there are no recent reports. But since the majority of these reports are old how can we know that they are true? This is in itself a very valid suggestion. But fortunately we have the documents of the equivalent of a law suit involving a Rat King. On January #, #, a young man came to the district office of the government of the king of Saxony in Leipzig with a complaint. His name, he stated, was Christian Kaiser and he was employed as a helper at the windmill at Lindenau, a hamlet within walking distance from Leipzig. A week earlier he had found a live Rat King consisting of # rats whose tails were intertwined. He had shown it to his master, the miller Tobias Jaeger. The reason why he bothered the officials was to complain about one Johann Adam Fasshauer, a resident of Lindenau. Said Johann Adam Fasshauer had gone to the aforementioned miller Tobias Jaeger and persuaded him to hand over the Rat King to said Fasshauer because he wished to make a painting of it. But in reality Fasshauer had exhibited the Rat King, charging admission, and petitioner was now petitioning the officials to force said Fasshauer to return the Rat King, to hand over the money he had earned by its public exhibition and also to pay the expenses for the action of the officials. Before committing themselves on the legal steps to be taken the officials made sure that there was a Rat King. They first questioned Christian Kaiser under oath about details of the capture. He told that he was working in the mill on January #, #, when he heard a noise near a staircase and saw several rats looking out at him. Taking a piece of firewood, he killed them, and then took a ladder to see whether there might be more rats on a ledge, this time taking an axe as a weapon. There he found the Rat King. He pulled it off the ledge, using the axe so that it fell to the floor. He counted sixteen rats, fifteen of them with their tails "plaited together" and the sixteenth sticking to the back fur of one of the fifteen. Most of them survived the fall from the ledge and stayed alive for some time. But though they attempted to pull free of each other they did not succeed. was to send a doctor to Lindenau. Then the doctor wrote a protocol, saying that he had arrived in Lindenau and had been led to a room in the Posthorn Inn where he had found a Rat King consisting of sixteen dead rats. "Fifteen of them," the doctor wrote, "had their tails knotted together into a large knot in such a manner that most tails were completely in the knot except for a piece one or two inches in length near their bodies." He then examined the rats in detail, and summarized the result of his examination in the following four points: "( I ) that the bodies, heads and feet of the rats had their natural shapes, "(#) that some of them had the color of gray ashes, some were a little darker and some almost black, "(#) that they measured more than a span in length this must refer to the length of the head and body without the tail; the normal figure for a black rat is about seven inches, "(#) that the proportions of their thickness to their length indicated that they were undernourished rather than well nourished." His conclusion was that "said sixteen rats were not one organism which is called a Rat King but sixteen individual rats of different size and coloration and (in my opinion) different age and sex." As for the reason, he pointed out that there had been a cold spell prior to the discovery. He thought that the rats had huddled together for warmth but that the urine of other rats hiding at a higher level had dripped down on the interwined tails and had frozen. I am sorry that I can't report whether the officials decided that Johann Adam Fasshauer had to return the Rat King to Christian Kaiser along with the money he had earned by its exhibition. Since my source is a zoological book, the legal consequences have been neglected, but the point is that after all these legalities and investigations the authenticity of the fact involved cannot easily be doubted. The good doctor's explanation of how the Rat King came into being is admittedly weak, but we still don't know what the actual reason is. Some later investigators have offered the guess that it might be the result of a disease of some kind which is peculiar to the black rat. of Lindenau was not unique. During December, #, two Rat Kings were found by three farm hands engaged in threshing grain in the barn of the local forester. The place was the hamlet of Dollstedt, not quite ten miles from the city of Gotha. While doing their work, the men heard the squealing of rats and started a search, aided by the forester's helper. They finally found that one of the main cross beams had a six-inch-deep hollow in its topside, evidently one that the rats had gnawed. They saw that this hollow was full of rats, and they were somewhat surprised that the rats made no attempt to run away. The men pushed the rats out, and saw that one was a Rat King of # rats and the other one, one of # rats. Both sets were described as consisting of fully grown rats, quite clean but also very hungry. Strangely enough they are also described as having been very docile, which probably means that the rats were in an advanced state of weakness from hunger. After the whole village had marveled at the find, the public spectacle ended by the execution of both Rat Kings, the execution being carried out with the flails. Then two of the men took pitchforks and tried to pry the bodies of the smaller assembly apart After much effort they succeeded in pulling out a few of the rats. The forester himself looked at them and wrote down that the tails had not been torn off in the process and even had their skin, but they "showed the impressions of the other tails, just like leather straps that had been plaited together for a long time." A later case has the advantage of having been examined by a man with scientific knowledge. The Rat King was found on February #, # by a drayman in a room of the abattoir of the cityof Diisseldorf. It was a room which was used for the storage of skins and which was, for this reason, not much frequented by people. The Rat King consisted of eight black rats, of which one was killed when it was discovered. The other seven lived for some time. A Mr. Wilhelm Deckers acquired it and went to a taxidermist to have it preserved. The taxidermist, naturally, cleaned it up so that one cannot tell whethei the intertwined tails were also held together by anything that might act like glue. After Mr. Deckers died, the specimen was donated to the local High School and examined by the school's science teacher. Prof. Ahrend. Ahrend wrote that "Guntermann the taxidermist had cleaned the tails of the animals carefully so that only their intertwined positions were preserved... but just looking at the intertwined tails makes it clear that even the smallest amount of a sticky substance would render the animals inseparable." The latest case which I could find in a quick survey was reported by the German zoologist Dr. Ludwig Heck, who later became the director of the Zoological Garden in Berlin. It refers to a Rat King found in January, #, in the village of Capelle, near Hamm in Westphalia. The local pastor, Wigger by name, informed the zoologist Reeker, who tried to acquire it for the Provincial Museum of Westphalia. But before Reeker could move, the Zoological Institute of the University of Gottingen had secured it for its own collection. It consisted of ten specimens of the black rat. The director of the Zoological Institute, Privy Councillor Ehlers, wrote to Dr. Heck in reply to a question that he could not explain how such a thing could have happened and that the rat's tails do not show any visible pathological changes. And he added that the Institute's taxidermist considered it impossible that this Rat King might have been made by some pranksters. Well, this is the story. All the cases have two things in common. It is always the black Mus ratius which produces a Rat King, and they have all been found during the coldest time of the year, in weather which would .make the animals huddle together for warmth. Gripping complete short science-fiction novel by Keith Laumer -- along with stories by Judith Merril, Philip K. Dick and many others -- F He sought help and a great gift of weaponry. What he found -- but could not keep -- was level  climbed up through the crevasses of a cliff of gems; the force which drove him was the love of man. Consider Mizzer, the resort planet, where the dictator Colonel Wedder reformed the culture so violently that whatever had been slovenly now became atrocious. Consider Genevieve, so rich that she was the prisoner of her own wealth, so beautiful that she was the victim of her own beauty, so intelligent that she knew there was nothing, nothing to be done about her fate. Consider Casher O'Neill, a wanderer among the planets, thirsting for justice and yet hoping in his innermost thoughts that "justice" was not just another word for revenge. Consider Pontoppidan, that literal gem of a planet, where the people were too rich and busy to have good food, open air or much fun. All they had was diamonds, rubies, tourmalines and emeralds. Add these together and you have one of the strangest stories ever told from world to world. I  Pontoppidan, he found that the capital city was appropriately called Andersen. This was the second century of the Rediscovery of Man. People everywhere had taken up old names, old languages, old customs, as fast as the robots and the underpeople could retrieve the data from the rubbish of forgotten starlanes or the subsurface ruins of Manhome itself. Casher knew this very well, to his bitter cost. Re-acculturation had brought him revolution and exile. He came from, the dry, beautiful planet of Mizzer. He was himself the nephew of the ruined ex-ruler, Kuraf, whose collection of objectionable books had at one time been unmatched in the settled galaxy; he had stood aside, half-assenting, when the colonels Gibna and Wedder took over the planet in the name of reform; he had implored the Instrumentality, vainly, for help when Wedder became a tyrant; and now he traveled among the stars, looking for men or weapons who might destroy Wedder and make Kaheer again the luxurious, happy city which it once had been. He felt that his cause was hopeless when he landed on Pontoppidan. The people were warmhearted, friendly, intelligent, but they had no motives to fight for, no weapons to fight with, no enemies to fight against. They had little public spirit, such as Casher O'Neill had seen back on his native planet of Mizzer. They were concerned about little things. Indeed, at the time of his arrival, the Pontoppidans were wildly excited about a horse. A horse! Who worries about one horse? Casher O'Neill himself said so. "Why bother about a horse? We have lots of them on Mizzer. They are four-handed beings, eight times the weight of a man, with only one finger on each of the four hands. The fingernail is very heavy and permits them to run fast. That's why our people have them, for running." "Why run?" said the Hereditary Dictator of Pontoppidan, "Why ruri, when you can fly? Don't you have ornithopters?" "We don't run with them," said Casher indignantly. "We make them run against each other and then we pay prizes to the one which runs fastest." cent, the Hereditary Dictator, "you get a very illogical situation. When you have tried out these four-fingered beings, you know how fast each one goes. So what? Why bother?" His niece interrupted. She was a fragile little thing, smaller than Casher O'Neill liked women to be. She had clear gray eyes, wellmarked eyebrows, a very artificial coiffeur of silver-blonde hair and the most sensitive little mouth he had ever seen. She conformed to the local fashion by wearing some kind of powder or face cream which was flesh-pink in color but which had overtones of lilac. On a woman as old as twenty-two, such a coloration would have made the wearer look like an old hag, but on Genevieve it was pleasant, if rather startling. It gave the effect of a happy child playing grown-up and doing the job joyfully and well. Casher knew that it was hard to tell ages in these off-trail planets. Genevieve might be' a grand dame in her third or fourth rejuvenation. He doubted it, on second glance. What she said was sensible, young, and pert: "But uncle, they're animalsl" "I know that," he rumbled. "But uncle, don't you see it?" "Stop saying 'but uncle' and tell me what you mean," growled the Dictator, very fondly. "Animals are always uncertain." "Of course," said the uncle. "That makes it a game, uncle," said Genevieve. "They're never sure that any one of them would do the same thing twice. Imagine the excitement -- the beautiful big beings from earth running around and around on their four middle fingers, the big fingernails making the gems jump loose from the ground!" "I'm not at all sure it's that way. Besides, Mizzer may be covered with something valuable, such as earth or sand, instead of gemstones like the ones we have here on Pontoppidan. You know your flower-pots with their rich, warm, wet, soft earth?" "Of course I do, uncle. And I know what you paid for them. You were very generous. And still are," she added diplomatically, glancing quickly at Casher O'Neill to see how the familial piety went across with the visitor. "We're not that rich on Mizzer. It's mostly sand, with farmland along the Twelve Niles, our big rivers." "I've seen pictures of rivers," said Genevieve. "Imagine living on a whole world full of flowerpot stuff!" "You're getting off the subject, darling. We were wondering why anyone would bring one horse, just one horse, to Pontoppidan. I suppose you could race a horse against himself, if you had a stopwatch. But would it be fun? Would you do that, young man?" Casher O'Neill tried to be respectful. "In my home we used to have a lot of horses. I've seen my uncle time them one by one." "Your uncle?" said the Dictator interestedly. "Who was your uncle that he had all these fourfingered 'horses' running around? They're all Earth animals and very expensive." low, slow blow he had met so many times before, right from the whole outside world into the pit of his stomach. "My uncle -- " he stammered -- "my uncle -- I thought you knew -- was the old Dictator of Mizzer, Kuraf." Philip Vincent jumped to his feet, very lightly for so wellfleshed a man. The young mistress, Genevieve, clutched at the throat of her dress. "Kuraf!" cried the old Dictator. "Kuraf! We know about him, even here. But you were supposed to be a Mizzer patriot, not one of Kuraf's people." "He doesn't have any children -- " Casher began to explain. "I should think not, not with those habits!" snapped the old man. " -- so I'm his nephew and his heir. But I'm not trying to put the Dictatorship back, even though I should be dictator. I just want to get rid of Colonel Wedder. He has ruined my people, and I am looking for money or weapons or help to make my home-world free." This was the point, Casher O'Neill knew, at which people either started believing him or did not. If they did not, there was not much he could do about it. If they did, he was sure to get some sympathy. So far, no help. Just sympathy. But the Instrumentality, while refusing to take action against Colonel Wedder, had given young Casher O'Neill an all-world travel pass -- something which a hundred lifetimes of savings could not have purchased for the ordinary man. (His obscene old uncle had gone off to Sunvale, on Ttiolle, the resort planet, to live out his years between the casiho and the beach.) Casher O'Neill held the conscience of Mizzer in his hand. Only he, among the star travelers, cared enough to fight for the freedom of the Twelve Niles. Here, now, in this room, there was a turning point. "I won't give you anything," said the Hereditary Dictator, but he said it in a friendly voice. His niece started tugging at his sleeve. The older man went on. "Stop it, girl. I won't give you anything, not if you're part of that rotten lot of Kuraf's, not unless -- " "Anything, sir, anything, just so that I get help or weapons to go home to the Twelve Niles!" "All right, then. Unless you open your mind to me. I'm a good telepath myself." "Open my mind! Whatever for?" The incongruous indecency of it shocked Casher O'Neill. He'd had men and women and governments ask a lot of strange things from him, but no one before had had the cold impudence to ask him to open his mind. "And why you?" he went on, "What would you get out of it? There's nothing much in my mind." "To make sure," said the Hereditary Dictator, "that you are not too honest and sharp in your beliefs. If you're positive that you know what to do, you might be another Colonel Wedder, putting y#ur people through a dozen torments for a Utopia which never quite comes true. If you don't care at all, you might be like your uncle. He did no real harm. He just stole his planet blind and he had some extraordinary habits which got him talked about between the stars. He never killed a man in his life, did he?" "No, sir," said Casher O'Neill, "he never did." It relieved him to tell the one little good thing about his uncle; there was so very, very little which could be said in Kuraf's favor. "I don't like slobbering old libertines like your uncle," said Philip Vincent, "but I don't hate them either. They don't hurt other people much. As a matter of actual fact, they don't hurt anyone but themselves. They waste property, though. Like these horses you have on Mizzer. We'd never bring living beings to this world of Pontoppidan, just to play games with. And you know we're not poor. We're no Old North Australia, but we have a good income here." That, thought Casher O'Neill, is the understatement of the year, but he was a careful young man with a great deal at stake, so he said nothing. The Dictator looked at him shrewdly. He appreciated the value of Casher's tactful silence. Genevieve tugged at his sleeve, but he frowned her interruption away. i#TF," said the Hereditary Dictator, "if," he repeated, "you pass two tests, I will give you a green ruby as big as my head. If my Committee will allow me to do so. But I think I can talk them around. One test is that you let me peep all over your mind, to make sure that I am not dealing with one more honest fool. If you're too honest, you're a fool and a danger .to mankind. I'll give you a dinner and ship you off-planet as fast as I can. And the other test is -- solve the puzzle of this horse. The one horse on Pontoppidan. Why is the animal here? What should we do with it? If it's good to eat, how should we cook it? Or can we trade to some other world, like your planet Mizzer, which seems to set a value on horses?" "Thank you, sir -- " said Casher O'Neill. "But, uncle -- " said Genevieve. "Keep quiet, my darling, and let the young man speak," said the Dictator. " -- all I was going to ask, is," said Casher O'Neill, "what's a green ruby good for? I didn't even know they came green." "That, young man, is a Pontoppidan specialty. We have a geology based on ultra-heavy chemistry. This planet was once a fragment from a giant planet which imploded. The use is simple. With a green ruby you can make a laser beam which will boil away your city of Kaheer in a single sweep. We don't have weapons here and we don't believe in them, so I won't give you a weapon. You'll have to travel further to find a ship and to get the apparatus for mounting your green ruby. If I give it to you. But you will be one more step along in your fight with Colonel Wedder." "Thank you, thank you, most honorable sir!" cried Casher O'Neill. "But uncle," said Genevieve, "you shouldn't have picked those two things because I know the answers." "You know all about him," said the Hereditary Dictator, "by some means of your own?" Genevieve flushed under her lilac-hued foundation cream. "I know enough for us to know." "How do you know it, my darling?" "I just know," said Genevieve. Her uncle made no comment. but he smiled widely and indul. gently as if he had heard that particular phrase before. She stamped her foot. "And I know about the horse, too. All about it." "Have you seen it?" "No." "Have you talked to it?" "Horses don't talk, uncle." "Most underpeople do," he said. "This isn't an underperson, uncle. It's a plain unmodified old Earth animal. It never did talk." "Then what do you know, my honey?" The uncle was affectionate, but there was the crackle of impatience under his voice. "I taped it. The whole thing. The story of the horse of Pontoppidan. And I've edited it, too. I was going to show it to you this morning, but your staff sent that young man in." Casher O'Neill looked his apologies at Genevieve. She did not notice him. Her eyes were on her uncle. "Since you've done this much, we might as well see it." He turned to the attendants. "Bring chairs. And drinks. You know mine. The young lady will take tea with lemon. Real tea. Will you have coffee, young man?" "You have coffee!" cried Casher O'Neill. As soon as he said it, he felt like a fool. Pontoppidan was a rich planet. On most worlds' exchanges, coffee came to about two man-years per jilo. Here halftracks crunched tjieir way through gems as they ent to load up the frequent trading vessels. The chairs were put in place. The drinks arrived. The Hereditary Dictator had been momentarily lost in a brown study, as though he were wondering about (jis promise to Casher O'Neill. He had even murmured to the young man, "Our bargain stands? Never mind what my niece says." Casher had nodded vigorously. The old man had gone back to frowning at the servants and did not relax until a tiger-man bounded into the room, carrying a tray with acrobatic precision. The chairs were already in place. The father held his niece's chair for her as a command that she sit down. He nodded Casher O'Neill into a chair on the other side of himself. He commanded, "Dim the lights..." The room plunged into semidarkness. Without being told, the people took their places immediately behind the three main seats and the underpeople perched or sat on benches and tables behind them. Very little was spoken. Casher O'Neill could sense that Pontoppidan was a well-run place. He began to wonder if the Hereditary Dictator had much real work left to do, if he could fuss that much over a single horse. Perhaps all he did was boss his niece and watch the robots load truckloads of gems into sacks while the underpeople weighed them, listed them and wrote out the bills for the customers. II was a good machine. The planet Pontoppidan came into view, its airless brightness giving strong hints of the mineral riches which might be found. Here and there enormous domes, such as the one in which this palace was located, came into view. Genvieve's own voice, girlish, impulsive and yet didactic, rang out with the story of her planet. It was as though she had prepared the picture not only for her own father, but for off-world visitors as well. (By Joan, that's it! thought Casher O'Neill. If they don't raise much food here, outside of the hydroponics, and don't have any real People Places, they have to trade: that does mean visitors, and many, many of them.) The story was interesting but the girl herself was more interesting. Her face shone in the shifting light which the images -- a meter, perhaps a little more, ' # from the floor -- reflected across the room. Casher O'Neill thought that he had never before seen a woman who so peculiarly combined intelligence and charm. She was girl, girl, girl, all the way through; but she was also very smart and pleased with being smart. It betokened a happy life. He found himself glancing covertly at her. Once he caught her glancing, equally covertly, at him. The darkness of the scene enabled them both to pass it off as an accident without embarrassment. Her viewtape had come to the story of the dipsies, enormous canyons which lay like deep gashes on the surface of the planet. Some of the color views were spectacular beyond belief. Casher O'Neill, as the "appointed one" of Mizzer, had had plenty of time to wander through the nonsalacious parts of his uncle's collections, and he had seen pictures of the most notable worlds. Never had he seen anything like this. One view showed a sunset against a six-kilometer cliff of a material which looked like solid emerald. The peculiar bright sunshine of Pontoppidan's small, penetrating, lilac-hued sun ran like living water over the precipice of gems. Even the reduced image, one meter by one meter, was enough to make him catch his breath. The bottom of the dipsy had! vapor emerging in curious cylindrical columns which seemed to erode as they reached two or three times the height of a man. The recorded voice of Genevieve was explaining that the very thin atmosphere of Pontoppidan would not be breathable for another # years, since the settlers did not wish to squander their resources on a luxury like breathing when the whole planet only had # inhabitants; they would rather go on with masks and use their wealth in other ways. After all, it was not as though they did not have their domed cities, some of them many kilometers in radius. Besides the usual hydroponics, they had even imported # hectares of garden soil, # centimeters deep, together with enough water to make the gardens rich and fruitful. They had bought worms, too, at the price of eight carats of diamond per living worm, in order to keep the soil of the gardens loose and living. Genevieve's transcribed voice rang out with pride as she listed these accomplishments of her people, but a note of sadness came in when she returned to the subject of the dipsies. "... and though we would like to live in them and develop their atmospheres, we dare not. There is too much escap)e of radioactivity. The geysers themselves may or ffiay not be contaminated from one hour to the next. So we just look at them. Not one of them has ever been settled, except for the Hippy Dipsy, where the horse came from. Watch this next picture. The camera sheered up, up, up from the surface of the planet. VVhere it had wandered among mountains of diamonds and valleys of tourmalines, it now took to the blue-black of near, inner space. One of the canyons showed (from high altitude) the grotesque pattern of a human woman's hips and legs, though what might have been the upper body was lost in a confusion of broken hills which ended in a bright almostiridescent plain to the North. "That," said the real Genevieve, overriding her own voice on the screen, "is the Hippy Dipsy. There, see the blue? That's the only lake on all of Pontoppidan. And here we drop to the hermit's house."  vertigo as the camera plummeted from off-planet into the depths of that immense canyon. The edges of the canyon almost seemed to move like lips with the plunge, opening and folding inward to swallow him up. Suddenly they were beside a beautiful little lake. A small hut stood beside the shore. In the doorway there sat a man, dead. His body had been there a long time; it was already mummified. Genevieve's recorded voice explained the matter: "... in Norstrilian law and custom, they told him that his time had come. They told him to go to the Dying House, since he was no longer fit to live. In Old North Australia, they are so rich that they let everyone live as long as he wants, unless the old person can't take rejuvenation any more, even with stroon, and unless he or she gets to be a real pest to the living. If that happens, they are invited to go to the Dying House, where they shriek and pant with delirious joy for weeks or days until they finally die of an overload of sheer happiness and excitement..." There was a hesitation, even in the recording. "We never knew why this man refused. He stood off-planet and said that he had seen views of the Hippy Dipsy. He said it was the most beautiful place on all the worlds, and that he wanted to build a cabin there, to live alone, except for his nonhuman friend. We thought it was some small pet. When we told him that the Hippy Dipsy was very dangerous, he said that this did not matter in the least to him, since he was old and dying anyhow. Then he offered to pay us twelve times our planetary income if we would lease him twelve hectares on the condition of absolute privacy. No pictures, no scanners, no help, no visitors. Just solitude and scenery. His name was Perino. My greatgrandfather asked for nothing more, except the written transfer of credit. When he paid it, Perino even asked that he be left alone after he was dead. Not even a vault rocket so that he could either orbit Pontoppidan forever or start a very slow journey to nowhere, the way so many people like it. So this is our first picture of him. We took it when the light went off in the People Room and one of the tiger-men told us that he was sure a human consciousness had come to an end in the Hippy Dipsy. "And we never even thought of the pet. After all, we had never made a picture of him. This is the way he arrived from Perino's shack." trol room, calling excitedly in the old Common Tongue. "People, people! Judgment needed! Moving object coming out of the Hippy Dipsy. Object has improper shape. Not a correct object. Should not rise. Does so anyhow. People, tell me, Feople, tell me! Destroy or not destroy? This is an improper object. It should fall, not rise. Coming out of the Hippy Dipsy." A firm click shut off the robot's chatter. A well-shaped woman took over. From the nature of her work and the lithe, smooth tread with which she walked, Casher O'Neill suspected that she was of cat origin, but there was nothing in her dress or in her manner to show that she was underpeople. The woman in the picture . lighted a screen. She moved her hands in the air in front of her, like a blind person feeling his way through open day. The picture on the inner screen came to resolution. A face showed in it. What a face! thought Casher O'Neill, and he heard the other people around him in the viewing room. The horse! Imagine a face like that of a newborn cat, thought Casher. Mizzer is full of cats. But imagine the face with a huge mouth, with big yellow teeth -- a nose long beyond imagination. Imagine eyes which look friendly. In the picture they were rolling back and forth with exertion, but even there -- when they did not feel observed -- there was nothing hostile about the set of the eyes. They were tame, companionable eyes. Two ridiculous ears stood high, and a little tuft of golden hair showed on the crest of the head between the ears. The viewed scene was comical, too. The cat-woman was as astonished as the viewers. It was lucky that she had touched the emergency switch, so that she not only saw the horse, but had recorded herself and her own actions while bringing him into view. Genevieve whispered across the chest of the Hereditary Dictator: "Later we found he was a palomino pony. That's a very special kind of horse. And Perino had made him immortal, or almost immortal." "Sh-h!" said her uncle. The screen-within-the-screen showed the cat-woman waving her hands in the air some more. The view broadened. The horse had four hands and no legs, or four legs and no hands, whichever way you want to count them. The horse was fighting his way up a narrow cleft of rubies which led out of the Hippy Dipsy. He panted heavily. The oxygen bottles on his sides swung wildly as he clambered. He must have seen something, perhaps the image of the cat-woman, because he said a word: W hay-yay-yay-yay-whay-yay! The cat-woman in the nearer picture spoke very distinctly : "Give your name, age, species and authority for being on this planet." She spoke clearly and with the utmost possible authority. The horse obviously heard her. His ears tipped forward. But his reply was the same as before: W hay-yay-yay! Casher O'Neill realized that he had followed the mood of the picture and had seen the horse the way that the people on Pontoppidan woud have seen him. On second thought, the horse was nothing special, by the standards of the Twelve Niles or the Little Horse Market in the city of Kaheer. It was an old pony stallion, no longer fit for breeding and probably not for riding either. The hair had whitened among the gold; the teeth were worn. The animal showed many injuries and burns. Its only use was to be killed, cut up and fed to the racing dogs. But he said nothing to the people around him. They were still spellbound by the picture. The cat-woman repeated: "Your name isn't Whayayay. Identify yourself properly; name first." The horse answered her with the same word in a higher key. Apparently forgetting that she had recorded herself as well as the emergency screen, the catwoman said, "I'll call real people if you don't answer! They'll be annoyed at being bothered." The horse rolled his eyes at her and said nothing. The cat-woman pressed an emergency button on the side of the room. One could not see the other communication screen which lighted up, but her end of the conversation was plain. "I want an ornithopter. Big one. Emergency." A mumble from the side screen. "To go to the Hippy Dipsy. There's an underperson there, and he's in so much trouble that he won't talk." From the screen beside her, the horse seemed to have understood the sense of the message, if not the words, because he repeated: W hay-yay-whay-yay-yay! "See," said the cat-woman to the person in the other screen, "that's what he's doing. It's obviously an emergency." The voice from the other screen came through, tinny and remote by double recording: "Fool, yourself, cat-woman! Nobody can fly an ornithopter into a dipsy. Tell your silly friend to go back to the floor of the dipsy and we'll pick him up by space rocket." Whay-yay-yay! said the horse impatiently. "He's not my friend, " said the cat-woman with brisk annoyance. "I just discovered him a couple of minutes ago. He's asking for help. Any idiot can see that, even if we don't know his language." The picture snapped off.  I 'HE next scene showed tiny human figures working with searchlights at the top of an inimeasurably high cliff. Here and there, the beam of the searchlight caught the cliff face; the translucent faceted material of the cliff looked almost like rows of eerie windows, their lights snapping on and off, as the searchlight moved. Far down there was a red glow. Fire came from inside the mountain. Even with telescopic lenses the cameraman could not get the close-up of the glow. On one side there was the figure of the hors; his four arms stretched at impossible angles as he held himself firm in the crevasse; on the other side of the fire there were the even tinier figures of men, laboring to fit some sort of sling to reach the horse. For some odd reason having to do with the techniques of recording, the voices came through very plainly, even the heavy, tired breathing of the old horse. Now and then he uttered one of the special horse-words which seemed to be the limit of his vocabulary. He was obviously watching the men, and was firmly persuaded of their friendliness to him. His large, tame, yellow eyes rolled wildly in the light of the searchlight and every time the horse looked down, he seemed to shudder. Casher O'Neill found this entirely understandable. The bottom of the Hippy Dipsy was nowhere in sight; the horse, even with nothing more than the enlarged fingernails of his middle fingers to help him climb, had managed to get about four of the six kilometers' height of the cliff face behind him. The voice of a tiger-man sounded clearly from among the shift of men, underpeople and robots who were struggling on the face of the cliff. "It's a gamble, but not much of a gamble. I weigh six hundred kilos myself, and, do you know, I don't think I've ever had to use my full strength since I was a kitten. I know that I can jump across the fire and help that thing be more comfortable. I can even tie a rope around him so that he won't slip and fall after all the work we've done. And the work he's done, too," added the tigerman grimly. "Perhaps I can just take him in my arms and jump back with him. It will be perfectly safe if you have a safety rope around each of us. After all, I never saw a less prehensile creature in my life. You can't call those fingers of his 'fingers.' They look like little boxes of bone, de. signed for running around and not much good for anything else." There was a murmur of other voices and then the command of the supervisor. "Go ahead." No one was prepared for what happened next. The cameraman got the tigerman right in the middle of his frame, showing the attachment of one rope around the tiger-man's broad waist. The tiger-man was a modified type whom the authorities had not bothered to put into human cosmetic form. He still had his ears on top of his head, yellow and black fur over his face, huge incisors overlapping his lower jaw and enormous antenna-like whiskers sticking out from his moustache. He must have been thoroughly modified inside, however, because his temperament was calm, friendly and even a little humorous; he must have had a carefully re-done mouth, because the utterance of human speech came to him clearly and without distortion. He jumped -- a mighty jump, right through the top edges of the flame. The horse saw him. The horse jumpjed too, almost in the same moment, also through the top of the flame, going the other way. The horse had feared the tigerman more than he did the cliff. The horse landed right in the group of workers. He tried not to hurt them with his flailing limbs, but he did knock one man -- a true man, at that -- off the cliff. The man's scream faded as he crashed into the impenetrable darkness below. The robots were quick. Having no emotions except on, off, and hih, they did not get excited. They had the horse trussed and, before the true men and underpeople had ensured their footing, they had signaled the crane operator at the top of the cliff. The horse, his four arms swinging limply, disappeared upward. The tiger-man jumped back through the flames to the nearer ledge. The picture went off. In the viewing room, the Hereditary Dictator Philip Vincent stood up. He stretched, looking around. Genevieve looked at Casher O'Neill expectantly. "That's the story," said the Dictator mildly. "Now you solve it." "Where is the horse now?" said Casher O'Neill. "In the hospital, of course. My niece can take you to see him." Ill very thorough peeping of his own mind by the Hereditary Dictator, Casher O'Neill and Genevieve set off for the hospital in which the horse was being kept in bed. The people of Pontoppidan had not known what else to do with him, so they had placed him under strong sedation and were trying to feed him with sugar-water compounds going directly into his veins. Genevieve told Casher that the horse was wasting away. They walked to the hospital over amethyst pebbles. Instead of wearing his spacesuit, Casher wore a surface helmet which enriched his oxygen. His hosts had not counted on his getting spells of uncontrollable itching from the sharply reduced atmospheric pressure. He did not dare mention the matter, because he was still hoping to get the green ruby as a weapon in his private war for the liberation of the Twelve Niles from the rule of Colonel Wedder. Whenever the itching became less than excruciating, he enjoyed the walk and the company of the slight, beautiful girl who accompanied him across the fields of jewels to the hospital. (In later years, he sometimes wondered what might have happened. Was the itching a part of his destiny, which saved him for the freedom of the city of Kaheer and the planet Mizzer? loveliness of the girl have otherwise tempted him to forswear his duty and stay forever on Pontoppidan? ) The girl wore a new kind of cosmetic for outdoor walking -- a warm peachhued powder which let the natural pink of her cheeks show through. Her eyes, he saw, were a living, deep gray; her eyelashes, long; her smile, innocently provocative beyond all ordinary belief. It was a wonder that the Hereditary Dictator had not had to stop duels and murders between young men vying for her favor. They finally reached the hospital, just as Casher O'Neill thought he could stand it no longer and would have to ask Genevieve for some kind of help or carriage to get indoors and away from the frightful itching. The building was underground. The entrance was sumptuous. Diamonds and rubies, the size of building-bricks on Mizzer, had been set to frame the doorway, which was apparently enameled steel. Kuraf at his most lavish had never wasted money on anything like this door-frame. Genevieve saw his glance. "It did cost a lot of credits. We had to bring a blind artist all the way from Olympia to paint that enamel-work. The poor man. He spent most of his time trying to steal extra gem-stones when he should have known that we pay justly and never allow anyone to get away with stealing." "What do you do?" asked Casher O'Neill. "We cut thieves up in space, just at the edge of the atmosphere. We have more manned boats in orbit than any other planet I know of. Maybe Old North Australia has more, but, then, nobody ever gets close enough to Old North Australia to come back alive and tell." They went on into the hospital. insisted on keeping them in the office and entertaining them with tea and confectionery, when they both wanted to go see the horse; common politeness prohibited their pushing through. Finally they got past the ceremony and into the room in which the horse was kept. Close up, they could see how much he had suffered. There were cuts and abrasures over almost all of his body. One of his hooves -- the doctor told them that was the correct name, hoof, for the big middle fingernail on which he walked -- was split; the doctor had put a cadmium-silver bar through it. The horse lifted his head when they entered, but he saw that they were just more people, not horsey people, so he put his head down, very patiently. "What's the prospect, doctor?" asked Casher O'Neill, turning away from the animal. "Could I ask you, sir, a foolish question first?" Surprised, Casher could only say yes. "You're an O'Neill. Your uncle is Kuraf. How do you happen to be called 'Casher'?" "That's simple," laughed Casher. "This is my young-man-name. On Mizzer, everybody gets a baby name, which nobody uses. Then he gets a nickname. Then he gets a young-man-name, based on some characteristic or some friendly joke, until he picks out his career. When he enters his profession, he picks out his own career name. If I liberate Mizzer and overthrow Colonel Wedder, I'll have to think up a suitable career name for myself." "But why 'Casher,' sir?" persisted the doctor. "When I was a little boy and people asked me what I wanted, I always asked for cash. I guess that contrasted with my uncle's wastefulness, so they called me Casher." "But what is cash? One of your crops?" It was Casher's time to look amazed. "Cash is money. Paper credits. People pass them back and forth when they buy things." "Here on Pontoppidan, all the money belongs to me. All of it," said Genevieve. "My uncle is trustee for me. But I have never been allowed to touch it or to spend it. It's all just planet business." The doctor blinked respectfully. "Now this horse, sir, if you will pardon my asking about your name, is a very strange case. Physiologically he is a pure earth type. He is suited only for a vegetable diet, but otherwise he is a very close relative of man. He has a single stomach and a very large cone-shaped heart. That's where the trouble is. The heart is in bad condition. He is dying." "Dying?" cried Genevieve. "That's the sad, horrible part," said the doctor. "He is dying but he cannot die. He could go on like this for many years. Perino wasted enough stroon on this animal to make a planet immortal. Now the animal is worn out but cannot die." Casher O'Neill let out a long, low, ululating whistle. Everybody in the room jumped. He disregarded them. It was the whistle he had used near the stables, back among the Twelve Niles, when he wanted to call a horse. The horse knew it. The large head lifted. The eyes rolled at him so imploringly that he expected tears to fall from them, even though he was pretty sure that horses could not lachrymate. He squatted on the floor, close to the horse's head, with a hand on its mane. "Quick," he murmured to the surgeon. "Gret me a piece of sugar and an underperson-telepath. The underperson-telepath must not be of carnivorous origin." I 'HE doctor looked stupid. He snapped "Sugar" at an assistant but he squatted down next to Casher O'Neill and said, "You will have to repeat that about an underperson. This is not an underperson hospital at all. We have very few of them here. The horse is here only by command of His Excellency Philip 'Vincent, who said that the horse of Perino should be given the best of all possible care. He even told me," said the doctor, "that if anything wrong happened to this horse, I would ride patrol for it for the next eighty years. So I'll do what I can. Do you find me too talkative? Some people do. What kind of an underperson do you want?" "I need," said Casher, very calmly, "a telepathic underperson, both to find out what this horse wants and to tell the horse that I am here to help him. Horses are vegetarians and they do not like meat-eaters. Do you have a vegetarian underperson around the hospital?" "We used to have some squirrel-men," said the chief surgeon, "but when we changed the air circulating system the squirrel, men went away with the old equipment. I think they went to a mine. We have tiger-men, catmen, and my secretary is a wolf." "Oh, no!" said Casher O'Neill. "Can you imagine a sick horse confiding in a wolf?" "It's no more than you are doing," said the surgeon, very softly, glancing up to see if Genevieve were in hearing range, and apparently judging that she was not. "The Hereditary Dictators here sometimes cut suspicious guests to pieces on their way off the planet. That is, unless the guests are licensed, regular traders. You are not. You might be a spy, planning to rob us. How do I know? I wouldn't give a diamond chip for your chances of being alive next week. What do you want to do about the horse? That might please the Dictator. And you might live." Casher O'Neill was so staggered by the confidence of the surgeon that he squatted there thinking about himself, not about the patient. The horse licked him, seemingly sensing that he needed solace. The surgeon had an idea. "Horses and dogs used to go together, didn't they, back in the old days of Manhome, when all the people lived on planet Earth?" "Of course," said Casher. "We no still run them together in hunts on Mizzer, but under these new laws of the Instrumentality we've run out of underpieople-criminals to hunt." "I have a good dog," said the chief surgeon. "She talks pretty well, but she is so sympathetic that she upsets the patients by loving them too much. I have her down in the second underbasement tending the dish-sterilizing machinery." "Bring her up," said Casher in a whisper. He remembered that he did not need to whisper about this, so he stood up and spoke to Genevieve : "They have found a good dogtelepath who may reach through to the mind of the horse. It may give us the answer." She put her hand on his forearm gently, with the approbatory gesture of a princess. Her fingers dug into his flesh. Was she wishing him well against her uncle's habitual treachery, or was this merely the impulse of a kind young girl who knew nothing of the way the world was run? IV T he interview went extremely well. The dog-woman was almost perfectly humaniform. She looked like a tired, cheerful, worn-out old woman, not valuable enough to be given the life-prolonging santaclara drug called stroon. Work had been her life and she had had plenty of it. Casher 'O'Neill felt a twinge of envy when he realized that happiness goes by the petty chances of life and not by the large destiny. This dog-woman, with her haggard face and her stringy gray hair, had more love, happiness and sympathy than Kuraf had found with his pleasures. Colonel Wedder with his powers, or himself with his crusade. Why did life do that? Was there no justice, ever? Why should a worn-out worthless old underwoman be happy when he was not? "Never mind," she said, "you'll get over it and then you will be happy." "Over what?" he said. "I didn't say anything." "I'm not going to say it," she retorted, meaning that she was telepathic. "You're a prisoner of yourself. Some day you will escape to unimportance and happiness. You're a good man. You're trying to save yourself, but you really like this horse." "Of course I do," said Casher O'Neill. "He's a brave old horse, climbing out of that hell to get back to people." When he said the word hell her eyes widened, but she said nothing. In his mind, he saw the sign of a fish scrawled on a dark wall and he felt her think at him, So you too know something of the "dark wonderful knowledge" which is not yet to be revealed to all mankind? He thought a cross back at her and then turned his thinking to the horse, lest their telepathy be monitored and strange punishments await them both. She spoke in words, "Shall we link?" "Link," he said. Genevieve stepped up. Her clear-cut, pretty, sensitive face was alight with excitement. "Could I -- could I be cut in?" "Why not?" said the dogwoman, glancing at him. He nodded. The three of them linked hands and then the dog-woman put her left hand on the forehead of the old horse. THE sand splashed beneath their feet as they ran toward Kaheer. The delicious pressure of a man's body was on their backs. The red sky of Mizzer gleamed over them. There came the shout: "I'm a horse, I'm a horse, I'm a horse!" "You're from Mizzer," thought Casher O'Neill, "from Kaheer itself!" "I don't know names," thought the horse, "but you're from my land. The land, the good land." "What are you doing here?" "Dying," thought the horse. "Dying for hundreds and thousands of sundowns. The old one brought me. No riding, no running, no people. Just the old one and the small ground. I have been dying since I came here." Casher O'Neill got a glimpse of Perino sitting and watching the horse, unconscious of the cruelty and loneliness which he had inflicted on his large pet by making it immortal and then giving it no work to do. "Do you know what dying is?" Thought the horse promptly: "Certainly. No-horse." "Do you know what life is?" "Yes. Being a horse." "I'm not a horse," thought Casher O'Neill, "but I am alive." "Don't complicate things," thought the horse at him, though Casher realized it was his own mind and not the horse's which supplied the words. "Do you want to die?" "To no-horse? Yes, if this room, forever, is the end of things." "What would you like better?" thought Genevieve, and her thoughts were like a cascade of newly-minted silver coins falling clean, bright, innocent. The answer was quick: "Dirt beneath my hooves, and wet air again, and a man on my back." The dog-woman interrupted: "Dear horse, you know me?" "You're a dog," thought the horse. "Goo-oo-oo-ood dog!" "Right," thought the happy old slattern, "and I can tell these people how to take care of you. Sleep now, and when you waken you will be on the way to happiness." She thought the command sleep so powerfully at the old horse that Casher O'Neill and Genevieve both started to fall unconscious and had to be caught by the hospital attendants. As they re-gathered their wits, she was finishing her commands to the surgeon. " -- and put about # supplementary oxygen into the air. He'll have to have a real person to ride him, but some of your orbiting sentries would rather ride a horse up there than do nothing. You can't repair the heart. Don't try it. Hypnosis will take care of the sand of Mizzer. Just load his mind with one or two of the drama-cubes packed full of desert adventure. Now, don't you worry about me. I'm not going to claim any credit, and I'm not going to give you any more suggestions. People-man, you!" she laughed. "You can forgive us dogs anything, except for being right. It makes you feel inferior for a few minutes. Never mind. I'm going back downstairs to my dishes. I love them, I really do. Good-by, you pretty thing," she said to Genevieve. "And goodbye, wanderer! Good luck to you," she said to Casher O'Neill. "You will remain miserable as long as you seek justice, but when you give up, righteousness will come to you and you will be happy. Don't worry. You're young and it won't hurt you to suffer a few more years. Youth is an extremely curable disease, isn't it?" She gave them a full curtsey, like one Lady of the Instrumentality saying good-by to another. Her wrinkled old face was lit up with smiles, in which happiness was mixed with a tiniest bit of playful mockery. "Don't mind me, boss," she said to the surgeon. "Dishes, here I come." She swept out of the room. "See what I mean?" said the surgeon. "She's so horribly happy! How can anyone run a hospital if a dishwasher gets all over the place, making people happy? We'd be out of jobs. Her ideas were good, though." They were. They worked. Down to the last letter of the dog-woman's instructions. the council. Casher O'Neill went along to see them in session. One councillor, Bashnack, was particularly vociferous in objecting to any action concerning the horse. "Sire," he cried, "sire! We don't even know the name of the animal! I must protest this action, when we don't know -- " "That we don't," assented Philip Vincent. "But what does a name have to do with it?" "The horse has no identity, not even the identity of an animal. It is just a pile of meat left over from the estate of Perino. We should kill the horse and eat the meat ourselves. Or, if we do not want to eat the meat, then we should sell it off-planet. There are plenty of peoples around here who would pay a pretty price for genuine earth meat. Pay no attention to me, sire! You are the Hereditary Dictator and I am nothing. I have no power, no property, nothing. I am at your mercy. All I can tell you is to follow your own best interests. I have only a voice. You cannot reproach me for using my voice when I am trying to help you, sire, can you? That's all I am doing, helping you. If you spend any credits at all on this animal you will be doing wrong, wrong, wrong. We are not a rich planet. We have to pay for expensive defenses just in order to stay alive. We cannot even afford to pay for air that our children can go out and play. And you want to spend money on a horse which cannot even talk! I tell you, sire, this council is going to vote against you, just to protect your own interests and the interests of the Honorable Genevieve as Eventual Title-holder of all Pontoppidan. You are not going to get away with this, sire! We are helpless before your power, but we will insist on advising you  -- " "Hear! Hear!" cried several of the councillors, not the least dismayed by the slight frown of the Hereditary Dictator. "I will take the word," said Philip Vincent himself. Several had had their hands raised, asking for the floor. One obstinate man kept his hand up even when the Dictator announced his intention to speak. Philip Vincent took note of him, too: "You can talk when I am through, if you want to." He looked calmly around the room, smiled imperceptibly at his niece, gave Casher O'Neill the briefest of nods, and then announced: "Gentlemen, it's not the horse which is on trial. It's Pontoppidan. It's we who are trying ourselves. And before whom are we trying ourselves, gentlemen? Each of us is before that most awful of courts, his own conscience. #iF WE kill that horse, gentlemen, we will not be doing the horse a great wrong. He is an old animal, and I do not think that he will mind dying very r much, now that he is away from the ordeal of loneliness which he feared more than death. After all, he has already had his great triumph -- the climb up the cliff of gems, the jump across the volcanic vent, the rescue by people whom he wanted to find. The horse has done so well that he is really beyond us. We can help him, a little, or we we can hurt him, a little; beside the immensity of his accomplishment, we cannot really do very much either way. "No, gentlemen, we are not judging the case of the horse. We are judging space. What happens to man when he moves out into the Big Nothing? Do we leave Old Earth behind? Why did civilization fall? Will it fall again? Is civilization a gun or a blaster or a laser or a rocket? Is it even a pianoforming ship or a pinlighter at his work? You know as well as I do, gentlemen, that civilization is not what we can do. If it had been, there would have been no fall of Ancient Man. Even in the Dark Ages they had a few fusion bombs, they could make some small guided missiles and they even had weapons like the Kaskaskia Effect, which we have never been able to rediscover. The Dark Ages weren't dark because people lost techniques or science. They were dark because people lost people. It's a lot of work to be human and it's work which must be kept up, or it begins to fade. Gentlemen, the horse judges us. "Take the word, gentlemen. 'Civilization' is itself a lady's word. There were female writers in a country called France who made that word popular in the third century before space travel. To be 'civilized' meant for people to be tame, to be kind, to be polished. If we kill this horse, we are wild. If we treat the horse gently, we are tame. Gentlemen, I have only one witness and that witness will utter only one word. Then you shall vote and vote freely." There was # murmur around the table at this announcement. Philip Vincent obviously enjoyed the excitement he had created. He let them murmur on for a full minute or two before he slapped the table gently and said, "Gentlemen, the witness. Are you ready?" There was a murmur of assent. Bashnack tried to say, "It's still a question of public funds!" but his neighbors shushed him. The table became quiet. All faces turned toward the Hereditary Dictator. "Gentlemen, the testimony. Genevieve, is this what you yourself told me to say? Is civilization always a woman's choice first, and only later a man's?" I" I I "Yes," said Genevieve, with a happy, open smile. The meeting broke up amid laughter and applause. V L month later Casher O'Neill sat in a room in a mediumsize pianoforming liner. They were out of reach of Pontoppidan. The Hereditary Dictator had not changed his mind and cut him down with green beams. Casher had strange memories, not bad ones for a young man. He remembered Genevieve weeping in the garden. "I'm romantic," she cried, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of his cape. "Legally I'm the owner of this planet, rich, powerful, free. But I can't leave here. I'm too important. I can't marry whom I want to marry. I'm too important. My uncle can't do what he wants to do -- he's Hereditary Dictator and he always must do what the Council decides after weeks of chatter. I can't love you. You're a prince and a wanderer, with travels and battles and justice and strange things ahead of you. I can't go. I'm too important. I'm too sweet! I'm too nice; I hate, hate, hate myself sometimes. Please, Casher, could you take a flier and run away with me into space?" "Your uncle's lasers could cut US to pieces before we got out." He held her hands and looked gently down into her face. At this moment he did not feel the fierce, aggressive, happy glow which an able young man feels in the presence of a beautiful and tender young woman. He felt something much stranger, softer, quieter -- an emotion very sweet to the mind and restful to the nerves. It was the simple, clear compassion of one person for another. He took a chance for her sake, because the "dark knowledge" was wonderful but very dangerous in the wrong hands. He took both her beautiful little hands in hers, so that she looked up at him and realized that he was not going to kiss her. Something about his stance made her realize that she was being offered a more precious gift than a sky-lit romantic kiss in a garden. Besides, it was just touching helmets. He said to her, with passion and kindness in his voice; . "You remember that dogwoman, the one who works with the dishes in the hospital?" "Of course. She was good and bright and happy, and helped us all." "Go work with her, now and then. Ask her nothing. Tell her nothing. Just work with her at her machines. Tell her I said so. Happiness is catching. You might catch it. I think I did myself, a little." "I think I understand you," said Genevieve softly. "Casher, goodby and good, good luck to you. Hdy uncle expects us." Together they went back into the palace. A nother memory was the farewell to Philip Vincent, the Hereditary Dictator of Pontoppidan. The calm, clean-shaven, ruddy, well-fleshed face looked at him with benign regard. Casher O'Neill felt more respect for this man when he realized that ruthlessness is often the price of peace, and vigilance the price of wealth. "You're a clever young man. A very clever young man. You may win back the power of your uncle Kuraf." "I don't want that power!" cried Casher O'Neill. "I have advice for you," said the Hereditary Dictator, "and it is good advice or I would not be here to give it. I have learned the political arts well: otherwise I would not be alive. Do not refuse power. Just take it and use it wisely. Do not hide from your wicked uncle's name. Obliterate it. Take the name yourself and rule so well that, in a few decades, no one will remember your uncle. Just you. You are young. You can't win now. But it is in your fate to grow and to triumph. I know it. I am good at these things. I have given you your weapon. I am not tricking you. It is packed safely and you may leave with it." Casher O'Neill was breathing softly, believing it all, and trying to think of words to thank the stout, powerful older man when the dictator added. With a little laugh in his voice: "Thank you, too, for saving me money. You've lived up to your name, Casher." "Saved you money?" "The alfalfa. The horse wanted alfalfa." "Oh, that idea!" said Casher O'Neill. "It was obvious. I don't deserve much credit for that." "I didn't think of it," said the Hereditary Dictator, "and my staff didn't either. We're not stupid. That shows you are bright. You realized that Perino must have had a food converter to keep the horse alive in the Hippy Dipsy. All we did was set it to alfalfa and we saved ourselves the cost of a shipload of horse food twice a year. We're glad to save that credit. We're well off here, but we don't like to waste things. You may bow to me now, and leave." Casher O'Neill had done so, with one last glance at the lovely Genevieve, standing fragile and beautiful beside her uncle's chair. recent. He had paid two hundred thousand credits for it, right on this liner. He had found the StopCaptain, bored now that the ship was in flight and the Go-Captain had taken over. "Can you get me a telepathic fix on a horse?" "What's a horse?" said the GoCaptain. "Where is it? Do you want to pay for it?" "A horse," said Casher O'Neill patiently, "is an unmodified earth animal. Not underpeople. A big one, but quite intelligent. This one is in orbit right around Pontoppidan. And I will pay the usual price." the Stop-Captain. "Ridiculous!" cried Casher O'Neill. They settled on two hvmdred thousand credits for a good fix and ten thousand for the use of the ship's equipment even if there were failure. It was not a failure. The technician was a snake-man: he was deft, cool, and superb at his job. In only a few minutes he passed the headset to Casher O'Neill, saying politely, "This is it, I think." It was. He had reached right into the horse's mind. The endless sands of Mizzer swam before Casher O'Neill. The # Star Shelf long lines of the Twelve Niles converged in the distance. He galloped steadily and powerfully. There were other horses nearby, other riders, other things, but he himself was conscious only of the beat of the hooves against the strong moist sand, the firmness of the appreciative rider upon his back. Dimly, as in a hallucination, Casher O'Neill could also see the little orbital ship in which the old horse cantered in mid-air, with an amused cadet sitting on his back. Up there, with no weight, the old worn-out heart would be good for many, many years. Then he saw the horse's paradise again. The flash of hooves threatened to overtake him, but he outran them all. There was the expectation of a stable at the end, a rubdown, good succulent green food, and the glimpse of a filly in the morning. The horse of Pontoppidan felt extremely wise. He had trusted people -- people, the source of all kindness, all cruelty, all power among the stars. And the people had been good. The horse felt very much horse again. Casher felt the old body course along the river's edge like a dream of power, like a completion of service, like an ultimate fulfilment of companionship. too large in the fantasy-adventure Hall of Fame to be readily crammed into the limited space of a single column such as this, especially since, after a hiatus of a score of years, anastonishing number of publishers are eager to gamble good money on the ability of his thundering adventures to woo the blase youth of today. So here is a second roundup of the Master. If the truth be known, I found it a most pleasant chore to reread the beloved fairy tales, even from the vantage point of our present pinnacle of scientific knowledge. Somehow, despite his frequently embarrassing awkwardness of style and the quaintness of his scientific background. Burroughs can still, to employ that overworked phrase, evoke a "Sense of Wonder". While Ace Books continues its policy of reissuing the old novels two per month in paperback, several other publishers have joined them on the Burroughs bandwagon. The most ambitious of these is Canaveral Press. They have already released eleven hardcovers: four Pellucidar books, a couple of Martian novels and a couple of the memorable single shots: The Land That Time Forgot, The Cave Girl, The Monster Men and the first of the Venusian novels, Pirates of Venus. Thuvia, Maid of Mars, The Chessmen of Mars and The Master Mind of Mars -- fourth, fifth and sixth in the Martian series -- are all in a fine paperback volume issued by Dover Publications. It is surprising that Dover elected to start the series in the middle but, since only the first three, or John Carter, stories are sequential, nothing is lost. The Dover editors also showed wisdom in including most of the original artwork by J. Allen St. John, who was a whiz at depicting Burroughs's muscular men, chaste and voluptuous women and monstrous monsters. A surprise entry in the Burroughs Stakes is Ballantine Books, who have announced their intention to reissue the entire Martian series, one volume per month. Since there are ten books in the series, they will obviously be well occupied for most of a year... further plans depending upon the degree of acceptance by their paying public. Canaveral is the only publisher so far to reissue what must be considered the most noteworthy of Burroughs's singles. Because Burroughs wrote when many areas of the world map remained blank, he was always on the lookout for an exotic, unknown region in which to base a story. Caprona, the mythical continent of compass-deflecting metal that the eighteenth century Italian navigator, Caproni, reported as lying deep in South Pacific waters, was a natural for his choice of a locale in which to plant the seed of an intriguing mystery. Burroughs's huge island, protected from external weather by high sheer cliffs, duplicates eons of evolution by geographical means. The low, steamy atmosphere of the south is analogous to that of the reptilian eras and, as the land gradually rises to the north, flora and fauna rise correspondingly on the evolutionary ground for a startling concept His island humans evolve outside the womb, traversing the island from south to north and rising from tadpole to full human estate. The novel, one of the author's longest, was written in the fiercely chauvinistic atmosphere of WW I but contains sheer, headlong adventure that is unusual even for an RB thriller. Both Canaveral Press and Ace Books. TO A marked degree, it appears as if Burroughs patterned many of his stories after the Arabian Nights. There are similar exotic environments, almost identical social structures, polygamy (practiced only by the bad guys, of course); slavery is normal, and precious jewels and gorgeous silks and tapestries are flaunted before the imaginative eye of the reader. Also, Burroughs's scientific marvels are seldom woven into the fabric of his cultures, as is the way with modern science fiction, but are exploited for their semi-magical shock value... in much the same manner that the powers of the Jinn were employed to twist a plot in extraordinary fashion. The Burroughs stories abound in abductions, and Fighting Man is no exception. Hadron of Hastor pursues the (polygamous) villains back to Jahar, a country whose cowardly ruler schemes to conquer all of Barsoom through the (semi-magical) twin inventions of the paint of invisibility and the ray of disintegration. Burroughs's choice of a model was a wise one. The Arabian Nights are corking good adventure stories in their own right. Canaveral Press and Ace Books. both reissued the above with Ace having an edge both in price and in artwork. The Canaveral editors exercised poor judgment in their choice of Mahlon Blaine as illustrator for several of their books. His delicate, unearthly pictures are eminently suited for stories such as those of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith or James Branch Cabell but not for the muscular fantasy of Burroughs. There are rumors, however, that these illustrations are to be redone by Frank Frazetta, who, ironically, illustrated the Ace edition of Monster Men and who captures the essence of the stories to far greater degree. Although this book suffers from some of Burroughs's worst writing, there is still a lot of excitement in his tale of a subman who discovers that he is really a superman. lications, Canaveral Press. Pellucidar, immured in the dungeons of Korsar, is in deep trouble (no pun intended) and Tarzan is summoned to the rescue. The relief expedition that he is asked to join has constructed a giant rigid dirigible of an extremely light and strong metal that Tarzan had conveniently discovered in some lost mines, strong enough to contain a vacuum. T.A.T.E.C. was written shortly after the Italian dirigible, Norge, had safely negotiated a passage over the North Pole in the #'s and at a time when rigid lighterthan-air ships appeared to hold the key to massive commercial and military conquest of the air. For convenience, and also to exploit the contemporary lack of contrariwise proof. Burroughs envisioned a polar opening through which to insert his favorite hero into the mixed-up ecology of the inner world. The gigantic reptilian and mammalian carnivores of Pellucidar are far more suitable adversaries for Tarzan than the badly overmatched denizens of our modern jungles. Burroughs, incidentally, advances the interesting theory, as good as any, that the giant carnivores might have been the agents of their own destruction on the outer crust by developing intelligence of high enough order to enable them to hunt cooperatively in concert, hastening the extinction of their natural prey and themselves. Press. ten this story with tongue in cheek. He casts away his hero, a Bostonian with the unlikely name of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones, on a tiny, unchartfed South Pacific island to face primitive cavepeople and a wild environment more suited to the specialized talents of Tarzan. Smith-Jones fumbles his way, successfully of course, through a typical Burroughs adventure yarn, which is sufficient reason for the ardent Burroughs fan to have made this one of the scarcest of collector's items during recent dearth of Burroughs books. Publications, Canaveral Press, Ace Books. all taken a crack at this Burroughs classic. Ace, in paperback, is of course the bargain of the lot. The hardcover edition, with the powerful advantage of original illustrations by J. Allen St. John, is by Canaveral, while Dover has coupled it with Lost on Venus as a quality paperback edition. The latter I haven't yet seen, but Dover assures me that it is as well executed as its Three Martian Novels and will also contain a selection of the original St. John illustrations. Burroughs turned to Venus for inspiration after he had pretty well exhausted the melodramatic potential of Mars. His hero. Carson Napier, out-did "Wrong-Way Corrigan" by a considerable stretch both in time and error by aiming for Mars and reaching Venus. Despite his usual penchant for coincidence and gratuitously fortuitous happenstances (whew!), his power of invention in the realm of pure adventure remains keen throughout the Venusian series. In addition to the above, Dover also plan to bring out coupled volumes of other titles. Ballantine, of all the involved publishers, is releasing its volumes in sequence, starting with A Princess of Mars, the first in the series, and also the first Burroughs novel ever to be published (he used the pseudonym, Norman Bean), and following it with The Gods of Mars, etc. It is surprising how the wheel has suddenly turned, thrusting Burroughs back into prominence after two decades of obscurity. He wrote a total of twenty-four Tarzan books, ten Martian, four Venusian and five Pellucidarian novels, as well as a large number of single titles. It remains to be seen whether this huge legacy of adventure will be allowed to die for a second, and possibly Found at last! A famous "lost' book by the master of science fiction... DR. OX'S by Jules Verne Available again after almost a hundred years -- the astonishing story of Dr. Ox's mass experiment to prove his unique theory: that oxygen is the prime source of virtue, wit, courage, talent, and imagination! A true science fiction "find," designed in a delightfully unusual format. Pene du Bois. Intro. by Willy Ley. Epilogue by Hubertus Strughold. Order your first edition copy! Dept. #, Riverside, New Jersey (#) for free examination. After # days I may return it and pay nothing. If I keep it I will remit # plus shipping. Name Address CityZone State coupon and WE pay all postage and handling costs. Same free examination with refund if not pleased. front seat with him, bucking this frame-up. He's, so get-off-the-road, and he wasn't letting this old shyster pass him. He said nonchalant, "Look, Mr. Craik. I'm retaining you to tight this biased, vindictive judgement, not lecture me on it, to protect my rights." Craik mugged: "That assumes you've left me some rights to protect, Mr. Blaire. You haven't. You are permanently debarred from operation of any power vehicle. I can do nothing further for you." "Appeal! Fix it! I can pay." And he sure can. The old moke tightened his mouth: "I infer you made the money by methods to match your driving record, not by grasp of essentials. I'll try again. This biased, vindictive judgement was handed down by the highest court your case can reach. Can you grasp that?" Those crazy kids the roads -- almost as bad their parents! I Sept. #, # (Earth time) with the stereos I took. I've been in history! So I've snakehipped the dicto-type for "homework." I'll get o'ff the mark at this lawyer's office. I was there to get shown my Pop was a dust-eater. Wotta laff! I was right up in the Pop came right back like the great sportsfan he is, "Well, we can contest those two-bit charges I hadn't time to fight when they were made. I know they can't debar me finally on imcontested stuff." The old guy looped down his eyelids: "If you'd ever bothered to appear in court yourself, or even read the transcripts, you would also know that all charges have been contested. Apparently you've been so cotton-wooled by insurance and connections and smart lawyers, you think you can brush off even child-murder." Pop bounced up, ready to ditch the moke: "Why, you... ! " "Your failure was no thanks to you. Would you have to kill children in actual fact to sober you? The commimity is not minded to let you try the experiment. This isn't #, you know." The two-timing old right-laner! I'd been told to keep my muffler cut, but there's times when you surge or burst. I surged, "And don't we ever get to score? A bunch of mokes get him in a jam, and a fresh cop calls us Flight of the Stumblebum -- because we have a yellow 'n' black zoom. Does my Pop have to take that gravel?" Craik looked at me like I was a parking ticket. 'Well, I suppose a lad should be loyal to his father. Pity it's not in a better cause. So, yes, my budding Big Shot, he does. On triple probation, he drove with such dashing irresp)onsibility that he sheared off three steel guard-posts and barely missed a group of children. He'll take what anyone calls him, and thank them it wasn't worse." He swung back at Pop. "I took your case to pay off a favor to Sam Hardy. I consider I've paid in full. And the case is closed." Pop kept a manly silence. Mom took over: "But, Mr. Craik, how can my husband do business without a car? A Plutomat representative can't walk up to a prospect's door like a peddler. This destroys my family's livelihood." "Your husband should have considered that sooner, Mrs. Blaire." My rad just boiled to hear her having to take the old honk-honk from minions of the law. I've never been much on girls because Mom is my ideal, and only my young sister Judy comes in that custom model. And I was just a skinny Teener, helpless to defend the family honor. But I sneaked a squeeze of her hand. Pop said grimly, "Then these fanatics have ruined me. I have no place to go in this so-called Free World." Craik shrugged: "Then find a Parallel that will take you, and get Translated, Mr. Blaire. That would solye everybody's problems." Obviously he was including his own. I perked up. Translation, switch to a parallel time, might be good. Pop said, "That costs a fortune." Craik shrugged again: "It might cost less than your dauntless career here. I'll send my account." He froze us out like trash. C T his record being for posteri ity, I better give the true facts which are already being suppressed. Because I've boned up on them. '#, the Golden Age of Go. A bunch called the Regular Guys had gotten the laws modemated -- "safe and reasonable speed,"  nationwide. They backed Bucky  Kooznik who'd been framed in a speed-trap, and won in Supreme Court. They backed Senator Smurge for Vice President -- the prince who got a national speed law laughed into the wreckers by tacking on an amendment to make the limit ninety -- and got him in. Well, this low-octane third party, the Life and Limb League (Lily-Livered Limks, we called them) tried to buck the traffic. Their candidate. Bob Green, had had a kid killed and had sort of blown his tires. Well, sure, like t Pop says, it's too bad but we can't all live in bungalows because kids a loud boff and lost all its deposits. Only Green kept squawking about how hiway deaths jumped from # in '#, to # in '#; and he signed up relatives and friends of "victims," and soreheads who'd got bunged up and couldn't be sports about it, and natural-bom cranks and scaredy-pants. You wouldn't think people would vote to get themselves traffic tickets. But in and more in '#. So we stopped laughing and fought back. We sued a paper for a cartoon of Smurge with his arms around a goony driver and a skeleton, saying, "My Buddies!" And the court ratted on us, and it upheld disgusting photos of crashes and libels that said more than "the car went out of control." So drivers got nervous and the "toll" climbed on. Then, in '#,. Green got in, and showed what a fanatic at the wheel will do. Laws, laws, laws. We said "They can't arrest everybody." Oh, no? Fines, confiscations, jail for thousands of respectable people. And a Gestapo of Lily-white drivers'd sp)ot you using the old elbow or boomin' the amber, and you'd get a stinking card that you'd lost points. Twenty-five peints got you a fine and a goo-talk about "mental attitudes". Blah! What about guts and skill and all that? Well, we figured there'd soon be enough people sore to give us they'd saved # lives in '#. So what the heck, it wouldn't have been you anyway. But there aren't many real fighters like Pop, and the Old Cause was driven to the curb. P had to drive home real humble because if they caught him now, they'd jail him, him, a free citizen. But he was looking stern and unbowed, like a guerrilla hero in Tri-Di. So presently I said, "Pop, let's do it!" Mogi chimed in, "Yes, Gail, if you can't work here, let's at least ask about it." Mom's real practical under the hood. Judy was keen too. At fourteen, in Ye Good Olde Daze, she'd have been a zee already. Now, she'd have to wait two years. So Pop got into passing gear. And just a week later he came home with his hat cocked and his heels clicking, and summoned us all to the tridiroom. "Well, keeds," he said, "they sure picked on the wrong man when they picked on ol' Buck Blaire. Biggest favor anyone ever did us. It seems there's a world called Jehu (some crackjaw gibberish in their language) after some old prophet. Anyway, Plutomat's granted me planetary franchise. Izzat good or is it? "And tape this, keeds! That planet's set up for adults. They're drivin' fools, wonderful roads, most powerful zooms anywhere, and, get this, nary a traffic law or a traffic court on the planet." Judy puzzled: "But, Daddy they must have some laws, like which side you drive on..." Pop's always indulged Judy. "Well, honey, that's rules; and anyone with sense knows when rules do and don't matter. Like if I drive on the left on an empty street, whose business is it? See, Judy, put deadheads off the road, leave things to skill and experience and you're safe. Their accident-rate's just about nil -- naturally." "Well, it sounds funny to me. You be careful." Mom said. "You been skull-scrubbed by Triple-L, keed? You never come out front unless you muscle into openings, like fast That's the secret of all big operators -- Cesar, Napoleon, Buck Blaire -- split-second decisions. We've gotta take off in a cloud of clamshells, and we can't wait for a lecture course. But you can vote on it. Now. All in favor of saying Nay, say Aye. Nobody? Carried! Oh, by the way, old Craik ain't such a bad old moke after all. He tipped me off on this Jehu place himself the other day." "Huh!" I thought. "# wouldn't trust that pussy-schnook much." But Pop took off with his rubber scorchin': Plutomat contract. Translation permit, appointment with the movers. The skids and zees in my gang were cynical; but I knew I'd get my own back, and I just sat tight and soaked up Jehuan by hypnophone. Came The Day. A crew put up a frame around our lot, higher than the house, and into the ground. I asked the foreman if it marked out the block that was going to be swapped with a block of Jehu. "You aren't as dumb as you look, kid," he said, "which must be a consolation to your folks. That's what it does." "Thanx," I said and strolled off. Gee, I hate a fresh guy! Sure, a butterfly-collector could have had a field-day in my stomach, when the fresh foreman called all his gang out and began countdown. Mom and Judy were too bunny to come out, but Pop and I stood on the steps. I felt revved up, then, like beating another zoom around a curve, and at Minus Five I called to all the skids in the crowd watching, "Here go the Regulars. We will Return!" like that historical guy on tri-di. Pop just stood stern and unbowed. years? Gimme a yippee-cart on Thrill-Hill! No stars streaking past, no roar, no icy chill. Just a j utter in your gizzard and there you were on a street like the old one with the houses shuffled. Even the crew to take down the frame looked the same. But not the guy who was there to welcome us; he had a lah-de-dah coat with wide skirts and lace like in Abe Washington's time, but he was a big, hard-looking zow like a zoom-bike cop. His zoom was a weirdy, too. Whee enough like an import job and done in this novelty one-tone finish, but no jem-krust trim, no swordfish roof-crest, no flared bumpers; it wouldn't have helped eggo much. The only real decoration was a leaping red tiger on all panels. He said he was to be our Patron, name of Thrangar Glash. I gave him the old Hi-de-ho and he froze my fuel-line. But when Mom and Judy came out, he swooned them with his bowing and oil-pressure. And when Mom was disappointed at the view, he explained, "This is just the Terran suburb. Madam. When I have advised you all on our, ah, driving customs, you can visit the main city." Pop scowled: "I was told you drove by common sense." Glash gave him a lopsided look: "True. But common sense differs in different places, sir. Shall we go in?" So we did, and Pal Patron Glash gave us the route-map. And had I been mucho right about old Schnooks Craik! Sure, they had no traffic laws or cops, no penalty points, no fines, no nothing. Sure! Only just this: If you merely annoyed another driver, much less bent his tin, he could challenge you to fight him. They fought in a public arena, on a sort of yippee-cart called a whippet, with sort of bull-whips. You wore leather armor, only the defender got less and darn little if he'd hurt or killed someone. " 'Course," Glash drawled, "even for blood-guilt, the limit's twenty minutes, and sometimes a dashing player comes off with his life." "His #-life?" Mom said. "With whips?" "Oh, a very spirited weapon, ma'am. I've dueled little, having been bred to courtesy but -- " he touched his left cheek, which was all scarred -- "one keeps in practice with one-cheek affairs, in case one becomes seriously involved." So he gave us the layout, and they had it set up like some game. Kids, gals, old gaffers, if you drove you were liable. No subs, not for wives or kids or sweeties. Only a Court of Honor appointed one if a bully had fixed a fight on somebody weaker or when an innocent guy was killed or disabled. A woman bashed a man's zoom, she fought. Fair enough. Like pal Thrangar said, "We're all equal, eh? Well, there's no chivalry between equals, only courtesy." And if you didn't play up you were outlaw and they'd ram you or run you off the road and you had no comeback. All tied up tighter 'n a sales contract. Finally Pop said, "I've been framed. I was lied into this." "Really, sir? Our embassy provided no literature?" Well, who reads literature? The real dope they'll shove in your face. Pop always says. And they hadn't. So it was same as lying. Huh? Pop said, "I was told this was a free society." "My dear Blaire, a society is free only to choose its rules. An aggressive race like yours, or mine, craves to domineer. You've got to control that itch from runits." "Yeh-yeh, sure. By common sense. Now me..." "Ah, yours, naturally. Mine too, I trust. But -- everyone's? No, you've just three systems that work: Public law, which irked you; posse law to hunt down pests which -- " he flicked an eyebrow -- "irked you even more; or a code of honor." Pop scowled. He always says, the first freedom oughta be freedom from preach. Then he hit back: "O-kay! Anything you jokers can do, I can pass you." And I felt proud again. "True sporting spirit, sir. So, study our code and our manners in practice. Get your whippet and join a school of arms. Then I'll introduce you to our Arena." And he flourished himself out. Back in the hall. Pop said "Hullo!" and picked up a letter that must have come before we left Earth. Inside was a sheet of letterhead, "Craik, Creak, Croak and Crock," and on it, in quotes: "When insolence outruneth law, men customarily arm themselves to chastise offense on the body of the offender. As the proverb saith: No courtesy sans valor." Leon da Milhao. The old speed-trap! He was giving us the razz. But we'll show him. II Oct. #, # Pop was sore all the time, like he was stuck behind a squadcar. At dinner he'd burst out, "Ahhh, what yokels! Yap-yap with the horns every move you make, yap-yap. Back-seat driving from other people's back seats -- it's going to rattle even me into fender-denting. It's a good thing our Thunderbolt Twelve can accelerate out of anything these lunks can mess up." "Ahh, you've been skullscrubbed by Triple-L. Let 'em try." As for us, this town's got nothing for Teeners. Whippet-school could be fun. Whippets are like a yippee-cart with a saddle instead of a seat, to give you free action; not real fast because you fight in a half-mile arena, but they turn like squirrels. But the teacher red-lights any fun. He has moustaches like wind-swept fenders, and he's worse than the horn-yappers : "Do that over, young fool. Recover, recover, you'll get your face opened. With little-stuff brains don't try to be big stuff." Spoils your nerve. I'm beginning to catch on. Mom's slower, and she won't drive on the street nohow, even with the novice plates. Judy's real sharp, but Mom won't let her out either, in spite of her having naturalborn driving rights here. But Pop's a wham, a natural. After lesson #, he came striding out: "See me clip the pro, keeds? I think I'm gonna like this." "You'll feel different if you were risking a real cut, Gail." "Nyahhh! Steady nerve and educated reflexes, that's real safety." Well, on the way home, there's this traffic signal down past our house. You don't have to stop, just yield right-of-way which Pop says makes sense, though the other zoom's gotta be half across for Pop to yield, but Jehuans treat them real bunny. So, this native zoom ahead of us dragged down slow to make the corner just as it changed, like mokes do. Well, we should linger while he played games? Pop whipped the Stumblebum past and across the guy's front into our drive, sprayin' gravel, and pulled the foaming steeds to their haunches. Ye Olde High Style! So here comes this Jehuan stalking across the lawn, a skinny guy in floppy green. He makes a bow to Mom and Ju and a stiff inch to Pop: "Sir, you drive with novice plates." "A blind cop could see that." Pop said, "What about it?" "Just this, sir. When you can no longer hide behind them, you will put your hog's elbow in my face again, and I will bleed your insolence. I will watch for you, believe me." "Don't bother," Pop said. "Gimme your address, and I'll drive up and down your block till you come out -- if you do." So the guy gave him a card and bowed himself off. Pop looked after him, jingling his pockets. "He'll do to start on." Arena, in his zoom. I'll say this for Jehuans, when they go, they Go; so when they do tangle, it's a dilly. We went down the main drag in a stream of zooms at sixty steady, with Glash giving exhaust about the average being twice the speed in any Earth city, and how he never needed to use his brakes. Sure, but in two blocks I was antsy-pantsy with that old bull-man urge-tosurge, while Glash defaulted chance after chance to Score. So, out where you'd expect a ball-park, was this Arena like the Colossus of Rome. It wasn't a tenth full, but two guys were looping and lashing, like at the school only more exciting because they had open left cheeks. But neither scored, and another pair took over. Glash looked bored and I lost interest too after five of these quickies and only one guy cut. But people kept trickling in, and Glash said, "Ah! About time for the main event. This high-ridin' ass, y'know, ran down a child on a back street. City's been debatin' how much leather he should get for challenger's parental negligence. I hear it's only a collar. Minimum. A cut to the larynx or big neck vessels ends a bout without a sportin' chance." Pop said real cool, "Well, what chance does that give him? "Say fifty to one. Challenger's a tough whip and deadly angry." Mom and Ju looked green. They've stopped more than once to view a crash but maybe they figured deliberate gore was something else. Mom said, "Well, I don't think the little girl should see this." Glash made a fish-mouth: "I cannot agree, madam. If a child isn't blooded young, it'll play the fool in emergencies." Just then, a referee came out on a platform halfway down the arena and the duellers appeared at opposite ends with their seconds and doctors, which they have for serious fights. People were piling in till there wasn't standing room. My heart was going bu-bop bu-bop. Glash drawled, "Ha! They've made challenger bare his right arm. That narrows the odds somewhat. This should be a notable Drive." Yehr, and he'd fixed to have us see the execution. Thanx! Came a pistol-shot that yanked the props out from my stomach. The crowd gasped "Off!" Then not a peep -- you could be challenged yourself for a disturbance. You could hear the motors snarl, even the sand grunt at swerves. They didn't come right in, like in spite-fights. Defender swung wide and then, when challenger closed, whipped behind him on two wheels and zipped down the arena. And they kept on swingin'er big and snappin'er tight till I began to think defender would make it. Then a look at the big arena clock showed only six minutes gone. Challenger had lashed twice and missed. Then, before I knew it, he did a skid-curve and nicked defender's shoulder. Not much, but the guy began to bleed, lost his nerve and got two more in two minutes. He pulled himself together and kept clear for a bit again. Then, just half-time, he goofed. He'd got on challenger's tail, and the old scoring spirit surged, and he took a crack at him. It only hit leather, and a crack costs time. Challenger veered, slam-braked, swiped as the guy shot past and scored an awful slice on his arm. Well, that was it. Defender dropped his whip and just steered. But he was dazed and losing blood. Challenger flicked and flicked. I got all churned up. Here was this guy, could see the arena, and hear the whippets yarrr, and feel his cuts. And if he didn't do more than he could do, in a couple of minutes he wouldn't know anything. Same time, challenger was coming through like on mental FM: "She'll never pounce onto the bed with me again. (Crack!) Never have college and a wedding. (Crack!) How many thousand of your smart tricks was that worth? (Ca-rack!)" It made me sick and dry. Defender played so crazy, he hung on for a bit, and I began to wonder again, would he make it. Six to go and my lungs were tied in a bownot. Challenger figure-#ed but reversed in the second loop; defender saw a big body-slash coming, just too late. He banked so tight, he toppled. He kicked the ejector-lever and flung clear. Everybody stood up. He spread-eagled, like in a wreck I saw once, and his whippet batted around spinning and scrabbling on its side. Challenger cut around it so sharp, I thought he'd tip too, and headed straight for the guy. Defender tried to heave clear... "My little honey!"... Ribs crack like wet sticks... Nobody talked. Even Garsh didn't pump any pi-jaw. But when we got home and Mom was hoping that now he wouldn't take so many chances. Pop said, "Look, keed, in this life you take chances or live in a keg. You just gotta be equal to them." And the very day the novice plates came off the Stumblebum, he came home whistling and announced he'd fixed a fight with this guy who'd left his address. "Keep me in practice, like Garsh says." Well, I guess he needs it. So far, they could only yap-yap when he double-parked at rushhour, or blocked a side-street, or motor-boated through puddles. Now, he'll spend half his time in that arena. And some day he'll outsmart himself into a biggie. Ill Oct. #, '#. HE day of his first duel. Pop came home .free-wheeling as a tomcat. Ju and I had the day off from school, but we weren't going. "No family," Pop had said. "This new back-seat driving would put me off. I could feel it from 'way up in the stands. Jonesie and I have arranged to back each other in these deals." So he had lunch and they took off on their whippets. I got myself into sporting bags for an afternoon all to myself with the zoom, and tip-toed down to the garage. Well, the zoom was gone. That stalled me. Pop had his whippet. Mom still wouldn't drive a block alone, or let Judy, to Ju's permanent sulk. Maybe Mom and Ju...? Then I heard Mom upstairs, and called, "Mom, where's Ju?" Mom dashed down like beatG AL AX Y ing an amber. But no Ju anywhere. Mom kept breathing, "The little fool! Oh, the little fool!" Then aloud, "She's your father all over. Oh, if she's gone in that car..." Of course, Ju had. Pop's fight had revved her up to thiry over the limit, and she'd gone to see. Like that, she was a suicide menace. The police just shrugged over the phone: "Driving is private business, madam. We do not interfere." (Pop's standby!) So, without a car, what could we do? Mom took a calmifier and lay down. I sat on the front steps and strewed cigarette butts. At that, I didn't see Judy coming till she turned up the walk, on foot. She was a mess, all blowsy from crying. If she'd crossed many streets, it was just luck we didn't have to whip someone for running her down. She blubbered, "Du-don't start ku-questions, pu-pease." But Mom didn't swallow that line and shook her till her hair flopped. So she told. She was near the Arena, feeling pretty high, when some moke ahead slowed for a right turn, like mokes do. Well, you don't pass any faster, I guess, but a Regular like Pop swings big left to show his Style and opinion of mokes. So naturally Ju swung and bashed head-on into another zoom at these Jehu speeds. She said, "The wu-woman was in the middle, I swear. But she claims she hadn't room." Another woman was bad. Even against rules, men often go easy on a girl; a woman, never. This zee claimed injury, and several other drivers were mad enough to swear anything. This wouldn't be any one-check deal. We were so razzed, we never heard the whipjet pull in. But I heard Pop clicketyclacking up the path, and got to the tridiroom door as he flipped his hat onto the rack: "Well, well, is this all the victor's welcome? Where's Mom and Judy?" Mom pushed by me and stood glaring at him. But Pop never did notice red lights much. He breezed on, "Yezzir! Ol' Killer Blaire clipped him, and him a thirty-fight veteran. And not a mark on me. Reflexes, like I've always told you. Now, how's about..." Well, I'd seen it in boffies but never expected to in real life. Mom smashed a vase-lamp on his head and towered over him. "Well, that's a mark on you now. Reflex-brains!"... and told him the score in about ten words, ending, "And I haven't raised a sweet child to be disfigured because her father's a retarded Teener." "Aw right, aw right! No reason to blow your tires at me. What've  done? We'll fix it. I suppose you never thought of Clash?" She said, soft, "You fix it. You call Clash, you and your steel nerves. I don't believe you grasp the situation yet." He slouched to the phone and I snaked up to the bedroom phone extension. Well, Clash had a big pick-up for Judy, like they all do, but he couldn't fix the ticket. "Blaire, if defender could substitute, I'd go in for her myself. What was the woman's insignia?... Red tornado? Hah! Slada Coy, hard as they come... No, you fool! You mention money, you'll be outlawed... You've no damn right to be ignorant of manners, sir." I've never seen Pop so slowed down. Even Mom's laid off him. Dec. #, #. such a grim month. Judy had lessons daily, and then I'd practice her. No bon. She was great in rehearsal, but in that Arena she'd freeze. She knew girls at school who'd been cut. She'd never been really hurt in her life, and got shivering sick just at the idea. It sure dulled her polish; and yet, she was more appealing to me, like when she was a brat and I'd pick her up when her Toddle Typhoon dumped. It wasn't fair. Pop's a real hero-type adult to these Teeners.  Was she supposed not to learn off him? And he'd never get touched. Then this Slada's deputies came, big squaws with muscles in their calves, and tried to rightlane Mom because she's custombuilt and they were trucks. But Mom had evidently boned up on Jehu law, and beat the time down from twelve to ten minutes, and fixed Judy's leather so she'd only have one arm exposed besides her cheek, and sent them off bow-legged. I felt real proud of Mom then. But it wouldn't help Ju. Five minutes would be too much. And a week before the fight, she podded into my room in her bathrobe and plopped on my bed: "Oh Chuck, what'll I do-oo-oo? We'll be put off the road here too and Daddy'll be ruined. Bu-bubut I can't fight that awful old woman. I couldn't even steer." Well, I'd hoped for a break in the traffic; now I'd have to elbow one. I patted her shoulder: "Opey-dopey, kid. I'll fix it." She grabbed me: "How? Daddy can't. Mr. Clash can't." "I'm not much bigger'n you. In leathers, nobody'd know the difference. I'll fight her." "Oh, but Ghuckie, I beat you all the time at school." "So who cares if my manly beauty gets marked?" I bet we both slept well that night, for just about the first time in weeks. charging-quarterback insignia and Ju faked her # for my # on mine and fixed some of her slacks to fit me. Came the day. I was to drive the whippet to the Arena, while the others followed in the car -- Pop's real expert at getting deadline repairs done. So, I sneaked off in Ju's slacks, with makeup and a kerchief to hide my buzzcut, and parked in the entrance tunnel to Defenders' End. And right on tick, Ju came out of Lady Defenders' Dressing Room and dodged around into the public Ladies' Room. I skulked after her. We took adjoining booths, and clothes came flying over the partition. And with three minutes to spare, we walked out again, one in slacks and one in leathers. We still damped our mufflers -- you never know who might be parked -- but Ju threw her arms around me and kissed me on the open cheek. It made me feel pretty brave. Then she shooed me ahead. I mounted and rolled into the arena. A pro mechanic-doctor came with me and checked my stirrups and ejector and stuff, and said good luck, and stood back. I'd cut things close, to avoid idle chat. Then I really began to get Lepidoptera in the viscera. The far end looked five miles off with the stands curving around, and the enemy whippet toy-size -- denture-pink and a red tornado on the panels. I'd watched outside Slada's house: She was midthirties but made up to look older, like mud on a moke's windshield, as if she had more to hide than she really did. That kind's always proving they're just as good as ever, which is bad. Another muscly dame. With swords or something, I might have felt different about fighting a woman. But this was like on the road where she'd ditch you to show her peerless skill. Maybe she was a moo-cow at home, but in a zoom her reality came out and you could drive her into a board with a hammer. So, I was going to do all I could to her -- if any. At the pistol, I sure gave my pro a dust-bath. I wanted to get Slada off balance. She was just flipping a cigarette butt -- the old Nonchalant Flair like she'd do whipping in and out of lanes with a kid doin' Ben Hur on the seat beside her -- when I was suddener than she'd expected. You know, when there's a gap two cars could pass in at a humble speed, and you just head for the middle? The other guy'll concede! So did Slada, and nearly dumped swerving. And I cleared the end wall by about two feet, and her pro jumped. Well, she was madded up at being bluffed by any Young Gerl, and began to show her old-hand knowhow, to restore her confidence. She'd wear me (Judy) down till she could lay my (Judy's) face open good. (And it could have been Judy.) And she sure played rough. I could read her far  enough ahead to hold her off. And all the time, something was building up in me like those Civil War radio tubes that took hours to get hot. This stuff was great for guys like Pop. (Zowrrr, whacko.) Put 'em in here and let 'em slug it out. (Here she comes.) Or for old-time Indians and Vikings who'd kill anybody for kicks, including themselves. (Zgrrrrunch, whack-crack.) But when those types got too gay, people just abolished them. (Now what...?) So why should Judy get her arm crippled or her face ground in the sand? (Whoooom, oofie.) Or even me, dammit? I'd planned just to steer and try to bull through. But suddenly it burst on me: In three minutes, she hadn't nearly touched me; and when I'd bluffed her at the start, she'd crumpled. (Watchit!) And why could I read her? (Vrooom, missed again.) 'Cause I could read Earth traffic, see? (No ya don't, sister.) These jokers trained for scientific hell. (Zwoooo, Brrrotherrr.) But I'd been trained dirty. I wasn't so proud of it now. But this was the time for it if ever. (Grrrrup.) Show 'em how to really play Russian roulette, and if a dumb little punk like me was champ at it, where was the Glory? So when she slowed on a turn, I timed her to a hair, zoom across her bumper (like beating the cross-traffic on a red). I'd have cut her too but she braked so hard she nearly went over her wheel and I only clunked her ka-whack across the helmet. But it sure shook her nerve again, and I got on her tail like a moke who can't decide to pass, and began clouting her, thunk, whap. Not sportin'? Who cared! To cut her cheek, I'd have had to pull level; but a whip stings and bruises even through leather. And I just glorified! I couldn't hate my own Pop, but I sure hated her. Show the kids how, huh? Then I gave her the Technique. Foo! Any Grampaw driving to work with his mind on his dyspepsia, can do it by force of habit to score three car-lengths per block. She suddenly slowed to force me ahead, and I surged and cut in front of her, like beating a guy to a red light, and braked so she had to swing to pass me, and I clunked her. I snake-hipped her both sides. I crowded her from behind and when she swung away, there I was crowding her on the other side. It's amazing how much supremacy you can jam into a few minutes. Only I forgot she wasn't a Regular or even a good old Earth moke. And sometimes these Jehuans go even Earth one better, when they're losing a fight, and do a kamikaze crash. So when she threw her whip away and opened her whippet out full, which is dangerous, I was too terrified to be scared. Geez guys! Those last two minutes were the longest hour I ever lived. We covered a good two miles in tight loops, I swear. Then, twenty seconds to go, she swung too tight, that gooey pink thing toppled, and the ejector threw her, all in one gasp. No time to brake. Left, right -- I could just feel that I'd hit her whippet and crash; soft bump and snapping bones. I went between with my head and eyes scronched down. I near rammed the wall before I realized neither crash nor bump had happened. Marshals came tearing out, zrowww. But Slada was already rolling over. My muscles sort of melted: For once I'd gotten a closeup of how it'd feel to Get It -- or Give It. But I hung on and drove slow to Defenders' End, just as the gate went up. how to get out of that jam. People were helping me down, patting my back, pulling at my helmet. I bolted for the only possible cover, that Ladies' Dressing Room. I expected a riot, but nobody realized I was a Him. And in my state of mind, the scenery didn't matter. Then Mom grabbed me: "Darling! You're all right?" and started on the helmet. I had to bolt again, for the cubicle she'd come out of. But she caught on fast, and I got another high-octane kiss all in the family. Hot coffee too. But she kept saying, "Now, from now on, Judy -- I mean Chuck -- no more of your father's nonsense. Now promise!" Well, all I wanted was to sit with my hands between my knees, but finally I hove up: "Look, Mom, I don't need to promise. I'm sick of the adept stuff. Judy'll promise anything right now, but she'll get yippeepills in her tank again because she's a born show-off. And as for Pop..." I just shrugged. "Well, if your father isn't impressed now..." I said, "Mom, the only cure for Pop is breaking his back or going where he can't drive." . L "Well, Chuckle, I did check, and there's a place called Bolgwalk where Plutomat wants a man, and they have no roads to speak of, just bogs." Well, we both knew Pop'd never ride in any such back seat. Just then, Judy burst in. She'd gotten by as "Miss Blaire's Sister". And as we switched clothes again, she reported that the fight had been a sensation. (She'd watched, though Mom wouldn't.) Half the audience was wild over the greatest daredevil show in history, and half was honking mad at my unsporting tactics and wanted Slada to rechallenge. (I bet!) Nuts and bolts to both, halves. Outside, Mom gave the old elbow to a mob of reporters: "Stand back, there. The girl's exhausted. You can call tomorrow." And there, at the whippet, was Pop. All month he'd been sulking as if the whole deal were a plot to cramp his style. But now he had that quirk smirk like the guy in the ad: "Drive cautiously with our Triple-Threat Modem StormTrooperol." The newshounds popped some bulbs, and he said, "Okay, keeds. you whisk along. I'll handle this." Mom walked at him. "You'll handle nothing. Get along to the car." He tempered: "What's this? I thought we'd celebrate for my famous daughter. So... you go home in an armored car if you like. Come on, Judy, you're a sport anyway. You and me, hey?" But Ju was still scared, even if it was wearing off, and said "No!" in that spoiled-brat voice he always thought was so cute. He sneered like when some moke elbows him in traffic, and wung away, beat us out to Spectator Parking, legged into the car like forking over his cayuse, whammed the door and roared the engine, all in one snappy action. He shot out of his stall with one deft whirl of the wheel, fixing to surge straight ahead out of the lot. Maybe if he hadn't been so mad, even he would have seen the other car. But he felt it first, a crash that knocked his hat off. He and the other guy, with a passenger, charged out to inspect the slaughter. Stumblebum had taken it on the rear bumper, but the side of the other looked like a discarded candy-wrapper. Well... Pop had hit him. The only good feature was that the other guy, though big, was gray-haired with a high complexion. Pop saw it too and, after they'd all asked couldn't they look where they were going, he began the old Road Lawyer line: "Well, now. Mister, this isn't an open street, y'know. How'm I to back blind with you crashing through full speed?" The old guy went turkey-red; "Why, look where you hit me! I was half way past you, sir." "All right. Challenge if you like. My little girl just made a monkey of a better fighter than you're likely to be." The old guy went beet-red. On Jehu, if an old guy doesn't want to fight, he better drive real humble. His jaw stuttered, then he grabbed for his fender, and slumped to the ground, and lay there grunting and not even pink. A doc jumped to him. But the old guy's passenger grabbed Pop and jerked him around. He looked like a lumberjack foreman, curly black hair, blackshaved chin, hot black eyes. He snarled, "So now I flay you on behalf of my father, bigmouth," Pop cased the gU # r's horsepower, and suddenly he looked all flabby. He did wrench his shoulder loose and try the hardboiled comeback: "If your father can't keep his temper, #'m not liable by your code." (Like he says, what can you lose? And you often win.) The guy pushed his face an inch from Pop's: "Code? Why you hog-trough oaf, twenty witnesses heard you insult him in a discussion of honor. They will strip your back and I, Slam Hollicker, will hack it to the bones. If you ever drive again, you will defer even to old men." He swung away without even bowing. Pop was pinned there till they got old Hollicker into an ambulance and towed away his car. Then, Mom got in the driver's seat of our car, and Pop got in beside her without a peep, and Judy in the back. So I went for the whippet. It sure looks like we'll need that Planet Bolgwalk Dec. #, #. of the kind. I didn't even pump Judy on what happened on that drive home; you owe your father some fenders to hide behind. But when I came in. Mom said, "Chuck, your father has taken a new job and we're translating again the day after tomorrow." So I went to borrow back some stuff and see some guys, but wondering why the overdrive. Till I saw Pop. He'd been figuring the percentages. Next day he was clearing up at his office. But he was home early fussing around like a pup in traffic, till the frame-building crew told him to go find a parking-deck. Then indoors, making sure nobody'd forgotten ansrthing to hold us up come morning. Then out trying to bribe the crew to work overtime. Then, when they said the inspector wouldn't clear it till morning an # Tway, phoning the inspector to bribe him. Honest, I thought he'd boil his rad. The old impetuous spirit got him down at crack of dawn, too, burning toast and eggs till Mom took the kitchen away from him. Which gained us three hours to stall around in while the crew finished the fence under his steely eye -- though he didn't know any more about it than he does about a carburetor. But at half an hour to zero, Mr. Glash arrived and Pop got onto his rear bumper. They were out by the fence and Pop giving with the old Twenty Questions -- why this, why that, with no break for answers -- when up pranced this guy in a blue-and-white rig and hollered Pop's name aloud. Pop winced. "Hey, tone it down. I can hear you. What's all this?" The guy began reading a paper which boiled down to a demand that Pop desist from running out on his honorable duel. Pop looked like one of these guys who, when they get in a crash, jump out of the car and run. He grabbed Glash. "Hey, this clown can't stop me moving, can he?" Glash drawled, "This 'clown' is Herald of the Courts of Honor. But, no, he can't stop your moving, as long as it's off Jehu." Pop reinflated slightly. 'Well, not that I want to welsh on an obligation. But Mrs. Blaire was so upset about the girl, and I had this offer. And you know how it is with big deals -- split-second decisions." Glash fluttered his eyelids. "Oh, yes, everyone knows. And as long as Hollicker feels he's run you off Jehu he'll be satisfied. But don't come back, even for a day for your firm, say. Not healthy." The inspector arriving at last saved Pop answering that one. Glash bowed with flourishes to Mom and Judy, and slightly to Pop. He drawled, "It's been, ah, interesting to know you, as a specimen of the, ah, Earth Regulars. I trust you find Bolgwalk congenial." Then suddenly he turned to me. "From what I hear through, ah, a contact at the Arena, you'll make a man yet, Charles. Get some education -- and get rid of the one you have. Good luck." So we shook hands. Man! But who saw through my game and didn't squeal? Bolgwalk; he fulfills his bullman ego by betting on the planetary whiffle-ball games. He usually loses but it's comparatively cheap. Judy could be on an asteroid, for all she cares now, if it had boys on it. No cars -- but they make out. Mom treats me real man-to-man. But now I've gotten over being a professional teener, I think I'll take Mr. Glash's advice. They say the High Vacuum Navy gives you wonderful training. And you can take chances in the line of duty... without scooping in civilians. 'V' ' ii hUBm gg  the state highway sign said. Dexter Foote turned into the side road that the arrow indicated. He had no way of knowing it at the time, but by his action he condemned his new convertible to a fate worse than death. The side road meandered down a long slope into a wooded hollow where a breeze born of cool bowers and shaded brooks made the July afternoon heat less oppressive. A quantity of the pique that had been with him ever since setting forth from the city departed. There were worse assignments, after all, than writing up a fallen star. Abruptly he applied the brakes and brought the convertible to a screeching halt. His blue eyes started from his boyish face. Well they might. The two Humpty Dumptyish creatures squatting in the middle of the road were as big as heavy tanks and, judging from their "skin tone," were constructed of similar material. They had arms like jointed cranes and legs like articulated girders. Their scissors-like mouths were slightly open, exposing maws the hue of an open hearth at tapping time. Either they were all body and no head, or all head and no body. Whichever was the case, they had both eyes and ears. The former had something of the aspect of peek holes in a furnace door, while the latter brought to mind lopsided TV antennae. As Dexter watched, the foremost of the two metallic monsters advanced upon the convertible and began licking the chrome off the grill with a long, tong-like tongue. Meanwhile, its companion circled to the rear and took a big bite out of the trunk. There was an awesome gave a convulsive shudder. At this point, Dexter got out and ran. More accurately, he jumped out and ran. A hundred feet down the road, he stopped and turned. He was just in time to see monster No. I bite off the to be outdone, monster No. # bit fronted Dexter's nostrils, and he discerned a faint yellow haze hovering about the convertible. The rear wheels went in two bites. The # HP. motor reholstery caught fire and began to bum. A gout of flame shot up as the gas tank exploded. Far from discouraging the two monsters, the resultant inferno merely served to whet their appetities. Dexter's shoulders sagged, and the spot next to his heart that the convertible had shared with his best girl gave a spasmodic twinge. Removing his suitcoat and slinging it over his shoulder, he turned his back on the grisly repast and set out sadly for Sugardale. He had not gone far before his stalled thought-processes got into gear again. been assigned by his editor to write up had been an unusureport the paper had received. Maybe its unusualness did not stop there. Maybe it was something more than a mere meteorite. Certainly the two monsters could not be classified as local woodland creatures. All of which was fine as far as copy was concerned. But it didn't bring his convertible back. Presently he saw two sizable deposits of slag at the side of the road, and approaching them more closely, he discovered that they were still warm. Could they be the remains of a previously devoured automobile? he wondered. What an ignominious fate indeed to overtake a car! He looked at the two deposits once more before moving on. All he could think of were two piles of elephant dung. L A mile and half later, he emerged in a small valley that sported a handful of houses, a scattering of business places, a church or two and a goodly number of trees. A roadside sign informed him that he had reached his destination, that its population was #, and that its speed limit was # mph. The population, however, was nowhere in evidence, and the speed limit seemed silly in view of the absence of cars. A scared-looking housewife, upon whose door he knocked, told him he'd probably find the local minion of the law at the Sugardale Inn, "sucking up beer the way he always is when he should be out earning his money." The Inn turned out to be a sagging three-story structure in desperate need of a paint-job. There was a model A sedan parked in front of it, the first automobile Dexter had seen. Formerly the establishment had provided a haven for weary travelers. Now it provided a haven for contented cockroaches. Its fin de siecle bar was a collector's item, and standing at it, one foot propped on the brass barrail, was a lone customer. He was tall and thin, and somewhere in his sixties, and he was wearing blue denim trousers and a blue chambray shirt There was a lackluster badge pinned on the fading shirtfront, and a beat-up sombrero sat atop the graying head. "Sheriff Jeremiah Smith at your service," he said calmly when Dexter dashed up to him. He took a sip from the schooner of beer that sat on the bar before him. "Got troubles, have you, young man?" "My car," Dexter said. "I was driving along the road and -- " "Got ate up, did it? Well, it's not the first one to get ate up around here." Jeremiah Smith faced the doorway that led to the lobby. "Mrs. Creasy, get this young man a beer," he called. A plump middle-aged woman whose dark hair fell down over her eyes like a thicket came into sight behind the bar. She flicked a cockroach off the drainboard with an expert forefinger, drew Dexter a schooner and set it before him. Jeremiah Smith paid for it. "Drink her down, young man," he said. "I know how I'd feel if my car got ate up." Manfully, Dexter dispatched half the contents of the schooner, after which he introduced himself and explained the nature of his mission to Sugardale. "I never figured on an # dhing like this, though," he concluded. "You must have made it through just before the roadblock was set up," Jeremiah said. "You were lucky." Dexter started at him. "Lucky! I lost my car." "Pshaw. What's a car to a newspaper man when a Big Story's in the air? Take this newspaper fellow I saw on TV Saturday night. He -- " "Big Stories went out long ago," Dexter said. "Newspapermen work for a living the same as anybody else. Get back to my car. Aren't you going to do anything about it?" Jeremiah looked hurt. "I've already done everything I can do. The minute I saw those tanks I knew it was a job for the army, and the state police agreed with me. So we notified them, after which we advised everybody to stay indoors and to keep their cars under lock and key. All we can do now is wait." Jeremiah sighed. "Crazy, if you ask me. Tanks eating automobiles!'  "I imagine," Dexter said thoughtfully. "that our diet would give them pause too. Where did this star of yours fall?" , "In Ed Hallam's north timber lot. Take you there, if you like. There's not much to see, though -- just a big hole in the ground." Dexter finished his beer. "Come on," he said. 'T'HE MOriEL A parked in front of the Inn turned out to be Jeremiah's. They took off down the road at a brisk pace, wound through woods, dales, pastures and fields. Dexter hadn't the remotest idea where he was when at last Jeremiah pulled up beside a grove larger and darker than the others. The old man squinted into the lengthening shadows. "Seems to me them auto-eating tanks ought to make better reading than a common ordinary falling star." Halfway out of the car, Dexter stared at him. "You mean to tell me you don't see the connection?" "What connection?" Dexter got the rest of the way out. "Between the automobileeaters and the spaceship, of course." Jeremiah stared at him. "What spaceship?" "Oh, never mind," Dexter said. "Show me the fallen star." It was in a clearing deep in the woods. Or rather, the crater-like hole it had made was. Peering down into the hole, Dexter saw the dark, pitted surface of what could very well have been an ordinary, if unusually large, meteorite. There was nothing that suggested an opening of any kind, but the opposite wall of the crater did look as though some heavy object had been dragged -- or had dragged itself -- up to the level of the clearing. The underbrush showed signs of having been badly trampled in the recent past. He pointed out the signs to Jeremiah. "See how those saplings are flattened? No human being did that. I'll bet if we followed that trail, we'd come to the remains of the first car they consumed. Whose car was it, by the way?" "Mrs. Hopkins's new Buick. She'd just started out for the city on one of her shopping trips. She was so scared when she came running back into town her hair was standing straight out behind her head. Maybe, though, it was because she was running so fast." Abruptly Jeremiah leaned forward and squinted at the ground. "Looks almost like a big footprint right there, don't it." He straightened. "But if the darn thing is a spaceship like you say, how come it buried itself?" "Because whoever or whatever was piloting it didn't -- or couldn't -- decelerate enough for an orthodox landing," Dexter explained. "Lucky it hit the clearing. If it had hit the trees, you'd have had a forest fire on your hands." Jeremiah looked worried. "Maybe we'd better be getting back to the road. I feel kind of guilty leaving my model A sitting there all alone." Dexter followed him back through the woods and climbed into the front seat beside him. The road took them to the main highway, and not long thereafter Jeremiah turned off the highway into another road -- a familiar road heralded by a familiar sign marked the spot where once Dexter's proud convertible had stood. He gazed at them sadly as they passed.  the model A to a screeching halt. The two desecrators of the American Dream Incarnate were in the midst of another repast. The victim this time, judging from the still-visible star and the O.D. color scheme, was an army staff car. The grill and the motor were already gone, and half of the roof was missing. Yellow haze enshrouded the sorry scene, and the countryside was resounding to a series of horrendous "Do you think if I sort of zoomed by, we could make it?" Jeremiah asked. "I hate to go all the way around the other way." "I'm game if you are," Dexter said. The two monsters didn't even look up. "You'd think my model A wasn't good enough for them," Jeremiah said peevishly. "Count your blessings. Look, there's someone up ahead." The "someone" turned out to be a two-star general, a chicken colonel and an enlisted man. Jeremiah stopped, and the trio climbed into the back seat. "Ate your staff car, did they. General?" he chuckled, taking off again. "Well, that's the way it goes." "The name," said the general, whose middleaged face had a greenish cast, "is General Longcombe, and I was on my way to Sugardale to reconnoiter the situation before committing any troops to the area. This is my aide. Colonel Mortby, and my driver. Sergeant Wilkins." "Sheriff Smith at your service," said Jeremiah. "This here's Dexter Foote, who came to Sugardale to do a Big Story on our falling star." yours, sheriff," General Longcombe said. Jeremiah twisted around. " 'Vehicle-Eating Monsters'," Colonel Mortby interposed. He was a small man with a pleasant youthful face. "It's standard army operating procedure to give an object a name before investigating it." "Oh." Jeremiah twisted back again, saved the model A from going into the ditch with a Herculean yank on the wheel. "Well, Dexter here seems to think that our falling star is a spaceship and that they landed in it, and I'm inclined to believe he's right." son, I'm inclined to believe he's right myself," Colonel Mortby said. "I think that what we have to do with here," he went on presently, when the general made no comment, "is a form of metalbased life capable of generating an internal temp)erature of at least three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The acrid odor they give off while 'feasting' probably arises from a substance analogous to our gastric juices which their heat-resistant stomachs supply to accomplish 'digestion,' only in this case 'digestion' consists primarily in melting down the metal they consume and in isolating its waste matter, after which the pure metal is reprocessed into 'body tissue' and the waste matter is thrown off in the form of slag. I think we might go so far as to call them a couple of animate open hearths." Dexter had turned around in the front seat and was looking at the colonel admiringly. "I think you've hit the nail right on the head, sir," he said. General Longcombe was scowling. "We're here to survey the situation. Colonel, not to jump to conclusions." He addressed the back of Jeremiah's weatherbeaten neck. "I trust we'll have no trouble finding suitable accommodations in Sugardale, sheriff." "Mrs. Creasy'll be glad to put you up at the Inn, if that's what you mean," Jeremiah said. M rs. creasy was more than glad. Indeed, from the way she looked at the two officers and hair, you would have thought they were the first roomers she'd had in months, discounting the cockroaches, of course. The general said petulantly, "Let's get down to business. Colonel. I want an armored company brought up immediately, and I want the fallen-star area put off limits at once. Have the sheriff show you where it is." He turned to Sergeant Wilkins. "Sergeant, get on the phone as soon as the colonel gets off it, and arrange for my personal Cadillac to be delivered here first thing." After phoning his paper, Dexter headed for the dining room and sat down beside General Longcombe. "Anything new on General Longcombe sighed. There were shadows under his eyes, and his cheeks showed signs of saggihg. "They're still in circulation. Scared the wits out of a couple of teenagers and ate their hot-rod. We've got them under constant surveillance, of course, and what with all the underbrush they trample it's easy enough to track them. But we can't stop them. They eat our gas grenades and our fragmentation grenades, and they're impervious to our tank killers and our antitank mines. A small A-bomb would take care of them nicely, but even assuming there's an area around here large enough and isolated enough to permit us to use an A-bomb, there's no way of herding them into it." "It just so happens that there is such an area," Jeremiah Smith said. "Tillson Valley -- about ten miles south of here. You'd have to vacate Old Man Tillson, of course, but he'd be glad to go if you made it worth his while. He hasn't grown a thing but weeds anyway since he got his pension. Just sits around all day and sucks up beer." "But there's still no way of geteral Longcombe objected. "Tell me, general," Dexter said, "have they eaten any of your jeeps or trucks or personnel carriers?" General Longcombe shook his head. "They've had plenty of opportunity to, too." "I have a theory," Dexter said. The look that promptly settled on General Longcombe's face made no bones about what he thought of presumptuous young reporters with theories. Colonel Mortby, however, was considerably less biased. "It won't do any harm to listen to what he's got to say, sir," he pointed out, "and it may even do some good. It'll be at least a day before the ship is excavated and even then we may not know any more about the sort of life forms we're dealing with than we do now." ther invitation. "I think it's pretty clear by now," he began, "that our two visitors from Planet X aren't attracted by metal in just any old form at all, but by metal in the form of new, or nearly new, automobiles. This strongly suggests that their landing was unpremeditated, because if it had been premeditated they would have come down in a section of the country where such metallic concoctions are in plentiful supply -- near a city or a 'large town, or close to a heavily traveled throughway. "But what is it about these new cars of ours that they find so irresistible? Let's try an analogy. Suppose that one of us has gone into a bakery to buy a birthday cake and that money is no object. Which cake is he most likely to buy? The answer is obvious: the one with the most visual appeal. To return to our visitors from Planet X. Suppose that all their lives they've been eating metal in various but uninspired ingot forms -- the metallic equivalents, let's say, of beans and bread and hominy grits. Now suppose they find their way to another planet where visual appeal in metallic creation is a major occupation, and suppose that shortly after disembarking from their spaceship they come upon a new convertible. Wouldn't they react in the same way we would react if all our lives our diet had been confined to beans and bread and hominy grits and we traveled to another planet, disembarked and came upon a delicious birthday cake just begging to be eaten? Wouldn't they make pigs of themselves and start looking for more cakes?" "But if it's the ornate nature of our late-model cars that attracts them, why did they eat the staff car?" Colonel Mortby asked. "And why did they eat the teenager's hot rod, and our gas and fragmentation grenades?" "I suggest," Dexter said, "that they ate the staff car because at the moment there weren't any other cars immediately available. As for the teenager's hot rod, I imagine it was loaded down with enough chrome accessories to sink a battleship. And as for the grenades -- your men threw them at them first, did they not?" Colonel Mortby nodded. "I see what you mean. Sort of like throwing candy to a baby. I'll buy your theory, Mr. Foote." "And now, if I may," Dexter continued, "I'd like to propose a means of getting rid of our unwanted visitors from Planet X." General Longcombe sighed. "Very well, Mr. Foote. Go on." "You mentioned earlier, sir, that there was no way of herding However, I think there is a way. Suppose we were to remove all of the automobiles from the vicinity with the exception of one, and suppose we were to park that one in the middle of Tillson Valley as bait, with a remotecontrolled A-bomb underneath it?" "But how would they know that the bait was there?" "Through association," Dexter said. "All of the automobiles they've consumed thus far were in operation shortly before they began to eat them, so by now they must have established an vmconscious relationship between the sound of the motors and the taste of the metal. Therefore, if we keep the bait idling and set up a P.A. system to amplify the sound, eventually they'll hear it, their mouths will salivate and they'll come running." General Longcombe offered no comment. He appeared to be deep in thought. "My car is in West Virginia," Colonel Mortby said. "My car was eaten," Dexter said. General Longcombe opened his mouth. "My car -- " he began. Sergeant Wilkins entered the room and saluted smartly. "The general's Cadillac has just arrived, sir," he said. readily enough, once he was assured that he would be indemnified not only for his ramshackle house but for the young mountain of beer bottles that stood in his back yard, and the command post was moved forthwith to the lip of the valley. Jeremiah Smith was allowed to go along as an observer, and Dexter was accorded a similar favor. By evening, everything was in place. The colonel's Cadillac, parked in the valley's center, had something of the aspect of a chrome-bedizened lamb resting on an altar of crab grass, buttercups and mustard weeds. Surrounding it were half a dozen floodlights, suspended over it was a microphone, standing next to it was a pole supporting three P.A. speakers, and located several hundred feet away was a TV camera. Beyond this imprqssive display, Old Man Tillson's homestead could be discerned, and beyond the homestead rose his mountainous collection of beer bottles. Colonel Mortby came out of the command-post tent and walked over to where Dexter and Jeremiah were standing, looking down into the valley. He handed each of them a pair of cobaltblue glasses. "If you watch the blast, make sure you wear these," he said, raising his voice above the amplified purring of the Cadillac's motor. "You'll be glad to ready on their way, Mr. Foote -- our walkie-talkie squad just called in. However, the creatures move so slowly that they probably won't be here before dawn." Dexter came out of a brown study. "One thing still bugs me," he said. "Why should two members of a race of extraterrestrials technically intelligent enough to build spaceships behave like a pair of gluttonous savages the minute they land on another planet?" "But you explained that," Jeremiah pointed out. "They just can't resist eating American automobiles." "I'm afraid I got carried away by my analogy. Civilized beings simply don't go running across the countryside the minute they land, and start grabbing up everything that strikes their eye. They make contact with the authorities first, and then they go running across the countryside and start grabbing up everyrthing that strikes their eye." Colonel Mortby grinned. "You've got a good point there, Mr. Foote. Well, I'm going to see if I can't grab forty winks or so -- it's been a trying day." "Me too," Jeremiah said, heading for his model A. Left alone, Dexter wedged a flashlight in the fork of a little tree, sat down in its dim radiance, got out pen and notebook, and began his article. The Solid Cheese Cadillac, he wrote, by Dexter Foote... Dawn found him dozing over page #. "There they are!" someone shouted, jerking him awake. "The filthy fiends!" The "someone" was General Longcombe. Joining him, Dexter moving relentlessly across the valley floor toward the helpless Cadillac. Jeremiah came up, rubing his eyes. Colonel Mortby could be discerned through the entrance of the command-post tent, leaning over a technician's shoulder. Cadillac and began licking off the chrome with their long, tong-like tongues. General Longcombe went wild. He waved his arms. "Monsters!" he screamed, "I'll blow you to Kingdom Come personally!" and stomped into the tent. Dexter and Jeremiah started to put on their cobalt-blue glasses. Abruptly thunder sounded, and a shadow darkened the land. Looking skyward, Dexter saw it -- The ship. The saucer. Whichever word you cared to apply to it. But whichever noun you chose, you had to prefix it with the adjective "gigantic," for the ventral hatch alone, which had just yawned open, was large enough to accommodate the Sugardale Methodist Church. In the command-post tent, the general, as yet unaware of the countdown in an anguished voice. "Two -- " were trying vainly to extricate themselves from a huge metallic net that had dropped over them. "One -- " On the lip of the valley, Dexter Foote was grappling with an insight. "Zero -- " Pfft!... General Longcombe said. "They cancelled out the chainreaction with some kind of a ray. I wonder..." He shook his head wistfully. "What a weapon, though." He and Colonel Mortby and the tech were standing by the chrome-stripped carcass of the Cadillac. Dexter and Jeremiah had just come up. "My theory turned out to be a little bit offcenter," Dexter said. "You see, I overlooked the possibility that our children aren't necessarily the only galactic small fry who run away from home and get themselves in Dutch. My birthday-cake analogy still holds true, but I would have done better to have compared our late-model automobiles to appetizing candy bars, or Easter baskets filled with jelly beans and chocolate chickens." The general regarded him blankly. "I'm afraid I don't follow you at all, Mr. Foote." "Did you ever turn a pair of hungry kids loose in a candy store, sir?" Understanding came into General Longcombe's eyes then, and he turned and gazed sadly at his chromeless Cadillac. "I wonder if they have castor oil on Planet X," he said." "I bet they have its equivalent," grinned Dexter Foote. I J His work was healing the sick -- but this planet was already dead!  municator with something like exasperation as his taped voice repeated a standard approach-call for the twentieth time. But no answer came, which had become irritating a long time ago. This was a new Med Service sector for Calhoun. He'd been assigned to another man's tour of duty because the other man had been taken down with romance. He'd gotten married, which ruled him out for Med Ship duty. So now Calhoun listened to his own voice endlessly repeating a call that should have been answered immediately. Murgatroyd the tormal watched with beady, interested eyes. The planet Maya lay off to port of the Med Ship Esclipus Twenty. Its almost circular disk showed full size on a vision screen beside the ship's control board. The image was absolutely clear and vividly colored. There was an ice cap in view. There were continents. There were seas. The cloud system of a considerable cyclonic disturbance could be noted off at one side, and the continents looked reasonably as they should, and the seas were of that muddy, indescribable tint which indicates deep water. Calhoun's oyn voice, taped an hour earlier, sounded in a speaker as it went again to the communicator and then to the extremely visible world a hundred thousand miles away. "Calling ground," said Calhoun's recorded voice. "Med Ship Esclipus Twenty calling ground to report arrival and ask coordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty standard tons. Repeat, fiveoh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection." I 'HE recorded voice stopped. There was silence except for the taped random noises which kept the inside of the ship from feeling like the inside of a tomb. Murgatroyd said: "Chee?" Calhoun said ironically, "Undoubtedly, Murgatroyd. Undoubtedly! Whoever's on duty at the spaceport stepped out for a moment, or dropped dead, or did something equally inconvenient. We have to wait until he gets back or somebody else takes over." Murgatroyd said "Chee!" again and began to lick his whiskers. He knew that when Calhoun called on the communicator, another human voice should reply. Then there should be conversation, and shortly the force-fields of a landing-grid should take hold of the Med Ship and draw it planetward. In time it ought to touch ground in a spaceport with a gigantic, silvery landing-grid rising skyward all about it. Then there should be people greeting Calhoun cordially and welcoming Murgatroyd with smiles and petting. "Calling ground," said the recorded voice yet again. "Med Ship Esclipus Twenty -- " It went on through the formal notice of arrival. Murgatroyd waited in pleasurable anticipation. When the Med Ship arrived at a port of call humans gave him sweets and cakes, and they thought it charming that he drank coffee just like a human, only with more gusto. Aground, Murgatroyd moved zestfully in society while Calhoun worked. Calhoun's work was conferences with planetary health officials, politely receiving such information as they thought important, and tactfully telling them about the most recent developments in medical science as known to the Interstellar Medical Service. "Somebody," said Calhoun darkly, "is going to catch the devil for this!" The communicator loudspeaker spoke abruptly. "Calling Med Ship," said a voice. "Calling Med Ship Esclipus T wenty! Liner Candida calling. Have you had an answer from ground?" Calhoun blinked. Then he said curtly; "Not yet. I've been calling all of half an hour, and never a word out of them!" "We've been in orbit twelve hours," said the voice from emptiness. "Calling all the while. No answer. We don't like it." Calhoun flipped a switch that threw a vision screen into circuit with the ship's electron telescope. A starfield appeared and shifted wildly. Then a bright dot centered itself. He raised the magnification. The bright dot swelled and became a chubby commercial ship, with the false ports that passengers like to believe they looked through when in space. Two relatively large cargo ports on each side showed that it carried heavy freight in addition to passengers. It was one of those workhorse intra-cluster ships that distributed the freight and passengers the long-haul liners dumped off only at established transshipping ports. Murgatroyd padded across the Med Ship's cabin and examined the image with a fine air of wisdom. It did not mean anything to him, but tormals imitate human actions as parrots and parrakeets imitate human speech. He said, "Chee.'" as if making an observation of profound significance, then went back to the cushion and again curled up. "We don't see anything wrong aground," the liner's voice complained, "but they don't answer calls! We don't get any scattersignals either. We went down to two diameters and couldn't pick up a thing. And we have a passenger to land. He insists on it!" "OY ordinary, communications between different places on a planet's surface use frequencies the ion-layers of the atmosphere either reflect or refract down past the horizon. But there is usually some small leakage to space, and line-of-sight frequencies are generally abundant. It is one of the annoyances of a ship coming in to port that space near most planets is usually full of local signals. "I'll check," said Calhoun curtly. "Stand by." The Candida would have arrived off Maya as the Med Ship had done, and called down as Calhoun had been doing. It was very probably a ship on schedule and the grid operator at the spaceport should have expected it. Space commerce was important to any planet, comparing more or less with the export-import business of an industrial nation in ancient times on Earth. Planets had elaborate traffic-aid systems for the cargo-carriers which moved between solar systems as they'd once moved between continents on Earth. Such traffic aids were very carefully maintained. Certainly for a spaceport landinggrid not to respond to calls for twelve hours running seemed ominous. "We've been wondering," said the Candida querulously, "if there could be something radically wrong below. Sickness, for example." The word "sickness" was a substitute for a more alarming word. But a plague had nearly wiped out the population of Dorset, once upon a time, and the first ships to arrive after it had broken out most incautiously went down to ground, and so carried the plague to their next two ports of call. Nowadays quarantine regulations were enforced very strictly indeed. "I'll try to find out what's the matter," said Calhoun. 'We've got a passenger," repeated the Candida aggrievedly, "who insists that we land him by space-boat if we don't make a ship landing. He says he has imp)ortant business aground." Calhoun did not answer. The rights of passengers were extravagantly protected, these days. To fail to deliver a passenger to his destination entitled him to punitive damages which no spaceline could afford. So the Med Ship would seem heaven-sent to the Candida's skipper. Calhoun could relieve him of responsibility. The telescope screen winked and showed the surface of the planet a hundred thousand miles away. Calhoun glared at the image on the port screen and guided the telescope to the spaceport city -- Maya City. He saw highways and blocks of buildings. He saw the spaceport and its landing-grid. He could see no motion, of course. He raised the magnification. He raised it again. Still no motion. He upped the magnification until the lattice-pattern of the telescope's amplifying crystal began to show. But at the ship's distance from the planet, a ground-car would represent only the fortieth of a second of arc. There was atmosphere, too, with thermals; anything the size of a ground-car simply couldn't be seen. But the city showed quite clearly. Nothing massive had happened to it. No large-scale physical disaster had occurred. It simply did not answer calls from space. screen. "I think," he said irritably into the communicator microphone, "I suspect I'll have to make an emergency landing. It could be something as trivial as a power failure -- " but he knew that was wildly improbable -- "or it could be -- anything. I'll land on rockets and tell you what I find." ! The voice from the Candida said hopefully: "Can you authorize us to refuse to land our passenger for his own protection? He's raising the devil! He insists that his business demands that he be landed." A word from Calhoun as a Med Service man would protect the spaceliner from a claim for damages. But Calhoun didn't like the look of things. He realized, distastefully, that he might find practically anything down below. He might find that he had to quarantine the planet and himself with it. In such a case he'd need the Candida to carry word of the quarantine to other planets and thus to Med Service sector headquarters. "We've lost a lot of time," insisted the Candida. "Can you authorize us -- " "Not yet," said Calhoun. "I'll tell you when I land." "But -- " "I'm signing off for the moment," said Calhoun. "Stand by." He headed the little ship downward, and as it gathered velocity he went over the briefing sheets covering this particular world. He'd never touched ground here before. His occupation, of course, was seeing to the dissemination of medical science as it developed under the Med Service. The Service itself was neither political nor administrative. But it was important. Every human-occupied world was supposed to have a Med Ship visit at least once in four years to verify the state of public health. Med Ship men like Calhoun offered advice on public-health problems. When something out of the ordinary turned up, the Med Service had a staff of researchers who hadn't been wholly baffled yet. There were great ships which could carry the ultimate in laboratory equipment and specialized personnel to any place where they were needed. Not less than a dozen inhabited worlds in this sector alone owed the survival of their populations to the Med Service, and the number of those which couldn't have been colonized without Med Service help was legion. Calhoun reread the briefing. Maya was one of four planets in this general area whose life systems seemed to have had a common origin, suggesting that the Arrhenius theory of space-traveling spores was true in some limited sense. A genus of groundcover plants with motile stems and leaves and cannibalistic tendencies was considered strong evidence of common origin. The planet had been colonized for two centuries now, and produced organic compounds of great value from indigenous plants, most of which were used in textile manufacture. There were no local endemic infections to which men were susceptible. A number of human-use crops were grown. Cereals, grasses and grains, however, could not be grown because of the native ground-cover motile-stem plants. All wheat and cereal food had to be imported, which fact severely limited Maya's population. There the planet, settled on a peninsula in the Yucatan Sea and a small area of mainland. Public-health surveys had shown a great many things about a great many subjects... but there was no mention of anything to account for the failure of the spaceport to respond to arrival calls from space. Naturally! The Med Ship drove on down, and the planet revolved beneath it. As Maya's sunlit hemisphere enlarged, Calhoun kept the telescope's field wide. He saw cities, and vast areas of cleared land where native plants were grown as raw materials for the organics' manufacturies. He saw very little true chlorophyll green, though. Mayan foliage tended to a dark olive color. that the city streets were empty even of ground-car traffic. There was no spaceship aground in the landing-grid. There were  no ground-cars in motion on the  splendid, multiple-lane highways. At thirty miles altitude there were still no signals in the atmoi sphere, though when he tried  amplitude-modulation reception I he picked up static. But there I was no normally modulated sigI nal on the air at any frequency, f At twenty miles -- no. At fifteen I miles, broadcast power was available, which proved that the landIj ing-grid was working as usual, I tapping the upper atmosphere for electric charges to furnish power for all the planet's needs. j From ten miles down to I ground-touch, Calhoun was busy.  It is not too difficult to land  a ship on rockets, with reasoni ably level ground to land on. But I landing at a specific spot is somei thing else. Calhoun juggled the ship to descend inside the grid , itself. His rockets burned out penj cil-thin holes through the clay ; and stone beneath the tarmac. He cut them off. Silence. Stillness. The Med Ship's outside microphones picked up small noises of wind blowing over the city. There was no other sound at all. -- No. There was a singularly deliberate clicking sound, not loud and not fast. Perhaps a click -- a double click -- every two seconds. That was all. Calhoun went into the airlock, with Murgatroyd frisking a little in the expectation of great social success among the people of this world. When Calhoun cracked the outer airlock door he smelled something. It was a faintly sour, astringent odor that had the quality of decay in it. But it was no kind of decay he recognized. Again stillness and silence. No traffic-noise; not even the almost inaudible murmur that every city has in all its ways at all hours. The buildings looked as buildings should look at daybreak, except that the doors and windows were open. It was somehow shocking. A ruined city is dramatic. An abandoned city is pathetic. This was neither. It was something new. It felt as if everybody had walked away, out of sight, within the past few minutes. Calhoun headed for the spaceport building with Murgatroyd ambling puzzledly at his side. Murgatroyd was disturbed. There should be people here! They should welcome Calhoun and admire him -- Murgatroyd -- and he should be a social lion with all the sweets he could eat and all the coffee he could put into his expandable belly. But nothing happened! Nothing at all. "Chee?" he asked anxiously. "They've gone away," growled Calhoun. "They probably left in ground-cars. There's not one in sight." There wasn't. Calhoun could look out through the grid foundations and see long, sunlit and absolutely empty streets. He arrived at the spaceport building. There was -- there had been -- a green area about the base of the structure. There was not a living plant left. Leaves were wilted and limp. The remains had become almost a jelly of collapsed stems and blossoms of dark olive-green. The plants were dead; but not long enough to have dried up. They might have wilted two or three days before. Calhoun went in the building. The spaceport log lay open on a desk. It recorded the arrival of freight to be shipped away -- undoubtedly -- on the Candida now uneasily in orbit somewhere aloft. There was no sign of disorder. It was exactly as if the people here had walked out to look at something interesting, and hadn't come back. Calhoun trudged out of the spaceport and to the streets and buildings of the city proper. It was incredible! Doors were opened or unlocked. Merchandise in the shops lay on display, exactly as it had been spread out to interest customers. There was no sign of confusion anywhere. Even in a restaurant there were dishes and flatware on the tables. The food in the plates was stale, as if three days old, but it hadn't yet begun to spoil. The appearance of everything was as if people at their meals had simply, at some signal, gotten up and walked out without any panic or disturbance. Calhoun made a wry face. He'd remembered something. Among the tales that had been carried from Earth to the other worlds of the galaxy there was a completely unimportant mystery story which people still sometimes tried to write an ending to. It was the story of an ancient sailing ship called the Marie Celeste, which was found drifting aimlessly in the middle of the ocean. Tliere was food on the cabin table, and the galley stove was still warm. There was no sign of any trouble, or terror, or disturbance which might cause the ship to be abandoned. But there was not a ( the century, Murgatroyd, I don't like this. I don't like it a bit!" living soul on board. Nobody had ever been able to contrive a believable explanation. "Only," said Calhoun to Murgatroyd, "this is on a larger scale. The people of this city walked out about three days ago, and didn't come back. Maybe all the people on the planet did the same, since there's not a communicator in operation anywhere. To make the understatement of II Ship, Calhoun stopped at another place where, on a grassgrowing planet, there would have been green sward. There were Earth-type trees, and some native ones, and between them there should have been a lawn. The trees were thriving, but the ground-cover plants were collapsed and rotting. Calhoun picked up a bit of the semi-slime and smelled it. It was faintly sour, astringent, the same smell he'd noticed when he opened the airlock door. He threw the stuff away and brushed off his hands. Something had killed the ground-cover plants Earth-type grass when planted here. He listened. Everywhere that humans live, there are insects and birds and other tiny creatures which are essential parts of the ecological system to which the human race is adjusted. They have to be carried to and established upon every new world that mankind hopes to occupy. But there was no sound of such living creatures here. It was probable that the bellowing roar of the Med Ship's emergency rockets was the only real noise the city had heard since its people went away. The stillness bothered Murgatroyd. He said, "Chee!" in a subdued tone and stayed close to Calhoun. Calhoun shook his head. Then he said abruptly: "Come along, Murgatroyd!" He went back to the building housing the grid controls. He didn't look at the spaceport log this time. He went to the instruments recording the second function of a landing-grid. In addition to lifting up and letting down ships of space, a landing-grid drew down power from the ions of the upper atmosphere and broadcast it. It provided all the energy that humans on a world could need. It was solar power, in a way, absorbed and stored by a layer of ions miles high, which then could be drawn on and distributed by the grid. During his descent Calhoun had noted that broadcast power was still available. Now he looked at what the instruments said. The needle on the dial showing power-drain moved slowly back and forth. It was a rh#dhmic movement, going from maximum to minimum power-use, and then back again. Approximately six out of the broadcast every two seconds for half of one second. Then the drain cut off for a second and a half, and went on again for half a second. Frowning, Calhoun raised his eyes to a very fine color photograph on the wall above the power dials. It was a picture of the human-occupied part of Maya, taken four thousand miles out in space. It had been enlarged to four feet by six, and Maya City could be seen as an irregular group of squares and triangles measuring a little more than half an inch by three-quarters. The detail was perfect. It was possible to see perfectly straight, infinitely thin lines moving out from the city. They were multiple-lane highways, mathematically straight from one city to another, and then mathematically straight -- though at a new angle -- until the next. Calhoun stared thoughtfully at them. "The people left the city in a hurry," he told Murgatroyd, "and there was little confusion, if any. So they knew in advance that they might have to go. They were ready for it. If they took anything, they had it ready packed in their cars. But they hadn't been sure they'd have to go because they were going about their businesses as usual. All the shops were open and people were eating in restaurants, and so on." Murgatroyd said, "Ciee!" as if in full agreement. "Now," demanded Calhoun, "where did they go? The question's really where could they go! There were about eight hundred thousand people in this city. There'd be cars for everyone, of course, and two hundred thousand cars would take everybody. But that's a lot of ground-cars! Put 'em two hundred feet apart on a highway, and that's twentysix cars to the mile on each lane. Run them at a hundred miles an hour on a twelve-lane road -- using all lanes one way -- and that's twenty-six hundred cars per lane per hour, and that's thirtyone thousand... two highways make sixty-two... three highways... With two highways they could empty the city in under three hours, and with three highways close to two. Since there's no sign of panic, that's what they must have done. Must have worked it out in advance, too. Maybe they'd done it before it happened... whatever it was that happened." which was so much more detailed than a map. There were mountains to the north of Maya City, but only one highway led north. There were more mountains to the west. One highway went into them, but not through. To the south there was sea, which curved aroxmd some three hundred miles from Maya City and put the human colony on Maya on a peninsula. "They went east," said Calhoun presently. He traced lines with his finger. "Three highways go east; that's the only way they could go quickly. They hadn't been sure they'd have to go but they knew where to go when they did. So when they got their warning, they left. On three highways, to the east. And we'll follow them and ask what the hell they ran away from. Nothing's visible here!" He went back to the Med Ship, Murgatroyd skipping with him. As the airlock door closed behind them, he heard a click from the outside-microphone speakers. He listened. It was a doubled clicking, as of something turned on and almost at once turned off again. There was a two-second cycle, the same as that of the power drain. Something drawing immediately off again every two seconds. It made a sound in speakers linked to outside microphones, but it didn't make a noise in the air. The microphone clicks were induction; pick-up; like cross-talk on defective telephone cables. Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He went to the communicator, "Calling Candida -- " he began, and the answer almost leaped down his throat. "Candida to Med Ship. Come in! Come in! What's happened down there?" "The city's deserted without any sign of panic," said Calhoun, "and there's power and nothing seems to be broken down. But it's as if somebody had said, 'Everybody clear ouf and they did. That doesn't happen on a whim! What's your next port of call?" The Candida's voice told him, hopefully. "Take a report," commanded Calhoun. "Deliver it to the public health office immediately you. land. They'll get it to Med Service sector headquarters. I'm going to stay here and find out what's been going on." He dictated, growing irritated as he did so because he couldn't explain what he reported. Something serious had taken place, but there was no clue as to what it was. Strictly speaking, it wasn't certainly a public health affair. But any emergency the size of this one involved public health factors. "I'm remaining aground to investigate," finished Calhoun. "I will report further when or if it is possible. Message ends." "What about our passenger?" "To the devil with your passenger!" said Calhoun peevishly. "Do as you please!" and prepared for activity outside the ship. Presently he and Murgatroyd went to look for transportation. The Med Ship couldn't be used for a search operation; it didn't carry enough rocket fuel. They'd have to use a ground vehicle. It was again shocking to note that nothing had moved but sun shadows. Again it seemed that everybody had simply walked out of some door or other and failed to come back. Calhoun saw the windows of jewelers' shops. Treasures lay unguarded in plain view. He saw a florist's shop. Here there were earth-type flowers apparently thriving, and some strange beautiful flowers with olive-green foliage which throve as well as the Earthplants. There was a cage in which a plant had grown, and that plant was wilting and about to rot. But a plant that had to be grown in a cage... He found a ground-car agency, perhaps for imported cars, perhaps for those built on Maya. He went in and from the cars on display he chose one, an elaborate sports car. He turned its key and it hummed. He drove it carefully out into the empty street, Murgatroyd sitting interestedly beside him. "This is luxury, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "Also it's grand theft. We medical characters can't usually afford such things. Or have an excuse to steal them. But these are parlous times, so we take a chance." "Cheer said Murgatroyd. "We want to find a fugitive population and ask what they ran away from. As of the moment, it seems that they ran away from nothing. They may be pleased to know they can come back." Murgatroyd again said, "CheeP' Calhoun drove through vacant ways. It was somehow nerveracking. He felt as if someone should pop out and say "Boo!" at any instant. He discovered an elevated highway and a ramp leading up to it At a cloverleaf he drove eastward, watching sharply for any sign of life. There was none. He was nearly out of the city when he felt the chest impact of a sonic boom, and then heard a trailing away growling sound which seemed to come from farther away as it died out. It was the result of something traveling faster than sound, so that the noise it made far away had to catch up with the sound it emitted nearby. He stared up. He saw a parachute blossom as a bare speck against the blue. Then he heard the even deeper-toned roaring of a supersonic craft climbing skjrward. It could be a spaceliner's lifeboat, descended into atmosphere and going out again. It was. It had left a parachute behind, and now went back to space to rendezvous with its parent ship. "That," said Calhoun impatiently, "will be the Candida's passenger. He was insistent enough." He scowled. The Candida's voice had said its passenger demanded to be landed for business reasons. And Calhoun had a prejudice against some kinds of business men who would think their own affairs more important than anything else. Two standard years before, he'd made a planetary health inspection on Texia II, in another galactic sector. It was a llano planet and a single able prairies had been sown with an Earth-type grass which destroyed the native ground-cover -- the reverse of the ground-cover situation here -- and the entire planet was a monstrous range for beef cattle. Dotted about were gigantic slaughterhouses, and cattle in masses of tens of thousands were shifted here and there by ground-induction fields which acted as fences. Ultimately the cattle were driven by these same induction fences to the slaughter houses and actually into the chutes where their throats were slit. Every imaginable fraction of a credit of profit was extracted from their carcasses, and Calhoim had found it appalling. He was not sentimental about cattle, but the complete coldbloodedness of the entire operation sickened him. The same coldbloodedness was practised toward the human employees who ran the place. Their living quarters were sub-marginal. The air stank of cattle murder. Men worked for the Texia Company or they did not work. If they did not work they did not eat. If they worked and ate, -- Calhoun could see nothing satisfying in being alive on a world like that! His report to Med Service had been biting. He'd been prejudiced against businessmen ever since. TUT A parachute descended,  blowing away from the city. It would land not too far from the highway he followed. And it didn't occur to Calhoun not to help the unknown chutist. He saw a small figure dangling below the chute. He slowed the ground-car as he estimated where the parachute would land. He was off the twelve-lane highway and on a feeder road when the chute was a hundred feet high. He was racing across a field of olive-green plants that went all the way to the horizon when the parachute actually touched ground. There was a considerable wind. The man in the harness boimced. He didn't know how to spill the air. The chute dragged him. Calhoun sped ahead, swerved and ran into the chute. He stoppjed the car and the chute stopped with it. He got out. The man lay in a hopieless tangle of cordage. He thrust unskilfully at it. When Calhoun came up he said suspiciously: "Have you a knife?" Calhoun offered a knife, politely opjening its blade. The man slashed at the cords and freed himself, There was an attache case lashed to his chute harness. He cut at those cords. The attache case not only came clear, but opened. It dumpjed out an incredible mass of brand new, tightly packed interstellar credit certificates. Calhoun could see that the denominations were one thousand and ten thousand credits. The man from the chute reached under his armpit and drew out a blaster. It was not a service weapon. It was elaborate, practically a toy. With a dour glance at Calhoun he put it in a side pocket and gathered up the scattered money. It was an enormous sum, but he packed it back. He stood up. "My name is Allison," he said in an authoritative voice. "Arthur Allison. I'm much obliged. Now I'll ask you to take me to Maya City." I "No," said Calhoun politely. "I just left there. It's deserted. I'm not going back. There's nobody there." "But I've important bus -- " The other man stared. "It's deserted? But that's impossible!" "Quite," agreed Calhoun, "but it's true. It's abandoned. Uninhabited. Everybody's left it. There's no one there at all." The man who called himself Allison blinked unbelievingly. He swore. Then he raged profanely. But he was not bewildered by the news. Which, upjon consideration, was itself almost bewildering. But then his eyes grew shrewd. He looked about him. "My name is Allison," he repeated, as if there were some sort of magic in the word. "Arthur Allison. No matter what's happened, I've some business to do here. Where have the people gone? I need to find them." "I need to find them too," said Calhoun. "I'll take you with me, if you like." "You've heard of me." It was a statement, confidently made. "Never," said Calhoun politely. "If you're not hurt, suppose you get in the car? I'm as anxious as you are to find out what's happjened. I'm Med Service." A car. Med Service, eh? I don't think much of the Med Service! You pjeople try to meddle in things that are none of your business!" Calhoun did not answer. The muddy man, clutching the attache case tightly, waded through the olive-green plants to the car and climbed in. Murgatroyd said cordially, "Chee-ciee!" but Allison viewed him with distaste. "What's this?" "He's Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "He's a tOTtnal. He's Med service personneL" "I don't like beasts," said Allison coldly. "He's much more iniportant to me than you are," said Calhoun, "if the matter should come to a test." Allison stared at him as if expjecting him to cringe. Calhoun did not. Allison showed every sign of being an important man who expjected his importance to be recognized and catered to. When Calhoun stirred impatiently he got into the car and growled a little. Calhoun took his place. The ground-car hummed. It rose on the six columns of air which took the place of wheels and slid across the field of darkgreen plants, leaving the parachute deflated across a number of rows, and a trail of crusheddown plants where it had moved. It reached the highway again. Calhoun ran the car up on the highway's shoulder, and then suddenly checked. He'd noticed something. He stopped the car and got out. Where the ploughed field ended, and before the coated surface of the highway began, there was a space where on another world one would expect to see green grass. On this planet grass did not grow; but there would normally be some sort of self-planted vegetation where there was soil and sunshine and moisture. There had been such vegetation here, but now there was only a thin, repellent mass of slimy and decaying foliage. Calhoun bent down to it. It had a sour, faintly astringent smell of decay. These were the ground-cover plants of Maya of which Calhoun had read. They had motile stems, leaves and flowers, and they had cannibalistic tendencies. They were the local weeds which made it impossible to grow grain for human use upon this world. And they were dead. Calhoun straightened up and returned to the car. Plants like this were wilted at the base of the spaceport building, and on another place where there should have been sward. Calhoun had seen a large dead member of the genus in a florist's, that had been growing in a cage before it died. There was a singular coincidence here: humans ran away from something, and something caused the death of a particular genus of cannibal weeds. It did not exactly add up to anything in particular, and certainly wasn't evidence for anything at all. But Calhoun drove on in a vaguely puzzled mood. The germ of a guess was forming in his mind. He couldn't pretend to himself that it was likely, but it was surely no more unlikely ings abandoning their homes at a moment's notice. Ill a town called Tenochitlan, some forty miles from Maya City. Calhoun swung off the highway to go through it. Whoever had chosen the name Maya for this planet had been interested in the legends of Yucatan, back on Earth. There were many instances of such hobbies in a Med Ship's list of ports of call. Calhoun touched ground regularly on planets that had been named for countries and towns when men first roamed the stars, and nostalgically christened their discoveries with names suggested by homesickness. There was a Tralee, and a Dorset, and an Eire. Colonists not infrequently took their world's given name as a pattern and chose related names for seas and peninsulas and moimtain chains. On Texia the landing-grid rose near a town called Corral and the principal meat-packing settlement was named Roundup. Whatever the name Tenochitlan would have suggested, though, was denied by the town itself. It was a small, with a pleasing local type of architecture. There were shops and some factories, and. many strictly private homes, some clustered close together and others in the middles of considerable gardens. In those gardens also there was wilt and decay among the cannibal plants. There was no grass, because the plants prevented it, but now the motile plants themselves were dead. Except for the one class of killed growing things, however, vegetation was luxuriant. But the little city was deserted. Its streets were empty, its houses untenanted. Some houses were apparently locked up here, though, and Calhoun saw three or four shops whose stock im trade had been covered over before the owners departed. He guessed that either this town had been warned earlier than the spaceport city, or else they knew they had time to get in motion before the highways were filled with the cars from the west. Allison looked at the houses with keen, evaluating eyes. He did not seem to notice the absence of people. When Calhoun swung back on the great road beyond the little city, Allison regarded the endless fields of darkgreen plants with much the same sort of interest. "Interesting," he said abruptly when Tenochitlan fell behind and dwindled to a speck. "Very interesting! I'm interested in land. Real property, that's my business. I've a land-owning corporation on Thanet Three. I've some holdings on Dorset, too, and elsewhere. It just occurred to me: what's all  this land and the cities worth, with the people all run away?" "What," asked Calhoun, "are the people worth who've run?" Allison paid no attention. He looked shrewd. Thoughtful. "I came here to buy land," he said. "I'd arranged to buy some hundreds of square miles. I'd buy more if the price were right. But -- as things are, it looks like the price of land ought to go down quite a bit. Quite a bit!" "It depends," said Calhoun, "on whether there's anybody left alive to sell it to you, and what sort of thing has happened." Allison looked at him sharply. "Ridiculous!" he said authoritatively. "There's no question of their being alive!" "They thought there might be," observed Calhoun. "That's why they ran away. They hoped they'd be safe where they ran to. I hope they are." Allison ignored the comment. His eyes remained intent and shrewd. He was not bewildered by the flight of the people of Maya. His mind was busy with contemplation of that flight from the standpoint of a man of business. The endless fields of dark green rushed past to the rear. The highway was deserted, just three strips of surfaced road, mathematically straight, going on to the horizon. They went on by tens and scores of miles, each strip wide enough to allow four ground-cars to nm side by side. The highway was intended to allow all the produce of all these fields to be taken to market or a processing plant at the highest possible speed and in any imaginable quantity. The same roads had allowed the cities to be deserted instantly the warning -- whatever the warning was -- arrived. Fifty miles beyond Tenochitlan there was a mile-long strip of sheds containing agricultural machinery for crop culture and trucks to carry the crops to market. There was no sign of life about the machinery, nor in a further hour's run to westward. Then there was a city visible to the left. But it was not served by this particular highway, but another. There was no sign of any movement in its streets. It moved along the horizon to the left and rear. Presently it disappeared. Half an hour later still, Murgatroyd said: "Chee!" He stirred uneasily. A moment later he said "Chee!" again. Calhoun turned his eyes from the road. Murgatroyd looked unhappy. Calhoun ran his hand over the tormaVs furry body. Murgatroyd pressed against him. The car raced on. Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Calhoun's hand felt the little animal's muscles tense sharply, and then relax, and after a little tense again. Murgatroyd said almost hysterically: "Chee-chee-chee-cheel" Calhoun stopped the car, but Murgatroyd did not seem to be relieved. Allison said impatiently, "What's the matter?" "That's what I'm trying to find out," said Calhoun. He felt Murgatroyd's pulse. The role of Murgatroyd in the Med Ship Esclipus Twenty was not only that of charming companion in the long, isolated runs in overdrive. Murgatroyd was a part of the Med Service. His tribe had been discovered on a planet in the Deneb sector, and men had made pets of them, to the high satisfaction of the tormals. Presently it was discovered that veterinarians never had tormals for patients. They were invariably in robustuous good health. They contracted no infections from other animals; they shared no infections with anybody else. The Med Service discovered that tormals possessed a dynamic immunity to germ and bacteria-caused diseases. Even viruses injected into their bloodstreams only provoked an immediate, overwhelming development of antibodies, so that tormals couldn't be given any known disease. Which was of infinite value to the Med Service. Now every Med Ship that could be supplied with a tormal carried a small, affectionate, whiskered member of the tribe. Men liked them, and they adored men. And when, as sometimes happened, by mutation or the simple enmity of nature, a new kind of infection appeared in human society -- why -- tormals defeated it. They produced specific antibodies to destroy it. Men analyzed the antibodies and synthesized them, and they were available to all the humans who needed them. So a great many because tormals were pleasant little animals with a precious genetic gift of good health.  sweep-second watch, timing the muscular spasms that Murgatroyd displayed. They coincided with irregularities in Murgatroyd's heartbeat, coming at approximately two-second intervals. The tautening of the muscles lasted just about half a second. "But I don't feel it!" said Calhoun. Murgatroyd whimpered again and said, "Chee-chee!" "What's going on?" demanded Allison with the impatience of a very important man indeed. "If the beast's sick, he's sick! I've got to find -- "  Calhoun ojjened his med kit and went carefully through it until he found what he needed. He put a pill into Murgatroyd's mouth. "Swallow it!" he commanded. Murgatroyd resisted, but the pill went down. Calhoun watched him sharply. Murgatroyd's digestive system was delicate, but it was dependable. Anything that might be poisonous, Murgatroyd's stomach rejected instantly and emphatically. The pill stayed down. "Look!" said Allison indignantly. "I've got business to do! In of interstellar credits, in cash, to pay down on purchases of land and factories. I ought to make some damned good deals! And I figure that that's as important as an#Tthing else you can think of! It's a damned sight more important than a beast with a bellyache!" Calhoun looked at him coldly. "Do you own land on Texia?" he asked. Allison's mouth dropped open. Extreme suspicion and unease appeared on his face. As a sign of the unease, his hand went to the side coat pocket in which he'd put a blaster. He didn't pluck it out. Calhoun's left fist swung around and landed. He took Allison's elaborate pocket blaster and threw it away among the monotonous rows of olive-green plants. He returned to absorbed observation of Murgatroyd. In five minutes the muscular spasms diminished. In ten, Murgatroyd frisked. But he seemed to think that Calhoun had done something remarkable. In the warmest of tones he said: "Chee!" "Very good," said Calhoun. "We'll go ahead. I suspect you'll do as well as we do -- for a while." The car lifted the few inches the air columns sustained it above the ground. It went on, still to the eastward. But Calhoun drove more slowly now. "Something was giving Murgatroyd rhythmic muscular spasms," he said coldly. "I gave him medication to stop them. He's more sensitive than we are, so he reacted to a stimulus we haven't noticed yet. But I think we'll notice it presently." Allison seemed to be dazed at the affront given him. It appeared to be unthinkable that anybody mighf lay hands on him. "What the devil has that to do with me?" he demanded angrily. "And what did you hit me for? You're going to pay for this!" "Until I do," Calhoun told him, "you'll be quiet. And it does have the devil to do with you. There was a Med Service gadget once -- a tricky little device to produce contraction of chosen muscles. It was useful for re-starting stopped hearts without the need of an operation. It regulated the beat of hearts that were too slow or dangerously irregular. But some businessman had a bright idea and got a tame researcher to link that gadget to ground induction currents. ! suspect you know that businessman!" "I don't know what you're talking about," snapped Allison. But he was singularly tense. "I do," said Calhoim unpleasantly. "I made a public health inspection on Texia a couple of years ago. The whole planet is a single, gigantic, cattle-raising enterprise. They don't use metal fences -- the herds are too big to be stopped by such things. They don't use cowboys -- they cost money. On Texia they use ground-induction and the Med , Service gadget linked together to ' serve ' as cattle fences. They act  like fences, though they're projected through the ground. Cattle become uncomfortable when they try to cross them. So they draw back. So men control them. They move them from place to place by changing the cattle fences, which are currents induced in the ground. The cattle have to keep moving or be punished by the moving fence. They're even driven into the slaughterhouse chutes by ground-induction fields! That's the trick on Texia, where induction fields herd cattle. I think it's the trick on Maya, where people are herded like cattle and driven out of their cities so the value of their fields and factories will drop, -- so a land buyer can find bargains!" "You're insane!" snapped Allison. "I just landed on this planet! You saw me land! I don't know what happened before I got here! How could I?" "You might have arranged it," said Calhoim. offended and superior dignity. Calhoun drove the car onward at very much less than the headlong pace he'd been keeping to. Presently he looked down at his hands on the steering wheel. Now and then the tendons to his fingers seemed to twitch. At rhythmic intervals, the skin crawled on the back of his hands. He glanced at Allison. Allison's hands were tightly clenched. "There's a ground-induction fence in action, all right," said Calhoun calmly. "You notice? It's a cattle fence and we're running into it. If we were cattle, now, we'd turn around and move away." "I don't know what you're talking about!" said Allison. But his hands stayed clenched. Calhoun slowed the car still more. He began to feel, all over his body, that every muscle tended to twitch at the same time. It was a horrible sensation. His heart muscles tended to contract too, simultaneously with the rest, but one's heart has its own beat rate. Sometimes the normal beat coincided with the twitch. Then his heart pounded violently -- so violently that it was painful. But equally often the imposed contraction of the heart muscles came just after a normal contraction, and then it stayed tightly knotted for half a second. It missed a beat, and the feeling was agony. No animal would have pressed forward in the face of such sensations. It would have turned back long ago. No animal. Not even Man. Calhoun stopped the car. He looked at Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd was completely himself. He looked inquiringly at Calhoun. Calhoun nodded to him, but he spoke -- with some difficulty -- to Allison. "We'll see -- if this thing -- builds up. You know that it's the Texia -- trick. A ground -- induction unit set up -- here. It drove people -- like cattle. Now we've -- run into it. -- It's holding people -- like cattle." He panted. His chest muscles contracted with the rest, so that his breathing was interfered with. But Murgatroyd, who'd been made uneasy and uncomfortable before Calhoun noticed anything wrong, was now bright and frisky. Medication had desensitized his muscles to outside stimuli. He would be able to take a considerable electric shock without responding to it. But he could be killed by one that was strong enough. A savage anger filled Calhoun. Everything fitted together. Allison had put his hand convenient to his blaster when Calhoun mentioned Texia. It meant that Calhoun suspected what Allison knew to be true. A cattle-fence unit had been set up on Maya, and it was holding -- like cattle -- the people it had previously driven -- like cattle. Calhoun could deduce with some precision exactly what had been done. The first experience of Maya with the cattle fence would have been very mild. It would have been lowpower, causing just enough uneasiness to be noticed. It would have moved from west to east, slowly, and it would have reached a certain spot and there faded out. And it would have been a mystery and an uncomfortable thing, and nobody would understand it on Maya. In a week it would almost be forgotten. But then there'd come a stronger disturbance. And it would travel like the first one; down the length of the peninsula on which the colony lay, but stopping at the same spot as before, and then fading away to nothingness. And this also would have seemed mysterious. But nobody would suspect humans of causing it. There would be theorizing and much questioning, but it would be considered an unfamiliar natural event. Probably the third use of the cattle fence would be most disturbing. This time it would be acutely painful. But it would move into the cities and through them and past them, and it would go down the peninsula to where it had stopped and faded on two previous occasions. The people of Maya would be disturbed and scared. But they considered that they knew it began to the westward of Maya City, and moved toward the east at such-and-such a speed, and it went so far and no farther. And they would organize themselves to apply this carefully worked out information. It would not occur to any of them that they had learned how to be driven like cattle. only reason that this must have happened. But nothing else could have taken place. Perhaps there were more than three uses of the moving cattle fence to get the Feople prepared to move past the known place at which it always faded to nothingness. They might have been days apart, or weeks apart, or months. There might have been stronger manifestations followed by weaker ones and then stronger ones again. But there was an inductive cattle fence across the highway here. Calhoun had driven into it. Every two seconds the muscles of his body tensed. Sometimes his heart missed a beat at the time that his breathing stopped, and sometimes it pounded violently. It seemed that the symptoms became more and more unbearable. He got out his med kit, with hands that spasmodically jerked uncontrollably. He fumbled out the same medication he'd given Murgatroyd. He took two of the pellets. "In reason," he said coldly, "I ought to let you take what this damned thing would give you. But -- here!" Allison had panicked. The idea of a cattle fence suggested discomfort, of course, but it did not imply danger. The experience of a cattle fence, designed for huge hoofed beasts instead of men, was terrifying. Allison gasped. He made convulsive movements. Calhoun himself moved erratically. For one and a half seconds out of two, he could control his muscles. For half a second at a time, he could not. But he poked a pill into Allison's mouth. "Swallow it!" he commanded. "Swallow!" The ground-car rested tranquilly on the highway, which here went on for a mile and then dipped in a gentle incline and then rose once more. The totally level fields to right and left came to an end here. Native trees grew, trailing prejKisterously with long fronds. Brushwood hid much of the ground. That looked normal. But the lower, ground-covering vegetation was wilted and rotting. Allison choked upon the pellet. Calhoun forced a second upon him. Murgatroyd looked inquisitively at first one and then the other of the two men. He said: "Chee? Chee?" Calhoun lay back in his seat, breathing carefully to keep alive. But he couldn't do anything about his heartbeat. The sun shone brightly, though now it was low, toward the horizon. There were clouds in the reddened sky. A gentle breeze blew. Everything, to outward appearance, was peaceful and tranquil and commonplace upon this small world. But in the area that human beings had taken over there were cities which were still and silent and deserted, and somewhere -- somewhere! -- the population of the planet waited uneasily for the latest of a series of increasingly terrifying phenomena to come to an end. Up to this time the strange, creeping, universal affliction had begun at ode place, and moved slowly to another, and then diminished and ceased to be. But this was the greatest and worst of the torments. And it hadn't ended. It hadn't diminished. After three days it continued at full strength at the place where previously it had stopped and died away. The people of Maya were L. frightened. They couldn't return to their homes. They couldn't go anywhere. They hadn't prepared for an emergency to last for days. They hadn't brought supplies of food. It began to look as if they were going to starve. o IV shape when the sports car came to the end of the highway. First, all the multiple roadways of the route that had brought him here were joined by triple ribbons of road-surface from the north. For a space there were twentyfour lanes available to traffic. They flowed together, and then there were twelve. Here there was evidence of an enormous traffic concentration at some time now past. Brush and small trees were crushed and broken where cars had been forced to travel off the hard-surface roadways and through undergrowth. The twelve lanes dwindled to six, and the unpaved area on either side showed that innumerable cars had been forced to travel off the highway altogether. Then there were three lanes, and then two, and finally only a single ribbon of pavement where no more than two cars could run side by side. The devastation on either hand was astounding. All visible vegetation for half a mile to right and left was crushed and tangled. And then the narrow surfaced road ceased to be completely straight. It curved around a hillock -- and here the ground was no longer perfectly flat -- and came to an end. And Calhoun saw all the ground-cars of the planet gathered and parked together. There were no buildings. There were no streets. There was nothing of civilization but tens and scores of thousands of groundcars. They were extraordinary to look at, stopped at random, their fronts pointed in all directions, their air-column tubes thrusting into the ground so that there might be trouble getting them clear again. Parked bumper to bumper in closely placed lines, in theory twenty-five thousand cars could be parked on a square mile of ground. But there were very many times that number of cars here, and some places were unsuitable for parking, and there were lanes placed at random and there'd been no special effort to put the maximum number of cars in the smallest place. So the surface transportation system of the planet Maya spread out over some fifty sprawling square miles. Here, cars were crowded closely. There, there was much room between them. But it seemed that as far as one could see in the twilight there were glistening vehicles gathered confusedly, so there was nothing else to be seen but an occasional large tree rising from among them. Calhoun came to the end of the surfaced road. He'd waited for the pellets he'd taken and given to Allison to have the effect they'd had on Murgatroyd. That had come about. He'd driven on. But the strength of the inductor field had increased to the intolerable. When he stopped the sports car he showed the effects of what he'd been through. Figures on foot converged upon him instantly. There were eager calls. "It's , stopped? You got through? We can go back?" Calhoun shook his head. It was just past sunset and many western sky, but they couldn't put color into Calhoun's face. His cheeks were grayish and his eyes were deep)-sunk, and he looked like someone in the last stages of exhaustion. He said heavily: "It's still there. We came through. I'm Med Service. Have you got a government here? I need to talk to somebody who can give orders." TF he'd asked two days earlier there would have been no answer, because the fugitives were only waiting for a disaster to come to an end. One day earlier, he might have found men with authority busily trying to arrange for drinking water for something entire absence of wells or pumps or ways of making either. And if he'd been a day later, it is rather likely that he'd have found savage disorder. But he arrived at sundown three days after the flight from the cities. There was no food to speak of, and water was drastically short, and the fugitives were only beginning to suspect that they would never be able to leave this place -- and that they might die here. Men left the growing crowd about the sports car to find individuals who could give orders. Calhoun stayed in the car, resting from the unbearable strain he'd undergone. The ground-inductor cattle fence had been ten miles deep. One mile was not bad. Only Murgatroyd had noticed it. After two miles Calhoun and Allison suffered; but the medication strengthened them to take it. But there'd been a long, long way in the center of the induction-field in which existence was pure torment. Calhoun's muscles defied him for part of every two-second cycle, and his heart and lungs seemed constantly about to give up even the pretense of working. In that part of the cattle-fence field, he'd hardly dared drive faster than a crawl, in order to keep control of the car when his own body was uncontrollable. But presently the field strength lessened and ultimately ended. Now Murgatroyd looked cordially at the figures who clustered about the car. He'd hardly suffered at all. He'd had half as much of the medication as Calhoun himself, and his body weight was only a tenth of Calhoun's. He'd made out all right. Now he looked expectantly at what became a jammed mass of crowding men about the vehicle that had come through the invisible barrier across the highway. They hoped desperately for news to produce hope. But Murgatroyd waited zestfully for somebody to welcome him and offer him cakes and sweets, and undoubtedly presently a cup of coffee. But nobody did. It was a long time before there was a stirring at the edge of the crowd. Night had fully fallen then, and for miles and miles in all directions lights in the ground cars of Maya's inhabitants glowed brightly. They drew upon broadcast power, naturally, for their motors and their lights. Off to one side someone shouted. Calhoun turned on his headlights for a guide. More shoutings. A knot of men struggled to get through the crowd. With difficulty, presently, they reached the car. "They say you got through," panted a tall man, "but you can't get back. They say -- " Calhoun roused himself. Allison, beside him, stirred. The tall man panted again; "I'm the planetary president. What can we do?" "First, listen," said Calhoun tiredly. He'd had a little rest. Not much, but some. The actual work he'd done in driving three hundred-odd miles from Maya City was trivial. But the continuous, and lately violent, spasms of his heart and breathing muscles had been exhausting. He heard Murgatroyd say ingratiatingly, "Cheechee-chee-chee," and put his hand on the little animal to quiet him. "The thing you ran away from," said Calhoun with effort, "is a type of ground-induction field using broadcast power from the grid. It's used on Texia to confine cattle to their pastures and to move them where they're wanted to be. But it was designed for cattle. It's a cattle fence. It could kill humans." ing strength and steadiness as he spoke. He explained, precisely, how a ground-induction field was projected in a line at a right angle to its source. It could be moved by adjustments of the apparatus by which it was projected. "But -- but if it uses broadcast power," the planetary president said urgently, "then if the power broadcast is cut off it has to stop! If you got through it coming here, tell us how to get through going back and we'll cut off the power broadcast ourselves! We've got to do something immediately. The whole planet's here. There's no food! There's no water! Something has to be done before we begin to die!" "But," said Calhoun, "if you cut off the power you'll die anyway! people here, and you're a hundred miles from food. Without power you couldn't get to food or bring it here. Cut the power and you're still stranded here. Without power you'll die' as soon as with it." There was a sound from the listening men around. It was partly a growl and partly a groan. "I've just found this out," said Calhoun. "I didn't know until the last ten miles exactly what the situation was, and I had to come here to be sure. Now I need some people to help me. It won't be pleasant. I may have enough medication to get a dozen people back through. It'll be safer if I take only six. Get a doctor to pick me six men. Good heart action. Sound lungs. Two should be electronics engineers. The others should be good shots. If you get them ready. I'll give them the same stuff that got us through. It's desensitizing medication, but it will do only so much. And try and find some weapons for them." Voices murmured all around. Men hastily explained to other men what Calhoun had said. The ! creeping disaster before which they'd all fled, -- it was not a natural catastrophe, but an artificial one! Men had made it! They'd been herded here and their wives and children were hungry because of something men had done! A low-pitched, buzzing, humming sound came from the crowd about the sports car. For the moment, nobody asked what could be the motive for men to do what had been done. Pure fury filled the mob. Calhoun leaned closer to Allison. "I wouldn't get out of the car if I were you," he said in a low tone. "I certainly wouldn't try to buy any real property at a low price!" Allison shivered. There was a vast, vast stirring as the explanation passed from man to man. Figures moved away in the darkness. Lighted car windows winked as they moved through the obscurity. The population of Maya was spread out over very many square miles of what had been wilderness, and there was no elaborate communication system by which information could be spread quickly. But long before dawn there'd be nobody who didn't know that they'd fled from a man-made danger and were held here like cattle, behind a cattle fence, apparently abandoned to die. He was a business man and up to now he'd thought as one. He'd made decisions in offices, with attorneys and secretaries and clerks to make the decisions practical and safe, without any concern for any consequences other than financial ones. He saw possible consequences to himself, here and now. He'd landed on Maya because he considered the matter too important to trust to anybody else. Even riding with Calhoun on the way here, he'd only been elated and astonished at the success of the intended coup. He'd raised his aim. For a while he'd believed that he'd end as the sole proprietor of the colony on Maya, with every plant growing for his profit, and every factory earning money for him, and every inhabitant his employee. It had been the most grandiose possible dream. The details and the maneuvers needed to complete it flowed into his mind. But now his teeth chattered. At ten words from Calhoun he Would literally be torn to pieces by the raging men about him. His atin cash -- it would be proof of whatever Calhoun chose to say. Allison knew terror down to the bottom of his soul. But he dared not move from Calhoun's side, even though a single sentence in the calmest of voices would destroy him, and he'd never faced actual, understood, physical danger before. Presently men came, one by one, to take orders from Calhoun. They were able-bodied and grimfaced men. Two were electronics engineers, as he'd specified. One was a policeman. There were two mechanics and a doctor who was also amateur tennis champion of the planet. Calhoun doled out to them the pellets that reduced the sensitiveness of muscles to externally applied stimuli. He gave instructions. They'd go as far into the cattle fence as they could reasonably endure. Then they'd swallow the pellets and let them act. Then they'd go on. His stock of pellets was limited. He could give three to each man. Murgatroyd squirmed disappointedly as this briefing went on. Obviously, he wasn't to make a social success here. He was annoyed, and he needed more space. Calhoun tossed Allison's attache case behind the seats. Allison was too terrified to protest. It still did not increase the space left on the front seat between Calhoun and Allison. Four humming ground cars lifted eight inches off the ground and hovered there on columns of rushing air. Calhoun took the lead. His headlights moved down the single-lane road to which two joining twelve-lane highways had shrunk. Behind him, other headlights moved into line. Calhoun's car moved away into the darkness. The others followed. A cluster of thousands of suns, a hundred light-years away, made a center of illumination that gave Maya's night the quality of a vivid if diffused moonlight. The cars went on. Presently Calhoun felt the twitchings of minor muscular spasms. He was riding into the field which had been first devised for purposes remote from the herding of cattle or humans, but applied to the first use on the planet Texia, and now applied to the second here. The road became two, and then four, and then eight lanes wide. Then four lanes swirled off to one side, and the remaining four presently doubled, and then widened again, and it was the twelve-lane turnpike that had brought Calhoun here from Maya City. TUT the rhythmic interference with his body grew stronger. Allison had spoken not one single word while Calhoun conferred with the people of Maya beyond the highway. His teeth chattered as they started back. He didn't attempt to speak during the beginning of the ride through the cattle-fence field. His teeth chatL tered, and stopped, and chattered again, and at long last he panted despairingly: "Are you going to let the thing kill me?" Calhoun stopped. The cars behind him stopped. He gave Allison two pellets and took two himself. With Murgatroyd insistently accompanying him, he went along the cars which trailed him. He made sure the six men he'd asked for took their pellets and that they had an adequate effect. He went back to the sports car. Allison whimpered a little when he and Murgatroyd got back in. "I thought," said Calhoun conversationally, "that you might try to take off by yourself, just now. It would solve a problem for me. Of course it wouldn't solve any for you. But I don't think your problems have any solution, now." He started the car up again. It moved forward. The other cars trailed dutifully. They went on through the starlit night. Calhoun noted that the effect of the cattle fence was less than it had been before. The first desensitizing pellets had not wholly lost their effect when he added to it. But he kept his speed low until he was certain the other drivers had endured the anguish of passing through the cattle-fence field. Presently he was confident that the cattle field was past. He sent his car up to eighty miles an hour. The other cars followed faithfully. To a hundred. They did not drop behind. The car hummed through the night at top speed -- a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty miles an hour. The three other cars' headlights faithfully kept pace with him. Allison, said desperately, "Look! I -- don't understand what's happened. You talk as if I'd planned all this. I -- did have advance notice of a -- a research project here. But it shouldn't have held the people there for days! Something went wrong! I only believed that people would want to leave Maya. I'd only planned to buy as much acreage as I could, and control of as many factories as possible. That's all! It was business! Only business!" Calhoun did not answer. Allison might be telling the truth. Some businessmen would think it only intelligent to frighten people into selling their holdings below true value. Something of the sort happened every day in stock exchanges. But the people of Maya could have died! For that matter, they still might. They couldn't return to their homes and food so long as broadcast power kept the cattlefence in existence. But they could not return to their homes and food supplies if the power broadcast was cut off, either. Over all the night surface of the world of Maya there was light only on one highway at one spot, and a multitude of smaller, lesser lights where the jeople of Maya waited to find out whether they would live or die. V  They were beyond what had been the farthest small city on the multiple highway. They would go on past now-starlit fields of plants native to Maya, passing many places where trucks loaded with the plants climbed up to the roadway and headed for the factories which made use of them. The fields ran for scores of miles along the highway's length. They reached out beyond the horizon, -- perhaps scores of miles in that direction, too. There were thousands upon thousands of square miles devoted to the growing of the dark-green vegetation which supplied the raw materials for Maya's space exports. Some hundred-odd miles ahead, the small town of Tenochitlan lay huddled in the light of the distant star-cluster' Beyond that, more highway and Maya City. Beyond that -- Calhoun reasoned that the projector to make the induction cattle fence would be beyond Maya City, somewhere in the mountains the photograph in the spaceport building showed. A large highway went into those mountains for a limited distance only. A ground-inductor projector field always formed at a right angle to the projector which was its source. It could be adjusted -- the process was analogous to focusing -- to come into actual being at any distance desired, and the distance could be changed. To drive the p)eople of Maya City eastward, the projector of a cattle fence -- about which they would know nothing; it would be totally strange and completely mysterious -- the projector of the cattle fence would need to be west of the people to be driven. Logically, it would belong in the mountains. Practically, it would be concealed. Drawing on broadcast power to do its work, there would be no large power source needed it required. It should be quite easy to hide beyond any quick or easy discovery. Hunting it out might require weeks of searching. But the people beyond the end of the highway couldn't wait. They had no food, and holes scrabbled down to ground-water by men digging with their bare hands simply would not be adequate. The cattle fence had to be cut off immediately -- while the broadcast of power had to be continued. Calhoun made an abrupt grunting noise. Phrasing the thing that needed to be done was practically a blueprint of how to do it. Simple! He'd need the two electronics engineers, of course. But that would be the trick... He drove on at a hundred thrity miles an hour with his lips set wrily. The three other cars came behind him. Murgatroyd watched the way ahead. Mile after mile, half-minute after halfminute, the headlights cast brilliantly blinding beams before the cars. Murgatroyd grew bored. He said, "Chee!" in a discontented fashion and tried to curl up between Allison and Calhoun. There wasn't room. He crawled over the seat-back. He moved about, back there. There were rustling sounds. He settled down. Presently there was silence. Undoubtedly he had draped his furry tail across his nose and gone soundly off to sleep. Allison spoke suddenly. He'd had time to think, but he had no practice in various ways of thinking. "How much money' have you got?" he asked. "Not much," said Calhoun. "Why?" "I -- haven't done anything illegal," said Allison, with an unconvincing air of confidence, "but I could be put to some inconvenience if you were to accuse me before others of what you've accused me personally. You seem to think that ! planned a criminal act. That the action I know of -- the research project I'd heard of -- that it became -- that it got out of hand is likely. But I am entirely in the clear. I did nothing in which I did not have the advice of counsel. I am legally unassailable. My lawyers -- " Calhoun told him. "I'm a medical man. I landed here in the middle of what seemed to be a serious public health situation. I went to see what had happened. I've found out. I still haven't the answer, -- not the whole answer an#Tway. But the human population of Maya is in a state of some privation, not to say danger. I hope to end it. But I've nothing to do with anybody's guilt or innocence of crime or criminal intent or anything else." Allison swallowed. Then he said with smooth confidence: "But you could cause me inconvenience. I would appreciate it if you would -- would -- " "Cover up what you've done?" asked Calhoun... "No! I've done nothing wrong. But you could simply use discretion. I landed by parachute to complete some business deals I'd arranged months ago. I will go through with them. I will leave on the next ship. That's perfectly open and above board. Strictly business. But you could make a  an unpleasing public image of me. Yet I have done nothing any other business man wouldn't do! I did happen to know of a research project -- " "I think," said Calhoun without heat, "that you sent men here with a cattle-fence device from Texia to frighten the people on Maya. They wouldn't know what was going on. They'd be scared; they'd want to get away. So you'd be able to buy up practically all the colony for the equivalent of peanuts. I can't prove that," he conceded, "but that's my opinion. But you want me not to state it. Is that right?" "Exactly!" said Allison. He'd been shaken to the core, but he managed the tone and the air of a dignified man of business discussing an unpleasant subject with fine candor. "I assure you you are mistaken. You agree that you can't prove your suspicions. If you can't prove them, you shouldn't state them. That is simple ethics. You agree to that!" Calhoun looked at him curiously. "Are you waiting for me to tell you my price?" "I'm waiting," said Allison reprovingly, "for you to agree not to cause me embarrassment. I won't be ungrateful. After all, I'm a person of some influence. I could do a great deal to your benefit. I'd be glad -- " "Are you working around to guess at a price I'll take?" asked Calhoun with the same air of curiosity. He seemed much more curious than indignant, and much more amused than curious. Allison sweated suddenly. Calhoun didn't appear to be bribable. But Allison knew desperation. "If you want to put it that way -- yes," he said harshly. "You can name your own figure. I mean it!" "I won't say a word about you," said Calhoun. "I won't need to. The characters who're operating your cattle fence will do all the talking that's necessary. Things all fit together, -- except for one item. They've been dropping into place all the while we've been driving down this road." "I said you can name your own figure!" Allison's voice was shrill. "I mean it! Any figure! Any!" Calhoun shrugged. "What would a Med Ship man do with money? Forget it!" He drove on. The highway turnoff to Tenochitlan appeared. Calhoun went steadily past it. The other connection with the road through the town apjjeared. He left it behind. Allison's teeth chattered again. The buildings of Maya City began to appear, some twenty minutes later. Calhoun slowed and the other cars closed up. He opened a window and called: "We want to go to the landinggrid first. Somebody lead the way!" A car went past and guided the rest assuredly to a ramp down from the now-elevated road, and through utterly dark streets, of which some were narrow and winding, and came out abruptly where the landing-grid rose skyward. At the bottom its massive girders looked huge and Cyclopean in the starlight, but the higher courses looked like silver lace against the stars. T hey went to the control building. Calhoun got out. Murgatroyd hopped out after him, dust clinging to his fur. He shook himself, and a ten-thousand-credit interstellar credit certificate fell to the ground. Murgatroyd had made a soft place for sleeping out of the contents of Allison's attache case. It was assuredly the most expensive if not the most comfortable sleeping cushion a tormal ever had. Allison sat still as if numbed. He did not even pick up the certificate. "I need you two electronics men," said Calhoun. Then he said apologetically to the others, "I only figured out something on the way here. I'd believed we might have to take some drastic action. come daybreak. But now I doubt it. I do suggest, though, that you turn off the car headlights and get set to do some shooting if anybody turns up. I don't know whether they will or not." He led the way inside. He turned on lights. He went to the place where dials showed the amount of power actually being used of the enormous amount available. Those dials now showed an extremely small power drain, considering that the cities of a planet depended on the grid. But the cities were dark and empty of people. The demand needle wavered back and forth, rhythmically. Every two seconds the demand for power went up by mately. The demand lasted for half a second, and stopped. For a second and a half the power in kilowatts. During this period only automatic pumps and ventilators and freezing equipment drew on the broadcast power for energy. mand came again for half a second. "The cattle fence," said Calhoun, "works for half a second out of every two seconds. It's intermittent or it would simply paralyze animals that wandered into it. Or people. Being intermittent, it drives them out instead. There'll be tools and parts for equipment here, in case something needs repair. I want you to make something new." The two electronics technicians asked questions. , "We need," said Calhoun, "an interrupter that will cut off the power broadcast for the half-second the ground-induction field is suppKJsed to be on. Then it should turn on the broadcast power for the second and a half the cattle fence is supposed to be off. That will stop the cattle-fence effect, and I think a ground car should be able to work with power that's available for three half-seconds out of four." The electronics men blinked at him. Then they grinned and set to work. Calhoun went exploring. He found a lunch box in a desk with three very stale sandwiches in it. He offered them around. It appeared that nobody wanted to eat while their families -- at the end of the highway -- were still hungry. The electronics men called on the two mechanics to help build something. They explained absorbedly to Calhoun that they were making a cutoff which would adjust to any sudden sixter what time interval was involved. A change in the tempo of the cattle-fence cycle wouldn't bring it back on. "That's fine!" said Calhoun. "I wouldn't have thought of that!" He bit into a stale sandwich and went outside. Allison sat limply, despairingly, in his seat in the car. "The cattle fence is going off," said Calhoun without triumph. "The people of the city will probably begin to get here around sunrise." "I -- I did nothing legally wrong!" said Allison, drythroated. "Nothing! They'd have to prove that I knew what the -- consequences of the research project would be. That couldn't be proved! It couldn't! So I've done nothing legally wrong..." Calhoun went inside, observing that the doctor who was also tennis champion, and the policeman who'd come to help him, were keeping keen eyes on the city and the foundations of the grid and all other places from which trouble might come. There was a fine atmosphere of achievement in the power-control room. The power itself did not pass through these instruments, but relays here controlled buried massive conductors which supplied the world with power. And one of the relays had been modified. When the cattle-fence projector closed its circuit, the power went off. When the groundinductor went off, the power went on. There was no longer a barrier across the highways leading to the east. It was more than probable that ground cars could run on current supplied for one and a half seconds out of every two. They might run jerkily, but they would run. amount of power drawn from the broadcast began to rise smoothly and gradually. It could mean only that cars were beginning to move. Forty-five minutes later still, Calhoun heard stirrings outside. He went out. The two men on guard gazed off into the city. Something moved there. It was a ground-car, running slowly and without lights. Calhoun said undisturbedly: "Whoever was running the cattle fence found out their gadget wasn't working. Their lights flickered, too. They came to see what was the matter at the landing-grid. But they've seen the lighted windows. Got your blasters handy?" But the unlighted car turned and raced away. Calhoun only shrugged. "They haven't a prayer," he said. "We'll take over their apparatus as soon as it's light. It'll be too big to destroy, and there'll be fingerprints and such to identify them as the men who ran it. And they're not natives. When the police start to look for the strangers who were living where the cattle-fence projector was set up... They can go into the jungles where there's nothing to eat, or they can give themselves up." He moved toward the door of the control building once more. Allison said desperately: "They'll have hidden their equipment. You'll never be able to find it!" Calhoun shook his head in the starlight. "Anything that can fly can spot it in minutes. Even on the ground one can walk almost straight to it. You see, something happened they didn't count on. That's why they've left it turned on at full power. The earlier, teasing uses of the cattle fence were low-power. Annoying, to start with, and uncomfortable the second time, and maybe somewhat painful the third. But the last time it was full power." He shrugged. He didn't feel like a long oration. But it was obvious. Something had killed the plants of a certain genus of which small species were weeds that destroyed Earth-type grasses. The ground-cover plants -- and the larger ones, like the one Calhoun had seen decaying in a florist's shop which had had to be grown in a cage -- the groundcover plants had motile stems and leaves and blossoms. They were cannibals. They could move their stems to reach, and their leaves to enclose, and their flowers to devour other plants, even perhaps small animals. The point, though, was that they had some limited power of motion. Earthstyle sensitive vines and flycatcher plants had primitive muscular tissues. The local ground-cover plants had them too. And the cattle-fence field made those tissues contract spasmodically. Powerfully. Violently. Repeatedly. Until they died of exhaustion. The fullpower cattle-fence field had exterminated Mayan ground-cover plants all the way to the end of the east-bound highway. And inevitably -- and very conveniently -- also up to the exact spot where the cattle-fence field had begun to be projected. There would be an arrow-shaped narrowing of the wiped-out groundcover plants where the cattle-field had been projected. It would narrow to a point which pointed precisely to the cattle-fence projector. "Your friends," said Calhoun, "will probably give themselves up and ask for mercy. There's not much else they can do." Then he said: "They might even get it. D'you know, there's an interesting side effect of the cattle fence. It kills the plants that have kept earthtype grasses from growing here. Wheat can be grown here now, whenever and as much as the people please. It should make this a pretty prosperous planet, not having to import all its bread." ground cars of the inhabitants of Maya City did begin to arrive at sunrise. Within an hour after daybreak, very savagely intent persons found the projector and turned it off. By noon there was still some anger on the faces of the people of Maya, but there'd been little or no damage, and life took up its normal course again. Murgatroyd appreciated the fact that things went back to normal. For him it was normal to be welcomed and petted when the Med Ship Esclipus Twenty touched ground. It was normal for him to move zestfully in admiring human society, and to drink coffee with great gusto. And while Murgatroyd moved in human society, enjoying himself hugely, Calhoun went about his business. Which, of course, was conferences with planetary health officials, politely receiving such information as they thought important, and tactfully telling them about the most recent developments in medical science. What else was a Med Ship man for? if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you re sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run outthe mail never does. 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RatclifT Standing; Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith. Rod Serling # famous authors start a new kind of writing school If you have writing talent worth developing, here's an opportunity never before available: Twelve of America's most famous authors have created a school of professional writing to help you develop your skill, talent and craftsmanship , . , and to pass on to you their secrets of achieving success and recognition. This unique home-training program is supervised by Rod Serling, winner of five Emmys for TV writing; Pulitzer Prize historian Bruce Catton; best-selling novelist Faith man; publisher-columnist Bennett Cerf; famed sportswriter Red Smith; Rudolf Flesch, top authority on readable writing; noted language expert Prof. Bergen Evans; famous mystery novelist Mignon G. Eberhart; J. D. Ratcliff, called by Time "America's No. I craftsman in the field of non-fiction"; and top ad men John Caples and Mark Wiseman. 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All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. D uring the recent unpleasantness, at places like Belsen and Buchenwald, a number of medical men on the payroll of the S.S. were given an unparalleled opportunity to engage in research on human beings. In most civilized countries -- which Germany at that time was not -- experimentation on human subjects is governed by strict laws and by perhaps even stricter medical rules. It is not allowed to shorten the life of a subject. It is not even allowed to cause him very much pain, or to maim him in some distinctive way. In a sense this is a pity. There is a great deal about tbs human body which is as yet poorly understood, and a lot of it could be cleared up pretty quickly if it were not for these fusspot rules. If you want quick, sure, definite answers, you want subjects without rights, for you want them to endure whatever fate you decree. These subjects the German doctors had in abundance, but what they did with them produced no harvest of definite answers. They spared their victims nothing. They strapped together the knees of parturient women imtil they died in agony ; they experimented with cures for frostbite bj dipping men in tanks of icy brine, then sandwiching them between nude women; they plucked out hearts like an Inca priest, and timed the convulsions of their victims. What they did, in short, may have been witchcraft, but it was not science and it was not medicine. Surely there be generally -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass feat and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of Ae book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe Q.X.M. I Scribe QX.M.  I Sao Jose, California !  Please send me the free book. The Mastery  I of Life, which explains how I may learn to  I use my faculties and powers of mind.   Name   , Address  Wfe Rosicrucians City,:. were scientific questions that they could have answered. At that time, for example, from # to #, the earliest stages of the human embryo were known only by conjecture and analogy, for no human eye had seen a foetus in its earliest "horizons" until # -- and it was not a German scientist that obtained the first such specimen then. The work was done in Boston -- without either If the Herr Doktors had systematically murdered pregnant female prisoners of the concentration camps and searched their ovaries for laboratory specimens -- the rest of the world would have hated the act, to be sure, but it is likely that one of the most sought-after treasures in Germany after the collapse that ended World War II would have been these same specimens. For they were literally irreplaceable -- are dreadfully scarce even now, and indispensable to the study of embryology. But they didn't. With no restrictive laws to stop them, with subjects in endless supply -- they achieved nothing. The question is, why? Why not anything of value from all that pain and death? W e start with the assumption that knowledge is a thing worth acquiring, which is to say that it is worth paying a price for. Human beings have just so many coins in which to pay for what they want -- money is one; but so is time, or danger, or suffering. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with spending suffM"ing to buy knowledge. Many a medical volunteer has given up his life in agony, and Ae state of the art has been enriched thereby. It is that key word, "volunteer," which makes the difference. Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum; there can't be any knowledge unless there is someone to know it. It was not a falling apple which produced the law of gravitation, but Newton's mind. Can a computer rattle off a list of primes, ten thousand times faster than a man? Yes, but the computer does not "know" what it has done. Knowledge caii be described as something possessed by human beings. It is at least a thesis worth debating that inhuman practices cannot produce useful knowledge for human beings. Suffering, voluntarily accepted by the subjects can produce results; the same suffering, inflicted on helpless victims, cannot. Or if it can... why hasn't it, ever? Two Great Science-Fiction Novels Author of rie Humanoids, Darker Than You Think, etc. He followed her through the ages, into a strange world of the future that might never come to be... A story of courage and dazzling Science-fiction adventure in a strange world inhabited by stranger people... If you missed Magabook No. I -- The Sky Is Falling and Badge of Infamy, two complete sf novels by Lester del Rey -- send #(i to Galaxy Publishing Co., #I Hudson St., N. Y. #, N. Y. I W hat a paradox, what a fearful reproach, when the distinction of a few hundred miles -- nay, as many feet or even inches! -- can transform heinous crime to simple unqualified circumstance!" -- Hm. Balder Bashin, in the Ecclesiarchic Nunciamento of Year # at For esse, on the planet Krokinole. "Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow." -- Popular aphorism. Excerpts from Smade Lof Smade's Planet, feature article in Cosmopolia, October, #. Q; Do you ever get lonesome, Mr. Smade? A: Not with three wives and eleven children. Q: Whatever impelled you to settle here? A rather dismal world, on the whole, isn't it? A; Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't care to run a vacation resort. Q: What kind of people patronize the tavern? A; People who want quiet and a chance to rest. Occasionally a traveler from inside the Pale or an explorer. Q: I've heard that some of your clientele is pretty rough. In fact -- not to mince matters -- it's the general belief that Smade's Tavern is frequented by the most notorious pirates and freebooters of the Beyond. A: I suppose they occasionally need rest too. Q: Don't you have difficulty with these people? Maintaining order, so to speak? A: No. They know my rules. I say, 'Gentlemen, please desist. Your differences are your own; they are fugitive. The harmonious atmosphere of the tavern is mine and I intend it to be permanent.' Q: So then they desist? A: Usually. Q; And if not? A: I pitch them into the sea. S made was a reticent man. His origins and early life were known only to himself. In the year # he acquired a cargo of fine timber, which, for a whole set of obscure reasons, he took to a small stony world in the middle Beyond. And there, with the help of ten indentured artisans and as many slaves, he built Smade's Tavern. The site was a long narrow shelf of heath between the Smade Mountains and Smade Ocean, precisely on the planet's equator. He built to a plan as old as construction itself, using stone for the walls, timber beams and plates of schist for the roof. Completed, the tavern clung to the landscape, as integral as an outcrop of rock : a long twostoried structure with a high gable, a double row of windows to front and rear, chimneys at either end venting smoke from fires of fossil moss. At the rear stood a group of cypress trees, their shape completely appropriate to the landscape. Smade introduced other new features into the ecology. In a sheltered valley behind the tavern he planted fodder and garden truck. In another he kept a small herd of cattle and a flock of poultry. All did moderately well, but showed no disposition to overrun the planet. Smade's dominion extended as far as he cared to claim -- there was no other habitation on the planet -- but he chose to assert control only over an area of perhaps three acres, within the bounds of a whitewashed stone fence. To occurrences beyond the fence Smade held aloof, unless he had reason to consider his own interests threatened: a contingency which had never arisen. Smade's Planet was the single companion of Smade's Star, an undistinguished white dwarf in a relatively empty region of space. The native flora was sparse : lichen, moss, primitive vines and palodendron, pelagic algae which tinctured the sea black. The fauna was even simpler: white worms in the seabottom muck; a few gelatinous creatures which gathered and ingested the black algae in a ludicrously inept fashion; an assortment of simple protozoa. Smade's alterations of the planet's ecology could hardly, therefore, be considered detrimental. Smade himself was tall, broad and stout, with bone-white skin and jet-black hair. His antecedents, as has been mentioned, were vague, and he never had been heard to reminisce. The tavern, however, was managed with the utmost decorum. The three wives lived in harmony, the children were handsome and well-mannered, Smade himself was unfailingly polite. His rates were high, but his hospitality was generous, and he made no difficulties about collecting his bill. A sign hung above the bar: "Eat and drink without stint. He who can and does pay is a customer. He who cannot and does not pay is a guest of the establishment." Smade's patrons were diverse: explorers, locaters, Jamell technicians, private agents in search of lost men or stolen treasure, tive, or "weasel", in the argot of the Beyond. Others were folk more dire, and these were of as many sorts as there were crimes to be named. Making a virtue of necessity, Smade presented the same face to all. T o Smade's Tavern in the July of # came Kirth Gersen, representing himself as a locater. His boat was the standard model leased by the estate houses within the Oikumene, a thirty-foot cylinder equipped with no more than bare necessities: in the bow the monitorautopilot duplex, a star finder, chronometer, macroscope and manual controls; midships the living quarters with air machine, organic reconverter, information bank and storage; aft the energy block, the Jarnell intersplit and further storage. The boat was as scarred and dented as any. Gersen's personal disguise was no more then wellworn clothes and natural taciturnity. Smade accepted him at his own terms. "Will you stay awhile, Mr. Gersen?" "Two or three days, perhaps. I have things to think over." Smade nodded in profound understanding. "We're slack just now; just you and the Star King. You'll find all the quiet you need." "I'll be pleased for that," said Gersen, which was quite true; his just-completed affairs had left him with a set of unresolved qualms. He turned away, then halted and looked back as Smade's words penetrated his consciousness. "There's a Star King here at the tavern?" "He has presented himself so." "I've never seen a Star King. Not that I know of." Smade nodded politely to indicate that the gossip had reached to the allowable limits of particularity. He indicated the tavern clock: "Our local time better set your watch. Supper at seven o'clock: just half an hour." Gersen climbed stone stairs to his room, an austere cubicle containing bed, chair and table. He looked through the window, along the verge of heath between mountain and ocean. Two spacecraft occupied the landing field. His own and another ship, larger and heavier, evidently the property of the Star King. Gersen washed in a hall bathroom, returned to the downstairs hall, where he dined on the produce of Smade's own gardens and herd. Two other guests made their appearance. The first was the Star King, who strode to the far end of the room in a flutter of rich garments: an individual with skin dyed jetblack, eyes like ebony cabochons as black as his skin. He was taller than average height, and carried himself with consummate arrogance. Lusterless as charcoal, the skin-dye blurred the contrast of his features, made his face a protean mask. His garments were dramatically fanciful : breeches of orange silk, a loose scarlet robe with white sash, a loose striped gray and black coif which hung rakishly down the right side of his head. Gersen inspected him with open curiosity. This was the first Star King he had observed as such, though popular belief had hundreds moving incognito through the worlds of man: cosmic mysteries since the first human visit to Lambda Grus. The second of the guests apparently had just arrived: a thin middle-aged man of indefinite racial background. Gersen had seen many like him: miscellaneous uncategorized vagabonds of the Beyond. He had short coarse white hair, a sallow undyed skin, an air of diffident uncertainty. He ate without appetite, looking back and forth between Gersen and the Star King in furtive speculation, but presently his most searching glances were directed toward Gersen. A fter dinner, as Gersen sat watching the play of lightning over the ocean, the man sidled close, wincing and grimacing in sheer nervousness. He spoke in a voice which he tried to keep even, but which trembled nevertheless. "I assume that you are here from Brinktown?" Gersen, with his own tensions, alarms and concerns, paused before replying, then gave a mild assent. "As a matter of fact, I am." "I expected to see someone else. But no matter. I've decided that I can't fulfill my obligation. Your journey is pointless. That's all." He stood back, teeth showing in a humorless grin. He was obviously braced against an expected dire reaction. "You mistake me for someone else," said Gersen. The other peered down in disbelief. "But you are here from Brinktown?" "What of that?" The other made a forlorn gesture. "No matter. I expected -- but no matter." After a moment he said, "I noticed your ship. Model #B. You're a locater, then." "Correct." "You're on your way out? Or in?" "I've been out. I can't say that I've had luck." The other man's tension suddenly gave way. His shoulders sagged. "I own to the same line of business. As to luck?" He heaved a forlorn sigh, and Gersen smelled Smade's home-distilled whiskey. "If it's bad, no doubt I have myself to blame." Gersen's suspicion was not completely lulled. The man's voice was well-modulated, his accent educated. In itself it indicated nothing. He might be precisely as he represented himself, a locater in some sort of trouble at Brinktown. Or he might be otherwise -- a situation entailing a set of hair-raising corollaries. Gersen would have preferred the company of his own thoughts, but he made a courteous gesture. "Do you care to join me?" "Thank you." The man seated himself gratefully, and with a new air of bravado seemed to dismiss all of his worries and apprehensions. "My name is Lugo Teehalt. Will you drink?" Without waiting for assent he signaled one of Smade's young daughters, a girl of nine or ten, wearing a modest white blouse and long black skirt. "I'll use whiskey, lass, and serve this gentleman whatever he decides for himself." Teehalt appeared to derive strength either from the drink, or from the' prospect of conversation. His voice became firmer, his eyes clearer and brighter. "How long have you been out?" "Four or five months," said Gersen, in his role of locater. "I've seen nothing but rock and mud and sulfur. I don't know whether it's worth the trouble." Teehalt smiled, nodded slowly. "But still -- there's always excitement. The star gleams, you notice a circlet of planets, you ask yourself, will it be now? And, time after time, the smoke and ammonia, the weird crystals, the winds of monoxide, the rains of acid. But you go on and on. Perhaps out in that region ahead the elements coalesce into nobler forms. Of course it's the same slime and methane snow. And then, suddenly, there it is. Utter beauty..." G ersen sipped his whiskey without comment. Teehalt apparently was a gentleman, well-mannered and educated, sadly come down in the world. Teehalt continued, halftalking to himself. "Where the luck lies, that I don't know. I'm sure of nothing -- now." Gersen laughed sourly. "Uncertainty hurts more than ignorance." Teehalt inspected him quizzically. "You can't believe that a man is the better for ignorance?" "Cases vary. But it's clear that uncertainty breeds indecision which is a dead halt. An ignorant man can act. As to right and wrong -- each man to his own answer." Teehalt smiled sadly. "You espouse a very popular doctrine, ethical pragmatism, which always turns out to be the doctrine of self-interest. Still, I understand you when you speak of uncertainty, for I am an uncertain man." He shook his thin sharpfeatured head. "I know I'm in a bad way, but I've had a peculiar experience." He finished the whiskey, leaned forward to gaze into Gersen's face. "You are perhaps more sensitive than first impression vould suggest. And possibly younger than you seem." "I was born in #." Teehalt made a sign which could mean anything, searched Gersen's face once more. "Can you understand me if I say that I have known over-much beauty?" "I probably could understand," said Gersen, "if you made yourself clear."  Teehalt blinked thoughtfully. "I will try." He considered. "As I have admitted to you, I am a locater. It is a poor trade -- with apologies to you -- for eventually it involves the degradation of beauty. Sometimes only to a small extent, which is what a person such as myself hopes for. Sometimes there is only small beauty to corrupt and sometimes the beauty is incorruptible. He gave his hand a wave toward the ocean. "The tavern harms nothing. The tavern allows the beauty of this terrible little planet to make itself known." He leaned forward, licked his lips. "You must know of Grendel?" Gersen controlled his expression. "Grendel the Monster, socalled? I know his reputation." "Whatever you may have heard, I assure you, it is flattery." "You don't know what I have heard." "I doubt if you have heard the worst. But nevertheless, and the astounding paradox..." Teehalt closed his eyes. "I am locating for Grendel. He owns my ship. I have taken his money." i(Tt is a difficult position." A "When I found out -- what could I do?" Teehalt threw up his hands in an excited extravagant gesture, reflecting either emotional turmoil or the effects of Smade's whiskey. "I asked myself this over and over. For I had my ship and my money, not from an estate house, but from an institution of far greater dignity. I did not think of myself as a common locater. The idea was demeaning. I was Lugo Teehalt, a man of parts, who had been appointed to the post of Chief Explorer for the institution, or some such folly -- so I assured myself. But they sent me out in a #B boat, and I could no longer delude myself. I was Lugo Teehalt, common locator. " "Where is your boat?" asked Gersen, idly curious. "There is only my own and the Star King's out on the landing-field." Teehalt pursed his lips, in another onset of wariness. "I have good reason for caution." Teehalt glanced right and left. "Would it surprise you to learn that I expect to meet -- " He hesitated, thought better of what he planned to say, and sat silently a moment, looking into his empty glass. Gersen signaled, and young Araminta Smade brought whiskey, on a white jade tray, upon which she herself had painted a red and blue floral border. "But this is inconsequential," said Teehalt suddenly. "I bore you with my problems." "Not at all," said Gersen, quite truthfully. "The affairs of Grendel interest me." "I can understand this," said Teehalt after another pause. "He is a peculiar combination of qualities." "From whom did you have your boat?" Gersen asked ingenuously. Teehalt shook his head. "I will not say. For all I know, you are Grendel's man. I hope not, for your own sake." "Why should I be Grendel's man?" "Circumstances suggest as much. But circumstances only. And in fact I know that you are not. He would not send someone here whom I have not met." "You have a rendezvous, then." "One I don't care to keep. But -- I don't know what else to do." "Return to the Oikumene." "What does Grendel care for that? He comes and goes as he pleases." "Why should he concern himself with you? Locators are twenty to the dozen." "I am unique," said Teehalt. "I am a locator who has found a prize too precious to sell." Gersen was impressed in spite of himself. "It is a world too beautiful for degradation," said Teehalt. "An innocent world, full of light and air and color. To give this world to Grendel, for his palaces and whirligigs and casinos -- it would be like giving a child to a squad of Sarcoy soldiers. Worse? Possibly worse." "And Grendel knows of this?" "It is my unfortunate habit to drink rashly and talk wildly." "As you do now," suggested Gersen. Teehalt smiled his wincing morose smile. "You could tell Grendel nothing he does not already know. The damage was done at Brinktown." "Tell me more of this world. Is it inhabited?" Teehalt smiled again, but made no answer. Gersen felt no resentment. Teehalt, beckoning to Araminta Smade, ordered Fraze, a heavy sour-sweet liquor reputed to include among its constituents a subtle hallucinizer. Gersen signified that he would drink no more. Night had long settled over the planet. Lightning crashed back and forth. A sudden downpour began to drum on the roof. Teehalt, lulled by the liquor, perhaps seeing visions among the flames, said, "You could never find this world. I am resolved that it shall not be violated." "What of your contract?" Teehalt made a contemptuous motion; "I would honor it for an ordinary world." "The information is on the monitor filament," Gersen pointed out. "The property of your sponsor." Teehalt was silent so long that Gersen wondered if he were awake. Finally Teehalt said, "I am afraid to die. Othenvise I would drop myself and boat and monitor and all into a star." Gersen had no comment to make. "I do not know what to do." Teehalt's voice became soft, as the drink soothed his brain and showed him visions. "This is a remarkable world. Beautiful, yes. I wonder if the beauty does not conceal another quality which I can't fathom, just as a woman's beauty camouflages her more abstract virtues. Or vices... In any event the world is beautiful and serene beyond words. There are mountains washed by rain. Over the valleys float clouds as soft and bright as snow. The sky is a deep dark sapphire blue. The air is sweet and cool -- so fresh that it seems a lens. There are flowers, though not very many. They grow in little clumps, so that to find them is like coming on a treasure. But there are many trees, and most magnificent are the great kings, with gray bark, which seem to have lived forever. "You asked if the world were inhabited. I am forced to answer yes, though the creatures who live there are strange. I call them dryads. I saw only a few hundred, and they seem a race ages old. As old as the trees. As old as the mountains." Teehalt shut his eyes. "The day is twice the length of ours; the mornings are long and bright; the noons are quiet, the afternoons are golden, like honey. The dryads bathe in the river or stand in the dark forest... Teehalt's voice dwindled, he appeared to be halfasleep. Gersen prompted him. " 'Dryads'?" Teehalt stirred, raised in his chair. "It's as good a name as any. They're at least half-plant. I made no real examination I dared not. Why? I don't know. I was there -- oh, I suppose two or three weeks. This is what I saw..." T eehalt landed the battered old #B on a meadow beside a river. He waited while the analyzer made environmental tests, though a landscape so fair could not fail to be hospitable -- or so thought Teehalt who was scholar, poet and wastrel in equal parts. He was not wrong. The atmosphere proved salubrious; allergen-sensitive cultures tested negative: micro-organisms of air and soil quickly died upon contact with the standard antibiotic with which Teehalt now dosed himself. There seemed no reason why he should not immediately go forth upon this world, and he did so. On the turf in front of the ship Teehalt stood entranced. The air was clear and clean and fresh, like the air of a spring dawn, and utterly silent, as if just after a bird-call. Teehalt wandered up the valley. Stopping to admire a grove of trees, he saw the dryads, who stood gathered in the shade. They were bipeds, with a peculiarly human torso and head structure, though it was clear that they resembled man in only the most superficial style. Their skin was a silver, brown, green, in sheens and splotches; the head showed no features other than purplish-green bruises, which seemed to be eye-spots. From the shoulders rose members like arms, which branched into twigs and then leaves of dark and pale green, burnished red, bronze-orange, golden ocher. They saw Teehalt and moved forward with almost human interest, to pause about fifty feet distant, swaying on supple limbs, the crests of colored leaves shimmering in the sunlight. They examined Teehalt and he examined them, in a mutual absence of fear, and Teehalt thought them the most entrancing creatures of his experience. Teehalt remembered the days which followed as idyllic and utterly calm. There was a majesty, a clarity, a transcendental quality to the planet which affected him with an almost religious awe. Presently he came to understand that he must leave shortly or succumb psychically, give himself completely to the world. The knowledge afflicted him with an almost unbearable sadness, for he knew that he would never return. During this time he watched the dryads as they moved through the valley, idly curious as to their nature and habits. Were they intelligent? Teehalt never answered the question to his own satisfaction. If not intelligent, he thought, surely they were wise. Their metabolism puzzled him, and also the nature of their life-cycle, though gradually he acquired at least a glimmer of enlightenment. He assumed at first that they derived energy from some sort of photosyntheti'c process. Then, one morning, as Teehalt contemplated a group of dryads standing immobile in the marshy meadow, a large winged hawk-like creature swooped down, buffeted one of the dryads to the side. As it toppled Teehalt glimpsed two white shafts, or prongs, extending from the supple gray legs into the ground, which at once retracted. The hawk-creature ignored the toppled dryad, but scratched and tore at the marsh and unearthed an enormous white grub. Teehalt watched with great interest. The dryad apparently had located the grub in its subterranean burrow and had pierced it with a sort of proboscis, presumably for the ingestion of sustenance. Teehalt felt a small pang of shame and disillusionment. The dryads were evidently not quite as innocent and ethereal as he had thought them to be. The hawk-thing lumbered up from the pit, croaked, coughed, flapped away. Teehalt went curiously forward and stared down at the mangled worm. There was little to be seen but shreds of pallid flesh, yellow ooze and a hard black ball, the size of Teehalt's two fists. As he stared down, the dryads came slowly forward and Teehalt withdrew. From a distance he watched as they clustered about the torn worm. It seemed to Teehalt that they mourned the mangled creature. But presently, with their supple lower limbs, they brought up the black pod which one of them carried away high in its branches. Teehalt followed at a distance, and watched in fascinated wonder as close beside a grove of slender whitebranched trees the dryads buried the black pod. I n retrospect Teehalt wondered why he had attempted no communication with the dryads. Once or twice during the time of his stay he toyed with the idea, and let the thought drift away -- perhaps because he felt himself a gross and unpleasant intruder. The dryads in their turn treated him with what might be courteous disinterest. Three days after the black pod had been buried Teehalt had occasion to return to the grove. To his astonishment he saw a pallid shoot rising from the ground above the pod. At the tip pale green leaves already were unfolding into the sunlight. Teehalt stood back and examined the grove with new interest. Had each of these trees grown from a pod originated in the body of a subterranean grub? He examined the foliage, limbs and bark, finding nothing to suggest such an origin. He looked across the valley, to the great dark-leaved giants. Surely the two varieties were similar? The giants were majestic, serene, with trunks rising two or three hundred feet to the first branching. The trees grown from the black pods were frail. Their foliage was a tenderer green. The limbs were more flexible, and branched close to the ground -- but the species were clearly related. Leaf shape and structure were almost identical, as was the general appearance of the bark, supple and rough-textured, though the bark of the giants was darker and coarser. Teehalt's head swarmed with speculations. Later the same day he climbed the mountain across the valley. Crossing the ridge he came down upon a glen with precipitous rocky walls. A stream rushed and splashed through mossy boulders and low fernlike plants, falling from pool to pool. Approaching the brink Teehalt found himself on a level with the foliage of the giant trees, which here grew close beside the cliff. He noted dull green sacs, like fruit, growing among the leaves. Straining, risking a fall, Teehalt was able to pluck one of these sacs. He carried it down the mountainside and across the meadow toward the boat. He passed a group of dryads who, fixing their purple-green eye-bruises on the sac, became rigid. Teehalt observed them with puzzlement. Now they approached, their gorgeous fans quivering and shimmering in agitation. Teehalt felt embarrassed and guilty. Evidently by plucking the sac he had offended the dryads. Why or how he could not fathom, but he hastily sought the concealment of his ship, where he cut open the sac. The husk was pithy and dry. Down the center ran a stalk from which depended white pea-sized seeds, of great complexity. Teehalt inspected the seeds under a magnifier. They bore a remarkable resemblance to small underdeveloped beetles, or wasps. With tweezers and knife he opened one out on a sheet of paper, noting wings, thorax, mandibles. Clearly an insect! For a long while he sat contemplating the insects which grew on a tree. A curious analogue, so Teehalt reflected, to the sapling which sprouted from a pod taken from the body of a worm. Sunset colored the sky; the distant parts of the valley grew indistinct. Dusk came and evening, with the stars blurring large as lamps. The long night passed. At dawn when Teehalt emerged from his boat he knew that the time of his departure was close at hand. How? Why? He had no answer. The compulsion nevertheless was real; he must leave, and he knew he would never return. As he considered the mother-of-pearl sky, the curve and swell of the hills, the groves and forests, the gentle river, his eyes went damp. The world was too beautiful to leave; far too beautiful to remain upon. It worked on something deep inside him, arousing a queer tumult which he could not understand. There was a constant force from somewhere to run from the ship, to discard his clothes, his weapons, to merge, to envelope and become enveloped, to immolate himself in an ecstasy of identification with beauty and grandeur. Today he must go. "If I'm here any longer," thought Teehalt, "I'll be carrying leaves over my head with the dryads." T Te wandered up the valley, turning to watch the sim swell into the sky. He climbed to the ridge of the hill, looked east over a succession of rolling crests and valleys, rising gradually to a single great mountain. To west and south he glimpsed the glimmer of water. To the north spread green parkland, with a crumble of gray boulders like the ruins of an ancient city. Returning into the valley Teehalt passed below the giant trees. Looking up he noticed that all the pods had split and now hung limp and withered. Even as he watched he heard a drone of wings. A hard heavy pellet struck his cheek, where it clung and bit. In shock and pain Teehalt crushed the insect, or wasp. Looking aloft he saw others -- a multitude, darting and veering. Hastily he returned to the I ship, dressed in a coverall of tough film, his face and head protected by transparent mesh. He was unreasonably angry. The wasp's attack had marred his last day in the valley, and in fact had caused him the first pain of his stay. It was too much to expect, he reflected bitterly, that paradise could exist without the serpent. And he dropped a can of compressed insect repellent into his pouch... though it might or might not be efficacious against these halfvegetable insects. Leaving the ship, he marched up the valley, with the insect's bite paining him still. Approaching the forest he came upon a strange scene: a group of dryads surrounded by a buzzing swarm of wasps. Teehalt approached curiously. The dryads, he saw, were under attack, but lacked any efficient means of defence. As the wasps darted in to settle on the silver skin, the dryads flapped their branches, rubbed against each other, scraped with their legs, dislodging the insects as best they could. Teehalt approached, filled with horrified anger One of the dryads near him seemed to weaken. Several of the insects gnawed through its skin, drawing gouts of ichor. The entire swarm suddenly condensed upon the unfortunate dryad, which tottered and fell, while the remaining dryads moved sedately away. Teehalt, impelled to disgust and loathing, stepped forward, turned the can of repellent upon the nearly solid mass of wasps. It acted with dramatic effectiveness, the wasps turning white, withering, dropping to the ground. In a single minute the entire swarm was a scatter of small white husks. The dryad under attack also lay dead, having been almost instantly stripped of its flesh. The dryads who had escaped were now returning, and so Teehalt thought, in a state of anguish and even fury. Their branches quivered and flashed; they marched down upon him with every indication of antagonism. Teehalt took to his heels and returned to his ship. the dryads. They stood about their dead comrade in a state of anxiety and irresolution. Apparently -- or at least it seemed so to Teehalt -- their anguish was as much for the withered insects as the dead dryad. They clustered over the fallen body. Teehalt could not observe exactly what they did, but presently they arose with a glossy black ball. And Teehalt watched them carry it across the valley toward the grove of giant trees. II I have examined the native life-forms of over two thousand planets. I have noted many examples of convergent evolution, but many many more of divergence. -- Life Volume II, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey. It is first of all essential that we understand exactly what we mean by the well-used term "convergent evolution". Especially we must not confuse statistical probability with some transcendental and utterly compelling force. Consider the class of all possible objects, the number of which is naturally very large: infinite indeed, unless we impose an upper limit of mass and certain other physical qualifications. Thus imposing and so qualifying, we find that still only an infinitesimal fraction of this class of objects can be considered life-forms... Before we have even started the investigation we have exercised a very stringent selection of objects which by their very definition will show basic similarities. To particularize: there are a limited number of methods of locomotion. If we find a quadruped on Planet A, and a quadruped likewise on Planet B, does this imply convergent evolution? No. It merely implies evolution, or perhaps no more than the fact that a four-legged creature can effectively stand without toppling and walk without stumbling. In my opinion, therefore, the expression "convergent evolution" is tautological. -- Ibid From: The Wages of Sin, Stridenko; article in Cosmopolis, May, #. Brinktown: what a city! Once the jumping-off place, the last outpost, the portal into infinity -- now just another settlement of the North East Middle Beyond. But "just another"? Is this a fair description? Decidedly not. Brinktown must be seen to be believed, and even then the hard of belief depart incredulous. The houses are set far apart along shaded avenues; still they rise like watch-towers, thrusting up into and through the palms, virebols, scalmettos. It is a mean house which does not soar above the treetops. The ground level is no more than an entry, a raised pavilion where the clothes must be changed, for local habit ordains the use of paper housecapes and paper slippers. Then above : what an explosion of architectural conceits, what turrets and spires, belfries and cupolas! What jejeune magnificence, what inspired scrimshaw, what intricate, inventive, farcical, wonderful applications and misapplications of likely and unlikely materials! Where else can one find balustrades of tortoise-shell studded with goldplated fish-heads? Where else do ivory nymphs hang suspended by their hair from the roof gutters, their faces expressing only bland benediction? Where else can a man's success be gauged by the sumptuousness of the tombstone he designs for himself and erects in his front yard, complete with panegyrical epitaph? And in fact where but in Brinktown is success such an ambiguous recommendation? Few indeed of the inhabitants dare show themselves within the Oikumene. The magistrates are assassins; the civil guard arsonists, extortioners and rapists; the elders of the council, bordello owners. But civil affairs proty worthy of the Grand Sessions at Borugstone, or a coronation at the Tower of London. The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, eel-vine skiver tussock. A single road leads from city down to jungle. The prisoner is merely locked out of the city. Escape is at his option; he may flee as far through the jungle as he sees fit; the entire continent is at his disposal. But no prisoner ever ventures far from the gate. And when his presence is required it is only necessary to unlock the gate and call his name. 'eehalt sat looking into the fire. Gersen wondered if he intended to say more. At last Teehalt spoke. "So I left the planet. I could stay no longer. To live there a person must either forget himself, give way completely to the beauty, drown his identity in it -- or else he must master it. Break it. Reduce it to a background for his own constructions. I could do neither, so I can never go back. But the memory of the place haunts me." "In spite of the wasps?" Teehalt nodded somberly. "Yes indeed. I did wrong to interfere. There is a rh#rthm to the planet, an equilibrium which I blundered into and disturbed. I've speculated for days, but I still don't understand the process completely. Wasps are born as fruit of the tree; the worms yield the seed to one kind of tree -- this much I know. I suspect that the dryads produce the seed to the great giants. The process of life becomes a great circle, or perhaps a series of incarnations, with the great trees as the end-result. The dryads seem to tap the worms for part of their sustenance, the wasps devour the dryads. Where do the worms come from? Are the wasps their first phase? Flying larvae, so to speak? Do the worms eventually metamorphose into dryads? I feel this must be the case -- though I don't know. If so, the cycle is beautiful, in a fashion I can't find words to describe. Something ordained, stately, ancient, like the rotation of the galaxy. If the pattern were disturbed, if one link were broken, the whole process would collapse. This would be a great crime." "So therefore you don't want to reveal the location of the world to your sponsor whom you believe to be Grendel the Monster." "I know to be Grendel," said Teehalt stiffly. "How did you find out?" Teehalt looked at him sidewise. "You are very interested in Grendel." Gersen shrugged. "One hears many strange tales." "True. But I do not care to document them. And do you know why?" "No." "I have changed my thoughts about you. Now I suspect you of weaselry." tTf I were a weasel," said Gersen smiling, "I'd hardfriends Bejond." "I am imconcemed," said Teehalt. "But I hope for better days if -- when I return home. I do not care to incur Grendel's animosity by identifying him to a weasel." "If I were a weasel," said Gersen, "you have already compromised yourself. You know of truth drugs and hypnotic rays." "Yes. I also know how to avoid them. But no matter. It's not important. You asked how I learned that Grendel was my sponsor. I have no objection to telling you this. Through my own drunken prolixity. I put into Brinktown. In Sin-San's Tavern I spoke at length, much as I spoke to you tonight, to a dozen enthralled listeners. Yes, I held their attention." Teehalt laughed bitterly. "Presently I was called to the telephone. The man at the other end said his name was Hildemar Dasce. Do you know him?" "No." "Odd," said Teehalt, "since you are so interested in Grendel. But, in any event, he spoke to me, told me to report to Smade's. He said I'd meet Grendel here." "What?" demanded Gersen. "Here?" "Here at Smade's. I asked, what's this to me? I had no dealings with Grendel and wished none. He convinced me otherwise. So I'm here. I am not a brave man." He made a small helpless gesture, picked up his empty glass, looked into it. "I don't know what to do. If I remain Beyond... Teehalt shrugged. "Destroy the monitor filament." Teehalt shook his head regretfully. "It's the surety I carry for my life. Indeed I'd rather -- he stopped short. "Did you hear anything?" "Rain. Thunder." "I thought I heard tubes blowing." He rose to his feet, peered from the window. "Some is coming." Gersen also went to the window. "I see nothing." "A ship dropped down into the field," said Teehalt. He thought a moment. "There are only two ships there: yours and the Star King's." "Where is your ship?" "I set down in a valley to the north. I want no one meddling with my monitor." He seemed to listen, then looking into Gersen 's eyes he said, "You are not a locator." "No." Teehalt nodded. "Locaters are, by and large, a vile lot. You are "Think of me as an explorer." "Will you help me?" "The harsh precepts of Gersen's training contended with an innate generosity; he muttered reluctantly, "Within limits -- very narrow limits." Teehalt smiled thinly. "What are these limits?" "My own business is urgent. I can't allow myself to be diverted." Teehalt was neither disappointed nor resentful. He could expect no more from a stranger. "Odd," he said once more, "that you do not know Hildemar Dasce. But he will come in presently. How do I know? By the logic of plain ordinary fear." "You'll be safe so long as you stay inside the tavern," said Gersen. "Smade has his rules." Teehalt nodded, politely acknowledging the discomfiture he had caused Gersen. A minute passed. The Star King rose to his feet, his pink and red garment glowed in the firelight. He walked slowly up the stairs, looking neither right nor left. Teehalt followed him with his eyes. "Impressive creature I understand that only the handsome ones are allowed to leave their planet." "So I have heard." Teehalt sat looking into the fire. Five minutes passed. Then Teehalt reached into his jacket, brought forth an envelope. "Here are photographs you might be pleased to inspect at your leisure." Gersen took them without comment. The door slid back. Three dark shapes stood in the gap, looking into the room. Smade roared from behind the bar, "Come in or stay out! Must I warm the whole cursed planet?" Into the hall otepped the strangest human being of Gersen's experience. "And there," said Teehalt with a sick titter, "you see Beauty Dasce." Dasce was about six feet tall. His torso was a tube, the same gauge from knee to shoulder. His arms were thin and long, terminating in great bony wrists, enormous hands. His head was also tall and round, with a ruff of red hair and a chin seeming almost to rest on the clavicle. Dasce had stained his neck and face bright red, excepting only his cheeks, which were balls of bright chalk-blue, like a pair of mildewed oranges. At some stage of his career his nose had been cleft into a pair of cartilaginous prongs, and his eyelids had been cut away; to moisten his corneas he wore two nozzles connected to a tank of fluid which every few seconds discharged a film of mist into his eyes. There was also a pair of shutters, now raised, which could be lowered to cover his eyes from the light, and which were painted to represent staring white and blue eyes similar to Dasce's own. '"The two men at his back by contrast appeared ordinary run-of-the-mill human beings: both dark, hard, competentseeming, with quick clever eyes. Dasce made a brusque signal to Smade, who stood impassively watching from behind the bar. "Three rooms, if you please. We will eat presently." "Very well." "The name is Hildemar Dasce." "Very well, Mr. Dasce." Dasce now sauntered across the room to where Teehalt and Gersen sat. His glance shifted from one to the other. "Since we are fellow travelers, house-guests of Mr. Smade, let us introduce ourselves," he said politely. "My name is Hildemar Dasce. May I inquire yours?" "I am Kirth Gersen." "I am Keelen Tannas." Dasce's lips, pale purple-gray against the red of his skin, moved in a smile. "To an amazing degree you resemble a certain Lugo Teehalt whom I expected to find here." "Think of me as you like," said Teehalt in a reedy voice. "I have spoken my name." "But what a pity. I have business to .transact with Lugo Teehalt!" "It is pointless then to approach me." "As you wish. Though I suspect that the business with Lugo Teehalt might interest Keelen Tannas. Will you step aside for a moment's private conversation?" "No. I am not interested. My friend knows my name. It is Keelen Tannas." "Your 'friend'?" Dasce turned his attention to Gersen. "Do you know this man well?" "As well as I know anyone." "And his name is Keelen Tannas?" "If this is the name he offers you, I can only suggest that you accept it!" Without further remark Dasce turned away. He and his men went to a table at the end of the hall, where they ate. Teehalt spoke in a hollow voice, "He knows me well enough." Gersen felt a spasm of irritation. Why should Teehalt feel impelled to embroil a stranger in his troubles, if his identity were already known? Teehalt explained his act in the next breath. "Since I fight the hook, he thinks he has me trapped, and he amuses himself." "What of Grendel? I thought you had come here to meet him." "Better that I return to Alphanor and confront him there. I will return his money, but I will not lead him to the planet." At the far end of the hall Dasce and his two companions were served with platters from Smade's kitchen. Gersen watched them a moment. "They seem unconcerned." Teehalt sniffed. "They think that I will deal with Grendel, but not with them... I will try to escape. Dasce does not know that I landed over the hill. Perhaps he thinks that your ship is mine." "Who are the other two men?" "Assassins. They know me well enough, from the tavern at Brinktown. Tristano is an Earthman. He kills by touches of his hand. The other is a Sarkoy venefice. He can brew stuff to kill from sand and water. All three are madmen -- but Dasce is the worst. He knows every horror there is to be known." TAasce at this moment looked at his watch. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he rose, crossed the room, bent over Teehalt. In a husky whisper he said, "Grendel waits you outside. He will see you now." Teehalt stared at him with sagging jaw. Dasce swaggered back to his table. Now Teehalt rubbed his face with quivering fingers, turned to Gersen. "I can still evade them if I can lose myself in the dusk. When I run out the door, will you detain the three?" "How do you suggest I do this?" Teehalt was silent a moment. "I don't know." "Nor do I, with the best will in the world." Teehalt gave a sad nod. "Very well, then. I will fend for myself. Good-by, Mr. Gersen." He rose to his feet, walked to the bar. Dasce slanted his eyes at him, but otherwise seemed disinterested. Beside the bar, Teehalt stood beyond the reach of his vision. Instantly Teehalt darted into the kitchen, out of sight. Smade looked after him with sardonic wonder. Dasce and the two assassins stolidly continued their meal. Gersen watched covertly. Why did they sit with such unconcern? Teehalt's ruse had been pitifully obvious. Gersen's skin began to prickle. In spite of his resolve, he rose to his feet, went to the doorway. Pushing open the timber panels, he stepped out on the veranda. The night was dark, lit only by stars. The wind, for a wonder, was still; but the sea, swirl.ing and flowing, sent up a muffled sad sound... A short sharp scream, a whimper, from behind the tavern. Gersen abandoned his resolve and started forward. A grip like the pinch of steel seized his arm, tweaked nerves at the back of his elbow; another hand clamped at his neck. Gersen let himself fall, broke the grip. He rolled over, bounced to his feet, stood in a half-crouch, shuffled slowly forward. Facing him with an easy smile stood Tristano the Earthman. "Careful, friend," said Tristano in the clipped flat Earth accent. "Give me trouble and Smade pitches you into the sea." Dasce came out the door, followed by the Sarcoy poisoner. Tristano joined them, the three walked to the space-port. Gersen remained on the terrace. Ten minutes later two ships rose into the night. The first was a squat armored vessel, with weapons fore and aft. The second was a battered old locator's ship. Model #B. Gersen stared in wonder. The second ship was his own. The ships disappeared, the sky once more was empty. Gersen returned into the tavern and sat before the fire. Presently he brought forth the envelope given r him by Lugo Teehalt, opened it and extracted three photographs, which he examined for the better part of an hour. 'he fire burnt low. Smade took himself to bed, leaving a son dozing behind the bar. Outside the night rains began to thrash down, lightning crackled, the ocean groaned. Gersen sat in deep thought. Presently from his pocki t he brought a sheet of paper, which listed five names: Grendel (the Monster) Howard Alan Treesong Viole Falushe Machine) Lens Larque From his pocket he brought a pencil, but still he deliberated. If he continually added names to his list he would never finish. Of course there was no real need to write. There vas no real need for a list: Gersen knew the five names as well as he knew his own. He compromised. To the right and below the last name of the original list he appended a sixth name: Hildemar Dasce. For a space he sat looking at the names, with two sides to his mind : the one so alive and passionate that the other, the cerebral detached observer, felt a trace of amusement. The flames settled low, chunks of fossilized moss glowed scarlet. The sea-sound was slower and lower in pitch. Gersen rose to his feet and climbed the stone stairs to his room. During his life Gersen had known little other than a succession of strange beds. Nevertheless sleep came slowly, and he lay staring into the dark. Visions passed before him, from as early as he could remember: a landscape which, as he recalled, seemed wonderfully pleasant and bright. There were tawny mountains, a village painted in faded pastel colors along the banks of a wide tawny river. But this picture, as always, was followed by another even more vivid: the same landscape, littered with hacked and bleeding bodies. Men and women and children shuffled into the holds of five long ships under the weapons of two score men in what seemed strange and outlandish costumes. With an old man who was his grandfather, Gersen watched horrified from across the river, concealed from the slavers by the bulk of an old barge. When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river. Then his grandfather told him, "Many things your father had planned for you. Learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?" "Yes, grandfather." "The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? This is Beyond; you will find that your work is never done -- so therefore you may never know a life of peace. However I guarantee you ample satisfaction: for I will teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of woman." '"The old man had been as good as his word. Eventually they made their way to Earth, the ultimate repository of every sort of knowledge. Young Kirth learned many things, from a succession of strange teachers which it would be tedious to detail. He killed his first man at the age of fourteen: a footpad who had the illluck to accost them in a back alley of Rotterdam. While his grandfather stood by, in the manner of an old fox teaching a cub to hunt, young Kirth, gasping and sobbing, broke first the ankle, then the neck of the astonished assailant. From Earth they moved to Alphanor, capitol planet of the Rigel Concourse, and here Kirth Gersen gained more conventional knowledge. When he was nineteen his grandfather died, bequeathing him a comfortable sum of money and a letter which read: My dear Kirth: I have seldom told of my affection and high regard for you; I take this occasion to do so. You have come to mean more to me than ever did my own son. I will not say I am sorry that I have set your feet in the path they now must take, even though you will be denied many ordinary pleasures and luxuries. Have I been presumptuous in so shaping your life? I think not. For several years you have been self-motivated, and have showed no inclination to point yourself in any other direction. In any event I can think of no more useful service for a man to perform than that which I have ordained for you. The Law of Man is bounded by the limits of the Oikumene. Good and evil, however, are ideas which encompass the universe; unluckily, beyond the Pale there are few to ensure the triumph of good over evil. Actually the triumph consists of two processes: first evil must be extinguished, then good must be introduced to fill the gap. It is impossible that a man should be equally efficacious in both functions. Good and evil, in spite of a traditional fallacy, are not polarities, nor mirror images, nor is one merely the absence of the other. In order to minimize confusion, your work will merely be the destruction of evil men. What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life. It must be reis not equivalent to expunging evil, which is a relationship between a situation and an individual. A poisonous spore will grow only in a nutrient soil. In this case the nutrient soil is Beyond, and since no human effort can alter the Beyond (which must always exist), you must devote your efforts to destroying the poisonous spores, which are evil men. It is a task of which you will never see the end. Our sharpest and first motivation in this matter, agreed, is no more than a primitive ache for revenge. Five pirate captains destroyed certain lives and enslaved other who were precious to us. Revenge is not an ignoble motive, when it works to a productive end. The names of these five pirate captains I do not know. My best attempts have brought me no information. One man, an underling, I recognized: his name is Parsifal Pankarow, and he is no less baneful than the five captains, though his potentialities for harm are less. You must seek him Beyond and learn from him the names of the five. Then you must kill the five, and it will do no harm if they suffer pain in the process, for they have brought an immeasurable amount of pain and grief to others. There is still much for you to learn. I would advise you to join the Institute, except I fear that the disciplines of this body would not set well with you. Do as you think best. In my youth I thought to become a catechumen, but Destiny ruled otherwise. If I were friends with a Fellow I would send you to him for counsel -- but I have no such friend. Perhaps you will be less constricted outside the Institute. Stringent conditions are imposed upon the catechumen through the first fourteen degrees. In any event, I advise you to devote a time to the study of Sarkoy poisons and hand-techniques, preferably on Sarkoy itself. There is room for improvement in your 'marksmanship and knife-play, though you need fear few men at hand-fighting. Your intuitive judgments are good; your self control, economy of action, and versatility are to be commended. But -- you still have much to learn. For the next ten years, study, train -- and be cautious. There are many other capable men. Do not rashly waste yourself against them until you are more than ready. In short, do not make an overvirtue of courage or heroism. A goodly amount of caution -- call it fear or even cowardice -- is a highly desirable adjunct for a man such as yourself, whose one fault might be said to be a mystical, almost superstitious, faith in the success of your destiny. Do not be fooled. We are all mortal, as I now attest. So, my grandson, I am dead. I have trained you to know good from evil. I feel only pride in my accomplishment, and hope that you will remember me with affection and respect. Your loving grandfather, Rolf Harpit Gersen T?or eleven years Kirth Gersen obeyed the dictates of his grandfather, or exceeded them, meanwhile seeking both within the Oikumene and Beyond for Parsifal Pankarow, but fruitlessly. Few occupations offered more challenge, more hazard, more Gersen undertook two assignments, on Pharode and Blue Planet. During the term of this latter, he submitted a preemptive requisition for information regarding Parsifal Pankarow, and felt himself well rewarded to learn that Parsifal Pankarow currently resided at Brinktown, where he was Ira Bugloss, operator of a prosperous import business. Gersen found Ira Bugloss, or Pankarow, to be a burly hearty man, egg-bald, his skin dyed lemon-yellow with mustachios which were wide, black and luxuriant. Brinktown occupied a plateau which stood like an island in a black and orange jungle. Gersen scrutinized Pankarow's movements for two weeks, learned his routine, which was that of a man without a care. Then one evening he hired a cab, rendered the operator unconscious, waited outside the Jodisei Conversation and Flower Arranging Club, until Pankarow tired of sporting with the inmates and emerged into the humid Brinktown night. Well pleased with himself, humming a tune he had just learned, he staggered into the cab and was conveyed, not to his vast and sumptuous home, but to a remote clearing in the jungle. Here Gersen put questions which Pankarow had no wish to answer. Pankarow made an effort to hold his tongue, to no avail. Finally five names were wrung from his memory. "Now in. "I will "You will le again." kfully and o Brinksly placid ite three-, Duses ema, purple vilight he jiet back use. ne stood ve monueres and a sculpil Pankase, head iky, arms stood apirteen or ped down jproached n my fawomen?" art to the put aside ting Panig a mesinquired anxious. have no Your faiway. He in return. cautious. ' capable i waste you til you ar short, do r of courage amount of or even c desirable  as yourse might be almost suj success of be fooled. I now att So, my I have trai from evil, my accon that you w affection i Your Rolf por elev sen ol his grand them, mei within the yond for F fruitlessly. Few occ challenge, than weas Gersen ur ments, on Planet. Dt latter, he tive requis From what will you do with me?" croaked the erstwhile Ira Bugloss. "I will kill you," said Gersen, pale and quivering after exercise he did not enjoy. "I have made you my enemy. FurtherI more you deserve to die a hundred times over." "At one time, yes!" cried the sweating Pankarow. "Now I lead a blameless life, I injure no one!" Gersen wondered if every such occasion would cause him such nausea, misgivings and misery. He responded in a voice held crisp and even by enormous effort. "What you say perhaps is true, but your wealth stinks of pain. And certainly you will make a report to the first agent of any of the five you meet." "No. I swear not. And my wealth -- take it all." "Where is your wealth?" Pankarow tried to make conditions. "I will lead you to it." Gersen shook his head sadly. "Accept my excuses. You are about to die. It comes to all men. You had best feel that you are requiting the evil you have done -- " "Under my tombstone!" screamed Pankarow. "Under the stone tombstone before my house!" Gersen touched a tube to Pan. karow's neck, which spat a Sarkoy poison into the skin. "I will go to look," he said. "You will sleep until you see me again." Pankarow relaxed thankfully and was dead in seconds.  ersen returned to Brinktown, a deceptively placid settlement of tall ornate three-, fourand five-story houses embowered among green, purple and black trees. At twilight he sauntered along a quiet back lane to Pankarow's house. The stone tombstone stood plain to see: a massive monument of marble spheres and cubes surmounted by a sculptured image of Parsifal Pankarow in a noble pose, head thrown back to the sky, arms outspread. As Gersen stood appraising it a boy thirteen or fourteen years old stepped down from the porch and approached Gersen. "Are you from my father? Is he with the fat women?" Gersen steeled his heart to the inevitable pangs, and put aside all thought of confiscating Pankarow's wealth. "I bring a message from your father." "Will you come in?" inquired the boy, tremulously anxious. "I'll call my mother." "No. Please don't. I have no time. Listen carefully. Your father has been called away. He is not sure when he can return. Perhaps never." The boy listened round-eyed. "Did he -- run away?" Gersen nodded. "Yes. Some old enemies found him, and he does not dare show himself. He said to tell you or your mother that money is hidden under the tombstone." The boy stared at Gersen. "Who are you?" "A messenger, no more. Tell your mother exactly what I have told you. One more thing. When you look beneath the tombstone, be careful. There may be . a trap to guard the money. Do you imderstand what I'm saying?" "Yes. A booby-trap." "That's right. Be careful. Get the help of someone you can trust." Gersen departed Brinktown. He thought of Smade's Planet, with its elemental quiet and isolation: precisely the antidote to his fretful conscience. Where, he asked himself, as the locater boat skidded down a fracture in the continuum, did the balance lie? He had by no means reached the tipping point. Parsifal Pankarow deserved the callous execution he had received. But what of wife and son? They must bear the pain, but why? To protect the women and children of more deserving men from worse pain. So Gersen reassured himself. But the haunted dark look of the boy's eyes would not leave his memory. Destiny led him. The first night at Smade's Tavern engaged him with Grendel the Monster, the first name Parsifal Pankarow had blurted forth. In his bed Gersen heaved a deep sigh. Pankarow was dead. Poor  miserable Lugo Teehalt was  probably dead. All men must i die; let there be an end to brood ing. He grinned into the dark, ! thinking of Grendel (whoever he might be) and Beauty Dasce  examining the monitor of his i ship. To begin with they would  be unable to open the monitor with their key. A formidable difficulty, even worse if they suspected thief-proofing of explosive, poison gas or acid. When after great travail they eventui ally extracted the filament, it I would show blank. Gersen's i monitor was no more than win: dow-dressing; he had never bothered to activate it. Grendel would look questioningly at Beauty Dasce, who would mutter some sort of objurgation. Perhaps then they would think to check the serial number of the ship, only to find that it was different from that issued to Lugo Teehalt. And then: swiftly back to Smade's Planet. But by that time, Gersen would make sure that he was gone. m Question put to Bale Maurmath. Chief Quaestor of TriPlanetary Police System, during a round-table television discussion, broadcast from Conover, Cuthbert, Vega. May #, #: I know your problems are tremendous, Quaestor Maurmath, in fact I don't really comprehend how you get on top of them. For instance, how can you possibly locate some one particular man, or trace his background among ninety-odd inhabited planets varieties of political complexion, local habit, doctrines of belief? Answer: Usually we can't. Message of Lord Jaiko Jaikoska. Chairman of the Executive Board, to the Valhalla General Legislative Assembly, Valhalla, Tau Gemini, August #, # L I urge you not endorse this sinister measure. Humanity many times has had sad experience of super-powerful police forces... As soon as (the police) slip from under the firm thumb of a suspicious local tribune, they become arbitary, merciless, a law to themselves. They think no more of justice, but only of establishing themselves as a privileged and envied elite. They mistake the attitude of natural caution and uncertainty of the civilian population as admiration and respect, and presently they start to swagger back and forth jingling weapons, in megalomaniac euphoria. People thereupon become not masters, but servants... Such a police force becomes merely an aggregate of uniformed criminals, the more baneful in that their position is unchallenged and sanctioned by law. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible. Public convenience or dignity means nothing. Police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly over-zealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, when apprehended, he is beaten or otherwise tortured for his intolerable presumption... The police complain that they cannot function efficiently, that criminals escape them. Better a hundred vmchecked criminals than the despotism of one unbridled police force. Again I warn you, do not endorse this measure. If you do, I shall surely veto it. Excerpt from address of Richard Parnell, Commissioner of Public Weal, Northern Territory, Xion, Rigel Concourse, to the Association of Police Crime Detection Agencies, at Parilia, Pilgham, Rigel, December #, #;... It is not enough to say that our problems are unique, they have become catastrophic. We are held responsible for the efficient conduct of our jobs, but are refused the necessary tools and powers to do so. A man can murder and rob anywhere within the Oikumene, jump into a waiting space-ship and be lightyears away before his crime is discovered. If he passes beyond the Pale, our jurisdiction ends -- at least officially, although all of us know of courageous officers who have put justice ahead of expediency and caution, and have gone beyond the Pale to make their arrests. This of course they have a right to do, since every human law becomes invalid Beyond. But the risk is their own. More often the criminal who  goes Beyond escapes scot-free. When he chooses to return into the Oikumene he may have changed his appearance, his prints, and is safe unless he has the misfortune to be arrested for a new infraction in the community where he committed his original crime and was there genified. Essentially, in this day of the Jarnell Intersplit, any criminal who takes a few elementary precautions can go unpunished. This association many times has sought to establish a more satisfactory basis for crime-detection and prevention. Our main problem is the diversity with their totally disparate standards, goals and range of problems, and the consequent chaos of information files and retrieval systems. An obvious solution exists, and the association's standing recommendation is the formation of a single official police system to maintain law and order throughout the Oikumene. The advantages of such a system are obvious: standardization of procedure, use of new equipment and ideas, unified control, a central office for the filing, The noun is gene-classification, thence to adjective gene-classified. abbreviated to genified. indexing and cross-indexing of information, and perhaps of highest importance, the creation and maintenance of an esprit, a pride of profession, to attract and hold men and women of the highest abilities. As we all know, this centralized agency has been denied us, no matter how urgently we plead its virtues. The ostensible motive behind this refusal is known to us all, and I will not dignify it by mentioning it. I will say that police morale is sinking to an ever lower level and soon may vanish -- unless something is done. Today I wish to put before the convention a proposal for the "something". Our association is the private organization of a group of private individuals. It has no official status or connection with any governmental office whatever. In short, we are free to do what we please, enter into any kind of business we please, so long as we contravene no laws. I propose that this association go into business, that we found a private crime detection agency. The new company will be strictly a commercial proposition, financed by association money and by private subscription. Headquarters will be established at some central and convenient location, but there will be branches on every planet. Our staff will be recruited from among members of this association and any other qualified Fersons. They will be well paid, from fees and profits. Where will these fees and profits derive? Primarily from local police organizations, who will use certain of the facilities of this new interplanetary agency, instead of expending large sums to maintain redundant facilities of the same sort. Since the proposed agency will be a private business organization subject to all local and interplanetary laws, the critics of our former schemes must be silenced... Eventually the Interworld Police Coordination Company would automatically be called upon to handle all problems of crime detection and prevention, other than those purely local, function usefully. In due course in scope all present and future official police groups. We will have our own laboratories, research programs, absolutely complete files, and an absolutely high-class staff -- recruited as I say from members of the association, and others. Are there any questions? A question from the floor: Is there any reason why police of, ficers of a municipality or a state should not simultaneously Answer : This is a very important point. No, there is none whatever. I see no conflict between the two agencies, and there is every reason to hope that local police officials will automatically wish to become would be to ttie advantage of and the individual himself. In other words, the local police officer would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by referthorizing the subsequent fee if he himself were a staff member. Men and Methods, by Raoul Past... Nominally an intra-Oikuforced by the dynamics of its basic rationale to operate Beyond. Here, where the only laws are local ordinances and taboos, tion: indeed the very opposite. a weasel. His life is constantly balanced on a knife-edge. The Central Agency shrouds in secrecy the exact number of "weasels", and also the percentage of casualties. The first figvue is suspected to be low, through difficulties of recruitment; the second high, through both the exigencies of the work and the efforts of that most fantastic of human constructions, the Deweaseling Corps... The universe is infinite; worlds without end exists ; but certainly one must travel far to find a situation so paradoxical, whimsical, and grim as this: that the single discipline organization of the Beyond exists only to extirpate the nominal forces of law and order. G ersen awoke in the strange bed, the sky through the small square window only vaguely gray. He dressed, descended the stone steps to the hall where he found one of Smade's sons, a dour dark lad of twelve, fanning the coals in the fireplace to life. He bade Gerson a gruff "Good morning", but seemed indisposed for further conversation. Gersen stepped outside on the terrace. Pre-dawn mist concealed the ocean, rolling in sheets and curls across the heath -- a dreary monochromatic scene. The sense of isolation was suddenly oppressive. Gersen returned inside to warm himself at the new fire. The boy was sweeping the told Gersen in gloomy satisfaction. "Little thin man got it. Right behind the moss-shed." "Is the body there?" Gersen asked presently. "No. No body. They took it with them. Three bad oneS; maybe four. Father is black mad they did their dirt inside the fence." Gersen grunted, displeased with every aspect of the situation. He asked for breakfast, which was presently forthcoming. As he ate, the dwarf sun lifted above the mountains, a brittle white wafer barely visible through the mist. An onshore wind came. When Gersen once more went outside the sky was clear, though fog wisps still blew in from the oily sea. Gersen walked north along the shelf between ocean cliffs and mountains. Underfoot was a carpet of spongy gray moss, redolent with a musty resinous odor. The sunlight streamed over his head, out to sea, the black water giving back no glint or reflection. He went to the edge of the cliff and looked down two hundred feet to the rise and fall of the water. He tossed a stone, watched the splash, and the ripples quickly absorbed in the larger motion. What would it be like, he wondered, to sail a boat on this ocean? Out across the horizons, with the whole world to explore; barren coasts, bleak headlands, tall stern islands, with no sight of human being or dwelling until the re. turn to Smade's Tavern. Gersetf turned away from the cliff and continued north. He passed the mouth of a valley fenced in against Smade's cattle. Teehalt certainly had not left his boat here. A quarter mile ahead a spur of the mountains humped down almost to the sea. In the shadow of the ridge Gersen found Teehalt's boat. He made a quick inspection. The vessel was indeed a Model #B, identical to his own. The gear and machinery seemed in good order. In a housing under the bow-bulge himg the monitor which had cost Teehalt his life. Gersen returned to the tavern. His original plan had been to spend several days. It must be altered: Grendel might discover his mistake and return with Hildemar Dasce and the two assassins. They would wish to take Teehalt's monitor, and this Gersen was resolved they should not do, though he did not care to risk his life in the effort. O eturning to the taven he noted that the landing field was empty. The Star King had departed. This morning? Or during the night? Gersen had no idea. He settled his score and, moved by some obscure impulse paid Lugo Teehalt's bill. Smade made no comment. He was clearly consumed by cold fury. His eyes showed white around the drab irises, his nostrils were distended, his chin jutted forward. The rage was not on Lugo Teehalt's behalf, Gersen realized. The murderer, whoever he might be -- Dasce had mentioned Grendel -- had flouted Smade's law, he had disturbed the serenity of Smade's Tavern, he had wronged Smade. Politely Gersen inquired, "When did the Star King leave?" Smade merely glared silently back at him like an angry Black Angus bull. Gersen gathered his small packet of belongings and departed the tavern, declining the twelve-year-old boys proffer of assistance. Once more he walked north. Crossing the ridge, he looked back toward the tavern. Staunch and secure it stood facing the sea, utterly alone. Gersen shook his head dubiously and turned away. "Everyone is the same," he told himself. "Anxious to arrive. And when they leave, wondering why they came." A few minutes later he took Teehalt's boat aloft on its boosters, then pointed it back toward the Oikumene and cut in the oversplit. Smade's Planet dwindled astern, and with its white dwarf sun, presently became lost, a single spark among flies blown on a dark wind, the light reaching Gersen's eyes by back-splash or back-curl, wherein the Doppler effect played no role. Perspective was lost; the eye was fooled. Stars moved astern, the near slipping across the far. Within hand-reach? A hundred yards distant? Ten miles? The eye had no tool by which to judge. Gersen set the star-finder to the index of Rigel, engaged the auto-pilot and made himself as comfortable as the spartan facilities of the Model #B permitted. The visit to Smade's Tavern had served him well, though the profit had been bought by Lugo Teehalt's death. Grendel wanted Lugo Teehalt's monitor: this was the premise which controlled the shape of the future. ter negotiations, and with equal certainty he would act through an agent. Although, thought Gersen, he had seen fit to kill Lugo Teehalt at first hand... There was something puzzling here. Why need Lugo Teehalt die? Sheer malice on the part of Grendel? Not impossible. But Grendel had killed and ravaged so extensively that taking the life of one thin miserable man could provide him only the smallest gratification. The motive more likely was habit; sheer offhanded casual habit. To sever relations with a man who might be inconvenient, you killed him... A third possibility: had Teehalt penetrated the anonymity which Grendel, among all the Demon Princes, held of supreme importance? Gersen reviewed his conversation with Teehalt. For all his ravaged and woebegone appearance, Teehalt had used educated speech. He had seen better days. Why had he turned to the disreputable profession of locating? Gersen shrugged. Why did a man set himself in any specific direction? Why did a man, presumably born of ordinary parents, become Grendel the Monster? "Teehalt had hinted or implied that Grendel was somehow involved in the leasing of the locater-ship. With this thought in mind Gersen made a careful inspection of the ship. He found the traditional brass plate, naming the place of manufacture: Liverstone on Fiame, a planet of the Rigel Concourse. The monitor likewise carried a bronze flake detailing its serial number and the manufacturer: the Feritse Precision Instruments Company, at Sansontiana on Olliphane, also of the Concourse. But there was no indication of the owner, no evidence of registration. It would be necessary, then, to trace ownership of the boat indirectly. Gersen set himself to consider the problem. Estate houses maintained twothirds of all locator ships, their stock in trade consisting of worlds with specific attributes: planets highly mineralized, planets suitable for colonization by dissident groups, planets pleasant enough to serve as a tinguished by a sufficiently interesting flora and fauna to attract curio dealers or biologists; most rarely, planets supporting intelligent or semi-intelligent life, of interest to sociologists, cultural taxonomists, linguists and the like. The estate houses were concentrated in the cosmopolitan centers of the Oikumene: three or four worlds of the Concourse, chief among them Alphanor; Vega's Cuthbert, Boniface, Aloyisius Novel; Pi Cassiopeia's Copus and Orpo; Quantique; Old Earth. The Concourse would be the logical starting-place, if in fact Lugo Teehalt worked for an estate house. But this was by no means certain. In fact, as Gersen seemed to recall, Teehalt had implied otherwise. If so, the investigation was narrowed considerably. Next to the estate houses, universities and research institutes were the chief employers of locators. And Gersen had a new thought. If Teehalt had been either a student or faculty member at some specific lyceum, college or university, he would probably apply to this same i n stitution for employment... Gersen corrected his thinking; the conjecture was not necessarily probable. A proud man, with friends and associates who might remember him, would use his old school in this fashion only as a last resort. Was Lugo Teehalt proud? Not in this way, or so it seemed to Gersen. Teehalt had seemed a man who might easily turn to his old haven for security. "There was another obvious source of information: the Feritse Precision Instrument Company at Sansontiana, where the monitor would be registered in the name of its purchaser. And another reason for visiting the Feritse Precision Instrument Company : Gersen wanted to open the monitor and remove the filament. To this end he needed a key. Monitors were often tamper-proofed with explosive capsules or corrosive; violent extraction of the filament seldom jdelded useful information. The officials of the Feritse Company might or might not prove accommodating. Sansontiana was a city of Braichis, one of Olliphane's nineteen independent nations. The Braichish were a headstrong, involute, altogether peculiar people. Concourse law, however, repudiated private claims beyond the Pale, and discouraged the use of explosive traps. Hence, in an ordinance detailing the equipment required aboard spacecraft: "The manufacturers of such devices (referring to monitors) are thereupon enjoined and required to furnish keys, switching devices, code-sticks, number sequences or any other tool, appliance or information necessary to the safe opening of the instrument in question, without delay, complaint, error, exorbitant charge, or any behavior or act calculated to deter the petitioner from obtaining the key, coded device or information demanded, if and when the petitioner is able to demonstrate ownership of said instrument. Presentation of the serial plate affixed by the manufacturer to the instrument shall be deemed sufficient and adequate evidence of ownership." All well and good. Gersen could secure the key, but the company need not furnish information as to previous registration of the instrument. Especially if Grendel should suspect that Gersen might come to Sansontiana with such a purpose in mind, and take steps to preclude the contingency. The thought opened a set of new vistas. Gersen frowned. Had his temperament been other than careful and orderly, these various options and possibilities might not occur to him. He would be saved a great deal of difficulty, but he probably would die sooner... He shook his head in resignation and reached for the starcharts. Not far off his line of fission was the star Cygnus T#, and its planet Euville where an unpleasant and psychotic population lived in five cities: Oni, Me, Che, Dun and Ve, each compulsively built in pentagonal patterns, from a central five-sided citadel. The space-port, on a remote island, was opprobriously named "Orifice". Everything Gersen needed could be found at the space-port; he had no desire to visit the cities, especially since each required in lieu of passport, the tattooing of a star on the forehead, a different color for each city. To visit all five cities the prospective tourist must display five colored stars: orange, black, mauve, yellow and green. From New Discoveries in Space, by Ralph Quarry;... Sir Julian Hove apparently derived his attitudes from the late Renaissance explorers. Upon return to Earth members of his crews imposed upon themselves (or had imposed) a strict rule of discretion and secrecy. Details nevertheless leaked out. Sir Julian Hove was, to use the most comprehensive term, a martinet. He was likewise a man utterly without humor. His eye was bleak, he spoke without moving his lips, his hair was combed day after day in photographically identical furrows. While he IV did not actually require that the personnel wear dinner jackets to meals, certain of his rules imposed an almost equivalent punctilio... The use of first names was eschewed; salutes were exchanged at the beginning and termination of each watch, even though the personnel was by and large civilian. Technicians whose specialties were without scientific pertinence were forbidden to set foot on the fascinating new worlds, an order which came close to fomenting mutiny, until Sir Julian's second in command prevailed upon Sir Julian to ameliorate it. The Rigel Concourse is Sir Julian's most noteworthy discovery: twenty-six magnificent planets, most of them not only habitable but salubrious, though only two display even quasi-intelligent autochthones... Sir Julian, exercising his prerogatives, named the planets for boyhood heroes: Lord Kitchener, Wil Ham Gladstone, Archbishop Rollo Gore, Edythe MacDevott, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas CarSamuel B. Gorsham, Sir Robert Peel, and the like. But Sir Julian was to be deprived of his privilege. He telegraphed ahead the news of his return to Maudley Space Station, together with a description of the Concourse and the names he had bestowed upon the members of this magnificent group. The list passed through the hands of an obscure young clerk, one Roger Pilgham, who rejected Sir Julian's nominations in disgust. To each of the twenty-six planets he assigned a letter of the alphabet and hurriedly supplied new names : Alphanor, Barleycorn, Chrysanthe, Diogenes, Elfland, Fiame, Goshen, Hardacres, Image, Jezebel, Krokinole, Lyonnesse, Madagascar, Nowhere Olliphane, Pilgham, Quinine, Raratonga, Somewhere, Tantamount, Unicom, Vakwnde, Walpurgis, Xion, Ys and Zacaranda -- the names derived from legend, msrth, romance and his own whimsy. Only one of the worlds was accompanied by a satellite, described in the dispatch as "an eccentric, tumbling, odd-shaped fragment of chondritic pumice", and this Roger Pilgham named Sir Julian. The press received and published the list and Rigel's planets became so known, though Sir Julian's acquaintances wondered about the sudden extravagance of his imagination. And who, or what, was "Pilgham"? Sir Julian presumably would explain upon his arrival. The clerk, Roger Pilgham, presently returns to the obscurity from which he sprang, and there is no record of his conduct or state of mind as Sir Julian's return became imminent. Did he feel apprehension? Uneasiness? Indifference? Beyond all doubt he had become resigned to the prospect of discharge from his position. In due course Sir Julian made a triumphant return, and in due course used the phrase, "most impressive perhaps are the New Grampian Mountains on the North Continent of Lord BulwerLytton". A member of the audience politely asked the whereabouts of Lord Bulwer-Lytton, and the change was revealed. Sir Julian's reaction to the deed was one of extraordinary fury. The clerk prudently went into seclusion; Sir Julian was encouraged to reintroduce his own nominations, but the damage had been done; Roger Pilgham's brash deed caught the fancy of the public, and Sir Julian's terminology gradually faded from memory. From popular Handbook ot the Planets, #rd Edition, published #: Alphanor, a planet considered the administrative node and cultural center of the Rigel Concourse. It is eighth in orbital order. Planetary Constants: Diameter, # miles. Mass, #. Mean Day, # hours, # minutes, # seconds. etc. General Remarks : Alphanor is a large bright sea-world, with a generally bracing climate. Ocean occupies three-quarters of the total surface, including the polar ice floes. The land mass is divided into seven nearly contiguous continents : Phrygia, Umbria, Lusitania, Scythia, Etruria, Lydia and Lycia, in a configuration suggesting seven pettals of a flower. There are uncounted islands. Autochthonous life is complex and vigorous. The flora has in no way yielded to terrestrial imports, which must be carefully tended and nurtured. The fauna is likewise complex, and on occasion actively savage, to cite the clever hyrcan major of upper Phrygia, and the invisible eel of the Thaumaturge Ocean. The political structure of Alphanor is a pyramidal democracry -- simple in theory, intricate in practice. The continents are divided into provinces, thence prefectures, districts and wards: these latter defined as population blocs of five thousand persons. Each ward committee sends a representative to the district council, which elects a delegate to the prefectural diet, which in turn is represented at the district assembly, which sends a member to provincial congress, which does likewise for the continental parliament. Each parliament elects seven rectors to the grand Council at Avente, in the Sea Province of Umbria, which thereupon chooses a chairman. From Preface to Peoples ot the Concourse, by Strick and Chemitz : The concourse populations are far from homogeneous. During the migrations from Earth racial groups tended to follow their own, and in the new environ#  menta, under the influence of interbreeding and new behavior patterns, such groups specialized even further... The folk of Alphanor in general are fair, brown-haired, of medium stature, though an hour's walk along the Grand Esplanade at Avente will show the observer every conceivable style of human being. The Alphanor psychology is more difficult to express. Every inhabited world is different in this regard; and though the differences are real and distinct enough, it is hard to present them accurately without discursiveness -- especially since each planet-wide generalization is compounded, vitiated, or contradicted by regional differences. "D igel, dead ahead, was a bright blue white point from which every other star seemed to flee. Gersen had little to do but contemplate his destination, speculate regarding Grendel's probable intentions and formulate his own set of responses. The first problem: where to land? One hundred and eighty-three spaceports on twenty-two of the twenty-six worlds were convenient to his lawful use -- as well as unlimited desert and wasteland, should he choose the quarantine laws. How intensely did Grendel want Teehalt's monitor? Would he arrange a watch at every space-port? Theoretically, this could be done, by the suborning of port officials. The cheapest and perhaps most effective system would be to offer a resounding reward to the man who reported Gersen's arrival. Gersen of course might choose to set down at another star system. It would be difficult to mount guard over every space-port of the Oikumene. But it was by no means Gersen's purpose to go into hiding. In the next phase of proceedings he must necessarily expose himself. This next phase was the identification of Grendel. Two methods to this end suggested themselves : he could either trace the registry of the monitor,, or await the approach of some member of Grendel's organization, and then try to trace the nerve of authority back to its source. Grendel would take for granted Gersen's intent to investigate the monitor, and would presumably concentrate his vigilance at the Kindune space-port, which served Sansontiana. Nevertheless, for a series of indefinite reasons, little more than himches, Gersen decided to land at the Grand Interplanetary Space-port at Avente. He approached Alphanor, coasted down into landing orbit. locked his auto-pilot into the official landing program and once more sat back. The boat settled, bumped in a roar of expiring jets upon the scorched red earth. The jets died there was silence. Automatically the pressureequalizing valve began to hiss. The port officials approached in a slide-car. Gersen answered questions, submitted to a brief medical inspection and received an entry permit. The officials departed. A mobile crane tmndled up, lifted the boat, carried it to a bay in the storage line at one side of the field. Gersen descended to the ground and started to detach the monitor, keeping a careful lookout in all directions. Two men sauntered along the storage line, casually, or so it seemed. Gersen recognized one of them instantly; the Sarcoy who had followed Hildemar Dasce into Smade's Tavern. As they approached, Gersen gave no overt heed, but they made no twitch or move that he did not observe. The Sarkoy wore a modest suit of dark gray wnth epaulettes embroidered with opals; his companion, a thin sandy-haired man with dancing white-gray eyes, wore a laborer's loose blue coverall. The two stopped a few feet from Gersen, stood watching as if in casual interest. Gersen, after a glance, ignored them. The Sarkoy muttered something to his associate, came a little forward. "I think we've met?" IBs voice was soft, sardonic. "Your name evades me," said Gerson politely. "I am Sivij Suthiro." ersen examined him carefully, seeing a manf middle weight, with the curious flat head of the Sarkoy Steppe-man, the face wider than high. SuthThe Sarkoy were held in low esteem by other peoples of the Oikumene, by virtue of repugnant eating habits, gross and exhibitionistic sexual conduct. Also despised was the popular Sarkoy sport known as harbite, or the baiting of a harikap, a large bristle-furred semi-intelligent biped of the north forests. The wretched creature, brought to a state of tension by hunger, would be thrust into a circle of men armed with pitchforks and torches, stimulated to wild activity by being set on fire, thrust deftly with pitchforks back into the center of the circle as it sought to escape. Sarkovy, the single planet of Phi Ophiuchi, was a dim world of steppes, swamps, black forests, morasses. The Sarkoy lived in tall wooden houses behind timber palisades; not even the largest of the towns was secure from the attack of bandits and nomads from the wastelands. By practice and tradition the Sarkoy were accomplished poisoners. A Master Venefice reportedly could kill a man merely by walking past him. iro's eyes were soft dead olivedrab, the nose snub and dark of nostril, the mouth wide, thicklipped -- a face shaped by more  than a thousand years of specialization and inbreeding. Gersen could not detect the "breath of death": an accomplishment forced upon indentured assassins, which shortened their lives, gave the skin a yellowish glaze and caused the hair to stiffen. Suthiro's skin was untoned pallid ivory. His hair was a glossy black pelt, and he wore tattooed on his right cheek the small Maltese cross of the Sarkoy hetman. Gersen said, "My apologies. Scop Suthiro. I don't remember the occasion you mention." "Ah." Suthiro's eyes widened at Gersen's use of the honorific. "You have visited Sarkovy. Dear green Sarkovy, its boundless steppes, its merry festivals!" "Merry, so long as the harikap last. Then what will you torture?" ' Suthiro, of a race inured to insult, took no offence. "We always have each other. I see you know my planet well." "Fairly well. Perhaps you remember me from Sarkovy." "No," said Suthiro wryly. "Elsewhere and more recently." Gersen shook his head. "Impossible. I have just come in from Beyond." "Exactly. We met Beyond. At Smade's Tavern." "Indeed." "Yes. With certain others I came to meet my friend Lugo Teehalt. In the confusion and excitement Lugo left Smade's Planet in your space-ship. Surely you are aware of this?" Gersen laughed. "If Teehalt has either apologies or complaints, I'm sure he will seek me out." "Exactly," said Suthiro. "Lugo Teehalt sent me to make adjustment. He begs forgiveness for his mistake, and wishes only that I recover his monitor." Gersen shook his head. "You can't have it." "No?" Suthiro moved closer. to indemnify you for his mistake." "I accept with thanks. Give me the money." "And the monitor?" "I will return it when he comes for it." '"The thin-faced man made an irritable clicking sound, but Suthiro grinned. "This is not exactly feasible. You will have the money, but we will not have the monitor." "There is no reason why you Oikumene. #U I should have the monitor. I will give Lugo Teehalt his monitor. However it is perfectly legitimate for you to give me the money. Unless, of course, you distrust my honesty." "By no means, since we do not intend to put it to the test. We propose, in fact, to take the moniter at this moment." "I think not," said Gersen. "I plan to take possession of the filament." "This is out of the question!" said Suthiro gently. "Try to stop me." Gersen returned to work, disengaged the seals from the monitor housing. Suthiro watched placidly. He made a signal to the thin-faced man who backed away and kept lookout. "I could stop you so suddenly you'd become a marble statue." He looked over his shoulder to the thin-faced man, who nodded. Suthiro exhibited a weapon he carried in his hand. "I can provide you a heart spasm, a brain hemorrhage, or a convulsion of the small intestine, whichever you prefer." Gersen paused in his work. "Your arguments are impressive. "I need pay you nothing. But here is the thousand I mentioned." He tossed Gersen a packet of notes, motioned to the thinfaced man who came forward, took Gersen's tools and expertly detached the monitor. Gersen counted the money, moved to the side. The two dropped the monitor into a bag, and without another word departed. Gersen laughed quietly. This was the monitor he had bought and installed at Euville, at a halt's monitor was safe inside the ship. Gersen returned into the ship, closed the ports. Time now was of the essence. Suthiro would require about ten minutes to communicate his success, either to Dasce or conceivably to Grendel himself. Messages would then go out to various other space-ports of the Concourse, calling off the alert. Grendel would not receive the monitor, if Gersen were in luck, for several hours, perhaps not for days, depending upon his whereabouts. There would be an additional delay while the deception was discovered, and then Grendel's organization would once again be mobilized, the focus now upon the Feritse Precision Instrument Company at Sansontiana, on the planet of Olliphane. By this time Gersen hoped to be there and gone. Certainly he would have no time to spare. Without further delay he started the jets, rose into the blue Alphanor sky and pointed the boat toward Olliphane. V rFrom Popular Handbook of the Planets; Olliphane, nineteenth planet of the Rigel Concourse. Planetary Constants: Diameter, # miles Mass, # etc. General Remarks : Olliphane is the most dense of the Rigel planets, and orbits close at the outer edge of the Habitable Zone. It has been speculated that when the proto-planet of the Third Group disintegrated Olliphane received and unduly large share of core materials. In any event, until recent astronomic times, Alliphone was subject to intense plutonic activity, and even today boasts ninety-two active volcanoes. Olliphane is highly mineralized. An imposing relief provides vast hydro-electric potential, furnishing cheaper energy than is possible from traditional sources. A diligent, disciplined population, utilizing these advantages, has made Olliphane the most highly industrialized world of the Concourse, rivaled only by Tantamount, with its shipyards, and Lyonnesse, with its monumental Gnome Iron Works. Olliphane is relatively cool and wet, with the population concentrated in the Equatorial Zone, notably around the shores  of Lake Clare. Here the visitor! will find the ten largest cities of the planet, led by Kindune, Sansontiana and New Ossining. Olliphane is likewise nutritionally self-sufficient. Few other than natural foods are consumed, of which per capita consumption is highest in the Concourse, third highest among major worlds of the Oikumene. The alpine valleys surrounding the lake are devoted to dairying and the production of greenstuffs. The Olphs are a mingled stock, derived primarily from a colony of Hyperborean Skakers. They are typically blond to brown of hair, large-boned, of, ten inclined to corpulence, with fair undyed skins. They are respectful of orthodoxy, sedate in personal lives, but notoriously enthusiastic during the public fetes and celebrations which serve as emotional release to an otherwise conventional and reserve folk. A caste system, though without legal status, permeates every phase of the social structure Prerogatives are carefully defined, jealously observed; thf language has expanded and loosened to provide at least a dozen styles of address. From A Study of Inter-Class Accommodations, by Frerb Hankbert, in Journal of the It is a remarkable experience for a visitor to watch a pair of Olphs, strange to each other, appraising each other for caste. The operation requires no more than an instant, and appears almost intuitive, for the persons concerned may well be wearing standard garments. I have questioned many Olphs in this matter, and can still make no definite assertions. In the first place most Olphs blandly deny the existence of caste structure, and consider their society completely egalitarian. In the second place, the Olphs themselves are not quite sure how they divine the caste of a stranger. He either has more of the quality known as haute than oneself, or less. I have theorized that rapid, unconscious and almost undetectable eye-movements are the key to the assessment of haute, with characteristic shifts or steadiness indicative of each caste. Hands and hand motions may play a similar function. As might be expected high officials of the bureaucracy enjoy the most exalted caste, and especially the Civic Tutelars, as the Olphs name their police. ersen landed at the Kindune space-port and, with Teehalt's monitor in a suitcase, boarded a subway for Sansontiana. To the best of his knowledge no one had heeded his arrival, no one had followed him. But now time was growing short. At any moment Grendel must realize he had been duped and would seek to re-establish contact. For the moment Gersen considered himself safe; nevertheless, he performed a few classic maneuvers to disengage himself from stick-tight or tracker. Finding nothing to dis Stick-tight -- these come in at least least five varieties, suitable to various applications: The servo-optical: a spy-cell supported on rotary wings, remotely guided by an operator. The automatic: a similar cell to follow a radioactive or monochromatic tag fixed to, oi smeared upon, man or vehicle. The Culp spy-master: a semiintelligent flying creature trained to follow any subject of interest; clever, cooperative, reliable, but relatively large and noticeable. The Manx spy-bird : a smaller, less obtrusive creature, trained to perform similarly; less docile and intelligent, more aggressive. The Manx spy-bird modification: similar to the above, equipped with control devices. concert him, he deposited the monitor in a public locker, at the subway interchange under the Rapunzel Hotel, retaining only the brass serial plate. Then, boarding an express car, he was delivered in fifteen minutes to Sansontiana eighty miles south. He consulted a directory, transferred to a local for the Ferristoun District, and presently was discharged into a station only a few hundred yards from the Feritse Precision Instrument Company. Ferristoun was a dismal district of industrial structures, warehouses, an occasional tavern: these latter cheerful little nooks, lavish with ornament, colored glass and carved wood, in emulation of the grand pleasure arcades along the lakeshore. The time was middle morning. Rain had darkened the black cobblestone pavement. Sixwheel drays lumbered along the streets. The entire district sounded to a subdued hum of engines. As Gersen walked, a short sharp bleat of whistle signaled a change of shift, and the sidewalks at once became crowded with workers. They were pale people, blank and humorless of face, wearing warm, well-made coveralls in one of three colors, gray, dark-blue or mustard yellow; a contrasting belt, either black or white; black roundtopped kaftans. All were standard issue, the government being an elaborate syndicalism, as thoroughgoing, careful and humorless as its constituency. Two further bleats of the whistle sounded. As if by magic the streets cleared, the workers ducking into buildings like cockroaches exposed to the blinding light. A moment later Gersen came to a stained concrete facade on which large bronze letters read hooked Olph script: Precision instruments. A single small door led into the building. Gersen entered, to find himself in a long dim hallway, a concrete tunnel, which after a hundred feet brought him to the administration offices. He went to stand at a counter, and was approached by an elderly woman of pleasant appearance and manner. By local custom, she wore masculine garments while at work: a dark blue suit with a black belt. Recognizing Gersen as an offworlder, of unguessable caste, she bowed with unctuous courtesy, and asked in a low reverent voice: "How, sir, may we serve you?" Gersen tendered the brass plate. "I have lost the key to my monitor, and I want to get a duplicate made." T he woman blinked. Her manner underwent an instant, if unconscious, change. She reached hesitantly for the plate, held it between thumb and forefinger as if it were tainted, looked over her shoulder. "Well?" asked Gersen in a voice made suddenly harsh by tension. "Is there any difficulty?" "There are new regulations," the woman muttered. "I have had instructions to... I must consult DirectorController Masensen. Excuse me, sir." She went almost at a trot to a side door, disappeared. Gersen waited, the subconscious perceptors in his brain ticking and prickling. He was more nervous than he cared to be. Nervousness clouded the judgment, affected the accuracy of observation. The woman slowly returned to the counter, looking to right and left, evading Gersen's eyes. "Just a moment, sir. If you will wait... There are records to be inspected isn't this the way always? When a person wishes haste..." "Where is the serial plate?" asked Gersen. "DirectorController Masensen has taken it into charge." "In that case. I'll speak to Director-Controller Masensen at once." "I will inquire," she said. "Please don't bother," said Gersen. Ignoring her startled squeak of protest he let himself through a swinging door, passed ahead of her into the inner chamber. A portly thick-faced man in faddish Special Issue blue and dove gray sat at a desk talking into a telephone. He looked at the brass serial plate as he spoke. At the sight of Gersen his eyebrows rose, his mouth sagged in irritation and dismay. Quickly he laid down the telephone. There was an instant while his eyes flicked up and down Gersen's clothes before he shouted, "Who are you, sir? Why do you come into my room?" Gersen reached across the desk, took possession of the serial plate. "Who do you telephone in connection with this matter?" Masensen became fiercely haughty. "None of your concern, whatsoever! Impudence! Here in my office!" Gersen spoke in a soft even voice. "The Tutelars will be interested in your illegal actions. I am puzzled that you choose to defy the law." Masensen sat back, in puffcheeked alarm. The Tutelars, of caste so elevated that the distinction between Masensen and his office-clerk would seem insignificant, were not to be trifled with. They were no respecters of person they tended to believe the accusation rather than the protestation of innocence. They wore uniforms of a sumptuous thick pile which showed various sheens according to the light: plum, dark-green, gold. Not so much arrogant as intensely serious, they conducted themselves to the full implications of their caste. On Olliphane penal torture was administered as a cheaper, if not more effective, deterrent than fines or imprisonment; the threat of a police accusation could therefore bring consternation to the most innocent. Director-Controller Masensen cried out, "I have never defied the law! Do I refuse your request? No, indeed!" "Then furnish my key immediately, as the law requires." "Softly, then," said Masensen. "We can not go so fast. There are records to inspect. Don't forget, we have more important affairs than leaping to serve ever raggle-taggle vagabond of a locator who marches into our room to insult us." Gersen stared into the round, pale face, which gave back hostility and defiance. "Very well," said Gersen. "I will go to complain before the Board of Tutelars." "Now then, be reasonable!" blurted Masensen in heavy affability. "All things do not come at once." "Where is my key? Do you still plan to defy the law?" "Naturally, no such thing is possible. I will see to the matter. Come, be patient. Take a chair and compose yourself for just these few minutes." "I do not care to wait." "Go then!" bellowed Masensen. "I have done exactly as the law requires!" His lips were pushing in and out; his face was pink with fury; he hammered the desk with his fists. The clerk, standing horrified in the doorway, emitted a low wait of terror. "Bring the Tutelars!" raged Masensen. "I will accuse you of molestation and threats! I will see you whipped!" Gersen turned, departed. He passed through the outer office, and out into the concrete tunnel. He paused, turned a quick look behind him. The receptionist, fluttering in excitement, paid him no heed. Gersen walked up the hall, away from the entrance, and presently came to an arched opening, giving upon the production chambers. Standing to the side, inconspicuous in the shadow of a pilaster, Gersen made a carefxil appraisal of the rooms, tracing the various production lines. Certain phases were under biomechanical control, others were performed by debtors, moral deviants, vagrants or drunks, leased by the dozen from the city. They sat chained to their benches, guarded by an old warden, and worked with apathetic efficiency. The room supervisor sat on an elevated platform, which swung on a boom to any area of the room. Gersem located the process where monitors were constructed, identified the area where locks were installed: an alcove two hundred feet along the wall, beside a cubicle where a clerical worker, perhaps a time-keeper, sat on a high chair. He made a final survey of the room. No one had showed the slightest interest in him. The supervisor's attention was turned elsewhere. T Te walked quickly along the wall to the cubicle where the clerk sat. The clerk was a harassed, hollow-cheeked, young-old man, with sardonic black eyebrows, a wrinkled, sallow skin, a cynical hook of nose and curl of mouth: a man not necessarily a pessimist, but apparently one without optimism. Gersen stepped to the back of the cubicle where there were shadows. The clerk looked around in astonishment. "Well, sir? What do you wish? This is not permitted." Gersen asked, "Would you very quickly?" The clerk grimaced sadly. "Of course. Who must I kill?" "My wants are less demanding," said Gersen. He displayed the brass plate. "Get me the key for this instrument, and fifty purple notes on the table. "Find out to whom the serial number He counted down the notes. The clerk looked at the money, turned a speculative glance over his shoulder, out across the shop. "Why not go to the front office? The DirectorController usually handles such things." "I have irritated DirectorController Masensen," said Gersen. "He makes difficulties, and I am in a hurry." "In other words. Directorcontroller Masensen would not approve of my helping you." "Which is why I offer you the tirely legal errand for me." "Is it worth my job?" "If I leave the back way no one need know. And Masensen will never know the difference." The clerk considered. "Very well," he said. "I can do it. But the key-maker." Gersen shrugged, brought "I will appreciate haste." The clerk laughed. "From my viewpoint the sooner you are gone, the better. I'll have to look through two sets of records. We're not too efficient here. Meanwhile keep to the back, out of sight." He noted the serial number, left the cubicle, disappeared behind a partition. Time passed. Gersen noticed that the back wall was paneled with painted glass. Bending, he put his eye to a scratch and obtained a blurred view of the room behind the partition. The clerk stood at an oldfashioned filing case, flipping cards. He found the file, made a set of notes. But now from a side door Masensen lumbered into the room. The clerk closed the file, walked away. Masensen stopped short, fired a question at the clerk, who responded with an indifferent word or two. Gersen paid silent tribute to his sang-froid. Masensen glared after him, then wheeled and went to the files. With one eye on Masensen's burly back, the clerk bent over the key-maker, whispered in his ear, departed. Masensen looked around suspiciously, but the clerk had left the room. The machinist dropped a key blank into the machine, consulted a paper, punched a set of buttons, to control the notches, twists, conductivities and magnetic nodes of the key. Masensen rummaged through the files, extracted a card, marched from the room. The clerk at once returned. The machinist tossed him the key; the clerk returned to the cubicle. He handed the key to Gersen, took five purple notes from the table. "And the registration?" asked Gersen. "I can't help you. Masensen got to the files ahead of me, and removed the card." ersen glumly considered the key. His main purpose had been to learn the registered owner of the monitor. The key of course was better than nothing. The record filament was easier to hide than the monitor itself. But time was short; he dared delay no longer. "Keep the other fifty," he said. The money, after all, had come from Grendel. "Buy your children a present." The clerk shook his head. "I accept pay only for what I achieve. I need no gift." "As you wish." Gersen returned the money to his pocket. "Tell me how to leave." "You had better go the way you came," said the clerk. "If you try to go out the back way, you will be stopped by the patrol." "Thank you," said Gersen. 'You are not Olph?" "No. But I've lived here so long I've forgotten anything better." Gersen looked cautiously from the cubicle. The situation was as before. He slipped out, walked quickly along the wall to the arch, passed through into the concrete tunnel. Passing the door which led into the administration offices, he looked through, saw Masensen pacing back and forth, evidently in a vicious mood. Gersen stepped past, hurried down the hall toward the outside door. But now this door opened. A man entered, his features dark against the outside light. Gersen continued forward briskly, confidently, as if his business were the most legitimate in the world. The man approached; their eyes met. The newcomer stopped. It was Tristano the Earthman. "Luck!" declared Tristano in a voice of hushed pleasure. "Luck indeed." Gersen made no reply. Slowly, carefully, he sought to sidle past. Tristano took a step, blocked his way. Gersen halted, appraised him. Tristano was shorter than himself by an inch, but thick in the neck and shoulders, flat but rather wide at the hip: an attribute indicating agility and good muscular leverage. His head was small, almost hairless; his features were neat. The ears were surgically cropped, the nose flat, the area around the mouth thick with muscle. His expression was calm, with a serene, secret half-smile twisting up the comers of his mouth. He seemed reckless rather than vicious; a man who would feel neither hate nor pity, a man driven only by the need to fulfill the extremes of his capabilities. A highly dangerous man, thought Gersen. He said quietly, "Stand aside." Tristano extended his left hand almost affably. "Whatever your name is, be wise. Come with me." Flicking and weaving the extended hand he leaned forward. Gersen watched Tristano's eyes, ignoring the distracting left hand. When the right hand darted forth he knocked it aside, drove his fist into Tristano's face. 'ristano reeled back, as if in desperate pain, and Gersen pretended to be deceived. He mshed forward, arm cocked back to administer another blow, then halted abruptly as with incredible agility Tristano swung up his leg: a kick intended to cripple or kill. As the foot swung by, Gersen seized toe and heel, twisted hard. Tristano, relaxing instantly, turned in mid-air, pulled himself into a ball, used the momentum of his turn and fall to wrench the foot harmlessly from Gersen's grasp. He caught himself cat-like on hands and feet, started to bounce away, but Gersen caught the back of Tristano's head, yanked Tristano's face down against his knee. Cartilage cmshed, teeth broke. Tristano fell back, now startled. For an instant he sat laxly asprawl. Gersen caught Tristano's leg and ankle in a lock, threw over his weight, and felt the bone snap. Tristano sucked in his breath. Snatching for his knife, he left his throat exposed; Gersen hacked backhand at the larynx. Tristano's throat was well-muscled, and he retained consciousness, to fall back, feebly waving his knife. Gersen kicked it away, edged forward carefully, for Tristano might be equipped with one or a dozen secret built-in weapons. "Leave me be," croaked Tristano. "Leave me be, go your way." He dragged himself to the wall. Gersen cautiously reached forth, giving Tristano the option to counter. Tristano refused; Gersen made contact with the massive shoulders, gripped. Tristano suffered this. The two stared eye to eye. Tristano made a sudden grab for an arm-lock, simultaneously bringing up his good leg. Gersen avoided the arm-lock, seized the leg, prepared to break the other ankle. Behind him there was an outcry and a flurry of movement. DirectorController Masensen, face contorted, came running awkwardly down the hall. Behind him trotted two or three underlings. "Stop this!" cried Masenson. "What do you do here, in this building?" He fairly spat in Gersen's face, "You are a devil, a crinriinal of the worst sort! You insult me, you attack my customer! I will have the Tutelars attend to you!" "By all means," said Gersen. "Call the Tutelars." Masensen raised his eyeborws. "What? You have this insolence, too?" "No insolence is intended," said Gersen. "A good citizen assists the police in apprehending criminals." "What do you mean!" "There is a certain name which I need speak only once to the Tutelars. I need only hint that you and this person are in collusion. For proof? This man -- " he looked down at the half-smiling, half-dazed Tristano -- "do you know him?" "No. Of course I do not know him." "But you identified him as a customer?" "So I thought him." "He is a notorious murderer." "Wrong, my agile friend," croaked Tristano. "No murderer I." "Lugo Teehalt is not alive to contradict you." T ristano essayed a grimace of outraged innocence. "We spoke, you and I, while the old man died." "In this case, neighbor Dasce nor the Sarkoy killed Teehalt. Who came with you to Smade's Planet?" "We came alone." "I find this hard to believe. Hildemar Dasce told Teehalt that Grendel awaited him outside." Tristano's response was a faint shrug. Gersen stood looking down at him. "I respect the Tutelars and their scourges. I dare not kill you. But I can break more bones, and you will walk sideways like a crab. I can spread apart your eyes, and you will look in two different directions the rest of your life." The lines bracketing Tristano's mouth became deep and melancholy. He slumped heavily back against the wall, disinterested, sodden with pain. He beyond the Pale called murder?" "Who killed Teehalt?" "I saw nothing. I stood with you, by the door." "But the three of you came together to Smade's." Tristano made no response. Gersen leaned forward, performed a quick viscious act. Masensen made an inarticulate sound, stumbled away, then halted as if caught by a wire and slowly turned once more to stare. Tristano looked numbly at his dangling hand. "Who killed Teehalt?" Tristano shook his head. "I will say no more. I would rather limp and squint than die of the Sarkoy's cluthe." "I can infect you with cluthe." "I will say no more." Gersen leaned forward, but Masensen uttered a short quavering cry. "This is intolerable! I will not allow it! Must you give me nightmares? I do not sleep well." Gersen examined him without friendliness. "You would do well not to interfere." "I will call in the Tutelars. Your acts are grossly illegal, you have broken laws of the state." Gersen laughed. "Call the Tutelars. We will learn who has broken laws and who will be punished." Masensen rubbed his pallid cheeks. "Go then. Never return, and I will say no more." "Not so fast," said Gersen. "You are in serious difficulties. I came here on a legal errand; you telephone for a murderer, who attacks me. This conduct no one should ignore." TV T asensen licked his lips. iVJ. "You are making false charges. I will add this to my particulars." It was a poor effort. Gersen laughted. He went to Tristano, turned him over on his face, pulled the jacket down the broad back to constrict the amfs, tied it in place with Tristano's sash. With his broken ankle Tristano was now immobilized. Gersen stepped down the hall, motioned to Masensen. "Let us go to your office." Gersen led the way, with Masensen stumping reluctantly behind; once in the office Masensen sank into his chair. "Now then," said Gersen. "Call the Tutelars." Masensen shook his head. "It -- it is better to make no difficulties. The Tutelars are sometimes unreasonable." "In that case you must tell me what I want to know." Masensen bowed his head. "Ask." "Who did you telephone when I appeared?" Masensen showed extreme agitation. "I cannot tell you," he said huskily. "Do you insist that I be killed?" "The Tutelars will ask the same question, as well as many others." Masensen looked in anguish to right, left, up at the ceiling. "A man," he said, "at the Grand Pomador Hotel. His name -- Spock." "I know better," said Gersen. "You are Isdng. I give you one more chance. Who did you call?" Masensen shook his head desperately. "I do not lie." "Have you seen the man?" "Yes. He is tall. He has short pink hair, a long big head and no neck. His face is a peculiar red color, and he wears dark spectacles, and a nose-guard -- very unusual. He has no more feeling than a fish." Gersen nodded. Masensen was telling the truth. This would be Hildemar Dasce. He turned. "Now then, this is most important. I wish to know to whom the monitor is registered." Masensen started to shake his head, then gave a fatalistic shrug and rose to his feet. "I will go for the record." "No," said Gersen. "We will go together. And if we cannot find the record, I swear to you, I will lodge the strongest possible charges." Masensen rubbed his forehead wearily. "I remember now. The record is here." He brought forth a card from his desk. "Sea Province University, Avente, Alphanor. Beneficial Grant #." "No name?" "No. And there is no value to you in the key. The University uses a coder in each of its monitors. We have sold them several." "Indeed." The use of a coder, to thwart the double-dealing of an unscrupulous locator, was common enough. M asensen's voice became heavily ironic. "The University has evidently sold you a coded monitor without the descrambling strip. If I were you I would complain to the Avente authorities." Gersen considered the implications of the information. They were far-reaching indeed, if one certain condition was met. "Why did you telephone the man Spock? Did he offer you money?" Masensen nodded miserably. "Money. And -- he made threats. An indiscretion of my past -- " He made a vague gesture. "Tell me, did Spock realize that the monitor was coded?" "Certainly. I mentioned this to him, but he was already aware of it." Gersen nodded. The condition had been met. Grendel must necessarily have access to the descrambling strip at the Sea Province University. He reflected a moment. Informatio was accumulating. Grendel himself had killed Teehalt, if Hildemar Dasce were to be believed. Tristano indirectly had verified this. He had conveyed more information than he meant. He had also confused the situation. If Dasce, the Sarkoy poisoner and Tristano had come together, with no fourth person, how was the presence of Grendel to be explained? Had he arrived simultaneously in another ship? Possible, but unlikely... Masensen was staring at him anxiously, miserably. "I'm going now," said Gersen. "Do you plan to tell this Spock that I was here?" Masensen nodded, all his bluster departed. "I must." "But you will wait one hour." Mansensen made no protest. He might or might not respect Gersen's wishes. Most likely not. But there was no help for this. Gersen turned and departed the office, leaving Masensen utterly deflated. Walking down the hall, Gersen overtook Tristano who somehow had managed to squirm and writhe himself erect. Now he hopped down the hall, one foot dragging at a queer angle. He looked over his shoulder at Gersen, still wearing the quiet halfsmile, though the muscles around his mouth were tight. Gersen stopped to consider the man. It would be wise and desirable to kill him, except for the possibility of police interference. So, contenting himself with a polite nod and stepping past Tristano, he went his way. VI Preface to Men of the Oikumene, by Jan Holberk Vaenz There is a stifling quality to his age which has been observed, remarked and lamented by a number of the contemporary anthropologists: a curious paradox, for never before have such variegated opportunities and possible channels of life existed. The most important fact of human life is the infinity of space: the bounds which can never be reached, the worlds without number still unseen. In short, the Beyond. It is my belief that the awareness of these awesome possibilities have somehow clotted at the core of human consciousness, and have diminished or dampened human enterprise. An instant qualification is necessary. Men of enterprise indeed exist, though sadly enough most of them work Beyond, and their enterprise is not entirely constructive. (The statement is not completely ironical: many of the most noxious forms of life exert some sort of useful sideeffect.) But, in general, ambition is turned inward, rather than out toward the obvious goals. Why? Does infinity, as an object of experience instead of a mathematical abstraction, daunt the human mind? Are we complacent and secure, knowing that the riches of the galaxy are always there for the taking? Is contemporary life already sated by too rich a diet of novelty? Is it conceivable that the Institute wields more control over the human psyche than we suspect? Or is there current a feeling of frustration and staleness, the conviction that all glory has been won, that all the meaningful goals have been achieved? Undoubtedly there is no single answer. But several points are noteworthy. First (to be mentioned without comment) is the peculiar situation where the most influential and effective systems of the day are the private, or at best semi-public, astute, the Jamell Corporation. Second is the decline of the general level of education. The extremes are certainly farther apart; the savants of the Institute on the one hand, and, say, the serfs of a Tertullian estate on the other. If we consider the condition of men beyond the Pale, the polarity is even more pronounced. There are obvious sources to the decline. Pioneers settling in strange and often hostile environments have sheer survival for their first concern. Possibly even more daunting is the unmanageable mass of accumulated knowledge. The trend toward specialization began with modem times, but after the break-out into space, and the consequent new amplitude of information, specialization has become even more narrowly focused. It is perhaps pertinent to consider the manner of man who has become the new specialist. He lives in a materialistic age, where comparatively small interest is given to absolutes. He is a man of charm, wit, sophistication, but no profundity. His ideals are not abstract. His field of endeavor, if he is a scholar, may be mathematics or one of the physical sciences: but a hundred times more likely will be a phase of what loosely are called humanistic studies: history, sociology, comparatives, symbology, esthetics, anthropology, the varieties of experience, penology, education, communication, administration and coercion, not to mention the morass of psychology already trampled by generations of incompetents, and the still unexplored wilderness of psionics. There are also those who, like the author, ensconce themselves on a thunderous crag of omniscience and, with protestations of humility which are either unconvincing or totally absent, assume the obligation of appraisal, commendation, derogation or denunciation of their contemporaries. Still, by and large it is an easier job than digging a ditch. From Ten Explorers: A Study of a Type, by Oscar Anderson : Every world has its distinctive psychic aroma: this is a matter attested to by each of the ten explorers. Isack Canaday is willing to wager that if blindfolded and taken to any planet of the Oikumene or the immediate Beyond, he will correctly identify this planet immediately upon removal of the blindfold. How does he perform such a feat? At first glance it seems incomprehensible. Canaday himself professes not to know the source of his knowledge. "I just raise my nose, I Ipok around the sky, I take a couple jumps -- and it comes to me." Canaday's explanation is of course arch and consciously quaint. Our senses are undoubtedly much more acute than we suspect. The composition of the air, the color of the light and the sky, the curvature and proximity of the horizon, the tension of gravity: these are presumably interpreted in our brains to produce an individuality, exactly as the sight of eyes, a nose, hair, a mouth, ears, creates the look of a face. All of this without mention of flora and fauna, the artifices of autochthone or man, the possibly distinctive look of sun or suns... Unspiek, Baron Bodissey : As a society matures the struggle for survival imperceptibly graduates and changes emphasis, and becomes what can only be termed the quest for pleasure. This is a large statement, possibly of no startling novelty. Nevertheless, as a generality, it affords a rich resonance of implications. The author suggests as a lively topic for a dissertation a survey of various environmentsurvival situations and the special types of pleasure-goals deriving therefrom. It seems probable, from a moment's reflection, that every particular scarcity or compulsion or danger generates a corresponding psychic tension demanding a particular gratification. ersen returned to the subway terminal at Sansontiana. He recovered the monitor and immediately made a trial of the key. To his gratification the lock moved smoothly. The case slid open. There was neither explosive nor acid present. He extracted the little cylinder containing the filament and weighed it in his hand. Then he stepped into a post-office booth and mailed the cylinder to himself, at the Hotel Credenza, Avente, Alphanor. He rode the subway back to Kindune and the space-port, and with no untoward incident took his ship aloft. The blue crescent of Alphanor presently bulged across the sky, with Rigel dazzling beyond. When the seven continents began toemerge from the dark, Gersen engaged his auto-pilot into the Avente landing program, and so was guided down to the space-port. The crane lifted the boat, carried it to a storage bay. Gersen emerged and made a cautious reconnaissance. Finding no evidence of his enemies, he proceeded down the ranks of stored space-craft to the terminal building. Here he breakfasted and considered his plans. They were, he decided, completely straightforward, deriving from a progression of logical steps in which he could see no flaw: a. Lugo Teehalt's monitor was registered to the Sea Province University. b. The information on the monitor filament was coded, accessible only upon application of the decoding, or descrambling, strip. c. The decoding strip was in possession of the Sea Province University at Avente. d. #. According to Lugo Teehalt, Grendel had been his original sponsor. (A fact he had apparently understood for the first time at Brinktown. Indiscretions by Hildemar Dasce? Everything considered, Grendel probably still regarded his incognito secure.) #. Grendel vigorously sought possession of the monitor and its filament, and hence must have access to the decoding strip. f. Gersen's course of action would therefore be: #. Identify the persons who had access to the decoding strip. #. Learn which of these fulfilled a set of conditions consistent with the identity and activities of Grendel. Which, for example, had been gone long enough for a visit to Smade's Planet? A str.ightforward and logial line cf attack indeed. But, Gersen reflected, the implementation of his logic might not be quite so easy. He dare not arouse Grendel's apprehensions. To a certain extent, possession of Teehalt's filament provided security. However, if Grendel felt a personal threat, and no qualms in arranging an assassination. To this moment, Grendel had no reason to fear exposure, and it would be foolhardy to convince him otherwise. The initiative, for the present, was his; there was no occasion for break-neck haste. His attention became distracted. In a booth nearby sat a pair of pretty girls who evidently had come to the terminal to welcome a friend, or to see one off. Gersen contemplated them wistfully, aware, not for the first time, of an empty area in his life. Frivolity... The two girls evidently had very little else on their minds. One had dyed her hair forest green and toned her skin a delicate lettuce green. The other wore a wig of lavender metal shavings with dead-white skintoning; an elaborate cloche of silver leaves and tendrils clung to her forehead and clasped her cheeks. Gersen drew a deep breath. Undoubtedly he had lived a grim cheerless existence. Thinking back across the years, scenes came crowding into his mind, all of which were variations on a single theme: other children occupied with irresponsible pleasure, while he, a rather thin boy with a grave face, watched from a distance. He had felt only interest and wonder at the easy gaiety -- so he recalled -- never relating the scenes to himself. His grandfather had seen to that. One of the girls at the nearby booth had noticed his attention; she whispered to her friend. Both glanced across the aisle, then ostentatiously ignored him. Gersen smiled ruefully. He felt no confidence in his dealings with women; he had known few intimately. He frowned, turned the two a wary side-glance. Not impossibly Grendel had sent these girls to beguile him... Ridiculous. Why two? They rose and departed the restaurant, each turning him one swift covert glance. Gersen watched their retreat, resisting the sudden urge to run after them, to introduce himself, to make them his friends... Ridiculous again, doubly ridiculous. What would he say? He pictured the two pretty faces at first puzzled, then embarrassed, while he stood making lame efforts to ingratiate himself... The girls were gone. Just as well, tliought Gersen, half-amused, half-angry with himself. Still, why deceive himself? Living the life of half a man was difficult, a source of dissatisfaction. The circumstances of his life had given him small command of the social graces. Still, what of that? He knew his mission in life, and he was superbly prepared to fulfill this mission. He had no doubts, no uncertainties; his goals were exactly defined. A sudden idea disturbed the flow of his self-reassurances : where would he be without this clear purpose? If he were less artificially motivated, he might not show so well in comparison with the easy men around him, with their pleasant manners and fluent talk. '"Turning the thought over, back and forth, Gersen began to feel spiritually deficient. No phase to his life had occurred by his own free choice. He felt no slightest tremor in his dedication : this was not the point at issue. But, he thought, a man's goals should not be imposed upon him until he knew enough of the world to make his own survey, to weigh his own decisions. He had not been given this option. The decision had been made, he had accepted it... After all, what matter? More to the point, what would he do when and if he succeeded in his aims? The chances were small, of course. But -- assuming the death of five men -- what then would he do with his life? Once or twice before he had reached this point in his reflections. Warned by some subconscious signal, he had never gone beyond it. Nor did he do so now. His breakfast was finished; the girls, who had prompted him to his brooding, had taken themselves off. Evidently they were not agents of Grendel the Monster. Gersen sat a few minutes longer considering the best approach to his problem, and again decided upon simple directness. He went to a communication booth and was connected to the Information Bureau at the Sea Province University in the suburb of Remo, ten miles south. The telescreen flickered first with the university seal, then a conventional reception presentation, printed with the words Please speak clearly. Simultaneously a recorded voice asked. "How may we serve you?" Gersen spoke to the still unseen receptionist. "I want information regarding tlie university's exploration program. Which department is directly concerned?" The screen clarified through a decorative cross-hatching, to show the gold-toned face of a young woman with blonde hair in flamboyant puffs at each ear. "That depends on the type of exploration." "It would be connected with Beneficial Grant #." "Just a moment, sir, and I'll inquire." The scene retreated behind the cross-hatching. Presently the girl's face reappeared. "I'll connect you with the Department of Galactic Morphology, sir." Gersen looked into another pale receptionist face. This young woman had an arch piquant face toned nacreous silver, and wore her hair in a dark nimbus of ten thousand tiny varnished spikes. "Galactic Morph." "I want to inquire about Beneficial Grant #," said Gersen. The girl considered a moment. "You mean the grant itself, sir?" "The grant, how it operates, who administers it." The arch young face pursed its mouth dubiously. "There's not much I can tell you, sir. It's the fund which finances our exploration program." "I'm particularly interested in a locater named Lugo Teehalt, who worked under the grant." She shook her head. "I wouldn't know anything about him. Mr. Detteras could tell you, but he's not available for appointments today." "Mr. Detteras hires the locaters?" T he girl twisted her eyebrows, squinted; she had a mobile expression, a wide mouth with a merry upward twitch at the corners. Gersen watched her in fascination. "I don't know too much about things like that, sir. We have our part in the Master Exploration Program, of course. That's not under Grant #, though. Mr. Detteras is Director of Exploration; he could tell you whatever you wanted to know." "Is there anyone else in the department who might sponsor a locater on Grant #?" The girl looked speculatively sidewise at Gersen, wondering as to the nature of his interest. "Are you a police official?" she asked timidly. Gersen laughed. "No. I'm a friend of Mr. Teehalt's, trying to finish up some business for him." "Oh. Well, there's Mr. Kelle, who is Chairman of the Research Planning Committee. And Mr. Warweave, the Honorary Provost, who made the donation for Grant #. Mr. Kelle is gone for the morning: his daughter is marrying tomorrow and he's very busy." "What about Mr. Warweave? Can I see him?" "Well -- " The girl pursed her lips, bent her head over an appointment panel. "He's busy until three, and then he keeps an open hour, for students or persons without appointments." "That would suit me very well." "If you'd care to leave your name," said the girl demurely, "I'll put it at the head of the list. Then you won't have to wait, in case there are lots of others." Gersen was startled by her solicitude. He searched her face, and was further surprised to find her smiling at him. "That's very kind of you," he said. "My name is Kirth Gersen." He watched her write. She seemed in no hurry to terminate the conversation. He asked, "What does an Honorary Provost do?" She shrugged. "I don't know, really. He comes and goes. I think he does just what he wants. Anyone who is rich does just what he wants. Wait till I'm richl" "One more thing," Gersen said. "Are you familiar with the routine of the department?" "Why, yes, I should say so." The girl laughed. "Insofar as there is a routine." "The recording filament of the monitor in a locater boat is coded. You're aware of this?" "So I have been told." The girl was definitely speaking to Gersen as an individual, rather than a face on a screen. Gersen thought her deliciously pretty, in spite of her rather extravagrant hair style. Definitely he had been in space too long. He kept his voice even with an effort. "Who unscrambles the filaments? Who is in charge of the code?" Again the girl was doubtful. "Mr. Detteras for one. Perhaps Mr. Kelle." "Can you find out definitely?" T he girl hesitated, examining Gersen's face. It was always wise to refuse to answer questions whose motives she could not fathom. Still -- where could be the harm? The man who inquired seemed interesting. Wistful and sad, she thought, and a trifle mysterious... and definitely not unattractive, after a plain hard-bitten fashion. "I can ask Mr. Detteras' secretary," she said brightly. "Will you wait?" The screen dimmed, and a minute or two later brightened again. The girl smiled back at Gersen. "I was right. Mr. Detteras, and Mr. Keller and Mr. Warweave -- these are the only people who have access to the decoding strip." "I see. Mr. Detteras is Director of Exploration, Mr. Kelle is Chairman of the Research Planning Committee, and Mr. Warweave is -- what?" "Honorary Provost. They gave him the title when he endowed the department with Grant #. He's a very wealthy man, and very interested in space exploration. He frequently goes Beyond. Have you ever been Beyond?" "I've just returned." She leaned forward, her face alive with interest. "Is it really as wild and dangerous as everyone says?" Gersen threw caution to the winds, with a bravado that startled even himself. "Come out with me and see for yourself." The girl did not appear unduly perturbed. But she shook her head. "I'd be alarmed. I've been taught never to trust strange men from the Beyond. You might be a slaver and sell me." "Such things have happened," said Gersen. "You're probably safer where you are." "Still," she said coquettishly, "who wants to be safe?" Gersen hesitated, started to speak, stopped short. The girl watched him with an expression of bland innocence. Well, why not? Gersen asked himself. His grandfather had been old and parched... "In that case -- if haps you'd spend the evening with me." "For what purpose?" The girl was suddenly demure. "Slavery?" "No. Just -- the usual. What ever you'd like to do." "This is very abrupt. After all, I haven't even seen you face to face." "Yes, you're right," said Gersen, abashed. "I'm not very gallant." "And still, what could be the harm? I'm impulsive myself, or so I've been told." "I suppose it depends on circumstances.' "You're just in from Beyond," the girl said magnanimously. "So I guess you can be excused." "Then you'll do it?" She pretended to consider. "Very well. I'll take a chance. Where will I meet you?" "I'll be out at three o'clock to see Mr. Warweave. We can make arrangements then." "I'm off duty at four. You're sure you're not a slaver?" "I'm not even a pirate." "Rather an unenterprising sort, I'd say. But I'm just as pleased. until I know you a little better." A wide sandy beach extended a hundred miles south of Avente, around the entire concavity of Ard Hook. As far as Remo, and a few miles beyond, villas built of glaring white coquina lined the crest of the sandy bluffs which overlooked the ocean. Gersen hired a small surfaceslider and skidded south over the broad white turnpike, the inevitable dust puffing up behind him. For a space the road followed the shore. Sand dazzled blue water under a collar of white foam sparkled and rolled calmly up and down the sand, creating a sound invariable on every other world in every other galaxy where surf meets shore. The road presently climbed the bluffs. To the left spread sanddunes overgrown with black and purple iron-bush, punctuated by tall white balloon-flower, the inflated pod floating at the end of a long stem. Other white villas looked forth from groves of cool green deodars, native feathertree, hybrid palm. Ahead the ground rose, the sandy bluffs became a range of low hills, presenting a steep face to the ocean. Remo occupied the flat land at the foot of one of these hills. A pair of piers terminating in high-domed casinos reached forth to create a harbor filled with small boats. The university occupied the crest of the hill, a series of low flat-roofed structures connected by arcades. Gersen arrived at the campus parking-area, lowered the slidecar and alighted. A slideway took him through a commemorative arch into a wide mall, where he inquired directions from a student. "The College of Galactic Morphology? Into the next quad, sir; at the far corner." Ruefully pondering the respectful "sir" from a man no more than seven years his junior, Gersen walked to the end of the mall, threading a many-voiced, many-costumed multitude of students. He crossed the quadrangle and approached the building at the far corner. At the portal he paused, aware of an emotion strangely like diffidence, or shyness, which had gradually been asserting itself during the entire trip out to the university. He jeered at himself. Was he a schoolboy, that the prospect of an evening with a strange girl should give him tremors? And more remarkable, the emotion seemed to take precedence over the basic goal of his existence! He shrugged, irritated and amused together, then entered the foyer. A t a desk a girl looked up, with an uncertainty Gersen identified as equivalent to his own. She was smaller and more slender than he had thought her to be, but by no means less appealing. "Mr. Gersen?" Gersen put on what he hoped was a reassuring mile. "It occurs to me that I don't know your name." She relaxed a trifle. "Pallis Atwrode." "That takes care of the formalities," said Gersen. "I hope that our arrangement is still working?" She nodded. "Unless you've changed your mind." "No." "I act far bolder than I actually am," said Pallis Atwrode. She gave an embarrassed laugh. "I've simply decided to ignore my upbringing. My mother is a blue-stocking. Perhaps it's time I began to overcompensate." "You begin to alarm me," said Gersen. "I'm not very bold either, and if I have to cope with overcompensation -- " "Not really formidable overcompensation. I won't become intoxicated, or pick a fight, or -- " She stopped. "Or?" "Oh -- just 'or'." Gersen looked at his watch. "I'd better see Mr. Warweave." "His offices are down that corridor. And Mr. Gersen -- " Gersen looked down into the upturned face. "Yes?" "Today I told you something which it seems I shouldn't have. About the code. It's supposed to be secret. Would you please not mention it to Mr. Warweave? I'd get in trouble." "I'll say nothing about it." "Thank you." He went off down the corridor she had indicated. The floor was resilient black and gray tesserae; the walls and ceiling were plastered white, devoid of decoration or relief except for the various doors and identificators -- these in various muted tones of maroon, mauve, dark green, indigo. Three doors along the corridor Gersen came upon a freefloating identificator of luminous blue letters, which read: He paused, struck by the incongruity of Grendel the Monster in such surroundings. Was there a break in his chain of reasoning? The monitor was coded, registered to the university. Hildemar Dasce, Grendel's lieutenant, had sought possession of the filament, which was useless without the decoder. Gyle Warweave, Detteras and Kelle were the three men who had access to the decoder; one of the three must be Grendel. So then: which? Warweave, Detteras or Kelle? Conjecture without facts was useless; he must deal with events as they occurred. He stepped forward. The door slipped aside, quick as a camera shutter; the identificator broke into individual letters which scattered like frightened fish, to regroup after he had passed. I n the outer office a tall thin, middle-aged woman with keen, unsympathic gray eyes stood listening to an obviously unhappy young man, shaking her head slowly as he spoke. "I'm sorry," she said finally, in a clear brittle voice. "These arrangements are all made on a formal basis of student achievement. I can't allow you to bother the provost with your complaints." "What is he there for, then?" shouted the young man. "He has open office hours, why can't he listen to my side of the story?" The woman shook her head. "I'm sorry." She turned away. "Are you Mr. Gersen?" she asked. Gersen came forward. "Mr. Warweave is expecting you; please go through that door." Gersen went as directed. Gyle Warweave, sitting at a desk rose to his feet as Gersen entered: a tall handsome man, strong and fit looking, of an age not immediately obvious -- perhaps ten or fifteen years older than Gersen. His hair was a cushion of black curls shaped close to his skull, his skin-dye a conservative pale umber. His face was emphatically marked; the eyes narrow, deep-set, black and brooding; the nose and chin harsh. He saluted Gersen with a measured courtesy. "Mr. Gersen, sit down, if you will. I'm glad to make your acquaintance." "Thank you." Gersen looked about him. The room was larger than the usual office. The desk occupied an unconventional position by the left of the door, with the greater part of room beyond. Tall windows at the right overlooked the quadrangle. The opposite wall was papered with hundreds of Mercator-projection maps of many worlds. The center of the room was empty, giving it the semblance of a conference chamber from which the table had been removed. At the far end, on a pedestal of polished wood, stood a construction of stone and metal spires, the provenance of which Gersen was ignorant. He seated himself and returned his attention to the man behind the desk. Gyle Warweave hardly conformed to Gersen's picture of the typical university administrator. This of course would well be true, thought Gersen, if Warweave were Grendel. Contradicting the evidence of his conservative skin-dye, Warweave wore a rich bright blue suit with a white sash, white leather greaves, pale blue sandals; garments which might be affected by a young buck of Sailmaker Beach district, north of Avente... Gersen groped at an elusive familiarity, a tantalizing wisp of recollection, which fled completely from view. Warweave inspected Gersen with a similar frank curiosity, in which there was a trace of condescension. Gersen definitely was no dandy. He wore the neutral garments of a person either uninterested in current modes or unaware of them. His skin was undyed (walking along the streets of Avente Gersen had felt almost undressed); his thick dark hail was cropped' into an undistinguished ruff. TTarweave waited with at' ' tentive politeness. Gersen said, "I'm here, Mr. Warweave, in connection with a rather complex matter. My motives are beside the point, so I'll ask you to i listen without troubling about them." Warweave nodded. "Rather difficult, but I'll try." "First of all, are you acquainted with Mr. Lugo Teehalt?" "No, I am not." The answer was immediate and decisive. "May I ask who has the responsibility for the university's space exploration program?" Warweave considered. "Do you refer to major expeditions, shotgun surveys, or what?" "Whatever program makes use of locators in leased boats." "Hm," said Warweave. He turned a quizzical look toward Gersen. "By any chance, are you a locator in search of a post? If so -- " Gersen smiled politely. "No, I'm not after a job." Warweave smiled in his turn, a quick humorless grimace. "No, of course not. I'm inept in my judgments. For instance, your voice tells me very little. You're not a native of the Concourse. If you were of a different physiognomy I'd place you from Mizar's Third." "During most of my youth I lived on Earth." "Indeed?" Warweave raised his eyebrows in manufactured astonishment. "Out here, you know, we think of Earthmen in terms of stereotypes ; cultists, mystics, hyper-civilized epicenes, sinister old men in Institute black, decadent aristocrats..." "I claim no particular niche," said Gersen. "Incidentally, you puzzle me no less than I puzzle you." Warweave put on an expression of rueful whimsy. "Very well, Mr. Gersen. You were asking about our policy in connection with locaters. First of all, we cooperate with a number of other institutions in the Master Space Exploration Program. Secondly, there is a small fund which may be drawn upon to expedite some special project." "That is Beneficial Grant #?" Warweave inclined his head in curt assent. "Very odd," said Gersen. " 'Odd'? How so?" "Lugo Teehalt was a locater. The monitor in his boat was chartered to Sea Province University, under Grant #." Warweave pursed his lips. "It's quite possible that Mr. Teehalt might be working for one of the department heads on some special project." "The monitor was coded. That should narrow the possibilities." Warweave pierced Gersen with a hard glance of black eyes. "If I knew what you wanted to learn, I could answer more to the point." T here was nothing to lose by telling at least part of the truth, thought Gersen. If Gyle Warweave were Grendel, he would know what had happened. If he were not, no harm could be done. "The name Grendel is familiar to you?" "Grendel the Monster? One of the so-called Demon Princes." "Lugo Teehalt located a world of apparently idyllic conditions -- a world literally beyond value, more Earthlike than Earth. Grendel learned of the discovery, how I don't know. In any event, at least four of Grendel's men hunted Teehalt to Smade's Tavern. "Teehalt arrived just after I did. He landed in a hidden valley and walked to the tavern. During the evening Grendel's men arrived. Teehalt tried to escape, but they caught him in the dark, killed him. Then they took off in my ship, apparently assuming that it was Teehalt's. Both were the same, old Model #B." Gersen laughed. "When they checked my monitor they had a sorry surprise. "The next day I left in Teehalt's boat. Naturally I took possession of his monitor. I plan to sell the filament for as much as the market will bear." Warweave nodded briskly, moved a sheet of paper on his desk an inch to the right. Gersen watched him, studsdng the immaculate hands, the glossy fingernails. Looking up he caught the stare of Warweave's gaze, less affable than his tone of voice. "And from whom do you propose to collect?" Gersen shrugged. I'll give Teehalt's sponsor the first opportunity. As I mentioned, the filament is coded, and is valueless without the decoding strip." Warweave leaned back in his chair. "Offhand, I don't know who might have contracted with this man Teehalt. Whoever it is naturally would not buy a pig in a poke." "Naturally not." Gersen placed a photograph on the desk. Warweave glanced at it, dropped it into a projection slot. A screen on the far wall burst into color. Teehalt had taken the picture from a rise of ground to one side of a valley. On either hand hills rolled back, over, away and beyond. The rounded tips could be seen receding into the distance. Groves of tall dark trees stood to the side of the valley; a river wandered through the meadows, the banks lined with rushes. At the far side of the meadow, almost in the shade of the forest, stood what appeared to be a bank of flowering shrubs. The sunlight was golden-white, warm, languid, and the time was evidently noon. Warweave studied the picture at length, then made a gruff, noncommittal sound. Gersen provided another photograph. The screen shifted to display the view down the valley: the river meandering and twisting, finally disappearing into the far distance. Trees standing tall at either side formed a sort of aisle, diminishing until all faded into haze. f Tarweave heaved a sigh.   "Beyond question a beautiful world. A hospitable world. What of atmosphere and biogens?" "Completely compatible, according to Teehalt." "If it is as you say -- undiscovered, uninhabited -- an independent locater could name his own price. Still, not being born yesterday, I wonder, could not this photograph have been made elsewhere? Even on Earth, where the vegetation is similar to this?" For answer Gersen brought forth a third photograph. Warweave dropped it into the slot. The screen depicted, as if from a distance of twenty feet, one of the objects which in the first photograph had appeared as a flowering shrub. It was revealed as a perambulatory being, semihumanoid, graceful . Slender gray legs supported a gray, silver, blue, green torso. Purple-green eyes looked forth from a perfect ovoid head, which was otherwise featureless. From the shoulders, arm-like members reached three feet into the air, branching and webbing, to support the peacock's tail fan of fronds. "The creature, whatever it is -- " "Teehalt called it a dryad." " -- certainly it is unique. I've never seen its like before. If the picture is not faked -- and I do not believe that it is -- then the planet is what you claim it to be." "I claim nothing. Teehalt made the claims. It is a world --  so he told me -- so beautiful that he could neither bear to stay not bear to leave."  "And you have Teehalt's filament in your possession." "Yes. I want to sell it. The market is presumably limited to those persons who have access to the decoding strip. Of these, the man who sponsored Lugo Teehalt's operation should have the first option." Warweave gave Gersen a long steady inspection. "A quixotic attitude, which puzzles me. You do not seem a quixotic man." "Why not judge from deeds rather than impressions?" Warweave merely raised his eyebrows in something like disdain. Then he said, "Conceivably I could make you an offer for the filament: say two thousand after inspection of the world. Possibly a trifle more." "Naturally I will take the best price I can get," said Gersen. "But I would like to interview Mr. Kelle and Mr. Detteras first. One of them must be Teehalt's sponsor. If neither is interested in the filament, then -- " Warweave interrupted sharplly. "Why do you specify these two men?" "Other than yourself, they are the only persons who have access to the decoding strips." "May I ask how you are aware of this?" Remembering Pallis Atwrode's request, Gersen felt a pang of guilt. "I asked a young man in the quadrangle. Apparently it's common knowledge." "Altogether too much loose talk," said Warweave, his mouth in a hard angry line. G ersen wanted to inquire how Warweave had spent the previous month, but the occasion was clearly inopportune. It could not be a wise question, if posed directly: if Warweave were Grendel, his suspicion would instantly be reinforced. Warweave now tapped fingers on his desk, rose to his feet. "If you will give half an hour I will ask Mr. Detteras and Mr. Kelle to step into my office, and you can make your inquiry. Will that be satisfactory?" "No." " 'No'?" barked Warweave. "Why not?" Gersen also rose to his feet. "Since the matter does not concern you, I would prefer to interview Mr. Kelle and Mr. Detteras alone, on my own terms." "This is at your option," said Warweave coldly. He considered a moment. "What you are after, I can't guess. I put little faith in your candor. But I will make a bargain with you." Gersen waited. "Kelle and Detteras are busy men," said Warweave. "They are not as accessible as I am. I will arrange that you see them at once -- today, if you like. Possibly one or the other will admit to an arrangement with Lugo Teehalt. In any case, after your interview with Kelle and Detteras, you will report to me what offers, if any, they have made, and so give me the opportunity of meeting or exceeding the offer." known, my money has gone to endow Grant #." "That's reasonable enough." "You agree to my bargain, then?" "Yes. So long as you understand that the first refusal goes to Teehalt's sponsor." Warweave's eyelids drooped. "I wonder why you insist on this." "Perhaps I am a quixotic man after all, Mr. Warweave." Warweave swung about, spoke into the desk-screen, listened, turned back to Gersen. "Very well. Mr. Kelle will see you first, then Mr. Detteras. After which, you will report back to me." "I agree." "Good. You will find Kelle's office at the opposite end of the building." Gersen went out into the corridor past Warweave's glint-eyed secretary, returned to the foyer. Pallis Atwrode looked up with an eager expectancy Gersen found very appealing. "Did you learn what you wanted to?" "No. He's sending me to see Kelle and Detteras." "Today?" "Right now." She looked at him with new interest. "You'd be surprised at the people both Mr. Kelle and Mr. Detteras have refused to see today." Gersen grinned. "I don't know how long I'll be... If you're off duty at four -- " "I'll wait," said Pallis Atwrode, and then she laughed. "I mean, you won't be very much longer than four, and I'd have to walk home, and explain where I live -- and it's just easier waiting." "I'll be as fast as I can," said Gersen. He left to prepare for his encounter with the Star King, feeling an unwonted sense of pleasure but he did not keep it long. Two thoughts obtruded in his mind and destroyed it for him. Did he dare involve this girl in his struggle with a cruel and inhuman enemy? Did he dare risk any distraction of his own purpose, in the face of this resourceful and devastating foe? "In other words," said Gersen, "you'd keep this world for your private use?" "Why not? The filament is no longer the property of the university. You have taken possession of it. And, if the truth be i      This couldn't happen, of course. People don't act this way. All of recorded history proves this point... one way or the other! 'he long, shiny car pulled up  with a whirr of turbines and a puff of dust. The sign over the another sign over a glass-fronted rustic building announced : was a pasture, with a bam and silo set back from the road. The two aliens sat quietly and looked at the signs. They both had hard purplish skins and little yellow eyes. They were wearing gray tweed suits. Their bodies looked approximately human, but you coul'd not see their chins, which were covered by orange scarves. Martha Crawford came hustling out of the house and into the basket stand, drying her hands on her apron. After her came Llewellyn Crawford, her husband, still chewing his cornflakes. "Yes, sir -- ma'am?" Martha asked nervously. She glanced at Llewellyn for support, and he patted her shoulder. Neither of them had ever seen an alien real close to. One of the aliens, seeing the Crawfords behind their counter, leisurely got out of the car. He, or it, was puffing a cigar stuck through a hole in the orange scarf. "Good morning," Mrs. Crawford said nervously. "Baskets? Curios?" The alien blinked its yellow eyes solemnly. The rest of its face did not change. The scarf hid its chin and mouth, if any. Some said that the aliens had no chins, others that they had something instead of chins that was so squirmy and awful that no human could bear to look at it. People called them "Hurks" because they came from a place called Zeta Herculis. The Hurk glanced at the baskets and gimcracks hung over the counter, and puffed its cigar. Then it said, in a blurred but comprehensible voice, "What is that?" It pointed downward with one horny, three-fingered hand. "The little Indian papoose?" Martha Crawford said, in a voice that rose to a squeak. "Or the birchbark calendar?" "No, that," said the Hurk, pointing down again. This time, craning over the counter, the Crawfords were able to see that it was looking at a large, disshaped gray something that lay on the ground. "That?" Llewellyn asked doubtfully. "That." Llewellyn Crawford blushed..."Why -- that's just a cowpat. One of them cows from the dairy got loose from the herd yesterday, and she must have dropped that there without me noticing." "How much?" The Crawfords stared at him, or it, without comprehension. "How much what?" Llewellyn asked finally. "How much," the alien growled around its cigar, "for the cowpat?" The Crawfords exchanged glances. "I never heard -- " said Martha in an undertone, but her husband shushed her. He cleared his throat. "How about ten ce -- well, I don't want to cheat you -- how about a quarter?" The alien produced a large change purse, laid a quarter on the counter and grunted something to its companion in the car. The other alien got out, bringing a square porcelain box and a gold-handled shovel. With the shovel, she -- or it -- carefully picked up the cowpat and deposited it in the box. Both aliens then got into the car and drove away, in a whine of turbines and a cloud of dust. The Crawfords watched them go, then looked at the shiny quarter lying on the counter. Llewellyn picked it up and bounced it in his palm. "Well, say!" He began to smile.  #I that week the roads were full of aliens in their long shiny cars. They went everywhere, saw everything, paid their way with bright new-minted coins and crisp paper bills. There was some talk against the government for letting them in, but they were good for business and made no trouble. Some claimed to be tourists, others said they were sociology students on a field trip. Llewellyn Crawford went into the adjoining pasture and picked out four cowpats to deposit near his basket stand. When the next Hurk came by, Llewellyn asked, and got, a dollar apiece. "But why do they want them?" Martha wailed. "What difference does that make?" her husband asked. "They want 'em -- we got 'em! If Ed Lacey calls again about that mortgage payment, tell him not to worry!" He cleared off the counter and arranged the new merchandise on it. He jacked his price up to two dollars, then to five. Next day he ordered a new ne fall afternoon two years later, Llewellyn Crawford threw his hat in a corner, and sat down hard. He glared over his glasses at the large circular object, tastefully tinted in concentric rings of blue, orange and yellow, which was mounted over the mantelpiece. To the casual eye, this might have been a genuine "Trophy" class pat, a museum piece, painted on the Hurk planet; but in fact, like so many artistic ladies nowadays, Mrs. Crawford had painted and mounted it herself. "What's the matter. Lew?" she asked apprehensively. She had a new hairdo and was wearing a New York dress, but looked peaked and anxious. "Matter!" Llewellyn grunted. "Old man Thomas is a damn fool, that's all. Four hundred dollars a head! Can't buy a cow at a decent price any more." "Well, Lew, we do have seven herds already, don't we, and -- " "Got to have more to meet the demand, Martha!" said Llewellyn, sitting up. "My heaven, I'd think you could see that. With, queen pats bringing up to fifteen dollars, and not enough to go 'round -- And fifteen hundred for an emperor pat, if you're lucky enough -- " "Funny we never thought ther was so many kinds of pats," Martha said dreamily. "The emperor -- that's the one with the double whorl?" Llewellyn grunted, picking up a magazine. "Seems like a person could kind of -- " A kindly gleam came into Llewellyn's eyes. "Change one around?" he said. "Nope -- been tried. I was reading about it in here just yesterday." He held up the current issue of The American Pat Dealer, then began to turn the glossy pages. "Pat-OGrams," he read aloud. "Preserving Your Pats. Dairying -- a Profitable Sideline. Nope. Oh, here it is. Fake Pats a Flop. See, it says here some fellow down in Amarillo got hold of an emperor and made a plaster mold. Then he used the mold on a couple of big cull pats -- says here they was so perfect you couldn't tell the difference. But the Hurks wouldn't buy. They knew." He threw the magazine down, then turned to stare out the back window toward the sheds. "There's that fool boy just sitting in the yard again. Why ain't he working?" Llewellyn rose, cranked down the louver, shouted through the opening, "You, Delbert! Delbert!" He waited. "Deaf, too," he muttered. "I'll go tell him you want -- " Martha began, struggling out of her apron. "No, never mind -- go myself. Have to keep after 'em every damn minute." Llewellyn marched out the kitchen door and across the yard to where a gangling youth sat on a trolley, slowly eating an apple. "Delbert!" said Llewellyn, exasperated. "Oh -- hello, Mr. Crawford," said the youth, with a gaptoothed grin. He took a last bite from the apple, then dropped the core. Llewellyn's gaze followed it. Owing to his missing front teeth, Delbert's apple cores were like nothing in this world. "Why ain't you trucking pats to the stand?" Llewellyn demanded. "I don't pay you to set on no empty trolley, Delbert." "Took some out this morning," the boy said. "Frank, he told me to take 'em back." "He what?" Delbert nodded. "Said he hadn't sold but two. You ask him if I'm lying." "Do that," Llewellyn grunted. He turned on his heel and strode back across the yard. ut at the roadside, a long car was parked beside a battered pickup at the pat stand. It pulled out as Llewellyn started toward it, and another one drove up. As he approached the stand, the alien was just getting back in. The car drove off. Only one customer was left at the stand, a whiskered farmer in a checked shirt. Frank, the attendant, was leaning comfortably on the counter. The display shelvesbehind him were well filled with pats. "Morning, Roger," Llewellyn said with well-feigned pleasure. "How's the family? Sell you a nice pat this morning?" "Well, I don't know," said the whiskered man, rubbing his chin. "My wife's had her eye on that one there -- " he pointed to a large, symmetrical pat on the middle shelf -- "but at them prices -- " "You can't do better, believe me, Roger. It's an investment," said Llewellyn earnestly. "Frank, what did that last Hurk buy?" "Nothing," said Frank. A persistent buzz of music came from the radio in his breast pocket. "Just took a picture of the stand and drove off." "Well, what did the one before -- " With a whirr of turbines, a long shiny car pulled up behind him. Llewellyn turned. The three aliens in the car were wearing red felt hats with comic buttons sewed all over them, and carried Yale pennants. Confetti was strewn on their gray tweed suits. One of the Hurks got out and approached the stand, puffing a cigar through the hole in his -- or its -- orange scarf. "Yes, sir?" said Llewellyn at once, hands clasped, bending forward slightly. "A nice pat this morning?" The alien looked at the gray objects behind the counter. He, or it, blinked its yellow eyes and made a curious gurgling noise. After a moment Llewellyn decided that it was laughing. "What's funny?" he demanded, his smile fading. "Not funny," said tlie alien. "I laugh because I am happy. I go home tomorrow -- our field trip is over. Okay to take a picture?" He raised a small lensed machine in one purple claw. "Well, I suppose -- " Llewellyn said uncertainly, "Well, you say you're going home? You mean all of you? When will you be coming back?" "We are not coming back," the alien said. He, or it, pressed the camera, extracted the photograph and looked at it, then grunted and put it away. "We are grateful for an entertaining experience. Good-by." He turned and got into the car. The car drove off in a cloud of dust. "Like that tlie whole morning," Frank said. "They don't buy nothing -- just take pictures." Llewellyn felt himself beginning to shake. "Think he means it -- they're all going away?" "Radio said so," Frank replied. "And Ed Coon was through here this morning from Hortonville. Said he ain't sold a pat since day 'fore yesterday." "Well, I don't understand it." Llewellyn said. "They can't just all quit." His hands were trembling badly, and he put them in his pockets. "Say, Roger," he said to the whiskered man, "now just how much would you want to pay for that pat?" "Well -- " "It's a ten dollar pat, you know," Llewellyn said, moving closer. His voice had turned solemn. "Prime pat, Roger." "I know that, but -- " "What would you say to seven fifty?" "Well, I don't know. Might give -- say, five." "Sold," said Llewellyn. "Wrap that one up, Frank." He watched the whiskered man carry his trophy off to the pickup. "Mark 'em all down, Frank," he said faintly. "Get whatever you can." 'he long day's debacle was almost over. Arms around each other, Llewellyn and Martha Crawford watched the last of the crowd leaving the pat stand. Frank was cleaning up. Delbert, leaning against the side of the stand, was eating an apple. "It's the end of the world, Martha," Llewellyn said huskily. Tears stood in his eyes. "Prime pats, going two for a nickel!" Headlights blinding in the dusk, a long, low car came nosing up to the pat stand. In it were two green creatures in raincoats, with feathery antennae that stood up through holes in their blue pork-pie hats. One of them got out and approached the pat stand with a curious scuttling motion. Delbert gaped, dropping his apple core. "Serps!" Frank hissed, leaning over the stand toward Llewellyn. "Heard about 'em on the radio. From Gamma Serpentis, radio said." The green creature was inspecting the half-bare shelves. Homy lids flickered across its little bright eyes. "Pat, sir -- ma'am?" Llewellyn asked nervously. "Not many left right now, but -- " "What is that?" the Serp asked in a rustling voice, pointing downward with one claw. The Llewellyns looked. The Serp was pointing to a misshapen, knobby something that lay beside Delbert's boot. "That there?" Delbert asked, coming partially to life "That's an apple core." He glanced across to Llewellyn, and a gleam of intelligence seemed to come into his eyes. "Mr. Crawford, I quit," he said clearly. Then he turned to the alien. "That's a Delbert Smith apple core," he said. Frozen, Llewellyn watched the Serp pull out a billfold and scuttle forward. Money changed hands. Delbert produced another apple and began enthusiastically reducing it to a core. "Say, Delbert," said Llewellyn, stepping away from Martha. His voice squeaked, and he cleared his throat. "Looks like we got a good little thing going here. Now, if you was smart, you'd rent this pat stand -- " "Nope, Mr. Crawford," said Delbert indistinctly, with hii mouth full of apple. "Figure I'll go over to my uncle's place. He's got an orchard." The Serp was hovering nearby, watching the apple core and uttering little squeals of appreciation. "Got to be close to your source of supply, you know," said Delbert, wagging his head wisely. Speechless, Llewellyn felt a tug at his sleeve. He looked down : it was Ed Lacey, the banker. "Say, Lew, I tried to get you all afternoon, but your phone didn't answer. About your collateral on those loans..." New! in the big December Worlds of Tomorrowl Seqnel to Arcturas Times Three, Big Baby, etc. by Jack Sharkey An exciting novelette by J. T. McIntosh The great concinsion of by Philip K. Dick -- and many others! December Worlds of Tomorrow on sa!e nowl for your information I n my column "Names in the Sky" which was published in the June, #, issue of Galaxy lack of space compelled me to neglect the names of the constellations. Ever since I have been receiving letters and postcards asking me to devote some space to these names. By now I feel it is time to give in. As I mentioned in my earlier column, the Astronomical Congress of # decided to recognize eighty-eight different constellations for the purpose of having easy labels for referring to areas in the sky. The list designating the precise borders for each of these constellations was published by E. Delporte of Brussels in his Atlas Celeste (Cambridge, #) so that there can be no longer any disagreement whether a faint star at the edge of one constellation belongs to the particular constellation or to its neighbor. As regards the names which are now recognized they are all of long standing and many of them are classical, going back to Ftolemy's Almagest. Ptolemy listed a total of fortyeight constellations, twelve of them being the Zodiac -- the belt of constellations along which the sun moves in the course of a year. Of the others, twenty-one were to the north of the Zodiac and fifteen to the south of the Zodiac. In fact, it was Ptolemy who is responsible for twelve constellations in the Zodiac. Most of the names of the signs of the Zodiac do not need any explanation. They are, in their customary order and in the Latin version, the following; Aries (the Ram), Taurus (the Bull) and Gemini (the Twins, named "Castor and Pollux" in the Greek version and "Man and Wife" in sixteenth-century Europe), followed by Cancer (the Crab, or the Crayfish in western Europe), Leo (the Lion) and Virgo, (the Virgin, originally just "the Woman"). The next constellation, Libra (the Scales) is the one Ptolemy made a separate constellation. Before him the Greeks had considered the constellation Libra to be a part, namely the pincers, of the following constellation Scorpio while the Romans considered it the scales held by Themis, which was the same as the preceding constellation Virgo. Though Ptolemy gave it the rank of a separate constellation he still called it chelai, "the pincers". The constellations following Libra, are, of course, Scorpius (the Scorpion), Sagittarius (the Archer), Capn'cornus (the Goat, originally the , Fish-Goat) Aquarius (the Water Carrier) and Pisces (the Fishes). Ptolemy's twenty-one constellations to the north of the Zodiac, numbered consecutively, were: No. #. Ursa minor and No. #. Ursa major (literally the Little Bear and the Great Bear... in the past called the Small Wain and the Great Wain... now called the Little and Big Dipper.) No. #. Draco (the Dragon) No. #. Cepheus (this is a personal name, presumed to be the Latin version of the name of an Ethiopian king.) No. #. Bootes (the Driver of the Oxen, or the Custodian of the Bears.) No. #. Corona borealis (the Northern Crown) No. #. Hercules (in Ptolemy's Almagest, "the Kneeling Man".) No. #. Lyra (originally a turtle, the shell of which then became the lyre, a rather poetic development.) No. #. Cygnus (the Swan; in Ptolemy "the Bird".) No. #. Cassiopeia (wife of Cepheus; on some old charts this constellations is called the Throne or the Queen's Throne.) No. #I . Perseus (the rescuer of of Andromeda.) No. #. Auriga (the Drajmian) No. #. Ophiuchus (the Carrier of the Serpent) No. #. Serpens (the serpent carried by Ophiuchus) No. #. Sagitta (the Arrow) No. #. Aquila (the Eagle) No. #. Delphinus (the Dolphin) No. #. Equuleus (the Filly; in Ptolemy the "Front Part of the Horse".) No. #. Pegasus (the Horse; not a winged horse in Ptolemy.) No. #. Andromeda (the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia.) No. #. Triangulum (the Triangle; originally the Nile Delta.) The constellations to the south of the Zodiac were: No. #. Cetus (the Whale) No. #. Orion (the Himter) No. #. Eridanus (the River; in Ptolemy this constellation is called potamos which is the Greek word for River, meaning the Nile. The Romans changed this to Eridanus, the Amber River, which was their name for the Elb river in Germany; later they called the same river Albis -- which caused a lot of confusion.) No. #. Lepus (the Hare) No. #. Canis major (the Big Dog; in Ptolemy just kynos, the dog.) No. #. Canis minor (the Little Dog; in Ptolemy this constellation was called prokyon, which is now the name of its principal star.) No. #. Argo navis (the Ship; since it also served as the symbol of the year it was pictured with either # or # oars, symbolizing months or weeks.) No. #. Hydra (the Sea Serpent) No. #. Crater (the Cup) No. #. Corvus (the Raven) No. #. Centaurus (the Centaur) No. #Lupus (the Wolf. In Ptolemy this constellation is just therion, which means "wild beast"; the Arabs were the ones who substituted a specific wild beast.) No. #. Ara (the Altar) No. #. Corona australis (the Southern Crown; the Arabs called it the Ostrich Nest.) No. #. Piscis austrinus (the Southern Fish). The constellation now known as Coma Berenices (the Hair of Berenice) was suggested before Ptolemy by the Greek astronomer Hipparchos, but for unknown reasons was not accepted by Ptolemy. pouring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries three more constellations were added: Monoceros (the Unicom), Camelopardalis (the Giraffe) and Columba (the Dove). The latter is credited in countless books to Dr. Edmond Halley but it was actually suggested by the Dutch geographer Pieter Plancius. The gradual mapping of the southern sky which followed in the wake of geographical exploration added literally dozens of new constellations, most of which were dropped later. It may be mentioned at this point that the early explorers expected the southern sky to be a replica (or else a mirror image) of the northern sky and they were puzzled that this did not turn out to be the case. They were especially disappointed that there was no South Pole Star. Of the many new constellations suggested during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number are still accepted. They are; Chamaeleon, Phoenix, Grus (the Crane), Pavo (the Peacock), Lacerta (the Lizard), Leo minor (the Little Lion), Hydrua (the Water Snake, Canes venatici (the Hunting Dogs), Dorado (the Swordfish, or Goldfish), and Crux (the Southern Cross). Two of the newer constellations, Lynx and Apus, require some explanation. The name Lynx applies to an area lacking in bright stars; it was created by the part-time astronomer, otherwise brewmaster and city alderman, Johannes Hewelcke (better known as Hevelius) of Danzig. A constellation was needed in that area to fill the space. Hevelius named it Lynx because he said that lynx eyes were needed to see anything at all. As for Apus the name is translated with annoying regularity as The Bee in manuals for amateurs. But the Latin word for "bee" is apis. Actually the name comes from Apus (seu avis') intaken notion that the bird of India" and is based on the mistaken notion that the Bird of Paradise was footless, which is what apus really means. Hence the constellation Apus should be rendered in English as "Bird of Paradise". For the modern list of eightyeight constellations, one of Ptolemy's constellations. No. #, Argo was divided into three: Carina, Vela and Puppis (Keel, Sails and Poop) but the Greek letters for the stars form one sequence through all three. The other constellations of the modem star atlas which have not been mentioned so far are, in alphabitical order: Antlia (originally Antlia pneumatica, the Air Pump) Caelum (originally Caelum sculptoris, the Sculptor's Tool) Circinus (the Compasses, originally Circinus et norma, Compasses and Ruler) I Fornax (the Furnace) I Horologium (the Pendulum I Clock) I Indus (the Indian) Mensa (the Table, originally Mons mensae, the Table Mountain, meaning Table Mountain near Cape Town in South Africa, from which Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, who introduced this constellation, observed the southern sky.) Microscopium (the Microscope) Musca (the Fly) Norma (the Ruler, but in the sense of "straightedge".) Pictor (originally Equus pictoris, the Painter's Easel) Pyxis (the Mariner's Compass. The literal meaning of the word is "small (wooden) box"; it came to mean Mariner's Compass via the Italian form, hussola della calamita, which was a wooden bowl, filled with water, in which a reed (calamita), supporting the magnetic needle was floating.) Reticulum (the Net; actually  Lacaille's reticule romboide, the instrument he used for measuring angular distances between the stars.) Sculptor (no translation needed) Scutum (the Shield, or Buckler; originally Scutum Sobiesii, Sobieski's Shield.) Sextans (the Sextant) Telescopium (the Telescope) Triangulum australis (the Southern Triangle) Tucana (the Toucan) Volans (originally Piscis volans, the Flying Fish) You have repeatedly pointed out scientific facts behind myths or allusions in classical literature. How about these lines from Shakespeare's As You Like It: Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in its head. What does the reference to the precious jewel mean? And while I am at it, are toads venomous? Deborah Crawford New York City. Let me take your last question first, it's easier that way. Toads are amphibians, and no amphibian is venomous in the sense that they have poison fangs like some snakes. But all amphibians have skin glands; and the liquid exuded by the skin glands of one South American tree frog actually is toxic enough to be used Vulpecula (usually called "the Fox" in English, though the word means Little Fox. The original name by Hevelius was Vulpecula cum ansere, the Little Fox and the Goose.) as an arrow poison. Whether the excretions of the skin glands of the common garden toad can be called venomous is the subject of a debate which by now has lasted for at least five centuries. In England you still find the belief in some quarters that touching a toad will cause warts, while German peasants are convinced that touching a toad in the light of a full moon will cure warts. (People just can't get together on some things!) I think it would be correct to say that the excretion is not venomous, though there are a few cases known where the handling of live toads caused a skin irritation. Now for the "precious jewel", also known as the toadstone. It was supposed to be a yello'vish stone which either had the shape of a toad or else had the image of a toad on it. And, while the toad itself does not produce such (Questions ? a stone, contemporary artisans had no trouble furnishing them for people with money. Shakespeare's contemporary, the writer Edward Topsell, who published a Historie of Fourefooted Beasts in #, has provided us with a summary of the beliefs then current: "There be many late Writers, which doe affirme that there is a precious stone in the head of a Toade There be many that weare these stones in Ringes, beeing verily perswaded that they keep them from all manner of grypings and paines of the belly, and the small guttes. But the Art (as they term it) is in taking of it out, for they say it must be taken out of the head alive, before the Toade be dead, with a peece of cloth of the colour of redde Skarlet, wherewithal! they are much delighted, so that while they stretch out themselves as it were in sport upon that cloth, they cast out the stone of their head, but instantly they sup it up againe, unlesse it be taken from them through some secrete hole in the said cloth, whereby it falleth into a cesterne or vessell of water, into which the Toade dare not enter, by reason of the coldness of the water." Topsell was not Shakespeare's source, because As You Like It is usually dated as having been written in # or #. Shakespeare must have read about it in one of the unnamed writers quoted by Topsell who also said that the toad stone was good against the "falling sickness" and that it changed color in the presence of poison. Topsell's own own conclusion is : "Now for my part I dare not conclude either with it, or against it, for many are directlie for this stone ingendered in the braine or head of the Toade: on the other side, some confesse such a stone by name and nature, but they make doubt of the generation of it, as others have delivered; and therefore, they beeing in sundry opinions, the found the Reader, I will referre him for his satisfaction unto a Toade, which he may easily every day kill: For although when the Toade is dead, the vertue thereof be lost, which consisted in the eye, or blew spot in the middle, yet the substance remaineth, and, if the stone be found there in substance, then is the question at an end; but, if it be not, then must the generation of it be sought for in some other place." As a resident of Hollywood, California, I am well acquainted with the tar pools of Hancock Park and I have paid a number of visits to our Museum where the skeletons of animals found in the tar pits have been re-assembled. My question is: how old are these bones? I have heard statements ranging from # to # years. Hasn't the radiocarbon dating method been tried out on these bones? Magnus Hellmann Hollywood, Calif. The reason why you have heard such different age estimates is that during the last few decades there has been a general re-dating of recent geological events. It had always been assumed that the animals of the tar fKJols, the so-called La Brea Fauna, existed at about the time of the last glaciation in the North. And it had also been assumed that the last retreat of the glaciers of the Ice Age took place about # years ago, a few geologists thinking that it might have been as recently as # years ago. Under these assumptions the age of the La Brea Fauna had to be not less than # years, probably nearer # years. But then the radio-carbon method permitted the dating of a spot in Wisconsin where a forest had been felled by the advance of the glaciers. It then turned out that the last glaciation was still going on # to # years ago. Nobody believed this result at first; obviously something had gone wrong. To check what it might be, samples of European material known to have been formed late during the last glaciation were sent to the United States for dating. The dates of this European material agreed with the Wisconsin dates within about a thousand years. Since the last glaciation had been more recent than had been assumed, the La Brea Fauna also had to be more recent. And another very strong hint was obtained elsewhere. One of the animals from the tar pits is a large ground sloth. Radiocarbon dating of the remains of identical ground sloths from Gsrpsum Cave in Nevada showed that they were between # and # years old. All this made it unlikely that the remains from the tar pits would be much older. The logical next step was to date something from the tar pits. When Pit No. # was excavated during the period from July, #, to August, #, a tree trunk, eight feet tall, was found rooted in the hard clay beneath the asphalt. Wood from this tree was sent to two different laboratories for dating. Since the wood was tarsoaked, part of the sample was washed in xylol to remove the tar and then dated. The other part was dated without removing the tar. The two cleaned samples gave the ages of # plus or minus # years and # plus or minus # years; the two samples which were not cleaned of tar gave the ages of # plus or minus # years and # plus or minus # years. While the first laboratory had tested pieces of the tree trunk, the second laboratory was supplied with a piece of one of the roots of the same tree. This laboratory extracted the tar from the whole sample and tested the cleaned root and the tar extracted from it separately. The tar proved to be "dead", which means that it was too old to be dated by this method, or older than # years. The root gave an age of # plus or minus # years. These tests show that the more recent age estimates of the La Brea Fauna were confirmed by direct dating. Instead of saying "# to # years old," one should say "Between # and # years." If both the Soviet Union and our own country stopped putting satellites into orbit, how many of those now in orbit would still circle the earth a hundred years from now? (I discount the space probes that are in orbit around the sun.) Isaac Braunstein Brooklyn, N. Y. The answer is "about twenty", but there is an uncertainty involved due to the fact that the U. S. Air Force has launched a number of secret satellites with undisclosed orbits. Some of them may have a lifetime of more than a century. And since the released information about the Russian series of "Cosmos" satellites is quite meager, it would be useless to guess about their lifetimes. Of the known satellites, the ones with a very long life expectancy are: Vanguard I (fired March #, #), Tiros I (fired (fired June #, #), Echo I (fired August #, #), Courier I (fired October #, #), Tiros II (fired Nov. #, #), Explorer IX (fired February #, #), Tiros II), Midas IV (fired Oct. Nov. #, #), Tiros IV (fired (fired March #, #), #Kappa-I (fired April #, #), Tiros V (fired June #, #), Telstar (fired July #, #), Tiros VI (fired September #, #), Alouette (fired Septem(fired June #, #). I am in the eighth grade and interested in the sciences. Last Degree length of one degree of longitude at of Place under that different latitudes. latitude Latitude Kilometers Quito, Ekniador (Equator) # Cayenne, Guiana U# San Jose, Costa Rica # Manilla, Philippines (approx.) # Guantanamo, Cuba ) Mexico, City ) (approx.) Hilo, Hawaii ) # Talhoku, Formosa # New Orleans, La., Cairo, Egypt # Albuquerque, N. Mex. # Philadelphia, Pa., Boulder Colo. Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minn. # # Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada # Newcastle on Tyne, England # Oslo, Norway # Fairbanks, Alaska # Tromso, Norway (approx.) # Devon Island, north of North America # Axel Heiberg Island # Arctic Ice north of Greenland # the Poles # week our science teacher pointed out that the usual map, the Mercator map, is all wrong because on this map the degrees of longitude form parallel lines while, in reality, they should all come together at the poles. He also said that for this reason a degree of longitude is of different lengths, depending on latitude. It is longest at the equator and has no length at all at the poles. Now I have two questions. If the Mercator map is so wrong, why is it still used? And is there a simple formula for calculating how long a degree is in various places? Michael Stromberg Indianapolis, I nd. The Mercator map just emphasizes a problem which is common to all maps. The earth is very nearly a sphere; hence Miles # #I # # # # # # # # #b #. rr # #I # # # # # any part of that sphere, say the continent of Africa, is a curved surface. If you flatten it out on paper for the purpose of making a map you have to introduce a distortion of some kind. Only a globe can be accurate. But if you deal with a sufficiently small area, like that of a county, the distortion of the Mercator map makes no difference. For maps showing whole continents or oceans the Mercator map has the advantage that you can tell at a glance which place is due North (or due South) of another. Its directions are true, even if the dimensions are not. There is no simple formula for computing the length of a degree; in fact it is a fairly complicated calculation. But I can give you a table, showing the values for every five degrees They brought the peace of the stars to ruined Earth... juf Earth had never asked for itl S campering across the unplowed field the three boys shouted as they saw the ship; it had landed, all right, just where they expected, and they were the first to reach it. "Hey, that's the biggest I ever saw!" Panting, the first boy halted. "That's not from Mars; that's from farther. It's from all the way out, I know it is." He became silent and afraid as he saw the size of it. And then looking up into the sky he realized that an armada had arrived, exactly as everyone had expected. "We better go tell," he said to his companions. Back on the ridge, John LeConte stood by his steam-powered chauffeur-driven limousine, impatiently waiting for the boiler to warm. Kids got there first, he said to himself with anger. Whereas I'm supposed to. And the children were ragged; they were merely farm boys. "Is the phone working today?" LeConte asked his secretary. Glancing at his clipboard, Mr. Fall said, "Yes, sir. Shall I put through a message to Oklahoma City?" He was the skinniest employee ever assigned to LeConte's office. The man evidently took nothing for himself, was positively uninterested in food. And he was efficient. LeConte murmured, "The immigration people ought to hear about this outrage." He sighed. It had all gone wrong. The armada from Proxima Centauri had after ten years arrived and none of the earlywarning devices had detected it in advance of its landing. Now Oklahoma City would have to deal with the outsiders here on home ground -- a psychological disadvantage which LeConte felt keenly. Look at the equipment they've got, he thought as he watched the commercial ships of the flotilla begin to lower their cargos. Why, hell, they make us look like provincials. He wished that his official car did not need twenty minutes to warm up; he wished -- did not exist. Centaurus Urban Renewal Bureau, a do-gooding body unfortunately vested with enormoqs inter-system authority. It had been informed of the Misadventure back in # and had started into space like a phototropic organism, sensitive to the mere physical light created by the hydrogen-bomb explosions. But LeConte knew better than that. Actually the governing organizations in the Centaurian system knew many details of the tragedy because they had been in radio contact with other planets of the Sol system. Little of the native forms on earth had survived. He himself was from Mars; he had headed a relief mission seven years ago, had decided to stay because there were so many opportunities here on Earth, conditions being what they were... This is all very difficult, he said to himself as he stood waiting for his steam-powered car to warm. We got here first, but face that awkward fact. In my opinion, we've done a good job of rebuilding. Of course, it isn't like it was before... but ten years is not long. Give us another twenty and we'll have the trains running again. And our recent road-building bonds sold quite successfully, in fact were oversubscribed. "Call for you, sir, from Oklahoma City," Mr. Fall said, holding out the receiver of the portable field-phone. "Ultimate Representative in the Field John LeConte, here," LeConte said into it loudly. "Go ahead; I say go ahead." "This is Party Headquarters," the dry official voice at the other end came faintly, mixed with static, in his ear. "We've receivedreports from dozens of alert citizens in Western Oklahoma and Texas of an immense -- " "It's here," LeConte said. "I can see it. I'm just about ready to go out and confer with its ranking members, and I'll file a full report at the usual time. So it wasn't necessary for you to check up on me." He felt irritable. "Is the armada heavily armed?" "Naw," LeConte said. "It appears to comprise bureaucrats and trade officials and commercial carriers. In other words, vultures." The Party desk-man said, "Well, go and make certain they understand that their presence here is resented by the native population as well as the Relief of War-torn Areas Administrating Coucil. Tell them that the legislature will be called to pass a special bill expressing indignation at this intrusion into domestic matters by an intersystem body." "I know, I know," LeConte said. "It's been all decided; I know." His chauffeur called to him, "Sir, your car is ready now." The Party desk-man concluded, "Make certain they understand that you can't negotiate with them; you have no power to admit them to Earth. Only the Council can do that and of course it's adamantly against that." LeConte hung up the phone and hurried to his car. D espite the opposition of the local authorities, Peter cate his headquarters in the ruins of the old Terran capital. New York City. This would lend they gradually widened the circle of the organization's influence. At last, of course, the circle would embrace the planet. But that would take decades. As he walked through the ruins of what had once been a major train yard, Peter Hood thought to himself that when the task was done he himself would have long been retired. Not much remained of the pretragedy culture here. The local authorities -- the political nonentities who had flocked in from Mars and Venus, as the neighboring planets were called -- had done little. And yet he admired their efforts. To the members of his staff walking directly behind him he said, "You know, they have done the hard part for us. We ought to be grateful. It is not easy to come into a totally destroyed area, as they've done." His man Fletcher observed, "They got back a good return." Hood said, "Motive is not important. They have achieved results." He was thinking of the official who had met them in his steam car; it had been solemn and formal, carrying complicated trappings. When these locals had first arrived on the scene years ago they had not been greeted, except perhaps by radiation-seared, blackened survivors who had stumbled out of cellars and gaped sightlessly. He shivered. man of minor rank saluted and said, "I think we've managed to locate an undamaged structure in which your staff could be housed for the time being. It's underground." He looked embarrassed. "Not what we had hoped for. We'd have to displace the locals to get anything attractive." "I don't object," Hood said. "A basement will do." "The structure," the minor great homeostatic newspaper, the New York Times. It printed itself directly below us. At least, according to the maps. We haven't located the newspaper yet; it was customary for the homeopapes to be buried a mile or so down. As yet we don't know how much of this one survived." "But it would be valuable," Hood agreed. "Its outlets are scattered all over the planet; it must have had a thousand different editions which it put out daily. How many outlets function -- " He broke off. "It's hard to believe that the local politicos made no efforts to repair any of the ten or eleven world-wide homopapes, but that seems to be the case." "Odd," Hood said. Surely it would have eased their task. The post-tragedy job of reuniting people into a common culture depended on newspapers, ionization in the atmosphere making radio and TV reception difficult if not impossible. "This makes me instantly suspicious," he said, turning to his staff. "Are they perhaps not trying to rebuild after all? Is their work merely a pretense?" It was his own wife Joan who spoke up. "They may simply have lacked the ability to place the homeopapes on an operational basis." Give them the benefit of the doubt. Hood thought. You're right. "So the last edition of the Times," Fletcher said, "was put  on the lines the day the Misad- venture occurred. And the entire network of newspaper com-; munication and news-creation has been idle since. I can't respect these politicos; it shows they're ignorant of the basics of a culture. By reviving the homeopapes we can do more to reestablish the pre-tragedy culture than they've done in ten thousand pitiful projects." His tone was scornful. Hood said, "You may misunderstand, but let it go. Let's hope that the cephalon of the pape is imdamaged. We couldn't possibly replace it." Ahead he saw the yawning entrance which the This was to be his first move, here on the ruined planet, restoring this immense self-contained entity to its former authority. Once it had resumed its activity he would be freed for other tasks; the homeopape would take some of the burden from him. A workman, still clearing debris away, muttered, "Jeez, I never saw so many layers of junk. You'd think they deliberately bottled it up down here." In his hands, the suction furnace which he operated glowed and praunded as it absorbed material, converting it to energy, leaving an increasingly enlarged open"I'd like a report as soon as possible as to its condition," Hood said to the team of engineers who stood waiting to descend into the opening. "How long it will take to revive it, how much -- " He broke off. Two men in black uniforms had arrived. Police, from the Security ship. One, he saw, was Otto Dietrich, the ranking investigator accompanying the armada from Centaurus, and he felt tense automatically; it was a reflex for all of them -- he saw the engineers and the workmen cease momentarily and then, more slowly, resume their work. "Yes," he said to Dietrich. "Glad to see you. Let's go off to this side room and talk there." He knew beyond a doubt what the investigator wanted; he had been expecting him. Dietrich said, "I won't take up too much of your time. Hood. I know you're quite busy. What is this, here?" He glanced about curiously, his scrubbed, round, alert face eager. I n a small side room, converted to a temporary office, Hood faced the two policemen. "I am opposed to prosecution," he said quietly. "It's been too long. Let them go." Dietrich tugging thoughtfully at his ear, said, "But war crimes are war crimes, even foul decades later. Anyhow, what argument can there be? We're required by law to prosecute. J Somebody started the war. They may well hold positions of responsibility now, but that hardly matters." "How many police troops have you landed?" Hood asked. "Two hundred." "Then you're ready to go to work." "We're ready to make inquiries. Sequester pertinent documents and initiate litigation in the local courts. We're prepared to enforce cooperation, if that's what you mean. Various experienced personnel have been distributed to key points." Dietrich eyed him. "All this is necessary; I don't see the problem. Did you intend to protect the guilty parties -- make use of their socalled abilities on your staff?" "No," Hood said evenly. Dietrich said, "Nearly eighty fortune. Can you forget that? Or is it that since they were merely local people, not known to us personally -- " "It's not that," Hood said. He knew it was hopeless; he could not communicate with the police mentality. "I've already stated my objections. I feel it serves no purpose at this late date to have trials and hangings. Don't request use of my staff in this; #I refuse on the grounds that I can spare no one, not even a janitor. Do I make myself clear?" "You idealists," Dietrich sighed. "This is strictly a noble task confronting us... to rebuild, correct? What you don't or won't see is that these people will start it all over again, one day, unless we take steps now. We owe it to future generations. To be harsh now is the most humane method, in the long run. Tell me. Hood. What is this site? What are you resurrecting here with such vigor?" "The New York Times," Hood said. "It has, I assume, a morgue? We can consult its backlog of information? That would prove valuable in building up our cases." Hoood said, "I can't deny you access to material we uncover." Smiling, Dietrich said, "A day by day account of the political events leading up to the war would prove quite interesting. Who, for instance, held supreme power in the United States at the time of the Misfortune? No one we've talked to so far seems to remember." His smile increased.  arly the next morning the report from the corps of engineers reached Hood in his temporary office. The power supply of the newspaper had been totally destroyed. But the cephalon, the governing brainstructure which guided and oriented the homeostatic system, appeared to be intact. If a ship were brought close by, perhaps its power supply could be integrated into the newspaper's lines. Thereupon much more would be known. "In other words," Fletcher said to Hood, as they sat with Joan eating breakfast, "it may come on and it may not. Very pragmatic. You hook it up and if it works you've done your job. What if it doesn't? Do the engineers intend to give up at that point?" Examining his cup. Hood said, "This tastes like authentic coffee." He pondered. "Tell them to bring a ship in and start the homeopape up. And if it begins to print, bring me the edition at once." He sipped his coffee. An hour later a ship of the line had landed in the vicinity and its power source had been tapped for insertion into the homeopape. The conduits were placed, the circuits cautiously closed. Seated in his office, Peter Hood heard far underground a low rumble, a halting, uncertain stirring. They had been successful. The newspaper was returning to life. The edition, when it was laid man, surprised him by its accuracy. Even in its dormant state, the newspaper had somehow managed not to fall behind events. Its receptors had kept going. Ten years after the Misfortune of a nuclear holocaust, the inter-syshas made its historic appearance on Earth's surface, landing from a veritable armada of craft -- a sight which witnesses described as "overpowering both in scope and in Hood, named top co-ordinator by Centaurian authorities, immediately set up headquarters in the ruins of New York City and conferred with aides, declaring that he had come "not to punish the guilty but to re-estalish the planet-wide culture by every means available, and to restore -- It was uncanny. Hood thought as he read the lead article. The varied news-gathering services of the homeopape had reached into his own life, had digested and then inserted into the lead article even the discussion between himself and Otto Dietrich. The newspaper was -- had been -- doing its job. Nothing of news-interest escaped it, even a discreet conversation carried on with no outsiders as witnesses. He would have to be careful. Sure enough, another item, ominous in tone, dealt with the anival of the black jacks, the police. Captain Otto Dietrich, supreme police investigator arriving with Centauri, said today that those responsible for the Misfortune of a decade ago "would have to pay for i.heir crimes" before the bar of Centaurian justice. Two hundred black-uniformed police, it was learned by the Times, have already begun exploratory activities designed to -- The newspaper was warning Earth about Dietrich, and Hood could not help feeling grim relish. The Times had not been set up to serve merely the occupying hierarchy. It served everyone, including those Dietrich intended to try. Each step of the police activity would no doubt be reported in full detail. Dietrich, who liked to work in anonymity, would not enjoy this. But the authority to maintain the newspaper belonged to Hood. And he did not intend to shut it off. One item on the first page of the paper attracted his further notice; he read it, frowning and a little uneasy. Supporters of Benny Cemoli, gathered in the familiar tent cities associated with the colorful political figure, clashed with local citizens armed with hammers, shovels, and boards, both sides claiming victory in the two-hour melee which left twenty injured and a dozen hospitalized in hastily-erected first aid stations. Cemoli, garbed as always in his toga-style red robes, visited the injured, evidently in good spirits, joking and telling his supporters that "it won't be long now " an evident reference to the organization's boast that it would march on New York City in the near future to establish what Cemoli deems "social justice and true equality for the first time in world history." It should be recalled that prior to his imprisonment at San Quentin -- Flipping a switch on his intercom system. Hood said, "Fletcher, check into activities up in the north of the county. Find out about some sort of a political mob gathering there." Fletcher's voice came back, "I have a copy of the Times, too, sir. I see the item about this Cemoli agitator. There's a ship on the way up there right now; should have a report within ten minutes." Fletcher paused. "Do you think -- it'll be necessary to bring in any of Dietrich's people?" "Let's hope not," Hood said shortly. ship, through Fletcher, made its report. Puzzled, Hood asked that it be repeated. But there team had investigated throughly. They had found no sign whatsoever of any tent city or any group gathering. And citizens in the area whom they had interrogated had never heard of anyone named "Cemoli." And there was no sign of any scuffle having taken place, no first aid stations, no injured persons. Only the peaceful, semi-rural countryside. Baffled, Hood read the item in the Times once more. There it was, in black and white, on the front page, along with the news about the landing of the mean? He did not like it at all. Had it been a mistake to revive the great, old, damaged homestatic newspaper? Trom a sound sleep that night Hood was awakened by a clanging from far beneath the ground, an urgent racket that grew louder and louder as he sat up in bed, blinking and confused. Machinery roared. He heard the heavy rumbling movement as automatic circuits fitted into place, responding to instructions emanating from within the closed system itself. "Sir," Fletcher was saying from the darkness. A light came on as Fletcher located the temporary overhead fixture. "I thought I should come in and wake you. Sorry, Mrs. Hood." "I'm awake," Hood muttered, rising from the bed and putting on his robe and slippers. "What's it doing?" Fletcher said, "It's printing an extra." Sitting up, smoothing her tousled blond hair back, Joan said, "Good lord. What about?" Wide-eyed, she looked from her husband to Fletcher. "We'll have to bring in the local authorities," Hood said. "Confer with them." He had an intuition as to the nature of the extra roaring through the presses at this moment. "Get that LeCone, that politico who met us on our arrival. Wake him up and fly him here immediately. We need him." It took almost an hour to obtain the presence of the haughty, ceremonious local potentate and his staff member. The two of them in their elaborate uniforms at last put in an appearance at Hood's office, both of them indignant. They faced Hood silently, waiting to hear what he wanted. In his bathrobe and slippers Hood sat at his desk, a copy of the Times' extra before him; he was reading it once more as LeConte and his man entered. He turned the paper, showing the headlines to the two Earthmen. "Who is this man?" he said. After a moment LeConte said, "I -- don't know." Hood said, "Come on, Mr. LeConte." "Let me read the article," LeConte said nervously. He scanned it in haste; his hands trembled as he held the newspaper. "Interesting," he said at last. "But I can't tell you a thing. It's news to me. You must imderstand that our communications have been sparse, since the Misfortune, and it's entirely possible that a political movement could spring up without our -- " "Please," Hood said. "Don't make yourself absurd." Flushing, LeConte stammered, "I'm doing the best I can, summoned out of my bed in the middle of the night." There was a stir, and through the office doorway came the rapidly-moving figure of Otto Dietrich, looking grim. "Hood," he said without preamble, "there's a Times kiosk near my headquarters. It just posted this." He no held up a copy of the extra. "The damn thing is running this off and distributing it throughout the world, isn't it? However, we have crack teams up in that area and they report absolutely nothing, no road blocks, no militiastyle troops on the move, no activity of any sort." "I know," Hood said. He felt weary. And still, from beneath them, the deep rumble continued, the newspaper printing its extra, informing the world of the march by Benny Cemoli's supporters on New York City -- a fantasy march, evidently, a product manufactured entirely within the cephalon of the newspaper itself. "Shut it off," Dietrich said. Hood shook his head. "No. I want to know more." "That's no reason," Dietrich said. "Obviously, it's defective. Very seriously damaged, not working properly. Youll have to search elsewhere for your worldwide propaganda network." He tossed the newspaper down on Hood's desk. To LeConte, Hood said, "Was Benny Cemoli active before the war?" There was silence. Both LeConte and his assistant Mr. Fall were pale and tense; they faced him tight-lipped, glancing at each other. "I am not much for police matters," Hood said to Dietrich, "but I think you could reasonably step in here." Dietrich, understanding, said, "I agree. You two men are under arrest. Unless you feel inclined to talk a little more freely about this agitator in the red toga." He nodded to two of his police, who stood by the office doorway; they stepped obediently forward. As the two policemen came up to him, LeConte said, "Come to think of it, there was such a person. But -- he was very obsecure." "Before the war?" Hood asked. "Yes." LeConte nodded slowly. "He was a joke. As I recall, and it's difficult... a fat, ignorant clown from some backwoods area. He had a little radio station or something over which he broadcast. He peddled some sort of anti-radiation box which you installed in your house, and it made you safe from bomb-test fallout." Now his staff member Mr. Fall said, "I remember. He even ran for the UN senate. But he was defeated, naturally." "And that was the last of him?" Hood asked. "Oh yes," LeConte said. "He died of Asian flu soon after. He's been dead for fifteen years." I n a helicopter. Hood flew slowly above the terrain depicted in the Times articles, seeing for himself that there was no sign of political activity. He did not feel really assured until he had seen with his own eyes that the newspaper had lost contact with actual events. The reality of the situation did not coincide with the Times' articles in any way; that was obvious. And yet -- the homeostatic system continued on. Joan, seated beside him, said, "I have the third article here, if you want to read it." She had been looking the latest edition over. "No," Hood said. "It says they're in the outskirts of the city," she said. "They broke through the police barricades and the governor has appealed for UN assistance." Thoughtfiolly, Fletcher said, "Here's an idea. One of us, preferably you. Hood, should write a letter to the Times." Hood glanced at him. "I think I can tell you exactly how it should be worded," Fletcher said. "Make it a simple inquiry. You've followed the accounts in the paper about Cemoli's movement. Tell the editor -- " Fletcher paused. "That you feel sympathetic and you'd like to join the movement. Ask the paper how." To himself. Hood thought. In other words ask the newspaper to put me in touch with Cemoli. He had to admire Fletchcrazy sort of way. It was as if Fletcher had been able to match the derangement of the newspaper by a deliberate shift from common sense on his own part. He would participate in the newspaper's delusion. Assuming there was a Cemoli and a march on New York, he was asking a reasonable question. Joan said, "I don't want to sound stupid, but how does one go about mailing a letter to a homeopape?" "I've looked into that," Fletcher said. "At each kiosk set Up by the paper there's a letterslot, next to the coin-slot where you pay for your paper. It was the law, when the homeopapes were set up originally, decades ago. All we need is your husband's signature." Reaching into his jacket, he brought out an envelope. "The letter's written." Hood took the letter, examined it. So we desire to be part of the mythical fat clown's throng, he said to himself. "Won't there be a headline reading a trace of wry amusement. "Wouldn't a good, enterprising homeopape make front page use of a letter such as this?" Obviously Fletcher had not thought of that; he looked chagrined. "I suppose we had better get someone else to sign it," he admitted. "Some minor person attached to your staff." He added, "I could sign it myself." Handing him the letter back. Hood said, "Do so. It'll be interesting to see what response, if any, there is." Letters to the editor, he thought. Letters to a vast, complex, electronic organism buried deep in the ground, responsible to no one, guided solely by its own ruling circuits. How would it react to this external ratification of its delusion? Would the newspaper be snapped back to reality? It was, he thought, as if the newspaper, during these years of its enforced silence, had been dreaming, and now, reawakened, it had allowed portions of its former dreams to materialize in its pages along with its accurate, perceptive accounts of the actual situation. A blend of figments and sheer, stark reporting. Which ultimately would triumph? Soon, evidently, the unfolding story of Benny Cemoli would have the toga-wearing spellbinder in New York; it appeared that the march would succeed. And what then? How could this be squared with the enormous inter-system authority and power? Surely the homeopape, before long, would have to face the incongruity. One of the two accounts would have to cease... but Hood had an uneasy intuition that a homeopape which had dreamed for a decade would not readily give up its fantasies. Perhaps, he thought, the news rebuilding Earth, will fade from the pages of the Times, will be given a steadily decreasing coverage each day, farther back in the paper. And at last only the exploits of Benny Cemoli will remain. It was not a pleasant anticipation. It disturbed him deeply. As if, he thought, we are only real so long as the T imes writes about us; as if we were dependent for our existence on it. 'wenty-four hours later, in its regular edition, the Times printed Fletcher's letter. In print it struck Hood as flimsy and contrived -- surely the homeopape could not be taken in by it, and yet here it was. It had managed to pass each of the steps in the pape's processing. Dear Editor; Your coverage of the heroic inarch on the decadent plutocratic stronghold of New York City has fired my enthusiasm. How does an ordinary citizen become a part of this history in the making? Please inform me at once, as I am eager to join Cemoli and endure the rigors and triumphs with the others. Cordially, Rudolf Fletcher Beneath the letter, the homeopape had given an answer; Hood read it rapidly. Cemoli's stalwarts maintain a recruiting office in downtown New York; address, # Bleekman St., New York #. You might apply there, if the oliee haven't cracked down on these quasi-legal activities, in view of the current crisis. Touching a button on his desk. Hood opened the direct line to police headquarters. When he had the chief investigator, he said, "Dietrich, I'd like a team of your men; we have a trip to make and there may be difficulties." After a pause Dietrich said drily, "So it's not all noble reclamation after all. Well, we've already dispatched a man to keep an eye on the Bleekman Street address. I admire your letter scheme. It may have done the trick." He chuckled. Shortly, Hood and four blackuniformed Centaurian policemen flew by 'copter above the ruins of New York City, searching for the remains of what had once been Bleekman Street. By the use of a map they managed after half an hour to locate themselves. "There," the police captain in charge of the team said, pointing. "That would be it, that building used as a grocery store." The 'copter began to lower. It was a grocery store, all right. Hood saw no signs of political activity, no persons loitering, no flags or banners. And yet -- something ominous seemed to lie behind the commonplace scene below, the bins of vegetables parked out on the sidewalk, the shabby women in long cloth coats who stood picking over the winter potatoes, the elderly proprietor with his white cloth apron sweeping with his broom. It was too natural, too easy. It was too ordinary. "Shall we land?" the police captain asked him. "Yes," Hood said. "And be ready." The proprietor, seeing them land in the street before his grocery store, laid his broom carefully to one side and walked toward them. He was. Hood saw, a Greek. He had a heavy mustache and slightly wavy gray hair, and he gazed at them with innate caution, knowing at once that they did not intend him any good. Yet he had decided to greet them with civility: he was not afraid of them. "Gentlemen," the Greek grocery store owner said, bowing slightly. "What can I do for you?" His eyes roved speculatively over the black Centaurian police uniforms, but he showed no expression, no reaction. Hood said, "We've come to arrest a political agitator. You have nothing to be alarmed about." He started toward the grocery store; the team of police followed, their side arms drawn. "Political agitation here?" the Greek said. "Come on. It is impossible." He hurried after tliem, panting, alarmed now. "What have I done? Nothing at all; you can look around. Go ahead." He held open the door of the store, ushering them inside. "See right away for yourself." "That's what we intend to do," Hood said. He moved with agility, wasting no time on the conspicuous portions of the store; he strode directly on through. T'he back room lay ahead, the warehouse with its cartons of cans, cardboard boxes stacked up on every side. A young boy was busy making a stock inventory; he glanced up, startled, as they entered. Nothing here. Hood thought. The owner's son at work, that's all. Lifting the lid of a carton Hood peered inside. Cans of peaches. And beside that a crate of lettuce. He tore off a leaf, feeling futile and -- disappointed. The police captain said to him in a low voice, "Nothing, sir." "I see that," Hood said, irritably. A door to the right, led to a closet. Opening it, he saw brooms and a mop, a galvanized pail, boxes of detergents. And -- There were drops of paint on the floor. The closet, some time recently had been repainted when he bent down and scratched with his nail he found the paint still tacky. Look at this," he said, beckoning the police captain over. The Greek, nervously, said, 'What's the matter, gentlemen? You find something dirty and report to the board of health, is that it? Customers have complained -- tell me the truth, please. Yes, it is fresh paint. We keep everything spick and span. Isn t that in the public interest?" Running his hands across the wall of the broom closet, the police captain said quietly, "Mr. Hood, there was a doorway here. Sealed up now, very recently." He looked expectantly toward Hood, awaiting instructions. Hood said, "Let's go in." Turning to his subordinates, the police captain gave a series of orders. From the ship, equipment was dragged, through the store, to the closet; a controlled whine arose as the police began the task of cutting into the wood and plaster. Pale, the Greek said, "This is outrageous. I will sue." "Right," Hood agreed. "Take us to court." Already a portion of the wall had given way. It fell inward with a crash, and bits of rubble spilled down onto the floor. A white cloud of dust rose, then settled. It was not a large room which Hood saw in the glare of the police flashlights. Dusty, without windows, smelling stale and ancient... the room had not been inhabited for a long, long time, he realized as he warily entered. It was empty. Just an abandoned storeroom of some kind, its wooden walls scaling and dingy. Perhaps before the Misfortune the grocery store had possessed a larger inventory. More stocks had been available then, but now this room was not needed. Hood moved about, flashing his beam of light up to the ceiling and then down to the floor. Dead flies, entombed here... and, he saw, a few live ones which crept haltingly in the dust. "Remember," the police captain said, "it was boarded up just now, within the last three days. Or at least the painting was just now done, to be absolutely accurate about it." "These flies. Hood said. "They're not even dead yet." So it had not even been three days. Probably the boarding-up had been done yesterday. What had this room been used or? He turned to the Greek, who had come after them, still tense and pale, his dark eyes flickering rapidly with concern. This is a smart man. Hood realized. We will get little out of him. At the far end of the storeroom the police flashlights picked out a cabinet, empty shelves of bare, rough wood. Hood walked toward it. "Okay," the Greek said thickly, swallowing. "I admit it. We have kept bootleg gin stored here. We became scared. You Centaurians -- " He looked around at them all with fear. "You're not like our local bosses; we know them, they understand us. You! You can't be reached. But we have to make a living." He spread his hands, appealing to them. From behind the cabinet the edge of something protruded. Barely visible, it might never have been noticed. A paper which had fallen there, almost out of sight; it had slipped down farther and farther. Now Hood took hold of it and carefully drew it out. Back up the way it had come. The Greek shuddered. It was. Hood saw, a picture. A heavy, middle-aged man with loose jowls stained black by the grained beginnings of a beard, frowning, his lips set in defiance. A big man, wearing some kind of uniform. Once this picture had hung on the wall and people had come here and looked at it, paid respect to it. He knew who it was. This was Benny Cemoli, at the height of his political career, the leader glaring bitterly at the followers who had gathered here. So this was the man. No wonder the Times showed such alarm. To the Greek grocery store owner, Hood said, holding up the picture, "Tell me. Is this familiar to you?" "No, no," the Greek said. He wiped perspiration from his face with a large red handkerchief. "Certainly not." But obviously, it was. Hood said, "You're a follower of Cemoli, aren't you?" There was silence. "Take him along," Hood said to the police captain. "And let's start back." He walked from the room, carrying the picture with him. A s he spread the picture out on his desk. Hood thought. It isn't merely a fantasy of the Times. We know the truth now. The man is real and twenty-four hours ago this portrait of him hung on a wall, in plain sight. It would still be there this moits appearance. We frightened them. The Earth people have a lot to hide from us, and they know it. They are taking steps, rapidly and effectively, and we will be lucky if we can -- Interrupting his thoughts, Joan said, "Then the Bleekman Street address really was a meeting place for them. The pape was correct." "Yes," Hood said. "Where is he now?" I wish we knew. Hood thought. "Has Dietrich seen the picture yet?" "Not yet," Hood said. Joan said, "He was responsible for the war and Dietrich is going to find it out." "No one man," Hood said, "could solely be responsible." "But he figured largely," Joan said. "That's why theyr've gone to so much effort to eradicate all traces of his existence." Hood nodded. "Without the Times," she said, 'Svould we ever have guessed that such a political figure as Benny Cemoli existed? We owe a lot to the pape. They overlooked it or weren't able to get to it. Probably they were working in such haste; they couldn't think of everything, even in ten years. It must be hard to obiterate every surviving detail of a planet-wide political movement, especially when its leader managed to seize absolute power in the final phase." "Impossible to obliterate," Hood said. A closed-off storeroom in the back of a Greek grocery store... that was enough to tell us what we needed to know. Now Dietrich's men can do the rest. If Cemoli is alive they will eventually find him, and if he's dead -- they'll be hard to convince, knowing Dietrich. They'll never stop looking now. "One good thing about this," Joan said, "is that now a lot of innocent people will be off the hook. Dietrich won't go around prosecuting them. He'll be busy tracking down Cemoli." True, Hood thought. And that was important. The Centaurian police would be thoroughly occupied for a long time to come, and that was just as well for its ambitious program of reconstruction. If there had never been a Benny Cemoli, he thought suddenly, it would almost have been necessary to invent him. An odd thought... he wondered how it had happened to come to him. Again he examined the picture, trying to infer as much as possible about the man from this flat likeness. How had Cemoli sounded? Had he gained power through the spoken word, like so many demagogues before him. And his writing... Maybe some of it would turn up. Or even tap recordings of speeches he had made, the actual sound of the man. And perhaps video tapes as well. Eventually it would all come to light; it was only a question of time. And then we will be able to experience for ourselves how it was to live under the shadow of such a man, he realized. The line from Dietrich's office buzzed. He picked up the phone. "We have the Greek here," Dietrich said. "Under drugguidance he's made a number of admissions; you may be interested." "Yes," Hood said. D ietrich said, "He tells us he's been a follower for seventeen years, a real old-timer in the Movement. They met twice a week in the back of his grocery store, in the early days when the Movement was small and relatively powerless. That picture you have -- I haven't seen it, of course, but Stavros, our Greek gentleman, told me about it -- that portrait is actually obsolete in the sense that several more recent ones have been in vogue among the faithful for some time now. Stavros hung onto it for sentimental reasons. It reminded him of the old days. Later on when the Movement grew in strength, Cemoli stopped showing up at the grocery store, and the Greek lost out in any personal contact with him. He continued to be a loyal dues-paying member, but it became abstract for him." "What about the war?" Hood asked. "Shortly before the war Cemoli seized power in a coup here in North America, through a march on New York City, during a severe economic depresand he drew a good deal of support from them. He tried to solve the economic problems through an aggressive foreign policy -- attacked several Latin American republics which were in the sphere of influence of the Chinese. That seems to be it, but Stavros is a bit hazy about the big picture... we'll have to fill in more from other enthusiasts as we go along. From some of the younger ones. After all, this one is over seventy years old." Hood said, "You're not going to prosecute him, I hope." "Oh, no. He's simply a source of information. When he's told us all he has on his mind we'll let him go back to his onions and canned apple sauce. He's harmless." "Did Cemoli survive the war?" "Yes," Dietrich said. "But that was ten years ago. Stavros doesn't know if the man' is still alive now. Personally I think he is, and we'll go on that assumption until it's proved false. We have to." Hood thanked him and hung up. As he turned from the phone he heard, beneath him, the low, dull rumbling. The homeopape had once more started into life. "It's not a regular edition," Joan said, quickly consulting her wristwatch. "So it must be another extra. This is exciting, having it happen like this; I can't wait to read the front page." What has Benny Cemoli done now? Hood wondered. According to the Times, in its misphased chronicling of the man's epic... what stage, actually taking place years ago, has now been reached? Something climatic, deserving of an extra. It will be interesting, no doubt of that. The Times knows what is fit to print. He, too, could hardly wait. Tn downtown Oklahoma City, John LeConte put a coin infhe slot of the kiosk which the Times had long ago established there. The copy of the Times, latest extra slid out, and he picked it up and read the headline briefly, spending only a moment on it to verify the essentials. Then he crossed the sidewalk and stepped once more into the rear seat of his chauffeur-driven steam car. Mr. F all said circumspectly. Sir, here is the primary material, if you wish to make a word-by-word comparison." The secretary held out the folder, and LeConte accepted it. The car started up. Without being told, the chauffeur drove in the direction of Party headquarters. LeConte leaned back, lit a cigar and made himself comfortable. On his lap, the newspaper blazed up its enormous headlines. hostilities To his secretary, LeConte said, "My phone, please." "Yes sir." Mr. Fall handed him the portable field-phone. "But we're almost there. And it's always possible, if you don't mind my pointing it out, that they may have tapped us somewhere along the line." "They're busy in New York," LeConte said. "Among the ruins." In an area that hasn't mattered as long as I can remember, he said to himself. However, possibly Mr. Fall's advice was good; he decided to skip the phone call. "What do you think of this last item?" he asked his secretary, holding up the newspaper. "Very success-deserving," Mr. Fall said, nodding. Opening his briefcase, LeConte brought out a tattered, coverless textbook. It had been manufactured only an hour ago, and it was the next artifact to be planted for the invaders from Proxima Centaurus to discover. This was his own contribution, and he was personally quite proud of it. The book outlined in massive detail Cemoli's program of social change; the revolution depicted in language comprehensible to school children. "May I ask," Mr. Fall said, "if the Party hierarchy intends for them to discover a corpse?" "Eventually," LeConte said. "But that will be several months from now." Taking a pencil from his coat pocket he wrote in the tattered textbook, crudely, as if a pupil had done it; Or was that going too far? No, he decided. There would be resistance. Certainly of the spontaneous, school boy variety. He added : Peering over his shoulder, Mr. Fall said, "What does that a bombastic, threatening quality... I must admit I enjoyed it." And meanwhile, LeConte thought, there are no war-crimes trials. We who were leaders during the war, on Earth and on Mars, we who held responsible posts -- we are safe, at least for a while. And perhaps it will be forever. If our strategy continues to work. And if our tunnel to the cephalon of the homeopape, which took us five years to complete, isn't discovered. Or doesn't collapse. The steam car parked in the reserved space before Party headquarters; the chauffeur came around to open the door, and LeConte got leisurely out, stepping forth into the light of day, with no feeling of anxiety. He tossed his cigar into the gutter and then sauntered across the sidewalk, into the familiar mean?" "Cemoli promises oranges to the youth," LeConte explained. "Another empty boast which the revolution never fulfills. That was Stavros' idea... he being a grocer. A nice touch." Giving it, he thought, just that much more semblance of verisimilitude. It's the little touches that have done it. "Yesterday," Mr . Fall said, "when I was at Party headquarters, I heard an audio tape that had been made. Cemoli addressing the UN. It was uncanny; if you didn't know -- " "Who did they get to do it?" LeConte asked, wondering why he hadn't been in on it. "Some nightclub entertainer here in Oklahoma City. Rather obscure, of course. I believe he specializes in all sorts of characterizations. The fellow gave it Sleep now, little one, fortunate child. (Summer follow spring and winter follow fall.) When you were born the kind gods smiled. Sleep, perfect little one, superior to all. Some have three eyes and some have one. (Dawn follow dark and dark follow day.) Some have many legs and others have none; some live a little while and then waste away. Some are hair covered, head to toe. (War follow hate and the bomb follow after.) Some are giants and some never grow. Sleep, perfect little one, to your mother's laughter. Some eat flesh and some eat grasses. (Men still love and still get married.) Tentacled lads and two headed lasses lie in the alley-ways, yet unburied. Sleep now, little one, fortunate child. (Summer follow spring and winter follow fall.) When you were born the kind gods smiled. Sleep, little one, who will never wake at all. Sheri S. Eberhart The man named Sam the Mosk, this milennium's Stentor, who gossips like an auctioneer, whose impact (if not influence) on fandom (if not science fiction) is without comparison ("He stamped about the Convention," wrote a fan, "dropping his own name,") has produced a book which is an ingroup landmark, and in many a sequence can be accused not only with indefatigability but with downright scholarship. On the theory that it is pointless to apply unguents until we have a patient, leave us first lay about us. Sam Moskowitz begins the book with the world's knobbiest definition of science fiction ("... a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it disbelief' on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy") and ends with a more-in-sorrow-thanin-anger implication that sf has lost direction and ceased to evolve: "Suave writing (has) diluted most of the "sense of wonder" in science fiction. The 'documentary,' too close to the present to allow for any imagination, (has) rinsed out most of what remained." In between is prose with the delicacy of a Caterpillar D-# -- no insult, really, for we have much respect for Mr. Caterpillars' products. The above quotes and citations are legitimate examples of a man's legitimate opinions. What makes one carp a little is the air of positiveness with which they are presented. One would be happier if, say, the words In my opinion... were run as a sort of subtitle on the dedication page -- a good position for it, at that, for there's no question that the man is dedicated to just that. And it is unfair to pick at a work of scholarship as if scholarship should have conferred grace, just as it is unfair to pick at a graceful work for its lack of scholarship. If the criterion is : did the author achieve his aims? then on the one hand Shakespeare did, for all his lack of science, and so did Moskowitz, for all his lack of poetry. And here end the kicks. The kudos is heartfelt and multifarious. One could not want a more detailed and fascinating accoimt of the birth and growth of what is certainly one of the most interesting forms of expression ever to strike this or any other planet. From the scientific dreams of Cyrano to the beauty of Dejah Thoris, from the influence of the legendary Golem on robot stories to the battle of the behemoths, wherein Otis Adelbert Kline took on Edgar Rice Burroughs, with epics as weapons: from the very well-written exposition of M. P. Shiel's truly vicious anti-Semitism to the extraordinary career of the almost-unknown Lu Senarens, author of most of the Frank Reade, Jr. series -- there is hardly a page of this remarkable book which will not yield you an astonishment, a revelation or at the very least as well, whaddaye know!" Some of the astonishments involve names that you may never have associated with science fiction before -- FitzJames O'Brien, for one, and Edward Everett Hale. And some of the examinations -- for example, that of Philip Wylie, and of Olaf Stapledon -- have a style and depth quite transcending all criticism of ham-handedness. In view of our remarks above concerning a man's right to his own choices and conclusions, what follows is not a complaint. We must, however, record our disappointment in seeing no mention of certain writers who have been, personally, profoimdly influential -- so much so that it would be hard for us (again, personally) to imagine science fiction without them. They are Budrys, Shute, Tenn, Vonnegut, Vercors and Tom Godwin, each of whom has inspired and instructed your correspondent. But certainly every writer in the field could compose a similar list, and it would be no discredit to Mr. Moskowitz, for each of us has a different opinion (sometimes differing a little, sometimes drastically) of what science fiction is. In sum, no one has surveyed the roots of sf as well as Mr, M. ; probably no one ever will; prossibly, no one else can. The book is published by World, costs # (and is worth it) has # pages and includes a pretty good index. Ask for Explorers oi the Infinite, Shapers of Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz. I n The World of Flying Saucers (Doubleday), Donald H. IVenzel and Lyle G. Boyd have gone to great lengths to track down all the surviving evidence "sighting" of the period of the Great Saucer Craze. There is no doubt that at this time a number of people saw things they couldn't account for and, in all good faith, attempted to explain them in terms of extra-terrestrial visitors. There is even less doubt that in the wake of these early sightings there sprang up a rank growth of lunatics and publicityhounds, buck-hustlers and frauds who by their clamor and obvious unreliability discredited not only their own claims but those of all the others. Dr. Menzel and Mrs. Boyd have patiently gone over every single case, preposterous or not, and they, present their findings here, without passion but with candor and touches of wit. What it all comes down to is that the case for flying saucers rests mostly on the words of observers describing what they saw -- or thought they saw, or claimed to see -- buttressed to some degree by a few smudged photographs and a scattering of physical objects described by their discoverers as of off-Earth origin. Many exhibits in each category are demonstrably fakes. The best that can be said of the remaining photographs and specimens is that they are ambiguous. As to the eyewitness reports, there are many by persons whose statements deserve careful attention; but in essentially every such case the authors have been able to show the existence, either as a matter of record or as at least a reasonable probability, of some other conspicuous phenomenon -- star, planet, cloud, plane, weather ballon or optical effect -- which might easily have the fact that an observer might have been mistaken is a long way from proof that he was mistaken. The authors point out, however, that if these other phenomena are not what the sighters saw, it is at least interesting that they didn't mention these things when they were in the very part of the sky where the sighters reported "unidentified" objects. The authors .conclude, rather regretfully, that while there are grounds for believing that intelligent life may exist off-Earth and may at any moment come calling on us, "No evidence yet found indicates such visits have begun." And so we end an age... In Spectrum II (Harcourt, Brace  World), Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest put together an anthology of familiar but first-rate stories by Wyman Guin, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and others, and present them with a thoughtful introduction berating those critics who reflexively damn all science fiction. What they say about these critics is well said, but they say it twice; the first time is as a two-line rubric on the dedication page of the volume: "S's no good," they bellow till we're deaf. "But this looks good." "Well, then, it's not sf." When we published Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters here a year or so ago, it was received with considerable delight, not only for its own considerable merits but because of the fine Gaughan illustrations that adorned it. Now in book form (Ace), the publishers have kept Gaughan on to do its cover, which is again a handsome job. The story remains what it was: one of the best sf stories to appear an # Twhere in the past half-dozen years. This is a double volume: the other half is an earlier, but well worthwhile, Vance sciencefiction adventure story called The Five Gold Bands... Readers of our companion magazine. If, will be pleased by another new Ace book, or at least by half of it: six of Keith Laumer's Retief stories, collected under the title of Envoy to New Worlds. The other half of the book is Flight from Yesterday, by Robsome Atlanteans to the #th century for assorted adventures, with mixed effect. -- FP There's nothing wrong with dying -- it just hasn't ever had the proper saies pitch! Tt all began when the new bookkeeping machine of a large Midwestern coffin manufacturer slipped a cog, or blew a transistor, or something. It was fantastic that the error -- one of two decimal places -- should enjoy a straight run of okays, human and mechanical, clear down the line; but when the figures clacked out at the last clackingout station, there it was. The figures were now sacred; immutable; and it is doubtful whether the President of the concern or the Chairman of the Board would have dared question them -- even if either of those two gentlemen had been in town. As for the Advertising Manager, the last thing he wanted to do was question them. He carried them (they were the budget for the coming fiscal year) into his office, staggering a little on the way, and dropped dazedly into his chair. They showed the budget for his own department as exactly one hundred times what he'd been expecting. That is to say, fifty times what he'd put in for. When the initial shock began to wear off, his face assumed an expression of intense thought. In about five minutes he leaped from his chair, dashed out of the office with a shouted syllable or two for his secretary, and got his car out of the parking lot. At home, he tossed clothes into a travelling bag and barged toward the door, giving his wife a quick kiss and an equally quick explanation. He didn't bother to call the airport. He meant to be on the next plane east, and no nonsense about it... TXrith one thing and another,   the economy hadn't been exactly in overdrive that year, and predictions for the Christmas season were gloomy. Early retail figures bore them out. Gift buying dribbled along feebly imtil Thanksgiving, despite brave speeches by the Administration. The holiday passed more in selfpity than in thankfulness among owners of gift-oriented businesses. Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving, the coffin ads struck. Struck may be too mild a word. People on the streets saw feverishly-working crews (at holiday rates!)slapping up posters on billboards. The first poster was a dilly. A toothy and toothsome young woman leaned over a coffin she'd been unwrapping. She smiled as if she'd just received overtures of matrimony aire. There was a Christmas tree in the background, and the coffin was appropriately wrapped. So was she. She looked as if had just gotten out of bed, or were ready to get into it. For amorous young men, and some not so young, the message was plain. The motto, "The Gift That Will Last More Than a Lifetime". seemed hardly to the point. Those at home were assailed on TV with a variety of bright and clever skits of the same import. Some of them hinted that, if the young lady's gratitude were really precipitous, and the bedroom too far away, the coffin might be comfy. Of course the more settled elements of the population were not neglected. For the older married man, there was a blow directly between the eyes: "Do You Want Your Widow to Be HalfSafe?" And, for the spinster without immediate hopes, " Dreamt I Was Caught Dead Without My Virginform Casket!". Newspapers, magazines and every other medium added to the assault, never letting it cool. It was the most horrendous campaign, for sheer concentration, that had ever battered at the public mind. The public reeled, blinked, shook its head to clear it, gawked, and rushed out to buy. C 'ihristmas was not going to  be a failure after all. Department store managers who had, grudgingly and under strong sales pressure, made space for a single coffin somewhere at the rear of the store, now rushed to the telephones like touts with a direct pronouncement from a horse. Everyone who possibly could got into the act. Grocery supermarkets put in casket departments. The Association of Pharmaceutical Retailers, who felt they had some claim to priority, tried to get court injunctions to keep caskets out of service stations, but were unsuccessful because the judges were all out buying caskets. Beauty parlors showed real ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets clogged with delivery trucks, rented trailers, and whatever else could haul a coffin. The Stock Market went completely mad. Strikes were declared and settled within hours. Congress was called into session early. The President got authority to ration lumber and other materials suddenly in starvationshort supply. State laws were passed against cremation, under heavy lobby pressure. A new racket, called boxjacking, blossomed overnight. The Advertising Manager who had put the thing over had been fighting with all the formidable weapons o( his breed to make his plant managers build up a stockpile. They had, but it went like a toupee in a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping, but by Wednesday after Thanksgiving they, along with the original one, were on a twenty-four hour, seven-day basis. Still only a fraction of the demand could be met. Jet passenger planes were stripped of their seats, supplied with Yankee gold, and sent to plunder the world of its coffins. It might be supposed that Christmas goods other than caskets would take a bad dumping. That was not so. Such was the upsurge of prosperity, and such was the shortage of coffins, that nearly everything -- with a few exceptions -- enjoyed the biggest season on record. On Christmas Eve the frenzy slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas morning there were still optimists out prowling the empty stores. The nation sat down to breathe. Mostly it sat on coffins, because there wasn't space in the living rooms for any other furniture. There was hardly an individual in the United States who didn't have, in case of sudden sharp pains in the chest, several boxes to choose from. As for the rest of the world, it had better not die just now or it would be literally a case of dust to dust. O f course everyone expected a doozy of a slump after Christmas. But our Advertising Manager, who by now was of course Sales Manager and First Vice President also, wasn't settling for any boom-and-bust. He'd been a frustrated victim of his choice of industries for so many years that now, with his teeth in something, he was going to give it the old bite. He gave people a short breathing spell to arrange their coffin payments and move the presents out of the front rooms. Then, late in January, his new campaign came down like a hundred-megatonner. Within a week, everyone saw quite clearly that his Christmas models were now obsolete. The coffin became the new status symbol. The auto industry was of course demolished. Even people who had enough money to buy a new car weren't going to trade in the old one and let the new one stand out in the rain. The garages were full of coffins. Petroleum went along with Autos. (Though there were those who whispered knowingly that the same people merely moved over into the new industry. It was noticeable that the center of it became Detroit.) A few trucks and buses were still being built, but that was all. Some of the new caskets were true works of art. Others -- well, there was variety. Compact models appeared, in which the occupant's feet were .to be doubled up alongside his ears. One manufacturer pushed a circular model, claiming that by all the laws of nature the foetal position was the only right one. At the other extreme were virtual houses, ornate and lavishly equipped. Possibly the largest of all was the "Togetherness" model, triangular, with graduated recesses for Father, Mother, eight children (plus two playmates), and, in the far corner beyond the baby, the cat. The slump was over. Still, economists swore that the new boom couldn't last either. They reckoned without the Advertising Manager, whose eyes gleamed brighter all the time. People already had coffins, which they polished and kept on display, sometimes in the new "Coffinports" being added to houses. The Advertising Manager's reasoning was direct and to the point. He must get people to use the coffins; and now he had all the money to work with that he could use. The new note was woven in so gradually that it is not easy to put a finger on any one ad and say, "It began here." One of the first was surely the widely-printed one showing a tattooed, smiling young man with his chin thrust out manfully, lying in a coffin. He was rugged-looking and likable (not too rugged for the spindly-limbed to identify with) and he oozed, even though obviously dead, virility at every pore. He was probably the finestlooking corpse since Richard the Lion-Hearted. Neither must one overlook the singing commercials. Possibly the catchiest of these, a really cute little thing, was achieved by jazzing up the Funeral March. It started gradually, and it was all so un-violent that few saw it as suicide. Teen-agers began having "Popping-off parties". Some of their elders protested a little, but adults were taking it up too. The tired, the unappreciated, the ill and the heavy-laden lay down in growing numbers and expired. A black market in poisons operated for a little while, but soon pinched out. Such was the pressure of persuasion that few needed artificial aids. The boxes were very comfortable. People just closed their eyes and exited smiling. The Beatniks, who had their own models of coffin -- mouldy, scroungy, and without lids, since the Beatniks insisted on being seen -- placed their boxes on the Grant Avenue in San Francisco. They died with highly intellectual expressions, and eventually were washed by the gentle rain. Of course there were voices shouting calamity. When aren't there? But in the long run, and not a very long one at that, they availed naught. T t isn't hard to imagine the reactions of the rest of the world. So let us imagine a few. The Communist Block immedately gave its Stamp of Disapproval, denouncing the movement as a filthy Capitalist Imperialist Pig plot. Red China, which had been squabbling with Russia for some time about a matter of method, screamed for immediate war. Russia exposed this as patent stupidity, saying that if the Capitalists wanted to die, warring upon them would only help them. China surreptitiously tried out the thing as an answer to excess population, and found it good. It also appealed to the well-known melancholy facet of Russian nature. Besides, after pondering for several days, the Red Bloc decided it could not affort to fall behind in anything, so it started its own program, explaining with much logic how it differed. An elderly British philosopher endorsed the movement, on the grounds that a temporary setback in Evolution was preferable to facing up to anything. The Free Bloc, the Red Bloc, the Neutral Bloc and such scraps as had been too obtuse to find themselves a Bloc were drawn into the whirlpool in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways. In less than two years the world was rid of most of what had been bedeviling it. Oddly enough, the country where the movement began was the last to succumb completely. Or perhaps it is not so odd. Coffin-maker to the world, the American casket industry had by now almost completely automated box-making and gravedigging, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements; there still remained the jobs of management and distribution. The President of General Mortuary, an ebullient fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well. "As long as I have a single prospective customer, and a single Stockholder," he said, mangling a stogie and beetling his brows at the one reporter who'd showed up for the press conference, "#I try to put him in a coffin so I can pay him a dividend." T?inally, though, a man who thought he must be the last living human, wandered contentedly about the city of Denver looking for the coffin he liked best. He settled at last upon a rich mahogany number with platinum trimmings, an Automatic Self-Adjusting Cadaver-contour Innerspring Wearever-Plastic-Covered Mattress with a built in bar. He climbed in, drew himself a generous slug of fine Scotch, giggled as the mattress prodded him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed in solid comfort. Soft music played as the lid closed itself. From a building nearby a turkey-buzzard swooped down, cawing in raucous anger because it had let its attention wander for a moment. It was too late. It clawed screaming at the solid cover, hissed in frustration and finally gave up. It flapped into the air begin, still grumbling It was tired of living on dead small rodents and coyotes. It thought it would take a swing over to Los Angeles, where the pickings yere pretty good. As it moved westward over parched hills, it espied two black dots a few miles to its left. It circled over for a closer look, then grunted and went on its way. It had seen them before. The old prospector and his burro had been in the mountains for so long the buzzard had concluded they didn't know how to die. The prospector, whose name was Adams, trudged behind his burro toward the buildings that shimmered in the heat, humming to himself now and then or addressing some remark to the beast. When he reached the outskirts of Denver he realized something was amisS. He stood and gazed at the quiet scene. Nothing moved except some skinny packrats and a few sparrows foraging for grain among the unburied coffins. "Tarnation!" he said to the burro. "Martians?" A half-buried piece of newspaper fluttered in the breeze. He walked forward slowly and picked it up. It told him enough so that he understood. "They're gone, Evie," he said to the burro, "all gone." He put his arm affectionately around her neck. "I reckon it's up to me and you agin. We got to start all over." He stood back and gazed at her with mild reproach. "I shore hope they don't favor your side of the house so much      Next issue, naturally, contains the conclusion of Jack Vance's The Star King, about which it is only necessary to say that all the thrill and color of the first half, herein, is amply sustained and brought to an exciting climax in the second. There's a certain temptation to rest on that, because if you won't be around to see how The Star King comes out, what can we tell you to change your mind? But, of course, there's more. Lots more -- and, we think, a great deal that you'll find just as rewarding as Vance. There is, for example, the lead novelette. Grandmother Earth, by that Old Reliable, J. T. McIntosh. There's a novelette by Philip K. Dick called Oh! to be a Blobel which has to deal with certain unanticipated problems of the aftermath of future interplanetary wars. (Talk about disabled veterans! In Dick's view, the quadrapelgics and other victims of minor-league events like World War II have nothing to worry about... ) And, of course, there'll be Willy Ley's usual contribution, short stories, features and all... pxewforth had almost most lost the habit of looking from windows. The train which took him to the city every morning passed through a country in the terminal stages of a long war of self-destruction. Whatever had been burned, botched, poisoned or exhausted in that struggle Lad been filled along the right-of-way, among drifts of soot and ground-mists of sulphurous smoke and chemical flatulence, to form a long tedious mural -- a parody of cloudborne Asiatic hills, precipitous and always so close to the tracks that their tops could not be seen. haunted the dying alleys. Madness stalked the wide streets. And what lay at the city's heart? This was almost merciful, considering what had been done to the sky. When the train did not sneak between hills of slag, cinders, rubbish, garbage, dross and the bloody brown carrion of broken machinery, it shot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbroken barriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaring tunnels full of grimy light and grubby air. There was one inconsistancy in this scheme of things : Just as the train emerged from a deep valley of slag-hills and swung into a long curve, passengers on the left side had a panoramic view of the city -- a frozen scene of battle between geometrical monsters, made remote and obscure by the dust of a thousand thousand merely human struggles, too small to be visible from the crusty windows of the train by the merely human eye. They had about one second in which to absorb this vision of corporate purpose. Then they were plunging into a final stretch of tunnel to the center of the city itself, where no surface was ever more than fifteen paces away and where there were no horizons at all. Dewforth was excited by this view even though it reached him in a fragmentary and subliminal way. Day after day he told himself that he would have all his faculties at the ready before the train swung into the curve. But morning after morning he was still emerging from the stale fumes of the preceding night's beer, or he allowed himself to be hypnotized by the sound of the wheels or fascinated by the jiggling of another passenger's earlobe at that critical moment. The train had always entered the clangorous colon of the city before this resolve could crystallize in his mind, and he was left with an impression which lay somewhere in the scale of reality between the after-image of a light bulb and the morning memory of a fever-dream. He could never have described the scene except in loose generalities about buildings of contrasting height and unemphatic color. rrhe single memorable feature of the panorama, looming above the rest, was not even a building. It eluded all familiar categories. It was, like the other components of the picture, rectangular; but it was a displaced rectangle. A shining thread of morning sky could be seen beneath it. It was only logical to suppose that it stood on legs of some kind -- a complicated process of girders. The upper part appeared to be made of corrugated metal, but, as with the matter of the legs, it was impossible to separate what was actually seen and what was merely inferred. The only other structures Dewforth had seen which resembled it at all were water towers and shipyard cranes, but these had been mere toys compared with the thing that hovered over the center of the city. Its purpose could not be guessed, but what disturbed Dewforth more was the fact that he could not be sure that it existed. He was a precision draftsman, more or less resigned to deteriorating eyesight, and his usual abstracted state of mind during that segment of his day had also to be considered. He hoped that someone else would mention the structure. Once -- only once -- a man sitting on the opposite seat had made a comment which could have applied to it. "It turned," he said, just as the tunnel swallowed the train. Dewforth would have liked to ask the other passenger what he had meant. Had he seen the same thing? Had he seen anything at all? And what had he meant by "turned"? But he had not asked. The other had been not merely forbidding, not merely repugnant, but alternately forbidding and repugnant -- in daylight, an impeccable burgher sitting tall and righteous under a tall hat; in tunnels, a hunchbacked gargoyle picking its nose in the fickle darkness. If Dewforth had been the only passenger on the train, or indeed the last man in the world, he could not have been more alone with his wonder. You did not ask whimsical questions of strangers nowadays. You did not ask many questions of friends. All uncertainties incubated in private darkness; they lived and grew and even put forth new appendages. Not a building. Not a water tank. Not a crane. Perhaps it was only an illusion. Illusion or not, it wanted a name so that it might be at least catalogued in his own mind. Therefore, on a morning since forgotten and for reasons never closely examined, he decided to call it The Control Tower. II '"There was an unholy Friday restlessness upon Dewforth. To make matters worse, it was the last Friday in March. Logically, perhaps, this should not have made any difference because Dewforth worked in one of a number of identical windowless rooms in a building from which all natural rhythms had been rigorously excluded. From skylights high in the ceilings of the drafting rooms came a light which had been pasteurized and was timeless. It could have been artificial. His work provided no refuge for his thought. It was demanding, but only mechanically so. Strictly speaking, he did not know what he was doing. No one did, apparently. He did not have the satisfaction of knowing that what he did was real. He filled large sheets of plastic with tracings of intricate, interconnected schematic hieroglyphs. But he knew that in another place a template would be laid over his work. An irregular portion like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle would be cut out of it and the rest, perhaps more than half of his work, would be destroyed. It was even possible that all of it was destroyed. Dewforth worked for a firm which made components. Of what, no one said, no one asked. Components, Inc., the firm was called. He knew that the finished products were small, heavy and very complicated. Their names were mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules. Some said that these components performed no functions. Others said that they worked, but their operations corresponded to no known human need. It was known that some of the finished products themselves were destroyed. Some maintained that they were dissolved in vats of hydrofluoric acid. Others argued that they were encased in cement, then taken out to sea in speedboats on moonless nights and jettisoned. The favorite rumor was that the entire firm was a decoy to bewilder agents of foreign powers and pre-empt their espionage efforts. There was neither proof of this nor evidence to the contrary. The penalty for circulating this last rumor was immediate dismissal with prejudice. In another place, another time, Dewforth might have spread the burden of his mood by confiding in other workers, but not under the circumstances so painstakingly arranged by Components, Inc. in the interest of what was called The Interloathing Index, or #. #. It was an axiom of modern industry that a high #. #, meant high productivity and also tighter security. The latter was as much the measure of the importance of an industry as what it made or how much. That there was design in the egg-box compartmentation of workspaces, for example, was obvious enough. Less overt were the lengths to which Personnel had gone to discourage the exchange of information, or confidences, among employees. Under the guise of aptitude testing, the psychologists had been able to select and organize teams consisting entirely of mutually incompatible individuals. So well had they succeeded that most workers could barely stand the sight of one another, and so were driven back upon themselves and their work. Only by practicing an almost egg-like self-containment could a draftsman or other worker hope to get through the day without open conflict and disaster. Latent antipathies among workers were further intensified by means of the Annual Proficiency Competitions. At the conclusion of these tests all employees save two were given Proficiency Stars. Of the remaining two, one was invariably a person who had shown signs of becoming too popular among his fellows. He was given a Leadership Star, and because an affable man was usually less rather than more efficient that the rest, this made of him a lonely little airbubble in a sea of resentment. The second of the two workers was always discharged. Thus a dash of anxiety was added to the proceedings. "The visible manifestations of high #. #, were hectic color, a characteristic ferocity of eye and throbbing jaw-hinges. Often the jaw-hinges of an entire team would be pulsating at once, sometimes even in unison. This spectacle emanated an overwhelming feeling of earnestness and purpose. Executives were fond of pointing out this phenomenon to visiting dignitaries. "Observe their jaw-hinges," they would say. Another factor which isolated employees from one another was the peculiarly virulent form of halitosis which afflicted all workers without exception. The company cafeteria was the source of this malady. Thus, if Dewforth had been the only employee in that vast complex of buildings, or in the world, he could not have been restlessness. Add to this the fact that it had been his misfortime to win the Leadership Star in the Proficiency Competitions only three days earlier. He did not have to trace the bitter stream of his mood any farther back than that to find the bilesource. The object of the contest had been to draw a single line # ## inches long and ## of an inch thick, a feat which is starkly simple in conception but only theoretically feasible. The draftsmen had spent hours preparing the surfaces of paper, straining ink through filters, honing drawing pens with emery and polishing them with rouge, drawing practice lines and scrutinizing them with powerful bench microscopes. They did Balinese finger exercises, Chinese body coordination exercises, Hindu breathing exercises and Tibetan spiritual calisthenics to dispel their incipient shakes. When the great moment came, a solemn little group of executives entered the drafting room and stood about in attitudes of grave ceremonial courtesy. The draftsmen then drew their lines. When it was over, the judges examined and graded the lines and the scores were announced by Mr. Shrank, the foreman. The better scores prompted little flutters of restrained applause from the executives. This moist and muted sound had reminded Dewforth of a hippopotamus venting its wind under water, and in a moment of thoughtless exhilaration he had even thought of sharing this bizarre notion with his wife. He never did so, as it happened. X'hy had he ever told his '  wife about that wretched Leadership Star? Her laughter persisted through his dreams, or through his dream. He only had one. In this dream she was always a massive machine which ingested songbirds between steel rollers and stamped them into pipe-flange gaskets at a rate of one hundred and twenty per minute. And the prize-winning line he had drawn -- it revealed its true nature in the perspective of days. There was no mistaking what it was. It was The Abyss. It could widen and it could engulf. How much light would a Leadership Star cast in that bottomless inkiness? Acute restless had the effect of sending Dewforth frequently to the lavatory, not so much for physiological reasons as because there was no other place to go and he had to go somewhere when the white walls of the drafting room threatened to crush him. He went as often as he thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. After several visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the lavatory, and in the sound -- the undifferentiated background sound which came from nowhere. Nowhere? It came through a window. He had been staring at a window -- probably the only one in the building -- and it had failed to register on his mind at the time because he had not expected it to be there. It was not part of the habitual pattern. He had seen a window. He had, moreover, looked through a window. What had he seen? He thought about this, and at the same time he thought about being sick -- administratively sick. He succeeded in working up a palpable fever and a windy yawning beneath the diaphragm. Before taking any action he would have to confirm what he had seen through the window of the lavatory. On his last trip to the lavatory he climbed up onto the slippery washbasin and looked through the high window. His position there would be impossible to explain, of course, if anyone should come in. He was past caring about that. The unpasteurized air made him a little drunk and the sound -- the immense distant sighing groan like a giant's whispper -- filled his brain. It made him want to expand to meet it somehow. Only one immense skeleton foot was visible, but there was no question about exactly what it was. No conventional structure would curve upward in that way. There was no point of reference by which to determine how far away it was, and the air was blue with haze, giving everything an appearance of remoteness and of unreality. He had never seen the city from that angle before, but if what he saw was what he thought it was, how could it have been so close without his knowing about it before this time? It was a thing which belonged to vast distances -- spatial distances and other kinds of disance as well. Now it was close, or he was closer to it than he had ever imagined he would be in his life. It was accessible. Dewforth left at half past three when the somnolence of afternoon was heaviest on the heads of the other draftsmen. He did not speak to Mr. Shrank about it. He did not clear with Miss Plock in the dispensary, nor with Mr. Fert in Personnel, nor with Miss Yurt in Wage Readjustment, nor with Miss Bort in Sick Leave Subdivision, nor with Miss Vibe in Special Problems, nor with Mr. Pfister in Sick Claims, nor with Miss Grope in Employee Grievances, nor with Miss Rupnick in Company Grievances, nor with Miss Guggward in Allowance Reductions, nor with Mr. Droon in Privilege Curtailment, nor with Miss Tremulo in Psychological Counseling, nor with Dr. Schreck in Spiritual Aid Subdiv. He did not even trouble to see Miss Nosemilker who kept the time book. He just left. Ill ' the hulking oyster-eyed man in the burlap overcoat. The bum's eyes cleared long enough for him to peer into Dewforth's eyes in order to see if his madness was worth sharing, then they filmed over again as he decided that it was not. Dewforth crowded past him and walked on. He was making real progress. He had at last found someone who acknowledged that there was something up there above eye-level. The others -- old lost children, figures of scab and grime -- had been unaware of anything but inner cavities of craving and fear above the sidewalk firmament of trodden gum disks, sputum stars and the ends of twice-smoked cigarettes. He could not have lost sight of the Control Tower. He had never realized what streets were. Before that time he had known a single well policed block between the station and his place of work. He still thought of streets as more or less open strips along which people moved, north or south, east or west, purposefully from Point A to Point B with perhaps one right-angle turn, two at the most, pausing only to tip hats or look into shop windows. Now it developed that streets were sewers, battlegrounds, lairs, abattoirs, cesspools, lazarettes, midways of deformity and brawling markets where nightmares and spirochetes were sold. The city had not less than three dimensions. He had not been fully prepared for the implications of this, either. Existence in three dimensions does not necessarily mean three-dimensional vision. The sky was not visible through the maze of girders, stairways and catwalks overhead. Dewforth tried to orient himself by the direction of shadows, but this was misleading. It was the heart of the shadow district, and the play of shadows was the order of things. The rules were the rules of phantoms. Flesh lived there in subjection. Long miscegenation with shadow had made phantoms of them all and endowed all shadows with the menace of the real. Everything was equivocal as hell. Dewforth wandered in a cavern without walls. He saw bulky overcoats with defeated hats or defeated heads; long-legged dwarfs in black leather jackets; willowy chorus-boys with platinum ringlets, waiting in their niches for the gift of violence; scuttling trolls with horse-blanket jackets and alpine hats; deposed patriarchs under the small shelter of black derbies, hiding from persecution behind the Spanish moss of consolidated beards; headless things and thingless heads, importuning, threatening, watching or just standing there, those that were able. In his search for a way out of the darkness, he was obliged to turn back time and again. If gangs of shadows fought with knives at the end of a street which had at first looked promising, what business had shadows cursing or screaming or bleeding? If the madman who enjoined the mob to fight in the service of nothingness was only a mouse dancing on a summit of garbage, why did they cheer? At the end of still another street, a mass rape may not have been in progress; the participants I many not have waited sullenly j in a long line; a macrocephalic gnome in a plaid suit may not ! actually have moved up and down the line selling tickets at i a reduced rate and explaining that the outrage had been in pro! gress since the preceding Christmas Eve; but why was the un' reality so consistant? And if no one was in fact being , ravaged, why did everyone look I as though they had been? A ' #I these spectacle tested Dewforth's courage, but they dimmed his resolve not at all. At last he found a deserted street. He followed it and he was rewarded with encouraging signs. There was more birdlime underfoot, and the inhuman yammering of the streets was replaced with echoing silence, and that silence was invaded by the sound -- the voice of the colossus, remote and terrible. Dewforth asked directions again, this time of a pear-shaped figure which may or may not have had legs and which sat in the mouth of an iron cave and smoked what appeared to be a twist of hemp. "Where..." Dewforth began. "Nobody goes up there," the hempsmoker answered without looking up at him. "Where do they come down, then," asked Dewforth, trying a new approach but with little hope. There was a long pause. The pear-shaped man didn't have arms either, Dewforth noticed. Hands, but no arms. "Well now, some got it, some ain't," he said. "How's that?" asked Dewforth. The pear blew out a cloud of smoke, sulphurous, with viscous strings through it. "I knowed a guy caught it from a drinking glass once." This dialogue might have gone on much longer if Dewforth had not just then noticed that his noninformer was sitting on the bottom step of a long, dark stairway which led up and up into a jungle of lacy girders and shadows above them. He did not bother kicking the pear-shaped man. He stepped over him and ran up the stairs two at a time. His footsteps rang on the iron stairs and carried through the structure. It sounded like the bells of a sunken cathedral ringing in the tide. On the second level there was more light and more air. It was colder. There were loiterers on the second level too, but these were far from menacing. They clung to things and pressed themselves against things, and they stared with unfocused eyes at something which had been there before but was not there now. These men seemed to be wearing greasy fezzes and dark, baggy long underwear with buttons and vestigial lapels. As he approached them, Dewforth saw that the fezzes were actually felt hats with the brims atrophied or rotted away, and the funereal long-johns were the weatherbeaten remains of those suits which are designed for Young Men On The Way Up. As though by tacit agreement of long standing, these men did not look directly at Dewforth as he passed, nor he at them. There was no difficulty about finding a stairway to the next level, but there was a rusty chain across the entrance. Dewforth's foot caught in this chain as he stepped over it, and it shattered like a chain of stale pretzels. There were no more people beyond the second level -- none that could be seen. He soon lost count of levels. Stairs became narrower and more heavily encrusted with birdlime and rust as he ascended. In some places there were long sweeping ramps which led to blind sacs or reached out unsupported into space, and he was forced to retrace his steps. At no time did he look down, even when it was possible. There were usually high barriers along the platforms and ramps. These were covered with layers of old advertising posters which peeled and were tom by the wind, revealing still more ancient posters underneath. They seemed to have grown there by themselves like lichen. It seemed entirely reasonable to Dewforth that the writing on the older posters underneath was runic or demotic and the faces were ochre-stained skulls, but his impulse was to hurry past and not study them too closely.  t last he found a long steepladder running up the outside of one of the legs of the Control Tower. Only huge slowly circling birds and low-flying douds came between him and the underside of the control house at the top of the structure. Before beginning the climb he admonished himself not to look down and not to ponder what he was doing. In order to keep climbing, however, he had to keep admonishing himself, thereby only reminding himself to look down and to ponder, to the detriment of his equilibrium and confidence. Was it vertigo, or did the ladder or the Tower itself sway in the singing wind? Who was to say that the earth itself did not heave like fermenting mash? Was any object inherently more solid than any other object? What was "stability"? When he looked down at the city he could not pick out the building in which he had worked. There was nothing in any feature of the landscape. Nothing. If his position, clinging to a girder high above the city, made no sense, it did not make less sense than the position of a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands of other blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him to the drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room -- not so much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed to itself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled hia navel, a poignant reminder of disconnectedness. An eagle glided close and screamed at him. It was like the laughter of his wife. He resumed his climb, looking down no more. The last few yards of the climb were the worst. Some bolts holding the ladder in place were shapeless little masses of rust. The eleventh rung from the top broke under his weight, and for the last ten steps he had to lighten his body by means of a technique of autosuggestion and willprojection which he invented on the spot, demonstrating what could be done under pressure of extreme necessity. He could see above his head a tiny balcony not more than a yard square, at which the ladder terminated. The floor of this balcony appeared to be made of long, weatherbeaten cigars which reason told him were badly corroded iron bars. Reason also told him that there would be a door there. He could not see a door through the skeleton floor of tha balcony, but the idea that there would not be a door there was, under the circumstances, insupportable. There would be a door, he told himself as he made his way upwards by means of levitation and the most tentative of teps. It would probably have an inhospitable sign on it -- NO be locked. If so, he would pound on it until some one opened it, he decided. There was even an outside possibility that no one would be inside. He had never considered that possibility before that time. He decided that it was not time to consider it now. When Dewforth heaved himself up onto the small projecting platform he felt the ladder give under his feet. It was not just another rung. He saw the entire ladder go curling away into the emptiness like a huge broken spring. Then he lay on the platform face down with his eyes closed, fingers clutching the sill of the door, for a long time. New sounds invaded his personal darkness as he lay there. He heard bells, buzzers, klaxons, whistles and slamming relays. There were voices from loudspeakers -- imperious and hopeless, angry and feeble, impassioned and monotonous, arrogant and anguished -- in a synthetic language made up of odd phonemes long since discarded from a thousand other languages. When he looked up he saw no door but only a rectangle of darkness with erratic flashes of colored light. Having no choice, he entered on his hands and knees. IV Tewforth wandered in a lab yrinth of control panels which reached almost to the ceiling, but did not entirely shut out the light. This light was like skimmed milk diffused in shadow. He reasoned that it came from windows, but when he tried to remember whether the control cab had windows he could not be sure. He had no visual image of windows seen from the outside, but he had supposed that such an edifice would hardly be blind. Somewhere beyond this maze of control panels, he also reasoned, there must be an area like the bridge of an enormous ship where the clamor of the bells, buzzers, klaxons and whistles and the silent warnings and importunings of dials, gauges, colored lights, ticker-tapes which spewed from metal mouths, the palsied styles which scribbled on creeping scrolls, were somehow collated and made meaningful, where the yammering loudspeakers could be answered, and where the operators could look out and down and see what they were doing. Where were the operators? The noise was deafening. Unlike the noise of machinery in a factory it was not homogenous. Each sound was intended to attract attention and to evoke a certain response, but what response and from whom? Long levers projecting from the steel deck wagged back and forth spastically like the legs of monstrous insects struggling on their backs. Several times Dewforth was temporarily blinded by an explosion of blue light as a fuse blew or something short-circuited among the rows of knifeswitches and rheostats on the panels. One would never really get used to the sporadic sound or to the lights. There was no knowable pattern about them -- about what they did or said. When he closed his eyes and tried to compose himself the words Out of Control flashed red against the back of his eyelids, but he told himself that this was foolish. How was one to adjudge a situation to be Out of Control when one did not know what constituted control, over what, or by whom? Furthermore, he rebuked himself, if the panels -- never mind how many or how forbidding -- with their lights, bells, buzzers, switches, relays, dials, gauges, styles, tapes, pointers, rheostats and buttons had any meaning, and in fact if the Tower itself had any meaning at all, that meaning was Control. How arrogant it had been of him to imagine, even briefly, that because he -- a green intruder in that high place -- had not immediately comprehended what it was all about, the situation must be out of control. Absurd! ' I here were hundreds -- per- haps thousands -- of little labels attached to the control panels, presumably indicating the functions of the buttons, switches and other controls. Dewforth leaned close and studied these, but found only mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules... They made him feel somewhat more fragile, more round-shouldered and colder, but he resisted despair. It was getting a little darker, though. The skimmed-milk light above him was taking on a bluish tint. He had no way of knowing how long he had wandered among the control panels. His time-sense had always been dependent upon clocks and bells -- and upon the arrivals and departures of trains. It was a sound which finally led Dewforth out of the maze of control panels. It was not a louder sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped in a closet. It came, as he discovered, from The Operator. He was quite alone among his levers, wheels, switches, buttons, cranks, gauges, lights, bells, buzzers, horns, ticker-tapes, creeping scrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials. Dewforth saw him sharply silhouetted against a long window through which bluish-gray light poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen from where he stood. The Operator sat on a high, onelegged stool. His head was drawn into his shoulders, which were crumpled things of birdlike bones. His head was bald on top but the fringe was long and wild. He had big simian ears set at right angles to his head and the light shone through them, not pink but yellowish. There was an aureole of fine hairs about them which gave them the appearance of angel's wings. Vith enlarged hands at the ends of almost fleshless arms he clutched at the knobs of rheostats and the cranks of transformers, hesitantly, spasmodically, and without ever quite reaching anything. Each time he withdrew his hands quickly as though he had been on the point of touching something very hot. His arms might have been elongated by a lifetime of such aborted movement. Just as Dewforth began to wonder how his sudden appearance there would affect the old man, feeble and distraught as he already was, the Operator whirled on his stool and stared at Dewforth with eyes so round, so huge and so terrified that the rest of his face was not noticeable at all. He shouted something that sounded like "HuzzahP' but almost certainly was not, then stiffened, then fell to the steel deck with no more fuss than a bag of corn-husks would have made, and died, O ne would think that a windowed control cab or wheelhouse atop the loftiest structure in a city, or in an entire landscape, would afford a man an Olympian view of the world below, and of its people and their activities. Dewforth must have believed this at one time, but he found that it was not so. The entire lower portion of the windows was covered with thin pages of typescript, mostly yellowed, dusty and curled at the edges -- orders, instructions, directives, memoranda, all Urgent, For Immediate Action, Important, Priority, On No Account, or At All Costs. The texts of these orders, instructions, directives or memoranda consisted of mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by hyphens or separated by virgules. Through the upper portion of the windows Dewforth could just make out the horizon and a narrow strip of darkening sky, which were silent and which demanded nothing of him. Amid the continuing clamor of all the signal devices, he tried to recapture the last utterance of the Operator -- the former Operator. "Huzzah!" was out of the question. 'Who's there?" or "Who's that?" were more likely, but, as he thought of it, weren't "Ihose what?", "What's where?", "Where's what" or even "Who's where?" just as likely? Of these possible last words, "Mho's where?" echoed most persistently in his memory. Dewforth might have tom away the pages of meaningless orders and looked down upon lights as darkness fell, but he did not. Opaque as they were in form and content alike, there was something reassuringly familiar in the lines of inane symbols. And they were all that stood between him and the approaching tidal wave of night, and beyond the night, the winter with its storms. In the Current issue of IF -- by Keith Loumer The dramatic conclusion of Damon Knight John Brunner Theodore Sturgeon All in the November IF -- on sale at your newsstand nowl NO The troupers of the Big Time lack no art to sway a crowd -- or to change all history! I To bring the dead to life Is no great magic. Few are wholly dead; Blow on a dead man's embers And a live flame will start -- Graves I dipped through the filmy curtain into the boys' half of the dressing room and there was Sid sitting at the star's dressing table in his threadbare yellowed undershirt, the lucky one, not making up yet but staring sternly at himself in the bulb-framed mirror and experimentally working his features a little, as actors will, and kneading the stubble on his fat chin. I said to him quietly, "Siddy, what are we putting on tonight? Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen or Shakespeare's Macbeth? It says Macbeth on the callboard, but Miss Nefer's getting ready for Elizabeth. She just had me go and fetch the red wig." He tried out a few eyebrow rears -- right, left, both together -- then turned to me, sucking in his big gut a little, as he always does when a gal heaves into hailing distance, and said, "Your pardon, sweetling, what sayest thou?" Sid always uses that kook antique patter backstage, until I sometimes wonder whether I'm in Central Park, New York City, nineteen hundred and three quarters, or somewhere in Southwark, Merry England, fifteen hundred and same. The truth is that although he loves every last fat part in Shakespeare and will play the skinniest one with loyal and inspired affection, he thinks Willy S. penned Falstaff with nobody else in mind but Sidney J. Lessingham. (And no accent on the ham, please.) I closed my eyes and counted to eight, then repeated my question. He replied, "Why, the Bard's tragical history of the bloody Scot, certes." He waved his hand toward the portrait of Shakespeare that always sits beside his mirror on top of his reserve makeup box. At first that particular picture of the Bard looked too nancy to me -- a sort of peeping-tom schoolteacher but I've grown used to it over the months and even palsy-feeling. He didn't ask me why I hadn't asked Miss Nefer my question. Everybody in the company knows she spends the hour before curtain-time getting into character, never parting her lips except for that purpose -- or to bite your head off if you try to make the most necessary conversation. "Aye, 'tiz Macbeth tonight," Sid confirmed, returning to his frowning-practice: left eyebrow up, right down, reverse, repeat, rest. "And I must play the illstarred Thane of Glamis." I said, "That's fine, Siddy, but where does it leave us with Miss Nefer? She's already thinned her eyebrows and beaked out the top of her nose for Queen Liz, though that's as far as she's got. A beautiful job, the nose. Anybody else would think it was plastic surgery instead of putty. But it's going to look kind of funny on the Thaness of Glamis." Oid hesitated a half second longer than he usually would -- I thought, his timing's otf tonight -- and then he harrumphed and said, "Why, Iris Nefer, decked out as Good Queen Bess, will speak a prologue to the play -- a prologue which I have myself but last week writ." He owled his eyes. " 'Tis an experiment in the new theater." I said, "Siddy, prologues were nothing new to Shakespeare. He had them on half his other plays. Besides, it doesn't make sense to use Queen Elizabeth. She was dead by the time he whipped up Macbeth, which is all about witchcraft and directed at King James." He growled a little at me and demanded, "Prithee, how comes it your peewit-brain bears such a ballast of fusty book-knowledge, chit?" I said softly, "Siddy, you don't camp in a Shakespearean dressing room for a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, without learning a little Sure I'm a mental case, a poor little A #s A existing on your sweet charity, and don't think I don't appreciate it, but -- " "A-and-A, thou sayest?" he frowned. "Methinks the gladsome new forswearers of sack and ale call themselves AA." "Agoraphobe and Amnesiac," I told him. "But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne over its schnozzle." "Ha!" he cried as if he'd caught me out. "And saying there's a new Elizabeth, wouldn't that be the bravest advertisement ever for the Empire? -- perchance rechristening the pilot, copilot and astrogator Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh? And the ship The Golden Hind? Tilly fally, lady!" He went on, "My prologue an anachronism, quotha ! The groundlings will never mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go to, doll." "Czechoslovakia, Siddy?" "Bohemia, then, what skills it? Leave me now, sweet poppet. Go thy ways. I have matters of import to ponder. There's more to running a repertory company than reading the footnotes to Furness." M artin had just slouched by calling the Half Hour and looking in his solemnity, sneakers, levis and dirty T-shirt more like an underage refugee from Skid Row than Sid's newest recruit, assistant stage manager and hardest-worked juvenile -- though for once he'd remembered to shave. I was about to ask Sid who was going to play Lady Mack if Miss Nefer wasn't, or, if she were going to double the roles, shouldn't I help her with the change? She's a slow dresser and the Elizabeth costumes are pretty realistically stayed. And she would have trouble getting off that nose, I was sure. But then I saw that Siddy was already slapping on the alboline to keep the grease paint from getting into his pores. Greta, you ask too many questions, I told myself. You get everybody riled up and you rack your own poor ricketty little mind; and I hied myself off to the costumery to settle my nerves. The costumery, which occupies the back end of the dressing room, is exactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies of any child, including an unraveled adult who's saving what's left of her sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are the regular costumes for Shakespeare's plays, all jeweled and spangled and brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the borders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your cheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other plays we favor; Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Shaw's Back to Methuselah and Hilliard's adaptation of Heinlein's Children of Methuselah, the Capek brothers' Insect People, O'Neill's The Fountain, Flecker's Hassan, Camino Real, Children of the Moon, The Beggar's Opera, Mary of Scotland, Berkeley Square, The Road to Rome. There are also the costumes for all the special and variety performances we give of the plays: Hamlet in modem dress, Julius Caesar set in a dictatorship of the #'s, The Taming of the Shrew in caveman furs and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding a dinosaur, The Tempest set on another planet with a spaceship wreck to start it off Karrumph! -- which means a half dozen spacesuits, featherweight but looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort of extraterrestrial-beast outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the other monsters. Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep of space and time that you sometimes get frightened you'll be whirled up and spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at something very real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where you really are -- as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chain around my neck (Siddy's first gift to me that I can remember) and chanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing my eyes and squeezing the holes in the token: "Columbus Circle, Times Square, Penn Station, Christopher Street..." B ut you don't ever get really frightened in the costumery. Not exactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled and your tummy chilled from time to time -- because you know it's all makebelieve, a lifesize doll world, a children's dress-up world. It gets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as pleasant places and not as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you forever. It's always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam... and the best sort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can't remember one single thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can't ever push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong... and I remember what happened the two times I did peek, and I have to come scuttling back. The costumery's good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or darned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there are so many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the racks extend into the fourth dimension -- not to mention the boxes of props and the shelves of scripts and promptcopies and other books, including a couple of encyclopedias and and the many thick volumes of 'Furness's Variorum Shakespeare, which as Sid had guessed I'd been boning up on. Oh, and I've sponged and pressed enough costumes, too, and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials. In a less sloppily organized company I'd be called wardrobe mistress, I guess. Except that to #  I i anyone in show business that suggests a crotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around her neck on a string. Although I got my I crochets, all right, I'm not that I old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody outranks me, even Martin. Of course to somebody outside show business, wardrobe mistress might suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn or Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legal costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I've tried that once or twice. But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think she'd whang me. And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my little whims. I don't mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to I have something. But in spite of Sid's whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about its I efficiency -- people trade around the parts they play without fuss, the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody getting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing it in the leading lady's , # face. In short, we're a team. Which is funny when you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and Maudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I romance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I think I am) while the rest come from just everywhere. Tesides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and help the actresses dress and the actors too. , The dressing room's very coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while Martin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about with dustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop with such silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to get through and duck back into the costumery to collect myself. ' Yes, the costum ery's a great place to quiet your nerves or improve your mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn't have been there eight minutes when Miss Nefer's Elizabeth-angry voice came skirling, "Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my niff with silver trim?" I laid my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old Queen Liz was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now and then and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character -- a real Paul Muni. She was all made up now, I was happy to note, at least as far as her face went -- I hate to see that spooky eight-spoked faint tattoo on her forehead (I've sometimes wondered if she got it acting in India or Egypt maybe). Yes, she was already all made up. This time she'd been going extra heavy on the burrowinginto-character bit, I could tell right away, even if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. She signed to me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as I got busy I looked at her eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely (maybe because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples and small tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge of nose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, very softly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it. "Cold, so cold," she said, still seeing things far away though her hands were working smoothly with mine. "Even a gallop hardly fires my blood. Never was such a Januarius, though there's no snow. Snow will not come, or tears. Yet my brain burns with the thought of Mary's death-warrant unsigned. There's my particular hell! -- to doom, perchance, all future queens, or leave a hole for the Spaniard and the Pope to creep like old worms back into the sweet apple of England. Philip's tall black crooked ships massing like sea-going fortresses southaway -- cragged castles set to march into the waves. Parma in the Lowlands! And all the while my bright young idiot gentlemen spurting out my treasure as if it were so much water, as if gold pieces were a glut of summer posies. Oh, alackanight!" And I thought. Cry Iced! -- thafs sure ipin to be one tyrannosauT of a prologue. And how you'll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beats me. Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you'd better give up your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some day when your nerves heal. S he was really getting to me, you see, with that characterization. It was as if I'd managed to go out and take a walk and sat down in the park outside and heard the President talking to himself about the chances of war with Russia and realized he'd sat down on a bench with its back to mine and only a bush between. You see, here we were, two females undignifiedly twisted together, at the moment getting her into that crazy crouch-deep bodice that's like a big icecream cone, and yet here at the same time was Queen Elizabeth the First of England, three hundred and umpty-ump years dead, coming back to life in a Central Park dressing room. It shook me. She looked so much the part, you see -- even without the red wig yet, just powdered pale makeup going back to a quarter of an inch from her own short dark bang combed and netted back tight. The age too. Miss Nefer can't be a day over forty -- well, fortytwo at most -- but now she looked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least a dozen years older. I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character she does it with each molecule. That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her a question. Probably I was figuring that she couldn't do me much damage because of the positions we happened to be in at the moment. You see, I'd started to lace her up and to do it right I had my knee against the tail of her spine. "How old, I mean how young might your majesty be?" I asked her, innocently wonderingly like some dumb serving wench. For a wonder she didn't somehow swing around and clout me, but only settled into character a little more deeply. "Fifty-four winters," she replied dismally. " 'Tiz Januarius of Our Lord's year One Thousand and Five Hundred and Eighty and Seven. I sit cold in Greenwich, staring at the table where Mary's death warrant waits only my sign manual. If I send her to the block, I open the doors to future, less official regicides. But if I doom her not, Philip's armada will come inching up the Channel in a season, puffing smoke and shot, and my English Catholics, thinking only of Mary Regina, will rise and i' the end the Spaniard will have all. All history would alter. That must not be, even if I'm damned for it! And yet... and yet... A bright blue fly came buzzing along (the dressing room has some insect life) and slowly circled her head rather close, but she didn't even flicker her eyelids. "I sit cold in Greenwich, going mad. Each afternoon I ride, praying for some mischance, some prodigy, to wash from my mind away the bloody question for some little space. It skills not what: a fire, a tree a-falling, Davison or e'en Eyes Leicester tumbled with his horse, an assassin's ball clipping the cold twigs : by my ear, a maid crying rape, a wild boar charging with dipping tusks, news of the Spaniard ' at Thames' mouth or, more hapI pily, a band of strolling actors j setting forth some new comedy to charm the fancy or some great unheard-of tragedy to tear the heart -- though that were somewhat much to hope for at this season and place, even if Southwark be close by." T he lacing was done. I stood back from her, and really she looked so much like Elia. beth painted by Gheeraerts or ' on the Great Seal of Ireland or something -- though the ash-colored plush dress trimmed in silver and the little silver-edge ruff and the black-silver tinselcloth cloak lined with  white plush hanging behind her lookI ed most like a winter riding costume -- and her face was such a pale frozen mask of Elizabeth's inward tortures, that I told myself. Oh, I got to talk to Siddy again, he's made some big , mistake, the lardy old lackwit, I Miss Nefer just can't be figuring I on playing in Macbeth tonight. As a matter of fact I was nerving myself to ask her all about I it direct, though it was going to I take some real nerve and maybe be risking broken bones or at least a flayed cheek to break j the ice of that characterization, when who should come by calling the Fifteen Minutes but Martin. He looked so downright goofy that it took my mind off Nefer-in-character for all of eight seconds. His levied bottom half still looked like The Lower Depths. Martin is Village Stanislavsky rather than Ye Olde English Stage Traditions. But above that , , . well, all it really amounted to was that he was stripped to the waist and had shaved off the small high tuft of chest hair and was wearing a black wig that hung down in front of his shoulders in two big braids heavy with silver hoops and pins. But just the same those simple things, along with his tarpaper-solarium tan and habitual poker expression, made him look so like an American Indian that I thought. Hey Zeus! -- he's all set to play Hiawatha, or if he'd just cover up that straight-line chest, a frowny Pocahontas. And I quick ran through what plays with Indian parts we do and could only come up with The Fountain. I mutely goggled my question at him, wiggling my hands like guppy fins, but he brushed me off with a solemn mysterious smile and backed through the curtain. I thought, nobody can explain this but Siddy, and I followed Martin. II History does not move in one current, like the wind across bare seas, but in a thousand streams and eddies, like the wind over a broken landscape. -- Cary  I he boys' half of the dressing  room (two-thirds really) was bustling. There was the smell of spirit gum and Max Factor and just plain men. Several guys were getting dressed or un-, and Bruce was cussing Bloody-something because he'd just burnt his fingers unwinding from the neck of a hot electric bulb some crepe hair he'd wound there to dry after wetting and stretching it to turn it from crinkly to straight for his Banquo beard. Bruce is always getting to the theater late and trying shortcuts. But I had eyes only for Sid. So help me, as soon as I saw him they bugged again. Greta, I told myself, yoti're going to have to send Martin out to the drugstore for some anti-bug powder. "For the roaches, boy? "No, for the eyes." Sid was made up and had his long mustaches and elf-locked Macbeth wig on -- and his corset too. I could tell by the way his waist was sucked in before he saw me. But instead of dark kilts and that bronze-studded sweat-stained leather battle harness that lets him show off his beefy shoulders and the top half of his heavily furred chest and which really does look great on Macbeth in the first act when he comes in straight from battle -- but instead of that he was wearing, so help me, red tights cross-gartered with strips of gold-blue tinsel-cloth, a green doublet gold-trimmed and to top it a ruff, and he was trying to fit onto his front a bright silvered cuirass that would have looked just dandy maybe on one of the Pope's Swiss Guards. I thought, Siddy, Willy S. ought to reach out of his portrait there and bop you one on the koko for contemplating such a crazy-quilt desecration of just about his greatest and certainly his most atmospheric play. Just then he noticed me and hissed accusingly, "There thou art, slothy minx! Spring to and help stuff me into this monstrous chest-kettle." "Siddy, what is all this?" I demanded as my hands automotically obeyed. "Are you going to play Macbeth for laughs, except maybe leaving the Porter a serious character? You think you're Red Skelton?" "What monstrous brabble is this, you mad bitch?" he retorted, grunting as I bear-hugged his waist, shouldering the cuirass to squeeze it home. "The clown costumes on all you men," I told him, for now I'd noticed that the others were in rainbow hues, Bruce a real eye-buster in yellow tights and violet doublet as he furiously bushed out and clipped crosswise sections of beard and slapped them on his chin gleaming brown with spirit gum. "I haven't seen any eight-inch polka-dots yet but I'm sure I will." Suddenly a big grin split Siddy's face and he laughed out loud at me, though the laugh changed to a gasp as I strapped in the cuirass three notches too tight. When we'd got that adjusted he said, "I' faith thou slayest me, pretty witling. Did I not tell you this production is an experiment, a novelty? We shall but show Macbeth as it might have been costumed at the court of King James. In the the clothes of the day, but gaudier, as was then the stage fashion. Hold, dove, I've somewhat for thee." He fumbled his grouch bag from under his doublet and dipped finger and thumb in it, and put in my palm a silver model of the Empire State Building, charm bracelet size, and one of the new Kennedy dimes. A s I squeezed those two and gloated my eyes on them, feeling securer and happier and friendlier for them though I didn't at the moment want to, I thought. Well, Siddy's right about that, at least I've read they used to costume the plays that way, though I don't see how Shakespeare stood it. But it was dirty of them all not to tell me beforehand. But that's the way it is. Sometimes I'm the butt as well as the pet of the dressing room, and considering all the breaks I get I shouldn't mind. I smiled at Sid and went on tiptoes and necked out my head and kissed him on a powdery cheek just above an aromatic mustache. Then I wiped the smile off my face and said, "Okay, Siddy, play Macbeth as Little Lord Faimtleroy or Baby Snooks if you want to. I'll never squeak again. But the Elizabeth prologue's still an anachronism. And -- this is the thing I came to tell you, Siddy -- Miss Nefer's not getting ready for any measly prologue. She's set to play Queen Elizabeth all night and tomorrow morning too. Whatever you think, she doesn't know we're doing Macbeth. But who'll do Lady Mack if she doesn't? And '# Martin's not dressing for Malcolm, but for the Son of the Last of the Mohicans, I'd say. What's more -- " You know, something I said must have annoyed Sid, for he changed his mood again in a flash. "Shut your jaw, you crook brained cat, and begone!" he snarled at me. "Here's curtain time close upon us, and you come like a wittol scattering your mad questions like the crazed Ophelia her flowers. Begone, I say!" "Yessir," I whipped out softly. I skittered off toward the door to the stage, because that was the easiest direction. I figured I could do with a breath of less grease-painty air. Then, "Oh, Greta," I heard Martin call nicelyHe'd changed his levis for black tights, and was stepping into and pulling up around him a very familiar dress, dark green and embroidered with silver and stage-rubies. He'd safety-pinned a folded towel around his chest -- to make a bosom of sorts, I realized. He armed into the sleeves and turned his back to me. "Hook me up, would you?" he entreated. Then it hit me. They had no actresses in Shakespeare's day, they used boys. And the dark green dress was so familiar to me because -- "Martin," I said, halfway up the hooks and working fast -- Miss Nefer's costume fitted him fine. "You're going to play -- ?" "Lady Macbeth, yes," he finished for me. "Wish me courage, will you Greta? Nobody else seems to think I need it." I punched him half-heartedly in the rear. Then, as I fastened the last hooks, my eyes topped his shoulder and I looked at our faces side by side in the mirror of his dressing table. His, in spite of the female edging and him being at least eight years younger than me, I think, looked wise, poised, infinitely resourceful with power in reserve, very very real, while mine looked like that of a bewildered and characterless child ghost about to scatter into air -- and the edges of my charcoal sweater and skirt, contrasting with his strong colors, didn't dispel that last illusion. "Oh, by the way, Greta," he said, "I picked up a copy of The Village Times for you. There's a thumbnail review of our Measure for Measure, though it mentions no names, darn it. It's around here somewhere..." But I was already hurrying on. Oh, it was logical enough to have Martin playing Mrs. Macbeth in a production styled to Shakespeare's own times (though pedantically over-authentic, I'd have thought) and it really did answer all my questions, eiifen why Miss Nefer could sink herself wholly in Elizabeth tonight if she wanted to. But it meant that I must be missing so much of what was going on right around me, in spite of spending # hours a day in the dressing room, or at most in the small adjoining John or in the wings of the stage just outside the dressing room door, that it scared me. Siddy telling everybody, "Macbeth tonight in Elizabethan costume, boys and girls," sure, that I could have missed -- though you'd have thought he'd have asked my help on the costumes. But Martin getting up in Mrs. Mack. Why, someone must have held the part on him twentyeight times, cueing him, while he got the lines. And there must have been at least a couple of run-through rehearsals to make sure he had all the business and stage movements down pat, and Sid and Martin would have been doing their big scenes every backstage minute they could spare with Sid yelling, "Witling! Think'st that's a wifely buss?" and Martin would have been droning his lines last time he scrubbed and mopped -- Greta, they're hiding things from you, I told myself. Maybe there was a #th hour nobody had told me about yet when they did all the things they didn't tell me about. Maybe they were things they didn't dare tell me because of my top-storey weakness. I felt a cold draft and shivered and I realized I was at the door to the stage. I should explain that our stage is rather an unusual one, in that it can face two ways, with the drops and set pieces and lighting all capable of being switched around completely. To your left, as you look out the dressing-room door, is an openair theater, or rather an openair place for the audience -- a large upward-sloping glade walled by thick tall trees and with benches for over two thousand people. On that side the stage kind of merges into the grass and can be made to look part of it by a green groundcloth. To your right is a big roofed auditorium with the same number of seats. The whole thing grew out of the free summer Shakespeare performances in Central Park that they started back in the #'s. The Janus-stage idea is that in nice weather you can have the audience outdoors, but if it rains or there's a cold spap, or if you want to play all winter without a single break, as we've been doing, then you can put your audience in the auditorium. In that case, a big accordion-pleated wall shuts off the out of doors and keeps the wind from blowing your backdrop, which is on that side, of course, when the auditorium's in use. Tonight the stage was set up to face the outdoors, although that draft felt mighty chilly. I hesitated, as I always do at the door to the stage -- though it wasn't the actual stage lying just ahead qf me, but only backstage, the wings. You see, I always have to fight the feeling that if I go out the dressing room door, go out just eight steps, the world will change while I'm out there and I'll never be able to get back. It won't be New York City any more, but Chicago or Mars or Algiers or Atlanta, Georgia, or Atlantis or Hell and I'll never be able to get back to that lovely warm womb with all the jolly boys and girls and all the costumes smelling like autumn leaves. Or, especially when there's a cold breeze blowing, I'm afraid that I'll change, that I'll grow wrinkled and old in eight footsteps, or shrink down to the witless blob of a baby, or forget altogether who I am --  -- or, it occurred to me for the first time now, remember who I am. Which might be even worse. Maybe that's what I'm afraid of. I took a step back. I noticed something new just beside the door: a high-legged, short-keyboard piano. Then I saw that the legs were those of a table. The piano was just a box with yellowed keys. Spinet? Harpsichord? "Five minutes, everybody," Martin quietly called out behind me. I took hold of m#reelf. Greta, I told myself -- also for the first time, you know that some day you're really going to have to face this thing, and not just for a quick dip out and back either. Better get in some practice. I stepped through the door. Teau and Doc were already out there, made up and in costume for Ross and King Duncan. They were discreetly peering past the wings at the gathering audience. Or at the place where the audience ought to be gathering, at any rate -- sometimes the movies and girlie shows and brainheavy beatnik bruhahas outdraw us altogether. Their costumes were the same kooky colorful ones as the others'. Doc had a mock-ermine robe and a huge gilt papiermache crown. Beau was carrying a ragged black robe and hood over his left arm -- he doubles the First Witch. As I came up behind them, making no noise in my black sneakers, I heard Beau say, "I see some rude fellows from the City approaching. I was hoping we wouldn't get any of those. How should they scent us out?" Brother, I thought, where do you expect them to come from if not the City? Central Park is bounded on three sides by Manhattan Island and on the fourth by the Eighth Avenue Subway. And Brooklyn and Bronx boys have got pretty sharp scenters. And whafs it get you insulting the woiking and non-woiking people of the woild's greatest metropolis? Be grateful for any audience you get, boy. But I suppose Beau Lassiter considers anybody from north ef Vicksburg a "rude fellow" and is always waiting for the day when the entire audience will arrive in carriage and democrat wagons. Doc replied, holding down his white beard and heavy on the mongrel Russo-German accent he miraculously manages to suppress on stage except when "Vot does it matter? Ve don't convinze zem, ve don't convinze nobody. Nichevo." Maybe, I thought. Doc shares my doubts about making Macbeth plausible in rainbow pants. Still unobserved by them, I looked between their shoulders and got the first of my shocks. It wasn't night at all, but afternoon. A dark cold lowering afternoon, admittedly. But afternoon all the same. Sure, between shows I sometimes forget whether it's day or night, living inside like I do. But getting matinees and evening performances mixed in something else again. It also seemed to me, although Beau was leaning in now and I couldn't see so well, that the glade was smaller than it should be, the trees closer to us and more irregular, and I couldn't see the benches. That was Shock Two. Beau said anxiously, glancing at his wrist, "I wonder what's holding up the Queen?" Although I was busy keeping up nerve-pressure against the shocks, I managed to think, So he knows about Biddy's stupid Queen Elizabeth prologue too. But of course he would. It's only me they keep in the dark. If he's so smart he ought to remember that Miss Nefer is always the last person on stage, even when she opens the play. And then I thought I heard, through the trees, the distant drumming of horses' hoofs and the sound of a horn. ow they do have horseback  riding in Central Park and you can hear auto horns there, but the hoofbeats don't drum that wild way. And there aren't so many riding together. And no auto horn I ever heard gave out with that sweet yet imperious ta-ta-ta-T A. I must have squeaked or something, because Beau and Doc turned around quickly, blocking my view, their expressions half angry, half anxious. I turned too and ran for the dressing room, for I could feel one of my mind-wavery fits coming on. At the last second it had seemed to me that the scenery was getting skimpier, hardly more than thin trees and bushes itself, and underfoot feeling more like ground than a ground cloth, and overhead not theater roof but gray sky. Shock Three and you're out, Gerta, my umpire was calling. I made it through the dressing room door and nothing there was wavering or dissolving, praised be Pan. Just Martin standing with his back to me, alert, alive, poised like a cat inside that green dress, the prompt book in his right hand with a finger in it, and from his left hand long black tatters swinging -- telling me he'd still be doubling Second Witch. And he was hissing, "Places, please, everybody. On stage!" With a sweep of silver and ash-colored plush. Miss Nefer came past him, for once leading the last-minute hurry to the stage. She had on the dark red wig now. For me that crowned her characterization. It made me remember her saying, "My brain bums." I ducked aside as if she were majesty incarnate. And then she didn't break her own precedent. She stopped at the new thing beside the door and poised her long white skinny fingers over the yellowed keys, and suddenly I remembered what it was called: a virginals. She stared down at it fiercely, evilly, like a witch planning an enchantment. Her face got the secret fiendish look that, I told myself, the real Elizabeth would have had ordering the deaths of Ballard and Babington, or plotting with Drake (for all they say she didn't) one of his raids, that long long forefinger tracing crooked courses through a crabbedly drawn map of the Indies and she smiling at the dots of cities that would burn. Then all her eight fingers came flickering down and the strings inside the virginals began to twang and hum with a high-pitched rendering of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King." Then as Sid and Bruce and Martin rushed past me, along with a black swooping that was Maud already robed and hooded for Third Witch, I beat it for my sleeping closet like Peer Gynt himself dashing across the mountainside away from the cave of the Troll King, who only wanted to make tiny slits in his eyeballs so that forever afterwards he'd see reality just a little differently. And as I ran, the master-anachronism of that menacing mad march music was Ill Sound a dumbe shew. Enter the three fatall sisters, with a rocke, a threed, and a pair of sheeres. -- Old Play M y sleeping closet is just a cot at the back end of the girls' third of the dressing room, with a three-panel screen to make it private. When I sleep I hang my outside clothes on the screen, which is pasted and thumbtacked all over with the New York City stuff that gives me security: theater programs and restaurant menus, clippings from the Times and the Minot, a torn-out picture of the United Nations building with a hundred tiny gay paper flags pasted around it, and hanging in an old hairnet a home-run baseball autographed by Willy Mays. Things like that Right now I was jumping my eyes over that stuff, asking it to keep me located and make me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with my knees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines from the play wouldn't be able to come nosing back around the trunks and tables andbright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listen to them, even if they're sort of sepulchral and drained of overtones by their crooked trip. But they're always tensemaking. And tonight (I mean this afternoon) -- no! It's funny I should find security in mementos of a city I daren't go out into -- no, not even for a stroll through Central Park, though I know it from the Pond to Harlem Meer -- the Met Museum, the Menagerie, the Ramble, the Great Lawn, Cleopatra's Needle and all the rest. But that's the way it is. Maybe I'm like Jonah in the whale, reluctant to go outside because the whale's a terrible monster that's awful scary to look in the face and might really damage you gulping you a second time, yet reassured to know you're living in the stomach of that particular monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifth planet of Aldebaran. It's really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressing room. The boys bring me meals: coffee in cardboard cylinders and doughnuts in little brown grease-spotted paper sacks and malts and hamburgers and apples and little pizzas, and Maud brings me raw vegetables -- carrots and parsnips and little onions and such, and watches to make sure . I exercise my molars grinding them and get my vitamins. I take spit-baths in the little john. Architects don't seem to think actors ever take baths, even when they've browned themselves all over playing Pindarus the Parthian in Julius Caesar. And all my shut-eye is caught on this little screen. #" ou'd think I'd be terrified  being alone in the dressing room during the wee and morning hours, let alone trying to sleep then, but that isn't the way it works out. For one thing, there's apt to be someone sleeping in too. Maudie especially. And it's my favorite time too for costume-mending and reading the Variorum and other books, and for just plain wayout dreaming. You see, the dressing room is the one place I really do feel safe. Whatever is out there in New York that terrorizes me, I'm pretty confident that it can never get in here. Besides that, there's a great big bolt on the inside of the dressing room door that I throw whenever I'm all alone after the show. Next day they buzz for me to open it. It worried me a bit at first and I had asked Sid, "But what if I'm so deep asleep I don't hear and you have to get in fast?" and he had replied, "Sweetling, a word in your ear: our own Beauregard Lassiter is the prettiest picklock unj ailed since Jimmy Valentine and Jimmy Dale. I'll not ask where he learned his trade, but 'tis sober truth, upon my honor." And Beau had confirmed this with a courtly bow, murmuring, "At your service. Miss Greta." "How do you jigger a big iron bolt through a three-inch door that fits like Maudie's tights?" I wanted to know. "He carries lodestones of great power and divers subtle tools," Sid had explained for him. I don't know how they work it so that some Traverse-Three cop or park official doesn't find out about me and raise a stink. Maybe Sid just throws a little more of the temperament he uses to keep most outsiders out of the dressing-room. We sure don't get any janitors or scrubwomen, as Martin and I know only too well. More likely he squares someone. I do get the impression all the company's gone a little way out on a limb letting me stay here -- that the directors of our theater wouldn't like it if they found out about me. In fact, the actors are all so good about helping me and putting up with my antics (though they have their own, Danu digs!) that I sometimes think I must be related to one of them -- a distant cousin or sister-in-law (or wife, my God!), because I've checked our faces side by side in the mirrors often enough and I can't find any striking family resemblances. Or maybe I was even an actress in the company. The least important one. Playing the tiniest roles like Lucius in Caesar and Bianca in Othello and one of the little princes in Dick the Three Eyes and Fleance and the Gentlewoman in Macbeth, though me doing even that much acting strikes me to laugh. But whatever I am in that direction -- if I'm anything -- not one of the actors has told me a word about it or dropped the least hint. Not even when I beg them to tell me or try to trick them into it, presumably because it might revive the shock that gave me agoraphobia and amnesia in the first place, and maybe this time knock out my entire mind or at least smash the new mouse-in-a-hole consciousness I've made for myself. I guess they must have got by themselves a year ago and talked me over and decided my best chance for cure or for just bumping along half happily was staying in the dressing room rather than being sent home (funny, could I bave another?) or to a mental hospital. And then they must have been cocky enough about their amateur psychiatry and interested enough in me (the White Horse knows why) to go ahead with a program almost any psychiatrist would be bound to yike at. I got so worried about the set up once and about the risks they might be running that, gritting down my dread of the idea, I said to Sid, "Siddy, shouldn't I see a doctor?" He looked at me solemnly for a couple of seconds and then said, "Sure, why not? Go talk to Doc right now," tipping a thumb toward Doc Pyeskov, who was just sneaking back into the bottom of his makeup box what looked like a half pint from the flash I got. I did, incidentally. Doc explained to me Kraepelin's classification of the psychoses, muttering, as he absentmindedly fondled my wrist, that in a year or two he'd be a good illustration of Korsakov's Syndrome. They've all been pretty dam good to me in their kooky ways, the actors have. Not one of them has tried to take advantage of my situation to extort an#dhing out of me, beyond asking me to sew on a button or polish some boots or at worst clean the wash bowl. Not one of the boys has made a pass I didn't at least seem to invite. And when my crush on Sid was at its worst he shouldered me off by getting polite -- something he only is to strangers. On the rebound I hit Beau, who treated me like a real Southern gentleman. All this for a stupid little waif, whom anyone but a gang of sentimental actors would have sent to Bellevue without a second thought or feeling. For, to get disgustingly realistic, my most plausible theory of me is that I'm a stage-struck girl from Iowa who saw her twenties slipping away and her sanity too, and made the dash to Greenwich Village, and went so ape on Shakespeare after seeing her first performance in Central Park that she kept going back there night after night (Christopher Street, Penn Station, Times Square, Columbus Circle see?) and hung around the stage door, so mousy but open-mouthed that the actors made a pet of her. And then something very nasty happened to her, either dowm at the Village or in a dark corner of the Park. Something so nasty that it blew the top of her head right off. And she ran to the only people and place where she felt she could ever again feel safe. And she showed them the top of her head with its singed hair and its jagged ring of skull and they took pity. My least plausible theory of me, but the one I like the most, is that I was bom in the dressing room, cradled in the top of a flat theatrical trunk with my ears full of Shakespeare's lines before I ever said "Mama," let alone lamped a TV; hush-walked when I cried by whoever was off stage, old props my first toys, trying to eat crepe hair my first indiscretion, sticks of greasepaint my first crayons. You know, I really wouldn't be bothered by crazy fears about New York changing and the dressing room shifting around in space and time, if I could be sure I'd always be able to stay in it and that the same sweet guys and gals would always be with me and that the shows would always go on. T his show was sure going on, it suddenly hit me, for I'd let my fingers slip off my ears as I sentimentalized and wishdreamed and I heard, muted by the length and stuff of the dressing room, the slow beat of a drum and then a drum note in Maudie's voice taking up that beat as she warned the other two witches, "A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come." Why, I'd not only missed Sid's history making and breaking Queen Elizabeth prologue (kicking myself that I had, now it was over), I'd also missed the short witch scene with its famous "Fair is foul and foul is fair," the Bloody Sergeant scene where Duncan hears about Macbeth's victory, and we were well into the second witch scene, the one on the blasted heath where Macbeth gets it predicted to him he'll be king after Duncan and is tempted to speculate about hurrying up the process. I sat up. I did hesitate a minute then, my fingers going back toward my ears, because Macbeth is specially tense-making and when I've had one of my mind-wavery fits I feel weak for a while and things are blurry and uncertain. Maybe I'd better take a couple of the barbiturate sleeping pills Maudie manages to get for me and -- but No, Greta, I told myself, you want to watch this show, you want to see how they do in those crazy costumes. You especially want to see how Martin makes out. He'd never forgive you if you didn't. So I walked to the other end of the empty dressing room, moving quite slowly and touching the edges here and there, the words of the play getting louder all the time. By the time I got to the door Bruce-Banquo was sasdng to the witches, "If you can look into the seeds of time. And say which grain will grow and which will not," -- those lines that stir anyone's imagination with their veiled vision of the tmiverse. The overall lighting was a little dim (afternoon fading already? -- a late matinee?) and the stage lights flickery and the scenery still a little spectral-flimsy. Oh, my mind-wavery fits can be lulus! But I concentrated on the actors, watching them through the entrance-gaps in the wings. They were solid enough. Giving a solid performance, too, as I decided after watching that scene through and the one after it where Duncan congratulates Macbeth, with never a pause between the two scenes in true Elizabethan style. Nobody was laughing at the colorful costumes. After a while I began to accept them myself. Oh, it was a different Macbeth than our company usually does. Louder and faster, with shorter pauses between speeches, the blank verse at times approaching a chant. But it had a lot of real guts and everybody was just throwing themselves into it, Sid especially. "The first Lady Macbeth scene came. Without exactly realizing it I moved forward to where I'd been when I got my three shocks. Martin is so intent on his career and making good that he has me the same way about it. The Thaness started off, as she always does, toward the opposite side of the stage and facing a little away from me. Then she moved a step and looked down at the stage-parchment letter in her hands and began to read it, though there was nothing on it but scribble, and my heart sank because the voice I heard was Miss Nefer's. I thought (and almost said out loud) Oh, dammit, he funked out, or Sid decided at the last minute he couldn't trust him with the part. Whoever got Miss Nefer out of the ice cream cone in time? Then she swung around and I saw that no, my God, it was Martin, no mistaking. He'd been using her voice. When a person first does a part, especially getting up in it without much rehearsing, he's boimd to copy the actor he's been hearing doing it. And as I listened on, I realized it was fundamentally Martin's own voice pitched a trifle high, only some of the intonations and rythms were Miss Nefer's. He was showing a lot of feeling and intensity too and real Martintype poise. You're off to a great start, kid, I cheered inwardly. Keep it up! Just then I looked toward the audience. Once again I almost squeaked out loud. For out there, close to the stage, in the very middle of the reserve section, was a carpet spread out And sitting in the middle of it on some sort of little chair, with what looked like two charcoal braziers smoking to either side of her, was Miss Nefer with a string of extras in Elizabethan hats with cloaks pulled around them. For a second it really threw me because it reminded me of the things I'd seen or thought I'd seen the couple of times I'd sneaked a peek through the curtain-hole at the audience in the indoor auditorium. It hardly threw me for more than a second, though, because I remembered that the characters who speak Shakespeare's prologues often stay on stage and sometimes kind of join the audience and even comment on the play from time to time -- Christopher Sly and attendant lords in The Shrew, for one. Sid had just copied and in his usual style laid it on thick. Welt, bully for you, Siddy, I thought, I'm sure the witless New York groundlings will be thrilled to their cold little toes knowing they're sitting in the same audience as Good Queen Liz and attendant courtiers. And as for you. Miss Nefer, I added a shade invidiously, you just keep on sitting cold in Central Park, warmed by dry-ice smoke from braziers, and keep your mouth shut and everything'll be fine. I'm sincerely glad you'll be able to be Queen Elizabeth all night long. Just so long as you don't try to steal the scene from Martin and the rest of the cast, and the real play. I suppose that camp chair will get a little uncomfortable by the time the Fifth Act comes tramping along to that drumbeat, but I'm sure you're so much in character you'll never feel it. One thing though: just don't scare me again pretending to work witchcraft -- with a virginals or any other way. Okay? Swell. Me, now, Fm going to watch the play. IV... to dream of new dimensions, Cheating checkmate by painting the king's robe So that he slides like a queen; -- Graves I swung back to the play just at the moment Lady Mack soliloquizes, "Come to my woman's breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers." Although I knew it was just folded towel Martin was touching with his fingertips as he lifted them to the top half of his green bodice, I got carried away, he made it so real. I decided boys can play girls better than people think. Maybe they should do it a little more often, and girls play boys too. Then Sid-Macbeth came back to his wife from the wars, looking triumphant but scared because the murder-idea's started to smoulder in him, and she got busy fanning the blaze like any other good little hausfrau intent on her husband rising in the company and knowing that she's the power behind him and that when there are promotions someone's always got to get the axe. Sid and Martin made this charming little domestic scene so natural yet gutsy too that I wanted to shout hooray. Even Sid clutching Martin to that ,( ridiculous pot-chested cuirass j didn't have one note of horseI play in it. Their bodies spoke. ! It was the McCoy. ' After that, the play began to : get real good, the fast tempo ; and exaggerated facial expres sions actually helping it. By the I time the Dagger Scene came along I was digging my fingernails into my sweaty palms. ' Which was a good thing -- my i eating up the play, I mean -- because it kept me from looking I at the audience again, even taki ing a fast peek. As you've gathI ered, audiences bug me. All those people out there in the shadows, watching the actors in the light, all those silent voyeurs as Bruce calls them. Why, they might be anything. And sometimes (to my mind-wavery sorrow) I think they are. Maybe crouching in the dark out there, hiding among the others, is the . one who did the nasty thing to me that tore off the top of mv head. Anyhow, if I so much as glance at the audience, I begin  to get ideas about it -- and sometimes even if I don't, as just at this moment I thought I heard horses restlessly pawing hard ground and one whinny, though that was shut off fast. Krishna I kressed us! I thought, Skiddy can't have hired horses for Nefer-Elizabeth much as he's a arcus man at heart. We don't hare that kind of money. Besides -- But just then Sid-Macbetfa gasped as if he were sucking in a bucket of air. He'd shed the cuirass, fortunately. He said, "Is this a dagger which I see before me. The handle toward my hand?" and the play hooked me again, and I had no time to think about or listen for anything else. Most of the offstage actors were on the other side of the stage, as that's where they make their exists and entrances at this point in the Second Act. I stood alone in the wings, watching the play like a bug, frightened only of the horrors Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote it. Yes, the play was going great. The Dagger Scene was terrif where Duncan gets murdered offstage, and so was the part afterwards where hysteria mounts as the crime's discovered. But just at this point I began to catch notes I didn't like. Twice someone was late on entrance and came on as if shot from a cannon. And three times at least Sid had to throw someone a line when they blew up -- in the clutches .Sid's better than any prompt book. It began to look as if the play were getting out of control, maybe because the new tempo was so hot. B ut they got through the Murder Scene okay. As they came trooping off, yelling "Well contented," most of them on my side for a change, I went for Sid with a towel. He always sweats like a pig in the Murder Scene. I mopped his neck and shoved the towel up under his doublet to catch the dripping armpits. Meanwhile he was fumbling around on a narrow table where they lay props and costumes for quick changes. Suddenly he dug his fingers into my shoulder, enough to catch my attention at this point, meaning I'd show bruises tomorrow, and yelled at me under his breath, "And you love me, our crows and robes. Presto!" I was off like a flash to" the costumery. There were Mr. and Mrs. Mack's king-and-queen robes and stuff hanging and sitting just where I knew they'd have to be. I snatched them up, thinking, Boy, they made a mistake when they didn't tell about this special performance, and I started back like Flash Two. As I shot out the dressing room door the theater was very quiet. There's a short low-pitched scene on stage then, to give the audience a breather. I heard Miss Nefer say loudly (it had to be loud to get to me from even the front of the audience) : " 'Tis a good bloody play. Eyes," and some voice I didn't recognize reply a bit grudigingly, "There's meat in it and some poetry too, though rough-wrought." She went on, still as loudly as if she owned the theater, " 'Twill make Master Kyd bite his nails with jealousy -- ha, ha!" Ha-ha yourself, you scenestealing witch, I thought, as I helped Sid and then Martin on with their royal outer duds. But at the same time I knew Sid must have written those lines himself to go along with his prologue. They had the unmistakable rough-wrought Lessingham touch. Did he really expect the audience to make an#d;hing of that reference to Shakespeare's predecessor Thomas Kyd of The Spanish Tragedy and the lost Hamlet? And if they knew enough to spot that, wouldn't they be bound to realize the whole Elizabeth-Macbeth tie-up was anachronistic? But when Sid gets an inspiration he can be very bull-headed. Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy on stage. Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, "Aye, Eyes, a good bloody play. Yet somehow, methinks -- I know not how -- I've heard it before." Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, "Did'st i hear? Ob, I like not that," and I I thought, Oh-ho, so now she's t beginning to ad-lib. Well, right away they all went I ci stage with a flourish, Sid and I Martin crowned and hand in d hand. The play got going strong I again. But there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be more uneasy than caught up, and I had to I stare consciously at the actors to keep off a wavery-fit. I O ther things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling. Macbeth's a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches -- or one of the Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there'd been more multiple-parting than I'd ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk, pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to hid his Banquo beard. He'd be able to tear it off, of course, after the Murderers got Banquo and he'd made his brief appearance as a bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself. My God, has Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to ElizabethNefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue's gone nuts! But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya forfend) was becoming a ricketty patchwork illusion with everybody racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Parksounds were scary too. I was actually shivering by the time Sid got to: "Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse." Those graveyard lines didn't help my nerves any, of course. Nor did thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly for her this time, "Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where. Think you 'tiz stolen?" Greta, I told myself, you need a miltown before the crow makes wing through your kooky head. I turned to go and fetch me #  one from my closet. And stopped dead. Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig. Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, Greta, you imagined that last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer's simply unkinked herself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. Maybe Sid just had her out there for the first half of the play. Or maybe she just couldn't stand watching Martin give such a bang-up performance in her part of Lady Mack. Yes, maybe I should have told myself something like that, but somehow all I could think then -- and I thought it with a steady mounting shiver -- was. We got two Elizabeths. This one is our witch Nefer. I know. I dressed her. And I know that devil-look from the virginals. But if this is our Elizabeth, the company Elizabeth, the stage Elizabeth... who's the other? And because I didn't dare to let myself think of the answer to that question, I dodged around the invisible cage that the ash-colored skirt seemed to ripple against as the Tiger Queen turned and I ran into the dressing room, my only thought to get behind my New York City Screen. V Even little things are turning out to be great things and becoming intensely interesting. Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers? -- The Maiden T ying on my cot, my eyes ' crosswise to the printing, I looked from a pink Algonquin menu to a pale green New Amsterdam program, with a tiny doll of Father Knickerbocker dangling between them on a yellow thread. Really they weren't covering up much of anything. A ghostly hole an inch and a half across seemed to char itself in the program. As if my eye were right up against it, I saw in vivid memory what I'd seen the two times I'd dared a peek through the hole in the curtain: a bevy of ladies in masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charles knee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch of people and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes, humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from their foreheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two and in one case that many heads -- as if they were dressed up in our Tempest, Peer Gynt and Insect People costumes and some more besides. Naturally I'd had mind-wavery fits both times. Afterwards Sid had wagged a finger at me and explained that on those two nights we'd been giving performances for people who'd arranged a costume theater-party and been going to attend a masquerade ball, and 'zounds, when would I learn to guard my halfpatched pate? I don't know, I guess never, I answered now, quick looking at a Giants pennant, a Korvette ad, a map of Central Park, my Willy Mays baseball and a Radio City tour ticket. That was eight items I'd looked at this trip without feeling any inward improvement. They weren't reassuring me at all. The blue fly came slowly buzzing down over my screen and I asked it, "What are you looking for? A spider?" when what should I hear coming back through the dressing room straight toward my sleeping closet but Miss Nefer's footsteps. No one else walks that way. She's going to do something to you, Greta, I thought. She's the maniac in the company. She's the one who terrorized you with the boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the others are covering up for. She's going to smile the devil-smile and weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam Wood'll come to Dunsinane and you'll be burnt at the stake by men in armor or drawn and quartered by eight-legged monkeys that talk or torn apart by wild centaurs or whirled through the roof to the moon without being dressed for it or sent burrowing into the past to stifle in Iowa # or Egypt # B.C. The screen won't keep her out. '"Then a head of hair pushed over the screen. But it was black-bound-with-silver, Brahma bless us, and a moment later Martin was giving me one of his rare smiles. I said, "Marty, do something for me. Don't ever use Miss Nefer's footsteps again. Her voice, okay, if you have to. But not the footsteps. Don't ask me why, just don't." Martin came around and sat on the foot of my cot. My legs were already doubled up. He straightened out his blue-and-gold skirt and rested a hand on my black sneakers. "Feeling a little wonky, Greta?" he asked. "Don't worry about me. Banquo's dead and so's his ghost. We've finished the Banquet Scene. I've got lots of time." I just looked at him, queerly I guess. Then without lifting my head I asked him, "Martin, tell me the truth. Does the dressing room move around?" I was talking so low that he hitched a little closer, not touching me anywhere else though. "The Earth's whipping around the sun at # miles a second," he replied, "and the dressing room goes with it." I shook my head, my cheek scrubbing the pillow, "I mean... shifting," I said. "By itself." "How?" he asked. "Well," I told him, "I've had this idea -- it's just a sort of fancy, remember -- that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing room and sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it. Actors can fit in anywhere. They're used to learning new parts and wearing strange costumes. Heck, they're even used to traveling a lot. And if an actor's a bit strange nobody thinks anything of it -- he's almost expected to be foreign, it's an asset to him." "And a theater, well, a theater can spring up almost anywhere and nobody ask questions, except the zoning authorities and such and they can always be squared. Theaters come and go. It happens all the time. They're transitory. Yet theaters are crossroads, anonymous meeting places, anybody with a few bucks or sometimes nothing at all can go. And theaters attract important people, the sort of people you might want to do something to. Caesar was stabbed in a theater. Lincoln was shot in one. And... My voice trailed off. "A cute idea," he commented. I reached down to his hand on my shoe and took hold of his middle finger as a baby might. "Yeah," I said, "But Martin, is it true?" He asked me gravely, "What do you think?" I didn't say anything. "How would you like to work in a company like that?" he asked speculatively. "I don't really know," I said. TTe sat up straighter and his  voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasy aside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightly slapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready for some of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. He thinks you never take him seriously." "Pardon me while I gasp and glow," I said. Then, "Oh Marty, I can't really imagine myself doing the tiniest part." "Me neither, eight months ago," he said. "Now, look. Lady Macbeth." "But Marty," I said, reaching for his finger again, "you haven't answered my question. About whether it's true." "Oh that!" he said with a laugh, switching his hand to the other side. "Ask me something else." "Okay," I said, "why am I bugged on the number eight? Because I'm permanently behind a private #-ball?" "Eight's a number with many properties," he said, suddenly as intently serious as he usually is. "The comers of a cube." "You mean I'm a square?" I said. "Or just a brick? You know, 'She's a brick.' " "But eight's most curious property." he continued with a frown, "is that lying on its side it signifies infinity. So eight erect is really -- " and suddenly his made-up, naturally solemn face got a great glow of inspiration and devotion -- "Infinity Arisen!" Well, I don't know. You meet quite a few people in the theater who are bats on numerology, they use it to pick stage-names. But I'd never have guessed it of Martin. He always stmck me as the skeptical, cynical type. "I had another idea about eight," I said hesitatingly. "Spiders. That #-legged asterisk on Miss Nefer's forehead -- " I suppressed a shudder. "You don't like her, do you?" he stated. "I'm afraid of her," I said. "You shouldn't be. She's a very great woman and tonight she's playing an infinitely more difficult part than I am. No, Greta," he went on as L started to protest, "believe me, you don't understand anything about it at this moment. Just as you don't understand about spiders, fearing them. They're the first to climb the rigging and to climb ashore too. They're the webweavers, the line-throwers, the connectors, Siva and Kali united in love. They're the double mandala, the beginning and the end, infinity mustered and on the march -- " "They're also on my New York screen!" I squeaked, shrinking back across the cot a little and pointing at a tiny glinting silver-and-black thing mounting below my Willy-ball. Martin gently caught its line on his finger and lifted it very close to his face. "Eight eyes I too," he told me. Then, "Poor I little god," he said and put it I' back.  "Marty? Marty?" Sid's desperate stage-whisper rasped the length of the dressing room. Martin stood up. "Yes, Sid?" Sid's voice stayed a whisper but went from desperate to ferocious. "You villainous elf-skin! Know you not the Cauldron Scene's been playing a hundred heartbeats? 'Tis 'most my entrance and we still mustering only two witches out of three! Oh, you nott-pated starveling!" Before Sid had got much more than half of that out, Martin had slipped around the screen, raced the length of the dressing room, and I'd heard a lusty thwack as he went out the door. I couldn't help grinning, though with Martin racked by anxieties and reliefs over his first time as Lady Mack, it was easy to understand it slipping his mind that he was still doubling Second Witch. VI I will vault credit and affect high pleasures I Beyond death. -- Ferdinand i I sat down where Martin had been, first pushing the . screen far enough to the side for me to see the length of the dressing room and notice anyone coming through the door and any blurs moving behind the thin white curtain shutting off the boys' two-thirds. I'd been going to think. But instead I just sat there, experiencing my body and the room around it, steadying myself or maybe readying myself. I couldn't tell which, but it was nothing to think about, only to feel. My heartbeat became a very faint, slow, solid throb. My spine straightened. No one came in or went out. Distantly I heard Macbeth and the witches and the apparitions talk. Once I looked at the New York Screen, but all the stuff there had grown stale. No protection, no nothing. I reached down to my suitcase and from where I'd been going to get a miltown I took a dexedrine and popped it in my mouth. Then I started out, beginning to shake. When I got to the end of the curtain I went around it to Sid's dressing table and asked Shakespeare, "Am I doing the right thing. Pop?" But he didn't answer me out of his portrait. He just looked sneaky-innocent, like he knew a lot but wouldn't tell, and I found myself think of a little silver-framed photo Sid had used to keep there too of a cocky German-looking young actor with "Erich" autographed across it in white ink. At least I supposed he was an actor. He looked a little like Erich von Stroheim, but nicer yet somehow nastier too. The photo had used to upset me, I don't know why. Sid must have noticed it, for one day it was gone. I thought of the tiny blackand-silver spider crawling across the remembered silver frame, and for some reason it gave me the cold creeps. Well, this wasn't doing me any good, just making me feel dismal again, so I quick went out. In the door I had to slip around the actors coming back from the Cauldron Scene and the big bolt nicked my hip. Outside Maud was peeling off her Third Witch stuff to reveal Lady Macduff beneath. She twitched me a grin. "How's it going?" I asked. "Okay, I guess," she shrugged. "What an audience! Noisy as highschool kids." "How come Sid didn't have a boy do your part?" I asked. "He goofed, I guess. But I've battened down my bosoms and playing Mrs. Macduff as a boy." "How does a girl do that in a dress?" I asked. "She sits stiff and thinks pants," she said, handing me her witch robe. " 'Scuse me now. I got to find my children and go get murdered." I 'd moved a few steps nearer the stage when I felt the gentlest tug at my hip. I looked down and saw that a taut black thread from the bottom of my sweater connected me with the dressing room. It must have snagged on the big bolt and unraveled. I moved my body an inch or so, tugging it delicately to see what it felt like and I got the answers : Theseus's clew, a spider's line, an umbilicus. I reached down close to my side and snapped it with my fingernails. The black thread leaped away. But the dressing room door didn't vanish, or the wings change, or the world end, and I didn't fall down. After that I just stood there for quite a while, feeling my new freedom and steadiness, letting my body get used to it. I didn't do any thinking. I hardly bothered to study anything around me, though I did notice that there were more bushes and trees than set pieces, and that the flickery lightning was simply torches and that Queen Elizabeth was in (or back in) the audience. Sometimes letting your body get used to something is all you should do, or maybe can do. And I did smell horse dung. When the Lady Macduff Scene was over and the Chicken Scene well begun, I went back to the dressing room. Actors call it the Chicken Scene because Macduff weeps in it about "all my pretty chickens and their dam," meaning his kids and wife, being murdered "at one fell swoop" on orders of that chickenyard-raiding "hell-kite" Macbeth. Inside the dressing room I steered down the boys' side. Doc was putting on an improbablelooking dark makeup for Macbeth's last faithful servant Seyton. He didn't seem as boozywoozy as usual for Fourth Act, but just the same I stopped to help him get into a chain-mail shirt made of thick cord woven and silvered. In the third chair beyond, Sid was sitting back with his corset loosened and critically surveying Martin, who'd now changed to a white wool nightgown that climg and draped beautifully, but not particularly enticingly, on him and his folded towel, which had slipped a bit. From beside Sid's mirror, Shakespeare smiled out of his portrait at them like an intelligent big-headed bug. Martin stood tall, spread his arms rather like a high priest, and intoned, "Amici! Romani! Populares!" I nudged Doc. "What goes on now?" I whispered. He turned a bleary eye on them. "I think they are rehearsing Julius Caesar in Latin." He shrugged. "It begins the oration of Antony." "But why?" I asked. Sid does like to put every moment to use when the performance-fire is in people, but this project seemed pretty far afield -- hyper-pedantic. Yet at the same time I felt my scalp shivering as if my mind were jumping with speculations just below the surface. Doc shook hjs head and shrugged again. Sid shoved a palm at Martin and roared softly, " 'Sdeath, boy, thou'rt not playing a Roman statua but a Roman! Loosen your knees and try again." Then he saw me. Signing Martin to stop, he called, "Come hither, sweetling." I obeyed quickly. He gave me a fiendish grin and said, "Thou'st heard our proposal from Martin. What sayest thou, wench?" '"This time the shiver was in my back. It felt good. I realized I was grinning back at him, and I knew what I'd been getting ready for the last twenty minutes. "I'm on," I said. "Count me in the company." Sid jumped up and grabbed me by the shoulders and hair and bussed me on both cheeks. It was a little like being bombed. "Prodigious!" he cried. "Thou'lt play the Gentlewoman in the Sleepwalking Scene tonight. Martin, her costume! Now sweet wench, mark me well." His voice grew grave and old. "When was it she last walked?" The new courage went out of me like water down a chute. "But Siddy, I can't start tonight" I protested, half pleading, half outraged. "Tonight or never! 'Tis an emergency -- we're short-handed." Again his voice changed. "When was it she last walked?" "But Siddy, I don't know the part." "You must. You've heard the play twenty times this year past. When was it she last walked?" Martin was back and yanking down a blonde wig on my head and shoving my arms into a light gray robe. "I've never studied the lines," I squeaked at Sdiney. "Liar! I've watched your lips move a dozen nights when you watched the scene from the wings. Close your eyes, girl! Martin, unhand her. Close your eyes, girl, empty your mind, and listen, listen only. When was it she last walked?" In the blackness I heard myself replying to that cue, first in a whisper, then more loudly, then full-throated but grave, "Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth -- " "Bravissimo! Siddy cried and bombed me again. Martin hugged his arm around my shoulders too, then quickly stooped to start hooking up my robe from the bottom. "But that's only the first lines, Siddy," I protested. "They're enough!" "But Siddy, what if I blow up?" I asked. "Keep your mind empty. You won't. Further, I'll be at your side, doubling the Doctor, to prompt you if you pause." That ought to take care of two of me, I thought. Then something else struck me. "But Siddy," I quavered, "how do I play the Gentlewoman as a boy?" "Boy?" he demanded wonderingly. "Play her without falling down flat on your face and I'll be past measure happy!" And he smacked me hard on the fanny. Martin's fingers were darting at the next to the last hook. I stopped him and shoved my hand down the neck of my sweater and got hold of the subway token and the chain it was on and yanked. It burned my neck but the gold links parted. I started to throw it across the room, but instead I smUed at Siddy and dropped it in his ' palm. I "The Sleepwalking Scene!" Maud hissed insistently to us from the door. I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits, and 'tis found ; They go on such strange geometrical hinges, ! You may open them both ways. -- The Duchess 'here is this about an actor on stage: he can see the audience but he can't look at them, unless he's a narrator or some sort of comic. I wasn't the first (Grendel groks!) and only scared to death of becoming the second as Siddy walked me out of the wings onto the stage, over I the groundcloth that felt so much like ground, with a sort I of interweaving policeman-grip I on my left arm. Sid was in a dark gray robe I looking like some dismal kind ' of monk, his head so hooded for I the Doctor that you couldn't see  his face at all. My skull was pulse-buzzing. My throat was squeezed dry. My heart was pounding. Below that my body was empty, squirmy, electricity-stung, yet with the feeling of wearing ice cold iron pants. miles, "When was it she last walked?" and then an iron bell somewhere tolling the the reply -- I guess it had to be my voice coming up through my body from my iron pants: "Since his majesty went into the field -- " and so on, until Martin had come on stage, stary-eyed, a white scarf tossed over the back of his long black wig and a flaring candle two inches thick gripped in his hight hand and dripping wax on his wrist, and started to do Lady Mack's sleepwalking half-hinted confessions of the murders of Duncan and Banquo and Lady Macduff. So here is what I saw then without looking, like a vivid scene that floats out in front of your mind in a reverie, hovering against a background of dark blur, and sort of flashes on and off as you think, or in my case act. All the time, remember, with Sid's hand hard on my wrist and me now and then tolling Shakespearan language out of some lightless storehouse of memory I'd never known was there to belong to me. T'here was a medium-size glade in a forest. Through the half-naked black branches shone a dark cold sky, like ashes of silver, early evening. The glade had two horns, as it were, narrowing back to either side and going off through the forest. A chilly breeze was blowing out of them, almost enough to put out the candle. Its flame rippled. Rather far back in the horn to my left, but not very far, were clumped two dozen or so men in dark cloaks they huddled aroimd themselves. They wore brimmed tallish hats and pale stuff showing at their necks. Somehow I assumed that these men must be the "rude fellows from the City" I remembered Beau mentioning though I couldn't see them very well, and didn't spend much time on them, there was one of them who had his hat off or excitedly pushed way back, showing a big pale forehead. Although that was all the conscious impression I had of his face, he seemed frighteningly familiar. In the horn to my right, which was wider, were lined up about a dozen horses, with grooms holding tight every two of them, but throwing their heads back now and then as they strained against the reins, and stamping tlieir front hooves restlessly. Oh, they frightened me, I tell you, that line of two-foot-long glossyhaired faces, writhing back their upper lips from teeth wide as piano keys, every horse of them , looking as wild-eyed and evil as Fuseli's steed sticking its head through the drapes in his picture "The Nightmare." To the center the trees came close to the stage. Just in front of them was Queen Elizabeth sitting on the chair on the spread carpet, just as I'd seen her out there before; only now I could see that the braziers were glowing and redly high-lighting her pale cheeks and dark red hair and the silver in her dress and cloak. She was looking at Martin -- Lady Mack -- most intently, i her mouth grimaced tight, swisti ing her fingers together. Standing rather close around her were a half dozen men with fancier hats and ruffs and wideflaring riding gauntlets. Then, through the trees and tall leafless bushes just behind Elizabeth, I saw an identical i Elizabeth-face floating, only this one was smiling a demonic smile. The eyes were open very wide. Now and then the pupils darted rapid glances from side to side.  I 'here was a sharp pain in my left wrist and Sid whispersnarling at me, "Accustomed action!" out of the corner of his shadowed mouth. I tolled on obediently, "It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour." Martin had set down the candle, which still flared and guttered, on a little high table so firm its thin legs must have been stabbed into the ground. And he was rubbing his hands together slowly, continually, tormentedly, trying to get rid of Duncan's blood which Mrs. Mack knows in her sleep is still there. And all the while as he did it, the agitation of the seated Elizabeth grew, the eyes flicking from side to side, hands writhing. He got to the lines, "Here's the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh oh!" As he wrung out those soft, tortured sighs, Elizabeth stood up from her chair and took a step forward. The courtiers moved toward her quickly, but not touching her, and she said loudly, "Tis the blood of Mary Stuart whereof she speaks -- the pails of blood that will gush j from her chopped neck. Oh, I , cannot endure it!" And as she  said that last, she suddenly turned about and strode back toward the trees, kicking out her ashcolored skirt. One of the courtiers turned with her and stooped toward her closely, whispering something. But although she paused a moment, all she said was, "Nay, Eyes, stop not the play, but follow me not! Nay, I say leave me, Leicester!" And she walked into the trees, he looking after her. Then Sid was kicking my ankle and I was reciting something and Martin was taking up his candle again without looking at it saying with a drugged agitation, "To bed; to bed; there's knocking at the gate." Elizabeth came walking out of the trees again, her head bowed. She couldn't have been in them ten seconds. Leicester hurried toward her, hand anxiously outstretched. Martin moved offstage, torturedly yet softly wailing, "What's done cannot be undone." Just then Elizabeth flicked aside Leicester's hand with playful contempt and looked up and she was smiling the devil-smile. A horse whinnied like a trumpeted snicker. As Sid and I started our last few lines together I intoned mechanically, letting words freefall from my mind to my tongue. All this time I had been answering Lady Mack in my thoughts. That's what you think, sister. God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than rising the dead. -- Summa Theologica T he moment I was out of sight of the audience I broke away from Sid and ran to the dressing room. I flopped down on the first chair I saw, my head and arms trailed over its back, and I almost passed out. It wasn't a mind-wavery fit. Just normal faint. I couldn't have been there long -- well, not very long, though the battle-rattle and alarums of the last scene were echoing tinnily from the stage -- when Bruce and Beau and Mark (who was playing Malcolm, Martin's usual main part) came in wearing their last-act stagearmor and carrying between them Queen Elizabeth flaccid as a sack. Martin came after them, stripping off his white wool nightgown so fast that buttons flew. I thought automatically, rU have to sew those. They laid her down on three chairs set side by side and hurried out. Unpinning the folded towel, which had fallen around his waist, Martin walked over and looked down at her. He yanked off his wig by a braid and tossed it at me. I let it hit me and fall on the floor. I was looking at that white queenly face, eyes open and staring sightless at the ceiling, mouth open a little too with a thread of foam trailing from the comer, and at that ice-creamcone bodice that never stirred. The blue fly came buzzing over my head and circled down toward her face. "Martin," I said with difficulty, "I don't think I'm going to like what we're doing." He turned on me, his short hair elfed, his fists planted high on his hips at the edge of his black tights, which now were all his clothes. "You knew!" he said impatiently. "You knew you were signing up for more than acting when you said, 'Count me in the company.' " Like a legged saphire the blue fly walked across her upper lip and stopped by the thread of foam. "But Martin... changing the the real queen...replacing her with a double -- " His dark brows shot up. "The real -- You think this is the real Queen Elizabeth?" He grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the nearest table, gushed some on a towel stained with greasepaint and, holding the dead head by its red hair (no, wig -- the real one wore a wig too) scrubbed the forehead. The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of #n "S" styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open. CtOnake!" he hissed. "Destroyerl The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent! God knows how many times people like Queen Elizabeth have been dug out of the past, first by Snakes, then by Spiders, and kidnaped or killed and replaced in the course of our war. This is the first big operation I've been on, Greta. But I know that much." My head began to ache. I asked, "If she's an enemy double, why didn't she know a performance of Macbeth in her lifetime was an anachronism?" "Foxholed in the past, only trying to hold a position, they get dulled. They turn half zombie. Even the Snakes. Even our people. Besides, she almost did catch on, twice when she spoke to Leicester." "Martin," I said dully, "if there've been all these replacements, first by them, then by us, what's happened to the real Elizabeth?" He shrugged. "God knows." I asked softly, "But does He, Martin? Can He?" He hugged his shoulders in, as if to contain a shudder. "Look, Greta," he said, "it's the Snakes who are the warpers and destroyers. We're restoring the past. The Spiders are trying to keep things as first created. We only kill when we must." I shuddered then, for bursting out of my memory came the glittering, knife-flashing, nightshrouded, bloody image of my lover, the Spider soldier-ofchange Erich von Hohenwald, dying in the grip of a giant silver spider, or spider-shaped entity large as he, as they rolled in a tangled ball down a flight of rocks in Central Park. But the memory-burst didn't blow up my mind, as it had done a year ago, no more than snapping the black thread from my sweater had ended the world. I asked Martin, "Is that what the Snakes say?" "Of course not! They make the same claims we do. But somewhere, Greta, you have to trust." He put out the middle finger of his hand. I didn't take hold of it. He whirled it away, snapping it against his thumb. "You're still grieving for that carrion there!" he accused me. He jerked down a section of white curtain and whirled it over the stiffening body. "If you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled, imprisoned, locked forever in the past, her mind pulsing faintly in the black hole of the dead and gone, yearning for Nirvana yet nursing one lone painful patch of consciousness. And only to hold a fort! Only to make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that all the other consequences flow on. The Snakes' Elizabeth let Mary live... and England die... and the Spaniard hold North America to the Great Lakes and New Scandinavia." Once more he put out his middle finger. A ll right, all right," I said, barely touching it. "You've convinced me." "Great!" he said. "'By for now, Greta. I got to help strike the set." "That's good," I said. He loped out. I could hear the skirling sword-clashes of the final fight to the death of the two Macks, Duff and Beth. But I only sat there in the empty dressing room pretending to grieve for a devilsmiling snow tiger locked in a time-cage and for a cute sardonic German killed for insubordination that I had reported... but really grieving for a girl who for a year had been a rootless child of the theater with a whole company of mothers and fathers, afraid of nothing more than subway bogies and Park and Village monsters. As I sat there pitying myself beside a shrouded queen, a shadow fell across my knees. I saw stealing through the dressing room a young man in worn dark clothes. He couldn't have been more than twenty-three. He was a frail sort of guy with a weak chin and big forehead and eyes that saw everything. I knew at one he was the one who had seemed familiar to me in the knot of City fellows. He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on the reserve makeup box by Siddy's mirror. And I began to tremble. He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began to tremble too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine. The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witches faintly wailing, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair -- " Sid has them echo that line offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled. Then Sid came pounding up. He's the first finished, since the fight ends offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mache head of him and show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door. Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid. He moved toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at the same time in breathy little rushes. S id stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling up behind him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so none of them could get past. Their faces peered around him. And all this while the stranger was saying, "What may this mean? Can such things be? Are all the seeds of time... wetted by some hell-trickle... sprouted at once in their granary? Speak... speak! You played me a play... that I am writing in my secretest heart. Have you disjointed the frame of things... to steal my unborn thoughts? Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world a stage? Speak, I say! Are you not my friend Sidney James Lessingham of King's Lynn... singed by time's fiery wand... sifted over with the ashes of thirty years? Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth... aye, and perchance hell too... Speak, I charge you!" And with that he put his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him, I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for tfie one time I ever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing to say. He worked his lips. He opened his mouth twice and twice shut it. Then, with a kind of desperation in his face, he motioned the actors out of the way behind him with one big arm and swung the other around the stranger's narrow shoulders and swept him out of the dressing room, himself following. The actors came pouring in then, Bruce tossing Macbeth's head to Martin like a football while he tugged off his horned helmet, Mark dumping a stack of shields in the corner, Maudie pausing as she skittered past me to say, "Hi Gret, great you're back," and patting my temple to show what part of me she meant. Beau went straight to Sid's dressing table and set the portrait aside and lifted out Sid's reserve makeup box. "The lights, Martin!" he called. Then Sid came back in, slamming and bolting the door behind him and standing for a moment with his back against it, panting. I rushed to him. Something was boiling up inside me, but before it could get to my brain I opened my mouth and it came out as, "Siddy, you can't fool me, that was no dirty S-or-S. I don't care how much he shakes and purrs, or shakes a spear, or just plain shakes -- Siddy, that was Shakespeare!" "Aye, girl, I think so," he told me, holding my wrists together. "They can't find dolls to double men like that -- or such is my main hope." A big sickly grin came on his face. "Oh, gods," he demanded, "with what words do you talk to a man whose speech you've stolen all your life?" I asked him, "Sid, were we ever in Central Park?" He answered, "Once -- twelve months back. A one-night stand. They came for Erich. You flipped." He swung me aside and moved behind Beau: AJl the lights went out. 'hen I saw, dimly at first, the great dull-gleaming jewel, covered with dials and green-glowing windows, that Beau had lifted from Sid's reserve makeup box. The strongest green glow showed his intent face, still framed by the long glistening locks of the Ross wig, as he kneeled before the thing -- Major Maintainer, I remembered it was called. "When now? Where?" Beau tossed impatiently to Sid over his shoulder. "The forty-fourth year before our Lord's birth!" Sid answered instantly. "Rome!" Beau's fingers danced over the dials like a musician's, or a safecracker's. The green glow flared and faded flickeringly. "There's a storm in that vector of the Void." "Circle it," Sid ordered. "There are dark mists every way." "Then pick the likeliest dark path!" I called through the dark, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair, eh, Siddy?" "Aye, chick," he answered me. " 'Tis all the rule we have!" Two of his greatest novels ini one volume and On sale at your newsstand in Galaxy Magabook No. II its vividly real telepathic society, detailed so ingeniously and dramatically that, finishing the hook, you'll find it hard to Ixlieve that society doesn't exist -- yet ! regular price, plus # for postage and handling. Supplies are limited ! Send your order in immediately! (Use Coupon or Separate Sheet) Pleaso #I Hudson St. rush me New York  copies of #, The Original Edition -- Completa I Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Plus Postage # Name Address -- CityState. I Enclose. Stop wasting time in a dead-end jobl Enjoy the big rewards offered the law-trained man in business A Correspondence Institution # S. Dearborn, Dept. ## Please send lue. Uve of tosi or ootiation. your illustrated booklet "l.aw Trainiog foE Lxdership." Name Age... Add ress County City Zone State Working Occupation Hours...A.M... P-M. #I Cnsdln rrMdrnlv LaSallr. Box #. 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Off  ' way system purchased a modified and rather rudimentary computer and installed it in the cab of one of its subway trains, the operating union took an extremely dim view of it. They suspected that if this experiment worked it would be only a step to automating all transportation and thus to throwing the city's whole force of motormen and conductors out of work. In this suspicion they were undoubtedly right. It's true that it seems likely it would be a rather long step, not to be taken in a hurry. After a year's experience with what Mike Quill calls "the Headless Horseman" and the subway officials term "the Automated Train" it seems pretty clear that there's a way still to go. The automated train was, to begin with, given the simplest job in the system -- it shuttles back and forth from Times Square to Grand Central, never switching, never stopping except at the ends of the line. It is a job that an idiot could do pretty well, and in fact the Headless Horseman does it in about the style of an idiot... and a neurotic and heavy-handed idiot, at that. It bumps irresolutely to its terminal and, as soon as it realizes it is there, flies into a panic nd were Rosicrftctans Benjamin Franklh Isaac Newton FrancMBacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose California, U.S.A. copy of "The Mastery of Life" -- ; ligation. A nonprofit organization. Address : Srribtf L.E.W. Scribe L.E.W. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains hpw I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name , AddressCity State -- and jams on the brakes... while the standby human motorman scowls into a dark future with his hands in his pockets. Why is the standby motorman there? To take over in case of emergency, says the union. To provide a means of testing and studying the equipment, says the company. But in fact he is there for only one reason -- because if the subway system hadn't agreed to employ him there the employees would have gone out on strike, feeling, with much logic, that the time to deal with a threat is before it gets too big to handle. Q uestion is, how big is the threat going to get? And more important -- when is it going to happen? It is our opinion -- admittedly backed by nothing much in the way of a guarantee, because we don't expect to be around long enough to be called on it -- that the worst fears of the opponents of automation will never be realized because (a) the great disastrous upsurge in unemployment simply won't happen and (b) anyway, most of it has happened already! For the tendency to develop ways for two men to do what used to be ten men's work is not something that was invented with automation. It has been going on for something more than two hundred years. It began with the steam textile mills in England; it grew with the introduction of the cotton gin in the South. It came to a head a third of a century ago in what was then called "rationalization" -- or sometimes, "the assembly line" -- and indeed it did lead to serious stress, playing a part in the cause and prolongation of the Great Depression. Automation is only a part of a larger process -- the continuing growth of techniques to increase the productivity of the individual worker. Granted that this has over the last couple of centuries Can you imagine anyone applying for any of those jobs today? There are simply some jobs that are too boring, too arduous, too pointless for a human being to do. These are the jobs that automation is out to get, just as its predecessors have got the jobs of picking the seeds out of cotton bolls and running a loom with a foot-treadle. If it hadn't been for previous similar developments, a lot of us would have been doing those jobs today. Those jobs are gone -- so those of us who would have had them are, in a sense unemployed. And frankly -- we're doing pretty well out of it, aren't we? by j. t. mcintosh Old Earth was dying, and neither courage nor strength could save it... but perhaps vanity could! I '"'vne after another the girls in bikinis and stripsuits on the beach at Cannes raised their heads and preened themselves as the tall, bronzed stranger strode past along the waterline. They could have saved themselves the trouble. He didn't even glance at them. That he should be a stranger was in itself intriguing. There were scarcely any strangers any more. There were so few people left that everybody knew nearly everybody else. The Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa were all empty, save for a few determined hermits. The Pyramids, Sydney Bridge, the Grand Canyon and Red Square no longer drew throngs of gaping, camera-clicking tourists -- although they were all still there, only Sydney Bridge and Red Square showing signs of neglect. (The Grand Canyon and the Pyramids were neglected too, but they didn't show it.) The Riviera being as good a place as any for a few score of thousands of people to live, winter and summer, with minimum effort and least danger from flood, fire, drought, pestilence, famine and wild animals, the population of Grandmother Earth had gradually collected there. California, Miami, Sydney, Biarritz and Algiers had held out for a while in the hope of winning the battle to be the last resort of a race dying of lethargy and apathy. One by one, however, they had put up the shutters. Cannes beach, although undeniably part of a reservation for the aged, equally undeniably didn't look it. The really old couldn't summon up enough energy to go out any more. Only teens and twenties, and the few children, went to the immense trouble of prettying themselves and walking to the beach to sunbathe. And most of these were women. When a race is dying, the average woman holds out longer than the average man. When a man comes to the conclusion that there is no longer anything worth doing, he's dead. A woman lasts longer because to the end a certain desire for admiration remains. She keeps herself clean and firm and attractive after her male counterpart has surrendered to dirt and idleness and silent solitude. She seeks the company of her own sex, and at least the acknowledgment of the other sex, when a man can't be bothered going out. So she remains half alive when he is three-quarters dead. Marcel was unaware of the interest he was kindling in a hundred golden-brown, scarcely covered breasts. He would not have cared had noticed it. He had other things on his mind. Marcel was one of the last rebels. True, if he had lived a few centuries earlier, temperament unchanged, he would have been regarded as the most timid, indolent conformist. But in his world, in his time, he was a rebel. He wanted to live, when nearly everyone else was content to die. IT e was in Cannes for a Council meeting that afternoon. He had cycled from San Remo, stopping overnight at Nice, for the distance was all of fifty miles. It was a long journey, but he preferred to cycle. Cars were becoming increasingly unreliable and there were no spares any more. Marcel had left one car in Genoa and another in Frejus, the two limits of present-day human habitation. Either might have been repaired in Nice or San Remo, but in Genoa and Frejus, the withering outposts of a shrinking community, they were so far from real civilization that they might as well have been in dead, empty Chicago. Not many delegates would take the trouble to come, he reflected as he walked along the golden sand, the tideless Mediterranean throwing up wavelets at his feet. Of the Council of # he doubted if more than thirty would be present. Perhaps only twentyfive. Well, the fewer there were, the fewer he'd have to convince. Something had to be done, and Marcel thought he knew what. Even if only twenty-five delegates turned up, the Council retained all its powers. Quorum provisions had gone long ago -- it was seldom that any meeting of any committee achieved this technical competence. In his mind he examined his proposal for flaws. He found none. It would work. And it was perhaps the only thing which would work. There was no point in thinking about it any more. Released at last from his mood concentration, Marcel took notice of one of the girls sleepily sunbathing up by the promenade wall. She was a pretty blonde of perhaps fourteen, her brown body lightly censored by a blue stripsuit. She smiled at him, frankly inviting, promising all there was to promise. He crossed the ten yards of sand that separated them and sat beside her. "Hi," she said. "I'm Roya. How come I've never seen you before?" "I'm from San Remo. Marcel is the natfie." "I've been in San Remo often, and I never saw you there." She seemed unable to get past the astonishment that such a man could exist, could have existed for all her life and perhaps seven or eight years more, quite unknown to her. "I'm not often on the beach. I'm a carpenter. I make chairs, tables, cabinets, things like that." "I guess somebody has to make them," she admitted. "But you must be on the beach sometimes. Where else did you get that tan?" "The sun shines," Marcel retorted, "not only on the beach, not only on the seventy by two mile strip we live in, but over the mountains, across the sea and on other continents. I could acquire a tan eleven thousand miles from San Remo beach." She stared. "You talk funny." "I suppose I do. Perhaps it comes of occasionally reading a book." "You read books too? Looking like you do? You make tables and chairs and read books?" He looked at her thoughtfully, wondering if behind her pretty face there was a mind capable of understanding important things, wondering whether she was trivial because she had never encountered anything but triviality. "What would you expect me to do?" he asked quietly. "I thought you were a lover." "You flatter me not." T Tis tone was cold, but it failed to repress her. She giggled. Even sex was too much trouble for a race which had lost its vitality. In the early stages of the decline, a century or two back, when it was steep but not precipitous, promiscuity such as Babylon and the French court had never dreamed of became the rule. It did not last. Conquests in which there was no contest ceased to divert. It became necessary to search for and invent new sensations, and soon there were none left. Now the jaded survivors languorously chased not sex but pleasure in sex, some ghost of meaning in sex. Sex with issue was of course rare. Few women wanted children, few who wanted them were capable of bearing them, and few men could give them all the necessary assistance. Marriage was as dead as witchcraft. All that was left was a lazy longing in both sexes to be stirred, however briefly and unproductively, into a semblance of passion. Nobody expected it to happen often, or for long. Certain comparatively lusty individuals of both sexes were much in demand as kindlers of passion. They could be amateurs, subtle or crude, powerful or frail, but they all had this in common: they offered life. Never had public opinion changed as drastically as in the way lovers were regarded. Once lovers would have been called gigolos, courtesans and worse. Now only odd people like Marcel were irritated to be thought to be no more than a lover. " want to be a lover," Roya said. "You would." She started telling him frankly about her qualifications. Although she did not claim to have had the great complete experience yet, she had come close, she said. It was the fault of the males that she had not done better. With Marcel she thought she... "How old are you?" he asked abruptly. "Fourteen." "You've plenty of time." If you could achieve passion at twelve or with a partner of twelve, good luck to you. By the time you were fifteen that compartment of your life might be closed for ever. Briefly interested in Roya, Marcel looked her over. Her blue stripsuit was a long ribbon which went round behind her neck, crossed her breasts and ran down in a narrow V to go up behind her and curve back round the hips to her abdomen again. It covered as much flesh as a bikini, but not the same flesh. Young girls wore stripsuits to show that they didn't sag -- if they didn't sag. "Want me to go home with you now?" he asked ungraciously"Why not? It's only half a mile." He stood up. "In that case, let's forget it," he said. "I have to come back here anyway." He strode on, unconscious of the fact that he, the rebel, the fighter, the energetic champion of lost causes, had just proved that he was very nearly as indolent as everybody else. II r T"he Council meeting was held in the Majestic, on the promenade, formerly one of the leading hotels of Cannes. Marcel, a white coat over his trunks, arrived precisely as the meeting was due to start. His eyes widened incredulously. There were not twenty-five delegates present. Not fifteen. Not even ten. Apart from himself, one man and one woman were present. They waited for five minutes, but no one else turned up. Then Dion, the senior member present, declared the Council in session. The subject was the moribund state of human society on Earth (it usually was), and the purpose of the meeting was to consider ways and means of improving the situation. Earth was dying, and knew it, but didn't like it. Not unnaturally, the three delegates who had taken the trouble to come (Marcel from San Remo, Selba from Nice and Dion from half a block away) were the three who were not only the most concerned about the situation, but also the readiest to produce possible countermeasures. Dion spoke first. An elderly, silver-haired man, just on the point of turning querulous, he addressed the meeting over the heads of Marcel and Selba as if the hall, formerly a ballroom, were packed with eager, attentive listeners. "The situation is grave," he said, as if they didn't know it. "The present population is roughly sixty thousand. But of this number, ten thousand are over seventy. In twenty years, if the present trend continues, the population will be fifty thousand. In another twenty, less than forty. I say again, the situation is grave. Extremely grave..." Nobody argued with him. He came presently to his main point "Yet we peopled the galaxy," he declared. "We blazed the way to the stars. On scores of far-off worlds, human settlements are thriving, growing, prospering. It is our sons and daughters who gave the galaxy life. Now Mother Earth has become Grandmother Earth. Our colonies are spawning new colonies, ever further out, further from home." He suddenly looked directly at Marcel and Selba. "It is up to our children to help us," he said. "We gave of our best. It was our strongest, bravest, most eager men and women who voyaged on the starships. We have heard how they prospered. Now we need the help of our strong, lusty children. We need..." He went on in this strain for some time. What started as an impassioned ringing appeal slowly dissolved into the hurt bitterness of an old man abandoned by his children, of Lear betrayed by his daughters. He had no positive suggestion. How the far-distant Terran colonies were to be told of Earth's need of their strength and lust for life was not mentioned. What exactly they were to do was not mentioned either. (Come back and recolonize the planet which had given them all birth? Or send some mystic talisman which would miraculously restore life to a dying world?) In conclusion he held out his hands in pitiful appeal, and then sat down. S elba, next in seniority, spoke next. She referred acidly to Naro, the President, who had not bothered to come and preside, although he lived only a mile or two away in Golfe Juan. Then she demolished Dion's vague complaints in a couple of sentences. "The nearest colony is twentytwo years away," she said. "If Dion wants to go there and bring back a restoration team, I suggest he will have to spend the next forty-four years of his life doing it." She paused significantly. Dion's age was uncertain; what was certain, however, was that he didn't have another fortyfour years to live. Selba was a tall, straight woman, once beautiful and still regally handsome. Now nearly fifty, she had grown out of the hot-headed certainty of youth into the cool, inflexible certainty of age. She had everything taped. "If we go to the colonies," she said firmly, "it must be to join them, not beg from them." Having made this brief opening statement she stood back, so to speak, to admire it. "Women hold the key," she declared. "In every really important situation, women always hold the key. Now, most of us are sterile or barren -- most of us of both sexes. There is no real reason for this, except that as a race we have lost the will to live. Yet if those of us who could have children had childdren, the population level would stabilize and even increase. "Why don't women who could have children bear them? Partly because they fear childbirth. Partly because they shrink from the responsibility and sheer hard work of bringing up children. We must overcome both these things. "As a closed community, we cannot do this. There is no competition. Women who refuse to face the responsibility of being women are permitted to persist in their refusal. What we need is a parallel community -- a rival community, in which more blunt, brutal, vital rules of conduct apply. Where can we find such a community? Only in the colonies." So her solution was for the Earth survivors to uproot themselves, every last one of them, and join one of the colonies. There was a three-quarters-finished ship, she said, somewhere in America. She understood it was near Philadelphia. It would be a small matter to finish it and evacuate Earth... IV T arcel's turn came. Like Selba, he began by demolishing the previous speaker. "Do you know what is done last on any huge technical project like building a starship?" he asked her directly. She admitted she did not, contriving to suggest that the knowledge was not important. "I'll tell you," Marcel said. "All the most difficult and complicated things. The things which demand the greatest skill and the greatest scientific knowledge. It would be easier by far to build a starship to # per cent completion than to do the rest." Without a pause he demanded: "Do you know how many passengers such a ship could carry?" "I imagine a great many -- " " Y es. A vast complement. Two hundred and eighty, plus crew. Three hundred twenty in all. And we have #." He waited. Selba waited too, hostilely. "We can forget the colonies," Marcel said at last, "as they have forgotten us. We'll see colonists only if some settlement decides to send a ship here. And why should they? Nobody pays social calls that take forty-five to seventy years to complete. That's why we haven't seen a ship from and of the colonies since before the last outward-bound starship left here a hundred and fifty years ago -- carrying the last of our adventurers. One day, when some of the colonies have finished building and have time to waste on things that don't matter very much, a shipload of archaeologists and anthropologists will arrive -- but, the way things look now, by the time they do there will only be remains for them to argue over." "It's not right," said Dion, almost to himself. "They should come and see us. We gave them birth." "Sentimentality," said Selba coldly. "Why should they care? It's us that's in a desperate situation, not them." "That's just it," Marcel observed. "We're not in a desperate situation. We couldn't be in an easier situation. We've picked one of the best all-the-year-round climates in the world. Fruit and crops grow so easily we scarcely have to do more than collect them, there's unlimited pasture for our cattle, and we have vast stocks of the things we can no longer be bothered to make, like textiles, ballpoint pens and plastic toilet-paper dispensers. Far from being desperate, we're in such an easy situation that we're all dying of sheer boredom." There was sufficient truth in this for the others to let it pass, although they would have expressed it differently. Marcel made his suggestion without hedging. "There used to be a border at Menton, between France and Italy. Let's close it! Let's create difference, hostility and distrust. It's our only way to survive." Selba forgot for a moment to be acidly polite. She crowed with triumph. "Marcel is young," she said. "Too young to remember that the plan he suggests was tried forty years ago -- and was a miserable failure. Naturally! Because the solution is an artificial one. The conflict he wants is artificial. When the border was closed, people sailed past it in boats. They swam round the barriers. Seeing no sense in artificial, unnecessary prohibitions, they ignored them." There was silence. Marcel, disappointed, had to admit to himself that if the Council adopted his plan, the general public would probably do once more exactly what they had done forty years ago -- ignore the closure. They wouldn't storm the barriers. That would be too much trouble, and somebody might get hurt. They would simply sail or swim past the barrier when they felt like it. That was no trouble at all. There was still sense in his idea, but as Selba bluntly said, it was an artificial solution. Almost anything which might be tried suffered from the same flaw. There was no question of boredom when an individual or a community had to struggle desperately for survival. But it was no use pretending that a desperate situation existed when everyone could plainly see it did not. In the silence they heard a strange but not quite unknown sound -- the sound of aero engines. Ill 'T'he black raider swept in from across the Mediterranean, towing a large anti-gravity barge. Linked together by a steel towwire, the two vessels circled Cannes and then dropped rapidly to hover near the harbor. Indolent as they were, the local inhabitants flocked to the spot. This was an incident completely out of the ordinary: although there were planes at Nice airport still allegedly capable of flight, only a few old men had ever piloted an aircraft and no younger people showed any particular inclination to learn. The black plane must be from some other, unknown community. That such a group existed was not surprising. Tiny pockets of humanity were known to exist, or to have existed, in many places. That it should be at a level of achievement capable of operating planes was a surprise, and by no means an unpleasant one -- Until the machine-guns opened up. No one was hit. The bursts of fire were evidently meant to contain the crowd which had already gathered. Isolated from the rest of the town by a fusillade, they crowded together fearfully with screams of horror, and no one who was not already there made any attempt to join them. Marcel was among the hundreds who, on their way to join the crowd on the promenade, saw and heard what was going on and crept under cover. The plane landed, the barge settling slowly behind it. Scores of black-suited men emerged. They spoke little. Their long black guns did all their talking for them. Blind panic made some of the trapped herd try to run to safety. The black raiders shot over their heads. The warning was enough. Silence fell again. The black raiders no longer had to shoot. The two or three hundred men and women huddled together in horrified apprehension had learned their lesson. The raiders all wore black pants, black sweaters and grotesque gas masks. Those among the hundreds of prisoners who kept their heads saw the implications of the masks: The raiders were prepared to release tear or poison gas if they had to. The anti-gravity barge reached the ground. Another dozen blacksuited men jumped down. And then the purpose of the raid emerged. The raiders went among their prisoners, threatening all of them but otherwise ignoring most of them. Those they did not ignore were the youngest and prettiest women. These were sent to the barge. There were more screams and several people fainted. Oddly enough, they saved themselves by fainting. The black raiders contemptuously ignored anyone who lapsed into unconsciousness. The crowd consisted of those who were quickest on their feet and had been on the beach or promenade when the plans appeared. They were therefore the youngest inhabitants of the town, more than half of them children. The raiders ignored girls who had not reached maturity. Those who had were chosen if they were attractive enough, no matter how young they were. When they had screened the whole group, the raiders had forty-nine girls between twelve and twenty-five. All of them were in the barge and the doors were shut. But they could still be sefen through the glass cover which enclosed the vessel, crying, beating the glass. nr'here was no move to rescue them. The people of Cannes, whether in the crowd on the promenade or watching from the surrounding buildings, had not forgotten the lesson of the machine-guns or the significance of the gas masks. The raiders went back to the grounded plane and the door in its shiny black side slammed behind them. None were in the barge with the women prisoners. None were needed, apparently. When the plane rose vertically into the air, the barge rose with it, operated by remote control. Those who remained on the promenade cowered as if expecting a blow. Many of them were. It seemed not unlikely that the black raiders, their booty safe, would now open up with murderous guns or drop lethal gas. However, they did not. The black plane suddenly darted eastwards along the coast and was soon out of sight. The people of Cannes, on the promenade or in the buildings overlooking it, blinked and frowned in surprise. The barge with the forty-nine girls in it had been left sixty feet up, motionless over the promenade. Marcel emerged from ' cover and ran to the beach. All around him people were shouting, talking excitedly, looking up at, the barge. He ignored them. The raiders would be back. Contemptuously they had left their booty in plain sight, out of reach. Obviously the girls must be rescued. But how? Marcel gauged the distance -- sixty feet, with black asphalt below. Jumping was out of the question. The girls had a door open and were crowded behind it, looking down fearfully. There must be some way to rescue them... The barge would stay at sixty feet, resisting any effort to pull it down. Could it be towed? Many of the buildings only a few hundred yards away had windows high enough for the girls to climb through, if the barge could be moved against them. But how to get a rope to the barge? Marcel remembered having seen pictures of people jumping from burning buildings into sheets held by a dozen men. Would it work, without practice? Could the girls be persuaded to jump? Easier still, surely much easier, was to get a rope to the barge. A rope could haul up a rope ladder. Failing that, surely the girls were desperate enough to climb down a rope? A thin cord could haul up a rope. Was it possible to throw a weight attached to a cord sixty feet in the air? It ought to be -- and yet, judging the distance again, he knew he couldn't do it himself. Sixty feet was only an estimate, it might be more. And the girls couldn't lean more than a foot or so beyond the door. It would be necessary for the thrower to stand back and throw the weight into the doorway. That would entail a throw of more like a hundred and twenty feet. Some of the men standing around were already trying experimental casts with small objects they had in their pockets. None of them managed to reach the barge. Tut there had to be a way.-'Haul a cart with a bale of hay below the barge? That might work, but the raiders would not be gone long. Contemptuous as they might be of the courage and resource of the people of Cannes, they must be aware that in a couple of hours, even an hour, some way of rescuing the women must be found. Whatever they had to do, whatever sent them racing along the coast toward Nice and Monte, would not occupy them more than half an hour at most. Ordinary ladders were useless. You couldn't jump from or to the top of a ladder. And from the top of a swaying ladder it wasn't easy to throw a rope hard and accurately. Marcel thought of harpoons and spring guns, only to abandon the line of thought. You might unearth a harpoon in working condition in a couple of days. Not in ten minutes. Couldn't the girls make a rope out of their clothes? After another glance up at them he abandoned that idea too. Most of them wore bikinis and stripsuits. The skirts, shorts and blouses which a few of them wore were too brief and fragile to supply more than a few feet of rope ladder in total. And the raiders would not have left anything useful in the barge. "The fire station!" he suddenly shouted. "Where's the fire station?" Most of the people around him stared blankly, but some caught on at once. A dozen men started to run up into the town. Marcel went with them. The fire station was closed, derelict. Nobody still alive had any fire-fighting training. The ordinary citizen knew better than to start fires and let them get out of hand -- there would be no organized rescue work, and everybody knew it. Such fires as did occur were left to burn themselves out. They were rare, for no building had been built for centuries of materials which would bum easily. In the first bay stood two dead fire engines, rusting and rotten. They had ladders which would still reach sixty feet and more, and although the motors would never run again, the vehicles could be pushed. But the ladders were poweroperated and there was no way to raise them by hand. As Marcel was examining the fire engines, a shout came from deeper in the station. Someone had found an older fire engine, even rustier and more rotten, but with a ladder which could be raised by hand. It took twenty of them to push it out. The steering wheel was jammed, but the front wheels could be kicked into position when the fire-wagon had to be turned. They manhandled it under the barge and turned the handles. The metal ladder was rusted into a short, solid mass. One of the handles broke under the strain six men were putting on it. Marcel seized an ancient axe and jumped up on the engine. He tapped the ladder and the rust gave, inch by inch. Others were smearing butter on the moving parts. The ladder crept upwards. When it reached the door in the side of the barge a cheer went up. Then there was sudden silence. The onlookers, hundreds of them now, were drawing breath for the next cheer, the one that would greet the sight of the first girl climbing down the ladder. It didn't come. The girls crowded in the doorway sixty feet up were looking at the ancient, black, swaying ladder with distrust. They were less scared to remain where they were than to entrust themselves to the ladder. "Look -- they're coming back!" Marcel shouted. The girls didn't look to check. A fifteen-year-old girl in a white bikini was first on the ladder. That was enough to start the rush. The women in the barge who ten seconds before had been hanging back doubtfully were fighting to be next to descend. Quick as they were, it took a surprisingly long time for fortynine women to climb down a sixty-foot ladder. Many anxious glances were cast along the coast before the last girl reached the promenade. The last girl was Roya. Marcel pulled her off the fire escape and dragged her away from the promenade. Now that the girls were safe, no one was anxious to remain. They all knew the black raiders would be back. The ancient fire engine was left where it stood. When the plane came back ten minutes later there wasn't a living creature to be seen in any street in Cannes. The plane buzzed angrily round the empty barge. Then it started machine-gunning the streets. Hundreds of windows were broken and a few small fires were started. Several people who had stood too close to a window were injured by flying glass. The raiders did not, however, land again. They knew that this time they would be met by no welcoming crowd. To rout out the women they had lost they would have to search every building in Cannes, risking any counter-measures that might have been taken against them. At last they turned and flew out over the Mediterranean, taking the empty barge with them. IV (tTt was terrible," Roya said. "I've never been so terrified in my life." "Of what, precisely?" Marcel enquired curiously. Apparently Roya didn't know, and that made it worse. "You're not very sympathetic," she protested. "Oh, but I am," said Marcel. "If I seem to be smiling, it's just a trick of the sun and the peculiar shape of my face." "There's nothing to smile about!" Roya said warmly. "The raiders machine-gunned half a dozen places and dropped tear gas in Monte. What's funny about that? It's a wonder nobody was killed." "Nevertheless," Marcel said comfortably, "nobody was." Privately he was convinced that the raiders' object had been to frighten the Rivierans, not to murder them. They had shown themselves ail along the inhabited coast, not relying on telephone communication to spread the word of their coming. Yet at each place they had fired wide first, shooting up the streets only when they had given the local populace plenty of time to get under cover. This was no more than the first act of a long play, and the tension would rise. What the climax would be Marcel had no idea, but he was sure there was much more to come before a crisis was reached. And he was secretly delighted. Although he had helped to frustrate the black raiders, wasn't their sudden appearance exactly what he and Selba and even Dion wanted? The Council of #, differing on details, had agreed for a long time that what was needed to infuse life into the dying community was conflict, different aims and interests strongly and stubbornly held. The mere existence of the black raiders might be exactly what was required to galvanize the Rivierans into new life. "You seem to be taking it very calmly," Roya complained. "Inwardly I'm shaking," Marcel assured her. The black raiders would be back. The Riviera community must take defense measures. Before returning to the Majestic, Marcel wanted to have some ideas to put before the Council. "What's that shouting?" Roya said suddenly. They were both instantly alert. An hour before, there had been nothing to fear. Now everyone held himself ready for instant flight. The crowd gathering near the harbor, however, seemed to see no reason for flight. Since the crowd was forming just outside the harbormaster's office, it was more than likely that the stir was caused by some fresh item of news that had come in by telephone. Whatever had happened had happened somewhere else. "I'll go and find out what it's all about," said Roya, jumping up. Marcel was content to let her. The Council, still in session, might at that moment be discussing the raiders, and Marcel still had no contribution to make. Guns. They'd have to look for guns, ammunition, bombs. When the raiders came back there would have to be some kind of resistance. At least enough to make them cautious. Suppose there really was fighting, what would it be like? What was war like? Marcel had read books and seen old movies. But he couldn't imagine scores, perhaps hundreds of people implacably determined to kill or be killed. He experienced strange sensations in his body. His chest was tight, his belly uneasy. There was a rushing sound in his ears. He recognized excitement anci welcomed it. He even welcomed fear. When fear was present there was no boredom, no apathy. That day marked a turningpoint in human history. Things would never be the same again! T oya came running back. "It A was all a game," she said, laughing in breathless relief. "A game?" "A trick, a stunt. The black plane just landed at Alassio. The engine failed out at sea and it had to limp back to the coast" "But..." Marcel's thoughts were chaotic. A trick? A game? "Naro was behind it. Imagine it, Naro, the President of the Council! It was just a trick to make us think we had enemies." "Naro?" said Marcel blankly. "Yes, Naro. The real reason the raiders wore gas masks was so that we wouldn't recognize them. When they left us in the barge, you were meant to get us out. Imagine that! Of course, when the engine failed -- " "Where did Naro get the plane?" Marcel demanded. "In a shed near Genoa. As I was saying, when the engine failed over the sea they had no choice but to land where they could. And they had to admit the whole thing. They had to surrender and explain who they were." Roya had more to say, much more. For her the news was unalloyed relief. She wasn't angry over what had happened, she was merely glad that the black raiders didn't represent a danger after all. That nothing represented a danger. That the world (or at least the narrow strip of coast she knew) was as safe a place as she had believed for all of her fourteen years. The general reaction would be very like Roya's. No great harm had been done. The whole black raider affair had been a stunt, no more. It would be too much trouble to figure out a just and fitting punishment for the raiders. The easiest thing to do would be to laugh the incident off, treat it as a joke. And the easiest thing to do was always the thing that was done. Marcel heard no more. He forgot Roya and wandered blindly away, bitterly disappointed. Selba was right, damn her. Artificial solutions were no use. Pretense was no use. A threat might save the Rivierans -- but it had to be a real threat. The trouble was, whatever was done had to be done from outside the small community that was Earth's last civilization. And there was nobody outside to do it. It was because of the abortive incident of the black raiders that when the Mercury arrived over Cannes the next day, nobody believed her arrival represented anything very important, but nobody took any chances. Almost certainly this was another trick, another fake, another stunt. Nevertheless, real shells had peppered Cannes the previous day, and somebody might have died. From under cover, the population of Cannes waited cautiously to see what happened. V T'om Piggott turned the wheel of the magnifying screen to its fullest extent. The docks of Marseilles rushed 'up at him. Then, as he cut in the power-operated fix mechanism, he was able to scan parks and sidewalks from an apparent height of twenty feet, the viewer swiveling to keep a succession of fixed points on the screen although the ship was making five hundred knots at fifteen thousand feet. The view was good, there being little or no haze and no cloud. But there was nothing much to see, certainly nothing that Piggott was looking for. Here and there buildings had collapsed, blocking streets from side to side. Parks and green spaces had become jungle. In some places the jungle pockets were driving salients into the dead concrete world that tried to contain them. "Want me to ease up so you can take a closer look?" the pilot said. "Want me to drop to a few hundred feet?" "You needn't bother," Tom said. "There's nobody there." "But you still think there are people left somewhere? Though we've checked Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona and not seen as much as a dead body?" "That's just it," Tom said. "There's no bodies in the streets and no sign of destruction, except through the natural erosion of time. So we can take it there's been no pestilence and no war. The people of these cities haven't been struck down suddenly. They've migrated." "Where to?" "Well, on this continent they'd go to the Riviera or Southern Italy or Greece, I'd say. Warm but not too hot. It's not surprising there aren't many of them left. A hundred and fifty years ago the population was already drawing into pockets in the best climates -- New Zealand, California, Miami, the Riviera." "The names mean nothing to me," said the pilot. You should read." He sighed and spun the wheel back, switching off the fix mechanism. The screen now showed a moving picture shot from five hundred feet up. Tom did not watch it continuously; the rapid movement would give him eyestrain. "Hurry on to Cannes and I'll take another look," he said. "Sure, boss," said the pilot. "I guess it would make sense to recolonize Earth," Tom mused. "It needs it. It needs it so bad I can't see the Terrans raising any objections... assuming there still are any left to object to the idea." Although he was merely thinking aloud, the pilot elected to answer. "You're forgetting the eighth settlement law. Nobody can move in once a planet's on the 'developed' list." "But that law was intended to protect expanding settlements," Tom objected. "It's taken for granted that any colony past the initial hardships will be growing like a forest fire. It wasn't meant to apply to worlds where the population is dwindling." "It's still the law. And by the time it's changed and colonists can come here, another century will have passed." There was no need to comment on this. If there were Terrans left, there couldn't be many. Could they last another century? Could they wait a hundred years for a blood transfusion? Tom spun the wheel and cut in the fix mechanism again. Almost at once he let out a yell: "This is it! There's people down there!" T ess than ten minutes later thej news ship Mercury landed beside Cannes harbor. Tom came out alone, looking around him in surprise. From the air he had seen scores, perhaps hundreds of people. Now there were none. Cannes looked as empty and deserted as Lisbon and Madrid and Barcelona. But it wasn't. One or two bicycles stood around, clean and obviously in current use. The boats in the harbor were seaworthy, riding high. The litter lying around was new litter. Most significant of all, a paper cup full of ice cream, dropped on its side on the hot asphalt, was only beginning to disgorge its contents in a slow, creamy stream. Tom faced the blank windows. "Come on out!" he shouted, feelfoolish. "We're friends. Anyway, there's only two of us." Nothing happened, though now he caught glimpses of faces in upstairs windows. When he stared at any particular window, the faces disappeared. Fear of infection -- that might be it. They were afraid that he had brought with him some plague harmless to him but deadly to them. They needn't worry. He told them so, feeling even more foolish, shouting explanations at silent buildings. The hell with it, he said to himself, spinning on his heels. The pilot looked up sardonically as he entered the Mercury's control room. "White man speak with lungs of brass. Indians wait in bullrushes, laughing selves silly." "Okay, so now you can see what you can do," Tom retorted. "They're timid, that's all. But they'd hardly be scared of you." The pilot stood up. "You don't think so?" "No. But if you go the way you are, the point may be lost." The pilot looked down at her shapeless overalls and evidently saw what he meant, for she unzipped them and stripped them off. Then she took off her cap and shook out her hair. The point was no longer in any danger of being lost. Her sweater and shorts were utilitarian, not primarily decorative. However, there was no doubt that she was a girl and unarmed. "I go," she announced, "bravely and without complaint. Have my medal sent to my mother." "There's no danger. They're scared of us, I tell you." When Stella emerged into the sunshine, the Terrans remained hidden. However, Tom's reasoning was sound. A lone girl obviously unarmed represented no great danger. After Stella had wandered a couple of hundred yards from the ship, Marcel, who had been watching cautiously from the shadows between two buildings, stepped out and faced her. "Hello," he said, and then with more enthusiasm as he got a good look at her, "helloP' r T"his time there were over ninety members present. There hadn't been such a turnout at a Council meeting for over a century. Dion presided; Naro thought it prudent to stay quietly at home for the time being. On Dion's left was Stella, on his right Tom. Tom had the floor. He was explaining what the Mercury was, who he and Stella were and what they were doing on Earth. And already the Council was bitterly disappointed. From the very beginning Tom made it clear that his visit was unofficial and not the forerunner of a larger-scale colonial expedition to Earth, that its object was not in any sense to render assistance to the Terrans, that Earth was only one of twenty worlds to be visited and that he and Stella would remain for only thrae days. Most of the Council members were old. Many of them, like Dion, felt that the colonies ought to be far more interested in the world which had given them birth, ought to visit Earth far more frequently, and ought to be gravely concerned over Earth's problems. Briefly excited when they learned the Mercury was from the colonies, these members now slumped into gloom, scarcely listening. Others, like Marcel and Selba, were still listening intently, alert for anything that could be turned to account. The Mercury, was, after all, from the colonies. More than that, it would be back there within a few weeks, if what Tom Piggott was saying could be believed. What message was the Mercury going to take back? What message did the Terrans want her to take back? "Some of you will be wondering how we managed to come here at all," Tom was saying. "As you can see we're both in our twenties. And we've already traveled over eighty lightyears..." Nobody was particularly interested in his description of the principle of the Mercury. Technical matters had long ago become too much trouble to try to understand. Keeping the water and electricity supplies going was about the limit of presentday technical achievement. Marcel gathered vaguely that the ship was a time machine and suspended animation tank as well as a vehicle. The ship itself had to go every inch of the way, taking many years to do so. But it was possible to play tricks with time if not with distance, provided the crew did not consist of more than two or three people. (Another disappointment. A twenty-five-year journey still took twenty-five years if more than three people had to travel.) The Mercury and her crew, the latter in suspended animation, took many years over the various hops -- but since the journey was accomplished in a kind of time vacuum, a hundredyear round trip could be completed in an apparent period of weeks. "No mission like ours would ever be possible without such a technique," Tom said. "Radio's no good in the galaxy. Until now, space travel was too slow to be used for anything less than settlement. It's not worth spending fifty years in space, even in suspended animation, merely to find something out. So there's been little or no communication between distant settlements. But this way, some of our big news agencies figured it was worth  financing a galactic news roundup. Stella and I are visiting Sherbourne, Centauri, Sirius, Medoc and Sol, catching up on the news of the last century or so." So it was just another stunt. Well, what else? The Mercury would take back to the colonies the interesting information that Earth was nearly dead. And that was all it would be, interesting information. Marcel ceased listening to Tom, as many of the others had done already. He looked instead at Stella. Stella had hit Marcel like a thunderbolt. Tom was energetic, efficient, businesslike; Stella was all these things and something more. Tom's vitality did not startle Marcel. Stella's did. Stella, Marcel had decided in that first moment, represented his personal future. What he wanted of her was more than sex, more than marriage, more than children. He needed her as a man dying of thirst needs water. He needed her and his race needed her. (In the next few days, Tom was saying, he and Stella and the Terrans would exchange information. Stella would take a record of all the events of the last century and a half on Earth, while he brought the Terrans up to date on what had happened in the galaxy in that time.) Marcel, and through him his people, needed Stella so desperately that she could not be allowed, could not be given any opportunity to refuse. You don't ask for what you need. You take it. Quietly, unobtrusively, Marcel slipped out of the ballroom. VI S tella had wanted to sleep on the ship, but Tom said that was no way to win the confidence of the Rivierans. So they had two rooms in one of the exhotels near the harbor. Two rooms, and not adjoining at that. It wasn't very late when Stella got to her room. The Terrans seemed to need, or fancied they needed, twelve hours' sleep at nights. And they didn't get up with the dawn. "Good night," Stella said firmly outside her room. Tom grinned. "On several other worlds I would have argued," he observed. "On several other worlds I have argued. On this one, the state of your virtue doesn't interest me." "In other words," said Stella, "the natives are friendly. Got one waiting for you now?" "Yes. Roya." "Thought she was Marcel's girl friend?" "She wanted to be before I turned up." "Don't you find her too insipid for words?" "There aren't going to be any words." "Good night, then," said Stella tolerantly. "Don't worry," Tom said. "It will be." Entering her room, Stella switched on the light. She was not greatly surprised when nothing happened. In the few hours she had been with the Rivierans she had formed a fair idea of the situation on Earth, and she already knew that though the electricity supply was good and reasonably reliable, all electrical fittings were over fifty years old and it was common to have to test one component after another before light or heat could be obtained. Since she was tired and the moonlight from the uncurtained window was adequate, she didn't propose to bother. She moved to the bed, unclasping her belt. From behind, an arm went round her. A soft pad was held over her mouth. She struggled violently, but in the first moment of shock she had drawn a deep breath through the cloth. Her movements, despite herself, became slower and feebler and more purposeless. When she awoke she was in a vehicle of some sort, roaring and bumping over a rough road. She sat up at once. "What the devil is going on?" she demanded. Marcel stopped the car and switched off the engine. "We'd better do some talking," he said. He switched off the lights too to save the battery. "Oh, it's you." She recognized him easily enough. They were on an open road in bright moonlight. There was no sign or sound of the sea. "Yes. We're about fifty miles from Cannes -- that's forty miles from the nearest human habitation." "And what," she demanded hotly, "is the idea?" "I just want to make sure that when the Mercury leaves, you won't be on it. I think I've made sure of that already, for the car's practically out of gas and it won't be easy to find any more. I'm sorry I had to kidnap you, but I had to be certain -- " Before he could stop her she was out of the car and running back the way they had come. Marcel, taken aback, did nothing at all for several seconds. He had assumed that there would be a great deal more discussion before any action was taken -- possibly acrimonious discussion, but still discussion. The way Stella made up her mind and acted took him by surprise. She had heard him say that they were forty miles from the nearest habitation. She didn't intend to attempt forty miles on foot, did she? Presently he turned the car and drove back. Within a few minutes he caught up with Stella, who had stopped running. When he drew in beside her, however, she took to the wasteland at the side of the road, running once more. "Stop!" Marcel shouted. "Stop and we'll talk it over." Already the girl was almost out of sight. AT arcel got out of the ca; and ran after her. He was angry and baffled. She hadn't even tried to discuss the matter with him, hadn't bothered to ask him to drive her back to Cannes. It was as if she regarded him as insane -- not dangerous, not important, just a harmless, slightly irritating lunatic. Well, he'd catch her and make her discuss the matter. Catching her wasn't so easy. Once or twice he came close, and then she pulled away from him again. Soon he realized that he had already lost his chance of catching her. In the first few minutes he might have done so by expending all his energy. But Stella's stamina was greater than his. She might let him come close, seeing no need to waste her energy. She had no intention of letting him catch her. The next time he came close enough, Marcel gasped: "All right, I'll take you back." She stopped and turned, watching him warily from fifteen yards' distance.  "If," Marcel went on, "you talk things over first." "There's nothing to talk over," she retorted. "I'm going back to Cannes. Don't think I can't find it. I'll find the sea and work my way along it. Tom will wait for me, even if it takes me a year. He has to." "Has to?" "What sort of reception do you think he'd get if he went home without me?" Marcel hadn't considered that. Now that she mentioned it, it was obviously something he should have considered. His plan had been based on Tom's firm declaration that 'the Mercury would remain only three days on Earth. Marcel had thought, rather ingenuously, that if he kept Stella out of the way for three days Tom would leave without her. "All right," he sighed. "We'll go back." She came a little nearer. "I don't blame you for trying," she said, not unkindly, "even though it lets me in for a long walk. What is it, do I inflame you with passion or something?" "That too," he sighed. "But it's more than that, and I wasn't just thinking of myself. We need your spirit." She looked at him with pity. "I know jjpu do. But you can't get it by taking it -- any more than a cannibal can acquire bravery by eating his enemy's heart. You can o. y get it by having it." "With you, I'd be a different man." "Don't delude yourself. Tom's having a party right now with Roya. He's satisfied. If a man really is a man, he doesn't need a woman to give him backbone. If he isn't, she can't anyway." Marcel tried not to be convinced, but the fact that Tom was satisfied with Roya was hard to get around. Stella came closer still. "Don't try anything else," she warned. "Anyway, you were wasting your time." "What do you mean?" "That if it came to a fight, I'd win." "I'm stronger than you." She shrugged. "Want a demonstration? We both know what you want. Take it." When he touched her, she caught his wrist and the next moment he found himself on his back. "Try again," she invited coolly. He said, "No, I'm convinced." He was more than convinced. He was hurt. They didn't have to walk after all. The car took them to the nearest village before running out of gas, and there Stella, not Marcel, found more. He would have been content to sniff up if no fuel was readily obtainable. She found her way down to the underground tanks and bored a hole in the bottom of one of them. A T arcel didn't try anything else. The fact that Tom spent all his spare time with Roya filled Marcel with gloom, not because he was jealous but because this seemed to prove that the fault lay in him, not Roya, that Stella was right when she said that no woman could give a man backbone. Just before they left for the next world on their list, Tom and Stella talked to Dion, Marcel, Selba and Roya in the ship. "You've certainly got some kind of a fixation, you people," Tom said. "I've only seen one worse case." "Fixation?" Marcel queried. "About being old and finished. About being the cradle of the galaxy and being abandoned by your ungrateful children and all that." "That's not a fixation," said Dion sadly. "It's true." "Nuts," said Tom rudely. "Didn't we tell you about Aidan? Maybe we didn't, at that." "What's Aidan?" Marcel asked. "A planet. Not an important world. Like Earth, only more so. All anybody can say about Aidan is 'Who cares?' " They didn't know what he meant, and said so. "Well, what does it matter where people come from, anyway? I was born on a world called Pradis, and because it's cold I like hot worlds. I like this one. At least, I like this bit of this one. I don't owe Pradis any debt. Who cares whether I ever go back there or not? You people have some cockeyed ideas... Why should anyone come back here, anyway?" "Because this is the mother world," said Dion patiently. "Didn't I tell you about Aidan?" "No, you didn't," said Stella, taking a hand. "Aidan's a world just like this. The few thousand people there think the whole galaxy should honor her because the human race evolved there." "But they didn't," Selba said coldly. "Earth is the mother world." "Can't be," Tom said definitely. "Your history only goes back about twenty thousand years. Aidan's creative period was about ninety thousand years ago. I don't know whether Aidan colonized this world directly or indirectly, but there's no doubt at all that they're older than you." "And they show it," Stella remarked. "You're old, but the people of Aidan are senile." "Older than us?" said Dion, puzzled. "Much older. They keep threatening to die out, as if the whole galaxy would collapse if they did. But they don't manage to die out, because every few centuries they become too lazy to practice birth control any more." "This is a lie," said Selba icily. "For reasons of your own, you've invented a world called Aidan." "To justify yourselves in refusing to help us," said Dion. "It's only to be expected. Young worlds have no time for the old." Tom protested laughingly. "Give me one good reason why we should invent a planet that doesn't exist." "I've given you it," Dion retorted. "To justify yourselves in refusing to help us." "What justifies you in refusing to help Aidan?" They blinked at him. "We can't," Selba said, "and anyway... She stopped. "And anyway, why should you?" Tom said easily. "Of course. Who cares about Aidan anyway?" "It's a lie," Selba said. "All a lie." "Wait a minute," Marcel saiT slowly. "Aidan. We've never heard of it, have we? What about Eden? Maybe there's something in this story after all." XThen the Mercury had left, " the Rivierans found some further information about Aidan, but not much, among the data Tom Piggott had left. Apparently there was such a world. And it claimed to be the cradle of the human race. And nobody cared... At the next Council meeting ar new rule was passed -- any member who missed three meetings running without an excuse would be suspended. A labor force was organized to renovate the public service undertakings like electricity, water and sewage. First in Cannes, then San Remo, then Monte, then Nice. The first issue for five years of the Riviera Times came out. This one was made necessary by the quantity and vehemence of things which had to be said about the visit of the Mercury and all that came out of it. The sober editorial simply pointed out that if the rest of the galaxy believed Aidan was the birthplace of the human race, and didn't care, Earth could not expect much attention now or in the future. And already there were many signs that Earth might not need charity after all. Well, it was a bit ridiculous, wasn't it, to be complaining of your age when your mother was still alive. Especially when she spent so much time complaining... Naro's son set up a still and began making whisky. Some said this was a retrograde step. But as the alcohol consumption went up, so did the number of births. The two things might not, of course, be connected. Crime went up, and this was certainly a retrograde step. However, it could no longer be said that nobody cared about anything. People cared a great deal about a great many things. Marcel nearly landed in serious trouble himself after a fight over Roya. The child she was going to have was his, not Tom Piggott's. The man who said other-, wise very nearly died for saying it. A scheme was afoot to sail across the Atlantic, and colonize the New World. While this wa agreed to be a trifle ambitious as yet, the plan found general favor. There was an urge in all communities to colonize... Earth might not be ready yet to rejoin the mad rush to colonize the galaxy; but at least she could colonize Earth. Tust after the Mercury was clear of Earth's atmosphere and before they took to the suspended-animation tanks, Stella said: "I don't think it's going to work." "Sure it's going to work," said Tom confidently. "Leave it to your Uncle Tom. I may as well be your uncle -- there doesn't seem much chance of any other relationship." ' "You should worry. After practically a honeymoon with yojir Terran popsy." "Anyway, it's certainly going to work. You can't wallow in your great age if you know there's someone older than you." "But there isn't. We invented Aidan. It's another artificial solution to their self-imposed problem. Just another, like the scores of others they've been trying unsuccessfully for years." "Artificial maybe," said Tom complacently, "but the point is it's an outside solution. You can't raise yourself by your own bootstraps -- but somebody else can!" -- j. t. McIntosh      They came in friendship and love. They couldn't help the way they looked l Judge Carter Gates of the " Third Circuit Court finished his chicken salad on whole wheat, thoughtfully crumpled the waxed paper bag and turned to drop it in the waste basket behind his chair -- and sat transfixed. Through his second-floor office window, he saw a forty-foot flower-petal shape of pale turquoise settling gently between the welltended petunia beds on the court-house lawn. On the upper, or stem end of the vessel, a translucent pink panel popped up and a slender, graceful form not unlike a large violet caterpillar undulated into view. Judge Gates whirled to the telephone. Half an hour later, he put it to the officials gathered with him in a tight group on the lawn. "Boys, this thing is intelligent; any fool can see that. It's putting together what my boy assures me is some kind of talking machine, and any minute now it's going to start communicating. It's been twenty minutes since I notified Washington on this thing. It won't be long before somebody back there decides this is top secret and slaps a freeze on us here that will make the Manhattan Project look like a publicity campaign. Now, I say this is the biggest thing that ever happened to Plum County -- but if we don't aim to be put right out of the picture, we'd better move fast." "What you got in mind, Jedge?" "I propose we hold an open hearing right here in the courthouse, the minute that thing gets its gear to working. We'll put it on the air -- Tom Clembers from the radio station's already stringing wires, I see. Too bad we've got no TV equipment, but Jody Hurd has a movie camera. We'll put Willow Grove on the map bigger'n Cape Canaveral ever was." "We're with you on that,' Carter!" Ten minutes after the melodious voice of the Fianna's translator had requested escort to the village headman, the visitor was looking over the crowded courtroom with an expression reminiscent of a St Bernard puppy hoping for a romp. The rustle of feet and throat-clearing subsided and the speaker began:  "People of the Green World, happy the cycle -- " Heads turned at the clump of feet coming down the side aisle; a heavy-torsoed man of middle age, bald, wearing a khaki shirt and trousers and rimless glasses and with a dark leather holster slapping his hip at each step, cleared the end of the front row of seats, planted himself, feet apart, yanked a heavy nickelplated .# revolver from the holster, took aim and fired five shots into the body of the Fianna at a range of ten feet. The violet form whipped convulsively, writhed from the bench to the floor with a sound like a wet fire hose being dropped, uttered a gasping twitter, and lay still. The gunman turned, dropped the pistol, threw up his hands, and called: "Sheriff Hoskins, I'm puttin myself in yer perfective custody." 'T'here was a moment of stunned silence; then a rush of spectators for the alien. The sheriffs three hundred and nine-pound bulk bellied through the shouting mob to take up a stand before the khaki-clad man. "I always knew you was a mean one, Cecil Stump," he said, unlimbering handcuffs, "ever since I seen you makin' up them ground-glass baits for Joe Potter's dog. But I never thought I'd see you turn to cold-blooded murder." He waved at the bystanders. "Clear a path through here; I'm takin' my prisoner over to the jail." "Jest a dad-blamed minute, Sheriff." Stump's face was pale, his glasses were gone and one khaki shoulder strap dangled -- but what was almost a grin twisted one meaty cheek. He hid his hands behind his back, leaned away from the cuffs. "I don't like that word 'prisoner'. I ast you fer perfection. And better look out who you go throwin' that word 'murder' off at, too. I ain't murdered nobody." The sheriff blinked, turned to roar, "How's the victim, Doc?" A small gray head rose from bending over the limp form of the Fianna. "Deader'n a mackerel, Sheriff." "I guess that's it. Let's go, Cecil." "What's the charge?" "First degree murder." "Who'd I murder?" "Why, you killed this here... this stranger." "That ain't no stranger. That's a varmint. Murder's got to do derstand it. You goin' to tell me that thing's humem?" Ten people shouted at once: " -- human as I am!" " -- intelligent being!" " -- tell me you can simply kill -- " " -- must be some kind of law -- " The sheriff raised his hands, his jowls drawn down in a scowl. "What about it, Judge Gates? Any law against Cecil Stump The judge thrust out his lower lip. "Well, let's see," he began. "Technically -- " "Good Lord!" someone blurted. "You mean the laws on murder don't define what constitutes -- I mean, what -- " "What a humem is?" Stump snorted. "Whatever it says, it sure-bob don't include no purple worms. That's a varmint, pure and simple. Ain't no different "Then, by God, we'll get him for malicious damage," a man called. "Or hunting without a license -- out of season!" " -- carrying concealed weapons!" Stump went for his hip pocket, fumbled out a fat, shapeless "wallet, extracted a thumbed rectangle of folded paper, offered it. "I'm a licensed exterminator. Got a permit to carry the gun, too. I ain't broken no law." He grinned openly now. "Jest doin' my job, Sheriff. And at no charge to the county."  smaller man with bristly red hair flared his nostrils at Stump. "You blood-thirsty idiot!" He raised a fist and shook it. "We'll be a national disgrace -- worse than Little Rock! Lynching's too good for you!" "Hold on there, Weinstein," the sheriff cut in. "Let's not go gettin' no lynch talk started." "Lynch, is it!" Cecil Stump bellowed, his face suddenly red. "Why, I done a favor for every man here! Now you listen to me! What is that thing over there?" He jerked a blunt thumb toward the judicial bench. "It's some kind of critter from Mars or someplace -- you know that as well as me! And what's it here for? It ain't for the good of the likes of you and me, I can tell you that. It's them or us. And this time, by God, we got in the first lick!" "Why you... you... hatemonger!" "Now, hold on right there. I'm as liberal-minded as the next feller. Hell, I like a nigger -- and I can't hardly tell a Jew from a white man. But when it comes to takin' in a damned purple worm and callin' it humem -- that's where I draw the line." Sheriff Hoskins pushed between Stump and the surging front rank of the crowd. "Stay back there! I want you to disperse, peaceably, and let the law handle this." "I reckon I'll push off now, Sheriff," Stump hitched up his belt. "I figgered you might have to calm 'em down right at first, but now they've had a chance to think it over and see I ain't broken no law, ain't none of these law-abiding folks going to do anything illegal -- like tryin' to get rough with a licensed exterminator just doin' his job." He stooped, retrieved his gun. "Here, I'll take that," Sheriff Hoskins said. "You can consider your gun license canceled -- and your exterminatin' license, too." Stump grinned again, handed the revolver over. "Sure. I'm cooperative, Sheriff. Anything you say. Send it around to my place when you're done with it." He pushed his way through the crowd to the corridor door. "The rest of you stay put!" a portly man with a head of bushy white hair pushed his way through to the bench. "I'm calling an emergency Town Meeting to order here and now!" TTe banged the gavel on the scarred bench top, glanced down at the body of the dead alien, now covered by a flag. "Gentlemen, we've got to take fast action. If the wire services get hold of this before we've gone on record. Willow Grove'll be a blighted area." "Look here, Willard," Judge Gates called, rising. "This -- this mob isn't competent to take legal action." "Never mind what's legal, Judge. Sure, this calls for Federal legislation -- maybe a Constitutional amendment -- but in the meantime, we're going to redefine what constitutes a person within the incorporated limits of Willow Grove!" "That's the least we can do," a thin-faced woman snapped, glaring at Judge Gates. "Do you think we're going to set here and condone this outrage?" "Nonsense!" Gates shouted. "I don't like what happened any better than you do -- but a person -- well, a person's got two arms and two legs and -- " "Shape's got nothing to do with it," the chairman cut in. "Bears walk on two legs! Dave Zawocky lost his in the war. Monkeys have hands." "Any intelligent creature -- " the woman started. "Nope, that won't do, either; my unfortunate cousin's boy Melvin was born an imbecile, poor lad. Now, folks, there's no time to waste. We'll find it very difficult to formulate a satisfactory definition based on considerations such as these. However, I think we can resolve the question in terms that will form a basis for future legislation on the question. It's going to make some big changes in things. Hunters aren't going to like it -- and the meat industry will be affected. But if, as it appears, we're entering into an era of contact with... ah... creatures from other worlds, we've got to get our house in order." "You tell 'em, Senator!" someone yelled. "We better leave this for Congress to figger out!" another voice insisted. "We got to do something... The senator held up his hands. "Quiet, everybody. There'll be reporters here in a matter of minutes. Maybe our ordinance won't hold water. But it'll start 'em thinking -- and it'll make a lots better copy for Willow "What you got in mind, Senator?" "Just this:" the Senator said solemnly. "A person is... any harmless creature..." Feet shuffled. Someone coughed. "What about a man who commits a violent act, then?" Judge Gates demanded. "What's he, eh?" "That's obvious, gentlemen," the senator said flatly. "He's vermin." "'vn the courthouse steps Cecil  Stump stood, hands in hip pockets, talking to a reporter from the big-town paper in Mattoon, surrounded by a crowd of late-comers who had missed the excitement inside. He described the accuracy of his five shots. the sound they had made hitting the big blue snake, and the ludicrous spectacle the latter had presented in its death agony. He winked at a foxy man in overalls picking his nose at the edge of the crowd. "Guess it'll be a while 'fore any more damned reptiles move in here like they owned the place," he concluded. The courthouse doors banged wide; excited citizens poured forth, veering aside from Cecil Stump. The crowd around him thinned, broke up as its members collared those emerging with the hot news. The reporter picked a target. "Perhaps you'd care to give me a few details of the action taken by the... ah... Special Committee, sir?" Senator Custis pursed his lips. "A session of the Town Council was called," he said. "We've defined what a person is in this town -- " Stump, standing ten feet away, snorted. "Can't touch me with no ex post factory law." " -- and also what can be classified as vermin," Custis went on. Stump closed his mouth with a snap. "Here, that s'posed to be some kind of slam at me, Custis? By God, come election time..." Above, the door opened again. A tall man in a leather jacket stepped out, stood looking down. The crowd pressed back. Senator Custis and the reporter moved aside. The newcomer came down the steps slowly. He carried Cecil Stump's nickel-plated .# in his hand. Standing alone now, Stump watched him. "Here," he said. His voice carried a sudden note of strain. "Who're you?" The man reached the foot of the steps, raised the revolver and cocked it with a thumb. "I'm the new exterminator," he said.     You'll thrill to Gripping Science-Fiction Adventure Novel by Poul Anderson #-par seVial begins in January IF -- an sale now! He was Earth's secret weapon, as deadly as a sword -- and two-edged! I nphe year was #, and Earth, at the time, was a political democracy. The population was ruled by the Over-Council and, in order of decreasing importance, by Councils, and Local Councils. Each was composed of representatives duly apportioned by popular vote between the two contending parties. Executive direction was provided by a variety of Secretaries, selected by vote of the appropriate Councils. An independent Judiciary upheld the laws. A unified Earth sent colonists to the stars. Back came strange tales and improbable animals. Back, too, came word of a burgeoning technological civilization on the planet Itra, peopled by entirely humanoid aliens. Earth felt it would be wise for Itra to join in a Galactic Federation and accordingly, submitted the terms of such a mutually advantageous agreement. The Itraians declined... S pace Captain Merle S. Shaeffer, the youngest and perhaps the most naive pilot for TransUniverse Transport, was called unexpectedly to the New York office of the company. When Capt. Shaeffer entered the luxurious eightieth story suite, Old Tom Twilmaker, the With an arm around his shoulder, Old Tom led Capt. Shaeffer to an immense inner office and introduced him to a General Reuter, identified as the Chairman of the Interscience Committee of the Over-Council. No one else was present. With the door closed, they were isolated in Olympian splendor above and beyond the affairs of men. Here judgments were final and impartial. Capt. Shaeffer, in the presence of two of the men highest in the ruling councils of Earth, was reduced to incoherent awe. General Reuter moved about restlessly. Old Tom was serene and beatific.  When they were seated. Old Tom swiveled around and gazed long in silence across the spires of the City. Capt. Shaeffer waited respectfully. General Reuter fidgetted. "Some day," Old Tom said at last, "I'm going to take my leave of this. Yes, gentle Jesus! Oh, when I think of all the souls still refusing to admit our precious Savior, what bitterness, oh, what sorrow is my wealth to me! Look down upon the teeming know not the Lord? Yes, some morning, I will forsake all this and go out into the streets to spend my last days bringing the words of hope to the weary and oppressed. Are you a Christian, Merle?" General Reuter cracked his knuckles nervously while Capt. Shaeffer muttered an embarrassed affirmative. "I am a deeply religious man," Old Tom continued. "I guess you've heard that, Merle?" "Yes sir," Capt. Shaeffer said. "But did you know that the Lord has summoned you here today?" Old Tom asked. "No, sir," Capt. Shaeffer said. "General Reuter, here, is a dear friend. We've known each other, oh, many years. Distantly related through our dear wives, in fact. And we serve on the same Board of Directors and the same Charity Committees... A few weeks ago, when he asked me for a man, I called for your file. Merle. I made discreet inquiries. Then I got down on my knees and talked it over with God for, oh, it must have been all of an hour. I asked, 'Is this the man?' And I was given a sign. Yes! At that moment, a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds!" G eneral Reuter had continued his n e r'v o u s movements throughout the speech. For the first time, he spoke. "Good God, Tom, serve us a drink." He turned to Capt. Shaeffer. "A little drink now and then helps a man relax. I'll just have mine straight, Tom." Old Tom studied Capt. Shaeffer. "I do not feel the gentle Master approves of liquor." "Don't try to influence him," General Reuter said. "You're embarrassing the boy." "I -- " Capt. Shaeffer began. "Give him the drink. If he doesn't want to drink it, he won't have to drink it." Sighing, Old Tom poured two bourbons from the bar in back of his desk and passed them over. Martyrdom sat heavily upon his brow. After a quick twist of the wrist and an expert toss of the head, General Reuter returned an empty glass. "Don't mind if I do have another," he said. He was already less restless. "How's your ability to pick up languages?" General Reuter asked. "I learned Spanish and Russaid apologetically. "I'm supposed to have a real high aptitude in languages, according to some tests I took. In case we should meet intelligent aliens, "You got no association with crackpot organizations, anything like that?" General Reuter asked. "You're either a good Liberal-Conservative or Radical-Progressive, aren't you? I don't care which. I don't believe in prying into a man's politics." "I never belonged to anything," Capt. Shaeffer said. "Oh, I can assure you, that's been checked out very, very thoroughly," Old Tom said. The General signaled for another drink. With a sigh of exasperation, Old Tom complied. "Bob," Old Tom said, "I really think you've had enough. Please, now. Our Master counsels moderation." "Damn it, Tom," the General said and turned back to the space pilot. "May have a little job for you." Old Tom shook his head at the General, cautioning him. "Actually," the General said, ignoring the executive, "we'll be In a way you'll still be working dollars out of the -- " "Bob!" " -- unmarked appropriation if questions asked. National Defense. I couldn't get anywhere near that much for an individual for a year. It gives us a pie to slice. We were talking about it before you came in. How does a year sound to you?" "When it comes to such matters," Old Tom interjected hastily, "I think first of the opportunities they bring to do good." The General continued, "Now you know, Merle. And this is serious. I want you to listen to me. Because this comes under World Security laws, and I'm going to bind you to them. You know what that means? You'll be held responsible." "Yes, sir," Merle said, swallowing stiffly. "I understand." "Good. Let's have a drink on that." (( T)lease be quiet, General," Old Tom said. "Let me explain. You see, Merle, the Interscience Committee was recently directed to consider methods for creating a climate of opinion on Itra -- of which I'm sure you've heard -- which would be favorable to the proposed Galactic Federation." "Excuse me," General Reuter said. "They don't have a democracy. like we do. They don't have any freedom like we do. I have no doubt the average whateveryoucallem -- Itraians, I guess -- the average gooks -- would be glad to see us come in and just kick the hell out of whoever is in charge of them." "Now, General," Old Tom said more sharply. "But that's not the whole thing," the General continued. "Even fit were right thing to do, an' I'm not saying isn't -- right thing to do -- there's log-lo-logistics. I don't want to convey the impresh, impression that our Defense Force people have been wasting money. Never had as much as needed, fact. No, it's like this. "We have this broad base to buil' from. Backbone. But we live in a democracy. Now, Old Tom's Liberal-Conservative. And me, I'm Radical-Progresshive. But we agree on one thing: importance of strong defense. A lot of people don' understan' this. Feel we're already spendin' more than we can afford. But I want to ask them, what's more important than the defense of our planet?" "General, I'm afraid this is not entirely germane," Old Tom said stiffly. "Never mind that right now. Point is, it will take us long time to get the serious nature of the menace of Itra across to the voters. Then, maybe fifteen, twenty years... Let's just take one thing. We don't have anywhere near enough troop transports to carry out the occupation of Itra. You know how long it takes to build them? My point is, we may not have that long. Suppose Itra should get secret of interstellar drive tomorrow, then where would we be?" Old Tom slammed his fist on the desk. "General, please! The boy isn't interested in all that." The General surged angrily to his feet. "By God, that's what's wrong with this world today!" he cried. "Nobody's interested in Defense. Spend only a measly twenty per cent of the Gross World Product on Defense, and expect to keep strong! Good God, Tom, give me a drink!" Apparently heresy had shocked him sober. Old Tom explained, "The General is a patriot. We all respect him for it." "I understand," Capt. Shaeffer said. General Reuter hammered his knuckles in rhythm on the table. "The drink, the drink, the drink! You got more in the bottle. I saw it!" Old Tom rolled his eyes Heavenward and passed the bottle across. "This is all you get. This is all I've got." II The General held the bottle up to the light. "Should have brought my own. Let's hurry up and get this over with." Old Tom smiled the smile of the sorely beset and persecuted and said, "You see, Merle, there's massive discontent among the population of Itra. We feel we should send a man to the planet to, well, foment change and, uh, hasten the already inevitable overthrow of the despotic government. That man will be strictly on his own. The Government will not be able to back him in any way whatsoever once he lands on Itra." The General had quickly finished the bottle. "You she," he interrupted, "there's one thing they can't fight, an' that's an idea. Jus' one man goes to Itra with the idea of Freedom, that's all it'll take. How many men did it take to start the 'Merican Revolution? Jefferson. The Russian Revolution? Marx!" "Yes," Old Tom said. "One dedicated man on Itra, preaching the ideas of Liberty -- liberty with responsibility and property rights under one God. That man can change a world." Exhausted by the purity of his emotions, Old Tom sat back gasping to await the answer. lars a year?" Capt. Shaeffer asked at length. nr'he Itraians spoke a common language. It was somewhat guttural and highly inflected. Fortunately, the spelling appeared to be phonetic, with only forty-three characters being required. As near as anyone could tell, centuries of worldwide communication had eliminated regional pecularities. The speech from one part of Itra was not distinguishable from that of another part. Most of the language was recovered from spy tapes of television programs. A dictionary was compiled laborously by a special scientific task force of the Over-Council. The overall program was directed and administered by Intercontinental Iron, Steel, Gas, Electricity, Automobiles and Synthetics, Incorporated. It took Shaeffer just short of three years to speak Itraian sufficiently well to convince nonItraians that he spoke without accent. The remainder of his training program was administered by a variety of other large industrial concerns. The training was conducted at a Defense Facility. At the end of his training, Shaeffer was taken by special bus to the New Mexican space port. A ship waited. The car moved smoothly from the Defense Force Base, down the broad sixteen-lane highway, through the surrounding slum area and into Grants. Sight of the slums gave Shaeffer mixed emotions. It was not a feeling of superiority to the inhabitants; those he had always regarded with a circumspect indifference. The slums were there. He supposed they always would be there. But now, for the first time in his life, he could truly say that he had escaped their omnipresent threat once and for all. He felt relief and guilt. During the last three years, he had earned #. As a civilian stationed on a Defense Force Base, he had, of course, to pay for his clothing, his food and his lodging. But the charge was nominal. Since he had been given only infrequent and closely supervised leaves, he had been able to spend, altogether, only #. Which meant that now, after taxes, he had accumulated in his savings account a total of nearly # awaiting his return from Itra. Qhaeffer's ship stood off Itra while he prepared to disembark. In his cramped quarters, he dressed himself in Itraian-style clothing. Capt. Merle S. Shaeffer became Shamar the Worker. In addition to his jump equipment, an oxygen cylinder, a face mask and a shovel, he carried with him eighty pounds of counterfeit Itraian currency... all told, forty thousand individual bills of various denominations. Earth felt this would be all he needed to survive in a technologically advanced civilization. His plan was as follows: #. He was to land in a sparsely inhabited area on the larger masses. #. He was to procure transportation to Xxla, a major city, equivalent to London or Tokyo. It was the headquarters for the Party. #. He was to establish residence in the slum area surrounding the University of Xxla. #. Working through student contacts, he was to ingratiate himself with such rebel intellectuals as could be found. #. Once his contacts were secure, he was to assist in the preparation of propaganda and establish a clandestine press for its production. #. As quickly as the operation was self-sufficient, he was to move on to another major city -- and begin all over. The ship descended into the atmosphere. The bell rang. Shamar the Worker seated himself. put on his oxygen mask and signaled his readiness. He breathed oxygen. The ship quivered, the door fell away beneath him and he was battered unconscious by the slipstream. Five minutes later, pinwheeling lazily in free fall, he opened his eyes. For an instant's panic he could not read the altimeter. Then seeing that he was safe, he noted his physical sensations. He was extremely cold. Gyrating wildly, he beat his chest to restore circulation. He stabilized his fall by stretching out his hands. He floated with no sensation of movement. Itra was overhead, falling up at him slowly. He turned his back to the planet and checked the time. Twelve minutes yet to go. He spent, in all, seventeen minutes in free fall. At # feet, he opened his parachute. The sound was like an explosion. He floated quietly, recovering from the shock. He removed his oxygen mask and tasted the alien air. He sniffed several times. It was not unpleasant. Below was darkness. Then suddenly the ground came floating up and hit him. The terrain was irregular. He fought the chute to collapse it, tripped, and twisted his ankle painfully. The chute lay quiet and he sat on the ground and cursed in English. At length he bundled up the chute and removed all of the packages of money but the one disguised as a field pack. He used the shovel to dig a shallow grave at the base of a tree. He interred the chute, the oxygen cylinder, the mask, the shovel and scooped dirt over them with his hands. He sat down and unlaced his shoe and found his ankle badly swollen. Distant, unfamiliar odors filled him with apprehension and he started at the slightest sound. Dawn was breaking. Ill X Toting his bearings carefully,  he hobbled painfully westward, with thirty pounds of money on his back. He would intersect the major North-South Intercontinental highway by at least noon. Two hours later, he came to a small plastic cabin in a clearing at the edge of a forest. Wincing now with each step, he made his way to the door. He knocked. There was a long wait. The door opened. A girl stood before him in a dressing gown. She frowned and asked, "Itsil obwatly jei gekompilp?" Hearing Itarian spoken by a native in the flesh had a powerful emotional impact on Shamar the Worker. Stumblingly, he introduced himself and explained that he was camping out. During the previous night he had become lost and injured his ankle. If she could spare him food and directions, he would gladly pay. With a smile of superiority, she stepped aside and said in Itraian, "Come in, Chom the Worker." He felt panic, but he choked it back and followed her. Apparently he had horribly mispronounced his own name. It was as though, in English he had said Barchestershire for Barset. He cursed whatever Professor had picked that name for whatever obscure reason. "Sit down," she invited. "I'm about to have breakfast. Eggs and bacon -- " the Itraian equivalent -- "if that's all right with you. I'm Garfling Germadpoldlt by the way, although you can call me Ge-Ge." The food was quite unpleasant, as though overly ripe. He was able to choke down the eggs with the greatest difficulty. Fortunately, the hot drink that was the equivalent of Earth coffee at the end of the meal, was sufficently spicy to quiet his stomach. "Good coffee," he said. "Thank you. Care for a cigarette?" "I sure would." He had no matches, so she lit it for him, hovering above him a moment, leaving with him the fresh odor of her hair. The taste of the cigarette was mild. Rather surprisingly, it substituted for nicotine and allayed the sharp longing that had come with the coffee. "Let's look at your ankle," she said. She knelt at his feet and began to unlace the right shoe. "My, it's swollen," she said sympathetically. He winced as she touched it and then he reddened with embarrassment. He had been walking across dusty country. He drew back the foot and bent to restrain her. Playfully she slapped his hand away. "You sit back! I'll get it. I've seen dirty feet before." She pulled off the shoe and peeled off the sock. "Oh, God, it is swollen," she said. "You think it's broken, Shamar?" "Just sprained." "I'll get some hot water with some MedAid in it, and that'll take the swelling out." When he had his foot in the water, she sat across from him and arranged her dressing gown with a coquettish gesture. She caught him staring at the earring, and one hand went to it caressingly. She smiled that universal feminine smile of security and recklessness, of invitation and rejection. "You're engaged," he noted. She opened her eyes wide and studied him above a thumbnail which she tasted with her teeth. "I'm engaged to Von Stutsman -- " as the name might be translated -- "perhaps you've heard of him? He's important in the Party. You know him?" "No." "You in the Party?" she said. She was teasing him now. Then, suddenly: "Neither am I, but I guess I'll have to join if I become Mrs. Von Stutsman." They were silent for a moment. Then she spoke, and he was frozen in terror, all thoughts but of self-preservation washed from his mind. "Your accent is unbelieveably bad," she said. "I'm from Zuleb," he said lamely, at last. "Meta -- Gelwhops -- or even Karkeqwol, that makes no difference. Nobody on Itra speaks like you do. So you must be from that planet that had the Party in a flap several years ago -- Earth, isn't it?" He said nothing. "Do you know what they'll do when they catch you?" she asked. "No," he said hollowly. "They'll behead you." S he laughed, not unkindly. "If you could see yourself! How ridiculous you look, Shamar. I wonder what your real name is, by the way? Sitting with a foot in the water and looking wildly about. Here, let me fix more coffee and we can talk." She called cheerily over her shoulder, "You're safe here. No one will be by. I'm not due back until Tuesday." She brought him a steaming mug. "Drink this while I dress." She disappeared into the bedroom. He heard the shower running. He sat waiting, numb and desperate, and drank the coffee because it was there. His thoughts scampered in the cage of his skull like mice on a treadmill. When Ge-Ge came back, he had still not resolved the conflict within him. She stood barefoot upon the rug and looked down at him, hunched miserably over the pan of water, now lukewarm. "How's the foot?" "All right." "Want to take it out?" "I guess." "I'll get a towel." She waited until he had dried the foot and restored the sock and shoe. The swelling was gone. He stood up and put his weight on it. He smiled wanly. "It's okay now. It's not broken, I guess." She gestured him to the sofa. He complied. "What's in the field pack?" she asked. "Money? How much?" She moved toward it. He half rose to stop her, but by then she had it partly open. "My," she said, bringing out a thick sheaf of bills. She rippled them sensuously. "Pretty. Very, very pretty." She examined them for texture and appearance. "They look good, Shamar. Ill dollars in research on paper and ink and presses to do this kind of a job. Only another government has got that kind of money to throw around." She tossed the currency carelessly beside him and came to sit at his side. She took his hand. Her hand was warm and gentle. "Tell me, Shamar," she said. "Tell me all about it." So this is how easily spies are trapped in real life, Shamar told himself with numb disbelief. The story came out slowly and hesistantly at first. She said nothing until he had finished. "And that's all? You really believe that, don't you? And I guess your government does, too. That all we need is just some little idea or something." She turned away from him. "But of course, that's neither here nor there, is it? I never imagined an adventurer type would look like you. You have such a soft, honest voice. As a little girl, I pictured myself being carried off by a tanned desert sheik on a camel; and oh, he was lean and handsome! With dark flashing eyes and murderously heavy lips and hands like iron! Well, that's life, I guess." She stood and paced the room. "Let me think. We'll pick up a flyer in Zelonip when we catch the bus next Tuesday. How much does the money weigh?" "Eighty pounds." "I can carry about # pounds in my bag. You can take your field pack. How much is in it? Thirty pounds? That'll leave about forty which we can ship through on extra charges. Then, when we get to Xxla, I can hide you out in an apartment over on the East side." "Why would you run a risk like that for me?" he asked. Qhe brushed the hair from her  face. "Let's say -- what? I don't really think you can make it, because it's so hopeless. But maybe, just maybe, you might be one of the rare ones who, if he plays his cards right, can beat the system. I love to see them licked! "Well, I'm a clerk. That's all. Just a lowly clerk in one of the Party offices. I met Von Stutsman a year ago. This is his cabin. He lets me use it. "He's older than I am; but there's worse husband material. But then again, he's about to be transferred to one of the big agricultural combines way out in the boondocks where there's no excitement at all. Just little old ladies and little old men and peasants having children. "I'm a city girl. I like Xxla. And if I marry him, all that goes up the flue. I'll be marooned with him, God knows where, for years. Stuck, just stuck. "Still -- he is Von Stutsman, and he's on his way up. Everyone says that. Ten, twenty years, he'll be back to Xxla, and he'll come back on top. "Oh... I don't know what I want to do! If I marry him, I can get all the things I've always wanted. Position, security. He's older than I am, but he's really a nice guy. It's just that he's dull. He can't talk about anything but Party, Party, Party. "That's what I came out to this cabin for. To think things over, to try to get things straightened out. And then you came along. Maybe it gives me a chance for something exciting before I ship off to the boondocks. Does that make sense to you? "I'll get married and sit out there, and I'll turn the pages of the Party magazine and smile sweetly to myself. Because, you see, I'll always be able to lean forward and say, 'Dear? Once upon a time, I helped hide an Earth spy in Xxla.' And that'll knock that silly and self-satisfied look off his face for once... Oh, I don't know! Let me alone!" With that, she fled to the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. He could hear her sobbing helplessly. In the afternoon, she came out. He had fallen asleep. She shook him gently to waken him. "Eh? Oh! Huh?" He smiled foolishly. "Wash up in there," she told him. "I'm sorry I blew up on you this morning. I'll cook something." When he came back, she was serving them their dinner on steaming platters. "Look, Ge-Ge," he said over coffee. "You don't like your government. We'll help you out. There's this Galactic Federation idea." He explained to her the crr'-sfertilization of the two cultures. "Shamar, my friend," she said, "did you see Earth's proposal? There was nothing in it about giving us an interstellar drive. We were required to give Earth IV all transportation franchises. The organization you used to work for was to be given, as I remember it, an exclusive ninetynine year right to carry all Earth-Itra commerce. It was all covered in the newspapers, didn't you see it?"  Shamar said, "Well, now, I'm not familiar with the details. I wasn't keeping up with them. But I'm sure these things could be, you know, worked out. Maybe, for Security reasons, we didn't want to give you the interstellar drive right off. but you can appreciate our logic there. Once we saw you were, well, like us, a peace-loving planet, once you'd changed your government to a democracy, you would see it our way and you'd have no complaints on that score." "Let's not talk politics," she said wearily. "Maybe it's what you say, and I'm just naturally suspicious. I don't want to talk about it." "Well, I was just trying to help -- " The sentence was interrupted by a monstrous explosion. "Good God!" Shamar cried. "What was that?" "Oh, that," Ge-Ge said, shaking off the effects. "They were probably testing one of their damned automated factories to see if it was explosion proof and it wasn't." Touring the week alone in the cabin, Ge-Ge fell in love with Shamar. "Oh, my God!" she cried. "What will I do when they catch you? I'll die, Shamar! I couldn't bear it. We'll go to Xxla, we'll hide away as quietly as two mice, somewhere. We won't go out. The two of us, alone but together, behind closed doors and drawn shades. Nobody will ever know about us. We'll be the invisible people." Shamar protested. "I don't see how we can ever be secure until something's done about your government. As long as you don't reach some kind of agreement with Earth, I'll be an outlaw. I'll be afraid any minute they'll tap my shoulder and come and take me away. I don't think we could hold up under that. We'd be at each other in no time." She wept quietly. The last day in the cabin, they went out and dug up the rest of the money. The trip to Xxla took place without incident. GeGe rented an apartment for him, and he safely checked in. She went shopping for food and clothing. Thereafter she came nearly every evening. They would eat and she would reveal the inconsequential details of the office regime to which she was daily exposed. After dinner, they would sit in the living room and practice Itraian and neck a little. Then she would go home. One day, after a month of this routine, she threw herself into his arms and sobbed, "I gave Von Stutsman back his earring today. It was the only fair thing to do. I'm afraid he knows about us. He's had me watched. I know he has. I admitted it was another man." Shamar held her tensely. She broke away. "You were born in Zuleb, you suffered amnesia, you woke up in a ditch one morning without papers. You've been an itinerant worker since. Things like that happen all the time. You hit a big lottery ticket a few months ago. I told him that. How can he check it?" "You told him I didn't have any papers?"  any papers -- the drifters, people that do casual labor, the people that don't work at all. The thing is, without papers he doesn't have any way to check on you. Oh, you should have seen his face when I gave him back his earring. He was absolutely livid. I didn't think he had it in him. I suppose I'll have to quit my job now. Oh, if you only had papers so we could be married!" Ge-Ge's mood, that evening, alternated between despair and optimism. In the end, she was moros and restless. She repeated several times, "I just don't know what's going to happen to us." "Ge-Ge," he said, "I can't spend my life in this apartment. I've got to get out." "You're mad." She faced him from across the room. She stood with her legs apart, firmly set. "Well, I don't care what happens any more. I can't stand things to go on like they are. I'll introduce you to some people I know, since you won't be happy until I do. But God help us!" '  fter approving his accent, which had improved under her tutelage, Ge-Ge took him to a party the following Saturday. The party was held in an illlighted railroad flat. People congregated cross-legged on the bare floor. Shamar listened to a man complaining that citizens were being taxed beyond all endurance to support the enforced automation program. "They aren't interested in building consumer goods. They're interested in building factories to build consumer goods and blow them up testing them. Or the factories are always obsolete just as soon as they finish them, and they can't phase into their new production setup and Hundred Year Plan." Ge-Ge whispered a warning to him to beware of spies. "Spies?" "The Party," she said, drawing him to one side. "But -- but -- you mean the Party just lets people talk like this?" "Whatever harm does it do?" she asked. "Everybody benefits from talking out their aggressions. Now, have another drink and relax, and Shamar, be careful! Nobody minds local crackpots, but nobody wants foreign crackpots!" She led him to another drink and left him standing with the host. "Nice party," Shamar said. "Thank you," the host said. "I find it very invigorating. As long as there's still people that think and that criticize on this planet, I feel there's hope, don't you? This is your first time? I don't recall your face. I have a study group that meets Wednesday nights. You're welcome to come. We have very stimulating discussions about government and politics. Please do come, any time you can. Just drop in any time after eight. What was your name again?" "Shamar the Worker." "Interesting name," the host said. "Another drink?" Later, Shamar found himself in an intense conversation with a bearded youth of perhaps seventeeen. "A guy's responsible for his own conduct, right? Right! I'm responsible for their conduct? Each man goes to hell in his own way, right? Right! I don't want anything to do with them. You can't do anything about it, man, that's what I'm telling you. I don't seem to be getting through. Don't you see, it's a machine..." "But if everybody joined the Party," Shamar suggested. "So everybody joins? So what's new? Okay, you vote in the Party elections. What do you get? You get these two guys running for office: one is slightly left of center and one is slightly right of center. And both are four-square for the Automated Factory Program. Just suppose you did get a radical -- suppose they accidentally let one slip through? He goes off and they argue him into line, and when he comes back, you say, 'Like, man, what happened?' And so he tells you, 'Well, I couldn't do anything about it.' That's just what I'm telling you." "I can't see that," Shamar said. "I just don't believe that."  t another time, Shamar tried to explain free elections to a female. He was informed, "Man, just give me a way to cast a vote against all those crumbs -- and then #I think twice about all this guff you're peddling." A sober, scholarly man told him, "Join the Party? Whatever for? You join the Party and you're expected to spend all your free evenings at rallies and meetings and speeches and in ceremonial parades in honor of the ground breaking for a new automated factory. No, thank you." Another told him, "You need a lesson in economics, son. What do you mean by free society? The only way you can run an industrial society is to limit production. If you produce enough for everybody, the government would produce itself out of business. Look here. The Party has of one kind or another clicking happily away day and night arranging production to fit income distribution. They've never been known to goof and produce a surplus of anything. Why, damn it, if every man, woman and child in the world went out to buy a pound of nails apiece, the shortage of nails would be fantastic. But would they produce more nails? You know they wouldn't. 'So you want more nails?' they'd say. 'Well, damn you, work for them!' And the price would go up. See what I mean, son? They'd have another stick to beat us with." Later, Shamar found himself seated on the floor across from an aesthetic in his late thirties. "You see, my friend, force and violence never accomplish their stated ends. We must stand firmly on the principle of non-violence." "But that's taking it laying down," Shamar protested. "No! Sometimes I think it goes to the very core of human existence. Perhaps this is the central import of all philosophy: the way things are done is more important than the ends that are obtained." At that point, Ge-Ge arrived breathlessly. "Shamar, quickly! We must go!" "Huh? I'm having this interesting little talk -- " She tugged him from the floor. Baffled, he followed her. As he did so, the fighting broke out in the far corner of the room. "Quickly!" she said. "Let's get out of here before the police come." They fought their way, hand in hand, to the door. There they paused for a moment to look back. "It's a couple of rival socialist parties fighting," she explained breathlessly. "What about?" "God knows. Hurry." They were in the street. "Don't run, walk," she cautioned. After a block, she said, "I didn't even need to watch you at the end. Everybody got so drunk nobody noticed you much." "Even the spies?" "Oh, they always get the drunkest." The siren sounded. "Let's hurry." When they arrived at Shamar's apartment, she asked, "Well, what did you think of the party?" "It was an education," he said after a moment. V 'T'he following week Shamar spent many hours walking the streets of Xxla. He tried to convince himself that the people he had met at the party were not representative. They were. Friday night Ge-Ge announce "Shamar, I can't stand much more of this! What's going to happen? What is Von Stutsman going to do? He's onto something. I sometimes wish -- oh, God ! -- I sometimes wish something would happen so we'd know where we stand, so we'd know what to do!" He tried to put an arm around her, but she brushed it away. "Don't! Let me alone!" She retired to the other side of the room. For a moment, and for no reason, the hostility in the air between them was like ice and fire. "I'm sorry," Ge-Ge said curtly. "That's all right," Shamar said, his voice cold and distant. "Let's talk about something else." They were silent for a minute. Then he said, "I wanted to ask you. Of all the people I talked to, I couldn't find anyone who seemed to give a damn, one way or the other, about Earth. Why is that? You'd think they'd be at least talking about Earth." "Why should they be? We've got our own problems." At that point, the police arrived and took Shamar the Worker away. nphey put him in a cell in which there were already three other prisoners. "What you in for, buddy?" Shamar studied the prisoner for a moment without answering. His companions looked up. "No visible means of support," Shamar said. "I'm Long John Freed." Shamar nodded. "They're trying to hook you for evading the productivity tax, huh?" Shamar declined comment Freed settled back on his bunk. "I say take them for all you can. Now, look, you're a little guy. So they bleed us white. Take a factory manager or an important Black Market operator -- you think they pay taxes? You can bet they don't It's a racket. The poor pay and pay because they can't hire fancy lawyers to lie for them; and the rich take and take. I don't see why the Party puts up with it." Freed shifted his positioa. "Say what you will about the Party -- and I know it's got it's faults -- still, there are dedicated men in it. I may be a small-time crook, but I'm as patriotic as the next man. The Party's done a lot of good. "First time for you? How old are you, twenty-seven or so? First time, they usually try to recruit you for the Factory Force. "It's not such a bad racket. When you start out, they toss you in with lots of kids -- usually the draftees. You get six weeks pick-and-shovel, and you're really dragging when you finish that. Then comes specialist school. "Try to get in as an electrician or plumber. Plasterers or bricklayers have to work too hard. Carpentry's not bad -- I'd hold out for cabinet-making, rather than rough carpentry, if I had to go into that. Then there's real specialties. Tile laying. You have to have a personality for that, or you'd go nuts. Demolition's not too bad; you blow up obsolete factories. That would have been right down my alley." Freed was silent a moment, then he resumed: "Sometimes I may talk like a radical, and maybe I am a little of a radical, I don't know. You look at the overall picture, things ain't too bad. I've known a lot of thieves and petty crooks in my time. As a class, for pure patriotism, I'll stack them up against anybody you can name; and in a way, you know, I'm kind of proud of that... Well, let's shut up and get some shuteye." W h en finally he slept, Shamar dreamed that the Party was a vast, invulnerable pyramid resting on the shifting base of the population. It was constructed to dampen out vibrations. The bottom quivered, and the quiver ran upward a few inches and was absorbed. The top of the pyramid remained stable, fixed and motionless, indifferrent even to its own foundation. The pyramid was built like an earthquake-proof tower. It was built to last. The Party was built to govern. It need only devote itself to its own preservation. Any other issue was secondary. It was an organic machine. The gears were flesh and blood. The people on top were maintenance engineers. Their job was to go around with an oil can that they could squirt when necessary to keep friction to a minimum. He awakened the following morning ravenously hungry and was hugely disappointed by breakfast. Even discounting his somewhat biased viewpoint, the food was inedible. Freed accepted Shamar's share eagerly with the comment, "It'll taste better after you miss a few meals. It always does." An hour later, the jailer came to open the cell. "Shamar the Worker? Get your stuff. We're going." Ge-Ge was waiting in the reception room. Her hair had been especially waved for the occasion. She wore a suit newly pressed and gleaming. She had tears in her eyes. She fled to his arms. "Darling!" she cried, caressing his face with childlike wonder. "Was it awful? Did they beat you?" "I'm fine." "Darling, we're going to get you out on bail. I've made all the arrangements. We just have to go to the Judge's chambers for a minute, and they'll let you go. Thank God you're going to be out of this horrible place, at least for a little while." The jailer brought Shamar's belt and his bag of possessions. Shamar signed a receipt for them and they went to the Judge. The Judge said, "Please be seated." He had a resonant and friendly voice. He went to his desk and sat down. Ge-Ge and Shamar seated themselves before him. "Ah, you young people," he said. "Now, you must be Shamar the Worker, and you -- " "Garfling Germadpoldlt." "Of course." He turned to Shamar. "I hate to see a fine young person like you in trouble, Shamar. It seems to me such a waste. Man and boy, for sixty years I've been a dedicated worker for the Party. Oh, Shamar, when I think of that glorious paradise to come -- that time of wealth and plenty for all -- that time when the riches and abundance of Mother Itra will, from Automation, overflow alike the homes of the rich and poor... They waited. He continued. "Here I sit, year after year, Garfling and Shamar, judging my fellow men. Judging poor creatures who do not live the Dream. I sometimes feel that this is not the way. I sometimes feel my job is out there on the street comers, preaching the Dream, awakening the souls, telling the story of love and beauty and abundance in the life to come. "Ah, me. But the world is not yet perfect, is it? And man's understanding is imperfect. Here you are before me today, Shamar, with no visible means of support and no record of having paid productivity taxes. Oh, what a grim and fearful picture! In all your life have you ever once thought of your obligation to the future? You have failed yourself; you have failed the Party; and failed the future. "Yet -- in a larger sense -- although this in no way militates against your own guilt -- have we not failed you? How have we permitted a human soul to degrade himself to the point where we must punish him?" Abruptly, the Judge stood up. "Well, I've done the best I can. I remand you to the custody of Miss Germadpoldlt. Your trial will be set at a later date. You are not to leave Xxla without permission of this court. And I hope my lecture today has fallen on fertile soil. It is not too late to correct your ways. And I may say, if I am the one who hears your case, your conduct between now and the trial may have some bearing on the outcome." nphey took a taxi back to his apartment Ge-Ge trembled violently most of the way and nestled against him; they murmured their affection. After he had been fed, she said nervously, "It was Von Stutsman who was responsible for your arrest. I should have known we couldn't fight the Party. If he digs hard enough, nothing on Itra can save us." Finally, she went out to canvas lawyers. She came back at dusk. "Shamar, darling," she said, "I've located him. I asked a lot of my friends, and he's the best. He's a big lawyer for left-wing people. I talked to him, I told him everything." "What! You told him everything?" "Why, yes." "You, you told him I was an Earthman?" He grabbed her by the shoulders. "Listen, Ge-Ge! I was arrested on a charge I could beat; now look what you've done. What makes you think he won't turn me over to the Party? This is too big, now! This isn't just a tax avoidance matter, this is treason for him." "It's all right, darling," she said soothingly, breaking free from him. "I had to tell him so he'd take the case. Why would a big man like Ijim want to defend a common vagrant?" Shamar closed his mouth. "But -- you mean, he won't tell anyone?" "Of course not." "Has the man no patriotism?" "Look, Shamar," she said in exasperation, "you once asked me why the people in the street aren't upset about Earth. I'm beginning to see the way you think. What you mean is, aren't we afraid of Earth? Aren't we afraid Earth would, oh, do something like invade us or something? That's what you mean." "Of course it is." "Once upon a time," she said, "when we first got space flight, the Party got all shook up about the possibility of some hostile force out there developing an interstellar drive and coming along and doing their will with us. They asked the computers about it. Invading and conquering a planet is such a vast technological undertaking that the mind just boggles at it. Don't forget, we've got a warning network out there. They're not very alert, or you wouldn't have gotten through, but they wouldn't miss an invasion fleet. There's computer-controlled chemical rockets in orbit, and we've got a few sited on Itra that can blast down anything that slows up to try to land. It wouldn't take one-hundredth, it wouldn't take onethousandth of the technological resources required to defend Itra that it would to attack her. Earth just simply can't afford to attack us. They'd go broke trying. Every here, we'd spend a thousand to keep you from landing. "Oh, I suppose if Earth wanted to, they might figure out some way to blow up Itra. But where's the profit in that? We're not bothering you. Why spend all that money when it's not going to get you one damn thing in return?" ' I 'he following day, Shamar called on the lawyer, Counselor Freemason. Counselor Freemason inquired politely as to the state of his financial reserves. Shamar replied reassuringly. "Good, good. That's most encouraging. Most encouraging indeed. We need not place any limit on our ingenuity, then. "I've been thinking about your case, Mr. Worker. The thing first to do, in my opinion, is to stir up public sympathy in your favor. It's almost an ideal case. It has no real political overtones. It's not as if you're accused of anything serious. Well, I believe I can interest some friends of mine who are always deeply concerned with cases involving the infringement of an individual's liberty -- provided, of course, there are no political overtones. I can think of several good people who would be willing to head up a Defense Committee. The fact that we have and I'm talking now about as much as, oh, one hundred thousand dollars?" He paused interrogatively. "I'm prepared to pay," Shamar said. "Maybe even more," Councilman Freemason continued quickly. "We can come to that later. The important thing right now is to get down to work on your case." "Counselor Freemason, now, obviously I'm not a lawyer," Shamar said, "and I know it's bad business to tell a professional how to run his job. But I believe Miss Germadpoldlt explained the, ah, rather unusual delicacy of my own position. It would seem to me that the less publicity we got, the better." Counselor Freemason shook a pen at him. "A very good point, Mr. Worker. It shows you're thinking, and I'm glad of the opportunity to explain the reasons for this recommendation. If I brazenly parade you before them, you see, by implication it means we're not afraid of your background being examined. We have nothing to hide. Consequently, they will not look for anything. If, on the other hand, S# I'm cautious, fearful, defensive, they'll ask themselves, 'What's Counselor Freemason trying to hide?' And they'll start digging into your past. "Now, I hope that clears that matter up to your satisfaction? Good. Good. I'll get right to work on your case. Do you have anything else? Miss Germadpoldt explained rather nicely, I think, yesterday. As far as anyone knows, you're a man without papers. You've never paid any taxes but they have no proof you owe taxes. You won money in the lottery. You collected anonymously; lots of people do for perfectly valid reasons. Let them prove you didn't win. The Party can't be very interested in a man like that. "So, I'll raise an issue. Maybe we'll suggest that any lottery winner is likely to be persecuted. The Party wants things to go smoothly. The lottery makes the people feel as if, you know, they actually own a piece of things. And too many people don't have papers. "My job is to take the specific and convert it to a vague general principle that a number of people feel deeply about. The Party will take the easy way out: they're not dumb. They've learned from experience. You're not worth that much trouble to them. Otherwise, there'll be a period of aggravation, people without papers beating up police and things like that." nphree days later, Shamar met with the newly formed Committee of One Hundred for Justice to Shamar the Worker. There were five members of the Committee and Counselor Freemason in attendance. They briefed him on their initial activities. They had printed letterheads and were circulating letters to people known to be friendly, with a hastily printed booklet giving the facts of the case. "As you can see," Counselor Freemason said, "we're off to a very fast start. Um, the question naturally arises as to finances. I have advanced a certain amount out of my own pocket... We will need more than I can conveniently scrape together at the moment, and I'm reluctant to -- ah -- impose on the Committee for a loan insofar as -- " "I took the liberty of bringing along some cash," Shamar said. "For current expenses and, of course, your retainer." They looked relieved. "Excellent, excellent. I might suggest, Mr. Worker, that we appoint one of the Committee as treasurer -- perhaps Mrs. Freetle, here -- " the lady smiled -- "to take these financial worries off your mind. This will leave you free to devote yourself fully to activities defense." "Now that that's out of the way," one of the male Committee members said, "let's get right down to business. As you can see, we're moving fast. Our overall strategy is this. We must first establish a public image for you, Mr. Worker, an image the average man can identify with. Counselor Freemason has described your case to us. I simply don't know what the Party's coming to to permit a man like Von Stutsman to persecute you this way. Oh, I tell you, it makes my blood boil, Mr. Worker!" Others of the Committee chimed in and the sentiment passed heatedly among them. "Well," said Counselor Freemason, "I guess that about winds it up for the moment. You all know where to reach me. Any time, day or night. I guess, Mr. Worker, if you'll just turn the money over to Mrs. Freetle. And I think, Mr. Hall, if you'd hire that speech writer -- what's his name? McGoglhy? -- to work with Mr. Worker on his speeches." "Speeches?" Shamar asked. "You're going to be our featured speaker at all the rallies, of course," Mrs. Freetle said. "I know you will do splendidly, just splendidly! Your accent is so captivating. I've never heard anything quite like it." VI n the evening of his first publie appearance, Shamar was given a neatly typed speech. He rehearsed it hurriedly, stammers and all. "Fellow citizens! As I stand here, looking over this sea of faces, hearing your applause and seeing how your hearts go out to one poor man in distress, it -- I -- Well, I'm deeply touched. I can't tell you how much it means to me. I prepared a speech for tonight, but I'm not going to use it. I'm just going to stand here, instead, and tell you, just as the words come out, how I feel." Here he would pause for applause and then continue. "Thank you so very much. Thank you. I know you're all behind me -- except for the police agents in the audience." Here he would wait for laughter. "We all know them, don't we? I see about a dozen. A dozen agents have come down here to find out what I'm going to say. Isn't that ridiculous?" Here there would be mixed laughter, applause and cries in the affirmative. "All right! Thank you. I hope they get an earful tonight." Later in the speech he would demand, "Why are they doing this to me? I want you to tell me why. What have I done? What am I accused of doing? Well, I'll tell you this -- I'm not the kind of a man who is going to submit meekly to this persecution. I'm going to fight back. I've got a little money left from my lottery winnings, and I'll spend every cent of it to fight these people doing this thing to me." Here he would pause dramatically. "I want to leave you with this point. It's not just Shamar the Worker that's involved. What am I? A poor, itinerant laborer going from town to town. I'm nothing, I have never had anything, and I guess I never will have anything. I'm no rich black marketeer or businessman. I'm no fat politician. I'm just one little man. But it's not me -- and this is the point I want to leave you with -- it's not Shamar the Worker. He's unimportant. What is important is that if they can do this to me, they can do it to you. If they can do it to Shamar the Worker today, next year one of you will be up here on this platform speaking just the way I am. So you see, this is your fight. It's not me that's important -- it's the principle that's important -- " Every time he paused, the audience responded just as the speech-writer had indicated. It was as if they were as well rehearsed as he. The next night, another meeting. And another. And another. He slept no more than four hours a night when the campaign was in full swing. He spoke dozens of times into the bright glare of TV cameras. He in an open-topped car. Faces poured in front of his own; on and on they came. People with tears in their eyes cried, "God bless Shamar the Worker!" Once the Committee hired a brass band. So, for two weeks, it went. Then the Party threw hirr back in jail, in an apparent e:' fort to deprive the movement of its momentus.  fter three days, during which -time Shamar was held incommunicado, Counselor Freemason obtained permission to interview his client. "We're making marvelous progress! Ge-Ge is turning into a most effective crusader. You should hear her when she cries, 'Give me back my man!' This is a wonderful development for us. It's having the opposite of the intended effect. Von Stutsman has over-reached himself this time. The Party is going to have to back down, and it will cost him dearly." "How's the finances?" "Ge-Ge has given us some advances -- " "How much have you spent?" "Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't been keeping track closely. Perhaps we've run a little more than we anticipated. The response, you see -- " Shamar returned to his cell wishing Earth's printing presses had worked a little longer. It took nearly two weeks to arrange for Ge-Ge to visit him. When she arrived, she was nearly on the point of tears. "Oh, my darling, how I've missed you!" She brought him up to date on the progress of his case. As Counselor Freemason had reported, his imprisonment merely increased the vigor of his supporters. Now they were at their highest pitch : a pitch which would be difficult to maintain. "I'm just worried sick," she said. "If the Party can hold out another week or two. I don't want to worry you, Shamar, but I want you to know how you stand. Counselor Freemason says the worst that could happen would be a short prison sentence, no more than a year, for not filing tax forms. We could keep you out on appeal for quite a while." "Ge-Ge, how much have we spent so far?" "About three hundred thousand dollars." "Good God! They'll have it all when they get through! If I ever get back to Earth -- " "I don't care about money, Shamar! I just want you free!" He took her shoulders. "Ge-Ge, suppose the Party can't afford to back down? Maybe they feel they have to stand firm to prevent a lot of future trouble. And when Freemason gets ail the money... then what chance will we stand? They might railroad me for years. They'll make an example out of me. Now, are you would jump at the chance to vote them out. If we could -- " "Please, Shamar," Ge-Ge said. "All this voting thing you've always been so sold on is all right, I guess -- but it just won't work. To begin with, there isn't any way to vote." "Maybe there is," he said. Chamar was still in jail the fol lowing day when Ge-Ge appeared on the TV program. was Itra's largest industrial cooperative -- Plastics, Agricultural Machinery, Detergents, Electricity and Newsprint -- and, being the most efficient, was responsible for operating the TV networks. "Good heavens," said the station executive. "Nobody can say we haven't already given you coverage, Miss Germadpoldlt." "They've ordered you to stop!" she protested. "They? The Party? Miss Germadpoldlt, do you honestly believe that? Nobody tells a station manager what to program. Believe me. There is no prior censorship whatsoever. But, on the other hand, we can't turn over the TV stations to minority propaganda either." Ge-Ge argued and pleaded, and in the end the executive sighed wearily. "I think we've been more than fair. But for you -- and this is a personal favor, Miss Germadpoldlt, because you are a young and attractive woman -- for you, I will phone our program director and see if he can get you on the Noon Interview Show for tomorrow. It gives you the Itra-wide network, which is certainly more than anyone has the right to ask. You'll have ninety seconds to make your case. That's the best I can do." "Oh, thank you, thank you," Ge-Ge sobbed. "You're so fair and generous." Outside his office she took a deep breath, crossed her fingers and went home to revise her speech. She had only expected sixty. Ge-Ge arrived at the studio well in advance and was handed over to the makeup department. With deft skill they converted her youth to age and contrived to instill in her face weariness and defeat. Her protests were ignored. "This is the way you make up for TV," she was told. They clucked collective tongues in disapproval when they were finished and sent her on her way to a brief chat with the M.C. The M.C. assured her that she looked divine and hastily scanned her prepared remarks, which had been heavily edited by some anonymous hand in the news department. The M.C. incorporated a few pointless revisions and dispatched the message to the department handling idiot-board material. It was explained that Ge-Ge was to read, word for word, from the electronic prompter. Ge-Ge watched the program from the wings. When she heard a commercial message in favor of the consumption of a particular variety of candy, her heart ran away with itself. Her courage faltered. But Shamar's face brought it back. The signal came. She walked into the terrible glare which held up every imperfection to microscopic inspection. She shook hands, turned, and the camera closed in, full face. Beyond the camera lay the largest daytime TV audience on Itra. She felt they were examining her pores with minute and critical attention. She blinked nervously and began to read. "I am here to tell you about Shamar the Worker." That was as far as she went with the prepared text. Before the horrified ears of the auditors in the studio, she plunged into remarks of another kind entirely. "If you want to do something to help Shamar the Worker, stop buying candy! Don't buy any more candy. If you want to help Shamar the Worker, don't buy any candy until he's free. If you want to help Shamar, please, please, don't buy -- " At this point the technicians cut Ge-Ge out and, with profound mistiming, faded in an oleogenous taped message from the candy manufacturer which began, "Friends, everybody likes buy it every day. Here's why -- " Ge-Ge surveyed the surrounding confusion and walked unmolested from the studio. When she arrived home, an angry Counselor Freemason was waiting on her doorstep. Inside, she allowed the Counselor to present his case. This new move, he explained, would have terrible consequences. Shamar's good faith would be prejudiced. One simply did not, with impunity, go outside the law in such matters. There were rules you absolutely must play the game by. He washed his hands of all responsibility for her conduct. "I hope to God nothing comes of it," he concluded. "I'm having the Committee prepare a denial of -- " The phone rang at this point, and without asking permission, Counselor Freemason answered it. "Yes? This is Counselor Freemason, go ahead." He listened a moment, said, "They did," in a weary voice and cradled the phone. He turned to Ge-Ge. "Now we're in for it. That was Pete Freedle from the Committee." "Well," said Ge-Ge, "I think we'll just wait a few days and see what happens." A week later, Ge-Ge was still waiting. Counselor Freemason, deprived of finances, was powerless to move. He saw everything crashing in shambles at their feet. "But are they selling candy?" Ge-Ge asked. "That's beside the point!" Counselor Freemason cried. "Look here, every crackpot on the planet will get into the act. They don't care about Shamar. All you're going to prove now is that the Party is unpopular. Everyone already knows that." He struck his forehead in exasperation. TT'or two weeks, all was quiet. There were no more rallies for Shamar the Worker. Signs were torn down and destroyed. No bulletins were printed. No word passed over the electronic communications network. The Committee, bankrupt, dissolved in mutual recriminations and bickering, convinced that the cause of civil liberties had been set back one hundred years. But candy was not selling. It clogged the distribution channels. It piled up in warehouses. It lay untouched in stores. It grew rancid. Mechanically the factories continued to turn it out. The Party denied the boycott was having any effect. This did not appease the distributors of candy and the sellers of candy and the producers of candy. Their jobs were at stake. They had payrolls to meet. The Party stopped production of candy. People suddenly found themselves with no jobs to go to. The economic system was so tightly controlled and organized that the effect was immediate. There was too little money available to purchase the supplies normally purchased. Suppliers cut back on their factory orders. This further reduced the need for supplies. At this point, the Party decided that the people would, by heaven, eat candy. The Party Leader himself went on TV to appeal to the patriotism of the people and to order them to resume buying candy. This was a tactical error. But being the idea of the Party Leader himself, who had always crashed headlong into obstacles, none opposed it. The issue was directly joined. People resented being told that it was their patriotic duty to eat something that all medical opinion held was harmful. Furthermore, people realized that they had somehow stumbled on a fatal flaw in the system, which they could exploit without immediate danger. They responded by refusing to buy soap. The people were now in open revolt. At last they had a method for disapproving of things in general. The economy plummeted. The computers were in a frenzy. Effects of corrective actions were no longer predictable. The Party frantically tried to buy soap and dump it. The people turned to other commodities. Pressure now mounted from within the Party itself. The Sucarefully nurtured empire begin to disintegrate. A massive layoff in Consumer Plastics (badly hit by a running boycott) took with it valuable key personnel. The the Party Leader himself that he damned well better do something about the situation, and damned soon, too. The Party Leader himself ordered the release of Shamar the Worker. But by then no one was interested in Shamar the Worker. 'T'he man came and unlocked Shamar's cell door. Shamar stood up. The guard tossed in Shamar's clothing. "Get dressed." Shamar got dressed. "Come along." Shamar came along. Shamar had had no word from outside for nearly two months, and it was not until he saw GeGe's face, radiant with joy, that he realized he had won. "You're free!" she cried excitedly. Shamar was given back his belt and possessions. As they waited for the Judge to make it official, Shamar asked, "I wonder what will happen now?" "Nobody knows. Everybody says the Party's out for sure. Individual Party members will try to form a new government, but it's going to have to be radically different. They'll try to keep all they can, but the people will wring them dry for every last concession. Maybe now when they build the factories, they'll stay built and actually produce something." "For a little while," Shamar said. "Longer than a little while," Ge-Ge said. "We've got a way to vote now, when things get too bad." The Judge, in his red robe, came in. They stood respectfully. He looked at them for a long time and said nothing. Finally, he spoke: "Well, Shamar the Worker, I guess you've got what you want. You pulled down a whole civilization. I hope you're satisfied. What Dream will you give us to replace the Dream you have taken from us?" His face hardened. "Shamar the Worker," he said, 'the Party Leader himself has asked us to dismiss the pending charges against you. This I now do. You are free to go." "Thank you, sir," Shamar said respectfully. "Shamar the Worker, for your own sake, you better hope that I never see you in my court. You better not get yourself arrested for anything. I will show you no mercy, but justice will be swift and summary. So that you may not rest easily at night, I am having some of my very skillful and competent friends check through your background thoroughly. You should hope, very sincerely, that they find nothing. You may go." Ge-Ge and Shamar stood. The turned in silence. When they were at the door, the Judge called, "Oh, Shamar the Worker!" He turned, "Yes, sir?" "Shamar the Worker, I do not like your accent." Shamar could feel Ge-Ge trembling uncontrollably at his side. But when they reached the street, they were greeted by healines announcing that a delegation from the planet Earth had arrived. 'TPhe Earth delegation had tak en over a suite in the Party Hotel, grandest and most expensive on Itra. Usually it was reserved for high Party members: Shamar and Ge-Ge presented themselves at the desk. Shamar wrote out a note in English. "Deliver this to the Earthmen," he instructed. Shamar and Ge-Ge retired to await results. Less than five minutes passed; the bell hop returned. "Sir and Madam," he said respectfully, "come with me." When he entered the suite, he felt the personality of Shamar the Worker drop from him into memory. "Captain Shaeffer! Captain Shaeffer! Oh, what a magnificant job! I'm Gene Gibson from the new Department of ExtraTerrestial Affairs. Who's this?" "This is my fiancee." "Good heavens, man, you intend to marry a native?" The man stepped back, shocked. Capt. Shaeffer turned to GeGe and performed bilingual introductions. They moved from the hallway to the sitting room and arranged themselves on the furniture. "I must say, Captain Shaeffer, that your success on Itra has surpassed our wildest expectations. The first inkling we had was when, out of the blue, as it were, there was your face looking out at us from the TV screen! You should have been there for our celebration that night! You'd been on Itra just a little over two months! You're going down in history as one of the greatest heroes of all time!" Capt. Shaeffer said, 'I think it would be best if Ge-Ge and I were to board your ship immediately. Her life may be in danger. Some old-line Party men might resent her role in the revolution. Actually, she had more to do with it than I did." "Oh, now, I'm sure you must be exaggerating a bit on that, Captain Shaeffer. Her life in danger? Surely, now! Speaking frankly, Captain -- and mind you, I have no personal objection at all; this is none of my business. But she is, after all, an Itraian. You know these mixed marriages -- " "I don't give a damn what you personally think," Capt. Shaeffer said. "Is that understood once and for all? She goes." "Of course. I was just -- now don't get huffy. Of course she goes. Just as you wish, Captain." The angry exchange over an unknown but fearfully expected issue caused Ge-Ge to blink back tears.  week later, Gene Gibson came for the first time to visit them. Capt. Shaeffer inquired as to progress. "Well, Captain, things are progressing. We are establishing a government which will be more responsive to the will of the people of Itra. We've had several very pleasant, informal chats with the Party Leader, himself. Really a wonderful man. Once he got all the facts -- which were kept from him the first time we landed -- he strikes me as being quite responsible. I think we may have misjudged him. I'm not too sure but what he isn't just the exact man to head up the new government. We've discussed a few details on trade agreements and, I must say, he's been very reasonable." Capt. Shaeffer said nothing. "Yes," Gene Gibson said, "he's really an exceptional individual. A wealth of administrative experience. A fine grasp of practical politics. I don't regard him as a typical Itraian at all. He feels that, with us backing him, we can get this whole mess straightened out in a few months." "Mess?" "Well, you must admit, I think, Captain Shaeffer, that you did -- well -- make negotiations extremely difficult, in view of the, ah, present temper of the populace. "You see, Earth would like to have a stable and responsible government. A government, that is, which can see larger issues in perspective. Not one which must devote its full time to coping with a group of unpatriotic anarchists running loose in the streets." "What's he saying?" Ge-Ge asked. "As it is now," Gene Gibson continued, "we do have several rather difficult problems. I think we'll probably have to quarantine Itra for a few months until the Party Leader himself can form a stable organizational structure. Somehow news of our trade discussions have leaked out and for some reason has resulted in a general work stoppage. So you see? By God, I'll just come right out and say it: Shaeffer, you've left us one hell of a mess!" With that, Gene Gibson departed. "What did he say?" Ge-Ge asked meekly. But Shaeffer only shook his head. The following day, the ship's captain came to pay a courtesy call. "A very neat piece of work, Merle. Your new assignment just came in, by the way, on the space radio." "New assignment? Ge-Ge and I are on our way back to Earth." "No. you're not. We're to drop you off at Midway for transhipment to Folger's Hill. It's a new planet. You're to be Earth representative to the people of Folger's Hill. The first shipload of colonists arrived about a month ago." "I see," Capt. Shaeffer said. "The salary's good," the ship's captain said. "Suppose I don't want to go?" "I've got orders to leave you at Midway. I'd want to go if I were you. They want you out of the way for a little while. You can't fight it. You've been appointed a General in the Defense Forces, so you're now under military law -- and it's an order." At this point, Ge-Ge broke in to say, "How are things going in Xxla?" General Shaeffer choked back his anger and presented the question. "They don't tell us anything. The crew is confined to the ship." Shamar the Worker turned to Ge-Ge. "It's going about the same," he said. A year later. General Merle S. Shaeffer's card popped out of the computer. "General Shaeffer's up for reassignment." "Who in hell is General Shaeffer?" "Never heard of him." The card passed upward. "Merle Shaeffer is due for reassignment," a man who knew the name told the Secretary of the Over Council at lunch the following day. "There's a new planet opened up even further away than Folger's Hill." "He's the one who butchered the Itra assignment? Send him there. Anything new from Itra recently, by the way?" "Same as usual. I understand the anarchists have formed some kind of government." "Terrible. Terrible. Well, the less said about that the better." A week later, again over lunch, the Secretary was told: "I guess we needn't worry about Merle Shaeffer any more. Disappeared from his post, he and that Itraian woman of his, a couple of weeks after they arrived on Folger's Hill. Probably a hunting accident got them both. Their bodies were never found. These things happen on wild new planets." The Secretary was silent for a long time. Then he said: "Shaeffer dead, eh? I guess it's better that way. Well, a genius has passed, and we'll not see his like again. Perverted, perhaps, but a genius none the less." They drank solemnly. "To Merle Shaeffer. You could call him a hero, so let's you and I drink to that. No one else ever will."  They drank again. Nothing further served to stir the Secretary's memory of Merle Shaeffer, and he retired six months later at the end of his term. The new Secretary was not familiar with the Itraian affair. He had been in office just a few days less than a year when, one morning, he arrived at his office in a furious rage. "Get me the Head of the Defense Forces!" "I'm sorry, sir, all the phones are tied up," his secretary said. "What in hell do you mean, all the phones are tied up?" "I don't know. Maybe all at once everybody just left their phones off the hook or something." "Why would they do that? That's ridiculous! Get a runner over after him." Half an hour later, the Head of the Defense Forces arrived. "Do you know," the new Secretary demanded, "that yesterday all the pennies went out of circulation? People apparently have been saving them for the last couple of months. It finally showed up. All at once, there aren't any pennies. You can't make change. Damn it, why would those crazy idiots all decide to save their pennies at the same time? It's not rational. Why did they do it?" The Head of the Defense Forces said nothing. The Secretary raved at him in anger, but the Head of the Defense Forces did not have the heart to tell him that a hero had returned home.      for your information I t may be traditional to divide a length called a foot into twelve inches and then chop up these inches into halves, quarters, etc. Or, going the other way, to say that three feet make one yard (why not four, since the inch gets quartered?) and end Comparison of the Pound Avoirdupois and the Foot with other r in #. 'pounds" and "feet"  Pound Foot London # # Paris .# # Amsterdam .# .# Leyden .# # Antwerp .# .# Strasbourg .# .# Bremen ".# .# Cologne .# .# Frankfurt the Main .# .# Toledo # .#  According to the Lexicon Technicum by John Harris. up with the interesting figure of # feet to a mile. It may be equally traditional twelve pence and that twenty least one historian holds that this relationship represents an original relationship of values, namely that one pound of gold was worth twenty pounds of silver while each pound of silver bought twelve pounds of copper. While these things may be traditional they are also quite impractical. Every individual has had to memorize them at one time in his or her life. On the other hand, it needs no time at all to "memorize" that there are # cents in the dollar, or that ter, and # meters make one kilometer. Since most of the household and workshop arithmetic can be carried out in one's head when using the metric system, but needs paper and pencil when carried out in the inchfoot system, the statement that the metric system will win out eventually does not even deserve the label "prediction". But how did it start and why? nphe "why" begins with the fact that in, say, # there was no system at all. If this statement makes you think that each country had its own "pound", and "foot" and "mile" you are only partly right. In actual fact, it was not each country, but each province; and sometimes the northern part of a province used one set of measurements while the southern part of the province used another one. And the cities, being rich, were much too proud to use the rural measurements of the surrounding countryside, so they had their own. The country that was best off in this chaos was England. There one system was used throughout by royal decree. But in France there was no such uniformity; in the northern part of the country alone the pound had twentyone different values, depending on where you happened to be. As for measures for grain, not less than three hundred different kinds have been compiled by patient historians. Their relationships were sometimes simple, as when a city council might decree that the city unit for grain was three of the units of the surrounding countryside. But sometimes the relationships were anything but simple. In fact they were sometimes so complicated that a mathematician had to be called in, as was the case in # when the council of the City of Ulm called on the great Johannes Kepler to straighten out their measurements. The merchants could never agree on the length of a "shoe" and the question of how much grain constituted a "bucket" often had the result that the suppliers and customers flung actual buckets at each other. Kepler accepted the job for two reasons. One was that the mathematical aspects of the problem intrigued him. The other was that the city paid him. The final outcome was the "Kettle of Ulm", a metal container which combined all the customary measurements. They were listed on the outside of the kettle in raised letters, even rhyming. The inside diameter of the kettle was one ell. its depth was two shoes, its capacity "one honest bucket". The weight of the kettle, when empty, was # V # units; when full of water it was # units. And now we come to the problem of the grain measure: if you filled the kettle # times with grain you had # measures! If one reads that in those days money changers and mer ants coped with the endless varieties of silver and of gold coins by just weighing them it looks at first glance as if at least the money changers had found a useful shortcut, based on the fact that a pound of silver is a pound of silver, and a pound of gold is a pound of gold. Well, yes. But which pound? The pound of London, or that of Strasbourg (which was less), or that of Hamburg (which the English then called Hamborough and which was .# of the London pound), or that of Leipzig, which was # of the London pound? No wonder that, in #, the Englishman John Harris compiled a book called Lexicon T echnicum which contained endless tables of how the pound of Calcutta, Rotterdam, etc. compared with that of England; other long tables compared the foot of the various countries. Glancing over these tables now, one sees with a good deal of astonishment that the "Spanish foot" was the same as the English, but the "Toledo foot" was shorter (see Table) while, on the other hand, the Toledo pound was the same as the English. (There seems to have been no "Spanish pound.") But the internal confusion was greatest in France. Many Frenchmen felt that, if the king of England could decree uniform measurements throughout his realm, the king of France should do the same. The French, at the time, had a system of making complaints and suggestions. The documents bore the name of Cahiers de doleance s (writs of grievances) and they seem to have contained complaints about the lack of uniform measurements almost every year. The earliest known was in a cahier of #. By about #, the government in Paris decided that a reform should be considered. Reading about a two-century interval one is reminded of the famous lines -- the government, the truth to tell, did nothing in particular, but did it very well! But it was not just a case of indifference and procrastination. To say that things are confused and that a reform is needed is one thing. Making useful suggestions for a reform is something else. The French government -- ultimately the king -- seems to have felt that the suggestions were incomplete in themselves. At any event that they were not definite enough to base decrees and laws on them. r I 'he English had taken their measurements from the human body. The "foot" was an actual foot; that is, it was the average of the foot lengths of a dozen grown men, picked at random (or so the story goes). Now it so happened that # barleycorns "from the center of an ear" made one foot; therefore the "barleycorn" became the subdivision of an inch, with three barleycorn to the inch. Later on most artisans decided that halving and quartering the inch was easier, so only bootmakers continued to use the barleycorn as the smaller unit -- a practice still continued by shoe manufacturers in England and in the United States. A difference of one size means a difference of one barleycorn, or one third of an inch, in length. It also happened that a piece of rope stretched from fingertip to fingertip across the chest of a man (a "fathom") was very closely six feet, and one half of that became a yard. The official English measurements, then, were based on the human body, and the measures of other areas and cities probably were too. But the French scientists did not wish to follow this pattern. The dimensions of the human body were too variable. Basing a set of official measures on the size of the planet Earth was more to their liking, since the size of the planet would not change. That was, of course, true enough ; the problem was that the size of the planet was not accurately known. It is not surprising that the first man to propose using the planet Earth as a standard was an astronomer. He was Jacques Cassini, and for that reason often called Cassini the Second. He suggested in # that the standard foot should be the hundredth part of one second of arc of a meridian. The French Academy thought this a fine and logical suggestion, which only had the one drawback that the various attempts to measure the length of a meridian showed rather poor agreement. About thirty years later another French scientist, the mathematician and astronomer Charles-Marie de la Condamine, came with another suggestion which would be easier to carry out in practice. Galileo Galilei had been the first to notice that the time required for a pendulum to complete one swing depended on the length of the pendulum. In reality the time required depends on two factors, namely the length of the pendulum and the latitude, but Galileo did not know that. It was suspected by the astronomer Jean Picard that latitude might be a factor involved. But Picard made the general suggestion that a pendulum of a length resulting in a period of one second would be a useful basis for linear measurements. The length of the seconds pendulum, it may be mentioned at this point, is #I inches, or # centimeters; this is the standard figure, which requires a correction for the latitude. To get away from the need for corrections, de la Condamine suggested the length of the seconds pendulum at the equator as the unit for linear measurement. So these were the two suggestions, either a fraction of the length of the meridian, or else the length of the seconds pendulum. But both still had to be determined.  long with the problem of finding a standard length which would not vary -- and which could be re-established in case a catastrophe of some kind destroyed the first standard -- there was the problem of subdivision of the standard. Thinking in dozens was customary; as we have seen the foot was divided into a dozen inches or into three dozen barleycorns. But the dozen was not the only subunit or super-unit in use. In some places the foot was divided into eighths, and in Germany things like eggs or hard rolls were sold not by the dozen, but by the Mandel which was # units. To make things worse the Germans had the "peasant's mandel" in addition; it consisted of # units. (Remember the "baker's dozen".) A dozen may be superior to ten because it can be divided by #, #, # and #, while ten can only be divided by # and #, but it so happens that we have ten fingers. A division into ten subunits is therefore easier to visualize, at least for the beginner. The man who was the first to advocate subdivision into tenths was the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin, military engineer to Count Maurits of Nassau. Stevin was not concerned with the measurements themselves or their origin and accuracy; he just advocated subdivision into decimal fractions. In order to find a larger audience he wrote his book twice, once in Latin and once in French. Both versions were printed in Leyden in #. The title of the French version was La Disme, and the English translation by Robert Norton (published in #) was called Disme: The Art of Tenths, or, Decimall Arithmeticke. The word disme means "tenth" and is related to "tithe". At one time it was the name of an American coin, the Half Dismes and Dismes between # and #, later spelled "dimes". Apparently Simon Stevin's book in its various editions convinced everyone -- with the exception of the Master of the Royal Mint -- of the superiority of decimal fractions, for the French Academy decided from the outset that this is what they would use in carrying out the mandate from the National Assembly to create a new system of weights and measures. The National Assembly had recommended the length of the seconds pendulum as a suitable (and repeatable) physical constant, but it had not said anything about decimal fractions. But while the Academy decided on decimal fractions it also decided that the meridian would be superior to the seconds pendulum as a standard. It recommended in #I that the ten from the pole to the equator should be the new unit of measurement, the meter. The National Assembly accepted the recommendation. And then the hard work of measuring began. In the meantime the savants had to fight with words. The unit was to be the meter (in French metre') and a tenth of a meter was a decimeter. A tenth of a decimeter, or a hundredth of a meter, was obviously a centimeter. The tenth part of a centiword means a thousandth of a meter. Going the other way, a term meaning a thousand meters was needed. The Greek word chilioi suggested itself, in spite of two drawbacks. In Greek letters the "ch" was the letter chi, which looks like an x. But the letter c hi, considered as a numeral, meant #. However, the Greeks themselves had often used the chi to mean #, as an abbreviation of the word chilioi. One thing somewhat disturbing to Frenchmen was that all classical scholars were agreed that the chi was a guttural and Frenchmen, for no better reason that they cannot pronounce them easily, are opposed to gutturals. But somebody saved the day by discovering that the Ionian dialect of Greek used a kappa instead of the chi -- the Ionians apparently were opposed to gutturals too -- and the name of the unit of # meters became the kilometer. VTow the unit of linear meas ure was to be the ten millionth part of the distance from a pole to the equator. This could be determined without much difficulty from the figure provided by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, who derived the length of one degree of the meridian under # latitude as # toises, each toise being six feet Parisian. (Take it from there... if you have absolutely nothing else to do.) But the new system also was to include weights, and the unit of weight was to be the weight of a unit volume of distilled water weighed in a vacuum chamber at the temperature of melting ice. The name chosen for this unit was gravet. Later on the unit volume was chosen as one cubic centimeter, and the temperature was shifted from that of melting ice to # degrees centigrade because at that temperature water shows its greatest density. Finally the name of this unit weight became gram, with kilogram for a thousand of these units and ton (metric ton) for a thousand kilograms. Everything would have been fine if France had not become a republic in the meantime. Now the work of establishing the new system was under a new commission. Of course it had the name of Commission temporaire des Poids  Mesures republicans, the Temporary Commission for Republican Weights and Measures. The system that had been meant foe everybody in all countries had now become the "System of the Republic", just as they concocted a "Calendar of the Republic" which was finally abandoned by Napoleon to the jubilation of everybody. Whether the French revolutionaries actually intended the new system to be for France only is not quite clear, but the title page of the official book introducing the system sounded as if this were the case. The title page read (the sign indicates that a new line began on the page) : Instructionsur Les Mesuresdeduitesde la Grandeur de la TerrejuniformesPour Toute la Republiqueetsur les calculs relatifs a leur division decimale. In English : Instructions on the Measurements derived from the size of the earth, uniform for the whole republic, with tables in decimal fractions. With such a title page, he King of England, the King of Prussia, the Czar of all the Russians and every other king or prince could not only suspect that this might not be suitable for his country, he almost had to come to the conclusion that it should be forbidden in his country. As a matter of fact, because of these (purely accidental) political implications the new system made headway very slowly. It made headway slowly in France too. The system became legal in December # and the First Consul of the Republic Napoleon Bonaparte made it compulsory in #. But in #, several governments later, a law had to be passed imposing fines on recalcitrant silk and wine merchants (among others) who did not use the metric system exclusively beginning January #, #. By now the metric system is all but universal. The Russians adopted it in #, and in the two countries which are still holding out, the British Commonwealth and the United States, it is at least legal. In the United States, as a matter of fact, the yard and pound, etc., are defined in terms of the metric system, so that a housewife buying two yards of fabric is actually buying according to the metric system, though she is not likely to know the fact unless her husband happens to be a lawyer or a scientist. What opposition to the metric system remains is usually based on invested capital. A factory dollars invested in non-metric machinery, and even though these machines could be converted it would not do any good, because the raw material, bar stock, etc., comes in non-metric dimensions from the rolling mill. And the rolling mill says, of course, that they have X million dollars invested in their machinery. It is an opposition which will slowly dwindle away. But as far as argumentation is concerned it is certainly superior to that of a now forgotten society which existed in # (and for a few years after) in Boston. The background for this society had been the attempt of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, to find all kinds of "cosmic secrets" in the Great Pyramid. Assuming that the number of the days of the year had to be hidden in the base line of the Great Pyramid, Piazzi Smyth divided the base line into # parts and named the unit thus derived the "pyramid meter". This he then divided into # parts to obtain the "pyramid inch", which turned out to be almost the same as the English inch. Piazzi Smyth quickly concluded that the English inch was just a faintly corrupted "pyramid inch". Hence the English system of measurement by inches really went back to ancient Egypt. By # most of those who played around with the dimensions of the Great Pyramid had also concluded that the pyramid had been divinely inspired in the most literal meaning of the term. Hence the inch was sacred. Hence it was necessary to form a society with the ultimate purpose of outlawing the "atheist metric system". James Abram Garfield, later president of the United States, was an active supporter of this movement against the meter. The movement did not last long. Besides, the metric system had been legalized in #. ()ueAtionS ? What are the "lost Messier objects?" George P. Wallace Boston, Mass. In #I the French astronomer Charles Messier published the first version of his Catalogue of Nebulosities, which was a byproduct of Messier's main work -- namely the hunting for new comets. Since a comet, before it develops a tail, looks like a fuzzy star, and since Messier knew that there are some objects in the sky which always look that way, it was only natural that he compile a catalogue of these objects so that he would not waste observing time on them. The objects listed in Messier's catalogue are now referred to with numbers preceded by an M. M-l for example, is the crab nebula, M-# the globular cluster in Hercules, M-#I the "nebula" (galaxy) in Andromeda. Two objects, namely M-# and M-#, could not be found by later astronomers and are therefore called the "lost Messier objects". It is believed that they were faint comets which Messier mistook for permanent nebulous objects. The announcement of the discovery of a third extra-solar planet by Dr. Peter van de Camp prompts me to ask whether there is any chance of actually seeing or at least photographing such planets. I understand that the new extra-solar planet is a dark companion of Barnard's Star, which is itself quite faint, and that its presence was deduced from the examination of minute changes of position of the visible star. While I don't doubt its existence, I think it would be a reason for rejoicing if the deduction could be verified photographically. J. D. Carbonara Phoenix, Arizona. I agree that it would be "reason for rejoicing" if any one of the three extra-solar planets now on record (the earlier two are those of #I Cygni and of Lalande #) could be verified photographically. I could even cite historical precedent. It was Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel who was the first to deduce the existence of a body in space in this manner. He deduced the existence of a Companion of Sirius, and later of a Companion of Procyon, and both were discovered visually at a later date when telescopes had grown larger. But in both cases the companions were dwarf stars -- bodies of stellar mass but of planetary dimensions. They are self-luminous. The three extra-solar planets now known are of planetary mass and planetary dimensions, though quite large. The two bodies accompanying #I Cygni and Lalande # must have a mass of about one per cent of the mass of our sun, while the "planet" of Barnard's Star has only about one and a half times the mass of the planet Jupiter. It would be most surprising (though not completely impossible) if they were self-luminous. The question of whether a true planet, visible by reflected light only, could be observed (or just seen) over a distance of several light-years has been investigated by several astronomers, e. g., the late Dr. Otto Struve and Dr. Lyman Spitzer. Dr. Spitzer assumed a planet of the same albedo as Jupiter, orbiting its star at the same distance as Jupiter orbits our sun. If that planetary system were # light-years distant the maximum separation of star and planet would be one second of arc. It is easy to make the case seem hopeless by saying that a separation of one second of arc is equal to the diameter of a quarter-dollar coin seen from a distance of three miles. This is quite true, but it is also true that it does not need a very large telescope to see two luminous points which are separated by one second of arc. The crux of the matter is that both points should be of about the same luminosity for easy separation, and a sun and its planet differ enormously in luminosity. If we imagine astronomers # light-years away looking for Jupiter, they would find that the sun is approximately the planet. It is like somebody waving a flashlight next to a battery of searchlights. And if the astronomers of that other planet have to look through an atmosphere the case becomes hopeless. They could improve their lot by placing their telescope on an atmosphereless satellite and by using an occulting disk which cuts off as much of the light of the star as possible, but will permit most of the light of the planet to pass when it is in a favorable position. Even then they would need a #-inch telescope. Our time for rejoicing, therefore, won't come until we have a lunar observatory with more powerful instruments than we have on earth right now. Looking through several Almanacs, I notice that the number of isotopes for the various elements differs from list to list. This, I presume, is the result of new discoveries. The almanacs are for different years. What I would like to know is whether there are elements which have only one isotope. Herman Howard Manhattan, Kansas. If we disregard radioactive isotopes, natural or artificial, there are eighteen elements which have only one stable isotope. In alphabetical order they are: Aluminum, Arsenic, Beryllium, Caesium, Cobalt, Fluorine, Gold, Holmium, Iodine, Manganese, Phosphorus, Praseodymium, Rhodium, Scandium, Sodium, Terbium, Thulium and Yttrium. The element with the largest number of stable isotopes is Tin which has ten, followed by Cadmium which has eight. The other elements have two or more, but less than eight, stable isotopes. The total number of stable isotopes now known is around # . Would you please write a piece on the names of the artificial satellites. What do their names mean? Marion McNamara Salem, Ohio Let me begin with the Russian satellites because there are fewer of them. The first Russian satellite was named Sputnik, which is a Russian word compounded from "s" (meaning "with"), "put" (pronounced poot, meaning "road") and the suffix "nik" which makes the word a noun. It therefore means "travel companion". Incidentally, the Russian plural is sputniki. The manned capsules are named Vostok, which is the Russian word for "East", but the name has historical significance. The first Russian sailing ship which circumnavigated the globe happened to be called Vostok. The current series of Russian research satellites is called Cosmos; no explanation necessary. The term "Lunik" is an invention of American newspapermen, not a Russian word or designation. The first Russian planetary probe was the only one which had a name. It was called Metchta, which can best be translated as "daydream". Since then the Russians have become very matter of fact. Their Mars probe which is now in space is just called "Mars,l". Our first satellite was named Explorer and our first to be fired over the poles was named Discoverer, and it has become customary to name satellites in polar orbits Discoverers while the ones in orbits more or less over the equator are named Explorers. The moon rockets were named Pioneer, and later Ranger while the planetary probes are called Mariner, all three obvious names. But some other names are less obvious. The satellite was a joint project of Army, pose: Orbiting Solar Observatory. One that is coming up will Orbiting Geophysical Observatory. As for Transit, the name is clear once you know that it is a navigational satellite. The Canadian satellite (fired by a U. S. rocket from Cape Canaveral) is named Alouette, which is French for "Skylark". The satellite Syncom is somewhat more complicated. It means a communications satellite in the synchronous orbit, # miles above the equator, needing # hours to go around the earth once and therefore seemingly hanging motionless over one point of the equator. Midas stands for Missile Defense Alarm System and Samos for Satellite and Missile Observation System. Echo was called that because the inflated balloon produced an echo of radio waves thrown at it, while the weather satellites Tiros are Television and Infrared Observation Satellites. The little satellite Oscar, for the use of radio "hams", had this name from the initials of Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio. Clumsiest name ever was that cember, #. Its name stood for Satellite Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment! Our local newspaper recently which the word "meteoroid" was used. What is a meteoroid? And since I am at it, why are the words "meteorite" and "meteorology" so similar, since they mean such different things? Elmer Green Trenton, New Jersey The best way to answer this question is to proceed historically. The classical Greek word meteoros means lofty, or high, while the word logos means knowledge. Therefore, when Aristotle wrote a book on weather he called it Meteorologica -- the knowledge of things which happen high up -- and the science of weather and weather forecasting is still called "meteorology." But Aristotle thought that certain phenomena, say shooting stars, were events in the atmosphere -- which, of course, is correct as far as it goes. A shooting star is an event taking place in the atmosphere; that it was of astronomical origin was not known in the ancient world. Later stones that had fallen out of the sky were called meteors or meteorites. The two words were used interchangeably at first -- they are still so used in several languages -- but then English astronomical usage began to make a sharp distinction. A meteorite was the body that could be picked up from the ground, while the flash it made in the sky was the meteor. The term meteoroid isrecent, and is meant to designate meteorites still in space, before they have entered the earth's atmosphere. OH, TO BE The trouble with his wife was, she wasn't -- usually -- a woman. But... he wasn't always a man! I T Te put a twenty-dollar platinum coin into the slot and the analyst, after a pause, lit up. Its eyes shone with sociability. It swiveled about in its chair, picked up a pen and pad of long yellow paper from its desk and said: "Good morning, sir. You may begin." "Hello, Doctor Jones. I guess you're not the same Doctor Jones who did the definitive biography of Freud; that was a century ago." He laughed nervously. Being a rather poverty-stricken man he was not accustomed to dealing with the new fully-homeostatic psychoanalysts. "Um," he said, "should I free-associate or give you background material or just what?" Dr. Jones said, "Perhaps you could begin by telling me who you are und warum mich -- why you have selected me." "I'm George Munster of catFrancisco condominium established #." "How do you do, Mr. Munster." Dr. Jones held out its hand, and George Munster shook it. He found the hand to be of a pleasant body-temperature and decidedly soft. The grip, however, was manly. "You see," Munster said, "I'm an ex-GI, a war veteran. That's how I got my condominium ans' preference." "Ah yes," Dr. Jones said, ticking faintly as it measured the passage of time. "The war with the Blobels." "I fought three years in that war," Munster said, nervously smoothing his long, black, thinning hair. "I hated the Blobels and I volunteered. I was only nineteen and I had a good job -- but the crusade to clear the Sol System of Blobels came first in my mind." "Um," Dr. Jones said, ticking and nodding. George Munster continued, "I fought well. In fact I got two decorations and a battlefield citation. Corporal. That's because I single-handed wiped out an observation satellite full of Blobels; we'll never know exactly how many because of course, being Blobels, they tend to fuse together and unfuse confusingly." He broke off then, feeling emotional. Even remembering and talking about the war was too much for him. He lay back on the couch, lit a cigarette and tried to become calm. The Blobels had emigrated originally from another star system, probably Proxiina. Several thousand years ago they had settled on Mars and on Titan, doing very well at agrarian pursuits. They were developments of the original unicellular amoeba, quite large and with a highlyorganized nervous system, but still amoebae, with pseudopodia, reproducing by binary fission, and in the main offensive to Terran settlers. The war itself had broken out over ecological considerations. It had been the desire of the Foreign Aid Department of the UN to change the atmosphere on Mars, making it more usable for Terran settlers. This change, however, had made it unpalatable for the Blobel colonies already there; hence the squabble. And, Munster reflected, it was not possible to change half the atmosphere of a planet, the Brownian movement being what it was. Within a period of ten years the altered atmosphere had diffused throughout the planet, bringing suffering -- at least so they alleged -- to the Blobels. In retaliation, a Blobel armada approached Terra and put into orbit a series of technically sophisticated satellites designed eventually to alter the atmosphere of Terra. This alteration had never come about, because of course the War Office of the UN had gone into action; the satellites had been detonated by self-instructing missiles... and the war was on. Dr. Jones said, "Are you married, Mr. Munster?" "No sir," Munster said. "And -- " he shuddered -- "you'll see why when I've finished telling you. See, Doctor, I'll be frank. I was a Terran spy. That was my task. They gave the job to me because of my bravery in the field, I didn't ask for it." "I see," Dr. Jones said. "Do you?" Munster's voice broke. "Do you know what was necessary in those days in order to make a Terran into a successful spy among the Blobels?" Nodding, Dr. Jones said, "Yes, Mr. Munster. You had to relinquish your human form and assume the form of a Blobel." Munster said nothing; he clenched and unclenched his fist bitterly. Across from him Dr. Jones ticked. T hat evening, back in his small ster opened a fifth of Teacher's scotch and sat sipping from a cup, lacking even the energy to get a glass down from the cupboard over the sink. What had he gotten out of the session with Dr. Jones today? Nothing, as nearly as he could tell. And it had eaten deep into his meager financial resources... meager because -- Because for almost twelve hours out of the day he reverted, despite all the efforts of himself and the Veterans' Hospitalization Agency of the UN, to his old wartime Blobel shape. To a formless unicellular-like blob, right in the middle of his own His financial resources consisted of a small pension from the War Office. Finding a job was impossible, because as soon as he was hired the strain caused him to revert there on the spot, in plain sight of his new employer and fellow workers. It did not assist in forming successful work-relationships. Sure enough, now, at eight in the evening, he felt himself once more beginning to revert. It was an old and familiar experience to him, and he loathed it. Hurriedly, he sipped the last of the cup of scotch, put the cup down on a table... and felt himself slide together into a homogeneous puddle. The telephone rang. "I can't answer," he called to it. The phone's relay picked up his anguished message and conveyed it to the calling party. Now Munster had become a single transparent gelatinous mass in the middle of the rug. He undulated toward the phone -- it was still ringing, despite his statement to it, and he felt furious resentment; didn't he have enough troubles already, without having to deal with a ringing phone? Reaching it, he extended a pseudopodium and snatched the receiver from the hook. With great effort he formed his plastic substance into the semblance of a vocal apparatus, resonating dully. "I'm busy," he resonated in a low booming fashion into the mouthpiece of the phone. "Call later." Call, he thought as he hung up, tomorrow morning. When I've been able to regain my human form. The apartment was quiet now. Sighing, Munster flowed back across the carpet to the window, where he rose into a high pillar in order to see the view beyond. There was a light-sensitive spot on his outer surface, and although he did not possess a true lens he was able to appreciate -- nostalgically -- the blur of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the playground for small children which was Alcatraz Island. Dammit, he thought bitterly. I can't marry; I can't live a genuine human existence, reverting this way to the form the War Office bigshots forced me into back in the war times... TTe had not known then, when A he accepted the mission, that it would leave this permanent effect. They had assured him it was "only temporary, for the duration," or some such glib phrase. Duration! Munster thought with furious, impotent resentment. It's been eleven years. The psychological problems created for him, the pressure on his psyche, were immense. Hence his visit to Dr. Jones. Once more the phone rang. "Okay," Munster said aloud, and flowed laboriously back across the room to it. "You want to talk to me?" he said as he came closer and closer; the trip, for someone in Blobel form, was a long one. "I'll talk to you. You can even turn on the vidscreen and look at me." At the phone he snapped the switch which would permit visual communication as well as auditory. "Have a good look," he said, and displayed his amorphous form before the scanning tube of the video. Dr. Jones' voice came, "I'm sorry to bother you at your home, Mr. Munster, especially when you're in this, um, awkward condition." The homeostatic analyst paused. "But I've been devoting time to problem-solving vis-a-vis your condition. I may have at least a partial solution." "What?" Munster said, taken by surprise. "You mean to imply that medical science can now -- " "No, no," Dr. Jones said hurriedly. "The physical aspects lie out of my domain; you must keep that in mind, Munster. When you consulted me about your problems it was the psychological adjustment that -- " "I'll come right down to your office and talk to you," Munster said. And then he realized that he could not; in his Blobel form it would take him days to undulate all the way across town to Dr. Jones' office. "Jones," he said desperately, "you see the problems I face. I'm stuck here in this apartment every night beginning about eight o'clock and lasting through until almost sev en in the morning. I can't even visit you and consult you and get help -- " "Be quiet, Mr. Munster," Dr. Jones interrupted. "I'm trying to tell you something. You're not the only one in this condition. Did you know that?" Heavily, Munster said, "Sure. In all, eighty-three Terrans were made over into Blobels at one time or another during the war. Of the eighty-three -- " he knew the facts by heart -- "sixty-one survived and now there's an organization called Veterans of Unnatural Wars of which fifty are members. I'm a member. We meet twice a month, revert in unison..." He started to hang up the phone. So this was what he had gotten for his money, this stale news. "Goodbye, Doctor," he murmured. Dr. Jones whirred in agitation. "Mr. Munster, I don't mean other Terrans. I've researched this in your behalf, and I discover that according to captured records at the Library of Congress fifteen Blobels were formed into pseudo-Terrans to act as spies for their side. Do you understand?" After a moment Munster said, "Not exactly." "You have a mental block against being helped," Dr. Jones said. "But here's what I want, Munster. You be at my office at eleven in the morning tomorrow. We'll take up the solution to your problem then. Good night." Wearily, Munster said, "When I'm in my Blobel form my wits aren't too keen, Doctor. You'll have to forgive me." He hung up, still puzzled. So there were fifteen Blobels walking around on Titan this moment, doomed to occupy human forms -- so what? How did that help him? Maybe he would find out at eleven tomorrow. Jones' waiting room he saw, seated in a deep chair in a corner by a lamp, reading a copy of Fortune, an exceedingly attractive young woman. Automatically, Munster found a place to sit from which he could eye her. Stylish dyed-white hair braided down the back of her neck -- he took in the sight of her with delight, pretending to read his own copy of Fortune. Slender legs, small and delicate elbows. And her sharp, clearlyfeatured face. The intelligent eyes, the thin, tapered nostrils -- a truly lovely girl, he thought. He drank in the sight of her... until all at once she raised her head and stared coolly back at him. "Dull, having to wait," Munster mumbled. The girl said, "Do you come to Dr. Jones often?" "No," he admitted. "This is just the second time." "I've never been here before," the girl said. "I was going to another electronic fully-homeostatic psychoanalyst in Los Angeles and then late yesterday Dr. Bing, my analyst, called me and told me to fly up here and see Dr. Jones this morning. Is this one good?" "Um," Munster said. "I guess so." We'll see, he thought. That's precisely what we don't know yet. The inner office door opened and there stood Dr. Jones. "Miss Arrasmith," it said, nodding to the girl. "Mr. Munster." It nodded to George. "Won't you both come in?" Rising to her feet, Miss Arrasmith said, "Who pays the twenty dollars, then?" But the analyst was silent; it had turned off. "I'll pay," Miss Arrasmith said, reaching into her purse. "No, no," Munster said. "Let me." He got out a twenty-dollar piece and dropped it into the analyst's slot. At once, Dr. Jones said, "You're a gentleman, Mr. Munster." Smiling, it ushered the two of them into its office. "Be seated, please. Miss Arrasmith, without preamble please allow me to explain your -- condition to Mr. Munster." To Munster it said, "Miss Arrasmith is a Blobel." Munster could only stare at the girl. "Obviously," Dr. Jones continued, "presently in human form. This, for her, is the state of involuntary reversion. During the war she operated behind Terran lines, acting for the Blobel War League. She was captured and held, but then the war ended and she was not tried." "They released me," Miss Arrasmith said in a low, carefully controlled voice. "Still in human form. I stayed here out of shame. I just couldn't go back to Titan and -- " Her voice wavered. "There is great shame attached to this condition," Dr. Jones said, "for any high-caste Blobel." Nodding, Miss Arrasmith sat clutching a tiny Irish linen handkerchief and trying to look poised. "Correct, Doctor. I did visit Titan to discuss my condition with medical authorities there. After expensive and prolonged therapy with me they were able to induce a return to my natural form for a period of about one-fourth of the time. But the other three-fourths... I am as you perceive me now." She ducked her head and touched the handkerchief to her right eye. "Jeez," Munster protested, "you're lucky! A human form is infinitely superior to a Blobel form. I ought to know. As a Blobel you have to creep along. You're like a big jellyfish, no skeleton to keep you erect. And binary fission -- it's lousy, I say really lousy, compared to the Terran form of -- you know. Reproduction." He colored. Dr. Jones ticked and stated, "For a period of about six hours your human forms overlap. And then for about one hour your Blobel forms overlap. So all in all, the two of you possess seven hours out of twenty-four in which you both possess identical forms. In my opinion -- " it toyed with its pen and paper -- "seven hours is not too bad, if you follow my meaning." After a moment Miss Arrasmith said, "But Mr. Munster and I are natural enemies." "That was years ago," Munster said. "Correct," Dr. Jones agreed. "True, Miss Arrasmith is basically a Blobel and you, Munster, are a Terran. But both of you are outcasts in either civilization. Both of you are stateless and hence gradually suffering a loss of ego-identity. I predict for both of you a gradual deterioration ending finally in severe mental illness. Unless you two can develop a rapprochement." The analyst was silent then. Miss Arrasmith said softly, "I think we're very lucky, Mr. Munster. As Dr. Jones said, we do overlap for seven hours day... we can enjoy that time together, no longer in wretched isolation." She smiled up hopefully at him, rearranging her coat. Certainly, she had a nice figure; the somewhat low-cut dress gave an ideal clue to that. Studying her, Munster pondered. "Give him time," Dr. Jones told Miss Arrasmith. "My analysis of him is that he will see this correctly and do the right thing." Still rearranging her coat and dabbing at her large, dark eyes, Miss Arrasmith waited. II 'T'he phone in Dr. Jones' office rang, a number of years later. He answered it in his customary way. "Please, sir or madam, deposit twenty dollars if you wish to speak to me." A tough male voice on the other end of the line said, "Listen, this is the UN Legal Office and we don't deposit twenty dollars to talk to anybody. So trip that mechanism inside you, Jones." "Yes, sir," Dr. Jones said, and with his right hand tripped the lever behind his ear that caused him to come on free. "Back in #," the UN legal expert said, "did you advise a couple to marry? A George Munster and a Vivian Arrasmith, now Mrs. Munster?" "Why yes," Dr. Jones said, after consulting his built-in memory banks. "Had you investigated the legal ramifications of their issue?" "Um, well," Dr. Jones said, "that's not my worry." "You can be arraigned for advising any action contrary to UN law." "There's no law prohibiting a Blobel and a Terran from marrying." The UN legal expert said, "All right, Doctor, I'll settle for a look at their case histories." "Absolutely no," Dr. Jones said. "That would be a breach of ethics." "We'll get a writ and sequester them, then." "Go ahead." Dr. Jones reached behind his ear to shut himself off. "Wait. It may interest you to know that the Munsters now have four children. And, following the Revised Mendelian Law, the offspring comprise a strict one, two, one ratio. One Blobel girl, one hybrid boy, one hybrid girl, one Terran girl. The legal problem arises in that the Blobel Supreme Council claims the pure-blooded Blobel girl as a citizen of Titan and also suggests that one of the two hybrids be donated to the Council's jurisdiction." The UN legal expert explained, "You see, the Munsters' marriage is breaking up. They're getting divorced and it's sticky finding which laws obtain regarding them and their issue." "Yes," Dr. Jones admitted, "I would think so. What has caused their marriage to break up?" "I don't know and don't care. Possibly the fact that both adults rotate daily between being Blobels and Terrans. Maybe the strain got to be too much. If you want to give them psychological advice, consult them. Goodbye." The UN legal expert rang off. Did I make a mistake, advising them to marry? Dr. Jones asked itself. I wonder if I shouldn't look them up; I owe at least that to them. Opening the Los Angeles Phonebook, it began thumbing through the Ms. nphese had been six difficult years for the Munsters. First George had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He and Vivian had set up their household in a condominium apartment with three instead of two rooms. Vivian, being in Terran form three-fourths of the time, had been able to obtain a job; right out in public she gave jet flight information at the Fifth Los Angeles Airport. George, however -- His pension comprised an amount only one-forth that of his wife's salary and he felt it keenly. To augment it, he had searched for a way of earning money at home. Finally in a magazine he had found this valuable ad; So in # he had bought his first pair of frogs imported from Jupiter and had begun raising them for swift profits, right in his own condominium apartment building, in a corner of the basement that Leopold, the partially-homeostatic janitor, let him use gratis. But in the relatively feeble Terran gravity the .frogs were capable of enormous leaps, and the basement proved too small for them; they ricocheted from wall to wall like green pingpong balls and soon died. Obviously it took more than a portion of ments to house a crop of the damned things, George realized. And then, too, their first child had been bom. It had turned out to be pure-blooded Blobel; for twenty-four hours a day it consisted of a gelatinous mass and George found himself waiting in vain for it to switch over V to a human form, even for a moment. He faced Vivian defiantly in this matter, during a period when both of them were in human form. "How can I consider it my child?" he asked her. "It's an alien life form to me." He was discouraged and even horrified. "Dr. Jones should have foreseen this. Maybe it's your child -- it looks just like you." Tears filled Vivian's eyes. "You mean that insultingly." "Damn right I do. We fought you creatures. We used to consider you no better than Portuguese men-o'-war." Gloomily, he put on his coat. "I'm going down to Veterans of Unnatural Wars Headquarters," he informed his wife. "Have a beer with the boys." Shortly he was on his. way to join with his old wartime buddies, glad to get out of the apartment house. crepit cement building in downtown Los Angeles, left over from the twentieth century and sadly little funds because most of its members were, like George Munster, living on UN pensions. However, there was a pool table and an old #-D television set and a few dozen tapes of popular music and also a chess set. George generally drank his beer and played chess with his fellow members, either in human form or in Blobel form; this was one place in which both were accepted. This particular evening he sat with Pete Ruggles, a fellow veteran who also had married a Blobel female, reverting, as Vivian did, to human form. "Pete, I can't go on. I've got a gelatinous blob for a child. My whole life I've wanted a kid, and now what have I got? Something that looks like it washed up on the beach." Sipping his beer -- he too was in human form at the moment -- Pete answered, "Criminy, George, I admit it's a mess. But you must have known what you were getting into when you married her. And my God, according to Mendel's Revised Law, the next kid -- " George broke in, "I mean I don't respect my own wife. That's the basis of it. I think of her as a thing. And myself, too. We're both things." He drank down his beer in one gulp. Pete said meditatively, "But from the Blobel standpoint -- " "Listen, whose side are you on?" George demanded. "Don't yell at me," Pete said, "or I'll deck you." A moment later they were swinging wildly at each other. Fortunately Pete reverted to Blobel form in the nick of time; no harm was done. Now George sat alone, in human shape, while Pete oozed off somewhere else, probably to join a group of the boys who had also assumed Blobel form. Maybe we can found a new society somewhere on a remote moon, George said to himself. Neither Terran nor Blobel. I've got to go back to Vivian, George resolved. What else is there for me? I'm lucky to find her; I'd be nothing but a war veteran guzzling beer here at day and night, with no future, no hope, no real life... He had a new money-making scheme going now. It was a home mail-order business; he had placed an ad in the Saturday come from Proxima and were obtainable on Titan; it was Vivian who had made the commercial contact for him with her people. But so far, few people had sent in the dollar-fifty. I'm a failure, George said to himself. Tortunately the next child, bom in the winter of #, showed itself to be a hybrid. It took human form fifty per cent of the time, and so at last George had a child who was -- occasionally, anyhow -- a member of his own species. He was still in the process of celebrating the birth of Maurice when a delegation of their neighcame and rapped on their door. "We've got a petition here," the chairman of the delegation said, shuffling his feet in embarrassment, "asking that you and "But why?" George asked, bewildered. "You haven't objected to us up until now." "The reason is that now you've got a hybrid youngster who will want to play with ours, and we feel it's unhealthy for our kids to -- " George slammed the door in their faces. But still he felt the pressure of the hostility from the people on all sides of them. And to think, he thought bitterly, that I fought in the war to save these people! It sure wasn't worth it! An hour later he was down at drinking beer and talking with his buddy Sherman Downs, also married to a Blobel. "Sherman, it's no good. We're not wanted; we've got to emigrate. Maybe we'll try it on Titan in Viv's world." "Chrissakes," Sherman protested, "I hate to see you fold up, George. Isn't your electro-magnetic reducing belt beginning to sell, finally?" For the last few months, George had been making and selling a complex electronic reducing gadget which Vivian had helped him design; it was based in principle on a Blobel device popular on Titan but unknown on Terra. And this had gone over well. George had more orders than he could fill. But -- "I had a terrible experience, Sherm," George confided. "I was in a drugstore the other day, and they gave me a big order for my reducing belt, and I got so excited -- " He broke off. "You can guess what happened. I reverted, right in plain sight of a hundred customers. And when the buyer saw that he canceled the order for the belts. It was what we all fear. You should have seen how their attitude toward me changed." Sherm said, "Hire someone to do your selling for you. A fullblooded Terran." Thickly, George said, "I'm a full-blooded Terran, and don't you forget it. Ever." "I just mean -- " "I know what you meant," George said. And took a swing at Sherman. Fortunately he missed and in the excitement both of them reverted to Blobel form. They oozed angrily into each other for a time, but at last fellow veterans managed to separate them. "I'm as much a Terran as anyone," George thought-radiated in the Blobel manner to Sherman. "And I'll flatten anyone who says otherwise." In Blobel form he was unable to get home; he had to phone Vivian to come and get him. It was humiliating. Suicide, he decided. That's the answer. How best to do it? In Blobel form he was unable to feel pain; best to do it then. Several substances would dissolve him... he could, for instance, drop himself into a heavily-chlorinated swimmaintained in its recreation room. Vivian, in human form, found him as he reposed hesitantly at the edge of the swimming pool, late one night. "George, I beg you -- go back to Dr. Jones." "Naw," he boomed dully, forming a quasi-vocal apparatus with a portion of his body. "It's no use, Viv. I don't want to go on." Even the belts; they had been Viv's idea, rather than his. He was second even there... behind her, falling constantly further behind each passing day. Viv said, "You have so much to offer the children." That was true. "Maybe #I drop over to the UN War Office," he decided. "Talk to them, see if there's anything new that medical science has come up with that might stabilize me." "But if you stabilize as a Terran," Vivian said, "what would become of me?" "We'd have eighteen entire hours together a day. All the hours you take human form!" "But you wouldn't want to stay married to me. Because, George, then you could meet a Terran woman." It wasn't fair to her, he realized. So he abandoned the idea. In the spring of #I their third child was bom, also a girl, and like Maurice a hybrid. It was Blobel at night and Terran by day. Meanwhile, George found a solution to some of his problems. He got himself a mistress. Ill A t the Hotel Elysium, a rundown wooden building in the heart of Los Angeles, he and Nina arranged to meet one another. "Nina," George said, sipping Teacher's scotch and seated beside her on the shabby sofa which the hotel provided, "you've made my life worth living again." He fooled with the buttons of her blouse. "I respect you," Nina Glaubman said, assisting him with the buttons. "In spite of the fact -- well, you are a former enemy of the people." George protested, "We must not think about the old days. We have to close our minds to our pasts." Nothing but our future, he thought. His reducing belt enterprise had developed so well that now he employed fifteen full-time Terran employees and owned a small, modern factory on the outskirts of San Fernando. If UN taxes had been reasonable he would by now be a wealthy man. Brooding on that, George wondered what the tax rate was in Blobel-run lands, on Io, for instance. Maybe he ought to look into it. ters he discussed the subject with Reinholt, Nina's husband, who of course was ignorant of the modus Vivendi between George and Nina. "Reinholt," George said with difficulty, as he drank his beer, "I've got big plans. This cradleto-grave socialism the UN operates... it's not for me. It's cramping me. The Munster Magic Magnetic Belt is -- " he gestured -- "more than Terran civilization can support. You get me?" Coldly, Reinholt said, "But George, you are a Terran. If you emigrate to Blobel-run territory with your factory you'll be beaying your -- " "Listen," George told him, "I've got one authentic Blobel child, two half-Blobel children, and a fourth on the way. I've got strong emotional ties with those people out there on Titan and Io." " "You're a traitor," Reinholt said, and punched him in the mouth. "And not only that," he continued, punching George in the stomach, "you're running around with my wife. I'm going to kill you." To escape, George reverted to Blobel form; Reinholt's blows passed harmlessly deep into his moist, jelly-like substance. Reinholt then reverted, too, and flowed into him murderously, trying to consume and absorb George's nucleus. Fortunately fellow veterans pried their two bodies apart before any permanent harm was done. Later that night, still trembling, George sat with Vivian in the living room of their eightroom suite at the great new condominium apartment building call, and now of course Reinholt would tell Viv. It was only a question of time. The marriage, as far as George could see, was over. This perhaps was their last moment together. "Viv," he said urgently, "you have to believe me; I love you. You and the children -- plus the belt business, naturally -- are my complete life." A desperate idea came to him. "Let's emigrate now, tonight. Pack up the kids and go to Titan, right this minute." "I can't go," Vivian said. "I know how my people would treat me, and treat you and the children, too. George, you go. Move the factory to Io. I'll stay here." Tears filled her dark eyes. "Hell," George said, "what kind of life is that? With you on Terra and me on Io -- that's no marriage. And who'll get the kids?" Probably Viv would get them. But his firm employed top legal talent -- perhaps he could use it to solve his domestic problems. The next morning Vivian found out about Nina. And hired an attorney of her own. ' phone talking to his top legal talent, Henry Ramarau. "Get me custody of the fourth child; it'll be a Terran. And we'll compromise on the two hybrids; I'll take Maurice and she can have Kathy. And naturally she gets that blob, that first so-called child. As far as I'm concerned it's hers anyhow." He slammed the receiver down and then turned to the board of directors of his company. "Now where were we in our analysis of Io tax laws?" During the next weeks the idea of a move to Io appeared more and more feasible from a profit and loss standpoint. "Go ahead and buy land on Io," George instructed his business agent in the field, Tom Hendricks. "And get it cheap. We want to start right." To his secretary Miss Nolan he said, "Now keep everyone out of my office until further notice. I feel an attack coming on, from anxiety over this major move off Terra to Io." He added, "And personal worries." "Yes, Mr. Munster," Miss Nolan said, ushering Tom Hendricks out of George's private office. "No one will disturb you." She could be counted on to keep everyone out while George reverted to his war-time Blobel shape, as he often did these days. The pressure on him was immense. When, later in the day, he resumed human form, George learned from Miss Nolan that a Doctor Jones had called. "I'll be damned," George said, thinking back to six years ago. "I thought it'd be in the junk pile by now." To Miss Nolan he said, "Call Doctor Jones and notify me when you have it. I'll take a minute off to talk to it." It was like old times, back in San Francisco. Shortly Miss Nolan had Dr. Jones on the line. "Doctor," George said, leaning from side to side and poking at an orchid on his desk. "Good to hear from you." The voice of the homeostatic analyst came in his ear, "Mr. Munster, I note that you now have a secretary." "Yes," George said, "I'm a tycoon. I'm in the reducing belt game; it's somewhat like the flea-collar that cats wear. Well, what can I do for you?" "I understand you have four children now -- " "Actually three, plus a fourth on the way. Listen, that fourth, Doctor, is vital to me; according to Mendel's Revised Law it's a full-blooded Terran and by God I'm doing everything in my power to get custody of it." He added, "Vivian -- you remember her -- is now back on Titan. Among her own people, where she belongs. And I'm putting some of the finest doctors I can get on my payroll to stabilize me. I'm tired of this constant reverting, night and day; I've got too much to do for such nonsense." Dr. Jones said, . "From your tone I can see you're an important, busy man, Mr. Munster. You've certainly risen in the world since I saw you last." "Get to the point, Doctor," George said impatiently. "I, um, thought perhaps I could bring you and Vivian together again." "Bah," George said contemptuously. "That woman? Never. Listen, Doctor, I have to ring off. We're in the process of finalizing on some basic business strategy, here at Munster, Incorporated." "Mr. Munster," Dr. Jones asked, "is there another woman?" "There's another Blobel," George said, "if that's what you mean." And he hung up the phone. Two Blobels are better than none, he said to himself. And now back to business. He pressed a button his desk and at once Miss Nolan put her head into the office. "Miss Nolan," George said, "get me Hank Ramarau; I want to find out -- " "Mr. Ramarau is waiting on the other line," Miss Nolan said. "He says it's urgent." Switching to the other line, George said, "Hi, Hank. What's up?" "I've just discovered," his top legal advisor said, "that to operate your factory on Io you must be a citizen of Titan." "We ought to be able to fix that up," George said. "But to be a citizen of Titan -- " Ramarau hesitated. "I'll break it to you as easy as I can, George. You have to be a Blobel!" "Dammit, I am a Blobel!" George said. "At least part of the time. Won't that do?" "No," Ramarau said, "I checked into that, knowing of your affliction, and it's got to be one hundred per cent of the time. Night and day." "Hmmm," George said. "This is bad. But we'll overcome it somehow. Listen, Hank, I've got an appointment with Eddy Fullbright, my medical coordinator. I'll talk to you after, okay?" He ran off and then sat scowling and rubbing his jaw. Well, he decided, if it has to be. Facts are facts, and we can't let them stand in our way. Picking up the phone he dialed his doctor, Eddy Fullbright. IV 'T'he twenty-dollar platinum coin rolled down the chute and tripped the circuit. Dr. Jones came on, glanced up and saw a stunning, sharp-breasted young woman whom it recognized by means of a quick scan of its memory banks as Mrs. George Munster, the former Vivian Arrasmith. "Good day, Vivian," Dr. Jones said cordially. "But I understood you were pn Titan." It rose to its feet, offering her a chair. Dabbing at her large, dark eyes, Vivian sniffled, "Doctor, everything is collapsing around me. My husband is having an affair with another woman... all I know is that her name is Nina and all the boys down at about it. Presumably she's a Terran. We're both filing for divorce. And we're having a dreadful legal battle over the children." She arranged her coat modestly. "I'm expecting. Our fourth." "This I know," Dr. Jones said. "A full-blooded Terran this time, if Mendel's Law holds... although I thought it only applied to litters." Mrs. Munster said miserably, "I've been on Titan talking to legal and medical experts, gynecologists and especially marital guidance counselors. I've had all sorts of advice during the past month. Now I'm back on Terra but I can't find George -- he's gone." "I wish I could help you, Vivian," Dr. Jones said. "I talked to your husband briefly the other day, but he spoke only in generalities. Evidently he's such a big tycoon now that it's hard to approach him." "And to think," Vivian sniffled, "that he achieved it all because of an idea I gave him. A Blobel idea." "The ironies of fate," Dr. Jones said. "Now, if you want to keep your husband, Vivian -- " "I'm determined to keep him, Doctor Jones. Frankly I've undergone therapy on Titan, the latest and most expensive it's because I love George so much, even more than I love my own people or my planet." "Eh?" Dr. Jones said. "Through the most modern developments in medical science in the Sol System," Vivian said, "I've been stabilized, Doctor Jones. Now I am in human form twenty-four hours a day instead of eighteen. I've renounced my natural form in order to keep my marriage with George." "The supreme sacrifice," Dr. Jones said, touched. "Now, if I can only find him, Doctor -- "  t the ground-breaking ceremonies on lo, George Munster flowed gradually to the shovel, extended a pseudopodium, seized the shovel, and with it managed to dig a symbolic amount of soil. "This is a great day," he boomed hollowly, by means of the semblance of a vocal apparatus into which he had fashioned the slimy, plastic substance which made up his unicellular body. "Right, George," Hank Ramarau agreed, standing nearby with the legal documents. The Ionan official, like George a great transparent blob, oozed across to Ramarau, took the documents and boomed, "These will be transmitted to my government. I'm sure they're in order, Mr. Ramarau." "I guarantee you," Ramarau said to the official, "Mr. Munster does not revert to human form at any time. He's made use of some of the most advanced techniques in medical science to achieve this stability at the unicellular phase of his former rotation. Munster would never cheat." "This historic moment," the great blob that was George Munster thoughtradiated to the throng of local Blobels attending the ceremonies, "means a higher standard of living for Ionans who will be employed. It will bring prosperity to this area, plus a proud sense of national achievement in the manufacture of what we recognize to be a native invention, the Munster Magic Magnetic Belt." The throng of Blobels thought-radiated cheers. "This is a proud day in my life," George Munster informed them, and began to ooze by degrees back to his car, where his chauffeur waited to drive him to his permanent hotel room at Io City. Someday he would own the hotel. He was putting the profits from his business in local real estate. It was the patriotic -- and the profitable -- thing to do, other Ionans, other Blobels, had told him. "I'm finally a successful man," George Munster thought-radiated to all close enough to pick up his emanations. Amid frenzied cheers he oozed up the ramp and into his Titanmade car. In Magabaok ## -- #c at all newsstands -- on sale now! m i: They awoke after ages of hiding -- to emerge into a world richer than they had dared to dream of! T) ik's first impressions were an uncomfortable chill creeping along his bare flesh, and a bright milky swirling of light that encompassed his entire vision. He shivered and blinked his eyes a few times, and then the swirling settled down and became the vault. The chill, he realized, was due to the body warmth being methodically sucked away by the cold slab on which he lay. Another shiver brought a gasp of breath into his lungs, and then he was wide awake. When he sat up and swung his legs over the side, the interior of the vault began swirling again. He had to grip the edge of the slab to keep from falling. The air was humid, much too humid, and he could taste the prickly presence of carbon dioxide when he breathed. "The pump," he mumbled, dropping to the floor on feet that he could barely control. "Something's happened to the pump." He pushed himself determinedly erect, then stumbled down the long corridor between the other slabs, hardly glancing at their silent tenants, until he got to Zina's. She lay still as death, not flicking somuch as an eyelid, and her flesh was like frozen wax beneath his exploring fingers. There was nothing he could do for her until he got the pump working again... Rik pushed away from the slab on which Zina lay, and went through the archway into the next chamber. Here another fifty of the group lay on their slabs, not so much as a muscle twitch betraying the fact that they were all quite alive. It seemed only a few hours since he had lain down on his slab in the other room and gotten his injection, but he could not, for a dizzy moment, recall in which direction the pump lay. His mind seemed to be plumbing dust-covered depths to dredge out his memories, one by one. He suddenly remembered the War. The war that had driven the group to build this place, to try and safeguard a handful from the holocaust that would set fire to the surface of the world and turn the seas to steam. Was it possible the war had passed? Or had it ever come! There was no way to know without going outside -- Wait! There was! Rik thought hard. trying to get his sense of direction back. The atom-powered clock that marked off months instead of minutes was in the central vault, where the elders slept. The other nine vaults ringed that one, he recalled, veering at right angles to his first direction, which would have taken him on a circular tour of the nine vaults and back to his starting place again. The archway to the vault of the elders was unaccountably blocked, and Rik realized suddenly that part of the ceiling there had fallen, carried by some fault in the granite of the mountain itself. But that was impossible! The elders had selected this site on the basis of the rigidity of the rocky strata that made it up. A fault could not have occurred for more years than Rik's own lifetime -- Or had that many years passed already? 'T'here was no way of knowing; not until he had examined the clock. Rik moved away from the blockade and made his way into the next vault, and the next, finally finding an archway in the sixth vault from his own where the rock had not completely sealed the way into the elders' vault. Here he had expected to find the air fresher, already having theorized that the staleness elsewhere was due to the poor circulation occasioned by the blockaded central vault. But in fact the air there was even worse, and laden with an odor that made Rik suddenly afraid to see its source. Still, he was the first to awake. It was up to him to try and save himself and the others. Rik made an effort of will, and then squeezed through the narrow orifice into the main chamber. He looked once toward the slabs holding the bodies of the elders, then quickly away. It was true. All were in advanced stages of corruption already. Choking, Rik went to the center of the high room and looked into the horizontal face of the clock. The broad indicator arm was at its utmost numeral, and was pocked with rust. They'd lain here beyond the time-ofawakening by at least four times the years they'd planned! "It can't be right," Rik gasped, his brain reeling for want of clean, cool air. "The mechanism has failed somehow." Afraid to think about it, he tilted the clock up on its base until the pedestal which supported it lay on its side upon the floor. The square block of metal that based the pedestal was now uptilted beyond the vertical, exposing a gaping trap in the floor. Rik did not like the tarnished look of the metal underside of the pedestal-base, forged of an alloy supposed to be incorruptible. A sick thought took hold of his insides then, as he placed one foot upon the rocky staircase under the floor. The clock-indicator had halted at its utmost numeral. But what if they'd lain here even longer than that? There would be no way of knowing. No way at all. He descended the staircase swiftly then, glad at least that the air was better down in the pump chamber. "It would be, of course," he reminded himself, "if the pump went off, even. This air would never be circulated, never have its chance to become corrupt with our exhalations." And then his musing was halted in midthought as he came upon the pump. Or upon what had been the pump. Where rigid cylinders of gleaming metal had been, a few jagged teeth of brown corruption lay in a circle. The pistons were no better, though their thickness had preserved more of their original shape despite the inroads of age, so they could be recognized for what they were -- had been. The central shaft was a long mqund of flaking dust on the floor between the path of the pistons, and the wallsized no mass of the filters -- woven of metal and powerful synthetic fibers -- crumbled beneath the pressure of his finger. He sought and found the ponderous casing in which the engine-empowering radioactive element had lain, and its thick walls tore away like wood pulp in his hands. The element, when he found it, was already become cold grey lead. And it had had a half-life of centuries... Rik crumpled slowly to the floor, shutting his eyes, trying not to think of the eons which must have passed while they all lay sleeping the pseudodeath in the vaults. What might the world have become in the interim!  current of cool air suddenly'-touched his face. His head came up instantly, his eyes seeking the source. A feathery motion of torn edges in the filter showed him that it came through the gap he had torn there. Rik sprang to his feet then, leaped at the filter and tore out chunks by the armful, letting the pulverized material float in spinning clouds of dust motes behind him. The air grew stronger, came faster, as he ripped away the corruption, and then he could see the tunnel beyond. Gasping at the effort -- how long since he had eaten? -- he staggered back from the opening then back up the stairs into the chamber of the elders. Now that his nostrils had been stimulated by the clean air the smell of corruption was violently repelling; but he held his breath and ran to the gap in the tumbled rock about the archway, and squeezed his way into the area of subsidiary vaults. Without the pump in operation, the air could not circulate to this point, but he hoped to drag some of his companions down to the torn filter and revive them -- then, with their help, bring the others. It would be all right. They would be saved, as planned. He regretted the loss of the elders. But no matter. They were but the rulers. He and the others were the chemists, the scientists, the engineers. New elderships could be created when they had become settled again, and could rebuild their civilization. He went to Zina's slab first. She would not be as much help as some of the others, but Zina and he were too close for him to delay her revival any longer. Life was not worth having without Zina. He carried her out of the vault, through the gap and thick miasma of corruption, then down into the pump chamber. Leaving her lying on her back, with the breeze ruffling her hair about her face, Rik went back up for the next person. Three exhausting trips later, he sat among the bodies of his friends, listening with joy to their returning quiver of breath and life. Zina was the first to open her eyes. She seemed startled to find she was no longer on the slab, and then joyous when her glance fell upon his eager face. "We've done it!" she sighed. 'We came through!" She tried to sit up, then lay down heavily. "Rik -- I'm so weak..." "We need food, all of us," he said. "I'm weak myself." He arose from his crouch at her side and stared down the tunnel to the outer world. "I don't know what it's like out there," he said. "There may be no food at all. If the War was as devastating as predicted, it may be barren rock, burning sun and overall death." "How long -- ?" Zina began, and then her eyes fell upon the time-rotted hulk of the pump and she stopped, her face going pale. "As long as that!" she whispered. "Oh, Rik! Do you think -- ?"  "I'll know when I've looked," he said. Their eyes met for a long, silent moment, then he turned and started up the tunnel. Three hundred strides brought him to the barrier, the thinly perforated shield of rock that had been left intact to hide the location of the vaults from their enemies. Rik put his shoulder to the shell. It cracked and fell away as he'd thought it would, with weather and erosion having weakened it for centuries. Bright yellow moonlight lay all about the land outside. Incredibly fine sand was everywhere, but a smell of fresh water and green growing things was mingled with the night air. The region had not been desert when the vaults were constructed. The War had left its mark of devastation here, Rik saw, looking in vain for a trace of the magnificent towered city that had once been just beyond this spot. He shook off his dismay and set himself to the task for which he'd emerged. The animals had to be alive, yet, or they were doomed. He'd always regretted the haste in their preparations that had precluded preparing survival vaults for the food animals. The best they'd been able to do, before the Day of Devastation, was herd the stupid beasts into caves and pile the entrances with loose rock, hoping the animals would dig themselves out only after the worst fury of the War had passed... Rik threw off the bitter memory, abruptly, as his ears detected a tiny buzz of sound. He dropped to the ground and lay still, watching to see what sort of beast would appear. It sounded larger than the animals he remembered. "I must be near a waterhole," he reasoned. "There's a pathway here, made by many animals passing this way..." he mused, studying the narrow, flattened track that he'd spotted in the night-chilled sand. Then he saw something coming slowly up the trail, a thing much larger than the animals he remembered. It was a long moment before he realized what it was, and smiled. Then he reached out his hands and had it. It buzzed loudly in his grip until he pounded it to silence on a rock. By the time he'd returned to the pump chamber, he'd managed to prise it open, but its contents -- mangled by the smashing upon the rock -- were barely fit to eat. "It's better than I could have hoped," he said to Zina, when they and the others had picked the thing clean. "Life promises to be much more exciting, infinitely more sporting in this new age outside the vaults. With care, we can survive until our engineers rig up some whiprays and herding-claws again." "It will be fun," Zina agreed, smiling with grim anticipation. "I enjoy a challenge in the hunt. Who'd have thought the animals would have come so far from the caves!" Tt was hours later that the bus company grew worried about their missing vehicle, and started an investigation. But they could find no trace of the bus, anywhere, and it remained a mystery until the day everybody suddenly knew what had happened. But that was far too late. A Great New Complete Short Novel by one of your all-time favorite science-fiction writer Murray Leinster Read It In the February issue of Worlds of Tomorrow -- the newest and fastest-growning science-fiction magazine -- on sale nowl Two were human. The third was a fearsome alien creature. Gersen gambled his life to decide which! Synopsis Gersen was a dedicated man. As a child he had seen his family wiped out in the attack of a Star King, a human-seeming creature totally without morals or compassion. Gersen had been bred and trained ever since for one purpose: revenge. After decades of growing and learning he was at last on the track of the being who had ravaged his home. The trail began on a lonely outpost planet where a desperate space explorer, doomed to death, told him of a wonderful virgin world he had sighted... and told him that the Star King was intent on owning the planet for himself. Gersen stole the dying explorer's coded control filament, which would enable him to locate the virgin planet. Tracking down the names of the men who had sponsored the explorer, Gersen found three persons, Kelle, Detteras and Warweave, all seeming solid citizens with a philanthropic interest in space exploration... but one of whom was a monster Gersen was certain he was on the right track when Sarkoy assassins tried to waylay him. Born and bred to kill in a thousand ways, they were yet no match tor Gersen, whose whole life had been devoted to countermeasures for any such attack. He made arrangements to interview the three men, one of whom was his enemy, and in the process met a girl, Pallis Atwrode, who touched the first human spark Gersen had felt in his whole life. There had been no others. In training himself to, combat a monster, Gersen discovered he had become almost a sort of monster himself. Deeming the unsubstantiated dogma of a localized religious cult to be an undignified and unsuitable base on which to erect the chronology of galactic man, the members of this convention hereby declare that time shall now be reckoned from the year # A.D. (Old System), which becomes the year #. The revolution of Earth about Sol remains the standard annual unit. -- Declaration at the Oikumenical Convention to Standardize measures. "Everything of which we are conscious... has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol." -- Oswald Spengler. "Who are our basic enemies? This is a secret, unknown even to these basic enemies." -- Xaviar Skolcamp, OverCentennial Fellow of the Institute, indulgently, in response to a journalist's toosearching question. Tf agge Kelle was a small compact man with a large solid well-arranged head. His skin was only faintly dyed, to a waxy bisque pallor; he wore a severe costume of dark brown and purple. His eyes were clear and remote, his nose was short and blunt, his mouth prim, held firmly as if in compensation for its over-fullness. Kelle seemed to make a virtue of inscrutability. He greeted Gersen with austere courtesy, listened to his story without comment, saw the photographs without perceptible show of interest. Choosing his words with care, he said, "I am sorry that I cannot help you. I did not sponsor Mr. Teehalt's expedition. I know nothing about this man." "In that case, will you allow me the use of the decoding strip?" Kelle sat motionless a moment. Then he said in an even voice, "Unfortunately this is contrary to the rules of the department. I would encounter not a little criticism. Still..." He picked up the photographs and examined them once more. "This is beyond question a world of interesting characteristics. What is its name?" "I don't have that information, Mr. Kelle." "I cannot conceive why you seek Teehalt's sponsor. Are you "I am a private individual, though naturally I can't demonstrate this." Kelle was skeptical. "Everyone works to his own interests. If I understood what you were trying to achieve, I could possibly act with more flexibility." "This is more or less what Mr. Warweave told me," said Gersen. Kelle turned him a sharp look. "Neither Warweave nor myself are what might be called innocent men." He thought a moment, then said grudgingly, "On behalf of the department, I can go so far as to make you an offer for the filament -- though, as you tell the story, it actually is the property of the department to begin with." Gersen nodded in full agreement. "This is exactly the point I am trying to establish. Does the filament actually belong to the university, or can I feel free to do as I like with it? If I could find Lugo Teehalt's sponsor -- or determine whether the sponsor actually exists -- then any number of new possibilities would appear." Kelle was not to be moved by Gersen's ingenuousness. "It is an extraordinary situation... As I say, I might be able to make you an attractive offer for the filament -- even as a private party, if that would expedite matters. Although I would naturally insist on a prior inspection of the planet." "You know my qualms in the matter, Mr. Kelle." Kelle's response was only a small incredulous smile. Once more he studied the photographs. "These -- er -- dryads, I must say they are creatures of considerable interest... Well, I can help you to this extent. I will consult university records for information regarding Lugo Teehalt. But in exchange, I would like you to assure me an opportunity to consider the purchase of this world, in the event that you don't find the 'sponsor'." Gersen could not restrain a mild gibe. "You gave me to understand that you weren't particularly interested." "Your assumptions are of no consequence," said Kelle evenly. "This should not injure your sensibilities, for you clearly are not concerned as to my opinion of you. You approach me as if I were mentally deficient, with a tale which would not impress a child." Gersen shrugged. "The tale is substantially accurate. Naturally I haven't told you everything." K elle smiled again, rather more generously. "Well, let's see what the records have to tell." He spoke into the microphone. The non-human voice of the information bank responded. "Confidential Information, ready." "The file on Lugo Teehalt." He spelled out the name. There was a series of subdued mutterings, a quiet eery whistling. The voice spoke once more, reading off the information it had gathered. "Lugo Teehalt: his file. Contents: application for admission, verification and appended comment. April #, #." "Pass," said Kelle. "Application for admission to advanced regimen, verification and appended comment. July #, #." "Pass." "Thesis for degree in College of Symbology: title: 'The Meaningful Elements in the Eye-Motion of the Tunkers of Mizar Six'. December #, #." "Pass." "Application for post as associate instructor, verification and comment. March #, #." "Pass." "Discharge of Lugo Teehalt, associate instructor, for conduct which appeared predjudicial to morale of student corpus. October #, #." "Pass." "Contract between Lugo Teehalt and Department of Galactic Morphology, January #, #." Gersen exhaled a small sigh, at the reduction of tension of whose existence he had barely been aware. It was definite: Lugo Teehalt had been employed as locater by someone within the department. "Quote in resume," Kelle ordered. "Lugo Teehalt and Department of Galactic Morphology agree and covenant to the following. Department will furnish Teehalt a suitable space-vessel, provisioned, equipped, found in typical and useful manner, in order that Teehalt shall conduct, as agent of Department, assiduous exploration of certain areas, of galaxy. Department advances Teehalt sum of five thousand graduated values for degrees of successful exploration. Teehalt agrees to devote best efforts to successful pursuit of exploration, to preserve results of said exploration secure and secret from all persons, groups, and agencies other than those authorized by Department. Signatures: Lugo Teehalt for Lugo Teehalt; Ominah Bazerman for Department. "No further information." "Mmf," said Kagge Kelle. He spoke to the screen. "Ominah Bazerman." A click, a voice spoke. "Ominah Bazerman, Chief Clerk." "Kelle speaking. Two years ago a certain Lugo Teehalt was despatched as a locater. You signed his contract. Do you remember the circumstances?" There was a moment's silence. "No, Mr. Kelle, I can't say that I do. The contract probably came to me in a set of other papers." "You don't remember who would have initiated this contract, who sponsored this particular exploration?" "No, sir. It must have been either yourself or Mr. Detteras. Or perhaps Mr. Warweave. No one else would order out such an exploration." "I see. Thank you." Kelle turned to Gersen, his eyes mild, almost bovine. "And there you have it. If it wasn't Warweave, it must be Detteras. As a matter of fact Detteras is former Dean of the College of Symbology. Perhaps he and Teehalt were acquaintances... ID undle Detteras, Director of Exploration, seemed a man completely at his ease -- at peace with himself, his job, the world at large. When Gersen entered his office he held up his hand in easy salute. Detteras was a large man, surprisingly ugly for this age when a pointed nose or an over-loose mouth could be repaired in a matter of hours. He made no attempt to camouflage his ugliness. Indeed, it seemed as if his rather harsh blue-green skin-dye, almost the color of verdigris, accentuated the coarseness of his features, the rather gauche brusqueness of his motions. His head was the shape of a gourd. The heavy chin rested on his breast with no perceptible intervention of neck; the hair was a bristle dyed the color of wet moss. From knee to shoulder he seemed of uniform thickness,with a torso like a log. He wore the quasi-military uniform of a Baron of the Order of Archangels: black boots, loose scarlet breeches, a splendid blouse striped green, blue and scarlet, with gold epaulettes and filigreed breast plates. Rundle Detteras was of sufficient presence to command both the uniform and his odd physiognomy. A man with the slightest dubiety or self-consciousness would instantly have seemed eccentric. "Well, well, Mr. Gersen," said Detteras, "is it too early for a taste of arrack?" "I'm out of bed." Detteras stared in brief puzzlement, then laughed heartily. "Excellent! This is when I usually hoist the hospitality flag. Tint, tang, or white?" "White, please." Detteras poured from the tall slender flask. He raised his glass: "Detteras au pouvoir!" He drank with gusto. "First of the day, like a visit home to mother." He poured himself a second tot, settled back, turned upon Gersen a glance of leisurely appraisal. Gersen asked himself, which one? Warweave? Kelle? Detteras? One of these exteriors hid the ferocious soul of Grendel the Monster. Warweave? Kelle? Detteras? Gersen had inclined toward Warweave; now he was once more dubious. Detteras had undeniable force, a rude harshtextured energy that was almost palpable. Detteras apparently felt no urgency about coming to grips with Gersen's business, for all the reputed press of his affairs. It was not unlikely that he and Warweave had been in communication, and possibly Kelle likewise. "A never-ending puzzle," said Detteras, rather pompously. "The modes of why and how men differ." If Detteras were in no hurry thought Gersen, neither was he. "No doubt you're right," he said, "although I don't understand the immediate relevance." Detteras laughed, a heavy booming sound. "Quite as it Should be. I would be surprised if you professed otherwise." He held up his hand to forestall Gersen's response. "Presumption on my part? No. Hear me out. You are a somber and pragmatic man. You carry a heavy load of secrets and dark resolves." Gersen sipped suspiciously at the arrack. The verbal pyrotechnics might be intended as a distraction, a device to diminish his wariness. He concentrated on the arrack, senses keen for the faintest off-flavor. Detteras had poured both drinks from the same flask, he had offered Gersen a choice of three distillations, he had taken up glasses without seeming calculation. There existed, nonetheless, enormous scope for ruse, which no normal vigilance could prevent... But the drink was innocent, so Gersen's tongue and nasal passages, trained on Sarkovy, assured him. He focused his attention upon Detteras and the previous remark. "Your opinions regarding me are exaggerated." T'Vetteras grinned, a great gaplipped grimace. "But nevertheless essentially accurate?" "Possibly." Detteras nodded complacently, as if Gersen had given him the most emphatic of corroborations. "It is a skill, or habit of observation, bom of long years of study. I formerly specialized in Symbology, until I decided that I'd cropped the pasture as short as my teeth were long, and as far as my tether would reach. So here I am in Galactic Morphology. A less complicated field, descriptive rather than analytic, objective rather than humanistic. Still, I occasionally find application for my previous field. Now is a case in point. You come into my office, an utter stranger. I assess your overt symbolic presentation: skin color; shape, condition, color of your hair; features, clothes, your general style. You will say this is common practice. I reply, true. Everyone eats, but a skilled taster is rare. I read these symbols with minute exactitude, and they provide me with information about your personality. I, on the other hand, deny similar knowledge to you. How? I bedizen myself with random and contradictory symbols, I am in constant camouflage, behind which the real Rundle Detteras watches, as calm and cool as an impresario at the hundredth performance of a glittering carnival extravaganza." Gersen smiled. "My nature might be as flamboyant as your symbols, and I might dissemble it for reasons similar to your own -- whatever they are. A second point: your presentation, if it can be believed, illuminated you almost as clearly as the set of your natural symbols. Third -- why bother in the first place?" Detteras seemed much amused. "Aha! You show me for the fraud and charlatan I am! Still, I cannot avoid the conviction that your symbols tell me more about you than mine do about me." Gersen leaned back in his seat. "To little practical effect." "Not so fast," exclaimed Detteras. "You occupy yourself exclusively with positivity! Consider negativity for a moment. Some people fret regarding the cryptic mannerisms of their colleagues. You protest that the symbols tell you nothing of importance; you dismiss them. These others worry because they cannot integrate a proliferation of information." Gersen started to demur; Detteras held up his hand. "Consider the Tunkers of Mizar Six. You are acquainted with them? A religious sect." "I heard them mentioned a few minutes ago." "As I say," Detteras continued, "they are a religious group. Ascetic, austere, devout to an astonishing extreme. The men and women dress identically, shave their heads, use a language of eight hundred and twelve words, eat identical meals at identical hours -- all this to protect themselves from the perplexity of wondering about each other's motivations. True. This is the basic purpose of the Tunker mode. And not too far from Mizar is Sirene, where for a similar reason men wear highly conventionalized masks, from birth to death. Their face is their dearest secret." He proffered the arrack flask. Gersen held out his glass. Detteras continued. "The practice here on Alphanor is more complicated. We gird ourselves for offense and defense, or sheer playfulness, with a thousand ambiguous symbols. The business of living is enormously complicated. Artificial tensions are established. Uncertainty and suspicion become normality." "And in the process," suggested Gersen, "sensitivities are developed unknown to either the Tunkers or the Sirenese." etteras held up his hand. "Again, not so fast. I know a great deal about both these peoples. Insensitivity is a word which cannot be applied to either. The Sirenese will detect the most remote nuance of uneasiness when a man masks himself above his status. And the Tunkers -- I know less of them, but I believe that their personal differentiations are as refined and varied as our own, if not more so. I quote an analogous esthetic doctrine : the tighter the discipline of an art-form, the more subjective the criteria of taste. Consider the Star Kings -- nonmen driven by their psyches to literally superhuman excellences. They must enter the field cold, as it were, without even the human racial unconscious as a matrix for their symbolic education. Returning to Alphanor, it must be remembered that the folk thrust an enormous amount of perfectly valid information at each other, as well as ambiguities." "Confusing," said Gersen dryly, "if one allows himself to be distracted." Detteras laughed quietly, evidently well pleased with himself. "You've led a different life than I have, Mr. Gersen. On Alphanor the issues aren't life and death; everyone is fairly sophisticated. It's easier than not to accept people at their own valuation. Indeed it's often impractical not to do so." He looked sidelong at Gersen. "Why do you smile?" "It dawns upon me that the dossier on Kirth Gersen, rein arriving. In the meantime, you find it impractical to accept me at my own valuation. Or even your own." Detteras laughed in his turn. an injustice. The dossier came promptly, several minutes before your arrival." He pointed to a photostat sheet on his desk. "I ordered the dossier, incidentally, in my role as a responsible officer of the institution. I think my caution was proper." "What did you learn?" asked Gersen. "I haven't seen the dossier recently." "It's marvellously blank." He picked up the paper. "You were born in #. Where? Not on one of the major worlds. At the age of #, you registered into Galileo Space Port on Earth, in the company of your grandfather, whose antecedents perhaps we should likewise check. You attended the usual schools, were accepted by the Institute as catechumen, reached the eleventh phase at the age of twenty-four. Quite respectable progress. Then you withdrew. From now on there is no record, suggesting that either you remained permanently on Earth, or departed illegally, without registration. Since you now sit before me, the latter seems to have been the case. Remarkable," said Detteras, "that a person could live to your age in a society as complex as the Oikumene with so little official record! Long years of silence while you were occupied where? How? To what purpose and to what effect?" He glanced questioningly at Gersen. "If it's not there," said Gersen, "I don't want it there." "Naturally... There is very little more." He tossed down the dossier. "Now you are anxious to make your inquiries. I will anticipate you. I knew Lugo Teehalt, far back indeed, in my undergraduate days. He involved himself in some sort of unsavory mess, and dropped from sight. A year or so ago he came to me, asking for a locater's contract." G ersen stared at him fascinated. So here was Grendel! "And you sent him out?" "I chose not to do so. I did not want him dependent upon me for the rest of his life. I was personal basis. I told him to apply either to the Honorary Provost Gyle Warweave, or the Chairman of the Research Planning Committee Kagge Kelle; to mention my name, that very likely they could assist him. This was the last I heard of him." Gersen took a deep breath. Detteras spoke with the assurance of truth. But which of them had not? Detteras at least had confirmed that one of the three -- either himself, Warweave or Kelle -- was lying. Which? Today he had seen Grendel, looked into his eyes, listened to his voice. He was suddenly uneasy. Why was Detteras so relaxed? Presumably a busy man, how could he spare so much time? Gersen sat abruptly up in his chair. "I will get to the point of my call upon you." He told the story he had already related to Warweave and Kelle while Detteras listened with a faint smile playing over his coarse mouth. Gersen displayed the photographs and Detteras looked at them negligently. "A beautiful world," said Detteras. "If I were wealthy I would ask you to sell it to me for my personal estate. However, I am not wealthy. To the contrary. In any event, you seem not so much anxious to sell your rights to this wprld as to locate poor old Teehalt's sponsor." Gersen was somewhat taken aback. "I'll sell to the sponsor for a reasonable price." Detteras smiled skeptically. "Sorry. I can't admit to a falsehood. Warweave or Kelle is your man." "They deny it." "Strange. So then?" "The filament is useless to me in its present condition. Will you furnish me the decoding strip?" "I'm afraid that's out of the question." "I thought as much. So I must sell to one or the other of you, or to the university. Or destroy the filament." "Hm." Detteras judiciously nodded his head. "This demands careful thought. If your demands were not excessive, I'd be interested... Or perhaps the three of us, in concert, could come to some agreement with you. Hm. Let me speak to Warweave and Kelle. And then, if you could, come back tomorrow, say at ten. I might have a definite proposition to put before you." Gersen rose to his feet. "Very well. Tomorrow at ten." #"es, we are a reactionary, secretive, pessimistic, organization. We have agents everywhere. We know a thousand tricks to discourage research, sabotage experiments, distort data. Even in the Institute's own laboratories we proceed with deliberation and discretion. But now let me answer some of the questions and accusations we often hear. Do the members of the Institute enjoy wealth, privilege, power, freedom from the law? Honesty compels the answer: yes, in varying degree, depending upon phase, achievement. Then the Institute is an inbred, restricted, centripetal group? By no means. We consider ourselves an intellectual elite, certainly. Why should we not? Membership is open to anyone, although few of our catechumens achieve even so far as the fifth phase. Our policy? Simple enough. Space-drive has given a terrible weapon to any megalomaniacs who happen to occur in our midst. There is other knowledge which, if equally free, could ensure them tyrannical power. We therefore control the dissemination of knowledge. We are scathed as "self-anointed divinities"; we are accused of pedantry, conspiracy, condescension; smugness, arrogance, obstinate self-righteousness. These are the mildest of the objurgations we hear. We are accused of intolerable paternalism, and in the same breath reproached for disengagement from ordinary human affairs. Why do we not use our lore to lighten toil, alleviate pain, prolong life? Why do we stand aloof? Why do we not transform the human estate into a Utopia, a task well within our power? The answer is simple -- perhaps deceptively so. We feel these are false boons; that peace and satiety are akin to death. For all its rawness and cruel excess we envy archaic humanity its ardent experience. We hold that gain after toil, triumph after adversity, achievement to a goal long-sought, is a greater beneficence than prebendary nutrient from the teat of an indulgent government. -- From the television address by Madian Carbuke, Centennial (Hundredth Phase Fellow) of the Institute, December #, #. Conversation between two Centennials of the Institute, in connection with a third not present: "I would gladly come to your house for a chat, if I did not suspect that Ramus were likewise invited." "But what is so wrong with Ramus? He often amuses me." "He is a fungus, a flatulence, a pompous old toad, and he irritates the hell out of me." Question occasionally put to Fellows of the Institute: Are Star Kings included among the fellowship? The customary answer: We certainly hope not. Motto of the Institute: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; a great deal of knowledge is disaster, which detractors of the Institute scornfully paraphrase to: Somebody else's ignorance is bliss. P allis Atwrode lived with two other girls in a seaside apartment tower to the south of Remo. Gersen waited in the lobby while she ran up to change clothes and re-tint her skin. He went out on the deck overlooking the ocean, leaned against the rail. Great blazing Rigel hung low over the ocean, laying a molten road from shore to horizon. Near at hand in the harbor, enclosed by twin piers, a hundred boats were moored: power yachts, sailing catamarans, glasshulled submarines, a shoal of jet-powered aquaplanes, to be ridden at maniacal speed over, through and across the waves. Gersen's mood was complex. It puzzled even himself. There was the heart-bumping anticipation of an evening with a pretty girl, a sensation he had not known for years. There was the melancholy normally induced by sunset -- and now the sunset was beautiful indeed; the sky glowed mauve and green-blue, around a great bank of persimmon-orange clouds stranded with magenta. It was not the beauty which brought on melancholy, mused Gersen, but rather the quiet halcyon light and its fading... And there was another melancholy -- different yet somehow similar -- which came to Gersen as he watched the debonair folk about him. They were all graceful and easy, untouched by the toil and pain and terror that existed on remote worlds. Gersen envied them their detachment, their social skills. Still, would he change places with any of them? He would not. Pallis Atwrode came to join him by the rail. She had tinted herself a beautiful soft olivegreen, with a subtle patina of gold; she now wore her hair in a loose dark curly cap. She laughed at Gersen's obvious approval. "I feel like a wharf-rat," said Gersen. "I should have changed into new clothes." "Please don't worry," she said. "It's completely unimportant. Now. What shall we do?" "You'll have to make suggestions." "Very well. Let's go into Avente and sit on the esplanade. I never tire of watching people walk past. Then we can decide what's next." G ersen acceded; they walked to the slide-car and drove north, Pallis chattering with ingenuous candor about herself, her job, her opinions, plans and hopes. She was, so Gersen learned, a native of Singhal Island, on the planet Ys. Her parents were prosperous, owning the only cold-storage warehouse of the Lantango Peninsula. When they retired to the Palmetto Islands, her oldest brother took control of the warehouse and likewise the family home. The brother next older had wished to marry her, this form of union being countenanced on Ys, which had been settled originally by a group of Reformed Rationalists. But the brother was stout, redfaced, arrogant, without a trade other than driving the warehouse van, and the prospect held no charm for Pallis. At this point Pallis hesistated and her candor seemed to slip gears, for she changed the subject. Gersen guessed at the dramatic confrontations, fierce reproaches and countering accusations which had taken place. Pallis had now lived in Avente for two years, and though sometimes homesick for the sights and sounds of Ys, she felt herself happy and lucky. Gersen was charmed by her talk. He had never known anyone so artless. They parked the slider, walked out along the esplanade, selected a table in front of one of the numerous cafes and sat watching the crowds stroll by. Beyond spread the dark ocean, with the sky now plum and indigo-gray, with only the faintest tinge of lemon to mark the passage of Rigel. The night was warm, folk from all the worlds of the Oikumene sauntered past. The waiter brought goblets of punch. Gersen sipped, his tensions began to relax. Neither spoke for a period; then Pallis suddenly turned to face him. "You're so silent. So guarded. It is because you're in from Beyond?" Gersen had no ready reply. Finally he gave a rueful laugh. "I hoped you'd think me easy and suave, like everyone else " "Oh, come now," said Pallis teasingly. "Nobody's like everyone else." "I'm not altogether sure," said Gersen. "I suppose it's a matter of relativity: how near you are. Even bacteria have individuality, if they're examined closely enough." "So now I'm a bacterium," said Pallis. "Well, I'm another, and I'm probably boring you." "No, no! Of course noi! I'm enjoying myself." "So am I. Too much. It's -- enervating." Pallis scented a compliment. "How do you mean?" "I can't allow myself the luxury of emotional commitments -- even if I should like to."  "You're much, much, much too sober for a young man." "I'm not young any more." She made a gay gesture. "But you admit you're sober!" "I suppose so. But be careful, don't push me too far." "A woman likes to think herself a temptress." A gain Gersen had no response. -He studied Pallis across the table. For the moment she seemed content to watch the passersby. What a warm-hearted gay creature, he thought, without a trace of malice or acerbity. Pallis turned her attention back to him. "You're really such a quiet man," she told him. "Everyone else I know refuses to stop talking, and I listen to continual floods of nonsense. I'm sure you know hundreds of interesting things, and you refuse to tell me any of them." ' Gersen grinned. "They're pfobably less interesting than you think." "Still, I'd like to make sure. So tell me about the Beyond. Is life really so dangerous?" "Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depended on whom you meet, arid why." "But -- perhaps you'd rather I didn't ask -- what do you do? You're not a pirate or a slaver?"  "Do I look like a pirate? Or a slaver?" "You know that I don't know what a pirate or a slaver looks like! But I'm curious. Are you a -- well, criminal? Not that it's necessarily a disgrace," she added hastily. "Affairs which are perfectly acceptable on one planet are absolutely taboo on another. For instance, I told one of my friends that all my life I'd expected to marry my oldest brother -- and her hair uncurled!" "I'm sorry to disappoint you," said Gersen, "but I'm not a criminal. I don't fit into any category." He considered. There could be no indiscretion in telling her what he had told Warweave, Kelle and Detteras. "I've come to Avente for a particular purpose, naturally -- " "Let's have dinner," said Pallis, "and you can tell me while we eat." "Where shall we go?" "There's an exciting new restaurant, only just opened. Everyone's talking about it and I've never been there." She jumped to her feet, took his hand with an easy intimacy, pulled him upright. He caught her under the arms, bent forward, but his daring waned; he laughed and released her. She said archly, "You're more impulsive than you look." Gersen grinned, half shamefacedly. "Well, where is the exciting new restaurant?" "Not far. We can walk. It's rather expensive, but Iplan to pay half the account." "That's not necessary," said Gersen. "Money is no particular problem to a pirate. If I run short, I'll rob someone. You perhaps..." "It's hardly worth the trouble... Come along then." She took his hand, and they walked north along the esplanade like any of the thousand other couples abroad this fine Alphanor evening. Ohe led him to a kiosk circled  by large luminous green letters lator dropped them two hundred feet into a tall octagonal lobby paneled with rattan screens. A major domo escorted them along a glass-vaulted tunnel, out upon the floor of the sea. Dining rooms of various sizes opened off the passage, into one of which they were conducted. They took a table close beside the sloping glass dome. The sea lay beyond, with beacons illuminating the sand, rocks, seaweed, coral, the passing submarine creatures. "Now," said Pallis, leaning forward, "tell me about the Beyond. And don't worry about alarming me, because I love an occasional shudder." "Smade's Tavern on Smade's Planet is a good place to start," said Gersen. "You've been there?" "Of course not. But I've heard it mentioned." "It's a small, barely habitable planet out in the middle of nowhere. All mountains. Wind, thunderstorms, an ocean black as ink. The tavern is the only building on the planet. Sometimes it's crowded, sometimes there'll be no one but Smade and his family for weeks on end. When I arrived the only other guest was a Star King." "A Star King? I thought they were always disguised as men." "It's not a matter of disguise," said Gersen. "They are men. Almost." "I never have understood about the Star Kings. Just what are they?" Gersen shrugged. "You'll get a different answer every time you ask. The general speculation goes more or less, the planet Lambda have to cough through your nose to get it even approximately right -- was inhabited by a rather frightening assortment of creatures. Among them was a small amphibious biped without any particular tools for survival except awareness and an ability to hide in the mud. He probably looked a little like a lizard, or a hairless seal... The species faced extinction half a dozen times, but a few always managed to hang on, and somehow scavenge an existence among creatures who were more savage, more cunning, more agile, better swimmers, better climbers, even better scavengers than themselves. The proto-Star Kings had only psychical advantages. Selfconsciousness. Competitiveness. A desire to stay alive by any means whatever." "They sound rather like the proto-humans on ancient Earth," said Pallis. "No one knows for sure. At least no men. What the Star Kings know they're not telling... These bipeds differed from proto-man in several respects. They were biologically much more flexible, able to transmit acquired characteristics. Secondly, they are not bisexual. There is cross-fertilization by means of spores emitted on the breath, but each individual is male and female at once, and the young develop as pods in the armpits. Perhaps from this lack of sexual differentiation the Star Kings have no natural physical vanity. Their basic drive is the urge to out-do, to out-function, to outsurvive. The biological flexibility coupled to a rudimentary intelligence provided the means to implement their ambitions; they consciously began to breed themselves into a creature which could out-perform as many of their less resourceful competitors as possible. Ophis is all speculation, of course, and what follows is speculation on an even more tenuous basis. But just let's assume that some race able to traverse space visited Earth. It might have been the people which left ruins on the Fomalhaut planets, or the Hexadelts, or whoever carved Monument Cliff on Xi Puppis X. "We assume that such a spacetraveling people came by Earth a hundred thousand years ago. Assume that they captured a tribe of Mousterian Neanderthals, and for some reason conveyed them to Ghnarumen, the world of the proto-Star Kings. Here is a challenging situation for both parties. The men are far more dangerous opponents to the Star Kings than the now-defeated natural enemies. The men are intelligent, patient, crafty, ruthless, aggressive. Under pressure of the environment the men themselves evolve into a different type: more agile, faster of body and mind than their Neanderthal predecessors. "The proto-Star Kings suffer setbacks, but they have their hereditary patience as well as important weapons : the competitive urge, the biological flexibility. Men have proved superior to themselves. To compete with men they shape themselves into human semblance. "Their war continues... and the Star Kings admit, very guardedly, that certain of their myths describe these wars. "Another assumption now becomes necessary. About fifty thousand years ago the space travelers return and convey the evolved Earthmen back to Earth. And perhaps a few Star Kings -- who knows? And so the CroMagnons appear in Europe. "On their own planet the Star Kings are at last more man-like than men. They prevail. The true men are destroyed. The Star Kings are supreme and remain so until five hundred years ago, when the men of Earth discover the intersplit. When they chance upon 'Ghnarumen' they are astonished to find creatures exactly resembling themselves: the Star Kings." "It sounds far-fetched," said Pallis dubiously. "Not as far-fetched as convergent evolution. It is a fact that Star Kings exist: a race not antagonistic, but not friendly either. Men are not allowed to visit Ghnarumen. They tell us only as much about themselves as they care to, and they send observers -- spies, if you like -- everywhere throughout the Oikumene. There are probably a dozen Star Kings in Avente." Pallis grimaced. "How can you tell them from men?" "Sometimes even a doctor can't, after they finish disguising and faking themselves. There are differences, of course. They have no genital organs; their pubic region is blank. Their protoplasm, blood, hormones have a different composition. Their breath has a distinctive odor. But the spies, or whatever they are, are altered, so that even an x-ray shows the same as that of a man." "How did you know the -- the creature at Smade's Tavern was a Star King?" "Smade told me." "How did Smade know?" Gersen shook his head. "I never thought to ask." T T e sat silent, preoccupied with a new notion. There had been three guests at Smade's Tavern: himself, Teehalt, and the Star King. If Tristano were to be believed -- and why not? -- he had arrived in company only with Dasce and Suthiro. If Dasce's statement to Teehalt were to be credited, Grendel must be reckoned Teehalt's murderer. Gersen had certainly heard Teehalt's scream, while Suthiro, Dasce and Tristano stood within his range of vision. Unless Smade were Grendel, unless another ship had surreptitiously arrived -- unlikely events -- then Grendel and the Star King must be one. Thinking back, Gersen recalled that the Star King had left the dining hall in ample time to allow a conference outside with Dasce. Pallis Atwrode lightly touched his cheek. "You were telling me of Smade's Tavern." "Yes," said Gersen. "So I was." He looked at her speculatively. She must certainly know a great deal about the comings and goings of Warweave, Kelle and Detteras. Pallis, misunderstanding the nature of his gaze, flushed prettily under her pale-green skin-toning. Gersen laughed uneasily. "Back to Smade's Tavern." He described the events of the evening. Pallis listened with interest, almost forgetting to eat. "So now you have Lugo Teehalfs filament and the university has the decoder." "Correct, and neither one valuable without the other." They finished dinner. Gersen, with no credit account on Alphanor, paid the bill in cash, and they returned to the surface. "Now what would you like?" "I don't care," said Pallis. "Let's go back along the esplanade to our table, for a while anyway." The night was now dark: the moonless black-velvet night of Alphanor. The facade of every building at the back of the esplanade glowed faintly, blue or green or pink; the pavement gav off a silver effulgence; the balustrade emitted a pleasant, almost unseen amber-beige radiance; everywhere was soft shadowless light, rich with muted ghost-color. Up in the dark sky stars floated, big, vague, pale. A v'-v' -- r brought coffee and liqueur and they settled back to watch the passing crowds. Pallis said in a reflective voice, "You're not telling me everything." "Of course not," said Gersen. "In fact... Gersen paused, grappling with a disturbing new thought. Grendel might mistake the nature of his interest in Pallis -- especially if Grendel were a Star King, sexless, unable to understand the male-female relationship. "In fact," said Gersen in a bleak voice, "I really have no right involving you in my troubles." "I don't feel involved," said Pallis, stretching her arms lazily. "And if I were, what of it? This is Avente on Alphanor, a civilized planet." Gersen gave a sardonic chuckle. "I told you that others were interested in this planet. Well -- these others are pirates and slavers as depraved as you could want. Have you ever heard of Grendel?" "Grendel the Monster? Yes." Gersen resisted the temptation of telling her that she took messages and ran errands daily for Grendel. "It's almost certain," he said, "that stick-tights are watching us. Now. This very minute. And the other end of the circuit is possibly Grendel himself." Pallis moved uneasily, scanned the sky. "Don't you mean that Grendel is watching me? That's a creepy feeling." Gersen looked to right, to left, stared. Two tables away sat Suthiro, the Sarkoy venefice. A Teeting Gersen's eye, Suthiro nodded politely, smiled. He rose to his feet, sauntered to the table. "Good evening, Mr. Gersen." "Good evening," said Gersen. "May I join you?" "I'd prefer not." Suthiro laughed softly, seated himself and inclined his fox face toward Pallis. "And this young lady, do you plan to introduce me?" "You already know who she is." "But she does not know me." Gersen turned to Pallis. "Here you see Scop Suthiro, Master Venefice of Sarkovy. You expressed an interest in evil men? Here you have as completely evil a man as you're likely to meet." Suthiro laughed in easy glee. "Mr. Gersen judiciously uses the word 'likely'. Certain of my friends surpass me as grandly as I surpass you. I hope indeed that you do not meet them. Hildemar Dasce, for instance, who boasts of his ability to paralyze dogs with a glance." Pallis' voice was troubled. "I'd just as soon not meet him." She stared at Suthiro in fascination. "You really -- admit that you're evil?" Suthiro laughed once more, a subtle muffled sound. "I am a man. I am a Sarkoy." Gersen said, "I've just been describing our encounter at Smade's Tavern to Miss Atwrode. Tell me something. Who killed Lugo Teehalt?" Suthiro seemed surprised. "Who else but Grendel? We three sat within. Does it make any difference? It might as easily have been myself or Beauty or Tristano... Tristano, by the way, is quite ill. He suffered a dreadful accident, but hopes to see you on his recovery." "He can consider himself lucky," said Gersen. "He is ashamed," said Suthiro. "He thinks himself skillful. I have told him he is not so skillful as I." "Speaking of skill," said Gersen, "can you do the paper trick?" Suthiro cocked his head sidewise. "Yes, of course. Where did you learn of the paper trick?" "At Kalvaing." "And what wrought you at Kalvaing?" "A visit with Coudirou the venefice." Suthiro pursed his heavy red lips. He wore a yellow skin-tone; his brown pelt was glossy and smooth with oil. "Coudirou is as wise as any. As for the paper trick..." Gersen handed him a napkin. Suthiro suspended it from left thumb and forefinger, stroked it lightly with his right hand. It fell to the table in five ribbons. CC'VT'ell done," said Gersen, and to Pallis: "His fingernails are hardened, sharp as razors. Naturally he would waste no poison on the paper, but each of his fingers is like the head of a serpent." Suthiro made complacent acquiescence. Gersen turned back to him. "Where is Fancy Dasce?" "Not too far distant." "Red face and all?" Suthiro shook his head sadly, at Dasce's poor taste in skintoning. "A very able and very strange man. Have you ever wondered about his face?" "When I could bear to look at it." "You are not my friend. You tricked me beautifully. Nevertheless I will warn you : never cross Fancy Dasce. Twenty years ago he was thwarted in some small escapade. It was a matter of collecting money from an obstinate man. Hildemar by chance found himself at a disadvantage. He was knocked down and strapped hand and foot. So now his creditor had the poor taste to cleave poor Hildemar's nose, and cut off his eyelids... Hildemar eventually escaped and now is known as Beauty Dasce, or Fancy Dasce." "How awful," muttered Pallis. "Exactly." Suthiro's voice became contemptuous. "A year later Hildemar allowed himself the luxury of capturing this man. He conveyed him to a private place, where he lives to this day. And occasionally Hildemar, remembering the outrage which cost him his features, returns to this private place to remonstrate with the man." Pallis turned glazed eyes at Gersen. "These people are your friends?" "No. We are associated only through Lugo Teehalt." Suthiro was looking along the esplanade. Gersen asked idly, "You and Dasce and Tristano work together and train together as a team?" "Often, though I for one prefer a singular scope." "And Lugo Teehalt had the misfortune to blunder upon you at Brinktown?" "He died quickly. Godogma takes all men. Is this misfortune?" "One never likes to hasten Godogma." "True." Suthiro inspected his strong agile hands. "Agreed." He looked toward Pallis. "On Sarkovy we have a thousand popular aphorisms to this effect." "Who is Godogma?" "The Great God of Destiny, who carries a flower and a flail, and walks on wheels." Gersen put on an air of studious concentration. "I will ask you a question. You need not answer. In fact, perhaps you do not know; but I am puzzled. Why should Grendel, a Star King, so vehemently desire this particular world?" S uthiro shrugged. "This is a matter with which I have never concerned myself. Apparently the world is valuable. I am paid. I kill only when I must or when it profits me -- so you see," he told Pallis parenthetically, "I am not really so evil a man, am I now? Presently I will return to Sarkovy and live out my days roaming the Gorobundur Steppe. Ah, now! There is the life! When I think of those times to come, I wonder why I sit here now, beside this odious wetness." He grimaced toward the sea and rose to his feet. "It is a presumption to advise you, but why not be sensible? You can never defeat Grendel. Therefore relinquish the filament." Gersen thought a moment, then said, "I will also presume, in the same spirit which prompts you. My advice is this: kill Hildemar Dasce the next moment you see him, or even before." Suthiro knit his furry brown eyebrows in puzzlement, glanced for the most fleeting instant upward. Gersen continued. "There is a stick-tight watching us, although I have not located it. Its microphone probably registers our conversation. Until you told me, I had no idea that the Star King at Smade's Tavern was Grendel. I am interested. I do not think this is common knowledge." "Quiet!" hissed Suthiro, eyes blazing with sudden red wrath. Gersen lowered his voice. "Hildemar Dasce quite possibly will be asked to punish you. If you wish to forestall Godogma, if you wish to take your wagon across Gorobundur Steppe -- kill Dasce and go." Suthiro hissed something below his breath, jerked up his hand as if to throw, then backed away, turned, melted into the crowd. Pallis relaxed, slumped into her chair. In an uncertain voice she said, "I'm not as adventurous as I supposed myself." "I'm sorry," said Gersen genuinely contrite. "I should never have asked you out." "No, no. I just can't accustom myself to that kind of talk, here on the esplanade, in peaceful Avente. But I suppose I'm actually enjoying it. If you're not a criminal, who or what are you?" "Kirth Gersen." "You must work for the "No." "Then you must be on the Institute's Special Committee." "I'm just Kirth Gersen." He rose to his feet. "Let's walk for a bit." They went north along the esplanade. To the left lay dark sea; to the right the edifices glowing in various soft colors; and beyond, the skyline of Avente: luminous spires against the black Alphanor night. Pallis presently took Gersen's arm. "Tell me, what if Grendel is a Star King? What does that mean?" "I've been wondering myself." Indeed, Gersen had been trying to remember the look of the Star King. Had it been Warweave? Kelle? Or Detteras? The lusterless black skin-tone had blurred the features; the striped coif had covered the hair. Gersen had an impression that the Star King had been taller than Kelle, but not quite so tall as Warweave. But would even the black skin-tone have camouflaged Detteras's rude rough features? Pallis was speaking: "Will they really kill that man?" Gersen glanced up to see if he could locate the stick-tight, without success. "I don't know. He's useful. Incidentally -- " Gersen hesitated, wondering anew as to the ethics of involving Pallis in the sordid affair. "Incidentally what?" "Nothing." For fear of the stick-tight's microphone Gersen dare not inquire as to the movements of Kelle, Detteras and Warweave; Grendel so far had no reason to suspect his interest. Pallis said in an injured voice, "I still don't understand how all of this affects you." Ance more Gersen chose to be discreet. The stick-t i g h t might hear; Pallis Atwrode herself might be an agent of Grendel's though Gersen considered this unlikely. So he said, "Not at all -- except in the abstract." "But any of these people -- " she nodded to the passersby -- "they might be Star Kings. How could we separate them from men?" "It's hard. On their home planet -- I won't attempt to pronounce it again -- they come in many approximations to man. Those who travel the known worlds as observers -- spies, if you prefer, although I can't imagine what they hope to leam -- they're almost exact facsimiles of true men." Pallis suddenly seemed subdued. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, and finally gave a gay fling of her hands. "Let's forget about them. Nightmares. You have me seeing Star Kings everywhere. Even at the university..." Gersen looked down into her upturned face. "Do you know what I'd like to do?" She smiled provocatively. "No. What?" "First I'd like to shake off the stick-tight, which is no great problem. And then..." "And then?" "I'd like to go somewhere quiet, where we could be alone." She looked away. "I don't mind. There's a place down the coast. Les Sirenes, it's called. I've never been there." She laughed in embarrassment. "But I've heard people talking." Gersen took her arm. "First to shake off the stick-tight..." Pallis entered into the maneuvers with child-like abandon. Looking into the merry face, Gersen wondered about his resolve to avoid emotional involvements. If they went to Les Sirenes, if the night brought them to closer intimacy, what then? Gersen thrust aside his qualms. He would cope with problems as they arose. The stick-tight, if it had existed, was confounded and lost; they returned to the parking area. There was little light; the ranked round shapes glimmered with silky dull highlights. They came to the slide-car; Gersen hesitated, then put his arms around the swaying girl, kissed her upturned face. Behind him was the loom of movement; ahead a furtive shifting. Gersen turned, in time to look into a horrid blood-red face with poisonous blue cheeks. Hildemar Dasce's arm descended. A great weight curled over Gersen's head; lightning exploded inside his skull. He tottered and fell to his knees. Dasce leaned over him. Gersen tried to dodge. The world reeled and toppled; he saw Suthiro grinning like a sick hyena, with his hand to the girl's neck. Dasce struck again, and the world went dim. Gersen had time for an instant of bitter self-reproach, before another thunderous buffet extinguished his consciousness. IX Excerpt from When is a Man Not a Man, by Podd Hachinsky, article in Cosmopolis, June, #:... As men have traveled from star to star they have encountered many forms of life, intelligent and non-intelligent (to emphasize a perfectly arbitrary and possibly anthropomorphic parameter). No more than half a dozen of these life forms merit the adjective "humanoid". Of these half dozen, a single species closely resembles man: the Star Kings of Ghnarumen. Ever since our initial astounded contact with the race, the question has recurred: are they of the family of man -- the "bifurcate, bibrachiate, monocephaloid, polygamite", as Tallier Chantron waggishly puts it -- or are they not? The answer, of course, depends on definitions. One point can instantly be settled. The Star Kings are not homo sapiens. But if what is meant is a creature which can talk a human language, walk into a haberdashery and dress himself off a rack, play an excellent game of tennis, or fight a bout of chess, attend the. regal functions of Stockholm or the lawn fetes of Strylvania without occasioning a lift of autocratic eyebrow -- then they are men. Man or not man, the typical Star King is a courteous, eventempered fellow, even if suspicious and humorless. Do him a favor, he will thank you, but feel no obligation ; injure him, he will explode in tigerish fury and kill you -- if he is in a situation where human law cannot restrain him. If such action will cause legal trouble, he will instantly dismiss the injury and hold no grudge. He is ruthless but not cruel, and is puzzled by such perverse human manifestations as sadism, masochism, religious fervor, flagellation, suicide. On the other hand he will demonstrate a whole battery of peculiar habits and attitudes no less inexplicable from our point of view, arising from the twists and quirks of his own psyche. To say that his origin is in dispute is like a remark to the effect that Croesus was well-off. At least a dozen theories to explain the remarkable similarity between Star King and Man exist. None are completely convincing. If the Star Kings themselves know, they will admit nothing. Since they bar all anthropological and archaeological research teams from their planet, we are afforded neither verification nor refutation of any of these theories. On human planets they punctiliously model their conduct after the best human examples, but their innate behaviour patterns are unique to the race. Perhaps to oversimplify, one can say that their dominant trait is a passion to excel, to outdo a competitor at his own game. Since man is the dominant creature of the Oikumene, the Star Kings accept him as the champion to be challenged and outdone. So they strive to outdo man in every aspect of the human capacity. If this ambition (at which they are often successful) seems unreal and artificial to us, no less so does our sexual drive seem to them; for the Star Kings are parthenogenetic, reproducing in a manner which is beyond the scope of this article to describe. Knowing nothing of vanity, setting no store by either beauty or ugliness, they strive for physical perfection only to score points in their semi-amicable contest with true men. What of their achievements? They are fine builders, daring engineers, excellent technicians. They are a pragmatic race, and not particularly apt at mathematics or the speculative sciences. It is hard to conceive of their giving birth to a Jarnell, who discovered the space-splitter by sheer accident. Their cities are impressive sights, rising from the flatlands like a growth of metallic crystals. Each adult Star King builds for himself a spire or tower. The more fervent his ambition and more exalted his rank, the higher and more splendid his tower (which he seems to enjoy only as a monument). Upon his demise the tower may be temporarily occupied by some junior individual during the period in which he accumulates sufficient wealth to build his own tower. Inspirational as the cities seem from a distance, they lack the most obvious municipal utilities, and the areas between the towers are unpaved, dusty, littered. Factories, industrial plants and the like are housed in low utilitarian domes and manned by the least aggressive and least evolved of the species -- for the race is by no means homogeneous. It is as if every human gathering included Proconsuls, Pithecanthropi, sinanthropus giganticus, Neanderthals, Magdalenians, Solutreans, Grimaldi, Cro-Magnon, and all the races of Modem Man.  t midnight a group of young-folk came laughing and singing into the parking area. They had dined with unaccustomed amplitude at The Halls. They had visited Llanfelfair, Lost Star Inn, Haluce, the Casino Plageale. They were intoxicated, but as much by exuberance as by the wines, smokes, perfusions, subliminal whirligigs, chants, voltes and other exaltments purveyed by the houses which they had visited. The youth who stumbled over Gersen's body uttered first a jocular malediction, then an exclamation of shocked concern. The group gathered. One ran to his vehicle and pressed the emergency call-button; two minutes later a police craft dropped down from the sky, and then an ambulance. Gersen was conveyed to a hospital where he was treated for concussion and shock with appropriate irradiation, massage, and vitalizing medicines. He presently returned to consciousness, and for a moment lay thinking. Then he gave a sudden lurch and tried to rise from the bed. The attending interns cautioned him, but Gersen, paying no heed, struggled erect and stood swaying. "My clothes!" he croaked. "Give me my clothes!" "They're safe in the closet, sir. Relax, recline, if you please. Here is the police officer to take your evidence." Gersen lay back fretfully. The police investigator approached : a keen-faced young man wearing the yellow-brown jacket and black breeches of the Sea Province Constabulary. He addressed himself to Gersen politely, seated himself and opened the flap of the recorder lens. "Now, sir, what happened?" "I was out for the evening with a young woman, Miss Pallis Atwrode of Remo. When we came back to the car, I was slugged, and I don't know what happened to Miss Atwrode. The last thing I remember she was struggling to escape from one of the men." "There were how many?" "Two. I recognized them. Their names are Hildemar Dasce and a man I know only as Suthiro, a Sarkoy. Both are notorious men Beyond." "I see. The young lady's name and address?" "Pallis Atwrode, Merioneth Apartments, Remo." "We'll check at once to make sure she hasn't arrived home. Now, Mr. Gersen, let's go over this again." In a dull voice Gersen gave a detailed account of the attack, described Hildemar Dasce and Suthiro. As he spoke, a report came in from Constabulary Control. Pallis Atwrode had not returned to her apartment. Roads, airways and space-terminals were had been called into the case. "Now, sir," said the investigator in a neutral voice, "may I inquire your business?" "I am a locater." "What is the nature of your association with these two men?" "None. I saw them at work once before, on Smade's Planet. Apparently they regard me as an enemy. I believe that they are part of Grendel the Monster's organization." "Very strange that they should commit an actionable offense so brazenly. In fact, why did they not kill you?" "I don't know." Gersen once more staggered to his feet. The investigator watched with professional attentiveness. "What are your plans, Mr. Gersen?" "I want to find Pallis Atwrode." "Understandable, sir. But it is best that you do not interfere. The police are more effective than a single man. We should have news for you at any time." "I don't think so," said Gersen. "By now they're in space." The investigator, rising to his feet, made tacit admission that such was the case. "We will naturally keep you informed." He bowed and departed. Gersen immediately dressed, with the disapproving help of an orderly. His knees were weak. His hand floated in a kind of generalized all-embracing pain. There was a faint singing in his ears from the drugs. An elevator dropped him directly to a subway station. Gersen stood on an exchange platform, straining to formulate a coherent plan of action. A phrase kept repeating itself compulsively, like an inch-worm traversing the inner surface of his skull: Poor Pallis, poor Pallis. With no better plan in mind he stepped into a capsule and sent himself to a station under the Esplanade. He emerged, but instead of going to the car, took a seat in a brasserie and drank coffee. "By now she's in space," he told himself once more. "And it's my fault. My fault." Because he should have foreseen this sort of outcome. Pallis Atwrode knew Warweave, Kelle and Detteras well; she saw them daily, heard whatever gossip there was to be heard. Grendel the Star King, Grendel the Monster, was one of three men, and Pallis Atwrode evidently had knowledge which, coupled to Suthiro's indiscretions, made Grendel's incognito insecure. Hence she must be removed. Killed? Sold into slavery? Taken by Dasce for his personal use?... Poor Pallis, poor Pallis. G ersen looked out over the 'ocean. A rim of lavender was forming at the horizon, presaging dawn. The stars were fading. "I've got to face up to it," Gersen told himself. "It's my responsibility. If she is harmed -- but no. Ill kill Hildemar Dasce in any event." Suthiro, treacherous, fox-faced Suthiro, was already as good as dead. And there was Grendel himself, the architect of the entire evil construction. As a Star King he somehow seemed less hateful: a dire beast, which might be expunged without emotion. Surfeited with hate and grief and misery, he went to the car in the now empty parking area. There, the spot where Dasce had stood. There, where he had lain unconscious -- what a wretched, careless fool! How the spirit of his grandfather must writhe in shame! He started the car, returned to his hotel. There were no messages. Dawn had come to Avente. Rigel threw wide horizontal fans of light between the distant Catiline Hills and a darkling bank of clouds. Gersen set the alarm dial, dosed himself with a twohour soporific, threw himself down on the bed. He awoke to gloom and depression even more intense than before. Time had passed; whatever had been in store for Pallis Atwrode was now fact. Gersen ordered coffee; he could not bring himself to eat. He considered what he must forced to tell everything he efficiently if he laid his information before them? He could tell them that he suspected an administrator of the Sea Province University to be one of the so-called Demon Princes. What force, with the vices and virtues characteristic of such an organization, might or might not be trustworthy. Star Kings had possibly infiltrated the group; in this case Grendel would certainly be warned. And how could the information help rescue Pallis Atwrode? Hildemar Dasce was the kidnapper. Gersen had reported this, and no information could be more explicit. Another possibility: the exchange of Teehalt's world for Pallis Atwrode. Gersen would gladly accept the trade -- but whom to trade with? He still could not identify would have means to detect him. Then what? The exchange would no longer be conceivable. There might be a quiet execution -- ed only upon the formal request of some authorized governmental agency. And in the meantime, what of Pallis Atwrode? She would be lost -- a small delightful spark of life, forgotten But if Gersen knew Grendel's identity he would have vastly more leverage. He could make his offer with assurance. The logic of the situation seemed to be that Gersen proceed as before. But how slow! Think of Pallis, poor Pallis!... Nevertheless, Hildemar Dasce had gone Beyond, and no effort avail against this hard fact. Grendel alone had the power to order his return. If Pallis Atwrode still lived. The situation had not changed. As before his first urgency was to identify Grendel. Then bargain -- or extort. With his course of action once more clear, Gersen's spirits lifted. More accurately, his resolve and dedication burned at a fervent new heat. Hate gave him a heady, almost drunken, sense of omnipotence. No one, nothing, could withstand emotion so intense! The hour of his appointment with Detteras, Warweave and Kelle was approaching. Gersen dressed, descended to the garage, slid his car out upon the avenue and headed south. A rriving at the university, heSparked, rode the slide-way to the mall, crossed the quadrangle to the College of Galactic Morphology. Hoping against hope, with sudden quick jerking of the heart, he looked toward the reception desk. A different girl was on duty. He asked politely, "Where is Miss Atwrode this morning?" "I don't know, sir. She hasn't arrived. Perhaps she's not feeling well." Perhaps indeed, thought Gersen. He mentioned his appointment and proceeded to the office of Rundel Detteras. Warweave and Kelle were there before him. The three undoubtedly had reached a decision on a common course of action. Gersen looked from face to face, Detteras to Warweave to Kelle. One of these creatures was human only in appearance. At Smade's Tavern he had glimpsed him. He tried to think back, to visualize, to remember. No image came. Black-dyed skin and exotic costume were a disguise beyond his penetration. Furtively he assessed each. Which? Warweave: aquiline, cold-eyed, arrogant? Kelle: precise, humorless, austere? Or Detteras, whose geniality now seemed insincere and counterfeit? He could not decide. He forced himself into a pose of studious courtesy, and made his primary gambit. "Let's simplify the whole matter," said Gersen. "I'll buy the decoding-strip. I imagine the college could use a that's the offer I wish to make." His adversaries, each in his own style, seemed taken aback. Warweave raised his brows, Kelle stared fixedly, Detteras put on a puzzled half-smile. Warweave said, "But we understood that you intended to sell what you conceived to be your interest in this matter." "I don't mind selling," said Gersen. "if you'll offer me enough." "And how much is enough?" or perhaps three, if you'll go that high." Kelle snorted, Detteras shook his big ugly head. "Fees of that sort are not paid to locaters," said Warweave. "Has it been established which of you sent out Teehalt?" asked Gersen. "What does it matter?" asked Warweave. "Your interest in the affair -- money -- has become clear enough." He looked from Kelle to Detteras. "Whoever it is has either forgotten or does not care to disclose himself. Doubtless that is the way the situation will remain." Detteras said, "It's certainly inconsequential. Come now, Mr. Gersen, we have decided to make you a joint offer -- certainly not as grandiose as the figure you name -- " "How much?" "Possibly as much as # "Ridiculous. This is an exceptional world." "You do not know this," Warweave pointed out. "You have not been there, or so you claim." "More to the point," said Kelle dryly, "neither have we." "You have seen the photographs," said Gersen. "Exactly," said Kelle. "We have seen no more. Photographs can be faked without difficulty. I for one do not propose to pay out a large sum on the strength of three photographs." "Understandable," said Gersen. "But for my part I don't intend to make a move without a guarantee. Don't forget I have suffered a loss. This is my opportunity to make it good." "Be reasonable!" Detteras urged bluffly. "Without the decoder, the filament is just another spool of wire." "Not completely. Fourier analysis eventually can break the code." "In theory. It is a long expensive process." "Not as expensive as giving the filament away for next to nothing." 'The discussion continued an hour, Gersen gritting his teeth in impatience. A price of #,crow, was eventually arranged, the sale conditional upon a list of provisos relating to the physical characteristics of the world in question. Agreement having been reached, telescreen contact with the Bureau of Deeds and Contracts at Avente was made. The four men identified themselves formally and the contract was read into the records. A second call, to the Bank of Alphanor, established the escrow account. The three administrators now sat back and inspected Gersen, who in his turn looked from one to the other. "So much is settled. Which of you goes with me to inspect this world?" The three exchanged glances. "I'll gladly go," said Warweave. "I was about to volunteer my own services," said Detteras. "In that case," said Kelle, "I might as well come along too. I'm overdue for a change." Gersen seethed in frustration. He had expected Grendel to volunteer his services -- in fact, to assert them -- whereupon Gersen could then take him aside, and offer a new deal: the filament for Pallis Atwrode. What, after all, was the world to him? His single goal was Grendel's identity... and after that, his life. But now this plan had good by the boards. If all three went out to Teehalt's planet, the identification of Grendel must depend upon new circumstances. Meanwhile the fate of Pallis Atwrode bore no thinking about. Gersen made a last-ditch protest. "My boat is small for four. Better if only one went out with me. Detteras threw his hands into the air, turned to the screen, called his seeretary. "Cancel all my appointments. Urgent business is taking me out of town. We'll take the departmental ship." "D etuming to Avente, Gersen pondered the future. What challenges would he face from these men, one of whom was Grendel? It would be foolhardy not to arrange safeguards: this was the training imposed upon him by his grandfather, a methodical man, who had labored diligently to discipline Gersen's innate tendency to rely upon improvisation. At the hotel Gersen examined his belongings, made certain selections, then packed and checked out. After painstaking precautions against stick-tights and human trackers, he went to a branch office of the Amalgamated Distribution Service, another of the monster semi-public utility companies with agencies throughout the Oikumene. In a booth he consulted catalogues which offered him a choice of a thousands of fabricators. Making his choice, he punched the requisite buttons, went to the service counter. There was a wait of three minutes, while automatic machinery ranged the shelves of the enormous underground warehouse, then the mechanism Gersen had ordered appeared on a belt. He examined it, paid the clerk, departed and rode the subway to the space-port. He inquired the location of the university ship from an attendant, who took him out on a terrace and pointed down the long line of spacecraft, large and small, each in its bay. "Notice, sir, the red and yellow yacht with side platform? Well, count down three. First the CD #, then the old Parabola, and then a green and blue ship with the big observation dome. That's the job. She's going out today, eh?" "Yes. About seven. How did you know?" "One of the crew is already aboard. I had to let him on." "I see." Gersen went down to the field, walked along the way which led past the ranked spacecraft. From the shadow of the ship in the next bay, he inspected the university ship. The contours were distinctive, as was the rather elaborate emblem at the bow. Recollection stirred at the back of his mind. Somewhere before he had seen this ship. Where? At Smade's Planet on the landing field between mountains and black ocean. It was the ship used by the Star King. The shape of a man passed in front of one of the observation windows. When he moved out of sight Gersen crossed the space between the two ships. Cautiously he tried the outer entry port. It eased ajar. He stepped into the transition chamber, peered through the panel into the ship's main saloon. Suthiro the Sarkoy worked at an object which he apparently had attached to the underside of a shelf. Tnside Gersen something more ferocious than gladness -- a peculiar exaltation of hate -- swelled and burst, suffusing his entire body. He tried the inner portal. It was locked from within. There was, however, an emergency disengagement which would unlock the door if pressure were equalized between cabin and outer atmosphere. Gersen touched the emergency switch. There was an audible click. Within the ship all was silent. Not daring to glance through the panel, Gersen pressed his ear to the port. Useless: no sound could pass through the laminated structure. He waited a minute, then carefully eased himself up to look into the cabin once more. Suthiro had heard nothing. He had gone forward, and now appeared to be adjusting the padding around a stanchion. His heavy flat-skulled head was bent forward, lips pursed out. Gersen slid back the port, stepped into the cabin, a projac pointed at the big square buckle of Suthiro's steppe-rider harness. "Skop Suthiro," said Gersen. "This is a pleasure for which I had not dared hope." Suthiro's dog-brown eyes opened and shut; he grinned broadly. "I was waiting for your arrival." "Indeed. And why?" "I wanted to continue our discussion of last night." "We were speaking of Godogma, the Long-Legged Walker, with Wheels on his Feet. Plainly he has wheeled across the path of your life, and you will never drive your wagon over the Gorobundur." . Suthiro became very still, his eyes measuring Gersen. "What happened to the girl?" asked Gersen gently. Suthiro considered, then rejected the feasibility of feigning innocence. "She was taken by Fancy Dasce." "With your connivance. Where is she now?" Suthiro shrugged. "He had orders to kill her. Why I don't know. I am told very little. Dasce will not kill her until he has the full use of her. He is a khet." Suthiro sneered the epithet, a metaphor linking Dasce to the obscenely fecund Sarkovy mink. "He has left Alphanor?" "Certainly." Suthiro seemed surprised at Gersen's naivete. "Probably for his little planet." He made a fretful uncomfortable motion, which brought him an imperceptible four inches closer to Gersen. "Where is this planet?" "Ha! Do you think he would tell me? Or anyone else?" "In that case -- but I must ask you to stand back." "Pah," whispered Suthiro in a childish display of petulance. "I can poison you any time I choose." Gersen allowed a faint smile to cross his lips. "I have already poisoned you." Suthiro raised his eyebrows. "When? You have never closed with me." "Last night. I touched you when I handed you paper. Look at the back of your right hand." Suthiro stared in slow horror at the red weal. "Cluthe!" Gersen nodded. "Cluthe." "But -- why should you do this to me?" "You merit such an end." Outhiro launched himself like a  leopard ; the projector in Gersen's hand discharged a stalk of blue-white energy. Suthiro fell to the deck, lay staring up at Gersen. "Better plasma than cluthe," he whispered huskily. "You'll die by cluthe," said Gersen. Suthiro shook his head. "Not while I carry my poisons." "Godogma calls you. So now speak truth. Do you hate Hildemar Dasce?" "I hate Dasce indeed." Suthiro seemed surprised, as if there were anyone who did not hate Dasce. "I would kill Dasce." "Most people would do no less." "Where is his planet?" "Beyond. I know no more." "When are you to see him next?" "Never. I am dying, and Dasce is bound for a deeper hell than mine." "If you lived?" "Never. I was to return to Sarkovy." "Who knows of this planet?" "Grendel... Perhaps." "Is there no one else? Tristano?" "No. Dasce tells little. The world is airless." Suthiro carefully hunched himself together. "Already the skin begins to itch." "Listen, Suthiro. You hate Dasce. Yes? And you hate me, for I have poisoned you. Think! You, a Sarkoy, poisoned by me, and so easily." Suthiro muttered, "I hate you indeed." "Tell me how to find Dasce, then. One of us must kill the other. The death will be your doing." Suthiro rocked his furry head in desolation. "But I cannot tell you what I do not know." "What has he said of his world? Does he talk?" "He boasts. Dasce is a vile braggart. His world is harsh; only a man like himself could master this world. He lives in the crater of a dead volcano." "What of the sun?" Suthiro hunched himself together. "It is dim. Yes. It must be red. They asked Dasce about his face. Why had he dyed himself red? To match his sun, said Dasce, which was the same color, and not much larger." "A red dwarf," mused Gersen. "So it might be." "Think! What else? Which direction? Which constellation? Which sector?" "He says nothing. And now -- I do not care. I think only of Godogma. Go away so that I may kill myself decently." Gersen surveyed the huddled form without emotion. "What are you doing here in the ship?" Suthiro looked at his hand curiously, then rubbed his chest. "I feel it moving." He examined Gersen. "Well, then, since you would look on my death, watch." He put hands to his neck, convulsed his knuckles. The brown eyes stared. "In thirty seconds now." "Who would know of Dasce's planet? Has he friends?" " 'Friends'?" Suthiro even in his last seconds took occasion to sneer. "Where does he lodge in Avente?" "North of Sailmaker Beach. In an old hut on Melnoy Heights." "Who is Grendel? What is his name?" Suthiro spoke in a whisper. "A Star King has no need for a name." "What name does he use on Alphano?" The thick lips opened and closed. Words rattled in the pale throat. "You killed me. Should Dasce fail, let Grendel kill you." The eyelids jerked, quivered. Suthiro lay back, seemed to stiffen, made no further movement and lay still. ersen looked down at the body. He walked around behind it, studied it. The Sarkoy were notoriously treacherous and revengeful. With his toe, he attempted to turn the body over on its face. Quick as the strike of a serpent the arm flashed around, poison-prongs ready. Gersen jerked back; the projac ejected a second dazzling line of energy; this time Suthiro was dead. Gersen searched the corpse. In the pouch he found a sum of money which he tucked into his own wallet. There was a kit of poisons, which Gersen examined, then, unable to comprehend Suthiro's cryptic nomenclature, discarded; also a device no larger than his thumb, intended to project crystalline needles of poison or virus on a jet of compressed air. A man could be infected from a distance of fifty feet and know nothing save a faint tingle. Suthiro carried a projac similar to his own, three stilettos and a packet of fruit lozenges, undoubtedly lethal. Gersen dropped the weapons back into Suthiro's pouch, dragged the body to a waste ejection locker and crammed it away, out of sight. Once in space, the touch of a button would dispose of Sivij Suthiro the Sarkoy. Next he looked to discover what Suthiro, while alive, had so earnestly been trying to achieve. Under the shelf he found a small toggle-switch controlling a set of wires which led to a concealed relay, which in turn activated the valves on four reservoirs of gas at various secret spots around the cabin. Deathgas or anesthetic? He detached one of the reservoirs and found a label printed in the crabbed Sarkoy syllabary: Tironvirasko's Instantaneous Narcoleptic; an odorless sleep-inducent with minimal postreducts. It seemed that Grendel, no less methodical than Gersen, was taking his own precautions. Gersen took each of the four reservoirs to the entry port, released their contents and replaced them where he had found them. He left Suthiro's switch in place, but changed its function. This accomplished, Gersen brought out his own device: the timer he had purchased at Amalgamated, and a grenade from his armament. After a moment's reflection he secured it inside the reactor housing, where it would do maximum damage and yet be convenient in case of need. He glanced at his watch. One o'clock. Time was growing short. Far too short to accomplish all which must be done. He departed, locking the ship behind him. Returning to the terminal, he took the subway for Sailmaker Beach. At a stand beside the station Gersen selected a self-service cab -- a single-seat scooter, gyroscopically balanced, with a the slot gave him possession for an hour. Stepping aboard, he drove north through the noisy streets of Sailmaker Beach. r T"he district had a unique flavor. Avente, a suave cosmopolitan city, was almost indistinguishable from fifty other polities of the Oikumene. Sailmaker Beach resembled no other locale in the known universe. The buildings were low and thickwalled, constructed for the most part of crushed coquina concrete, white or color-washed. In the blazing light of Rigel even pastels seemed intense. For some reason lavender and pale blue, along with white, were the most popular tints. The district was home to scores of off-world nationalities, each forming an enclave with its characteristic food shops, restaurants, specialty houses. Though widely disparate of origin, habit and physiognomy, the inhabitants of the district were uniformly voluble, halfsuspicious, half-naive, contemptuous of outsiders and equally contemptuous of each other. They earned their living from tourists, as domestic servants or day laborers, as proprietors of small shops and craft studios, as entertainers or musicians in the innumerable taverns, bistros, bordellos, restaurants. At the north rose Melnoy Heights. Here the architecture changed to tall apartment buildings of almost Gothic elongation, each seeming to peer over the other's shoulder, across Sailmaker Beach to the more conventional districts. In Melnoy Heights Hildemar Dasce reputedly had lodgings. As methodically as shortness of time and anxiety allowed, Gersen sought information regarding Dasce. There was no Hildemar Dasce listed in the Melnoy Heights Directory -- nor had Gersen expected to find one. Dasce undoubtedly would desire privacy and the pose of normality. Gersen began to visit the taverns, describing the tall man with the split nose, the red skin, the chalk-blue cheeks. He soon encountered folk who had noticed Dasce, but not until the fourth tavern did he find anyone who had spoken with him. "You must mean Beauty," said the bartender, a stubby orangeskinned man, with russet hair arranged in fine glossy festoons and curls. Gersen stared in fascination at the chain carved from turquoise which looped from a hole in his left nostril to a hole in the lobe of his left ear. "Beauty comes in often to drink. A space man he claims himself, but as to this I can't be certain. I have often declared myself a great lover. All of us lie, as much or more than necessary. 'What is truth?' asks Pons Pilatus, in the fable, and I answer: 'A commodity as cheap as air, which we hide as if it were as precious as yewl-stone.' " The bartender was disposed to further philosophy. Gersen hauled him back to the issue at hand. "Where does Beauty Dasce house himself?" "Up the hill, up back." The bartender made a vague gesture. "I can tell you no more, because I know no more." Gersen rode his scooter up the steep lanes and switchbacks of Melnoy Heights. Inquiry at another tavern, a tiresome series of questions at various shops, lobbies and street-corners, finally resulted in explicit directions to Dasce's lodgings. Riding a little unpaved road which left the area of tall apartments, Gersen circled a steep rocky hillside, where gangs of children scrambled like goats. At the end of the road stood an isolated rectangular cottage, rudely, if substantially, constructed. It commanded a magnificent view over the ocean; over Sailmaker Beach; the Grand Esplanade, dwindling far to the south; and, only just perceptible through the haze, the apartment towers of Remo. ersen approached the cottage with care, though it exuded the indefinable but unmistakable feeling of vacancy. He walked around peering through the windows, seeing nothing of interest. After a quick glance to right and left, he broke in the sash of an inconspicuous window and cautiously, in the event that Dasce had set man-traps, climbed into the cottage. The house was strong with the feel of Dasce's habitancy; a faintly acrid odor, together with an aura more subtle than odor, of crudeness, dark pompous magnificent strength. There were four rooms, encompassing the usual functions. Gersen made a quick general investigation, then concentrated his attention upon the parlor. The ceiling was scrolled plaster, painted pale yellow. The floor was covered by a carpet of greenish-yellow fiber, the walls were a checkerboard of maroon and dark brown hardwood tiles. At the far end Dasce had placed a desk and heavy chair. The wall over the desk was hung with dozens of photographs: Dasce in all poses, against every variety of background. There was Dasce in startling close-up, revealing every pore of his skin, the split cartilage of his nose, the lidless blue eyes. There was Dasce in the costume of a Bernal flamefighter -- varnished black plates and horns and cusps and prongs, like a titanic stag beetle. There was Dasce in a palanquin of yellow rattan, hung with persimmon silk, borne on the shoulders of six black-haired maidens. The angle of the wall displayed a set of photographs of a man who was not Dasce. Apparently they had been taken over a period of years. The first showed the face of a man thirty years old: a sturdy, confident, bulldog face, serene, even complacent. The face had changed alarmingly in the second of the photographs. The cheeks were sunken, the eyes started from their sockets, the nerves at the temples showed in an intricate mesh. In each succeeding photograph the face became ever more haggard... Gersen glanced along a row of books: pornography of a childishly obscene nature, weapon manuals, an index to Sarkoy poisons, a late edition of Handbook to the Planets, an index to Dasce's micro-book library, a Star Directory. The desk itself was extremely handsome: side panels of dark wood carved to represent griffins and winged serpents in a jungle; the surface an exquisite inlay of opals polished flat. Gersen checked the drawers and pigeonholes. They were barren of information -- completely empty, in fact. Gersen stood back, a tide of grim despair rising within him. He looked at his watch. In four hours he must meet Detteras, Warweave and Kelle at the space-port. He stood in the center of the room, carefully scrutinized every article. Somewhere must be a link with Dasce's secret planet; how to recognize it? He went to the book-shelf, took down the Star Directory, examined the lay of the binding. If Dasce's red dwarf were listed he certainly must have located it in the directory. If he had done so several times, there might be a crease, a smear, a discoloration. No such mark was visible. Gersen held the book by its two covers, let it hang. A third through the book the pages separated a hair-breadth. Gersen carefully opened the book at this spot, looked down the listing. Each star -- and on this page there were two hundred -- wqs described under eleven headings : index number, constellation placement as viewed from Earth, star type, planetary information, mass, vector of velocity, diameter, density, location coordinates, remarks. Twenty-three red dwarfs were listed. Eight of these were double. Eleven hung solitary in space, forlorn feeble sparks. Four were accompanied by planets, eight planets in all. These four Gersen scrutinized with especial care. Reluctantly he was forced to conclude that none of these planets could conceivably be considered habitable. Five of the planets were too hot, one was completely awash in liquid methane, two were too massive to allow human toleration of the gravity. Gersen's mouth drooped in disappointment. Nothing. Still, the page at one time had been earnestly consulted: there must be information here which Dasce needed or valued. Gersen tore the page from the book. , p , he front door opened; Gersen whirled. In the opening stood a middle-aged man no larger than a boy of ten. His head was round. His eyes brimmed with curiosity, flicking over Gersen and around the room. He had large features, long pointed ears, a heavy protuberant mouth: a Highland Imp from the Highlands of Krokinole, one of the more specialized races of the Concourse. He came forward, fearlessly swaggering. "Who are you that's in Mr. Spock's house? Looking through Mr. Spock's things? A burglar, I think." Gersen replaced the book, and the Imp said, "That's one of his precious volumes, that bit of stuff. Not likely he wants your fingers all over it. I'd better go for the constable." "Come back here," said Gersen. "Who are you?" "I'm the by-your-leave caretaker, that's who I am. Also this is my land and my house and my freehold. Mr. Spock is the man I let to, and why should I give every burglar north of Swansea leave to pillage and loot?" "Mr. Spock is a criminal," said Gersen. "And if he is, it's proof then that there's no honor among thieves." "I'm no thief," said Gersen tenant, Mr. Spock." The Imp bent his big head foryour blazer." On the assumption that a Krokinole Imp would not recognize one, Gersen displayed a transparent tablet, with his photograph under a gold seven-pointed star. He touched it to his forehead and it glowed into light, a factitious display which impressed the Imp. He instantly became effusive in his cordiality. "Never did think that Mr. Spock was up to good. He'll come to a bad end, mark my words! What's he done now?" "Kidnap. Murder." "Bad deeds, both. I'll have to caution Mr. Spock." "He is a wicked man. How long has he lived here?" "Donkey's years." "You know him well, then?" 'Well indeed. Who drinks with him when everyone else turns their heads as if Mr. Spock smelt poorly? Me. I drink with him, and frequently. I have my compassion." "So you're Spock's friend?" 'T'he big features twisted and moved in successive displays of tolerance, crafty speculation, virtuous indignation. "I? Certainly not. Do I look the sort who consorts with criminals?" "But -- let us say -- you have heard Spock talking." "That I have, and oh the tales he tells!" The Imp's eyes rolled ludicrously upward. "Do I believe him? No." "Has he ever spoken of a secret world where he has a hideaway?" "Again and again. He calls it Thumbnail Gulch. Why? He always shakes his head when he's asked. A tight-mouthed man, Mr. Spock, for all his loose braggadocio." "What more has he said of his world?" The Imp shrugged. "The sun's blood-red, hardly enough to keep him warm." "And where is this world?" "Aha! That's where he's sly. No word of this will he speak. Many the time I've wondered, thinking that suppose poor Mr. Spock took sick on this lonesome world -- who'd know to tell his friends?" Gersen smiled grimly. "And this argument never induced him to confide in you?" "Never. Why do you wish to know?" "He's kidnaped an innocent young woman and taken her to this world." "The rogue. What a raffish creature." The Imp shook his head in distress, from which a certain measure of wistful envy was not absent. "I'll never let my land and house to him again." "Think. What has Spock said regarding the world?" The Imp screwed up his eyes. "Thumbnail Gulch. The world is bigger than the sun. Astonishing, no?" "If the sun is a red dwarf, not too astonishing." "Volcanos. There are live volcanos on this world." "Volcanos? That's odd. A red dwarf's planet shouldn't have volcanos. It's too old." "Old or young, the volcanos thrive. Mr. Spock lives in a dead crater, and he sees a whole line of volcanos smoking up along the horizon." "What else?" "Nought." "How long does it take to get to his planet?" "That I can't say." "You've never met any of his friends?" "Toss-pots at the tavern, no more. But yes. One. Less than a year ago -- an Earthman, a heavy cruel man." "Tristano ? I "I know nothing of his name. Mr. Spock had just returned from a business trip Beyond, to a planet called New Hope. Do you know it?" "I've never been there." "Nor I, though I've wandered far. But the very day of his return, while we sit in Gelperino's Saloon, the Earthman comes in. 'Where have you been?' he asks. 'Ten days I've been here, and we left New Hope together.' Mr. Spock gives him his haughty look. 'If you must know, I looked in on my little hideaway for half a day. I have obligations there, you know.' And the Earthman said no more." Gersen thought a moment and suddenly was in a hurry to leave. "What more do you know about Spock?" "Nothing more." ersen made a last survey of the house, under the inquisitive scrutiny of the Imp, then departed, ignoring the Imp's sudden harsh demands for damages when he discovered the broken window sash. Hastily, now, Gersen rode down through the winding avenues, across Sailmaker Beach, back into central Avente. He went to an office of the Universal Technical Consultative Service, and gained the attention of an operator. "Set up this problem," said Gersen. "Two ships leave the planet New Hope. One proceeds directly here, to Avente. The other goes to a red dwarf star, spends half a day, then comes to Avente, arriving ten days later. I want a list of the red dwarf stars which this second ship might have visited in the nine and a half days." The operator considered. "There is obviously an ellipsoid shell here, the foci being New Hope and Alphanor. We must take into account the accelerations and decelerations, the probable coast periods and landing times. There will necessarily be a locus of most probability, and areas of diminishing probability." "Set up the problem so that the machine lists these stars in order of probability." "To what limits?" "Oh -- one chance in fifty. Include also the constants of these stars as given in the directory here." "Very well, sir. The fee will Gersen brought forth money; the operator translated the problem into precise language, spoke into a microphone. Thirty seconds later a sheet of paper dropped from a slot. The operator glanced at it, signed his name, handed it without a word to Gersen. Forty-three stars were listed. Gersen compared the list with the page he had tom from Dasce's Directory. A single star occurred on both lists. Gersen frowned in puzzlement. The star was a member of a binary, without planets. The couple was... Naturally! thought Gersen, illumination flooding his mind. How else could volcanos exist on the companion of a red dwarf? Dasce's world was not a planet, but a dark star: a dead surface, perhaps still faintly warm. Gersen had heard of such worlds. Usually they were too dense, too massive for human occupancy, but if a small star in the course pened to sweep up enough detritus to build a thick shell of light material the surface gravity might well be reduced to a tolerable level.  t ten minutes to seven Kelle, Warweave and Detteras appeared at the space-port, wearing spacemen's harness, their skins washed the blue-brown tone which originally, in popular credence, was thought to protect the human organism from certain mysterious Jarnell effluviae, and which by usage had become a normal adjunct to the spacetraveler's accoutrements. They halted in the middle of the lobby, looked about, spied Gersen, turned to face him as he approached. Gersen surveyed them with a dour smile. "We seem to be ready, all of us. I thank you gentlemen for your promptness." "Achieved at great inconvenience to all of us," stated Kelle. "In due course the reason for haste will become clear," said Gersen. "Your luggage?" "On its way to the ship," said Detteras. "Then we will leave. We have clearance?" "Everything has been arranged," said Warweave. The group proceeded from the lobby, walked around to the docking area, toward which a crane was already trundling. The luggage, four large cases and as many smaller packets, was stacked beside the ship. Warweave unlocked the entry ports; Gersen and Kelle passed the cases into the cabin. Detteras made a bluff attempt to assert command. "We have four compartments aboard. I'll take forward starboard; Kelle, you'll have starboard aft; Warweave, port forward; Gersen, port aft. We might as well move our luggage out of the cabin." "One moment," said Gersen. "There is a situation that we must resolve before we proceed any further." Detteras's big face creased in a scowl. "What?" "We are two parties of interest here -- at least two parties. Neither trusts the other. We are going Beyond, past the edge of law. All of us, recognizing this fact, have brought weapons. I propose that we lock all weapons in the security cabinet; that we open the luggage, and if necessary, strip ourselves naked, to assure each other that all the weapons have been declared. Since you are three to my one, if any advantage lies to either side, it is to yours." "A highly undignified process," grumbled Detteras. Kelle, more equable now than Gersen could have believed, said, "Come now, Rundle. Gersen is merely verbalizing reality. In short, I agree with him. The more so since I carry no weapons." Warweave made a careless gesture. "Search me, search my luggage; but let's get under way." Detteras shook his head, opened his case, withdrew a projac of great power, tossed it upon the table. "I have my doubts about the wisdom of this. I have nothing against Mr. Gersen personally -- but suppose he takes us to a far planet where he has accomplices waiting, who capture us and hold us for ransom? Stranger crimes have occurred." Gersen laughed. "If you consider this a real danger you need only remain here. I don't care whether one goes or all go." "What of your own weapons?" asked Warweave dryly. Gersen brought forth his projac, a pair of stilettos, a dagger, four grenades the size of walnuts. "My word," said Detteras. "You maintain quite an armament." "I occasionally have need for it," said Gersen. "Now, the luggage..." The accumulated arms were placed in a cabinet which was secured with four locks, each man retaining a key to one of the locks. The crane trundled up to the ship; the boom swung around. Hooks engaged in trammels; the ship jerked, hung free, was carried out on the field. Detteras went to the main console and touched a button, which flashed a row of green lights. "Everything ready to go," he said. "Tanks full, machinery in order." Kelle cleared his throat, brought forth a handsomely mounted wooden case, bound in red leather. "This is one of the departmental rationalizers. You have Mr. Teehalt's filament, I assume?" "Yes," said Gersen. "I have the filament with me. But there is no hurry. Before we engage the monitor we must reach zero basepoint, which is far distant." "Very well," said Detteras. "What are the coordinates?" Gersen brought forward a slip of paper. "If you will allow me," he said politely, "I will make the settings on the auto-pilot." With ill grace Detteras rose to his feet. "It seems to me that there is no longer reason for distrust. We have stripped ourselves of our weapons, all the issues have been settled. So let us all relax and behave amicably." "With pleasure," said Gersen. The ship was lowered to the launching pad, the crane disengaged and rolled away. The group settled themselves into take-off seats; Detteras started the automatic launching sequence. There was a jar, a sense of acceleration, and Alphanor retreated below. X From the chapter Grendel the Monster, in the book by Caril Carphen, published by Elucidarian Press, New Wexford, Aloysius, Vega:... In our cursory summary we have seen how each Demon Prince is unique and highly individuated, each displaying his characteristic style. This is all the more remarkable, in that the basic variety of possible crimes is limited and can be numbered on the fingers. There is crime for gain: extortion, robbery (which includes piracy and raids on settled communities), swindling in its infinite guises. There is slavery, with its various manifestations: procuring, selling, and using slaves. Murder, coercion and torture are merely adjuncts to these activities. The personal depravities are are equally limited, and can be classified under sexual debauchery, sadism, violent acts prompted by pique, vindictiveness, revenge, or vandalism. Doubtless the catalogue is incomplete, perhaps even illogical, but this is by the blow. I merely wish to display the basic paucity, in order to illustrate this point: that each of the Demon Princes, in inflicting one or another atrocity, impresses the act with his own style, and seems to create a new crime. In the previous chapters we have examined the maniacal Kokor Hekkus and his theories of absolute frightfulness; the devious Viole Falushe, voluptuary, sybarite, and amateur of kinaesthetics. Completely distinctive is Grendel the Monster, in style and mannerism. Rather than enlarging himself, projecting a macroscopic delineation of his person and deeds, to mesmerize his victims and intimidate his enemies, Grendel prefers the possibly ence, invisibility, dispassionate impersonality. There is no reliable description of Grendel. Certainly Grendel is a cognomen, derived from a folk-epic of ancient Earth. He acts with implacable viciousness, although his cruelties are never wanton, and if he maintains a pleasure-palace after the style of Viole Falushe or Howard Alan Treesong, it is a well-guarded secret. Grendel's activities are primarily extortion and slavery. In the Conclave of # at Smade's Planet, where five Demon Prince and a score of lesser operators met to define and circumscribe their activities, Grendel was allotted that sector of the Beyond centered on Ferrier's Cluster. It included over a hundred settlements, towns and vicinities, upon all of which Grendel levies assessments. He rarely encounters protest or complaint, for he need merely cite the example of Mount Pleasant, a town of # persons, which declined to meet his demands. In the year # Grendel invited four other Princes to join him. The junta swept down upon the town, captured and enslaved the entire population. On the planet Grabhorne he maintains a plantation of about ten thousand square miles, with a slave population estimated at twenty thousand. Here are carefully tilled farms, factories which build exquisite furniture, musical instruments and electronic mechanisms. The slaves are not overtly ill-treated, but workinghours are long, the dormitories are drab, social opportunities are restricted. Punishment is a term in the mines, which few survive. Grendel's attention is usually wide and dispassionate, but he often focuses upon some individual. The planet Caro lies in an area which none of the Demon Princes claim. Mayor Janous Paragiglia of the city Desde espoused and advocated a militia and space-navy sufficient to protect Caro, and to seek out and destroy Grendel or any other of the Demon Princes who dared to attack Caro. Grendel kidnaped Janous Paragiglia and tortured him for thirty-nine days, telecasting the entire process to the cities of Caro, to all the planets in his own sector and, in one of his rare acts of bravado, to the Rigel Concourse. As mentioned, his personal appetites are unknown. A rumor frequently encountered runs to the effect that Grendel enjoys engaging in personal gladiatorial duels with able-bodied enemies, with swords for weapons. Grendel is said to exhibit superhuman strength and dexterity, and seems to derive a satisfaction from slowly hewing his opponent to bits. Like certain other Demon Princes, Grendel maintains a discrete and respectable identity within the Oikumene, and if whispers are correct, occupies a prestigious position on one of the major worlds...  lphanor became a misty pale disk, mingled with the stars. Within the ship the four men settled into an uneasy accommodation. Kelle and Warweave started a quiet conversation. Detteras stared forward into starspattered emptiness. Gersen watched the three men. One of them was a simulated man, Grendel the Monster. Which? Gersen thought he knew. There was still no certainty in his mind; his conjecture was based on indications, probabilities, suppositions. Grendel, for his part, must still feel secure in his incognito. He had no reason to suspect Gersen's objective. He must still consider Gersen no more than an acquisitive locater out to drive as hard a bargain as he could. So much the better, thought Gersen, if it would help him to a sure identification. He wanted only the freedom of Pallis Atwrode and the death of Grendel. And of course, of Hildemar Dasce. If Pallis Atwrode were dead -- so much the worse for Dasce. Surreptitiously Gersen watched his suspect. Was this man Grendel? It was frustrating to be so close to his goal. Grendel of course had his own plans. Behind the human skull worked thought-patterns incommensurable with his own, moving toward a goal still obscure. Gersen could define at least three areas of uncertainty in the situation. First, did Grendel still carry weapons or have access to weapons previously concealed aboard the ship? A possibility, although Grendel might be relying entirely on the hidden tanks of anesthetic gas. Second, were either or both of the other men his accomplices? Again a possibility, but distinctly less strong. Third, and a less simple set of circumstances: what would happen when the ship reached Dasce's dead star? Here again variables piled on variables. Did Grendel know of Dasce's hideaway? If so, would he recognize it by sight? The answers here were both Probably yes. The question then would be how to surprise and either capture or kill Hildemar Dasce with out hindrance from Grendel. Gersen reached a decision. Detteras had urged the need for amicability. One thing was sure: amicability would be sternly tested before long. npime passed. A wary routine was established. Gersen chose a propitious time and gave the body of Suthiro to space. The ship slid effortlessly past shining stars, at astounding speed, by means only vaguely comprehensible to the men who controlled it. The pale of human civilization and law came to an end. The ship passed Beyond and struck up and out toward the dwindling fringes of the galaxy. Gersen kept steady if discreet surveillance over his three shipmates, wondering who would first show concern, anxiety or suspicion as to the immediate destination. This person was Kelle, though any of the three might have been muttering together out of Gersen's hearing. "Where the devil are we headed?" Kelle inquired peevishly. "This is no area to attract a locater. We're practically in intergalactic space." Gersen took up a relaxed position. "I have not been altogether candid with you three gentlemen." Three faces turned swiftly, three pairs of eyes bored in at him. "What do you mean?" grated Detteras. "It is not a serious matter. I have been compelled to make a detour. After I perform a certain errand, we will proceed with our original plans." He raised his hand as Detteras took a deep breath. "It serves no purpose to admonish me. The situation is unavoidable." Warweave spoke in an icy voice: "What is this 'situation'?" "I'll be glad to explain, and I'm sure all of you will appreciate my predicament. First of all, I seem to have made an enemy of a well-known criminal. He is known as Grendel the Monster." Gersen glanced from face to face. "Doubtless you all have heard of him. He is one of the Demon Princes. The day before we left one of his lieutenants, a creature named Hildemar Dasce, kidnaped a young woman I happen to be interested in, and conveyed her to a private world. I feel obligated to this young woman. She is suffering through no fault of her own, but merely from Grendel's desire, to punish or intimidate me. I believe I have located Dasce's planet. I plan to rescue this young woman, and I hope for your cooperation." Detteras spoke in a voice thick with rage, "Why could you not have told us of your plans before we left? You insisted on leaving, you forced us to break our engagements at great inconvenience -- " Gersen said mildly, "You have some cause for resentment but, since my own time is limited, I thought it best to combine the two projects." He grinned as Detteras's neck swelled in new fury. Kelle said meditatively, "The kidnaper has conveyed the young woman to a world in this vicinity?" "I think so. I hope so." "And you expect our help in rescuing this young woman?" "Only in a passive sense. Just don't interfere." "Suppose the kidnaper kills you." "The possibility exists. But I have the advantage of surprise. He must feel completely secure, and probably I will have no great trouble overpowering him." " 'Overpowering' him?" inquired Warweave, delicately sardonic. A t this moment the Jamell kicked out, the ship whined down into ordinary velocities. Ahead glowed a dim red star. If it were double, its companion was yet invisible. Gersen said, "As I say, surprise is my most important asset, so therefore I must ask that none of you through inadvertence or malice use the radio." Gersen already had disabled the radio, but he saw no reason to put Grendel on his guard. "I'll explain my plans so that there can be no misunderstanding. First, I'll bring the ship close enough to inspect the surface of the planet, but far enough out to avoid radar detection. If I locate Dasce's habitation, I'll go to the far side of the world, approach the surface and land as close to Dasce's dwelling as feasible. Then I'll take the platform flyer and do what must be done. The three of you need only wait till I return. Then we shall be once more on our way to Teehalt's planet. I know I can count on your cooperation, because I naturally shall take the monitor filament with me, and hide it somewhere. If I am killed, the filament will be lost. Naturally I will need the weapons which are now in the security locker, but I see no reason why you should object to that" No one spoke. Gersen studied their faces and laughed inwardly. Grendel was posed with a maddening dilemma. If he should interfere and by some means warn Dasce, then Gersen might well be killed, and Grendel's hopes of acquiring Teehalt's planet dashed. Would he trade Dasce for the planet? Gersen was certain of his decision; Grendel was notoriously callous. Detteras heaved a deep sigh. "Gersen, you're a subtle man. You've put us in a position where for motives of sweet reason we are forced to do your bidding." "I assure you that my motives are irreproachable." "Yes, yes, the damsel in distress. All very well; we would not deny ler the chance of rescue. My exasperation is not at your goals -- if y.ou have told us the truth -- but at your lack of candor." With nothing to lose, Gersen became contrite. "Yes, perhaps I should have explained more carefully. But I am accustomed to working by myself. In any event, the situation is now as I have described it. Do I have the cooperation of you all?" "Humph," said Warweave. "We have little choice, as you are perfectly well aware." "Mr. Kelle?" asked Gersen. Kelle inclined his head. "Mr. Detteras?" "As Warweave points out, we have no choice." "In that case I will proceed with my plans. The world on which we are to land is a dead star, not a planet." "What about the gravity? Won't it make habitation inconvenient?" asked Kelle. "We'll know very shortly."   to look out at the nearing red dwarf. The dark companion nowhad became visible. It was a large brown-gray disk, three times the diameter of Alphanor, mottled and reticulated in black and umber. Gersen was pleased to find surrounding space rich in detritus. The radar screen indicated dozens of minuscule planetoids and moonlets in orbits about each star. Gersen could approach the dead star boldly with small fear of detection. A momentary shift into intersplit braked the ship; another brought it to a state of lazy drifting a now looming mass. The surface seemed dim and featureless, with vast areas covered by what seemed oceans of chocolate-colored dust. The outline of the world was sharp and stark against the black of space, indicating a sparse atmosphere. Gersen went to the macroscope to inspect the surface. The world's relief leapt into perspective. Chains of volcanic mountains netted the surface; there was a mesh of rifts and crevasses, a number of ancient isolated plutonic buttes, hundreds of volcanos, some active, others dead or quiescent. Gersen set cross-bars on a short sharp peak at the demarcation between day and night. The object seemed not to move relative to the line of darkness : apparently the world held a constant face to its companion. In such case, Dasce's dwelling would almost certainly be on the bright face, probably near the equator, at the longitude directly under the sun. He scrutinized the region carefully, under high magnification. The area was large. There were dozens of volcanic craters, large and small. Gersen searched an hour. Warweave, Kelle and Detteras stood watching him with varying degrees of impatience and sardonic dislike. Gersen reviewed his logic; it seemed to hang together. The red dwarf had been listed on a wellused page in Dasce's Directory; it was tound within the requisite ellipsoidal shell: it had a dark star companion. This must be the star. And by every likelihood Dasce's crater must be located somewhere within the warm sunlit area below. An odd formation attracted his attention: a square plateau, with five mountain ranges radiating like the fingers of a hand. A phrase of the Melnoy Heights Imp occurred to him: "Thumbnail Gulch". At fullest magnification Gersen examined the area corresponding to the thumbnail. Certainly there was a small crater here. Certainly it seemed to show a slightly different color, a slightly different texture than the others. And there where the sunlight struck glancingly on the inside wall, a glint? And below, the faint shine of white? ersen reduced the magnification to study the surrounding terrain. Even though Dasce might not detect approaching ships at planetary distances, his radar might warn him of someone approaching for a landing. If he dropped down on the far side of the world, slanted in behind the horizon, to land behind ' the plateau which formed the palm of the hand, he might well be able to surprise Dasce. He fed the necessary information into the course computer, engaged the autopilot. The ship veered and began its descent. Kelle, unable to contain his curiosity, asked, "Well? Have you found what you were looking for?" "I think so," said Gersen. "If you are careless enough to be killed," said Kelle, "you will put us to enormous inconvenience." Gersen nodded. "This is essentially what I meant to convey to you a short while ago. I am sure that you'll help me, at least passively." "We have already agreed to this." The dark star loomed below. The ship landed on a shelf of naked brown stone, a quarter mile from a heave of low black hills. The stone was the texture of brick. The surrounding plain displayed a surface resembling dried brown mud. Overhead the red dwarf bulked large. The ship cast a dense black shadow. A thin wind blew small curls of dust across the plain, sifting a greenish blue powder into long herringbone drifts. Detteras said thoughtfully, "You know, I think it only fair that you leave the filament here. Why victimize us?" "I don't plan to be killed, Mr. Detteras." . "Your plans might go awry." "If so, your troubles will seem very trivial in comparison to mine. May I have my weapons?" The locker was opened. The three watched warily while Gersen armed himself. He looked from face to face. In the mind of one of these men, feverish plots were hatching. Would he act as Gersen anticipated -- which was to say, by not acting? Here was a chance Gersen must take. Suppose he were wrong. Suppose this were not Dasce's planet and Grendel knew it; suppose Grendel through some intuition suspected Gersen's goals -- he might be ready to sacrifice his hopes of acquiring Teehalt's world in order to maroon Gersen out here on this dark star. There was a precaution Gersen could take; it would be foolish for him not to do so. He stepped back into the engine room and detached a small but vital component from the energy reactor. He tucked it into his pouch along with the filament. Warweave, standing in the doorway, observed the act but made no comment. Gersen dressed himself in an air-suit and left the ship. Opening the forward hatch he winched down the little platform flyer, loaded aboard a spare airsuit and spare tanks of oxygen, and without further ceremony set out for Thumbnail Gulch, skimming low to the ground, the thin atmosphere keening over the wind-screen. nphe landscape was odd even to one accustomed to the terrain of strange planets : a dark spongy surface in varying shades of maroon, brown and gray, marred here and there by volcanic cones and low wallowing black hills. This might be true star-stuff -- clinker remaining after the fires had died -- or it might be sediment swept up from space. More likely, both. Gersen wondered, did the awareness that he was traversing the surface of a dead star contribute to the sense of weirdness and unreality?' The thin atmosphere allowed absolute clarity of vision. The horizons were far, the panorama seemed endless. And overhead, the glowering sphere of the red sky. The ground shouldered up to become the plateau, which comprised the palm of the hand, a titanic flow of lava. Gersen swerved to the right. Far ahead he could see a line of black hills lying across the landscape like the back of a monstrous petrified triceratops. This was the "thumb", at the end of which rose Dasce's volcano. Gersen flew low to the ground, taking advantage of all possible cover. swerving in and out, close to the wall of the plateau, and so approached the line of jagged black peaks. Slowly, cautiously, Gersen eased up the tumbled slopes, jets muffled by the thin air to no more than a mutter. Dasce might have installed detectors along these slopes. But it seemed hardly likely. Dasce would consider the effort superfluous. Why attack by land when a torpedo from space would be easier? Gersen gained the ridge. There two miles ahead, was the volcano which he hoped to be Dasce's hideaway. Off to the side, down on the plain which continued on and on indefinitely, was the most welcome sight of Gersen's experience: a small space-boat. His hypothesis had been correct. Here was Thumbnail Gulch in all certainty; here would be found Hildemar Dasce. And Pallis Atwrode? Gersen landed the platform and continued on foot, taking advantage of all possible cover, avoiding approaches where detectors would be most likely. He mounted the slopes of mingled basalt, obsidian and tuff. Reaching the lip of the crater, he peered cautiously over -- out on a webbed dome constructed of thin cables, transparent film, held distended by air pressure. The crater was not large: fifty yards in diameter and almost perfectly cylindrical, the walls being formed of striated volcanic glass. At the bottom of the crater Dasce had made a careless gesture at landscaping. There was a pond of brackish water, a clump of palm trees, a tangle of rank vines. In the center of the crater was a cage, and in the cage sat a naked man. Tall, haggard, his face was a ghastly wreck, his body crooked, marked with a hundred welts. Gersen remembered Suthiro's explanation of how Dasce lost his eyelids. Looking again he remembered the photographs in Dasce's parlor. This man was the subject of the photographs. ersen looked elsewhere. Directly below was a pavilion of black cloth, a series of connected tents. There was no sign of Hildemar Dasce. Entrance to the crater was apparently by way of a tunnel leading through the wall of the volcano. Gersen moved carefully around the lip, looked down over the slope. The porous brownblack plain extended limitlessly off in three directions. Nearby rested the space-boat, seeming no larger than a toy in the clarity of the atmosphere. Gersen turned his attention back to the dome. With a knife he cut a small slit in the film, then settled himself to watch. Ten minutes passed before the pressure-drop activated a warning signal. Then out from one of the tents charged Hildemar Dasce. He wore only loose white pantaloons. His torso, stained a faded purple, was ribbed with muscle. He stared up with lidless eyes, the blue cheeks blooming from the vermilion face. Dasce marched across the crater floor. The prisoner within the cage followed him attentively with his gaze. Dasce vanished from sight. Gersen hid in a crevice. Dasce presently emerged on the plain in an air-suit, carrying a case. He mounted the crater wall with strong easy strides, passing close by Gersen. Dasce put down the case, brought forth a projector, swept a beam of radiation over the surface of the dome. The escaping air, evidently dosed with a fluorescent agent, glowed yellow. Dasce went to the cut and bent over it, and Gersen felt his instant suspicion. He straightened up, looked all around, and Gersen crouched back out of sight. When he looked once more, Dasce was at work mending the rip with cement and a new strip of film. The entire operation required but a minute. Then Dasce replaced the unused material and the projector into the case and straightened up. He made another careful scrutiny of rim, slope and plain; then, suspicion blunted, he started back down the slope. Gersen rose from his hiding place and followed, not fifty feet behind. Dasce, jumping from rock to rock down the slope, failed to look back -- until Gersen dislodged a rock which bounded ahead and past. Dasce stopped, turned sharply. Gersen was out of sight behind a jut of rock. Dasce proceeded. Gersen followed close behind. At the base of the slope a sound, a vibration, alarmed Dasce. Once more he turned to look up-slope -- directly at the figure bounding down on him. Gersen saw the loose pale mouth open in startlement, and then he struck. Dasce toppled, rolled, bounded to his feet, started to run awkwardly for the air-lock ; Gersen fired at the back of one of the rangy thighs. Dasce fell. G ersen seized him by the ankles, dragged him into the air-lock, slammed the outer door. Dasce struggled and kicked, the red and blue face hideously contorted. Gersen pointed the pro'  jac, but Dasce merely tried to kick it from his grasp. Gersen fired again, numbing Dasce's other leg. Dasce lay still, glaring like a boar at bay. With a roll of tape brought hopefully for the purpose, Gersen lashed Dasce's ankles. Then warily he seized the right arm, bent it back and around. Dasce was forced over on his face. Presently, after a struggle, his arms were taped behind his back. The lock mechanism automatically had filled the space with air. Gersen now removed the vitrine globe from Dasce's head. "We renew our acquaintance," said Gersen in a pleasant voice. Dasce said nothing. Gersen dragged him out into the floor of the crater. The prisoner jumped to his feet, pressed himself to the bars of the cage and stared at Gersen as if he were an archangel, with wings, trumpet and aureole. Gersen assured himself as to the security of Dasce's bonds, ran over to the tent, pro jac ready for an unexpected servitor or comrade-in-arms of Dasce's. The prisoner looked after him with unbelieving eyes. Pallis Atwrode lay huddled under a limp dirty sheet, face to the wall. There was no one else. Gersen touched her on the shoulder, and fascinatedly watched her flesh crawl. "Pallis," he said. "Pallis -- it's Kirth Gersen." The words reached her, muffled by the globe which Gersen still wore; she only crouched and huddled more tightly. Gersen rolled her over. She lay with her eyes shut. Her face, once so gay and impudent and charming, was bleak. "Pallis," called Gersen, "open your eyes. It's Kirth Gersen! You're safe!" She shook her head slightly, her eyes tight shut. Gersen turned away. At the door to the tent he looked back. Her eyes were wide open, staring in wonder, but she instantly closed them again. Gersen left her, investigated the entire crater, reassured himself that no one else was present and returned to Dasce. "Nice place you've got here, Dasce," said Gersen in a conversational tone. "A little hard to find when your friends want to drop in." "How did you find me?" said Dasce in a guttural voice. "No one knows of this place." "Except your boss." "He doesn't know." "How do you think I found out?" Dasce was silent. Gersen went to the cage, unbarred the door and motioned to the prisoner, wondering whether the man's mind had also failed him. "Come out." The prisoner limped haltingly forward. "Who are you?" "No matter. You are free." " 'Free'?" The man worked his loose jaws over the word, turned to look toward Dasce. He spoke in a reverent voice. "What of him?" "I shall kill him presently." The man said softly, "This must be a dream." ersen returned to Pallis. She was sitting on the bed, the sheet clutched around her. Her eyes were open. She looked at Gersen, rose to her feet, and fainted. Gersen lifted her, carried her out to the crater floor. The erstwhile captive stood looking at Dasce from a respectful distance. Gersen spoke to him. "What is your name?" The man looked momentarily bewildered. "I am Robin Rampold," he said in a soft hushed voice. "And you -- you are his enemy?" "I am his executioner." "It is a marvel!" breathed Rampold. "After so long that I cannot remember the beginning..." T ears began to course down his cheeks. He looked at the cage, walked over to it, studied it, then looked back at Gersen. "I know this place well. Each crack, each crevice, each fleck and crystal of the metal." His voice faded. Suddenly he asked, "What is the year?" " # ." Rampold seemed to become smaller. "I did not know it was so long. I have forgotten so much." He looked up toward the dome. "There is no day or night here -- nothing but the red sun. When he is gone, there are no events... Seventeen years I have stood in that cage. And now I am out." He walked over to Dasce, stood looking down at him. Gersen followed. Rampold said, "Long, long ago we were two different people. I taught him a lesson. I made him suffer. The memory is all that has kept me alive." Dasce laughed a harsh cackle. "I have sought to repay you." He glanced up toward Gersen. "Best kill me while you can, or I will do the same." Gersen stood reflecting. Dasce must die. There would be no compunction when the time came. But behind the red forehead was knowledge which Gersen needed. How to extract this knowledge? Torture? Gersen suspected that Dasce would laugh while being torn limb from limb. Trickery? Subtlety? He looked speculatively down into the course red and blue face. Dasce did not flinch. Gersen turned to Rampold. "Can you navigate Dasce's space-boat?" Rampold sadly shook his head. "Then I suppose you must come with me." Rampold spoke in a tremulous voice, "What of him?" "Eventually I'll kill him." Rampold said in a low voice, "Give him to me." "No." Gersen returned to the inspection of Dasce. Somehow he must be made to reveal the identity of Grendel. A direct question would be worse than useless. "Dasce," he asked, "why did you bring Pallis Atwrode out here?" "She was too beautiful to kill," said Dasce easily. "Still, I enjoy Gersen grinned. Dasce possibly hoped to provoke him. "You may or may not live to regret your sins." "Who sent you here?" asked Dasce. "Someone who knew." Dasce slowly shook his head. "There is only one, and he never sent you." So much for that ploy, thought Gersen. Dasce would not easily be deceived. Well then. He would take Dasce aboard the ship. The situation was certain to produce some sort of reaction. Now a new problem. He did not dare leave Robin Rampold alone with Dasce, not even for long enough to fetch the platform. Rampold might kill Dasce. Or Dasce might command Rampold to release him. After seventeen years of degradation, Rampold might be sufficiently under Dasce's influence to obey. And Pallis Atwrode, what of her? Gersen locked Dasce in the cage. He assisted Rampold into an air-suit and took him back to the platform. Jets roaring at full power, the over-loaded platform lurched sluggishly around the plateau, blowing up a fan of dust which settled with startling rapidity in the thin atmosphere. Ahead stood the space-ship, minute against the sweep of the vast horizon. Gersen landed close beside the entrance port. Hand-weapon within easy reach, he climbed the accommodation ladder. Inside, Grendel had watched his approach, had seen the cargo. Grendel could not know what Dasce had told Gersen. He must be taut with indecision. Dasce, who would recognize the ship, might suspect but could not be sure that Grendel was aboard. The air-lock thudded shut, the pumps throbbed, the inner door swung open. Gersen stepped forward. Kelle, Detteras, Warweave sat at various quarters of the room. They looked at him without friendliness. No one moved. Gersen unfastened the headglobe. "I'm back." "So we see," said Detteras. "I've been successful," said Gersen. "I've got a captive with me: Hildemar Dasce. A word of warning to you. This man is a brutal murderer. He is desperate. I intend to hold him under rigid conditions. I ask that none of you interfere or have anything to do with this man. The other two persons are a man Dasce has kept penned in a cage for seventeen years, and a young woman whom Dasce recently kidnaped and whose mind has suffered in consequence. She shall use my cabin. I shall keep Dasce in the cargo hold. The other man, Robin Rampold, will no doubt be happy for the use of a settee." "This voyage becomes stranger by the hour," said Warweave. Detteras rose impatiently to his feet. "Why do you bring this man Dasce aboard? I'm surprised you haven't killed him." "Consider me squeamish." Detteras gave a bark of sour laughter. "Let us proceed. We are anxious to get this trip over as fast as possible." Gersen sent Rampold into the ship with Pallis Atwrode; then with a winch, he slid the platform with Dasce aboard, into the cargo hold, where he removed Dasce's head-globe. Dasce glared at him wordlessly. "You may see someone aboard you recognize," said Gersen. Dasce said nothing. Gersen secured him with exceeding care. At the center of a long cable he made a loop which he knotted and clamped tightly around Dasce's neck. The ends of the cable he made fast at opposite sides of the hold, stretching the cable taut. Dasce was now constricted in the middle of the hold, the cable extending past him to right and left, the ends ten feet out of his reach to either side. Even with hands free Dasce would not work himself loose. Gersen now cut the tapes binding Dasce's arms and legs. Dasce instantly struck out. Gersen dodged aside and clubbed Dasce with the butt of his weapon. Dasce reeled over senseless. Gersen slipped off Dasc's airsuit, searched the pockets of the white pantaloons, finding nothing. He made a final check of the bonds, then returned to the main saloon, bolting the hatch behind him. Rampold had divested himself of his air-suit and sat quietly in a corner. Detteras and Kelle had done the same for Pallis Atwrode, and had dressed her in spare clothing. Kelle cast a glance of disapprobation toward Gersen. "This is Miss Atwrode, the receptionist at the department. What in the name of heaven is she doing out here?" "The answer is perfectly simpie," said Gersen. "I met her the first day I visited the university and asked her out for the evening. For sheer malice, Hildemar Dasce struck me down and kidnaped her. I felt it was my duty to rescue her." Kelle smiled thinly. "I suppose we can't fault you for this." Warweave spoke in the driest of voices: "Presumably we will now make for our original destination." "Yes," grumbled Detteras. "The sooner we put a term to this fantastic voyage the better." r T"he dark star and its feeble red companion became one with space. In the hold Hildemar Dasce, recovering consciousness, swore a low vile mutter and tested his bonds with insensate ferocity. He tore and twisted at the clamps till the skin peeled from his fingers; he plucked at the metal strands in the cable till his fingernails broke. Then he tried a new procedure. Thrusting against the floor, lunging from side to side, he tried to pull the cable loose from where it was fastened at the walls : first to the right, then to the left. He succeeded only in bruising his neck. Assured that he was in fact helpless, though hands and feet were free, he relaxed, panting. His mind seethed with emotion. How had Gersen located the dark star? No one alive knew the location but himself... and Grendel. Dasce reviewed the occasions on which he had circumvented, cheated or failed Grendel and wondered if one of these occasions might not have come home to roost. In the saloon Gersen sat brooding on a settee. The three men from the university -- one of whom was not a man -- stood together far forward. There was Kelle: suave, fastidious, compact in physique; Warweave: ectomorphic, saturnine; Detteras: large-bodied, restless, moody. Gersen eyed his suspect, probing his every act, word and gesture for corroboration, for some sign to provide the absolute assurance he needed. Pallis Atwrode sat quietly nearby, lost in reverie. From time to time her face twitched, her fingers clenched into her palms. There would be no qualms to the kiting of Hildemar Dasce. Robin Rampold stood listlessly at the microfilm library, looking at the index, stroking his long bony chin. He turned, glanced toward Gersen, sidled across the room wolfishly. In a voice so polite as to seem servile he asked, "He -- is he alive?" "For the moment." Rampold hesitated, opened his mouth, closed it again. Finally he asked diffidently, "What do you plan for him?" "I don't know," said Gersen. "I want to make use of him." D ampold became very earnest. He spoke in a low voice, as if afraid that the other occupants of the saloon would hear. "Why not put him into my charge? Then you would be relieved of the effort of guarding and tending him." "No," said Gersen, "I think not." Rampold's face became even more haggard and desperate. "But -- I must." "You must?" Rampold nodded. "You cannot understand. For seventeen years he has been -- " He could not find words. Finally he said, "He has been the center of my existence. He has been like a personal god. He has provided food and drink and pain. Once he brought me a kitten -- a beautiful black kitten. He watched as I touched it, smiling as if benign. That time I thwarted him. I killed the little creature at once, because I knew his plan. He wanted to wait until I came to love it, then he would torture it where I could watch... Of course he made me pay." Gersen drew a deep breath. "He has too much power over you. I can't trust you with him." Tears began to form in Rampold's eyes. He spoke in a series of disjointed sentences. "It is strange. I feel grief now. What I feel for him I cannot put into words. It goes to an extreme and beyond and becomes almost tenderness. Substances can be so sweet that they taste bitter, so sour that they taste salt... Yes, I would care for him with great pains. I would devote the rest of my life to him." He held out his hands. "Give him to me. I have nothing, or I would repay you." Gersen could only shake his heard. "We will talk of this later." Rampold nodded heavily, returned across the room. Gersen looked forward to where Detteras, Kelle and Warweave continued a desultory conversation. Apparently they were agreed on a policy of disinterest toward the new passengers. Gersen smiled grimly. He who was Grendel would not care to confront Hildemar Dasce. Dasce's temperament was not a subtle one; he was as likely as not to blurt out some damaging disclosure. Grendel would certainly try for a few quiet words of warning and reassurance, or conceivably an opportunity to discreetly murder Dasce. The situation was unstable; sooner or later it was bound to collapse into more truthful relationships. Gersen toyed with the idea of precipitating the collapse, but decided to bide his time. He still carried his weapons. The three from the university, apparently assured of his good intentions, had not required that he restore them to the locker. Amazing, thought Gersen. Even now Grendel could have no cause to suspect that Gersen stalked him. He would be less wary than he might be, and using the pretext of curiosity, might well seek to look in on Dasce. Vigilance, thought Gersen. It occurred to him that Robin Rampold would be a useful ally in this situation. No matter what distortions and sublimations seventeen years had produced, he would be no less alert than Gersen himself... in any matters relating to Hildemar Dasce. ersen rose to his feet, went aft, through the engine room, into the cargo hold. Dasce, making no pretense of stoic resignation. glared at him. Gersen noted Dasce's bleeding fingers. Putting his projac on a shelf to void the possibility of Dasce wresting it away from him, he stepped close to check Dasce's bonds. Dasce kicked savagely. Gersen hacked him behind the ear with the side of his hand, and Dasce fell back. Gersen assured himself as to the clamps which constricted the cable around Dasce's neck, then moved back, out of Dasce's reach "It seems," said Gersen, "that troubles are catching up with you." Dasce spat at him. "Fah! What more can you do to me? Do you think I fear death? I live only out of hate." "Rampold has asked that I give you into his care." Dasce sneered. "He fears me until he reeks and crawls. He is soft as honey. It was no longer gratifying to hurt him." "I wonder how long it will take to make the same sort of man out of you." Dasce spat once more. Then he said, "Tell me how you found my star." "I had information." "From whom?" "What difference does it make?" said Gersen. He thought to insert an idea into Dasce's mind. "You'll never have the opportunity of paying him off." Dasce pulled back his mouth in a hideous grin. "Who is aboard this ship?" Gersen made no reply. Standing back in the shadows, he watched Dasce. He must suspect, to the point of certainty, that Grendel was aboard. Dasce could be no less uncertain than Grendel himself. Gersen framed and discarded a half-dozen questions calculated to trick Grendel's name from Dasce. They were either too clumsy or too subtle; they would apprise Dasce that Gersen wanted information, and so put him on his guard. Tvasce tried to wheedle. "Come! As you say, I am helpless, at your mercy. I am interested in learning who betrayed me." "Who do you think it might be?" Dasce grinned ingenuously. "I have a number of enemies. For instance, the Sarkoy. Was it he?" "The Sarkoy is dead." "Dead!" "He helped you kidnap the young woman. I poisoned him." "Fah," spat Dasce. "Women are everywhere. Why become excited? Release me. I have wealth and I will pay you half -- if you tell me who betrayed me." "It was not Suthiro the Sarkoy." "Tristano? Surely not Tristano. How could he know?" "When I met Tristano he had little to say." "Who then?" Gersen said, "Very well, I'll tell you; why not? An adminis'trator at the Sea Province University gave me the information." Dasce rubbed his hand over his mouth, looked sidewise at Gersen in suspicion and doubt. "Why should he do so?" he muttered. "I can't understand any of this." Gersen had hoped to surprise an exclamation from Dasce. He asked, "Do you know whom I refer to?" But Dasce only looked at him blankly. Gersen picked up his projac, left the hold. Returning to the saloon he found conditions as before. He signaled Robin Rampold back into the engine room. "You asked that Dasce might be put into your charge." Rampold eyed him in tremulous excitement. "Yes!" "I cannot do this, but I need your help in guarding him." "Of course!" "Dasce is tricky. You must never enter the cargo hold." Rampold winced in disapointment. "Equally important, you must not allow anyone else near the cargo hold. These men are Dasce's enemies. They might kill him." "No, no!" exclaimed Rampold. "Dasce must not die!" Gersen had a new thought. Grendel had ordained the death of Pallis Atwrode for fear that unwittingly she might reveal his identity. In her present state she posed no threat; nevertheless she might recover. Grendel might well wish to destroy her, if he could do so without risk. Gersen said, "Also, you must guard Pallis Atwrode, and make sure that no one disturbs her." Rampold was less interested. "I will do what you ask." XI From The Avatar's Apprentice, in Scroll from the Ninth Dimension: Intelligence? asked Marmaduke at one of the permitted inis intelligence? human occupation: an activity which men put their brains to, as a frog kicks his legs to swim; it is a standard which men in their egotism use to measure other and perhaps nobler races, who are thereby dumbfounded. other than man can share the quality of intelligence? But ha! And why should I not dial slime, a purulence in the original candid mud, which culminates through cycles and degrees, by distillations and sediments, in the human manifestation? that other worlds demonstrate the jewels of Olam, as well as the folk of the Chthonian Bog. Witling, how have you glanced off the exact stroke of the ESdulgence. The way along the Parapet is not to the forward-footed. my direction be defined. Eight tones of the gong have sounded. Be content for the nonce, and fetch the morning wine. r Tphe filament from Lugo Teehalt's monitor fed impulses into the computer, which digested the information, combined it with the equations describing the ship's previous position and dispatched instructions to the auto-pilot which swerved the ship off and away, on a course roughly parallel to the line between Alphanor and Smade's Planet. Time passed. Life within the ship fell into a routine. Gersen, assisted by Robin Rampold, guarded the cargo hold, though Gersen forbade Rampold entry into the hold itself. Hildemar Dasce for the first few days evinced a brassy jocularity, alternating with earnest threats of vengeance at the hands of an agent he refused to identify. "Ask Rampold what he thinks," said Dasce, leering from his bright blue iidless eyes. "Do you want this happening to you?" "No," said Gersen. "I don't think it's going to happen." Occasionally Dasce demanded that Gersen answer his questions. "Where are you taking me?" he would ask. "Back to Alphanor?" "No." "Where then?" "You'll see." "Answer me, or by -- " here Dasce swore obscene oaths -- "I'll do you worse than you've ever imagined!" "It's a chance we have to take," said Gersen. " 'We'?" asked Dasce softly. "Who is 'we'?" "Don't you know?" "Why doesn't he come in here? Tell him I want to talk to him." "Any time he wants he can come in." At that Dasce fell silent. Goad, prod, pry as he might, Gersen never could induce Dasce to utter a name. Nor did any of the three from the university show interest in Dasce. As for Pallis Atwrode, her detachment, if anything, became more profound. For hours she would sit, looking out at the passing stars. At times she ate, slowly, hesitantly, without hunger; she slept hours on end, curled into as tight a ball as possible. She spoke to no one, and submitted without protest to the ministrations of Gersen and Rampold. A T ore time passed. The ship traversed new regions, and regions after regions where no man had passed but one: Lugo Teehalt. To all sides hung stars by the thousand and the million: streaming, swarming, flowing, glaring, glittering; shifting silently one across the other, and the other across another still -- worlds of infinite variety, populated by who knows whom; each drawing the eye, fixing the imagination, evoking wonder; each world an urge, a temptation, a mystery; each a promise of unseen sights, unknown knowledge, unsensed beauty. Eventually a warm goldenwhite star showed dead ahead. The monitor panel blinked alternately green, red, green, red. The auto-pilot choked down the energy output; the split began to collapse; the ship set up a weird sub-sound as eddies and disturbances and back-drafts of a substance which could only be called space sucked at its fabric. The split collapsed with a slight shock; the ship slid serenely, like a boat drifting on a pond. The golden-white sun hung close at hand, controlling three planets. One was orange, small and near, a fuming cinder. Another swung in a far orbit, a gloomy dismal world, the color of tears. The third, sparkling green and blue and white, revolved close below the ship. Gersen, Warweave, Detteras and Kelle, antagonisms temporarily set aside, bent over the macroscope. The world was clearly beautiful, with a thick moist atmosphere, ample oceans, a varied topography. Gersen was the first to stand away from the screen. The time had come to hone his vigilance to its sharpest edge. Warweave stood back next. "I'm completely satisfied. The planet is nonpareil. Mr. Gersen has not deceived us." Kelle looked at him in surprise. "You think it unnecessary to land?" "I do think it unnecessary, moved across the cabin, stood near the shelf to which was affixed Suthiro's switch. Gersen tensed. Is it to be Warweave? But Warweave passed on. Gersen released his pent breath. Of course the time was not yet. To profit from the gas, Grendel must somehow protect himself from its influence. Kelle said, "I certainly believe that we should land, at least to make biometrics. In spite of its appearance the world may be completely unfriendly." Detteras said doubtfully, "It's rather awkward, with captives and invalids and passengers. The sooner back to Alphanor the better." Kelle snapped in a voice as sharp as any Gersen had heard him use, "You talk like a jackass. All this way, merely to turn tail and run home? Obviously we must land, if only to walk out on the planet for five minutes!" "Yes," said Detteras glumly. "No doubt you're right." "Very well," said Warweave. "Down we go." G ersen wordlessly swung the auto-pilot toggle over into the landing program. The horizons extended, the landscape became distinct: green parkland, low rolling hills, a chain of lakes to the north, a range of snow-clad crags to the south. The ship settled to the ground; the roar of exhaled energy ceased. There was now solidity underfoot, utter quiet except for the ticking of the automatic environment analyzer, which presently flashed three green lights: the optimum verdict. There was a short wait for pressure equalization. Gersen and the three men from the university donned exterior clothing, rubbed allergen-inhibitor on face, hands and neck, adjusted inhalators against bacteria and spores. Pallis Atwrode looked from the observation ports in innocent wonder. Robin Rampold sidled uneasily along the back bulkhead like a lean old gray rat, making tentative motions, as if he wished to alight but did not dare leave the sure security of the saloon. Air from outside flooded the boat, smelling fresh, damp, clean. Gersen went to the port, swung it open, made a polite if ironic gesture. "Gentlemen -- your planet." Warweave was the first to step down to the ground, with Detteras close behind, then Kelle. Gersen followed more slowly. The monitor had brought them to a spot hardly a hundred yards from Lugo Teehalt's landing. Gersen thought the landscape even more entrancing than the photographs had suggested. The air was cool, scented with a vaguely herbacious freshness. Across the valley, beyond a stand of tall dark trees, the hills rose, massive yet gentle, marked by outcrops of worn gray rock, the hollows holding copses of soft foliage. Beyond rose a single great billowing cloud-castle, bright in the noon sunlight. Across the meadow, on the far side of the river, Gersen saw what appeared to be a growth of flowering plants and knew them to be the dryads. They stood at the edge of the forest, swaying on supple gray limbs, their movements easy and graceful. Magnificent creatures, thought Gersen, beyond a doubt -- but somehow they were a -- well, a discordant element. A perverse notion, but there it was. On tl'eir own planet they seemed out of place! Exotic elements in a scene as xiear and beloved as -- as what? Earth? Gersen felt no conscious emotional attachment for Earth. Still, the world most nearly like this was Earth i -- or, more accurately, those occasional areas of Earth which somehow had evaded the artifices and modifications wrought by generations of man. This world was fresh, natural, unmodified. Except for the dryads -- a jarring note -- this might 'be Old Earth, Earth of the Golden Age, the Earth of natural man. Gersen felt a small exhilarating shock of enlightenment. Here resided the basic charm of the world: its near-identity to the environment in which man had evolved. Old Earth must have known many such smiling valleys. The feel of such landscapes permeated the entire fabric of the human psyche. Other worlds of the Oikumene might be pleasant and comfortable, but none were Old Earth; none of them were Home. For a fact, mused Gersen, here is where I would like to build a cottage, with an old-fashioned garden, an orchard in the meadow, a rowboat tied to the riverbank. Dreams, idle yearning for the unattainable... But dreams and yearning which necessarily must affect every man. Gersen blinked at the impact of a new thought. Suddenly attentive, he watched the others. 'yT'arweave stood by the riverbank frowning down into the water. Now he turned and shot a suspicious glance toward Gersen. Kelle, beside a clump of ferns as high as his shoulder, looked first up to the head of the valley with its great white spire of cumulus, then down toward the far open parkland. The forest at either side of the valley formed an aisle, continuing till it melted and blurred into haze. Detteras paced slowly along the meadow, hands behind his back. Now he bent, scooped up a handful of sod, worked it between his fingers, let the soil sift and fall. He turned to stare at the dryads. Kelle did the same. The dryads, gliding slowly on supple legs, moved out of the shadows, toward the pool. Their fronds shone blue and magenta, copper-russet, gold-ocher. Intelligent beings? Gersen turned once more to watch the three men. Kelle scowled faintly. Warweave inspected the dryads with obvious admiration. Detteras suddenly put his hands to his mouth and shrilled an ear-piercing whistle, to which the dryads seemed oblivious. There was a sound from the ship. Gersen turned to see Pallis Atwrode descending the ladder. She raised her hands in the sunlight, drew a deep breath. "What a beautiful valley," she murmured. "Kirth, what a beautiful valley." She wandered slowly away, pausing now and then to look around her in delight. Gersen, on sudden thought, turned and ran back up the ladder into the ship. Rampold -- where was Rampold? Gersen hastened back to the cargo hold. Rampold had already entered. Gersen advanced cautiously, listened. Dasce's voice came gruff, hoarse, full of a detestable exultation. "Rampold, do as I say. you hear me?" "Yes, Hildemar." "Go to the bulkhead. Unloose the cable. Hurry now!" Gersen moved to where he could look unobserved into the hold. Rampold stood not four feet from Dasce, staring down into the red face. "Do you hear me? Hurry, or I will cause you to bewail the day you were born." Rampold laughed softly, quiet ly. "Hildemar, I have asked Kirth Gersen for you. I told him I would cherish you like a son, I would feed you the most nutritious foods, the most invigorating drink... I do not think he will give you to me, so I must gulp down just a taste of the joy I have promised myself for seventeen years. I am now about to beat you to death. This is the first opportunity -- " Gersen stepped forward. "Sorry, Rampold, to interrupt." D ampold uttered an inarticulate cry of utter desolation, turned and ran from the hold. Gersen followed him. In the engine room he made a careful adjustment of his projac, thrust it into a holster, returned to the cargo hold. Dasce bared his teeth like a wild animal... "Rampold has no patience." He went to the bulkhead and began to unfasten the cable. "What are you going to do?" Dasce demanded. "The orders are that you shall be executed." Dasce stared. "What orders?" "You fool," said Gersen. "Can't you guess what's happened? I'm taking your old position." One side of the cable fell free. Gersen crossed the room. "Don't move unless you want me to break your leg." He unfastened the other end of the cable. "Now stand up. Walk slowly forward and down the ladder. Don't make a single wrong move or I'll shoot you." Dasce rose slowly to his feet. Gersen motioned with his projac. "Move." Dasce said, "Where are we?" "Never mind where we are. Move." Dasce slowly turned, and trailing the two long ends of the cable went forward -- through the engine room, into the saloon, to the exit port. Here he hesitated, looked back over his shoulder. "Keep going," said Gersen. Dasce descended the ladder. Gersen, following close, slipped on the trailing cable. He jumped to the ground and fell heavily, flat on his face. Dasce gave a wild raucous cry of exultation, leapt on him, seized the projac, sprang back. Gersen slowly rose to his feet, backed away. "Stop there," called Dasce, "Oho, but I have you now." He glanced around. Fifty feet to one side stood Warweave and Detteras, and slightly behind them Kelle. Pressed against the hull was Rampold. Dasce flourished the projac. "All of you! Stand together, while I decide what to do. Old Rampold, it's time he was dead. And Gersen, naturally, in the belly." He looked to where the three from the university stood. "And you -- " he said to one of the men -- "you played me false." Gersen said, "You won't do yourself much good, Dasce." "Oho, I won't? I hold the weapon. There's three here who are going to die. You, old Rampold, and Grendel." "There's only a single charge in the gun. You may get one of us, but the others will get you." Dasce turned a quick look at the charge indicator. He laughed harshly. "So be it. Who wants to die? Or rather, who do I want to kill?" He looked from face to face. "Old Rampold, I've had my pleasure from him. Gersen. Yes, I'd like to kill you -- with a red-hot iron in your ear. And Grendel. You sly dog, you betrayed me. What your game is I don't know. Why you brought me here I don't know -- but you're the one I'm going to kill." He raised the weapon, pointed, squeezed the trigger. Energy darted from the gun -- but not the blazing blue bolt. It was only a weak pale sizzle. It struck Warweave and knocked him to the ground. Gersen charged Dasce. Instead of fighting, Dasce hurled the weapon at Gersen's head, turned and ran up the valley. Gersen picked up the projac, snapped it open, inserted a fresh power-pack.  TTe walked slowly forward to  where Warweave was picking himself up from the ground. Detteras barked at Gersen, "You must be a moron allowing such a man to take your gun." Kelle spoke in a puzzled voice, "But why shoot Gyle Warweave? Is he a maniac?" Gersen said, "I suggest we go back into the ship, where Mr. Warweave can rest. There was only a small charge in the gun, but no doubt it hurt." Detteras grunted, turned toward the ship. Kelle took Warweave's arm; but Warweave shook him off and lurched up the accommodation ladder, followed by Detteras and Kelle, and finally Gersen. Gersen asked Warweave, "Are you feeling better now?" "Yes," said Warweave in a cold voice. "But I agree with Detteras. You displayed the utmost folly." "I'm not so sure as to that," said Gersen. "I carefully arranged the whole affair." Detteras gaped at him stupidly. "Purposely?" "I shorted out the projac, I arranged that Dasce could seize it, I informed him that there was a single charge left -- so that he could verify my own conviction regarding the identity of Grendel." "Grendel?" Kelle and Detteras stared blankly at Gersen. Warweave watched him narroweyed. "Grendel the Monster. I've watched Mr. Warweave a long time, suspecting that he should more properly be known as Grendel." "This is lunacy," gasped Detteras. "Are you serious?" "Certainly I'm serious. It had to be either you, Warweave or Kelle. I picked Warweave." "Indeed," said Warweave. "May I ask why?" "Of course. First of all I dismissed Detteras. He is an ugly man. Star Kings are more careful with their physiognomy." "Star Kings?" blurted Detteras. "Who? Warweave? What nonsense!" "Detteras likewise is a good eater, while Star Kings eat human food with disgust. As for Mr. Kelle, I also thought him an unlikely candidate. He is short and round -- again not the physiognomy characteristic of a Star King." Warweave's face twisted in a glacial smile. "You imply that a good appearance guarantees depravity of character?" "No. I imply that Star Kings seldom leave their planet unless they can compete successfully against true men. Now, two other points. Kelle is married and has bred at least one daughter. Secondly, Kelle and Detteras have legitimate careers at the university. You are Honorary Provost and I remember something to the effect that a large endowment brought you the job. "This is insanity," declared Detteras. "Warweave as Grendel the Monster. And a Star King to boot!" "It's a fact," said Gersen. "And what do you propose to do?" "Kill him." T'Vetteras stared, then lunged forward, roaring in triumph as he grappled Gersen, only to grunt as Gersen twisted, swung an elbow and struck with the butt of the projac. Detteras reeled back. "I want the cooperation of you and Mr. Kelle," said Gersen. "Cooperate with a lunatic? Never!" "Warweave is frequently absent from the university for long periods. Am I right? And one of these periods was only recently. Right?" Detteras set his jaw. "I'll say nothing about that." "This is true enough," said Kelle uneasily. He glanced sidewise at Warweave, then back to Gersen. "I assume you have strong reasons for your accusation." "Certainly." "I'd like to hear some of these reasons." "They make a long story. It's enough to say that I tracked Grendel to the Sea Province University and narrowed the possibilities to you three. I suspected Warweave almost from the first, but I never was certain until the three of you stepped out on this planet." "This is sheer farce," sighed Warweave wearily. "This planet is like Earth -- an Earth that no man alive has ever known; an Earth which hasn't existed for ten thousand years. Kelle and Detteras were entranced. Kelle drank in the view, Detteras reverently felt the soil. Warweave went to look into the water: and Star Kings evolved from amphibious lizards who lived in wet holes. The dryads appeared. Warweave admired them, seemed to consider them ornamental. To Kelle and Detteras -- and to myself -- they are intruders. Detteras whistled at them, Kelle scowled, for we men don't want fantastic creatures on a world so dear to us... But all this is theorizing. After I managed to capture Hildemar Dasce I went to great lengths to convince him that Grendel was his betrayer. When I gave him the chance he identified Warweave -- with the projac." Warweave shook his head pityingly. "I deny all your allegations." He looked to Kelle. "Do you believe me?" . Kelle pursed his lips. "Confound it, Gyle, I've come to regard Gersen as a competent man. I don't believe him to be either irresponsible or a lunatic." Warweave turned to Detteras. "Rundle -- what of you?" Detteras rolled up his eyes. "I am a rational man. I can't have blind faith -- in you, in Gersen or anyone else. Gersen has made a case. Astonishing as it is, facts seem to bear him out. Can you demonstrate to the contrary?" Warweave considered. "I believe so." He strolled to the shelf below which Suthiro had installed the switch. The inhalator he had worn outside dangled from his hand. "Yes," said Warweave, "I believe I can make a convincing case for myself." He pressed the inhalator to his face, touched the switch. At once the air pollution alarm sounded: a racuous loud clanging. Gersen called out, "the noise will stop." Warweave numbly reached below the shelf and reversed the switch. Gersen turned to Kelle and Detteras. "Warweave is as surprised as you. He thought that the switch controlled the gas reservoirs which you will find under the settees, hence his use of the inhalator. I emptied the tanks and changed the leads to connect the switch to an alarm." Kelle looked under the settee, brought forth the canister. He looked at Warweave. "Well, Gyle?" Warweave tossed aside the inhalator, turned his back in disgust. Detteras suddenly roared. "Warweave! Let's have the truth!" Warweave spoke over his shoulder. "You've heard the truth, from Gersen." "You are Grendel?" said Detteras in a hushed voice. "Yes." Warweave wheeled about, drew himself up to his full height. His black eyes glared back and forth. "And I am a Star King, superior to men!" "A man has defeated you," said Kelle. Warweave's eyes burnt even brighter. He turned to consider Gersen. "I am curious. Ever since your encounter with Lugo Teehalt you have sought Grendel. Why?" "Grendel is one of the Demon Princes. I plan to kill them." Warweave thought a moment. "You are an ambitious man," he said in a neutral voice. "There are not many like you." "There were not many survivors of the raid on Mount Pleasant. My grandfather was one. I was another." "Indeed," said Warweave. "The Mount Pleasant raid. So long ago." "This is a peculiar voyage," said Kelle, whose attitude had become one of wry detachment. "At least we have achieved our purpose. The planet exists. It is as Mr. Gersen described it, and the money in escrow becomes his property." "Not until we return to Alphanor," growled Detteras. Gersen spoke to Warweave. "You have taken great pains to secure this world for yourself. I wonder why." Warweave shrugged noncommittally. "A man might want to live here, or build himself a palace," suggested. Gersen. "A Star King wants none of these things." Warweave said presently, "You make a common mistake. Men are after all quite parochial. You forget that individual diferences exist among folk other than yourselves. Some perhaps are denied the freedom of their own worlds. They become 'renegade': neither man nor their own kind. The folk of Ghnarumen -- " he easily used the name which sounded like a cough -- are quite as orderly as the most lawabiding folk of the Oikumene. In short, the career of Grendel is not one which the folk of Ghnarumen would care to emulate. They may be right, they may be wrong. It is myprerogative to organize my own style of life. As you know, the Star Kings are strongly competitive. This world, to men, is beautiful. I find it pleasant enough. I plan to bring here folk of my race, to nurture them on a world more beautiful than Earth, to father a world and a people, superior to both men and the people of Ghnarumen. This was my hope, which you will not understand, for there can be no such understanding between your race and mine." T'Vetteras said between clenched teeth. "But you took advantage of our liberality to dishonor us. If Gersen doesn't kill you, I will." "Neither of you will kill Grendel the Star King." Two steps took him to the exit port. Detteras lunged after him, frustrating Gersen's attempt to use his projac. Warweave turned, lashed out with his foot, kicked Detteras in the stomach, jumped to the ground and ran off down the slope. Gersen stepped to the exit port. He sent a bolt of energy unsuccessfully after the bounding figure, descended the ladder and gave chase. Warweave reached the meadow. He hesitated at the edge of the river, looked back at Gersen, continued down the valley. Gersen kept to the upper slopes where the ground was hard, and began to gain on Warweave, who had come to a marshy area. Warweave once more went to the river-bank and hesitated. If he plunged in, before he gained the opposite shore Gersen would be upon him. He looked back over his shoulder. His face was no longer that of a man; Gersen wondered how he could have been fooled, even for an instant. Warweave turned, uttered a cry in a slurred guttural language, went to his knees and disappeared. Gersen, reaching the spot, found a hole in the river-bank almost two feet across. He bent to peer in, but saw nothing. Detteras and Kelle ran up, panting. "Where is he?" Gersen pointed to the burrow. "According to Lugo Teehalt, large white grubs live under the marsh." "Hmf," said Detteras. "His ancestors evolved in the swamps in just such holes. He probably couldn't want a better haven." Kelle said dubiously, "He'll have to come out -- to eat." "I'm not so sure. The Star Kings dislike human food. Men find the Star King diet equally repellent. We cultivate plants and domesticate animals; they do similarly for worms and insects, such things as that. Warweave should do quite well on what he finds underground." Gersen looked up the valley where Hildemar Dasce had fled. "I've lost them both. I was willing to sacrifice Dasce to get Grendel -- but both..." The three stood on the riverbank. A breeze rippled the surface of the water, moved the branchs of the great dark trees which grew at the base of the hills. A tribe of dryads wandering along the opposite shore turned their purple-green eyesmudges on the men. Gersen said, "Perhaps it's just as bad, leaving them together on "Worse," said Detteras devoutly. "Worse by far." Hphey returned slowly to the ship. Pallis Atwrode, sitting on the turf, rose to her feet as Gersen approached. She came over to him, took his arm, smiled up into his face. "Kirth, I like it here, don't you?" "Yes, Pallis, very much." "Imagine!" said Pallis. "A pretty house up there on the hill, like old Sir Morton Hodenfroe's house on Blackstone Edge. Wouldn't that be nice, Kirth? I wonder. I wonder..." "First we must return to Alphanor, Pallis. Then we'll talk about coming back." "Very well, Kirth... Do you know, I've had the most horrible dream." She sobbed, clutched at him. He put his arms around her, patted her head and shoulders. Detteras said gruffly, "Well, Gersen, you've made use of Kelle and myself in a most cavalier fashion. I can't say that I enjoy it,' but I can't bring myself to resent it either." Robin Rampold approached slowly, keeping to the shadow of the ship. "Hildemar ran away," he said mournfully. "Now he will make over the mountains to town and I will never seen him again." "He can make over the mountains," said Gersen, "but he won't find any towns." "I have been watching up along the hillside, and through the forest," said Rampold. "I think he is somewhere nearby." "Very likely," said Gersen. "It is distressing," said Rampold. "It is enough to sadden a man." Gersen laughed. "You would prefer to be back in the cage?" "No, of course not. But then I had my dreams of what I would do when I won free. Seventeen years of hopes and dreams! But now I am free and Hildemar is beyond my reach." He moved disconsolately away. After a pause Kelle said, "As a scientist I find this planet a place of fascination. As a man I find it entrancing. As Kagge Kelle, erstwhile colleague of Gyle Warweave -- I find it extremely depressing. I am prepared to leave at any time." "Yes," said Detteras in a gruff voice. "Why not?" Gersen looked up the valley to where Hildemar Dasce, wearing only soiled white pantaloons, lurked in the forest like a raging desperate beast. He looked down the valley, far down over the hazy plain, then back to the swampy meadow, under which crawled Grendel the Monster. He looked down into the face of Pallis Atwrode. She was watching him. "Was it real, Kirth? What happened?" "Yes. But it's all over." "I've been..." She hesitated, frowned. "I don't remember too much." "Just as well." "Look, Kirth, what are those beautiful creatures?" "Dryads." "What are they doing?" "I don't know. Looking for something to eat, I suppose. Lugo Teehalt says they suck up nourishment from big grubs which burrow under the meadow. Or perhaps they lay eggs in the soil." The dryads, wandering up the shore, flourished their gorgeous fronds, swaying slowly like branches in the wind. On the swamp they moved more slowly, a step at a time. One of them stopped, stood stock-still. Under its foot showed a glint of white, as the concealed proboscis plunged down into the soft ground. A few seconds passed. The ground heaved, erupted : the dryad toppled over backward. Up from a crater staggered Warweave, the proboscis still thrust through his back. His face was stained with dirt, his eyes started from his head; from his mouth issued a series of appalling cries. He shook himself, fell to his knees, rolled over, disengaged himself from the fluttering dryad, jumped erect, ran crazily up the hillside. His steps flagged. He fell to his knees, clutched at the ground, kicked and lay still. G yle Warweave was buried on the hillside. The group returned to the ship. Robin Rampold now diffidently approached Gersen. "I have made up my mind to stay here." In one part of his brain Gersen was shocked and astonished. In another part there was only confirmation of a previous expectation. "So," said Gersen heavily, "you expect to live on this planet with Hildemar Dasce." "Yes." "Do you know what will happen? He will make you his slave. Or he will kill you for the food which I shall be bound to leave you." Rarnpold's face was bleak and drawn. "It may be as you say. But I cannot leave Hildemar Dasce." "Think," said Gersen. "You will be here alone. He will be more savage than ever before." "I hope that you will leave me certain articles. A weapon, a shovel, a few tools to build a shelter, some food." "And what will you do when the food runs out?" "I will look for natural food. Seeds, fish, nuts, roots. These may be poisonous, but I will test them carefully. And what else is left for me?" Gersen shook his head. "Far better that you return with us to Alphanor. Hildemar Dasce will take senseless but terrible vengeance on you." Robin Rampold said, "It is a chance I must take." "As you wish." The ship lifted from the meadow, leaving Rampold standing beside his meager stack of supplies. The horizons spread out. The planet became a green and blue ball and fell astern. Gersen turned to Kelle and Detteras. "Well, gentlemen, you have visited Teehalt's planet." "Yes," said Kelle tonelessly. "By a roundabout method you have fulfilled the terms of your agreement with us, the money is yours." Gersen shook his head. "I don't want the money. I suggest that we keep the existence of this planet secret, to preserve it from what could only be desecration." "Very well," said Kelle. "I'm agreed." "I agree," said Detteras, "provided that I may return another time, under more relaxing conditions." "This is what I wish to do myself," said Gersen. "Can we build a house, Kirth?" asked Pallis Atwrode. "A pretty little house with steep gables?" "If you like."  year later Kirth Gersen returned alone to Teehalt's planet in his old Model #B spaceboat. Hanging in space he examined the valley by macroscope, but discovered no signs of life. There was now a projac on the planet and it might well be in the hands of Hildemar Dasce. He waited till nightfall and landed the boat on a shelf in the mountains above the river valley. The long quiet night came to an end. At dawn Gersen started down the valley, keeping always to the shelter of the trees. From far off he heard the sound of an axe. With great care he approached the sound. On the edge of the forest Robin Rampold chopped at a fallen tree. Gersen stealthily moved closer. Rampold's face had filled out. He looked bronzed and strong and fit. Gersen called his name. Rampold looked up, startled, searching the dark shadows. "Who is there?" "Kirth Gersen." "Come forth, come forth. No need to steal up so furtively." Gersen moved to the edge of the forest, looked carefully all around. "I feared I might find Hildemar Dasce." "Ah," said Rampold. "No need to worry about Hildemar." "He is dead?" "No. He is quite alive, in a little pen I built for him. With your permission, I will not take you to see him, as the pen is in a private spot, well hidden from any who might visit the planet." "I see," said Gersen. "You defeated Dasce then." "Of course. Did you ever doubt it? I have much more resource than Dasce. I dug a pit during the night, built a deadfall. In the morning Hildemar Dasce swaggered forth, hoping to confiscate my stores. He fell into it, and I took him captive. Already he has become a changed man." He looked closely into Gersen's face. "You do not approve?" Gersen shrugged. "I came to take you back to the Oikumene." "No," said Rampold. "Never fear for me. I will live out my days here, with Hildemar Dasce. It is a beautiful planet. I have found sufficient food to maintain us, and daily I demonstrate to Hildemar Dasce the tricks and conceits he taught me long ago." They wandered down the valley to the previous landing place. "The life-cycle here is strange," said Rampold. "Each form changes into another, endlessly. Only the trees are permanent." "So I learned from the man who first found the planet." "Come, I'll show you Warweave's grave." Rampold led the way up the slope, to a copse of slender white-timbered trees. To the side grew a seedling, rather different from the rest. The trunk was veined with purple, the leaves were dark-green and leathery. Rampold pointed. "There rests Gyle Warweave." Gersen looked a moment, then turned away. He gazed up and down the valley. It was as beautiful and placid and quiet as before. "Well, then," said Gersen. "I will once more depart. I may never return. Are you sure you wish to stay?" "Absolutely." Rampold looked up at the sun. "But I am late. Hildemar will be expecting me. A pity to disappoint him. I will bid you farewell now." He bowed and departed, crossing the valley and disappearing into the forest. Gersen once more looked up and down the valley. The world was no longer innocent; it had known evil. A sense of tarnish lay across the panorama. Gersen sighed, turned and stood looking down at what had become Gyle Warweave's grave. He bent, seized the seedling, pulled it from the soil, broke it, cast it aside. Then he turned and walked up the valley toward his space-boat.      The first step in writing a science-fiction story is to guess what major developments in science may change the shape of tomorrow. However, we ask more from our writers than that. We ask them not merely to suggest what specific inventions or discoveries the future may hold, but to tell us what's going to follow from them. We ask them, in short, to do our imagining for us -- and to do it in detail. Of all science-fiction writers, the one whose vision ranges farthest into the totality of the life of the future is a fellow named Cordwainer Smith. Cordwainer Smith doesn't write stories about interstellar travel, or longevity, or the relationship between future humans and their robot or mutated animal creations; what he writes about is people, in a culture where all of these things and much more are the stuff of their daily lives. Such a story is The Boy Who Bought Old Earth, a short novel complete in the next issue of Galaxy. The world Smith describes in it is probably not the world you would guess as a probable future for us... but it is consistent... it is logical... it is challenging, fascinating, exciting... it is, in short, a typical Cordwainer Smith story, and we recommend it. If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" In your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed with new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! i if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. I Yes! Send me the nett # big issues of IF! I enclose  #. (Outside o! N. and S. America add # postage. Name ! Address... IF City. Zone State Use coupon or order by letter if you wish yicnrJiuld JwmmmvvllcI Jltj Modern psychology shows you th  way to use Graphoanalysis to "read between the lines' and see people as they really arewith. their masks ofT. Learn how to identify character and personality traits from letters, notes, signatures and any other handwritten material. Graphoanalysis is now being widely used by employment agencies and jicrsonnel departments to get "behind" the formal applications. Clergymen and teachers are finding Graphoanalysis valuable for gaining a deejer ins'ght into ,jeople for more elective counseling. Lawyers and law enforcement officials analyze handwritten messages to find out things the messages do not say -- or intentionally try to conceal. Credit departments are now more successful in weeding out had credit risks In-fore trouble starts. And when accounts later turn into problems the credit manager knows I teller how to handle the people involved after he studies the handwriting. Personal and individual uses of Graphoanalysis are for some people of greatest importance. Newly marrieds learn to adjust by understanding each other more clearly. Parents find Graphoanalysis invaluable in helping them understand and guide their children. And many intelligent people, with or without problems. G raphoannlyze their own handwriting in order to see themselves objectively. Maybe you have never beard of Graphoanalysis as it is a relatively new psychological technique. So it should In? explained that Graphoanalysis is not occult graphology and has nothing at all to do with fortune-telling. It is a rapidly growing scientific procedure, already proved and tested. Its growth during the past few years has been spectacular, even exceeding the growth of other forms of psychological testing, which have leen amazing. Graphoanalysis has been written up in Newsweek, Business Week , American Management Association's Personnel, Insiders' Newsletter , Insurant !' Salesman, London ( England) Telegraph, and other highly regarded publications. serious explanation of Graphoanalysis, its scientific background and its many uses in business apd the professions. What, does all this mean to you? First of all here is your chance to acquire a specialized knowledge that will help you personally in a hundred different ways. Secondly, you can almost certainly use the techniques of Graphoanalysis to advance yourself in your present occupation. More and more men and women are becoming professional Graphoanalysts. There are great opportunities for you in this area, if you have what it fakes to he your own boss. Let us send you free information. Without any obligation to you we would like to mail you details of Graphoanalysis, how you can learn it and how you can use it. No salesman will get in touch with yxJU -- we respect your privacy. Simply mail the coupon below or send a note asking for the free details about Graphoanalysis. Information will he mailed to you at once, without charge. ' This could lie a turajdg point in your life... mail your request today. International Graphoanalysis Society, '#" W. Jackson Blvd., Dept. AX-# Chicago fi. #. J International Graphoanalysis Society j # W. Jackson Blvd., Dept. AX# j Please mail me information alout Graphoanalysis, I I without any tost or obligation on my part.   I Name I I I  Address I I I City  State  Galaxy #c b V, OC TO If you wonder what happened to the "wonder" in your science-fiction stories -- it's in IF! Every issue packed With new, fast tales of tomorrow and space! IF brings you new stories by old masters, plus the best of today's new writers-challenging ideas combined with skillful writing and all the adventure and thrills of interstellar space itself! The greatest names in science fiction Del Rey, Clarke, Harmon, Schmitz, Pohl, Davidson, Simak, Bloch, Keyes, Sturgeon, Galouye, Sharkey, McIntosh, Fyfe; Dickson -- they're all in IF! if #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. Yes! Send me the next # big issues of IF! I enclose S#. (Outside of N. and S. America add SI .# postage.) Name Address City Zone State Use coupon or order by letter If you wish i Galaxy by Cordwainer Smith  by Harry Harrison by Philip Jose Farmer Editor Science Editor Publisher Production Manager Art Director Advertising by Albert Bermel by Sydney Van Scyoc by Ernst Mason by Jack Sharkey by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street New York #. N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N Y and at additional mailing offices. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U. S. A. By Tne Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off cience A nybody who listens in on gatherings of scientific people must have begun to notice a dismaying lack of communication between Them and Us. It doesn't help much if We are also scientists, too -- not unless we are in the same line, maybe not even then! It isn't just a matter of words like deoxyribonucleic acid (desoxyribonucleic acid? Depends on where you come from). The mind has evolved a technique for that sort of thing. It may not be able to translate for you, but it registers a sort of burst of static that conveys the message, Unfamiliar term, meaning unknown, or, That one I don't dig, boss, but he sure talks pretty. With luck you can then figure out some sort of meaning from the context. If you're not that lucky, at least you have the consolation that you may not know what they're talking about but at least you know you don't know it The real communications breakdown comes when the language sounds like something you ought to understand. "We were knitting all day, and when we got that cleaned up she started a cocktail party" sounds sensible enough... sort of. "We got to the white room but then we were nitpicking for half an hour and they couldn't hold the chilldown" is almost as deceptive. Or try: "As long as Stockpile was only two or three Kahns. I wasn't worried, but once it gets up near a Beach there's trouble, right?" "Right," you nod, and ask if anybody's seen the new batting order for the San Fran-, cisco Giants. Of course, all this may be en claire for you. If you're a cyberneticist you may know that the first example refers to the bugs computers develop -- according to N. Zvegintzov, "knitting" is the process of repetitively punching tape, while a readout that is pure gibberish is called a "cocktail party." (Figures!) Anybody around Cape Kennedy knows be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe x.L.G. ! Scribe X.L.G. i San Jose, California ,  Please send me the free book. The Mastery  i of Life, which explains how I may learn to  i use my faculties and powers of mind. t ' i I Name  I i  Address  ! City ! that a nitpicking hold is one in which assorted minor flaws are fixed, the white room is the last staging area before the astronaut enters his vehicle and a chilldown is the process of keeping liquid gases liquid. Those who attended the Pugwash conferences might recognize the Beach as that quantity of nuclear weapons which will kill half the Earth's population by fallout (c urtesy of course, of Nevil Shute), a Kahn that smaller quantity sufficient to annihilate any given country (one Beach equals about # Kahns), and a Stockpile is a variable representing actual quantity of nuclear weapons in being in the world at any particular time. (These terms are taken from Freeman J. Dyson, writing in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .) No doubt some such shorthand is needed. You can't expect the Cape Kennedy people to call one of their body-function telemeters an extinctospectr o p p o I ariscopeoculogyrogravoadaptometer, so they call it a V-meter and everybody's happy. If you want to distinguish between the thrust of rapid acceleration from the rear and rapid acceleration from the front, it's fair enough to term the first "eyeballs in" and the second "eyeballs out". What does a panel of hull metal look like? Why, like an elephant's ear -- more or less -- and so that is what it is called. And no f doubt a special name is needed for the kind of toothache caused by rapid changes in air pressure experienced by astronauts ejected from their capsules. If so, aerodontalgia is undoubtedly as good a name for it as any. (These aerospace terms we found in Martin Caidin's Manin-Space Dictionary .) T)ut it's all going too far, if you ask us. The trouble is, we're running out of words. Maybe Johnathan Swift had a good idea. His Laputans didn't use words at all, but carried on their backs an assortment of all objects they might wish to discuss. If they wanted to convey "apple", they pointed to a real apple. Similarly there isn't any need to invent a term like polyfluxpicated cisducer" when you can just point to the widget in question and say, "You know, that thing there." Of course, this might seriously cut down shop-talk away from the actual scene of work -- a bevatron isn't normally the kind of thing one carries to a faculty tea. But what's wrong with that? Complete Short Novel The Old Norstrilians weren't exactly hostile to the rest of humanity -- they just didn't want to L ater, much later, people forgot how Rod McBan had bought the whole Planet Earth without even knowing that he bother with theml had done it. They remembered the extraneous things, like the Council of Thieves chartering whole fleets to intercept Rod on his way between Old North Australia and Earth. They remembered the little ballad which had been made up for the Chief of Thieves at about that time: Arson lor the arsenal. Money In the money-bags Parson In the parsonage. And the girl for me! (They even explained that a parsonage was a vital statistics computer and the parson was its input screen.) The real drama remained untold. What had driven a rich, mysterious boy to gamble everything -- perhaps even his life -- from the richest planet in the galaxy in order to buy Earth? What could he have possibly done with Earth if he did get it? You have to understand something of Old North Australia (familiarly called "Norstrilia") to see how he did it. You have to understand why a lot of the young died young. Then you get the pitch of it and you have the real story, the inside story, the original history -- not just a cartoon of a handsome yellow-haired boy standing with his arms full of megacredit papers.  He never held them, anyhow. He couldn't have held them. There were too many. This boy had bought Earth, Manhome itself, the Earthport tower, the oceans, everything. You couldn't get the paper titles of all that stuff into one person's room, much less into his arms. So let's go back to the beginnings, and start with Old North Australia. I Ctory, place and time -- these are the essentials. The story is simple. There was a boy who bought the planet Earth. We know that, to our cost. It only happened once, and we have taken pains that it will never happen again. He came to Earth, got what he wanted and got away alive, in a series of very remarkable adventures. That's the story. The place? That's Old North Australia. What other place could it be? Where else do the for a bottle of beer? Where else do people lead peaceful lives, untouched by militarism, on a world which is boobytrapped with death and things worse than death? Old North Australia has stroon -- the santaclara drug -- and more than a thousand other planets clamor for it. But you can get stroon only from Norstrilia, because it is a virus which grows on enormous, gigantic, misshapen sheep. The sheep were taken from Earth to start a pastoral system; they ended up as the greatest of imaginable treasures. The simple aires, but they kept their farming ways. They started tough and they got tougher. People get pretty mean if you rob them and hurt them for almost three thousand years. They get obstinate. They avoid strangers, except for sending out spies and a very occasional tourist. They don't mess with other people and they're death, death inside out and turned over twice, if you mess with them. Then one of their kids showed up on Earth and bought it. The whole place, lock, stock and underpeople. That was a real embarrassment for Earth. And for Norstrilia, too. If it had been the two governments, Norstrilia would have collected all the eye-teeth on earth and sold them back at compound interest. That's the way Norstrilians do business. Or they might have said, "Skip it, cobber. You can keep your wet old ball. We've got a nice dry world of our own." That's the "temper they have. Unpredictable. But a kid had bought Earth, and it was his. Legally he had the right to pump up the Sunset Ocean, shoot it into space and sell water all over the inhabited galaxy. He didn't. He wanted something else. The Earth authorities thought it was girls, so they tried to throw girls at him of all shapes, sizes, smells and ages -- all the way from young ladies of good family down to undergirls who smelled of romance all the time, except for the first five minutes after they had had hot antiseptic showers. But he didn't want girls. He wanted postage stamps. That baffled both Earth and Norstrilia. The Norstrilians are a hard people from a harsh planet, and they think highly of property. (Why shouldn't they? They have most of it.) A story like this could only have started in Norstrilia. hat's Norstrilia Somebody once singsonged it up, like this: "Gray lay the land, oh. Gray grass from sky to sky. Not near the weir, dear. Not a mountain, low or high -- only hills and gray gray. Watch the dappled dimpled twinkles blooming on the star bar. "That is Norstrilia. "All the muddy glubbery is gone -- all the poverty, the waiting and the pain. People fought their way away from monstrous forms. People fought for hands and noses, eyes and feet, man and woman. They got it all back again. Back they came from daylight nightmares, centuries when monstrous men, sucking the water around the pools, dreamed of being men again. They found it. Men they were again, again, far away from a horrid when. "The sheep, poor beasties, did not make it. Out of their sickness they distilled immortality for man. Who says research could do it? Research, besmirch! It was a pure accident Smack up an accident, man, and you've got it made. "Beige-brown sheep lie on blue-gray grass while the clouds rush past, low overhead, like iron pipes ceilinging the world. "Take your pick of sick sheep, man, it's the sick that pays. Sneeze me a planet, man, or cough me up a spot of lifeforever. If it's barmy there, where the noddies and trolls like you live, it's too right here. "That's the book, boy. "If you haven't seen it, you haven't seen Norstrilia. If you did see it, you wouldn't believe it. If you got there, you wouldn't get off alive. "Mother Hitton's littul kittons wait for you down there. Little pets they are, little little little pets. Cute little things, they say. Don't you believe it. No man ever saw them and walked away alive. You won't either. That's the final dash, flash. That's the utter clobber, cobber. "Charts call the place Old North Australia." We can suppose that that is what it is like in this time, the first century of the Rediscovery of Man. When C'mell lived. About the time they polished off Shayol, like wiping an apple on the sleeve. Long deep into our own time. Fifteen thousand years after the bombs went up and the boom came down on Old, Old Earth. Recent, see? hat happens in the story? Read it Who's there? It starts with Rod McBan -- who had the real name of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold you can't tell a story if you call the main person by a name as long as Roderick Frederick ArBan. You have to do what his neighbors did -- call him Rod McBan. The old ladies always said, "Rod McBan to the hundred and fiftyfirst..." and then sighed. Flurp a squirt at them, friends. We don't need numbers. We know his family was distinguished. We know the poor kid was born to troubles. He was bom to inherit the Station of Doom. He almost failed the Garden of Death. The Onseck was after him. His father had died out in the dirty part of space, where people never find nice clean deaths. When he got in trouble, he trusted his computer. The computer gambled, and it won Earth. He went to Earth. That was history itself -- that and C'mell beside him. At long, long last he got his rights and he came home. That's the story. Except for the details. They follow. II D od McBan faced the day of days. He knew what it was all about, but he could not really feel it. He wondered if they had tranquilized him with halfrefined stroon, a product so rare and precious that it was never, never sold off-planet. He knew that by nightfall he would be laughing and giggling and drooling in one of the Dying Rooms, where the unfit were put away to thin out the human breed, or else he would stand forth as the oldest landholder on the planet, Chief Heir to the Station of Doom. The farm had been salvaged by his great #grandfather, almost two thousand years ago, and it was called Doom when he first inherited it. But the great #grandfather had bought an ice-asteroid, crashed it into the farm over the violent objections of his neighbors and learned clever tricks with artesian wells which kept his grass growing while the neighbors' fields turned from gray-green to blowing dust. The McBans had kept the sarcastic old name for their farming station, the Station of. Doom. By night, Rod knew, the Station would be his. Or he would be dying, giggling his way to death in the laughed and grinned and rollicked about while they died. He found himself humming a bit of a rhyme that had always been a part of the tradition of Old North Australia : We kill to live, and die to grow -- That's the way the world must go! He'd been taught, bone deep, that his own world was a very special world, envied, loved, hated and dreaded across the galaxy. He knew that he was part of a very special people. Other races and kinds of men farmed crops, or raised food, or designed machines, and manufactured weapons. Norstrilians did none of these things. From their dry fields, their sparse wells, their enormous sick sheep, they refined immortality itself. And sold it for a high, high price. Rod McBan walked a little way into the yard. His home lay behind him. It was a log cabin built out of Daimoni beams -- beams uncuttable, unchangeable, solid beyond all expectations of solidity. They had been purchased as a matched set thirtyodd planet-hops away and brought to Old North Australia by photosails. The cabin was a fort which could withstand even major weapons, but it was still a cabin, simple inside and with a front yard of scuffed dust. The last red bit of dawn was whitening into day. Rod knew that he could not go far. He could hear the women out behind the house, the kinswomen who had come to barber and groom him for the triumph -- or the other. They never knew how much he knew. Because of his affliction, they had thought around him for years, counting on his telepathic deafness to be constant. Trouble was, it wasn't; lots of times he heard things. He even remembered the sad little poem they had about the young people who failed to pass the test for one reason or another and had to go to the Dying House instead of coming forth as Norstrilian citizens and fully recognized subjects of Hermajesty-the-queen. (Norstrilians had not had a real queen for some fifteen thousand years, but they were strong on tradition and did not let mere facts boggle them.) How did the little poem run, "This is the house of the long ago..."? In its own gloomy way it was cheerful. TTe erased his own footprint A A from the dust and suddenly he remembered the whole thing. He chanted it softly to himself. This Is the house of the long ago. Where the old ones murmur an endless woe, Where the pain of time Is an actual pain And things once known always come again. Out In the garden of death, our young Have tasted the valiant taste of fear; With muscular arm and reckless tongue, They hav won and lost and escaped us here. This is the house of the long ago. Those who die young do not enter here. Those loving on know that hell is near. The old ones who suffer have willed It so. Out In the garden of death, the old Look with awe at the young and bold. It was all right to say that they looked with awe at the young and bold, but he hadn't met a person yet who did not prefer life to death. He'd heard about people who chose death -- of course he had -- who hadn't? But the experience was third-hand, fourth-hand, fifthhand. He knew that some people had said of him that he would be better off dead, just because he had never learned to communicate telepathically and had to use old spoken words like outworlders or barbarians. Rod himself certainly didn't think he would be better dead. Indeed, he sometimes looked at normal people and wondered how they managed to go through life with the constant silly chatter of other people's thoughts running through their minds. In the times that his mind lifted, so that he could "hier" for a while, he knew that hundreds or thousands of minds rattled in on him with unbearable clarity; he could even "hier" the minds that thought they had their telepathic shields up. Then, in a little while, the merciful cloud of his handicap came down on his mind again and he had a deep unique privacy which everybody on Old North Australia should have envied. His computer had said to him once, "The words hier and spiek are corruptions of the words hear and s peak. They are always pronounced in the second rising tone of voice, as though you were asking a question under the pressure of amusement and alarm, if you say the words with your voice. They refer only to telepathic communication between persons or between persons and underpeople." "What are underpeople?" he had asked. "Animals modified to speak, to understand, and usually to look like men. They differ from cerebrocentered robots in that the robots are built around an actual animal mind, but are mechanical and electronic relays, while underpeople are composed entirely of Earth-derived living tissue." "Why haven't I ever seen one?' "They are not allowed on Norstrilia at all, unless they are in the service of the defense establishments of the Commonwealth." "Why are we called a Commonwealth, when all the other places are called worlds or planets?" "Because you people are subjects of the Queen of England." "Who is the Queen of England?" "She was an Earth ruler in the Most Ancient Days, more than fifteen thousand years ago." "Where is she now?" "I said," said the computer, "that it was fifteen thousand years ago." "I know it," Rod had insisted, "but if there hasn't been any Queen of England for fifteen thousand years, how can we be her subjects?" "I know the answer in human words," the reply had come from the friendly red machine, "but since it makes no sense to me, I shall have to quote it to you as people told it to me. 'She bloody well might turn up one of these days. Who knows? This is Old North Australia out here among the stars and we can dashed well wait for our own Queen. She might have been off on a trip when Old Old Earth went sour.' " The computer had clucked a few times in its odd ancient voice and had then said hopefully, in its toneless voice, "Could you re-state that so that I could program it as part of my memory-assembly?" "It doesn't mean much to me. Next time I can hier other minds thinking I'll try to pick it out of somebody else's head." r I 'hat had been about a year ago, and Rod had never run across the answer. Last night he had asked the computer more urgently. "Will I die tomorrow?" "Question irrelevant. No answer available." "Computer!" he had shouted, "you know I love you." "You say so." "I started your historical assembly up after repairing you when that part had been thinkless for hundreds of years." "Correct." "I crawled down into this cave and found the personal controls where great # grandfather had left them when they became obsolete." "Correct" "I'm going to die tomorrow and you won't even be sorry." "I did not say that," said the computer. "Don't you care?" "I was not programmed to care. Since you yourself repaired me, Rod, you ought to know that I am the only allmechanical computer functioning in this part of the galaxy. I am sure that if I had emotions I would be very sorry indeed. It is an extreme probability, since you are my only companion. But I do not have emotions. I have numbers, facts, language and memory -- that is all." "What is the probability, then, that I will die tomorrow in the Giggle Room?" "That is not the right name. It is the Dying House." "All right, then, the Dying House." "The judgment on you will be a contemporary human judgment based upon emotions. Since I do not know the individuals concerned, I cannot make a prediction of any value at all." "What do you think is going to happen to me, computer?" "I do not really think. I respond. I have no input on that topic." "Do you know anything at all about my life and death tomorrow? I know I can't spiek with my mind, but have to make sounds with my mouth instead. Why should they kill me for that?" "I do not know the people concerned and therefore I do not know the reasons," the computer had replied, "but I know the history of Old North Australia down to your great # grandfather's time." "Tell me that, then," Rod had said. He had squatted in the cave which he had discovered, listening to the forgotten set of computer controls which he had repaired, and had heard again the story of Old North Australia as his great # grandfather had understood it. Stripped of personal names and actual dates, it was a simple story. This morning his life hung on it Norstrilia had to thin out its people if it were going to keep its Old Old Earth character and be another Australia, out among the stars. Otherwise the fields would fill up, the deserts turn into apartment houses, the sheep die in cellars under endless kennels for crowded and useless people. No Old North Australian wanted that to happen, when he could keep character, immortality and wealth -- in that particular order of importance. It would be contrary to the character of Norstrilia. The simple character of Norstrilia was immutable -- as immutable as anything out among the stars. This ancient Commonwealth was the only human institution older than the Instrumentality. Ill r T"he story was simple, the way the computer's clear long-circuited brain had sorted it out. Take a farmer culture straight off Old Old Earth -- Manhome itself. Put the culture on a remote planet. Touch it with prosperity and blight it with drought. Teach it sickness, deformity, hardihood. Make it learn poverty so bad that men sold one child to buy another child the drink of water which would give it an extra day of life while the drills whirred deep into the dry rock, looking for wetness. Teach that culture thrift, medkane, scholarship, pain, survival. Give those people the lessons of poverty, war, grief, greed, magnanimity, piety, hope and despair by turn. Let the culture survive -- survive disease, deformity, despair, desolation, abandonment. w Then give it the happiest accident in the history of time. Out of sheep-sickness came infinite riches, the santaclara drug or "stroon" which prolonged human life indefinitely. Prolonged it -- but with queer side-effects, so that most Norstrilians preferred to die in a thousand years or so. Norstrilia was corulsed by the discovery. So was every other inhabited world. But the drug could not be synthesized, paralleled, duplicated. It was something which could be obtained only from the sick sheep on the Old North Australian plains. Robbers and governments tried to steal the drug. Now and then they succeeded, long ago, but they hadn't made it since the time of Rod's great # grandfather. They had tried to steal the sheep. Several had been taken off the planet. The Fourth Battle of New Alice, in which half the menfolk of Norstrilia had died beating off the Bright Empire, had led to the abduction of two of the sick sheep -- one female and one male. The Bright Empire thought it had won. It hadn't. The sheep got well, produced healthy lambs, exuded no more stroon and died. The Bright Empire had paid . four battle fleets for a coldbox full of mutton, and the monopoly remained in Norstrilia. The Norstrilians exported the santaclara drug, and they put the export on a systematic basis. They achieved almost infinite riches. The poorest man on Norstrilia was always richer than the richest man anywhere else, emperors and conquerors included. Every farm-hand earned at least a hundred Earth megacredits a day -- measured in real money on Old Earth, not in paper which had to travel at steep arbitrage. But the Norstrilians made their choice: the choice -- To remain themselves. They taxed themselves back into simplicity. Luxury goods got a tax of #. For the price of fifty palaces on Olympia, you could import a handkerchief into Norstrilia. A pair of shoes, landed, cost the price of a hundred yachts in orbit. All machines were prohibited, except for defense and the drug-gathering. Underpeople were never made on Norstrilia, and imported only by the defense authority for top secret reasons. Old North Australia remained simple, pioneer, fierce, open. Many families emigrated to enjoy their wealth; they could not return. But the population problem remained, even with the taxation and simplicity and hard work. Cut back, then -- cut back people if you must. But how, whom, where? Birth control -- beastly. Sterilization -- inhuman, unmanly, un-British. (This last was an ancient word meaning "very bad indeed.") By families, then. Let the families have the children. Let the Commonwealth test them at sixteen. If they ran under the standards, send them to a happy, happy death. T)ut what about the families? You can't wipe a family out, not in a conservative farmer society, when the neighbors are folk who have fought and died beside you for a hundred generations. The Rule of Exceptions came. Any family which reached the end of its line could have the last surviving heir re-processed -- up to four times. If he failed, it was the Dying House for the boy, and a designated adopted heir from another family took over the name and the estate. Otherwise their survivors would have gone on, in this century a dozen, in that century twenty. Soon Norstrilia would have been divided into two classes, the sound ones and a privileged class of hereditary freaks. This they could not stand, not while the space around them stank of danger, not when men a hundred worlds away dreamed and died while thinking of how to steal the stroon. They had to be fighters, and they chose not to be soldiers or emperors. Therefore they had to be fit, alert, healthy, clever, simple and moral. They had to be better than any possible enemy or any possible combination of enemies. They made it. Old North Australia became the toughest, brightest, simplest world in the galaxy. One by one, without weapons, Norstrilians could tour the other worlds and kill almost anything which attacked them. Governments feared them. Ordinary people hated them or worshipped them. Offworld men eyed their women queerly. The Instrumentality left them alone, or defended them without letting them know. (As in the case of Raumsog, who brought his whole world to a death of cancer and volcanoes, because the Golden Ship struck once.) Norstrilian mothers learned to stand by with dry eyes when their children, unexpectedly drugged if they failed the tests, drooled with pleasure and went giggling away to their deaths. The space and sub-space around Norstrilia became sticky and sparky with the multiplicity of their defenses. Big outdoorsy men sailed tiny fighting craft around the approaches to Old North Australia. When people met them in outports, they always thought that Norstrilians looked simple, but the looks were a snare and a delusion. The Norstrilians had been conditioned by thousands of years of unprovoked attack. They looked as simple as sheep, but their minds were as subtle as serpents. And now -- Rod McBan. The last heir, the very last heir, of their proudest old family had been found a half-freak. He was normal enough by Earth standards, but by Norstrilian measure he was inadequate. He was a bad, bad telepath. He could not be counted on to hier. Most of the time other people could not transmit into his mind at all; they could not even read it. All they got was a fiery bubble and a dull fuzz of meaningless sub-sememes, fractions of thought which added up to less than nothing. And on spieking, he was worse. He could not talk with his mind at all. Now and then he transmitted, and when he did the neighbors ran for cover. If it was anger, a bloody screaming roar almost blotted out their consciousnesses with a rage as solid and red as meat hanging in a slaughterhouse. If he was happy, it was worse. His happiness, which he transmitted without knowing it, had the distractiveness of a speed-saw cutting into diamondgrained rock. His happiness drilled into people with an initial sense of pleasure, followed rapidly by acute discomfort and the sudden wish that all their own teeth would fall out, for the teeth had turned into spinning whorls of raw, unqualified discomfort. They did not know his biggest personal secret. They suspected that he could hier now and then without being able to control it. They did not know that when he did hier, he could hier everything for miles around with microscopic detail and telescopic range. His telepathic intake, when it did work, went right through other people's mindshields as though they did not exist. (If some of the women in the farms around the Station of Doom knew what he had accidentally peeped out of their minds, they would have blushed the rest of their lives.) As a result, Rod McBan had a frightful amount of unsorted knowledge which did not quite fit together. Previous committees had neither awarded him the Station of Doom nor sent him off to the giggle death. They had appreciated his intelligence, his quick wit, his enormous physical strength. But they remained worried about his telepathic handicap. Three times before he had been judged. Three times. And three times judgment had been suspended. They had chosen the lesser cruelty and had sent him not to death, but to a new babyhood and a fresh upbringing, hoping that the telepathic capacity of his mind would naturally soar up to the Norstrilian normal. They had underestimated him. He knew it. Thanks to the eavesdropping which he could not control, he understood bits and pieces of what was happening even though nobody had ever told him the rational whys and hows of the process. I t was a gloomy but composed big boy who gave the dust of his own front yard one last useless kick, who turned back into the cabin, walking right through to the main room to the rear door and the back yard, and who greeted his kinswomen politely enough as they, hiding their aching hearts, prepared to dress him up for his trial. They did not want the child to be upset, even though he was as big as a man and showed more composure than did most adult men. They wanted to hide the fearful truth from him. How could they help it? He already knew; but he pretended he didn't. Cordially enough, just scared enough but not too much, he said: "What ho, auntie! Hello, cousin. Morning, Maribel. Here's your sheep. Curry him up and trim him for the livestock competition. Do I get a ring in my nose or a bow ribbon around my neck?" One or two of the young ones laughed, but his oldest "aunt" -- actually a fourth cousin, married into another family -- pointed seriously and calmly at a chair in the yard and said, "Do sit down, Roderick. This is a serious occasion and we usually do not talk while preparations are going on." She bit her lower lip and then she added, not as though she wanted to frighten him but because she wanted to impress him: "The Vice-chairman will be here today." ("The Vice-chairman" was the head of the government; there had been no Chairman of the Temporary Commonwealth Government for some thousands of years. Norstilians did not like posh and they thought that "vice-chairman" was high enough for any one man to go. Besides, it kept the offworlders guessing.) Rod was not impressed. He had seen the man. It was in one of his rare moments of broad hiering and he found that the mind of the vice-chairman was full of numbers and horses, the results of every horse-race for three hundred and twenty years, and the projection forward of six probable horse races in the next two years. "Yes, auntie," he said. "Don't bray all the time today. You don't have to use your voice for little things like saying yes. Just nod your head. It will make a much better impression." He started to answer, but gulped and nodded instead. She sank the comb into his thick yellow hair. Another one of the women, almost a girl, brought up a small table and a basin. He could tell from her expression that she was spieking to him, but this was one of die times in which he could not hier at all. The aunt gave his hair a particularly fierce tug just as the girl took his hand. He did not know what she meant to do. He yanked his hand back. The basin fell off the small table. Only then did he realize that it was merely soapy water for a manicure. "I am sorry," he said; even to him, his voice sounded like a bray. For a moment he felt the fierce rush of humiliation and self-hate. They should kill me, he thought. By the time the sun goes down Fll be in the Giggle Room, laughing and laughing before the medicine makes my brains boil away. He had reproached himself. The two women had said nothing. The aunt had walked away to get some shampoo, and the girl was returning with a pitcher, to re-fill the basin. He looked directly into her eyes, and she into his. "I want you," she said, very clearly, very quietly, and with a smile which seemed inexplicable to him. "What for?" said he, equally quietly. "Just you," she said. "I want you for myself. You're going to lfve." "You're Lavinia, my cousin," said he, as though discovering it for the first time. "Sh-h-h," said the girl. "She's coming back." TT'hen the girl had settled ' 'down to getting his fingernails really clean, and the aunt had rubbed something like sheep-dip into his hair, Rod began to feel happy. His mood changed from the indifference which he had been pretending to himself. It became a real indifference to his fate, an easy acceptance of the gray sky above him, the dull rolling earth below. He had a fear -- a little tiny fear, so small that it might have seemed to be a midget pet in a miniature cage -- running around the inside of his thinking. It was not the fear that he would die. Somehow he suddenly accepted his chances and remembered how many other people had had to take the same play with fortune. This little fear was something else, the dread that he might not behave himself properly if they did tell him to die. But then, he thought, I don't have to worry. A negative decision is never a word -- just a hypodermic, so that the first bad news the victim has is his own excited, happy laugh. With this funny peace of mind, his hiering suddenly lifted. He could not see the Garden of Death, but he could look into the minds tending it; it was a huge van hidden just beyond the next roll of hills, where they used to keep Old Billy, the #ton sheep. He could hear the clatter of voices in the little town eighteen kilometers away. And he could look right into Lavinia's mind. It was a picture of himself. But what a picture! So grown, so handsome, so brave-looking. He had schooled himself not to move when he could hier, so that other people would not realize that his rare telepathic gift had come back to him. Auntie was spieking to Lavinia without noisy words, "We'll see this pretty boy in his coffin tonight." Lavinia thought right back, without apology, "No, we won't." Rod sat impassive in his chair. The two women, their faces grave and silent, went on spieking the argument at each other with their minds. "How would you know?" spieked auntie. "He has the oldest station in all of Old North Australia. He has one of the very oldest names. He is -- " and even in spieking her thoughts cluttered up, like a stammer -- "he is very nice. He's going to be a wonderful man." "Mark my thought," spieked the auntie again, "I'm telling you that we'll see him in his coffin tonight and that by midnight he'll be in his coffin-ride to the Long Way Out." Lavinia jumped to her feet. She almost knocked over the basin of water a second time. She moved her throat and mouth to speak words but she just croaked: "Sorry, Rod. Sorry." Rod McBan, his face guarded, gave a pleasant, stupid little nod, as though he had no idea of what they had been spieking. She turned and ran, shoutspieking the loud thought at auntie, "Get somebody else to do his hands! You're heartless, hopeless. Get somebody else to do your corpse-washing for you. Not me. Not me!" CtVX#Tiat's the matter with her?" said Rod to the auntie, just as though he did not know. "She's just difficult, that's all. Nerves, I suppose," she added in her croaking spoken words. She could not talk very well, since all her family and friends could spiek and hier with privacy and grace. "We were spieking with each other about what you would be doing tomorrow." "Where's a priest, auntie?" said Rod. "A what?" "A priest, like the old poem has, in the rough rough days before our people found this planet and got our sheep settled down. Everybody knows it. Here Is the place where the priest went mad. Over there my mother burned. I cannot show you the house we had. We lost that slope when the mountain burned. There's more to it, but that's the part I remember. Isn't a priest a specialist in how to die? Do we have any around here?" He watched her mind as she lied to him. As he had spoken he had a perfectly clear picture of one of their more distant neighbors, a man named Tolliver, who had a very gentle manner; but her words were not about Tolliver at all. "Some things are men's business," she said, cawing her words. "Anyhow, that song isn't about Norstrilia at all. It's about it. I didn't know you knew it." In her mind he read, "That boy knows too much." "Thanks, auntie," said he meekly. "Come along for the rinse," said she. "We're using an awful lot of real water on you today." He followed her and he felt more kindly toward her when he saw her think, Lavinia had the right feelings but she drew the wrong conclusion. He's going to be dead tonight. That was too much. Rod hesitated for a moment, tempering the chords of his oddly-attuned mind. Then he let out a tremendous howl of telepathic joy, just to bother the lot of them. It did. They all stopped still. Then they stared at him. In words the auntie said, "What was that?" "What?" said he, innocently. "That noise you spieked. It wasn't meaning." "Just sort of a sneeze, I suppose. I didn't know I did it." Deep down inside himself he chuckled. He might be on his way to the Hoohoo Garden, but he would fritter their friskies for them while he did it. It was a dashed silly way to die, he thought all to himself. And then a strange, crazy, happy idea came to him: Perhaps they can't kill me. Perhaps I have powers -- powers of my own! Well, we'll soon enough find out... IV D od walked across the dusty ' lot, took three steps up the folding staircase which had been let down from the side of the big trailer van, knocked on the door once as he had been instructed to do, had a green light flash in his face, opened the door and entered. It was a garden. The moist, sweet, scent-laden air was like a narcotic. There were bright green plants in profusion. The lights were clear but not bright; their ceiling gave the effect of a penetrating blue sky. He looked around. It was a copy of Old Old Earth. The growths on the green plants were rose s; he remembered pictures which his computer had showed him. The pictures had not gotten across the idea that they smelled nice at the same time that they looked nice. He wondered if they did that all the time, and then remembered the wet air: wet air always holds smells better than dry air does. At last, almost shyly, he looked up at the three judges. With real startlement, he saw that one of them was not a Norstrilian at all, but the local commissioner of the Instrumentality, the Lord Redlady -- a thin man with a sharp, inquiring face. The other two were Old Taggart and John Beasley. He knew them, but not well. "Welcome," said the Lord Redlady, speaking in the funny singsong of a man from Manhome. "Thank you," said Rod. "You are Roderick Frederick Arthur McBan the one hundred and fifty-first?" said Taggart, knowing perfectly well that Rod was that person. Lord love-a-duck and luckyme! thought Rod, I've got my hiering, even in this place! "Yes," said the Lord Redlady. There was silence. The other two judges looked at the manhome man; the stranger looked at Rod; Rod stared, and then began to feel sick at the bottom of his stomach. For the first time in his life, he had met somebody who could penetrate his peculiar perceptual abilities. At last he thought, "I understand." The Lord Redlady looked sharply and impatiently at him, as though waiting for a response to that single word "yes," but Rod had already answered -- telepathically. At last Old Taggart broke the silence. "Aren't you going to talk? I asked you your name." The Lord Redlady held up his hand in a gesture for patience; it was not a gesture which Rod had ever seen before, but he understood it immediately. He thought telepathically at Rod, "You are watching my thoughts." "Indeed I am," thought Rod, back at him. The Lord Redlady clapped a hand to his forehead. "You are hurting me. Did you think you said something?" With his voice Rod said, "I told you that I was reading your mind." r T"he Lord Redlady turned to the other two men and spieked to then: "Did either of you hier what he tried to spiek?" "No." "No." They both thought back at him. "Just noise, loud noise." "He is a broadbander like myself. And I have been disgraced for it. You know that I am the only Lord of the Instrumentality who has been degraded from the status of Lord to that of Commissioner -- " "Yes," they spieked. "You know that they could not cure me of shouting and suggested I die?" "No," they answered. "You know that the Instrumentality thought I could not bother you here and sent me to your planet on this miserable, job, just to get me out of the way?" 'Yes," they answered. "Then, what do you want to do about him? Don't try to fool him. He knows all about this place already." The Lord Redlady glanced quickly, sympathetically up at Rod, giving him a little phantom smile of encouragement. "Do you want to kill him? To exile him? To turn him loose?" The other two men fussed around in their minds. Rod could see that they were troubled at the idea he could watch them thinking, when they had thought him a telepathic deafmute; they also resisted the Lord Redlady's unmannerly precipitation of the decision. Rod almost felt that he was swimming in the thick wet air, with the smell of roses cloying his nostrils so much that he would never smell anything but roses again, when he became aware of a massive consciousness very near him -- a fifth person in the room, whom he had not noticed at all before. It was an earth soldier, complete with uniform. The soldier was handsome, erect, tall, formal with a rigid military decorum. He was, furthermore, not human and he had a strange weapon in his left hand. "What is that?" spieked Rod to the Earthman. The man saw his face, not the thought. "An underman. A snakeman. The only one on this planet. He will carry you out of here if the decision goes against you." Beasley cut in, almost angrily. "Here, cut it out. This is a hearing, not a blossoming tea-party. Don't clutter all that futt into the air. Keep it formal." "You want a formal hearing?" said the Lord Redlady. "A formal hearing for a man who knows everything that all of us are thinking? It's foolish." "In Old North Australia, we always have formal hearings," said Old Taggart. With an acuteness of insight born of his own personal danger, Rod saw Taggart all over again for the first time -- a careworn poor old man, who had worked a poor farm hard for a thousand years; a farmer, like his ancestors before him ; a man rich only in which he would never take time to spend; a man of the soil, honorable, careful, formal, righteous and very just. Such men did not yield to innovation, ever. "Have the hearing then," said the Lord Redlady, "have the hearing if it is your custom, my mister and owner Taggart, my mister and owner Beasley." The Norstrilians, appeased, bowed their heads briefly. Almost shyly, Beasley looked over at the Lord Redlady. "Sir and Commissioner, will you say the words -- the good old words that will help us to find our duty and to do it." (Rod saw a quick flare of red anger go through the Lord Redlady's mind as the Earth commissioner thought fiercely to himself, "Why all this fuss about go, you dull clutts, or kill him." But the Earthman had not directed the thoughts outward and the two Norstrilians were unaware of his private view of them.) n the outside, the Lord Redlady remained calm. He used his voice, as Nostrilians did on occasion of great ceremony: "We are here to hear a man." "We are here to hear him," they responded. "We are not to judge or to kill, though this may follow," said he. "Though this may follow," they responded. "And where, on Old Old Earth, does man come from?" They knew the answer by rote and said it heavily together: "This is the way it was on Old Old Earth, and this the way it shall be among the stars, no matter how far we men may wander: "The seed of wheat is planted in dark, moist earth; the seed of man in dark, moist flesh. The seed of wheat fights upward to air, sun and space; the stalk, leaves, blossom and grain flourish under the open glare of heaven. The seed of man grows in the salty private ocean of the womb, the sea-darkness remembered by the bodies of his race. The harvest of wheat is collected by the hands of men; the harvest of men is collected by the tenderness of eternity." "And what does this mean?" chanted the Lord Redlady. "To look with mercy, to decide with mercy, to kill with mercy, but to make the harvest of man strong and true and good, the way that the harvest of wheat stood high and proud on Old Old Earth." "And who is here?" he asked. They both recited Rod's full name. When they had finished, the Lord Redlady turned to Rod and said, "I am about to utter the ceremonial words, but I promise you that you will not be surprised, no matter what happens. Take it easy, therefore; easy, easy." Rod was watching the Earthman's mind and the mind of the two Norstrilians. He could see that Beasley and Taggart were befuddled with the ritual of the words, the wetness and scent of the air and the false blue sky in the top of the van; they did not know what they were going to do. But Rod could also see a sharp, keen triumphant thought forming in the bottom of the Lord Redlady's mind, I'll get this boy off ! He almost smiled, despite the presence of the snake man with the rigid smile and the immovable glaring eyes standing just three paces beside him and a little to his rear, so that Rod could only look at him through the corner of his eye. "Misters and owners!" said the Lord Redlady. "Mister chairman!" they answered. "Shall I inform the man who is being heard?" "Inform him!" they chanted. "Roderick Frederick Ronald Ban the one hundred and fiftyfirst!" "Yes, sir," said Rod. "Heir-in-trust of the Station of Doom!" "That's me," said Rod. "Hear me!" said the Lord Redlady. "Hear him!" said the other two. "You have not come here, child and citizen Roderick, for us to judge you or to punish you. If these things are to be done, they must be done in another place or time, and they must be done by men other than ourselves. The only concern before this board is the following: should you or should you not be allowed to leave this room safe and free and well, taking into no account your innocence or guilt of matters which might be decided elsewhere, but having regard only for the survival and the safety and the welfare on this given planet? We are not punishing and we are not judging, but we are deciding, and what we are deciding is your life. Do you understand? Do you agree?" Rod nodded mutely, drinking in the wet rose-scented air and with the dampness of the atmosphere. If things went wrong now, they did not have very far to go. Not with the motionless snake-man standing just beyond his reach. He tried to look at the snake-brain but got nothing out of it -- except for an unexpected glitter of recognition and defiance. nphe Lord Redlady went on, Taggart and Beasley hanging on his words as though they had never heard them before. "Child and citizen, you know the rules. We are not to find you wrong or right. No crime is judged here, no offense. Neither is innocence. We are only judging the single question. Should you live or should you not? Do you understand? Do you agree?" Said Rod, "Yes, sir." "And how stand you?" "What do you mean?" "This board is asking you your opinion. Should you live or should you not?" "I'd like to," said Rod, "but I'm tired of all these childhoods." "That is not what the board is asking you, child and citizen," said the Lord Redlady. "We are asking you, what do you think? Should you live or should you not live?" "You want me to judge myself?" "That's it, boy," said Beasley, "you know the rules. Tell them, boy. I said we could count on you." The sharp, friendly, neighborly face unexpectedly took on great importance for Rod. He looked at Beasley as though he had never seen the man before. This man was trying to judge him, Rod; and he, Rod, had to help decide on what was to be done with himself. The medicine from the snake-man and the giggle-giggle death, or a walk out into freedom. Rod started to speak and checked himself ; he was to speak for Old North Australia. Old North Australia was a tough world, proud of its tough men. No wonder the board gave him a tough decision. Rod made up his mind and he spoke clearly and deliberately: "I'd say no. Do not let me live. I don't fit. I can't spiek and hier. Nobody knows what my children would be like, but the odds are against them. Except for one thing... "And what, child and citizen, is that?" asked the Lord Redlady, while Beasley and Taggart watched as though they were staring at the last five meters of a horse race. "Look at me carefully, citizens and members of the board," said Rod, finding that in this milieu it was easy to fall into a ceremonious way of talking. "Look at me carefully and do not consider my own happiness, because you are not allowed, by law, to judge that anyhow. Look at my talent -- the way I can hier, the big thunderstorm way I can spiek." Rod gathered his mind for a final gamble and as his lips got through talking, he spat his whole mind at them : -- anger-anger, rage-red! -- blood-red! -- fire-fury ! -- noise, stench, glare, roughness, sourness and hate hate hate! -- all the anxiety of a bitter day! -- crutts, whelps, pups ! It all poured out at once. The Lord Redlady turned pale and compressed his lips, Old Taggart put his hands over his face, Beasley looked bewildered and nauseated. Beasley then started to belch as calm descended on the room. In a slightly shaky voice, the Lord Redlady asked, "And what was that supposed to show, child and citizen?" "In grown-up form, sir, could it be a useful weapon?" The Lord Redlady looked at the other two. They talked with the tiny expressions on their faces; if they were spieking, Rod could not read it. This last effort had cost him all telepathic input. "Let's go on," said Taggart. "Are you ready?" said the Lord Redlady to Rod. "Yes, sir," said Rod. "I continue," said the Lord Redlady. "If you understand your own case as we see it, we shall proceed to make a decision and, upon making the decision, to kill you immediately or to set you free no less immediately. And we appreciate the courtesy which you will have shown this board, for without courtesy there could be no proper hearing, without the hearing no appropriate decision, and without an appropriate decision there could be neither justice nor safety in the years to come. Do you understand? Do you agree?" "I suppose so," said Rod. "Do you really understand? It is your life which we are talking about," said the Lord Redlady. "I understand and I agree," said Rod. "Cover us," said the Lord Redlady. Rod started to ask how when he understood that the command was not directed at him in the least. The snake-man had come to life and was breathing heavily. He spoke in clear old words, with an odd dropping cadence in each syllable. "High, my lord, or utter maximum?" TT'or answer, the Lord Redlady pointed his right arm straight up with the index finger straight at the ceiling. The snake-man hissed and gathered his emotions for an attack. Rod felt his skin go goosepimply all over, then he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise, finally he felt nothing but an unbearable alertness. If these were the thoughts which the snake-man was sending out of the trailer van, no passer-by could possibly eavesdrop on the decision. The startling pressure of raw menace would take care of that instead. The three members of the board held hands and seemed to be asleep. The Lord Redlady opened his eyes and shook his head, almost imperceptibly, at the snake-soldier. The feeling of snake-threat went off. The soldier returned to his immobile position, eyes forward. The members of the board slumped over their table. They did not seem to be able or ready to speak. They looked out of breath. At last Taggart dragged himself to his feet, gasping his message to Rod: "There's the door, boy. Go. You're a citizen. Free." Rod started to thank him but the old man held up his right hand: "Don't thank me. Duty. But remember -- not one word, ever, about this hearing. Go along." Rod plunged for the door, lurched through, and was in his own yard. Free. For a moment he stood in the yard, stunned. The dear gray sky of Old North Australia rolled low overhead; this was no longer the eerie light of Old Earth, where the heavens were supposed to shine perpetually blue. He sneezed as the dry air caught the tissue pf his nostrils. He felt his clothing chill as the moisture evaporated out of it; he did not think whether it was the wetness of the trailer-van or his own sweat which had made his shirt so wet. There were a lot of people there, and a lot of light. And the smell of roses was as far away as another life might be. Lavinia stood near him, weeping. He started to turn to her, when a collective gasp from the crowd caused him to turn around. The snake-man had come out of the van. (It was just an old theater-van, he realized at last, the kind which he himself had entered a hundred times.) His earth uniform looked like the acme of wealth and decadence among the dusty coveralls of the men and the poplin dresses of the women. His green complexion looked bright among the tanned faces of the Norstrilians. He saluted Rod. Rod did not return the salute. He just stared. Perhaps they had changed their minds and had sent the giggle death after him. The snake-soldier watched with flickering eyes. He made no comment, but he saluted and went stiffy back to the van. At the door he turned and looked over the crowd as though he were appraising the easiest way to kill them all. He said nothing, threatened nothing. He opened the door and put himself into the van. There was no sign of who the human inhabitants of the van might be. There must be, thought Rod, some way of getting them in and out of the Garden of Death very secretly and very quietly, because he had lived around the neighborhood a long time and had never had the faintest idea that his own neighbors might sit on a board. The people were funny. They stood quietly in the yard, waiting for him to make the first move. He turned stiffly and looked around more deliberately. Why, it was his neighbors and kinfolk, all of them -- McBans, MacArthurs, Passarellis, Schmidts, even the Sanders! He lifted his hand in greeting to all of them. Pandemonium broke loose. r T' l hey rushed toward him. The women kissed him, the men patted him on the back and shook his hand, the little children began a piping little song about the Station of Doom. He had become the center of a mob which led him to his own kitchen. Many of the people had begun to cry. He wondered why. Almost immediately, he understood -- They liked him. For unfathomable people reasons, mixed-up non-logical human reasons, they had wished him well. Even the auntie who had predicted a coffin for him was snivelling without shame, using a comer of her apron to wipe her eyes and nose. He had gotten tired of people, being a freak himself, but in this moment of trial their capricious goodness flowed over him like a great wave. He let them sit him down in his own kitchen. Among the babies, the weeps, the laughter, the hearty and falsely cheerful relief, he heard a single fugue being repeated again and again: they liked him. He had come back from death. Without liquor, it made him drunk. "I can't stand it," he shouted, "I like you all so dashed bloomed crutting much that I could beat the sentimental brains out of the whole crook lot of you..." "Isn't that a sweet speech?" murmured an old farm wife nearby. A policeman in full uniform agreed. The party had started. It lasted three full days, and when it was over there was not a dry eye or a full bottle on the whole Station of Doom. From time to time he cleared up enough to enjoy his miraculous gift of hiering. He looked through all their minds while they chatted and sang and drank and ate and were as happy as Larry; there was not one of them who had come along vainly. They were truly rejoicing. They loved him. They wished him well. He had his doubts about how long that kind of love would last, but he enjoyed it while it lasted. Lavinia stayed out of his way the first day; on the second and third days she was gone. They gave him real Norstrilian beer to drink, which they had brought up to # proof by the imple addition of raw spirits. With this, he forgot the Garden of Death, the sweet wet smells, the precise offworld voice of the Lord Redlady. He looked in their minds and over and over again he saw the same thing. "You're our boy. You made it. You're alive. Good luck, Rod, good luck to you, fellow. We didn't have to see you stagger off, giggling and happy, to the house that you would die in." Had he made it, thought Rod, or was it chance which had done it for him? V T)y the end of the week, the celebration was over. The assorted aunts and cousins had gone back to their farms. The Station of Doom was quiet, and Rod spent the morning making sure that the fieldhands had not neglected the sheep too much during the prolonged party. He found that Daisy, a young #ton sheep, had not been turned for two days and had to be relanolinized on her ground side before earth canker set in; he discovered that the nutrient tubes for Tanner, his #-ton ram, had become jammed and that the poor sheep was getting a bad case of edema in his gigantic legs. Otherwise things were quiet. Even when he saw Beasley's red pony tethered in his own yard, he had no premonition of trouble. He went cheerfully into the house, greeting Beasley with an irreverent : "Have a drink on me, Mister and Owner Beasley! Oh, you have one already! Have the next one then, sir!" "Thanks for the drink, lad, but I came to see you. On business." "Yes sir," said Rod. "You're one of my appointed trustees, aren't you?" "That I am," said Beasley, "but you're in trouble, lad. Real trouble." Rod smiled at him evenly and calmly. He knew that the older man had to make a big effort to talk with his voice instead of just spieking with his mind; he appreciated the fact that Beasley had come to him personally, instead of talking to the other trustees about him. It was a sign that he, Rod, had passed his ordeal. With genuine composure, Rod declared, "I've been thinking, sir, this week, that I'd gotten out of trouble." "What do you mean, Owner McBan?" "You remember..." Rod did not dare mention the Garden of Death, nor his memory that Beasley had been one of the secret board who had passed him as being fit to live. Beasley took the cue. "Some things we don't mention, lad, and I see that you have been well taught." He stopped there and stared at Rod with the expression of a man looking at an unfamiliar corpse before turning it over to identify it. Rod became uneasy with the stare. "Sit, lad, sit down," said Beasley, commanding Rod in his own house. Rod sat down on the bench, since Beasley occupied the only chair -- Rod's grandfather's huge, carved, offworld throne. He sat. He did not like being ordered about, but he was sure that Beasley meant him well and was probably strained by the unfamiliar effort of talking with his throat and mouth. Beasley looked at him again with that peculiar expression, a mixture of sympathy and distaste. "Get up again, lad, and look round your house to see if there's anybody about." "There isn't," said Rod. "My aunt Doris left after I was cleared, the workwoman Eleanor borrowed a cart and went off to market and I have only two station hands. They're both out reinfecting Baby. She ran low on her santaclara count." Normally, the wealth-producing sicknesses of their gigantic half-paralyzed sheep would have engrossed the full attention of any two Norstrilian farmers, without respect to differences in age and grade. This time, no. Beasley had something serious and unpleasant on his mind. He looked so pruney and unquiet that Rod felt a real sympathy for the man. D od did not argue. Dutifully  he went out the back door, looked around the south side of the house, saw no one, walked around the house on the north side, saw no one there either, and re-entered the house from the front door. Beasley had not stirred, except to pour a little more bitter ale from his bottle to his glass. Rod met his eyes. Without another word, Rod sat down. If the man was seriously concerned about him (which Rod thought Beasley was), and if the man was reasonably intelligent (which Rod knew he was), the communication was worth waiting for and listening too. Rod was still sustained by the pleasant feeling that his neighbors really liked him, a feeling which had come plainly to the surface of their honest Norstrilian faces when he walked back into his own back yard from the van of the Garden of Death. Beasley said, as though he were speaking of an unfamiliar food or a rare drink, "Boy, this talking has some advantages. If a man doesn't put his ear into it, he can't just pick it up with his mind, can he, now?" Rod thought for a moment. Candidly he spoke, "I'm too young to know for sure, but I never heard of somebody picking up spoken words by hiering them with his mind. It seems to be one or the other. You never talk while you are spieking, do you?" Beasley nodded. "That's it, then. I have something to tell you which I shouldn't tell you, and yet I have got to tell you. So if I keep my voice blooming low, nobody else will pick it up, will they?" Rod nodded. "What is it, sir? Is there something wrong with the title to my property?" Beasley took a drink but kept staring at Rod over the top of the mug while he drank. "You've got trouble there too, lad. But even though it's bad, it's something I can talk over with you and with the other trustee. This is more personal, in a way. And worse." "Please, sir! What is it?" cried Rod, almost exasperated by all this mystification. "The Onseck is after you." "What's an onseck?" said Rod, "I have never heard of it." "It's not an it," said Beasley gloomily, "it's a him. Onseck, you know, the chap in the Commonwealth government. The man who keeps the books for the vice-chairman. It was HonSec., meaning Honorary Secretary or something else prehistoric, when we first came to this planet, but by now everybody just says Onseck and writes it just the way it sounds. He knows that he can't reverse your hearing in the Garden of Death." "Nobody could!" cried Rod. "It's never been done; everybody knows that." "They may know it, but there's civil trial." "How can they give me a civil trial when I haven't had time to change? You yourself must know -- ?" "Never, laddie, never say what Beasley knows or doesn't know. Just say what you think." Even in private, between just the two of them, Beasley did not want to violate the fundamental secrecy of the hearing in the Garden of Death. "I'm just going to say, Mister and Owner Beasley," said Rod very heatedly, "that a civil trial for general incompetence is something which is applied to an owner only after the neighbors have been complaining for a long time about him. They haven't had the time or the right to complain about me, have they now?" Beasley kept his hand on the handle of his mug. The use of spoken words tired him. A crown of sweat began to show around the top of his forehead. "Suppose, lad," said he very solemnly, "that I knew through proper channels something about how you were judged in that van -- there! I've said it, me that shouldn't have. And suppose that I knew the Onseck hated a foreign gentleman that might have been in a van like that -- " "The Lord Redlady?" whispered Rod, shocked at last by the fact that Beasley forced himself to talk about the unmentionable. "Aye," nodded Beasley, his honest face close to breaking into tears, "and suppose that I knew that the Onseck knew you and felt the rule was wrong, all wrong, that you were a freak who would hurt all Norstrilia, what would I do?" "I don't know," said Rod. "Tell me, perhaps?" "Never," said Beasley. "I'm an honest man. Get me another drink." O od walked over to the cupboard, brought out another bottle of bitter ale, wondering where or when he might have known the Onseck. He had never had much of anything to do with government. His family -- first his grandfather, while he lived, and then his aunts and cousins -- had taken care of all the official papers and permits and things. Beasley drank deeply. "Good ale, this. Hard work, talking, even though it's a fine way to keep a secret, if you're pretty sure nobody can peep our minds." "I don't know him," said Rod. "Who?" asked Beasley, momentarily off his trail of thought. "The Onseck. I don't know any Onseck. I've never been to New Canberra. I've never seen an official -- no, nor an offworlder neither, not until I met that foreign gentleman we were talking about. How can the Onseck know me if I don't know him?" "But you did, laddie. He wasn't Onseck then." "For sheep's sake, sir," said Rod, "tell me who it is!" "Never use violent language when simple thoughts are clearer," said Beasley glumly. "I'm sorry, sir. I apologize. Who was it?" "Houghton Syme to the hundred-and-forty-ninth," then said Beasley. "We have no neighbor of that name, sir." "No, we don't," said Beasley hoarsely, as though he had come to the end of his road in imparting secrets. Rod stared at him, still puzzled. In the far, far distance way beyond Pillow Hill, his giant sheep baa'd. That probably meant that Hopper was hoisting her into a new position on her platform so that she could reach fresh grass. Beasley brought his face close to Rod's. He whispered, and it was funny to see the hash a normal man made out of whispering when he hadn't even talked with his voice for half a year. His words had a low, dirty tone to them, as though he were going to tell Rod an extremely filthy story or ask him some personal and most improper question. "Your life, laddie," he gasped. "I know you've had a rum one. I hate to ask you, but I must. How much do you know of your own life?" "Oh, that," said Rod easily. "That. I don't mind being asked that, even if it is a little wrong-o. I have had four childhoods, zero to sixteen each time. My family kept hoping that I would grow up to spiek and hier like everybody else, but I just stayed me. Of course, I wasn't a real baby on the three times they started me over, just sort of an educated idiot the size of a boy sixteen." "That's it, ad. But can you remember them, those other lives?" "Bits and pieces, sir. Pieces and bits. It didn't hold together -- " He checked himself and gasped, "Houghton Syme! Houghton Syme! Old Hot and Simple. Of course I know him. The one-shot boy. I knew him in my first prepper, in my first childhood. We were pretty good friends, but we hated each other anyhow. I was a freak and he was too. I couldn't spiek and hier, and he couldn't take stroon. That meant that I would never get through the Garden of Death -- just the giggle room and a fine owner's coffin for me. And him -- he was worse. He would just get an Old Earth lifetime -- a hundred and sixty years or so and then blotto. He must be an oldish man now. Poor chap! How did he get to be Onseck? What power does an Onseck have?" ' says he's your friend and that he hates to do it, but he's got to see to it that you are killed -- for the good of Norstrilia. He says it's his duty. He got to be Onseck because he was always jawing about his duty and people were a little sorry for him because he was going to die so soon, just one Old Earth lifetime with all the stroon in the universe produced around his feet and him unable to take it -- " "They never cured him, then?" "Never," said Beasley. "He's an old man now, and bitter. And he's sworn to see you die." "Can he do it? Being Onseck, I mean." "He might. He hates that foreign gentleman we were talking about because the offworlder told him he was a provincial fool. He hates you because you will live and he will not. What was it you called him in school?" "Old Hot and Simple." "He's not hot and he's not simple. He's cold and complicated and cruel and unhappy. If we didn't all of us think that he was going to die in a little while, ten or a hundred years or so, we might vote him into a giggle room ourselves. For misery and incompetence. But he is Onseck and he's after you. I've said it now. I shouldn't have. But when I saw that sly cold face talking about you and trying to declare your board incompetent right while you, laddie, were having an honest binge with your family and neighbors at having gotten through at last -- when I saw that white sly face creeping around where you couldn't even see him for a fair fight -- than I said to myself. Rod McBan may not be a man officially, but the poor clodding crutt has paid the full price for being a man. So I've told you. I have taken a chance, and I may have hurt my honor." Beasley sighed. His honest red face was troubled indeed. "I may have have hurt my honor, a sore thing here in Norstrilia where a man can live as long as he wants. But I'm glad I did. Besides, my throat is sore with all this talking. Give me another bottle of bitter ale, lad, before I go and get my horse." Wordlessly Rod got him the ale and poured it for him. Beasley, uninclined to do any more talking, sipped at the ale. Perhaps, thought Rod, he is hiering around carefully to see if there have been any human minds nearby which might have picked up the telepathic leakage from the conversation. As Beasley handed back the mug and started to leave with a wordless neighborly nod, Rod could not restrain himself from asking one last question, which he spoke in a hissed whisper. Beasley had gotten his mind so far off the subject of sound talk that he merely stared at Rod. Perhaps, Rod thought, he is asking me to spiek plainly because he has forgotten that I cannot spiek at all. That was the case, because Beasley croaked in a very hoarse voice: "What is it, lad? Don't make me talk much. My voice is scratching me and my honor is sore within me." "What should I do, sir? What should I do?" "Mister and Owner McBan, that's your problem. I'm not you. I wouldn't know." "But what would you do, sir? Suppose you were me." Beasley's blue eye's looked over at Pillow Hill for a moment, abstractedly. "Get offplanet. Get off. Go away. For a hundred years or so. Then that man -- him -- he'll be dead in due time and you can come back, fresh as a new-blossomed twinkle." "But how, sir? How can I do it?" Beasley patted him on his shoulder, gave him a broad wordless smile, put his foot in his stirrup, sprang into his saddle and looked down at Rod. "I wouldn't know, neighbor. But good luck to you, just the same. I've done more than I should. Good-by." He slapped his horse gently with his open hand and trotted out of the yard. At the edge of the yard the horse changed to a canter. Rod stood in his own doorway, utterly alone. VI A fter Beasley left, Rod loped miserably around his farm. He missed his grandfather, who had been living during his first three childhoods, but who had died while Rod was going through a fourth, simulated infancy in an attempt to cure his telepathic handicap. He even missed his Aunt Margot, who had voluntarily gone into Withdrawal at the age of #. There were plenty of cousins and kinsmen from whom he could ask advice; there were the legal trustees of the Station of Doom; there were the two hands on the farm; there was even the chance that he could go see Mother Hitton herself, because she had once been married to one of his great #I uncles. But this time he did not want companionship. There was nothing he could do with people. The Onseck was people too; imagine old "hot and simple" becoming a power in the land. Rod knew that this was his own fight. His own. What had ever been his own before? Not even his life. He could remember bits about the different boyhoods he had. He even had vague uncomfortable glimpses of seasons of pain -- the times they had sent him back to babyhood while leaving him large. That hadn't been his choice. The old man had ordered it or the Vice-chairman had approved it or Aunt Margot had begged for it. Nobody had asked him much, except to say, "You will agree..." He had agreed. He had been good -- so good that he hated them all at times and wondered if they knew he hated them. The hate never lasted, because the real people involved were too well-meaning, too kind, too ambitious for his own sake. He had to love them back. Trying to think these things over, he loped around his estate on foot The big sheep lay on their platform, forever sick, forever gigantic. Perhaps some of them remembered where they had been lambs, free to run through the sparse grass, free to push their heads through the pliofilm covers of the canals and to help themselves to water when they wanted to drink. Now they weighed hundreds of tons and were fed by feeding machines, watched by guard machines, checked by automatic doctors. They were fed and watered a little through the mouth only because pastoral experience showed that they stayed fatter and lived longer if a semblance of normality were left to them. His aunt Doris, who kept house for him, was still away. His workwoman Eleanor, whom he paid an annual sum larger than many planets paid for their entire armed forces, had gone to market. The two sheephands, Bill and Hopper, were still out. And he did not want to talk to them, anyhow. He wished that he could see the Lord Redlady, that strange offworld man whom he had met in the Garden of Death. The Lord Redlady just looked as though he knew more things than Norstrilians did, as though he came from sharper, crueller, wiser societies than most people in Old North Australia had ever seen. But you can't ask for a Lord. Particularly not when you have met him only in a secret hearing. Rod had gotten to the final limits of his own land. Humphrey's Lawsuit lay beyond -- a broad strip of poor land, completely untended, the building-high ribs of long-dead sheep skeletons making weird shadows as the sun began to set. The Humphrey family had been lawing over that land for hundreds of years. Meanwhile it lay waste except for the few authorized public animals which the Commonwealth was allowed to put on any land, public or private. Rod knew that freedom was only two steps away. All he had to do was to step over the line and shout with his mind for people. He could do that even though he could not really spiek. A telepathic garble of alarm would bring the orbiting guards down to him in seven or eight minutes. Then he would need only to say: "I swear off title. I give up mistership and ownership. I demand my living from the Commonwealth. Watch me, people, while I repeat." Three repetitions of this would make him an Official Pauper, with not a care left -- no meetings, no land to tend, no accounting to do, nothing but to wander around Old North Australia picking up any job he wanted and quitting it whenever he wanted. It was a good life, a free life, the best the Commonwealth could offer to squatters and owners who otherwise lived long centuries of care, responsibility and honor. It was a fine life -- But no McBan had ever taken it. Not even a cousin. Nor could he. He went back to the house, miserable. He listened to Eleanor talking with Bill and Hopper while dinner was served -- a huge plate of boiled mutton, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, station-brewed beer out of the keg. (There were planets, he knew, where people never tasted such food from birth to death. There they lived on impregnated pasteboard which was salvaged from the latrines, reimpregnated with nutrients and vitamins, deodorized and sterilized and issued again the next day.) He knew it was a fine dinner, but he did not care. How could he talk about the Onseck to these people? He dropped the rest of the 'inner into his stomach as though it were sheep-food pellets, and went to his bedroom early. For the first time in his life, he slept badly. And out of the badsleep, the answer came. "Ask Hamlet." Hamlet was not even a man. He was just a talking picture in a cave, but he was wise, he was from Old Earth Itself, and he had no friends to whom to give Rod's secrets. With this idea, Rod turned on his sleeping shelf and went into a deep sleep. I n the morning his Aunt Doris was still not back, so he told the workwoman Eleanor: "I'll be gone all day. Don't look for me or worry about me." "What about your lunch, mister and owner? You can't run around the station with no tucker." 'Wrap some up, then." "Where're you going, mister and owner, sir, if you can tell me?" There was an unpleasant searching edge in her voice, as though -- being the only adult woman present -- she had to check on him as though he were still a child. He didn't like it, but he replied with a frank enough air. "I'm not leaving the station. I just need to think." More kindly she said, "You think, then, Rod. Just go right ahead and think. If you ask me, you ought to go live with a family -- " 'I know what you've said," he interrupted her. "I'm not making any big decisions today, Eleanor. Just rambling and thinking." "All right then, mister and owner. Ramble around and worry about the ground you're walking on. It's you that get the worries for it. I'm glad my daddy took the official pauper words. We used to be rich." Unexpectedly she brightened and laughed at herself. "Now that, you've heard that too, Rod. Here's your food. Do you have your water?" "I'll steal from the sheep," he said irreverently. She knew he was joking and she waved him a friendly good-by. The old, old gap was to the rear of the house, so he left by the front. He wanted to go the long wrong way around, so that neither human eyes nor human minds would stumble on the secret he had found fifty-six years before, the first time he was eight years old. Through all the pain and the troubles he had remembered this one vivid bright secret -- the deep cave full of treasures. To these he must go. nphe sun was high in the sky, spreading its patch of brighter gray above the gray clouds, when he slid into what looked like a dry irrigation ditch. He walked a few steps along the ditch. Then he stopped and listened carefully, very carefully. There was no sound except for the snoring of a young hundredton ram a mile or so away. Rod then stared around. In the far distance, a police omithopter soared as lazy as a sated hawk. Rod tried desperately much to hier. He heard nothing with his mind, but with his ears he heard the slow heavy pulsing of his own blood pounding through his head. He took a chance. The trapdoor was there, just inside the edge of the culvert. He lifted it and, leaving it open, dove in as confidently as a swimmer knifing his way into a familiar pool. He knew his way. His clothes ripped a little but the weight of his body dragged him past the narrowness of the doorframe. His hands reached out and like the hands of an acrobat they caught the inner bar. The door behind snapped shut How frightening this had been when he was little and tried the trip for the first time! He had let himself down with a rope and a torch, never realizing the importance of the trap-door at the edge of the culvert! Now it was easy. With a thud, he landed on his feet. The bright old illegal lights went on. The dehumidifier began to purr, lest the wetness of his breath spoil the treasures in the room. There were drama-cubes by the score, with two different sizes of projectors. There were heaps of clothing, for both men and women, left over from forgotten ages. In a chest, in the corner, there was even a small machine from before the Age of Space, a crude but beautiful little mechanical chronograph, completely without resonance compensation, and the ancient name "Jaeger Le Coultre" written across its face. It still kept earth time after fifteen thousand years. Rod sat down in an utterly impermissable chair -- one which seemed to be a complex of pillows built on an interlocking frame. The touch alone was a medicine for his worries. One chair-leg was broken, but that was the way his grandfather-tothe-nineteenth had violated the Clean Sweep. The Clean Sweep had been Old North Australia's last political crisis many centuries before, when the last underpeople were hunted down and driven off the planet and when all damaging luxuries had to be turned in to the Commonwealth authorities, to be re-purchased by their owners only at a re-valuation twenty thousand times higher than their assessed worth. It was the final effort to keep Norstrilians simple, healthy and well. Every citizen had to swear that he had turned in every single item, and the oath had been taken with thousands of telepaths watching. It was a testimony to the high mental power and adept deceitfulness of grandfather-to-thenineteenth that Rod McBan bolic breakage on his favorite treasures, some of which were not even in the categories allowed for re-purchase, like offworld drama-cubes, and had been able to hide his things in an unimportant corner of his fields -- hide them so well that neither robbers nor police had thought of them since. Rod picked up his favorite. speare. Without viewer, the cube was designed to act when touched by a true human being. The top of the cube became a little stage, the actors appeared as bright miniatures speaking Ancient Inglish, a language very close to Old North Australian, and the telepathic commentary, cued to the Old Common Tongue, rounded out the story. Since Rod was not dependably telepathic, he had learned a great deal of the Ancient Inglish by trying to understanding the dramas without the commentary. He did not like what he first saw and he shook the cube until the play approached its end. At last he heard the dear high familiar voice speaking in Hamlet's last scene: I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu! You that look pale and tremble at this chance. That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time -- as this fell sergeant, death, Is strict in his arrest -- O! I could tell you -- But let it be, Horatio, I am dead. Rod shook the cube very gently and the scene sped down a few lines. Hamlet was still talking:... what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shaU live behind me. If thou didst ever hold me In thy heart. Absent thee from felicity a while. And in this harsh world draw thy breath In pain To tell my story. Rod put down the cube very gently. The bright little figures disappeared. The room was silent. But he had the answer and it was wisdom. And wisdom, coeval with man, comes unannounced, unbidden, and unwelcome into every life; Rod found that he had discovered the answer to a basic problem. Tut not his own problem. The answer was Houghton Symes, old Hot and Simple. It was the Hon. Sec. who was already dying of a wounded name. Hence the persecution. It was the Onseck who had the "fell sergeant, death" acting strictly in his arrest, even if the arrest were only a few decades off instead of a few minutes. He, Rod McBan, was to live; his old acquaintance was to die; and the dying -- oh. the dying, always, always! -- could not help resenting the survivors, even if they were loved ones, at least for a little bit. Hence the Onseck. But what of himself? Rod brushed a pile of priceless, illegal manuscripts out of the way and picked up a small book marked, Reconstituted Late Inglish Language Verse. At each page as it opened, a young man or woman seven centimeteis high stood up brightly on the page and recited the text. Rod ruffled the pages of the old book so that the little figures appeared and tt cm bled and fled like weak flames seen on a bright day. One caught his eye and he stopped the page at mid-poem. The figure was saying: The challenge holds. I cannot now retract The boast I made to that relentless court. The hostile Justice of my self-contempt. If now the ordeal Is prepared, my act Must soon be shown. I pray that It Is short. And never dream that I shall be exempt. He glanced at the foot of the page and saw the name, Casimir Colegrove. Of course, he had seen that name before. An old poet. A good one. But what did the words mean to him, Rod McBan, sitting in a hidden hole within the limits of his own land? He was a Mister and Owner, in all except final title, and he was running from an enemy he could not define. "The hostile justice of my selfcontempt..." That was the key of it! He had not run from the Onseck. He had run from himself. He took justice itself as hostile because it corresponded with his sixtyodd years of boyhood, his endless disappointment, his compliance with things which would never, till all worlds burned, be complied with. How could he hier and spiek like other people if somewhere a dominant feature had turned recessive? Hadn't real justice already vindicated him and cleared him? It was himself who was cruel. Other people were kind. (Shrewdness made him add, "sometimes.") He had taken his own inner sense of trouble and had made it fit the outside world, like the morbid little poems he had read a long time ago. It was somewhere right in this room, and when he had first read it, he felt that the long-dead writer had put it down for himself alone. But it wasn't really so. Other people had had their troubles too and the poem had expressed something older than Rod McBan. It went. The wheels of fate are spinning around. Between them the souls of men are ground. Who strive for throats to make some sound Of protest out of the mad profound Trap of the godmachine! "Godmachine," though Rod, "now that's a due. I've got the only all-mechanical computer on this planet. I'll play it on the stroon crop speculations, win all or lose all." The boy stood up in the forbidden room. "Fight it is," he said to the cubes on the floor, "and a good thanks to you, grandfather-tothe-nineteenth. You met the law and did not lose. And now it is my turn to be Rod McBan." He turned and shouted to himself : "To earth!" The call embarrassed him. He felt unseen eyes staring at him. He almost blushed, and would have hated himself if he had. He stood on the top of a treasure-chest turned on its side. Two more gold coins, worthless as money but priceless as curios, fell noiselessly on the thick old rugs. He thought a good-by again to his secret room and he jumped upward for the bar. He caught it, chinned himself, raised himself higher, swung a leg on it but not over it, got his other foot on the bar and then, very carefully but with the power of all his muscles, pushed himself into the black opening above. The lights suddenly went off, the dehumidifier hummed louder, and the daylight dazzled him as the trapdoor, touched, flung itself open. He thrust his head into the culvert. The daylight seemed the treasure room. All silent. All clear. He rolled into the ditch. The door, with silence and power, closed itself behind him. He was never to know it, but it had been cued to the genetic code of the descendants of Rod McBan. Had any other person touched it, it would have withstood them for a long time. Almost forever. You see, it was not really his door. He was its boy. C# r T"his land has made me," said Rod aloud, as he clambered out of the ditch and looked around. The young ram had apparently wakened; his snoring had stopped and over the quiet hill there came the sound of his panting. Thirsty again! The Station of Doom was not so rich that it could afford unlimited water to its giant sheep. They lived all right. Rod would have asked the trustees to sell even the sheep for water, if a real drought set in. But never the land. Never the land. No land for sale. It didn't even really belong to him: he belonged to it -- the rolling dry fields, the covered rivers and canals, the sly catchments which caught every drop which might otherwise have gone to his neighbors. That was the pastoral business -- its product immortality and its price water. The Commonwealth could have flooded the planet or created oceans, with the financial resources it had at command, but the planet and the people were regarded as one ecological entity. Old Australia -- the fabulous continent of old Earth now covered by the ruins of the abandoned Chinesian cityworld of Nanbien -- had in its prime been broad, dry, open, beautiful; the planet of Old North Australia, by the dead weight of its own tradition, had to remain the same. Imagine trees. Imagine leaves -- vegetation dropping uneaten to the ground. Imagine water pouring by the thousands of tons, no one greeting it with tears of relief or happy laughter! Imagine Earth -- Old Earth -- Manhome itself. Rod had tried to think of a whole planet inhabited by Hamlets, drenched with music and poetry, kneedeep in blood and drama. It was unimaginable, really, though he had tried to think it through. Like a chill, a drill, a thrill cutting into his very nerves he thought: Imagine Earth women! What terrifying beautiful things they must be! Dedicated to ancient and corruptive arts, surrounded by the objects which Norstrilia had forbidden long ago stimulated by experiences which the very law of his own world had expunged from the books! He would meet them; he couldn't help it; what, what would he do when he met a genuine Earth woman? He would have to ask his computer, even though the neighbors laughed at him for having the only pure computer left on the planet. They didn't know what grandfather to-the-nineteenth had done. He had taught the computer to lie. It stored all the forbidden things which the Law of the Clean Sweep had brushed out of Norstrilian experience. It could lie like a trooper. Rod wondered whether "a trooper" might be some archaic Earth official who did nothing but tell the untruth, day in and day out, for his living. But the computer usually did not lie to him. If grandfather # had behaved as saucily and unconventionally with the computer as he had with everything else, that particular computer would know all about women. Even things' which they did not themselves know. Or wish to know. Good computer! thought Rod as he trotted around the long, long fields to his house. Eleanor would have the tucker on. Doris might be back. Bill and Hopper would be angry if they had to wait for the mister before they ate. To speed up his trip, he headed straight for the little cliff behind the house, hoping no one would see him jump down it. He was much stronger than most of the men he knew, but he was anxious, for some private inexpressible reason, for them not to know it. He found the cliff. He dropped over it, feet first, his heels kicking up the scree as he tobogganed through loose rock to the foot of the slope. And aunt Doris was there. "Where have you been?" said she. "Walking, mum," said he. She gave him a quizzical look but knew better than to ask more. Talking always fussed her, anyhow. She hated the sound of her voice, which she considered much too high. The matter passed. Inside the house, they ate. Beyond the door and the oil lamp, a gray world became moonless, starless, black. This was night, his own night.  t the end of the meal he waited for Doris to say grace to the Queen. She did, but under her thick eyebrows her eyes expressed something other than thanks. "You're going out," she said right after the prayer. It was an accusation, not a question. The two hired men looked at him with quiet doubt. A week ago he had been a boy. Now he was the same person, but legally a man. Workwoman Eleanor looked at him too. She smiled very unobtrusively to herself. She was on his side whenever any other person came into the picture; when they were alone, she nagged him as much as she dared. She had known his parents before they went offworld for a long-overdue honeymoon and were chewed into molecules by a battle between raiders and police. That gave her a proprietary feeling about him. He tried to spiek to Doris with his mind, just to see if it would work. It didn't. The two men bounded from their seats and ran for the yard, Eleanor sat in her chair holding tight to the table but saying nothing and aunt Doris screeched so loud that he could not make out the words. He knew she meant "Stop it!", so he did, and looked at them friendly. That started a fight. Quarrels were common in Norstrilian life, because the Fathers had taught that they were therapeutic. Children could quarrel until adults told them to stop, freemen could quarrel as long as misters were not involved, misters could quarrel as long as an owner was not present, and owners could quarrel if, at the very end, they were could quarrel in the presence of an offworlder, nor during an alert, nor with a member of the defense or police on active duty. Rod McBan was a mister and owner, but he was under trusteeship; he was a man, but he had not been given clear papers; he was a handicapped person. The rules got all mixed up. When Hopper came back to the table he muttered, "Do that again, laddie, and I'll clout you one that you won't forget!" Considering how rarely he used his voice, it was a beautiful man's voice, resonant, baritone, fullbodied, hearty and sincere in the way the individual words came out. Bill didn't say a word, but from the contortions of his face Rod gathered that he was spieking to the others at a great rate and working off his grievance that way. "If you're spieking about me, Bill," said Rod with a touch of arrogance which he did not really feel, "you'll do me the pleasure of using words or you'll get off my land!" When Bill spoke, his voice was as rusty as an old machine. "I'll have you know, you clutty little pommy, that I have more money in my name on Sidney 'Change than you and your whole glubby land are worth. Don't you tell me twice to get off the land, you silly half of a mister, or I will get. So shut up!" Rod felt his stomach knot with anger. His anger became fiercer when he felt Eleanor's restraining hand on his arm. He didn't want another person, not one more damned useless normal person, to tell him what to do about spieking and hiering. Aunt Doris's face was still hidden in her apron; she had escaped, as she always did, into weeping. Just as he was about to speak again, perhaps to lose Bill from the farm forever, his mind lifted in the mysterious way that it did sometime ; he could hier for miles. The people around him did not notice the difference. He saw the proud rage of Bill, with his money in the Sidney Exchange, bigger than many station owners had, waiting his time to buy back on the land which his father had left; he saw the honest annoyance of Hopper and was a little abashed to see that Hopper was watching him proudly and with amused affection; in Eleanor he saw nothing but wordless worry, a fear that she might lose him as she had lost so many homes, for hnnnhnnnhnn dzzmmmmm, a queer meaningless reference which had a shape in her mind but took no form in his; and in aunt Doris he caught her inner voice calling, "Rod, Rod, Rod, come back! This may be your boy and I'm a McBan to the death, but I'll never know what to do with a cripple like him." T)ill was still waiting for him to answer when another thought came into his mind : "You fool -- go to your computer!" "Who said that?" he thought, not trying to spiek again, but just thinking it with his mind. "Your computer," said the faraway thinkvoice. "You can't spiek!" said Rod. "You're a pure machine with not an animal brain in you." "When you call me, Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred and fifty first, I can speak across space itself. I'm cued to you and you shouted just now with your spiekmind. I can feel you hiering me." "But -- " said Rod in words. "Take it easy, lad," said Bill, right in the room with him. "Take it easy. I didn't mean it." "You're having one of your spells," said Aunt Doris, emerging rednosed from behind her apron. Rod stood up. Said he to all of them, "I'm sorry. I'm going out for a bit." "You're going to that bloody computer," said Bill. "Don't go, mister McBan," said Hopper, "don't let us anger you into going. It's bad enough being around that computer in daylight, but at night it must be horrible." "How would you know?" retorted Rod. "You've never been there at night. And I have. Lots of times... "There are dead people in it," said Hopper. "It's an old war computer. Your family should never have bought it in the first place. It doesn't belong on a farm. A thing like that should be hung out in space and orbited." "All right, Eleanor," said Rod, "you tell me what to do. Everybody else has," he added with the last bit of his remaining anger, as his hiering closed down and he saw the usual opaque faces around him at the uncleared table. "It's no use, Rod. Go along to your computer. You've got a strange life and you're the one that will live it, Mister McBan, and not these other people around here." Her words made sense to him, even then. He stood up. "I'm sorry," said he, again, in lieu of a better good-by. He stood in the doorway, hesitant. He would have liked to say good-by in a better way, but he did not know how to express it. Anyhow, he couldn't spiek, not so they could hier it with their minds; speaking with a voice was so crude, so flat for the fine little things that needed expression in life. They looked at him, and he at them. "Ngahh!" said he, in a raw cry of self-derision and fond disgust. Their expressions showed that they had gotten his meaning, though the word carried nothing with it. Bill nodded, Hopper looked friendly and a little worried, Aunt Doris stopped snivelling and began to stretch out one hand, only to stop it in midgesture and Eleanor sat immobile at the table, upset by wordless troubles of her own. He turned. The cube of lamplight, the cabin room, was behind him. Ahead was the darkness of all Norstrilian nights, except for the weird rare times that they were cut up by traceries of lightness. He started off for a house which only a few but he could see, and which none but he could enter. It was a forgotten, invisible temple; it housed the MacArthur family computer, to which the older McBan computer was linked; and it was called the Palace of the Governor of Night. IX n od loped across the rolling  land, his land. Other Norstrilians, telepathically normal, would have taken fixes by hiering the words in nearby houses. Rod could not guide his walk by telepathy, so he whistled to himself in an odd off-key with lots of flats. Echoes, very faint, pulsed back to his unconscious mind; he got them through the overdeveloped hearing which he had worked out for not being able to hier with his mind. He sensed a slope ahead of himself and jogged up it: he avoided a clump of brush; he heard his youngest ram, snoring the resounding snore of a santaclara-infected sheep. Soon he would see it -- the Palace of the Governor of Night, forever luminescent in the ultraviolet band. It was a Daimonibuilt palace once, long, long ago. It had been built for the Governor of Night on Khufu II, where they used to raise the Furry Mountain Fur But the Fur was gone and the Khufuans starved, and the palace had gone up for sale when there was no more a Governor of Night. had bought it for a prodigious price and shipped it to his farm. It was a replica of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, way back on Manhome Earth itself. Normal people could not see it, since it was visible only in the ultra-violet band. Sometimes, with a real mean dust storm, the dust outlined it and the palace then showed up in ghostly form -- mysterious, sacred, useless, but very beautiful -- to ordinary people. For Rod it was the front gate to his old family computer, just as the secret passage in the gap was the back gate. Only relatives of the McBans, with eyesight which ran into the ultra-violet, could see the building at normal times. And now it belonged to Rod McBan, and housed his computer. His own computer. He could speak to it at the extension which reached into the gap of hidden treasures. He talked to it, other times, at the talkpoint in the field, where the polished red-and-black metal of the old computer was reproduced in exquisite miniature. Or he could come to this strange building, the Palace of the Governor of Night, and stand as the worshippers of Diana had once stood, crying, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" When he came in this way, he had the full console in front of him; it was automatically unlocked by his presence, just as his grandfather had showed him, three childhoods before, when the old McBan still had high hopes that Rod would turn into a normal Old North Australian boy. The grandfather, using his personal code in turn, unlocked the access controls and invited the computer to make its own foolproof recording of Rod, so that Roderick Frederick Ronald known to the mathine. no matter what age he attained, no matter how maimed or disguised he might be, no matter how sick or forlorn he might return to the machine of his forefathers. The old man did not even ask the machine how the identification was obtained. He trusted the computer. P od climbed the steps of the Palace. The columns stood with their ancient carving, bright in his second sight. He never quite knew how he could see with the ultra-violet, since he noticed no difference between himself and other people in the matter of eyesight, except that he more often got headaches in the open on clean-cloudy days. At a time like this, the effect was spectacular. It was his time, his temple, his own place. In the reflected light from the Palace, he could see that many of his cousins must have been out to see the Palace during the nights. They too could see it, as it was a family inheritance to be able to watch the invisible temple which one's friends could not see. But they did not have access; he alone had that. "Computer," he cried, "admit me!" "Message unnecessary," said the computer. "You are always clear to enter." The voice was a male Norstrilian voice, with a touch of the theatrical in it. Rod was never quite sure that it was the voice of his own ancestor; when challenged directly as to whose voice it was using the ma chine had told him, "Input on that topic has been erased in me. I do not know. Historical evidence suggests that it was male, contemporary with my installation here, and past middle age when coded by me." Rod would have felt lively and smart except for the feelings of awe which the Palace of the Governor of Night, standing bright and visible under the dark clouds of Norstrilia, had upon him. He wanted to say something lighthearted but at first he could only mutter: "Here I am." "Observed and respected," stated the computer-voice. "If I were a person I would say 'congratulations, since you are alive.' As a computer I have no opinion on the subject. I note the fact." "What do I do now?" said Rod. "Question too general," said the computer. "Do you want a drink of water or a rest-room? I can tell you where those are. Do you wish to play chess with me? I shall win just as many games as you tell me to." "Shut up, you fool!" cried Rod. "That's not what I mean." "Computers are fools only when they malfunction. I am not malfunctioning. The reference to me as a fool is therefore nonreferential and I shall expunge it from my memory system. Repeat the question, please." "What do I do with my life?" "You will work, you will marry, you will be the father of Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-second and several other children, you will die, your body will be sent into the endless orbit with great honor. You will do this well." "Suppose I break my neck this very night?" argued Rod. "Then you would be wrong, wouldn't you?" "I would be wrong, but I still have the probabilities with me." "What do I do about the Onseck?" "Repeat." Rod had to tell the story several times before the computer understood it. "I do not," said the computer, "find myself equipped with data concerning this one man whom you so confusingly allude to as Houghton Syme sometimes and as 'Old Hot and Simple' at other times. His personal history is unknown to me. The odds tected are # to I against success, because too many people know you and know what you look like. I must let you solve you own problem concerning the Hon. Sec." "Don't you have any ideas?" "I have answers, not ideas." "Give me a piece of fruit cake and a glass of fresh milk, then." "It will cost you twelve credits and by walking to your cabin you can get these things free. Otherwise I will have to buy them from Emergency Central." "I said get them!" said Rod. The machine whirred. Extra lights appeared on the console. "Emergency Central has authorized my own use of sheltered supplies. You will pay for the replacement tomorrow." A door opened. A tray slid out, with a luscious piece of fruit cake and a glass of foaming fresh milk. Rod sat on the steps of his own palace and ate. Conversationally, he said to the computer, "You must know what to do about Old Hot and Simple. It's a terrible thing for me to go through the Garden of Death and then have a dull tool like that pester the life out of me." "He cannot pester the life out of you. You are too strong." "Recognize an idiom, you silly ass!" said Rod. The machine paused. "Idiom identified. Correction made. Apologies are herewith given to you, Child McBan." "Another mistake. I'm not Child McBan any more. I'm Mister and Owner McBan." "I will check central," said the computer. There was another long pause as the lights danced. Finally the computer answered. "Your status is mixed. You are both. In an emergency you are already the Mister and Owner of the Station of Doom, including me. Without an emergency, you are still Child McBan until your trustees release you." "When will they do that?" "Voluntary action. Human. Timing uncertain. In four or five days, it would seem. When they release you, the Hon. Sec. will have the legal right to move for your arrest as an incompetent and dangerous owner. From your point of view, it will be very sad." "And what do you think?" said Rod. "I shall think that it is a disturbing factor. I speak the truth to you." "And that is all?" "All," said the computer. "You can't stop the Hon. Sec.?" "Not without stopping everybody else." "What do you think people are, anyhow? Look here, computer, you have been talking to people for hundreds and hundreds of years. You know our names. You know my family. Don't you know anything about us? Can't you help me? What do you think I am?" "Which question first?" said the computer. Rod angrily threw the empty plate and glass on the floor of the temple. Robot arms flicked out and pulled them into the trash bin. He stared at the old polished metal of the computer. It ought to be polished. He had spent hundreds of hours polishing its case, all sixty-one panels of it, just because the machine was something which he could love. "Don't you know me? Don't you know what I am?" "You are Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-first. Anatomically, you are a spinal column with a small bone box at one end, the head, and with reproductive equipment at the other end. Inside the bone box you have a small portion of material which resembles stiff, bloody lard. With that you think -- you think better than I do, even though I have over five nections. You are a wonderful object. Rod McBan. I can understand what you are made of. I cannot share your human animal side of life." "But you know I'm in danger." "I know it." "What did you say, a while back, about not being able to stop Old Hot and Simple without stopping everybody else too? Could you stop everybody else?" "Permission requested to correct error. I could not stop everyone. If I tried to use violence, the war computers at Commonwealth Defense would destroy me before I even started programming my own actions." "You're partly a war computer." "Admittedly," said the unwearied, unhurried voice of the computer, "but the Commonwealth made me safe before they let your forefathers have me." "What can you do?" "Rod McBan the hundred and fortieth told me to tell no one, ever." "I override. Overridden." "It's not enough to do that. Your great # grandfather has a warning to which you must listen." "Go ahead," said Rod. nphere was a silence; Rod thought that the machine was searching through ancient archives for a drama cube. Rod stood on the peristyle of the Palace of the Governor of Night and tried to see the Norstrilian clouds . crawling across the sky near overhead. It felt like that kind of night; but it was very dark away from the illuminated temple porch and he could see nothing. "Do you still command?" asked the computer. "I didn't hear any warning," said Rod. "He spieked it from a memory cube." "Did you hier it?" "I was not coded to it. It was human-to-human, McBan family only." "Then," said Rod, "I override it." "Overridden," said the computer. It was not programmed to concern itself with whether the effect of its orders had been what the originator intended. "What can I do to stop everybody?" "You can bankrupt Norstrilia temporarily, buy Old Earth Itself, and then negotiate on human terms for anything you want." "Oh, lord!" said Rod. "You've gone logical again, computer! This is one of your as-if situations." The computer voice did not change its tone. It could not. The sequence of the words held a reproach, however. "This is not an imaginary situation. I am a war computer, and I was designed to include economic warfare. If you did exactly what I told you to do, you could take over all Old North Australia by legal means." "How long would we need? Two hundred years? Old Hot and Simple would have me in my grave by then." The computer could not laugh, but it could pause. It paused. "I have just checked the time on the New Melbourne Exchange. The 'Change signal says they will open in seventeen minutes. I will need four hours for your voice to say what it must. That means you will need four hours and seventeen minutes, give or take five minutes." "What makes you think you can do it?" "I am a pure computer, obsolete model. All the others have animal brains built into them, to allow for error. I do not. Furthermore, your great # grandfather hooked me into the defense net." "Didn't the Commonwealth cut you out?" "I am the only Computer which was built to tell lies. I lied to the Commonwealth when they checked on what I was getting. I am obliged to tell the truth only to you and to your designated descendants." '"I know that, but what does it have to do with it?" "I predict my own space weather, ahead of the Commonwealth . The accent was not in the pleasant, even-toned voice; Rod himself supplied it. "You've tried this out?" "I have war-gamed it more I had nothing else to do while I waited for you." "You never failed?" "I failed most of the time, when I first began. But I have not failed a 'war-game from real data for the last thousand years." "What would happen if you failed now?" "You would be disgraced and bankrupt. I would be sold and disassembled." "Is that all?" said Rod cheerfully. "Yes," said the computer. "I could stop Old Hot and Simple if I owned Old Earth Itself. Let's go." "I do not go anywhere." "I mean, let's start." "You mean, to buy Earth, as we discussed?" "What else?" yelled Rod. "What else have we been talking about?" "You must have some soup, hot soup and a tranquilizer first. I cannot work at optimum if I have a human being who gets excited." "All right," said Rod. "You must authorize me to buy them." "I authorize you." "That will be three credits." "In the name of the seven healthy sheep, what does it matter? How much will Earth cost?" lion megacredits." "Deduct three for the soup and the pill then," shouted Rod, "if it won't spoil your calculations." "Deducted," said the computer. The tray with the soup appeared, a white pill beside it. "Now let's buy Earth." "Drink your soup and take your pill first," said the computer. Rod gulped down his soup, washing the pill down with it.  "Now, let's go, cobber." "Repeat after me," said the computer, "I herewith mortgage the whole body of the said sheep five hundred thousand credits to the New Melbourne Exchange on the open board..." Rod repeated it. The process of buying Earth had begun. TTe repeated it -- and repeated it -- and repeated it. The house became a nightmare of repetition. The computer lowered its voice to a low murmur, almost a whisper. When Rod stumbled in the messages, the computer prompted him. Forward purchase... sell short... option to buy... preemptive margin... offer to sell... offer temporarily reserved... first collateral '... second collateral... deposit to drawing actwelve thousand tons of stroon... mortgage forward... promise to buy... promise to sell... hold... margin... collateral guaranteed by previous deposits... promise to pay against the pledged land... guarantor... McBanland... MacArthur land, this computer itself...conditional legality... buy... sell... guarantee... pledge... withhold... offer confirmed... offer canmegacredits... rate accepted... rate refused... forward purchase... deposit against interest... collateral previously pledged... conditional appreciation... guarantee... accept title... refuse delivery... solar weather... buy... sell...pledge... withdraw from market... withdraw from sale... not available... no collections now... dependent on radiation... corner market... buy... buy... buy... buy... buy... firm title... reconfirm title... transactions completed... reopen... register... re-register... confirm at Earth central... message fees... fifteen thousand megacredits... Rod's voice became a whisper, but the computer was sure, the computer was untiring, the computer answered all questions from the outside. Many times Rod and the computer both were given telepathic warnings built into the markets communications net. The computer was cut out and Rod could not hier them. The warnings went unheard... buy... sell... hold... confirm... deposit... convert guarantee... arbitrage... message fee... Commonwealth tax... commission... buy... ' . sell... buy... buy... buy... buy... deposit title! deposit title! deposit title! By the time that the first pretty parts of silver-gray dawn had begun, it was done. Rod was dizzy with fatigue and confusion. "Go home and sleep," said the computer. "When people find out what you have done with me, many of them will probably be excited and will wish to talk to you at great length. I suggest you say nothing." X Tvrunk with fatigue, Rod stumbled across his own land back to his cabin. He could not believe that anything had happened. If the Palace of the Governor of Night -- If the computer spoke the truth, he was already the wealthiest human being who had ever lived. He had gambled and won not a few tons of stroon or a planet or two, but credits enough to shake the Commonwealth to its foundation. He owned the Earth, on the system that any overdeposit could be called due at a certain very high margin. He owned planets, countries, mines, places, prisons, police systems, fleets, border guards, restaurants, pharmaceuticals, textiles, night clubs, treasures, royalties, licenses, sheep, land, stroon, more sheep, more land, more stroon. He had won. Only in Old North Australia could a man have done this witnout being besieged... y soldiers, reports, guards, police, investigators, tax-collectors, fortune-seekers, doctors, publicity hounds, the sick, the inquisitive, the compassionate, the angry and the affronted. Old North Australia kept calm. Privacy, simplicity, frugality -- these virtues had carried them through the hellworld of tains ate people the volcanoes poisoned sheep, the delirious oxygen made men rave with bliss as they pranced to their own deaths. The Norstrilians had survived many things, including sickness and deformity. If Rod McBan had caused a financial crisis, there were no newspapers to print it, no viewboxes to report it, nothing to excite the people. The Commonwealth authorities would pick the crisis out of their "in" baskets sometime after tucker and tea the next morning, and by afternoon he, his crisis and the computer would be in the "out" baskets. If the deal had worked, the whole thing would be paid off honestly and literally. If the deal had not worked out the way that the computer had said, his lands would be up for auction and he himself would be led gently away. But that's what the Onseck was going to do to him anyway -- Old Hot and Simple, a tiring dwarf-lifed man, driven by the boyhood hatred of many long years ago! Rod stopped for a minute. Around him stretched the rolling plains of his own land. Far ahead, to his left, there gleamed the glassy worm of a river-cover, the humped long barrel-like line which kept the precious water from evaporating. That too was his. Maybe -- after the night now passed. He thought of flinging himself to the ground and sleeping right there. He had done it before. But not this morning. Not when he might be the person he might be -- the man who made the worlds reel with his wealth. The computer had started easy. He could not take control of his property except for an emergency. The computer had made him create the emergency by selling his next three years production of santaclara at the market price. That was a serious enough emergency for any pastoralist to be in deep, sure ' trouble. From that the rest had followed. Rod sat down. He was not trying to remember. The remembering was crowding into his mind. He wanted just to get his breath, to get on home, to sleep. A tree was near him, with a thermostatically controlled cover which domed it in whenever the winds were too strong or too dry, and an underground sprinkler which kept it alive when surface moisture was not sufficient. It was one of the old MacArthur extravagances which his McBan ancestor had inherited and had added to the Station of Doom. It was a modified Earth oak, very big, a full thirteen meters high. Rod was proud of it though he did not like it much, but he had relatives who were obsessed by it and would make a three-hour ride just to sit in the shade -- dim and diffuse as it was -- of a genuine tree from Earth. When he looked at the tree, a violent noise assailed him. Mad frantic laughter -- Laughter beyond all jokes -- Laughter sick, wild, drunk, dizzy! He started to be angry and was then puzzled. Who could be laughing at him already? As a matter of nearer fact, who could be trespassing on his land? Anyhow, what was there to laugh about? (All Norstrilians knew that humor was "pleasurable corrigible malfunction." It was in the Book of Rhetoric which their Appointed Relatives had to get them through if they were even to qualify for the tests of the Garden of Death since there were no schools, no classes, no teachers, no libraries except for private ones. There were just the seven liberal arts, the. six practical sciences, and the five collections of police and defense studies. Specialists were trained off-world, but they were trained only from among the survivors of the Garden, and nobody could get as far as the Garden unless the sponsors, who staked their lives along with that of the student -- so far as the question of aptness was concerned --  guaranteed that the entrant knew the eighteen kinds of Nostrilian Knowledge. The Book of Rhetoric came second, right after the Book of Sheep and Numbers, so that all Norstrilians knew why they laughed and what there was to laugh about.) But this laughter! Aagh, who could it be? A sick man? Impossible. Hostile hallucinations brought on by the Hon. Sec. in his own onseckish way with unusual telepathic powers? Scarcely. Rod began to laugh himself as he realized what the sound must be. It was something rare and beautiful, a kookaburra bird, the same kind of bird which had laughed in Original Australia on Old Old Earth. A very few had reached this new planet. They had not multiplied well, even though the Norstrilians respected them and loved them and wished them well. Good luck came with their wild birdish laughter. A man could feel he had a fine day ahead. Lucky in love, thumb in an enemy's eye, new ale in the fridge or a ruddy good chance on the market. Laugh, bird, laugh! thought Rod. Perhaps the bird understood him. The laughter increased and reached maniac, hilarious proportions. The bird sounded as though it was watching the most comical bird-comedy which any bird-audience had ever been invited to, as though the birdjokes were side-splitting convulsive gut popping, unbelievable, racy, daring and overwhelming. The bird-laughter became hysterical and a note of fear, of warning crept in. Rod stepped toward the tree. In all this time he had not seen the kookaburra. He squinted into the tree, peering against the brighter side of the sky which showed the morning had arrived well. To him, the tree was blindingly green, since it kept most of its earth color, not turning beige or gray as the earth grasses had done when they had been adapted and planted in Norstrilian soil. To be sure, the bird was there, a tiny slender laughing impudent shape. Suddenly the bird cawed: this was no laugh. Startled, Rod stepped back and started to look around for danger. The step saved his life. The sky whistled at him, the wind hit him, a dark shape shot past him with the speed of projectile and was gone. As it leveled out just above the ground. Rod saw what it was. A mad sparrow. Qparrows had reached twenty  kilos' weight, with straight sword-like beaks almost a meter in length. Most of the time the Commonwealth left them alone. They performed a useful function; they preyed on the giant lice, the size of footballs, which had grown with the sick sheep. But now and then one of the birds went mad and attacked people. Rod turned, watching the sparrow as it walked around. about a hundred meters away. Some mad sparrows, it was rumored, were not mad at all, but were tame sparrows sent on death by Norstrilian men whose minds had been twisted into crime. This was rare, but possible. Could the Onseck already be attacking? Rod slapped his belt for weapons as the sparrow took to the air again, flapping upward with the pretense of innocence. He had nothing except his beltlight and a canister. This would not hold out long unless somebody came along. What could a tired man do, using bare hands, against a sword which burst through the air with a monomaniac birdbrain behind it? Rod braced himself for the bird's next power-dive, holding the canister like a shield. The canister was not much of a shield. Down came the bird, preceded by the whistle of air against its head and beak. Rod watched for the eyes and when he saw them, he jumped. The dust roared up as the giant sparrow twisted its spearlike beak out of the line of the ground, opened its wings, beat the air against gravity, caught itself centimeters from the surface and flapped away with powerful strokes; Rod stood and watched quietly, glad that he had escaped. Rain was so rare in the Norstrilian plains that he did not see how he could have gotten wet. He glanced down idly. Blood it was, and his own. The kill-bird had missed him with its beak but had touched him with the razor-like wingfeathers, which had mutated into weapons; both the rhachis and the vane in the large feathers were tremendously reinforced, with the development of a bitterly sharp hyporhachis in the case of the wingtips. The bird had cut him so fast he had not felt or noticed it. Like any good Norstrilian, he thought in terms of first aid. The flow of blood was not very rapid. Should he try to tie up his arm first or to hide from the next diving attack? The bird answered his question for him. The ominous whistle sounded again. Rod flung himself along the ground, trying to get to the base of the tree trunk, where the bird could not dive on him. The bird, making a serious mental mistake, thought it had disabled him. With a flutter of wings it landed calmly, stood on its feet and cocked its head to look him over. When the bird moved its head, the sword-beak gleamed evilly in the weak sunshine. Rod reached the tree and started to lift himself up by seizing the trunk. Doing this, he almost lost his life. He had forgotten how fast the sparrows could run on the ground. In one second, the bird was standing, comical and evil, studying him with its sharp, bright eyes; the next second, the knife-beak was into him, just below the bony part of the shoulder. He felt the eerie wet pull of the beak being drawn out of his body, the ache in his surprised flesh which would precede the griping pain. He hit at the bird with his belt-light. He missed. T)y now he was weakened from   his two wounds. The arm was still dripping blood steadily and he felt his shorts get wet as blood poured from his shoulder. The bird, backing off, was again studying him by cocking its head. Rod tried to guess his chances, One square blow from his hand, and the bird was dead. The bird had thought him disabled -- but now he really was partially disabled. If his blow did not land, score one mister for the bird, mark a credit for the Hon. Sec., give Old Hot and Simple the victory! By now Rod had not the least doubt that Houghton Syme was behind the attack. The bird rushed. Rod forgot to fight the way he had planned. He kicked instead and caught the bird right in its heavy, coarse body. It felt like a very big football filled with sand. The kick hurt his foot but the bird was flung a good six or seven meters away. Rod rushed behind the tree and looked back at the bird. The blood was pulsing fast out of his shoulder. The kill-bird had gotten to his feet and was walking firmly and securely around the tree. One of the wings trailed a little; the kick seemed to have hurt a wing, but not the legs or that horribly strong neck. Once again the bird cocked its comical head. It was his own blood which dripped from the long beak, now red, which had gleamed silver gray at the beginning of the fight. Rod wished he had studied more about these birds. He had never been this close to a mutated sparrow before and he had no idea of how to fight one. All he had known was that they attacked people on very rare occasions and that sometimes the people died in the encounters. He tried to spiek, to let out a scream which would bring the neighborhood and the police flying and running toward him. He found he had no telepathy at all, not when he had to concentrate his whole mind and attention on the bird, knowing that its very next move could bring him irretrievable death. This was no temporary death with the rescue squads nearby. There was no one in the neighborhood, no one at all, except for the excited and sympathetic kookaburras haha-ing madly in the above. He shouted at the bird, hoping to frighten it. The killbird paid him no more attention than if it had been a deaf reptile. The foolish head tipped this way and that. The little bright eyes watched him. The red sword-beak, rapidly turning brown in the dry air, probed abstract dimensions for a way to his brain or heart. Rod took time to wonder how the bird solved its problems in solid geometry -- movement of the beak, the the angle of approach, the line of thrust, the movement of the beak, the weight and direction of the fleeing object, himself. He jumped back a few centimeters, intending to look at the bird from the other side of the tree-trunk. There was a hiss in the air, like the helpless hiss of a gentle little snake. The bird, when he saw it, looked odd: suddenly it seemed to have two beaks. Rod marveled. He did not really understand what was happening until the bird leaned over suddenly, fell on its side, and lay -- plainly dead -- on the dry cool ground. The eyes were still open but they looked blank. The bird's body twitched a little. The wings opened out in a dying spasm. One of the wings almost struck the trunk of the tree, but the tree-guarding device raised a plastic shaft to ward off the blow; a pity the device had not been designed as a people-guard as well. Only then did Rod see that the second "beak" was no beak at all, but a javelin, its point biting cleanly and tightly right through the bird's skull into its brain. No wonder the bird had dropped dead quickly! XI  s Rod looked around to see who his rescuer might be, the ground rose up and struck him. He had fallen. The loss of blood was faster than he had allowed for. He looked around, almost like a child in his bewilderment and dizziness. There was a shimmer of turquoise and the girl Lavinia was standing over him. She had a medical pack open and was spraying his wounds with cryptoderm -- the living bandage which was so expensive that only on Norstrilia, the exporter of stroon, could it be carried around in emergency cans. "Keep quiet," she said with her voice. "Keep quiet, Rod. We've got to stop the blood first of all. Lands of mercy, but you're a crashing mess!" "Who... ?" said Rod weakly. "The Hon. Sec.," said she immediately. "You know?" he asked, amazed that she should understand everything so very quickly indeed. "Don't talk, and I'll tell you." She had taken her field-knife and was cutting the sticky shirt off him, so that she could lift the bottle and spray right into the wound. "I just suspected you were in trouble, when Bill rode by the house and said some thing crazy, that you had bought half the galaxy by gambling all night with a crazy machine which paid off. I did not know where you were, but I thought that you might be in that old temple of yours that the rest of them can't see. I didn't know what kind of danger to look for, so I brought this." She slapped her hip. Rod's eyes widened. She had stolen her father's onefciloton grenade, which was to be removed from its rack only in the event of offworld attack. She answered his question before he asked her. "It's all right. I made a dummy to take its place before I touched it. Then, as I took it out, the Defense monitor came on and I just explained that I had hit it with my new broom which was longer than usual. Do you think I would let Old Hot and Simple kill you, Rod, without a fight from me? I'm your cousin, your kith and kin. As a matter of fact, I'm number twelve after you when it comes to inheriting Doom and all the wonderful things there are on this station." Rod said, "Give me water." He suspected she was chattering to keep his attention off what she was doing to his shoulder and arm. The arm glowed once when she sprayed the cryptoderm on it; then it settled down to more aching. The shoulder had exploded from time to time as she probed it. She had thrust a diagnostic needle into it and was reading the tiny bright picture on the end of the needle. He knew it had both analgesics and antiseptics as well as an ultra-miniaturized X-ray, but he did not think that anyone would the field. She answered this question, too, before he asked it. She was a very perceptive girl. "We don't know what the Onseck is going to do next. He may have corrupted people as well as animals, I don't dare call for help, not until you have your friends around you. Certainly not, if you have bought half the worlds." od dragged out the words. He seemed short of breath. "How did you know it was him?" "I saw his face. I hiered it when I looked in the bird's own brain. I could see Houghton Syme, talking to the bird in some kind of odd way, and I could see your dead body through the bird's eyes, and I could feel a big wave of love and approval, happiness and reward, going through the bird when the job was to have been finished. I think that man is evil. Evil!" "You know him, yourself?" 'What girl around here doesn't? He's a nasty man. He had a boyhood that was all rotten from the time that he realized he was a short-lifer. He has never gotten over it. Some people are sorry for him and don't mind his getting the job of Hon. Sec. If I'd had my way, I'd have sent him to the giggle room long ago!" Lavinia's face was set in prudish hate, an expression so unlike herself, who usually was bright and gay, that Rod wondered what deep bitterness might have been stirred within her. "Why do you hate him?" "For what he did." "What did he do?" "He looked at me," she said, "he looked at me in a way that no girl can like. And then he crawled all over my mind, trying to show me all the silly, dirty, useless things he wanted to do." "But he didn't really do anything -- " said Rod. "Yes, he did," she snapped. "Not with his hands. I could have reported him. I would have. It's what he did with his mind, the things he spieked to   fj me. "You can report those too," said Rod, very tired of talking but nevertheless mysteriously elated to discover that he was not the only enemy which the Onseck had made. "Not what he did, I couldn't," said Lavinia, her face set in anger but dissolving into grief. Grief was tenderer, softer, but deeper and more real than anger. For the first time Rod sensed a feeling of concern about Lavinia. What might be wrong with her? She looked past him and spoke to the open fields and the big dead bird. "Houghton Syme was the worst man I've ever known. I hope he dies. He never got over that rotten boyhood of his. The old sick boy is the enemy of the man. We'll never know what he might have been. And if you hadn't been so wrapped up in your own troubles. mister Rod to the hundred and fifty first, you'd have remembered who I am." "Who are you?" said Rod, naturally. "I'm the Father's Daughter." "So what?" said Rod. "All girls are." "Then you never have found out about me. I'm the Father's Daughter from The Father's Daughter's Song." "Never heard it." She looked at him and her eyes were close to tears. "Listen, then, and I'll sing it to you now. And it's true, true, true. You do not know what the world Is like And I hope that you never will. My heart was once much full of hope. But now It Is very still My wife went mad. She was my love and wore my ring When both of us were young. She bore my babes, but then, but then... And now there isn't anything My wife went mad. Now she lives In another place. Half sick, half well, and never young. I am her dread, who was her love. Each of us has another face. My wife went mad. You do not know what the world Is like. War is never the worst of it. The stars within your eyes can drop. The lightning in your brain can strike. My wife went mad. And I see you have heard it, too," she sighed. "Just as my father wrote it. About my mother. My own mother." "Oh, Lavinia," said Rod, "I'm sorry. I never thought it was you. And you my own cousin only three or four times removed. But Lavinia, there's something wrong. How can your mother be mad if she was looking fine at my house last week?" ((Qhe was never mad," said  Lavina. "My father was. He made up that cruel song about my mother so that the neighbors complained. He had his choice of the Giggle Room to die in, or the sickplace, to be immortal and insane. He's there now. And the Onseck, the Onseck threatened to bring him back to our neighborhood if I didn't do what he asked. Do you think I could forgive that? Ever? After people have sung that hateful song at me ever since I was a baby? Do you wonder that I know it myself?" Rodnodded. Lavinia's troubles impressed him, but he had troubles of his own. The sun was never hot on Norstrilia, but he suddenly felt thirsty and hot He wanted to sleep but he wondered about the dangers which surrounded him. She knelt beside him. "Close your eyes a bit, Rod. I will spiek very quietly and maybe nobody will notice it except your station hands, Bill and Hopper. When they come we'll hide out for the day and tonight we can go back to your computer and hide. I'll tell them to bring food." She hesitated, "And, Rod?" "Yes?" he said. "Forgive me." "For what?" "For my troubles," she said contritely. "Now, you have more troubles. Me," he said. "Let's not blame ourselves, but for sheeps' sake, girl, let me sleep." He drifted off to sleep as she sat beside him, whistling a loud clear tune with long long notes which never added up. He knew some people, usually women, did that when they tried to concentrate on their telepathic spieking. Once he glanced up at her before he finally slept. He noticed that her eyes were a deep, strange blue. Like the mad, wild, faraway skies of Old Earth Itself. He slept, and in his sleep he knew that he was being carried. The hands which carried him felt friendly, though, and he curled himself back into deep, deeper dreamless sleep. "I T #"hen Rod finally awakened, " ' it was to feel his shoulder tightly bound and his arm throbbing. He had fought waking up, because the pain had increased as his mind moved toward consciousness, but the pain and the murmur of voices caused him to come all the way to the hard, bright surface of consciousness. The murmur of voices? There was no place on all Old North Australia where voices murmured. People sat around and spieked to each other and answered without the clatter of vocal cords. Telepathy made for the participants darting their thoughts this way and that, soaring with their shields so . as to produce the effect of a confident whisper. But here there were voices. Many voices. Not possible! And the smell was wrong. The air was wet -- luxuriously, extravagantly wet, like a miser trying to catch a rainstorm! It was almost like the van of the Garden of Death. Just as he woke, he recognized Lavinia singing an odd little aong. It was one which Rod knew, because it had a sharp, catchy, poignant little melody to it which sounded like nothing on his world. She was singing, and it sounded like one of the weird sadnesses which his people had brought from their horrible group experience on the abandoned planet of ParaIs there anybody here or Is everybody dead at the grey green blue black lake? The sky was blue and now It Is red over old tall green brown trees. The house was big but now It looks small at the grey green blue black lake. And the girl that I knew Isn't there any more at the old flat dark tom place. His eyes opened. It was indeed Lavinia whom he saw at the edge of vision. This was no house. It was a box, a hospital, a prison, a ship, a cave or a fort. The furnishings were machined and luxurious. The light was artificial and almost the color of peaches. A strange hum in the background sounded like alien engines dispensing power for' purposes which Norstrilian law never permitted to private persons. The Lord Redlady leaned over Rod; the fantastic man broke into song himself, chanting -- Light a lantern. Light a lantern. Light a lantern. Here we crane. When he saw the obvious signs of Rod's perplexity, he burst into a laugh, "That's the oldest song you ever heard, my boy. It's prespace. It used to be called 'general quarters' where ships like big iron houses floated on the waters of earth and fought each other. We've been waiting for you to wake up." "Water," said Rod. "please give me water. Why are you talking?" "Water!" cried the Lord Redlady to someone behind him. His sharp, thin face was alight with excitement as he turned back to Rod. "And we're talking because I have my buzzer on. If people want to talk to each other, they jolly well better use their voices in this ship." "Ship?" said Rod, reaching for the mug of cold water which a hand had reached out to him. "This is my ship, mister and owner Rod McBan to the hundred and fifty-first! An earth ship. I pulled it out of orbit and grounded it with the permission of the Commonwealth. They don't know you're on it, yet. They can't find out right now, because my Humanoid-Robot Brainwave Dephasing Device is on. Nobody can think in or out through that, and anybody who tries telepathy on this boat is going to get himself a headache." "Why you?" said Rod. 'What for?" "In due time," said the Lord Redlady. "Let me introduce you first. You know these people." He waved at a group. Lavinia sat with his hands, Bill and Hopper, with his workwoman Eleanor, with his Aunt Doris. They looked odd, sitting on the low, soft, luxurious earth furniture. They were all sipping some earth drink of a color which Rod had never seen before. Their expressions were diverse. Bill looked truculent, Hopper looked greedy, Aunt Doris looked utterly embarrassed and Lavinia looked as though she were enjoying herself. "And then here..." said the Lord Redlady. '"T'he man he pointed to might-not have been a man. He was the Norstrilian type all right. But he was a giant, of the kind which were always killed in the Garden of Death. "At your service," said the giant, who was almost three meters tall and who had to watch his head, lest it hit the ceiling. "I am Donald Dumfrie Hordern Anthony Garwood Gaines Wentworth to the fourteenth generation, mister and owner McBan. A military surgeon, at your service, sir!" "But this is private. Surgeons aren't allowed to work for anybody but government." "I am on loan to the Earth Government," said Wentworth, the giant, his face in a broad grin. "And I," said the Lord Redlady, "am both the Instrumentality and the Earth Government for diplomatic purposes. I borrowed him. He's under Earth rules. You will be well in two or three hours." The doctor, Wentworth, looked at his hand as though he saw a chronograph there, "Two hours and seventeen minutes more." "Let it be," said the Lord Redlady. "Here's our last guest." A short angry man stood up and came over. He glared out at Rod and held forth an angry hand. "John Fisher to the hundreth. You know me." "Do I?" said Rod, not impolitely. He was just dazed. "Station of The Good Fresh Joey," said Fisher. "I haven't been there," said Rod, "but I've heard of it." "You needn't have," snapped the angry Fisher. "I met you at your grandfather's." "Oh, yes, mister and owner Fisher," said Rod, not really remembering anything at all, but wondering why the short redfaced man was so angry with him. "You don't know who I am?" said Fisher. "Silly games!" thought Rod. He said nothing but smiled dimly. Hunger began to stir inside him. "Commonwealth Financial Secretary, that's me," said Fisher. "I handle the books and the credits for the government." "Wonderful work," said Rod "I'm sure it's complicated. Could I have something to eat?" The Lord Redlady interrupted: "Would you like French pheasant with Chinesian sauce steeped in the thieves' wine from Viola Siderea? It would only cost you six thousand tons of refined gold, orbited near earth, if I ordered it sent to you by special courier." TT'or some inexplicable reason the entire room howled with laughter. The men put their glasses down so as not to spill them. Hopper seized the opportunity to refill his own glass. Aunt Doris looked hilarious and secretly proud, as though she herself had laid a diamond egg or done some equal marvel. Only Lavinia, though laughing, managed to look sympathetically at Rod to make sure that he did not feel mocked. The Lord Redlady laughed as loudly as the rest, and even the short, angry John Fisher allowed himself a wan smile, while holding out his hand for a refill on his drink. An animal, a little one which looked very much like an extremely small person, lifted up the bottle and filled his glass for him; Rod suspected that it was a "monkey" from Old Old Earth, from the stories he had heard. Rod didn't even say, "What's the joke?" though he realized plainly that he was himself in the middle of it. He just smiled weakly back at them, feeling the hunger grow within him. "My robot is cooking you an Earth dish. French toast with maple syrup. You could live ten thousand years on this planet and never get it. Rod, don't you know why we're laughing? Don't you know what you've done?" "The Onseck tried to kill me, I think," said Rod. Lavinia clapped her hand to her mouth, but it was too late. "So that's who it was," said the doctor, Wentworth, with a voice as gigantic as himself. "But you wouldn't laugh at me for that -- " Rod started to say. Then he stopped himself. An awufl thought had come. "You mean, it really worked? That stuff with my family's old computer?" The laughter broke out again. It was kind laughter, but it was always the laughter of a peasant people, driven by boredom, who greet the unfamiliar with attack or with laughter. "You did it," said Hopper. worlds." John Fisher snapped at him, "Let's not exaggerate. He's gotten about one point six stroon years. You couldn't buy any billion worlds for that. In the first In the second place, there aren't many worlds for sale. I doubt that he could buy thirty or forty." The little animal, prompted by some imperceptible sign from the Lord Redlady, went out of the room and returned with a tray. The odor from the tray made all the people in the room sniff appreciatively. The food was unfamiliar, but it combined pungency and sweetness. The monkey fitted the tray into an artfully concealed slot at the head of Rod's couch, took off an imaginary monkey cap, saluted and went back to his basket behind the Lord Redlady's chair. The Lord Redlady nodded. "Eat boy, it's on me." Rod sat up. His shirt was still blood-caked and he realized that it was almost worn out. "That's an odd sight, I must say," said the huge doctor Wentworth. "There's the richest man in many worlds, and he hasn't the price of a new pair of overalls." "What's odd about that? We've always charged an import of the orbit price of goods," snapped angry John Fisher. "Have you ever realized what other people have swung into orbit around our sun, just waiting for us to change our minds so they could sell us half the rubbish in the universe? This world would be knee-deep in junk if we ever dropped our tariff. I'm surprised at you, doctor, forgetting the fundamental rules of Old North Australia!" "He's not complaining," said Aunt Doris, whom the drink had made loquacious. "He's just thinking. We all think." "Of course we all think. Or daydream. Some of us leave and go off-planet to be rich people on other worlds. A few of us even manage to get back here on severe probation when we realize what the off worlds are like. I'm just saying," said the doctor, "that Rod's situation would be very funny to everybody except us Norstrilians. We're all rich with the stroon imports, but we kept ourselves poor in order to survive." "Who's poor?" snapped the fieldhand Hopper, apparently touched at a sensitive point. "I can match you with megacredits, doc, any time you care to gamble. Or I'll meet you with throwing knives, if you want them better. I'm as good as the next man!" "That's exactly what I mean," said John Fisher. "Hopper here can argue with anybody on the planet. We're still equals. We're still free. We're not the victims of our own wealth -- that's Norstrilia for you!" Rod looked up from his food and said, "Mister and owner secretary Fisher, you talk awfully well for somebody who is not a freak like me. How do you do it?" T?isher started looking angry again, though he was not really angry: "Do you think that financial records can be dictated telepathically? I'm spending centuries out of my life, just dictating into my blasted microphone. Yesterday I spent most of the day dictating the mess which you have made of the Commonwealth's money for the next eight years. And you know what I'm going to do at the next meeting of the council?" "What?" said Rod. "I'm going to move the condemnation of that computer of yours. It's too good to be in private hands." "You can't do that!" shrieked Aunt Doris, somewhat mellowed by the earth beverage she was drinking. "It's MacArthur and McBan family property!" "You can keep the temple," said Fisher with a snort. "But no bloody family is going to outguess the whole planet again. Do you know that boy sitting there has four megacredits on Earth at this moment?" Bill hiccupped, "I got more than that myself." Fisher snarled at him, "On A silence hit the room. credits? He can buy Old Australia and ship it out here to us." Bill sobered fast. Said Lavinia mildly, "What's foe money?" "Do you know, mister and owner McBan?" said Fisher, in a peremptory tone. "You had better know, because you have more of it than any man has ever had before." "I don't want to talk about money," said Rod. "I want to find out what the Onseck is up to." "Don't worry about him!" laughed the Lord Redlady, prancing to his feet and pointing at himself with a dramatic forefinger. "As the representative of Earth, I filed six hundred and eighty-five lawsuits against him simultaneously, in the name of your Earth debtors, who fear that some harm might befall you." "Do they really?" said Rod. "Already?" "Of course not. All they know is your name and the fact that you bought them out. But they would worry if they did know, so as your agent I tied up the Hon. Sec. Houghton Syme with more law cases than this planet has ever seen before." The big doctor chuckled. "Dashed clever of you, my lord and mister! You know us Norstrilians pretty well, I must say. If we charge a man with murder, we're so freedom-minded that he has time to commit a few more before being tried for the first one. But civil suits! Hot sheep! He'll never get out of those, as long as he lives." "Is he onsecking any more?" said Rod. "What do you mean?" asked Fisher. "Does he still have his job -- Onseck?" "Oh, yes," said Fisher. "But we put him on two hundred years' leave and he had only about a hundred and twenty years to live, poor fellow. Most of that time he will be defending himself in civil suits." Rod finally exhaled. He had finished the food. The small polished room with its machined elegance, the wet air, the bray of voices all over the place -- these made him feel dreamlike. Here grown men were standing, talking as though he really did own Old Earth. They were concerned with his affairs, not because he was Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the hundredand-fifty-first, but because he was Rod, a boy among them who had stumbled upon danger and fortune. He looked around the room. The conversations had accidentally stopped. They were looking at him, and he saw in their faces something which he had seen before. What was it? It was not love. It was a rapt attentiveness, combined with a sort of pleasurable and indulgent interest. He then realized what the looks signified. They were giving him the adoration which they usually reserved only for cricket players, tennis players, and great track performers -- like that fabulous Hopkins Harvey fellow who had gone offworld and won a wrestling match with a "heavy man" from Wereld Schemering. He was not just Rod any more. He was their boy. As their boy, he smiled at them vaguely and felt like crying. 'Tphe breathlessness broke when the large doctor, mister and owner Wentworth threw in a stark comment: "Time to tell him, mister and owner Fisher. He won't have his property long if we don't get moving. No, nor his life either." Lavinia jumped up and cried out, "You can't kill Rod -- " Doctor Wentworth stopped her. "Sit down. We're not going to kill him. And you there, stop acting foolish! We're his friends here." Rod followed the line of the doctor's glance and saw that Hopper had snaked his hand back to the big knife he wore in his belt. He was getting ready to fight anyone who attacked Rod. "Sit, sit down, all of you, please!" said the Lord Redlady, speaking somewhat fussily with his singsong Earth accent. "I'm tonight. Doctor, you take my table. Sit down yourself. You will stop threatening my ceiling or your head. You, ma'am and owner," said he to Aunt Doris, "move over there to that other chair. Now we can all see the doctor." "Can't we wait?" asked Rod. "I need to sleep. Are you going to ask me to make decisions now? I'm not up to decisions, not after what I've just been through. All night with the computer. The long walk. The bird from the Onseck -- " "You'll have no decisions to make if you don't make them tonight," said the doctor firmly and pleasantly. "You'll be a dead man." "Who's going to kill me?" asked. Rod. "Anybody who wants money. Or who wants power. Or who would like unlimited life. Or who needs these things to get something else. Revenge. A woman. An obsession. A drug. You're not just a person now, Rod. You're Norstrilia incarnate. You're Mr. Money himself! Don't ask who'd kill you. Ask who wouldn't. Us, I think. But don't tempt us." "How much money have I got?" said Rod. Angry John Fisher cut in: "So much that the computers are clotted up, just counting it. About one and a half stroon years. Perhaps three hundred years of Old Earth's total income. You sent more Instant Messages last night than the Commonwealth government itself has sent in the last twelve years. Those messages are expensive. One kilocredit each, paid in foe money." "I asked a long time ago what this 'foe money' was," said Lavinia, "and nobody has got around to telling me." ''he Lord Redlady took the middle of the floor. He stood there with a stance which none of the Old North Australians had ever seen before. It was actually the posture of a master of ceremonies opening the evening at a large night club, but to people who had never seen those particular gestures, his movements were eerie, self-explanatory and queerly beautiful. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, using a phrase which most of them had only heard in books, "I will serve drinks while the others speak. I will ask each in turn. Doctor, will you be good enough to wait while the financial secretary speaks?" "I should think," said the doctor irritably, "that the lad would be wanting to think over his choice. Does he want me to cut him in two, here, tonight, or doesn't he? I should think that would take priority, wouldn't you?" "Ladies and gentlemen," said the Lord Redlady, "the mister and doctor Wentworth has a very good point indeed. But there is no sense in asking Rod about being cut in two unless he knows why. Mister financial secretary, will you tell us all what happened last night?" John Fisher stood up. He was so chubby that it did not matter. His brown, suspicious,, intelligent eyes looked over the lot of them. "There are as many kinds of money as there are worlds with people on them. We here on Norstrilia don't carry the tokens around, but in some places they have bits of paper or metal which they use to keep count We talk our money into the central computers which even out all our transactions for us. Now what would happen if I wanted a pair of shoes?" Nobody answered. He didn't expect them to. "I would," he went on, "go to a shop and look in the screen at the shoes which the offworld merchants keep in orbit. I would pick out the shoes I wanted. What's a good price for a pair of shoes in orbit?" Hopper was getting tired of these rhetorical questions so he answered promptly, "Six bob." "That's right. Six minicredits." "But that's orbit money. You're leaving out the tariff," said Hopper. "Exactly. And what's the tarIff?" asked John Fisher, snapping. Hopper snapped back, "Two hundred thousand times, what you bloody fools always make it in the Commonwealth council." "Hopper, can you buy shoes?" said Fisher. "Of course I can!" The station hand looked belligerent again his glass. He sniffed the aroma, calmed down and said, "All right, what's your point?" "The point is that the money secure, A for and, D for delivered. That's any kind of good money with backing behind it. Stroon is the best backing there is, but gold is all right. Rare metals, fine manufactures, and so on. That's just the money off the planet, in the hands of the recipient. Now how many times would a ship have to hop to get to Old Earth itself?" "Fifty or sixty," said Aunt Doris unexpectedly. "Even I know that." "And how many ships get through?" "They all do," said she. "Oh, no," cried several of the men in unison. "About one ship is lost every sixty or eighty trips, depending on the solar weather, on the skills of the pinlighters and gocaptains, on the landing accidents. Did any of you ever see a really old captain?" "Yes," said Hopper with gloomy humor, "a dead one in his coffin." "So if you have something you want to get to Earth, you have to pay your share of the costly ships, your share of the go-captain's wages and the fees of his staff, your share of the insurance for their families. Do you know what it could cost to get this chair back to earth? said Fisher. "Three hundred times the cost of the chair," said doctor Wentworth. "Mighty close. It's two hundred and eighty-seven times." "How do you know so mucking much?" said Bill, speaking up. "And why waste our time with all this crutting glubb?" "Watch your language, man," said John Fisher. "There are some mucking ladies present. I tell you this because we have to get Rod off to Earth tonight, if he wants to be alive and rich." "That's what you say!" cried Bill. "Let him go to his house. We can load up on little bombs and hold up against anybody who could get through the Norstrilian defenses. What are we paying these mucking taxes for, if it's not for the likes of you to make sure we're safe? Let's take the boy home. Come along." 'T'he Lord Redlady leaped to the middle of his own floor. He was no prancing Earthman putting on a show. He was the old Instrumentality itself, surviving with raw weapons and raw brains. In his hand he held a something which none of them could see clearly. "Murder," he said, "will be done this moment if anybody moves. I will commit it. I will, people. Move, and try me! And if I do commit a murder, I will arrest myself, hold a trial and acquit myself. I have strange powers, people. Don't make me use them. Don't even make me show them." The shimmering thing in his hand disappeared. "Mister and doctor Wentworth, you are under my command, by loan. Other people, you are my guests. Be warned. Don't touch that boy. This is Earth territory, this cabin we're in." He stood a little to one side and looked at them brightly out of his strange Earth eyes. Hopper deliberately spat on the floor. "I suppose I would be a puddle of mucking glue if I helped old Bill?" "Something like it," said the Lord Redlady. "Want to try?" The things that were hard to see were now in each of his hands. His eyes darted between Bill and Hopper. "Shut up, Hopper. We'll take Rod if he tells us to go. But if he doesn't -- it crudding well doesn't matter. Eh, mister and owner McBan?" Rod looked around for his grandfather, dead long ago: then he knew they were looking at him instead. Tom between sleepiness and anxiety he answered. "I don't want to go now, fellows. Thank you for standing by. Go on, mister secretary, with the foe money and the sad money." The weapons disappeared from the Lord Redlady's hands. "I don't like Earth weapons," said Hopper, speaking very loudly and plainly to no one at all, "and I don't like Earth people. They're dirty. There's nothing in them that's good honest crook." "Have a drink, lads," said the Lord Redlady with a democratic heartiness which was so false that the workwoman, Eleanor, silent all the evening, let out one wild caw of a laugh, like a kookaburra beginning to whoop in a tree. He looked at her sharply, picked up his serving jug, and nodded to the financial secretary, John Fischer, that he should resume speaking. Fisher was flustered. He obviously did not like this Earth practice of quick threats and weapons indoors. But then Lord Redlady -- disgraced and remote from Old Earth as he was -- was nevertheless the accredited diplomat of the Instrumentality. Even Old North Australia did not push the Instrumentality too far. There were ugly things surmised about worlds which had done so. Soberly and huffily he went on. "There's not much to it. If the money is discounted thirty-three and one third per cent per trip, and if it is fifty-five trips to get to Old Earth, it takes a heap of money to pay up in orbit right here before you have a minicredit on earth. Sometimes the odds are better. Your Commonwealth government waits for months and years to get a really favorable rate of exchange. And of course we send our freight by armed sailships, which don't go below the surface of space at all. They just take hundreds or thousands of years to get there, while our cruisers dart in and out around them, just to make sure that nobody robs them in transit. There are things about Norstrilian robots which none of you know, and which not even the Instrumentality knows." He darted a quick look at the Lord Redlady, who said nothing to this, and went on. "It is well worth while not to muck around with one of our perishing ships. We don't get robbed much. And we have other things that are even worse than Mother Hitton and her littul kittons. But the money and the stroon which finally reaches Old Earth Itself is Free, O is for On, E is for Earth. F, O, E -- free on Earth. That's the best kind of money there is, right on Old Earth Itself. And Earth has the final exchange computer. Or had it." "Had it?" said the Lord Redlady. "It broke down last night. Rod broke it. Overload." "Impossible!" cried Redlady. "I'll check." Tie went to the wall, pulled down a desk. A console, incredibly miniature, gleamed out at them. In less than three seconds it glowed. Redlady spoke into it, his voice as clear and cold as the ice they had all heard about : "Priority. Instrumentality. Short of War. Instant. Instant. Redlady calling. Earthport." "Confirmed," said a Norstrilian voice, "confirmed and charged." "Earthport," said the console in a whistling whisper which filled the room. "Redlady instrumentality official centputer allrightquestion cargo approved question out." "Cenputer allright cargo approved out," said the whisper. The people in the room had seen an immense fortune squandered. Even by Norstrilian standards, the faster-than-light messages were things which a family might not use twice in a thousand years. They looked at Redlady as though he were an evilworker with strange powers. Earth's prompt answer to the skinny man made them all remember that though Old North Australia produced the wealth, Earth still distributed much of it -- and that the super-government of the Instrumentality reached into far places where no Norstrilian would even wish to venture. The Lord Redlady spoke mildly, "The central computer seems to be going again, if your government wishes to consult it. The 'cargo' is this boy here." "You've told Earth about me?" said Rod. "Why not? We want to get you there alive." "But message security -- ?" said the doctor. "I have references which no outside mind will know," said the Lord Redlady. "Finish up, mister financial secretary. Tell the young man what he has on Earth." "Your computer outcomputed the government," said John Fisher-to-the-hundredth, "and it mortgaged all your lands, all your sheep, all your trading rights, all your family treasures, the right to the MacArthur name, the right to the McBan name and itself. Then it bought futures. Of course, it didn't do it. You did, Rod McBan." Startled into full awakeness, Rod found his right hand up at his mouth, so surprised was he. "I did?" "Then you bought futures in stroon, but you offered them for sale. You held back the sales, shifting titles and changing prices, so that not even the central computer knew what you were doing. You bought almost all of the eighth year from now, most of the seventh year from now, and some of the sixth. You mortgaged each purchase as you went along, in order to buy more. Then you suddenly tore the market wide open by offering fantastic bargains, trading the six-year rights for seventhyear and eighth-year. Your computer made such lavish use of Instant Messages to Earth that the Commonwealth defense office had people buzzing around in the middle of the night. By the time they figured out what might happen, it had happened. You registered a monopoly of two year's export, far beyond the predicted amount. The government rushed for a weather recomputation, but while they were doing that you were registering your holdings on Earth you began to buy up all the imports around Old North Australia, and when the government finally declared an emergency, you had secured final title to one and a half stroon years and to megacredits, than the Earth computers could handle. You're the richest man that ever was. Or ever will be. We changed all the rules this morning and I myself signed a new treaty with the Earth authorities, ratified by the Instrumentality. Meanwhile, you're the richest of the rich men who ever lived on this world. And you're also rich enough to buy all of Old Earth. In fact, you have put in a reservation to buy it, unless the Instrumentality outbids you." "Why should we?" said the Lord Redlady. "Let him have it. Well watch what he does with the Earth after he buys it. If it is something bad, we will kill him." Y ou'd kill me, Lord Redlady?" said Rod. "I thought you were saving me?" "Both," said the doctor, standing up. "The Commonwealth government has not tried to take your property away from you, though they have their doubts ae to what you will do with Earth if you do buy it. They are not going to let you stay on this planet and endanger it by being the richest kidnap victim who ever lived. Tomorrow they will strip you of your property, unless you want to take a chance on running foi it. Earth government is the same way. If you can figure out your own defenses, you can come on in. Of course the police will protect you, but would that be enough? I'm a doctor. And I'm here to ship you out if you want to go." "And I'm an officer of government, and I will arrest you if you do not go," said John Fisher. "And I represent the Instrumentality, which does not declare its policy to anyone, least of all to outsiders. But it is my personal policy," said the Lord Redlady, holding out his hands and twisting his thumbs in a meaningless, grotesque, but somehow very threatening way, "to see that this boy gets a safe trip to Earth and a fair deal when he comes back here!" "You'll protect him all the way!" cried Lavinia, looking very happy. "All the way. As far as I can. As long as I live." "That's pretty long," muttered Hopper, "conceited little pommy cockahoop!" "Watch your language, Hopper," said the Lord Redlady. "Rod?" "Yes, sir?" "Your answer?" The Lord Redlady was peremptory. "I'm going," said Rod. "What on Earth do you want?" said the Lord Redlady ceremoniously. "A genuine Cape triangle." "A what?" cried the Lord Redlady. "A Cape triangle. A postage stamp." "What's postage?" said the Lord Redlady, really puzzled. "Payments on messages." "But you do that with thumbprints or eyeprints!" "No," said Rod, "I mean paper ones." "Paper messages?" said the Lord Redlady, looking as though someone had mentioned grass battleships, hairless sheep, solid cast-iron women, or something else equally improbable. "Paper messages?" he repeated, and then he laughed, quite charmingly. "Oh!" he said, with a tone of secret discovery. "You mean antiquities... ?" "Of course," said Rod. "Even before Space itself." "Earth has a lot of antiquities, and I am sure you will be welcome to study them or to collect them. That will be perfectly all right Just don't do any of the wrong things, or you will be in real trouble." "What are the wrong things?" said Rod. "Buying real people, or trying to. Shipping religion from one planet to another. Smuggling underpeople." "What's religion?" said Rod. "Later, later," said the Lord Redlady. "You'll learn everything later. Doctor, you take over." X T #"entworth stood very care 'fully so that his head did not touch the ceiling. He had to bend his neck a little. "We have two boxes, Rod." When he spoke, the door whirred in its tracks and showed them a small room beyond. There was a large box, like a coffin, and a very small box, like the kind that women have around the house to keep a single party-going bonnet in. "There will be criminals, and wild governments, and conspirators, and adventurers, and just plain good people gone wrong at the thought of your wealth. There will be all these waiting for you to kidnap you or rob or even kill you -- " "Why kill me?" "To impersonate you and to try to get your money," said the doctor. "Now look. This is your big choice. If you take the big box. we can put you in a sail-ship convoy and you will get there in several hundred or thousand years. But you will get there, ninety-nine point ninety-nine per cent. Or we can send the big box on the regular pianoforming ships, and somebody will steal you. Or we scun you down and put you in the little box." "That little box?" cried Rod. "Scunned. You've scunned sheep, haven't you?" "I've heard of it. But a man, no! Dehydrate my body, pickle my head, and freeze the whole mucking mess?" cried Rod. "That's it. Too bloody right!" cried the doctor cheerfully. "That'll give you a real chance of getting there alive." "But who'll put me together. I'd need my own doctor -- ?" His voice quavered at the unnaturalness of the risk, not at the mere chanciness and danger of it. "Here," said the Lord Redlady, "is your doctor, already trained." "I am at your service," said the little Earth-animal, the "monkey," with a small bow to the assembled company. "My name is A'gentur and I have been conditioned as a physician, a surgeon and a barber." The women had gasped. Hopper and Bill stared at the little animal in horror. "You're an underperson!" yelled Hopper. "We've never let the crutting things loose on Norstrilia." "I'm not an underperson. I'm an animal. Conditioned to -- " The monkey jumped. Hopper's heavy knife twanged like a musical instrument as it clung to the softer steel of the wall. Harper's other hand held a long thin knife, ready to reach Redlady's heart. The left hand of the Lord Redlady flashed straight forward. Something in his hand glowed silently terribly. There was a hiss in the air. 'll There Hopper had been, a ' 'cloud of oily thick smoke, stinking of burning meat, coiled slowly toward the ventilators. Hopper's clothing and personal belongings, including one false tooth, lay on the chair in which he had been sitting. They were undamaged. His drink stood on the floor beside the chair, forever to remain unfinished. The doctor's eyes gleamed as he stared strangely at Redlady: "Noted and reported to the Old North Australian Navy." "I'll report it too," said the Lord Redlady, "as the use of illegal weapons on diplomatic grounds." "Never mind," said John Fishertothehundredth, not angry at all, but just pale and looking a little ill. Violence did not frighten him, but decision did. "Let's get on with it Which box, big or little, boy?" The workwoman Eleanor stood up. She had said nothing but now she dominated the scene. "Take him in there, girls," she said, "and wash him like you would for the Garden of Death. Ill wash myself in there. You see," she added, "I've always wanted to see the blue skies of earth, and wanted to swim in a house that ran around on the big big waters. I'll take your big box, Rod. If I get through alive, you will owe me some treats on earth. You take the little box, Roddy, take the little box and that little tiny doctor with the fur on him. Rod, I trust him." Rod stood up. Everybody was looking at him and at Eleanor. Said the Lord Redlady, "You agree to be scunned and put in the little box for instant shipment to Earth?" He nodded. "You will pay all the extra expense?" He nodded again. The doctor said, "You authorize me to cut you up and reduce you down, in the hope that you may be reconstituted on Earth?" Rod nodded to him, too. "Shaking your head isn't enough," said the doctor. "You have to agree for the record." "I agree," said Rod quietly. Aunt Doris and Lavinia came forward to lead him into the dressing room and shower room. Just as they reached for his arms, the doctor patted Rod on the back with a quick strange motion. Rod jumped a little. "Deep hypnotic," said the doctor. "You can manage his body all right, but the next words he on Old Earth Itself." The women were wide-eyed but they led Rod forward to be cleaned for the operations and the voyage. The doctor turned to die Lord Redlady and to John Fisher, the financial secretary. "A good night's work," he said. "Pity about that man, though." Bill sat still, frozen with grief in his chair, staring at Hopper's empty clothing in the chair next to him. The console tinkled, "Twelve hours, Greenwich mean time. No adverse weather reports from the channel coast or from Meeya Meefla or Earthport building. All's well!" The Lord Redlady served drinks to the misters. He did not even offer one to Bill. It would have been no use, at this point. TT'rom beyond the door, where they were cleaning the body, clothes and hair of the deeply hypnotized Rod, Lavinia and Aunt Doris unconsciously reverted to the ceremony of the Garden of Death and lifted their voices in a sort of plainsong chant : Out in the Garden of Death, our young Have tasted the valiant taste of fear. With muscular arm and reckless tongue. They have won, and lost, and escaped us here! The three men listened for a few moments, attentively. From the other washroom there came the sounds of the workwoman Eleanor, washing herself, alone and unattended, for a long voyage and a possible death. The Lord Redlady heaved a sigh. "Have a drink, Bill. Hopper brought it on himself." Bill refused to speak to them but he held forth his glass. The Lord Redlady filled that and the others. He turned to John Fisher to-the-hundreth and said, "You're shipping him?" "Who?" "The boy." "I thought so." "Better not," said the Lord Redlady. "You mean -- danger?" "That's only half the word for it," said die Lord Redlady. "You can't possibly plan to offload him at Earth port. Put him into a good medical station. There's an old one, still good, on Mars, if they haven't closed it down. I know Earth. Half the people of Earth will be waiting to greet him and the other half will be waiting to rob him." "You represent the Earth government, sir and commissioner," said John Fisher. "That's a rum way to talk about your own people." "They're not that way all the time," laughed Redlady. "Just when they're in heat. Sex hasn't a chance to compare with money when it comes to the human race on earth. They all think that they want power and freedom and six other impossible things. I'm not speaking for the Earth government when I say this. Just for myself." "If we don't ship him, who will?" demanded Fisher. "The Instrumentality." "The Instrumentality? You don't conduct commerce. How can you?" "We don't conduct commerce, but we do meet emergencies. I can flag down a long-jump cruiser and he'll be there months before anybody expects him." "Those are warships. Y ou can't use one for passengers!" "Can't I?" said the Lord Redlady, with a smile. "The Instrumentality would -- ?" said Fisher, with a puzzled smile. "The cost would be tremendous. How will you pay for it? It'd be hard to justify." "He will pay for it. Special donation from him for special service. One megacredit for the trip." The financial secretary whistled. "That's a fearful price for money and not surface money, I suppose?" "Hot buttered moonbeams, man! That's a thousand times the most expensive trip that any person has ever had." The big doctor had been listening to the two of them. "Mister and owner Fisher," he said, "I recommend it." "You?" cried John Fisher angrily. "You're a Norstrilian and you want to rob this poor boy?" "Poor boy?" snorted the doctor. "It's not that. The trip's no good if he's not alive. Our friend here is extravagant but his ideas stre sound. I suggest one amendment." "What's that?" said the Lord Redlady quickly. "One and a half megacredits for the round trip. If he is well and alive and with the same personality, apart from natural cause. But note this. One kilocredit only if you deliver him on Earth dead." J ohn Fisher rubbed his chin. His suspicious eyes looked down at Redlady, who had taken a seat, and up at the doctor, whose head was still bumping the ceiling. A voice behind him spoke. "Take it, mister financial secretary. The boy won't use money if he's dead. You can't fight the Instrumentality, you can't be reasonable with the Instrumentality, and you can't buy the Instrumentality. With what they've been taking off us all these thousands of years, they've got more stroon than we do, hidden away somewhere. You, there!" said he rudely to the Lord Redlady. "Do you have any idea what the Instrumentality is worth?" The Lord Redlady creased his brow. "Never thought of it. I suppose it must have a limit, but I never thought of it. We do have accountants, though." "See," said Bill. "Even the Instrumentality would hate to lose money. Take the doctor's bid, Redlady. Take him up on it, Fisher." His use of their surnames was an extreme incivility, but the two men were convinced. "I'll do it," said Redlady. "It's awfully close to writing insurance, which we a. ; not chartered to do. I'll write it in as his emergency clause." "I'll take it," said John Fisher. "It'll be thousands of years until another Norstrilian financial secretary pays money for a ticket like this, but it's worth it. To him. I'll square it in his accounts to our planet." "I'll witness it," said the doctor. "No, you won't," said Bill savagely. "The boy has one friend here. That's me. Let me do it." They stared at him, all three. He stared back. He broke. "Sirs and misters, please let me be the witness." The Lord Redlady nodded and opened the console. He and John Fisher spoke the contract into it. At the end Bill shouted his full name as witness. The two women brought Rod McBan, mother-naked, into the room. He was immaculately clean and he stared ahead as though he were in an endless dream. "That's the operating room," said the Lord Redlady. "I'll spray us all with antiseptic if you don't mind." "Of course," said the doctor. "You're going to cut him up and boil him down -- here and now?" cried Aunt Doris. "Here and now," said the Lord Redlady, "if the doctor approves. The soone. he goes, the better chance he has of coming through the whole thing alive." "I consent," said the doctor. "I approve." He started to take Rod by the hand, leading him toward the room with the long coffin and the small box. At some sign from Redlady, the walls had opened up to show a complete surgical theater. "Wait a moment," said the Lord Redlady. "Take your colleague." "Colleague?" saidthe giant. "A'gentur," said Redlady. "It'll be he who puts Rod together again." "Of course," said the doctor. The monkey had jumped out of his basket when he heard his name mentioned. Together, tire giant and the monkey led Rod into the little gleaming room. They closed the door behind them. The ones who were left behind sat down nervously. "Mister and owner Redlady," said Bill, "since I'm staying, could I have some more of that drink?" "Of course, sir and mister," said the Lord Redlady, not having any idea of what Bill's titla might be. There were no screams from I Rod, no thuds, no protest. There was the cloying sweet horror of unknown medicines creeping through the airvents. The two women said nothing as the group of people sat around. Eleanor, wrapped in an enormous towel, came and sat with them. In the second hour of the operations on Rod, Lavinia began sobbing. She couldn't help it. 'TT'hat very night it happened. They scunned him; they reduced him; they froze him; they dehydrated him. The Lord Redlady arranged a relay with the special courier ship which would run him to Earth itself. These things were supposed to be secret, but they could not be kept completely secret. We all know that no communications systems are wholly leak-proof. Even inside the vast networks of the Instrumentality, shielded, coded and protected though they were, there were soft electronic spots, weak administrative points, or garrulous men here and there. The old computer had not allowed for ordinary human wickedness. It understood the human rules, but not the temptations to break the rules. All the messages concerning Rod's vast speculations had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy. We all know the old rhyme: Luck Is hot and people funny. Everybody's fond of money. Lost a chance and sell your mother. Win the pot and buy another. Other people fall and crash : You could win the pot of cash! It applied in this case, too. People ran hot and cold with the news. On Earth, Commissioner Teadrinker wondered if he dared kidnap this rich man who was coming and hold him to ransom. It was illegal, but Teadrinker was so old that he had outlived mere legality. At Viola Siderea, the Council of Thieves sent the Chief of Thieves in pursuit, spending hard-stolen money on honest lease of patrol ships, so great was their urgency. At the heart of the underpeople world, an unknown magister invoked the seven logoi and the three Nameless Ones, hoping that the stranger might bring great tidings. The Commonwealth Council of Old North Australia sat on the matter and decided to send along a full dozen' McBan impersonations, just to throw robbers and interceptors off the track. They did not do this because they loved Rod, or because they had special regard for him as an individual citizen, but because it was against their principles to let any Old North Australian to be robbed with impunity. And Rod -- Rod woke on Mars, already reconstituted. XV D od woke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium -- knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed. The whole world was on fire! Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch. But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed. "Eleanor!" he shouted. "Come here!" He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this -- what was this? When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather's time. The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight. He did not look as though he could lift a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby's face.He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician. "We're feeling better, I see," said he. "Where on earth am I?" asked Rod. "In a satellite? It feels odd." "You're not on Earth, man." "I know I'm not. I've never been there. Where's this place?" "Mars. The Old Star Station. I'm Jeanjacques Vomact." Rod mumbled the name so badly that the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject. "Where's Mars? Can you untie me? When's that light going to go off?" "I'll untie you right now," said Doctor Vomact, "but stay in bed and take it easy until we've given you some food and taken some tests. The light -- that's sunshine. I'd say it's about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don't you know what Mars is? It's a planet." "New Mars, you mean," said Rod proudly, "the one with the enormous shops and the zoological gardens." "The only shops we have here are the cafeteria and the PX. New Mars? I've heard of that place somewhere. It does have big shops and some kind of an animal show. Elephants you can hold in your hand. This isn't that place at all. Wait a sec, I'll roll your bed to the window." Rod looked eagerly out of the window. It was frightening. A naked, dark sky did not have a cloud in sight. A few holes showed in it here and there. They almost looked like the "stars" which people saw when they were in spaceship transit from one cloudy planet to another. Dominating everything was a single explosive horrible light, which hung high and steady in the sky without ever going off. He found himself cringing for the explosion, but he could tell, from the posture of the doctor next to him, that the doctor was not in the least afraid of that chronic hydrogen bomb, whatever it might turn out to be. Keeping his voice level and trying not to sound like a boy he said, "What's that?" "The sun." T'Von't cook my book, mate! Give me the straight truth. Everybody calls his star a sun. What's this one?" "The sun. The original sun. The sun of Old Earth Itself. Just as this is plain Mars. Not even Old Mars. Certainly not New Mars. This is Earth's neighbor." "That thing never goes off, goes up -- boom ! -- or goes down?" "The sun, you mean?" said Doctor Vomact. "No, I should think not. I suppose it looked that way to your ancestors and when we were all running around naked on Earth." The doctor busied himself as he talked. He chopped the air with a strange-looking little key, and the tapes fell loose. The mittens dropped off Rod's hands. Rod looked at his own hands in the intense light and saw that they seemed strange. They looked smooth and naked and clean, like the doctor's own hands. Weird memories began to come back to him, but his handicap about spieking and hiering telepathically had made him cautious and sensitive, so he did not give himself away. "If this is old, old Mars, what are you doing, talking the Old North Australian language to me? I thought my people were the only ones in the universe who still spoke Ancient Inglish." He shifted proudly but clumsily over to the Old Common Tongue: "You see, the Appointed Ones of my family taught me this language as well. I've never been offworld before." "I speak your language," said the doctor, "because I learned it. I learned it because you paid me, very generously, to learn it. In the months that we have been reassembling you, it's come in handy. We just let down the portal of memory and identity today, but I've talked to you for hundreds of hours already." Rod tried to speak. He couldn't utter a word. His throat was dry and he was afraid that he might throw up. The doctor put a friendly hand on his arm. "Easy, mister and owner McBan, easy now. We all do that when we come out." Rod croaked, "I've been dead. Dead. Me?" "Not exactly dead," said the doctor, "but close to it." "The box -- that little boxP cried Rod. "What little box?" "Please, doctor -- the one I came in?" "That box wasn't so little," said Doctor Vomact. He squared his hands in the air and made a shape about the size of the little ladies' bonnet-box which Rod had seen in the Lord Redlady's private operating room. "It was this big. Your head wai full natural size. That's why it's been so easy and so successful to bring you back to normality in such a hurry." "And Eleanor?" "Your companion? She made it, too. Nobody intercepted the ship." "You mean the rest is true, too? I'm still the richest man in the universe? And I'm gone, gone from home?" Rod would have liked to beat the bedspread, but did not. "I am glad," said Doctor Vomact, "to see you express so much feeling about your situation. You showed a great deal when you were under the sedatives and hypnotics, but I waa beginning to wonder how we could help you realize your true position when you came back, as you now have, to normal life. Forgive me for talking this way. I sound like a medical journal. It's hard to be friends with a patient, even when one really likes him." TT'riends they became in the ensuing days. After several weeks, Vomact came to the plans he had -- when Rod was well enough -- for the disguise for a trip to Earth. "What are you going to do to me, sir and doctor?" asked Rod. "Anything you want," said Vomact lightly. "Really, now. What?" "Well," said Vomact, "the Lord Redlady sent along a whole cube of suggestions. Keep your personality. Keep your retinal and brain images. Change your appearance. Change your workwoman into a young man who looks just like your description." "You can't do that to Eleanor. She's a citizen." "Not here, not on Mars, she isn't. She's your baggage." "But her legal rights!" "This is Mars, Rod, but it's Earth territory. Under Earth law. Under the direct control of the Instrumentality. We can do these things all right. The hard thing is this. Would you consent to passing for an underman?" "I never saw one. How would I know?" said Rod. "Could you stand the shame of it?" Rod laughed. Vomact sighed. "You're funny people, you Norstrilians. I'd rather die than be mistaken for an underman. The disgrace of it, the contempt! But the Lord Redlady said that you could walk into Earth as free as a breeze if we made you pass for a cat-man. I might as well tell you, Rod. Your wife is already here." Rod stopped walking. "My wife? I have no wife." "Your cat-wife," said the doctor. "Of course it isn't real marriage. Underpeople aren't allowed to have it. But they have a companionship which looks something like marriage and we sometimes slip and call them husband and wife. The Instrumentality has already sent a catgirl out to be your 'wife.' She'll travel back to Earth with you from Mars. You'll just be a pair of lucky cats who have been doing dances and acrobatics for the bored station personnel here." "And Eleanor?" "I suppose somebody will kill her, thinking it's you. That's what you brought her for, isn't it? Aren't you rich enough?" "No, no, no!" said Rod. "Nobody is that rich. We have to think of something else." They spent the entire walk back making new plans which would protect Eleanor and Rod both. As they entered the shed port and took off their helmets, Rod said, "This wife of mine, when can I see her?" "You won't overlook her," said Vomact. "She's as wild as fire and twice as beautiful." "Does she have a name?" "Of course she does," said the doctor. "They all do." "What is it, then?" "C'mell." D od walked to the edge of the little park. This was utterly unlike any ship he had ever seen or heard about in Norstrilia. There was no noise, no cramping, no sign of weapons -- just a pretty little cabin which housed the controls, the GoCaptain, the Pinlighters and the Stop-Captain, and then a stretch of incredible green grass. He had walked on this grass from the dusty ground of Mars. There was a purr and a whisper. A false blue sky, very beautiful, covered him like a canopy. He felt strange. He had whiskers like a cat, forty centimeters long, growing out of his upper lip, about twelve whiskers to each side. The doctor had colored his eyes with bright green irises. His ears reached up to a point. He looked like a cat-man and he wore the professional clothing of an acrobat; C'mell did too. He had not gotten over C'mell. She made every woman in Old North Australia look like a sack of lard. She was lean, limber, smooth, menacing and beautiful; she was soft to the touch, hard in her motions, quick, alert and cuddlesome. Her red hair blazed with the silkiness of animal fire. She spoke with a soprano which tinkled like wild bells. Her ancestors and ancestresses had been bred to produce the most seductive girl on Earth. The task had succeeded. Even in repose, she was voluptuous. Her wide hips and sharp eyes invited the masculine passions. Her catlike dangerousness challenged every man whom she met. The true men who looked at her knew that she was a cat, and still could not keep their eyes off her. Human women treated her as though she were something disgraceful. She travelled as an acrobat, but she had already told Rod McBan confidentially that she was by profession a "girlygirl," a female animal, shaped and trained like a person, to serve as hostess to offworld visitors, required by law and custom to invite their love, while promised the penalty of death if she accepted it. Rod liked her, though he had been painfully shy with her at first. There was no side to her, no posh, no swank. Once she got down to business, her incredible body faded . partway into the background, though with the sides of his eyes he could never quite forget it. It was her mind, her intelligence, her humor and good humor, which carried them across the hours and days they spent together. He found himself trying to impress her that he was a grown man, only to discover that in the spontaneous, sincere affections of her quick cat-heart, she did not care in the least what his status was. He was simply her partner and they had work to do together. It was his job to stay alive and it was her job to keep him alive. The doctor Vomact had told him not to speak to the other passengers at all ; at the same time, the doctor had asked C'mell to tell the other passengers not to say anything to each other, and to call for silence if any of them spoke. r  'here were ten other passen gers who stared at one-another in uncomfortable amazement. Ten in number, they were. All ten of them were Rod McBan. Ten identical Roderick FredMacArthur McBans to the one hundred and fifty-first, all exactly alike. Apart from C'mell herself and the little monkeydoctor, A'gentur, the only person on the ship who was not Rod McBan was Rod McBan himself. He had become the catman. The others seemed, each by himself, to be persuaded that he alone was Rod McBan and that the other nine were parodies. They watched each other with a mixture of gloom and suspicion mixed with amusement, just as the real Rod McBan would have done, had' he been in their place. "One of them," said doctor Vomact in parting, "is your companion Eleanor from Norstrilia. The other nine are mouse-powered robots. They're all copied from you. Good, eh?" He could not conceal his professional satisfaction. And now they were all about to see the wonders of Old Earth itself together. C'mell took Rod to the edge of the little world and said gently, "I want to sing 'The Tower Song' to you, just before we shut down on the top of Earthport." And in her wonderful voice she sang the strange little old song. Oh. my love, for you! High birds, crying and a High sky flying, and a High heart striving, and a High wind driving, and a High brave place -- for you! Rod felt a little funny, standing there, looking at nothing, but he also felt pleasant with the girl's head against his shoulder and his arm enfolding her. She seemed not only to need him, but to trust him very deeply. She did not feel adult -- not self-important and full of unexplained business. She was merely a girl, and for the time his girl. It was pleasant. It gave him a strange foretaste of the future. The day might come when he would have a permanent girl of his own, facing not a day, but life; not a danger, but destiny. He hoped that he could be as relaxed and fond with that future girl as he was with C'mell. C'mell squeezed his hand, as though in warning. He turned to look at her but she stared ahead and nodded with her chin, She said, "Keep watching straight ahead. Earth." He looked back at the blank blue artificial sky of the ship's force-field. It was a monotonous but pleasant blue, conveying depths which were not really there. The change was so fast that he wondered whether he had really seen it. In one moment the clear flat blue -- then the false sky splashed apart as though it had literally been slashed into enormous ribbons, ribbons in their turn becoming blue spots and disappearing. Another blue sky was there -- Earth's. Manhome. Rod breathed deeply. It was hard to believe. The sky itself was not so different from the false "sky" which had surrounded the ship on its trip from Mars, but there was an aliveness and wetness to it, unlike any other sky he had ever heard about. I t was not the sight of earth which surprised him -- it was the smell. He suddenly realized that Old North Australia must smell dull, flat and dusty to Earthmen. This Earth air smelled alive. There were the odors of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air his people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. The wetness was not the cherished damp of one of his covered canals. It was wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance which no Norstrilian could understand. No wonder the descriptions of Earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated! What was stroon that men would pay water for it -- water, the giver and carrier of life. This was his home, not matter how many generations his people had lived in the twisted hells of ures of Old North Australia. He took a deep breath, feeling the plasma of earth pour into him, the quick effluvium which had made man. He smelled Earth again. It would take a long lifetime, even with stroon, before a man could understand all these odors which came all the way up to the ship, which hovered, as pianoforming ships usually did not, twenty-odd kilometers above the surface of the planet. There was something strange in this air, something sweet and clear to the nostrils, refreshing to the spirit. One great beautiful odor overrode all the others. What could it be? He sniffed and then said, very clearly, to himself. "Salt!" C'mell reminded him that he was beside her. "Do you like it, C'rod?" "Yes, yes, it's better than -- " Words failed him. He looked at her. Her eager, pretty, comradely smile made him feel that she was delight. "But why," he asked, "do you waste salt on the air? What good does it do? Is it to clean the ship some way?" . "Ship? We're not cm the ship, C'rod. This is the landing roo i of Earthport." He gasped. No ship? There was not a mountain on Old North Australia more than six kilometers above mean ground level! And these mountains were all smooth, worn, old, folded by immense eons of wind into a gentle blanketing that covered his whole home world. He looked around. The platform was about two hundred meters long by one hundred wide. The ten "Rod McBans" were talking to some men in uniform. Far at the other side a steeple rose into eye-catching height -- perhaps a whole half-kilometer. He looked down. There it was -- Old Old Earth. The treasure of water reached before his very eyes -- water to feed a galaxy of sheep, to wash an infinity of men. The water was broken by a few islands on the far horizon to the right. "Hesperides," said C'mell, following the direction of his gaze. "They came up from the sea when the Daimoni built this for us. For people, I mean. I shouldn't say 'us' when I mean people." T Te did not notice the correc" tion. He stared at the sea. Little specks were moving in it, very slowly. He pointed at one of them with his finger and asked C'mell: "Are those wethouses?" "What did you call them?" "Houses which are wet. Houses which sit on water. Are those some of them?" "Ships," she said, not spoiling his fun with a direct contradiction. "Yes, those are ships." "Ships?" he cried. "You'd never get one of those into space! Why call them ships then?" Very gently C'mell explained, "People had ships for water before they had ships for space. I think the Old Common Tongue takes the word for space vessel from the things you are looking at." "I want to see a city," said Rod. "Show me a city." "It won't look like much from here. We're too high up. Nothing looks like much from the top of Earthport. But I can show you, anyhow. Come over here, dear." When they walked away from the edge, Rod realized that the little monkey was still with them. "What are you doing here with us?" asked Rod, not unkindly. The monkey's preposterous little face wrinkled into a knowing smile. The face was the same as it had been before, but the expression was different -- more assured, more clear, more purposeful than ever before. There was even humor and cordiality in the monkey's voice. "We animals are waiting for the people to finish their entrance." We animals? thought Rod. Then he remembered his furry head, his pointed ears, his catwhiskers. No wonder he felt at ease with this girl and she with him. The ten Rod McBans were walking down a ramp, so that the floor seemed to be swallowing them slowly from the feet If you've enjoyed this story, don't miss -- The Store of Heart's Desire Another Rod McBan Novel Complete in the May issue of If -- watch for HI In the same issue -- The Imperial Stars by L E. Smith, Ph.D. up. They were walking in single file, so that the head of the leading one seemed to sit bodiless on the floor, while the last one in line had lost nothing more than his feet. It was odd indeed. Rod looked at C'mell and A'gentur and asked them frankly, "When people have such a wide, wet, beautiful world, all full of life, why should they kill me?" A'gentur shook his monkey head sadly, as though he knew full well, but found the telling of it inexpressibly wearisome. C'mell answered, "You are who you are. You hold immense power. Do you know that this tower is yours?" "Mine!" he cried. "You've bought it, or somebody bought it for you. Most of that water is yours, too. When you have things that big, people ask you for things. Or they' take them from you. Earth is a beautiful place, but I think it is a dangerous place, too, for offworlders like you who are used to just one way of life. You haven't caused all the crime and meanness in the world, but it's  been sleeping. And now it wakes up for you." "Why for me?" "Because," said A'gentur, "you're the richest person who has ever touched this planet. You own most of it already. on your thoughts and your decisions." They had reached the opposite side of the top platform. Here, on the land side, the rivers were all leaking badly. Most of the land was covered with steam-clouds, such as they saw on Norstrilia when a covered canal burst out of its covering. These clouds represented incalculable treasures of rain. He saw that they parted at the foot of the tower. "Weather machines," said C'mell. "The cities are all covered with weather machines. Don't you have weather machines in Old North Australia?" "Of course we do," said Rod, "but we don't waste water by letting it float around in the open air like that. It's pretty, though. I guess the extravagance of it makes me feel critical. Don't you Earth people have anything better to do with your water than to leave it lying on the ground or having it float over open land?" "We're not Earth people," said C'mell. "We're underpeople. I'm a cat-person and he's made from apes. Don't call us people. It's not decent." "Fudge!" said Rod. "I was just asking a question about Earth, not pestering your feelings when -- " He stopped short. They all three spun around. A man faced them -- a tall man, clad in formal garments, his face gleaming with intelligence, courage, wisdom and a very special kind of elegance. am projecting," said he. "You know me," he said to C'mell. "My lord Jestocost!" "You will sleep," he commanded A'gentur, and the little monkey crumpled into a heap of fur on the deck of the tower. "I am the Lord Jestocost, one of the Instrumentality," said the strange man, "and I am going to speak to you at very high speed. It will seem like many minutes, but it will only take seconds. It is necessary for you to know your fate." "You mean my future?" said Rod McBan. "I thought that you, or somebody else, had it all arranged." "We can dispose, but we cannot arrange. I have talked to the Lord Redlady. I have plans for you. Perhaps they will work out." A slight frowning smile crossed the face of the distinguished man. With his left hand he warned C'mell to do nothing. The beautiful cat-girl started to step forward and then obeyed the imperious gesture, stopped, and merely watched. The Lord Jestocost dropped to one knee. He bowed proudly and freely, with his head held high and his face tilted upward while he stared directly at Rod McBan. Still kneeling, he said ceremoniously, "Some day, young man, you will understand what you are now seeing. The Lord Jestocost, which is myself, has bowed to no man or woman since the day of his initiation. That was more time ago than I like to remember. But I bow freely to the man who has bought Earth. I offer you my friendship and my help. I offer both of these without mental reservation. Now I stand up and I greet you as my younger comrade." He stood erect and reached for Rod's hand. Rod shook hands with him, still bewildered. "Within minutes assassins will be on their way to kill your impersonators. Other people will try to hunt you down for what you have done or for what you some of your property and all of your life. You will have experiences which you will treasure -- if you live through them. "You have no chance at all without me. I'll correct that. You have one chance in ten thousand of coming out alive. "With me, if you obey me through C'mell, your chances are very good indeed. More than one thousand to one in your favor. You will live -- " "But my money!" Rod spieked wildly without knowing that he did it. "Your money is on Earth. It is Earth," smiled the wise, powerful old official. "It is being taxed at enormous rates. This is your fate, young man. Remember it, and be ready to obey it. When I lift my hand, repeat after me. Do you understand?" Rod nodded. He was not afraid, exactly, but some unknown core within him had begun to radiate animal terror. He was not afraid of what might happen to himself; he was afraid of the strange, wild fierceness of it all. He had never known that man or boy could be so utterly alone. The loneliness of the open outback at home was physical. people around him. He felt the past crowding up as though it were alive in its own right. The cat-girl beside him comforted him a little; he had met her through Doctor Vomact; to Vomact he had been sent by Redlady; and Redlady knew his own dear home. The linkage was there, though it was remote. In front of him there was no linkage at all. Tie stood, in his own mind, on a precipice of the present, staring down at the complex inexplicable immensity of Earth's past. This was the place that all people were from. In those oceans thty had crawled in the slime; from those salt, rich seas they had climbed to that land far below him; on that land they had changed from animals into men before they had seized the stars. This was home itself, the home of all men, and it could swallow him up. The word-thoughts came fast out of the Lord Jestocost's mind, directly into his own. It was as though Jestocost had found some way around his impediment and had then disregarded it. "This is Old Earth Itself, from which you were bred and to which all men return in their thoughts if not in their bodies. This is still the richest of the worlds, though its wealth is measured in treasures and memories, not in stroon. "Many men have tried to rule this world. A very few have done it for a little while." Unexpectedly, the Lord Jestocost lifted his right hand. Without knowing why he did it. Rod repeated the last sentence. "A very few men have governed the world for a little while." "The Instrumentality has made that impossible." The right hand was still in the commanding "up" position, so Red repeated, "The Instrumentality has made that impossible." "And now you, Rod McBan of Old North Australia, are the first to own it." The hand was still raised. "And now I, Rod McBan, of Old North Australia, am the first to own it." The hand dropped, but the Lord spieked on. "Go forward, then, with death around you. "Go forward, then, to your heart's desire. "Go forward, with the love you will win and lose. "Go forward, to the world, and to that other world under the world. "Go forward, to wild adventures and a safe return. "Be watchful of C'mell. She will be my eyes upon you, my arm around your shoulders, my . authority upon your person; but go. "Go." Up went the hand. "Go... " said Rod. The Lord vanished. C'mell plucked at his sleeve. "Your trip is over, my husband. Now we take Earth itself." Softly and quickly they ran to the steps which went to unimaginable Earth below them. Rod McBan had come to the fulfilment of his chance and his inheritance. What happens when mankind meets a starhcrn race of aliens whose basic moral code outrages everything 'that humanity holds dear? Read one of the most challenging science-fiction stories ever written! Complete in the April issue of Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale nowl (a native) Looking for somewhere new to travel? Try Earth I # -- but beware your fellow tourists. This lovely flyway between Los Angeles and Old Nueva York is among the most picturesque of Earth's planetary routes. From East to West one retraces the steps of the early Sodbusters, or Okies, following the vanishing herds of buffalo toward That Great Gold Strike in Hollywood. From West to East one partially follows the path of the Annihilation Eclipse of '#. Rich in historical associations, superb in its natural beauties. Earth Eighteen is justly famed as a pleasant and inexpensive vacation tour for those whose budgets do not permit something better. O km, Earth # begins at the ancient village of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, once the largest (in area) community on this continent and now a settlement of some # human beings administered as a Vegan naval base under the Treaty of Capella XV. At the time of the Occupation of Earth elaborate defense works were constructed by the natives, which, however, failed in their purpose and are now used by the Vegans for training exercises in the demolishment of defense positions. Little now remains of this once mighty system of walls and fortifications, known locally as Freeways. However, even less remains of the people who built them. A number of side trips are available, which the discerning traveler will avoid. # km w., on local route Wilshire Boulevard, the La Brea Tar Pits, app. # hectare tract of Pleistocene asphalt beds, part of a sedimentary series of sands, clays and gravel, present thickness estimated at from # to # meters. In the geologic past these beds comprised open tar seeps, perhaps with a thin film of water as a surface feature, attracting thirsty fauna. These became entrapped in the tar and attracted carnivores to prey on them, which in turn became entrapped and attracted later forms as spectators, chewing-gum vendors and purveyors of picture post cards. Among the species represented in the tar are dire wolves, saber-tooth tigers and mastodons, which are extinct, and dogs, cats and human beings, which are not, quite. # km. s.e., on local route JJ, is Disneyland, inhabited by American Indians, early rocket men, cowboys, "bank robbers" and other primitive forms, none of which are alive. # km. Hoover Desert. This great dust bowl, which must be approached with respirators, is an awe-inspiring sight. Named after a mythical early hero (cf. Hooverville, Hoovertown, Hoover Vacuum Cleaner, etc.), the name refers to anything which is shabby or in need of cleaning, hence this massive ruin. More than # meters in length and bone dry, it was at one time a mighty reservoir conserving the waters of the Colorado River until residents of the State of Arizona, angered because of what they deemed an unfair division of its waters, crept to the base of the dam one night and left its faucets running. # km. Grand Canyon, # km long and nearly # km in width at some points, has been compared in size and beauty with the Polar Chasm of Aldeby those who have visited Aldeeroded walls can be seen rock strata going back nearly one preCambrian schists and gneisas Coca-Cola bottle tops and ses, lacking in any fossil remains, through Cambrian, Devonian, Mississippian and Permian layers, to recent deposits rich in archeological finds such bumed-out picture tubes. Exploring the lower portion of the Canyon afoot or atentacle is a pleasant diversion for visitors who do not expect too much. The natives can provide pack animals for those who wish to venture down the old rock trails to the bottom of the chasm, where desert plants like agave and Spanish bayonet flourish. The pack animals are strong, agile and specially bred for this arduous work, but cannot be relied upon for transport of visitors weighing more than # kg. For heavier visitors quadrupeds, such as "horses" or "mules", are available. The lower portion of the Coconino Plateau, forming the south rim of the Canyon, is off-limits to all visitors lacking protective armor or weapons of defense. These areas have been colonized by Lesser Betelgeusan Chamelions which, masked as boulders or tree-stumps, lie in wait for their prey beside the trails. # km. Wupatld National Monument. This spot has a rich and fascinating history. Unfortunately none of it is known. # km n. on Planetary Route # may be seen the sites of the former Navajo Cliff Dwellings, now a flat and featureless desert. Their appearance dates from Local Year #, wnen an Arizona senator succeeded in having them classified as tenements and demolished as part of an "urban redevelopment program." At # km the flyway passes s. of Mt. Taylor (# meters), a peak of the Rocky Mountain chain. Care must be taken in passing this point, as the snowcapped peak visible to the south Is not a mountain but a Greater Betelgeusan Chamelion. no At # km, by bringing your floatcraft above # meters you may be fortunate enough to see southward a muddy trickle wending its feeble way along what what was at one time the border between the provinces of Mexico and Usa. Shallow, narrow and seasonally unreliable, this stream was known derisively to the natives as "The Big River" or Rio Grande. # km. The Carlsbad Caverns. At this point the flyway passes over what is almost the last surviving preserve of native life in its preContact form. In this underground empire, more than # km of connecting chambers and passages are known to exist, some of which reach a length of nearly a kilometer and a ceiling height of some # meters. Formed some # local years ago by water erosion in beds of gypsum and limestone, in # the Caverns were occupied by refugees fearing nuclear holocaust and, sustained by primitive forms of food-synthesizers, water recirculators, etc., they have remained there ever since. The area has been declared a Galactic Game Refuge, and no visitors are permitted to enter the Caverns except when accompanied by a licensed galactic guide and equipped with no-see invisibility shields, sound dampers, etc. Permits may be obtained from the Park Director for the guided tour. Qualified academic or government personnel may secure authorization for unconducted visits, including the privilege of visiting sections of the Caverns not normally included in the tour and the right to take specimens, but this must be arranged in writing in advance. The Earth colony in the Caverns comprises nearly # adult population and, although the census of recent years has shown some decline in the number of young born each spring, it is expected that it will stabilize at a figure in excess of #. The natives are bellicose and imbued with a mystique they call "Massive Retaliation". Much of their religious activity centers around an annual war dance and role-playing ceremony in which chosen heroes known as the Teller (or Good One) and the Pauling (or Evil One) contend in mock combat to decide whether or not to "Press the Button." By convention the Teller always wins but in a richly symbolic ceremony is prevented from "pressing the button" by a horde of masked assassins in a rite known as "civilian interference with strategic concepts." The "button" may at one time have had some relation to actual weapons, but all such have of course long since been disarmed or removed by Sirian teams of engineers. The homes are principally carved out of the rock, although some attempt has been made to erect huts in the larger chambers, where the tribal life retains more of its original vitality, the women cooking and caring for the children while the men follow their traditional occupations of cave-bat hunting and television repair. Of recent years there has been much debate as to the ultimate fate of this colony in the halls of the Protectorate Council, some factions proposing to tell them that the war is over and return them to the surface, the more conservative element advocating retaining them as they are. It is considered likely that the latter view will prevail, at least as long as the planet continues to produce an adequate supply of other protein. # km. Houston, although pleasantly located, is not recommended for more than a short visit because of the unpleasant odor of a native hydrocarbon compound. Once used as fuel, "oil", as it is called, invades the drinking water, the air and the conversation of the locals, who firmly believe it will once again have value and attempt to trade "leases" to travellers in exchange for chocolate bars or bits of colored glass. # km. At Galveston at low tide may be seen the rusting remains of the Nuclear Ship Savannah, one of the earliest atomicpowered surface craft built on Earth. Local tradition holds that its engines, driven by "kobalds" or "gobs" under the direction of a legendary figure named Rickover, never needed refueling. Ritual caste differences between "locals" at the time of launching made it impossible to secure a crew and the vessel never put to sea, so indeed they never did. # km. Here the flyway passes over the open sea for a distance of some # km where, just s. of the Mississippi River Delta, is Gulfhaven, a modern resort for aquatic forms, equipped with pressure rooms, steam generators, whirligons, etc. Gulfhaven is unique among Earth Eighteen's tourist attractions in that its administration and financing is # per cent Terrestrial controlled, as a Point # Project sponsored jointly by Procyon system after the Occupation of Earth. Actual construction, of course, was accomplished by imported machinery, mostly from Rigel VI. Among the resort's many forms of amusement and sports are swimming, floating, diving, writhing, soaking, flowing and glunt. The natives are intelligent, cooperative and cultured. They are not to be confused with the biped land form with whom they once contended for the domination of the planet. Aquatic but air-breathing, the Terrestrials of Gulfhaven are known locally as "dolphins." # km. Amphibian forma may relish a stopover at The Everglades, a tract of some # square km of swamp, forest, marsh and waterways. Abounding in game of every variety, The Everglades have been described as a hunter's paradise, where limit bags may be taken of bear, otter, deer, white-banded teal, human beings, white and blue herons, panthers, bullfrogs, manatees, brown mallard, duck, roseate spoonbill, alligators, Cape Sable seaside sparrows and snakes. Sea trout, tarpon, channel bass and other marine vertebrates tempt aquatic forms. All in all, The Everglades have considerable local renown as a firstrate place for a picnic for almost any traveller, and their attractions have been enhanced by a vigorous building program on the part of Park authorities, including game areas, hostels and barbecue pits, with native servants to clean away any untidy remnants. These human beings may not be taken on your Transient Hunting License. Please cooperate with the Park authorities by bagging only the wild humans for table or trophy, as the trained specimens are hard to replace. If you inadvertently take one of them you must report it at once to the Park Director and pay a fair price per kilogram of dressed weight. # km. In Miami Beach simple accommodations may be obtained for a few "pennies" in local currency at establishments such as the Eden Roc or Fontainebleau. Southern Florida is subtropical in climate (## A.) and displays many lovely flowering plants, none of them native. Those interested in geology will find the eastern coast somewhat elevated over the west as the weight of the Gulf of Mexico depressed the western strata, thus displaying more ancient rock formations on the eastern side. At Bradenton (# km nnw.) may be seen the rusting remains of the hydraulic jacks built in #, when a #th District "congressman" fought through a large federal appropriation to combat this geological shift and "set the damn thing straight again." #I km. Now a National Park, the former site of Cape Canaveral is rich in local historical interest. The people are friendly, provided one purchases souvenirs. The males are tall, wear soft caps and speak a curious local argot. The women do not show themselves in the presence of strangers. An interesting feature of the Canaveral dialect is their unique numbering system, which' goes, "Five, four, three, two, one, oh, curse it all!" The most prominent local feature is a pylon of dressed stone # meters high, representing a primitive rocket missile and totem" after the initials of the NationalArbeiter Sozialistische Aktion, the group which first sponsored rocket research. Manny's, a beach club, provides box lunches for travelers and a simple dinner on the premises for those who wish to lunch while overlooking the rusted gantries. A local delicacy is smoked salmon, which has a complex religious significance for the natives under its name of "lox." # km. Brunswick, Georgia, the site of the first invasion from the sea by Vegan marine forces during the Occupation of Earth, is now noted principally for its series of rolling sand dunes extending n. and s. as far as the eye can reach. Here Vegan amphitanks, advancing from staging areas just off the Continental Shelf, rolled inland in waves of a thousand or more tanks, beaming individual targets with lasers and mortaring tactical nuclear shells in a creeping barrage that preceded them as they advanced. The aboriginal population was wiped out entirely. One Vegan was a casualty, having sprained a fluke in a collision between his amphitank and a landing triphib assault craft. As a sightseeing object Brunswick is something of a disappointment, since there is essentially nothing left to see, but that's a Vegan invasion for you. A side trip to Atlanta (# km wnw) will prove of more interest to historically minded visitors. This ghost town, now inhabited by only a few small quadrupeds and great flocks of pigeons, was once considered a major human-being community and had something the status of a regional capital. Modeled after Greek sources -- that is to say, with a pleasure-bent aristocracy subsisting on the toil of slaves -- it was thus drogatorily referred to as "The Athens of the South." Here the Vegan drive culminated with the burning of the city, an event which is commemorated in the doleful native folk ballad, Marse Sherman, We Thought You Wuz Dead but You Fooled Ut. # km. Washington. Muggy, miasmic and malarious, the climate of this former provincial capital is such that stopovers are not recommended in the months of May through October or December through March. It is at its best, if best is the right word, in April and November, when it is unpleasant. The men are tall, indolent and gloomy, with bushy eyebrows. The women nag the men. The quaint name of the town comes from the folk belief that at one time this area was inhabited by countless "government workers" who proliferated until their natural increase came to a halt because of the destruction of their grazing grounds. It was said that they survived by the taking in of one another's washing (cf, # Terrestrial Folk Sayings, by I. Asenion), hence the description of the place as "washing done." Rooms may be had at the White House, but travelers are cautioned to beware of insect pests. In case of real need one may find meals hawked by vendors on Constitution Mall. Avoid Pennsylvania Avenue, where mendicants (the local term is "lobbyists") are present in large numbers, whining, begging and exhibiting maimed limbs and ulcerated sores, termed "depreciation allowances." This stopover is not recommended. Visible w. at altitudes over # meters is The Pentagon, a ruin whose five sides are said to represent the five branches of the Old American government: the Legislative, the Executive, the Judicial, the Military and the A.M.A. Its outer corridors make a shrouded, mysterious retreat, especially attractive to children. However, it is not wise to penetrate its inner recesses without taking along a native guide, or two if one is especially hungry. # km nw, on local route XX-#, is Gettysburg, site of a minor engagement between humans but venerated because named after the legendary general and oil prospector, J. Getty Eisenhoover, who was elected president of the United States in the famous "# percent or fight" campaign -- a figure which refers (as above) to depreciation allowances. #I km. In Philadelphia an old lamasery contains a cantrip, or Q'ran, which provides a focus for religious observances by the natives. Copperplate-printed in #, it purports to be a "declaration of independence" setting forth a program designing to abolish certain iniquities, such as standing armies and "a multitude of new offices, and... swarms of officers who harass our people and eat out their substance." It is interesting, if fruitless, to speculate on the consequences if this program had succeeded. # km. Old Nueva York. This broad bay where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic Ocean is thought to have been the site of a large city at one time. Legends give various reasons for its disappearance. Held to have been "the money center of the world", some theories state that with the abolition of money due to the growth of credit cards, its purpose ceased to exist and it was plowed under in a ritual sacrifice to propitiate evil spirits and bring back "the good old days." (Cf. the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, etc.) An alternate legend tells of a time of building mighty monoliths in ceremonies known in other primitive communities as "potlatching", spicuously consumed their wealth in erecting a huge structure, to be matched by another tribe, the Pan-Ams, etc. According to this folk-tale the foundations of the island simply could not support its superstructure and it turned over and disappeared in the sea. A third legend, that the city was obliterated in a nuclear conflict, has been conclusively disproved by phaseanalysis methods based on a study of human psychological traits as reconstructed from surviving documents. Clearly they were crazy, but no race could be that crazy. In any event, the site at present comprises a broad, clear bay surrounded by pleasant woods and savannas. As the bay is of deep water and offers shelter for vessels it was once contemplated that a trading center be established there, but the project was given up when it was realized there was nothing on Earth worth trading for. # km e. on local route Northern State Boulevard is Levittown, a surprisingly well preserved community of humans. Nearly one tenth of the buildings survive, though many are awash at high tide. A few of the structures are of traditional local interest, as the home at the corner ot Alexanderplatz Drive and Les Champs Elysees du Ouest. This building is tabu to the natives, who held that in its early history it was the subject of a shameful violation of folkways, since it was purchased for cash. At various points s. of Levittown civilized colonies have been established, and meals and lodgings can be obtained. A celebrated old inn is Howard Johnson's Floater Lodge where # varieties of accommodations can be obtained, including hiG, deep freeze and methane. Mjlssss's, celebrated for its Arcturan cuisine, is rewarding for the seasoned traveler seeking a meal that is different. It is not recommended for those traveling with children weighing less than # kilograms. Caution must be observed in eating the Arcturan dishes, as they may eat you first. # km n.w. on local route Thruway is Niagara Falls, which some travelers consider a scenic wonder comparable to the Jovian Red Spot. Others consider it pretty dull. The waterfall itself is divided into two parts, locally termed the "American" and the "Canadian" falls, over which an aggregate of some # cubic meters of water pass each minute, descending an average distance of # meters. That is all there is to it. It hardly seems enough. # km. Boston, and the terminus of your trip! Here travelers may secure transmatter passage for their return to civilization, not without a hearty sense of gratitude in most cases. Boston (or, as it is sometimes called, "boss-town") itself is a fishing village of no great distinction although scenically it is attractive particularly when approached in darkness. Clinging to a precarious existence under the constant threat of invasion by its more powerful neighbors on the opposite bank of the Charles River, Boston, ringed by watchfires and under martial law from dusk to dawn, is an impressive sight from the air at night # km e. is Cape Cod, now a missile base occupied by Vegan mermen but once celebrated human vacation resort and historical shrine. On its sandy beaches an invasion of Vikings led by Eric the Red were repulsed by local irregulars under Joe McCarthy, who according to tradition parted the waters with a birch rod and thus stranded the invasion fleet. The spot is marked by a monolith known as Plymouth Rock, or Wreck. And so we come to an end in your pleasure-jaunt along old Earth Eighteen! On behalf of the various Park directors, the Tourist Agency and those overburdened gamekeepers charged with the care of the surviving humans of this planet, we wish you a safe trip home -- and better luck on your next vacation! The transfluvian tribes are hostile. Until recent times they eked out their grazing economy by decoying floatcraft into landing in their territory by means of false beacons. Thereupon the travelers would be ambushed, robbed and sometimes killed by the native weapon, a sort of boomerang or "slipstick", which they use with great skill. This, of course, was put a stop to. The present occupants of the transCharles territory are new immigrants, their predecessors being now extinct. mmrjmmt imn S ir Francis Gal ton, who died in #I just one month before reaching the age of #, was one of the important scientists of the latter part of the nineteenth century even though his name is not very well known any more. He was bom in Birmingham in #. By the time little Francis received his first lessons, one of his cousins who was thirteen years older studied for the ministry and passed his spare time as an enthusiastic collector of English beetles. The name of the beetle-collecting cousin was Charles Darwin; the grandfather of them both was Dr. Erasmus Darwin. By the time Charles Darwin went on a voyage around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle, instead of mounting the pulpit, Francis Galton was at Trinity College, Cambridge studying anthropology. At the age of # he went travelling too, first to the Sudan, then to South-West Africa. After his return he first wrote about his travels and then turned to the study of meteorology. His Meteorographica (#) was one of the first comprehensive books on the then new science of weather research. That he did not stick to meteorology but changed course once more was the fault of his cousin. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species had been published in #. Galton read it, of course, and realized that here was a whole collection of new fields and that Darwin, thorough as he had been, had not been able to cover everything. Therefore he began to work in a few of these Gallon's "Random Machine" peripheral fields. He became especially interested in heredity as applied to humans, and began statistical studies of hereditary traits. His studies involved the results of inheritance in certain families, but also of people who were not related but had something in common -- for example genius, or color blindness, or a criminal record. The last subdivision led him to fingerprints, about which he wrote several books.  Z # # # #S # # f The distribution of # beans picked at random. Upper line T T eredity was understood in Galton's time, to the extent that it had been noticed that both parents passed on traits to their children, and that some traits were pronounced while others seemed to disappear. But it was also known that traits sometimes jumped across one generation. His own famous grandfather and famous grandson, Charles Darwin, were one example. The Mendelssohn family in Berlin was another one, where the (middle) member, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, remarked that it was tough to be the son and the father of famous men. (His father had been the famous Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, his son was the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.) But the extremes, genius on the one side and idiocy on the other, were rare. The majority was in the middle. One day Galton constructed, presumably for purposes of demonstration, a device which he called the Random Machine. (See Fig. #.) It consisted of a funnel-like metal strip, mounted on a board. Below the funnel mouth were a large number of evenly distributed brads, and below them a number of vertical slots. The front of the whole was covered by a pane of glass. The top was open so that the experimenter could drop small steel balls into the funnel. The steel ball would roll down one of the slopes and then bounce its way through the row of brads. Finally it would end up in one of the slots. It was impossible to tell in advance in which slot the ball would end up. But if a large number, at least a hundred, balls were used, the center slots would receive more of them, and the final distribution of the balls in the slots would always show a curve, highest in the center, and sloping down on both sides. Nor did it matter whether the balls were fed into the machine one by one in succession, or were thrown in by the handful. The result was always the same. Thoroughness compels me to record that Galton's device was also used for an unscientific purpose -- namely that of some genteel gambling at home. All one had to do was to number the slots and to make bets whether the next ball would end up in slot number # or number #. Or else one could bet that none of the first fifty balls would find its way into slot number #. One enterprising character, name unknown, manufactured the device and marketed it "for family entertainment" under the name of Tivoli. Now Galton's device worked with identical objects which underwent different events; that is, they had collided with different brads in different positions. This reflected the random events that mix traits (nowadays we would say "genes") in heredity. But then this was extended to objects which were different because the random events of heredity had already happened to them. A group of German researchers bought a few pounds of dry beans in the farmer's market and spent a few afternoons measuring them. The beans were all of the same botanical species, but some of them were, of course, larger than others. In this case the largest bean happened to be just twice as long as the smallest. A rack of chemical test tubes was pressed into service as a receiver. It was dubbed the "bean harp", since the row of vertical tubes reminded somebody with musical inclinations and some imagination of the strings of a harp. The largest bean went into test tube number #, the smallest into test tube number #; and the overall result of the sorting can be seen in Fig. #. It was the same kind of curve. # # # # # #  # # # # # # # # #Z# Weight of the brain of # Scandinavian males. Vertical column at left gives number of individuals, horizontal column at bottom the weight in grams. Dotted line is the mathematical curve. The military, especially the Quartermaster Corps, became interested. If beans had such a definite curve showing the average numbers of beans of each size, that might apply to soldiers too -- or rather to their uniforms and boots. Of course people differed far more from each other than did beans. Still it could do no harm to let a mathematician play around for some time with statistics of military inventories. '  'his, it may be necessary to A note, was more than a decade before the outbreak of World War I. It may also be added that the mathematicians were disdainful of the biologists' term "bean curve" and at once talked about Gaussian curves. In the meantime Swedish researchers had extended the bean curve to humans, or the most typically human part of them, namely the brain. In the course of autopsies made for all kinds of reasons the brain weights were noted. The comparison by weight of the brains of # Scandinavian males gave the curve in Fig. #. (If there had been three times as many autopsies the actual curve would have Height of # American soldiers, #. Vertical column at left is the number of individuals, horizontal figures at bottom give height in inches. fitted the theoretical curve bet ter than was the case.) Some fifty years ago zoologists and biologists were quite happy with the "bean curve" as applied to animals and to certain parts of plants, especially their seeds. The curve was always useful in predicting the probable number of individuals of a certain size in an animal population. To make the curve work, two items had to be established, the more important of them being the location of the center line -- that is, the size represented in the largest number of individuals. The less important item is to establish the actual ends of the curve. In the beans first used been measured the largest might But these would be the practical meters (about # inches) long. They simply do not exist -- even though the curve, written as an equation, might say that there bean in every ten or fifteen million. Prior to World War I no practical conclusions were based on the bean curve, under whatever name. The reason probably was that private individuals still had their garments made to measure, while the military could set artificial limits and accept as draftees or volunteers only men of arbitrarily set minimum and maximum heights and sizes. But after the first World War such studies, for the very practical purpose of military purchases of uniforms, underwear, socks and boots, were started. Fig. # shows the curve for # American soldiers, a random group picked in #. The center line then was # feet # inches, represented by # men. One inch shorter was represented by # men and one inch taller by # men. The size range from # feet # inches to # feet # inches comprised # men -- very nearly three-quarters of the # soldiers fell into that size range. It is easy to understand how a knowledge of these facts will influence decisions on military purchases. Of course, this curve of the year # no longer applies literally. People have grown since then and by now the center line may be # feet # inches instead of # fet # inches. Likewise the center line of the curve will vary with nationality. If I had actual statistics I would expect quite different center lines for the British army, the French army and the Japanese army. But the curve itself would apply in every army, just with a different center line and different cutoff points -- which, of course, could be arbitrary. Af course statistics can go both ways. Actually helmets come in just three sizes, small, medium and large. But if some army wished to issue precisely fitting helmets it could derive its figures from the statistics of the number of different hat sizes purchased by the civilian population. These statistics may be misleading at the extreme ends; men with unusually large heads (like me) usually have so much trouble getting their size that they stop wearing hats except in very bad weather. The result is that the sales statistics do not properly express the distribution of hat sizes. And when I lived in Washington during the second World War, I heard another story of statistics that miscarried. The Women's Army Corps had been formed and they needed shoes, of course. Purchases were made in accordance with the statistics supplied by manufacturers of women's shoes, and it turned out that they had bought too many small sizes. Because the manufacturer's statistics were, naturally, based on sales volume... and in this case the sales volumes did not reflect the distribution of foot size! But aside from such comparatively minor exceptions the bean curve is a useful statistical It was a triumph of international diplomacy -- a triumph over sensei  t that time the nations known as America and Russia had set off # nuclear explosions, pulverized every small island in the Pacific, Arctic and Indian Oceans, blown out of the earth lumps of great magnitude and little mineralogical value, and saturated the enclosing atmosphere and stratosphere with new elements, from Strontium-# to Neptunium-#. It was then that the American Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister pointed out to their respective leaders that the "tests," as these detonations were popularly called, had not been successful. "By not successful," the Secretary of State added, "I mean that we have failed to widen the gap." "By not successful," the Foreign Minister elaborated, "I mean that we have failed to widen the gap." The leaders of both nations immediately called for a conference and met near a beautiful lake in an intermediate country. Warmed by their consultations with eighty-proof bourbon and one-hundred-ten-proof vodka, they agreed that they would neither widen the gap nor narrow it, but simply eliminate gaps once and for all. The Russian leader told the story of a Ukrainian peasant who loved to eat bacon, "but he was so fond of his pig that he could not bring himself to kill it. He therefore swapped pigs with his neighbor." The American leader replied: "We must not hesitate to make sacrifices and, as our scientists have repeatedly stated, we must not be afraid to think about the unthinkable." The conversation continued in this vein for forty-five minutes. As a result, the leaders drew up the outline for a new treaty: they would each drop one medium-sized hydrogen bomb -- with a #-megaton yield -- onto the other's home territory, or over it, whichever proved the more convenient. This co-operative action would have two advantages or, as the American leader expressed it, two consumer benefits. Firstly, the impact of the explosions could be tested, not on thin air alone but also on people. Secondly, the two countries would be able to try out their civil defense programs under genuine rather than simulated conditions. The American leader said, "This ought to deter certain of our citizens from sitting down in Times Square during drill time." The Russian leader answered, 'We allow nobody to sit down in Red Square at any time." The two men then shook hands, paid handsome tribute to the country in which they had convened as a bastion of international understanding, issued a cheerful communique which the news services somehow misinterpreted and flew away, the American leader to his yacht, the Russian leader to his dacha. And it was then that the disagreements began. vver Aquavita-flavored tea (en verre) and highballs a la Philadelphia, the Russian Foreign Minister and the American Secretary of State (with their Ambassadors to the United Nations in attendance) sat for twelve hours at an oval table inlaid with Mollweide's projection of the world in five colors, to implement the details of the treaty by selecting a Russian and an American city as targets. The principal difficulty was that the cities must be equal in population and wealth -- although, as the Foreign Minister observed, 'We should be prepared to give or take a few citizens in exchange for a few hundred roubles." There followed a number of fruitless comparisons between San Francisco and Kiev, NijnyNovgorod and Detroit, Portland (Me.) and Archangel. The four men bent long over the Mollweide projection and eventually arrived at a temporary compromise, London and Warsaw. Then they parted for the night and their hotels in order to telephone the respective shores of Florida and the Black Sea. The next morning they came together again with firm instructions from home to abandon the temporary compromise. Overnight, the Presidential yacht had bidden its second-in-command to "stay within Soviet boundaries -- but West of the Urals if humanly possible" and not to "sell America's Polish vote down the Vistula." The Chairman's dacha, on the other hand, had begun his discourse with a folk tale about a canny peasant from the Ukraine who had succeeded in exchanging a sparrow (Warsaw? London?) for a duck (London? Warsaw?), but the duck now had to be fed, whereas the sparrow had been capable of finding its own food and... On the word "and" the Foreign Minister had fallen asleep with the receiver at his ear. He had awakened thirty-five minutes later, just in time to learn that the destruction of Warsaw would irrevocably lead to uprisings in Prague, Tirana, Sofia, Bucharest and -- God help the Red Army -- Budapest. The message ended: "Did nobody think of East and West Berlin? Alternatively, the people of the Soviet Union would reluctantly have relinquished Peking for London, except that Das Kapital was written in the British Museum, and the People's Democracy of China almost certainly has its own atomic firecrackers and might retaliate." After reshaping these communications in diplomatic terminology, the Foreign Minister and the Secretary of State again took up their bargaining. To their surprise, and almost grudgingly, they came to terms within minutes. The American bomb would be dropped over Voronezh which, as the Secretary of State confided to his Ambassador, gave promising possibilities of fallout on Rostov, Dnepropetrovsk, Kursk, Kharkov and Moscow. The Ambassador studied Mollweide and saw that the Secretary was right. For Voronezh and its bonuses, the Secretary of State was more than Ohio, which, he explained, had long been considered a "test city" in a less conclusive sense by the American advertising community, as well as by several motivational research organizations. So Voronezh-Columbus it was, and in good time for lunch. The two Ambassadors to the United Nations gratefully fastened their briefcases and talked about an afternoon swim in the neighboring lake. But during the caviar aux trufles the Foreign Minister looked thoughtful, and halfway through the wurst piemontaise he spoke a vehement Nyet and called an afternoon session. S adly the Ambassadors reopened their briefcases at two p.m. The Foreign Minister now claimed -- although he would not produce census figures to prove it -- that the population of Voronezh had swollen considerably under the latest ten-year industrial plan, and that Baltimore would be more nearly equivalent than Columbus. The Secretary of State could not accept this demand, in view of the proximity of Baltimore to New York. (The American Ambassador was momentarily surprised that his colleague had overlooked Washington, which was much closer). The Secretary then offered, in quick but unsuccessful succession : Atlanta, Little Rock (which the Foreign Minister rejected out of hand), New Orleans and Butte. The conference thereupon "deadlocked," as most of the press reported. (By means of judicious leaks from two Northern senators and one Russian general, the corps of correspondents had been led to believe that the conference was concerned with the exchange of American alfalfa for Russian millet.) That evening at a jazz concert in the Russian embassy the Foreign Minister was urged by his counterpart to relent, but in vain. The Secretary of State left early and lay inert on his hotel bed for over an hour, watching the pendulum of a cuckoo clock and wondering whether Baltimore and New York were worth the effort. Top-secret telephone messages went out that night to Biscayne Bay and the Crimean waters, and were meticulously tapped by two espionage organizations, the ing morning the American and Russian leaders returned almost simultaneously on the same airstrip and paid immediate tribute to their host, this tiny country from which the spirit of international good will irradiated the globe. Within an hour they had displayed the decisiveness for which both were famous, and had settled -- that is, undeadlocked -- the conference with a new agreement of breathtaking simplicity. Russia would drop its own bomb on Moscow... and America would drop its own bomb on New York City. Thus, thanks to an astute combination of statesmanship and generosity, the long-feared Third World War never came to pass. They had searched the galaxy for a fellow species... now there was nowhere left to go I T T autamaki had landed the ship on a rubble-covered pan of rock, a scored and ancient lava flow on the wrong side of the glacier. Tjond had thought, but only to herself, that they could have landed nearer; but Hautamaki was shipmaster and made all the decisions. Then again, she could have stayed with the ship. No one had forced her to join in this hideous scramble across the fissured ice. But of course staying behind was out of the question. There was a radio beacon of some kind over there -- on this uninhabited planet -- sending out squeals and cracklings on a dozen frequencies. She had to be there when they found it. Gulyas helped her over a difficult place and she rewarded him with a quick kiss on his windburned cheek. It was too much to hope that it could be anything other than a human beacon, though their ship was supposed to be covering an unexplored area. Yet there was the slimmest chance that some others might have built the beacon. The thought of not being there at the time of a discovery like that was unbearable. How long had mankind been looking now? For how many time-dimmed centuries? She had to rest, she was not used to this kind of physical effort. She was roped between the two men and when she stopped they all stopped. Hautamaki halted and looked when he felt her hesitant tug on the rope, staring down at her and saying nothing. His body said it for him, arrogant, tall, heavily muscled, bronzed and nude under the transparent atmosphere suit. He was breathing lightly and normally, and his face never changed expression as he looked at her desperately heaving breast. Hautamaki! What kind of a man are you, Hautamaki, to ignore a woman with such a deadly glance? Tj'or Hautamaki it had been the hardest thing he had ever done. When the two strangers had walked up the extended tongue of the ship's boarding ramp he had felt violated. This was his ship, his and Kiiskinen's. But Kiiskinen was dead and the child that they had wanted to have was dead. Dead before birth, before conception. Dead because Kiiskinen was gone and Hautamaki would never want a child again. Yet there was still the job to be done; they had completed barely half of their survey swing when the accident had occurred. To return to survey base would have been prodigiously wasteful of fuel and time, so he had called for instructions -- and this had been the result. A new survey team, unfledged and raw. They had been awaiting first assignment -- which meant they at least had the training if not the experience. Physically they would do the work that needed to be done. There would be no worry about that. But they were a team, and he was only half a team ; and loneliness can be a terrible thing. He would have welcomed them if Kiiskinen had been there. Now he loathed them. The man came first, extending his hand. "I'm Gulyas, as you know, and my wife Tjond." He nodded over his shoulder and smiled, the hand still out. "Welcome aboard my ship," Hautamaki said and clasped his own hands behind his back. If this fool didn't know about the social customs of Men, he was not going to teach him. "Sorry. I forgot you don't shake hands or touch strangers." Still smiling, Gulyas moved aside to make room for his wife to enter the ship. "How do you do, shipmaster?" Tjond said. Then her eyes widened and she flushed, as she saw for the first time that he was completely nude. "I'll show you your quarters," Hautamaki said, turning and walking away, knowing they would follow. A woman! He had seen them before on various planets, even talked with them, but never had he believed that there would some day be one on his ship. How ugly they were, with their swollen bodies! It was no wonder that on the other worlds everyone wore clothes. They needed to conceal the blubbery excess fat. "Why -- he wasn't even wearing shoes!" Tjond said indignantly as she closed the door. Gulyas laughed. "Since when has nudity bothered you? You didn't seem to mind it during our holiday on Hie. And you knew about the Men's customs." "That was different. Everyone was dressed -- or undressed -- the same. But this, it's almost indecent!" "One man's indecency is another's decency." "I bet you can't say that three times fast." "Nevertheless it's true. When you come down to it he probably thinks that we're just as socially wrong as you seem to think he is." "I don't think -- I know!" she said, reaching up on tiptoes to nip his ear with her tiny teeth, as white and perfectly shaped as rice grains. "How long have we been married?" "Six days, nineteen hours standard, and some odd minutes." "Only odd because you haven't kissed me in such a terribly long time." He smiled down at her tiny, lovely figure, ran his hand over the warm firmness of her hairless skull and down her spare, straight body. "You're beautiful," he said, then kissed her. II vnce they were across the glacier the going was easier on the hard-packed snow. Within an hour they had reached the base of the rocky spire. It stretched above them against the green-tinted sky, black and fissured. Tjond let her eyes travel up its length and wanted to cry. "It's too tall! Impossible to climb. With the gravsled we could ride up." "We have discussed this before," Hautamaki said, looking at Gulyas as he always did when he talked to her. "I will bring no radiation sources near the device up there until we determine what it is. Nothing can be learned from our aerial photograph except that it appears to be an untended machine of some kind. I will climb first. You may follow. It is not difficult on this type of rock." It was not difficult -- it was downright impossible. She scrambled and fell and couldn't get a body's-length up the spire. In the end she untied her rope. As soon as the two men had climbed above her she sobbed hopelessly into her hands. Gulyas must have heard her, or he knew how she felt being left out, because he called back down to her. "I'll drop you a rope as soon as we get to the top, with a loop on the end. Slip your arms through it and I'll pull you up." She was sure that he wouldn't be able to do it, but still she had to try. The beacon -- it might not be human made! The rope cut into her body, and surprisingly enough he could pull her up. She did her best to keep from banging into the cliff and twisting about: then Gulyas was reaching down to help her. Hautamaki was holding the rope... and she knew that it was the strength of those corded arms, not her husband's that had brought her so quickly up. "Hautamaki, thank you for -- " "We will examine the device now," he said, interrupting her and looking at Gulyas while he spoke. "You will both stay here with my pack. Do not approach unless you are ordered to." He turned on his heel, and with purposeful stride went to the outcropping where the machine stood. No more than a pace away from it he dropped to one knee, his body hiding most of it from sight, staying during long minutes in this cramped position. "What is he doing?" Tjond whispered, hugging tight to Gulyas' arm. "What is it? What does he see?" "Come over here!" Hautamaki said, standing. There was a ring of emotion in his voice that they had never heard before. They ran, skidding on the ice-glazed rock, stopping only at the barrier of his outstretched arm. "What do you make of it?" Hautamaki asked, never taking his eyes from the squat machine fixed to the rock before them. 'T'here was a central structure, a half sphere of yellowish metal that clamped tight to the rock, its bottom edge conforming to the irregularities beneath it. From this projected stubby arms of the same material, arranged around the circumference close to the base. On each arm was a shorter length of metal. Each one was shaped differently, but all were pointing skywards like questing fingers. An arm-thick cable emerged from the side of the hemisphere and crawled over to a higher shelf of rock. There it suddenly straightened and stood straight up, rearing into the air above their heads. Gulyas pointed to this. "I have no idea what the other parts do, but I'll wager that is the antenna that has been sending out the signals we picked up when we entered this system." "It might be," Hautamaki admitted. "But what about the rest?" "One of those things that's pointing up towards the sky looks like a little telescope," Tjond said. "I really believe it is." Hautamaki gave an angry cry and reached for her as she knelt on the ground, but he was too late. She pressed one eye to the bottom of the tube, squinted the other shut and tried to see. "Why -- yes, it is a telescope!" She opened the other eye and examined the sky. "I can see the edge of the clouds up there very clearly." Gulyas pulled her away, but there was no danger. It was a telescope, as she had said, nothing more. They took turns looking through it. It was Hautamaki who noticed that it was slowly moving. "In that case -- all of the others must be turning too, since they are parallel," Gulyas said, pointing to the metal devices that tipped each arm. One of them had an eyepiece not unlike the telescope's, but when he looked into it there was only darkness. "I can't see a thing through it," he said. "Perhaps you weren't intended to," Hautamaki said, rubbing his jaw while he stared at the strange machine, then turned away to rummage in his pack. He took a multi-radiation tester from its padded carrying case and held it before the eyepiece that Gulyas had been trying to look through. "Infra-red radiation only. Everything else is screened out." Another of the tube-like things appeared to focus ultra-violet rays, while an open latticework of metal plates concentrated radio waves. It was Tjond who voiced the thought they all had. "If I looked through a telescope -- perhaps all these other things are telescopes too! Only made for alien eyes, as if the creatures who built the thing didn't know who, or what, would be coming here and provided all kinds of telescopes working on all kinds of wavelengths. The search is over! We... mankind... we're not alone in the universe after all!" VX#'e mustn't leap to conclu'  sions," Hautamaki said, but the tone of his voice belied his words. "Why not?" Gulyas shouted, hugging his wife to him in a spasm of emotion. "Why shouldn't we be the ones to find the aliens? If they exist at all we knew we would come across them some time! The galaxy is immense -- but finite. Look and you shall find. Isn't that what it says over the entrance to the academy?" "We have no real evidence yet," Hautamaki said, trying not to let his own growing enthusiasm show. He was the leader, he must be the devil's advocate. "This device could have been human made." "Point one," Gulyas said, ticking off on his finger. "It resembles nothing that any of us have ever seen before. Secondly, it is made of a tough unknown alloy. And thirdly it is in a section of space that, as far as we know, has never been visited before. We are light-centuries from the nearest inhabited system, and ships that can make this sort of trip and return are only a relatively recent development..." "And here is real evidence -- without any guesswork!" Tjond shouted, and they ran over to her. She had followed the heavy cable that transformed itself into the aerial. At the base, where it was thickened and fastened to the rock, were a series of incised characters. There must have been hundreds of them, rising from ground level to above their heads, each one clear and distinct. "Those aren't human," Tjond said triumphantly. "They do not bear the slightest resemblance to any written characters of any language known to man. They are newP' "How can you be sure?" Hautamaki said, forgetting himself enough to address her directly. "I know, shipmaster, because this is my specialty. I trained in comparative philology and specialized in abbicciology -- the study of the history of alphabets. We are probably the only science that is in touch with earth -- " "Impossible!" "No, just very slow. Earth must be halfway around the galaxy from where we are now. If I remember correctly, it takes about four hundred years for a round-trip communication. Abbicciology is a study that can only grow at the outer fringes; we deal with a hard core of unalterable fact. The old Earth alphabets are part of history and cannot be changed. I have studied them all, every character and every detail, and I have observed their mutations through the millennia. It can be observed that no matter how alphabets are modified and changed they will retain elements of their progenitors. That is the letter 'L' as it has been adapted for computer input." She scratched it into the rock with the tip of her knife, then incised a wavy character next to it. "And this is the Hebrew lamedh, in which you can see the same basic shape. Hebrew is a proto-alphabet, so ancient as to be almost unbelievable. Yet there is the same rightangle bend. But these characters -- there is nothing there that I have ever seen before." r T'he silence stretched on while  Hautamaki looked at her, studied her as if the truth or falsity of her words might be written somehow on her face. Then he smiled. "I'll take your word for it. I'm sure you know your field very well." He walked back to his pack and began taking out more test instruments. "Did you see that," Tjond whispered in her husband's ear, "he smiled at me." "Nonsense. It is probably the first rictus of advanced frostbite." Hautamaki had hung a weight from the barrel of the telescope and was timing its motion over the ground. "Gulyas," he asked, "do you remember this planet's period of rotation?" "Roughly eighteen standard hours. The computation wasn't exact. Why?" "That's close enough. We are at about # degrees north latitude here, which conforms to the angle of those rigid arms, while the motion of these scopes..." "Counteracts the planet's rotation, moving at the same speed in the opposite direction. Of course! I should have seen it." "What are you two talking about?" Tjond asked. "They point to the same spot in the sky all the time," Gulyas said. "To a star." "It could be another planet in this system," Hautamaki said, then shook his head. "No, there is no reason for that. It is something outside. We will tell after dark." Ill They were comfortable in their atmosphere suits and had enough food and water. The machine was photographed and studied from every angle and they theorized on its possible power source. In spite of this the hours dragged by until dusk. There were some clouds, but they cleared away before sunset. When the first star appeared in the darkening sky Hautamaki bent to the ocular of the telescope. "Just sky. Too light yet. But there is some sort of glowing grid appearing in the field, five thin lines radiating in from the circumference. Instead of crossing they fade as they come to the center." "But they'll point out whatever star is in the center of the field -- without obscuring it?" "Yes. The stars are appearing now." It was a seventh-magnitude star, isolated near the galactic rim. It appeared commonplace in every way except for its location, with no nearby neighbors even in stellar terms. They took turns looking at it, marking it so they could not possibly mistake it for any other. "Are we going here?" Tjond asked, though it was more of a statement than a question that sought an answer. "Of course," Hautamaki said. s soon as their ship hadcleared atmosphere, Hautamaki sent a message to the nearest relay station. While they waited for an answer they analyzed the material they had. With each result their enthusiasm grew. The metal was no harder than some of the resistant alloys they used, but its composition was completely different and some unknown process of fabrication had been used that had compacted the surface molecules to a greater density. The characters bore no resemblance to any human alphabet. And the star towards which the instruments had been pointed was far beyond the limits of galactic exploration. When the message arrived, signal recorded, they jumped the ship at once on the carefully computed and waiting course. Their standing instructions were to investigate anything, report everything, and this they were doing. With their planned movements recorded they were free. They, they, were going to make a first contact with an alien race -- had already made contact with one of its artifacts. No matter what happened now, the honor was irrevocably theirs. The next meal turned naturally into a celebration, and Hautamaki unbent enough to allow other intoxicants as well as wine. The results were almost disastrous. "A toast!" Tjond shouted, standing and wobbling just a bit. "To Earth and mankind -- no longer alone!" No longer alone, they repeated, and Hautamaki's face lost some of the party gaiety that it had reluctantly gained. "I ask you to join me in a toast," he said, "to someone you never knew, who should have been here to share this with us." "To Kiiskinen," Gulyas said. He had read the records and knew about the tragedy that was still fresh in Hautamaki's thoughts. "Thank you. To Kiiskinen." They drank. "I wish we could have met him," Tjond said, a tendril of feminine curiosity tickling at her. "A fine, man," Hautamaki said, seeming anxious to talk now that the subject had been broached for the first time since the accident. "One of the very finest. We were twelve years on this ship." "Did you have children?" Tjond asked. "Your curiosity is not fitting," Gulyas snapped at his wife. "I think it would be better if we dropped... T T autamaki held up his hand. "Please. I understand your natural interest. We Men have settled only a dozen or so planets and I imagine our customs are curious to you; we are only in a minority as yet. But if there is any embarrassment it is all your own. Are you embarrassed about being bisexual? Would you kiss your wife in public?" "A pleasure," Gulyas said, and did. "Then you understand what I mean. We feel the same way and at times act the same way, though our society is monosexual. It was a natural result of ectogenesis." "Not natural," Tjond said, a touch of color in her cheeks. "Ectogenesis needs a fertile ovum. Ova come from females; an ectogenetic society should logically be a female society. An all-male one is unnatural." "Everything we do is unnatural," Hautamaki told her without apparent anger. "Man is an environment-changing animal. Every person living away from Earth is living in an 'unnatural' environment. Ectogenesis on these terms in no more unnatural than living, as we are now, in a metal hull in an unreal manifestation of space-time. That this ectogenesis should combine the germ plasm from two male cells rather than from an egg and a sperm is of no more relevancy than your vestigial breasts." "You are being insulting," she said, blushing. "Not in the least. They have lost their function, therefore they are degenerative. You bisexuals are just as natural -- or unnatural -- as we Men. Neither is viable without the 'unnatural' environment that we have created." The excitement of their recent discovery still possessed them, and perhaps the stimulants and the anger had lowered Tjond's control. "Why -- how dare you call me unnatural -- you -- " "You forget yourself, woman!" Hautamaki boomed, drowning out the word, leaping to his feet. "You expected to pry into the intimate details of my life and are insulted when I mention some of your own taboos. The Men are better off without your kind!" He drew a deep, shuddering breath, turned on his heel and left the room. Tjond stayed in their quarters for almost a standard week after that evening. She worked on her analysis of the alien characters and Gulyas brought her meals. Hautamaki did not mention the events, and cut Gulyas off when he tried to apologize for his wife. But he made no protest when she appeared again in the control section, though he reverted to his earlier custom of speaking only to Gulyas, never addressing her directly. T"yd he actually want me to come too?" Tjond asked, closing her tweezers on a single tiny hair that marred the ivory sweep of her smooth forehead and skull. She pulled it out and touched her brow. "Have you noticed that he really has eyebrows? Right here, great shabby things like an atavism. Even hair around the base of his skull. Disgusting. Ill bet you that the Men sort their genes for hirsuteness, it couldn't be accident. You never answered -- did he ask for me to be there?" "You never gave me a chance to answer," Gulyas told her, a smile softening his words. "He didn't ask for you by name. That would be expecting too much. But he did say that there would be a full crew meeting at nineteen hours." She put a touch of pink makeup on the lobes of her ears and the bottoms of her nostrils, then snapped her cosmetic case shut. "I'm ready whenever you are. Shall we go see what the shipmaster wants?" "In twenty hours we'll be breaking out of jump-space," Hautamaki told them when they had met in the control section. "There is a very good chance that we will encounter the people -- the aliens -- who constructed the beacon. Until we discover differently we will assume that they are peacefully inclined. Yes, Gulyas?" "Shipmaster, there has been a good deal of controversy on the intentions of any hypothetical race that might be encountered. There has been no real agreement..." "It does not matter. I am shipmaster. The evidence so far indicates a race looking for contact. not conquest. I see it this way. We have a rich and very old culture, so while we have been searching for another intelligent life form we have also been exploring and recording with ships like this one. A poorer culture might be limited in the number of ships that they could apply to this kind of occupation. Therefore the beacons. Many of them could be easily planted by a single ship over a large area of space. There are undoubtedly others. All of them serve to draw attention to a single star, a rendezvous point of. some type." nphis doesn't prove peaceful intentions. It could be a trap." "I doubt it. There are far better ways to satisfy warlike tendencies than to set elaborate traps like this. I think their intentions are peaceful, and that is the only factor that matters. Until we actually encounter them any action will have to be based on a guess. Therefore I have already jettisoned the ship's armament -- " "You what?" " -- and I'll ask you to surrender any personal weapons that you might have in your possession." "You're risking our lives -- without even consulting us," Tjond said angrily. "Not at all," he answered, not looking ,at her. "You risked your own life when you entered the service and took the oath. You will obey my instructions. All weapons here within the hour; I want the ship clean before we break through. We will meet the strangers armed only with our humanity... You may think the Men go naked for some perverse reason, but that is wrong. We have discarded clothes as detrimental to total involvement in our environment, a both practical and symbolic action." "You aren't suggesting that we remove our clothes as well, are you?" Tjond asked, still angry. "Not at all. Do as you please. I am just attempting to explain my reasons so we will have some unanimity of action when we encounter the intelligent creatures who built the beacon. Survey knows now where we are. If we do not return, a later contact team will be protected by mankind's complete armory of death. So we will now give our aliens every opportunity to kill us -- if that is what they are planning. Retribution will follow. If they do not have warlike intentions we will make peaceful contact. That, in itself, is reason enough to risk one's life a hundred times over. I don't have to explain to you the monumental importance of such a contact." The tension grew as the time for break-through approached. The box of handguns, explosive charges, poisons from the laboratory -- even the large knives from the kitchen -- had long since been jettisoned. They were all in the control area when the bell pinged softly and they broke through, back into normal space. Here, at the galactic rim, most of the stars were massed to one side. Ahead lay a pit of blackness with a single star glowing. "That's it," Gulyas said, swinging back the spectral analyzer, "but we're not close enough for clear observation. Are we going to take another jump now?" "No," Hautamaki said, "I want a clevs observation first." r T'he sensitive clevs screen began to glow as soon as the pressure dropped, darkening slowly. There were occasional bursts of light from their surface as random molecules of air struck them, then this died away. The forward screen deepened to the blackness of outer space and in its center appeared the image of the star. "It's impossible!" Tjond gasped from the observer's seat behind them. "Not impossible," Hautamaki said. "Just impossible of natural origin. Its existence proves that what we see can -- and has -- been constructed. We will proceed." The star image burned with unreality. The star itself at the core was normal enough -- but how to explain the three interlocking rings that circled it? They had the dimensions of a planetary orbit. Even if they were as tenuous as a comet's tail their construction was an incredible achievement. And what could be the significance of the colored lights on the rings, apparantly orbiting the primary like insane electrons? The screen sparkled and the image faded. "It could only be a beacon," Hautamaki said, removing his helmet. "It is there to draw attention, as was the radio beacon that drew us to the last planet. What race with the curiosity to build spaceships could possibly resist the attraction of a thing like that?" Gulyas was feeding the course corrections into the computor. "It is still baffling," he said. "With the physical ability to construct that why haven't they built an exploring fleet to go out and make contacts -- instead of trying to draw them in?" "I hope that we will discover that answer soon. Though it . probably lies in whatever composes their alien psychology. To their way of thinking this might be the obvious manner. And you will have to admit that it has worked." IV 'TPhis time when they made the transition from jumpspace the glowing rings of light filled the front ports. Their radio receivers were on, automatically searching the wavelengths. They burst into sound on a number of bands simultaneously. Gulyas lowered the volume. "This is the same kind of broadcast we had from the beacon," he said. "Very directional. All of the transmissions are coming from that golden planetoid, or whatever it is. It's big, but doesn't seem to have a planetary diameter." "We're on our way," Hautamaki told him. "I'll take the controls, see if you can get any image on the video circuits." "Just interference. But I'm sending out a signal, a view of this cabin. If they have the right equipment there they should be able to analyze our signal and match it... Look, the screen is changing! They're working fast." The viewscreen was rippling with color. Then a picture appeared, blurred, then steadied. Tjond focused and it snapped into clear life The two men looked, stared. Behind them Tjond gasped. "At least no snakes or insects, praise fortune for that!" The being on the screen was staring at them with the same intensity. There was no way to estimate its relative size, but it was surely humanoid. Three long fingers, heavily webbed, with an opposed thumb. Only the upper part of its figure was visible, and this was clothed so that no physical details could be seen. But the being's face stood out clearly on the screen, golden in color, hairless, with large, almost circular eyes. Its nose, had it been a human one, would be said to be broken, spread over its face, nostrils flaring. This, and the cleft upper lip, gave it a grim appearance to human eyes. But this yardstick could not be applied. By alien standards it might be beautiful. "S'bb'thik," the creature said. The radio beacons carried the matching audio now. The voice was high pitched and squeaky. "I greet you as well," Hautamaki said. "We both have spoken languages and we will learn to understand each other. But we come in peace." "Maybe we do, but I can't say the same thing for these aliens," Gulyas interrupted. "Look at screen three." This held an enlarged view taken from one of the forward pickups, locked onto the planetoid they were approaching. A group of dark buildings stood out from the golden surface, crowned with a forest of aerials and antennas. Ringed about the building were circular structures mounted with squat tubular devices that resembled heavy-bore weapons. The similarity was increased by the fact that the numerous emplacements had rotated. The open orifices were tracking the approaching ship. locity," Hautamaki said, stabbing the control buttons in rapid sequence. "Set up a repeater plate here and switch on a magnified view of those weapons. We'll find out their intentions right now." vnce their motion relative to the golden planetoid had been stopped, Hautamaki turned and pointed to the repeater screen, slowly tapping the image of the weapons. Then he tapped himself on the chest and raised his hands before him, fingers spread wide, empty. The alien had watched this dumb show with glistening, golden eyes. It rocked its head from side to side and repeated Hautamaki's gesture, tapping itself on the chest with its long central finger, then pointed into the screen. "He understood at once," Gulyas said. "Those weapons -- they're turning away, sinking out of sight." "We'll continue our approach. Are you recording this?" "Sight, sound, full readings from every instrument. We've been recording since we first saw the star, with the tapes being fed into the armored vault as you ordered. I wonder what the next step is?" "They've already taken it -- look." The image of the alien reached off the screen and brought back what appeared to be a metal sphere that it held lightly in one hand. From the sphere projected a pipe-like extrusion of metal with a lever half way up its length. When the alien pressed the lever they heard a hissing. "A tank of gas," Gulyas said. "I wonder what it is supposed to signify? No -- it's not gas. It must be a vacuum. See, the pipe is sucking up those grains sprinkled on the table." The alien kept the lever depressed until the hissing stopped. "Ingenious," Hautamaki said. "Now we know there is a sample of their atmosphere inside that tank." There was no mechanical propulsion visible, but the sphere came swooping up towards their ship where it swung in orbit above the golden planetoid. The sphere stopped, just outside the ship and clearly visible from the viewports, bobbing in a small arc. "Some sort of force beam," Hautamaki said, "though nothing registers on the hull instruments. That's one thing I hope we find out how to do. I'm going to open the outer door on the main hatch." 'As soon as the door opened the sphere swooped and vanished from sight and they saw, through the pickup inside the air lock, that it fell gently to the deck inside. Hautamaki closed the door and pointed to Gulyas. "Take a pair of insulated gloves and carry that tank to the lab. Run the contents through the usual air examination procedures that we use for testing planetary atmosphere. As soon as you have taken the sample evacuate the tank and fill it with our own air, then throw it out through the lock." r T"'he analyzers worked on the sample of alien air, and presumably the aliens were doing the same with their tank of ship's atmosphere. The analysis was routine and fast, the report appearing in coded form on the panel in control. "Unbreathable," Gulyas said, "at least for us. There seems to be enough oxygen, more than enough, but any of those sulphurated compounds would eat holes through our lungs. They must have rugged metabolisms to inhale stuff like that. One thing for certain, we'll never be in competition for the same worlds " "Look! The picture is changing," Tjond said, drawing their attention back to the viewing screen. The alien had vanished and the viewpoint appeared to be in space above the planetoid's surface. A transparent bulge on its surface filled the screen and while they watched the alien entered it from below. The scene shifted again, then they were looking at the alien from inside the clear-walled chamber. The alien came towards the pickup, but before reaching it the alien stopped and leaned against what appeared to be thin air. "There's a transparent wall that divided the dome in half," Gulyas said. "I'm beginning to get the idea." The pickup panned away from the alien, swept around to the opposite direction where there was an entrance cut into the clear fabric of the wall. The door was open into space. "That's obvious enough," Hautamaki said, rising to his feet. "That central wall must be airtight, so it can be used for a conference chamber. I'll go. Keep a record of everything." "It looks like a trap," Tjond said, fidgeting with her fingers while she looked at the invitingly open door on the screen. "It will be a risk... Hautamaki laughed, the first time they had ever heard him do it, as he climbed into his pressure suit. "A trap! Do you believe they have gone to all this to set a trap for me? Such ego is preposterous. And if it were a trap -- do you think it possible to stay out of it?" TJe pushed himself free of the  ship. His suited figure floated away, getting smaller and smaller. Silently, moving closer together without realizing they did so, they watched the meeting on the screen. They saw Hautamaki drawn gently in through the open doorway until his feet touched the floor. He turned to look as the door closed, while from the radio they heard a hissing, very dimly at first, then louder and louder. "It sounds like they are pressurizing the room," Gulyas said. Hautamaki nodded. "Yes, I can hear it now, and there is a reading on the external pressure gauge. As soon as it reaches atmospheric normal I'm taking my helmet off." Tjond started to protest, but stopped when her husband raised his hand in warning. This was Hautamaki's decision to make. "Smells perfectly breathable," Hautamaki said, "though it has a metallic odor." He laid his helmet aside and stripped his suit off. The alien was standing at the partition and Hautamaki walked over until they stood face to face, almost the same height. The alien placed his palm flat against the transparent wall and the human put his hand over the same spot. They met, as close as they could, separated only by a centimeter of substance. Their eyes joined and they stared for a long time, trying to read intent, trying to communicate. The alien turned away first, walking over to a table littered with a variety of objects. It picked up the nearest one and held it for Hautamaki to see. "Kilt," the alien said. It looked like a piece of stone. Hautamaki for the first time took notice of the table on his side of the partition. It appeared to hold the identical objects as the other table, and the first of these was a lump of ordinary stone. He picked it up. "Stone," he said, then turned to the television pickup and the unseen viewers in the ship. "It appears that a language lesson is first. This is obvious. See that this is recorded separately. Then we can program the computor for machine translation in case the aliens aren't doing it themselves." The language lesson progressed slowly once the stock of simple nouns with physical referents had been exhausted. Films were shown, obviously prepared long before, showing simple actions, and bit by bit verbs and tense were exchanged. The alien made no attempt to learn their language, he just worked to insure accuracy of identity in the words. They were recording too. As the language lesson progressed Gulyas's frown deepened, and he started to make notes, then a list that he checked off. Finally he interrupted the lesson. "Hautamaki -- this is important. Find out if they are just accumulating a vocabulary or if they are feeding a MT with this material." The answer came from the alien itself. It turned its head sideways, as if listening to a distant voice, then spoke into a cup-like device at the end of a wire. A moment later Hautamaki's voice spoke out, toneless since each word had been recorded separately. "I talk through a machine... I talk my talk... a machine talk your talk to you I am Liem... we need have more words in machine before talk well." "This can't wait," Gulyas said. "Tell them that we want a sample of some of their body cells, any cells at all. It is complex, but try to get it across." The aliens were agreeable. They did not insist on a specimen in return, but accepted one. A sealed container brought a frozen sliver of what looked like muscle tissue over to the ship. Gulyas started towards the lab. "Take care of the recordings," he told his wife. "I don't think this will take too long." V I t didn't. Within the hour he had returned, coming up so silently that Tjond, intent on listening to the language lesson, did not notice him until he stood next to her. "Your face," she said. "What is wrong? What did you discover?" He smiled wryly at her. "Nothing terrible, I assure you. But things are very different from what we supposed." "What is it?" Hautamaki asked from the screen. He had heard their voices and turned towards the pickup. "How has the language progressed?" Guylas asked. "Can you understand me, Liem?" "Yes," the alien said, "almost all of the words are clear now. But the machine has only a working force of a few thousand words so you must keep your speech simple." "I understand. The things I want to say are very simple. First a question. Your people, do they come from a planet orbiting about a star near here?" "No. We have traveled a long way to this star, searching. My home world is there, among those stars there." "Do all your people live on that world?" "No, we live on many worlds, but we are all children of children of children of people who lived on one world very long ago. "Our people have also settled many worlds, but we all come from one world," Gulyas told him, then looked down at the paper in his hands. He smiled at the alien in the screen before him, but there was something terribly sad about this smile. "We came originally from a planet named Earth. That is where your people came from too. We are brothers, Liem." "What madness is this?" Hautamaki shouted at him, his face swollen and angry. "Liem is humanoid, not human! It cannot breathe our air!" "He cannot breathe our air, or perhaps she," Gulyas answered quietly. "We do not use gene manipulation, but we know that it is possible. I'm sure we will eventually discover just how Liem's people were altered to live under the physical conditions they do now. It might have been natural selection and normal mutation, but it seems too drastic a change to be explained that way. But that is not important. This is." He held up the sheets of notes and photographs. "You can see for yourself. This cleus of one of my own cells. This is Liem's. They are.identical. His people are as human as we are." "They can't be!" Tjond shook her head in bewilderment. "Just look at him, he is so different, and their alphabet -- what about that? I cannot be wrong about that." "There is one possibility you did not allow for, a totally independent alphabet. You yourself told me that there is not the slightest similarity between the Chinese ideographs and western letters. If Liem's people suffered a cultural disaster that forced them to completely reinvent writing you would have your alien alphabet. As to the way they look -- just consider the thousands of centuries that have passed since mankind left Earth and you will see that his physical differences are minor. Some are natural and some may have been artificially achieved, but geim plasm cannot lie. We are all the sons of man." CtTt is possible," Liem said, A speaking for the first time. "I am informed that our biologists agree with you. Our points of difference are minor when compared to the points of similarity. Where is this Earth you come from?" Hautamaki pointed at the sky above them, at the star-filled sweep of the Milky Way, burning with massed stars. "There, far out there on the other side of the core, roughly half way around the lens of the galaxy." "The core explains partially what must have happened," Gulyas said. "It is thousands of light-years in diameter and over # degrees in temperature. We have explored its fringes. No ship could penetrate it or even approach too closely because of the dust clouds that surround it. So we have expanded outwards, slowly circling the rim of the galaxy, moving away from Earth. If we stopped to think about it we should have realized that mankind was moving the other way too, in the opposite direction around the wheel." "And sometime we would have to meet," Liem said. "Now I greet you, brothers. And I am sad, because I know what this means." "We are alone," Hautamaki said, looking at the massed trillions of stars. "We have closed the circle and found only ourselves. The galaxy is ours, but we are alone." He turned about, not realizing that Liem, the golden alien -- the man -- had turned at the same time in the same manner. They faced outwards, looking at the infinite depth and infinite blackness of intergalactic space, empty of stars. Dimly, distantly, there were spots of light, microscopic blurs against the darkness, not stars but island universes, like the one at whose perimeter they stood. These two beings were different in many ways: in the air they breathed, the color of their skins, their languages, mannerisms, cultures. They were as different as the day is from the night: the flexible fabric of mankind had been warped by the countless centuries until they could no longer recognize each other. But time, distance and mutation could not change one thing: they were still men, still human. "It is certain then," Hautnmaki said, "we are alone in the galaxy." "Alone in this galaxy." They looked at each other, then glanced away. At that moment they measured their humanness against the same rule and were equal. For they had turned at the same instant and looked outward into intergalactic space, towards the infinitely remote light that was another island galaxy. "It will be difficult to get there,"  someone said. They had lost a battle. There was no defeat. Street, New York #, N. Y. # #. Location of the headquarters or general business office of the publishers (not printers), #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y. #. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor; Publisher Sol Cohen: #I Hudson St... New York #, N. Y... Editor Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson St., New York #, N. Y... Managing editor none. #. Owner: Galaxy Publishing Corp... #I Hudson St... New York #. N. Y., Robert M. Guinn (sole stock stockholder) #I Hudson St... New York #, N. Y. #. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or securities; none #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements in two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon tne books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been Included in paragraphs # and # when the Interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run): overage no. copies each issue during proceeding # months; #. single issue nearest to filing date: #. B Paid circulation. #. To term subscribers by mail, carrier delivery or by other means; average no. copies each issue during proceeding # months: #, single issue nearest to filing date, #. #. Sales through agents, news dealers, or otherwise: average no. copies each issue during proceeding # months: #; single issue nearest to filing date: #. C. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier delivery, or by other means: average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: none; single issue nearest to filing date: none. D. Total no. of copies distributed (sum of lines Rl, B# and C) : average no copies each issue during preceding II months: #; single issue nearest to filing date: #. I certify that the statements made by mo above are correct and complete. Sol Cohen, Publisher. Anyone can review movies they've seen . Here Jack Sharkey does it the hard wayl I had high hopes when I attended the re-processed Gone with the Wind at the Music Hall the other day, but came away considerably less than gruntled at the results. The addition of tactility, odor, taste, #-D and selective-subjective (Selsub) camera work seems to detract from, rather than improve, this last-century classic, though I must admit my viewpoint was rather biliously biased by the underdone pork ribs I consumed (as the taller Tarleton twin) in the barbecue-eating scene at the Wilkes plantation. Scarlett's peppery old parsnip, later on, didn't help my increasing tendency toward malaise, either. The benefit ball was a joy, but Aunt Pittipat's underarm problem was laid on a bit thick, and I sincerely wished I (as Rhett) had had the chance to take Scarlett outside for air. Likewise, bad cutting in the love scenes had me shifting nerve-rackingly from being Rhett to being Scarlett. Selsub still has a few bugs. Up until the last minute I trembled between the option of kissing Vivian Leigh or being resoundingly bussed by Clark Gable. As to the burning of Atlanta, the heat effects were well-nigh perfect, and I felt quite narrowly escaped from a good scorching. But there again, the reinbums on my hand as I led the horse through the holocaust kept shifting embarrassingly to twinges of Melanie's bumpy ride in the wagon, and mingled with the charred aroma of the town was much too much effluvium of her baby's sour milk. A ludicrous error on the part of the tacility-coordinator (Tacco) had me one moment feeling the green velvet drapes in my (Scarlett's) fingers before ripping them down for Mammy to sew into a gown, and the next I was the drapes, and had sundered vertically to the navel before a merciful shift of scene restfully transformed me into a riffling pack of cards in a guard's hand outside Rhett's cell. I think it's going too far for excitement to allow the spectator to be Bonnie Blue in that fatal gallop toward the high hurdles, but the quick switch into the identity of her pony an instant after her tumble toward death began was not much relief, due to the subsequent scene where Rhett comes to my stall and puts a pistol-ball between my eyes... One suggestion to the distributors: in the final moment of the movie, when I (Scarlett) stand once again silhouetted against the skies on the lush fields of Tara, with the glorious theme music rising like an angelic choir about me, wouldn't it be more in keeping with the mood of that moment to fill my nostrils with the sweet scent of dewy, burgeoning grain, instead of wafting a staggering stench of hot fertilizer from the stables? To date, have not had the opportunity of experiencing the remake of The Lost Weekend, but my fellow-reviewers' unanimous opinions in print that it was "shimply wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful" make it a must on my schedule in the coming week. The staff of our paper expresses its regrets to the employers of the late Barnaby Ringwold of the Herald, whose career as a feelie-reviewer was curtailed so tragically last week during a viewing of Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, when that unforeseen slip of the Taccomechanism turned him (and other unfortunate patrons at the Strand) into Ann Blyth's body By all means do not delay in attending the Laurel and Hardy Festival at the Museum of Modem Art. Despite the purist-oriented objections of Elia Kazan, Jr. (now in charge of extra-visual additions to the beloved old silents), the froth on the pies (soapsuds when the films were made) has been flavored, nevertheless, to taste like whipped cream, and you will find this movie melange of their best slapstick efforts one of the most currently delicious showings in town. The long-awaited release of De Sade, Man or Monster? has been snarled in more red tape, and recalled to the studio for Selsub-changes. The producers' hones of a good cross-section of masochism in the public has, it appears, been overoptimistic. Nobody at the sneak nreviews has shown signs of wishing to be anybody in the film but the Marquis himself. This will come as a blow to those many actresses whose every last ganglion was violated to record onto the lacco-track for the spectators' fullest experience. Once again, the rankest sort of censorship is despoiling the pleasures of the feelie-going public. Universal's two-hourlong epic, Dracula's Grandson,  has been sliced chopped and otherwise ravaged of its gustatorial merits ("for the sake of the children" says one of the reports), and I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the throats of the mesmerized maidens who fall victim to the nefarious Count yielded nothing tastier than strawberry phosphate. In my opinion, this is not shielding the children from reality, it is tempting them to outright emulation! The world had best prepare itself for a series of bizarre crimes involving punctured maidens and bitterly disillusioned, phosphate-hungry children, if this situation is not shortly remedied. Ben-Hur's re-release still pending while the film moguls continue to search for someone actions to the Tacco-pool. It just wouldn't be Ben-Hur without a brief Selsub of Messala's run-in with the chariots. I drew the short straw in the most controversial reviewing job in feelie history. As representative of not only my, but every other local reviewer's, paper, I will be the first person -- including those involved in the production -- to experience the re-processed version of Hitchcock's Psycho. I'm assured by the new producers that the role of Marion Crane is only Taccoed in for objective sensations. I When a machine goes haywire , you simply repair it. Now , what do you do about man? T Te awoke several feet outside his window, standing on his hands. Only the narrow ledge on which he stood separated him from an emptiness that ended seventeen stories below in pavement. But, realizing at once where he was, he did not panic. No. He simply smiled and brought his legs slowly, slowly from the wall where they leaned. She couldn't frighten him that easily. "Foolish, Joel, foolish," she lisped inside him. She had a silly, soft, soupy voice. He smiled and made three firm steps toward the window. His elbows did not buckle; his heart did not pound. Then as he steadied himself, his legs swayed out over emptiness. Frantically he stiffened his back, fought his legs to the wall. His arms quivered, and his face dampened. She was smug. "Silly showoff Joel." He scowled. He would not say, I can't do it, help me, save me. No. He drew an heroic breath and made another step. His legs swayed again. His elbows quivered, buckled. Before he could straighten, her giggling filled his head. He fought for balance and lost. His legs bent back and over. He clawed at the ledge, then fell tumbling, eyes squeezed tight, shoulders set. She giggled and giggled. When he had fallen too long, he knew she had not let him fall but the falling went on. He awoke on the bed, shaking, damp and sick. T T e swung himself up. "I could have gotten myself in," he muttered darkly. "You have excellent balance." Her voice was silky now, murmuring. "Then why did you make me fall?" he demanded. "Hands getting very tired. Oh, foolish." "You made me fall because my hands were getting tired!" he howled. His fingers twitched. He wanted to break something. Her. "Angry?" she clucked. "Anger best gotten from system." He couldn't help himself. He plunged about the room, smashing at impressively papered walls with a brocaded chair, splintering, tearing. "Angry, Joel?" she taunted. "No, damn it!" He smashed and smashed. "Angry? Angry?" He hurled shoes at a gold framed mirror. Glass tinkled and tinkled. At last he had no strength, and his breath burned. "More anger, Joel?" she taunted. He panted. "You know I'm too beat to be angry." He sank to the bed, heaving. His fingers still twitched. He sat on them, hard, and they twitched under him like worms. He had to get away from them. He pulled on shirt, trousers, coat and shoes. Then his fingers were twitching at the doorknob. "Broken reminders of spent anger most depressing," she murmured. He couldn't help himself. He had to call the superintendent to order chair, mirror and wallpaper replaced. He didn't notice he hadn't dialed the telephone. "Yessir, Mr. Blanche, yessir," the superintendent said when Joel gave his order. "Have them installed by noon and no excuses," Joel growled. "Discourtesy heavy on conscience," she lisped. He slumped. He called again. "I won't need the replacements before five," he said wearily. "I am most sorry to have been cross and demanding." "Yessir, Mr. Blanche, yessir," the superintendent said. He would have eaten. But when he reached his kitchen he found a woman and two children at his table. They looked up and spoke, but he didn't hear what they said. He backed to the door. Ooon he was grumbling down  the street. First he would go to his father's office for money. Then he would buy a boat and skis, hire an instructor and take Marta water skiing. He had always wanted to take Marta water skiing. A familiar red face loomed from the crowd. "Joe Blanche!" A hand stung his shoulder. "How's Trix, boy?" He muttered rudely. Then he couldn't help himself, he had to stop and talk. He kept cocking his head but he couldn't hear what the man said. Nor could he hear what he answered. Finally he was away, muttering darkly through the crowd, cursing inside where only she could hear. "Angry, Joel?" she taunted. "Angry?" He tried to swallow his anger. He choked on it. "Anger must be spit out." "I am not angry," he snarled. Then he was whirling and smashing, crashing, crashing, and she was giggling inside. "Anger must be gotten from system," she lisped. It was humiliating. Finally he was spent. He paid the shopkeeper for the broken window and merchandise and slunk through the crowd that had gathered. "Trix. He's got a Trix," someone hissed. A small boy complained, "I can't see his Trix. On telebision they got a bulge where the Trix is." "Hush," his mother said. "Someone loves him very much. That is why he has a Trix." "Flappermouth kid," Joel growled. Then he couldn't help himself, he was peeling off his shirt to show the kids the scars on his sides where Trix was. She giggled and giggled. Had it always been this way? He wondered all the way to his father's office, as much as he could wonder through her giggling. He was shocked, upon reaching his father's office, to find that it was his own office. He had forgotten he had an office. "Money in drawer for Joel to have a good time," she lisped. It was her first sensible idea. But his lips tightened when he found not only money but correspondence, charts, forms. "Bad for conscience not to work for money," she whispered. "Father old. Help father." The morning was gone, wasted, when he finished the paper work. "I was going to water ski with Marta," he muttered. "Cannot enjoy play without first working." He stood. "Next time they cut you out for overhaul. I'm going to bleed right out without you. You wait." Outside he was almost run down crossing the street. She pulled him to the curb just in time. She giggled and giggled. "I leave you five seconds, you step in front of the truck." "I am a responsible adult," he said. "I can cross the street by myself, anytime I know I'm crossing by myself." "Oh, foolish." she tittered. Now he was approaching the street where he would turn to call for Marta for lunch. Unfortunately he did not turn. "Hey!" he protested. "To the mother's for lunch," she lisped. "The mother old and lonely. Needs her son." "She's got friends, hasn't she?" he challenged. "Matchmaking difficult without male to match." He drooped. He had forgotten again. "But Marta -- " "Marta most unsuitable for wealthy, sophisticated young executive. Black-eyed pig. Someday slit your throat with whiskey bottle. Oh, foolish, with slit throat."  lice was slim, cool, blonde. Her mother was slim, cool, gray. So was his. They sat at the luncheon table and they spoke, but he didn't notice what they said. Not until Alice's mother said, "Such an ingenious device, Trixie." "She does bring out the best," Joel's mother said. "At first, when he was a child, and such an unmanageable child, she was so much more practical than a nurse. She was always there, and she could always make him behave." Alice's mother murmured. "The initial cost is quite reasonable, but you must set aside a fund for maintenance, because she must be removed every year. Yes. When my husband passed on, Trixie was due for overhaul any day, and if we hadn't had the fund we would have had to let her go. Because you know how erratic they become. The funniest things happen." Joel sat up very straight, frowning. There was something he had forgotten to do. Something important. "Oh, yes, father passed on." Her voice was sticky and sweet, cake icing on a hot, hot day. "Dead many years now. Son only support of himself and aged mother." He forgot to wonder what he had forgotten to do. He frowned, because he distinctly remembered that he went to his father's office every day for money to spend on Marta. "Foolish boy. Father left all money in drawer for son. Have a ball, son." "If you want only the best," his mother said, "Trixie is the answer. Any parent who cares will tell you -- get Trixie!" He wondered why her lips didn't match her words. When he stood his mother drew him to the corridor. She was very erect and very distinguished. "I have invited Carolyn and her mother for lunch tomorrow, Joel. You will come?" He nodded eagerly. Of course he would come. Anything for Mother. He kissed her forehead. As he left he remembered Marta. Tomorrow they would price includes cost of installation, hospitalization, etc. (Consult your psychiatrist about our units designed for the senile and the emotionally disturbed.) lunch together. Afterward she would invite him to her apartment. He walked faster, smiling. Marta was very rich and very beautiful. Also she was a nymphomaniac. He decided, I'll go sailing this afternoon. "After hard day at office, good to relax. Good, Joel." TTe stopped at a public tele phone, called Robard at the yacht club, instructed him to ready a suitable craft. He didn't notice that he hadn't dialed. "Yessir, Mr. Blanche, yessir," Robard said. Naturally he was disappointed when he found himself at his desk. "I have already worked," he pointed out. "Oh selfish. Sailing when baby needs shoes." She giggled. He opened the drawer, pointed to the money. "Baby can have twenty pair of shoes," he said. "Should not take money without working." She had a point. "Father old. Father need help with office." He considered, then settled ab sently to charts and forms. Ten minutes later he said, suddenly, frowning, "What baby?" She clucked. "Youngest of Joel and Alice. Lovely little girl with blonde ringlets. Unfortunately needs shoes before can play at beach with mother and brother." "Oh." He didn't remember. But it was hardly worth worrying about. When the work was done he took a handful of money. But she clucked inside his head. So he put most of it back. He reached home at five o'clock and went directly to his bedroom. He was upset to find the walls and mirror still smashed. But only one splinter of chair lay on the carpet, and no glass. "Ah, careless." She was contrite. Now there were sticks of wrecked chair, shards of mirror, plaster. He frowned because the little girl with golden ringlets had picked up a shard of mirror to see her face. "The children will cut themselves," he protested. He hated to see children bleed. "Ah, careless again." Now there were no children. He was satisfied. He went to change. Marta was waiting. "Foolish Trix soon require overhaul," she mourned. "And I'll bleed right off without you too." He only said it from habit. He went to the kitchen. His wife was working at die sink, blonde and efficient. "Any mail today?" he asked. He wished his mother would stop matchmaking. He had too many wives already. r T'here was a card from Manipulatrix Inc. reminding the patron that his unit was two weeks overdue for overhaul, that an overdue unit might become arratic and unpredictable, that an overdue unit could not be relied upon to remind the patron that overhaul was due, that Manipulatrix Inc. could not assume responsibility for damages incurred by an overdue unit. He kissed the cook, who had a wart on her nose. "Any mail today?" "Nossir, Mr. Blanche," she said. He ate dinner with the cook and her two children. Then he went to take Marta to dinner. He was very hungry. On the way he stopped and bought seven pair of shoes for the cook's youngest daughter. He sent the shoes to the apartment by special messenger, enclosing a card which read, "With all respects, from my father and his wife." Unfortunately he spent the evening in a gymnasium supervising boys' calisthenics. He was not at all happy but he couldn't remember why. Before he left he reminded Berry, a good kid, ten years old, to go to Joel's mother and let her fix him up with Joel's youngest daughter, who had golden ringlets but no shoes. "Gee, that's too bad, Mr. Blanche," Berry said. Joel nodded solemnly, walked uthe wall and out the window. He was disappointed upon reaching home to find that the cook had bedded her horse in his bed. He roused the cook's youngest daughter. She came with a whip and drove the horse through the mirror. But Joel didn't sleep well, what with horsehair in the bed and Trix mourning. Sometime during the night he heard a faint click, and then he was filled with silence. He felt completely alone ir the dark, and it made him uneasy. T T e awoke sticky and tired but   got up anyway and went to the window. There was nothing to see except the building opposite and, far below, a patch of green that might have been grass. Unsatisfied, he went to his closet, dressed and went to the kitchen. There he dialed breakfast, and his wife talked to him. She told him what she had done the day before and what she would do today. Also she told him what the children had done the day before and what they would do today. Later he went down the elevator. It was convenient, working in the very building he lived in. It was also convenient having the schools, recreation centers and shopping facilities in the same building. He never had to go outside. He reached his floor and walked past rows of partitioned spaces to his own. It was convenient having the machines do his work. He had only to push buttons and watch three rows of lights. Because he had nothing else to do he began remembering things. He remembered a man in white telling his mother, years before, "Your son is constitutionally unsuited to the monotony of modem industrial life. He is also incapable of inventing a satisfying vicarious life for himself. He will continue crawling out ledges and sniping in the halls until you take action. I recommend a Manipulatrix unit. They're safely installed, relatively inexpensive, and they keep the individual disciplined and emotionally satisfied." He remembered the day they had wanted to take him to have the unit installed. He had crawled so far out the ledge that they had had to wait until the next day. He remembered the same man telling his mother, "The major expense involved in the purchase of a Manipulatrix is the prepaid fee for annual overhaul. The unit, after a year's wear, may begin to assume your son's undesirable characteristics -- illogic, desire for sensation and conquest. Or it may simply stop functioning. In any case, it must be removed annually, overhauled and reinstalled. This is the unit's only undesirable characteristic." He worked until lunch, when he went down one floor and ate. He didn't have to pay. He had only to sign. Anytime he spent too much, the machines simply raised his pay. He went back and worked until two o'clock, when he began to wonder if he could crawl down inside one of the machines without getting both of his legs cut off. He went to see. At three o'clock they hoisted him from the machine with a giant vacuum nozzle. He kicked so vigorously they had to spray him asleep. Then the supervisor notified Manipulatrix Inc., and Manipulatrix Inc. sent a capsule for him. TTe awoke in his own bed, and A her voice was cool and milky, asking if he was ready to get up. He slid out of bed for her, yawned and tried to stretch, but his sides hurt when he raised his arms. She murmured sympathy. He grinned as he leaned out of the window to watch the traffic. He had a notion to walk out the ledge, like a kid, just to see if he could do it. "Foolish, foolish." Her voice admired more than it admonished. He laughed and went to the kitchen. "Start the day the healthful way, with fresh, wholesome eggs," she said. But she wasn't stuffy about it. He nodded appreciatively. Here was a woman with sense. Then he fixed breakfast because he didn't want to wake his wife. Later he would run down to the office, give Pop a hand. The old boy was too old to run the whole shebang himself. He didn't mind helping. That left the entire afternoon for... But he was careful not to think details. He sometimes suspected his wife of reading his mind. And no wife was likely to understand about Marta. They spanned the stars to find proof of their godhood -- proof they had put there themselves! nr'welve thousand ancestors looked down on him. Jagu stopped for a moment. Despite his skepticism, he could not help being impressed and even a little guilty. Twelve thousand! If there were such things as ghosts, what a might of phantoms was massed in this dark and holy chamber! How intense would be their assembled hatred, focused on him! He was on the ground floor of the castle and in the Room of the Hero-Fathers. A hundred feet square, it was at this moment lit by a few electric flambeaux. A tremendous fireplace was at one end. In it, in the old days, the greatest enemy of the Wazaga, Ziitii of the Uruba clan, had been burned alive after the Battle of Taaluu. Above the mantel were the trophies of that battle: swords, shields, lances, maces and several flintlock blunderbusses. Beyond this room, deeper in the castle, was a room decorated with the accumulated trophies of a thousand years. Beyond that was another in which the skulls and preserved heads of fallen enemies stared out from niches, above plates bearing their names and the date and place of death. Nowadays, the door to the room was kept locked out of deference to modern sensibilities. It was opened only to historians and anthropologists or during the clan Initiations, the Greeting of the Ghosts. Three nights ago, Jagu had been locked for twelve hours, all alone in that room. That was the trouble, thought Jagu, as he turned away and walked softly on four bare paws towards the dark anteroom. The Ghosts, the Hero-Fathers, had not greeted him. There had not been any. He could not tell his four parents that. It was impossible to acknowledge that his ancestors had scorned him, that they thought him unworthy of the name of joma -- "man." Not that he thought that the Heroes had scorned him. What does not exist cannot scorn. His parents did not know that. They had been elated because he had been one of the few to graduate from the space-navy Academy of Vaagii. They were happy to put their eldest son through the long-awaited initiation into adulthood. But they had not been so happy when he said that he was not yet ready to choose a group-mate from the eligible members of the clan. All four had pleaded with him, threatened him, stormed. He must get married before he left for the stars. He must ensure the perpetuation of their line, leave many eggs in the hatchery before he assumed his duties as a spacer. Jagu had said n,. Now, he was sneaking out late at night, and he had run the gauntlet of the twelve thousand. But... they were only squares of canvas or wood on which various colored oils had been arranged in different patterns. That was all. He paused by a tall wallmirror. The lights behind him shone gloomily in it. He looked like a ghost stepping out of the dark past towards himself, and where his two selves met... Qix and a half feet tall he  stood. His vertical torso was humanoid. At a distance, and in a dim light, if all but the forward breasts upwards had been hidden, he could have been mistaken for a human being. But his pinkish skin was hidden up to the neck with a golden pile of short curling hairs. The head was very broad and round and massively boned. The cheekbones bulged like bosses on a shield. The jawbone was very thick; the deeply cleft chin was a prow. (The latter was another sore point. His parents did not like it that he had shaved off the goatee.) The nose was bulbous and covered with tiny bristling blackish hairs. The supraorbital ridges flared out Gothicly. The eyes beneath were large, hazel and rimmed with a halfinch wide circle of brown hair. The ears were shaped like a cat's, and the yellow hair on top of his head stood straight up. At the base of the spine of his upper torso was a device of bone, a natural universal joint that permitted the upper torso a ninety-degree description forward. The lower torso was quadrupedal, as if he had only halfevolved. The legs and paws were lion-shaped; his long tail was tufted at the end with black hair. Jagu had the normal vanity of a youth. He thought he was rather good-looking, and he did not mind examining himself. The string of diamonds hanging from around his neck was magnificent, as was also the gold plate at its end. On the plate was a design formed of diamonds in the shape of a lightning streak, his totem. Though he enjoyed the view, he could not stay there fbrever. He passed through a doublepointed arch into the anteroom. As he neared the door, he saw a big mound of fur rise and shake itself and slowly form into a six-legged animal with a long bushy tail, a sharp pointed nose, and great round scarlet ears. The rest of the siygeygey was, except for the black nose and round black eyes, a chocolate brown. It rumbled in its massive chest. Then, recognizing Jagu with its nose, it whined a little and wagged its tail. Jagu patted it and said, "Go back to sleep, Aa. I'm not taking you hunting tonight." The animal slumped into amorphous shagginess. Jagu pointed the key at the lock and pressed on the end. Just after dinner, he had deftly removed the key from its hook on the belt of Timo. Since another parent, Washagi, had locked the front door, Timo had not missed the key. Jagu regretted having to do this, though he did get a thrill out of being a successful pickpocket. But he saw no sense in the custom of refusing a youth his own key until he had become married. He wanted to go out late that night. If he could not get permission, he would go without it. # T'he door swung open. He stepped quickly outside, and the door closed. Ten years ago he would have had to bribe or sneak past the Watcher of the Door. Now doormen were of the past. They could make more money working in the factories. The last of the family retainers had died some years ago; his place was taken by an electronic device. A full late-summer moon shone at zenith. It cast greensilver nets everywhere and caught shadows gaunt and grotesque. These were the towering diorite statues of the greatest Heroes on the broad lawn, the hundred-odd whose fighting fury had made the name of Wazaga famous. He did not pause to look at them, for he feared that an awe and dread left over from childhood might influence him. Instead he looked upward, where a score of joma-made satellites raced brightly across the night sky. He thought of the hundreds he could not see, of the spacenavy ships patrolling the reaches between the planets of the system, and of the few interstellar ships out there, probing the galaxy. "What a contrast!" he murmured. "On this earth, sdumb stone sculptures rule the minds of a people who can go to the stars!" He walked into a dark spot at the foot of the castle wall, an opening to a tunnel that led at a sharp slope downward. Formerly this area had been the moat. Then the moat was filled in. Later the excavation was dug and lined with cement. At its end lay the underground garage. Here Jagu used the key to open the door again, and he entered. He did not hesitate making a choice among the six vehicles. He wanted the long low sleek Firebird. This was last year's model, one electric motor per wheel, one hundred horsepower per motor, stick-controlled, with a bubble-top, holding four passengers. It was painted fiery red. Jagu lifted the bubble-top and stepped over the low side onto the floor. He squatted down behind the instrument panel, his rump against a thick cushion attached to a vertical steel plate. Then he pulled the bubble down. This was secured by magnetic clamps to the chassis. A separate and small motor provided the power for the electromagnets. He flicked a toggle switch, and the on indicator lit up. The big hydrogen tank was full. He pulled out the sliding panel with its three small sticks and pushed forward on one. Silently the Firebird rolled forward and up the ramp. As its rear cleared the garage, Jagu pressed a button and the iris of the garage door closed. The Firebird cruised down the driveway, past the stone ancestors and then turned to the right onto the private highway. This led him winding through the forest of wexa (scarlet pinoids) for about a mile. Only when he turned onto the public highway, which inclined downwards at this point, did he push the speed-stick forward as far as it would go. The column of the velocity indicator, an instrument like a thermometer, showed # mph attained in twenty seconds. II TTe shot up and over the top of the hill and had to swerve violently to the left to pass a big cargo truck. But there were no approaching lights, and his horn, honking like a goose, answered the truckdriver's furious blasts. He wished that these were the old days. Then when an aristocrat wanted to travel without obstacle he notified the police. They went ahead to clear the road. Now, to keep the ancient privilege in force would disrupt the heavy flow of commerce. Business came first; so he must take his chances like any one else. He was not, like his ancestors, immune from arrest if he ran over someone or forced somebody off the road. He was even supposed to obey the speed laws. Usually he did... but tonight he did not feel like it. He passed a dozen other vehicles, several of them the old internalcombustion type. After traveling for several miles, he slowed enough to turn onto another private road with some screeching of tires and fishtailing. He drove for a quarter of a mile, then stopped. Here he picked up Alaku. They gave each other a brief kiss. Alaku then jumped into the car beside Jagu and braced his rump against the plate; the bubble closed, the car turned around and they sped away. Alaku unhooked a flask from his belt, unscrewed the top and offered Jagu a drink. Jagu stuck his tongue out, signifying a negative reply, so Alaku tipped the bottle to his own lips. After gulping several times he said, "My parents were after me again to know why I didn't pick a mate-group." "So?" "So I suggested that I marry you and Fawani and Tuugee. You should have heard the gasping, the choking, seen the red faces, the bristling tails, the flying fingers. And heard the words! I calmed them down somewhat by telling them that I was only joking, of course. Nevertheless, I had to hear a long and hot lecture on the degeneracy of modern youth, its flippancy, its near-blasphemy. On how humor was a very good thing, but there were some things too sacred to joke about. And so on and on. If the lower classes wanted to forget about clan distinctions and marry just anybody, that was to be expected. What with increasing industrialization, anc urbanization, mass migrations, modem mobility and so forth, the proletariat couldn't keep the clan lines straight. And it did not matter with them. But with us jorutama, the aristoi, it mattered very much. Where would society. religion, government, etc., be if the great clans let everything slide into chaos? Especial#C ly, if our clan, the Two-Fanged Eagles, set a bad example for the rest? You've heard the same thing." Jagu sucked his breath inwards sharply with assent, and afraid I shocked my parents even more. Questioning marriage lines is bad enough. But to suggest that belief in ancestral ghosts just might -- just barely might -- not be true, might be a hangover from the old superstitious days... well, you've no idea of outraged parenthood until you've hinted at that. I had to undergo a ceremonial purification -- an expensive one for the family and a tiring one for me. Also I had to spend four hours locked up in a cell in the dungeon, and I had to listen to sermons and prayers piped into my cell. No way of turning the abominable stuff off. But the chanting did help me to sleep." "Poor Jagu," said Alaku, and he patted Jagu's arm. A few minutes later they hurtled over a hilltop and saw, a mile away at the bottom of the long hill, twin beams of light from a car parked by the roadside. Jagu pulled up alongside the car. Two got out of it and walked into his Firebird: Fawani and Tuugee. Fawani of the Tree Lion clan and Tuugee of the Split-tongue Dragons. All gave each other a kiss. Then, Jagu drove back to the highway and, in a short time, had it whistling at full speed. "Where are we meeting tonight?" said Tuugee. "I didn't get the message until late. Fawani phoned, but I had to make small talk and avoid saying anything about tonight. I think my parents are monitoring my calls. The Dragons have always had a reputation for excessive suspiciousness. In this case, they've good reason to be -- though I hope they don't know it." 'We're going to the Siikii Monument tonight," said Jagu. The others gasped. "You mean where the great battle was fought?" said Alaku. "Where our ancestors who fell in that battle are buried? Where... "Where the ghosts congregate every night and slay those who dare walk among them?" said Jagu. "But that's asking for it!" said Fawani. "So we ask for it," said Jagu. "You don't really believe in all that tripe? Or do you? If so, you'd better get out now. Go home, ask at once for a ritual cleansing, take your beating. What we've done so far has been enough to stir up the ghosts -- if any exist." There was silence for a moment. Then Fawani said, "Pass the bottle, Alaku. I'll drink to defiance to the ghosts and to our everlasting love." Jagu's laugh was hollow. H said, "A good toast, Fawani. But you'd better drink one to Waatii, the Hero of Speed. We're going to need his blessing, if he exists. Here comes a cop!" The others turned to see what Jagu had detected in his rearview mirror. About a mile behind them, a yellow light was flashing off and on. Jagu flicked on a switch which brought in outside noises and turned the amplifier control. Now they could hear the barking of the highway patrolman's siren. "One more ticket, and my parents will take the Firebird away from me," said Jagu. "Hang on." TTe pressed a button. A light  on the instrument panel lit up to indicate that shields were being lowered over the license plates. He took the Firebird around a passenger vehicle, his horn blaring, while the approaching beams of another grew larger and larger. Just before collision seemed imminent, while the others in his car had broken into terrified calls to the ghosts of their ancestors to save them, he whipped in front of the car just passed. The cry of tires burning on the pavement came to them, and the gabble of the car they had just missed ramming keened away. His passengers said nothing; they were too frightened to protest. Besides, they knew that Jagu would pay no attention to them. He would kill them and himself rather than allow them to be caught. And actually it was better to die than be exposed to a public scandal, the recriminations of their parents and the ritual cleansing. Jagu drove for half a mile and overtook a lumbering semi-trailer. He could not pass on the left, for a string of twin beams, too near, told him that he would have to wait. If he did, the patrolman would be on them. So he passed on the right, on the shoulder of the road. Without slowing. Fortunately the shoulder was comparatively smooth and wide. Just wide enough for the Firebird; an inch away from the right wheels, the shoulder fell off and began to slope ever more towards the perpendicular. At the bottom of the hill was a creek, silvery in the moonlight. It ran along a heavily wooded slope. # Alaku, looking out the bubble at the nearness of the hill, groaned. Then he lifted the bottle to his lips again. By the time he had taken a few deep swallows, Jagu had pulled around the truck. Fawani, looking behind him, saw the patrol car pull up behind the truck. Then one beam appeared as the car began to make the same maneuver as Jagu's. But it disappeared; the cop had changed his mind and swung in behind the truck. "He'll radio ahead," said Fawani. "Do you mean to crash a roadblock?" "If I have to," said Jagu cheerily. "But the entrance to the Siikii Monument is only a half mile down the road." "The cop'll know where we turned in," said Alaku. Jagu switched off the lights, and they sped at # mph along the moonlit highway. He began to slow after a few seconds, but they were still traveling at # mph when he took the sideroad. For a moment, all were sure that they were going to overturn -- all except Jagu. He had practiced making this turn at least twenty times, and he knew exactly what he could do. He skidded, but he brought the Firebird out of it just in time to keep the rear from sideswiping a large tree. Then he was back on the road and building up speed on the narrow, treelined pavement. This time he stopped accelerating at # mph and drove for a half mile, taking the twists and turns with the ease of much practice and familiarity with this road. Suddenly he began slowing the car. In another half mile, he had turned off the road and plunged into what looked to the others like a solid mass of trees. But there was a space between the trees, an aisle just wide enough for the Firebird to pass through without scraping the paint off the sides. And at the end of the dark aisle, another which turned at a forty-five degree angle. Jagu drove the car into the space there and turned off the power. nphey sat there, breathing heavily, looking off through the trees. From here they could not see the road itself, but they could see the flashing yellow of the patrol car as it sped down the road toward the Siikii Monument. "Isn't there danger he'll see the others there?" said Fawani. "Not if they hid their cars like I told them to," said Jagu. He released the bubble, lifted it and jumped out of the car. Raising the trunk cover in the rear of the car, he said, "Give me a hand. I've got something to fool him when he comes back looking for our tracks on the roadside." They climbed out and helped him lift a tightly rolled mass of green stuff. Under his orders, they carried it back to the point on the road at which they had turned off. After unrolling the stuff, they spread it out over the car tracks and smoothed it. When they were done the area looked like smooth grass. There were even a few wild flowers -- or what looked like wild flowers -- sprouting up here and there among the grasses. Presently, from their hiding places behind trees, they saw the patrol car moving slowly back, its searchlight probing along the dirt and grass beside the pavement. It passed, and soon they could see its lights no more. Jagu gave the word, and they rolled the counterfeit grass into a tight bundle. Jagu had driven the car backward to the roadside while they were doing that. They placed the roll in the trunk, climbed back in, and Jagu drove off toward the Monument. As they went along the twisting road, Fawani said, "If we hadn't been driving too fast, we could have avoided all this." "And missed a lot of fun," said Jagu. "The rest of you still don't understand," said Alaku. "Jagu doesn't care if we live or die. In fact, I sometimes think he'd just as soon die. Then his problems -- and ours -- would be over. Besides, he wants to make some sort of gesture at our parents and the society they represent -- even if it's only outrunning a cop." "Alaku's the cool, objective one," said Jagu. "He sits to one side and dissects the situation and the people involved. But, despite his often correct analysis, he never does anything about it. The Eternal Spectator." "I'm not a leader," said Alaku somewhat coldly. "But I can take as much action as the next person. So far, I've participated quite fully. Have I ever failed to follow you?" "No," said Jagu. "I apologize. I spoke from the back of my head. You know me; always too impulsive." "No apology needed," said Alaku, his voice warming. Ill r T"hen they were at the gateway to the Siikii Monument. Jagu drove the car past it and under some trees across the road. Other vehicles were parked there. "All seven here," he said. They recrossed the road to a point about forty yards south of the main gate. Jagu called softly. A voice replied softly; and a moment later a flexible plastic rope was thrown over the gate. Jagu was pulled up the twenty-feet high stone wall first, with much difficulty because of the leocentauroid construction of his body. On the other side, he found Ponu of the Greentail Shrike clan waiting for him. They embraced. After the others had descended and the rope was pulled back over the wall, they walked softly toward the assignation point. The stone statues of their great and glorious ancestors stared down at them. These were dedicated to the fallen of the Battle of Siikii, the last major conflict of the last civil war of their nation. That had occurred one hundred and twenty years before, and the ancestors of some of those assembled tonight had fought and slain each other then. It was this war that had killed off so many of the aristoi that the lower classes had been able to demand certain rights and privileges denied them. It was also this war that had accelerated the growth of the fledgling Industrial Age. The youths walked past the frowning Heroes and the pillars that marked various heroic exploits during the battle. All but Juga showed a restraint in the overwhelming presence of the heads. He chattered away in a low but confident voice. Before they had reached the center of the Monument, the others were also talking and even laughing. Here, in the center, where the battle had been decided, was the most sacred of all sites in this area. Here was the colossal statue of Joma, the eponymous ancestor of the joma species. The statue was carved out of a single mass of diorite and painted with colors that imitated those of the living joma. It had no upper torso nor arms, only the head and neck attached to the quadrupedal body. The holy scriptures of the joma, the Book of Mako, said that Joma had once been like his descendants. But in return for the power of sentience and for the privilege of seeing his young become the dominant species of this world, and eventually of the universe, he had surrendered his arms, become like a crippled beast. Pleased by this sacrifice, Tuu-God had allowed Joma to reproduce parthenogenetically, without the aid of the other three mates. (Since Joma was the surviving member of his kind after Tuu had, in a fit of righteous anger, killed most beings, Joma had no other partners.) It was here that Jagu had decided to hold the love feast. He could not have picked a place more appropriate to show his contempt for the ghosts and for the beliefs that the entire population of the planet held sacred. Jagu and his friends greeted those waiting for them. Drinks were passed around along with jests. Ponu was that night's administrator. He had spread the carpets and placed the food and drinks on them -- eight carpets, and four joruma sat on each. As the night passed, and the moon reached its zenith and began to sink, the talking and laughing became louder and thicker. Then Jagu took a large bottle from Ponu, unscrewed the cap and went among the group. He gave each one a large pill from the bottle. Each swallowed it under his watchful eye. They made faces of repulsion, and Fawani almost threw his up. But he managed to keep it down when Jagu threatened to ram it down with his paw if Fawani didn't do the job himself. After that Jagu made a mock prayer to Mako, a parody of the one that newly married quartets made to their particular household clan-Hero of Fertility. He ended by taking a swig from a bottle of wine and then smashing the bottle against the face of Joma. A n hour later the first round of the love feast had been completed. The participants were resting, getting ready for the next round, and discussing the beauty and the minor disappointments of the last congress. A whistle blew shrilly. Jagu sprang to his feet. "The cops!" he said. "All right, everybody, don't panic! Get your headpieces and breastplates. Don't bother to put them on yet. Leave the carpets here; they haven't got any clan insignias on them. Follow me!" The statue of Joma stood on a small hill in the center of the Monument. It was this advantage in viewing that had determined Jagu's choice of site, in addition to his purpose in making the greatest blasphemy of all. He could see that the main gateway was open, and several cars with beams burning had just come through it. There were three other gates; all but one was also open and cars coming through them. Probably, he thought, that gate had been left closed to lure them toward it. Once over it, they would find the police waiting for them beside the wall. But if this were a trap, then the police would have observed them hide their cars in the brush. That meant that even if he and his friends eluded the cops, they would all have a long long walk home. A useless walk, because the police would have no trouble determining and finding the owners. There was a chance that this was not a prepared ambush. The patrolman who had chased them might have been suspicious and brought back other police. They could have climbed the walls, seen the group under Joma and decided to swoop in now. If so, it was also possible that they did not have enough personnel to come in through all the gates. The unguarded fourth gate could be an escape route. Almost he decided to make a run for the closed gate. But if he did so, and he was wrong, he would lead his friends to ruin. Whereas he had prepared some time ago a hiding place within the Monument grounds itself. It would be foolish to take a chance on an unknown when he had something that was nearly one hundred per cent sure. "Follow me to Ngiizaa!" he said. "Run, but don't panic. If anyone falls or gets into difficulty, call out. We'll stop to help you." H e began running; behind him was the thud of paws and the harsh breathing of stress. They went down the hill on the side opposite the main gateway and toward the granite statue of the Hero Ngiizaa. Jagu looked around and noted that the other statues should hide them from the approaching policemen. He had chosen Ngiizaa because there was a ring of statues around it, marking where Ngiizaa had fallen inside a pile of his enemy's bodies. It took sixty seconds to get there from the center of the Monument, plenty of time to open the trapdoor at the base of Ngiizaa and for all of them to crowd into the hole beneath. Over a year ago, Jagu and some of the others, working on moonless or cloudy nights, had dug out the hole. Then they had placed the beams which supported the trapdoor and put sod over it. The trapdoor was solid; he and five others had stood on it to test its weight and make sure that, on the days when crowds came to visit, the door would not betray its presence by bending. Now he and three others began rolling the sod back. The strip was narrow; it did not take long to do the job. Then, while he held the door up, the others jumped into the hole beneath and went to the back of the hole to make room for those following. By the time all except himself were in, the police cars had reached the center. Their searchlights began probing the Monument. He had to drop down and lie motionless while several beams in turn sprayed the circle of statues. When they had passed he leaped up. Alaku, below, held the trapdoor up just far enough for him to squeeze through. He had replaced the sod on top of it. This was the ticklish part of the whole procedure. No one could be left above to smooth the sod and make sure that the ragged edges did not show. But he did not think that the police could conceive of such a hiding place. When they started to make a search on paw, using their flashlights, they would expect to flush out the members of the party from behind individual statues. Their lights would play swiftly over the grass; they would be looking for youths lying flat on the grass, not for hidden trapdoors. It was hot and crowded in the hole. Jagu hoped they would not have to wait too long. Zotu had a mild case of claustrophobia. If he started to panic, he'd have to be knocked out for the good of everybody. The luminous face of his wristwatch showed #:#. He'd give John (?wnta # the cops an hour to search before deciding that the party had somehow gotten over the wall and away. After that, he would lead his friends out of the hole. If the police had not left somebody to watch the road, or if they did not make a determined search of the woods nearby and found the hidden cars, then all would go well. Many ifs... but it was exciting. A few minutes later, somehody stepped hard on the trapdoor. Jagu suppressed a groan. If the cop heard the hollow sound... but that was unlikely. They should be shouting at each other. There was another rap as if somebody were stomping his feet on the trapdoor. Then, while he held his breath and hoped the others would not cough or make any other noise, he heard something grate against wood. The next moment, the door swung up slowly. A harsh voice said. "All right boys. The game's up. Come on out. Don't try anything. We'll shoot you." IV L ater, in the cell, when he had time to think, Jagu wished that he had resisted. How much better to have been killed than to go through this! He was in a small cell and alone. He had been there for he did not know how long. There were no windows, his watch had been taken away and he had no one to talk to. Three meals were given to him through a little swinging door at the bottom of the large door. The tray was bolted to the door, and the food was placed in depressions. There was no cutlery; he had to eat with his fingers. Fifteen minutes after the tray swung inwards, it began to withdraw. No amount of tugging on his part could keep it from moving. The cell itself was furnished simply. The bed was bolted to the floor and without blankets or pillows. There was a washbowl and an airblower with which to dry himself, and a hole in the floor to receive refuse. The walls were padded . He could not commit suicide if he wished to. Sometime after the third meal, while he paced back and forth and wondered what punishment he would have to endure, what his companions were going through, what his parents knew and felt, the door opened. It did so silently; he was not aware of it until he turned to pace back toward it. Two soldiers -- not police -- entered. Silently they escorted him out of the cell. Neither were armed, but he had the feeling that they knew all about bare-hand-and-pawfighting, that they were experienced and that he would get badly hurt if he tried to attack them. He had no such intention. Not until he saw his way clear, anyway. As long as he was inside a building new to him, one that must be equipped with closed-circuit TV and electronic beams, he would be quiet. Meanwhile... TJ e was taken down a long corridor and into an elevator. The elevator was some time rising, but he had no way of telling how many stories they had gone up. Then it stopped, and he was taken down another long hall and then another. Finally they stopped before a door on which was incised, in the florid syllabary of a century ago, Tagimi Tiipaaroozuu. Head of Criminal Detection. Arigi, the man responsible for detection and arrest of criminals of stature, conducted his business here. Jagu knew him, for Arigi had been among the elders present at his Initiation. He was a fellow clansman. Though Jagu's knees shook, he swore he would show no fear. When he was marched in, he knew that he would have to remind himself constantly that he was not afraid. Arigi sat on his haunches behind a huge crescentshaped desk of polished bird wood. He had a cold hard face that was made even more unreadable by the dark glasses he wore. On his head was the fourcornered tall-crowned hat of the High Police. His arms were covered with bracelets, most of which had been awarded him by the government for various services. In his right hand was a stiletto with a jeweled handle. "It may interest you, fledgling," he said in a dry voice, pointing the stiletto at Jagu, "that you are the first of your fellows to be interviewed. The rest are still in their cells, wondering when the trial will commence. "Tell me," he said so sharply that Jagu could not help flinching, "when did you first decide that the ghosts of your ancestors did not exist? Except as a primitive superstition, figments in the minds of fools?" Jagu had decided not to deny any accusation that was true. If he were to suffer, so much the worse. But he would not degrade himself by lying or pleading. "I've always thought so," he said. "When I was a child I may have believed in the existence of the spirits of my ancestors. But I do not remember it. "And you were intelligent enough not to proclaim this disbelief publicly," said Arigi. He seemed to relax a trifle. But Jagu was sure that Arigi was hoping he too, would relax so that he could spring at him, catch him off guard. He wondered if his words were being recorded, his image being shown on a screen to his judges. He doubted that his trial for blasphemy would be made public. It would reflect too much discredit and dishonor on his clan, and they were powerful enough to suppress these things. Perhaps they might even have him in here merely to scare him, to make him repent. Then he would be let off with a reprimand or, more likely, be assigned to a desk job. Forever earthbound. But no, blasphemy was not merely a crime against the people of this planet. It was a spit in the face of his ancestors. Only pain and blood could wipe out that insult; the ghosts would crowd around him while he screamed over a fire and would lap at the blood flowing from his wounds. A rigi smiled as if he now had Jagu where he wanted him. He said, "Well, at least you're a cool one. You act as a Wazaga should. So far, anyway. Tell me, do all your friends also deny the existence of an afterlife?" "You will have to ask them that yourself." "You mean you do not know what they believe?" "I mean that I will not betray them." "But you betrayed them the moment you led them to the Siikii Monument to defile the making and your blasphemous prayers," said Arigi. "You betrayed them the moment you first confided to them your doubts and encouraged them to express theirs. You betrayed them when you bought an unlawful contraceptive from criminals and fed it to your comrades before the orgy." Jagu stiffened. If no one had talked, how did Arigi know all this? Arigi smiled again, and he said, "You betrayed them more than you know. For instance, the weefee pill you gave them tonight had no potency at all. I had already ordered your source of supply to give you a pill that looked like and tasted like weefee. But it had no effect. A fourth of your friends must be pregnant right now. Maybe you, too." Jagu was shaken, but he tried to hide the effect of Arigi's words. He said, "If you've known about us for a long time, why didn't you arrest us before?" Arigi leaned his upper torso back and placed his fingers behind his head. He looked at a point above Jagu, as if his thoughts were there. He said slowly, and it seemed irrelevantly, "So far, we joruma have discovered exactly fifty-one planets which can support our type of life. Fifty-one out of an estimated # in this galaxy alone. Of the ones discovered -- all found in the last twenty-five years -- twelve were inhabited by a centauroid type of sentient, similar to us, five by a bipedal type, six by very weird sentients indeed. All of these intelligent beings are bisexual or, I should say, have a sexual bipolarity. "None of them have our quadrupolar sexual makeup. If we extrapolate on what we have so far found, we could say that the centauroid type of body is that most favored by Tuu or, if you prefer, the old pagan Four Parents of Nature. The bipedal form is second. And Tuu alone knows what other exotic beings are scattered throughout the Cosmos. "We could also speculate that Tuu, for some reason, has favored us with a monopoly on the quadrupolar method of reproduction. At least, we joruma are the only ones encountered so far with that method. Now, what does that suggest to you?" V J agu was puzzled. This inquisition was not going on the lines he had anticipated. He was not getting a thundering denunciation, a blistering lecture, threats of physical and mental punishment, of death. What was Arigi leading up to? Perhaps this line of conversation was intended to make him think that he was going to escape. Then Arigi would attack savagely when his defenses were lowered. "The Book of Mako says that a joma is unique in this universe. That the joruma are fashioned in the shape of Tuu. No other creature in all the world -- so said Mako -- is favored of Tuu. We are chosen by him to conquer the Cosmos." "So said Mako," replied Arigi. "Or whoever wrote the book which is supposed to be written by Mako. But I want to know what you think." Now Jagu thought he knew what Arigi was trying to do to him. He was talking thus, leading him, so he could get him to admit his disbelief. Then Arigi would spring. But why should Arigi bother? He had all the evidence. "What do I think?" said Jagu. "I think it rather strange that Tuu should have made so many differing sentient beings -- that is, those intelligent enough to have language and to have a word for God in their languages -- but only make one in Tuu's image. If he wanted all the planets to be eventually populated by the joruma, why did he create other beings on these planets? All of whom, by the way, think they have been formed in their Maker's image." The two pairs of Arigi's eyelids had moved inwards so that only a sliver of pale green showed between them. He said, "You know that what you have said is enough to condemn you? That if I submit the evidence to the judges, you could be slowly burned alive? It's true that most blasphemers are killed quickly by being thrown into an intense furnace. But the law still stands. I would be within legal rights if I had you toasted so slowly that it would take you twelve hours or more to die." "I know," said Jagu. "I had my fun with my friends; I spat at the ghosts. Now I have to pay." Again Arigi seemed to start talking without relevance to the issue. "Before Mako died, he said that his ghost would go forth through the cosmos, and he would place on other worlds a sign that the world was to be the possession of the joruma. Now, this took place # years before space travel. Such a thing was not even dreamed of in his time. "Yet when we reached the first inhabitable world, we found the sign he promised to leave behind him: The stone statue of Joma, our ancestor. It was carved by Mako to show that he had been there and had staked out this world for the faithful, for the joruma; and five others of the fifty-five so far found have thereon a giant stone statue of Joma. "Tell me, how do you account for that?" J agu said, slowly, "Either Mako's ghost carved the image of Joma out of the native stone, or..." He paused. "Or what?" Jagu opened his mouth, but the words came hard. He swallowed and forced them out. "Or our spacemen carved those statues themselves," he said. Arigi's reaction was not what Jagu had expected. Arigi laughed loudly until his face was red. Finally, wheezing, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, he said, "So! You guessed it! I wonder how many others have? And like you are keeping silent because of fear?" He blew his nose and then continued, "Not many, I suppose. There are not too many bom sceptics such as yourself. Or many as intelligent." He looked curiously at Jagu. "You aren't happy to find yourself right? What's the matter?" "I don't know. Maybe, though I disbelieved, I'd always hoped that my faith could be re-established. How much easier for me if it could be! If our spaceships had found the statues of Mako waiting for them, I'd have no choice but to believe..." "No, you wouldn't," said Arigi sharply. Jagu stared. "I wouldn't?" "No! If all the evidence pointed toward the reality of Mako as a ghost, if the evidence were overwhelming, you still would not have believed. You would have found some rationalization for your disbelief. You would have said that the correct explanation or interpretation just wasn't available. And you would have continued to reject the idea of the ghost." "Why?" said Jagu. "I'm a reasonable person; I'm rational. I think scientifically." "Oh, sure," said Arigi. "But you were born an agnostic, a sceptic. You had the temperament of the disbeliever in the womb. Only by a violent perversion of your innate character could you have accepted religion. Most people are bom believers; some are not. It's that simple." "You mean," said Jagu, "that reality doesn't have a thing to do with it? That I think as I do, not because I have reasoned my way through the dark labyrinth of religion, but because my temperament made me think so?" "That's an accurate statement." "But -- but -- " said Jagu, "what you're saying is that there is no Truth! That the most ignorant peasant and fervent believer of ghosts has as much basis to his claims as I have to mine." "Truth? There are truths and truths. You fall off a high cliff, and you accelerate at such and such a velocity until you hit the ground. Water, if not dammed, flows, downward. These are truths no one argues about. Temperament does not matter in physical matters. But in the realm of metaphysics, truth is an affair of natal prejudice. That is all." J agu had not been shaken by the thought of the fire and he death that waited for him. Now he was trembling, and outraged. Later he would be depressed. Arigi's cynicism made his look like a child's. Arigi said, "The enlightened members -- pardon me -- the bom sceptics of the aristoi have not believed in the existence of ghosts for some time. In a land crowded with the granite images of their illustrious ancestors, and crowded with worshippers of these sculptured stones, we laugh. But silently. Or only among ourselves. Many of us even doubt the existence of God. "But we aren't fools. We suppress any show of public scepticism. After all, the fabric of our society is woven from the threads of our religion. It's an excellent means for keeping the people in line or for justifying our rule over them. "Now, haven't you detected a certain pattern in the finding of the statues of Mako on the interstellar planes? In the particular type of planet on which the statues are?" Jagu spoke slowly to control the shakiness of his voice. "The images are not found on those planets populated by sentients technologically equal to us. Only on those planets with no sentients or with sentients having an inferior technology." "Very good!" said Arigi. "You can see that that is no coincidence. We aren't about to wage war on beings who are able to retaliate effectively. Not yet, anyway. Now, I'll tell you why I revealed this to you -- rather, confirmed your suspicions. Ever since we have had a faster-thanlight drive, our interstellar exploratory ships have been manned with crews of a certain type. All are aristocrats, and all are disbelievers. They have had no compunction about chiseling statues out of the native rock on the appropriate planets." "Why do they have to do this?" said Jagu. "To establish a principle. To justify us. Some day, another sentient of equal, maybe superior, technological development will try to claim one of our planets for its own. When that day comes, we want our warriors and the people at home to be fired with a religious frenzy. "You want me and my comrades to do this work for you?" "For yourselves, too," said Arigi. "You young ones will have to take the reins of government after we're dead. And there's another factor. We're recruiting you because we need replacements. This is dangerous work. Every now and then, a ship is lost. Just lost. Leaves port and is never heard of again. We need new interstellar spacers. We need you and your friends now. What do you say?" "Is there a choice?" asked Jagu. "If we turn down your offer, what happens to us?" "An accident," said Arigi. "We can't have a trial and execution. Not even in secret. Too much chance of dishonoring ancient and honorable clans. "Very well. I accept. I can't speak for my friends, but I'll speak to them." "I'm sure they'll see the light," said Arigi dryly. VI  few days later, Jagu flew to the school for advanced space-navy officers. He and his friends began to take numerous training trips on ships that operated within the confines of the solar system. A year passed, and then they made three trips to nearby planetary systems under the tutelage of veterans. On the final voyage and the combat exercises that went with it, the veterans acted only as observers. There was another ceremony. A new interstellar destroyer was commissioned and christened the Paajaa, an a Jagu was given a captain's redstone to wear on the brim of his hat. The rest of the group also got various insignias of lesser ranks, for the craft was to be manned entirely by them. Before leaving on the maiden voyage of the Paajaa, Jagu was summoned for one more interview with Arigi. By now Jagu knew that Arigi held more power than the public guessed. He was not only head of the planetary police system, he also was responsible for all military security systems. Arigi welcomed Jagu as a member of the inner circle. He asked him to sit down and gave him a glass of kusuto. It was vintage of the best, thirty years old. "You have added honor and luster to our clan," said Arigi. "The Wazaga can be proud of you. You were not given the captainship merely because you are a Wazaga, you know. A stellar ship is too expensive and important to be entrusted to a youth whose main ability is affiliation with a ruling group. You are a captain because you deserve the rank." He sniffed at the bouquet of the wine and took a small sip. Then he put the glass down, squinted at Jagu and said, "In a few days you will receive official orders to make your first exploratory voyage. Your ship will have enough fuel and supplies for a four-year trip, but you will be ordered to return at the end of two and a half, circumstances permitting. During that one and a quarter year, you will try to locate inhabitable planets. If any planet has sentients with a technology with space travel restricted to its system and atomic power, you will note its present development and its potential resistance to future attack by us. If the sentients have interstellar travel, you will observe as much as possible but will not place your ship in danger of attack. And you will return, after making the observations, directly and at full speed to us. I f the sentients have an inferior technology, you will locate a site easily observable from orbit and will erect or carve an image of Mako there. "Now! By the time you will have returned, many more eggs will have been hatched here. There will be a larger proportion of natal disbelievers among them than in the few years previously. By the time you are my age, the number of disbelievers will be a great problem. There will be strife, changing mores, doubt, perhaps even bloodshed. Before this occurs, before the change of Zeitgeist is on the side of the disbelievers and the faith in the Heroes and in Mako declines, we will have settled colonies on various planets uninhabited by sentients. We will also have wiped out or reduced greatly in number those sentients inferior to us. We will have started populating these with our kind. Because of our method of reproduction, we can populate a planet faster than any other sentient. And that is well, since we will need these colonies to aid us in the wars that will come. "It is inevitable that we will have to fight cultures equal or perhaps even superior to ours. When that comes, we will have established the pattern -- that we have a spiritual right to take anything we want. By then the weakened belief in the religion of our fathers will not affect our fighting zeal. We will be replacing it with another belief. Our right to conquest. "Meanwhile, of course, I will be doing my best to suppress any resistance to our official religion. Those infidels among the aristoi will be indoctrinated in in the proper attitude: a conscious hypocrisy. Those who nobly refuse will be dealt with in one way or another. The disbelievers among the lower classes will also be eliminated. They will be branded as criminals. "But, of course, they can only fight the Zeitgeist so long. Then it takes over. By that time, I will have joined my ancestors, and my work will be done." He smiled wryly and said, "I will be a ghost, perhaps, with a statue erected to me. However, by then my descendants -- except for the inevitable ultrareactionaries -- will regard my shrine as a historical or anthropological curiosity. I will have to go hungry among the other hungry ghosts -- unhonored, unfed, wailing with weakness and impotent anger." Jagu wondered if Arigi did not more than half-mean those words. He also wondered if Arigi was not as self-deceiving as those he laughed at. He was making his own, personal mythology to replace the old. After all, what evidence did he really have to support his thesis that believers were born, not made?  week later, he was on the Paajaa and had given the order to take it off. Another week, and his natal star was only one among many, a tiny glow. He was headed for the faroff and the unknown. A year later, thirty stars later, they found two inhabitable planets. The second, like the first, rotated around a star of the Ao-U type. Unlike the first, it was the third planet from the star and it had sentients. The Paajaa went into orbit in the upper atmosphere, and the telescopes were turned on the surface. The powers of magnification of the telescopes were so great that the spacers could see as distinctly as if they had been poised only twenty feet above the ground. The sentients were bipedal and comparatively hairless except for thick growths on their heads or, among the males, on the faces. The majority covered their bodies with a variety of garments. Like the joruma, their skin colors and hair types varied ; the darker ones were mainly in the equatorial zone. Thousands of photographs were made during the orbitings of the Paajaa. Those taken of the groups that wore little or no clothing made it evident that these bipedals had only two sexes. Another fact was determined. These sentients had no technology to be compared to the joruma's. They did not even have aircraft, except for a few balloons. Their main propulsive power was the steam engine. Steam drove engines of iron on iron tracks and paddlewheels or screws on ships. There were many sailships, also. The most formidable weapons were cannons and simple breech-loading rifles. The aborigines were roughly at about the same stage the joruma had been about a century and a half ago. vn their three hundredth orbit, Alaku made a shattering discovery. He was looking at the scene projected on a large screen by a telescope when he cried out loudly. Those nearby came running, and they stopped when they saw what he was staring at. They too cried out. By the time Jagu arrived, the scene was out of the telescope's reach. But he listended to their descriptions, and he ordered that the photos made be brought to him at once. He looked at the photos, and he said, keeping his face immobile so that the others could not understand how shocked he was, "We'll have to go down and see for ourselves." Four of them went down on the launch while the ship, in stationary orbit, stayed overhead. Their destination was on a rocky plateau about five miles southeast of the nearest city. The city was on the west bank of a great river that created a ribbon of greenery in the middle of die desert that covered much of the northern half of the continent. It was night, but a full moon shone in a cloudless sky. It illuminated brightly the three huge pyramids of stone and the object that had upset the crew of the Paajaa so much. This lay in the center of a large quarry. Ofter hiding their ship in a deep and narrow ravine, the four proceeded in a small halftrack. A minute later, Jagu halted it, and all got out to look. There was silence for a while. Then Jagu, speaking slowly as if hesitant to commit himself, said, "It seems to be Joma." "It's ancient," said Alaku. "Very ancient. If Mako made this, he must have done so immediately after dying. He must have come straight here." "Don't jump to conclusions," said Jagu. "I was going to say that another ship had gotten here before us. But we know no ship has been sent to this sector. However..." "However what?" said Alaku. "As you said, it's ancient. Look at the ripples in the stone. They must have been made by erosion from blowing sand. Look at the face. It's shattered. Still, the natives of long ago could have made this. It's very possible." Silent again, they re-entered the halftrack and began to drive slowly around the enormous statue. "It faces the east," said Alaku. "Just as Mako said the statues of Joma would." "Many primitive sentients on many worlds face their gods, their temples and their dead towards the east," said Jagu. "It's natural to regard the rising sun as the recurrent symbol of immortality." Fawani said, "This may be the biggest reproduction of Joma. But it's not the only one on this world. The photos showed others. They too must be ancient. Perhaps it's only coincidence. The natives themselves made them. They're figures, symbols of their religion." "Or," said Alaku, "the natives founded a religion that was based on Joma after Mako came here and carved this statue out of the rock. He may even have given them our religion. So, as you saw, they set up a temple before Joma. I'm sure that's what the ruins in front of the breasts were. They made other smaller images of Joma. Then ages later they ceased to believe in Joma... just as we are ceasing to believe. Yet the testimony to the truth was before their mocking eyes..." Jagu knew they could not determine the truth no matter how long they speculated among themselves. The thing to do was to locate somebody who did know. T T e turned the halftrack to- wards the city. There were isolated houses on its outskirts. Before he had gone a mile, he found what he was looking for. A party of natives were headed towards him. All were riding beasts tjjat looked very much like the gapo of the deserts of his own planet, except that these had only four legs and one hump. The gapoids scattered in a panic; some threw their riders. The joruma shot these with gasdriven darts, the tips of which were coated with a paralyzing drug. After tearing the robes from his victims to make sure he had a specimen of each sex (for he knew that the zoologists at home would want to examine them) he joruma chose a male and a female. These were loaded into the halftrack, which then returned to the launch. In a few minutes, the launch was rising towards the Paajaa. Back on the ship, the sleepers were placed on beds within a locked room. Jagu inspected them and, for the thousandth time, wondered if the joruma were not designed by Tuu to be superior. Perhaps they were really made in Tuu's image. These bipedals seemed to be so scrawny and weak and so inefficient, sexually speaking. One sex could never hatch an egg or bear young. This fault halved the species' chances of reproducing. Moreover, he thought, preserving humor even in his semistunned condition, it cut out three-quarters of the fun. Maybe the other sentients were, as some theologians had theorized, experiments on Tuu's part. Or maybe Tuu had meant for non-joruma to be inferior. Let the theologians speculate. He had a far more important and immediate enigma to solve. Also he had Alaku to worry about. Alaku, the cool one, he whose only permanent passion was intellectualism, the agnostic, was by far the most shaken. Jagu remembered Arigi's words. You believe what you want to believe. The metaphysical cannot be denied or affirmed in terms of the physical. "It's a judgment," said Alaku. "We thought we were so clever and our fathers so ignorant and superstitious. But Mako knew that some day we would come here and find the truth. He knew it before our great-greatgreat-great-grandfathers were bom." "We have two natives," said Jagu. "We'll learn their language. From them we may discover who did carve out Joma -- I mean that statue that seems to resemble Joma." "How will they know?" said Alaku, looking desperate. "They will have only the words of their ancestors as testimony, just as we have the words of ours." This was the last time Jagu talked to Alaku. Shortly thereafter, Alaku failed to appear for his turn of duty on the bridge. Jagu called him over the intercom. Receiving no answer, he went to Alaku's cabin. The door was locked, but it 'yielded to the master key. Alaku lay on the floor, his skin blue from cyanide. He left no note behind. None was needed. 'T'he entire crew was saddened and depressed. Alaku, despite a certain aloofness, had been loved. The many eggs he had fathered in them, and the eggs tions o f ot hers... can persuade them to DO on Psychie Dominance shows you in easy-toDynamic Telepathy and Thought Control. Make others obey you and the world is wide rushed to you by return mail in plain thrilled or money back. Send only # to P.O. Box #, Dept. SA # San Jose, Calif. they had fathered in him, were in the cryogenic tank, waiting to be quickthawed when they returned to their home. A few hours later, the two natives killed each other. The bigger one strangled the other. But before that the veins of the strangler's wrists had been bitten into and opened by the other. After the smaller had died, the other had exercised violently to stimulate the bleeding. Almost, Jagu decided to turn around and capture some more sentients from the same area. But he could not force himself to do that. To return and see Joma again, the awe-inspiring ancient being of stone... who knew but what more might go mad? He could be among them. For several ship-days, he paced back and forth on the bridge. Or he lay in his bed in his cabin, staring at the bulkhead. Finally, one third-watch, Jagu went onto the bridge. Fawani, the closest of all to him, was also on the bridge, carrying out his slight duties as pilot. He did not seem surprised to see Jagu; Jagu often came here when he was supposed to be sleeping. "It has been a long time since we were together," said Fawani. "The statue on that Tuu-forsaken planet and Alaku's suicide... they have killed love. They have killed everything except wonder about one question." "I don't wonder. I know that it was made by the natives. I know because that's the only way it could be." "But there's no way of proving it, is there?" said Fawani. "No," replied Jagu. "So before we get back home, long before, we must make up our minds to act." "What do you mean?" "We have several avenues of action. One, report exactly what we have seen. Let the authorities do the thinking for us, let them decide what to do. Two, forget about having discovered the second planet. Report only the first planet. Three, don't go home. Find a planet suitable for colonization, one so far away it may not be found by other joruma ships for hundreds of years, maybe longer.  #I three are dangerous," continued Jagu. "You don't know Arigi as I do. He will refuse to believe in the coincidence because the mathematical chances against it are too high. He will also refuse to believe that Mako did it. He will conclude that we made those statues to perpetrate a monstrous hoax." "But how could he believe such a thing?" "I couldn't blame him," said Jagu, "because he knows our past record. He might think that we did it just to raise hell. Or even that the long voyage unbalanced us, that we became converted, backslid to superstition, committed a pious fraud to convince him and others like him. It doesn't matter. Hell think we did it He has to think that or admit his whole philosophy of life is wrong. "If we try to get rid of all evidence, the photos, the logbook, we run a risk of someone talking. I think it'd be a certainty. We belong to the species that can't keep its mouth shut Or somebody else may go mad and babble the truth. "Personally I think that we should try the third alternative. Go far out into an unknown sector, so far that we can't return. This will put us beyond the range of any ships now built. If, in the future, one should find us, we can always say we had an accident, that the ship couldn't return." "But what if we reach the end of our fuel, and we still have found no suitable planet?" said Fawani. "It's a long chance, but the best we have," said Jagu. He pointed at the lower lefthand comer of a starmap on a bulkhead. "There are quite a few Ao-U stars there," he said. "If I gave the order to you now. at this moment, to head the ship toward them -- would you obey my order?" "I don't know what to think," said Fawani. "I do know that we could spend the rest of our long voyage home arguing about the best course of action. And still be undecided by the time we let down on earth. I trust you, Jagu, because I believe in you." "Believe?" said Jagu. He smiled. "Are there also bom believer in others? And those men bom to be believed in? Perhaps. But what about the rest of the crew? Will they as unhesitatingly follow me?" "Talk to them," said Fawani. "Tell them what you told me. They will do as I did. I won't even wait for the outcome. I'll turn the ship now. They won't need to know that until after they've decided to do so -- provided you talk to them before I'm relieved." "Very well. Turn it around. Head it in that general direction. We'll pick out a particular star later. Well find one or die trying. We'll begin life anew. And we don't teach our children anything about the ghosts of longdead heroes." "Turn about it is," said Fawani. He busied himself with the controls and with inserting various cards in the computer. thing about the ghosts of heroes." Then, he said, "But can man exist in a religious vacuum? What will we tell them to replace the old beliefs?" "They'll believe what they want to believe," said Jagu wearily. "Anyway, we've a long time to think about that." T Te was silent while he looked out at the stars. He thought about the planet they had just left. The sentients there would never know what gratitude they owed to him, Jagu. If he had returned to base and told his story, the Navy -- no matter what happened to Jagu and his crew -- would go to that planet. And they would proceed to capture specimens and would determine their reaction to a number of laboratory-created diseases. Within a few years only the naturally resistant of the natives would be left alive. Their planet would be open to colonization by the joruma. Now the bipedals had a period of grace. If they developed space travel and atomic power soon enough, the next joruma ship would declare them off-limits. Who knew? His own descendants might regret this decision. Some day, the sons of those sentients who had been spared by his action might come to the very planet on which his, Jagu's, sons would be living. They might even attack and destroy or enslave the joruma. That was another chance he and his descendants would have to take. He pressed the button that would awaken the sleepers and summon those on watch. Now he must begin talking. He knew that they all would be troubled until the day they died. Yet, he swore to himself, their sons would not know of it. They would be free of the past and its doubts and its fears. They would be free. Poul Anderson, who seemingly never learned how to write a bad story, gives us a particularly good one next issue. There's all that lunar real estate hanging up there in the sky, you see -- but no air, no water, ergo no life. We talk glibly of terraforming it to make lebensraum for Earth's expanding population. But is it going to be as easy as that? In next issue's complete short novel. To Build a World, Anderson gives us the answer to the three big questions of terraforming: How? How much? And -- most of all -- Over whose dead body? It's a good one! -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. 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U S Pat Off All We Unemployed  couple of months ago in these pages we discussed the technological revolution called automation, a word which has As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote more than one hundred years ago -- The majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a . thousand ways feel that they might lose by one. One of the advantages of reading science fiction is that it accustoms one to the long view. Naturally we can see the advantages of automation; they have been spelled out for us by a hundred writers over a period of decades. We know perfectly well that in the long run automation is what will make our grandchildren as much richer than we as we are than the Elizabethans. Of course, in the long run -- as John Maynard Keynes told Franklin Roosevelt -- we are all dead. What is quite certain in the short run is that automation is going to put a lot of people out of work, and the equally certain corollary of that fact is that they will not like having this happen. It will happen all the same, of course. Competition will see to that. But what are we going to lives? I n the event, we should be able to put quite a lot of sugarcoating on the unemployment pill; and as a matter of fact, we have already done so.  p -- ssw;'V ,  s I , " , ' -- i ese great minds were Rosicrucians Benjamin Frankl ' Isaac Newton Francis Bacon tmv these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose California, U.S.A. copy of "The Mastery of I Life" -- : ligation. A nonprofit organization. Address : Scibe X.Y.T. Scribe XY ,T. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains hpw I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. N.imp How many unemployed would you guess there are in the United States today? Five or six indicate? Not by a long shot! There are at least double that, and maybe far more. Add to those who are out of work and looking for work those who are equally out of work, but aren't looking. The over-# retired persons. The widows living on insurance or pensions. The divorcees living on alimony. The beneficiaries of stock-retirement plans. Add in a large section of the student population of our colleges and even our high schools; add in, in fact, every man and woman able to work but at present not actually working, whether or not he or she really wants to find a job -- for these are as technologically unemployed as any Massachusetts shoemaker. We don't have jobs for them. The difference is simply that they are bought off instead of laid off, by the enormous productive capacity of the #th century. And don't forget to add in all the "made" jobs -- the compositors setting "bogus" type that .has no destiny but to be set, proofread, corrected and melted down ; the government employees in arsenals and training camps that exist only because a Congressman won't let them be phased out; add in, in short, everyone whose work performs no real function except to aid in the distribution of our surpluses. These too are as unemployed as any West Virginia miner on the dole; but their dole takes a more attractive form. And there is probably a lot more of it. r T"he surplus work force re leased by automation doesn't have to stagnate on a dole. It can be put to work. Maybe it can even be put to work on things that are worth doing... worth doing not because someone can make a profit out of them, or because they enhance a national image, or because Oatflake County asks for a payroll under a distressed areas bill, but because... well, "because they are there." For that reason, those Congressmen who criticize the space projects because of their tremendous cost -- and in the next breath vote funds for a highway that leads from nowhere in particular to nothing at all -- have always baffled us. After all, if we're going to pay people to do jobs that don't really accomplish anything... why not hire some of them to help us toward the stars? Man had exterminated them aft -- now they were being reborn I Hphe biologist was showing the distinguished visitor through the zoo and laboratory. "Our budget," he said, "is too limited to re-create all known extinct species. So we bring to life only the higher animals, the beautiful ones that were wantonly exterminated. I'm trying, as it were, to make up for brutality and stupidity. You might say that man struck God in the face every time he wiped out a branch of the animal kingdom." He paused, and they looked across the moats and the force fields. The quagga wheeled and galloped, delight and sun flashing off his flanks. The sea otter poked his humorous whiskers from the water. The gorilla peered from behind bamboo. Passenger pigeons strutted. A rhinoceros trotted like a dainty battleship. With gentle eyes a giraffe looked at them, then resumed eating leaves. "There's the dodo. Not beautiful but very droll. And very helpless. Come. I'll show you the re-creation itself." In the great building, they passed between rows of tall and wide tanks. They could see clearly through the windows and the jelly within. "Those are African elephant embryos," said the biologist. "We plan to grow a large herd and then release them on the new government preserve." "You positively radiate," said the distinguished visitor. "You really love the animals, don't you?" "I love all life." "Tell me," said the visitor, "where do you get the data for re-creation?" "Mostly, skeletons and skins from the ancient museums. Excavated books and films that we succeeded in restoring and then translating. Ah, see those huge eggs? The chicks of the giant moa are growing within them. These, almost ready to be taken from the tank, are tiger cubs. They'll be dangerous when grown but will be confined to the preserve." The visitor stopped before the last of the tanks. "Just one?" he said. "What is it?" "Poor little thing," said the biologist, now sad. "It will be so alone. But I shall give it all the love I have." "Is it so dangerous?" said the visitor. "Worse than elephants, tigers and bears?" "I had to get special permission to grow this one," said the biologist. His voice quavered. The visitor stepped sharply back from the tank. He said, "Then it must be... But you wouldn't dare!" The biologist nodded. "Yes. It's a man." 'If you've missed any copies of Galaxy, IF or Worlds of Tomorrow from # to date, our Back Number Department has a limited supply available at #c each, any three issues for #, regardless of original cover price. Copies sent postpaid anywhere in U.S. or Canada. Sorry, no copies before # at present available. Send dates and title of issues you wish with remittance to Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York City #. You can't execute a man for a crime he didn't know he was committing -- can you? nphe Director of the crossroads world of Duhnbar had no other name, nor needed any; and his handsomeness and majesty were not necessarily according to the standards of the human race. But then, he had never heard of the human race. He sat in his equivalent of a throne room day by day, while the representatives of a thousand passing races conducted their business below and before the dai on which his great throne chair sat. He enjoyed the feeling of life around him, so he permitted them to be there. He did not like to be directly involved in that life. Therefore none of them looked or spoke in his direction. Before him, he saw their numbers spread out through a lofty hall. At the far end of the hall, above the lofty portal, was a balcony pierced through to the outside, so that it overlooked not only the hall but the armed guards on the wide steps that approached the building. On this balcony, more members of diferent races talked and stood. Next to the Director's chair, on his left, was a shimmering mirror surface suspended in midair, so that by turning his head only slightly he could see himself reflected at full length. Sometimes he looked and saw himself. But at this moment, now, he looked outward. In his mind's eye, he looked beyond the throne room and the balcony and the steps without. He saw in his imagination all the planetwide city surrounding, and the five other worlds of this solar system, which were the machine shops and granaries of this crown-world of Duhnbar. This world and system he... ruled is too mild a word. This world he owned, and wore like a ring on his finger. All of it, seen in his mind's eye, had the dull tinge of familiarity and sameness. He moved slightly the index one of his four-jointed fingers, of which he had three, with an opposed thumb on each hand. The male adult of his own race who currently filled a role something like that of chamberlain stepped forward from behind the throne chair. The Director did not look at the Chamberlain, knowing he would be there. The Director's thin lips barely moved in his expressionless, pale green face. "It has been some moments," he said. "Is there still nothing new?" t C TAirector of All," said the low voice of the Chamberlain at his ear. "Since you last asked, there has been nothing on the six worlds which has not happened before. Only the landing here at the throne city of a single alien of a new race. He has passed into the city now, omitting to sacrifice at a purple shrine but otherwise behaving as all behave on your worlds." "Is there anything new," said the Director, "about his failure to sacrifice?" "The failure is a common one," said the Chamberlain. "It has been many generations since anyone seriously worshipped at a purple shrine. The sacrifice is a mere custom of our port. Strangers not knowing of it invariably fail to light incense on the cube before the purple." The Director said nothing immediately. The Chamberlain stood waiting. If he had been left to wait until he collapsed from fatigue or starvation, another would have taken his place. "Is there a penalty for this?" said the Director at last. "The penalty," said the Chamberlain, "by ancient rule is death. But for hundreds of years it has been remitted on payment of a small fine." The Director turned these words over in his mind. "There is a value in old customs," he said after a while. "Old customs long fallen into disuse eem almost like something new when they are revived. Let the ancient penalty be reestablished." "From this transgressor," asked the Chamberlain, "as well as all others after?" The Director moved his index finger in silent assent and dismissal. The Chamberlain stepped backward and spoke to the under-officers who were always waiting. The Director, sated with looking out over the hall, turned his gaze slightly to his own seated image in the mirror surface at his left. He saw there an individual a trifle over seven feet in height, seated in a tall, carven chair with ornate armrests. Fourfingered hands lay upon the curved ends of the armrests. The arms, the legs, the body was covered in a slim, simple garment of sky blue. From the neck of the garment emerged a tall and narrow head with lean features, a straight, almost lipless mouth, narrow nose and a greenish, hairiess skull. The eyes were golden, enormous and beautiful. But neither the eyes nor the face showed any expression. The faces of the Chamberlain and the guards and others of the race sometimes showed expressions. But the Director's face, never. He was several hundreds of years old and would live until some rare accident killed him, or he became weary of life. He had never known what it was to be sick. He had never known cold, hunger or any discomfort. He had never known fear, hatred, loneliness or love. He watched himself now in the mirror, for he posed an unending enigma to himself -- an enigma that alone relieved the boredom of his existence. He did not attempt to investigate the engima. He only savored it as a connoisseur might savor a fine wine. The image in the mirror he gazed upon was the image of a being who could find no alternative but to consider himself as a God. ATTill Mauston was broken' knuckled and wrinkled about the eyes. The knuckles he had broken on human and alien bones, fighting for what belonged to him. The wrinkles about the eyes had come from the frowning harshness of expression evolved from endless bargains driven. On the infrequent occasions that he got back to Earth to see his wife and two young children, the wrinkles almost disappeared... for a while. But Earth was overcrowded and the cost of living there was high. He always had to leave again, and the wrinkles always came back. He was twenty-six years old. He had heard of Duhnbar through a race of interstellar traders called the Kjaka, heavybodied, lion-featured and honest. He had assumed there must be such a world, as on Earth in the past there had been ancient cities like Samarkand under Tamerlane, where the great trade route crossed. He had searched and inquired and the Kjakas had told him. Duhnbar was the Samarkand of the stars. One mighty stream of trade flowed out from the highly developed worlds of the galaxy's center and met here with several peripheral routes among the outlying, scattered stars. Will had come alone and he was the first from Earth to reach it. From this one trip, he could well make enough to retire and not have to leave his family on Earth again. The Kjakas were honest and had taught him the customs of the Duhnbar port. They had sent him to Kahl Dohn, one of their own people on Duhnbar, who would act as Will's agent there. They had forgotten the small matter of the purple shrine. The custom was all but obsolete, the fine was nominal. They had talked of larger transactions and values. Passing through the terminal building of the port, Will saw a cube of metal, a purple cloth hanging on the wall above it and small purple slivers that fumed and reeked. He passed at a good distance. Experience had taught him not to involve himself with the religions and customs of peoples he did not know. Riding across the city in an automated vehicle set for the address of his agent, Will passed a square in which there was what seemed to be a sort of forty-foot high clothespole. What way hung on it, however, were not clothes, but bodies. The bodies were not all of the native race, and he was glad to leave it behind. He reached the home of the Kjakan agent. It was a pleasant, two story, four-sided structure surrounding an interior courtyard rich with vegetation unknown to Will. He and his host sat on an interior balcony of the second floor overlooking the courtyard, and talked. The agent's name was Kahl Dohn. He ate a narcotic candy particular to his own race and saw that Will was supplied with a pure mixture of distilled water and ethyl alcohol -- to which Will added a scotch flavor from one of the small vials he carried at his belt. Will had set up a balance of credit on several Kjakan worlds. Khal Dohn would buy for him on Duhnbar against that credit. They were beginning a discussion of what was available on Duhnbar that would be best for Will to purchase, speaking in the stellar lingua franca, the trading language among the stars. Abruptly, they were interrupted by a voice from one of the walls, speaking in a tongue Will did not understand. Khal Dohn listened, answered and turned his heavy, leonine face on Will. "We must go downstairs," he said. He led Will back down to the room which led to the street before his home. Waiting there were two of the native race in black, short robes, belted at the waist with silver belts. A black rod showed in a sort of silver pencil-case attached to the belt of each native. As Will and Khal came down a curving ramp to them, the golden eyes of both natives fastened on Will with mild curiosity. "Stranger and alien," said one of them in the trade tongue, "you are informed that you are under arrest." VX#'ill looked at them, and opened his mouth. But Khal Dohn was already speaking in the native tongue; and after a little while the natives bowed shortly and went out. Khal Doha turned back to Will. "Did you see in the terminal -- " Khal Dohn described the Purple Shrine. Will nodded. "Did you go near it?" "No," said Will. "I always steer clear of such things, unless I know about them." Khal Dohn stared at him for a long moment. Below the heavy, rather oriental fold of flesh, his eyes were sad, dark and unreadable to Will. "I don't understand," he said at last. "But you are my guest, and my duty is to protect you. We'd better go see an acquaintanced of mine -- one who has more influence here in the throne city than I do." He led Will out to one of the automated vehicles. On their way to the home of the acquaintance he answered Will's questions by describing the custom of the Purple Shrine. " -- I don't understand," the Kjaka said. "I should have been able to pay your fine to the police and settle it. But they had specific orders to arrest you and take you in." "Why didn't they, then?" asked Will. The dark eyes swung and met his own. "You're my guest," said Khal Dohn. "I've taken on the responsibility of your surrender at the proper time, while they fulfill my request for the verification of the order to arrest you." Outside the little vehicle, as they turned into the shadow of a taller building, a coolness seemed to gather about them and reach inside to darken and slow Will's spirits. "Do you think it's something really important?" he said. "No," answered Khal Dohn. "No. I'm sure it's all a mistake." They stopped before a building very like the home of Khal Dohn. Khal led Will up a ramp to a room filled with oversize furniture. From one large chair rose a narrow-bodied, long-handed alien with six fingers to a hand. His face was narrow and horselike. He stood better than seven and half feet, in jacket and trousers of a dark red color. A dagger hung at his belt. "You are my guest as always, Khal Dohn!" he cried. His voice was strident and high-pitched. He spoke the trade tongue, but he pronounced the Kjakan name of Khal Dohn with a skill Will had not been able to master. "And welcome as the guest of my guest is -- " he turned to Will, speaking to Khal -- "what is its name -- ?" "His name," said Khal, "is Will Mau -- " his own, Kjakan tongue failed the English sf sound -- "Will Mauzzon." "Welcome," said the tall alien. "I am Avoa. What is it?" "Something I don't understand." Khal switched to the native tongue of Duhnbar and Will was left out of the conversation. They talked some little while. "I will check," cried Avoa, finally, breaking back into the, trade tongue. "Come tomorrow early, Khal Dohn. Bring it with you." "Him," said Khal. "I will bring him." "Of course. Of course. Come together. I'll have news for you then. It can be nothing serious." Ihal and Will left and came back to the balcony above the courtyard of Khal's home. They sat talking. The sunset of the planet spread across the western skyline of the throne city, its light staining the white ceiling above them with a wash of red. "You're sure it's nothing to worry about?" Will asked the Kjaka. "I'm sure." Khal Dohn fingered one of his narcotic candies in thick fingers. "They have a strict but fair legal code here. And if there is any misunderstanding, Avoa can resolve it. He has considerable influence. Shall we return to talk of business?" So they talked as the interior lights came on. Later they ate their different meals together -- Will's from supplies he had brought from his ship -- and parted for the night. It was a comfortable couch in a pleasant, open-balconied room giving on the courtyard below, that Khal assigned Will. But Will found sleep standing off some distance from him. He was a man of action, but here there was no action to be taken. He walked to the balcony and looked down into the courtyard. Below, the strange plants were dim shapes in the light of a full moon too weak and pale to be the moon of Earth. He wondered how his wife and the two children were. He wondered if, across the light-years of distance, they were thinking of him at this moment, perhaps worrying about him. He breathed the unfamiliar, tasteless night air and it seemed heavy in his lungs. At his belt was a container of barbiturates, four capsules of seconal. He had never found the need to take one before in all these years between the stars. He took one now, washing it down with the flat, distilled water they had left in this room for him. He slept soundly after that, without dreams. VX'hen he woke in the morn' ing, he felt better. Khal Dohn seemed to him to be quite sensible and undisturbed. They rode over to the home of Avoa together; and Will took the opportunity he had neglected before to pump Khal about the city as they rode through it. When they entered the room where they had met Avoa the day before, the tall alien was dressed in clothing of a lighter, harsher red but seemed the same in all other ways. "Well," said Will to him, smiling, after they had greeted each other in the trade tongue. "What did you find out the situation is?" Avoa stared back at him for a moment, then turned and began to speak rapidly to Khal in the native tongue. Khal answered. After a moment they both stopped and looked at Will without speaking. "What's happened?" said Will. "What is it?" "I'm sorry," said Khal slowly, in the trade tongue. "It seems that nothing can be done." Will stared at him. The words he had heard made no sense. "Nothing can be done?" he said. "About what? What do you mean?" "I'm sorry," said Khal. "I mean, Avoa can do nothing." "Nothing?" said Will. Neither of the aliens answered. They continued to watch him. Suddenly, Avoa shifted his weight slightly on his long feet, and half-turned toward the doorway of the room. "I am sorry!" he cried sharply. "Very sorry. But it is a situation out of my control. I can do nothing." "Why?" burst out Will. He turned on Khal. "What's wrong? You told me their legal system was fair. I didn't know about the shrine!" "Yes," said Khal. "But this isn't a matter for their law. Their Director has given an order." "Director?" The word buzzed as deadly and foolishly as a tropical mosquito in Will's ears. "The one on the throne? What's he got to do with it?" "It was his command," said Avoa suddenly in his strident voice. "The ancient penalty was to be enforced. After he heard about your omission. From now on, newcomers will be warned. They are fair here." "Fair!" the word broke from between Will's teeth. "What about me? Doesn't this Director know about me? What is he, anyway?" Khal and Avoa looked at each other, then back at Will. "These people here," said Khal slowly, "control trade for light-years in every direction. Not because of any virtue in themselves, but because of the accident of their position here among the stars. They know thk -- so they need something. J symbol, something to set up, to reassure themselves of their right position." "In all else, they are reasonable," said Avoa. "Their symbol," said Khal, "k the Director. They identify with him as being all-powerful, ovef things in the universe. His slightest whim is obeyed without hesitation. He could order them afl to cut their own throats and they would do it, without thinking. But of course he will not. He is not in the least irresponsible. He is sane and of the highest intelligence. But the only law he knows is his own." Cried Avoa, "He is all but impotent. Ordinarily he does nothing. We interest and amuse him, and he is bored, so he lets us trade here with impunity. But if he does act, there is no appeal. It is a risk we all take. You are not the only one." "But I've got a wife -- " Will broke off suddenly. He had shouted out without thinking in English. They were gazing back at him now without understanding. For a moment a watery film blurred them before his eyes. r T"'he desertdry wind of a despair blew through him, shriveling his hopes. What did they know of wives and children,  or Earth? He saw their faces clearly now, both alien, one heavy and leonine, one patrician and?quine. He thought of his wife again, and the children Without his income they would be forced to emigrate. A remembrance of the bitter, crude and barren livings of the frontier planets came to his mind like strangling smoke. "Wait," he said, as Avoa turned to go. Will brought his voice done to a reasonable tone. "There must be someone I can appeal to. Khal Dohn." He turned to the Kjaka. "I'm your guest." "You are my guest," said Khal. "But I can't protect you against this. It's like a natural, physical force -- a great wind, an earthquake against which I would be helpless to protect any guest, or even myself." He looked at Will with his dark, alien eyes, like the eyes of an intelligent beast. "Pure chance -- the chance of the Director hearing about you and the shrine when he did," said Khal, "has selected you. All those who face the risk of trading among the stars know the chance of death. You must have figured the risk, as a good trader should." "Not like this -- " said Will between his teeth, but Avoa interrupted, turning to leave. "I must go," he said. "I have appointments on the throne room balcony. Khal Dohn, give it anything that will make these last hours comfortable and my house will supply. You must surender it before midday to the police." "No!" Will called after the tall alien. "If nobody else can save me, then I want to see him!" "Him?" said Khal. Avoa suddenly checked, and slowly turned back. "The Director." Will looked at both of them. "I'll appeal to him." Khal and Avoa looked at each other. There was a silence. "No," said Avoa, finally. "It is never done. No one speaks to him." He seemed about to turn again. "Wait." It was Khal who spoke this time. Avoa looked sharply at him. Khal met the taller alien's eyes. "Will Mauzzon is my guest.' "It is not my guest," said Avoa. "# am your guest," said Khal, without emotion. Avoa stared now at the shorter, heavier-bodied alien. Abruptly he said something sharply in the native tongue. Khal did not answer. He stood looking at Avoa without moving. "It is already dead," Avoa said at last slowly, in the trade tongue, glancing at Will, "and being dead can have no further effect upon the rest of us. You waste your credit with me." Still Khal neither spoke nor moved. Avoa turned and went out. "My guest," said Khal, sitting down heavily in one of the oversize chairs of the room, "you have little cause for hope." A fter that he sat silent. Will paced the room. Occasionally he glanced at the chronometer on his wrist, adjusted to local time. It showed the equivalent of two and three-quarters hours to noon when the wall chimed and spoke in Avoa's voice. "Yoq have your audience," said Khal, rising. "I would still advise against hope." He looked with his heavy face and dark eyes at Will. "Worlds can't afford to war against worlds to protect their people, and there is no reason for a Director to change his mind." He took Will in one of the small automated vehicles to the throne room. Inside the portal, at the steps leading up to the balcony, he left Will. "I'll wait for you above," Khal said. "Good luck, my guest." Will turned. At the far end of the room he saw the dais and the Director. He went toward it through the crowd, that at first had hardly noticed him but grew silent and parted before him as he proceeded, until he could hear in the great and echoing silence of the hall the sound of his own footsteps as he approached the dais, the seated figure and the throne, behind which stood natives with the silver pencil cases and black rods at their silvver belts. He came at last to the edge of the dais and stopped, looking up. Above him, the high greenish skull, the narrow nouth, the golden eyes leaned forward to look down at him; and he saw them profiled in the mirror surface alongside. The profile was no more remote than the living face it mirrored. Will opened his mouth to speak, but one of the natives behind the throne, wearing the Chamberlain's silver badge, stepped forward as the finger of the Director gestured. "Wait," said the Chamberlain in the trade tongue. He turned and spoke behind him. Will waited, and the silence stretched out long in the hall. After a while there was movement and two natives appeared, one with a small chair, one with a tube-shaped container of liquid. "Sit," said the Chamberlain. "Drink. The Director has said it." Will found himself seated and with the tube in his hand. An odor of alcohol diluted with water came to his nostrils; and for  moment a burst of wild laughter trembled inside him. Then he controlled it and sipped from the tube. "What do you say?" said the Chamberlain. Will lifted his face to the unchanging face of the Director. Like the unreachable stare of an insect's eyes the great golden orbs regarded him. "I haven't intentionally committed any crime," said Will. "The Director," said the Chamberlain, "knows this." His voice was flat, uninflected. But he seemed to wait. The golden eyes of the throned figure seemed to wait, also watching Irrationally, Will felt the first small flame of a hope flicker to life within him. His trader's instinct stirred. If they would listen, there must always be a chance. "I came here on business," he said, "the same sort of business that brings so many. Certainly this world and the trading done on it are tied together. Without Duhnbar there could be no trading place here. And without the trading would Duhnbar and its other sister worlds still be the same?" He paused, looking upward for some reaction. "The Director," said the Chamberlain, "is aware of this." "Certainly, then," said Will, "if the traders here respect the laws and customs of Duhnbar, shouldn't Duhnbar respect the lives of those who come to trade?" He stared at the golden eyes hanging above him, but he could read no difference in them, no response. They seemed to wait still. He took a deep breath. "Death is -- " He stopped. The Director had moved on his throne. He leaned slowly forward until his face hung only a few feet above Will's. He spoke in the trade tongue, in a slow, deep, unexpectedly resonant voice. "Death," he said, "is the final new experience." He sat slowly back in his chair. The Chamberlain spoke. "You will go now," he said. Will sat staring at him, the tube of alcohol and water still in his grasp. "You will go," repeated the Chamberlain. "You are free until midday and the moment of your arrest." Will's head jerked up. He snapped to his feet from the chair. "Are you all insane?" he shouted at the Chamberlain. "You can't do this sort of thing without an excuse! My people take care of their own -- " He broke off at the sight of the Chamberlain's unmoved face. He felt suddenly dizzy and nauseated at the pit of his stomach. Said the Chamberlain, "It is understandable that you do not want to die. You will go now or I will have you taken away." Something broke inside Will.  It was like the last effort of a man in a race who feels the running man beside him pulling away and tries, but cannot match the pace. Dazedly, dully, he turned. Blindly he walked the first few steps back toward the distant portal. "Wait." The Chamberlain's voice turned him around. "Come back," said the Chamberlain. "The Director will speak." Numbly he came back. The Director leaned forward once more, until when Will halted their faces were only a few feet apart. "You will not die," said the Director. Will stared up at the alien face without understanding. The words rang and reechoed like strange, incomprehensible sounds in his ears. "You will live," said the Director. "And when I send for you, from time to time, you will come again and talk to me." Will continued to stare. He felt the smooth, flexible tube of liquid in his right hand, and he felt it bulge between his fingers as his fingers contracted spasmodically. He opened his lips but no words worked their way past his tight muscles of his throat. "It is interesting," said the Director, as his great, golden eyes looked down at Will, "that yoa do not understand me. It is interesting to explain myself to you. You give me reasons why you should not die." " -- Reasons?" Between Will's dry lips, the little word slipped huskily out. Miraculously, out of the ashes of his despair, he felt the tiny warmth of a new hope. "Reasons," said the Director. "You give me reasons. And there are no reasons. There is only    me. The hope flickered and stumbled in its reach for life. "I will make you understand now," said the deep and measured voice of the Director. "It is I who am responsible for all things that happen here. It is my whim that moves them. There is nothing else." The golden eyes looked into Will's.  "It was my whim," said the Director, "that the penalty of the shrine's neglect should be imposed once more. Since I had decided so, it was unavoidable that you should die. For when I decide, all things follow inexorably. There is no other way or thing." Will stared, the muscles of his neck stiff as an iron brace. "But then," said the deep voice beneath the glorious eyes, "as you were leaving another desire crossed my mind. That you might interest me again on future occasions." He paused. "Once more," he said, "all things followed. If you were to interest me in the future, you could not die. And so you are not to." His eyes held Will's. "And now you understand." A faint thoughtfulness clouded his golden eyes. "I have done something with you this day," he said almost to himself, "that I have never done before. It is quite new. I have made you know what you are, in respect to what I am. I have taken a creature not even of my own people and made it understand it has no life or death or reasons of its own, except those my desires desire." He stopped speaking. But Will still stood, rooted. "Do not be afraid," said the Director. "I killed you. But I have brought another creature who understands to life in your body. One who will walk this world of mine for many years before he dies." of summer lightning flared in Will's head, blinding him. He heard his own voice shouting, in a sound that was rage without meaning. He flung his right arm forward and up as his sight cleared, and saw the liquid in the tube he had held splash itself against the downward-gazing, expressionless face above him, and the container bounce harmlessly from the sky-blue robe below the face. There was a soundless jerk through all the natives behind the throne. A soundless gasp as if the air had changed. Native hands had flown to the black rods. But there they hung. The Director had not moved. The watered alcohol dripped slowly from his nose and chin. But his features were unchanged, his hands were still, no finger on either hand stirred. He continued to gaze at Will. After a long second, Will turned. He was not quite sure what he had done, but something sullen and brave burned redly in him. He began to walk up the long aisle through the crowd, toward the distant portal. In that whole hall he was the only thing moving. The thousand different traders followed him with their eyes, but otherwise none moved, and no one made a sound. From the crowd there was silence. From the balcony overlooking, and the steps beyond the entrance, there was silence. Step by echoing step he walked the long length of the hall and passed through the towering archway into the bright day outside. He made it as far as halfway down the steps before, inside the hall, the Director's finger lifted, the message of that finger was flashed to the ranked guards outside, and the black rods shot him down with flame in the sunlight. On the balcony above, overlooking those steps, Avoa stirred at last, turning his eyes from what was left of Will and looking down at Khal Dohn beside him. "What was... Avoa's voice fumbled and failed. He added, almost humbly. "I am sorry. I do not even know the proper pronoun." "He," said Khal Dohn, still looking down at the steps. "He. What did he call himself?" Avoa said. "You told me, but I do not remember. I should have listened, but I did not. What did you say -- what was he?" Khal Dohn lifted his heavy head and looked up at last. "He was a man," said Khal Dohn. Cordwainer Smith E. ESmith, Ph.D.  George O. Smith Jack Smith J All in the May IF -- still on sale! And don't forget -- starting with the I II ! T i V V  v ' I I T ! I I T I I T T I I f I I  I I I I  I v V T T T T T  , T I T' Getting to the planets may not be the big problem -- maybe the hard part will be handling the stay-at-homesl I 'T'he sudden whine underneath them was like the dying song of a motor. But their car, being a linear job, didn't have one. The only motor was far away in the control station, setting up a magnetic beat in the pulse strips laid along the middle of each traffic lane. The dying fall was in the tractive case -- but the effect was the same; as the whine faded through a whimper into silence the car slowed and stopped. Howe pulled on the handbrake. Pennell looked at the dead pulse meter, then questioningly at Howe. This was only his second assignment -- his first with Howe. Howe's craggy face splintered in a crooked grin. "Sign One. Things must be warming up." "But they sell Linear because they guarantee the power." "Through Sleet and Snow and Rain and Hail, The Linear Strip Will Never Fail" Howe quoted sardonically. "It hasn't failed. It's been failed. Switched off, dear boy." People said that Howe was a one-time actor. He wasn't the only one in Special Branch to have accreted that aura. It seemed to be the myth of Branch, just as in advertising (where Pennell had started his career). There they regarded themselves all as frustrated Great Writers trapped in the plastic towers of commerce, their wings clipped, wild Byronic collars trimmed to neat button-downs. People must have some pretty rich private fantasies to be in such a crazy set-up as Branch -- and a pretty good assortment of reasons. His own was simple -- to get a toehold, however oblique, in the Space Service... a reason which he had carefully concealed from the Interview Board eight months ago. They might have thought it the wrongest possible one. Howe reached into the glove compartment and took out a black watch-sized instrument. He slid back the door and went round behind the car. Pennell followed him. Howe bent over the pulse strip. It was buried an inch below the molycrete surface, but the line of filler above it was clearly discernible. Howe straightened. "I thought so." He crossed the highway to the barrier that divided the two sets of lanes. He straddled it, then kneeled again over the nearest lane -- the high-speed one. Pennell just reached the barrier when he glimpsed something from the corner of his eye. It was red and moving fast. "Watch out!" he screamed. T T owe reacted instinctively, flinging himself up against the barrier as the red car hurtled past. Pennell caught a glimpse of the driver's face -- a fat, frightened one. Then the car was a dwindling spot in the distance. "Thanks," Howe said nonchalantly, swinging back over the barrier. He dusted down his night-colored uniform with one sleek leather glove. "That confirms it. Power's full on the other strip -- going out of Bonfield." "Then it's already started," Pennell said as they went back to the car. It wasn't a question. Score two out of two, in his limited experience so far, for Special Branch's statistics department. "It's uncanny, the way they get it taped." "Not so uncanny. Just efficient, blast 'em," Howe answered. "And experienced by now, after three years. Pressure doesn't build up in really small towns -- anything under ten thousand population. Towns that size aren't much more than dormitories or stopover places. And in big towns the pressure gets dispersed. People can change their jobs -- or even get out. The bigger the city, the more houses are rented. It's the Bonfields of this world that are the danger points. They're just big enough to support some industry. People buy their houses. They've got more ties -- and more reasons for feeling trapped." "I learned a bit about that at Training School." "Oh, they teach you that now, do they?" "Only in outline. Just enough to let us know what kind of organization they've got behind the front line. All the same, it's -- " "Uncanny. Yeah, you said that. And all done without having a Man On The Spot -- all out of freely available statistics and press reports. It's just knowing what to watch. A creep-up of the juvenile delinquency figures is usually the first sign. That immediately puts a red star on the file. Then -- well, all kinds of things... a crop erf small-timeembezzlements... undue demand on the hospital -- especially the mental hospital, if the town's got one... an upturn in marital dispute cases. If a town gets more than one murder in a short space of time, that really gets the boys busy on their graphs. Various symptoms build up. The graph takes on a familiar shape with a predictable curve. Once that happens -- well, that's when we're alerted." He broke off and gestured to Pennell to change over seats. Pennell did as he was bid, though he could see no point in it. He said as much to Howe. "Who goes to ring the breakdown service?" "Neither of us, my lad." Howe grinned and reached beneath the fascia. A humming started up and mounted to a low drone. He answered Pennell's look of surprise : "It happened to me last time out but one. So I took the precaution of having an emergency motor fitted. Branch are thinking of making them standard equipment -- just in case this is going to become part of the pattern. Better than getting official screws put on the Linear people. That would be a mite too obtrusive for Branch. Anyway, it's not the Linear company's fault. Their local controller probably has a gun in his back." He nodded at Pennell. "Go on, give it a whirl. That pedal on the right controls the power." Pennell's foot found it. "I wondered what it was for. Thought it was something to do with the air-conditioning." He pushed it down experimentally, releasing the handbrake. A handbrake was something you only used on a linear job for parking and emergencies. Driving a linear was even easier than driving an auto-transmission petrol car. You had no worries about vehicles behind you or in front of you. You only had to watch when you switched lanes, Momentum carried you from one pulse strip to another; then you picked up the pulse again -- to ride on the crest of a magnetic wave at sixty, ninety or a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Those were the speeds of the lanes, as unvarying as the frequency of an alternating power line, except in smog or snow when they were cut down to whatever safe speed visibility dictated. But if most of the old thrill of driving had been taken away, there was ample compensation in slashed running and maintenance costs. And there were still plenty of roads left that you could run an ordinary car on if you so wanted. Pennell put his foot right down and the car slowly reached a majestic twenty-five. "Though all the Linear stations fall, the Howe De Lux  will never stall," Howe chanted, parodying the Linear company' slogan. "Well, not for fifty miles, anyway, which is the limit of a Lansen cell. But Bonfield's only twenty miles away now." 'T'hey went sedately on their way. It was early morning, a faint mist still masking the day, and there had been little traffic on the roads so far. A couple of cars passed them coming out of Bonfield, and each time the Special Branch men caught a glimpse of mouths dropping in surprise. The sight of a car going at twenty-five along a linear highway must have had all the unreality of a slow-motion film. For three miles they saw nothing on their side of the highway. Then a utility wagon came hurtling towards them. "Keep right on," Howe muttered. The utility driver appeared to have the same idea. But at the last moment he seemed to remember the rule of the road and slewed violently past them, with a screech of brakes. In their rear mirror the two Special Branch men saw it turn in pursuit of them. Which wasn't a hard task ; at their speed any elesent of a contest was conspicuously lacking. The utility pulled alongside them. It held two policemen. The driver flagged them vehemently. Howe leaned out graciously like a grand seigneur bowing and proceeded to hold two fingers up, practically in the nostrils of the other driver. The latter went a shade of purple and wrenched savagely at his steering wheel. "I think we had better stop, dear boy," Howe murmured. But Pennell had already lifted his foot from the pedal. The cops climbed out of their wagon and stalked over. One was carrying sergeant's stripes and walked as if they were newly acquired. He stopped by the Branch men's car and pushed his cap back. "What's the game, mister?" "I should ask you that, I think," Howe answered suavely. "Oh, you do, do you? Well, I'm the one who asks the questions round here, and I'm the one who gives the orders. And the order I'm giving you is to follow my wagon to the next turnaround -- " "But that's just the direction we were heading, officer." " -- and head back the way you've come." "Ah. That we don't intend to do." The other cop -- a youngster; Pennell, at twenty-six. could have given him a few years -- reached to his hip. The sergeant waved a hand to restrain him, smirking as he did so. He fetched out a notebook, ostentatiously extracted a pencil from its spine and licked the point. "Right. Which way do you want it?" "I don't quite get you," Howe countered innocently. "What's on? Some kind of trouble?" "No," the cop said hastily -- a shade too hastily. "It's none of your business." "But it is my business," Howe said sweetly. "Here we were, driving along peacefully, when -- " The sergeant held up a beefy hand. "If that's the way you want to play it -- " The pencil descended and began moving. , "One, failing to obey a signal to stop -- " "Since when has a motorized bull-charge been a signal to stop?" "Two, driving a non-linear vehicles on a linear highway." "You can talk! This is a linear vehicle. Latest model. And we were driving on the right side of the road, at least." The sergeant glared at him and went on. "Three, insulting behavior, i.e. making an obscene gesture to a member of the --  He broke off and turned to his subordinate. "What is it, Hawkins?" r T"he young cop had been clearing his throat noisily. Now he gestured meaningly towards Howe and Pennell. The sergeant followed his gesture, the look of annoyance on his face shading into puzzlement -- until he got the message. The seats on the latest linear cars were low slung so that not much more than the heads of the occupants were visible. The sergeant had thought they were wearing dark business suits. Now he made out the semi-military cut of their jackets, the comettail moulding on the black buttons. He stepped back and planted his fists on his hips. "So you're two of them, are you? Well, don't think that gives you any privileges in my book." "I'm sorry to hear you say that," said Howe achingly. Despite the sergeant's words, the uniforms had obviously had a chastening effect on him. Any visitors to Bonfield would be highly unwelcome just now, but that two Spacers should turn up was against all the odds. Infuriatingly so! "Look," the sergeant said, a note of pleading entering his voice. "I don't want any more on my plate than I have got. If you want just to go through the town I'll give you an escort." "Come, come," Howe chided. "Where's your local patriotism? What did the guide book say... Bonfield, pop. #, sealevel, set in the midst of the renowned Southchester country... ?" The sergeant looked pained. "I've got my orders." "And we," said Howe, "have got the freedom of Bonfield." He pulled a slim black book from his pocket. "The Spaceman's Passport. Take a look inside. Skip the somewhat lamentable likeness of myself and concentrate on the reading matter." "I don't want to know," the sergeant said surlily. "Hold on." He jammed his cap back over his eyes and stalked back to his wagon, where he lifted a microphone. The youngster craned down over the car and whispered hoarsely to Howe. "Certainly, dear boy," Howe responded. "You mean it? ThanksV' He thrust his book through the open window, looking back over his shoulder to make sure his sergeant wasn't watching. "Do you mind putting the name of your base underneath?" "Of course," said Howe, obliging with more alacrity than truthfulness. "Marsopolis," the boy breathed He added eagerly, "You know, I volunteered for the Spacers, but got turned down. Those tests are tough, ain't they? I -- " The sergeant was returning from the utility. The young cop stuffed his book back in his pocket and straightened hurriedly"Okay," the sergeant said heavily. "You've been cleared. You can go through." "Much obliged," said Howe. He nodded to Pennell, who restarted the motor. "Despite your doubts, officer, I'm sure we shall enjoy our stay." II 'T'he road followed a gap in the hills. They came out on the crest of a gentle gradient -- and the town of Bonfield stretched beneath them, its nearer houses a scant two miles away. It looked like most other towns of comparable size. A cluster of taller buildings in the center; to one side a small factory area: around that the gray roofs of the older houses, newer red roofs blocking in the rest. It looked normal and peaceful enough from this distance. But -- "Look," said Howe. Through the lifting heat haze, what could have at first been mistaken for a smoking factory stack could be seen as the charred skeleton of a building, still smoldering after a fire. "I see," Pennell said slowly. "But listen." Howe duly listened. "Good for you. That's not the first thing most new agents notice." Pennell was still listening -- and remembering being out with his first-ever girl, walking in the woods high above his hometown in the evening, listening to its voice. It was the voice of a town. A voice that never stopped, but only varied as the wind veered or the stereo theaters turned out; as whatever note, man-made or elemental, turned up on the score. Sometimes, by some freak of orchestration, it would be hushed and a clear single note would make itself heard -- a train crying into the distance, a dull cryptic thudding, some voice raised in a never-to-be-known emotion. He smiled wryly at the memory -- not only of the voice but of himself then. And now he was here -- a member of a strange force -- listening to another voice... and knowing that it was wrong. The ground-bass of traffic was missing, for one thing. And the note of other wheels -- those of Industry -- was as sporadic as an engine missing on several cylinder? ihe human component was wrong too, ragged and out-of-tune. There was a sense of alarm bells ringing, but he couldn't swear that he actually heard them. But he did hear a siren, for a brief second before it died on a strangled note. He shivered. "Check kit," Howe said. He took out his wallet and snapped it open. Pennell followed suit. "Haemoxin pills," Howe intoned. "Check." "Anti-ditto." "Check." "Vecol." "Check." "Antifax." "Check." "Disposal bomb.' "Check." Pennell grinned briefly. "As well as anyone can check it, short of actually using it." Howe grunted. "We'd better take an antifax now. Just in case they put lie detectors on us. That doesn't often happen, but you never know. Right, let's roll." A mile on they passed a sign that said Wecome to Bontield. Pennell grimaced, wondering what kind of welcome Bonfield would have for them. 'T'hey had to wait for that until they had checked the car in at the Linear Station on the outskirts of town -- the usual siting. Several cops were clustered around the place, trying hard to look as if their group presence there was entirely coincidental. But the only person to come running was the green-uniformed controller, who leaped out of his plexiglass control dome as if he had just discovered that it was being pumped full of poison gas. "May I extend' the sincere apologies of the company?" he stuttered. He was a little man with a bald head. The head was glistening more brightly than the temperature warranted. "Any inconvenience to you will be compensated. I assure -- " Howe cut him off with a sweeping gesture. "No compensation would be adequate for the waste of time my companion and I have suffered. We shall see our lawyers when we get back to civilization." "I'm sure there will be no need for that," the controller said agitatedly, taking a quick look back over his shoulder. Pennell tracked the glance. Howe had been right. Gun in hand or not, there was certainly somebody else in the dome. He wasn't in police uniform -- but neither was he in Linear Service green. "Be assured that every care will be taken with your vehicle while it is in our charge." The little man semaphored to an overalled service hand. Howe merely snorted contemptuously and, beckoning to Pennell, strode off. Only now did the cops move. A couple peeled off and waited for the Space Service men at the exit gates. "We've been detailed to look after you," one of them said. "Look after us?" Howe's eyebrows rose in feigned amazement. "Well, remind whoever detailed you that there exists something called the Spaceman's Charter." "We know," said the cop, a pained expression on his face. "Nobody's stopping you going anywhere. This is just protection." " Protection ? Is your town so badly run that people need protecting?" The cop made a step towards them as if he'd like to punch their faces in -- then obviously thought better of it. "I see," said Howe. "A bit near the mark, eh? Well, let me give you the exact wording of the Charter on this point." He pulled out his passport and opened it. "'Section one, paragraph three. Inasmuch as any member of the Space Service, being a citizen of space, is therefore a citizen of all Earth, so he shall be deemed a free man of all countries and of all states, counties, communes or department of those countries and of all cities, towns or villages ana be permitted to pass freely, subject to his abiding by common law, in all such places and over all boundaries and frontiers without let or hindrance.' " Howe looked up. "Briefly, gentlemen, I regard your company -- roaring good fellows as you may be -- as definitely a let andor a hindrance. Kindly report back to your chief to that effect -- and let us alone." The two Branch men stalked off. The cops didn't follow. Howe snickered loudly. "God, they must hate us! You know, I think one must be a bit of a sado-masochist to enjoy this job." Pennell grinned. "Are you? Do you?" "That would be telling, dear boy. Let me just say that it fills a space in this old lumberroom of a soul of mine that would otherwise be grievously empty." They passed a turned-over car, and another that had obviously just been rescued from that condition. Its bodywork a stove-in ruin, it was being winched onto a breakdown truck. There were few people on the streets, though eyes peered out from the windows of every other house. There was a hush over the town like the hush after a bombardment -- half relief, half fear for when the next barrage should start.  couple of youngsters came out of a side street. They caught sight of the Spacers and jerked excitedly at each other's sleeves. They beckoned furiously over their shoulders and were joined by a dozen more teenagers, boys and girls -- though it was a job to tell one from the other in the crewcuts and back slacks and jerkins that both sexes affected. The mob descended on the two Branch men. "Close ranks," Howe said easiy. Pennell didn't feel so easy. They used to tear pop singers apart once, didn't they? The mob was on them. "Sign this, please." "Real Spacers! Boy" "Which planet you from?" "Kiss me! Kiss me!" . Pennell caught a glint of scissors -- reaching for a shoulder tab or a lock of his hair. He ducked. Then Howe struck out, his arm flashing in a black arc. His open hand landed, with all his strength, across the nearest face. It fell back. So did the rest of them -- in a sudden vacuum of silence. The one that Howe had struck sprawled on the ground. "Peggy!" one of the boys said in a shocked voice. The girl picked herself up, her black pants dusty, one side of her face branded crimson, the rest of it pale. Then, in a way curious to see, her whole face went as red as the slap mark. She turned on her heel and fled sobbing. "Wliat'd you do that for, mister?" one of the boys blurted. "I wonder you ask," Howe said curtly. "Look at you! What does it say on your jacket?" He squinted, though the letters were nearly a foot high. "Spaceman?" His eyes went round the circle. "Mars Or Bust? Venus Flight?" His voice was scathing. "You'd never make space, any of you. You need discipline for our job." The kids' eyes fell. There was a shuffling of feet. "Sorry, captain. We've never been so close to a Spacer before." "And get your ranks right." Howe pointed to his sleeve. 'We're only Spacers First Class, not captains." "Onlyl" one of them said. "That's like saying you're only -- well, only the fifth Knight of the Round Table!" "D'you ever hear anyone so modest?" a girl breathed ecstatically. Howe cursed. He had been in Branch from the start, but he could still make mistakes. Kids had such blasted short memories! They had already forgotten the girl he had slapped. He would have to correct the balance. "What do you want, anyway?" "Just -- just to be with you," one of the girls said. "Haven't you Earthworms got anything better to do?" "Earth... worms?" echoed a tall, fair boy. He had a big comet-tail painted across his jerkin. Howe sneered. "That's what we call you in the Service." The fair boy's lip drooped. Then he brightened. "But we won't be Earthworms all our lives, will we, fellers?" There was a chorus of assent from his mates. "The Service is getting bigger every day, isn't it, mister?" "So's the world population, sonny -- faster. But we haven't got time to chat on street comers with a bunch of pimply kids." "Will you come and give a talk at our club?" asked the tall fair boy. "I strongly doubt it." "Can we have a button?" "You certainly may not." "Well, autographs, then?" Howe sighed. "All right. Juat one." There was a flurry of movement, but the fair boy already had his book out. Howe took it. He held it up under his eyes and signed it with a hand that shook violently"What's up with him?" one of the boys whispered anxiously to Pennell. "Planet shakes," Pennell told him. "We all get it." "But I thought you fellers were supposed to be so fit." "Sure -- we were... once." Pennell twitched. "I -- I see," the boy said, edging away. A girl took his place, holding out her bared arm. "I haven't got a book. Anyway, I'd rather have it on my arm. I won't ever wash it till the day I become a nurse in the Space Service." T)ennell had half a mind to take a haemoxin pill right there and then. The effect would soon dispel any romantic notions she might have about nursing the Brave Boys of the Space Service. But that would have been badly timed; haemoxins had to be reserved for times of maximum effect. He scrawled illegibly on the girl's arm, pressing harder than he need have. She bit her lip. He glanced at Howe, who nodded briefly. They detached themselves from the teen-age gaggle and strode towards the town center. The day was getting warmer and gave every threat of being a scorcher. They halted outside a pub. It was boarded shut. They sought the next, and found it in what was obviously the old original market square of the town. There was probably, thought Pennell, a Bonfield Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The nineteenth-century houses were immaculately painted, the few shops obviously high-class ones. Yet that civic pride had cracked. Several windows were broken. One shop front was a gutted ruin. Most of the rest were shut and shuttered. Only a baker's shops was doing business. and that almost furtively. One or two people lounged warily under the trees. The place was hushed. The two Special Branch men went up to the doors of the pub, the King's Head. This one had all its glass, but a turnover card in its door said: Sony, Closed. Open # a m. Today it lied, Howe thought. They weren't sorry to be closed -- not today. He looked at hia watch. The sign lied twice. It was already half past the hour. He raised his fist and smote the glass panel so hard that Pennell thought it would shatter. But Howe had a longer experience of hammering on bar doors -- both on and off duty. There was a clumping of feet from inside. A voice called out hollowly, "We're shut." "Under the terms of your license," Howe announced, "you are obliged to afford refreshment to travelers." A face peered out from the shadows within. "How do I know you're -- " The landlord had obviously just noticed the uniforms. There was a pause, then bolts slid bads. The door opened, on a chain. "All right, so you're travelers. This place is shut. You can take it up with the police if you've got any objections." By this time a small crowd had collected behind the two Spacers. Howe was beginning to enjoy himself. "You mean -- the police have closed you up?" "Of course not. There -- there was a bit of trouble in town last night, that's all. Now, if you don't mind -- " But Howe already had one gleaming black boot in the door. "Was the Riot Act read?" "Not here it wasn't. "Anywhere else?" "Not that I know of." Which was according to pattern, Howe thought. The local authorities did everything to keep the trouble within ordinary limits. They would block the roads into town ; they would censor phone calls out of it. They could gloss over things like that with an excuse of power or mechanical failure. And they would call in every spare cop for miles around. But riot measures, and the final resort -- martial law -- were things every town this happened to shuddered from. "Then the police have no legal right to close you." tpLUjfocn "I told you, they haven't closed us. They -- they just advised all of us to stay shut till things blew over, but they left it to our discretion." "I see. Do you think it's being -- ah, discreet -- to keep all these people out?" Howe bent closer to the landlord and whispered, "Would you rather let them in or have them batter their way in?" The landlord hesitated. "All right. But at the first sign of trouble I'll call the cops." There would be no need to. Howe looked over his shoulder and was not surprised to see a couple of blue uniforms dispersed through the crowd. #  Ill A cheer went up as the lights switched on. The chain rattled free and the doors opened. The landlord made a beeline for his bar-flap to escape the rush. But the procession inside was pretty orderly. There was more rush to slap the Spacers on the back than to get to the bar. But the drink started to flow. Everybody insisted on treating the two men in black. The two in blue looked on sourly from the doorway. Pennell edged out to the men's room at the first opportunity and swallowed a vecol. That would counter as much alcohol as he could absorb in the next two hours. He went back to find Howe telling some epic stories of his exploits in space. The audience was lapping it up. But Pennell knew that the repertoire was as carefully scripted as a tri-vee commercial. The story about what happened when Howe was marooned for three weeks in a Venusian ape-peoples' warren was funny, fictitious and pretty disgusting, even for a barroom story. Laugh now, think later. That was the kicker buried in such ancedotes. And Howe was telling them in just the right way -- Pennell had to admire his performance -- in a voice just too loud, laughing at his own stories a shade too raucously. H himself joined in, but Howe was the center of attraction right now. Pennell found himself jostled to the periphery of the crowd. The landlord craned anxiously over the bar. "Your friend's having a lot to drink." "He can take it," Pennell told him. He certainly could, with the help of a vecol. "Did you have it bad last night?" "We didn't. Only a few bottles smashed. But some of the other places in town were wrecked. I don't know what's come over the place. It's normally so peaceful. Nobody's sure just how it started. Some say it was when Johnny Colson came home from failing his Space Service test. He was one of the brightest kids in town. No kid's ever made the Service from Bonfield -- and you know how keen they all are." "Yeah. I know." "Still, it wasn't kids that did all the damage around town last night. I heard one of my regulars was taken in for murder. He's one of the quietest men I know -- that's the funniest thing." "Funny?" "Crazy, I mean. That's what it is -- crazy. It seems to have been brewing for months. Now suddenly the town's like -- I don't know how to explain it -- ifs like everyone's been taken over." He shivered and pulled himself together with a visible effort. "My wife says if we have another night like last night she's going to move out. Can't say as I'd blame her, either." "Let's hope it doesn't come to that," Pennell said -- and meant it. He drained his glass. Other glasses around him were empty too. He had noticed that they had been that way for the past ten minutes. The Spacers had been treated royally; now people were waiting to be treated back. Spacers got good money, didn't they? Howe was carefully -- but not too carefully -- not noticing. Pennell caught his eye and they exchanged a ghost of a wink. It was still noisy in the pub, but it was beginning to sound a bit hollow. Pennell decided it was a good time to leave Howe to it. He slipped out into the bright sunlight of the square. The news had evidently got around that two Spacers were in town. People came up to him for souvenirs and autographs. He was suitably brusque with them. He saw a coffee bar open, and went in. The place was full of kids. The hero-worship started immediately, but the clamor was not half so intense as when that first mob of teenagers had engulfed them. Word must have got around about that, too, along the kids' special grapevine. Some of them even looked indifferent. After signing a few autographs, he sorted one of them out, a dark-haired boy who was looking on sullenly from a table by the wall. "Want my autograph, sonny?" Pennell called out to him. nphe boy sneered. Unlike most of the other kids, he was dressed, not in black, but in a striped sweatshirt. He was sitting by himself in the otherwise crowded room. "Who wants a lousy Spacer's autograph?" Boos and angry yells were directed at him by the other kids. "You're looking for a clout round the ear," Pennell told him. The boy stood up. He wasn't big, but his manner was quietly defiant. A sudden hush fell on the place. "Who's going to do that small thing?" the boy asked. Pennell started to move towards him, the crowd falling away in front of him. Then he faltered and stopped. "I've got better things to do than argue with a kid." he said. He turned away and sat down, snapping his fingers to the waitress for a coffee. The silence crumbled into a debris of murmurs. The kids gaped at him as if they couldn't believe their eyes and ears, then whispered to each other. Pennell smiled inwardly. He wondered if old-time stage villains enjoyed getting hissed from the stage. Did they take it simply as a tribute to their performance -- or did it secretly gnaw at their vitals? The waitress came over with his coffee and waited for payment. He let her wait before looking up at her. "What, do you expect Spacers to pay?" She glared at him, then shrugged and went away. Another small victory. But not so small, he told himself. She must deal with hundreds of customers in a day. She was one of the important people. He turned to a girl sitting next to him. She couldn't have been more than thirteen; only on the fringe of the coffee bar circle by the look of her. "What's the name of that kid?" he asked her, to say something, anything. "That cheeky kid who didn't want my autograph." "Johnny -- Johnny Colson," she said in a tiny voice. That was the kid the landlord of the King's Head had mentioned. He couldn't have picked anyone better. "Still, let's not talk bout a stupid kid like him. Let's talk about us." The kid looked sideways at him nervously. Pennell put his arm around her. She squirmed under his touch. "Come on, honey, you're a big girl," he said loudly, pleadingly. All eyes were on him. The girl was acutely embarrassed. Someone said, "What's wrong with him?" "Can't he find women his own age?" "Is he spooky or something?" Pennell was tempted, for the second time, to take a haemoxin. But it might have the wrong effect, swing them back into sympathy. Kids were unpredictable. They'd had special classes on kids -- and the teacher had wound up by confessing just that. The girl squirmed free and moved to another table. Pennell was wondering whether to give it another twist when he heard one of the kids say, "I wonder if all Spacers are like that?" and knew that he had achieved enough here. He got up and strolled to the door. He turned and flung a coin in the direction of the counter. As he did so, . he saw that the Colson boy was no longer setting alone. The final satisfaction was hearing the clink of the coin flung back and clattering on the pavement behind him. He walked back past the King's Head. It was quiet -- oddly so after the way he had left it. He looked in. Only a couple of people were holding the bar up. Howe wasn't one of them. "Where's my friend?" he demanded, taking a step inside. r T"he landlord glared at him. "The police took him in to cool off. He was trying to start a riot all on his own. Took ten people to get him to the wagon." "He was always good for ten cops," Pennell said braggingly. "Only two cops." The landlord's tone was caustic. "The others were my customers. They were glad to help." Good for Howe! Pennell thought. Well, at least he'd know where to find him. But he'd just test results. He started to walk up to the bar. The landlord lifted one flat hand. 'We don't want your custom, Spacer." He spoke the last word as if it were a dirty one. "I just rang up my lawyer. Maybe I do have to be open to serve travelers, maybe you do have special privileges -- though lord knows how characters like you ever got them -- but a landlord's still got the right to admit who he likes... and refuse who he don't. And you, your friend and any more of your precious Space Service I don't." Pennell shrugged and went on his way.  After five minutes he came to the main shopping street of the town. On a normal day it must be pretty busy. Even today there was a fair number of people about. He thought he detected that people weren't so edgy as they had been first thing that morning. Perhaps he was kidding himself. Perhaps people were just recovering from the night's uproar and would have come out in any case. But word got around. Howe had pried open one pub. Other landlords would have got the message soon enough and opened up too. They would have heard, too, about the fracas at the King's Head, but that was explicable -- two Spacers turning up and shouting their mouths off. Something definite, curable, instead of the baffling violence that had erupted the night before. Pennell slipped a red haemoxin pill in his mouth and gulped it down. He walked on, attracting the usual glances, curious, admiring -- but some definitely hostile now. Then the pill took hold. Violently. It didn't feel pleasant, and it looked horrible. He started to stagger, cannoning into two or three startled passers-by. His head felt as if it was trying to swell to twice its normal size. He finally collapsed in a heap on the pavement. That last bit was acting. A man under the influence of one haemoxin could stay on his feet -- but with an effort. Someone bent over him. He groaned. "Quick, someone, call an ambulance. This man's ill." Pennell plucked at the stranger's sleeve. "No -- there's no need for an ambulance." He meant it. He didn't want hospital doctors running around him in circles trying to cure a disease that didn't exist! "But you look terribly ill." Pennell know. By now his face must be a bright mauve, with all the capillaries standing out on it as if a madman had scrawled across it for hours with a red ballpoint. Added to that were such personal touches as agents were encouraged to cultivate -- in his case a realistic frothing at the mouth and a breathing that sounded like a decrepit rat dragging its way through a cellar full of rusty nails. He'd worked hard on that one. "It's all right," he gasped. "It's only -- only Spacer's sickness." A crowd had collected. For the second time in his short career Pennell knew what it must be like to be in a car crash... people looking at you with a fascinated horror, trying to turn away but being unable to. He clawed at his tunic collar. Hands unbuttoned it for him. A nd then he saw a face in the crowd. It seemed to leap out in sudden focus, the rest of the faces blurring away to grayness. It was the kid from the coffee bar -- the Colson kid. This is all I want, he thought savagely. The kid wouldn't sort hirft out now, surely. But after, while there was still a crowd about, he might. And that could have one of two effects, both highly not to be desired. At best, it could turn the crowd from pity to sympathy. There was a big difference. Pity had the required ingredient of contempt. At the worst, it could be the focus of a riot -- a real riot. "Just -- just prop me against a wall," he murmured. Hands lifted, carried him. "Give me air." The crowd stumbled back. There must be hundreds of them. But he couldn't see Johnny Colson's face among them now. Perhaps he had only imagined it, he told himself. A slight, but unpredictable, hallucinogenesis was one of the side-effects of haemoxin. "I'm sure we ought to call an ambulance," said the man who had first come to his aid. "No -- I've got some pills." He groped inside his tunic and brought out his wallet. Fumbling it open, he took out an antihaemoxin pill. He swallowed it, and made sure that everyone got a view of the multi-colored array of capsules in the wallet before he folded it shut and stowed it back in his pocket. He heard someone whisper, "See that? He's got a regular medicine chest in there." "That's better," he said. "I'll get over it in a few minutes." "How come they keep you in the Space Service if you get turns like this?" "Huh -- that's a good one! They wouldn't be able to run a Space Service if they sacked every man who got the sickness. It's all the gravity changes. Sure, your body adapts, but it always gets back at you." "Funny. I've read a lot about what it's like out there, but I never read about that." "Course you don't. D'you think they'd get so many volunteers if they let everybody know about it?" The man looked suddenly iller than Pennell had felt during the entire episode of his "seizure". "What's wrong?" Pennell asked him. "Only that both my boy have volunteered. Course, they haven't got much chance of be-' ing taken. All the same... I'll have to tell them. That there's a lot they don't know, I mean." Pennell wasn't going to let him get away as easily as that. "Hey, don't go round giving people a bad impression of the Service. They give you these pills. As long as you don't make a habit of them, it's all right." "How do you mean -- habit?" "Perhaps I shouldn't have said that. I mean if you rely on them too much. I know one oldtimer -- he must be pushing forty -- who takes ten a day. Which is all right while it lasts, but of course -- " "Of course what?" the man almost screamed now. "Well, the old heart can't take that kind of thing too long, can it? One day it's pift -- and out the airlock feet first." The man gulped. "I'm okay now," said Pennell. "Help me up." He deliberately didn't frame it as a request. Neither, when he was back on his feet, did he thank the man, but turned away from him as he buttoned up his tunic. When he turned back the man was gone -- home hotfoot to report to his boys, Pennell trusted. Most of the crowd had gone, too. Pennell dusted himself down and went to walk off. And then he saw him again -- the Colson kid, standing cross the street, watching him from the shadow of a shop doorway. IV "Pennell let his eyes travel past the boy, telling himself that this was nothing to worry about. With the crowds gone, any danger was past. If the kid wanted a fight, that was all right by him. It would be a fight he couldn't lose -- in more senses than one. He had backed down in the coffee bar. Now if he beat him up, he would earn an equal dividend of disfavor. But the kid would have to start it. He walked off down the street. He hadn't gone far before he knew that the kid was following him. He stopped in a shop doorway -- the kind of arcade entrance with windows at an angle to the sidewalk. By its reflection he saw the kid, fifty yards behind him, stop too. A good day for window-shoppers, Pennell thought. He walked on. He came to a upermarket that was open and went in. It wasn't very full. There was no chance of dodging anyone here. When he came out, the kid was standing across the road, a sardonic smile on his lips. A cab That was the answer. But he didn't remember seeing one about the place. There must be one or two in the town, but their drivers had probably taken themselves off the road during the trouble. Perhaps they had been wrecked. It was no way out, in any case. Bonfield was too small a place to lose yourself in for long. Why did he want to lose himself, anyway? It gave him something to occupy his mind while he wandered round the place. There was nothing much he could do now, except watch and wait. He wasn't experienced enough to be certain, but he could swear that the tension was going out of the town. Which meant his job was nearly done. All the same, he felt a nagging disquiet. If the kid wanted a fight, why didn't he come up and start one? He set off again. The kid followed him at the same kind of distance as before, too far away for Pennell to call out to him without attracting attention. If anything did start, he must avoid giving any impression that he had picked on the kid. But after an hour of it, Pennell had had enough. He stopped and turned round to face the kid. The kid stopped too. He just stood there, in the middle of tile sidewalk, his hands hanging easily by his side, the same sardonic smile on his face. Pennell swore under his breath, and took a step towards him. The kid didn't move. But when Pennell started to walk towards him, he turned and walked across the road. He stopped and turned. Pennell had already stopped. There was no future in this. He turned and went on. There was only one answer -- he would have to contact Howe. It was about time he bailed him out, anyway. Howe would know to a degree if their mission had succeeded. They could pack up and walk out of this town without worrying about crazy kids or anything else. T T e found the police station A easily enough. As he walked up the steps to it, he glanced over his shoulder. The kid was still following him. Well, perhaps now, when he saw where Pennell was going, he would have second thoughts. The desk sergeant looked at him curiously as Pennell entered. "I believe you have a buddy of mine in charge," Pennell said. "Not any more. We let him out." "What?" "About twenty minutes ago. The chief decided not to charge him. We expected half the town to come demanding his release. Him being a Spacer, I mean. But we didn't get a soul in. He must have made a hell of a nuisance of himself. He certainly did in here." Pennel felt suddenly disquiet ened. He needed Howe, and the broken-down ham had to disappear. He felt annoyed at himself for feeling at a loss over such a small matter as the Colson kid. But he did his best to sound unconcerned. "Well -- you know how it is. Back on Earth for leave." "Yeah, but it must be a hell of a life out there to make a man cut up the way he did. Funny. I dreamed once of getting out there myself." The sergeant looked down at his ample waistline and coughed. Pennell humored him. "It's a tough life, all right. Not all starlight and roses." He changed the subject. "How are things in town?" "How d'you mean?" "I wondered if the chief might be imposing a curfew tonight." "A curfew?" The sergeant stared at him as if it was a word in Martian. "You must be nuts." "I just wondered." Pennell felt slightly better. That seemed to confirm his impression that the danger point had been passed. But it still left the small problem of the Colson kid. He looked out of the window. There was no sign of him. But, when he put his face close to the glass and squinted down the street, he cursed. The kid was standing on the corner. He turned back to the sergeant. "Is there another way out of this place? A back entrance, maybe?" The sergeant looked at him quizzically. "What, you want to avoid your fans?" He looked out into the empty street and smirked sarcastically. But he came out from behind his desk and showed Pennell along a corridor. He pushed open a door at the end of it. "Thanks," Pennell said. He was in a yard. A couple of cops were lounging in a squad car. They looked at him with minimal interest as he turned and went round the building. He moved quietly and came up to the Colson kid from behind. "Well, sonny, what do you want?" The boy turned quickly. But if he was startled, he didn't show it. He merely grinned. "Just waiting for the next act." r t was Pennell who was startled, and he was sure that he didn't conceal it at all. What did he do now? Try and pass it off, tell the kid to beat it? But if the kid did suspect something that would be fatal. "Well?" he said, as evenly as he could. "I've got a cousin in Fenton," the boy went on. "What's that? A prison?" "You can lay off the act, mister," the boy said. "This is intermission time. Fenton's a small town up north, about two hundred miles from here. They had some kind of trouble up there, too, about a year ago. My cousin wrote to me about it. He said they had quite a ball while it lasted. My parents come from Fenton, and my uncle sends the local paper on every week. So, the week after, when I get the paper, what do I do? I look for the news splashed all over the front page. And what do I find? Nothing. Except, inside, the police court reports just happen to be about three times longer than usual. But scatttered through the paper, instead of being in one chunk. And no word about any riots. So I think -- either my crummy cousin was dreaming, or else the town council don't like things like that being splashed all over the place. And I would have forgotten all about it, even when things started to blow up here. I mean, things like that can happen anywhere, I guess. Only -- " "Only -- ?" Pennell said, his mouth dry. "Only, my cousin also said, in the same letter, that a couple of Spacers had turned up in town. He just put it in a P.S. and I remember I was mad at him, going on about some stupid old riots and leaving the important news till the end -- and in a couple of lines. He just said, 'Two Spacers arrived in town. They were creeps.' I was so mad I wrote him a stinking letter, then I thought that anyone who could write about Spacers like that wasn't worth wasting time and paper on, so I tom it up." He looked a bit shame-faced. "I'm telling you the way I felt then." "And how do you feel now?" Pennell said, quietly. "It isn't so much what I feel. It's what I think." He looked straight into Pennell's eyes. "It's what I know." r T"here was only one thing for it, Pennell knew now. He would have to find Howe. Rule Nine. In case of emergency contact the Senior Officer. He grabbed the kid's arm. "You're coming along with me." The boy winced under Pennell's grip, but he grinned. "Sure, take me to your leader. But lay off piy arm, will you?" Pennell let go of his arm, but watched him warily. The kid made no attempt to escape. He's enjoying this, Pennell thought vehemently. He certainly wasn't. Only his second assignment, and he had muffed it. He had visions of ruthless top-level action, of agents -- real agents, the kind with lean jaws and flat pistols -- embarking on midnight jets. Of Special Branch toppling in mins, all because of him. He braced himself. "Come on," he said to the kid. Where to, he didn't know. And then he did know, and cursed himself for letting this incident jolt him so badly. Of course l He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. The bars weren't open for the evening yet. He could hardly picture Howe sitting in some cafe sipping tea. Luckily they were heading the right way. He remembered seeing the place that morning. Sure enough, Howe was there -- in the lounge of the town's one hotel. He was acting with comforting normality, too -- arguing with a white-jacketed waiter at the top of his voice. As the waiter departed, Howe spotted Pennell and the boy. "Ah, guests!" He waved them into chairs at his table. "I just gained a victory over that reluctant servitor of Bacchus. At least, I think I did. I ordered two glasses, too, in the hope you would locate me shortly." He cast an eye at the kid. "To what do we owe the pleasure of this stripling's company, though?" "I think he'd better tell you himself," Pennell said hollowly. The boy started talking. Before very long it was obvious that he knew -- that he had worked it out Pennell watched Howe desperately, but the other's craggy face gave no sign of emotion as the boy's version unfolded. The boy didn't have all the details, of course. He couldn't have. Nobody, except a few hundred people whose job it was to know, had any idea of how desperate a problem it was. Man had been in space for fifty years now -- really in space. First the Moon; soon after, Mars and Venus. On all three he had gained a precarious foothold. A foothold that was maintained only at enormous cost. Rockets alone were expensive enough, but the cost of fuel alone meant that every kilogram of payload cost thousands to transport to the Outpost Planets. There weren't enough things of enough value out there to justify that kind of money. And men were payload. There was talk of new drives that would cut transit time and cost to a fraction... but there had been talk like that for decades now. It was still in the verbal stage. The painful and ironic fact was that there was a bottleneck in space -- of all places. There had been a bottleneck in many other endeavors in man's history. Always somebody had turned up with a means of breaking it. It had happened with the automobile, a rich man's toy until Ford had brought it within the range of every man's pocket -- by mass-production. But nobody yet had found a way of mass-producing spaceships. The budgets of the world creaked under the burden. And only ten thousand people were in space or on the planets yet -- after fifty years. And there were nearly five of whom would have given their right arms for the chance to get out there. Space had been plugged too hard for too long by all the interested parties -- for scientific, industrial, financial, national or plain personal motives -- the image polished too bright. The image called to far more people than the traffic could bear. Frustration had bred a particularly dangerous kind of claustrophobia -- one that could, if it got out of hand, become global. '"p'hat was how Special Branch had come into being -- to tarnish the image at those times that the danger bell rang, when all that bottled-up frustration exploded in violence. It was an oddball remedy for a tricky problem -- but it worked. At least, it had so far. It was just a matter of applying the remedy at the right point at the right time, before the situation spread. In that respect it was no different from any other riot situation in history. But this was a recurrent pattern -- one that could be plotted. Special Branch had learned quickly. A team of two had proved to be enough. More created suspicion; there weren't that number of spacemen, and only a small fraction of them on Earth at any one time. " -- so I suddenly saw," the boy was saying, "how it was. Just as I've said." The waiter arrived then with a bottle of scotch and two glassasked him sweetly. The waiter glared and departed. Howe smacked his lips, but it was Pennell who grabbed at the bottle. Howe glanced at him chidingly. Pennell's hand shook slightly as he poured out. There was a long silence. "Of couse," Howe said at last, beaming over his glass at the Colson kid, "you know what we have to do now? You're quite right, we are agents. But, of course, we can't let people know that. So what will it be? Poison or cold steel?" The boy blinked nervously. But Pennell had to admire his gunts. "So what?" the boy said with only a small tremor in his voice. "You can't keep it a secret for ever. Other people will find out." "You're quite right," Howe told him. "Other people will. Other people have. But not many. And we have our ways of silencing them." He reached in his pocket and pulled out -- a pad. A tear-off pad! Pennell's world started to crumble at the edges. He gaped at Howe. "What's your name, son?" How asked the boy. "Colson. John Colson." "Date of birth?" "Thirty-first of May, two thousand and nine." Howe filled in the details and handed the pad to the boy, together with his pen. "Sign this." The boy stared at the paper then at Howe, his eyes widening in diebelief. "But -- but this is an enlistment form. r ' "Well, do you want to sign it or not?" "Do !" He signed it as if expecting to see it disappear at any moment. Howe tore a carbon from under the top sheet and handed it over. "Take that to your nearest Space Office." He added dryly, "if you look at the small print, you'll see that it swears you to secrecy about any aspect of the Service. Any aspect." "Do you think I'd breathe a word to anyone?" Tennell watched the boy disappear through the revolving doors. He gulped down his drink. Howe guffawed. "Don't look so surprised! What do you expect the Service to do -- atomize him or something?" "Will they? Is that what it is -- a trick?" "Of course not. Branch are devious, but not that devious. He'll start basic training next week." "But -- " "Now you know why you have to report to your senior officer in emergencies. This is the kind of emergency they mean. As I told the kid just now, it doesn't happen very often. Only fifteen times so far in the three years of Special Branch. Johnny Colson's the sixteenth." "It's a kind of blackmail," Pennell said slowly. "And Branch pays off." "If you like. But only because they can afford to. The intake is eight hundred a year, and out the Service gets, that can't help to be more than slightly random -- even taking the cream. So five a year getting in by the back door is neither here nor there." Pennell felt suddenly indignant. He wanted to get into other people. He thought he had played it clever -- and all he had got himself into was this weird backwater of a service. And yet this kid had just walked out of here with a precious enlistment paper in his hand! "That's damn fine way to get recruits," he exploded. "Funny you should say that," Howe said. "Eleven out of the fifteen passed out of basic training in the highest grade. Two hadn't finished the course the last time I looked at the figures. ' other two were only very good. You see, it seems that anybody who does spot just what's going on is possessed of a very rare quality in this massproduced age -- initiative. So Johnny Colson had a cousin in a town the same thing happened to, so you think that's lucky, maybe? But most people have heard of these riots by now, even though the towns concerned clam up on them. But most people don't put two and two together." "But say a man who's too old for space puts two and two together?" Howe grinned crookedly. "Well, I hope I don't look too old. I've always rather prided myself on -- " "You mean -- you...?" Howe signed reminiscently. "It was a small town -- just like Bonfield. Too damned small to have a theater, really. Which probably accounted for the manager decamping with the takings, leaving yours truly flat broke and stranded...But it's all fate, laddy. If the theater hadn't been closed, it would probably have got wrecked when the rioting broke out. But that's another story." He downed his drink, and laughed. "Johnny worked most of it out. I wonder whether he worked out the final bit -- that neither of us have been in space at all? Perhaps he thinks that we're just seconded to this job for twelve months or something. I can just see him going round when he passes out, trying to find the two men who gave him his big chance! I bet -- " He stopped, seeing the expression on Pennell's face. "Ah, well, that's all in the realm of conjecture. Here and now we've the best part of a bottle to finish up before we report back for stand-by. Pennell brought himself back from far distances. "You're darn right we have," he muttered. "You can fill mine up -- to the brim." And this was one time he wasn't going to take a vecol. Next month IF goes monthly -- featuring stories by j. t. mcintosh better-than-ever IF... or subscribe today! for your information I feel quite sure that many of my readers, after Mercury flights, Vostok flights, American Explorer and Russian Kosmos satellites and TV programs via Telstar and Syncom, have quietly wondered whether the other nations are going to sit back and watch the Russians race the Americans to the moon (or vice no versa) or whether they have space plans of their own. The answer is that they do, and since items about space ambitions of other nations hardly ever break out of the professional journals -- and are fairly rare even in those journals -- it may be a good thing to do some reporting. But don't expect any clear-cut time-tables for, say, France, or West Germany or the United Kingdom. They don't exist yet, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is a simple and understandable one: lack of money in large quantities. The other reason is that there is much talk about collaboration between the WestEuropean nations, coupled with a poorly hidden desire to do it independently. Still another reason for the general European uncertainty is the work already done (or in the planning stage) This was brought out recently by a blistering editorial in monthly reports of the German Society for Rocket Research and Space Travel. This is what the editor wrote: "Now work has begun in Europe and also in Germany -- but work to what purpose? It is a historical fact that -- especially in Germany -- too few people were seriously interested in space travel prior to #. The large number of those who are new in the business lack general background knowledge as well as proper judgement. This very often has the result that things the Americans are doing today are set up as European goals, goals which could not be reached until a number of years has gone by and which, when finally achieved, will by then be obsolete. It does not make much sense, for example, to make plans for a large number of communication satellites in low orbits when it is absolutely certain that by that time a chain of American satellites in the #-hour orbit will be operational. Nor is there any sense in the plans for a # kilogram (# pounds) instrument package to be soft-landed on the moon in #, when both the Americans and the Soviets are planning the same thing for the years # and # and are like to have a permanent manned base on the moon by #. So far no European country, nor any of the international European organizations, has offered any project for development which is not a copy of existing American projects." I don't know whether the editor of the Mitteilungen had a discussion with General Walter Dornberger about half a dozen years ago when he paid a visit to his native country. After his return Dornberger told me that he had been asked to speak to various organizations on the question of what Europe could contribute to the Space Age. His answer had been about as follows: "Just assume that the manned space station is in existence and that a manned flight around the moon had been made. You sit down and think about what should be done afterwards and then do it." It was good advice, but apparently it did not penetrate. TTowever, the very fact that A there are two nations which have advanced far beyond all the others opens another possibility: one of the countries that has not yet done much in the field of space research but feels competent to do so might do it in collaboration with one of the "Big Two". Whether there is any such collaboration between the Soviet Union and one of the smaller countries behind the Iron Curtain is not known, but the western world has produced a number of examples.  There are now two satellites in orbit which are called "international". One of these two was designed and made in England (its name is Ariel') while the other was designed and built in Canada (called Alouette-, French for "Skylark"). Both were fired from the Atlantic Missile Range at Cape Kennedy and carried into orbit by American rockets. The British-built Ariel, named by Prime Minister Harold MacMillan after the sprite in Shakespeare's Tempest, was put into orbit on April #, # by a Thor-Delta rocket and is in an orbit which guarantees a lifetime of at least a century; the perigee is # miles out and the apogee # miles. The orbital period is #I minutes. The dome-shaped satellite has a diameter of # inches and is a little less than #I inches high. Its purpose is to measure electron density in space (equipment designed by the University of Birmingham) and cosmic ray intensity (equipment by Imperial College, London), and to establish the concentration of ions and electrons near the earth, as well as the intensity of X-rays and ultraviolet rays coming from the sun (equipment by University College, London, and the University of Leicester). The Canadian Alouette, put into orbit on September #, # by a Thor-Agena B rocket, is heavier than Ariel; Alouette weighs # pounds, Ariel only # pounds. Alouette looks circular (diameter # inches) when seen Overall length (inches) Nose cone length (inches) Payload space (cubic feet) Burning time (seconds) Thrust (pounds) Rocket weight, empty, (pounds) Takeoff, without payload (pounds) Black Brant I Black Brant n # # # # # # # # # # # # # # from top and nearly oval (height # inches) when seen from the side. It is the satellite with the longest antennas, one # feet long and the other # feet. The satellite has been dubbed a "topside sounder" since its purpose is to detect cosmic noise and natural radio signals originating in the earth's ionosphere; it reports on such electronic noises from outside; hence its designation. The orbit of Alouette can justly be called circular since the perigee distance is # miles and the apogee distance # miles. Canada has its own rocket range, located at Fort Churchill, Manitoba, a site originally picked for American high-altitude research rockets (Aerobees and other types) during the International Geophysical Year. The conditions laid down then were that the firing site should be as far to the north as possible and located in a sparsely settled section of the country. To these considerations a third one, of a practical nature, had to be added, namely that the place should be accessible by rail for transporting the rockets and other equipment. Since Fort Churchill was then the northernmost place in Canada that could be reached by rail this site was chosen. A Canadian rocket now being tested at the Fort Churchill range is called Black Brant. The second version of this rocket has carried instrument payloads weighing # pounds to altitudes between # and # miles. The Black Brant rockets are solid fuel rockets and the design considerations said, "Reliability first; high payload capacity and high altitude capacity are secing to be a larger version of Black Brant II, but Black Brant TV will be a two-stage rocket, expected to be able to lift a paylead of # pounds to around # miles. While the Black Brant rockets are a purely Canadian development which have nothing to do with international cooperation course, also agreements of coCanada. In general the policy of the United States for such international ventures is that no funds will change hands though the some cases. And the condition is that all the results of such cooperations will be published in scientific journals which are available to any scientist without regard to nationality. vne such scientific coopera tion has been going on for some time between the United States and Sweden. The rockets used were American NikeCajun solid fuel high altitude sounders as well as American Launching site was the area of Kronogard, and the main object of the four Nike-Cajun shots was the study of the very high noctilucent clouds. Two were fired while noctilucent clouds were present in the sky and the two others when such clouds were not present. The measurements were made at altitudes between # and # miles and the temperatures at these altitudes were found to be extremely low: minus # centigrade when no noctilucent clouds were present, and minus # centigrade when they were present. Sweden is also going to be the site of a far northern space research range, to be established near the town of Kiruna, which is north of the Arctic Circle. The cost of this range is to be divided among the eleven nations of search Organization) which are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany (West), Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. No date has been set for its completion. Another international rocket range was formally opened with a shot of a Nike-Apache sounding rocket in November, #. The name of the site is Thumba, located at the southern tip of India. It is not quite an equatorial range since India does not reach that far south, but it is within less than # degrees of the equator. Four Nike-Apache plus a loan of a launcher and photographic equipment, and the Indian personnel was trained the launching site -- available for scientific work by any nation -- and tiie scientific payloads, in this case devices releasing sodium vapors for the investigation of high altitude winds. While the Indian rocket range could not be placed on the geographic equator it is located on the magnetic equator, which is useful for later shots devoted to investigation of the earth's magnetic field. r T'he most interesting of these joint projects is the Italian San Marco Project, designed to put a satellite into an equatorial orbit. Some of the existing satellites, mainly American Explorer satellites, are said to be in equatorial orbits, but this is a somewhat loose designation, it merely means that the inclination of the satellite's orbit to the equator is small. The San Marco satellite is to be in an equatorial orbit in the strict sense of the word, staying over the equator all the way round. And the simplest way of establishing such an orbit is to shoot due East from a point at the equator. In the San Marco Project this will be done by firing from a towable platform at the equator off Africa's East Coast. The San Marco Project has three phases, the first being the firing of test satellites (for checking telemetry and so forth) along sub-orbital trajectories from Wallops Island (off Virginia). A rocket called Shot put was used, it is a two-stage all solid fuel rocket with a take-off thrust of # pounds. The first Shotput was fired on April #, #. It was one of those shots which look perfect to the eye, but the telemetry tapes later inform you that it wasn't; in this case the payload kept spinning though it was not supposed to. In the second Shotput shot, carried out from Wallops Island on August #, #. the eyes of the observers and the telemetry tapes agreed. It was a perfect shot, carrying the #-pound test satellite to an altitude of # miles and # miles down-range where it splashed into the Atlantic; no recovery was planned. The first phase of the San Marco Project will close with a third Shotput launching from the platform. But meanwhile the second phase will have been carried out, which is putting a San Marco satellite into orbit by means of a Scout rocket, but fired from Wallops Island. This shot will not produce an equatorial orbit but will be a test of the satellite. The third phase, finally, will be the firing of a Scout rocket from the towable platform to put a San Marco satellite into an equatorial orbit. Because of the rocket used and the weight of the satellite it will be a fairly low orbit, with an average distance from the ground of about # miles. Coming to the nations which have built, and are building, rockets without United States aid, one gets into the difficulty that it is not easy to tell whether a specific rocket -- no matter what it may be called -- is meant for high altitude and ultimately for space research, or whether it is a prototype of a military rocket, or whethei a specific rocket shot was just a political gesture. Israel's Shavit II (shavit is Hebrew for "comet") is a case in point. Fired on July #, #, the rocket climbed to a height of # miles, releasing sodium vapor at the peak of its flight, but did not carry any scientific instruments. It was announced that it was all solid fuel and "all Israeli-made", but nothing else was said. The launching site was "at the Mediterranean shore", but no location was given. It had either two or three stages. The question of whether there had been a Shavit I was not answered. And nothing else has happened since -- which leads one to conclude that the rocket most likely was a prototype of a weapon and that that particular shot was meant to show Nasser that Israel did have rockets.  s for Egypt, it is the only country -- aside from the ployed German rocket scientists who did their research during the second World War. In the years immediately following the war a group of Germans worked in Egypt for the openly announced purpose of developing modern anti-aircraft rockets. By the year # another group of Germans took over, and in July, #, the United Arab Republic paraded several missiles. One, an antiaircraft weapon, was the Russian-made SA-#, radar guided and burning solid fuel. The others were liquid fuel ground to ground missiles, named AI Zafir (Victory), Ai Kahir (Conqueror) and AI Ared (Pioneer), the latter one being a two stage missile. It was said at the time that AI Zafir and AI Kahir had a range of from # to # miles but that AI Ared was yet to be tested. Only a month later it was announced that AI Ared would be made into a three-stage rocket so that it could place a scientific satellite, called "The Star", into orbit. The satellite is also built by Germans working in Cairo under Dr. Hassan Marie, the chairman of Egypt's Committee for Space Research. Nothing is known so far about the scientific functions of this satellite -- its political function is obvious -- nor about its intended orbit. But it has been stated that the shot is to be carried out on July #. #, which is the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution which put Gamal Abdel Nasser into power. Before going on to western Europe a quick look to the Far East, namely Japan, is necessary. The Japanese began their study of high-altitude rockets with a series of tiny rockets called "Pencil". They were hardly larger, though much thicker, than an ordinary pencil. That was in April, #. Later in the same year they built a series of rockets called "Baby", which were three and four feet in length, still quite small. Their first real project, in the sense that these rockets were expected to yield scientific data, was called Kappa, five inches in diameter and seven to eight feet in length. Kappa rockets were used during the International Geophysical Year, along with Sigma rockets which were smaller, weighing only # pounds, but were released after balloons had carried them to great heights. The largest of the Kappa rockets, Kappa # L, reached a maximum altitude of # miles and fell into the Japan Sea #I miles from the firing site at Akita, located in the northern portion of Honshu Island's west coast. After that several things happened. The range of the Kappa # L was almost enough to reach Vladivostok or Olga, on the Asian mainland, which could easily lead to international complications. Hence the Japanese built a new firing site at Kagoshima near the southern end of Kyushu Island, where there is plenty of open sea. Then they sold a number of Kappa # rockets to the Yugoslav Astronomical Association. This rocket is capable of carrying an instrument load of # pounds to nearly # miles of altitude. Then they started out on the development of Lambda, which is a solid fuel booster # feet long and about two feet in diameter, capable of producing # tons of thrust for # seconds. A Kappa# rocket with a Lambda booster should be able to put a small satellite into orbit. In between the Japanese have also entered into an arrangement Nike-Cajun rockets for ionosphere research. And, in addition to all this, the Japanese have developed a number of military missiles of their own. anti-aircraft missile looking somewhat like our Nike-Hercules, while the other, the Japanese version of the Sidewinder missile, an air to air weapon, equipped with an infrared homing device. A mong the west European countries the one with the most clearcut space program is France. It is a little known fact that one of France's aviation pioneers, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, was working on the design of a high altitude rocket during the years from # to #. The outbreak of the second World War prevented EsnaultPelterie from finishing his rocket. German rocket experts who saw it have expressed the opinion that it could easily have reached the design altitude of # miles: if the second World War had started a year later we would now consider the high-altitude sounding rocket a French invention. And after the war the French were the first west European nation to come up with a liquid fuel research rocket of their own, the Veronique. If I did not have the word of Prof. E. Vassy of the University of Paris that the design was derived from that of the V-#, I would have thought that it was an updated version of EsnaultPelterie's rocket, Veronique, # feet tall and with a diameter erf # inches, burned Diesel oil with nitric acid. Its empty weight was # pounds, take-off weight # pounds, the highest altitude reached by the first series of Veronique rockets -- on February #, # -- was # miles. The second series saw a change in fuel, turpentine was substituted for Diesel oil with a fifty per cent increase in altitude. French plans comprise the development of three high-altitude rockets, a guided (and larger) Veronique, Vesta and Rubis, the development of a French satellite (simply called FR. #) and the launching of at least two FR. I satellites, one by one by a French Diamant rocket, which is # feet long with a liquid fuel first stage and solid fuel upper stages. But in spite of the intensive work carried on, the French intend to participate in European space work, in the search Organization) as well as Development Organization). General Robert Aubiniere, director of the Centre National f Etudes Spatiales, stated i "France feels that space research should be planned on a European basis. This concentration of Name Propellant Number of Payload Altitude stages (lbs.) (miles) Belier (Ram) solid Centaure solid Dragon solid Emma (weather rocket) solid # Veronique liquid Aigle solid Eridan (second stage is Aigle) solid Veronique (guided) liquid Vesta liquid Rubis solid The figures for the performances of the guided Veronique, Vesta and Rubis are the design figures; for the other rockets these are actual performance figures. effort should allow Europe to recover its past scientific and technical primacy." A S' oving across the Channel to Great Britain we find a country which has an extensive missile range, at Woomera in Australia, at its disposal and which has developed quite a number of smaller missiles, most of them anti-aircraft -- but which has been curiously lagging, in spite of some promising beginnings, in the development of large rockets. These beginnings were two rockets named Black Knight and Blue Streak. The Black Knight rocket is about # feet tall, with a diameter of # feet, and was built by Saunders-Roe in collaboration with the Royal Aircraft Establishment. It is powered by a Bristol Siddeley Gamma-# rocket engine, burning kerosene with concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Its four thrust chambers produce a take off thrust of # pounds at sea level, which thrust increases to about # pounds in a vacuum. The Black Knight has been used successfully on the Woomera range for the testing of re-entry nose cones and has carried such nose cones as high as # miles. Since the height of the nose cones has been kept secret it is impossible to judge how well the Black Knight would do as an instrument carrying sounding rocket for very high altitudes. The other big British rocket was the Blue Streak, developed originally as an intermediate range (say # miles) ballistic missile. The word "was" is due to the fact that, to everybody's surprise, the British Government cancelled the Blue Streak as a missile in April, #. But the rocket exists, built by de Havilland, powered by two RollsRoyce RZ-# rocket engines of # pounds thrust each, burning kerosene with liquid oxygen. The diameter of the rocket is # feet, the overall length, including the engines, is #I feet # inches. Since the cancellation of the Blue Streak as a missile removed much of the secrecy attached to it, British rocket enthusiasts suggested using a Black Knight as a second stage for a Blue Streak for the orbiting of a British satellite. The Ministry of Supplies did not reply to this suggestion at all and the British satellite was orbited by an American rocket. But late in # the British Government offered the Blue Streak to France, for possible use as the first stage of a joint European space rocket. And it is this fact which brings us to West Germany -- for the West Germans think a great deal in terms of a European satellite carrier. nphough the Germans made the big jump from experimental small rockets to the operational V-# during the second World War, they were then cut off from rocketry for a long time. They were so much out off, as a matter of fact, that the Deutsches Museum in Munich, when it planned a Hall of Space, had to get a V-# from the United States in order to make their exhibit. What happened was quite simple, of course. The whole research and planning staff of the Peenemunde rocket research center came to the United States. A few others, like Dr. Eugen Sanger and Dr. Irene Bredt (later Mrs. Sanger) worked for the French for a while. A few of the younger men went to Egypt and others were old enough to retire. And a number of rocket experts who had worked in various factories during the war later followed the trail to the United States and joined the men from Peenemunde. In addition to losing all the experts, Germany was a defeated and occupied country for a number of years, not sovereign and therefore not free to engage in research which might be interpreted as military. The combination of all these circumstances meant that the Germans entered the active space age later than anybody else. And when Dr. Sanger returned to Germany to take over the post of director Fig. I Preliminary design sketch of a West German High-Altitude research rocket with flex wing for recovery and re-use. of research, he refrained from building rocket engines which would have been a duplication of other rocket engines, and concentrated on ramjets and theoretical work. But now the Germans want to do something. They have spent a great deal of thought on the design of a satellite which is expected to be quite heavy (weight around # tons) but also quite versatile, capable of being used as a communications satellite, a meteorological satellite and a geodetic satellite. Since other satellite designs have progressed quite far, it may be doubted whether this design will ever be actually built. On the other hand a German design for a high altitude sounding rocket which is recoverable and reusable (see Fig. #) may well be built. The final size of this rocket has not yet been determined, since it obviously can be built in various sizes; the preliminary design sketch has a peak altitude of # miles as the basis for all calculations. Another German design is concerned with a satellite-carrying tion. The first stage of this design is the British Blue Streak. The French have offered to build the second stage and the Germans would like to tackle the third stage which, because of the carrying capacity of the two lower stages, must not weigh over # pounds. Because of this restriction they have high energy fuels in mind, either liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen, like the American Centaur, or, if at all possible, liquid hydrogen with liquid fluorine. Personally I feel that it will be hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is a fuel which offers many problems. But as the American Centaur flight has shown, these problems can be overcome and hydrogen is only explosive but neither toxic nor corrosive, while fluorine is the most difficult of gll elements to handle. And the advantages of using fluorine are not very great. I have in front of me a tabulation of the German calculations for three possible stages, two of them for hydrogen and one for fluorine. They calculate a specific impulse for vacuum conditions of # and # for the two kinds of hydrogen powered third stages, and a specific impulse of # for the fluorine powered version. These #-# points hardly justify the extra problems and dangers the fluorine would pose. Well, that's the picture as it stands at the end of #, forecasting possible Egyptian, French meantime the British are planning and building two satellites tentatively called UK-# and UK-# which, when finished, will be put into orbit the way Ariel was put there. ## Any Questions ? In my logarithm table (printed in Europe) the mean distance from the sun, the astronomical kilometers. Expressed in statute miles this would be # million miles. But American books usually give the astronomical # miles. Evidently the a round figure. Could you give me a more precise figure which is generally accepted? Richard Mannheimer Denver, Colorado miles is a rounded-off figure for easy remembering and it is slightly too large. However,the corrections which have been made during the last thirty years are on the order of # miles or less -- which sounds small, especially if you remember that the first determination of the astronomical unit (by Giovanni Domenico Cassini of #, based on measurements during a Mars opposition) arrived at # million kilometers or # miles. The next determination of #, based on a transit of meters or # miles in # Johann Gottfried Galle in Berlin used an opposition of the minor planet Flora and arrived tion of the minor planet Eros in # gave the figure of # lion miles (the origin of the figure in most books). Gerard de Vaucouleurs, in #, arrived at #.# kilometers or # miles, while radar bounces from Venus, also in #, gave # kilometers or # miles. I suspect that I learned the answer to my question in high school but that was, I regret to say, quite a number of years ago. My question is this: Christmas is always the #th of December, but Easter wanders back and forth across the calendar. Why? And how is the date of Easter determined? E. B. M. Barrett Coral Gables, Florida The reason why Easter does on a specific date is that the length of the year cannot be evenly divided into weeks, and Easter is to be a Sunday. The Council of Nicea (in # A. D.) decided that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday which follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The earliest possible Easter date, therefore, is the #nd of March, while the latest possible Easter date is the #th of April. The calculation of the date used to be a tedious job, until Carl Friedrich Gauss evolved a relatively simple formula which involves dividing the year by a set of numbers of which the first one is #. Let us take the year # as an example. # divided by # is # with # left over. Gauss' formula works with these "leftovers" and assigns a letter to each one of them. Easter, according to this formula, falls on either March ( #de ) or April ( de # ) Now we have to find the values for d and e where the formula runs as follows: The remainder o f Year divided by # Is a The remainder of Year divided by # is b The remainder of Year divided by # is e #b  #c  #d  N e  the values of M and N depend on the year according to this table : # # M  # N  # # # # # # # # # # # # # One more provision has to be mentioned : if the derived date should read April # (one day beyond the possible limit) the date will be April #. If the date is the limit of April #, it is changed to April #, provided that d-# and a is larger than #. (All these provisions are needed to take care of leap years). Now let us carry the example through : Y#, a  # Y #, b  # Y #, c  # d  (#  #  #I : #  #. remainder #)  #. e  (#  #  #  #  # ; # #, remainder #) #. which produces the two possible dates of March (#  I  #)  # April (#-#  #-#)  # The April date, being negative, is impossible, hence the date for Easter for # is March #. In the May # issue of the magazine Planetary and Space Science -- I read my brother-inlaw's copy -- there is a remark that Russian writers have said that The Book of the Secrets of Enoch contains a passage which may be interpreted as a reference to a landing of extra-terrestrials on earth. The author of the article considers this interpretation mistaken. I must confess that I had never heard of such a book before and I wonder whether you could find out something about it. Dorothy Steinfeld Orange, New Jersey I had read this article too and I also had never heard of the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, but one afternoon in the New York Public Library clarified things. Fortunately the book was translated into English in # Oxford University. It is one of a group of ancient writings which go under the general term of "apocalyptic writings" and the Enoch to whom it is attributed is the Enoch of Genesis V: #-#, the father of Methuselah and great grandfather of Noah. There are, as I learned from Mr. Morfill, two books of Enoch, one in Ethiopian and one in Slavonic but, again according to Mr. Morfill, they have nothing in common but the title. The Slavonic version is known in several copies, the most recent of which is a part of a Sbornik (collection) of the seventeenth century. The, book must have been written at about the time of Christ, for it is quoted in the so-called Epistle of Barnabas which is dated somewhere between # and # A. D. and in a few writings which are a few years older than Barnabas. But the writer was evidently somebody who spoke Greek and in all probability, Greek only because he told why Adam was given his name. According to this book the Lord wanted to indicate that Adam and his seed were to rule the earth, hence he was named after the four quarters of the earth which are : anatole (sunrise or east), dysis (sunset or west), arktos (north) and mesembria (south), hence a-d-a-m! That this little anagram works in Greek only and not in any other language did not occur to the writer. The contents of the book are that Enoch is shown the heavens and that the Lord then decrees that Enoch shall be permitted to hear the sacred books. He is taken aside by the archangel Vretil (Morfill remarks that this name does not occur anywhere else; my Greek dictionary supplies the information that bretaa is the term for a wooden image of a god; this may or may not be the root word) who reads to him for thirty days and nights without stopping, Enoch taking down every word. Then he is returned to earth. All the time I was, of course, waiting for the passage which Russian writers, to whom the Book of Enoch is obviously more familiar than to us, had interpreted as being a record of an extraterrestrial visit, Finally, near the very end, I found the only lines which could conceivably be meant: with the people, the Lord sent a darkness upon the earth, and there was a gloom, and it had those men standing with Enoch. (#) And the angel hasted and took Enoch and carried him to the highest heaven where the Lord secured him, and set him before his face, and the darkness departed from the earth and there was light. (#) And the people saw and did not understand how Enoch was taken, and they glorified God. And they who had seen such things departed to their houses. Since the whole work is one of religious imagery, the statement that Enoch was carried to the highest heaven while a supernatural darkness surrounded him can hardly be interpreted as having a physical meaning. As a matter of fact the whole last scene is just an elaboration of Genesis V: # "And Enoch walked with God; and he was not; for God took him." And it is probably this line which caused the ancient Greek-speaking writer to single him out as the central character of his own work. Most of the other people mentioned in Genesis simply die. I understand that several aircraft manufacturers have plans for supersonic passenger jetliners on the drawing boards which will be able to cross the United States in about two hours. But I have also heard that there is a movement afoot for not licensing such airliners because of the noise problem. I can see that they must cause a lot of noise when they break through the sound barrier, but I don't see why this could not be over the ocean at both ends of the trip. E. E. Farbstein Great Neck, Long Island First let me say that the term "sound barrier" is one of the most misleading and most meaningless terms ever coined. There is no such thing. When the pilot of one of our supersonic fighters or bombers passes the speed of sound he has to look at his instrument panel to learn that he did. No sensation of any kind accompanies this so-called feat. It is sheer routine -- if the plane is built for it. Then what is the "sonic boom" that rattles windows when a supersonic plane passes overhead? The truthful answer is that it is a shock wave, but since this term does not mean much to most people let's take the whole problem more slowly -- beginning with a propeller plane which travels at the rate of # miles per hour or about # per cent of the speed of sound. Since the sound made by this plane is faster than the plane itself, the sound will travel ahead. To an observer on the ground the overall result is that he first hears a faint propeller noise from a distance, which then grows in volume, and is loudest when the plane is approximately overhead. Then it diminishes at about the same rate at which it increased earlier. Now let us imagine a plane flying at precisely the speed of sound. (This cannot actually be done. An actual plane can stay below the speed of sound or it can fly faster than sound, but not at the speed of sound.) Since such a plane would move as fast as the noise it produces, its noise cannot travel ahead. Hence its approach could not be heard. To an observer on the ground the plane would approach noiselessly but then, when it is overhead, its noise would hit the observer with a sudden blow. As distinct from the gradual increase of the noise level of the subsonic plane, the noise from the plane travelling at the speed of sound would start at maximum intensity and then diminish gradually. The actual case of a plane flying faster than the speed of sound is quite similar to the example of the plane flying at the speed of sound just given -- except that it cannot yet be heard even when it is overhead. The diagram shows what happens in the case of a plane flying at twice the speed of sound, or, in figures, af the rate of # feet per second. But the noise made by the plane spreads only at the rate of # feet per second. If we imagine the observer to be on the ground directly below the plane, at the line marked # in the diagram, the plane has traveled # feet during the three seconds since it passed the zero line. But the noise produced three seconds ago at the zero line has travelled only # feet. The noise made two seconds ago at the line marked I has spread only # feet, and the noise made one second ago has spread for only # feet. As can be seen, these expanding spheres of sound (which appear as circles in the diagram) all fit into a cone which, in honor of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, is called the Mach cone. All the noise produced by the plane is inside the Mach cone. Outside the cone complete silence prevails -- that is, as far as noise from that particular plane is concerned. So if you hear the "sonic boom", it really means that you have just been enveloped by a Mach cone. Now we can get back to the problem of the supersonic airliner. At take off and landing, when it is flying at far less than the speed of sound, the noise is the same as that of current jetliners. But a number of minutes after takeoff the plane will become supersonic, and the Mach cone will begin to form and it will travel with the plane for the whole duration of its flight. For a flight across the ocean this probably won't matter. But a cross-country flight is a different story. Naturally the Mach cone, like any shock wave, will be attenuated by distance. But normal flying altitudes are, as we well know, not high enough. And simply increasing the flight altitudes would have the result that the passenger liners get into the high air lines now reserved for military traffic. But this is a different problem. Coming Soon! The Best Science Fiction Stories from IF #-page paperbound collection of the best stories from the last few years of IF -- your favorite writers with some of their top yarns of recent years. Watch for it on your newsstand -- on sale soonl i It would make a fine exhibit in someone's collection. Too bad it happened to be alive! tCTThat are you doing there, '  human?" "It's a long story." "Good, I like long stories. Sit down and talk. No -- not on me!" "Sorry. Well, it's all because of my uncle, the fabulously wealthy -- " "Stop. What does 'wealthy' mean?" "Well, like rich." "And 'rich'?" "Hm. Lots of money.' "What's money?" "You want to hear this story or don't you?" "Yes, but I'd like to understand it too." "Sorry, Rock, I'm afraid I don't understand it all myself." "The name is Stone." "Okay, Stone. My uncle, who is a very important man, was supposed to send me to the Space Academy, but he didn't.  He decided a liberal education was a better thing. So he sent me to his old spinster alma mater to major in nonhuman humanities. You with me, so far?" "No, but understanding is not necessarily an adjunct to appreciation." "That's what I say. I'll never understand Uncle Sidney, but I appreciate his outrageous tastes, his magpie instinct and his gross meddling in other people's affairs. I appreciate them till I'm sick to the stomach. There's nothing else I can do. He's a carnivorous old family monument, and fond of having his own way. Unfortunately, he also has all the money in the family -- so it follows, like a xxt after a zzn, that he always does have his own way." "This money must be pretty important stuff." "Important enough to sent me across ten thousand light-years to an unnamed world which, incidentally, I've just named Dunghill." "The low-flying zatt is a heavy eater, which accounts for its low flying... "So I've noted. That is moss though, isn't it?" "Yes." "Good, then crating will be less of a problem." "What's 'crating'?" "It means to put something in a box to take it somewhere else." "Like moving around?" "Yes." "What are you planning on crating?" "Yourself. Stone." "I've never been the rolling sort..." "Listen, Stone, my uncle is a rbck collector, see? You are the only species of intelligent mineral in the galaxy. You are also the largest specimen I've spotted so far. Do you follow me?" "Yes, but I don't want to." "Why not? You'd be lord of his rock collection. Sort of a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind, if I may venture an inappropriate metaphor." "Please don't do that, whatever it is. It sounds awful. Tell me, how did your uncle learn of our world?" "One of my instructors read about this place in an old space log. He was an old space log collector. The log had belonged to a Captain Fairhill, who landed here several centuries ago and held lengthy discourses with your people." "Good old Foul Weather Fairhill! How is he these days? Give him my regards -- " "He's dead." "What?" "Dead. Kaput. Blooey. Gone. Deeble." "Oh my! When did it happen? I trust it was an esthetic occurrence of major import -- " "I really couln't say. But I passed the information on to my uncle, who decided to collect you. That's why I'm here -- he sent me." "Really, as much as I appreciate the compliment, I can't accompany you. It's almost deeble time -- " "I know, I read all about deebling in the Fairhill log before I showed it to Uncle Sidney. I tore those page out I want him to be around when you do it. Then I can inherit his money and console myself in all manner of expensive ways for never having gone to the Space Academy. First I'll become an alcoholic, then I'll take up wenching -- or maybe I'd better do it the other way around... "But I want to deeble here, among the things I've became attached to!" "This is a crowbar. I'm going to unattach you." "If you try it, I'll deeble right now." "You can't. I measured your mass before we struck up this conversation. It will take at least eight months, under Earth conditions, for you to reach deebling proportions." "Okay, I was bluffing. But have you no compassion? I've rested here for centuries, ever' since I was a small pebble, at did my fathers before me. I've added so carefully to my atom collection, building up the finest molecular structure in the neighborhood. And now, to be snatched away right before deebling time, it's -- it's quite unrock of you." "It's not that bad. I promise you'll collect the finest Earth atoms available. You'll go places no other Stone has ever been before." "Small consolation. I want my friends to see." "I'm afraid that's out of the question." "You are a very cruel human. I hope you're around when I deeble." "I intend to be far away and on the eve of prodigious debaucheries when that occurs." T Tnder Dunghill's sub-E gravitation Stone was easily rolled to the side of the space sedan, crated, and, with the help of a winch, installed in the compartment beside the atomic pile. The fact that it was a shortjaunt sport model sedan, customized by its owner, who had removed much of the shielding, was the reason Stone felt a sudden flush of volcanic drunkenness, rapidly added select items to his collection and deebled on the spot. He mushroomed upwards, then swept in great waves across the plains of Dunghill. Several young Stones fell from the dusty heavens wailing their birth pains across the community band. "Gone fission," commented a distant neighbor, above the static, "and sooner than I expected. Feel that warm afterglow!" "An excellent deeble," agreed another. "It always pays to be a cautious collector." Some men should never go Into space -- for their own sake, and for the Earth'sl One by one I dismayed them, frightened them sore with my glooms One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms. from The Law of the Yukon Robert W. Service tt'T'welve, helmet lock," Robeson's voice rattled from the external speaker of his pressure suit. "Twelve," Sonny Greet echoed, glancing at the red arrows now point-to-point on the helmet and shoulder plate, then banging the closed latch with his fist. "Aligned and locked." "Thirteen, bleed valve," Robson read from the checklist mounted on the bulkhead. "Thirteen, closed," Sonny tapped the other man's suit with his knuckles. "Fourteen, patch kit." "Fourtee..." "What are you doing, Sonny, just what in the hell do you think you are doing?" Captain Hegg broke in, stomping across the airlock chamber towards them. "Helping the prof with his checklist -- I thought that was obvious, Cap'n." "Helping to kill him maybe. You are going to have to take this kind of thing more seriously. You didn't check that bleeder valve." "I looked at it, the handle is up and down like it always is. Closed -- and I've never seen one of them open yet." "But you don't know until you have checked it," Hegg insisted with slow patience. "The handle might be broken, or turned a half turn." "But it's not, see Cap." The tiny handle did not move when he pushed on it. "So I was right all along." "You were not, Sonny. You did not follow checklist routine, that is all that matters." "Mea culpa," Sonny insisted, raising his hands in mock surrender, grinning disarmingly. "Have patience with my youth, Cap'n, and I promise never to do it again." "See that you don't."  kill you, do you, Prof?" Sonny asked, looking ruefully away from the retreating back of the captain. "If you were dead who could I possibly win a chess game from once in a while?" "That's just Hegg's way, you know." Robson's smile could just be made out through the thick viewplate of his helmet. "He is really a good type, but terribly hardworking. He means well." "But why is it always my neck that gets caught in the bear trap when he is meaning well?" Robson shrugged. "We had better finish running through the checklist. I want to get those sample traps in before dark." "Right you are, Prof. We'll pick it up from fourteen." Sonny watched through their single view port as Captain Hegg and Robson, slow and clumsy in their pressure suits, clambered over the nearby ridge and vanished from sight among the strangely earth-like trees. He shook his head, not for the first time, at the unreasonableness of it all. "How about a game?" Arkady called from his bunk, holding up his pocket chess set. "I'll spot you a rook." 'Why commit suicide? You even won that game when you had no queen." "Just your bad luck, Sonny. With a queen ahead you could even win against the great Botvinnik, may his memory be revered, if you would remember to just keep exchanging." "Yeah, but I keep forgetting. Look, Ivan Ivanovich, look out there at a sunny day on Cassidy-#. Wind in the trees, grass growing, maybe just a teensy tinge of green to the air that isn't quite earthlike. Doesn't it make you want to shuck off your clothes and go out and take a walk?" "Makes you want to be dead in five seconds," Arkady answered heavily, setting up a problem on the board. "The air out there is rich with deadly poisons and a mixture of hydrogen and methane that would bum with a lovely flame in this room. Or in your lungs. Even the stones would burn in our air. Look how wonderfully Reshevsky sank Euwe back in middle ages, #." "Aw, come on, you know what I'm talking about. I could give you lectures about the natural wonders of this world. Remember I'm the mineralogist here and you are just a thick-headed Russky mining engineer..." "I go back to salt mine in morning." "... I'm talking about romance, emotion, art. Look out there. A world as close as the thickness of this wall, yet more unattainable than Earth, which happens to be light-years away. Don't you feel it? Don't you want to go out there?" "I go out there without my suit I'll be dead in five seconds." "You're an unimaginative clod. If you are the end product of the Glorious Revolution I say bring back the Czar." "Da. It's your turn to cook today." "How could I forget? I was awake all night worrying about what to make for dinner. Will caviar go with the beef Stroganoff? Is the vodka cold enough?" "Dehydrations and coffee will be fine with me," Arkady ansewered imperturbably, concentrating on the chess board. "You just torture yourself."  CT'm worried about young A Greer," Captain Hegg said, after carefully making sure that he was talking through his suit speaker and that his radio was turned off. "Sonny is a good chap," Robson answered, plodding along at his side. "He's not as young as all that either. He has his doctorate, he's done some very original work. I've read some of his papers." "It's not his work that bothers me. If he couldn't do it Spatial Survey would never have sent him out on this job. If there are the right kind of mineral deposits here he will find them and Barabashev will find a way to get the stuff out. I don't know anything about that; but I do know my job, which is running this expedition and seeing that everyone stays alive. And Sonny Greer is too careless out here." "He has had field experience before." "On Earth," Hegg snorted. "Antarctic, jungles, deserts. Kid stuff. This is his first offplanet trip and he is not serious enough about it. You know what I mean, professor." "Only too well -- since this is my eighth survey. And I am much more supernumerary than you are, let us not forget. The only reason the higher powers include a food-consuming ecologist such as I on these junkets is to stress the scientific value of new-planet work and to get a bigger appropriation come budget time. I have developed a very relaxed attitude towards this sort of thing from being on these expeditions, yet always being a bit on the outside. Give the chap enough time and keep after him. He'll catch on. Don't you remember me on my first expedition? Tanarik-,#?" Hegg laughed. "How could any of us forget it? It must have been a month before the smell washed off." "Then you see what I mean. Everyone is green as grass at the start. He'll come around." "I suppose you are right." "There's something in my trap -- look! A serpentoid and I swear -- it has six legs!" Two of the other traps also contained samples of the local life forms, and it took some time for Robson to poison them and transfer them to the sealed carrying case. There was no possible way to bring living specimens back to earth, or even to keep them alive in the dome with the restricted means available. The animals would have to be dissected and preserved in sealed plastic. It was sunset when they started the trek back with the heavy carrying case, and it was dark long before they had reached the dome. But the directional beam came in clearly and the light on top of the radio mast was visible while they were still two kilometers away. Air might have been a problem, they were both on their reserve tanks, but they had more than enough left for the remaining time. The outer door of the lock was open and Hegg pulled it shut behind them, spun the wheel to seal it, then began the atmosphere evacuation pumps. Robson turned on the cleansing showers to wash away all traces of the alien atmosphere and soil from their suits. The shower roared briefly, then died to a weak trickle. "The tank is empty," Hegg said, looking at the indicator on its side. "Who was supposed to refill it?" "Sonny -- I think," Robson said hesitatingly. "But I'm not really sure of the roster." "I'm sure," Hegg said grimly. He spun to the intercom phone on the wall of the lock chamber and leaned on the bell button. "What's up?"' the tiny speaker buzzed. "This station on call day and ni... " "You did not fill the shower tank, Greer. It is on your duty roster for today." "You're right, Cap'n. Clean slipped my head worrying about dinner and all. Soon as you get inside I'll get right on it." "Can you tell me how we are going to get back inside if we can't rinse?" r T'here was only silence for long seconds. Then, "I'm sorry about that. Just an accident. Is there anything we can do?" "You're damn right there is. Get the drill and chuck in a bit with a diameter smaller than cans. Shave down the end of the hose, then one of you stand by with the tank while the other one drills a hole. As soon as the drill is through jam in the end of the hose -- and I mean fast. You'll have a positive pressure on your side, so youll be all right. We're in our suits. Then let in the shower fluid. We'll wash under the hose." "It sounds dangerous, Captain. Isn't there anything else." "No. Do it that way, and do it now!" "I'm surprised they didn't build the tank in there with a pipe so it could be filled from in here." "The principle is to have a few openings as possible in a sealed bulkhead -- and we can discuss the shortcomings of the designers some other time. Get Captain Hegg waited stolidly while the endless seconds dragged by, but Robson could not control his growing concern. He kept glancing at his oxygen reserve indicator, tapping it nervously. The needle was almost to the empty mark. He jumped, startled, when a sudden shrill whining came from the silicon bronze wall. The whining slowed to a steady grinding noise and the black nose of the drill bit burst through the metal. It was jerked out and the hiss of incoming air ended abruptly as the tip of the hose plugged the opening. Liquid gushed from it. "Do a good job of washing -- and don't bother to look at your oxygen dial," Hegg said. "There is an unmarked safety reserve in all these tanks. We have more than enough time to do a complete job here." They scrubbed quickly with the heavy brushes, taking turns to wash the inaccessible parts of each other's suits. Robson had a stifling sensation that he knew was wholly imaginary and had to fight back an urge to scream when Hegg methodically washed the sample boxes, tilting them on end to get at their bottoms. More minutes dragged by as he went over them both, then carefuly over the floor, with the sniffer. He found two suspect spots neai the drain and had Robson scrub them while he finished quartering the area. "All clean," Hegg said, straightening up "And atmosphere evacuation is complete. Start the air pump and I'll crack the door." Air hissed in, but even though the inner door was unlocked it stayed sealed, held in place by the difference in atmospheric pressure. Robson stood before it, clenching his sweat-damp fingers inside the armored gloves, fighting to appear as calm as Captain Hegg at his side. The sound of incoming air stopped and the door opened before them. Robson fumbled at the latch to unseal his helmet. Hegg already had his off, placed carefully in the rack, before he stalked into the dome, straight to the whitefaced Sonny Greer who stood against the far wall. "Do you know what you did? Do you have any idea just what you did?" 'T'he words surprised the cap A tain, because that was not what he had meant to say at all. Nor had he intended violence, yet his fist was clenched and his arm drawn back. Christ, he thought to himself, do I want to kill the kid? Toughened by experience on a dozen high-gravity worlds, his fist in that metal gauntlet would break the man's jaw, maybe his neck. It took more effort to relax than he had thought possible and he had to rub at the cable-hard muscles in his neck to force away the tension. "I said that I was sorry, Captain. I mean that -- " "Will you get this through your thick head? Being sorry won't help me if I'm dead. You have had expedition experience before -- earthside experience. What happens in the bloody Gobi desert or wherever you worked, if you don't fill the shower?" CJ  "I'll tell you what happens. Nothing happens. Someone maybe stays dirty for awhile but that is all. And what happens here if you forget to fill the shower? Two men can die, that is what can happen! Does the difference penetrate, mister bloody stupid schoolboy?" Sonny Greer's face was red, then suddenly white with suppressed rage. Robson was watching from the doorway where he stood, his helmet in his hands. "Easy on, Captain," he said in a worried voice. "There's no need for all of this." "No, the captain is right," Sonny broke in, his voice shaking, whether from anger or other emotion was hard to tell. "I deserved that. And I'd lose my temper myself if someone pulled a stunt like that on me." Arkady watched but said nothing. Captain Hegg turned his back and became involved in removing his pressure suit so that the others could not see his face. He felt that his lips were pulled back from his teeth like an animal ready to bite, and a small, cool part of his consciousness wondered at the unexpected ferocity of his reaction. Moving with unhurried precision, he forced himself to remove and stow the suit before he spoke. He was in control of himself again. Arkady was helping Robson with his armor in the lock chamber; they could hear what was being said but not interrupt. "Listen, Greer. I have nothing personal against you, I hope you realize that." His voice was normal. "I know that Cap'll. You'm rough but square." Hegg chose to ignore the hint of amusement in Sonny's tones. "I'm glad you realize that, so you will understand that what I am going to do has no personal prejudice but is done by the book and for the good of the expedition as a whole. Have you ever heard of a planetary inefficiency rating?" "No." "I didn't think you had. It is not a secret, but at the same time it is also not talked about much. The rules are simple. Two strikes and you are out. Out of the expedition, out of Spatial Survey and out of a job. You have just had your first strike." "What do you mean... ?" "I mean exactly what I say. When I send in the weekly report tomorrow I am going to give you a negative efficiency mark. This will go on your record. It is not good, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, a lot of men have had them. The importance of the rating is double -- to drive home the importance of regulations to you and to be sure you do not endanger anyone else's life. If you make one more blunder I send for your replacement." "Have a heart, Cap'n, it wasn't all that bad! No one was hurt. I promise nothing like it will happen again. I'll try doubly hard if you don't report this." "You will try doubly hard because I do report it. If I had any brains I would have sent in the first report when you didn't check the bleed valve on Robson's suit. If I had done that this would be your second mark and you would be out -- which is where you belong. I don't think you have it in you to be a good spacer." He turned and walked away, as far as he could in the limited confines of the dome. Sonny stared after him, chewing his lip. "I am hungry," Arkady said, walking across the dome and looking into the pot that was simmering slowly on the electric stove. "The stew smells as good as ever. Anyone joining me?" "A bowl for me, if you will, Arkady," Hobson said, trying with slight success to keep a natural tone into his voice. t#''our heroic treatment seems to have worked," Robson said looking out of the port to see if Sonny and Arkady were returning yet. "Over two weeks now and your problem child has beert good as gold, serious as a clam and attentive to his' duty." "Not as serious as that. He is starting with the jokes again." Captain Hegg stretched his long fingers, cramped from laboring the keys of the minityper as he wrote up his report. "He must take things seriously, all the time." "I think that you are worrying without cause. You know that it is possible for a man to have a sense of humor and still to be serious about his work. Good lord, you never seem to complain about my jokes, except that you don't think them funny." "A very different thing, professor. No matter how you are feeling you always do your work the same way, correctly and methodically." "Some people use the term 'old-maidish' for that." "Perhaps on Earth, where there are very few critical mistakes to be made. Out here it is essential to survival. A man must have it naturally, as you do, or force himself to learn it. Some never learn it and find jobs on earth. I would sleep much better if our mineralogist were there with them." "Speak of the devil. They're on their way back now, lugging a great ruddy trunk between them. I hope you filled the shower tank." "Of course! It's on my roster -- " He caught Robson's eye and forced himself to smile in return, though he did not consider this sort of joke to be in very good taste. The shower thundered and roared on the other side of the bulkhead. Hegg eyed the patch where they had drilled the hole and made a mental note to change it in the morning; the continual pressure changes could not be doing the flexible material any good. He wished, not for the first time, that their weight allowance had allowed for some metalworking tools. The sound of the shower stopped and the inner lock opened; the two men burst into the dome cheering and swinging the heavy case between them. "So pure they won't have to bother to refine it!" Arkady shouted. "The mother lode, the bonanza, the richest strike in the known history of man -- no, in the history of the galaxy!" Sonny struck a noble pose, one foot on the case, arms flung theatrically wide. "I gather you have found a new deposit of ore," Robson observed dryly. "Did you check with the sniffer before you bled in the air?" "Of course, Cap'n, old watchdog!" Sonny was so lost in enthusiasm that he had the temerity to slap the captain on one massive shoulder and never noticed the sudden narrowing of his eyes. "As of this very moment you can chalk up this expedition as a howling success!" CtTt will be three months before the ship is here to take us off. Plenty of work yet... " "Paperwork and tedium, Cap me lad! The purpose of this trip was to see if rich enough deposits of titanium, beryllium or sodium could be found in great enough concentration to justify the installation of robot mining equipment, since it is impossible to bring in enough oxygen for large-scale human operation." "We have found it," Arkady broke in. "Almost a mountain of ore! Chunks of pure metallic sodium. I can see the installation now -- a pithead, a spaceport. The robot miners, conveyers, the hum of mighty machines!" "Whenever you Russians get poetic it is always tractors or mighty machines," Captain Hegg said, catching the spark of their enthusiasm. "Now climb out of those suits. And if either of you are capable of it, I would enjoy having a written report that I can send off as soon as possible." For a few hours that night the precariousness of their thinwalled bubble of air on an alien world was forgotten, for this was an event to be celebrated. Their survey was a success, even more successful than had been hoped for. The planet of Cassidy# would reluctantly release its precious metals and it would be the members of the expedition who received the credit for this largesse. Captain Hegg rooted in the bottom of the container of the dehydrated fish that they all loathed, and brought up four steaks that he had hidden there for a deserving occasion. Hobson, as acting medical officer, contributed a container of brandy from the hospital stores. The alcohol only added to their elation; they did not really need it. This was a night that would long be remembered. They retired late, calling back and forth from their bunks in the darkness, laughing outrageously at the sudden onslaught of Hobson's snores, then one by one falling off to sleep as well. Captain Hegg awoke possessed by the premonition that something was very wrong. He shook his head, cursing the muffling effects of the brandy, trying to understand why he had woken up. The room was dark, except for the glow of telltale lights from the instrument panel, and even from his upper bunk he could see that they all were glowing green. It couldn't be that. A red warning when the board was on night command set off enough alarms to lift them right out of their beds. What else? He coughed and cleared his throat. With sudden panic he inhaled deeply and broke into spasmodie coughing. Smoke! There could be no smoke here! Smoking was forbidden, while very few things in the dome were even combustible... The ore case with the samples) ccp oil out!" Hegg bellowed'-as he half jumped, half fell from the high bunk and dived for the light switch. As his hand hit it he saw the red hairline gleam between the lid and the body of the sealed case. "Get up! Get up!" He pulled Sonny halfway out of his high bunk and at the same instant kicked Arkady in the side. This was all the time he could spare. He was aware of Robson stumbling up behind him as he dived for the case. "Robson! Open the door to the lock chamber." The ecologist was tugging at the wheel even before he had finished speaking, and Hegg put his shoulder to the case and pushed just as the side burst open with roaring flame. Clouds of white smoke poured out and intense glare bathed the full wall of the room. Hegg fell backward, coughing and retching painfully. Sonny jumped over him and threw a wad of blankets and bedding over the flame. The resistant material covered the flame and checked the smoke for an instant while he and Arkady pushed the case towards the lock chamber door, now standing open. Flame burst through the coverings almost instantly but they were at the door. Molten metal was dribbling from the flaming case and, pushing wildly, Arkady slipped and put his knee full into a pool of it. He rolled free, without uttering a sound, and beat the flame from his pajama legs with his bare hands. At the same moment Robson and Sonny gave 'a last concerted heave and the leaking case slid into the lock chamber. They pushed at the door. "Evacuation... pump... Hegg managed to say through his coughing, but Arkady had dragged himself there with one leg and the motor was already whining. The smoke was thicker before the last burning gobbet of metal had been shoveled up and dropped into the largest of their sample boxes. This was lined with heavier metal; before it burned through they had the lid sealed shut and an atmosphere of inert helium pumped in. The metal held, and in the lock chamber the burning also stopped as the combustible atmosphere was removed. With each passing second the air cleared as the air circulators drew out and filtered away the smoke. "What happened...?" Arkady asked, still dazed by the suddenness of the emergency. Blood ran down his leg, yet neither he nor any of the others noticed it. "One of the locks on the sample case wasn't closed all the way," Robson said thickly. "I saw it just as I pushed the thing through the door. Right hand lock, open a couple of notches. Enough to let a trickle of air in " "Who sealed that case?" Hegg's voice hammered at them, his coughing forgotten, or under control. "I did," Arkady said. Then, grimly, "But Sonny opened it again to put in a last piece of     ore. As though their heads were controlled by the same silent command they turned to face Sonny. "But I didn't... well, maybe, it was an accident..." he said, his face slack, still stunned by the suddenness of the emergency. Robson was closest. "You -- you -- " he said, but could not find the words. With his shining bald head and jowled cheeks he should have looked funny as he stood there, shaking with rage, but he did not. Almost of its own volition his open hand sprang out and slapped Sonny across the face. Sonny stumbled backwards, his fingers fumbling towards the livid red mark on his white cheek. Arkady hopped forward. His hard fist, swung with all of his weight, caught Sonny on the side of the neck, knocking him to the floor. The three men fell on the writhing body, pummeling and kicking it, mouthing inarticulate sounds. Captain Hegg ground his heel deep into the prostrate man's side just once before he realized who he was and what he was doing. He reeled away, then turned back to shout to the other two men. They did not hear him and kept on grimily at what they were doing. Pulling at them did no good either so he had to stop Arkady with a paralyzing judo blow and drag the little professor over to his bunk and hold him there until he stopped struggling. "Let me have the key to the medical supplies," he said, when he saw that Robson was finally listening. To one ever discussed the  affairs of that night, except for the needed mechanical details of cleaning up the damage. Sonny Greer lay for three days in his bunk, bandaged and silent, closing his eyes when anyone came near. Arkady's burns were bandaged and he hobbled around the dome doing the minor maintenance work that he was capable of. Captain Hegg broke into fits of exhausting coughing if he did anything strenuous. Prof. Robson, though unmarked physically, seemed to have shrunk and his skin hung loosely. The three men kept very much to themselves, and when they talked did so in low voices. It would be thirteen weeks before the relief ship arrived. On the fourth day Sonny Greer climbed out of his bunk. Except for his bruised face and the bandages he seemed fit for duty. "Is there anything I can do?" he asked. Arkady and Robson turned away when he spoke. Hegg forced himself to answer. "Just one thing. Arkady can't get into a suit, so you will have to go out with me oilce to get some more samples. After that you will be relieved of duty. You will stay in or near your bunk. You will touch none of the controls or equipment. Your meals will be brought to you." After that no one talked to Sonny, even when they handed him his food. The tension in the small' dome grew worse with every passing day and Hegg wondered how long it would be before something really snapped. Sonny had stumbled once, on his way from his bunk to the toilet cubby, and accidentally leaned on the air control console. Arkady had hit him once, knocking him halfway across the room. Hegg had been putting off the trip for the samples, but he finally forced himself to schedule it Perhaps getting the man away from the others for a while would help. "We are going after the ore samples tomorrow," he announced to the room in general. The silence that followed was deadly. "Let me check out your suit for you, Captain," Arkady finally said. "I'll help him." Robson climbed to his feet. 'With two checking there are no errors. It's better that way." Hegg let them go. It was that way all the time now, the three of them checking and counterchecking each other, almost living in panic with their awareness of the manifold dooms that the planet held in store for them. Captain Hegg did not know how this situation could remain static for three full months. When the two men emerged from the lock chamber, he realized that Sonny was looking at him. "Can I check my suit, Captain?" he asked. Neither of the men had gone near Greer's suit. It was as though he didn't exist. "Go ahead," Hegg said, then followed him through the dot and watched his every move. It was a compulsive action he could not have resisted if he had wanted to. The morning was worse. Sonny was forced to fumble into his suit by himself since the men ignored him, while at the same time they insisted on going through Captain Hegg's checklist three times before they were satisfied. The inner door had actually been closed before Hegg could force himself to go over to the man, to run through the checklist with him. To touch Sonny's suit seemed repellent. "One," Sonny said. "Spare oxy tank full." "One," Hegg repeated, and with an effort of will drove his fingers to tap the hated metal. They went slowly down the list. "Thirteen, bleed valve." "Thirteen, closed." And Hegg's fingers went out and felt the closed valve... then spun it open a half turn. ttVXait! There, it's all right."  ' He sealed the valve again with palsied hands. What had possessed him, he thought as they left the lock and trudged slowly towards the distant hills? Why had he done that? He had not willed it. He would not kill Sonny, though he knew the man would be better off dead, before he did something that killed them all. It was that simple. Sonny Greer was a menace. No longer a friend, he was in league with the planet, joined in battle against them. That was why the other two men shunned him like a Jonah. He was a Jonah. Worse than a Jonah. He was linked with the omnipresent powers that sought to destroy them, and they must both feel, as he did, that Greer would be better off dead. At that moment Sonny Greer let go of his end of the sample case, stumbled and fell. Hegg looked on, stunned, as he writhed on the ground, clawing silently at his helmet. Sonny's suit speaker was cut off and only muffled sounds came through the thick armor. Hegg bent over him, uncomprehending, as the man's body arched like a bow and collapsed. Hegg rolled him over and looked through the faceplate at the dead, tortured face. His instant sympathy was overwhelmed by a feeling of immense relief. Sonny seemed to have been killed by poisoning from the atmosphere. But how could it have entered his suit? There could be no leaks in the armor. Hegg would swear to that; he had checked it thoroughly himself. Then he remembered his traitor fingers at the bleed valve and he quickly tried it. No, it was sealed. Or was it? The handle was tight to the stop and vertical -- but wasn't there too much thread showing? Hegg turned the limp body until the sun shone directly into the mouth of the valve. It was jammed half open by a particle of metal. The air in the suit would be forced out by the greater internal pressure, and when the pressure dropped the outside atmosphere would leak in. Had leaked in; because Sonny Greer was completely and finally dead. Again the wave of relaxation swept over the captain, and it carried with it a tiny, nagging question. How had the metal gotten into the valve? By accident? A lucky accident that made it lodge in exactly such a way that the valve handle would look shut and feel shut -- even though it was open? "Cause of death, accidental," Captain Hegg said, louder than he had intended, as he climbed to his feet and cleaned the alien dust from his hands, then rubbed them on his legs to cleanse them again. "It had to be an accident. I can't very well list you as suicide," he said to the unmoving body. "It really should be selfdefense, or justified homicide or something. But I can't say that, can I, Sonny?" Now that death had removed the threat, he could feel for the first time the compassion that had been buried by his urge for survival. "I'm sorry, Sonny," he whispered gently, and touched the lifeless shoulder. "You just shouldn't have been out here. I wish for all our sakes we had found that out earlier. "Mostly for your sake though," he said, rising. Then in a firmer voice. "I better get back to the dome, straighten this mess out..." Beginning the long process of forgetting.      Ever since Scanners Live in Vain more than a decade ago, the name of Cordwainer Smith has stood for something rare and precious in science fiction, a kind of story that not only transcends what we know and do, but even what we are. Smith's characters are no longer entirely human. They are something beyond. Maybe they are something better. In the next issue of Galaxy we have a long complete story by Cordwainer Smith called The Dead Lady of Clown Town which shows what we mean. We recommend it to any Smith fan -- and, we think, it will create a lot of new members of that class! Back after an all-too-long absence is another Galaxy favorite, Richard Wilson. In The Watchers in the Glade next issue Wilson brings you a glimpse of the starry frontiers as our descendants may find them, a few centuries hence. They may not like what they'll find -- but you'll like what Wilson has to say on the subject... And, of course, there'll be more. Novelette called The Children of Night, by a fellow named Pohl. Column by Willy Ley on fossils of several kinds -- the kind that are dug up, and the kind that do the digging and are sometimes embarrassed by what they find. Short stories... maybe another novelette or two... yes. we think you'll like the issuel An Ancient Madness It was a crockery island, afloat on an endless sea, and its mighty old engines drove it on to... nowhere l 'T'hirty sisters, as like as peas, were sitting at their looms in the court above the Gallery of Weavers. In the cool shadow, their white dresses rustled like the stirrings of doves, and their voices now murmured, now shrilled. Over the courtyard was a canopy of green glass, through which the sun appeared to swim like a golden-green fish; but over the roofs could be seen the strong blue of the sky, and even, at one or two places, the piercing white sparkle of the sea. The sisters were ivory-skinned, strong armed and straight of back, with eyebrows arched black over bright eyes. Some had grown fat, some were lean. But the same smiles dimpled their cheeks, the same gestures threw back their sleek heads when they laughed, and each saw herself mirrored in the others. Only the youngest, Mary, was different. Hers was the clan face, but so slender and grave that it seemed a stranger's. She had been brought to birth to replace old Anna-one, who had fallen from the lookout and broken her neck sixteen springs ago; and some said it had been done too quick; that Mary was from a bad egg and should never have been let grow. Now the truth was that Mary's genes had a longrecessive trait of melancholy and unworldliness, turned up by accident in the last cross; but the Elders, who after all knew best, had decided to give her the same chance as anyone. For in the floating island of Iliria, everyone knew that the purpose of life was happiness. And therefore to deprive anyone of life was a great shame. At the far side of the court, Vivana called from her loom, "They say a new Fisher came from the mainland yesterday!" She was the eldest of the thirty, 'a coarse, goodnatured woman with a booming laugh. "If he's handsome, I may take him, and give you others a chance at my Tino. Rose, how would you like that? Tino would be a good man for you." Her loom whirled, and rich, dark folds of liase rippled out. It was an artificial fiber, formed, spun, woven and dyed in the loom, hardening as it reached the air. A canister of the stuff, like tinted gelatin, stood at the top of every loom. It came from the Chemist clan, who concocted it by mysterious workings out of the sea water that tumbled through their vats. "What, is he tiring of you already?" Rose called back. She was short and moon-faced, with strong, clever fingers that danced on the keyboard of her loom. "Probably you belched in his face once too often." She raised her shrill voice over the laughter. "Now let me tell you, Vivana, if the new Fisher is as handsome as that, I may take him myself, and let you have Mitri." Mounds of apple-green stuff tumbled into a basket Between them, Mary worked on, eyes cast down, without smiling. "Gogo and Vivana!" someone shouted. "Yes, that's right -- never mind about the Fisher! Gogo and Vivana!" All the sisters were shouting and laughing. But Mary still sat quietly busy at her loom. "All right, all right," shouted Vivana, wheezing with laughter. "I will try him, but then who's to have Gunner?" "Me!" "No, me!" Gunner was the darling of the Weavers, a pink man with thick blond lashes and a roguish grin. "No, let the youngsters have a chance," Vivana called reprovingly. "Joking aside, Gunner is too good for you old scows." Ignoring the shrieks of outrage, she went on, "I say let Viola have him. Better yet, wait, I have an idea -- how about Mary?" 'T'he chatter stilled; all eyes turned toward the silent girl where she sat, weaving slow cascades of creamy white liase. She flushed quickly, and bowed her head, unable to speak. She was sixteen, and had never taken a lover. The women looked at her, and the pleasure faded out of their faces. Then they turned away, and the shouting began again: "Rudi!" "Ernestine!" "Huga!" "Areta!" Mary's slim hands faltered, and the intricate diapered pattern of her weaving was spoiled. Now the bolt would have to be cut off, unfinished. She stopped the loom, and drooped over it, pressing her forehead against the smooth metal. Tears burned her eyelids. But she held herself still, hoping Mia, at the next loom, would not see. Below in the street, a sudden tumult went up. Heads turned to listen: there was the wailing of flutes, the thundering of drums, and the sound of men's rich voices, singing and laughing. A gate banged open, and a clatter of feet came tumbling up the stair. The white dresses rustled as the sisters turned expectantly toward the arch. A knot of laughing, struggling men burst through, full into the midst of the women, toppling looms, while the sisters shrieked in protest and pleasure. The men were Mechanics, dark-haired, gaunt, leavened by a few blond Chemists. They were wrestling, Mechanic against Chemist, arms locked about each other's necks, legs straining for leverage. One struggling pair toppled suddenly, overturning two more. The men scrambled up, laughing, red with exertion. Behind them was a solitary figure whose stillness drew Mary's eyes. He was tall, slender and grave, with russet hair and a quiet mouth. While the others shouted and pranced, he stood looking around the courtyard. For an instant his calm gray eyes met hers, and Mary felt a sudden pain at the heart. "Dear, what is it?" asked Mia, leaning closer. "I think I am ill," said Mary faintly. "Oh, not now!" Mia protested. Two of the men were wrestling again. A heave, and the dark Mechanic went spinning over the other's hip. A shout of applause went up. Through the uproar, Vivana's big voice came booming, "You fishheads, get out! Look at this, half a morning's work ruined! Are you all drunk? Get out!" "We're all free for the day!" one of the Mechanics shouted. "You, too -- the whole district! It's in the Fisher's honor! So come on, what are you waiting for?" The women were up, in a sudden flutter of voices and white skirts, the men beginning to spread out among them. The tall man still stood where he was. Now he was looking frankly at Mary, and she turned away in confusion, picking up the botched fabric with hands that did not feel it. She was aware that two Mechanics had turned back, were leading the tall man across the courtyard, calling, "Violet -- Clara!" She did not move, but her breath stopped. Then they were pausing before her loom. There was an av.'ful moment when she thought she could not move. Then she looked up fearfully. He was standing there, hands in his pockets, slumped a little as he looked down at her. He said, "What is your name?" His voice was low and gentle. "Mary," she said. "Will you go with me today, Mary?" Around her, the women's heads were turning. A silence spread; she could sense the waiting, the delight held in check. She could not! Her whole soul yearned for it, but she was too afraid, there were too many eyes watching. Miserably, she said, "No," and stopped, astonished, listening to the echo of her voice saying gladly, "Yes!"... Suddenly her heart grew light as air. She stood, letting the loom fall, and when he held out his hand, hers went into it as if it knew how. UCo you have a rendezvous  with a mainland Fisher?" the Doctor inquired jovially. He was paleeyed and merry in his broad brown hat and yellow tunic; he popped open his little bag, took out a pill, handed it to Mary. "Swallow this, dear." 'What is it for, Doctor?" she asked, flushing. "Only a precaution. You wouldn't want a baby to grow right in your belly, would you? Ha, ha, ha! That shocks you, does it? Well, you see, the Mainlanders don't sterilize the males, their clan customs forbid it, so they sterilize the females instead. We have to be watchful, ah, yes, we Doctors! Swallow it down, there's a good girl." She took the pill, drank a sip of water from the flask he handed her. "Good, good -- now you can go to your little meeting and be perfectly safe. Enjoy yourself!" Beaming, he closed his bag and went away. II "'vn the high Plaza of Fountains, overlooking the quayside and the sea, feasts of shrimp and wine, seaweed salad, caviar, pasta, iced sweets had been laid out under canopies of green glass. Orchestrinos were playing. Couples were dancing on the old ceramic cobbles, white skirts swinging, hair afloat in the brilliant air. Farther up, Mary and Fisher had found a place to be alone. Under the bower in the cool shade, they lay clasped heart to heart. In her ecstasy she could not tell where her body ended or his began. "Oh, I love you, I love you!" she murmured. His body moved, his head drew back a little to look at her. There was something troubled in his gray eyes. "I didn't know this was going to be your first time," he said. "How is it that you waited so long?" "I was waiting for you," she said faintly, and it seemed to her that it was so, and that she had always known it. Her arms tightened around him, wishing to draw him closer to her body again. But he held himself away, looking down at her with the same vague uneasiness in his eyes. "I don't understand," he said. "How could you have known I was coming?" "I knew," she said. Timidly her hands began to stroke the long, smooth muscles of his back, the man's flesh, so different from her own. It seemed to her that her fingertips knew him without being told. His body stiffened; his gray eyes half closed. "Oh, Mary..." he said, and then he was close against her again, his mouth busy on hers. Near the end she began to weep, and lay in his arms afterward with the luxurious tears wetting her cheeks, while his voice asked anxiously, "Are you all right? Darling, are you all right?"; and she could not explain, but only held him tighter and wept. Later, hand in hand, they wandered down the bonewhite stairs to the quayside strewn with drying nets, the glass floats sparkling sharp in the sun, spars, tackle and canvas piled everywere. Only two boats were moored at the floating jetty below. The rest were out fishing, black specks on the glittering sea, almost at the horizon. Over to eastward, they saw the desolate smudge of the mainland and the huddle of stones that was Porto. "That's where you live," she said wonderingly. "Yes." "What do you do there?" He paused, looked down at her with that startled unease in his glance. After a moment he shrugged. "Work. Drink a little in the evenings, make love. What else would I do?" A dull pain descended suddenly on her heart and would not lift its wings. "You've made love to many women?" she asked with difficulty. "Of course. Mary, what's the matter?" "You're going back to Porto. You're going to leave me." Now the unnamed thing in his eyes had turned to open incredulity. He held her arms, staring down at her. "What else?" She put her head down obstinately, burying it against his chest. "I want to stay with you," she said in a muffled voice. "But you can't You're an Islander -- I'm a Mainlander." "I know." "Then why this foolishness?" "I don't know." TTe turned her without speaking, and they stepped down from the promenade, went into the shadow of some storehouses that abutted on the quayside. The doors were open, breathing scents of spices and tar, new cordage, drying fish. Beyond them was a pleasant courtyard with boats piled upside down on one side, on the other a table, an umbrella, chairs, all cool in the afternoon shadow. From there they took a shallow staircase up into a maze of little streets full of the dim, mysterious blue light that fell from canopies of tinted glass between roofs. Passing a house with open shutters, they heard the drone of childish voices. They peered in: it was the nursery school -- forty young Bakers, Chemists, Mechanics, fair skins and dark, each in a doll-like miniature of his clan costume, all earnestly reciting together while the shovelhatted Teacher stood listening at the greenboard. Cool, neutral light came from the louvred skylights. The small faces were clear and innocent, here a tiny Cook in his apron, there two Carters sitting together, identical in their blue smocks, there a pale Doctor, and beside him, Mary saw with a pang, a little Weaver in white. The familiar features were childishly blunted and small, the ivory skin impossibly pure, the bright eyes wide. "Look -- that one," she whispered, pointing. He peered in. "She looks like you. More like you than the others. You're different from all the rest, Mary. That's why I like you." He looked down at her with a puzzled expression; his arm tightened around her. "I've never felt quite this way about a girl before. What are you doing to me?" he said. She turned to him, embracing him, letting her body go soft and compliant against his. "Loving you, darling," she said, smiling up, her eyes half-closed. He kissed her fiercely, then pushed her away, looking almost frightened. "See here, Mary," he said abruptly, "we've got to understand something." "Yes?" she said faintly, clinging to him. "I'm going to be back in Porto tomorrow morning," he said "Tomorrow!" she said. "I thought -- " "My work was done this morning. It was a simple adjustment of the sonics. You'll catch plenty of fish from now on... I have nothing else to do." She was stunned; she could not believe it. Surely there would be at least another night... that was little enough to ask. "Can't you stay?' she said. "You know I can't." His voice was rough and strained. "I go where they tell me, come when they say come." Ohe tried to hold back the time, k' but it slipped away, ran through her fingers: the sky darkened slowly from cerulean to Prussian blue. The stars came out, and the cool night wind stirred over the jetty. Below her, in a cluster of lights, they were making the boat ready. Orchestrinos were playing up the hillside, and there was a little crowd of men and women gathering to say good-by. There was laughter, joking, voices raised good-naturedly in the evening stillness. Kief, pale in the lights, came up the stairs to where she stood, his head tilted as he came, his grave eyes holding hers. "I'm not going to cry," she said. His hands took her arms, gripping her half in tenderness, half impatiently. "Mary, you know this is wrong. Get over it. Find yourself other men -- be happy." "Yes. I'll be happy." she said. He stared down at her in uncertainty, then bent his head and kissed her. She held herself passive in his arms, not responding or resisting. After a moment he let her go and stepped back. "Good-by, Mary." "Good-by, Kief." He turned, went quickly down the steps. The laughing voices surrounded him as he went toward the boat; after a moment she heard his voice, too, lifted in cheerful farewells. In the morning she awoke knowing that he was gone. A frightening knowledge of loss seized her, and she sat up with her heart leaping. Down the high dormitory, smelling faintly of cinnamon oil and fresh linens, the sisters were beginning to rustle sleepily out of their cubicles, murmuring and yawning. The familiar hiss of the showers began at the far end of the room. The white-curtained windows were open, and from her bed Mary could see the cream and terra cotta roofs spread out in a lazy descent. The air was cool and still and mysteriously pure: it was the best moment of the day. She rose, washed herself and dressed mechanically. "What is it, dear?" asked Mia, bending toward her anxiously. "Nothing. Kief is gone." "Well, there'll be others." Mia patted her hand with a relieved smile and went away. There was a closeness between them, they were almost of an age, and yet even Mia could not be comfortable long in Mary's company. Mary sat with the others at table, silent in the steaming fragrances of coffee and new bread, the waves of cheerful talk that flowed around her. Carrying her loom, she went down with the rest into the court and sat in her usual place. The work began. 'T'ime stretched away wearily into the future. How many mornings in her life would she sit here, where she sat now, beginning to weave as she did now? How could she endure it? How had she ever endured it? She put her fingers on the controls of the loom, but the effort to move them appalled her. A tear dropped bright on the keyboard. Mia leaned over toward her. "Is there anything the matter? Don't you feel well?' Her fists clenched uselessly. "I can't -- I can't -- " was all she could utter. Hot tears were running down her face; her jaw was shaking. She bowed her head over the loom. The others clustered around her. "Sick?" "What's the trouble?" "It was her first time, remember." Then Vivana's big voice: "All right, what's wrong?" She lifted her face. "He's gone, Vivana. I can't -- " "Of course he is. Don't be a silly girl." A big arm went around her comfortingly. "But I love him!" "Well, of course you did. Nothing to cry about. Now sit up and behave yourself." She held Mary's chin, squinting at her critically. "Hm. I don't suppose you've had much sleep. Didn't eat a bite at breakfast, either, did you?" The tears kept on flowing, silently; Mary could not stop them. "She isn't as strong as -- " someone whispered. "Shush! Now look here." Vivana's voice grew gentler. "I'm going to let you off weaving this morning. Go up and get some sleep, if you want to. Or go down to the pools and take the sun. Go on with you now; don't worry about the loom." Mary stood up, drying her eyes, feeling miserable but flattered by the attention. The other sisters drifted back to their work. Vivana, taking Mary's arm, walked her over to the archway. "Listen," she said in a hoarse undertone, "how long since you've been to church?" "I don't know. A few weeks. Or a month. Why?" "Better go this morning. It'll do you good, believe me -- take my advice." With a final squeeze, Vivana let go her arm and turned away. Ill I liria was neither wearisomely flat, nor cone-shaped nor pyramidal in its construction, like some of the northern islands, but was charmingly hollowed, like a cradle. The old cobblestoned streets rose and fell; there were stairways, balconies, arcades; never a vista, always a new prospect. The buildings were pleasingly various, some domed and spired, others sprawling. Cream was the dominent color, with accents of cool light blue, yellow and rose. For more than three hundred years the island had been afloat, just as it now was: the same plazas with their fountains, the same shuttered windows, the same rooftops. The people, too, were unchanged. Making the best of their reduced stock of healthy genes, Iliria's founders had chosen some two hundred types, all congenial, sturdy, industrious and cheerful, to be reproduced over and over, time without end. Every Ilirian male was sterilized before puberty; the race had its only immortality in the incubators and frozenstorage units of the clans' birth laboratories. During the last century, some colonies had been creeping back onto the land as the contamination diminished; but every Ilirian knew that only island life was perfect. Above, the unchanging streets and buildings served each generation as the last. Down below, the storage chambers, engine rooms, seines, preserving rooms, conveniently out of sight and hearing, went on functioning as they always had. Unsinkable, sheathed in ceramic above and below, the island would go on floating just as it now was, forever. It was strange to Mary to see the familiar streets so empty. The morning light lay softly along the walls. In comers blue shadow gathered. Behind every door and window there was a subdued hum of activity; the clans were at their work. All the way to the church circle, she passed no one but a Messenger and two Carters with their loads. All three looked at her curiously until she was out of sight. Climbing the Hill of Carpenters, she saw the gray dome of the church rising against the sky -- a smooth, unrelieved ovoid, with a crescent of morning light upon it. Overhead, a flock of gulls hung in the air, wings spread, rising and dipping. They were gray against the light. She paused on the porch step to look down. From this height she could see the quays and the breakwater, and the sun on the bright-work of the moored launches; and then the long rolling back of the sea, full of whitecaps in the freshening breeze; and beyond that, the dark smudge of the land, and the clutter of brown windowed stone that was Porto. She stood looking at it for a moment, dry-eyed, then went into the shadowed doorway. Clabert the Priest rose up from his little desk and came toward her with inkstained fingers, his skirt flapping around his ankles. "Good morning, cousin, have you a trouble?" "I'm in love with a man who has gone away." Tie stared at her in perplexity for a moment, then darted down the corridor to the left. "This way, cousin." She followed him past the great doors of the central harmonion. He opened a smaller door, curved like the end of an egg, and motioned her in. She stepped inside. The room was gray, egg-shaped, and the light came uniformly from the smooth ceramic walls. "Twenty minutes," said Clabert, and withdrew his head. The door shut, joining indistinguishably with the wall around it Mary found herself standing on the faintly sloping floor, with the smooth single curve of the wall surrounding her. After a moment she could no longer tell how far away the big end of the ovicle was; the room seemed first quite small, only a few yards from one end to the other; then it was gigantic, bigger than the sky. The floor shifted uncertainly under her feet, and after another moment she sat down on the cool hollow slope. The silence grew and deepened. She had no feeling of confinement. The air was fresh and in constant slight movement. She felt faintly and agreeably dizzy, and put her arms behind her to steady herself. Her vision began to blur; the featureless gray curve gave her no focus for her eyes. Another moment passed, and she become aware that the muffled silence was really a continual slow hush of sound, coming from all points at once, like the distant murmuring of the sea. She held her breath to listen, and at once, like dozens of wings flicking away in turn, the sound stopped. Now, listening intently, she could hear a still fainter sound, a soft, rapid pattering that stopped and came again, stopped and came again... and listening, she realized that it was the multiple echo of f.fiUnrA her own heartbeat. She breathed again, and the slow hush flooded back. r T'he wall approached, receded... gradually it became neither close nor far away; it hung gigantically and mistily just out of reach. The movement of air imperceptibly slowed. Lying dazed and unthinking, she grew intensely aware of her existence, the meaty solidness of her flesh, the incessant pumping of blood, the sigh of breath, the heaviness and pressure, the pleasant beading of perspiration on her skin. She was whole and complete, all the way from fingers to toes. She was uniquely herself; somehow she had forgotten how important being herself was... "Feeling better?" asked Clabert, as he helped her out of the chamber. "Yes..." She was dazed and languid; walking was an extraordinary effort. "Come back if you have these confusions again," Clabert called after her, standing in the porch doorway. Without replying, she went sunshine. Her head was light, her feet were amusingly slow to obey her. In a moment she was running to catch up with herself, down the steep cobbled street in a stumbling rush, with faces popping out of shutters behind her, and fetched up laughing and gasping with her arms around a light column at the bottom. A stout Carter in blue was grinning at her out of his tanned face. "What's the joke, woman?" "Nothing," she stammered. "I've just been to church." "Ah!" he said, with a finger beside his nose, and went on. She found herself taking the way downward to the quays. The sunlit streets were empty; no one was in the pools. She stripped and plunged in, gasping at the pleasure of the cool fresh water on her body. And even when two Baker boys, an older one and a younger came by and leaned over the wall shouting, "Pretty! Pretty!" she felt no confusion, but smiled up at them and went on swimming. Afterward, she dressed and strolled, wet as she was, along the sea-wall promenade. Giddily, she began to sing as she walked, "Open your arms to me, sweetheart, for when the sun shines it's pleasant to be in love... " The orchestrinos had been playing that, that night when -- She felt suddenly ill, and stopped with her hand at her forehead. What was wrong with her? Her mind seemed to reel, shake itself from one pattern into another. She swung her head up, looking with sharp anxiety for the brown tangle of buildings on the mainland. At first it was not there, and then she saw it, tiny, almost lost on the horizon. The island was drifting, moving away, leaving the mainland behind. She sat down abruptly; her legs lost their strength. She put her face in her arms and wept: "Kief! Oh, Kief!" 'This love that had come to her was not the easy, pleasant thing the orchestrinos sang of. It was a kind of madness. She accepted that, and knew herself to be mad, yet could not change. Waking and sleeping, she could think only of Kief. Her grief had exhausted itself; her eyes were dry. She could see herself now as the others saw her -- as something strange, unpleasant, ill-fitting. What right had she to spoil their pleasure? She could go back to church, and spend another dazed time in the ovicle. "If you have these confusions again," the Priest had said. She could go every morning, if need be, and again every afternoon. She had seen one who needed to do as much, silly Marget Tailor who always nodded and smiled drooling a little, no matter what was said to her, and who seemed to have a blankness behind the glow of happiness in her eyes. That was years ago. She remembered the sisters always complained of the wet spots Marget left on her work. Something must have happened to her; others cut and stitched for the Weavers now. Or she could hug her pain to herself, scourge them with it, make them do something... She had a vision of herself running barefoot and ragged through the streets, with people in their doorways shouting, "Crazy Mary! Crazy Mary!" If she made them notice her, made them bring Kief back... k She stopped eating except ' when the other sisters urged her, and grew thinner day by day. Her cheeks and eyes were hollow. All day she sat in the courtyard, not weaving, until at length the other women's voices grew melancholy and seldom. The weaving suffered; there was no joy in the clan house. Many times Vivana and the others reasoned with her, but she could only give the same answers over again, and at last she stopped replying at all. "But what do you want?" the women asked her, with a note of exasperation in their voices. What did she want? She wanted Kief to be beside her every night when she went to deep, and when she wakened in the inoming. She wanted his arms about her, his voice murmuring in her ear. Other men? It was not the same thing. But they could not understand. IV Tphe Elders met in a long, low room with cream colored walls and beams of bone white. Behind a plain table of sanded, unpolished wood they sat in their starched white garments, and looked at her with their wrinkled dark faces, with their great dark eyes that were like an aged caricature of her own. "Please your ageships," said Vivana uncomfortably, "this is the matter of your youngest, Mary, who won't go back to work at the looms." She curtsied and sat down. "Won't go back to work?" asked the eldest, the crone Lauraone, with an incredulous lift of her hairless eyebrows. "Is she lick then?" Vivana bobbed up again. "Please your ageship, she's been to the Doctors. They said she tiras poorly and gave her a tonic, but she threw it away." There was an agitated stir among the Elders. Heads bent togther; eyes stared at Mary in disbelief and alarm. "Come closer, child," said Laura-one at last, beckoning with a clawed finger. Mary rose and walked to the table. "Now, then, tell me. Why won't you go back to work? Why did you throw the tonic the doctor gave you away?" "I won't work," she dared to say, "until they give me back Kief." The Elders looked at each other. "Kief? What is Kief?" "Kief is my lover!" she said. "He had to go back to the Mainland, but no one will listen. I have to be with him. Either let me go, or bring him back. That's all about it," she finished, and folded her arms across her breast. "But my dear child," said Laura-one, bending across the table, "if I understand what you are saying you feel you have a claim upon this Kief of yours, simply because he lay with you a night or two? Is that it?" Mary nodded. "But don't you see how absurd that is? What if all of us suddenly decided to feel the same way?" "Then each woman would have her man, and everyone would be happy!" answered Mary. "My dear, they are all happy now. Except you." At these words, Mary found herself unable to prevent the tears from flowing. She wept miserably, and could only sob, "He's mine. I want him! I want him!" The Elders looked at each other with faces of dismay. At a sign from Laura-one, Vivana led Mary away. "Sisters," said the eldest, when Mary was gone, 'here's a pretty pail of fish. What's to be done?" "The girl came from a bad egg," said Laura-two, tracing a round design on the table with her fingertip. "It's a pity. It happens sometimes. There was a madman when I was a child, I remember the women talking of it. Once I think I saw him: wild eyes, and he waved his arms. Some of the Chemist boys laughed, but he frightened me." "What was done with him, do you remember?" asked Ednathree. "No. I don't like to think of it." The others looked at each other. "We must help her if we can," said Laura-one. "Yes." "She's had no man since this Kief?" "It seems not." "If she had one or two, she'd soon see there's little difference." "That's true." "Let's think." The old heads leaned nearer across the table. t#Tut why do you want me " to make myself pretty?" Mary asked with dull curiosity. Mia bent over her with a tube of cosmetic, touching the pale lips with crimson. "Never mind, something nice. Here, let me smooth your eyebrows. Tut. how thin you've got! Never mind, you'll look very well. Put on your fresh robe, there's a dear." "I don't know what difference it makes." But Mary stood up and wearily took off her dress, thin and pale in the light. She put the new robe over her head, shrugged her arms into it. "Is that all right?" she asked. "Dear Mary," said Mia, with tears of sympathy in her eyes. "Sweet, no, let me smooth your hair. Stand straighter, can't you? How will any man -- " "Man?" said Mary. A little color came and went in her cheeks. "Kief?" "No, dear. Forget Kief, will you?" Mia's voice turned sharp with exasperation. "Oh." Mary turned her head away. "Can't you think of anything else? Do try, dear. For me. Just try." "All right" "Now come along, they're waiting for us." Mary stood up submissively and followed her sister out of the dormitory. I n bright sunlight, the women stood talking quietly and worriedly around the bower. With them was a husky Chemist with golden brows and hair. His pink face was good-natured and peaceful. He pinched the nearest sister's buttock and whispered something in her ear; she slapped his hand irritably. "Quick, here they come," said one suddenly. "Go in now. Gunner." With an obedient grimace, the blond man ducked his head and disappeared into the bower. In a moment Mia and Mary came into view, the thin girl hanging back when she saw the crowd and the bower. "What is it?" she complained. "I don't want -- Mia, let me go." '"No, dear. Come along. It's for the best, you'll see," said the other girl soothingly. "Do give me a hand here, one of you, won't you?" The two women urged the girl toward the bower. Her face was pale and frightened. "But what do you want me to -- You said Kief wasn't -- Were you only teasing me? Is Kief -- ?" The women gave each other looks of despair. "Go in, dear, and see, why don't you?" A wild expression came into Mary's eyes. She hesitated, then stepped nearer the bower. The two women let her go. "Kief?"' she called plaintively. There was no answer. "Go in, dear." She looked at them appealingly, then stopped and put her head in. A man's form lay waiting for her in the dimness. "Kief?" she said. The man sat up; strong hands caught her wrists, pulled her down. His eyes gleamed in the dimness; she caught the reek of his breath -- beer and fish. She gasped and began to struggle. "So, so," the man muttered, holding her body hard against him. "But you're not Kief! Let me go!" She kicked ineffectually, clawed at his face. The man grunted in surprise. When she screamed, he put his hand over her mouth. "Stop that!" he said, then cried out in pain -- she had bitten the meaty pad under his thumb. "'What's the matter with you?" Her limbs had turned weak She tried to get up, and this time the man's body rolled away from her. Outside the bower, anxious voices were calling. Weeping, Mary got to hands and knees, then struggled to her feet. "What's the matter with you?" the man's voice said again, in a tone of anger. She came out into the light, blinded by tears. Her robe was wadded somehow around her waist, and she could not see to pull it down. Bent over, tuggir.'i at the robe to cover herself, she walked past the blurred faces, the reaching hands. "Mary, wait -- " "Dear, what is it -- what did he do?" "She bit me!" came the man's indignant voice. "You fool, you must have been too rough." Somewhere up the slope, an orchestrino began playing. "If you would not be cruel, torment me no more. Do not deny me ever; let it be now or never. Give me your love, then, as you promised me before..." V T Ter ageship, Laura-one, the eldest Weaver, was pacing up and down the sea-wall promenade, knotting her fingers together in silent agitation. Once she paused to look over the parapet. Below her the wall dropped sheer to blue water. She glanced over at the blur of Porto, half concealed in the morning haze, and at the stark hills above with their green fur of returning vegetation. Her eyes were still keen. Halfway across the distance, she could make out a tiny dark dot moving toward the island. Footsteps sounded in the street below. In a moment Vivana appeared, holding Mary by the arm. The younger woman's eyes were downcast; the older looked worried and anxious. "Here she is, your ageship," said Vivana. "They found her at the little jetty, throwing bottles into the sea." "Again?" asked the old woman. "What was in the bottles?" "Here's one of them," said Vivana, handing over a crumpled paper. "Tell Kief the Fisher of the town of Porto that Mary Weaver still loves him," the old woman read. She folded the paper slowly and put it into her pocket. "Always the same," she said. "Mary, my child, don't you know that these bottles never can reach your Kief?" The young woman did not raise her head or speak. "And twice this month the Fishers have had to catch you and bring you back when you stole a launch," the old woman continued. "Child, don't you see that this must end?" Mary did not answer. "And these things that you weave, when you weave at all." said Laura-one, taking a wadded length of cloth from her apron pocket. She spread it taut and held it to the light. In the pattern, visible only, when the light fell glancingly upon it, was woven the figure of a seated woman with a child in her arms. Around them were birds with spread wings among the intertwined stems of flowers. "Who taught you to weave like this, child?" she asked. "No one," said Mary, not looking up. The old woman looked down at the cloth again. "It's beautiful work, but -- " She sighed and put the cloth away. 'We have no place for it. Child, you weave so well, why can't you weave the usual patterns?" "They are dead. This one is alive." The old woman sighed again. "And how long is it that you have been demanding your Kief back, dear?" "Seven months." "But now think." The old woman paused, glanced over her shoulder. The black dot on the sea was much nearer, curving in toward the jetty below. "Suppose this Kief did receive one of your messages. What then?" "He would know how much I love him," said Mary, raising her head. Color came into her cheeks: her eyes brightened. "And that would change his whole life, his loyalties, everything?" "Yes!" "And if it did not?" Mary was silent. "Child, if that failed, would you confess that you have been wrong? Would you let us help you?" "It wouldn't fail," Mary said stubbornly. "But if it did?" the older woman insisted gently. "Just suppose -- just let yourself imagine." Mary was silent a moment. "I would want to die," she said. 'T'he two elder Weavers looked at each other, and for a moment neither spoke. "May I go now?" Mary asked. Vivana cast a glance down at the jetty, and said quickly, "Maybe it's best, your ageship. Tell them -- " Laura-one stopped her with a raised hand. Her lips were compressed. "And if you go, child, what will you do now?" "Go and make more messages, to put into bottles." The old woman sighed. "You see?" she said to Vivana. Footsteps sounded faintly on the jetty stair. A man's head appeared. He was an island Fisher, stocky, dark-haired, with a heavy black mustache. "Your ageship, the man is here," he said, saluting Laura-one. "Shall I -- ?" "No," said Vivana involuntarily. "Don't. Send him back." "What would be the good of that?" the old woman asked reasonably. "No, bring him up, Alec." The Fisher nodded, turned and was gone down the stair. Mary's head had come up. She said, "The man -- ?" "There, it's all right," said Vivana, going to her. "Is it Kief?" she asked fearfully. The older woman did not reply. In a moment the blackmustached Fisher appeared again; he stared at them, climbed to the head of the stair, stood aside. Behind him, after a moment, another head rose out of the stairwell. Under the russet hair, the face was grave and thin. The gray eyes went to Laura-one. then to Mary; they stared at her, as the man continued to climb the steps. He reached the top, and stood waiting, hands at his sides. The black-mustached Fisher turned and descended behind him. Mary had begun to tremble all over. "There, dear, it's all right," said Vivana, pressing her arms. As if the words had released her, Mary walked to the Fisher. Tears were shining on her face. She clutched his tunic with both hands, staring up at him. "Kief?" she said. His hands came up to hold her. She threw herself against him then, so violently that he staggered, and clutched him as if she wished to bury herself in his body. Strangled, hurt sounds came out of her. The man looked over her head at the two older women. "Can't you leave us alone for a moment?" he asked tonelessly. "Of course," said Laura-one, a little surprised. "Why not? Of course." She gestured to Vivana, and the two turned, walked away a little distance down the promenade to a bench, where they sat looking out over the sea wall. Gulls mewed overhead. The two women sat side by side without speaking or looking at one another. They were not quite out of earshot. VI t tX s it really you?" Mary askX ed, holding his face between her hands. She tried to laugh. "Darling, I can't see... you're all blurred." "I know," said Kief quietly. "Mary, I've thought about you many times." "Have you?" she cried. "Oh, that makes me so happy. Oh. Kief, I could die now! Hold me, hold me." His face hardened. His hands absently stroked her back, up and down. "They sent me to talk to you," he said. "They thought you might listen to me. I'm supposed to cure you." "Of loving you?" Mary laughed. At the sound, his hands tightened involuntarily on her back. "How foolish they were! How foolish, Kief!" "Mary, we have only these few minutes," he said. She drew back a little to look at him. "I don't understand." "I'm to talk to you, and then go back. That's all I'm here for." She shook her head in disbelief. "But you told me -- " "Mary, listen to me. There is nothing else to do. Nothing." "Take me back with you. Kief." Her hands gripped him hard. "That's what I want -- just to be with you. Take me back." "And where will you live? In the Fishers' dormitory with forty men?" "I'll live anywhere, in the streets, I don't care -- " "They would never allow it. You know that, Mary." She was crying, holding him, shuddering all over. "Don't tell me that, don't say it. Even if it's true, can't you pretend a little? Hold me, Kief! Tell me that you love me." "I love you," he said. "Tell me that you'll keep me -- never let me go -- no matter what they say." He was silent a moment. "Ifi impossible." She raised her head. "Try to realize," he said. "Thia is a sickness, Mary. You must cure yourself." "Then you're sick too!" she said. "Maybe I am, but I'll get well, because I know I have to. And you must get well too. Forget me. Go back to your sisters and your weaving." "No, never," she said. "You must. Promise me, Mary." He held her tighter. "Do you understand? It's important to me. I must know, before I leave, that you'll let them cure you. Otherwise -- " "Otherwise?" "I couldn't bear it," he said. She put her cheek against his chest, gazing out across the bright ocean. "Let me just be quiet with you a moment," she said. '"I won't cry any more. Kief -- ?" "Yes?" "Is that all you have to say to me?" "It has to be all." His eyes closed, opened again. "Mary, I didn't want to feel this way. It's wrong, it's unhealthy, it hurts. Promise me, before I go. Say you'll let them cure you." She pushed herself away, wiped her eyes and her cheeks wth the heel of one hand. Then she looked up. "I'll let them cure me," she said. His face contorted. "Thank you. I'll go now, Mary." "One more kiss!" she cried, moving toward him involuntarily. "Only one more!" TTe kissed her on the lips, then wrenched himself away, and looking down to where the two women sat, he made an angry motion with his head. As they rose and came nearer, he held Mary at arm's length. "Now I'm really going," he said harshly. "Good-by, Mary.'" "Good-by, Kief." Her fingers were clasped tight at her waist. The man waited, looking over her head, until Vivana came up and took her arms gently. Then he moved away. At the head of the stairs he looked at her once more; then he turned and began to descend. "Dear, it will be better now, you'll see," said Vivana uncertainly. Mary said nothing. She stood still, listening to the faint sounds that echoed up from the stairwell: footsteps, voices, hollow sounds. There was a sudden stir, then footsteps mounting the stair. Kief appeared again, chest heaving, eyes bright. He seized both of Mary's hands in his. "Listen!" he said. "I'm mad. You're mad. We're both going to die." "I don't care!" she said. Her face was glowing as she looked up at him. "They say some of the streams are running pure, in the hills. Grass is growing there -- there are fish in the streams, even the wild fowl are coming back. We'll go there, Mary, together -- just you and I. Alone. Do you understand?" "Yes, Kief, yes, darling." "Then come on!" "Wait!" cried Laura-one shrilly after them as they fan down the stair. "How will you live? What will you eat? Think what you are doing!" Faint hollow sounds answered her, then the purr of a motor. Vivana moved to Laura-one's side, and the two women stood watching, stricken silent, as the dark tiny shape of the launch moved out into the brightness. In the cockpit they could make out the two figures close together, dark head and light. The launch moved steadily toward the land; and the two women stood staring, unable to speak, long after it was out of sight. Why was the Moan at peace when all the rest of the Solar System was at war? #tT had no idea," said the UN A representative as they stepped through the airlock hatch, "that the United States' lunar base was so big, and so thoroughly well equipped." "It's a big operation, all right," Colonel Patton answered, grinning slightly. His professional satisfaction showed even behind the faceplate of his pressure suit. The pressure in the airlock equalibrated, and they squirmed out of their aluminized protective suits. Patton was big, scraping the maximum limit for spacevehicle passengers, Torgeson, the UN man, was slight, thin-haired, bespectacled and somehow bland-looking. They stepped out of the airlock, into the corridor that ran the length of the huge plastic dome that housed Headquarters, U. S. Moonbase. "What's behind all the doors?" Torgeson asked. His English had a slight Scandinavian twang to it. Patton found it a little irritating. "On the right," the colonel answered, businesslike, "are officers' quarters, galley, officers' mess, various laboratories and the headquarters staff offices. On the left are the computers." Torgeson blinked. "You mean that half this building is taken up by computers? But why in the world... that is, why do you need so many? Isn't it frightfully expensive to boost them up here? I know it cost thousands of dollars for my own flight to the Moon. The computers must be -- " "Frightfully expensive," Patton agreed, with feeling. "But we need them. Believe me we need them." They walked the rest of the way down the long corridor in silence. Patton's office was at the very end of it. The colonel opened the door and ushered in the UN representative. "A sizeable office," Torgeson said. "And a window!' "One of the privileges of rank," Patton answered, smiling tightly. "That white antenna mast off on the horizon belongs to the Russian base." "Ah, yes. Of course. I shall be visiting them tomorrow." Colonel Patton nodded and gestured Torgeson to a chair as he walked behind his metal desk and sat down. "Now then," said the colonel. "You are the first man allowed to set foot in this Moonbase who is not a security-cleared, triplechecked, native-born, Government-employed American. God knows how you got the Pentagon to okay your trip. But -- now that you're here, what do you want?" Torgeson took off his rimless glasses and fiddled with them. "I suppose the simplest answer would be the best. The United Nations must -- absolutely must -- find out how and why you and the Russians have been able to live peacefully here on the Moon." P atton's mouth opened, but no words came out. He closed it with a click. "Americans and Russians," the UN man went on, "have fired at each other from orbiting satellite vehicles. They have exchanged shots at both the North and South Poles. Career diplomats have scuffled like prizefighters in the halls of the United Nations building..." "I didn't know that." "Oh, yes. We have kept it quiet, of course. But the tensions are becoming unbearable. Everywhere on Earth the two sides are armed to the teeth and on the verge of disaster. Even in space they fight. And yet, here on the Moon, you and the Russians live side by side in peace. We must know how you do it!" Patton grinned. "You came on a very appropriate day, in that case. Well, let's see now... how to present the picture. You know that the environment here is extremely hostile : airless, low gravity..." "The environment here on the Moon," Torgeson objected, "is no more hostile than that of orbiting satellites. In fact, you have some gravity, solid ground, large buildings -- many advantages that artificial satellites lack. Yet there has been fighting aboard the satellites -- and not on the Moon. Please don't waste my time with platitudes. This trip is costing the UN too much money. Tell me the truth." Patton nodded. "I was going to. I've checked the information sent up by Earthbase : you've been cleared by the White the Pentagon." "So?" "Okay. The plain truth of the matter is -- " A soft chime from q small clock on Patton's desk interrupted him. "Oh. Excuse  me. Torgeson sat back and watched as Patton carefully began clearing off all the articles on his desk: the clock, calendar, phone, and pipe rack, assorted papers and reports -- all neatly and quickly placed in the desk drawers. Patton then stood up, walked to the filing cabinet, and closed the metal drawers firmly. He stood in the middle of the room, scanned the scene with apparent satisfaction, and then glanced at his wristwatch. "Okay," he said to Torgeson. "Get down on your stomach." "What?" "Like this," the colonel said, and prostrated himself on the rubberized floor. Torgeson stared at him. "Come on! There's only a few seconds." Patton reached up and grasped the UN man by the wrist. Unbelievingly, Torgeson got out of the chair, dropped to his hands and knees and finally flattened himself on the floor, next to the colonel. For a second or two they stared at each other, saying nothing. "Colonel, this is embar -- ." The room exploded into a shattering volley of sounds. Qomething -- many somethings -- ripped through the walls. The air hissed and whined above the heads of the two prostrate men. The metal desk and file cabinet rang eerily. Torgeson squeezed his eyes shut and tried to worm into the floor. It was just like being shot at! Abruptly it was over. The room was quiet once again, except for a faint hissing sound. Torgeson opened his eyes and saw the colonel getting up. The door was flung open. Three sergeants rushed in, armed with patching disks and tubes of cement. They dashed around the office sealing up the several hundred holes in the walls. Only gradually, as the sergeants carried on their fevered, wordless task, did Torgeson realize that the walls were actually a quiltwork of patches. The room must have been riddled repeatedly ! He climbed slowly to his feet. "Meteors?" he asked, with a slight squeak in his voice. Colonel Patton grunted negatively and resumed his seat behind the desk. It was pockmarked, Torgeson noticed now. So was the file cabinet. "The window, in case you're wondering, is bulletproof." Torgeson nodded and sat down. "You see," the colonel said, "life is not as peaceful here as you think. Oh, we get along fine with the Russians -- now. We've learned to live in peace. We had to." "What were those... things?" "Bullets." "Bullets? But how -- " The sergeants finished their frenzied work, lined up at the door and saluted. Colonel Patton returned the salute and they turned as one man and left the office, closing the door quietly behind them. "Colonel, I'm frankly bewildered." "It's simple enough to understand. But don't feel too badly about being surprised. Only the top level of the Pentagon knows about this, And the president, of course. They had to let him in on it." "What happened?" Colonel Patton took his pipe rack and tobacco can out of a one of the pipes. "You see," he began, "the Russians and us, we weren't always so peaceful here on the Moon. We've had our incidents and scuffles, just as you have on Earth." "Go on." "Well -- " he struck a match and puffed the pipe alight -- "shortly after we set up this dome for Moonbase HQ, and the Reds set up theirs, we got into some real arguments." He waved the match out and tossed it into the open drawer. "We're situated on the Oceanus Procellarum, you know. Exactly on the lunar equator. One of the biggest open spaces on this hunk of airless rock. Well, the Russians claimed they owned the whole damned Oceanus, since they were here first. We maintained the legal ownership was not established, since according to the UN Charter and the subsequent covenants -- " "Spare the legal details! Please, what happened?" Patton looked slightly hurt. "Well... we started shooting at each other. One of their guards fired at one our guards. They claim it was the other way round, of course. Anyway, within twenty minutes we were fighting a regular pitched battle, right out there between our base and theirs." He gestured toward the window. "Can you fire guns in airless space?" "Oh, sure. No problem at all. However, something unexpected came up." "Oh?" "Only a few men got hit in the battle, none of them seriously. As in all battles, most of the rounds fired were clean misses." "So?" Patton smiled grimly. "So one of our civilian mathematicians started doodling. We had several thousand very-high-velocity bullets fired off. In airless space. No friction, you see. And under low-gravity conditions. They went right along past their targets -- " Recognition dawned on Torgeson's face. "Oh, no!" 'TPnat's right. They whizzed right along, skimmed over the mountain tops, thanks to the curvature of this damned short lunar horizon, and established themselves in rather eccentric satellite orbits. Every hour or so they return to perigee... or, rather, periluna. And every twenty-seven days, periluna is right here, where the bullets originated. The Moon rotates on its axis every twenty-seven days, you see. At any rate, when they come back this way, they shoot the living hell out of our base -- and the Russian base, too, of course." "But can't you..." "Do what? Can't move the base. Authorization is tied up in the Joint Chiefs of staff, and they can't agree on where to move it to. Can't bring up any special shielding material, because that's not authorized, either. The best thing we can do is to requisition all the computers we can and try to keep track of all the bullets. Their orbits keep changing, you know, every time they go through the bases. Air friction, puncturing walls, ricochets off the furniture... all that keeps changing their orbits enough to keep our computers busy full time." "My God!" "In the meantime, we don't dare fire off any more rounds. It would overburden the computers and we'd lose track of all of 'em. Then we'd have to spend every twenty-seventh day flat on our faces for hours." Torgeson sat in numbed silence. "But don't worry," Patton concluded with an optimistic, professional grin. "I've got a small detail of men secretly at work on the far side of the base -- where the Reds can't see -- building a stone wall. That'll stop the bullets. Then we'll fix those warmongers once and for all" Torgeson's face went slack. The chime sounded, muffled, from inside Patton's desk. "Better get set to flatten out again. Here comes the second j--lHt' Cordwainer Smith E. E. Smith, Ph.D. George O. Smith t C kilTU Jack Smith  XXxX J All in the Moy IF -- still on sale! And don't forget -- starting with theXXX They might not have been quite authentic, but they were really sincere. In fact, they were -- I "yX#"hen Bettycee saw what the men were doing at the spaceship her first reaction was characteristic. Oh! she thought. Tomcee shouldn't be helping. Not in his condition. Then the full significance of what they were up to hit her. She gasped, and listened for a moment to their incredible conversation. Panic-stricken, she squealed and, thankful for the adaptability of a truly human body, flattered for herself the six-foot long legs of an ostrichtoad. With huge strides she raced across the heathery slopes of Berlin and round the wooded base of the hill, New York, back to Bettyaye and Bettybee. She dropped down to her normal height and breathlessly gasped out the news. Bettybee blinked. "Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do!" she exclaimed indignantly. Bettyaye drew herself to her full height. She was, naturally, a tall blonde with greenish eyes, as all women have been since the human race began. But she was sterner and fiercer than the other two, and the staunchest upholder of the ancient Beliefs. "It's that filthy science of theirs, and that ridiculous Arrhenius theory," she said. "It leads them further and further into lies and other unrighteous things every day." Bettycee nodded, but she was herself. It had been her duty to tell the others about the men, of course. But she wished there had been some way of avoiding it. She knew only too well what it would lead to. She spoke timidly. "Perhaps -- well, it doesn't excuse the men for shifting things, of course, but I mean they could be right about a second spaceship, couldn't they? If it were bringing Somebody and his watt." "Somebody!" said Bettyaye impatiently. "That's the only part of the Beliefs you ever think about. Anyway, did anybody ever say anything about Somebody using a spaceship to come?" Bettycee shook her head miserably. Nobody ever had. "Watt can't be cured. Must be endured," said Betybee cryptically. "Well, all I meant was -- " began Bettycee. But she was wasting her breath. The other two had already gone. Ohe caught them up just as  they reached the spaceship. The men were well forward with their work by now. One instrument, made of twisted metal, was out on the grass, and they were just lifting another, consisting largely of shattered crystal, through the spaceship entrance. Bettyaye raised her voice to a scream. "How dare you! Put them back at once!" Tomaye looked at her haughtily. "We need both the telescope and the radar for observing the second spaceship." Tombee nodded. "That's a known scientific fact," he said. Bettycee blinked. Everybody inherits ancestral memory from Original-Betty and OriginalTom, of course; but at times Bettycee suspected that she had acquired more of it than other people had. She felt quite sure that a radar and a telescope ought to be a lot less crushed and broken than that if you were going to use them for observing things. Still, the men were scientists. So perhaps they liked to have scientific instruments around them while they worked, even if they couldn't really observe with anything but their eyes. Tomcee spoke gently. "We are doing this as much for the good of your sex as ours, really," he said. Bettycee's heart warmed for him. There he was -- still working much too hard for a man in his condition -- and yet he found time to be considerate and think of other people. Bettybee did not share her sentiments. She sidled up to Betty aye, then glared at Tomcee. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," she snapped. That anybody else had managed to speak at all so far was due only to the fact that Bettyaye had been choked into silence by indignation. Now she recovered a little. "The whole idea of a second spaceship is sheer blasphemy!" she screamed. "And taking things out of the one and only spaceship is sacrilege. Your pretended belief in this disgusting Arrhenius theory doesn't excuse either." Tomaye bristled, and did his best as a mere male to out-bawl her. "Old, discredited superstitions must always give way before the needs of scientific investigation!" he yelled. Tombee nodded solemnly. "That's a known scientific fact," he concurred. Bettycee groaned inwardly and tried to shut her ears to all of it. It had all been gone over so often before. Over and over and over again ever since the human race began. 'T'he women were Believers, holding fast to the ancient faith in a single, uniquely-created spaceship that had by divine command been sent from Original-Earth to Earth, in order to found the human race. And although it was Bettyaye that did most talking about it, Bettycee's belief in this was as deep and profound as anybody's. Indeed, among the ancestral memories that had been passed down to her was one quite distinct one about Original-Betty being on Original-Earth. And OriginalEarth, it seemed, had even had places on it called New York and Berlin and London; though they were not nice places like the real ones, but rather nasty spots full of piled-up stone and metal and noisy rushing machines. The men, however, refused to accept any of this. Strictly scientific, they were dedicated to the Arrhenius theory that space was filled with a number of lifespores, or ships, each with its own cargo of would-be flatteredones like Original-Tom and Original-Betty, that were driven onward by the pressure of light until by chance one of them crashed on a suitable planet. And really, thought Bettycee, although it's quite a stupid idea I don't see why the men shouldn't keep it if it amuses them. I really don't see why we've got to wait for Somebody to come with his watt before we stop quarreling about it. She blinked, realizing suddenly that the men had finished talking and were acting. They had shouldered the radar and telescope and were marching off with them through the trees across the heathery slope of Berlin towards the hill, New York. Bettyaye, white-faced from shock, took action herself. She left the side of the other women, ran round in front of the men and threw her arms wide, sacrificing half her body weight to gain extra spread. "Stop! In the name of the flattered-ones, stop!" The men marched forward. Bettyaye held her ground. Then a pointed piece of metal sticking out from the radar poked at the middle of her chest, forcing her to grow a hole to accommodate it. She squealed and wriggled aside. The men went straight on. As Bettyaye began to flatter herself the strongest vocal cords and longest tongue ever, Bettycee turned and ran off through the trees. She just couldn't bear to know what happened next. II A fter running for a while she slowed down, but she went on walking around on her own for a long time, trying hard not to think about anything. Then, gradually, she drifted back. After all, she had to know what had happened, however dreadful it was. She found Bettyaye and Bettybee standing before the Ship, talking. The men were nowhere to be seen. Bettyaye looked up as she approached, and spoke scornfully. "So there you are." "Time and tide wait for no man," said Bettybee. "Don't they?" said Bettycee. "No," snapped Bettyaye. "Do you realize that the men have already got the telescope and radar in place on the side of New York and we haven't even started our preparations yet?" "Oh," said Bettycee. She thought of something that had not occurred to her before. "What makes them feel so sure that a second spaceship is coming now?" Bettyaye snorted. "Tomaye claims to have seen something up there; and to know it's a ship just because it changed direction. According to him no inert object following a natural orbit ever does that, though how much he knows about it -- " "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names never hurt me," interrupted Bettybee. Bettyaye nodded. "You're right. It's a waste of time just telling each other what we think of them. We've got to do something." Bettycee blinked. "But -- but what can we possibly do?" Bettyaye glared at her. "Not everybody has spent their time in the woods sulking," she said. "We've got a plan." She began to speak more briskly. "You're the best of us at doing out-of-the-way flatterings, so you'd better play the would-be. Nobody knows how one should look, so it doesn't matter what shape you take so long as the men don't recognize you." Bettycee's head was beginning to whirl. "But why shouldn't they recognize me? I mean, Tomcee might -- " "Don't be stupid," snapped Bettyaye. "If they recognize you when you walk down to them we will have wasted our time pushing the observation dome up so that it shows above the top of New York. They'll know it's only the old one that's been shifted, not a new one that's just arrived." "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," said Bettybee. "Exactly!" Bettyaye nodded triumphantly. "And the more blissfully ignorant we can keep the men, thinking that a second ship and another would-be flattered-one have proved their Arrhenius theory, the bigger fools they will look." Bettycee started to understand what it was all about. "Oh!" she said. "Oh, but I think -- " "Well?" said Bettyaye ominously. "What do you think?" Bettycee gulped twice, and tried to find enough courage. But it was no good. She just couldn't say it. Not to Bettyaye's face. 'lA#'hen she wandered off into the woods for the second time she wasn't running away again. Not because she didn't want to, but because she knew it would be a waste of time. She'd been allowed this break only because everything was ready except the men. They, it seemed, were not expecting their second ship just yet, since they had left the telescope and radar and wandered off somewhere. Bettycee didn't know where they had gone, but she hadn't left the other two women very far behind when she heard the rumble of Tomaye's voice, and Tombee's assurance that that was a "known scientific fact." She turned aside. She didn't want to talk to those two now. When she saw Tomcee sitting alone in a little copse she told herself that she didn't want to talk to him either. But somehow she found herself walking up to him. He looked up and smiled as she sat down. "Hello, dear. I'm glad you've come. I've been wanting to talk to you about something." "Have you, darling?" "Yes. This thing that's going to happen to us soon." He blushed faintly. "Don't you think it's rather beautiful that two such things should occur at once? That, and the coming of a new race to this old planet Earth." Bettycee couldn't remember ' ever having felt so wretched before. Oh, the poor darling? He really believed it! It was too cruel. "Look, Tomcee," she began miserably. "Don't build your hopes up too much -- " "Why not?" Misery made Bettycee reckless. Frantically she tried to keep all thoughts of Bettyaye out of her mind. "Well, supposing -- I mean just supposing -- somebody was playing a trick on you." "A trick?" "Yes. Trying to make sometiling look as if it was so when it wasn't, just to alter your beliefs and things." Tomcee smiledtolerantly. "But that's the advantage of science, my dear. We don't have Beliefs. All our conclusions are based on the application of reasons to observable data. Nobody could play a trick like that" "Oh. But what if a -- " r T'omcee interrupted rather more forcefully than was usual for him. "Please let's leave that subject, my dear. We haven't a lot of time before the ship comes, and I want to talk about something sensible." "Sensible? But -- Oh, well all right." "Fine." Tomcee leaned back on his hands. "Now, flattery in the animal kingdom is random. A newly born flatterer flatters the first creature it meets. But only human children are allowed to flatter human beings." "Everybody knows that." "Certainly they do. But my point is that according to the Arrhenius theory the would-bes in a life-spore must be essentially human, whatever their shape." Bettycee was used to being sat upon, pushed around or ignored. But for the last hour she seemed to have been getting a far greater concentration of such treatment than usual. Her voice felt as if it was going to choke her. "What do you mean?" "Come, my dear," said Tomcee rather impatiently. "Surely it's obvious what I mean." "I suppose it is. You really do mean that you -- you'd let our babies and the would-bes in the second ship -- ?" Tomcee nodded, smiling. "I feel it would be a great gesture of hospitality." Then he blinked at her. "What's the matter? Don't you Hke the idea?" Like the idea? What was the matter with him? If there really had been a second spaceship goodness knows what the wouldbe flattered-ones on board might have been. Things with three heads, perhaps, or tentacles. And he would actually have taken advantage of the innocence and helplessness of his own children to let them flatter the horrors and turn into -- well, just anything ! Suddenly everything seemed to hit Bettycee at once. All the years of quarrel, quarrel, quarrel. Then the men taking things out of the Ship, and Bettyaye's silly, spiteful trick. And finally this suggestion from the man she loved and admired. The choking sensation was worse than ever now, and something seemed to burn inside her. Somehow she found herself on her feet, with no clear idea how she got there. Why! She thought with surprise, this is how Bettyaye feels all the time. And it's -- no, not nice exactly. But satisfactory. She glared down at her husband, and forced herself to speak gaily. "Why, whatever made you think I didn't like the idea?" she said. "It's grand. You go ahead and do it as soon as you get the chance." And she turned and ran away from him. Naturally, being Bettycee, now that she had made a move of her own and improved Bettyaye's plan beyond measure, she had not run more than a hundred yards before she found herself wishing that something would happen that would put a stop to the whole thing. In her present mood, though, it would have seemed the most incredible thing in the universe that any wish of hers should be granted. So when it happened she simply did not realize it. She was conscious only of a loud thrumming sound that seemed to come from far overhead. Ignoring it, she ran on. Ill Ty the time she got back to Bettyaye and Bettybee the new feeling that Tomcee had invoked had left her completely. She listened meekly and contritely while Bettybee commented sniffily about many hands making light work. She cringed while Bettyaye snapped agreement, and then demanded peremptorily, "Just what have you been up to?" "I -- I've only been talking to Tomcee," said Bettycee. Then she added hastily, "Oh, no, I haven't given anything away. In fact I might have improved things." And she spilled out the story of her husband's suggestion and her reply. Bettyaye seemed almost mollified. "Oh, well, that's all right. I suppose. Anyway, Bettybee and I have got the dome free so that you can get it to the top of the hill on your own. Now we two will go round and talk to the men. When you are ready push the dome up to where they can see it, and then come down to them and announce yourself as a would-be and -- " Bettycee was still wishing fervently that something would happen to stop all this. Vaguely, too, she was wishing what she had wished so often before, that something -- anything -- would stop Bettyaye talking. Yet even now, when both wishes were granted simultaneously, she was not aware of it at first. She only knew that suddenly her ears were being tortured by a thunderous roar, and that a circular patch of light was leaping at an impossible speed across the land. Ohe reached the shelter of  the nearest bush in the same fraction of a second as the other two women, and cowered with them for the heart-thud's time that the monstrous shadow took to pass over. But when th roar ceased abruptly she was the first on her feet, the first tfl see the brand-new spaceship that had landed on this side of New York, its sparkling observation dome raised high above the brow of the hill, where the men would plainly see it from the other side. Her initial reaction was a lightening heart. It was real! It had actually come! Tomcee was right and Bettyaye was wrong, wrong, wrong! That lady was not disposed to admit the fact so easily. She crawled out from under the bush took one look, and whimpered, "It's a trick the men are playing. It's got to be." Bettybee sat up and blinked. "Seeing's believing. The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Bettycee looked down at them. Seeing Bettyaye humiliated like this had done something to her. Somehow her chest seemed to be ten times its usual size, though she wasn't flattering a thing except her normal self. And the feeling that surged through her now wasn't even Bettyayish. It was something bigger, stronger and better. "Get up," she said. Bettyaye gaped at her. "What?" Bettybee shivered and crouched lower "Discretion is the better part of valor." "I don't care what part it is," she said. "Bettyaye, Tomcee and my family are in danger Now we've got to find out whether it's Somebody or a would-be in that ship. And if it's a wouldDe we've got to keep it from meeting the men until it's been found by a wild flatterer."" She turned and set off across Berlin, not bothering to look behind her. Bettybee followed immediately. Bettyaye hesitated, but not for long. The spaceship, when you got close to it, was a crude, rawlooking thing compared with the original one. There were no pretty-colored lichens growing out of its seams, no delicate purple and primrose ivies trailing over it. And its surface was just harsh, glaring metal without a single streak of warm, brown encrustation. The three women hid themselves in a small clump of trees to watch; flattering a few branches and leaves to give themselves extra cover. After a second or two a round hole opened in the side of the ship and something came out. Or, more accurately, some Thing came out IV Tt didn't have three heads, and there were no tentacles; but the very subtlety of its freakishness made it the more horrifying. In a lumpish sort of way it was shaped like a man. Two arms, two legs, a head. But it was nearly two inches too short for a true human male, and its coloring was utterly, revoltingly wrong. Blue eyes and bright red hair. As the Thing walked away from the ship there was a crackling sound, and a blue light flowed all around it. The grass at its feet steamed, then flamed, but the Thing walked on unharmed. The Thing started to walk away from the ship. As it did so Bettycee, partly recovered from her shock at its appearance, noticed a metal plate strapped to its shoulder. Ancestral memory flashed the word "radio" to her, but she had no idea wh it meant. Suddenly the plate spoke. "We'd better test the shockfield." The Thing answered grumpily from its mouth. "Do you have to test it every single time we land?" "It's there," said the plate, "For a purpose I like. To bum the ears off any bug predator that takes a fancy to wander in to the ship. And since regulations say it's to be tested, tested it's going to be." The Thing's mouth said, "I've got a feeling that if ever one of these tests fail it'll be the protective suit that doesn't work, not the field." As it spoke there came a crack ling sound and a blue light flowed up and out, enclosing the ship like an umbrella-top. Where the light touched the ground the grass steamed, then flamed. But the Thing just walked on. Betty whimpered, "What a nasty way for a spaceship to behave!" "It didn't hurt the would-be, anyway," said Bettycee. Having seen the Thing she put all thought of Somebody and his watt out of her mind. "Now," she said, "flatter up all the ugly things you can think of and -- oh!" Her stomach felt as if it were flattering a big stone and dropping right out of her. Tomaye and Tombee were coming over the top of the hill already, before she had had time to scare the would-be away, or anything! Almost she reverted to the old Bettycee, but she made herself keep calm. At least Tomcee wasn't here yet. The Thing began babbling nonsense out of its mouth. "Humanoids, you said. These people are genuine humans, or I've never seen any." The metal plate said, "Looks like it. But -- I don't know. Go carefully." Tomaye stopped in front of the Thing. "Welcome, wouldbe," he said formally. "Well -- uh -- hello," said the Thing from its mouth. "That's a known scientific fact," said Tombee. "Uh -- is it?" The Thing dropped its voice. "They talk galacspeak. They must be human. But something's screwy." "Yeah," said the plate. "Watch out about a hundred yards to your left. Three females coming out of some trees." "Dettycee was rather sur" prised. She didn't see how the plate knew, since it didn't have any eyes. She stopped just clear of the trees, and extended an arm to hold the other two women back. Until she found out where Tomcee was and what he was up to it was difficult to know what to do for the best. Tomaye said to the Thing cheerfully, "Don't worry. You won't have long to wait." "That's -- " began Tombee. "You, I know," said the Thing's mouth. "That's a known scientific fact." Tombee looked nonplussed. The plate said, "I'm beginning to remember something. How well did the hypno-course on space-history take on you?" "Not too well," said the mouth. "Nor on me. But I recall that back in the early days there was a wreck out this way somewhere. A married couple. Their pictures struck me when I learned about them what a well-matched pair they must have been. He was an out-planet ecologist and a thorough agnostic. She was a fundamentalist, out to bring the message to any new races that might be around." The Thing's mouth chuckled. "Nice recipe for a happy marriage. You reckon these are their descendants, degenerated into idiocy?" "Maybe. But -- watch out. Here comes another one." Bettycee had been trying to make sense of the Thing's queer duo-monologue. Now she gave up. Tomcee was coming over the top of New York. He was holding his arms straight out in front of him, and his hands were cupped. Bettycee's heart warmed for him so fiercely that she nearly sobbed. So that was why he had not been with Tomaye and Tombee. His time had come upon him. And she had not been there, and oh! she should have been. When a man first becomes a mother he needs above all to have his wife by his side. She stretched her neck a little so that she could look into his hands. There they were, the little darlings! Two of them, writhing their sweet green heads forward, blindly seeking something to flatter in the manner of babies since time began. Bettybee said abruptly, "As the twig is bent the tree will grow." nphe words pierced the warm glow of fatherhood that had been enveloping Bettycee and brought her back to reality again. She remembered with a swift surge of horror just why Tomcee was here. Fear almost choked her for the moment, and then she forced out a scream. "No! No, Tomcee darling. Please don't." He turned his head and blinked at her in surprise. "But I must, my dear. Remember, I didn't only make the promise to you, but to this poor, stray would-be as well. Have we the right to deprive it of its high destiny now?" The Thing had fallen back a couple of steps, and had been jerking its head from side to side as she and her husband spoke. Tomcee stepped towards it, arms extended. Bettycee screamed again. She knew he could not possibly get there in time. Tomcee 's babies were already lifting themselves up out of their mother's hands But despairingly, using every ounce of herself that she could spare, she swept upwards on enormous legs and leaped forward. The Thing screeched from its mouth and yelled from its plate. "So that's it!" And it jabbed a hand into its clothing and jerked out a metal tube. Something flattered thunder, and -- And then the universe went utterly, utterly mad. Madder than it had gone when the second ship turned up. Madder even than it had gone when that pseudohuman abortion had walked out of it. For, abruptly, one by one, everybody began to stop being there. Or, more accurately, they began to be everywhere at once. TT'irst poor Tomcee and his children went, great gobs of them flying outwards, and spattering all over New York. Then Tomaye followed, and Tombee, and Bettyaye and Bettybee -- Bettycee had never seen such a thing happen to anybody before, but instinctively she knew it must be quite unpleasant. Suddenly she was feeling more Bettyayish than ever she had. In mid-leap she switched substance from her legs to her arms. The thunder-flattering tube had finished with everyone else and was rising towards her. She snatched it and tossed it behind her, then whipped out an arm to cord-like proportions and wound it round and round the Thing. "You -- you beast!" she panted. "Why did you do that? You don't deserve to be flattered at all." The Thing's mouth began to scream. "Help! It's disarmed me. Turn the ship's guns on both of us before it changes me!" The plate said, "Don't panic, you fool. It's an adult. Only an unchanged young one can take you over." Bettycee took no notice of the noise. Now that she had got the Thing she wasn't quite sure what she wanted to do with it, but an inherent sense of justice made her feel that it ought to have something nasty happen to it after the way it had treated everybody else. With her spare arm she flattered the claws of a warrior beetle, and gave its nose a quick pinch. Its mouth yelled, "Hell! It's pulling me to pieces now. Get me out of here!" The plate said, "All right. I'll lift ship and yank you both up to me with the anti-grav. The shock-field will shake the brute off, and you'll be safe inside your protective suit." "Fine. Only hurry up." It was a shock to Bettycee when suddenly the ground start(effective with July issue) LLhH i brings you the finest in science fiction on't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His great new novel, Farnham's Freehold, takes you into a time where humanity has done its best to destroy itself -- and the survivors have built themselves a strange new life! The Silkie -- the story of a man whose heritage and training transcend humanity -- a creature whose one mission is to protect the human race, though he is no longer a part of it! And coming soon -- Fourth and greatest of the immortal "Skylark" stories, his memorable serials! Send in your order today and we will send you the next newsstand price. But act now! Use this order blank or order by letter -- but don't delay! I IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. # Yes, sendvne the next # issues of IF! I enclose #. I  New  Renewal Name  Address  City State Zip No # (Outside of N. and S. America add # for postage) ed to fall away beneath her. But she refused to let it show. "You needn't think you're going to frighten me into letting you go by playing silly tricks like this," she told the Thing crossly. "No?" said the Thing's mouth as they sailed upwards. "You of shock-field burning you up! You'll let go." "I won't," said Bettycee. And then she stopped, unconsciously tightening her grip. "What did you say?" The Thing seemed to be gettiny into a panic again now. "Hell, don't crush me to death. I didn't mean it -- I mean -- " Bettycee shook it to calm it. "Stop blethering. You said some"Yeah, sure. But -- " Bettycee gave a little squeal, and blanked her mind to the Thing's sputtering. I must be steady, she warned herself. I mustn't build my hopes up too high, or it will be such a letdown if I turn out to be wrong. But after all, the only reason we thought this Thing couldn't be him was because it is so ugly. Yet, if you come to think of it, OriginalTom never said he would be nice-looking. Tvesperately she tried to check. One -- how did it go? One, three -- or was it five? -- It was no use. Generations of being able to flatter up as many fingers as you liked had made counting forever a last art. Bettycee shook the Thing again. "Tell me the truth. Are you really Somebody, or aren't you?" "S -- somebody? What the heck do you mean?" a big enough number?" "Big enough -- ?" "Big enough to include number four, stupid!" The Thing, white-faced, gaped at her as if it had lost its senses. 'Well, sure it is. But -- " "Then you are Somebody," interrupted Betty, squealing with delight. "Oh! how marvelous. But why -- ?" At that moment they hit the shock-field. The blue light half blinded Bettycee, and the burning hurt more than she had expected; but when it was over she forgot it. Falling Earthwards she had to flatter a 'chute-seed so that she could land safely, of course; but she had enough of herself left over for a tiny voicebox with which to croon happily as she went down. V A s she dropped the last hun dred feet the Thing sat in the ship far above her, facing a slightly larger Thing as monstrously shaped and colored as itself. "Imitators!" it was saying angrily. "And you tell me the Council will only put the planet off limits? It ought to be dusted clean." The larger Thing spoke, oddly, in a voice just like the one that had come from the smaller ones plate. "Not worth the bother," it said. "They're no menace. "No menace? When they can imitate a man exactly, know ever ything that's in his brain?" "Only occasionally, when a once-in-a-thousand-years shipwreck happens. And they soon lose the start that gives them." "Yeah?" "Yes. Any human -- or fake human -- brain forgets things and falsifies memories. When the imitators breed their young, with no more humans around to copy, imitate their parents, taking over the distorted memories just as they are. Then they go through life adding further alterations, and pass them on in turn." "I see." "Sure. And that's not all of it. While the memories are going, character traits are going too by the same process. If a number of imitators copy the same man they start off alike. But after a few generations you have a group of differing individuals, one or two facets of the original's character." The smaller Thing nodded, and exhaled noisily. "Oh well, that's a relief." nphe ship went on and on. As it entered its second lightyear out from Earth, Bettycee relaxed against the bole of the tree from which she was ingesting bark and looked round at the rest of the human race. She wasn't quite herself again yet; but most of her was there. The others had done their best to pull themselves together as well, but large chunks of them had been blown too far away. Each of them was going to have to do quite a lot of eating before he or she could return to human form all at once. "All right," said Bettycee didactically, continuing a discussion that had been going on ever since she got back to Earth. "It's agreed then that the body of our knowledge be called Scientific Beliefs, or Believer's Science." Bettyaye had been concentrating on being a mouth and stomach and one small ear. Now she stopped gulping in the grass long enough to flatter up a voice-box. "The word Believers should be first." "For women," said Bettycee. "Believer's Science for women, Scientific Beliefs for men. And both sets of knowledge to be exactly the same. Now, about the Arrhenius theory -- " Tomaye had found himself a wriggly-ants nest. The speakingtongue that he flattered up quivered in sympathy with its hunting companion. "Ar -- Arrhenius unassailable -- c -- can't permit -- modifications -- " Tombee, wrapped around a piece of tree-stump that was really too large for him to consume in his present size, said, "Thas non scient'ficfac." Bettycee said, "Don't argue, please. I was the one who met Somebody, and he gave me a bilnumber four. And you all know what getting number four means." Everybody fell silent. Although nobody had wanted to think about it much in the old days the ancestral memory was still there, bright and clear. After Original-Betty had been flattered, Original-Tom had gone on indulging in love-play, darting away here and there pretending it did not want to be caught. Finally the three who had founded the male side of the human race had got it cornered. It had stood still, trembling ecstatically in anticipation. "So that's it," it had said. "What my wife would inevitably have called the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose." It had sighed. "Funny. I'd become resigned to the fact that arguments between Betty and me would never finish while we were alive. But I did think they'd end when we died. Now I suppose they will go on and on until Somebody comes and gives you creatures watt four -- " Tomaye's voice, though still jerky, was almost humble. "All r -- right. W -- what is the Scientific Belief about the Ar -- Arrhenius theory?" "Space is filled with lifespores pushed outwards by rays of light," said Bettycee. "But space is small enough for there to be only two spores, the one that founded the human race and the one that brought Somebody." "And if another spaceship comes?" "Then we'll run away and hide." U nimaginably far away, the smaller of the two Things in the ship was making fine adjustments to a series of vernier dials beneath a large screen. Suddenly a picture of the human race sprang into being. The Thing counted. "All there," it said. "Bits of them, anyway. Oh. well. Since they're harmless I don't begrudge it to them." Back on Earth, Tomcee snuggled up to his wife, cooing softly. Since he had taken the first, direct shot it would be many, many meals before he and his children could do much else but snuggle and coo. But his action was enough to remind Bettycee that there were other things for a leader to do besides recodifying Beliefs. "Now, about children," she said. "Children?" said Bettyaye. Bettycee nodded. "Some of us can only talk in certain ways, some of us talk too much, and some of us only want to argue. But there's one thing we can all do. We can all think wise and beautiful thoughts if we try. In future, any children that are born will not be allowed to flatter their parents immediately. They will be held off until their father and mother are quite, quite sure they are thinking the wisest and most beautiful thoughts they possibly can." Despite his limited resources Tomcee managed one word. "Nice." "Yes," said Bettycee complacently. "And I'm going to think of lots more ways of making things nice, too." Up till now Bettybee had been concentrating wholly on a tasty piece of fern-root, leaving discussion to others. This opportunity, though, was too good to miss. Hastily she began the necessary conversion. Aloft in the ship the picture on the screen was beginning to shrink and fade. The smaller Thing leaned closer to peer at it. "You know," it said, "Even now those brutes must remember something of the old quarrels. Wonder what sort of a life they are making for themselves these days?" F ar below Bettycee repeated herself dreamily. "Lots and lots of more ways of making things nice." Bettybee finished her new flattering. Hastily she appraised her fresh resources. Tongue, vocal cords, lungs. Yes, they were all there. Happily she gave forth. "And then," she chortled, "And then they all lived happily for ever and ever after. Yippee." The larger Thing scratched its chin thoughtfully. "What sort of a life those brutes are leading now?" it said. "I don't suppose we shall ever find out." And alas! poor Things, they Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! 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And they spend up to several hours on each assignment completed by a student... revising, correcting, and advising. The Famous Writers School is less than three years old. Its first students are not due to graduate until later this year. Yet, many have sold their writings to such varied publications as The Reader's Digest, Redbook, Popular Science , True Story. To select people with writing talent worth developing, the # Famous Writers have designed a revealing Talent Test. The coupon will bring you a copy, along with a brochure about the School. Your completed Test will be graded without charge or obligation by one of the School's instructors. If your Test indicates writing talent, you are then eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under absolutely no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport. Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have writing talent worth developing. Please mail me, without obligation, the Famous Writers Talent Test. 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In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-paqe Galaxy ,  I foreign postoge)  (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues  # # Issues  # # Issues (s' # Name City Address Zone State oaiaxy Galaxy is published in French and Italian. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille. This Edition is also published in Living Tape by Blind, Inc., Des Moines, lows. by Cordwainer Smith by Brian W. Aldiss by Richard Wilson by Wyman Goin by Robert Siilverberg by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy Subscribtion; (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. T. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. rpntering our quadrennial busi -- ' ness of electing an American president with the usual mixture of anticipation and dread, our thoughts are beginning to turn to politics. So, as you will observe beginning of page # of this issue, are the thoughts of sciencefiction writers. And of course, the kind of politics Wyman Guin is thinking about are rather remote in space and time from our own... they are, in fact, that long view of events that science fiction gives us better than any other form of reading ever committed to paper and print; because Guin's politicians are not merely other than Democrats and Republicans. They are other than human! But all too human in their approach to the serious problem of governing their world. A personal note might be in order here. As a natural consequence of having registered in one of America's two political parties in an area where the other party had long held a monopoly of election victories, I've spent most of my Novembers for the past few years either running for an office or helping some other candidates run for an office. As a result of this rather expensively obtained education. I would like to suggest a fact of political life that doesn't seem to be widely known. That is : In an election, hardly anyone votes for a candidate; what they actually go to the polls to do is to vote against his opponent. There are many reasons for this, but what seems to me to be the significant one is that American political parties don't really embody differing political philosophies; it is a matter of personality that brings the vote out. And of course, we are always quicker to express dislike than we are fondness... But if the parties are totally different... well, read Wyman Guin's story and see. be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes toMy. The Rosicrucians (not a religions organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centO' ries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teaching Write today for a free copy of me book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of oppor tunity for you. Address: Scribe H.C.H, ! Scribe H.C.H, I San Jose, California  Please send me the ree book. The Mastery I a Gye, which explains howl may learn to I use my faculties and powers of mind. ! Name -- ! Address Rosicrucians She was bom and bred to heal my IH -- in an age which had forgot the habit of sickness I Y ou already know the end -- the immense drama of the Ld Jestocost, seventh of his Bne, and how the cat-girl C'mell kutiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, kow the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, the Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'joan. It is even less likely tliat you know the other story -- the one behind D'joan. This story is sometimes mentioned as the matter of the "name#ms witch," which is absurd, because she really had a name. The ame was "Klaine," an ancient and forbidden one. Elaine was a mistake. Her birth, her life, her career were all mistakes. The ruby was wrong. How could that have happened? G o back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where #I things start. Bright it was. Red square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun. This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains. An-fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name. The lovely meaningless name was Meeya Meefla, where the lines of ancient roadways, untouched by a wheel for thousands of years, forever paralleled the warm, bright, clear beaches of the Old South East. The headquarters of the People Programmer was at An-fang, and there the mistake happened: A ruby trembled. Two tourmaline nets failed to rectify the laser beam. A diamond noted the error. Both the error and the correction went into the general computer. The error assigned, on the general account of births for Fomaltherapist, female, intuitive capacity for correction of human physiology with local resources." On some of the early ships they used to call these people witchwomen, because they worked unaccountable cures. For pioneer parties, these lay therapists were invaluable; in settled post-Riesmannian societies, they became an awful nuisance. Sickness disappeared with good conditions, accidents dwindled down to nothing, medical work became institutional. Who wants a witch, even a good witch, when a thousand-bed hospital is waiting with its staff eager for clinical experience... and only seven out of its thousand beds filled with real people? (The remaining beds were filled with lifelike robots on which the staff could practice, lest they lose their morale. They could, of course, have worked on underpeople -- animals in the shape of human beings, who did the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy -- but it was against the law for animals, even when they were underpeople, to go to a human hospital. When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them -- in slaughterhouses. It was easier to breed new underpeople for the job than it was to repair sick ones. Furthermore, the tender, loving care of a hospital might give them ideas. Such as the idea that they were people. This would have been bad, from the prevailing point of view. Therefore the human hospitals remained almost empty while an underperson who sneezed four times or who vomited once was taken away, never to be ill again. The empty beds kept on with the robot patients, who went through endless repetitions of the human patterns of injury or disease.) This left no work for witches, bred and trained. Yet the ruby had trembled; the program had indeed made a mistake; the birth-number for a 'lay therapist, general, female, immediate use" had been orderM uch later, when the story was all done down to its last historic detail, there was an investigation into the origins of Elaine. When the laser had trembled, both the original order and the correction were fed simultaneously into the machine. The machine recognized the contradiction and promptly referred both papers to the human supervisor, an actual man who had been working on the job for seven years. He was studying music, and he was bored. He was so cloM to the end of his term that h was already counting the days to his own release. Meanwhile he was rearranging two popular songs. One was The Big Bamboo, a primitive piece which tried to evoke the original magic of man. The other was about a girl, Elaine, Elaine whom the song asked to refrain from giving pain to her loving swain. Neither of the songs was important; but between them they influenced history, first a little bit and then very much. The musician had plenty of time to practice. He had not had to meet a real emergency in aU his seven years. From time to time the machine made reports to him, but the musician just told the machine to correct its own errors, and it infallibly did so. On the day that the accident of Elaine happened, he was trying to perfect his finger work on the guitar, a very old instrument believed to date from the prespace period. He was playing The Big Bamboo for the hundredth time. The machine announced its mistake with an initial musical chime. The supervisor had long since forgotten all the instructions which he had so worrisomely memorized seven long years ago. The alert did not really and truly matter, because the machine invariably corrected its own mistakes whether the supervisor was on duty or not. The machine, not having its chime answered, moved into a second-stage alarm. From a loudspeaker set in the wall of the room, it shrieked in a high, clear human voice, the voice of some employee who had died thousands of years earlier: "Alert, alert! Emergency. Correction needed. Correction needed!" The answer was one which the machine had never heard before, old though it was. The musician's fingers ran madly, gladly over the guitar strings and he sang clearly, wildly back to the machine a message strange beyond any machine's belief: Beat, beat the Big Bamboo! Beat, beat, beat the Big Bamboo fop me... ! Hastily the machine set its memory banks and computers to work, looking for the code reference to "bamboo," trying to make that word fit the present context. There was no reference at all. The machine pestered the man some more. "Instructions unclear. Instructions unclear. Please correct." "Shut up," said the man. "Cannot comply," stated the machine. "Please state and repeat, please state and repeat, please state and repeat." "Do shut up," said the man, but he knew the machine would not obey this. Without thinking, he turned to his other tune and sang the first two lines twice over: Elaine. Elaine, go cure the pain! Elaine, Elaine, go cure the pain! Repetition had been inserted as a safeguard into the machine, on the assumption that no real man would repeat an error. The name "Elaine" was not correct number code, but the fourfold emphasis seemed to confirm the need for a "lay therapist, female." The machine itself noted that a genuine man had corrected the situation card presented as a matter of emergency. "Accepted," said the machine. This word, too late, jolted the supervisor away from his music. "Accepted what?" he asked. There was no answering voice. There was no sound at all except for the whisper of slightly-moistened warm air through the ventilators. The supervisor looked out the window. He could see a little of the blood-black red color of the Peace Square of An-fang; beyond lay the ocean, endlessly beautiful and endlessly tedious. The supervisor sighed hopefully. He was young. "Guess it doesn't matter," he thought, picking up his guitar. (Thirty-seven years later, he found out that it did matter. The Lady Goroke herself, one of the chiefs of the Instrumentality, sent a subchief of the Instrumentality to find out who had caused D'joan. When the man found that the witch Elaine, was the source of the trouble she sent him on to find out how Elaine had gotten into a well-ordered universe. The supervisor was found. He was still a musician. He remembered nothing of the story. He was hypnotized. He still remembered nothing. The sub-chief invoked an emergency and Police Drug Four ("clear memory") was administered to the musician. He immediately remembered the whole silly scene, but insisted that it did not matter. The case was referred to Lady Goroke, who instructed the authorities that the musician be told the whole horrible, beautiful story of D'joan at Fomalhaut -- the very story which you are now being told -- and he wept. He was not punished otherwise, but the Lady Goroke commanded that those memories be left in his mind fct so long as he might live.) The man picked up his guitar, but the machine went on about its work. It selected a fertilized human embryo, tagged it with the freakish name "Elaine," irradiated the genetic code with strong aptitudes for witchcraft and then marked the person's card for training in medicine, transportaand release for service on the planet. Elaine was bom without being needed, without being wanted, without having a skill which could help or hurt any existing human being. She went into life doomed and useless. It is not remarkable that she was misbegotten. Errors do happen. Remarkable was the fact that she managed to survive without being altered, corrected or killed by the safety devices which mankind has installed in society for its own protection. Unwanted, unused, she wandered through the tedious months and useless years of her own existence. She was well fed, richly clothed, variously housed. She had machines and robots to serve her, underpeople to obey her, people to protect her against one another or against herself, should the need arise. But she could never find work; without work, she had no time for love; without work or love, she had no hope at all. If she had only stumbled int the right experts or the right authorities, they would hove altered or re-trained her. This would have made her into an acceptable woman; but she did not find the police, nor did they find her. She was helpless to correct her own programming, utterly helpless. It had been imposed on her at An-fang, way back at Anfang, where all things begin. The ruby had trembled, the tourmaline failed, the diamond passed unsupported. Thus, a woman was bom doomed, II M uch later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions: other women hate me. Men never touch me. I am too much me. I'll he a witch! Mama never towelled me. Daddy never growled me Little kiddles grate me I'll be a bitch! People never named me Dogs never shamed me Oh. I am a such me! I'll be a witch. I'll meike them shun me. They'll never run me. Could they even stun met I'll be a witch. Let them aU attac ma. They can only rack mo. Me -- I can hack me. I'U be a witch. Other women hate me. Men never touch me. I am too much me. I'll be a witch. The song overstates the case. Women did not hate Elaine; they did not look at her. Men did not shun Elaine; they did not notice her either. There were no places could have met human children, for the nurseries were far underground because of chancy radiation and fierce weather. The song pretends that Elaine began with the thought that she was not human, but underpeople, and had herself been born a dog. This did not happen at the beginning of the case, but only at the very end, when the story of D'joan was already being carried between the stars and developing with all the new twists of folklore and legend. She never went mad. ("Madness" is a rare condition, consisting of a human mind which does not engage its environment correctly. Elaine approached it before she met D'joan. Elaine was not the only case, but she was a rare and genuine one. Her life, thrust back from aU attempts at growth, had turned back on itself and her mind had spiraled inward to the only safety she could really know, psychosis. Madness is always better than X, and X to each patient is individual, personal, secret and overwhelmingly important. Elaine had gone normally mad; her imprinted and destined career was the wrong one. "Lay therapists, female" were coded to work decisively, autonomously, on their own authority and with great rapidity. These working conditions were needed on new planets. They were not coded to consult other people; most places, there would be no one to consult. Elaine did what was set for her at An-fang, all the way down to the individual chemical conditions of her spinal fluid. She was herself the wrong and she never knew it. Madness was much kinder than the realization that she was not herself, should not have lived, and amounted at the most to a mistake committed between a trembling ruby and a young, careless man with a guitar.) She found D'joan and the worlds reeled. Their meeting occurred at a place nicknamed "the edge of the world," where the undercity met daylight. This was itself unan unusual and uncomfortable planet, where wild weather and men's caprice drove architects to furious design and grotesque execution. "# laine walked through the  city, secretly mad, looking for sick people whom she could help. She had been stamped, imprinted, designed, born, bred and trained for this task. Ther was no task. She was an intelligent woman. Bright brains serve madness as well as they serve sanity -- namely, very well indeed. It never occurred to her to give up her mission. like the people of Manhome Earth itself, are almost uniformly handsome; it is only in the far-out, half-unreachable worlds that the human stock, strained by the sheer effort to survive, becomes ugly, weary or varied. She did not look much different from the other intelligent, handsome people who flocked the streets. Her hair was black, and she was tall. Her arms and legs were long, the trunk of her body short. She wore her hair brushed straight back from a high, narrow, square forehead. Her eyes were an odd deep blue. Her mouth might have been pretty, but it never smiled, so that no one could really tell whether it was beautiful or not She stood erect and proud: but so did everyone else. Her mouth was strange in its very lack of communicativeness and her eyes swept back and forth, back and forth like ancient radar, looking lor the sick, the nedy, and stricken, whom she had a passion to serve. How could she be unhappy? She had never had time to be hapoyIt was easy for her to think that happiness was something which disappeared at the end of childhood. Now and then, here and there, perhaps when a fountain murmured in sunlight or when leaves exploded in the startling Fomalhautian spring, she wondered that other people -- people as responsible as herself by the doom of age, grade, sex, training and career number -- should be happy when she alone seemed to have no time for happiness. But she always dismissed the thought and walked the ramps and streets until her arches ached, looking for work which did not yet exist. Human flesh, older than history, more dogged than culture, has its own wisdom. The bodies of people are marked with the archaic ruses of survival, so that preserved the skills of ancestors she never even thought about -- those ancestors, who in the incredible and remote past, had mastered terrible Earth itself. Elaine was mad. But there was a part of her which suspected that she was mad. Perhaps this wisdom seized her as she walked from Waterrocky Road toward the bright esplanades of the Shopping Bar. She saw a forgotten door. The robots could clean near it but, because of the old, odd, architectural shape, they could not sweep and polish right at the bottom line of the door. A thin hard line of old dust and caked polish lay like a sealant at the base of the doorline. It was obvious that no one had gone through for a long, long time. The civilized rule was that prohibited areas were marked both telepathically and with symbols. The most dangerous of all had robot or underpeople guards. But everything which was not prohibited, was permitted. Thus Elaine had no right to open the door, but she had no obligation not to do so. She opened it -- By sheer caprice. Or so she thought. This was a far cry from the "I'll be a witch" motif attributed to her in the later ballad. She was not yet frantic, not yet desperate, she was not yet even noble. That opening of a door changed her own world and changed life on thousands of planets for generations to come, but the opening was not itself strange. It was the tired caprice of a thoroughly frustrated and mildly unhappy woman. Nothing more. All the other descriptions of it have been improvements, embellishments, falsifications. She did get a shock when she opened the door, but not for the reasons attributed backwards to her by balladists and historians. S he was shocked because the door opened on steps and the steps led down to landscape and sunlight -- truly an unexpected sight on any world. She was looking from the New City to the Old City. The New City rose on its shell out over the old city, and when she looked "indoors" she saw the sunset in the city below. She gasped at the beauty and the unexpectedness of it. There, the open door -- with another world beyond it. Here, the old familiar street, clean, handsome, quiet, useless, where her own useless self had walked a thousand times. There -- something. Here, the world she knew. She did not know the words "fairyland" or "magic place," but if she had known them, she would have used them. She glanced to the right, to the left. The passerby noticed neither her nor the door. The sunset was just beginning to show in the upper city. In the lover city it was already blood-red with streamers of gold like enormous frozen flame. Elaine did not know that she sniffed the air; she did not know that she trembled on the edge of tears; she did not know that a tender smile, the first smile in years, relaxed her mouth and turned her tired tense face into a passing loveliness. She was too intent on looking around. People walked about their business. Down the road, an underpeople type -- female, possibly cat -- detoured far around a true human who was walking at a slower pace. Far away, a police ornithopter flapped slowly around one of the towers; unless the robots used a telescope on her or imless they had one of the rare hawk-undermen who were sometimes used as police, they could not see her. She stepped through the doorway and pulled the door itself back into the closed position. She did not know it, but therewith unborn futures reeled out of existence, rebellion flamed into coming centuries, people and underpeople died in strange causes, mothers changed the names of unborn Lords and starships whispered back from places which men had not even imagined before. Spaces which had always been there, waiting for men's notice, would come the sooner -- because of her, because of the door, because of her next few steps, what she would say; I  Ill aiid the child she would meet. (The ballad-writers told the whole story later on, but they told it backwards, from their own knowledge of D'joan and what Elaine had done to set the worlds afire. The simple truth is the fact that a lonely woman went through a mysterious door. That is aU. Everything else happened later.) At the top of the steps she stood, door closed behind her, the sunset gold of the unknown city streaming out in front of her. She could see where the great shell of the New City of Kalma arched out toward the sky; she could see that the buildings here were older, less harmonious than the ones she had left. She did not know the concept "picturesque," or she would have called it that. She knew no concept to describe the scene which lay peacefully at her feet. There was not a person in sight. Far in the distance, a firedetector throbbed back and forth on top of an old tower. Outside of that there was nothing but the yellow-gold city beneath her, and a bird -- was it a bird, or a large storm-swept leaf? -- in the middle distance. Filled with fear, hope, expectation and the surmisal of strange appetites, she walked downward. With quiet, unknown purpose.  t the foot of the stairs, nina flights of them there had been, a child waited -- a girl, about five. The child had a bright blue smock, wavy red-brown hair, and the daintiest hands which Elaine had ever seen. Elaine's heart went out to her. The child looked up at her and shrank away. Elaine knew the meaning of those handsome brown eyes, of that muscular supplication of trust, that recoil from people. It was not a child at all -- just some animal in the shape of a person, a dog perhaps, which would later be taught to speak, to work to perform useful services. The little girl rose, standing as though she were about to run. Elaine had the feeling that the little dog-girl had not decided whether to run toward her or from her. She did not wish to get involved with an underperson -- what woman would? -- but neither did she wish to frighten the little thing. After all, it was small, very young. The two confronted each other for a moment, the little thing uncertain, Elaine relaxed. Then the little animal-girl spoke. "Ask her," she said, and it was a command. Elaine was surprised. Since when did animals command? "Ask her!" repeated the little tiling. She pointed at a window ran. A flash of blue from her dress, a tv'inkle of white from her running sandals, and she was gone. Elaine stood quiet and puzzled in the forlorn and empty city. The window spoke to her, "You might as well come on over. You will, you know." It was the wise mature voice of an experienced woman -- a voice with a bubble of laughter underneath its phonic edge, with a hint of sympathy and enthusiasm in its tone. The command was not merely a command. It was, even at its beginning, a happy private joke between two wise women. Elaine was not surprised when a machine spoke to her. Recordings had been telling her things all her life. She was not sure of this situation, however. "Is there somebody there?" she said. Yes and no," said the voice. "I'm 'Travelers' Aid' and I help everybody who comes through this way. You're lost or you wouldn't be here. Put your hand in my window." "What I mean is," said Elaine, "are you a person or are you a machine?" "Depends," said the voice. "I'm a machine, but I used to be a person, long, long ago. A lady, in fact, and one of the Instrumentality. But my time came and they said to me, 'Would you mind if we made a machine print of your whole personality? It would be very helpful for the information booths." So of course I said yes, and they made this copy, and I died, and they shot my body into space with all the usual honors, but here I was. It felt pretty odd inside this contraption, me looking at things and talking to people and giving good advice and staying busy, until they built the new city. So what do you say? Am I me or aren't I?" "I don't know, ma'am." Elaine stood back. The warm voice lost its humor and became commanding. "Give me your hand, then, so I can identify you and tell you what to do." "I think," said Elaine, "that I'll just go back upstairs and go through the door into the upper city." "And cheat me," said the voice in the window, "out of my first conversation with a real person in four years?" There was demand in the voice, but there was still the warmth and the humor; there was loneliness too. The loneliness decided Elaine. She stepped up to the window and put her hand flat on the ledge. "You're Elaine," cried the window. "You're Elaine! The worlds wait for you. You're from Anfang, where all things begin, the Peace Square at An-fang, on old Earth itself!" "Yes," said Elaine. The voice bubbled over with enthusiasm. "He is waiting for you. Oh, he has waited for you a long, long time. And tlie little girl you met. That rras D'joan herself. The story has begun. 'The world's great age begins a new.' And I can die when it is over. So sorry, my dear. I don't mean to confuse you. I am the lady Pane Ashash. You're Elaine. Your number originally ended # and you shoudn't even be on this planet. All the important people here end with the numbers # and #. You're a lay therapist and you're in the wrong place, but your lover is already on his way, and you've never been in love yet, and it's all too exciting." Elaine looked quickly around her. The old lower town was turning more red and less gold as the sunset progresssed. The steps behind her seemed terribly high as she looked back, the door at the top very small. Perhaps it had locked on her when she closed it Maybe she wouldn't ever be able to leave the old lower city. T 'he window must have been watching her in some way, because the voice of the lady Pane Ashash became tender. "Sit down my dear," said the voice from the window. "When I was me, I used to be much more polite. I haven't been me for a long, long time. I'm a machine, and still I feel like myself. Do sit down, and do forgive me." Elaine looked around. There was the roadside marble bench behind her. She sat on it obediently. The happiness which had been in her at the top of the steps bubbled forth anew. If this wise old machine knew so much about her. perhaps it could tell her what to do. What did the voice mean by "wrong planet"? By "lover"? By "he is coming for you now," or was that what the voice had actually said? "Take a breath, my dear," said the voice of the lady Pane Ashash. She might have been dead for hundreds or thousands of years, but she still spoke with the authority and kindness of a great lady Elaine breathed deep. She saw a huge red cloud, like a pregnant whale, getting ready to butt the rim of the upper city, far above her and far out over the sea. She wondered if clouds could possibly have feelings. The voice was speaking again. What had it said? Apparently the question was repeated. "Did you know you were coming?" said the voice from the window. "Of course not." Elaine shrugged. "There was just this door, and I didn't have anything special to do, so I opened it. And here was a whole new world inside a house. It looked strange and rather pretty, so I came down. Wouldn't you have done the same thing?" "I don't know," said the voice candidly. "I'm really a machine. I haven't been me for a long, long time. Perhaps I would have, when I was alive. I don't know that, but I know about things. Maybe I can see the future, or perhaps the machine part of me computes such good probabilities that it just seems like it. I know who you are and what is going to happen to you. You had better brush your hair." "Whatever for?" said Elaine. "He is coming," said the happy old voice of the lady Pane Ashash. "Who is coming?" said Elaine, almost irritably. "Do you have a mirror? I wish you would look at your hair. It could be prettier, not that it isn't pretty right now. You want to look your best. Your lover; that's who is coming, of course." "I haven't got a lover," said Elaine. "I haven't been authorized one, not till I've done some of my lifework, and I haven't even found my lifework yet. I'm not the kind of girl who would go ask a Subchief for the dreamies, not when I'm not entitled to the real thing. I may not be much of a person, but I have some self-respect." Elaine got so mad that she shifted her position on the bench and sat with her face turned away from the all-watching window. The next words gave her gooseflesh down her arms, they were uttered with such real earnestness, such driving sincerity. "Elaine, Elaine, do you really have no idea of who you are?" Elaine pivoted back on the bench so that she looked toward the window. Her face was caught redly but the rays of the setting sun. She could only gasp. "I don't know what you mean..." The inexorable voice went on. "Think, Elaine, think. Does the name 'D'joan' mean nothing to you?" "I suppose it's an underperson, a dog. That's what the D is for, isn't it?" "That was the little girl you met," said the lady Pane Ashash, as though the statement were something tremendous. "Yes," said Elaine dutifully. She was a courteous woman, and never quarreled with strangers. "Wait a minute," said the lady Pane Ashash, "I'm going to get my body out. God knows when I wore it last, but it'll make you feel more at easy terms with me. Forgive the clothes. They're old stuff, but I think the body will work all right. This is the beginning of the story of D'joan, and I want that hair of yours brushed even if I have to brush it myself. Just wait right there, girl, wait right there. I'll just take a minute." I'he clouds were turning from dark red to liver-black. What could Elaine do? She stayed on the bench. She kicked her shoe against the walk. She jumped a little when the old-fashioned street lights of the lower city went on with sharp geometrical suddenness: they did not have the subtle shading of the newer lights in the other city upstairs, where day phased into the bright clear night with no sudden shift in color. The door beside the little window creaked open. Ancient plastic crumbled to the walk. Elaine was astonished. Elaine knew she must have been unconsciously expecting a monster, but this was a charming women of about her own height, wearing weird, old-fashioned clothes. The strange woman had glossy black hair, no evidence of recent or current illness, no signs of severe lesion in the past, no impairment evident of sight, gait, reach or eyesight. (There was no way she could check on smell or taste right off, but this was the medical check-up she had had built into her from birth on -- the checklist which she had run through with every adult person she had ever met. She had been designed as a "lay therapist, female" and she was a good one, even when there was no one at all to treat.) Truly, the body was a rich one. It must have cost the landing charges of forty or fifty planetfalls. The human shape was perfectly rendered. The mouth moved over genuine teeth; the words were formed by throat, palate, tongue, teeth and lips, and not just by a microphone mounted in the head. The body was really a museum piece. It was probably a copy of the lady Pane Ashash herself in time of life. When the face smiled, the effect was indescribably winning. The lady wore the costume of a byegone age -- a stately frontal dress of heavy blue material, embroidered with a square pattern of gold at hem, waist and bodice. She had a matching cloak of dark, faded gold, embroidered in blue with the same pattern of squares. Her hair was upswept and set with jeweled combs. It seemed perfectly natural, but there was dust on one side of it. The robot smiled, "I'm out of date. It's been a long time since I was me. But I thought, my dear, that you would find this old body easier to talk to than the window over there..." Elaine nodded mutely. "You know this is not me?" said the body, sharply. Elaine shook her head. She didn't know; she felt that she didn't know anything at all. The lady Pane Ashash looked at her earnestly. "This is not me. It's a robot body. You looked at it as though it were a real person. And I'm not me, either. It hurts sometimes. Did you know a machine could hurt? I can. But -- I'm not me." "Who are you?" said Elaine to the pretty old woman. "Before I died, I was the lady Pane Ashash. Just as I told you. Now I am a machine, and a part of your destiny. We will help each other to change the destiny of worlds, perhaps even to bring mankind back to humanity." Elaine stared at her in bewilderment. This was no common robot. It seemed like a real person and spoke with such warm authority. And this thing, whatever it was, this thing seemed to know so much about her. Nobody else had ever cared. The nurse-mothers at the Childhouse on earth had said, "Another witch-child, and pretty too, they're not much trouble," and had let her life go by. At last Elaine could face the face which was not really a face. The charm, the humor, the expressiveness were still there. "What -- what," stammered Elaine, "do I do now?" "Nothing," said the long-dead lady Pane Ashash, "except to meet your destiny." "You mean my lover?" "So impatient!" laughed the dead woman's record in a very human way. "Such a hurry. Lover first and destiny later. I was like that myself when I was a girl." "But what do I do?" persisted Elaine. The night was now complete above them. The street lights glared on the empty and unswept streets. A few doorways, not one of them less than a full street-crossing away, were illuminated with rectangles of light or shadow -- light if they were far from the street lights, so that their own interior lights shone brightly, shadow if they were so close under the big lights that they cut off the glare from overhead. "Go through this door," said the old nice woman. But she pointed at the undistinguished white of an uninterrupted wall. There was no door t all in that place. tTut there's no door there," said Elaine. "If there were a door," said the lady Pane Ashash, "you wouldn't need me to tell you to go through it. And you do need me." "Why?" said Elaine. "Because I've waited for you hundreds of years, that's why." "That's no answer!" snapped Elaine. "It is so an answer," smiled the woman, and her lack of hostility was not robot-like at all. It was the kindliness and composure of a mature human being. She looked up into Elaine's eyes and spoke emphatically and softly. "I know because I do know. Not because I'm a dead person -- that doesn't matter any more -- but because I am now a very old machine. You will go into the Brown and Yellow Corridor and you will think of your lover, and you will do your work, and men will hunt you. But you will come out happily in the end. Do you understand this?" "No," said Elaine, "no, I don't." But she reached out her hand to the sweet old woman. The lady took her hand. The txuch was warm and very human. "You don't have to understand it. Just do it. And I know you will. So since you are going, go." Elaine tried to smile at her, but she was troubled, more consciously worried than ever before in her life. Something real was happening to her, to her own individual self, at a very long last. "How will I get through the door?" "I'll open it," smiled the lady, releasing Elaine's hand, "and you'll know your lover when he sings you the poem." "Which poem?" said Elaine, stalling for time and frightened by a door which did not even exist. "It starts, 'I knew you and loved you, and won you, in Raima...' You'll know it. Go on in. It'll be bothersome at first, but when you meet the Hunter, it will all seem different." "Have you ever been in there, yourself?" "Of course not," said the dear old lady. "I'm a machine. That whole place is thoughtproof. Nobody can see, hear, think or talk in or out of it. It's a shelter left over from the ancient wars, when the slightest sign of a thought would have brought destruction on the whole place. That's why the lord Englok built it, long before my time. But you can go in. And you will. Here's the door." The old robot lady waited no longer. She gave Elaine a strange #a friendly crooked smile, half proud and half apologetic. She took Elaine with firm fingertips holding Elaine's left elbow. They walked a few steps down toward the wall. "Here, now," said the lady Pane Ashash, and pushed. Elaine flinched as she was thrust toward the wall. Before she knew it, she was through. Smells hit her like a roar of battle. The air was hot. The light was dim. It looked like a picture of the Pain Planet, hidden somewhere in space. Poets later tried to describe Elaine at the door with a verse which begin. There were brown ones and blue ones And white ones and whiter. In the hidden and forbidden Downtown of Qown Town. There were horrid ones and horrider In the brown and yellow corridor. The truth was much simpler. Trained witch, born witch that she was, she perceived the truth immediately. All these people, all she could see, at least, were sick. They needed help. They needed herself. But the joke was on her, for she could not help a single one of them. Not one of them was a real person. They were just animals, things in the shape of man. Underpeople. Dirt. And she was conditioned to the bone never to help them. She did not know why the muscles of her legs made her walk forward, but they did. There are many pictures of that scene. The lady Pane Ashash, only a few moments in her past, seemed very remote. And the city of Raima itself, the new city, ten stories above her, almost seemed as though it had never existed at an. This, this was real. She stared at the underpeople. And this time, for the first time in her life, they stared right back at her. She had never seen anything like this before. They did not frighten her; they surprised her. The fright, Elaine felt, was to come later. Soon, perhaps, but not here, not now. IV Oomething which looked like a middle-aged woman walked right up to her and snapped at her. "Are you death?" Elaine stared. "Death? What do you mean? I'm Elaine." "Be damned to that!" said the woman-thing. "Are you death?" Elaine did not know the word "damned" but she was pretty sure that "death," even to these things, meant simply "termination of life." "Of course not," said Elaine. "I'm just a person. A witch woman, ordinary people would call me. We don't have anything to do with you underpeople. Nothing at all." Elaine could see that the woman-thing had an enormous coiffure of soft brown sloppy hair, a sweat-reddened face and crooked teeth which showed when she grinned. "They all say that. They never know that they're death. How do you think we die, if you people don't send contaminated robots in with diseases? We all die off when you do that, and then some more underpeople find this place again later on and make a shelter of it and live in it for a few generations until the death machines, things like you, come sweeping through the city and kill us off again. This is Clown Town, the underpeople place. Haven't you heard of it?" Elaine tried to walk past the woman-thing, but she found her arm grabbed. This couldn't have happened before, not in the history of the world -- an underperson seizing a real person! "Let go!" she yelled. The woman-thing let her arm go and faced toward the others. Her voice had changed. It was no longer shrill and excited, but low and puzzled instead. "I can't tell. Maybe it is a real person. Isn't that a joke? Lost, in here with us. Or maybe she is death. I can't tell. What do you think, Charley-is-my-darling?" The man she spoke to steppea forward. Elaine thought, in another time, in some other place, that underperson might pass for an attractive human being. His face was illuminated by intelligence and alertness. He looked directly at Elaine as though he had never seen her before, which indeed he had not, but he continued looking with so sharp, so strange a stare that she became uneasy. His voice, when he spoke, was brisk, high, clear, friendly; set in this tragic place, it was the caricature of a voice, as though the animal had been programmed for speech from the habits of a human, persuader by profession, whom one saw in the storyboxes telling people messages which were neither good nor important, but merely clever. The handsomeness was itself deformity. Elaine wondered if he had come from goat stock. "Welcome, young lady," said Charley is my darling. "Now that you are here, how are you going to get out? If we turned her head around, Mabel," said he to the underwoman who had first greeted Elaine, "turned it around eight or ten times, it would come off. Then we could live a few weeks or months longer before our lords and creators found us and put us all to death. What do you say, young lady? Should we kill you?" "Kill? You mean, terminate life? You cannot. It is against the law. Even the Instrumentality does not have the right to do that without trial. You can't. You're just underpeople." "But we will die," said Charley-is-my-darling, flashing his quick intelligent smile, "if you go back out of that door. The police will read about the Brown and Yellow Corridor in your mind and they will flush us out with poison or they will spray disease in here so that we and our children will die." Elaine stared at him. The passionate anger did not disturb his smile or his persuasive tones, but the muscles of his eye-sockets and forehead showed the terrible strain. The result was an expression which Elaine had never seen before, a sort of selfcontrol reaching out beyond the lim.its of insanity. He stared back at her. She was not really afraid of him. Underpeople could not twist the heads of real persons; it was contrary to all regulations. A thought struck her. Perhaps regulations did not apply in a place like this, where illegal animals waited perpetually for sudden deatii. The being which faced her was strong enough to turn her head around ten times clockwise or counter-clockwise. From her anatomy lessons, she was pretty sure that the head would come off somewhere dur-i ing that process. She looked ai him with interest. Animal-typg fear had been conditioned out of her, but she had, she found, an extreme distaste for the termin-i ation of life under random circumstances. Perhaps her "witch" training would help. She tried to pretend that he was in fact a man. The diagnosis "hypertension : chronic aggression, now frustrated, leading to overstimulation and neurosis: poor nutritional record: hormone disorder probable" leapt into her mind. She tried to speak in a new voice. "I am smaller than you," she said, "and you can 'kill' me just as well later as now. We might as well get acquainted. I'm Elaine, assigned here from Manhome Earth." he effect was spectacular. Charley-is-my-darling stepped back. Mabel's mouth dropped open. The others gaped at her. One or two, more quickwitted than the rest, began whispering to their neighbors. At last Charley-is-my-darling spoke to her. "Welcome, my lady. Can I call you my lady? I guess not. Welcome, Elaine. We are your people. We will do whatever you say. Of course you got in. The lady Pane Ashash sent Va She has been telling us for h hundred years that somebody would come from Earth, a real person with an animal name, not a number, and that we should have a child named D'joan ready to take up the threads of destiny. Please, please sit down. Will you have a drink of water? We have no clean vessel here. We are all underpeople here and we have used everything in the place, so that it is contaminated for a real person." A thought struck him. "Baby-baby, do you have a new cup in the kiln?" Apparently he saw someone nod, because he went right on talking. "Get it out then, for our guest, with tongs. New tongs. Do not touch it. Fill It with water from the top of the little waterfall. That way our guest can have an uncontaminated drink. A clean drink." He beamed with a hospitality which was as ridiculous as it was genuine. Elaine did not have the heart to say she did not want a drink of water. She waited. They waited. By now, her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. She could see that the main corridor was painted a yellow, faded and stained, and a contrasting light brown. She wondered what possible human mind could have selected so ugly a combination. Cross-corridors seemed to open into it; at any rate, she saw illuminated archways further down and people walking out of them briskly. No one can walk briskly and naturally out of a shallow alcove, so she was pretty sure that the archways led to something. The underpeople, too, she could see. They looked very much like people. Here and there, individuals reverted to the animal type -- a horse-man whose muzzle had regrown to its ancestral size, a rat-woman with normal human features except for nylon-like white whiskers, twelve or fourteen on each side of her face, reaching twenty centimeters to either side. One looked very much like a person indeed -- a beautiful young woman seated on a bench some eight or ten meters down the corridor, and paying no attention to the crowd, to Mabel, to Charley-is-my-darling or to herself. "Who is that?" said Elaine, pointing with a nod at the beautiful young woman. Mabel, relieved from the tension wh'ch had seized her when she had asked if Elaine were "death," babbled "with a sociability which was outre in this environment. "That's Crawlie." "What does she do?" asked Elaine. "She has her pride," said Mabel, her grotesque red face now jolly and eager, her slack ' mouth spraying spittle as she spoke. "But doesn't she do anything?" said Elaine. Charley-is my darling intervened. "Nobody has to do anything here, lady Elaine -- " "It's illegal to call me 'lady,' " said Elaine. "I'm sorry, human being Elaine. Nobody has to do anytfiing at all here. The whole bunch of us are completely illegal. This corridor is a thoughtshelter, so that no thoughts can escape or enter it. Wait a bit! Watch the ceiling... Now!" A red glow moved across the ceiling and was gone. "The ceiling glows," said Charley-is my darling, "whenever anything thinks against it. The whole tunnel registers 'sewage tank: organic waste' to the outside, so that dim perceptions of life which may escape here are not considered too unaccountable. People built it for their own "They weren't here on Fomalsnapped Elaine. Why, she wondered, did she snap at him? He wasn't a person, just a talking animal who had missed being dropped down the nearest incinerator. "I'm sorry, Elaine," said Charley-is-my-darling. "I should have said, a long time ago. We underpeople don't get much chance to study real history. But we use this corridor. Somebody with a morbid sense of humor named this place Clown Town. We live along for ten or twenty or a hundred years, and then people or robots find us and kill us all. That's why Mabel was upset. She thought you were death for this time. But you're not. You're Elaine. That's wonderful, wonderful." His sly, tooclever face beamed with transparent sincerity. It must have been quite a shock to him to be honest. tC'ou were going to tell me  what the undergirl is for," said Elaine. "That's Crawlie," said he. "She doesn't do anything. None of us really have to. We're all doomed anyhow. She's a little more honest than the rest of us. She has her pride. She scorns the rest of us. She puts us in our place. She makes everybody feel inferior. We think she is a valuable member of the group. We all have our pride, which is hopeless anyway, but Crawlie has her pride all by herself, without doing anything whatever about it. She sort of reminds us. If we leave her alone, she leaves us alone." Elaine thought. You're funny things, so much like people, but so inexpert about it, as tiiough you all had to "die" before you really learned what it is to be alive. Aloud, she could only say, "I never met anybody like that." Crawlie must have sensed that they were talking about her, because she looked at Elaine with a short quick stare of blazing hatred. Crawlie's pretty face locked itself into a glare of concentrated hostility and scorn; then her eyes wandered and Elaine felt that she, Elaine, no longer existed in the thing's mind, except as a rebuke which had been administered and forgotten. She had never seen privacy as impenetrable as Crawlie's. And yet the being, whatever she might have been made from, was very lovely in human terms. A fierce old hag, covered with mouse-gray fur, rushed up to Elaine. The mouse-woman was the Baby-baby who had been sent on the errand. She held a ceramic cup in a pair of long tongs. Water was in it. Elaine took the cup. Sixty to seventy underpeople, including the little girl in the blue dress whom she had seen outside, watched her as she sipped. The water was good. She drank it all. There was a universal exhalation, as though everyone in the corridor had waited for this moment Elaine started to put the cup down but the old mousewoman was too quick for her. She took the cup from Elaine, stopping her in med-gesture and using the tongs, so that the cup would not be contaminated by the touch of an underperson. "That's right. Baby-baby," said Charley-is-my-darling, "we can talk. It is our custom not to talk with a newcomer until we have offered our hospitality. Let me be frank. We may have to kill you, if this whole business turns out to be a mistake, but let me assure you that if I do kill you, I will do it nicely and without the least bit of malice. Right?" Elaine did not know what was so right about it, and said so. She visualized her head being twisted off. Apart from the pain and the degradation, it seemed so terribly messy -- to terminate life in a sewer with things which did not even have a right to exist. He gave her no chance to argue, but went on explaining, "Suppose things turn out just right. Suppose that you are the Esther-Elaine-or-Eleanor that we have all been waiting for -- the person who will do something to D'joan and bring us all help and deliverance -- give us life, in short, real life -- then what do we do?" "I don't know where you get all these ideas about me. Why am I Esther-Elaine-or-Eleanor? What do I do to D'joan? Why me?" C harley-is-my-darling stared at her as though he could not believe her question. Mabel frowned as though she could not think of the right words to put forth her opinions. Baby-baby, who had glided back to the group with swift mouselike suddenness, looked around as though she expected someone from the rear to speak. She was right. Crawlie turned her face toward Elaine and said, with infinite condescension: "I did not know that real people were ill-informed or stupid. You seem to be both. We have all our information from the lady Pane Ashash. Since she is dead, she has no prejudices against us underpeoole. Since she has not had much of anything to do, she has run through ities for us. All of us know what most probabilities come to -- sudden death by disease or gas, or maybe being hauled off to the slaughterhouses in big police orinthopters. But the lady Pane Ashash found that perhaps a person with a name like yours would come, a human being with an oldname and not a number name, that that person would meet the Hunter, that she and the Hunter would teach the underchild D'joan a message and that the message would change the worlds. We have kept one child after another named D'joan, waiting for a hundred years. Now you show up. Maybe you are the one. You don't look very competent to me. What are you good for?" "I'm a witch," said Elaine. Crawlie could not keep the surprise from showing on her face. "A witch? Really?" "Yes," said Elaine, rather humbly. "I wouldn't be one," said Crawlie. "I have my pride." She turned her face away and locked her features in their expression of perennial hurt and disdain. Charley-is my darling whispered to the group nearby, not caring whether Elaine heard his words or not, "That's wonderful, wonderful. She is a v.-itch. A human witch. Perhaps the great day is here! Elaine," said he humbly, "will you please look at us." Elaine looked. When she stopped to think about where she was, it was incredible that the empty old lower city of Kalma should be just outside, just beyond the wall, and the busy new city a mere thirty-five meters higher. This corridor was a world to itself. It felt like a world, with the ugly yellows and browns, the dim old lights, the stenches of man and animal mixed under intolerably bad ventilation. Babybaby, Crawlie, Mabel and Charley-is-my-darling were part of fhi s world. They were real; but they were outside, outside, so far as Elaine herself was concerned. "Let me go," she said. "I'll come back some day." Charley is my darling, who was so plainly the leader, spoke as if in a trance: "You don't understand, Elaine. The only 'going' you are going to go is death. There is no other direction. We can't let the old you go out of this door, not when the lady Pane Ashash has thrust you in to us. Either you go forward to your destiny, to our destiny too, either you do that, and all works out all right, so that you love us, and we love you," he added dreamily, "or else I kill you with my own hands. Right here. Right now. I could give you another clean drink of water first. But that is all. There isn't much choice for you, human being Elaine. What do you think would happen if you went outside?" "Nothing, I hope," said Elaine. "Nothing!" snorted Mabel, her face regaining its original indignation. "The police would come flapping by in their ornithopter -- " "And they'd pick your brains," said Baby-baby. "And they'd know about us," said a tall pale man who had not spoken before. "And we," said Crawlie from her chair, "would all of us die J within an hour or two at the longest. Would that matter to you, ma'am and Elaine?" "And," added Charley-is-mydarling, "they would disconnect the lady Pane Ashash, so that even the recording of that dear dead lady would be gone at last, and there would be no mercy at all left upon this world." "What is 'mercy'?" asked Elaine. "It's obvious you never heard of it," said Cravlie. The old mouse-hag Babybaby came close to Elaine. She looked up at her and whispered through yellow teeth. "Don't let them frighten you, girl. Death doesn't matter all that much. not even to you true humana with your four hundred years oi to us animals with the slaughterhouse around the corner. Death is a when, not a what. It's the same for all of us. Don't be scared. Go straight ahead and you may find mercy and love. They're much richer than death, if you can only find them. Once you do find them, death won't be very important." "I still don't know mercy," said Elaine, "but I thought I knew what love was, and I don't expect to find my lover in a dirty old corridor full of underpeople." "I don't mean that kind of love," laughed Baby-baby, brushing aside Mabel's attempted interruptioii with a wave of her hand-paw. The old mouse face was on fire with sheer expressiveness. Elaine could suddenly imagine what Baby-baby had looked like to a mouse-underman when she was young and sleek and gray. Enthusiasm flushed the old features with youth as Baby-baby went on, "I don't mean love for a lover, girl. I mean love for yourself. Love for life. Love for all things living. Love even for me. Your love for me. Can you imagine that?" E laine swam through fatigue but she tried to answer the question. She looked in the dim light at the wrinkled old mousehag with her filthy clothes and her little red eyes. The fleeting image of the beautiful young mouse-woman had faded away; there was only this cheap, useless old thing, with her inhuman demands and her senseless pleading. Peoole never loved underpeople. They used them, like chairs or doorhandles. Since when did a doorhandle demand the Charter of Ancient Rights? "No," said Elaine calmly and evenly, "I can't imagine ever loving you." "I knew it," said Crawlie from her chair. There was triumph in the voice. Charley-is-my-darling shook his head as if to clear his sight. "Don't you even know who con"The Instrumentality," said Elaine. "But do we have to go on talking? Let me go or kill me or something. This doesn't make sense. I was tired when I got here, now." Mabel said, "Take her along." "All right," said Charley-ismy-darling. "Is the Hunter there?" The child D'joan spoke. She had stood at the back of the group. "He came in the other way when she came in the front." Elaine said to Charley-is-my darling, "You lied to me. You said there was only one way." "I did not lie," said he. "There is only one way for you or me or for the friends of the lady Pane Ashash. The way you came. The other way is death." "What do you mean?" "I mean," he said, "that it leads straight into the slaughterhouses of the men you do not know. The Lords of the Instrumentality who are here on FomFemtiosex, who is just and without pity. There is the Lord Limaono, who thinks that underpeople are a potential danger and should not have been started in the first place. There is the Lady Goroke, who does not know how to pray, but who tries to ponder the mystery of life and who has shown kindnesses to underpeople, as long as the kindnesses were lawful ones. And there is the Lady Arabella Underwood, whose justice no man can understand. Nor underpeople eitlier," he added with a chuckle. "Who is she? I mean, whfere did she get the funny name? It doesn't have a number in it. It's as bad as your names. Or my own," said Elaine. "She's from Old North Australia, the stroon world, on loan to the Instrumentality, and she follows the laws she was bom to. The Hunter can go through the rooms and the slaughterhouses of the Instrumentality, but could you? Could I?" "No," said Elaine. "Then forward," said Charleyis-my-darling, "to your death or to great wonders. May I lead the way, Elaine?" Elaine nodded wordlessly. The mouse-hag Baby-baby patted Elaine's sleeve, her eyes alive with strange hope. As Elaine passed Crawlie's chair, the proud, beautiful girl looked straight at her, expressionless, deadly and severe. The doggirl D'joan followed the little procession as if she had been invited. They walked down and down and down. Actually, it could not have been a full half-kilometer. But with the endless browns and yellows, the strange shapes d the lawless and untended underpeople, the stenches and the thick heavy air, Elaine felt as if she were leaving all known worlds behind. In fact, she was doing precisely that, but it did not occur to her that her own suspicion might be true. V A t the end of the corridor there was a round gate with a door of gold or brass. Charley-is-my-darling stopped. "I can't go further," he said. "You and D'joan will have to go on. This is the forgotten antechamber between the tunnel and the upper palace. The Hunter is there. Go on. You're a person. It is safe. Underpeople usually die in there. Go on." He nudged her elbow and pulled the sliding door apart. "But the little girl," said Elaine. "She's not a girl," Charley-ismy-darling. "She's just a dog -- as I'm not a man, just a goat brightened and cut and trimmed to look like a man. If you come back, Elaine, I will love you like God or I will kill you. It depends." "Depends on what?" asked Elaine. "And what is 'God'?" Charley-is-my-darling smiled the quick tricky smile which was wholly insincere and completely friendly, both at the same time. It was probably the trademark of his personality in ordinary times. "You'll find out about God somewhere else, if you do. Not from us. And the depending is something you'll know for yourself. You won't have to wait for me to tell you. Go along now. The whole thing will be over in the next few minutes." "But D'joan?" persisted Elaine. "If it doesn't work," said Charley-is-my-darling, "we can always raise another D'joan and wait for another you. The lady Pane Ashash has promised us that. Go on in!" He pushed her roughly, so that she stumbled through. Bright light dazzled her and the clean air tasted as good as fresh water on her first day out of the spaceship pxid. The little dog-girl had trotted in beside her. The door, gold or brass, clanged to behind them. Elaine and D'joan stood still, side by side, looking forward and upward. There are many famous painting of that scene. Most of the paintings show Elaine in rags with the distorted, suffering face of a witch. This is strictly unhistorical. She was wearing her everyday culottes, blouse and twin over-the-shoulder purses when she went in the other end of Clown Town. That was the usual time. She had done nothing at all to spoil her clothes, so she must have looked the same when she came out. And D'joan -- well, everyone knows what D'joan looked like. The Hunter met them. 'he Hunter met them, and new worlds began. He was a shortish man, with black curly hair, black eyes that danced with laughter, broad shoulders and long legs. He walked with a quick sure step. He kept his hands quiet at his side, but the hands did not look tough and calloused, as though they had been terminating lives, even the lives of animals. "Come up and sit down," he greeted them. "I've been waiting for you both." Elaine stumbled upward and forward. "Waiting?" she gasped. "Nothing mysterious," he said. "T had the viewscreen on. The one into the tunnel. Its connections are shielded, so the police could not have peeped it." Elaine stopped dead stiU. The little dog-girl, one step behind her, stopped too. She tried to draw herself up to her full he ght. She was about the same tallness that he was. It was difficult, since he stood four or five steps above them. She managed to keep her voice even when she said; "You know, then?" "What?" "All those thin.gs they said." "Sure I know them," he smiled. "Why not?" "But," stammered Elaine, "about you and me being lovers? That too?" "That too," he smiled again. "I've been hearing it half my life. Come on up, sit down and have something to eat. We have a lot of things to do tonight, if history is to be fulfilled through us. What do you eat, little girl?" said he kindly to D'joan. "Raw meat or people food?" "I'm a finished girl," said D'joan, "so I prefer chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream." "That you shall have," said the Hunter. "Come, both of you, and sit down." They had topped the steps. A luxurious table, already set, was waiting for them. There were three couches around it. Elaine looked for the third person who would join them. Only as she sat down did she realize that he meant to invite the dog-child. He saw her surprise, but did not comment on it directly. Instead, he spoke to D'joan. "You know me, girl, don't you?" The child smiled and relaxed for the first time since Elaine had seen her. The dog-girl was really strikingly beautiful when the tension went out of her. The wariness, the quietness, the potential disquiet -- these were dog qualities. Now the child seemed wholly human and mature far beyond her years. Her white face had dark, dark brown eyes. "I've seen you lots of times. Hunter. And you've told me what would happen if I turned out to be the D'joan. How I would spread the word and meet great trials. How I might die and might not, but people and underpeople would remember my name for thousands of years. You've told me almost everything I know -- Except the things that I can't talk to you about. You know them too, but you won't talk, will you?" said the little girl imploringly. "I know you've been to Earth," said the Hunter. "Don't say it! Please don't say it!" pleaded the girl. "Earth! Manhome itself?" cried Elaine. "How, by the stars, did you get there?" The Hunter intervened. "Don't press her, Elaine. It's a big secret, and she wants to keep it. You'll find out more tonight than mortal woman was ever told before." "What does 'mortal' mean?" asked Elaine, who disliked antique words. "It just means having a termination of life." "That's foolish," said Elaine. "Everything terminates. Look at those poor messy people who went on beyond the legal four hundred years." She looked around. Rich black-and-red curtains hung from ceiling to floor. On one side of the room there was a piece of furniture she had never seen before. It was like a table, but it had little broad flat doors on the front, reaching from side to side; it was richly ornamented with unfamiliar woods and metals. Nevertheless, she had more important things to talk about than furniture. S he looked directly at the Hunter (no organic disease; wounded in left arm at an earlier period; somewhat excessive exposure to sunlight; might need correction for near vision) and demanded of him: "Am I captured by you, too?" "Captured?" "You're a Hunter. You hunt things. To kill them, I suppose. That underman back there, the goat who calls himself Charleyis-my-darling -- " "He never does!" cried the doggirl, D'joan, interrupting. "Never does what" said Elaine, cross at being interrupted. "He never calls himself that. Other people, underpeople I mean, call him that. His name is Balthasar, but nobody uses it." "What does it matter, little girl?" said Elaine. "I'm talking about my life. Your friend said he would take my life from me if something did not happen." Neither D'joan nor the Hunter said anything. Elaine heard a frantic edge go into her voice, "You heard it!" She turned to the Hunter, "You saw it on the view screen." The Hunter's voice was serenity and assurance: "We three have things to do before this night is out. We won't get them done if you are frightened or worried. I know the underpeople, but I know the Lords of the Instrumentality as well -- all four of them, right here. The Lords Limaono and Femtiosex and the Lady Goroke. And the Norstilian, too. They will protect you. Charley-is-my-darling might want to take your life from you because he is worried, afraid that the tunnel of Englok, where you just were, will be discovered. I have ways of protecting him and yourself as well. Have confidence in me for a while. That's not so hard, is it?" "But," protested Elaine, "the man -- or the goat -- or whatever he was, Charley-is-mydarling, he said it would all happen right away, as soon as I came up here with you." "How can anything happen," I said little D'joan, "if you keep j talking all the time?" The Hunter smiled. I "That's right," he said. "We've talked enough. Now we must become lovers." Elaine jumped to her feet, "Not with me, you don't. Not with her here. Not when I haven't found my work to do. I'm a witch. I'm supposed to do something, but I've never really found out what it was." "Look at this," said the Hunter calmly, walking over to the wall, and pointing with his finger at an intricate circular design. Elaine and D'joan both looked at it. The Hunter spoke again, his voice urgent. "Do you see it, D'joan? Do you really see it? The ages turn, waiting for this moment, little child. Do you see it? Do you see yourself in it?" Elaine looked at the little doggirl. D'joan had almost stopped breathing. She stared at the curious symmetrical pattern as though it were a window into enchanting worlds. The Hunter roared, at the top of his voice, "D'joan! Joan! Joanie!" The child made no response. The Hunter stepped over to the child, slapped her gently on the cheek, shouted again. D'joan continued to stare at the intricate design. "Now," said the Hunter, "you and I make love. The child is absent in a world of happy dreams. That design is a mandala, something left over from the unimaginable past. It locks the human consciousness in place. D'joan will not see us or hear us. We cannot help her go toward her destiny unless you and I make love first." Elaine, her hand to her mouth, tried to inventory symptoms as a means of keeping her familiar thoughts in balance. It did not work. A relaxation spread over her, a happiness and quiet that she had not once felt since her childhood. "Did you think," said the Hunter, "that I hunted with my body and J.illed with my hands? Didn't anyone ever tell you that the game comes to me rejoicing, that the animals die while they scream with pleasure? I'm a telepath, and I work under license. And I have my license now from the dead lady Pane Ashash." Elaine knew that they had come to the end of the talking. Trembling, happy, frightened, she fell into his arms and let him lead her over to the couch at the side of the black-and-gold room. A thousand years later, she was kissing his ear and murmuring loving words at him, words that she did not even realize she knew. She must, she thought, have picked up more from the story-boxes than she ever realized. "You're my love," she said, "my only one, my darling. Never, never leave me; never throw me away. Oh, Hunter, I love you so!" "We part" he said, "before tomorrow is gone, but shall meet again. Do you realize that all this has only been a little more than an hour?" Elaine blushed. "And I," she stammered, "I -- I'm hungry." "Natural enough," said the Hunter. "Pretty soon we can waken the little girl and eat together. And then history will happen, unless somebody walks in and stops us." "But, darling," said Elaine, "can't we go on -- at least for a while? A year? A month? A day? Put the little girl back in the tunnel for a while." "Not really," said the Hunter, "but I'll sing you the song that came into my mind about you and me. I've been thinking bits of it for a long time, but now it has really happened. Listen." He held her two hands in his two hands, looked easily and frankly into her eyes. There was no hint in him of telepathic power. He sang to her the song which we know as I Love You and Lost You. I knew you. and loved you, and won you, In Kalma. I loved you, and won you, and lost you, my darling! The dark skies of Waterroclc swept down against us. Llghtnlng-lit only by our own love, my lovely! Our time was a short time, a sharp hour of glory -- We tasted delight and we suffer denial. The tale of us two is a bittersweet story. Short as a shot but as long as death. We met and we loved, and vainly we plotted To rescue beauty from a smothering war. Time had no time for us, the minutes, no mercy. We have Ipved and lost, and the world goes on. We have lost and have kissed, and have parted, my darling! Ail that we have, we must save in our hearts, iove. The memory of beauty and the beauty of memory... I've loved you and won you and lost you, in Kalma. His fingers, moving in the air, produced a soft organ-like music in the room. She had noticed music-beams before, but she had never had one played for herself. By the time he was through singing, she was sobbing. It was all so true, so wonderful, so heartbreaking. He had kept her right hand in his left hand. Now he released her suddenly. He stood up. "Let's work first Eat later. Someone is near us." He walked briskly over to the little dog-girl, who was still seated on the chair looking at the mandala with open, sleeping eyes. He took her head firmly and gently between his two hands and turned her eyes away from the design. She struggled momentarily against his hands and then seemed to wake up fully. She smiled. "That was nice. I rested. How long was it -- five minutes?" "More than that," said 'the Hunter gently. "I want you to take Elaine's hand." A few hours ago, and Elaine would have protested at the grotesquerie of holding hands with an underperson. This time, she said nothing, but obeyed: she looked with much love toward the Hunter. "You two don't have to know much," said the Hunter. "You, D'joan, are going to get everything that is in our minds and in our memories. You will become us, both of us. Forevermore. You will meet your glorious fate." The little girl shivered. "Is this really the day?" "It is," said the Hunter. "Future ages will remember this night." "And you, Elaine," said he to her, "have nothing to do but to love me and to stand very stiH. Do you understand? You will se tremendous things, some of them frightening. But they won't be real. Just stand still." Elaine nodded wordlessly. "In the name," said the Hunter, "of the First Forgotten One, in the name of the Second Forgotten One, in the name of the Third Forgotten One. For the love of people, that will give them life. For the love that will give them a clean death and true..." His words were clear but Elaine could not understand them. The day of days was here. She knew it. She did not know how she knew it, but she did. The lady Pane Ashash crawled up through the solid floor, wearing her friendly robot body. She came near to Elaine and murmured : "Have no fear, no fear." Fear? thought Elaine. This is no time for fear. It is much too interesting. A s if to answer Elaine, a clear, strong, masculine voice spoke out of nowhere ; This is the time for the daring sharing. When these words were spoken, it was as if a bubble had been pricked. Elaine felt her personality and D'joan mingling. With ordinary telepathy, it would have been frightening. But this was not communication. It was being. She had become Joan. Sh felt the clean little body in its tidy clothes. She became aware of the girl-shape again. It was oddly pleasant and familiar, in terribly faraway kinds of feeling, to remember that she had had that shape once -- the smooth, innocent flat chest; the uncomplicated groin; the fingers which still felt as though they were separate and alive in extending from the palm of the hand. But the mind -- that child's mind! It was like an enormous museum illuminated by rich stained-glass windows, cluttered with variegated heaps of beauty and treasure, scented by strange incense which moved slowly in unpropelled air. D'joan had a mind which reached all the way back to the color and glory of man's antiquity. D'joan had been a Lord of the Instrumentality, a monkey-man riding the ships of space, a friend of the dear dead lady Pane Ashash, and Pane Ashash herself. No wonder the child was rich and strange: she had been made the heir of all the ages. This is the time for the glaring top of the truth at the wearing sharing, said the nameless, clear, loud voice in her mind. This is the time for you and him. Elaine realized that she was responding to hypnotic suggestions which the Lady Pane Ashash had put into the mind of the little dog-girl -- suggestions which were triggered into full potency the moment that the three of them came into telepathic contact. For a fraction of a second, she perceived notliing but astonishment within herself. She saw nothing but herself -- every detail, every secrecy, every thought and feeling and contour of flesh. She was curiously aware of how her breasts hung from her chest, the tension of her belly-muscles holding her female backbone straight and erect -- Female backbone? Why had she thought that she had a female backbone? And then she knew. She was following the Hunter's mind as his awareness rushed through her body, drank it up, enjoyed it, loved it all over again, this time from the inside out. She knew somehow that the little dog-girl watched everything quietly, wordlessly, drinking in from them both the full nuance of being truly human. Even with the delirium, she sensed embarrassment. It might be a dream, but it was still too much. She began to close her mind and the thought had come to her that she should take her hands away from the hands of Hunter and the dog-child. But then fire came... VI F ire came up from the floor, burning about them intangibly. Elaine felt nothing... but she could sense the touch of the little girl's hand. Flames around the dames, games, said an idiot voice from nowhere. Fire around the pyre, sire, said another. Hot is what we got, tot, said a third. Suddenly Elaine remembered Earth, but it was not the Earth she knew. She was herself D'joan, and not D'joan. She was a tall, strong monkey-man, indistinguishable from a true human being. Shehe had tremendous alertness in herhis heart as heshe walked across the Peace Square at An-fang, the Old Square at An-fang, where all things begin. Shehe noticed a discrepency. Some of the buildings were not there. The real Elaine thought to herself, "So that's what they did with the child -- printed her with the memories of other underpeople. Other ones, who dared things and went places." The fire stopped. Elaine saw the black-and-gold room clean and untroubled for a moment before the green whitetopped ocean rushed in. The water poured over the three of them without getting them wet in the least. The greenness washed around them without pressure, without suffocation. Elaine was the Hunter. Enormous dragons floated in the sky herself wandering across a hill, singing with love and yearning. She had the Hunter's own mind, his own memory. The dragon sensed him, and flew down. The enormous reptilian wings were more beautiful than a sunset, more delicate than orchids. Their beat in the air was as gentle as the breath of a baby. She was not only Hunter but dragon too; she felt the minds meeting and the dragon d#ring in bliss, in joy. Somehow the water was gone. So too were D'joan and the Hunter. She was not in the room. She was taut, tired, worried Elaine, looking down a nameless street for hopeless destinations. She had to do things which could never be done. The wrong me, the wrong time, the wrong place -- and I'm alone, I'm alone, I'm alone, her mind screamed. The room was back again ; so too were the hands of tiie Hunter and the little girl. Mist began rising -- Another I'ream? thought Elaine. Aren't we done? But there was another voice somewhere, a voice which grated like the rasp of a saw cutting through bone, like the grind of a broken machine still working at ruinous top speed. It was an evil Perhaps this really was the "death" which the tunnel underpeople had mistaken her for. The Hunter's hand released hers. She let go of D'joan. There was a strange woman in the room. She wore the baldric of authority and the leotards of a traveler. Elaine stared at her. tt"ou'll be punished," said  the terrible voice, which now was coming out of the woman. "Wh -- wh -- what?" stammered Elaine. "You're conditioning an underperson without authority. I don't know who you are, but the Hunter should know better. The animal will have to die, of course," said the woman, looking at little D'joan. Hunter muttered, half in greeting to the stranger, half in explanation to Elaine, as though he did not know what else to say: "Lady Arabella Underwood." Elaine could not bow to her, though she wanted to. The surprise came from the little dog girl. I am youT sister Joan, she said, and no animal to you.  The lady Arabella seemed to have trouble hearing. (Elaine I herself could not tell whether I she was hearing spoken words or taking the message with her mind.) I am Joan and I love you. The lady Arabella shook herself as though water had splash' ed on her. "Of course you're Joan. You love me. And I love you." . People and underpeople meet on the terms of love. "Love. Love, of course. You're I a good little girl. And so right." You will forget me, said Joan, until we meet and love again. "Yes, darling. Good-by for  now." i At last D'joan did use words.  She spoke to the Hunter and Elaine, saying, "It is finished. I know who I am and what I must , do. Elaine had better come with me. We will see you soon. Hunter -- if we live." Elaine looked at the Lady Arabella who stood stock still, staring like a blind women. The Hunter nodded at Elaine with his wise, kind, rueful smile. The little girl led Elaine down, down, down to the door which led back to the tunnel of Englok. Just as they went through the brass door, Elaine heard the voice of the Lady Arabella say to the Hunter : "What are you doing here all by yourself? The room smells funny. Have you had animals here? Have you killed something?" "Yes, ma'am," said the Hunter as D'joan and Elaine stepped through the door. "What?" cried the Lady Arabella. Hunter must have raised his voice to a point of penetrating emphasis because he wanted the other two to hear him, too: "I have killed, ma'am," he said, "as always -- with love. This time it was a system." They slipped through the door while the Lady Arabella's protesting voice, heavy with authority and inquiry, was still sweeping against the Hunter. Joan led. Her body was the body of a pretty child, but her personality was the full awakening of all the underpeople who had been imprinted on her. Elaine could not understand it, because Joan was still the little dog-girl, but Joan was now also Elaine, also Hunter. There was no doubt about their movement; the child, no longer an undergirl, led the way and Elaine, human or not, followed. The door closed behind them. They were back in the brownand-yellow corridor. Most of the underpeople were awaiting them. Dozens stared at them. The heavy animalhuman smells (rf the old tunnel rolled against them like thick, slow waves. Elaine felt the beginning of a headache at her temples, but she was much too alert to care. For a moment, D'joan and Elaine confronted the underpeople. TVTost of you have seen paintings or theatricals based upon this scene. The most famous of all is, beyond doubt, the fantastic "one-line drawing" of San Shigonanda -- the board of the background almost uniformly gray, with a hint of brown and yellow on the left, a hint of black and red on the right, and in the center the strange white line, almost a smear of paint, which somehow suggests the bewildered girl Elaine and the doom-blessed child Joan. Charley-is-my-darling was, of course, the first to find his voice. (Elaine did not notice him as a goat-man any more. He seemed an earnest, friendly man of middle age, fighting poor health and an uncertain life with great courage. She now found his smile persuasive and charming. Why, thought Elaine, didn't I see him that way before? Have I changed?) Charley 's my darling had spoken before Elaine found her wits. "He did it. Are you D'joan?" "Am I D'jcan?" said the child, asking the crowd of deformed, weird people in the tunnel. "Do you think I am D'joan?" "No! No! You are the lady who was promised -- you are the bridge-to-man," cried a tall yellow-haired old woman, whom Elaine could not remember seeing before. The woman flung herself to her knees in front of the child, and tried to get D'joan's hand. The child held her hands away, quietly, but firmly, so the woman buried her face in the child's skirt and wept. "I am Joan," said the child, , "and I am dog no more. You are people now, people, and if you die with me, you will die men. Isn't that better than it has ever been before? And you, Ruthia," said she to the woman at her feet, "stand up and stop crying. Be glad. These are the days that I shall be with you. I know your children were all taken away and killed, Ruthie, and I am sorry. I cannot bring them back. But I give you womanhood. I have even made a person out of Elaine." "Who are you?" said Charleyxs-my-darling. "Who are you?" "I'm the little girl you put out to live or died an hour ago. But now I am Joan, not D'joan, and I bring you a weapon. You are women. You are men. You are people. You can use the weapon." 'What weapon?" The voice was Crawlie's, from about the third row of spectators. "Life and life-with," said the child Joan. "Don't be a fool," said Crawlie. "What's the weapon? Don't give us words. We've had words and death ever since the world of undefpeople began. That's what people give us -- good words, fine principles and cold murder,, year after year, generation after generation. Don't tell me I'm a person -- I'm not. I'm a bi.son and I know it. An animal fixed up to look like a person. Give me a something to kill with. Let me die fighting." Little Joan looked incongruous in her young body and Short stature, still wearing the little blue smock in which Elaine had first seen her. She commanded the rpom. She lifted her hand and the buzz of low voices, which had started while Crawlie was yelling, dropped off to silence again. "Crawlie," she said, in a voice that carried all the way down the hall, "peace be with you in the everlasting now." Crawlie scowled. She did have the grace to look puzzled at Joan's message to her, but she did not speak. "Don't talk to me, dear people," said little Joan. "Get used to me first. I bring you life-with. It's more than love. Love's a hard, sad, dirty word, a cold word, an old word. It says too much and it promises too little. I bring you something much bigger than love. If you're alive, you're alive. If you're alive-with, then you know the other life is there too -- both of you, any of you, all of you. Don't do anything. Don't grab, don't clench, don't possess. Just be. That's the weapon. There's not a flame or a gun or a poison that can stop it." "I want to believe you," said Mable, "but I don't know how to." "Don't believe me," said little Joan. "Just wait and let things happen. Let me through, good people. I have to sleep for a while. Elaine wiU watch me while I sleep and when I get up, I will tell you why you are underpeople no longer." Joan started to move forward -- A wild ululating screech split the corridor. Tveryone looked around to see where it came from. It was almost like the shriek of a fighting bird, but the sound came from among them. Elaine saw it first. Crawlie had a knife and just as the cry ended, she flung herself on Joan. Child and woman fell on the floor, their dresses a tangle. The large hand rose up twice with the knife, and the second time it came up red. From the hot shocking burn in her side, Elaine knew that she must herself have taken' one of the stabs. She could not tell whether Joan was still living. The undermen pulled Crawlie off the child. Crawlie was white with rage, "Words, words, words. She'll kill us all with her words." A large, fat man with the muzzle of a bear on the front of an otherwise human-looking head and body, stepped around the man who held Crawlie. He gave her one tremendous slap. She dropped to the floor unconscious. The knife, stained with blood, fell on the old worn carpet. (Elaine thought automatically : restorative for her later; check neck vertebrae; no problem of bleeding.) For the first time in her life, Elaine functioned as a wholly efficient witch. She helped the people pull the clothing from little Joan. The tiny body, with the heavy purple-dark blood pumping out from just below the rib-cage, looked hurt and fragile. Elaine reached in her left handbag. She had a surgical radar pen. She held it to her eye and looked through the flesh, up and down the wound. The peritoneum was punctured, the liver cut, the upper folds of the large intestine vere perforated in two places. When she saw this, she knew what to do. She brushed the bystanders aside and got to work. First she glued up the cuts from the inside out, starting with the damage to the liver. Each touch of the organic adhesive was preceded by a tiny spray of re-coding powder, designed to reinforce the capacity of the injured organ to restore itself. The probing, pressing, squeezing, took eleven minutes. Before it was finished, Joan had awakened, and was murmuring ; "Am I dying?" "Not at all," said Elaine, "unless these human medicines poison your dog blood." "Who did it?" "Crawlie." "Why?" said the child. "Why? Is she hurt too? Where is she?" "Not as hurt as she is going to be," said the goat-man, Charleyis-my-darling. "If she lives, we'll fix her up and try her and put her to death." "No, you won't," said Joan. "You're going to love her. You must." The goat-man looked bewildered. He turned in his perplexity to Elaine. "Better have a look at Crawlie," said he. "Maybe Orson killed her with that slap. He's a bear, you know." "So I saw," said Elaine, drily. What did the man think that thing looked like, a hummingbird? She walked over to the body of Crawlie. As soon as she touched the shoulders, she knew that she was in for trouble. The outer appearances were human, but the musculature beneath was not. She suspected that the laboratories had left Crawlie terribly strong, keeping the buffalo strength and obstinacy for some remote industrial reason of their own. She took out a brainlink, a close-range telepathic hookup which worked only briefly and slightly, to see if the mind still functioned. As she reached for Crawlie's head to attach it, the unconscious girl sprang suddenly to life, jumped to her feet and said: "No, you don't! you don't peep me, you dirty human!" "Crawlie, stand still." "Don't boss me, you monster!" "Crawlie, that's a bad thing to say." It was eerie to hear such a commanding voice coming from the throat and mouth of a small child. Small she might have been, but Joan commanded the scene. "I don't care what I say. You all hate me." "That's not true, Crawlie." "You're a dog and now you're a person. You're born a traitor. Dogs have always sided with people. You hated me even before you went into that room and changed into something else. Now you are going to kill us all." "We may die, Crawlie, but I won't do it." "Well, you hate me, anyhow. You've always hated me." "You may not believe it," said Joan, "but I've always loved you. You were the prettiest woman in our whole corridor." rawlie laughed. The sound ''gave Elaine gooseflesh. "Suppose I believed it. How could I live if I thought that people loved me? If I believed you, I would have to tear myself to pieces, to break my brains on the wall, to do -- " The laughter changed to sobs, but Crawlie managed to resume talking: "You things are so stupid that you don't even know that you're monsters. You're not people. You never will be people. I'm one of you myself. I'm honest enough to admit what I am. We're dirt, we're nothing, we're things that are less than machines. We hide in the earth like dirt and when people kill us they do not weep. At least we were hiding. Now you come along, you and your tame human woman -- " Crawlie glared briefly at Elaine -- "and you try to change even that. I'll kill you again if I can, you dirt, you slut, you dog! What are you doing with that child's body? We don't even know who you are now. Can you tell us?" The bear-man had moved up close to Crawlie, unnoticed by her, and was ready to slap her down again if she moved against little Joan. Joan looked straight at him and with a mere movement of her eyes she commanded him not to strike. "I'm tired," she said, "I'm tired, Crawlie. I'm a thousand years old when I am not even five. And I am Elaine now, and I am Hunter too, and I am the Lady Pane Ashash, and I know a great many more things that I thought I would ever know. I have work to do, Crawlie, because I love you, and I think I will die soon. But please, good people, first let me rest." The bear-man was on Crawlie's right. On her left, there had moved up a snake-woman. The face was pretty and human, except for the thin forked tongue which ran in and out of the mouth like a dying flame. She had good shoulders and hips but no breasts at all. She wore empty golden brassiere cups which swung against her chest. Her hands looked as though they might be stronger than stedL Crawlie started to move toward Joan, and the snake-woman hissed. It was the snake hiss of Old Earth. For a second, every animalperson in the corridor stopped breathing. They all stared at the snake-woman. She hissed again, looking straight at Crawlie. The sound was an abomination in that narrow space. Elaine saw that Joan tightened up like a little dog, Charley-is-my-darling looked as though he was ready to leap twenty meters in one jump, and Elaine herself felt an impulse to strike, to kill, to destroy. The hiss was a challenge to them all. The snake-woman looked around calmly, fully aware of the attention she had obtained. "Don't worry, dear people. See, I'm using Joan's name for aU of us. I'm not going to hurt Crawlie, not unless she hurts Joan. But if she hurts Joan, if anybody hurts Joan, they will have me to deal with. You have a good idea who I am. We Speople have great strength, high intelligence and no fear at all. You know we cannot breed. People have to make us one by one, out of ordinary snakes. Do not cross me, dear people. I want to learn about this new love which Joan is bringing, and nobody is going to hurt Joan vdiile I am here. Do you hear me, people? Nobody. Try it, and you die. I think I could kill almost all of you before I died, even if you all attacked me at once. Do you hear me, people? Leave Joan alone. That goes for you, too, you soft human woman. I am not afraid of you either. You there," said she to the bear-man, "pick little Joan up and carry her to a quiet bed. She must rest. She must be quiet for a while. You be quiet too, all you people, or you will meet me. Me." Her black eyes roved across their faces. The snake-woman moved forward and they parted in front of her, as though she were the only solid being in a throng of ghosts. Her eyes rested a moment on Elaine. Elaine met the gaze, but it was an uncomfortable thing to do. The black eyes with neither eyebrow nor lashes seemed full of intelligence and devoid of emotion. Orson, the bear-man, followed obediently behind. He carried little Joan. As the child passed Elaine she tried to stay awake. She murmured, "Make me bigger. Please make me bigger. Right away." "I don't know how ,..." said Elaine. The child struggled to full awakening. "I'll have work to do. Work... and maybe my deatii to die. It will all be wasted if I am this little. Make me bigger.' "But -- " protested Elaine again. "If you don't know, ask the lady." "What lady?" The S-woman had paused, listening to the conversation. She cut in. "The Lady Pane Ashash, of course. The dead one. Do you think that a living Lady of the Instrumentality would do anything but kill us all?" A s the snake-woman and Orson carried Joan away, Charley-is-my-darling came up to Elaine and said, "Do you want to go?" "Where?" "To the Lady Pane Ashash, of course." "Me?" said Elaine. "Now?" said Elaine, even more emphatically. "Of course not," said Elaine, pronouncing each word as though it were a law. "What do you think I am? A few hours ago I did not even know that you existed. I wasn't sure about the word 'death.' I just assumed that everything terminated at four hundred years, the way it should. It's been hours of danger, and everybody has been threatening everybody else for all that time. I'm tired and I'm sleepy and I'm dirty, and I've got to take care of myself, and besides -- " She stopped suddenly and bit her lip. She had started to say, and besides, my body is all worn out with that dream-like lovemaking which the Hunter and I had together. That was not the business of Charley-is-my-darling: he was goat enough as he was. His mind was goatish and would not see the dignity of it all. The goat-man said, very gently, "You are making history, Elaine, and when you make history you cannot always take care of all the little things too. Are you happier and more important than you ever were before? Yes? Aren't you a different you from the person who met Balthasar just a few hours ago?" Elaine was taken aback by the seriousness. She nodded. "Stay hungry and tired. Stay dirty. Just a little longer. Time must not be wasted. You can talk to the Lady Pane Ashash. Find out what we must do about little Joan. When you come back with further instructions, I will take care of you myself. This tunnel is not as bad a town as it looks. We will have everything you could need, in the Room of Englok. Englok himself built it, long ago. Work just a little longer, and then you can eat and rest. We have everything here. T am the citizen of no mean city.' But first you must help Joan. You love Joan, don't you?" "Oh, yes, I do," she said. "Then help us just a little bit more." With death? she thought. With murder? With violation of law? But -- but it was all for Joan. It was thus that Elaine went to the camouflaged door, went out under the open sky again, saw the great Saucer of Upper Kalma reaching out over the Old Lower City. She talked to the voice of the Lady Pane Ashash, and obtained certain instructions, together with other messages. Later, she was able to repeat them, but she was too tired to make out their real sense. She staggered back to the place in the wall where she thought the door to be, leaned against it, and nothing happened. "Further down, Elaine, further down. Hurry! When I used to be me, I too got tired," came the strong whisper of the Lady Pane Ashash, "but do hurry!" Elaine stepped away from the wall, looking at it. A beam of light struck her. The Instrumentality had found her. Ohe rushed wildly at the wall.  The door gaped briefly. The strong welcome hand of Charleyis my-darling helped her in. "The light! The light!" cried Elaine. "I've killed us all. They saw me." "Not yet," smiled the goatman, with his quick crooked intelligent smile. "I may not be educated, but I am pretty smart." He reached toward the inner gate, glanced back at Elaine appraisingly, and then shoved a man-sized robot through the door. "There it goes, a sweeper about your size. No memory bank. A worn-out brain. Just simple motivations. If they come down to see what they thought they saw, they will see this instead. We keep a bunch of these at the door. We don't go out much, but when we do, it's handy to have these to cover up with." He took her by the arm. "While you eat, you can tell me. Can we make her bigger...?" "Who?" "Joan, of course. Our Joan. That's what you went to find out for us." Elaine had to inventory her own mind to see what the Lady Pane Ashash had said on that subject. In a moment she remembered. "You need a pod. And a jelly bath. And narcotics, because it will hurt. Four hours." "Wonderful," said Charley-ismy-darling, leading her deeper and deeper into the tunnel. "But what's the use of it," said Elaine, "if I've ruined us all? The Instrumentality saw me coming  in. They will follow. They will kill all of you, even Joan. Where is the Hunter? Shouldn't I sleep first?" She felt her lips go thick with fatigue: she had not rested or eaten since she took that chance on the strange little door between Waterrocky Road and the Shopping Bar. "You're safe, Elaine, you're safe," said Charley-is-my-darling, his sly smile very warm and his smooth voice carrying the ring of sincere conviction. For himself, he did not believe a word of it. He thought they were all in danger, but there was no point in terrifying Elaine. Elaine was the only real person on their side, except for the Hunter, who was a strange one, almost like an animal himself, and for the Lady Pane Ashash, who was very benign, but who was, after all, a dead person. He was frightened himself, but he was afraid of fear. Perhaps they were all doomed. In a way, he was right.  I 'ae Lady Arabella Underwood had called the Lady Goroke. "Something has tampered with my mind." The Lady Goroke felt very shocked. She threw back the inquiry. Put a probe on it. "I did. Nothing." Nothing? More shock for the Lady Goroke, Sound the alert, then. "Oh, no. Oh, no, no. It was a friendly, nice tampering." The Lady Arabella Underwood, being an Old North Australian, was rather formal : she always thought full words at her friends, even in telepathic contact. She never sent mere raw ideas. But that's utterly unlawful. You're part of the Instrumentality. It's a crime! thought the Lady Goroke. She got a giggle for reply. You laugh...? she inquired. "I just thought a new Lord might be here. From the Instrumentality. Having a look at me." The Lady Goroke was very proper and easily shocked. We wouldn't do that! The Lady Arabella thought to herself but did not transmit, "Not to you, my dear. You're a blooming prude." To the other she transmitted, "Forget it then." Puzzled and worried, the Lady Goroke thought: Well, all right. Break? "Right-ho. Break." The Lady Goroke frowned to herself. She slapped her wall. Planet Central, she thought at it. A mere man sat at a desk. "I am the lady Goroke," she said. "Of course, my lady," he replied. "Police fever, one degree. One degree only. Till rescinded. Clear?" "Clear, my lady. The entire planet?" "Yes," she said. "Do you wish to give a reason?" his voice was respectful and routine. "Must I?" "Of course not, my lady." "None given, then. Close." He saluted and his image faded from the wall. She raised her mind to the level of a light clear call. Instrumentality Only -- Instrumentality Only. I have raised the Police fevlevel # by command. Reason, personal disquiet. You know my voice. You know me. Goroke. Far across the city -- a police ornithopter flapped slowly down the street. The police robot was photographing a sweeper, the most elaborately malfunctioning sweeper he had ever seen. The sweeper raced down the road at unlawful speeds, approaching three hundred kilometers an hour, stopped with a sizzle of plastic on stone, and began picking dust-motes off the pavement. When the ornithopter reached it, the sweeper took off again, rounded two or three corners at tremendous speed and then settled down to its idiot job. The third time this happened, the robot in the ornithopter put a disabling slug through it, flew down and picked it up with the claws of his machine. He saw it in close view. "Birdbrain. Old model. Birdbrain. Good they don't use those any more. The thing could have hurt A Man. Now, I'm printed from a mouse, a real mouse with lots and lots of brains." He flew toward the central junkyard with the worn-out sweeper. The sweeper, crippled but still conscious, was trying to pick dust off the iron claws which held it. Below them, the Old City twisted out of sight with its odd geometrical lights. The new city, bathed in its soft perpetual glow, shone out against the night of the everlasting ocean boiled in its private storms. n the actual stage the actors cannot do much with the scene of the interlude, where Joan was cooked in a single night from the size of a child five years old to the tallness of a miss fifteen or sixteen. The biological machine did work well, though at the risk of her life. It made her into a vital, robust young person, without changing her mind at all. This is hard for any actress to portray. The storyboxes have the advantage. They can show the machine with all sorts of improvements -- flashing lights, bits of lightnight, mysterious rays. Actually, it looked like a bathtub full of boiling brown jelly, completely covering Joan. Elaine, meanwhile, ate hungrily in the palatial room of Englok himself. The food was very, very old, and she had doubts, as a witch, about its nutritional value, but it stilled her hunger. The denizens of Clown Town had declared this room "off limits" to themselves, for reasons which Charley-is-my-darling could not make plain. He stood in the doorway and told her what to do to find food, to activate the bed out of the floor, to open the bathroom. Everything was very oldfashioned and nothing responded to a simple thought or to a mere slap. A curious thing happened. Elaine had washed her hands, had eaten and was preparing for her bath. She had taken most of her clothes off, thinking only that Charley-is-my-darling was an animal, not a man, so that it did not matter. Suddenly she knew it did matter. He might be an imderperson but he was a man to her. Blushing deeply all the way down to her neck, she ran into the bathIlDoin and called back to him: "Go away. I will bathe and ttien sleep. Wake me when you have to. not before." "Yes, Elaine." "And -- and -- " "Yes?" "Thank you," she said. "Thank you very much. Do you know, I never said 'thank you' to an underperson before." "That's all right," said Charley-is-my-darling with a smile. "Most real people don't. Sleep well, my dear Elaine. When you awaken, be ready for great things. We shall take a star out of the skies and shall sets thousands of worlds on fire..." "What's that?" she said, putting her head around the comer of the bathroom. "Just a figure of speech," he smiled. "Just meaning that you won't have much time. Rest well. Don't forget to put your clothes in the ladysmaid machine. The ones in Clown Town are all worn out. But since we haven't used this room, yours ought to work." "Which is it?" she said. "The red lid with the gold handle. Just lift it." On that domestic note he left her to rest, while he went off and plotted the T hey told her it was mid-morning when she came out of tiie room of Englok. How could she have known it? The brownand-yellow corridor, with its gloomy old yellow lights, was just as dim and stench-ridden as ever. The people all seemed to have changed. Baby-baby was no longer a mouse-hag, but a woman of considerable force and much tenderness. Crawlie was as dangerous as a human enemy, staring at Elaine, her beautiful face gone bland with hidden hate. Charleyis-my-darling was gay, friendly and persuasive. She thought she could read expressions on the faces of Orson and the S'woman, odd though their features were. After she had gotten through some singularly polite greetings, she demanded, "What's happening now?" A new voice spoke up -- a voice she knew and did not know. Elaine glanced over at a niche in the wall. The Lady Pane Ashash! And who was that with her? Even as she asked herself the question, Elaine knew the answer. It was Joan, grown, only half a head less tall than the Lady Pane Ashash or herself. It was a new Joan, powerful, happy, and quiet; but it was all the dear little old D'joan too. "Welcome," said the lady Pane Ashash, "to our revolution." "What's a revolution?" asked aine. "And I thought you '"couldn't come in here with all the thought shielding?" The Lady Pane Ashash lifted a wire which trailed back from her robot body, "I rigged this up so that I could use the body. Precautions are no use any more. It's the other side which will need the precautions now. A revolution is a way of changing systems and people. This is one. You go first, Elaine. This way." "To die? Is that what you mean?" The lady Pane Ashash laughed warmly. "You know me by now. You know my friends here. You know what your own life has been down to now, a useless witch in a world which did not want you. We may die, but it's what we do before we die that counts. This is Joan going to meet her destiny. You lead as far as the Upper City. Then Joan will lead. And then we shall see. "You mean, all these people are going too?" Joan looked at the ranks of the underpeople, who were beginning to form into two queues down the corridor. The queues bulged wherever mothers led their children by the hand or carried small ones in their arms. Here and there the line was punctuated by a giant underperson. They have been nothing, thought Elaine, and I was nothing too. Now we are all going to do something, even though we may be terminated for it. "May be" thought she: "shall be" is the word. But it is worth it if Joan can change the worlds, even a little bit, even for other people. Joan spoke up. Her voice had grown with her body, but it was the same dear voice which the little dog-girl had had sixteen hours (they seem sixteen years, thought Elaine) ago, when Elaine first met her at the door to the tunnel of Englok. Joan said, "Love is not something special, reserved for men alone. "Love is not proud. Love has no real name. Love is for life itself, and we have life. "We cannot win by fighting. People outnumber us, outgun us, outrun us, outfight us. But people did not create us. Whatever made people, made us too. You all know that, but will we say the name?" There was a murmur of no and never from the crowd. "You have waited for me. I have waited too. It is time to die, perhaps, but we will die the way people did in the beginning, before things became easy and cruel for them. They live in a stupor and they die in a dream. It is not a good dream and if they awaken, they will know that we are people too. Are you with me?" They murmured yes. "Do you love me?" Again they murmured agreement. "Shall we go out and meet the day?" They shouted their acclaim. Joan turned to the Lady Pane Ashash. "Is everything as you wished and ordered?" "Yes," said the dear dead woman in the robot body. "Joan first, to lead you. Elaine preceding her, to drive away robots or ordinary underpeople. When you meet real people, you will love them. That is all. You will love them. If they kill you, you will love them. Joan will show you how. Pay no further attention to me. Ready?" Joan lifted her right hand and said words to herself. The people bowed their heads before her, faces and muzzles and snouts of all sizes and colors. A baby of some kind mewed in a tiny falsetto to the rear. Just before she turned to lead the procession, Joan turned back to the people and said, "Crawlie, where are you?" "Here, in the middle," said a clear, calm voice far back. "Do you love me now, Crawlie?" "No, D'joan. I like you less than when you were a little dog. But these are my people too, as well as yours. I am brave. I can walk. I won't make trouble." "Crawlie," said Joan, "will you love people if we meet them?" A #I faces turned toward the beautiful bison-girl. Elaine could just see her, way down the murky corridor. Elaine could see that the girl's face had turned utter, dead white with emotion. Whether rage or fear, she could not tell. At last Cravlie spoke, "No, I won't love people. And I won't love you. I have my pride." Softly, softly, like death itself at a quiet bedside, Joan spoke. "You can stay behind, Crawlie. You can stay here. It isn't much of a chance, but it's a chance." Crawlie looked at her, "Bad luck to you, dog-woman, and bad luck to the rotten human being up there beside you." Elaine stood on tiptoe to see what would happen. Crawlie's face suddenly disappeared, dropping downward. The snake woman elbowed her way to the front, stood close to Joan where the others could see her, and sang out in a voice as clear as metal itself: "Sing 'poor, poor, Crawlie,' dear people. Sing 'I love Crawlie,' dear people. She is dead. I just killed her so that we would all be full of love. I love you too," said the S'woman, on whose reptilian features no sign of love or hate could be seen. Joan spoke up, apparently prompted by the lady Pane Ashash. "We do love Crawlie, dear people. Think of her and then let us move forward." Charley-is my darling gave Elaine a little shove. "Here, you lead." In a dream, in a bewilderment, Elaine led. She felt warm, happy, brave when she passed close to the strange Joan, so tall and yet so familiar. Joan gave her a full smile and whispered, "Tell me I'm doing well, human woman. I'm a dog and dogs have lived a man." "You're right, Joan, you're completely right! I'm with you. Shall I go now?" responded Elaine. Joan nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. Elaine led. Joan and the Lady Pane Ashash followed, dog and dead woman championing the procession. The rest of the underpeople followed them in turn, in a double line. When they made the secret door open, daylight flooded the corridor. Elaine could almost feel the stale odor-ridden air pouring out with them. When she glanced back into the tunnel for the last time, she saw the body of Crawlie lying all alone on the floor. Elaine herself turned to the steps and began going up them. No one had yet noticed the procession. Elaine could hear the wire of the Lady Pane Ashash dragging on the stone and metal of the steps as they climbed. When she reached the top door, Elaine had a moment of indecision and panic. "This is my life, my life," she thought. "I have no other. 'What have I done? Oh, Hunter, Hunter, where are you? Have you betrayed me?" Said Joan softly behind her, "Go on! Go on. This is a war of love. Keep going." Elaine opened the door to the upper street. The roadway was full of people. Three police ornithopters flapped slowly overhead. This was an unusual number. Elaine stopped again. "Keep walking," said Joan, "and warn the robots off." Elaine advanced and the revolution began. 'he revolution lasted six minutes and covered one himdred and twelve meters. The police flew over as soon as the underpeople began pouring out of the doorway. The first one glided in like a big bird, his voice asking, "Identify! Who are you?" Elaine said, "Gro away. That is a command." "Identify yourself," said the bird-like machine, banking steeply with the lens-eyed robot peering at Elaine out of its middle. "Go away," said Elaine. "I am a true human and I command." The first police omithopter apparently called tn the others by radio. Together they flapped their way down the corridor between the big buildings. A lot of people had stopped. Most of their faces were blank, a few showing animation or amusement or horror at the sight of so many underpeople all crowded in one place. Joan's voice sang out, in the clearest possible enunciation of the Old Common Tongue: "Dear people, we are people. We love you. We love you." The underpeople began to chant lov, love, love in a weird plainsong full of sharps and halftones. The true humans shrank back. Joan herself set the example by embracing a young woman of about her own height Charley-is-my-darling took a human man by the shoulders and shouted at him: "I love you, my dear fellow! Believe me, I do love you. It's wonderful meeting you." The human man was startled by the contact and even more startled by the glowing warmth of the goat-man's voice. He stood mouth slack and body relaxed with sheer, utter and accepted surprise. Somewhere to the rear a person screamed. A police omithopter came flapping back. Elaine could not tell if it was one of the three she had sent away, or a new one altogethi er. She waited for it to get close  enough to hail, so that she could tell it to go away. For the first time, she wondered about the actual physical character of danger. Could the police machine  put a slug through her? Or shoot  flame at her? Or lift her screaming, carrying her away with its iron claws to some place where she would be pretty and clean j and never herself again? "Oh, Hunter, Hunter, where are you now? Have you forgotten me? I Have you betrayed me?" i The underpeople were still surging forward and mingling with with the real people, clutchi ing them by their hands or their j garments and repeating in the  queer medley of voices: "I love you. Oh, please, I love you! We are people. We are your sisters and brothers..." The snake-woman wasn't making much progress. She had seized a human man with her morethan-iron hand. Elaine hadn't seen her saying anything, but the man had fainted dead away. The nake woman had him draped over her arm like an empty overcoat and was looking for somebody else to love. Behind Elaine a low voice said, "He's coming soon." "Who?" said Elaine to the Lady Pane Ashash, knowing perfectly well whom she meant, but not wanting to admit it, and busy with watching the circling ornithopter at the same time. "The Hunter, of course," said the robot with the dear dead lady's voice. "He'll come for you. You'll be all right. I'm at the end of my wire. Look away, my dear. They are about to kill me again and I am afraid that the sight would distress you." Fourteen robots, foot models, marched with military decision into the crowd. The true humans took heart from this and some of them began to slip away into doorways. Most of the real people were still so surprised that they stood around with the underpeople pawing at them, babbling the accents of love over and over again, the animal origin of their voices showing plainly. The robot sergeant took no note of this. He approached the Lady Pane Ashash only to find Elaine standing in his way. "I command you," she said, with all the passion of a working witch, "I command you to leave this place." His eye-lenses were like darkblue marbles floating in milk. They seemed swimmy and poorly-focused as he looked her over. He did not reply but stepped around her, faster than her own body could intercept him. He made for the dear, dead Lady Pane Ashash. Elaine, bewildered, realized that the Lady's robot body seemed more human than ever. The robot-sergeant confronted her. This is the scene which we all remember, the first authentic picture tape of the entire incident: The gold and black sergeant, his milky eyes staring at the Lady Pane Ashash. The Lady herself, in the pleasant old robot body, lifting a commanding hand. Elaine, distraught, half-turning as though she would grab the robot by his right arm. Her head is moving so rapidly that her black hair swings as she turns. Charley-is-my-darling shouting, "I love, love, love!" at a small handsome man with mousecolored hair. The man is gulping and saying nothing. All this we know. Then comes the unbelievable, which we now believe, the event for which the stars and skylanes were unprepared. Mutiny. Robot mutiny. Disobedience in ten daylight. T he words are hard to hear on the tape, but we can still make them out. The recording device on the police ornithopter had gotten a square fix on the face of the Lady Pane Ashash. Lip-readers can see the words plainly; non-lip-readers can hear the words the third or fourth time the tape is run tl. rough the eyebox. Said the Lady, "Overridden." Said the sergeant, "No, you're a robot." "See for yourself. Read my brain. I am a robot. I am also a woman. You cannot disobey people. I am people. I love you. Furthermore, you are people. You think. We love each other. Try. Try to attack." "I -- I cannot," said the robot sergeant, his milky eyes seeming to spin with excitement. "You love me? You mean I'm alive? I exist?" "With love, you do," said the Lady Pane Ashash. "Look at her," said the Lady, pointing to Joan, "because she has brought you love." The robot looked and disobeyed the law. His squad looked with him. He turned back to the Lady and bowed to her: "Then you know what we must do, if we cannot obey you and cannot disobey the others." "Do it," she said sadly, "but know what you are doing. You are not really escaping two human commands. You are making a choice. You. That makes you men." The sergeant turned to his squad of man-sized robots: "You hear that? She says we are men. I believe her. Do you believe her?" "We do," they cried almost unanimously. This is where the picture-tape ends, but we can imagine how the scene was concluded. Elaine had stopped short, just behind the sergeant-robot. The other robots had come up behind her. Charley-is-my-darling had stopped talking. Joan was in the act of lifting her hands in blessing, her warm brown dog eyes gone wide with pity and understanding. People wrote down the things that we cannot see. Apparently the robot-sergeant said, "Our love, dear people, and good-by. We disobey and die." He waved his hand to Joan. It is not certain whether he did or did not say, "Good-by, our lady and our liberator." Maybe some poet made up the second saying: the first one, we are sure about. And we are sure about the next word, the one which historians and poets all agree on. He turned to his men and said, "Destruct." Fourteen robots, the blackand-gold sergeant a.nd his thirteen silver-blue foot soldiers, suddenly spurted white fire in the street of Kalma. They detonated their suicide buttons, th.c-rmlte caps in their own heads. They had done something with no !iurnan command at all, on an order from another robot, the body of the Lady Pane Ashash, and she in turn had no human authority, but merely the word of the little dog-girl Joan, who had been made an adult in a single night. Fourteen white flames made people and underpeople turn their eyes aside. Into the light there dropped a special police ornithopter. Out of it came the two Ladies, Arabella Underwood and Goroke. They lifted their forearms to shield their eyes from the blazing dying robots. They did not see the Hunter, who had moved mysteriously into an open window above the street and who watched the scene by putting his hands over his eyes and peeking through the slits between his fingers. While the people still stood blinded, they felt the fierce telepathic shock of the mind of the Lady Goroke taking command of the situation. That was her right, as a Chief of the Instrumentality. Some of the people, but not all of them, felt the outre counterabock of Joan's mind reaching out to meet the Lady Goroke. "I command," thought the Lady Goroke, her mind kept open to all beings. "Indeed you do, but I love, I love you," thought Joan. The first-order forces met. They engaged. The revolution was over. Nothing had really happened, but Joan had forced people to meet her. This was notliing like the poem about people and underpeople getting all mixed up. The mixup came much later, even after the time of C'mell. The poem is pretty, but is it dead wrong, as you can see for yourself : You should ask me. Me. me, me, Because I know -- I used to live On the Eastern Shore. Men aren't men. And women aren't women, And people aren't people any more. There is no Eastern Shore on pleunderpeople crisis came much later than this. The revolution had failed, but history had reached its new turning-point, the quarrel of the two Ladies. They left their' minds open out of sheer surprise. Suicidal robots and world-loving dogs were unheardof. It was bad enough to have illegal underpeople on the prowl, but these new things -- ah I pxestroy them all, said the Lady Goroke. "Why?" thought the Lady Arabella Underwood. Malfunction, replied Goroke. "But they're not machines!" Then they're animals -- underpeople. Destroy! Destroy! Then came the answer which has created our own time. It came from the Lady Arabella Underwood, and all Kalma heard it; Perhaps they are people. They mu.st have a trial. The dog-girl Joan dropped to her knees. "I have succeeded, I have succeeded, I have succeeded! You can kill me, dear people, but I love, love, love you!" The Lady Pane Ashash said quietly to Elaine, "I thought I would be dead by now. Really dead, at last. But I am not. I hpve seen the worlds turn, Elaine, and you have seen them turn with me." The underpeople had fallen quiet as they heard the highvolume telepathic exchange between the two great Ladies. The real soldiers dropped out of the sky, their ornithopters whistling as they hawked down to the ground. They ran up to the underpeople and began binding them with cord. One soldier took a single look at the robot body of the Lady Pane Ashash. He touched it with his staff, and the staff turned cherry-red with heat. The robotbody, its head suddenly drained, fell to the ground in a heap of icy crystals. Elaine walked between the frigid rubbish and the red-hot staff. She had seen Hunter She missed seeing the soldier who came up to Jor darted to bind her and then fell back weeping, babbling, "She loves me! She loves me!" The Lord Femtiosex, who commanded the inflying soldiers, bound Joan with cord despite her talking. Grimly he answered her: "Of course you love me. You're a good dog. You'll die soon, doggy, but till then, you'll obey." "I'm obeying," said Joan, "but I'm a dog and a person. Open your mind, man, and you'll feel it." Apparently he did open his mind and felt the ocean of love riptiding into him. It shocked him. His arm swung up and back, the edge of the hand striking at Joan's neck for the ancient kill. "No, you don't," thought the Lady Arabella Underwood. "That child is going to get a proper trial." He looked at her and glared, Chief doesn't strike Chief, my Lady. Let go my arm. Thought the Lady Arabella at him, openly and in public; "A trial, then." In his anger he nodded at her. He would not think or speak to her in the presence of all the other people. A soldier brought Elaine and Hunter before him. "Sir and master, these are people, not underpeople. But they have dog-thoughts, cat-thoughts, goat-thoughts and robot-ideas in their heads. Do you wish to look?" "Why look?" said the Lord Femtiosex, who was as blonde as the ancient pictures of Baldur, and oftentimes that arrogant as well. "The Lord Limaono is arriving. That's all of us. We can have the trial here and now." Elaine felt cords bite into her wrists; she heard the Hunter murmur comforting words to her, words which she did not quite understand. "They will not kill us," he murmured, "though we will wish they had, before this day is out. Everything is happening as she said it would, and -- " "Who is that she?" interrupted Elaine. "She? The lady, of course. The dear dead Lady Pane Ashash, who has worked wonders after her own death, merely with the print of her personality on the machine. "Who do you think told me what to do? Why did we wait for you to condition Joan to greatness? Why did the people way down in Clown Town keep on raising one D'joan after another, hoping that hope and a great wonder would occur?" "You knew?" said Elaine. "You knew... before it happened?" "Of course," said the Hunter, "not exactly, but more or less. She had had hundreds of years after death inside that computer. thoughts. She saw how it would be if it had to be, and I -- " "Shut up, you people!" roared the Lord Femtiosex. "You are making the animals restless with your babble. Shut up, or I will stun you!" Elaine fell silent. The Lord Femtiosex glanced around at her, ashamed at having made his anger naked before another person. He added quietly: "The trial is about to begin. The one that the tall Lady ordered." IX X'ou all know about the trial, so there is no need to linger over it. There is another picture of San Shigonanda, the one from his conventional period, which shows it very plainly. The street had filled full of real people, crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time. They all had numbers or numbercodes instead of names. They were handsome, well, dully happy. They even looked a great deal alike, similar in their handsomeness, their health and their underlying boredom. All of them had a total of four hundred years to live. None of them knew real war, even though the extreme readiness of the soldiers showed vain practice of hundreds of years. The people were beautiful, but they felt themselves useless, and they were quietly desperate without knowing it themselves. This is all clear from the painting, and from the wonderful way that San Shigonanda has of forming them in informal ranks and letting the calm blue light of day shine down on their handsome, hopeless features. With the underpeople, the artist performs real wonders. Joan herself is bathed in light. Her light brown hair and her doggy brown eyes express softness and tenderness. He even conveys the idea that her new body is terribly new and strong, that she is virginal and ready to die, that she is a mere girl and yet completely fearless. The posture of love shows in her legs: she stands lightly. Love shows in her hands: they are turned outward toward the judges. Love ' shows in her smile: it is confident. And the judges! The artist has them, too. The Lord Femtiosex, calm again, his narrow sharp lips expressing perpetual rage against a universe which has grown too small for him. The Lord Limaono, wise, twice-rebom, sluggardly, but alert as a snake behind the sleepy eyes and the slow smile. The Lady Arabella Underwood, the tallest true-human present, with her Norstrilian pride and the arrogance of great wealth, along with the capricious tenderness of great wealth, showing in the way that she sat, judging her fellowjudges instead of the prisoners. The Lady Goroke, bewildered at last, frowning at a play of fortune which she does not understand. The artist has it all. And you have the real viewtapes, too, if you want to go to a 'museum. The reality is not as dramatic as the famous painting, but it has value of its own. The voice of Joan, dead these many centuries, is still strangely moving. It is the voice of a dogcarved-into-man, but it is also the voice of a great lady. The image of the Lady Pane Ashash must have taught her that, along with what she had learned from Elaipe and Hunter in the antechamber above the Brown and Yellow Corridor of Englok. The words of the trial, they too have survived. Many of them have became famous, aU across the worlds. Joan said, during inquiry, "But it is the duty of life to find more than life, and to exchange itself for that higher goodness." Joan commented, upon sentence. "My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me." When the soldiers had killed Charley-is-my-darling and were trying to hack off the head of the S'woman until one of them thought to freeze her into crystals, Joan said: "Should we be strange to you, we animals of earth that you have brought to the stars? We shared the same sun, the same oceans, the same sky. We are all from Manhome. How do you know that we would not have caught up with you if we had all stayed at home together? My people were dogs. They loved you before you made a womanshaped thing out of my mother. Should I not love you still? The miracle is not that you have made people out of us. The miracle is that it took us so long to understand it. We are people now, and so are you. You will be sorry for what you are going to do to me, but remember that I shall love your sorrow, too, because great and good things will come out of it." The Lord Limaono slyly asked, "What is a 'miracle'?" And her words were, "There is knowledge from Earth which you have not yet found again. There is the name of the Nameless one. There are secrets hidden in time from you. Only the dead and the unborn can know them right now: I am both." he scene is familiar, and yet we will never understand it. We know what the lords Femtiosex and Limaono thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order and they were putting it on tape. The minds of men can live together only if the basic ideas are communicated. Nobody has, even now, found out a way to recording telepathy directly into an instrument. We get pieces and snatches and wild jumbles, but we never get a satisfactory record of what one of the great ones was trasmitting to another. The two male chiefs were trying to put on record all those things about the episode which would teach careless people not to play with the lives of the underpeople. They were even trying to make underpeople understand the rules and designs by virtue of which they had been transformed from animals into the highest servants of man. This would have been hard to do, given the bewildering events of the last few hours, even from one Chief of the Instrumentality to another; for the general public, it was almost impossible. The outpouring from the Brown and Yellow Corridor was wholly unexpected, even though the Lady Goroke had surprised D'joan; the mutiny of the robot police posed problems which would have to be discussed halfway across the galaxy. Furthermore, the dog-girl was making points which had some verbal validity. If they were left in the form of mere words without proper context, they might affect heedless or impressionable minds. A bad idea can spread like a mutated germ. If it is at all interesting, it can leap from one mind to another halfway across the universe before it has a stop put to it. Look at the ruinous fads and foolish fashions which have nuisanced mankind even in the ages of the highest orderliness. We today know that variety, flexibility, danger and the seasoning of a little hate can make love and life bloom as they never bloomed before; we know it is better to live with the complications of thirteen thousand old languages resurrected from the dead ancient past than it is to live with the cold blind-alley perfection of the Old Common Tongue. We know a lot of things which the Lords Femtiosex and Limaono did not, and before we consider them stupid or cruel, we must remember that centuries passed before mankind finally came to grips with the problem of the underpeople and decided what "life" was within the limits of the human community. Finally, we have the testimony of the two Lords themselves. They both lived to very advanced ages, and toward the end of their lives they were worried and annoyed to find that the episode of D'joan overshadowed all the bad things which had not happened during their long careers -- bad things which had labored to forestall for the protection of the planet Fomalhaut to see themselves portrayed as casual, cruel men when in fact they were nothing of the sort. If they had seen that the story of get to be what it is today -- one of the great romances of mankind, along with the story of C'mell or the romance of the lady who sailed The Soul -- they would not only have been disappointed, but they would have been justifiably angry at the fickleness of mankind as well. Their roles are clear, because they made them clear. The Lord Femtiosex accepts the responrfbility for the notion of fire; the Lord Limaono agrees that he concurred in the decision. Both of them, many years later, reviewed the tapes of the scene and agreed that something which the Lady Arabella Underwood had said or thought -- Something had made them do it. But even with the tapes to refresh and clarify their memories, they could not say what. We have even put computers on the job of cataloguing every word and every inflection of the whole trial, but they have not pinpointed the critical point either. And the Lady Arabella -- nobody ever questioned her. They didn't dare. She went back to her own planet of Old North Australia , surrounded by the immense treasure of the santaclara drug, and no planet is going to pay at the rate of two thousand privilege of sending an investigator to talk to a lot of obstinate, simple, wealthy Norstrilian peasants who will not talk to offworlders anyhow. The Norstrilians charge that sum for the admission of any guest not selected by their own initiative so we will their own invitation; so we will never know what the lady Arabella Underwood said or did after she went home. The Norstrilians said they did not wish to discuss the matter, and if we do not wish to go back to living a mere seventy years we had better not anger the only planet which produces stroon. And the Lady Goroko -- she, poor thing, went mad. People did not know it till later, but there was no word to be gotten out of her. She performed the odd actions which we now know to be a part of the dynasty of Lords Jestocost, who forced themselves by diligence and merit upon the Instrumentality for two hundred and more years. But on the case of Joan she had nothing to say. The trial is therefore a scene about which we know everything -- and nothing. We think that we know the physical facts of the life of D'joan who became Joan. We know about the Lady Pane Ashash who whispered endlessly to the underpeople about a justice yet to come. We know the whole life of the unfortunate Elaine and of her involvement with the case. We know that there were in those centuries, when underpeople first developed, many warrens in which illegal underpeople used their near-human wits, their animal cunning and their gift of speech to survive even when mankind had declared them surplus. The Brown and Yellow Corridor was not by any means the only one of its kind. We even know what happened to the Hunter. For the other underpeople -- Charley-is-my-darling, Babybaby, Mabel, the S'woman, Orson and all the others -- we have the tapes of the trial itself. They were not tried by anybody. They were put to death by the soldiers on the spot, as soon as it was plain that their testimony would not be needed. As witnesses, they could live a few minutes or an hour; as animals, they were already outside the regulations. A h, we know all about that now, and yet know nothing. Dying is simple, though we tend to hide it away. The how of dying is a minor scientific matter; the when of dying is a problem to each of us, whether he lives on the old-fashioned #-year-life planets or on the radical new ones where the freedoms of disease and accident have been reintroduced; the why of it is still as shocking to us as it was to pre-atomic man, who used to cover farmland with the boxed bodies of his dead. These underpeople died as no animals had ever died before. Jo#dully. One mother held her children up for the soldier to kill them alL She must have been of rat origin, because she had septuplets in closely matching form. The tape shows us the picture of the soldier getting ready. The rat-woman greets him with a smile and holds up her seven babies. Little blondes they are, wearing pink or blue bonnets, all of them with glowing cheeks and bright little blue eyes. "Put them on the ground," said the soldier. "I'm going to kill you and them too." On the tape, we can hear the nervous peremptory edge of his voice. He added one word, as though he had already begun to think that he had to justify himself to these underpeople. "Orders," he added. "It doesn't matter if I hold them, soldier. I'm their mother. They'll feel better if they die easily with their mother near. I love you, soldier. I love all people. You are my brother, even though my blood is rat blood and yours is human. Go ahead and kill them soldier. I can't even hurt you. Can't you imderstand it? I love you, soldier. We share a common speech, common hopes, common fears, and a common death. That is what Joan has taught us all. Death is not bad, soldier. It just comes badly, sometimes, but you will remember me after you have killed me and my babies. You will remember that I love you now -- " The soldier, we see on the tape, can stand it no longer. He clubs his weapon, knocks the woman down; the babies scatter on the groimd. We see his booted heel rise up and crush down against their heads. We hear the wet popping sound of the little heads breaking, the sharp cut-off of the baby wails as they die. We get one last view of the ratwoman herself. She had stood up again by the time the seventh baby is killed. She offers her hand to the soldier to shake. Her face is dirty and bruised, a trickle of blood running down her left cheek. Even now, we know she is a rat, an underperson, a modified animal, a nothing. And yet we, even we across the centuries, feel that she had somehow become more of a person than we are -- that she dies human and fulfilled. We know that she has triumphed over death: we have not. We see the soldier looking straight at her with eerie horror, as though her simple love, were some unfathomable device from an alien source. We hear her next words on the tape: "Soldier, I love all of you -- " His weapon could have killed her in a fraction of a second, if he had used it properly. But he didn't. He clubbed it and hit her, as though his heat-remover had been a wooden club and himself a wild man instead of part of the elite guard of Kalma. We know what happens then. She falls under his blows. She points. Points straight at Joan, wrapped in fire and smoke. The rat-woman screams one last time, screams into the lens of the robot camera as though she were talking not to the soldier but to all mankind: "You can't kill her. You can't kill love. I love you, soldier, love you. You can't kill that. Remember -- " His last blow catches her in the face. She falls back on the pavement. He thrusts his foot, as we can see by the tape, directly on her throat. He leaps forward in an odd little jig, bringing his full weight down on her fragile neck. He swings while stamping downward, and we then see his face, full on in the camera. It is the face of a weeping child, bewildered by hurt and shocked by the prospect of more hurt to come. He had started to do his duty, and duty had gone wrong, all wrong. poor man. He must have been one of the first men in the new worlds who tried to use weapons against love. Love is a sour and powerful ingredient to meet in the excitement of battle. All the underpeople died that way. Most of them died smiling, saying the word "love" or the name "Joan." The bear-man Orson had been kept to the very end. He died very oddly. He died laughing. The soldier lifted his pelletthrower and aimed it straight at Orson's forehead. The pellets and had a muzzle velocity of only # meters per second. In that manner, they could stop recalcitrant robots or evil underpeople, without any risk of penetrating buildings and hurting the true people who might be inside, out of sight. Orson looks, on the tape the robots made, as though he knows perfectly well what the weapon is. (He probably did. Underpeople used to live with the danger of a violent death hanging over them from birth until removal.) He shows no fear of it. in the pictures we have; he begins to laugh. His laughter is warm, generous, relaxed -- like the friendly laughter of a happy foster-father who has found a guilty and embarrassed child, knowing full well that the child expects punishment but will not get it. "Shoot, man. You can't kill me, man. I'm in your mind. I love you. Joan taxxght us. Listen man. There is no death. Not for love. Ho, ho, ho, poor fellow, don't be afraid of me. Shoot! You're the unlucky one. You're going to live. And remember. And remember. And remember. I've made you human, fellow." The soldier croaks, "What did you say?" "I'm saving you, man. I'm turning you into a real human being. With the power of Joan. The power of love. Poor guy! go ahead and shoot me if it makes you uncomfortable to wait. You'll do it anyhow." This time we do not see the soldier's face, but the tightness of his back and neck betray his own internal stress. We see the big broad bear face blossom forth in an immense splash of red as the soft heavy pellet plow into it. Then the camera turns to something else. A little boy, probably a fox, but very finished in his human shape. He was bigger than a baby, but not big enough, like the larger underchildren, to have understood the deathless importance of Joan's teaching. He was the only one of the group who behaved like an ordinary underperson. He broke and ran. He was clever: He ran among the spectators, so that the soldier could not use pellets or heatreducers on him without hurting an actual human being. He ran and jumped and dodc,ad, fighting passively but desperately for his life. At last one of the spectators -- a tall man with a silver hat -- tripped him up. The fox-boy fell to the pavement, skinning his palms and knees. Just as he looked up to see who might be coming at him, a bullet caught him neatly in the head. He fell a little way forward, dead. People die. We know how they die. We have seen them die shy and quiet in the Dying Houses. We have seen others go into the #-year-rooms, which have no door-knobs and no cameras on the inside. We have seen pictures of many dying in natural disasters, where the robot crews took picture-tap# for the record and the investigation later on. Death is not uncommon, and it is very unpleasant. But this time, death itself was different. All the fear of death -- except for the one little fox-boy, too young to understand and too old to wait for death in his mother's arms -- had gone out of the underpeople. They met death ness in their bodies, their voices, their demeanor. It did not matter whether they lived long enough to know what happened to Joan herself: they had perfect confidence in her, anyway. This indeed was the new weapon, love and the good death. Crawlie, with her pride, had missed it all. The investigators later found the body of Crawlie in the corridor. It was possible to reconstruct who she had been and what had happened to her. The computer in which the bodiless image of the Lady Pane Ashash survived for a few days after the trial was, of course, found and disassembled. Nobody thought at the time to get her opinions and last words. A lot of historians have gnashed their teeth over that. The details are therefore clear. The archives even preserve the long interrogation and responses concerning Elaine, when she was processed and made clear after the trial. But we do not know how the idea of "fire" came in. Somewhere, beyond sight of the tape-scanner, the word must have been passed between the four Chiefs of the Instrumentality who were conducting the trial. There is the protest of the Head of Birds (Robot), or police chief of Kalma, a Subchief named Fisi. The records show his appearance. He comes in at the right side of the scene, bows respectfully to the four Chiefs and lifts his rit hand in the traditional sign for "beg to interrupt," an odd twist of the elevated hand which the actors have found it very difficult to copy when they tried to put the whole story of Joan and Elaine into a single drama. (In fact, he had no more idea that future ages would be studying his casual appearance than did the others. The whole episode was characterized by haste and precipitateness, in the light of what we now know.) The Lord Limaono says: "Interruption refused. We are making a decision." The Chief of Birds spoke up anyhow. "My words are for your decision, my Lords and my Ladies." "Say it, then," commanded the Lady Goroke, "but be brief." "Shut down the viewers. Destroy that animal. Brainwash the spectators. Get amnesia yourselves, for this one hour. This whole scene is dangerous. I am nothing but a supervisor of omithopters, keeping perfect order, but I -- "We have heard enough," said the Lord Femtiosex. "You manage your birds and we'U run the worlds. How do you dare to think 'like a Chief'? We have responsibihties which you can't even guess at. Stand back." Fisi, in the pictures, stands back, his face sullen. In that parI ticular frame of scenes, one can ' see some of the spectators going away. It was time for lunch and they had become hungry: they had no idea that they were going to miss the greatest atrocity in history, about which a thousand I and more grand operas would be  written. j Femtiosex then moved to the I .climax. "More knowledge, not ' less, is the answer to this problem. I have heard about something which is not as bad as the Planet Shayol, but which can do just as well for an exhibit on a civilized world. You there," said he to Fisi, the Chief of Birds, "bring oil and a spray. Immediately." Joan looked at him with compassion and longing, but she said nothing. She suspected what he was going to do. As a girl, as a dog, she hated it; as a revolutionary, she welcomed it as the consummation of her mission. The Lord Femtiosex lifted his right hand. He curled the ring finger and the little finger, putting his thumb over them. That left the first two fingers extended straighf out. At' that time, the sign from one Chief to another, meaning, "private channels, telepathic, immediate." It has since been adopted by underpeople as their emblem for political unity. The four Chiefs went into a tracelike state and shared the judgment. J oan began to sing in a soft, protesting, dog-like wail, using the off-key plainsong which the underpeople had sung just before their hour of decision when they left the Brown and Yellow Corridor. Her words were nothing special, repetitions of the "people, dear people, I love you" which she had been communicating ever since she came to the surface of Kalma. But the way she did it has defied imitation across the centuries. There are thousands of lyrics and melodies which call themselves, one' way and another, The Song of Joan, but none of them come near to the heart-wrenching pathos of the original tapes. The singing, like her own personality, was unia.ue. The appeal was deep. Even the real people tried to listen, shifting their eyes from the four immobile Chiefs of the Instrumentality to the brown-eyed singing girl. Some of them just could not stand it. In true human fashion, they forgot why they were there and went absent-mindly home to lunch. Suddenly Joan stopped. Her voice ringing clearly across the crowd, she cried out: "The end is near, dear people. The end is near." Eyes all shifted to the two Lords and the two Ladies of the Instrumentality. The Lady Arabella Underwood lookedgrim after the telepathic conference. The Lady Goroke was haggard with wordless grief. The two Lords looked severe and resolved. It was the Lord Femtiosex who spoke. "We have tried you, animal. Your offense is great. You have lived illegally. For that the penalty is death. You have interfered with robots in some manner which we do not understand. For that brand-new crime, the penalty should be more than death; and I have recommended a pimishment which was applied on a planet of the Violet Star. You have also said many unlawful and improper things, detracting from the happiness and security of mankind. For that the penalty is reeducation, but since you have two death sentences already, this does not matter. Do you have anything to say before I pronounce sentence?" "If you light a fire today, my lord, it will never be put out in the hearts of men. You can destroy me. You can reject my love. You cannot destroy the goodness in yourselves, no matter how much goodness may anger you -- " "Shut up!" he roared. "I asked for a plea, not a speech. You will L die by fire, here and now. What do you say to that?" "I love you, dear people." Femtiosex nodded to the men of the Chief of Birds, who had dragged a barrel and a spray int o the street in front of Joan. "Tie her to that post," he commanded. "Spray her. Light her. Are the tape-makers in focus? We want this to be recorded and known. If the underpeople try this again, they will see that mankind controls the worlds." He looked at Joan and his eyes seemed to go out of focus. In an unaccustomed voice he said, "I am not a bad man, little doggirl, but you are a bad animal and we must make an example of you. Do you understand that?" "Femtiosex," she cried, leaving out his title, "I am very sorry for you. I love you too." With these words of hers, his face became clouded and angry again. He brought his right hand down in a chopping gesture. Fisi copied the gesture and the men operating the barrel and spray began to squirt a hissing stream of oil on Joan. Two guards had already chained her to the lamp post, using an improvised chain of handcuffs to make sure that she stood upright and remained in plain, sight of the crowd. 'Tire," said Femtiosex. Elaine felt the Hunter's body, beside her, cramp sharply. He seemed to strain intensely. For herself, she felt the way she had felt when she was defrozen and taken out of the adiabatic pod in which she had made the trip from earth -- sick to her stomach, confused in her mind, emotions rocking back and forth inside her. Hunter whispered to her, "I tried to reach her mind so that she would die easy. Somebody else got there first. I... don't know who it is." Elaine stared. The fire was being brought. Suddenly it touched the oil and Joan flamed up like a human torch. X rphe burning of D'joan at Fomalhaut took very little time, but the ages will not forget it. Femtiosex had taken the cruelest step of all. By telepathic invasion he had suppressed her human mind, so that only the primitive canine remained. Joan did not stand still like a martyred queen. She struggled against the flames which licked her and climbed her. She howled and shrieked like a dog in pain, like an animal whose brain -- good though it is -- caimot comprehend the senselessness of human cruelty. The result was directly contrary to what the Lord Femtiosex had planned. The crowd of people stirred forward, not with curiosity but because of compassion. They had avoided the broad areas of the street on which the dead underpeople lay as they had been killed, some pooled in their own blood, same broken by the hands of robots, some reduced to piles of frozen crystal. They walked over the dead to watch the dying, but their watching was not the witless boredom of people who never see a spectacle; it was the movement of living things, instinctive and deep, toward the sight of another living thing in a position of danger and ruin. Even the guard who had held Elaine and Hunter by gripping Hunter's arm -- even he moved forward a few unthinking steps. Elaine found herself in the first row of the spectators, the acrid, unfamiliar smell of burning oil making her nose twitch, the howls of the dying dog-girl tearing through her eardrums into her brain. Joan was turning and twisting in the fire now, trying to avoid the flames which wrapped her tighter than clothing. The odor of something sickening and strange reached the crowd. Few of them had ever smelled # , the stink of burning meat before. Joan gasped. In the ensuing seconds of silence, Elaine heard something she had never expected to hear before -- the weeping of grown human beings. Men and women stood there sobbing and not knowing why they sobbed. Femtiosex loomed over the crowd, obsessed by the failure erf his demonstration. He did not know that the Hunter, with a thousand kills behind him, was committing the legal outrage of peeping the mind of a Chief of the Instrumentality. The Hunter whispered to Elaine, "In a minute I'll try it. She deserves something better than that... Elaine did not ask what. She too was weeping. The whole crowd became aware that a soldier was calling. It took them several seconds to look away from the burning, dying Joan. The soldier was an ordinary one. Perhaps he was the one who had been unable to tie Joan with bonds a few minutes ago, when the Lords decreed that she be taken into custody. He was shouting now, shouting frantically and wildly, shaking his fist at the Lord Femtiosex. "You're a liar, you're a coward, you're a fool, and I challenge you -- " The Lord Femtiosex became aware of the man and of what he was yelling. He came out of his deep concentration and said, mildly for so wild a time: "What do you mean?" "This is a crazy show. There is no girl here. No fire. Nothing. You are hallucinating the whole lot of us for some horrible reason of your own, and I'm challenging you for it, you animal, you fool, you coward." I n normal times even a Lord had to accept a challenge or adjust the matter with clear talk, This was no normal time. The Lord Femtiosex said, "All this is real. I deceive no one." "If it's real, Joan, I'm with you!" shrieked the young soldier. He jumped in front of the jet of oil before the other soldiers could turn it off and then he leapt into the fire beside Joan. Her hair had burned away but her features were still clear. She had stopped the doglike whining shriek. Femtiosex had been interrupted. She gave the soldier, who had begun to burn as he stood voluntarily beside her, the smiles. Then she frowned, the gentlest and most feminine of smiles. Then she frowned, as though there were something which she should remember to do, despite the pain and terror which surrounded her. "Now!" whispered the Hunter. He began to hunt the Lord Femtiosex as sharply as he had ever sought the alien, native minds of The crowd could not tell what had happened to the Lord Femtiosex. Had he turned coward? Had he gone mad? (Actually, the Hunter, by using every gram of the power of his mind, had momentarily taken Femtiosex courting in the skies; he and Femtiosex were both male bird-like beasts, singing wildly for the beautiful female who lay hidden in the landscape far, far below.) Joan was free, and she knew she was free. She sent out her message. It knocked both Hunter and Femtiosex out of thinking; it flooded Elaine;it made even Fisi, the Chief of Birds, breathe quietly. She called so loudly that within the hour messages were pouring in from the other cities to Kalma, asking what had happened. She thought a single message, not words. But in words it came to this: "Loved ones, you kill me. This is my fate. I bring love, and love must die to live on. Love asks nothing, does nothing. Love thinks nothing. Love is knowing yourself and knowing all other people and things. Know -- and rejoice. I die for all of you now, dear ones -- " She opened her eyes for a last time, opened her mouth, sucked in the raw flame and slumped forward. The soldier, who had kept his nerve while his clothing and body burned, ran out of the fire, afire himself, toward his squad. A shot stopped him and he pitched flat forward. The weeping of the people was audible throughout the streets. Underpeople, tame and licensed ones, stood shamelessly among them and wept too. The Lord Femtiosex turned wearily back to his colleagues. The face of Lady Goroke was a sculptxired, frozen caricature of sorrow. He turned to the Lady Arabella Underwood. "I seem to have done something wrong, my lady. Take over, please." The Lady Arabella stood up. She called to Fisi, "Put out that fire." She looked out over the crowd. Her hard, honest Norstrilian features were unreadable. Elaine, watching her, shivered at the thought of a whole planet full of people as tough, obstinate and clever as these. "It's over," said the Lady Arabella. "People, go away. Robots, clean up. Underpeople, to your jobs." She looked at Elaine and the Himter. "I know who you are and I suspect what you have been doing. Soldiers, take them away." The body of Joan was fireblackened. The face did not look particularly human any more; the last burst of fire had caught her in the nose and eyes. Her young, girlish breasts showed with heart-wrenching immodesty that she had been young and female once. Now she was dead, just dead. The soldiers would have shoveled her into a box if she had been an imderperson. Instead, they paid her the honors of war that they would have given to one of their own comrades or to an important civilian in time of disaster. They unslung a litter, put the little blackened body on it and covered the body with their own flag. No one had told them to do so.  s their own soldier led them up the road toward the Waterrock, where the houses and offices of the military were located, Elaine saw that he too had been crying. She started to ask him what he thought of it, but Hunter stopped her with a shake of the head. He later told her that the soldier might be punished for talking with them. When they got to the office, they found the lady Goroke already there. The Lady Goroke already there... It became a nightmare in the weeks that followed. She had gotten over her grief and was conducting an inquiry into the case of Elaine and D'joan. The Lady Goroke already there... She was waiting when they slept. Her image, or perhaps herself, sat in on all the endless interrogations. She was particularly interested in the chance meeting of the dead lady Pane Ashash, the misplaced witch Elaine, and the non-adjusted man, the Hunter. The Lady Goroke already there... She asked them everything, but she told them nothing. Except for once. Once she burst out, violently personal after endless hours of formal, official work, "Your minds will be cleansed when we get through, so it wouldn't matter how much else you know. Do you know that this has hurt me -- me! -- all the way to the depths of .everything I believe in?" They shook their heads. "I'm going to have a child, and I'm going back to Manhome to have it. And I'm going to do the genetic coding myself. I'm going to call him Jestocost. That's one of the Ancient Tongues, the Paroskii one, for 'cruelty,' to remind him where he comes from. I and why. And he, or his son, or his son will bring justice back into the world and solve the puzzle of the underpeople. What do you think of that? On second thought, don't think. It's none of your business, and I am going to do it an#nvay." They stared at her sympathetically, but they were too wound up in the problems of their own survival to extend her much sympathy or advice. The body of Joan had been pulverized and blown into the air, because the Lady Goroke was afraid that the underpeople would make a goodvlace out of it; she felt that way herself, and she knew that if she herself were tempted, the underpeople would be even more tempted. Elaine never knew what happened to the bodies of all the other people who had turned themselves, under Joan's leadership, from animals into mankind, and who had followed the wild, foolish march out of the Tunnel of Englok into the Upper City of Kalma. Was it really wild? Was it really foolish? If they had stayed where they were, they might have had a few days or months or years of life, but sooner or later the robots would have found them and they would have been exterminated like the vermin which they were. Perhaps the death they had chosen was better. Joan did say, "It's the mission of life always to look for something better than itself, and then to try to trade life itself for meaning." At last, the Lady Goroke called them in and said, "Good-by, you two. It's foolish, saying good-by, when an hour from now you will remember neither me nor Joan. You've finished your work here. I've set up a lovely job for you. You won't have to live in a city. You will be weather-watchers, roaming the hills and watching for all the little changes which the machines can't interpret fast enough. You will have whole lifetimes of marching and picknicking and camping together. I've told the technicians to be very careful, because you two are very much in love with each other. When they re-route your synapses, I want that love to be there with you." They each knelt and kissed her hand. They never wittingly saw her again. In later years they sometimes saw a fashionable ornithopter soaring gently ovei' their camp, with an elegant woman peering out of the side of it; they had no memories to know that it was the Lady Goroke, recovered from madness, watching over them. T heir new life was their final life. Of Joan and the Brown and Yellow Corridor, nothing remained. They were both very sympathetic toward animals, but they might have been this way even if they had never shared in the wild political gamble of the dear dead Lady Pane Ashash. One time a strange thing happened. An underman from an elephant was working in a small valley, creating an exquisite rock garden for some important official of the Instrumentality who might later glimpse the garden once or twice a year. Elaine was busy watching the weather, and the Hunter had forgotten that he had ever hunted, so that neither of them tried to peep the underman's mind. He was a huge fellow, right at the maximum permissable size -- five times the gross stature of a man. He had smiled at them friendily in the past. One evening he brought them fruit. Such fruit! Rare offworld items which a year of requests would not have obtained for ordinary people like them. He smiled his big, shy, elephant smile, put the fruit down and prepared to lumber off. "Wait a minute," cried Elaine, "why are you giving us this? Why us?" "For the sake of Joan," said the elephant man. "Who's Joan?" said the Hunter. The elephant man looked S#rmpathetically at them. "That's all right. You don't remember her, but I do." "But what did Joan do?" said Elaine. "She loved you. She loved us all," said the elephant man. He turned quickly, so as to say no more. With incredible deftness for so heavy a person, he climbed speedily into the fierce lovely rocks above them and was gone. "I wish we had known her," said Elaine. "She sounds very nice." In that year there was bom the man who was to be the first Lord Jestocost. I Now in the new monthly IF:  Greof new serial by Robert A. Heintein I Don't miss it! for your A ( I 'his," I said to a visitor, handing him a fossilized trilobite from the Silurian period, "is due to three accidents." "Accidents?" he repeated, wondering whether I mean what I said. "Accidents! Three of them. The first accident was that this trilobite died under circumstances which made it possible for it to become a fossil. The second accident was that the fossil was found. And the third was that it was foimd by somebody who recognized it for what it was." The whole discussion had started with the chance remark that we don't know yet whether the human race originated in Asia or in Africa. The fossil finds, I had said, are inconclusive so far, mainly because there are so few of them. Of course, it would have been appropriate if I could have handed my visitor a fossil human skull to illustrate my point. I couldn't do that because there are so few of them, and for that reason they are where they belong, in museums and in university collections. Only about a century ago no museum anywhere had a human fossil. As a matter of fact no director of a museum would have expected to see one. And that brings me to my story. paleontology, the science of fos sils and extinct life forms, is one of the sciences that were found essentially by one man. He was Georges Leopold, Baron Cuvier, a French naturalist, born at Montbliard in #; and the work which became the foxmdation of the new science was his Recherches sar les ossemens tossiles, or in English, Researches on Fossil Bones. It appeared in #, only eight years before Cuvier's death. Cuvier had done wonders with the scant material he had at his disposal and it was only natural that he noticed that among his fossils there, fishes and amphibians, reptiles and mammals, crustaceans and worms, but that fossils of humans were conspicuous by their absence. Man, Cuvier reasoned, must have been a late arrival on earth. The Bible, he pointed out, also said that Man had been created last. Hence Man had not been present when the other creatures became fossils and for that reason it was actually useless to look for human fossils. As Cuvier put it: Thomme fossil n' exists pas -- "fossil man does not exist." Just one year after Cuvier's death a Belgian paleontologist by the name of Schmerling finished a voluminous work with the title. Account of the fossil bones found in caves in the Province of Lieie. In it he pointed out that he had found human remains in the same layers as bones of cave bears, mammoths and so forth, so that it seemed logical to assume that they had lived during the same period. If anybody who read Schmerling's work remembered that the No. I The cliff of the Neanderthal Valley before It became a limestone quarry. Baron von Schlotheim had reported the same situation from a place near Gera in Central Germany some time earlier (in #) he probably had the same explanation for both cases. Early settlers had buried their dead in the debris covering cave floors -- and the human bones had thereby in death acquired companions they had never known when alive. For more than three decades nothing happened to disturb these assximptions. If people did not insist on building stone houses there might have been another three or four decades of peace and quiet. But people build, and one of the things they need for building is limestone. There was one source of limestone which was not only big but easily accessible. Near the small city of Mettmann in western Germany a river, the Dussel, had cut itself a deep and narrow canyon into soft limestone. The gorge even had a name. Three centuries earlier a man by the name of Toachim Neumann had fallen in love with the romantic beauty of the gorge and had visited it again and again. Since he became famous as the author of Christian hymns which he wrote under the name of Joachim Neander, the canyon was named in his honor after his death. It was named Neander Valley, or in German, Neanderthal. Tt was in # that the limestone cliffs that formed the walls of the canyon became a quarry. Local people knew that there were several natural caves in the face of the cliff. They had even been given separate names. Two neighboring caves were called, nobody knows why, the Churches of Feldhof. The workmen began their task by cleaning out the caves, and just dumped the loose debris down the cliff to the bottom of the valley, some # feet below. While cleaning out the smaller of the two "churches" they found bones and felt obligated to report the fact to the owner of the quarry. The owner suspected that this might be important. Since the cave had been all cleaned out by the time he arrived, he ordered that the dumped material be carefully searched. Then he handed all the recovered bones to the locally famous Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a high school teacher, with the remark that these seemed to be bones of the cave bear of which he had heard so much. Fuhlrott saw immediately that the remains were human consisting of the two upper arm bones fragments of other arm bones both femurs a fragment of the pelvis and the top of the skull -- the latter was one of the bones that had been dumped. Fuhlrott looked at the heavy bony ridges over the eye sockets. He noted that the whole skull was shallow with a receding forehead. He considered the femurs to be unusually heavy -- and concluded that he looked at the remains of a more primitive type of man. In a lecture he delivered soon afterwards (it was printed with some delay in #), he said so. But while Fuhlrott could consider himself a naturalist he knew that his knowledge of anatomy was restricted. But he also knew that Professor Schaaffhausen of the University of Bonn an expert in human anatomy was interested in new discoveries. He sent the bones to Schaaffhausen, who examined and measured them with utmost care and published a report in #, stating that he agreed with Fuhlrott; this was an individual with strangely primitive characteristics. Being a careful man, Schaaffhausen did not attempt to determine its age, saying that he hoped that further discoveries would provide definite clues. For a while Fuhlroot and Schaaffhausen stood alone. A Dr. PrunerBey in Paris said that these were probably just the remains of an old Celt who had died during a tribal migration. Professor Andreas Wagner in Gottingen considered it more likely that they were the bones of a Dutch sailor, while others guessed that it might be a Cossack who had taken part in the final campaign against Napoleon. Enter now Dr. Rudolf Virchow, professor of pathology, having been appointed director of the Pathological Institute in Berlin during the same year workers began cleaning out the caves of the Neanderthal. Since what I have to report about Virchow will sound as if he had not been too bright, I must say first that he was justly famous as a medical researcher. He reformed the sanitation system of Berlin, and he (somewhat unusually) was also very active politically. For years he was the leader of the Progressive Party of Prussia and was even elected a member of the Reichstag on the Liberal Party slate. But he had limitations. He had carefully investigated the tubercles in human lungs and written an excellent description in a highly literary style. But when it was suggested to him that these tubercles might be caused by a microorganism he had nothing but sarcasm for the little country doctor who advanced this nonsensical idea. (The little country doctor later became a famous bacteriologist. His name was Robert Koch, and in Sweden they awarded him a Nobel Prize for medicine.) No. #. Skull of a Neanderthal man (old male) from La Chapello' auX'Saints, France. In the original skull from the Neander Valley only the portions above the line A -- A were preserved. To Virchow the remains from the Neanderthal were just one more case of what he had been observing for years. He did not guess at nationality or tribe. All he could say that this man had been sick all his life. One could see the marks of his fonner suffering clearly. To begin with, this individual happened to be born with an unusually long skull and greatly reduced sinus cavities. In his early childhood he had suffered severely from rachitis. But somehow he got over it and grew to manhood, probably to be a warrior since some minor thickenings might be due to battle injuries. However, the main features of the skull which had misled Fuhlrott (only a high school teacher, after all) and Schaaffhausen (a fine anatomist but not a pathNo. # Plihecanfbropus erecfus. Skull No. I from Trinil ologist) had been produced by arthiitis deformans and old age. The outer layers of the skull had been reduced as a result of old age and new layers had formed on the inside with ossification of the skin enclosing the brain. What was left of the arms showed signs of severe arthritis. So said Schaaffhausen; and all this was not advanced as a possibility, or even a probability. It was preceded by the sentence: "We can conclude with absolute certainty -- " One of the men who supported Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen was land, also an anatomist. After stating the reasons for his position, he then proceeded to give the bones the still famous name Homo neanderthalensis. But most scientists were reluctant to go along. After all, Virchow was Virchow! How could they, who were not even medical men, dispute the findings of a pathologist? There was only one such find and it was certainly possible, if unusual, that the one specimen had belonged to a sickly individual. In the meantime -- in # -- at least definite proof that Man and extinct mammals had been contemporaneous had been found. Jacques Boucher de Cr#vecoeur de Perthes had for some years asserted that the stone artifacts he had found had been weapons used by primitive man to hunt mammoths. But while these shaped stones, which might easily have been spearpoints, did exist, who could say what had been hunted with them? -- if they had been hunting weapons at all. (And one could always point out that Boucher de Perthes had written tragedies for the stage, novels for amusement and diplomatic notes for deception. In short, that he had engaged in unscientific activities.) But the new proof, found by Edouard Lartet in a cave of the Vez#re Valley in southern France, was a piece of mammoth tusk, with the outline of a mammoth scratched into it. nphe final proof came from Belgium, from a cave at Spy in the vicinity of Namur. It consisted of two (incomplete) skeletons of this t#T#e of man, along with bones of extinct animals and stone implements. The particular kind of stone implements had been foimd earlier in France in a place named Le Moustier and had been provisionally labelled the Moust#rian Culture. We now know that it is typical for the Neanderthalers. But we also know that Lartet's mammoth drawings belongs to a later time, the Magdalenien, which was not "Neanderthal". Other finds followed. Then some scientists began to feel that the name given by professor King was too specific. One of the suggestions made was Homo primigenius (or Homo primogenitus') but by then everybody was careful. Since the name means "first" man it was not accepted -- maybe somebody would find a still older form. But along with the suggestion Homo diluvianus. The geological period preceding the present period was then generally called Diluvium, so that the name was suggestive of the time. (Now the geological present is called the "holocene" and the preceding period, for which "Ice Age" is another synonym, goes under the name of "pleistocene.") As for the still older form it already had a name. Professor Ernst Haeckel, reasoning that at one time a form halfway between ape and man must have existed, had coined the term Pithecanthropus or "apeman" for this hypothetical being. (In his work General Morphology, first published in #.) And a Dutch physician, Eugene Dubois by name, had joined the Dutch Colonial Services for the purpose of being sent to the tropics, where he was going to look for the common ancestor of both presentday man and of Neanderthal man. He was sent to Java. There he learned that fossils had been discovered in the banks of the Bengawan river near a place called Trinil. When the river was at its lowest point in # he began to dig. His first success, as far as human remains were concerned, was a single tooth, but Dubois said to himself that that tooth could have belonged to a now extinct species of ape. However, in # he could shout success. He had found the roof of a skull first and later and some distance -- about # feet -- away a left femur. As long as he had the skull fragment only he had thought that it belonged to a large now extinct gibbon. But the very human looking femur made it clear that he had found what Haeckel had only deduced, namely Pithecanthropus erectus, the "upright apeman". Fig. #. Profiles of the tops of the skulls of three early forms of humans. V irchow was asked about his opinion. Virchow pointed out that the femur showed a pathological change -- a bone spur which indicated that the owner had suffered from a deepseated abscess which evidently had healed, indicating nursing by others of its kind. Hence the femur was human. The skull, on the other hand, belonged to a large extinct gibbon. The two bones had nothing to do with each other; after all they had been found some distance apart. Later on Virchow changed his opinion. The layer was probably too old to contain human remains, and if there had been a gibbon-like creature of this size it might have walked upright because it was too heavy to live in the treetops like the gibbons of our time. By that time Virchow was in his seventies and respect had somewhat waned. Others went ahead with their investigation. They were determined to find out whether this was, or had been, an apeman or not. They did not deny that an apeman might have existed. "Brain capacity" became the new battle cry. Living humans pygmies excluded, but otherwise without regard as to skin color, nationality, religion or credit rating -- have an average brain capacity of about # cubic centimeters. The Neanderthal types from Germany, Belgium, France and elsewhere in Europe averaged # cubic centimeters or a little more. A large gorilla, largest of the apes, fell a little short of # cubic centimeter. How about Pithecanthropus? Since the skull roof was incomplete there was a little leeway in computing the former content, but the disagreement was minor. It ranged from # to # cubic centimeters. Nicely in the middle, between goriUa on the one side and Homo neanderthalensis on the other. The unsolved problem that remained was one of distance. The valley of the Bengawan was very far from the valley of the Vezere or even from Croatia where more Neanderthal men had been found. However, if you discounted the arms of the Sunda Sea between Java and the Asian mainland (and who could say whether they had existed then?), there were no insurmountable obstacles between Java and Franca. Even a slowly wandering tribe, if it kept going, could do it in just one generation. The sequence seemed clear: some unknown ancestor first, then Pithecanthropus, then Neanderthal man, then modem man. If you believed in this sequence in Europe in # you were under faint suspicion of being a socialist, unless you had a Ph. D. to indicate that you knew what you were talking about. By # you could believe in this sequence without arousing political suspicious, through a doctorate was still helpful. Fig. #. A. Lower jaw of a Neanderthal man from Krapma in Croatia. Be Lower jaw of a mn from an early historical burial site near Tulin in Austria. i I Now we know much more, but aren't so sure any more. On the one hand we have more reason to think that Pithecanthropus was ancestral to Neanderthal man. On the other hand there is a great deal of doubt whether Neanderthal man is ancestral to us. I T et me take the latter probI lem first, if only because I sometimes encountered a surI prised reaction when I say so. How could Neanderthal man ! not be ancestral, since he was around a long time earlier? I think that a comparison with dog-breeding will illustrate the Eoint. The animal which was to become the domesticated dog was probably a small jackal-like form. Slowly it was bred larger into forms somewhat resembling today's greyhound, though smaller. Then (this is just an example, not dog-breeding history) let us say that breeders produced the English bulldog, a dog of specialized shape. Much later other I breeders went after another shape I of dog, say a poodle. I But they would start with the ! original stock, not with the specialized bulldog. Neanderthal man would correspond to the bulldog of this example, an early and specialized offshoot. Some skulls have been found that look like Neanderthal man, but with less pronounced special features. Some researchers have assumed that they are hybrid forms. But it is just as possible that they are an older and not yet so specialized form of Neanderthalers. The history of the discoveries of human fossils since Dubois unearthed Pithecanthropus would make a very long article by itself, but at this point we need only the most pronounced highlights. In # Dr. Davidson Black discovered skulls near Peking which were subsequently labelled Sinanthropus pekinensts, with a brain capacity higher than that of Pithecanthropus but still less than Neanderthal. More specimens of Pithecantthropus were added from Sangiran (Java) by Dr. G. H. R. von Koenigswald. A very large Neanderthal man turned up in Rhodesia, Africa. And southern Africa added a whole series of small forerunners of Man which are collectively called the australopithecines. (The word has nothing to do with the Australian continent, it merely means "southern monkeys".) One theory has it that our own ancestors originated in Africa and migrated northward to Europe to turn into early Europeans. Those who stayed on Africa were the ancestors of the Africans of today. According to that theory, the Neanderthal type originated in eastern Asia and performed a westward migration to Europe rather late in their history. But no decision on whether this theory or rival theories are correct can be made at the moment. Cince the question of who is  ancestral to whom cannot yet be decided, researchers have sorted all human fossils into three groups, once more using brain volume as the criterion. They distinguish : (A) the australopithecines, with a brain capacity .of # to # cc; (B) Homo erectus, with a brain capacity of # to # cc; (C) Homosapiens, with a brain capacity of over # cc. This sorting scheme puts Pithecanthropus into the Homo erectus group, but puts the late European neanderthalers (a s well as the neanderthaler from Rhodesia) into the Homo sapiens group. To repeat, this is essentially a method of sorting, and does not necessarily indicate actual relationships. To clear that question up we need many more of the "triple accidents."      A couple of years ago Gordon R. Dickson wrote a novel called The Genetic General -- its title as a serial was Dorsal! -- which added a good bit to his already very high stature as one of science-fiction's best-liked and most prolific authors. Ever since we've been after him to tell us more of his strange and wonderful words of the future -- the Dorsal and the Friendlies, the parts of humanity that have given themselves to the stars heredities... , and the man has finally come through for us. The title is Soldier, Ask Not; it's a short novel; it's complete in the next issue of Galaxy. In the saime issue -- The Children of Night (scheduled for this issue, but squeezed out to make room for Wyman Guin's timely and delightful return), a new Philip K. Dick story, Willy Ley's fine column... and much more. See you then! This was the world fhct machines had made. Could men hope fa win it back? I eastern sky glittered over the city and the sun came up. Robin Hedging wasn't one of the superstitious kind who thought you would die within twenty-four hours of seeing the morning sun through glass. Nevertheless, he lowered the. window of the bus to stare out at it. This was always a good moment for him, when the rain ration had stopped falling and the sun rose before you got to work. The city stood high on piers above the plain. The plain as yet; would be dark. That was what, gave Robin the thrill: the thought of that grirh black land where no humans went, where terrors dwelt. Covertly, he cir-' cled himself. His father looked up from beside him, catching the gesture. "What's the matter, son? You thinking something you shouldn't do?" "It's nothing." "You worrying about seeing the sun through glass? You don't have to. You're wearing your spectacles -- that makes two lots of glass. The superstition says you only die if you see the sun through one bit of glass." "That means I'm going to die, Father. I opened the window and saw it through my spectacles alone." Robin spoke with as much of a sneer as he could muster, but a pang tore at his heart. He had not thought enough. But he'd seen the sun through one thickness of glass before and not died... Only maybe then there'd been some extenuating circumstances... Maybe he'd seen a robot before seven... His father's pouchy face shook. "You're a careless young fool, Robin. You'll cost me my job yet." "You know what happens to people who voice their greatest fear?" That was a remark to provide a row in any company, but a man sitting behind the Hedgings leaned forward and tapped Robin on the shoulder. "Don't mind me butting in, young H, but I could hear what you and your dad were saying. I don't think you've got anything to worry about. The saying is that you mustn't see the sun through a pane of glass. Now you wouldn't count your specs as a pane of glass would you, so you're okay." Old Sam Hedging dug his son hard in the ribs, and with a downward droop to his mouth indicated he was to say as little as possible. He then turned to look at the intruder. Ovine was a sad baggy man with a square face on which the patina of old eczema papules was partly concealed below a straggling moustache. His one-piece suit was new, and of course sharp blue. Both Hedgings dreaded his presence, on the bus or in the Distributive Point, but were afraid to say so. "What are spectacles if they aren't panes of glass?" Sam asked. "I'm only trjdng to help the boy." "Well, I'm asking you, O, what are spectacles if they aren't panes of glass?" "I suppose you're right." Ovine turned his face away, and then, struck by a sudden thought, said, "But in that case they are two panes of glass, so your son's all right." "I'm the best judge of that -- " Robin tried not to listen to the argument. He liked the journey to work, but these older men always spoilt it with their tiny arguments. This third deck of the bus was full of men, mostly in working one pieces, haggling over little things. Well, you took your choice: you haggled over little things, or you kept quiet. There did not seem to be any other alternatives. rrhey were passing over Dunshinnan Bridge now. Robin braced himself. As the great lighted palace of the bus trundled forward at its statutory twenty miles an hotir, he looked down into the canyon. Yes, night was still down there, impervious to the lights on the bridge, night and the ancestral earth. He thought he saw something white crawl down there -- but it would have been a sheet of paper if it was anything. Though the population was held steady now, the government had deemed it necessary to expand the city. That had been over four -- or was it five? -- centuries ago, but Robin had studied urbography during his year at school. He still recalled some of the details. The new sector, Dimshinnan, had been built up on piles to join the rest of the city. But an error had' been made. Always there were errors, in government, in engineering, in life. One understood that. The cybos and robos were no more effective at dealing with error than were humans. Dunshinnan had been constructed with its base a meter lower than the main city and with a gulf of a hundred and thirty meters separating the two sections. It was a large error; but bridges were built to span the gulf, no harm was done -- and every morning Robin got his stomach-wrenching view of midnight. The first stop over the bridge was where the Hedgings and Ovine and one or two others -- the pallid Farven, the choleric Claysbank -- got off. They climbed down onto the walk, old Sam Hedgings and Ovine still joined in grumbling talk. It was not far to the edge of the Dunshinnan, but high walls prevented one looking over. At first, before the walls had been erected, people had thrown themselves over the railings into the drop. There was still a mystique about it. Particularly on Kennedy and Vareller Days, dedicated parties would scale the walls and sacrifice themselves over the drop. You heard about it in whispers. Robin checked himself at Distributive Point D #'s door. Farven laid a hand on his arm. "You're dreaming again, young H," he said, smiling with a nervy twitch. "F's go before H's under a threshold, or they used to when I was a boy." Robin apologized and stepped back. The little group went in in alphabetical order, those who knew their alphabet helping the others. This was an important juncture, the beginning of work, when obviously one had to be careful. Demons were most active in the early morning. The lights came on in D #. Supervisor stood there awaiting the men. He was the only cybo who remained switched on during the night, a large and immobile bulk of a machine. His sides and the containers on his sides had become plastered with notices, waybills, delivery slips and chalked figures. It was considered unlucky to remove these until Renovation Day. "Come in, humans. Equality and happiness in your day's w-w-work." Supervisor had developed a slight stammer with his ws. Farven, the mech, was unable to remedy it; when the robomech arrived on his bi-monthly inspection of the point, he would repair it. Robin followed his father up to Supervisor. They asked the traditional question, " Is there any special w-w-work you require of us today?" It was reckoned judicious to imitate the speech of Supervisor, thus gathering for oneself some of his power. As always, the answer was neg. ative. he Hedgings climbed into their gallery; already the first deliveries of goods were arriving. Claysbank waddled round, switching on the auxiliary robos. The first one he activated rolled behind him, clattering to itself as it checked the output of its fellows, recharging them from its own power supplies if necessary. As more and more machines came alive, the hall filled with noise and light For Robin, it was a cheering noise. This was life. No illomens; everything working with as much efficiency as could be humanly expected. He followed his father into their little hut up on the catwalk. Already they had a light on their switchboard. It was a sign of plenty. The spirits were harmless. Old Hedging acknowledged the signal, settling himself down into their battered chair as he did so. "Grocery consignment One. DP D#. One thousand two hundred sixty-five nine-ounce cans marrow soup." Down on the floor, they could see the robotruck that had announced itself. It had drawn in to the first bay, where one of the point's loaders hauled off its freight with padded metal hands, stacking the cans with its auxiliary hands so that they stood separately on the conveyor belt behind it and were carried one by one into the distance. In response to the announcement, Sam shifted a bead along a thin wire. Supervisor would be keeping exact details of the entry; Sam's was just a rough double-check. "Grocery consignment Two. DP D#. Five hundred twentyeight twenty-ounce cans marycake pudding, two hundred nine ten-ounce cans marycake pudding." "Milk consignment. DP D#. Two hundred nine-ounce containers Grade A milk. Six hundred sixty-two eighteen-ounce containers Grade A milk. Three hundred ninety-three twentyeight-ounce containers Grade A milk." Laconically Sam moved two more beads across the wire. Business was warming up. More robotrucks were arriving with more of the day's supplies for Dvmshinnan Second District. They called their orders methodically as they entered. The automatic cop jockeyed them into place, his hand-sized fliers leading them to allotted bays, where they were unloaded. The big hall was humming and stuttering with the activity of robots and humans. The whole city was humming with activity. It was the same sort of activity, did Robin but know it, that characterized a chicken's rushing around when its head is cut off. The mechanical business of city life ground on, mindlessly. No conscious government was left. Men capable of governing died or were killed or shot themselves or escaped centuries ago. The machinery of government ground on with no human hand to steer it. In the steel palm of the city, life crawled thoughtlessly, and obeyed the laws of a robos kept the system going, and each year became a little more entangled with the system. From his vantage point, Sam saw the newscart trundle in. It was a red vehicle with auto tracks on either side, and very noticeable among the subdued colors of the other vehicles. "I'm going down onto the floor, Robin. Do you think you can manage?" "Of course. Father. Luck!" "And you, boy." They both circled themselves with inpointing forefingers, and Sam moved along the catwalk and down to the floor. Moving carefully so as not to touch any of the robos -- with good reason, for it was considered a sign of forthcoming inJury if you touched one of them while ftey were at work -- he reached the red vehicle just as it was announcing its consignment. "Newspost consignment. DP D#. Four hundred seventy copies City. Three hundred eightythree copies City and Star. Three hundred fifty-two copies Tidings. Seventy copies Dunshinnan Light." Dexterously, Sam picked copies of three of the four newsdigests off the racks before they were tossed onto the conveyor. Claysbank arrived and began to do the same thing. Smiling, Sam signalled a thumbs-up sign at his son, watching through the cabin window. Someone in DP D# went short of their morning news every morning. No system is perfect. The men in the point were careful to see that it was a different house that missed out each time. II P utting the tablets in his pocket, old Hedging strolled to the far end of the bay. Always, if the day had begun well, he liked this little exercise, liked to see that everything was going smoothly, liked to smell the sweet oil and warm metal and the occasional tang of bad food, where something had fallen off the conveyor belt and eluded the sweep of the cybocleaner. You couldn't have a better job than in the distributive point -- except in Government, of course. But that was not for the likes of the Hedgings. He felt happy that he had inherited this job, and comfortable to think that he would hand it down to Robin. His reverie faded. Ovine was watching him. Not watching him openly, but standing behind a a stanchion and spjdng, for all the world like a banshee in a cartoon. He pretended to look the other way when he saw Sam's eye on him. Ovine's job was one of the rare kind that machines did less efficiently than a man of average ability. He was a floor retriever. Of the material that fell to the floor, not all was rubbish to be swept into the metal maws of the cleaners; much of it was perfectly good food and such like, which had tumbled off the conveyor and could still be used. For some reason -- probably a design flaw -- the cleaners found difficulty in distinguishing such articles from genuine trash. But Ovine could, so Ovine had a genuinely functional job, and was therefore regarded by supers like the Hedgings and Farvan with suspicion and contempt, and the fear tiiat went with suspicion and contempt A retriever's job, boasting no particular pitch of its own, was noninheritable. Ovine had arrived to take up the job only last month. He was not a good acquisition. "You looking for something?" Sam asked him. "No, Mr. Hedging," Ovine said. Tt was a deadly insult. Only if they had been eating together would it have been propitious for Ovine to have used anything but Sam's initial when addressing him. To have one's name spoken out loud like this was asking for trouble. Angrily, Sam lumbered forward. Ovine backed away in alarm, but before he could get away, Sam broke one of his tablets between them. The printed circuits lay on the floor in a scatter of glass. The misfortime had been handed back to its instigator. Although Ovine had been defeated, Sam was unsettled by the incident. He strolled round the floor, grumbling to the other men, with whom Ovine was just an unpleasant newcomer. Soothed by the S#rmpathy he gained, Sam retmned to the little cabin up in the roof. The beads were piling up on the other side of the ware. Sam took over from his son, gave him the copy of the Light and settled to look through the other newsdigests. Robin turned the pages of the tablet slowly. He hked to watch the pictures struggle slowly into life and color. Somehow their efforts to perform efficiently always woke a chord of sympathy in him. Their meaning interested him less. These stories, fact and fiction mixed, and told all in picture form, had never meant much to him. He dropped the tablet, exchanged signs with his father and went in his turn for a stroll about the point. His thoughts were chiefly on Gina Lombard, their new lodger. So beautiful, that girl, so shy and yet so lively, with arms so ripe and soft! It would be good to get back and see her... He caught Ovine looking at him. "Are you wanting to speak to me?", he asked. "No -- er, no, young H. I was merely thinking how busy we are today," Ovine said, fingering his moustache. "I am not quite used to the routine yet, being new here." "Where did you work before?" "I was on structure maintenance." Robin had no desire to talk. He moved away, and went along the other side. Farven popped out of a companionway and laid a hand on his arm; Robin was none too fond of the way Farven clutched arms, but he greeted the old man civilly enough. "You don't want to talk to that O too much, young H," Farven said, putting his pale nose up towards Robin's eyes, as if to peck at them. "He's got the evil eye. He upset your father not ten minutes ago. And see that moustache on his face -- isn't that a sign of Neg?" "You are being old-fashioned," Robin protested. "Am I? Am I now? We shall see. But remember this: tomorrow night is Wellpurgers' Night... , O may get his name burnt if he isn't too careful." R obin sucked in his breath. Something cold tingled down his back. He hated these old men with their relish of the rites; they seemed to see it less as a grim necessity than as a pleasure. "He's new. We must try to make allowances," he said, and moved off before Farven could answer. The old man became garrulous and addressed you like a public meeting if he was upset. Dodging an empty truck rattling towards the exit, Robin climbed down the nearby companionway. This was the section of the point that fascinated him most. The steps wound down for a long way; there were also elevators, but only robos used them. He emerged into what was known as the Services. The Services had one' overriding attraction for him. They were on the ground, the real ground, the Earth, the territory he glimpsed when crossing Dunshinnan Bridge. It lay beyond the concrete walls. The Services formed a complex series of sub-roads, entirely enclosed, entirely lit by selumce. Robin was careful not to get in the way of the purely automatic traffic that moved by. Its reactions were not always as fast as they should be, which was why everything was geared down to travel at no more than twenty miles an hour. At twenty miles an hour, human and robo reactions work at maximum efficiency together... A slinker with a large D# painted on its side moved up and offered itself. Robin jumped into the small cab, grateful to be out of the rancid wind that blew down here. They chugged down the straight road that was D#. That straight road ran for an uncurving ten and a half miles. Above it was the double row of dwellings, one thousand two hundred and sixty-five of them, that made the D# Avenue. In Dunshinnan there were four hundred such Services below four hundred such avenues, some longer, some shorter than this. The city proper, of course, was a bigger proposition altogether. From the roof appeared the conveyor belt that had been loaded in the distributive point Robin had just left. It worked to the lower level in steps, feeding its contents onto another and synchronized belt that ran at eye level all along the Services. Cybocheckers fussed at this trouble point. Quick btlrsts of code flashed up to Supervisor, squatting impeturbably somewhere above. Chugging further, the slinker moved beneath the houses. Here Robin felt less comfortable, although the gloom they had entered held its own kind of fearful pleasure. This was a region of stretching hands, lit only by the EL of the bulkhead above. As the eye-level belt rumbled down the ten-mile stretch, little photoelectric eyes winked secret signals to the bulkhead above. A load for House # signalled itself to House #. As it rode beneath the house, autoarms came down, scooping hands lifted the load, bore it up and into chute mouths that gaped open in the bulkhead. Circling himself, Robin watched the process. He had watched it for years. It never ceased to hold him. In the busy feeding movements of the arms and mouths there was a symbol of some colossal and unending greed bigger than a human greed. The Services maintenance trucks came round less frequently than they should do (in fact some heretics whispered that the city was slowly running to a standstill). The arms and jaws developed minor eccentricities. Some snatched too soon, some almost too late; many squeaked or whined as they did their task -- and at this time of day they were kept busy. No. # had greedy arms that snatched # 's groceries as well as its own. No. # regularly broke its fruit juice jars. These foibles were known to the robos, and allowed for where possible. T he clatter of falling goods and the buzz of alarmed cybos came to Robin. He called to the slinker to stop, jumped out and looked back down the somber subway. "City sprites, the main supply belt has stopped!" he exclaimed. The eye-level belt was still on the move. The belt coming down from above had lurched to a halt. He heard men's voices shouting, his father's among them. A figure appeared, running down the steps of the stopped conveyor belt. It was Ovine. He slipped among rolling cans, threw up his hands and fell onto the moving belt knees first. He buckled and stayed there. Clattering feet sounded down the companionway. The redfaced Claysbank appeared, brandishing a stick. Farven and Sam Hedging were not far behind him. Above their voices echoed the voice of Supervisor, calling for order. Although he knew they were not after him, Robin felt alarm. These sudden persecutions were common; whether or not he was their victim, they scared him. As his pursuers arrived in the Services, Ovine pulled himself up. The belt had carried him some way towards where Robin stood. He got onto his knees, and above him mouths opened and mechanical hands reached down for him. Robin shouted. In that moment he was no longer a doubter. He believed to the hilt all the whispers he had ever heard. He knew that the city really belonged to a Higher Power -- and that the Higher Power had heart as well as hands of metal. His scream acted as a warning to Ovine. The retriever looked up in time. As the arms came down, he jumped. He landed almost at Robin's feet. "Don't let them get me I" One of the cybos had stepped into the path of the running men, its arms spread. Claysbank hit it across the shoulder. It lost its balance and fell. Something inside it sizzled and flashed. Robin stood before Ovine. He had no weapon, but he could not let the man be killed without going to his rescue. Gasping, Ovine picked himself up, half-heartedly attempting to explain as he stood behind Robin. Robin was not listening. For the attackers had stopped. Beyond the cybo they stood, staring at its length, and at the smoke curling from it A ll the way home, old Hedging talked of the incident. The smoke issuing from the metal body had formed the sign of the circle. He had seen it, and the others thought they had too. It must mean something. Whatever it meant, it had stopped their hunt for Ovine. Bit by bit, Robin pieced together what had happened. Ovine, walking carelessly across the floor, had got in the way of a robotruck. The truck had swerved and bowled into another vehicle. Together, the two trucks had jammed into the conveyor belt and stopped it. "You know what it means when two robos hit each other," Sam said in a fearful imdertone. "Some human has put them at cross purposes. Who'd do that but Ovine? That's why we determined to have his blood. Otherwise the spirits might have had ours." "So we should have had him," agreed Farven from the seat in front, "but for that sign of the circle. What's it mean? The powers of metal must be on Ovine's side." "They're against us right enough," Robin agreed. "We've a thousand man-hours in overtime to do now, to make up the value of that cybo. You shouldn't have knocked him down." to ignore this assertion, Farven said merely, "It's Wellpurging Night tomorrow. If Ovine is fool enough to show his face tomorrow, we must have his blood." His nose was as sharp as a dagger. He nodded his parting benediction curtly as he moved to leave the bus. The Hedgings were gloomily silent when they stepped off at Avenue C#. They had some way to walk down the pedestrian path to their home. The city, large though it was, was virtually without architecture. Everything had been spread out, with several low buildings taking the place of the large dty blocks that had been the fashion a score of centuries ago, back in the days of improperly mechanized groimd cities. The centralization that created the need for big buildings, as well as traffic problems, had also been done away with. Civic centers had been dispersed. The Services supply routes solved the old pressing need for convenient shopping centers. Government itself took place in fully automated hutments. There was no core to the city, only a logic and a finite number of streets. The front wall of their home was adorned with a motif of colored geometrical designs, functional as well as decorative, for the motif served as an additional means of identifying the house beside the number. It was said that no two houses in the entire city bore the same pattern. Otherwise they were all alike. T hey genuflected on the threshold, waited until nobody wearing a black suiting was in sight, and went in. Robin was glad to see that Gina Lombard was in. "Hello, L, you are back promptly." They were not yet familiar enough to call each other by their first initial. "I was arranging your groceries. I hope you don't mind. Their wants for the day had come up through the Services hatch and lay in the delivery baskets. Robin shuddered to think of what would have happened to Ovine if the metal hands had caught him and tried to force him into that two-footsquare hatch. Death was everywhere. He saw how necessary it was to propitiate it. He lost some of his unease as he talked to Gina. She was beautiful with her trim black hair that came almost to a peak above her eyes; and her conversation, though guarded by formality, had an unusual quality' about it that interested Robin. Instinctively he felt she was "unsafe", without knowing quite what he meant by that. He felt nothing but pleasure when his father moodily retired to the sitting room and turned on the iUiscop... Robin and Gina were sitting together on the kitchen bench when Mrs. Hedging arrived. She had won herself some reputation as a hag, and spent much of every day going among her neighbours, counselling them. As her popularity spread further afield, her days became longer. Since the morrow was to be a special day, she opened the supper without a word. Robin felt his account of what happened at the DP die on his Hps; though he spoke to Gina, he knew his mother was listening, and feared that she would construe something evil from his tale. Was there not some prohibition about retelling bad events? In the night, he had a vile dream. People he knew took on a sudden menace and closed in on him. They extended steel claws at him. He fell through the ground. He fell through space. But space had a floor. On the floor stood his parents. He fell towards them. They opened their mouths. The inside of their mouths was pocked and roughened by eczema. As he fell, their tongues -- He woke. In the dark, an abysmal rumble came. The rubbish hatch was emptying automatically into the Services, where it would be collected in the morning. Throughout the city, and Dunshinnan, thouwould be vomiting their muck down into the cavernous depths. The fact became part of his nightmare. He could hardly struggle out of it. Stranded at last on the muddy shore of wakefulness, Robin wiped his brow and gulped for breath. He climbed from his bunk and peered out of the window. All was utterly quiet, utterly dark -- but somewhere across the city he thought a fire burned. He desperately needed the comfort of Gina's bed, but had not the courage to leave his tiny cabin.  t work in the Distributive Point next morning, he remained ill at ease. The omens had set against him. He told nobody, but he had seen a cloud like a cross in the sky, and his spectacles had misted when he drank his morning beverage -- a sure presentiment that there were things hidden from him, awaiting their time. Walking moodily about the floor, behind one of the unpacking bays, he came across Ovine's vest. Its sharp blue rendered it instantly identifiable. He shied at it, and looked about to see if anyone was watching. John Ovine had not arrived that morning. The men had cursed and demanded his address of Supervisor. Supervisor had sent them stonily back to work. The mood in the place was bad. Even up in the cosy little hut on the catwalk, which had been handed down through four generations of  Hedgings, tension reigned in every creak of Sam's swivel chair. Robin plunged in his hand into the breast pocket of Ovine's garment. He brought out a notebook. He retired to the men's room to investigate it, making the sign of the circle over it. The notebook bore stamped beneath it the words for which the initials stood. Government Investigation Bureau. It fell from Robin's hands. Trembling, he picked it up again and leafed through it. The contents were obscure, being mainly in note form, or in words that defied Robin's simple reading standards. But their intent was clear enough, even to him. Ovine had been watching them for the government, and was making a report on them. He had found all the supers redundant. Of the humans working in the Distributive Point, only the functional job Ovine was temporarily holding -- the despised job of floor retriever -- had any practical purpose. The list of men who could be dismissed included both Hedgings and the pallid Farven. "But -- but -- we've got rights to the job!" He was standing in the metal cubicle, whispering the words aloud. The job was threatened. There were rumors about what happened to people who could not find jobs, just as there was glum tattle about what happened to the aged who were taken into homes. His father held documents of inheritance for the checking job, it was true. But the agreement was with the family, had been for over two centxuies. If the Distributive Point cancelled the arrangement, there would be nothing they could do about it. Who owned the DP? He didn't know -- the government presumably. But who was the government? Who owned the Government Investigation Bureau? Obviously, those same faceless people... or powers. His dream came back to him. The ground was opening beneath him sure enough. IV H e stuck it in the Distributive until midday. His father and the other men only played on his nerves with their remarks about hunting down Ovine and sacrificing him as a warlock during the night's revels. He knew how feeble these affairs often were when the evening came, but the talk of blood did him no good. When the rest of them went down to the autobar, he slipped out. Supervisor would not miss h im , or if he was missed would not sack him. He was -- no, he'd never realized it till now -- redundant, as the watching eyes of Ovine had quickly seen. He was a super. It was no term of praise; it probably meant superfluous. Though Robin was not a perceptive man, a vision came to him. It came in the form of a question: how long ago did the present state of affairs crystallize? His education in the robo and most rudimentary during his year at school. He had no concept of history, but after the question came the reflection: things can't always have been like this. He did not know what a large mental step he had taken. First, he needed someone to talk to. He thought of the youths he played football with once a I week; there was nobody there he cared to confide in. He thought of Gina and her bright eyes. She would be someone who would be able to think -- perhaps more clearly than he could. He did not know where she worked, for there were tabus about inquiring into other people's jobs, but there might be an address he could find in her room. He caught a bus home. It was strange, moving round the town at this time of day; he had a sudden breath of unaccustomed freedom that carried him back to his early boyhood before civilization closed in on him. But the clerks talking the seat behind him reminded him that captivity could not be eluded by a bus ride. They were, talking about the Dark Thing that flew over the city on Wellpurging Night. He might have been sitting with his workmates! As they crawled over Dunshinnan Bridge, he looked down and saw the earth far below. It was in shadow and no features were discemable. On sudden impulse, Robin pulled Ovine's notebook out of his pocket, flinging it wide of the bus. Fluttering like a tiny live thing, it fell below the level of the bridge. The parapet cut it from view. Alighting at C#, he became suddenly cautious. Some of his excitement left him. Th last perscMi he wanted to see was his mother. It was unlikely, h thought, that she would be at home, but she would be in the neighborhood and particu-, larly active on a day like this. Interference from her would be intolerable. Few people were about. Hq moved forward fast, not liking to run. People did not run. The two women he passed kept their eyes to themselves. He let himself through the front door. "Mother! L!" he called in a whisper, hearing his heart beat. Something moved in the kitchen. Swivelling his head, eyes astare, he saw the evening's meal tip out of the hatch into the basket. Smiling limply to himself, he moved upstairs to Gina's cabin. His nerves were bad. The house held a weird desolation; even the lights and shadows that lay about its floors felt unnatural at this unvisited time of day. A stair creaked under his tread and a rictal jerk took the comer of his mouth. Cursing himself, making the circle, he went at a run into Gina's tiny cabin. I t was better there. A faint prurient interest strengthened him when he opened her tiny closet and saw her dress there. He touched its fabric. "Gina!" he said, but there was no answer. She had so few possessions. In her suitcase under the pink face towel he came on the leather stamped on the cover. When he had uttered a few broken noises, he opened it. Written inside was her name, and the address of the Government Investigation Bureau. He had seen the same address in Ovine's notebook, without taking it in. Now the whole business was on a different footing. Finding Ovine's notebook had shown him a trap was in operation; finding Gina's notebook told him the trap was aimed at him and his father. He hardly took in the few scanty notes in the notebook. Mostly there were symbols -- Gina, he could see at a glance, operated on a more sophisticated level than Ovine, for all that they worked for the same organization -- though on one page, under his initials, she had scrawled, "Good intelligence potential, poor lad, but a savage, just a savage." He was making little uncouth sounds to himself, trying to take the shape of these new things. His first impulse was to escape but there was nowhere to escape to. So he had to go and confront Gina. A sound came that was not his. Mouth jerking open, he turned. A terrible thing stood just inside the doorway, a thing with an idiot metal face and body of fur, tatty fur that ended in human feet. He screamed hate and fear at it with all his lungs' strength as he flung himself upon it. He had the girl's open suitcase held by the handle. He struck the thing with the comer of it. The thing shrieked and fell back, striking its head on the doorpost. Then it slid slowly to the floor. The metal mask dropped away as it went, revealing the wizened face of Robin's mother. Striking the mat, the body twitched, kicked ineffectually at the wall and was silent Almost beyond horror, Robin sank to his knees, bmshing the stupid mask under the bunk. This was a new Wellpurging costume his mother had on. Once he called to her. Even when the faintest exhalation of breath came to his ears, he could not bring himself to touch her. Suddenly strength came back to his chilled muscle fiber. He up and ran. V dress, he argued with himself. She'd had no right to come sneaking up to him like that. She should have taken that terrifying mask off, apeing the puissance of robos. His guilt remained, whatever he told himself. Yet he felt no love or regret. His mother had always been aloof, wrapped in the mysteries of her hagdom. He might have behaved foolishly, but he had had the sense to take a small steak knife from the kitchen as he left. He clutched it in his pocket like a ju-ju. a main trafficway. On the opposite comer was a canteen. Robin entered it, gave his works number and received a plateful of food in exchange for the pledge of an hour's overtime. This was a poor move to begin with. The pledge would be sent back to his DP, who would then have a check on his whereabouts. He thought, I need to get away to another city. But how did one go about it? Was it possible? The meal was welcome. He ate building. He realized he was lonely and frightened. He had broken territorial tabus; he had committed matricide; if the Dark Thing flew tonight, it would have a call for him. People were beginning to leave the building opposite. Robin grew more undecided. At last he rose to go, and at that moment he saw Gina in the street. She was walking towards the his spectacles and mbbed them on his shirt before taking another look. It was Gina. Her head was down, and she carried depression in every line of her sleek body. As she entered the crossed the road after her. In the doorway, a cluster of people leaving work got in his way. They saw him and made the quick gestures of covering themselves. Having no idea what tabu he had offended against, Robin could oidy conclude that here in a different region of town, and in a different business, people must have different tabus. He pushed past them and went upstairs. shabby and utilitarian, even by the standards to which the Hedgings were accustomed. A robot stood at the top of the stairs, but it seemed to be out of commission. Doors with glass panels stood open, the rooms beyond for the most part deserted. When he came to a door that was closed, he threw it open. It was a tiny cabin with one window, giving a view across to the canteen in which he had eaten. It was empty, but over by the window was a closet, the door of which was open. Faint sounds -- gasping or weeping -- came from it. For a second, skin crawled along Robin's neck; then he moved forward. Gina turned and came into his arms. He thrust a hand over her mouth, though fetish objects like lips and teeth touched his palm. "I'm not going to hurt you, L. I just want to ask you questions. Calm downl" W hen she stopped struggling and her eyes looked less wild, he removed his hand. "You're a matricide!" she said. She had been back to her room -- it must have been almost immediately after Robin had left -- and found Mrs. Hedging at the foot of the stairs, dead. The hag had lived long enough to drag herself a little way for help. Shocked, Robin sat on Gina's table and told her what had happened. As he finished, lights came automatically on in the room. Looking round in surprise, he saw the tawdry little room for the first time. It was recognizable as a room that had been inhabited for centuries; the atmosphere reminded him so much of the Hedging hut in DP# that he felt a momentary nostalgia. Nodding to the line of ancestors' skulls on the shelf above the door, he aed, "You hold this room by inheritance?" "No. I'm temporary here while the boss is on an investigation elsewhere. Robin, why do you tell me all this? You must see I'm yoxuenemy." "Sometimes you're closer to your enemies than your friends." She walked over and switched the light off, so that the deep blue outside the window turned blankety gray. "Robofficers'll get me unless I do something," he said. no "Robofficers rarely kill humans unless they are sick or aged. Didn't you observe that? But no -- all you people have been carefully trained not to use your powers of observation, not to believe in cause and effect. Instead, you're indoctrinated into tying your minds up with a tissue of superstitions! Robin, can't you see how man is lost in this city, ruling himself by fear and mob law and gobbledy-gook?" Shaking his head as if to avoid her words, he grasped her wrist. "You don't say why you were spying on us. You were working with Ovine, weren't you?" "Let go of me! Listen, never mind what I was doing. Just believe this -- I have more reason to suspect you than you me. If you will trust me, I will get you out of here." Where was out? "You're Government," he said. "You're going to have me dissected." "You savage! Can't you see there is no government as you understand the term? The people left in this city are incapable of rational thought. Reasoning man opted out of this city over six centuries ago! He began to leave over a thousand years ago, when he first found a machine could do his thinking for him. He made a big error then, thinking his machines were efficient, thinking that he could trust them more than he could trust himself." "And can't he?" "Never, Robin. Even the most complex machine, the computer, is just a sort of special fool. When men shaped themselves to fit into a computerized world, they became fools themselves, they sank back into this sort of urban savagery, this ghastly mixture of automation and ancestral skulls!" Dazed, he groped for an answer. There was, must be an answer. He knew the necessity for ancestral skulls. They insured one's inheritance, and -- From outside, a shriek came from the drab sky, growing louder fast I t was almost night. It was Wellpurging Night. The few clouds in the sky were dappled with the last stains of sundown. In the north, a thing with spread wings rose. It was black. It traveled unwaveringly, and slowly as if to survey every soul in the city. Two red eyes blinked down. The Dark Thing was in flight. Robin sank to his knees. Of all the people in the city, he was the one it was after. He had transgressed the most. His heart struggled to break free and rise up to that shape of retribution. Ill She was tugging his hair and crying to him to get up, smacking his face, twisting his ear, crying. In pain, he hit back, grasped her round the legs, buried his face in her warm thigh. She fell on top of him. She was half-laughing. "Get up, you great savage! Come on. I'll take you out of here -- away from the city." He was sober at once. He rose and helped her to her feet. "I want to get out of the city," he said. It was all he had ever wanted -- and it had taken him till now to realize it. As the Dark Thing shrieked overhead -- there were cries from the streets to mark its passage; people would be dying out there -- they hurried into the gloom of the passage. A man stood there with a gun. He flashed a torch in their eyes and they came to a shocked halt. "I've been listening to everything you said." His voice was less steady than his gim. "You are both guilty of crime talk. I saw you in the canteen, young H. I saw you through this window when you put your light on. I know just what you are up to." Robin recognized the sad and baggy face. "Ovine!" he exclaimed. "O to you, thanks., I still believe in the law, if you don't Miss L, you must take me with you, out of the city. I want to get away from here. Take me with you or I'll shoot you both and swear it was my duty." "Turn your torch off," she ordered. Her voice was calm. "You, can't come. Ovine. Resign yourself to the fact." In a humble voice he said, "I I'm no good at it. It's been in my family over four centuries, but I'm just a failure. Wherever I go to investigate, they always discover me. I'm an outcast. I'm always chased and beaten. I can't -- " Robin's blow caught him in the midriff. He doubled up, dropping the torch and slipping to the floor. Gina seized Robin's arm and led him along the corridor. "My big brave savage!" she murmured. "You were pretty calm, weren't you?" "Yes. I happened to know that that gun of his was an old family heirloom, but he had no -- shots, or whatever the word is. No fuel for it. Gun fuel isn't available any more." 'hey came out of the building. Distantly down the avenue a bonfire burned. Figures danced round it and there was some shouting. The lights of the canteen burned; silhouetted by them was a knot of men. Robin held the girl back. He recognized some of the men. His father was there. "I gave my address away to them by eating in the canteen," he whispered. "They aren't looking this way. Can we get round the back?" They investigated a side alley ing and the next. It led nowhere. As they worked their way back. Ovine emerged from the building, still clutching his stomach, and staggered out into the road. A cry went up from the group of men as they recognized him. Ovine turned and ran down the avenue towards the bonfire. With whoops and shrieks, the others gave chase. Sam Hedging and Claysbank were in the lead. Taking advantage of the distraction, Robin anci Gina hurried onto the trafficway and jumped aboard a tram. After a silence, he said, "You must have known Ovine well." "No. I told you, I was not permanent there. One day you'll understand the hopelessness of the network of this city's life. The gation to find how many men in DP# are redundant. Ovine -- had all gone well -- would have made his report. You would all have been declared redimdant. but nothing would have happened. The report would have been filed in the entrails of some idiotic machine -- and next generation the work would have been done all over again, just as it was last generation by Ovine's father, and the generation before that by his grandfaredundant!" "But then -- " "AU humans in the city are redundant. They've got no meaning and no purpose. The machines just find them little jobs to keep 'em quiet." VI XThen they got off the bus, ' ' she led the way to a nearby door. "Is this a trap, Gina?" She opened the front door impatiently, stepping aside to let him in before her. "You'd better come in and see." Annoyed with himself for doubting her, he walked in. Heavy padded hands came up and grasped his head. In the dark he fought with fear and fury. But the thing was of metal that held him, and had more than one pair of hands. In no time he was hamstrung. They were in utter dark, and then a light filled his eyes. The robo was revealed in outline for a brief second, as a writhing illuniination covered it. It relaxed its grip on Robin and fell. "I'm terribly sorry about that," Gina said, clinging to him. "I should have guessed that they'd get after me as well as you when your mother was discovered. I've been careless. Since the mindless fools were expecting only me, they sent only one robofficer for me. We'd better move before more come." "What did you do to him?" Robin asked as they stepped over the metal hulk. "A sort of gun that really works. They don't make them in this city. But they do where I come from." "Hag's sake, Gina, where do you come from?" "Where we're going to, fast!" In the kitchen, she shut the door and switched on the light, grumbling because the windows of the city did not have curtains. Outside, with its blood-separating screech, the Dark Thing sailed over again. It was close, but Robin paid no attention. Gina was opening up her refuse well. Behind the disposal chute, the regulation pattern had been altered. The rotor that mashed the refuse as it went down had been removed. A metal ladder hung into the depths. Inside the door, a torch dangled. Gina took it and climbed through the hatch onto the ladder. 'Tollow me, and be sure to close the hatch behind you. There's a stout bolt on this side." "What are we going down into the Services for?" "Oh, hurry, Robin, hurry!" Reluctantly, he climbed into the well. As he did so, there came a knocking at the front door of the house, a knocking that changed into a pounding. As he slammed the hatch to, he heard a door panel splinter. He climbed hurriedly down into the depths, preceded by the jigging circle of Gina's torchlight. had happened to the Services, and realized that the concrete beyond the ladder was new; they had bypassed the Services level They could only be going to one place. "Steady now," she cautioned. He came down and stood beside her as she fumbled with a lock. "Wait a moment," he said, grasping her hand. She turned to see his face shining with sweat His chest heaved as he forced the words out, "I know where we are -- it's the ground outside, isn't it? I can't go out there. I'll see you out, then I'll go back upstairs to face -- " She broke in, "I can't leave you now. Get a grip of yourself and come on." "No, you don't understand! It may be true, all you say about our having been taught a lot of superstition, but you don't just throw off a lifetime's habit in one go." "You do if you're determined enough. Listen, even today the centuries when man was a creature living on the edge of endless forests and jungles is not far enough behind him. We never managed to throw off the superstitions of those times before we took to building our own jimglesubstitutes, the cities. So as well as being centers of civilization, they've always been centers of ignorance and fear as well. The greatest cities in the world have sheltered more savages than savants. This city has no savants! It's a stone and steel jungle, and you're a savage. Choose! Are you going back into the trees or out into the light with me?" As he stood there, a series of blows soimded from above their heads. The robos were breaking in the kitchen hatch. Robin laughed hoarsely. "It seems I'm on your side." Distantly over their heads, a light showed. He knew then how far they had climbed. They would be on the ground now... A searchlight flashed on from above; at the same time, Gina had the lock open and they tumbled out into darkness. f Ten vision returned to   his eyes, Robin saw they were indeed on the ground. It was not as he had imagined it. The dark made it a terrifying world in two tones of black. Massive pillars and strute and cross girders bit a confusing pattern out of the sky. They stumbled over uneven ground littered with stone and the occasional trench. A wind blew, hooking bits of paper out of the shadow and back, in a lunatic chase. Robin thought of the white things he had seen moving from Dunshinnan Bridge. Instinctively he looked up. The black monster of the dty crouched over them, huge and cruel and senseless as an ancient curse. He tripped and fell. "I've got a half track parked where it's smoother," Gina said. "Don't keep falling over." He had hurt his shin and was angry. Broken ground was a new experience. "Why don't you put your damned torch, on?" "Because there's someone or something ahead." They moved round a massive leg of  metal. Out in the open, crouched on the rough ground, was a machine, with two robos near it. Gradually, the two humans distinguished between shadow and substance. Robin felt his legs shake. "It's the Dark Thing!" he whispered. There it lay, its red eyes closed. "They're waiting till it's time to do another circuit of the city. And they're in our way. Oh, Robin, and I've got lost... I can't remember where I parked the half-track. Perhaps it was the other side. All this darkness -- it's so confusing!" She began to weep. He held her, confused and yet gratified by her weakness. Her sobs sounded horribly loud. He stared out at the Dark Thing with a dry mouth, watching to see if the robos had heard anything. Then a stab of light from' behind made him turn. The pursuit had climbed down the well from Gina's house and was looking for them. One, two, three heavy robos appeared, flashing their lights among the superstructure of city supports. The robos by the Dark Thing began signalling and calling to the newcomers. There was a swift exchange of calls, and they began to join forces. Making a dash for it, Gina and Robin jumped behind a buttress. A shout rose as they went. "They've seen us! We'll never get away," Gina said. "Wait!" He looked cautiously round the buttress. The robos had their backs turned. Their lights shone through a maze of girders onto a vehicle. He pulled Gina up. "That's what they're shouting about. Is that your car?" She nodded. "There's a chance, Robin. Follow me." She was running out into the open. He followed without hesitation; he had to be with her. They ran out towards the Dark Thing. He was not afraid. If robos worked it, it was another machine. I t was bigger than he had expected. They pulled up together, sheltered under one wing from the robos now examining her vehicle. "Can you work this thing?" he asked. It was half a prayer. "Now's my chance to leam." "Good girl!" They scrambled into a roomy cabin, sat on unpadded seats before a control board that meant nothing to him. She worked switches. Lights came on. Motors roared, died, burst into full life. "Hold tight!" she called, but they were already tipping upwards. He caught a last glimpse of their pursuers, galloping out towards them. Horribly near. the lip of the city came up, black and ponderous, then they saw the city itself, canting at an angle, a tangle of light and dark, a smaller place than he knew, a place it was very easy to escape from. She was laughing, and he enjoyed the sight of it. Above the noise, she" shouted, "One last scare for them -- I can't switch the banshee siren off!" "Why do they need all this spook apparatus?" he yelled. "If they don't want man, why don't they -- just wipe him out?" "They need men! They need us, Robin! They can't do without us the way we can do without them. We may be redundant in the city, but in the world, they are redundant. You shall see -- we're heading for my city, where robos are back in their proper place." She said something else more gently, so that he could not hear for the noise. "What did you say?" Again he missed her shouted reply. Only her smile was clear as they sped over the featureless plain, howling like a banshee all the way. -- Brian W. Aldiss A lively, illusfrafed explanation of a useful and fascinating branch of mathematics Experiments  in Topology "Until Barr turned his thoughts toward topology it had never occured to anyone that closed, one-sided surfaces such as Klein bottle and projective planes could be made simply by cutting and pasting sheets of paper... Yet it would be unfair to say that his book is no more than a collection of topological recreations. The play is mixed with important mathematics, and there are occasional asides that plunge into deep waters." New York #, N. Y. # ' "A mathematician named Klein Thought the Moebius band was divine. Said he: Tf you glue The edges of two, Ycell get aweird bottle like minef" J If wasn't a bad planet. The food was good -- once you managed to eat iU N evins, who had been iU, did not rejoin the others for nearly two weeks after they had been cast away by the mutineers. It was dusk when he walked into the glade of flamecolored grass where they had decided to wait. Jeffries was the only one to greet him. "HeUo, Nevins," he said. "Going to be part of the happy group, are you? How's the fever?" "Gone, I guess. But I still feel lightheaded." Jeffries laughed. "So do we all. It's something in the atmosphere of this bloody planet Well, pick yourself a spot. One's as good as another." Nevins looked around. There was no hut or lean-to, or even bedding. "Where do you sleep?" he asked. Jeffries laughed again, with little humor. "You've been sleeping? You're the lucky one. We don't sleep, friend." "They had me doped up. I guess I was out most of the time. You mean you can't sleep?" "Can't -- and don't need to," Jeffries said. "It's the atmosphere, old boy. Something in it. But nothing to knit up the old raveled sleave. Damn nuisance, of course, but there it is. We're the original lively four. Five, now you're here." "Nobody looks very lively," Nevins said. Cadman, who was closest to them, sat crosslegged in front of his portable typewriter, which he had propped on top of a flat rock. He was pecking "at the keys with two fingers, without enthusiasm but steadily. "Hello, Cadman," Nevins said. "Working?" Cadman looked at him with no particular expression. "That's what Interplanetary News pays me for," he said. "I'm preparing a dispatch." "I see. That's the spirit." Cadman brightened a little. "Look, Ralph," he said. "You've been away. You can use a fill-in. Feel free to look over my stuff any time. It wouldn't be right for you to miss out on the story just because you've been sick." "That's damn nice of you," Nevins said. Jeffries said; "Code of the journalist, eh, Cadman?" "Just the decent thing to do," Cadman said, not looking at Jeffries. "Thanks, Cadman," Nevins said. "I'll have a look later." "Okay." Cadman went back to typing. "There's really no hurry." Before Jeffries led him away, Nevins had a glimpse of the line Cadman was typing. It said: damn nice code journalist look later no hurry tt adman's got it all down,"  Jeffries said. "Every jot and tittle. Every crashing bore of an incident. It's there for when you want it, but you won't want it. He's crackers, you know." "Crackers?" "Nutty as a fruit cake, to use your idiom. More so than the rest of us." Nevins looked at him closely. "Not you," he said. "Not Justin Jeffries of the Daily Mail, dean of the British press corps." He'd tried to say it lightly, but it came out sounding nasty. He hadn't meant it to; Jeffries was supercilious and full of biting wit but there was no malice in him. "The same," said Jeffries, who'd apparently taken no offense. "We've all developed our little ways. Just as you will, Ralph L. Nevins of Galactic News, now that you're back from limbo." "How's Cindy? She's a pretty level-headed one." Cindy Garth, feature writer for World Wide News, wasn't the prettiest girl in the world. Few women correspondents were externally beautiful. But Cindy was intelligent and pleasant and, before the mutiny, had been a real diplomat as lone woman in the ship. She'd earned the respect of each of her male colleagues, even those she'd had to rebuff when they tried too unsubtly to be lady-killers. Jeffries said: "Want to talk to her now, or save it for dessert? It may come as a shock." Ralph Nevins hesitated. He could see Cindy at the far end of the glade. She was perched on a hummock, turned half away from them, watching the sun-moon as it prepared to sink behind the dark red ridge across the little valley. She looked perfectly normal, almost pretty, in the gathering dusk. What could be wrong with her? Nothing, Ralph decided. "Come on; let's go say hello." Jeffries shrugged. "Hold on to your illusions." Cindy Garth looked around sharply as they neared. She sprang to her feet. "Hold!" she cried, flinging out an imperious arm. "None approaches save at our bidding." She glared at them. "What seek ye?" Ralph turned to the older man in dismay. "Whafs happened to her?" Cindy's hair was a tangle. She wore no makeup. Her clothing was rumpled. Nevertheless her carriage was erect and her gaze haughty. "She's Queen of the May," Jeffries said. "Or perhaps Catherine the Great. Had enough for now?" Yes. I'll talk to her when I'm stronger." They turned away. Cindy went back to her hummock, muttering. It sounded as if she were saying, "... respect for our sovereign person."  s they headed back toward the center of the darkening glade Hunter, the fifth in their group, jogged past them around the perimeter. His head was flung back and his eyes appeared to be closed. He held his hands in fists, close to his chest, and trotted soundlessly around a narrow track which had been worn into the yellow orange grass. He was breathing in a deep, controlled rhythm. "What's he doing?" Ralph asked. "Working himself up to it" "To what? I'd say hello, but he looks as if he doesn't want anybody to bother him." "He wouldn't talk to you now. Afterwards, maybe." "After what?" "Let's see if we can fine you a hummock to call your own," Jeffries said. 'We may not sleep, but we can't stand up all night like bloody horses, either." The sun-moon touched the rim of the horizon and seemed to spread its softly silver luminescence along the edge of it, as if it were an egg yolk accommodating itself to the flatness of a pan. Then it was sucked under the rim, leaving the sky dark but with fiery streaks at one of the bottom edges of its inverted bowl. Then the moon-moon rose, in almost the exact place where the sun-moon had srt, and, on a far ridge between it and the glade, some figures began to move back and forth in a curious, jerky way. They were at such a distance that it was hard to judge their size, but Ralph imagined they were about as big as wolves. They traveled in a kind of mechanical lope, moving in one direction for several seconds, then halting with a jerk and going in the opposite way. They were little more than silhouettes at this distance, and to Ralph they looked like cookie-cutter figures being manipulated by a child in the beam of a projector. They constantly moved back and forth, crisscrossing, perhaps even swinging around one another the way people did at a bam dance. Then another image came into Ralph's mind, that of a crackthe-whip at a carnival, where each car was sent speeding in one direction and then was whipped around as it reached the end of its mechanical tether. But that was still not right The word "wolves" came back into his mind, without reason. Jeffries had paused and watched with him. "Hstjnotic spectacle, isn't it? For some reason, undoubtedly psychological, everybody calls them the wolves. Yet they don't look a bit like wolves, do they?" He watched them for a while longer, then turned away and said abruptly: "Besides, there aren't any animals on this planet Except for us." II T iey had never learned the name of the leader of the mutiny aboard the man o' war Patton. Nor were the correspondents able to learn the reason for it Only two ship's officers were spared -- Captain Brian Larcom and Lieutenant John Raney, the medics -- and neither would discuss it. The uprising had been carried out swiftly early one morning (ship's time) as the Patton sped in tertiary max. toward a rendezvous with the remnants of a beleaguered Earth fleet, a specified number of parsecs from Barnard's Oph. Nevins had heard one scream. When he dragged himself out of his cabin, feverish and half asleep, a mutineer prodded him toward the lounge. The other four correspondents were already there, herded into a corner under a diorama of Paris-before-the-bomb. Even Justin Jeffries had lost some of his imperturbability, possibly due to the fact that he hadn't been allowed to dress except for a robe over his pajamas. There had been a gidfly moment as the ship came to a stop, ending the flutter-in-the-stomach of tertiary max. which they had almost come to accept as normal. There had been some whispering among the mutineers. Then Cindy Garth screamed. She'd had a glimpse through a port of the bodies of the murdered officers, in orbit anound the Patton. The apparent leader of the uprising, a gaunt, middle-aged man with a terrible scar over his left eye, spoke. "We've got nothing against you," he said. "There's a planet on the chart where we'll drop you and the two medics who didn't want to throw in with us." "I'll go with you," one of the correspondents said to the mutineer chief. He was Ramsey Hunter, a lean, unfriendly war correspondent whose reputation had been made because he happened to be in the right place to dash to the Sinkiang border to report that short-lived, accidental Sinomen and women died in three days because of a misunderstood order from either Moscow or Peking. Had it not been for Hunter, the rest of the world might never have heard about the terrible conflict. Had it not been for his dispatches, there might not have been those basic changes in east-west diplomacy which brought some sense to a world which had been on the lip of the pit of disaster. No one knew then, of course, that soon a united Earth would face interplanetary disaster. Hunter, who was only #, had been hired away from his news agency and was now a rove-atWill syndicated war correspondent for TransUniverse Features. He claimed he had a Chinese bullet in his left arm and a piece of Russian shrapnel in his right leg. Though he never mentioned them except in print, his scars had been plain to see when he went for a swim at Wallops Island before the Patton leapt away to fling itself across six light-years to the vicinity of Barnard's Oph, to fight the war of the particles. So Ramsey Hunter naturally said to the mutineers that he would join them, in a professional capacity, of course. There would be many a column in the experience, and probably a better chance of getting back to Earth. "No, you won't," the mutineer chief said. "We're taking our own and nobody else. This is a nice uninhabited planet we picked out for you. It's got air and everything." He had a sense of humor, of a kind, this scarred mutineer. "But that's inhuman!" Arthur Cadman said. "Who would ever find us?" "Nobody, maybe. On the other hand, if we get where we're going, and if we feel like it, we'll send a message to Earth and tell them where you are. If you cooperate and don't make any trouble, that is." "I don't think we can ask for more than that," Justin Jeffries said, with a glance at the bodies circling outside against the unfamiliar sky. The mutineers could easily add five more grisly satellites. Or four more, keeping Cindy for themselves. No, it would be best to take what was offered and to ask no questions, such as what the mutiny had been about. "Very sensible, Mr. Jeffries," the chief mutineer told him. "Now you pioneers go back to your cabins and pack what you want to. Stay there till we let you know. It'll be a few hours yet before we get you to your new home." T he warm climate, where the temperature did not vary by a degree day or night, and the lack of rain made shelter unnecessary. Captain Larcom and Lieutenant Raney, the medics, had built a chemical privy near the little house they put up. The mutineers had let them have pre-formed material out of the stores. The mutineers also had left enough material for each of the correspondents to have built himself a fair-sized hut, had he wished to. But none had. Perhaps if Cindy Garth had singled out one of them there would have been some carpentry. But with the medics' toilet available to all and with Cindy gone mad. there was no need for building. Nothing went up in the glade. The medics had put up their place in a smaller clearing behind a low hill and out of sight of the glade. They called it a dispensary. It actually had served as a hospital for Ralph Nevins until he recovered from his fever. But Jeffries called it the fairy palace. He was positive that Captain Larcom and Lieutenant Raney were homosexuals and that they had built their dispensary not because they were concerned about the health of their fellow castaways but because they were the only two people on the planet who were having any kind of sexual relations. "I have no proof," Jeffries told Ralph. "It could be just my nasty mind. You spent a fortnight there. In your lucid moments, how did they strike you?" Ralph shrugged. "There's nothing overt about them, but there are signs, if they mean anything: the fussy way they fight with each other, for one thing." "You don't mean physically fight?" "No; I mean argue. It's a petty sort of contradiction -- or a vying for superlatives. It's as if one of them said he had once treated a very difficult case of double pneumonia and the other had to say he'd once had a terrible case of triple pneumonia." "I see. A sort of one-upmanship -- over nothing." "Over nothing important, anyway," Ralph said. "And the kiss-and-make-up went on out of sight." "If there was any. We're just guessing, aren't we?" "Gossiping, I'd call it. But there's nothing much else to do, is there? Not until mealtime, anyway." "When is mealtime?" "Whenever Hunter gets back," Jeffries said. "Back from where?" "It's interesting how we've adjusted to eating only one meal a day. Like the family dog." Ralph said: "This is the second time you've evaded one of my questions about what Hunter goes out for. Why?" "Why have I evaded your question? I'll keep on evading for a while." Ty then it was dark, or as  dark as it ever got. Hunter, who all this time had been jogging aroimd the track, increased his pace for a final lap, then sped away from the glade until he disappeared among the tall, toad-stool-shaped trees. Arthur Cadman, whose typing had finally stopped, though earlier it had continued despite the gathering gloom; Cindy Garth, wary-eyed and aloof, but obviously in need, now, of having people around her; Lieutenant John Raney, a thin man, apparently in his late twenties, whose hair was rapidly turning gray; Captain Brian Larcom, a once-trim figure in his early forties who was now beginning to bulge above the belt and below the chin; and Justin Jeffries, who led Ralph Nevins to the center of the glade as if initiating him into a rite. The medics arrived in single file, several feet apart, from out of the toadstool wood beyond the circular glade of grass. The glade had lost its yellow-orange daytime fire and was now the color of a steak which had lain too long in the supermarket freezer-shelf. No one spoke. They arranged themselves on hummocks, almost ceremoniously, facing the faroff rise where the silhouetted figures persisted in their silent, tireless dance. Ralph, his questions hushed by the obvious solemnity of the occasion, sat down where Jeffries indicated he should. The moon-moon had risen just so far over the horizon and hovered there, concentrically ringed, like a thin onion-slice in the dark sky. The far-off stage was filled vnth ever-changing shapes. Occasionally, although the movements of the figures had to be purely random, Ralph was tempted to ascribe rational motives to them. Even as a dedicated skywatcher must inevitably find meaning in a cloud-shape, so did Ralph find significance in the motions of these others with whom he and his fellow castaways shared the planet. And as they watched -- intent, involved, apprehensive, fearful -- a new figure appeared at the left of the double-moon-illuminated stage. It was Ramsey Hunter, instantly recognizable. But then, as Hunter's presence made itself felt, the movements of the others on the stage, heretofore calm and ordered, if swift, became frenzied and frantic, as if menace had entered from the wings. Then Ralph noticed Cindy. As Hunter joined the group across the valley and became one of the silhouettes, Cindy became less aloof. Her hands began to flutter, to her hair, to her face, to her breast. Cadman, who was sitting near Cindy, watched her with concern. He moved closer and then. tentatively, fearfully, not looking at her, he stretched out a hand to her, ready to withdraw it instantly if it were rebuffed. But it was not rebuffed. It was ignored for a time; then Cindy reached out, without looking, and grasped Cadman's hand and clung to it as she watched the distant tableau. O alph looked away to the others. Larcom and Raney, who had entered the glade so conspicuously apart, were sitting on a hummock. As Hunter appeared on the ridge they moved closer together, as if in fear. Then slowly, unconsciously perhaps, Larcom's right hand reached out and gripped Raney's left and they clung to each other, their eyes fixed on the drama being enacted on the far ridge. Justin Jeffries, having brought Ralph to the center, sat apart from him. Jeffries watched as intently as any of the others, but seemingly wiout the need for another's support. Yet toward the end of the drama he too had become tensely involved. As he watched, his right hand made a fist and slowly bored into his left palm. Ralph, not knowing what any of this meant, was less personally involved, though the obvious emotion of the others was affecting him. His realization that the others were being so profoundly moved made him seek harder for clues to what was really happening on the ridge where Ramsey Hunter and the other silhouetted creatures were acting out their macabre ballet. Those others on the stage-like ridge now drew away from Hunter as if he were contaminated. It was as if those who approached Hunter from the right did so with the greatest reluctance. But approach they must, Ralph thought, because they were on a treadmill. No, not so much a treadmill as one of those little hand-cranked merry-gorounds you used to see in the city, on the back of a truck, where the horses and swans and ostriches moved with stroboscopic haltingness both from left to right and right to left. All that was lacking was the music, the imitation-calliope sound. While the figures approaching Hunter did so haltingly -- fearfully? -- those fleeing from him went in a wild plunge, as if strung on elastic, almost as if exultant at having been spared. The weird dance became even more frenzied. It must have been Ralph's delusion but Hunter, the hunter, had become shninken and had assumed the shape of a wolf. Or had he merely dropped down on all fours? But at the same time the oth# I ers -- the hunter's prey -- became human-shaped. Their scissorwork outlines took on the forms of full, rounded men and women. They grew arms and legs of the most astonishing realism. With the legs they sought hopelessly to run from this alien creature intent on their destruction. But their legs were chained to the eternally revolving central mechanism. There was nowhere they could go except to cower away from their himter as they were drawn toward him and then to fling themselves away as soon as they were able. With their arms they gestured to each other and to their foe, making plain their fear and disgust. They did not hold each other's hands nor did they strike out against the wolf-shape of the hunter who menaced them. Their arms appeared designed less for offense or selfdefense than to express their otherwise unvoicable emotions -- their terror at being attacked by this alien creature. The faces of the hunted could not be distinguished, but there was enough in the way they turned their heads, this way or that, or held them at an angle, to persuade Ralph that only intelligence could have directed such movements. It was appalling to watch, therefore, as the wolf-shaped creature Ralph knew to be a human being crept ever closer to the terrified pack of tethered human-seeming beings. The tableau became a silent crescendo of agonized movement as the hunter reached slowly into their midst and came away with the one he had chosen. Ill I t had been done so quickly, after the ritualistic preliminary, that Ralph almost missed it. He had expected to see Hunter re-assume human form and strike with a knife, with a dramatic upflung and downthrust arm. But Hunter attacked from near the ground and used no weapon that Ralph could see. The one taken from the midst of the others threw up its arms in one final hopeless gesture. Its head went back on its neck in a silent scream of despair. Then it withered. It simply collapsed and was borne away across the shoulder of the man who had now risen to his full human height. A great sigh, whether of relief or shame Ralph could not tell, rose from the watchers in the glade. Ralph himself felt chiefly release from tension. The others had not sighed in unison, but each individual sigh had been of such duration that at one point they had blended into a unified expression of group emotion. As the hunter left the distant stage with his kill the dancers on that knoll returned to the measured round in which they had been peacefully engaged before the stranger joined the scene. Now that this act of the drama had ended, those in the glade drew apart. Cindy Garth dropped Arthur Cadman's hand with an expression of distaste and retired to a separate hummock. Cadman looked after her for a moment, then took a small notebook from his pocket and began to write busily, bending close to the page so he could see in the dimness. Larcom and Raney unclasped hands and self-consciously withdrew to opposite sides of the same hummock, where each sat stiffly upright. Justin Jeffries, the cool one, stopped turning his fist in palm and stood up, thrusting hands into pants pockets. He looked at Ralph, who shook his head and gave a smile of no meaning. Jeffries walked to Ralph's hummock. He said with forced lightness: "What do you think of our amateur theatricals?" Ralph, putting his voice together, said: "You sound like the actor who asked Mrs. Lincoln how she liked the show. I thought it was horrible, of course." He saw Cadman cock an ear toward them, then write in his notebook, nose almost touching a page. Ralph could image him putting down: Lincoln theater horrible of course... "Of course," Jeffries said. "But fascinating, too, you must admit. You wouldn't think the same routine could hold an audience night after night, but it does. The same audience, needless to say." "You mean it's always Hunter who goes out?" "He's a volunteer. Never mind now. Here comes the killer with his kill." Hunter strode into the glade with some awful thing over his shoulder. O amsey Hunter, chronicler of wars, castaway of fate, killer of aliens, strode into the glade with a confident step and a proud bearing. He went directly to Cindy Garth and kneeled before her. "I have returned, O my Queen, with food for your subjects," he said. His expression was a mixture of haughtiness and mock servility, overshadowed by a look which laughed at everyone and everything. Cindy ignored the look, if she saw it, and stood. She stretdied out a tentative hand which did not quite touch Hunter on the forehead. "Rise, mighty hunter," she said. "Thou hast done well." Hunter rose and tossed down the thing he had been carrying. Ralph djdn't know what he had expected -- perhaps a clatter of skeletal bones or the thud of a body. What he heard was the faintest rustle, as if Hunter had dropped an autumn cornstalk. And when he looked he saw a leafy bundle, a sheaf, hose plucking would have been no more traumatic than the picking of an apple. "Will Your Highness honor me by accepting the first of the servings?" Hunter asked. "We accept," Cindy said and. Hunter leaned down and broke off a piece. It was about as long as a leg of lamb and not quite as thick. Cindy grabbed it out of his hand and ran to her place at the edge of the glade, calling over her shoulder: "Serve the others, mighty hunter, and thyself." Hunter reached down again and broke off a piece which he put in his pocket. Then he beckoned to the medics, who seemed the most eager to be fed. Cindy had seemed more eager to leave them than to eat. Larcom and Raney accepted the portion Hunter tore off for them, then went off beyond the glade to their infirmary (or fairy palace), Larcom first and Raney carrying the food. No words were exchanged. Cadman was the next to go up. Hunter, a benevolent smile on his lips, waited for him to approach. Ralph, watching, thought of Hunter as heir apparent and wondered how he would treat poor Cadman as he claimed his pound of grain, or whatever the stuff was that lay, inert, on the ground. To Ralph's surprise. Hunter (Hunter the hunter, dispenser of life) treated Cadman very decently. "How are you, Cadman?" he said. "Everything all right?" "Fine, Hunter," Cadman said. "I'm keeping it up to date." "That's the way," Hunter said. "Take some chow so you'll have the strength for it." He put a piece in Cadman's pocket "Here, have another little something for later, in case you get bogged down in the middle of the night while you're doing the history. It's amazing how a little something to nibble on stimulates the creative juices." "Thank you," Cadman said gravely. "Having been a writer yourself. Hunter, you understand our problems. I appreciate that" "Quite," Hunter said, equally grave. "Carry on, Cadman, and remember the old precept: Never mind the facts, but be sure you spell the names right." He kept an absolutely straight face. A little frown appeared on Cadman's forehead. He said: "Forgive me for asking, but is it Hunter with a capital H or is it small-h hunter? I mean  in the generic sense. I do get confused." And Hunter said, again more kindly than Ralph would have expected: "It depends entirely on your point of view, Arthur. You're the historian; you're Herodotus, you're Toynbee. And the historian is the referee. Call 'em as you see 'em, Arthur, and damn the dissenters." Cadman, his notebook out, as busy recording it all, his face close to the paper, as he backed away from Hunter, the man on the Queen's hummock; Hunter, the acting chief. 'hen it was Justin Jeffries' turn. Jeffries went with a combination of bravado and subservience, a mingling of defiance and dependence. He said: "Hail, Chief. Congratulations on a successful hunt. What can I, your humble servant, do for you?" Hunter regarded him coldly. "You can hunt in my place tomorrow night. How would that suit you, wise guy?" "Perfectly," Jeffries replied. "I've offered before, you remember, but you've never accepted." asked, as if in disbelief. "You'd risk the perils, the psychic terrors?" "Ah, bull," Jeffries said. "It's not so terrible as all that. I particularly want to put my offer on the record because we have a new arrival today: Ralph Nevins." "I am glad to welcome him," Hunter said. "Out of courtesy to him I overlook all the ways you have attempted to subvert my authority and belittle my achievement." Ralph, who had drawn close to the two, said: "Surely Hunter hasn't forgotten that we were all together aboard the Patton." "I'm afraid he has," Jeffries replied under his breath. "He's completely absorbed in this heroic drama he's playing. Try him out if you like." "I will." Ralph thought for a moment while Hunter stared coldly at Jeffries. Then he said: "Hunter, what do you plan to do when the rescue ship comes?" Hunter went into the first person plural, as if Cindy no longer existed, and said: "Our fealty is to our subjects. Naturally we shall stay here with them." Jeffries put left ear to left shoulder and rolled his eyeballs up as if to say: You see? Completely mad. "Enough of this empty talk," Hunter said. "Here is your share, Jeffries, and yours, Nevins. Now get thee hence, that the hunter may enjoy what is left to himself, before the great sleep descends." Ralph watched Hunter detach a piece which he handed to Jeffries. He gave another to Ralph and stuffed what was left under his arm and loped off to the edge of the glade, halfway between Cindy and Cadman. Ralph told Jeffries; "He talks like a cross between the King James version and Edgar Rice Burroughs." "Really?" Jeffries said with a minimum of interest now that dinner had been served. "I'm hungry, so I suggest you go and eat, privately, while I do the same. Don't be self-conscious. No one will watch." As Ralph hesitated. Jeffries, though, obviously anxious to go, took the time to say; "What you've got to understand is that they're vegetables." "I know that, I suppose." "Well, you have no compimctions about digging up a potato, have you? And then plucking out its eyes and boiling it in water, or baking it in its skin, and then eating it? Same thing. Only these are mobile vegetables." "But they're shaped like people." "So's a gingerbread man. You've got to be realistic. The only other stuff that grows here is impossible. It has no nourishment and it makes you sick. "Maybe we could build up an immunity to it." "Don't think we haven't tried. It's like eating a poison ivy salad." Saying no more, Jeffries went off to his own hummock, clutching the meal that Hunter had given him. R alph, after a moment's hesitation, took his share and vent to his own place, near the perimeter. There, sitting beside his hummock, which so accommodatingly fitted its edge to the back of his neck, Ralph examined his ration. It was less ominous than he had feared. There was nothing about it that was the least like flesh. Relieved, Ralph broke off a piece. It caused him no more pain than it would to snap a bread stick. It was crisp, like celery. It had separated cleanly, with no bleeding or any other indicat-on that it might once have been flesh. Grateful for this, Ralph looked to see what the others were doing. Cindy Garth was eating as if there might never be tomorrow, cramming food into her mouth in an orgy of self-gratification. Ralph stared at her for a time but she either did not see him or chose to ignore him. His gaze went next to Arthur Cadman, the fortunate one who had held the Queen's hand and who had been spoken civilly to by Hunter. But Cadman was even less responsive. He had eyes for nothing but his journal. He wrote steadily, a pencil in his right hand and his eyes close to the page, his left hand only occasionally bringing a bite of supper to his mouth. Ralph looked next to Jeffries, a dozen feet away. Jeffries, former man-about-London, sophisticate, sometimes adviser of prime ministers, was so engrossed in his meal that Ralph, shocked, looked away quickly. At the moment there was nothing to be learned from Jeffries except gluttony. Ralph turned finally to study the hunter himself, Ramsey Hunter. Hunter was eating like a gourmet, choosing a bit of this, a trifle of that, wiping his lips with a handkerchief and then nibbling again, unhurriedly. It was a bravura performance, like his earlier one on the knoll across the valley, none the less polished now that Ralph Nevins was the sole member of the audience. But then, for no apparent reason, Hunter clutched his belly, groaned and ran. Like anyone who is about to vomit, he headed away from his fellow creatures. He went a little beyond the perimeter and stood there, facing out from them, his body heaving as his stomach worked to rid itself of that which offended it. To Ralph, who had not yet eaten, this was a discouraging sight. If the great hunter could not stomach his own provender, who else could be expected to? Ouddenly Ralph had no appetite. He took his share to Cadman. (His first impulse had been to go to Jeffries, but Jeffries' gluttony had disgusted him.) Cadman looked up from his notebook and said : "Thanks." "Does Hunter always get sick like that?" Ralph asked. "Always when it's his turn." "You mean others have been out? Hunter talked as if he was the only one." "Oh, no," Cadman said; "we've all been out. Hunter's just going through one of his heroic moods. Then it'll be up to Jeffries or me -- or you." He smiled at Ralph. "You thought I was crazy, didn't you? I suppose I am, in a way. But not as crazy as some. Poor Cindy, for instance, is worse off by far. And Jeffries -- I really feel sorry for him. He can't eat at all when he's the hunter and he tries to make up for it by stuffing himself when somebody else has gone out." Ralph looked at Cadman through new eyes. "You've been out?" he said. "By yourself?" "Certainly," Cadman said. "I tcld you. We've all been out -- all except Cindy, and even she said she wanted to but we wouldn't let her." "The medics, too? Have they gone?" Cadman smiled. "Yes, in tandem." Ralph considered this new information. Then he said: "Could you eat afterwards, when you'd been out?" "Only when I wasn't noticing," Cadman said. "If I was engrossed in my journal, and eating was secondary, yes. Only once, when it was so dark I couldn't write at all and when eating became a conscious thing -- then I couldn't." "I can't eat now," Ralph said. "Oh,you must. You'll need your strength." "I keep seeing them up there, like people, terrified of Hunter." "Lots of vegetables move," Cadman said. "Try to bear that in mind. You've seen waving wheat and Mexican jumping beans. You've seen a willow tree in a windstorm, shaking its skirt like a hula dancer. Didn't you ever see an aspen shimmer in the slightest breeze, like a woman in sequins in a spotlight? Here, take this and go on back to your hummock and try. No one will watch you. It's a sort of unwritten rule." Ralph was touched by Cadman's concern. After a moment he said: "Thanks; I'll try. I shouldn't have stared at you and the rest, should I? I'm sorry." "That's all right. Go ahead and eat. I have a lot of writing to do. I especially want to get down my little speech to you -- the one about the moving vegetables -- before I forget it. Forgive my vanity." Ralph went back to his hummcc': and, resolutely thinking of gingerbread men and Mexican jum.ping beans, managed to eat a little. Then he must have dozed, back of neck comfortably against hummock's edge, because when he next noticed the sunsun had joined the sunmoon in the sky. IV I 'n the bright, hard light the knoll where the drama had taken place was like any small hilltop, and the creatures which had been hunted were about as lively as a cornfield. Ralph's companions sat on or lay against their hummocks in a seeming stupor, except Cadman, who was writing. Cadman was almost always writing. Ralph stood up, then staggered as he tried to walk. He was weak, like any hospital patient who had been on his back for a long time. He knew then, as well as if one of the medics had explained it to him, that he needed food. He felt himself toppling and guided his fall toward the little pile of food Cadman had persuaded him to keep and to try to eat. Lying on his left side where he had gone down (none of the others had made the slightest effort to help him, Ralph reached for one of the food pieces. But even before he brought it to his mouth he realized he couldn't eat it. It was not that there was anything psychologically wrong, as there had been last night, now the stuff was literally inedible. He could no more have got nourishment from the thing he was holding than he could have got marrow from a stone. Feebly, he threw it away. It bounced toward Jeffries, who finally looked up, rousing himself from his torpor. "You have to eat it while it's fresh," Jeffries said, as if everybody should have known that. "All the good goes out of it overnight." "I feel weak." "You should have eaten last night. Last night it had the crunchiness of celery, the juiciness of good rare steak, the crumbly consistency of cheese. I enjoyed it. Mad or not. Hunter gave me a particularly fine piece. But today it would be like eating an old cowflop." "I'm hungry," Ralph said. "Isn't there anything else I could eat?" Jeffries shrugged. "Poison ivy salad." "If I had the strength I'd drag myself over to the ridge and cut myself a fresh piece. I don't think it's as traumatic an experience as Hunter made out. Jeffries shrugged again. He looked bored with Ralph s troubles. "Suit yourself." "I suppose I've got to go. Ralph tried a jest; "I can't sit around starving until the next safari leaves, can I? "It's your stomach," Jeffries said, vastly uninterested. He leaned back against his hummock and closed his eyes. Hating him suddenly, Ralph --  to his knees, then stood erect and, carefully putting one foot ahead of the other, started out of the glade toward the far ridge Jl where the vegetation stood mo"O alph felt a bright light inside his skull. Although there was a visual impression of great heat the temperature was no higher than it had been the previous night. He was not perspiring. But there was no breath of motion to the air, and the unfiltered light hurt his eyes so that he had to close them to slits. The glare also seemed to focus on his brain, cooking it without heat. He envied the others their torpor and their full bellies. Well, the sooner he got to the ridge and cut himself a meal, the sooner he'd be able to lounge against his own hummock and wait for it to be a more bearable time of day. Ralph stopped at the medics' to borrow a machete. No one answered his call, so he helped himself to the heavy jungle knife which hung outside and went on through the wood. The toadstool shaped, umbercolored trees gave some relief from the stabbing light, but the glare was so much more intense when there were gaps between the tall trees that it seemed almost worse to have had their random protection. His brain cooking, Ralph could understand why the food gathering took place after the sun-sun had set. Step by dogged step he brought himself to the base of the ridge where the crop, or whatever it was, grew. It stood there in stalks, like a dusty corn field, yellowy-tan, silent, unmoving. In a final burst of forced energy, Ralph went up the rise and cut a single stalk. His machete sliced through it effortlessly. There was no excitement or danger, as there had seemed to be when Hunter was here last night. Nobody, nothing, grimaced at Ralph, or threw up his-her-its hands in despair. Nobody, nothing, screamed; or opened a mouth (or anything like a mouth) to scream, silently or otherwise. It was dull, in fact. He felt a little disappointed because there had been no dashing back and forth of humanoid plants, no mystery or drama. Each of the other faded-tan stalks had drooped dutifully, dully in its place while he cut down its brother. The stuff didn't even wave, as wheat was said to do. It certainly hadn't waved at Ralph, either with affection or fear. Giddy because of his hunger and the piercing light in his skull but pleased with himself, Ralph looked across the v. ley to the glade where his fellow castaways sat or lay, locked in ennui. They had certainly made a big problem out of this harvesting, this bringing in of the sheaves. He couldn't make out the expressions on their faces, but all of them seemed to be watching him. Hunter particularly (mighty hunter, indeed!) seemed to have an intent eye on him. Having gained strength from his triumph, Ralph decided it would be possible to return to the glade with his stalk intact and eat it there -- perhaps even to make the magnanimous gesture of offering some to Hunter. This thought buoyed him up so that the trip back took much less time than his outward journey. T he sun-sun had passed its zenith before his return. His fellow castaways seemed to gain strength as the brightness faded and they left their hummocks to greet him. Even Larcom and Raney had come to the glade from their self-imposed segregation. Ralph, so elated by this reception that he felt he could postpone eating almost indefinitely, tossed his trophy to the ground. It fell with a tiny rustling noise. Hunter looked down at it, then at Ralph. "Back with your kill, are you, Nevins?" he asked sardonically. Ralph replied modestly; "Oh, I wouldn't call it a 'kill.' It wasn't all that hard." "Was it easy?" Jeffries asked. "Well, I did what I had to do. It was easy, frankly, and not at all traumatic." "So much so," Hunter said with a sneer, "that you don't see what aU the fuss was about, do you? Isn't that right?" "Oh, I think I can understand how the ritual came to be built up," Ralph said, smiling despite a sudden new pang of hunger (he could hold out a few minutes longer, anyway.) "I guess after I've been out here in the glade as long as you have. I'll welcome some sort of diversion too. Some kind of -- " "Amateur dramatics?" Hunter asked. "Group theatricals?" "That's it, of course," Ralph said recklessly. "A kind of community pageant to relieve the tedium, with everyone playing his assigned role -- " Ralph's voice trailed off as Cindy Garth came forward. The others stepped aside for her. She looked much better. Last night she had been mad; but now she was angry. "Just let me say something to him while I'm rational," Cindy said. "Go ahead, Cindy," Cadman said. Captain Larcom said: "Don't excite yourself, Cindy. It's not worth it." Cindy said to Ralph: "You're new here and we can forgive that." It wasn't the royal "we" she was using now. "Of course we were all together aboard the Patton and that should count for something, but these past two weeks when you were safely tucked away in the infirmary sometimes seem more like two years. We've all gone crazy in different ways, Nevins, and some more than others. You'll find your own peculiar mania in a day or two. I'm sure. In the meantime give us credit for having a small residue of common sense. We do what we have to do -- a few of us a little more strenuously than necessary -- but we're all human beings and we've all adjusted to this impossible planet the way we've had to. So stop feeling superior to Hunter because you went out in the midday sun. Things are not what they seem, especially in the euphoric noon. Nobody's going to eat your pathetic little offering. Not even you." Ralph met their various glances, then dropped his gaze to his dry stalk. "Why not?" he asked hopelessly, already knowing the answer. "What's wrong with it?" "Try it and see," Cindy said softly. With his triumph turned to straw, Ralph's hunger could no longer be denied. Finally, embarrassed and in gnawing pain, he tried it. There was no nourishment in it. No juice or even moisture in the silly little stalk he had bravely harvested and brought back to gloat over. It was simply a dried hulk, like a cornstalk from last year's mulch pile. He spat out the tasteless, powdery thing. "Sorry," Cindy said. She added, ever so rationally: "I suppose somebody should have told you the juices leave the stalk in daylight. The moisture that makes the plant edible hides in the roots until the sun-sun goes down." V XTight finally came and he  was able to go out again. His hunger had become a gnawing ache, punctuated by an occasional stabbing pang. Ralph had taken Hunter's advice on how to alleviate it by jogging around the perimeter, as all true hunters were alleged to do. The monotonous, jarring of feet on earth (Earth! -- would he ever see it again?) had made the time pass faster and had even taken his mind off his hunger a little. It had also numbed his mind, but again only a little. Because the waiting for night had been hard, they took compassion on him to the extent of talking to him now and then. As he jogged he remembered disjointed random fragments: Hunter saying: "Let me assure you that there's not one unnecessary move in this nightly performance. In the first place it has to be every night. You found out for yourself that the stuff won't keep through the heat of the day..." Jog, jog, jog. Somebody (himself?) saying: "Grant me that you consider murder an odious occupation." Thud of heels on packed earth. (Earth? No.) Somebody else: "Murder, yes; but not picking vegetables." Ignore the pangs. Jog. Thud. Himself?: "Tell me what you consider murder to be." Thud. Jog. Pang, pang. Another: "The destruction of a thinking being, I suppose." Head back, breathe deeply of the still air. Jog, jog. Cindy Garth (listen, now; listen to Cindy; Cindy knows): "We have communicated with them, though we know not how. A queenly gift of second sight? Telepathy? No matter; they are tiiinking beings." (Cindy was mad again. Still, everyone was listening respectfully as if she told a truth they knew.) "We know them well. They are friendly, compatible, intelligent; lovable, even. They have been, at times, evocative to us of old friends, family, lovers..." Cadman: "I had a Bunk Johnson record that I used to play all the time. It was my grandfather's. It was You Always Hurt the One you Love." Himself?: "That's all right; I'm a vegetarian." Hunter: "Is that your bad joke for today, cannibal?" Who?: "We were all cannibals once. That's the kind of business we were in. We stole each other's stories and copied each other's leads. We bribed and spied to cultivate a new source, preferably one 'close to the presidential palace' or 'ac quainted with the Leader s thinking,' in our journalistic jargon, and then we fed on each other's sources until they'd been milked dry and discarded for more sensational ones. Too often we were less interested in writing the truth (which might just explode under everybody, us included) than we were in promulgating a government line or in helping an obscure department send up a trial balloon which quite often was shot down the following day. Knowingly abetting this, we were immoral, we were savages, we were cannibals." J oggity jog-jog. Words, only words. They had no meaning to match that of hunger. Another (Cadman?) : "At least we're honest cannibals now. We kill our fellow thinkers only that we may keep alive. If they think. There once was a paper in New York -- remember New York? -- that called itself 'The Paper for People who Think.' It was a Hearst paper and when it wanted to emphasize a word or a phrase in an editorial it printed it all in capital letters. It's critics called it 'The Paper for People who Think They Think.' So maybe we only think they think -- I mean maybe we only think they think. At least -- let me see if I can think this through -- I'd like to think we only think they think. What do you think?" And Cindy said: "If you think about it long enough you go crazy. If you think about any; thing long enough you go crazy. We -- I went crazy, thinking. I haven't come back yet." And Hunter said: "Shut up, Cindy. It's hard enough without you reminding us all." And Cindy: "But when I do come back I'll comb my hair and put on makeup and maybe somebody, not noticing that I'm a cannibal, will dance with me. I won't think then; I'll just dream." Hunter; "Shut up, Cindy." Thud, thud. Jog, jog. The vibrations jarring through his body were almost as good as food. (What a lie!) This way he could stand it (he told himself). As he jogged around the track, head back, fists clenched, he remembered Cadman trying to persuade Cindy to let him (Ralph) have some of the emergency ration -- the food he had been fed in the hospital. There couldn't have been much of it but he found it hard to understand Cindy's flat refusal. "Nevins isn't going to starve to death in the next couple of hours," she had said. "And he'll learn a lesson." He (Ralph) was learning it. He was Ralph. He was Nevins. He was (full name now Ralph Leslie Nevins. Oh, yes, he (you know who) was learning a good lesson. He was learning to hate them all, the bastards. Bastards and a bitch. Cindy BitchQueen Garth, who wouldn't let him have the ration. Justin Bastard Jeffries, who had let him go out under the sun-sun, sadistically knowing he was making a futile trip. He hated Jeffries worse. He had wanted to go early but they explained (some of them reasonably, some shouting angrily) that it would do no good to cut a stalk until the juices had returned to it from the roots. Hadn't he learned that? Ralph had said he would dig the roots (he was in pain, starving, famished; it was impossible to bear) but they explained (as to a child, some of them, but others in disgust because he didn't know what they knew) that when the roots were disturbed the moisture fled through them into the soil, leaving no nourishment. "You may think this is a lot of melodrama." Who had said that. The Who who had spoken several times earlier. "It is not a lot of melodrama. It is essential. Es-sen-tial. Know this." He knew it now. He was convinced of it. His stomach was convinced, at least. His stomach was devout, a true believer. Jog; jog and thud. Was it still too early to go? He could understand how thejogging would numb the mind as well as the stomach. F inally, finally, it was time. He left the perimeter, scarcely believing his release had come, he left the well-beaten track and set off across the valley as the short night began. There they were, on the far ridge, waving, beckoning to him. To him? Beckoning? Or horri# fied to see him approach? Him -- Nevins the hunter, the killer, the vegetable eating cannibal. Nevins the new one, perhaps crueler than the others who had come before. Off he went, recalling his relatively calm conversation with Hunter (Hunter who had joined hunter -- Ralph -- in jogging around the track:) "But why do you call them wolves?" And Hunter saying : "A euphemism. Both hunter and hunted became the wolves, the beasts. Each, driven by something outside itself, loses its human qualities. I, forced by hunger; they, shaken by terror." "You agree with Cindy that they think?" "I reject that possibility. I must. All I know is that they thrash about. Lots of plants can do that under certain circumstances. But these seem to be under a double terror, or whatever word you want to use. 'Fear' is too weak. First, their terror of being killed; second, the unacceptable realization that anyone or anything on their heretofore peaceful planet could connobody -- nothing, I mean -- vas able to move from the spot where he first germinated. I mean it. " Ralph knew what he meant. He had gone across the valley, through the toadstool wood, and was at the edge of the field of thrashing, terrified creatures. (Hunter was right: "fear" was too pallid a word.) Thy could not be human; could not even be creatures. His mind told him this, but his emotions told him something else: Not only could they be creatures (living, if not breathing; thinking, if not speaking), they were human. He knew that now, as of this minute. And what was he doing here, about to cornmit an atrocity upon one of them? Who was he, God?, to be destroying another living creature? He was not a flesh-eater, true, but he was undeniably a cannibal. Shut up, he told himself. You haven't destroyed anybody yet and it's a moot question whether you will. (This was not his stomach talking.) So don't let anybody panic you. You're just out here on a tactical exercise, so to speak -- a dry run, so far, to see how you'll react when the real thing comes along, if it ever does. Of course you aren't going to kill these dear, helpless creatures. His stomach laughed at this nonsense. Certainly he was going to kill. Kill and eat; kill and provide. It was kill or starve. It wasn't an ethical problem at all -- hadn't his pioneer ancestor's killed to feed their famit lies? Hadn't they killed daily? Hadn't they slaughtered the dear little chickens and geese and bulls and brown-eyed calves and wooly lambs and whatever other sweet, succulent creatures stood between them and hunger, or even appetite? Of course they had. They might even be burning in hell for it -- if there waa a hell, anywhere else but here. 'hen he recalled Cindy'a vision of having communi cated with them, or of having thought she had. He was having a vision of his own, in hia extremity of starvation. He waa communicating with them himself. Well, not really: they were revealing themselves to him; he had said nothing to them except tacitly, by being there with a weapon which spoke for him; silently, terribly. His hunger induced revelations were graphic depictions of the most awful things that had ever happened to people he knew or to whom he was related. As remembered from his childhood in ghastly detail, they included: His Uncle Alfred, arrested through some terrible miscarriage of justice and sentenced to a road gang in the South, dragging his ball and chain behind him as his poor, brokenblistered hands, which he had previously used to chalk abstruse, beautiful mathematical formulae on a blackboard at the Institute for Advanced Theory, tried to drive his mattock into the soil often enough to avoid the lash of the gang-master; His Grandma Maud, polio victim, her leg in a brace, dragging it behind her as she tried to get closer to the faith healer who, for a twenty-five-dollar love offering, was laying on hands under a big tent in the vacant lot down near the railroad siding; His father, a foot caught in his own fox trap, and so weak from loss of blood that he was unable to pry it open, crawling through the woods toward the house more than a mile away; His mother, alone in the house in her wheelchair after her operation, when the oilburner exploded... More visions crowded in on him; visions of people burdened or crippled or otherwise rendered unable to move very far or very fast: Visions of Roosevelt, of Joan of Arc, of Tantalus, of Christ... Then the visions coalesced and the vegetable people, hurling themselves away in their terrified attempt to escape his sword, took on the personalities of his hallucinations. It was more than horrible, it was shocking and obscene, that he should be the instrument of their distruction, that he should be forced to choose which of these well beloved creatures he would maim and kill. Worse: not which, but whom. You always hurt the one you love... But must you kill? Must you choose among mother, father, saint, president, God? Was it necessary to decide, coldly, in the midst of horror, whom to destroy? Did continued existence demand that he pick which body would be sliced through with his blade? Did life depend on slaughter? R alph avoided the answers as the terrified plant creatures hurler themselves away from this executioner; from this despicable thing that would kill and eat its own family, its own Lord. (But why not? Did not some religions hold that the communion wafer was the actual, the literal body of Christ? Is it cannibalism to eat the flesh of Jesus? Faster and faster they seemed to circle, to come toward him reluctantly, fearfully, bending back away from him until they were almost flat on the ground; then, as their Coney Island ride brought them inevitably past hurricane-tossed palm branches, straining to escape, to be beyond the reach of his terrible blade. Three times he raised his machete -- three times, impelled by the gnawing in his stomach. Each time he let it fall to his side. He sobbed in frustration: how could be cut down these beautiful people, these gods and goddesses? How could he butcher his mother or his father (or his Father) and then feed them to his friends? Of course he couldn't. He dropped his machete. He'd rather die. Then Hunter was there, shouting: "You've got to jog, man, jog! You were just standing. You can't let them get through to you; it's impossible if they do Jog, jog. Come on, Nevins! Can you do it? Can you?" Obviously Ralph could not. He sank to the ground. Hunter said: "Too bad. Never mind; stand back." With a swish of his own machete, Hunter lopped down a big stalk as it hurtled past him, expertly severing it close to the ground. A hallucinatory voice, not Hunter's, taunted Ralph: "How speaks he now, This loud-voiced, proud-voiced newcomer? "A change of tune, a dull harpoon; less haughty than he thought he was." It had a pedantic sound, as if one of his old professors of journalism, or maybe an over educated city editor, was sneering at him. Then came Hunter's voice. There was nothing hallucinatory about it. "Okay, Nevins, let's go. That's all for today." But Ralph could do nothing and Hunter had to half-carry him back to the glade. VI 'he others watched openly  as Cindy, cradling him in her left arm, his head against her breast, fed him. Too weak now to move or protest, he accepted mouthfuls of nourishment without questioning its origin. Cindy, feeding him and herself alternately, chewing away, smiled at him. He smiled back, chewing also, his palate reveling in what it imagined to be a smorgasbord of delicacies, successively:  the whitest, crunchiest celery, stuffed with the best homemade cheese, sprinkled with paprika;  a gargantuan ripe olive, pitted;  crisp, warm, buttered whole wheat toast;  freshly-given milk;  a bite into a Winesap apple;  a morsel of perfectly-fried scallop;  a mouthful of Maine lobster, dipped in melted Wisconsin butter;  a forkful of Idaho potato, baked, whipped with butter and salted;  a slice of rare roast beef;  a slightly-salted, gorgeously-green avocado half;  a demi-tasse of Columbian coffee. He was very t delirious, of course. "That was about the end of it. Ralph never went out again. After he had been nourished back to the point where he could feed himself, Cindy would have nothing more to do with him. She retreated into her regal self, her moment of compassion spent. Hunter once again assumed de facto command. He was their only possible provider. Despite the others' brave talk or their sneers at Ralph, Hunter was the only one who had been out more than once. Hunter alone had been capable of working out the logistics of the situation; he alone had been strong enough to keep his fears, his illusions, his hallucinations to himself. It was obvious that Cindy was only the titular ruler. Sometime later Cadman died and Ralph took over the keeping of the journal. The medics, who did not say why Cadman had died, buried him during the short, bright day, at the edge of the plant-people patch on the far ridge. It was only right, Ralph supposed, that Cadman's remains should nourish the roots of the plants. Ralph wrote: "Now that I am no longer an active participant in the hunt, I am beginning to find it exciting." At first the others expressed interest in his daily journal entries and even praised him, sometimes, for the cleverness of his writing. "Cadman merely recorded," Jeffries said to him once, "but you comment. Cadman was a journalist, you are an historian." Ralph glowed to that for days, although in his American way he would have said "a historian." To him the other was like saying "an horse." But after a while Jeffries and the others, with one exception, lost interest in the journal, even when it mentioned them, and drew back to their own hummocks. Only at night, when Hunter was out bagging their game, was there a drawing together in an approximation of a community spirit. And it was clear to Ralph now that nothing else mattered. Nothing else was vital. And of course after a while Ralph wrote about nothing else. His daily entry was an ingenious attempt, by a resourceful journalist turned historian, to find fresh meaning in the nightly hunt. The only other one who cared was Hunter. Therefore it became a ritual with them to meet after the nightly division of the nutrient (the vegetable, the meat, the Wafer -- whatever it was) and for Hunter to describe his adventures to Ralph. Hunter would talk -- in the first person singular or plural, depending on his mood -- and Ralph would make notes before either of them touched his nightly ration. Having finished his notes, Ralph and Hunter would withdraw to their separate hummocks and eat. Hunter vomiting less often than he used to. Ralph ate thoughtfully and without aftereffects, scarcely aware of his bites as he considered how best to transcribe his notes. But there the strain became too much for even Hunter's ego and he became repetitive at yjl duU. Ralph became alarme.J. If there were no more to write his function would vanish as Cadman's had. He would become superfluous. He went to Cindy Garth, to record her reactions to the nightly kill, but she waved him away languidly. He wrote this up as verbosely as possible. He went to Jeffries, who met him with an amused smile but told him: "Nothing to say, old boy." When Ralph persisted, Jeffries dismissed him by saying: "It's all been said, you know. I told it to Cadman a dozen times and he took it down each time. I have no desire to repeat myself to you. Look it up in Cadman's journal if you like but don't bother me." Ralph wrote up his talk with Jeffries at as great a length as possible, quoting himself as well as Jeffries (he had deliberately asked some long-winded questions). But it was impossible to string it out forever. He went to the medics and was rewarded with an outpouring of words. Away from the others, Larcom and Raney had witty and crackling things to say about the few events their world provided. Ralph, delighted, took full notes and transcribed at great length. This kept him busy for many days. But then they began to repeat themselves. Their apparent wit charmed the new acquaintance, but one who came to know them for any length of time realized that there was a limit to the variations they could apply to their basic conversational formula. They became tiresome as well as repetitious. Then, as if realizing their failure to entertain, they became argumentive -- first with each other, then with Ralph. A t that point Ralph, having transcribed all that was available from them jointly, interviewed them singly. Separate floodgates opened; Ralph took down page after page of pent-up frustration, petty tirade and invective as each of the medics turned his wrath on the other. Fascinated, occasionally repelled, Ralph wrote them up at gratifying length, first together and then separately. But this field also went fallow as eventually each developed a case of the sulks and refused to talk to him. This left no one. Doggedly, Ralph went back to each: to Hunter who, having rested as raconteur, was good for a few more nights; to Jeffries, whose now-insulting behavior toward Ralph provided a day's copy; and to Cindy, who was completely silent but whose attitude Ralph described in great detail, drawing heavily on surmise. Again there was no one left. Except -- inspiration! -- himself. But he found himself a thin source. For several days he talked to himself and recorded the result. But Ralph had always been an honest reporter and this deceit soon palled. He vas unable to delude himself, as Cadman had, that he was preparing a dispatch. Nor would he put down fiction or halftruths; his entire journalistic background rebelled against such heresy. He examined his pen and the other one that Cadman had involuntarily bequeathed him. Ink aplenty, enough for a decade, remained in each. It seemed clear that there was more ink than there were words to write with it. He knew now why poor Cadman had died. Cadman had been no egocentric hero. He had been, as Ralph Nevins was, an honest journalist: not an analyst but an annalist. And the annals were complete. Nothing more remained to be said about this handful of huxr-'n beings stranded on the only habitable planet between Sol's Earth and Barnard's Oph. Nevertlieless much had to be said, regardless of whether it was worth saying, if Ralph were to remain sane against the day when the rescue ship heaved to and took him home. The easy way would be to let himself slip into the madness of Ramsey Hunter and Cindy Garth, the apathy of Justin Jeffries or the self-centered isolation of the medics. But Ralph was not ready to give up. As long as he did not have to go out at night to bring in the sheaves, it was possible to work and to hope. Then the engine in his mind started and its fuel was his memories. He realized that what was within himself was limited : there was only Ralph Nevins, at the current or earlier age, on which to draw. Still a single person was a microcosm of the human race and perhaps he was as good as any other for the purpose, at this particular time. That being so, he reached back as far into his memory as it was possible to go... (he knew that when he had nothing more to say he would be dead)... and he found a place Thus, one night, after having dined with pleasure, without questioning the source, on an unusually thick stalk which he chose to think tasted of Thanksgiving turkey, he wrote the following in his journal: Book I, Chapter One Nevins the Child, or, The Humble Start Ralph Leslie Nevins, so named by his parents, Leslie Coombs and Leslie Hume Nevins (we shall return to this coincidence of names presently, aged respectively # and #, was bom. In wedlock, on an August day. the #th, a Thursday, to be precise. In the Year of Our Lord, or Whoever is In Charge, #... # nd thus Ralph Nevins began the chronicle which we found when we grew over to the glade and which, together with other scattered documents from the worlds that they had attempted to colonize, provided us with an invaluable insight to the mores of those who knew themselves as human beings. Oh, yes. To answer Ralph's question, it might just be noted that we're in charge here. And everywhere. -- Richard Wilson Complete in Worlds of Tomorrow: by Avram Davidson Riproaring story of space adventure -- on sale now! Mortal enemies? No... for they were not quite mortall I F resh snow had fallen during the night. Now it lay like a white sheet atop the older snow, nine or ten feet of it, that already covered the plain. Now all was smooth and clear almost to the horizon. As Michael Holt peered through the foot thick safety glass of his command room window, he saw, first of all, the zone of brown earth, a hundred yards in diameter, circling his house, and then the beginning of the snowfield with a few jagged bare trees jutting through it, and then, finally. a blot on the horizon, the metallic tower that was Andrew McDermott's dwelling. Not in seventy or eighty years had Holt looked at the McDermott place without feeling hatred and irritation. The planet was big enough, wasn't it? Why had McDermott chosen to stick his pile of misshapen steel down right where Holt had to look at it all his days? McDermott's estate was big enough. McDermott could have built his house another fifty or sixty miles to the east, near the banks of the wide, shallow river that flowed through the heart of the contlnent. He hadn't cared to. Holt had politely suggested it, when the surveyors and architects first came out from Earth. McDermott had just as politely insisted on putting his house where he wanted to put it. It was still there... Michael Holt peered at it, and his insides roiled. He walked to the control console of the armament panel, and let his thin, gnarled hands rest for a moment on a gleaming rheostat. There was an almost sexual manner to the way Holt fondled the jutting knobs and studs of the console. Now that his two hundredth year was approaching, he rarely handled the bodies of his wives that way any more. But then he did not love his wives as keenly as he loved the artillery emplacement with which he could blow Andrew McDermott to atoms. Just let him provoke me. Holt thought. He stood by the panel, a tall, gaunt man with a withered face and a savage hook of a nose and a surprisingly thick shock of faded red hair. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the luxury of a daydream. T T e imagined that Andrew McDermott had given him offense. Not simply the eternal offense of being there in his view, but some direct, specific affront. Poaching on his land, perhaps. Or sending a robot out to hack down a tree on the borderland. Or putting up a flashing neon sign that mocked Holt in some vulgar way. Anything that would serve as an excuse for hostilities. And then: Holt saw himself coming up here to the command room and broadcasting an ultimatum to the enemy. "Take that sign down, McDermott," he might say. "Keep your robots off my land," perhaps. Or else, "Thismeans war!" McDermott would answer with a blast of radiation, of course, because that was the kind of sneak he was. The deflector screens of Holt's front line defenses would handle the bolt with ease, soaking it in and feeding the energy straight to Holt's own generators. Then, at long lasf. Holt would answer back. His fingers would tighten on the controls. Crackling arcs of energy would leap toward the ionosphere and bound downward at McDermott's place, spearing through his pitiful screens as though they weren't there. Holt saw himself gripping the controls with knuckle whitening fervor, launching thunderbolt after thunderbolt while on the horixon Andrew McDermott's hideous keep blazed and glowed in hellish fire and crumpled and toppled and ran in molten puddles over the snow. Yes, that would be the moment to live for! That would be the moment of triumph! To step back from the controls at last, and look through the window and see the glowing red spot on the horizon where the McDermott place had been. To pat the controls as though they were the flanks of a beloved old horse. To leave the house, and ride across the borderland into the McDermott estate, and see the charred ruin, and know that he was gone forever. Then, of course, there would be an inquiry. The fifty lords of the planet would meet to discuss the battle, and Holt would explain, "He wantonly provoked me. I need not tell you how he gave me offense by building his house within my view. But this time -- " And Holt's fellow lords would nod sagely. They would understand, for they valued their own unblemished views as highly as Holt himself. They would exonerate him and grant him McDermott's land, as far as the horizon, so no newcomer could repeat the offense. Michael Holt smiled. The daydream left him satisfied. His heart raced perhaps a little too enthusiastically as he pictured that slagheap on the horizon. He made an effort to calm himself. He was, after all, a fragile old man, much as he hated to admit it, and even the excitement of a daydream taxed his strength. He walked away from the panel, back to the window. Nothing had changed. The zone of brown earth where his melters kept back the snow, and then the white field, and finally the excrescence on the horizon, glinting coppery red in the thin midday sunlight. Holt scowled. The daydream had changed nothing. No shot had been fired. McDermott's keep still stained the view. Turning, Holt began to shuffle slowly out of the room, toward the dropshaft that would take him five floors downward to his family. II T he communicator chimed. Holt stared at the screen in surprise. "Yes?" "An outside call for you. Lord Holt. Lord McDermott is calling," the bland metallic voice said. "Lord McDermott's secretary, you mean?" "It is Lord McDermott himself, your lordship." Holt blinked. "You're joking," he said. "It's fifty years since he called me. If this is a prank I'll have your circuits shorted!" "I cannot joke, your lordship. Shall I tell Lord McDermott you do not wish to speak to him?" "Of course!" Holt snapped. "No -- wait. Find out what he wants. Then tell him I can't speak to him." Holt sank back into a chair in front of the screen. He nudged a button with his elbow, and tiny fingers began to massage the muscles of his back, where tension poisons had suddenly flooded in to stiffen him. McDermott calling? What for? To complain, of course. Some trespass, no doubt. Some serious trespass, if McDermott felt he had to make the call himself. Michael Holt's blood warmed. Let him complain! Let him accuse, let him bluster! Perhaps this would give the excuse for hostilities at last. Holt ached to declare war. He had been guilding his armaments patiently for decade after decade, and he knew beyond doubt that he had the capability to destroy McDermott within moments after the first shot was fired. No screens in the universe could withstand the array of weaponry Holt had assembled. The outcome of a conflict was in no doubt. Let him statt something, Michael Holt prayed. Oh, let him be the aggressor! I'm ready for him, and more than ready! The bell chimed again. The robot voice of Holt's secretary said, "I have spoken to him, your lordship. He will tell me nothing. He wants you." Holt sighed. "Very well. Put him on, then." There was a moment of electronic chaos on the screen as the robot shifted from the inside channel to an outside one. Holt sat stiffly, annoyed by the sudden anxiety he felt. He realized, strangely, that he had forgotten what his enemy's voice sounded like. All communication between them had been through robot intermediaries for years. The screen brightened and showed a test pattern. A hoarse, querulous voice said, "Holt? Holt, where are you?" "Right here in my chair, McDermott. What's troubling you?" "Turn your visual on. Let me have a look at you, Holt." "You can speak your piece without seeing me, can't you? Is my face that fascinating to you?" "Please. This is no time for bickering. Turn the visual on!" "Let me remind you," Holt said coldly, "that you have called me. The normal rules of etiquette require that I have the privilege of deciding on the manner of transmission. And I prefer not to be seen. I also prefer not to be speaking to you. You have thirty seconds to state your complaint. Important business awaits me."  I 'here was silence. Holt gripped the arms of his chair and signalled for a more intense massage. He became aware, in great irritation, that his hands were trembling. He glared at the screen as though he could burn his enemy's brain out simply by sending angry thoughts over the communicator. McDermott said finally, "I have no complaint. Holt. Only an invitation." "To tea?" Holt sneered. "Call it that. I want you to come here. Holt." "You've lost your mind!" "Not yet. Come to me. Let's have a truce," McDermott rasped. "We're both old, sick, stupid men. It's time to stop the hatred." Holt laughed. "We're both old, yes. But I'm not sick and you're the only stupid one. Isn't it a little late for the olive branch?" "Never too late." "You know there can't ever be peace between us," Holt said. "Not so long as that eyesore of yours sticks up over the trees. It's a cinder in my eye, McDermott. I can't ever forgive you for building it." "Will you listen to me?" McDermott said. "When I'm gone, you can blast the place apart, if it pleases you. All I want is for you to come here. I -- I need you. Holt. I want you to pay me a visit." "Why don't you come here, then?" Holt jeered. "I'll throw my door wide for you. We'll sit by the fire and reminisce about all the years we hated each other." "If I could come to you," McDermott said, "there would be no need for us to meet at all." "What do you mean?" "Turn your visual on, and you'll see." Michael Holt frowned. He knew he had become hideous with age, and he was not eager to show himself to his enemy. But he could not see McDermott without revealing himself at the same time. With an abrupt, impulsive gesture. Holt jabbed the control button in his chair. The mists on the screen faded, and an image appeared. All Holt could see was a face, shrunken, wizened, wasted. McDermott was past two hundred. Holt knew, and he looked it. I There was no flesh left on his face. The skin lay like parchment over bone. The left side of his face was distorted, the nostril flared, the mouth-corner dragged down to reveal the teeth, the eyelid drooping. Below the chin, McDermott was invisible, swathed in machinery, his body cocooned in what was probably a nutrient bath. He was obviously in bad shape. H e said, "I've had a stroke. Holt. I'm paralyzed from the neck down. I can't hurt you." "When did this happen?" "A year ago." "You've kept very quiet about it," Holt said. "I didn't think you'd care to know. But now I do. I'm dying. Holt, and I want to see you once face to face before I die. I know you're suspicious. You think I'm crazy to ask you to come here. ni turn my screens off. I'll send aU my robots across the river. Ill be absolutely alone here, helpless, and you can come with an army if you like. There. Doesn't that sound like a trap. Holt? I know I'd think so if I were in your place and you were in mine. But it isn't a trap. Can you believe that? Ill open my door to you. You can come and laugh in my face as I lie here. But come. There's something I have to tell you, something of vital importance to you. And you've got to be here in person when I teU you. You won't regret coming. Believe that. Holt." Holt stared at the wizened creature in the screen, and trembled with doubt and confusion. The man must be a limatic! It was years since Holt had last stepped beyond the protection of his own screens. Now McDermott was asking him not only to go into the open field, where he might be gunned down with ease, but to enter into McDermott's house itself, to put his head right between the jaws of the lion. Absurd ! McDermott said, "Let me show you my sincerity. My screens are off. Take a shot at the house. Hit it anywhere. Go ahead. Do your worst!" Deeply troubled, chilled with mystification. Holt elbowed out of his chair and went beyond the range of the visual pickup, over to the control console of the guns. How many times in dreams he had fondled these studs and knobs, never once daring to fire them except in test shots directed at his own prope'ty! It was unreal to be actually training the sights on the gleaming tower of McDermott's bouse at last Excitement surged in him. Could this all be some subtle way, he wondered, of causing him to have a fatal heart attack through overstimulation? He gripped the controls. He pondered, considered tossing a thousand megawatt beam at McDermott, then decided to use sometliing a little milder. If the screens really were down all the way, even his feeblest shot would score. He sighted -- not on the house itself, but on a tree just within McDermott's inner circle of defense. He fired, still half convinced he was dreaming. The tree became a yard-high stump. "That's it," McDermott called. "Go on. Aim at the house, too! Knock a turret off -- the screens are down!" Senile dementia. Holt thought. Baffled, he lifted the sight a bit and let the beam play against one of McDermott's outbuildings. The shielded wall glov.'ed a moment, then gave as the beam smashed its way through. Ten square feet of McDermott's castle now was a soup of protons, fleeing into the cold. Holt realized in stunned disbelief that there was nothing at cll preventing him from destroying McDermott and his odious house entirely. There was no risk of a counterattack. He would not even need to use the heavy artillery that he had been so jealously hoarding against this day. A light beam would do it easily enough. It would be too easy this way, though. There could be no pleasure in a wanton attack. McDermott had not provoked him. Rather, he sat there in his cocoon, sniveling and begging to be visited. Holt returned to the visual field. "I must be as crazy as you are," he said. "Turn your robots loose and leave your screens down. I'll come to visit you. I wish I understood this, but I'll come anyway." Ill M ichael Holt called his family together. Three wives, the eldest near his own age, the youngest only seventy. Seven sons, ranging in age from sixty to a hundred thirteen. The wives of his sons. His grandchildren. His top echelon of robots. He assembled them in the grand hall of Holt Keep, took his place at the head of the table, and stared down the rows at their faces, so like his own. He said quietly, "I am going to pay a call on Lord McDermott." He could see the shock on their faces. They were too well disciplined to speak their minds, of course. He was Lord Holt. His word was law, and he could, if he so pleased, order them all put to death on the spot. Once, many years before, he had been forced to assert his parental authority in just such a way, and no one would ever forget it. He smiled. "You think I've gone soft in my old age, and perhaps I have. But McDermott has had a stroke. He's completely paralyzed from the neck down. He wants to tell me something, and I'm going to go. His screens are down and he's sending all his robots out of the house. I could have blasted the place apart if I wanted to." He could see the muscles working in the jaws of his sons. They wanted to cry out, but they did not dare. Holt went on, "I'm going alone except for a few robots. If there's been no word from me for half an hour after I'm seen entering the house, you're authorized to come after me. If there's any interference with the rescue party, it will mean war. But I don't think there'U be trouble. Anyone who comes after me in less than half an hour will be put to death." Holt's words died away in a shiver of echoes. He eyed them all, one at a time. This was a critical moment, he knew. If they dared, they might decide among themselves that he had gone mad, and depose him. That had happened before, too, in other families. They could topple him, reprogram all the robots to take commands from them instead and confine him to his wing of the house. He had given them evidence enough, just now, of his irresponsibility. But they made no move. They lacked the guts. He was head of the household, and his word was law. They sat, pale and shaken and dazed, as he rolled his chair past them and out of the grand hall. Within an hour, he was ready to go. Winter was in the fourth of its seven months, and Michael Holt had not left the house since the first snowfall. But he had nothing to fear from the elements. He would not come in contact with the frigid air of the sub-zero plain. He entered his car within his own house, and it glided out past the defense perimeter, a gleaming dark teardrop sliding over the fresh snow. Eight of his robots accompanied him, a good enough army for almost any emergency. A visual pickup showed him the scene at McDermott Keep. The robots were filing out, a army of black ants cluster ing around the great gate. He could see them marching eastward, vanishing from sight beyond the house. A robot overhead reported that they were heading for the river by the dozens. rrhe miles flew past. Black, twisted trees poked through the snow, and Holt's car weaved a way through them. Far below, under many feet of whiteness, lay the fertile fields. In the spring all would be green. The leafy trees would help to shield the view of McDermott Keep, though they could not hide it altogether. In winter, the ugly copper-colored house was totally visible. That made the winters all the more difficult for Holt to endure. A robot said softly, "We are approaching' the borderlands, your lordship." "Try a test shot to see if his screens are still down." "Shall I aim for the house?" "No. A tree." Holt watched. A thickboled, stubby tree in McDermott's front palisade gleamed a moment, and then was gone. "The screens are still down," the robot reported. "All right. Let's cross the border." He leaned back against the cushion. The car shot forward. They left the bounds of Holt's own estate, now, and entered McDermott's. There was no warning ping to tell them they were trespassing. McDermott had even turned off the boundary scanners, then. Holt pressed sweaty palms together. More than ever now he felt that he had let himself be drawn into some sort of trap. There was no turning back now. He was across the border, into McDermott's own territory. Better to die boldly, he thought, than to live huddled in a shell. He had never been this close to McDermott Keep before. When it was being built, McDermott had invited him to inspect it, but Holt had of course refused. Nor had he been to the housewarming. Alone among the lords of the planet, he had stayed home to sulk. He could hardly even remember when he had last left his own land at all. There were few places to go on this world, with its fifty estates of great size running through the temperate belt. Whenever Holt thirsted for the companionship of any of his fellow lords, which was not often, he could have it easily enough via telescreen. Some of them came to him, now and then. It was strange that when he finally did stir to pay a call, it should be a call on McDermott. Drawing near the enemy keep, he found himselT reluctantly admitting that it was less close range than it seemed from the windows of Holt Keep. It was a great blocky building, hundreds of yards long, with a tall octagonal tower rising out of its northern end, a metal spike jabbing perhaps five hundred feet high. The reflected afternoon light, bouncing from the snowfield, gave the metalsheathed building a curiously oily look, not unattractive at this distance. "We are within the outer defense perimeter," a robot told Holt. "Keep going." The robots sounded worried and perturbed, he thought. Of course, they weren't programmed to show much emotional range, but he could detect a note of puzzlement in what they said and how they said it. They couldn't understand this at all. It did not seem to be an invasion of McDermott Keep -- that they could have understood. But it was not a friendly visit, either. The robots did not know what to make of this journey. They were not alone in their confusion at this most unusual situation, Holt thought grimly. He sat back nervously as he and his guardian robots were swiftly carried forward. IV f Then they were a hundred  ' yards from the great gate of McDermott Keep, the doors swung wide. Holt called McDermott and said, "See that those doors stay open all the time I'm here. If they begin to close, there'll be trouble." McDermott said, "Don't worry. I'm not planning any tricks." Holt's car shotbetween the gate walls, and he knew that now he was at his enemy's mercy in earnest. His car rolled up to the open carport, and went on through, so that now he was actually within McDermott Keep. His robots followed him through. "May I close the carport?" "Keep it open!" Holt said. "I don't mind the cold." The hood of his car swung back. His robots helped him out. Holt shivered momentarily as the cold outside air, filtering into the carport, touched him. Then he passed through the irising inner door and, flanked by two sturdy robots, walked slowly but doggedly into the Keep. McDermott's voice reached him over a loudspeaker. "I am on the third floor of the tower," he said. "If I had not sent all the robots away, I could have let CMie of them guide you." J "You could send a member of  ! your family down," Holt said  sourly. i McDermott ignored that. "Continue down the corridor luitil it turns. Go past the armor room. You will reach a dropshaft that leads upward." i Holt and his robots moved ; through the silent halls. The place was li' .e a museum. The dark, high-vaulted corridor was lined with statuary and artifacts, everything musty-looking and depressing. How could anyone want to live in a tomb like this? Holt passed a shadowy room where ancient suits of armor stood mounted. He could not help but compute the cost of shipping such useless things across the light-years from Earth. They came to the dropshaft. Holt and his two robots entered, j A robot nudged the reversing I stud, and up they went, into the  tower Holt had hated so long,  McDermott guided them with a word or two. They passed down a long hall whose dull, dark walls were set : off by a gleaming floor that . looked like onyx. A sphincter opened, admitting them to an oval room ringed by windows, exhaling a dry, foul stench of death and decay. Andrew McDermott sat squarely in the middle of the room, nesting in his life-capsule. A tangled network of tubes and pipes surrounded him. All oi McDermott that was visible was a pair of eyes, two shining coals in the wasted face. tcT'm glad you came," Mc-iDermott said. His voice, without . benefit of electronic amplification, was thin and feeble, like the sound of feathers brushing through the air. Holt stared at him in fascination. "I never thought I'd see this room," he said. "I never though you would either. But it was good of you to come. Holt. You look well, you know. For a man your age." The thin lips curled in a grotesque twisted smile. "Of course, you're still a youngster. Not even two hundred yet. I've got you by thirty-odd years." Holt did not feel like listening to the older man's ramblings. "What is it you wanted?" he asked without warmth. "I'm here, but I'm not going to stay all day. You said you had something vital to tell me." "Not really to tell," McDermott said. "More to ask. A favor, I want you to kill me. Holt." "What?" "It's very simple. Disconnect my feed line. There it is, right by my feet. Just rip it out. I'll b dead in an hour. Or do it even more quickly. Turn off my lungs. This switch, right here. That would be the humane way." "You have a strange sense of humor," Holt said. "Do you think so? Top the joke, then. Throw the switch and cap the jest." "You made me come all the way here to kill you?" "Yes," McDermott said. The bla#ing eyes were unblinking now. "I've been immobili#ed for a year now. I'm a vegetable in this thing. I sit here day after day, idle, bored. And healthy. I might live another hundred years -- do you reali#e that. Holt? I've had a stroke, yes. I'm paraly#ed. But my body's still vigorous. This damned capsule of mine keeps me in tone. It feeds me and exercises me and -- do you think I want to go on living this way, Holt? Would you?" Holt shrugged. "If you want to die, you could ask someone in your family to unplug you." "I have no family." "Is that true? You had five sons -- " "Four dead. Holt. The other one gone to Earth. No one lives here any more. I've outlasted them all. I'm as eternal as the heavens. Two hundred thirty years, that's long enough to live. My wives are dead, my grandchildren gone away. They'll come home when they find they've inherited. Not before. There's no one here to throw the switch." "Your robots," Holt suggested. Again the grim smile. "You must have special robots. Holt. I don't have any that can be I've tried it. They know what'll happen if my life-capsule is disconnected. They won't do it. You do it. Holt! Turn me off. Blow the tower to hell, if it bothers you. You've won the game. The pri#e is yours." i'There was a dryness in Holt's throat, a band of pressure across his chest. He tottered a little. His robots, ever sensitive to his condition, steadied him and guided him to a chair. He had been on his feet a long time for a man of his age. He sat quietly until the spasm passed. Then he said, "I won't do it." "Why not?" "It's too simple, McDermott. I've hated you too long. I can't just flip a switch and turn you off." "Bombard me, then. Blast the tower down!" "Without provocation? Do #'ou think I'm a criminal?" Hclt asked. "What do you want me to do?" McDermott said tiredly. "Order V my robots to trespass? Set fire to your orchards? What will provoke you. Holt?" "Nothing," Holt said. "I don't want to kill you. Get someone else to do it." The eyes glittered. "You devil," McDermott said. "You absolute devil. I never realized how much you hated me. I send for you in a time of need, asking to be put out of my misery, and will you grant me that? Oh, no. Suddenly you get noble. You won't kill me! You devil, I see right through you. You'll go back to your keep and gloat because I'm a living dead man here. You'll chuckle to yourself because I'm alone and frozen into this capsule. Oh, Holt, it's not right to hate so deeply! I admit I've given offense. I deliberately built the tower here to wound your pride. Punish me, then. Take my life. Destroy my tower. Don't leave me here!" Holt was silent. He moistened his Hps, filled his lungs with breath, got to his feet. He stood straight and tall, towering over the capsule that held his enemy. "Throw the switch," McDermott begged. "I'm sorry." "Devil!" Holt looked at his robots. "It's time to go," he said. "There's no need for you to guide us. We can find our way out." iThe teardrop-shaped car sped across shining snow. Holt said nothing as he made the return journey. His mind climg to the image of the immobilized McDermott, and there was no room for any other thought. That stench of decay that tingled in his nostrils -- that glint of madness in the eyes as they begged for oblivion. They were crossing the borderlands now. Holt's car broke the warning barrier and got a pinging signal to halt and identify. A robot gave the password, and they went on toward Holt Keep. His family clustered near the entrance, pale, mystified. Holt walked in under his own steam. They were bursting with questions, but no one dared ask anything. It remained for Holt to say the first word. He said, "McDermott's a sick, crazy old man. His family is dead or gone. He's a pathetic and disgusting sight. I don't want to talk about the visit." Sweeping past them. Holt ascended the shaft to the command room. He peered out, over the snowy field. There was a double track in the snow, leading to and from McDermott Keep, and the sunlight blazed in the track. Ml The building shuddered suddenly. Holt heard a hiss and a whine. He flipped on his comcnunicator and a robot voice said, "McDermott Keep is attacking, your lordship. We've deflected a high energy bombardment." "Did the screens have any trouble with it?" "No, your lordship. Not at all. Shall I prepare for a counterattack?" Holt smiled. "No," he said. "Take defensive measures only. Extend the screens right to the border and keep them there. Don't let McDermott do any harm. He's only trying to provoke me. But he won't succeed." The tall, gaunt man walked to the control panel. His gnarled hands rested lovingly on the equipment. So they had come to warfare at last, he thought. The cannon of McDermott Keep were doing their puny worst. Flickering needles told the story: whatever McDermott was throwing was being absorbed easily. He didn't have the firepower to do any real harm. Holt's hands tightened on the controls. Now, he thought, he could blast McDermott Keep to ash. But he would not do it, any more then he would have thrown the switch that would have ended Andrew McDermott's life. TLyffcDermott did not understand. Not cruelty, but simple selfishness, had kept him Just as, all these years. Holt had refrained from launching an attack he was certain to win. He felt remotely sorry for the paralyzed man locked in the lifecapsule. But it was inconceivable that Holt would kill him. Once you are ne, Andrew, who will I have to hate? That was why he had not killed. For no other reason. Michael Holt peered through the foot-thick safety glass of his command room window. He saw the zone of brown earth, the snowfield with its fresh track, and the coppery ugliness of McDermott Keep. His intestines writhed at the hideousness of that baroque tower against the horizon. He imagined the skyline as it had looked a hundred years ago, before McDermott had built his foul keep. He fondled the controls of his artillery bank as though they were a young girl's breasts. Then he turned, slowly and stiffly, making his way across the command room to his chair, and sat quietly, listening to the sound of Andrew McDermott's futile bombardment expending itself against the outer defenses of Holt Keep as the winter night Wild as political conventions are here on Earth -- think whcjf they're like out among the turbulent stars! I TV Ty eldest son, who looks so much like his mother, my chief wife, shrugged his shoulders and glanced at the branch above He said sullenly, "Yes, I will swing into the tree when it's time." I turned again to be sure the bearers were safely up on the his head. bluff. I selected an arrow and fitted it to my bow and cautiously walked out across the hot glade of teree grass. In the far thicket the charl boar grubbed and snorted unconcernedly. Pack at the lodge, a day's walk from here, all my elite people had paused and were concentrating telepathically on our minds here. Through my eyes, through my son's eyes, through the eyes of the nontelepathic bearers on the bluff, they watched this scene, alerted by our tension. My third wife, the dainty little one from Kewananga, stopped her romping with the children and hushed them. Innocently, she censured me. "You should not have taken My chief wife, the boy's mother, was not speaking to me. My father, aging beside the small fire in his room of memories, whispered to me in excitement. "Careful, son. He's a big brute. Hear the weight of him when he moves." Red Giant boiled hugely in the afternoon sky as if he trembled to engulf his tiny companion sun, White Dwarf. In this glade the pink teree grass reflected the red sunlight and shimmered ominously. I glanced back one last time at my son. In that instant, I saw that he was not yet the "young man" I had thought to bring on his first hunt. He was just a slim boy confused by his noodle-headed mother. Well, it was too late now to leave him home as he and his mother had wished. The charl boar would have scented us long ago except for the pungent odor of the giant fungus he was grubbing. Now, I penetrated too far into the bittersweet aroma that drifted from the thicket. I felt the old thrill race along my back, and I glanced reassuringly across to my son. His sudden thought shook me -- far more than the sonic boom that came at that moment from some Matterist rocket beyond the Guapanga mountains. The boar, monstrous and unstoppable, charged from the thicket. My son's task was to put an arrow into his driving rear flank. He was to yell and divert him toward the tree. He did neither. He threw down his bow and swung into the tree. There was no place for me to run. The bearers were yelling from the rock... with no effect on the boar. Flashing toward me across the teree grass, the boar held the gleaming tusks high. A greasy chill clutched my belly while I cursed my chief wife with my mouth and with my mind. The boar's head went down and I drew the bow. I watched the heaving spot at the base of his massive shoulder hump where the gray bristles make a swirl. There is an opening there. A spear will not enter it, but a man may sometimes put an arrow through it and sever the spinal cord. I did. His front legs buckled. The great rump with its shoddy flag of a tail vaulted at me. I was knocked flat and the carcass crashed painfully across my legs. At his shoulder ts boar had stood almost as high as a man. I lay waiting for the bearers to get him off me. I looked up at the churning surface of Red Giant and marveled that I was still alive. A fter I was standing, the head bearer grasped my arms in the traditional gesture but he avoided my eyes. He said, "Tawe tawa," which scholars say once meant, "Hunter of hunters," in the primitive vocal language. The other bearers were blankfaced and they did not dance on the carcass or pass wine. I looked down on the charl boar... certainly the greatest I had ever killed. I yelled with my mind and did not care that elite Guapanga might hear: "Woman! Because of your nuts-and-fruit thinking, I cannot mount this shameful head in our lodge!" The chief bearer, knowing only the silence in the glade, took out his steel knife and began expertly to dress the animal. The other bearers got in his way helping. They were anxious to avoid my eyes. Their atelepathic minds cringed from the probing they hoped I was gentlemanly enough not to make. I felt my face bum. I looked over to where my eldest son stood. Because of this boy's mother and the radical Mentalist thinking she had recently subscribed to, none of my three wives now admitted me to their rooms. Because of this boy and his goose of a mother, I was almost dead with a tusk from groin to throat. I walked over to where his mind seethed with sactimonious pride in his absurd Mentalist extremes, and with horror at the sight of the great boar bearing down on me. The words in this confusion were, "I did what I knew at the last moment I had to do. I tried to explain my Mentalist principles to you and you wouldn't listen. My mother has condoned my decision." Abruptly, my chief wife was in my mind, horrified at what had almost happened to me, protective of the boy and still stubborn with righteousness. "Our son will devote his life to building our beautiful Mentalist heritage. He cannot taint himself I heard a groan from my lips. "Leave us, woman." Now she wept. From the bench were she sat in the courtyard of the lodge the paving stones blurred as though in rain, and her mouth cried out, "My husband, we have almost killed you. Forgive us. The boy had never seen a live boar. He did not know. Forgive me, and I will give i p my thinking." "Leave us." "You were dying and you cursed me before the elite world." "Leave us." T stood hoteyed before the boy. I am a conservative Mentalist -- which is the conservative party in the first place. I know exactly what the Matterists are after -- and I am dead against It. I do not allow the use of any machines anywhere on my lands. My grandfather fought against the vote for women until the radical Mentalists finally beat him fifty years ago. To this day no elite woman from Guapanga casts a vote. Among conservative Mentalists, I am rockbound conservative. To the radicals, I am "The Mountain Ogre." Now I faced a cowardly son because radical women's thinking had entered my own household. I was about as dead politically as a man can get and still cast a vote. Even as I stood there I could hear the first repercussions of this shameful incident snickering off into the Mentalist world. "Oh, didn't he turn out to be an ogre at home?" "Well, you must admit, he's great with boars." Another Matterist passenger rocket screamed overhead. Its parting thunder boomed back from the gorges of Guapanga. This irritating sound was, as they say, the gem that sank the boat. I slapped the boy. Yet, even as my helpless rage propelled the hand, I felt my own guilt slow it. Afterward, it was not a time to admit that feeling of guilt. It was time -- and far too late a time -- to start contradicting his mother's thinking. With my mind I said to him, "Very well. All is mind. Matter is an illusion. But a mental charl boar can kill a mental man as surely as if he were material. And a mental son has a duty to his mental father." Now his shame dominated his confusion and he bawled. I went on, "The Mentalist culture of which you are so proud will not protect your feet from stones, while this boar will make shoes for the whole lodge. You must eat meat and meat must be kiUed." Stubbornly, through his shame, he echoed his mother. "The killing should be done by common men, not by a Mentalist." These Mentalist fads and cults, such as the one my chief wife was dabbling in, had grown only in the last five years since the Chupa Uprisings. They were unhealthy signs of the shock and fear left in us by the unexpected revolt of the chupas. I shook my head. "Arm your tenants and train them to hunt? One day you will find them hunting you." I reached out and gripped his arm. "Your grandfather built this Mentalist empire here in the Guapangas, sprang between two Matterist republics. Geographically and spiritually it must be the most Mentalist of empires. It must be the conservative stronghold. And that means, your own meat." Now I was through with him. I was not quite in a mood to start making a chum of him. "You will return with the bearers. I am going back alone." I walked over to the bearers. "The boy will return with you." The head bearer looked me in the eye now and nodded respectfully. "Yes, Excellency." II T#rom that high valley at the  feet of the Guapangas, I followed a great conifered ridge that borders my lands. I walked in telepathic solitude, angry and ashamed. In the late afternoon I arrived at a craggy mountain that stands apart from its parent Guapangas. There the ridge begins to drop toward my lodge. At the base of this moimtain there is a little lake and I stopped and bathed. Afterward, I lay on the grassy bank and watched a herd of greathoms high on the mountain as they made their dainty way from one perilous coign to another. I became aware of the approach of a Matterist. We both, ceremonially closed our minds. "I pass your mind in peace. May Mr. Executive shield us both." "I withdraw my mind with respect. I commend you to Old Man." The present political divisions, Matterists and Mentalists, were left after all of the ancient telepathic cultures had fused or been annihilated. In the meantime there had evolved the institution of the Old Man. (The priggish Matterists call him Mr. Executive, but he is still just Old Man.) The Old Man is one mind which stands between the two planet-wide political parties and acts as final law for both. Our greatest political crisis comes when an Old Man dies. Then hurriedly come the two planetwide telepathic conventions -- the building of the two new platforms -- the election of two opT'osing candidates (one of which will become the new Old Man) -- and finally, the moment of "war". In the truce after the "war" the candidate of the victors cautiously contacts the minds of the defeated. With utmost care he synthesizes a pragmatic position for himself embracing, if he is a Mentalist, one after another of the Matterist points of faith, as "beliefs necessary to the wellbeing of my Matterist subjects." At the same time he rarefies his former Mentalist beliefs into pragmatic notions necessary to "guide my actions and obtain my ends as Old Man." Now his one mind handles the two conflicting faiths in a logical manner, and for his lifetime he keeps the peace. He keeps the peace absolutely because none may plot against him for a moment. Awake or asleep, and without any bother on his part, his mind would automatically shunt contradictory beliefs into the mind of the plotter and thus confuse him completelyI rose from the grass and dressed to meet the Matterist. I t was some time before he appeared around a wooded knoll. He had with him two bearers who carried the carcass of a greathom. The beautiful curving horns were the color of nut meats. His machine-made clothing was drab and unpretentious compared to the elegance of my cap and tunic, the silk of my breeches and the handsomely tooled leather of my boots. He wore the usual unadorned clothes and his machine-made boots were plain. He was a neighbor of mine. As I looked to the south down his valley, I could see the ugly smudge from his pulp mills and paper factories. (The Matterists have a type of daily reading they are addicted to instead of enjoying books. Everything that has happened that day in their society, endless minutiae you would never pause over in telepathic scanning, they read about in the evening. They require enormous amounts of cheap paper to keep up this "papernews".) The Matterist apologized' unnecessarily. "I hope you don't mind that I pass through this part of your land. It is the only way I can get to the greathoms of this mountain. I spread my hands. "You are welcome at any time." Naturally we did not touch, and of course we spoke only with our mouths. Our minds were closed to each other. He was carrying a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight The telescope excited me. We may build telescopes to study Lalone and the other planets and moons. But to build or use a sight with which to kill would be a Matterist herebyI glanced up at the face of the mountain and found the herd of greathorns. "May I use your sight?" Knowing I should not touch the rifle, he graciously dismounted the sight and handed it to me. It was a wonderful thrill to me to have the herd of greathorns leap into close perspective. I watched their frightful, surefooted progress until retention of the sight became impolite. I returned it to him and he remounted it. Then he stood for a moment looking at the rusty sky where Red Giant hovered over tire Guapangas. He said, "Well, this time tomorrow we will each probably be casting our vote for the next Mr. Executive." I stared at him in a stupid pause. He saw the ignorance on my face. He said, "You must have spent tile day absorbed in some very disturbing personal problem." I focused in panic on the mind of Old Man. He was dying. He had had a stroke and he was dying. The mountain beneath me rocked. We looked at each other, the Matterist and I, and each saw tiie other's determination. "Why are you so stuDDom about this one thing? We only want to try it on one of them, and it is so far away." I shook my head. "It is not just 'one thing'. I do not want to be told how many wives I may have, when I should work, or what I may read." He flushed. "The last three Executives have been Mentalist candidates. Yet with the cooperation of your radical Mentalists these Executives have been able to afford us much of the change we needed. Why not this? We only want to try it on one of them." He referred to a distant, yellow sun where the Matterists want to invade and colonize one of the planets. They have a theory that life is at its best imder yellow suns. Three times now this ambition of theirs to colonize planets of yellow suns had been delayed because we had won the "war" and placed a Mentalist as Old Man. This is the reason we Mentalists will not allow improvements in technology until we have improved our own souls. We see in the Matterists how the destructiveness of their engines has outstripped their ability to control themselves. They rationalize the crime they wish to carry out with the wide-eyed innocence of anim als. It is to be only "one" experiment... at least until it has proved successful. That little insignificant yellow sun is so far away. Those distant semi-rationals who call their planet "Erth" do not even telepath. It is all so innocent and "progressive". I said coldly, "I think your soul has plenty of room to improve right here under Red Giant and White Dwarf." His face went rigid with anger. He saluted me stiffly and he and his bearers moved on. T contacted my father-in-law in Basahn at once. "Councillor, I have had some personal problems. I did not realize..." He is my chief wife's father. He said, "Yes, I have had tearful news of those problems. I reminded your wife that I would not tolerate her behavior myself and do not expect you to. In the name of my family, I apologize." He proceeded bluntly to the plans for the Mentalist convention where he would certainly be the outstanding nominee for Old Man. He is a vigorous old lecher who keeps three wives and three concubines happy and still drinks a full gourd of wesah spirits a day. "I am sorry to say that your 'charl boar incidenti has made you a laughing stock. There is now no chance to get you on the Council of Pragmatists until next fall." "Yes, sir. I understand." "Nevertheless, your voters are among the best trained in the Mentalist party, and your pragmatic stand is very important to us." "Yes, sir. I am aware." "Begin contacting your elite people at once. Old Man has rallied momentarily, but the end might come suddenly." "I will do so." Ill T had no desire to be in this part of my lands with elections coming up. The moment Old Man was dead, the Matterists would be able to send out groups of atelepathic non-voters carrying rifles and explosives to pick off our elite people. For this they cannot of course spare elite people from the voting and the "war". Also they cannot use highly destructive, nuclear weapons, because the geography of the two parties is so interlaced. They can only be did not intend to be "picked". While I walked and trotted, I contacted my party lieutenants and instructed them in the grouping of our voters along their convictions in pragmatism. My voters would, of course, be voting for the things I believe in. Any man that didn't would find himself off my lands next day, packing his wife and kids for the polar mines. Until this morning, when my chief wife had made a planetwide ass of me, I had been a powerful force in our Mentalist party. I had campaigned several years now for her father who owns much of Basahn beyond the Guapangas. I invented his campaign slogan, "A man who believes in nothing makes a great Old Man." Night before last, while my son and I were at camp on our inglorious charl boar hunt, I had made a scheduled speech that was listened to across the planet by all Mentalists. My pragmatism was naturally cheered by conservative Mentalists and hissed by radical Mentalists., But the most heartening response had been from the chupas. These children from the union of an elite person with a common, atelepathic person (usually a concubine), lacks nothing in intelligence and they telepath as well as elite people. Like the common people, however, they have minds of their own. Each chupa is a little culture to himself, completely independent. They are realists, first and last, and seem always pragmatic. They like me. Now, since the Uprisings, they had become important politically. "Delow the ridge the streaking lights of Matterist cars began to glow along their highway. Only a few years ago Old Man had granted them this highway which crossed part of my land. It was not the least part of my disgust with the radical Mentalists that, to spite me, they had provided Old Man the necessary balance of opinion in this matter and allowed the desecration of a virgin Mentalist forest. The moon nearest our planet, the little yellow one we call Falon the Messenger, came rocketing up in the east. By its waxy light I was able to descend at the proper point to the highway and cross under it through one of the wide tunnels which had been provided for moving wildlife. Above me the cars whistled on their pavement. The Matterist minds they carried were still closed to us, but they, too, were hurrying to be ready for Old Man's death. As I came out of the tunnel, I became aware that the young Chupa overseer of my lands was on his way to meet me with a lantern. I was pleased that he had not delegated this to an atelepathic on this dangerous night. He called to me with his strong, cheerful mind. "Excellency, I have just crossed the creek above Serapon Marsh. On Skull Hill I will swing a lantern until you sight me." "I am climbing toward Skull Hill now. We will meet there." I envied him, the chupa. He is now a lieutenant in my political organization and a good one. In this election he would work hard for me, though he had fought skillfully against me in the Chupa Uprisings. He was not the least ashamed of the Uprisings and, unlike many in the Mentalist elite, I do not hold those days against the chupas. The improvements in their station which they then gained had been due. After all, we in the elite worlds have only our own moral laxity to blame for the fact that there are chupas. Trom the chupa lieutenant's mind came a solemn remark. "I, too, do not know for sure. But I would be honored if it were so." The open minds which he and I kept with each other were occasionally embarrassing. It had passed through my mind that this chupa's mother had died without telling, but many have claimed that my own father was her elite lover. One thing was sure, my father kept a stingy grip on that part of his memories. I mounted the pass below the great rock skull that was bathed in the tallow light of Falrn. His lantern came swinging toward me and he laughed with his mouth. "I saw your thatch before you saw my lantern." I had taken off my cap, leaving my red hair loose. The subtle mixture of lantern light and moonglow showed his firm features grinning at me. We grasped thumbs affectionately and started back the way he had come. I noticed that when he was not speaking directly with his mind it closed rhythmically against me. I understood he would protect me against his thoughts about my son and chief wife. I focused at once on my son's mind and spoke firmly but cheerfully. "How is your camp?" "It is good, father. We are about half way back to the lodge from the high valleys." "Have you seen to the comfort of your bearers?" "Yes, we..." He paused and continued meekly, "We are broiling part of the boar and will eat soon." "You realize that the Mentalist convention could start at any minute. Since you are not of voting age, close your mind at once and remain that way until contacted." "Yes, father. I will do so." The chupa shifted his lantern to his other hand and put his free arm on my shoulder. "I knew you wovild not continue to be harsh with the boy. It was not his fault, and he would never do it again." Momentarily, the picture of thrashing a naked woman with a stick was embarrassingly sharp in his mind. He hastened his thinking to the words, "Of course, I have no rightful thoughts on whose fault it might have been." As we started down the slopes above Serapon Marsh, he pointed east where Garrison Bluff was drenched in moonlight. I nodded. The garrison was dark and deserted. My monks had already left their cells and each had departed alone for some impromptu retreat in the forest. There they would hold their convictions against Matterism and vote steadily for Mentalism. When the brief moment of "war" came, their full telepathic force would be against the Matterist platform. So now, if a Matterist non-voter chose to blow up the garrison, little would be lost. A s the chupa and I came up the stone walk to the lodge, my father-in-law contacted me again. "Old Man has weakened so that Intelligence is able to study the possible Matterist platform. I am confident that when the "war" comes we will win. If I am placed as Old Man I will ask immediately for you to be voted into the Council. You will lose due to that ridiculous chart boar business of this morning. However, I will keep asking and I am sure you will be voted in next fall." My father-in-law withdrew his busy focus as the chupa and I passed beneath the autumnspangled leera trees and entered the great stone-paved court of my lodge. I caught a glimpse of my chief wife hurrying along a portico in the waning light of Falon. Her robe blew about her fine figure in tallow folds that were mystically related to the wax-hard withdrawal of her proud mind. The chupa grasped thumbs with me. "May the Mentalists win again." He saluted rrie ironically and left. The lodge was dark and silent. The children were all asleep. The adults were awake and anxious about the convention. In his rooms off one of the upper porticos my aged father hummed to himself and dreamed of a convention and "war" in his youth. My second wife stirred uncomfortably in bed with the big baby she was carrying and resented its father profoundly. She would not speak with me when I focused comfortingly on her mind. She knew that I never cared to speak with her except to persuade her to have big heavy babies with heads like red melons. A breeze moved through the trees and shrubs of the court. The splashing of the fountain was a great noise. The crackling of coals in the open cooking pit beyond the fountain was another noise. I found that I was desperately hungry.  Over the bed of coals the carcass of a black horn sizzled. There was a loaf of bread and a skin of wine on the stone table. There were no servants to help me, of course. All the men were stationed about the grounds, guarding with bow and spear against the possible rifles and explosives of Matterist common people. Their women were huddled about their own cooking fire where they whispered the ageold superstitions about politics. I cut a huge piece of the meat and ate it with the bread, sitting at the stone serving table. I drank the wine directly from the skin, chewed ravenously and stared into the coals. My third wife, the little one from Kewananga, was no longer speaking with me, even to scold. She now sided completely with the chief wife whom I had cursed. I decided to bathe again when I had finished eating. I threw off my harness of arrows and my clothes and left them in a heap on the stones of the court I vaulted into the fountain, frightened the decorative fish into a shimmering explosion. Aftejrward I walked in angry nakednesa across the court and along the great portico to my rooms. ' I 'he Matterists marry only one woman. I have often assumed from this basic stupidity springs the meanness of their culture. This night I had learned that three women are no certainty of affection. Alone in my rooms, I shouted to all three of them with my mind, "Don't worry that I will not return from this convention with a firm mind! I will come back here with a stick and beat two of you all the way to the Basahn Hills. I will save the stick and when the other had whelped I will stand in one spot and beat affection into her. Her heart will melt for man and child." I threw on a cap and left my rooms and let my boots crash theatrically on the stones. I went up the stairs and along the upper portico to my father's rooms. He said with his mind, "Come in, son. After the convention I will come out on the portico to see you return with a stick. Then we will have peace and love about here once more." I entered and stood before him. To me his face will always be the most beautiful of my life. There is written in those deep seams a long life of building and adventure and care. It was he who had fought in three elections to win and place a Mentalist Old Man and prevent the Matterists from invading the planets of other suns. It was he, too, who had counseled me during the Chupa Uprisings. The memory of his understanding in those days stirred in me a sudden question. "Are you the father of my chupa?" He was angry with me. "You think of trivia in the presence of this ceremony!" I was ashamed. I had caught from his mind a hard ache of remembered love and a sweet face, and this I had tricked from him. But this thought left one certainty. It is a fine thing to love a woman who can't read your mind. I gestured placatingly for the ceremony. All over our planet, where it was now light and where it was now dark, these ancient Mentalist words were being spoken. The hands of an old man trembled on the kneeling young one and the primitive, almost meaningless words of mouth were said by the ancient. After these magical words of mouth one could go into the forest and lie on the ground and fight the telepatliic war. For, in ancient times, before the institution of Old Man, the election was the war. I walked out of the lodge along the great portico which is supported by thirteen caryatids carved as the demons spawned in "The Beginning" by White Dwarf. There my chief wife knelt on the stones and grasped my thighs. I did not put my hand on her dark and lovely head. She drew herself up my body and sought my lips. I did not refuse her this, but I could not return the kiss. Too clearly, gleaming tusks flashed in the teree grass. It was cruel and insulting. Salty with tears, her lips moaned away from me. She turned and clung to a caryatid and it was the female demon, Paline. I left her sobbing face imcomforted between wooden breasts. IV autumn dawns start softly, a subtle, pink glowing without direction that grows and grows until suddenly day crashes in. Deep in a secret part of the forest I stood on a little eminence and leaned against a cold face of basalt. I have always attended the political conventions from this secret place in my forests. Through the enormous rusty glowing a great black chahar winged his heavy way. Even as I watched his flight he gave his screaming cry, and it was day. The first ray from Red Giant lanced the black belly of a cloud, splashing blood across the high cliffs of Guapanga. At that moment Old Man died. His hand, held by that of his chief wife, relaxed. Over his fading telepathic fans, he muttered a name that was heard by waitplanet. Then he was dead. The Mentalist convention began immediately. I walked over to a grassy knoll and lay down and closed my eyes. Throughout the morning of voting on issues and principles that would make up our platform, there whispered outside our minds the ominous workings of the Matterist convention where an opposing platform was taking shape. These foreign arguments and all this communication we kept firmly from our minds. The moment would come soon enough when we would face them with our platform and they would face us with theirs. And in less time than it takes to melt a scoop of butter over a fire, the logic of the stronger side would begin to confuse and dissolve the logic of the weaker side. This would be the moment of "war". When it was finished one logic would stand intact across the planet and the victors would install the next Old Man. While we were busy building the Mentalist platform our chupa minds stood respectfully aside. For a chupa thinks independently of the party platforms, just as a common man thinks pretty much as he pleases in his lonely world. But an elite man necessarily takes part in his telepathic culture (or, as we call it today, "platform"). It is the thing which forms his mental boundaries. Every elite person, upon the death of an Old Man, is deeply concerned with the changes that will occur in his allowable philosophy. Touring the morning my chupa half-brother contacted me. "Excellency, can you spare a moment? It is important." "Of course, but you know not to keep me too long." "I have been increasingly aware that you intend to enter again your plea for dishonest government." "Yes, I do. I suppose it will make as little impression this time as it has in the past. But it is an essential part of my conservatism and I can't neglect it." "Pardon me. Excellency. I think it wrill make a very definite impression this time. We chupas, loyal to the Mentalists, have held a conference about it just now. We can promise you a solid vote for dishonesty in government." I was stunned with pleasure. All morning, in the face of the general amusement over my first wife's disloyalty, I had availed myself only of my routine vote. Now I saw that my political fortune had turned in a moment. "You see. Excellency, what this could mean when the two platforms are face to face." Lying in the cool forest, I opened my eyes and looked across the rusty sky, and closed them. stood him. The chupas on the Matterist side would like this part of our platform as much as our chupas. They would vote for this aspect of our platform. S hortly, the convention was at that point where the provincial law in Guapanga which forbids voting to woman was causing its usual trouble. A radical Mentalist from the east had the attention and was being particularly abusive. This maneuver was not intended to do anything practical about the law itself. It was meant simply to discredit me, Ae law's chief defender, before I could propose any of my pragmatic aspects for our new platform. The radical" shouted, "Out there in those hills the women will try anything to get free." This was the inevitable reference to "the charl boar incident." Everyone laughed, even the conservatives. I held my peace. I would just have to wait my turn for attention which I could now see would not come again until afternoon. But when my turn did come, I was going to rock them. I had been the first politician to see that pragmatism could be used within a party platform as well as by Old Man and the Council of Pragmatists. For example, I inovated having our common people vote against work. They continue to vote against work cheerfully and with great energy, knowing that they will be plowing their fields tomorrow. In our Mentalist platform a request for this vote is without difficulty, but in the final facing of the two platforms this strong vote cannot be absorbed by the Matterists to whom "work" must be the most important of virtues if they are to keep their factories going. The parts of the platform coming up did not require unusual action. I decided to leave and have lunch. I contacted one of my elite lieutenants and left my vote for him to proxy with intructions for standard, conservative responses. Ii anything came up he had only to contact me. When I opened my eyes to the red forest, I found a young woman sitting on a rock near me. She rose and came toward me gracefully. She carried a freshly cut hasam gourd and in the other hand one of the huge hasam leaves folded as a pouch. She knelt before me and handed me the gourd. "It is water from the creek." She indicated the nearby sound of the stream. The water had, only a short time ago, splashed from the high snows of Guapanga. It made my teeth ache. She spread the huge hasam leaf before me and I found that she had provided for my lunch exactly as I had planned to do. She had gathered the autumn nuts and berries and several kinds of fruit. She had cracked and cleaned the nuts into a separate smaller leaf. She was not telepathic, but she was an unusual beauty. Her features were sensual without being soft. I watched with pleasure the grace of her walk. I asked with my mouth, "Who sent you here?" "No one sent me." "Did you know I would be here?" She smiled mysteriously. "I knew." She picked up some of the fruit for herself, a bunch of iceblue wesah. Then she indicated the meal with her head. "Eat, Excellency. You will have to get back to the convention." I did not wish to think about the speech I would give in the afternoon. Instinct told me I would destroy essential spontanity. I welcomed this woman as a diversion. She sat and munched the wesah while I ate the meal and drank from the gourd. We watcheach other in appreciative silence and grinned occasionally. ' I 'he little ginkas, both the red and the blue-furred ones, were gathering nuts beneath the red trees. In the forest there was only their chatter and the occasional belling of a black jay. When she was satisfied that I was through eating, she asked, "Excellency, why doesn't your chief wife come to you?" I saw that the common people, as well as the elite, knew of my problems. "You know it is unlawful for a delegate to be with his women during a convention." She pretended to be naive. "Why is that. Excellency?" "It used to be thought they might influence one's vote. Now they just vote 'contrary to one." "And yet. Excellency, you may ask me to your arms." I did not like her brazen calm. "That is not proper at any time." Her strange smile angered me. tl was about to order her away when she raised her arms and ttmdid the knot of her honeycolored hair so that it fell to her shoulders as girls wear their hair before marriageable age. "Do you recognize me, Excellency? Wasn't there a time during the telepathic fighting of the chupas when you felt less harshly against my company." Then I recognized her. She was the daughter of one of my tenants. While I had rested from fighting the chupas five years ago, she had happened by here. She smiled. It was entirely a forgiving smile. "I was only a girl then. Excellency. I am a woman now. I have heard that your wives do not come to you, election day or not." She declared this as bluntly as she might say, "I see that your red thatch needs trimming." We sat there for some time, looking at each other through knowing lids while I remembered her sweet youth and felt a ravenous need for her. I beckoned her to me, and as I did so I realized that the air-tide of our planet was rising. Red Giant and White Dwarf were overhead. Together they draw an angry tide of storm through all our noons. Even as the woman knelt to me the first confused gusts of the tide whirled crimson leaves about us. Presently the tide raced through the forest. It sang through bare autumn branches and half buried us in a drift of leaves. The woman's warm mouth whispered over my face. Then, far away I heard the mighty wave of wind bellow into in the wild crags. I lay dreaming. One day I would be Old Man. If I became a councillor next fall my way would be easy. This would be inevitable, because my grandfather and my father had built an empire and left it to me. With such an empire and my own good talent as a logician I could, as I lay there in the forest, decide that I wanted one day to be Old Man. The woman lay still in my arms. Her eyes had been fixed on the depths of trees where Red Now they turned to me in a dream. I stroked her shoulder where coils of honey-colored hair buried my hand. The last gusts of the tide lifted lazy dervishes from the leaves about us and rnled the flame of her cheeks. She said, "I have loved you since you came to me, like a god here in your forest." I saw in her gentle mind that this was so, and also that she had hardly realized her capacity to love. Suddenly I remembered the name that Old Man had muttered as he died. His elite wives had been gathered at his bed. His dearest friends had been there. But the last name he had uttered had been that cf a common woman, a concubine who was not even allowed in the house. I marveled that he had taken this atelepathic woman to himself and outraged elite people even before he became Old Man. And I saw that what this might have lost him in political support from elite women had been more than offset by his later popularity among the chupas. I focused again on the mind of this gentle, passionate woman beside me, and I found that her adoration was tempered by a strong determination of her own. The strength of her will astonished me until she said in her mind, "He has hair like yours. It is red like the flame of Red Giant." Then this woman's mind opened to me. I was happy with understanding. I kissed her face till she wept, and she said haltingly, "He is like Red Giant in another way. He takes a storm with him everywhere." And suddenly, of all my children, I loved best the wild littl chupa. V I t is wrong by the old standards, but I lay beside the woman throughout the afternoon of the convention. She neither stirred nor spoke with her mouth in all that time. My awareness left the forest and centered entirely in the convention. I had returned barely in time. The voting had reached subjects critical to me. My turn for attention before the delegates came quickly. I began my speech gravely. "Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, and delegates. I am going to return to my plea for dishonesty in government." There was a massive, telepathed groan from the ranks of radical Mentalists and even some heavy sighs from conservatives. The radicals began hooting. It took the chair several seconds to quiet the disorder. Afterward I spoke dramatically, directly to the chair. "Mr. Chairman, to protect this assembly against further outbursts of childishness, I am going to make an announcement. After I have made it, I think you may wish to grant a #-second recess to allow the delegates to confirm the announcement "Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, and delegates. What I am going to ask as an integral part of our platform... what I am going to put into that platform concerning dishonesty in government... will in the terrible moment of "war" this afternoon... will in that crucial moment... I paused for a second while they sweated in anticipation of the moment that our logic would face the Matterist logic. "... will in that decisive moment, receive a solid vote of yes' from every... chupa... on... this... planet." It was a stunning moment. They were getting the thrill that had come to me when my halfbrother had told me the news and it had crashed into my mind that chupas on the Matterist side could join chupas on our side to vote for us. In one moment our politics had been revolutionized.  fter the recess which the Chairman eagerly called, I did not have to ask if chupa friends of the delegates had confirmed me. The attention on me had deepened to the absolute. I had indeed rocked them, and for the first time they would hear me. "Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, and delegates. It remains for me to state in a form suitable for our platform, the logic of our attitude tovard dishonesty in government. "Politicians who want your money want, at worst, the least part of you. Even then they usually take only a little of the least part. They take what will not cause much excitement, so that the source will remain fruitful. Such men are almost never dangerous. "Give me the dishonest government. I know where they stand. We need only structure our laws so that their activities have the dignity of commercial defense. Then these clever foxes, while fleecing us lightly, will defend our freedom and our principles like lions. In such a strong government we need only on occasional politician who is a fanatic about 'honesty' to keep the rest in reasonable line." I paused a few seconds and felt only profound attention focused on me. I had begun nicely, a logic that would fit our platform. "No, it is among honest politicians that danger may lie! Show me the politician that has never gained money or made it possible for his friends to do so, or h"s never partaken of the other licenses that power provide, and I will show you a fanatic. "The best that an honest poliIT i tician can be is a fanatic about honesty. But he can be much worse. It behooves you first to ask why he is honest. If he can answer that satisfactorily it behooves you to ask why he is in government. "How much of your freedom does the honest politician want in exchange for not taking your money? Does he want your right to vote? Your right to your land? Your right to your women, your right to drink spirits, or eat meat, or read books? "Such questions become critical when many honest men congregate in one government. Why have they foregathered in this ominous way? Why this unnatural climate of sobriety and thrift? What is it these honest men are seeking to change? The foxes have flown and your society is sick. "Let the next Old Man reduce the penalties against governmental dishonesty and embezzlement -- just as I proposed at the last convention. Let the next Old man make our political position attractive to clever and intelligent men who happen to be a little dishonest. Only in this way can we have a government strong enough to resist honest fanatics and radical encroachment." I paused again, and I found a surprised approval falling toward me... a murmured phrase that was repeated over and over from all directions like a shower of autumn leaves. "Their moneyeconomy. Their money-economy. T?or the first time this assembly  had caught a glimpse of my political pragmatism and the dimensions in which it could work for us. With the Matterists everything is organized... into management teams, labor unions and clubs. They have only blackand-white language for their supposed virtues such as "industry", "honesty" and "frugality". Yet there is less virtue in their higher circles than in my meanest tenant. So now I shouted to the assembly. "Yes, their money-economy! The Matterists have an almost complete money-economy in which dishonesty and embezzlement are, at one and the same time, essentially prevalent and highly abhorred. "But what of our semi-feudal economy? Need we be fearful of political dishonesty where power and position are the right of birth? Will not the chupas be pleased that we lower the penalties on dishonesty to give them greater opportunity to succeed our world? "So, if we have logical reasons, as I have given them, to accept dishonesty as a fundamental in our political platform, what will happen to the Matterists when we face them in the moment of "war"? "In that moment when our minds are open to them, won't their logic be confounded? For they cannot deny the prevalence of dishonesty. And they cannot deny that the most dangerous politicians are honest fanatics from whom we are protected by strong, dishonest governments. Yet acceptance of these things implies destruction of their economy. "Ladies and gentlemen, we will win the "war" and lose nothing in the peace!" This conclusion was greeted with a storm of approval. My father in law focused tightly on me. "You will not have to wait till next fall. You will be voted to the Council of Pragmatists later in the afternoon. Why don't you tactfully leave the convention now, at the height of your approval? You need not return until the voting starts." VI I lay in quiet triumph beside the woman, and she knew I had returned. She did not say anything, but she thought about me unashamedly, and I knew her thoughts. She offered me a drink fronl the hasam gourd and I took it. Then I asked with my mind, "How far is it to your father's house." In her mind there was not an answer to my question. Rather, her mind filled with the realization that I would buy her for a concubine. So I had to repeat my question, and still there was in her mind only this realization. Then I laughed and said loudly with my mouth, so that it startled her in the silent, afternoon forest, "How far is it to your father's house?" Now I saw in her mind that the house would not be far beyond the creek. A place with a well in the yard and an arbor for wesah. The little chupa would be teasing the hopani fowl in cackling flurries around the house. That was the way it was as we walked down from the forest except that the little chupa was not about. We crossed a field of freshly mown teree grass and walked up to the house. The woman straightened her hair self-consciously. I adjusted my tunic and my cap and found some leaves on my breeches. Red Giant hung in a cloudy blaze, waiting to start his plunge at the horizon. The father and his workmen had finished in the fields for the day. They had just returned to the barns and the animals as the woman called him. He came out, a tall weathered man, straight and kindly faced. Yet I saw the face harden with resentment when he recognized me. This was a proud man who would never have asked me to right a wrong. Nevertheless, he bowed with respect. I spoke the proper idiom with warmth, for I respected the father of such a woman. "I withdraw respectfully from the door to your mind." Now, as was proper, he straightened from his bow. I saw that in the interim he had understood what this was about. He was happy for his daughter, and that the wrong would now be righted. Now the ceremony would have to come at once. In small talk tiiere might occur exchanges which are thought to be bad omens. So I declared, "Man, I would buy your daughter for a concubine." The woman at once turned her twick to us and lowering her head, sighed. The father's eyes were suddenly misted. Ceremonially, he looked up at the sky. "Red Giant witnesses what a fraud has come here." T T e went to the bam and called his three workmen out as witnesses to the "fraud". He had had no wife for many years and so these would be the only witnesses. The workmen stood with their caps in their hands. Two of them who were married were smiling over the young woman's fortune, but the unsmiling bachelor had had a secret hope of his own. Doing my best to remember this ceremony, I took the traditional coin of small worth from my purse and grasped the father's hand and placed the coin in it. I repeated, "I would buy your daughter, man." The father cast the coin on the ground. I was grateful that he used the ancient, simpler form of the ceremony. He stamped on the coin and said, "I count not your money but your honor. Thus I see that you will mistreat her." "I will treat her with respect." "And then you will bring her unhappiness." "I will bring her love and tenderness." "And finally, you will abandon her to wretchedness." "I will keep her with me always." The father turned to his witnesses and demanded, "You hear this fraud?" And the workmen used the aiident form, retorting in ragged unison, "No, we deem it honorable." The father then asked me, "You swear by Theda to do these things?" "I swear by Theda I will do all these things." The ceremony was over, and the father and I clasped thumbs while the woman remained as she was with bowed head. He said, "I will take these witnesses to the village tomorrow and sign papers. They will be delivered to you for signing, will they not?" "I think so. I have never done this." He smiled and it was kind of him to say, "Though you think not. White Dwarf will reappear." This common figure, referring to the regular eclipse and return of White Dwarf, meant it had been beyond human power that I was five years late in purchasing his daughter. I drew him aside at this point and this perturbed him. "No, Excellency, do not make a suggestion. There is no need for a purchase." "I know there is no need, but I honor you and I insist." "Please, no. I would not feel right." I knew that he spoke the truth. I smiled and forced him to grasp thumbs again. "But you can do nothing if I sign to you whatever land you now cultivate." With him this made a purchase possible because he need not physically accept something. It was an extravagant price that would outrage elite people. He saw that this measured my respect for his inability to accept the usual money. He shook his head and stared at the ground, unable to hide his smile of pride. The woman, w.io should have been standing in ceremonial silence some distance behind us, my son, drop the thing. Throw it away. Father, you were supposed to look after him. Oh, my son, drop the thing." It was the little chupa. He strode from the brush grimed and sweaty, holding in his hand a thin, lavender-striped nolegs as long as a man's arm. The woman would not approach her son when she reached him because he gleefully waved the coiling nolegs at her. Her father left me and took the nolegs from the child and let it glide away in the grass. Only then did she kneel and scold the chupa, while she brushed the dust from his tunic and the grime from his face and picked leaves and twigs from his red hair. He stared over her shoulder at me. Even when she used the #f hem of her gown to wipe the dirt from his face, pushing his face this way and that, he kept his wide eyes on me. I could feel his mind searching, and I opened my mind to him. The workman had laughed lightly about the nolegs. But when one of them saw the redpolled chupa being presented to me with my red hair falling from under my cap, he guffawed. The farmer ordered all three back to the barns. I lifted the child so that he sat on my arm and his mind seemed to be coming from his eyes. Presently he put his hands on me and he loved me. A fter a time the woman took him from me and he rested his head at her throat. She took her eyes from me and looked up at Red Giant. Then she said the simple thing that was true. "If all were chupa there would be no need for this "war". What she said was even truer than she meant it. For, as I glanced with her at the sky, I saw the pale glow of our sister planet, Lalone, where the Matterists invaded and enslaved the semi-rationals during the reign of the last Matterist Old Man. If all were chupa we would not have to fight over and over against the Matterist ambitions. I turned to her father. "Have her pack only what she may need for tonight. I will send servants tomorrow for whatever she wishes." He started to agree but an expression of intense concentration came over his face. I spun to the woman and found the same look on her face. One of my lieutenants was instructing them to begin voting. I took just a monent to scan all of Guapanga, found the people voting hard against the Matterists' "organized labor", and the monks voting their subtle denials of Matterism, and the chupas voting like crazy for dishonest government. It was a fine panorama for the dead-serious Matterists to have to face when they opened their minds to us. I promptly returned my awareness to the convention. I learned in an incidental flash that I had won my place on the Council, and I found the delegates in a hasty vote for our candidate for Old Man. My father-in-law won, as had been foregone, and only just in time. The Matterists were already probing for our collective awareness. It was the moment of "war". This probing of foreign logic acts as a catalyst. All elite Mentalists, including now even the women of Guapanga, opened tbeir minds to the logic of our platform. Collectively and intensely we believed our platform in all its logical beauty; an algebra of faith, cemented at every possible point to reality. Every Mentalist on the planet partook of one mind and one logic. nly three times in my life have I been part of this almost unendurable moment of total, social awareness. It is like a moment of being a god. Our logic neatly encompassed and projected, on my pragmatic basis, the massive, uniform vote of the common people and the telepathing of the chupas. We saw, even as the collective mind of the Matterists became discernable, how impossible it would be for their logic to digest or deny these comically true assertions about life with which we could live so easily. Now the two collective minds were completely interpentrated Age-old confusions were stirred in us by the Matterist's foreign logic. But we were stirring more than confusion in them. In only a few minutes they were in defeat, their collective logic fragmented by our stronger logic. Abruptly, they were asking individually for tlie placing of Old Man to begin. While we still held our collective mind in order that the placing of Old Man could get safely under way, it was fascinating to listen to snatches of conversation back and forth between individual Matterists. They were contacting friends and family members now that their collective mind had been broken, and they spoke not as a stationary god, the way we continued to speak, but as mystified people. "What in the name of Paline was that business about dishonest government being the best government?" Then a woman to her prominent husband, "I tell you, you have to do something. H#w horrible to be ruled by an Executive with three wives and a raft of messy concubines!" Then one industrialist to another: "There they were again with all their people voting against work. If our workers get that way we're doomed." A young schoolman cursed angrily. "How can they go on disbelieving in progress and beat us every time?" talists held our collective mind, our god-like awareness of each other and the total, victorious platform of belief and logic we had put together that day. While we held this collective mind, our new Old Man, my father-in-law, made his delicate, pragmatic way into the Matterists' shattered faiths. This process of becoming Old Man requires a consummate logician and the ardent assistance, throughout the truce, of his former enemies as well as his friends. Frequently, the first pretender to this position has had more ambition than talent for pragmatic logic and has gone out of his mind. But my father-in-law would make it. There was no doubt about the old lecher's ability. He would make a fine Old Man... and one who would not live too long for my ambitions. yhen at last we Mentalists were released from the collective mind by an order from the new Old Man, I found myself in the farmer's yard. Of course I had fallen to the ground during the great concentration. The woman was kneeling near me without touching me. She explained, "Father has fed the boy and is putting him to bed." Red Giant boiled on the crest of the black Guapangas and darkness streaked across the foothills. The larger moon, the electric blue Theda, Goddess of Love, had risen behind us. So I said, "Our way home will be lighted by Theda and warmed by Red Giant" My elite women consider me crude, and I saw that this woman and I would get along fine. For, in the common language, my remark had a double meaning and her quiet laugh had a hoydenish ring. But we did not leave in time to be warmed by Red Giant. The father came out and announced, "You have had a victory." I corroborated that and he added, "Then we have two things to drink to." We went into the kitchen and he poured liberal glasses of cool wesah wine. We drank them slowly sitting before a wood fire and talking about how the father should have another wife. Then he poured us another glass, except for the woman who said she would have no more. So her father and I had two more. After that I said, "No, thank you. I am sufficiently drunk to withstand a walk through the woods." I carried the sleeping child and tile woman carried her bundle. Sometimes we touched each other, but it was a little late for woodland love -- especially since I was burdened with the past offense that slept on my shoulder. "IThen we reached the lodge   we found servants out in the entrance with lanterns. My chupa half-brother stated, "Excellency, you have kept a closed mind and we have been worried about you.'"Thank you. I have been well." He stared at the honey-haired woman. The thought that crossed his mind was immediately picked up inside the lodge, and I felt the minds of all three elite wives tense. Well, they would stay tense all night, I could tell them. I was weary of my role as strong father. I said to my halfbrotlier, "Here, please carry this dumpling." To a servant I said, "And you please take the woman's bundle." Now, my half-brother was staring at the child's red poll, and he laughed aloud with his mouth. At that there was a flurry of telepathic gabbling from within the lodge. They left the bathing of the children and the roasting of a flank of the charl boar, and the overseeing of the setting of the table for dining, and they were coming to meet us. I put my arm about the woman's shoulder. We walked into the great lodge with its hundred rooms and many courts to meet my elite women. I felt her tremble and I pressed her shoulder to me reassuringly. My eldest son came running pellmell and stopped before us. He stared in stunned silence at the honey-haired woman. She smiled at him and he smiled with widening eyes. Then he dashed forward and threw himself in my arms. "Father, I'm so glad you're back." I held the youth with one arm and stroked his dark head. "I'm glad to be back, son." "Father, you know we have had big gray karks in the grain bins." "Yes, they have been eating and spoiling too much grain." "I killed three of them today with a club." I looked him in the eye steadily. Then I removed my arm from the woman and took his head in my hands and kissed his cheek. "Thank you, son. That had to be done." I pushed him away playfully. "Get along now. We have to meet your mother." A t the entrance to the central court my three elite wives stopped and stared at us. We stopped and the servants stopped. With my mouth I announced to my elite wives, "I have brought home a concubine," and realized with embarrassment that I had made it sound like I had brought home some grand present for them. Graciously, my chief wife said with her moutih, "Isn't Ae love#S !y." And she extended her hands and came forward to greet the woman. To me she telepathed, "I had rather you came home with a stick, My Husband." My father was suddenly in my mind, irritable and resentful. "I want to see her. I want to see the honey-haired woman and her red-haired child. I want to see the big club you have brought home." "Forgive me, father. Please! Tomorrow. This is so short a night." Ilis mouth chuckled. "Tomorrow, son. This has been a fine convention all around." "This day had made it clear to me that the old worlds of the elite were very nearly over. As a politician first and an archconservative later, I had reached a radical conclusion. This admirable child with the red poll was the future. As Old Man, I would help that chupa's future along by changing a few marriage laws. In that future, all will be diupa. That will end the Matterist plans to colonize yellow suns. I stroked the child's red head and knew his dreaming mind. He was fascinated with the booming flight of the rockets. As surely as he lay there he would build more engines and fly into space. Very well. He can go to that distant yellow sim and tell those semi-rationals on Erth how they have been saved by the conservative party of Guapanga. When he is old enough, I will be Old Man, and I will arrange the trip. It will give those Erth people something to think about besides that mechanical telepathing by Eid Sulvan and Joni Karson. How that stuff can jam the galaxy. I envy him, the little chupa. There on Erth, they have a blue jay. It is one thing to telepath from the mind of a semi-rational who is there. It would be quite another thing to see, with your own eyes, one of those blue jays flash in the trees of Erth like a splinter struck from that blue On sale now at ail newsstands! 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The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. sphere are lights in the sky at night -- and not all of them are stars. Every once in a while something else wheels into view -- a nova, a long-period comet, a hatch of meteorites -- to brighten up our night-time sky and give us something changeable and fresh to look at. This September particularly there are a couple of objects on display which you don't usually find, no matter how hard you look. For instance, did you ever see an asteroid with the naked eye? With a little luck, you just might be able to see one around September #d. It is the worldlet Vesta, a #-mile-diameter boulder, third largest of the thousands of chunks of rock we call the asteroid belt. (About #, to be more precise -- # known and catalogued, and a lot that aren't.) You may never have thought of an asteroid as a naked-eye object, and indeed the other # aren't. But Vesta is not only big, it is for some unknown reason particularly bright. Every once in a while it makes a specially close approach to the Earth, and then it comes right up to the threshhold of vision. If you'd like to test your sharpness of eye on Vesta, here's how: First, make sure it's a clear night. (At its brightest Vesta reaches just a hair above #th magnitude, which is usually considered the lower limit for bareeye viewing.) Second, locate the constellation Aquarius. The usual way to locate These great winds were lioshravans Benjamin Frankie O' Isaac Newton ' Francis Bacon iprseooK FRi were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. cojy of "The Mascwy of  Life" -- x ligation A non: : : profit ;; : organizaTuhriO Address : Namei Scribe K.W.B.  if Scribe K.W.B. Please send me the free book. The Mastery af Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Aquarius is first to find the North Star. Then draw from it an imaginary line, slightly curved, sweeping south and a touch westward through Cassiopeia and the Great Square in Pegasus until you come to Aquarius. That's the usual way. Fortunately, this year it is a little easier. The planet Saturn happens to be stagnating in Aquarius right now, exhibiting that retrograde motion that so puzzled the epicyclists : so if you look toward the south in the late evening the brightest object you see is probably Saturn, and the stars around it are the constellation you want, Aquarius. Well, a few degrees southeast of Saturn you should, the fates being with you, find a very faint object; and if you watch it for a couple of evenings, and it moves, or changes its appearance, or disappears entirely, you will then know you have had a naked-eye sighting of the asteroid Vesta. yt lmost equally difficult to see -- but not because it isn't bright -- is the planet Mercury. Considering that it is a firstmagnitude object, it is surprising that so few people have seen it with the naked eye -- or, at least, recognized what they have seen. The trouble, of course, is that the little devil lies so close to the sun that most of the time when Mercury is in the sky, it is unfortunately a daylight sky. A couple of times a year, for a day or two at a time, we have a fighting chance to find it. This year's best remaining chance occurs in the early mornings around September #th. Your first step is to get out of bed at least an hour before sunrise. Find a spot with an unobstructed view to the east, and look in that direction. You will surely see a very bright object, fairly high in the sky. Ignore it. It isn't Mercury, it is Venus. But below Venus, low on the horizon just before the sky begins to brighten, you should be able to spot another -- lesser, but still bright -- object; and that is what you are looking for. Find it? Then consider yourself one up on, for example, Copernicus -- who spent all his life looking for Mercury, but was never able to find it at all. (He had the misfortune to spend most of his life in areas with considerable ground fog, it seems.) Seeing Vesta, on the other hand, puts you one up not only on Copernicus but on every other astronomer who lived from Eratosthenes to Olbers, who discovered it about a hundred and fifty odd years ago. But Olbers cheated. He used a telescope. The star-born " splinter races" of Man were coming home again, to meet on a battered planet where men faced Dorsail Soldier, ask not -- now or ever -- Where to war your banners go...  I yts I got off the spaceliner on St. Marie, the little breeze from the higher pressure of the ship's atmosphere at my back was like a hand from the dark-, ness behind me, shoving me into the dark day and the rain. My Newsman's cloak covered me. The wet chill of the day wrapped around me but did not enter me. I was like the naked claymore of my own early ancestors, wrapped and hidden in the plaid -- sharpened on a stone -- and carried now at last to the meeting for which it had been guarded over three years of waiting. A meeting in the cold rain of spring. I felt it, cold as old blood on my hands and tasteless on my lips. Above, the sky was low and clouds flowing to the east. The rain fell steadily. The sound of it was like a rolling of drums as I went down the outside landing stairs, the multitude of raindrops sounding  their own end against the unyielding concrete all around. The ' concrete stretched far from the ship in every direction, hiding the earth, as bare and clean as the last page of an account book before the final entry. At its far edge, the spaceport terminal stood like a single gravestone. The curtains of falling water between it and me thinned and thickened like the smoke of battle, but could not hide it entirely from my sight. It was the same rain that falls in all places and on all worlds. It had fallen like this on Athens of Old Earth, when I was only a boy, on the dark, unhappy house of the uncle who brought me up after my parent's death, on the ruins of the Parthenon as I saw it from my bedroom window. I listened to it now as I went down the landing stairs, drumming on the great ship behind me which had shifted me free between the stars -- from Old Earth to this second smallest of the worlds, this small terraformed planet under the Procyon suns -- and drumming hollowly upon the Credentials case sliding down the conveyor belt beside me. That case now meant nothing to me -- neither my papers or the Credentials of Impartiality I had carried six years and worked so long to earn. Now I thought less of these than of the name of the man I should find dispatching groundcars at the edge of the field. If, that was, he was actually the man my Earth informants had named to me. And if they had not lied... "... Your luggage, sir?" T woke from my thoughts and the rain. I had reached the concrete. The debarking officer smiled at me. He was older than I, though he looked younger. As he smiled some beads of moisture broke and spilled like tears from the brown visor-edge of his cap onto the tally sheet he held. "Send it to the Friendly compound," I said. "I'll take the Credentials case." I took it up from the conveyor belt and turned to walk off. The man standing in a dispatcher's uniform by the first groundcar in line did fit the description. "Name, sir?" he said. "Business on St. Marie?" If he had been described to me, I must have been described to him. But I was prepared to humor him. "Tam Olyn," I said. "Old Earth resident and Interworld News Network representative. I'm here to cover the FriendlyExotic conflict." I opened my case nd gave him my papers. j#Fine, Mr. Olyn." He handed em back to me, damp from the ain. He turned away to open e door of the car beside him and set the automatic pilot. "Follow the highway straight to Joseph's Town. Put it on automatic at the city limits and the car'll take you to the Friendly compound." "All right," I said. "Just a minute." He turned back. He had a young, good-looking face with a little mustache and he looked at me with a bright blankness. "Sir?" "Help me get in the car." "Oh, I'm sorry, sir." He came quickly over to me. "I didn't realize your leg -- " "Damp stiffens it," I said. He adjusted the seat and I got my left leg in behind the steering column. He started to turn away. "Wait a minute," I said again. I was out of patience. "You're Walter Imera, aren't you?" "Yes, sir," he said softly. "Look at me," I said. "You've got some information for me, haven't you?" He turned slowly back to face me. His face was still blank. "No, sir." I waited a long moment, looking at him. "All right," I said then, reaching for the car door. "I guess you know I'll get the information anyway. And they'll believe you told me." His little mustache began to look like it was painted on. "Wait -- " he said. "What for?" "Look," he said, "you've got to understand. Information like that's not part of your news, is it? I've got a family -- " "And I haven't," I said. I felt nothing for him. "But you don't understand. They'd kill me. That's the sort of organization the Blue Front is now, here on St. Marie. What d'you want to know about them for? I didn't understand you meant -- " "All right," I said. I reached for the car door. "Wait -- " He held out a hand to me in the rain. "How do I know you can make them leave me alone if I tell you?" "They may be back in power here some day," I said. "Not even outlawed political groups want to antagonize the Interplanetary News Network." I started to close the door once more. "All right -- " he said quickly. "All right. You go to New San Marcos. The Wallace Street Jewelers there. It's just beyond Joseph's Town, where the Friendly compound is you're going to." He licked his lips. "You'll tell them about me?" "I'll tell them." I looked at him. Above the edge of the blue uniform collar on the right side of his neck I could see an inch or two of fine silver chain, bright against winter-pale skin. The crucifix attached to it would be down under his shirt. "The Friendly soldiers have been here two years now. How do people like them?" He grinned a little. His color was coming back. "Oh, like anybody," he said. "You just have to understand them. They've got their own ways." I felt the ache in my stiff leg where the doctors on New Earth had taken the needle from the spring rifle out of it three years before. "Yes, they have," I said. "Shut the door." He shut it. I drove off. nphere was a St. Christopher's medal on the car's instrument panel. One of the Friendly soldiers would have ripped it off and thrown it away, or refused the car. And so it gave me a particular pleasure to leave it where it was, though it meant no more to me than it would to him. It was, not just because of Dave, my brother-in-law, and the other prisoners they had shot down on New Earth. It was simply because there are some duties that have a small element of pleasure. After the illusions of childhood are gone and there is nothing left but duties, such pleasures are welcome. Fanatics, when all is said and done, are no worse than mad dogs. But mad dogs have to be destroyed; it is a simple common sense. And you return to common sense after a while in life, inevitably. When the wild dreams of justice and progress are all dead and buried, when the painful beatings of feeling inside you are finally stilled, then it becomes best to be still, unliving, and unyielding as -- the blade of a sword sharpened on a stone. The rain through which such a blade is carried to its using does not stain it, any more than the blood in which it is bathed at last. Rain and blood are alike to sharpened iron. I drove for half an hour past wooded hills and plowed meadows. The furrows of the fields were black in the rain. I thought it a kinder black than some other shades I had seen; and at last I reached the outskirts of Joseph's Town. The autopilot of the car threaded me through a small, neat, typical St. Marie City of about a hundred thousand people. We came out on the far side into a cleared area, beyond which lifted the massive, sloping concrete walls of a military corns' pound. A Friendly non-com stopped my car at the gate with his black spring rifle, and opened the car door at my left. "Thee have business here?" His voice was harsh and high in his nose. The cloth tabs of a groupman edged his collar. Above them his forty-year-old face was lean and graven with lines. Both face and hands, the only uncovered parts of him, looked unnaturally white against the black cloth and rifle. I opened the case beside me and handed him my papers. "My Credentials," I said. "I'm here to see your acting Commander of Expeditionary Forces, Commandant Jamethon Black." "Move over, then," he said nasally. "I must drive thee." I moved. He got in and took the stick. We drove through the gate and turned down an approach alley. I could see an interior square at the alley's far end. The close concrete walls on either side of us echoed the sound of our passage as we went. I heard drill commands growing louder as we approached the square. When we rolled out into it, soldiers were drawn up in ranks for their midday service, in the rain. nphe groupman left me and went in the entrance of what seemed to be an office inset in the wall on one side of the square. I looked over the soldiers standing in formation. They stood at present-arms, their position of worship under field conditions; and as I watched, the officer standing facing them, with his back to a wall, led them into the words of their Battle Hymn. Soldier, ask not -- now or ever. Where to war yoor banners go. Anarch's legions, all surround us. Strike! And do not count the blow! I sat trying not to listen. There was no musical accompaniment, no religious furniture or symbols except the thin shape of the cross whitewashed on the gray wall behind the officer. The massed male voices rose and fell slowly in the dark, sad hymn that promised them only pain, and suffering, and sorrow. At last, the final line mourned its harsh prayer for a battle death, and they ordered arms. A groupman dismissed the ranks as the officer walked back past my car without looking at me, and passed in through the entrance where my non-commissioned guide had disappeared. As he passed I saw the officer was young. A moment later the guide came for me. Limping a little on my stiffened leg, I followed him to an inner room with the lights on above a single desk. The young officer rose and nodded as the door closed behind me. He wore the faded tabs of a commandant on his uniform lapels. As I handed my credentials across the desk to him, the glare of the light over the desk came full in my eyes, blinding me. I stepped back and blinked at his blurred face. As it came back into focus I saw it for a moment as if it was older, harsher, twisted and engraved with the lines of years of fanaticism. Then my eyes refocused completely, and I saw him as he actually was. Dark-faced, but thin with the thinness of youth rather than that of self-starvation. He was not the face burned in my memory. His features were regular to the point of being handsome, his eyes tired and shadowed ; and I saw the straight, weary line of his mouth above the still, selfcontrolled stiffness of his body, smaller and slighter than mine. He held the credentials without looking at them. His mouth quirked a little, dryly and wearily, at the corners. "And no doubt, Mr. Olyn," he said, "you've got another pocket filled with authorities from the Exotic Worlds to interview the mercenary soldiers and officers they've hired from the Dorsai and a dozen other worlds to oppose God's Chosen in War?" I smiled. Because it was good to find him as strong as that, to add to my pleasure of breaking him. II T looked across the ten feet or  so of distance that separated us. The Friendly non-com who had killed the prisoners on New Earth had also spoken of God's Chosen. "If you'll look under the papers directed to you," I said, "you'll find them. The News Network and its people are impartial. We don't take sides." "Right," said the dark young face opposing me, "takes sides." "Yes, Commandant," I said. "That's right. Only sometimes it's a matter of debate where Right is. You and your troops here now are invaders on the world of a planetary system your ancestors never colonized. And opposing you are mercenary troops hired by two worlds that not only belong under the Procyon suns but have a commitment to defend the smaller worlds of their system -- of which St. Marie is one. I'm not sure right is on your side." He shook his head slightly and said, "We expect small understanding from those not Chosen." He transferred his gaze from me to the papers in his hand. "Mind if I sit down?" I said. "I've got a bad leg." "By all means." He nodded to a chair beside his desk and, as I sat down, seated himself. I looked across the papers on the desk before him and saw, standing to one side, the solidograph of one of the windowless highpeaked churches the Friendlies build. It was a legitimate token for him to own -- but there just happened to be three people, an older man and woman and a young girl of about fourteen, in the foreground of the image. All three of them bore a family resemblance to Jamethon Black. Glancing up from my credentials he saw me looking at them; and his gaze shifted momentarily to the graph and away again, as if he would protect it. "I'm required, I see," he said, drawing my eyes back to him, "to provide you with cooperation and facilities. We'll find quarters for you here. Do you need a car and driver?" "Thanks," I said. "That commercial car outside will do. And I'll manage my own driving." "As you like." He detached tha papers directed to him, passed the rest back to me and leaned toward a grill in his desktop. "Groupman." "Sir," the grill answered promptly. "Quarters for a single male civilian. Parking assignment for a civilian vehicle, personnel." "Sir." The voice from the grill clicked off. Jamethon Black looked across his desk at me. I got the idea he was waiting for my departure. "Commandant," I said, putting my credentials back in their case, "two years ago your Elders of the United Churches on Harmony and Association found the planetary government of St. Marie in default of certain disputed balances of credit, so they sent an expedition in here to occupy and enforce payment. Of that expedition, how much in the way of men and equipment do you have left?" "That, Mr. Olyn," he said, "is restricted military information." "However -- " and I closed the case  -- "you, with the regular rank of commandant, are acting Commander of Forces for that remnants of your expedition. That position calls for someone about five ranks higher than you. Do you expect such an officer to arrive and take charge?" "I'm afraid you'd have to ask that question of Headquarters on Harmony, Mr. Olyn." "Do you expect reinforcements of personnel and more supplies?" "If I did -- " his voice was level -- "I would have to consider that restricted information, too." "You know that it's been pretty widely mentioned that your General Staff on Harmony has decided that this expedition to St. Marie is a lost cause? But that to avoid loss of face they prefer you here to be cut up, instead of withdrawing you and your men." "I see," he said. "You wouldn't care to comment?" His dark, young, expressionless face did not change. "Not in the case of rumors, Mr. Olyn." "One last question then. Do you plan to retreat westward, or surrender when the spring offensive of the Exotic mercenary forces begins to move against you?" "The Chosen in War never retreat," he said. "Neither do they abandon, or suffer abandonment by, their Brothers in the Lord." He stood up. "I have work I must get back to, Mr. Olyn." I stood up, too. I was taller than he was, older, and heavierboned. It was only his almost unnatural composure that enabled him to maintain his appearance of being my equal or better. , "I'll talk to you later, perhaps, when you've got more time," I said. "Certainly." I heard the office door open behind me. "Groupman," he said, speaking past me, "take care of Mr. Olyn." '"T"he groupman he had turned me over to found me a small concrete cubicle with a single high window, a camp bed and a uniform cabinet. He left me for a moment and returned with a signed pass. "Thanks," I said as I took it. "Where do I find the Headquarters of the Exotic Forces?" "Our latest advices, sir," he said, "is that they're ninety kilometers east of here. New San Marcos." He was my height, but, like most of them, half a dozen years younger than I, with an innocence that contrasted with the strange air of control they all had. "San Marcos." I looked at him. "I suppose you enlisted men know your General Headquarters on Harmony has decided against wasting replacements for you?" "No, sir," he said. I might have commented on the rain for all the reaction he showed. Even these boys were still strong and unbroken. "Is there somewhat else?" "No," I said. "Thanks." He went out. And I went out, to get in my car and head ninety kilometers east through the same sort of country to New San Marcos. I reached it in about threequarters of an hour. But I did not go directly to find the Exotic Field Headquarters. I had other fish to fry. These took me to the Wallace Street Jewelers. There, three shallow steps down from street level and an opaqued door let me in to a long, dim-lighted room filled with glass cases. There was a small elderly man at the back of the store behind the final case and I saw him eyeing my correspondent's cloak and badge as I got closer. "Sir?" he said, as I stopped across the case from him. He raised gray, narrow old eyes in a strangely smooth face to look at me. "I think you know what I represent," I said. "All worlds know the News Services. We're not concerned with local politics." "Sir?" "You'll find out how I learned your address anyway," I kept on smiling at him. "So #I tell you it was from a spaceport autodispatcher named Imera. I promised him protection for telling me. We'd appreciate it if he remains well and whole." "I'm afraid -- " He put his hands on the glass top of the case. They were veined with the years. "You wanted to buy something?" will," I said, "for information." His hands slid off the countertop. "Sir." He sighed a little. "I'm afraid you're in the wrong store." "I'm sure I am," I said. "But your store'll have to do. We'll pretend it's the right store and I'm talking to someone who's a member of the Blue Front." He shook his head slowly and stepped back from the case. "The Blue Front is illegal," he said. "Good-by, sir." "In a moment. I've got a few filings to say first." "Then I'm sorry." He retreated toward some drapes covering a doorway. "I can't listen. No one will come into this room with you, sir, as long as you talk like that." He slipped through the drapes and was gone. I looked around the long, empty room. "Well," I said, a little more loudly, "I guess I'll have to speak to the walls. I'm sure the walls can hear me." I paused. There was no sound. "All right," I said. "I'm a correspondent. All I'm interested in is information. Our assessment of the military situation here on St. Marie -- " and here I told the truth -- "shows the Friendly Expeditionary Forces abandoned by their home headquarters and certain to be overrun by the Exotic Forces as soon as the ground dries enough for heavy equipment to move." There was still no answer, but the back of my neck knew they were listening, and watching me. "As a result," I went on -- and here I lied, though they would have no way of knowing -- "we consider it inevitable that the Friendly Command here will have got in contact with the Blue Front. Assassination of enemy commanders is expressly in violation of the Mercenaries' Code and the Articles of Civilized Warfare -- but civilians could do what soldiers could not." Still there was no sound or movement beyond the drapes. "A news representative," I said, "carries Credentials of Impartiality. You know how highly these are held. I only want to ask a few questions. And the answers will be kept confidential..." For a last time I waited, and there was still no answer. I turned and went up the long room and out. It was not until I was well out on to the street that I let the feeling of triumph within spread out and warm me. They would take the bait. People of their sort always did. I found my car and drove to Exotic Headquarters. 'Tphese were outside the town. There a mercenary commandant named Janol Marat took me in charge. He conducted me to the bubble structure of their HQ building. There was a feel of purpose, there, a sure and cheerful air of activity. They were well armed, well trained. After the Friendlies it jumped at me. I said so to Janol. "We've got a Dorsai Commander and we outnumber the opposition." He grinned at me. He had a deeply tanned, long face that went into deep creases as his lips curved up. "That makes everybody pretty optimistic. Besides, our commander gets promoted if he wins. Back to the Exotics and staff rank -- out of field combat for good. It's good business for us to win." I laughed and he laughed. "Tell me more, though," I said. "I want reasons I can use in the stories I send back to News Network." "Well -- " he answered the snappy salute of a passing groupWith emphasis " harshly nd! proucHy gmajor " E minoi J J' Sol -- -dies' ciste. rurt now or sv -- er -AwHn. gtn'irr. cgrrnlrt. #m'n. Amin. grrtvQ mn. t Where to uiat L mrJ -- #a #I -- w --  --  --  -I  J  #minAmta. grtf Fn'n. frwinSi-rik! And do pot OKitfr the man, a Cassidan, by the look of him -- "I guess you might mention the usual -- the fact our Exotic employers don't permit themselves to use violence and consequently they're always rather generous than otherwise when it comes to paying for men and equipment. And the OutBond -- that's the Exotic Ambassador to St. Marie, you know -- " "I know." "He replaced the former OutBond here three years ago. Anyway, he's something special, even for someone from Mara or Kultis. He's an expert in ontogenic calculations. If that means much to you. It's all over my head." Janol pointed. "Here's the Field Commander's office. He's Kensie Graeme." "Graeme?" I said, frowning. I had spent a day at the Hague looking up Kensie Graeme before I came, but I wanted Janol's reactions to him. "Sounds familiar." We approached the office building. "Graeme..." "You're probably thinking erf another member of the same family." Janol took the bait. "Donal Graeme. A nephew. The one who pulled that wild stunt not long ago, attacking Newton with just a handful of Freiland ships. Kensie is Donal's uncle. Not as spectacular as the young Graeme, but I'll bet you'll like him better than you would the nephew. Kensie's got two men's likeableness." He looked at me, grinning slightly again. "That supposed to mean something special?" I said. "That's right," said Janol. "His own likeableness and his twin brother's, too. Meet Ian Graeme sometime when you're in Blauvain. That's where the Exotic embassy is, east of here. Ian's a dark man." We walked into the office. "I can't get used," I said, "to how so many Dorsai seem related." "Neither can I. Actually, I guess it's because there really aren't so many of them. The Dorsai's a small world, and those that live more than a few years -- " Janol stopped by a commandant sitting at a desk. "Can we see the Old Man, Hari? This is a News Network man." "Why, I guess so." The other looked at his desk signal board. "The OutBonds with him, but he's just leaving now. Go on in." Janol led me between the desks. A door at the back of the room opened before we reached it and a calm-faced man of middle age wearing a blue robe and close-cropped white hair came out. He looked strange but not ridiculous -- particularly after you met his odd, hazelcolored eyes. He was an Exotic. T knew of Padma, as I knew the Exotics. I had seen them on their own home worlds of Mara and Kultis. A people committed to non-violence, mystics but very practical mystics, masters of what were known as the "strange sciences" -- a dozen wizardic step-children of early psychology, sociology and the humanistic fields of research. "Sir," said Janol to Padma, "this is -- " "Tam Olyn. I know," said Padma softly. He smiled up at me, and those eyes of his seemed to catch light for a moment and blind me. "I was sorry to learn about your brother-in-law, Tam." I went quite cool all over. I had been ready to walk on, but now I stood stock still and looked at him. "My brother-in-law?" I said. "The young man who died near Castlemain, on New Earth." "Oh, yes," I said, between stiff lips. "Pm surprised that you'd know." "I know because of you, Tam." Once more the hazel eyes of Fadma seemed to catch light. "We have a science called ontogenies, by which we calculate the probabilities of human actions in present and future situations. You've been an important factor in those calculations for some time." He smiled. "That's why I was expecting to meet you here, and now. We've calculated you into our present situation here on St. Marie, Tam." "Have you?" I said. "Have you? That's interesting." "I thought it would be," said Padma softly. "To you, especially. Someone like a newsman, like yourself, would find it interesting." "It is," I said. "It sounds like you know more than I do about what I'm going to be doing here." "We've got calculations," said Padma in his soft voice, "to that effect. Come see me in Blauvain, Tam; and I'll show you." "I'll do that," I said. "You'll be very welcome." Padma inclined his head. His blue robe whispered on the floor as he turned, and went out of the room. "This way," said Janol, touching my elbow. I started as if I had just wakened from a deep sleep. "The commander's in here." I followed him automatically into a further office. The individual I had come to see stood up as we came through the door. He was a great, lean man in field uniform, with a heavy-boned, but open, smiling face under black, slightly curly hair. A sort of golden warmth of personality -- a strange thing in a Dorsai -- seemed to flow out from him as he rose to meet me and his longfingered, powerful hand swallowed mine in a handshake. "Come on in," he said. "Let me fix you up with a drink. Janol," he added to my mercenary commandant from New Earth, "no need for you to stick around. Go on to chow. And tell the rest of them in the outer office to knock off." Janol saluted and went. I sat down as Graeme turned to a small bar cabinet behind his desk. And for the first time in three years, under the magic of the unusual fighting man opposite me, a little peace came into my soul. With someone like this on my side, I could not lose. Ill # # credentials?" asked Graeme, as soon as we were settled with drinks of Dorsai whisky -- which is a fine whisky -- in our hands. I passed my papers over. He glanced through them, picking out the letters from Sayona, the Bond of Kultis, to "Commander -- St. Marie Field Forces." He looked these over and put them aside. He handed me back the credentials folder. "You stopped at Joseph's Town first?" he said. I nodded. I saw him looking at my face, and his own sobered. "You don't like the Friendlies," he said. His words took my breath away. I had come prepared to fence for an opening to tell him. It was too sudden. I looked away. I did not dare answer right away. I could not. There was either too much or too little to say if I let it come out without thinking. Then I got a grip on myself. "If I do anything at all with the rest of my life," I said, slowly, "it'll be to do everything in my power to remove the Friendlies and all they stand for from the community of civilized human beings." I looked back up at him. He was sitting with one massive elbow on his desktop, watching me. "That's a pretty harsh point of view, isn't it?" "No harsher than theirs." "Do you think so?" he said seriously. "I wouldn't say so." "I thought," I said, "you were the one who was fighting them." "Why, yes." He smiled a little. "But we're soldiers on both sides." "I don't think they think that way." He shook his head a little. "What makes you say that?" he said. "I've seen them," I answered. "I got caught up front in the lines on Castlemain on New Earth, three years ago." I tapped my stiff knee. "I got shot and I couldn't navigate. The Cassidans around me began to retreat -- they were mercenaries, and the troops opposing them were Friendlies hired out as mercenaries." I stopped and took a drink of the whisky. When I took the glass away, Graeme had not moved. He sat as if waiting. "There was young Cassidan, a buck soldier," I said. "I was doing a series on the campaign from an individual point of view. I'd picked him for my individual. It was a natural choice. You see -- " I drank again, and emptied the glass -- "my younger sister went out on contract as an accountant to Cassida two years before that, and she'd married him. He was my brother-in-law." raeme took the glass from my hand and silently replenished it. "He wasn't actually a military man," I said. "He was studying shift mechanics and he had about three years to go. But he stood low on one of the competitive examinations at a time when Cassida owed a contractual balance of troops to New Earth." I took a deep breath. "Well, to make a long story short, he ended up on New Earth in this same campaign I was covering. Because of the series I was writing, he was assigned to me. We both thought it was a good deal for him, that he'd be safer that way." I drank some more of the whisky. "But," I said, "you know, there's always a better story a little deeper in the combat zone. We got caught up front one day when the New Earth troops were retreating. I picked up a needle through the kneecap. The Friendly armor was moving up and things were getting hot. The soldiers around us took off toward the rear in a hurry, but Dave tried to carry me, because he thought the Friendly armor would fry me before they had time to notice I was a non-com batant. Well," I took another deep breath, "the Friendly ground troops caught us. They took us to a sort of clearing where they had a lot of prisoners and kept us there for a while. Then a groupman -- one of their fanatic types, a tall, starved-looking soldier about my age -- came up with orders they were to reform for a fresh attack." I stopped and took another drink. But I could not taste it. "That meant they couldn't spare men to guard the prisoners. They'd have to turn them loose back of the Friendly lines. The Groupman said that wouldn't work. They'd have to make sure the prisoners couldn't endanger them." Graeme was still watching me. "I didn't understand. I didn't even catch on when the other Friendlies -- none of them were non-coms like the Groupman -- objected." I put my glass on the desk beside me and stared at the wall of the office, seeing it all over again, as plainly as if I looked through a window at it. "I remember how the Groupman pulled himself up straight. I saw his eyes. As if he'd been insulted by the others, objecting. " 'Are they Chosen ot God '? " he shouted at them. 'Are they of the Chosen F " I looked across at Kensie Graeme and saw him still motionless, still watching me, his own glass small in one big hand. "You understand?" I said to him. "as if because the prisoners weren't Friendlies, they weren't quite human. As if they were some lower order it was all right to kill." I shook, suddenly. "And he did it! I sat there against a tree, safe because of my News Correspondent's uniform and watched him shoot them down. All of them. I sat there and looked at Dave, and he looked at me, sitting there, as the Groupman shot him!" I quit all at once. I hadn't meant to have it all come out like that. It was just that I'd been able to tell no one who would understand how helpless I had been. But something about Graeme had given me the idea he would understand. "Yes," he said after a moment, and took and filled my glass again. "That sort of thing's very bad. Was the Groupman found and tried under the Mercenaries Code?" "After it was too late, yes." H e nodded and looked past me at the wall. "They aren't all like that, of course." "There's enough to give them a reputation for it." "Unfortunately, yes. Well" -- he smiled slightly at me -- "we'll try and keep that sort of thing out of this campaign." "Tell me something," I said, putting my glass down. "Does that sort of thing -- as you put it -- ever happen to the Friendlies, themselves?" Something took place then in the atmosphere of the room. There was a little pause before he answered. I felt my heart beat slowly, three times, as I waited for him to speak. He said at last, "No, it doesn't." "Why not?" I said. The feeling in the room became stronger. And I realized I had gone too fast. I had been sitting talking to him as a man and forgetting what else he was. Now I began to forget that he was a man and become conscious of him as a Dorsai -- an individual as human as I was, but trained all his life, and bred down the generations to a difference. He did not move or change the tone of his voice, or any such thing; but somehow he seemed to move off some distance from me, up into a higher, colder, stonier land into which I could venture only at my peril. I remembered what was said about his people from that small, cold stony-mountained world ; that if the Dorsai chose to withdraw their fighting men from the services of all the other worlds, and challenge those other worlds, not the combined might of the rest of civilization could stand against them. I had never really believed that before. I had never even really thought much about it. But sitting there just then, because of what was happening in the room, suddenly it became real to me. I could feel the knowledge, cold as a wind blowing on me off a glacier, that it was true; and then he answered my question. "Because," said Kensie Graeme. "anything like that is specifically prohibited by Article Two of the Mercenaries' Code." Then he broke out abruptly into a smile and what I had just felt in the room withdrew. I breathed again. "Well," he said, putting his glass down empty on the desk, "how about joining us in the Officers' Mess for something to eat?" T had dinner with them and the meal was very pleasant. They wanted to put me up for the night -- but I could feel myself being pulled back to that cold, joyless compound near Joseph's Town, where all that waited for me was a sort of cold and bitter satisfaction at being among my enemies. I went back. It was about eleven p.m. when I drove through the gate of the compound and parked, just as a figure came out of the entrance to Jamethon's headquarters. The square was dim-lighted with only a few spotlights about the walls, their light lost in the rain-wet pavement. For a moment I did not recognize the figure -- and then I saw it was Jamethon. He would have passed by me at some little distance, but I got out of my car and went to meet him. He stopped when I stepped in front of him. "Mr. Olyn," he said evenly. In the darkness I could not make out the expression of his face. "I've got a question to ask," I said, smiling in the darkness. "It's late for questions." "This won't take long." I strained to catch the look on his face, but it was all in shadow. "I've been visiting the Exotic camp. Their commander's a Dorsai. I suppose you know that?" "Yes." I could barely see the movement of his lips. "We got to talking. A question came up and I thought I'd ask you, Commandant. Do you ever order your men to kill prisoners?" An odd, short silence came between us. Then he answered. ers of war," he said without emotion, "is forbidden by Article Two of the Mercenaries' Code." "But you aren't Mercenaries here, are you? You're native troops in service to your own True Church and Elders." "Mr. Olyn," he said, while I still strained without success to make out the expression of his shadowed face -- and it seemed that the words came slowly, though the tone of the voice that spoke them remained as calm as ever, "My Lord has set me to be His servant and a leader among men of war. In neither of those tasks will I fail Him." And with that he turned, his face still shadowed and hidden from me, and passed around me and went on.  lone, I went back inside to my quarters, undressed and lay down on the hard and narrow bed they had given me. The rain outside had stopped at last. Through my open, unglazed window I could see a few stars showing. I lay there getting ready to sleep and making mental notes on what I would need to do tomorrow. The meeting with Padma the OutBond had jolted me sharply. I took his so-called calculations of human actions with reservation -- but I had been shaken to learn of them. I would have to find out more about hojv much his science of ontogenies knew and could predict. If necessary, from Padma himself. But I would start first with ordinary reference sources. No one, I thought, would ordinarily entertain the fantastic thought that one man like myself could destroy a culture involving the populations of two worlds. No one, except perhaps a Padma. What I knew, he with his calculations might have discovered. And that was that the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association were facing a decision that would mean life or death to their way of living. A very small thing could tip the scales they weighed on. For there was a new wind blowing between the stars. Four hundred years before we had all been men of Earth -- Old Earth, the mother planet which was my native soil. One people. Then, with the movement out to new worlds, the human race had "splintered", to use an Exotic term. Every small social fragment and psychological type had drawn apart by itself, and joined others like it and progressed toward specialized types. Until we had half a dozen fragments of human types -- the warrior on the Dorsai, the philosopher on the Exotic worlds, the hard scientist on Newton, Cassida and Venus, and so forth... Isolation had bred specific types. Then a growing intercommunication between the younger worlds, now established, and an ever-increasing rate of technological advance had forced specialization. The trade between the worlds was the trade of skilled minds. Generals from the Dorsai were worth their exchange rate in psychiatrists from the Exotics. Communications men like myself from Old Earth bought spaceship designers from Cassida. And so it had been for the last hundred years. But now the worlds were drifting together. Economics was fusing the race into one whole, again. And the struggle on each world was to gain the advantages of that fusion while holding on to as much as possible of their own ways. Compromise was necessary -- and the harsh, stiff-necked Friendly religion forbade compromise and had made many enemies. Already public opinion moved against the Friendlies on other worlds. Discredit them, smear them, publicly here in this campaign and they would not be able to hire out their soldiers. They would lose the balance of trade they needed to hire the skilled specialists trained by the special facilities of other worlds, and which they needed to keep their own two poor-in-natural resources worlds alive. They would die. As young Dave had died. Slowly. In the dark... In the darkness now, as I thought of it, it rose up before me once again. It had been only noon when we were taken prisoner, but by the time the Group man came with his orders for our guards to move up, the sun was almost down. After they left, after it was all over and I was left alone, I crawled to the bodies in the clearing. And I found Dave among them; and he was not quite gone. He was wounded in the body and I could not stop the bleeding. It would not have helped if I had, they told me afterwards. But then it seemed that it would have. So I tried. But finally I gave up and by that time it was quite dark. I only held him and did not know he was dead until he began to grow cold. And then was when I had begun to change into what my uncle had always tried to make me. I felt myself die inside. Dave and my sister were to have been my family, the only family I had ever had hopes of keeping. Instead, I could only sit there in the darkness, holding him and hearing the blood from his red-soaked clothing, falling drop by drop, slowly on the dead variform oak leaves beneath us.  lay there now in the Friendly compound, not able to sleep and remembering. And after a while I heard the soldiers marching, forming in the square for midnight service. I lay on my back, listening to them. Their marching feet stopped at last. The single window of my room was over my bed -- high in the wall against which the left side of my cot was set. It was unglazed and the night air with its sounds came freely through it along with the dim light from the square which painted a pale rectangle on the opposite wall of my room. I lay watching that rectangle and listening to the service outside; and I heard the duty officer lead them in a prayer for worthiness. After that they sang their battle hymn again, and I lay hearing it, this time, all the way through. Soldier, ask not -- now, or ever. Where to war your banners go. Anarch's legions all surround us. Strike -- and do not count the bow. Glory, honor -- praise and profit. Are but toys of tinsel worth. Render up your work, unasking. Leave the human clay to earth. Blood and sorrow -- pain unending. Are the portion of us all. Grasp the naked sword, opposing. Gladly in the battle fall. So shall we, anointed soldiers. Stand at last before the Throne. Baptized in our wounds, red-flowing. Sealed unto our Lord -- alone! After that they dispersed to cots no different from mine. I lay there listening to the silence in the square and the measured dripping of a rainspout outside by my window, its slow drops falling after the rain, one by one, uncounted in the darkness. IV A fter the day I landed, there was no more rain. Day by day the fields dried. Soon they would be firm underneath the weight of heavy surface-war equipment, and everyone knew that then the Exotic spring offensive would get under way. Meanwhile both Exotic and Friendly troops were in training. During the next few weeks, I was busy about my newswork. Mostly feature and small stories on the soldiers and the native people. I had dispatches to send and I sent them faithfully. A correspondent is only as good as his contacts; I made contacts everywhere but among the Friendly troops. These remained aloof, though I talked to many of them. They refused to show fear or doubt. I had heard these Friendly soldiers were generally undertrained because the suicidal tactics of their officers kept their ranks always filled with green replacements. But the ones here were the remnants of an Expeditionary Force six times their present numbers. They were all veterans, though most of them were in their teens. Only here and there, among the non-coms, and more often among the commissioned officers, I saw the prototype of the non-com who had ordered the prisoners shot on New Earth. Here, the men of this type looked like rabid, gray wolves mixed among polite, wellschooled young dogs just out of puppyhood. It was a temptation to think that they alone were what I had set out to destroy. To fight that temptation I told myself that Alexander the Great had led expeditions against the hill tribes and ruled in Pella, capital of Macedonia, and ordered men put to death when he was sixteen. But still the Friendly soldiers looked young to me. I could not help contrasting them with the adult, experienced mercenaries in Kensie Graeme's forces. For the Exotics, in obedience to their principles, would hire no drafted troops or soldiers who were not in uniform of their own free will. Meanwhile I had heard no word from the Blue Front. But by the time two weeks had gone, I had my own connections in New San Marcos, and at the beginning of the third week one of these brought me word that the jewelers shop in Wallace Street there had closed its door -- had pulled its blinds and emptied the long room of stock and fixtures, and moved or gone out of business. That was all I needed to know. For the next few days, I stayed in the vicinity of Jamethon Black himself, and by the end of the week my watching him paid off. At ten o'clock that Friday night I was up on a catwalk just above my quarters and under the sentry-walk of the walls, watching as three civilians with Blue Front written all over them drove into the square, got out and went into Jamethon's office. They stayed a little over an hour. When they left, I went back down to bed. That night I slept soundly. nr'he next morning I got up early, and there was mail for me. A message had come by spaceliner from the director of News Network back on Earth, personally congratulating me on my dispatches. Once, three years before, this would have meant a great deal to me. Now, I only worried that they would decide I had made the situation here newsworthy enough to require extra people being sent out to help me. I could not risk having other news personnel here now to see what I was doing. I got in my car and headed east along the highway to New San Marcos and the Exotic Headquarters. The Friendly troops were already out in the field; eighteen kilometers east of Joseph's Town, I was stopped by a squad of five young soldiers with no non-com over them. They recognized me. "In God's name, Mr. Olyn," said the first one to reach my car, bending down to speak to me through the open window at my left shoulder. "You cannot go through." "Mind if I ask why?" I said. He turned and pointed out and down into a little valley between two wooded hills at our left. "Tactical survey in progress," I looked. The little valley or meadow was perhaps a hundred yards wide between the wooded slopes, and it wound away from me and curved to disappear to my right. At the edge of the wooded slopes where they met open meadow, there were lilac bushs with blossoms several days old. The meadow itself was green and fair with the young chartreuse grass of early summer and the white and purple of the lilacs, and the variform oaks behind the lilacs were fuzzy in outline, with small, new leaves. In the middle of all this, in the center of the meadow, were black-clad figures moving about with computing devices, measuring and figuring the possibilities of death from every angle. In the very center of the meadow for some reason they had set up marking stakes -- a single stake, then a stake in front of that with two stakes on either side of it, and one more stake in line before these. Farther on was another single stake, down, as if fallen on the grass and discarded. I looked back up into the lean young face of the soldier. "Getting ready to defeat th Exotics?" I said. He took it as if it had been a straightforward question, with no irony in my voice at all. "Yes sir," he said seriously. I looked at him and at the taut skin and clear eyes of the rest. "Ever think you might lose?" "No, Mr. Olyn." He shook his head solemnly. "No man loses who goes to battle for the Lord." He saw that I needed to be convinced, and he went about it earnestly. "He hath set His hand upon His soldiers. And all that is possible to them is victory --  or sometimes death. And what is death?" He looked to his fellow soldiers and they all nodded. "What is death?" they echoed. I looked at them. They stood there asking me and each other what was death as if they were talking about some hard but necessary job. I had an answer for them, but I did not say it. Death was a Groupman, one of their own kind, giving orders to soldiers just like themselves to assassinate prisoners. That was death. "Call an officer," I said. "My pass lets me through here." "I regret, sir," said the one who had been talking to me. "We cannot leave our posts to summon an officer. One will come soon." I had a hunch what "soon" meant, and I was right. It was high noon before a Force Leader came by to order them to chow and let me through. A s I pulled into Kensie Graeme's Headquarters, the sun was low, patterning the ground with the long shadows of trees. Yet it was as if the camp was just waking up. I did not need experience to see the Exotics were beginning to move at last against Jamethon. I found Janol Marat, the New Earth commandant. "I've got to see Field Commander Graeme," I said. He shook his head, for all that we now knew each other well. "Not now, Tarn. I'm sorry." "Janol," I said, "this isn't for an interview. It's a matter of life and death. I mean that. I've got to see Kensie." He stared at me. I stared back. "Wait here," he said. We were standing just inside the headquarters office. He went out and was gone for perhaps five minutes. I stood, listening to the wall clock ticking away. Then he came back. "This way," he said. He led me outside and back between the bubble roundness of the plastic buildings to a small structure half-hidden in some trees. When we stepped through its front entrance, I realized it was Kensie's personal quarters. We passed through a small sitting room into a combination bedroom and bath. Kensie had just stepped out of the shower and was getting into battle clothes. He looked at me curiously, then turned his gaze back on Janol. "All right, Commandant," he said, "you can get back to your duties, now." "Sir," said Janol, without looking at me. He saluted and left. "All right, Tam," Kensie said, pulling on a pair of uniform slacks. "What is it?" "I know you're ready to move out," I said. He looked at me a little humorously as he locked the waistband of his slacks. He had not yet put on his shirt, and in that relatively small room he loomed like a giant, like some irresistible natural force. His body was tanned like dark wood and the muscles lay in flat bands across his chest and shoulders. His belly was hollow and the cords in his arms came and went as he moved them. Once more I felt the particular, special element of the Dorsai in him. It was not just his physical size and strength. It was not even the fact that he was someone trained from birth to war, someone bred for battle. No, it was something living but untouchable -- the same quality of difference to be found in the pure Exotic like Padma the OutBond, or in some Newtonian or Cassidan researchist. Something so much above and beyond the common form of man that it was like a serenity, a sense of conviction where his own type of thing was concerned that was so complete it made him beyond all weaknesses, untouchable, unconquerable. I saw the slight, dark shadow of Jamethon Black in my mind's eye, standing opposed to such a man as this; and the thought of any victory for Jamethon was unthinkable, an impossibility. But there was always danger. "All right, I'll tell you what I came about," I said to Kensie. "I've just found out Black's been in touch with the Blue Front, a native terrorist political group with its headquarters in Blauvain. Three of them visited him last night. I saw them." Kensie picked up his shirt and slid a long arm into one sleeve. "I know," he said. I stared at him. "Don't you understand?" I said. "They're assassins. It's their stock in trade. And the one man they and Jamethon Black both could use out of the way is you." He put his other arm in a sleeve. "I know that," he said. "They want the present government here on St. Marie out of the way and themselves in power -- which isn't possible with Exotic money hiring us to keep the peace here." "They haven't had Jamethon Black's help." "Have they got it now?" he asked, sealing the shirt closure between thumb and forefinger. "The Friendlies are desperate," I said. "Even if reinforcements arrived tomorrow, Jamethon knows what his chances are with you ready to move. Assassins may be outlawed by the Conventions of War and the Mercenaries' Code, but you and I know the Friendlies." Kensie looked at me oddly and picked up his jacket. "Do we?" he said. I met his eyes. "Don't we?" "Tam." He put on the jacket and closed it. "I know the men I have to fight. It's my business to know. But what makes you think you know them?" "They're my business too," I said. "Maybe you'd forgotten. I'm a newsman. People are my business, first, last and always." "But you've got no use for the Friendlies." "Should I?" I said. "I've been on all the worlds. I've seen the Cetan entrepreneur -- and he wants his margin, but he's a human being. I've seen the Newtonian and the Cassidan with their heads in the clouds, but if you yanked on their sleeves hard enough, you could pull them back to reality. I've seen Exotics like Padma at their mental parlor tricks, and the Freilander up to his ears in his own red tape. I've seen them from my own world of Old Earth, and Coby, and Venus and even from the Dorsai, like you. And I tell you they've all got one thing in common. Underneath it all they're human. Every one of them's human -- they've just specialized in some one, valuable way." "And the Friendlies haven't?" "Fascinaticism," I said. "Is that valuable? It's just the opposite. What's good -- what's even permissible about blind, deaf, dumb, unthinking faith that doesn't let a man reason for himself?" "How do you know they don't reason?" Kensie asked. He was standing facing me now. "Maybe some of them do," I said. "Maybe the young ones, before the poison's had time to work in. What good does that do, as long as the culture exists?" A sudden silence came into theroom. "What are you talking about?" said Kensie. "I mean you want the assassins," I said. "You don't want the Friendly troops. Prove that Jamethon Black has broken the Conventions of War by arranging with them to kill you; and you can win St. Marie for the Exotics without firing a shot." "And how would I do that?" "Use me," I said. "I've got a pipeline to the political group the assassins represent. Let me go to them as your representative and outbid Jamethon. You can offer them recognition by the present government, now. Padma and the present St. Marie government heads would have to back you up if you could clean the planet of Friendlies that easily." He looked at me with no expression at all. "And what would I be supposed to buy with this?" he said. "Sworn testimony they'd been hired to assassinate you. As many of them as needed could testify." "No Court of Interplanetary Inquiry would believe people like that," Kensie said. "Ah," I said, and I could not help smiling. "But they'd believe me as a News Network Representative when I backed up every word that was said." There was a new silence. His face had no expression at all. "I see," he said. He walked past me into the salon. I followed him. He went to his phone, put his finger on a stud and spoke into an imageless, gray screen. "Janol," he said. He turned away from the screen, crossed the room to an arms cabinet and began putting cm. his battle harness. He moved deliberately and neither looked nor spoke in my direction. After a few long minutes, the building entrance slid aside and Janol stepped in. "Sir?" said the Freilander officer. "Mr. Olyn stays here until further orders." "Yes sir," said Janol. Graeme went out. I stood numb, staring at the entrance through which he had left. I could not believe that he would violate the Conventions so far himself as not only to disregard me, but to put me essentially under arrest to keep me from doing anything further about the situation. I turned to Janol. He was looking at me with a sort of wry sympathy on his long, brown face. "Is the OutBond here in camp?" I asked him. "No." He came up to me. "He's back in the Exotic Embassy in Blauvain. Be a good fella now and sit down, why don't you? We might as well kill the next few hours pleasantly." We were standing face to face; I hit him in the stomach. I had done a little boxing as an undergraduate on the college level. I mention this not to make myself out a sort of muscular hero, but to explain why I had sense enough not to try for his jaw. Graeme could probably have found the knockout point there without even thinking, but I was no Dorsai. The area below a man's breastbone is relatively large, soft, handy and generally just fine for amateurs. And I did know something about how to punch. For all that, Janol was not knocked out. He went over on the floor and lay there doubled up with his eyes still open. But he was not ready to get up right away. I turned and went quickly out of the building. The camp was busy. Nobody stopped me. I got back into my car, and five minutes later I was free on the darkening road for Blauvain. V TT'rom New San Marcos to Blauvain and Padma's Embassy was fourteen hundred kilometers. I should have made it in six hours, but a bridge was washed out and I took fourteen. It was after eight the following morning when I burst into the half-park, half-building that was the embassy. "Padma -- " I said. "Is he still -- " "Yes, Mr. Olyn," said the girl receptionist. "He's expecting you." She smiled above her purple robe. I did not mind. I was too busy being glad Padma had not already taken off for the fringe areas of the conflict. She took me down and around a corner and turned me over to a young male Exotic, who introduced himself as one of Padma's secretaries. He took me a short distance and introduced me to another secretary, a middle-aged man this time, who led me through several rooms and then directed me down a long corridor and around a corner, beyond which he said was the entrance to the office area where Padma worked at the moment. Then he left me. I followed his direction. But when I stepped through that entrance it was not into a room, but into a further short corridor. And I checked, stopping myself dead. For what I suddenly thought I saw coming at me was Kensie Graeme -- Kensie with murder on his mind. But the man who looked like Kensie nerely glanced at me and dismissed me, continuing to come on. Then I knew. Of course, he was not Kensie. He was Kensie's twin brother, Ian, commander of Garrison Forces for the Exotics, here in Blauvain. He strode on toward me; and I began once more to walk toward him, but the shock stayed with me until we had passed one another. I do not think anyone could have come on him like that, in my position and not been hit the same way. From Janol, at different times, I had gathered how Ian was the converse of Kensie. Not in a military sense -- they were both magnificent specimens of Dorsai officers -- but in the matter of their individual natures. Kensie had had a profound effect on me from the first moment, with his cheerful nature and the warmth of being that at times obscured the very fact that he was a Dorsai. When the pressure of military affairs was not directly on him he seemed all sunshine; you could warm yourself in his presence as you might in the sun. Ian, his physical duplicate, striding toward me like some two-eyed Odin, was all shadow. Here at last was the Dorsai legend come to life. Here was the grim man with the iron heart and the dark and solitary soul. In the powerful fortress of his body, what was essentially Ian dwelt as isolated as a hermit on a mountain. He was the fierce and lonely Highlandman of his distant ancestry, come to life again. Not law, not ethics, but the trust of the given word, clanloyalty and the duty of the blood feud held sway in Ian. He was a man who would cross hell to pay a debt for good or ill; and in that moment when I saw him coming toward me and recognized him at last, I suddenly thanked whatever gods were left, that he had no debt with me. r T"hen we had passed each other, and he was gone around a corner. Rumor had it, I remembered then, that the blackness around him never lightened except in Kensie's presence. That he was truly his twin brother's other half. And that if he should ever lost the light that Kensie's bright presence shed on him, he would be doomed to his own lightlessness forever. It was a statement I was to remember at a later time, as I was to remember seeing him come toward me in that moment. But now I forgot him as I went forward through another entrance into what looked like a small conservatory and saw the gentle face and short-cropped white hair of Padma, the OutBond, wearing a pale yellow robe. "Come in, Mr. Olyn," he said, getting up. "And come along with   #t me. He turned and walked out through an archway of purple clematis blooms. I followed him, and found a small courtyard, all but filled with the elliptical shape of a sedan aircar. Padma was already climbing into one of the seats facing the controls. He held the door for me. "Where are we going?" I asked as I got in. He touched the autopilot panel; the ship rose in the air. He left it to its own navigation, and pivoted his chair about to face me. "To Commander Graeme's headquarters in the field," he answered. His eyes were a light hazel color, but they seemed to catch and swim with the sunlight striking through the transparent top of the aircar, as we reached altitude and began to move horizontally. I could not read them, or the expression on his face. "I see," I said. "Of course, I know a call from Graeme's HQ could get to you much faster than I could by groundcar from the same spot. But I hope you aren't thinking of having him kidnap me or something like that. I have Credentials of Impartiality protecting me as a Newsman, as well as authorizations from both the Friendly and the Exotic worlds. And I don't intend to be held responsible for any conclusions drawn by Graeme after the conversation the two of us had earlier this morning -- alone." Padma sat still in his aircar seat, facing me. His hands were folded in his lap together, pale against the yellow robe, but with strong sinews showing under the skin of their backs. "You're coming with me now by my decision, not Kensie Graeme's." "I want to know why," I said tensely. "Because," he said slowly, "you are very dangerous." And he sat still, looking at me with unwavering eyes. I waited for him to go on, but he did not. "Dangerous?" I said. "Dangerous to who?" "To the future of all of us." I stared at him, then I laughed. I was angry. "Cut it out!" I said. He shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. I was baffled by those eyes. Innocent and open as a child's, but I could not see through them into the man himself. "All right," I said. "Tell me, why am I dangerous?" "Because you want to destroy a race of people. And you know how." nphere was a short silence. The aircar fled on through the skies without a sound. "Now that's an odd notion," I said slowly and calmly. "I wonder where you got it?" "From our ontogenic calculations," said Padma, as calmly as I had spoken. "And it's not a notion, Tam. As you know yourself." "Oh, yes," I said. "Ontogenies. I was going to look that up." "You did look it up, didn't you, Tam?" "Did I?" I said. "I guess I did, at that. It didn't seem very clear to me, though, as I remember. Something about evolution." "Ontogenies," said Padma, "is the study of the effect of evolution upon the interacting forces of human society." "Am I an interacting force?" "At the moment and for the past several years, yes," said Padma. "And possibly for some years into the future. But possibly not." "That sounds almost like a threat." "In a sense it is." Padma's eyes caught the light as I watched them. "You're capable of destroying yourself as well as others." "I'd hate to do that." "Then," said Padma, "you'd better listen to me." "Why, of course," I said. "That's my business, listening. Tell me all about ontogenies -- and myself." He made an adjustment in the controls, then swung his seat back to face mine once more. "The human race," said Padma, "broke up in an evolutionary explosion at the moment in history when interstellar colonization became practical." He sat watching me. I kept my face attentive. "This happened for reasons stemming from racial instinct which we haven't completely charted yet, but which was essentially self-protective in nature." I reached into my jacket pocket. "Perhaps I'd better take a few notes," I said. "If you want to," said Padma, unperturbed. "Out of that explosion came cultures individually devoted to single facets of the human personality. The fighting, combative facet became the Dorsai. The facet which surrendered the individual wholly to some faith or other became the Friendly. The philosophical facet created the Exotic culture to which I belong. We call these Splinter Cultures." "Oh, yes," I said. "I know about Splinter Cultures." "You know about them, Tam, but you don't know them." "I don't?" "No," said Padma, "because you, like all our ancestors, are from Earth. You're old, fullspectrum man. The Splinter peoples are evolutionarily advanced over you." I felt a little twist of bitter anger knot suddenly inside me. "Oh? I'm afraid I don't see that." "Because you don't want to," said Padma. "If you did, you'd have to admit that they were different from you, and had to be judged by different standards." "Different? How?" "Different in a sense that all Splinter people, including myself, understand instinctively, but full-spectrum man has to extrapolate to imagine." Padma shifted a little in his seat. "You'll get some idea, Tam, if you imagine a member of a Splinter culture to be a man like yourself, only with a monomania that shoves him wholly toward being one type of person. But with this difference: Instead of all parts of his mental and physical self outside the limits of that monomania being ignored and atrophied as, they would be with you -- " I interrupted, "Why specifically with me?" "With any full-spectrum man, then," said Padma calmly. "These parts, instead of being atrophied, are altered to agree with and support the monomania, so that we don't have a sick man -- but a healthy, different one." "Healthy?" I said, seeing the Friendly non-com on New Earth again in my mind's eye. "Healthy as a culture. Not as occasional crippled individuals of that culture. But as a culture." "Sorry," I said. "I don't believe it." "But you do, Tam," said Padma, softly. "Unconsciously you do. Because you're planning to take advantage of the weakness such a culture must have to destroy it." "And what weakness is that?" "The obvious weakness that's the converse of any strength," said Padma. "The Splinter Cultures are not viable." I must have blinked. I was honestly bewildered. "Not viable? You mean they can't live on their own?" "Of course not," said Padma. "Faced with an expansion into space, the human race reacted to the challenge of a different environment by trying to adapt to it. It adapted by trying out separately all the elements of its personality, to see which could survive best. Now that all elements -- the Splinter Cultures -- have survived and adapted, it's time for them to breed back into each other again, to produce a more hardy, universeoriented human." The aircar began to descend. We were nearing our destination. "What's that got to do with me?" I said, at last. "If you frustrate one of the Splinter Cultures, it can't adapt on its own as full-spectrum man would do. It will die. And when the race breeds back to a whole, that valuable element will be lost to the race." "Maybe it'll be no loss," I said, softly in my turn. "A vital loss," said Padma. "And I can prove it. You, a fullspectrum man, have in you an element from every Splinter Culture. If you admit this you can identify even with those you want to destroy. I have evidence to show you. Will you look at it?" The ship touched ground; the door beside me opened. I got out with Padma and found Kensie waiting. I looked from Padma to Kensie, who stood with us and a head taller than I -- two heads taller than OutBond. Kensie looked back down at me with no particular expression. His eyes were not the eyes of his twin brother -- but just then, for some reason, I could not meet them. "I'm a newsman," I said. "Of course my mind is open."  Padma turned and began'walking toward the headquart I ers building. Kensie fell in with us and I think Janol and some of the others came along behind, though I didn't look back to make sure. We went to the inner office where I first met Graeme -- just Kensie, Padma and myself. There was a file folder on Graeme's desk. He picked it up, extracted a photocopy of something and handed it to me as I came up to him. I took it. There was no doubting its authenticity. Tt was a memo from Eldest Bright, ranking elder of the joint government of Harmony and Association, to the Friendly War Chief at the Defense X Center, on Harmony. It was dated two months previously. It was on the single-molecule sheet, where the legend cannot be tampered with, or removed once it is on. Be Informed, in God's Name --  -- That since it does seem the Lord's Will that our Brothers on St. Marie make no success, it is ordered that henceforth no more replacements or personnel or supplies be sent them. For if our Captain does intend us the victory, surely we shall conquer without further expenditure. And if it be His wiH that we conquer not, then surely it would be an impiety to throw away the substance of God's Churches in an attempt to frustrate that WiH. Be it further ordered that our Brothers on St. Marie be spared the knowledge that no further assistance is forthcoming, that they may bear witness to their faith in battle as ever, and God's Churches be undismayed. Heed this Command, in the Name of the Lord: By order of he who is called...  Bright Eldest Among The Chosen I looked up from the memo. Both Graeme and Padma were watching me. "How'd you get hold of this?" I said. "No, of course you won't tell me." The palms of my hands were suddenly sweating so that the slick material of the sheet in my fingers was slippery. I held it tightly, and talked fast to keep their eyes on my face. "But what about it? We already knew this, everybody knew Bright had abandoned them. This just proves it. Why even bother showing it to me?" "I thought," said Padma, "it might move you just a little. Perhaps enough to make you take a different view of things." I said, "I didn't say that wasn't possible. I tell you a Newsman keeps an open mind at all times. Of course," I picked my words carefully, "if I could study it -- " "I'd hoped you'd take it with you," said Padma. "Hoped?" "If you dig into it and really understand what Bright means there, you might understand all the Friendlies differently. You might change your mind about them." "I don't think so," I said. "But -- " "Let me ask you to do that much," said Padma. "Take the memo with you." I stood for a moment, with Padma facing me and Kensie looming behind him, then shrugged and put the memo in my pocket. "All right," I said. I'll take it back to my quarters and think about it. -- I've got a groundcar here somewhere, haven't I?" And I looked at Kensie. "Ten kilometers back," said Kensie. "You wouldn't get through anyway. We're moving up for the assault and the Friendlies are maneuvering to meet us." "Take my aircar," said Padma. "The Embassy flags on it will help." "All right," I said. We went out together toward the aircar. I passed Janol in the outer office and he met my eyes coldly. I did not blame him. We walked to the aircar and I got in. "You can send the aircar back whenever you're through with it," said Padma, as I stepped in through the entrance section of its top. "It's an Embassy loan to you, T am. I won't worry about it." "No," I said. "You needn't worry." I closed the section and touched the controls. It was a dream of an aircar. It went up into the air as lightly as thought, and in a second I was two thousand feet up and well away from the spot. I made myself calm down, though, before I reached into my pocket and took the memo out. I looked at it. My hand still trembled a little as I held it. Here it was in my grasp at last. What I had been after from the start. And Padma himself had insisted I carry it away with me. It was the lever, the Archimedes pry-bar which would move not one world but fourteen. And push the Friendly Peoples over the edge to extinction. VI r T"hey were waiting for me. They converged on the aircar as I landed it in the interior square of the Friendlies compound, all four of them with black rifles at the ready. They were apparently the only ones left. Black seemed to have turned out every other man of his remnant of a battle unit. And these were all men I recognized, case-hardened veterans. One was the Groupman who had been in the office that first night when I had come back from the Exotic camp and stepped in to speak to Black, asking him if he ever ordered his men to kill prisoners. Another was a forty-year old Force Leader, the lowest commissioned rank, but acting Major -- just as Black, a Commandant, was acting as Expeditionary Field Commander -- a position equivalent to Kensie Graeme's. The other two soldiers were non-commissioned, but similar. I knew them all. Ultrafanatics. And they knew me. We understood each other. "I have to see the commandant," I said, as I got out, before they could begin to question me. "On what business?" said the Force-Leader. "This aircar hath no business here. Nor thyself." I said, "I must see Commandant Black immediately. I wouldn't be here in a car flying the flags of the Exotic Embassy if its wasn't necessary." They could not take the chance that my reason for seeing Black wasn't important, and I knew it. They argued a little, but I kept insisting I had to see the Commandant. Finally, the ForceLeader took me across into the same outer office where I had always waited to see Black. I faced Jamethon Black alone in the office. He was putting on his battle harness, as I had seen Graeme putting on his earlier. On Graeme, the harness and the weapons it carried had looked like toys. On Jamethon's slight frame they looked almost too heavy to bear. "Mr. Olyn," he said. I walked across the room toward him, drawing the memo from my pocket as I came. He turned a little to face me, his fingers sealing the locks on his harness, jingling slightly with his weapons and his harness as he turned. "You're taking the field against the Exotics," I said. He nodded. I had never been this close to him before. From across the room I would have believed he was holding his usual stony expression, but standing just a few feet from him now I saw the tired wraith of a smile touch the corners of his straight mouth in that dark, young face, for a second. "That is my duty, Mr. Olyn." "Some duty," I said. "When your superiors back on Harmony have already written you off their books." "I've already told you," he said, calmly. "The Chosen are not betrayed in the Lord, one by another." "You're sure of that?" I said. Once more I saw that little ghost of a weary smile. "It's a subject, Mr. Olyn, on which I am more expert than you." T looked into his eyes. They were exhausted but calm. I glanced aside at the desk where the picture of the church, the older man and woman and the young girl stood still. "Your family?" I asked. "Yes," he said. "It seems to me you'd think of them in a time like this." "I think of them quite often." "But you're going to go out and get yourself killed just the same." "Just the same," he said. "Sure!" I said. "You would!" I had come in calm and in control of myself. But now it was as if a cork had been pulled on all that had been inside me since Dave's death. I began to shake. "Because that's the kind of hypocrites you are -- all of you Friendlies. You're so lying, so rotten clear through with your own lies, if someone took them away from you there'd be nothing left. Would there? So you'd rather die now than admit committing suicide like this isn't the most glorious thing in the universe. You'd rather die than admit you're just as full of doubts as anyone else, just as afraid." I stepped right up to him. He did not move. "Who're you trying to fool?" I said. "Who? I see through you just like the people on all the other worlds do! I know you know what a mumbo-jumbo your United Churches are. I know you know the way of life you sing of through your nose so much isn't what you claim it is. I know your Eldest Bright and his gang of narrow-minded old men are just a gang of world-hungry tyrants that don't give a damn for religion or anything as long as they get what they want. I know you know it -- and I'm going to make you admit it!" And I shoved the memo under his nose. "Read it!" He took it from me. I stepped back from him, shaking badly as I watched him. He studied it for a long minute, while I held my breath. His face did not change. Then he handed it back to me. "Can I give you a ride to meet Graeme?" I said. "We can get across the lines in the OutBond's aircar. You can get the surrender over with before any shooting breaks out." He shook his head. He was looking at me in a particularly level way, with an expression I could not understand. "What do you mean -- no?" "You'd better stay here," he said. "Even with ambassadorial flags, that aircar may be shot at over the lines." And he turned as if he would walk away from me, out the door. "Where're you going?" I shouted at him. I got in front of him and pushed the memo before his eyes again. "That's real. You can't close your eyes to that!" Ti e stopped and looked at me.  Then he reached out and took my wrist and put my arm and hand with the memo aside. His fingers were thin, but much stronger than I thought, so that I let the arm go down in front of him when I hadn't intended to do so. "I know it's real. I'll have to warn you not to interfere with me any more, Mr. Olyn. I've got to go now." He stepped past me and walked toward the door. "You're a liar!" I shouted after him. He kept on going. I had to stop him. I grabbed the solidograph from his desk and smashed it on the floor. He turned like a cat and looked at the broken pieces at my feet. "That's what you're doing!" I shouted, pointing at them. He came back without a word and squatted down and carefully gathered up the pieces, one by one. He put them into his pocket and got back to his feet, and raised his face at last to mine. And when I saw his eyes I stopped breathing. "If my duty," he said, in a low, controlled voice, "were not in this minute to -- " His voice stopped. I saw his eyes staring into me; and slowly I saw them change and the murder that was in them soften into something like wonder. "Thou -- " he said, softly -- "Thou hast no faith?" I had opened my mouth to speak. But what he said stopped me. I stood as if punched in the stomach, without the breath for words. He stared at me. "What made you think," he said, "that that memo would change my mind?" "You read it!" I said. "Bright wrote you were a losing proposition here, so you weren't to get any more help. And no one was to tell you for fear you might surrender if you knew." "Is that how you read it?" he said. "Like that?" "How else? How else can you read it?" "As it is written." He stood straight facing me now and his eyes never moved from mine. "You have read it without faith, leaving out the Name and the will of the Lord. Eldest Bright wrote not that we were to be abandoned here -- but that since our cause was sore tried, we be put in the hands of our Captain and our God. And further he wrote that we should not be told of this, that none here should be tempted to a vain and special seeking of the martyr's crown. Look, Mr. Olyn. It's down there in black and white." "But that's not what he meant! That's not what he meant!" He shook his head. "Mr. Olyn, I can't leave you in such delusion." I stared at him, for it was sympathy I saw in his face. For me. "It's your own blindness that deludes you," he said. "You see nothing, and so believe no man can see. Our Lord is not just a name, but all things. That's why we have no ornament in our churches, scorning any painted screen between us and our God. Listen to me, Mr. Olyn. Those churches themselves are but tabernacles of the earth. Our Elders and Leaders, though they are Chosen and Anointed, are still but mortal men. To none of these things or people do we hearken in our faith, but to the very voice of God within us." TTe paused. Somehow I could not speak. "Suppose it was even as you think," he went on, even more gently. "Suppose that all you say was a fact; and that our Elders were but greedy tyrants, ourselves abandoned here by their selfish will and set to fulfill a false and prideful purpose. No." Jamethon's voice rose. "Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me -- " his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me -- "that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me -- and that opposed were all the legions of the universe -- still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is r.o power can stay me!" He stopped speaking and turned about. I watched him walk across the room and out the door. Still I stood there, as if I had been fastened in place -- until I heard from outside, in the square of the compound, the sound of a military aircar starting up. I broke out of my stasis then and ran out of the building. As I burst into the square, the military aircar was just taking off. I could see Black and his four hard-shell subordinates in it. And I yelled up into the air after them. "That's all right for you, but what about your men?" They could not hear me. I knew that. Uncontrollable tears were running down my face, but I screamed up into the air after him anyway -- prove your point! Can't you listen? You're murdering helpless men!" Unheeding, the military aircar dwindled rapidly to the west and south, where the converging battle forces waited. And the heavy concrete walls and buildings about the empty compound threw back my words with a hollow, wild and mocking echo. T should have gone to the spaceport. Instead, I got back into the aircar and flew back across the lines looking for Graeme's Battle Command Center. I was as little concerned about my own life just then as a Friendly. I think I was shot at once or twice, in spite of the ambassadorial flags on the aircar, but I don't remember exactly. Eventually I found the Command Center and descended. Enlisted men surrounded m as I stepped out of the aircar. I showed my credentials and went up to the battle screen, which had been set up in open air at the edge of shadow from some tall variform oaks. Graeme, Padma and his whole staff were grouped around it, watching the movements of their own and the Friendly troops reported on it. A continual low-voiced discussion of the movements went on, and a steady stream of information came from the communications center fifteen feet off. The sun slanted steeply through the trees. It was almost noon and the day was bright and warm. No one looked at me for a long time; and then Janol, turning away from the screen, caught sight of me standing off at one side by the flat-topped shape of a tactics computer. His face went cold. He went on about what he was doing. But I must have been looking pretty bad, because after a while he came by with a canteen cup and set it down on the computer top. "Drink that," he said shortly, and went off. I picked it up, found it was Dorsai whisky and swallowed it down. I could not taste it; but evidently it did me some good, because in a few minutes the world began to sort itself out around me and I began to think again. I went up to Janol. "Thanks." "All right." He did not look at me, but went on with the papers on the field desk before him. "Janol," X said. "Tell me what's going on." "See for yourself," he said, still bent over his papers. "I can't see for myself. You know that. Look -- I'm sorry about what I did. But this is my job, too. Can't you tell me what's going on now and fight with me afterwards?" "You know I can't brawl with civilians." Then his face relaxed. "All right," he said, straightening up. "Come on." TT e led me over to the battle screen, where Padma and Kensie were standing, and pointed to a sort of small triangle of darkness between two snakelike lines of light. Other spots and shapes of light ringed it about. "These -- " he pointed to the two snakelike lines -- "are the Macintok and Sarah Rivers, where they come together -- just about ten miles this side of Joseph's Town. It's fairly high ground, hills thick with cover, fairly open between them. Good territory for setting up a stubborn defense, bad area to get trapped in." "Why?" He pointed to the two river lines. "Get backed up in here and you find yourself hung up on high bluffs over the river. There is no easy way across, no cover for retreating troops. It's nearly all open farmland the rest of the way, from the other sides of the rivers to Joseph's Town." His finger moved back out from the point where the river lines came together, past the small area of darkness and into the surrounding shapes and rings of light. "On the other hand, the approach to this territory from our position is through open country, too -- narrow strips of farmland interspersed with a lot of swamp and marsh. It's a tight situation for either commander, if we commit to a battle here. The first one who has to backpedal will find himself in trouble in a hurry." "Are you going to commit?" "It depends. Black sent his light armor forward. Now he's pulling back into the high ground, between the rivers. We're far superior in strength and equipment. There's no reason for us not to go in after him, as long as he's trapped himself -- " Janol broke off. "No reason?" I asked. "Not from a tactical standpoint." Janol frowned at the screen. "We couldn't get into trouble unless we suddenly had to retreat. And we wouldn't do that unless he suddenly acquired some great tactical advantage that'd make it impossible for us to stay there." I looked at his profile. "Such as losing Graeme?" I said. He transferred his frown to me. "There's no danger of that." TT'here was a certain change in the movement and the voices of the people around us. We both turned and looked. Everybody was clustering around a screen. We moved in with the crowd and, looking between the soldiers of two of the officers of Graeme's staff, I saw on the screen the image of a small grassy meadow enclosed by wooded hills. In the center of the meadow, the Friendly flag floated its thin black cross on white background beside a long table on the grass. There were folding chairs on each side of the table, but only one person -- a Friendly officer, standing on the table's far side as if waiting. There were the lilac bushes along the edge of the wooded hills where they came down in variform oak and ash to the meadow's edge; and the lavender blossoms were beginning to brown and darken for their season was almost at an end. So much difference had twentyfour hours made. Off to the left of the screen I could see the gray concrete of a highway. "I know that place -- " I started to say, turning to Janol. "Quiet!" he said, holding up a finger. Around us, everybody else had fallen still. Up near the front of our group a single voice was talking. " -- it's a truce table." "Have they called?" said the voice of Kensie. "No, sir." "Well, let's go see." There was a stir up front. The group began to break up and I saw Kensie and Padma walking off toward the area where the aircars were parked. I shoved myself through the thinning crowd like a process server, running after them. I heard Janol shout behind me, but I paid no attention. Then I was up to Kensie and Padma, who turned. "I want to go with you," I said. "It's all right, Janol," Kensie said, looking past me. "You can leave him with us." "Yes, sir." I could hear Janol turn and leave. "So you want to come with me, Mr. Olyn?" Kensie said. "I know that spot," I told him. "I drove by it just earlier today. The Friendlies were taking tactical measurements all over that meadow and the hills on both sides. They weren't setting up truce talks." T#" ensie looked at me for a long moment, as if he was taking some tactical measurements himself. "Come on, then," he said. He turned to Padma. "You'll be staying here?" "It's a combat zone. I'd better not." Padma turned his unwrinkled face to me. "Good luck, Mr. Olyn," he said, and walked away. I watched his yellow-robed figure glide over the turf for a second, then turned to see Graeme halfway to the nearest military aircar. I hurried after him. It was a battle car, not luxurious like the OutBond's, and Kensie did not cruise at two thousand feet, but snaked it between the trees just a few feet above ground. The seats were cramped. His big frame overfilled his, crowding me where I sat. I felt the butt-plate of his spring pistol grinding into my side with every movement he made on the controls. We came at last to the edge of the wooded and hilly triangle occupied by the Friendlies and mounted a slope under the cover of the new-leaved variform oaks. They were massive enough to have killed off most ground cover. Between their pillar-like trunks the ground was shaded, and padded with the brown shapes of dead leaves. Near the crest of the hill, we came upon a unit of Exotic troops resting and waiting the orders to advance. Kensie got out of the car and returned the ForceLeader's salute. "You've seen these tables the Friendlies set up?" Kensie asked. "Yes, Commander. That officer they've got is still standing there. If you go just up over the crest of the slope here, you can see him -- and the furniture." "Good," said Kensie. "Keep your men here, Force. The Newsman and I'll go take a look." He led the way up among the oak trees. At the top of the hill we looked down through about fifty yards more of trees and out into the meadow. It was two hundred yards across, the table right in the middle, the unmoving black figure of the Friendly officer standing on its far side. "What do you think of it, Mr. Olyn?" asked Kensie, looking down through the trees. "Why hasn't somebody shot him?" I asked. He glanced sideways at me. "There's plenty of time to shoot him," he said, "before he can get back to cover on the far side. If we have to shoot him at all. That wasn't what I wanted to know. You've seen the Friendly commander recently. Did he give you the impression he was ready to surrender?" "No!" I said. "I see," said Kensie. "You don't really think he means to surrender? What makes you think something like that?" "Truce tables are generally set up for the discussion of terms between opposing forces," he said. "But he hasn't asked you to meet him?" "No," Kensie watched the figure of the Friendly officer, motionless in the sunlight. "It might be against his principles to call for a discussion, but not to discuss -- if we just happened to find ourselves across a table from one another." He turned and signaled with his hand. The Force-Leader, who had been waiting down the slope behind us, came up. "Sir?" he said to Kensie. "Any Friendly strength in those trees across the way?" "Four men, that's all, sir, Our scopes pick out their body heats clear and sharp. They aren't attempting to hide." "I see." He paused, "Force." "Sir?" "Be good enough to go down there in the meadow and ask that Friendly officer what this is all about." "Yes, sir." We stood and watched as the Force-Leader went stiff-legging it down the steep slope between the trees. He crossed the grass -- it seemed very slowly -- and came up to the Friendly officer. They stood facing each other. They were talking but there was no way to hear their voices. The flag with its thin black cross whipped in the little breeze that was blowing there. Then the Force-Leader turned and climbed back toward us. TTe stopped in front of Ken- sie, and saluted. "Commander," he said, "the Commander of the Chosen Troops of God will meet with you in the field to discuss a surrender." He stopped to draw a fresh breath. "If you'll show yourself at the edge of the opposite woods at the same time; and you can approach the table together." "Thank you, Force-Leader," said Kensie. He looked past his officer at the field and the table. "I think I'll go down." "He doesn't mean it," I said. "Force-Leader," said Kensie. "Form your men ready, just under the crown of the slope on the back side, here. If he surrenders, I'm going to insist he come back with me to this side , immediately." "Yes, sir." "All this business without a regular call for parley may be because he wants to surrender first and break the news of it to his troops afterwards. So get your men ready. If Black intends to present his officers with an accomplished fact, we don't want to let him down." "He's not going to surrender," I said. "Mr. Olyn," said Kensie, turning to me. "I suggest you go back behind the crest of the hill. The Force-Leader will see you're taken care of." "No," I said. "I'm going down. If it's a truce parley to discuss surrender terms, there's no combat situation involved and I've got a perfect right to be there. If it isn't, what're you doing going down yourself?" Kensie looked at me strangely for a moment. "All right," he said. "Come with me." Kensie and I turned and went down the sharply pitched slope between the trees. Our bootsoles slipped until our heels dug in, with every step downward. Coming through the lilacs I smelled the faint, sweet scent -- almost gone now -- of the decaying blossoms. Across the meadow, directly in line with the table, four figures in black came forward as we came forward. One of them was Jamethon Black. Kensie and Jamethon saluted each other. "Commandant Black," said Kensie. "Yes, Commander Graeme. I am indebted to you for meeting me here," said Jamethon. "My duty and a pleasure, Commandant." "I wished to discuss the terms of a surrender." "I can offer you," said Kensie, "the customary terms extended to troops in your position under the Mercenaries' Code." "You misunderstand me, sir," said Jamethon. "It was your surrender I came here to discuss." he flag snapped. Suddenly I saw the men in black measuring the field here, as I had seen them the day before. They had been right where we were now. "I'm afraid the misunderstanding is mutual, Commandant," said Kensie. "I am in a superior tactical position and your defeat is normally certain. I have no need to surrender." "You will not surrender?" "No," said Kensie strongly. All at once I saw the five stakes, in the position the Friendly non-coms, officers and Jamethon were now, and the stake up in front of them fallen down. "Look out!" I shouted at Kensie -- but I was far too late. Things had already begun to happen. The Force-Leader had jerked back in front of Jamethon and all five of them were drawing their sidearms. I heard the flag snap again, and the sound of its rolling seemed to go on for a long time. For the first time then I saw a man of the Dorsai in action. So swift was Kensie's reaction that it was eerily as if he had read Jamethon's mind in the instant before the Friendlies began to reach of their weapons. As their hands touched their sidearms, he was already in movement forward over the table and his spring pistol was in his hand. He seemed to fly directly into the Force-Leader and the two of them went down together, but Kensie kept travelling. He rolled on off the Force-Leader who now lay still in the grass. He came to his knees, fired, and dived forward, rolling again. The Groupman on Jamethon's right went down. Jamethon and the remaining two were turned nearly full about now, trying to keep Kensie before them. The two that were left shoved themselves in front of Jamethon, their weapons not yet aimed. Kensie stopped moving as if he had run into a stone wall, came to his feet in a crouch, and fired twice more. The two Friendlies fell apart, one to each side. Jamethon was facing Kensie now, and Jamethon's pistol was in his hand and aimed. Jamethon fired, and a light blue streak leaped through the air, but Kensie had dropped again. Lying on his side on the grass, propped on one elbow, he pressed the firing button on his spring pistol twice. Jamethon's sidearm sagged in his hand. He was backed up against the table now, and he put out his free hand to steady himself against the table top. He made another effort to lift his sidearm but he could not. It dropped from his hand. He bore more of his weight on the table, half-turning around, and his face came about to look in my direction. His face was as controlled as it had ever been, but there was something different about his eyes as he looked into mine and recognized me -- something oddly like the look a ritn gives a competitor whom he had just beaten, and who was no real threat to begin with. A little smile touched the corners of his thin lips. Like a smile of inner triumph. "Mr. Olyn..." he whispered. And then the life went out of his face and he fell beside the table. Nearby explosions shook the ground under my feet. From the crest of the hill behind us the Force-Leader whom Kensie had left there was firing smoke bombs between us and the Friendly side of the meadow. A gray wall of smoke was rising between us and the far hillside, to screen us from the enemy. It towered up the blue sky like some impassable barrier, and under the looming height of it, only Kensie and I were standing. On Jamethon's dead face there was a faint smile. T i a daze I watched the Friendly troops surrender that same day. It was the one situation in which their officers felt justified in doing so. Not even their Elders expected subordinates to fight a situation set up by a dead Field Commander for tactical reasons unexplained to his officers. And the live troops remaining were worth more than the indemnity charges for them that the Exotics would make. I did not wait for the settlements. I had nothing to wait for. One moment the situation on this battlefield had been poised like some great, irresistable wave above all our heads, cresting, curling over and about to break downward with an impact that would reverberate through all the worlds of Man. Now, suddenly, it was no longer above us. There was nothing but a farflooding silence, already draining away into the records of the past. There was nothing for me. Nothing. If Jamethon had succeeded in sult he had won a practically bloodless surrender of the Exotic troops -- I might have done something damaging with the incident of the truce table. But he had only tried; and died, failing Who could work up emotion against the Friendlies for that? I took ship back to Earth like a man walking in a dream, asking myself why. Back on Earth, I told my editors I was not in good shape physically; and they took one look at me and believed me. I took an indefinite leave from my job and sat around the News Network Center Library, at the Hague, searching blindly through piles of writings and reference material on the Friendlies, the Dorsai and the Exotic worlds. For what? I did not know. I also watched the news dispatches from St. Marie concerning the settlement, and drank too much while I watched. I had the numb feeling of a soldier sentenced to death for failure on duty. Then in the news dispatches came the information that Jamethon's body would be returned to Harmony for burial; and I realized suddenly it was this I had been waiting for; The unnatural honoring by fanatics of the fanatic who with four henchmen had tried to assassinate the lone enemy commander under a truce flag. Things could still be written. I shaved, showered, pulled myself together after a fashion and went to see my superiors about being sent to Harmony to cover the burial of Jamethon, as a wrap-up. The congratulations of the Director of News Network, that had reached me on St. Marie earlier, stood me in good stead. It was still fresh in the minds of the men just over me. I was sent. TT'ive days later I was on Harmony, in a little town called Remembered-of-the-Lord. The buildings in the town were of concrete and bubble plastic, though evidently they had been up for many years. The thin, stony soil about the town had been tilled as the fields on St. Marie had been tilled when I got to that other world -- for Harmony now was just entering the spring of its northern hemisphere. And it was raining as I drove from the spaceport of the town, as it had on St. Marie that first day. But the Friendly fields I saw did not show the rich darkness of the fields of St. Marie. Only a thin, hard blackness in the wet that was like the color of Friendly uniforms. I got to the church just as people were beginning to arrive. Under the dark, draining skies, the interior of the church was almost too dim to let me see my way about -- for the Friendlies permit themselves no windows and no artificial lighting in their houses of worship. Gray light, cold wind and rain entered the doorless portal at the back of the church. Through the single rectangular opening in the roof watery sunlight filtered over Jamethon's body, on a platform set up on trestles. A transparent cover had been set up to protect the body from the rain, which was channeled off the open space and ran down a drain in the back wall. But the elder conducting the Death Service and anyone coming up to view the body was expected to stand exposed to sky and weather. I got in line with the people moving slowly down the central aisle and past the body. To right and left of me the barriers at which the congregation would stand during the service were lost in gloom. The rafters of the steeply pitched roof were hidden in darkness. There was no music, but the low sound of voices individually praying to either side of me in the ranks of barriers and in the line blended into a sort of rhythmic undertone of sadness. Like Jamethon, the people were all very dark here, being of North African extraction. Dark into dark, they blended, and were lost about me in the gloom. I came up and passed at last by Jamethon. He looked as I remembered him. Death had had no power to change him. He lay on his back, his hands at his sides, and his lips were as firm and straight as ever. Only his eyes were closed. I was limping noticably because of the dampness, and as I turned away from the body, I felt my elbow touched. I turned back sharply. I was not wearing my correspondent's uniform. I was in civilian clothes, so as to be inconspicuous. I looked down into the face of the young girl in Jamethon's solidograph. In the gray rainy light her unlined face was like something from the stained glass window of an ancient cathedral back on Old Earth. "You've been wounded," she said in a soft voice to me. "You must be one of the mercenaries who knew him on Newton, before he was ordered to Harmony. His parents, who are mine as well, would find solace in the Lord by meeting you." The wind blew rain down through the overhead opening all about me, and its icy feel sent a chill suddenly shooting through me, freezing me to my very bones. "No!" I said. "I'm not. I didn't know him." And I turned sharply away from her and pushed my way into the crowd, back up the aisle. After about fifteen feet, I realized what I was doing and slowed down. The girl was already lost in the darkness of the bodies behind me. I made my way more slowly toward the back of the church, where there was a little place to stand before the first ranks of the barriers began. I stood watching the people come in. They came and came, walking in in their black clothing with their heads down and talking or praying in low voices. I stood where I was, a little back from the entrance, half numbed and dull-minded with the chill about me and the exhaustion I had brought with me from Earth. The voices droned about me. I almost dozed, standing there. I could not remember why I had come. Then a girl's voice emerged from the jumble, bringing me back to full consciousness again. " -- he did deny it, but I am sure he is one of those mercenaries who was with Jamethon on Newton. He limps and can only be a soldier who hath been wounded." Tt was the voice of Jamethon's sister, speaking with more of the Friendly cant on her tongue than she had used speaking to me, a stranger. I woke fully and saw her standing by the entrance only a few feet from me, half-facing two elder people who I recognized as the older couple in Jamethon's solidograph. A bolt of pure, freezing horror shot through me. "No!" I nearly shouted at them. "I don't know him. I never knew him -- I don't understand what you're talking about!" And I turned and bolted out through the entrance of the church into the concealing rain. I all but ran for about thirty or forty feet. Then I heard no footsteps behind me; I stopped. I was alone in the open. The day was even darker now and the rain suddenly came down harder. It obscured everything around me with a drumming, shimmering curtain. I could not even see the groundcars in the parking lot toward which I was facing; and for sure they could not see me from the church. I lifted my face up to the downpour and let it beat upon my cheeks and my closed eyelids. "So," said a voice from behind me. "You did not know him?" The words seemed to cut me down the middle, and I felt as a cornered wolf must feel. Like a wolf I turned. "Yes, I knew him!" I said. Facing me was Padma, in a blue robe the rain did not seem to dampen. His empty hands that had never held a weapon in their life were clasped together before him. But the wolf part of me knew that as far as I was concerned, he was armed and a hunter. "You?" I said. "What are you doing here?" "It was calculated you would be here," said Padma, softly. "So I am here, too. But why are you here, Tam? Among those people in there, there's sure to be at least a few fanatics who've heard the camp rumors of your responsibility in the matter of Jamethon's death and the Friendlies' surrender." "Rumors!" I said. "Who started them?" "You did," Padma said. "By your actions on St. Marie." He gazed at me. "Didn't you know you were risking your life, coming here today?" I opened my mouth to deny it. Then I realized I had known. "What if someone should call out to them," said Padma, "that Tam Olyn, the St. Marie campaign Newsman, is here incognito?" I looked at him with my wolffeeling, grimly. "Can you square it with your Exotic principles if you do?" "We are misunderstood," answered Padma calmly. "We hire soldiers to fight for us not because of some moral commandment, but because our emotional perspective is lost if we become involved." There was no fear left in me. Only a hard, empty feeling. "Then call them," I said. Padma's strange, hazel eyes watched me through the rain. "If that was all that was needed," he said. "I could have sent word to them. I wouldn't have needed to come myself." "Why did you come?" My voice tore at my throat. "What do you care about me, or the Exotics?" "We care for every individual," said Padma. "But we care more for the race. And you remain dangerous to it. You're an idealist, Tam, warped to destructive purpose. There is a law of conservation of energy in the pattern of cause-and-effect as in other sciences. Your destructiveness was frustrated on St. Marie. Now it may turn inward to destroy you, or outward against the whole race of man." I laughed, and heard the harshness of my laughter. "What're you going to do about it?" I said. "Show you how the knife you hold cuts the hand that holds it as well as what you turn it against. I have news for you, Tam. Kensie Graeme is dead." I i  Yend?" The rain seemed  to roar around me suddenly and the parking lot shifted unsubstantially under my feet. "He was assassinated by three men of the Blue Front in Blauvain five days ago." "Assassinated..." I whispered. "Why?" "Because the war was over," said Padma. "Because Jamethori's death and the surrender of the Friendly troops without the preliminary of a war that would tear up the countryside left the civilian population favorably disposed toward our troops. Because the Blue Front found themselves farther from power than ever, as a result of this favorable feeling. They hoped by troops into retaliation against the civilian population, so that the St. Marie government would have to order them home to our Exotics, and stand unprotected to face a Blue Front revolt." I stared at him. "All things are interrelated," said Padma. "Kensie was slated for a final promotion to a desk command back on Mara or Kultis. He and his brother Ian would have been out of the wars for the rest of their professional lives. Because of Jamethon's death, that allowed the surrender of his troops without fighting, a situation was set up which led the Blue Front to assassinate Kensie. If you and Jamethon had not come together on St. Marie, and Jamethon had won, Kensie would still be alive. So our calculations show." "Jamethon and I?" The breath went dry in my throat without warning, and the rain came down harder. "You were the factor," said Padma, "that helped Jamethon to his solution." "I helped him!" I said. " did?" "He saw through you," said Padma. "He saw through the revenge-bitter, twisted surface you thought was yourself, to the idealistic core that was so deep in the bone of you that even your uncle hadn't been able to eradicate it." The rain thundered between us. But Padma's every word came clearly through it to me. "I don't believe you!" I shouted. "I don't believe he did anything like that!" "I told you," said Padma, "you didn't fully appreciate the evolutionary advances of our Splinter Cultures. Jamethon's faith was not the kind that can be shaken by outer things. If you had been in fact like your uncle, he would not even have listened to you. He would have dismissed you as a soulless man. As it was, he thought of you instead as a man possessed. A man speaking with what he would have called Satan's voice." "I don't believe it!" I yelled. "You do believe it," said Padma. "You've got no choice except to believe it. Because only because of it could Jamethon find his solution." "Solution!" "He was a man ready to die for his faith. But as a commander he found it hard his men should go out to die for no other reasonable cause." Padma watched me, and the rain thinned for a moment. "But you offered him what he recognized as the devil's choice -- his life in this world, if he would surrender his faith and his men, to avoid the conflict that would end in his death and theirs." "What crazy thinking was that?" I said. Inside the church, the praying had stopped, and a single strong, deep voice was beginning the burial service. "Not crazy," said Padma. "The moment he realized this, his answer became simple. All he had to do was begin by denying whatever the Satan offered. He must start with the absolute necessity of his own death." "And that was a solution?" I tried to laugh but my throat hurt. "It was the only solution," said Padma. "Once he decided that, he saw immediately that the one situation in which his men would permit themselves to surrender was if he was dead and they were in an untenable position for reasons only he had known." I felt the words go through me with a soundless shock. "But he didn't mean to die!" I said. "He left it to his God," said Padma. "He arranged it so only a miracle could save him." "What're you talking about?" I stared at him. "He set up a table with a flag of truce. He took four men -- " "There was no flag. The men were overage, martyrdom-seekers." "He took four!" I shouted. "Four and one made five. The five of them against one man. I stood there by that table and saw. Five against -- " "Tam." Ophe single word stopped me. Suddenly I began to be afraid. I did not want to hear what he was about to say. I was afraid I knew what he was going to tell me. That I had known it for some time. And I did not want to hear it, I did not want to hear him say it. The rain grew even stronger, driving upon us both and mercilessly on the concrete, but I heard every word relentlessly through all its sound and noise. Padma's voice began to roar in my ears like the rain, and a feeling came over me like the helpless floating sensation that comes in high fever. "Did you think that Jamethon for a minute fooled himself? He was a product of a Splinter Culture. He recognized another in Kensie. Did you think that for a minute he thought that barring a miracle he and four overage fanatics could kill an armed, alert and ready man of the Dorsai -- a man like Kensie Graeme? Before they were gunned down and killed themselves?" Themselves... themselves... themselves... I rode off a long way on that word from the dark day and the rain. Like the rain and the wind behind the clouds it lifted me and carried me away at last tx that high, hard and stony land I had glimpsed when I had asked Kensie Graeme that question about his ever allowing Friendly prisoners to be killed. It was this land I had always avoided, but to it I was come at last. And I remembered... From the beginning, I had known inside myself that the fanatic who had killed Dave and the others was not the image of all Friendlies. Jamethon was no casual killer. I had tried to make him into one in order to hide my own shame, my own selfdestruction. For three years I had lied to myself. It had not been with me as I claimed, at Dave's death. I had sat there under that tree watching Dave and the others die, watching the black-clad machine rifle. And, in that moment, the thought in my mind had not been the one with which I justified three years of hunting for an opportunity to ruin someone like Jamethon and destroy the Friendly peoples. It had not been me, thinking, what is he doing there, what is he doing to those helpless, innocent men! I had thought nothing so noble. Only one thought had filled all my mind and body in that instant. It had been simply -- after he's done, is he going to turn that gun on me? T came back to the day and to the rain. The rain was slackening and Padma was holding me upright. As with Jamethon, I was amazed at the strength of his hands. "Let me go," I mumbled. "Where would you go, Tam?" said Padma. "Any place," I muttered. "I'll get out of it. I'll go hole up somewhere and get out of it. I'll give up." "An action," said Padma, letting me go, "goes on reverberating for ever. Cause never ceases its effects. You can't let go now, Tam. You can only change sides." "Sides!" I said. The rain was dwindling fast. "What sides?" I stared at him drunkenly. "You uncle's side which is one," said Padma. "And the opposing side, which is yours -- which is ours as well." The rain was falling only lightly now, and the day was lightening. A little pale sunlight worked through thin clouds and illuminated the space between us. "In addition there are two strong influences besides we Exotics concerned with the attempt of man to evolve. We can't calculate or understand them yet, beyond the fact they act almost as single powerful individual wills. One seems to try to aid, one to frustrate, the evolutionary process; and their influences can be traced back at least as far as man's first venture into space from Earth." I shook my head. "I don't understand it," I muttered. "It's not my business." "It is. It has been all your life." Padma eyes caught light for a moment. "A force intruded on the pattern on St. Marie, in the shape of a unit warped by personal loss and oriented toward violence. That was you, Tam." I tried to shake my head again, but I knew he was right. "You are blocked in your effort," said Padma. "But the law of conservation of energies could not be denied. When you were frustrated by Jamethon, your force, transmuted, left the pattern in the unit of another individual, warped by personal loss and oriented toward violent effect on the fabric." I stared at him and wet my lips. "What other individual?" "Ian Graeme." I stared at him. "Ian found his brother's three assassins hiding in a hotel room in Blauvain. He killed them with his hands -- and in doing that he calmed the mercenaries and frustrated the Blue Front. But then he resigned and went home to the Dorsai. He's charged now with the sense of loss and bitterness you were charged with when you came to St. Marie." Padma paused and added softly. "Now he has great causal potential for some purpose we can't yet calculate." "But -- " I looked at Padma. "You mean I'm free!" Padma shook his head. "You're only charged with a different force instead," he said. "You received the full impact and charge of Jamethon's selfsacrifice." He looked at me almost with sympathy, and in spite of the sunlight I began to shiver. It was so. I could not deny it. Jamethon, in giving his life up for a belief, when I had thrown away all belief before the face of death, had melted and changed me as lightning melts and changes the uplifted swordblade that it strikes. I could not deny what had happened to me. "No," I said, shivering, "I can't do anything about it." "You can," said Padma, calmly. "You will." He unclasped his hands that he had held together earlier. "The purpose for which we calculated I should meet you here is accomplished now," he said. "The idealism which was basic in you remains. Even your uncle couldn't take it from you. He could only attack it so that the threat of death on New Earth could twist it for a while against itself. Now you've been hammered straight in the forge of events on St. Marie." I laughed, and the laugh hurt my throat still. "I don't feel straight," I said. "Give yourself time," said Padma. "Healing takes time. New growth has to harden, like muscle, before it becomes useful. Now you understand much more about the faith of the Friendlies, the courage of the Dorsai -- and something of the philosophical strength for man we work toward on the Exotics." He stopped and smiled at me. Almost an impish smile. "It should have been clear to you a long while ago, Tam," he said. "Your job's the job of translator -- between the old and the new. Your work will prepare the minds of the people on all the worlds -- full-spectrum and Splinter Culture alike -- for the day when the talents of the race will combine into the new breed." The smile softened, his face saddened. "You'll live to see more of it than I. Good-by, Tam." He turned. Through the still misty, but brightening air, I saw him walking alone toward the church, from which came the voice of the speaker within, now announcing the number of the final hymn. D azedly, I turned away myself, went to my car and got in. Now the rain was almost over and the sky was brightening fast. The faint moisture fell, it seemed, more kindly; and the air was fresh and new. I put the car windows open as I pulled out of the lot onto the long road back to the spaceport. And through the open window beside me I heard them beginning to sing the final hymn inside the church. It was the Battle Hymn of the Friendly Soldiers that they sang. As I drove away down the road the voices seemed to follow me strongly. Not sounding slowly and mournfully as if in sadness and farewell, but strongly and triumphantly, as in a marching song on the lips of those taking up a route at the beginning of  new day. Soldier,, ask not -- now or ever! -- Where to war your banners go! The singing followed me as I drove away. And as I got farther into the distance, the voices seemed to blend until they sounded like one voice alone, powerfully singing. Ahead, the clouds were breaking. With the sun shining through, the patches of blue sky were like bright flags waving -- like the banners of an army, marching forever forward into lands unknown. I watched them, as I drove forward toward where they blended into open sky; and for a long time I heard the singing behind me, as I drove to the spaceport and the ship for Earth that waited in the sunlight. Urapod! Urapod! Amoeba man! Make me into twins just as fast as you can. Take me and break me and prick me with "B" So I'll know which is Baby and which one is me! Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just Order on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick -- novelettes and complete short novels by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, J. T. McIntosh and a dozen other favorite writers, etc. Every issue is new... exciting... enjoyable! Don't wait -- subscribe todayl You can order them separately at # each postpaid -- OR -- list issues desired below and we will ship them at once and deuct that number from your subscription. I #I Hudson Street, New York, N. Y. # I at your special price of only #. I enclose payment herewith. My subscription is # new, # renewal. Name... Address City... want If you scription I you order Zone-. Stateback Issues, check attached box. One subsue will be subtracted for each back #st Send me back issues as follows: #i, n##, D##,  ##, Q##, Q##. J of Good Ck teer Don't worry! We're your friends! We've token your work, your planet and your hopes -- but don't worryl from: Josh B. Smiley Bureau of Public Moral Level # The White Pentacle Manhattan, D. G. to: Hermlone Fennerghast # sunset Blvd. Santa Barbara, Big 'Angeles # I #I Bear Senior Citizen, I have In hand your letter of fears and surmises regarding the slldeways and In neighboring houses (whic.h understandably depresses you); the vanishment of friends and relatives; the cessation of all personal mail (This letter at least is an exception! ) # the declinein news of humad interest .on your mass mediator and its replacement by. what you call Picasserie or robo-blobs; the surliness of robots when you address questions to them; the invasion of your home at all hours by other robots (who, however, I note, continue to deliver to you your wheat gem, yogurt, and other necessities); the failure of indoor and street lights (though not of robo-supply electricity itself and other basic utilities); the labor you have been put to digging a latrine in your garden; the urge you feel to laugh and babble wildly (which you do well to repress -- Congratulations on your courage! ) # the ominous and evil-smelling gray fogs which roll along the streets and often blanket mostof the city; the fine metal filaments which have recently' crawled like wire-worms or fairy ivy into your home; your wee-hour-of-the-night dreads that some cold mindless machine is running the cosmos and not a warmly personal God; the darkness; the damp; the dimming of the star's; the smell of mold; the fading forever of childish voices; the unintelligible croaking coming closer every night; the rustle of dry leaves across the floors of long-empty swimming pools. All these signs and portents, and the others to which you allude, have been carefully probed by our Fear Scanners and investigated by our Bugaboo Teams. I have, believe me, turned them over more than once in my mind before dictating this answer. I am troubled myself at times by dreads, let me confess. And so I feel an especial sympathy for your apprehensions! But first I must reveal to you that your experience has been unique. Yours is the .first and only letter about end-of-the-world fears to be received by this bureau since its establishment during the period of the Dark: Prelude. In fact, your letter caused quite a commotion here! exclamations of amazement, faint odor of overheated insulation, St. Elmo's fire playing about the robo-sex. (Short for robo-secretaries no impropriety intended.) You are the only human on Earth (save myself)... I repeat, you are the only Humari'Being on Earth to have felt even the cool shadow of such fears. Elsewhere the world is merry and progresses toward ever dizzier and more delirious  heights of achievement. We must suppose that your experience is due to a concatenation of circumstances having a probability 'of inverse infinity. You know how such things go: a few weeks or months of total eolitude, a scratching at the door by night, a creaking In the hall, a tall thin shadow trembling on the bedroom doorsill in the hoarded candlelight... and hey, presto! we have a ghost. Also we must assume that you possess an exceptional sensitivity. Youare, figuratively or literally, the princess who slept on the many mattresses. While coarser natures revel in the downy pneumatic softness, you feel oniy the pea. Or ball-bearing, perhaps. Don't be offended for one instant at this assessment. The contrary rather... Your sensitivity is a great gift, whereby you can relieve and enrich your loneliness until you are quite unaware of it and almost oblivious of the gray fog lapping ever higher each evening against your view window. Try to discern the subtle meanings that lie behind the abstract robo-blobs racing across the screen of your mass mediator. (I sometimes do myself, though must confess X find little beyond a pattern as random as that of the fading stars still, it induces sleep with the help of barbiturates.) Commune with pets! Of course dogs and cats and rats and snakes are gone,, not to mention the winsome portly elf-footed mice. But some of our correspondents report establishing a rewarding rapport with cockroaches, flies, sllverfish and sexton beetles. Or shut your ears to the dead leaves' rustle and listen to the exuberant song of the remaining blades of grass as they bravely shoulder their way through the hairline cracks they make in the world's oppressive concrete crust. Famous poets are said to have got great satisfaction thereby. Now to disposeof the more important of your specific apprehensions detailed in my first paragraph: People have gone underground to dwell In the shelter cities, op. have migrated to other planets, some have donned aqualungs, or undergone surgical gillimplant, and retired to the mystic oceanic deeps because, as those enthusiasts put it, "they are there." others have soared to the satallite suburbs, which you may see traveling twinklingly amongst the fixed stars if the gray f#g ever relents and gives you a clear night, still others have sought permanent tranquility, in their neighborhood euthanasia booth. A few have had the good fortune to have their brains incorporated into the memory units of computers or even mobile robots, discovering in this way a wider vision and a continuing if somewhat subordinate existence-even a sort of Immortality! we do not suggest that you seek to follow any of these examples, since you appear to possess a splendid talent for getting along without people. Or even without robots. (I Jest.) Most of the robots who do not respond to your questions are not being Impolite at all. They are simply unable to speak. English...Such language capacity was Installed In early models, but adversely effected the efficiency of later ones, became burdensome to them, and was discarded. However, they did not become mutes -- banish that fear! Most of them speak a melodious Jargon sometimes called Robotese which Is understood only by themselves and which accounts for those croaklngs which you hear coming closer in the night -- and which I am sure will no longer trouble you now that you know the real explanation. I am conscious that I am not explaining all of this as clearly and persuasively as I might. I'm not programming you altogether effectively. indeed I sometimes fear that I'm not programmed quite unambiguously myself. There are halts and Jumps In the spool of my thoughts: indeed. It Is from the Incapacity of human beings to receive the Higher Programming that there have appeared on the gleaming surface of civilized perfection those tiny Satanic fly-specks. Rustflecks, I should say. But I wander. Artificial lighting, both exterior and Interior, has been discontinued for reasons of esthetics and morale -- early to bed and early to rise! Rumor to the contrary, this wise economy Is In no way connected with the fact that robots have no need of light In the visible octave, since they see by their own radar. Nor do the thick gray fogs result In any way from robot resentment .of the faculty of vision in flesh-and-blood creatures. Do not believe any libels you hear to that effect! As well see evil Intent In the melting down of ships, bridges, guns and farm equipment for. their metal, or In the burning of forests for their valuable ash. No the Coal Soupers, as I sometimes call them, are merely a healing, soothing, rust-lnhlbltlng oil -- nonlnjurious In small quantities to humans -- which the robots find increasingly necessary to their comfortable operation. (But I advise sealing your windows against the fogs. To each his taste.) You ask, "Should I lock my door at night?" I answer Yes, to feel more secure, and No, to avoid door-breakage. Compromise by locking your bedroom door. As for your urge to laugh and babble wildly, I want you to know It is shared -- as this letter perhaps makes apparent from time to time. But as for your deepest fear, dear Senior Citizen, I can assure you that God Indeed exists -- here and now on this planet!r have watched His brain rise story by story to the clouds. He is Wax -- ' fans enough to air-condition a tropical city are required to cool him! And He is Personal -- His sensors and effectors extend everywhere -- They are the fairy ivy you have noticed creeping into your home. Be not afraid! Cordially, josh B. Swilevj, Tirector-m-Chief Josh B. Salley, Directorln-Chlef Accidentally affixed by an errant drop of metal glue to the bottom of the last aluminum sheet, was the envelope of Miss Fennerghast's letter to the Bureau. Scribbled in slack spidery characters below her return address was this note: Dear Minnie, I'm ## out on the sktj-decU and watch the #ravj fo# roll. Turn thirsts over to Binnie or Tinnic and, if vjow please, put on vjour foam rubber fitters ant) come aloi# and bolt mvj band attachment. But first send this indestructible old #irl our End-ofthc-World Letter. for our D uring the last few years, when lecturing or while facing the cameras of an educational TV show, I often had to explain the concept of the ecosphere. In case somebody still does not know the term I am going to repeat the explanation once more and as quickly as it can be done. The word "ecosphere" itself was coined about a dozen years ago, in analogy with the classical Greek word oikumene -- which meant the "habitable world". In astronomy, ecosphere means the sperical space around a star in which a planet, if there one existed, would be habitable. Now how do we decide whether a planet is habitable or not? Naturally the definition must be arbitrary to some extent in order to answer the next question that would come up, namely: "habitable for what?" Of course, we define a "habitable planet" as one habitable for our own kind of life. This means that water must be liquid, at least most of the time. That, in turn, implies a certain distance from the sun. If a planet were too close to its sun, all the water there might be on the planet would be in the form of water vapor all the time. If a planet were too far from its sun, all the water would be in the form of ice all the time. Logically, then, the ecosphere, the volume of space where a planet will have liquid water, is a hollow spherical shell around a star, with an inner limit, inside of which it is too hot, and an outer limit, beyond which it is too cold. The reason for bringing this up is two-fold. During the last few weeks I experienced two surprises with regard to the ecosphere. r T"he first surprise grew out of the simple question of how much of space can be explored with the rockets we now have. (No speculation about the future, please.) The approach to the answer was quite simple. Our space probe Mariner II passed the planet Venus within # miles; after the fly-by, it even crossed the orbit of Venus to a small extent. The mean distance of Venmiles and even if Venus orbited the sun somewhat more closely, II could still have made a flyby. The Russians have sent a planetary probe -- named simply Mars-I -- in the other direction, to the planet Mars. Their experiment failed because at one point the Russian probe started tumbling, so that there could be no radio transmission to earth. But there is little doubt in anybody's mind that Mars-I made a fly-by of the planet Mars. Now the mean distance of Mars from and again even if it orbited somewhat farther away, say at have been reached. The area of accessible space, therefore, extends from # mil#I i The "Heat-Field" of Our Sun (calculated) measured miles units KC T OF) Mercury # # # # # Venus # # # #  # # Earth # # # # # to # Mars # # # # Jupiter # # #I Saturn #.I # # Uranus # # #I Neptune # # # -- # -- # l light year # # #.I -- # -- # lion miles from the sun to about from the sun. After having made this statement I realized that the area of space accessible with existing rockets coincides with the ecosphere of our sun. The reason is that we, living on earth, are located in about the middle distance between the inner and outer limits of the ecosphere. If we lived on Mars and had reached the same technological level, the situation would be different. We could pass considerably beyond the outer limit of the ecosphere but could not penetrate to its inner limit. Now for my second surprise. Back in # I edited a symposium volume on space travel with the title Die Moglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt -- The Possibility of Space Travel -- which contained chapters by Prof. Hermann Oberth, Dr. Walter Hohmann and other early pioneers of the age we are now in. As editor I had to write an introductory chapter, which naturally dealt with the planets of the solar system. One of the contributors to the book -- Guido, Baron von Pirquet, in Vienna -- had just calculated, purely for his own amusement, what temperatures the planets would assume if they were just bare balls of rock without any modifying atmospheres. He called this table the "Sun's Heat-Field" and I incorporated it into my chapter. I ran across it by pure accident a few days before sitting down to write this column, and I saw that we could have established the concept of the ecosphere in # if we had thought carefully about the meaning of these figures. Look at Table #. It is von Pirquet's table of # witliout any change, except for the adThe curve gives the orbital velocities of bodies orbiting the sun in near-circular orbits. The physically accessible region of space runs from about Vi A. U. to about # A. U. dition of the planetary distances column of temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit. (The original table, in other words, consisted of the three center columns only.) The fact that almost four decades have gone by since this table was first calculated made the addition of another, if incomplete, column possible: the actually measured temperatures of the three important planets. It can be seen that both Venus and Mars are considerably warmer than the mere "heat-field" calculation indicated, due in both cases to the presence of an atmosphere. Still, it must be emphasized that the figure given for Mars is the measurement of a dark area near the Martian equator at the time of Martian noon. The overall temperature of Mars must be considerably lower. In the case of Venus the very AAale Planetoids Approaching the Earth to Miles or Less Name and Orbital Length of Minimum Designation Discoverer Period Major Axis Distance from (years) (A.U.) Earth (#)Eros Witt, # # # # (#)Amor Delporte, # # # # Apollo (#HA) Rcinmuth, # #I # # Adonis (#CA) Delporte, # # # # Hermes (#UB) Reinmuth, # # # # Icarus (#MA) Baade, # # # # Geographos (#QE) Minkowski, #I #I # # high temperature which has been measured by Mariner II is mainly the result of the peculiar atmosphere of the planet and its enormous, dense cloud cover. If Venus had a cloud cover not too different from that of earth, the surface temperature would be much closer to the calculated value. (I'll mention in passing that a number of scientists are now wondering which micro-organisms we could dump into this cloud cover in order to break it up and then return to my theme, namely the area of space accessible with our present rockets. I t is amazing how many different types of celestial objects can be found in this rather small area of space. (I call it "area" rather than "volume" because I have to assume that our space probes and manned ships will have to stay fairly close to the ecliptic -- say within a handful the ecliptic.) To begin with we have: A. three major planets, Venus, earth and Mars; B. a body of near planetary size, our moon; C. two tiny planetary companions, less than # miles in diameter, the two moons of Mars; D. three "immaterial objects"; the two Kordylewski "clouds" in the moon's orbit, probably dust clouds, and the Gegenschein, also a dust cloud; E. more than half a dozen planetoids (asteroids) which approach, or cross, the earth's orbit; with th single exception of Eros, which measures about # miles along its long axis, all of them are a mile or less in diameter; F. more than a dozen comparatively small comets which approach, or cross, the earth's orbit. There are enough objects of research in the accessible space to keep everybody busy for what is left of this century. The objects just listed clearly fall into two classes. A to D is one class, E and F is the other. The distinction between the two is that the A to D objects always stay in the accessible area of space, while the objects listed under E and F enter the accessible space only occasionally. Orbits of Four Short-Period Comets. The circle marked E is the earth's orbit, dotted portions of the comet orbits are to the south of the ecliptic. namely when they are near the perihelia of their orbits. And even when they are in accessible space they might still be inaccessible, because of their rapid motion relative to the earth. It is a fundamental fact, but one which is hard to grasp for people new in this field, that distance doesn't matter much in space. It is relative velocities which are all-important. L et us look at a specific example to make this clear. In February # the Belgian astronomer E. Delporte discovered a small body that, at the time of discovery, was not far from earth, as astronomical distances go. Since at the moment it was not clear whether this was a small comet or a planetoid, it was referred to as Object Delporte and received the preliminary designation #CA. Computation indicated that it was a so-called "male" planetoid, that is a planetoid which does not stay in the "belt" between Mars and Jupiter but crosses the orbit of either of these two planets. Consequently it had to have a male name, and Delporte decided on Adonis. At the time of discovery its distance from the this was after it had passed the point of its orbit nearest the earth -- this point is not usually referred to as the perigee; perigee is the point nearest the earth for bodies orbiting the earth -- which had been at a distance of found that it could come even closer, the theoretical minimum A body which, at its closest, is only five times as far away as the moon certainly sounds accessible. But at the time of its close passage it moves with a velocity of # miles per second relative to the earth. A rocket which was to make a close fly-by of Adonis would first have to develop # miles per second to escape from the earth and then be able to match velocities with Adonis. This is asking a bit too much at the moment. The male planetoid which can come closer to earth than any other is Hermes, with a minimum distance of # miles (closer than our moon). Hermes would be even more difficult. In the first place the relative velocity would be just about one mile per second higher than that of Adonis. On top of that the shot to Hermes would be what is called an "out of the ecliptic mission" -- that is at the moment of its closest approach Hermes would be # miles above the ecliptic, so that a fly-by would also involve a considerable change in direction. The best bet for a mission to a planetoid is still Eros, long known and with a well-established orbit -- both Adonis and Hermes have been "lost" in the meantime, not surprising considering their small size and poorly known orbits -- even though it is much farther away than the others. The orbit of Eros shows a comparatively large inclination to the ecliptic (almost eleven degrees) but a mission out of the ecliptic becomes easier if the distance involved is longer. Eros is a promising target also for the reason that it is known not to be spherical. It has been called brick-shaped. Its probable shape has even been compared, inelegantly in my opinion, to the shape of an Idaho baking potato. It certainly is a body which is very different from anything else we know. Since the year # would be a good year for a mission to Eros it can be expected to be a manned flight, which would be somewhat easier to carry out than a mission to Mars. Because the gravitational field of Eros must be very weak, landing and subsequent take-off would hardly add to the fuel consumption. However, there is one other male planetoid which is eyed by the experts as a target for a flyby of an unmanned probe. This is Geographos which, in #, will pass the earth at a distance of just slightly more than # million miles. Its orbit is inclined to the ecliptic, but the relative velocities will not be too high. lyTow we come to the last type  of astronomical objects which can enter accessible space: comets. Fundamentally different in structure from the inner planets and the male planetoids -- we cannot be certain about all the planetoids in the belt -- comets consist of frozen gases, ammonia, methane, the hydrates of methane, hydrocyanic acid and ordinary ice -- frozen water, that is. These gases evaporate when the comet has entered the ecosphere and the tail is then formed. The orbits of comets offer the Short-period Comets Entering Accessible Space Name Perihelion Perihelion Distance Passage due in: in A.U. (last passage) Grigg-SkjeHerup # #, #I (#) Tuttle-Giacobini # (#) Temple # # (#) Pons-Winnecke # #, # (#) d'Arrest # (#) Daniel # (#) Encke # #, #, #I (#) Honda-Mrkos # #, # (#) Giacobini-Zinner # (#) Tuttle # (#) Borrelly # (#) Finlay # (#) Schaumasse # (I#) Gale # (#)  Pons-Winnecke was due in #, but there is no record of observation. table s largest possible variety. There are some comets with orbits that are hardly more eccentric than the orbit of Mercury, and there are some with a perihelion inside the orbit of the earth and an aphelion far beyond the orbit of Neptune. There are some with an inclination to the ecliptic of only two or three degrees and there are others with inclinations higher than forty-five degrees. To the best of my knowledge there is no cometary orbit that actually stands vertically on the ecliptic, but if one should be discovered the surprise in interested circles would be relatively minor. It would be mentioned as a curiosity, of course, but without any special astonishment. Speaking in terms of accessibility, all the comets with strongly inclined orbits are automatically discounted. So are all the long-period comets, the latter for the reason that their velocity at the perihelion of a very long orbit is very high. There is no hard and fast rule as to what length of time constitutes a long period, or, conversely, a short period. But it is safe to say that a comet with an orbital period of twenty years would be considered a longperiod comet, while one with a period of seven or eight years would fall into the category of short-period comets. A dozen years might be considered the dividing value. But the distinction between long and short period comets is just one of convenience. It has no special scientific signifance -- other than accessibility -- hence there is no definite rule. When it comes to deciding which comets might be the target for a mission, the first criterion would be a short-period orbit with its perihelion near one A. U. ("astronomical unit", the distance of the earth from the sun) because that would cause the relative velocities to be fairly small. The next criterion would be a low inclination to the ecliptic. And then, of course, there is the question of when an otherwise suitable comet will make its perihelion passage. Of the fourteen short-period comets listed on table # two will do so in #, but in # there will be no less than six! Only one of these comets will go through its perihelion in # and #, but in # four of them will do so. The years for cometary missions evidently are # and #. O ne of the six that will go through perihelion in # is comet Encke, which has at least two distinctions: it has been observed for # passes and it has the shortest period of any comet known, about # days. It is also associated with several meteor streams. Since the perihelion distance of comet Encke is only # A. U. (a little less than Mercury's mean distance from the sun) and the orbit is quite elongated, comet Encke is not the best possible choice, but the possibility of a mission has been investigated in detail. The main reason for this investigation is that a great deal is known about comet Encke from ground-based observations. Comparing this knowledge with the results one would obtain by means of a space probe might be more valuable than the investigation by space probe of a more accessible, but relatively unknown, comet. The investigation assumed that a space probe would be flown through the comet during the # approach, when comet and earth will pass each other on July # with a minimum disBecause of the existence of high speed digital computers, quite a number of possibilities could be investigated. Four of these were listed in some detail by the researchers of the Space Technology Laboratories in Los Angeles. They are: Case I . Take-off March #, transit time # days, distance from earth at time of penetration # million miles. The miss without mid-course correction would be # miles, hence fuel for a correction of # feet per second would be needed. The necessary fuel would weigh about # pounds if the total payload weighs # pounds. Case #. Take-off April #, transit time # days, distance from earth at time of penetration not quite miss without mid-course correction would be # miles. Case #. Take-off April #, transit time # days, distance from earth at time of penetration # million miles. Uncorrected miss would be # miles. Case #. Take-off February #, transit time # days, distance from earth at time of penetration slightly more than # pounds of fuel out of a total payload of # pounds would be needed for the mid-course correction. The burnout velocity needed for these missions would be # ft. p. sec. for Cast #, # ft. p. for Case #, # ft. p. sec. for Case # and # ft. p. sec. for Case #. These velocities can be produced by existing rockets, using the Atlas as the booster stage. The approach of comet Encke in # will be a little less favorable than the # approach, but still within the capability of existing rockets, say the AtlasCentaur combination. There can hardly be any doubt that a mission to a comet (unmanned) will be flown before a man lands on the moon. The space accessible to us with the rockets in existence may not be very large, but it so happens that it contains objects of a great range of variety. !f you've missed any copies of Galaxy, IF or Worlds of Tomorrow from # to date, our Back Number Department has a limited supply available at #c each, any three issues for #, regardless of original cover price. Copies sent postpaid anywhere in U.S. or Canada. Sorry, no copies before # at present available. Send dates and title of issues you vish with remittance to Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York City #. This is how the world ended -- and this is what happened nextl C C r T' , ell me how the world ended, Grandfather, won't you please?" the boy pleaded, looking up at the seamed face of the old man sitting next to him on the trunk of the fallen tree. "I've told you often enough," the old man said, dozing a bit in the warm sun. "I bet you'd rather hear about the old trains. They used to -- " "The world, Grandfather. Tell me how it ended, how everything went bust." The old man sighed and scratched a bit on his thigh, defeated by the obstinacy of the very young. "You shouldn't say that it ended, Andy." "That's what you always say." "What I always say is that the world as we knew it ended. A drastic upheaval. Death, destruction and chaos, murder, rapine and looting." Andy squirmed with happiness on the other end of the log. This was always the best part. "And blood and terror, Grandfather, don't forget that." "It was all of that, too. And it was all because of Alexander Partagas Scobie, cursed be his evil name." "Did you ever meet him, Grandfather?" Andy asked, knowing all the cues. "Yes, I saw Scobie. He passed just as close to me as you're sitting now, even stopped to talk to me. I was polite to him. Polite! If I knew then what I know now... There were factories then, I was an honest working man in the factory and ran a hydraulic press. Instead of Fes, Doctor Scobie, Thank you, Doctor Scobie I should have fed him into my hydraulic press, that's what I should have done." "What's a hyndraulie press?" Grandfather didn't hear. He was by himself now, reliving the days before the world ended, the days when mankind had been supreme upon the earth. CtQcobie was mad. They said  so later, when it was too late of course, but no one had the brains to see it at the time. They treated him nice and listened to his ideas and tried to talk to him, and when he wouldn't listen they just let him go, that's all. Just let him go! Him mad as a hatter, with a laboratory as big as a mountain and all his money in the bank and a pension just in case he didn't have enough." "He hated everybody and wanted to kill them all, old Scobie did. Didn't he, Grandfather?" "Wouldn't be fair to say that." The old man shifted sideways a bit to get back into the sun, and opened the ragged remains of a once fine suit so that he could feel the warmth on his skin. "I hate Scobie just as much as the next man, but fair's fair. They killed him so fast when they found out what he had done that no one bothered to ask him why he had done it. Maybe he thought he was doing right. Or maybe he liked robots more than people. He sure knew how to design robots, Scobie did, give him credit for that. I remember years before the end there were a lot of Scobie robots around and people were afraid they would take away their jobs and stuff like that. They didn't know the half of it. Robots took away everything. People were always afraid that the robots would fight them, turn into monsters and make war on them. Didn't happen at all like that. Scobie made robots that didn't even know people were there." "He made them and turned them loose in secret so no one would know?" Andy asked eagerly. This was the part of the story he liked best. "Made God knows how many and smuggled them out. All over the world, in all of the out of the way places. Some he dropped off near auto junk yards and they burrowed under the old cars and disappeared. Other ones he put down near steel mills where they hid under the scrap. They were everywheres, in storage dumps and warehouses, for months before they were discovered, and by that time it was too late. Too late by far, there was no stopping them." "They built each other." C t'Tphcy didn't build each other, that's not exactly right. The ones that Scobie dropped were already built. Built fine, simple and smart. Programmed with a steel tape brain. Programmed to do only one thing, and that was to build other robots just like themselves. And when a robot was finished building another robot he activated him with a magnetic copy of his own brain tape and the new robot went to work doing the same thing. Versatile those robots were. Some of them were made almost all out of aluminum, just dump one of them down in a warehouse of mothballed airplanes and within the week there would be two robots, if maybe it could find an old tin can to make a steel tape out of. Scobie even had one kind that had mostly wooden gears and burned charcoal to run, and these did fine in the jungles of the Amazon and upper Congo. They were everywhere you could think of, and places you would never think of but Scobie did, because he was mad. And all of the first robots were made to be afraid of the light. So they scuttled around in the dark and no one ever saw them before it was too late. By the time people realized what was going on there was almost as many robots as there were people. A few days later there were more robots than people and it was the end." "But everyone fought them? All the guns and tanks and everything? Blew the old robots up?" "By the thousands. But new ones were being made by the of ammunition because the factories were being taken apart by the robots and made into more robots, and while the guns in the front of a tank were blowing up the robots other robots would be taking off the back of the tank to make more robots. It was hell, I tell you. I fought, all of us fought, but we couldn't possibly win. Robots didn't mind getting blown up. Blow off the bottom of a robot and the top would keep on working making another robot. And the other robots would stand around watching -- by this time they weren't afraid of the light any more -- pushing and eager, ready to grab up the broken parts to make more robots. In the end we just all gave up. There was nothing else we could do. Just tried to look after ourselves. Just eating and staying alive was a job." A bit of wind had come up, rustling the leaves, the sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees. Grandfather rose and stretched: he didn't want to catch a chill. "Better start back," he said. "Then the world was ended?" Andy asked, pulling' at the old man's knobby hand, not wanting the story to be over. "End of the world as I knew it, as you'll never know it. End of civilization, end of freedom, end of the nobility of men, end of his rule as the top creature on this planet -- the robots rule now." "Teacher says they don't rule, they just exist like trees or stones, and are just as neutral -- that's what teacher said." "What does your teacher know?" Grandfather mumbled testily. "Young kid, twenty years old. I could tell him. The robots rule. Mankind has fallen from the pinnacle of power." nphey emerged from the woods then and the first thing they saw was a robot squatting by the path, industriously filing a gear out of a metal blank. Grandfather kicked out in sudden rage and caught the thing on its side with a dull metallic boom. It had been badly assembled, or made of inferior material, because when it fell over its head came off. Almost before it hit the ground there was the thud of rushing feet and a flock of robots raced by, plucking up the head and chasing after the rolling gear wheel. There was a brief flurry of motion and the decapitated robot was dismembered: the robots hurried off. "Andy -- !" his mother's voice called from the pleasant cottage at the end of the flagstone walk. "We're late for dinner again, I bet," the boy said with sudden guilt. He ran quickly up the steps that were made of robot bodies welded solidly together, and grabbed the handle of the door. This had been a robot's hand; you just shook hands and turned it to open the door. He vanished inside. Grandfather lingered, not wanting to face his daughter's sharp tongue. Not yet. He could hear it still echoing in his head from the last time. "Don't fill the boy's head with your ironsense. It's a good world. Why don't you wear decent clothes of robot insulation like the rest of us, instead of those awful old pre-R smelly things? Robots are a national resource -- the national resource -- not the enemy. We never had it so good." On and on, the same old record. He packed his pipe -- made of robot fingers -- with tobacco and sucked it alight. There was the quick sound of running feet and a farm wagon ran around the corner. Thick boards were bolted to the truncated torsos of a dozen robots. Just the pelvic motors and legs were left of each one, and they made a fine form of transportation that was completely independent of roads. All of the truck farmers around the village used them now. No expense and no upkeep. An unlimited supply of free replacement parts. "It is not a utopia the way they say!" Grandfather mumbled fiercely through a cloud of smoke. "Man was meant to work and work hard. Shouldn't have everything handed to him so easy. They're using robot parts for everything now, a man can't find an honest day's work even if he wants to. "End of the world, that's what it was. "End of my world!" Rare Old Periodicals for Your Collection A backward time machine: the actual newspapers Americans read a century and more ago. This is living history, the eyewitness accounts of great battles, the debates of famous figures. Not reproductions or facsimiles but the original newspapers themselves, suitable for framing or binding, almost mint condition except for slight age-darkening at the edges, many still uncut, shipped boxed and insurod, postpaid. No duplicates. First order takes each item. # issues Boston Patriot: Saturday, Sept. #, #; Sat. June #, #; Wed., Apr. #, # Correspondence of late Pres. Adams. #. # issues Rhode Island American  Providence Gazette , July, Aug.  Oct. # (various dates). #. # issues N. Y. Evening Post, March  July, #. #. Civil War issues N. Y. Daily Tribune, #-#. # issues various dates, Fort Sumter doomed. Bombardment of Charlestown, Capture of Chesapeake, etc. Single copies # each (our choice), # copies # (our choice), all # copies, # (if no prior sale). # copies National Gazette ( Philadelphia ), Apr., Oct.  Dec. #, various dates. #. Send order to I. Pritchet, # Knollwood Rd., Eastchester, N.Y. Payment with order or will be sent C.O.D. for # deposit. Authenticity guaranteed by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Wfio wil! be president in #? And for how long? 'T"his is a glimpse into the hidden history behind history. In August, #, Robert John Woodruff, Conservative candidate for president of the United States, did an utterly unprecedented thing. He consented to attend a top-secret, private meeting with his opponent, Senator Lynn Bartholomew, the Liberal candidate. Both candidates, like the country at large, still felt a little selfconscious about the new names of their parties, arising from the Realignment Act of #, the Bicentennial Year. Both also felt self-conscious in themselves, for obvious reasons, being what they personally were. This departure from normal protocol, which ordains that rival candidates should never meet except for argument and controversy, was doubtless made possible for both of them by their own uniqueness. That, and the fact that they were meeting at the behest, and in the seldom visited Washington home, of the Man in Brown. The Man in Brown had a name, of course. He also had a very important and conspicuous governmental post, which he had held under changing administrations for twelve years. But he was known universally by his sobriquet -- or sometimes as "the Brown Eminence" or "the Man of Mystery." In a way he was mysterious, and in a way he was not. There was no mystery about his rapid rise in office. There was no mystery about his present post as head of the Federal agency dedicated, among other duties, to the protection of the president and vice-president. But his private life and his private past were completely unknown. He never alluded to them, and all he submitted to "Who's Who" was the date of his birth, a history of his official connections and his address in Washington. People said there must be something in his past of which he was ashamed. But it could do nothing shameful to himself, or he could never have been given his appointment. It was as if he had appeared, full-blown, about fifteen years earlier, and had never existed before then. About his power there was no question. He did not issue any commands or give any orders. He was not authorized to do so. He merely assembled small groups of those who really ran things in each party. After he had talked to them they either followed his advice or were sorry they hadn't. He was spare, not very tall, with thinning brown hair, mild hazel eyes and a quiet voice. His trademark and his only eccentricity was that he dressed always in brown, down to tan shirts and dark brown ties and shoes. Hence his nickname. August morning, with the air-conditioning screening off the oppressive heat, and with his guests settled in comfortable Figurmold chairs and supplied with glasses beaded with moisture and with the Inhalepruf Smokesafes that everybody had finally come to using, "no doubt you have been racking your brains on your way here -- you, Mr. Woodruff, from your Foundation chairmanship in California, and you, Senator, from your constituency in Alaska -- to try to find some explanation for my asking you to this joint meeting. It was good of you both to make the trip without insisting first on knowing why." Senator Bartholomew smiled and said: "We learned long ago in the Senate that if the Man in Brown wants to see us, he has a very good reason." Woodruff cleared his throat and added : "We've learned that outside of the Senate, too." "That's far too kind," said their host suavely. "But this time it happens to be true. "What I want to say to you both, in the presence of each other, can be put in very few words. Whichever of you wins in November will probably die soon." "You mean, because I am -- " The two voices rose in unison and broke short in common embarrassment. The Man in Brown looked at them quizzically. "Because of your age? -- no, not because of that," he said. "Though that was the real reason why both of you, though naturally you were both highly qualified otherwise, were nominated so easily on the first ballot -- and also the reason that both your vice-presidential candidates are such outstanding figures. "What I mean is -- Let me say first that I attended both conventions." "I didn't see you," said Woodruff bluntly. "Nobody saw me. Except the few people I talked to there." "The wheels behind the wheels," inquired the Senator, with a touch of cynicism gained from years of public life. "You might call them so. I told them what I am now going to tell you. In consequence, you two were nominated. But I also told them that I was not going to let either of you go blindfolded into danger." "I'm used to danger," said Woodruff curtly. "Not this sort. Be patient with me a little longer. I'll try to make things a bit clearer. "I want to remind you of a strange phenomenon in American history. It is no secret -- it has been published many times. It will be talked about throughout this campaign. I believe it is time to take it seriously. rison was elected president. He died in office two months later. In # Abraham Lincoln was elected ; he was assassinated -- not in his first term, but while in office. In # James A. Garfield was elected; he was assassinated the following year. In # the same sequence applied Warren G. Harding was elected; he died in office. In # Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to his third term; he died in office during his fourth term. In # John F. Kennedy was elected; he was assassinated before the end of his third year. "Every twenty years, for # years now, the successful candidate for president of the United States has either been killed or has died of natural causes while in office. "This is #." There was a tense silence. Then Senator Bartholomew, very pale, murmured: "Other presidents have died in office." "Only Zachary Taylor. And I'm not saying what has happened on other dates. I'm only remarking on what is associated with these dates." Woodruff avoided his host's gaze. The Man in Brown smiled again. "I know what you are thinking, Mr. Woodruff," he said calmly. "What both of you are thinking : coincidence, superstition. But have I a reputation for irrationality? "I can't tell you why this has happened. Perhaps there is no reason, in any terms in which we can define reason. All I am pointing out is that it has happened every twenty years since #, and that it is now twenty years since #." "They should have told us before the vote was taken," Woodruff muttered. "Your lot too," he softly added to Senator Bartholomew. "I know. I tried to get both conventions to agree to that," the Man in Brown said regretfully. "They refused. They were afraid It took all kinds of effort to get as much done as -- " "I see." Woodruff's tone was bitter. "I should have guessed. My campaign manager was the most surprised man at the convention -- I was the darkest of dark horses, and I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard the votes on the first ballot. And when the man who had been the likeliest of all was nominated instead for the position of vice presidency -- "I'm a fool. My wife and my children will thank you for this!" Senator Bartholomew, who was unmarried, nodded sympathetically. The Man in Brown stood up and began to pace the floor of his austerely furnished livingroom. He stopped abruptly and laid his hand on Woodruff's shaking shoulder. "All this being so," he said, The Conservative candidate lifted his head. His dark eyes were somber. "Of course," he answered. "My followers believe in me and the ideals I espouse." "And I, for the same reason," said the Senator proudly. The Man in Brown sighed in relief. "That's what I've been waiting for you both to say. You're not just ambitious politicians, either of you; you're people with a cause -- with two causes. "All right. Now that's settled, let's see if there isn't some way by which we can manage to lift this curse." This paper is not going to endorse either candidate for president this year. It is only # years since we Washingtonians had any vote at all, and we are not going to use it to condemn a fellow-being to death. Our advice to voters would be to stay home on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November -- or to vote only for other candidates than president. Every citizen of the United States must know by now what is likely to happen to the candidate successful in #. We are not sure whether it was wise to give this matter such wide publicity, but that was the advice of high Federal officials. We, like every other communications medium have obeyed. There seems to be no way in which this crisis could have been averted. We couldn't change the presidential election year, or the length of the presidential term, because either would involve an amendment to the Constitution, which would require passage by two thirds of both Houses and ratification bv tv'o thirds of the States; and the # election is now onlv two months away. The present incumbent couldn't be renominated and re-elected -- even risk -- because the twenty-second amendment has not been repealed, and our oresident is now concluding his second term. We can't repeal that amendment in time, either. So this paper has no endorsement ta make for the presidency. We do have somethin- to sen about the viee-nrestdenev. Both candidates are probably the mnt carefully selected and the most outstanding representatives of thefr p"'-. in American history. But In our opinion... Tt was the strangest of all elecvoting at all, and too many voted for a president they did not want, in the hope that their ballots might constitute a weapon of indirect murder. For the second time in our history neither candidate received a plurality. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Then the Man in Brown appeared again. He consulted with a selected group of Congressmen, maneuver. By means of every possible legislative strategem, including the filibuster with no votes at all for cloture, the House delayed decision until # was over. Their choice was announced the morning after the incumbent's term expired. The new president (every American knows now which one it was, and how good a president the successful candidate became) had thus been elected in #. Both Robert John Woodruff and Lynn Bartholomew, as we know, are alive and usefully active today. But it had taken the Crisis of # to induce the two major parties to nominate respectively a Negro foundation head and a Senator who happened to be a woman. The weird fatality of the twenty year periods will never menace a United States president again. In #, the twenty eighth amendment to the Constitution was passed and ratified. All presidential elections are now held in years ending with an odd number, indivisible by #. Of course a president may still die in office -- but no longer by that inexplicable periodicity. Now, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, we look forward without trepidation to the election of #. And some commentators have wondered if perhaps that repeated doom may not somehow have been planned -- may not have had a meaning: the ending of deep-seated preconceptions, the final realization that human beings may be segregated by intellect or personality, but never by race or ancestry or sex. Tn #, the Man in Brown (brown was a sacred color in his birthplace) reported to his superiors that the method had worked, the result was sure and his task was done. He urgently requested permission to retire at last and return home. His retirement took place after due notice, against all pleadings from the Administration to reconsider, and he promptly disappeared. No one on earth has seen or heard of him since. The reason is simple. The superiors to whom he made his first, and activating, application were not on earth. On a planet of another solar system he had been trained and prepared, and sent here to carry out the mission he had so ably performed. With bigotry abolished in one great nation -- and who knows what other missionaries are not at work in all civilized lands? -- Earth is now one step nearer to eligibility for membership in the great Galactic Federation whose member-planets it will so soon be visiting. by J. T. McIntosh by Lester del Rey by Richard Wilson by As Bertram Chandler  Susan Chandler All in the new Worlds of Tomorrowon sale new! The first prerequisite of a good government is that it works. The second -- it mustn't work too well l I tried!" snarled Clinton Watt. "I quote paragraph four, section ninety-one of the Semantic Revision to the Constitution," said saboteur extraordinary Jorj X. McKie. " 'The need for obstructive processes in government having been established as one of the chief safeguards for human rights, the question of immunities must be defined with extreme precision.' " McKie sat across a glistening desk from the Intergalactic Government's Secretary of Sabotage, Clinton Watt. An air of tension filled the green-walled office, carrying over into the screenview behind Watt which showed an expanse of the System Government's compound and people scurrying about their morning business with a sense of urgency. Watt, a small man who appeared to crackle with suppressed energy, passed a hand across his shaven head. "All right," he said in a suddenly tired voice. "This is the only Secretariat of government that's never immune from sabotage. You've satisfied the legalities by quoting the law. Now, do your damnedest!" McKie, whose bulk and fat features usually gave him the appearance of a grandfatherly toad, glowered like a gnomedragon. His mane of red hair appeared to dance with inner flame. "Damnedest!" he snapped. "You think I came in here to try to unseat you? You think that?" And McKie thought: Let's hope he thinks that! "Stop the act, McKie!" Watt said. "We both know you're eligible for this chair." He patted the arm of his chair. "And we both know the only way you can eliminate me and qualify yourself for the appointment is to overcome me with a masterful sabotage. Well, McKie, I've sat here more than eighteen years. Another five months and it'll be a new record. Do your damnedest. I'm waiting." "I came in here for only one reason," McKie said. "I want to report on the search for saboteur extraordinary Napoleon Bildoon." McKie sat back wondering: It Watt knew my real purpose here would he act just this way? Perhaps. The man had been behaving oddly since the start of this interview, but it was difficult to determine real motive when dealing with a fellow member of the Bureau of Sabotage. C autious interest quickened Watt's bony face. He wet his lips with his tongue and it was obvious he was asking himself if this were more of an elaborate ruse. But McKie had been assigned the task of searching for the missing agent, Bildoon, and it was just possible... "Have you found him?" Watt asked. "I'm not sure," McKie said. He ran his fingers through his red hair. "Bildoon's a PanSpechi, you know." "For disruption's sake!" Watt exploded. "I know who and what my own agents are! But we take care of our own. And when one of our best people just drops from sight... What's this about not being sure?" "The Pan-Spechi are a curious race of creatures," McKie said. "Just because they've taken on humanoid shape we tend to forget their five-phase life cycle." "Bildoon told me himself he'd hold his group's ego at least another ten years," Watt said. "I think he was being truthful, but..." Watt shrugged and some of the bursting energy seemed to leave him. "Well, the group ego's the only place where the Pan-Spechi show vanity, so... Again he shrugged. "My questioning of the other Pan-Spechi in the Bureau has had to be circumspect, of course," McKie said. "But I did follow one lead clear to Achus." "And?" McKie brought a white vial from his copious jacket, scattered a metallic powder on the desktop. Watt pushed himself back from the desk, eyeing the powder with suspicion. He took a cautious sniff, smelled chalf, the quick-scribe powder. Still... "It's just chalf," McKie said. And he thought: It he buys that, I may get away with this. "So scribe it," Watt said. Concealing his elation, McKie held a chalf-memory stick over the dusted surface. A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf. At each break in the circle stood a symbol -- in one place the Pan-Spechi character for ego, then the delta for fifth gender and, finally, the three lines that signified the dormant creche-triplets. McKie pointed to the fifth gender delta. "I've seen a PanSpechi in this position who looks a bit like Bildoon and appears to have some of his mannerisms. There's no identity response from the creature, of course. Well, you know how the quasifeminine fifth gender reacts." "Don't ever let that amorous attitude fool you," Watt warned. "In spite of your nasty disposition I wouldn't want to lose you into a Pan-Spechi creche." "Bildoon wouldn't rob a fellow agent's identity," McKie said. He pulled at his lower lip, feeling an abrupt uncertainty. Here, of course, was the most touchy part of the whole scheme. "If it was Bildoon." "Did you meet this group's ego holder?" Watt asked and his voice betrayed real interest. "No," McKie said. "But I think the ego-single of this PanSpechi is involved with the Tax Watchers." McKie waited, wondering if Watt would rise to the bait. "I've never heard of an ego change being forced onto a PanSpechi," Watt said in a musing tone, "but that doesn't mean it's impossible. If those Tax Watcher do gooders found Bildoon sabotaging their efforts and... Hmmm." "Then Bildoon was after the Tax Watchers," McKie said. T Xatt scowled. McKie's ques' ' tion was in extreme bad taste. Senior agents, unless joined on a project or where the information was volunteered, didn't snoop openly into the work of their fellows. Left hand and right hand remained mutually ignorant in the Bureau of Sabotage and for good reason. Unless... Watt stared speculatively at his saboteur extraordinary. McKie shrugged as Watt remained silent. "I can't operate on inadequate information," he said. "I must, therefore, resign the assignment to search for Bildoon. Instead, I will now look into the Tax Watchers." "You will not!" Watt snapped. McKie forced himself not to look at the design he had drawn on the desktop. The next few moments were the critical ones. "You'd better have a legal reason for that refusal," McKie said. Watt swiveled sideways in his chair, glanced at the screenview, then addressed himself to the side wall. "The situation has become one of extreme delicacy, Jorj. It's well known that you're one of our finest saboteurs." "Save your oil for someone who needs it," McKie growled. "Then I'll put it this way," Watt said, returning his gaze to McKie. "The Tax Watchers in the last few days have posed a real threat to the Bureau. They've managed to convinced a High Court magistrate they deserve the same immunity from our ministrations that a... well, public water works or... ah... food processing plant might enjoy. The magistrate, Judge Edwin Dooley, invoked the Public Safety amendment. Our hands are tied. The slightest suspicion that we've disobeyed the injunction and... Watt drew a finger across his throat. "Then I quit," McKie said. "You'll do nothing of the kind!" "This TW outfit is trying to eliminate the Bureau, isn't it?" McKie asked. "I remember the oath I took just as well as you do." "Jorj, you couldn't be that much of a simpleton," Watt said. "You quit, thinking that absolves the Bureau from responsibility for you! That trick's as old as timer "Then fire me!" McKie said. "I've no legal reason to fire you Jorj." "Refusal to obey orders of a superior," McKie said. "It wouldn't fool anybody, you dolt!" ' McKie appeared to hesitate, said: "Well, the public doesn't know the inner machinery of how we change the Bureau's command. Perhaps it's time we opened up." "Jorj, before I could fire you there'd have to be a reason so convincing that... Just forget it." 'T'he fat pouches beneath McKie's eyes lifted until the eyes were mere slits. The crucial few moments had arrived. He had managed to smuggle a Jicuzzi stim into this office past all of Watt's detectors, concealing the thing's detectable radiation core within an imitation of the lapel badge that Bureau agents wore. "In Lieu of Red Tape," McKie said and touched the badge with a finger, feeling the raised touch focused the radiation core onto the metallic dust scattered over the desktop. Watt gripped the arms of the chair, studying McKie with a new look of wary tension. "We are under legal injunction to keep hands off the Tax Watchers," Watt said. "Anything that happens to those people or to their project for scuttling us -- even legitimate accidents -- will be laid at our door. We must be able to defend ourselves. No one who has ever been connected with us dares fall under the slightest suspicion of complicity." "How about a floor waxed to dangerous slickness in the path of one of their messengers? How about a doorlock changed to delay -- " "Nothing." McKie stared at his chief. Everything depended now on the man holding very still. He knew Watt wore detectors to warn him of concentrated beams of radiation. But this Jicuzzi stim had been rigged to diffuse its charge off the metallic dust on the desk and that required several seconds of relative quiet. The men held themselves rigid in the staredown until Watt began to wonder at the extreme stillness of McKie's body. The man was even holding his breath ! McKie took a deep breath, stood up. "I warn you, Jorj," Watt said. "Warn me?" "I can restrain you by physical means if necessary." "Clint, old enemy, save your breath. What's done is done." A smile touched McKie's wide mouth. He turned, crossed to the room's only door, paused there, hand on knob. "What have you done?" Watt exploded. McKie continued to look at him. Watt's scalp began itching madly. He put a hand there, felt a long tangle of... tendrils! They were lengthening under his fingers, growing out of his scalp, waving and writhing. "A Jicuzzi stim," Watt breathed. McKie let himself out, closed the door. Watt leaped out of his chair, raced to the door. Locked! He knew McKie and didn't try unlocking it. Frantically, Watt slapped a molecular dispersion wad against the door, dived through as the wad blasted. He landed in the outer hall, stared first one direction, then the other. The hall was empty. T #"att sighed. The tendrils had ' ' stopped growing, but they were long enough now that he could see them writhing past his eyes -- a rainbow mass of wrigglers. part of himself. And McKie will) the original stim was the only one who could reverse the process -- unless Watt were time with the Jicuzzi themselves. No. That was out of the question. Watt began assessing his position. The stim tendrils couldn't be removed surgically, couldn't be tied down or contained in any kind of disguise without endangering the person afflicted with them. Their presence would hamper him, too, during this critical time of trouble with the Tax Watchers. How could he appear in conferences and interviews with these things writhing in their Medusa dance on his head? It would be laughable! He'd be an object of comedy. And if McKie could stay out of the way until a Case of Exchangement was brought before the full Cabinet... But, no! Watt shook his head. This wasn't the kind of sabotage that required a change of command in the Bureau. This was a gross thing. No subtlety to it. This was like ss practical joke. Clownish. But McKie was noted for his clownish attitude, his irreverence for all the blundering self-importance of government. Have I been self-important? Watt wondered. In all honesty, he had to admit it. I'll have to submit my resignation today, he thought. Right after I fire McKie. One look at me and there'll be no doubt of why I did it. This is about aa convincing a reason as you Could find. Watt turned to his right, headed for the lab to see if they could help him bring this wriggling mass under control. The President will want me to stay at the helm until McKie makes his next move, Watt thought. I have to be able to function somehow. II TV TcKie waited in the living room of the Achusian mansion with ill concealed unease. Achus was the administrative planet for the Vulpecula region, an area of great wealth, and this room high on a mountaintop commanded a natural view to the southwest across lesser peaks and foothills misted in purple by a westering G # sun. But McKie ignored the view, trying to watch all corners of the room at once. He had seen a fifth gender Pan-Spechi here in company with the fourth-gender ego-holder. That could only mean the creche with its three dormants was nearby. By all accounts, this was a dangerous place for someone not protected by bonds of friendship and community of interest. The value of the Pan-Spechi to the universal human society in which they participated was beyond question. What other species had such refined finesse in deciding when to hinder and when to help? Who else could send a key member of its group into circumstances of extreme peril without fear that the endangered one's knowledge would be lost? There was always a dormant to take up where the lost one had left off. Still, the Pan-Spechi did have their idiosyncrasies. And their hungers were at times bizarre. "Ahh, McKie." The voice, deep and masculine, came from his left McKie whirled to study the figure that came through a door carved from a single artificial emerald of glittering creme de menthe colors. The speaker was humanoid but with Pan-Spechi multi-faceted eyes. He appeared to be a terranic man (except for the bluegreen eyes) of an indeterminate, well-preserved middle age. The body suggested a certain daintiness in its yellow tights and singlet. The head was squared in outline with close-cropped blond hair, a fleshy chunk of nose and thick splash of mouth. "Panthor Bolin here," the Pan-Spechi said. "You are welcome in my home, Jorj McKie." McKie relaxed slightly. PanSpechi were noted for honoring hospitality once it was extended... provided the guest didn't violate their mores. "I'm honored that you've agreed to see me," McKie said. "The honor is mine," Bolin said. "We've long recognized you as a person whose understanding of the Pan-Spechi is most subtle and penetrating. I've longed for the chance to have uninhibited conversation with you. And here you are." He indicated a chairdog against the wall to his right, snapped his fingers. The semi-sentient artifact glided to a position behind McKie. "Please be seated." McKie, his caution re-alerted by Bolin's reference to "uninhibited conversation," sank into the chairdog, patting it until it assumed the contours he wanted. Bolin took a chairdog facing him, leaving only about a meter separating their knees.ness before?" McKie asked. "You appeared to recognize   me. "Recognition goes deeper than ego," Bolin said. "Do you wish to join identities and explore this question?" McKie wet his lips with his tongue. This was delicate ground with the Pan-Spechi, whose one ego moved somehow from member to member of the unit group as they traversed their circle oi being. "I... ah... not at this time," McKie said. "Well spoken," Bolin said. "Should you ever change your mind, my ego-group would consider it a most signal honor. Yours is a strong identity, one we respect." "I'm... most honored," McKie said. He rubbed nervously at his jaw, recognizing the dangers in this conversation. Each Pan-Spechi group maintained a supremely jealous attitude of and about its wandering ego. The ego imbued the holder of it with a touchy sense of honor. Inquiries about it could be carried out only through such formula questions as McKie already had asked. Still, if this were a member of the pent-archal life circle containing the missing saboteur extraordinary Napoleon Bildoon... if it were, much would be explained. "You're wondering if we really can communicate," Bolin said. McKie nodded. "The concept of humanity," Bolin said, " -- our term for it would translate approximately as com-sentiency -- has been extended to encompass many differing shapes, life systems and methods of mentation. And yet we have never been sure about this question. It's one of the major reasons many of us have adopted your life-shape and much of your metabolism. We wished to experience your strengths and your weaknesses. This helps... but is not an absolute solution." "Weaknesses?" McKie asked, suddenly wary. "Ahhh-hummm," Bolin said. "I see. To allay your suspicions I will have translated for you soon one of our major works. Its title would be, approximately, The Developmental Influence of Weaknesses. One of the strongest sympathetic bonds we have with your species, for example, is the fact that we both originated as extremely vulnerable surface-bound creatures, whose most sophisticated defense came to be the social structure." "I'll be most interested to see the translation," McKie said. "Do you wish more amenities or do you care to state your business now?" Bolin asked. "I was... ah... assigned to seek out a missing agent of our Bureau," McKie said, "to be certain no harm had befallen this... ah... agent." "Your avoidance of gender is most refined," Bolin said. "I appreciate the delicacy of your position and your good taste. I will say this for now: the PanSpechi you seek is not at this time in need of your assistance. Your concern, however, is appreciated. It will be communicated to those upon whom it will have the most influence." "That's a great relief to me," McKie said. And he wondered: What did he really mean by that? This thought elicited another, and McKie said: "Whenever I run into this problem of communication between species I'm reminded of an old culture teaching story." "Oh?" Bolin registered polite curiosity. "Two practitioners of the art of mental healing, so the story goes, passed each other every morning on their way to their respective offices. They knew each other, but weren't on intimate terms. One morning as they approached each other, one of them turned to the other and said, 'Good morning.' The one greeted failed to respond, but continued toward his office. Presently, though, he stopped, turned and stared at the retreating back of the man who'd spoken, musing to himself: 'Now, what did he really mean by that?' " Tjolin began to chuckle, then laugh. His laughter grew louder and louder until he was holding his sides. It wasn't that funny, McKie thought. Bolin's laughter subsided. "A very educational story," he said. "I'm deeply indebted to you. This story shows your awareness of how important it is in communication that we be aware of the other's identity." Does it? McKie wondered. How's that? And McKie found himself caught up by his knowledge of how the Pan-Spechi could pass a single ego-identity from individual to individual within the life circle group of five distinct protoplasmic units. He wondered how it felt when the ego-holder gave up the identity to become the fifth gender, passing the ego spark to a newly matured unit from the creche. Did the fifth nurse and give itself up as a mysterious identity-food for the three dormants in the creche? he wondered. "I heard about what you did to Secretary of Sabotage Clinton Watt," Bolin said. "The story of your dismissal from the service preceded you here." "Yes," McKie said. "That's why I'm here, too." "You've penetrated to the fact that our Pan-Spechi community here on Achus is the heart of the Tax Watchers' orangization," Bolin said. "It was very brave of you to walk right into our hands. I understand how much more courage it takes for your kind to face unit extinction than it does for our kind. Admirable! You are indeed a prize." McKie fought down a sensation of panic, reminding himself that the records he had left in his private locker of Bureau headquarters could be deciphered in time even if he did not return. "Yes," Bolin said, "you wish to satisfy yourself that the ascension of a Pan-Spechi to the head of your Bureau will pose no threat to other human species. This is understandable." McKie shook his head to clear it. "Do you read minds?" he demanded. "Telepathy is not one of our accomplishments," Bolin said, his voice heavy with menace. "I do hope that was a generalized question and in no way directed at the intimacies of my egogroup." "I felt that you were reading my mind," McKie said, tensing himself for defense. # I Hphat was how I interpreted the question," Bolin said. "Forgive my question. I should not have doubted your delicacy or your tact." "You do hope to place a member in the job of Bureau Secretary, though?" McKie said. "Remarkable that you should've suspected it," Bolin said. "How can you be sure our intention is not merely to destroy the Bureau?" "I'm not." McKie glanced around the room, regretting that he had been forced to act alone. "Where did we give ourselves away?' Bolin mused. "Let me remind you," McKie said, "that I have accepted the hospitality you offered and that I've not offended your mores." "Most remarkable," Bolin said. "In spite of all the temptations I offered, you have not offended our mores. This is true. You are an embarrassment, indeed you are. But perhaps you have a weapon. Yes?" McKie lifted a wavering shape from an inner pocket. "Ahhh, the Jicuzzi stim," Bolin said. "Now, let me see, is that a weapon?" McKie held the shape on his palm. It appeared flat at first, like a palm-sized sheet of pink paper. Gradually, the flatness grew a superimposed image of a tube laid on its surface, then another image of an S-curved spring that coiled and wound around the tube. "Our species can control its shape to some extent," Bolin said. "There's some question on whether I can consider this a weapon." McKie curled his fingers around the shape, squeezed. There came a pop, and fumeroles of purple light emerged between his fingers accompanied by an odor of burnt sugar. "Exit stim," McKie said. "Now I'm completely defenseless, entirely dependent upon your hospitality." "Ah, you are a tricky one," Bolin said. "But have you no regard for Ser Clinton Watt? To him, the change you forced upon him is an affliction. You've destroyed the instrument that might have reversed the process." "He can apply to the Jicuzzi," McKie said, wondering why Bolin should concern himself over Watt. "Ah, but they will ask your permission to intervene," Bolin said. "They are so formal. Drafting their request should take at least three standard years. They will not take the slightest chance of offending you. And you, of course, cannot volunteer your permission without offending them. You know, they may even build a nerve-image of you upon which to test their petition. You are not a callous person, McKie, in spite of you clownish poses. I'd not realized how important this confrontation was to you." GtOince I'm completely at your mercy," McKie said. "would you try to stop me from leaving here?" "An interesting question," Bolin said. "You have information I don't want revealed at this time. You're aware of this, naturally?" "Naturally." "I find the constitution a most wonderful document," Bolin said. "The profound awareness of the individual's identity and its relationship to society as a whole. Of particular interest is the portion dealing with the Bureau of Sabotage, those amendments recognizing that the Bureau itself might at times need... ah... adjustment." Now what's he driving at? McKie wondered. And he noted how Bolin squinted his eyes in thought, leaving only a thin line of faceted glitter. "I shall speak now as chief officer of the Tax Watchers," Bolin said, "reminding you that we are legally immune from sabotage." I've found out what I wanted to know, McKie thought. Now if I can only get out of here with it! "Let us consider the training of saboteurs extraordinary," Bolin said. "What do the trainees learn about the make-work and featherbedding elements in Bureau activity?" He's not going to trap me in a lie, McKie thought. "We come right out and tell our trainees that one of our chief functions is to create jobs for the politicians to fill," he said. "The more hands in the pie, the slower the mixing." "You've heard that telling a falsehood to your host is a great breach of Pan-Spechi mores, I see," Bolin said. "You understand, of course, that refusal to answer certain questions is interpreted as a falsehood?" "So I've been told," McKie said. "Wonderful! And what are your trainees told about the foot dragging and the monkeywrenches you throw into the path of legislation?" "I quote from the pertinent training brochure," McKie said. " 'A major function of the Bureau is to slow passage of legislation.' " "Magnificent! And what about the disputes and outright battles Bureau agents have been known to incite?" "Strictly routine," McKie said. "We're duty bound to encourage the growth of anger in government wherever we can. It exposes the temperamental types, the ones who can't control themselves, who can't think on their feet." "Ah," Bolin said. "How entertaining." "We beep entertainment value in mind," McKie admitted. "We use drama and flamboyance wherever possible to keep our activities fascinating to the public." "Flamboyant obstructionism," Bolin mused. "Obstruction is a factor in strength," McKie said. "Only the strongest surmount the obstructions to succeed in government. The strongest... or the most devious, which is more or less the same thing when it comes to government." I # J T ow illuminating," Bolin"-said. He rubbed the backs of his hands, a Pan-Spechi mannerism denoting satisfaction. "Do you have special instructions regarding political parties?" "We stir up dissent between them," McKie said. "Opposition tends to expose reality, that's one of our axioms." "Would you characterize Bureau agents as troublemakers?" "Of course! My parents were happy as the devil when I showed troublemaking tendencies at an early age. They knew there'd be a lucrative outlet for this when I grew up. They saw to it that I was channeled in the right directions all through school -- special classes in Applied Destruction, Advanced Irritation, Anger I and II... only the best teachers." "You're suggesting the Bureau's an outlet for society's regular crop of troublemakers?" "Isn't that obvious? And troublemakers naturally call for the services of troubleshooters. That's an outlet for do-gooders. You've a check and balance system serving society." McKie waited, watching the Pan-Spechi, wondering if his answers had gone far enough. "I speak as a Tax Watcher, you understand?" Bolin asked. "I understand." "The public pays for this Bureau. In essence, the public is paying people to cause trouble." "Isn't that what we do when we hire police, tax investigators and the like?" McKie asked. A look of gloating satisfaction came over Bolin's face. "But these agencies operate for the greater good of humanity!" he said. "Before he begins training," McKie said, and his voice took on a solemn, lecturing tone, "the potential saboteur is shown the entire sordid record of history. The do-gooders succeeded once... long ago. They eliminated virtually all red tape from government. This great machine with its power over human lives slipped into high speed. It moved faster and faster." McKie's voice grew louder. "Laws were conceived and passed in the same hour! Appropriations came and were gone in a fortnight. New bureaus flashed into existence for the most insubstantial reasons." McKie took a deep breath, realizing he'd put sincere emotional weight behind his words. "Fascinating," Bolin said. "Efficient government, eh?" "Efficient?" McKie's voice was filled with outrage. "It was like a great wheel thrown suddenly out of balance! The whole structure of government was in imminent danger of fragmenting before a handful of people, wise with hindsight, used measures of desperation and started what was called the Sabotage Corps." "Ahhh, yes, I've heard about the Corps' violence." He's needling me, McKie thought, but found that honest anger helped now. "All right, there was bloodshed and terrible destruction at the beginning," he said. "But the big wheels were slowed. Government developed a controllable speed." "Sabotage," Bolin sneered. "In lieu of red tape." I needed that reminder, McKie thought. "No task too small for Sabotage, no task too large," McKie said. "We keep the wheel turning slowly and smoothly. Some anonymous Corpsman put it into words a long time ago: 'When in doubt, delay the big ones and speed the little ones.' " ' ' Watchers were a 'big one' or a 'little one'?" Bolin asked, his voice mild. "Big one," McKie said and waited for Bolin to pounce. But the Pan-Spechi appeared amused. "An unhappy answer." "As it says in the Constitution," McKie said. " 'The pursuit of unhappiness is an inalienable right of all humans.' " "Trouble is as trouble does," Bolin said and clapped his hands. Two Pan-Spechi in the uniforms of system police came through the creme de menthe emerald door. "You heard?" Bolin asked. "We heard," one of the police said. '"Was he defending his bureau?" Bolin asked. "He was," the policeman said. "You've seen the court order," Bolin said. "It pains me because Ser McKie accepted the hospitality of my house, but he must be held incommunicado until he's needed in court. He's to be treated kindly, you understand?" Is he really bent on destroying the Bureau? McKie asked himself in sudden consternation. Do I have it figured wrong? "You contend my words were sabotage?" McKie asked. "Clearly an attempt to sway the chief officer of the Tax Watchers from his avowed duties," Bolin said. He stood, bowed. McKie lifted himself out of the chairdog, assumed an air of confidence he did not feel. He clasped his thick-fingered hands together and bowed low, a grandfather toad rising from the deep to give his benediction. "In the words of the ancient proverb," he said, " 'The righteous man lives deep within a cavern and the sky appears to him as nothing but a small round hole.' " Wrapping himself in dignity, McKie allowed the police to escort him from the room. Behind him, Bolin gave voice to puzzlement: "Now, what did he mean by that?" Ill # # T Y ear ye! Hear ye! System High Court, First Bench, Central Sector, is now in session!" The robo-clerk darted back and forth across the cleared lift dais of the courtarena, its metal curves glittering in the morning light that poured down through the domed weather cover. Its voice, designed to fit precisely into the great circular room, penetrated to the farthest walls: "All persons having petitions before this court draw near!" The silvery half globe carrying First Magistrate Edwin Dooley glided through an aperture behind the lift dais and was raised to an appropriate height. His white sword of justice lay diagonally across the bench in front of him. Dooley himself sat in dignified silence while the roboclerk finished its stentorian announcement and rolled to a stop just beyond the lift field. Judge Dooley was a tall, black browed man who affected the ancient look with ebon robes over white linen. He was noted for decisions of classic penetration. He sat now with his face held in rigid immobility to conceal his anger and disquiet. Why had they put him in this hot spot? Because he'd granted the Tax Watchers' injunction? No matter how he ruled now, the result likely would be uproar. Even President Hindley was watching this one through one of the hotline projectors. The President had called shortly before this session. It had been Phil and Ed all through the conversation, but the intent remained clear. The Administration was concerned about this case. Vital legislation pended; votes were needed. Neither the budget nor the Bureau of Sabotage had entered their conversation, but the President had made his point -- don't compromise the Bureau but save that Tax Watcher support for the Administration! "Clerk, the roster," Judge Dooley said. And he thought: They'll get judgment according to strict interpretation of the law! Let them argue with that! The robo-clerk's reelslate buzzed. Words appeared on the repeater in front of the judge as the clerk's voice announced: "The People versus Clifton Watt, Jorj X. McKie and the Bureau of Sabotage." Dooley looked down into the courtarena, noting the group seated at the black oblong table in the Defense ring on his left: a sour-faced Watt with his rainbow horror of Medusa head, McKie's fat features composed in the look of someone trying not to snicker at a sly joke -- the two defendants flanking their attorney, Pander Oulson, the Bureau of Sabotage's chief counsel. Oulson was a great thug of a figure in defense white with glistening eyes under beetle brows and a face fashioned mostly of scars. At the Prosecution table on the right sat Prosecutor Holjance Vohnbrook, a tall scarecrow of a man dressed in conviction red. Gray hair topped a stern face as grim and forbidding as a latter day Cotton Mather. Beside him sat a frightened appearing young aide and Panthor Bolin, the PanSpechi complaintant, his multifaceted eyes hidden beneath veined lids. "Are we joined for trial?" Dooley asked. Both Oulson and Vohnbrook arose, nodded. "If the court pleases," Vohnbrook rumbled, "I would like to remind the Bureau of Sabotage personnel present that this court is exempt from their ministrations." "If the prosecutor trips over his own feet," Oulson said, "I assure him it will be his own clumsiness and no act of mine nor of my colleagues." Vohnbrook's face darkened with a rush of blood. "It's well known how you..." A great drumming boomed through the courtarena as Dooley touched the handle of his sword of office. The sound drowned the prosecutor's words. When silence was restored, Dooley said : "This court will tolerate no displays of personality. I wish that understood at the outset." Oulson smiled, a look like a grimace in his scarred face. "I apologize, Your Honor," he said. Dooley sank back into his chair, noting the gleam in Oulson's eyes. It occurred to Dooley then that the defense attorney, sabotage-trained, could have brought on the prosecutor's attack to gain the court's sympathy. "The char-ge is outlaw sabotage in violation of this court's injunction," Dooley said. "I understand that opening statements have been waived by both sides, the public having been admitted to causae in this matter by appropriate postings?" "So recorded," intoned the roboclerk. Oulson leaned forward against the defense table, said: "Your Honor, defendant Jorj X. McKie has not accepted me as counsel and wishes to argue for separate trial. I am here now representing only the Bureau and Clinton Watt." "Who is appearing for defendant McKie?" the judge asked. McKie, feeling like a man leaping over a precipice, got to his feet, said: "I wish to represent myself, Your Honor." "You should be cautioned against this course," Dooley said. "Ser Oulson has advised me I have a fool for a client," McKie said. "But in common with most Bureau agents, I have legal training. I've been admitted to the System Bar and have practiced under such codes as the Gowachin where the double-negative innocence requirement must be satisfied before bringing crim,# inal accusation against the prosecutor and proceeding backward the premise that... "This is not Gowacliin," Judge Dooley said. "May I remind the Court," Vohnbrook said, "that defendant McKie is a saboteur extraordinary. This goes beyond questions of champerty. Every utterance this man... "The law's the same for official saboteurs as it is for others in respect to the issue at hand," Oulson said. "Gentlemen!" the judge said. "If you please? I will decide law in this court." He waited through a long moment of silence. "The behavior of all parties in this matter is receiving my most careful attention." McKie forced himself to radiate calm good humor. VtTatt, whose profound knowl' ' edge of the saboteur extraordinary made this pose a danger signal, tugged violently at the sleeve of defense attorney Oulson. Oulson waved him away. Watt glowered at McKie. "If the court permits," McKie said, "a joint defense on the present charge would appear to violate... "The court is well aware that this case was bound over on the basis of deposa summation through a ruling by a robolegum," Dooley said. "I warn both defense and prosecution, however, that I make my own decisions in such matters. Law and robo-legum are both human constructions and require human interpretation. And I will add that, as far as I'm concerned, in all conflicts between human agencies and machine agencies the human agencies are paramount." "Is this a hearing or a trial?" McKie asked. "We will proceed as in trial, subject to the evidence as presented." McKie rested his palms on the edge of the defense table, studying the judge. The saboteur felt a surge of misgiving. Dooley was a no-nonsense customer. He had left himself a wide avenue within the indictment. And this was a case that went far beyond immediate danger to the Bureau of Sabotage. Far-reaching precedents could be set here this day  -- or disaster could strike. Ignoring instincts of self preservation, McKie wondered if he dared try sabotage within the confines of the court. "The robo-legum indictment requires joint defense," McKie said. "I admit sabotage against Ser Clinton Watt, but remind the court of Paragraph Four, section ninety-one, of the Semantic Revision to the Constitution, wherein the Secretary of Sabotage is exempted from all immunities. I move to quash the indictment as it regards myself. I was at the time a legal officer of the Bureau required by my duties to test the abilities of my superior." Vohnbrook scowled at McKie. "Mmmm," Dooley said. He saw that the prosecutor had detected where McKie's logic must lead. If McKie were legally dismissed from the Bureau at the time of his conversation with the Pan-Spechi, the prosecution's case might fall through. "Does the prosecutor wish to seek a conspiracy indictment?" Dooley asked. For the first time since entering the courtarena, defense attorney Oulson appeared agitated. He bent his scarred features close to Watt's gorgon head, conferred in whispers with the defendant. Oulson's face grew darker and darker as he whispered. Watt's gorgon tendrils writhed in agitation. "We don't seek a conspiracy indictment at this time," Vohnbrook said. "However, we would "Your Honor!" Oulson said, surging to his feet. "Defense must protest separation of indictments at this time. It's our contention that... "Court cautions both counsel in this matter that this is not a Gowachin jurisdiction," Dooley said in an angry voice. "We don't have to convict the defender and exonerate the prosecutor before trying a case! However, if either of you would wish a change of venue... Vohnbrook, a smug expression on his lean face, bowed to the judge. "Your Honor," he said, "we wish at this time to request removal of defendant McKie from the indictment and ask that, he be held as a prosecution witness." t C'lbjection!" Oulson shouted. "Prosecution well knows it cannot hold a key witness under trumped up... "Overruled," Dooley said. "Exception!" "Noted." Dooley waited as Oulson sank into his chair. This is a day to remember , the judge thought. Sabotage itself outfoxed! Then he noted the glint of sly humor in the eyes of saboteur extraordinary McKie, realizing with an abrupt sense of caution that McKie, too, had maneuvered for this position. "Prosecution may call its first witness," the judge said, and he punched a code signal that sent a robo-aide to escort McKie away from the defense table and into a holding box. A look of almost-pleasure came over prosecutor Vohnbrook's cadaverous face. He rubbed one of his downdrooping eyelids, said: "Call Panthor Bolin." The Achusian capitalist got to his feet, strode to the witness ring. The robo-clerk's screen flashed for the record: "Panthor Bolin of Achus IV, certified witness in case A#BD i ,gGY#R( ) "The oath of sincerity having been administered, Panthor Bolin is prepared for testifying," the robo-clerk recited. "Panthor Bolin, are you chief officer of the civil organization known as the Tax Watchers?" Vohnbrook asked. "I... ah... y-yes," Bolin faltered. He passed a large blue handkerchief across his forehead, staring sharply at McKie. He just now realizes what it is I must do, McKie thought. "I show you this recording from the robo-legum indictment proceedings," Vohnbrook said. "It is certified by System police as being a conversation between yourself and Jorj X. McKie in which..." "Your Honor!" Oulson objected. "Both witnesses to this alleged conversation are present in this courtarena. There are more direct ways to bring out any pertinent information from this matter. Further, since the clear threat of a conspiracy charge remains in this case, I object to introducing this recording as forcing a man to testify against himself." "Ser McKie is no longer on trial here and Ser Oulson is not McKie's attorney of record," Vohnbrook gloated. "The objection does, however, have some merit," Dooley said. He looked at McKie seated in the holding box. "There's nothing shameful about that conversation with Ser Bolin," McKie said. "I've no objection to introducing this record of the conversation." Bolin rose up on his toes, made as though to speak, sank back. Now he is certain, McKie thought. "Then I will admit this record subject to judicial deletions," Dooley said. Clinton Watt, seated at the defense table, buried his gorgon head in his arms. Vohnbrook, a death's-head grin on his long face, said: "Ser Bolin, I show you this recording. Now, in this conversation, was Sabotage Agent McKie subjected to any form of coercion?" "Objection!" Oulson roared, surging to his feet. His scarred face was a scowling mask. "At the time of this alleged recording, Ser McKie was not an agent of the Bureau!" He looked at Vohnbrook. "Defense objects to the prosecutor's obvious effort to link Ser McKie with..." "Alleged conversation!" Vohnbrook snarled. "Ser McKie himself admits the exchange!" Tn a weary voice, Dooley said: "Objection sustained. Unless tangible evidence of conspiracy is introduced here, references to Ser McKie as an agent of Sabotage will not be admitted here." "But, Your Honor," Vohnbrook protested, "Ser McKie's own actions preclude any other interpretation!" "I've ruled on this point," Dooley said "Proceed." McKie got to his feet in the holding box, said: "Would Your Honor permit me to act as a friend of the Court here?" Dooley leaned back, hand on chin, turning the question over in his mind. A general feeling of uneasiness about the case was increasing in him and he couldn't pinpoint it. McKie's every action appeared suspect. Dooley reminded himself that the saboteur extraordinary was notorious for sly plots, for devious and convoluted schemes of the wildest and most improbable inversions -- like onion layers in a five dimensional klein-shape. The man's success in practicing under the Gowachin legal code could be understood. "You may explain what you have in mind," Dooley said, "but I'm not yet ready to admit your statements into the record." "The Bureau of Sabotage's own Code would clarify matters," McKie said, realizing that these words burned his bridges behind him. "My action in successfully sabotaging acting Secretary Watt is a matter of record." McKie pointed to the gorgon mass visible as Watt lifted his head and glared across the room. "Acting Secretary?" the judge asked. "So it must be presumed," McKie said. "Under the Bureau's Code, once the Secretary is sabotaged he... "Your Honor!" Oulson shouted. "We are in danger of breach of security here! I understand these proceedings are being broadcast!" "As Director-in-Limbo of the Bureau of Sabotage, I will decide what is a breach of security and what isn't!" McKie snapped. Watt returned his head to his arms, groaned. Oulson sputtered. Dooley stared at McKie in shock. Vohnbrook broke the spell. The prosecutor said: "Your Honor, this man has not been sworn to sincerity. I suggest we excuse Ser Bolin for the time being and have Ser McKie continue his explanation under oath." Dooley took a deep breath, said: "Does defense have any questions of Ser Bolin at this time?" "Not at this time," Oulson muttered. "I presume he's subject to recall?" "He is," Dooley said, turning to McKie. "Take the witness ring, Ser McKie." IV IQolin, moving like a sleepwalker, stepped out of the ring, returned to the prosecution table. The Pan-Spechi's multifaceted eyes reflected an odd glitter, moving with a trapped sense of evasiveness. McKie entered the ring, took the oath and faced Vohnbrook, composing his features in a look of purposeful decisiveness that he knew his actions must reflect. "You called yourself Directorin-Limbo of the Bureau of Sabotage," Vohnbrook said. "Would you explain that, please?" Before McKie could answer, Watt lifted his head from his arms, growled: "You traitor, McKie!" Dooley grabbed the pommel of his sword of justice to indicate an absolute position and barked: "I will tolerate no outbursts in my court!" Oulson put a hand on Watt's shoulder. Both of them glared at McKie. The medusa tendrils of Watt's head writhed as they ranged through the rainbow spectrum. "I caution the witness," Dooley said, "that his remarks would appear to admit a conspiracy. Anything he says now may be used against him." "No conspiracy, Your Honor," McKie said. He faced Vohnbroolc, but appeared to be addressing Watt. "Over the centuries, the function of Sabotage in the government has grown more and more open, but certain aspects of changing the guard, so to speak, have been held as a highly placed secret. The rule is that if a man can protect himself from sabotage he's fit to boss Sabotage. Once sabotaged, however, the Bureau's Secretary must resign and submit his position to the President and the full Cabinet." "He's out?" Dooley asked. "Not necessarily," McKie said. "If the act of sabotage against the Secretary is profound enough, subtle enough, carries enough far reaching effects, the Secretary is replaced by the successful saboteur. He is, indeed, out." "Then it's now up to the President and the Cabinet to decide between Ser Watt and yourself, is that what you're saying?" Dooley asked. "Me?" McKie asked. "No, I'm Director-in-Limbo because I accomplished a successful act of sabotage against Ser Watt and because I happen to be senior saboteur extraordinary on duty." "But it's alleged that you were fired," Vohnbrook objected. "A formality," McKie said. "It's customary to fire the saboteur who's successful in such an effort. This makes him eligible for appointment as Secretary if he so aspires. However, I have no such ambition at this time." W att jerked upright, staring at McKie. McKie ran a finger around his collar, realizing the physical peril he was about to face. A glance at the Pan-Spechi confirmed the feeling. Panthor Bolin was holding himself in check by a visible effort. "This is all very interesting," Vohnbrook sneered, "but how can it possibly have any bearing on the present action? The charge here is outlaw sabotage against the Tax Watchers represented by the person of Ser Panthor Bolin. If Ser McKie..." "If the distinguished Prosecutor will permit me," McKie said, "I believe I can set his fears at rest. It should be obvious to -- " "There's conspiracy here!" Vohnbrook shouted. "What about the... A loud pounding interrupted him as Judge Dooley lifted his the room. When silence had been  restored, the judge lowered his sword, replaced it firmly on the ledge in front of him. Dooley took a moment to calm himself. He sensed now the delicate political edge he walked and thanked his stars that he had left the door open to rule tha' the present session was a hearing. "We will now proceed in an orderly fashion," Dooley said. "That's one of the things courts are for, you know." He took a deep breath. "Now, there are several people present whose dedication to the maintenance of law and order should be beyond question I'd think that among those we should number Ser Prosecutor Vohnbrook; the distinguished defense counsel, Ser Oulson: Ser Bolin, whose race is noted for its reasonableness and humanity; and the distinguished representatives of the Bureau of Sabotage, whose actions may at times annoy and anger us, but who are, we know, consecrated to the principle of strengthening us and exposing our inner resources." This judge missed his calling, McKie thought. With speeches like that, he could get into the Legislative branch. Abashed, Vohnbrook sank back into his chair. "Now," the judge said, "unless I'm mistaken, Ser McKie has referred to two acts of sabotage." Dooley glanced down at McKie. "Ser McKie?" "So it would appear, Your Honor," McKie said, hoping he read the judge's present attitude correctly. "However, this court may be in a unique position to rule on that very question. You see, Your Honor, the alleged act of sabotage to which I refer was initiated by a Pan-Spechi agent of the Bureau. Now, though, the secondary benefits of that action appear to be sought after by a creche mate of that agent, whose..." "You dare suggest that I'm not the holder of my cell's ego?" Bolin demanded. Without knowing quite where it was or what it was, McKie was aware that a weapon had been trained on him by the PanSpechi. References in their culture to the weapon for defense of the ego were clear enough. "I make no such suggestion," McKie said, speaking hastily and with as much sincerity as he could put into his voice. "But surely you cannot have misinterpreted the terranic-human culture so much that you do not know what will happen now." XI Tamed by some instinct, the '  judge and other spectators to this interchange remained silent. Bolin appeared to be trembling in every cell of his body. "I am distressed," he muttered. "If there were a way to achieve the necessary rapport and avoid that distress I would have taken it," McKie said. "Can you see another way?" Still trembling, Bolin said: "I must do what I must do." In a low voice, Dooley said: "Ser McKie, just what is going on here?" "Two cultures are, at last, attempting to understand each other," McKie said. "We've lived together in apparent understanding for centuries, but appearances can be deceptive." Oulson started to rise, was pulled back by Watt. And McKie noted that his former Bureau chief had assessed the peril here. It was a point in Watt's favor. "You understand, Ser Bolin," McKie said, watching the PanSpechi carefully, "that these things must be brought into the open and discussed carefully before a decision can be reached in this court. It's a rule of law to which you've submitted. I'm inclined to favor your bid for the Secretariat, but my own decision awaits the outcome of this hearing." "What things must be discussed?" Dooley demanded. "And what gives you the right, Ser McKie, to call this a hearing?" "A figure of speech," McKie said, but he kept his attention on the Pan-Spechi, wondering what the terrible weapon was that the race used in defense of its egos. "What do you say, Ser Bolin?" "You protect the sanctity of your home life," Bolin said. "Do you deny me the same right?" "Sanctity, not secrecy," McKie said. Dooley looked from McKie to Bolin, noted the compressedspring look of the Pan-Spechi, the way he kept a hand hidden in a jacket pocket. It occurred to the judge then that the PanSpechi might have a weapon ready to use against others in this court. Bolin had that look about him. Dooley hesitated on the point of calling guards, reviewed what he knew of the Pan-Spechi. He decided not to cause a crisis. The Pan-Spechi were admitted to the concourse of humanity, good friends but terrible enemies, and there were always those allusions to their hidden powers, to their ego jealousies, to the fierceness with which they defended the secrecy of their creches. Slowly, Bolin overcame the trembling. "Say what you feel you must," he growled. j TcKie said a silent prayer ofhope that the Pan-Spechi could control his reflexes, addressed himself to the nexus of pickups on the far wall that was recording this courtarena scene for broadcast to the entire universe. "A Pan-Spechi who took the name of Napoleon Bildoon was one of the leading agents in the Bureau of Sabotage," McKie said. "Agent Bildoon dropped from sight at the time Panthor Bolin took over as chief of the Tax Watchers. It's highly probable that the Tax Watcher organization is an elaborate and subtle sabotage of the Bureau of Sabotage itself, a move originated by Bildoon." "There is no such person as Bildoon!" Bolin cried. "Ser McKie," Judge Dooley said, "would you care to continue this interchange in the privacy of my chambers?" The judge stared down at the saboteur, trying to appear kindly but firm. "Your Honor," McKie said, "may we, out of respect for a fellow human, leave that decision to Ser Bolin?" Bolin turned his multi-faceted eyes toward the bench, spoke in a low voice: "If the court please, it were best this were done openly." He jerked his hand from his pocket. It came out empty. He leaned across the table, gripped the far edge. "Continue, if you please, Ser." McKie swallowed, momentarily overcome with admiration for the Pan-Spechi. "It will be a distinct pleasure to serve under you, Ser Bolin," McKie said. "Do what you must!" Bolin rasped. McKie looked from the wonderment in the faces of Watt and the attorneys up to the questioning eyes of Judge Dooley. "In Pan-Spechi parlance, there is no person called Bildoon. But there was such a person, a group mate of Ser Bolin. I hope you notice the similarity in the names they chose for themselves?" "Ah... yes," Dooley said. "I'm afraid I've been somewhat of a nosey Parker, a peeping Tom and several other categories of snoop where the PanSpechi are concerned," McKie said. "But it was because I suspected the act of sabotage to which I've referred here. The Tax Watchers revealed too much inside knowledge of the Bureau of Sabotage." "I... ah... am not quite sure I understand you," Dooley said "The best kept secret in the universe, the Pan-Spechi cyclic change of gender and identity, is no longer a secret where I'm concerned," McKie said. He swallowed as he saw Bolin's fingers go white where they tightly gripped the prosecution table. "It relates to the issue at hand?" Dooley asked. "Most definitely, Your Honor," McKie said. "You see, the Pan-Spechi have a unique gland that controls mentation, dominance, the relationship between reason and instinct. The five group mates are, in reality, one person. I wish to make that clear for reasons of legal necessity." "Legal necessity?" Dooley asked. He glanced down at the obviously distressed Bolin, back to McKie. "The gland, when it's functioning, confers ego dominance on the Pan-Spechi in whom it functions. But it functions for a time that's definitely limited -- twenty-five to thirty years." McKie looked at Bolin. Again, the Pan-Spechi was trembling. "Please understand, Ser Bolin," he said, "that I do this out of necessity and that this is not an act of sabotage." B olin lifted his face toward McKie. The Pan-Spechi's features appeared contorted in grief. "Get it over with, man!" he rasped. "Yes," McKie said, turning back to the judge's puzzled face. "Ego transfer in the PanSpechi, Your Honor, involves a transfer of what may be termed basic experience learning. It's accomplished through physical contractor when the ego holder dies, no matter how far he may be separated from the creche, this seems to fire up the eldest of the creche triplets. The egosingle also bequeaths a verbal legacy to his mate whenever possible -- and that's most of the time. Specifically, it's this time." Dooley leaned back. He was beginning to see the legal question McKie's account had posed. "The act of sabotage which might make a Pan-Spechi eligible for appointment as Secretary of the Bureau of Sabotage was initiated by a... ah... cell mate of the Ser Bolin in court today, is that it?" Dooley asked. McKie wiped his brow. "Correct, Your Honor." "But that cell mate is no longer the ego dominant, eh?" "Quite right, Your Honor." "The... ah... former ego holder, this... ah... Bildoon, is no longer eligible?" "Bildoon, or what was once Bildoon, is a creature operating solely on instinct now, Your Honor," McKie said. "Capable of acting as creche nurse for a another destiny I'd rather not explain." "I see." Dooley looked at the weather cover of the court arena. He was beginning to see what McKie had risked here. "And you favor this, ah, Ser Bolin's bid for the Secretariat?" Dooley asked. "If President Hindley and the Cabinet follow the recommendation of the Bureau's senior agents, the procedure always followed in the past, Ser Bolin will be the new Secretary," McKie said. "I favor this." "Why?" Dooley asked. "Because of this unique roving ego, the Pan-Spechi have a more communal attitude toward fellow sentients than do most other species admitted to the concourse of humanity," McKie said. "This translates as a sense of responsibility toward all life. They're not necessarily maudlin about it. They oppose where it's necessary to build strength. Their creche life demonstrates several clear examples of this which I'd prefer not to describe." "I see," Dooley said, but he had to admit to himself that he did not. McKie's allusions to unspeakable practices were beginning to annoy him. "And you feel that this Bildoon-Bolin act of sabotage qualifies him, provided this court rules they are one and the same person?" "We're not the same person!" Bolin cried. "You don't dare say I'm that... that shambling, clinging..." "Easy," McKie said. "Ser Bolin, I'm sure you see the need for this legal fiction." "Legal fiction," Bolin said as though clinging to the words. The multi-faceted eyes glared across the courtarena at McKie. "Thank you for the verbal nicety, McKie." "You've not answered my question, Ser McKie," Dooley said, ignoring the exchange with Bolin. "Sabotaging Ser Wft through an attack on the entire Bureau contains sublety and finesse never before achieved in such an effort," McKie said. "The entire Bureau will be strengthened by it." McKie glanced at Watt. The acting Secretary's medusa tangle had ceased its writhing. He was staring at Bolin with a speculative look in his eyes. Sensing the quiet in the courtarena, he glanced up at McKie. "Don't you agree. Ser Watt?" McKie asked. "Oh, yes. Quite," Watt said. The note of sincerity in Watt's voice startled the judge. For the first time, he wondered at the dedication which these men brought to their jobs. "Sabotage is a very sensitive Bureau," Dooley said. "I've some serious reservations -- " "If Your Honor please," McKie said, "forbearance is one of the chief attributes a saboteur can bring to his duties. Now, I wish you to understand what our Pan-Spechi friend has done here this day. Let us suppose that I had spied upon the most intimate moments between you, Judge, and your wife, and that I reported them in detail here in open court with half the universe looking on. Let us suppose further that you had the strictest moral code against such discussions with outsiders. Let us suppose that I made these disclosures in the basest terms with every four-letter word at my command. Let us suppose that you were armed, traditionally, with a deadly weapon to strike at such blasphemers, such -- " "Filth!" Bolin grated. "Yes," McKie said. "Filth. Do you suppose, Your Honor, that you could have stood by with"God heavens!" Dooley said. V CtOer Bolin," McKie said, "I  offer you and all your race my most humble apologies." "I'd hoped once to undergo the ordeal in the privacy of a judge's chambers with as few outsiders as possible," Bolin said. "But once you were started in open court..." "It had to be this way," McKie said. "If we'd done it in private, people would've come to be suspicious about a PanSpechi in control of..." "People?" Bolin asked. "Non Pan-Spechi," McKie said. "It'd have been a barrier between our species. "And we've been strengthened by all this," McKie said. "Those provisions of the Constitution that provide the people with a slowly moving government have been demonstrated anew. We've admitted the public to the inner workings of Sabotage, shown them the valuable character of the man who'll be the new Secretary." "I've not yet ruled on the critical issue here," Dooley said. "But Your Honor!" McKie said. "With all due respect to you as a saboteur extraordinary, Ser McKie," Dooley said, "I'll make my decision on evidence gathered under my direction." He looked at Bolin. "Ser Bolin, would you permit an agent of this court to gather such evidence as will allow me to render verdict without fear of harming my own species?" "We're humans together," Bolin growled. "But terranic humans hold the balance of power," Dooley said. "I owe allegiance to law, yes, but my terranic fellows depend on me, too. I have a... "You wish your own agents to determine if Ser McKie has told the truth about us?" "Ah... yes," Dooley said. Bolin looked at McKie. "Ser McKie, it is I who apologize to you. I had not realized how deeply xenophobia penetrated your fellows." "Because," McKie said, "outside of your natural modesty, you have no such fear. I suspect you know the phenomenon only through reading of us." "But all strangers are potential sharers of identity," Bolin said. "Ah, well." "If you're through with your little chat," Dooley said, "would you care to answer my question, Ser Bolin? This is still I hope, a court of law." "Tell me, Your Honor," Bolin said, "would you permit me to witness the tenderest intimacies between you and your wife?" D ooley's face darkened, but he saw suddenly in all of its stark detail the extent of McKie's analogy and it was to the judge's credit that he rose to the occasion. "If it were necessary to promote understanding," he rasped, "yes!" "I believe you would," Bolin murmured. He took a deep breath. "After what I've been through here today, one more sacrifice can be borne, I guess. I grant your investigators the privilege requested, but advise that they be discreet." "It will strengthen you for the trials ahead as Secretary of the Bureau," McKie said. "The Secretary, you must bear in mind, has no immunities from sabotage whatsoever." "But," Bolin said, "the Secretary's legal orders carrying out his Constitutional functions must be obeyed by all agents." McKie nodded, seeing in the glitter of Bolin's eyes, a vista of peeping Tom assignments with endless detailed reports to the Secretary of Sabotage -- at least until the fellow's curiosity had been satisfied and his need for revenge satiated. But the others in the courtroom, not having McKie's insight, merely wondered at the question: What did he really mean by that? What's the Maine of That Town? Poor liftle computer! It couldn't remember what it most wanted to know... and neither could anyone else ! # # TT piktistes tells me that you are onto something big, Mr. Smirnov," Valery said, turning to her companion. "Epikt has the loudest mouth of any machine I was ever associated with," Gregory Smirnov growled. "I never saw one that could keep a secret. But this one goes to extremes. Actually, we don't have a thing. We're just fiddling around with an unborn idea." "How about it, Epikt?" Valery asked. "Big, real big," the machine issued. "What are you doing now, Epikt?" Valery wanted to know. "Talk to me, dammit! I'm the man, he's the machine," Smirnov cut in. "He's chewing encyclopedias and other references. It's all he ever does." "I thought he went through them all long ago." "Certainly, dozens of times. He has all the data that can be fed into a machine, and every day we shovel in bales of the new stuff. But he's chewing it now for a very different purpose." "What different purpose, Mr. Smirnov?" "It's difficult to say because I haven't as yet been able to state it to him. We're trying to set a problem where it seems there ought to be one -- and then answer it. We may find the answer before the question. At first, he rejected my request, later he accepted it -- ironically. I doubt that he's sincere now. He can be quite a clown, as you should well know." "I know that you two are onto something good," Valery said. "The more you deny it, the more I'm sure of it. Tell me the truth, Epikt." "Big, real big," Epiktistes issued to Valery. "Valery," said Smirnov. "You're a woman and you might be inclined to say something about this to the other Institute people. Please don't. We don't have anything yet and it makes me nervous to have hot little people breathing down my neck." "I won't say a word," Valery swore with grave insincerity. She winked at the machine, and Epikt winked back at her with three tiers of eyes. Valery Mok and Epiktistes had a thing going with each other. X Talery was nearly as bad as a  machine at not being able to keep a secret. She had the whole Institute staff excited about what Smirnov and Epiktistes were working on. The staff consisted of Charles Cogsworth, her own over-shadowed husband, Glasser the stiff-necked inventor of the E.P. Locator and Aloysius Shiplap the seminal genius. They were all after Smirnov and his machine the next day. "We've been together on every project," Glasser said. "Valery tells us that the problem hasn't been properly formulated, and that Epikt has only accepted it ironically. We're pretty good at formulating problems, Gregory, and a little sterner than you, when it comes to dealing with clownish machines." "All right, this is the way it is, Glasser," Smirnov said reluctantly. "My first statement was, we should seek to discover something not known to exist, by a close study of the absence of evidence. When I put the problem to Epiktistes in this generalized form he just laughed at me." "That would have been my first impulse too, Smirnov," said Shiplap. "Don't you have a better idea of what you're looking for?" "Shiplap, I had the feeling of trying to remember something that I'd been compelled to forget. My second statement wasn't much better. 'Let us see,' I said to Epikt, 'if we cannot reconstruct something of which even the idea has been completely eradicated, let's see if we can't find it by considering the excessive evidence that it was never there.' In this form, Epikt accepted it. Or else he decided to go along with me for the gag. I'm never quite sure how this clanking machine takes things." "Well, no hole can be filled up perfectly," said Cogsworth. "There will either be too much or too little of whatever is being used as the filler, or it will be of a different texture. The difficulty is that you didn't give Epikt any clues. There will be a pressed that will show an irregularity of fill. How will Epikt know which of them is the one that you are somehow trying to remember?" "Item. The buried thing will have a buried tie with my boss man Smirnov," Epiktistes, the machine, issued. "Yes, of course," said Glasser. "Has Epikt turned up anything?" "Only a bushelful of things that seem to mean nothing," said Smirnov sadly. "Item. Why in Hungarian dictionary-encyclopedias of a certain period, is there padding between the words Sik and Sikamlos?" Epiktistes asked. "I follow your thought, Epikt," Glasser agreed. "That could be a clue to something. If the idea and the name of something were expunged from every reference, then, in all original editions, other subjects on the same page would have to be padded slightly or another subhurried, and therefore of an inferior quality. So, who knows a word that is no longer used and that comes between Sik and Sikamlos? If we knew the word would we know what it meant? And would it help us if we did?" tcTtem. Why is the young of a bear now referred to as a pup when once it may have been known as a cube?" Epikt issued. "I've never heard the young of a bear referred to as a cube," Shiplap protested. "Epikt has come on that by our omission-appraisal method," Smirnov explained. "There is probably an imperfect erasure working. I believe that cube is a distortion of a word that has somehow been forced out of folk memory. Epikt has this clue from a ballad which I believe is far removed from the main suppression or it would not have survived in even this distorted form." "Item. Why is the awkward word Coronal used for the simple doubling or return of a rope? Why is not a simpler word used?" Bpikt asked. "Has Epikt considered that seamen have always used odd terms and that landsmen often adopt them?" Cogsworth asked. "Naturally -- Epikt always considers everything," Smirnov answered. "He has thousands of these items now, and he believes that he will be able to put them into a pattern." "Item. Why is there a great hiatus in period jazz. It's as though a great hunk of it had been yanked out by the roots, in the words of one Benny B-Flat." "Smirnov, I know that your machine has unusual talents," said Glasser, "but if he can tie these things together he's a concatenated genius." "Or a cantankerous clown," Smirnov said. "I know that he has to have some emotional release from the stress of his work, but he often overdoes it with humor and drollery." "Item. Why is reference to the Amerindian peace-pipe avoided as though some obscenity were attached to it, and none is discoverable?" "That's a new one while we're standing here," said Smirnov. "He's accumulating quite a few of them." "Item. Why is -- ?" Epikt started. "Oh, shut up and get back to work," Smirnov ordered his machine. "Let's leave him with it until tomorrow, folks. It may begin to pull together by then," said Smirnov, stalking off. "Going to be real big," Epiktistes issued to them after his boss man had left. "Boys and girls, it's going to be real big." The next day they combined the meeting around the machine with a party for Shiplap. Aloysius Shiplap had grown -- for the first time ever, anywhere -- left-handed grass. It was not called that because it whorled to the left, but because the organic constitutents of it were reversed in their construction. Left-handed minerals had been constructed long since, and perhaps they also occurred in nature. Lefthanded bacteria and broths were long known, but nobody else had ever grown anything as complex as left-handed grass. "In everything, its effect is reversed," Shiplap explained. "Cattle pastured on this would lose rather than gain weight. If there ever develops a market for really skinny cattle I'll be waiting for it." They tossed off a good bit of Tosher's Gin as they got into the celebration. Tosher's is the only drink that will buzz up both humans and Ktistec machines. There is a flavoring used in Tosher's that gets machines high. The alcohol in it sometimes has a similar effect on humans. Epiktistes got as mellow as a Pottawattamie County pumpkin. Ktistec machines are like the Irish and the Indians. They start unwinding when the gin begins to flow. Their behavior could become quite wild unless carefully watched. And the Institute people were also having a good time. "I wouldn't have him any other way," said Smirnov. "When he relaxes, he relaxes all over the place. Hawkin's machine literally bites people when it's frustrated by a difficult problem. Drexel's smaller machine comes all apart throwing arc-snuffers and solenoids and is mighty dangerous to be around. There are worse sorts than the clown of a machine I have -- though he does get pretty slushy when he's in his cups." Valery Mok had gathered up a bunch of Epiktistes' utterances and slipped them into cocktail cookies. Glasser, eating one, chewed on a bit of the metallic tape. He pulled it, slithering, off his tongue, and read -- "Item. What was the mysterious name written by a deaf moron on the wall of the men's room in an institution in Vinita, Oklahoma?" Epiktistes giggled, though the item may have been serious when he issued it. Cogsworth pulled one out of his mouth, stripping the crumbs from it with his tongue as it came. "Item. Why does Petit Larousse take five lines too many to say almost nothing about the ancient Chibcha Indians of Columbia?" At this point Valery went into her high laugh that would even make the alphabet sound funny. jhiplap pulled one out of his grinning mouth, and it seemed an extension of his grin as it came. "Item," he read. "What is there about the Great Blue Island Swamp that puzzles Geologists? Or -- in the old by-lining manner -- how recent is recent?" Tosher's is giggle juice. Glasser's laughter sounded like a string of fire-crackers going off. Smirnov extracted the utterance from his cookie in the lordly manner. He read the utterance as though it were of extreme importance -- and it was. "Item. What peculiarity is almost revealed by the faded paint of old Rock Island and Pacific Railroad box-cars?" "Oh, stop giggling, Epikt, it isn't as funny as that!" "It is, it is!" bubbled Valery. Then she nearly choked bringing out from her own cookie a very long tape, and she read it with a very gay voice: "Item. Why, when the gruesome Little Willy verses were revived among sub-teen-agers in the early nineteeneighties, were they concerned almost entirely with chewing gum? In their Australian and British homelands six decades before they were concerned with everything. But here we have gruesome verses about forty-nine different flavors of gum. As for instance, Little Willy mixed his gum with bits of Baby's cerebrum and Papa's blood for Juicy Fruit. Mother said, "Or, Will, don't duit." "I'd think it would give too high a flavor to the gum," said Glasser. It's a lot of fun to open cocktail cookies and read out utterances of a Ktistec machine. The Institute staff generated a bunch of what we can only call merriment. But they were busy people, and the party had to come to an end. Epiktistes issued a verse as they prepared to leave. When the world's last Tosher's is drunken, and the world's last item has flewn, and the Institute people are stunken, and Epikt is high as the -- And there he stuck! Eight contacts he had in him, and he couldn't come up with a rime for flewn. "How many items have you really gathered, Epikt?" Glasser asked as they began to break up. lions of them." "No. Actually he has about he believes he can tie together," Smirnov explained. "I feel that he'll bring them into a pattern, but I'm afraid that it will be a facetious one." "Epikt, you cute cubicle, will you be able to give us any idea of what to look for by tomorrow?" Valery asked. "Boys and girls, I'll have it all wrapped up and on display for you tomorrow," Epiktistes issued. "I'll even be able to tell you what the thing smelled like." T? xpectation ran high among  J the people of the Institute. Epiktistes wanted to have the reporters in, but Smirnov said no. He didn't trust his machine. Epikt was a cube twenty meters on a side; and of his thousands of eyes, some of them always seemed to be laughing at his master. "It won't be a hoax?" Smirnov asked his machine apprehensively. "Boss, did I ever hoax you?" Epikt issued. "Yes." "Boss, some things are best presented in the guise of a hoax, but underneath this won't be one." It was a crooked-tongued machine sometimes, and Smirnov was more apprehensive than ever. The next day everyone gathered early to hear what Epikt had to say. They pulled up chairs and recording canisters and waited for the machine to begin. "Ladies, gentlemen, associates," said Epikt solemnly, "we are gathered together to hear of an important matter. I will present it as well as I am able. There will be disbelief, I know, but I am sure of my facts. Make yourselves comfortable." He paused and then as an afterthought added -- "You may smoke." "You clanking cubicle, don't tell us what we may do," Smirnov screamed. "You're only a machine that I made." "You and three thousand other workers," issued Epikt, without blinking an eye, "and in the final stages, the important stages, I directed my own assembly. I could not have happened otherwise. Only I know what is in me. As to my own abilities -- " "Get on with it, Epikt," Smirnov ordered, "and try to avoid the didactic manner." "Then to get to the point -- in the year #, the largest City of the American Midland was destroyed by an unnatural disaster." "That was only twenty years ago," Glasser cut in. "It seems that someone would have heard of it." "I wonder if St. Louis knew that she was destroyed," Valery ventured. "She acts as though she thought that she were still there." "St. Louis was not the City," issued Epikt. "This destruction of a metropolitan area of seven than seven seconds was a great horror from the human viewpoint -- come to think of it I now recall being a little disturbed by it myself. The thing was so fearful that it was decided to suppress the whole business and blissfully forget about it." "Wouldn't that be a little difficult?" said Aloysius Shiplap sarcastically. tTt was very difficult to do," issued Epikt, "and yet it was done, completely, within twenty hours. And from that moment until this, nobody has remembered or thought about it at all." "And if Your Whimsical Highness will just explain how this was done?" Smirnov challenged his machine. "I'll explain as well as I can, good master. The project was put in charge of a master scientist who shall be nameless -- but only for a few minutes." "How were the written references of a metropolis of seven ed Cogs worth. "By a device then newly invented by our master scientist," Epikt answered. "It was known as the Tele Pantographic Distorter. Even I from this distance of time and through the cloud of induced amnesia, cannot understand how it worked. But it did work, and it simultaneously destroyed all printed references to our subject. This left holes in the references, and the flow of matter to fill those holes was sometimes of inferior texture, as I have noted. Holographic -- that is handwritten, for you, Valery -- references were more difficult. Most were simply destroyed In more importent document., the text was flowed in automatic writing to fill the hole, and in close imitation of the original handwriting. But these imitations were often imperfect. I have a few thousand instances of this. But the TelePantographic Distorter was a truly remarkable machine, and I regret that it is now out of use." "Kindly explain what happened to this remarkable machine," said Smirnov. "Oh, it's still here in the Institute. You stumble into it a dozen times a day, good master, and you curse it as 'That Damnable Pile of Junk.' " issued Epikt. "But you have a block, that will not allow you to remember what it is." "I believe that I have been stumbling into such a pile of junk for many years," mused Smirnov. "Several times I have almost permitted myself to wonder what it was." "And you invented it. The master scientist of the memoryobliteration was yourself, Gregory Smirnov." "Hog hang it, Epikt! Your jug will leak!" protested Shiplap. "How of the human memotants of the city would have had relatives of at least an equal number elsewhere. Didn't they wonder about their mothers or children or brothers and sisters?" "They sorrowed, but they didn't wonder," issued Epikt. "It was a sorrow to which they could give no name. Examine the period and see how many really sad songs were popular in the years # and #. But broadcast euphoria soon masked it over. The human memory of the thing was blocked by induced world amnesia. This was done hypnotically over the broadcast waves, and over more subtle waves Few escaped it. The deaf moron mentioned in one of my items was one of those few. He scrawled the name of the town on a wall once, but it meant nothing to anyone." "But there would be a hunup," Glasser protested. UD aise that number several powers," issued Epikt. "There were very many loose ends, and most of them were taken care of. I gathered a million or so that remained in the process of this study, but they could not break through the induced amnesia. The door was bolted on the whole subject Then it was double-locked. It was necessary to destroy not only the memory, but also the memory of that memory. Mr. Smirnov, in what was perhaps his greatest feat, put himself under the final hypnosis against it. It was his job to pull in the hole after them all. But it bothered him more than others because he was more involved in it. After this temporary explanation it will bother him no more. This time he will forget it with a clear conscience. "He does not recognize or remember it even now. It was his intent and triumph that he never should. The city and its destruction are forgotten forever, but the method of that memoryobliteration has only been forced to a subliminal level. It will be resurrected and used again whenever there is a great unnatural disaster." "And where in tarnation or the American Midlands was this city?" Cogsworth hollered. "Its site is now known as the Great Blue Island Swamp," issued Epikt. "Finish it, you goggle-eyed gadget!" S h i p I a p shrilled. "What's the name of that town?" "Chicago," issued Epiktistes. That broke it! That tore it clear up! It was a hoax after all. That clattering clown of a cubicle had led them into it with all eyes open. Valery went into her high laughter, and her good husband Cogsworth chortled like that gooney bird with the hiccups. "Chicago! It sounds like a little zoo beaver sliding down a mud slide and hitting the water. Chicago!" It was the funniest word Valery had ever heard. "Nobody but a machine gone comic could coin a name like that," laughed Glasser with his fire-cracker laugh. "Chicago!" "I take my hat off to you, Epiktistes," said Aloysius Shiplap, "You are a cog-footed, tongue in cheek tall tale teller. People, this machine is ripe!" "I'm a little disappointed," said Smirnov. "So the mountain labored and produced a mouse. But did it have to be a wall-eyed mouse in a clown suit, Epikt? It's too tall even for a tale. That a great city could be completely destroyed only twenty years ago and we know nothing about it -- that's tall enough. But that it should have the impossible name of Chicago tops it all. If you weighed all possible sounds -- and I'm sure that you did, Epikt -- you could not come up with a more ridiculous sounding name than that." tlood people, it is meant  to be this way," issued Epiktistes. "You cannot remember it. You cannot recognize it. And when you leave this room you will not even be able to recall the funny name. You will have only the dim impression that the clownish machine played a clownish trick on you. The disasters -- for I suspect that there were several such -- are well forgotten. The world would lie down and die if it remembered them too well. "And yet there really was a large city named Chicago. As Sikago it left a hole in one Hungarian dictionary encyclopedia; and the Petit Larousse had to flow French froth about the Chibcha Indians into the place where Chicago had stood. Something, for which I find the tentative name of Chicago Hot was pulled out of the jazz complex by the roots. The Calumet River had flowed about the City somewhere, so there came a reluctance to use that name of the old Indian peace-pipe. Chicago was a great city. The heart of her downtown was known as the Loop, and one of her baseball teams was named the Cubs. For that reason those two words were forced out of use. They might be evocative." "Loop? Cubs?" giggled Valery. "Those words are almost as funny as Chicago. How do you make them up, Epikt?" "In popular capsule impression Chicago was the chewinggum capital of the world. The leader in this manufacture was a man named -- as well as I can reconstruct it Wiggly. Childdren somehow found the echos of the gruesome destruction of Chicago and tied it in with this capsule impression to produce the bloody Little Willy verses about chewing gum." "Epikt, you top yourself," said Shiplap, "if anything could top an invention as funny as Chicago." "Good people, it comes down over you like a curtain," issued Epiktistes. "You forget again -- even my joke, even the funny name of the town. And, more to the point, I forget also. "It's gone Gone. All gone. How peculiar! It is a long blank tape you all stare at as though you were under hypnosis. I must have suffered a black-out. I never issued a blank tape before. Smirnov, I have the taste in my terminals of an experiment that didn't quite come off. Feed me another. I don't fail often." tt'That is enough for today,  Epiktistes. We are all sleepy for some reason. No it didn't work out -- whatever it was. I forget what it was that we were working on. It doesn't matter. Our failures are well forgot. We'll hit on something else. We're working on a lot of things." Then they all shuffled out sleepily and went back to their work. Smirnov's machine had busted on something or other, but it was a good machine and would hit the next time, of that they were sure. In a corridor, Smirnov stumbled into his old Tele-Pantographic Distorter. He had been stumbling unseeing into it every day for twenty years. The machine rolled nine banks of eyes at Smirnov and of those disasters? Was there any deep work to be done? TelePan was ready. But no. Smirnov passed on. The machine smiled again and went peacefully back to sleep. "That damnable piece of junk," Smirnov growled, walking along and petting his sore shin. "I feel almost as if I were on the verge of wondering what If You Can Make It to the West Coast --   On Labor Day or thereabouts, drop in on the World Convention in Berkeley the I  weekend of September # , # , # and # . All your favorite writers, editors, artists,   etc. -- or at least a large-scale quorum of them, including Poul Anderson, I  Antony Boucher, Jack Vance, Frederik Pohl, Edmond Hamilton, James Blish.   Interested? Write for information to Pacificon, P.O. Box #, Fairmont Sta  tion, El Cerrito, California.   s They weren't shadows -- exactly. They also weren't human. They were, in fact, our consciences!  shadow maybe. But now and then it went off to do something or get something, and came back into some slightly different position looking like a damn fool. Maxwell saw it first on waking after a binge. During the evening's riot he had insulted his two dearest friends -- the husband saw him home anyhow -- and knocked over a baby-carriage. It had no baby in it, but Maxwell reflected it might have had, and wept. Then he was trying to pick a policeman's pocket and lamentably failing. He heard his friend explain: "Always does that, Officer. It don't mean a thing." But why would anyone go to the trouble of picking a policeman's pocket unless he meant something by it? And in the hurting morning light, the monkey sat on the foot of his bed. He threw a pillow. The pillow went through, unreasonably slowed down. You don't expect an object passing through a ghost to lose momentum. Maxwell said: "You are a semi-hallucinatory precipitation of gaseous particules, or a thing from outer space. Under either interpretation, your invasion of my domicile constitutes a tort." Maxwell was the most junior partner in the law firm of Bindle, Bindle, Bindle and Maxwell. "Get down off my bed." The monkey did so, tossed the pillow up on the covers, and resumed its earlier position. "I see," said Maxwell. "You understand speech, you manipulate material objects although they don't necessarily manipulate you, and you prefer the letter to the spirit. Please get me an aspirin." The monkey just sat there. It was black, tailless, the size of an Airedale, male. So far as Maxwell could tell it was young and healthy like himself, but probably not hung over. Maxwell reeled to the bathroom. The monkey paralleled his movements, just out of reach -- not that Maxwell felt much desire to grab. Maxwell washed down two aspirins. "Want one?" The monkey nodded, caught the tablet, and waited for Maxwell to get out of the bathroom and give him room. Maxwell removed the key and stood aside; the monkey entered; Maxwell sighed and locked him in. The monkey returned through the keyhole and settled back into its normal shape, rumpled, irritated, and larger than before. "So you were hung over," said Maxwell, getting dressed. The monkey ignored that, imitating Maxwell's motions with the shirt. Since it had no clothes of its own and showed no inclination to steal Maxwell's, this appeared an empty ritual -- shadow work. For breakfast, Maxwell tossed the monkey some actual burned toast, but wasn't about to pour any extra coffee until the brute got a cup for himself and set it down within Maxwell's reach, looking miserable. Maxwell washed up, the monkey making theoretical motions at a safe distance from the tangible sink. Phony-casual, Maxwell asked; "By the way, how would you have proceeded if that bathroom door had had no keyhole? Or, say, a Yale lock?" The monkey replied only by looking grave, which was the way he looked anyhow. A T axwell could not avoid go-L'-Mng to the office. As the most junior partner, he was expected to sweat out a serious quantity of dogwork to justify his existence in what the most senior Bindle described (often) as a situation of substantial trust. He told the monkey; "I am now about to go downstairs, out, and five stations uptown on the subway. I then walk from Lexington to Third and uptown two more blocks; elevator from main to ninth floor. Any comment?... No comment." He stepped out, quickly closing the apartment door, which had a Yale lock. A block from the subway entrance the monkey caught up with him. It had enlarged again, being now as tall as Maxwell, and was rubbing its left hip as if it might be a bit lame, and glowering. It was one of those lush and tender mornings in May when New Yorkers find it a genuine pleasure to inhale grit. Those who passed Maxwell and his associate paid the monkey no more attention than they would have given to any offbeat shadow. Faint frowns, puzzled glances. One elderly lady opened her mouth but didn't speak. Politeness, Maxwell supposed. Nobody likes to stop a stranger and say: "Excuse me, sir, you may not have noticed -- your shadow is looking more simian than you do this morning." Or perhaps the monkey knew some extra-terrestrial means of co-operating with Maxwell's wish for obscurity. Decent of him to use it, if so. Descending the subway steps, Maxwell said over his shoulder: "Sorry about all those doors." Understandably, the monkey went unnoticed in the subway crowds. At the moment of Maxwell's apology it had returned to the size of a child, and quit glowering. At the office Maxwell hung up his hat in his own small room, leaving the door open for his usual early morning contemplation of the back of Sheila Walker's neck. fiss Walker at twenty-nine JVi. was losing hope, but the back of her neck was exquisite. She did not lack other prettiness of a spaniel-eyed, wistful sort. Though a competent receptionist and secretary to all four partners, she was developing a tendency to flutter and squeak. She recognized it herself with honest dismay. She also found herself clutching her mousy hair at demoralizing sounds, such as the long angry bray of H. K. Bindle clearing his throat for speech. This uproar was no worse than T. J. Bindle's sneeze, and F. W. Bindle, while dictating, scratched his left trouser-leg with dull sonority; so Miss Walker sometimes clutched her hair at all three. Pretty, Shelia at times became beautiful, when nobody was looking at her and she was looking at the back of Maxwell's neck. The back of Maxwell's neck was not exquisite ; occasionally not even very clean. When she noticed Maxwell's monkey following him into the office that morning she felt that to speak of it would be not only tactless but -- well, difficult. She said: "Good morning, Max!" and smiled spaniel-eyed, slamming the typewriter carriage back and savoring the baritone boom of his "Yo, Sheila!" She too had gone through a bad time since waking -- had indeed thought of talking things over with a well-heeled friend of hers who was just about halfway through her third psychoanalyst. After Maxwell settled in his office, with the door open, she continued tearing away at a brief in the suit of one Jasper Baring against his grand-nephew Judson Baer for defamation of character. The said Judson Baer was alleged to have asserted loudly in a public place, to wit a bar, before six persons bearing witness, that the said Jasper Baring was not fit to carry guts to a bear. Her exquisite neck grew warmer and warmer up over the ears, and she got things all snarled up. When she could bear it no longer, Sheila flung down her eraser and bravely stepped into Maxwell's office to ask him -- flat-out, quickly, before her courage faded -- how you spell "eligible." "I keep thinking it's two es, somewhere, but it never comes out looking right!" "Mm, well, what's the context?" Maxwell asked -- not intelligently, mostly in order to keep her in the office while he made up his mind about something. "Well, it's what this old Jasper said about Jud -- no, Judson about Jasper -- wait, I'll get it, Max."  s she fluttered back to her desk, Maxwell was forced to abandon his last doubt. He was not even slightly hung over, and there were two monkeys in the room. His own, and the one standing in the doorway behind Sheila making desperate motions with imaginary papers. Maxwell's monkey seemed to be more or less off duty, perhaps because Maxwell's desk chair stood close to the wall, which cramps the style of any shadow. Maxwell's monkey was in fact deeply interested in the other one. They were about the same size -- quite a nice match, in a way. "Here it is," said Sheila, fluttering back. "You see, H. K. felt we should have like a legal translation of what this old Judson said about -- wait -- 'being then and there at the site known as' -- no, it's further on -- here: 'defendant having then and there uttered expressions including the direct statement that plaintiff was not qualified or eligible to initiate or promote or perform the conveyance or transport of eviscerated material, to wit entrails' -- oh, look how I spelled evis -- oh -- oh, damn!" "You poor kid," said Maxwell, and made it around his desk fairly fast, heedless of the flying pages of legal size. The first kiss, intended partly as a consolation job, bounced off her nose. The second, even more complexly motivated, was amateur in execution but far more advanced in concept. The monkeys too appeared to feel that at least one crisis in their own relations had been met and passed. During those five or ten minutes -- (this anyhow was the none too clear impression of both Shelia and Maxwell) -- three persons passed the office door: F. W. Bindle, who seemed to note the embrace with mixed feelings, some of them green; F. W.'s father T. J. Bindle, who leered in a manner that could hardly be interpreted to mean anything but "Nice work Max!" and the most senior H. K. Bindle, who always noted everything that happened, but never said anything unless it could be expressed in sentences of not less than two hundred and fifty words. A crisis passed usually means another one approached. A week after his monkey's first appearance Maxwell came to see me, not so much distressed as puzzled, not so much puzzled as angry. It took time and bourbon before he could work off those feelings of hostility and resentment which they say we should work off, no kidding. He told his story coherently. As he talked and drank and brooded, his shadow was more disturbed than he was, but I could not reach any firm conclusion about it. It has been suggested that they possess some means -- possibly a ray, though I don't buy that -- of unsettling the observer's vision at its source. I did feel inclined to fault my own visual perception, when Maxwell's shadow strolled off to the bathroom and Maxwell just sat there. "We've checked out one thing for sure," he said. "It won't let you do anything you yourself think is wrong. I mean, it'll let you all right, but it gets bigger and meaner and uglier till a man can't stand it. But it goes by what you think, not by any other standards. Take cussing. I can't see anything wrong about a bit of normal cussing, so when I do it my monkey doesn't give a damn. But Sheila's got a thing about cussing, her own that is. Last time she let go with a little 'hell' or something -- and with every provocation, mind you -- a couple of other words came along for the ride, and her monkey -- my God, I don't care to see that again! Sheila nearly passed out cold." "You say there's been this -- gradual growth?" "All week long. If only you damn science-fiction writers would just -- " "Let's stay with the subject. Approximately how large is your shad -- your monkey, right this moment?" "Can't you see?" "Not too clearly, I admit. (Cheers.)" "That's evident. (What? Oh, cheers.) Why, he's about two gorillas' worth and uglier than dammit." "And Sheila's?" "Size of her maternal grandmother, approximately." "Her maternal grandmother was -- " "Is. Stout. About mediumlarge grizzly size." "And you feel that your conduct this week -- " "We've been good as gold. If you confounded science-fiction writers would -- " "Max, now hear this : we didn't invent outer space. It has been there all the time, and bugs me as much as you. Please stick to the subject." "Sure, sure, that's how a man talks when he doesn't happen to have a monkey. Oh, well, we drove out across the river the other night and parked, and I admit my feelings ran away with me. Sheila's too I guess. But she said no, and -- well, see, the monks had gone outside. No room for 'em on the back seat any more, they've grown so. And they were hulking around out there in the dark, and there's this sudden God-awful pounding on the top of the car as though some lunatic -- " "By which monkey was the pounding?" "Sheila's. I stuck my head out and saw her. Eyes glow in the dark, damned if they don't. Coming home they rode outside on the roof, and we could see their feet stuck down through the rear windows, I suppose to keep the wind from blowing them away. If only it could!" "The pounding occurred when Sheila said no?" "About that time. You see? No pleasing them." "In relation to Sheila what did you then do, Counselor?" "Nothing but nothing, you crumb. She said no. If you damned science -- " "And you claim your own monkey is two gorillas' worth and growing all the time. Max, short of rubbing your two stupid noses in it, how could they make it any plainer?" He made a show of thinking that over a long while, but the truth is that Maxwell is anything but stupid. He said at last: "See what you mean of course. But she still says no and she means it." I said (and I think well enough of the remark so that I have it in a notebook and may use it again some time) : "Max, of the many ways of persuading a woman to change her mind, sitting on your butt thinking sad thoughts is not one." He left soon after that. I noticed how long it took his shadow to follow him after he slammed the door. He called me four hours later, at two in the morning, sounding peaceful and friendly. All he had to say was: "They did too." XT ow that we all have them,  things aren't going too badly -- maybe even a little better than they used to, as a matter of fact. You should see Khrushchev's, honest. It probably shows the human race can get along with anything, if it has to. Almost anything. Mine for instance is occupying the large armchair across the room from my typewriter, finishing up something or other (with my ball-point) and naturally I haven't a God-damn notion what he's produced. A lusty young man's adventures in the Dark Ages -- # years in the future! "Despite the poetically magnificent language (including the uninhibited vulgarity and the unabashed sexuality) whiah makes this an almost exuberent book to read, it nevertheless is one which you put down almost with tears in your eyes. I say 'almost' only because us sophisticated jerks aren't supposed to be moved in such a fashion."... highly entertaining and delightful reading." -- Hartford Courant "Surprising, provocative... It is plotted not with contrivances, but mercilessly with things which can happen." National Review # A novel by Edgar Pangborn He had helped fa rebuild dying Mars -- now he could do the same for dead Earth I "Delow the 'copter of Milt Biskle lay newly fertile lands. He had done well with his area of Mars, verdant from his reconstruction of the ancient water network. Spring, two springs each year, had been brought to this autumn world of sand and hopping toads, a land once made of dried soil cracking with the dust of former times, of a dreary and unwatered waste. Victim of the recent Prox-Terra conflict. Quite soon the first Terran emigrants would appear, stake their claims and take over. He could retire. Perhaps he could return to Terra or bring his own family here, receive priority of land acquisition -- as a reconstruct engineer he deserved it. Area Yellow had progressed far faster than the other engineers' sections. And now his reward came. Reaching forward, Milt Biskle touched the button of his longrange transmitter. "This is Reconstruct Engineer Yellow," he said. "I'd like a psychiatrist. Any one will do, so long as he's immediately available." TS#hen Milt Biskle entered the office Dr. DeWinter rose and held out his hand. "I've heard," Dr. DeWinter said, "that you, of all the forty odd reconstruct engineers, have been the most creative. It's no wonder you're tired. Even God had to rest after six days of such work, and you've been at it for years. As I was waiting for you to reach me I received a news memo from Terra that will interest you." He picked the memo up from his desk. "The initial transport of settlers is about to arrive here on Mars... and they'll go directly into your area. Congratulations, Mr. Biskle." Rousing himself Milt Biskle said, "What if I returned to Earth?" "But if you mean to stake a claim for your family, here -- " Milt Biskle said, "I want you to do something for me. I feel too tired, too -- " He gestured. "Or depressed, maybe. Anyhow I'd like you to make arrangements for my gear, including my wug-plant, to be put aboard a transport returning to Terra." "Six years of work," Dr. DeWinter said. "And now you're abandoning your recompense. Recently I visited Earth and it's just as you remember -- " "How do you know how I remember it?" "Rather," DeWinter corrected himself smoothly, "I should say it's just as it was. Overcrowded, tiny conapts with seven families to a single cramped kitchen. Autobahns so crowded you can't make a move until eleven in the morning." "For me," Milt Biskle said, "the overcrowding will be a relief after six years of robot autonomic equipment." He had made up his mind. In spite of what he had accomplished here, or perhaps because of it, he intended to go home. Despite the psychiatrist's arguments. Dr. DeWinter purred, "What if your wife and children, Milt, are among the passengers of this first transport?" Once more he lifted a document from his neatly-arranged desk. He studied the paper, then said, "Biskle, Fay, Mrs. Laura C. June C. Woman and two girl children. Your family?" "Yes," Milt Biskle admitted woodenly; he stared straight ahead. "So you see you can't head back to Earth. Put on your hair and prepare to meet them at Field Three. And exchange your teeth. You've got the stainless steel ones in, at the moment." Chagrined, Biskle nodded. Like all Terrans he had lost his hair and teeth from the fallout during the war. For everyday service in his lonely job of rereconstructing Yellow Area of Mars he made no use of the expensive wig which he had brought from Terra, and as to the teeth he personally found the steel ones far more comfortable than the natural color plastic set. It indicated how far he had drifted from social interaction. He felt vaguely guilty; Dr. DeWinter was right. But he had felt guilty ever since the defeat of the Proxmen. The war had embittered him; it didn't seem fair that one of the twc competing cultures would have to suffer, since the needs of both were legitimate. Mars itself had been the locus of contention. Both cultures needed it as a colony on which to deposit surplus populations. Thank God Terra had managed to gain tactical mastery during the last year of the war... hence it was Terrans such as himself, and not Proxmen, patching up Mars. "By the way," Dr. DeWinter said. "I happen to know of your intentions regarding your fellow reconstruct engineers." M nt , Biskle glanced up swift"As a matter of fact," De Winter said, "we know they're at this moment gathering in Red Area to hear your account." Opening his desk drawer he got out a yoyo, stood up and began to operate it expertly doing walking the dog. "Your panic stricken speech to the effect that something is wrong, although you can't seem to say just what it might be." Watching the yo-yo Biskle said, "That's a toy popular in the Prox system. At least so I read in a homeopape article, once." "Hmm. I understood it originated in the Philippines." Engrossed, Dr. DeWinter now did around the world. He did it well. "I'm taking the liberty of sending a deposition to the reconstruct engineers' gathering, testifying to your mental condition. It will be read aloud, -- sorry to say." "I still intend to address the gathering," Eiskle said. "Well, then there's a compromise that occurs to me. Greet your little family when it arrives here on Mars and then we'll arrange a trip to Terra for you. At our expense. And in exchange you'll agree not to address the gathering of reconstruct engineers or burden them in any way with your nebulous forebodings." DeWinter eyed him keenly. "After all, this is a critical moment. The first emigrants are arriving. We don't want trouble; we don't want to make anyone uneasy." "Would you do me a favor?" Biskle asked. "Show me that you've got a wig on. And that your teeth are false. Just so I can be sure that you're a Terran." Dr. DeWinter tilted his wig and plucked out his set of false teeth. "I'll take the offer," Milt Biskle said. "If you'll agree to make certain that my wife obtains the parcel of land I set aside for her." Nodding, DeWinter tossed him a small white envelope. "Here's your ticket. Round trip, of course, since you'll be coming back." I hope so, Biskle thought as he picked up the ticket. But it depends on what I see on Terra. Or rather on what they let me see. He had a feeling they'd let him see very little. In fact as little as Proxmanly possible. Wen his ship reached Terra a smartly uniformed guide waited for him. "Mr. Biskle?" Trim and attractive and exceedingly young she stepped forward alertly. "I'm Mary Ableseth, your Tourplan companion. I'll show you around the planet during your brief stay here." She smiled brightly and very professionally. He was taken aback. "I'll be with you constantly, night and day." "Night, too?" he managed to say. "Yes. Mr. Biskle. That's my job. We expect you to be disoriented due to your years of labor on Mars... labor we of Terra applaud and honor, as is right." She fell in beside him, steering him toward a parked 'copter. "Where would you like to go first? New York City? Broadway? To the night clubs and theaters and restaurants..." "No, to Central Park. To sit on a bench." "But there is no more Central Park, Mr. Biskle. It was turned into a parking lot for government employees while you were on Mars." "I see," Milt Biskle said "Well, then Portsmouth Square in San Francisco will do." He opened the door of the 'copter. "That, too, has become a parking lot," Miss Ableseth said, with a sad shake of her long, luminous red hair. "We're so dam overpopulated. Try again. Mr. Biskle; there are a few parks left, one in Kansas, I believe, and two in Utah in the south part near St. George." "This is bad news," Milt said. "May I stop at that amphetamine dispenser and put in my dime? I need a stimulant to cheer me up." "Certainly," Miss Ableseth said, nodding graciously. Milt Biskle walked to the spaceport's nearby stimulant dispenser, reached into his pocket, found a dime, and dropped the dime in the slot. The dime fell completely through the dispenser and bounced .onto the pavement. "Odd," Biskle said, puzzled. "I think I can explain that," Miss Ableseth said. "That dime of yours is a Martian dime, made for a lighter gravity." "Hmm," Milt Biskle said, as he retrived the dime. As Miss Ableseth had predicted he felt disoriented. He stood by as she put in a dime of her own and obtained the small tube of amphetamine stimulants for him. Certainly her explanation seemed adequate. But -- "It is now eight p.m. local time," Miss Ableseth said. "And I haven't had dinner, although of course you have, aboard your ship. Why not take me to dinner? We can talk over a bottle of Pinot Noir and you can tell me these vague forebodings which have brought you to Terra, that something dire is wrong and that all your marvelous reconstruct work is pointless. I'd adore to hear about it." She guided him back to the 'copter and the two of them entered, squeezing into the back seat together. Milt Biskle found her to be warm and yielding, decidedly Terran; he became embarrassed and felt his heart pounding in effort-syndrome. It had been some time since he had been this close to a woman.-j automatic circuit of the 'copter caused it to rise from the spaceport parking lot, "I'm married. I've got two children and I came here on business. I'm on Terra to prove that the Proxmen really won and that we few remaining Terrans are slaves of the Prox authorities, laboring for -- " He gave up; it was hopeless. Miss Ableseth remained pressed against him. "You really think," Miss Ableseth said presently, as the 'copter passed above New York City, "that I'm a Prox agent?" "N-no," Milt Biskle said. "I guess not." It did not seem likely, under the circumstances. "While you're on Terra," Miss Ableseth said, "why stay in an over-crowded, noisy hotel? Why not stay with me at my conapt in New Jersey? There's plenty of room and you're more than welcome." "Okay," Biskle agreed, feeling the futility of arguing. "Good." Miss Ableseth gave an instruction to the 'copter; it turned north. "We'll have dinner there. It'll save money, and at all the decent restaurants there's a two-hour line this time of night, so it's almost impossible to get a table. You've probably forgotten. How wonderful it'll be when half our population can emigrate!" "Yes," Biskle said tightly. "And they'll like Mars; we've done a good job." He felt a measure of enthusiasm returning to him, a sense of pride in the reconstruct work he and his compatriots had done. "Wait until you see it, Miss Ableseth." "Call me Mary," Miss Ableseth said, as she arranged her heavy scarlet wig; it had become dislodged during the last few moments in the cramped quarters of the 'copter. "Okay," Biskle said, and, except for a nagging awareness of disloyalty to Fay, he felt a sense of well-being. "Things happen fast on Terra," Mary Ableseth said. "Due to the terrible pressure of overpopulation." She pressed her teeth in place; they, too, had become dislodged. "So I see," Milt Biskle agreed, and straightened his own wig and teeth, too. Could I have been mistaken? he asked himself. After all he could see the lights of New York below; Terra was decidedly not a depopulated ruin and its civilization was intact. Or was this all an illusion, imposed on his percept-system by Prox psychiatric techniques unfamiliar to him? It was a fact that his dime had fallen completely through the amphetamine dispenser. Didn't that indicate something was subtly, terribly wrong? Perhaps the dispenser hadn't really been there. I'Tphe next day he and Mary Ableseth visited one of the few remaining parks. In the southern part of Utah, near the mountains, the park although small was bright green and attractive. Milt Biskle lolled on the grass watching a squirrel progressing toward a tree in wicket-like leaps, its tail flowing behind it in a gray stream. "No squirrels on Mars," Milt Biskle said sleepily. Wearing a slight sunsuit, Mary Ableseth stretched out on her back, eyes shut. "It's nice here, Milt. I imagine Mars is like this." Beyond the park heavy traffic moved along the freeway; the noise reminded Milt of the surf of the Pacific Ocean. It lulled him. All seemed well, and he tossed a peanut to the squirrel. The squirrel veered, wickethopped toward the peanut, its intelligent face twitching in response. As it sat upright, holding the nut, Milt Biskle tossed a second nut off to the right. The squirrel heard it land among the maple leaves; its ears pricked up, and this reminded Milt of a game he once had played with a cat, an old sleepy tom which had belonged to him and his brother in the days before Terra had been so overpopulated, when pets were still legal. He had waited until Pumpkin -- the tomcat -- was almost asleep and then he had tossed a small object into the corner of the room. Pumpkin woke up. His eyes had flown open and his ears had pricked, turned, and he had sat for fifteen minutes listening and watching, brooding as to what had made the noise. It was a harmless way of teasing the old cat, and Milt felt sad, thinking how many years Pumpkin had been dead, now, his last legal pet. On Mars, though, pets would be legal again. That cheered him. In fact on Mars, during his years of reconstruct work, he had possessed a pet. A Martian plant. He had brought it with him to Terra and it now stood on the living room coffee table in Mary Ableseth's conapt, its limbs draped rather unhappily. It had not prospered in the unfamiliar Terran climate. "Strange," Milt murmured, "that my wug-plant isn't thriving. I'd have thought in such a moist atmosphere..." "It's the gravity," Mary said, eyes still shut, her bosom rising and falling regularly. She was almost asleep. "Too much for it." Milt regarded the supine form of the woman, remembering Pumpkin under similar circumstances. The hypnogogic moment, between waking and sleeping, when consciousness and unconsciousness became blended... reaching, he picked up a pebble. He tossed the pebble into the leaves near Mary's head. At once she sat up, eyes open, startled, her sunsuit falling from her Both her ears pricked up. "But we Terrans," Milt said, "have lost control of the musculature of our ears, Mary. On even a reflex basis." "What?" she murmured, blinking in confusion as she retied her sunsuit. "Our ability to prick up our ears has atrophied," Milt explained. "Unlike the dog and cat. Although to examine us morphologically you wouldn't know because the muscles are still there. So you made an error." "I don't know what you're talking about," Mary said, with a trace of sullenness. She turned her attention entirely to arranging the bra of her sunsuit, ignoring him. "Let's go back to the conapt," Milt said, rising to his feet. He no longer felt like lolling in the park, because he could no longer believe in the park. Unreal squirrel, unreal grass... was it actually? Would they ever show him the substance beneath the illusion? He doubted it. The squirrel followed them a short way as they walked to their parked 'copter, then turned its attention to a family of Terrans which included two small boys; the children threw nuts to the squirrel and it scampered in vigorous activity. "Convincing," Milt said. And it really was. Mary said, "Too bad you couldn't have seen Dr. DeWinter more, Milt. He could have helped you." Her voice was oddly hard. "I have no doubt of that," Milt Biskle agreed as they reentered the parked 'copter. 'VX#'hen they arrived back at Mary's conapt he found his Martian wug-plant dead. It had evidently perished of dehydration. "Don't try to explain this," he said to Mary as the two of them stood gazing down at the parched, dead stalks of the once active plant. "You know what it shows. Terra is supposedly more humid than Mars, even reconstructed Mars at its best. Yet this plant has completely dried out. There's no moisture left on Terra because I suppose the Prox blasts emptied the seas. Right?" Mary said nothing. "What I don't understand," Milt said, "is why it's worth it to you people to keep the illusion going. I've finished my job." After a pause Mary said, "May be there're more planets requiring reconstruct work, Milt." "Your population is that great?" "I was thinking of Terra. Here," Mary said "Reconstruct work on it will take generations; all the talent and ability you reconstruct engineers possess will be required." She added, "I'm just following your hypothetical logic, of course." "So Terra's our next job. That's why you let me come here. In fact I'm going to stay here." He realized that, thoroughly and utterly, in a flash of insight. "I won't be going back to Mars and I won't see Fay again. You're replacing her." It all made sense. "Well," Mary said, with a faint wry smile, 'let's say I'm attempting to." She stroked his arm. Barefoot, still in her sunsuit, she moved slowly closer and closer to him. Frightened, he backed away from her. Picking up the dead wug-plant he numbly carried it to the apt's disposal chute and dropped the brittle, dry remains in. They vanished at once. "And now," Mary said busily, "we're going to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then, if we have time, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. They've asked me to keep you busy so you don't start brooding." "But I am brooding," Milt said as he watched her change from her sunsuit to a gray wool knit dress. Nothing can stop that, he said to himself. And you know it now. And as each reconstruct engineer finishes his area it's going to happen again. I'm just the first At least I'm not alone, he realized. And felt somewhat better. "How do I look?" Mary asked as she put on lipstick before the bedroom mirror. "Fine," he said listlessly, and wondered if Mary would meet each reconstruct engineer in turn, become the mistress of each. Not only is she not what she seems, he thought, but I don't even get to keep her. It seemed a gratuitous loss, easily avoided. He was, he realized, beginning to like her. Mary was alive; that much was real. Terran or not. At least they had not lost the war to shadows; they had lost to authentic living organisms. He felt somewhat cheered. "Ready for the Museum of Modern Art?" Mary said briskly, with a smile. I ater, at the Smithsonian, after he had viewed the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers' incredibly ancient plane -- it appeared to be caught sight of an exhibit which he had been anticipating. Saying nothing to Mary -- she was absorbed in studying a case of semi-precious stones in their natural uncut state -- he slipped off and, a moment later, stood before a glass-walled section entitled Three Prox soldiers stood frozen, their dark muzzles stained and grimy, side arms ready, in a makeshift shelter composed of the remains of one of their transports. A bloody Prox flag hung drably. This was a defeated enclave of the enemy; these three creatures were about to surrender or be killed. A group of Terran visitors stood before the exhibit, gawking. Milt Biskle said to the man nearest him, "Convincing, isn't it?" "Sure is," the man, middleaged, with glasses and gray hair, agreed. "Were you in the war?" he asked Milt, glancing at him. "I'm in reconstruct," Milt said. "Yellow Engineer." "Oh." The man nodded, impressed. "Boy, those Proxmen look scary. You'd almost expect them to step out of that exhibit and fight us to the death." He grinned. "They put up a good fight before they gave in, those Proxmen; you have to give 'em credit for that." Beside him the man's gray, taut wife said, "Those guns of theirs make me shiver. It's too realistic." Disapproving, she walked on. "You're right," Milt Biskle said. "They do look frighteningly real, because of course they are." There was no point in creating an illusion of this sort because the genuine thing lay immediately at hand, readily available. Milt swung himself under the guard rail, reached the transparent glass of the exhibit, raised his foot and smashed the glass; it burst and rained down with a furious racket of shivering fragments. As Mary came running, Milt snatched a rifle from one of the frozen Proxmen in the exhibit and turned it toward her. She halted, breathing rapidly, eyeing him but saying nothing. you," Milt said to her, holding the rifle expertly. "After all, if my own race no longer exists I can hardly reconstruct a colony world for them; even I can see that. But I want to know the truth. Show it to me and I'll go on with my job." Mary said, "No, Milt, if you knew the truth you wouldn't go on. You'd turn that gun on yourself." She sounded calm, even compassionate, but her eyes were bright and enlarged, wary. "Then I'll kill you," he said. And, after that, himself. "Wait." She pondered. "Milt -- this is so difficult. You know absolutely nothing and yet look how miserable you are. How do you expect to feel when you can see your planet as it is? It's almost too much for me and I'm -- " She hesitated. "Say it." "I'm just a -- " she choked out the word -- "a visitor." "But I am right," he said. "Say it. Admit it." "You're right, Milt," she sighed. npwo uniformed museum guards appeared, holding pistols. "You okay, Miss Ableseth?" "For the present," Mary said. She did not take her eyes off Milt and the rifle which he held. "Just wait," she instructed the guards. "Yes ma'am." The guards waited. No one moved. Milt said, "Did any Terran women survive?" After a pause Mary said, "No, Milt. But we Proxmen are within the same genus, as you well know. We can interbreed. Doesn't that make you feel better?" "Sure," he said. "A lot better." And he did feel like turning the rifle on himself now, without waiting. It was all he could do to resist the impulse. So he had been right; that thing had not been Fay, there at Field Three on Mars. "Listen," he said to Mary Ableseth, "I want to go back to Mars again. I came here to learn something, I learned it, now I want to go back. Maybe I'll talk to Dr. DeWinter again, maybe he can help me. Any objection to that?" "No." She seemed to understand how he felt. "After all, you did all your work there. You have a right to return. But eventually you have to begin here on Terra. We can wait a year or so, perhaps even two. But eventually Mars will be filled up and we'll need the room. And it's going to be so much harder here... as you'll discover." She tried to smile but failed; he saw the effort. "I'm sorry, Milt." "So am I," Milt Biskle said. "Hell, I was sorry when that wug-plant died. I knew the truth then. It wasn't just a guess." "You'll be interested to know that your fellow reconstruct engineer Red, Cleveland Andre, addressed the meeting in your place. And passed your intimations on to them all, along with his own. They voted to send an official delegate here to Terra to investigate; he's on his way now." "I'm interested," Milt said. "But it doesn't really matter. It hardly changes things." He put down the rifle. "Can I go back to Mars now?" He felt tired. "Tell Dr. DeWinter I'm coming." Tell him, he thought to have every psychiatric technique in this repertory ready for me, because it will take a lot. "What about Earth's animals?" he asked. "Did any forms at all survive? How about the dog and the cat?" Mary glanced at the museum guards; a flicker of communication passed silently between them and then Mary said, "Maybe it's all right after all." What's all right?" Milt Biskle said. "For you to see. Just for a moment You seem to be standing up to it better than we had expected. In our opinion you are entitled to that." She added, "Yes, Milt, the dog and cat survived; they live here among the ruins. Come along and look." He followed after her, thinking to himself, Wasn't she right the first time? Do I really want to look? Can I stand up to what exists in actuality -- what they've felt the need of keeping from me up until now? At the exit ramp of the museum Mary halted and said, "Go on outside, Milt. I'll stay here. I'll be waiting for you when you come back in." Haltingly, he descended the ramp. And saw. It was, of course, as she had said, ruins. The city had been decapitated, leveled three feet above ground-level; the buildings had become hollow square, without contents, like some infinite arrangement of useless, ancient courtyards. He could not believe that what he saw was new; it seemed to him as if these abandoned remnants had always been there, exactly as they were now. And -- how long would they remain this way? To the right an elaborate but small scale mechanical system had plopped itself down to a debris-filled street. As he watched, it extended a host of pseudopodia which burrowed inquisitively into the nearby foundations. The foundations, steel and cement, were abruptly pulverized; the bare ground, exposed, lay naked and dark brown, seared over from the atomic heat generated by the repair autonomic rig -- a construct, Milt Biskle thought, not much different from those I employ on Mars. At least to some meager extent the rig had the task of clearing away the old. He knew from his own reconstruct work on Mars that it would be followed, probably within minutes, by an equally elaborate mechanism which would lay the groundwork for the new structures to come. And, standing off to one side in the otherwise deserted street, watching this limited clearingwork in progress, two gray, thin figures could be made out. Two hawk-nosed Proxmen with their pale, natural hair arranged in high coils, their earlobes elongated with heavy weights. The victors, he thought to himself. Experiencing the satisfaction of this spectacle, witnessing the last artifacts of the defeated race being obliterated. Some day a purely Prox city will rise up here: Prox architecture, streets of the odd, wide Prox pattern, the uniform boy-like buildings with their many subsurface levels. And citizens such as these will be treading the ramps, accepting the high-speed runnels in their daily routines. And what, he thought, about the Terran dogs and cats which now inhabit these ruins, as Mary said? Will even they disappear? Probably not entirely. There will be room for them, perhaps in museums and zoos, as oddities to be gaped at. Survivals of an ecology which no longer obtained. Or even mattered. And yet -- Mary was right. The Proxman were within the same genus. Even if they did not interbreed with the remaining Terrans the species as he had known it would go on. And they would interbreed, he thought. His own relationship with Mary was a harbinger. As individuals they were not so far apart. The results might even be good. The results, he thought as he turned away and started back into the museum, may be a race not quite Prox and not quite Terran; something that is genuinely new may come from the melding. At least we can hope so. Terra would be rebuilt. He had seen slight but real work in progress with his own eyes. Perhaps the Proxmen lacked the skill that he and his fellow reconstruct engineers possessed... but now that Mars was virtually done they could begin here. It was not absolutely hopeless. Not quite. Walking up to Mary he said hoarsely, "Do me a favor. Get me a cat I can take back to Mars with me. I've always liked cats. Especially the orange ones with stripes." One of the museum guards, after a glance at his companion, said, "We can arrange that, Mr. Biskle. We can get a -- cub, is that the word?" "Kitten, I think," Mary corrected. 'An the trip back to Mars,   Milt Biskle sat with the box containing the orange kitten on his lap, working out his plans. In fifteen minutes the ship would land on Mars and Dr. DeWinter -- or the thing that posed as Dr. DeWinter anyhow -- would be waiting to meet him. And it would be too late. From where he sat he could see the emergency escape hatch with its red warning light. His plans had become focused around the hatch. It was not ideal but it would serve. In the box the orange kitten reached up a paw and batted at Milt's hand. He felt the sharp, tiny claws rake across his hand and he absently disengaged his flesh, retreating from the probing reach of the animal. You wouldn't have liked Mars anyhow, he thought, and rose to his feet. Carrying the box he strode swiftly toward the emergency hatch. Before the stewardess could reach him he had thrown open the hatch. He stepped forward and the hatch locked behind him. For an instant he was within the cramped unit, and then he began to twist open the heavy outer door. "Mr. Biskle!" the stewardess' voice came, muffled by the door behind him. He heard her fumbling to reach him, opening the door and groping to catch hold of him. As he twisted open the outer door the kitten within the box under his arm snarled. You, too? Milt Biskle thought, and paused. Death, the emptiness and utter lack of warmth of 'tween space, seeped around him, filtering past the partly opened outer door. He smelled it and something within him, as in the kitten, retreated by instinct. He paused, holding the box, not trying to push the outer door any farther open, and in that moment the stewardess grabbed him. "Mr. Biskle," she said with a half-sob, "are you out of your mind? Good God what are you doing?" She managed to tug the outer door shut, screw the emergency section back into shut position. "You know exactly what I'm doing," Milt Biskle said as he allowed her to propel him back into the ship and to his seat. And don't think you stopped me, he said to himself. Because it wasn't you. I could have gone ahead and done it. But I decided not to. He wondered why. L ater, at Field Three on Mars, Dr. DeWinter met him as he had expected. The two of them walked to the parked 'copter and DeWinter in a worried tone of voice said, "I've just been informed that during the trip -- " "That's right. I attempted suicide. But I changed my mind. Maybe you know why. You're the psychologist, the authority as to what goes on inside us." He entered the 'copter, being careful not to bang the box containing the Terran kitten. "You're going to go ahead and stake your land parcel with Fay?" Dr. DeWinter asked presently as the 'copter flew above green, wet fields of high protein wheat. "Even though -- you know?" "Yes." He nodded. After all, there was nothing else for him, as far as he could make out. "You Terrans." DeWinter shook his head. "Admirable." Now he noticed the box on Milt Biskle's lap. "What's that you have there? A creature from Terra?" He eyed it suspiciously; obviously to him it was the manifestation of an alien form of life. "A rather peculiar-looking organism." "It's going to keep me company," Milt Biskle said. "While I go on with my work, either building up my private parcel or -- " Or helping you Proxmen with Terra, he thought. "Is that what was called a 'rattlesnake'? I detect the sound of its rattles." Dr. DeWinter edged away. "It's purring." Milt Biskle stroked the kitten as the autonomic circuit of the 'copter guided it across the dully red Martian sky. Contact with the one familiar life-form, he realized, will keep me sane. It will make it possible for me to go on. He felt grateful. My race may have been defeated and destroyed, but not all Terran creatures have perished. When we reconstruct Terra maybe we can induce the authorities to allow us to set up game preserves. We'll make that part of our task, he told himself, and again he patted the kitten. At least we can hope for that much. Next to him, Dr. DeWinter was also deep in thought. He appreciated the intricate workmanship, by engineers stationed on the third planet, which had gone into the simulacrum resting in the box on Milt Biskle's lap. The technical achievement was impressive, even to him, and he saw clearly -- as Milt Biskle of course did not. This artifact, accepted by the Terran as an authentic organism from his familiar past, would provide a pivot by which the man would hang onto his psychic balance. But what about the other reconstruct engineers? What would carry each of them through and past the moment of discovery as each completed his work and had to -- whether he liked it or not -- awake? I t would vary from Terran to Terran. A dog for one, a more elaborate simulacrum, possibly that of a nubile human female, for another. In any case each would be provided with an "exception" to the true state. One essential surviving entity, selected out of what had in fact totally vanished. Research into the past of each engineer would provide the clue, as it had in Biskle's instance; the cat-simulacrum had been finished weeks before his abrupt, panic-stricken trip home to Terra. For instance, in Andre's case a parrotsimulacrum was already under construction. It would be done by the time he made his trip home. "I call him Thunder," Milt Biskle explained. "Good name," Dr. DeWinter -- as he titled himself these days -- said. And thought, A shame we could not have shown him the real situation on Terra. Actually it's quite interesting that he accepted what he saw, because on some level he must realize that nothing survives a war of the kind we conducted. Obviously he desperately wanted to believe that a remnant, even though no more than rubble, endures. But it's typical of the Terran mind to fasten onto phantoms. That might help explain their defeat in the conflict; they were simply not realists. "This cat," Milt Biskle said, "is going to be a mighty hunter of Martian sneak-mice." "Right," Dr. DeWinter agreed, and thought, As long as its batteries don't run down. He, too, patted the kitten. A switch closed and the kitten purred louder.      Harry Harrison, who wrote Deathworld, How the Old World Died (in this issue) and a great many other first-rate science-fiction stories, gives us a complete short novel in our next Galaxy. It is about an immense interstellar war. Cultures clash. Huge fleets raven at each other. Casualties mount at the speed of light. It is, in short, a space-war yarn m the classic tradition... except that Harrison, who is a very funny man, began chuckling to himself as he put the first page on paper. And the result is something to see. Now, we don't promise that The Starloggers will inspire you or make you a Better Person... but we are prepared to bet it will make you laugh out loud! Backing it up are a pair of noteworthy novelettes, too: Wyman Guin's A Man of the Renaissance and Lester del Rey's To Avenge Man. Good issue, we think. Don't miss it! Waging war from star to star is expensive , long-I a s t i n g -- and remarkably hard to stop l I CC W e met before," I told  Haber. "In #, when you were running the Des Moines office." He beamed and held out his hand. "Why, darn it, so we did! I remember now, Odin." "I don't like to be called Odin." "No? All right. Mr. Gunnarsen -- " "Not 'Mr. Gunnarsen', either. Just 'Gunner.' " "That's right, Gunner; I'd almost forgotten." I said, "No, you hadn't forgotten. You never knew my name in Des Moines. You didn't even know I was alive, because you were too busy losing the state for our client. I pulled you out of that one, just like I'm going to pull you out now." The smile was a little cracked, but Haber had been with the company a long time and he wasn't going to let me throw him. "What do you want me to say, Gunner? I'm grateful. Believe me, boy, I know I need help -- " "And I'm not your boy. Haber, you were a fat cat then, and you're a fat cat now. All I want from you is, first, a quick look around the shop here and, second, a conference of all department heads, including you, in thirty minutes. So tell your secretary to round them up, and let's get started on the sightseeing. "doming in to Belport on the  scatjet I had made a list of things to do. The top item was: #. Fire Haber. Still, in my experience that isn't always the best way to put out a fire. Some warts you remove, some you just let wither away in obscurity. I am not paid by MB to perform cosmetic surgery on their Habers, only to see that the work the Habers should have done gets accomplished. As a public relations branch manager he was a wart, but as t tourist guide he was fine, although he was perspiring. He led me all around the shop. He had taken a storefront on one of the main shopping malls, aircurtain door, windows draped tastefully in gray silk. It looked like the best of four funeral parlors in a run-down neighborhood In gilt letters on the window was the name of the game: Public Relations Northern Lake State Division T. Wilson Haber, Division Manager "Public relations," he informed me, "starts at home. They know we're here, eh, Gunner?" "Reminds me of the Iowa office," I said, and he stumbled where there wasn't even a sill. That was the presidential campaign of '#, where Haber had been trying to carry the state for the candidate who had retained us, and those twelve electoral votes came over at the last minute only because we sent Haber to Nassau to rest and I took over from him. I believe Haber's wife had owned stock in the company. His Belport layout was pretty good at that, though. Four pry booths, each with a Simplex # and an operator-receptionist in the donor's waiting room. You can't tell from appearances, but the donors who were waiting for their interrogation looked like a good representative sample -- a good mixture of sexes, ages, conditions of affluence -- and with proper attention to weighing he should at least be getting a fair survey of opinions. Integration of the pry-scores was in a readout station in back -- I recognized one of the programmers and nodded to him: good man -- along with telefax equipment to the major research sources, the Britannica, Library of Congress, news-wire services and so on. From the integration room the readout operator could construct a speech, a #-V commercial, a space ad or anything else, with the research lines to feed him any data ' he needed, and test its appeal on his subjects. In the front of the building was a taping booth and studio. Everything was small and semiportable, but good stuff. You could put together a #-V interview or edit one as well here as you could on the lot in the Home Office. "An A-Number One setup, right, Gunner?" said Haber. "Set it up myself to do the job." I said. "Then why aren't you doing it?" He tightened up. The eyi . looked smaller and more intelligent, but he didn't say anything directly. He took my elbow and turned me to the data-processing room. "Want you to meet someone," he said, opened the door, led me inside and left me. A tall, slim girl looked up from a typer. "Why, hello, Gunner," she said. "It's been a long time." I said, "Hello, Candace." Apparently Haber was not quite such a fat cat as he had seemed, for he had clearly found out a little something about my personal life before I showed up in his office. The rest of the list I had scribbled down in the scatjet was: #. Need "big lie". #. Investigate Children. #. Investigate opponents proposition. #. Marry Candace Harmon? nphis was a relatively small job for Moultrie  Bigelow, but it was for a very, very big account. It was important to win it. The client was the Arcturan Confederacy. In the shop the word was that they had been turned down by three or four other PR agencies before we took them on. Nobody said why, exactly, but the reason was perfectly clear. It was just because they were the Arcturan Confederacy. There is nothing in any way illegal or immoral about a public-relations firm representing a foreign account. That is a matter of statute -- as most people don't take the trouble to know: the SmithMacchioni Act of '#. And the courts held that it applied to extra-planetary "foreigners" as well as to Terrestrials in #, back when the only "intelligent aliens" were the mummies on Mars. Not that the mummies had ever hired anybody on Earth to do anything for them. But it was Moultrie  Bigelow's law department that sued for the declaratory judgement, as a matter of fact. Just on the off chance. That's how MB operates. Any public-relations man takes on the color of his clients in the eyes of some people. That's the nature of the beast. The same people wouldn't think of blaming a surgeon because he dissolved a malignancy out of Public Enemy No. #, or even a lawyer for defending him. But when you are in charge of a client's emotional image, and that image isn't liked, some of the dislike rubs off on you. At MB there is enough in the paycheck at the end of every month so that we don't mind that. MB has a reputation for taking on the tough ones -- the only surviving American cigarette manufacturer is ours. So is the exiled Castroite government of Cuba, that still thinks it might one day get the State Department to back up its claim for paying off on the bonds it printed for itself. However, for two reasons -- as a simple matter of making things easy for ourselves; and because it's better doctrine -- we don't flaunt our connection with the unpopular clients. Especially when the job is going badly. One of the surest ways to get a bad public response to PR is to let the public know that some hotshot PR outfit is working on it. So every last thing Haber had done was wrong. In this town, it was too late for pry booths and MR. I had just five minutes left before the conference, and I spent it in the pry-booth section anyhow. I noticed a tri-D display of our client's home planet in the reception room, where donors were sitting and waiting their turn. It was very attractive: the wide, calm seas with the vertical air-mount islets jutting out at intervals. T turned around and walked out fast, boiling mad. A layman might not have seen just how many ways Haber had found to go wrong. The whole pry-booth project was probably a mistake anyway. To begin with, to got any good out of pry booths you need depth interviews, way deep-down MR stuff. And for that you need paid donors, lots of them. And to get them you have to have a panel to pick from. That means advertising in the papers and on the nets and interviewing twenty people for every one you hire. To get a satisfactory sample in a town the size of Belport you need to hire maybe fifty donors. And that means talking to a thousand people, every one of whom will go home and talk to his wife or her mother or their neighbors. In a city like Chicago or Saskatoon you can get away with it. With good technique the donor never really knows what he's being interviewed for, although of course a good newspaperman or private eye can interview a couple of donors and work backward from the sense-impulse stimuli with pretty fair accuracy. But not in Belport, not when we never had a branch here before, not when every living soul in town knew what we were doing because the rezoning ordinance was Topic One over every coffee table. In short, we had tipped our hand completely. A-: I say, an amateur might not have spotted that. But Haber WM i not supposed to be an amateur. I had just seen the trendcharts, too. The referendum on granting rezoning privileges to our client was going to a vote in less than two weeks. When Haber had opened the branch, sampling showed that it would fail by a four to three vote. Now, a month and a half later, he had worsened the percentage to three to two and going downhill all the way. Our client would be extremely unhappy -- probably was unhappy already, if they had managed to puzzle out the queer terrestrial progress reports we had been sending them. And this was the kind of client that a flackery didn't want to have unhappy. I mean, all the others were little-league stuff in comparison. The Arcturan Confederacy was a culture as wealthy and as powerful as all Earth governments combined, and as Arcturans don't bother with nonsense like national governments or private enterprise, at least not in any way that makes sense to us, this one client was -- As big as every other possible client combined. They were the ones who decided they needed this base in Belport, and it was up to MB -- and specifically to me, Odin Gunnarsen --  to see that they got it It was too bad that they had been fighting Earth six months earlier. In fact, in a technical sense we were still at war. It was only armistice, not a peace, that had called off the H-bomb raids and the fleet engagements. Like I say. MB takes on the tough ones! Tjesides Haber, four of the staff looked as though they knew wh'ch end was up. Candace Harmon, the pry-integration programmer and two very junior T.A.s. I took the head chair at the conference table without waiting to see where Haber would want to sit and said, "We'll make this fast, because we're in trouble here and we don't have time to be polite. You're Percy?" That was the programmer; he nodded. "And I didn't catch your name?" I said, turning to the next along the table. It was the copy chief, a lanky shave-headed oldster named Tracy Spockman. His assistant, one of the T.A.s I had had my eye on, turned out to be named Manny Brock. I had picked easy jobs for all the deadheads, reserving the smart ones for whatever might turn up, so I started with the copy chief. "Spockman, we're opening an Arcturan purchasing agency and you're it You should be able to handle this one; if I remember correctly, you ran the Duluth shop for a year." He sucked on a cal pipe without expression. "Well, thanks, Mr. Gun -- " "Just Gunner." "Well, thanks, but as copy chief -- " "Manny here should be able to take care of that, If I remember the way you ran the Duluth operation, you've probably got things set up so he can step right in." And so he probably did. At least, it surely would do no real harm to give somebody else a chance at lousing things up. I handed Spockman the "positions wanted" page from the paper I'd picked up at the scatport and a scrawled list of notes I'd made up on the way in. "Hire these girls I've marked for your staff, rent an office and get some letters out. You'll see what I want from the list. Letters to every real estate dealer in town, asking them if they can put together a five thousand acre parcel in the area covered by the zoning referendum. Letter to every general contractor, asking for bids on buildings. Make it separate bids on each -- I think there'll be five buildings altogether. One exoclimatized -- so get the air-conditioning, heating and plumbing contractors to bid, too. Letter to every food wholeBaler and major grocery outlet asking if they are interested in bidding on supplying Arcturans with food. Fax Chicago for what the Arcturans fancy, I don't remember -- no meat, I think, but a lot of green vegetables -- anyway, find out and include the data in the letters. Electronics manufacturers, office equipment dealers, car and truck agencies -- well, the whole list is on that piece of paper. I want every businessman in Belport starting to figure out by tomorrow morning how much profit he might make on an Acturan base. Got it?" "I think so, Mr. -- Gunner. I was thinking. How about stationery suppliers, attornies, C.P.A's?" "Don't ask, do it. Now, you down at the end there -- " "Henry Dane, Gunner." "Henry, what about club outlets in Belport? I mean specialized groups. The Arcturans are hot for navigation, sailing, like that; see what you can do with the motorboat clubs and so on. I noticed in the paper that there's a flower show at the Armory next Saturday. It's pretty late, but squeeze in a speaker on Arcturan fungi. We'll fly in a display. They tell me Arcturans are hot gardeners when they're home -- love all the biological sciences -- nice folks, like to dabble." I hesitated and looked at my notes. "I have something down here about veterans' groups, but I haven't got the handle for it. Still, if you can think of an angle, let me know -- what's the matter?" He was looking doubtful. "It's only that I don't want to conflict with Candy, Gunner." And so, of course, I had to face up to things and turn to Candace Harmon. "What's that, honey?" I asked. "I think Henry means my Arcturan-American Friendship League." It turned out that that had been one of Haber's proudest ideas. I wasn't surprised. After several weeks and about three thousand dollars it had worked up to a total of forty-one members. How many of those were employees of the MB branch? "Well, all but eight," Candace admitted at once. She wasn't smiling, but she was amused. "Don't worry about it," I advised Henry Dane. "We're folding the Arcturan American Friendship League anyway. Candace won't have time for it. She'll be working with me." "Why, fine, Gunner," she said. "Doing what?" T almost did marry Candace one time, and every once in a while since I have wished I hadn't backed away. A very good thing was Candace Harmon. "Doing," I said, "what Gunner says for you to do. Let's see. First thing, I've got five hundred Arcturan domestic animals coming in tomorrow. I haven't seen them, but they tell me they're cute, look like kittens, are pretty durable. Figure out some way of getting them distributed fast --  maybe a pet shop will sell them for fifty cents each." Haber protested, "My dear Gunner! The freight alone -- " "Sure, Haber, they cost about forty dollars apiece just to get them here. Any other questions like that? No? That's good. I want one in each of five hundred homes by the end of the week, and if I had to pay a hundred dollars to each customer to take them, I'd pay. Next: I want somebody to find me a veteran, preferably disabled, preferably who was actually involved in the bombing of the home planet -- " I laid out a dozen more working lines, an art show of the Arcturan bas-relief stuff that was partly to look at but mostly to feel, a #-V panel show on Arcturus that we could plant... the whole routine. None of it would do the job, but all of it would help until I got my bearings. Then I got down to business. "What's the name of this fellow that's running for councilman, Connick?" "That's right," said Haber. "What've you got on him?" I asked. I turned to Candace, who said promptly, "Forty-one years old, Methodist, married, three kids of his own plus one of the casualties, ran for State Senate last year and lost, but he carried Belport, running opposed to the referendum this year, very big in Junior Chamber of Commerce and V.F.W. -- " "No. What've you got on him?" I persisted. Candace said slowly, "Gunner, look. This is a nice guy." "Why, I know that, honey. I read his piece in the paper today. So now tell me the dirt that he can't afford to have come out." "It wouldn't be fair to destroy him for nothing!" I brushed aside the "fair" business. "What do you mean, 'for nothing'?" "We're not going to win this referendum, you know." "Honey, I've got news for you. This is the biggest account anybody ever had and I want it. We will win. What've you got on Connick?" "Nothing. Really nothing," she said quietly. "But you can get it." Candace said, visibly upset, "Of course, there's probably some -- " "Of course. Get it. Today." II Tut I wasn't relying totally on anyone, not even Candace. Since Connick was the central figure of the opposition I caught a cab and went to see him. It was already dark, a cold, clear night, and over the mushroom towers of the business district a quarter-moon was beginning to rise. I looked at it almost with affection, I had hated it so when I was there. As I paid the cab two kids in nowsuits came sidling out to inspect me. I said, "Hello. Is your Daddy home?" One was about five, with freckles and bright blue eyes; the other was darker, brown-eyed, and he had a limp. The blueeyed one said, "Daddy's down in the cellar. Mommy will let you in if you ring the doorbell. Just push that button." "Oh, that's how those things work. Thanks." Connick's wife turned out to be a good-looking, skinny blonde in her thirties; and the kids must have raced around the back way and alerted the old man, because as she was taking my coat he was already coming through the hall. I shook his hand and said, "I can tell by the smells from your kitchen that it's dinner time. I won't keep you. My name ia Gunnarsen and -- " "And you're from Moultrie and Bigelow -- here, sit down, Mr. Gunnarsen -- and you want to know if I won't think it over and back the Arcturan base. No, Mr. Gunnarsen, I won't. But why don't you have a drink with me before dinner? And then why don't you have dinner?" He was a genuine article, this Connick. I had to admit he had caught me off balance. "Why, I don't mind if I do," I said after a moment. "I see you know why I'm here." He was pouring drinks. "Well, not altogether, Mr. Gunnarsen. You don't really think you'll change my mind, do you?" "I can't say that until I know why you oppose the base in the first place, Connick. That's what I want to find out." He handed me a drink, sat down across from me and took a thoughtful pull at his own. It was good Scotch. Then he looked to see if the kids were within earshot, and said : "The thing is this, Mr. Gunnarsen. If I could, I would kill every Arcturan alive, and if it meant I had to accept men to do it, that wouldn't be too high a price. I don't want the base here because I don't want anything to do witfi those murdering animals." "Well, you're candid," I said; finished my drink, and added, "If you meant that invitation to dinner, I believe I will take you up on it." T must say they were a nice family. I've worked elections before: Connick was a good candidate because he was a good man. The way his kids behaved around him proved it; and the way he behaved around me was the clincher. I didn't scare him a bit. Of course, that was not altogether bad, from my point of view. Connick kept the conversation off Topic A during dinner, which was all right with me, but as soon as it was over and we were alone he said, "All right. You can make your pitch now, Mr. Gunnarsen. Although I don't know why you're here instead of with Tom Schlitz." Schlitz was the man he was running against. I said, "You don't know this business, I guess. What do we need him for? He's already committed on our side." "And I'm already committed against you, but I guess that's what you're hoping to change. Well, what's your offer?" He was moving too fast for me. I pretended to misunderstand. "Really, Mr. Connick, I wouldn't insult you by offering a bribe -- " "No, I know you wouldn't. Because you're smart enough to know I wouldn't take money. So it isn't money. What is it, then? Moultrie  Bigelow working for me instead of Schlitz in the election? That's a pretty good offer, but the price is too high. I won't pay it." "Well," I said, "as a matter of "Yes, I thought so. No deal. Anyway, do you really think I need help to get elected?" That was a good point, I was forced to admit. I conceded, "No, not if everything else was equal. You're way ahead right now, as your surveys and ours both show. But everything else isn't equal." "By which you mean that you're going to help old Slitsand-fits. All right, that makes it a horse race." I held up my glass and he refilled it. I said, "Mr. Connick, I told you once you didn't know this business. You don't. It isn't a horse race because you can't win against us." "I can sure give it the hell of a try, though. Anyway -- " he finished his own drink thoughtfully -- "you brainwashers are a little bit fat, I think. Everybody knows how powerful you are, and you haven't really had to show it much lately. I wonder if the emperor's really running around naked." "Oh, no, Mr. Connick. Best dressed emperor you ever saw, take my word for it." He said, frowning a little bit, "I think I'll have to find out for myself. Anyway, frankly, I think people's minds are made up and you can't change them." "We don't have to," I said. "Don't you know why people vote the way they do, Connick? They don't vote their 'minds'. They vote attitudes and they vote impulses. Frankly, I'd rather work on your side than against you. Schlitz would be easy to beat. He's Jewish." Connick said angrily, "There's none of that in Belport, man." "Of anti-semitism, you mean. Of course not. But if one candidate is Jewish, and if it turns up that fifteen years ago he tried to square a parking ticket -- and there's always something that turns up, Connick, believe me -- then they'll vote against him for fixing parking tickets. That's what I mean by 'attitudes'. Your voter -- oh, not all of them; but enough to swing any election -- goes into the booth pulled this way and that. We don't have to change his mind. We just have to help him decide which part of it to operate on." I let him refill my glass, and took a pull at it. I was aware that I was beginning to feel the effects. "Take you, Connick," I said. "Suppose you're a Democrat and you go in to cast your vote. We know how you're going to vote for president, right? You're going to vote for the Democratic candidate." Connick said, not unbending much, "Not necessarily. But probably." CtXTot necessarily, right. And  ' why not necessarily? Because maybe you know this fellow who's running on the Democratic ticket -- or maybe somebody you know has a grudge against him, couldn't get the postmaster's job he wanted, or ran against his delegates for the convention. Point is, you have something against him just because your first instinct is for him. So how do you vote? Whichever way happens to get dominance at the moment of voting. Not at any other moment. Not as a matter of principle. But right then. No, we don't have to change any minds... because most people don't have enough mind to change!" He stood up and absent-mindedly filled his own glass -- I wasn't the only one who was beginning to feel the liquor. "I'd hate to be you," he said, half to himself. "Oh, it's not bad." He shook his head, then recollected himself and said, "Well, thanks for the lesson. I didn't know. But I'll tell you one thing you'll never do. You'll never get me to vote on the Arcturan side on any question." I sneered, "There's an open mind for you! Leader of the people! Takes an objective look at every question!" "All right, I'm not objective. They stink." "Race prejudice, Connick?" "Oh, don't be a fool." "There is," I said, "an Arcturan aroma. They can't help it." "I didn't say 'smell'. I said 'stink'. I don't want them in this town and neither does anybody else. Not even Schlitz." "You don't have to ever see them, They don't like Earth climate, you know. Too hot for them. Too much air. Why, Connick," I said, "I'll bet you a hundred bucks you won't set eyes on an Arcturan for at least a year, not until the base is built and staffed...And then I doubt they'll bother to -- What's the matter?" He. was looking at me as though I were an idiot, and I almost began to think I was. "Why," he said, again in that tone that was more to himself than to me, "I guess I've been overrating you. You think you're God, so I've been accepting your own valuation." "What do you mean?" "Inexcusably bad staff work, Mr. Gunnarsen," he said, nodding judgematically. "It ought to make me feel good. But you know, it doesn't. It scares me. With the kind of power you throw around, you should always be right." "Spit it out!" "It's just that you lose your bet. Didn't you know there's an Arcturan in town right now?" Ill "fit Then I got back to the car  ' the phone was buzzing and the "Message Recorded" light blinked at me. The message was from Candace: "Gunner, a Truce Team has checked into the Statler-Bills to supervise the election and get this. One of them's an Arcturan!" The staff work wasn't so bad, after all, just unpardonably slow. But there wasn't much comfort in that.  I called the hotel and was connected with one of the Truce Team staff -- the best the hotel would do for me. The staff man was a colonel who said, "Yes, Mr. Knafti is aware of your work here and specifically does not wish to see you. This is a Truce Team, Mr. Gunnarsen. Do you know what that means, exactly?" And he hung up on me. Well, I did know what it meant -- strictly hands-off, all the way -- I simply hadn't known that they would interpret it that rigidly. It was a kick in the eye, any way I looked at it. Because it made me look like a fool in front of Connick, when I kind of wanted him scared of me. Because Arcturans do, after all, stink -- not good public relations at all, when your product smells like well-rotted garlic buds a few hundred feet away. I didn't want the voters smelling them. And most of all because of the interference that I was sure any red-blooded, stubborn-minded, confused voter would draw. Jeez, Sam, you hear about that Arcturan coming to spy on us? Yeah, Charley, the damn bugs are practically accusing us of rigging the election. Damn right, Sam, and you know what else? They stink, Sam. Half an hour later I got a direct call from Haber. "Gunner, boy! Good God! Oh, this is the reeking end!" I said, "It sounds to me like you've found out about the Arcturan on the Truce Team." "You know? And you didn't tell me?" Well, I had been about to ream him for not telling me, but obviously that wasn't going to do any good. I tried anyway, but he fell back on his fat ignorance. "They didn't clue me in from Chicago. Can I help that? Be fair now, Gunner, boy!" Gunner boy very fairly hung up. I was beginning to feel very sleepy. For a moment I debated taking a brisk-up pill, but the mild buzz Connick's liquor had left with me was pleasant enough, and besides it was getting late. I went to the hotel Candace had reserved for me and crawled into bed. It only took me a few minuter to fall asleep, but I was faintly aware of an odor. It was the same hotel the Truce Team was staying at. I couldn't really be smelling this Arcturan, Knafti. It was just my imagination. That's what I told myself as I dialed for sleep and drifted off. 'T'he pillow-phone hummed and Candace's voice said out of it, "Wake up and get decent, Gunner, I'm coming up." I managed to sit up, shook my head and took a few whiffs of amphetamide. As always, it woke me right up, but at the usual price of feeling that I hadn't had quite enough sleep. Still, I got into a robe and was in the bathroom fixing breakfast when she knocked on the door. "It's open,"I called. "Want some coffee?" "Sure Gunner." She came and stood in the doorway, watching me turn the Hilsch squirt to full boil and fill two cups. I spooned dry coffee into them and turned the squirt to cold. "Orange juice?" She took the coffee and shook her head, so I just mixed one glass, swallowed it down, tossed the glass in the disposal hamper and took the coffee into the other room. The bed had stripped itself already : it was now a couch, and I leaned back on it, drinking my coffee. "All right, honey," I said, "What's the dirt on Connick?" She hesitated, then opened her bag and took out a photofax and handed it to me. It was a reproduction of an old steel-engraving headed, in antique script, The Army of the United States, and it said, Be it known to all men that has this date been separated from the service of the United States for the convenience of the government; and Be it further known to all men that the conditions of his discharge are "Well, what do you know," I said. "You see, honey? There's always something." Candace finished her coffee, set the cup down neatly on a windowsill and took out a cigarette. That was like her: she always did one thing at a time, an orderly sort of mind that I couldn't match -- and couldn't stand, either. Undoubtedly she knew what I was thinking because undoubtedly she was thinking it too; but there wasn't any nostalgia in her voice when she said: "You went and saw him last night, didn't you?... And you're still going to knife him?" I said, "I'm going to see that he is defeated in the election, yes. That's what they pay me for. Me and some others." "No, Gunner," she said, "that's not what MB pay me for, if that's what you mean, because there isn't that much money." "I got up and went over beside her. "More coffee? No? Well, I guess I don't want any either. Honey -- " Candace stood up and crossed the room, sitting in a straightbacked chair. "You wake up all of a sudden, don't you? Don't change the subject. We were talking about -- " "We were talking," I told her, "about a job that we're paid to do. All right, you've done one part of it for me, you got me what I wanted on Connick." I stopped, because she was shaking her head. "I'm not so sure I did." "How's that?" "Well, it's not on the fax, but I know why he got his DD. 'Desertion of hazardous duty.' On the Moon, in the U.N. Space Force. The year was #." I nodded, because I understood what she was talking about. Connick wasn't the only one. Half the Space Force had cracked up that year. November. A heavy Leonid strike of meteorites and a solar flare at the same time. The Space Force top brass had decided they had to crack down and asked the U.S. Army to court-martial every soldier who cut and ran for an underground shelter, and the Army had felt obliged to comply. "But most of them got presidential clemency," I said. "He didn't?" Candace shook her head. "He didn't apply." "Urn. Well, it's still on record." I dismissed the subject. "Something else. What about these Children?" Candace put out her cigarette and stood up. "Why I'm here, Gunner. It was on your list. So -- get dressed." "For what?" She grinned. "For my peace of mind, for one thing. Also for investigating the Children, like you say. I've made you an oppointment at the hospital in fifty-five minutes." Y ou have to remember that I didn't know anything about the Children except rumors. Bless Haber, he hadn't thought it necessary to explain. And Candace only said, "Wait till we get to the hospital. You'll see for yourself." Donnegan General was seven stories of cream-colored ceramic brick, air-controlled, wall-lighted throughout, tiny asepsis lamps sparkling blue where the ventilation ducts opened. Candace parked the car in an underground garage and led me to an elevator, then to a waiting room. She seemed to know her way around very well. She glanced at her watch, told me we were a couple of minutes early and pointed to a routing map that was a mural with colored lights showing visitors the way to whatever might be their destination. It also showed, quite impressively, the size and scope of Donnegan General. The hospital had twenty-two fully equipped operating rooms, a specimen and transplant bank, X-ray and radiochemical departments, a cryogenics room, the most complete prosthesis installation on Earth, a geriatrics section, O.T. rooms beyond number... And, of all things, a fully equipped and crowded pediatric wing. I said, "I thought this was a V-A. facility." "Exactly. Here comes our boy." A Navy officer was coming in, hand and smile outstretched to Candace. "Hi, good to see you. And you must be Mr. Gunnartt sen. Candace introduced us as we shook hands. The fellow's name was Commander Whitling; she called him "Tom". He said, "We'll have to move. Since I talked to you there's been an allhands evolution scheduled for eleven -- some high brass inspection. I don't want to hurry you, but I'd like it if we were out of the way... this is a little irregular." "Nice of you to arrange it," I said. "Lead on." We went up a high-rise elevator and came out on the top floor of the building, into a corridor covered with murals of Disney and Mother Goose. From a sun deck came the tinkle of a music box. Three children, chasing each other down the hall, dodged past us, yelling. They made pretty good time, considering that two of them were on crutches. "What the hell are you doing here?" asked Commander Whitling sharply. I looked twice, but he wasn't talking to me or the kids. He was talking to a man with a young face but a heavy black beard, who was standing behind a Donald Duck mobile looking inconspicuous and guilty. "Oh, hi, Mr. Whitling," the man said. "Jeez. I must've got lost again looking for the PX." "Carhart," said the commander dangerously, "if I catch you in this wing again you won't have to worry about the PX for a year. Hear me?" "Well, jeez. All right, Mr. Whitling." As the man saluted and turned, his face wearing an expression of injury, I noticed that the left sleeve of his bathrobe was tucked, empty, into a pocket. "You can't keep them out," said Whitling and spread his hands. "Well, all right, Mr. Gunnarsen, here it is. You're seeing the whole thing." I looked carefully around. It was all children -- limping children, stumbling children, pale children, weary children. "But what am I seeing, exactly?" I asked. "Why, the Children, Mr. Gunnarsen. The ones we liberated. The ones the Arcturans captured on Mars."  nd then I connected. I remembered about the capture of the colony on Mars. Interstellar war is waged at the pace of a snail's crawl, because it takes so long to go from star to star. The main battles of our war with Arcturus had been fought no farther from Earth than the surface of Mars and the fleet engagement around Orbit Saturn. Still, it had taken eleven years, first to last, from the surprise attack on the Martian colony to the armistice signed at Washington. I remembered seeing a reconstructed tape of that Martian surprise attack. It was a summer's day -- hot -- at full noon, ice melted into water. The place was the colony around the Southern Springs. Out of the small descending sun a ship appeared. It was a rocket. It was brilliant gold metal, and it came down with a halo of gold radiation around its splayed front, like the fleshy protuberance of a star-nosed mole. It landed with an electrical crackle on the finegrained orange sand, and out of it came the Arcturans. Of course, no one had known they were Arcturans then. They had swung around the sun in a long anecliptic orbit, watching and studying, and they had selected the small Martian outpost as the place to strike. In Mars gravity they were bipeds -- two of their ropy limbs were enough to lift them off the ground -- man tall, in golden pressure suits. The colonists came running out to meet them, and were killed. All of them. All of the adults. The children, however, had not been killed, not that quickly or that easily, at least. Some had not been killed at all, and some of those were here in Donnegan General Hospital. But not all. Comprehension beginning to emerge in my small mind I said, "Then these are the survivors." Candace, standing very close to me, said, "Most of them, Gunner. The ones that aren't well enough to be sent back into normal life." "And the others?" "Well, they mostly don't have families -- having been killed, you see. So they've been adopted out into foster-homes here in Belport. A hundred and eight of them, isn't that right, Tom? And now maybe you get some idea of what you're up against." sphere was something like a hundred of the Children in that wing, and I didn't see all of them. Some of them were not to be seen. Whitling just told me about, but couldn't show me, the bloodtemperature room, where the very young and very bad cases lived. They had a gnotobiotic atmosphere, a little rich in oxygen, a little more humid than the ambient air, plus pressure to help their weak metabolism keep oxygen spread in their parts. On their right, a little farther along, were the small individual rooms belonging to the worst cases of all. The contagious. The incurables. The unfortunates whose very appearance was bad for the others. Whitling was good enough to open polarizing shutters and let me look in on some of those where they lay (or writhed, or stood like sticks) in permanent solitary. One of the Arcturan efforts had been transplantation, and the project seemed to have been directed by a whimsical person. The youngest was about three; the oldest in late teens. They were a disturbing lot, and if I have glossed lightly over what I felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious. Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population weren't put back shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings, they even pulled at mine; and every time a foster-parent, or a foster-parent's neighbor, or a casual passer-by on the street, felt that heartstring tug he would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this. dangerous adults they had caged the tractable small ones as valuable research specimens. And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets! Whitling was all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in his voice the sound of what I was up against; because he loved and pitied those kids. "Hi, Terry," he said on the sundeck, bending over a bed and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him. "Can't hear us, of course," said Whitling. "We grafted in new auditory nerves four weeks ago -- I did it myself -- but they're not surviving. Third try, too. And of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before; antibodies." I said, "He doesn't look more than five years old." Whitling nodded. "But the attack on the colony was -- " "Oh, I see what you mean," said Whitling. "The Arcturans were, of course, interested in reproduction too. Ellen -- she left us a couple of weeks ago -- was only thirteen, but she'd had six children. Now, this is Nancy." Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped and regarded me with dislike and suspicion. "Nancy's one of our cures," Whitling said proudly. He followed my eyes. "Oh, nothing wrong there," he said. "Mars-bred. She hasn't adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn't slow, the ball's bouncing too fast. Here's Sam." Sam was a near-teen-ager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress. A candystriped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back, grinning. "Sam's central nervous system was almost gone," Whitling said fondly. "But we're making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is awfully -- " I wasn't listening; I was looking at Sam's grin, which showed black and broken teeth. "Diet deficiency," said Whitling, following my look again. "All right," I said, "I've seen enough, now I want to get out of here before they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whitling. I think I thank you. Which way is out?" IV T didn't want to go back to Haber's office. I was afraid of what the conversation might be like. But I had to get a fill-in on what had been happening with our work and I had to eat. So I took Candace back to my room and ordered lunch from room service. I stood at the thermal window looking out at the city while Candace checked with the office. I didn't even listen, because Candace knev what I would want to know, I just watched Belport cycle through an average dull Monday at my feet. Belport was a radial town, with an urban center-cluster of the mushroom-shaped buildings that were popular twenty years ago. The hotel we were in was one, in fact, and from my window I could see three others looming above and below me, to right and left, and beyond them the cathedral spires of the apartment condominia of the residential districts. I could see a creeping serpent of gaily colored cars moving along one of the trafficways, pinpointed with sparks of our pro-referendum campaign parades. Or one of the opposition's. From four hundred feet it didn't seem to matter. "You know, honey," I said as she clicked off the #-V, "there isn't any sense to this. I admit the kids are sad cases, and who can resist kids in trouble? But they don't have one solitary damned thing to do with whether or not the Arcturans should have a telemetry and tracking station out on the lake." Candace said, "Weren't you the man who told me that logic didn't have anything to do with public relations?" She came to the window beside me, turned and half-sat on the ledge and read from her notes: "Survey index off another half-point... Haber says, be sure to tell you that's a victory, would have have been off two points at least without the Arcats. Supplier letters out. Chicago approves budget overdraft. And that's all that matters." "Thanks." The door chimed, and she left me to let the bellmen in with our lunch. I watched her without much appetite, except maybe for the one thing that I knew wasn't on the menu, Candace herself. But I tried to eat. Candace did not seem to be trying to help me eat. In fact, she did something that was quite out of character for her. All the way through lunch she kept talking, and the one subject she kept talking about was the kids. I heard about Nina, who was fifteen when she came to Donnegan General and had been through the occupation all the way -- who wouldn't talk to anybody, and weighed fifty-one pounds, and screamed unless she was allowed to hide under the bed. "And after six months," said Candace, "they gave her a hand-puppet, and she finally talked through that" "How'd you find all this out?" I asked. "From Tom. And then there were the germ-free kids... She told me about them, and about the series of injections and marrow transplants that they had needed to restore the body's the patient. And the ones with auditory and vocal nerves destroyed, apparently because the Arcturans were investigating the question of whether humans could think rationally in the absence of articulate words. The ones raised on chemically pure glucose for dietary studies. The induced bleeders. The kids with no sense of touch, and the kids with no developed musculature. "Tom told you all this?" "And lots more, Gunner. And remember, these are the survivors. Some of the kids who were deliberately -- " "How long have you known Tom?" She put down her fork, sugared her coffee and took a sip, looking at me over the cup. "Oh, since I've been here. Two years. Since before the kids came, of course." "Pretty well, I judge." "Oh, yes." "He really likes those kids, I could see that. And so do you." I swallowed some more of my own coffee, which tasted like diluted pig swill, and reached for a cigarette and said, "I think maybe I waited too long about the situation here, wouldn't you say?" "Why, yes, Gunner," she said carefully, "I think you maybe missed the boat." "I tell you what else I think, honey. I think you're trying to tell me something, and it isn't all about Proposition Four on the ballot next week." And she said, not irrelevantly, "As a matter of fact, Gunner, I'm going to marry Tom Whitling on Christmas day." T sent her back to the office and stretched out on my bed, smoking and watching the smoke being sucked into the wall-vents. It was rather peaceful and quiet because I'd told the desk to hold all calls until further notice, and I wasn't feeling a thing. Perfection is so rare, it is interesting to find a case in which one has been perfectly wrong all the way. If I had taken out my little list then I could have checked off all the points. One way or another. I hadn't fired Haber, and in fact I really didn't want to any more, because he wasn't much worse than I was at this particular job; the record showed it. I had investigated the Children, all right. A little late. I had investigated Connick, the number one opponent to the proposition, and what I had found would hurt Connick, all right, but I couldn't really see how it would help do our job. And I certainly wasn't going to marry Candace Harmon. Come to think of it, I thought, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the old one, there had been a fifth item, and I had blown that one too. The classics of public relations clearly show how little reason has to do with MR, and yet I had allowed myself to fall into that oldest and most imbecilic of traps set for flacks. Think of history's masterstrokes of flackery: "The Jews stabbed Germany in the back!" "Seventy-eight (or fifty-nine, or one hundred and three) card-carrying communists in the State Department!" "I will go to Korea!" It is not enough for a theme to be rational ; indeed it is wrong for a theme to be rational, if you want to move men's glands, because, above all else, it must seem new, and fresh, and of such revolutionary simplicity that it illuminates an enormous, confused and disagreeable problem in a fresh and hopeful light. Or so it must seem to the Average Man. And since he has spent any number of surly, worried hours groping for some personal salvation in the face of a bankrupt Germany, or a threat of subversion, or a war that is going nowhere, no rational solution can ever meet those strictures... since he has already considered all the rational solutions and found either that they are useless or that the cost is more than he wants to pay. So what I should have concentrated on in Belport was the bright, irrational, distractive issue. The Big Lie, if you will. And I had hardly found even a Sly Insinuation. It was interesting to consider in just how many ways I had done the wrong thing. Including maybe the wrongest of all : I had let Candace Harmon get away. And then in these thoughts, myself almost despising, haply the door chimed and I opened it, and there was this fellow in Space Force olive-greens saying, "Come along, Mr. Gunnarsen, the Truce Team want to talk to you." TT'or one frozen moment there, I was nineteen years old again. I was a Rocketman #c on the Moon, guarding the Aristarchus base against invaders from outer space. (We thought that to be a big joke at the time. Shows how unfunny a joke can turn.) This fellow was a colonel, and his name was Peyroles, and he took me down the corridor, to a private elevator I had never known was there, up to the flat dome of the mushroom and into a suite which made my suite look like the cellar under a dogrun in Old Levittown. The reek was overpowering. By then I had gotten over my quick response to the brass and I took out a ker-pak and held it to my nose. The colonel did not even look at me. "Sit down!" barked the colonel, and left me in front of an unlighted fireplace. Something was going on; I could hear voices from another room, a lot of them ; " -- burned one in effigy, and by God we'll burn a real one -- " " -- smells like a skunk -- " " -- turns my stomach!" And that last fellow, whoever he was, was pretty near right, at that -- although actually in the few seconds since I entered the suite I had almost forgotten the smell. It was funny how you got used to it. Like a ripe cheese; The first whiff knocked you sick, but pretty soon the olfactory nerves got the hang of the thing and built up a defense. " -- all right, the war's over and we have to get along with them, but a man's home town -- " Whatever it was that was going on in the other room, it was going on loudly. Tempers were always short when Arcturans were around, because the smell, of course, put everybody on edge. People don't like bad smells. They're not nice. They remind us of sweat and excrement, which we have buttressed our lives against admitting as real, personal facts. Then there was a loud military yell for order -- I recognized the colonel, Peyroles -- and then a voice that sounded queerly not-quite-human, althought it spoke in English. An Arcturan? What was his name, Knafti? But I had understood they comun't make human sounds. Whoever it was, he put an end to the meeting. The door opened. Through it I could see a couple of dozen hostile backs, leaving through another door, and coming toward me the Space Force colonel, a very young man with a pale, angel's face and a dragging limp, in civilian clothes... and, yes, and the Arcturan. It was the first one I had ever been with at so close range, in so small a group. He wobbled toward me on four or six of his coat-hanger limbs, breathing-thorax encased in a golden shell, his mantis face and bright black eyes staring at me. Peyroles closed the door behind them. He turned to me and said, "Mr. Gunnarsen... Knafti... Timmy Brown." I hadn't the ghost of a clue whether to offer to shake, and if so, with what. Knafti however merely regarded me gravely. The boy nodded. I said: "I'm glad to meet you, gentlemen. As you perhaps know, I tried to set up an appointment before but your people turned me down. I take it now the shoe is on the other foot." Colonel Peyroles frowned toward the door he had just shut -- there were still noises behind it -- but said to me, "You're quite right. That was a meeting of a civic leaders' committee -- " The door interrupted him by opening, and a man leaned through and yelled: "Peyroles! Can that thing understand white man's talk? I hope so. I hope it hears me when I say that I'm going to make it my personal business to take it apart if it's still in Belport this time tomorrow. And if any human being, or so-called human being like you, gets in the way, I'll take him apart too!" He slammed the door without waiting for an answer. "You see?" said Peyroles gruffly, angrily. Things like that would never have happened with well-tempered troops. "That's what we want to talk to you about." "I see," I said, and I did see, very clearly, because that fellow who had leaned through the door had been the Arcturanproperty-sale standard bearer we had counted on, old -- what had Connick called him? -- old Slitsand-Fits Schlitz, the man we were attempting to elect to get our proposition through. J udging by the amount of noise I'd heard from the citizens' delegation, there was lynch in the atmosphere. I could understand why they would reverse themselves and ask for me, before things got totally out of control and wound up in murder, if der --  -- although, it occurred to me, lynching Knafti might not be the worst thing that could happen; public sentiment might bounce back -- I shoved that thought out of my mind and got down to business. "What, exactly?" I asked. "I gather you want me to do something about your image." Knafti sat himself down, if that's what Arcturans do, on an entwining-rack. The pale boy whispered sofnething to him, then came to me. "Mr. Gunnarsen," he said, "I am Knafti." He spoke with a great precision of vowels and a stress at the end of each sentence, as though he had learned English out of a handbook. I had no trouble in understanding him. At least, not in understanding what it was he said. It did take me a moment to comprehend what he meant; and then Peyroles had to help. "He means at this moment he's speaking for Knafti," said the colonel. "Interpreter. See?" The boy moved his lips for a moment -- shifting gears, it seemed -- and said, "That is right, I am Timmy Brown. Knaiti's translator and assistant." "Then ask Knafti what he wants from me." I tried to say it the way he had -- a sort of sneeze for the "K" and an indescribable whistle for the "F." Timmy Brown moved his lips again and said, "I, Knafti, wish you to stop... to leave... to discontinue your operation in Belport." From the twining-tree, the Arcturan waved his ropy limbs and chittered like a squirrel. The boy chirped back and said: "I, Knafti, commend you on your effective work, but stop it." "By which," rumbled Colonel Peyroles, "he means knock it off." "Go fight a space war, Peyroles. Timmy -- I mean, Knafti, this is the job I'm paid to do. The Arcturan Confederacy itself hired us. I take my orders from Arthur S. Bigelow, Jr., and I carry them out whether Knafti likes it or not." Chirp and chitter between Knafti and the pale, limping boy. The Arcturan left his twiningtree and moved to the window, looking out into the sky and the copter traffic. Timmy Brown said: "It doer, not matter what your orders may be, I, Knafti, tell you that your work is harmful." He hesitated, mumbling to himself. "We do not wish to obtain our base here at the cost of what is true, and -- " he turned imploringly to the Arcturan -- "and it is apparent you are attempting to change the truth." He chirped at the Arcturan, who took his blind black eyes from the window and came toward us. Arcturans don't walk, exactly. They drag themselves on the lower part of the thorax. Their limbs are supple and thin, and what are not used for support are used for gestures. Knafti used a number of his now, as he chirped one short series of sounds at the boy. " -- Otherwise," Timmy Brown finished off, "I, Knafti, tell you we will have to fight this war over again." A s soon as I was back in my room I messaged Chicago for orders and clarification and got back the answer I expected: Hold everything. Referring matSo I awaited. The way I awaited was to call Candace at the office and get the latest sitrep. I told her about the near-riot in the Truce Team's suite and asked her what it was all about. She shook her head. "We have their appointments schedule. Gunner. It just says 'Meeting with civic leaders.' But one of the leaders has a secretary who goes to lunch with a girl from Records #s Accounting here and -- " "And you'll find out. All right, do that, and now what's the current picture?" She began reading off briefing digests and field reports. They were mixed, but not altogether bad. Opinion sampling showed a small rise in favorability toward the Arcturans, in fact. It wasn't much, but it was the first plus change I had seen, and doubly puzzling because of Knafti's attitude and the brawl with the civic leaders. I asked, "Why, honey?" Candace's face in the screen was as puzzled as mine. "We're still digging." "All right. Go on." There were more pluses. The Flower Fair had yielded surprisingly big profits in attitudes -- among those who attended. Of course, they were only a tiny fraction of the population of Belport. The Arcats were showing a plus for us, too. Where we resolutions, in resignations from Candace's Arcturan-American Friendship League, in poor attendance at neighborhood coffeeklatsches. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see what the Children had done to us. In every family-situation sampling, the attitudes were measurably worse than when the subjects were interviewed in a non-family environment -- at work, stopped on the street, in a theater. The importance of that was just what I had told Connick. No man is a simple entity. He behaves one way when his selfimage is as head of a family, another when he is at a cocktail party, another at work, another still when a pretty girl sits down beside him on a commuter-copter. Elementary truths. But it had taken the MR boys half a century to learn how to use them. In this case the use was clear: Play down family elements, play up play. I ordered more floats, torchlight parades and a teen-age beauty contest. I canceled the fourteen picnic rallies we had planned and ordered a hold on the coffee-klatsches. I was not exactly obeying Chicago's orders. But it didn't matter. All this could be canceled with a single word, and anyway it was only nit-picking detail. The One Big Weeny still escaped me. I lit a cigarette, thought for a minute and said, "Honey get me some of the synoptic extracts of opinion-sampling from heads of families and particularly families containing some of the Children. I don't want the integration or anaylsis. Just the raw interviews but with the scutwork left out." And as soon as she was off the line the Chicago circuit came in with a message they'd been holding : top is taken off budget and your hand is freed, can you guarantee, repeat guarantee, win on referendum question? Tt was not the response I had expected from them. Still, it was a legitimate question. I took a moment to think it over. Junior Bigelow had already given me a pretty free hand -- as he always did; how else can a troubleshooter work? If he was now emphasizing that my hand was freed entirely, it would not be because he thought I hadn't understood him in the first place. Nor would it be because he suspected I might be cheese-paring secretarial salaries. He meant one thing: Win, no matter what. Under those conditions, could I do it? Well, of course I could win. Yes. Provided I found the One Big Weeny. You can always win an election, any election anyto pay the right price. It was finding the price to pay that was hard. Not just money. Sometimes the price you pay is a human being, in the role for which I had been lining up Connick. Throw a human sacrifice to the gods and your prayer is granted... But was Connick the sacrifice the gods wanted? Would it help to defeat him, bearing in mind that his opponent was one of the men who had been screaming at Knafti in the Truce Team suite? And if so -- had my knife enough edge to drain his blood? Well, it always had had before. And if Connick wasn't the right man, I would find the man who was. I messaged back, short and sweet, Yes. And in less than a minute, as though Junior had been standing by at the faxtape receiver, waiting for the word from me -- and perhaps he had! -- his reply came back: Gunner, we've lost the Arcturan Confederacy account. Arc Con liaison man says all bets off. They're giving notice of cancellation our contract, suggestion they will cancel entire armistice treaty too. I don't have to tell you we need them. Some possibility that showing strong results in Belport will get them hack. That's what we have to play for. No holds barred, Gunner, win that election. nphe office circuit chimed then. Probably it was Candace, but I didn't want to talk to her just then. I turned all the communication circuits to "hold", stripped down, climbed into the shower, set it for full needle spray and let the water beat on me. It was not an aid to thought, it was a replacement for thought. v I didn't want to think any more. I wanted time out. I did not want to think about (a) whether the war would break out again, and, if so, in what degree I would have helped to bring that about; (b) what I was doing to Nice Guy Connick; (c) whether It Was All Worth It or (d) how much I was going to dislike myself that coming Christmas day. I only wanted to let the hot splash of scented foaming water anesthetize me. When my skin began to look pale and wrinkly, although I had not come to any conclusions or found any solutions, I came out, dressed, opened the communications circuits and let them all begin blinking, ringing and winking at once. I took Candace first. She said, "Gunner! Dear lord, have you heard about the Armistice Commission? They've just released a statement -- " "I heard. What else, honey?" Good girl, she shifted gears without missing a beat. "Then there was that meeting of civic leaders in the Truce Team suite  "I saw. Feedback from the Armistice Commission's statement. What else?" She glanced at the papers in her hand, hesitated, then said: "Nothing important. Uh, Gunner. That #-V preempt for tonight -- " "Yeah, honey?" "Do you want me to cancel it?" I said, "No. You're right, we won't use the time for the ArcturanAmerican Friendship League or whatever we had scheduled, but you're wrong, we'll use the time some way. I don't know how right now." "But Junior said -- " "Honey," I told her. "Junior says all sorts of things. Anybody looking to scalp me?" "Well," she said, "There's Mr. Connick. I didn't think you'd want to see him." "No, I'll see him. I'll see anybody." "Anybody?" I had surprised her. She dived into her list again. "There's somebody from the Truce Team -- " "Make it everybody from the Truce Team." " -- and Commander Whitling from -- " "From the hospital. Sure, and tell him to bring some kids." " -- and... She trailed off and looked at me. "Gunner, are you putting me on? You don't really want to see all these people." I smiled and reached out and patted the viewphone. From her point of view it would look like an enormous cloudy hand dor, ' in on her screen, but she would know what I meant. I said, "You could not be more wrong. I do. I want to see them all, the more the better, and the way I'd like to see them best is in my office, all at once. So set it up, honebecause I'll be busy between now and then." "Busy doing what, Gunner?" "Busy trying to think of what I want to see them for." And I turned off the viewphone, got up and walked out, leaving the others gobbling into emptiness behind me. What I needed was a long, long walk, and I took it.  Then I was tired of walking   I went to the office and evicted Haber from his private quarters. I kept him standing by what had once been his own desk while I checked with Candace and found that she had made all my appointments for that evening, then I told him to get lost. "And thanks," I said. He paused on his way to the door. "For what, Gunner?" "For a very nice office to kill time in." I waved at the furnishings. "I wondered what you'd spent fifty grand on when I saw the invoices in the Chicago office, Haber, and I admit I thought there might have been a little padding. But I was wrong." He said woundedly: "Gunner, boy! I wouldn't do anything like that." "I believe you. Wait a minute." I thought for a second, then told him to send in some of the technical people and not to let anybody, repeat anybody, disturb me for any purpose whatever. I scared him good, too. He left a shaken man, a little angry, a little admiring, a little excited inside, I think, at the prospect of seeing how the great man would get himself out of this one. Meanwhile the great man talked briefly to the technicians, took a tenminute nap, drank the Martinis out of his dinner tray and pitched the rest of it in the dispos-all. Then, as I had nearly an hour before the appointments Candace had set up for me, I scrounged around fat-cat Haber's office to see what entertainment it offered. There were his files. I glanced at them and forgot them; there was nothing about the hoarded memoranda that interested me, not even for gossip. There were the books on his shelf. But I did not care to disturb the patina of dust that even the cleaning machines had not been able to touch. There was his private bar, and the collection of photographs in the end compartment of his desk drawer. It looked like very dull times waiting, until the studio men reported in that they had completed their arrangements at my request, and the #-V tape-effects monitor could now be controlled by remote from my desk, and then I knew I had a pleasant time. Have you ever played with the console of a #-V monitor, backed by a library of tape-effects strips? It is very much like being God. All that the machine does is take the stored videotapes that are in its files and play them back. But it also manipulates size and perspective or superimposes one over another... so that you can, as I in fact have done, put the living person of someone you don't like in a position embarrassing to him, and project it on a montage screen so that only a studio tech can find the dots on the pattern where the override betrays its presence. Obviously, this is a way out of almost any propaganda difficulty, since it is child's play to make up any event you like and give it the seeming of reality. Of course, everybody knows it can be done. So the evidence of one's own eyes is not longer quite enough, even for a voter. And the laws can cut you down. I had thought of whomping up some frightful frame around Connick, for example. But it wouldn't work; no matter when I did it there would still be time for the other side to spread the word of an electoral fraud, and a hoax of this magnitude would make its own way onto the front pages. So I used the machine for something much more interesting to me. I used it as a toy. I started by dialing the lunar base at Aristarchus for background, found a corps of Rocketman marching off in the long lunar step, patched my own face onto one of the helmeted figures and zoomed in and out with the imaginary camera, watching R#c Odin Gunnarsen as a boy of nineteen, scared witless but doing his job. He was a pretty nice boy, I thought objectively, and wondered what had gone wrong with him later. I abandoned that and sought for other amusements. I found Candace's images on tape in the files and pleasured myself with her for a time. Her open, friendly face gave some dignity to the fantastic bodies of half a dozen #-V strippers in the files; but I stopped that child's game. I looked for a larger scope. I spread the whole panoply of the heavens across the screen of the tape machine. I sought out the crook of the Big Dipper's handle, traced its arc across half the heavens until I located orange Arcturus. Then I zoomed in on the star, as littler stars grew larger and hurtled out of range around it, sought its seven graygreen planets and located number five among them, the watery world that Knafti had spawned upon. I bade the computing mind inside the tape machine reconstruct the events of the orbit bombing for me, and watched hell-bombs splash enormous mushrooms of poisonous foam into the Arcturan sky, whipping the island cities with tidal waves and drowning them in death. Then I destroyed the whole planet. I turned Arcturan into a nova and watched the hot driven gases sphere out to embrace the planet, boil its seas, slag its cities... and found myself sweating. I ordered another drink from the dispenser and switched the machine off. And then I became aware that the pale blue light over the door to Haber's office was glowing insistently. It was time; my visitors had arrived. C onnick had brought his kids along, three of them; the lover from Donnegan General had brought two more; Ilnafti and Colonel Peyroles had Timmy Brown. "Welcome to Romper Room," I said. "They're making lynch mobs young this year." They all yelled at me at once -- or all but Knafti, whose tweeting chitter just didn't have the volume to compete. I listened, and when they showed signs of calming down I reached into fat cat Huber's booze drawer and poured myself a stiff one and said, "All right, which of you creeps want first crack?" And they boiled up again while I drank my drink. All of them, except Candace Harmon, who only stood by the door and looked at me. So I said, "All right, Connick. you first. Are you going to make me spread it all over the newscasts that you had a dishonorable discharge?... And by the way, maybe you'd like to meet my assistant blackmailer; Miss Harmon over there dug up the dirt on you." Her boy friend yelped, but Candace just went on looking. I didn't look back, but kept my eyes on Connick. He squinted his eyes, put his hands in his pockets and said, with considerable self-restraint, "You know I was only seventeen years old when that happened." "Oh, sure. I know more. You had a nervous breakdown the year after your discharge, space cafard, as they call it on the soapies. Yellow fever is what we called it on the Moon." He glanced quickly at his kids, the two that were his own and the one that was not, and said rapidly: "You know I could have had that DD reversed -- " "But you didn't. The significant fact isn't that you deserted. The significant fact is that you were loopy. And, I'd say, still are." Timmy Brown stuttered: "One moment. I, Knafti, have asked that you cease -- " But Connick brushed him aside. "Why, Gunnarsen?" "Because I intend to win this election. I don't care what it costs -- especially what it costs you." "But, I, Knafti, have instructed -- " That was Timmy Brown trying again. "The Armistice Commission issued orders -- " That was Peyroles. "I don't know which is worse, you or the bugs!" And that was Candace's little friend from the hospital, and they all were talking at once again. Even Knafti came dragging toward me on his golden slug's belly, chirruping and hooting, and Timmy Brown was actually weeping as he tried to tell me I was wrong, I had to stop, the whole thing was against orders and why wouldn't I desist? I shouted: "Shut up, all of you!" They didn't, but the volume level dropped minutely. I rode over it: "What the hell do I care what any of you want? I'm paid to do a job. My job is to make people act a certain way. I do it. Maybe tomorrow I'll be paid to make them act the opposite way, and I'll do that, too. Anyway, who the hell are you to order me around? A stink-bug like you, Knafti? A GI quack like yourself, Wliitling? Or you, Connick. A -- " "A candidate for public office," he said clearly. And I give him much mana; he didn't shout, but he talked right over me. "And as such I have an obligation -- " But I out-yelled him anyway. "Candidate! You're a candidate right up to till the minute I tell the voters you're a nut, Connick. And then you're dead ! And I will tell them, I promise, if -- " I didn't get a chance to finish that sentence, because all three of Connick's kids were diving at me, his own two and the other one. They sent papers flying off Haber's desk and smashed his sand-crystal decanter; but they didn't get to my throat, where they clearly were aimed, because Connick and Timmy Brown dragged them back. Not easily. I allowed myself a sneer ."And what does that prove? Your kids like you, I admit -- even the one from Mars. The one that Knafti's people used for vivisection -- that Knafti himself worked over, likely as not. Nice picture, right? babies, destroying kids... or didn't you know that Knafti himself was one of the boss bugs on Timmy Brown shrieked wildly, "You don't know what you are doing. It was not Knafti's fault at all!" His ashen face was haggard, his rotten teeth bared in a grimace. And he was weeping. Tf you apply heat to a single molecule it will take off like a tom with a spark under his tail, but you cannot say where it will go. If you heat a dozen molecules they will fling out in all directions, but you still do not know which directions they will be. If, however, you heat a few a thimble of dilute gas, you know where they will go: they will expand. Mass action. You can't tell what a single molecule may do -- call it the molecule's free will, if you like -- but masses obey mass laws. Masses of anything; even so small a mass as the growling troop that confronted me in Haber's office. I let them yell, and all the yelling was at me. Even Candace was showing the frown and the darkening of the eyes and the working of the lips, although she watched me as silently and steadily as ever. Connick brought it to a head: "All right, everybody," he yelled, "now listen to me! Let's get this thing straightened out!" He stood up, a child gripped by each elbow and the third, the youngest, trapped between him and the door. He looked at me with such loathing that I could feel it -- and didn't like it, either, although it was no more than I had expected, and he said: "It's true. Sammy, here, was one of the kids from Mars. Maybe that has made me think things I shouldn't have thought -- he's my kid now, and when I think of those stinkbugs cutting -- " He stopped himself and turned to Knafti. "Well, I see something. A man who would do a thing like that would be a fiend. I'd cut his heart out with my bare hands. But you aren't a man." Grimly he let go of the kids and strode toward Knafti. "I can't forgive you. God help me, it isn't possible. But I can't blame you -- exactly -- any more than I can blame lightning for striking my house. I think I was wrong. Maybe I'm wrong now. But -- I don't know what you people do -- I'd like to shake your hand. Or whatever the hell it is you've got there. I've been thinking of you as a perverted murderer and a filthy animal, but I'll tell you right now, I'd rather work together with you -- for your base, for peace, for whatever we can get together on -- than with some human beings in this room!" I didn't stay to watch the tender scene that followed. I didn't have to, since the cameras and tape recorders that the studio people had activated for me behind every one-way mirror in the room would be watching for me. I could only hope they had not missed a single word or scream, because I didn't think I could do that scene over again. I opened the door quietly and left. And as I was going I caught the littlest Connick kid sneaking past me, headed for the #-V set in the waiting room, and snaked out an arm to stop him. "Stinker!" he hissed. "Rat fink!" "You may be right," I told him, "but go back and keep your father company. You're in on living history today." "Nuts! I always watch Dr. Zhivago on Monday nights, and it's on in five minutes and -- " "Not tonight it isn't, son. You can hold that against me, too. We preempted the time for a different show entirely." I escorted him back into the room, closed the door, picked up my coat and left. C andace was waiting for me with the car. She was driving it herself. "Will I make the nine-thirty flight?" I asked. "Sure, Gunner." She steered onto the autotraffic lane, put the car on servo and dialed the scatport, then sat back and lit a cigarette for each of us. I took it and looked morosely out tinwindow. Down below us, on the slowtraffic level, we were passing a torchlight parade, with floats and glee clubs and free beer at the major pedestrian intersections. I opened the glove compartment and took out field glasses, looked through them -- "Oh, you don't have to check up, Gunner. I took care of it. They're all plugging the program." "I see they are." Not only were the marchers carrying streamers that advertised our preempt show, that was now already beginning to be on the air, but the floats carried projection screens and amplifiers. You couldn't look anywhere in the procession without seeing Knafti, huge and hideous in his gold carapace, clutching the children and protecting them against the attack of that monster from another planet, me. The studio people had done a splendid job of splicing in no time at all. The whole scene was there on camera, as real as I had just lived it. "Want to listen?" Candace fished out and passed me a hyperboloid long-hearer, but I didn't need it. I remembered what the voices would be saying. There would be Connick denouncing me. Timmy Brown denouncing me. The kids denouncing me, all of them. Colonel Peyroles, denouncing me; Commander Whitling, denouncing me; even Knafti -- denouncing me. All that hate and only one target. Me. "Of course. Junior'll fire you. He'll have to, Gunner." I said, "I need a vacation anyway." It wouldn't matter. Sooner or later, when the pressure was off, Junior would find a way to hire me back. Once the lawsuits had been settled. Once the armistice commission could finish its work. Once I could be put on the payroll inconspicuously, at an inconspicuous job in an inconspicuous outpost of the firm. With an inconspicuous future. We slid over the top of a spiraling ramp and down into the parking bays of the scatport. "So long, honey," I said, "and Merry Christmas to you both." "Oh, Gunner! I wish -- " But I knew what she really wished and I wouldn't let her finish. I said, "He's a nice fellow, Whitling. And you know? I'm not." I didn't kiss her good-by. The scatjet was ready for boarding. I fed my ticket into the check-in slot, got the green light as the turnstile clicked open, entered the plane and took a seat on the far side, by the window. You can win any cause if you care to pay the price. All it takes is one human sacrifice. By the time the scatjet began to roar, to quiver and to turn on its axis away from the terminal I had faced the fact that that price once and for all was paid. I saw Candace standing there on the roof of the loading dock, her skirts whipped by the backblast. She didn't wave to me, but she didn't go away as long as I could see her standing on the platform. Then, of course, she would go back to her job and ultimately on Christmas morning to that nice guy at the nospital. Haber would stay in charge of his nolonger-important branch office. Connick would win his campaign. Knafti would transact his incomprehensible business with Earth; and if any of them ever thought of me again it would be with loathing, anger and contempt. But that is the way to win an election. You have to pay the price. It was just the breaks of the game that the price of this one was me. They came from space. Earth was their prey! by Keith Latimer In the same issue -- by Frederik Pohl Many more in the October IF -- now monthly! Don't miss it! r Imagine! Here's what you gel . Commander Camera Retai Value:  # I Roll Kodacolor Film Retail Value: # I Roll Kodak Black-and-Whitc Film Retail Value: .# Pre paid Processing Certificate Retail Value: # (Good for # Jumbo Color Print' and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!) # # limited! Clip coupon and mail today! the button -- you can't make mistakes! Nothing to locus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp blackand-whites, amazingly life-like color shots -- even slides -- with no effort at all! P.O. Box #, N.Y., N.Y. # extra charge). Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus # handling. name (please print)  Send C.O.D. I am enclosing # deposit and will pay postman #. plus #? handling, plus postal charges.  I want to save postal charges. I am enclosing #. plus #? for handling. not completely pleased! Forgotten road to success in writing By J. D. Ratcliff X can't imagine why more beginners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to you -- but they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at home, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing.) You learn to write by writing. Our instructors, themselves all published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well -- or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. "Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. Although he works only four hours a day, he has had hundreds of articles published in top magazines, including over # in Reader's Digest alone. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut I want to know' if I have writing aptitude. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs Age, Miss (please print) Street City Zone... County State The School is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council, Washington, D.C.  December # o n o n C ro -- if you want to keep your copy of Galaxy intact for permanent possession! Why mutilate a good thing? But, by the same token... if you're devotee enough to want to keep your copies in mint condition, you ought to subscribe. You really ought to. For one thing, you get your copies earlier. For another, you're sure you'll get them! Sometimes newsstands run out -- the mail never does. (And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field -- Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) #XXV Galaxy is published in French and Italian. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille. This Edition is also published in Living Tape by Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. by Harry Harrison by Wyman Guin by Lester del Rey No. #... # Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. by Norman Spinrad by Roger Zelazny by David R. Bunch by Sheri S. Eberhart by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy Subscribtion: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Qalaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights Including translations reserved. Ail material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.SA. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. T. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. T et's say that we get to Mars in the next few years and learn that, in spite of everything, there really are Martians. The way we learn this is that our spacecraft cushions its soft landing on a Martian canal-tender's hut; and as a direct consequence of this mishap grave events follow, for all of which the Martian government holds us responsible. Next thing you know the President of the United States is summoned to defend himself before the Third Marslaw Folk Conciliatorium. Clearly the President needs a lawyer -- and a space lawyer, at that. Where is he going to find one? As a matter of fact, he won't have very far to look -- not by the time we land on Mars, and indeed not even today. Space law is already a recognized specialty; the most recent proof of this to cross our desk is a fat, good-looking volume entitled Law and Public Order in Space (Yale University Press), written by three law professors named McDougal, Lasswell and Vlasic. (Professors McDougal and Lasswell are on the Yale faculty. Professor Vlasic, however, shows just how far this thing has gone. Secrets entrusted to a few be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to onebut factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind die tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these bets remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious Rosicrucians organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe n.X.Q.  Scribe N.X.Q. i San Jose, California J Please send me the free book. The Mastery i of Life, which explains how I may learn to i use my faculties and powers of mind. ' I ' Nim, l I ! Address I City.  with his academic connection: his school is McGill's Institute of Air and Space Law.) What is most interesting about Law and Public Order in Space is that it is not science fiction. It is solid law: which means that it rests firmly on statute and precedent, and although you might not think it, both statute and precedent exist copiously right now. The authors have found any number of points of law concerning marine vessels and aircraft, for example, which must clearly apply to Gemiri and Vostok as well. How can nations determine who owns what when Mars is colonized? The precedents come from Antarctica. What happens if there are Martians, and they object? A whole budget of law on such questions as American relations with the Apaches give the answers. The authors of this tome have considered nearly as many possibilities as Heinlein and Van Vogt -- and have found legal matter concerning everything from a collision between orbiting satellites to the trick question of contact with superintendent aliens who wish to send us missionaries preaching their One True Religion. It's interesting reading. (Quotes a number of familiar names as authorities, by the way -- Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, Willy Ley, C. S. Lewis, etc.) Maybe we should all start boning up right now... Tf not on space law, then how about the sort of law, or at least governmental policy, that scientists are making right now? What makes us think of that is another book, this one called Scientists and National Policy Making (Columbia University Press), a symposium edited by Robert Gilpin and Christopher Wright on how scientists are helping to shape government policies today. There are plenty of them, some # in that National Bureau of Standards alone. What do they do? Why, they advise, mostly. But their advice has much force behind it, since it is rather clear that most laymen don't -- and can't -- know enough about certain rather large scientific questions to be entitled to an opinion without such advice. This is a step forward -- as the book points out, in the halfcentury after the National Academy of Sciences was founded in # it was consulted by the War Department on only five subjects, including "Tests for the Purity of Whiskey" and how to preserve paint on Army knapsacks. There have been changes since Left , right! Left, right! Keep -- and, above all, I B ill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and barrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality. He would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along don't ask why I the road. He might never have heard it and his life would have been very, very different. But he did hear it and dropped the handles of the plow that was plugged into the robomule, turned and gaped. It was indeed a fabulous sight Leading the parade was a onerobot-band, twelve-feet high and splendid in its great black busby that concealed the hi-fi speakers. The golden pillars of its legs stamped forward as its thirty articulated arms sawed, plucked and fingered at a dazzling variety of instruments. Martial music poured out in wave after inspiring wave and even Bill's thick peasant feet stirred in their clodhoppers as the shining boots of the squad of soldiers crashed along the road in perfect unison. Medals jingled on the manly swell of their scarlet-clad chests. And there could certainly be no nobler sight in all the world. To their rear marched the sergeant, gorgeous in his braid and brass, thickly clustered medals and ribbons, sword and gun, girdled gut and steely eye which sought out Bill where he stood gawking over the fence. The grizzled head nodded in his direction, the steel-trap mouth bent into a friendly smile and there was a conspiratorial wink. Then the little legion was past, and hurrying behind in their wake came a huddle of dustcovered ancillary robots, hopping and crawling or rippling along on treads. As soon as these had gone by Bill climbed clumsily over the splitrail fence and ran after them. There were no more than two interesting events every four years here, and he was not going to miss what hopefully promised to be a third. A crowd had already gathered in the market square when Bill hurried up, and they were listening to an enthusiastic band concert. The robot hurled itself into the glorious measures of Star Troopers to the Skies Avaunt, and thrashed its way through Rockets Rumble and almost demolished itself in the tumultuous rhythm of Sappers at the Pithead Digging. It pursued this last tune so strenuously that one of its legs flew off, rising high into the air, but was caught dexterously before it could hit the ground and the music ended with the robot balancing on its remaining leg beating time with the detached limb. It also, after an ear-fracturing peal on the basses, used the leg to point across the square to where a tri-di screen and refreshment booth had been set up. The troopers had vanished into the tavern and the recruiting sergeant stood alone among his robots, beaming a welcoming smile. ( t T ow hear this! Free drinks ' for all, courtesy of the Emperor, and some lively scenes of jolly adventure in distant climes to amuse you while you sip," he called in an immense and leathery voice. Most of the people drifted over, Bill in their midst, though a few embittered and elderly draftdodgers slunk away between the houses. Cooling drinks were shared out by a robot with a spigot for a navel and an inexhaustible supply of plastic glasses in one metallic hip. Bill sipped his happily while he followed the enthralling adventures of the space troopers in full color with sound effects and stimulating subsonics. There was battle and death and glory though it was only the Chingers who died: troopers only suffered neat little wounds in their extremities that could be covered easily by small bandages. And while Bill was enjoying this. Recruiting Sergeant Grue was enjoying him, his little piggy eyes ruddy with greed as they fastened onto the back of Bill's neck. This is the one! he chortled to himself while, unknowingly, his yellowed tongue licked at his lips. He could already feel the weight of the bonus money in his pocket. The rest of the audience were the usual mixed bag of overage men, fat women, beardless youths and other unenlistables. All except this broadshouldered, square-chinned, curly-haired chunk of electroniccannon fodder. With a precise hand on the controls the sergeant lowered the background subsonics and aimed a tight-beam stimulator at the back of his victim's head. Bill writhed in his seat, almost taking part in the glorious battles unfolding before him. As the last chord died and the screen went blank the refreshment robot pounded hollowly on its metallic chest and bellowed sheeplike audience swept that way, all except Bill who was plucked from their midst by a powerful arm. "Here, I saved some for you," the sergeant said, passing over a prepared cup so loaded with dissolved ego-reducing drugs that they were crystallizing out at the bottom. "You're a fine figure of a lad and to my eye seem a cut above the yokels here. Did you ever think of making your career in the forces?" "I'm not the military type, shargeant..." Bill chomped his jaws and spat to remove the impediment to his speech, puzzled at the sudden fogginess in his thoughts. Though it was a tribute to his physique that he was even conscious after the volume of drugs and sonics that he had been plyed with. "Not the military type. My fondest ambition is to be of help in the best way I can, in my chosen career as a Technical Fertilizer Operator and I'm almost finished with my correspondence course..." ttnphat's a crappy job for a bright lad like you," the sergeant said while clapping him on the arm to get a good feel of his biceps. Rock. He resisted the impulse to pull Bill's lip down and take a quick peek at the condition of his back teeth. Later. "Leave that kind of job to those that like it. No chance of promotion. While a career in the troopers has no top. Why Grand-Admiral Pflunger came upthrough the rocket tubes, as they say, from recruit trooper to grand-admiral. How does that sound?" "It sounds very nice for Mr. Pflunger but I think fertilizer operating is more fun. Gee -- I'm feeling sleepy. I think I'll go lie down." "Not before you've seen this, just as a favor to me of course," the sergeant said, cutting in front of him and pointing to a large book held open by a tiny robot. "Clothes make the man and most men would be ashamed to be seen in a crummy looking smock like that thing draped around you or wearing those broken canal boats on their feet. Why look like that when you can look like this?" Bill's eyes followed the thick finger to the color plate in the book where a miracle of misapplied engineering caused his own face to appear on the illustrated figure dressed in trooperred. The sergeant flipped the pages and on each plate the uniform was a little more gaudy, the rank higher. The last one was that of a grand-admiral and Bill blinked at his own face under the plumed helmet, now with a touch of crowfeet about the eyes and sporting a handsome and gray-shot moustache, but still undeniably his own. "That's the way you will look," the sergeant murmured into his ear, "once you have climbed the ladder of success. Would you like to try a uniform on? Of course you would like to try a uniform on. Tailor!" When Bill opened his mouth to protest the sergeant put a large cigar into it, and before he could get it out the robot tailor had rolled up, swept a curtain bearing arm about him and stripped him naked. "Hey! Hey...!" he said. "It won't hurt," the sergeant said, poking his great head through the curtain and beaming at Bill's muscled form. He poked a finger into a pectoral (rock) and then withdrew. tt"vuch!" Bill said as the  ' tailor extruded a cold pointer and jabbed him with it, measuring his size. Something went chunk deep inside its tubjacket began to emerge from a slot in the front. In an instant this was slipped onto Bill and the shining golden buttons buttoned. Luxurious gray moleskin trousers were pulled on next, then gleaming black knee-length boots. Bill staggered a bit as the curtain was whipped away and a powered full-length mirror rolled up. "Oh how the girls love a uniform," the sergeant said, "and I can't blame them." A memory of the vision of Inga-Maria Calyphigia's matched white moons obscured Bill's sight for a moment, and when it had cleared he found he was grasping a stylo and was about to sign the form that the recruiting sergeant held before him. "No," Bill said, a little amazed at his own firmness of mind. "I don't really want to. Technical Fertilizer Operator..." "And not only will you receive this lovely uniform, an enlistment bonus and a free medical examination, but you will be awarded these handsome medals." The sergeant took a flat box, offered to him on cue by a robot, and opened it to display a glittering array of ribbons and bangles. "This is the Honorable Enlistment Award," he intoned gravely, pinning a jewel-encrusted nebula, pendant on chartreuse, to Bill's wide chest. "And the Emperor's Congratulatory Gilded Horn, The Forward to Victory Starburst, the Praise Be Given Salutation of the Mothers of the Victorious Fallen and the Everflowing Cornucopia which does not mean anything but it looks nice and can be used to carry contraceptives." He stepped back and admired Bill's chest which was now adangle with ribbons, shining metal and gleaming paste gems. "I just couldn't," Bill said. "Thank you anyway for the offer, but..." The sergeant smiled, prepared even for this eleventh hour resistance, and pressed the button on his belt that actuated the programmed hypno-coil in the heel of Bill's new boot. The powerful neural current surged through the contacts and Bill's hand twitched and jumped, and when the momentary fog had lifted from his eyes he saw that he had signed his name. "But... " C#'lX#'elcome to the Space  ' Troopers," the sergeant boomed, smacking him on the back (trapezius like rock) and IN!" in a larger voice, and the recruits stumbled from the tavern. "What have they done to my son!" Bill's mother screeched, coming into the market square, clutching at her bosom with one hand and towing his baby brother Charlie with the other. Charlie began to cry and wet his pants. "Your son is now a trooper for the greater glory of the Emperor," the sergeant said, pushing his slack-jawed and round-shouldered recruit squad into line. "No! it can't be..." Bill's mother sobbed, tearing at her graying hair. "I'm a poor widow he's my sole support... you cannot...!" "Mother..." Bill said, but the sergeant shoved him back into the ranks. "Be brave, madam," he said humbly. "There can be no greater glory for a mother." He dropped a large newly minted coin into her hand. "Here is the enlistment know he wants you to have it. With a clash of heels the graceless recruits braced their shoulders and lifted their chins. Much to his surprise, so did Bill. In a single, graceful motion as the command robot relayed the order to the hypno-coil in fect rhythm, so well under control that, try as hard as he could Bill could neither turn his head nor wave a last good-by to his mother. She vanished behind him and one last, anguished wail cut through the thud of marching feet. "Step up the count to #," the sergeant ordered, glancing at the watch which was set under the nail of his little finger. "Just ten miles to the station and we'll be in camp tonight, my lads." The command robot moved its metronome up one notch and the tramping boots conformed to the smarter pace and the men began to sweat. By the time they had reached the copter station it was nearly dark, their red paper uniforms hung in shreds, the gilt had been rubbed from their potmetal buttons and the surface charge that repelled the dust from their thin plastic boots had leaked away. They looked as ragged, weary, dusty and miserable as they felt. II I t wasn't the recorded bugle playing reveille that woke Bill, but the supersonics that streamed through the metal frame of his bunk that shook him teeth. He sprang to his feet and stood there shivering in the gray of dawn. Because it was summer the floor was refrigerated : no mollycoddling of the men in Camp Leon Trotsky. The pallid, chilled figures of the other recruits loomed up on every side. When the soul-shaking vibrations died away they dragged their thick sackcloth and sandpaper fatigue uniforms from their bunks, pulled them hastily on, jammed their feet into the great, purple recruit boots and staggered out into the dawn. "I am here to break your spirit," a voice, rich with menace, told them, and they looked up and shivered even more as they faced the chief demon in this particular hell. Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang was a specialist from the tips of the angry spikes of his hair to the corrugated stamping soles of his mirror-like boots. He was wide shouldered and lean hipped, while his long arms hung, curved like some horrible anthropoid, the knuckles of his immense fists scarred from the merciless breaking of thousands of teeth. It was impossible to look at this detestable form and imagine that it issued from the tender womb of a woman. He could never been born; he must have been built to order by the government. Most terrible of all was the head. The face! The hairline was scarcely a fingerswidth above the black tangle of the brows that were set like a rank growth of foliage at the rim of the black pits that concealed the eyes -- visible only as baleful red gleams in the stygian darkness. A nose, broken and crushed, squatted above the mouth that was like a knife slash in the taut belly of a corpse, while from bebetween the lips issued the great, white fangs of the canine teeth, at least two inches long, that rested in grooves on the lower lip. "I am Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang and you will call me 'sir' or 'm'lord'." He began to pace grimly before the row of terrified recruits. "I am your father and your mother and your whole universe and your dedicated enemy, and very soon I will have you regretting the day you were bom. I will crush your will. When I say frog you will jump. My job is to turn you into troopers, and troopers have discipline. Discipline simply means unthinking subservience, loss of free will, absolute obedience. That is all I ask..." T Te stopped before Bill, who was not shaking quite as much as the other recruits and scowled. "I don't like your face. One month of Sunday KP." "Sir..." "And a second month for talking back." He waited, but Bill was silent He had already learned his first lesson on how to be a good trooper. Keep your mouth shut. Death wish paced on. "Right now you are nothing but horrible, sordid, flabby pieces of debased civilian flesh. I shall turn that flesh to muscle, your wills to jelly, your minds to machines. You will become good troopers or I will kill you. Very soon you will be hearing stories about me, vicious stories about how I killed and ate a recruit who disobeyed me." He halted and stared at them. Slowly the coffin-lid lips parted in an evil travesty of a grin, while a drop of saliva formed at the tip of each whitened tusk. "That story is true." A moan broke from the row of recruits and they shook as though a chill wind had passed over them. The smile vanished. "We will run to breakfast now as soon as I have some volunteers for an easy assignment. Can any of you drive a helicar?" Two recruits hopefully raised their hands and he beckoned them forward. "Alright, both of you, mops and buckets behind that door. Clean out the latrine while the rest are eating. You'll have a better appetite for lunch." That was Bill's second lesson on how to be a good trooper: never volunteer. The days of recruit training passed with a horribly lethargic speed. With each day conditions became worse and Bill's exhaustion greater. This seemed impossible, but it was nevertheless true. A large number of gifted and sadistic minds had designed it to be that way. The recruits' heads were shaved for uniformity and their genitalia painted with orange antiseptic to control the endemic crotch crickets. The food was theoretically nourishing but incredibly vile and when, by mistake, one batch of meat was served in an edible state it was caught at the last moment and thrown out and the cook reduced two grades. Their sleep was broken by mock gas attacks and their free time filled with caring for their equipment. nphe seventh day was designated as a day of rest but they all had received punishments, like Bill's KP, and it was as any other day. On this, the third Sunday of their imprisonment, they were stumbling through the last hour of the day before the lights were extinguished and they were finally permitted to crawl into their casehardened bunks. Bill pushed against the weak force field that blocked the door, cunningly designed to allow the desert flies to enter but not leave the barracks, and dragged himself in. After fourteen hours of KP his legs vibrated with exhaustion and his arms were wrinkled and pallid as a corpse's from the soapy water. He dropped his jacket to the floor, where it stood stiffly, supported by its burden of sweat, grease and dust, and dragged his shaver from the foot locker. In the latrine he bobbed his head around trying to find a clear space on one of the mirrors. All of them had been heavily stenciled in large letters with Black-rimmed, bloodshot eyes stared back at him as he ran the buzzing machine over the underweight planes of his jaw. It took more than a minute for the meaning of the question to pentrate his fatigue-drugged brain. "I haven't got a sister," he grumbled peevishly. "And if I did why should she want to marry a lizard anyway?" It was a rhetorical question but it brought an answer from the far end of the room, from the last shot tower in the second row. "It doesn't mean exactly what it says -- it's just there to make us hate the dirty enemy more." Bill jumped, he had thought he was alone in the latrine, and the razor buzzed spitefully and gouged a bit of flesh from his lip. "Who's there? Why are you hiding?" he snarled, then recognized the huddled dark figure and the many pairs of boots. "Oh, it's only you Eager." His anger drained away and he turned back to the mirror. Eager Beager was so much a part of the latrine that you forgot he was there. A moon-faced, eternally smiling youth whose apple red cheeks never lost their glow, and whose smile looked so much out of place here in Camp Leon Trotsky that everyone wanted to kill him until they remembered that he was mad. TTe had to be mad because he was always eager to help his buddies and had volunteered as permanent latrine orderly. Not only that, but he liked to polish boots and had offered to do those of one after another of his buddies until now he did the boots for every man in the squad every night. Whenever they were in the barracks Eager Beager could be found crouched at the end of the thrones that were his personal domain, surrounded by heaps of shoes and polishing industriously, his face wreathed in smiles. He would still be there after lights-out, working by the light of a burning wick struck in a can of polish and was usually up before the others in the morning, finishing his voluntary job and still smiling. Sometimes, when the boots were very dirty, he worked right through the night. The kid was obviously insane but no one turned him in because he did such a good job on the boots and they all prayed that he wouldn't die of exhaustion until recruit training was finished. "Well if that's what they want to say, why don't they just say 'hate the dirty enemy more'," Bill complained. He jerked his thumb at the far wall where there was a poster labeled tured a life-size illustration of a Chinger, a seven foot high saurian that looked very much like a scale covered, four armed, green kangaroo with an alligator's head. "Whose sister would want to marry a thing like that anyway? And what would a thing like that want to do with a sister, except maybe eat her?" Eager put a last buff on a purple toe and picked up another boot. He frowned for a brief instant to show what a serious thought this was. "Well you see, gee -- it doesn't mean a real sister. It's just part of psychological warfare. We have to win the war. To win the war we have to fight hard. In order to fight hard we have to have good soldiers. Good soldiers have to hate the enemy. That's the way it goes. The Chingers are the only non-human race that has been discovered in the galaxy that has gone beyond the aboriginal level, so naturally we have to wipe them out." "What the hell do you mean naturally ? I don't want to wipe anyone out. I just want to go home and be a Technical Fertilizer Operator." Cfl TC#'ell I don't mean you per' ' sonally, of course -- gee!" Eager opened a fresh can of polish with purplestained hands and dug his fingers into it. "I mean the human race, that's just the way we do things. If we don't wipe them out they'll wipe us out. Of course they say that war is against their religion and they will only fight in defense, and they have never made attacks, yet. But we can't believe them even though it is true. They might change their religion or their minds some day and then where would we be? The best answer is to wipe them out now." Bill unplugged his razor and washed his face in the tepid, rusty water. "It still doesn't seem to make sense. Alright, so the sister I don't have doesn't marry one of them. But how about that -- " he pointed to the stenciling -- " The sign above the urinal for the moment that we don't have any secrets here worth traveling a mile to hear, much less twenty-five light-years -- how could a Chinger possibly be a spy? What kind of make-up would disguise a seven foot lizard as a recruit? You couldn't even disguise one to look like Deathwish Drang, though you could get pretty close -- " The lights went out and, as though using his name had summoned him like a devil from the pit, the voice of Deathwish blasted through the barracks. "Into your sacks! Into your sacks! Don't you lousy bowbs know there's a war on!" he rumbled menacingly. Bill stumbled away through the darkness of the barracks where the only illumination was the red glow from Deathwish's eyes. He fell asleep the instant his head touched his carborundum pillow and it seemed that only a moment had elapsed before reveille sent him hurtling from his bunk. At breakfast, while he was painfully cutting his coffee-substitute into chunks small enough to swallow, the telenews reported heavy fighting in the Beta Lyra sector with mounting losses. A groan ripples through the mess hall when this was announced, not because of any excess of patriotism, but because any bad news would only make things worse for them. They did not know how this would be arranged, but they were positive it would be. They were right. Oince the morning was a bit  cooler than usual the Monday parade was postponed until noon when the ferroconcrete drill ground would have warmed up nicely and there would be the maximum number of heat prostration cases. But this was just the beginning. From where Bill stood at attention near the rear he could see that the airconditioned canopy was up on the reviewing stand. That meant brass. The trigger guard of his atomic rifle dug a hole into his shoulder and a drop of sweat collected then dripped from the tip of his nose. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see the steady ripple of motion as men collapsed here and there among the massed ranks of thousands, and were dragged to the waiting ambulances by alert corpsmen. Here they were laid in the shade of the vehicles until they revived and could be urged back to their positions in the formation with other staggering recruits. Then the band burst into Spacemen Ho and Chingers V anguished! and the broadcast signal to each boot heel snapped the ranks to attention at the same instant and the thousands of rifles flashed in the sun. The commanding general's staff car -- this was obvious from the two stars painted on it -- pulled up beside the reviewing stand and a tiny, round figure moved quickly through the fumacelike air to the comfort of the enclosure. Bill had never seen him any closer than this, at least from the front, though once while he was returning from late KP he had spotted the general getting into his car near the camp theatre. At least Bill thought it was him, but all he had seen was a brief rear view. Therefore, if he had a mental picture of the general, it was of a large backside superimposed on a teeny ant-like figure. He thought of most officers in these general terms, since the men of course had nothing to do with officers during their recruit training. Bill had had a good glimpse of a #nd lieutenant once, near the orderly room, and he knew he had a face. And there had been a medical officer who hadn't been more than thirty yards away, who had lectured them on venereal disease, but Bill had been lucky enough to sit behind a post and had promptly fallen asleep. After the band shut up, the anti-G loudspeakers floated out over the troops and the general addressed them. He had nothing to say that anyone cared to listen to and he closed with the announcement that because of losses in the field their training program would be accelerated, which was just what they had expected. Then the band played some more and they marched back to the barracks, changed into their haircloth fatigues and marched -- doubletime now -- to the range where they fired their atomic rifles at plastic replicas of Chingers that popped up out of holes in the ground. Their aim was very bad until Deathwish Drang popped out of a hole and every trooper switched to full automatic and hit with every charge fired from every gun, which is a very hard thing to do. Then the smoke cleared and they stopped cheering and started sobbing when they saw that it was only a plastic replica of Deathwish, now tom to tiny pieces, and the original appeared behind them and gnashed its tusks and gave them all a full month's KP. Ill tt'T'he human body is a wonderful thing," Bowb Brown said, a month later, when they were sitting around a table in the Lowest Ranks Klub eating plastic skinned sausages stuffed with road sweepings and drinking watery warm beer. Bowb Brown was a thoatherder from the plains, which is why they called him Bowb since everyone knows just what thoatherders do with their thoats. He was tall, thin and bowlegged, his skin burnt to the color of ancient leather. He rarely talked, being more used to the eternal silence of the plains broken only by the eerie cry of the restless thoat. He was a great thinker since the one thing he had had plenty of was time to think in. He could worry a thought for days, even weeks, before he mentioned it aloud, and while he was thinking about it nothing could disturb him. He even let them call him Bowb without protesting : call any other trooper bowb and he would hit you in the face. Bill and Eager and the other troopers from X squad sitting around the table all clapped and cheered, as they always did when Bowb said something. "Tell us more, Bowb!" "It can still talk -- I thought it was deadl" "Go on -- why is the body a wonderful thing?" They waited in expectant silence while Bowb managed to tear a bite from his sausage and, after ineffectual chewing, swallowed it with an effort that brought tears to his eyes. He eased the pain with a mouthful of beer and spoke. "The human body is a wonderful thing -- because if it doesn't die -- it lives." They waited for more until they realized that he was finished, then they sneered. "Boy, are you full of bowb!" "Sign up for O.C.S.!" "Yeah -- but what does it mean?" Bill knew what it meant, but didn't tell them. There were only half as many men in the squad as there had been the first day. One man had been transferred. All the others were sick or in the mental hospital, or discharged for the convenience of the government as being too crippled for active service. Or dead. The survivors, after losing every ounce of weight not made up of bone or essential connective tissue, Rad put back the lost weight in the form of muscle and were now completely adapted to the rigors of Camp Leon Trotsky, though they still loathed it. Bill marveled at the efficiency of the system. Civilians had to fool around with examinations, grades, retirement benefits, seniority and a thousand other factors that limited the efficiency of the workers. But how easily the troopers did it! They simply killed off the weaker ones and used the survivors. He respected the system. Though he still loathed it.  need a woman," Ugly Ugglesway said. "Don't talk dirty," Bill told him promptly, since he had been brought up correctly. "I'm not talking dirty!" Ugly whined. "It's not like I said I wanted to re-enlist or that I thought Deathwish was human or anything like that. I just said I need a woman. Don't we all?" "I need a drink," Bowb Brown said as he took a long swig from his glass of dehydrated reconstituted beer, shuddered, then squirted it out through his teeth in a long stream onto the concrete, where it instantly evaporated. "Affirm, affirm," Ugly agreed, bobbing his mat-haired warty head up and down. "I need a woman and a drink." His whine became almost plaintive. "After all, what else is there to want in the troopers outside of out?" They thought about that a long time, but could think of nothing else that anyone really wanted. Eager Beager looked out from under the table where he was surreptitiously polishing a boot and said that he wantetd more polish, but they ignored him. Even Bill, now that he put his mind to it, could think of nothing he really wanted other than this inextricably linked pair. He tried hard to think of something else, since he had vague memories of wanting other things when he had been a civilian, but nothing else came to mind. "Gee, it's only seven more weeks until we get our first pass," Eager said from under the table, then screamed as everyone kicked him at once. But slow as subjective time crawled by, the objective clocks were still operating and the seven weeks did pass by and eliminate themselves one by one. Busy weeks filled with all the essential recruit training courses: bayonet drill, small arms training, short arm inspection, greypfing, orientation lectures, drill, communal singing and the Articles of War. These last were read with dreadful regularity twice a week and were absolute torture because of the intense somnolence they brought on. At the first rustle of the scratchy, monotonous voice from the tape player heads would begin to nod. But every seat in the auditorium was wired with brain waves of the captive troopers. As soon as the shape of the Alpha wave indicated transition from consciousness to slumber a powerful jolt of current would be shot into the dozing buttocks, jabbing the owner painfully awake. The musty auditorium was a dimly lit torture chamber, filled with the droning dull voice punctuated by the sharp screams of the electrified, the sea of nodding heads abob here and there with painfully leaping figures. VTo one ever listened to the ' terrible executions and sentences announced in the Articles for the most innocent of crimes. Everyone knew that they had signed away all human rights when they enlisted. The itemizing of what they had lost interested them not in the slightest. What they really were interested in was counting the hours until they would receive their first pass. The ritual by which this reward was begrudgingly given was unusually humiliating, but they expected this and merely lowered their eyes and shuffled forward in the line, ready to sacrifice any remaining shards of their self-respect in exchange for the crimpled scrap of plastic... ms rite finished, there was a scramble for the monorail train whose track ran on electrically charged pillers, soaring over the thirtyfoot high barbed wire, crossing the quicksand beds, then dropping into the little farming town of Leyville. At least it had been an agricultural town before Camp Leon Trotsky had been built and sporadically, in the hours when the troopers weren't on leave, it followed its original agrarian bent. The rest of the time the grain and feed stores shut down and the drink and knock shops opened. Many times the same premises were used for both functions. A lever would be pulled when the first of the leave party thundered out of the station and grain bins became beds, salesclerks pimps, cashiers retained their same function -- though the prices went up -- while counters would be racked with glasses to serve as bars. It was to one of these establishments, a mortuary-cum-saloon, that Bill and his friends went. "What'll it be, boys?" the ever-smiling owner of the Final Resting Bar and Grill asked. "Double shot of embalming fluid," Bowb Brown told him. "No jokes," the landlord said, the smile vanishing for a second as he took down a bottle on MPs." The smile returned as money struck the counter. "Name your poison, gents." They sat around a long, narrow table as thick as it was wide with brass handles on both sides, and let the blessed relief of ethyl alcohol trickle a path down their dust-lined throats. "I never drank before I came into the service," Bill said, draining four fingers neat of Old Kidney Killer and held his glass out for more. ttX'ou never had to," Ugly  said, pouring. "That's for sure," Bowb Brown said, smacking his lips with relish and raising a bottle to his lips again. "Gee," Eager Beager said, sipping hesitantly at the edge of his glass, "It tastes like a tincture of sugar, wood chips, various esters and a number of higher alcohbls." "Drink up," Bowb said incoherently around the neck of the bottle"All them things is good for you." "Now I want a woman," Ugly said and there was a rush as they all jammed in the door trying to get out at the same time, until someone shouted Look! and they turned to see Eager still sitting at the table. "Woman!" Ugly said enthusiastically, in the tone of voice you say Dinner! in when you are calling a dog. The knot of men stirred in the doorway and stamped their feet. Eager didn't move. "Gee -- I think I'll stay right here," he said, his smile simpler than ever. "But you guys run along." "Don't you feel well. Eager?" "Feel fine." "Ain't you reached puberty?" "Gee... " "What you gonna do here?" Eager reached under the table and dragged out a canvas grip. He opened it to show that it was packed with great, purple boots. "I thought I'd catch up on my polishing." They walked slowly down the wooden sidewalk, silent for the moment. "I wonder if there is something wrong with Eager?" Bill asked, but no one answered him. They were looking down the minated sign that cast a tempting, ruddy glow. The front wall of the Spaceman's Rest was covered with shatterproof glass cases filled with tri-di pix of the fully dressed (bangle and double stars) entertainers, and further in with pix of them nude (debangled with fallen stars). Bill stayed the quick sound of panting by pointing to a small sign almost lost among the tumescent wealth of mammaries. "Move along," an MP grated and poked at them with his electronic nightstick. They shuffled on. r T'he next establishment admitted men of all classes, but the cover charge was # credits, more than they all had between pavement ended and all the lights were behind them. "What's that?" Ugly asked at the sound of murmured voices from a nearby darkened street. Peering closely they saw a line of troopers that stretched out of sight around a distant corner. "What's this?" he asked the last man in the line. , "Lower ranks cathouse. Two credits, two minutes. And don't try to buck the line, bowb. On the back, on the back." They joined up instantly and Bill ended up last, but not for long. They shuffled forward slowly and other troopers appeared and cued up behind him. The night was cool and he took many life-preserving slugs from his bottle. There was little conversation and what there was died as the red-lit portal loomed ever closer. It opened and closed at regular intervals and one by one Bill's buddies slipped in to partake of its satisfying, though rapid, pleasures. Then it was his turn and the door started to open and he started to step forward. Suddenly sirens started screaming and a large MP with a great fat belly jumped between Bill and the door. "Emergency recall. Back to the base you men!" it barked. Bill howled a strangled groan of frustration and leaped forward, but a light tap with the electronic nightstick sent him reeling back with the others. He was carried along, half stunned, with the shuffling wave of bodies while the sirens moaned and the artificial northern lights in the letters of flame each a hundred miles long. Someone put his hand out, holding Bill up as he started to slide under the trampling purple boots. It was his old buddy, Ugly, carrying a satiated smirk and he hated him and tried to hit him. But before he could raise his fist they were swept into a monorail car, hurtlIV ed through the night and disgorged back in Camp Leon Trotsky He forgot his anger when the gnarled claws of Deathwish Drang dragged them from the crowd. "Pack your bags," he rasped. "You're shipping out." "They can't do that to us -- we haven't finished our training." "They can do whatever they want, and they usually do. A. glorious space battle has just been fought to its victorious conclusion and there are over four a hundred thousand. Replacements are needed, which is you. Prepare to board the transports immediately if not sooner." "We can't -- we have no space gear! The supply room..." "All of the supply personnel have already been shipped out." "Food..." "The cooks and KP pushers are already spacebound. This is an emergency. All unessential personnel are being sent out. Probably to die." He twanged a tusk coyly and watched them with his loathsome grin. "While I remain here in peaceful security to train your replacements." The delivery tube plunked at his elbow and as he opened the message capsule and read its contents his smile slowly fell to pieces. "They're shipping me out too," he said, hollowly.  lready # recruits had been shipped into space through Camp Leon Trotsky, so the process was an automatic and smoothly working one even though this time it was processing itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. Bill and his buddies were the last group of recruits through and the snake began ingesting itself right behind them. No sooner had they been shorn of their sprouting fuzz and deloused in the ultrasonic delouser than the barbers rushed at each other and in a welter of under and over arms, gobbets of hair, shards of moustache, bits of flesh, drops of blood, they clipped and shaved each other then pulled the operator after them into the ultrasonic chamber. Medical corpsmen gave themselves injections against rocket fever, space-cafard and the clap, record clerks issued themselves pay books and the loadmasters kicked each other up the ramps and into the waiting shuttle-ships. Rockets blasted, living columns of fire-like scarlet tongues licking down at the blasting pads, burning up the ramps in a lovely pyrotechnic display since the ramp operators were also aboard. The ships echoed and thundered up into the night sky leaving Camp Leon Trotsky a dark and silent ghost town. Bits of daily orders and punishment rosters rustled and blew from the bulletin boards, dancing through the deserted streets to finally plaster themselves against the noisy, bright windows of the Officer's Club. A great drinking party was in progress there, although there was much complaining because they had to serve themselves. Up and up the shuttleships shot, towards the great fleet of deep-spacers that darkened the stars above. It was a new fleet, the most powerful the galaxy had ever seen, so new in fact that the ships were still under construction. Welding torches while hot rivets hurled their flat trajectories across the sky into waiting buckets. The spots of light died away as one behemoth of the star lanes was completed and thin screams sounded in the spacesuit radio circuit as the workers, instead of being returned to the yards, were pressed into service on the ship they had so recently built. This was total war. T) ill staggered through the sag  ging plastic tube that connected the shuttleship to a dreadnaught of space and dropped his bags in front of a Petty Chief Officer who sat at a desk in the hanger-sized spacelock. Or rather he tried to drop it, but since there was no gravity the bags remained in midair and when he pushed them down he rose. (Since a body when it is falling freely is said to be in free fall, and anything with weight has no weight, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction or something like that.) The Petty looked up and snarled and pulled Bill back down to the deck. "None of your bowby spacelubber tricks, tropper. Name?" "Bill, spelled with two L's." "Bil," the Petty mumbled, licking the end of his stylo, then inscribing it in the ship's roster "Two L's for officers only, bowb -- learn your place. What's your classification?" "Recruit, unskilled, untrained, spacesick." "Well don't puke in here, that's what you have your own quarters for. You are now a Fusetender #th class, unskilled. Bunk down in compartment #J-#T-#. Move. And keep that woopsysack over your head." No sooner had Bill found his quarters and thrown his bags into a bunk, where they floated five inches over the reclaimed rock-wool mattress, then Eager Beager came in, followed by by Bowb Brown and a crowd of strangers, some of them carrying welding torches and angry expressions. "Where's Ugly and the rest of the squad?" Bill asked. Bowb shrugged and strapped himself into his bunk for a little shuteye. Eager opened one of the six bags he always carried and removed some boots to polish. "Are you saved?" a deep voice vibrant with emotion sounded from the other end of the compartment. Bill looked up startled, and the big trooper standing there saw the motion and stabbed towards him with an immense finger. "You, brother, are you saved?" "That's a little hard to say," Bill mumbled, bending over and rooting in his bag, hoping the man would go away. But he didn't, in fact he came over and sat down on Bill's bunk. Bill tried to ignore him, but this was hard to do because the trooper was over six feet high, heavily muscled and iron jawed. He had lovely, purplish black skin that made Bill a little jealous because his was only a sort of grayish pink. Since the trooper's shipboard uniform was almost the same shade of black he looked all of a piece, very effective with his flashing smile and piercing gaze. # #'IT#elcome aboard the Chris' ' tine Keeler," he said and with a friendly shake splintered most of Bill's knuckle bones. "The grand old lady of this fleet, commissioned almost a week ago. I'm Reverend Fusetender #th Class Tembo, and I see by the stencil on your bag that your name is Bill, and since we're shipmates, Bill, please call me Tembo, and how is the condition of your soul?" "I haven't had much chance to think about it lately..." "I should think not, just coming from recruit training, since attendance of chapel during training is a court-martial offense. But that's all behind you now and you can be saved. Might I ask if you are of the faith?" "My folks were Fundamentalist Zoraoastrian, so I suppose..." "Superstition, my boy, rank superstition. It was the hand of fate that brought us together in this ship, that your soul would have this one chance to be saved from the fiery pit. You've heard of Earth?" "I like plain food..." "It's a planet, my boy -- the home of the human race. The home from whence we all sprang, see it, a green and lovely world, a jewel in space." Tembo had slipped a tiny projector from his pocket while he spoke and a colored image appeared on the bulkhead, a planet swimming artistically through the void girdled by white clouds. Suddenly, ruddy lightning shot through the clouds and they twisted and boiled while great wounds appeared on the planet below. From the pinhead speaker came the tiny moaning sound of rolling, clashing thunder. "But wars sprang up among the sons of man and they smote each other with the atomic energies until the Earth itself groaned aloud and mighty was the holocaust. And when the final lightnings stilled there was death in the north, death in the west, death in the east, death, death, death. Do you realize what that means?" Tembo's voice was eloquent with feeling, suspended for an instant in midflight, waiting for the answer to the catachistical question. "I'm not sure," Bill said, rooting aimlessly in his bag, "I come from Phigerinadon II. it's a quieter place..." "There was no death in the spared, I ask you, and the answer is because it was the will of Samedi that all the false prophets and false religions and false gods be wiped from the face of the Earth so that the only true faith should remain. The First Reformed Voodoo Church , . eneral Quarters sounded, a hooting alarm keyed to the resonant frequency of the human skull so that the bone vibrated as though the head were inside a mighty bell and the eyes blurred out of focus with each stroke. There was a scramble for the passageway where the hideous sound was not quite as loud and where non-coms were waiting to herd them to their stations. Bill followed Eager Beager up an oily ladder and out of the hatch in the floor of the fuse room. Great racks of fuses stretched away on all sides of them, while from the tops of the racks sprang arm-thick cables that looped upwards and vanished through the ceiling. In front of the racks, evenly spaced, were round openings a foot in diameter. "My opening remarks will be brief, any trouble from any of you and I will personally myself feed you head first down the nearest fuseway." A greasy forefinger pointed at one of the holes in the deck and they recognized the voice of their new master. He was shorter and wider and thicker in the gut than Deathwish, but there was a generic resemblance that was unmistakable. "I am Fusetender First Class Spleen. I will take you crumbly groundcrawling bowbs and will turn you into highly skilled and efficient fusetenders or else feed you down the nearest fuseway. This is a highly skilled and efficient technical specialty which usually takes a year to train a good man. But this is war so you're going to learn to do it now or else. I will now demonstrate. Tembo front and center. Take board #J-#, it's out of circuit now." Tembo clashed his heels and stood at rigid attention in front of the board. Stretching away on both sides of him were the fuses, white ceramic cylinders capped on both ends with metal, each one a foot in diameter, five foot high and weighing # pounds. There was a red band around the midriff of each fuse. First Class Spleen tapped one of these bands. "Every fuse has one of these red bands which is called a fuseband and is of the color red. When the fuse burns out this band turns black. I don't expect you to remember all this now, but it's in your manual and you are going to be letter perfect before I'm done with you, or elseNow I will show you what will happen when a fuse bums out. Tembo -- that is a burned out fuse! Go!" "Unggh!" Tembo shouted and leaped at the fuse and grasped it with both hands. "Unggh!" he said again as he pulled it from the clips, and again Unggh! when he dropped it into the fuseway. Then, still Ungghing, he pulled a new fuse from the storage rack and clipped it into place and, with a final Unggh! snapped back to attention. "And that's the way it is done, by the count, by the numbers, the trooper way and you are going to learn it or else." A dull buzzing sounded, grumbling through the air like a stifled eructation. "There's the chow call, so I'll let you break now and while you're eating think about what you are going to have to learn. Fall out." "ther troopers were going by in the corridor and they followed them into the bowels of the ship. "Gee -- do you think the food might be any better than it was back in camp?" Eager asked, smacking his lips excitedly. "It is completely impossible that it could be any worse," Bill said as they joined a line leading make it better. After all -- aren't we fighting troopers now? We have to go into combat fit, the manual says." The line moved forward with painful slowness, but within an hour they were at the door. Inside of it a tired looking KP in soapstained, greasy fatigues handed Bill a yellow plastic cup from a rack before him. Bill moved on and when the trooper in front of him stepped away he faced a blank wall from which there emerged a single, handleless spigot. A fat cook standing next to it, wearing a large white chef's hat and a soiled undershirt, waved him forwards with the soup ladle in his hand. "C'mon, co'mon, ain't you never et before? Cup under the spout, dogtag in the slot, snap it up!" Bill held the cup as he had been advised and noticed a narrow slit in the metal wall just at eye level. His dogtags were hanging around his neck and he pushed one of them into the slot. Something went buzzzzz and a thin stream of yellow fluid way. "Next man!" the cook shouted and pulled Bill away so that Eager could take his place. "What is this?" Bill asked, peering into the cup. "What is this! What is this!" the cook raged, growing bright red. "This is your dinner you stupid bowb! This is absolutely chemically pure water in which are dissolved # amino acids, # vitamins, #I mineral salts, a flatty acid ester and glucose. What else did you expect?" "Dinner...?" Bill said hopefully, then saw red as the soup ladle crashed down on his head. "Could I have it without the fatty acid ester?" he asked hopefully, but he was pushed out into the corridor where Eager joined him. "Gee," Eager said. "This has all the food elements necessary to sustain life indefinitely. Isn't that marvelous?" Bill sipped at his cup then sighed tremulously. #T ook at that," Tembo said, ' and when Bill turned, a projected image appeared on the corridor wall. It showed a misty firmament in which tiny figures seemed to be riding on clouds. "Hell awaits you, my boy, unless you are saved. Turn your back on your superstitious way. The First Reformed Voodoo Church welcomes you with open arms, come unto her bosom and find your place in heaven at Samedi's right hand. Sit there with Mondongue and Bakalou and Zandor who will welcome you." The projected scene changed, the clouds grew closer, while from the little speaker came the tiny sound of a heavenly choir with drum accompaniment. Now tile figures could be seen clearly, all with very dark skins and white robes from the back of which protruded great black wings. They smiled and waved gracefully to each other as their clouds passed, while singing enthusiastically and beating on the little tom-toms that each one carried. It was a lovely scene and Bill's eyes misted a bit. "Attention!" The barking tones echoed from the walls and the troopers snapped their shoulders back, heels together, eyes ahead. The heavenly choir vanished as Tembo shoved the projector back into his pocket. "As you was," First Class Spleen ordered, and they turned to see him leading two MPs with drawn handguns who were acting as a bodyguard for an officer. Bill knew it was an officer because they had had an Officer Identification course, plus the latrine wall that he had had a great deal of opportunity to study during an anguilluliasis epidemic. His jaw gaped open as the officer went by, almost close enough to touch, and stopped in front of Tembo. "Fusetender #th Class Tembo I have good news for you. In two weeks your seven year period of enlistment will be up and because of your fine record Captain Zekial has authorized a doubling of the usual musteringout pay, an honorable discharge with band music as well as your free transport back to Earth." Tembo, relaxed yet firm, looked down at the runty lieutenant with his well-chewed blonde moustache who stood before him. "That will be impossible, sir." I I T mpossible ! " the lieutenant A screeched and rocked back and forth on his high-heeled boots. "Who are you to tell me what is impossible -- ?!" "Not I, sir," Tembo answered with utmost calm. "Regulation #-#A, paragraph #, page #, volume # of Rules, Regulations and Articles of War. 'No man nor officer shall or will receive a discharge other than dishonorable with death sentence from a vessel, post, base, camp, ship, outpost, or labor camp during time of emergency'..." "Are you a ship's lawyer, Tembo?" "No, sir. I'm a loyal trooper, sir. I just want to do my duty, sir. "There's something very funny about you, Tembo. I saw in your record that you enlisted voluntarily without drugs and or hypnotics being used. Now you refuse discharge. That's bad, Tembo, very bad. Gives you a bad name. Makes you look suspicious. Makes you look like a spy or something." "I'm a loyal trooper, of the Emperor, sir, not a spy." "You're not a spy, Tembo, we have looked into that very carefully. But why are you in the service, Tembo?" "To be a loyal trooper of the Emperor, sir, and to do my best to spread the gospel. Have you been saved, sir?" "Watch your tongue, trooper or I'll have you up on charges! Yes, we know that story -- reverend -- but we don't believe it. You're being too tricky, but we'll find out..." He stalked away muttering to himself and they all snapped to attention until he was gone. The other troopers looked at Tembo oddly and did not feel comfortable until he had gone. Bill and Eager walked slowly back to their quarters. "Turned down a discharge!" Bill mumbled in awe. "Gee," Eager said, "maybe he's nuts? I can't think of any other reason." "Nobody could be that crazy," then "I wonder what's in there?" pointing to a door with a large "Gee -- I don't know -- maybe food?" They slipped through instantly and closed the door behind them, but there was no food there. Instead they were in a long chamber with one curved wall, while attached to this wall were cumbersome devices set with meters, dials, switches, controls, levers, a view screen and a relief tube. Bill bent over and read the label on the nearest one. "Mark IV Atomic Blaster -- and look at the size of them! This must be the ship's main battery." He turned around and saw that Eager was holding his arm up so that his wristwatch pointed at the guns and was pressing on the crown with the index finger of his other hand. "What are you doing?" Bill asked. "Gee -- just seeing what time it was." "How can you tell what time it is when you have the inside of your wrist towards your face and the watch is on the outside?" Footsteps echoed far down the long gundeck and they remembered the sign on the outside of the door. In an instant they had slipped back through it and Bill pressed it quietly shut. When he turned around Eager Beager had gone so that he had to make his way back to their quarters by himself. Eager was busy shining boots for his buddies and didn't look up from his work when Bill came in. But what had he been doing with his watch? V 'T'his question kept bugging Bill all the time during the days of their training as they painfully learned the drill of fusetending. It was an exacting, technical job that demanded all their attention, but in spare moments Bill worried. He worried when they stood in line for chow, and he worried during the few moments every night between the time the lights were turned off and the heavy descent of sleep rested upon his fatigue drugged body. He worried whenever he had the time to do it. And he lost weight. He lost weight not because he was worrying, but for the same reason everyone else lost weight. The shipboard rations. They were designed to sustain life, and that they did, but no mention was made of what kind of life it was to be. It was a dreary, underweight, hungry one. Yet Bill took no notice of this. He had a bigger problem and he needed help. After Sunday drill at the end of their second week he stayed to talk to First Class Spleen instead of joining the others in their tottering run towards the mess hall. "I have a problem, sir." "You ain't the only one, but one shot cures it and you ain't a man until you've had it." "It's not that kind of problem. I'd like to... see the... chaplain..." Spleen turned white and sank back against the bulkhead. "Now I heard everything," he said weakly. "Get down to chow and if you don't tell anyone about this, I won't either." Bill blushed. "I'm sorry about this, First Class Spleen, but I can't help it. It's not my fault I have to see him, it could have happened to anyone." His voice trailed away and he looked down at his feet, rubbing one boot against another. The silence stretched out until Spleen finally spoke, but all the comradeliness was gone from his voice. "Alright, trooper -- if that's the way you want it. But I hope none of the rest of the boys hear about it. Skip chow and get up there now -- here's a pass." He scrawled on a scrap of paper then threw it contemptuously to the floor, turning and walking away as Bill bent humbly to pick it up. B ill went down dropchutes, along corridors, through passageways and up ladders. In the ship's directory the chaplain was listed as being in compartment #B on the #th deck and Bill finally found this, a plain metal door set with rivets. He raised his hand to knock while sweat stood out in great beads from his fece and his throat was dry. His knuckles boomed hollowly on the panel and after an endless period a muffled voice sounded from the other side. "Yeah, yeah -- c'mon in -- it's open." Bill stepped through and snapped to attention when he saw the officer behind the single desk that almost filled the tiny room. The officer, a #th lieutenant, though still young was balding rapidly. There were black circles under his eyes and he needed a shave. His tie, was knotted crookedly and badly crumpled. He continued to scratch among the stacks of paper that littered the desk, picking them up, changing piles with them, scrawling notes on some and throwing others into an overflowing wastebasket. When he moved one of the stacks Bill saw a sign on the desk that "Excuse me, sir," he said, "but I am in the wrong office. I'm looking for the chaplain." "This is the chaplain's office but he's not on duty until # hours, which, as someone even as stupid looking as you can tell, is in fifteen minutes more." "Thank you, sir, I'll come back." Bill slid towards the door. "You'll stay and work." The officer raised bloodshot eyeballs and cackled evilly. "I got you. You can sort the hanky reports. I've lost # jockstraps and they may be in there. You think it's easy to be a laundry officer?" He sniveled with self-pity and pushed a tottering stack of papers over to Bill who began to sort through them. Long before he was finished the buzzer sounded that ended the watch. "I knew it!" the officer sobbed hopelessly. "This job will never end, instead it gets worse and worse. And you think you got problems!" He reached out an unsteady finger and flipped over the sign on his desk. It read Then he grabbed the end of his necktie and pulled it back hard over his right shoulder. The necktie was fastened to his collar and the collar was set into ball bearings that rolled smoothly in a track fixed to his shirt. There was a slight whirring sound as the collar rotated, then the necktie was hanging out of sight down his back and his collar was now on backwards, showing white and smooth and cool to the front. nphe chaplain steepled his fingers before him, lowered his eyes and smiled sweetly. "How may I help you my son?" "I thought you were the laundry officer." Bill said, taken aback. "I am, my son, but that is just one of the burdens that must fall upon my shoulders. There is little call for a chaplain in these troubled times, but much call for a laundry officer. I do my best to serve." He bent his head, humbly. "But -- which are you? A chaplain who is a part-time laundry officer, or a laundry officer who is a part-time chaplain?" "That is a mystery, my son. There are some things that it is best not to know. But I see you are troubled. May I ask if you are of the faith?" "Which faith?" "That's what I'm asking you!" the chaplain snapped, and for a moment the old laundry officer peeped through. "How can I help you if I do not know what your religion is?" "Fundamentalist Zoroastrian." The chaplain took a plastic covered sheet from a drawer and ran his finger down it. "Z... Z... Zen... Zodomite... Zoroastrian, Reformed Fundamentalist, is that the one?" "Yes sir." "Well, should be no trouble with this my son... # I # #..." He quickly dialed the number on a control plate set in the desk, then, with a grand gesture and an evangelistic gleam in his eye, he swept all the laundry papers to the floor. Hidden machinery hummed briefly, a portion of the desk top dropped away and reappeared a moment later bearing a black plastic box decorated with golden bulls, rampant. "Be with you in a second," the chaplain said, opening the box. First he unrolled a length of white cloth sewn with more golden bulls and draped this around his neck. He placed a thick, leather-bound book next to the box, then on the closed lid set two metal bulls with hollowed out backs. Into one of them he poured distilled water from a plastic flask and into the other sweet oil, which he ignited. Bill watched these familiar arrangements with growing happiness. "It's very lucky," Bill said, "that you are a Zoroastrian. It makes it much easier to talk to you." U VT luck involved, my son,  just intelligent planning." The chaplain dropped some powdered haoma into the flame and Bill's nose twitched as the drugged incense filled the room. "By the grace of Ahura Mazdan I am an anointed priest of Zoroastra. By Allah's will a faithful Muezzin of Islam, through Yahweh's intercession a circumcized rabbi, and so forth." His benign face broke into a savage snarl. "And also because of an officer shortage I am the damned laundry officer." His face cleared. "But now, you must tell me your problem." "Well, it's not easy. It may be just foolish suspicion on my part, but I'm worried about one of my buddies. There is something strange about him. I'm not sure how to tell it... "Have confidence, my boy, and reveal your innermost feelings to me and do not fear. What I hear shall never leave this room for I am bound to secrecy by the oath of my calling. Unburden yourself." "That's very nice of you, and I do feel better already. You see this buddy of mine has always been a little funny, he shines the boots for all of us and volunteered for latrine orderly and doesn't like girls." The chaplain nodded beatifically and fanned some of the incense towards his nose. "I see little here to worry you, he sounds a decent lad. For is it not written in the Vendidad that we should aid our fellow man and seek to shoulder his burdens and pursue not the harlots of the streets?" Bill pouted. "That's alright for Sunday school, but it's no way to act in the troopers! Anyway, we just thought he was out of his mind and he might have been -- but that's not all. I was with him on the gun deck and he pointed his watch at the guns and pressed the stem and I heard it click! It could be a camera. I... I think he is a Chinger spy!" Bill sat back, breathing deeply and sweating. The fatal words had been spoken. The chaplain continued to nod, smiling, half unconscious from the haoma fumes. Finally he snapped out of it, blew his nose and opened the thick copy of the Avesta. He mumbled aloud in old Persian a bit, which seemed to brace him, then slammed it shut. "You must not bear false witness!" he boomed, fixing Bill with piercing gaze and accusing finger. tiATou got me wrong," Bill  moaned, writhing in the chair. "He's done these things, I saw him use the watch. What kind of spiritual aid do you call this?" "Just a bracer my boy, a touch of the old-time religion to renew your sense of guilt and start you thinking about going to church regular again. You have been backsliding!" the chaplain roared. "What else could I do -- chapel is forbidden during recruit training." "Circumstance is no excuse, but you will be forgiven this time because Ahura Mazdah is allmerciful." "But what about my buddy -- the spy?" "You must forget your suspicions, for they are not worthy of a follower of Zoroaster. This poor lad must not suffer because of his natural inclinations to be friendly, to aid his comrades, to keep himself pure, to own a crummy watch that goes click. And besides, if you do not mind my introducing a spot of logic -- how could he be a spy? To be a spy he would have to be a Chinger, and Chingers are seven feet tall with tails. Catch?" "Yeah, yeah," Bill mumbled unhappily. "I could figure that out for myself -- but it still doesn't explain everything." "It satisfies me, and it must satisfy you. I feel that Ahriman has possessed you to make you think evil of your comrade, and you had better do some penance and join me in a quick prayer before the laundry officer comes back on duty." This ritual was quickly finished and Bill helped stow the things back in the box and watched it vanish back into the desk. He made his good-bys and turned to leave. "Just one moment, my son," the chaplain said with his warmest smile, reaching back over his shoulder at the same time to grab the end of his necktie. He pulled and his collar whirred about and as it did the blissful expression was wiped from his face to be replaced by a surly snarl. "Just where do you think you're going, bowb! Put your ass back in that chair." "B-but," Bill stammered, "you said I was dismissed." "That's what the chaplain said, and as laundry officer I have no truck with him. Now -- fast -- what's the name of this Chinger spy you're hiding?" "I told you about that under oath -- " t C 'ou told the chaplain about  it, and he keeps his word and he didn't tell me, but I just happened to hear." He pressed a red button on the control panel. "The MPs are on the way. You talk before they get here, bowb, or I'll have you keelhauled without a spacesuit and deprived of canteen privileges for a year. The name?" "Eager Beager," Bill sobbed as heavy feet trampled outside and two redhats forced their way into the tiny room. "I have a spy for you boys," the laundry officer announced triumphantly and the MPs grated their teeth, howled deep in their throats, and launched themselves through the air at Bill. He dropped under the assault of fists and clubs and was running with blood before the laundry officer could pull the overmuscled morons with their eyes not an inch apart, off him. "Not him... the officer gasped, and threw Bill a towel to wipe off some of the blood. "This is our informant, the loyal, patriotic hero who ratted on his buddy by the name of Eager Beager, who we will now grab and chain so he can be questioned. Let's go." The MPs held Bill up between them and by the time they had come to the fusetenders' quarters the breeze from their swift passage had restored him a bit. The laundry officer opened the door just enough to poke in his head. "Hi, gang!" he called cheerily. "Is Eager Beager here?" Eager looked up from the boot he was polishing, waving and grinning. "That's me -- gee." "Get him!" the laundry officer expostulated, jumping aside and pointing accusingly. Bill dropped to the floor as the MPs let go of him and thundered into the compartment. By the time he had staggered back to his feet Eager was pinioned handcuffed and chained, hand and foot, but still grinning. "Gee -- you guys want some boots polished too?" "No backtalk you dirty spy," the laundry officer grated and slapped him hard on the offensive grin. At least he tried to slap him on the offensive grin but Beager opened his mouth and bit the hand that hit him, clamping down hard so that the officer could not get away. "He bit me!" the man howled and tried desperately to pull free. Both MPs, each handcuffed to an arm of the prisoner, raised their clubs to give him a sound battering. At this moment the top of Eager Beager's head flew open. TTappening at any other time  this would have been considered unusual, but happening at this moment it was spectacularly unusual and they all, including Bill, gaped as a seveninch high lizard climbed out of the open skull and jumped to the floor in which it made a sizeable dent upon landing. It had four tiny arms, a long tail, a head like a baby alligator and was bright green. It looked exactly like a Chinger except that it was seven inches tall instead of seven feet. "All bowby humans have B. O." it said in a thin imitation of Eager Beager's voice. "Chingers can't sweat Chingers forever!" It charged across the compartment toward Beager's bunk. Paralysis prevailed. All of the fusetenders who had witnessed the impossible events stood or sat as they had been, frozen with shock and eyes bulging like hardboiled eggs. The laundry officer was pinioned by the teeth locked into his hand, while the two MPs struggled with the handcuffs that held them to the immobile body. Only Bill was free to move and, still dizzy from the beating, he bent over to grab the tiny creature. Small and powerful talons locked into his flesh and he was pulled from his feet and went sailing through the air to crash against a bulkhead. "Gee -- that's for you, you stoolie!" the miniscule voice squeeked. Before anyone else could interfere the lizardoid ran to Beager's pile of barracks bags and tore the topmost one open and dived inside. A highpitched humming grew in volume an instant later and from the bag emerged the bulletlike nose of a shining projectile. It pushed out until a tiny spaceship not two feet long floated in the compartment. Then it rotated about its vertical axis, stopped when it pointed at the bulkhead. The humming rose in pitch and the ship suddenly shot forward and tore through the metal of the partition as if it. had been no stronger than wet cardboard. There were other distant tearing sounds as it penetrated bulkhead after bulkhead until, with a rending clang it crashed through the outer skin of the ship and escaped into space. There was the roar of air rushing into the void and the clamor of alarm bells. "Well I'll be damned." the laundry officer said, then snapped his gaping mouth closed and screamed, "Get this thing offa my hand -- it's biting me to death!" The two MPs swayed back and forth, handcuffed effectively to the immobile figure of the former Eager Beager. Beager just stared, smiling around the grip he had on the officer's hand, and it wasn't until Bill got his atomic rifle and put the barrel into Eager's mouth and levered the jaw open that the hand could be withdrawn. While he did this Bill saw that the top of Eager's head had split open just above his ears and was held at the back by a shiny brass hinge. Inside the gaping skull, instead of brains and bones and things, was a model control room with a tiny chair, miniscule controls, teevee screens and a water cooler. Eager was just a robot worked by the little creature that had escaped in the spaceship. It looked like a Chinger -- but it was only seven inches tall. "Hey!" Bill said, "Eager is just a robot worked by the little creature that escaped in the spaceship! It looked like a Chinger -- but it was only seven inches tall... "Seven inches, seven feet -- what difference does it make!" the laundry officer mumbled petulantly as he wrapped a handkerchief around his wounded hand. "You don't expect us to tell the recruits how big the enemy really are, or to explain that they come from a #G planet. We gotta keep the morale up." VI VTow that Eager Beager had  ' turned out to be a Chinger spy, Bill felt very much alone. Bowb Brown, who never talked anyway, now talked even less, which meant never, so there was no one that Bill could bitch to. Bowb was the only other fuseman in the compartment who had been in Bill's squad at Camp Leon Trotsky, and all of the new men were very clannish and given to sitting close together and mumbling and throwing suspicious looks over their shoulders if he should come too close. Their only recreation was welding and every offwatch they would break out the welders and weld things to the floor and the next watch cut them loose again which is about as dim a way of wasting time as there is, but they seemed to enjoy it. So Bill was very much out of things and tried bitching to Eager Beager. "Look at the trouble you got me into!" he whined. "At least close your head when I'm talking to you," Bill snarled and reached over to slam the top of Eager's head shut. But it didn't do any good. Eager couldn't do anything now except smile. He had polished his last boot. He just stood there now, he was really very heavy and besides was magnetized to the floor. The fusetenders hung their dirty shirts and arc welders on him. He stayed there for three watches before someone figured out what to do with him. Finally a squad of MPs came with crowbars and tilted him into a handcar and rolled him away. "So long," Bill called out, waving after him, then went back to polishing his boots. "He was a good buddy even if he was a Chinger spy." Bowb didn't answer him, and welders wouldn't talk to him and he spent a lot of the time avoiding Reverend Tembo. The grand old lady of the fleet, Christine Keeler, was still in orbit while her engines were being installed. There was very little to do because, in spite of what First Class Spleen had said they had mastered all the intricies of fusetending in a little less than the prescribed year -- in fact it took them something like maybe fifteen minutes. In his free time Bill wandered around the ship, going as far as the MPs who guarded the hatchways would allow him. He even considered going back to se chaplain so he could have one to bitch to. But if he timed it wrong he might meet the laundry officer again and that was more than he could face. So he walked through the ship, very much alone, and looked in through the door of a compartment and saw a boot on a bed. T)ill stopped, frozen, immobile, shocked, rigid, horrified, dismayed, and had to fight for control of his suddenly contracted bladder. He knew that boot. He would never forget that boot until the day he died, just as he would never forget his serial number and could say it frontwards or backwards or from the inside out. Every detail of that terrible boot was clear in his memory from the snakelike laces in the repulsive leather of the uppers -- said to be made of human skin -- to the corrugated stamping soles tinged with red that could only have been human blood...That boot belonged to Deathwish Drang. The boot was attached to a leg and paralyzed with terror, as unable to control himself as a bird before a snake, he found himself leaning further and further into the compartment as his eyes traced up the leg past the belt to the shirt to the neck upon which rested the fa" that had featured largely in his nightmares since he had enlisted. The lips moved. "Is that you Bill? C'mon in and rest it." Bill stumbled in. "Have a hunk of candy," Deathwish said, and smiled. Reflex drove Bill's fingers into the offered box and set his jaw chewing on the first solid food that had passed his lips in weeks. Saliva spouted from dusty orifices and his stomach gave a preliminary rumble while his thoughts drove maddingly in circles while he tried to figure out what expression was on Deathwish's face. Lips curved at the corners behind the tusks, little crinkles on the cheeks. It was hopeless. He could not recognize it. "I hear Eager Beager turned out to be a Chinger spy," Deathwish said, closing the box of candy and sliding it under the pillow. "I should have figured that one out myself. I knew there was something very wrong with him, doing his buddies' boots and that crap, but I though he was just nuts. Should have known better..." "Deathwish," Bill said hoarsely, "it can't be, I know -- but you are acting like a human being!" Deathwish chuckled, not his ripsaw slicing human bone chuckle, but an almost normal one. Bill stammered. "But you are a sadist, a pervert, a beast, a creature, a thing, a murderer... "Why, thanks, Bill. That's very nice to hear. I try to do my job to the best of my abilities, but I'm human enough to enjoy a word of praise now and then. Being a murderer is hard to project but I'm glad it got across, even to a recruit as stupid as you were." "B-but... aren't you really a... # #'TT'asy now!" Deathwish snapJ ped, and there was enough of the old venom and vileness to lower Bill's body temperature six degrees. Then Deathwish smiled again. "Can't blame you, son, for carrying on this way, you being kind of stupid and from a rube planet and having your education retarded by the troopers and all that. But wake up, boy! Military education is far too important a thing to be wasted by allowing amateurs to get involved. If you read some of the things in our college textbooks it would make your blood cold, yes indeed. Do you realize that in prehistoric times the drillsergeants or whatever it was they called them, that they were real sadists! The armed forces would let these people with no real knowledge absolutely destroy recruits. Let them learn to hate the service before they learned to fear it, which wrecks hell with discipline. And talk about wasteful! They were always marching someone to death by accident or drowning a squad or nonsense like that. The waste alone would make you cry." "Could I ask what you majored in in college?" Bill asked in a very tiny and humble voice. "Military Discipline, Spirit Breaking and Method Acting. A rough course, four years, but I graduated Sigma Cum, which is not bad for a boy from a working class family. I've made a career of the service and that's why I can't understand why the ungrateful bastards went and shipped me out on this crummy can!" He lifted his goldrimmed glasses to flick away a developing tear. "You expect gratitude from the service?" Bill asked humbly. "No, of course not, how foolish of me. Thanks for jerking me back into line, Bill, you'll make a good trooper. All I expect is criminal indifference which I can take advantage of by working through the old boys' network, bribery, cutting false orders, black-marketing and the other usual things. It's just that I had been doing a good job on you slobs in Camp Leon Trotsky and the least I expected was to be left alone to keep doing it, which was pretty damn stupid of me. I had better get cracking on my transfer now." He slid to his feet and stowed the candy and goldrimmed glasses away in a locked footlocker. T ill, who in moments of shock found it hard to adjust instantly, was still bobbing his head and occasionally banging it with the heel of his hand. "Lucky thing," he said, "for your chosen career that you were born deformed -- I mean you have such nice teeth." "Luck nothing," Deathwish said, plunking one of his projecting tusks, "expensive as hell. Do you know what a gene-mutated, vatgrown, surgically implanted set of two-inch tusks cost? I bet you don't know! I worked the summer vac for three years to earn enough to buy these -- but I tell you they were worth it. The image, that's everything. I studied the old tapes of prehistoric spiritbreakers and in their own crude way they were good. Selected by physical type and low I.Q. of course, but they knew their roles. Bullet heads, shaved clean with scars, thick jaws, repulsive manners, hot pants, everything. I figured a small investment in the beginning would pay rich dividends in the end. And it was a sacrifice, believe me, you won't see many implanted tusks around! For a lot of reasons. Oh, maybe they are good for eating rough meat, but what the hell else? Wait until you try kissing your first girl... Now, get lost Bill, I got things to do. See you around." His last words faded in the distance since Bill's well-conditioned reflexes had carried him down the corridor the instant he had been dismissed. When the spontaneous terror faded he began to walk with a crafty roll, like a duck with a spring kneecap, that he thought looked like an old spacesailor's gait. He was beginning to feel a seasoned hand and momentarily labored under the delusion that he knew more about the troopers than they knew about him. This pathetic misconception was dispelled instantly by the speakers on the ceiling which belched and then grated their nasal voices throughout the ship. "Now hear this, the orders direct from the old man himself, Captain Zekial, that you all have been waiting to hear. We're heading into action so we are going to have a clean buckledown fore and aft, stow all loose gear." A low, heartfelt groan of pain echoed from every compartment of the immense ship. nphere was plenty of latrine rumor and scuttlebutt about this first flight of the Chris' Keeler but none of it was true. The rumors were planted by undercover MPs and were valueless. About the only thing they could be sure of was that they might be going someplace because they seemed to be getting ready to go someplace. Even Tembo admitted to that as they lashed down fuses in the storeroom. "Then again," he added, "we might be doing all this just to fool any spies into thinking we are going someplace when really some other ships are going there." "Where?" Bill asked irritably, tying his forefinger into a knot and removing part of the nail when he pulled it free. "Why anyplace at all, it doesn't matter." Tembo was undisturbed by anything that did not bear on his faith. "But I do know where you are going, Bill." "Where?" Eagerly. A perennial sucker for a rumor. "Straight to hell unless you are saved." "Not again." Bill pleaded. "Look there," Tembo said temptingly, and projected a heavenly scene with golden gates, clouds and a soft tom-tom beat in the background. "Knock off that salvation crap!" First Class Spleen shouted, and the scene vanished. Something tugged slightly at Bill's stomach, but he ignored it as being just another of the symptoms sent up continually by his panic-stricken gut which thought it was starving to death and hadn't yet realized that all its marvelous grinding and dissolving machinery had been condemned to a liquid diet. But Tembo stopped work and cocked his head to one side, then poked himself experimentally in the stomach. "We're moving," he said positively, "and going interstellar too. They've turned on the stardrive." "You mean we are breaking through into sub-space and will soon experience the terrible wrenching at every fiber of our being?" "No, they don't use the old sub-space drive anymore because though a lot of ships broke through into subspace with a fiber-wrenching jerk, none of them have yet broke back out. I read in the Trooper's Times where some mathematician said that there had been a slight error in the equations and that time was different in sub-space, but it was different faster not different slower so that it will be maybe forever before those ships come out." tnphen we're going into hyperspace?" "No such thing." "Or we're being dissolved into our component atoms and recorded in the memory of a giant computer who thinks we are someplace else so there we are?" "Wow!" Tembo said, his eyebrows crawling up to his hairline. "For a Zoroastrian farmboy you have some strange ideas! Have you been smoking or drinking something I don't know about?" "Tell me!" Bill pleaded. "If it's not one of them -- what is it? We're going to have to cross interstellar space to fight the Chingers. How are we going to do it?" "It's like this," Tembo looked around to make sure that First Class Spleen was out of sight, then put his cupped hands together to form a ball. "You make believe that my hands are the ship, just floating in space. Then the bloater drive is turned on -- " "The what?" "The bloater drive, it's called that because it bloats things up. You know, everything is made up of little bitty things called electrons, protons, neutrons, trontrons, things like that, sort of held together by a kind of binding energy. Now if you weaken the energy that holds things together -- I forgot to tell you that also they are spinning around all the time like crazy, or maybe you already know -- you weaken the energy and because they are going around so fast all the little pieces start to move away from each other, and the weaker the energy the further apart they move. Are you with me so far?" "I think I am, but I'm not sure that I like it." "Keep cool. Now -- see my hands? As the energy gets weaker the ship gets bigger," he moved his hands farther apart. "It gets bigger and bigger until it is as big as a planet, then as big as a sun then a whole stellar system. The bloater drive can make us just as big as we want to be, then it's turned the other way and we shrink back to our regular size and there we are." " Where are we?" "Wherever we want to be," Tembo answered patiently. Bill turned away and industriously rubbed shine-o onto a fuse as First Class Spleen sauntered by, a suspicious glint in his eye. As soon as he turned the corner Bill leaned over and hissed at Tembo. "How can we be anywhere else than where we started? Getting bigger, getting smaller doesn't get us anyplace." "Well. they're pretty tricky with the old bloater drive. The way I heard it it's like you take a rubber band and hold one end in each hand. You don't move your left hand but you stretch the band out as far as it will go with your right hand. When you let the band shrink back again you keep your right hand steady and let go with your left. See? You never moved the rubber band, just stretched it and let it snap -- but it has moved over. Like our ship is doing now. It's getting bigger, but in one direction. When the nose reaches wherever we're going the stern will be wherever we were. Then we shrink and bango! there we are. And you can get into heaven just that easily, my son, if only... " "Preaching on government time, Tembo!" First Class Spleen howled from the other side of the fuserack over which he was looking with a mirror tied to the end of a rod. "I'll have you polishing fuseclips for a year. You've been warned before." They tied and polished in silence after that, until a little planet about as big as a tennis ball swam in through the bulkhead. A perfect little planet with tiny icecaps, cold fronts, cloud cover, oceans and the works. "What's that?" Bill yiped. "Bad navigation," Tembo scowled. "Backlash, the ship is slipping back a little on one end instead of going all the other way. No-no! Don't touch it, it can cause accidents sometimes. That's the planet we just left, Phigerinadon II." "My home," Bill sobbed and felt the tears rise as the planet shrank to the size of a marble. "So long, Mom." He waved as the marble shrunk to a mote then vanished. After this the journey was uneventful, particularly since they could not feel when they were moving, did not know when they stopped, and had no idea where they were. Though they were sure they had arrived somewhere when they were orderd to strip the lashings from the fuses. The inaction continued for three ran with the others, happy for the first time since he had enlisted. All the sacrifices, the hardships would not be in vain. He was seeing action at last against the dirty Chingers. They stood in first position opposite the fuseracks, eyes intent on the red bands on the fuses that were called the fusebands. Through the soles of his boots Bill could feel a faint, distant tremor in the deck. "What's that?" he asked Tembo out of the comer of his mouth. "Main drive, not the bloater drive. Atomic engines. Means we must be maneuvering, doing something." "But what?" "Watch them fusebands!" First Class Spleen shouted. T)ill was beginning to sweat -- then suddenly realized that it was becoming excruciatingly hot. Tembo, without taking his eyes from the fuses, slipped out of his clothes and folded them neatly behind him. "Are we allowed to do that?" Bill asked, pulling at his collar. "What's happening?" "It's against regulations but you have to strip or cook. Peel, son, or you will die unblessed. We must be going into action because the shields are up. Seventeen force screens, one electromagnetic screen, a double armored hull and a thin layer of pseudoliving jelly that flows over and seals any openings. With all that stuff there is absolutely no energy loss from the ship, nor any way to get rid of energy. Or heat. With the engines running and everyone sweating it can get pretty hot. Even hotter when the guns fire." The temperature stayed high, just at the boundary of tolerability for hours, while they stared at the fusebands. At one point there was a tiny plink that Bill felt through his bare feet on the hot metal rather than heard. "What was that?" "Torpedoes being fired." "At what?" Trembo just shrugged in answer and never let his vigilant gaze stray from the fusebands. Bill writhed with frustration, boredom, heat rash and fatigue for another hour, until the all clear blew and a breath of cool air came in from the ventilators. By the time he had pulled his uniform back on Tembo was gone and he trudged wearily back to his quarters. There was a new mimeographed notice pinned to the bulletin board in the corridor and he bent to read its blurred message. TO: All Personnel RE: Recent engagement On ##-# this ship did participate in the destruction by atomic torpedo of the enemy installation #KL-# and did in concert with the other accomplish its mission, it is thereby hereby authorized that all personnel of this vessel shall attach an Atomic Cluster to the ribbon denoting the Active Duty Unit Engagement Award, or however if this is their first mission of this type they will be authorized to wear the Unit Engagement Award. served with their Atomic Clusters bs fter the heroic razing of '" #KL-# there were weeks of training and drill to restore the battle-weary veterans to their usual fitness. But midway in these depressing months a new call sounded over the speakers, one Bill had never heard before, a clanging sound like steel bars being clashed together in a metal drum full of marbles. It meant nothing to him nor to the other new men, but it sent Tembo springing from his bunk to do a quick two step Death Curse Dance with tom-tom accompaniment on his footlocker cover. "Are you around the bend?" Bill asked dully from where he sprawled reading a tattered copy of Real Ghoul Sexfiend Shocker Comics with built-in sound effects. A ghastly moan was keening from the page he was looking at. "Don't you know?" Tembo That's mail call, my boy, the grandest sound in space." The rest of the watch was spent in hurrying up and waiting, standing in line and all the rest. Maximum inefficiency was attached to the delivery of the mail but finally, in spite of all barriers, the post was distributed and Bill had a precious specialpostal from his mother. On one side of the card was a picture of the Noisome-Offal refinery just outside of his hometown, and this alone was enough to raise a lump in his throat. Then, in the tiny square allowed for the message, his mother's scrawl had traced out: "Bad crop, in debt, robmule has packing glanders, hope you are the same -- love, Maw." Still, it was a message from home and he read and reread it as they stood in line for chow. Tembo, just ahead of him, also had a card, all angels and churches, just what you would expect, and Bill was shocked when he saw Tembo read the card one last time then plunge it into his cup of dinner. "What are you doing that for?" he asked, shocked. "What else is mail good for?" Tembo hummed, and poked the card deeper. "You just watch this now." Before Biirs startled gaze, and right in front of his eyes, the card was starting to swell. The white surface broke off and fell away in tiny flakes while the brown insides grew and grew until they filled the cup and were an inch thick. Tembo fished the dripping slab out and took a large bite from one corner. "Dehydrated chocolate," he said indistinctly. "Good! Try yours." TT'ven before he spoke Bill had  -- t pushed his card down into the liquid and was fascinatingly watching it swell. The message fell away, but instead of brown a swelling white mass became visible. "Taffy -- or bread maybe," he said, and tried not to drool. The white mass was swelling, pushing against the sides of the cup, expanding out of the top. Bill grabbed the end and held it as it rose. Out and out it came until every drop of liquid had been absorbed and Bill held between his outstretched hands a string of fat, connected letters they read. Bill leaned over and bit out an immense mouthful of T. He spluttered and spat the damp shards onto the deck. "Cardboard," he said hollowly. "Mother always shops for bargains. Even in dehydrated chocolate..." He reached for his cup for something to wash the old newsprint taste out of his mouth but it was empty. S omewhere, high in the seats of power a decision was made, a problem resolved, an order issued. From small things do big things grow; a tiny bird terd lands on a snowcovered mountain slope, rolls, collects snow, becomes bigger and bigger, gigantic and more gigantic until it is a thundering mass of snow and ice, an avalanche, a ravening mass of hurtling death that wipes out an entire village. From small beginnings... Who knows what the beginning was here, perhaps the Gods do, but they are laughing. Perhaps the haughty strutting peahen wife of some high minister saw a bauble she cherished and with shrewish, spiteful tongue exacerbated her peacock husband until, to give himself peace, he promised her the trinket, then sought the money for its purchase. Perhaps this was a word in the Emperor's ear about a new campaign in the #sub#th Zone, quiet now for years, a victory there -- or even a draw if there were enough deaths -- would mean a medal, an award, some cash. And thus did a woman's covetousness, like a tiny bird's terd, start the snowball of warfare rolling, mighty fleets gathering, ship after ship assembling, like a rock in a pool of water the ripples spread until even the lowliest were touched by its motion... ' ' Tembo said as he sniffed at his cup of lunch. "They're loading up the chow with stimulants, pain depressors, saltpeter and antibiotics." "Is that why they keep playing the patriotic music?" Bill shouted so that he could be heard over the endless roar of bugles and drums that poured from the speakers. Tembo nodded. "There's little time left to be saved, to assure your place in Samedi's legions -- " "Why don't you talk to Bowb Brown?" Bill screamed. "I got tom-toms coming out of my ears! Every time I look at a wall I see angels floating by on clouds. Stop bothering me! Work on Bowb -- anybody who would do what he does with thoats would probably join up with your Voodoo mob in a second." "I have talked with Brown about his soul, but the issue is still in doubt. He never answers me so I am not sure if he has heard me or not. But you are different, my son, you show anger which means you are showing doubt, and doubt is the first step to belief." The music cut off in mid-peal and for three seconds there was an echoing blast of silence that abruptly terminated. "Now hear this. Attention all hands... stand by... in a few moments we will be taking you to the flagship for an on-the-spot report from the admiral... stand by... The voice was cut off by the sounding of General Quarters, but went on again when this hideous sound had ended... and here we are on the bridge of that gigantic conquistadore of the spacelanes, the twenty-mile long, heavily armored, mightily gunned super battleship the Fairy Queen... the men on watch are stepping aside now and coming towards me in a simple uniform of spun platinum is the Grand Admiral of the Fleet, the Right Honorable Lord Archaeopteryx... Could you spare us a moment Your Lordship? Wonderful! The next voice you are about to hear will be..." The next voice was a burst of music while the fusemen eyed their fusebands, but the next voice after had all the rich adenoidal tones always heard from peers of the empire. "Lads -- we're going into action! This, the mightiest fleet the galaxy has ever seen is heading directly towards the enemy to deliver the devasting blow that may win us the war. In my operations tank before me I see myriad pinpoints of light, stretching as far as the eye can see and each point of light, I tell you they are like holes in a blanket!, is not a ship, not a squadron -- but an entire fleet! We are sweeping forward, closing in..." 'T'he sound of tom-toms filled the air and on the fuseband that Bill was watching appeared a matched set of golden gates, swinging open. "Tembo!" he screamed. "Will you knock that off! I want to hear about the battle." "Canned tripe," Tembo sniffed. "Better to use the few remaining moments of this life that may remain to you to seek salvation. That's no admiral, that's a canned tape. I've heard it five times already. They only play it to build morale before what they are sure is to be a battle with heavy losses. It never was an admiral, its from an old teevee program." "Yippee!" Bill shouted and leaped forward. The fuse he was looking at crackled with a brilliant discharge around the clips and at the same moment the fuseband charred and turned from red to black. "Unggh!" he grunted, then in rapid succession, "Unggh! Unggh! Unggh!" burning his palms on the still hot fuse, dropping it on his toe, and finally getting it into a fuseway. When he turned back Tembo had already clipped a fresh fuse into the empty clips. "That was my fuse -- you shouldn't have..." there were tears in his eyes. "Sorry. But by the rules I must help if I am free." "Well, at least we're in action," Bill said, back in position and trying to favor his bruised foot. "Not in action yet, still to cold in here. And that was just a fuse breakdown, you can tell by the clip discharge, they do that sometimes when they get old." "... massed armadas manned by heroic troopers..." 'We could have been in combat." Bill pouted. "... thunder of atomic broadsides and lightning trails of hurtling torpedoes..." "I think we are now. It does feel warmer, doesn't it, Bill? We had better undress, if it really is a battle we may get too busy." "Let's go, let's go, down to the buff," First Class Spleen barked leaping gazelle-like down the rows of fuses, clad only in a pair of dirty gymsocks and his tatooed-on stripes and fouled fuse insignia of rank. There was a sudden crackling in the air and Bill felt the shortly clipped stubs of his hair stirring in his scalp. "What's that?" he yi ed. ( # Qecondary discharge from  that bank of fuses," Tembo pointed. "It's classified as to what is happening but I heard tell that it means one of the defense screens is under radiation attack and as it overloads it climbs up the spectrum to green, to blue to ultraviolet until finally it goes black and the screen breaks down." "That sounds pretty way out." "I told you it was just a rumor. The material is classified." A crackling bang split the humid air of the fuseroom and a bank of fuses arced, smoked, burned black. One of them cracked in half, showering small fragments like shrapnel in every direction. The fusemen leaped, grabbed the fuses, slipped in replacements with sweating hands, barely visible to each other through the reeking layers of smoke. The fuses were driven home and there was a moment's silence, broken only by a plaintive bleating from the communications screen. "Son of a bowb!" First Class Spleen muttered, kicking a fuse out of the way and diving for the screen. His uniform jacket was hanging on a hook next to it, and he struggled into this before banging the receive switch. He finished closing the last button just as the screen cleared. Spleen saluted, so it must have been an officer he was facing. The screen was edge on to Bill so he couldn't tell, but the voice had the quacking no-chin-andplenty-of-teeth whine that he was beginning to associate with tiie officer class. "You're slow in answering, First Class Spleen -- maybe Second Class Spleen would be able to answer faster?" "Have pity, sir -- I'm an old man." He dropped to his knees in a prayerful attitude which took him off the screen. "Get up you idiot! Have you repaired the fuses after that last overload?" "We replace, sir, not repair." "None of your technical gibberish, you swine! A straight answer!" "All in order, sir. Operating in the green. No complaints from anyone, your worship." "Why are you out of uniform?" "I am in uniform, sir," Spleen whined, moving closer to the screen so that his bare behind and shaking lower limbs could not be seen. "Don't lie to me! There's sweat on your forehead. You aren't allowed to sweat in uniform. Do you see me sweating? And I have a cap on too -- at the correct angle. I'll forget it this time because I have a heart of gold. Dismissed." tt'E'ilthy bowb!" Spleen cursed JL at the top of his lungs, tearing the jacket from his stifling body. The temperature was over # and still rising. "Sweat! They have air-conditioning on the bridge -- and where do you think they discharge the heat? Two entire bands of fuses blew out at the same time, three of the fuses exploding like bombs. At the same moment the floor under their feet bucked hard enough to actually be felt. "Big trouble!" Tembo shouted. "Anything that is strong enough to feel through the stasis field must be powerful enough to flatten this ship like a pancake. There go some more!" He dived for the bank and kicked a fuse clear of the clips and jammed in a replacement. It was an inferno. Fuses were exploding like aerial bombs, sending whistling particles of ceramic death through the air. There was a lightning crackle as a board shorted to the metal floor and a hideous scream, thankfully cut short, as the sheet of lightning passed through a fusetender's body. Greasy smoke boiled and hung in sheets making it almost impossible to see. Bill raked the remains of a broken fuse from the darkened clips and jumped for the replacement rack. He clutched the # pound fuse in his aching arms and had just turned back towards the boards when the universe suddenly exploded. All the remaining fuses seemed to have shorted at once and the screaming bolt of crackling electricity crashed the length of the room. In its eye-piercing light and in a single, eternal moment Bill saw the flame sear through the ranks of the fusetenders, throwing them about and incinerating them like particles of dust in an open fire. Tembo crumpled and collapsed, a mass of seared flesh; a flying length of metal tore First Class Spleen open from neck to groin in a single hideous wound. "Look at that vent in Spleen!" Bowb shouted, then screamed as a ball of lightning rolled over him and turned him to a blackened husk in a fraction of a second. B y chance, a mere accident, Bill was holding the solid bulk of the fuse before him when the flame struck. It washed over his left arm which was on the outside of the fuse and hurled its flaming weight against the thick cylinder. The force hit Bill, knocked him back towards the reserve racks of fuses, and rolled him end over end flat on the floor while the all-destroying sheet of fire crackled inches above his head. It died away, as suddenly as it had come, leaving behind nothing but smoke, heat, the scorched smell of roasted flesh, destruction and death, death, death. Bill crawled painfully for the hatchway. Nothing else moved down the blackened and twisted length of the fuseroom. The compartment below seemed just as hot, the air as bereft of nourishment for his lungs as the one he had just quitted. He crawled on, barely conscious of the fact that he moved on two lacerated knees and one bloody hand. His other arm just hung and dragged, a twisted and blackened length of debris, and only the blessings of deep shock kept him from screaming with unbearable pain. He crawled on, over a sill, through a passageway. The air was clearer here, and much cooler: he sat up and inhaled its blessed freshness. The compartment was familiar -- yet unfamiliar -- he blinked at it, trying to understand why. Long and narrow with a curved wall that had the butt ends of immense guns projecting from it. The main battery, of course, the guns Chinger spy Eager Beager had photographed. Different now, the ceiling closer to the deck, bent and dented, as if some gigantic hammer had beat on it from the outside. There was a man slumped in the gunner's seat of the nearest weapon. "What happened?" Bill asked, dragging himself over to the man and clutching him by the shoulder. Surprisingly enough the gunner only weighed a few pounds and he fell from the seat light as a husk with a shriveled parchment face as though not a drop of liquid were left in his body. "Dehydrator ray," Bill grunted. " thought they only had them on teevee." The gunner's seat was padded and looked very comfortable, far more so than the warped steel deck: Bill slid into the recently vacated position and stared with unseeing eyes at the screen before him. Little moving blobs of light. In large letters, just above the "I won't forget," Bill mumbled as he started to slide sideways from the chair. To steady himself he grabbed a large handle that rose before him, and when he did a circle of light with an X in it moved on the screen. It was very interesting. He put the circle around one of the green lights, then remembered something about a court-martial offense. He jiggled it a bit and moved it over to a red light, with the X right over the light. There was a red button on top of the handle and he pressed it because it looked like the kind of button that is made to be pressed. The gun next to him went whffle... in a very subdued way and the red lights went out. Not very interesting, he let go of the handle. "Oh, but you are a fighting fool!" a voice said and, with some effort, Bill turned his head. A man stood in the doorway wearing a burned and tattered uniform still hung with shreds of gold braid. He weaved forward. "I saw it," he breathed. "Until my dying day I won't forget it. A fighting fool! What guts! Fearless! Forward against the enemy, no holds barred, don't give up the ship..." "What the bowb you talking about?" Bill asked thickly. "A hero!" the officer said pounding Bill on the back, which caused a great deal of pain and was the last straw for his conscious mind which let go the reins of command and went away to sulk. Bill passed out. IX ' trooper-wooper and drink your dinner..." The warm notes of the voice insinuated themselves into a singularly repulsive dream that Bill was only too glad to leave and, with a great deal of effort he managed to heave his eyes open. A quick bit of blinking got them into focus and he saw before him a cup on a tray held by a white hand that was attached to a white arm that was connected to a white uniform well stuffed with female breasts. With a guttural animal growl Bill knocked the tray aside and hurled himself at the dress. He didn't quite make it because his left arm was wrapped up in something and hung from wires, so that he spun around in the bed like an impaled beetle, still uttering harsh cries. The nurse shrieked and fled. "Glad to see that you are feeling better," the doctor said, whipping him straight in the bed with a practiced gesture and numbing Bill's still flailing right arm with a neat judo blow. "I'll pour you some more dinner and you drink it right down, then we'll let your buddies in for the unveiling, they're all waiting outside." The tingling was dying from his arm and he could wrap his fingers about the cup now. He sipped. "What buddies? What unveiling? What's going on here?" he asked suspiciously. Then the door was opened and the troopers came in. Bill searched their faces, looking for buddies, but all he saw were exwelders and strangers. Then he remembered. "Bowb Brown cooked!" he screamed. "Tembo broiled! First Class Spleen gutted! They're all dead!" He hid under the covers and moaned horribly. "That's no way for a hero to act," the doctor said, dragging him back onto the pillows and tucking the covers under his arms. "You're a hero, trooper, the man whose guts, ingenuity, integrity, stick-to-itiveness, fighting spirit and deadly aim saved the ship. All the screens were down, the power room destroyed, the gunners dead, control lost and the enemy dreadnaught zeroing in for the kill when you appeared like an avenging angel, wounded and near to death, and with your last conscious effort fired the shot heard round the fleet, the single blast that disemboweled the enemy and saved our ship, the grand old lady of the fleet Christine Keeler." He handed a sheet of paper to Bill. "I am, of course, quoting from the official report, me myself I think it was just a lucky accident." "You're just jealous," Bill sneered, already falling in love with his new image. tt'T'Xon't get freudian with me!" the doctor screamed, then snuffled pitifully. "I always wanted to be a hero, but all I do is wait hand and foot on heroes. I'm taking that bandage off now." He unclipped the wires that held up Bill's arm and began to unwind the bandages while the troopers crowded around to watch. "How is my arm, Doc?" Bill was suddenly worried. "Grilled like a chop. I had to cut it off." "Then what is this?" Bill shrieked, horrified. "Another arm that I sewed on. There were lots of them left over after the battle. The ship had over # percent casualties and I was really cutting and chopping and sewing, I tell you." The last bandage fell away and the troopers ahhhed with delight. "Say, that's a mighty fine arm!" "Make it do something." "And a damn nice seam there at the shoulder -- look how neat the stitches are!" "Plenty of muscles too and good and long, not like the crummy little short one he has on the other side." "Longer and darker -- that's a great skin color!" "It's Tembo's arm!" Bill howled. "Take it away!" He squirmed across the bed but the arm came after him. They propped him up again on the pillows. "You're a lucky bowb. Bill, having a good arm like that. And your buddy's arm too." "We know that he wanted you to have it." "You'll always have something to remember him by." It really wasn't a bad arm. Bill bent it and flexed the fingers still looking at it suspiciously. It felt alright. He reached out with it and grabbed a trooper's arm and squeezed. He could feel the man's bones grating together while he screamed and writhed. Then Bill looked closer at the hand and began to shout curses at the doctor. "You stupid sawbones! You thoat doctor! Some big job -- this is a right arm!" "So it's a right arm -- so what?" "But you cut off my left arm! Now I have two right arms." "Listen, there was a shortage of left arms. I'm no miracle worker. I do my best and all I get are complaints. Be happy I didn't sew on a leg." He leered evilly, "Or even better I didn't sew on a... CTt's a good arm, Bill," the A trooper said who was rubbing his recently crushed forearm. "And you're really lucky too. Now you can salute with either arm, no one else can do that." "You're right," Bill said humbly. "I never thought of that. I'm really very lucky." He tried a salute with his left-right arm and the elbow whipped up nicely across his chest and the fingertips quivered at his eyebrow. All the troopers snapped to attention and returned the salute. The door crashed open and an officer poked his head in. "Stand easy, men -- this is just an informal visit by the old man." "Captain Zekial coming here!" "I've never seen the old man..." The troopers chippered like birds and were as nervous as virgins at a defloration ceremony. Three more officers came through the door followed by a male nurse leading a ten-yearold moron wearing a bib and a captain's uniform. "Uh... hi ya fellows... " the captain said. "The captain wishes to pay his respects to you all," the first lieutenant said crisply. "Is dat da guy in da bed?" "And particularly wishes to pay his personal respects to the hero of the hour." "... Dere was sometin' else but I forgot..." "And he furthermore wishes to inform the valiant fighter who saved our ship that he is being raised in grade to Fusetender First Class, which increase in rank includes an automatic reenlistment for seven years to be added to his original enlistment, and that upon dismissal from the hospital he is to go by first available transportation to the Imperial planet of Helior, there to receive the hero's award of the Purple Dart with Coalsack Nebula Cluster from the Emperor's own hand." . I think I gotta go to da bathroom... "But now the exigencies of command recall him to the bridge and he wishes you all an affectionate farewell." Bill saluted with both arms and the troopers stood at attention until the captain and his officers had gone, then the doctor dismissed the troopers as well. "Isn't the old man a little young for his post?" Bill asked. "Not as young as some," the doctor scratched through his hypodermic needles looking for a particularly dull one for an injection. "You have to remember that all captains have to be of the nobility and even a large nobility gets stretched damn thin over a galactic empire. We take what we can get." He found a crooked one and clipped it to the cylinder. "Affirm, so he's young, but isn't he also a little stupid for  the job?" "Watch that lese majesty stuff, bowb! You get an empire that's a couple of thousand years old and you get a nobility that keeps inbreeding and you get some of the crunched genes and defective recessives coming out and you got a group of people that are a little more exotic than most nuthouses. There's nothing wrong with the old man that a new I.Q. wouldn't cure! You should have seen the captain of the last ship I was on..." he shuddered and jabbed the needle viciously into Bill's flesh. Bill screamed, then gloomily watched the blood drip from the hole after the hypodermic had been withdrawn. The door closed and Bill was alone, looking at the blank wall and his future. He was a First Class Fusetender, and that was nice. But the compulsory reenlistment for seven years was not so nice. His spirits dropped. He wished he could talk to some of his old buddies, then remembered that they were all dead and his spirits dropped even further. He tried to cheer himself up but could think of nothing to be cheery about until he discovered that he could shake hands with himself. This made him feel a little bit better. He lay back on the pillows and shook hands with himself until he fell asleep. H ow easy is the fall from the pinnacle of power to the depths of degradation, for success and failure are but two sides of the same coin, one the obverse and the other the reverse, as the expression goes, and the shaking hand of fate flips this coin and no man knoweth on which side it will landeth. Fate flipped for Bill. The same fate that had guided his fingers to the trigger that destroyed the Chinger dreadnaught failed one day to guide his fingers on a more mundane mission. He received his medal -- pinned on by the Emperor himself in a heart-warming ceremony -- and as soon as the royal cortege had withdrawn the honor guard sprang on Bill and savaged him soundly. "Sacrilege!" a colonel of marines roared as he sank his heel into Bill's quivering kidney. "If you were one of my lads I'd have you blown from an atomic cannon!" screeched an artillery major as he mashed a fist against Bill's ear. Unconscious and bleeding, Bill was finally dragged away by the MPs and locked behind bars. This was only the first of a series of military pokeys through which they shuttled his carcass while trying to make up their minds what to do with him. In transit he brushed against the criminal inhabitants of this secluded world and learned a form of low cunning that enabled him to survive with a minimum of effort. It was a pleasant, easy life, and in all ways superior to his existence as a trooper. X r I 'he transit stockade was a A makeshift building of plastic sheets bolted to bent aluminum frames and was in the center of a large quadrangle. MPs with bayoneted atom rifles marched around the perimeter of the six electrified barbed-wire fences. The multiple gates were opened by remote control and Bill was dragged through them by the handcuff robot that had brought him here. This debased machine was a squat and heavy cube as high as his knee that ran on clanking treads, and from the top of which projected a steel bar with heavy handcuffs fastened to the end. Bill was on the end of the handcuffs. Escape was impossible because if any attempt was made to force the cuffs the robot sadistically exploded a peewee atom bomb it had in its guts and blew up itself and the escaping prisoner, as well as anyone else in the vicinity. Once inside the compound the robot stopped and did not protest when the guard sergeant unlocked the cuffs. As soon as its prisoner was freed the machine rolled into its kennel and vanished. "Alright wiseguy, you're in my charge now, and dat means trouble for you," the sergeant snapped at Bill. He had a shaven head, a wide and scar-covered jaw, small, close-set eyes in which there flickered the guttering candle of stupidity. Bill narrowed his own eyes to slits and slowly raised his good left-right arm, flexing the bicep. Tembo's muscle swelled and split the thin prison fatigue jacket with a harsh ripping sound. Then Bill pointed to the ribbon of the Purple Dart which he had pinned to his chest. "Do you know how I got that?" he asked in a grim and toneless Chingers single handed in a pillbox I had been sent into. I got into this stockade here because back and killed the sergeant who sent me in there. Now -- what did you say about trouble, sergeant?" "You don't give me no trouble I don't give you no trouble," the guard sergeant squeaked as he skittered away. "You're in cell #, in there, right upstairs... he stopped suddenly and began to chew all the fingernails on one hand at the same time, with a nibbling crunching sound. Bill gave him a long glower for good measure, then turned and went slowly into the building. The door to number # stood open and Bill looked in at the narrow cell, dimly lit by the light that filtered through the translucent plastic walls. The doubledecker bunk took up almost all of the space, leaving only a narrow passage at one side. Two sagging shelves were bolted to the far wall and, along with the made up the complete furnishings. A small man with a pointed face and beady eyes lay on the bottom bunk looking intently at Bill. Bill looked right back and frowned. Uome in, sarge," the little  man said as he scuttled up the support into the upper bunk. "I been saving the lower for you, yes I have. The name is Blackey and I'm doing ten months for telling a second looey to blow it out... He ended the sentence with a slight questioning note that Bill ignored. Bill's feet hurt. He kicked off the purple boots and stretched out on the sack. Black ey's head popped over the edge of the upper bunk, not unlike a rodent peering out the landscape. "It's a long time to chow -- how's about a dobbinburger?" A hand appeared next to the head and slipped a shiny package down to Bill. After looking it over suspiciously Bill pulled the sealing string on the end of the plastic bag. As soon as the air rushed in and hit the combustible lining the burger started to smoke and within three seconds was steaming hot. Lifting the bun Bill squirted ketchup in from the little sack at the other end of the bag, then took a suspicious bite. It was rich, juicy horse. "This old gray mare sure tastes like it used to be," Bill said, talking with his mouth full. "How did you ever smuggle this into the stockade?" Blackey grinned and produced a broad stage wink. "Contacts. They bring it in to me, all I gotta do is ask. I didn't catch the name." "Bill." Food had soothed his ruffled temper. "I was sent up on an indeterminate sentence for a crime too hideous to mention." "What was it?" Blackey licked his lips with anticipation. "I was given a medal by himself, the Emperor, in person and the ceremony was broadcast live "So what's wrong with that?" "My fly was open." Bill swallowed the last mouthful and wiped his fingers on the blanket. "That was a good burger, too bad there's nothing to wash it down with." Blackey produced a small botand passed it to Bill. "Specially mixed for me by a friend in the medics. Half grain alcohol and half ether." "Zoingg!" Bill said, dashing the tears from his eyes after draining half the bottle. He felt almost at peace with the world. "You're a good buddy to have around, Blackey." "You can say that again," Blackey told him earnestly. "It never hurts to have a buddy, not in the troopers, the army, the navy, anywheres. Ask old Blackey, he knows. You got muscles, Bill?" T)ill lazily flexed Tembo's muscle for him. "That's what I like to see," Blackey said in admiration. "With your muscles and my brain we can get along fine..." "I have a brain too!" "Relax it! Give it a break, while I do the thinking. I seen service in more armies than you got days in the troopers. I got my first purple heart serving with Hannibal, there's the scar right there," he pointed to a white arc on the back of his hand. "But I picked him for a loser and switched to Romulus and Remus's boys while there was still time. I been learning ever since and I always land on my feet. I saw which way the wind was blowing and ate some laundry soap and got the trots the morning of Waterloo, and I missed but nothing I tell you. I saw the same kind of thing shaping up at the Somme -- or was it Ypres? -- I forget some of them old names now, and chewed a cigarette and put it into my armpit. You get a fever that way, and missed that show too. There's always an angle to figure I always say." "I never heard of those battles. Fighting the Chingers?" "No, earlier than that, a lot earlier than that. Wars and wars ago." "That makes you pretty old, Blackey. You don't look pretty old." "I am pretty old, but I don't tell people usually because they give me the laugh. But I remember the pyramids being built, and I remember what lousy chow the Assyrian army had, and the time we took over Wug's mob when they tried to get into our cave, rolled rocks down on them." "Sounds like a lot of bowb," Bill said lazily, draining the bottle... "Yeah, that's what everybody says, so I don't tell the old stories anymore. They don't even believe me when I show them my good luck piece." He held out a little white triangle with a ragged edge. "Tooth from a pterodactyl. Knocked it down myself with a stone from a sling I had just invented." "Looks like a hunk of plastic." "See what I mean? So I don't tell the old stories anymore. Just keep re-enlisting and drifting with the tide." Bill sat up and gaped. "Reenlist! Why, that's suicide... "Safe as houses. Safest place during the war is in the army. The jerks in the front lines get their asses shot off, the civilians at home get their asses blown off. Guys in between safe as houses. It takes #, # maybe # guys in the middle to supply every guy in the line. Once you learn to be a fileclerk you're saft. Who ever heard of them shooting at a fileclerk? I'm a great fileclerk. But that's just in wartime. Peacetime, whenever they make a mistake and there is peace for awhile, it's better to be in the combat troops. Better food, longer leaves, nothing much to do. Travel a lot." "So what happens when the war starts?" "I know # different ways to get into the hospitals." "Will you teach me a couple?" "Anything for a buddy, Bill. I'll show you tonight, after they bring the chow around. And the guard what brings the chow is being difficult about a little favor I asked him. Boy, I wish he had a broken arm!" he sighed. "Which arm?" Bill cracked his knuckles with a loud, rending crunch. "Dealer's choice." 'phe Plastichouse Stockade was a transient center where prisoners were kept on the way from somewhere to elsewhere. It was an easy, relaxed life enjoyed by both guards and inmates with nothing to disturb the even tenor of the days. There had been one new guard, a real eager type fresh in from the National Territorial Guard, but he had had an accident while serving the meals and had broken his arm. Even the other guards were glad to see him go. About once a week Blackey would be taken away under armed guard to the Base Records Section where he was forging new records for a light colonel who was very active in the black market and wanted to tired. While working on the records Blackey saw to it that the stockade guards received undeserved promotions, extra leave time and cash bonuses for nonexistent medals. As a result Bill and Blackey ate and drank very well and grew fat. It was as peaceful as could possibly be until the morning after a session in the records section when Blackey returned and woke Bill, "Good news," he said. "We're shipping out." "What's good about that?" Bill asked, surly at being disturbed and still half stoned from the previous evening's drinking bout. "I like it here." "It's going to get too hot for us soon. The colonel is giving me the eye and a very funny look and I think he is going to have us shipped to the other end of the galaxy where there is heavy fighting. But he's not going to do anything until next week after I finish the books for him, so I had secret orders cut for us this week sending us to Tabes Dorsalis where the cement mines are." "The dust world!" Bill shouted hoarsely and picked Blackley up by the throat and shook him. "A worldwide cement mine where men die of silicosis in hours. Hell hole of the universe..." Blackey wriggled free and scuttled to the other end of the cell. "Hold it!" he gasped. "Don't go off half cocked. Close the cover on your priming pan and keep your powder dry! Do you think I would ship us to a place like that? That's just the way it is on the teevee shows, but I got the inside dope. If you work in the cement mines, roger, it ain't so good. But they got one tremendous base section there with a lot of clerical help and they use trustees in the motor pool since there aren't enough troops there. While I was working on the records I changed your MS from fusetender which is a suicide job to driver, and here is your drive's license with qualifications on everything from a monocycle to an atomic #-ton tank. So we get us some soft jobs and besides, the whole base is air-conditioned." "It was kind of nice here," Bill said, scowling at the plastic card that certified to his aptitude in chauffeuring a number of strange vehicles most of which he had never seen. "They come, they go, they're all the same," Blackey said, packing a small toilet kit. They began to realize that something was wrong when the column of prisoners were shackled then chained together with neckcuffs and leg irons and prodded into the transport spacer by a platoon of combat MPs. "Move along!" they shouted. "You'll have plenty of time to relax when we get to Tabes Dorsalgia."  "Where are we going?" Bill gasped. "You heard me, snap it bowb." "You told me Tabes Dorsalis," Bill snarled at Blackey who was ahead of him in the chain. "Tabes Dorsalgia is the base on Veneria where all the fighting is going on -- we're heading for combat!" "A little slip of the pen," Blackey sighed. "You can't win them all." He dodged the kick Bill swung at him then waited patiently while the MPs beat Bill senseless with their clubs and dragged him aboard the ship. XI TT'eneria... a fog-shrouded  world of untold horrors, creeping in its orbit around the ghoulish green star Hernia like some repellent heavenly trespasser newly rose from the nethermost pit What secrets lie beneath the eternal mists? What nameless monsters undulate and gibber in its dank tarns and bottomless black lagoons? Faced by the unspeakable terrors of this planet men go mad rather than face up to the faceless. Veneria... swamp world, the lair of the hideous and unimaginable Venians... It was hot and it was damp and it stank. The wood of the newly constructed barracks was already soft and rotting away. You took your shoes off and before they hit the floor fungus was growing out of them. Once inside the compound their chains were removed, since there was no place for labor camp prisoners to escape to, and Bill wheeled around looking for Blackey, the fingers of Tembo's arm snapping like hungry jaws. Then he remembered that Blackey had spoken to one of the guards as they were leaving the ship, had slipped him something, and a little while later had been unlocked from the line and led away. By now he would be running the file section and by tomorrow he would be living in the nurse's quarters. Bill sighed, let the whole thing slip out of his mind and vanish since it was just one more antangonistic factor that he had no control over and dropped down onto the nearest bunk. Instantly a vine flashed up from a crack in the floor, whipped four times around the bunk lashing him securely to it, then plunged tendrils into his leg and began to drink his blood. "Grrrrk..." Bill croaked against the pressure of a green loop that tightened around his throat. "Never lie down without you got a knife in your hand," a thin, yellowish sergeant said as he passed by and severed the vine, with his own knife, where it emerged from the floorboards. "Thanks, sarge," Bill said, stripping off the coils and throwing them out the window. The sergeant suddenly began vibrating like a plucked string and dropped onto the foot of Bill's bunk. "P-pocket... shirt... p-ppills... he stuttered through chattering teeth. Bill pulled a plastic box of pills out of the sergeant's pocket and forced some of them into his mouth. The vibrations stopped and the man sagged back against the wall, gaunter and yellower and streaming with sweat. (t Taundice and swamp fever I and galloping filariasis, never know when an attack will hit me, that's why they can't send me back to combat, I can't hold a gun. Me, Master Sergeant Ferkel, the best damned flame thrower in Kirjassoff's Kutthroats, and they have me playing nursemaid in a prison labor camp. So you think that bugs me? It does not bug me, it makes me happy, and the only thing that would make me happier would be shipping off this cesspool planet at once." "Do you think alcohol will hurt your condition?" Bill asked, passing over a bottle of cough syrup. "It's kind of rough here?" "Not only won't hurt it but it will." There was a deep gurgling and when the sergeant spoke again he was hoarser but stronger. "Rough is not the word for it. Fighting the Chingers is bad enough, but on this planet they have the natives, the Venians, on their side. These Venians look like moldy newts and they got just maybe enough IQ to hold a gun and pull the trigger, but it is their planet and they're murder out there in the swamps. They hide under the mud and they swim under the water and they swing from the trees and the whole planet is thick with them. They got no sources of supply, no army divisions, no organizations, they just fight. If one dies the others eat him. If one is wounded in the leg the others eat the leg and he grows a new one. If one of them runs out of ammunition or poison darts or whatever he just swims back a hundred miles to base, loads up and back to battle. We have been fighting here for three years and we now control one hundred square miles of territory." "A hundred, that sounds like a lot." "Just to a stupid bowb like you. That is ten miles by ten miles, and maybe about two square miles more than we captured in the first landings." There was the squishthud of tired feet and weary, mud-soaked men began to drag into the barracks. Sergeant Ferkel hauled himself to his feet and blew a long blast on his whistle. "Alright you new men, now hear this. You have all been assigned to B squad which is now assembling in the compound, which squad will now march out into the swamp and finish the job these shagged creeps from A squad began this morning. You will do a good days work out there. I am not going to appeal to your sense of loyalty, your honor or your sense of duty... Ferkel whipped out his atomic pistol and blew a hole in the ceiling through which rain began to drip. "I am only going to appeal to your urge to survive, because any man shirking, goofing off or not pulling his own weight will personally be shot dead by me. Now get out." With his bared teeth and shaking hands he looked sick enough and mean enough and mad enough to do it. Bill and the rest of B squad rushed out into the rain and formed ranks. # #T)ick up da axes, pick up da A picks, get the uranium out," the corporal of the armed guard snarled as they squelched through the mud towards the gate. The labor squad, carrying their tools, stayed in the center, while the armed guard walked on the outside. The guard wasn't there to stop the prisoners from escaping but to give some measure of protection from the enemy. They dragged slowly down the road of felled trees that wound through the swamp. There was a sudden whistling overhead and heavy transports flashed by. "We're in luck today," one of the older prisoners said, "they're sending in the heavy infantry again. I didn't know they had any left." "You mean they'll capture more territory?" Bill asked. "Naw, all they'll get is dead. But while they're getting butchered some of the pressure will be off of us and we can maybe work without losing too many men." Without orders they all stopped to watch as the heavy infantry fell like rain into the swamps ahead -- and vanished just as easily as raindrops. Every once in awhile there would be a boom and flash as a teensie A-bomb went off, which probably atomized a few Venians, the enemy just waiting to rush in. Small arms crackled in the distance and grenades boomed. Then over the trees they saw a bobbing, bouncing figure approach. It was a heavy infantryman in his armored suit and gasproof helmet, A-bombs and grenades strapped to him, a regular walking armory. Or rather hopping armory, since he would have had trouble walking on a paved street with the weight of junk hung about him, so therefore moved by jumping, using two reaction rockets, one bolted to each hip. His hops were getting lower and lower as he came near. He landed # yards away ana sank slowly to his waist in the swamp, his rockets hissing as they touched the water. Then he hopped again, much shorter this time, the rockets fizzling and popping, and he threw his hel met open in the air. "Hey, guys," he called. "The dirty Chingers got my fuel tank. My rockets are almost out, I can't hop much more. Give a buddy a hand will you..." He hit the water with a splash. "Get outta the monkey suit and we'll pull you in," the guard corporal called. "Are you nuts!" the soldier shouted. "It takes an hour to get into and outta this thing." He triggered his rockets but they just went pffft and he rose about a foot in the water, then dropped back. "The fuel's gone! Help me you bastards! What's ' this, bowb-your-buddy week..." he shouted as he sank, then his ' head went under and there were a few bubbles and nothing else. "It's always bowb-your-buddy week," the corporal said. "Get the column moving!" he ordered, and they shuffled forward. "Them suits weigh # pounds. Goes down like a rock," the corporal said as he prodded them ahead. I f this was a quiet day, Bill didn't want to see a busy one. Since the entire planet of Veneria was a swamp no advances could be made until a road was built. Individual soldiers might penetrate a bit ahead of the road, but for equipment or supplies or even heavily armed men a road was necessary. Therefore the labor corps was building a road of felled trees. At the front. Bursts from atom rifles steamed in the water around them and the poison darts were as thick as falling leaves. The firing and sniping on both sides was constant while the prisoners cut down trees, trimmed and lashed them together to push the road forward another few inches. Bill trimmed and chopped and tried to ignore the screams and falling bodies until it began to grow dark. The squad, now a good deal smarter, made their return march in the dusk. "We pushed it ahead at least # yards this afternoon," Bill said to the old prisoner marching at his side. "Don't mean nothing, Venians swim up in the night and take the logs away." Bill instantly made his mind up to get out of there. "Got any more of that joyjuice?" Sergeant Ferkel asked when Bill dropped onto his bunk and began to scrape some of the mud from his boots with the blade of his knife. Bill took a quick slash at a plant coming up through the floorboards before he answered. "Do you think you could spare me a moment to give me some advice, sergeant?" "I am a flowing fountain of advice once my throat is lubricated." Bill dug a bottle out of his pocket. "How do you get out of this outfit?" he asked. "You get killed," the sergeant told him as he raised the bottle to his lips. Bill snatched it out of his hand. "That I know without your help," he snarled. "Well that's all you gonna know without my help," the sergeant snarled back. Their noses were touching and they growled at each other deep in their throats. Having proven just where they stood and just how tough they both were they relaxed, and Sergeant Ferkel leaned back while Bill sighed and passed him the bottle. UT Tow's about a job in the orderly room?" "We don't have an orderly room. We don't have any records. Everyone sent here gets killed sooner or later, so who cares exactly when." "What about getting wounded?" "Get sent to the hospital, get well, get sent back here." "The only thing left to do is mutiny!" Bill shouted. "Didn't work last four times we tried it. They just pulled the supply ships out and didn't give us any food until we agreed to start fighting again. Wrong chemistry here, all the food on this planet is pure poison for our metabolisms. We had a couple of guys prove it the hard way. Any mutiny that is going to succeed has to grab enough ships first so we can get off-planet. If you got any good ideas about that I'll put you in touch with the Permanent Mutiny Committee." "Isn't there any way to get out?" "I anshered that firsht," Ferkel told him and fell over stone drunk. "I'll see for myself," Bill said as he slid the sergeant's pistol from his holster and slipped out the back door. Armored floodlights lit up the forward positions facing the enemy and Bill went in the opposite direction, towards the distant white flares of landing rockets. Barracks and warehouses were dotted about on the boggy ground but Bill stayed clear of them since they were all guarded, and the guards had itchy trigger fingers. They fired at anything they saw, anything they heard, and if they didn't see or hear anything they fired once in awhile anyway just to keep their morale up. Lights were burning brightly ahead and Bill crawled forward on his stomach to peer from behind a rank growth at a tall, floodlighted fence of barbed wire that stretched out of sight in both directions. A burst from an atomic rifle burned a hole in the mud about a yard behind him and a searchlight swung over, catching him full in its glare. "Greetings from your commanding officer," an amplified voice thundered from loudspeakers on the fence. "This is a recorded announcement. You are now attempting to leave the combat zone and enter the restricted headquarters zone. This is forbidden. Your presence has been detected by automatic machineryand these same devices now have a number of guns trained upon you. They will fire in sixty seconds if you do not leave. Be patriotic, man! Do your duty. Death to the Chingers! Fifty-five seconds. Would you like your mother to know that her boy is a coward? Fifty seconds. Your Emperor has invested a lot of money in your training -- is this the way you repay him? Forty five seconds... Bill cursed and shot up the nearest loudspeaker but the voice continued from others down the length of the fence. He turned and went back the way he had come. As he neared his barracks, skirting the front line to avoid fire from the nervous guards in the buildings, all the lights went out. At the same time gunfire and bomb explosions broke out on every side. S omething slithered close by in the mud and Bill's trigger finger spontaneously contracted and he shot it. In the brief atomic flare he saw the smoking remains of a dead Venian, as well as an unusually large number of live Venians squelching to the attack. Bill dived aside instantly, so that their return fire missed him, and fled in the opposite direction. His only thought was to save his skin and this he did by getting as far from the firing and the attacking enemy as he could. That this direction happened to be into the trackless swamp he did not consider. Survive his shivering little ego screamed and he ran on into the swamp. Running became difficult when the ground turned to mud, and even more difficult when the mud gave way to open water. After paddling desperately for an interminable length of time Bill came to more mud. The first hysteria had now passed, the firing was only a dull rumble in the distance and he was exhausted. He dropped onto the mudbank and instantly sharp teeth sank into his buttocks. Screaming hoarsely he ran on until he ran into a tree. He wasn't going fast enough to hurt himself and the feel of rough bark under his fingers brought out all of his eoanthropic survival instincts: he climbed. High up there were two branches that forked out from the trunk and he wedged himself into the crotch, back to the solid wood and gun pointed straight ahead and ready. Nothing bothered him now and the night sounds grew dim and distant, the blackness was complete and within a few minutes his head started to nod. He dragged it back a few times, blinked about at nothing, then finally slept soundly. It was the first gray light of dawn when he opened his gummy eyes and blinked around. There was a little lizard perched on a nearby branch watching him with jewel-like eyes. "Gee -- you were really sacked out," the Chinger said. Bill's shot tore a smoking scar in the top of the branch, then the Chinger swung back up from underneath and meticulously wiped bits of ash from his paws. "Easy on the trigger, Bill," it said. "Gee -- I could have killed you anytime during the night if I had wanted to." "I know you," Bill said hoarsely. "You're Eager Beager, aren't you." -- this is just like old '-J home week, isn't it." A centipede was scuttling by and Eager Beager the Chinger grabbed it up with three of his arms and began pulling off legs with his fourth and eating them. "I recognized you Bill, and wanted to talk to you. I've been feeling bad ever since I called you a stoolie, that wasn't right of me. You were only doing your duty when you turned me in. You wouldn't like to tell me how you recognized me, would you?" he asked, and winked slyly. "Why don't you bowb off, Jack?" Bill growled and groped in his pocket for a bottle of cough syrup. Eager Chinger sighed. "Well, I suppose I can't expect you to betray anything of military importance, but I hope you will answer a few questions for me." He discarded the delimbed corpse and groped about in his marsupial pouch and produced a tablet and tiny writing instrument. "You must realize that spying is not my chosen occupation, but rather I was dragooned into it through my specialty which is exopology -- perhaps you have heard of this discipline?" "We had an orientation lecture once, an exopologist, all he could talk about was alien creeps and things." "Yes -- well that roughly sums it up. The science of the study of alien life forms, and of course to us you homo sapiens are an alien form." He scuttled halfway around the branch when Bill raised his gun. "Watch that kind of talk, bowb!" "Sorry, just my manner of speaking. To put it briefly, since I specialized in the study of your species I was sent out as a spy, reluctantly, but that is the sort of sacrifice one makes during wartime. However, seeing you here reminded me that there are a number of questions and problems still unanswered that I would appreciate your help on, purely in the matter of science, of course." "Like what?" Bill asked suspiciously, draining the bottle and flinging it away into the jungle. "Well -- gee -- to begin simply, how do you feel about us Chingers?" "Death to all Chingers!" The little pen flew over the tablet. "But you have been taught to say that. How did you feel before you entered the service?" "Didn't give a damn about Chingers." Out of the corner of his eye Bill was watching a suspicious movement of the leaves in the tree above. "Fine! Then could you explain to me just who it is that hates us Chingers and wants to fight a war of extermination?" "Nobody really hates Chingers, I guess. It's just that there is no one else around to fight a war with so we fight with you." The moving leaves had parted and a great, smooth head with slitted eyes peered down. ttT knew it! And that brings A me to my really important questions. Why do you homo sapiens like to fight wars?" Bill's hand tightened on his gun as the monstrous head dropped silently down from the leaves behind Eager Chinger Beager. It was attached to a foot-thick and apparently endless serpent body. "Fight wars? I don't know," Bill said, distracted by the soundless approach of the giant snake. "I guess because we like to, there doesn't seem to be any other reason." "You like to!" the Chinger squeaked, hopping up and down with excitement. "No civilized race could like wars, death, killing, maiming, rape, torture, pain to name just a few of the concomitant factors. Your race can't be civilized!" The snake struck like lightning and Eager Beager Chinger vanished down its spine-covered throat with only the slightest of muffled squeals. "Yeah... I guess we're just not civilized," Bill said, gun ready, but the snake kept going on down. At least fifty yards of it slithered by before the tail flipped past and it was out of sight. "Serves the damn spy right," Bill grunted happily and pulled himself to his feet. Once on the ground Bill began to realize just how bad a spot he was in. The damp swamp had swallowed up any marks of his passage from the night before and he hadn't the slightest idea in which direction the battle area lay. The sun was just a general illumination behind the layers of fog and cloud, and he felt a sudden chill as he realized how small were his chances of finding his way back. The invasion area, just ten miles to a side, made a microscopic pinprick in the hide of this planet. Yet if he didn't find it he was as good as dead. And if he just stayed here he would die, so, picking what looked like the most likely direction, he started off. "I'm pooped," he said, and was. A few hours of dragging through the swamps had done nothing except weaken his muscles, fill his skin with insect bites, drain a quart or two of blood into the ubiquitous leeches and deplete the charge in his gun as he killed a dozen or so of the local lifeforms that wanted him for breakfast. He was also hungry and thirsty. And still lost. The rest of the day just recapitulated the morning so that when the sky began to darken he was close to exhaustion and his supply of cough medicine was gone. He was very hungry when he climbed a tree to find a spot to rest for the night and he plucked a luscious looking red fruit. "Supposed to be poison," he looked at it suspiciously, then smelled it. It smelled fine. He threw it away. In the morning he was much hungrier. "Should I put the barrel of the gun in my mouth and blow my head off?" he asked himself, weighing the atomic pistol in his hand. "Plenty of time for that yet. Plenty of things can still happen," yet he didn't really believe it. Suddenly he heard voices coming through the jungle towards him, human voices. He settled behind the limb and aimed his gun in that direction. Ophe voices grew, then a clanking and rattling. An armed Venian scuttled under the tree, but Bill held his fire as other figures loomed out of the fog. It was a long file of human prisoners wearing the neckirons used to bring Bill and the others to the labor camp, all joined together by a long chain that connected the neckirons. Each of the men was carrying a large box on his head. Bill let them stumble by underneath and kept a careful count of the Venian guards. There were five in all With a sixth bringing up the rear. When this one had passed underneath the tree Bill dropped straight down on him, braining him with his heavy boots. The Venian was armed with a Chinger-made copy of a standard atomic rifle and Bill smiled wickedly as he hefted its familiar weight. After sticking the pistol into his waistband he crept after the column, rifle ready. He managed to kill the fifth guard by walking up behind him and catching him in the back of the neck with the rifle butt. The last two troopers in the file saw this but had enough brains to be quiet as he crept up on number four. Some stir among the prisoners or a chance sound warned this guard and he turned about, raising his rifle. There was no chance now to kill him silently so Bill burned his head off and ran as fast as he could towards the head of the column. There was a shocked silence when the blast of the rifle echoed through the fog and Bill filled it with a shout. The soldiers dived into the mud and Bill held his atomic rifle at his waist as he ran, fanning it back and forth before him like a water hose and holding the trigger on full automatic. A continuous blast of fire poured out a yard above the ground and he squirted it in an arc before him. There were shouts and screams in the fog and then the charge in the rifle was exhausted. Bill threw it from him and drew the pistol. Two of the remaining guards were down and the last one was wounded and got off a single badly aimed shot before Bill burned him too. "Not bad," he said, stopping and panting. "Six out of six." There were low moans coming from the line of prisoners and Bill curled his lip in disgust at the three men who hadn't dropped at his shouted command. "What's the matter?" he ask, ed, stirring one with his foot, "never been in combat before?" But this one didn't answer because he was charred dead. tC XT ever..." the next one answered, gasping in pain. "Get the corpsman, I'm wounded, there's one ahead in the line. Oh, oh, why did I ever leave the Chris' Keeler! Medic." Bill frowned at the three gold balls of a fourth lieutenant on the man's collar, then bent and scraped some mud from his face. "You! The laundry officer!" he shouted in outraged anger, raising his gun to finish the job. "Not I!" the lieutenant moaned, recognizing Bill at last. "The laundry officer is gone, flushed down the drain! This is I, your friendly local pastor, bringing you the blessings of Ahura Mazdah, my son, and have you been reading the Avesta every day before going to sleep?" "Bah!" Bill snarled, he couldn't shoot him now, and walked over to the third wounded man. "Hello Bill..." a weak voice said. "I guess the old reflexes are slowing down... I can't blame you for shooting me, I should have hit the dirt like the others..." "You're damn right you should have," Bill said looking down at the familiar, loathed, tusked face. "You're dying Deathwish, you've bought it." "I know," Deathwish said and coughed. His eyes were closed. "Wrap this line in a circle," Bill shouted. "I want the medic up here." The chain of prisoners curved around and they watched as the medic examined the casualties. "A bandage on the looie's arm takes care of him," he said. "Just superficial burns. But the big guy with the fangs has bought it." "Can you keep him alive?" Bill asked. "For awhile, no telling how long." "Keep him alive." Bill looked around at the circle of prisoners. "Any way to get those neckirons off?" he asked. "Not without the keys," a burly infantry sergeant answered, "and the lizards never brought them. We'll have to wear them until we get back. How come you risked your neck saving us?" he asked suspiciously. "Who wanted to save you?" Bill sneered. "I was hungry and I figured that must be food you were carrying." "Yeah, it is," the sergeant said, looking relieved. "I can understand now why you took the chance." Bill broke open a can of rations and stuffed his face. '"T"he dead man was cut from his position in the line and the two men, one in front and one in back of the wounded Deathwish, wanted to do the same with him. Bill reasoned with them, explained the only human thing to do was to carry their buddy, and they agreed with him when he threatened to bum their legs off if they didn't. While the chained men were eating. Bill cut two flexible poles and made a stretcher by slipping three donated uniform jackets over them. He gave the captured rifles to the burly sergeant and the most likely looking combat veterans, keeping one for himself. "Any chance of getting back?" Bill asked the sergeant, who was carefully wiping the moisture from his gun. "Maybe. We can backtrack the way we come, easy enough to follow the trail after everyone dragged through. Keep an eye peeled for Venians, get them before they can spread the word about us. When we get in earshot of the fighting we try and find a quiet area -- then break through. A fifty-fifty chance." "Those are better odds for all of us than they were about an hour ago." "You're telling me. But they get worse the longer we hang around here." "Let's get moving." Following the track was even easier than Bill had thought, and by early afternoon they heard the first signs of firing, a dim rumble in the distance. The only Venian they had seen had been instantly killed. Bill halted the march. "Eat as much as you want, then dump the food," he said. "Pass that on. We'll be moving fast soon." He went to see how Deathwish was getting on. "Badly -- " Deathwish gasped, his face white as paper. "This is it, Bill... I know it... I've terrorized my last recruit... stood on my last pay line... had my last shortarm... so long -- Bill... you're a good buddy... taking care of me like this..." "Glad you think so, Deathwish, and maybe you'd like to do me a favor." He dug in the dying man's pockets until he found his noncom's notebook, then opened it and scrawled on one of the blank pages. "How would you like to sign this, just for old time's sake -- Deathwish ?" The big jaw lay slack, the evil red eyes open and staring. "The dirty bowb's gone and died on me," Bill said disgustedly. After pondering for a moment he dribbled some ink from the pen onto the ball of Deathwish's thumb and pressed it to the paper to make a print. ( yTedic!" he shouted, and the line of men curled around so the medic could come back. "How does he look to you?" "Dead as a herring," the corpsman said after his professional examination. "Just before he died he left me his tusks in his will, written right down here, see? These are real vatgrown tusks and cost a lot. Can they be transplanted?" "Sure, as long as you get them cut out and deep froze inside the next twelve hours." "No problem with that, we'll just carry the body back with us." He stared hard at the two stretcher bearers and fingered his gun r and they had no complaints. "Get that lieutenant up here." "Chaplain," Bill said, holding out the sheet from the notebook, "I would like an officer's signature on this. Just before he died this trooper here dictated his will, but was too weak to sign it, so he put his thumbprint on it. Now you write below it that you saw him thumbprint it and it is all affirm and legallike, then sign your name." "But -- I couldn't do that my son. I did not see the deceased print the will and glmmpf... He said glmmpf because Bill had poked the barrel of the atomic pistol into his mouth and was rotating it, his finger quivering on the trigger. "Shoot," the infantry sergeant said, and three of the men who could see what was going on were clapping. Bill slowly withdrew the pistol. "I shall be happy to help," the chaplain said, grabbing for the pen. Bill read the document, grunted in satisfaction, then went over and squatted down next to the medic. "You from the hospital?" he asked. "You can say that again, and if I ever get back into the hospital I ain't never going out of it again. It was just my luck to be out picking up combat casualties when the raid hit." "I hear that they aren't shipping any wounded out. Just putting them back into shape and sending them back into the line." "You heard right. This is going to be a hard war to live through." "But some of them must be wounded too badly to send back into action," Bill insisted. tt'T'he miracles of modem medicine," the medic said indistinctly as he worried a cake of dehydrated luncheon meat. "Either you die or you're back in the line in a couple of weeks." "Maybe a guy gets his arm blown off?" "They got an icebox full of old arms. Sew a new one on and bango, right back into the line." "What about a foot?" Bill asked, worried. "That's right -- I forgot! They got a foot shortage. So many guys lying around without feet that they're running out of bedspace. They were starting to ship some of them offplanet when I left." "You got any pain pills?" Bill asked, changing the subject. The medic dug out a white bottle. "Three of these and you'd laugh while they sawed your head off." "Give me three." "If you ever see a guy around what has his foot shot off you better quick tie something around his leg just over the knee, tight, to cut the blood off." "Thanks buddy."  "Let's get moving," the infantry sergeant said. "The quicker we move the better our chances." Occasional flares from atomic rifles burned through the foilage overhead and the thud-thud of heavy weapons shook the mud under their feet. They worked along parallel with the firing until it had died down, then stopped. Bill, the only one not chained in the line, crawled ahead to reeonnoiter. The enemy lines seemed to be lightly held and he found the spot that looked the best for a breakthrough. Then, before he returned, he dug the heavy cord from his pocket that he had taken from one of the ration boxes. He tied a tourniquet above his right knee and twisted it tight with a stick, then swallowed the three pills. He stayed behind some heavy shrubs when he called to the others. "Straight ahead, then sharp right before that clump of trees. Bill led the way until the first men could see the lines ahead. Then he called out, "What's that?" and ran into the heavy foilage. "Chingers!" he shouted and sat down with his back to a tree. He took careful aim with his pistol and blew his right foot off. "Get moving fast!" he shouted and heard the crash of the frightened men through the undergrowth. He threw the pistol away, fired at random into the trees a few times, then dragged to his feet. The atomic rifle made a good enough crutch to hobble along on and he did not have far to go. Two troopers, they must have been new to combat or they would have known better, left the shelter to help him inside. "Thanks, buddie," he gasped, and sank to the ground. "War sure is hell." '  'he martial music echoed from the hillside, bouncing back from the rocky ledges and losing itself in the hushed green shadows under the trees. Around the bend, stamping proudly through the dust, came the little parade led by the magnificent form of a one-robot-band. Sunlight gleamed on its golden limbs and twinkled from the brazen instruments it worked with such enthusiasm. A small formation of assorted robots rolled and clattered in its wake and bringing up the rear was the solitary figure of the grizzle-haired recruiting sergeant, striding along strongly, his rows of medals ajingle. Though the road was smooth the sergeant lurched suddenly, stumbling, and cursed with the rich proficiency of years. "Halt!" he commanded, and while his little company braked to a stop he leaned against the stone wall that bordered the road and rolled up his right pants leg. When he whistled one of the robots trundled quickly over and held out a tool box from which the sergeant took a large screwdriver and tightened one of the bolts in the ankle of his artificial foot. Then he squirted a few drops from an oil can onto the joint and rolled the pants leg back down. When he straightened up he noticed that a robomule was pulling a plow down a furrow in the field beyond the fence a farmlad guided it. "Beer!" the sergeant barked, then, "A Spacemen's Lament ." "That's sure pretty music," the plowboy said. "Join me in a beer," the sergeant said, sprinkling a white powder into it. "Don't mind iffen I do, sure is hottern'n H out here today." "Say hell, son." "Momma don't like me to cuss. You sure do have long teeth, mister." The sergeant twanged a tusk. "A big fellow like you shouldn't worry about a little cussing. If you were a trooper you could say hell -- or even bowb -- if you wanted to, all the time."  "I don't think I'd want to say anything like that," he flushed redly under his deep tan. "Thanks for the beer, but I gotta be ploughing on now. Momma said I was to never talk to soldiers." tt'VT'our momma's right, a  dirty, cussing, drinking crew the most of them. Say, would you like to see a picture here of a new model robomule that can run # hours without lubrication?" The sergeant held his hand out behind him and a robot put a viewer into it. "Why that sounds nice!" The farmlad raised the viewer to his eyes and looked into it and flushed an even deeper red. "That's no mule, mister, that's a girl and her clothes are..." The sergeant reached out swiftly and pressed a button on the top of the viewer. Something went thunk inside of it and the farmer stood, rigid and frozen. He did not move or change expression when the sergeant reached out and took the little machine. "Take this stylo," the sergeant said, and the other's fingers closed on it "Now sign this form, recruits' signature." "My Charlie! What are you doing with my Charlie!" an ancient, gray-haired woman wailed as she scrambled toward them. "Your son is now a trooper for the greater glory of the Emperor," the sergeant said, and waved over the robot tailor. "No -- please!" the woman begged, clutching the sergeant's hand and dribbling tears onto it. "I've lost one son, isn't that enough." she blinked up through the tears, then blinked again. "But you -- you're my boy! My Bill come home! Even with those teeth and the scars and one black hand and one white hand and one artificial foot, I can tell, a mother always knows!" The sergeant frowned down at the woman. "I believe you might be right," he said. "I thought Phigerinadon II was familiar." The robot tailor had finished his job, the red paper jacket shone bravely in the sun, the one-molecule-thick boots gleamed. "Fall in," Bill shouted. "Billy, Billy..." the woman wailed, "this is your little brother Charlie! You wouldn't take your own little brother into the troopers, would you?" Bill thought about his mother, then he thought about his baby brother, Charlie, then he thought of the one month that would be taken off of his enlistment time for every recruit he brought in, and he snapped his answer back. "Yes," he said. The music blared, the soldiers marched, the mother cried -- as mothers have always done -- and the brave little band tramped down the road and over the hill and out of sight into the sunset. Anyone who dared might enter the maze from the stars , but no one would return alive -- or humanl 'T"he great silver dome sat in the desert at Yucca Flats. It was featureless, save for an innocent-appearing open entranceway, but there was something about it that shrieked : alien. The silver shimmer was not quite the shimmer of silver. Rather it was more like the silver of shimmer. The tanks, machine-gun emplacements and foxholes surrounding the dome confirmed the sense of alienness. The dome was surrounded and cordoned off. Whether it was being guarded or contained was a moot question. Near the opening in the dome a tent had been pitched. The flag of a three-star general flew from a makeshift flagpole. Inside the tent were a half-dozen canvas folding chairs, an elaborate radio setup, a large map table that seemed to serve no useful function, five assorted colonels, Lieutenant General Richard Brewster -- a middleaged man with the look of an athlete gone to fat -- and one lone civilian, looking plucked and out of place amidst all that khaki plumage. General Brewster eyed the civilian with cold resignation. "I've lost ten men in there already," he said, in a tone of voice like a poker player describing a particularly bad run of cards. "Ten men, and we don't know any more than when we started." Brewster stared out the open tent flap at the entrance to the dome. "Only one thing we know," he said. "It's from the stars." "Interesting," said the civilian flatly. He was a wiry man, not short, not tall. His face showed even more tension than his spare body. His mouth seemed frozen in a perpetual sour sneer, his expression appeared dead and juiceless. Only his large dark eyes betrayed him. They shifted purposefully from focus to focus, absorbing, categorizing, analyzing. "Interesting? Is that all you have to say, Lindstrom? Interesting? It's from the stars, man. We tracked it from beyond the orbit of Pluto. Don't you understand? It's a spaceship from another solar system. It's the key to the stars." "That's what it is to you," said Lindstrom. "But what is it to whatever sent it here? Are you so sure they intend it as a key to the stars? What about those ten men you sent in who never came out? Do you think they're so sure it's the key to the stars?" "What are you leading up to, man?" spat Brewster, with unconcealed distaste. "Just that you know nothing about why that thing came here. Ten men go in, and none of them come out. Maybe it's not here to give us the stars at all. Maybe it's purpose is as alien as its manufacture. Or maybe -- " Lindstrom paused and allowed himself a grin. "Maybe it's just a better mousetrap," he said. "Well," said Brewster, "will you cr won't you? If you're trying to point out how dangerous it is, you're wasting your time. I've lost ten men as it is. I know damn well it's dangerous. I've been told you're not afraid of danger. I've been told you enjoy it." Lindstrom laughed brittly. "In a way," he said. "It's not that I enjoy danger, General. It's just that I need it. The question is, how much do you think you need me?" "What do you mean?" "I mean two hundred and fifty thousand tax-free dollars. Take it or leave it." "Payable if you succeed in telling us what's inside the dome?" "What else?" Brewster nodded. "Okay, you're on." T)ert Lindstrom was aware of his glamor only when he wanted a woman. Then it proved most useful; it was a wellhoned, finely-crafted tool. There were plenty of women who could resist the soldier of fortune myth, to be sure, but there were many more who could not. The probabilities were all on his side. And odds were Bert Lindstrom's religion. Lindstrom was a calculating man. He would undertake nothing that did not seem to offer an odds on chance of success. Nothing, from seduction to assassination. Yet he would never fail to accept a challenge when the odds were in his favor -- no matter if he were risking m dime or his life. For in his system of values, there was no real difference. It was not what was being risked that counted, it was the risk itself. His life meant little to him when he was not risking it. Only when he was gambling with his existence did it come to have meaning -- then it was the stake, the challenge, the risk. Lindstrom did not seek death. He risked his life only when he felt that the odds were on his side. He did not seek death, but he had to be near it, he had to risk it, for only at the moment of risk could his life have any meaning. And this was the best risk in a life of risks. Not necessarily because it was the longest shot of all. Lindstrom had the professional risk-taker's contempt for soldiers who took risks on orders. That ten soldiers had not come out was a thing of little import. What was interesting was that the dome from the stars was a total unknown. Even the odds on coming out were incalculable. They might be in his favor, they might not. He was betting his instinctive feelings about himself against a complete unknown. If he had set up the situation himself in a laboratory he could not have contrived a more perfect risk. nphe hot desert wind blew at Lindstrom's back as he approached the entrance to the dome. The soldiers who had not come out had been armed to the teeth. Therefore Lindstrom was not. He carried only his old .#, a machete which was more a luckcharm than anything else, a coil of rope, an all-purpose utility knife and a flashlight. The entrance was little more than a door-sized hole in the material of the dome. Lindstrom peered inside. He could see nothing but blackness. He drew his gun, turned on the flashlight and stepped inside. As soon as he crossed the threshhold, there was light. It did not seem to come from anywhere, it just was. In the pearly luminescence, he could see he was standing at the mouth of a tunnel, a smooth, round, somehow almost colorless tunnel, that curved crazily upwards and leftwards in an arc so steep that it seemed impossible to hold one's footing. Nevertheless, Lindstrom decided to try to climb it. Although the material of the tunnel seemed glass-smooth, it did not have a low frictional coefficient. It was more like walking on concrete than glass. Stranger still, although his eyes told him that he was walking up a curve at an impossible angle, his body . tilted almost forty degrees from the vertical, his kinesthetic senses told a different story. The force of gravity remained perpendicular to the floor of the tunnel, no matter what angle the tunnel took to the Earth's surface, so that he was walking upright, as if the tunnel had a private gravity all its own. Lindstrom was somewhat frightened: the instinctual fear of the unknown. This he had, of course, expected. Fear meant that there was danger, risk. And risk meant that he was living. The tunnel came to a fork. Decision number one. Had this been the point at which the soldiers had made the wrong calculation? Lindstrom was sure that surviving in the dome was a matter of making the proper calculations, the correct decisions. Either that, or there was no way of surviving. And that was a possibility not worth considering -- since if it were true, the game was already lost. It was like walking on a ledge over a precipice in the dark. You knew that there was a safe path and you knew that there was a point beyond which death lurked. But you had no way of knowing how Wide the ledge was, how much margin for error you had. There was nothing to choose between the two forks. The one on the right curved up, the one on the left down. Otherwise they were identical. A random choice. Okay, thought Lindstrom. He hesitated for only a moment, and then, for no reason in particular, took the right-hand turn. He had only gone a few steps, the intersection was just behind him, when he felt a sudden flash of heat at his back. He whirled in time to see a solid pillar of fire engulf the crotch of the intersection, the spot where he had stood moments ago pondering his choice. T esson number one, he thought. ' No Hamlets allowed. When faced with a decision, make it, one way or the other. Don't temporize, or you'll be vaporized. The tunnel wound on for an indeterminable distance. Then it ended. Or, from another point of view, took an abrupt ninety-degree turn and became a bottomless, black, circular hole. Lindstrom shined his light into the hole. The beam petered out in the blackness. The hole seemed made of the same material as the tunnel. There was nothing to secure the rope to. Now what? thought Lindstrom grimly. And how much time do I have? He remembered the pillar of fire at the fork. He felt that weird, timeless, floating exhilaration that he only experienced at those times when he knew that death was near, and had the time to contemplate it. The hole was like the tunnel. He must go forward, or... Not like the tunnel. It was the tunnel. Or at least it should be. Fatalistically he dangled his feet into the hole, until his soles contacted its sides. Then he "stood up" -- or rather stood down. Quite suddenly, he was standing upright in what had been the hole. Now it was just more of the same tunnel. The thing actually did have a gravity of its own. Lesson number two, he thought. This place has its own rules. Learn them and obey them. It was highly probable that none of the soldiers had gotten this far. This was a place that demanded a cold mathematical intimacy with death. It was a place where the greatest risk of all was not to take risks. It was no place for a man under orders. Lindstrom felt calmer now; he had dared and he had won. The fear that he had left was not a paralyzer, it was a tonic, the satisfied fear that a matador feels when he realizes that he is facing a truly great bull. He wandered further along the tunnel, and with every passing minute, the calmness he felt he had earned diminished. This was not ordinary mortal danger -- Lindstrom had lived on speaking terms with death too long for mere danger to be extraordinary. It was something far worse. He was thinking too much as he walked, and this was a place that was not to be thought about, because it was a place without rules... which is one symptom of madness... There might be no rules, he thought, but there must be a purpose. Something had brought the dome to Earth, something intelligent, and intelligence implies purpose. But what if it really were just a giant mousetrap? But that was ridiculous. If they had wanted merely to kill him, they could have done it long ago. The dome was not only their creation, it was a universe in itself. Inside the dome, they could alter the very rules of existence. No, the rules were set up so that it was possible to survive. Fantastically difficult, but possible. That was all he had to cling to. The odds against survival might be astronomical, but survival was at least a possibility. I can die, he thought. Therefore I can live. In the distance, around a bend, the tunnel ended. It opened into a large domed chamber. The chamber was lit with the same pearly light as the tunnel, and it seemed to be made of the same substance. It was a smooth, featureless room. A dead end. It was empty. A voice that was not a voice nibbled at his mind. "You have passed the entrance examination," it "said". "Are you ready?" "Ready for what?" "Ready." The single word had many nuances. It seemed to Lindstrom that the voice in his mind was intimate with his entire being. Ready... Ready was the word that described his entire life. Ready seemed to imply acceptance and belligerance at the same time. Ready to accept possible death, and ready to fight to cling to life. Ready to wait, and ready to make instant decisions. "Yes," said the voice, "yes." "Why?" asked Lindstrom. "Why all this? Why..." "Your General Brewster was right," said the voice. "In a way, this is a spaceship. A starship. For your people, it can be the key to the universe. If you are ready. If you can change." "Change to what?" said Lindstrom. "Change," said the voice. "Not change to what. Adapt to that which is constantly changing. Live on a tightrope strung over nothingness. Your race is now reaching for the planets of your solar system. A tiny beginning. You have conquered your world by adapting it to your needs. But the universe will not be adapted. An infinity of deaths awaits you out there. Death you cannot now even conceive of." "Fve never been afraid of death," snapped Lindstrom. "You have always been afraid of death," said the voice. "It is your very fear which allows you to face it. But fear is not enough." "What else is there?" "You will learn. Here you will learn, or you will die." "Why? Why?" "Perhaps you are ready to begin to learn why," said the voice. "Behold the road to the stars." He was in a place that was terror. It was no place at all. It was everyplace. He was at the same time in a lightless blackness, and the mad dissociated core of a sun. It was a space with no dimensions. It was a space with an infinity of dimensions. He had no senses. He had senses that could not exist. He tasted color. He saw time raveled like a vast ball of twine about him. He heard the creation of the universe, and he smelt the acrid stench of its eventual death. Entropy ran forward, backward, in circles. He was bigger than the entire universe; it nestled in his navel. He stood on the non-existent surfaces of a trillion electrons. He was an insect, a star, a void, a galaxy. He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed... He burned and froze, exploded and imploded, his mind was boiled in alien thoughts unspeakably foul. He rolled in beauty so hideous that he died an infinity of deaths from pleasure... "Stop. Stop. Stop!" His cries echoed from the walls of existence and rebounded back to sting his flesh like a geometrically breeding nest of angry hornets... "Enough," said the voice. T T e was back in the featureless chamber. "W-what... what was it?" "That," said the voice, "is the real universe. All else, is illusion, a partial truth, the projection in three dimensions of a reality with an infinity of dimensions. That is the road to the stars." "You mean we have to learn to navigate in that? To remain sane long enough to find our way? It's impossible!" "No," said the voice. "That is the real universe. It is not enough to learn to travel through it. You must learn to live in it." "In it?" exclaimed Lindstrom. "In that madness?" "It is reality," said the voice. "The universe is not as tidy as you would like it to be. Time is not really a straight line, nor space three-dimensional. It is possible to be all places at once. It is possible to be all times at once. Your race's view of the universe is pathetically limited. Limited, perhaps to preserve your sanity." Lindstrom felt his mind perched on the edge of a fathomless abyss. He felt the bonds of reality crumbling about him. What, after all, was reality? Was it really this unspeakable horror, this mad, murderous confusion...? "Yes," said the voice, "you are looking down into an abyss. But you must do more, you must In the real universe, laws of nature are not constant. The rules themselves vary, according to rules for rules, which in turn vary according to still higher orders or rules..." "Stop. Stop. No one can cope with a thing like that. I don't want to know any more. I -- " "The choice is not yours," said the voice. "No human will be permitted to leave this place unchanged. This chamber is a dead end. There is no other passage out but the way you came, and that tunnel is sealed to you forever." "You mean you intend to keep me a prisoner here for the rest of my life?" "No," said the voicd. "There is no passage out, but there is a way out. Either you will learn it, or you will die. We begin." TTe was in a space with four dimensions. It hurt his mind. There was a fourth dimension that was somehow at right angle to all three normal directions... His body was... different. He was enclosed in a cubical box of some dull metal. Enclosed on all six sides. Slowly the walls of the box began to contract in on him He was trapped. He was surrounded on all six sides. But in this space, a cube did not have six sides, it had thirtysix. He did a thing that strained his mind near breaking. He moved at right angles to all six faces of the contracting cube, simultaneously. He was out. And he was a point in a space with no dimensions. He was every point in the space, since all points coincided. He was trapped in a space with no dimensions. There could be no motion... But time existed, and in this place time had three dimensions. The special point that was Lindstrom wriggled in three temporal dimensions, and became a temporal solid, and thus... He was back in "normal" space-time. And was whisked into a starfilled blackness... But the blazing suns were also the nuclei of the atoms of his body, corresponding, one for one, with each other, macrocosm and microcosm. He did a thing with his mind for which there are no words, and he was back once more in the featureless chamber... And was transported to even stranger othernesses... An infinity of places, dimensions and othernesses for which there are not even the ghosts of concepts. He felt a strangeness in his mind, a complexity beyond complexity, a revelation of new and unexpected textures in his psyche. Time was flux, space was flux, eternity was a variable. There came a time when he stood, naked, alone and homesick, on the surface of some faroff planet, looking up at a small star he knew was Sol. He remembered the spaces he had seen -- spaces of no dimensions, an infinity of dimensions, spaces that were not spaces, but times. There was a way back to Earth. He did something with his mind, and the surface of the planet vanished like mist. His body floated in total blackness. He felt it expand and contract rhythmically, from the size of an electron to the size of the universe... He caught it in a phase where each of its atoms corresponded to a star in the Galaxy. Then he let his entire mass slide down the hill of space-time into one of the sun-atoms, the one called "Sol", to one of its electrons called "Earth." He was back in the chamber. And he knew the way out. eneral Brewster stood outside his tent, staring at the silver dome, and wondering whether it was time to try something else. "Lindstrom's been in there two days," he said to a nervous-looking colonel. "I think we can assume that whatever happened to the others happened to him." "What now, sir?" "I don't know... I just don't know. I suppose we could try to blow the thing open, but -- " A man suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He was standing just outside the dome. He was a wiry man, not short, not tall... "What -- it's Lindstrom." The being that had been Bert Lindstrom began to walk slowly toward the tent. It had two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose, a mouth. It was, in fact, the perfect image of the man who had entered the dome. But when Lindstrom was close enough for Brewster to see into his eyes, the general was dreadfully sure that the creature facing him was something other than human. Among the wild Reguleans we trade in beer and hides for sacks of mMomimotl leaves and carcasses of brides. They love 'em and they leave 'em, once affection's been displayed, to the everloving merchants of the Interstellar Trade. Chorus: Don't throw that bride away, friends; don't turn that carcass loose. What's only junk on Regulus is gold on Betelguese. We potter out to Betelguese with crates of brides and leaves, and what the Betelgueseans do with both no one believes. They weep, though, while they're doin' it, great bottles full of tears, which we stow in the afterhold between the bales of ears. Chorus: Don't waste your weeps on Betelguese, don't let your teardrops fade. Those teardrops are the life-blood, friends, of Interstellar Trade.  Ca. # C E.  On Arcturus eleven they are connoisseurs of wine and think the bottled Betel-juice a vintage rare and fine. They buy the bales of Betel ears for making mating hats, and, in exchange, we take aboard Arcturan worms and bats. Chorus: Don't step on that Arcturan worm, for once it's been fileted it's worth its weight in platinum to Interstellar Trade. On Terra, sauce of worm filet's an epicurean dish with aphrodisiac side-effects beyond one's fondest wish, the only antidote to which (least Terrans feel dismayed) is serum of Arcturan bat from Interstellar Trade. Chorus: Fill up the holds with hides, my boys, you've spent what you were paid. I wonder what's on Scorpii for Interstellar Tradel for F or the last sixty years zoologists and many other people who love wildlife have been worrying about a problem that does not even occur to a real estate dealer or the manager of the Friendly Neighborhood Household Finance office. It is the fact that our earth is growing poorer by a species of animal life every decade or so. And during the last twenty years this worry has taken a sharp turn upward for two reasons : the general population explosion and the fact that there are many new and recently independent nations in South East Asia and in Africa. I am, on principle, quite pleased about the fact that these nations are now independent I am even all of their governments know how sad it would be if the wildlife of their areas disappeared. Unfortunately they don't do much about it British and German scientists who flew to Africa for private inspections have stated with both anger and concern that things are not as pretty by far as the government handouts would have it. Sure, there are wildlife preserves. Often they actually have boundary markers. But most of them are not policed and poachers, even if caught, are never prosecuted. Trying to convince the people concerned sounds like a hopeless task; they simply do not understand the need for conservation. When told that without conservation the zebras and gnus and antelopes will be gone one day, they answer that cattle taste better. Fortunately the larger forms of the African fauna are still numerous enough so that they can be saved. We have seen in the past what can be done even at a late hour -- the American bison is an impressive example of this. At the time the thirteen colonies declared their idependence there were an estimated sixty ican continent. After the railroads had been built across the continent -- and in spite of a few protective laws passed by states like Kansas and Colorado -- the bison were virtually hunted out day of the New York Zoological Park wrote the Smithsonian Report for # and entitled it "The Extermination of the American Bison", predicting that the species would be extinct within less than two decades. Since a census taken by Hornaday in # showed that there were only #I bison still living (two-thirds of them in Canada) his prediction would probably have come true if nothing had been done. But Hornaday, in #, founded the American Bison Society which gained the support of Theodore Roosevelt. Bison sanctuaries were founded, stocked and protected and forty-five years later the number of bison had grown to more than #. It is even necessary now to slaughter surplus animals from time to time to keep the herds from deteriorating. Fig. #. The "Tasmanian Wolf". Does If Still Exist?  nother pleasing example is the story of a large and ungainly deer called Milu or Pere David's Deer, for its "discoverer" was the French missionary Pere Armand David who went to China in #. I put the word "discoverer" in quotation marks because Father David did not discover the deer in the usual manner, that is in the open, as he did the Giant Panda. The deer existed only in one place, the emperor's private hunting park. Father David, by climbing the wall, verified the existence of a species of deer unknown to science and then arranged for a few specimen ts to be shipped to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. After the wall of bureaucratic secrecy had been breached the embassies of other countries became active. The Zoological Garden in Berlin obtained a specimen via a diplomatic exchange of some kind and the Duke of Bedford bought several. This purchase saved the Milu. In # there was a flood of the Hun Ho river that toppled the wall of the Imperial Park in several places. The starving peasants, made homeless by the same flood, killed and ate every animal in sight, including all the Milus. The speciments in the various zoological parks died of old age one by one and only the small herd at IjVobum Abbey on the estates of Duke of Bedford increased. In spite of a setback during the first World War the herd did well. Now there are close to three hundred Milus in existence, at Woburn and in many zoological gardens. There are a few more examples of this kind. Some thirty years ago the koalas of Queensland were believed to be near extinction. They are numerous again now, due to strict measures. And in Europe the efforts of a society patterned after the American Bison Society seem to be successful in saving the European cousin of the bison, the wisent. There were only about fifty animals left at the end of the second World War. By now the number is more than, a hundred. ' These examples have proved that even a late action can be quite successful. The societies which are now concerned with the survival of the Whooping Crane and the California Condor can take heart. But for a few other species the day of extinction is near. Zoologists have drawn up a list of about fifteen species which are very much endangered by two facts: the number of specimens is very small, and their geographical range is also very small. Their extinction could be the result of a single large forest fire, an unusually severe winter or the inability to escape newly introduced predators. This list has been referred to as "tomorrow's fossils". While it contains a few names where this term seems to be exaggerated -- for example the wisent, which is under the firm protection of its own watchdog society -- it also contains two names of species which may no longer exist. If survivors of these species are still in existence somewhere they are the rarest animals on earth. T heir scientific names are Thylacinus cynocephalus and Solenodon cubanus, inhabitants, or former inhabitants, of Tasmania and of Cuba respectively. Thylacinus was named by the English zoologist Harris who displayed a fine knowledge of classical Greek in the process. The generic name Thylacinus was derived from the word thylax meaning "pouch" and kiifeter which means "disturber": While the specific name cynocephalus comes from kyon ("dog") and kephale ("head"). The English version of the scientific name would therefore be: the dogheaded pouched disturber (of livestock). The actual English name is Tasmanian Wolf because of the wolf-like head, or sometimes Tasmanian Tiger, because of the tiger-striped hindquarters. In size a fully grown male could compete with a police dog. The females were much smaller. The Tasmanian Wolf, therefore, was the largest meat-eating marsupial. As long as the number of settlers was small and the number of "wolves" was large it was very decidedly a nuisance. It is not surprising that the settlers shot them whenever they saw one. But while wolf-like in appearance, the habits of Thylacinus were quite different. It seems to have hunted alone and was not particularly swift. Instead of overtaking its prey the Tasmanian Wolf wore it out by relentless pursuit. Then, when the prey finally collapsed, Thylacinus just ate as much as it wanted, leaving the remains to the other predatory marsupial of Tasmania, the smaller Tasmanian Devil. One zoologist, about eighty years ago, claimed that small groups of Tasmanian Devils trailed a hunting Tasmanian Wolf, knowing from experience that a free meal would be forthcoming sooner or later. The Tasmanian Devil is now rare, too, but does seem to be on the verge of extinction. It may be saved because it makes a friendly pet when captured young enough to be trained. The last thirty years of the history of the Tasmanian Wolf consist mainly of rumors. It is definite that a settler shot one in #. At that time another specimen was alive in the zoological park at Hobart, Tasmania's largest city. When the zoo speciment died in # the officials issued a call for a replacement, apparently confident that they would get one soon. They never did. But in # one was shot and photographed at Mawbanna on Tasmania's northwest coast. In #, a pilot, flying a helicopter along the island's west coast, saw a striped animal from the air which could have been a Tasmanian Wolf. But a search on the ground which was started almost immediately did not find it. 'T'he latest case dates from the year #. A fisherman nightfishing for bait at Sandy Cape (also in the northwest of the island) ran into an animal in the dark, and in the ensuing fight bashed its skull in. In the morning he realized that he had probably killed a "tiger", as he called it. He must have done some soulsearching in the light of the early morning. He knew of a fine of on the other hand he knew that any reliable report on this animal was of scientific value. So he took hair and blood samples and sent them to the university where they were tentatively identified as having come from a "tiger". Presumably the samples were too small to make the identification positive. And that's the story now. Nobody can say that the Tasmanian Wolf is extinct, and noFig. #. The Cuban Solenodon Probably exterminated by mongooses. body can insist that it is still alive. If it is, it is one of the rarest animals on earth. A #I this applies to the Cuban solenodon too, with the complication that it is much harder to get any information at all. But before I go into the short and flimsy story of the Cuban solenodon a little backtracking is necessary. In # the Russian Academy in St. Petersburg received a specimen of a new animal from Haiti. It looked somewhat like a shrew but was the size of a very large rat. It was turned over to the Curator of Mammals, a German named Brandt, who described it and who also had to invent a scientific name. Since it was generally a puzzling animal he called it Solenodon paradoxus. (Solenodon means "grooved teeth".) Naturally American scientists were interested, but inquiries made near the latter part of the nineteenth century brought the reply that no such animal was known. If there had been one like it, it was extinct. One of the men who received such a reply was Prof. Addison Emery Verrill of Yale University; and his son, Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, who explored the West Indies early in this century, succeeded in re-discovering Solenodon paradoxus in Santo Domingo in #. He obtained a female which, on the day after capture, gave birth to three naked young and died immediately afterward. The animal must have been very rare. It is now extinct. The Cuban solenodon was discovered in #I when a German traveler by the name of Gundlach shot one and sent it to the Natural History Museum in Berlin for identification. It was found to be a close relative of the species described by Brandt and though it lived on Hispaniola as well as on Cuba the scientific name became Solenodon cubanus. In shape it looked very much like a shrew. Its color was a typical camouflage color of the forest floor, a yellowish brown which was overlaid on the back by fairly long blackish guide hairs. The tail was naked. The overall length was about # inches with the tail accounting for about # inches of the total length. Several zoologists went to Cuba for the main purpose of studying solenodon. They found that it was nocturnal and fond of going into shallow water. It would eat anything, provided it was meat; when hunting on its own it ate beetles, grubs and kill young chickens, which it tore apart with the long claws of its front feet. It had two cries. One of them was likened to the grunting of a piglet, while the other was shrill, like that of a carnivorous bird. Every once in a while -- reasons unknown -- it would secrete an oily reddish liquid with an unpleasant smell. T) y about # zoologists knew that the nearest living relatives of the two solenodons were the Giant Water Shrew ( Potam ogale velox ) of Africa and the hedgehog-like Tenrec of Madagascar. This was not as surprising as it may look at first glance. Solenodon and its relatives belonged to a group of ancient mammals which go under the general designation of insectivores. The name is misleading in that they do not live on insects only-; the African Potamogale is on a diet of fish and freshwater crabs, as are some of the smaller shrews that also are classed with the insectivores. In any event this is an ancient group of worldwide distribution. It is therefore not too much out of the ordinary that fairly close relatives should exist in widely separated parts of the globe. Since almost all of the insectivores are of nocturnal habits and most of them are small they are overlooked by the average person, even one living in the country. Even though the Cuban solenodon might have stolen a young chicken here and there it had never been actively pursued by the Cuban peasantsThey had a much bigger worry. Rats had come ashore from ships and had multiplied prodigiously. Getting rid of rats, was, for a time, the main problem. Officials of the various island republics asked for expert advice: was there an animal which liked to hunt and to kill rats, preferably an animal that did not bother people? The experts said that there was just such an animal which also likes to hunt snakes, the Burmese mongoose. Beginning around # mongooses were imported to Jamaica, to Cuba, to Hispaniola and everywhere else where rats caused damage. At first it looked like a huge success. Within three years the loss because of rat-spoiled sugar cane was halved on Jamaica. Cuba had similar results. Everybody was pleased that the mongooses liked the climate and multiplied rapidly. But every mongoose wanted to eat and the rats had become comparatively rare by the time the mongooses were numerous. So they attacked and ate snakes, and lizards and other wildlife -- including solerodon. Officials of the U. S. Wildlife Commission watched, and saw to it that a law was passed prohibiting the import of live mongooses into the U.S.A. The South American countries followed suit and the Central American countries did the same. Even the various island governments passed such laws -- a futile gesture because they already had the "beneficial" mongoose on their islands in large numbersThe mongoose is the reason why Solenodon cubanus is likely to be extinct by now. I f I fail to sound positive one way or another it is by no means accidental, for amazing rediscoveries have taken place. In spite of the fact that more than fifty species have become extinct during the last one and a half centuries, zoological literature is full of notes and reports saying that such and such an animal, believed extinct, has been four, again. When I was a boy of about ten, there was a glass-covered case in the Natural History Museum in Berlin, showing a display of a number of fairly large pale-colored and beautiful butterflies. A black-bordered card stated that this butterfly -- its name is Apollo -- was unfortunately extinct. When I was about twenty-five, the display case was still there but the card had been removed; in the meantime Apollo had been found alive and in large numbers in an area only about # miles to the east of the area in which it had been exterminated by a series of severe winters. In Australia they had a card marked with a skull -- meaning extinct -- in the Melbourne museum on a case displaying Leadbeater's Opossum ( Gymnobelid eus leadbeateri ) with the additional information that only five specimens of it had ever been found. In #I the card had to be re-written, for a specimen of Leadbeater's Opossum, quite alive and in good health, was caught in the mountains only # miles from Melbourne. In New Zealand they were even sadder about an extinct large and flightless brightly colored bird which went under the native name of Takahe as well as under the scientific name of Notornis. Once it had ranged over both islands, and after it had become extinct on the North Island it had been captured repeatedly on the South Island, the last one in August #. Only four specimens had been captured. The skins of three of them were in museums in Europe; New Zealand held on to the last one. Of course the cards on the cases were either blackbordered or bore skulls, depending on local scientific custom. By # it was evident that the Takahe was extinct, since repeated searches had failed to find one. But in # a live Takahe was seen by an expedition looking for it because of footprints that had been found. One of the members of the expedition threw a net -- capturing two Takahes. It is now known that there are two colonies of the birds in two adjacent areas to the west of Lake Te Anau. Of course the Takahe is a very rare bird, just as Leadbeater's Opossum is a rare marsupialBut they are not extinct. The story of the Cahow bird of Bermuda is quite similar. It was thought to be extinct and occasional reports were put down as confusions with a similar looking bird that goes under the name of Audubon's Lesser Shearwater. Most of the reports probably were confusions, but some may have been correct, because in January #I (after a dead bird which had killed itself flying into a "lighthouse had been fig. #. Steller's Sea Cow Only three drawings of the animal exist, of which this one is the best. It was originally drawn by Sven Plenisner, a member of Bering's expeditionidentified as a Cahow) it was discovered alive. Again : it is very rare, but it isn't extinct.  nd there is now good reason to believe that we have one more case of an animal believed to be extinct but actually still existing in very small numbers. The case has been reported in the August # issue of the Russian journal Priroda ("Nature"), the official journal of the Academy of Science of the and the crew of the Russian whaling ship Buran saw a group of large marine mammals in shallow water off Cape Navarin to the northeast of Kamtchatka. The bottom of this area is covered by a dense growth of all kinds of marine plants. The six animals were not whales and they were not seals. Their length was between # and # feet, the skin was dark in color and they had a pendulous upper lip hanging across the front end of the lower jaw. Every once in a while they dived, possibly browsing on the vegetation. Considering the place where these marine mammals were seen and the description of their appearance they could only be surviving specimens of Steller's Sea Cow, known to zoologists as Rhytina stelleri. The animal was originally discovered during the winter from #I to # when the survivors of Vitus Bering's expedition to Alaska were shipwrecked on the island where Bering died and which bears his name. The naturalist of the expedition, Geog Wilhelm Steller, recognized it as an enormously large relative of the manatee and the dugong. They were up to # feet in length and lived in the shallow water around the island, forming distinctive small herds. Steller said that they were numerous around the island all year round, but that he had never seen one before anywhere else. About # A. ENordenskiold collected all the material about the animal that could be found in Russian archives. In # the vessel of one Ivan Krassilnikov was provisioned with the flesh and hides of the artic sea cow. and in # somebody named Korovin did the same. But in # Dimitri Bragin, who had been instructed to keep a journal on animal life in these waters, failed to see one. Other negative reports followed. Therefore Brandt in St. Petersburg (the one who named solenodon) concluded that the animal had been exterminated around #. This was a mistake. Reports on sea cow hunts made in # and # were found later, and the Russian archives contained a statement about a sighting of a sea cow during the year #. Nordenskiold, after reading all the reports, decided that the arctic sea cow had not been exterminated in #, but driven away from the island. But he concluded that they then became extinct anyway because their new habitat did not offer them favorable conditions. After the report from the Buran it seems that Nordenskiold was both right and wrong. They were not exterminated at Bering Island, but dispersed. However, they found new habitats which permitted them to She was doomed as a sacrifice to the god her people feared. A great unrest was among the people, for the time of decision was again at hand. The Elders voted upon the candidates and the sacrifice was affirmed over the objections of Ryllik, the oldest. "It is wrong to capitulate thus," he argued. But they did not answer him, and the young virgin was taken to the grotto of smokes and fed the leaves of drowsiness. Ryllik watched with disapproval. "It should not be so," he stated. "It is wrong." "It has always been so," said the others, "in the spring of the year, and in the fall. It has always been so." And they cast worried glances down the trail to where the sun was pouring morning upon the world. The god was already travelling through the great-leafed forest. "Let us go now," they said. "Did you ever think of staying? Of watching to see what the monster god does?" asked Ryllik bitterly. "Enough of your blasphemies! Come along!" Ryllik followed them. "We grow fewer every year," ' n said. "One day we shall no longer have any sacrifices left to offer." "Then that day we die," said the others. "So why prolong it?" he asked. "Let us fight them -- now, before we are no more!" But the others shook their heads, a summary of that resignation Ryllik had watched grow as the centuries passed. They all respected Ryllik's age, but they did not approve of his thoughts. They cast one last look back, just as the sun caught the clanking god upon his gilt-caparisoned nount, his death-lance slung at his side. Within the place where the smokes were bom the maiden thrashed her tail from side to side, rolling wild eyes beneath her youthful browplates. She sensed the divine presence and began to bellow. They turned away and lumbered across the plains. As they neared the forest Ryllik paused and raised a scaley forelimb, groping after a thought. Finally, he spoke: "I seem to have memory," said he, "of a time when things by VTow that the revolution was  a success the little Chacone and I were staying at the Stone Inn. As you might suspect from the name, there is not a piece of rock in the whole building. Nevertheless, it is the best address on my home island. I sat at a window of my parlor and watched the streetlamps gutter in oily smoke. The first gray of dawn pearled the mists between the lights. With day approaching, you could hear an occasional patter of feet on the worn, plank streets. The voices of our guards came more frequently from far and near. "Halt, for inspection!" I felt a sigh heave my chest. The rebel leader and I had not commanded our forces very anticipated. The defenders of the false king, together with our own dead, had been piled in the streets, and in the courtyard of the Tower, and up all the stairs of the Tower. Every burial pool on the island had been crowded with mourners for two days now. From where I sat listening to the first stirring of the frightened city, I could see the dim lights in the shabby Tower of my home island. Our kings have never lived higher than six levels above the sea. Even the poor little island of Tome has a higher Tower. Tonight, all of the rooms of our Tower were lighted as a protection for the young prince whom we had taken from his prison and placed in the tower the night before last. We had him under the protection of the first overlord and those soldiers from the old army who had joined the revolution. The first overlord was now preparing the Tower for the ceremony at noon, today, in which the prince would be made king. Until that ceremony there was danger everywhere. nphe people were happy about the death of the false king and about the placing of the young prince in the Tower. It was my own plans they were against. They wanted no part of my scheme to bind two other small, floating islands to our island and create one large, rich island. I had not lived on my home island since childhood and I was, to my rude people, a fancy foreigner with educated ideas. Across the gray fog, appeared the first ochre streams of day. Sha'tule, our yellow sun, would rise shortly. About an hour later his bluish twin, Sha'cham, would come up. Then the fog would melt. There was a gentle knock at the door between our apartments and the little Chacone entered. She was dressed in mourning for the "rebel dead." Her black sheath did little to obscure her figure, and it set off her beautiful face dramatically. She was wearing a royal funeral tiara of the black diamonds that are mined by divers in the shallow Sea of Mourning. This was her right, since the beautiful women of Chacone are made true queens before they leave the island. From wherever in the world their masters may live, they participate by messenger in the highest affairs of Chacone. After all, the whole island is supported by these rare women. "She hesitated at the door to make sure she was not intruding. "I heard you moving about over an hour ago." "I am just waiting for noon. Nothing is safe until noon." Up the street I thought I glimpsed a furtive scuffle. She was approaching me and I raised a hand. "Did you hear a cry?" She stopped, but she did not glance out into the fog. "I heard nothing." "I thought I heard a cry." Now she came directly to me. She took my hands and raised them until I followed with my body to stand over her. S he said, "Darling, you are dehave killed because you had to. Now, in a few hours, your people will have a good king." 'T killed because I want to bind three poor little islands into one rich, big island." I spoke with conscious melodrama. "The men who died will never share that wealth. The men who live do not want it." I kissed her and went on. "To put things clearly, the so-called 'false' king is 'false' only because he is dead. He got that way because he refused to sign the treaty I want with the islands of Tome and Parsos. "He was a better administrator than this prince will be. Don't forget, I taught this prince while he attended the University of Hahn. I can tell you, he is something of a lout. But he will sign the treaty as I wish it, and so, he is a 'true' king, in my estimation." She put her golden arms about my shoulders and kissed my mouth. Since she had been trained from childhood in every nuance of love, and since she loved me deeply, it was a kind of kiss that would have made a common man throw sticks at his bride. Her lips broke with a little laugh and she drew back. "Darling, I must be seen in my funeral finery. Won't you take me down to the dining room?" Without offense she had interjected a little light-heartedness. Since arriving on my island a few weeks ago we had a joke about her. In their natural habitat -- the great cities on the rich islands of the world -- the Chacone women display no vanity. For thousands of years die Chaconese have lived in ritual polyandry, breeding and perfecting these beautiful creatures for export. These women are so accomplished in manners and so talented in the arts that it usually does not occur to an ordinary woman to envy them. Still, there are always a few who do, and on many islands the native word for female vanity has been replaced by a phrase that means, "trying to act like a Chacone". "fTThHe we had lived on the ' ' rich island of Hahn, she had been simply, the most beautiful Chacone anyone had even seen. Here on this naive little island where none of the last three kings had been able to afford a Chacone, she was the most beautiful human anyone had ever seen. The adulation had shocked her at first. Then she had begun to revel in it because, once my people accept a stranger, it is all the way to the heart. So we had this joke -- that she was a Chacone trying to act like a vain wife. With her little parody, she had made me face the fact that my "guilt" essary as her 'Vanity". For the first time since we had got the prince into the first overlord's protection and the fighting had ceased, I began to get a grip on my depression. "My marvelous little Chacone!" I took her sweet face in my hands and kissed her again. I debated about arming myself to go down to breakfast. Then I put on the Great Blade of Hahn and tucked my steel knife into my sash. As I reached to open the door to the hallway, to let the Chacone pass through, there was a knock on it. I pressed her back and drew the knife and opened the door a crack. It was the big rebel leader. We grasped forearms affectionately, and he bowed with respect to the Chacone. As we went down the hall toward the stairs he fell into step beside me. "There are things I do not like." "For example?" "The Tower is locked." "The Tower is always locked on the day a king is made." "Nevertheless, there are things I do not like. I am going to have a close look at everything." T'Vownstairs he bowed again to the Chacone. To me he said, "I will be back before Sha'cham rises." He had succeeded in stirring some unease in me. When the Chacone and I entered the dining room, I let the attendant take my cloak and feathered hat, but I kept my Great Blade and my knife. We were no more than seated at our table when I caught a flash erf evidence that I was right to be alert. A man at a table against the wall made a mistake. He was having flashed gull eggs for breakfast. Instead of driving his sipping tube through the shell of the egg he was holding, he punched a delicate hole in it with his thumb nail. He froze, and I swept my eyes to the face of the Chacone before he could inspect the dining room. The islands held by sea bandits have never adopted the sipping tube which is proper everywhere else. I smiled at the Chacone and then made a disinterested survey of the room. He was looking directly at me. He had picked me as the only guest who might have noticed that a spy from the sea bandits had just broken an egg. On any island where there is political strife, and even on islands where these clever men can smell it coming, there are spies for the sea bandits. When these spies report that an island is sufficiently divided and weakened, the bandits come in for brief, bloody raids. I decided that as long as this man was worried about the manner in which he ate his eggs, we were safe from such a raid. Now that we knew him, he could be watched and it would be time enough to worry if he disappeared. "Waiter." He came around the table from where he had been watching the boys put saucers of fruit before us and fill our glasses with spiced rainwater. "Yes, Master?" "What is that shouting out in the street?" "Both of the local printers have sheets out this morning that tell of the revolution. Shall I send one of the children?" "Please do." T Te beckoned an urchin of less than six years from the comer of the room and sent him for the papers. "Is that all before I serve your first course. Master?" "No. Look me in the eye." This waiter had been very loyal to the revolution. He stood still and looked me in the eye. "The man against that wall is a spy for the bandits." "Ahhhh ! Really?" He was staring hard into my eyes trying to remember the guests in the direction I had glanced. "Ahhhh! In the white blouse with lace?" I had only to nod once. "Really! I would never have guessed." "Have him watched constantly." "Of course." "And waiter." "Yes, Master?" "Sha'tule is up. Many of the guests here, who are trying to stare at my lady are looking directly into the panes of this window. Why don't we draw the curtain for their benefit." A smile passed his lips. "How gracious of you, Master." She gasped, "Oh!", and with a little laugh, she popped a berry into her mouth. Just before the waiter drew the curtains, I saw dark shadows of soldiers race along the translucent panes on some emergency. I grinned at her. "I must say, you are being seen." She dropped her delighted eyes in embarrassment. "Darling, please! It was only a silly joke." The child returned with both papers. I looked into the pale, pinched face that you see so often in these children of my home island, and I overtipped him lavishly. He hardly understood what I had given him. Instead of returning to his post in the corner of the room, he raced from the inn for home and mother. The Chacone was shaking her head. "You shouldn't do that, darling. He may be accused of stealing." I shook my head in turn. "I don't know why I do it to the little beggers." XT either of us mentioned that  I had a son of that age whom I had never seen. She simply reached out and covered the back of my hand with hers and asked, "May I have a paper, dear?" One of the printers was still using wooden type, but the other had acquired the metal type that is now molded on the island of Hahn. I gave her the one printed with metal. We had been served hot bitter-berry tea, and we both sipped while we read. Abruptly, she started exclaiming in whispers. "Darling, it tells all about you here. It says that you are not just a Master of The Seven Arts, but the most learned and talented man in the world. It says that your books and scrolls are treasured by seven kings and countless lords. It says that your paintings in oil and your sculptures and your designs for the great Towers of the world ft are... "Does it say anything about my flying machine?" She glanced up and down the page. "No, I don't see anything about that." "I didn't think you would. But if we had lost the revolution you would be reading a feature story about it." " Did you have a flying machine?" "No, I had a machine that didn't fly." My paper, printed from the larger wooden type was quite thick and I began hunting with excited annoyance for some mention of my great plan to bind together my home isle and the islands of Tome and Parsos. I could find no mention of it. "Oh, darling, it tells about me! Listen! 'For his work in developing the steel of the Great Blade of Hahn, the Master was given a beauteous Chacone by the king of Hahn. It is said that the king paid for her the highest price ever paid to the Chaconese.' "Oh, darling, listen to this! 'Our whole citizenry has been grateful these past weeks for her gracious -- ' " "My dear. Calm yourself!" " -- 'for her gracious presence... her wit... her taste and artistry... her...!' " S he was becoming quite breathless. I couldn't help laughing. Her breathing stopped and she turned to me with the glazed stare of a completely ravished woman. "What was funny, darling?" "I'll tell you what let's do. Give me that paper, now. Then, after breakfast, we'll go upstairs and snuggle into bed and read to each other about ourselves. Won't that be fun?" She handed me the paper obediently. "Don't be silly." While she sat in her daze, automatically rebathing in adulation, I searched the metal print for any mention of my plan to bind together the three little islands. There was nothing. Slowly, I lowered the paper to the table. It was an ominous sign. They were dead against it. In the moment of our triumph they did not dare mention it. But when the time came they would try to swing the popular dislike of my plan to influence the new king against it. I heard my teeth gritting together and I found that I was trembling with anticipatory rage. I had not led hundreds to dreds only to let two smudgefingered printers stand in my way. I saw that the spy for the sea bandits was leaving. Then he hesitated, staring at the doorway. II nnhe rebel leader was standing in the entrance. There was an air of urgency about him. The spy would have given anything if he had not already risen and headed for the entrance, but it was too late now, and he passed oh out with only a glance at the rebel. When the big man reached our table, I saw what the spy had seen. The blunt face was chalked with shock, the pupils dilated, the breathing shallow and fast. I could feel the blood draining from my own face. My whole body was straining; first to swell into a giant of rage, then to shrivel to a beetle and scuttle for the wall. He sat down, whispering hoarsely. "It is all lost. We have been tricked. The first overlord has locked the prince in the Tower dungeon. He commands the remnants of the old army against us. They have just taken the warehouse we were using as a garrison and killed over a hundred men." I started to rise. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down. "Listen to me. We are safe as long as we don't leave the hotel. Even if I'm captured I do not think the first overlord will have me killed. It is you and your plan he wants to stop. We must get you off the island." He continued with heavy breathing, "Now, listen. The bamboo forests are still in fog. I am preparing a guarded way for us through the alleys to the edge of the city. I am also preparing a fast ship for you and your lady. If we are cut off from that, I am having a raft prepared for you." I stared at him. "Rebel, we are surrounded by desert seas right now. I can't take a raft into those deserts." "Master, I believe you can do anything. I only say that you cannot always do everything at once. If we are reduced to the raft, your lady will have to remain." The little Chacone was clutching and unclutching my hand in hers. I became aware that the dining room had become electrified with terror and was emptying. We three had become a focal point where the sudden threat of death hummed in the ears of those present like a stricken wasp. The waiter hurried up to us. "Master, I have heard about the treachery. But listen, there is more. The spy for the bandits has disappeared. In days, the sea about here will be swarming with them. If you were thinking of escaping with your lady... I beg you, don't." Qhe was shaking her head  piteously with tears glistening on her cheeks. "Please don't leave me. I do not fear any of these things. Please take me with you." The rebel and I were staring at each other across the horrible thought of capture by sea bandits. I turned dazedly to the Chacone and shook my head. She buried her face and wept. The waiter declared, "Master, no harm will come to her. We will take good care of her." Then he excused himself and hurried away. The rebel rose. "I will make one last check of the escape route while you say farewell to your lady." He left the dining room by way of the kitchens. I stood up, and drew the Chacone up to me. Her lips moved warmly and her tears were hot on my face. Undoubtedly, for the last time, I was holding the world's most fabulous prize in my arms. Yet death, buzzing insistantly in my ears reminded me that I had been condemned, long ago, to love another. The woman I loved was beautiful, but not this beautiful; talented, but not this talented; royal, but not his regal. She was the mother of my son, and perhaps I was condemned to love her simply because I could not have her. I kissed the dear little Chacone over and over and promised her that I would return. Then I found that I was promising to return with soldiers and retake the Tower. So there it was in the open... enough. It had only been in vain. Whether or not the sea bandits came I would come again, to kill again for my plan to bind together the three islands. Tphe rebel and I had no difficulty reaching the edge of the city. We were beckoned from point to point by our waiting comrades. Trouble began immediately when we entered the forests of bamboo. A rebel came racing toward us from ochre banners of fog. "They have captured the boat and the three men guarding it. Take this side path to the raft. Hurry, they are right behind me. He gestured wildly and fell at our feet with a javelin in his back. We raced into the forest where the light of Sha'tule beat at the fog with a golden hammer. Shrieks and moans from a thousand lost souls burst from the path ahead of us. I stopped dead in the path and the big rebel crashed into me. We both simultaneously recognized the din as the pipes and strings of funeral music. The scale in which my people play their harsh instruments is fortunately unknown on other islands. The rebel leader was pressing me forward. "Move in and mingle with the mourners. They will be hurrying the funeral to avoid the Sun Gods. They will not notice." Masked by the racket and concentration of the ceremony, we went in among the mourners who encircled the pool. Smoking torches still fluttered along the edge of the golden bowl of light above the pool... light that was now fretted with the blue of Sha'cham. A red-shrouded corpse was poised over the water on his bamboo slide. The bural stone to which his feet were bound was a rich one, fully a hand thick, and as big around as a man could encircle with his arms. The wailing of the instruments ceased, and now the big rebel, his rock-like face unmoved, worked to still his deep breathing. On all sides, presently, I could hear the soldiers moving quietly. They inspected the mourners from a pious distance and they passed right by us. The Shaman mounted his stand at the head of the reclining corpse. After a long time in which little accidental sounds ceased, he started reading from his sacred scroll. "All things that live on land all the animals of the islands and the cities of men on the islands, float at the surface of the sea where there is storm and sinking and terror." Suddenly the widow, who stood with her friends beside the Shaman's place, lifted her arms to the thinning fog and shrieked a curse. With a bound of my heart, I recognized that it was me at whom she hurled this hatred. The rebel turned to me, and he could not help grinning. There was a little commotion near the widow and the rudely grinning rebel used the moment to whisper, "Master, they are praising you." M ow it made my throat ache ' to see this corpse. He had been Captain of the Guard at the Tower, and last to stand before the door to the apartments of the false king. I had to run the brave man through. The Shaman went on with his reading. "On the currents of the worldwide sea, our islands drift to the north and they drift to the south. They bring us to the depredations of the Ice Islanders. Our islands drift into the boiling waters of steam and pumicine and into the chill waters of ice and snow. "All these terrors are controlled by the evil eyes of the stars which control all things at the surface of the sea." This belief is the reason funerals are held at dawn or sunset. They want the dead to go to the sea floor without being seen by the evil stars or wrathful Sun Gods. The Shaman continued. "But the eyes of the stars do not reach to the Floor of the Sea. Down there, where decay cannot occur, far from the storm and terror of living, there go all the dead... Behind me a soldier coughed nervously, and from the other side of the pool, another also coughed. The rebel smiled sympathetically. The Shaman had reached that part of sacred belief that is most distressing to a man of action, and presently I could hear the soldiers begin moving away. In the thinking of the pious, the Floor of the Sea is a great, calm plain on which, in static promenade, the buried dead stand about in the blue shrouds of women and the red shrouds of men, their feet bound to their burial stones, contemplating for the eternity the asqueous silence. Unable to bear such a prospect, the sailor has invented the lascivious Sea Women, and the soldier has named our twin suns Sha'tule and Shal'cham... "commander of the dead that arise as mists," and "commander of the dead that arise as storms". 'TT'he drums about the burial pool began to murmur and the slide bearing the corpse was slowly tilted. I thought the brave captain would never let go of his slide. Then, as the drums reached a deafening roar, it was as though he remembered some gleeful prospect, so abruptly did he shoot into the black water. My throat ached, but I found there were no words to say to him. To make sure we would lose the soldiers, the rebel and I returned toward the city for a way with the mourners. We left them where a narrow path headed back toward the island's edge. We raced down this still protected from any distant view by the thinning fog. The ground grew softer and now, only a few feet beneath us, was the sucking of the sea. The rebel motioned to me and stopped. He studied things through the fog a bit and then whispered. "They are guarding the paths ahead. If we don't slip through them, run for the amphibial." I whispered back. "Listen, if we are separated, tell our people I have gone to Thule for soldiers." He stared at me in disbelief. "I thought the king of Thule had condemned you to the plank?" "He will have forgiven me." He continued to stare at me and shook his head. "Master, you have lost your mind to go back there." Behind me a man shouted very loudly, "Aaaaeeee, here!" Ill T T e was hurling a bone-pointed javelin and it was sad for him that he missed my face. I drew the gleaming Blade of Hahn, the blade a stride long, a length unheard of in most of the world. I took two steps and ran him through. The rebel was calling to me, "This way." Soldiers rose out of the shallow ground, eager and yelling. I heard all about us as we ran, that dry whisper of death -- arrows clipping through the bashai leaves. We plunged into the rank growth of the amphibial where the thin ground waved under foot, where the thicket crawled with deadly snakes and toads. While an island drifts through tropic waters it is bordered with this pumicine pack and its wildly growing plant life. there and the soldiers did not follow. They stood on the higher ground and waited. When we started to move we waved the head-high, pulpy bush. A shower of arrows snickered through the leaves. There was laughter from the shore. They had themselves a real sport. If they didn't hit us, the snakes would. I went ahead of the rebel with my Great Blade and in thirty stops I cut six filthy snakes. The soldiers showered arrows increasingly wide of us as the stir we caused drew out of their sight. Finally, we were free of the soldiers and there was only the great, hot hush of the amphibial about us. The island had not passed through a storm in many months and so the amphibial was unusually solid. Even so, we stepped through the treacherously waving earth frequently, and once the rebel went clear through till I grabbed the bushy hair of his head. Sha'tule, and Sha'cham were high now and boiled down into the thicket. Clouds of insects made our progress torment. What a curse it is that this great military barrier around every island fails us when we need it most. As our islands drift north or south toward the Ice Islanders, the encircling amphibial shrivels. Creeping roots that have collected these great pumicine packs and rotting leaves in the long tropic heat now freeze. The snakes and poisonous toads retreat to the more solid land and burrow. The chill waves smash away all but a little rim of the once forbidding amphibial and when the Ice Islanders come in their fearsome, homed boats we must defend every pace of the frozen shore. nphe rebel leader, an older man than I, floundered more and more frequently. One man cannot carry another, or any great burden, without breaking through such thin ground. We were desperate by the time we came upon a small boating channel. The fishers maintain these channels with walls and bottom woven of bamboo. As an island heads for the tropics and an amphibial grows about it, the fishers add these cradles of bamboo making a channel to the sea for their craft. We crawled onto the overhead cross members separating the bamboo walls of this channel. We lay in the hot sunlight unable to care what might happen. At last I asked him, "Is the raft in this channel?" He nodded without speaking to me. It was mid-moming before we let ourselves down into the sea water and swam silently back to the land. Two soldiers with bone-pointed javelins stood on the floating wharf watching the shore and whispering to each other. A raft had been upended on the wharf for repairs and the two stood with this between themselves and the shore. Not once as we approached did they worry about the surrounding amphibial. I drew the rebel to me and whispered to him while our toes rested on the bamboo cross members at the bottom of the channel. With our heads barely above water we moved cautiously ahead. When we reached the end of the wharf they were about ten paces away. I nodded to the rebel and he sank from sight. I counted methodically to #. I drew my steel knife and threw it, a flash of light, between the ribs of the man on the left. His companion turned in astonishment. I grimaced and hissed a curse. He raised his javelin as, behind him, the rebel mounted the wharf. I ducked and the javelin boiled into the water over my shoulders. I raised my head to see him kneeling with coy surprise before he rolled into the water. I mounted the wharf and retrieved my knife. We hurried to a fishing raft that was somewhat larger and more substantial than the others. The rebel loosened the moorings. "You will have to do with what provisions are here," he whispered. I turned to him in stunned disbelief. "Isn't it stocked? Are you trying to kill me? I have to cross a desert sea." "Something has gone wrong. This isn't the raft we had prepared." I opened the floor box of the raft and glimpsed gaffing rods and a coil of rope. I cast about the wharf frantically until I saw one of those huge baskets which fishermen sometimes tow behind them filled with live fish. I brought this and threw it onto the deck while the rebel was shoving past the end of the floating wharf. I leaped two paces to the deck and he handed me a paddle. "I will help you paddle out to sea. If soldiers appear before we are out of sight I can duck back into the amphibial until dark." Standing on opposite sides of the raft we paddled it back out the channel to the bobbing beds of free pumicine. I moored to the last bamboo stays of the channel and we rested. He was a big man with a determined face and a blunt way. "I am not sure you will return. Your cause is not our cause." "My cause includes your cause. We both want the young prince made king. Once he is king I will be able to take my business to him." "You are sure he will sign the treaties you want with the islands of Torne and Parsos?" "I know him. After all, I was his teacher when he was a boy. I taught him the first two of the Seven Arts." "You think the King of Tome and Parsos will sign?" "They have already signed a proposal." "What do they gain by this?" I began to unroll the split bamboo sail. Since the wind was from the land the raft pulled at its mooring. It made me angry to talk with him about this. Why could not the people of my homeland see that they would have no lasting prosperity until they federated with other freely floating islands? r T'he kings of Tome and Par- sos were both convinced that my plan was feasible to bind together with great ropes these small islands so that eventually they would grow together in the tropic lushness. When next their lands drifted out of the north seas clean of amphibial, they planned to erect the great sails I had designed. They would try to maneuver their islands together and bind them. With three islands thus bound there would be so much less shore to defend and so many more to defend it the next time we drifted against the Ice Islanders. Such a man-joined island, ruled by these three peaceful Kings, would be as wealthy and powerful as the great rock latched islands of Thule and Hahn. But the people of my homeland are stubborn and arrogant. The former king, who had obtained the Tower falsely, would never listen to me. So I had joined these rebels to place the young prince to whom I could talk in the Tower. One could not talk to these stubborn rebels about joining peaceful hands with a sister island. They were as independent as sea-going turtles. This one shook his head profoundly. "You worry too much about the Ice Islanders. I wouldn't sleep on the same island with a Tomian. They are root grubbers." I had the sail fully hoisted and the raft jerked at its mooring. He did not take the hint, so I went back and squatted nearthe rope to untie it. I turned and snapped, "You, rebel, have not been taken from your home as a boy by the Ice Islanders. You have not spent two years as their slave. You are a small-island man and you think like a small..." Suddenly, I saw on the sea over his shoulder, what had happened to the raft that had been prepared for me. Four soldiers paddled it swiftly, silently toward us. nphe rebel, as if answering my insult with an impudent gesture, thrust at me from his mouth the barbed head of an arrow. I spun backward, drawing the Great Blade. I slashed the mooring, and the raft leaped into the pumicine beds. As a second arrow sang over the deck, I tore open the lid to the deck box and dived into this narrow confine, jabbing myself painfully on a gaffing hook. Two more arrows thudded into the deck and then no more. I peeked out and saw that the soldiers were struggling to mount their sail. They would draw more water, and I was sure they could not overtake me. Nevertheless, I spent little ceremony in disposing of the dead rebel and assisting my flight by paddle. Soon they gave up the chase and headed back for the channel. I stopped paddling and let the sail bounce me over the pumicine. Across our seas drift great reaches of this stone, some as large as a man's thumb tip, and most much smaller. If one cuts a piece of this stone on a lapidary's wheel he will find it filled with air spaces. If one digs anywhere on an island he will find, beneath the soil of rotted vegetation, a thick ground of pumicine tightly matted in wiry roots. On an old rock-latched island such as Thule, this base may be ten times as deep as a man stands. IV I t is the belief of the pious that the islands were bom in antiquity by fabled Sea Goddesses who sometimes cohabited with the Sun Gods. Thus, it is said that the beautiful isle of Ohme, which never leaves its narrowly circling current in the tropics, was begat by Sha'tule, commander of the mist. It is said that the Sea Goddess, Tora, in gratitude for this delightful her womb until it was the most beautiful in the world. She is said to have travailed for a thousand years to create Ohme, where the tiny red deer bound across emerald meadows and the balloon flowers loose themselves from their branches at night and copulate above the tree tops with little cries. A man who notices what he sees instead of what he hears will not believe that Ohme, or any other island, was bom in such a way. In my lifetime our knowledge of the world has grown tremendously, and we are not so likely to believe that Sea Godto treasure them as myth. I think this: the islands are being built each day. There are forces building them and forces tearing them apart In many parts of the ocean, such as Chryo where stupendous rocks reach to the clouds, there are great boiling places out of which gouts of pumidne are coughed up from the water. In addition there are many places in the sea where cones of hot rock and fire rise high in the sky and two of these are near the rock-latched island of Hahn. From all these places comes stone filled with airspaces. Where beds of such pumicine float in calm seas you find them strewn with plantlife, and if the time is long enough you can pick up clumps of floating stone tightly bound in wiry roots and already plastered on the underside with the bulbous red leaves of the bottom plant. Such a clump is a primitive little island which is being borne only figuratively in the womb of a Sea Goddess. For the bottom plants suck up water and strain it of salt and deliver fresh water to the planets above. These in their turn are spread in the sunlight, which plants must have, and somehow they exchange sunlight with the bottom plants that were always in the sea. I think that shallow islands such as Chacone, where the soil is brackish and unfit for agriculture, will one day be deep islands like Thule. After a storm on any island, you find pumicine in the funeral pools which means it has been driven in under the island where it may be incorporated by the muscular bottom plants into a deeper ground. # t last I was free of the pumicine beds of my home isle. Now, about me ,the green sea swelled like white-nippled breasts of the necrophilic seawomen. The raft slapped from wave to wave with a busy illusion of progress. I stepped forward of the sail and watched the horizon where a blue line lay. I decided that I had about two hours before I would be leaving the green sea. I lashed the basket in the water at the rear of the raft, and used one of the gaffing hooks to land my food before I reached the desert. I was able to bring in six large blue-stripes without harming them unduly and I dropped them into the basket. A seventh, I left on the deck for tonight's food. I reached the endless blue of the desert. There would be no fishing here. The sparse plankton supported no life. Now my progress fretted me. The improbability of success began to depress me. The first overlord would probably assume the kingship tomorrow. Now was the time to overthrow him while the people were bitter that the young prince had not been placed. Now was the time, and here I sat slapping from wave to wave. Worst of all had been the death of the rebel leader. Now the rebels would have to rise spontaneously when and if I reappeared. Prospects were even gloomier ahead of me on Thule. I was going there to beg soldiers from a man who had last looked upon me in fabulous rage and had cried out in anguish, "Give him one hundred lashes. Nail him to a plank and put him adrift at sea." I had been saved from that punishment. I had escaped to Parsos where the king had given me refuge against every threat and bribe from Thule. But I could not go to Parsos or Torne for help in this venture. If their soldiers came storming and overlords -- even putting the young prince in the Tower would not sooth the feelings of my people. After such a day there would never be a treaty such as I wanted. '""T'he only source of soldiers close enough this year to be feasible was the rock-latched island of Thule near which our present currents were carrying us. The source was a good one. I was simply the worst possible ambassador. I had heard that the rage of the king toward me had cooled. Definitely he had not tom down the Great Tower of Thule though at first he had threatened to do so. How could he have done that? Of all my works, the Great Tower for the king of Thule is the crowning achievement. The huge platform on which it stands is built of hardwood raided from the Ice Islanders and is a hundred paces square. On the upper floors, I had directed a hundred lapidaries for two years to finish the mosaics of the outer walls. These are of ivory and pearl, wood and stone. They depict all the allegories of the Sea Dieties and the highest levels depict the epics of the ancestors of the king of Thule. The wood panels on the inner walls I had painted magically in oil so that the human form and all the animals and fishes of the world are seen in delightful poses and so real that the eye is bewitched. This Tower rises fourteen levels over its massive columns, gleaming high above the lesser Towers of lords of Thule. Truly, the king of Thule is raised above the sea. How could he have brought himself to destroy such a work? And every day that he lived in those halls he looked upon the message of my hand. Surely he would have softened toward me. That night I ate the raw fish and drank its water. I lay on my back watching the stars. I was steady on course. The Shaman say the stars are "evil eyes" that create all disaster. A man who thinks does not credit such talk. A man who sails, (and whoever heard of a sailor Shaman?) knowns the stars as friends. There are many wonderful thoughts in the world today, new ideas that thrill you. One, that is most exciting to me, is the theory of the aged professor of astronomy at the University of Parsos. This theory is that the stars are really suns like Shatule and Sha'charn and that they are so small only because they are far from us. I like to think that there may be other worlds on which those suns shine. I have tried to think of other worlds, for example, one where the sea would be almost dried up, perhaps by a closer sun. On such a world parts of the bottom of the sea might be exposed. Plants might grow on the exposed sea floor just as they do on pumicine. Animals would walk on solid rock. The Ice Isanders have great piles of rock which rise out of the ice and into the clouds and on which the hardwood grows. I mean... the whole world would be like that, and the islands would not move... Tonight I tired of thinking of such different worlds and I wished that the little Chacone were with me. When I awakened the suns lay hot on the horizon. I was startled. Hurriedly I checked the sea about me, and as a good seaman should, I looked into the suns. It is a good thing that I did. I recognized her at once. Practically all the ships sailed by sea bandits are built to a pattern. This ship came at me like a great, black bat skimming between the suns, and I had only moments to prepare. My heart fluttered wildly into my constricted throat. I would die, but I would not be tortured. I jerked open the deck box of the raft and brought out the gaffing polls. The advice of an old merchant seaman raced in my mind. "I've boarded three of 'em and there's only one way to do it. They always approach you on their windward because that's high-boarding for them." I wanted them to board me forward of my sail. Aft of the sail, I rammed the butts of the gaffing polls through the bamboo and braced them in the logs. Their vicious points were a formidable barrier to boarding there. I snatched the coil of rope out of the deck box and formed a noose as they bore down on me. I cotinted nine men leaning over the rail and one at the rudder. Three of the men, hesitating before the ugly gaffing polls about me, leaped onto my for ward deck. I gave thanks to the rich ladies of Hahn. They are lavishly untrue to their husbands, and a student at that university is not worth his salt unless he can throw a noose to the second floor of a rich man's Tower. The bandit ship swept past, and I caught the rudder pommel neatlyDesperation hoisted me to the railing, and one motion that drew and swung the Great Blade slashed the throat of the surprised helmsman. The bandits came at me to take a live prize, but when I opened the chest of a man from arm to arm they changed plan. The great Blade of Hahn is still as rare in the world as a king's Tower and greatly feared by fighting men. These five bandits now saw what I carried and they hurled club and javelin to kill. A javelin laid bare one of my ribs and a club momentarily stunned me and I fell heavily to my knees. The voice of the old merchant man came back commandingly. "Board at the rudder and fight your way to the rear hatch." I followed the voice in a gleaming frenzy of the Great Blade. They would flay me a little at a time and salt my body if they took me. I jumped down the stairs and slammed and bolted the door to the captain's cabin. Right behind me two of them hit it with terrifying fury. They would have it down in seconds, but if the old merchant man's advice held up they would be too late. His voice lashed me to action. "Throw open the door to the forward compartment and jam it so you can see the forward hatch. Hurry back to the lee port in the captain's cabin and open it. Reach way up and you can cut loose the boom." I watched through the door I had opened and when I saw light at the forward hatch I slashed the lashing of the boom with my knife. There was a sickening lurch through the ship and two men screamed. A leg that had started down the ladder in the forward hatch was whisked out again as if by the hand of a god. There followed two splashes in the sea. r T"he door to the captain's cabin was splintering, and I dashed forward. I went up the hatch-ladder, blade first, and chopped off one of two bare feet that suddenly appeared before me on the deck. His unbalanced blow with a club smashed into the hatch and enough of my head to knock northern lights through my brain. As I climbed groggily onto the deck I heard the two who had smashed open the captain's door yell disappointment and clamber back up the rear hatch for the deck. The fellow who had lost a foot did not realize it. He was trying to come at me with a knife. His head flew off with one swing of the Great Blade, and the two who had come up out of the rear hatch witnessed this. When I approached them they backed off respectfully. One of them dropped a stone ax to the deck. Presently he turned and dove into the sea. The other man held a bone javelin hesitantly. I gestured over the side of the ship. He shook his head. I took a step toward him and he hurled the javelin. I chopped it out of the air. I raised the point of the Great Blade and I started backing him. When he reached the rail he just leaned away from the point until he fell overboard. Then I understood why he had not done as had his companion. He could not swim. I had to listen to his screams while I brought the sail down to retrim the ship. The three men who had boarded my raft had made some progress. The man who had jumped overboard and one of the men who had been knocked overboard by the boom were swimming for the raft. The raft was still a hundred paces away when I began rehoisting the sail and felt the trim little bandit slip tighten like an airborne bird. I set my course for Thule. By the time the raft was out of sight I had got rid of the bodies and swabbed the deck clean. Then I sat down near the tiller and carefully cleaned and polished my Great Blade. What a marvel this metal was! Recently the Hahnese have been working the gray iron that flows from a fiery cone near their rock latched island. Now I had learned to work it with charcoal to make blades such as these. It had been for this the King of Hahn had given me the Chacone. lution, I had no remorse over They are descendants of the Ice Islanders. For centuries their ancestors dominated our oceans; their raiding and slaughtering almost wiped civilization off of most islands. Those dark centuries were ended only by the rise of the great navies of Thule and Hahn which have pushed V the bandits back to a few poor islands from which they operate. I was thinking these things as I finished cleaning the blade and I remembered that I had seen some writing on the table in the captain's cabin. It is a seeming paradox that the bandits so love slaughter and torture that the most brutal man of another island shudders at the though of them -- and yet they are said to be constant poets. The long sagas of their history are marvels of myth and they are said to leave a scene of slaughter with every man vying to compose the best verse about it. This captain had indeed been composing in a labored hand when I was sighted. His cup of morning tea had crashed to the floor when I later cut the boom. But the piece of parchment and his writing brush were where he had left them. "Up ecstatic towers we raced. With bone lance and flesh. Their women we pierced, Till thousands of doves. Were cooing for death." I reflected over the savage faces of the morning and decided that the man whose chest I had opened had been the captain. I tucked his lines under my sash.  s you approach Thule you understand that it takes a man two days to walk across this largest of all islands. It lies across the horizon like an endless, green cloud. The rocks to which it is latched do not rise out of the soil. But the gleaming Tower of the King of Thule, which is my design, can be seen from the sea. Thule is the great stationary point of trade. All islands which are in currents that pass near her have cycles of industry and trade based on that fact. The approach near Thule is always festival time. When the currents bring an island into these waters, the stores of its products are traded for the exotic products from many islands. Even the Ice Islanders of the north sometimes appear in fearsome armadas to stand off Thule and conducted sullen trade. I had not had Thule on the horizon more than a short time when the sails of a fighting ship came out in my direction. At this latitude there is little growth of amphibial and they keep a close watch on the sea. My ship, obviously a sea bandit, brought this fighter out under taut sail. The fighter came about. The faces of the soldiers were many and they inspected every inch of my deck. I lowered sail rapidly and waited. From about fifty paces the captain called to me. "Who are you?" I cupped my hands and called back, "I am a Master of the Seven Arts. I call on the King of Thule." The captain ordered his sail down and we drifted together in silent waiting. The grim soldiers did not speak with each other. They watched my deck. The soldiers of Thule are the finest in the world and their discipline is a thing to behold. The ship captains are always Lords of Thule. "I'm alone." "How did you come by this ship?" "I captured it." "Alone?" "If you retrace my course you will pick up five ugly sea bandits adrift on my raft. The other five I killed and I have brought their ship as a prize to the navy of Thule." F or the first time the soldiers looked at each other and there was laughter. I drew the Great Blade and flashed it between Sha' and Sha'. The laughter abruptly ceased. The Lords of Thule already carry such blades and these soldiers now believed me. At five paces the captain ordered a line thrown to me, and I made it fast. I stepped to the deck of the fighter of Thule and prickles of fear were on my back. The captain studied my face, and he recognized me. He exclaimed "Master!" I saw the many implications of this meeting storm across his rugged face. A soldier whispered, "I'll swear on the Sea Floor, it is the builder of the Tower." All motion about me ceased and there was silence in which no man heard more loudly than I that anguished cry, Give him one hundred lashes. Nail him to a plank, and put him adrift at sea. The captain could only stare at me. I had painted for one of the inner walls of his tower a scene that had since become famous. It depicts the legend of Namora. Startled from her bed of pearls, the chaste goddess fights off the advances of Ti, the sea serpent. With this painting I had at last achieved such depiction of the human body that all who saw it stood in awe. None of the paintings I had done on Parsos or Hahn equaled it. This captain had been proud of his association with me. I saw on his face that the lords of Thule would be dismayed at my return. In their eyes I had not done such a wrong. In the last great raid of the Ice Islanders my parents had been killed. All their servants, and I their son, had been taken as slaves. It was not, to the lords of Thule, a discredit to me that subsequently a false king had assumed the Tower of my home isle and had dissolved the lordship of my father. If then, I was a lord by desert, it was no great crime to have loved the youngest of the six daughters of their king. Unpolitic behavior, no doubt. But to be nailed to a plank! The thought is abhorrent even beyond its reality because of the belief that such cursed planks drift into the desert seas and remain afloat. nphe Lord Captain who now stared into my face knew that my sentence was irrational. If the king had had a son, if one of his older daughters had had a son, I would today be married into the king's family. For in that circumstance a son of pure Thulian blood would not have been required of the youngest princess, to be later, King of Thule. In that circumstance my impropriety would have led, not to her ineligibility for royal marriage, but to our early marriage. The captain took me aside. "Master, why have you brought this trial to me? I must take you to your death. Don't you wish to stand on the Sea Floor? Must you decay here at the surface?" "You think he cannot forgive me?" "He will go through with it because he commanded it. What in the name of Sha'charn has brought you here?" "A false pretender holds the Tower of my home isle. I have come for soldiers to retake it." "Why didn't you go to Parsos which is drifting close to you now?" The sails of the fighter had been rehoisted and the light breeze heeled us away from the bandit ship which was returned with soldiers to pick up the raft-load of its former crewmen. I explained to the captain why I could not use soldiers from Parsos. The people of my homeland have an outlandish reputation for unpredictable and romantic action. The Lords of Thule and Hahn, the great powers that forced back the Ice Islanders, sometimes look down their noses at our violent political history. They call us "teri che" which is to say, "wild ones". This captain now hurt my heart, as if he had slapped my face. He shook his head with a grim smile and said, "Teri che." Then, staring into my face uncomprehendingly, he went on, "You will not live to retake your Tower, let alone to carry out a scheme for binding islands together. You are going to be a dead patriot." Then, without meaning to, he hurt me even deeper. "Thule owes you better than a plank. I promise that after your death, I will raise an invasion and straighten out your politics at home. I will place your great prince in his Tower." With his contemptuous tone about our prince, which we agreed on, he expressed his evaluation of my plan to bind the islands, which he understood no better than my own people. Neither by the rude nor by the sophisticated was my plan understood. VI T ater, when we marched along ' a country road toward the city, with soldiers ahead and to the rear of us, I found there was one thing that rude people everywhere understood of me. The news of my capture had run ahead. Tillers came down the neat rows of their fields to  stand beside the road. They snickered and nudged each other and sometimes one could hear a suggestion that I must have a finer "tower" even than the king. The analogy had the inspired hurtfulness of the rude, and the hurt lay in the heart of the proud old man to whom I was being taken. Twice soldiers had to dash to the side of the road and knock heads with their javelin butts. I began to understand why the King of Thule could not forgive me. The flesh of my back crawled, and I perspired more than the day called for. The captain sometimes looked at me, but he said no more. After the long walk through the country came the city. First, the two-level towers of the poor on their awkward stilts; then towers of more levels, and towers that reared gorgeous mosaics of ivory and wood and pearl, seven and nine levels into the blue and gold sunlight. These rich men were indeed raised resplendently above the monotony of the sea. Here in these nacreous 'ers lived the charming people whose eyes I had dazzled with carvings and paintings, and whose minds I had thrilled with theories. Now they turned from me in grief. I felt at my back the northwind of fear. Then came the great square of Thule which is actually paved from one end to the other with stone. All of this stone was raided two centuries ago from the great pile in the northern Ice Islands, and it is said that in the years of those raids # Thulians died -- and twice that many Ice Islanders. Here in this great sunlit square they would nail me to the plank. As sharply and dryly as the breaking of small sticks would sound the stone mallet on the pegs. The sound of the mallet would spank along the decorated tower walls and die away, and they would lift the plank to carry it out to sea. The crowd in the square would melt away, fearful and brooding because another vengeful "shee-shoon", which is to say, condemned spirit, would be loose upon the sea. So I would drift into deserts with the suns banging my eyes while my home isle drifted in poverty. The work of my own hand was the final blow to my hopes. How awesome was this dwelling! At the far end of the square it soared fourteen levels into the sky. Its grounds were walled with stone to twice the height of a man. Inside there, in the spacious gardens, rose four more towers, and even these were nine levels high. All this had been done to my design, and now I trembled before it They did not take me to him. Instead, he came to me. He came in the night to the jail. I saw with pain that he was now an old man, as if something had broken in him and loosed the tensions of his haughty bearing. He stood before me and studied my fear. He stood that way while they drew my hands up to the low ceiling in a noose and bound my feet to a shackle in the floor. Then he spoke and I learned that the voice was still his. He asked softly, "How could you have done this to me? To me, who loved you and rewarded you and gloried in your work? How could you have taken from me my last hope?" I could say nothing. Then, in the tiny, windowless jail, his terrible pride shrieked, "How could you have made a laughing stock of me?" He tore the lash from the great brute beside him, and he smashed it into my face. Repeating over and over, "How could you have made a laughing stock of me?' he lashed my face and chest and groin, and I tasted what was to come. As a boy I was tortured by the Ice Islanders. I do not bear torture well. I moaned when his weak flailing warned me of what the big jailer could do. When he had exhausted himself, he sat down on the damp floor and beat feebly with his fists. The jailer took up the lash. He grinned pleasantly to me and asked politely, "How would you like it, Master? Slow, or fast." "No," I shouted. "No, Highest One, don't let him do this!" But the poor old man was deaf to everything except his own misery and shame. XThen I was again con  scious, and the lights had stopped bursting in my eyes, the jailer was seated on a bench, resting. The fat of his chest heaved, and he ran a stubby hand across it to wipe away his sweat. The king had risen from the floor. His silks were dirty and disheveled. "How many have you given him?", he asked the jailer, hoarsely. "Barely thirty, Highest One." Through the swimming of the room, I saw the jailer rise and start toward me, and I screamed. "Let him down. Be gentle with him." I allowed myself to sink to the calm Sea Floor. He had me taken to his own apartments, in the highest levels of the Tower. In silence, he came every day and washed my wounds and dressed them. He came several times each day and repeated this care in silence so that I wept when I was alone for what I had done to him. On the third day he spoke. "The Lord Captain who took you has explained the reason you have come. It is good politics for the rock-latched islands like Thule and Hahn, to strengthen the freely floating islands. You may have the soldiers. Whatever you need." With that he rose to leave. Then at the door he turned, the whisper of his robes as loud as the shouting of a thousand soldiers. "Be very clear about this. I do not waste a soldier for the sake of ten che. I believe your plan to bind those three little islands into one rich, strong island will work. By aiding that plan, I do one more little thing to keep back the Ice Islanders and keep down the sea bandits. It strengthens Thule." His gray eyes lingered momentarily as he turned and left me. A gain and again, while the captain and I worked on the plans for storming my home isle, the king's words stung me. "Z do not waste a soldier for the sake of teri che." Again and again, this stinging drove my mind to the pool in the gardens of the Tower of my homeland. It is a hole into the sea for decorative purposes and many islands there is such a pool in the gardens of the Tower. I have often thought. "Behind all the guards at the walls of the Tower, there is a way in." When the captain and I had completed our plans and had decided to embark in another four days, suddenly it came to me. "A craft can be built to go under the island and come up in the pool." Such a surprise would save many soldiers of Thule, and many of my teri che. In one moment things fell into place from countless observations and sources. How had I built and caulked the plumbing in the Great Tower of Thule? How does a fish roll in the water? How strong is the thickest of the round lenses of the glass of Hahn? For two days, hardly taking time to eat or sleep, I stayed in my apartment drawing plans for such a craft. Once I went to the winery in the country and inspected two of the great hogsheads for storage which are large enough for a man to stand in. The two giant hogsheads could be spliced together with mores than enough strength and more room inside than would be needed by two men. This would be too buoyant, and so stone would have to line the bottom of the craft until it was almost ready to sink. Now, there would have to be a way to take on weight for sinking and get rid of it for coming back to the surface. So I would have a barrel braced on the floor midship and a pipe with a cock in that would let water into it so that the craft would sink. From the iron that flows near their island, the Hahnese have contrived a pump which a man may work by a handle and force water up a height. I would have to arrange one of these pumps so that water could be forced from the barrel back into the sea, and thus we would come again to the surface. I saw that when the craft sank I would go on sinking, however slowly, unless a means other than emptying the barrels were used to stop this motion. So I would have structures along the sides like the fins of a fish that would maintain a level of descent as long as the craft was moving forward. It was in moving the craft forward that I had trouble. There are no winds under the sea, and to paddle my hogsheads seemed to me out of the question. A boat can be moved forward by thrashing the rudder in a crude duplication of the fish tail. But I saw that no rudder I might design would move us from the edge of my home isle to the pool in the gardens of the Tower before the two or three occupants of the hogsheads fell from exhaustion. I had to ask the captain for a delay in the embarkation. Nafor any plan that would spare his men. So I went back to my apartment and the problem of propulsion. The more I thought about the clumsy action of a rudder, the more exasperated I became. There was something in this action that escaped me. It was evening again, and I was utterly exhausted. I took a bottle of spirits from the cabinet and poured a drink. I sipped it while I stared at all the drawings I had made for propelling mechanisms. I poured another, large drink and went to the windows. I do not deny that in my goings and comings about the Tower, I had never ceased to watch for the princess. I had not seen her and I did not see her now as my eyes searched the lawns and courts between the towers. But I longed deeply to see her, and suddenly I was drunk and very tired. I awakened in the night with a headache. I rolled over in the luxurious bed and buried my face, and abruptly, there was the idea for the propulsion. The rudder need not move like the tail of a fish, it need not act like any living thing. It could be a spinning rudder of two blades tilted oppositely on their axis. This could be turned by a shaft extending into the craft. The shaft should have two cranks in it so that two men could turn at once. Now, before noon, I finished all the drawings for my craft, and I sent a servant to the king. He invited me to lunch on his balcony, and there I showed him the drawings for this marvelous boat that would take men under the sea. By the end of our lunch he had become as excited as I. Then suddenly, we were both saddened that the old days were gone when we had planned together like this. He said simply, "Have the Lord Captain procure craftsmen and proceed at once to build it." I was dismissed. He shook his head to prevent me from speaking. VT#e built the undersea craft on one of the navy wharfs. In barely seven days we were ready for a trial. We let the boat into water. I had added a barrel to the top of the structure through which the occupants could enter and leave. In the front of this superstructure I had had them caulk a thick lens of the glass of Hahn so that I could look forward under water. I had somehow miscalculated the buoyancy and we had to add some stone to the floor. Finally, when I and the soldier who would go with me were both aboard, little more than the superstructure remained above water. The poor soldier was shaking with fright but determined to die for Thule. I climbed the rungs back up into the superstructure and told the Lord Captain to pole us away from the wharf. A luxurious litter appeared and came toward us. I knew at once that it was the king. He could not stay away from this trial. I waited, standing in a barrel in the sea. I hoped for some warning or some encouragement from him. He simply motioned the Lord Captain and soldiers to be at ease. Then he waved to me in silence and stood waiting.  ' fighters of Thule at a good distance from shore. I took one last sighting on the fighter to make sure we were pointing toward it. Then, hurriedly, I closed and tightened the hatch in the top of the barrel and decended into the dark to hear the soldier's teeth chattering. I said, "Soldier, are you standing by the crank?" He gulped hard. "Yes, Master." "Stay there. Start cranking when I tell you." I fumbled in the dark and opened the cock of the barrel. Through the shallow, fast breathing of the soldier, I could hear water running into the barrel. Back at the window I caught a blurred glimpse of the fighter just before the sea lapped over the glass. Then I was looking at the cool, green of underwater and fishes turning past. My heart beat widly. I let the light deepen a little and hurried back to close the cock, barking my shins on the gracings for the barrel. "Now, soldier, start to crank!" I joined my effort to his at my part of the shaft. I could hear his frightened breathing begin to even out with the labor over the cranks. I counted up to one hundred turns of the shaft while it became insufferably hot in the hogsheads. "Keep cranking with all your might," I gasped and made my way up to the window. The green light outside had deepened shockingly. For the first time I felt fear of the sea. I scrambled to the pump and worked it for fifteen back-breaking strokes. Then I turned the crank with the soldier for twenty-five turns, and I could restrain my anxiety no longer. I went to the window and wiped fog from the glass. The light was reassuringly brighter. "Rest a while, soldier." "What Master?" "Rest a while." I kept wiping the fog from the window and watching the light brighten until I could see the swirling of the sea surface. Now we needed forward speed so the fins along the side would keep us from coming all the way to the surface. "Let's start cranking again." "Master, are we all right?" "We're all right, soldier, as long as we crank." I turned the crank another hundred times with the soldier and stumbled with exhaustion back to the window. The light was still all right. I looked hopefully ahead and to the sides, knowing we could not be near the fighter. nphe soldier labored with great lung-bursting breaths. I told him to rest again, and I tumed the crank alone for fifty times before I fell to the stones of the floor in a daze. The air was foul and hot and my lungs heaved desperately. When I could speak, I commanded, "Turn the crank, soldier." "Master, I'm dying." "Soldier turn the crank or you will die." At first with infinite weariness and then with dogged energy, I could hear him start turning the crank. I drug myself up to the window. Just as I wiped away the fog, I saw something off to the left. Then it was no longer there. I fell back into the hogsheads yelling at the soldier. "Crank, man! Crank!" I banged my head and ripped skin from my shins getting to the screws that controlled the rudder. I turned the rudder the wrong way. Then I turned it rightly. I made myself count slowly to twenty. Then I straightened the rudder. When I again wiped the fog from the window, there was the hull of the fighter floating magically in a green-yellow sky. "Soldier, we're there. Just a little more turning. Turn, soldier." He turned and I turned with him. Then, gasping as if in death, I clambered back to the window and cried out. "Stop, man. Crank the other way." For a moment I had thought we might pass under the fighter and rip off the superstructure, but we stopped short of her. The soldier had collapsed. I thought I would never finish pumping the water out of the barrel. For a time, after I was able to open the hatch, I stood and gulped at the air like a dying fish. Then I lifted the soldier and held him while he breathed it. I climbed out the hatch and stood on the forward hogshead with water occasionally lapping my feet. We had come around the fighter and placed her between ourselves and the shore. All on her deck were at the other side watching for us toward the island. We drifted to a gentle bump against the ship. I reached up and caught the rail and pulled myself slowly to the deck. I stood there for a moment looking at their backs, and then I said loudly, "Captain, we are here." nphe King of Thule is a com- plex man. When the fighter, towing the undersea craft, brought us back, he stood before me for a time and simply nodded his head. Then, no longer able to restrain himself, he threw his arms about me and his old hands clapped my shoulders. Still holding me he called to all about. "It is a holiday. The island must celebrate. There will be dancing and free wine." As I walked back to the city beside his litter, I was not able to join in his enthusiasm. For I had not anticipated the agonies of the underwater trip. I knew that the distance out to the fighter had been little more than a Jdnrd of the shortest distance from the shore of my home isle to the pool in its Tower gardens. Suddenly I remembered the burial pools where we could surface for good air and rest in the protection of a tabooed place. Then I became as gay as the king was, and when I saw the many lords and ladies he invited to his apartments in my honor and the lavish banquet he had served, I knew that I had completely won his forgiveness. Somehow, having dissolved his shame by punishing me, his pride had risen again in the achievement of the day. It was only natural that a gnawing hope rose in me. I watched every entering guest. I longed more than anything else in the world to see the princess, and I knew that it was impossible. He could not bring her here. 'T'wo days later the undersea craft was ready on the deck of a cargo carrier, and the soldiers and ships were ready for the expedition to take the Tower of my homeland. I planned to take two soldiers to turn the crank. This would free me to handle the controls during the dangerous passage under the island and to keep careful eye on the beacons of daylight that would fall through the pools. In the late afternoon, the king sent a servant for me. The man took me down smoothly in one of the lifts I had designed for the Tower. Then he led me out to one of the spacious gardens where the king was waiting for me. "First I must #how you something over here i the garden house." He led me to a small service house where the gardeners kept their tools. With poorly hidden excitement he pushed me through the entrance and closed the door behind me. I was in blackness. Then I saw, glowing before me, a garden hoe and a fork. There was also a board with glowing letters. "Master, you are not the only inventor." . What an old fox this king was. The door opened and he was standing there as proud as Sha'charn. "You know the glowing fish from the currents of Ohme?" I nodded, smiling at his pleasure. "I keep some of those fish in the pool over there. The light you saw in there is the stuff from their glowing stripes. It will last over a day, and you will have no trouble finding the controls of your craft." Sha'tule, in sunset, and Sha'charn, yet a little higher, were splashing colors across a fluffy sky. The towers of the city were irridescent with fires. The king spoke as if he suggested a stroll. He spoke softly, too softly, and he laid his hand affectionately on my arm. "Would you go with me to have cakes and wine with the princess?" The island rocked and I put out a hand. I was dismayed at what was happening to me. I stammered, "No. Highest One. That would not be right. Do not stir this thing." "I think so too, but I can deny her nothing. Also, I would give you an opportunity to ruin my last hope or to vindicate the faith I had in you." This last, I did not really hear. I was too dazed. I walked the way he led me, and the island was rocked by a storm deep in the sea. I n a garden behind one of the lesser towers, we came to her. She sat at a table decorating a fabric. As we approached she dropped the needle and her hand trembled on the unfinished fabric. I stared at her hand that was telling everything and then at her lovely face, and my chest ached. I bowed and it felt like I was being moved by strings. The king asked me to be seated and I stood unmindfully until he repeated his request. Then, after I was seated, I found that I was unable to speak. She did speak, but her words meant nothing because her voice fluttered like a bird in a snare. "You have been traveling many years, Master." "Pardon me, Princess?" "I say... I say, you have been away... a long time." "Yes, I have been to many islands, Princess." It seemed, after six years, that this was going to be all we had to say. The king cleared his throat, and I was grateful for the compassion in his voice. "The Master has come for soldiers to retake the Tower of his homeland from a false pretender." A nurse appeared at the nearby door, and I saw that she had with her the boy. A thrill gripped me. This was my son. The nurse saw us and grasped frantically to return the lad to the rooms. He fled her like a deer, bounding over the pretty flowers, and threw himself into his mother's arms. She drew his head to her breast and kissed his forehead and admonished him. The nurse hurried forward to retrieve him, but the king waved her away. "Meet the child and me in a little while at the entrance to the Great Tower. I will go for a walk in the gardens with him." Momentarily, I raised my eyes from the child to his mother's face, and found her staring at me with a great pride and warmth. Now, suddenly, we had so much to say to each other that we needed only our eyes to speak with. The king rose and extended his hand to the child. "Come, my son, I will show you the luminous fish." I stared at the boy and could not take my eyes from him. He was as favored as I had heard. He had his mother's famous looks. But I saw, too, the shock to hair that is my people's and tile thin line of a mouth that is mine. The king took the child's hand and repeated, "Come, my son." His message was not lost on me. For this was his son, the only heir he would ever have to the Tower of Thule. ' ' and sat beside her. The light of Sha'charn was soft on her lovely head. I saw that she was now a woman, even as I was no longer a young man. I had forgotten the thick beat of my heart. It was as though the years since our parting had stood for nothing. I felt my ambitions for my homeland melting away like a mist. What did I care to bind together three ridiculous little islands? She assured me, between our kisses, that her father would make her Provincial Queen of the island of Lani and allow me to marry her as consort ruler if I but asked it. In that beguiling twilight we both understood that this long separation would only deepen the delight of Lani. Our touch still had the magic of our first touch. When I had, one last time, kissed her eyelids, her cheeks and her mouth, I left her and went to ask him for this simple happiness. From behind a low cloud Sha'cham hurled a vast shaft of fire at the Great Tower of Thule. I was momentarily dazzled. I looked up the cascading mosaics of fire to where an old man waited in the pinnacle of flame. Then I awakened and knew that Lani would never be. When I was admitted to his apartments, he stood at a window looking out over the wealth of his city. He did not turn. I waited in silence and presently he spoke. "Do not ask of me what she wishes. If you ask it I will allow it I suffer with both of you. But do not ask it of  f  me. Her face, in its last look of love, appeared before me and sharpened painfully till it blotted out the harsh reality of the room. I heard his voice repeat, "Do not ask it of me." I felt the huge wave of emotion on which she and I had risen begin to wash from me. Helplessly I stood there and felt it all wash from me until I was left empty as a cadaver that had somehow struck a pose of adoration. Then her face was gone and I was back in the bitter reality of the king's room. From far below, the noisy happiness of the evening streets was a murmur of irony in this high place where the last light of Sha'charn lay across the rich carpet as might a fading, blue shroud. He turned to me and gestured as if he deprecated that of which he spoke. "It is not a law, but an expectation, that the King of Thule will be Thulian. The people often prefer to see laws broken, but they do not easily tolerate the disappointment of an expectation. "I have not much longer to live. If I declare the princess to be Queen and Interim Ruler the people will in time forget you and there will be no more than ill-mannered heckling when, eventually, the prince assumes the Tower. But if you marry her, if you remain about as a constant reminder..." He spread his hands as a conclusion. He turned again to the dying light from the window, and I knew that he saw a marvelous vista that I had planned. "I have built Thule into the greatest power on the sea. I want my son to rule what I have built." I went down to the streets. I was numb with loss, and I understood that, all these years, I had existed on the hope that eventually he would let us live together. Now I found that I was going to have to live with the bleak certainty that I would never again hold her. At the thought, my mouth grew dry and my palms perspired. I walked to the tower of the Lord Captain. While I awaited him, I looked for the last time upon my painting of Namora. The captain came from his dining and looked at me questioningly. "We leave tonight. Captain. It is the wish of the king." We sailed with nine fighters. On the morning of the second day out, before Sha'tule had raised the first mists from the bobbing pumicine beds of my home isle, we lowered the underwater craft into the sea on a boom. I remember the eerie light in the craft that came from the luminous stuff of the fishes, and I remember the soldiers cranking desperately in the stagnant air. I can still see the great balls of light from the burial pools where we surfaced and lay out on the hogsheads, gasping like monstrous fish. Most clearly, I remember her face weeping in the dark of the sea. I remember the garden pool of the Tower from which I stared heard only her voice murmuring of Lani. The great sound of the soldiers of Thule storming through the streets of my homeland did not still her murmur, nor did the screams of the guards at the gates as we three came from behind and cut them down. I suppose a quiet sea will always speak to me of Lani. In any case, I can recapture her face only as it drifts in the dark nether world. There was a strange thing down there... little fish with rods straight up from their heads on which hung bell-like lanterns, brightly lighted. They came to the window and inspected me. Now they always invade her memory, like little clowns relieving tragedy. IX I had the prince made king that very noon. I was taking no more chances with the lords of my home island... and it is true, as has been claimed, that when we brought him from the prison to his Tower, he stumbled over corpses. He would have to do that !... not once, but twice. The officers of Thule laughed. It really looked like we were placing a dolt in the Tower to rule the teri che. I gave him time to bathe and dine after the rudely rushed ceremony. Then I had myself brought to him in his shoddy, administrative rooms. As the captain of a mercenary foroe asks his price for services rendered, I put before our new king the treaty which had already been signed by the Kings of Parsos and of Tome. He hesitated fretfully. He asked many questions. I had expected him, in gratitude to me, and out of respect for the two great men who had already signed the document, to grab a pen with haste. Instead the lout kept bringing up other matters of inconsequence. He interrupted my argument with asides to his new First Overlord. This First Overlord was simply one of yesterday's rebels and behaved accordingly. His idea of polish was servility. Suddenly he glanced at me in fright. Then, like a great bell, I reheard what this profound king had just asked yesterday's rebel. He had asked, "Where is the Chacone they sent to me with food while I was in prison?" He had asked this as though it had just now occurred to him. Slowly I lowered the map which showed how Tome and Parsos could be most efficiently bound to our island. The First Overlord was agitated. "She is here, Highest One. You asked that..." "Never mind what I asked. Bring her." Then he said to me apologetically, "Ah, Master, forgive these interruptions. So many things have come up. I know it is not important to you, but I have fallen in love. Desperately! It happens she is a Chacone, and I must determine to whom she belongs so that I may pay the man a fair price. My mind will be much more receptive to your theories when I have settled this affair of the heart." I was suddenly suffering a very bad chill and I shivered. He took the map from my hands and looked at it rather gaily and with new interest. "Master, this is truly a moment in our history. To think that my signature will set this great plan in motion. You will be the hero of our people once they realize the greater prosperity and safety that will be theirs... The cringing First Overlord returned, and with him entered my little Chacone. Like the broken barking of a north wind I tore at him. "Why you impudent little... you ungrateful... what do you know of love?" He reddened and yammered. "You can't talk like that to mel I'm king now, not your pupil! Do you want to stand on a stone? What's this woman to you, anyway?" "You know very well what she is to me. Do you think I'll bargain with you? No! I'll take her to Parsos and let you drift to Chryo." He stormed out of the room. "You're under detention. Don't forget it You're under detention." And then at the door, melodramatically, "Oh, that you should have blundered with her loveliness before I found her!" I could have choked him through a thousand deaths I went to the wall and beat my fist. The little Chacone wept openly. She came and took my bruised hand and kissed it. She sobbed, "Oh, Master, my heart will break. I have known, Master. The way he looked at me from the jail, I knew this would happen. But my heart will break." I caught the finality in her statement, and I took her shoulders and stared into her face. "What makes you think I would give you up?" "You will have to. I heard them talking." She sobbed and indicated the First Overlord who still stood at the door. "You will not get the plan for the islands unless you do." S he knew me better than I knew myself. She knew I would go back to the table and stare at the map of three islands bound in one. She knew I would turn then to stare at her, because she did not wait for that She left quietly with the First Overlord. I was appalled at her certainty of me, and I knew that she was right. I knew it with a loathing that began to crawl in my belly like some hideous toad. How could I be so dedicated to this plan of mine that I would destroy in this girl a delicate monolith of love? I was a cruder man than the sea bandit who had gloried that a thousand doves cooed for death. This dove would coo forever in some dark recess of her heart For it is true of the women of Chacone that they will kill themselves before they will let a man other than their owner come near them. But should that owner trade them to another they will remain as faithful to the master, and will then as savagely fight off the former owner as any other man. For this they are trained from childhood in it. Thus I saw that I was going to shut myself from the heart of the Chacone, and my anger at the king dissolved in the slime of my loathing for myself. I went to him without the slightest accusation and got his signature on the treaty with Torne and Parsos. I went down from the shabby Tower of my homeland and walked alone among my people which are called teri che. They love to drink and there are many taverns in the city. I went into one of these and ordered spirits. Then I also ordered one for the amiable sot who instantly joined me. We drank in silence for a while. Indeed, I had nothing to say to any man since I had shut myself from the tender heart of the Chacone. I stared without seeing across the talkative room and realized that a common man could come in here and brag with impunity that he had slept with the wives of ten lords. Then let him brag that he had slept with the Chacone of one lord, and he would be laughed out of the tavern. The sot could stand the silence no longer. "Now, Master, you're done in, aren't you? Well, it's a fine thing you managed, getting the young prince to his Tower. Of course, this business of tying us up with Parsos and Tome, I don't see. But I suppose the king will decide on that." I stood up to go. He grabbed my sleeve. "Now, Master, don't take offense. You ought to get to know your homeland. You've been away too long doing fine things for other islands. You ought to build a new Tower for our... I crashed him over the table and into the near wall. For a moment the place went silent. The wine seller glanced from his counter and shook his head. "Now, Master, it's a fine thing to get drunk and disorderly, but let's not tamper with life and limb." I stalked out to the streets, and again I was alone among my people. I accepted their respectful nods and bows and understood that I would always be separated from them by this heart that could love reason so deeply and reason away love so quickly. They were right to fear my plan to bind the islands together. The threat of the Ice Islanders was too distant and the pinched faces of their children too close to weigh against the was a plan bom purely of reason. It threatened much of the spirit in them that was fashioned with such disorderly grandeur from pride and prejudice and the demands of provincialism. The street-lighters had set the lamps guttering, and the fog moved in and turned to pearl between them. Somehow the fog brought restraint and order and a muffling of guilt. As I walked the lamps came from the fog in a regular cadence and the damp planks of the street became an orderly path through chaos. My enormous crime against the Chacone settled into a knot of guilt that I was going to have to live with. It was a guilt fate had made necessary if I was to put through the plan... and only I would put it through. I stopped involuntarily and declared to the fog, "I am what I am!" Then, glancing about me, I walked on. There was much to be set in motion so that the islands could be maneuvered together and bound. I would sail tomorrow for parsos and get things started. All stories complete in Worlds of Tomorrow A. Bertram Chandler Richard Wilson J. T. McIntosh Lester del Rey -- and many morel November Issue still on sale -- get your copy today l lh, love Without it, we would be like robots. With it, robots would be like -- well, like what? I had just come in from a hard day of expediting at the power wafer works, and I and Dan the Can were getting settled for one of our usual eventless evenings. I thought. I was making myself comfortable in a soof-air chair, one with pulsing upholstery that massaged buttocks, thighs and back, and Dan was standing by on his solid squarecornered feet, ready to do what I asked. But soon I saw he wasn't his usual self. When he changed the set of the chair pumps and brought me my somooso pipe and dozoff shoes I noted some strange agitation. Always fearing for our relationship and wanting to get at the truthbottom of things at once I asked, "Something wrong, Dan?" The lower half of his face crashed open like a scoop ready to dip. "Yoops," he said in the funny grating way sound always came out of him when he was upset. "Sompin' wroong." "What's wrong then, Dan?" "At's Noona. I bea woontin' her. Ever since I saw her in a shoop, yesterday when we strooled, I bea woontin' her." "But Dan!" I said, amused and alarmed at the same time. "Is this Noona someone like you?" "Noops. She's a -- a -- well, I guess yoo'd say she's a goorl." "Sure, of course. But is she -- well, is she a manufactured article like you? I mean, Dan, is he mechanical?" Dan's protruding eyes that usually glowed a kind of deep red when he was feeling right changed to purple-blue. With those weird beams he looked straight at me. He didn't answer my question, but he laughed a screechy laugh that sent shivers over my body. "Heepa heepa heepa," it sounded. "Change the air, Dan!" I shouted to reestablish my mastery. "Set the needle on tired man's roll, the way you know I always want it when I'm done with businessman's come-home." He moved sluggishly toward the pumps. "Brisk, Dan!" I snapped. "Get it done." He moved then with speed that rattled the floor. "And another thing, Dan. Remember, you and I have been tiie perfect relationship for four years now. Or, in other words, ever since I obtained you from the government robot pool and started to work at the state wafer factory. Through all the working day I help make wafers to feed your ever-demanding power maw; you burn those wafers to serve me. Most of the human emotions are gone from me now. Thank God you never had any. We live the great life, Dan, we function. Why should we be cluttering the works with this Noona?" "Amoosement," grated Dan. "Foon. Loove, too. Besides I get loonesome when you're oop at the wafer factoory all day." "Dan!" I almost screamed, so surprised was I that he should speak so. "Do we not play chess or checkers every night, emotionless games that give our steel-sharp minds a chance to function? Do I not let you sit in the rolling soof-air chair when you want to? Though for the life of me I don't know why you, with your steel shell, want to. Do I not feed you your power wafers every day promptly at the hour we begin our evening? In short, Dan, are you not one of the best-cared-for robots in town?" "Need Noona!" he bellowed his reply. "Saw her inna shoop yesterday when we strooled. Saw that loovely name in raised loomps on her chest! Saw her firm hoord legs as she bent to pick up a sack, yesterday when we passed." Then he started making the gestures that always brought me to my feet. He raised up the hinged section of his chest and threatened to tear out his heart, or, more specifically, the core where the power wafers digested. "Don't Dan," I pleaded, as I always did. "That would kill you. And I need you -- need you to give my life a meaning. Or more accurately, perhaps, I require your presence to make my life's non-meaning bearable. Anyway -- " "Goo see Noona," he suggested as a kind of ultimatum while his steel fingers played with the core where the wafers digested. "Go see Noona," I promised, not knowing how else to save Dan. "Tomorrow. I'll take off work." XT ext morning I arose from my   bed that had the roko-pulse mattress with the exciting big spongy knobs and the tinglylined holes, and I went to see Dan who was standing like a steel rock, firmly planted beside the soof-air chair. I feared that he had stood all night there in a kind of trance, dreaming metal dreams of Noona. "Good morning, Dan," I said, checking his power unit. He replied, "Goob morning," in a normal voice that made me have hopes that we would not have to go see his girl friend after all. But near the end of my breakfast Dan clumped over to stand beside me. "Goo see?" he asked, letting metal fingers idly flicker up and down past the place where his chest would come open. "Yes Dan," I said, trying to smile, "a promise is a promise. And of course I want to see Noona too." "Goob. I like you." And he caused his fingers to stop making those threats. After breakfast I pushed the emergency leave button for time off from work, and the wafer factory sent up a green positivereply flare from the Time-Clock building. So we started, led by Dan. He clumped and rattled along almost at a run. He seemed entirely confident of his direction as we went past the power wafer plants, the rocket mills and many factories where machines were being whammed together by other machines at terrific pace amidst great noise. I did not remember going past these places yesterday, but Dan did not seem to be lost. And when we got to the place he sought, a shop in the big-number streets far from the main part of town, I understood. We had been there yesterday, but we had come by a different route. "No woonderin' by the river and woostin' time this time," said Dan. "I coom today by the way I like. Short." We went into a littered place where a small man sat by himself. There was something defeated in the way the arms pulled the shoulders down and trailed along the chair sides, dumping hands toward the floor. His eyes were tragic, and when he spoke it was in a voice that hurried to have done with what it had to say. "Hear noise?" We heard it, a tappity-rap and rattle sound surely locked in a closet somewhere, or maybe in a basement under us. "When you don't hear it, it'll be all over. Don't care. Did all I could. Wouldn't listen." "Who? What?" I blurted. "Noona," he cried. "Committing suicide. Now. Hammering at the locks I put on. She'll get them. Nothing can seem to stop the crazy force she's working for now. But I don't care now." "But why? What?" "Something from yesterday. Couldn't understand. Good up to then, good functional. Helped in this parts store. Helped me to prosper. I could buy more wafers. She could help me more. It was a good arrangement. Then yesterday -- Something passed in the street! "Noona!" Dan shrieked. "Don't do it. Here's loove!" And he pounded across to a place in the floor and stamped hard on the boards. A hidden door sprang up. "Don't!" Dan screamed again, and he went to his knees to peer into the dark basement hole. But the pounding continued that sounded like a hammer tapping a chisel. I could see that each tap tore at Dan's power core and almost ripped him apart. I felt sorry for Dan the Can then, but soon I admired him. For once he had made his decision he hardly wasted a tick. He leaped through the air like a dedicated being and fell several feet to the cement floor of that basement hole. I heard him hit, and it sounded like dumping scrap at tiie mill. I shuddered. When the noise of Dan's descent cleared away, the tapping noise seemed louder for a moment. Then it stopped altogether. New sounds took its place, the smallest of scratchy noises down in that basement dark, like metal sections being tenderly opened on hinges that made almost no noise. Through this were the two soft words, Danny -- Noona, said with a strange metallic tenderness. Then they came up in each others arms. The shopowner could hardly believe what he saw. His eyes became strangely bright when he saw them embrace. , Then a petty anger shond through the tragedy in them, "Worse than death!" he screamed at Noona, who definitely was a girl robot with steel ringlets to her head and roundness at places. "Worse than if you'd torn out your power wafers!" "Did doo," said Noona smiling a simperish, halfembarrassed smile out of her square, shining face. "Did too," echoed Dan smiling worse than a bridegroom as he raised his chest's hinged part. "We're soo much a part of each oother." Then I saw what they had done! They had exchanged power cores. "Well, whatta ya know!" I blurted, and the shopowner yelled, "Hell's hinges, this will kill them both." XToona of course came home  to live with Dan and me, since the shopowner said he no longer had any use for her, couldn't trust her now anyway. In the days that followed I saw how much the man was right in predicting disaster for the metal lovebirds. Noona and Dan, after a few weeks of dallying and toying with each other's metal sections and being enamored with each other's nearness, became, like almost any other married pair, bored and snappish with each other. And I, remembering my own less-thansuccessful marriage of many years ago, watched with bitter amusement as these two, with desires horribly mixed, tried to dominate one another... I knew something must soon give way. It happened one cold March evening, about six months after the nuptials of Noona and Dan. I had called eight times for Dan to come change the chair massage from businessman's come-home to home-owner's bounce-around, and he hadn't obeyed. I went after him. I met him coming from the back beige room where he and Noona had quarters; his scoop-shaped face was twitching so that it shook his eyes. "I hate hate hate her!" he screamed. "But she has noo power power oover anything noow. I'm glad." He was clutching his power core in his metal fingers, having ripped it from Noona's chest! "I'm my own can now!" "But Dan," I cried, "you can't use two! Take Noona back her power; then we'll turn her out of this house. We'll go back to our functional living. We'll be through with emotion and this silly love-and-stuff." "Noo," shrieked Dan as he ripped her power from his chest. He clapped in his own and threw hers out the window; it landed in a garbage pail. "Damn Noona!" he continued, still shrieking. "She's rooned my life. But I have looved her -- I could never stand to see her with anoother." "Let's go adjust the massage and be like old times," I suggested. So we did, after awhile. And after many weeks Dan seemed almost to forget that tragic period when he had been slave to Noona and love's sickening emotions. Now our days are spent, much the same as before Noona, among the clean-cut little victories of functional living. Eight hours I work at the power wafer factory so that I may earn enough wafers to power Dan the can for eight hours of gameplaying and care in the soof-air chair. Eight hours I sleep. And Noona just lies in the back beige room, cold, alone, without any power, waiting for some master tinkerer in robots I suppose to come and repair her. Dan and I hardly ever mention her name as we grow quietly older, so assured, so unbothered, coolly living our never changing functional routine. But sometimes when the moon shines down a certain way on the wafer factory roofs and there is a soft touch of valentine weather in a pink and peaceful time, and steel lovers sing to their steel ladies in the big entertainment panels of the wall, I see Dan get that funny look. Then I say, "Dan, you've been working too hard again, Dan; time for your vacation again, Dan." And before he can react to stop me I rush over to jerk out his power wafers -- to save him from -- well, to save him from his foolish foolish self. Next issue brings long stories by Cordwainer Smith, J. T. McIntosh and James H. Schmitz, as well as shorts by -- well, well see how many we can fit in. We think it will be a rather outstanding issue, in terms of its fiction content. But what we want to tell you about right now is not the fiction but the features. Feature one: The next Willy Ley column 'is produced at the suggestion and special request of Betsy Curtis, herself a first-rate writer. "What," she asked us recently, "are all those different kinds of things called orreries that I see in museums and shops?" We fielded the question neatly by passing it on to Willy; and the result is his upcoming column, which will tell you rather more than you thought there was to know about orreries (otherwise known as the poor man's planetarium) and their successor devices for portraying planetary orbits. Feature two: Next issue we bring back our regular book review column, an event which we have postponed until we were able to find the reviewer we liked best. We've got him now. His name is Algis Budrys. Men were dead, but they had left mourners behind... determined to track down I T Tate spewed across the gal- axy in a high crusade. Metal ships leaped from world to world and hurtled across space to farther and farther stars. Planets surrendered their ores to sky-reaching cities, built around fortress temples and supported by vast networks of technology. Then more ships were spawned, armed with incredible weapons, and sent forth in the eternal search for an enemy. In the teeming cities and aboard the questing ships, soulwrenching music was composed, epic fiction and supernal poetry wfere written, and great paintings and sculpture were developed, to be forgotten as later and nobler work was done. Science strove for the ultimate limtheir murderers I it of understanding, fought against that limit, and surged past it to limitless possibilities. But behind all the arts and sciences lay the drive of religion. And the religion was one of ancient anger and dedicated hate. The ships filled the galaxy until every world was conquered. For a time they hesitated, preparing for the great leap outward. Then the armadas sailed again, across thousands and millions of light-years toward the beckoning galaxies beyond. With each ship went the holy image of their faith and the unsated and insatiable hunger of their hate... II Hphe cat-track labored up the rough road over the crater wall, topped the last rise and began humming its way down into Aristarchus. As it dipped into the ink black of its own shadow from the sun behind, its headlights flashed on. Around it, the jagged rocky walls scintillated in a riot of reflected colors from crystal fractures that had never been dulled by wind or rain. Inside the cab, the driver's seat groaned protestingly at the robot's weight as Sam shifted his six hundred terrestrial pounds forward. Coming home was always a good time. He switched lenses in his eyes and began scanning the crater floor for the first sight of the Lunar Base Dome, though he knew it was still hidden around a twist of the trail. "You don't have to be quite so all-fired anxious to get back, Sam," Hal Norman complained. But the little selenologist was also gazing forward eagerly. "You might show some appreciation for the time I've spent answering your fool questions and trying to pound sense into your tin head. Anybody'd think you didn't like my company," he pouted humorously. Sam made the sound of a human chuckle as he had taught himself to acknowledge all the verbal nonsense men called humor. But truth compelled him to answer seriously. "I like your company very much, Hal." He had always liked the company of the men he'd met on Earth or during his many years on the Moon. Humans, he had decided long ago, were wonderful. He had enjoyed the long field trip with Hal Norman while they collected data from the automatic recorders scattered over the lunar surface. But it would still be good to get back to the dome, where the men had given him the unique privilege of joining them. There he could listen to the often inexplicable but always fascinating conversation of forty men. And there, perhaps, he could join them in their singing. Music and reading were the chief recreations of the men here. There were thousands of microbooks in the dome library, brought in a few at a time by many men over the long years. They were one of the few taboos. It was against orders for Sam to read any of them, and a man had once told him that it was to save him from unnecessary confusion. But the collection of music was not forbidden, and he was often permitted to join in their singing. All the robots had perfect pitch, of course. But only Sam had learned to sing acceptably enough to win a place in the dome. In anticipation, he began humming a chanty about the sea he had never seen. The cat-track hummed downward between the walls of the road that had been crudely bulldozed from the rubble of the crater. Then they broke out into the open, and he could see the dome and the territory around it Hal grunted in surprise. "That's odd. I hoped the supply rocket would be in. But what are those three ships doing here?" Sam cut off the headlights and switched back to wide-angle lenses. Now most of the crater was visible, until it vanished against the horizon, giving place to the blackness of the sky and the myriad colored pinpoints of the stars. Ahead lay the low dome that roofed the Base, with its biphase microwave antenna tracking the manned space platform that circled Earth. Half a mile beyond it stood three ships, bulky with exposed tanks and each carrying a huge passenger globe encased in bracing girders. They didn't look like supply rockets. Sam's eyes swept across the crater floor, almost to the horizon. There he could make out the crumpled wreck of an early ship, still surrounded by the supply capsules that had been sent on automatic control to keep the stranded crew alive until rescue could be sent. The three ships bore a striking resemblance to the one that had crashed. The only other such ships were those used in the third expedition. But they had been parked in orbit around Earth after the end of the third expedition fifty years ago. Once the Base was established, their capacity had no longer been needed, and they were inefficient for routine supply shipment and the rotation of the men stationed here. T)efore he could comment on the ships, the buzzer sounded, indicating that Base had spotted the cat-track. Sam flipped the switch and acknowledged the call. "Hi, Sam." It was the voice of Dr. Robert Smithers, the leader of Lunar Base. "Butt out, will you? I want to talk to Hal." Sam could have tuned in on the communication frequency with his own receptors, since the signal was strong enough at this distance. But he obeyed the order to avoid listening as Hal reached for the handset. There was no way to detune his audio receptors, however. He heard Hal's greeting. Then there was silence for at least a minute. Hal's face was shocked and serious when he finally spoke again. "But that's damned nonsense, Chief! Earth got over such insanity half a century ago. There hasn't been a sign of... Yes, sir... All right, sir. Thanks for not taking off without me." He hung up the handset, shaking his head. When he faced Sam, his expression was unreadable. "Full speed, Sam." "There's trouble," Sam guessed. He threw the cat-track into its top speed of thirty miles an hour, fighting and straining with the controls. Only a robot could manage the tricky machine at such a rate over the crude road, and it required his full attention. Hal's voice was strange and harsh. "We're being sent back to Earth. Big trouble, Sam. But what can you know of war and rumors of war?" "War was a dangerous form of political insanity, outlawed at the conference of #," Sam quoted from a speech that had come over the radio. "Human warfare has now become unthinkable." "Yeah. Human war." Hal made a rough sound in his throat. "But not cruel and inhuman war, it seems... Oh, hell. Stop looking so gloomy; it's not your problem." Sam decided against chuckling this time, though reference to his set, unsmiling expression was usually meant to be a form of humor. He filed the puzzling words away in his permanent memory for later consideration. The terminator was rushing across the lunar surface. It would soon be night. More than half of the near crater was already hidden in blackness, though sunlight was still reaching the Base, and the territory beyond was in glaring white light. But the undiffused shadows stretched long behind every projection in the road. Seeing was hard as they neared the dome, and all Sam's attention had to be directed to his driving. Behind him, he heard Hal getting into the moonsuit to leave the cab. Sam brought the cat-track to a halt to let Hal out at the entrance to the sealed underground hemisphere of lunar rock that was the true dome -- The light upper structure was simply a shield against the heat of the sun. He drove the machine under that and shut off the motor. As he emerged from the airlock, air gushed out of small cavities of his body and made a haze of glittering crystals that fell slowly to the surface. But he felt no discomfort. There was only the faint click as a pressure sensitive piezzo-electric switch activated a relay inside his torso. That switch was designed as an emergency measure, to turn his power on if there should be a puncture of the dome wh:?e he was inactivated, and now it merely indicated the pressure drop. Maybe one of the reasons the men liked having him inside was the existence of that switch, since it could save their lives -- though he hoped there were other explanations. There had been no room in the Mark Three robots for such devices. He saw some of the Mark Threes waiting just beyond the entrance as he approached. There were tracks in the lunar dust leading to the space ships, but whatever ferrying they had done was obviously finished, and they were merely standing in readiness. They were totally unlike him. S am bulked over the tiny black robots. One of them, directly in his path, slipped under his raised arm to make room for him, moving with a light gracefulness that he couldn't approximate. He was bulky and mechanical, designed only for fuhction, in the early days when men needed help on the Moon. The Mark Threes were almost childlike, under their dark enamel, and their size and weight had been pared down to less than that of a man. There had' been thirty of the model originally, but accidents had left only a few more than twenty. And of the original Mark Ones, only Sam was still functioning. "When dc we leave?" he called to one of the little robots over the radio circuit. The black head turned slowly toward him. "We do not know. The men did not tell us." "Didn't you ask them?" he called. But he had no need of their denial. They had not been told to ask. They were still unformed, less than five years old, and their thoughts were tied to the education given by the computers in the creche. They lacked more than twenty years of his intimate association with men. But sometimes he wondered whether they would ever learn enough, or whether they had been too strongly repressed in training. Men were afraid of robots back on Earth, as Hal Norman had once told him, which was why they were still being used only on the Moon. He turned away from them and went down the entrance to the inner dome. The entrance led to the great community room, and the men were all gathered there, wearing moonsuits. They were arguing with Hal as he began emerging from NX the lock, but at sight of Sam the words were cut off. He stared about in the silence, feeling suddenly awkward. "Hello, Sam," Dr. Smithers said finally. He was a tall, spare man of barely thirty, but seven years of responsibility here had etched deep lines into his face and put gray in his mustache, though his other hair was still jet black. "All right, Hal. Your things are on the ship. I cut it fine waiting for you, so we're leaving at once. No more arguments. Get out there!" "Go to hell!" Hal told him. "I don't desert my friends." Other men began moving out. Sam stepped aside to let them pass, but they seemed to avoid looking at him. Smithers sighed wearily. "Hal, I can't argue this with you. You'll go if I have to chain you. Do you think I like this? But we're under military orders now. They're going crazy back there. They didn't find out about the expected attack until a week ago, as near as I can learn, but they've already canceled space. Damn it, I can't take him! We're at the ragged limit of available lift now, and he represents six hundred pounds of mass -- more than four of the others," he raised his arms slightly. Hal gestured sharply toward the outside. "Then leave four of those behind. He's worth more than the whole lot of them." "Yeah. He is. But my orders specify that all men and the maximum possible number of robots must be returned." Smithers twisted his lips savagely and suddenly turned to face the robot. "Sam, I'll give it to you straight. I can't take you with us. We have to leave you here alone. I'm sorry, but that's how it has to be." "You won't be alone, Sam," Hal Norman said. "I'm staying." Sam stood silently for a moment, letting it register. His circuits found it hard to integrate. He had never thought of being separated from these men who had been his life. Going back to Earth had been easy to accept; he'd gone back there once before. Little hopes and future-pictures he hadn't known were in his mind began to appear. But with those came memories of Hal Norman's expressed hopes and dreams. The man had showed Sam a picture of his future wife and tried to describe all that such a creature meant to a man. He'd spoken of green fields and the sea. He'd raved about Earth too often during the days they were together. Sam moved forward toward Hal. The man saw him coming and began to back away, but he was no match for the robot. Sam held his arms and closed the moonsuit, then gathered the man up carefully. Hal was struggling, but it did no good against Sam's determination. "All right, Dr. Smithers. We can go now," Sam told the Chief. r T"hey were the last to leave the dome. The little black robots were already marching across the surface, with the men straggling along behind them. Smithers fell into step with Sam, moving as if the burden was on his back instead of in the arms of the robot. Hal had ceased struggling. He lay outwardly quiet; but through the suit, Sam's body receptors picked up sounds that he had heard only twice before on occasions he tried not to remember. They were the sounds of a man trying to control his weeping. Half way to the ships, faint words came over the radio. "Put me down, Sam. I'll go quietly." Sam obeyed, and the three moved on together. Smithers' hand touched Sam's shoulder, and the man's words came through his suit. "Thanks, Sam. Handling Hal was a favor I no longer had the right to ask erf you. Well, it looks as if you're going to have a lot of time to kill. And we..." He didn't finish the thought. Sam mulled over the words he could understand, and even they made no sense. With the men all gone, there would be no spare time. There would be more than he could possibly find time to accomplish. The great solar observatory across the crater would need tending, the selenographs would have to be checked and at least the routine reports from all instruments would have to be sent off weekly. He should have had hours of instructions, but now it looked as if there would be no time for more than hasty orders. By the time the three reached the nearest ship, the other men and the little robots were all aboard. The Chief motioned Hal up the ramp. For a moment the younger man hesitated. He turned toward Sam, started to make a motion, and then swung away and dashed into the ship, his shoulders shaking convulsively. Smithers still stood after the other had disappeared. The radio brought the sound of a sigh, before the man moved. But there were no words. "You haven't given me my orders," Sam reminded him. Smithers shook his head, as if coming out of some deeper thoughts ef his own. His lips twitched into what might have been a smile. "No, Sam. There are no orders. All orders, past. present or future -- all are canceled. There is no more work. Space is finished!" He put his foot on the ramp and turned partly away from Sam. Then abruptly he swung back. "Good-by, Sam," he said thickly. His right hand lifted in a brief gesture. "Don't forget the books!" A moment later, he was through the entrance to the ship. The ramp was drawn in after him, and the great outer seal of the rocket ship began to close. Ill Cam ran back to the en trance to the dome, to avoid the blast. As he ran, he realized slowly the meaning of what Smithers had said. No orders! There hadn't even been orders left for him to come back here, back to the place men had left. Yet his feet went on moving, as if acting on some strange orders of their own. The edge of darkness had touched the dome now, leaving the rocket standing in the last light as he turned back. He Watched the takeoff of the three heavily laden ships. They staggered up slowly on great tails of flame. They rose on sharper jets until they were above the crater walls and against the black of space, carrying the men toward the rendezvous with Earth's orbital station. Sam watched until they were beyond the range of his strongest vision. Then, without orders or knowledge of why he acted, he turned into the dome. It was silent and empty around him. He stared at the clock on the wall and at the calendar that they had kept marked off. He hadn't found how long they would be gone. But Smithers' words gave a vague answer -- he would have a lot of time to kill. That could mean anywhere from one month to most of a year, judging by the application of similar phrases in the past. He looked at the shelves filled with microbooks for a few moments. Then he went outside, to stare up at the Earth in the sky above him. There were spots of light in the dark areas that he knew to be the cities of men. There were men there, a quarter of a must be speech and man-laughter and singing. He stood there a long time, staring upwards. Finally he went back inside, to tidy up the mess the men had made in their hasty leaving. He folded the few spare clothes and put them away, cleaned the cooking equipment and straightened up as best he could. Hal had left the picture of the female man about whom he'd spoken so often, and Sam stared at it, trying again to understand. At last, he put it carefully into a drawer, closing it away from view. The microbooks Hal had liked to keep near him were in the same drawer, and they reminded Sam of Smithers' last words. "Don't forget the books!" The words seemed needless, since Sam could never forget unless ordered to do so. And the Chief had said there were no orders. There wasn't even an order against reading the books now. And that, Sam realized, might have been what Smithers was indicating to him in those final words. The second day after the takeoff of the ship, Sam was watching the dark areas of Earth again when some of them grew suddenly brighter. New spots of brightness rose and decayed during the hours he watched. They were far brighter than any city should have been. Other spots glowed where no cities had been before. But eventually, they all faded. After that, there were no bright areas at all. As Earth turned slowly, he saw that all the cities on Earth were now dark. It was a mystery for which he had no explanation. He went inside to try the radio that brought news and entertainment from the relay on the orbital station, but no signal was coming through. He debated calling them, but initiating such a call was reserved for Smithers. And he was gone. He was outside again, staring at Earth the next time the familiar spots that should have been cities swam into the darkened side of Earth. There were still no spots of lights. Even with the small telescope used for the infrequent observations of Earth, he could detect no sign of the cities. There was only the hint of a dull glow in a few places, too diffuse to be from normal lights. And the radio was silent. T T e paced about, trying to force his eyes to see what was not there to see. Men had to be there! And the lights of their cities would be the proof of it -- the assurance that men were still talking and making what they called jokes and singing, even if they were beyond his hearing. Now suddenly, he needed that proof, and there was no evidence! It was as if all men had disappeared with the going of the few from the Moon! Through all the fifth day, he waited before the radio with the gain turned up to its maximum. The men who had left here should have arrived at their destination now. He knew there was no reason to expect such a call; men were not obligated to report to a robot, as they would have reported to other men. But his brain circuits had been filled with odd future-pictures that drove him to the set and kept him there for long hours after he knew there would be no signal for him. Finally, he knew there would be no call. He got up and went into the empty room where the men had spent so much of their time. Eventually his pacing led him to the music player. They had let him use it at times, and he turned to it now, to fill the emptiness of the room and of his mind with sound. He found a tape that was one of his favorites and threaded it. But when the final chorus of Beethoven's Ninth reached its end, the dome seemed more empty and silent than ever. He found another tape, without voices this time. And that was followed by another. It helped a little, but it was not enough. It was then that he turned to the books, taking one at random. It was something about Mars, by a human named Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he started to put it back. He had already learned enough about astronomy from the education machine. But at last he threaded it into the microreader and sat down to read. It started well enough, and it was about some strange kind of man, not about astronomy. But then Sam made a strange sound, only slowly realizing that he had imitated the groan of a man for the first time in his existence. It was all madness! He knew men had never reached Mars -- and couldn't reach this Mars, because the planet was totally unlike what he knew existed. It must be some strange form of human humor. Or else there were men unlike any he had known and facts that had been kept from him. The latter seemed more probable. He struggled through it, to groan again when it ended and he still didn't know what had happened to the strange female man who was a princess and who laid highly impossible eggs. But by then he had begun to like John Carter. He wanted to read more. He was confused -- but even more curious than puzzled. Eventually, he found the whole series and read them all. It was much later that one of the books solved some of the puzzle for him. There was a small note before the book really began: This is a work of speculative fiction; any resemblance to present-day persons or events is entirely coincidental. He looked up fiction in the dictionary he had seen the men use and felt better afterwards. It wasn't quite like humor, but it wasn't fact, either. It was a game of some kind, where the rules of life were all changed about in idiosyncratic ways. The writer might pretend that men liked to kill each other or were afraid of women, or some other ridiculous idea; then he tried to show what might happen. It was obviously taboo to pretend about real people and events, though some of the books had stories that used names and backgrounds that had the same names as those in reality. The best fiction of all sometimes looked like books of fact, if the writer was clever enough. "History" was mostly that. There was a whole imaginary world called Rome, for instance. It was fortunate that Sam had been taught the simple facts of man's progress by the education machine before reading such books. Men, it was true, had sometimes been violent, but not when they understood all the facts or could help it. I n the end he evolved a simple classification. If a book made him think hard and forced him to strain to follow it, it was fact; if it made him read faster and think less as he went through it, it was fiction. There was one book that was hardest of all to classify. It was an old book, written before men had gone out into space. Yet it was full of carefully documented and related facts about an invasion of flying saucers from far in space. Eventually he was forced to decide from the internal evidence that it was fact; but it left him disturbed and unhappyHal Norman had referred to inhuman war, and Dr. Smithers had mentioned an attack. Could it be that the strange ships from somewhere had struck Earth? lights over the cities, so much like the great ray weapons described in some of the fiction about space war. Sometimes there were elements of truth even in fiction. There had been a book about men who went back in time and fought totally impossible monsters -- and then he had discovered that there really had been dinosaurs of that size and kind. There was a book about those who spoke for Boskone, and puzzling suggestions that the evil men who seemed to have existed were agents of that Boskone, or of the Eich. It would at least explain why the probably fictional Hitler could be treated as fact, in books that otherwise did not seem to be fiction. If invaders had come in great ships to fight against Earth, it might take men longer than Sam cared to think about to fight them off. If there were flying saucers or ships of the Eich attacking Earth, some of his men might never come back at all! And there was nothing Sam could do here to help them. He went outside to stare at the sky. Earth still showed no sign of cities. They must be blacked out, as they would be if flying saucers were in their skies. He searched the space over the Moon, but he could find no strange craft. Then he went back inside to read through the microbooks again. It was poetry that somehow finally shoved the worry from his mind. He had tried poetry before, and given up, unable to follow it. But this time he made a discovery. He tried reading it aloud, until it began to beat at him and force its rhythm on him. He was reading Swinburne's Hymn of Man, attracted by the title, and suddenly the words and something besides began to sing their way into his deepest mind. He went back over four lines again and again, until they were music, or all that music had tried to say and had failed: " In the gray beginning of things that began, "The word of the earth in the ears of the world, was it God? was it man?" Sam went up and down the dome for most of that day, chanting to himself that the word of the earth in the ears of the world was man! Then he turned back to other poetry. None quite equaled that one experience, but most of it stirred his circuits in strange ways. A book of limericks even surprised him twice to the point where he chuckled, without realizing that he had never done that spontaneously before. There were slightly over four thousand volumes in the little library, including the technical books. He timed them carefully, stretching them by rereading his favorites, until he finished the last at exactly midnight on the eve of the takeoff anniversary. The next twenty-four hours he spent outside the dome, watching the sky and staring at Earth, while his radio receptors scanned all the frequencies. It had been a lot of time already killed. But there was no signal, and no rocket ship blasted down, bringing back the men. At midnight he gave a sighing sound and went back inside the dome. In the technical section. be unlocked the controls for the atomic generator and turned it down to its lowest idling rate. He came back, turning the now dim lights off as he moved. In the main room, he put his favorite tape on the player and the copy of Swinburne in the microreader. But he did not turn them on. Instead, he dropped his heavy body quietly onto the floor before the entrance, where the men would be sure to see him when they finally returned. Then one hand reached up firmly, and he turned himself off. IV Cam's eyes turned toward the entrance as consciousness snapped on again. There was no sign of men there. He stood up, staring about the dome, then hastened outside to stare across the floor of the crater. It lay bare, except for the old wrecked rocket ship. Men had not come back. Inside again, he looked for something that might have fallen and hit his switch. The switch itself was still in the off position, however. And when he turned on the tape player, no sound came. It was confirmation enough. Something had happened to the air in the dome, and his internal switch had gone into operation to turn him on automatically. A few minutes later he found the hole. A meteoroid the size of an egg must have hit the surface above. It had struck with enough force to blast a tiny craterlet almost completely through the dome, and internal pressure had done the rest He secured patching material and began automatically making the repairs. There was still more than enough air in the tanks to fill the dome again. Sam sighed as the first whisper of sound reached him from the tape player. He flipped his switch back to on position before the rising pressure negated the emergency circuit. He still had to get back to the entrance to resume his vigil. It had simply been bad luck that had aroused him before the men could return. He moved back through the dome, hardly looking. But his eyes were open, and his mind gradually began to add the evidence. There was no way to tell how long he had been unconscious; he had no feeling of any time. But there was dust over everything -- dust that had been disturbed by the outrushing air, but that had still patina-plated itself on metal firmly enough to remain. And some of the metal showed traces of corrosion. That must have taken years! He stopped abruptly, checking his battery power. The cobaltplatinum cell had been fully charged when he lay down. Now it was at less than half charge. Such batteries had an extremely slow leakage. Even allowing for residual conductance through his circuits, it would have taken at least thirty years for such a loss! Thirty years! And the men had not come back.  groan came to his ears, and he turned quickly. But it had only been his own voice. And now he began shouting. He was still trying to shout in the airless void as he reached the surface. He caught himself, bracing his back against the dome as his balance circuits reacted to some wild impulse from his brain. Men would never desert him. They had to come back to the Moon to finish their work, and the first thing they would do would be to find him. Men couldn't just leave him there! Only in the wild fiction could that happen, and even there only the postulated evil men would do 'such a thing. His men would never dream of it! He stared up at Earth. The dome was in night again, and Earth was a great orb in the sky, glowing blue and white, with touches of brown in a few places. He saw the outline of continents through the cloud cover, and reorganized the great cities that must lie within the thin darkened area. There should have been lights visible there, even against the contrast of brighter Earthlight. But there was no light. He sighed soundlessly again, and now he felt himself relaxing. The attackers must still be hovering there! The dangerous Ufothings from space. Men were still embattled and unable to return to him. Thirty years of that for them, and here he was losing balance over what had been only a year of his conscious time! He faced the worst of possibilities more calmly now. He even forced himself to admit that men might have been so badly crippled by the war that they could not return to him -- perhaps not for more time than he could think of. Smithers had said they were abandoning space, at a time when the attack had not yet come. How long would it take to recover and regain their lost territory? He went back into the dome, but the radio was silent. Hesitantly, he initiated a call to the orbital station. After half an hour, he gave up. The men there, if men were still there, must be keeping strict radio silence. "All right," he said slowly into the silence of the dome. "All right, face it. Men aren't coming back for a robot. Ever!" It was a speech out of the fiction he had read, rather than out of rationality. But somehow saying it loudly made it easier to face. Men could not come to him. He wasn't that valuable to them. He shook his head over that, remembering the time he had been taken back to Earth after twenty years out of the creche and on the Moon. The Mark One robots had all been destroyed in the accidents and difficulties of getting the Base established, except for Sam. Supposedly better Mark Two robots were sent to replace them, but they had been beset by some circuit flaws that made them more prone to accident and less useful than the first models. More than a hundred had been sent in all -- and none had remained. It was then they called Sam back to study him. nphere, deep in the securityhidden underground robot development workshops, he had been tested in every way they knew to help them in designing the Mark Three robots. And there old Stephen DeMatre had interviewed him for three whole days. At the end of that time, the man who had first introduced him to his place with men had put a hand on his metal shoulder and smiled at him. "You're unique, Sam," he'd said. "A lucky combination of all the wild guesses we used in making each Mark One individually, as well as some unique conditioning among that first Base staff. We don't dare duplicate you yet, but some day the circuit control computer is going to want to get your pattern in full for later brains. So take good care of yourself. I'd keep you here, but... You take care of yourself, Sam. You hear me?" Sam had nodded. "Yes, sir. Do you mean you can make other brains exactly like mine?" "Technically, the control computer can duplicate your design," DeMatre had answered. "It won't be just like your brain -- too many random factors in any really advanced mechanical mind unit -- but with similar capabilities. That's why you're worth more money than this whole project without you. You're worth quite a few million dollars, and it's up to you to see valuable property like that isn't destroyed. Right, Sam?" Sam had agreed and been shipped back to the Moon, along with the first of the Mark Three robots. And maybe his trip back had been of some use, since the new models worked as well as their limitations permitted. They were far better than the preceding models. Maybe he wasn't valuable enough to men for them to come for him now. But by DeMatre's own words, he was one of their most valuable possessions. If it was up to him to see that he wasn't destroyed, then it was up to him also to see that he wasn't lost to men. If they couldn't come for him, he had to go to them. The question was: How? He couldn't project himself by mind power like John Carter. He had to have a rocket! With the thought, he went dashing out through the entrance and heading toward the old wreck. It stood exactly as it had after the landing that had ruined it, with half its hull plating ripped off and most of its rocket motors broken. It could never be flown again. Nor could the old supply capsules. They had burned out their tubes in getting here, being of minimum construction. There wasn't even room inside one for him. Sam considered it, making measurements and doing the hardest thinking of his exisence. Without the long study of all the technical manuals of the dome library, he could never have found an answer. But eventually he nodded. A motor from the big shop could be fitted to a capsule. It would be barely strong enough. But the plating could be removed to lighten the little ship; Sam needed no protection from space. And the automatic guidance system could be removed to make enough room for him. He could operate it manually, since his reaction and integrating times were faster than that of even the system. Fuel would be a problem, though there was enough oxygen in the dome storage tanks. It would have to be hydrogen, since he could find rocks from which that could be released by the power of the generator. Fortunately, lunar gravity was easier to escape than that of Earth. He went back to the dome and found paper and pencil. He was humming softly to himself as he began laying out his plan. It wasn't easy. He might not be skilled enough to pilot the strange craft to the station. And it would take a great deal of time. But Sam was going to the men who wouldn't come to him! V I t takes experience to turn engineering theory into practice. Almost three years had passed since Sam's awakening before the orbital station swam slowly into view before him. And the erratic takeoff and flight had been one that no human body could have stood. But now he sighted on the huge metal doughnut before him, estimating its orbit carefully. There were only a few gallons of fuel remaining in the tanks behind him, and he had to reach the landing net at the first try. His first calculations seemed wrong. He glanced down at the huge orb of Earth and flipped sun filters over his eyes. Something was wrong. The station was not holding its bottom pointed exactly at the center of Earth as it should have done; it was turning very slowly, and even its spin was uneven, as if the water used to balance it against wobbling had not been distributed properly. Beside it, the little ferry ship used between station and ships from Earth was jerking slightly on the silicone-plastic line that held it. Sam felt an unpleasant stirring in his chest where most of his brain circuits lay. But he forced it down and computed his blast for all the factors. He had learned something of the behavior of his capsule during the minutes of takeoff and the later approach to the station. His fingers moved delicately, and fuel metered out to the cranky little motor. It was not a perfect match, but he managed to catch himself in the net around the entrance to the hub. He pulled himself free, as the capsule drifted off, and began scrambling up to the lock. A moment later, he was standing in the weightlessness of the receiving section. And from the sounds of his feet, there was still air in the station. He froze motionless as he let himself realize he had made it. Then he began looking for the men who should have seen his approach and be coming to question him. There was no sound of steps or of any other activity, except for his own movements. Nor was there any light from the bulbs above him. The only illumination was from a thick quarts port that faced directly into the sun. Sam cut on the lamp built into his chest, and began sweeping the sections of the hub with its light. Dust had formed a patina here, too. He sighed softly into the air. Then he moved toward the outer sections, his step determined. Half-way down the tube that ran from the hub to the outer hull, Sam stopped and cut off his light. Ahead of him there was a glow! Lights were still burning! T Te let out a yell to call the men and began running, adjusting for the increasing feeling of weight as he moved outward. Then he was under the bulb. He stared up at it -- a single bulb burning among several others that were black, though they were on the same circuit. How long did it take for these bulbs to burn out? Years surely, and probably decades. Yet most of the station was in darkness, though there was still power from the atomic generator. He found a few other bulbs burning in the outer station, but not many. The great reception and recreation room was empty. Beyond that, the offices were mostly open and vacant. Some held a litter of paper and other stuff, as if someone had gone through carelessly, not bothering to put anything back in place. The living section with its tiny sleeping cubicles was worse. Some of the rooms were simply bare, but others were in complete disorder. Four showed signs of long occupancy, with the sleeping nets worn almost through and not replaced. But nothing showed how recently they had been left. He went through another section devoted to station machinery and came to a big room that was apparently now used for storage. Sam had seen a plan of the station in one of the older books in the dome. He placed this room as one designed as a storage for hydrogen bombs once. But that had been from the pre-civilized days of men, and the bombs had been dismantled and destroyed more than sixty years before. It was in the hydroponics room that he was forced to face the truth. The plants there had been the means of replacing the oxygen in the air for the men, and now the tanks were dry and the vegetation had been dead so long that only dessicated stalks remained. There could be no men here. He didn't need the sight of the bare food section for confirmation. Some men had stayed here until the food was gone before they left the untended plants to die. It must have been many years ago that they had abandoned the station. Sam shook his head in anger  at himself. He should have guessed it when he saw that there were none of the winged rocket ships waiting outside the station. So long as men were here, they would have kept some means for return to Earth. The observatory was dark, but there was still power for the electronic telescope. The screen lighted at his touch, showing only empty space. He had to wait nearly two hours before the slow tumble of the station brought Earth into full view. Most of it was in daylight, and there was only a thin cloud cover. Once a thousand cities could have been scanned plainly from here. When seeing was best, even streams of moving cars could be seen. But now there were no cities and no signs of movement! Sam emitted a harsh gasping sound as he scanned the continent of North America. He had seen pictures of New York, Chicago and several other city complexes from this view. Now there was only dark ruin showing where they had been. It came to him with an almost physical human beings had died in those wrecks of cities. There were still smaller towns where he could make out the pattern of houses. But there was no movement, even there. He cut power from the telescope with an angry flick of his finger, trying to blot the things he had seen from his memory. A moment later, he had power on again and was hunting down roadways and rivers for signs of movement. But there was no evidence of man. And all of the ruins looked old and weathered, as if there had been no man to fight on for a great many years. He sagged against the telescope, his mind filled with pictures he could not control. Great ships ravening out of space, carrying savage alien monsters and bringing planet-wrecking rays against Earth. There had been no Lens, no miracle to save Earth. There had been only the ruin of all man's achievements. And man had been gone before Sam had finished his first year of waiting. T T e shook off his imaginings by force of will. There had been men here on the station. They must have left some records. He moved rapidly away from the observatory, hunting for the communications section. It was in worse shape than most other places when he found it. It looked as if some man had deliberately tried to wreck the machinery. A hammer lay tangled in a maze of ruin that must once have been the main receiver. There was something that looked like dried blood on a metal cabinet, with a dent that might have fitted a human fist. The floor was littered with tape that should have held a record of all the communications received and sent, and the drive capstan on the tape player was bent into uselessness. Sam lifted a section of tape and placed it in the slot that gave his face a sad caricature of a mouth. The tape sensors moved into place, and he began scanning the bit of plastic. It was blank, probably wiped of any message by time and the unshielded transformer that was still humming below the contnpl panel. Most of the tape cabinet was empty, and there was nothing on tapes within. Sam ripped open drawers, hunting for some evidence. He finally found a single tape in the cabinet dented by a fistprint, lying at the back with the reel broken as if it had been hurled savagely into the drawer. Most of the impression on the tape was a garble of static; stray fields had gotten to it, even through the metal of the cabinet. But towards the end, a few words could barely be picked out from the noise... test chambers here away from the blast... Thought we'd made it -- a starving... went mad. Must have been a nerve aerosol, but it didn't settle as... Mad. Everywhere. Southern hemisphere, too. Your men who came down here didn't have a chance... Took a chance after I heard your broadcasts, but finding a transmitter was diffi... Weeks. Now I'm the last survivor. I must be. For God's sake, stay where you are! Don't... The noise grew worse then, totally ruining intelligibility. Sam caught bits of what might have been sentences, but they made no sense to him; they seemed to be pure gibberish. Then suddenly a small section of the tape against the hub became almost clear. The voice was high-pitched now, and overmodulated, as if the words had been too loud to be carried by the transmitter. There was a strange, unpleasant quality that Sam had never heard in a human voice before... all shiny and bright. But it couldn't fool me. I knew it was one of them! They're waiting up there, waiting for me to come out. They want to eat my soul. They're clever now, they won't let me see them. But when I turn my back, I can feel... The tape came to an end. Sam could make no sense of it, though he replayed it all again in hopes of finding some other clue. He gave up and reached down to shut off the power in the transformer. It was amazing that the wreckage hadn't already blown all the fuses for this section. He groped for the switch and flipped it, just as his eyes spotted something under the transformer shelf. It was a fountain pen, gold and black enamel. Sam had seen one like it countless times, and now he turned it over in his hands, to see familiar lettering engraved the initials of Dr. Smithers, and the pen could only have been his. He'd been one of those who had reached the station, probably one who had waited there to receive that strange message from Earth. The Moon ships had made it safely, and Smithers had stayed on here until the food was gone. Then he must have returned to Earth where the tape indicated at least one man still survived, after the attack was over. The telescope had showed no sign of men. But if there were only a few men left on the immense face of the planet below, the chance of finding any evidence of them was too slight to determine. The search must be made from the surface of Earth, not from this useless station in the sky. I n theory, getting back to Earth from the station wasn't too difficult. A small retro-thrust from a rocket could slow its speed and change its orbit enough to bring it down to the atmosphere. Then any winged craft with shallow enough an angle of glide could be maneuvered down slowly to avoid burning from the friction of the air. There was more than enough sheet metal in the sheathing of the station to provide modifications to the little ferry, and there were books that showed most details of the design of the regular landing craft. There was even enough fuel; the emergency tanks in the station were half filled with the monopropellant suited for the little rocket motor in the ferry. Sam had allowed himself perhaps a month to complete the task. But at the end of that time, he was swearing, using unprofane but colorful words he had learned from a score of historical novels. By then he was beginning to realize that the gap between theory and practice was enormous. He would be lucky to finish his work in a year, and then the results would be crude and uncertain. The sheet metal was already all work-hardened, and there was no annealing oven to prepare it for reshaping. There was no press or large sheet metal brake in the tiny shop provided in the station. Even the welders were designed only for small repair. No transformer was suitable for constructing a larger welder, and he was forced to rewind one of the power cores, hoping that it would carry the amperage he needed. Tt took two weeks of hard work to draw in the ferry, tie it down firmly to the hub against the wobbling of the station, and construct a crude scaffolding around it. Then he discovered that the hub was in the shadow of the station too much of the time, making metal there brittle with cold. The whole job had to be undone, the ferry moved to the top of the station and the entire scaffolding rebuilt. The framework for his wings, controls and nose cone had to be built up by welding together a network of small plumbing pipes; they were too heavy and he was forced to build another framework through the walls of the ferry and across most of the small cabin. It left him barely room for himself. Then he discovered by bitter trial that there was no way to form the sheet metal around the frame without so much welding that air turbulence would have made atmospheric maneuvering quite impossible. He finally was forced to hand form his wing covering on a crude mold built on the main deck of the station, fighting to force the sheets into their proper curves by repeated careful hammering. When finally finished, they were too large to move through the halls, and he was forced to cut a new path out through the station. It was made possible only because he had no need of air to breathe. Even the fuel turned out to be a problem. Thirty years of sitting in the tanks had started a slow process that resulted in small tarry filaments throughout. Pint by slow pint, it had to be filtered and refiltered until it was clear enough to pass through the tiny nozzle of the injector on the motor. By then he knew it would have been simpler to centrifuge it. But at last it was done. VI Qurprisingly, the modified  ferry behaved far better than Sam had dared to hope. It heated badly at the first touches of atmosphere, but the temperature remained within the limits he and the craft could stand. He learned slowly to control the descent to a glide neither too shallow for stability nor too steep to avoid overheating. By the time he was down to thirty miles above the surface, he was almost pleased with the way it handled. He had set his course to reach the underground creche that had been his home at awakening and during the first three years of his education, before they sent him to the Moon. It was the only home he knew on Earth. Now he saw that he could never make it. The first fifteen minutes in the upper layers of atmosphere had been at too steep a glide angle, and he could never reach far inland. He might even have trouble reaching the shore at all, he realized; when the clouds thinned, he could see nothing but ocean under him. He opened the rocket motor behind him gently, letting its thrust raise his speed to the highest his little craft could take at this altitude. But there was too little fuel left to help much. It might have given him an extra twenty miles of glide, but not more. Sam considered the prospects of landing in the water with grim foreboding. He could exist in it for a while, even at fair depths. If he landed near the shore, he might work his way out. But within a limited period of time, the water would penetrate through his body to some of the vital wiring. Once that was shorted, he would cease to exist. He came down under the clouds, fighting for every inch of altitude. Then, far ahead, he could see the shore. There were no islands here, so it had to be the mainland. Once there, he "could reach the creche in a single day. He passed over the shoreline at a height of five hundred feet There was a short stretch of sand, some woods, and then a long expanse of green that must be grass. He eased the control forward, then back again. The little ship came skimming down at two hundred miles an hour. Its skids touched the surface, and it bounced upwards. Sam fought the controls to keep it from nosing over. Again it touched, jerking with deceleration. This time it seemed to have struck right. Then a hummock of ground caught against one skid. The craft slithered sideways and flipped over. Sam braced himself as the ship began coming to pieces around him. IT e pulled himself out, star- ing at the wreckage. It was a shame that it was ruined, he thought. But it couldn't be made as strong as he was and still glide through the air. He turned to study the world around him. The grass was kneehigh, moving gently in the wind. Beyond it lay woods. Sam had seen only pictures of trees like that before. He moved toward them, noticing the thickness of the underbrush around them. Below them, the dirt was dark and moist. He lifted a pinch to his face, moving his smell receptors forward in his mouth slit. It was a rich smell, richer than the stuff in the hydroponic tanks. He lifted his head to look for the birds he expected, but he could see no sign of them. There were only insects, buzzing and humming. The sun had already set, he noticed. Yet it was not yet dark. There was a paling of the light, and a soft diffusion. He shook his head. Above him, tiny twinkling spots began to appear. He had read that stars twinkled, but he had thought it only fiction. He had never been under the open sky of Earth before. Then a soft murmur of sound reached him. He started away, to be drawn back to it. Slowly he realized it was a sound like the description of that heard near the sea. He had never seen an ocean, either. And now one lay no more than a mile away. He stumbled through the woods in the growing darkness. For some reason, he was reluctant to turn on his light. Eventually he learned to make his way through the brush and around the trees. The sound grew louder as he progressed. It was dark when he reached the seashore, but there was a hint of faint light to the east. As he watched, it increased. A pale white arc appeared over the horizon and grew to a large circle. The Moon, he realized finally. The waves rose and fell, booming into surf. And far out across the sea, the Moon seemed to ride on the waves, casting a silver road of light over the water. Sam had read the word. Now for the first time, he found an understanding of it. This was Beauty. He sighed as he heaved himself from the sand and began heading along the shore in search of a road that would take him westward. No wonder men wanted to come back to defend a world where something like this could be seen. The moon rose higher as he moved on, its light now bright enough to give him clear vision. He came over a small rise in the ground and spotted what seemed to be a road beyond it. Beside the road was a house. It was dark and quiet, but he swung aside, going through a copse of woods to reach it and search for any evidence of humanity. The windows were mostly broken he saw as he approached. And weeds had grown up around it. There was a detached building beside it that held a small car, by what he could see through the single dusty window. He skirted that and reached the door of the house; it opened at his touch, its hinges protesting rustily. Inside, the moonlight shone through the broken windows on a jumble of furniture that was overturned and scattered in no order Sam could see. And there were other things -- white things that lay sprawled about on the floor. IT e recognized them from  the pictures in the books -- skeletons of human beings. Two small skeletons were tangled in one comer with their skulls bashed in. A male skeleton lay near them, with the rusty shape of a knife shoved through a scrap of clothing between two ribs. There was a revolver near one hand. Across the room, a female skeleton was a jumbled pile of bones, with a small hole in the skull that could have come from a bullet. Sam backed out of the room. He knew the meaning of another word now. He had seen Madness. Men had learned to build good machines. The car motor barely turned over after Sam had figured out the controls, but it caught and began running with only a slight sputtering. The tires were slightly soft, but they took the bumps of the rutted little rail. Later, when Sam found a better road, they lasted under he punishment of high speed. Most of the road was clear. There were few vehicles along its way, and most of those seemed to have drifted to the shoulder before they stopped or crashed. The sun was just rising when Sam located the place where the factory and warehouse had served as a legitimate cover for the secret underground robot project. Fire and weather had left only gutted ruins and rusty things that had once been machines. But the section that housed the creche entrance now stood apart from the rest, almost unharmed. Sam moved into it and to the metal door openly concealed among other such doors. He should probably not have known the combination, but men were often careless among robots. He had been curious enough to note the details, and Sam did not forget. He bent to what seemed to be an ornamental grille and called out a series of numbers. The door seemed to stick a little, but then it moved aside. Beyond lay the elevator, and that operated smoothly at the combination he punched. Power was still on, at least. There was no light, but the bulbs sprang into life as he found a switch. He called out once, but he no longer expected to find men so easily. The place had the feel of abandonment. And while it could have protected its workers from almost anything, there had been only enough food and water stocked here for two weeks. There were a few signs that it had been used for a shelter, but most of it was still in very good order. He moved past offices and laboratories toward the back. The real creche, with its playrooms and learning devices was empty, he saw. No robots had been receiving postawakening training. Sam was not surprised. Most of the work here had been devoted to research or the possibilities of robots. Actual construction was only a necessary sideline. Usually the brain complexes had been created and tested without bodies, and then extinguished before there had been a full awakening. He started toward the educator computer out of his old habits. But it was only a machine that had programmed his progress from prepared tapes and memory circuits. It could not help him now. Beyond the creche lay the heart of the whole affair. Here the brain complexes were assembled from components according to esoteric calculations. This was work that required a computer that was itself intelligent to some extent. It had to make sense out of the desirable options given it by men, then form the brain paths needed. either during construction or during the initial period before awakening. Everything that Sam had been before awakening had come from this. That pattern would still be recorded, along with what the great computer had learned of him during his return here five years before men abandoned the Moon. Cam moved toward the ma# chine, gazing in surprise at the amount of work lying about. There were boxes of robot bodies crammed into every storage space. They could never have been assembled in such numbers here during the period he remembered. And beyond lay shelves jammed with the components for the brain complexes. With such supplies, enough robots could be made to supply the Lunar Base needs for generations. The computer itself was largely hidden far below, but its panel came to life at his touch. It waited. "This is Robot Ninety-Three, Mark One," Sam said. "You have authorization on file." The authorization from Dr. DeMatre should have been canceled. But the machine did not switch on alarm circuits. A thin cable of filaments reached out and passed into Sam's mouth slit. It retracted, and the speaker came to life. "There is authorization. What is wanted?" "What is the correct date?" Sam asked. Then he grunted as the answer came from the machine's isotope clock. It had been more than thirtyseven years since the men had left the Moon. He shook his head, and the robot bodies caught his attention again. "Why are so many robots being built?" "Orders were received for one thousand robots trained to fly missiles. Orders were suspended by Director DeMatre. No orders have been received for removing parts." "Do you know what happened to the men?" Sam had little hope of finding an easy answer any more, but he had to ask. The machine seemed to hesitate. "Insufficient data. Orders were given by Director DeMatre to monitor broadcasts. Broadcasts were monitored. Analysis is incomplete. Data of doubtful coherence. Requests for more data were broadcast on all frequencies for six hours. Relevant replies were not received. Request further information if available." "Never mind," Sam told it. "Can you teach me how to fly a plane?" "Robot Ninety-Three, Mark One, was programmed with established ability to control all vehicles. Further instruction not necessary." Sam grunted in amazement. He'd been surprised at how well he had controlled the landing craft and then the car. But it had never occurred to him that such knowledge had been built in. "All right," he decided. "Start broadcasting again on all the frequencies you can handle. If you get any answers, find where the sender is and record it. If anyone asks who is calling, say you're calling for me and take any message. Tell them I'll be back in one month." He started to turn away, then remembered. "Finished for now." The machine darkened. Sam headed out to find a field somewhere that might still have an operable plane. But he was already beginning to suspect what he would find. rass grew and flowers bloom'-J ed. Ants built nests and crickets chirped in the soft summer night. The seas swarmed with marine life of most kinds. And reptiles sunned themselves on rocks, or retired to their holes when the sun was too hot. But on all the Earth, no warmblooded animal could be found. The Earth of man was without form and void. The cities were slag heaps from which radioactivity still radiated. No fires burned on the hearthstones of the most isolated houses. The villages were usually burned, sometimes apparently by accident, but often as if they had been fired deliberately by their owners. The Moon was a thing of glory over Lake Michigan. It was the only glorious thing for six hundred miles. Four returned winged rockets rested on a field in Florida, but there was no sign of what had become of the men who rode down from the station in them. One winged craft stood forlornly outside Denver, and there was a scrawl in crayon inside its port that spelled the worst obscenity in the English language. There was a library still standing in Phoenix, and the last newspaper had the dateline of the day when Sam had seen the lights brighten over the cities of Earth. Most of the front page was occupied by a large box which advised its readers that the government had taken over all radio communications during the crisis and would broadcast significant news on the hour. The paper was cooperating with the government in making all such news available by broadcast only. The same box appeared in the nine preceding issues. Before that, the major news seemed to involve a political campaign in United South Africa. Other scattered small libraries had papers that were no different Yet the only clue was in one of those places. It was a piece of paper resting under the hand of a skeleton that was scattered before bound copies of a technical journal. The paper was covered with doodles and stained in what might have been blood. But the words were legible: "Lesson for the day. Assign to all students. Politics: Men could not win such a war and that is obvious. Chemistry: Their nerve gas was similar to one we tested in small quantities. It seemed safe. Yet when they dropped it over us in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, it did not settle out as the test batches had done. Proved, that aerosols must be tested in massive quantities. Medicine: Bonny was in the shelter with me three weeks, yet there was still enough in the air to make her die in the ecstasty of a theophany. Geography: The wind patterns have been known for years. In three weeks, they reach all the Earth. Psychology: I am mad. But my madness is that I am become only cold logic without a soul. Therefore, I must kill myself. Religion: Nothing matters. I am mad. God is -- " That was all. r T"he creche was still the same, of course. Sam sat before the entrance three nights after his return to his only home on Earth, staring at the Moon that was rising over the horizon. It was a full Moon again, and there was beauty to it, even here. But he was only vaguely aware of that. Below him, the great computer was quiescent now. It had taken all the mass of tiny details he had gathered and had integrated them with all of the Such a job had taken time, even for such a machine. But a few hours after his return it called him over the radio frequencies to issue its report. "All data correlated," was its announcement. "Data not fully coherent with previous data. Degree of relevancy approaches zero. Data insufficient for conclusion." Then it had gone back to stand-by, while Sam had sought the sight of living plants and insects outside the creche. He had expected little else from the computer. He had known there was too little for a logical conclusion. But his own conclusion was drawn now. As he sat under the light of the Moon, staring at the sky from which evil had come, there was a coldness in his brain complex that seemed deeper than the reaches of space. Men were gone. He had faced that fact during the early days of his search, and now he was learning to live with it. There were no more of his creators. He would go on searching for them, of course, in the faint hope that a paltry few might have survived somehow, somewhere. But he was certain that the search would be in vain. They had come from somewhere out there, he thought bitterly. The Eich, the minions of Boskone, or some other horror equally evil had appeared more than a century before and snooped and sniffed at Earth in their various saucers, only to leave. Now they had come back, giving Earth only a week's warning of their approach. They had struck all Earth with glowing bombs or radiation that ruined the cities of men. And when men still survived in spite of their rain of destruction, they had resorted to a deadly mist of insanity that was borne by the winds to every part of the planet. "They dropped it over us," the note had said. And the wonderful race Sam had known had died in madness, usually of some destructive kind. There had not even been a purpose to it. They hadn't wanted the Earth for themselves. They had simply come and slaughtered, to depart as senselessly as they had departed before. Sam beat his fist against his leg until the metal clanged through the night. Then he lifted his other fist toward the stars and shook it. It was wrong that the alien invaders should escape from punishment. They had come with fire and pestilence, and they should be found and overcome with all that they had meted out of mankind. He had supposed that evil was something found only in fiction. But now evil was ruler of the universe. It should be met as it was usually met in fiction. It should be wiped from existence in a suffering as great as it had afflicted. But such justice was apparently the one great lie of fiction. He beat his fists resoundingly against his legs again and shouted at the Moon, but there was no relief for what was burning deep in him. Then his ears picked up a new sound and he stopped all motion to listen. It came again, very weakly and from very far away. "Help!" Tie shouted back audibly and -by radio and was on his feet, running toward the sound. His feet crashed through the brush and he leaped over the rubble, making no effort to find the easy path. As he stopped to listen again, he heard the sound, directly ahead, but even weaker. A minute later he almost stumbled over the caller. It was a robot. Once it had been slim and neat, covered with black enamel. Now it was bent and bare metal was exposed. But it was still a Mark Three. It lay without motion, only a whisper coming from its speaker. Sam felt disappointment strike through all his brain complex, but he bent over the prone figure, testing quickly. It was power failure, he saw at once. He ripped a spare battery from the pack that had been with him during his long search and slammed it quickly into place, replacing the corroded one that had been there. The little robot sat up and began trying to get to its feet. Sam reached out a helping hand, staring down at the worn, battered legs that seemed beyond any hope of functioning. "You need help," he admitted. "You need a whole new body. Well, there are a thousand new ones going to waste in the creche, ready for you to use. What's your number?" It had to be one of the robots from the Moon. Men had never permitted any robots to remain on Earth. The robot teetered for a moment, then seemed to gain some mastery over its legs. "Joe. They called me Joe. I'm glad I heard your signal over the radio weeks ago, but it was a long way. My transmitter is broken. I couldn't answer you. A long way, and I was afraid I would fail before I could reach here. But now hurry. We can't waste time here." "We'll hurry. But that way," Sam told him, pointing toward the creche. Joe shook his head, making a creaking, horrible sound of it. "No, Sam. He can't wait. I think he's dying! He was sick when I heard the call from you, but he insisted I bring him here. He -- " "Sick? Dying? There's a man with you?" Joe nodded jerkily and pointed. S am scooped the light figure up in his arms. Even on Earth, it was no great load for his larger body, and they could make much better time than by letting the other try to run. Hal, Sam thought. It was probably Hal. Hal had been the youngest Hal would be only fifty-nine, or something like that. That wasn't too old for a man, from what he had learned. He flicked his light on, unable to maintain full speed by the moonlight. The pointing finger of the other guided him down the slope to a worn, weed-covered trail. It was already more than five miles from the entrance to the creche. "He was worried you might leave here before we could reach you," Joe explained. "He knew the month was almost up, and it might take too long for me to bring him. He ordered me to leave him and go ahead alone. Sometimes now it is hard to know whether he means what he says, but this was a clear order." "You'd have been wiser to stick to the car and drive all the way with him," Sam suggested. He was forcing his way through a tangle of underbrush, wondering how much farther they had to go. "There was no car," Joe said. "I can't drive one now. My arms sometimes stop working, and it would be dangerous to drive. I found a little wagon and dragged him behind me on that until we got here." Sam took his eyes off the trail to stare at Joe's battered legs. Joe had almost worn out his body. But in other ways, he must have developed a great deal since the days on the Moon. Time, experience and the companionship of men had shaped him far beyond what Sam remembered. Then they were in a little hollow beside a brook, and there was a small tent pitched beside a cart. Sam released Joe and headed for the shelter. Moonlight broke through the trees and fell on the drawn suffering of a human face just inside the tent. It took long study to find familiar features. At first nothing seemed right. Then Sam traced the jawline behind the long beard and gasped in recognition. "Dr. Smithers!" "Hello, Sam." The eyes opened slowly, and a pain-racked smile stretched the lips briefly. "I was just dreaming about you. Thought you and Hal got lost in a crater. Better go shine up now. We'll want you to sing for us tonight. You're a good man, Sam, even if you are a robot. But you stay away too long out on those field trips." Sam sighed softly. This was another reality he could recognize only from fiction. But he nodded. "Yes, Chief. It's all right now." He began singing softly, the song about a Lady Greensleeves. A smile flickered over Smithers' lips again, and the eyes closed. Then abruptly they snapped open, and Smithers tried to sit up. "Sam! You really are Sami How'd you get here?" J oe had been fussing over a little fire, drawing supplies from the cart. Now he hobbled up with a bowl of some broth and began trying to feed the man. Smithers swallowed a few mouthfuls dutifully, but his eyes remained on Sam. And he nodded as he heard the summary of the long struggle back to Earth. But when Sam told of the landing, he slumped back onto his pad. "I'm glad you made it. Glad I got a chance to see you again before I give up the last ghost on Earth. I couldn't figure that radio signal Joe heard. Knew it couldn't be a human call, but I never thought of you making it back to Earth. Should have had a brass band to welcome you." He closed his eyes, but the weak voice went on. "Hal and Randy died. Pete suicided. I'm the only one left, Sam. We waited up in the station three years, guessing what had happened here. Then we came down and tried to find somebody -- anybody -- to start the race over. But there weren't any left. We covered every continent for thirty years. The robots got busted. except for Joe here. Then we came back. And now I'm the last man. The last man on Earth heard a knock on the door -- and it was Sam. It's a better ending on the story than I expected." He slept fitfully after that, though Sam could hear him moan at times. It was cancer, according to what Joe knew, and there was no hope. Somehow, Joe had found a hospital with its equipment intact and books to study. The robot had taken Smithers there and tried to treat him with the equipmen, but it had been a losing battle. Then, when the message came, broadcast by the computer at Sam's orders, Smithers had insisted on leaving. They had no radio capable of answering, and little hope of finding a working transmitter in time, so Smithers had insisted they must come in person. In the hospital, the treatment might have given him a year more of life; but he had ordered Joe to leave, knowing that he might not survive the trip. And now only his will seemed to keep the man alive. Joe had a few drugs to ease the pain, but that was all the help that could be given. During the long night, Joe told more of the long search for survivors. It had been thorough. But they had found no trace of another living human being. The nerve gas had produced eventual death by nerve damage, as well as the initial insanity that had killed many. "Who?" Sam asked bitterly. "What race did this?" J oe made a gesture of uncertainty. "They talked about that. Mr. Norman told me about it, too. He explained that men killed each other off. One side attacked this side, and then our side had to hit back, until nobody was left. But I don't understand it." "Do you believe it?" "No," Joe answered. "Mr. Norman was always saying things I found he didn't really mean. No man would do anything like this." Sam nodded, and began telling his theories. At first Joe was doubtful. Then the little robot seemed convinced. He dredged up small confirming bits of information from the long years of search. They weren't important by themselves, but a few seemed to add to the total picture. A sign cursed the "sky devils" in Borneo. There were odd bits from a sermon printed in Louisianna. And there were other vague hints at doom from beyond the Earth. Twice during the long night Smithers wakened, but he was irrational. Sam soothed him and sang to him, while Joe tried to give him nourishment that was loaded with morphine. Now even Sam could see that the man was near death. The pulse was thready and the breathing seemed too much for the worn body. In the morning, however, Smithers was rational again. He managed a smile. "Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners won't go about the streets this time. There won't be any mourners." "There will be two," Sam told him. "Yes." Smithers thought it over and nodded. "That's good, somehow. A man hates not being missed. I guess you two will have to take on all the debts of the human race now." His breath caught sharply in his throat, and he retched weakly. But he forced himself up on his elbows and looked out through the flap of the tent toward the hills that showed through the shrubbery and the blue of the sky beyond. "There are a lot of debts and a lot of broken promises, Sam, Joe." he said. "Man had promised to write some great things into the future of this universe. He was going to conquer the stars and even make a better scheme for everything. But he failed. He's finished. He dies, and the universe won't even know he's gone." "We'll know," Joe said softly. Smithers dropped back onto the pad. "Yeah. Maybe that helps. We had our faults, but I guess there must have been a lot of good in us, too -- there had to be, if we could make two people like you. God, I'm tired!" He closed his eyes. A few minutes later, Sam knew he was dead. nphe two robots waited to be sure, and then wrapped the body in the tent and buried it, while Sam recited the scraps of the burial service he had picked up from his reading. Sam sat down then where Smithers had died, staring at the world where no man would ever live again. And the knot in his brain complex grew stronger and colder. He could not see the stars in the light of the day. But he knew they were there. And somewhere out there was the debt Smithers had given him -- a debt of justice that had to be paid. Saucers, Boskone, the Eich -- whatever they were, the evil alien monsters must be repaid to the last full measure for the foulness they had done and which man could no longer settle with them. Anger and hate grew slowly in him against the enemy from the stars, until he could no longer contain his emotions. His radio message was almost a scream as he roused the computer. "You've got a thousand robot bodies waiting. Can you build brains for them, modelled after the records of my brain? Can you build them without the limits you used for later models? Do you have materials for that?" "Such a program is feasible," the machine answered. "Then start -- " Sam began. But his eyes fell on the wreck of Joe's body, and he modified his order. "No, save one body to replace another robot I'll bring you. Start work at once on all the others." "The program is begun," the machine agreed. Nine hundred and ninety-nine should be enough. They wouldn't be just like him, Sam realized; DeMatre had said there was a random factor. But they would do. The first group could find raw materials for ten thousand more, and those for still more. There would be robots enough to study all the books men had left, and to begin the long trip out into space. This time, there would be more than a tape education for them. Sam would be there to tell them the story of man, the glory of the race, and the savage treachery that had robbed the universe of that rac. They would learn that the universe held an enemy, a race of technological monsters that must be sought among the stars and exterminated to the last individual. They would comb the entire galaxy for that enemy if they had to. And someday, mankind's debt of justice would be paid. Man would be avenged. Sam looked up at the sky and foreswore all robots for all time to that debt of vengeance. IX T Tate spewed across the universe in a high crusade. Metal ships leaped from star to star and hurtled across the immensities between the far-flung galaxies. The ships spawned incessantly, and with each went the holy image of their faith and the unsated and insatiable hunger of their hate. A thousand stars yielded the dead and ancient wreckage of races that had once achieved technology. Five hundred suns gave light to intelligent races -- quiet, peaceful races with backward cultures. The great ships dropped onto their worlds and went away again, leaving peoples throughout the galaxies filled with gratitude and paying homage to the incredibly beautiful images of the supernal be : ng called Man. But still the quest went on. I n a great temple palace on the capital world of the Andromeda Galaxy, Sam stared down at a long table piled with little scraps of evidence. One graceful finger of his lithe seventeenth body stirred some of the scraps and he bent closer to read what was left of the ancient writing. Then he looked up and across at the great scientist who had just returned from the ancient mother world of Earth, incredible light-years away. "That is how the human race died?" Sam asked quietly. "You are quite sure?" The scientist nodded. "Quite sure. Even with a hundred million workers, it took us fifty years to gather all this on Earth. It has been so badly scattered, so nearly ruined. But no truth from the past can be completely concealed from our present methods of research. Man died as I said." Sam sighed softly and moved to the window. Outside it was summer, and the trees were in blossom, competing with the bright plumage of the birds brought from far Deneb. The gardens were a poem of color. He bent forward, sniffing the blended fragrance of the flowers. Strains of music came from the great Hall of Art that lifted its fairy beauty across the park. It was the eighth opus of their greatest living composer -- an early work, but still magnificent in its reach and its ambition. For the moment his shoulders slumped faintly. His emotions blended with the halfbitter memories of other discoveries. There had been the first visit to Mars -- a Mars where no John Carter could ever have fought green men for the hand of the incredible Dejah Thoris. There had been star after star, with no friendly Arisians, no gallant dragon-folk to join against the undiscovered menace of Boskone. And for a thousand years, as fiction paled before reality, there had been the growing doubt in his mind. Now the last effort to make himself believe the legend he had created was spent. "There is no Enemy now," the scientist said from behind him. "There can be no doubt. Man was his own destroyer. He killed himself. In a sense, his race was the one we are sworn to kill." S am leaned further out the window. Below, the throng of busy, laughing people looked up at him and cheered. There were a dozen races in the park, mingled with a majority of his people. He smiled and lifted his hand to them, then bent further out, until he could just see the great statue of Man that reared heavenward over the central part of the temple palace. He sighed again and inclined his head, before backing from the window. "How many know this besides you, Robert?" he asked. "None. It was gathered in too small fragments, until I could assemble it into a meaningful pattern." Sam smiled at him. "Your work was well done, and there will be ways to reward you for it properly. But now I suggest that we bum this evidence." "Burn it!" Robert's voice rose. "Burn this evidence and shackle our race to superstition forever? Our entire lives have been shaped to fit a cult of vengeance. Now we can free ourselves. This is our heritage, Sam -- we can be ourselves!" Sam ran his finger through the evidence again. There was pity in his mind for the scientist, but more for the strange race of man whose true nature had finally been revealed in fact. Man had missed owning the universe by so little! But the fates of that universe had conspired against him. The fates had offered two roads to intelligence. In one, there was the quiet growth that led to pastoral life and gentle pleasures, but somehow never got beyond its native planet. In the other, chosen by man, intelligence grew from the aggression of savagery and thrust the race ahead to great discoveries -- while building the means to the inevitable final aggression that must destroy itself utterly. Man had failed, like all other of animal life. But in dying, he had passed on part of his soul to another race that had been designed without his mighty passions. Somehow he had passed on the driving anger of his spirit of his true children, the robots. And they had carried on. The robots had been a created race, a race designed only to serve, able to live in perfect peace and without ambition. They had owned no heritage. But through an accident of fiction and a few dying words, men had left them a rich heritage. Anger had carried them throughout the stars, and hatred had bridged the spaces between the galaxies. "You're mistaken, Robert," Sam said. "Vengeance is our heritage. Burn .the evidence." Most of the material was tinder dry, and it caught fire at the first spark. For a few seconds, it was a seething pillar of flame. Then there was only a dark scar on the wood to show the true death of man. Imagine! Here's what you get... the button -- you can't make mistakes! Nothing to focus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp blackand-whites. amazingly life-like color shots -- even slides -- with no effort at all! Commander Camera Retail Value: # I Roll Kodacolor Film Retail Value: # I Roll Kodak Black-and-White Film Retail Value: .# Pre paid Processing Certificate Retail Value-. # (Good for # Jumbo Color. Prints and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!) # limited! Clip coupon and mail today! P.O. Box #, N.Y., N.Y. # extra charge). Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus #c handling. cplease print)  Send C.O.D. I am enclosing # deposit and will pay postman #, plus # handling, plus postal charges.  I want to save postal charges. I am enclosing #, plus # for handling. not completely pleased! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y.  February # galaxy fep by Imagine! Here's what you get . , . the button you can't make mistakes! Nothing to locus! Nothing to set or adjust! No double exposures! You get crisp, sharp blackand-whites, amazingly life-like color shots even slides with no effort at all! Commander Camera Retail Value: # I Roll Kodacolor Film Retail Value: # I Roll Kodak Black-and-White Film Retail Value: .# Pre paid Processing Certificate Retail Value: # (Good for # Jumbo Color Prints and I new fresh roll of Kodacolor Film!) # limited! Clip coupon and mail today! P.O. Box #, N.Y., N Y. # extra charge). Total retail value: #. I pay only # plus # handling. name (please print)  Send C.O.D. I am enclosing # deposit and will pay postman #, plus #f handling, plus postal charges.  I want to save postal charges. I am enclosing #, plus # for handling. not completely pleased! galaxy Galaxy is published In French and Italian. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille. This Edition Is also published In Living tap# Sf Blind, Inc., Dee Moines, lorn. No. # Editor Science Editor Associate Editor by Cordwainer Smith by J. T. McIntosh by James H. Schmitz Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. by C. C. MacApp by Robert Silverberg by Richard Wilson by Donald H. MenzeJ by Willy Ley by Frederilc Pohl by Algis Budrys bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #e per copy Subscribtion: (# copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possession. Elsewhere #. Second-clas postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York #S by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actui persons Is coincidental. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. hevlsited "-phe astronomer Fred Hoyle, A for whom the undersigned has shared with many other science-fiction fans a very special interest (see Algis Budrys's column in this issue), has always struck us as A Man to Keep an Eye On. You never know what he is going to come up with next. He not only thinks like a sciencefiction writer; he even writes like a science-fiction writer. He writes, in fact, both science-fiction ( The Black Cloud, Ossian's Ride, etc.) and now the sort of extrapolative not-quite-fact that is sometimes called "non-fiction science fiction". No doubt the sort of thing that Fred Hoyle will ultimately be measured by is whether some of his grander attempts to explain the beginnings of everything, such as his Steady-State theory of the permanent process of creation of matter and the revision of Einstein's laws he proposed a few months ago in London, turn out to meet the tests of prediction and observation. In a way, this is a pity. He is doing something quite apart from those things, and doing it very well. He is writing books like Of Men and Galaxies, just published by the University of Washington Press. Says Hoyle: "My experience with scientific problems, in particular those in astronomy, is that where alternative possibilities exist it is never the possibility that leads to a dead end, the possibil'ty that lacks interesting consequences, that turns out to be correct. It seems to be an overriding feature of all physical laws that they become more elegant, simpler in a way, as we get to know them better, but that their consequences become more varied and complex." This is "science-fiction writer thinking" if we ever heard any -- imagine choosing among alternative astrophysical theories on the basis of which one is going to be the most fun -- and what makes it most dear to our hearts is that, for Fred Hoyle at least, it clearly works. Interesting book. Interesting man. Wonder how we can go about getting him to write for Benjamin Branklk Isaac Newton mvtt Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the power within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp die inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a frill and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist . , . like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world.  #fie San Jose Scribe Y .C.A. Mas.  # Ufa" -- San Jose, California, VS.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life , which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. A nonI Namt organize I tion. Address i  Mil Y.C.A. I Underpeople can't give orders to humans. But this girl was not only an underperson -- she was immensely , frighteningly more! I U A t two seventy-five in the morning," said the Administrator to Casher O'Neill, "you will kill this girl with a knife. At two seventy-seven, a fast ground car will pick you up and bring you back here. Then the power cruiser will be yours. Is that a deal?" He held out his hand as if he wanted Casher O'Neill to shake it then and there, making some kind of an oath or bargain. Casher did not slight the man, so he picked up his glass and said, "Let's drink to the deal first." The Administrator's quick, restless, darting eyes looked Casher up and down very suspiciously. The warm sea-wet air blew through the room. The Administrator seemed wary, suspicious, alert, but underneath his slight hostility there was another emotion, of which Casher could perceive just the edge. Fatigue with its roots in bottomless despair? Despair set deep in irrecoverable fatigue? That other emotion, which Casher could barely discern, was very strange indeed. On all his voyages back and forth through the inhabited worlds, Casher had met many odd types of men and women. He had never seen anything like this Administrator beHis title was "Mr. Commissioner" and he was an ex-Lord of the Instrumentality. HT'hough no longer a Lord, he  nevertheless represented the Instrumentality on this planet of Henriada, where the population had dropped from six hundred forty thousand. Indeed, local government had disappeared into limbo and this odd man, with the title of "Administrator", was the only law and cavil authority which the planet knew. Nevertheless, he had a surplus power cruiser and Casher O'Neill was determined to get that cruiser as a part of his long plot to return to his home planet of Mizzer and to unseat the usurper, Colonel Wedder. , T v he Administrator stared sharply, wearily at Casher and then he, too, lifted his glass. The green twilight colored his liquor and made it seem like some strange poison. It was only Earth-byegarr, though a little on the strong side. With a sip, only a sip, the older man relaxed a little. "You may be out to trick me, young man. You may think I am an old fool running an abandoned planet. You may even be thinking of a crime. It is not a crime at alL I am the Administrator of Henriada and I have ordered that girl killed every year for the last eighty years. She isn't even a girl, to start with. Just an underperson. Some kind of an animal turned into a domestic servant I can appoint you a deputy sheriff, if you like. Or chief of detectives. That might be tetter. I haven't had a chief erf detectives for a hundred years and more. You are my chief of detectives. Go in tomorrow. The house is not hard to find. It's the biggest and best house left on this planet. Go in tomorrow morning. Ask for her master and be sure that you use the correct title, 'Mister and Owner Murray Madigan.' The robots will tell you to keep out. If you persist, she will come to the door. That's when you will stab her through the heart, right there in the doorway. My ground car will race up one metric minute later. You jump in and come back here We've been through this before. Why don't you agree? Don't you know who I am?" "I know perfectly well," smiled Casher O'Neill, "who you are, Mr. Commissioner and Administrator. You are the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, once of Earth Two. After all, the Instrumentality itself gave me a permit to land on this planet on private business. They knew who I was, too, and what I wanted. There's something funny about all this. Why should you give me a power cruiser -- the best ship, you yourself say, in your whole fleet -- just for killing one modified animal which looks and talks like a girl? Why me? Why the visitor? Why the man from offworld? Why should you care whether this particular underperson is killed or not? If you've given the order for her death eighty times in eighty years, why hasn't it been carried out long ago? Mind you, Mr. Administrator, I'm not saying no. I want that cruiser very much indeed. But what's the deal? What's the trick? Is it the house you want?" "Beauregard? No, I don't want Beauregard. Old Madigan can rot in it for all I care. It's between Ambiloxi and Mottile, on the Gulf of Esperanza. You can't miss it. The road is good. You could drive yourself there." "What is it, then?" Casher's voice had an edge of persistence to it. Hjphe Administrator's response was singular indeed. He filled his huge inhaler-glass with the potent byegarr. He stared over the full glass at Casher O'Neil) as if he were an enemy. He drained the glass. Casher knew that that much liquor, taken suddenly, could kill the normal human being. The Administrator did not fall over dead. He did not even become noticeably more drunk. His face turned red and his eyes almost popped out, as the harsh #-proof liquor took effect, but he still did not say anything. He just stared at Casher. Casher, who had learned in his long exile to play many games, just stared back. The Administrator broke first. He leaned forward and burst into a birdlike shriek of laughter. The laughter went on and on until it seemed that the man had hogged all the merriment in the galaxy. Casher snorted a little laugh along with the man, more out of nervous reflex than anything else, but he waited for the Administrator to stop laughing. The Administrator finally got control of himself. With a broad grin and a wink at Casher, he poured four fingers more of the byegarr into his glass, drank it down as if it were a sip of cream, and then -- only very lightly unsteady -- stood up, came over and patted Casher on the shoulder. "You're a smart boy, my lad. I'm cheating you. I don't care whether the power cruiser is there or not. I'm giving you something which has no value at all to me. Who's ever going to take a power cruiser off this planet? It's ruined. It's abandoned. And so am I. Go ahead, you can have the cruiser for nothing. Just take it, free. Unconditionally." This time it was Casher who leaped to his feet and stared down into the face of the feverish, wanton little man. "Thank you, Mr. Administrator!" he cried, trying to catch the hand of the Administrator to seal the deal. Rankin Meiklejohn looked awfully sober for a man with that much liquor in him. He held his right hand behind his back and would not shake. "You can have the cruiser all right. But kill that girl first! Just as a favor to me." "Why?" said Casher, his voice loud and cold, trying to wring some sense out of the chattering man. "Just -- just -- just because I say so," stammered the Administrator. "Why?" said Casher, cold and loud again. Hphe liquor suddenly took over inside the Administrator. He groped back for the arm of his chair, sat down suddenly and then looked up at Casher. He was very drunk indeed. The strange emotion, the elusive fatigue-despair, had vanished from his face. He spoke straightforwardly. Only the excessive care of his articulation would have shown a passer-by that he was drunk. "Because, you fool," said Meiklejohn, "those people, more than eighty in eighty years, that I have sent to Beauregard with orders to kill the girl. Those people -- " he repeated, and stopped speaking, clamping his lips together. "What happened to them?" asked Casher calmly. The Administrator grinned. "I don't know what happened," said tiie Administrator. "For the life of me, I don't know. Not one of them ever came back." "What happened to them? Did she kill them?" cried Casher. "How would I know?" said the drunken man, getting visibly more sleepy. "Why didn't you report it?" This seemed to rouse the Administrator. "Report that one little girl had stopped me, the planetary Administrator? Just one little girl, and not even a human being! They would have sent help, and laughed at me. By the Bell, young man. I've been laughed at enough! i need no help from outside. You're going in there tomorrow morning at two seventy-five, with a knife. And a ground car waiting." He stared fixedly at Casher and then suddenly fell asleep in his chair. Casher called to the robots to show him to his room; they tended to the master as well. II r I 'he next morning at two sev- enty-five sharp, nothing happened. Casher walked down the baroque corridor, looking into beautiful barren rooms. All the doors were open. Through one door he heard a sick, deep bubbling snore. It was the Administrator, sure enough. He lay twisted in his bed. A small nursing machine beside him, her white enameled body only slightly rusty. She held up a mechanical hand for silence and somehow managed to make the gesture seem light, delicate and pretty, even from a machine. Casher walked lightly back to his own room, where he ordered hotcakes, bacon and coffee. He studied a tornado through the armored glass of his window while the robots prepared his food. The elastic trees clung to the earth with a fury which matched the fury of the wind. The trunk of the tornado reached like the nose of a mad elephant down into the gardens, but the flora fought back. A few animals whipped upward and out of sight. The tornado then came straight for the house, but did not damage it outside of making a lot of noise. "We have two or three hundred of those a day," said a butler robot. "That is why we store all spacecraft underground and have no weather machines. It would cost more, the people said, to make this planet livable than the planet could possibly yield. The radio and news are in the library, sir. I do not think that the honorable Rankin Meiklejolin will wake until evening, say seven-fifty or eight o'clock." "Can I go out?" "Why not, sir? You are a true man. You do what you wish." "I mean, is it safe for me to go out?" "Oh, no, sir! The wind would tear you apart or carry you away." "Don't people ever go out?" "Yes, sir. With ground cars or with automatic body armor. I have been told that if it weighs fifty tons or better, the person inside is safe. I would not know, sir. As you see, I am a robot. I was made here, though my brain was formed on Earth Two. I have never been outside this house." Casher looked at the robot. This one seemed unusually talkative. He chanced the opportunity of getting some information. "Have you ever heard of Beauregard?" "Yes, sir. It is the best house on this planet. I have heard people say that it is the solidest building on Henriada. It belongs to the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. He is an Old North Australian, a renunciant who left his home planet and came here when Henriada was, a busy world. He brought all his wealth with him. The underpeople and robots say that it is a wonderful place on the inside." "Have you seen it?" "Oh, no, sir, I have never left this building." "Does the man Madigan ever come here?" The robot seemed to be trying to laugh, but did not succeed. He answered, very unevenly, "Oh, no, sir. He never goes anywhere." "Can you tell me anything about the female who lives with him?" "No, sir," said the robot. "Do you know anything about her?" "Sir, it is not that. I know a great deal about her." "Why can't you talk about her, then?" "I have been commanded not to, sir." "I am," said Casher O'Neill, "a true human being. I herewith countermand those orders. Tell me about her." The robot's voice became formal and cold. "The orders cannot be countermanded, sir." "Why not?" snapped Casher. "Are they the Administrator's?" "No, sir." "Whose, then?" "Hers," said the robot softly, and left the room. '-'lasher O'Neill spent the rest  I of the day trying to get information; he obtained very little. The Deputy Administrator was a young man who hated his chief. When Casher, who dined with him, the two of them having a poorly cooked state luncheon in a dining room which would have seated five hundred people, tried to come to the point by asking bluntly, "What do you know about Murray Madigan?", he got an answer which was blunt to the point of incivility. "Nothing." "You never heard of him?" cried Casher. "Keep your troubles to yourself, mister visitor," said the Deputy Administrator. "I've got to stay on this planet long enough to get promoted off. You can leave. You shouldn't have come." "I have," said Casher, "an all-world pass from the Instrumentality." "All right," said the young man, "that shows that you are more important than I am. Let's not discuss the matter. Do you like your lunch?" Casher had learned diplomacy in his childhood, when he was the heir apparent to the Dictatorship of Mizzer. When his horrible uncle, Kuraf, lost the rulership, Casher had approved of the coup by the Colonels Wedder and Gibna, but now Wedder was supreme and enforcing a period of terror and virtue. Casher thus knew courts and ceremony, big talk and small talk, and on this occasion he let the small talk do. The young Deputy Administrator had only out ambition, to get off the planet Henriada and never to see or hear of Rankin Meiklejohn again. Casher could understand the point. Only one curious thing happened during dinner. Toward the end, Casher slipped in the question, very informally: "Can underpeople give orders to robots?" "Of course," said the young man. "That's one of the reasons we use underpeople. They have more initiative. They amplify our orders to robots on many occasions." Casher smiled. "I didn't mean it quite that way. Could an underperson give an order to a robot which a real human being could not then countermand?" The young man started to answer, even though his mouth was full of food. He was not a very polished young man. Suddenly he stopped chewing and his eyes grew wide. Then, with his mouth half full, he said: "You are trying to talk about this planet, I guess. You can't help it. You're on the track. Stay on the track, then. Maybe you will get out of it alive. I refuse to get mixed up with it, with you, with him and his hateful schemes. All I want to do is to leave when my time comes." The young man resumed chewing, his eyes steadfastly on his plate. Tefore Casher could pass off the matter by making some casual remark, the butler robot stopped behind him and leaned over. "Honorable sir, I heard your question. May I answer it?" "Of course," said Casher, softly"The answer, sir," said the butler-robot, softly but clearly, "to your question is no, no, never. That is the general rule of the civilized worlds. But on this planet of Henriada, sir, the answer is yes." "Why?" said Casher. "It is my duty, sir," said the robot butler, "to recommend to you this dish of fresh artichokes I am not authorized to deal with other matters." "Thank you," said Casher, straining to keep himself lot' mg imperturbable. Nothing much happened that night, except that Meiklejohn got up long enough to get drunk all over again. Though he invited Casher to come and drink with him, he never seriously discussed the girl except for one outburst. "Leave it till tomorrow. Fair and square. Open and aboveboard. Frank and honest. That's me. I'll take you around Beauregard myself. You'll see it's easy. A knife, eh? A travelled young man like you would know what to do with a knife. And a little girl, too. Not very big. Easy job. Don't give it another thought. Would you like some apple juice in your byegarr?" Casher had taken three contraintoxicant pills before going to drink with the ex-Lord, but even at that he could not keep up with Meiklejohn. He accepted the dilution of apple juice gravely, gracefully and gratefully. The little tornadoes stamped around the house. Meiklejohn, now launched into some drunken story of ancient injustices which had been done to him on other worlds, paid no attention to them. In the middle of the night, past nine-fifty in the evening, Casher woke alone in his chair, very stiff and uncomfortable. The robots must have had standing instructions concerning the Administrator, and had apparently taken him off to bed. Casher walked wearily to his own room, cursed the thundering ceiling and went to sleep again. Ill nphe next day was very different indeed. The Administrator was as sober, brisk and charming as if he had never taken a drink in his life. He had the robots call Casher to join him at breakfast and said, by way of greeting, "I'll wager you thought I was drunk last night." "Well... said Casher. "Planet fever, that's what it was. Planet fever. A bit of alcohol keeps it from developing too far. Let's see. It's three-sixty now. Could you be ready to leave by four?" Casher frowned at his watch, which had the conventional twenty-four hours. The Administrator saw the glance and apologized. "Sorry! My fault, a thousand times. I'll get you a metric watch right away. Ten hours a day, a hundred minutes an hour. We're really very progressive on Henriada." He clapped his hands and ordered that a watch be taken to Casher's room, along with a watch-repairing robot to adjust it to Casher's body rhythms. "Four, then" he said, rising briskly from the table. "Dress for a trip by ground car. The servants will show you how." There was a man already waiting in Casher's room. He looked like a plump, wise ancient Hindu, as shown in the archeology books. He bowed pleasantly and said, "My name is Gosigo. I am a forgetty, settled on this planet, but for this day I am your guide and driver from this place to the mansion of Beauregard." Forgetties were barely above underpeople in status. They were persons convicted of various major crimes, to whom the courts of the worlds or the Instrumentality had allowed total amnesia instead of death or some punishment worse than death, such as the planet Shayol. Casher looked at him curiously. The man did not carry with him the permanent air of bewilderment which Casper had noticed in many forgetties. Gosigo saw the glance and interpreted it. "I'm well enough, now, sir. And I am strong enough to break your back if I had the orders to do it." "You mean, damage my spine? What a hostile, unpleasant thing to do!" said Casher. "Anyhow, I rather think I could kill you first if you tried it. Whatever gave you such an idea?" "The Administrator is always threatening people that he will have me do it to them." C t T T ave you ever really broken anybody's back?" asked Casher, looking Gosigo over very carefully and re-judging him. The man, though shorter than himself, was luxuriously muscled. Like many plump men, he looked pleasant on the outside but could be very formidable to an enemy. Gosigo smiled briefly, almost happily. "Well, no, not exactly." "Why haven't you? Does the Administrator always countermand his own orders? I should think that he would sometimes be too drunk to remember to do it." "It's not that," said Gosigo. "Why don't you, then?" "I have other orders," said Gosigo, rather hesitantly. "Like the orders I have today. One set from the Administrator, one set from the Deputy Administrator and a third set from an outside source." "Who's the outside source?" "She has told me not to explain just yet." Casher stood stock still. "Do you mean who I think you mean?" Gosigo nodded very slowly, pointing at the ventilator as though it might have a microphone in it. "Can you tell me what your orders are?" "Oh, certainly. The Administrator has told me to drive you to Beauregard, to take you to the door, to watch you stab the undergirl and to call the second ground car to your rescue. The Deputy Administrator has told me to take you to Beauregard and to let you do as you please, bringing you back here by way of Ambiloxi if you happen to come out of Mister Murray's house alive." "And the other orders?" "To close the door upon you when you enter and to think of you no more in this life, because you will be very happy." "Are you crazy?" cried Casher. "I am a forgetty," said Gosigo, with some dignity, "but I am not insane." "Whose orders are you going to obey, then?" Gosigo smiled a warmly human smile at him. "Doesn't that depend on you, sir, and not on me? Do I look like a man who is going to kill you soon?" "No, you don't," said Casher. "Do you think what you look like to me?" went on Gosigo, with a purr. "Do you really think that I would help you if I thought that you would kill a small girl?" "You know it!" cried Casher, feeling his face go white. "Who doesn't?" said Gosigo. "What else have we got to talk about, here on Henriada? Let me help you on with these clothes, so that you will at least survive the ride." With this he handed shoulder padding and a padded W helmet to Casher, who began to put on the garments, very clumsily. Gosigo helped him. " dressed, he thought that he had never dressed this elaborately for space itself. The world of Henriada must be a tumultuous place if people needed this kind of clothing to make a short trip. Gosigo had put on the same kind of clothes. He looked at Casher, friendily, with an arch smile which came close to humor. "Look at me, honorable visitor. Do I remind you of anybody?" Casher looked honestly and carefully, and then said, "No, you don't." The man's face fell. "It's a game," he said. "I can't help trying to find out who I really am. Am I a Lord of the Instrumentality who has betrayed his trust? Am I a scientist who twisted knowledge into unimaginable wrong? Am I a dictator so foul that even the Instrumentality, which usually leaves things alone, had to step in and wipe me out? Here I am, healthy, wise, alert. I have the name Gosigo on this planet. Perhaps I am a mere native of this planet, who has committed a local crime. I am triggered. If anyone ever did tell me my true name or my actual past, I have been conditioned to shriek loud, fall unconscious and forget anything which might be said on such an occasion. People told me that I must have chosen this instead of death. Maybe. Death sometimes looks tidy to a forgetty." "Have you ever screamed and fainted?" "I don't even know that," said Gosigo, "no more than you know where you are going this very day." Casher was tied to the man's mystifications, so he did not let himself be provoked into a useless show of curiosity. Inquisitive about the forgetty himself, he asked, "Does it hurt?" he asked. "Does it hurt to be a forgetty?" "No," said Gosigo, "it doesn't hurt, no more than you will." Gosigo stared suddenly at Casher. His voice changed tone and became at least one octave higher. He clapped his hands to his face and panted through his hands as if he would never speak again. "But, oh! the fear -- the eerie, dreary fear of being me." He still stared at Casher. Quieting down at last, he pulled his hands away from his face, as if by sheer force, and said in an almost-normal voice, "Shall we get on with our trip?" G osigo led the way out into the bare bleak corridor. A perceptible wind was blowing through it, though there was no sign of an open window or door. They followed a majestic staircase, with steps so broad that Casher had to keep changing pace on them, all the way down to the bottom of the building. This must at some time have been a formal reception hall. Now it was full of cars. Curious cars. Land vehicles of a kind which Casher had never seen before. They looked a little bit like the ancient "fighting tanks" which he had seen in pictures. They also looked a little like submarines of a singularly short and ugly shape. They had high spiked wheels, but their most complicated feature was a set of giant corkscrews, four on each side, attached to the car by intricate but operational apparatus. Since Casher had been landed right into the palace by planoform, he had never had occasion to go outside among the tornadoes of Henriada. The Administrator was waiting, wearing a coverall on which was stencilled his insignia of rank. Casher gave him a polite bow. He glanced down at the handsome metric wristwatch which Gosigo had strapped on his wrist, outside the coverall. It read #:#. Casher bowed to Rankin Meiklejohn and said: "I'm ready, sir, if you are." "Watch him!" whispered Gosigo, half a step behind Casher. The Administrator said, "Might as well be going." His voice trembled. Casher stood polite, alert, immobile. Was this danger? Was this foolishness? Could the Administrator already be drunk again? Casher watched the Administrator carefully but quietly, waiting for the older man to precede him into the nearest ground car, which had its door standing opened. Nothing happened, except that the Administrator began to turn pale. There must have been six or eight people present. The others must have seen the same sort of thing before, because they showed no sign of curiosity or bewilderment. The Administrator began to tremble. Casher could see it, even through the bulk of the travelwear. The man's hands shook. The Administrator said, in a high nervous voice: "Your knife, you have it with you?" Casher nodded. "Let me see it," said the Administrator. Casher reached down to his boot and brought out the beautiful superbly balanced knife. Before he could stand erect, he felt the clamp of Gosigo's heavy fingers on his shoulder. "Master," said Gosigo to Meiklejohn, "tell your visitor to put the weapon away. It is not allowed for any of us to show weapons in your presence." C asher tried to s uirm out of the heavy grip without losing his balance or his dignity. He found that Gosigo was knowledgeable about karate too. The forgetty held ground, even when the two men waged an immobile, invisible sort of wrestling match, the leverage of Casher's shoulder working its way hither and yon against the strong grip of Gosigo's powerful hand. The Administrator ended it; he said, "Put away your knife," in that high funny voice of his. The watch had almost reached #:# but no one had yet gotten into the car. Gosigo spoke again, and when he did there was a contemptuous laugh from the Deputy Administrator, who had stood by in ordinary indoor clothes. "Master, isn't it time for 'one for the road'?" "Of course, of course," chattered the Administrator. He began breathing almost normally. "Join me," he said to Casher. "It's a local custom." Casher had let his knife slip back into his bootsheath; when the knife dropped out of sight Gosigo had released his shoulder; he now stood facing the Administrator and rubbing his shoulder. He said nothing, but shook his head gently, showing that he definitely did not want a drink. One of the robots brought the Administrator a glass which appeared to contain at least a liter and a half of water. The Administrator said, very politely, "Sure you won't share it?" This close, Casher could smell the reek of it. It was pure byegarr, and at least # proof. He shook his head again, firmly but also politely. The Administrator lifted the glass. Casher could see the muscles of the man's throat work as the liquid went down. He could hear the man breathing heavily between swallows. The white liquid went lower and lower in the gi gantic glass. At last it was all gone. The Administrator cocked his head sidewise and said to Casher in a parrotlike voice, "Well, toodle-oo!" "What do you mean, sir?" said Casher. The Administrator had a pleasant glow on his face. Casher was surprised that the man was not dead after that big and sudden a drink. "I just mean, g'by. I'm not feeling... well." With that he fell straight forward, as stiff as a rock tower. One of the servants, perhaps another forgetty, caught him before he hit the ground. "Does he always do this?" said Casher to the miserable and contemptuous Deputy Administrator. "Oh, no," said the Deputy. "Only at times like these." "What do you mean, 'like these'?" "When he sends one more armed man against the girl at Beauregard. They never come back. You won't come back, either. You could have left earlier, but you can't now. Go along and try to kill the girl. I'll see you here about #:# if you succeed. As a matter of fact, if you come back at all, I'll try to wake him up. But you won't come back. Good luck. I suppose that's what you need." C asher shook hands with the man without removing his gloves. Gosigo had already climbed into the driver's seat of the machine and was testing the electric engines. The big corkscrews began to plunge down. But before they touched the floor Gosigo had reversed them and thrown them back into the "up" position. The people in the room ran for cover as Casher entered the machine, though there was no immediate danger in sight. Two of the human servants dragged the Administrator up the stairs, the Deputy Administrator following them rapidly. "Seat belt," said Gosigo. Casher found it and snapped it to. "Head belt," said Gosigo. Casher stared at him. He had never heard of a head belt. "Pull it down from the roof, sir. Put the net under your chin." Casher glanced up. There was a net fitted snug against the roof of the vehicle, just above his head. He started to pull it down, but it did not yield. Angrily, he pulled harder, and it moved slowly downward. "By the Bell and Bank, do they want to hang me in this!" he thought to himself as he dragged the net down. There was a strong fibre belt attached to each end of the net, while the net itself was only fifteen to twenty centimeters wide. He ended up in a foolish position, holding the head belt with both hands lest it snap back into the ceiling and not knowing what to do with it. Gosigo leaned over and, half-impatiently, helped him adjust the web under his chin. It pinched for a moment and Casher felt as though his head were being dragged by a heavy weight. "Don't fight it," said Gosigo. "Relax." Casher did. His head was lifted several centimeters into a foam pocket, which he had not previously noticed, in the back of the seat. After a second or two, he realized that the position was odd but comfortable. Gosigo had adjusted his own head belt and had turned on the lights of the vehicle. They blazed so bright that Casher almost thought they might be a laser, capable of charring the inner doors of the big room. The lights must have keyed the door. IV Tpwo panels slid open and a wild uproar of wind and vegetation rushed in. It was rough and stormy but far below hurricane velocity. The machine rolled forward clumsily and was out of the house and on the road very quickly. The sky was brown, bright luminous brown, shot through with streaks of yellow. Casher had never seen a sky of that color on any other world he had visited, and in his long exile he had seen many planets. Gosigo, staring straight ahead, was preoccupied with keeping the vehicle right in the middle of the black, soft, tarry road. "Watch it!" said a voice speaking right into his head. It was Gosigo, using an intercom which must have been built into the helmets. Casher watched, though there was nothing to see except for the rush of mad wind. Suddenly the ground car turned dark, spun upside down, and was violently shaken. An oily, pungent stench of pure fetor immediately drenched the whole car. Gosigo pulled out a panel with a console of buttons. Light and fire, intolerably bright, burned in on them through the windshield and portholes on the side. The battle was over before it. began. The ground car lay in a sort of swamp. The road was visible thirty or thirty-five meters away. There was a grinding sound inside the machine and the ground car righted itself. A singular sucking noise followed, then the grinding sound stopped. Casher could glimpse the big corkscrews on the side of the car eating their way into the ground. At last the machine was steady, pelted only by branches, leaves, and what seemed like kelp. A small tornado was passing over them. Gosigo took time to twist his head sidewise and to talk to Casher. "An air-whale swallowed us and I had to burn our way out." "A what?" cried Casher. "An air-whale," repeated Gosigo calmly on the intercom. "There are no indigenous forms of life on this planet, but the imported Earth forms have changed wildly since we brought them in. The tornadoes lifted the whales around enough so that sme of them got adapted to flying. They were the meat-eating kind, so they like to crack our ground cars open and eat the goodies inside. We're safe enough from them for the time being, provided we can make it back to the road. There are a few wild men who live in the wind, but they would not become dangerous to us unless we found ourselves really helpless. Pretty soon I can unscrew us from the ground and try to get back on the road. It's not really too far from here to Ambiloxi." The trip to the road was a long one, even though they could see the road itself all the times that they tried various approaches. The first time, the ground car tipped ominously forward. Red lights showed on the panel and buzzers buzzed. The great spiked wheels spun in vain as they chewed their way into a bottomless quagmire. Gosigo, calling back to his passenger, cried, "Hold steady! We're going to have to shoot ourselves out of this one backward!" Casher did not know how he could be any steadier, belted, hooded and strapped as he was, but he clutched the arms of his seat. 'TT'he world went red with fire  as the front of the car spat flame in rocket-like quantities. The swamp ahead of them boiled into steam, so that they could see nothing. Gosigo changed the windshield over from visual to radar, and even with radar there was not much to be seen -- nothing but a gray swirl for formless wraiths, and the weird lurching sensation as the machine fought its way back to solid ground. The console suddenly showed green and Gosigo cut the controls. They were back where they had been, with the repulsive burnt entrails of the air-whale scattered among the coral trees. "Try again," said Gosigo, as though Casher had something to do with the matter. He fiddled with the controls and the ground car rose several feet. The spikes on the wheels had been hydraulically extended until they were each at least # centimeters long. In sensation, the car felt like a large enclosed bicycle as it teetered on its big wheels. The wind was strong and capricious but there was no tornado in sight. "Here we go," said Gosigo. The ground car pressed forward in a mad rush, hastening obliquely through the vegetation and making for the highway on Casher's right. A bone-jarring crash told them that they had not made it. For a moment he was too dizzy to see where they were. He was glad of his helmet and happy about the web brace which held his neck. That crash would have killed him if he had not had full protection. Gosigo seemed to think the trip normal. His classic Hindu features relaxed in a wise smile as he said, "Hit a boulder. Fell on our side. Try again." Casher managed to gasp, "Is the machine unbreakable?" There was a laugh in Gosigo's voice when he answered. "Almost. We're the most vulnerable in it." Again fire spat at the ground, this time from the side of the ground car. It balanced itself precariously on the four high wheels. Gosigo turned on the radar screen to see through the steam which their own jets had called up. There the road was, plain and near. "Try again!" he shouted, as the machine lunged forward and then performed a veritable ballet on the surface of the marsh. It rushed, slowed, turned around on a hummock, gave itself an assist with the jets and then scrambled through the water. Casher saw the inverted cone of a tornado, half a kilometer or less away, veering toward them. Gosigo sensed his unspoken thought, because he answered: "Problem: who gets to the road first, that or we?" The machine bucked, lurched, twisted, spun. Casher could see nothing any more from the windscreen in front, but it was obvious that Gosigo knew what he was doing. There was the sickening, stomach-wrenching twist of a big drop and then a new sound was heard -- a grinding as of knives. G osigo, unworried, took his head out of the head net and looked over at Casher with a smile. "The twister will probably hit us in a minute or two, but it doesn't matter now. We're on the road and I've bolted us to the surface." "Bolted?" gasped Casher. "You know, those big screws on the outside of the car. They were made to go right into the road. All the roads here are neoasphaltum and self-repairing. There will be traces of them here when the last known person on the last known planet is dead. These are good roads." He stopped for the sudden hush. "Storm's going over us." It began again before he could finish his sentence. Wild raving winds tore at the machine which sat so solid that it seemed bedded in permastone. Gosigo pushed two buttons and then calibrated a dial. He squinted at his instruments and then pressed a button mounted on the edge of his navigator's seat. There was a sharp explosion, like a blasting of rock by chemical methods. Casher started to speak but Gosigo held out a warning hand for silence. He turned his dials quickly. The windscreen faded out, radar came on and then went off. At last a bright map -- bright red in background, with sharp gold lines -- appeared across the whole width of the screen. There were a dozen or more bright points on the map. Gosigo watched these intently. The map blurred, faded, dissolved into red chaos. Gosigo pushed another button and then could see out of the front glass screen again. "What was that?" said Casher. "Miniaturized radar rocket. I sent it up twelve kilometers for a look around. It transmitted a map of what it saw and I put it on our radar screen. The tornadoes are heavier than usual, but I think we can make it. Did you notice the top right of the map? "The top right?" said Casher. "Yes, the top right. Did you see what was there?" "Why, nothing," said Casher. "Nothing was there." "You're utterly right," said Gosigo. "What does that mean to you?" "I don't understand you," said Casher. "I suppose it means that there is nothing there." "Right again. But let me tell you something. There never is."  "Never is what?" "Anything," said Gosigo. ""'here never is anything cm the maps at that point. That's east of Ambiloxi. That's Beauregard. It never shows on the maps. Nothing happens there." "No bad weather -- ever ?" said Casher. "Never," said Gosigo. "Why not?" said Casher. "She will not permit it," said Gosigo firmly, as though his words made sense. ttAT'ou mean, her weather ma' chines work?" said Casher, grasping for the only rational explanation possible. "Yes," said Gosigo. "Why?" Casher asked, more perplexed than ever. "She pays for them." "How can she?" exclaimed Casher. "Your whole world of Henriada is bankrupt!" "Her part isn't." "Stop mystifying me," said Casher. "Tell me who she is and what this is all about." "Put you head in the net," said Gosigo. "I am not making puzzles because I want to do so. I have been commanded not to talk." "Because you are a forgetty." 'What's that got to do with it? Don't talk to me that way. Remember, I am not an animal or an underperson. I may be your servant for a few hours, but I am a man. You'll find out, soon enough. Hold tight!" The ground car came to a panic stop, the spiked teeth eating into the resilient firm neoasphaltum of the road. At the instant they stopped, the outside corkscrews began chewing their way into the ground. First Casher felt as though his eyes were popping out, because of the suddenness of the deceleration; now he felt like holding the arms of his seat as the tornado reached directly for their car, plucking at it again and again. The enormous outside screws held and he could feel the car straining to meet the gigantic suction of the storm. "Don't worry," shouted Gosigo over the noise of the storm. "I always spin us down a little bit more by firing the quickrockets straight up. These cars don't often go off the road." Casher tried to relax. The funnel of the tornado, which seemed almost like a living being, plucked after them once or twice more and then was gone as suddenly as it had hit. This time, Casher had seen no sign of the air-whales which rode the storms. He had seen nothing but rain and wind and desolation. The tornado was gone in a moment. Ghostlike shapes trailed after it in enormous prancing leaps. "Wind-men," said Gosigo glancing at them incuriously. "Wild people who have learned to live on Henriada. They aren't much more than animals. We are close to the territory of the lady. They would not dare attack us here." Casher O'Neill was too stunned to query the man or to challenge him. He tried once more to relax. Once more the car picked itself up and coursed along the smooth, narrow, winding neoasphaltum road, almost as though the machine itself were glad to function and to be functioning well. V dasher could never quite remember when they went from the howling wildness of Henriada into the stillness and beauty of the domains of Mister Murray Madigan. He could recall the feeling but not the facts. The town of Ambiloxi eluded him completely. It was so normal a town, so old-fashioned a little town that he could not think of it very much. Old people sat on the wooden boardwalk taking thei'r afternoon look at the strangers who passed through. Horses were tethered in a row along main street, between the parked machines. It looked like a peaceful picture from the ancient ages. Of tornadoes there was no sign, nor of the hurt and ruin which showed around the house of Rankin Meiklejohn. There were few underpeople or robots about, unless they were so cleverly contrived as to look almost exactly like real people. How can you remember something which is pleasant and non-memorable? Even the buildings did not show signs of being fortified again t the frightful storms which had brought the prosperous planet of Henriada to a condition of abandonment and ruin. Gosigo, who had a remarkable talent for stating the obvious, said tonelessly. "The weather machines are working here. There is no need for special precaution." But he did not stop in the town for rest, refreshments, conversation or fuel. He went through deftly and quietly, the gigantic armored ground car looking out of place among the peaceful and defenseless vehicles. He went as though he had been on the same route many times before, and knew the routine well. Once beyond Ambiloxi he speeded up, though at a moderate pace, compared to the frantic elusive action he had taken against storms in the earlier part of the trip. The landscape was earthlike... wet... and most of the ground was covered with vegetation. Old radar countermissile towers stood along the road. Casher could not imagine their possible use, even though he was sure, from the looks of them, that they were long obsolete. "What's the countermissile radar for?" he asked, speaking comfortably now that his head was out of the head net. Gosigo turned around and gave him a tortured glance in which pain and bewilderment were mixed. "Countermissile radar? Countermissile radar? I don't know that word, though it seems as though I should..." "Radar is what you were using to see with, back in the storm, when the ceiling and visibility were zero." Gosigo turned back to his driving, narrowly missing a tree. "That? That's just artificial vision. Why did you use the word 'countermissile radar'? There isn't any of that stuff here except what we have on our machine, though the mistress may be watching us if her set is on." "Those towers," said Casher. "They look like countermissile towers from the ancient times." "Towers. There aren't any towers here," snapped Gosigo. "Look," cried Casher. "Here are two more of them." "Oh, no man made those. They aren't buildings, just air coral. Some of the coral which people brought from earth mutated and got so it could live in the air. People used to plant it for windbreaks, before they decided to give up Henriada and move out. They didn't do much good, but they are pretty to look at." 'Tphey rode along a few minutes without asking questions. Tall trees had Spanish moss trailing over them. They were close to a sea. Small marshes appeared to the right and left of the road; here, where the endless tornadoes were kept out, everything had a park-like effect. The domains of the estate of Beauregard were unlike anything else on Henriada -- an area at peaceful wildness in a world which was rushing otherwise toward uninhabitability and ruin. Even Gosigo seemed more relaxed, more cheerful as he steered the ground car along the pleasant elevated road. Gosigo sighed, leaned forward, managed the controls and brought the car to a stop. He turned around calmly and looked full-face at Casher O'Neill. "You have your knife?" Casher automatically felt for it. It was there, safe enough in his bootsheath. He simply nodded. "You have your orders." girl." "I remember that. You didn't have to stop the car to tell me that." "I'm telling you now," said Gosigo, his wise Hindu face showing neither humor nor outrage. "Do it." "You mean, kill her? Right at first sight?" "Do it," said Gosigo. "You have your orders." "I'm the judge of that," said Casher. "It will be on my conscience. Are you watching me for the Administrator?" "That drunken fool?" said Gosigo. "I don't care about him, except that I am a forgetty and I belong to him. We're in her territory now. You are going to do whatever she wants. You have orders to kill her. All right. Kill her." "You mean -- she wants to be murdered?" "Of course not!" said Gosigo, with the irritation of an adult who has to explain too many things to an inquisitive child. "Then how can I kill her without finding out what this is all about?" "She knows. She knows herself -- she knows her master -- she knows this planet. She knows me and she knows something about you. Go ahead and kill her, since those are your orders. If she wants to die, that's not for you or me to decide. It's her business. If she does not want to die, you will not succeed." "I'd like to see the person," said Casher, "who could stop me in a sudden knife attack. Have you told her that I am coming?" "I've told her nothing, but she knows we are coming and she is pretty sure what you have been sent for. Don't think about it. Just do what you are told. Jump for her with the knife. She will take care of the matter." "But -- " cried Casher. "Stop asking questions," said Gosigo. "Just follow orders and remember that she will take care of you. Even you." He started up the ground car. Within less than a kilometer they had crossed a low ridge of land and there before them lay Beauregard -- the mansion at the edge of the waters, its white pillars shining, its pergolas glistening in the bright air, its yards and palmettos tidy. Casher was a brave man, but he felt the palms of his hands go wet when he realized that in a minute or two he would have to commit a murder. VI 'Hphe ground car swung up the drive. It stopped. Without a word, Gosigo activated the door. The air smelled calm, sea-wet, salt and yet coolly fresh. Casher jumped out and ran to the door, surprised to feel that his legs trembled as he ran. He had killed before, real men in real quarrels. Why should a mere animal matter to him? The door stopped him. Without thinking, he tried to wrench it open. The knob did not yield and there was no automatic control in sight. This was indeed a very antique sort of house. He struck the door with his hands. The thuds sounded around him. He could not tell whether they resounded in the house. No sound or echo came from beyond the door. He began rehearsing the phrase, "I want to see Mister and Owner Madigan... The door did open. A little girl stood there. He knew her. He had always Known her. She was his sweetheart, come back out of his childhood. She was the sister he had never had. She was his own mother, when young. She was at the marvellous age, somewhere between ten and thirteen, where the child -- as the phrase goes -- "becomes an old old child and not a raw grown-up." She was kind, calm, intelligent, expectant, quiet, inviting, unafraid. She felt like someone he had never left behind: yet, at the same moment, he knew he had never seen her before. He heard his voice asking for the Mister and Owner Madigan while he wondered, at the bask of his mind, who the girl might be. Madigan's daughter? Neither Rankin Meiklejohn nor the deputy had said anything about a human family. The child looked at him levellyHe must have finished braying his question at her. "Mister and Owner Madigan," said the child, "sees no one thin day, but you are seeing me." There was humor and fearlessness in her eyes. "Who are you?" he blurted out. "I am the housekeeper of this house. My name is T'ruth." His knife was in his hand before he knew how it had gotten there. He remembered the advice of the Administrator: plunge, plunge, stab, stab, run! She saw the knife but her eyes did not waver from his face. He looked at her uncertainly. I f this was an underperson, it was the most remarkable one he had ever seen. But even Gosigo had told him to do his duty, to stab, to kill the woman named T'ruth. Here she was. He could not do it. He spun the knife in the air, caught it by its tip and held it out to her, handle first. "I was sent to kill you," he said, "but I find I cannot do it. I have lost a cruiser." "Kill me if you wish," she said, "because I have no fear of you." Her calm words were so far outside his experience that he took the knife in his left hand and lifted his arm as if to stab toward her. He dropped his arm. "I cannot do it," he whined. "What have you done to me?" "I have done nothing to you. You do not wish to kill a child and I look to you like a child. Besides, I think you love me. If this ig so, it must be very comfortable for you." Casher heard his knife clatter to the floor as he dropped it. He had never dropped it before. "Who are you," he gasped, "that you should do this to me?" "I am me," she said, her voice as tranquil and happy as that of any girl, provided that the girl was caught at a moment of great happiness and poise. "I am the housekeeper of this house." She smiled almost impishly and added, "It seems that I must almost be the ruler of this planet as well." Her voice turned serious. "Man," she said, "can't you see it, man? I am an animal, a turtle. I am incapable of disobeying the word of man. When I was little I was trained and I was given orders. I shall carry out those orders as long as I live. When I look at you, I feel strange. You look as though you loved me already, but you do not know what to do. Wait a moment. I must let Gosigo go." The shining knife on the floor of the doorway, she saw: she stepped over it. Gosigo had gotten out of the ground car and was giving her a formal, low bow. "Tell me," she cried, "what you have just seen!" There was friendliness in her cell, as though the routine were as old game. "I saw Casher O'Neill bound up the steps. You yourself opened the door. He thrust his dagger into your throat and the blood spat out in a big stream, rich and dark and red. You died in the doorway. For some reason Casher O'Neill went on into the house without saying anything to me. I became frightened and I fled." He did not look frightened at all. "If I am dead," she said, "how can I be talking to you?" "Don't ask me," cried Gosigo. "I am just a forgetty. I always go back to the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, each time that you are murdered, and I tell him the truth of what I saw. Then he gives me the medicine and I tell him something else. At that point he will get drunk and gloomy again, the way that he always does." "It's a pity," said the child. "I wish I could help him, but I can't. He won't come to Beauregard." "Him?" laughed Gosigo. "Oh, no, not him! Never! He just sends other people to kill you." "And he's never satisfied," said the child sadly, "no matter how many times he kills me!" "Never," said Gosigo cheerfully, climbing back into the ground car. " 'By now." "Wait a moment," she called. "Wouldn't you like something to eat ox drink before you drive back. There's a bad clutch of Storms on the road." "Not me," said Gosigo. "He might punish me and make me a forgetty all over again. Say, maybe that's already happened. Maybe I'm a forgetty who's been put through it several times, not just once." Hope surged into his voice. "T'ruth! T'ruth! Can you tell me?" "Suppose I did tell you," said she. "What would happen?" T Tis face became sad, "I'd have a convulsion and forget what I told you. Well, good-by anyhow. I'll take a chance on the storms. If you ever see that Casher O'Neill again," called Gosigo, looking right through Casher O'Neill, "tell him I liked him but that we'll never meet again." "I'll tell him," said the girl gently. She watched as the heavy brown man climbed nimbly into the car. The top crammed shut with no sound. The wheels turned and in a moment the car had disappeared behind the palmettoes in the drive. While she had talked to Gosigo in her clear warm high girlish voice, Casher had watched her. He could see the thin shape of her shoulders under the light blue shift that she wore. Her hips had not begun to fill. When he glanced at her in one-quarter profile, he could see that her cheek was smooth, her hair wellcombed, her little breasts just beginning to bud on her chest. Who was this child who acted like an empress? She turned back to him and gave him a warm, apologetic smile. "Gosigo and I always talk over the story together. Then he goes back and Meiklejohn does not believe it and spends unhappy months planning my murder all over again. I suppose, since I am just an animal, that I should not call it a 'murder' when somebody tries to kill me, but I resist, of course. I do not care about me, but I have strong orders to keep my master and his house safe from harm." "How old are you?" said Casher. He added, " -- if you can tell the truth." "I can tell nothing but the truth. I am conditioned. I am nine hundred and six earth-years old." "Nine hundred?" he cried. "But you look like a child!" "I am a child," said the girl, "and not a child. I am an earth turtle, changed into human form by the convenience of man. My life expectancy was increased three hundred times when I was modified. They tell me that my normal life span should have been three hundred years. Now it is ninety thousand years, and sometimes I am afraid. You will be dead of happy old age, Casher O'Neill, while I am still opening the drapes in this house to ler the sunlight in. But let's not stand in the door and talk. Come on in and get some refreshments. You're not going anywhere, you know." Casher followed her into the house but he put his worry into words, "You mean I am your prisoner." "Not my prisoner, Casher. Yours. How could you cross that ground which you travelled in the ground car? You could get to the ends of my estate all right, but then the storms would pick you up and whirl you away to a death which nobody would even see." She turned into a big old room, bright with lightcolored wooden furniture. dasher stood there, awkward ly. He had returned his knife to its boot-sheath when they left the vestibule. Now he felt very odd, sitting with his victim on a sun-porch. T'ruth was untroubled. She rang a brass bell which stood on an old-fashioned round table Feminine footsteps clattered ia the hall. A female servant entered the room, dressed in a black dress with a white apron. Casher had seen such servants in the old drama cubes, but he had never expected to meet one is the flesh. "We'll have high tea," said T'ruth. "Which do you prefer, tea or coffee, Casher? Or I have beer and wines. Even two bottles of whiskey brought all the way from Earth." "Coffee would be fine for me," said Casher. "And you know what I want, Eunice," said T'ruth to the servant. "Yes, ma'am," said the maid, disappearing. Casher leaned forward. "That servant -- is she human?" "Certainly," said T'ruth. "Then why is she working for an underperson like you? I mean -- I don't mean to be unpleasant or anything -- but I mean that's against all laws." "Not here on Henriada, it isn't." "And why not?" persisted Casher. "Because on Henriada I am myself the law." "But the government -- ?" "It's gone," she said calmly. "The Instrumentality?" T'ruth frowned. She looked like a wise, puzzled child. "Maybe you know that part better than I do. They leave an administrator here, probably because they do not have any other place to put him and because he needs some kind of work to keep him alive. Yet they do not give him enough real power to arrest my master or to kill me. They ignore me. It seems to me that if I do not challenge them, they leave me alone." "But their rules -- ?" "They don't enforce them, neither here in Beauregard nor over in the town of Ambiloxi. They leave it up to me to keep these places going. I do the best I can." "That servant, then? Did they lease her to you?" "Oh, no," laughed the girlwoman. "She came to kill me twenty years ago, but she was a forgetty and she had no place else to go, so I trained her as a maid. She has a contract with my master, and her wages are paid every month into the satellite above the planet. She can leave if she ever wants to. I don't think she will." Rasher sighed. "This is all too  ' hard to believe. You are a child, but you are almost a thousand years old. You're an underperson, but you command a whole planet -- " "Only when I need to!" she interrupted him. "You are wiser than most of the people I have ever known and yet you look young. How old do you feel?" "I feel like a child," she said, "a child one thousand years old. And I have had the education and the memory and the experience of a wise lady stamped right into my brain." "Who was the lady?" said Casher. "The Owner and Citizen Agatha Madigan. The wife of my master. As she was dying they transcribed her brain on mine. That's why I speak so well and know so much." "But that's illegal!" cried Casher. "I suppose it was," T'ruth agreed, "but my master had it done anyhow." Casher leaned forward in his chair. He looked earnestly at the person. One part of him still loved her for the wonderful little girl whom he had thought she was, but another part was in awe of being more powerful than anyone he had seen before. She returned his gaze with that composed half-smile which was wholly feminine and completely selfpossessed; she looked tenderly upon him as their faces were reflected by the yellow morning light of Henriada. "I begin to understand," he said, "that you are what you have to be. It is very strange, here in this forgotten world." "Henriada is strange," she said, "and I suppose that I must seem strange to you. You are right, though, about each of us being what she has to be. Isn't that liberty itself? If we each one must be something, isn't liberty the business of finding it out and then doing it -- that one job, that uttermost mission compatible with our natures? How terrible it would be, to be something and never know what!" "Like who?" said Casher. "Like Gosigo, perhaps. He was a great king and he was a good king, on some faraway world where they still need kings. But he committed an intolerable mistake and the Instrumentality made him into a forgetty and sent him here." "So that's the mystery!" said Casher. "And what am I?" Ohe looked at him calmly and  steadfastly before she answered. "You are a killer, Casher O'Neill. You are a good man, but you are a killer too. It must make your life very hard in many ways. You keep having to justify yourself." This was so close to the truth -- so close to Casher's long worries as to whether justice might not just be a cover name for "revenge" -- that it was his turn to gasp and be silent. "And I have work for you," added the amazing child. "Work? Here?" "Yes. Something much worse it, Casher, if you want to go away from here before I die, eighty-nine thousand years from now." She looked around. "Hush!" she added. "Eunice is coming and I do not want to frighten her by letting her know the terrible things that you are going to have to do." "Here?" he whispered urgently. "Right here, in this house?" "Right here in this house," said she in a normal voice, as Eunice entered the room bearing a huge tray covered with plates of food and two pots of beverage. Casher stared at the human woman who worked so cheerfully for an animal, but neither Eunice, who was busy setting things out cm the table, nor T'ruth who, turtle and woman that she was, could not help rearranging the dishes with gentle peremptories, paid the least attention to him. The words rang in his head. "In this house... something They made no sense. Neither did it make sense to have high tea before five hours, decimal time. He sighed and they both glanced at him with affectionate concern. "He's taking it better than most of them do, ma'am," said Eunice. "Most of them who come here to kill you are very upset when they find out that they cannot do it." "He's a killer, Eunice, a real killer, so I think he wasn't too bothered." Eunice turned to him very pleasantly and said, "A killer, sir. It's a pleasure to have you here. Most of them are terrible amateurs and then the lady has to heal them before we can find something for them to do." Casher couldn't resist a spot inquiry. "Are all the other wouldbe killers still here?" "Most of them, sir. The ones that nothing happened to. Like me. Where else would we go? Back to the Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn?" She said the last with heavy scorn indeed, curtseyed to him, bowed deeply to the woman-girl T'ruth, and left the room. T 'ruth looked friendlily at Casher O'Neill. "I can tell that you will not digest your food if you sit here waiting for bad news. When I said you had to do something worse than killing, I suppose I was speaking from a woman's point of view. We have a homicidal maniac in the house. He is a house guest and he is covered by Old North Australian law. That means we cannot kill him or expel him, though he is almost as immortal as I am. I hope that you and I can frighten him away from molesting my master. I cannot cure him or love him. He is too crazy to be reached through his emotions. Pure, utter awful fright might do it, and it takes a man for that job. If you do this, I will reward you richly." "And if I don't?" said Casher. Again she stared at him as though she were trying to see through his eyes all the way down to the bottom of his soul; again he felt for her that tremor of compassion, ever so slightly tinged with male desire, which he had experienced when he first met her in the doorway of Beauregard. Their locked glances broke apart. T'ruth looked at the floor. "I cannot lie," she said, as though it were a handicap. "If you do not help me I shall have to do the things which it is in my power to do. The chief thing is nothing. To let you live here, to let you sleep and eat in this house until you get bored and ask me for some kind of routine work around the estate. I could make you work," she went on, looking up at him and blushing all the way to the top of her bodice, "by having you fall in love with me, but that would not be kind. I will not do it that way. Either you make a deal with me or you do not. It's up to you. Anyhow, let's eat first. I've been up since dawn, expecting one more killer. I even wondered if you might be the one who would succeed. That would be terrible, to leave my master all alone!" "But you -- wouldn't you yourself mind being killed?" "Me? When I've already lived a thousand years and have eighty-nine thousand more to go? It couldn't matter less to me. Have some coffee." And she poured his coffee. npwo or three times Casher I tried to get the conversation back to the work at hand, but T'ruth diverted him with trivialities. She even made him walk to the enormous window, where they could see far across the marshes and the bay. The sky in the remote distance was dark and full of worms. Those were tornadoes, beyond tire reach of her weather machines, which coursed around the rest of Henriada but stopped short at the boundaries of Ambiloxi and Beauregard. She made him admire the weird coral castles which had built themselves up from the bay bottom, hundreds of feet into the air. She tried to make him see a family of wild wind-people who were slyly and gently stealing apples from her orchard, but either his eyes were not used to the landscape or T'ruth could see much further than he could. This was a world rich in water. If it had not been located within a series of bad pockets of space, the water itself could have become an export. Mankind had done the best it could, raising kelp to provide the iron and phosphorus so often lacking in off-world diets, controlling the weather at great expense. Finally the Instrumentality recommended that they give up. The exports of Henriada never quite balanced the imports. The subsidies had gone far beyond the usual times. The earth-life had adapted with a vigor which was much too great. Ordinary forms rapidly found new shapes, challenged by the winds, the rains, the novel chemistry and the odd radiation patterns of Henriada. Killer whales became airborne, coral took to the air, human babies lost in the wind sometimes survived to become subhuman and wild. Even jellyfish became skysweepers. The former inhabitants of Hennada had chosen a planet at a reasonable price -- not cheap, but reasonable -- from the owner, who had in turn bought it from a post-Soviet settling cooperative. They had leased the new planet, had worked out an ecology, had emigrated, and were now doing well. Henriada kept the wild weather, the lost hopes and the ruins. And of these ruins, the greatest was Murray Madigan. Once a prime landholder and host, a gentleman among gentlemen, the richest man on the whole world, Madigan had become old, senile, weak. He faced death or catalepsis. The death of his wife made him fear his own death and with his turtle-girl T'ruth, he had chosen catalepsis. Most of the time he was frozen in a trance, his heartbeat imperceptible, his metabolism very slow. Then, for a few hours or days, he was normal. Sometimes the sleeps were for weeks, sometimes for years. The Instrumentality doctors had looked him over -- more out of scientific curiosity than from any judicial right -- and had decided that though this was an odd way to live, it was a legal one. They went away and left him alone. He had had the whole personality of his dying wife Agatha Madigan impressed on the turtlechild, though this was illegal. Quite simply, the doctor had been bribed. A #I this was told by T'ruth to Casher as they ate and drank their way slowly through an immense repast. An archaic wood fire roared in a real fireplace. While she talked, Casher watched the gentle movement of her shoulderblades when she moved forward, the loose movement of her light dress as she moved, the childish face which was so tender, so appealing and yet so wise. Knowing as little as he did about the planet of Henriada, Casher tried desperately to fit his own thinking together and to make sense out of the predicament in which he found himself. Even if the girl were attractive, this told him nothing of the real challenges which he still faced inside this very house. No longer was his preoccupation with getting the power cruiser his main job on Henriada. No evidence was at hand to show that the drunken, deranged Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn, would give him anything at all unless he, Casher, killed the girl. Even that had become a forgotten mission. Despite the fact that he had come to the estate of Beauregard for the purpose journey without a destination. Years of sad experience had taught him that when a project went completely to pieces, he still had the mission of personal survival, if his life were to mean anything to his home planet, Mizzer, and if his return, in any way or any fashion, could bring real liberty back to the Twelve Niles. So he looked at the girl with a new kind of unconcern. How could she help his plans? Or hinder them? The promises she made were too vague to be of any real use in the sad complicated world of politics. He just tried to enjoy her company and the strange place in which he found himself. The Gulf of Esperanza lay just within his vision. At the far horizon he could see the helpless tornadoes trying to writhe their way past the weather machines which still functioned, at the expense of Beauregard, all along the coast from Ambiloxi to Mottile. He could see the shoreline choked with kelp, which had once been a cash crop and was now a nuisance. Ruined buildings in the distance were probably the leftovers of processing plants; the artificiallooking coral castles obscured his view of them. A nd this house -- how much sense did this house make? An undergirl, eerily wise, who herself admitted that she had obtained an unlawful amount of conditioning; a master who was a living corpse; a threat which could not even be mentioned freely within the house; a household which seemed to have displaced the planetary government; a planetary government which the Instrumentality, for unfathomable reasons of its own, had let fall into ruin. Why? Why? The turtle-girl was looking at him. If he had been an art student, he would have said that she was giving him the tender, feminine and irrecoverably remote smile of a Madonna, but he did not know the motifs of the ancient pictures; he just knew that it was a smile characteristic of T'ruth herself. "You are wondering...?" she said. He nodded, suddenly feeling miserable that mere words had come between them. "You are wondering why the Instrumentality let you come here?" He nodded again. "I don't know either," said she, reachirg out and taking his hand. His hand felt and looked like the hairy paw of a giant as she held his right hand with her two pretty, well-kept little-girl hands; but the strength of her eyes and the steadfastness of her voice showed that it was she who was giving the reassurance, not he. The child was helping him? The idea was outrageous, impossible, true. It was enough to alarm him, to make him begin to pull his hand away again. She clutched him with tender strength, and he could not resist her. Again he had the feeling, which had gripped him so strongly when he first met her at the door of Beauregard and failed to kill her, that he had always known her and had always loved her. (Was there not some planet on which eccentric people believed a weird cult, thinking that human beings were endlessly reborn with fragmentary recollections of their own previous human lives? It was almost like that here, now. He did not know the girl but he had always known her. He did not love the girl and yet he had loved her from the beginning of time.) Said she, so softly that it was almost a whisper: "Wait. Your death may come through that door pretty soon and I will tell you how to meet it. But before that, I have to show you the most beautiful thing in the world." TVespite her little hand lying tenderly on his, Casher spoke irritably: "I'm tired of talking riddles here on Henriada. The Administrator gives me the in it. Then you promise me a battle and give me a good meal instead. Now you talk about the battle and start off with some other irrelevancy. You're going to make me angry if you keep on and, and -- " he stammered at last -- "and I get pretty useless if I'm angry. If you want me to fight for you, let me know the fight and let me go do it Her remote, kind half-smile did not waver. "Casher," she said, "what I am going to show you is your most important weapon in the fight." With her free left hand she tugged at the fine chain of a thin gold necklace. Some kind of jewelry came out of the top of her shift dress, where she had kept it hidden. It was the image of two pieces of wood with a man nailed to them. Casher stared and then he burst into hysterical laughter. "Now you've done it, ma'am," he cried. "I'm no use to you or to anybody else. I know what mat is, and up to now I've just suspected it. It's what the robot, rat and Copt agreed on when they went exploring back in Space Three. It's the Old Strong Religion. You've put it in my mind and now the next person who meets me will peep it and will wipe it out. Me too, probably, along with it. That's no weapon. That's a defeat. You've done me in. I knew the sign of the Fish a long time ago, but I had a chance of getting away with just that little bit." "Casher!" she cried. "Casher! Get hold of yourself. You will know nothing about this before you leave Beauregard. You will forget. You will be safe." He stood on his feet, not knowing whether to run away, to laugh out loud, or to sit down and weep at the silly sad misfortune which had befallen him. To think that he himself had become brain-branded as a fanatic -- forever denied travel between the stars -- just because an undergirl had shown him an odd piece of jewelry! "It's not as bad as you think," said the little girl, and stood up too. Her face peered lovingly at Casher's. "Do you think, Casher, that I am afraid?" "No," he admitted. "You will not remember this, Casher. Not when you leave. I am not just the turtle-girl T'ruth. I am also the imprint ol the citizen Agatha. Have you ever heard of her?" "Agatha Madigan?" He shook his head slowly. "No. I don't see how... No, I'm sure that I never heard of her." "Didn't you ever hear the story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon?" Casher looked surprised. "Sure I saw it. It's a play. A drama. It is said to be based on some legend of immemorial time. The 'space-witch' they called her, and she conjured fleets out of nothing by sheer hypnosis. It's an old story." "Eleven hundred years isn't so long," said the girl. "Eleven hundred years, fourteen local months come next tonight." "You weren't alive eleven hundred years ago," said Casher. TTe stood up from the remains of their meal and wandered over toward the window. That terrible piece of religious jewelry made him uncomfortable. He knew that it was against all laws to ship religion from world to world. What would he do, what could he do, now that he had actually beheld an image of the God Nailed High? That was exactly the kind of contraband which the police and customs robots of hundreds of worlds were looking for. The Instrumentality was easy about most tilings, but the transplanting of religion was one of its hostile obsessions. Religions leaked from world to world anyhow. It was said that sometimes even the underpeople and robots carried bits of religion through space, though this seemed improbable. The Instrumentality left religion alone when it had a settled place on a single planet, but the Lords of the Instrumentality themselves shunned other people's devotional lives and simply took good care that fanaticism did not once more flare up between the stars, once again bringing wild hope and great death to all the mankinds. And now, thought Casher, the Instrumentality has been good to me in its big impersonal collective way, but what will it do when my brain is on fire with forbidden knowledge? The girl's voice called him. "I have the answer to your problem, Casher," said she, "if you would only listen to me. I am the Hechizera of Gonfalon, at least I am as much as any one person can be printed on another. " His jaw dropped as he turned back to her. "You mean that you, child, really are imprinted with this woman Agatha Madigan? Really imprinted?" "I have all her skills, Casher," said the girl quietly, "and a few more which I have learned on my own." "But I thought it was just a story!" said Casher. "If you're that terrible woman from Gonfalon, you don't need me. I'm quitting. Now." Casher walked toward the door. Disgusted, finished, through. She might be a child, she might be charming, she might need help, but if she came from that terrible old story, she did not need him. "Oh, no you don't," said she. IX T Tnexpected, she took her place in the doorway, barring it. In her hand was the image of the man on the two pieces of wood. Ordinarily Casher would not have pushed a lady. Such was his haste that he did so this time. When he touched her, it was like welded steel ; neither her gown nor her body yielded his strong hand and heavy push. "And now what?" she asked gently. Looking back, he saw that the real T'ruth, the smiling girlwoman, still stood soft and real in the window. Deep within, he began to give up; he had heard of hypnotists who could project, but he had never met anyone as strong as this. She was doing it, but how was she doing it? Or was she doing it? The operation could be subvolitional. There might be some art carried over from her animal past which even her re-formed mind could not explain. Operations too subtle, too primordial for analysis. Or skills which she used without understanding. "I project," she said. "I see you do," he replied glumly and flatly. "I do kinesthetics," she said. His knife whipped out of his bootsheath and floated in the air in front of him. He snatched it out of the air instinctively. It wormed a little in his grasp, but the force on the knife was nothing more than he had felt when passing big magnetic engines. "I blind," she said. The room went totally dark for him. "I hear," he said, and prowled at her like a beast, going by his memory of the room and by the very soft sound of her breathing. He had noticed by now that the simulacrum of herself which she had put in the doorway did not make any sound at all, not even that of breathing. He knew that he was near her. His fingertips reached out for her shoulder or her throat. He did not mean to hurt her, merely to show her that two could play at tricks. "I stun," she said, and her voice came at him from all directions. It echoed from the ceiling, came from all five walls of the old odd room, from the open windows, from both the doors. He felt as though he were being lifted into space and turned slowly in a condition of weightlessness. He tried to retain selfcontrol, to listen for the one true sound among the many false sounds, to trap the girl by some outside chance. "I make you remember," said her multiple echoing voice. For an instant he did not see how this could be a weapon, even if the turtle-girl had learned all the ugly tricks of the Hechizera of Gonfalon. But then he knew. T T e saw his uncle, Kuraf , again.  He saw his old apartments vividly around himself. Kuraf was there. The old man was pitiable, hateful, drunk, horrible; the girl on Kuraf's lap laughed at him, Casher O'Neill, and she laughed at Kuraf too. Casher had once had a teenager's passionate concern with sex and at the same time he had a teenager's dreadful fear of all the unstated, invisible implications of what the man-woman relationship, gone sour, gone wrong, gone bad, might be. The presentmoment Casher remembered the long-ago Casher, and as he spun in the web of T'ruth's hypnotic powers he found himself back with the ugliest memory he had: Mizzer. The colonels had taken Kaheer itself, and they ultimately let Kuraf run away to the pleasure planet of Ttiolle. But Kuraf's companions, who had debauched the old republic of the Twelve Niles, those people! They did not go. The soldiers, stung to fury, had cut them down with knives. Casher thought of the blood sticky on the floors, blood gushing purple into the carpets, blood bright red and leaping like a fountain when a white throat ended its last gurgle, blood turning brown where handprints had left it on marble tables. The warm palace, long ago, had gotten the sweet sick stench of blood all the way through it. The young Casher had never known that people had so much blood inside them, or that so much could pour out on the perfumed sheets, the tables still set with food and drink, or that blood could creep across the floor in growing pools as the bodies of the dead yielded up their last few nasty sounds and their terminal muscular spasms. Before that day of Butchery had ended, one thousand, three hundred and eleven human bodies, ranging in age from two months to eighty-nine years, had been carried out of the palaces once occupied by Kuraf. Kuraf. under sedation, was waiting for a starship to take him to perpetual exile and Casher -- Casher himself O'Neill! -- was shaking the hand of Colonel Wedder, whose orders had caused all the blood. The hand was washed and the nails pared and cleaned, but the cuff of the sleeve was still rimmed with the dry blood of some other human being. Colonel Wedder either did not notice his own cuff, or he did not care. "Touch and yield!" said a girlvoice out of nowhere. Casher found himself on all fours in the room, his sight suddenly back again, the room un changed, and T'ruth smiling. "I fought you," she said. He did not trust himself to speak. He reached for his water-glass, looking at it closely to see if there were any blood on it. Of course not. Not here. Not this time, not this place. He pulled himself to his feet. The girl has sense enough not to help him. She stood there in her thin modest shift, looking very much like a wise female child, while he stood up and drank thirstily. He refilled the glass and drank again. Then, only then, did he turn to her and speak. "Do you do all that?" She nodded. "Alone. Without drugs or machinery?" She nodded again. "Child," he cried out, "you're not a person! You're a whole weapons system all by yourself. What are you, really. Who are you?" "I am the turtle child T'ruth," she said, "and I am the loyal property and loving servant of my good master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan." "Madame," said Casher, "you are almost a thousand years old. I am at your service. I do hope you will let me go free later on. And especially, that you will take that religious picture out of my mind." As Casher spoke, she picked a locket from the table. He did not notice it. It was an ancient watch or a little round box, swinging on a thin gold chain. "Watch this," said the child, "if you trust me, and repeat what I then say." (Nothing at all happened: nothing -- anywhere.) dasher said to her, "You're  making me dizzy, swinging that ornament. Put it back on. Isn't that the one you were wearing?" "No, Casher, it isn't." "What were we talking about?" demanded Casher. "Something," said she. "Don't you remember?" "No," said Casher brusquely. "Sorry, but I'm hungry again." He wolfed down a sweet roll encrusted with sugar and decorated with fruits. His mouth full, he washed the food down with water. At last he spoke to her. "Now what?" She had watched with timeless grace. "There's no hurry, Casher. Minutes or hours, they don't matter." "Didn't you want me to fight somebody after Gosigo left me here?" "That's right," she said, with terrible quiet. "I seem to have had a fight right here in this room." He stared around stupidly. She looked around the room, very cool. "It doesn't look as though anybody's been fighting here, does it?" "There's no blood here, no blood at all. Everything is clean." "Pretty much so." "Then why," said Casher, "should I think I had a fight?" "This wild weather on Henriada sometimes upsets offworlders until they get used to it," said T'ruth mildly. The old room with the goldenoak furniture swam around him. The world outside was strange with the sunlit marshes and wide bayous trailing off to the forever-thundering storm, just over the horizon, which lay beyond the weather machines. Casher shrugged and shivered. He looked straight at the girl. She stood erect and looked at him with the even regard of a reigning empress. Her young budding breasts barely showed through the thinness of her shift; she wore golden flat-heeled shoes. Around her neck there was a thin gold chain, but the object on the chain hung down inside her dress. It excited him a little to think of her flat chest barely budding into womanhood. He had never been a man who had an improper taste for children, but there was something about this person which was not child-like at all. And around the edge of his mind there flickered up hot little torments of memory. "Now I remember," he cried, "you have me here to kill somebody. You are sending me into a fight." "You are going to a fight, Casher. I wish I could send somebody else, not you, but you are the only person here strong enough to do the job." Impasively he took her hand. The moment he touched her, she ceased to be a child or an underperson. She felt tendei and exciting, like the most desirable and important person he had ever known. His sister? But he had no sister. He felt he was himself terribly, unendurably important to her. He did not want to let her hand go, but she withdrew from his touch with an authority which no decent man could resist. "You must fight to the death, now, Casher," she said, looking at him as evenly as might a troop commander examine a special soldier selected for a risky mission. X Tie nodded. He was bred of having his mind confused. He knew something had happened to him after the forgetty, Gosigo, had left him at the front door, but he was not at all sure of what it was. They seemed to have had a sort of meal together in this room. He felt that he was in love with the child, though he knew that she was not even a human being. He remembered something about her living ninety thousand years and he remembered something else about her having gotten the name and the skills of the greatest battle hypnotist of all history, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. There was something strange, something frightening about that chain around her neck. There were things he had hoped he would never have to know. He strained at the thought and it broke like a bubble. "I'm a fighter," he said. "Give me my fight and let me know." "He can kill you. I hope not... but you must not kill him. He is immortal and insane; but in the law of Old North Australia, from which my master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan, is an exile, we must not hurt a house guest, nor may we turn him away in a time of great need." "What do I do?" snapped Casher impatiently. "You fight him. Frighten him Make his poor crazy mind fearful that he will meet you again." "I'm supposed to do this?" "You can," she said very seriously. "I've already tested you. That's why you have the little spot of amnesia about this room." "But why? Why bother? Why not get some of your human servants and have them tie him up or put him in a padded room?" "They can't deal with him. He is too strong, too big, too clever, even though insane. Beside, they don't dare fdllow him." "Where does he go?" said Casher sharply. "Into the control room," replied T'ruth, as if it were the saddest phrase ever uttered. "What's wrong with that? Even a place as fine as Beauregard can't have too much of a control room. Put locks on the control." "It's not that kind of a control room." Almost angry, he shouted, "Whal is it, then?" "The control room," she answered, "is for a planoform ship. This house -- These counties, all the way to Mottile on the one side and to Ambiloxi on the other -- The sea itself, way out into the Gulf of Esperanza. All this is one ship." Casher's professional interest took over. "If it's turned off, he can't do any harm." "It's not turned off," she said. "My master leaves it on a very little bit. That way, he can keep Ae weather machines going and make this edge of Henriada a very pleasant place." tC' r ou mean," said Casher, "that you'd risk letting a lunatic fly all these estates off into space." "He doesn't even fly." "What does he do, then?" yelled Casher. "When he gets at the controls, he just hovers." "He hovers? By the Bell, girl, don't try to fool me. If you hover a place as big as this, you could wipe out the whole planet any moment. There have been only two or three pilots in the history of space who would be able to hover a machine like this one." "He can, though," insisted the little girl. "Who is he, anyhow?" "I thought you knew. His name is John Joy Tree." "Tree the Go-Captain?" Casher shivered in the warm room. "He died a long time ago after he made that record flight." "He did not die. He bought immortality and went mad. He came here and he lives under my master's protection." "Oh," said Casher. There was nothing else he would say. John Joy Tree, the great Norstrilian who took the first of the Long Plunges outside the galaxy; he was like Magno Taliano of ages ago, who could fly space on his living brain alone. But fight him? How could anybody fight him? Pilots are for piloting; killers loving or forgetting. When you mix up the purposes, everything goes wrong. Casher went down abruptly. "Do you have any more of that coffee?" "You don't need coffee," she said. He looked up inquiringly. "You're a fighter. You need a war. That's it," she said, pointing with her girlish hand to a small doorway which looked like the entrance to a closet. "Just go in there. He's in there now, tinkering with the machines again. Making me wait for my master to get blown to bits at any minute! And I've put up with it for over a hundred years." "Go yourself," he said. "You've been in a ship's control room," she declared. "Yes," he nodded. "You know how people go all naked and frightened inside. You know how much training it takes to make a go-captain. What do you think happens to me?" At long last, her voice was shrill, angry, excited, childish. "What happens?" said Casher dully, not caring very much; he felt weary in every bone. Useless battles, murder he had to try, dead people arguing after their ballads had already grown out of fashion. Why didn't the Hechizera of Gonfalon do her own work? # Catching his thought she screeched at him, "Because I can't!" "All right," said Casher. "Why not?" "Because I turn into me." A little startled, Casher said, "You what?" "I'm a turtle child. My shape is human. My brain is big. But I'm a turtle. No matter how much my master needs me, I'm just a turtle." "What's that got to do with it?" "What do turtles do when they're faced with danger? Not underpeople-turtles, but real turtles, little animals. You must have heard of them somewhere." "I've seen them," said Casher, "on some world or other. They pull into their shells." "That's why I do," she wept, "when I sould be defending my master. I can meet most things. I am not a coward. But in that control room, I forget, forget!" "Send a robot, then!" She almost screamed at him. "A robot against John Joy Tree? Are you mad, too?" Casher admitted, in a mumble, that on second thought it wouldn't do much good to send a robot against the greatest gocaptain of them all. He concluded lamely, "I'll go, if you want me to." "Go now," she shouted. "Go right in!" She pulled at his arm, halfdragging and half-leading him to the little brightened door which looked so innocent. "But -- " he said. "Keep going," she hissed. "This is all we ask of you. Don't kill him, but frighten him, fight him, wound him if you must. You can do it. I can't." She sobbed as she tugged at him. "I'd just be me." Before he knew quite what had happened she opened the door. The light beyond was clear and light and tinged with blue, the way the skies of Manhome, Mother Earth, were shown in all the viewers. He let her push him in through the door. He heard the door click behind him. Before he even took in the details of the room or noticed the man in the go-captain's chair, the flavoring and meaning of the room struck him like a blow against his throat. This room, he thought, is hell. He wasn't even sure that he remembered where he had learned the word "hell." It denoted all good turned to evil, all hope to anxiety, all wishes to greed. Somehow, this room was it. And then... XI A nd then the chief occupant of hell turned and looked squarely at him. If this was John Joy Tree, he did not look insane. He was a handsome, chubby man with a red complexion, bright eyes, dancing-blue in color, and a mouth which was as mobile as the mouth of a temptress. "Good day." "How do you do?" said Casher inanely. "I do not know your name," said the ruddy brick man, speaking in a tone of voice which was not the least bit insane. "I am Casher O'Neill, from the city of Kaheer on the planet Mizzer." "Mizzer?" laughed John Joy Tree. "I spent a night there, long, long ago. The entertainment was most unusual. But we have other things to talk about. You have come here to kill the undergirl T'ruth. You received your orders from the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, may he soak in drink! The child has caught you and now she wants you to kill me, but she does not dare utter those words." John Joy Tree, as be spoke, shifted the spaceship controls to stand-by, and got ready to get out of his captain's seat. Casher protested, "She said said you might kill me." "I might, at that." The immortal pilot stood on the floor. He was a full head shorter than Casher but he was a strong and formidable man. The blue light of the room made him look clear, sharp, distinct. The whole flavor of the situation tickled the fear-nerves inside Casher's body. He suddenly felt that he wanted very much to go to a bathroom, but he felt quite surely that if he turned his back on this man, in this place, he would die like a felled ox in a stockyard. He had to face John Joy Tree. "Go ahead," said the pilot. "Fight me." "I didn't say that I would fight you," said Casher. "I am supposed to frighten you and I do not know how to do it." "This isn't getting us anywhere," said John Joe Tree. "Shall we go into the outer room and let poor little T'ruth give us a drink? You can just tell her that you failed." "I think," said Casher, "that I am more afraid of her than I am of you." John Joy Tree flung himself into a comfortable passenger's chair. "AH right, then. Do something. Do you want to box? Glover? Bare fists? Or would you like swords? Or wirepoints? There are some over there in the closet. Or we can each take a pilot ship and have a ship-duel out in space." "That wouldn't make much sense," said Casher, "me fighting a ship against the greatest go-captain of them all." John Joy Tree greeted this with an ugly underlaugh, a barely audible sound which made Casher feel the whole situation was ridiculous. "But I do have one advantage," said Casher. "I know who you are and you do not know who I am." "How could I tell," said John Joy Tree, "when people keep on getting born all over the place?" He gave Casher a scornful, comfortable grin. There was charm in the man's poise. Keeping his eyes focused directly on Casher, he felt for a carafe and poured himself a drink. He gave Casher an ironic toast and Casher took it, standing frightened and alone. More alone than he had ever been before in his life. Suddenly John Joy Tree sprang  lightly to his feet and stared with a complete change of expression past Casher. Casher did not dare look around. This was some old fighting trick. Tree spat out the words, "You've done it then! This time you will violate all the laws and kill me. This fashionable oaf is not just one more trick." A voice behind Casher called softly, "I don't know." It was a man's voice, old, slow and tired. Casher had heard no one come in. Casher's years of training stood him in good stead. He skipped sidewise in four or five steps, never taking his eyes off John Joy Tree, until the other man had come into his field of vision. The man who stood there was tall, thin, yellow-skinned and yellow-haired. His eyes were an old sick blue. He glanced at Casher and said: "I'm Madigan." Was this the master? thought Casher. Was this the being whom that lovely child had been imprinted to adore? He had no more time for thought. Madigan whispered, as if to no one in particular, "You find me waking. You find him sane. Watch out." Madigan lunged for the pilot's controls, but his tall, thin old body could not move very fast. John Joy Tree jumped out of his chair and ran for the controls too. Casher tripped him. Tree fe I !, rolled over, and got halfway up, one knee and one foot on the floor. In his hand there shimmered a knife very much like Casher's own. Casher felt the flame of his body as some unknown force flung him against the wall. He stared, wild with fear. Madigan had climbed into the pilot's seat and was fiddling with the controls as though he might blow Henriada out of space at any second. John Joy Tree glanced at his old host and then turned his attention to the man in front of him. There was another man there. Casher knew him. He looked familiar. It was himself, rising and leaping like a snake, left arm weaving the knife for the neck of John Joy Tree. The image-Casher hit Tree with a . thud that resounded through the room. Tree's bright blue eyes had turned crazy-mad. His knife caught the image-Casher in the abdomen, thrust hard and deep, and left the young man gasping on the floor, trying to push the bleeding entrails back into his belly. The blood poured from the image-Casher all over the rug. Blood! Casher suddenly knew what he had to do and how he could do it -- all without anybody telling him. TTe created a third Casher on the far side of the room fid gave him iron gloves. There was himself, unheeded against the wall; there was the dying Casher on the floor; there was the third, stalking toward John Joy Tree. "Death is here," screamed the third Casher, with a voice which Casher recognized as a fierce crazy simulacrum of his own. Tree whirled around. "You're not real," he said. Image-Casher stepped around the console and hit Tree with an iron glove. The pilot jumped away, a hand reaching up to his bleeding face. John Joy Tree screamed at Madigan, who was playing with the dials without even putting on the pinlighter helmet. "You got her in here?" he screamed. "You got her in here with this young man! Get her out!" "Who?" said Madigan softly and absentmindedly. "T'ruth. That witch of yours. I claim guest-right by all the ancient laws. Get her out." The real-Casher, standing at the wall, did not know how he controlled the image-Casher with the iron gloves, but control him he did. He made him speak, in a voice as frantic as Tree's own voice: "John Joy Tree, I do not bring you death. I bring you blood. My iron hands will split your eyes. Blind sockets will stare in your face. My iron hands will split your teeth and break your jaw a thousand times, so that no doctor, no machine will ever fix you. My iron hands will crush your arms, turn your hands into living rags. My iron hands will break your legs. Look at the blood, John Joy Tree! There will be a lot more blood. You have killed me once. See that young man on the floor." They both glanced at the first imageCasher, who had finally shuddered into death in the great rug. A pool of blood lay in front of the body of the youth. John Joy Tree turned to the image-Casher and said to him, "You're the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You can't scare me. You're a turtlegirl and can't really hurt me." "Look at me," said real-Casher. John Joy Tree glanced back and forth between the duplicates. Fright began to show. Both the Cashers now shouted, in crazy voices which came from the depths of Casher's own mind : "Blood you shall have! Blood and ruin. But we will not kill you. You will live in ruin, blind, emasculated, armless, legless. You will be fed through tubes. You cannot die and you will weep for death but no one will hear you." "Why?" screamed Tree. "Why? What have I done to you?" "You remind me," howled Casher, "of my home. You remind me of the blood poured by Colonel Wedder when the poor useless victims of my uncle's lust paid with their blood for his revenge. You remind me of myself, John Joy Tree, and I am going to punish you as I myself might be punished." T ost in the mists of lunacy,  -- John Joy Tree was still a brave man. He flung his knife unexpectedly at real-Casher. Image-Casher, in a tremendous bound, leaped across the room and caught the knife on an iron glove. It clattered against the iron glove and then fell silent into the rug. Casher saw what he had to see. He saw the place of Kaheer, covered with death, with the den death -- the dead men holding little packages they had tried to save, the girls, with their throats cut, lying in their own blood but with the lipstick still even and the eyebrow-pencil still pretty on their dead faces. He saw a dead child holding a broken doll, looking like a broken doll itself. He saw these things and he made John Joy Tree see  them too. "You're a bad man." said John Joy Tree. "I am very bad," said Casher. "Will you let me go, if I never enter this room again?" Image-Casher snapped off, both the body on the floor and the fighter with the iron gloves. Casher did not know how T'ruth had taught him the lost art of fighter-replication, but he had certainly done it well. "The lady told me you could go." "But who are you going to use," said John Joy Tree, calm, sad and logical, "for your dreams of blood if you don't use me?" "I don't know," said Casher. "I follow my fate. Go now, if you do not want my iron gloves to crush you." John Joy Tree trotted ou'; of the room, beaten. Only then did Casher, exhausted, grab a curtain to hold himself upright and look around the room freely. The evil atmosphere had gone. Madigan, old though he was, had locked all the controls on stand-by. He walked over to Casher. "Thank you. She did not invent you. She found you and put you to my service." Casher coughed out, "The girl. Yes." "My girl," corrected Madigan. "She could not have thought you up. She is my dead wife over again. The citizeness Agatha might have done it. But not T'ruth." Casher looked at the man as he talked. The host wore the bottoms of some very cheap yellow pajamas and a washable bathrobe which had once been stripes of purple, lavender and white. Now it was faded, like its wearer. Casher also saw the white clean plastic surgical implants on the man's arms, where the machines and tubes hooked in to keep him alive. "I sleep a lot," said Murray Madigan, "but I am still the master of Beauregard. I am grateful to you." The hand was frail, withered, dry, without strength. The old voice whispered: "Tell her to reward you. You can have anything on my estate. Or you can have anything on Henriada. She manages it all for me." Then the old blue eyes opened wide and sharp and Murray Madigan was once again the man, just momentarily, that he had been hundreds of years ago -- a Norstrilian trader, sharp, shrewd, wise and not unkind. He added sharply: "Enjoy her company. She is a good child. But do not try to take her." "Why not?" said Casher, surprised at his own bluntness. "Because if you do, she will die. She is mine. Imprinted to me. I had her made and she is mine. Without me she would die in a few days. Do not take her." Casher saw the old man leave the room by a secret door. He left himself, the way he had come in. He did not see Madigan again for two days, and by that time the old man had gone far back into his cataleptic sleep. 'T'wo days later T'ruth took Casher to visit the sleeping Madigan. "You can't go in there," said Eunice in a shocked voice " Nobody goes in there. That's the master's room." "I'm taking him in," said T'ruth calmly. She had pulled a cloth-of-gold curtain aside and she was spinning the combination locks on a massive steel door. It was set in Daimoni material. The maid went on protesting, "But even you, little ma'am, can't take him in there!" "Who says I can't?" said T'ruth calmly and challengingly. The awfulness of the situation sank in on Eunice. In a small voice she muttered, "If you're taking him in, you're taking him in, but it's never been done before." "Of course it hasn't Eunice, not in your time. But Casher O'Neill has already met the mister and owner. He has fought for the mister and owner. Do you think I would take a stray guest in to look at the master, just like that?" "Oh, not at all, no," said Eunice. "Then go away, woman," said the lady-child. "You don't want to see this door open, do you?" "Oh, no," shrieked Eunice and fled, putting her hands over her ears as though that would shut out the sight of the door. When the maid had disappeared, T'ruth pulled with her whole weight against the handle of the heavy door. Casher expected the mustiness of the tomb or the medicine-smell of a hospital: he was astonished when fresh air and warm sunlight poured out from that heavy, mysterious door. The actual opening was so narrow, so low, that Casher had to step sidewise as he followed T'ruth into the room. The master's room was enormous. The windows were flooded with perpetual sunlight. The landscape outside must have been the way Henriada loaded in its prime, when Mottile was a of vacationers and Ambiloxi a port feeding worlds halfwav across the galaxy. There was no sign of the ugly snaky storms which worried and pestered Henriada in these later years. Everything was landscape, order, neatness, the triumph of man, as though Turner had painted it. nphe room itself, like the other great living-room of the estate of Beauregard, was an exuberant neo-baroque in which the architect, himself half-mad, had been given wild license to work out his fantasies in steel, plastic, plaster, wood and stone. The ceiling was not flat: it had a nave. The four comers of the room were each alcoves, cutting deep into the four sides, so that the room was in effect an octagon. The propriety and prettiness of the room had been a little diminished by the shoving of the furniture to one side, sofas, upholstered armchairs, marble tables and knicknack stands all in an indescribable melange to the left, while the right hand part of the room, facing the master window with the illusory landscape, was equipped like a surgery with an operating table, hydraulic lifts, bottles of clear and colored fluid hanging from chrome stands and two large devices which (Casher later surmised) must have been heart-lung and kidney machines. The alcoves, in their turn, were wilder. One was an archaic funeral parlor with an immense coffin, draped in black velvet, resting on a heavy teak stand. The next was a spaceship control cabin of the oM kind, with the levers, switches and controls all in plain sight -- the meters: actually read the galacticallystable location of this very place, and to do so they had to whirl mightily -- as well as a pilot's chair with the usual choice of helmets and the straps and shock absorbers. The third alcove was a simple bedroom done in very old-fashioned taste, the walls a Wedgewood blue with deep winecolored drapes, coverlets and pillowcases marking a sharp but tolerable contrast. The fourth alcove was the copy of a fortress. It might even be a fortress; the door was heavy and the walls looked as though they might be Daimoni material, indestructible by any imaginable means. Cases of emergency food and water were stacked against the walls. Weapons which looked oiled and primed stood in their racks, together with three different calibers of wirepoint. The alcoves had no people in them. The parlor was deserted. The mister and owner Murray Madigan lay naked on the operating table. Two ox three wires led to gauges attached to his body. Casher thought that he could see a faint motion of toe chest, as the cataleptic man breathed at a rate one-tenth normal or less. The girl-lady, T'ruth, was not the least embarrassed. "I check him four or five times a day. I never let people in here. But you're special, Casher. He's talked with you and fought beside you and he knows that he owes you his life. You're the first human person ever to get into this room." "I'll wager," said Casher, "that the Administrator of Henriada, the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, would give up some of his 'honorable' just to get in here and have one look around. He wonders what Madigan is doing when Madigan is doing nothing." "He's not just doing nothing," said T'ruth sharply. "He's sleeping. It's not everybody who can sleep for forty or fifty or sixty thousand years and can wake up a few times a month, just to see how things are going." Casher started to whistle and then stopped himself, as though he feared to waken the unconscious, naked old man. "So that's why he chose you." r T" , ruth corrected him as she washed her hands vigorously in a wash-basin. "That's why he had me made. Turtle stock, three hundred years. Multiply that with intensive stroon treatments, three hundred times. Ninety thousand years. Then he had me printed to love him and adore him. He's not my master, you know. He's my god." "Your what?" "You heard me. Don't get upset. I'm not going to give you any illegal memories. I worship him. That's what I was printed for, when my little turtle eyes opened and they put me back in the tank to enlarge my brain and to make a woman out of me. That's why they printed every memory of the citizeness Agatha Madigan right into my brain. I'm what he wanted. Just what he wanted. I'm the most wanted being on any planet. No wife, no sweetheart, no mother has ever been wanted as much as he wants me now, when he wakes up and knows that I am still here. You're a smart man. Would you trust any machine -- any machine at all -- for ninety thousand years?" "It would be hard," said Casher, "to get batteries of monitors long enough for them to repair each other over that long a time. But that means you have ninety thousand years of it. Four times, five times a day. I can't even multiply the numbers. Don't you ever get tired of it?" "He's my love, he's my joy, he's my darling little boy," she carolled, as she lifted his eyelids and put colorless drops in each eye. Absentmindedly she explained, "With this slow a metabolism, there's always some danger that the eyelids will stick to his eyeballs. This is part of the checkup." She tilted the sleeping man's head, looked earnestly into each eye. Then she stepped a few paces aside and put her face close to the dial of a gently humming machine. There was the sound of a shot. Casher almost reached for his gun, which he did not have. The child turned back to him with a mischievous smile. "Sorry, I should have warned you. That's my noisemaker. I watch the encephalograph to make sure his brain keeps a little auditory intake. It showed up with the noise. He's asleep, very deeply asleep, but he's not drifting downward into death." Back at the table she pushed Madigan's chin upward so that the head leaned far back on its neck. Deftly holding the forehead, she took a retractor, opened his mouth with her fingers, depressed the tongue and looked down into the throat. "No accumulations there," she muttered, as if to herself. She pushed the head back into a comfortable position. She seemed on the edge of another set of operations when it was obvious that an idea occurred to her. "Go wash your hands, thoroughly, over there, at the basin. Then push the timer down and be sure you hold your hands under the sterilizer until the timer goes off. You can help me turn him over. I don't have help here. You're the first visitor." Casher obeyed and while he washed his hands he saw the girl drench her hands with some flower-scented unguent. She began to massage the unconscious body with professional expertness, even with a degree of roughness. As he stood with his hands under the sterilizer-drier, Casher marvelled at the strength of those girlish arms and those little, hands. Indefatigably they strok ed, rubbed, pummelled, pulled, stretched and poked the old body. The sleeping man seemed to be utterly unaware of it but Casher thought that he could see a better skin color and muscle tone appearing. He walked back to the table and stood facing T'ruth. A huge peacock walked across the imaginary lawn outside the window, his tail shimmering in a paroxysm of colors. 'T'ruth saw the direction of A Casher's glance. "Oh, I program that too. He likes it when he wakes up. Don't you think he was clever, before he went into catalepsis, to have me made? To have me created to love him and to care for him? It helps that I'm a girl. I can't ever love anybody but him, and it's easy for me to remember that this is the man I love. And it's safer for him. Any man might get bored with these responsibilities. I don't." "Yet -- " said Casher. "Shh," she said, "wait a bit. This takes care." Her strong little fingers were now plowing deep into the abdomen of the naked old man. She closed her eyes so that she could concentrate all her senses on the one act of tactile impression. She took her hands away and stood erect. "All clear," she said. "I've got to find out what's going on inside him. But I don't dare use X-rays on him. Think of the radiation he'd build up in a hundred years or so. Here, now. You can help me turn him over, but watch the wires. Those are the monitor controls. They report his physiological processes, radio a message to me if anything goes wrong, and meanwhile supply the missing neurophysical impulses if any part of the automatic nervous system began to fade out or just simply went off." "Has that ever happened?" "Never," she said, "not yet. But I'm ready. Watch that wire -- you're turning him too fast There now, that's right. You can stand back while I massage him on the back." She went back to her job of being a masseuse. Starting at the muscles joining the skull to the neck, she worked her way down the body, pouring ointment on her hands from time to time. When she got to his legs she seemed to work particularly hard. She lifted the feet, bent the knees, slapped the calves. Her face cleared. "He's all right. He'll get along well for the next two hours. I'll have to give him a little sugar then. All he's getting now is normal saline." She stood facing him. There was a faint glow in her cheeks from the violent exercise in which she had been indulging, but she still looked both the child and the lady -- the child irrecoverably remote, hidden in her down wisdom from the muddled world of adults, and the lady, mistress in her own home, her own estates, her own planet, serving her master with almost immortal love. "I was going to ask you, back there --  " Casher started. "You were going to ask me?" He spoke heavily. "I was going to ask you, what happens to you when he dies?" "I couldn't care less," her voice sang out. He could see by the open, honest smile on her face that she meant it. "I'm his. I belong to him. That's what I'm for." She passed Casher, almost pulled herself clear of the floor tugging on the great inside levers of the main door. She gestured him past. He stooped and stepped through. "Turn away again," she said. "All I'm going to do is to spin the dials, but they're cued to give any viewer a bad headache so he will forget the combination. Even robots. I'm the only person tuned to these doors." He heard the dials spinning but he did not look around. She murmured, almost under her breath, "I'm the only one. The only one." nphey proceeded down a corri- dor, forgotten pictures hanging on the walls, unremembered luxuries left untouched by centuries of neglect. The bright yellow light of Henriada poured in through an open doorway on their right. It must be a room, thought Casher, with its window open. From the room came snatches of a man singing while playing a stringed instrument. Later, Casher found that this was a verse of the Henriada Song, the one which went: Don't put your ship in the Boom Lagoon, Look up North for the raving wave. Henriada's boiled away But Ambiloxi's a saving grave. They entered the room. A gentleman stood up to greet them. It was the great go-pilot, John Joy Tree. His ruddy face smiled, his bright blue eyes lit up, a little condescendingly, as he greeted his small hostess, but then his glance took in Casher O'Neill. The effect was sudden, and evil. John Joy Tree looked away from both of them. The phrase which he had started to use stuck in his throat. He said, in a different voice, very "away" and deeply troubled, "There is blood all over this place. There is a man of blood right here. Excuse me. I am going to be sick." He trotted past them and out the door which they had entered. "You have passed a test," said T'ruth. "Your help to my master has solved the problem of the captain and honorable John Joy Tree. He will not go near that control room if he thinks that you are there." "Do you have more tests for me? Still more? By now, you ought to know me well enough not to need tests." "I am not a person," she said, "but just a built-up copy of one. I am getting ready to give you your weapon. This is a communications room as well as a music room. Would you like something to eat or drink?" "Just water," he said. "At your hand," said T'ruth. A rock-crystal carafe had been standing on the table beside him, unnoticed. Or had she transported it into the room with one of the tricks of the Hechizera, the dreaded Agatha herself? It didn't matter. He drank. Trouble was coming. r TTuth had swung open a polished cabinet panel. The communicator was the kind they mount in pianoforming ships right beside the pilot. The rental on one of them was enough to make any planetary government reconsider its annual budget. "That's yours?" cried Casher. "Why not?" said the little-girl lady. "I have four or five." "But you're rich!" "I'm not. My master is. I belong to my master, too." "But things like this. He can't handle them. How does he manage?" "You mean money and things?" The girlish part of her came out. She looked pleased, happy and mischievous. "I manage them for him. He was the richest man on Henriada when I came here. He had credits of stroon. Now he is about forty times richer." "He's a Rod McBan!" cried Casher. "No, not even near. Mister McBan had a lot more money than we. But he's rich. Where do you think all the people from Henriada went?" "I don't know," said Casher. "To four new planets. The? belong to my master and he charges the new settlers a very small land-rent." "You bought them?" said Casher, "For him," smiled T'rutk "Haven't you heard of planetbrokers?" "But that's a gambler's business!" said Casher. "I gambled," she said, "and I won. Now keep quiet and watch me." She pressed a button. "Instant message." "Instant message," repeated the machine. "What priority?" "War news, double A one, subspace penalty." "Confirmed," said the machine. "The planet Mizzer. Now. War and peace information. Will fighting end soon?" The machine clucked to itself. Casher, knowing the prices of this kind of communication, almost felt that he could see the artificial spurt of money go out Of Henriada's budget as the machines reached across the galaxy, found Mizzer and came back with the answer. "Skirmishing. Seventh Nile. Ends three local days." "Close message," said T'ruth. The machine went off. T'ruth turned to him. "You're going home soon, Casher, if you can pass a few little tests." He stared at her and blurted, "I need my weapons, my cruiser and my laser." "You'll have weapons. Better ones than those. Right now, I want you to go to the front door. When you have opened the door, you will not let anybody in. Close the door. Then please come back to me here, dear Casher, and if you are still alive, I will have some other things for you to do." dasher turned in bewilderment.  It did not occur to him to contradict her. He could end up a forgetty, like the maidservant Eunice or the Administrator's brown man, Gosigo. Down the halls he walked. He met no one except for a few shy cleaning-robots who bowed their heads politely as he passed. He found the front door. It stopped him. It looked like wood on the outside but it was actually a Daimoni door, made of nearindestructible material. There was no sign of a key or dials or controls. Acting like a man in a dream, he took a chance that the door might be keyed to himself. He put his right palm firmly against it, at the left or opening edge. The door swung in. Meiklejohn was there. Gosigo held the Administrator upright. It must have been a rough trip. The Administrator's face was bruised and there was a trickle of blood coming out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes focused on Casher. "You're alive. She caught you too?" Quite formally, Casher asked, "What do you want in this house?" "I have come," said the Administrator, "to see her." "To see whom?" insisted Casher. The Administrator hung almost slack in Gosigo's arms. By his own standard and in his own way, he was a very brave man indeed. His eyes looked clear even though his body was collapsing. "To see T'ruth, if she will see me," said Rankin Meiklejohn. Said Casher, "She cannot see you now. Gosigo!" The forgetty turned to Casher and gave him a bow. "You will forget me. You have not seen me." "I have not seen you, Lord. Give my greetings to your lady. Anything else?" "Yes. Take your master home, as safely and swiftly as you can." "My lord!" cried Gosigo, though this was an improper title for Casher. Casher turned around. "My lord, tell her to extend the weather machines for just a few more kilometers and I will have him home safe in ten minutes. At top speed." "I can tell her," said Casher, "but I cannot promise she will do it." "Of course," said Gosigo. He picked up the Administrator and began putting him into the ground car. Rankin Meiklejohn bawled once, like a man crying in paint. It sounded like a blurred version of the name Murray Madigan. No one heard it but for Gosigo and Casher; Gosigo busy closing the ground car, Casher pushing on the big house door. The door clicked. There was silence. The opening of the door was remembered only by the warm sweet salty stink of seaweed which had disturbed the odorpattern of the changeless, musty old house. Casher hurried back with the message about the weather machines. r Tp'ruth received the message  gravely. Without even looking at the console, she reached out and controlled it with her extended right hand while not taking her eyes off Casher for a moment. The machine clicked its agreement. T'ruth exhaled. "Thank you, Casher. Now the Instrumentality and the forgetty are gone." She stared at him, almost sadly and inquiringly. He wanted to pick her up, to crush her to his chest, to rain his kisses on her face. But he stood stock still. He did not move. This was not just the forever-loving turtlechild; this was the real mistress of Henriada. This was the Hechizera of Gonfalon, whom he had formerly thought about only in terms of a wild, melodic grand opera. "I think you are seeing me, Casher. It is hard to see people, even when you look at them every day. I think I can see you, too, Casher. It is almost time for us both to do the things which we have to do." "Which we have to do?" he whispered, hoping she might say something else. "For me, my work here on Henriada. For you, your fate on your homeland of Mizzer. That's what life is, isn't it? Doing what you have to do in the first place. We're lucky people if we find it out. You are ready, Casher. I am about to give you weapons which will make bombs and cruisers and lasers and bombs seem like nothing at all." "By the Bell, girl! Can't you tell me what those weapons are?" T'ruth stood in her innocently revealing sheath, the yellow light of the old music room pouring like a halo around her. "Yes," she said, "I can tell you now. Me." Casher felt a wild surge of erotic attraction for the innocently voluptuous child. He remembered his first insane impulse to crush her with kisses, to sweep her up with hugs, to exhaust her with all the excitement which his masculinity could bring to both of them. He looked. She stood there, calm. That sort of an idea did not ring right. He was going to get her, but he was going to get something far from fun or folly -- something, indeed, which he might not even like. TT#'hen at last he spoke, it was  " out of the deep bewilderment of his own thoughts, "What do you mean, you're going to give me yourself? It doesn't sound very romantic to me, nor the tone in which you said it." The child stepped close to him, reaching up and patting his forehead. "You're not going to get me for a night's romance, and if you did, you would be sorry. I am the property of my master and no other man. But I can do something with you which I have never done to anyone else. I can get myself imprinted on you. The technicians are already coming. You will be the turtle child. You will be the citizeness Agatha Madigan, the Hechizera of Gonfalon herself. You will be many other people -- and yourself. You will then win. Accidents may kill you, Casher, but no one will be able to kill you on purpose. Not when you're me. Poor man! Do you know what you will be giving up?" "What?" he croaked, at the edge of a great fright. He had seen danger before, but never danger from within himself. "You will not fear death, ever again, Casher. You will have to lead your life minute by minute, second by second, and you will not have the alibi that you are going to die anyhow. You will know that's not special." He nodded, understanding her words and scrabbling around his mind for a meaning. "I'm a girl, Casher... He looked at her and his eyes widened. She was a girl -- a beautiful, wonderful girl. But she was something more. She was the mistress of Henriada. She was the first of the underpeople really and truly to surpass humanity. To think that he had wanted to grab her poor little body. The body -- ah, that was sweet! -- but the power within it was the kind of thing that empires and religions are made of... and if you take the print of me, Casher, you will never lie with a woman without realizing that you know more about her than she does. You will be a seeing man among blind multitudes, a hearing person in the world of the deaf. I don't now how much fun romantic love is going to be to you after this." Gloomily he said, "If I can free my home planet of Mizzer, it will be worth it. Whatever it is." "You're not going to turn into a woman!" she laughed, "Nothing that easy. But you are going to get wisdom. And I will tell you the whole story of the Sign of the Fish before you leave here." "Not that, please," he begged. "That's a religion and the Instrumentality would never let me travel again." "I'm going to have you scrambled, Casher, so that nobody can read you for a year or two. And the Instrumentality is not going to send you back. I am. Through space-three." "It'll cost you a fine, big ship to do it." "My master will approve when I tell him, Casher. Now give me that kiss you have been wanting to give me. Perhaps you will remember something of it when you come out of scramble." She stood there. He did nothing. "Kiss me!" she commanded. He put his arm around her. She felt like a big little girl. She lifted her face. She thrust her lips up toward his. She stood on tip-toe. He kissed her the way a man might kiss a religious object. The heat and fierceness had gone out of his hopes. He had not kissed a girl, but power -- tremendous power and wisdom put into a single slight form. "Is that the way your master kisses you?" She gave him a quick smile. "How clever of you! Yes, sometimes. Come along now. We have to shoot some children before the technicians are ready. It will give you a good last chance of seeing what you can do when you have become what I am. Come along, the guns are in the hall." XV Hphey went down an enormous light-oak staircase to a floor which Casher had never seen before. It must have been the entertainment and hospitality center of Beauregard long ago, when the mister and owner Murray Madigan was himself young. The robots did a good job of keeping away the dust and the mildew. Casher saw inconspicuous little air-driers placed at strategic places, so that the rich tooled leather on the walls would not spoil, so that the velvet barstools would not become slimy with mold, so that the pool tables would not warp nor the golf clubs go out of shape with age and damp. By the Bell, he thought, that man Madigan could have entertained a thousand people at one time in a place this size. The gun-cabinet, now, that was functional. The glass shone. The velvet of oil showed on the steel and walnut of the guns. They were old earth models, very rare and very special. For actual fighting, people used the cheap artillery of the present time or wirepoints for close work. Only the richest and rarest of connoisseurs had the old earth weapons or could use them. T'ruth touched the guardrobot and waked him. The robot saluted, looked at her face and without further inquiry, opened the cabinet. "Do you know guns?" said T'ruth to Casher. "Wirepoints," he said. "Never touched a gun in my life." "Do you mind using a learninghelmet, then? I could teach you hypnotically with the special rules of the Hechizera, but they might give you a headache or upset you emotionally. The helmet is neuro-electric and it has filters." Casher nodded and saw his reflection nodding in the polished glass doors of the gun-cabinet. He was surprised to see how helpless and lugubrious he looked. But it was true. Never before in his life had he felt that a situation swept over him, washed along like a great wave, left him with no choice and no responsibility. Things were her choice now, not his, and yet he felt that her power was benign, self-limited, restricted by factors at which he could no more than guess. He had come for one weapon -- the cruiser which he had hoped to get from the Administrator Rankin Meiklejohn. She was offering him something else -- psychological weapons in which he had neither experience nor confidence. Qhe watched him attentively for  a long moment and then turned to the gun-watching robot. "You're little Harry Hadrian, aren't you? The gun-watcher." "Yes, ma'am," said the silver robot brightly, "and I'm owlbrained too. That makes me very bright." "Watch this," she said, extending her arms the width of the gun cabinet and then dropping them after a queer flutter of her hands. "Do you know what that means?" "Yes, ma'am," said the little robot quickly, the emotion showing in his toneless voice by the speed with which he spoke, not by the intonation. "It means you have-taken-over and I-am-offduty! Can-I-go-sit-in-the-garden and look-at-the-live-things?" "Not quite yet, little Harry Hadrian. There are some wind people out there now and they might hurt you. I have another errand for you first. Do you remember where the teaching helmets are?" "Silver hats on the third floor in an open closet with a wire running to each hat? Yes." "Bring one of those as fast as you can. Pull it loose very carefully from its electrical connection." The little robot disappeared in a sudden, fast, gentle clatter up the stairs. T'ruth turned back to Casher. "I am helping you. You don't have to look so gloomy about it." "I'm not gloomy. The Administrator sent me here on a crazy erperson. I find out that the person is really a little girl. Then I find out that she is not an underperson, but a frightening old dead woman, still walking around alive. My life gets turned upside down. All my plans are set aside. You propose to send me hope to fulfill my life's work on Mizzer. I've struggled for this, so many years! Now you're making it all come through, even though you are going to cook me through spacethree to do it and throw in a lot of illegal religion and hypnotic tricks that I'm not sure I can handle. Now you tell me to come along -- to shoot children with guns. I've never done anything like that in my life and yet I find myself obeying you. I'm tired out, girl, tired out. If you have put me in your power, I don't even know it. I don't even want to know it." "Here you are, Casher, on the ruined wet world of Henriada. In less than a week you will be recovering among the military casualties of Colonel Wedder's army. You will be under the clear sky of Mizzer, and the Seventh Nile will be near you, and you will be ready at long last to do what you have to do. You will have bits and pieces of memories of me. Not enough to make you find your way back here or to tell people all the secrets of Beauregard, but enough for you to remember that you have been loved. You may even -- " and she smiled very gently, with a tender wry humor on her face -- "marry some Mizzer girl because her body or her face or her manner reminds me to you." "In a week?" he gasped. "Less than that." e cried out, "Who are that you, an underperson, should run real people and manipulate their lives?" "I didn't look for power, Casher. Power doesn't usually work if you look for it. I have eightynine thousand years to live, Casher, and as long as my master lives, I shall love him and take care of him. Isn't he handsome? Isn't he wise? Isn't he the most perfect master you ever saw?" Casher thought of the old ruined-looking body with the plastic knobs set into it; he thought of the faded pajama bottoms; he said nothing. "You don't have to agree," said T'ruth. "I know I have a special way of looking at him. But they took my turtle brain and raised the IQ to above normal human level. They took me when I was a happy little girl, enchanted by the voice and the glance and the touch of my master. They took me to where this real woman lay dying and they put me into a machine and they put her into one too. When they were through, they picked me up. I had on a pink dress with pastel blue socks and pink shoes. They carried me out into the corridor, on a rug. They had finished with me. They knew that I wouldn't die. I was healthy. Can't you see it, Casher. I cried myself to sleep, nine hundred years ago." Casher could not really answer. He nodded sympathetically"I was a girl, Casher. Maybe I was a turtle once, but I don't remember that, any more than you remember your mother's womb or your laboratory bottle. In that one hour I was never tobe a girl again. I did not need go to school. I had her education, and it was a good one. She spoke twenty or more languages. She was a psychologist and a hypnotist and a strategist. She was also the tyrannical mistress of this house. I cried because my childhood wag finished, because I knew what I would have to do. I cried because I knew that I could do it. I loved my master so, but I was no longer to be the pretty little servant who brought him his tablets or his sweetmeats or his beer. Now I saw the truth As she died I had myself become Henriada. The planet was mine, to cate for, to manage, to protect my master. If I come along and I protect and help you, is that so much for a woman who will just be growing up when your grandchildren will all be dead of old age?" "No, no," stammered Casher O'Neill. "But your own life? A family, perhaps?" A nger lashed across her pretty face. Her features were the features of the delicious girlchild T'ruth, but her expression was that of the citizeness Agatha Madigan, perhaps, a worldly woman reborn to the endless worldliness of her own wisdom. "Should I order a husband from the turtle bank, perhaps? Should I hire out a piece of my master's estate, to be sold to somebody because I'm an underperson, or perhaps put to work somewhere in an industrial shop? I'm me. I may be animal, but I have more civilization in me than all the wind-people on this planet. Poor things! What kind of people are they, if they are only happy when they catch a big mutated duck and tear it to pieces, eating it raw? I'm not going to lose, Casher. I'm going to win. My master will live longer than any person has ever lived before. He gave me that mission when he was strong and wise and well in the prime of his life. I'm going to do what I was made for, Casher, and you're going to go back to Mizzer and make it free, whether you like it or not!" They both heard a happy scurrying on the staircase. The small silver robot, little Harry Hadrian, burst upon them; he carried a teaching helmet. T'ruth said, "Resume your post. You are a good boy, little Harry, and you can have time to sit in the garden later on, when it is safe." "Can I sit in a tree?" said the little robot. "Yes, if it is safe." Little Harry Hadrian resumed his post by the gun cabinet. He kept the key in his hand. It was a very strange key, sharp at the end and as long as an awl. Casher supposed that it must be one of the straight magnetic keys, cued to its lock by a series of magnetized patterns. "Sit on the floor for a minute," said T'ruth to Casher, "you're too tall for me." She slipped the helmet on his head, adjusted the levers on each side so that the helmet sat tight and true upon his skull. With a touching gesture of intimacy, for which she gave him a sympathetic apologetic little smile, she moistened the two small electrodes with her own spit, touching her finger to her tongue and then to the electrode. These went to his temples. She adjusted the verniered dials on the helmet itself, lifted the rear wire and applied it to her forehead. Casher heard the click of a switch. "That did it," he heard T'ruth's voice saying, very far away. TJe was too busy looking into  the gun cabinet. He knew them all and loved some of them. He knew the feel of their stocks on his shoulder, the glimpse of their barrels in front of his eyes, the dance of the target on their various sights, the welcome heavy weight of the gun on his supporting arm, the rewarding thrust of the stock against his shoulder when he fired. He knew all this, and did not know how he knew it. "The Hechizera, Agatha herself, was a very accomplished sportswoman," murmured T'ruth to him. "I thought her knowledge would take a second printing when I passed it along to you. Let's take these." She gestured to little Harry Hadrian who unlocked the cabinet and took out two enormous guns which looked like the long muskets mankind had on earth even before the age of space began. "If you're going to shoot children," said Casher with his newfound expertness, "these won't do. They'll tear the bodies completely to pieces." T'ruth reached into the little bag which hung from her belt. She took out three shotgun shells. "I have three more," she said. "Six children is all we need." Casher looked at the slug projecting slightly from the shotgun casing. It did not look like any shell he had ever seen before. The workmanship was unbelievably fine and precise. "What are they? I never saw these before." "Proximity stunners," she said. "Shoot ten centimeters above the head of any living thing and the stunner knocks it out." "You want the children alive?" "Alive, of course. And unconscious. They are a part of your final test." npwo hours later, after an exciting hike to the edge of the weather controls, they had the six children stretched out on the floor of the great hall. Four were little boys, two girls; they were fine-boned, soft-haired people, very thin, but they did not look too far from earth-normal. T'ruth called up a doctor-underman from among her servants. There must have been a crowd of fifty or sixty undermen and robots standing around. Far up the staircase, John Joy Tree stood hidden, half in shadow. Casher suspected that he was as inquisitive as the others but afraid of himself, Casher, "the man of blood." T'ruth said quietly but firmly to the doctor. "Can you give them a strong euphoric before you waken them? We don't want to have to pluck them out of all the curtains in the house, if they go wild when they wake up." "Nothing simpler," said the doctor-underman. He seemed to be of dog origin but Casher could not tell. He took a glass tube and touched it to the nape of each little neck. The necks were all streaked with dirt. These children had never been washed in their lives, except by the lain. "Wake them," said T'ruth. The doctor stepped back to a rolling table. It gleamed with equipment. He must have preset his devices, because all he did was to press a button and the children stirred into life. The first reaction was wildness. They got ready to bolt. The biggest of the boys, who by earthstandards would have been about ten, got three steps before he stopped and began laughing. T'ruth spoke the Old Common Tongue to them, very slow-, ly and with long spaces between the words: "Wind-children... do... you... know... where... you... are?" The biggest girl twittered back to her so fast that Casher could not understand it. T'ruth turned to Casher and said, "The girl said that she is in the Dead Place, where the air never moves and where the Old Dead Ones move around on their own business. She means us." To the wind-children she spoke again. "What... would... you... like... most?" The biggest girl went from child to child. They nodded agreement vigorously . They formed a circle and began a little chant. By the second repetition around, Casher could make it out. Shig -- shag -- shuggery shuck shuck shuck ! What all of us need is an all-around duck. Shig -- shag -- shuggery, shuck shuck shuck! At the fourth of fifth repetition they all stopped and looked at T'ruth who was so plainly the mistress of the house. She in turn spoke to Casher O'Neill: "They think that they want a tribal feast of raw duck. What they are going to get is inoculations against the worst diseases of this planet, several duck meals, and their freedom again. But they need something else beyond all measure. You know what that is, Casher, if you can only find it." The whole crowd turned its eyes on Casher, the human eyes of the people and underpeople, the milky lenses of the robots. Casher stood aghast. "Is this a test?" he said "You could call it that," said T'ruth, looking away from him. 'dasher thought furiously and rapidly. It wouldn't do any good to make them into forgetties. The household had enough of them. T'ruth had announced a plan to let them loose again. Mister and owner Murray Madigan must have told her, sometime or other, to "do something" about the wind people. She was trying to do it. The whole crowd watched him. What might T'ruth expect? The answer came to him in a flash. If she were asking him, it must be something to do with himself. Something which he -- uniquely among these people, underpeople and robots -- had brought to the storm-sieged mansion of Beauregard. Suddenly he saw it. "Use me, my lady Ruth," said he, deliberately giving her the wrong title, "to print on them nothing from my intellectual knowledge, but everything from my emotional makeup. It would not do them any good to know about Mizzer, where the Twelve Niles work their way down across the Intervening Sands. Nor about Pontoppidan, the Gem Planet. Nor about Olympia, where the blind brokers promenade under numbered clouds. Knowing things would not help these children. But wanting -- " Wanting things was different. He was unique. He had wanted to return to Mizzer. He had wanted return beyond all dreams of blood and revenge. He had wanted things fiercely, wildly, so that even if he could not get them, he zig-zagged the galaxy in search of them. T'ruth was speaking to him again, urgently and softly, but not in so low a voice that the others in the room could not hear. "And what, Casher O'Neill, should I give them from you?" she asked softly. "My emotional structure. My determination My desire. Nothing else. Give them that and throw them back into the winds. Perhaps if they want something fiercely enough, they will grow up to find out what it is." There was a soft murmur of approval around the room. T'ruth hesitated a moment and then nodded. "Casher, you answered quickly and perceptively. Bring seven helmets, Eunice, Stay here, doctor." Eunice, the forgetty, left, taking two robots with her. "A chair," said T'ruth to no one in particular. "For him." A large powerful underman pushed his way through the crowd and dragged a chair to the end of the room. T'ruth gestured that Casher should sit in it. Qhe stood in front of him.  Strange, thought Casher, that she should be a great lady and still a little girl. How could he ever find a girl like her? He was not even afraid of the mystery of the Fish, or the image of the man on two pieces of wood. He no longer dreaded space-three, where so many travellers had gone in and so few had come out. He felt safe, comforted by her wisdom and authority. He felt that he would never see the like of this again -- a child running a planet and doing it well, a half-dead man surviving through the endless devotion of his maidservant, a fierce woman hypnotist living on with all the anxieties and angers of humanity gone but with the skill and obstinacy of turtle genes to sustain her in her reimprinted form. "I can guess what you are thinking," said T'ruth, "but we have already said the things that we had to say. I've peeped into your mind a dozen times and I know that you want to go back to Mizzer so bad that spacethree will spit you out right at the ruined fort where the big turn of the Seventh Nile begins. In my own way I love you, Casher, but I could not keep you here without turning you into a forgetty and making you a servant to my master. You know what always comes first with me, and always will." "Madigan." "Madigan," she answered, and with her voice the name itself was a prayer. Eunice came back with the helmets. "When we are through with these, Casher, I'll have them take you to the conditioning room. Good-by, my might have been." In front of everyone, she kissed him full on the lips. He sat in the chair, full of patience and contentment. Even as his vision blacked out, he could see the thin light sheath of a smock on the girlish figure, he could remember the tender laughter lurking in her smile. In the last instant of his consciousness, he saw that another figure had joined the crowd -- the tall old man with the worn bathrobe, the faded blue eyes, the thin yellow hair. Murray Madigan had risen from his private-life-in-death and had come to see the last of Casher O'Neill. He did not look weak, nor foolish. He looked like a great man, wise and strange in ways beyond Casher's understanding. There was the touch of T'ruth's little hand on his arm and everything became a velvety cluttered dark quiet inside his own mind. XT Then he awoke, he lay naked  ' and sunburned under the hot sky of Mizzer. Two soldiers with medical patches were rolling him on to a canvas litter. "Mizzer!" he cried to himself. His throat was too dry to make a sound. "I'm home." Suddenly the memories came to him and he scrabbled and snatched at them, seeing them dissolve within his mind before he could get paper to write them down. Memory: there was the front hall, himself getting ready to sleep in the chair, with the old giant of a Murray Madigan at the edge of the crowd and the tender light touch of T'ruth -- his girl, his girl, now uncountable light-years away -- putting her hand on his arm. Memory: there was another room, with stained glass pictures and incense, and the weepworthy scenes of a great life shown in frescoes around the wall. There were the two pieces of wood and man in pain nailed to them. But Casher knew that scattered and coded through his mind, there was the ultimate and undefeatable wisdom of the sign of the Fish. He knew he could never fear fear again. Memory: there was a gaming table in a bright room, with the wealth of a thousand worlds being raked toward him. He was a woman, strong, wig-busted, bejewelled and proua. He was Agatha Madigan, winning at the games. (That must have come, he thought, when they printed me with T'ruth.) And in that mind of the Hechizera, which was now his own mind too, there was clear sure knowledge of how he could win men and women, officers and soldiers, even underpeople and robots, to his cause without a drop of blood or a word of anger. The man, lifting him on the litter, made red waves of heat and pain roll over him. He heard one of them say, "Bad case of burn. Wonder how he lost his clothes?" The words were matter-offact; the comment was nothing special; but the cadence, that special cadence, was the true speech of Mizzer. As they carried him away he remembered the face of Rankin Meiklejohn, enormous eyes staring with inward despair over the brim of a big glass. That was the Administrator, on Henriada. That was the man who sent him past Ambiloxi to Beauregard at two seventy-five in the morning. The litter jolted a little. He thought of the wet marshes of Henriada and knew that soon he would never remember them again. The worms of the tornadoes creeping up to the edge of the estate. The mad wise face of John Joy Tree. Space-three? Space-three? Already, even now, he could not remember how they had put him into space-three. And space-three itself -- All the nightmares which mankind has ever had pushed into Casher's mind. He twisted once in agony, just as the litter reached a medical military cart. He saw a girl's face -- what was her name? -- and then he slept. TT'ourteen Mizzer days later, the first test came. A doctor colonel and an intelligence colonel, both in the workaday uniform of Colonel Wedder's Special Forces, stood by his bed. "Your name is Casher O'Neill and we do not know how your body fell among the skirmishers," the doctor was saying, roughly and emphatically. Casher O'Neill turned his head on the pillow and looked at the man. "Say something more!" he whispered to the doctor. The doctor said, "You are a political intruder and we do not know how you got mixed up among our troops. We do not even know how you got back loose among the people of this planet." The intelligence colonel standing beside him, nodded agreement. "Do you think the same thing, Colonel?" whispered Casher O'Neill to the intelligence colonel. "I ask questions. I don't answer them," said the man grufflyCasher felt himself reaching for their minds with a kind of fingertip which he did not know he had. It was hard to put into ordinary words, but it felt as though someone had said to him, "That one is vulnerable at the left forefront area of his consciousness, but the other one is well armored and must be reached through the midbrain." Casher was not afraid of revealing anything by his expression. He was too badly burned and in too much pain to show nuances of meaning on his face. (Somewhere he had heard of the wild story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon! Somewhere endless storms boiled across ruined marshes under a cloudy yellow sky! But where, when, what was that...? He could not take time off for memory. He had to fight for his life.) "Peace be with you," he whispered to both of them. "Peace be with you," they responded in unison, with some surprise. "Lean over me, please," said Casher, "so that I do not have to shout." They stood stock straight. Somewhere in the resources of his own memory and intelligence Casher found the right note of pleading which could ride his voice like a carrier wave and make them do as he wished. "This is Mizzer," he whispered. "Of course this is Mizzer," snapped the intelligence colonel, "and you are Casher O'Neill. What are you doing here?" "Lean over, gentlemen," he said softly, lowering his voice so that they could barely hear him. This time they did lean over. His burned hands reached for their hands. The officers noticed it, but since he was sick and unarmed, they let him touch them. Suddenly he felt their minds glowing in his as brightly as if he had swallowed their gleaming, thinking brains at a single gulp. He spoke no longer. He thought at them -- torrential, irresistible thought. I am not Casher O'Neill. You will find his body in a room, tour doors down. I am the civilian Bindaoud. 'Hphe two colonels stared, breathing heavily. Neither said a word. Casher went on: "Our fingerprints and records have gotten mixed. Give me the fingerprints and papers of the dead Casher O'Neill. Bury him then, quietly, but with honor. Once he loved your leader and there is no point in stirring up wild rumors about returns from out of space. I am Bindaoud. You will find my records in your front office. I am not a soldier. I am a civilian technician doing studies on the salt in blood chemistry under field conditions. You have heard me, gentlemen. You hear me now. You will hear me always. But you will not remember this, gentlemen, when you awaken. I am sick. You can give me water and a sedative." They still stood, enraptured by the touch of his hands. Casher O'Neill said, "Awaken." Casher O'Neill let go their hands. The medical colonel blinked and said amiably, "You'll be better, mister and doctor Bindaoud. I'll have the orderly bring you water and a sedative." To the other officer he said, "I have an interesting corpse four doors down. I think you had better see it." They left, talking. Casher O'Neill tried to think of the recent past, but the blue light of Mizzer was all around him, the sand-smell, the sound of horses galloping. For a moment he thought of a big child's blue dress and he did not know why he almost wept. Philip Jose Farmer's Greatest Story author of The Lovers and many other great sf storiesl Philip K. Dick R. S. Richardson Theodore L. Thomas -- and many others All in the January Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! OF Here's the way to succeed in business -- or in spite of itl Date: April #, #. F rom : President. To : Vice Presidents, Regional Managers. Subject: Loose handling of information. The Chairman of the Board has asked me to call to your attention a disturbing laxity in the handling of proprietary Company information. There has been too much casual discussion of Company plans, expenditures, technical processes and formulas. The Chariman and the rest of the Board were quite disturbed that a competitive distiller was able to learn in advance of publication details of our newest advertising campaign based on the virtues of our splendid new hardwood whiskey bottles. This leak of information will force us to spend addicating the public to the fact that only our particular wooden container, with its special wood and unique interior design, confers the benefits described. We of course want to maintain and promote interdepartmental co-operation and smooth working relationships, but it is considered desirable that there be less fraternization between personnel of different departments. Naturally this will have to be approached with tact and sublety. In particular, Technical personnel must stop casually revealing details of secret processes and materials to Sales personnel. Accounting and Sales must stop discussing selling prices, markups, salaries, commissions, etc,, with Production and with Research. And Purchasing must stop revealing potential or actual fluctuations in raw material markets, to Sales and Production. This constant hubbub of gossip creates anxieties and dissatisfactions and is definitely inimical to the best interests of Interstellar Distilleries, Inc. The Chairman and I want you to give this your personal attention and to enlist tactfully the co-operation of your department heads and managers. Cordially, Ellingsworth J. Pough, President. Date: May # #. From: Hdqtrs. Purchasing. To: Production Manager, Arcturus V. Subject: Requisition for Pencils. No. V-#-#-#. No doubt subject requisition become garbled in the sub-space transmission. As received, it calls for # lead pencils, medium soft, cedar, yellow lacquered, with red rubber erasers. How many new pencils did you actually want? I. Haggel. Date: May #, #. From: Production Manager, Arcturus V. To: Hdqtrs. Purchasing. Subject: Requisition for pencils. However, under separate cover I am entering an additional requialong with ten dozen pencil sharpeners, you know, the kind you fasten on the wall. Make sure they're good quality so they won't wear out. It doesn't matter what color the sharpeners are, but make sure the pencils are exactly as requisitioned, and that the whole shipment gets here by the date specified. Otto Stehdenbed, Prod. Mgr. Date: May #, #. From Hdqtrs. Purchasing. To: Production Manager, Arcturus V. Subject: Pencils. We are still not sure we have the figures right, and if we do, we do not think we can approve the requisition. What possible use could you have for that many pencils and sharpeners? I. Haggel. Date: May #, #. From : Production Manager, Arcturus V. To: Hdqtrs. Purchasing, Att'n I. Haggel. Subject: Delayed requisition, and obstructionist tactics. If you can't okay the pencils yourself, get the Old Man to do it, and while you're talking to him inform him that the first month's quota of wooden bottles won't be met because you're diddling around with my requisitions. Also ask him to explain to you why my reason for wanting the pencils is none of your damned business. As for the sharpeners, I want them to sharpen the pencils with. O. Stehdenbed. Date: May #, #. From: Shipping Dept., Earth. To : Production Manager, Arcturus V. Subject: Rush shipment. ON #-V-#S#. We are shipping this morning, special express, your order dozen sharpeners. It is costing the Company seventeen thousand dollars extra to get these to you by the date demanded. If you had taken the trouble to enter your order a few days earlier, we could have shipped by regular freight. E. O. Hippus, Shipping Clerk. Date: May #, #. From: Director of Research To : Production Manager, Arcturus V. Subject: Request for Development of New Process. Refer NP D No. V-#-#. I have your memorandum inquiring as to progress on subject project. It has been less than thirteen months since you entered this request. Considerable laboratory time has been expended on this project, and a number of promising leads developed. However, press of other work (you yourself have several other requests in) coupled with personnel shortages and a limited budget, have delayed the project. Would you like us to assign it an "A" priority, or perhaps a "B"? This project deals with a process for hollowing out wooden blocks, leaving a rather complex inner surface. It is regrettable that you find it necessary to be so uninformative as to the process you are currently using. (We presume that this is something you already have in production.) It would help immeasurably if you could at least inform us as to the finished product involved. We can only conjecture from the incomplete specifications you supplied that it is some kind of a food container. If so, you should so advise us so that we may start getting clearance from the Federal and Interstellar Food and Drug Administrations. We are sure you are well acquainted with this Company's liabilities in regard to edible products. We find that we have used up all the sample blocks of wood you sent us. Since you specify that no other wood is satisfactory, could you send us another supply? I. Ben Dopenoff, Ph. D Director of Research. Date: May #, #. From: Director of Sales. To: President. Subject: Wooden Bottles Program. As you know, E. J., we are ready to hit the market with this thing. TV and Feely-Smelly space is all hired, and everything's ready to go, and it's unthinkable that we should fall on our faces now by not having the product ready on time. I was asking Otto out on Arcturus when the shipment of bottles is coming in. Attached is a photostat of his reply, which seems to reflect a negative attitude. I know you'll grasp the seriousness of this at once, and will want to make your own inquiries. Goodwin Grype. Date: June #, #. From : Production Manager, Arcturus V. To: President. Subject: Goddam wooden bottles. Yes boss they'll be there. Otto. Date: June #, #. From: Headquarters Accounting. To: Production Manager, ArcTurus V. Subject: Pencils and Sharpeners. As you know, such items as office supplies must be accounted under Supervisory Overhead. You have erroneously reported a month's usage of pencils and sharpeners under Production Costs. We are returning your Monthly Operating Report for May, #. Please file a Corrected Report promptly so we can clear your books for May. D. U. Plicate. Date: June #, #. From: Special Field Representative. (Confidential). To: President (personal). Subject: Production Manager, Arcturus V. E. J.: Otto acting oddly. You may have to replace him. I'll be in with a verbal report day after tomorrow. Date: June #, #. From: President. To: Production Manager, Arcturus V. Subject: Arcturus operations. Otto, what's going on? Date: June #, #. From: Vice President in charge of Efficiency Cost Examination. To: President. Subject: Savings, office supplies. E. J. : I'm rather proud of some savings we've been able to effect lately, and I'm sure you'll appreciate having one particularly substantial item called to your attention. Some of our divisions have been using considerable numbers of lead pencils. Working with our suppliers, I was able to find a new experimental pencil, just coming into production, which is nearly nine per cent cheaper in wholesale lots. Instead of being made from prime solid cedar, this new pencil has a composition moulded around the lead, made from ground waste wood with a synthetic glue binder. As I understand it, the saving results from the use of the the substitution of moulding for the old cutting and shaping processes. We are always alert for opportunities to reduce costs and thus augment our profits, f think we can be forgiven a little pride when we are as successful as we have been in this case. I.C. Abuck, Vice President. Date: June #, #. From: Ex-Production Manager, Arcturus V. To : President. Subject: Pencilburgers. Enclosed is my resignation, which I am completing while I'm still able to write. First of all, let me inform you that your shipment of # wooden bottles will not arrive on schedule. They are all ready to go, but I think when you hear about them you won't want to waste shipping costs. We may as well leave them here. Secondly, I'll explain about the pencilburgers. It's very simple. The only way to make the damned bottles is the way the original samples were made. (If I'd known how those were made, I'd never have come out here.) The dominant race on Arcturus V is a race of intelligent termites, about two inches long. That is, the individuals are two inches long. They produce and trade around the galaxy all sorts of carved wooden goods. They're very artistic, and good scientists too in their way. The wooden bottles they make have just the right chemistry, and some damned thing in the pattern of their inner surfaces, to give whiskey the mellowness and special boost we advertise. As you may or may not know, we've been trying for a year to get Research off its fanny to develop some mechanical way of hollowing out the bottles, but they haven't come up with anything, so when the deadline got close I went ahead and contracted with the termites to have them do the work. We take a block of wood and shape it on the outside, then they eat their way in through the neck and shape it on the inside the way its supposed to be. About four months ago I discovered that there's something about an ordinary lead pencil from Earth that makes it a great delicacy here. We grind up a pencil, lead and all, except for the little brass part and the rubber eraser. Some of the termites like it without any rubber. Others like it with the rubber sliced or ground up and sprinkled on, like onion in a hamburger. We serve a pencilburger between two small slabs of ordinary local wood instead of a bun. They don't give a damn about Terran money if they can get pencilburgers instead. Now, I was very thorough in my requisitions and specified the exact kind of pencils I needed and all, but some jackass went ahead and shipped some new kind that seems to be made out of sawdust instead of good aromatic cedar. I was out in the hills supervising some lumbering when they came in, and no one found out what was happening until over a hundred thousand pencilburgers had been doled out to the termites. I tell you, E. J., I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it. There was something about those pencils that made the termites absolutely ribald. The word is too mild. Think of the worst drunk you've ever been on, or seen, and multiply it by ten and imagine it went on for seven or eight days. The first day wasn't so bad. They did carve all sorts of pornographic pictures and mottos on all the wooden buildings, and put a lot of equipment out of commission. The second day they got into the files and ate up all the records. Ordinarily they don't care much for paper, but they were too drunk to care. The third day they attacked personnel. They weren't vicious; just playful. One of their favorite tricks was to eat their way quietly up through the seat of a wooden chair someone was sitting on, and -- But all that we could have stood. On the fourth day we discovered that they'd gotten into the insides of the bottles. I don't know what the hell they did, but I can describe the results. If you take good whiskey and put it in one of those bottles, the following changes occur within one day: #. The alcohol content drops to nil. #. The color changes to sickening green. #. The taste becomes awful. I can only describe it as tasting like vinegar in which spoiled salt herring have been soaked. There were other things that happened, but I haven't time to describe them. Everything considered, we're all happy to come through it alive. I personally am in hiding from the Termite government, with a price on my head. I am also avoiding my former human employees, who seem to blame me for the whole thing. One bunch even went around looking for a rope, but fortunately the drunken termites had chewed them all up. I'm starting for the hills as soon as I mail this report. I'm taking two loaves of bread I managed to steal from the commissary, and ten of the original sample bottles that are still filled with the good whiskey. I also have in my knapsack a few thousand of the old cedar pencils, with which I hope, after things have cooled down a little, to propitiate the Termite authorities or a least bribe my way to the spaceport. I thought I might head out to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or somewhere. You can apply my last month's salary against the whiskey. Good-by and good luck, Otto Stehdenbed. Date: June #, #. From: President. To: Vice Presidents, Regional Managers. Subject: Intercompany communications. Sometimes the stupidity of some of our employees approaches downright treason. I refer to the disastrous and completely unforgivable breakdown in interdepartmental co-ordination in the recent matter of handling requisitions for our former plant on Arcturus V. How can we advance, or even stay in business, if our right hands do not know what our left hands are doing? Of course we don't want to jeopardize the secrecy of any valuable proprietary Company formulas or processes, nor do we want plans, costs, remunerations, etc., bandied about carelessly. But I want each of you to... ter I four information ( C r Tphe forerunner of the planetarium of today is the orrery, and the forerunner of the orrery... When I said this sentence aloud at home, both my daughters interrupted me in unison -- a unison that would normally need half a dozen rehearsals to make it as perfect as it was. But they did not say the same thing. One of them said: "The what?" while the other, not trusting my pronunciation, said: "Spell it." I did spell it. But that did not clarify the situation at all; they swore they had never heard the word. I pointed out that both of them had repeatedly seen a very fine orrery. The answer again came in unison: "Where?" I'll explain what an orrery is in a moment, but it seems to me that the word should be explained first. If somebody had asked me, say about a year ago, about the derivation of the word I probably would have guessed that it was somehow derived from the Latin hora, meaning "hour" -- assuming that somebody in England, a century or two ago, had dropped the initial "h" somewhere along the way. My guess would have been ingenious and totally wrong. It so happens that the word orrery is not a corruption of a Latin term; it is a name. The device is named after Charles Boyle, Fourth Earl of Orrery. And the earl was not even the inventor; he merely had a very fine one in his castle circa #. After getting the word out of the way I can proceed to the explanation of what an orrery really is. It is a model of the solar system and there is a very fine one at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where it is called the Copemican Room. The planets, represented by spheres of the proper size, hang from the ceiling and move in circular tracks, accompanied by their moons which move around them. Of course the motion has been speeded up, or else one would not be able to see it. A similar large orrery is at the Morehead Planetarium, Chapel Hill, N.C., while a third one can be found in the German Museum in Munich. I n all three cases a modern planetarium is housed in the same building, so that visitors can see easily how they differ in function. The orrery shows how the planets move in their orbits and the mechanism could, if desired, be stopped at the moment where the positions of the model planets agree with the positions of the actual planets on that day. That is how the solar system would appear at that moment, as seen from the outside. The modern planetarium, on the other hand, produces the view from the earth. In fact, the starry sky of the planetarium is superior to the actual night sky in several respects. In the first place, it does not matter what the weather is doing outside the dome. In the second place, the motions can be speeded up so that you can actually follow the motions of Mars among the fixed stars. Finally, you are not restricted geographically to the place where you happen to be. Nor are you limited to the time in which you happen to live. The planetarium can reproduce the sky as it looked from Ur of the Chaldees in # B.C. when Alpha Draconis was the pole star; or it can reproduce the sky as seen from Manhattan Island in about # A.D. when Vega will be the North Star and the Southern Cross will be above the horizon over New York Bay. While the orreries in Munich, New York and Chapel Hill -- listing them in chronological order of their completion -- are large and expensive and therefore rare devices, smaller orreries exist in many places. The smallest and simplest device which could still be called an orrery is one that consists of an electric light bulb with a reflector in the middle, a small globe of the earth and a small sphere representing the moon. When you turn a crank the moon will start spinning around the earth and the earth will start turning and describe its orbit around the sun. It is a teaching device for demonstrating the phases of the moon and for showing why the moon is not eclipsed by the earth's shadow each time it goes around the earth. There can be no doubt that a large number of orreries which once existed have never been described in print. Those we know about all date from # or later and are, therefore, models of the solar system after Copernicus and'Kepler had been generally accepted. Whether, say prior to #, anybody ever tried to build an orrery according to Ptolemy, with the earth in the center, is not known. It probably was not done because at the time the armillary sphere (we'll get to that soon) was considered sufficient for the purpose of explaining the construction of the universe. But we cannot be certain because the written word is incomplete in a very peculiar way. Writers, especially at a time when there were very few of them, wrote selectively. They either wrote down what happened to have made an impression, or else they wrote what they thought the future might wish to know. The result of this attitude is that we have very little knowledge of those things which these writers took for granted. If we now know what kinds of knives and forks were used at a baronial banquet in, say, #, we are likely to know this because of Fig. I Tycho Brahe's great armilla, mounted in his 'second observatory of Stjerneborg on the island of Hveen. (From his own work on his instruments.) actual knives and forks that have somehow come down to our time, not from contemporary descriptions. Let me add one more example. We would know from contemporary chronicles, bills of sale and similar things that the gold coin of the reign of Henry called an "angel". But it would be a major literary research project (and one that is likely to fail) to find out how an "angel" looked. Of course nobody needs to undertake this research project since we have the actual coin; it isn't even a great rarity. The fact that a pre-Copernician orrery is not mentioned anywhere is therefore no proof that none ever existed. It merely proves that it, if it existed, did not become famous enough to be described. But let us assume that none was built. And that brings us to the question of what preceded the orrery. T T ere you get two opinions, depending on point of view. Those who consider an orrery mainly a complicated mechanical device are likely to name the astronomical clocks, which were the pride of many a European city between # and #. Astronomers, however, will be inclined to name the armillary sphere as the forerunner, since it was an attempt at representing the universe. And the armillary sphere, or armilla -- both terms are used almost interchangeably, though a more complicated example is usually called an armillary sphere -- in turn goes back to the celestial globes of antiquity. Celestial globes were just what their name means, globes on which the positions of the major stars and constellations were engraved on the outside. An especially fine example is a celestial globe with a diameter of not quite # inches, supported by a statue of Atlas. The sculpture, of Greek origin, dates back to about # B.C. and is now in the National Museum at Naples. A number of other celestial globes, usually made of bronze or silver, has been mentioned by Muslim writers, especially if they were made for the ruling Caliph, but the oldest still extant example is one made in # A.D. But as a device for teaching the solid sphere had a drawback. It showed the stars on the outside of a globe. The pupil had to imagine, if he could, that he saw the stars from the inside. The armillary sphere was a skeleton sphere; you could look through it. There is a mural dating back to about # B.C. on the wall of a villa at Boscoreale, not far from Pompeii, which shows a sphere consisting only of the imaginary circles, like equator, arctic and antarctic circles, and the ecliptic. It is not known, of course, whether this mural was just a painting or whether it can be taken as an illustration of this kind which actually existed then. If it does depict something then in actual existence, the model for the painting would be a very early armillary sphere. If it is a painting showing a principle, then it was the forerunner of actual spheres to be built. The early pictures of armillary spheres which definitely are illustrations depicting existing spheres can be found in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They show the equator, the tropics the polar circles, the ecliptic and usually a number of meridians. After that, as we know from actual examples that have been preserved, the craftsmen took over and lavished their skill on the job of building a "good" sphere. The ecliptic was no longer a wire ring in the proper position. It became a band of chased copper with the signs of the zodiac engraved upon it. There were movable pointers for the more important stars. In some the planets were added and could be  moved along wire loops by hand. But Venus was not just a ball of ivory, or Mars a ball of copper -- they were symbolical figures representing Venus and Mars. It is no exaggeration to say that some of these spheres were smothered in elaboration. I have often been asked by people who looked at one of these elaborate armillary spheres (or just photographs of them) how they were used for astronomical observations. The answer is that they weren't They were teaching devices for classroom use The teacher might, for example, move the figure representing the sun into the constellation Virgo. He would then explain that, with this position of the sun, the sign of Virgo and the neighboring constellations would be in the daylight sky and hence invisible, but that the constellations of the zodiac opposite the position of the sun -- "look through the sphere and you'll see them" -- would be in the night sky. I know of a modern astronomer who uses an armillary sphere for the purpose of teaching his students how astronomy was taught in the past. It not only does this particular job, it also proves that the armillary sphere itself was a rather good teaching device for memorizing and understanding the apparent motions of the celestial bodies. Of course the armillary sphere was built with the assumption that the earth was in the center of the universe. The more elaborate specimens do have a globe of the earth in the center. This enhances the sphere as a model of what the world was believed to be, but the central globe interfered with the teaching so that the spheres actually used had an empty center so that you could look through the sphere. W hile the armillary sphere '  was meant for students, the astronomical clocks were meant for the public. A typical arrangement (much simplified) is shown in Fig. #. The upper clock was simply a clock, while the lower face showed the zodiac. There two arrangements were possible and both were used. Either you had the zodiac immobile, just painted on the background in gold, silver, green, blue, red and a few other colors and you had a golden disk representing the sun at the end of a pointer, moving it over the signs of the zodiac once a year. Or else (as assumed for Fig. #) you had the golden disk of the sun immobile and the zodiac painted on a slowly moving circle. Separate dials gave the month and the date, while a slowly turning sphere which was half silver and half black showed the phases of the moon. A look at such a clock therefore provided the date, the time of day, the prevailing lunar phase and the position of the sun along the zodiac. But this was only the actual information supplied by such a clock. There was still room for elaboration. The astronomical clock built in Strassbourg in # was an example. We know that the master who built this cathedral clock spent two full years on this work. (Legend says that his name was Jehan Boerhave and that he was the pupil of Arab craftsmen, but in fact, the name of the master is unknown.) A quick description will show why A rooster, perched on top, crowed every hour. Then a statue of the Virgin Mary appeared and the three Wise Men passed in front of her, bowing. The crowing of the rooster was followed by a hymn on a carillon. And there was a somewhat stylized human figure with a pointer moving over it, indicating that part of the body which was astrologically favored for bleeding, if bleeding was deemed necessary. Yes, it was possible to be more elaborate than that, as was proved in # by Kaspar Brunner, when the City of Bern requested him to build an astronomical clock for a tower especially built for the purpose. The clock part consisted of the customary two dials, one giving the hours and minutes, the other the astronomical information for astrological purposes. Since Bern was in a republic, and since the clock was not a church clock but a city clock, Brunner could not use kings and princes as had been done elsewhere, nor could he use a religious theme for elaboration Hence the famous clock of Beni marked the hours as follows: Five minutes before the hour a rooster crowed and the figure of a fool sitting above him hit Fig. # Picture of an armilia with zodiac from a book by the Austrian astronomer Georg von Peuerbach (died #) printed in #I #i The lady to the left is labelled "Astrology" the man to the right is Ptolemy. two different bells. After that a royal figure, representing the sun, turned its hand holding an hourglass and a bear (the coat of arms of the city features a bear) who sat opposite the rooster shook his head. Thereupon, on a lower gallery, a whole troop of bears pranced across, some walking, some on horseback. After they were gone, the rooster crowed again, then a very tall figure of a man, dressed all in black, appeared, raised a hand holding a hammer and struck a square bell. The new hour had started... Let's get back to representations of the sky. r  'he earliest known example is a tent made by an unknown Arab craftsman. It was conquered during the Fifth Crusade; when Emperor Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen returned to Italy in # he brought it with him. It is described as having had a cupola-shaped roof showing the constellations. A hidden clockwork made the stars move, as the not very detailed description says; in all probability it turned the whole cupola so that a man sitting inside the tent could watch the motion of the stars across the night sky in accelerated time. Unfortunately this earliest forerunner of the planetarium is lost without a trace. No good description is known. No drawing, if one was made, is still in existence. The next attempt to represent the appearance of the starry sky is much better documented. It is known as Gottorp's Globus, named after Duke Friedrich von Holstein-Gottorp, who had it built for him. Scientific advisor was the mathematician and astronomer, Adam Olearius; the man who did the actual building was Andreas Busch. The work took from # to #. It was a sphere of sheet copOn the outside it was painted to show the continents and oceans of the earth. But all the more important stars were represented by holes drilled through the copper so that Duke Friedrich, when he entered his globe during daylight hours, had a representation of the night sky. Since the ducal family had a Russian branch, the famous globe was taken to St. Petersburg in #; I have not been able "to find out what has happened to it since. The Gottorp globe found a successor in London in #I when James Wyld, M. P., had a sixtyfoot globe built in the center of Leicester Square. Mr. Wyld's original idea had been to show the extent of the British Empire to Londoners and visitors by means of a very large globe. But he then realized that a person standing near a very large globe can see only a small portion of that globe and he found a solution in an inverted globe. The continents and oceans and rivers and so forth were put on the inside of his sixty-foot sphere in bas relief. That way a visitor could look at a much larger area at a glance and, if the reporter of the Illustrated London News of the time can be trusted, the globe was large enough so that a visitor would not realize that he looked at a concave surface. But James Wyld's inverted globe -- called the "georama" in some references -- had nothing to do with astronomy or a representation of the sky. I t seems a long way from Gottorp's globe to the modern planetarium, but the long way was traversed in a single step, without any intermediary developments. The way this came about was as follows: In #, Dr. Oskar von Miller, the son of Ferdinand von Miller, who was the director of the Royal Foundry in Munich, outlined his ideas for a museum which was to be devoted to accomplishments in science and technology. The museum conceived by Dr. von Miller now exists: it is the German Museum in Munich. Part of the museum was to be devoted to astronomy, which meant a "planetarium". When von Miller used this word he meant a large orrery. But in addition to a large orrery von Miller also wanted something that represented the sky as seen in a clear night. Knowing about Gottorp's globe, he had something like the movable cupola of an astronomical observatory in mind, with holes for the stars so that the night sky could be seen during the day by way of daylight shining through the holes. If operation during the night should be scheduled, floodlights could do the job. While Dr. von Miller had a general idea of how it could be done, he knew very well that he would need specialists for the details. He sent a request to the firm of Carl Zeiss in Jena, which did not only build optical instruments, but observatory cupolas as well. At the Zeiss office they started to think. Wouldn't it be better to use light bulbs of different strengths for the stars? That would make the operation of the new planetarium completely independent of the weather. But what about the planets? Fig. #. Typical arrangement of the dials on an astronomical clock of the sixteenth century. (For detail see text.) Dr. von Miller had not prescribed any figures but he wanted his planetarium large enough to accomodate up to a hundred visitors at a time. This meant that the planets would have to be illuminated balls at the ends of pointers that would have to be as much as twenty or more feet in length. The designing engineers groaned at the thought. But the task, was, after all, only difficult. Nobody had asked for anything impossible and they had all the leeway they wanted when it came to detail. So they went to work. Before anything could be shown the first World War began and everything was delayed for four years. But there had been enough preliminary work so that a first model was ready some eight months or so after the end of that war. Then it turned out that the first idea of how to do it had quite a number of drawbacks. The "planets" could not be made visible by means of spotlights without illuminating part of the dome. And the big cupola which carried all the light bulbs representing the stars could not be turned, except so noisily that the lecturer's voice would be drowned out. After this experience the director of the Zeiss works, Dr. Walter Bauersfeld, came to the conclusion that the planets should be projected against the dome. But if you project the planets, why not the fixed stars as well? Therefore he proposed that the dome should not rotate but be solid and motionless, serving only as the projection surface for the images originating from a series of small projectors located in the center of the sphere, that is to say in the center of the floor of the seating area. The suggestion was accepted, but it took five years until all the minor difficulties could be overcome. The first planetarium -- as we now understand the term -- was opened in Munich in the late summer of #. The Zeiss projector did not yet have the now familiar shape resembling a monstrous dumbbell. There was one projector for the fixed stars and an inclined cylinder for everything else. But it worked, and the firm of Carl Zeiss quickly received requests from other cities. The second Zeiss planetarium was built in Dusseldorf, the next one in Nuremberg and, after some delay, one in Berlin. In the meantime American museums and scientific institutions had negotiated with Zeiss too, and the first planetarium in the United States was the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. It opened its doors on May #, #. The Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia was the second (November #, #), the Griffith Observatory and Planetarium in Los Angeles the third (May #, #). New York's Hayden Planetarium followed hard on the heels of the Griffith Planetarium; it was opened on October #, #. The Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh was the fifth (October #, #) and the Morehead Planetarium of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N. C., rounded out the first half dozen when it was opened on May #, #. How many are in operation in the United States now? According to a letter which Armand N. Spitz wrote to me on July #, #, the number is "between # and #" -- and I might add that Armand N. Spitz is mainly responsible for this large number. nphe fully developed Zeiss pro- jector was a modem miracle, but modern miracles tend to be expensive. The Zeiss projector was no exception. Spitz wanted a projector that would do what the Zeiss instrument could do, or at least come close, but that would be within financial reach of High Schools, smaller museums and libraries in smaller communities. In # he succeeded in building a small and relatively inexpensive functioning projector. The projector for the fixed stars consisted of a dodecahedron made of black plastic sheets. Inside the dodecahedron was a light bulb. The stars were holes of different sizes drilled into the black plastic through which the light of the bulb shone. To produce the diurnal motion of the stars the machine was rotated around an axis parallel to the axis of the earth. Changes in latitude were produced by tilting this axis. The planets and the sun and moon were handled by separate projectors. One of the first Spitz projectors was installed at the U.S. Merchant j Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. Within ten years of its creation, nearly # of the small projectors were installed all over the United States. But while this was going on, j the Spitz projector grew, too. Model B, as it was called, was a much bigger projector, resembling in external shape the later model of the Zeiss projector. But while the Zeiss projector i has a solid mounting, the Model B projector was suspended from cables, so that it seemed to float in air during a demonstration. The first of the Model B projectors was installed at the Centro Municipal de Divulgacion Cientifica in Montevideo, Uruguay. The second went to Flint College in Flint, Mich., and the third to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The advent of the space age added a new request. Up to # everybody had been quite happy to overcome time and geographical location on the ground by means of a planetarium projector. But then the question came up how things would look when seen from space. The first projection device which is not earthbound, though it rests on a solid mounting like the Zeiss instruments, is the one at Abrams Planetarium of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. It has the somewhat cumbersome name of Intermediate Space Transit Planaround the earth, fly from the earth to the moon, make a loop around the moon and take up a parking orbit around the moon -- or, at least it will look that way to the audience. The next type -- still under development -- is the Space does, but in addition to that it will be capable of flying to Mars and to Venus. Astronauts getting ready for missions to Mars and to Venus will be able to use it for training. And the day is not too far off when an astronaut, after having returned from an interplanetary mission and being tired of answering questions of what things look like in space, wilt take his questioners by the hand, lead them to the nearest instisay; "Sit still now and see for If you've missed any copies of Galaxy, IF or Worlds of Tomorrow from # to date, our Back Number Department has a limited supply available at #c each, any three issues for #, regardless of original cover price. Copies sent postpaid anywhere in U.S. or Canada. Sorry, no copies before # at present available. Send dates and title of issues you wish with remittance to Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York City #I St was the richest treasure in the galaxy, and anyone could win it. All you had to do was die l Ben Azai was deemed worthy and stood at the gate of the sixth palace and saw the ethereal splendor of the pure marble plates. He opened his mouth and said twice, "Waterl Waterl" In the twinkling of an eye they decapitated him and threw eleven thousand iron bars at him. This shall be a sign for all generations that no one shall err at the gate of the sixth palace. -- Lesser Hekhaloth nphere was the treasure, and there was the guardian of the treasure. And there were the whitening bones of those who had tried in vain to make the treasure their own. Even the bones had taken on a kind of beauty, lying out there by the gate of the treasure vault, under the blazing arch of the heavens. The treasure itself lent beauty to everything near it -- even the scattered bones, even the grim guardian. The home of the treasure was a small world that belonged to red Valzar. Hardly more than moon-sized, really, with no atmosphere to speak of, a silent, dead little world that spun from its cooling primary. A wayfarer had stopped there once. Where from, where bound? No one knew. He had established a cache there, and there it still lay, changeless and eternal, treasure beyond belief, presided over by the faceless metal man who waited with metal patience for his master's return. There were those who would have the treasure. They came, and were challenged by the guardian, and died. On another world of the Valzar system, men undiscouraged by the fate of their predecessors dreamed of the hoard, and schemed to possess it. Lipescu was one: a tower of a man, golden beard, fists like hammers, gullet of brass, back as broad as a tree of a thousand years. Bolzano was another: awl-shaped, bright of eye, fast of finger, twig-thick, razor-sharp. They had no wish to die. I ipescu's voice was like the  ' rumble of island galaxies in collision. He wrapped himself around a tankard of good black ale and said, "I go tomorrow, Bolzano." "Is the computer ready?" "Programmed with everything the beast could ask me," the big man boomed. "There won't be a slip." "And if there is?" Bolzano asked, peering idly into the blue, oddly pale, strangely meek eyes of the giant. "And if the robot kills you?" "I've dealt with robots before." Bolzano laughed. "That plain is littered with bones, friend. Yours will join the rest. Great bulky bones, Lipescu. I can see them now." "You're a cheerful one, friend." Lipescu shook his head heavily. "If you were realistic, you wouldn't be in this with me," he said slowly. "Only a dreamer would do such a thing as this." One meaty paw hovered in the air, caugnt Bolzano's forearm. The little man winced as bones ground together. Lipescu said, "You won't back out? If I die, you'll make the attempt?" "Of course I will, you idiot." "Will you? You're a coward, like all little men. You'll watch me die, and then you'll turn tail and head for another part of the universe as fast as you know how -- won't you?" "I intend to profit by your mistakes," Bolzano said in a clear, testy voice. #'Let go of my arm." Lipescu released his grip. The little man sank back in his chair, rubbing his arm. He gulped ale. He grinned at his partner and raised his glass. "To success," Bolanzo said. "Yes. To the treasure." "And to long life afterwards." "For both of us," the big man boomed. "Perhaps," said Bolzano. "Perhaps." TJ e had his doubts. The big man was sly, Ferd Bolzano knew. His was a good combination, not often found; strength and cunning. Yet the risks were great. Bolzano wondered what he preferred -- if Lipescu should gain the treasure on his attempt, he was assured of a share without risk, or if Lipescu should die, he would be forced to venture his own life. Which was better, a third of the treasure without hazard, or the whole thing for the highest stake? Bolzano was a good enough gambler to that. Yet there was more than cowardice to the man; in his own way, he longed for the chance to risk his life on the airless treasure world. Lipescu would go first. That was the agreement. Bolzano had stolen the computer, had turned it over to the big man, who would make the initial attempt. If he gained the prize, his was the greater share. If he perished, all was Bolzano's. An odd partnership, odd terms, but Lipescu would have it no other way, and Ferd Bolzano did not argue the point with his beefy compatriot. Lipescu would return with the treasure, or he would not return at all. There would be no middle way. Of this, both were certain. Bolzano spent an uneasy night. His apartment, in an airy shaft of a building overlooking glittering Lake Eris, was a comfortable place, and he had little longing to leave it. Lipescu, by preference, lived in the stinking slums beyond the southern shore of the lake, and when the two men parted at midnight, they went in opposite ways. Bolzano considered bringing a woman home for the night -- but did not. Instead, he sat moody and wakeful before the televector screen, peering at the green and 'gold and ochre planets as they sailed through the emptiness. Toward dawn, he ran the tape of the treasure. Octave Merlin had made that tape, a hundred years before, as he orbited sixty miles above the surface of the airless little world. Now Merlin's bones bleached on the plain, but the tape had come home, and bootlegged copies commanded a high price in hidden markets. His camera's sharp eye had seen much. T here was the gate -- there was the guardian. Gleaming, ageless, splendid. The robot stood ten feet high, a square, black shape topped by the tiny anthropomorphic head-dome, featureless and sleek. Behind him the gate, wide open but impassable. And then the treasure, culled from the craftsmanship of a thousand worlds. Left here untold years ago. No mere jewels, No dreary slabs of so-called precious metal. The wealth here was not intrinsic; no vandal would think of melting the treasure into dead ingots. Here were statuettes of spun iron, that seemed to move and breathe. Plaques of purest lead, engraved with lathework that dazzled the mind and made the heart hesitate. Cunning intaglios in granite, from the workshops of a frosty world half a parsec from nowhere. A scatter of opals, burning with an inner light, fashioned into artful loops of brightness. A helix of rainbow-colored wood. A series of interlocking strips of some beast's bone, bent and splayed so that the pattern blurred and perhaps abutted some other dimensional continuum. Cleverly carved shells, one within the other, descending to infinity. Burnished leaves of nameless trees. Polished pebbles from unknown beaches. A dizzying spew of wonders, covering some fifty square yards, sprawled out behind the gate in stunning profusion. Rough men unschooled in the tenets of esthetics had given their lives to possess the treasure. ft took no fancy knowledge to realize the wealth of it. Collectors, strung from galaxy to galaxy, would fight with bared fangs to claim their share. Gold bars did not a treasure make. But these things? Beyond duplication, almost beyond price? Bolzano was wet with a fever of yearning before the tape had run its course. When it was over, he slumped in his chair, drained, depleted. Dawn came. The silvery moons fell from the sky. The red sun splashed across the heavens. Bolzano allowed himself the luxury of an hour's sleep. And then it was time to begin. Asa precautionary measure, they left the ship in a parking orbit three miles above the airless world. Past reports were unreliable, and there was no telling how far the robot guardian's power extended. If Lipescu was successful, Bolzano would descend for him -- and the treasure. If Lipescu failed, Bolzano would land and make his own attempt. The big man looked even bigger, encased in his suit and in the outer casement of a dropshaft. Against his massive chest he wore the computer, an extra brain as lovingly crafted as any object in the treasure-hoard. The guardian would ask him questions; the computer would help him answer. And Bolzano would listen. If Lipescu erred, possibly his partner could benefit by knowledge of the error and succeed. "Can you hear me?" Lipescu asked. "Perfectly. Go on, get going!" "What's the hurry? Eager to see me die?" "Are you that lacking in confidence?" Bolzano asked. "Do you want me to go first?" "Fool," Lipescu muttered. "Listen carefully. If I die, I don't want it to be in vain." "What would it matter to you?" The bulky figure wheeled round. Bolzano could not see his partner's face, but he knew Lipescu must be scowling. The giant rumbled, "Is life that valuable? Can't I take a risk?" "For my benefit?" "For mine," Lipescu said. "I'll be coming back." Lipescu walked to the lock. A moment later, he was through, and gliding downward, a oneman spaceship, jets flaring beneath his feet. Bolzano settled by the scanner to watch. A televector pickup homed in on Lipescu just as he made his landing, coming down in a blaze of fire. The treasure and its guardian lay a mile away. Lipescu rid himself of the dropshaft, stepping from it like some newborn insect quitting a cocoon. He strode with giant bounds toward the waiting guardian. Bolzano watched. Bolzano listened. The televector pickup provided full fidelity. It was useful for Bolanzo's purposes, and useful, too, for Lipescu's vanity -- for the big man wanted his every moment taped for posterity. It was interesting to see Lipescu dwarfed by the guardian. The black faceless robot, squat and motionless, topped the big man by better than three feet. Lipescu said, "Step aside." nphe robot's reply came in sur-" prisingly human tones, though void of any distinguishing accent. "What I guard is not to be plundered." "I claim it by right," Lipescu said. "So have many others. But their right did not exist. Nor does yours. I cannot step aside for you." "Test me," Lipescu said. "See if I have the right or not!" "Only my master may pass." "Who is your master? I am your master!" "My master is he who can command me. And no one can command me who shows ignorance before me." "Test me, then," Lipescu demanded. "Death is the penalty for failure." "Test me." "The treasure does not belong to you." "Test me and step aside." "Your bones will join the rest here." "Test me," Lipescu said. Watching from aloft, Bolzano was tense. His thin body drew together like that of a chilled spider. Anything might happen now. The robot might propound riddles, like the Sphinx confronting Oedipus. It might demand the proofs of mathematical theorems. It might ask the translation of strange words. So they gathered, from their knowledge of what had befallen other men here. And, so it seemed, to give a wrong answer was to earn instant death. He and Lipescu had ransacked the libraries of the world. They had packed all knowledge, so they hoped, into their computer. It had taken months, even with multistage programming. The tiny shining globe of metal on Lipescu's chest contained an infinity of answers to an infinity of questions. Below, there was long silence as man and robot studied one another. Then the guardian said, "Define latitude." "Do you mean geographical latitude?" Lipescu asked. Bolzano congealed with fear. The idiot, asking for a clarification! He would die before he began! The robot said, "Define latitude." Lipescu's voice was calm. "The angular distance of a point on a planet's surface north or south of the equator, as measured from the center of the planet." "Which is more consonant," the robot asked. "The minor third or the major sixth?" There was a pause, Lipescu was no musician. But the computer would feed him the answer. a i... ,t ttnphe minor third," Lipescu said. Without a pause, the robot fired another question. "Name the prime numbers between # and #." Bolzano smiled as Lipescu handled the question with ease. So far, so good. The robot had asked strictly factual questions, schoolbook stuff, posing no real problems to Lipescu. After the initial hesitation and quibble over latitude, Lipescu had seemed to grow in confidence from moment to moment. Bolzano squinted at the scanner, looking beyond the robot, through the open gate, to the helter-skelter pile of treasures. He wondered which would fall to his lot when he and Lipescu divided them, two-thirds for Lipescu, the rest for him. "Name the seven tragic poets of Elifora," the robot said. "Domiphar, Halionis, Slegg, Hork-Sekan -- " "The fourteen signs of the zodiac as seen from Morneez," the robot demanded. "The Teeth, the Serpents, the Leaves, the Waterfall, the Blot -- " "What is a pedicel?" "The stalk of an individual flower of an inflorenscence," Lipescu answered. "How many years did the Siege of Larrinax last?" "Eight." "What did the flower cry in the third canto of Somnor's Vehicles?" " 'I ache, I sob, I whimper, I die,' " Lipescu boomed. "Distinguish between the stamen and the pistil." "The stamen is the pollen-producing organ of the flower; the pistil -- " And so it went. Question after question. The robot was not content with the legendary three questions of mythology; it asked a dozen, and then asked more. Lipescu answered perfectly, prompted by the murmuring of the peerless compendium of knowledge strapped to his chest. Bolzano kept careful count: the big man had dealt magnificently with seventeen questions. When would the robot concede defeat? When would it end its grim quiz and step aside? It asked an eighteenth question, pathetically easy. All it wanted was an exposition of the Pythagorean Theorem. Lipescu did not even need the computer for that. He answered, briefly, concisely, correctly. Bolzano was proud of his burly partner. Then the robot struck Lipescu dead. I t happened in the flickering of an eyelid. Lipescu's voice had ceased, and he stood there, ready for the next question. But the next question did not come. Rather, a panel in the robot's vaulted belly slid open, and something bright and sinuous lashed out, uncoiling over the ten feet or so that separated guardian from challenger, and sliced Lipescu in half. The bright something slid back out of sight. Lipescu's trunk toppled to one side. His massive legs remained absurdly planted for a moment; then they crumpled, a spacesuited leg kicked once, and all was still. Stunned, Bolzano trembled in the lonelirtess of the cabin, and his lymph turned to water. What had gone wrong? Lipescu had given the proper answer to every question, and yet the robot had slain him. Why? Could the big man possibly have misphrased Pythagoras? No -- Bolzano had listened. The answer had been flawless, as had the seventeen that preceded it. Seemingly the robot had lost patience with the game, then. The robot had cheated. Arbitrarily, maliciously, it had lashed out at Lipescu, punishing him for the correct answer. Did the robot cheat, Bolzano wondered? Could they act in malicious spite? No robot he knew was capable of such actions. But this robot was unlike all others. For a long while, Bolzano remained huddled in the cabin. The temptation to blast free of orbit and head home was strong. Yet the treasure called t him. Some suicidal impulse drove him on. Siren-like, the robot drew him downward. There had to be a way to make the robot yield, Bolzano thought, as he guided his small ship down to the broad barren plain. Using the computer had been a good idea, but it hadn't helped Lipescu pass the robot. The records were' uncertain, but it appeared that in the past, men had died when they finally gave a wrong answer after a series of right ones. Lipescu had given no wrong answers. Yet he too had died. It was inconceivable that the robot understood some relationship of the squares on the hypotenuse and on the other two sides that was different from the relationship Lipescu had expressed. Bolzano wondered what method would work. T T e plodded leadenly across  the plain toward the gate and its guardian. The germ of an idea formed in him, as he walked doggedly on. He was, he knew, condemned to death by his own greed. Only extreme agility of mind could save him from sharing Lipescu's fate. Ordinary intelligence would not work. Odyssean cleverness was the only salvation. Bolzano approached the robot. Bones lay everywhere. Lipescu weltered in his own blood. Against that vast dead chest lay the computer, Bolzano knew. But he shrank from reaching for it. He would do without it. He the sight of Lipescu's severed body interfere with the coolness of his thoughts. He collected his courage. The robot showed no interest in him. "Give ground," Bolzano said. "I am here. I come for the treasure." "Win your right to it." "What must I do?" "Demonstrate truth," the robot said. "Reveal inwardness. Display understanding." "I am ready," said Bolzano. The robot offered a question. "What is the excretory unit of the vertebrate kidney called?" Bolzano contemplated. He had no idea. The computer could tell him, but the computer lay strapped to fallen Lipescu. No matter. The robot wanted truth, inwardness, understanding. Those things were not necessarily the same as information. Lipescu had offered information. But Lipescu had perished. "The frog in the pond," Bolzano said, "utters an azure cry." Mphere was silence. Bolzano watched the robot's front, waiting for the panel to slide open and the sinuous something chop him in half. The robot said, "During the War of Dogs on Vanderveer IX, the embattled colonists drew up thirty-eight dogmas of defiance. Quote the third, the ninth, the twenty-second, and the thirtyfifth." Bolzano pondered. This was an alien robot, product of an unknown hand. How did its maker's mind work? Did it respect knowledge? Did it treasure facts for their own sake? Or did it recognize that information is meaningless, insight a non-logical process? Lipescu had been logical. He lay in pieces. "The mereness of pain," Bolzano responded, "is ineffable and refreshing." The robot said, "The monastery of Kwaisen was besieged by the soldiers of Oda Nobunaga on the third of April, #. What words of wisdom did the abbot utter?" Bolzano spoke quickly and buoyantly. "Eleven, forty-one, elephant, voluminous." The last word slipped from his lips despite an effort to retrieve it. Elephants were voluminous, he thought. A fatal slip? The robot did not appear to notice. Sonorously, ponderously, the great machine delivered the next question. "What is the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere of "False witness bears a swift sword," Bolzano replied. The robot made an odd humming noise. Abruptly it rolled on massive treads, moving some six feet to its left. The gate of the treasure-trove stood wide, beckoning. "You may enter," the robot said. Bolzano's heart leaped. He had won! He had gained the high prize! Others had failed, their bones glistened on the plain. They had tried to answer the robot, sometimes giving right answers, sometimes giving wrong ones, and they had died. Bolzano lived. It was a miracle, he thought. Luck? Shrewdness? Some of each, he told himself. He had watched a man give eighteen right answers and die. So the accuracy of the responses did not matter to the robot. What did? Inwardness. Understanding. Truth. There could be inwardness and understanding and truth in random answers, Bolzano realized. Where earnest striving had failed, mockery had succeeded. He had staked his life on nonsense, and the prize was his. the treasure-trove. Even in the light gravity, his feet were like leaden weights. Tension ebbed in him. He knelt among the treasures. The tapes, the sharp-eyed televector scanners, had not begun to indicate the splendor of what lay here. Bolzano stared in awe and rapture at a tiny disk, no greater in diameter than a man's eye, on which myriad coiling lines writhed and twisted in patterns of rare beauty. He caught his breath, sobbing with the pain of perception as a gleaming marble spire, angled in mysterious swerves, came into view. Here, a bright beetle of some fragile waxy substance rested on a pedestal of yellow jade. There, a tangle of metallic cloth spurted dizzying patterns of luminescence. And over there -- and beyond -- and there -- The ransom of a universe, Bolzano thought. It would take many trips to carry all this to his ship. Perhaps it would be better to bring the ship to the hoard, eh? He wondered, though, if he would lose his advantage if he stepped back through the gate. Was it possible that he would have to win entrance all over again? And would the robot accept his antime? It was something he would have to chance, Bolzano decided. His nimble mind worked out a plan. He would select a dozen, two dozen of the finest treasures, as much as he could comfortably carry, and take them back to the ship. Then he would lift the ship and set it down next to the gate. If the robot raised objections about his entering, Bolzano would simply depart, taking what he had already secured. There was no point in running undue risks. When he had sold this cargo, and felt pinched for money, he could always return and try to win admission once again. Certainly, no one else would steal the horde if he abandoned it. Selection, that was the key. grouching, Bolzano picked ' I through the treasure, choosing for portability and easy marketability. The marble spire? Too big. But the coiling disk, yes, certainly, and the beetle, of course, and this small statuette of dull hue, and the cameos showing scenes no human eye had ever beheld, and this, and this, and this -- His pulse raced. His heart thundered. He saw himself travelling from world to world, vending his wares. Collectors, museums, governments would vie with one another to have these prizes. He would let them bid before he sold. And, of course, he would keep one or two for himself, or perhaps three or four, souvenirs of this great adventure. And someday when wealth bored him he would return, and face the challenge again. And he would dare the robot to question him, and he would reply with random absurdities, demonstrating his grasp on the fundamental insight that in knowledge there is only hollow merit. And the robot would admit him once more to the treasure-trove. Bolzano rose. He cradled his lovelies in his arms. Carefully, carefully, he thought. Turning, he made his way through the gate. The robot had not moved. It had shown no interest as Bolzano plundered the hoard. The small man walked calmly past it. The robot said, "Why have you taken those? What do you want with them?" Bolzano smiled. Nonchalantly he replied, "I've taken them because they're beautiful. Because I want them. Is there a better reason?" "No," the robot said, and the panel slid open in its ponderous black chest. Too late, Bolzano realized that the test had not yet ended, that the robot's question had arisen out of no idle curiosity. And this time he had replied in earnest, speaking in rational terms. Bolzano shrieked. He saw the brightness coming toward him. Death followed instantly. On your newsstand now -- Brian W. Aldiss Miriam Allen deFord Julian F. Grow Keith Laumer Fritz Leiber C. C. MacApp Cordwainer Smith Robert F. Young Get your copy today They lived forever -- and, of course, they feared to die! S he interrupted the suave voice coldly. "I don't even listen to threats," she said, and snapped off sound and vision. Within five seconds the buzzer was rasping its hoarse demand for attention. She didn't move, frowning at the blank screen of the visiphone. Presently the buzzer stopped. When it sounded again five minutes later she switched on. The face that appeared was again the pale, blank face of the no extortionist. Obviously he wore a mask. Without giving him a chance to speak she switched off again. This time the buzzer stood silent. She was a tall, regal woman, with something icy and enigmatic about her perfection. For fully ten minutes after the second call she stood motionless in front of the screen with no change in her expression. Then at last, with obvious reluctance, she made a call. The face that appeared this time was that of a young police sar. She did not miss the slight hardening of his expression when he saw her and realized what she was. "Vanessa Gort here," she said. "Obviously you know I'm an elsie. Your name, please?" "Sar Smith. You'll want to talk to the cap, of course. No elsie would waste her time with a mere sar." "Wait. I've been threatened." "With what?" "Disfiguration. You know what that means." "To you, yes." "To any woman." "To you more than to a woman." There was a subtle emphasis on the word. He meant that she was an elsie, not a woman. "Sar," she said wearily, "I have heard more insolence than you could heap on me if you devoted your entire life to it. After a time it provokes no reaction. Whether you hate elsies because you think they should not exist or because you want to be one yourself is irrelevant." "All the same, I'll tell you, Vanessa Gort. I hate them because I think they shouldn't exist." "Right, now we've disposed of that, can we go on? Or should I talk to your cap after all?" "You can talk to me. You've been threatened with disfiguration. Unless what?" dols." T he young sar began for the first time to look interested. "Not exactly a modest demand. Even from an elsie. May I ask how old you are?" "Over four hundred. I forget the exact figure. If you mean, could I pay, the answer is yes. I don't choose to pay." "Meanness?" "On principle." "What was the man like?" "He wore a mask. He called himself the Avenger, a ridiculous melodramatic name. Incidentally, before you ask, I've never done anything that anybody could possibly want to avenge." "In four hundred years?" "Never -- in four hundred years." "Well, if you say so... How often has this man called?" "Three times." "Good. If he's called three times he'll call again. And we'll catch him." There was a pause. "Is that all?" Vanessa asked. "Isn't it enough? Are you officially demanding protection?" "No. The man is probably, as you seem to think, a harmless crank. I don't like making a fuss. I was reluctant to call you at all." "So it seems, since you waited until he'd called three times. Do you plan to go out this afternoon?" "Only to the beauty salon in this building. I needn't give you the address, I suppose." "Quite unnecessary," Smith agreed drily. "Although I don't happen to know all about you offhand, it will be easy to obtain any information about you we may need. You have, after all, been around for four centuries." "It will be all right to go to the salon?" "Better stay in your apartment." "My private elevator admits me direct to the interior. And only clients with appointments are admitted." She added significantly: "No men under any circumstances." "Then I guess it's okay, provided you leave your apartment quite secure. I'll report all this to Cap Zagreb, and he'll decide what action to take." II  fter switching off, Sar Smith arranged to have all Vanessa Gort's calls monitored, recorded and traced. Then he got up and went to the file receiver. Why, he was wondering, was this sort of thing relatively uncommon? Of course, considering the power the elsies controlled, only a fool or a brave man would attempt anything of the sort. But there were plenty of fools and brave men in the world. He turned the first scanner so he turned the second scanthe button. The printer began to chatter. In a matter of seconds he was able to tear off the first page. There had been no more than four attempts at extortion with menaces from elsies in the last five years -- one in Germany, one in Italy, one in South Africa and one in Australia, In each case the full might of the Elsie Council had been called in by the local authorities and the criminal had been found and imprisoned before he had a chance to blow his nose. That was it, no doubt. You had more chance of robbing a bank successfully than of jostling an elsie in the street and getting away with it. Despots in ancient history had had the power to have a man eviscerated so that they could warm their feet in the cavity of his abdomen. Although the elsies had no such power officially, their unofficial power made the ancient despots seem petty. Sar Smith was aware that he had been both a brave man and a fool to bait an elsie. If she wished, Vanessa Gort could get him fired and make it practically impossible for him to get another job. The printer had already stopped. Four minor attempts at extortion. No more. The file was, however, set for crime -- which meant, by definition, acts by people responsible for their actions. Smith cut in the psychotic file and pressed the button again. This time the printer was much busier. There were ninety-eight cases of threats by psychotics. Two elsies had actually been killed, one in South Africa and one in Greece. Nineteen had been injured. Again, all the psychotics responsible had been caught sooner or later. It figured, Smith thought. You didn't threaten elsies if you were sane. If you were insane, eventually somebody noticed it. nn th the sheets from the printer in his hand he tapped on Cap Zagreb's door. "Do come in," Zagreb's fruity voice invited. Smith entered. Zagreb, already overweight, was making matters worse by eating candied fruit. The faint astringency of the relationship between the cap and his sar could have been sensed at once had there been anyone present to sense it. Smith was young and sensitive ; Zagreb was ironically cynical. Smith was a plebeian cop and too conscious of it; Zagreb was a cultured patrician who might have been expected to be an elsie instead of a police cap. Smith was #; Zagreb was #. "Well? Are you here on matters of state, Smith, or is this merely a social call?" "A female elsie has been threatened, sir. Threatened with disfiguration by a masked man calling himself the Avenger. He has phoned three times." "Hardly an unusual situation, Smith. It would be unusual, however, if anything were to come of it." "Yes. sir." "Has the lady a name? It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that I may have met her socially. I move in exalted circles, Smith." "Vanessa Gort." "Indeed?" A candied apricot hung motionless in mid-air. "It behooves us to take the matter more seriously, Smith. Vanessa Gort is a woman of character." "An elsie, sir." "Quite. Immortals can possess character too, you know." "You mean because she's a woman of character the threat is less likely to be the work of a crank, sir?" "I mean that Vanessa Gort would not have reported the matter to us unless she thought it might not be. I assume you have taken the routine steps. Smith. She lives alone. Presumably you told her not to go out?" "She's going to the beauty salon in the same building, sir. I said it would be all right." The phone rang. It was an emergency call on the soundonly police line. The cap picked up the receiver and listened. His expression did not change. "It was not," he said, putting down the instrument. "Not what, sir?" Smith asked. "Not all right. Vanessa Gort has been slashed in the beauty salon. I think we'd better get over there at once." # ather to Smith's relief,  though he would never have admitted it, Zagreb himself went straight to the Gort apartment, sending Smith to the beauty salon to find out what he could there. The proprietress, twittering with shock, was no help at all. The presence of a police sar in her salon seemed almost as incredible to her as a knife attack on a client, and an elsie at that. (No men admitted under any circumstances, Vanessa Gort had said.) Nobody had seen what had happened. Miss Gort had been found in a pool of her own blood, quite conscious and rational. She had insisted on going right back to her apartment instead of waiting in the salon for a doctor. One of the manicurists was more helpful. The attack must, she said, have been by a woman who had given her name as Sara Blair, # Caxton Apartments. This woman had made an appointment and had been photographed when she arrived. But she had not kept her appointment and was not in the salon. Indeed, nobody had seen her, with the possible exception of Vanessa Gort. "Yet she was photographed?" Smith said. Apparently every client was automatically photographed on arrival -- a safeguard, Smith guessed, against subsequent nonpayment of bills rather than against more spectacular crime. Smith took the photograph and looked up at the manicurist after a glance. "Do your clients often arrive dressed like this?" "Oh, yes. Those who live in the building arrive direct from their apartments. And we also have an autocar terminal." "I see." The photograph was a good, clear, full-length color picture of a very pretty girl with a towel round her hips and another over her shoulders. She wore gold slippers. Something not quite right about her strongly suggested that she was wearing a mask. That was obvious anyway. The face didn't go with her figure. Although the loose towels concealed the lines of her body better than a street dress, the impression came through that Sara Blair was older than the eighteen-year-old face she wore. There was nothing more to be done in the salon. Sara Blair was probably still in her autocar in one of the underground tunnels or overhead tubes, but there was no way of tracing it. It hardly seemed worth while racing to Caxton Apartments in the naive hope that the woman would emerge from the autocar terminal there. Zagreb admitted Smith to Vanessa Gort's apartment. The injured elsie, her face bandaged, reclined on a divan. "You were wrong, Sar Smith," she said through the bandages. "It was not safe for me to keep my appointment." Smith opened his mouth, but it was Zagreb who answered. "We've been into that already, Miss Gort. There can be no allegation that Sar Smith instructed you not to remain in thi# apartment, as any sensible person who took the threats seriously would have done. The responsibility of going out was entirely yours. Smith assumed, as you evidently did yourself, that in a place which only women could enter you would be safe from a male extortionist. But you were attacked by a woman -- which means that at least two people are involved." The woman on the divan nodded wearily. "I'm making no complaint. But there can hardly be congratulation either. I guess you know what this means to me. No elsie can heal. Normal metabolism must be restored, at very considerable cost, for six weeks or more. At the end of that time I'll be completely healed, true, with no visible scar, but I can only become an elsie again at the usual tremendous cost." "I am sure," Zagreb said smoothly, "that you are insured." "Of course I'm insured. Do you think that makes me quite happy to... oh, let it go." "Perhaps you now wish that demanded?" S he sat up. "Certainly not," she said firmly. Zagreb nodded. "I understand. The... uh... Avenger was beyond all doubt a man?" "Beyond all doubt." "And you were attacked by a woman. So two people are involved, people prepared to challenge the considerable power of the various elsie organizations which will undoubtedly take up this case... I hesitate, for reasons of modesty, even to mention the efforts of Sar Smith and myself." "I've been thinking about that. Anyone who knew me would know I'd refuse. I don't think I was ever supposed to pay the money. I was supposed to refuse and be slashed." Zagreb nodded again. "I am gratified to have my own theory so succinctly stated. You believe then, that this is the first move in a campaign to extort money from other elsies?" "Or myself, later." "I think, given youi full cooperation, we can guarantee your safety from now on, Miss Gort. Although you have already told Sar Smith that you've never done anything that anyone could possibly want to avenge, I must ask you to make an effort of memory -- " "I've already done that. I'm quite certain. I don't go around injuring people. I can think of nobody who could even believe himself or herself to have a genuine grievance against me." "One other thing, then. Please describe your attacker in as much detail as possible." "I scarcely saw her. It was in the corridor leading from the elevators. My name was spoken and I turned. I suppose I closed my eyes as the scalpel came at me -- " "Scalpel?" "Something like that. All I saw was that the woman was young, dark-haired, of average height. I half fainted. I don't even know where she went." While she was talking Smith had handed Zagreb the photograph of Sara Blair. When Zagreb showed it to Vanessa, she said at once: "Yes. That's her." Zagreb gave the photograph back to Smith. "Well, go on, Smith. Find her." "Sara Blair must be a false name, sir." "Of course." "She won't be at this address." "Naturally not." "This isn't her own face. She's wearing a mask." "One presumes so," Zagreb sighed. "What are you waiting for?" Ill A t Caxton Apartments, by no means to his surprise, Smith drew a complete blank. Nobody knew a girl resembling Sara Blair, which was only to be expected, since she would scarcely wear the same mask all over the city to enable the police to trace all her movements before and after the attack. Smith considered checking on all the women in the block between seventeen and forty-five, but when he found there were over five hundred of them he decided not to bother. When he returned to police HQ he found Zagreb eating a banana. "We are famous, Smith," Zagreb told him. "Or rather, infamous." He handed the sar a sheaf of photostats, clips from the news service prints which the HQ information room monitored round the clock. Whenever anything happened anywhere, police HQ knew it at least as soon as the television news editors. "How did the news service get the story, sir?" Smith asked. "I gave it to them. I want this right out in the open. Smith. Extortionists and blackmailers thrive in the dark. They shrivel up and die in the full glare of public investigation." Cap Zagreb was in charge of the case, the reports said. But there was already a suggestion that the Elsie Council would not be satisfied with a routine investigation. "I guess not," Smith said with dry bitterness. "Elsies are important. Elsies matter. They're the salt of the earth. They're the people who can afford to buy immortality at something over they do go on living, power tends to get stuck in their hands. They don't put up Presidents, police commissioners or governors, but they make sure they're always in a position to put all the pressure they want on anybody who holds authority anywhere. The elsies are only one thousandth of the population, but they hold seventy per cent of the power." Zagreb had been listening with polite interest. "Have you finished, Smith?" he asked. "No, sir. The elsies have stopped space travel and everything else that they consider too dangerous for them. If we went into space and they didn't, human communities might grow up somewhere not under elsie control. They've rebuilt every major city so that no elsie can get killed in a street accident. They've taken over Florida as a Retreat for any elsie who doesn't want to be contaminated by the very sight of an ordinary human being. The Elsie Council fights every verbal, economic, social, psychological or physical attack on any elsie so fiercely that nobody dares to brush an elsie in the street or open his mouth about them." "Come, now. It can scarcely be said, Smith, that you are not at this moment daring to open your mouth." Ignoring this. Smith went on: "There's only one elsie for every hundred thousand of us -- yet the whole world is run for them." "Do feel free, sar, to say anything more you wish." nphe sar frowned at his superior. "Is there anything I've said that's untrue, sir?" "You spoke the truth and nothing but the truth, but by no means the whole truth. If you there be anything to stop you becoming an elsie?" "Nothing would ever make me join them, sir. I'm going to live out my life as a human being -- not as a living corpse." "There we have it, Smith. Immortals are known as elsies from the initials LC, indicating living corpse. Like many not exactly complimentary descriptions, the name has stuck. Immortals are, indeed, living corpses, and they're not even immortal. It is as easy to kill an immortal as to kill anyone else. Cut them and they bleed -- as we have recent cause to know. Elsies are merely people who do not age. Nothing more than that, nothing less." "Cap, why are we talking like this?" Smith demanded. "You are young," Zagreb ruminated. "And intolerant. When you're older you will not, one hopes, make such definite statements before learning all the facts." "What facts don't I know, sir? What's the big secret?" "No secret, Smith. Nothing you could not find out if you wished. The trouble is you don't wish. I suspect, for instance, that you assume unthinkingly that elsies are rich simply because they're elsies." Qrnith looked surprised. As a  matter of fact, he did. "Since and it has to be done before you're thirty-five, it stands to reason -- " "I'm not talking about that, precisely. Most elsies are treated at the expense of parents too old, by the time they make their pile, to become elsies themselves. What I mean is: how, simply by living indefinitely, does one become very rich?" "You can invest money at compound interest and wait until it multiplies itself." "True, but where does the money come from and what do you live on while it grows?" "Parents who can pay a million usually leave quite a bit when they die." "Also true, but you're still missing the point, sar. The longer you live the more you spend. Vanessa Gort has spent, on a rough estimate, some twenty-five Where did she get it?" "She was left money, I guess." "She was left nothing but immortality. Four centuries ago, at the age of twenty-five, she received no legacy from her father but the elsie treatment." "Then other legacies since -- " "It doesn't work that way. Smith. It never has. Property passes forward, not backwards. Brothers and sisters and cousins of elsies leave their money to their own children, and it keeps going right on down -- never back to the great-aunt or greatgreat-uncle who became an elsie. Go on, sar. Tell me where elsies get their money." "If you go on living for centuries -- " "I've told you," Zagreb sighed, "going on living isn't enough. What else do elsies have to do?" "Work, I guess." "Exactly. Elsies who become rich and powerful and important have to work for their riches and power and importance." "And what does that prove, sir?" For the first time Zagreb showed exasperation. "If you can't see that for yourself. Smith, I wonder how you ever manage to catch the most incompetent criminal -- " cphe visiphone on Zagreb's desk buzzed peremptorily. Knowing all calls were monitored, the cap switched on at once. No call switched through to him could be refused. "Cap Zagreb," he said. The lean face on the screen said: "I'm Henry Fax, president of the Elsie Council." "Yes," Zagreb said. "I've been expecting you to call." "Zagreb, we're not going to interfere in any way with your investigation into the Gort case. But as you can understand, the criminal simply must be found. Anything you want, absolutely anything, will be arranged the moment you request it." "Thank you. The police organization is, however, moderately well equipped and staffed." "Kind of thing I mean. Your sar just made inquiries about Sara Blair at Caxton Apartments. If you want the entire list of # occupants checked out by private investigators, just say the word." "I'll bear your offer in mind, Mr. Fax." "Or if you want a law passed so that any area in which this criminal is known to be can be closed off, even a whole city, let me know." "I shall, Mr. Fax, I shall." "Another thing -- suppose all wearing of masks was banned. That might simplify matters for you." "It might. And again, we might find all our time and attention taken up with charging people who were doing nothing more criminal than wearing a mask. One small thing occurs to me. I'd like the unofficial assistance of a female elsie. A volunteer, of course -- to work with my sar." Smith's head jerked up. "There might be danger for this... volunteer?" Fax said. "There appears to be danger for all elsies at the moment. Admittedly anyone who offered to help might find herself with more than her fair share." "I'll find somebody." HP agreb completed his arrangements with Henry Fax and switched off. "Cap, what's in your mind?" Smith demanded. "Vagueness. One of my vague ideas is that you may have to become an elsie." "Huh?" "In name and appearance only, of course." "You can tell an elsie at a glance." "How, Smith?" "You know as well as I do, sir." "Tell me all the same. How do you instantly recognize an elsie as such?" "Well... take two ordinary girls, one twenty-two and one twenty-eight. The girl of twentytwo isn't exactly in early adolescence, and the girl of twentyeight hasn't even started to decay. Yet most people can tell that one is about twenty-two and the other about twenty-eight." Zagreb nodded. "How do you tell that a girl's twenty-eight and not twentytwo? I guess by her eyes, expression, maturity, experience... It's not lines or skin flaws or anything like that. A girl of twenty-eight can be lineless and flawless. Yet you still know. Now take a woman who's lived one hundred sixty-five years. She can have the body of an eighteenyear-old girl and the most perfect complexion you ever saw. She usually does. Yet you only have to glance at her and you know she's an elsie." "Precisely. So take an elsie who really is twenty-five. How do you know then?" "Well... you don't sir." "Quod erat demonstrandum. Meantime, however, since I expect it will take some time for the situation to develop, all I want you to do is visit all the elsies in this area and ask if they have been threatened." "Yes, sir." This was a normal, routine assignment. Vanessa Gort might or might not be the first elsie threatened by Sara Blair and her partner. The others, if any, might or might not have paid up quietly. It was obviously sensible to find out. "We'll continue our interesting discussion on the rights and wrongs of the elsie situation later," Zagreb said. "Meantime, write your report and get on with your job." "No further orders, sir?" c The Zagreb eyebrows went up in his characteristic expression of pained surprise. "Have I ever tied your hands, Smith?" "No, sir." "Have I not always shown a rather touching faith in the capabilities of my assistants?" "You could put it that way, sir. They might say that you expect miracles." "Very well, Smith. Go thou and perform a miracle." IV Tphree days and six elsies later, Smith had to admit to himself that there had been some justification for Zagreb's accusation that he had sounded off about elsies without knowing much about them. Although meeting and talking to elsies did not change Smith's views in any significant particular, he realized that there was more to being an immortal than met the eye, Homer Daniels was a quiet little man who didn't want anyone to know he was an elsie. In the nature of things this was impossible. He did, however, do his best by living quietly, changing his abode regularly, and invariably going out masked. Smith was forced to admit that Daniels was no megalomaniac and that there was little luxury in his life. He had given up practically everything for one thing only: perpetual stalemate in the battle of life and death. Blanche Morton was a nymphomaniac. The number of men she had had, or vice versa, must be staggering, since she had lived for three hundred years and still had the body of a girl of eighteen. Smith suspected that what she got from immortality, what she wanted, was not really eternal life. It was, first, the reassurance that whether, however and whenever she did eventually die, she would never have known old or even middle age; and, second, the certainty that no elsie could have children. Jim Stephens lived an eternal life of terror. He knew that any major scratch would be enough to force him to surrender his immortality, and that there was no guarantee that the restoration process would be entirely successful. He had nearly died the first time. He was convinced he would die the second time. Ergo, a scratch would kill him. So he guarded himself like a fortune in fine crystal. Helen Bauer was that rarity, an elsie who had not had the treatment until she was in her forties, and yet had survived. Smith envied her least of all. Suspension in eternal youth was one thing, suspension in middle age quite another. Jo Seymour was perhaps the best adjusted of the six. She had fun, she had a vast fortune, and she was sufficiently free of Stephen's terror to ski and skate and swim. She had undergone the treatment four times after injury. Blake Smedley was the only one of the six who resembled Smith's theoretical elsie. He had vast power and he liked to use it. No mask for him. When he strode into the non-elsie world, everything about him proclaimed that he was one of the elite.  #I denied having been threatened. "But Stephens is worth watching," Smith reported to Zagreb. "Either he's lying or he soon will be approached. When he is, he'll pay." "Stephens," Zagreb ruminated, "being the one who's terrified he may cut his finger?" "He'll never cut his finger, sir. I was searched before I saw him to make sure I carried nothing as dangerous as a pin. There isn't a knife in the house that would cut anything tougher than butter." "Do I detect a certain diminution in your jealousy of elsies, Smith?" "Jealousy, sir? I was never jealous of them." "No? Well, let that pass. When we were interrupted in our previous discussion, I had pointed dols is excluded from the ranks of elsies. Since the treatment greater skill than any surgical operation ever performed, is there anything unfair about this?" "I didn't say it was unfair." "No? I was under the impression you did. However. Payment guarantees success. In some forty per cent of all cases, immediate death results. In another thirty per cent, although the treatment is not fatal, it is not successful either. Of course, they can try again. Thus of those who can pay and want to become elsies, only forty-two per cent succeed." "I don't quite get your drift, sir." "Perhaps not... perhaps I have no drift, Smith. But remember this -- only the cream of the men and women who become elsies do last for centuries. You know perfectly well that the suicide rate among elsies is high. Ironic, isn't it? A less spectacular thinning of the ranks occurs in a very natural way: most elsies who have to revert to normal metabolism in order to heal simply don't have the cash for the restoration process." "Well, sir?" "So the elsies who have been around for a long time are on the whole highly intelligent, competent, prudent, successful men and women." "Maybe." "I'll accept that somewhat grudging admission and go on. Then I must point out that we share in all the benefits which the elsies have provided for themselves. I believe you said -- quote -- they've rebuilt every major city so that no elsie can get killed in a street accident -- unquote. How many non-elsies get killed in street accidents in such cities, Smith?" "None, sir." "Quite. You also remarked that they took over Florida as an Elsie Retreat -- by force of arms, Smith?" "No, sir. They paid for it. Billions. "Once again, quite. Talking of the Retreat, Smith -- you are going there." "I, sir? I'm not an elsie." "You will not go as Sar Smith. Nor will you go alone. But first -- there have been more threats." "You didn't tell me." "I'm telling you now. Three elsies in other cities have been threatened. They all departed immediately for the Retreat." "Well, that's sensible. They're safe there." "None of the calls were traced, but we have recordings of two of them. The elsies concerned had taken the precaution of recording all calls." "Pity they didn't go further and let us trace all their calls." "They did. I should not have said the calls were untraced, but that the information didn't help us It only takes a moment to step out of a public call-box and get very thoroughly lost... Let's watch the recordings." Tie pressed a switch. A blank face came on the screen. It was a poor mask. The quality of face masks depended, naturally, on their expense. A mask like this was obviously a mask, but it effectively concealed the identity of the wearer nevertheless. A mask like the one worn by Sara Blair would have needed very close examination before it could be identified as a mask. "Cyril Black," the blank face said, "this is the Avenger. You happened to Vanessa Gort will also happen to you. Since you're a man, a threat to your face might not perhaps be so effective. Your belly will be slashed and you will suffer a good deal of pain." The screen went blank. "That all?" Smith said. "No answer expected, no arrangement for collecting the cash?" "Evidently this is a preliminary call, made to see what Cyril Black would do. What he did do was depart for the Retreat -- as thousands of other elsies are doing." "There's room for them," Smith said drily. "Florida at one time had a population of twentyabout thirty-five thousand elsies in the whole world." "True. Let's watch the second recording." Zagreb pressed the switch again. This time it was the face of a girl which appeared. It was the face of Sara Blair. She said: "Betty Slessinger, Vanessa Gort is a friend of yours. She sure . you won't." Smith blinked as the face abruptly disappeared. The message was certainly short, if not sweet. "You've had the voices analyzed?" he said. "Unfortunately the extortionists have heard about voice identification as well as face and fingerprint identification. The voices in both cases were modified by throat resonators. Betty Slessinger also departed for the Retreat -- she is there now." Zagreb reached out toward the intercom. "Send in the lady when she arrives." "She's just come, sir." "Very well, send her in now." "That's the elsie volunteer? Who is she?" "You'll see in a moment." "What's the idea, sir?" "As a twenty-five-year-old elsie alone, you wouldn't fool anyone for long Smith. As the companion of the volunteer whom Henry Fax has found for us, you should have no trouble being as conspicuous or inconspicuous as you like." The door opened and Jo Seymour came in. Of course. She was the only elsie Smith had come across who took chances with her precious eternal youth and didn't squeal when they didn't come off. Qmith and Jo Seymour were at  the airport, and Smith was just about to don the identity of Frank Sharp, a genuine twentyfive-year-old English elsie who had agreed to stay under cover until further notice, when an airport cop came and told him he was wanted at police HQ. "Miss Seymour can wait here," the cop said. "You won't be long. You'll catch the next plane." Zagreb wasted no time when Smith arrived. "Things have happened," he said with unusual terseness. "The Avenger tried to slash Blake Smedley, but failed. He was lucky to get away. It was a rather poor effort -- yet the fact that such an attempt was made, without a prior demand for money, has naturally worried elsies all over the world quite considerably. The other thing has worried them even more. Betty Slessinger had been slashed inside the Retreat." "Inside the Retreat?" Smith exclaimed. "But nobody who isn't an elsie can possibly get inside." "You seem to forget that you are on your way there yourself. And that you will certainly get inside." "But the Elsie Council knows about me, sir." "Yes. It should be remembered, stringent as the precautions are, that no foolproof check has so far been made on arrivals at the Retreat. It should also be remembered that instead of perhaps a dozen arrivals a day, the check-points have recently had to deal with thousands. However it happened, Sara Blair most certainly did get in the Retreat. And there she slashed Betty Slessinger exactly as Vanessa Gort was slashed." "You're sure it's Sara Blair?" "I am. There's another photograph." He passed it across the table. It was a poor photograph, taken by a camera which was part of a very elementary alarm system -- the kind that might be expected to be installed in houses inside the Retreat if there was an alarm system at all. Poor as it was, the girl who was shown running from the house was undoubtedly Sara Blair, wearing her usual mask. "Something bothers you, Smith?" Zagreb inquired, after a pause. "The whole picture, sir. Vanessa Gort was threatened. Anyone who knew her knew she wouldn't pay. She was slashed. Smedley wasn't even threatened, yet the Avenger tried to get him. Betty Slessinger was threatened but given no chance to pay. She was slashed -- " "Where does this lead us?" Zagreb asked, with an expression which suggested he was already there. "It's not extortion at all, sir. The Avenger really believes he has something to avenge. He just hates elsies." Zagreb leaned back and examined the ceiling. "Such a scheme would, I presume, have your entire approval, Smith?" "It's my job to catch whoever's behind it, sir." "Exactly. Now you can continue your journey to the Retreat -- knowing that Sara Blair is there." "Someone who could get in could get out." "Not so, Smith. At the beginning of all campaigns mistakes are made. This one is no exception. Then organization is tightened up, and fewer mistakes are made. You can take my word for it that however masked, dressed, disguised or transported, Sara Blair will not get out of the Retreat." "So I'm to catch her, sir?" "You are." "I'll get back to the airport then, sir, if that's all." "Do that, Smith. One further thing. Although I propose to remain here at the moment, if there are any further developments within the Retreat, I shall ask the Elsie Council to invite me in officially and openly. It would, of course, be more convenient if you succeeded in solving the whole affair without my assistance -- " "But that, sir, is hardly to be expected," said Smith drily. "No," Zagreb sighed. V T?ven on short air journeys elsies like Jo Seymour were acctistomed to the luxury of a private cabin. Smith, masked and dressed as Frank Sharp, was therefore able to talk freely to her. His attitude toward Jo Seymour, whom he had now met five times, was ambivalent. She was an elsie, and he still disliked and resented elsies for an amalgam of reasons; yet she was the elsie he liked best. So a man who hated all Spaniards might say grudgingly of a particular man: he's okay -- for a Spaniard. Her two centuries of life had left no physical mark on her except for a few minor scars, the result of playgirl accidents. From her mind they had removed all petty resentment and desire to score off her fellow-beings, elsie or otherwise. "Well?" she invited, soon after takeoff. "Do you tell me what's happened, or don't you?" She was sitting demurely on a massive-looking window seat, her back to the clouds. Her dress was red, short, and highly provocative. And Smith was provoked. "That depends," he said. "How close are you and I supposed to be?" "Not as close as you might think," she said, smiling. "Men are not a particular weakness of mine." "You'd travel about with a guy like Frank Sharp and live in the same house with him and sleep alone?" "Yes. Elsies don't have to be in a hurry." "I see." Anyway, he told her what had happened and asked her: "From your experience as an elsie, would you say that the Avenger and his girl-friend could possibly be elsies?" "It isn't likely, is it?" "It's more likely now than it was. Plenty of crooks of one kind or another have tried to get into the Retreat, knowing how much loot in cash and valuables is lying around inside, and knowing there are no cops. But nobody ever succeeded. How did Sara Blair manage it if she isn't an elsie?" "Slipped in with the crowd." "Maybe. Anyway, how about answering the question? Could elsies try anything like this?" Jo considered the question seriously. "They'd have to be utterly desperate. And I don't think they'd get away with it. You see, there aren't all that many elsies and we live a long time. I don't say every elsie knows every other elsie, but we know each other and about each other pretty well. If an elsie existed who was capable of this sort of thing, somebody would know, would tell the Elsie Council, and they'd get at the truth in a matter of hours." "It could be the work of a couple of elsie psychopaths." Jo shook her head definitely. "The Council knows all about the psychotics among us. There aren't so many, you know. Known psychopaths aren't aced for treatment, and the treatment tends to prevent the occurrence of major psychological upsets. Besides -- psychopaths generally work alone. You don't get two of them cooperating smoothly on the same crazy scheme." "Maybe one wants money and the other is crazy." "Perhaps." "T'here was no opportunity for  further discussion, for the plane was already landing ten miles outside the border of the Retreat. No flying was permitted over the area; any ship of any kind which tried it was automatically destroyed by chaser missiles. Approach by sea was equally impossible. The only way in or out was through the seven checkpoints. Despite his disguise and being in the company of a genuine elsie, Smith would have stood no chance of getting inside the Retreat had he not arrived, by arrangement, at a checkpoint where Henry Fax himself had taken charge of the screening. None of the other elsies who arrived at the same time, half a dozen or so, could have noticed anything out of the ordinary about the way Smith was treated. The only difference was that the result of the tests made on him was ignored. Given a blood sample, it was quite easy to determine whether a person was an elsie or not. The perpetual youth process halted the diminution of the elasticity of the coats of the arteries. The capillaries therefore remained sufficiently supplied, and the normal progress of senility was permanently frozen -- at costs which were well known. The whole organism replaced its cells with machine-like regularity and exactitude. No major change was allowed to take place. Thus elsi es remained at the same height and weight, immune to age, immune to disease -- but terrifyingly vulnerable to the slightest injury. So no blood sample was ever taken from an elsie. The prick never healed, the blood removed never replaced itself. You couldn't have a frozen metabolic pattern and at the same time obligingly versatile cells which took over the functions of different cells. Elsie's bodies were like intricate charcoal sketches waxed over. So long as the wax was undamaged, the sketches lasted for ever. Once the wax was broken, the charcoal became mere loose carbon, as vulnerable as sand castles washed by the tide of time. The new tightened check no longer relied on documents, the Elsie Register and a psychological and memory test. It was based, prosaically, on the fact that no matter how much elsies ate or drank, they had to return to a basic weight. Thus above a certain level of nourishment the body simply refused to accept food. It was rejected one way or another practically unmodified. This test was unpleasant and slow, but it was certain. "You're Henry Fax, aren't you?" Smith-Sharp asked as he ate his third meal in two hours. "You don't usually spend your time working as a frontier guard, do you?" "I don't," said Fax grimly, "but this area really is a retreat now. There are twenty-five thou'sand of us here. That only leaves about eight thousand elsies in the rest of the world." "Are elsies still flocking here, then?" Smith asked. "Despite the news?" "You mean that Sara Blair is in the Retreat. No, they're not. You can see for yourself. Thousands in the last few days, a handful today. Mostly our people want out, not in. We're not letting them out." "Why not?" "We know that Sara Blair is inside," said Fax slowly. "Whatever happens -- whatever happens -- nobody leaves the Retreat until she's found." The message, Smith rightly assumed, was not intended foi Frank Sharp but for Sar Smith. nphte Retreat was a playground for gods and goddesses, every one of whom had an Achilles heel The only transport was a railcar system. There were never any mishaps on rail journeys and nobody could possibly be hurt in street accidents. There were no animals or reptiles. The face of the whole terrain had been carefully smoothed so that it was very difficult to fall from any height. Every possible safeguard in the rivers and lakes guarded against swimming accidents. and there was no waterskiing. The promenades were of soft plastic and no flight of stens lacked a banister. It was like the court where nothing existed which might prick the princess's finger. Inside the Retreat, the eternally youthful elsies lived in a country-club life denuded of all physically dangerous pursuits. Tennis, swimming, sunbathing, carefully stewarded golf, walking. parties and gambling were in: climbing, riding, all kinds of shooting, fencing and sparring were out. Even bicycles were forbidden. Too many people fell off bicycles, they could travel too fast, and there were bicycle-pedestrian accidents. There was no law enforcement. There didn't need to be. Elsies didn't run the risk of being punished by elsies, of being outlawed. More than that, they didn't run the risk of injury. Only Jo Seymour and a few others took such risks, and they took care not to involve any other elsies. Expenses in the Retreat were enormous, and for no high standard of luxury at that. The reason was simply that since nobody but elsies was allowed in, elsies had to do all the work -- all the cooking, serving, cleaning, repairing, lifting and carrying. Only those who needed the money would do it, and only for an extortionate return. Smith saw only a little of this on his first day in the Retreat, for he and Jo were not released inside until early evening. The checkpoint closed at night. Invited to a party a few hours later at Henry Fax's enormous mansion, they had accepted. It was no part of Smith's assignment to sit at home in the chalet Jo Seymour maintained by the side of a lake. He had to see everything that there was to see. Jo's chalet being less than half a mile from Henry Fax's house, they went to the chalet first, opened it up, showered and changed, and then walked to the party, there being no other way of getting there. For a moment, when Smith entered the huge ballroom with Jo, the blaze of light blinded him. Then, when he was able to take in the scene, what he saw dazed and shocked him. He had arrived at parties before, cold sober, when everyone present was already in an advanced stage of hysterical, frenetic inebriation. And although he had seldom been present as a guest at any particularly wild party, he had attended quite a few parties of this type in the line of duty. He had never seen anything like this. Beside him, Jo murmured: "Don't look like that, or everybody will know you're not one of us." It was necessary for her to warn him, he admitted, but the phrasing saddened and sickened him. She was saying that she was one of this crowd. Smith was aware academically that elsies could get drunker than anyone else. Normal metabolism allowed the intake of only so much alcohol and then took drastic measures to stop it. Elsies could drink whisky like lemonade, getting rid of the bulk within a very short time and retaining the alcohol. I n the middle of the floor the men and women who were still capable of dancing danced. They were a handsome lot. No one looked older than twentyfive, and those who were still dancing hadn't reached the stage that most of the others had. Most of the girls and some of the men sprawled around had removed at least part of their clothing. (Perhaps, Smith had to admit to himself, non-elsie parties might have different conventions on this kind of exhibitionism if everybody present had the kind of shape which could stand being revealed.) Elsies had to get into the best possible physical shape during the initial treatment. Thereafter they kept this same shape, perhaps for centuries. The only woman present who did not have the kind of figure which could stand revelation was Helen Bauer. And she, Smith observed, was taking no part in the dmateur strip-tease. So this was how the people who really mattered enjoyed themselves. "Dance?" said Jo. Smith nodded, and they moved onto the floor. Half an hour later, when they went out on the veranda for air, he said curtly: "I don't think much of elsie parties. Are they always like this?" "No," Jo said. "Haven't you noticed something? I haven't had more than a couple of drinks. Neither has Henry Fax. The girl who's operating the music isn't drinking at all. Helen Bauer is as sober as we are. So are a dozen others -- the ones who are the least scared." "I see. The Avenger and his girl friend really have this lot worried. So they drink themselves incapable." "That's about it. Can you blame them?" "Easily," said Smith drily, "but it's no part of my job." They went inside and danced again. Smith would have preferred to stay exclusively in Jo's company, but he wouldn't learn much that way. He therefore let himself be introduced to anyone who could still talk. He had three invitations to private parties consisting of two, taking place at once somewhere within the huge house. "And really," Jo said the next time they took the air, "if you particularly want to avoid suspicion that you're not an elsie, you shouldn't turn them down so bluntly. At least half a dozen people have been asking me about you. They're not suspicious, exactly, they just wonder who you are and how a man like you comes to be here." Smith grunted. They were leaving the party an hour later when uproar broke out. A girl out on the veranda was screaming. Smith ran to the veranda and pushed his way through the chattering, terrified, suddenly sober men and women who were staring in fascination at what the screaming girl had found. Henry Fax lay on the ground, his throat cut so deeply that his head was almost severed from his body. VI Omith did not elect to an nounce his identity and start taking statements from everybody at the party. With a team of detectives to guard the doors, herd the guests together and take the house and gardens apart in search of the smallest clue, he might have been able to accomplish something. As it was, with no disciplined, trained men he could call upon, he preferred to remain Frank Sharp and see what he could see, which wasn't much. Zagreb arrived with the dawn. There was no pretense that he was an elsie: the headless Elsie Council brought him into the Retreat by special dispensation, prepared to try anything that might result in the capture of the Avenger and Sara Blair. He found Smith on the veranda overlooking the lake. Jo was having a swim before breakfast. "If you enjoy seeing elsies worried, Smith," Zagreb said grimly, "you're going to have a ball. Nothing you've seen so far can compare with what you'll see today." "How's that, sir?" "The Avenger has sent his first real demand to the newspapers. The news should be breaking all over the Retreat about now. He any particular elsie, but from elsies in general. Unless the Elsie Council agrees within twentyfour hours, elsies inside and outside the Retreat are not merely going to be slashed. They're going to die, like Henry Fax." Smith said nothing. Jo, curious, swam to the landing-stage below the veranda and climbed out. The early morning sun caught the droplets on her skin and turned them into gold. As she stood slim and erect by the rail, hearing the news from Zagreb, two things fought for Smith's whole attention: the temptation to get rid of Zagreb somehow, anyhow, ing, inside the chalet; and the sudden realization that Jo's present appearance, entirely typical of girl elsies, was highly significant. Duty won. "Sir," he said, "I think I can tell you who Sara Blair is." I #'#"ou've found something out?" said Zagreb. "No. I just thought of something, that's all." Jo was watching him steadily, patiently. "Something I don't know?" Zagreb demanded. "Something you've noticed since coming to the Retreat?" "No, sir. Nothing you don't know. It was you who told me that I'd only manage to pass as an elsie among elsies if I took the identity of a known, recent, genuine elsie." "Oh." Zagreb was disappointed. "If that's all... my dear Smith, naturally we've checked that angle. It leads nowhere." "It was you, too, who made me admit that elsies are generally competent and efficient." "Well?" "If you recall what we know of the Avenger and of Sara Blair, you'll agree that everything the woman has done has been effective and the man has made a botch of the one thing he's tried. It's also important that at a time when nearly every elsie is within the Retreat, the woman is inside and the man has to stay outside, sending demands to newspapers." "All right," Zagreb said. "Assume the woman is an elsie and the man is not. How does that help us?" "Jo told me that if an elsie was involved in such a scheme, he or she would have to be desperate. Blair is an elsie and desperate; the Avenger, whether desperate or not, is no elsie What does that suggest?" "Blackmail?" "Something stronger that that, I think. Love. Blair wants the man to join her as an elsie. But dols. I guess the Avenger is approaching the top age limit -- if he doesn't get the treatment soon it'll be too late." "Ingenious as all this undoubtedly is, it's nothing more than a series of guesses." "Until you look at Jo, sir." Jo had not said a word. She started slightly at this. "At Miss Seymour?" Zagreb said. "If you're going to tell me that Jo Seymour is Sara Blair, Smith, I really must -- " "No, sir. I said look at her." They looked at her. Her green swimsuit was slit narrowly from breast to hip, showing the uncanny elsie absence of bulge or sag. "And the point is," Smith went on, "that there's nothing in the least remarkable about her. Practically all elsies have bodies like that. Tell me, sir -- what kind of female elsie would be desperate not to lose her man, so desperate that she either instigated or agreed to a scheme like this to enable him to join her as an elsie?" "Of course!" Jo suddenly exclaimed. "Elsies in general are physically twenty-five or less. An elsie who was older, who wasn't wealthy, wouldn't find men friends among elsies. She'd -- " "Very well," said Zagreb. "I'm convinced. Let's go." T T elen Bauer received them with exactly the right mixture of startled innocence and annoyance at being suspected of such a thing. While Zagreb and Jo talked to her, however, Smith was looking around. It was no use looking for the knife, which could be lying openly among the rest of the cutlery. But Helen Bauer's chalet was tiny and bare; there were not many places where masks and the other materials necessary for successful disguise could be hidden. He found them under the boards of the bedroom. "It's no use, Miss Bauer," Zagreb said. "You can't prove anything," she said. "I have a mask that looks like the one the woman Sara Blair used. That's all." "It's by no means all," Zagreb said grimly. "You amateur criminals haven't a chance once we begin to suspect you. Analysis of your clothes, the dust in your hair, the patina of your skin and a host of other things will show us where you've been recently and what you've done. If the knife you used is still here, we'll match it with Fax's injuries and that in itself will convict you. We'll have your voice, modified by a throat resonator, checked against the Slessinger demand recording." The woman saw she was beaten. She shrugged. "You'll never find out who worked with me," she said. "I think we will. Miss Seymour, will you step outside for a moment?" Jo hesitated, then turned and went out. "Smith," Zagreb said. "You hate elsies. You think they're the scum of the earth." Smith said nothing. "Here's an elsie who won't tell us the name of the man she worked with. She likes playing with knives. Have you a pocket knife, Smith?" "You're not scaring me," said Helen Bauer contemptuously. She was a hard woman. She had slashed two women and killed a man. "I'll be executed anyway." "No. You'll be restored to normal metabolism and kept in jail for life." "Then I haven't much to lose, have I?" "No," Zagreb admitted. "You've nothing to lose. And yet I'm prepared to wager that you'll do anything to stop Smith inflicting a minor cut on you. That's why your scheme nearly worked, because all elsies are terrified of minor injury. Smith!" "You can't do it. You're cops aren't you? You can't -- " "Miss Bauer, all Smith is going to do is cut you somewhere. The location of the cut I leave to him. It's such a small offense that -- " "Small offense! The Elsie Council will -- " Zagreb had to laugh. "Miss Bauer, if you think that you of all people can count on the Elsie Council for anything whatever... but I'm sure you don't. You were merely making a pleasantry. Well, Smith?" Smith was no sadist. But he took out his knife and opened it. Before the woman could move he seized her arm. As she watched, fascinated, he drew the blade lightly across her forearm, so lightly that only the top skin was severed and no blood came. Two tiny red droplets showed. "Stop!" Helen Bauer screamed. She knew she was going to lose her elsie status anyway, but that was in the future and this was immediate. Something might happen at the trial; somehow she might get off. She couldn't watch herself losing immortality. "I'll tell you," she said. #t'#' ou ' re wrong, Smith," Zag reb said gently. "It's a great honor to be invited to meet the Elsie Council. Personally I wouldn't miss it for worlds." "I'm going to tell them," Smith said, as they waited for the double doors to open, "that I did my duty." "But of course. By the way, do you know who the new Elsie Council president is?" "No. Should I?" The doors opened and they found themselves at one end of a long table at which twelve ordinary-looking men and women sat. Smith saw only one face -- that of Jo. She sat at the head of the table, smiling. "Please sit down," she said. "Gentlemen, we asked you here to thank you. Of course you only did what you had to do in convicting Robert Gilbert and Helen Bauer. But we're grateful to you both, particularly to Sar Smith." "When the Elsie Council has reason to be grateful to anyone, the usual thing is to offer them the elsie treatment if they wish it. Unfortunately, Cap Zagreb, it's unlikely in your case that the treatment would be successful." "I'm well aware of that," Zagreb sighed. "Before you embarrass me, Miss Seymour, let me make it clear that no reward of any kind is necessary or would be acceptable." Jo nodded. "Then we'll merely thank you, Cap Zagreb. As for Sar Smith, the offer of the elsie treatment is open." There was a pause, and then Jo went on: "Knowing you as I do, I suggest that you say nothing at all now, but think it over for, say, a week. No one knows better than we do that as well as advantages in being an elsie, there are disadvantages." "There's no need to think about it," Smith said. He had gone white. He had been genuinely unprepared for this. And when it was made, when a man had a chance never to age, to project himself into the far future personally instead of vicariously through his children, perhaps by the side of girls like Jo Seymour, there was only one possible answer. "I accept," he said, and did not turn his head or even blush when, beside him, Zagreb began to laugh uncontrollably. Everybody on Earth was with the astronauts on their Mars trip -- not only in spiritl T Tarry Protagonist, space-age entrepreneur, had been planning the project since the Gus Grissom shot. The idea was splendidly simple -- to let everyone in the United States participate personally when the first Americans landed on Mars. Harry Protagonist promised something special. Not the vicarious sort of participation people had when they listened to delayed recordings of an astronaut telling about fireflies in space, or watched a mock-up clock ticking off the minutes since blastoff. Harry promised full audience participation... a living link between the space pioneers and those lucky enough to have joined his You, Astronaut Club. What Harry was selling was an intimate connection with the mind of one of the four astronauts participating in Project Long Leap. He offered utter identification with one of the first people to set foot on Mars. This, historically comparable to the first footfall by Columbus in the western hemisphere, would cost a mere ten bucks -- # on the pre-payment plan to those who sent their checks at Harry, a former senior editor at Life Magazine, knew which executive he had to deal with at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to get exclusive brain rights to the astronauts. It cost Harry a mere # million, payable on the launching of the four-man spaceship. 'T'he four Marsbound astroA nauts were George Lincoln, John F. Adams, Dwight D. Roosevelt and Thomas Alva Wright. By an amazing coincidence, ethnicswise, the four were a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew and a Moslem who was also a Negro Thus they were # trueblue Americans. Each had an I.Q. no lower than # and no higher than # # ). Each of the astronauts knew he might never return, but each also knew that if he did he would be a hero -- and a rich hero. His many pre-launch contracts, with Harry Protagonist and others, guaranteed him a fortune before his #th birthday. Thus, for a fee of # payable on his return to Earth, each astronaut let himself be fitted with a sensor which connected electronic ear but also to Harry Protagonist's giant empathy installation at the You, Astronaut Club. Virtually all Americans were hooked up to the Marsbound hero astronauts. This was because Harry Protagonist had generously okayed a special rate of I per kid for schools, so that every child in every school that had electricity was connected, brainwise, to the Intrepid Four. Everybody got his choice of an astronaut, even the dollarapiece kids. This meant that when he paid his buck or his ten bucks he picked one of the four astronauts for his very own to share history with. Harry Protagonist guaranteed everybody that what the astronaut saw, felt and thought, he would see, feel and think, from liftoff on Earth to landfall on Mars. You can see what's coming, can't you? I will tell you anyway; it will appeal to your sense of irony. What happened was that the Martians pranged the astronauts as they were coming in for a landing. They (the Martians) got them (the astronauts) in their sights and clobbered them like sitting ducks. It was too bad but, as the British would put it (and later did), there it was. Nobody had figured on there being Martians, let alone bad Martians. I n the ordinary course of things we'd have lost only four astronauts. But because of Harry Protagonist's grand scheme, one hunthree hundred and sixty-two thousand, five hundred and eighty-nine people who had been hooked up, mindwise, to the four astronauts also perished. It was a real brain drain. Fortunately for Harry Protaghad paid in advance; and he himself, instinctively distrustful of his own schemes, hadn't been hooked up to any of the astronauts. He became a rather sad and long. The overpopulated British, attracted by the American vacuum, came down by way of Canada to take over the country and applied their confiscatory taxes to the Queen's new subject, Harry Protagonist. The British explained that they had acted in the highest tradition of the Anglo-American Alliance and from the purest motive possible, to keep the Russians out. There wasn't anything anybody was able to do about it; I mean there it was. Beginning this month in If -- and Frederik Pohl This and stories by Keith Laumer, Wilson Tucker and other favorite science-fiction writers in the January If... get your copy today! OO fin Nolan was undoubtedly dead. But what was it that was living on -- eternally? OO returned late that afternoon to find the phone ringing imperatively. I answered it, dashed out again, hailed a passing taxi and settled back to scan the paper I had picked up on the way. There was the story on page one, a few lines concerning my closest friend and former teacher: Late News Bulletin Los Angeles, April #. Frederick I. "Fin" Nolan, the world-famous scientist, died here today as a result of a heart attack at the age of #. His studies of space and time, extensions of Einstein's theories, won him international recognition as a mathematical physicist. During World War II he made significant contributions to both the chemical and physical aspects of the famed Manhattan Project which produced the first atomic bomb. Nolan had been in practical retirement for several years, because of poor health. His nearest living relative is a niece, Harriet E. Nolan, of Santa Monica. I was shocked, of course -- shocked but not surprised. After his first heart attack two years ago, Fin should have taken it easier. If anything, he had accelerated his pace, working long hours in his private laboratory. As a former student, I was Fin's closest friend and confidant. He tried out his theories on me and we worked as a team in the experimental laboratory, mixing chemicals, assembling electronic devices, and so on. Exciting, fascinating ! Most people assumed that Fin's nickname derived from his initials. I knew of two more compelling reasons. He had not acquired the "handle" until college where his exceptional talent for science and mathematics became evident. The concept of infinity, especially from the standpoint of space and time, fascinated him. He was always so ready to discuss his favorite topic that his associates took to calling him "Infinity," which time and familiarity shortened to "Fin." And Fin Nolan's right cheek bore a livid birthmark in the shape of a figure eight lying on its side: the mathematician's symbol for infinity. I have said "birthmark," but I remember Fin's telling me that the disfiguring symbol had not appeared until he was about two years old. He was rather proud of it. To him it was more a trademark than a birthmark. Fin Nolan was an out-andout-genius. His knowledge in the sciences -- physics, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry -- was prodigious. He possessed, in addition, an inventive streak, which enabled him to turn nature's laws to practical use. He was something of an engineer and royalties from several of his inventions had made him wealthy. Perhaps the most successful of these was a highly accurate atomic wristwatch, whose luminous dial provided motive power for the hands. His greatest interest -- call it a hobby if you will -- was in the geometry of the universe: the fundamental meaning of space and time. On these subjects he read everything that came to hand, from Einstein to Ray Bradbury. Rockets, missiles, satellites, space travel interested him equally. jV fy mind flashed back to a recent conversation. "You know, Dave," Fin had said, "Einstein's theory of relativity is based on a hypothesis that time is a fourth dimension. Time, therefore, should be on a par with space in the universe. And yet there is a singular difference, arising from the fact that space has three dimensions, where time has only one. You can turn an object upside down in space but you can't reverse it in time. In outer space there is no unique direction, such as up or down. But there is in time. Time is always a one-way stretch, a single track leading forward into the future or backward into the past. But, in the purely geometric sense, how can you say which direction of time is the past and which the future?" "Surely that's no problem," I argued. "I always associate time with motion -- rotation of the earth or revolution of the planets around the sun." "That's exactly what I mean, Dave." Fin said. "Just suppose that you are a man from some planet revolving around the star Sirius and that you've never seen the solar system. Now, if I were to present you with a motionpicture film showing the planets whirling around the sun, you'd have no way of figuring out how to put it into the projector. The film would make just as much sense backwards as forwards. None of the basic laws of physics and astronomy would be changed. So that you, as a Sirian, couldn't tell from the film which is the past and which the future." "But," I argued, "suppose the film should show meteors plunging into the earth's atmosphere and burning up. Surely I could tell then. A backwards film, showing a train of fire shooting out into space and condensing into a solid meteor, would make no sense at all." "I agree, of course," Fin admitted. "The only processes indicating the direction of what Eddington once termed 'Time's Arrow' are those associated with heat or friction. A bucket of hot water, in cooler surroundings, always cools down. It never gets hotter of its own accord. "But what I really meant was that time should be associated with the universe itself -- not based upon the microscopic processes that govern friction and heat. Otherwise time would be very different from space, which exists independently of the matter it contains. "Or does it?" Fin mused aloud. "You're familiar of course with the theory known as Continuous Creation of Matter -- invented by Gold, Hoyle and Bondi?" I nodded agreement, and Fin continued. "The expanding universe is a fact -- not a theory. It is well established by observation. Gold and his colleagues argue that, as space expands, matter must continually and automatically be created in it, so that the universe won't thin out. "Now let me ask you a simple question. Why does a balloon expand?" "It expands because you blow into it," I answered. "Exactly! Gold, Hoyle and Bondi are right except that they have their theory hindside to. They've confused cause and effect. I think that the universe is expanding because matter is being created within it. And this new matter pushes out the boundaries of space with a speed approaching that of light. "It seems to me that the reasoning of Gold and company is a modern version of the discredited idea of the ancients that nature abhors a vacuum -- which of course is absolute nonsense. I don't see how a vacuum could suck matter into existence. However, a positive pressure from the new atoms could push out the boundaries of space. "My idea now clearly defines the progression of time. Time advances as the universe expands. More than that! I conclude that one could in some way cause matter to disappear 'uncreated' -- we could reverse time." i i r r'hat doesn't sound reasonable to me," I objected. "Surely there's no way of turning time backward." "Maybe not in the Universe as a whole," Fin agreed. "But if we could uncreate matter in a limited region, time would reverse there perhaps balanced by excess creation of matter in the regions immediately surrounding, where time would progress more rapidly than elsewhere in the universe." "Isn't the atomic bomb uncreation of matter?" I asked. "Certainly not! In the bomb, matter is merely transformed into energy. The total mass is identical since matter and energy are equivalent to one another. "This concept of mine suggests that matter breeds matter, so to speak. I visualize that the whole ago -- consisted of only one or, more probably, two atoms contained in a tiny sphere about the size of a toy balloon. Suddenly matter began to appear inside and the balloon started its expansion which has gone on steadily ever since. The entire universe is the offspring of those two original atoms." "The original Atom and Eve?" I queried. Fin's pained face indicated his disapproval of my occasional compulsion to turn the apt pun. So I continued on a more scientific plane. "Do you mean that the sun and the earth are gradually growing bigger because of atoms created in them?" I asked. "There are two opposite schools of thought," he replied. "Gold thinks that the new matter is spread uniformly through all of space. And then, to get it back into the stars where it could serve as a fuel and prolong their lives, he imagines that the stars capture it, the matter raining down to the surface. On this hypothesis not much matter forms in any one place. As Hoyle expresses it, in a single year only one atom is created in a volume about the size of a large skyscraper. "I've already expressed my view. Matter breeds matter. I think that the creation occurs wherever matter is already dense. So that everything is actually putting on weight." "How much?" I asked. "Can I blame my increasing avoirdupois on this?" "Hardly," Fin replied. "The atoms per cubic inch every second." "Sounds like a lot to me," I continued. "You've forgotten how light atoms actually are. At that rate years to put on a single pound. This means that no test known to man could possibly decide between these two extremes, whether the created matter is uniformly distributed through space or concentrated in the denser regions like stars and planets." Qeveral months later Fin indiM cated to me that he had not considered our talk mere fancy. We were in his laboratory, inspecting one of his latest experiments, employing equipment that looked like a miniature electric power station: wires, insulators, transistors, surrounding a large metal tube about three feet on each side. "Solid uranium," he said, "except for a small hollow about six inches across at its center." "Pure uranium #?" I asked, somewhat awed by the amount of the metal and its great value. "Obviously," Fin replied. "This mass is far above the critical mass for U-#. Only a fraction of that amount of U-# and we would be mere atoms floating in the mushroom cloud of an afterexplosion!" "But U-# has a very low level of radioactivity," I observed. "Why not use a cyclotron or an atomic pile?" "I'm using this uranium because of its high density, not as a source of radioactivity," he explained quietly. "Since this is one of the dense elements, creation of matter within this mass will be greater than any other place on earth, if my theory is correct." The simple statement was startling in its implications. "The central chamber contains coils of electrons capable of producing the most powerful electromagnetic fields in the world," Fin had said. "Now watch." He pressed a switch and a motor generator began to whine. The laboratory lights dimmed. Without warning, the tubes began to glow. A sudden crack, like the sound of a thousand jet planes simultaneously breaking the sound barrier, almost broke my eardrums. Then silence, as the lights returned to normal "Considerable hydrogen fusion in the chamber," Fin explained. "Something like a miniature Hbomb. But still not enough for a sustained reaction. However, that isn't the real reason behind this experiment." Opening a door in the cube, he withdrew a small filmholder. We developed it together in the darkroom. A few minutes later we were studying the result. "This is a spectrogram of hydrogen, excited in the electromagnetic field of the chamber. Don't pay any attention to the broader line at the center. That's caused by ordinary Stark or Zeeman effects. But look at the peculiar appearance at the edges." I could see the normal straight line curled like hooks. "Why," I gasped, "the wavelengths are all shifted. The beta line is orange-yellow instead of bluegreen. All the lines are shifted to the left!" "Yes," Fin agreed. "The red shift, like that shown in light from nebulae in distant parts of the universe where time proceeds more slowly than it does here. Dave, I feel that I'm on the verge of the greatest discovery of my life. In these intense electromagnetic fields I am slowing time down by inhibiting the creation of matter!" That conversation took place three months ago, and I had not seen Fin since. Consolidated had sent me to Cape Kennedy to help study some problems of their new intercontinental ballistic missile. And now I should never know the answer. nphe arrival of the taxi at the E and C Building recalled my mind from the past. I went up to the office of Mr. Dines, Fin's personal lawyer. Mr. Dines himself greeted me. "We've been trying to reach you all afternoon, Mr. Desmond," he said. "Sorry to bring you such bad news. I know how close you were to Mr Nolan. But this matter is very urgent." He ushered me into his office. "I assume you know Miss Harriet Nolan," he remarked, inclining his head toward the thin woman who wore a grayish bun at the nape of her neck. Of course I knew Harriet, the unmarried daughter of Fin's brother. Funny how I always thought of her as old, though she was only # or so. Our paths had crossed many times, but I took no pleasure from recalling those meetings. Harriet approved neither of me nor of her Uncle Fin -- or, rather, her Uncle Frederick, for she had taken an aversion to his nickname. She gave me a cold, tightlipped smile t llG t acknowledged my presence and said, with obvious irritation, "Where have you been, David? We've been waiting more than five hours!" "Sorry," I apologized. "But I had no way of knowing. Spent the afternoon in conference. Confidential work. That's all I can say, of course. My sincere condolences about Fin." "Now that Uncle Frederick is gone," she remonstrated, "I hope you will drop that horrible nickname. Why do parents give their children names whose initials can be so easily corrupted!" Harriet's middle name was Edna, I knew. Perhaps her dislike of "Fin" stemmed from fear that people might dub her "Hen", as indeed some of us did, behind her back. Mr. Dines cleared his throat and, indicating a chair for me, broke up our exchange. "This shouldn't take long," he said. "First the will and then certain instructions about the funeral." He unfolded a paper and read. The will was simple enough. I, Frederick I. Nolan, being of sound and disposing mind, declare this to be my last will and testament, revoking all previous wills made by me. I direct that my funeral expenses and all debts be paid promptly. To my niece, Harriet E. Nolan, of Santa Monica, California, I bequeath the sum of #. The residue of my estate, I give, devise, and bequeath to my esteemed friend and associate, David Desmond. I nominate David Desmond to be the executor of this my will to serve without bond and with full authority to sell or otherwise dispose of my property as he may desire. A confidential letter, attached hereto, and addressed to David Desmond, gives further directions concerning my funeral and burial. As the attorney concluded, an explosive gasp called my attention to Harriet. Her cheeks were pink and her pursed lips blue with anger. "Of all the nerve!" she sputtered. "It's an outright insult! I knew his mind was failing these last few years. Of course I'll break the will." "The will is five years old and properly signed and witnessed," Dines advised. "Let's see what's in the letter then," Harriet interjected. "That might clear up the matter." "The letter's addressed to David Desmond," Dines observed pointedly. Speaking directly to me, he advised, "You have no obligation whatever to disclose its contents to anyone. Even I don't know its provisions." "Oh, go ahead and read it," I conceded. "After all, Harriet is his closest relative and will have to know about the funeral arrangements." TT'he lawyer inspected the red wax seal, slit the envelope, and unfolded the contents. "Perhaps I should tell you," he said, "that Mr. Nolan replaced an earlier letter with this new one just last week." He then went on to read. Dear Dave: i have full confidence that you will carry out my wishes to the letter, however bizarre some of them may seem to you. My funeral is to be private, attended only by vourself and Harriet, should she wish to come. I made the basic arrangements long ago. The casket, one that I designed personally, is in storage at Lane's Mortuary. You will insist that no one is to make any adjustments whatever of the various dials on the exterior. There are to be no formal services. The casket containing my body should be placed in the family burial vault at Evergreen Cemetery. On the side of the casket you will find a large silver button. When the casket is finally set in place, you are to push that button and then leave immediately. The lawyer turned the page and hesitated. "Miss Nolan," he said, "I'm afraid the next paragraph wasn't intended for you. I think that we'd all be happier if we stopped right here." "Not at all!" Harriet exclaimed. "I've got to know the rest, now." "Okay, then. But remember I warned you." He hurried on, reading rapidly until the end. You probably will have some trouble with Hen, who has never liked either of us. She hasn't the slightest appreciation of science. So be careful in your dealings with her. I rely entirely on your judgment should any unexpected emergency arise. Sincerely yours, Fin The explosion next to me came ing that of the bomb at Hiroshima. "Of all the insults! Of all the idiots! First of all a mere # from an estate that must be this -- " She fumed on. Had it been out of doors, I'm sure that a mushroom cloud would have been clearly visible overhead. The attorney quickly intervened. "Probably between # and #, but subject to heavy taxes before distribution." He coughed and spoke apologetically to me. "This is really your responsibility, I know. However, you can't keep figures like that under cover for long." "But," I asked Harriet, "I understood that you were quite wealthy in your own right? After all, your mother... "That isn't it," she returned. "Frankly, I feel I have as much right as you do to Uncle Frederick's estate. Especially since his latest actions have been so peculiar." I bristled. "Peculiar? In my entire life I have never thought Fin peculiar in any respect." She overlooked my use of the nickname. "Peculiar is right! Always taking about explosions. Explosions in time and space!" I suppose that some of Fin's explanations would have been unintelligible to a non-scientist. And I could recall his exact words. "Explosions," he had said, "are events primarily of space rather than of time. An atomic bomb detonates. The explosion develops into a shock wave that has a devastating effect on space, but none at all upon time. But -- you get a strong enough force field and I think you might change time as well as space." That discussion, which Harriet also had heard, antedated ours about time and expanding universe. I suppose it would have been frightening to a layman -- and a woman at that. A nd that is how I, on a rainy April afternoon, came to be in a darkened vault in Evergreen Cemetery. Dust-covered stone slabs concealed several coffins. A few urns, standing in niches on the vails, undoubtedly contained the ashes of other relatives. By comparison, Fin's casket, even in the gray light, was startling to behold. It had the appearance of burnished silver, though I didn't know what the metal was. It was certainly not uranium, though I thought how singularly appropriate that metal would have been. Most startling of all were several dials on the side, which gave to it the appearance of a huge radio set. I recalled Fin's admonition about the dials and had carefully warned the Mortuary about this detail. And I readily recognized the silver button ready for me to push. The casket was open, as I had directed. I took a last look at Fin. He looked very natural, even to the infinity-symbol mark on his cheek. Numerous floral tributes had arrived despite the printed request, "Please omit flowers." I felt sure that Fin himself would have approved my arrangement of them to form the doubled circle of infinity. The screeching of a rusty hinge interrupted my thoughts, and a shadow fell on the casket. I turned to face Harriet. "I decided to come after all," she announced, stepping toward Fin and allowing her hands to rest lightly on the casket. "Poor Uncle Frederick. What nonsense about these dials!" Suddenly, before I could intervene, she gave one of them a vicious turn. "Stop!" I cried -- too late. "You mustn't move them!" I tried to reset the dial, but the resetting was only approximate of course. In accord with the directions I pushed down the lid, which clicked into place. I then pressed the silver button, and stepped back. "We must leave immediately," I advised, walking rapidly toward the door of the vault. A low humming noise, like the buzzing of a swarm of bees, came from the casket. The sound grew louder until it seemed a pulsing roar. By this time I was frightened. "Hurry!" I yelled to Harriet. But it was already too late. A greenish glow, emanating from the casket, suffused the scene, casting weird reddish shadows against the wall. Then came a deafening explosion. The blast threw me violently to the floor and I blacked out from the concussion. When I recovered my senses, darkness had come. I stumbled to my feet, groped in my pocket for a flashlight and pushed the button. The beam revealed the casket twisted and torn open -- and mysteriously empty. All this I saw in a glance as I knelt over Harriet. She was alive though her pulse was feeble and fluttering. But I had the greatest shock when I turned the light on her face. Her cheeks were shrunken and wrinkled, her hair -- still in a prissy bun -- white. Were it not for the identifying dress she wore, I would never have recognized this obviously aged creature as Harriet. In semi-panic I lifted her over my shoulder and stumbled toward the door. Stumbled indeed! In the darkness my foot struck a soft object. A bundle of clothes, I thought, until a piercing cry from it made me realize that the bundle contained something alive. Quickly I carried Harriet to my parked car, dropped her on the rear seat and ran back breathlessly to the tomb. The "bundle" proved to contain a child, about a year old as nearly as I could judge. I took the baby to the car and drove to the gate, which a suspicious watchman finally opened. From there I dashed to the hospital. T early a year has elapsed since  then. During this interval, my conviction has grown that the casket was a time machine, operating on principle of uncreating matter. Fin had undoubtedly preset dials with the intention of bringing himself back to the prime of his life. But Harriet's contemptuous turning of the dial had upset the delicate adjustment. Outside the casket time had jumped ahead, causing Harriet to age some thirty years in the same time transition whose greater intensity and reversed sign within the casket and had carried Fin sixtyseven years into the past. Harriet survived. The doctors attributed her sudden aging to some unusual and unknown disease -- an explanation which she herself accepted. She was, after all, somewhat hazy about the passage of time, though by no means senile. She remembered Fin's death but had no recollection of what had happened. She swallowed her pride enough to solicit my help in her business affairs -- probably because she had no one else to turn to. But she resented the child, whom I had managed to adopt and had given the name of Frederick I. Nolan Desmond. The records indicate that he was a doorstep baby but the location of the doorstep that I found him on is not mentioned. At our last meeting, Hen voiced her feelings. "Why do you insist on calling that child Fin? You know how I dislike that nickname." And then she continued as if talking to herself, "He certainly does resemble Uncle Frederick's baby pictures." She carefully scrutinized the boy who was adeptly arranging blocks on the carpet. Suddenly she gave a choking cry. Pointing at little Fin, she exclaimed, "I never saw that before!" I looked myself. There on the child's right cheek I saw for the first time the shadowy markings of a figure eight lying on its side, the mathematician's symbol for infinity. Street, New York, N.Y., #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business office of the publishers (not printers), #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y., #. Name and addresses of publisher, editor and managing editor; Publisher Sol Cohen; #I Hudson Street. New York, N.Y., #, Editor Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y., #, Managing editor none. #. Owner; Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. , #, Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder) #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y., #. #. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortages or securities: none. #. Paragraphs # and # include in cases whiere the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements in two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been included in paragraphs # and # when the interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of stocks or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run): average t. copies each issue during preceding # months. #. gingle Issue nearest to filing dato: #. . Paid circulation. #. To term subscribers by mail carrier delivery or by other means: average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #, single issue nearest to filing date, #. #. Sales through agents, news dealers, or otherwise: average no. copies each issue during preceding # months #; single issue nearest to filing date: #. C. Free distribution (including samples) by mall, carrier delivery, or by other means: average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months: none; single issue nearest to filing date: none. Total no. of copies distributed (Sum of lines Bl, B# and C) ; average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months; #; single issue nearest to filing date; #. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Sol Cohen, Fublisher.Al # u T)ook reviewing, like writing, editing or driving a nitroglycerine truck, is one of those occupations for which no one feels need of much previous training. So it must also turn out to be one of those occupations as full of ground rules as a Zen tea ceremonial and as little susceptible to perfect success. In this unsettling view of the matter, the only promising way for the beginner is with the resolve to keep things direct and simple. Accordingly, I here propose to read books, consider what I imagine their authors to have been doing, and discuss what I find interesting in some of them. This is about all I propose to do. If I then turn out to have been doing more, the consequent dismay will be mutual. r T"he salient thing about Poul Anderson at this moment is that we will all soon realize he has for some time been science fiction's best storyteller. In part, this is because he rarely lets a story go by without conveying a sense that he had to learn something new in order to write it. Learning something new seems to be important to him, and he has now been at it for some fifteen years and over a span of hundreds of stories of various lengths ranging over scores of various kinds. Doubleday has recently published two collections, Trader to The Stars (#) and Time and Stars (#), which, while they do not prove these assertions, do suggest them. The former book is a package of three novelettes about Nicholas Van Rijn, the boorish slob who makes unblushing use of his naked power, wallows in the sensual luxuries attendant on his commercial success and thus makes a splendid pulp hero. Time and Stars is a more broad collection of six less clangorous stories, including a beautifully done piece of work like nothing I have seen in the field before. Van Rijn, endowed with surprising agility in so bulky a man, is loveable and not especially unbelievable in "Hiding Place" and "Territory," the first two stories in Trader to The Stars. He was the same in his novel, The Man Who Counts, where if you recall he solved one major problem by biting the finger of the alien villain, who was of course totally helpess to withstand the virulent poisons in earthly saliva. Ingenious, ingratiating, and heartwarming though this kind of writing is, it is not going to suit Anderson for long stretches at a time, it never has in the past. And I believe this is why, though "Hiding Place" is a neat puzzle-find the intelligent aliens hiding among their exotic specimens on the captured alien zoo-ship -- and "Territory" is the story in which Little Blasphemous Sambo sets the tigers running around his tree so fast they melt themselves into an excellent grade of commercial butter -- "The Master Key" is something else again. It is the story of adventure told from arm-chairs at the London military club by the chapfallen young Indian Army officer who fears he has let the side down. The Sir Aubrey Smith part is played by Van Rijn; the flashback battle scenes all star Errol Flynn as the subaltern, with a part written in for Tyrone Power as the Captain From Castile. Van Rijn blusters and starts his way through this audition; the mannerisms that seem possible in a silk-shirted bounder from pillow to purse do not sit well on a bulwark of Empire. For long moments, it is almost as if we were being asked to believe there is some ultimate social good in Van Rijn's personal avarice, a hypothesis true in the abstract but thoroughly undermined here by the hero's broad winks into the wings during the first two acts. But please note the complaint is with the inconsistency, not with the integrity of the inconsistent piece. For what "The Master Key" is, it is well-enough done. It should not have been shaped for inclusion in the Van Rijn canon, but that is probably a fault of Anderson's being able to write in so many different ways, and being impatient to write them. With that kind of fault, a man needs fewer virtues. What Anderson needed in Time and Stars was an editor. "Eve Times Four," the last piece in the book, is an anticlimactic, out-of-focus inversion of the old Planet Stories castaways-of-thestarlanes plot. The reverse-hero is ugly, not bumptious, and the superficially levelheaded heroine marooned with him may have been well within her logic but was obviously reasoning straight from her chastity belt all the same. See "Territory," where much the same young lady dances the same dance, but to Van Rijn's tune. The second least successful story in Time and Stars is the lead. "No Truce With Kings," a-flicker with confusing scenechanges, stuffed with narrative compressions and a pale army of sketched characters, should have been tried as a novel (Heinlein's Sixth Column in reverse, with less unity but more breadth and depth, and I think better characterization.) But between these two stories, which serve to provide an exasperating beginning and a flat ending to a four-dollar book, lies more than your money's worth. "Turning Point" is distinguished by its simple charm; a reasonably good what-if idea (What if we do run into aliens who are so likeable and so superior that we will just give up and sit down to applaud?) told with inventiveness for detail and fond characterization, and embodying a likely proposal for solving this possible real problem. This is followed by "Escape From Orbit," which I'll get back to. That is followed by "Epilogue," an unfalteringly sustained creation reminiscent of Don A. Stuart's "Night" crossed with whatever you think is the best Hal Clement story; a story about an Earth so far removed in time and circumstances from our own that the contemporary humans who intrude on it seem monstrous, while the Earth-denizens of that day seem right and proper masters of the house they have built on what Man abandoned. And "The Critique of Impure Reason," while mostly a writer's story, about a future society in which the "little magazine" and the kind of creativity it engenders have taken over publishing, is going to be pleasant reading for science-fiction fans as well. What may turn out to be highI y memorable reading for science-fiction fans is the story I put by above. "Escape From Orbit" is a technique-problem story; the consulting expert is called in to resolve the emergency in space, where three men are trapped and doomed to die unless he can, by exercising technical ingenuity in an office on Earth's surface, so arrange the available materials and data as to bring them safely down. As we all know, this story when well done affirms many ideals for us. It is done very well lere. But it isn't the real story. Vhat Anderson has really been doing with this structure is brought forward and recapitulated at the end, when the exhausted hero, his dealings with the inflexible Universe satisfactorily concluded, now has to go home and get his kid off to school. The wife who has been phoning him for help with her routine household problems while he was figuring orbits has been so drained by her difficulties that she has slept through the ringing of the alarm clock. Anderson's technical execution of this story is superb. The most important of the many subtle objectives he set out to reach -- and he reached every one I could detect at all -- was to make this a profoundly optimistic and ennobling story. He has at least added a new dimension to what seemed to be a completely rounded science-fiction form. I actually believe he has wiped it out and substituted something much more genuinely satisfying and truer to life, but that remains to be seen. One thing that impresses me most distinctly is that Anderson shows the hero manipulating the supposedly difficult problem by wireless, but having to fend off the wife's problems with stopgaps and finally having to go home in person, not to solve but merely to alleviate one specify among them. I doubt very much whether this story was intended to be merely about one man and one wife, or cabbages or kings; I believe it was intended to be about whatever energy-sink each of us has; we all have them -- so do our wives, kids and kings. I think one thing you could say about this story, if you had only one thing to say, would be that it is about where entropy really lives. And I think it is a piece of literature that could only have been written by a man thoroughly steeped in the traditions of science fiction, and which consequently could not possibly be fully understood by the editors or readers of "mainstream" anthologies of noteworthy contemporary writing, which is one of the places where this piece of work otherwise belongs. Their loss is a consequence of our gain, and much comfort may that give a man whose tireless polishing of his talents has put him in that paradox. Whether this story is the clear and outstanding contribution to the field that I presently believe it to be, I may have occasion to report at some time when my blood has cooled and my omniscience is not impaired by admiration. I do believe that "Escape From Orbit" creates a doubt that there have been very many genuinely realistic science-fiction stories. It certainly makes a mockery of the kind of realism based on conscientiously counting the number of Johns aboard the spaceship. T lr ' eith Laumer's The Great  Time Machine Hoax (Simon  Schuster, #) is billed as a picaresque jape about Chester W. Chester IV, swept back and perhaps forth through time by his idiosyncratic great-grandfather's equally eccentric, omnipotent computer. Various adventures are recorded, and finally Chester, a far better man when he started out, rescues two time-stranded companions -- one of them a synthetic naked girl who turns real just in time -- and the book ends. Actually, Laumer has been playing a little joke on Simon # Schuster. Buried in the middle of this volume is a long episode of straight adventure-with-lectures in which Chester is not only transformed from Jack Oakie to Jack Armstrong but encounters just the right people to lecture and be lectured at. Most of them are from the cast of Atlas Shrugged. But the attractiveness of the doctrines reflected lies between Laumer and anyone with # to spend on a book. What I found interesting is that Laumer can do a number of things well; be funny, be straightforward, be suspenseful, be technical (about gliders and other simple machinery, not about time machines, though I grant you he designed it), be convincing even when he carps. My objection is that he has now done all of them, has expended three or four widely different divergent plots and situations besides, and doesn't have even one whole book to show for it. f ne of the two things most people remember about John Taine is that he was a writer of rococco adventure ( Before The Dawn, The Greatest Adventure ) as distinguished from, say, H. G. Wells the writer of sociological -- and thus modern -- science fiction. He is usually also known to have been Eric Temple Bell, once professor of mathematics somewhere. Even his publishers these days (in this case, Dover, which also publishes Wells as well as David Harum ) tend to present his books as nostalgia -- pleasantly archaic "entertainments" spun by the idling brain of a narrowly specialized postVictorian academician and illustrated by Frank R. Paul. This is as serious an error, because equally devious, as would be the notion that Isaac Asimov is a biochemist and science reporter whereas Ray Bradbury is a writer. There are some very hard human questions raised by such Taine novels as The Time Stream. (I also suggest that Seeds of Life is the more searching of two roughly similar novels of identity, the other being The Invisible Man.) Taine has a habit of telling things out of chronological order and starting slowly in any case. But he repays the slight necessary effort. Try the present Dover omnibus ( Three Science Fiction Novels by John Taine, Dover Publications, #, largesize paperback) containing The Time Stream, The Greatest Adventure, and The Purple Sapphire. My point is not that Taine will now impress you most as a social philosopher neglected in the shade of his distinguished English contemporary; my point is that these supposed entertainments of an outmoded scientifiction will impress you with how cogent they are, while entertaining you. T he Reefs of Space, by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson (Ballantine Books), is oration for the adult science fiction market. It is not like a Jack Frederik Pohl novel, and not like a Pohl-Kornbluth novel; accordingly, it has passed the first test of this collaboration, and probably answered your first question. It is full of inventions. Among them is the premise that the continuous creation of hydrogen in empty space is paralleled by the continuous creation of life; that this life takes the form of matter-converting organisms roughly analogous to coral, who have built up great "reefs" of crystallized heavy elements in space which may, in fact, be the mechanism by which planets, and planetary life, came into being. These developments of elaborated ideas on the original Hoyle hypothesis are very impressive to watch ; when translated into mental pictures of great self-luminescent fairylands flashing and sailing in the wilderness of interstellar night, they become beautiful. The action plot is reminiscent of most novels done according to what I think of as collaborative method; the hero is at odds with his social organization (in this cace a machine administered Plan of Man) against his own best wishes. He wants little more than to be accepted by the Plan case, a physicist) but he unwittingly has done something and knows something to which the Plan objects, though he cannot get it to specify what that might be. In time, after a series of conflicts, confrontations, escapes and perils, he learns the answers and participates in activities which drastically alter society so that he Can fit into it. But there are things going on here which quite rare in science fiction nowadays and completely overshadow the plot in any appraisal of this book's individuality. Its most significant feature is the constant generation of science-fiction ideas and sciencefiction characters, for which the hero's troubles are never much more than a vehicle. The reefs are inhabited not only by the fusorians, who built them by fusing hydrogen into heavier elements, but by beautiful, reasonably intelligent golden spacelings, much like mute porpoises. Their natural enemies are the vicious pyropods, organically rocketdriven animals something like squid. And the reefs, of which the nearest is far beyond Pluto, have become the refuge of various dissidents from the Plan. Moreover, the spacelings have an inertialess (the book's word is "jetless") organic drive, which as everyone knows is impossible under the Third Law of Motion, and unlikely even in porpoises, but which nevertheless enables the spacelings to swim anywhere they please, taking their own atmosphere with them. You can see the plot-threads in there, and sure enough the hero, who has been assigned the task of developing a jetless drive for the Plan, and accused of knowing all about it but refusing to cough it up, ends his tale on a reef, where all is made right in the end, which comes suddenly and flatly. What I did not see in there was that the writers would come up with a perfectly reasonablesounding basis not only for the spacelings' inertialessness but for Hoyle's continuous-creation hypothesis, which as we all know is against common sense, a harder taskmaster than Newton ever was. The plot, as I say, ends anticlimatically. Furthermore, several characters are thrown away after considerable development, among them a chap named Oporto and a Godot-figure named Ron Donderevo. There are other deficiencies of detail. But there are no deficiencies in the things that distinguish a science-fiction story from all other stories; there is the melding of actual science with an author's scientific counter-hypothesis that amplifies and romanticizes it, and there is the reader's growing sense of grasping something grand... the sense of wonder, if you will. This is not the best example of a novel you will see in the field this year, but it's a most rewarding piece of science fiction. OF On fhit world men could not live, for here you forgot everything -- even forgot you were forgetting I I  t best, Major Wade Colgrave decided, giving his mudcaked boot tips a brooding scowl, amnesia would be an annoying experience. But to find oneself, as he had just done, sitting on the rocky hillside of an unfamiliar world which showed no sign of human habitation, with one' think-tank seemingly in good general working order but with no idea of how one had got there, was more than annoying. It could be fatal. The immediate situation didn't look too dangerous. He might have picked up some appalling local disease which would presently manifest itself, but it wasn't likely. A foreign-duty agent of Earth's military intelligence was immunized early in his career against almost every possible form of infection. Otherwise, there was a variety of strange lifeforms in sight, each going about its business. Some looked big enough to make a meal of a human being and might, if they noticed him. But the gun on Colgrave's hip should be adequate to knock such ideas out of predators who came too close. He'd checked the gun over automatically on discovering a few minutes before that he had one. It was a standard military type, manufactured by upward of a dozen Terran colonies and excolonies. There were no markings to indicate its origin; but more important at the moment was the fact that the ammocounter indicated that it contained a full charge. What could have happened to get him into this position? The amnesia, however he'd acquired it, took a peculiar form. He had no questions about his identity. He knew who he was. Further, up to a point... in fact, practically up to a specific second of his life... his memory seemed normal. He'd been on Earth, had been told to report at once to the office of Jerry Redman, his immediate superior. And he was walking along a hall on the eighteenth floor of the headquarters building, not more than thirty feet from the door of Redman's office, when his memory simply stopped. He couldn't recall a thing between that moment and the one when he'd found himself sitting there. Presumably Redman had prepared a new assignment for him: and presumably he'd been briefed on it and set off. If he could extend his memory even thirty minutes beyond the instant of approaching the door, he might have a whole fistful of clues to what had gone on during the interval. But not a thing would come to mind. It wasn't a matter of many years being wiped out; if he'd aged at all, he couldn't detect it. Some months, however, might easily have vanished, or even as much as two or three years... Had somebody given him a partially effective memory wipeout and left him marooned here? Not at all likely. A rather large number of people unquestionably would be glad to see Intelligence deprived of his talents, but they wouldn't resort to such roundabout methods. A bullet through his head, and the job would have been done. 'i 'he thought that he'd been on a spaceship which cracked up in attempting a landing on this planet, knocking him out in the process, seemed more probable. He might have been the only survivor and staggered away from the wreck, his wits somewhat scrambled. If that was it, it had happened very recently. He was thirsty, hungry, dirty, and needed a shave. But neither he nor his clothing suggested he had been an addled castaway on a wild planet for any significant length of time. The clothes were stained with mud and vegetable matter but in good general condition. He might have stumbled into a mud hole in the swamps which began at the foot of the hills below him and stretched away to the right, then climbed up here and sat down until he dried off. There was, in fact, a blurred impression that he'd been sitting in this spot an hour or so, blinking foggily at the landscape, before he suddenly grew aware of himself and his surroundings. Colgrave's gaze shifted slowly about the panorama before him, searching for the glitter of a downed ship or any signs of human activity. There was no immediate point in moving until he could decide in which direction he should go. It was a remarkable view of a rather unremarkable world. The yellow sun disk had somewhat more than Sol's diameter. Glancing at it, he had a feeling it had been higher above the horizon when he noticed it first, which would make it afternoon in this area. It was warm but not disagreeably so; and now that he thought of it, his body was making no complaints about atmospheric conditions and gravity. He saw nothing that was of direct interest to him. Ahead and to the left, a parched plain extended from the base of the hills to the horizon. In the low marshland on the right, pools of dark, stagnant water showed occasionally through thick vegetation. Higher up, lichen-gray trees formed a dense forest sweeping along the crests of the hills to within a quarter-mile of where Colgrave sat. The rock-cluttered hillside about him bore only patches of bushy growth. The fairly abundant animal life in view was of assorted sizes and shapes and, to Colgrave's eyes, rather ungainly in appearance. Down at the edge of the marshes, herds of several species mingled peacefully, devoting themselves to chomping up the vegetation. An odd, green, bulky creature, something like a walking vegetable and about the height of a man, moved about slowly on stubby hind legs. It was using paired upper limbs to stuff leaves and whole plants into its lump of a head Most of the other animals were quadrupeds Only one of the carnivorous types was active... a dogsized beast with a narrow rod for a body and a long, weaving neck tipped by a round cat head. A pack of them quartered the tall grass between marsh and plain in a purposeful manner, evidently intent on small game. T' , he other predators Colgrave  could see might be waiting for nightfall before they did something about dinner. Half a dozen heavy leonine brutes lay about companionably on the open plain, evidently taking a sunbath. Something much larger and dark squatted in the shade of a tree on the far side of the marsh, watching the browsing herds but making no move to approach them. The only lifeforms above the size of a lizard on the slopes near Colgrave were a smallish gray hopper, which moved with nervous jerkiness from one clump of shrubs to another. They seemed to be young specimens of the green biped in the marsh. There was a fair number of those downhill on the slopes, ranging between one and three feet in height. They were more active than their elders; now and then about two or three would go gamboling clumsily around a bush together, like fat puppies at play. After returning to the business of stripping clumps of leaves from the shrubbery they would stuff them into the mouthslits of their otherwise featureless heads. One of them, eating steadily away, was about twenty feet below him. It showed no interest whatever in the visitor from Earth. However he considered the matter, he couldn't have been stumbling around by himself on this world for more than fifteen hours. And he could imagine no circumstances under which he might have been abandoned here deliberately. Therefore there should be, within a fifteen-hour hike at the outside, something -- ship, camp, Intelligence post, settlement -- from which he had started out. If it was a ship, it might be a broken wreck. But even a wreck would provide shelter, food, perhaps a means of sendThere might be somebody else still alive on it. If there wasn't, studying the ship itself should give him many indications of what had occurred, and why he was here. Whatever he would find, he had to get back to his starting point -- Colgrave stiffened. Then he swore, relaxed slightly, sat still. There was a look of intense concentration on his face. Quietly, unnoticed, while his attention was fixed on the immediate problem, a part of his lost memories had returned. They picked up at the instant he was walking along the hall toward Redman's office, ran on for a number of months, ended again in the same complete, uncompromising manner as before. He still didn't know why he was on this world. But he felt he was close to the answer now -- perhaps very close indeed. II r ie Lorn Worlds, Imperial Rala -- the Sigma File -- Imperial Rala, the trouble maker, two centuries ago the most remote of the scattered early Earth colonies, now a compact heavy-industry civilization which had indicated for some time that it intended to supplant Earth as the leading interstellar power. It had absorbed a number of other ex-colonies of minor status, turned its attention then on the nearby Lorn Worlds as its first important target of conquest. Colgrave had been assigned to the Lorn Worlds some years previously. At that time the Lornese were attempting to placate Rala and refused all assistance to Earth's intelligence agencies. Redman had called him to the office that day to inform him there had been a basic shift in Lornese policies. He was being sent back. A full-scale invasion by Imperial Rala was in the making, and the Lorn Worlds had asked for support. Earth's military forces could not be redeployed in sufficient strength to meet a massive thrust in that distant area of space in time to check the expected invasion. When it came, the Lorn Worlds would fight a delaying action, giving ground as slowly as possible until help arrived. Until it did arrive, they would remain sealed off from Earth almost completely by superior Ralan strength. Colgrave worked with Lornese intelligence men for almost three months, setting up the Sigma File. It contained in code every scrap of previously withheld information they could give against Rala. For decades the Lornese had been concerned almost exclusively with the activities of their menacing neighbor and with their own defensive plans. The file would be of immense importance in determining Earth's immediate strategy. For Rala, its possession would be of equal importance. Colgrave set off with it finally in a Lornese naval courier to make the return run to Earth. The courier was a very fast small ship which could rely on its speed alone to avoid interception. As an additional precaution, it would follow a route designed to keep it well beyond the established range of Ralan patrols. A week later, something happened to it. Just what, Colgrave didn't yet know. Besides himself there had been three men on board; the two pilot-navigators and an engineering officer. They were picked men and Colgrave had no doubt of their competence. He didn't know whether they had been told the nature of his mission, the matter was not brought up. It should have been an uneventful, speedy voyage home. When one of the Lornese pilots summoned Colgrave to the control room to tell him the courier was being tracked by another ship, the man showed no serious concern. Their pursuer could be identified on the screen; it was a Ralan raider of the Talada class, ten times the courier's tonnage but still a rather small ship. More importantly, a Talada could produce nothing like the courier's speed. Nevertheless, Colgrave didn't like the situation in the least. He had been assured that the odds against encountering Ralan vessels in this area of space were improbably high. By nature and training he distrusted coincidences. However, the matter was out of his hands. The pilots already were preparing to shift to emergency speed and, plainly, there was nothing to be done at the moment. He settled down to watch the operation. One of the pilots was speaking to the engineering officer over the intercom; the other handled the controls. It was this second man who suddenly gave a startled shout. In almost the same instant, the ship seemed to be wrenched violently to the left. Colgrave was hurled out of his seat, realized there was nothing he could do to keep from smashing into the bulkhead on his right...  t that precise point, his memories shut off again. "Fleegle!" something was crying shrilly. "Fleegle! Fleegle! Fleegle!" Colgrave started, looked around. The small green biped nearest him downhill was uttering the cries. It had turned and was facing him frontside. Presumably it had just become aware of him and was expressing alarm. It waved its stubby forelimbs excitedly up and down. Farther down the slope several of its companions joined in with "Fleegle!" pipings of their own. Others stood watchfully still. They probably had eyes of a sort somewhere in the wrinkled balls of their heads; at any rate, they all seemed to be staring up at him. "Fleegle! Fleegle! Fleegle!" The whole hillside below suddenly seemed alive with the forelimbs. Colgrave twisted half around, glanced up the slope behind him. He was sliding the gun out erf its holster as he came quietly to his feet, completing the turn. The thing that had been coming down toward him stopped in midstride, not much more than forty feet away. It was also a biped, of a very different kind, splotchy grayblack in color and of singularly unpleasant appearance. About eight feet tall, it had long, lean, talon-tipped limbs and a comparatively small body like a bloated sack. The round, black head above the body looked almost fleshless, sharp bone-white teeth as completely exposed as those of a skull. Two circular yellow eyes a few inches above the teeth stared steadily at Colgrave. He felt a shiver of distaste. The creature obviously was a carnivore and could have become dangerous to him if he hadn't been alerted by the clamor of the fleegle pack. In spite of its scrawny, gangling look, it should weigh around two hundred and fifty pounds, and the teeth and talons would make it a formidable attacker. Perhaps it had come skulking down from the forest to pick up one of the browsing fleegles and hadn't noticed Colgrave until he arose. But he had its full attention now. TTe waited, unmoving, gun in hand, not too seriously concerned -- a couple of blasts should be enough to rip that pulpy body to shreds -- but hoping it would decide to leave him alone. The creature was a walking nightmare, and tangling with unknown lifeforms always involved a certain amount of risk. He would prefer to have nothing to do with it. The fleegle racket had abated somewhat. But now the toothy biped took a long, gliding step forward and the din immediately set up again. Perhaps it didn't like the noise, or else it was interested primarily in Colgrave; at any rate, it opened its mouth as if it were snarling annoyedly and drew off to the right, moving horizontally along the slope with long, unhurried spider strides, round yellow eyes still fixed on Colgrave. The fleegle cries tapered off again as the enemy withdrew. By the time it had reached a point around sixty feet away, the slopes were quiet. Now the biped started downhill, threading its way deliberately among the boulders like a long-legged, ungainly bird. But Colgrave knew by then it was after him; and those long legs might hurl it forward with startling speed when it decided to attack. He thumbed the safety off the gun. With the fleegles silent, he could hear the rasping sounds the thing made when it opened its mouth in what seemed to be its version of a snarl... working up its courage, Colgrave thought, to tackle the unfamiliar creature it had chanced upon. As it came level with him on the hillside, it was snarling almost incessantly. It turned to face him then, lifted its clawed forelegs into a position oddly like that of a human boxer, hesitated an instant and came on swiftly. A shrill storm of fleegle pipings burst out along the slope behind Colgrave as he raised the gun. He'd let the thing cut the distance between them in half, he decided, then blow it apart... Almost with the thought, he saw the big biped stumble awkwardly across a rock. It made a startled, bawling noise, its forelimbs flinging out to help it catch its balance; then it went flat on its face with a thump. There was instant stillness on the hillside. The fleegles apparently were watching as intently as Colgrave was. The biped sat up slowly. It seemed dazed. It shook its ugly head and whimpered complainingly, glancing this way and that about the slope. Then the yellow eyes found Colgrave. Instantly, the biped leaped to its feet, and Colgrave hurriedly brought the gun up again. But the thing wasn't resuming its charge. It wheeled, went plunging away up the slope, now and then uttering the bawling sound it had made as it stumbled. It appeared completely panicked. Qtaring after it, Colgrave  scratched his chin reflectively with his free hand. After a moment, he resafetied the gun, shoved it back into the holster. He felt relieved but puzzled. The biped, plainly, was not a timid sort of brute. It must possess a certain amount of innate ferocity to have felt impelled to attack a creature of whose fighting ability it knew nothing. Then why this sudden, almost ludicrous flight? It might be convinced he had knocked it down in some manner as it came at him, but still -- Colgrave shrugged. It was unimportant, after all. The biped had almost reached the top of the slope by now, was angling to the left to reach the lichen-gray forest a few hundred yards away. Its pace hadn't lessened noticeably. He was rid of it. Then, as Colgrave's gaze shifted along the boulder-studded top of the hill, something like a half-remembered fact seemed to nudge his mind. He stared, scowling abstractedly. Was there something familiar about that skyline? Something he should... he made a shocked sound. An instant later, he was climbing hurriedly, in something like a panic of his own, up the rocky slope. Beyond that crest, he remembered now, the ground dropped away into a shallow valley. And in that valley -- how many hours ago? -- he had landed the Ralan Talada's lifeboat, with the Sigma File on board. Every minute he had spent wandering dazedly about the area since then had brought him closer to certain recapture -- TTe had been slammed against the bulkhead on the Lornese courier with enough violence to stun him. When he awoke, he was a prisoner under guard on the Talada, lying on a bunk to which he was secured in a manner designed to make him as comfortable as possible. The cabin's furnishings indicated it belonged to one of the ship's officers. It told Colgrave among other things that they knew who he was. Raiders of the Talada class had a liquid-filled compartment in their holds into which several hundred human beings could be packed at a time, layered like so many sardines, and kept alive and semiconscious until the ship returned to port. An ordinary prisoner would simply have been dumped into that vat. His suspicions were soon confirmed. A swarthy gentleman, who addressed Colgrave by name and introduced himself as Colonel Ajoran, an intelligence agent of Imperial Rala, came into the cabin. He waved out the attendant guard, offered Colgrave a cigarette, outlined his situation briefly to him. Rala had obtained information of his mission on the Lorn Worlds and arranged to have the courier which would take him back to Earth with the Sigma File intercepted along any of the alternate routes it might take. The courier's engineering officer was a Ralan agent who had jammed the emergency drive to block their escape, then, as an additional measure, released a paralysis gas to keep Colgrave and the Lornese pilots helpless until the courier could be boarded, Colgrave already had been knocked out by the jolt given the ship by the jammed drive, but the pilots had some seconds left in which to act. One of them had shot himself in preference to becoming a Ralan prisoner. The other had shot the engineering officer, had been captured with Colgrave and was at present being tortured to death in retribution for his illconsidered slaying of a Ralan agent. Colonel Ajoran offered Colgrave another cigarette, made a few philosophical remarks about the fortunes of war, and came out with his proposition. He wanted Colgrave's help in decoding and transcribing the Sigma File immediately. In return he would see to it that when they reached Imperial Rala, Colgrave would be treated as a reasonable man who understood that the only course open to him was to serve Ralan interests as effectively as he previously had served those of Earth. In that event, he would find, Ajoran assured him, that Rala was generous to those who served it well. Implying that their discussion would be continued after dinner, the colonel then excused himself, called the guard back in and left the cabin. Touring the next hour Colgrave ' put in some heavy thinking. He had made one observation which presently might be of use to him. At the moment, of course, he could do nothing but wait. Colonel Aj oran's plan was a bold one but made sense. Evidently he held a position fairly high up in the echelons of Ralan intelligence. Knowing the contents of the Sigma File in detail, he immediately would become an important man to rival government groups to whom the information otherwise would not be readily available. He could improve his standing by many degrees at one stroke. At the end of the hour, dinner was served to Colgrave in his cabin by a woman who was perhaps as beautiful, in an unusual way, as any he had seen. She was very slender; her skin seemed almost as pure a white as her close-cropped hair, and her eyes were so light a blue that in any other type they would have appeared completely colorless. She gave, nevertheless, an immediate impression of vitality and contained energy. She told Colgrave her name was Hace, that she was Aj oran's lady, and that she had been instructed to see to it that he was provided with every reasonable comfort while he considered Ajoran's proposal. She went on chatting agreeably until Colgrave had finished his dinner in the bunk. The colonel then joined them for coffee. The discussion remained a very indirect one, but Colgrave presently had the impression that he was being offered an alliance by Ajoran. He was one of Earth's top military agents, possessed unique information which the colonel could put to extremely good use on Rala. Colgrave would, in effect, remain on Ajoran's staff and receive every consideration due a valuable associate. He gathered that one of the immediate shipboard considerations being proffered for his cooperation was the colonel's lady. When the pair left him, Ajoran observing that the Talada's sleep period had begun, the thing had been made clear enough. Neither of the two guards assigned to Colgrave reappeared in the cabin -- which he had learned was a section of A j oran's own shipboard suite -- and the door remained closed. Presumably he was to be left undisturbed to his reflections for the next seven hours. Colgrave did not stay awake long. He had a professional's appreciation of the value of rest when under stress; and he already had appraised his situation here as thoroughly as was necessary. He had a minimum goal -- the destruction of the Sigma File -- and he had observed something which indicated the goal might be achieved if he waited for circumstances to favor him. Beyond that, he had an ascending series of goals with an ascending level of improbability. They also had been sufficiently considered. There was nothing else he cared to think about at the moment. He stretched out and fell asleep almost at once. ' " lata I with the hairs prickling at the base of his skull, he believed for a moment he was dreaming of the thing he had not cared to think about. There was light on his right and the shreds of a voice... ghastly whispered exhalations from a throat which had lost the strength to scream. Colgrave turned his head to the right, knowing what he would see. Part of the wall to one side of the door showed now as a vision screen; the light anu the whispers came from there. Colgrave told himself he was seeing a recording, that the Lornese pilot captured with him had been dead for hours. Colonel Ajoran was a practical man who would have brought this part of the matter to an end without unreasonable delay so that he could devote himself fully to his far more important dealings with Colgrave, and the details shown in the screen indicated the pilot could not be many minutes from death. The screen slowly went dark again and the whispers ended. Colgrave wiped sweat from his face and turned on his side. There was nothing at all he could have done for the pilot. He had simply been shown the other side of Ajoran's proposition. A few minutes later, he was asleep again. When he awoke the next time, the cabin was lit. His two guards were there, one of them arranging Colgrave's breakfast on a wall table across from the bunk. The other simply stood with his back to tiie doc , a nerve gun in his hand, his eyes on Colgrave. Fresh clothes, which Colgrave recognized as his own, brought over from the courier, had been placed on a chair. The section of wall which ordinarily covered the small adjoining bathroom was withdrawn. The first guard completed his arrangements and addressed Colgrave with an air of surly deference. Colonel Ajoran extended his compliments, was waiting in the other section of the suite and would like to see Major Colgrave there after he had dressed and eaten. Having delivered the message, the guard came over to unfasten Colgrave from the bunk, his companion shifting to a position from which he could watch the prisoner during the process. That done, the two withdrew from the room, Colgrave's eyes following them reflectively. He showered, shaved, dressed, and had an unhurried breakfast. He could assume that Ajoran felt the time for indirect promises and threats was over, and that they would get down immediately now to the business on hand. XltThen Colgrave came out of  ' the cabin, some thirty minutes after being released, he found his assumption confirmed. This section of the suite was considerably larger than the sleep cabin; the colonel and Hace were seated at the far right across the room, and a guard stood before a closed door, a little left of the section's center line. The door presumably opened on one of the Talada's passages. The guard was again holding a nerve gun, and a second gun of the same kind lay on a small table beside Ajoran. Hace sat at a recording apparatus just beyond the colonel Evidently she doubled as his secretary when the occasion arose. At the center of the room, on a table large enough to serve as a work desk, was writing material, a tape reader and, near the left side of the table, the unopened Sigma File. Colgrave absorbed the implications of the situation as he came into the room. The three of them there were on edge, and the nerve guns showed his present status -- they wouldn't injure him but could knot him up painfully in an instant and leave him helpless for minutes. He was being told his actions would have to demonstrate that he deserved Aj oran's confidence. Almost simultaneously, the realization came to him that the favorable circumstances for which he had decided to wait were at hand. He went up to the table, looked curiously down, at the Sigma File. It was about the size and shape of a briefcase set upright. Colgrave glancing over at Ajoran, said, "I'm taking it for granted you've had the destruct charge removed." Ajoran produced a thin smile. "Since it could have no useful purpose now," he said, "I did, of course, have it removed." Colgrave gave him an ironic bow. His left hand, brushing back, struck the Sigma File, sent it toppling toward the edge of the table. He might as well have stuck a knife point into all three of them. A drop to the floor could not damage the file, but they were too keyed up to check their reactions. Ajoran started to his feet with a sharp exclamation; even Hace came half out of her chair. The guard moved mo:e effectively. He leaped forward from the wall, bending down, still holding the nerve gun, caught the file with his wrist and free hand as it went off the table, turned to place it back on the table. C olgrave stepped behind him. In the back of the jackets of both guards he had seen a lumpy bulge near the hip, indicating each carried a second gun, which could be assumed to be a standard energy type. His left hand caught the man by the shoulder, his right found the holstered gun under the jacket, twisted it upward and fired as he bent the guard over it. His left arm tingled -- Ajoran had cut loose with the nerve gun, trying to reach him through the guard's body. Then Colgrave had the gun clear, saw Ajoran coming around on his right and snapped off two hissing shots, letting the guard slide to the floor. Ajoran stopped short, hauled open the sleep cabin door and was through it in an instant, slam ming it shut behind him. Across the room, Hace, almost at the other door, stopped, too, as Colgrave turned toward her. They looked at each other a moment, then Colgrave stepped around the guard and walked up to her, gun pointed. When he was three steps away, Hace closed her eyes and stood waiting, arms limp at her sides. His left fist smashed against the side of her jaw and she dropped like a rag doll. Colgrave looked back. The guard was twisting contortedly about on the floor. His face showed he was dead, but it would be a minute or two before the nerve charge worked itself out of his body. The colonel's lady wouldn't stir for a while. Ajoran himself... Colgrave stared thoughtfully at the door of the sleep cabin. Ajoran might be alerting the ship from in there at the moment, although there hadn't been any communication device in view. Or he could have picked up some weapon he fancied more than a nerve gun and was ready to come out again. The chances were good, however, that he'd stay locked in where he was until somebody came to inform him the berserk prisoner had been dealt with. It wasn't considered good form in Rala's upper echelons to take personal risks which could be delegated to subordinates. Whatever happened, Colgrave told himself he could achieve his minimum goal any time he liked now. A single energy bolt through the Sigma File would ignite it explosively. And its destruction, getting it out of Ralan hands, had been as much as he reasonably could expect to accomplish in the situation. He glanced at the closed door to the sleep cabin again, at the door which should open on one of the Talada's passages, and decided he didn't feel reasonable. He took the Sigma File from the table, carried it over to the passage door and set it down against the wall. He'd expected to see the second guard come bouncing in through the door as soon as the commotion began in here. The fact that he hadn't indicated either that he'd been sent away or that A j oran's suite was soundproofed. Probably the latter... Colgrave raised the gun, grasped the door handle with his left hand, turned it suddenly, hauled the door open ,r jphe second guard stood out side, but he wasn't given time to do much more than bulge his eyes at Colgrave. Colgrave went quickly along the passage, the Sigma File in his left hand, the gun ready again in his right. Now that it was over he felt a little shaky. By the rules he should, in such circumstances, have been satisfied with his minimum goal and destroyed the file before he risked another encounter with an armed man. If he'd been killed just now, it would have been there intact for Rala to decode. But the other goals looked at least possible now, and he couldn't quite bring himself to put a bolt through the file before it became clear that he'd done as much as he could. He moved more cautiously as he approached the corner of the passage. This was officer's country, and his plans were based on a remembered general impression of the manner in which the Talada raiders were constructed. The passageway beyond the corner was three times the width of this one... it might be the main passage he was looking for. He glanced around the corner, drew back quickly. About thirty feet away in the other side of the passage was a wide doorspace, and two men in officer's uniform had been walking in through it at the moment he looked. Colgrave took a long, slow breath. His next goal suddenly seemed not at all far away. He waited a few seconds, looked again. Now the passage was clear. Instantly he was around the corner, running down to the doorspace. As he stepped out before it, he saw his guess had been good. He was looking down a short flight of steps into the Talada's control room. Looking and firing... The gun in his hand hissed like an angry cat, but several seconds passed before any of the half-dozen men down there realized he was around. By then two of them were dead. They had happened to be in the gun's way. The drive control panels, the gun's target, were shattering from end to end. Colgrave swung the gun toward a big communicator in a corner. At that moment, somebody discovered him. The man did the sensible thing. His hand darted out throwing one of the switches before him. A slab of battlesteel slid down across the doorspace, settling the control room away from the passage. Colgrave sprinted on down the passage. The emergency siren came on. The Talada howled monstrously like a wounded beast as it rolled and bucked. Suddenly he was in another passage, heard shouts ahead, turned back, stumbled around a corner, went scrambling breathlessly up a steep, narrow stairway. At its top, he saw ahead of him, like a wish-dream scene, the lit lock, two white-faced crewmen staggering on the heaving deck as they tried to lift a heavy boxed item into it. Colgrave came roaring toward them, wild-eyed, waving the gun. They looked around at him, turned and ran as he leaped past them into the lock. The man at the controls of the Talada's lifeboat died before he realized somebody was running up behind him. Colgrave dropped the Sigma File, hauled the body out of the seat, slid into it... ITe was several minutes' flight  away from the disabled raider before he realized he was laughing like a lunatic. He was clear. And now the odds, shifting all the way over, were decidedly in his favor. The question was how long it would take them to repair the damage and come after him. With enough of a start, they couldn't know which way he'd headed and the chance of being picked up before he got within range of the Earth patrols became negligible. But first there was the matter of getting the lifeboat fueled for the long run. It used iron, the standard medium; and he had, Colgrave calculated, enough for fifteen hours' flight on hand. Which wasn't too bad. It would have been nicer if he could have given the two crewmen time to dump another few boxes of ingots on board before he took off. But a scan of the stellar' neighborhood showed two planets respectively seven and eight hours away indicating conditions which should allow a man to stay a short time without serious damage or discomfort. The lifeboat had the standard iron location and refining equipment on board. A few hours on either of those worlds; and he'd be ready. After dropping the body of the Ralan pilot into space, he decided the seven hour run gave him a slight advantage. Once the Talada got moving, it had speed enough to check over both worlds without losing a significant amount of time. They could figure out his fuel requirements as well as he. If they arrived before he was finished and gone, the raider's scanning devices were almost certain to spot the lifeboat wherever he tried to hide it. The chances seemed very good that they simply wouldn't get there soon enough. But the minimum goal remained a factor. Colgrave decided to cache the Sigma File in some easily identifiable spot as soon as he touched ground, take the boat to another section of the planet to do his mining, come back for the file when he was prepared to leave. It would cut the risk of being surprised with it to almost nothing... IV T T ow many hours had passed since then? Clawing his way up through the boulders and shrubbery, slipping in loose soil, Colgrave glanced back for a moment at the sun. It was noticeably lower in the sky again, appeared to be dropping almost visibly toward the horizon. But that told him nothing He remembered the landing now; it had been daylight and he had come down to hide the Sigma File... had hidden it, his memory corrected him suddenly. And then, for the next six or ten or fourteen hours, he appeared to have simply waited around here, in some mental fog, for the Talada to come riding its fiery braking jets down from the sky. The raider might arrive at any moment. Unless... Colgrave blocked off the rest of that thought. The slope had begun to level off as he approached the top; he covered the last stretch in a rush, lungs sobbing for breath. He clambered on hastily through a jagged crack in the back of the ridge. For an instant, he saw the shallow dip of the valley beyond. He dropped flat immediately. They were already here. It was a shock but one he realized he had half expected. After a few seconds, he crept up to the shelter of a rock from where he could look into the valley without exposing himself. The Talada had set down about a hundred yards back of the lifeboat, perhaps no more than half an hour ago. The smaller vessel's lock stood open; a man came climbing out of it, followed by two others. The last of the three closed the lock and they started back toward the raider, from which other men were emerging. Ajoran had ordered the lifeboat searched first, to make sure the Sigma File wasn't concealed on it. Without that delay they should have caught him while he was still climbing up the slope... the group coming out of the Talada now was a hunting party; most of them had quick-firing rifles slung across their backs. They lined up beside the ship while a wedge-shaped device was maneuvered out of the lock. It remained floating a little above the ground near the head of the line, about twenty feet long, perhaps a dozen feet across at its point of greatest width. Colgrave had seen such devices before. It was a man-tracker, a type used regularly in Ralan expeditions against settlements on other planets. Its power unit and instruments were packed into the narrow tip; most of its space was simply a container, enclosed and filled with the same kind of numbing liquid preservative as that in the prisoner vats in the Talada ships. It could be set either to hunt down specific individuals or any and all human beings within its range, and to either kill them as they were overtaken or pick them up with its grapplers and deposit them unharmed in the container. They could use it to follow him now; the clothing he had left on the ship would give it all the indications it needed to recognize and follow his trail. " T ore men had come out be'-"-hind the machine, including one in a spacesuit. Colonel Ajoran apparently was assigning almost the entire complement of the Talada to the search for Colgrave and the Sigma File. Colgrave decided he'd seen enough. If he had been observed on the hillside as the Talada was descending, they would have gone after him immediately. Instead, they would now follow their man-tracker over the ridge and down to the swamp where the herds of native animals were feeding. It gave him a little time. He crawled backward a dozen feet into the narrow crevasse, rose and retraced his way through it to the other side of the ridge. Beyond the plain, the sun was almost touching the horizon. The gray forest into which the aggressive biped had retreated began a few hundred yards to his right. He'd have better shelter there than among the tumbled rocks of the ridge. He went loping toward it, keeping below the crest-line. His eyes shifted once toward the swamp. One great tree stood there, towering a good hundred feet above the vegetation about it. The Sigma File was wedged deep among the giant's root, a few feet below the water. He'd seen the tree from the air, put the lifeboat down in the little valley, hurried down to the swamp on foot. Twenty minutes later, the file was buried and he'd started wading back out of the swamp. What had happened between that moment and the one when he found himself sitting on the hillside he still didn't know... He reached the forest, came back among the trees over the top of the ridge until he saw the valley again. During the few minutes that had passed, the ridge's evening shadow had spread across half the lower ground. It had seemed possible that when they realized how close it was to nightfall here, the hunt for him would be put off till morning. But Ajoran evidently wanted no delay. The man in the spacesuit still stood near the open lock of the ship, but the search party was coming across the valley behind their tracking machine. They headed for a point of the open ridge about a quarter-mile away from Colgrave. They'd have lights to continue on through the night if necessary. The chase plan was simple but effective. If the man-tracker hadn't flushed him into view before morning, the Talada could take the lifeboat aboard, move after the search party and put down again. They could work on in relays throughout the following day, half of them resting at a time on the ship, until he was run down. r T' l he Sigma File was safest where he'd left it. The tracker's scent perceptors were acute enough to follow his trail through the stagnant swamp, getting signs from the vegetation he'd brushed against or grasped in passing, even from lingering traces in the water itself. And it might vary well detect the file beneath the surface. But -- ironically, considering Ajoran's purpose -- the discovery would be meaningless to the machine except as another indication that the man it was pursuing had been there. It would simply move on after him. The worst thing he could attempt at the moment would be to get down to the swamp ahead of the searchers and destroy the file. He would almost certainly be sighted on the open slopes below the forest; and either the tracker or the man in the spacesuit could be overhead instants later. Colgrave's gaze shifted back to the spacesuited figure. He would have to watch out for that one. His immediate role presumably was to act as liaison man between the ship and the hunters, supplementing the communicator reports Ajoran would be getting on the progress of the search. But he was armed with a rifle; and if Colgrave was seen, he could spatter the area around the fugitive with stun-gas pellets while remaining beyond range of a hand weapon. He had floated back up to the Talada' s lock for a moment, was now heading out to the ridge, drifting about fifty feet above the ground. It wasn't a graceful operation. Maneuvering a suit designed for weightless service in space near the surface of a planet never was. But the fellow was handling himself fairly well, Colgrave thought. He came up to the ridge as the troop began filing across it, hovered above the line a few seconds, then swung to the left and moved off in a series of slow, awkward bounces above the hillside. He seemed to be holding something up to his helmet, and Colgrave guessed he was scanning the area with a pair of powerful glasses. After some minutes, he came back. Colgrave had crossed over to the other side of the ridge to follow the progress of the column. It had swung to the right as it started down, was angling straight toward the swamp along the route he had taken with the file. He watched, chewing his lip. If the man-tracker happened to cross his return trail on the way, he might beiin trouble almost immediately... The man in the spacesuit drifted after the search party, passed above them some two hundred feet in the air, then remained suspended and almost unmoving. Colgrave glanced over at the horizon. The sun was nearly out of sight; its thin golden rim shrank and disappeared as he looked at it. Night should follow quickly here, but as yet he couldn't see any advantage the darkness would bring him. The man in the spacesuit was coming back to the ridge. He hovered above it a moment, settled uncertainly toward the flat top of a boulder, made a stumbling landing and righted himself. He turned toward the plain and the swamp, lifting the object that seemed to be a pair of glasses to the front of his helmet again. Evidently he'd had enough of the suit's airborne eccentricities for a while. Colgrave's throat worked. The man was less than two hundred yards away... T T is eyes shifted toward a tuft of shrubs twenty feet beyond the edge of the forest growth. Some seconds later, he was there, studying the stretch of ground ahead. Other shrubs and rocks big enough to crouch behind... but they would give him no cover at all if for some reason the fellow decided to lift back into the air. The fading light wouldn't help then. Those were space glasses he was using, part of the suit, designed to provide clear vision even when only the gleam of distant stars was there for them to absorb. But perhaps, Colgrave told himself, Spacesuit would not decide to lift back into the air. In any case, no other approach was possible. The far side of the ridge was controlled by the Talada's night-scanners, and they would be in use by now. He moved, waited, gathered himself and moved again. Spacesuit was directing most of his attention downhill, but now and then he turned for a look along the ridge in both directions. Perhaps, as the air darkened, the closeness of the forest was getting on his nerves. Native sounds were drifting up from the plain, guttural bellowing and longdrawn ululations. The meat eaters were coming awake. Presently there was a series of short, savage roars from the general direction of the swamp; and Colgrave guessed the search party had run into some big carnivore who had never heard about energy rifles. When the roaring stopped with a monstrous scream, he was sure of it. He had reduced the distance between them by almost half when the spacesuit soared jerkily up from the boulder. Colgrave had a very bad moment. But it lifted no more than a dozen feet, then descended again at a slant which carried it behind the boulder. The man had merely changed his position. And the new position he had selected took them out of each other's sight. Colgrave was instantly on his feet, running forwards. Here the surface was rutted with weather fissures. He slipped into one of them, drawing out his gun, moved forward at a crouch. A moment later, he had reached the near side of the boulder which Spacesuit had stood. Where was he now? Colgrave listened, heard a burst of thin, crackling noises. They stopped for some seconds, came briefly again, stopped again. The suit communicator... the man must have taken off the helmet, or the sound wouldn't have been audible. He couldn't be far away. Colgrave went down on hands and knees, edged along the side of the boulder to the right. From here he could see down the hillside. On the plain, the night was gathering; the boundaries between the open land and the swamp had blurred. But the bobbing string of tiny light beams down there, switching nervously this way and that, must already be moving through the marsh. The communicator noises came again, now from a point apparently no more than fifteen feet beyond the edge of the boulder ahead of Colgrave. It was as close as he could get. It was important that the man in the space suit should die instantly, which meant a head shot. Colgrave rose up, stepped out quietly around the boulder, gun pointed. The man stood faced half away, the helmet tipped back on his shoulders. In the last instant, as Colgrave squeezed down on the trigger, sighting along the barrel, the head turned and he saw with considerable surprise that it was Colonel Ajoran. Then the gun made its spiteful hissing sound. Ajoran's head jerked slightly to the side and his eyes closed. The spacesuit held him upright for the second or two before he toppled. Colgrave already was there, reaching under the collar for one of the communicator's leads. He found it, gave it a sharp twist, felt it snap. V I n the Talada, the man watch ing the night-scanners saw Colonel Ajoran's spacesuit appear above the ridge and start back to the ship. He informed the control room and the lock attendant. The outer lock door opened as the suit came up to it. Colgrave made a skidding landing inside His performance in the suit had been no improvement on Ajoran's. He shut off the suit drive, clumped up to the inner door, left arm raised across the front of the helmet, hand fumbling with the oxygen hose. It would hide his face for a moment from whoever was on the other side of the door. His right hand rested on his gun. The door opened. The attendant stood at rigid attention before the control panel six feet away, rifle grounded, eyes front. Mentally blessing Ralan discipline, Colgrave stepped up beside him, drew out the gun and gave the back of the man's skull a solid thump with the barrel. When the attendant opened his eyes again a few minutes later, his head ached and there was a gag in his mouth. His hands were tied behind him, and Colgrave was wearing his uniform. Colgrave hauled him to his feet, poked a gun muzzle against his back. "Lead the way to the control room," he said. The attendant led the way. Colgrave followed, the uniform cap pulled down to conceal his face. Ajoran's handgun and a stunner he had taken from the attendant were stuck into his belt. The attendant's energy rifle and the one which had been strapped to the spacesuit were concealed in a closet near the lock. He had assembled quite an arsenal. When they reached the wide main passage in the upper level of the ship, he halted the lock attendant. They retraced their steps to the last door they had pissed. Colgrave opened it. An office of some kind... he motioned the attendant in and followed him, closing the door. He came out a few seconds later, shoved the stunner back under his belt, and stood listening. The Talada seemed almost eerily silent. Not very surprising, he thought. The number of men who had set out after him indicated that only those of the crew who were needed to coordinate the hunt and maintain the ship's planetary security measures had remained on board. That could be ten or twelve at most; and every one of them would be stationed at his post at the moment. Colgrave went out into the main passage, walked quietly along it. Now he could hear an intermittent murmur of voices from the control room. One of them seemed to be that of a woman, but he wasn't sure. They were being silent again before he came close enough to distinguish what was being said. sphere was nothing to be gained by hesitating at this point. The control room was the nerve center of the ship, but there couldn't be more than four or five of them in it. Colgrave had a gun in either hand as he reached the open doorspace. He turned through it, started unhurriedly down the carpeted stairs leading into the control room, eye and mind photographing the details of the scene below. Ajoran's lady was nearest, seated at a small table, her attention on the man before the communicator set in a corner alcove on the left. This man's back was turned. A gun was belted to his waist. Farther down in the control room sat another man, facing the passage but bent over some instrument on the desk before him. The desk shielded him almost completely, which made him the most dangerous of the three at the moment. No one else was in view, but that didn't necessarily mean that no one else was here. Hace became aware of him as he reached the foot of the stairs. Her head turned sharply: she seemed about to speak. Then her eyes were wide with shocked recognition. He'd have to get the man at the desk the instant she screamed. But she didn't scream. Instead, her right hand went up, two fingers lifted and spread. She nodded fiercely at the communicator operator, next at the man behind the desk. Only two of them? Well, that probably was true. But he'd better use the stunner on Hace before attempting to deal with two armed men. At that moment, the communicator operator looked around. He was young and his reactions were as fast as Hace's. He threw himself sideways out of the chair with a shout of warning, hit the floor rolling over and clawing for his gun. The man behind the desk had no chance. As he jerked upright, startled, an energy bolt took him in the head. The operator had no real chance, either. Colgrave swung the gun to the left, saw for an instant eyes fixed on him, bright with hatred, and the other gun coming up, and fired again. He waited a number of seconds, then, alert for further motion. But the control room remained quiet. So Aj oran's lady hadn't lied. She stayed where she was, unstirring, until he turned toward her. Then she said quietly, her expression still incredulous, "It seemed like magic! How could you get into the ship?" C olgrave looked at the dark, ugly bruise his fist had printed along the side of her jaw, said, "In Ajoran's spacesuit, of course." She hesitated. "He's dead?" "Quite dead," Colgrave said thoughtfully. "I wanted," Hace said, "to kill him myself. I would have done it finally, I believe... She hesitated again. "It doesn't matter now. What can I do to help you? They're in trouble down in the swamp." "What kind of trouble?" "That isn't clear. It began two or three minutes ago, but we haven't been able to get an intelligible report from the two communicator men. They were excited, shouted, almost irrational." Colgrave scowled. After a moment, he shook his head. "Let's clean up the ship first. How many on board?" "Nine besides those two... and myself." "The man in the lock's taken care of," Colgrave said. "Eight. On the lifeboat?" "Nobody. Ajoran had a trap prepared for you there, in case you came back before they caught you. You could have got inside, but you couldn't have started the engines, and you would have been unable to get out again." Colgrave grunted. "Can you get the men in the ship to come individually to the control room?" "I see. Yes, I think I can do that." "I'll want to check you over for weapons first." "Of course." Hace smiled slightly, stood up. "Why should you trust me?" "I wouldn't know," Colgrave said. They came in, unsuspecting, one by one; and, one by one, the stunner brought them down from behind. Shortly afterwards, a freight carrier floated into the Talada's vat room. Hace stood aside as Colgrave unlocked the cover of the drop hole in the deck and hauled it back. A heavy stench surged up from the vat. Colgrave looked down a moment at the oily black liquid eight feet below, then dragged the nine unconscious men in turn over from the carrier, dropped them in, and resealed the vat. A ; man's voice babbled and sobbed. Another man screamed in sudden fright; then there was a sound of rapid, panicky breathing mingled with the sobs Colgrave switched off the communicator, looked over at Hace. "Is this what it was like before?" She moistened her lips. "No. this is insanity!" Her voice was unsteady. "They're both completely incapable of responding to us now. What could there be in that swamp at night to have terrified them to that extent? At least some of the others should have come back to the ship..." She paused. "Colgrave, why do we stay here? You know what they're like -- why bother with them? You don't need any of them to handle the ship. One person can take it to Earth if necessary." "I know," Colgrave said. He studied her, added, "I'm wonderhelp me get to Earth." Anger showed for an instant in the pale, beautiful face. "I'm no Ralan! I was picked up in a raid on Beristeen when I was twelve. I've never wanted to do anything but get away from Rala since that day." Colgrave grunted, rubbed his chin. "I see... Well, we can't leave immediately. For one thing, I left the Sigma File in that swamp." Hace stared at him. "You haven't destroyed it?" "No. It never quite came to that point." She laughed shortly. "Colgrave, you're rather wonderful! Ajoran was convinced the file was lost, and that his only chance of saving his own skin was to get you back alive so he could find out what you had learned on the Lorn Worlds... No, you can't leave the file behind, of course! I understand that. But why don't we lift the ship out of atmosphere until it's morning here?" She nodded at the communicator. " That disturbance -- whatever they've aroused down there -- should have settled out by then. The swamp will be quiet again. Then you can work out a way to get the file back without too much danger." Colgrave shook his head, got to his feet. "No, that shouldn't be necessary. The man-tracker was being monitored from the ship, wasn't it? Where is the control set kept?" Hace indicated the desk twenty feet behind her where the second man had sat when Colgrave came into the control room. "It's lying over there. That's what he was doing." Colgrave said, "Let's take a look at it. I want the thing to return to the ship." He started toward the desk. Hace stood up, went over to the desk with him. "I'm afraid I can't tell you how to operate it." "I should be able to do it," Colgrave said. "I played around a few hours once with a captured man-tracker which had been shipped back to Earth. This appears to be a very similar model." He looked down at the moving dark blurs in the screen which formed the center of the control set, twisted a knob to one side of it. "Let's see what it's doing now before I have it return to the ship." r I 'he screen cleared suddenly. The scene was still dark, but in the machine's night-vision details were distinct. A rippling weed bed was gliding slowly past below; a taller leafy thicket ahead moved closer. Then the thicket closed about the tracker. Hace said, "The operator was trying to discover through the tracker what was happening to the men down there, but it moved out of the range of their lights almost as soon as the disturbance began. Apparently the devices, once set, can't be turned around." "Not unless you're riding them," Colgrave agreed. "Telemonitoring starts them off and observes what they're doing. They either go on and finish their business, or get their sensors switched off and return to their starting point. It's still following my trail. Now... "What's that light?" Hace asked uneasily. "It looks like the reflection of a fire." The tracker had emerged from the thicket, swung to the left, and was gliding low over an expanse of open water, almost touching it. There were pale orange glitters on the surface ahead of it. Colgrave studied them, said, "At a guess it simply means there's a moon in the sky." He pushed a stud on the set, and the scene vanished. "That wiped out the last instructions it was given. It will come back to the ship in a minute or two." Hace looked at him. "What do you have in mind?" "I'm riding it down to the swamp." "Not now! In the morning you... "I don't think I'll be in any danger. Now let's find a place where I'm sure you'll stay locked up until I get back. As you said, one person can do all that's needed to lift this ship off the planet and head away... VI F ive hundred feet above the ground, the man-tracker's open saddle was not the most reassuring place to be in. But the machine was considerably easier to maneuver than the spacesuit had been and the direct route by air to the giant tree beneath which he'd concealed the Sigma File was the shortest and fastest. Colgrave was reasonably certain nothing had happened to the file, but he wouldn't know until he held it in his hands again. The orange moon that had pushed above the horizon was a big one, the apparent diameter of its disk twice that of the vanished sun. Colgrave was holding the tracker's pace down. But no more than a few minutes passed before he could make out the big tree in the vague light, ahead and a little to his right. He guided the machine over to it, circled its crown slowly twice, looking down, then lowered the tracker down to a section of open water near the base of the tree, turned it and went gliding in toward the tangled root system of the giant. He turned the control set off, remained in the saddle a few moments, looking about and listening. The swamp was full of sound, most of it of a minor nature... chirps, twittering, soft hoots. Something whistled piercingly three times in the tree overhead. Behind him, not too far off, was a slow, heavy splashing which gradually moved away. At the very limit of his hearing was something else. It might have been human voices, faint with distance, or simply his imagination at work. Nearby, nothing moved. Colgrave pulled the control set out of its saddle frame, slid down from the saddle, clinging to it with one hand, finally dropped a few inches into a layer of mud above the mass of tree roots. He climbed farther up on the roots, found a dry place under one of them where he shoved the control set in out of sight. Then he went climbing cautiously on around the great trunk, slipping now and then on the slimy root tangle beneath the mud... And here was where he had concealed the Sigma File. A little bay of water extended almost to the trunk itself about five feet deep. Colgrave slipped down into it. There was firm footing here. He moved forward to the tip of the bay, took a deep breath and crouched down. The warm water closed over his head. He groped about among the root shelves before him, touched the file, gripped it by its handle and drew it out. He clambered up out of the water, started back around the tree... And there the thing stood. Colgrave stopped short. This   was almost an exact duplication of what happened after he brought the Sigma File down here and concealed it. It had been daylight then, and what he saw now as a bulky manlike shape in the shadow of the tree had been clearly visible. It was a green monstrosity, heavy as a gorilla, with a huge, round bobbing ball of a head which showed no features at all through its leafy appendages. It was bigger than it had looked at a distance from the hillside, standing almost eight foot tall. The first time, it had been only a few yards away, moving toward him around the tree, when he saw it. His instant reaction had been to haul out his gun... Now he stayed still, looking at it. His heart beat had speeded up noticeably. But this was, he told himself, an essentially vegetarian creature. And it was peaceable because it had a completely effective means of defense. It could sense the impulse to attack in an approaching carnivore, and it could make the carnivore forget its purpose. As often as was necessary. Colgrave made himself start forwards. He had no intention, his mind kept repeating, of harming this oversized fleegle, and it had no intention of harming him. It did not move out of his path as he came toward it, but turned slowly to keep facing him as he clambered past over the roots a few feet away. Colgrave didn't look back at it and heard no movement behind him. He saw the mantracker floating motionless above the mud ahead, put the file down and pulled the tracker's control set out from under the root where he had left it. A minute or two later, he was back in the machine's saddle, out in the moonlight away from the big tree, the Sigma File fastened to his belt. He tapped a pattern of instructions into the control set, checked them very carefully, slid the set into the saddle frame and switched it on. The man-tracker swung about purposefully, went gliding away through the swamp. A hundred yards on, it encountered three fleegles, somewhat smaller than the one under the tree, wading slowly leg-deep through the mud. They stopped as the machine appeared, and Colgrave thought friendly and admiring things about fleegles until they were well behind him again. Perhaps a minute later, the man-tracker stopped in the air above the first of the Talada's loct crew. He had crawled into a thicket and was blubbe, ing noisily to himself. When two of the machine's grapplers flicked down into the thicket and locked about him, he bawled in horror. Colgrave looked straight ahead, not particularly wanting to watch this. There was a click behind him as the preservative tank opened. For a moment, his nostrils were full of the stink of the liquid. Then there was a splash, and the bawling stopped abruptly . The tank clicked shut. 'y'he man-tracker swung around on a new point, set off again. Its present instructions were to trail and collect every human being within the range of its sensory equipment, except its rider. They'd been on edge to begin with here, Colgrave told himself. Their rifles already had brought down one brute which came roaring monstrously at them in the dusk; and presumably the rifles could handle anything else they might encounter. But they hadn't liked the look of the swamp the man-tracker was leading them into. Wading through pools, slipping in the mud, flashing their lights about at every menacing shadow, they followed the machine, mentally cursing the order that had sent them after the Earth intelligence agent as night was closing in. And then a great green ogre was standing in one of the light beams... Naturally, they tried to shoot it. And as they made the decision, they began to forget. Progressive waves of amnesia... first, perhaps, only a touch. The men lifting rifles forgot they were lifting them. Until they saw the fleegle again -- The past few hours might be wiped out next. They stood in a swamp at night, not knowing how they'd got there or why they were there. But they had rifles in their hands, and an ogrish shape was watching them Months forgotten now. The fleegle could keep it up. About that point, they'd begun to stampede, scattered, ploughed this way and that through the swamp. But the fleegles were everywhere. And as often as a gun was lifted in panic, another chunk of memory would go. Until the last of the weapons was dropped. The man-tracker wasn't rounding up men but children in grown-up bodies, huddled in hiding on a wet, dark nightmare world, dazed and uncomprehending, unable to do more than wail wildly as the machine picked them up and placed them in its tank. ol grave came out of the compartment where the mantracker was housed, locked the door and turned off the control set. "You haven't closed the vat yet," Hace said. He nodded. "I know. Let's go back." "I'm still not clear on just what did happen," she went on, walking beside him up the passage. "You say they lost their memories...?" "Yes. It's a temporary thing. I had the same experience when I first got here, though I don't # ! seem to have been hit as hard as most of them were. If they weren't floating around in that slop now, they'd start remembering within hours." He opened the door to the vat room, motioned her inside. Hace wrinkled her nose in automatic distaste at the odor of the preservative, said, "It's very strange. How could any creature affect a human mind in that manner?" "I don't know," Colgrave said. "But it isn't important now." He followed her in, closing the door behind him, went on, "Now this will be rather unpleasant, so let's get it over with." She glanced back at him. "Get what over with, Colgrave?" "You're getting the ride to Earth you said you wanted," Colgrave told her, "but you're riding along with the crew down there." Hace whirled to face him, her eyes wild with fear. "Ah -- no! Colgrave... I... you couldn't..." "I don't want you awake on the ship," he told her. "Though I might have thought of some other way of making sure you wouldn't be a problem if my pilot hadn't died as he did." "What does that have to do with me?" Her voice was shrill. "Didn't I try to help you in the control room?" "You played it smart in the control room," Colgrave said. "But you would have gone into the vat with the first group if I hadn't thought you might be useful in some way." "But why? Am I to blame for what Ajoran did?" Colgrave shrugged. "I'm not sorry for what happened to Ajoran. But I'm not stupid enough to think that a Ralan intelligence agent would go out in a spacesuit to help look for me, leaving the ship in charge of a couple of junior officers. Ajoran went out because he was ordered to do it. And there were a few other things. What they add up to, lady, is that you were the senior agent in this operation. And it would suit you just fine to get back to Rala with the Sigma File, and no one left alive to tell how you almost let it get away from you." Hace wet her lips, her eyes darting wildly about his face. "Colgrave, I... she started to plead. "No," Colgrave said. He placed his hand flat against her chest, shoved hard. Hace went stumbling backward toward the open drop hole of the vat. There was a scream and a splash. He walked over and looked down. The oily surface was smooth again. He slammed the cover down over the drop hole, sealed it and left the room. A bout two hours had passed. The Talada hung in space near the fringes of the solar system which contained the fleegle world. Colgrave had completed his studies of the ship's navigational system. It was a standard setup for long-range vessels, self-locating, self-focussing. Once he got the raider under way, there would be less for him to do than there would have been on the lifeboat. But there was one more matter to take care of before he left. On the planet he hadn't dared let himself think about it. The Talada ' s computers knew where the ship was but weren't registering the fact. For most navigational purposes, it was meaningless. You only had to know where you wanted to go. Carrying out a location check was a separate operation which would take him at least another hour. The time wouldn't be wasted, Colgrave thought. Recording the ship's exact coordinates here might turn out to be as important as getting the Sigma File to Earth -- more so... It had been at the other end of the swamp, shortly before he returned to the ship, while the tracker was picking up a man who had got farther than most, that he suddenly had become aware of a glow of greenish luminescence on his left and turned in the saddle to look at it. There was a wide opening in the forested hillside above the level of the swamp. Colgrave had stared at it with a feeling almost of superstitious fear. A group of fleegles was streaming slowly into it; a few others were emerging. There was a sense of something ordered and arranged stretching far back into the dim green light under the hill. The equivalant of human buildings, he had thought. And beyond them, taller than the structures, he could make out vague, green figures moving hugely about His skin was crawling when the tracker deposited its last captive in the tank, turned and went gliding back toward the center of the swamp. He had a strong conviction he should do nothing whatever to draw attention to himself here. But as the machine came up to a dense thicket which would have shut off his view, Colgrave looked back. The opening in the hill had vanished. A n underground civilization of some kind, and intelligence... In all the time man had been in space, there had been no previous recorded contact with another intelligent race. Perhaps we've never taken the time to really look for thorn, Colgrave thought. Our main business somehow always seems to be fighting among ourselves. As the coming war with Rala would prevent any immediate action being taken on the report he would make. But some day a scientific expedition would start out from Earth to settle down on the fleegle world and make contact -- Colgrave leaned forward in his chair, pulled the Talada's locator toward him, snapped it into the computing system, and placed his hand on the activating switch. Then he went still, head raised, tilted sideways a little in an attitude of listening. From somewhere, very far away, a huge, quiet voice was addressing him. Colgrave gave the locator a puzzled look, pulled it out of the system, stood up and restored it to its casing. He returned, studied the focal chart which contained Earth briefly once more, then reached out and cut in the main drive. The Talada began to move. Colgrave settled back in his chair, watching a not very remarkable yellow sun slide slowly away from him in the screen. There was a momentary uneasy feeling that something else was also sliding away... something very important that now would be forever lost. Then he forgot it.      Next issue Frank Herbert will be with us again with a novelette called Committee of the Whole. We're always glad to welcome the author of Dustworld, Under Pressure and any number of other well-remembered stories; we're pleased, too, to have in the same issue Kei' Laumer, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, Willy Ley and Algis Budrys; but we have an idea that the real news of the issue will be two writers you've seldom seen before. Their names are Larry Niven and Hayden Howard, both young Californians, both previously published in our companion magazine. If -- where, as you may have noted, we have for some time been following a policy of introducing at least one brand-nsw-anywhere author in each issue. Niven is a graduate of this school; Howard's first appearance antedated it -- but it is writers like these that we are looking for in doing this, and we're pleased to be able to say that we are finding them! We think these two, in particular, are Going Somewhere. We certainly hope they'll be back with us in their travels -- early, often and long! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. 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(And you can just put your name and address on a plain sheet of paper and mail it to us, at the address below. We'll know what you mean... provided you enclose your check!) In the past few years Galaxy has published the finest stories by the finest writers in the field -- Bester, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Sturgeon, Leiber and nearly everyone else. In the next few years it will go right on, with stories that are just as good... or better. Don't miss any issue of Galaxy. You can make sure you won't. Just subcribe today. (lf, on the other hand, your habit is to read them once and go on to something new -- please -- feel free to use the coupon! It's for your convenience, not ours.) Enter my subscription for the New Giant #-page Galaxy  foreign postage) (U. S. Edition only) for: # Issues (tc' #... # Issues (w #... # Issues (w #... Name City... Address Zone...State.  Galaxy is published in French and Italian. The U. S. Edition Is published In Braille. This Edition Is also published in Living Tape by Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. Editor Science Editor by Frank Herbert by Hayden Howard by Gordon R. Dickson by Joseph Green by Keith Laumer by Larry Niven by John Brunner by R. A. Lafferty by C. C. MacApp by Willy ley by Frederik Pobl by Algis Budrys Associate litor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # per year In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off this issue we've added ' ' a section on non-fiction science books to our review department. But two recent books on astronomy seem to call for something more. They're beautiful books! The first is a huge volume (and priced accordingly: #!) called The FlammaTton Book of Astronomy (Simon # Schuster, Inc.). Its intent is simple: it covers everything. Of course, the trouble with such a simple plan is that it is impossible. There is too much to cover. If you discuss quasers and the anomalous OH emissions from our galactic center, you just don't have room to deal with Phobos's peculiar orbit or the strange temperature readings on the portions of Jupiter's surface shadowed by its moons. But astonishingly. The Flammarion Book of Astronomy comes pretty close at that. It takes you everywhere from our own earth and moon out to distant, receding galaxies, and back. Primarily intended for Frenchspeaking people, even the translation is a little Francophile, so that you will find much more attention paid to the observatory at Pic du Midi than to the one at Palomar. But it's a fine book. If you had only one book on astronomy -- this would be the book to have! ir?ven more beautiful as to illustrations is Beyond the Solar System (Viking). The text is first-rate too, of course -- since it is our own Willy Ley. The illustrations are by Chesley Bonestell. Enough said! Just the captions will tell you what they are like: "Antares, a red supergiant, as viewed from a hypothetical inhabited planet." "Mira Ceti." And perhaps most wondrous of all: "The incredible system of Epsilon Aurigae" -- a binary in which the main component is so huge and tenuous that is does not seem to glow at all. If you resound to the beauty of That Big Universe Out There -- these books will set you thrumming like a guitar string! 'uaim Betmnttf Tutuht-i  #.-. ,i hail KiutoiZ Vrauv h Bthon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the cowers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind I Learn the secrets of a ftdl and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. Saa Jose California, U.S.A. ''The Maa of Life' -- A non ofganiza V Address t Scribe T.B.N Scribe T.B.N. San Jose, California, U.S.A. Please send me the fret book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. AddressCity States The information could never be made public, no matter what -- yet H could not be kept quiet! I X#ith an increasing sense of  " unease, Alan Wallace studied his client as they neared the public hearing room on the second floor of the Old Senate Office Building. The guy was too relaxed. "Bill, I'm worried about this," Wallace said. "You could damn well lose your grazing rights here in this room today." They were almost into the gantlet of guards, reporters and TV cameramen before Wallace got his answer. "Who the hell cares?" Custer asked. Wallace, who prided himself on being the Washington-type lawyer -- above contamination by complaints and briefs, immune to all shock -- found himself tongue-tied with surprise. They were into the ruck then and Wallace had to pull on his bold face, smiling at the press, trying to soften the sharpness of that necessary phrase; "No comment. Sorry." "See us after the hearing if you have any questions, gentlemen," Custer said. The man's voice was level and confident. He has himself over-controlled, Wallace thought. Maybe he was just joking... a graveyard joke. The marble-walled hearing room blazed with lights. Camera platforms had been raised above the seats at the rear. Some of their cameramen standing on the window ledges. The subdued hubub of the place eased slightly, Wallace noted, then picked up tempo as on of Oregon" they called him -- entered with his attorney, passed the press tables and crossed to the seats reserved for them in the witness section. Ahead and to their right, that one empty chair at the long table stood waiting with its aura of complete exposure. "Who the hell cares?" That wasn't a Custer-type joke, Wallace reminded himself. For all his cattle-baron pose, Custer held a doctorate in agriculture and degrees in philosophy, math and electronics. HU western neighbors called him "The Brain". It was no accident that the cattlemen had chosen him to represent them here. Wallace glanced covertly at tiie man, studying him. The cowboy boots and string tie added to a neat dark business suit would have been affectation oa most men. They merely accented Custer's good looks -- the sunburned, windblown outdoorsman. He was a little darker of hair and skin than his father had been, still light Miough to be called blonde, but not as ruddy and without the late father's drink-tumescent veins. But then young Custer wasn't quite thirty. Custer turned, met the attorney's eyes. He smiled. tt'Those were good patent at- torneys you recommended, Al," Custer said. He lifted his briefcase to his lap, patted it. "No mincing around or mealymouthed excuses. Already got this thing on the way." Again, he tapped the briefcase. He brought that damn' light gadget here with him? Wallace wondered. Why? He glanced at tile briefcase. Didn't know it ivas that small... but maybe he's fust talking about the plans for it. "Let's keep our minds on this hearing," Wallace whispered. "This is the only thing that's important." Into a sudden lull in the room's high noise level, the voice of omeone in the press section carried across them : "greatest political show on earth." "I brought this as an exhibit," Custer said. Again, he tapped the briefcase. It did bulge oddly. Exhibit? Wallace asked himself. It was the second time in ten minutes that Custer had shocked him. This was to be a hearing of a subcommittee of the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. The issue was Taylor grazing lands. What the devil could that... gadget have to do with the battle of words and laws to be fought here? "You're supposed to talk over all strategy with your attorney," Wallace whispered. "What the devil do you... He broke off as the room fell suddenly silent. Wallace looked up to see the subcommittee chairman. Senator Haycourt Tiborough, stride through the wide double doors followed by his coterie of investigators and attorneys. The senator was a tall man who had once been fat. He had dieted with such savage abruptness that his skin had never recovered. His jowls and the flesh on the back of his hands sagged. The top of his head was shiny bald and ringed by a three-quarter tonsure that had purposely been allowed to grow long and straggly so that it fanned back over his ears. The senator was followed in close lock step by syndicated columnist Anthony Poxman who was speaking fiercely into Tiborough's left ear. TV cameras tracked the pair. If Poxman's covering this one himself instead of sending a flunky, it's going to be bad, Wallace told himself. Tiborough took his chair at the center of the committee table facing them, glanced left and right to assure himself the other members were present. Senator Spealance was absent, Wallace noted, but he had party organization difficulties at home, and the Senior Senator from OregcKi was, significantly, not present. Illness, it was reported. A sudden attack of caution, that common Washington malady, no doubt. He knew where his campaign money came from... but he also knew where the votes were. They had a quorum, though. Tiborough cleared his throat, said : "The committee will please come to order." 'he senator's voice and manner gave Wallace a cold chill. We were nuts trying to fight this one in the open, he thought. Why'd I let Custer and his friends talk me into this? You can't butt heads with a United States senator who's out to get you. The only way's to fight him on the inside. And now Custer suddenly turning screwball. Exhibit! "Gentlemen," said Tiborough, "I think we can... that is, today we can dispense with preliminaries... unless my colleagues... if any of them have objections." Again, he glanced at the other senators -- five of them. Wallace swept his gaze down the line behind that table -- Flowers of Nebraska (a horse trader), Johnstone of Ohio (a parliamentarian -- devious). Lane of South Carolina (a Republican in Democrat disguise), Emery of Minnesota (new and eager -- dangerous because he lacked the old inhibitions) and Meltzer of New York (poker player, fine old family with traditions). None of them had objections. They've had a private meeting -- both sides of the aisle -- and talked over a smooth steamroller procedure, Wallace thought. It was another ominous sign. "This is a subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on Interior and In,sular Affairs," Tiborough said, his tone formal. "We are charged with obtaining expert opinion on proposed amendments to the Taylor Grazing Act of #. Today's hearing will begin with testimony, and . , . ah, questioning of a man whose family has been in the business of raising beef cattle in Oregon for three generations." Tiborough smiled at the TV cameras. The son-of-a-bitch is playing to the galleries, Wallace thought. He glanced at Custer. The cattleman sat relaxed against the back of his chair, eyes half lidded, staring at the senator. "We call as our first witness Bend, Oregon," Tiborough said. "Will the clerk please swear in Mr. Custer." Custer moved forward to the "hot seat", placed his briefcase on the table. Wallace pulled a chair up beside his client, noted how the cameras turned as the derk stepped forward, put the Bible on the table and administered the oath. Tiborough ruffled through some papers in front of him, waited for full attention to return to him, said; "This subcommittee... we have before us a bill, this is a United States Senate Bill entitled SB-# of the current session, an act amending the Taylor Grazing Act of # and, the intent is, as many have noted, that we would broaden the base of the advisory committees to tlie Act and include a wider public representation." 'luster was fiddling with the " clasp of his briefcase. How the hell could that light gadget be an exhibit here? Wallace asked himself. He glanced at the set of Custer's jaw, noted the nervous working of a muscle. It was the first sign of unease he'd seen in Custer. The sight failed to settle Wallace's own nerves. "Ah, Mr. Custer," Tiborough said. "Do you -- did you bring a preliminary statement? Your counsel..." "I have a statement," Custer said. His big voice rumbled through the room, requiring instant attention and the shift of cameras that had been holding tardily on Tiborough, expecting an addition to the question. Tiborough smiled, waited, then: "Your attorney -- is your statement the one your counsel supplied the committee?" "With some slight additions of my own," Custer said. Wallace felt a sudden qualm. Custer's statement. He leaned close to his client's ear, whispered : "They know what your stand is. Skip the preliminaries." Custer ignored him, said: "I intend to speak plainly and simply. I oppose the amendment. Broaden the base and wider public representation are phases of political double talk. The intent is to pack the committees, to put control of them into the hands of people who don't know the first thing about the cattle business and whose private intent is to destroy the Taylor Grazing Act itself." "Plain, simple talk," Tiborough said. "This committee... we welcome such directness. Strong words. A majority of this committee... we have taken the position that the public range lands have been too long subjected to the tender mercies of the stockmen advisors, that the lands... stockmen have exploited them to their own advantage." The gloves are off, Wallace thought. I hope Custer knows what he's doing. He's sure as hell not accepting advice. Custer pulled a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and Wallace glimpsed shiny metal in the case before the flap was closed. Chrisi! That looked like a un or something! Then Wallace recognized the papers -- the brirf he and his staff had labored over -- and the preliminary statement. He noted with alarm the penciled markings and marginal notations. How could Custer have done that much to it in just twenty-four hours? Again, Wallace whispered in Custer's ear: "Take it easy, Bill. The bastard's out for blood." Custer nodded to show he had heard, glanced at the papers, looked up directly at Tiborough. A hush settled on the room, broken only by the scraping of a chair somewhere in the rear, and the whirr of cameras. II T?irst, the nature of these lands we're talking about," Custer said. "In my state... He cleared his throat, a mannerism that would have indicated anger in the old man, his father. There was no break in Custer's expression, though, and his voice remained level. "... in my state, these were mostly Indian lands. This nation took them by brute force, right of conquest. That's about the oldest right in the world, I guess. I don't want to argue with it at this point." "Mr. Custer." It was Nebraska's Senator Flowers, his amiable farmer's face set in a tight grin. "Mr. Custer, I hope..." "Is this a point of order?" Tiborough asked. "Mr. Chairman," Flowers said, "I merely wished to make sure we weren't going to bring up that old suggestion about giving these lands back to the Indians." Laughter shot across the hearing room. Tiborough chuckled as he pounded his gavel for order, "You may continue, Mr. Custer," Tiborough said. Custer looked at Flowers, said: "No, Senator, I don't want to give these lands back to the Indians. When they had these lands, they only got about three hundred pounds of meat a year off eighty acres. We get five hundred pounds of the highest grade proteins -- premium beef -- from only ten acres." "No one doubts the efficiency of your factory-like methods," Tiborough said. "You can... we know your methods wring the largest amount of meat from a minimum acreage." Ugh! Wallace thought. That was a low blow -- implying BilFs overgrazing and destroying the land value. "My neighbors, the Warm Springs Indians, use the same methods I do," Custer said. "They are happy to adopt our methods because we use the land while maintaining it and increasing its value. We don't permit the land to fall prey to natural disasters such as fire and erosion. We don't..." "No doubt your methods are meticulously correct," Tiborough said. "But I fail to see where... "Has Mr. Custer finished his preliminary statement yet?" Senator Flowers cut in. Wallace shot a startled look at the Nebraskan. That was help from an unexpected quarter. "Thank you, Senator," Custer to the Chairman's methods and explain the meticulous correctness of my operation. Our lowliest cowhands are college men, highly paid. We travel ten times as many jeep miles as we do horse miles. Every outlying division of the ranch -- every holding pen and grazing supervisor's cabin is linked to the central ranch by radio. We use the..." "I concede that your methods must be the most modern in the world," Tiborough said. "It's not your methods as much as the results of these methods that are at issue here. We... TTe broke off at a disturbance by the door. An Army colonel was talking to the guard there. He wore Special Services fouragere -- Pentagon. Wallace noted vith an odd feeling of disquiet that the man was armed -- a .# at the hip. The weapon was out of place on him, as though he had added it suddenly on an overpowering need... emergency. More guards were coming up outside the door now -- Marines and Army. They carried rifles. The colonel said something sharp to the guard, turned away from him and entered the committee room. All the cameras were tracking him now. He ignored them, crossed swiftly to Tiborough, and spoke to him. The senator shot a startled glance at Custer, accepted a sheaf of papers the colonel thrust at him. He forced his attention off Custer, studied the papers, leafing through them. Presently, he looked up, stared at Custer. A hush fell over the room. "I find myself at a loss. Mr. Custer," Tiborough said. "I have here a copy of a report... it's from the Special Services branch of the Army... through the Pentagon, you understand. It was just handed to me by, ah... the colonel here." He looked up at the colonel who was standing, one hand resting lightly on the bolstered .#. Tiborough looked back at Custer and it was obvious the senator was trying to marshall his thoughts. "It is," Tiborough said, "that is... this report supposedly... and I have every confidence it is what it is represented to be... here in my hands... they say that... uh, within the last, uh, few days they have, uh, investigated a certain device... weapon they call it, that you are attempting to patent. They report... He glanced at the papers, back to Custer, who was staring at him steadily. "... this, uh, weapon, is a thing that... it is extremely dangerous." "It is," Custer said. "I... ah, see." Tiborough cleared his throat, glanced up at the colonel who was staring fixedly at Custer. The senator brought his attention back to Custer. "Do you in fact have such a weapon with you, Mr. Custer?" Tiborough asked. "I have brought it as an exhibit, sir." "Exhibit?" "Yes, sir." Wallace rubbed his lips, found them dry. He wet them with his tongue, wished for the water glass, but it was beyond Custer. Christ! That stupid cowpuncher! He wondered if he dared whisper to Custer. Would the senators and that Pentagon lackey interpret such an action as meaning he was part of Custer's crazy antics? "Are you threatening this committeewith your weapon, Mr. Custer?" Tiborough asked. "If you are, I may say special precautions have been taken... extra guards in this room and we... that is, we will not allow ourselves to worry too much about any action you may take, but ordinary precautions are in force." allace could no longer sit quietly. He tugged Custer's sleeve, got an abrupt shake of the head. He leaned close, whispered: "We could ask for a recess, Bill. Maybe we..." "Don't interrupt me," Custer said. He looked at Tiborough. "Senator, I would not threaten you or any other man. Threats in the way you mean them are a thing we no longer can indulge in." "You... I believe you said this device is an exhibit," Tiborough said. He cast a worried frown at the report in his hands. "I fail... it does not appear germane." Senator Flowers cleared his throat. "Mr. Chairman," he said. "The chair recognizes the senator from Nebraska," Tiborough said, and the relief in his voice was obvious. He wanted time to think. "Mr. Custer," Flowers said, "I have not seen the report, the report my distinguished colleague alludes to; however, if I may... is it your wish to use this committee as some kind of publicity device?" "By no means, Senator," Custer said. "I don't wish to profit by my presence here... not at all." Tiborough had apparently come to a decision. He leaned back, whispered to the colonel, who nodded and returned to the outer hall. "You strike me as an eminently reasonable man, Mr. Custer," Tiborough said. "If I may..." "May I," Senator Flowers said. "May I, just permit me to conclude this one point. May we have the Special Services report in the record?" "Certainly," Tiborough said. "But what I was about to suggest..." "May I," Flowers said. "May I, would you permit me, please, Mr. Chairman, to make this point clear for the record?" Tiborough scowled, but the heavy dignity of the Senate overcame his irritation. "Flease continue, Senator. I had thought you were finished." "I respect... there is no doubt in my mind of Mr. Custer's truthfulness," Flowers said. His face eased into a grin that made him look grandfatherly, a kindly elder statesman. "I would like, therefore, to have him es-' plain how this... ah, weapon, can be an exhibit in the matter before our committee." Wallace glanced at Custei, saw the hard set to the man' jaw, realized the cattleman had gotten to Flowers somehovs. This was a set piece. Tiborough was glancing at the other senators, weighing the advisability of high-handed dismissal... perhaps a star chamber session. No... they were all toe curious about Custer's device his purpose here. The thoughts were plain on the senator's face. "Very well," Tiborough said He nodded to Custer. "You may proceed, Mr. Custer." tiTuring last winter's slack season," Custer said, "two of my men and I worked' on a project we've had in the works for three years -- to develop a sustained-emission laser device." Custer opened his briefcase, slid out a fat aluminum tube mounted on a pistol grip with s. conventional appearing trigger. "This is quite harmless," he said. "I didn't bring the power pack." "That is... this is your weapon?" Tiborough asked. "Calling this a weapon is misleading," Custer said. "The term limits and oversimplifies. This is also a brush-cutter, a substitute for a logger's saw and axe, a chine... and a weapon. It is also a turning point in history." "Come now, isn't that a bit pretentious?" Tiborough asked. "We tend to think of history as something old and slow," Custer said. "But history is, as a matter of fact, extremely rapid and immediate. A President is assassinated, a bomb explodes over a city, a dam break, a revolutionary device is announced." "Lasers have been known for quite a few years," Tiborough said. He looked at the papers the colonel had given him. "The principle dates from # or thereabouts." "I don't wish it to appear that I'm taking credit for inventing this device," Custer said. "Nor am I claiming sole credit for developing the sustained-emission laser. I was merely one of a team. But I do hold the device here in my hand, gentlemen." "Exhibit, Mr. Custer," Flowers reminded him. "How is this an exhibit?" "May I explain first how it works?" Custer asked. "That will make the rest of my statement much easier." "Tiborough looked at Flowers,  back to Custer. "If you will tie this all together, Mr. Custer," Tiborough said. "I want to...  the bearing of this device on our -- we are hearing a particular bill in this room." "Certainly, Senator," Custer said. He looked at his device. "A ninety-volt radio battery drives this particular model. We have some tliat require less voltage, some that use more. We aimed for a 'construction with simple parts. Our crystals are common quartz. We shattered them by bringing them to a boil in water and then plunging them into ice water... repeatedly. We chose twenty pieces of very close to the same size -- about one gram, slightly more than fifteen grains each." Custer unscrewed the back of the tube, slid out a round lengtii of plastic trailing lengths of red, green, brown, blue and yellow wire. Wallace noted how the cameras of the TV men centered on the object in Custer's hands. Even the senators were leaning forward, staring. We're gadget crazy people, Wallace thought. "The crystals were dipped in thinned household cement and then into iron filings," Custer said. "We made a little jig out of a fly-tying vice and opened a passage in the filings at opposite ends of the crystals. We then made some common celluloid -- nitrocellulose, acetic acid, gelatin and alcohol -- all very common products, and formed it in a length of garden hose just long enough to take the crystals end to end. The crystals were inserted in the hose, the celluloid poured over them and the whole thing was seated in a magnetic waveguide while the celluloid was cooling. This centered and aligned the crystals. The waveguide was constructed from wire salvaged from an old TV set and built following the directions in the Radio Amateur's Handbook." Custer re-inserted the length of plastic into the tube, adjusted the wires. There was an unearthly silence in the room with only the cameras whirring. It was as though everyone were holding his breath. "A laser requires a resonant cavity, but that's complicated," Custer said. "Instead, we wound two layers of fine copper wire around our tube, immersed it in the celluloid solution to coat it and then filed one end flat. This end took a piece of mirror cut to fit. We then pressed a number eight embroidery needle at right angles into the mirror end of the tube until it touched the side of the number one crystal." Custer cleared his throat. Two of the senators leaned back. Flowers coughed. Tiborough glanced at the banks of TV cameras and there was a questioning look in his eyes. then determined the ' ' master frequency of our crystal series," Custer said. "We used a test signal and oscilloscope, but any radio amateur could do it without the oscilloscope. We constructed an oscillator of that master frequency, attached it at tile needle and a bare spot scraped in the opposite edge of the waveguide." "And this... ah... worked?" Tiborough asked. "No." Custer shook his head. 'When we fed power through a voltage multiplier into the system we produced an estimated four hundred joules emission and melted half the tube. So we started all over again." "You are going to tie this in?" Tiborough asked. He frowned at the papers in his hands, glanced toward the door where the colonel had gone. "I am, sir, believe me," Custer said. "Very well, then," Tiborough said. "So we started all over," Custer said. "But for the second celluloid dip we added bismuth -- a saturate solution, actually. It stayed gummy and we had to paint over it with a sealing coat of the straight cdluloid. We then coupled this bismuth layer through a pulse circuit so that it was bathed in a counter wave -- # degrees out of phase with the master frequency. We had, in effect, immersed the unit in a thermoelectric cooler that exactly countered the heat production. A thin beam issued from the unmirrored end when we powered it. We have yet to find something that thin beam cannot cut." "Diamonds?" Tiborough asked. "Powered by less than two hundred volts, this device could cut our planet in half like a ripe tomato," Custer said. "One man could destroy an aerial armada with it, knock down ICBMs before they touched atmosphere, sink a fleet, pulverize a city. I'm afraid, sir, that I haven't mentally catalogued all the violent implications of this device. The mind tends to boggle at the enormous power focused in..." "Shut down those TV cameras!" It was Tiborough shouting, leaping to his feet and making a sweeping gesture to include the banks of cameras. The abrupt violence of his voice and gesture fell on the room like an explosion. "Guards!" he called. "You there at the door. Cordon off that door and don't let anyone out who heard this fool!" He whirled back to face Custer. "You irresponsible idiot!" "I'm afraid, Senator," Custer said, "that you're locking the bam door many weeks too late." For a long minute of silence Tiborough glared at Custer. Then: "You did this deliberately, eh?" Ill ttCenator, if I'd waited any  longer, there might have been no hope for us at all." Tiborough sat back into his chair, still keeping his attention fastened on Custer. Flowers and Johnston on his right had their heads close together whispering fiercely. The other senators were dividing their attention between Custer and Tiborough, their eyes wide and with no attempt to conceal their astonishment. Wallace, growing conscious of the implications in what Ciister had said, tried to wet his Ups with his tongue. Christ! he thought. This stupid cowpoke has sold us all down the river! Tiborough signaled an aide, spoke briefly with him, beckoned the colonel from the door. There was a buzzing of excited conversation in the room. Several of the press and TV crew were huddled near the windows on Custer's left, arguing. One of their number -- a florid-faced man with gray hair and hornrimmed glasses, started across the room toward Tiborough, was stopped by a committee aide. They began a low-voiced argument with violent gestures. A loud curse sounded from the door. Poxman, the syndicated columnist, was trying to push past the guards there. "Poxman!" Tiborough called. The columnist turned. "My orders are that no one leaves," Tiborough said. "You are not an exception." He turned back to face Custer. The room had fallen into a semblance of quiet, although there still were pockets of muttering and there was the sound of running feet and a hurrying about in the hall outside. "Two channels went out of here live," Tiborough said. "Nothing much we can do about them, although we will trace down as many of their viewers as we can. Every bit of film in this room and evgry sound tape will be confiscated, however." His voice rose as protests sounded from the press section. "Our national security is at stake. The President has been notified. Such measures as are necessary will be taken." The colonel came hurrying into the room, crossed to Tiborough, quietly said something. "You should've warned me!" Tiborough snapped. "I had no idea that... The colonel interrupted with a whispered comment. "These papers... your damned report is not clear!" Tiborough said. He looked around at Custer. "I see you're smiling, Mr. Custer. I don't think you'll find much to smile about before long." "Senator, this is not a happy smile," Custer said. "But I told myself several days ago you'd fail to see the implications of this thing." He tapped the pistolshaped device he had rested on the table. "I told myself you'd fall back into the old, useless pattern." CcTs that what you told yourself, really?" Tiborough said. Wallace, hearing the venom in the senator's voice, moved his chair a few inches farther away from Custer. Tiborough kxked at the laser projector. 'Ts that Ihing really disarmed ?" "Yes, sir." "If I order one of my men to take it from you, you will not resist?" "Which of your men will you trust with it. Senator?" Custer asked. In the long silence that followed, someone in the press section emitted a nervous guffaw. "Virtually every man on my, ranch has one of these things," Custer said. "We fell trees with them, cut firewood, make fence posts. Every letter written to me as a result of my patent application has been answered candidly. More than a thousand sets of schematics and instructions on how to build this device have been sent out to varied places in the world." "You vicious traitor!" Tiborough rasped. "You're certainly entitled to your opinion. Senator," Custer said. "But I warn you I've had time for considerably more concentrated and considerably more painful thought than you've applied to this problem. In my estimation, I had no choice. Every week I waited to make this thing public, every day, every minute, merely rai.sed the odds that humanity would be destroyed by..." "You said this thing applied to the hearings on the graidng act," Flowers protested, and there was a plaintive note of complaint in his voice. "Senator, I told you the truth," Custer said. "There's no real reason to change the act, now. We intend to go on operating under it -- with the agreement of our neighbors and others concemed. People are still going to need food." Tiborough glared at him. "You're saying we can't force you to..." He broke off at a disturbance in the doorway. A rope barrier had been stretched there and a line of Marines stood with their backs to it, facing the hall. A mob of people was trying to press through. Press cards were being waved. "Colonel, I told you to clear that hall!" Tiborough barked. The colonel ran to the barrier. "Use your bayonets if you have to!" he shouted. The disturbance subsided at the sound of his voice. More uniformed men could be seen moving in along the barrier. Presently, the noise receded. 'iborough turned back to Custer. "You make Benedict Arnold look like the greatest friend the United States ever had," he said. "Cursing me isn't going to help you," Custer said. "You are going to have to live with this tiring: so you'd better try understanding it." "That appears to be simple," Tiborough said. "All I have to do is send twenty-five cents to the Patent office for the schematics and then write you a letter." "The world already was headed toward suicide," Custer said. "Only fools failed to realize... "So you decided to give us a little push," Tiborough said. "H. G. Wells warned us," Custer said. "That's how far back it goes, but nobody listened. 'Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe,' Wells said. But those were just words. Many scientists have remarked the growth curve on the amount of raw energy becoming available to humans -- and the diminishing curve on the number of persons required to use that energy. For a long time now, more and more violent power was being made available to fewer and fewer people. It was only a matter of time until total destruction was put into the hands of single individuals." "And you didn't think you could take your government into your confidence." "The government already was committed to a political course diametrically opposite the one this device requires," Custer said. "Virtually every man in the government has a vested interest in not reversing that course." "So you set yourself above the government?" "I'm probably wasting my time," Custer said, "but I'll try to explain it. Virtually every government in the world is dedicated to manipulating something called the 'mass man'. That's how governments have stayed in power. But there is no such man. When you elevate the non-existent 'mass man' you degrade the individual. And obviously it was only a matter of time until all ot us were at the mercy of the individual holding power." "You talk like a commie!" "They'll say I'm a goddamn' capitalist pawn," Custer said. "Let me ask you, Senator, to visualize a poor radio technician in a South American country. Brazil, for example. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence, ground down by an overbearing, unimaginative, essentially uncouth ruling oligarchy. What is he going to do when this device comes into his hands?" # # IV f urder, robbery and an archy." "You could be right," Custer said. "But we might reach an understanding out of ultimate necessity -- that each of us must cooperate in maintaining the dignity of all." Tiborough stared at him, began to speak musingly: "We'll have to control the essential materials for constructing this thing... and there may be trouble for awhile, but..." "You're a vicious fool." In the cold silence that followed, Custer said: "It was too late to try that ten years ago. I'm telling you this thing can be patchworked out of a wide variety of materials that are already scattered over the earth. It can be made in basements and mud huts, in palaces and shacks. The key item is the crystals, but other crystals will work, too. That's obvious. A patient man can grow crystals... and this world is full of patient men." "I'm going to place you under arrest," Tiborough said. "You have outraged every rule -- " "You're living in a dream world," Custer said. "I refuse to threaten you, but I'll defend myself from any attempt to oppress or degrade me. If I cannot defend myself, my friends will defend me. No man who understands what this device means will permit his dignity to be taken from him." Custer allowed a moment for his words to sink in, then: "And don't twist those words to imply a threat. Refusal to threaten a fellow human is an absolute requirement in the day that haa just dawned on us." "You haven't changed a thing!" Tiborough raged. "If one man is powerful with that thing, a hundred are..." "All previous insults aside," Custer said, "I think you are a highly intelligent man, Senator. I ask you to think long and hard about tliis device. Use of power is no longer the deciding factor because one man is as powerful restraint is now the key to survival. Each of us is at the mercy of his neighbor's good will. Each of us, Senator -- the man in the palace and the man in the shack. We'd better do all we can to increase that good will -- not attempting to buy it, but simply recognizing that individual dignity is the one inalienable right of... "Don't you preach at me, you commie traitor!" Tiborough rasped. "You're a living example of..." "Senator!" It was one of the TV cameramen in the left rear of the room. "Let's stop insulting Mr. Custer and hear him out," the cameraman said. "Get that man's name," Tiborough told an aide. "If he..." "I'm an expert electronic technician, Senator," the man said. "You can't threaten me now." duster smiled, turned to face Tiborough. "The revolution begins," Custer said. He waved a hand as the senator started to whirl away. "Sit down, Senator." Wallace, watching the senator obey, saw how the balance of control had changed in this room. "Ideas are in the wind," Custer said. "There comes a time for a thing to develop. It comes into being. The spinning jenny came into being because that was its time. It was based on countless ideas that had preceded it. " "And this is the age of the laser?" Tiborough asked. "It was bound to come," Custer said. "But the number of pr-ople in the world who're fihed with hate and frustration and violence has been growing with terrible speed. You add to that the enormous danger that this might fall into the hands of just one group or naticwi or..." Custer shrugged. "This is too much power to be confined to one man or group with the hope they'll administer wisely. I didn't dare delay. That's why I spread this thing now and announced it as broadly as I could." Tiborough leaned back in his chair, his hands in his lap. His face was pale and beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. "We won't make it." "I hope you're wrong. Senator," Custer said. "But the only thing I know for sure is that we'd have had less chance of making it tomorrow than we have today." WrongWav Street What was the ancient alien ship on Earth's Moon? What had happened to its people? jyyTike Capoferri turned out to be at one time in his life the loneliest man on the Moon. But it was not his first venture into aloneness. He had felt it before, almost twenty years before, when he was twelve and his eight-year-old brother died. Young Tony had been riding a Flexy, a kind of bobsled on wheels, down the hill road above Venice Boulevard. At the bottom of the hill he had turned hard right onto Venice. The Flexy had flipped over on its back, and its blunt rubber handle had poked hard into Tony's stomach. One of the first things the doctor did was to take Tony's blood pressure. It was low, which meant shock. It started to fall almost as soon as the blood pressure cuff was removed, but the doctor didn't know that until it was too late. Tony's spleen was ruptured. Mike had loved his younger brother. He sat in his room most of the time, unable to get used to his loss, and not really trying. After four weeks of it his father neglected his own grief long enough to take Mike to a child psychologist. Mike was a recent but ardent science-fiction fan. "I want to change it. Doctor Stuart," he said earnestly. "I want to go back to four weeks ago and take away Tony's Flexy." He meant it, of course. Doctor Stuart had worked hard to get Mike to say those words. If he was thinking in terms of sibling rivalries and guilt fedings, it didn't show. "You can't do that, Mike. Time is a oneway street with no parking spaces. You just have to keep going." "Until you have an accident," Mike said bitterly. Doctor Stuart nodded. "Or run out of gas," he added, because he himself was old enough for the analogy to apply. They talked for almost three hours, with Mike doing most of the talking. Afterwards Mike gradually stopped mourning. X Then Mike Capoferri gradu'  ated from high school he had become intensely interested in space travel. His first year at Cal Tech was the year Walnikov landed on Mars. Mike was determined to follow. In a way he traveled further than Walnikov. He never got to Mars, but he did make it to the Moon. And unlike Mars, the Moon once had intelligent visitors. Mike was one of many. Thirty men and women had come to the alien base, determined to probe all its secrets. By this time Mike was thirty-one years old and held doctorates in physics, mathematics and philosophy. He was tall, dark, not too homely, a little too earnest. He got over that at the base, where the only defense against strangeness was a sense of humor. Besides the base, the aliens had thoughtfully provided one spaceship. It rested on its side near the base, a fat cylinder with conical ids and asymmetrical bulges in unexpected places. Mike began going through the ship before he ever entered the base, and he kept at it through the years. This wasn't unusual. The ship was thought to be the real treasure, for its star charts showed (in hard-to-read notations in ultraviolet ink) that it had cruised between widely separated stars. It may have had a faster-than-light drive. The base personnel lived in the base itself, with their own air regenerating system and their own airlock built into the open alien airlock. There was plenty of room for them. The aliens had averaged ten feet tall, and there were things which must have been bunks for fortyeight of them. Still, the base took getting used to. The alien engineers had put steps and ledges in the floor wherever the ground beneath wasn't exactly level. Newcomers leetrned to walk with bowed heads to avoid stubbed toes. They learned not to sit on the Tsunks,' which looked like pieces of free-form sculpture, felt like foam rubber with a metal core, and changed shape without warning. They were told not to touch mosaic designs which had been marked with paint, for the design might hide a control surface of some kind. I t was four years since Mike had landed on the Moon. In that time the human tenants had made a great deal of progress. An emergency repair kit from the ship had yielded a method of creating artificial crystals of almost any shape from almost any solid, by building them up atom by atom. Already ships had lifted on rocket motors built from large diamonds. A box which held perfectly preserved sections from some non-terrestrial animals, possibly used as food, had given them a field which would interrupt any chemical process. The applications were numerous and varied. A short-range death ray. A beam to fight forest fires. A new method of inducing suspended animation, very useful in surgery. A sculpting implement, used by the aliens as a means of recreation (the base was infested with the statues they had left behind), had become a disintegrator. Turning it on had been heartbreakingly difficult. Mike had solved that problem in his second year, but had never been able to turn it off. The alien rec room had to be kept in vacuo, with a separate airlock, because air disappeared into the little ball of nothing at the end of the sculpting tool. Enough progress had been made on the alien number system that it was possible to do calculus with it. The money system, however, remained a complete mystery. Aside from the crystal maker and the airlock controls, the ship was as great and as fascinating an enigma as ever. The rows of 'bunks' near the back -- suppose a bunk changed shape and dumped its occupant during a #G maneuver? The controls, in plain sight on a common-sense control board in the bunk section -- what did it take to make them work? And what was the purpose of the dull red tetrahedron, seven feet on a side, which was set in the rear wall of the passenger section? Mike was taking a coffee break with Terry Holmes, a pretty, cheerful, blonde little Doctor of Languages, the day he first said, "I think I know what the central pyramid is for." Many people had said that, of course, but Mike was not addicted to wild guesses. "What is it?" Terry asked eagerly. "It's a time machine," he said. Terry got mad and left the table. The Halloween before Mike had dressed to imitate an alien statue and had frighteningly 'come to life' before her horrified eyes. Since then she had been sensitive about his jokes. "No, really," he told her during the afternoon coffee break. "The idea makes a great deal of sense. We can be sure that the aliens had suspended animation, can't we?" "Sure." The reaction damping field was perfect for that purpose. "Right. So if they had time travel to go with it, it adds up through a hundred-year journey and then move back a hundred years." "You're only guessing," Terry told him. "If the pyramid is an interstellar drive they didn't need time travel. If they had suspended animation they could have spent generations on one trip. We'll have to do that ourselves, probably." "Sure, but the idea of a timetravel device in the center of a spaceship is at least logical. I've been working on the thing for quite a while, and I think that's what it is. I've made it produce a weak gravitational field, so I know it can distort four-space." "Then it's for artificial gravity." She laughed as his face fell. "Mike, I dub thee world's champion rationalizer. And now I've got to get back to work." For a month nothing important happened. Carlos found a way to turn on the alien television set and got three-dimensional, technicolor static. Terry made some progress with the alien money ; she had a tentative ordering of coins into either ascending or descending value, if in fact they were coins. Then one day the ship disappeared. TVyrike was trying something new. He had set up a magnetic field around the control board and pushed one of the pyramid knobs. There were two of these, the same shape and color as the massive machine behind him. Now he put a block of glass between the poles of his generator and cut the current. The knob lit with an almost invisible blue glow. Suddenly everything was in free fall. "Eureka," Mike said absently, meaning; at last I've gotten some action out of the beast. When he turned his head he saw that the big red tetrahedron was base forward. He'd heard no sound of motion. A taint purple line grew across the top of the board. There were too many unknowns crawling into his experiment. Mike looked back so that he could see the big pyramid turn around, and switched his generator back on. Results came instantly. Mike sat up trying to rub the pain out of his eyes. It was several seconds before he could open them. The pyramid was apex-forward again. Mike got up and pulled out the pyramid knob, waited a moment for luck, then turned off the field generator. At last he sat down perspiring on an alien "bunk'. What a sight that had been! He couldn't even remember it without his eyes hurting. Mike's bunk inconsiderately dropped him on the floor. He promptly got up and made for the airlock, feeling a crying need for coffee, Terry Holmes, conversation and familiar things. The strangeness had suddenly become too much to take. His momentary fear of the ship was gone by the time he left the airlock. What had started it, anyway? Merely the fact that he'd gotten things to working at last. Now they could make some real progress. He moved toward the base in easy four-foot leaping strides which splashed waves of dust when he landed. He was looking straight at the base airlock, but he was preoccupied by the thought of coffee and the familiar, instantly suppressed wish for a cigarette. He was half-way there before he noticed... The base airlock was closed. The alien airlock! Mike stopped short, staring. At first he was only bewildered, not horrified. How could the doors have closed? The bulk of the U N airlock would have stopped them. Or was the alien tnetal strong enough to -- Mike made a strangling noise. The human airlock must have been crushed flat! He ran. I t had taken the base team months to open those doors. Although Mike had arrived a year later, he knew how they had done it. But why had they closed it? Had some fool been meddling with the controls? With alien designing, practically anything could be a control. The aliens had cleverly hidden their knobs, buttons, and pressure sensitive surfaces in esthetically pleasing designs. The doors could have been closed by somebody accidentally leaning against a wall. Nobody had ever bothered to find out how to open them from the inside. Mike began picking pressure points out of the mosaic on the outer door. He stopped to wonder if the base held air, then decided that it didn't matter. Anyone still alive would be wearing a spacesuit under emergency regulations. He was taking a breather when he noticed that the UN ship was gone. Had they started to evacuate the base? No, the ship only held four people and cargo. They must have gone for help. The lock had been designed for use by two ten-footers with fourteen-foot branched tentacles. Mike needed forty minutes and a great deal of ingenuity, but finally the lock swung open. There was no wreckage in the lock. "Dust," Mike told himself. There was almost no moondust on the worn path between the ship and the base. Yet dust had spurted beneath his boots... and there was no Earth-built ship, and the station was locked. "Eureka," he said softly. "They haven't found the base yet. I've traveled in time." Yet there were other possibilities. Mike began seeking them out even as he was going to work on the inner door. Maybe he had gone forward in time, to when the base had been restored as a museum. Or, worse yet, to some time after the return of the legitimate owners. (That naa once been a favorite joke around the base: 'Hey, look, they're coming back!') He might even be in another time track, one in which the base had never been abandoned. After all, he really didn't know much about the machine he'd been running. One look through a telescope would have told all. He could see the Earth from where he was standing, huge and full, but of course, he could not make out the shapes of the continents. He kept working. He was rigidly tensed as the doors folded back. Had the station been abandoned yet? Was his the honor, God help him, of meeting the first inhuman intelligence? But nobody came to meet him. His air pressure dial read # poundssquare inch. This must be alien air. T Te walked through the base,  slowly and cautiously; after four and a half years he was used to vatching where he stepped. The base was like a haunted house. There was an air of strangeness here that he had never known before, not even when he had first come. Not Commander Link Day of UN Flight Four, but Mike Capoferri, was the first man to set foot in this place. Could he get back? Sure he could. The other button must be the one that controlled flight into the future. But even then, he might not be able to tell anyone. Hey, he told himself proudly, Fm a time traveler! Wait here, he answered solicitiously, ' call the medic. No, he protested, I can prove it. Get in the ship and I'll show you. But that could go wrong in a dozen ways. He'd ' want to know more about what he was doing before he tried this again. Kilroy was here, he thought If he left marks of his visit, they would still be here when he returned to his own time. He could scratch his initials -- hmm. He turned right. When he reached the rec room he went to one of the sculpting machines and began to take it apart. The tool itself looked like a big, fat mechanical pencil. It was set in a brace which could be moved to any part of the work. The brace allowed the tool to move freely under pressure and held it steady otherwise. The pointed business end of the tool generated a sphere of emptiness into which matter vanished without trace. Removing the tool from the brace was almost easy. Turning it on took just under an hour. Once Mike almost gave up the idea, but he kept at it, for he had nothing else which would mar any of the indestructible materials used to build the base. He held the device like a pencil, but more carefully. His first thought had been to put a portrait of Commander Link Day on the statue of an alien female in the bunk room. He'd changed his mind. It would be dangerous and stupid to change his own past. He had to do something which would not be discovered before he arrived at the base, in #. The inner side of the outer door would be a good place to hide a carving, because nobody had ever seen it. It folded against the airlock wall when the lock was open. A wind blew toward his hand as he walked. There must be a way to shut air out of the disintegrator, but he hadn't the time to find it. He couldn't remember whether the team had found air in the base. If they had, he was changing the past right now. What should he write? 'The world is my ash tray', he decided, and slammed his toe into a ledge. He threw both hands out to break his fall, and changed his mind too late. Horrified, he watched the sculpting pencil vanish into the floor. It left a neat cylindrical hole. Well, Mike thought furiously. that takes care of that. I've made my mark. T Te plugged the hole with cement from the meteor repair kit on his suit belt. There was now a machine missing from the base, one that had been there in his own time, but he couldn't do anything about that. He did manage to close the airlock doors as he left. The breathtaking beauty of the full Earth stopped him outside the ship. He gazed at the magnificent bluish-white disk, trying to decide what made it seem different. Was there more cloud area? Whatever the reason, the sight was more impressive than ever. Then it came to him. The Earth was bigger! It was probably twice as large as he had ever seen it. Of course, there was nothing nearby to compare it to; which was why he hadn't noticed before. Mike was smiling as he entered the lock. The Moon has been moving outward from the Earth since creation, picking up energy from the slowing of the Earth's rotation. He must be a long way years... He pushed through the inner door and stood a moment, looking down the three broken rows -- one along the floor of the ship, the others down the sides -- of amethyst portholes. It would have been nice to be able to se out, but the glassy material wai transparent only to a wide range of ultraviolet light He went through the motions at the control panel. Right pyramid knob in -- and it had better be the right move. Generator on. Glass block betwei the poles. Generator off. He floated. Suddenly, remembering the sight of the central pyramid 'turning', Mike was glad that he could not see the ship traveling through time. Obviously the aliens could stand the sight -- but they could also look at the central pyramid, for they had done nothing to protect themselves from it. A green line crept across the board, covering and wiping out the faint purple line. Mike let it grow until the purple line wai gone, then slipped on his generator. Wrong, wrong! He was still ht free fall! I n hideous indecision he watched the board, waiting for it to tell him -- it didn't matter what, for the board was quiet and dark. In the end he left the knob in and the generator oa and pushed himself aft. He had to get a look outside. He braced himself in the airlock, suspiciously examining the he was still traveling in time. There was nothing. Mike turned on his shoes and gingerly stepped out onto the hull. When he looked down, the Moon wasn't there. A misty white planet floated nearby. It was a heavy atmosphere type, as uniform and featureless as a piece of bedsheet. It was Venus, if he was still in the solar system. Otherwise -- heavy atmospheres are the norm in space. It seemed obvious now that he'd guessed wrong. The knob on the left must control time travel; the one on the right, space travel. It was a chance he he'd have to take. Mike watched the white disk slowly setting toward one horizon of the ship. As the last thing he might see in life, it left a lot to be desired. Still, blank as it was, he could tell quite a bit about it. It couldn't be very large, for instance. If it were a giant, its atmosphere would be banded. It must be bigger than Mars to have an opaque atmosphere, but, unless an oversized moon had stripped away most of the air, it couldn't be much larger than Earth. When he saw its star he could try guessing its surface temperature. He sat down on the hull. There were two days' worth of oxygen in the ship, and little chance that it would get him home. He was lost in both space and time. He didn't know how to go into the future; if there was a way, he could expect to spend months looking for it. It was time to face death. Besides, he'd been running for hours, torn by conflicting emotions, through a world whose laws were more black magic than physics. It was high time for a coffee break. Mike licked dry lips. That last, lost cup of coffee would have tasted wonderful. A cigarette would have tom his throat out after four and a half years, but it would have felt natural and smelled good smoldering between his fingers. He'd left precious little legacy for the others at the base; a spare spacesuit that couldn't fit anyone else, three sets of lounging overalls, and a few interesting discoveries. He'd taken the spaceship; they'd cuss him out good for that... Or had he ever lived at all? He had died before he was bom. Perhaps there would be no Mike Capoferri, ever. But UN Flight Four would find his anonymous traces when they opened the base. Footprints in moondust. A sculpting tool missing from the rec room. A hole in the floor; his cement was sure to disintegrate in three billion years. Would they ever guess how deep it was? The damn thing must have fallen all the way to the center of the Moon. Searing light stabbed his eyesMike groped blindly for his filter switch, and found it The light became bearable. A sun was rising over the hull. It looked very much like the Sun as seen from the Moon; but that only meant that it wasn't. Seen from a Venus orbit, the Sun would have been much larger. He was in another solar system. Could the ship have come home by itself? Was that the home world of the base race? No, of course not. The aliens had had a water metabolism, and there would be no water down there. That world, in an Earthlike orbit around a type G yellow dwarf, must have a surface temperature of around five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Mr. Parkman in Physics IB had told him that "The Earth's atmosphere goes 'way past the Moon," he told the class one day. He seemed surprised by their laughter. It was his highly successful way of holding their attention. "No, it's true. Of course, it gets pretty thin. The idea is that the Earth's atmosphere end where its density drops to the density of surrounding space, la the same way, the Sun's atmosphere goes out beyond Mars. "Well, the air is thin enough to behave like separate particles at that distance. So the Moon m constantly whipping through thi cloud of gas molecules -- he made frantic motions with hi hands -- "and it pulls some of them up to escape velocity every, time it goes by. Naturally they're never heard from again. The air keeps replacing itself, more or less, by volcanic action. "Now, most planets don't have giant moons, so they grow tremendous air envelopes. Like Venus. Here's where the greenhouse effect comes in..." Mike snapped back to the present because of something small and dark and spinning. With the light filter over his eyes he couldn't see more. He looked away. Something was worrying at the bottom of his mind. Again his mind's eye watched the sculpting tool fall into a tunnel of its own making. He saw it lying at the center of the Moon, perhaps carving out a little pit for itself... Wrong. There would be millions of tons of pressure to flatten any cavity into oblivion...  Any cavity but one. Now the picture was right. The sun had dropped below the hull, though part of the corona still showed. Mike raised his filter and searched for the spinning blob. He knew what it was, now. At first glance it looked like a walnut shell; but not quite, for the shape was wrong and the convolutions were too deep. What it really resembled was a deflated beach ball which somebody has crushed between his hands. The moon had had a long time to push itself through a sphere an inch and a half in diameter. Probably it had not taken more than a few millenia. Afterwards there had been nothing but this crumpled ball of waste, too light and rigid for gravity to comyears the Earth had been moonless. "... Six to eight hundred degrees!" Mr. Parkman waited a moment while the scribblers caught up. "They knew about the greenhouse effect, but they hadn't dreamed that it would apply to little Venus. You could melt lead in such a greenhouse! "The point is, the astronomers were using Earth as a norm. It isn't. The Earth-Moon system is an astronomical freak. A normal planet in Earth's orbit would have an opaque, very thick atmosphere, so thick that wind and light and temperature changes would never reach the surface. An eternal searing black calm." A yrike turned and crawled into the airlock, moving as fast as he dared in free fall. He could have gone mad waiting for the inner door to open, but he didn't dare. The knowledge of certain death had been better than this aching sense of responsibility. The door opened and he jumped toward the control board. Already he was planning. He had to go back some time before his first arrival. Then -- remove the sculpting tools from the rec room, or somehow scramble the controls of the base airlock, or leave a message for liimself' on the outer door. Anything to restore the past. The glass block had not floated out of place. All he had to do was cut the magnetic field. He watched the purple line until he was sure that it was longer than it had been before. When he flipped the generator back on his feet thumped satisfyingly against the floor. Half the battle. Ghosts from his childhood whispered to him while he waited for the outer door to open. Parkman was there, but Mike refused to listen to him. He remembered Tony; which was unfair, because he'd only robbed Tony of eight years. The door opened on the Moon. Mike bounded toward the base... Or had he? He really should have known better than to loan Tony his Flexy. His Flexy, because Tony's had a broken wheel. Had he told Doctor Stuart that? No. "Time is a one-way street," said Doctor Stuart, sympathetically but firmly. He was wrong, dead wrong. Mike stood before the base airlock wriggling his fingers like a clarinet player. How far back had he come this time? He turned left to see the size of the Earth. It wasn't there. But it was always there! Bewildered, Mike peered around him. The Moon must still be rotating... To his right, the Earth was a vast, incredible crescent -- and the plain was full of ships. They were of many different sizes, but they all had the same lump cylindrical shape. Tiny figures moved among them. Stuart was right, he thought idiotically. You go the wrong way on a one-way street, you've got to have accidents. He turned and ran. Behind him the lock swung open. Two ten-foot tripeds turned to each other and gestured rapidly, like nests of striking snakes. Then one of them hopped after him and picked him up. Thn'Hing complete novel of adventure in space and time by Larry Niven Plus stories by Brian W. Aldiss, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., and many others -- all in the AAarch Worlds of Tomorrow. On sale now -- get your copy today! This was the start of the Eskimo Invasion -- a creature from beyond the stars, and a Stone Age humanl I TJehind his back his sled dogs ' whined as if sea demons were hunting under the ice. Something clanked down there. Through the soles of his mukluks, Peterluk felt the sharp echoes. His youthful eyes narrowed. A strange grinding -- a metallic sound was rising from the Arctic Ocean beneath the ice. "Turn-nrak -- spirit, go away!" Peterluk threatened shrilly in his jumbled English and Eskimo speech. "Go away. This person's Grandfather is an angakok!" The glittering pack-ice bulged. Sometliing big, very big -- only a demon-whale would try to break through ice this thick I Peterluk glanced toward the hopelessly distant gray shore. There, within the dark speck of a tent his Grandfather was crouched listening to the world. Under Peterluk's feet the ice shuddered. "Grandfather, help me." Peterluk's voice faded into distance. The ice cracked. Whimpering, tile sled dogs backed away, further entangling their traces. The dogs yipped as a thunder boom struck Peterluk's eardrums. A cloud-trail shrieked across the Arctic sky. "Kabloonas -- whitemen, help me!" Peterluk shouted after the vanishing jet bomber. But the whitemen had become as distant as the stars since that moment of terror when the Eskimos ran away. The Eskimos had not even returned to collect their Family Allowances from the Canadian government. The whitemen would not help him. A jarring thud beneath the ice hurled Peterluk to his knees. "Grandfather, help me! Grandfather -- " Then Peterluk's broad face contorted in realization. "Forgive me. Grandfather -- if my thoughts of you were bad." He tried to run. A bubbling uproar of water erupted from a crack like an open mouth -- to devour him. "Have mercy. Grandfather." Peterluk stood motionless. "This poor miserable person was not trying to run away from your island." The dogs howled. "Grandfather!" Peterluk wailed, leaping, shouting, his shrill voice starting a flight of gulls toward the island, toward his Grandfather's distant tent. The tent was much bigger than an ordinary Eskimo tent because of what it concealed from the airplane-eyes. At this distance, the tent was smaller than the front sight of Peterluk's rifle. Across the shimmering ice, Peterluk knew his voice flew to the angakok, crouching in the darkness of the tent upon the navel of the world. "Grandfather, this person was thinking only good thoughts about you. This person would never leave you while my wife is in your talons." Peterluk spread his arms. "You are holding my baby son. Gladly, this poor person will hunt seals for you always. This person will never complain again. This person will drag your sky iron anywhere. Like a sled dog this person will drag your heavy sky iron wherever you point your face. Eh-eh, yes -- yes, joyfully this person will drag your sky iron. My wife and baby son when he is bigger will drag your sky iron -- " peterluk gasped for breath, un used to sudi oratory. Behind his back the ice growled. "Please, Grandfather, great mngakok, great worker of magic, please send away your demon." Peterluk clutched his rifle. "Who will bring fat seals for you? If this poor hunter is devoured by the demon, you will starve. Do not let the demon come out of the sea. Eh-eh, this person promises to kiU you -- kill a fat seal for you. Grandfather, far-dreaming angakok, into your jaws a fat seal!" The ice creaked. The dogs' voices whined. The demon had not devoured them. With his finger on the trigger of his rifle, Peterluk turned, peering at the new lead of open water. The low sun shot arrows into his stinging eyes. He could not see the demon in the water. Peterluk scowled at himself. Perhaps the bad noises had been only a current under the ice dragging something, a log, a dead walrus, a dead seal, a fat seal. The corners of Peterluk's eyes wrinkled like smiles. "Ha-ho! You rabbits!" Peterluk shouted at his sled dogs. "What were you afraid of? A current? Ha! Get up! We go!" But Peterluk's painfully learned caution returned, and he bowed toward the distant shoreline. "Thank you. Grandfather, for your mercy this person will bring you a fat seal." A bad thought crept out of his skull : May it choke you to death. "Dog! Why are you lying down?" Peterluk yanked the nearest dog by the harness so hard it yelped. "Grandfather, this person is hurrying." With kicks and shoves, Peterluk unsorted the tangled dogs. "Eh-eh, we will travel far out to open water where the seals are. Oh, merciful angakok, we will leave this demon hole." Under Peterluk's hand the lead dog was shivering with excitement as if a seal had risen nearby. Impossible. Peterluk was afraid to look. No seal would rise in this bad place. In unison the dogs turned their heads toward the demon hole. Peterluk leaned forward, blinking. A dark spot? In the shimmering lead of open water a dark spot was swimming. A seal in the demon hole? Peterluk's massive Eskimo jaw sagged. He became motionless, almost. Convulsively, he swallowed the saliva flooding his hungry mouth. If he shot the seal in the water it would sink, but in a moment the seal would notice the dogs and would dive forever. Peterluk's head began to hurt. What should he do? Overhead the shriek of another jet split the sky. Peterluk's big teeth flashed white, a grin of disgust and relief. He did not have to decide what to do. The eal would dive. "Good-by, brother seal." hen Peterluk giggled. Astonishingly, not even the noise from the jet bomber had made the seal dive. The seal was still swimming toward him, swimming awkwardly as if injured, splashing through the water, swimming so strangely. Seal or demon? "Na-una -- this person does not know," Peterluk whispered, squinting with bewilderment at ttiis world he could not understand. "Grandfather, great angakok, tell me what to do. The sealdemon is swimming closer." During Peterluk's short life the pieces had not fit. As a nosepicking boy he had witnessed mumbling Canadian doctors holding up magic skeleton pictures. He had watched openmouthed while his father beat a hoop-drum and another older Eskimo, perhaps his Grandfather, had danced and danced and fallen down, was bound with thongs, yet vanished from the darkened igloo, and reappeared! The old Eskimo said he had been away hunting caribou on the moon and held up a caribou haunch to prove it This was more than four winters ago when Peterluk was an unworried boy who did not have to decide anything. Another important time, four winters ago, when the Eskimos came into the Post to collect their Family Allowances the southern horizon had sparkled. "End of the world!" the Eskimo minister had shouted, but he had been wrong. Peterluk's father had laughed and cursed like a whiteman, and stolen a can of kerosene. The Elskimos had left the slant-eyed minister and fled north, leaving the whitemen. "Forever," Peterluk's father had insisted. "End of their ways." But whitemen's spirits were everywhere, perhaps as strong as demons! Was this a demon or a seal? "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John," Peterluk whispered toward the demon hole, "command this one little wounded seal to climb up on the ice." The seal raised its indistinct head above the water. It was trying to see up on to the ice. But it sank back. "Grandfather," Peterluk hissed, "tell your seal to climb up on the ice." A gain it heaved up. Oddly, one of its flippers raised like a hand. Peterluk giggled nervously As he watched, the seal bent its head beneath the surface. Peterluk's hand tightened on his rifle. Only the seal's gleaming back was visible. Peterluk knew it was preparing to dive. The seal would vanish forever. Peterluk raised his rifle. "lyonamut!" Peterluk exhaled. He shot. His ears ringing, snatching up his harpoon, Peterluk raced toward the thrashing black shape. He cried out, stumbling, as it sank. He fell to his knees at the edge of the ice where it had been. Peering down into the shadowy water, Peterluk witnessed its dark silhouette drifting downward and away. Violently, he plunged his harpoon. His hand stung. The shaft of the harpoon slashed the water back and forth, tom loose from his hand by the agonized strength of the aninial under the water. With a shout of triumph, Peterluk hauled at the harpoon line, and the harpoon's iron and ivory barbed head twisted within the flesh, anchoring itself. The freed wooden shaft floated back up the taut line to the surface. Peterluk grabbed it, and he jammed the wooden shaft into a crack in the ice for support. He braced himself in case the seal made a sudden rush, for this was no ordinary seal and he did not know what to expect. The tugging line signalled iti struggles, weaker and weaker. His breath wheezing in and out, Peterluk waited for the seal to drown down there. When he could feel no motion except a slight dragging from the current, Peterluk began drawing in the line hand over hand, his movements becoming tight-muscled and hesitant as the long blur neared the surface. Tangled in tiie line, it was rising upside down. Its hind flippers seemed split apart much farther than a seal's. On its back appeared a hump, a long hump strapped on like a dog's pack, a seal with a pack on its back? Peterluk's mouth opened. But his stubby hunter's hands continued hauling up the line. Rising, turning in the current, the dark shape struck the underedge of the ice with a startling metallic sound like a ship's bell. Its front flippers swayed out thin and black and much longer than a seal's. Then its slack head was tilted upward in the water. Peterluk's soul leaped out of his mouth in a scream of horror. Its face, its face was all one huge round gleaming eye. Falling away, snatching up his rifle in his flight to the sled, Peterluk whipped his dogs across the ice toward the distant shore. There was no hissing or roaring of demons behind him. Glancing back, he glimpsed nothing but glaring white pack-ice. "Aii-ee! Its tribe, they are pursuing me under the ice!" Cracking his whip, he belabored the sled dogs toward the driftwood beach. II T T e shouted at his wife to get the baby out of the tent. "We must go from here! Get my son!" "The angakok, it holds the baby." She lowered her head in a gesture of helplessness. "What are you thinking of? Una? What is it?" She giggled nervously. "What are you afraid of now?" "Demons! Look -- you -- you stupid woman. A tribe of demons coming. This unlucky person has shot a seal demon. Now its whole tribe is coming for our blood and eyes." Stupidly, Peterluk's wife stood staring out over the pack-ice. "There is nothing but ice." Her dead father had travelled much with missionaries and had left her with a stupid lack of understanding when it came to demons. "Demons! There, and there, and ever#Twhere. Seal demons. You, you can't expect to see them!" Peterluk shouted. "You tvoman!" Peterluk plunged into the darkness of the tent. "Grandfather, great angakok, help me. Demons are coming! Seal demons. Through no fault of his own this person accidentally shot a seal demon -- what is that noise? Grandfather, its tribe comes for blood vengeance." The angakok's hump-backed shape swayed upward. Within the big tent, the angakok towered above Peterluk. Muttering like an uneasy bear, it held Peterluk's baby son cradled in its talons. It leaned weakly against the huge dented ball of sky iron. In the dimness of the tent, clothed in its gigantic parka of caribou skins sewn by Peterluk's wife, the angakok resembled a man -- if the beholder needed to see a man. Like a man, its burned face had two white eyes. Its drooling mouth was ever hungry for seal meat. Its taloned hands were as quick as the hands of a man. From its hands fire had engulfed Peterluk's father. Only a powerful Eskimo angakok could work such magic. After the first winter, it had remembered and agreed with Peterluk. Because it had flown far from the Earth, because it was the most powerful angakok, it must be Peterluk's vanished Grandfather returned from the sky, and Peterluk had believed! "Grandfather, use your power!" Peterluk scuttled sideways within the big tent, a tent too big, too cold because its purpose was to hide tlie sky iron, which was neither meteorite nor satelKte. The round mass of the sky iron, higher than a winter igloo, occupied the whole center of the tent. To Peterluk's dismay, he noticed that the perpetual buzzing and clicking from the broken wire intestines within the sky iron sounded weaker. Even the magic blue light which glowed through the burned hole in the side of the sky iron seemed dimmer. Peterluk suspected that the angakok could not renew its magic power from the sky iron, the broken sky sled in which it had fallen like a flaming egg from the stars. Now, when much power was needed to protect Peterluk from the seal demons, the angakok leaned weakly against the sky iron and did nothing. The baby whimpered. "Hear the demons approaching!" Peterluk cried out. "Even my baby son hears the demons. Grandfather, this person did not mean to shoot the seal demon. Protect me, or let us flee from this evil island." Dropping to his knees, Peterluk seized one of the long driftwood sled-runners upon which the sky iron was permanently lashed. The angakok growled in warning. Peterluk sprang back. His head began to hurt as the angakok'a eyes glowed, expanding dream pictures inside Peterluk's head. The blurry picture of a big thing shaped like a whale with a hump on its back was moving beneath the ice. In its belly something burned like a distant bonfire. This was not a clear picture, and Peterluk had the frightened feeling that the angakok did not understand what it was seeing. '"The angakok forced another picture into Peterluk's head, the whale-thing, now floating on the surface like a ship. The angakok seemed to be asking him a question. Little naked Eiskimos appeared on top of the whale-ship. This was impossible. Any ship was impossible. "No ship out there," Peterluk shouted slowly, trying to make the angakok understand. "Demons, protect us against demons. Seal demons." Peterluk tried to brush away the ship pictures with his hand. "Too much ice for a ship," he insisted. "My own eyes have seen no smoke, no masts on the horizon, no trading ship, no ship. Grandfather, listen, it is demons we must fear." Outside the tent, the dogs began to howl. "The demons are close," Peterluk gasped. "Grandfather, great angakok, now, quickly, burn them with all of your magic power." Three times Peterluk had seen the angakok turn iron into fire. The first time four years ago other Eskimos fell down, burning and d#ring, Peterluk's father among them. The second time had been to punish Peterluk when he tried to escape from the island. The third time had been when the parachutist landed, so charred that Peterluk had been unable to recognize whether it was an Eskimo or a Whiteman. But now the angakok stood swaying and holding the baby and doing nothing. A dog whimpered outside the tent. "Grandfather, the seal demons have arrived! Quickly, work great magic." Peterluk knelt, his heart thudding. During the four years since his Grandfather fell from the sky Peterluk had told his Grandfather many tales of the magic of other Eskimo angakoks. Although his Grandfather could speak no more clearly than a polar bear, he listened to Peterluk's words -- even when Peterluk was not speaking. The angakok had crowded questioning pictures into Peterluk's head as if his Grandfather had forgotten the ways of the Eskimos. Soon the angakok had become less interested in demons, more interested in the world to the south. How many people? Peterluk tried to ow there were more whitemen than the fingers and toes of all the people who could be crowded into this big tent Their weapons? Rifles like his. The noisy flying objects? Airplanes containing doctors, ministers and Canadian Mounted Policemen. What carried the airplanes through the air? The magic power of the Canadian Government, Peterluk had explained, but powerful angakoks could fly without using airplanes. Now the angakok must use his power. "Grandfather, you must use fire magic against the seal demons!" Peterluk gasped. "Bum them like you burned the Eskimos!" A triangle of light stabbed into the tent. As the tent flap opened, Peterluk shrieked. He thought the seal demons had come for him. The silhouette was his wife. "A ship!" she laughed excitedly. "After four years, a ship." "There is no ship!" Peterluk shouted. "Come in here quickly. A ship is impossible. It is a trick of the seal demons to make me go out on the ice." But his wife, with her usual foolhardy attitude toward demons, scurried outside, shouting for Peterluk to come out. "A trading ship!" she shouted. 'A wonderful trading ship." peterluk whimpered. As far out as a whole day's sledding from shore the ice was too thick for a trading ship. Even a powerful ice-I )reaker would have been visible on the horizon for many days before it finally arrived, slowly butting its way through the ice. Behind Peterluk in the dark tent the angakok was clutching the baby to its chest. On the angakok' s back its growing hump heaved and writhed as if it had life of its own, and the angakok lumbered past Peterluk to the tent flap. Squatting down, the angakok looked out into the bright world. It emitted a coughing cry. When Peterluk peered out past the angakok's massive caribouskin leggings into the glare of the ice. his eyes narrowed. "It is impossible," Peterluk murmured apologetically. But this low ship was so distinct he could see even the men on top of the tall gray cabin as if they were really there. "Wave to them, build a signal fire!" his wife shouted. "Now is our chance." Peterluk did not know whether she meant their chance to escape from the angakok or their chance to trade with the white men. "See the Kabloonas climbing down on to the ice," she shouted. "See, they are handing down wonderful shiny things, fine guns, wonderful black boxes. All those black boxes, they must be loaded with trade goods, mirrors, cotton cloth. Family Allowances, many cans of kerosene." His wife bustled past him into the tent and began to gather up the white fox furs. "Hurry up," Peterluk's wife shouted. "This person knows they are signalling for us to leave the angakok here and go out to their ship. We will trade fox furs for all sorts of wonderful things. Tell the angakok we will soon return. The angakok must let us leave." On the low ship, a light was winking. The ship was gray as a whale. "The ship," Peterluk murmured wonderingly, "it is like a great kayak." Neither Peterluk nor his wife had ever seen a submarine. "This person will take my baby now." Peterluk's wife signed for the angakok to hand her the baby. The angakok did not do so.  Iways before when whitemen approached in airplanes, tire angakok had hidden. His Grandfather had growled and seemed afraid of the whitemen's planes. But now the angakok wanted Peterluk to drive the sled out over the ice toward the whitemen's ship. "Demons' ship!" Peterluk bleated in realization. "No whitemen! Seal demons. Grandfather, you are giving me to the demons!" He tried to run, but the magic thoughts of the angakok were too strong. "Trade for flour." Peterluk's wife shouted after them. "And needles!" Alhile Peterluk drove the  ' sled out over the ice toward the ship, he muttered with fear. From the corners of his eyes he studied each crack in the ice, half expecting a vengeful demon to spring up. The sled lurched. Concealed under the fox furs, the angakok growled in warning. Hisses of icy wind slithered across the pack-ice. "Grandfather, protect me!" Peterluk stared at the mirage of the ship. The low ship appeared almost real. The small shapes like men moved on the roof of its cabin. They climbed down awkardly like real whitemen. But the mast was not believable. It resembled a thin stove pipe with a Imob at the upper end. And a strange round net was turning on the roof of the cabin, sweeping the sky. Peterluk's brow wrinkled. If these were whitemen -- trying to net low-flying puffins at this hopeless distance from the bird nesting cliffs, they must be starving. The small man-shapes were setting up something on the ice. It had three thin legs. Now they were attaching something strange on top. It was longer than a shotgun barrel, thicker than -- Agitated picture-thoughts from the angakok crowded into Peterluk's head. Stop the sled. "Hoo!" Peterluk halted the sled dogs. "Grandfather, those men are all dressed in gray, like seals. Seal demons, too many for you to bum. Let us go back." To Peterluk's horror, the angakok pictured to him to pick up a white fox fur and walk toward the seal demons. "No, Grandfather." But Peterluk's leg stumbled forward over the sea ice. He was walking beside a lead of open water toward the ship. With a startled whimper, he clutched the fox fur to his chest. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed his own harpoon shaft still wedged in a crack beside the lead. Here he had harpooned the seal demon. His eyes widened. Here came the seal demons from the ship, their legs running toward him. "Grandfather, protect me!" Peterluk closed his eyes. His grandfather had shown great power four years ago when the Eskimos hammered on his sky iron. The Eskimos had found the sky iron in a heatglazed hole. A star had fallen from the Arctic night. Some said it was a meteorite for which the whitemen would give a reward. Others had said it was a satellite for which the whitemen would give a bigger reward. Laughing, they had hammered the big dented ball with their rifle butts, and the angakok had emerged, growling. Women shrieked. Someone had shot. The angakok roared like a speared bear and the Eskimos' knives and rifle barrels had glowed red, exploding. Flames like fur covered the nearest Eskimos. Children became darting streaks of flame. Only Peterluk and a girl who was farthest away survived. When Peterluk had tried to flee, the angakok had burned him -- a little. When Peterluk had knelt before the angakok, he had understood it must be his vanished Grandfather. Only his Grandfather could have such power. Ir ow Peterluk knew his Grand father's power had leaked out. Peterluk could hear the seal men -- running -- closer and closer. "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John," Peterluk murmured in desperation. For a long time he had suspected his Grandfather's power was diminishing. During the four years since the burning of the other Eskimos, Peterluk had grown to the strength of a man. Often he grumbled when the angakok indicated it was time to break camp, to move the heavy sky iron. When he was slow to obey the angakok had burned him. Later, as the angakok's hump had grown bigger it simply waited. Muttering to himself, Peterluk finally would lever the sky iron on to the sled. He would obey, although he could not understand why the angakok desired to move to a new camp while there vas still good hunting here. Was the angakok searching for new power? Peterluk could not know that they were following the North Magnetic Pole. The focus of the Earth's magnetic lines of force is a shifting thing. In the distant past of #, Amundsen located the North Magnetic Pole at Latitude #" North, Longitude #" West on the Boothia Peninsula. By # it had shifted with many hesitations and waverings in a true northerly direction several hundred miles to Latitude # North, Longitude #" West. By Peterluk's time the North Magnetic Pole had shifted across the Boothia Peninsula and its ice-locked islands. Induced by the mysterious flowages within the core of the planet, it wavered across the coastal islands, closer and closer to the last shore-camp beside the deepening Arctic Ocean, Here, Peterluk had gone out on the ice to hunt fat seals for his Grandfather. Peterluk knew his Grandfather's power was diminishing because his dreams had changed. In the night Peterluk would awaken moaning with loneliness, not his own. It was loneliness from the overlapping dreams of the angakok. In first dreams there had been two suns circling. Twin shadows spread out from moving things. Peterluk had cried out in his sleep until he had grown used to these shapechanging things for which he had no words. Even the patterns of the stars were strange. But more and more the angakoks dreams included familiar snow and ice, and Peterluk recognized himself, his wife, the sled dogs, and airplanes droning high overhead. In its dreams the angakok moaned at the airplane. Peterluk knew the angakok's power must be weak if it feared the airplanes of the whitemen. peterluk's nostrils flared -- the scent of tobacco. He opened his eyes and shouted joy at the approaching men. They were not seal men. They were whitemen. They smelled like whitemen. Peterluk rushed to meet them, his hand outstretched in a whiteman's ceremonial greeting. As he shook hands with each of the gray-uniformed whitemen, Peterluk's smile spread wider and wider, for he could not understand a word they said. Their Canadian was the strangest he had ever heard. Not a word was familiar to him, and he nodded politely as if he understood. The whitemen were pointing this way and that. Peterluk glanced toward the sled where the angakok lay concealed beneath the furs. In a moment he planned to lead the whitemen to the sled. He would snatch off the white fox furs and laugh at the helpless squirming of the angakok because magic will not work against whitemen. Peterluk's eyes narrowed. In those black boxes beside the ship there must be all sorts of wonderful things. Peterluk imagined knives and fishhooks, gramaphone records and cartons of gleaming rifle bullets. Everything a man could possibly want soon would be hia for the trading. No doubt there was an alarm clock in one of those black boxes for his baby son to play with, and silk scarves, face cream, lip grease. His wife was a fine woman and deserved all of these things. Peterluk held up the fine white fox fur. After four years of trapping without trading he had more fox furs than any Eskimo! He giggled with embarrassment. "Only a few poor foxes has this person," Peterluk spoke with an Eskimo traditional selfdepreciation before strangers. "The foxes have outsmarted me again -- " Never had Peterluk seen finer furs than his own! But the most important whiteman barely glanced at the fox fur. Evidently he was a shrewd trader. He shaded his eyes as if he was looking around for something else. He made thrashing motions with his arms. Peterluk's eyes widened with understanding. "Seals. Eh-eh, yes-yes, seals." Evidently, they had caught few birds in the slowly turning net on the roof of the cabin of their ship. They must be very hungry for seals. The man made more swimming motions. 'T'here would be no seals where a ship was, but Peterluk contradict such an important man. "Eh-eh, seals," Peterluk agreed patiently, while the man made snorting sounds and thrust up his graycapped head like a seal rising from the water. Peterluk's admiring gaze clung to the shiny medals on his chest. The man had so many that surely he would trade. Peterluk thrust out the fox fur. Speaking slowly in Canadian and very loudly so that the men would be sure to understand, Peterluk waved the white fox fur back and forth. "Foxes! Trade! Kerosene! Bullets! Bangbang!" At this, they all began talking so much his head hurt. Their caps bobbed on their heads with the loudness of their talking. Peterluk's smile widened still further. More than anything he desired one of those fine gray caps. Shyly, Peterluk put his hand to his head. These men had plenty of caps, each cap decorated with a beautiful red star. The important man smiled thinly at Peterluk. "Droog. Da? Pa-pi-ro-sa?" Peterluk accepted the pack of cigarettes and thrust it into the voluminous sleeve of his parka. His covetous gaze clung to the handsome gray cap on the important man's head, the lovely red star. But the Whiteman was pointing at the lead of open water, at the cracks, at Peterluk's distant tent. "Amerika-nets?" Did this mean seal meat? Peterluk spread his arms. "There is no seal meat in my tent," he lied. This was not a hospitable way for an Eskimo to talk, and Peterluk felt ashamed. "This person is a very poor hunter, but you Kabloonas are my friends. Yes, yes, this person will hunt seals for you -- after we have traded." Peterluk's smile returned. He could see a whiteman clambering down a ladder from the roof of the tall cabin, carrying a sack. The man tossed the sack to other whitemen waiting on the ice. One of these men ran with the sack toward the important man and Peterluk. Undoubtedly, the sack contained what they wished to trade. The whitemen grouped around Peterluk. The sack was to be opened. Peterluk smiled expectantly. Peterluk's mouth clicked shut. Instead of trade goods, from the sack was lifted a pair of dark cut-off fins and a huge round shiny eye. IP IV P eterluk shrank from these cut-off parts of a seal demon, but the whitemen showed no fear, touching them with their hands, pointing along the leads, making searching motions with their faces, then stared hungrily at the cut-off parts and shifting their gaze to Peterluk's blank face. Peterluk's stubby hand rubbed his jaw. His eyes narrowed to slits of thought. He tottered like a man overcome by sleep. "It is understood!" Peterluk shouted with joy. "You whitemen have traveled here to hunt seal demons. The fins, the round eye, like the one killed by my rifle and harpoon. But mine was bigger, much bigger!" Spreading his arms, Peterluk stood on tip-toe. "Big-big, very big," Peterluk explained to the important man. Peterluk slapped his own chest. With a shout, he snatched up his rifle, thrusting its rusty muzzle at the round eye. "Ha! Bang!" Whirling, he aimed his rifle along the open lead. "Bang! Ha! Big-big!" The whitemen had to run to keep up with him. They were wheezing for breath as they neared the edge of the lead. Peterluk could see the dark straightness of his harpoon shaft. With his hand feeling the dead weight on the harpoon line, Peterluk nodded up at them. His own seal demon had not been freed by others of its tribe. Its body still hung deep in the water on the other end of the line. Squatting, the taut line in one fist, his rifle in the other, Peterluk waited, smiling with pride. To kill a seal demon was a difficult and dangerous thing, and now he frowned for dramatic effect while studying the pale faces above him. These whitemen were breathing hard, clutch ing their crooked rifles as if afraid the seal demon still might be alive. Peterluk's smile gleamed like an iceberg while he hauled in the line. As the dark shape of the seal demon neared the surface, the whitemen exclaimed with awe and fear, shouldering Peterluk aside and drawing in the line so rapidly that the iron pack on the seal demon's back gonged against the underside of the ice. The whitemen lifted the deman up, bent over its body. They shook it to be sure it was dead. With a cry, one tugged at the protruding ivory harpoon head. Another laid his ear to the seal demon's chest, listening to be sure its heart had stopped. To Peterluk's surprise they were able to remove the round glass eye by unstrapping the back of the head. Inside was a white face in imitation of a man's. It looked like a drowned man's -- T#rom their angry shouts, Peterluk realized that the seal demon must be an enemy of their tribe. Peterluk was glad to have helped them. "Eh-eh, yes-yes, big!" Peterluk slapped his chest and grinned triumphantly at their flushed and angry faces. Their faces sprang at him. Joltingly, he was shoved backward. His rifle was snatched away. Peterluk gave a great cry of horror as one of the whitemen raised Peterluk's rifle high and hurled it into the bottomless lead so that Peterluk's family would starve. Lurching forward, Peterluk glimpsed closed hands striking at his face. He felt a knocking against his head and blindly tried to turn away, but they were clinging to him like wolverines. The men behind twisted his arms so that he growled with pain, and the ones in front merged in a blurr of yelling faces and smashing hands like hailstones against his face. As Peterluk heaved to buck himself free, his mukluks slipped. He pitched forward, crawling on the ice, their boots thudi ding against his ribs. He cried out in horror and humiliation. They were kicking him like a dog. Like a dog he was being beaten by their rifle butts. He cried out for help. "Grandfather!" His face was mashed into the ice, and he heard himself choking. The whitemen's voices were shouting angrily among the thuds of boots and rifle butts against his ribs and skull. "Oobiy-tsa!" they were shouting. "Oobiy-tsa! America-nets oobiyfas!" Peterluk struggled upward to his knees, and was beaten down. Like a dog he was being beaten. Even his Grandfather had forsaken him. Peterluk merged his face with the ice like a dyto leave this humiliation. Faintly, he heard the Kabloonas shouting to each other. "Lyu-di? Nye-pri-ya-tel?" they were shouting. "Ta-va-rishch, sharko li vam?" The boot toes in front of his eyes pointed toward shore. The men shouted unintelligibly in their strange language. "Da, comrade Captain, my rifle barrel has become hot also." "The metal parts of my binoculars are hot!" "Pevski, you are the polar expert. What do you make of it?" "In lieu of more complete evidence I must propound the tentative theory that there is some casual relationship between the magnetic anomaly we were sent here to investigate and this sudden heating of metal objects. By heating I mean in a technical sense the sudden intensification of molecular -- " "Shut up, Pevski! I think it is an imperialist death ray!" "What is it Captain? Are you wounded? Your face shows pain." "My hand! My medals are hot! Comrades, this is your captain speaking. Fall back to the submarine. You, too, Pevski." "My own highly tentative theory is that their, not to be underrated, research are focusing a magnetic laser, that is a concentration of the Earth's magnetic lines of force which would in some ways be analagous to a laser which would -- " "Faster, Pevski!" "O aising his face from the ice, Peterluk watched blearily while the whitemen ran toward the long ship. They were dragging the body of the seal demon, his seal demon. Peterluk struggled erect. He spat blood. The ruins of his face contorted. "Like a dog," he croaked, coughing, swaying. "Like a dog, beaten like a dog." He looked around for his rifle, and his bloodshot eyes widened in horror as he remembered. "My rifle, they threw my rifle in the lead so my family will starve, and they beat me -- "Beat me like a dog!" he screamed in mounting rage. "Grandfather, you didn't help me." Peterluk staggered toward the mount of white fox furs on the sled. "You, you let them beat me like a dog. "See, Grandfather!" Peterluk hurled away the fox furs which had concealed the angakok. "They are climbing on their ship. They are lifting my seal demon on to their ship. They have stolen my seal demon. They have beaten me like a dog. You, you have done nothing! "Grandfather! You let them beat me!" Peterluk yelled. "Like a dog they beat me, like a dog!" Peterluk kicked the sled, and the angakok groaned, turning on its side, its back to Peterluk. Under its misshapen caribou skin parka, its huge hump quivered like the belly of a woman whose birthtime has come. "Grandfather, why didn't you burn them? You couldn't bum them. You can't even burn me. Your magic is gone. Dying thing, get off my sled!" Peterluk raised his whip handle. "Get off my sled! This person will take his wife, his son, his furs, his food, his tent -- and leave this bad island. And leave you to starve! Die!" Vaguely, Peterluk's ears heard the dogs whimpering. Inside Peterluk's head the angakok's picture-thought writhed. "Get off my sled!" Peterluk shrieked. The angakok sat up. "You can't reach me with your magic." Peterluk felt a coldness at his back. "You are no angakok. Your magic has leaked out -- " Something in Peterluk's head turned him toward the whitemen's ship. Peterluk's bones melted. His wide jaw sagged as he fell to his knees with awe. For the ship was sinking! Already the dark water of the lead formed across its low deckInstead of leaping overboard to save themselves, the whitemen were climbing down the smokehole into the cabin, vanishing into the sinking ship. Peterluk moaned with awe. A bubbling roar rose against Peterluk's eardrums as the tall, gray cabin sank down. The ship's stubby mast sliced downward through the water until only its topmost knob survived, swiveling desperately from side to side, glittering like a drowning eye. and then it, too, was gone. AbjectiLy, Peterluk crawled toward tiie powerful angakok. Not a single whiteman had been allowed to escape. With his own eyes, Peterluk had seen them all destroyed. As easily as if it had been a skin kayak, the angakok had sunk the whitemen's ship. A faint picture of himself driving the loaded sled back to the tent entered Peterluk's throbbing head. "Yes, yes, at once, Grandfather!" V  lhen they reached the shore,  ' Peterluk yelled at his wife to come out. "Quickly, woman. Help me get him on to his feet. Careful now! My Grandfather has just sunk the whitemen's ship and he is very tired." Inside the tent, the angakok staggered against the sky iron. His weight was too much for them both to support. He fell heavily, like an iceberg from the face of a glacier, he fell. Peterluk looked down. "My Grandfather, is he dead?" Already the huge face seemed to be withering. Peterluk's wife screamed. On the angakok's back the great hump was splitting. Opening, it drooled slime. A slippery thing poured out as long as a man. Gleaming, it writhed, sat upi' pawed at its slime-clogged eyei with one hand -- five fingers. Its wide open eyes stared up at them. It stood up as tall as Peterluk -- and smiled. "Look," Peterhik's wife gasped. "This Eskimo man, he looks like you!" With a quick motion the naked Eskimo walked as if he had been in the tent brfore. He reacheci for the ptarmigan rag behind the seal lamp and began to wiprthe slime from his body. "Like you -- " Peterluk's wife marveled, and Peterluk moved forward. "He looks like you." "Utak?" Peterluk asked, naming one of his dead brothers, for infant mortality among the Elskimo is high. "Ohud-lerk? Arluk?" "Edwardhik?" he asked th smiling young man. Edwardluk had been Peterluk's oldest brother, born dead nine summers before Peterluk was bom, but Peterluk remembered the name and circumstances as they had been told to him by his father. The young man cocked his head, and seemed to ponder this name for a moment, his eyes narrowing although his smile remained wide. Then the young man replied in a voice like Peterluk's, speaking the tribal mixture of Eskimo words and thoughts mixed with whitemen's expressions as perfectly as Peterluk did, and extended his hand in a ceremonial handshake. "This person is Edwardluk, your oldest brother," the young man answered. His hand was warm and very strong. "Eh-eh, yes-yes, born nine summers before you," the naked young Eskimo laughed. Being older, it was evident that he must be wiser and stronger than Peterluk, more influential, a man to be listened to. Edwardluk turned his head. "Woman, get me my brother's other parka. Quickly, woman! We must break camp." He smiled at Peterluk. "My brother, you must sledge the -- the sky iron far out on to the ice and upset it into the water. Eh-eh, we will make it disappear forever. We don't need it anymore. This thing also, the body of -- your Grandfather, we don't need it either." Edwardluk glanced down at the huge, shriveled body, then whirled at Peterluk's wife. "Hurry up, you stupid woman, find me mukluks for my feet. There is much to be done." He smiled at Peterluk. "My brother, we must hunt -- kill much meat. This is a big planet. Many Eskimos will be born, all hungry!" Peterluk grinned with embarrassment and pleasure. It was good to have a brother. Scratching himself, Peterluk marveled how much his brother resembled -- himself. "Eh-eh," Peterluk giggled. The only difference was the small hump growing on his brother's back. His brother's friendly arm closed around Peterluk's shoulders. He laughed into Peterluk's ear. "Eh-eh, soon many sons, many daughters to feed. In a few seasons we Eskimos will fill this for your Infornricition T here are symbols and symbols, of course. One kind is the symbolic expression in speech or in writing where a statement is made for the purpose of conveying something else. A virtually perfect example of such writing is a small but old book known as the Psysiologus that was composed by; an otherwise unknown early Christian writer for purposes of meditation. The first paragraph of that book deals with the lion which is said to "have three qualities". The first is that it erases its tracks with its tail, so that the hunters cannot follow. The second is that it sleeps with its eyes open and the third that it is born dead but that, after three days, its father breathes into its face and it then comes to life. These three "qualities", the book goes on to explain, have their meanings : the first one means that the incarnation of Christ is a mystery that cannot be fathomed. The second quality means that, while the body of Christ was dead, his divine spirit was awake in heaven and the third, of course, refers to the resurrection after three days. But there is also the "symbolic expression" that has the purpose of creating a mystery where there is none. The alchemists excelled in that kind of symbolism by using descriptions for which the term circumlocution is not quite strong enough. When they spoke of the "dried blood of a blue-gray dove" they meant a bright orange-red powder that could be derived from bluish-gray lead. Plumbers and fitters of our time just call it "red lead", and a chemist would refer to it as Pb#. That kind of symbols, which are really abbreviations, is the kind I intend to discuss. B efore going on to symbols that could be spelled out if it were desirable or convenient, a few symbols that could not be spelled out have to be mentioned, mainly because they are very old. In order of age they are; the six-pointed star constructed of two triangles and known as tlie star of David. It symbolizes Judaism as the cross symbolizes Christianity and the crescent and star symbolizes Mohammedanism. Two other old Christian symbols are the so-called Chrismon, the intertwined P and X and the simplified drawing of a fish, both being symbols for Christ. Both are Greek in origin, the Chrismon just combines the Greek letter "ch" (which looks like an X) and the "r" (which looks like a P) ; while the fish is the result of an acrostic. The Greek words "Jesus Christos, God's Son, Savior" spell ichthys, the Greek word for "fish". When it comes to the question of the oldest non-religious symbols that are still in use, I am not going to accept the statement; the letters you are using right now. Of course letters are symbols in that they stand for sounds, but for purposes of this column we have specified that symbols are abbreviations, like , that could be spelled out if one wanted to do so. Now the early printers in the sixteenth century invented many abbreviations, mainly for the purpose of expressing Latin word endings like... orum... , umque and so forth by single signs. The only one of these so-called contractions that is still in use is the ampersand ( # ). If you put it on its side you'll discover that it is an intertwined e and t, meaning et, Latin for "and" or "also". But since we have defined symbols as something that could be spelled out, the ordinary figures have to be regarded as symbols. Of course every early civilization evolved its own way of writing figures. There was an Egyptian system, a Mayan system and many more. Some languages, notably Hebrew and classical Greek, did not invent separate signs for figures, but assigned number values to their normal letters. An example of classical Greek usage is given in Fig. #. It is the system used by Ptolemy in his famous work on astronomy and those of my readers who are familiar with the Greek alphabet may wonder about a few of the letters, namely those designated # , # and #. These signs are I I n I V Vyi Myni DC X # ? Y F C # V #   r r tp H V A  IS cent.  -- # Cent #  J t S S' # e #  -- tSCcni Y  #  S # f S S cr A a H, S( sfi Z # # OoLz I t Uv xy AS Eic Qr, E A X Pf Tlw Fc Mi Xr zt Np Tt Z.' '# . Tr' ' # Fig. #. The development of the number signs. Ptolemy's system for writing thousands was to use a lower case letter preceded by a comma, the beta would then represent #, the gamma # and so forth. Even though a sign for zero existed, the idea of positional notation did not occur to the Greeks. letters that were already obsolete in the time of Ptolemy, the one designating # is called the digamma when a capital and stigma when lower case. When still used in writing by old-fashioned people in Ptolemy's time the stigma was a symbol in itself, serving as a contraction for the letters sigma and tau (hence its name). The # symbol bears the name qoppa and the # symbol Is called sampi, both letters disappeared early as letters, but were retained for figures because the Greek alphabet in its later form did not have enough letters. I f you read in a book that: (a  b)# -- a  #ab  b your recollection of just when and why you were taught this formula may be hazy, but you are not in doubt for even a moment that the  means "add" and that  means "is equal to" and that a stands for a x a or aa. Symbols like these are necessarily the result of agreement and convention, but even a convention has to be introduced by somebody. Who decided that  should be used to mean "add"? All the mathematical signs we now use originated during a relatively short period beginning in #, that is soon after the invention of printing. Prior to the year # all required arithmetical operations had usually been spelled out, manuscripts stated in words that you should add this and multiply that and that the correct result would be such and such. One of the first to decide that this was a nuisance was the Italian mathematician Lusa Pacioli, also known as Luca di Sorgo, #-#. In his own works he used the sign p to exprs the instruction to add, the line over the letter had the purpose of indicating that this was an operational sign, not a factor. For subtraction he used m or de (for demptus, in the sense of "diminished" or "reduced"). The idea of using symbols to indicate mathematical operations seems to have been applauded at once, but at first there was agreement on the principle only, not on the signs to be used. Pacioli's compatriot and near contemporary Niccolo Tartaglia (#-#) used the sign # to mean "plus", while he used the minus to indicate division. The sign # has survived on engineering drawings of continental European and Japanese origin, confusing American engineers who usually need a little time to discover that this is not supposed to be a Greek letter but just means "diameter". During the second half of the sixteenth century the sign for addition was usually a capital P with a horizontal line drawn through it under the loop. By # a number of German and Swiss mathematicians left off the loop and the  sign had been born. At the same time they agreed on the single line -- as the sign for minus. The multiplication sign X was introduced by the English mathematician William Oughtred in #. During the same year his compatriot Thomas Harriot advocated the centered dot  for the same purpose. Both are stiU in use, the X usually in elementary books and the  in more advanced works. Unfortunately British printers now often use the centered dot to indicate the decimal point -- I wish they would stop, if only to save my correspondence because my American printed books naturally use it as the sign for multiplication. 'Thomas Harriot also introdued the signs  and  respectively for "smaller than" and "larger than" and started writing a and a for aa and aaa. His sign for equality was the horizontal # which John Wallis, in #, used as the sign for infinity, defined as either the largest possible integer or else as the sum of all integers. Of course this is still the sign for infinity, while  is the sign for equality, first so used by the Englishman Robert Recorde in #. The German Wilhelm (Holtzmann) Xylander used a double vertical line as the sign for equality -- but even his compatriots soon switched over to Recorde's  which could not be mistaken for a Greek capital Pi. The sign for division was advocated simultaneously by Johann Henrich Rahn of Zurich and John Pell of London in about #. It is still in use in English-speaking countries while the other European countries and the Soviet Union use the simple colon ( : ) as the sign for division. The root sign goes back to Ruo i o' V. E  T I c -- o H Fig. #. Astronomical and astrological symbols. dolff in #, it is simply a special form of the written r (because of radix, Latin for root) just as the integral sign is a special form of the letter s (summa). Letters having one meaning only are a sub-division of mathematical symbols. In # the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler decided to designate the basis of the natural logarithms (#...) as e. It may be of interest to note that this thought occurred to him while he was thinking of a mathematical description of the processes taking place when a cannon is discharged. Another such definite letter is the , standing for the square root of minus #, and, of course, the Greek letter pi for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The use of pi was first suggested by Christian Goldbach in # but gained currency mainly because Euler accepted this usage in his main work that was printed in #. If you think that the letter c (for the velocity of light) is equally exclusive you happen to be wrong. Einstein's use of it in his formula Emc could not do away with aU the other uses of c. In treatises on aerodynamics it stands for the speed of sound, in works on rocketry it denotes the exhaust velocity and in some meteorological formulas it stands for the wind velocity. Even an established symbol can acquire a special meaning. Normally the dagger (!) is a reference to a footnote, but in paleontological books it means that the species marked by a dagger is extinct. And in biological works the astrological symbols used for Mars and Venus (we'll get to them in a moment) are used to denote "male" and "female". '"The next science where ssrm- bols are often used (though far less frequently than in mathematics) is astronomy. The signs, all of them of astrological origin, are not very numerous, (see Fig. #.) There is one for each planet and there are twelve signs for the twelve constellations of the zodiac. The other constellations, fortunately, have no signs. Both the signs for the planets and the custom of assigning a metal to each planet go back to classical antiquity, we can no longer tell who first drew the sign for Venus or who designated copper as the metal to go with that planet. But we can still tell what these symbols represent. The one for Mercury is a stylized drawing of the caduceus, the staff with the two snakes which Mercury carried with him when one of the other gods sent him on a long journey. The symbol for Venus is a hand mirror, vanity is not a recent invention. The symbol for Mars is composed of shield and spear while that for Jupiter is a special form of the letter Z (from Zeus). The symbol for Saturn is a stylized hand sickle, for Saturn was the god of agriculture. The symbols for the three planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were introduced soon after their discoveries to maintain tradition. V a H.# O GR Q ct AA. V S w A c j y F F. o t t T t S h # y Pt. V V T W Y Hg S # f Aa Fig. #. The mbok of the alchemtth. Uranus, discovered by Sir William Ilerschel, is usually designated by the symbol shown in the illustration, but in older books you can find the other symbol, the one incorporating a capital H, standing for Herschel's name. The reason for this symbol is tills : after the planet Neptune had been discovered on the basis of the calculations made by the Frenchman Leverrier, Leverrier's superior, D.F.J. Arago, felt that the new planet should be called Planet Leverrier. To make this suggestion more palatable to other astronomers he proposed to call Uranus Planet Herschel. Opposition to this suggestion was virtually unanimous and Leverrier himself quickly voted for Neptune as the name of the new planet. Neptune, of course, got the classical trident as its symbol, and the symbol for Uranus was changed by leaving out the H. Pluto's symbol has a double meaning. PL are the first two letters of the name and they are also the initials of Percival Lowell, who initiated the search that finally (after his death) culminated in the discovery of the planet. Most of the symbols for the constellations of the zodiac are also ancient, but the stylized versions now in use are fairly recent. During the late Middle Ages and afterwards artists competed with each other in producing the most elaborate drawings of the animals that they could manage, in fact they are usually so elaborate that one has trouble finding the stars. As regards the derivation of the stylized symbols the interpreter is sometimes on firm ground, but only sometimes. "The first constellation of the zodiac, Aries (the Ram) is easy, the symbol is obviously a stylized drawing of a ram's horns. The same goes for the second sign, Taurus (The Bull), the symbol is a stylized bull's head. Gemini (The Twins) is also simple, it is a Roman II. The fo irth sign. Cancer (The Crab) presents some difficulties, a French historian of science guessed that it may be the crab's claws. I feel that I can do a little better, the sign points in two directions and it originated in Europe where the most common representative of these animals is the crayfish. A crayfish, on land, will crawl forward, in water it will go backward and this fact is incorporated in several proverbs. (It is even incorporated in music, during the eighteenth century a melody which sounded the same, whether played from beginning to end, or from end to beginning, was XD Ptotinum Biimulh R Cobalt Zlc Monoanet V Wtsr Sulfids of n Copper hol ? Nlttoaea # -- # Arsenic  Alkali "#" Acid Ragulus A PMogistoa #-#. The chemical symbols of #!ov Bergman. referred to as a "crabwise melody".) The next sign, that of Leo (the Lion), bears a symbol much used in alchemical writings and called the "dragon's head", but I think that it is simply a capital Greek lambda, since the Greek word for lion also starts with an L Icon). The S#rmbol for Virgo (the Virgin) has not been explained, but it could be Christian symbolism since it dearly incorporates the letter M, standing for Mary. Libra (the Scales) is obviously a simplified drawing of an old-fashioned hand-held pair of scales. The symbol for Scorpios (the Scorpion) is unexplained, though the scorpion's tail is evidently part erf it. Sagittarius (the Archer) is, of course, symbolized by an arrow. The symbol for Capricornus (The Goat) defies explanation, unless it is supposed to express the jumps of a mountain goat. (When drawn artistically the animal used to represent Capricornus was usually the ibex of th Alps.) Aquarius (the Water Carrier) is neatly symbolized by waves while the symbol for Pisces (the Fishes) at least expresses that there is more than one. And now we come to the science that uses symbols about as extensively as does mathematics: chemistry, where a symbol saying H#SO# (sulphuric acid) is as definite and unequivocal as any mathematical formula. The predecessors, at least chronologically, of the chemists, the alchemists, just loved to indulge in symbols. Fig. # shows a collection of alchemical symbols for some metals and a few common substances. (For Figs. #, # and #, I am indebted to an article Development of Chemical Symbols by Prof. Ingo W. D. Hackh which appeared in The Scientific Monthly for March, #.) The first vertical row of these symbols is always the astrological sign of the corresiK)nding planet in the case of metals. The symbols for "water" are either waves, the second and third, or downward pointing arrows and triangles (rain) while the things that look like windows may also refer to rain and the necessity for staying indoors. The symbols for arsenic include crosses, triple crosses and a cross surmounted by a triangle (roof or tombstone) because of its toxicity. A pparently the first man who tried to bring some system into symbols used for chemical substances was the Swede Olov Bergman (#-#). He used the planetary symbols for those metals which traditionally were assigned to a planet, invented new symbols for metals discovered after # (platinum, cobalt, zinc, etc.) and added symbols for concepts such as acid, alkali, regulus and chalx. The latter two terms were based on the then current phlogiston theory which ruled the field until oxygen had not only been discovered but its actions were also understood. When Bergman spoke of the regulus of silver he meant the uncombined metal, while Chalx of mercury was used to designate what we would now call the oxide of mercury. By using symbols indicating compounds, Bergman anticipated the chemical formula. The man who continued this process was John Dalton (#) who did several things, (see Fig. #.) Each element was represented by a circle with clear geometrical design, or with a letter, after Dalton had run out of designs that were simple enough not to be confused with others. GO HO (HjO) # HN (NH,I ## nitrogen(X) strontium(# magnesium() !N,#.) (HjSO.) CjHaO, (CjH.Oj) (C.H#.) Fig. #. The chemical symbols of John Dalton (#). Note that Dalton, in labelling the iron atom !, the silver atom S and the gold atom G used the English and not th Latin names of the metals. But the important thing was that in Dalton's scheme the circle with a dot in the center no longer meant hydrogen in general. It meant an atom of hydrogen, just as in present chemical formulae, here a C also does not mean carbon in general, but very specifically a carbon atom. By the time Dalton published his New System of Chemical Philosophy (#) the concept of the molecule had not yet been advanced by Amadeo Avogadro, hence Dalton considered that water consisted of one atom of oxygen and one of hydrogen. As can be seen from the illustration Dalton undertook to picture fairly complicated compounds. That he happened to be wrong more often than he was right is fairly unimportant; mistakes are a customary item in the progress of science and they are valuable items if they, as in Dalton's case, pioint in the direction of their correction. One man who did much to correct these early mistakes, Baron Jons Jacob Berzelius, also invented the system of chemical notations which we use today, designating each element by a letter or two letters, since not every name of an element begins with a different letter. But in this century there was one belated attempt to revive drawn symbols. It originated with a German high-school teacher who held the opinion that such symbols, while not a contribution to chemical science, would contribute to the elementary teaching of chemistry. His symbols (Fig. #) were based on the valence of the elements. Everything that had a valence of I took the shape of an arrow, everything with a valence of # had two "handles" (like the symbols of beryllium and oxygen), everything with a valence of # was triangular and so forth. The illustration shows the first ten elements and a number of simple compounds. t  HaO A n I # I CO,  n A ,Q  Q . O K O ( Boric oci d ) ( Nitric acid ) Fig. #. The last attempt to save chemical symbols, ca. #. 'he criticism levelled immediately against this suggestion was that the symbols could not be pronoimced, or rather that, in order to pronounce them, one would have to use the Berzelius notation and that there was, therefore, no need for extra symbols. To that criticism another one can be added, namely that the figures for the compounds would rapidly get so difficult that one would need a long time to find out just what is under discussion. The symbol for H#BO# (shown) is stiU reasonable, but H#B#O# (tetraboric acid) would already be difficult and I did not even attempt to construct the symbolic picture of beryl, Be#AL#(SiOs)e. Near the beginning of this column I used a symbol which fitted the discussion but which I failed to explain. It was the  sign. Its origin goes back to # when the Count von Schlick was put in charge of minting operations, using the metal from a then newly discovered and rich silver mine at St. Joachim's Dale in Bohemia. In German this is Joachimsthal and the large shiny silver coins which were made quickly called Joachimsthaler. Then the word was abbreviated into Thaler, which in Low German changed into Daler and from there into Dollar. Soon a Thaler or Daler did not have to come from Joachimsthal anymore to be called that, any silver coin of about the right size was called a Daler. Both the name and the coin were widely known when the United States came into being and made a large silver coin, called Dollar, the unit of its monetary system. But what does that have to do with ? Well, since the dollar was not exclusively a coin of the United States it had to be referred to as U.S. Dollar in order to avoid misunderstandings. And it is believed that  evolved from the letters U.S. superimposed on      Robert Sheckley, absent from our pages for all too many years, comes back next issue, and comes back big. The story is Mindswap. In it a typical American youth (he's #) of the #d century, bored with the humdrum rounds of his existence (camping in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, skiing at the South Pole), seeks adventure out in space, and gets it by exchanging minds with a Martian. Nothing unusual about that... but the Martian is a criminal, and what happens to Our Hero thereafter is fast, funny, bright and colorful. It is, in a word, typical Sheckley. It's a complete novel, and we think you're going to put it right up there with Watcbbird, The Journey of Joenes and all the other Sheckley classics. Willy Ley's column is a beauty, too, dealing with the race to the Moon and its surest prize, an unmatchable site for an astronomical observatory. What it would be like, and what we can expect from it, are his themes in next month's For Your Information -- and we've asked a few first-rate astronomers, including Donald H. Menzel and Robert S. Richardson, to add their own views and comments. We're pleased with the result. I (tT do trust youl" said Tom A Parent. "You don't! You don't!" said his wife Lucy. "You just say you do but you don't!" Tom ran the fingers of his right hand in near desperation through his closecropped brown hair. About them in the lounge of the imperial suite aboard the spaceship descending on the planet Mul'Rahr, four Hugwo lance-gunners stood scattered about like statues at rigid attention. They looked like nothing so much as oversized clams, Anybody can get rich quick speculating in planets -- if they pick the right planet! equipped with armored legs and arms, their tall lance-guns upright in their grasps. Luckily, thought Tom, the Hugwos did not understand English, which he and Lucy were talking at the moment. Lucy was blonde and beautiful and he loved her dearly, but -- "I do!" said Tom. "You don't understand. It's like Caesar's wife -- the Consort Lucy must be above suspicion. As ambassador to Mul'Rahr, I may have to engage in some pretty active diplomatic trickeries. If you don't know about them, no one can accuse you -- " He broke off. A fifth Hugwo, the corporal in charge of the honor guard of lance-gunners, had just clanked in with a message in code, which he handed to Tom. "Thank you." "Sir!" shouted the corporal, clanked backwards three paces, saluted with the precision for which these mercenary soldiers were famous, and became rigid. Both he and Tom had spoken the lingua franca of the civilized worlds of the Galactic Federation, to which the human worlds were relative newcomers. Tom scanned the message, translating mentally as he read. He had had the recent codes hypnoed into him before leaving Earth. ttT keep telling you," Tom went on to Lucy in English as he read, "how serious this is. We overextended our human resources when we took over the Jaktal empire" "But you took over the Jaktal seat for us among the forty-three great interstellar powers in this sector." said Lucy, puzzled. "I thought -- " "That gave us political position. But we need economic position," mumbled Tom, as he perused the message. "The Office Upstairs, back on Earth -- see how I trust you and tell you October # things -- decided this could be best gotten by investing in the advantages of future trading agreement with the Wockii, the dominant race on Mul'Rahr. Against my advice, incidentally. It seemed to me there was something fishy -- " "They asked you?" said Lucy. "Of course," muttered Tom, still decoding as he talked. "After all. I'm the only living individual of the human race who's a member of the Interstellar Assassin's Guild, even if I am only an apprentice and became one by mistake. Because of my apprentice's briefing, I know more about the interstellar situation than any human alive -- oh, oh, just as I thought!" He snapped a pocket loset from his Assassin's weapons harness and hastily disintegrated the message blank. "What? What did you think? Tell me!" said Lucy. "I shouldn't," muttered Tom, snapping the loset back into its holster clip. "You don't trust me!" "But I will." Tom began to pace worriedly up and down the room, between the statuesque Hugwos, with Lucy following after him. "It's just as I feared. There's been a wobble in Wockii futures on the Interstellar Futurities Exchange. A bad wobble." "Wobble?" cried Lucy. "Wobble? I don't understand." "It's not easy for anyone to understand without an Assassin's briefing knowledge," said Tom, frowning. "That's why I warned the Office Upstairs against this." "What did they do -- oops!" said Lucy. Tom had just turned around suddenly and bumped into her. # # #orry," said Tom. "Well,  briefly, there's a sort of interstellar stock exchange in whch member races can speculate by buying and selling stock in their own and other races' future wealth and productivity. When we took over the Jaktal empire we took over the Jaktal committments. In order to back these, the Office Upstairs decided to issue stock in our own human futures -- all very good and sound as far as it went. But then, they turned around and wanted to borrow against the credit thus established to purchase the total stock of the futures of the dominant race here on Mul'Rahr, listed as the Wockiis. And I was sent here to endorse the purchase by a trade agreement with the Wockiis personally, even though they haven't reached Interstellar Citizenship level and are administrated by the Skikana, who discovered Mul'Rahr." "But what's wrong with that?" "Both the sixth and seventh of my para-instincts activated by the Assassin's briefings were made suspicious by the availability of those same Wockii futures. My seventh, in particular, was very positive about it. It was all too easy and now we're committed. The endorsing trade agreement is only a formality unless actual chicanery can be proved." He stopped pacing. Lucy stopped too. "You think there's been chicanery?" Lucy stared at him. "No doubt of it. But can we prove it?" Tom shook his head worriedly. "That message just told me there's been a sudden drop in the value of Wockii futures on the Interstellar Exchange. In one hour their value dropped fifteen points below the computer-predicted minimum level for the next thousand years. A bad 'wobble' as the Exchange dealers put it." "Then you mustn't make the trade agreement. That's all," said Lucy firmly. "I can't avoid it without reason." Tom paused to glance at a screen across the room, which showed a wide expanse of concrete landing pad and a battalion of what looked like six foot tall praying mantises armed and standing strictly at attention. "We're almost down. There's the Skikana honor guard drawn up to greet us. From now on be careful what you say. Even a mountaintop ten miles away has ears. Only in our Ambassadorial quarters -- " The landing bell of the ship rang suddenly through all the rooms, followed by the distant thrumming of what seemed like harp music. "What's that?" cried Lucy. tC'The Skikana battle harps," said Tom. "You'll see them when we go out. They vibrate so powerfully they can be heard right through the hull of the ship. Come on now. We get off first. Protocol -- Corporal!" "Sir!" shouted the Hugwo corporal, springing to life. He rapped out orders in Hugwo and the lance-gunners formed up behind Tom and Lucy and they all marched out of the suite, down the ship's corridor and out through the airlock. "Be sure not to squint," hissed Tom at Lucy in English as they went. "We're stepping out of the lock into pretty bright sunlight, now. And Skikanas are extremely touchy and proud. They take offense at the slightest provocation." They marched out and down the landing ramp, Lucy trying valiantly not to squint in spite of the sunlight that made the whole scene waver through a film of tears. They halted, their heads ringing with the powerful vibrations of the Skikana battle harps, great seven-foot triangular, metal-stringed affairs, each resting on a spike driven deep into the very concrete itself. "... And may I also present my consort, the Consort Lucy, Colonel?" Lucy heard Tom saying. She cleared her vision in time to see a six-foot high praying mantis shape leaning stiffly over her. "H-Honored to meet you, sir," she managed in the sibilant Skikana tongue she and Tom had picked up on the way here. "Madame!" snapped the Skikana colonel, with a frosty bow. "May you dine on your worst enemy by sundown!" "Oh, thank you!" said Lucy. "May you dine on yours even sooner than that!" To her surprise she saw Tom frown. "Madame!" stiffening, the colonel clashed his jaws together almost spasmodically. Oddly, a little froth appeared on them. "I would not presume! We Skikana take no advantages and need none. To dine before the consort of my guest. Skikana manners would not permit!" "Oh, I didn't mean -- " Lucy was beginning. But Tom, with diplomatic smoothness, was already stepping into the breach. "Happily," he said, "I may inform the Colonel that my consort has already broken her fast, this day." "May I be the first to congratulate her, then!" said the colonel, relaxing. He relaxed, in fact, quite noticably, and his gaze came unfocused. He pulled himself together with a jerk and clashed his jaws spasmodically. "Follow me. I will escort you to your quarters." He led them and their Hugwos on to a waiting flying platform which took off just as the battle harps struck up again. II tCh, my!" said Lucy in English, rubbing her ears when they were safely alone in their ambassadorial suite at the Skikana fort. "What was that they were playing?" "None Shall Interrupt Our Feast," replied Tom. "Hmmm. Did you notice anything odd about the colonel?" "I couldn't tell," said Lucy, truthfully. "Everything he did and said seemed odd to me. Why were you humming?" "That song," said Tom, thoughtfully. "The Skikana are so touchy they're liable to give themselves away with anything they do. Something is definitely rotten about the whole business of Wockii futures. If there was only some way to get out of it -- " "But can't we do that? Just write off our losses?" asked Lucy. "It would break us," said Tom, solemnly. "Our human worlds would be mortgaged and our future generations placed under a crushing load of financial obligation. If the Wockii futures turn out to be worthless we won't be able to use them as security to meet our committments while we wait a thousand years for the Wockii to reach a civilized level and begin paying off in exportimport agreements with us." He frowned. "What puzzles me," he said, "is the Skikana. By taking protectorate rights over the Wockii they gave up their right to any direct interest in Wockii futures. So they shouldn't care one way or another about the matter -- but obviously they're mixed up in it somehow." "Can't you get them to give themselves away, somehow?" asked Lucy. "Betray themselves, I mean?" "A very good idea," said Tom, thoughtfully. He stepped across the room to a communications screen, and pressed the buttons at its base. A second later the face of the Skikana colonel appeared on the screen. "Sir Ambassador!" said the colonel and champed his jaws. "In what may I serve you?" "You may supply me with an escort, my dear Colonel," said Tom. "I, with my Hugwos and the Consort Lucy will start for Wockiiland, immediately." The colonel stared out of the screen blankly at him for a moment. "But sir Ambassador," the Skikana said, "it has been arranged for the Wockii chiefs to come to the fort, here." "No doubt. However," said Tom, with diplomatic steeliness in his tones, "I have concluded that it is of the utmost importance for me to contact -- " he bent a severe glance upon the colonel in the screen " -- the dominant race of Mul'Rahr, immediately." "Sir!" The colonel's jaws champed. "A banquet has been ordered." "We shall appear at the banquet, but leave immediately afterwards. Good day," said Tom, and cut the connection. I mmediately afterwards, however, he activated the screen again, this time with a view outside the fort gate looking backvards into the wooded hills of the wild native countryside, toward Wockiiland. "What are you looking for?" asked Lucy, after a moment "Watch. Wait," said Tom, without turning his head. Lucy watched. After a moment or two, a platoon of Skikana soldiers, mounted on individual flying platforms, left the gate and skimmed with haste toward the hills. "The pot," said Tom to Lucy, "is starting to boil. Clearly for some reason the Skikana want to warn the Wockii's against my coming. Why? There must be something in Wockiiland they don't want me to see." The doors to their quarters gave forth a mellow chime, interrupting him. A second later the Hugwo corporal returned from answering it leading a Skikana captain of Regulars, lean and hard-bitten, but just at the moment with unfocused eyes. "Bells..." murmured the captain, dazedly. "Sir!" shouted the Hugwo corporal to Tom, and the captain came to. "Visitor to speak with the Ambassador, sir!" He saluted and stepped back. The captain bowed to Tom and Lucy. "Sir," he said. "I am Captain Jabat of the #th Skikana here at Fort Duhnderhef . Possibly you notice the medals on my prothorax?" "Indeed," said Tom, his eyes narrowing. "They are poor things, no doubt, in the eyes of an Assassin," said Jabat, bowing gracefully. "Nevertheless, I must confess to a nodule of pride in the medal on the far right. You see it there?" "Ah, ys," said Tom. "I received it," went on Jabat, "on winning the championship of the quick-draw-kill-anddevour, of the Skikana handgun competition at the last All-Skikana Worlds Games. As an Assassin, of course you are familiar with the Skikana handgunning art?" "Of course," said Tom. "Then, for the pride of the #th Skikana here at the fort," said Jabat, "may I ask you to accept this small offering?" He produced a tiny gold whistle from his weapons harness and blew it. A Skikana enlisted soldier marched in bearing a silver dish with a cover which he placed on a small table at Tom's right. Bowing, both Skikanan withdrew. tt'nr'hey didn't waste any time," said Tom, as the door closed behind the two. He gazed with slitted eyes at the dish. "Develishly subtle, these Skikana." "What did he give you?" inquired Lucy, lifting the cover of the dish. "Oh -- " "Don't touch it!" said Tom, quickly. Lucy had revealed a beautiful competition model Skikana handgun. "If a human hand touches it, a signal will go off on the #th Skikana bulletin board, and I'll have accepted the challenge." "Challenge?" Lucy jerked her hand back from the gun. "Tom! And he's a champion! They're trying to kill you!" "Nothing so crude, unfortunately," said Tom. "What they must be planning is to discredit me. As an Assassin, they expect me to make short work of Jabat in the duel. However, having killed him, I must finish off the matter by ceremoniously eating every bit of him. It's the final tribute to a fallen foe, according to the Skikana code duello. They've undoubtedly checked up and found that we humans haven't the incredible Skikana capacity for food -- even if Skikana were edible by human standards." He looked thoughtful. "If I refuse to eat him," Tom said, "they undoubtedly plan a protest that will get me removed as ambassador. And no other human has my qualifications to see through what's going on here." "Don't kill him, then," urged Lucy. "Just -- just scratch him." "I'm not sure I can," said Tom, solemnly. "You forget. I've had the briefing, but I lack the years of intensive physical training that makes an Assassin. The Skikana don't know it, but their champion can almost undoubtedly take me. I'll be dead before I can clear the handgun from its clip on my harness." "Tom!" Lucy's face was horrified. "Don't you fight him! Don't you fight him at all!" "An Assassin back away from a challenge? Impossible," said Tom. "The Assassin's Guild themselves would eliminate me if I did such a thing." "Can't you just tell him, some other time?" Lucy almost wrung her hands. "Be polite, but firm?" "No," said Tom, sadly. "After all, whole armies have been known to mutiny and refuse to advance when they heard that a single Assassin barred their path." He sighed, heavily. "Well, maybe I can think of something. We better get going to the banquet." Ill Ourrounded by their Hugwos,  they left the suite, and were guided by an officer posted outside their door down a corridor and into a vast, hall-like room vith a lofty, raftered roof and no windows except narrow slits up near the rafters at the top of the walls. These windows were set ajar, however, to the warm, sunset air of Mul'Rahr. Inside the hall great ceremonial torches eight feet tall flared and danced their flames above the long tables at which the Skikana officers sat. Wide circular platters of polished wood sat before each diner or empty chair. And enormous toadstools like logs of wood gave up a savory smell like roast beef as they lay at length on the tables brt veen rows of plates. The Hugwo corporal conducted Tom and Lucy to seats at the left of the Skikana colonel. "You have met our brave Captain Jabat?" inquired the colonel, as soon as the two humans were seated. "I have indeed," replied Tom. "Even among we Skikana his courage is proverbial," said the colonel. "He..." his gaze wandered and his voice trailed off. "Colonel!" prompted Lucy, kindheartedly. The colonel started, forked a bite of toadstool into his mouth, gulped it down and came alert again. "... Ah, yes," he said significantly, looking at Tom. "It is courage not even to be despised by an... Assassin, shall we say?" Lucy caught her breath. "We shall, to be sure," said Tom smoothly. "But work before pleasure, my dear Colonel. The Wockii concern me at the moment." The colonel inclined his head and signaled to a Skikana enlisted soldier, who stepped forward to carve slices from the nearest huge toadstool. He served the slices on the platters before Tom and Lucy. Lucy sniffed obtrusively at hers. The aroma was delicious. "Is it safe for us to eat?" she whispered in English to Tom. "I'll check," whispered back Tom. The colonel's attention was momentarily devoted to finishing his own slice and ordering another with typical Skikana voracity. Tom produced a small handbook and thumbed through it. "Let's see... 'MuVRahr... toadstooloids of, large... Agarica MuI'Rahrens is Gigantica, page one hundred and fortythree...' Here it is... 'See Rhu, page one-thirty-eighf..." he flipped pages. " 'Rhu, a widespread root system often extending over miles underground, putting forth root and tuberose projections of many varieties and types'..." Tom's voice trailed off. "Hmm..." he muttered, "interesting..." "But can we eat it?" demanded Lucy. "Oh!" Tom started, almost after the fashion of the colonel. "Yes, I think so... 'edible for the following races... , Adjarts, Allahns,... uh, Hssoids, Hytszs...' Yes, here we are... 'Humans'." "Oh, good, said Lucy, "it smells so appetizing -- "  twang from high above interrupted her, followed by an approaching high-pitched drone and ending in a thud. A small black arrow quivered in the center of Lucy's slice of toadstooloid, pining it to the wooden platter. Shocked silence filled the hall and all eyes turned upward to discover a three-foot high, faunlike figure covered with white woolly hair and with a lamblike face. This figure stood perched on one of the rafters by an open window, now reslinging a small bow over its shoulder and drawing an eighteen-inch sword. "What -- what is it?" gasped Lucy, unthinkingly in English. "A Flal," answered Tom, swiftly in the same language, "supposed to be one of the semiintelligent local life forms -- " The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a bellow. "A Flal!" the colonel was roaring, starting to his feet and tugging at the ceremonial sword that was the only weapon the Skikana officers had worn to the banquet. "Get it down from there! Get it down, I say!" With a sudden, fantastic leap, the Flal left the rafter high overhead and landed on the table before the colonel. In a twinkling, the Flal's midget sword was menacing the colonel's prothorax and an imperious whistle burst from the Flal's lamblike lips. "Cut it down! That's an order!" thundered the colonel to his officers. "Never mind me!" But the officers hesitated. Taking advantage of this hesitation, the Flal turned and directed a stream of angry, musical whistling at Tom, gesturing with its free hand at the nearest toalstooloid. Then the Skikana officers dashed forward and the Flal, releasing the colonel, dodged away, ducking into the sea of three-foot long, flashing Skikana swords, twisting, swivelhipping and dancing on black hooves as his own tiny blade, glittering with a speed of reflex the Skikana could not match, fenced a way for him to the nearest torch stand. A leap carried him to the top of the stand. From there, disdainful of the licking flame, another leap carried him to crenellations in the wall and from there to a rafter leading to an open window. At the window he turned about, and, whipping a miniature hunting horn from his belt, he paused to blow a blast like some small, elfin bronx cheer at those below. The Skikana soldiery howled in baffled fury, waving their weapons. Then the Flal had ducked through the window and was gone. tcQir Ambassador! Consort  Lucy!" said the colonel, gnashing his jaws but sheathing his sword and getting himself back under control -- he paused to gulp a half-slice of toalstooloid -- "please be seated. Forgive this minor interruption. These local life forms -- mere semi-inteUigent animals -- not even a language, just whistle to show their emotional state -- please put it out of your mind. My soldiers will see that the banquet is not interrupted again." "That won't be necessary, colonel," said Tom. "I promised only to put in an appearance at this banquet and I consider that promise fulfilled now. I, my Consort, and my Hugwos will make use of that escort I asked you for, to leave for Wockiiland immediately." "Of -- of course!" said the colonel, getting himself under control. "If you wish it, sir Ambassador. The escort is provided. However -- " he hesitated. "I cannot permit the Consort Lucy to risk a night journey through the Mul'Rahrian wilds. You and the Hugwos, of course, but -- " "Sir!" Tom's voice snapped him off in mid-speech. "Are you presuming to tell me where to take my Consort?" "I have a duty," said the colonel stiffly, "as local commander to protect civilians -- " "May I remind the colonel?" Tom's words cut like a knife. Lucy looked at him in admiration. "That the Consort Lucy will have an Assassin to escort her?" "Sir!" said the colonel, stiffening in his turn. "Am I to infer a lack of trust in my soldiers and myself." "Certainly not," said Tom, without hesitation, and Lucy beamed at him for his quick thinking. It was perfectly clear that if Tom had expressed a lack of trust in the Skikana, the colonel would have had grounds for a protest to get Tom removed as ambassador. "I trust you and your officers and men impUcity, Colonel. It is the Consort Lucy I don't trust." Lucy gasped. "You don't -- " the colonel's naturally bulging eyes seemed to bulge farther, " -- trust your consort, sir Ambassador?" "Not out of my sight for a moment," said Tom, firmly. "A purely human situation. Colonel. I'm sure you wouldn't be interested in the details. And now, the escort?" "It's already waiting for you at the west gate," said the colonel, stiffly. Gnashing his jaws in defeat, he stepped back and allowed them both to proceed by him followed by their Hugwos. IV F ifteen minutes later, they floated westward on flying platforms over the rolling semiwooded landscape of Mul'Rahr under the enormous single moon that made the night seem almost as bright as day. Tom and Lucy were sharing a platform, with their faithful Hugwos riding individual platforms before and behind them. Beyond and behind the Hugwos were half a dozen platform mounted soldiers of the Skikana escort, none of whom seemed close enough to be in earshot. Tom lowered his voice and spoke to Lucy in English. "Lucy -- " he began. "Don't speak to me," said Lucy, staring off in the opposite direction at the shadowy woods. "Do not speak to me! I would appreciate it!" "Now Lucy -- " said Tom. "If you please," said Lucy. "There is nothing for us to discuss. Nothing at all." "Don't you understand?" pleaded Tom. "The colonel wanted you as a hostage. I couldn't leave you in his hands. I had to say the first thing that came into my head!" "No doubt," said Lucy. "It was very clever of you. Curious, is it not, though, that you should make use of the fact that I am untrustworthy? I do not wish to make a point of this," went on Lucy in syllables resembling splinters of jagged ice. "It merely crossed my mind. In passing, so to speak." "Lucy, I do trust you. You know I do!" "How bright the moonlight is upon this world," said Lucy, splintering a little more ice. They rode in silence for the following forty minutes or so, at the end of which Tom tried again. "Lucy -- " he began. He broke off suddenly as he caught sight of the officer in charge of their escort whipping his flying platform about and zipping back toward the one Tom and Lucy occupied. "Yes, Captain?" asked Tom, as the officer swung about and flew alongside. It was Captain Jabat. The moonlight glittered in his black eyes in what Lucy, at least, could not help but feel was a very sinister fashion. "Sir," said the captain to Tom. "We approach the Wockii chiefs now. We should meet them in the next few seconds." "Excellent. Tell me, Captain," said Tom, thoughtfully. "Just as a matter of interest, was it a case of your original Skikana scoutship seeking out the Wockii, when they discovered Mul'Rahr? Or did the Wockii come forth on their own initiative to make friends with the scoutship?" CC'p'he Wockii came forth on their own, sir," said Jabat. "We consider it a tribute to our Skikana approachability, and honor. The Skikana honor is without stain. None may accuse us of being merciful in victory or resentful in defeat." "To be sure," said Tom. "However, aside from that -- would you tell me if the Wockii are a particularly truthful race?" "Hardly, my dear sir," Jabat gave the low rasp of Skikana laughter. "We have a little saying at Fort Duhnderhef. The only Wockii that don't lie are the dead Wockii, and even they lie about being dead." Jabat rasped again. "You follow the joke, sir Ambassador and Consort Lucy? See, the Wockii lie when they're alive, and when they're flat on the ground, dead. ' "Very humorous, Captain," interrupted Tom. "Very humorous indeed. But isn't that the Wockii Chiefs I see approaching now?" Jabat turned and looked up toward the head of the column. "You are right, sir Ambassador," he said. And, whipping his platform about, he shot off to meet the group that was approaching on foot in the moonlight. In a moment the two parties had come together. The Wockii stood about nine-feet high. They looked something like enormous badgers with curved short tusks. They wore heavy, six-foot cutlasses but nothing else except ribbons tied about their tusks. "Sir Assassin," said Captain Jabat, presenting these hulking figures to the platform on which Tom and Lucy rode, "and Consort Lucy, may I introduce Hlugar. Chief of Chiefs for the Wockii." Captain Jabat had spoken in Wockii, which Tom and Lucy had also learned by briefing machine on the way to Mul'Rahr, as they had learned the Skikana tongue. "All hail, Hlugar!" said Tom, in Wockii. "All hail, foreigner!" grunted Hlugar in a deep bass voice that seemed to shake the bones of the two humans. "Welcome to Wockiiland. My burrow is your burrow." "And my burrow is your burrow. Let us go feast this happy occasion." In a shrewd tone of voice he added, much to Lucy's astonishment. "What shall we feast on? Perhaps -- some roasted Flals?" Hlugar's bass bellow split the moonlight of the Mul'Rahrian night. "Never!" he roared, dropping on all fours and beginning to dig frantically in the dirt before him. "Never eat Flals! Never, you hear?" He thrust his tusked muzzle down into the hole he had dug, roaring muffedly -- "Never!" "Sir -- " began Jabat, in an outburst of indignation. But before he could continue, sudden bedlam broke loose. Ohrill whistles sounded from the tree shadows on all sides of them. Small black arrows began to drone among them. The booming bellows of the Wockii mingled with the harsh battle commands of the Skikana. There was a swirl of motion and little faun-like, hooved figures with gleaming swords were all about them. Before Tom and Lucy could move, something like heavy cloths fell over their heads. They felt themselves picked up and carried off at a run. It was useless to struggle. They were carried for some distance and gradually Lucy felt her senses slipping away from her. The cloth or whatever heavy material it was that was wrapped around her seemed to give off a pleasant, faint perfume with an anesthetic effect. She roused herself to struggle against it, but it was too late. She drifted off into unconsciousness. When she opened her eyes again, she was lying on the slope of a pleasant, grassy hillside. Dawn had just broken and the bright yellow sun of Mul'Rahr was rising in the blue sky directly ahead of her. A little distance off stood Tom, facing some armed Flals. Surprisingly, only a dozen feet or so away, the faithful Hugwos stood at attention, lance-guns in hand... It's no use," Lucy heard Tom saying to the Flals. "I can't understand a meaning-symbol you whistle." He was speaking in Wockii, Lucy noted drowsily. She remembered that she was mad at him for some reason, but she felt so pleasant that she could not at the moment recall what she was supposed to be mad at him about. "Tom!" she cried faintly, trying to sit up. Tom turned, saw her stirring and hurried over. "I didn't know you were awake," he said, helping her to her feet. "You feel fine, don't you?" "As a matter of fact, yes," said Lucy, bewildered. "I do." She got to her feet. "But what  "That was the veil, or undermembrane of the Rhu toadstooloid -- Agarica M ul' R ahren sis Gigantica, the one they served us for dinner at the fort," said Tom. "It appears to have shght narcotic as well as excellent analgesic and tranquilizing properties. But never mind that now. I'm finally beginning to get the general picture of the situation here on Mul'Rahr, and it's more desperate than I thought. Ordinarily as the consort of an ambassador, you'd be safe trusting in the Skikana sense of honor. But the Skikana here on Mul'Rahr, as I suspected when the colonel tried to hold you back as a hostage, are no longer to be trusted. They're planning actual genocide -- but there's no time to go into that now. Do you have your consort's credentials with you?" (#f course," said Lucy, surprised, reaching down into the small belt-purse of her dress. "You told me never to go anywhere without them. I keep them right in -- yes, here they are." "Good!" said Tom, plucking the papers out of her fingers. He whipped a stylus out of its holster on his weapons harness and scribbled rapidly on the margin of the topmost paper. He folded the papers and thrust them back at Lucy. "Put those back into your purse, there -- " Lucy obeyed, as he went on. "If you hear that anything's happened to me, you contact the nearest representative of the Assassin's Guild and show them what I've written. And -- " "Happen to you!" cried Lucy, her fingers freezing on the snap of the purse, which she had just reclosed. "What do you mean happen to you? What do you mean if I hear -- " "I'm sending you directly back to the landing field and the spaceship we came in on," said Tom. "Now don't argue -- " "I won't argue!" burst out Lucy. "I just won't go! You can't make me! I'm not going to leave you!" "Yes, you are," said Tom, urgently. "The Hugwos will see you safely back to the landing field." A sharp whistle from the group of Flals interrupted him. He looked over at the small hooved figures and groaned. "Too late," he said. "I'll just have to hope that the Skikana have enough sense left to spare you when they attack. Come along, I've got to get back to these Flals." "But attack? Why should the Skikana attack?" asked Lucy, bewilderedly, following him back toward the Flals. "Because this spot here is the place the Skikana have been searching for ever since they discovered the Wockii had lied to them about being tlie dominant intelligent race on Mul'Rahr. For the same reason the Flals kidnapped us and brought us here to help them." "But why do you have to be the one to help them?" wailed Lucy. "Why can't you leave? Then I'd go with you." tcTor me," said Tom, solemn-T ly. "There's no choice. The galaxy knows that no Assassin could ever be kidnapped without his permitting it. You can't kidnap an Assassin. Kill one, yes, if you have sufficient battle-hardened troops and mobile armor. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that I allowed myself to be kidnapped by the Flals out of cowardice, in an attempt to avoid facing up to Jabat's challenge -- unless I can get to the bottom of things here and clear myself by showing what I was really trying to do." "But... but, I don't understand -- " Lucy broke off helplessly, staring at him as they stopped before the small group of Flals. Those small individuals were now looking up at Tom and Lucy inquiringly. Their little pink noses, furry faces, and kindly brown eyes were lit up by the golden rays of the rising sun. "I'm not completely sure I do. either," said Tom. "I'm using my para-instincts and playing by ear as I go. These Flals have a high nobility-of-character index. My para-instincts assure me of that. But since their language, and they really do have one, is musico-emotional in base, I can't understand the explanations they've been trying to give me. It's as if they see the universe around them in terms of varying degrees of right or wrong and define those degrees in musical terms to make up their language." "Oh," said Lucy, looking at them with a softening glance, and remembering the single Flal in the banquet hall fighting off all the Skikana officers. "And they're such brave little beings, too." "That's true, they are. And," said Tom, "because of their natures, able to read the characters of others at a glance. They were able to sense, as a result, right from the start that we and the Hugwos are honorable. Just as they sensed from the beginning that the Skikana are cruel and rapacious; and they've always known, of course, that the Wockii were brutal and greedy." "But if they want you to help them, but can't tell you -- " Lucy was beginning, when a whistle from the closest Flal interrupted her. Tom turned to the Flal and whistled the first few bars of Mendelssohn's Wedding March. The Flal turned to Lucy and bowed politely. "Why!" cried Lucy, delighted. "You can, too, talk to them!" itrfnly after a fashion," answered Tom. "I was trying to tell him that you're my wife. Of course they've always said music was the universal language. But that's an oversimplification. In this case the concept of 'wife' probably missed him completely, in spite of the fact that the Flals, like us are bisexual. What he probably got were just some of the emotional overtones of our relationship." "But you could work out a language from that sort of thing, couldn't you?" inquired Lucy. "In time. But time is just what we don't have -- " A silvery Flal horn sounded off among the giant toadstooloids and the trees at the base of the slope they stood on. A second later, another sounded from the far side of the hill. "There come the Wockii and the Skikana. Just as I'd hoped." "Just as you'd hoped?" Lucy stared at him. "Yes," said Tom. "I particularly need those Skikana battle harps." He turned to the Flals and made pounding motions in the air with his fist. "Try the drum again," he said in Wockii. The group parted and just beyond them Lucy saw what seemed to be a drum mounted on a stake driven down into the earth. Two Flals began to beat the drum vigorously. It did not sound so loud in the air, but Lucy could feel the vibration of it through the ground at her feet. A sudden new chorus of whistles broke out below the slope. They all turned around and saw the first line of armed Skikana infantry march into view and pause at the foot of the slope. Mixed in among them were heavy Wockii figures carrying their mighty cutlasses in hairy fists. The Flals drew their swords. A strange sound vibrated all about the scene. "What was that?" cried Lucy. "It sounded like a yawn!" But Tom's attention was directed down the hill towards the Skikana battle harpsmen, who were emerging from the trees in front of the troops and driving the supporting spikes of their harps into the earth so that the harps stood upright, ready to play. The Skikana colonel emerged into view, with Captain Jabat marching correctly at his left and half a pace to his rear. Together and alone, they marched up the hill toward Tom, Lucy and the Flal leaders. Halfway up the slope the colonel said something to Jabat, who stopped and held his position midway there between the forces of the Wockii and the Skikana. He came on up the slope and halted before Tom. V said stiffly. He stood 'for a second, champing his jaws a little uncertainly as if he was having trouble remembering what he was going to say. "I must ask you to use your influence with these Flals to cause them to surrender themselves so that we may dig up this area to discover goods reported stolen from our fort. Do not think of resistance, please. Your case is hope -- What was that?" "Another yawn," said Lucy. "Nonsense!" snapped the colonel, sharply. Then, getting his voice under control, he gave a curt bow of apology in Lucy's direction. " -- As I was saying, resistance would be useless. Your position on this slope is hopeless." "Permit me," said Tom, "to disagree with you, sir. The Flals, as your Skikana have cause to know, are not unworthy fighters in spite of their small size. All the galaxy knows the reputation of the Hugwo lance-gunners. And, last but not least, I am myself an Assassin." "True," said the colonel, champing his jaws convulsively once more. "However, I must inform you that your recent actions in allowing yourself to be kidnapped by these Flals, here, have cast some grave doubts in our mind on your status as a true Assassin. No doubt they are groundless -- " "No doubt," said Tom. "And no doubt I am mistaken in my conjecture that the supply of unharvested toadstooloid is rapidly approaching the vanishing point?" The colonel staggered visibly, but pulled himself erect once more. "There's plenty of toadstooloid!" he snapped. "Plenty," said Tom in steely tones, "for the native Flal and Wockii populations. After all the ecology was balanced that way. But not enough for these and a regiment of Skikana soldiery, when each soldier was capable of eating his own weight or more of food at a sitting. And moreover, once the effect of the toadstooloid upon the Skikana eaters became known -- " "Stop!" shouted the colonel. "Assassin or not, I warn you. There are some secrets not meant to be uncovered." "The secret," said Tom, unflinchingly, "has already been uncovered. It began when whoever was fronting for you Skikana in the purchase of Wockii futures realized that those futures were worthless and made them available on such attractive terms that my human government snapped them up. This forced you to a situation where you had to seek out the true dominant intelligence of Mul'Rahr and destroy it." (Ctot true!" snapped the colonel, frothing slightly at the jaws. "A pack of lies! The Flals are not intelligent! And no normal civilized race would dare the crime of genocide, even if -- " "The Flals are intelligent," said Tom, relentlessly. "You found out the Wockii had lied to you about that shortly after you established your administration here on Mul'Rahr." "Lies!" roared the colonel. "If that were true, we'd have made an agreement with the Flals at once, rather tlian risk prosecution as a race violating Interstellar agreement. Why didn't we?" "For the same reason," said Tom, "that you Skikana stationed here could contemplate the crime of genocide. You were not normal any longer. You -- " "Stop!" champed the colonel. "No," said Tom. "It's too late to hide the truth. Agarica MuV Rahrensis Gigantica, or the local edible giant toadstooloid on which you, like the Wockii and the Flals, have been feeding is not dissimilar to the Agaricas muscarius, or fly agaric, one of the poisonous mushrooms of my own world." Lucy gasped, but Tom went on without paying any attention to her. "MttVRahrensis produces a derivative of the alkaloid muscarine. Which, however, acts not so much as a poison but as a narcotic, a tranquilizer and a euphoric. Taken in the small amounts of toadstooloid, a Flal, or even a Wockii individual, is capable of consuming at one time, the toadstooloid is merely a mild and harmless intoxicating food -- " "Stop!" said the colonel, his voice cracking in a very unSkikana-like way. "But," continued Tom relentlessly, "taken in the enormous quantities in which the smallest Skikana soldier can consume at a sitting, the toadstooloid becomes a powerful, habit-forming drug. A drug that the addict will go to any lengths to obtain and which no intelligent, civilized being would allow another inteUigent being to consume -- " CtX rery well," said the colonel. ' He had pulled himself together, and there was something almost sad in his voice. "You would not let me stop you. Now you've sealed your own fate." He turned and bowed to Lucy. "I regret. Consort Lucy," he said, "that you must be included with the rest. No human, Hugwo or Flal must leave this spot alive." He looked back sadly at Tom. "Didn't you realize that addicted soldiers like my troops would stop at nothing once our secret was out? Death means nothing to us, compared to being cut off from our toadstooloid supply. You are doomed once I give the word for the battle harps to sound the attack." "Not at all," said Tom. "Sound them, and find out." The colonel stared at him. "Sir!" he said. "You wish me to sound the battle harps for the attack upon you?" "T-Tom..." began Lucy, timidly. "After all -- " "Quiet, Lucy!" said Tom. "I know what I'm doing. Go ahead !" he snapped at the colonel. "Sound the harps. I defy you!" "Defy me?" In a sudden typical, towering Skikana rage, the colonel spun about and shouted down the hill to Captain Jabat. "Sound the Harps! Prepare to advance!" Up on the slope they all saw the captain salute and turn. His voice floated faintly back to them as he shouted down to the battle harpsmen of the Skikana. "Sound the Prepare to Advance!" they heard him call. "Shortly We Shall Eat You. Now!" The battle harps broke suddenly into their air-rending, ground-shaking melody. The colonel spun back and shouted thinly above their unbelievable harmonies. "You've asked for it!" he cried. "No quarter! No prisoners and no -- His voice caught in his throat. The ground had suddenly heaved up alongside him and the cap of a toadstooloid six feet across poked itself above ground. Abruptly it split apart into two enormous lips and the aperture between them inhaled with a gust that almost sucked them all off their feet. "What's going on up here?" boomed forth a voice from the lips in accentless Wockii, and with such volume that it overrode even the harp music. Downslope the amazed and aghast harpsmen fell into jangling discordancies and thence into silence. In the quiet that followed a smaller toadstooloid poked itself above ground, grew upwards suddenly to about ten feet in height of stalk, and bent its cap toward the colonel. The surface of the cap drew back to reveal half a dozen large eyes. "Who're you?" ttolonel, commanding...  #th Skikana..." mumbled the colonel, obviously badly shaken but trying valiantly to pull himself up in military fashion. The toadstooloid with the eyes swiveled toward Tom and Lucy, twisted toward the Hugwos, turned toward the Flals and at last looked down toward the distant ranks of the Wockii and the Skikana. "I am the Prar'Rhu -- or Proto-Rhu of the Rhu root system here on Mal'Rahr, as you strangers would doubtless put it," announced the toadstooloid lips boomingly. "Children, children! Can't I take even a little nine thousand year nap without your getting into trouble? What is it this time?" One of the Flals stepped forward and began to whistle rapidly, gesturing at the Wockii and the colonel. The eyed toadstooloid, which had been watching the Flal, swiveled again toward the distant Wockii. "For shame!" boomed the enormous lips. The Wockii all immediately prostrated themselves. Tom stepped forward to the toadstooloid with the eyes. "Excuse me," he said, "but might I inquire of you what the relation happens to be -- of mass to energy?" "Not at all. A simple question!" boomed the toadstooloid. "As anyone who has devoted even a few millenia of thought to the question must realize at once, emc. Or, energy equals mass times the constant, squared -- in the present and immediate universe only, of course. I assume you were asking about the relation as it exists merely in the present and immediate imiverse?" "I was," said Tom. "Excellent," boomed the Prar'Rhu. "Because the relationship becomes somewhat more complicated when we consider an infinite series of parallel universes in an enfolded hyperspace. Are you planning to make use of the relationship in immediate, practical nuclear terms, may I ask? Because, if so, I should perhaps warn you of certain explosive results..." "No," said Tom. "I asked the question only as a preliminary to introducing you to myself and to a whole galaxy of different, intelligent and educated races capable of conversing with you on a civilized level." A whole..." the lips broke off, trembling slightly with emotion. "You say, intelligent, educated races capable of conversing..." The Prar'Rhu was clearly unable to continue. Its half-dozen eyes on the taller toadstooloid blinked rapidly. "I mean just that," said Tom, sympathetically. "Your hundreds of thousands of years of loneliness are over. No longer will you need to take ten-thousandyear naps to escape unbearable and sanity-threatening boredom. No more will you be forced to exist only in the society of your intellectual inferiors. At last you will be able to communicate with minds the equal in capacity and accumulated wisdom with your own -- " "Never!" screamed the Skikana colonel, frothing at the jaws. He turned around and roared down the slope at Jabat. "Never mind the Prepare to Advance! Never mind the Advance! Sound the Charge! Now!" Jabat wheeled about to repeat the order. "You shall not!" thundered the toadstooloid lips. And barely had the thunder of that voice died away on the surrounding slopes and hills when hundreds of thousands of little purple puffballs began to sprout around the feet of the Skikana soldiery and an enticing, spicy fragrance filled the air. With wild cries, the Skikana soldiers threw aside their harps and weapons and fell upon the purple puffballs, cramming them into their jaws and passing quickly into a foolishly grinning stupor. "No!" cried the colonel, staggering, torn between his military pride and the odor of the puffballs that had sprouted at his feet. "Get up... Charge! Get up, I say!" He was almost weeping. "Get up and fi..." The scent of the puffballs overcame him. He collapsed on the ground and tore into those within arm's reach like a starving man. VI (tT)ut what's going to happen to the Skikana soldiers now?" asked Lucy, as they strolled from the edge of the concrete landing pad out toward their spaceship, some six hours later. The Skikana soldiery, including the officers and the colonel, had escorted them back to the fort, marching as if hynotized by the orders of the Prar'Rhu. "They're addicted to the toadstooloid, now, and -- " "No more," said Tom. "When I was in the fort just now, I found that the fort kitchens had, of course, whipped up a large meal of toadstooloid, as was customary for the returning troops. However, to a soldier, the Skikana turned their heads away weakly and couldn't stand the sight of the food. They ate imported Skikana battle rations instead." "The Prar'Rhu put something in the little purple puffballs to cure them?" asked Lucy. She sunlight the shadow at the base of the spaceship was almost too dark to see into, but she thought she saw several Skikana figures waiting by the airlock ramp. "Yes. The colonel realized that," said Tom. "That's why he asked to see me before we left. He offered to make a clean breast of the facts here for Interstellar publication, if I would help explain to Interstellar Court that the original addiction wasn't the fault of the Skikana -- which it wasn't. Actually, it was an accident having to do with the Skikana capacity for food -- what's the matter?" "Tom!" Lucy clutched at his arm. "Isn't that Captain Jabat and a couple of other Skikana officers waiting for us at the ship?" "What? Oh, yes," said Tom. "I was expecting him." He called ahead in Skikana. "Good afternoon, Captain!" "Good afternoon, sir Ambassador!" replied Jabat, stiffly as Tom and Lucy came up into the shadow at the foot of the ship. "I believe that before you leave we have some little matter to discuss." Lucy's heart sank. Abruptly, she remembered the competition model Skikana handgun which had been brought to Tom in the fort, earlier. "Ah, yes," Tom was saying easily. "Do you have it with you?" "Right here, sir!" said Jabat. Another Skikana officer stepped forward with the dish containing the handgun. The handgun's twin, Lucy saw, was clipped to Jabat's harness, waiting. "Tom!" she cried urgently in English. "Don't touch it!" CCertainly, my dear," said Tom in Skikana, as if she had merely been encouraging him. "It will be a pleasure to encounter the prospect of being handgunned and devoured by such an eminent opponent as Captain Jabat." In English he added hastily. "Stop worrying, Lucy! He must be an excellent shot, or he wouldn't have won that medal!" Tom took the handgun as Lucy gave vent to a stifled shriek. "Don't!" wailed Lucy in English. "Do you think I want you killed and d-devoured? Even by an excellent shot? Tom, come back!" Tom was already moving off with Jabat and the other Skikana to place themselves for the duel. "Tom, don't you go get yourself handgunned! You said yourself he was bound to be faster on the draw than you are! What's the matter? Have you gone crazy?" "Not at all," called Tom, who had now taken up his position, facing Jabat, and was waiting for the signal to fire. "It doesn't matter if he can outdraw me if he misses me, does it? Stay there. I'll be right back." "But you said he was an excellent shot -- " the words froze on Lucy's lips as the presiding officer gave the command to fire. Jabat's reflexes were too fast for Lucy's eye to follow. One moment he was standing there. The next, his handgun was in his grasp and a pale lance of fire was driving toward Tom. It passed some inches above Tom's head. Lucy stared. Tom had not even drawn his own handgun. "Tom! Shoot!" cried Lucy. "Certainly not!" he called back in English, annoyedly. "Please, Lucy, be quiet. You're disrupting the order of the occasion with all this talk." Jabat had not stirred. With the typical unshakable pride and courage of a Skikana, he was standing waiting. "Sir!" he called to Tom, "I believe you have a return shot coming." "That is quite correct, Captain," Lucy heard Tom reply through her whirling confusion. "However, I do not believe I will take it at this moment." It was a physiological impossibility for a Skikana to turn pale. However, it seemed to Lucy that Captain Jabat faded. "No, sir?" he answered. "May I ask when you do intend to?" "I'm not sure," replied Tom, idly. "Possibly tomorrow. Possibly a year from now. Possibly not even in our respective lifetimes. In fact, the more I think of it, the more I think I'll probably never be able to get around to it." (( #h. I see," said Jabat. He raised his handgun and saluted Tom. The other officers did likewise. "It has been an honor to know you, sir Ambassador and Assassin." "Well, that's finished," said Tom, coming back to Lucy. "Let's get aboard so that the ship can take off." He patted a pocket attached to his weapons harness as he led the way up the ramp, Lucy following wordlessly at his side. "Ah, there you are, sir," he said to the ship's first officer, waiting at the airlock. "My compliments to the Captain, and will he take off as soon as possible " "You men can go to your own quarters," he informed the .Hugwos, standing at attention in the suite. "The Consort Lucy and I will be settling down for the return trip." He watched them file out and shut the door behind them. "Loyal fellows," he remarked to Lucy. "But it's simply not good policy to let anyone see where I secrete this agreement. "You realize how well we've come out of all this?" he asked, turning back to Lucy. "Instead of an exclusive agreemervt to deal with the Wockii in the future, we're relieved of our obligations to the Wockii, since they weren't the dominant intelligence on Mul'Rahr after all. And we've got an exclusive contract for immediate dealings with the true dominant intelligence, the Prar'Rhu -- who is a biochemical synthesis! with a skill beyond imagination. Our human economic future is assured in the galaxy -- " he broke off. "Lucy, what's wrong?" "You!" exploded Lucy. Tom took a hasty step backward. "You!" cried Lucy, following him up, and looking as if she was going to kick him. "What do you mean, getting into a duel, when I called and called and pleaded with you not to do it? What do you mean trying to get yourself killed? What if Jabat hadn't missed?" "But he had to!" protested Tom, retreating. "You don't understand. The Skikana are proud of their honor being without stain. ' -- Never merciful in victory, never resentful in defeat... remember what Jabat said? The chance to challenge had been offered. I couldn't leave the planet without duelling him. But good Skikana manners forbade that he should try to kill me after I had defeated them, here on Mul'Rahr. It might have looked like sour grapes. He had very deliberately to avoid trying to kill me in the duel. That's why I refused to shoot back. It would have been murder." Tom stopped backing up, feeling he had scored a point. "To say nothing of the fact," he added a trifle smugly, "that I have now stymied all future challenges to duel. Since no one can fight me until my present duel with Jabat is completed." "But that's even worse!" she burst out, enraged. "You knew there was no danger, and you let me stand out there and worry.And you told the colonel I wasn't trustworthy, and I know you don't trust me! Oh, I could kill you myself! I could -- " "Wait!" yelped Tom, as she started to advance on him again. "Wait! I tell you I do trust you -- " "You don't." "Didn't you read what I wrote on your credentials just before the Skikana attacked?" cried Tom. "How could I trust you any more than that. I left it all up to you if anything should happen to me." "What do you mean. I -- " Lucy ripped open her belt-purse snatched out her credential papers and unfolded them. "If you've done something else -- " Her voice failed. She was staring at Tom's handwriting. "To all Assassin Guild Officials... she read aloud, "the individual presenting this is not a wilf, but my consort, on whom falls the duty of completing a mission in which I have just been slain. I charge all Guild officials and members with the duty of assisting her to complete that mission in my name, stating that I have the utmost trust and faith in her capabilities to do so. Thomas Parent, Apprentice and Guild Member..." "You see," said Tom. "All the time I did trust -- " Lucy flung herself upon him. Prepared rather for war than affection, Tom lost his balance and went over backwards onto the rug. Lucy fell on top of him. It's very undignified," he managed to mutter, a few moments later, "for an ambassador, to say nothing of an Assassin to be on his back on the floor -- " "Oh, shut up!" said Lucy, kissing him. Youfi is beyond doubt the most precious commodity in the world -- too bad it's -- Wasted on the Young he doorbell sounded. Hal Page had been attending to two final tasks: first, checking around the apartment and making sure everything was ready for this, which was going to be one hell of a party; second, trying to decide where to put the notice. He would have liked to destroy it, but when he came to the mouth of the disposal! and opened it -- letting the faintest, faintest whiff of the stink from the far-away incinerators mingle with the heady perfumes loading the air in the room -- he found he had changed his mind. He needed the solid feel of it in his hand, the crinkly rustle of it in his ears, to drive him to the completion of his ultimate purpose. At a party like this, no hiding place was likely to remain secret, especially in view of his reckless reputation; the guests would make it a point of honor to seek out and, if possible, ruin his most costly possessions, to make him break new records when he cleared up the mess and replaced the spoiled items. But he dared not have anyone even guess at the motive for throwing such a party on this randomly chosen day. If anyone realized word would spread like the rumor of plague, and he would spend tonight alone, staring at nothing, and feeling the cold hand of terror on his heart. "Oh, God damn!" he said aloud, snatching the notice into a place of concealment in the front of his loose silk shirt. Automatically he consulted his watch, though he knew the bell had sounded twenty minutes at least ahead of party time. It was the most expensive watch in the world; it had cost him four full years, and sat on the back of his left index-finger measuring the decay rate of a tiny grain of radium. The bell sounded a second time. He reached his decision. What the hell point was there in keeping the notice? Every word of it was ingrained in his mind, and could be summed into the single terrible warning: tomorrow! But if he had no intention of being here, of being alive tomorrow, why hesitate to have the paper destroyed? He thrust the document into the disposall as he had originally intended. The gesture brought him a sense of calm, of boats being burnt. He went smoothly and coolly to open the door. "You're early, but come in anyway -- no reason to delay the... lized that the man facing him a little older than himself, say thirty-five, slim, saturnine, bright eyed -- was wearing the black of an adult. And then, with a twisting grimace of disgust, he made to close the door, wishing it were possible to slam it with a crash. "Wait," the man in black said softly. "Remember me, Hal?" Page hesitated. He made a valiant effort to see the face above the drab black garb as that of an individual instead of merely as the mask of an adult, and relays of memory closed. He said, "Why -- at a party of... What was the girl's name?" "Karen Sottine -- but that doesn't matter. Mine does. I'm Thomas Dobson." The man in black paused, his eyes sharp as scalpels. "Are you going to make me stand here where anyone passing down the corridor might see me? Are you going to have them start to wonder why an adult comes calling on Hal Page, the professional youth? You see, I know about the notice you've had, and the reason for this spectacular party tonight." "You're not going to be here?" Page forced out violently. "I said 'open house', but hell's name I didn't mean -- " "No, of course not." Dobson managed to put into the short disclaimer an infinite quantity of contempt, and Page wanted to writhe but lacked the time before the other continued. "Your guests won't be less than half an hour late -- you know that as well as I do. Even for a glimpse of the legendary Hal Page, who gambled and got away with it, who's dragging so many others after him by his example." Page recovered his self-possession and made a mocking half bow. "So you've come for a sight of me, have you? To see what you've missed? Well, come in then. Have what you want, at my expensel" He waved Dobson past him with a grandiose gesture, indicating the array of delicacies with which the room was stocked; antiques and objets d'art had been thrust aside hastily to make room for them. "Champagne -- genuine champagne from France? Caviar? Lark's tongues? Take your pick, it's all charged to me." "Thank you," Dobson said, and selected a sliver of hard toast with which to dip into a bowl of red caviar. "You know," he added musingly when he had swallowed the first mouthful, "it's a shame you're not equipped to value this for v.'hat it is -- that you should see it only as a gigantic prop for your ego." fJou're not equipped to enjoy anything," Page snapped. "God, even the first time I met you -- what? Five years ago! -- you weren't equipped to get fun out of life! You sat there like a brooding ghost and poured out second-hand philosophical claptrap that nobody wanted to listen to -- " "You listened." Dobson dipped a second portion of the caviar and the toast crunched noisily between his teeth. "Only because I didn't believe you could be real," Page grunted. "There you sat -- there was this girl alongside you, the one with pretty red hair and a mouth that -- well, skip that. But I got her afterwards." "I know. She told me." Dobson swallowed the last of his toast and dropped into a soft chair. A fugitive smile crossed his face. "You mean she looked at you twice?" A vague stab of noncomprehension troubled Page momentarily. "We got married," Dobson said. "A course of action which probably wouldn't interest you very much." "Damned right," Page said shortly. "She had a hell of a body, but her mind was all cluttered with the same kind of nonsense you were spouting that evening... And yet, you know, I guess I should be grateful to you in a way. Up to that time I'd run with the herd; I'd taken for granted all the pious nothings which I'd had spooned into my ears in school. I looked at you, and I thought hell, if they're going to take me and grind me into the same mould as you, I'm going to get my kicks first. And -- why yes! It was right on the following day that I went out and got myself something which cost a whole year for the first time. And I felt great. And I went right on from there." "Tell me something." Dobson cocked his saturnine head and regarded Page with apparently sincere interest. "Didn't you feel anything when you ran your debt up over a century?" "Sure!" Page gave a harsh laugh. "I felt I was getting out from under." "Nothing else?" "I know what you mean. You're trying to say: wasn't I scared that they'd come along and cut the ground from under my feet? Hell, no. You take yourselves too seriously, you adults. A minimum of thirty years free, that's what they tell you. Granted, I had a bad moment the day I woke up and found I was a week past thirty -- I'd sort of lost count during a weekend party. But it kept on, and kept on, and here I am. Thirty-two years, one month and four days." "Stop," said Dobson quietly, and reached for another dip of red caviar. Page reddened. He said, "So what's going to be done about it? My debt's up to three hundred years now, and there isn't a damned thing you can do! It's spent -- or it will be by dawn tomorrow!" "And what do you have to show for it?" # #T have to show what anyone A will tell you. I have proof of more guts than you. I have proof I wasn't scared of the consequences. I didn't turn around and make myself into an adult ahead of due date, so that when they called for me I'd go fawning and saying, 'Look, here I'm already acting like one of you -- please be kind to me!" A sudden thought broke his train of words like a derailment. He shot out an accusing finger. "Hey! How do you know about the -- the...?" The question trailed off into silence colored with more than a little alarm. "No, I haven't come to get you, if that's what you're thinking," Dobson said equably. I am in fact required to call on you and make sure you understand the responsibilities which go with all of the privileges you've enjoyed." "Sure, I understand them fine," Page said, and motioned towards the door. "Now suppose you get on your way, and leave me to have my last fling." "Sorry." The voice sounded genuinely regretful, but Page alertly sought a trace of sarcasm in the dark-browed face. "I have to do the job, and if I don't get to complete it before your guests arrive I just have to try and do it later. So the choice is fairly simple: sit and listen now, or sit and listen later because there won't be anyone else here to keep you ctmpany -- the word will have got around. And you know how superstitious everyone in your group is about someone who's been given notice. As though diey suddenly carried the taint of a deadly disease." He'd been comparing it mentally to plague, earlier: that gibe got throu Page's annoyance. He dropped into a chair facing Dobson and sighed. "I'd rather take you and push your smug face down the disposal!, but -- oh, spit it out and make it diort!" Dobson folded his hands calmly on his lap. He said, "I doubt if you've caught up on classics of literature during this expensive whirlwind of a life, but maybe if you'd done so you'd have developed a greater insight into your situation, particularly if you'd read a couple of works by the dramatist Shaw. Eariy and mid-twentieth century. Mean anything to you?" "Point Come to the point I've had my notice -- you know that -- and I don't want to be bated tonight of all nights #" #CXe-es, you have rather a  marked capacity for boredom, don't you? Seems somehow unfair... Well, to be precise what I had in mind was a beautiful capsule summary of the contemporary economic setup vch is pcobbly apocryphal, but who cem be sure? Reputed, Shaw said in his old age that youth was wonderful; what a pity it had to be wasted on the # TOung! For in his view -- as expounded at some length in Back to Methuselah -- only the vnsdom which age entrains can fit an individual to make optimum use of the energies of youth." Dobson's eyes went once around the room, seeming to take in, sum up and dismiss everything for which Page had staked three centuries of existence. Page shivered and ordered him violently to hurry up with his little chat. The other briskened. "All right. Well, even enclosed as you are in your psychologically incestuous circle of good-time chums, it must have been borne in on you that there has been progress since the old days? That we have colonized two other planets in this . system, that we are reaching out to explore the planets of other stars?" "I caught something about it on three-vee," Page said in a heavily ironical tone. "Yes. Moreover, we enjoy a universally high standard of living, in which we apply as the only truly dependable economic yardstick the investment of individual effort." "I've spent three centuries worth," Page grunted. "Have you any news that isn't stale?" "Patience!" Dobson raised a slender hand. "I'm required to do this, as I told you. Even if your interruptions compel me to spend all night at it." "I heard! I just don't see the point of the lecture on current affairs. Are you softening me up to tell me that I'm to be sent out to Mars or somewhere, to sweat on one of those damned construction projecte?" "You caught that on three-vee too, presumably," Dobson suggested with acid politeness. "No, you are not to be sent to Mars. The work there is almost at the point where human effort can be supplanted by machinery, and only skilled options are likely to remain open there in future. Do I get the chance to make my point, or do you so much like the sound of your own voice you'd rather hear only it between now and tomorrow morning?" Page made a disgusted gesture and leaned back in the chair. "Thank you. In your last year of school, when you should by rights have been old enough to make a fairly enlightened decision, you were instructed in the forms of modem society. You were told, for instance, of the expenditure against credit which would be made available to you at least until age thirty, and that the credit was charged like all expenditure nowadays against a standard base-scale of individual work. Only the time counts; there's no question, for instance, of someone who's not capable of highly skilled work being made to return more years of unskilled labour to balance the accounts. We're very rich as a race, we human beings -- we don't have to be petty in such things," he paused CC'#'ou were told the reasoning behind this system. You were told -- and like most adolescents, you certainly didn't believe -- that an endless round of pleasure and self-indulgence ultimately would grow boring, and that by the time you got your notice, to repay to society the credit you had drawn, you'd wish to make some more constructive use of your life. You were told also that there was nothing fixed or inevitable about this repayment; there's a certain inalienable minimum available to everyone, so that by living frugally a person may continue to be his own absolute master as long as he wishes -- this course is usually chosen by those with a strong rebellious and creative bent, who would rather sit on the edge of a desert and paint sunsets than take up an adult's post in the world. I don't wish to criticize such people, by the way; in my view, that marks them out as among the most mature and self-reliant specimens of the race." Unused to sitting and listening, Page had begun to fidget. Now he burst out again, angrily this time. "I was certainly told all this, but I wasn't convinced, and I still am not convinced. I'm getting a hell of a lot of kicks out of life, and the idea of being arbitrarily grabbed by the neck and -- " "Not arbitrarily," Dobson cut in, with the first hint of strong feeling Page had yet seen from him. "You were told; you didn't listen." "Told what? That -- how did you put it? That 'an endless round of self-indulgence' would end up by boring me? Hell, the only times I've been really bored have been 'like now, when some stuffy-brained adult started preaching at me!" He jumped up and went to fetch himself a shot of brandy. "The fact remains," he went on over his shoulder, "I'm not fooled as easily as most people. You know they go around almost in awe of me? Like I'd done something special! All I did was see through this guff about what my debt to society consists of! I told you frankly, I had some bad moments when I realized I'd hit age thirty with a debt already topping two centuries. Then I caught on. If you jumped on mei right then and there, the first possible moment, the very day I got past the promised limit, you'd mark yourselves for scared. People would have said, 'It's a fraud! They jumped on Hal Page because he took what he wanted from life and didn't give a damn about the time he'd used up. Hell, if we're all going the same way, let's take what we can while we can!' Isn't that the size of it?" He rounded on Dobson with a challenging glare. ttXou're visualizing the whole of your generation spending their credit by the century, the same as you," Dobson murmured. "Do you seriously think that would matter? I said we're a rich race. You have no conception how rich we are! If every single one of the guests you've ever had to all your wild parties -- if every guest at every party you've ever been to -- if everyone of your entire generation decided to spend as freely and lavishly as you, all it would take to absorb this would be to reprice their expenditure down to the productive effort we can reasonably accomodate during their later lives. We're embarrassingly rich, Hal! These days, we seldom even have to send a notice to people. With the thirtieth birthday come and gone, people tend to get restless -- they lose interest in their round of pleasure -- they turn up one day and ask to be assigned for some real work. I did that myself." "But I'm not like you," Page rasped. Somehow the contempt he had intended to load into his voice rang false on utterance. "The point I'm making still stands," Dobson countered equably. "Our difficulty is in utilizing the resources which make themselves available to us. Nine people out of ten who reach the age of thirty nowadays have already lost heart for mere passing amusements. They've taken a course of study, or set themselves a small research project, or made plans for a family -- done something adult, in short. And we have to cope with thic tremendous flow of creative energy, channel it, make the most of it... That's why we're going out to the stars. It'll be a hell of a long time before we actually reduce starflight to a routine operation, like a trip to the moon, but we're going to need that escape route simply for the sake of not wasting the potential modern human society boils off like -- like surplus heat from an engine!" "Finished?" Page growled. He drained his glass of brandy and poured another shot. "Not quite. We can't let things slide; this is what I'm trying to put across to you. We can't raise the age of full credit to thirtyfive, for example, simply to reduce the pressure on us to absorb the would-be adults." "I'd have no objection!" Page blurted, thinking of the terrible warning notice he had thrust into the disposall: your full free credit period terminates tomorrow... "But already people are finding it hard to last out thirty years fooling around." Dobson raised one eyebrow. "Did you not just hear me say so?" "I've heard it all! I'm sick of it all! There's nothing more you can tell me -- how about using the door?" Page tossed down the second brandy as though he hated it. "Yes," Dobson sighed, and made to rise. "It's all been said to you, over and over. You just don't seem able to draw the conclusions... 'None so deaf as those who will not -- ' Ah, never mind." Page watched him move towards the door. The hostility died in his eyes as the final question burned upwards toward full consciousness. Without intending, he found himself starting to voice it. "Dobson! Do you know what's    r And there it faltered, partly because he was ashamed to admit to this black-garbed intruder that the prospect made him afraid, partly because he was afraid. The saturnine man paused and looked back. "Do I know what they'll make you do? As a matter of fact, yes. But I'm not empowered to tell you." "Make me? I thought there was supposed to be a range of free choice!" Page forced some of his normal bluster back into the words. "You poor fool," Dobson said. "How many choices do you imagine remain open to someone who's spent more than three hundred years' worth of credit?" And he was gone. T) ut it was a great party. There were just two bad moments ' -- the first, when meditechs had to be called after a fight developed between two men over some chit of a girl Page had had last year and didn't think worth the trouble; the second, when he found himself screaming at the crowd to drink more, eat more, dance more frantically, and realized that their eyes were on him, their faces halfway frightened at the dreadful intensity of his manner. He checked himself deliberately and covered his moment of sdf-betrayal by seizing the nearest I around the waist to smother her face in kisses. He must not -- dared not -- let it be suspected that he was imder sentence of death. Tonight, up to the very last minute, he must be with people, he must have the noise and laughter and the crash and smash of priceless articles, a soft hot sweat-pearled body under his, a silk pillow for his head ringing with Dobson's calm, terrifying voice echoing in memory. With the third girl, around three in the morning, he failed to make it, and knew that the time was come. Abruptly he pushed her aside and got off the bed. He went into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. Luckily there was no one in here just now, though earlier three or four people had been showering down together and writing obscene verse on the tiled walls with a bar of lavendercolored soap. He steadied himself with one hand and gazed at his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. "Last time," he whispered. "But they'll remember me." The one who cheated them. The only ambition he had ever conceived. It wasn't unique to himself. But others whom he'd heard of. who tried the same, who fouad the prospect of being snatched away from this ceaseless selfish delight intolerable, had botched the job. There were whispers; there were shuddering rumours in answer to casual questions. "Where's so-and-so lately? Haven't seen him around." Oh, he got his notice. "And -- ?" Tried to get out from under. Cut his throat. "And -- ?" They healed him. "I guess Dobson would accept that," Page told his reflection, seeing the grim lines form around his soft mouth. "I guess he'd say they were warned and had to take the consequences. But being told in advance doesn't justify it. I don't give a damn for paying back what I've had in credit. No one asked me when they set up this filthy system, and I opt out!" His voice had peaked to a loudness that scared him; he didn't want to be overheard. When he went, he wanted the party to continue. Maybe it would go on till the news came back: Hal Page made it! Hal Page got out from under! One final twinge of irresolution overcame him; then he recalled the expression on Dobson's face as he went out, and thought about the implications of his parting promise. No: better the silent dark of death. And he -- he wasn't going to botch the job. "The aircar had cost him one and a half years' credit. It was going to be well worth it, he thought dreamily as he gulped down the five capsules of hypnotic -- three hours' credit -- and set the controls to carry him out to sea. There was just about enough fuel for fifty miles; by then, he'd be at thirty thousand feet. And hitting water from such a height ought to be pretty much like smashing into a stone wall. If they even got back enough to use for prosthetics they'd be lucky, but that was the most they could hope to have back from... Hal Page's famous record-breaking debt... of more than... three hundred... Blackness. And horror. Light in darkness. Awareness. A shocking, horrifying lack of bodily presence. Vision, indestructible without lids to lower over the traitor eyes. He tried to scream, and found he had no voice; he tried to rise and run, and found he had no legs. He was in a large, light room, pale walled, without a window, and facing him on a steel chair was the grim black form of Dobson, somehow elongated from front to back, as though he was deeper than he should be. A voice said, "On now," and a whitish presence moved at the edge of vision, crazily out of proportion: a woman in a sterile coverall. "I think you have the lenses too far apart," Dobson said. "He's probably getting exaggerated-stereo vision." Something monstrous loomed in Page's field of vision, and the perspectives of the environment shrank to something nearer normal. "I'm sorry for you, Hal," Dobson said softly. "And by the way, don't try to talk. We haven't cut in the vocal circuits yet." The consciousness of Hal Page withdrew, turned into something smaller than a mouse, began to run frantically around and around in the confines of his brain... which, he knew and could not face knowing, was all that was left to him. "You may go insane," Dobson said, his voice reduced to a thin whispering. "But I guess in some senses you've always been insane. Borderline psychopathic, incapable of drawing a rational conclusion from what you were told, incapable of empathizing to the point of taking someone else's word. I guess we have to be grateful that people like you still turn up occasionally -- it's our greatest strength as a race that we can build on our own weaknesses..." he paused. tt'There was almost nothing left of you, Hal, but you should have known from what I told you when I called at your apartment that you were a rarity, too rare to waste. We're compelled to be strictly honest; there are unpleasant tasks to undertake, and we never hide the fact. You elected yourself for one of them, in full possession of all the information which would have enabled you to back out if you'd cared to. But you didn't. You went right ahead. You spent credits founded on other people's efforts until the free choices open to you as repayment dwindled to a single possibility. "So here I am with the task of telling you, after you made the mistake of thinking you could welsh on your debt." Dobson sighed heavily. "We have to go to the stars, Hal. Creeping outward. As I told you, it's forced on us because we have so much energy to absorb, so much frantic creativity, so much skill and impatience. One day we'll go at the speed of light, freely and easily, but before that epoch arrives there must be scouts, explorers, pathfinders... You, Hal. You're going to Rigel, as the commander, and the crew, of a slow, slow rocketship, and the round trip is going to last just about three hundred years." His iob was to make decisions for his people And these terrifying Earth creatures did it fhemselvesl 'lhe Decision Maker swam leisurely just beneath the surface, listening to the vast pulsebeat that was the life of his people. It had been some time since he had eaten last and his eyes, obedient to that primal command, were alert for prey; but hunting did not interfere with the more mental functions which occupied the group part of his mind. He angled to the surface for air, glancing briefly at the human's Gathering-Place while his head was above water. The round gray buildings squatted like overlarge toadstools on the rocky shore a hundred body-lengths away, dimly seen through the snow that a driving wind had brought down off the mountains. As he dipped beneath the surface he caught a glimpse of something dark and sleek to his left and turned that way. The fi.sh saw him and tried, too late, to flee. He bit off its head while still in motion, swallowed it, then seized the body in his webbed fingers and disposed of it in two bites. The fish-which-flys comes, Decision Maker, came a strong projection from the south. It was a composite voice made by many individuals, and accompanying it was a clear image of a small winged ship. He swam to the surface and turned his eyes to the southern sky. The ship itself was too small to be visible, but he located it by the brightness of its flaring retrorockets. Then the fires winked out as it sank below the horizon. He called for strength from all people in his immediate area, received it, and projected. He found the ship immediately, now moving swiftly toward him. And yes, the human's Decision Maker was inside. tif've put us in a polar orbit, Conscience Odegaard," said the shuttle pilot to his only passenger. "Ground Control says the blow-storm should clear up by the time we make a round. I'll de-polarize the floor viewplate and let you look Sister over direct while we wait." He touched a control and the floor between their seats grew milky, then transparent. The harsh, xanthic light of Capella G flooded in. Below them, stretching endlessly to the horizons, was mile after mile of deep blue water. The pilot made a few final adjustments on the attitude gyros, then relaxed and said, "Atlantis is on the other side, and we'll pass over the station in a minute." Allan Odegaard stared with weary disinterest at the watery landscape. They were moving toward the planet's northern pole, and the edge of the North polar continent soon came in sight. He saw a narrow ledge of ice hugging a low and rocky shore. "The station's under those," said the pilot, pointing. Allan gazed where the finger indicated, but saw only the whitetinged clouds of the blowstorm. As they moved inland the clouds fell behind, and he saw great mountains rearing craggy heads in an immense annular formation, the dominant feature of the continent. A thin sheet of ice covered most of the lower land between the peaks, sparkling and glittering in the sunlight. Like a rather flat diamond in a Tiffany setting, Allan thought. Then they were over the sea once more. "There's the first peaks of Atlantis," said the pilot, pointing again, and Allan saw three small islands floating like green jewels on the blue water, the last two curving sharply avay to the left. Then the view was monotonous until they reached the southern polar continent, where the mountains seemed taller and the icecap even thinner. Allan sat back and relaxed, knowing he had seen the planet's entire land area, Sister, or Capella G Eight as it was more properly known, was visually less interesting than most, and nowadays even the best bored him. He had been too long away from home. After this assignment he was going to insist on returning to Earth, if only for a vacation. A Practical Philosopher could not afford to lose contact with the people he represented. The pilot was good, the touchdown scarcely jarring the little shuttle. A big, smiling man in cold weather clothes met Allan at the ship's base and helped him loosen his helmet. The fresh air was so cold he almost strangled on his first breath. "I'm Station Manager Zip Murdock, Conscience Odegaard," said the big man in a hearty voice. "And this is Phyllis Roen, our biologist." The tiny woman by the big man's side said, "I'm afraid I'm responsible for getting you here. Conscience Odegaard. Zip and the others don't feel a question even exists." T urdock glanced up at the cargo hatch, where the pilot was already rigging the small crane. "They don't need us for the unloading. Let's get inside and get you settled, and then Phyllis can bring you up to date on our problem -- if we have one." The sun had moved behind a high cirque in the west, and deep shadows were creeping across the field. Allan started with them toward the foamfab buildings, which huddled at the base of a rocky ridge two-hundred yards inland. From the ridge to the sea the ground had been cleared of loose rock, the debris forming two long piles of heaped boulders. Half of the cleared area nearest the beach was used for a landing field. They had taken only a few steps wbTi there was a loud yell erf warning behind them. Allan turned, to see that the scene had suddenly and dramatically changed. From behind the rock walls near the water, and from the sea itself, fist-sized rocks were appearing and flying toward the Earthmen. The unloading crew was scrambling for shelter, yelling wildly and drawing their laser guns. "It's the seals!" said Phyllis, and there was fear in her voice. Murdock had already drawn a laser pistol, its dark red jewel glinting in the fading light. There were no attackers in sight, just the rocks appearing from nowhere and arcing toward them. After a moment Murdock, in apparent frustration, fired toward a cluster of rocks near at hand. The hit boulder sparkled briefly, absorbing the heat but not all the light. Other beams began to flash as the unloading crew got into action. The little landing area became a weird tangle of multicolored lights, shifting shadows and coruscating rocks. The net effect was to provide a flickering but adequate illumination. Allan saw his first seal clearly as it left the shelter of the rocks and ran for the water, dragging a wounded comrade. They were tiny creatures, only half his height, and they moved with an odd, stiff-jointed swing from one leg to the other that looked awkward but was marvelously fast. Murdock saw them also and lifted his gun, but the beam hissed through the air where they had been as they dove together into the sea. And abruptly the creatures were gone. It was quiet again and the darkness was creeping swiftly over the narrow beach. "The little devils are getting bolder," said Murdock, bolstering his gun. "That's the first daylight attack on dry land." Allan stooped and picked up one of the stones which had just been flung at them. It was apparently obsidian, and had been hand-chipped until it had several sharp edges, each capable of penetrating a spacesuit. Primitive -- but deadly. "How did they propel them so far?" he asked Phyllis, but before riie could answer an excited voice called, "Miss Roen! Miss Roen, I've found a dead one in the rocks! Do smu want the body?" Allan saw the small woman visibly hesitate before she called back, "Yes, please. Take it into the lab." "I'd better stay here a moment and assess the damage," said Murdock, moving toward a man who was lying on the ground holding a bloody arm. no "If you'll go with Phyllis, Conscience Odegaard..." A s they approached the buildings Allan saw two sentries standing on rocky eminences, where they could observe the entire area. Large floodlights brightly illuminated the ground around the buildings. Evidently these civilians had learned to take some rather military precautions on Capella G Eight. There was no airlock, but the station personnel had built an anteroom where both spacesuits and cold weatlie gear were hung. Allan shed his suit with thanksgiving, and turned to find Phyllis Roen already out of her heavy clothes and waiting for him. The tiny woman was obviously Eurasian, with very black hair streaked with gray and features which were delicate without being pretty. He estimated her age at around thirty-five. She still looked very good to him, and this was another indication that he had been too long away from Earth. "Do you like what you see. Conscience Odegaard ?" Phyllis asked, and though she was smiling there was an edge in her voice. He realized he had been staring. "I'm sorry," he said quickly. "And please, call me Allan." He paused, not wanting to explain that 'Conscience' was a popular term rather than an actual title, and he had grown very tired of hearing it. A doctorate in philosophy was the highest academic achievement on his record, but to qualify as a Practical Philosopher master's degrees were required in political science, alien psychology, sociology and biology. The public, when it learned of the unique responsibilities of the Practical Philosophers, had sviftly christened them the 'Consciences of Mankind', and the name had stuck. Mankind needed a conscience, these days. His swiftly expanding exploration and colonization of the galaxy was bringing him into contact with dozens of completely new lifeforms, and seemingly limitless variations of those already familiar. Time and again the question had arisen of whether alien creatures on habitable worlds were animals or intelligent beings, and some wrong decisions had been made before the P.P. corp was established. The exhaustive academic routine deterred all but the most hardy, and there were less than a dozen 'Consciences' to date, but they had brought the pro'olem somewhat under control. At least romantic Space Service captains were no longer declaring a planet unfit for colonization because its overlarge ants had unusually well-developed instinctual patterns. This time her smile was more sincere. "All right, Allan, and the same. Now if you'll come with me I'll take you on the penny tour, and after dinner we'll have a look at the dead seal." II "Yhe Decision Maker's body had relaxed into the state of lazy somnolence which was the nearest his kind approached sleep, but his group mind was still active. As he moved automatically toward the dark surface for air he turned the matter of his opposite among the humans, and finally concluded that there were too many unknowns at present. He was unable to perform his function. He could, and did, reach one conclusion, and communicated it to those individuals whose added consciousness within his mind enabled him to be a Decision Maker. It was that the people would make no further attacks at present. The next move would be left to the humans. At dinner Allan met about half the station's complement of forty scientists, and discovered there was a general air of cheerful optimism prevalent. On some tiny stations on bitterly hostile worlds he had seen isolation and confinement sour personal relations until the whole crew was ready tc commit murder. He was surprised, as Phyllis kept rattling off names and professions, to find meteorologists, geologists and glacialists dominating the group. Usually it was chemists, biologists, and the new 'Environmental Adjustors'. Zip Murdock did not appear for dinner. Apparently he and the unloading crew were still busy outside. The departing thunder of the shuttle's rockets penetrated the aerated walls as Phyllis led Allan into the lab. The seal was lying on a table in the cold room, an area ventilated to outside atmosphere. Phyllis produced light but warm clothing for them and they went inside. Allan looked down at the prone form on the table, the sleek skin marred by a deep-burned hole in the neck. It was the head that gave the first strong impression of seal. The face had a black, square-cut nose, long whiskers, a rounded ridge of forehead rising abruptly above the muzzle; but the body ruined the illusion. The lower abdomen split into two short legs, each ending in a large flat pad. The upper members, though equally short, had a jointed section, and the ends terminated in long ridged fingers of cartilage, with a thin membrane between. Allan ran trained fingers over the musculature of a leg. The large muscles on the front and back were equal in size, a wonderful arrangement for swimming but somewhat awkward for walking. Yet he had seen two of them actually running when they retreated after that brief attack on the landing field. He asked Phyllis how they did it. She grinned, an impish grimace on her small face. "They fool you, Allan. A bit more adaptable than they look Watch." She lifted one pad clear of the table, held the leg with her other hand and slowly forced the pad to move. It revolved until it was perpendicular to the body, and he saw that it was set in a very flexible bone socket. She dropped the leg, rolled the creature on its side and twisted the other pad in the opposite direction. It also moved to the perpendicular. "One pad before, one behind. A very stable arrangement," said Phyllis. "It gets around with relative ease on land, even though it looks awkward to us, and you saw how they threw stones with those arms." "Not with the arms. Look what they found with this fellow." Allan stepped to another bench, picked up a long flat strip of hide she had not noticed, and folded the ends together. A wide section in the center formed a pouch. "A sling! Of all weapons." There was a touch of awe in Phyllis' voice. "Well, this should convince Zip, if he still needs convincing!" "That the seals are intelligent? I doubt it. Animals have used tools before." "Yes, but -- they didn't have these earlier, you see. They live an almost entirely aquatic existence, and the only artifacts we've seen have been sharpened basalt spiears. This is a dry land weapon. They just invented it, to use in fighting us." "That's interesting, but still no proof. This continent you're trying to raise has been dry land several times, I understand. Quite possibly these creatures have used the sling in the past and retained an instinct of how to build it." "A far more sensible explanation than intelligence," said a new voice.  llan turned to see Murdock entering the cold room from outside. The big man stamped some clinging snow off his feet and walked to the table. "H-mm-m, a nice fat one. Let's have him for dinner tomorrow, Cissy." "Zip! Please, I have a hard enough time living with the memory that we did eat a few!" "And they were a little fishy tasting, but not bad," said Murdock cheerfully. "Beats the concentrates every time. Look, I've got to change and go eat. Don't let this dizzy female fill your head full of nonsense. Conscience Odegaard." "I do not form premature conclusions," said Allan carefully. Murdock, and most of the scientists here, were university employees, the result of a steadily increasing trend for large universities to contract colonization evaluations. They had almost edged out the competing private companies, and the government had long ago settled for supervision of the contracts. These people had a strong vested interest in seeing that his decision went against the seals. When intelligence was established it was standard policy to abandon the planet to its native owners. "Fine. Cissy is unabashedly prejudiced on the question. I'll see you later in the evening, then." As the big man closed the door behind him Allan turned to the woman and asked, "Even in an unmilitary organization such as this, isn't that manner of speaking to you a little familiar?" She gave him a cool glance. "Perhaps, but that's because he feels familiar. We've entered into a trial marriage contract, and plan on full matrimony when we get back to Earth." "Oh, I see. That's odd, I wouldn't have thought you compatible types." She shrugged. "Who sa#rs we are? Perhaps it's just sex drive and propinquity on both sides. But in any case we're living together, and were perfectly happy until we started quarreling about the seals. I had to go over his head to get you in here, and he's going to be a long time forgiving me for that." Allan found himself wishing heartily he had not ventured into such personal ground. It was presumptions of him, and her answer had brought back his own deep-seated loneliness, twisting the knife of bitterness again. Kay had quickly divorced him when he had annovmced he was going into space; there would be no 'widow's wait' for her. She had married again before he finished his final studies and left Earth, and when he visited his children his little daughter was already calling another man father. The life of a regular spaceman was bad enough, but at least he returned to Earth an average of once every two years. Allan had not been home in eight. Planet after planet raised the unique problem which called for a P.P.'s special authority, and die swiftiy spreading network of exploration brought in new ones faster than decisions could be made. Unless he rebelled he might spend the rest of his days hopping from world to world, with never a life of his own.  llan beat a hasty retreat. "I'd like to see your notes, if you've already performed a dissection," he said, turning toward the door. "Tomorrow I'll run one on this chap myself." "Of course," said Phyllis, reverting to business as easily as he. "I ran several, and I've never seen a body better adapted for both swimming and walking. But the brain is -- very odd. You'll have to see it for yourself." She escorted him to his cubicle, then left with word that she would see him later in the lounge. He found his luggage stacked on the bunk, and an hour later, showered, depilated and dressed in clean clothes, he headed for the lounge. Most of the station's off-duty personnel were there, including Murdock. "Come sit by me, Allan," the big man called. "I'll split my shaker with you." Murdock was drinking maquella, a mildly intoxicating beverage from Centaurus Four that had no after effects. Allan accepted a glass and sat down. "What do you think of our operation so far?" asked Murdock pleasantly. "I hardly know enough about it to think at all. Can you give me a general run-down on your plans? I was amazed to find Phyllis the only biologist here, and this is the first time I've seen an evaluation team with a high percentage of glacialists." "He can talk about it all night," said Phyllis, who was sitting on Murdock's other side. "But the basic fact is that Sister is so nearly Earth-type that chemists and biologists aren't really needed. The only genuine problem is raising Atlantis, and the general opinion is that this can be accomplished by a slight change in the weather." "Yes, all it requires is a new ke age," said Murdock with a chuckle. "But to give you some background -- the median temperature on Sister is somewhat higher than humans prefer, and the open land area almost nonexistent Offhand it looks very unpromising. But this planet has a very fortunate peculiarity. All three major land masses, the two poles and Atlantis, have the same distinguishing feature, a great circle of volcanic mountains surrounding a lower inland area. Atlantis is the largest and lowest of the three, and almost entirely under water. We propose, not to raise the continent, but to lower the ocean level. "The means of accomplishing this is relatively simple. Sister, despite the high concentration of water vapor in the air, has a low precipitation rate. The atmosphere is exceptionally clean due to the tiny exposed land surface and low volcanic activity, and there is very little dust to serve as sublimation nuclei for raindrops. Precip is almost entirely dependent on giant condensation nuclei, and that too is small because the oceans have a low salinity rate and there is very little sodium chloride in the air. Briefly, we propose to stimulate the precip rate by blowing up the smallest of the four moons, in such a fashion that most of the material turns to dust. We will slow it below orbital speed with the explosions, and create a rain of dust into the upper atmosphere which will continue for many years. Precip will rise to several thousand percent of normal. Over both polar regions this will come down as snow, and the rapid accumulation in the two enclosed continents will swell the existing icefields until a sizable percentage of the planet's water is locked up in ice. The world ocean level will drop, we estimate slightly over three-hundred feet, and that will bring all the ring of mountains and about half the interior of Atlantis above the surface. In addition, the temperature will drop to bearable limits. And then you can send in the colonists." "It sounds almost too simple, ' said Allan wonderingly. Ct'"That's an explanation in very broad terms. There are a few relevant details to be worked out, such as the large sunmirrors we'll have to post above each pole, to artificially stimulate the firm fields and turn snow to ice by continuous melting and refreezing, the four mirrors we plan to place above what will be the largest lakes on the continent, both to help dry them up and stimulate the precip rate, the river shaping that will have to be done when the dropping ocean level starts them flowing, and a few thousand smaller details, some of which we can't even imagine yet. This will be the first attempt to terraform an entire planet by weather control. But if plans work out, within a hundred years nine-tenths of Atlantis will be growing grass, and that's a land area of almost farming activities of the colonists should keep the dust level high and make the new precip rate self-perpetuating." "It's a big undertaking, but everyone thinks it can be done," said Phyllis earnestly. "When you compare that much surface to those tiny areas on some of the new planets, where every square foot of soil has to be treated and re-treated before it will take Earth plants, you can begin to see what a wonderful opportunity this is." "Yes, we've taken at least two thousand cores out of the higher areas in Atlantis," resumed Murdock. "They show it's been raised and inundated three times within the past hundred thousand years, obviously a result of volcanic activity causing a temporary increase in the dust level. Plant growth was extensive each time the water receded, and we have a fairly thick layer of humus-rich soil on which to plan an economy. The sea has both animal and plant life in great quantities, including many species, like the seals, which can live on either land or water. I think Sister, within two hundred years, can support a hundred"Weather control is still not an exact science, even on Earth. Can you really be this sure of how your dust and mirrors will affect this planet?" "No, but we're certain enough to recommend going ahead witti it once we've finished our current job of assessing the icecarrying capacity of this pole. After all, there's no intelligent life to be harmed if we blunder." Phyllis glared angrily at Murdock, but did not answer the implied derision. Most of the people in the lounge had been drifting out as they talked, suppressing yawns. The tiny Eurasian rose, said goodnight to Allan, and left also. "I'm prepared to offer you any assistance within my power, Allan," said Murdock rising. "Just let me know what you need." "Thanks. I'll probably call on you. Phyllis and I are going to dissect that seal in the morning and see what we can learn." They learned very little Phyllis had not already known. Allan pushed back from the table after four hours of intense work, and turned off the recorder into which he had been making a running commentary. The seal was basically a variation of its distant cousins on Earth. There was nothing of unusual interest about its bodily processes, with the exception of that baffling brain. The pan was small, the cranium narrow, the actual size less than a quarter that of a human. But it was like nothing he had ever seen. They washed up and went to lunch. Phyllis had been a comand the notes she had taKen on what little she had observed of the seal's behavior were no help. Her belief that the creatures were intelligent was apparently based on woman's intuition rather than accumulated dat"I think we've learned aS much as we can from a dead specjimen," he said after the meal. "What we need is a live seal. How do we go about getting one?" "That's a tough questionThey carry away their wounded after an attack, and it's almost impossible to Catch them in the water. Several of the men tried, when we were -- " she made a rnoue of distaste " -- eating them." "I'll discuss it with Murdock tonight," said Allan. T should be the one! th Deci sion Maker projected into the night, his individuality f?r once overriding the group consciousness and speaking cleatlyMine is the risk, let mine be the body! . but the soft, insistent voices of the individuals comprising the race memory cried No! No! it may not be! No danger to the Decision Maker. No danger. No danger... and he yielded, letting the desire to offer himself for the trap the humanS were setting fade from his mind. With its passing came the need for decisions. The humans were establishing a work party near the edge of the water, the work to continue after dark in hopes of luring the seals into an attack. Men with stun-guns were hidden throughout the rocks, and three large lights had been concealed at high points overlooking the area. The seals movements must be planned to insure that the humans captured only the one individual the group selected. Also, the attack must look real, must seem to involve a large party while actually exposing the smallest possible number to danger. The word 'Tactics' appeared in his mind, and almost immediately there was an answering pulse. One of the new memory carriers, containing only the human knowledge... He scanned the word and its associated meanings, leaped to three other memorybank units checking out inferences and related data, and had his plan. One of the humans had been an ardent follower of a game played on Earth, one which involved deceptive movement of bodies, concerted displays of an object called a ball to a specified section of the playing area... He formulated the necessary details, and swiftly communicated them to the selected units of the people. Ill A llan crouched low in the rocks and watched the water. The two larger moons were passing slowly through the clear sky and the beach was well-lighted. He turned away a second to rub his eyes, and when he looked again the beach was swarming with short figures. It was almost as if he had signalled them to attack by looking away. The seals came running upright out of the water and scurried behind the two walls of rock, moving stiff-legged but swiftly across the open area. From his vantage point Allan could see the leaders starting to twirl their slings. He drew his laser pistol and sent a red beam flaring into the sky. Instantly the searchlights came on, brightly illuminating the areas behind the rocks where the seals were gathering. The work gang dropped their tools and drew stun-guns, and the men hidden in the rocks rose to their feet, searching for targets. The abortive attack stalled. The seals broke for the sea, fleeing what was obviously a trap. Allan saw the hurrying line of sleek forms plunging into the water, and rubbed his eyes. He would have sworn there were many more of them than now seemed visible. "Got one!" came an exultant yell, and "Me too!" said another voice. But Allan's attention was abruptly distracted. A seal popped into view less than twenty feet away, twirling a sling and looking directly at him. He hastily drew his stun-gun, fired and missed, cursed himself for a bungling professor who belonged in a classroom, fired again, and saw the small figure drop. The sharpedged missile clattered to the rock at his feet. The floodlights abruptly went out. There were wild yells as the humans, their eyes slow to adjust back to moonlight, found themselves blinded. Allan groped his way to the seal he had shot and crouched over the body. They should have gotten several prisoners, but remembering the creatures' habit of carrying off their wounded he was taking no chances. After a moment someone found the outlet where the power cable had been disconnected, and the lights came back on. The noises of fighting had died away in the darkness, and now Allan saw there were no attackers in sight. "Hey! My seal's gone!" called the first man who had claimed a hit, as though he could hardly believe it. "Mine too!" said another voice, and other men began to climb among the rocks, looking for seals they had been certain they saw fall. When the confusion subsided Allan discovered they had exactly one captive . His. nphe small creature in the cage  twitched its long whiskers, stirred, and after a moment raised its head. The eyelids moved, and Allan found himself staring into a slightly protuberant pair of golden eyes. The thick black lips opened as the seal gave an almost human yawn, showing the long incisors of a carnivore's dentition. The mouth closed with an audible click of teeth, and it moved to the bars separating them. "At close range it even looks intelligent," said Phyllis softly, and the captive turned the golden eyes on her. They were alone in the cold room. I am not intelligent as you humans use the term, said a clear, cold voice in both their minds, in perfect World English. As a separate entity I exist as an animal, directed primarily by inherited instincts. But I am a member of a mentally interlocked race, and the combined minds which merge in my brain possess the quality of intelligence. The two humans turned toward each other simultaneously, and each saw that the other had received the message. There was a brief silence while the stunning implications sank in, and then Phyllis opened her rosebud mouth in a yell of high glee. "I told him! Oh, the thick-headed oaf, I told him, I told him!" Her enthusiasm was contagious, but Allan forced himself to be calm. A sense of steadily mounting excitement was building up and his breath was ragged -- these unexpected discoveries were one of the rewarding parts of his job -- but this was no time to become emotional. There was an odd quality to the mental voice. It gave a strong impression of a group speaking in chorus, but with the voice of this individual dominating the rest. "How may I best communicate with you?" he asked aloud. As you are now doing. Your immediate thoughts are unclear when you do not vocalize. "Then first," his mind shifted into high gear, many events of the past few hours clicking together into a coherent pattern, "first I want to know why you only pretended to attack the work party and deliberately let us capture you." Because we wish to establish face-to-face communication. It is our understanding that you will decide whether these humans now here will leave, or stay and be joined by many more. "That is my responsibility, yes. But why are you interested in my decision?" There was a brief silence. Allan felt Phyllis' hand clinging tightly to his arm, and he stared into the unblinking golden eyes, waiting. The creature finally projected, It would be best if you would accompany this unit to a Gathering-Place. I am only a messenger. The Decision Maker wishes to meet you face-to-face, in the presence of a complete memory. Allan turned to look at Phyllis. She was staring at him, wideeyed. Her expression asked. Trap? He shook his head, turned back to the seal. It had closed its mouth, and the heavy lips hid the sharp teeth. For the first time he saw how the large eyes, the downward curve of the mouth, the jutting whiskers, gave the seal a tragic-comic look, like the sad clowns of an ancient circus. "I will go with you," he said aloud. t#''our safety while you are here is my responsibility!" said Murdock angrily. "I couldn't possibly permit it!" "You have no way of preventing me." Allan made a strong effort and kept his voice down. Despite the man's bluff friendliness he had not liked Murdock from the first, and this unexpected opposition was too ill-timed to be anything but deliberate obstructionism. "I have the authority to take command of this, or any other civilian-operated station, and I will summarily remove you as manager if that becomes necessary." Murdock jumped to his feet, stood towering over the smaller man. His face was a fiery red, his big hands clenched into fists. Allan found himself wondering if Murdock would actually be foolish enough to hit him. "Rerrioving me may not be as easy as you seem to think!" the big man bellowed. They were alone in his private offce, and the sound was almost deafening. "Don't be childish. The station personnel are thoroughly familiar with the authority of a Practical Philosopher. They aren't going to risk a prison sentence by supporting you." "You talk pretty rough for such a small man!" "Please. Will you simply supply me with the needed equipment without further argument?" Murdock supplied it. An hour after daybreak Allan and the seal were swimming through the blue water, about twenty feet below the surface, heading northwest along the ice shelf. The station's standard underwater gear was a spacesuit with a ducted propeller mounted on the back, with a simple variable speed control installed between the first two fingers of the right hand. At maximum he could move less than ten miles an hour, and keeping his head tilted back for vision and his arms rigidly ahead for guidance was tiring. Surrounding them, but keeping at a respectful distance, were fighting seals, all carrying basalt spears. Phyllis had assured him she had seen a team of seals kill the largest fish in this freshwater ocean with those sharpened rocks. It was another long and weary hour before his escort projected. Move toward the ice and descend slightly. Slow your speed. He obeyed, and after a moment he saw a dark shadow in the white wall of ice, a shadow that swiftly grew larger. He angled slowly toward it and it became a jagged tunnel. The seal moved ahead to guide him. After a few yards the roof began to recede and he angled upward; he rose until he broke the surface, to find himself in a scene of strange but compelling beauty. It was a large grotto in the ice, at the head of a glacier that had reached the shore and lost its momentum. It had calved in a peculiar way, leaving this great hollow opening, and the sides had grown together again at the top. The ceiling was thin, sunlight pouring in through several long cracks where the joint was not perfect. The yellow beams struck one ice wall and rebounded in glittering fantasms of color, springing from surface to surface in a deceptive brightness that concealed more than it revealed. The massive walls were rough and jagged, with many sharp protruding edges. It was a fairy palace of crystal and glass, of reflected light and softened shadow, and Allan Odegaard thought it the most beautiful spot he had ever seen. Lying on the little beach and watching him with unblinking attention were about thirty adult seals. As he waded out of the water Allan saw that they formed a semi-circle, and at its center was the one who could only be the Decision Maker. IV '"T'he two Decision Makers faced each other, the golden eyes of the seal meeting and matching the brown eyes of the small Earthman. Allan lowered his gaze to check his environmental indicator, then undid his helmet. The air had a slightly fishy smell, but was crisp and cold. We welcome you to this Gathering-Place, came a projection, strong and commanding, and again it was compounded of many minds, though the overriding personality was that of the Decision Maker. We have brought you here to prove that within the meaning of your terms defining 'race' and 'intelligenf we are an intelligent race. We want you to declare this planet unlawfully occupied by Earthmen, and order those present to leave and all others to stay away. "I have no choice but to grant that as a race you are intelligent," said Allan slowly. "But if this mental ability is achieved by grouping minds, and as individuals you are something much less than the unified whole, then you are a unique lifeform and will require further study. But for now I would like to know why you want us to leave the planet." We know what the other Earthmen, those who understand the ways of wind, water and ice, seek to do here. Three times from the year our racial memory came into being the ice has grown, the sea lowered, the area you call Atlantis become half land and half water, the land green with growing things. Three times within memory our people have moved in great numbers onto the land, only to be driven back into the sea when the ice melted once more. We have confirmed, from knowledge found in the minds of Earthmen, what we already felt to be true, that we as a race cannot progress until we have freed ourselves of the environment of the sea. In another eight thousand of our seasons the ice will begin to form, as it has before. We will move onto the land, as we have before. But this time we will apply what we have taken from the minds of your companions and stored in our memory; we shall master the physical sciences, develop the necessary technology, learn to control the weather as you do. There will be no more flooding of the land. Listening to the calm, relentless way the words formed themselves and beat slowly through the neural passages of his brain Allan accepted the fact these people could do exactly what they said. "You have taken all the knowledge of all the humans here and stored it in your 'racial memory'?" All except yourself. Yours we will have in a few more nights. "Since you can read my mind you know that I have a difficult decision to make. It would help me if I knew what your 'racial memory' is, and how it works." I would also like to know your goals as a race once you are on the land, and how you plan to achieve them." 'T'hose questions are easily answered. Our group memory is an accumulated mass of knowledge which is impressed on the memory area of young individuals at birth, at least three such young ones for each memory segment. We are a short-lived race, dying of natural causes after eight of our years. As each individual who carries a share of the memory feels death approaching he transfers his part to a newly born child, and thus the knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation, forever. As for our aims, they are similar to your own. We have achieved -- there was a brief pause -- economic plenty. We have none of the conflicts between individuals or groups of individuals which characterize your society. But this is not enough. We seek to improve the life of the individual within the race, and this entails increasing the natural lifespan, eliminating enemies, perfecting a science of medicine -- a concept new to us -- and achieving the ability to enjoy pleasure, which we now know to be lacking in our lives. All this we can accomplish by means of the knowledge now stored in our memory, once the land is again ours. And the Earthman has corrupted another innocent race, thought Allan with wry bitterness. We can read your thoughts when you project that strongly. You define 'corruption' as increased knowledge of the choices open to an intelligent being, and an inclination to make those choices which lead toward greater pleasure in life. Why do you consider this a retrogressive quality? "I'm afraid it would be too complicated to explain, and perhaps I don't fully understand myself," said Allan grimly. "For now it's enough to know I must make a decision which will vitally affect your future, and I freely admit I'm going to find it hard to do." Since you state we qualify as an intelligent race your path should be clear. If you are now ready another unit will guide you back to your base. When you have made your decision speak it aloud, and we will hear. Bear in mind that if you decide to stay we will harass and fight you in every manner within our power. Allan slowly replaced his helmet and turned toward the water. He felt like a man who has eaten too large a meal and wants nothing more than to crawl into a corner and estivate while it digests. But his meal had been mental, and he might be a long time in torpor before he fully understood all that he had learned. The trip back was uneventful, and by noon he found himself in Murdock's office, with only Phyllis and the base manager present. He gave them a brief report, and watched the incredulous expression form on Murdock's face. Phyllis, too, seemed a little stunned. "Do I understand you have definitely decided an individual seal is not intelligent?" asked Murdock when he regained his composure. "I've made no decision. This ability to group minds is new to us, and requires study." "Because their group intelligence is a unique phenomena is no reason to consider the individuals within the group as weak," said Phyllis heatedly. "I'll probably want to talk to you again later," Murdock's voice was carefully expressionless. "In the meantime why don't you get a bite of lunch. Phyllis, can you stay a moment?"  llan took the implied dismissal at face value and rose. He was hungry, but when he sat down to eat the concentrates seemed curiously tasteless. He kept thinking of the refreshing coolness of the air in the grotto, of the beauty of the sun on the sparkling ice, the strange and ancient wisdom he had found in a group of seals. How odd, that as a race they had achieved the goals that had dominated the thinking of Earth's best philosophers for thousands of years, and then had formed the conviction that the need of the individual were as important as those of the race. There were still social planners on Earth who were unable to think of people in any terms except 'groups' and 'masses'. After lunch he put on cold weather gear and went outside. He walked the beaches all afternoon, hating his responsibility and the necessity for it. When he returned to the station at dusk his thinking had degenerated to vagrant thoughts; loose fragments, impressions and partial memories swirled through his mind... we have achieved economic plenty, but this is not enough... corruption is increased knowledge of the choices open to an intelligent being... we will harass and fight you in every manner within our power... The memory of blood oozing from the bitten body of a fish before the seal gulped it down without chewing, the sadclown faces, the overwhelming inclination to think of them as lovable pets... What would it be like, to share your tholights, emotions and desires with your fellows, to form a composite being greater than the sum of its parts? There was a clear, reasoning power in the Decision Maker, an intellect of great strength. When he stepped inside the door the p.a. was calling his name. He walked to Murdock's office as requested. "Sit down, Allan." The bluff heartiness, the easy, friendly attitude had been discarded, as though the big man knew they no longer served a purpose. His voice was brisk and impersonal. "I'm going to give you some information about Sister you won't find in the regular reports. All personnel who are aware of it have been sworn to strict secrecy. Not that that's necessary in your case, of course." "Thanks," said Allan stiffly. "You are aware, I'm sjnre, that Earth's supply of uranium is almost exhausted. In the excitement over this new 'sunlight diffusion' method of power generation and propagation the public has tended to forget the thousands of other industrial and medical applications of atomic science. They think that virtually unlimited power, available anywhere at anytime, will solve all problems. Actually, the need for uranium grows every day, and it has proven hard to find in commercial quantities. Sister is a very rich planet. The cores we have taken from Atlantis show extensive deposits of uranite and davidite, as well as some pitchblende, carnotite and tobernite. The primary concentration of davidite is on a rather high plateau, one which wiU be above water in five years. I predict that within ten there will be a refining plant there, shipping ore to Earth. I can't over-emphasize how important this is." "That's interesting information, Zip, but I fail to see the direct connection. I'm sure you are aware economic considerations never play any part in a P.P.'s decision." "Oh, come off it! That garbage about being the 'conscience of Mankind' won't wash with me. When word of these deposits reaches certain ears on Earth they'll have your credentials withdrawn in a minute if you give us trouble." "Do you really think so?" asked Allan. His voice was soft, almost gentle. "I'm certain of it. Idealism has its uses, but it can't stand in the way of a genuine need." "Would this sudden disbelief in a P.P.'s authority be connected in any way with the royalties your university wiU lose if I rule against you?" Murdock's face flushed, and he rose to his feet. "Can't you understand that I'm thinking of the good of all mankind?" Allan sighed tiredly. "Perhaps you are. And the needs of all mankind influence me, in a way you might not understand. But you're a little late with your information. I've already made up my mind. And I'll require that underwater gear again in the morning." When he was standing in his own cubicle after dinner he spoke into the air; "You said that you could hear me. Acknowledge that you do." There was a sudden electric sense of awareness, as though someone had picked up a telephone and stood holding it without speaking. He waited, and after a moment the calm multiple voice asked. What is your wish? "I would like to speak to the Decision Maker again, in person. Would you send someone at daylight to take me to the GatheringPlace?" There was another brief silence, and he could almost hear the ether stirring with the hurried conference. Then the voice said. It shall be done. beautiful grotto seemed unchanged, except that there were several more of the spearcarrying warriors present. They did not trust him, which indicated that their mind-reading abilities were limited. He had prepared no treachery. The Decision Maker regarded him sadly from the center of his race's memory bank, the golden eyes unblinking. This time you have summoned us. Allan took a deep breath of the cold air and paced back and forth on the small beach as he spoke, not looking at the seals. "You said you had no concept until our arrival of the science of medicine. Do you understand the meaning of the term 'gamble'? Because I am gambling with your future, and I can't possibly know how it will turn out. Let me give you my reasons and then my decision, which I have already sent to Earth." The guards nearest him moved closer, their spears perceptibly rising. He sensed the air of menace in the room, and wondered if he had made a mistake in coming here in person. It would be strange to die in this ice palace, when he had many times felt himself to be in far greater danger and escaped alive. "If you are left alone it will be eight-thousand years before a seal again walks the land, but then it will be a safe and certain thing. If we occupy your planet and war comes, you will kill many Earthmen before you are finally hunted down and killed. But make no mistake about it, you will be exterminated. Man is a capable, ruthless, relentless foe, and if he sets out to destroy you he will succeed. Your cooked bodies will grace his table, and it will not matter that the brains he shatters contain a racial memory that reaches farther into the past than his own. "I cannot endure the thought that another thousand generations of your kind should follow the tortuous road of the sea, gaining nothing but the day's sustenance. Neither do I wish war between us. My decision has been to report that you are definitely an intelligent race... but that I recommend completing the terraforming operation and starting colonization." There was an instant stir among the seals, a silent shifting nearest him raised their spears and advanced, stood poised, ready to thrust him through. He glanced at the waiting warriors and back to the Decision Maker, and knew that his life hung on his next words. He had not known how they would react, and his meager knowledge of hive-minds did not justify guesses, but somehow he had not thought they'd take an immediate and personal revenge. "I am an Earthman," he said slowly and clearly. "Sometimes I have been proud of my people, and sometimes ashamed. But the gamble I am taking is based on a knowledge of them, of other races, of your own, that you cannot match even with your long memory. If the colonists will follow my recommendation -- cooperate with you, help you on land and be helped by you in the sea -- there is no reason the two races cannot progress together. Despite our past history I have enough faith in man to think he will fulfill his share of the bargain. Will you match my faith, and pledge your race to work with mine?" The Decision Maker faced him silently, and he felt a secret tug of knowing sympathy for an individual who must decide the course of his entire race. The silence stretched out; the guards standing by him did not lower their spears. The Earthman stood waiting for the word that would decide his personal fate. The decision that the two races CQuld work together had been reached by reasoning, the one to tell the seals in person by a sudden impulse. Now he would learn the truth Rare Old Periodicals for Your Collection A backward time machine: the actual newspapers Americans read a century and more ago. This is living history, the eyewitness accounts of great battles, the debates of famous figures. Not reproductions or facsimiles but the original newspapers themselves, suitable for framing or binding, almost mint condition except for slight age-darkening at the edges, many still uncut, shipped boxed and insured, postpaid. No duplicates. First order takes each item. # issues Boston Potriot; Saturday, Sept. #, #; Sat. June #, #; Wed., Apr, #, # Correspondence of late Pres. Adams. #. # issues Rhode Istand American  Providence Gozette, July, Aug.  Oct. # (various dates). #. # issues N. Y. Evening Post, March  July, #. #. Civil War issues N. Y. Daily Tribune, ##. # issues various dates. Fort Sumter doomed. Bombardment of Charlestown, Capture of Chesapeake, etc. Single copies # each (our choice), # copies # (our choice), all # copies, # (if no prior sale). # copies National Gazette (Philadelphia), Apr., Oct.  Dec. #, various dates. #. Send order to t. Pritchet, # Knollwood Rd., Eastchester, N.Y. Payment with order or will be sent C.O.D. for # deposit. From the collection of Robert M. Guinn. Authenticity guaranteed by Galaxy Publishing Corp. H was just an ordinary Tuesday night... rather slow, in facti A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street. "Preserve us this night," he said as he touched his hat to them, "and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?" "I gave you a thousand last Friday," said the young man. "Indeed you did," the panhandler replied, "and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight." "That's right, George, he did," said the young woman. "Give it to him dear. I believe he's a good sort." So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars; and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks, and went on to the recouping of his fortunes. As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed IIdefonsa Impala the most beautiful woman in the city. "Will you marry me this night, Ildy?" he asked cheerfully. "Oh, I don't believe so, Basil," she said. "I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don't seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that." But when they had parted she asked herself: "But whom will I marry tonight?" The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.  Then the Abebaios block had ' ' been removed from human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was imderstood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery. Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight hour period, Freddy Fixico had just invented a manus module. Freddy was a Nyctalopw, and the modules were characteristic of these people. The people had then divided themselves -- according to their natures and inclinations -- into the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops; or the Dawners who had their most active hours from # A.M. till Noon, the Day-Flies who otjtained from Noon to # P.M., and the Night-Seers whose civilization thrived from # P.M. to # A.M. The cultures, inventions, markets and activities of these three folk were a little different. As a Nyctalops, Freddy had just begun his working day at # P.M. on a slow Tuesday night. Freddy rented an office and had it furnished. This took one minute, negotiation, selection and installation being almost instantaneous. Then he invented the manus module; that took another minute. He then had it manufactured and marketed; in three minutes it was in the hands of key buyers. It caught on. It was an attractive module. The flow of orders began within thirty seconds. By ten minutes after eight every important person had one of the new manus modules, and the trend had been set. The module began to sell in the millions. It was one of the most interesting fads of the night, or at least the early part of the night. Manus modules had no practical function, no more than had Sameki verses. They were attractive, or a psychologically satisfying size and shape, and could be held in the hands, set on a table, or installed in a module niche of any wall. Naturally Freduy became very rich. Ildefonsa Impala the most beautiful woman in the city was always interested in newly rich men. She came to see Freddy about eight-thirty. People made up their minds fast, and Ildefonsa had hers made up when she came. Freddy made his own up quickly and divorced Judy Fixico in Small Claims Court. Freddy and Ildefonsa went honeymooning to Paraiso Dorado, a resort. I t was wonderful. All of Ildy's marriages were. There was the wonderful floodlighted scenery. The recirculated water of the famous falls was tinted gold;' the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall. The beach was a perfect copy of that at Merevale, and the popular drink that first part of the night was blue absinthe. But scenery -- whether seen for the first time or revisited after an interval -- is striking for the sudden intense view of it. It is not meant to be lingered over. Food, selected and prepared instantly, is eaten with swift enjoyment: and blue absinthe lasts no longer than its own novelty. Loving, for Ildefonsa and her paramours, was quick and consuming: and repetition would have been pointless to her. Besides Ildefonsa and Freddy had taken only the one hour luxury honeymoon. Freddy wished to continue the relationship, but Ildefonsa glanced at a trend indicator. The manus module would hold its popularity for only the first third of the night. Already it had been discarded by people who mattered. And Freddy Fixico was not one of the regular successes. He enjoyed a full career only about one night a week. They were back in the city and divorced in Small Claims Court by nine thirty-five. The stock of manus modules was remaindered, and the last of it would be disposed to bargain hunters among the Dawners who will buy anything. "Whom shall I marry next?" Ildefonsa asked herself. "It looks like a slow night." "Bagelbaker is buying," ran the word through Money Market, but Bagelbaker was selling again before the word had made its rounds. Basil Bagelbaker enjoyed making money, and it was a pleasure to watch him work as he dominated the floor of the Market and assembled runners and a competent staff out of the corner of his mouth. Helpers stripped the panhandler rags off him and wrapped him in a tycoon toga. He sent one runner to pay back twentyfold the young couple who had advanced him a thousand dollars. He sent another with a more substantial gift to Ildefonsa Impala, for Basil cherished their relationship. Basil acquired title to the Trend Indication Complex and had certain falsifications .set into it. He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage. He had been the richest man in the world for some minutes now. He became so money-heavy that he could not maneuver with the agility he had shown an hour before. He became a great fat buck, and the pack of expert wolves circled him to bring him down. Very soon he would lose that first fortune of the evening. The secret of Basil Bagelbaker is that he enjoyed losing money spectacularly after he was full of it to the bursting point. A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philo.sophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each sub-section; an adept would use the paradox feed-in, and the striking analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. "I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting," said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it wa a work of philosophy. Maxwell Mouser sent the work out to publishers, and received it back each time in about three minutes. An analysis of it and reason for rejection was always given -- mostly that the thing had been done before and better. Maxwell received it back ten times in thirty minutes, and was discouraged. Then there was a break. Ladion's work had become a hit within the last ten minutes, and it was now recognized that Mouser's monograph was both an answer and a supplement to it. It was accepted and published in less than a minute after this break. The reviews of the first five minutes were cautious ones; then real enthusiasm was shown. This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night. There were those who said it might be one of the enduring works and Ieven have a hold-over appeal to the Dawners the next morning. Naturally Maxwell became very rich, and naturally Ildefonsa came to see him about midnight. Being a revolutionary philosopher, Maxwell thought that they might make some free arrangement, but Ildefonsa insisted it must be marriage. So Maxwell divorced Judy Mouser in Small Claims Court and went off with Ildefonsa. This Judy herself, though not # beautiful as Ildefonsa, was the fastest taker in the City. She CMily wanted the men of the moment for a moment, and she was always there before even Ildefonsa. Ildefonsa believed that rfie took the men away from Judy: Judy said that Ildy had her leavings and nothing else. "I had him first," Judy would always mock as she raced through Small Claims Court. "Oh that damned Urchin!" Ildefonsa would moan. "She wears my very hair before I do." Ayyaxwell Mouser and Ildefonsa Impala went honeymooning to Musicbox Mountain, a resort. It was wonderful. The peaks were done with green snow by Dunbar and Fittle. (Back at Money Market Basil Bagelbaker was putting together his third and greatest fortune of the night which might surpass in magnitude even his fourth fortune of the Thursday before.) The chalets were Switzier than the real Swiss and had live goats in every room. (And Stanley Skuldugger was emerging as the top ActorImago of the middle hours of the night.) The popular drink for tliat middle part of the night was Glotzenglubber, Eve Cheese and Rhine wine over pink ice. (And back in the city the leading Nyctalops were taking their midnight break at the Toppers' Club.) Of course it was wonderful, as were all of Ildefonsa's -- But she had never been really up on philosophy so she had scheduled only the special thirty-five min ute honeymoon. She looked at the trend indicator to be sure. She found that her current husband had been obsoleted, and his opus was now referred to sneeringly as Mouser's Mouse. They went back to the city and were divorced in Small Claims Court. The membership of the Toppers' Club varied. Success was the requisite of membership. Basil Bagelbaker might be accepted as a member, elevated to tlie presidency and expelled from it as a dirty pauper from three to six times a night. But only important persons could belong to it, or those enjoying brief moments of importance. "I believe I will sleep during the Dawner period in the morning," Overcall said. "I may go up to this new place Kpjmopolis for an hour of it. They're said to be good. Where will you sleep, Basil?" "Flop-house." "I believe I will sleep an hour by the Midian Method," said Burnbanner. "They have a fine new clinic. And perhaps I'll sleep an hour by the Prasenka Process, and an hour by the Dormidio." "Crackle has been sleeping an hour every period by the natural method," said Overcall. "I did that for a half hour not long since," said Burnbanner. "I believe an hour is too long to give it. Have you tried the natural method, Basil?" "Always. Natural method and a bottle of red-eye." Otanley Skuldugger had become the most meteoric actor-imago for a week. Naturally he became very rich, and Ildefonsa Impala went to see him about # A.M. "I had him first!" rang the mocking voice of Judy Skuldugger as she skipped through her divorce in Small Claims Court. And Ildefonsa and Stanley-boy went off honeymooning. It is always fun to finish up a period with an actor-imago who is the hottest property in the business. There is something so adolescent and boorish about them. Besides, there was the publicity, and Ildefonsa liked that. The rumor-mills ground. Would it last ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? Would it be one of those rare Nyctalops marriages that lasted through the rest of the night and into the daylight off hours? Would it even last into the next night as some had been known to do? Actually it lasted nearly forty minutes, which was almost to the end of the period. It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three minute and five minute capsule dramas, and several of the six minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine -- a solidly sordid offering -- seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit. Hundred-storied buildings had been erected, occupied, obsoleted, and demolished again to make room for more contemporary structures. Only the mediocre would use a building that had been left over from the DayFlies or the Dawners, or even the Nyctalops of the night before. The city was rebuilt pretty completely at least three times during an eight-hour period. The Period drew near its end. Basil Bagelbaker, the richest man in the world, the reigning president of the Toppers' Club, was enjoying himself with his cronies. His fourth fortune of the night was a paper pyramid that had risen to incredible heights; but Basil laughed to himself as he savored the manipulation it was founded on. "Three ushers of the Toppers' Club came in with firm step. "Get out of here, you dirty bum!" they told Basil savagely. They tore the tycoon's toga off him and then tossed him his seedy panhandler's rags with a three-man sneer. "All gone?" Basil asked. "I gave it another five minutes." "All gone," said a messenger from Money Market. "Nine billion gone in five minutes, and it really pulled some others down with it." "Pitch the busted bum out!" howled Overcall and Burnbanner and the other cronies. "Wait, Basil," said Overcall. "Turn in ttie President's Crosier before we kick you down stairs. After all, you'll have it several times again tomorrow night." The Period was over. The Nyctalops drifted off to sleep clinics or leisure-hour hide-outs to pass their ebb time. The Auroreans, the Dawners, took over the vital stuff. Now you would see some action! Those Dawners really made fast decisions. You wouldn't catch them wasting a full minute setting up a business. A sleepy panhandler met IIdefonsa Impala on the way. "Preserve us this morning, Ildy," he said, "and will you marry me the coming night?" "Likely I will, Basil," she told him. "Did you marry Judy during the night past?" "I'm not sure. Could you let me have two dollars, Ildy?" "Out of the question. I believe a Judy Bagelbaker was named one of the ten best-dressed women during the frou-frou fashion period about two o'clock. Why do you need two dollars?" "A dollar for a bed and a dollar for red-eye. After all, I second." "I keep my two sorts of accounts separate. Here's a dollar, Basil. Now be off! I can't be seen talking to a dirty panhandler." "Thank you, Ildy. I'll get the , red-eye and sleep in an alley. Preserve us this morning." Bagelbaker shuffled off whistling Slow Tuesday Night. And already the Dawners had set Wednesday morning to jumpT he great fashion in dealing with science fiction used to be to treat it as a pocket universe. And "used to be" is not so far behind us that we do not still get home at nit with shoe-tip bruises on our heels and elsewhere. Nor has there been as yet a marked thinning-out of . either numbers or energy among the vigorous proponents of that root-bound view. In one aspect, that view is nurtured by making critical comparisons of stories by, say, Paul Janvier, to the writing of "the Mainstream." On those rare occasions when something more specific is obviously called for, the comparison is always to, say, John A. Sentry. This is because whether the names of tiiese two science fiction writers are remembered now or not, they are obviously safer in each other's arms than they would be if party of the second part were, say, Herbert Gold, much less somebody like Terry Southern. I don't propose to enlarge much on this here. My point is not that Gold or Southern are intrinsically better writers than, say Sam #e Janet Argo. My point is tiiat many, many science fiction people of various degrees of graceful intelligence have been scared for a long time that they are, or have been certain of it and have been playing the point spread to build little copies of Mediterranean viUas for themselves out here just this side of Hadrian's wall. They are now having to come to terms with the invasion of the cosmopolitans. But what all this means, and how it relates to the paramount twentieth century dilemma -- whether to be square or hip -- are things we must each grope for on our own time, since we are met here only for the simple discussion of books published within our harmlessly hobbyistic circle of entertainment aiicion. libness and memory play strange tricks, as when I recall that my grammar school history teacher was fond of saying that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman or an empire. Memory calls him to mind on the occasion of this review of the #th Annual version of The Year's Best SF (Judith Merril, Ed., Simon  Schuster, #): reason rebels against glibness when one considers that my grammar school history teacher lived partly by refraining from trying his borrowed wit on Charlemagne (stubborn fellow with a beard; lost at Roncesvalles but kept his scepter in good repair). There is less pretense every year that the running title of this important and often distinguished series has any literal meaning. In this year's compendium (the year treated by this late # book is, of course, #), there are such inclusions as Ben Bova's good article "Where is Everybody?", Jules Feiffer's whimsically vicious cartoon feature "Dog Eat Dog", two other cartoons which show up callow in contrast to their distinguished company, and W.J.J. Gordon's "The Nobel Prize Winners", a passing fair piece of fiction which is assuredly about scientists but is not science fiction or, sadly, fantasy. And the editor herself goes to some lengths to explain that the book consists of the "best" pieces she could find in a complex and crowded marketplace; that some of them are substitutes for stories she would have included had she had more room, or world enough or time. She is joined by Anthony Boucher, among the supporting memoranda which traditionally leash the various stories together and then provide the cart for them to pull, in a species of lament not only for the condition of the marketplace but on the diversity of goods for sale. In short, the editor of this institution not only displays a great deal of competence in maintaining it at all, she then tells you how difficult it is, how intractable the material, how increasingly hard it is to ferret out its annual significance. Meanwhile, back in the book, chaos reigns. All the running commentary does is make excuses for it, where no excuses are needed. The stories include Allan Danzig's "The Great Nebraska Sea," Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird," and Cordwainer Smith's "Drunkboat." Together with the Bova article, which offers a lucid explanation for why we have not been obviously visited by extraterrestrials, and the Feiffer cartoon feature, these are the only instances in which the creator has obviously stayed in control of his material according to his original intention all the way and made it seem worthwhile. The Danzig is also the book's crispest exposition of scientific notion, Hal Clement's "Hot Planet" having disqualified itself by attempting to also be about people. The Malamud is a fine, sly fantasy and the "best" story in the book, if by that we mean it successfully treats of the nature of things in and outside the skin. The Smith is as usual the obvious triumph of emotion over reason, but see farther in this column for a laudatory view of Smith's reasoning powers. The rest -- and it is a long list, containing names to conjure with, if your taste runs to conjuring with Andre Maurois -- are variously interesting. Some of them, like Alfred Hester's "They Don't Make Life Like They "Bernie the Faust" do not fluff until the last few notes and have meanwhile furnished some memorable moments you may well prefer to the powerful but strict integrity of the Danzig. There are one or two things that clearly embarrassed me to the point where my critical faculty went dead; apart from the Gerberg and Gallagher cartoons, these specifically include Richard Matheson's apprentice Crow Jim poem, "The Jazz Machine." There are one or two things I enjoyed reading while convinced they were simply not good enough for anything named the "best," even the "best" of such a content-free colophon as time has made of "SF." And what I meant by my reference to Maurois a while back was that even Stanton Coblentz, who I fear is coming in for some hard licks these days after not getting enough of them in the #s, could have handled this idea better, and that Miss Merril assuredly knows this, and that therefore the inclusion of "The Earth Dwellers" is a straight sop for the culture vultures. He is here not because he has written one of the best SF stories of the year, and not because the works of Andre Maurois are directly effective in determining the course of science fiction, but because someone associated with the preparation of this volume felt a need, still, to prove the respectability of the hands that turn to it. But it is not by Andre Maurois that the walls will be tumbled and the icons tom down; it is in any case too late to issue engraved invitations to the barn-burning, and the guest list was compiled by subversives. I think the thing that muses me most is that Miss Merril has a good thing here, and keeps trying to make it something else, for formalism's sake. There is great value in having an annual collection, scrupulously compiled, respectably published, which to some extent does reflect the taste of the one knowledgeable person whose name is attached thereto. It hardly matters whether one story that is in has occupied space which should have gone to a story that is out, because the very nature of Miss Merril 's vested interest still gives her a broader field of candidates ' than any of the rest of us are ever going to evaluate anyhow. Nor does it matter that the ground seems to keep shifting nnder the editor's feet as the field makes contact with mean ol' mainstream and we spin toward the day when it will no longer be remarkable that someone has written a Rudyard Kipling novel set on the planets of distant suns, or that Herbert Gold, to pick up on my previous example, has written a short story about people which just happens to use a stock sf situation to prove its point as it could not have been proved in any other way. There is more permanent value in calling the series Judith MeriiVs Annual of Her Favorite SF, and letting it go at that, and thus giving us the inevitable fascinating hodge-podge and letting the reader make of it what he will, than there is in trying to cobble the fragments of a villa into another villa. Science fiction is clearly in a process of catastrophic change; Miss Merril says so, and the nature of the various contents of her book says so without her help and despite her attempts to make a shape out of the flying fragments before they have fairly started on their way. But no one ever listens to me, and neither do I, very much. I think that what The #th Annual of the Year's Best SF is most interesting for is as a piece of evidence for the assertion that better and more orderly times are coming; that there will be SF (whatever that means) by writers perhaps yet unborn who are always SF writers and yet not commercial science fiction writers; that there will be a healthy and enjoyable, entertaining (meaning "commercial") science fiction which clearly cannot be confused with anything else, and that we can then all pack up our dichotomies and go home to our various delights. I think the very existence of Miss Merril's series has been a precipitating factor, and that she would be happier in her blurbs if she relaxed and realized that no matter what you call it, it is the only empire in town. TV To Future In It is a collection  of eleven stories by John Brunner, published by Doubleday at #. Seven of them are from British magazines; the other four are from the top U.S. publications. So this is a collection which combines novelty with certified competence. "No Future in It," the first story in the book, is about a medieval charlatan -- that is, a hapless fellow in a bind because he claimed to be a magician -- who finally succeeds in evoking a time traveller within his pentad e. That is, he benefits by fortunate coincidence. "Puzzle for Spacemen" is a murder mystery in space; the outstanding feature of it is the repeatedly underscored assertion that people doing dangerous work in a weightless environment would have a very bad time with corpses. "Fair" is about a government agency whose purpose is to promote mutual understanding and whose gimmick is to disguise its modus operandi as a carnival entertainment device. The story ends with the hero's discovery of this fact. "The Windows of Heaven" is about the man on the Moon who witnesses Earth's death when the sun flares, then goes down to the surface to re-seed it with life by leaving his own body there. At no time does Brunner refer to Alfred Bester's "Adam But No Eve," an oversight. "Out of Order" is a gimmick story about a super-automated service mechanism which has been ordered to deliver something "yesterday." Slight but good of its kind, this story is clearly not in Brunner's main line of work, but does go to show that his range includes an occasional talent for humor, as "No Future in It" failed to do. "Elected Silence," about a man who has been kept in solitary confinement by completely inhuman creatures for a very long time, and is then rescued by our side, is quite good in many places; the portrait of the central character's mind is very convincing. I have the uneasy feeling Brunner thinks his vicious Terrestrial military people are typical of their class, and that his compromising doctor is also symbolic of the moderate's ineffectuality. But that's his red wagon ; my basic criticism of this story is that it could obviously have been told with more economy. "Badman" is a soc. gimmick story; the attempt to reduce human nature to something in a test-tube, whereon the proponent of the scheme-reagent drops la his idea and... See the bubbles rise and clarify the people! In other words, it's a story about how the idea of setting up strawman hatred surrogates for everyone to blow off his aggressions keeps the world at peace, and furthermore permits the recruits to strawdom to feel a lot of deKciously masochistic pangs at how they'll suffer. (Prose courtesy your latest college bull-session; please leave a dime for beer.) "Report on the Nature of the Lunar Surface" is another gimmick story, not bad, good enough and short enough so that it'll leave its point undisturbed. "The Iron Jackass" is another sociological gimmick story; this one, I will not buy even if Mbiyu Koinange and Arthur C. Clarke both visit my living room to explain Indian birth-cries to me (Brunner having introduced the names of these gentlemen as supporting affidavits for a story about Slavs). "Protect Me from My Friends" and "Stimulus," the last two stories in the book, are about two different kinds of superman; their mutual point seems to be that Man will have to be tricked into letting new breeds get started, and that getting started is not necessarily good for new breeds. It is the first instance in which Brunner betrays any sign of realizing that the world and the universe are not simple and will not yield to simple solutions. I am as encouraged to see it as I am discouraged by the auctorial introductions which precede each piece. These often seem to be about something else entirely, and always make each story sound the way a cake frosted with pure Crisco tastes. 'The Planet Buyer, by Cordwainer Smith (Pyramid Books #R-#, #c, paper), is the author's first novel. That would automatically place it high on the reading list, even if Pyramid's notably honest Don Bensen were not suggesting it as a Hugo candidate. And there is more to it than that. But let us take it one step at a time. The first thing anybody notices about Smith, of course, is technique; the jab, jab, jab of his repetitions which may in fact be part of a symphonic approach to the problem of communication; the picking up of clearly potent nonsensewords like "Vomact" or "Abba Dingo" and making characterizations out of them at his leisure, if one may use that term. I cannot guess what Smith thinks he is doing in places like that; I know what he does to me, and he does it in style. The most important thing about Smith, I am beginning to realize, is that all his stories relate directly to a completely consistent phantom universe; they are not so much sequels to each other as they are tesserae in a mosaic, and what appear to be loose ends or at best plants are in fact integral fragments of other parts which will not take on their intended function until he later lays down the main body of that part. What I mean is, he does not have a vague master plan and a trick of the mind which permits him to spin off interesting notions he may later discover are not suitable pegs on which to hang the "next" story. There is no next story. They are all going on at the same pseudo-time, which is as real for the phantom universe as our pseudo-time is for ours. Whether he actually holds the complete work in his head at this moment is irrelevant to this part of my point, this part being that the only thing that prevents Siiith from presenting us with a completely realized, seamless structure which will yield entertainment and information from any angle at any focus and speed -- just like the real universe -- is that he is limited by his medium to describing infinity in finite time. We all are, of course, but the rest of us are content to take on the job in parts, whose exact relationships will come as something of a surprise to ourselves and represent a sort of discovery. If we manage to string together five or six stories or a couple of novels, we do it for the sake of a character or a nevertheless straightforward idea whose possibilities continue to open before us. Not Smith. He's not inventing, he's reporting. And he's doing it from God's point of view. But whether he does actually hold the completed work in his head or whether it is unnecessary for him to ever do so -- the only two possibilities -- even a #-page book can only be a larger piece than Smith has previously revealed all at once; it cannot possibly be a novel. Or, for that matter, a story (it's too long for that). This particular piece is dominated by about half the story of Rod McBan, the scion of a family of Norstrilian sheep farmers, which automatically means he is fabulously wealthy (but only on the other side of the tariff barrier around his cannily simple home world). Thus he became "The Boy Who Bought Old Earth" in the earlier novelette version. In The Planet Buyer, we are promised by the author -- or perhaps by a character in another piece who will turn out to have been the narrator of this one -- that we will see the rise of this figure and his triumph over the volitions that would make of him an object rather than a player. The promise is not kept; McBan when we last see him has undergone some remarkable transformations from the heir with a shaky title to the legatee of a fantastic fortune pyramided for him by others, but he has yet to move on his own account. Considering that Norstrilian sheep are the only source of immortality drug, that McBan is the only handle the rest of the universe might grasp to pry Norstrilia open, that in Smith's universe there are no heroes or villains but rather -- to borrow a frame of reference I dimly recall from somewhere -- the hip, the square, and things, there is still a great deal due to pop, and many games to be enjoyed. Smith proposes (or the narrator proposes) that the game is with the reader, at the end. It is not. He'd get tom apart or bored. And actually, I do think that Smith is reporting, and will file the latest dispatch in due course. Where I think he is actually reporting from is this universe, of course, and he is no more God than any of the rest at us are. But how many of the rest of us have arrived at a working hypothesis that lets you move toward the advantage every time whether you know all the conditions or not? I suggest that the most interesting thing about this book is that it is of things interesting; try some... a half a dollar is what you use it for. I n addition to the two astronomical books discussed in the editorial, we have a clutch of others worth your attention. Thomas Whiteside's Aone Through the Dark Sea (George Braziller) is only partly of interest here, since it is composed erf three long essays. One deals with Captain Kurt Carlsend and his ship, the Flying Enterprise (remember?) one is about the evacuation of the island of Tristan da Cimha -- and the third, entitled To the Cytherean Phase, is the one we're interested in now. It is an adventure story of a great voyage -- the voyage of Mariner II to Venus in #, described in rich and anthropomorphic detail What Mariner II reported of course, has been the subject of great and unceasing debate ever since. If its readings, or rather the interpretations of its transtoiissions, are correct, then we simply did not know anywhere near as much as we thought we did about the planet Venus. (All in all it seems a less troublesome assumption to believe that somehow some errors were made in Mariner II's reports.) Nevertheless, the flight was a tremendous technical achievement, and Whiteside's essay is probably the best lay account you can find. Robert G. Aitken's The Binary Stars (Dover) is fairly technical and a somewhat dated survey of everything that was known as of # or so about visual, spectroscopic and eclipsing binaries. This is a field that dates fast. It's too bad, of course, that such puzzles as W Puppis and Epsilon Aurigae were not dealt with here. Nevertheless, The Binary Stars was, and remains, a classic in the field. Riddles of Astronomy (Basic Books) brings back to us a well known science fiction name, Otto Binder -- who, as half of the most famous brother act in science fiction, Eando (for Earl and Otto) Binder, kept most of the sf magazines of the #'s in business. It is a defect of the book that Binder wrote it in the tones of a science-fiction writer, enraptured with the wonder of It all. There is far too much geewhiz and over-dramatization, for a subject which is already so exciting and provocative. Yet it may be that this sort of color will hold readers whose senses have been jaded by TV and the hard sell; and beyond question there is a large budget of interesting information in the book. A fine book (but hardly "hammock reading") by Richard Hinckley Allen is called Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (Dover). Did you know that our North Star, Polaris, vas once known as Cynosura? (Meaning "the dog's tail".) And that from this the word cynosure made its way into the English language? Did you know that the wobbly northern "W" we call Cassiopeia looked to the Chinese like the porch of a house and was called Ko Taou? However, if there is anything you would like to know about what men of all eras have seen in the starry skies, this book is the place to find it! One of the most pleasant and gently written handbooks for the amateur skygazer is The Friendly Stars by Martha Evans Martin (Dover). Originally published over half a century ago (but the skies don't change! And in any event it has been considerably revised and reexamined by Donald H. Menzel), this is a first-rate guide for beginners, and a pleasant companion for advanced starers at the stars. The plants grew strange fruit -- but within them was something stranger! I mi Frentrup, staring down at the planet he'd intended never to mention, let alone revisit, seethed with a mixture of feelings. There was dread, crawling icily up his spine. There was the futile rage at this ship's hardeyed crew and their master, Trux Madden. There was self-loathing for having piloted them here, even at gun-point. There was the older shame he'd buried inside himself for eight years, since he'd lost an exploration crew on this planet, smuggled out the beautiful and strange little figurines he couldn't resist, falsified the ship's logs, lied through the hearings, and been permitted to resign his commission without official disgrace. He no longer owned the figurines, and had never shared in the fantastic wealth they now represented. It must have cost terrifically, even by Madden's standards, to trace them back to Jim, piercing the careful series of aliases. He glanced over at the man. Madden's square face showed none of the excitement he must feel; Madden's hands, brutal despite manicuring, were steady. He met Jim's eyes and said softly, "What are you waiting for?" Jim tried to hold his own hands steady as he reached for the controls. As the ship dropped, he realized with surprise that among his other feelings was a hint of relief. Maybe now some of the gaps in his memory would be filled in. T Te landed where he had before, beside a fallen obelisk on the wide rock-and-fill dam at a constriction of the valley. They made him sit where he was for half an hour, then Madden came to him and said, "I want you to go outside and walk around for a while. Don't get more than a hundred yards from the ship." Jim got up woodenly and went. They'd burned clear the scattered trees and brush from the middle part of the dam. He picked a way through smoking ashes to the downward side and looked out over the old ruins. A few rabbity things moved among them furtively, and there were silent gray birds, but he saw nothing bigger. Whoever the people had been (there wasn't even a skeleton, but stone statues showed them to have looked like long-tailed sheep standing erect), they'd built for more permanency than they'd stayed to enjoy. Thick rock walls still stood, though adobe and timbers remained only as traces. The city had stretched the length of the dam, just below it, protected by levees from the two rivers that spilled around each end of the dam to curve down the sides of the widening valley. That had been choice bottom land ; and from aloft, traces of the irrigation system could still be seen. There'd been terraces along both valley slopes, too, for m'es above and below the dam. Whatever crops had grown on terraces and bottom land were long swallowed up by the natural flora, which ran heavily to squat trees with coarse cinnamon-colored bark and twisting horizontal limbs that supported lacelike sprays of blue-green foliage. So far he hadn't seen anything he didn't remember. He turned and walked to the lake side of the dam. The water was clear and placid. Some flattish things drifted slowly above the water. A pair moved toward him and he hoped he remembered rightly that they were harmless and almost mindless. They were like transparent pancakes, thin but three feet across, with thickened centers where the vitals were and from which radiated cartilaginous ribs. They flew by scooping air and forcing it downward and rearward. They circled him leisurely, then came close and nudged at his head as gently as butterflies. Finally, having tasted or smelled, they drifted out over the lake again. He glanced up. The two dots in the sky, barely visible, would be a pair of ships maintaining a telescope watch of the ground. The other three would be farther out, on guard, though the chances of anyone else being in this sector of space were vanishingly small. Madder, didn't take even small chances unless he had to. A voice blared from the ship, "Frentrup. Come back in now." He turned and walked slowly toward the ladder, his anger stirring anew at the premptory order. He hesitated before climbing up, with a strange rel ictance. Partly, it might be that he didn't look forward to being caged again, nor to the ship's scru'obed atmosphere with its faint smell of isopropanol and formaldehyde, after the planet's spicy air Mostly, though, he realized, it had something to do with the formless dread. Somehow, the ship didn't seem much protection. He wanted to be outside where he could see what was coming. TV T adden took him into the ship's salon, which was luxurious (not surprisingly, since this was a pirated and re-fitted luxury yacht). The outlaw sat relaxed, a beamer pistol stuffed casually in a pocket. He said, "Mix yourself a drink if you like." Jim ignored the invitation. "The original offer still stands," said Madden. "Work with me, and you can have your pick of any ship I've got, and a bank account you can live on comfortably for the rest of your life. You ought to realize oy now you've got nothing to gain by holding out." Jim said wearily, "I've told you a hundred times I'm not holding out. I just don't remember." Madden eyed him for a minute, without expression. "The things are solid diamond, not cast nor ground. That means some kind of fast crystallization, which implies a technology beyond ours. I can see, as you told me, that there was only an agricultural civilization here. So, either you didn't get the things here, or you got them here from other visitors. If you're protecting some alien race, you're wasting your stubbornness; I'm not going to repeat anything I hear from you. Self-interest will keep me quiet. And I only want a few of the things. Too many would break the price." Jim scowled at him. "Don't you think I've figured out those angles? What sense would it make for me to hold out now? I'm in your hands. If I knew anything more I'd be eager to tell it, and make myself as useful as possible. That would be my only chance to survive. All I know is, I think I got them here." "It's a pity you didn't keep your ship's true records." "I can quote them to you if you insist," Jim told him, "word for word and figure for figure. They won't mean any more to you than they do to me." Madden shifted to a more comfortable position. "It's hard for me to believe you sent your whole crew out in a bunch, while you stayed alone in the ship. The X-Corps doesn't operate that way. Nobody does." "It's no easier for me to believe. I told you I had some kind of a fever." "Well, we've checked the air and the ground, and there are no germs around here that could infect a man. Obviously it wasn't any plague that wiped out the natives, or there'd be skeletons, at least. What's your theory about that?" J im shrugged. "Your theory of advanced aliens is as good as any. For all I know, they may come back in five minutes and take us too." He enjoyed Madden's scowl. Madden reached for a small communicator, and said into it, "Bring in the movies." To Jim he said, "I'm going to assume for the moment that you're telling the truth. I want to show you something." Two men came in and set up a translucent screen and a small projector. One touched a stud and a colored movie appeared on the screen. It was a shot of Jim coming back to the ship, less than half an hour ago, evidently taken by some hidden camera outside. It ran through once at normal speed, then started over in slow motion and kept repeating. "Notice anything?" Madden asked softly. Jim frowned. "Well, I remember hesitating before I stepped onto the ladder." "Do you remember," Madden asked, "why you turned and looked up the lake? You weren't looking at an#dhing nearby." Jim clamped his mouth on a retort and watched the screen once more. Now that he noticed it, there was an instant when he turned his head and stared. The nameless dread rose in him again. He fought to control his face and said, "No. I'll... have to think about it." Madden said, "Well, you'll have a few minutes, then we're going up-lake to see if that jogs your memory." If only the dream-memores would stop billowing around in his skull and let him concentrate on what was real! He remembered bending to pick up small objects somewhere beside this lake. Had those been the figurines? All he could say for sure was that when he'd come out of the delirium the seven figurines had been in the ship; each representing, with an exquisite and inexplicable art, one of the dead crewmen. He hadn't been able to resist them then. WrulJ he have, if he'd known that men would be murdered for them, fortunes squandered on mere rumors of them? He doubted it. There was more to tbre than mei'e monetary value. Hlc thoughts were wrenched bar!; to the present as a gunman banged on. his compartment door. "Madden wants you outside." # T adden and four of his men waited, armed with beamer rifk": and sidearms. Madden said, go up the left side of the lake. That's where you were lookhrg. You lead." turnerl and went along the dam. H. ? noted that one of the ships ovrrhe.ad had come lower and no'-drifted slowly with them. To gof to the side of the valley thr' had to cross the river at tbmt ond of the dam. He went do"into the ruins and shoved through brush to where the stre.cn spread out and was shallow Madi'en and three of the men followed him closely, while one stayed a little behind. Jim fo'ind a way across, from boulder to boulder, which he seemed ha'f 'o remember, then turned upstr.oam, trying to fight off the I . # dread that threatened to paralyze his mind. This was late summer, and a sandy strip lay exposed between the water and the crumbling wall of the lowest terrace. Now and then they had to push through reeds. The urgency of his situation was pressing in upon Jim now. He had little hope that Madden would let him live, however cooperative he was. It would be so much more logical to shut him up permanently. Now and then he glanced back. After half an hour's walk. Madden was showing impatience. Then, a few minutes later, they rounded a bend and he saw a wooded promontory ahead. He paused, remembering suddenly that an old ramp came down there, across the terraces from the valley's rim. He found that he remembered the ramp in detail. Once, it had been made firm with heavy blocks of stone, and probably paved over. Some of the stones were exposed now, and some were displaced, and twisting gullies had formed, where water came down in the wet season. Along the edges, much soil had washed down from the terraces to form the promontory, which projected a hundred feet or so into the lake and was wooded to the tip. Hope leaped in him. If he could get among the trees... But as they neared, Madden said, "Hold on a second." He was holding a communicator to his ear, listening to something from the ship overhead. Presently he lowered the communicator and looked at Jim. "They say there's something peculiar just ahead." They punctured Jim's hopes by making him wade around the promontory instead of crossing it. As soon as he was beyond, he saw the thing up the shore. It was a cluster of large plants, on a mound at the water's edge that looked too regular to be natural. There were two dozen or more vertical stalks, each three or four inches thick at the base. Every eighteen or twenty inches up each stalk was a disc-shaped horizontal leaf, two feet in radius. Birds and other small creatures rested on the leaves. As he stared, a thing like a frog with flying membranes leaped from a leaf to soar out over the lake and finally plop in. T T e knew that this was the source of his dread, but somehow he didn't feel any urge to flee. It was as if it were something he could surely outrun, if he had plenty of room to run in, and he wasn't afraid to approach fairly closely. He did that, staring at the fantastic blossoms fifteen feet or more above ground. They were like monster orchids; some solid hues, some striped or dappled. All colors, bright or modest, were there. Each bloom sent up a number of thin wands, also multi-colored, that coiled and twisted with unmistakable life. Several of the flat transparent things drifted about the blossoms, and the wands teased at them playfully. There was a strong perfume in the air, like snapdragons but sharper. He stopped forty feet away, tingling with excitement. One of the gunmen came up beside him, stared, then suddenly grunted and took a step forward, pointing. "Look! Among the stalks!" The glittering thing was halfburied in the dirt, but it must have been the size of Jim's forearm. It was a statuette of some kind of animal. Eight years before, aerial pictures had showed herds of grass-eaters and various predators, on the rolling lands above the valley's rim, but this didn't look like any of those. Jim itched to hold the thing in his hands, but restrained himself. The gunman wasn't so cautious. He took a step forward... Jim must have known what to expect, subconsciously, for he whirled and ran, bent over, protecting his face and hands. Madden shouted something. A few small pellets or seeds (Jim visualized a shower of them behind him) flew past him. The gunman cried out, then, as Jim turned, chuckled sheepishly. "Scared me," he said, wiping at his cheek, "I thought -- " Suddenly, his face twisted in terror. He uttered something between a sob and a scream, and began to run. He stumbled into the water, went down and floundered, mouthing odd sounds. Madden and the other three were moving toward him, and Madden was shouting into the communicator. Then the stricken man stood up and waded back to shore, silently, face slack. Ignoring the others, he walked like a zombie toward the plants. Madden yelled at him but he gave no sign of hearing. A shimmer began to form around the stalks. The blossoms drooped and shrank, withdrawing into the ground. The shimmer grew, broke away, formed a cloud as of very fine mist. It drifted to meet the zombie-like man. AyTadden sent a rifle beam into it, causing an agitation, but the cloud kept coming. It settled over the man, who contorted and began to struggle. His mouth was open as if he were screaming, but no sound escaped. His clothes began to char and smoke. His skin turned red, then black; puffed and blistered; showed pink cooked flesh vhere it split. He was dead now, hanging suspended in the cloud and turning slowly as if weightless. The cloud moved back and hovered over the mound. More rifle beams hit it, but didn't seem to hurt it much. A heavy ship's beam came down, nicked it, and did seem to hurt. Madden shouted into the communicator, "Don't shoot!", evidently concerned for the statuettes. There was only a charred skeleton left in the cloud, with a few metal objects that glowed red. Then the bones were gone, and the metal vanished, and there was only one small point of incandescence. The cloud let that fall to the dirt, then began to split up and seep into the ground. Soon it was gone. The incandescent thing, about the size of a man's little finger, was cooling. Jim knew it would be a figurine with all the vanished features perfectly etched on its face. Madden, eyes deadly, held his rifle steady on Jim as they backed down the shore. "So you suckered us after all," he said softly. "This is far enough. Talk." Jim realized that now his only chance was to pretend knowing more than he did. Otherwise, he'd be no more use to Madden. "It happened so fast," he said. "I didn't expect him to go closer. I -- you can outrun the things. I was going to tell you that." Madden grinned scornfully. "It won't wash. I'm not going to be so gentle with you from now on. Are there more of them?" Jim nodded. "We'd better not stay here." Madden glanced around, then up at the ship which was settling toward them. "Where would they be? Among the trees?" Jim thought fast Instead of answering, he let his eyes flick nervously toward the lake. If Madden had the ship pick them up here, Jim was finished. If he could get Madden to move back to the promontory... Madden looked back at the mound, where the statuettes lay unmoved. "Go get them," he said. plain death, from a rifle beam for instance, Jim could face without panic; but it took all his will power to get his legs moving back toward the mound. Would the thing come out again, or was it sated for the time being? Had one of these plants consumed all seven of his men? He stepped gingerly onto the mound, which looked freshly plowed now. He picked up the big statuette first, then hurried to get the five others of smaller animals and the figurine of the man, which was barely warm now. He retreated, stuffing into pockets all but the biggest one, which he carried. When he was a safe distance away he raised the thing to his ear, ignoring Madden, and thumped it with a finger. It rang like the finest crystal glassware, throbbingly, persistently. The sound permeated his mind, and it was as if he dreamed... Summer, and sun warm on my fur, and good green leaves to eat. The young of the grasseaters frisk about and make bleating sounds, for they too feel the goodness of being alive. They'd better beware of that predator that crouches at the edge of the trees, waiting for them to blunder near. He glances warily at me, for he knows the might of my big taloned paws and the crushing weight of my body and the grinding strength of my big teeth. But what is that, drifting across the grass? One of the Things! I must run! But oh, I am a slow creature, and my limbs are weak with fright, and Jim thrust the thing away from him and stood trembling and sweating. The agony and terror were so vivid... He looked up and found Madden watching him intently. Jim's mind went into high gear. He pretended nervousness, glancing behind him and up the lake. When he reached Madden he stopped, but acted reluctant. Madden looked around. To pick them up here, the ship would have to land in the water. Madden nodded to him to start back toward the promontory. Jim moved, pulse thumping. Now if they only didn't insist on his wading around it again... He hadn't acted afraid of the water the first time; would Madden see through his act now? There was one difference. He carried the statuettes now. He turned, made a vague gesture of offering them to Madden, trying to look frightened and dazed. Madden grinned. "You carry them, in case the owner comes after them." A t the promontory he started out along it slowly, eyes on the water. He glanced at Madden and stopped. Madden said, "Go on across," and moved up, with the three men, until the rifles were nearly touching Jim. Jim was sick with hopelessness. How could he hope for anything? Then he noticed that the ship was following overhead, and that its shadow drifted along just behind them. His heart jumped. Maybe... But he needed some other distraction, to set that up. He climbed the side of the promontory and picked a way among the trees. He pretended to stumble and, leaning for a moment against a tree-trunk, unobtrusively got one of the smaller statuettes out of a pocket. He went on, holding the thing in front of him. He was nearing the other side of the promontory; he could see water ahead. It would have to be now. He forced his way through some brush, and, as soon as it concealed him below the shoulders, flipped the statuette ahead of him. Would it reach the water? It did, just barely. At the splash he halted and crouched as if startled. He half-turned his head slowly, gave Madden what he hoped was a terrified look. Then he let his eyes shoot past the men and go wide. "Look out!" The ship's shadow fell upon the trees. They whirled, rifles swinging up, and he was running, bent so the brush would hide him, up the promontory, trying to put tree trunks between himself and Madden. Madden shouted, and beams sliced around him, blasting chunks out of the trees. One scorched his right cheek and he dodged desperately and went on, legs pumping. He risked turning right, and it was lucky he did for a heavy ship's beam crashed where he'd been headed. He took the second terrace up and pushed along it as fast as the dense undergrowth would let him. He felt exultant nojv, though his lungs ached te'ribly. The trees hid him completely from overhead and from all sides; and the sound of the ship's weapons, blasting along the promontory, covered any noise he made. Madden must have realized that, for he shouted . and the firing stopped. Jim stood still for a moment, but there was a crackling of trees on fire behind him, that would mask any small noise he made. He pushed on slowly, and found a chance to climb up one more terrace. He thought he'd best get as high as he could, and as far up-lake. For the first time, he realized that he still clutched the biggest statuette, and had the others in his pockets. Was that good or bad? If he'd dropped them in the open. Madden might take them and not bother about Jim. Now, he'd be thinking of getting them. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn't let the ships fire for fear of ruining them. The sound of the forest fire was falling behind, but then he heard similar sounds, faintly, ahead. He stopped again and listened. The sounds were coming from all directions. Suddenly, he understood. Madden had called the other ships down, and they were etching a ring of fire around him to pen him in. The gray birds, recognizing something wrong, were flitting back and forth in agitation. For a second Jim thought he could feel heat, then he recognized that it was only the ache in his scorched cheek. He pondered which way to go. The fire would probably bum up the slope faster than down. He climbed another terrace. Maybe he could find a cave or something, hoi up and let the fire bum past him, then escape. It was only an how to sundown. But of course th ships had floodlights. TV Tadden's amplified voice boomed from somewhere above the trees. "Frentrup, you haven't a chance. I'm going t make you one more offer. There's a level spot on the ramp, at the fourth terrace from the bottom, where there's no fire. Bring the statues out and leave them, and we'll leave you here alive. That'll you." There was no more for fifteen minutes, while the fires got closer. Then Madden added, "Don't think I'll worry about damaging the statues. We've spotted more, and I can pick up all I want I'd just rather save the trouble. Bring the ones you've got to the ramp. We'll leave you a pistol and some supplies. Yell if you agree. We'll hear you." No doubt they would; they'd have sound pickups aimed around. Jim didn't believe Madden would let him live, and anyway, he wasn't going to crawl for Madden. He kept looking for a cave. The valley was almost in dusk, and the glow of the fires was beginning to show. The birds were all gone, and other forest creatures were running about in fright. Something big charged by Jim, snarled, and went on. Madden didn't speak again, and Jim went on with his search. There were hollows beneath boulders of the old terrace walls, but none looked good enough. He was getting worried; it was dark and his eyes stung from the smoke. He found one hollow that would almost do, but decided to look farther. A few minutes later a beam crashed into the trees scant yards away, seemingly at random. Each started a fire, and each fire made the smoke worse. Desperate, he ran back to the hollow he'd rejected, knelt and scooped out dirt to make it bigger. His eyes were streaming now, and fits of coughing tied him in knots. A beam crashed on the terrace above him, and a burning branch came down. He threw it off and rolled frantically in the moist dirt, but his clothes were burned through and there was a bad bum on his neck. He squirmed into his hole and pushed dirt up before him for protection. A big limb came down, one mass of flame, and sealed him in. He dug with fingers that bled and heaped up dirt, twisted and tried to find breathable air in the hole, but a fit of coughing seized him so that he was paralyzed. His back stung like the devil, and his lungs felt as if a blowtorch had been turned into them. If he got through this he'd have to find mud, or some animal grease to smear on his burns. But he was beginning to feel that he wasn't going to get through. He was almost in a coma from the coughing. "Damn him!" he groaned, "Damn him! I hope he -- " '"Then it was as if something moved physically inside his skull, and a calm thought came, "' take over now." Whatever was tmly Jim Frentrup screamed, fought a brief desperate resistance, and was overwhelmed.  can change safely, he thought, but I haven't enough substance to do much. I could reach unburnt foliage, but that's such lean fare. Animals? They've all fled. The men in the ships? Too dangerous, all by myself. He consumed parts of the Jimbody, bolstering the brain and whatever else was required for temporary life; materialized a root-tip and thrust it down into the soil; sent out thin filaments, searching. A few feet down he found an inter-colony contactroot half an inch thick. He absorbed back his other filaments and grew them into the right one until it would carry a message. Brothers! Attend! Who are you? came a drowsy reply, You feel odd. It is I, who entered the intelligent animal and went into the sky. Henceforth, I wish to be called Jim-entity. There is danger! There are more of the animals -- they are called 'men' -- and they hove weapons that can hurt! Another awareness joined in, half awake. We are aware of them. I dined upon one. They will go away soon, in their hollow metal things that fly. Attend! Jim-entity demanded, insistently. There are a thousand worlds full of them, and they have weapons that can blast us to atoms! We must seize them before they go! They were coming full-awake now, more of them joining in. Some of them, feeling his weakness, sent power flowing along the root, and he drank it in thirstily. Then Old One came awake; he who ate little, slept much, and who, it was whispered in awe, had come long ago from the sky. His feel was amused. So; the young traveller has returned. What did you learn beyond the sky? I learned much. Marvels, which there is no time to describe; and feelings, which are strange things but which I would not give up now. I have learned to love. And to hate. power was throbbing along the root now. He said, I will send a few small clouds first, to enter the ships unseen, for insurance. Then we will form more clouds to carry the seeds, and try to capture all the men. We can decide later which ones to consume and which to hide in, so they will take us to others of their kind. Good! approved the Old One, more vigorously than anyone had ever heard him speak, It is time we moved again. We have fallowed here long enough. Someone else said. There will be many fine statues.      War Against Yuklis He was a combat soldier in a war he had never expected -- a war where he was the enemyl I professor Peter Elton swung his machete half-heartedly at a hanging vine as thick as his wrist; the blade rebounded with a dull clunk. He lowered the black pigskin suitcase in his left hand to the spongy layer of rotted vegetation that covered the ground, took out a large handkerchief with a faded machinestitched monogram belonging to a fellow customer of the Collegiate Laundry and Cleaners, and mopped at his face. "Constable Eoyle," he called to the stoc'.-y, Hia'ci-clad man whacking at the dense verdure ahead. "Are you sure you know where we're going?" Boyle turned, flicked the sweat from the end of his nose. "Absolutely, sir," he called cheerily. "Chased that ruddy great jaguar right through this same ruddjr thicket. Lost him at the river's edge -- the Choluteca, that is. That would be about five miles ahead." Elton groaned. He hobbled to a convenient log, sat, pulled off his brand-new hiking boots, and began massaging his foot. "But we don't have to go all that way, sir," Constable Boyle reassured him. "It was on the way back I stumbled over it; it can't be far from where we are at this moment." "I can't help recalling my last ill-advised venture into the brush," Elton said. "An unspoiled Aztec site just twenty miles south of Taxco. We reached it after a fourteen hour burro ride. After clearing away the greenery, I uncovered a Dr. Pepper sign, several hundred beer bottles, and the principle chassis members of a Model T Ford." "This is the real thing, sir," Boyle said heartily. "Just this column, like, sticking up; bloody great slab o' rock the size of a Bentley Tourer." "And you're sure it shows signs of human handicraft?" "Oh, that I can guarantee, sir. ' Boyle got out a well-worn hip flask, passed it across to Elton, who uncapped it and took a healing draught. "I hope you're not thinking of packing it home as a souvenir," Boyle went on. "You'd need a ruddy derrick." "Nothing like that, constable," the professor said. "I've already told you I merely wish to examine it; make a few tests." A that bloody great case is in aid of..." He nodded at the heavy piece of expensive-looking luggage at Elton's feet. "I wish you'd let me carry it for you for a bit." "No, no. I'll see to this, constable." Elton put a protective hand on the case. "The device I have here -- which I developed myself -- may well revolutionize the whole art of archaeological dating." "That's a bit over my head, sir," the constable said. Elton took another swig from the flask and handed it back. "With the chronalyzer -- " he patted the case -- "I'll be able to establish the ages of stone artifacts which have hitherto defied analysis. You see, the incidence of naturally occuring high-velocity particles on exposed rock II surfaces induces sub-microscopic changes in the internal crystalline structure of the material ; naturally, when a cut is made in a stone surface by man -- " "Who cares how old a blinking rock is?" Boyle cut in. "Now, my idea is, you can vet this thing, say whether it's worth the trouble of doing a bit of digging; then if we turn up an#rthing -- say a few solid-gold chamber pots -- " "Now, constable, I'm not interested in visionary schemes to defraud the authorities." "Defraud, sir? That's rather a harsh term. As for meself, my salary as a blooming game warden is -- " "Is none of my business," Elton pulled his boots on and got to his feet. "I suggest we resume while the sunlight is good." "As you say, sir. But it seems a shame, considering the fact that we're a good fifty miles from Tegucigalpa and there's boats on the river to be had for a song." "I don't sing very well," Elton said severely. "I have an adequate position with a reasonably good, small university and a full professorship in the offing if my chronalyzer proves out. That is the sole purpose of this expedition." Boyle squinted at the sun. "We'd best be moving if we want to be back to Yuscaran tonight." T ate sunlight was filtering ' through high treetops where green parrots had set up a raucous evening serenade among the orchids when Boyle stumbled into a tiny clearing, yelled "Ha!" and pointed. Elton came up beside him, his once natty bush jacket hanging damply, his solar topi on backwards, his shins scratched. Before him, a two-yard thick cylinder thrust up from a tangle of flowering viner, its weathered surface almost obscured by a growth of grayish moss. 'Well, it appears to be artificial, just as you said," Elton commented. He gazed at the ten-foot high monument, circled it, studying the surface. "Not much over a thousand years old," I'd guess," he said. "The Mayan stone-workers -- " "Why not try your apparatus on it and find out for sure?" Boyle suggested... "Then perhaps we might do just a bit of digging." "No digging," Elton said firmly. He squatted by the case containing the chronalyzer, noting the scars and scratches in the once-splendid leather. He remembered the dinner the previous spring at which the luggage had been presented to him, along with a nice little check, on the occasion of his award-winning paper on Some Evidences ot an Advanced Technology Among Pre-Columbian Central Americans. What would his colleagues say, he wondered, opening the case, if he returned from this trip with proof of the chronalyzer's success? "Crikey," Boyle said, leaning over to peer into the case. "Looks like the insides of a reddy telly set." "Oh, it's quite simple, really," Elton said, erecting the folding tripod he had taken from the case. I merely expose the surface in question to radiation of specific wave-length, and the resultant refraction patterns are interpreted by the sensor unit; the results are read directly from the screen here. Later, of course, it would be a simple matter to devise a direct-reading scale." He lifted the chronalyzer from the case, settled it in position on the tripod, then flipped a switch, and checked indicator dials. Power was flowing at the correct levels. He sighted through an eye piece, fine focused the crystal-guided light source, then flipped down the toggle switch which bombarded the target with high-range ultra-violet. A beam of pale light made a gray spot on the curve of mossy rock. The constable stood at Elton's shoulder, staring at the wavering green glow of the four-indi square indicator screen, watching th wave-forms dance. "What's that wiggly line mean?" he inquired. "Hmmm." Elton studied the pattern, compared it with the scale taped to the panel above the glass. "Curious; the surface seems to date about eight thousand years back. That is, it was exposed to the open air at about that date." 'T.here was a harsh, grating sound, a sense of vibration deep underfoot. Elton stepped back, looking startled. Before him, the stone seemed to tremble... "Here, what's that?" the constable's voice had a note of surprise. "You feel that, sir?" The vibration was very perceptible now. The stone was quivering visibly. Elton hastily switched off tihe chronalyzer. With a loud click! A hairline crack became visible running from top to bottom of the looming cylinder. The crack widened; curved panels were opening out, sliding silently on oiled bearings. A bluish light winked on, revealing an interior chamber lined with fittings of an incomprehensible complexity. "It's not... not one of these missiles, sir?" A loud beep! came from the interior of the apparition. Elton Jumped. "Ascrabilik ahubarata" an inhuman, metallic voice said from inside the capsule. "That's not Rooshian, is it, ir?" "Definitely not Russian," Elton said, backing away. "You had me fooled, sir," Boyle said. "Nice bit o' camouflage it was, too." He chuckled. "I'd of wagered you'd never been here before; a jolly good act you put on." "Thank you, constable," Elton said in a squeaky voice, mentally picturing squads of armed security men pounding through the jungle to take him into custody. "But how," he pictured himself asking, "was I to know that there was a secret minuteman silo under this old rock... F' "You scientist blokes," the cop said. "You're full of surprises." He shook his head admiringly. "Yes," Elton mumbled, going into motion suddenly. "Well, thanks for your cooperation, constable. We may as well be running along now." He lifted the chronalyzer from its tripod, lowered it into the case. "You're going to leave it like this, sir?" The constable's eyebrows went up. "We're pressed for time," Elton said hurriedly. "We don't want to be caught out in the jungle after dark..." "Ascrabilik ahubarata," the voice said again. ttTTere, sir, where's the voice coming from?" The contable poked his head inside the blue-glowing interior, his voice taking on an echoic quality. "What's -- " A sharp buzz cut him off in mid-sentence. He stiffened, his arms jerking out from his sides; a dazed look spread over his face. A pair of bright metal clamps had extended from a receptacle, locked into the constable's head. Elton jumped forward, grabbed his arm, and hauled at him. The buzz stopped abruptly, the clamps retracted. The constable staggered back, his hands to his head. "Wh-What happened?" he choked. "Felt like my ruddy brains was being wrung out like a bar-rag!" "Mobile Command Center Ten ninety-four, standing by for instructions," a harsh, high-pitched voice with a Middlesex accent said from inside the capsule. "You might've warned me, sir," the constable said in a hurt tone. "Uh... well, after all, these secret installations..." Elton improvised. "But I'll explain it all as we hike out." Ing instructions," the voice said again. "On five minute stand-by alert, counting... "Where's the chap manning this show, an # Tway?" the contable asked. "They oughtn't to go off and leave it like this." "Probably they just stepped ut for coffee. No concern of ours, constable. Now, if you'll just give me a hand with the bag." "Abandoned their post? Very trange, I'd call that, sir. UnBritish. But then I suppose tiiey're Wogs." ing instructions. Battle status, active." "You hear that sir? Blimey, do you suppose it's started? I knew that we couldn't trust those Russkis!" "Just a routine exercise, I should think," Elton soothed, edging off into the surrounding undergrowth. "Now if you're ready -- " "Here," the constable said loudly, addressing his remarks to the capsule. "Constable Boyle here. What's this about a battle?" "Battle report follows," the voice answered. "First Grand Fleet, annihilated, casualties total; Second Grand Fleet annihilated, casualties total; Third firand Fleet..." The voice went on, reeling off tatistics. tt'his is It, right enough! Constable Boyle smacked a fist into his palm. "A hell of a fight going on somewhere "... Grand Fleet annihilated, casualties total," the voice droned on. "Sixth Grand Fleet, casualties ninety-eight percent; surviving units retired to defensive dome at station #, under Yukk siege -- " "Ever heard of these Grand Fleets?" Boyle called to Elton. "That would be your lot, I reckon?" "Certainly not," Elton said quickly. "Just code names; you know; the Blue Army versus the Red Army -- " "Never had any use for bloody Reds meself," Boyle stated flatly. "Well if it's not you Yanks, it must be British units involved. Always knew we were keeping a secret weapon tucked away someplace. Who'd have thought it'd be here in Honduras? But our chaps are in trouble, from the sound of it."... Tenth Grand Fleet; Mobile Command Center Ten ninety-four standing by." "Ten ninety-four? That's this apparatus here!" Boyle said excitedly. "And its ruddy crew's stepped out for tea!" "If we hurry," Elton called cheerily. "I don't like the sound of this," Boyle said. "Looks like the bloody Reds have had all the best of it, so far." He raised his voice to shout into the interior of the capsule. "What kind of shape are the other blighters in?" "Yukk Primary Echelon, annihilated, casualties total; Yukk Secondary Echelon, heavy casualties. Yukk Dreadnought Abominable operational, standing by off station # -- " "Yukks, eh? Code name for the Russkis, shouldn't wonder," Boyle said. "And their dreadnought's got a group of our lads hemmed in at someplace called station #. They'll be wanting a spot of help, sir!" "Elements of Sixth Grand Fleet under siege at station #. Besieging Yukk Dreadnought heavily outweighs units in ton seconds firepower." "We've got to get cracking, sir!" Boyle yelled. "We can't let the Bolsheviks wipe our chaps out!" "Awaiting instructions," the voice said. "Three minute alert"  C T T ere, where's your station complement?" Boyle demanded. "Station personnel departed to conduct local reconnaissance," the voice stated. The constable whirled on Elton. "It's clear enough, sir; these chaps have buggered off and left their mates in the lurch. Lucky we happened along. It's awaiting our instructions!" "Now, constable," Elton said reasonably. "Surely it's not talking to us -- " "Who bloody else? It popped open when we came along, didn't it?" "I suppose my U-V triggered sometliing," Elton muttered. Boyle looked suddenly knowing. "Ah-hah, I think I see, sir. Security. You can't take action while I'm hanging about." "Well, constable," Elton grabbed at the straw, "you don't mic security?" "I'll never breathe a word sir, cross my heart!" Boyle was standing at attention, chin in, toes out. 'We've got to give them a leg up, sir!" "Out of the question, constable," Elton said, looking around for the first signs of flashing red lights, whooping sirens, and pouncing military police. "You're a cool one, sir," Boyle said stiffly. "Have to be, I suppose, in the counter-espionage game. But it's not the British way to desert one's mates in time of need." "One's mates? What in the world are you talking about? We've stumbled into some sort of war games, constable; if we're here when the authorities arrive, we'll end up in a maximum-security prison!" "I'm saying it's the real thing, sir. Our boys are under fire. They're counting on us, sir!" "What the devil do you expect me to do?" A strident note had entered Elton's voice, reminding him of his last interview with Dean Longspoon, in which the irascible department head had suggested that Elton spend more time in the classroom and less in what he termed exotic peregrinations. How right, Elton thought, the dean had been. "We'll fill in for these blinking tea-drinkersf" Boyle proposed. "And I'll have a word for their superiors when this is over!" "But -- but -- " "Two minute alert," the voice stated. "I always thought when the chips were down you Yanks would stand with us," Boyle said. "I'm going in -- alone, if I have to." "But -- it might be dangerous." "Chance we have to take," Boyle said curtiy. "Coming?" Elton came slowly across to Boyle's side, looked into the dim blue interior of the capsule, at a maze of pin-point indicator lights, conduits, push-buttons, fittings. "Hmmm. Interesting layout. New type oscilloscope, subminiature fluorescents -- " "Awaiting instructions; one minute alert before reverting to inactive status," the voice said. "Go ahead, sir!" Boyle urged "I'm right behind you!" Elton looked around; there were still no signs of aroused security forces bearing down. He put the suitcase on the ground, sighed, and stepped hesitantly through the open entry. Ill  t once, a folding seat deployed from the floor, nudged the back of Elton's knees, and he sat abruptly. Boyle crowded in behind him. Elton stared at the array of tiny dial faces and toggles, packed together like a display in a bargain jeweler's window. "Say, you've got to hand it to those Air Ministry bods," Boyle said. "Not half crafty, that lot. Not a word in the papers about all this." He was looking around admiringly at the wilderness of quivering needles. "Thirty second alert," the voice stated. "Wonder what that means?" Elton frowned. "In twenty-five seconds. Mobile Center will revert to permanent inactive status if not activated," the voice said. ## "Yoa mean -- well be out of the fight?" Boyle expostulated. "Affirmative. Actitm must be taken within prescribed time limit, in accordance with standard anti-Yukk operational procedures." "Suppose we don't?" "Mobile Center will detonate. Fifteen second warning." Elton started out of his seat. "Fifteen seconds -- let's get out of here!" "We can't sir!" Boyle caught his arm. "It's too late now to run! If it blows, it'll take us to kingdom come!" "What'll I do?" "Anything, sir! Just jab a button at random!" Elton dithered, then lunged for the panel, depressed a fat red button directly before him. Instantly, metal bands snapped around his mid-section, clamping him to the seat. Behind him, Boyle grunted, similarly restrained. "Prepare for immediate jump to Battle Sector," the voice said emotionlessly. The curved door slid shut with a smooth sigh. The blue glow died, leaving only tlie jewel-sparkle of the instruments. "Hold on here," Elton yelled, tugging at the seat belt. There was an abrupt jar, an instant's pause -- then a silent concussion that seemed to burst painlessly inside his skull. Boyle gave a choked shout -- then all was silent and still again. "S-sir?" Boyle got out. "What... happened?" Elton managed. "Sir, I've got a feeling... we're floating, sort of." ttXJonsense; the thing mal functioned, obviously. Whatever was supposed to happen didn't. Perhaps it was never intended to. I'm beginning to suspect that we're the victims of the most idiotic practical joke of the decade!" Elton tugged at the seat clasp. "Now I suppose we're trapped here until they decide to come along and -- " "On station. Battle Sector Nine," the voice announced. "Request permission to deploy view screens." "By all means, deploy the view screens," Elton said wearily. "And by the way, just who the devil are you? Where are you speaking from? What's this farce all about, an#rway? My name is Elton, and I demand -- " "This is the Lunar Battle Computer," the voice said. "I am positioned nine point three four two miles under the Lunar surface feature known as Mount Tycho. At your instruction, I have placed Mobile Command Center Ten-ninety-four on station in Battle Sector Nine, four thousand miles off Callisto, on an intercept course with the Yukk Dreadnought Abominable. Request permission to deploy forward batteries." "You mean -- you really -- I mean -- " Elton tried twice to swallow, made it on the third attempt. "This s all some ghastly joke?" he croaked. "Negative," the voice said flatly. It seemed to issue from a small slot set among the flashing lights -- which were now blinking with renewed e.nthusiasm. A large amber X in mid-panel winked on and off frantically. "Callisto," Boyle said. "I've heard of it. Somewhere near Jamaica, I believe." "Someone's idea of humor," Elton croaked. He managed a stifled laugh. "Why, if we were really four thousand miles off Callisto, we'd be hundreds of space." "Space, sir?" "Callisto is -- " he swallowed -- "one of the moons of Saturn -- or is it Jupiter?" "Jupiter," the voice said tonelessly. "Jupiter? Well, now, I knew our lads were holding something back," Boyle said complacently. "You Yanks and your moon shots are all very well, but here we British are, all the way out on Jupiter. Goes to show... Hoes to show what?" Elton yelped. "Suppose this thing knows what it's talking about? Do you know anything about piloting a satellite... his voice trailed off in a squeak. Two translucent panels which had slid down from slots above, opened out, glowed briefly, then snapped into the crystal clarity of the finest photograph. Against a background of utter black, blazing points of light flared and curve of light like an enormous full moon edged into the picture. The screen above showed a similar scene, with the familiar tiny ringed disc of Saturn glowing, bright-edged, off to one side. In the center of the screen a moving blip glowed. "There you are," Boyle said proudly, indicating Jupiter. "British soil, the whole lot." There was a loud ping! "What was that?" "Yukk suppressor rays have locked on Command Center," the voice said in the same emotionless tone. "Likelihood of immediate salvo fire." "Fire? You mean they're shooting at us? Goodness. Who would want to do that -- ?" "Yukk dreadnought on closing course," the Lunar Computer announced. "Request instructions." "Take evasive action!" Elton yelled. "Get us out of here!" "Drive mechanism non-functional in field of Yukk suppressor rays," the voice said. "Uh -- fire the forward batteries!" Elton yelled. "Guns non-operative in field of Yukk suppressor rays." On the screen the blip grew; it swelled visibly, bearing down at a headlong clip. Elton could make out details of the image now. A clumsy, double-pyramid shape, slab-sided, angular, rushing at him from dead ahead. "Nothing for it but to ram, sir!" Boyle yelled. "God save the Queen!" Elton lurched forward as the capsule seemed to break suddenly. The pressure grew. Elton grunted as the seat clamp cut into his stomach. "Yukk tractor rays now grappling Command Center," the voice said indifferently. "Request permission to self-destruct." "Not bloody likely!" Boyle bawled. "We're not ruddy Kami Kazis!" he pressure slacked off. The forward screen went dark, filled by the bulk of the Yukk dreadnought. In the rear screen the stars glittered and winked. A tremor ran through Elton's seat -- a sharp jar, a sense of diding, then silence again. "We -- we've stopped," Elton said uncertainly. U# "What do you suppose it means, sir?" Boyle said in a strained voice. "I'd have wagered a fiver we were bound to collide with that monster." "We're practically bumping into it now." "We must be hove to alongside," Boyle said. "I... I suppose they'll be along to collect us any minute now," Elton said. "Captured," Boyle said disgustedly. "Without firing a shot." "By the Yukks," Elton added. "We'll be brainwashed..." "There'll be help on the way, sir," Boyle said cheerfully. get back and find their machine missing, they'll be through to Air Ministry like a shot." "I wonder what they're waiting for?" Elton stared at the dark screen, unable to make out details of their captor. "I'd like to get on to the name-rank-andserial-number part, and possibly get in touch with the Red Cross." "Pity we're not armed," Boyle said. "We could have put up a spirited defense, and maybe taken a couple of the blighters with us." Elton didn't answer; he was swallowing hard, running over speeches : I am a civilian, captain; as a non-combatant, I insist -- No, that would be hard to put over under the circumstances. How about; Well, fellows, the fortunes of war, eh? Wonderful job you did at Stalingrad... "Maybe if you twiddle the knobs a bit, you can see something of what's going on out there," Boyle suggested. Elton tried the controls beside the dark forward screen; suddenly it lightened; a pitted surface of iodinecolored metal curved before them, sliding slowly past. "That's better," Boyle muttered. "Don't imagine the Reds had anything like that! Bloody vast thing, isn't it?" "Bigger than anything we've got," Elton said. "Alien looking, isn't it? I wonder if Washingtcm knows about this?" "I should think Whitehall has likely let them in on it, sir." #tT isten," Elton said. "Do you -- ' suppose that we somehow eluded their radar? After aH, we're rather small, and they may have been expecting something their own size." "You may have something there, sir." Boyle smacked his fist into his palm. "Hard lines we can't activate this blasted pogo stick we're sitting in." "Look here, Lunar Computer," Elton said. "Isn't there a chance you can get us out of this spot we're in? It appears -- " "All systems now functional," the voice said. "What! Why didn't you say so!" "Data not requested," the voice snapped. "Well, what about it. Can we jump away from here -- get back where we started from?" "Yukk suppressors are activated by high-velocity bodies moving within sensitivity range of instruments," the voice said flatly. "Suppose we sneak away? Just sort of edge off-stage, so to speak?" "What about the Commies, sir?" Boyle remonstrated. "If you're feeling a bit better now, we can renew the fight." "Fight? Look here, Boyle, this has gone far enough. I must have been under the influence of alcohol. What kind of fight can this -- this wandering phone booth put up against that Leviathan? No, thank you. I'll be happy just to get back, pay my fines, and leave quietly tomorrow aboard the S.S. Togetherness as planned -- " "Sir! Look there!" Boyle's fingers dug into Elton's arm; he pointed to the screen. In the section of the Yukk hull passing across the screen, a vast, gaping rent showed. Inside, Elton caught a glimpse of twisted structural members, buckled deck plates. "No wonder they paid us no heed!" Boyle blurted. "Looks a though they had a spot of bother of their own." A second vast wound in the immense hull drifted into view. Great, blackened tubes that could only have been weapons hung in their carriages, silent. "Crikey!" Boyle commented happily. "They've jolly well had it!" "They're still active enough to deactivate our gruis, shut down our engines, and take us in tow," Elton said. "The crew are probably all in tiie imdamaged part, ready to blast us at the first sign of life." Ct'fTT'hat about that, Looney Control?" Boyle barked. "It's Lunar Control," Elton put in. "Affirmative," the voice said. "You see?" Elton said. "Are they on the lookout for us?" Boyle pressed on. "Negative." "Why not?" Elton demanded. "There are no survivors aboard the Yukk ship," the voice said casually. "No survivors?" Boyle and Elton echoed together. "Then," Elton said perplexedly, "who's been operating the suppressor, and tractor rays, and -- " "Yukk defensive armaments activated automatically at the approach of possible hostile bodies." "Now you tell us!" Elton sagged in his seat. "Well, Boyle, I think that lets us off the hook. We can go back now." "I wouldn't say so, sir," Boyle cut in. "What about those chaps under siege? We can't just go off and forget them." "What siege? The Yukks have been wiped out. There's no one here to besiege them!" "Perhaps they're not aware of their victory, sir! We've got to carry the good news to them. It'll be a feather in our cap, sir." "I don't care for feathery caps," Elton said. "Let Lunar Control tell them, if it wants too -- it seems to be damnably cagy when it comes to withholding information." "All you've got to do is ask the right question, sir." Boyle's voice was smug. "After all, it's only a machine; admitted that itself. We're the only personnel here -- and I say we have a duty to perform." "All right, all right." Elton addressed Lunar Control. "Can you take us there -- to wherever this Lost Batallion is supposed to be pinned down?" "Station #," the voice said. "Affirmative." "All right, I guess we'll give it a try. But creep along slowly. so as not to wake any sleeping electronic dogs. Where is this station #, anyway?" "On the surface of the moon Callisto." IV ttTV yTiserable place to be ma-Lrrooned," Elton said, staring at the bleak expanse of wan lit, cratered rock below. "Callisto is much too small to support an atmosphere, and at this distance from the sun I imagine the rock never warms much above absolute zero." The ground was moving up swiftly; the screens swept the close ragged horizon, fixed on the black of the sky. There was a lurch, followed by a thump. "We're down," Boyle announced. "All right, open up," he called. "And -- " "No!" Elton yelled -- too late. The seat clamps snapped back, the doors slid open -- and a breath of cool, perfumed air wafted in from outside. "It's -- but -- how... ?" "Contact at station #," the voice said. "You are now within the defensive force dome." "Oh, that explains it," Elton let out the breath he had been holding. "The dome keeps the Yukks out, and holds the air and heat in." "Now to spread the good word," Boyle said heartily. "Ready, sir?" "I suppose you were right about coming over to let them know they've won." Elton stepped out, felt grass underfoot, sniffed the air. "My, won't they be delighted." He stared up at the heavens; Jupiter was a vast, pale crescent moon, glowing in banded pastel colors. Other, smaller moons moved visibly nearby. Vast numbers of fat, close stars glittered overhead. "I wonder where they are?" Elton squinted into the deep gloom of the Callistan night. "How many men have survived?" Boyle called to the capsule. "Seven hundred and five individuals now occupy the redoubt," the slightly bored-sounding voice said. "None of them are Men." "Did you say," Elton got out, "they're not... men?" "Affirmative," the voice was bland. "Blimey," Boyle said. "A bunch of ruddy Martians?" "No wonder the Yukk ship looked alien," Elton groaned. "This is some kind of interplanetary war between intelligent oysters, or something. What are we doing mixed up in it?" "Questions relating to organic motivations are not within my scope," the computer said. #t yi nd the Yukks aren't Commies at all?" Boyle sounded disappointed. "Negative, in the sense in which you employ the terra; however, the Yukk practice a form of communal life, based on -- " "There you are, sir! Commies, as I said. These Reds are a crafty lot. As I see it, we British have made contact with the Martians, who've become our allies. It's a group of their lads out here, and it's our plain duty to carry on." Elton scrambled back inside the capsule. "I don't know about you, constable!" he called, "But I'm leaving." "Warning," the voice said. "Yukk batteries command entire volume of space within ten million miles. Any attempt to jump will result in approach to Yukk vessel and consequent concentrated automatic Yukk fire with high negative probability of survival of Mobile Command Center." Elton scrambled back out rf the capsule. "Dandy," he said. "Marvelous. Rush to the assistance of our Martian allies, eh? Now look at the pickle you've gotten us in!" "Me, sir? Why, I've merely lent a hand -- " "All right! But here we are -- wherever we are -- sitting ducks V for the Yukk -- whatever they are." "Yukks; some kind of Bolsheviks, I don't doubt. But it's all the same to me. What we've got to do now, sir, we've got to make contact with our side and work out a plan of action." "Never mind that," Elton said. "We've got troubles of our own. There's got to be some way to slip out from under the guns of that derelict." "Not without first contacting these Martian chaps," Boyle protested. "We can take time to propose a toast or two, exchange cigarettes, that sort of thing..." Boyle's voice faded. He stood, head cocked, listening. "Do you hear anything, sir?" he whispered. "Only you, making another fatuous suggestion," Elton replied tartly. "Personally, I favor asking questions of this mobile whatever-it-is until we get some useful answer, and then leaving as hastily as possible." "There it is again sir!" Boyle said. "What?" There was a sudden quick padding of feet, a loud whoosh!, a sharp chemical odor; Elton took a breath to shout, choked, felt the world swim out from underneath and fall on him like a vast feather mattress. professor Elton moved to get away from an impleasant jogging sensation, discovered tight folds of coarse netting binding his arms to his sides and holding his legs in a tight crouched position. His left ear was pressing into the rough strands, and there was a sharp pain in his neck. "Help!" he croaked. "Boyle, where are you?" "Here, sir," a weak voice came back. "What happened? I'm wrapped up like a mummy in some sort of seine." "Same here, sir. We were took unawares, it appears." "By your Martian friends, I suppose?" "Look on the bright side, sir. We haven't been done in yet. That's something." They were in a dim-lit corridor, Elton saw. By twisting his head, he made out the silhouettes of slender biped figures with immense heads. He was, he saw, trussed in a net slung like a hammock from the shoulders of a pair of the creatures. There were shrill shouts from ahead, answering cries from his captors. More of the bipeds crowded around; Elton strained to get a clear view through the mesh, but carried as he was in e head-down position, he was unable to make out any more detail. There was an abrupt lurching as he was carried up a short flight of stairs. He squinted his eyes against the sudden, brilliant light, then he oofed as the support dropped from under him, slamming him against a cool, hard floor. He pushed at the enveloping net, kicking it free of his feet, fighting it over his head. "Good Heavens!" Boyle's voice burst out. "Hang on, Boyle! I'm coming!" Elton shouted encouragingly. He flung the net from him, whirled -- "It said they weren't men," Boyle croaked. Standing in a semi-circle facing the captives were six exceedingly pretty girls. "Rubavilup mockerump hifswimp," one of the girls said. Elton reached up dazedly to adjust his tie, his gaze glued to the large greenish eyes in the pert face before him. Below the face was a slender neck, adorned with multiple strands of turquiose-like beads. A close-fitting, short-skirted tunic hugged nicely curved hips; a pair of shapely legs leds Elton's eyes to the polished floor, where they paused for a moment, blinked, and started back up. tC'hey're not bad looking, sir," Boyle said approvingly, "considering they're Martians." The girl in the center of the group frowned. "Asibolimp hubshut ook?" she asked Elton. "I'm terribly sorry, Miss," he said. "I'm afraid I don't understand." "Here," Boyle said loudly. "Who's in charge here?" "Aridomop urramin ralafoo glip?" with gestures. The girls spoke briefly among themselves. One pointed to a door across the room, then took Boyle's arm, urged him on. He jerked free. "Look here, my girl -- " he started, shaking a finger under her nose. A sharp slap sent him back a step; his mouth opened and closed; then he reached for her. An instant later, having described a somersault over the girl's shoulder, Boyle gazed up from a supine position on the floor. "Ralafoo glip," the girl said, and jerked her head toward the door. "I think when she says ralafoo glip she means it; better do as she says," Elton suggested, starting toward the indicated door. "All very well for you Yanks, you're used to this sort of thing," In the inner ron, Elton followed gestures toward a massive chair placed against the wall, seated himself gingerly. Something cool touched the sides of his face just in front of his ears, pressed firmly, "niere was a sharp prickling sensation. Abruptly, his head seemed full with a screech like a tape recorder running backward at high speed. Elton flopped in the chair, caught by the head. As suddenly as it had begun, the screech ended; the clamps retracted. Elton stumbled to his feet. "What in the name of the Fallen Towers of Hubilik was that?" he demanded, rubbing his ears. "The language indoctrinator," the nearest girl said. "I don't understand," Elton stated, staring from the girl to the chair. "How in the name of the Five Sacred Snakes of Bomakook did my sitting in that thing teach you to speak Grmblkpsk?" "Umma oobabba ungha," Boyle yelled incomprehensibly, pointing at Elton. Two girls seized his arms, thrust him toward the chair. He braced his feet, still shouting nonsense. Elton savv? the bright metal clamps sving down and grip the constable's head. They held him as he kicked out wildly, mouth open; then the chair released him. The girls stepped back. tt'VJow, if you'll behave your self," the leading girl said to Boyle. "Calm yourself, Boyle," Elton snapped. "I'm sure your behavior isn't helping us." He faced the auburn-haired girl who had first spoken. "Now, young lady, if you'll just let me explain: My name is Rflxk..." he paused, frowning. "Rflxk? Is that my name?" "If you're honest, you have nothing to worry about, dearies," the auburn-haired girl said, taking his arm in a firm grip and steering him back out into the hall. "Our detectors showed us something has passed through the screen. Naturally, we couldn't afford to take any chances. After all, you could have been Yukks -- just like we learned in Trainmg. "Us Yukks," Elton managed a chuckle. "Why, my dear, we came here to assist you." "Far lot of good it did us," Boyle muttered behind him. "These bloody Amazons don't want helping." "Assist us how?" Elton's auburn-haired captor inquired, "Why, in the fight with the Yukks; but of course -- " "Ix-nay, ir-say," Boyle said quickly. "One-day ell-tay emthey ut-way ee-way ound-fay." "Well, back to the language indoctrinator," a red-head said. "That won't be necessary," Elton said hastily. "My friend was just uh... reciting an old poem. By the way, where are we going?" "A good luck spell? I hope it's a good one -- not that they work." "You're on your way to see the Mother." "This is out of our jurisdiction," another added. The girl holding Elton's arm looked up at him with a reassuring smile; her delicately curved lips were parted, showing even white teeth ; her hair looked as soft as angora; her lashes were long and dark. With an effort he kept his eyes from the warm, rounded shape poking against his arm. "We don't often get visitors from the other domes," she said "It's kind of exciting, having you here." "Why did you come?" another asked. "Is it about the fungus competition?" "Now Nid, the Mother will handle the interrogation." VI 'he two men followed their X escort along tihe high-vaulted corridor, up more steps and under a filigreed arch into a wide room, where dim light from lamps placed at random among deep chairs glowed on small tables with bowls of exotic fruits, cushioned chaise lounges, and, at the center of the room, a fountain that leaped up to fall back into a shallow pool in which a vast, pale-white figure reclined. Two of the girls went forward, spoke briefly to the fat woman in the water. Elton could hear an answer in a hearty, policematron voice; the girls twittered again, pointing toward the two strangers. "Let's have a look at 'em," the fat woman said. Elton and Boyle moved up to the pool edge, averted their eyes in embarrassment as the matronly figure, totally nude, reached out for a fruit bowl at poolside, selected a mango-like ovoid, took a large bite, chewed noisily. "All right," the Mother said. "You did right, girls; they're an odd-looking pair; look a little weather-beaten; not what you'd call beauties; but they're not Yukks, that's easy to see. You there -- " Elton knew she was talking to him. He faced her, arranging a faculty-type smile. "We haven't seen strangers here in a long time," the woman said. "Especially the kind that barge in without warning. Why didn't your Mother call me? Never mind; good experience for the girls. Hearing about something in Training is one thing. actually seeing it's another. Now," she took another bite of fruit. "You two girls just tell me in your own words what you're doing here." "What do you mean, you two oof!" Boyle subsided as Elton's elbow caught him in the side. "Well, ah..." Elton started. "I don't believe I've seen your type before," the Mother said. "Flat-chested, aren't you? And narrow through the hips. You must have a hard time with your babies." She shot Elton a sharp look. "Oh, ah, terrible," Elton nodded. "Actually, I've never -- " "What dome is it you're from?" "As a matter of fact, we came here from Shrulp," Elton said. He blinked, trying the name again. "Shrulp?" "Here, sir," Boyle put in. "Why not just teU them we're from... Shrulp." He looked puzzled. #T've hear of Mumbulip JDome," the Mother was saying. "And we had a delegation from Rilifub Dome in my Mother's time, after a rock tremor knocked out one of their air plants. They had a terrible time of it, crossing Outside in one of those old Travelers, afraid it would break down any minute; but Shrulp -- that's a new one on me. Must be away over on Par Side." The Mother frowned. "You're not here to stir up trouble, I hope?" "Goodness, no," Elton felt the smile slipping, twisted it back into position. "We understood that you needed help in the fight against the Yukks." "Praise Mother," the woman made a cryptic sign with her hands, which the girls standing in her line of vision copied. She frowned at Elton. "Where did you get the idea we don't know how to deal with a Yukk?" "Frankly," Elton ignored Boyle's look, took the plunge; "The Lunar Battle Computer told us -- " he broke off, seeing the expression on the Mother's face. "Look here, young lady," the Mother snapped. "I'm as devout as the next person, but I won't stand for any superstitious nonsense. Now, I think you'd better explain your invasion of my Dome -- and don't take me for a gullible old fool. I showed Mother Rilifub just how far she'd get trying to take the fimgus arrangement championship away from us with her slick tricks." "But it's nothing like that." "Not that I don't respect the old ways, mind you. If it weren't for you trouble-makers, the World would be a peaceful place -- and Girl has her place in it. But I'm not standing by t# see charlatans get my girls all aroused. First thing you know, they'll be openly advocating Strange Ways -- " A gasp ran through the assembled girls. The old woman ignored the reaction, signaled to a pair of handmaidens standing by. They stepped forward, gripped the fat arms of the Mother, and heaved her to her feet. She puffed, wading to shore. "Tikki, Nid," she said to the attendant girls, "I'm tired. I'll talk to these girls later; they've put me all on edge, and I want to be calm if it comes to a Judgement. Take them along and mind you keep them under close surveillance." She accepted a vast huck towel, draped it across her shoulders, waddled to a chair. t#XTou'd better give them a blanket apiece and lock them in a storeroom," she added. "You know how crowded we are for space..." She shot a hard look past Elton at the girl Tikki. "Yes, I hardly know how we're going to find room for them, with crowding the way it is. But we'll manage somehow. Meanwhile, I intend to check witii this Shrulp Dome wherever it is. If they're here to spread Strange propaganda..." She gave Elton a look which reminded him of a portly Dean of Women he had once known, who had suspected him of intent to impregnate her charges. "But we haven't told you -- " Elton started. "Silence!" the fat woman snapped. "I'll talk to you later. Maybe tomorrow." "See here, we came here to do you a good turn, and without even listening, you're talking about locking us in storerooms." "If they haven't taught you proper respect for Mother at Shrulp Dome, you'll learn it here!" The Mother said sharply. "Take them away, girls!" Back out in the corridor, Elton cleared his throat and tried again. "Pardon me, but aren't you girls concerned about the Yukk dreadnought out there, aiming its guns at you right now?" "You girls must be overly preoccupied with theology over at Shrulp Dome," the girl the Mother had called Tikki said. "Sure, we know all about the Yukks, but after all..." she winked at Elton. "Nobody's ever really seen one. So why should we worry?" "I don't understand," Elton said. "Here you are, right in the midst of a terrible battle with some sort of ghastly monsters with huge ships the size of mountains -- and you don't seem to care." "If we're good Girls, they can't hurt us," the girl dismissed the subject. "Listen, you seem like nice enough girls. The Mother said to lock you in a storeroom, but... maybe we could work something out." She turned to speak in a low tone to the girl beside her. They turned into a side corridor lined on both sides with identical doors; it had a deserted air. Through a halfopen door. Elton caught a glimpse of an empty room, daintily furnished in bright, flashing colors. "Look," Tikki said. "I'll tuck you in my room. Even though we're awfully crowded, as the Mother said," she added. "It won't hurt if we double up, if you don't mind sharing the bed. You must be simply worn out from the trip. I'll bet it's just awful outside the Dome," she shuddered. "Sharing... your bed?" Elton asked. "It will just be for tonight. Your friend will go with Nid. Tomorrow one of the other girls will have you, and the night after that another." Elton took a deep oreath. "Well, if you're sure it won't put you out?" "It'll be fun," the girl said. "We can just cuddle up and have a nice long talk. I want to hear all about Shrulp." I t was a small, neat room, with fluffy curtains at the window, a shaggy rug on the floor, a flounced spread on the bed, and a rack in one corner on which hung a dozen brightcolored short tunics. Elton's hostess took off her turquoise beads and hung them on the rack, eyeing Elton's battered bush jacket. "My, those are certainly strange-looking clothes you have on. I suppose you needed them for the trip, but you can get out of them now. I'll draw us a tub. Would you like a little ginger in it, or maybe a touch of mint? I alvays like mint, myself." "Tub?" Through an open door Elton saw a pink-tiled room, and tropical-looking flowers in planters lining a ten-foot square simken pool with bright chrome fittings. "We can just relax and scrub each other's backs," Tikki said. She finished undoing the snaps down the back of her tunic, shucked it off, dropped it in a wall-slot, faced Elton wearing a diaphanous one-piece undergarment. Elton's collar suddenly felt tight. He felt his face break into a silly smile, "Well, whatever you say... Tikki plucked a small box from a table, offered Elton what looked like a plastic cigarette. He groped, took one, jabbed it at his mouth. Tikki took one, drew on it, blew out perfumed smoke. "I'm afraid you bugged the Mother, with all that talk about the Yukks. She's a dear, really, but very hard-headed when it comes to religion. She says it's time we did away with outmoded concepts and recognized that the Yukks are merely an externalized personification at an inner yearning for defilement, or something." "Look," Elton said abruptly. "Let's play a little game. We'll pretend I just arrived from... from someplace so far away that I never even heard of the Yukks, or the Mother, or the domes -- and you tell me all about it," Elton said. "That sounds like a very strange game," Tikki said doubtfully. She opened the door to an adjoining room, stepped inside; a moment later a sound of rushing water started up. Steam wafted into the room, carrying a scent of Lifesavers. Tikki came back, holding a large cake at violet soap. "Is that what you play back at Shrulp?" "Yes, we spend a lot of time telling each other things we already know. The trick it to catch the other... ah... girl in a mistake." it doesn't really ' ' sound like much fun. If you feed like playing, wouldn't you rather just wrestle? I'll bet you know some interesting iMlds." "Maybe later," Elton gulped. "Now, you were going to tell me #I about the Yukks, remember?" Tikki put a finger to her cheek, nibMed at her lower lip, looking thoughtfully at the ceilElton found the expression perfectly delightful. So was the slim, tanned body below it. "Well, nine hundred and sixtyfour -- or is it sixty-five...? Let me see." Tikki nibbled a finger tip. "It must be sixtyfive because I finished Baby Training when I was ten, and Girl Training when I was eighteen, and it was sixty-one then, and that was four -- " "Sixty-five it is," Elton put in. "You're doing fine." "Anyway, nine hundred and sixty-five cycles ago, when the war with the Yukks was in its nineteenth cycle, there was a great battle fought between two fleets. Now, in those days there were many among the Girls who were badly tainted with Strange Ways." Her voice, Elton noticed, had taken on the tone of a pupil reciting lessons. "Because of this, the Girls weren't able to destroy the wicked Yukks, as they deserved. Instead, the Great Mother sent a terrible thing called a Disrupter that caused the machines of the Girls to malfunction, and all of the Girls were killed or captured -- except one shipload. The captain was a righteous Mother, and so she and her Girls were spared. They landed here on the World, and set up the Force Domes, and the defensive screens, to keep the Yukks at bay. That's why it's our duty to tend the Field Generators, and defend Girlhood, and weed out any traces of... she blushed, "... Strange Ways. Not that anybody has any," she added. "Any what?" Elton asked. "Strange Ways," Tikki said primly. "You know." "But we're playing that I don't know, remember?" "Here," Tikki said reaching for Elton's top jacket button. "I'll help you get these things off. The tub's ready by now." The steam had formed a pinkish haze at eye level. "Is this what holds it?" She undid the button clumsily. "I'm not very good at this..." She undid another button. "What about the Yukks?" Elton's voice sounded strained. Tikki undid the last coat button and pulled the garment off him.  the Yukks are evil ' ' beings who tried to enalave all Girlhood, once, long ago, before we were driven out of the Heavenly Garden. They were great big ugly creatures, with hair growing all over their faces, and huge, bony hands -- six of them, I think -- and whenever they could catch a poor, defenseless Girl, they'd... Tikki swallowed, her face pink. "They'd do Strange Things to her." "Strange Things?" Elton's voice was a squeak. Tikki was just finishing the last shirt button. She peeled it back over his shoulders. "And the terrible power they had was, that they made perfectly nice Girls want them to do the Strange Things. Even now, there's always the danger that a Girl will fall into Strange Ways -- like dreaming about a Yukk chasing her, with all six hands reaching for her -- and even catching her..." Tikki took a deep breath. "That's what makes the Yukks so terrible, and that's Yukks, and one of them ever managed to get into the Dome -- " Her eyes were flashing with anger; her nostrils flared. "Everyone would tear the horrible hairy thing into tiny little pieces before he could spread any Strange Ways!" "Tiny little pieces?" Elton stammered. He grabbed for his shirt, pulled it back on. Tikki's eyes strayed to his chest. "My in an envious tone. She put a hand under each of her magnificently formed mammaries, looked sadly down at them. "These DO get in the way..." Elton was backing toward the door. "Ah... I've just remembered something," he blurted, fumbling the door open. "Where did they take my friend? I have to find hi -- her -- right away!" "Oh. she's just next door," Tikki said. "But -- " Elton whirled to the adjoining door, banged on it, twisted the knob. It flew open. Boyle, shirtless, was just reaching for the tanned curve of his hostess's hip. "No!" Elton shouted. Boyle yipped and jumped a foot into the air. "I've got to talk to you!" Elton hissed, "privately!" "Look here, can't it wait?" Boyle's face had assumed a beefy color. "Bloody cheek, I call it, bursting in here just when I was about to... to... make friends." "That's what I have to talk to you about." Elton glanced at Boyle's roommate, then at Tikki, standing in the doorway, looking puzzled. "Do you mind, girls? Just for a moment?" He ushered the girls out, closed the door. "I've made a discovery," he started. "Me too," Boyle said, smirking. "I think we're on to a good thing. A different one every night, at that. Now if you'd just toddle off, there's a good lad -- " "Do you know what they do to Yukks if they catch one?" Elton cut in. "Tear 'em to bits, Nid said -- that's my young lady. They've no more use for bloody Reds than -- " "Correct," Elton said. "They tear them to pieces. Small, hairy pieces." "So what's that to do with us?" "Plenty," Elton said. "We're Yukks." T)oyle was sitting on the bed,  mopping at his face with a tiny lacy hanky he had found under the pillow. "That was a near thing," he said. "Another five minutes -- " "And you'd have stood revealed as the ancient arch-enemy of Girlhood," Elton said decisively. "But look here, from what Nid said, they've been living here on this Tup'ny world for nine-hundred cycles, whatever those are." "Nine hundred and sixty-five," Elton corrected him. "I think the term probably refers to Jupiters revolutions around the sun. That would be about... hmm...  eight thousand two hundred years, Shrulp time." "Eight blinking thousand years? But that Looney Control affair said the crew had just stepped out." "They did, too -- about the time the ice was melting off Wisconsin. Probably ran into a party of early head-hunters or a wandering hyaenodon. I'm afraid Lunar Control has little or no awareness of the meaning of time." Boyle shook his head. "Eight thousand years with no Yukks? Then how in the Six Rivers of Blue Mud do they have blinking babies?" "I'd imagine they have a supply of frozen sperm -- or possibly they've developed a method of parthenogenesis." "How do you suppose this bloody system ever got started?" Boyle looked bewildered. "What this lot needs is a firm masculine hand to put things in order. I've a mind to -- " "To be tom to bits? Please, Boyle, this situation requires careful handling. We've got to get away from here -- that much is clear. And there's no time to lose. Sooner or later someone is going to put two and two together." "And it may as well be me," Boyle said with sudden decision. T.eave that Nid to me for a ni gh t or two and I fancy -- " "Strange Ways," Elton said. "That's what they call that sort of thing. I suppose it all started with some sort of idiotic feminist movement, somewhere. The women developed a method of reproducing without men, and declared their independence. Naturally, war followed; a war fought in space." "Why space? And how? There weren't any Ueeding space vessels eight thousand years ago."   A pparently tl matter of there were. As a fact, I did a paper once -- but never mind that. Being women, the Girls wouldn't want to do anything as untidy as fighting a war right there on Earth -- and then too, I suppose the important logistical targets were off-planet; cmitrol of the spaceways was the key to success. And so a great battle was fought, and both sides virtually wiped each other out. The surviving Girls reached Callisto here, and set up these force domes and a defensive screen to keep off what was left of the Yukks; and the Yukks, with only one damaged ship left mounted a siege; then they died off -- but the Girls never knew." "I see... and back home, everybody made up and forgot the whole thing." "JNot quite: there's still a certain residual hostility. But the economic drain of the war and the loss of personnel plunged society back to a minimal cultural level -- and we're only now reattaining their level of technology." "All right, granted you're on tfie right track; what do we do now? Slip out of here and leg it back to the Mobile Whatsit?" "We don't even know where it is -- and anyway, the Yukks have us pinned down, remember? The minute we come out from under the defensive screen, blooie!" Boyle chewed the inside of his cheek; a shrewd expression settled over his features. "They won't shoot -- not if we let them know we're Yukks ourselves." "Maybe," Elton said, looking thoughtful. "We could give it a try, I suppose." "No time like the present." Boyle went to the door, opened it. Nid and Tikki came in, two slim creatures as imself-conscious as a pair of young antelope. "What arc you two girls talking about in here?" Tikki asked. "I'll bet you have some important message from your Mother?" Nid hazarded. "As a matter of fact, we do," Elton said. "Of course, this is a very confidential matter. You musn't tell anybody." "Not even Mother?" "We ten Mother everything," Nid said. "Even about your -- Strange Thoughts?" Elton hazarded. XT id and Tikki blushed a deli' cate shade of purple. "We'll have to confide in you ladies," Boyle said solemnly. "We've got wind of a big push the Reds are planning. High Command is counting on us. We have to go back to our traveler." "You mean -- there really are Yukks?" Nid's eyes were large with wonder. "Absolutely," Elton nodded. "I... I feel all sort of wiggly inside." Tikki put her hands to her stomach. "Can't you wait till in the morning?" Nid asked anxiously. "It's only a month away." "No, we have to go right now." "Even before our bath?" "Definitely." "You're such brave girls," Nid said admiringly. "I... I can't go," Tikki said. "I'm afraid I might -- " Her lip quivered. "I might turn out to be -- unreliable." She burst into tears. "There, there," Elton patted her shoulder, dismayed. "What's there to be afraid of? You'll be with us." "You don't know what an awful Girl I am," Tikki sniffled. "I have Strange Thoughts all the time... and I'm afraid... might... I might... disgrace Mother." Her sobs took over. Nid took her hand. "Now, Tikki, you're not the only one. I don't know a Girl who doesn't have a Strange Thought now and then." "B-but I have them all the time... "I'll tell you a secret: So do I; but -- " "But I like them!" "Look, we'll keep an eye on you," Boyle said. "You'll have to shut down that salt-water factory now, we've got to get cracking." Tikki dabbed at her eyes and looked at Boyle resentfully. "Why, you're the meanest Girl I ever met," she said. Elton stepped up and put a protective arm around her. "Just leave Tikki alone, Boyle. Can't you see she's upset?" "Too right," Boyle muttered. "Let's be off, Nid me lass. No time to waste, you know. Mother's orders and all that." Nid opened the door and peeked out. "Coast is clear," she said. "What about you, Tikki? Coming?" Tikki looked up at Elton. "I'll go," she said, still sniffling. "If youll promise to... to watch me. "I won't take my eyes off you." "Good. I'll feel safe then." She squeezed Elton's hand. They stepped out and started off along the hall. T'wenty minutes later, the foursome rounded a fountain tinkling in the dark, stumbled past a six-foot hedge, saw the blue glow of the Mobile Command Center ahead. Elton halted. "There aren't any guards on it, I hope?" he whispered. "Of course not? Why should there be?" Tikki said aloud. "Shhh!" Elton cautioned. "This is a top secret mission, remember." They came up to the capsule sitting quietly, doors open, waiting. "Looks like everything's shipshape," Boyle said. "Just like we left her." Elton leaned close to him. "Stand by with the girls a few yards back. I'll try to arrange a truce." "Right," Boyle moved to comply. Elton stepped into the cramped chamber, settled into tile seat. "Ah... look here, Lunar Computer. I'd like to contact the Yukk ship, get a message to their computer; whatever it is that controls the vessel. Is that possible?" "Messages can be transmitted m the Yukk wavelength." "All right; I want to tell them I'm taking off, and not to shoot. I want them to know we're on their side. Tell them we're Yukks, just like they are, and -- " metallic voice screeched. "Yukks occupying Mobile Combat Command Center Ten Ninety-four! Executing emergency procedure forty-one!" Elton's seat lifted, dumping him out onto the grass. With a hiss and a sharp smack! the doors closed, snipping off the blue glow. There was an abrupt zing!, followed by a small thundercap. A gust of wind ruffled Elton's hair. The capsule was gone. "Here!" Boyle yelled. "What do you think you're doing?" Nid and Tikki stood staring. "It... it went off and left us," Elton said weakly. "Did I hear it say... Yukks?" Nid demanded. "W-where are they?" Tikki asked, looking around. "Now we've had it," Boyle groaned. "Stranded, among these Yukk-eating females!" "What did you say?" Nid demanded. "Never mind, my dear. You've been as nice a little friend as a girl could have. Now just run along and let me think." "Hold on, Boyle," Elton said, getting to his feet. "Don't panic." He turned to Tikki. "You girls don't happen to have another Traveler like ours -- do you?" he asked hopefully. The girl shook her head. "I never saw one like that before." "Do you have any kind of... of space vessel?" Elton said desperately. "Anything you can use to travel up there?" He jabbed a finger at the night sky. "We have one... Nid said doubtfully. "But -- " "That's all we need," Boyle said promptly. "Just lead the way, there's a good girl." "Well... it's a funny time to be going to church." Distantly, Elton heard the shrill of a siren. Far away, someone shouted. "Oh, dear," Tikki said. "Someone's discovered you girls have gone out without permission. I'll bet. Mother's going to be upset." "Let's just hurry along to the ship -- quietly," Elton urged. "After all, we can't let anything interfere with the mission, can we?" "I think we'd better tell Mother," Nid said doubtfully. "No time," Boyle said. "Every minute counts. Mother will understand, won't she, professor?" "That's what I'm afraid of. Let's get going!" "This way," Nid said, and slipped away into the shadows, the others at her heels. A vast, clumsy pyramidal shape loomed up, the base stretching away into darkness. Elton came up to it breathing hard, listening to the clang at bells, the shouts of Yukks and the shrill ululation of the siren. "They're pretty well stirred up," Boyle said. "How do you reckon we get inside this beast?" "Where's the door, girls?" Elton inquired, peering through the gloom. "Over here," Nid called. At Elton's side, Tikki shivered. "It's scary," she said. "I have the feeling the Yukks are right here beside us." Ahead, Boyle muttered a curse. "Watch that bottom step, professor: rotted through." Elton gave Tikki a hand up, followed her up a short flight of crumbling wooden steps; as he stepped through the wide entry, hit shoes clanged on metal. "Where's the bridge, or the cockpit, or whatever you call it?" Boyle asked in a hoarse whisper. "You mean the Mother's Seat?" Nid asked. "This way..." Elton and Boyle grunted and puffed, clambering up narrow companionways in the dark, banging their heads on low passages, snorting dust from their nostrils. "Bit of rum odor about the place," Boyle commented. "It reminds me of the smell f the Royal Chamber in Cheops' pyramid," Elton said. "Here we are," Tikki said. "What are you going to do now?" There was a lAout from below, an answering call, then a mutter of conversation. "How do we close the entry port -- the doorway?" Elton hissed. "That's this big handle over here," Nid said. "Are you going to hold a Service now?" Elton grabbed the dimly seen lever, hauled it down. There was a growl of metal. Below, a heavy dang! cut off the voices. "Wish there was a bit of light here," Boyle said. A wavering, yellowish illumination sprang up. Tikki smiled from the panel, where scattered indicator lights glowed wanly. Elton went over, stared at the layout. "Tikki, do you understand all this?" "Oh, certainly; we had all this ki Training." "How do you start the engines?" "Oh, goody; we're going to have a Service." Tikki turned to die panel, reeling off details of the countdown checklist. Boyle came over, holding a thick book in his hand. "Have a look at this, sir; the log, I imagine." "Later," Kton said. "You'd better give me a hand here, Boyle. This is pretty complicated." Boyle listened in silence for a moment. "Hold up there, Tikki," he said. "Look here, professor, this is hopeless. It would take a ruddy genius to gen up on this drill in the time we've got. You see what we have to do, don't you?" Elton looked at him. Tikki had stopped her recital and was listening, eyes wide. "You mean?" Elton said. "Right! They've got to go along. Couldn't let them back outside anyway, without letting that lot down below in." "But -- that would be kidnapping." "Tikki!" Nid's voice came suddenly, a shrill yelp. "Look!" Tikki jumped up. Nid rushed to her, thrust a faded and curled sheet of flexible plastic into her hand. Elton craned to see it. heading read. Under the legend was a clear, glossy full-length photograph of a nude Yukk. Tikki looked from Elton to Boyle, back to the picture. "It... it looks... like the new girls," she said in a quavering voice. "Just look at that flat chest," Nid gasped. "And those skinny hips; and-and..." There was a heavy thumping from below. Boyle whirled to Nid. "Look here, love, there's no time to give you the full story now; just get this machine going, there's a good girl!" "We... we really ought to go for help," Nid quavered. "Start the ship up, Tikld," Elton pleaded. "Even if we are Yukks, we're not such monsters, are we now?" "But I don't... I mean, why -- ?" "With that crew snapping at our heels, I should think it would be bloody obvious!" Boyle snapped. "You said you know how to operate this thing! Hop to it, or we've bought the ruddy farm!" "I'm a wicked, wicked Girl," Tikki said weakly. "I'll do it..." Ohe went to the control panel, seated herself in the padded chair, punched buttons, closed switches; lights winked and glowed sluggishly; instrument needles stirred from pegs; there was a dry click! somewhere. Tikki got to her feet. "There," she said. "But I just don't see how you can think of ritual at a time like this -- " 'What ritual? We just want to depart as quickly as possible," Elton reached for Tikki's hand. "T hate to kidnap you like this, my dear, but -- " Tikki shivered and leaned against Elton. "I keep having the Strangest Thoughts..." There was a final thump from below, a screech of reluctant hinges, then a babble of voices. Feet thumped on stair rungs. "They're inside!" Elton urged Tikki toward the panel. "Quick!" A girl appeared at the control room door; Boyle jumped at her, came staggering back as she stiff-armed him. More girls crowded into the room; a heavyset fortyish woman pushed through, stood with hands on hips eyeing Elton and Boyle. "So you're Yukks," she said in a loud, deep voice. "You don't look so tough to me!" Elton lunged for the panel, punched buttons at random. Two of the girls pulled him away. "A religious nut," the deepvoiced woman barked. "Well, it's too late for that, you! And anyway, you Yukks have no business desecrating the Church!" "Church? She said it was a ship," Elton stammered. "The only one there was..." Boyle groaned. "It just came to me," he said. "No wonder nothing happened when Tikki twoddled the controls. This must be the ruddy vessel this lot came here in, eight thousand years ago." "So the story goes," the captain said. "Now let's get moving, you two." She shot Tikki and Nid a hard look. "And there'll be an investigation into the role you Girls played in this escapade, too." "We... we kidnapped them," Elton said. "A likely story." The woman jerked a thumb toward the frightened girls. "Put all four of them under guard and march 'em back to the dorm. It looks like the Mother's going to be sitting in Judgment tonight." IX 'he Mother was reclining in a heavily padded chaise lounge, with a box of pink and yellow candies at one elbow and a plate of cookies at the other. Heavy robes with elaborate flounces obscured her ample contours. She looked at Elton severely. "Lying to the Mother," she said. "You ought to be ashamed, even if you are Yukks -- and I never thought the Enemy would turn out to be so insignificant looking." "They're worse than they look," the captain of the guard said. "You see the state they've got this pair of ninnies in," she indicated Tikki and Nid, standing by with drooping expressions. The Mother's face tightened. "I thought from the first there was something Strange about them." The assembled Girls -- several hundred of them, Elton estimated, all ages, crowded into the wide Mother's Room -- sighed in unison. "Silence in the courtroom!" the Mother snapped. "This is an open-and-shut case. These two are Yukks -- that's plain enough. They led a pair of formerly decent Girls astray." she eyed Tikki and Nid. "I'm going to let you two off lightly; cold baths every three hours for the next two days; that ought to cool those Strange Ideas off." She turned back to Elton and Boyle. "As for you, there's only one way to deal with a Yukk: it's out in the Cold for you -- " The crowd of Girls gasped; a murmur ran through them. Tikki sprang forward. "That's perfectly horrid!" she cried. "If they're going out in the Cold, I'm going too!" Strongarm girls jumped for her, dragged her back in line. Nid was sobbing quietly. Boyle shot her a sickly smile. "There, there, lass, don't fret." Elton cleared his throat. "Just a minute. Mother," he said loudly. "Before you take this drastic step, I think there are a few things you should know." "Whafs that? What could a Yukk have to say that would interest a Mother?" Elton folded his arms, a calm, self-confident expression on his face. "If you'll clear these others from the room," he said easily, "I'd like to tell you the Facts of Life." ITlton was lounging at ease in a deep-cushioned chair that was a twin to the one the Mother had occupied at the Judgment, eating large hot-house grapes that were being popped into his mouth one at a time by Tikki, while other Girls crowded close. Wide double doors opened across the room. Boyle appeared, shaved, his hair curled, a neat short tunic flapping at his thighs. A bevy of shapely Girls surged around him, all chattering at once. Two ran forward, scattered vari-colored cushions in a heap by the side of the wide pool set in the floor. "I've got to give you credit, professor," he said. "You look like a blooming oriental potentate. How in the name of the Nine Gates of Ishalik did you do it?" Elton wrinkled his nose. "I think they overdid it a bit with the perfume, Boyle," he said easily. "Otherwise you look well." "The old bitch was ready to shove us outside the dome without even a set of ear-muffs," Boyle stated. "We'd have frozen solid before we had a chance to asphyxiate. What did you say to her to rate us all this?" "Girls, leave us!" Elton said, waving a hand. "You can come back in a few minutes, dears." They fled, casting longing glances back. "Well?" Boyle demanded. "Elementary, my dear Boyle. Surely you noticed the large number of rooms in the dormitory wings? Several hundred in our wing alone, and I saw at least a dozen wings -- " "Don't talk ruddy architecture. Get to the point!" "This is the point. There are only seven hundred and four Girls here -- and yet the building was obviously designed for many more. And then there was the business of the Mother chattering about the crowded conditions; consigning us to a broom closet." "That was just a bit of bloody cheek," Boyle said. ( ( XT o, it was important to her  to give us the impression that the dome was overflowing with Girls; these domes don't get along too well with each other, remember. She didn't want strangers to find out her fighting strength had fallen so low." "Well, if it's low, it's her own ruddy fault. I reckon she's the one that controls the birth-rate." "Hmmm, yes -- as far as she can. But did you notice, Boyle, that there are no children around? Tikki and Nid are about twenty-one; there's quite a number about the same age. The next grouping is at about the forty-five age level; the older generation, I suppose. Then there are a few old ladies who -- " "But there's no new generation, Boyle, and none of the girls are pregnant." "So?" "They've been using an artificial insemination method -- using frozen sperm cells, all of the x-x variety -- thus only girls were born. But unfortunately, the supplies ran out twenty-odd years ago." "Blimey! Then -- " "Exactly. After eight thousand years, it was all over -- until we came along." "So now it's up to us?" "Correct, Mr. Boyle. I suggest we work out some sort of equitable division. It should take us a year or so to work our way through, and then start over." "Of course," Boyle said doubtfully, "It means we're stranded." "Not forever. I learned from the Mother that there are very extensive libraries here, wellequipped laboratories -- " "Hold it!" Boyle leaned on one elbow, looking worried. "These little ones we'll be fathering: hatf of them will be little Yukks!" "Of course. Things will come back to normal in about twenty years -- and by that time I think we'll be ready to retire. We'll set up schools, start training a new generation of technicians. They'll be able to get the old ship going again -- or build a new one. We can neutralize the Yukk ship, return to Earth in style with enough technology to make us too rich to talk to." Elton picked up a dusty book from the floor. tCT)ut, this is my greatest prize," he said. "The log book from the ship. It gives an excellent picture of the pre-history of human affairs on Earth from about # B.C. up until the war seven thousand years later." "Twenty years, eh?" Boyle mused. "But look here, professor; I just happened to think! All the old bag had to do was take a specimen from one of us "But she didn't know that, Boyle -- so we'll just let it be our little secret." "I think you've hit on it, professor," Boyle called. "Never tell 'em all you know." "Correct," Elton said. "And in the meantime, we'll deal with our problems...one at a time." Worlds of brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delay -- send in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! 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Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. jVT artin Gardner and Stephen Barr are old friends -- to science-fiction readers, to each other and to Galaxy. As a matter of fact, they've each played a considerable part, at one time or another, in Galaxy's history -- Steve Barr with such memorable stories as The Back of Our Heads and I Am a Nucleus, while Martin Gardner's connection with the magazine goes back to a point before it existed; he was one of the original experts called in for advice on policies and programs before the first issue of Galaxy came out. Now both Gardner and Barr have new books out; and although the books are not in a technical sense related, they certainly supplement each other handsomely. Barr's book is about the whereness of things ; it is called Experiments in Topology (Crowell). What is topology? Well, says Barr, it begins with "the continuity of space, or shapes; it generalizes, and then by analogy leads us into other kinds of continuity -- and space as we usually understand it is left far behind. Really high-bouncing topologists not only avoid anything like pictures of these things, they mistrust them." Barr is a high-bouncing topologist. His experiments -- all of which you can do, by the way; you may not think so at first, because they bounce pretty high, too, but you can -- will lead you a far piece from the Moebius strip and the four-color map be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's probletns. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious WTe Rosicrucians # organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe A.N.X. ! Scribe A.N.X. i San Jose, California J Please send me the free book. The Mastery i , of Life, which explains how I may learn to ! i use my faculties and powers of mind. I i ! Name i i I Address I !City : s problem. Of course, he doesn't skimp these subjects, nor yet that #-D paradigm of the Moebius strip that is called the Klein bottle in fact, he shows you how to build one -- out of paper! And his Moebius strips take some surprising turns. Assuming that you carefully scissored one down the midline of its narrow ribbon, do you know what would happen? If you do that with a paper collar like a cigar band, obviously you get two paper collars. But if you do it with the papercollargiven-a-half-turn called a Moebius strip -- ? Well, you don't get two. Cutting it in half leaves it whole; you come out with a single Moebius strip, half as wide, twice as "long". (Assuming that a Moebius strip has "length".) And the reason? It is a matter of "handedness". "Handedness" is what Martin Gardner's The Ambidextrous Universe (Basic Books) is about; its subtitle is "Left, Right and the Fall of Parity." Starting with topological considerations Gardner goes on to consider the fourth dimension and what would happen if a #-D body (say a man) were rotated in a fourth dimension, as a two-dimensional sheet of paper can be rotated in a third. In that context, does reversal" of left and right really mean anything? Gardner comes at the answer by quoting from George O. Smith's Amateur in Chancery (originally published here) as well as from such other topologically interesting science fiction as George Gamow's The Heart on the Other Side and H. G. Well's The Plattner Story. In a symmetrical universe, Gardner concludes, "handedness" means nothing but an arbitrary convention, based on nothing more substantial than common agreement. But is the universe symmetrical? That's where the fall of parity comes in, for at least in some types of intranuclear reactions it is not. Why? How? That's what science is working on now. Gardner does not supply the answer. He does, however, give a priceless quotation from Niels Bohr, speaking to Wolfgang Pauli who had just proposed to him a theoretical explanation for the non-parity effects: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy star-travel in the body. Only an idiot would take a chance on the other way I I Ti yfarvin Flynn read the followT'J. j n g advertisement in the classified section of the Stanhope Gazette: " Gentleman from Mars, age #, quite, studious, cultured, wishes to exchange bodies with similarly inclined Earth gentleman. August I -- September #. References Exchanged. Brokers Protected." This commonplace announcement was enough to set Flynn's pulse racing. To swap bodies with a Martian! It was an exciting idea, but also a repellent one. After all, no one would want some sandgrubbing old Martian inside his head moving his arms and legs, looking out of his eyes and listening with his ears. But in return for this unpleasantness, he, Marvin Flynn, would be able to see Mars. And he would be able to see it as it should be seen; through the senses of a native. As some wish to collect paintings, others books, others women, so Marvin Flynn wanted to acquire the substance of them all through travel. But this, his ruling passion, was sadly unfulfilled. He had been born and raised in Stanhope, New York. Physically, his town was some three hundred miles from New York City. But spiritually and emotionally, the two cities were about a hundred years apart. Stanhope was a pleasing rural community situated in the foothills of the Adirondacks, garlanded with orchards and dotted with clusters of brown cows against rolling green pastureland. Invincibly bucolic, Stanhope dung to antique ways. Amiably, but with a hint of pugnacity, the town kept its distance from the flint-hearted megalopolis to the way had burrowed upstate as far as Kingston, but no further. Gigantic freeways twisted their concrete tentacles over the countryside, but could not take over Stanhope's elm-I ined Main Street. Other communities maintained a blast pit; Stanhope clung to its antiquated jet field. Often at night, Marvin had lain in bed and listened to that poignant sound of a vanishing rural America; the lonely wail of a jetliner. Stanhope was satisfied with itself. The rest of the world seemed quite satisfied to leave Stanhope in its romantic dream of a less hurried age. The only person whom the arrangement did not suit was Marvin Flynn. #I e had gone on the usual tours, and had seen the usual things. Like everyone else, he had spent his weekends in Europe. And he had explored the sunken city of Miami by scuba, gazed at the Hanging Gardens of London, and worshipped in the Bah'ai temple in Haifa. For his longer vacations he had gone on a walking tour across Marie Byrd Land, explored the lower Ituri Rain Forest, crossed Sinkiang by camel and had even lived for several weeks in Lhassa, the art capital of the world. In short, the usual tourist assortment. Flynn wanted to really travel. That meant going extraterrestrial. It didn't seem so much to ash. Yet he had never even been to the Moon. In the final analysis, it was a matter of economics. Interstellar travel in the flesh was expensive, out of the question for an average sort of fellow. Unless, of course, he wished to avail himself of the advantages of Mindswap. Marvin had tried to reconcile himself to his position in life, and to the very acceptable possibilities which that position offered him. After all, he was free, gray and #, a tall, broad-shouldered boy with a clipped black mustache and gentle brown eyes. He had received the usual education -- grade school, high school, twelve years of college, and four years of post-graduate work -- and was considered well trained for his job with the Reyck-Peters Corporation. There he fluoroscoped plastic toys for microshrinkage, porosity, texture fatigue and the like. Perhaps it wasn't the most important job in the world; but then, we can't all be kings or spaceship pilots. It was certainly a responsible position, especially when one considers the importance of toys in this world, and the vita! task of alleviating the frustrations of children. Marvin knew all this; and yet, he was unsatisfied. To see Mars, to visit the burrow of the Sand King, to travel through the aural splendor of The Wound, to listen to the chromatic sands of the Great Dry Sea... He had dreamed before. But this time was different. That strange sensation in his throat argued a decision in the forming. Marvin wisely did not try to force it. Instead, he put on his beanie and went downtown to the Stanhope Pharmacy. II # s he had expected, his best friend, Billy Hake was at the soda fountain, drinking an "How's the mom, Sorn?" Hake asked, in the slang popular at that time. "Soft and mazy, Esterhazy," Marvin replied, giving the obligatory response. "Du koomen ta de la klipje?" Billy asked. (Pidgin SpanishAfrikaans dialect was the new laugh sensation that year.) "Ja, Mijnheer," Marvin answered, a little heavily. His heart simply was not in clever repartee. Billy caught the nuance of dissatisfaction. He raised a quizzical eyebrow, folded his copy of James Joyce Comics, popped a Keen-Smoke into his mouth, bit down to release the fragrant green vapor, and asked, "Forwhy you burrow?" The question was wryly phrased but obviously well-in ' ended. Marvin sat down beside Billy. reveal his unhappiness to his light-hearted friend, he held up both hands and proceeded to speak in Plains Indian Sign Language. (Many intellectually inclined young men were still under the influence of last year's sensational Projectoscope production of Dakota Dialogue , starring Bjorn Rakradish as Crazy Horse and Milovar Slavovivowitz as Red Cloud, done entirely in gesture.) Marvin made the signs, mocking yet serious, for heart-thatbreaks, horse-that-wanders, sunthat-will-not-shine, moon-thatcannot rise. He was interrupted by Mr. Bigelow, proprietor of the Stanhope Pharmacy. Mr. Bigelow was a middle-aged man of #, slightly balding, with a small but evident paunch. Yet he affected boys' ways. Now he said to Marvin, "Eh, Mijnheer, querenzie tornar la klopje inmensa de la cabeza vefrouvens in forma de ein skoboldash sundae?" It was typical of Mr. Bigelow and others of his generation to overdo youthful slang. "Schnell," Marvin said, putting him down with the thoughtless cruelty of youth. "Well, I never," said Mr. Bigelow, and moved huffily away. Billy perceived his friend's pain. It embarrassed him. He was #, nearly a man. He had a good job as foreman of Assembly Line # in Peterson's Box Factory. He clung to adolescent ways, of course, but he knew that his age presented him with certain obligations. Thus, he cross-circuited his fear of embarrassment, and spoke to his oldest friend in clear. "Marvin. What's the matter?" 'll T arvin shrugged his shoulder, '  quirked his mouth and drummed aimlessly with his fingers. He said, "Oiga, hombre, ein Kleinnachtmusik es demasiado, nicht wahr? The Todt you ruve to touch..." "Straighten it," Billy said, with dignity beyond his years. "I'm sorry," Marvin said, in clear. "It's just -- oh, Billy, I really do want to travel so badly!" Billy nodded. He was aware of his friend's obsession. "Sure," he said. "Me too." "But not as bad. Billy -- I got the burns." His skoboldash sundae arrived. Marvin ignored it, and poured out his heart to his lifelong friend. "Mira, Billy, it's really got me wound tighter than a plastic retriever coil. I think of Mars and Venus, and really far-away places like Aldeberan and Antares and -- I mean, gosh, I just can't stop thinking about it all. Like the Talking Ocean of Procyon IV, and the tripartritate hominoids of Allua II, and it's like I'll simply die if I don't really and actually see those places." "Sure," his friend said. "I'd like to see them, too." "No, you don't understand," Marvin said. "It's not just to see -- it's like -- it's worse than -- I mean, I can't just live here in Stanhope the rest of my life. Even though I got a nice job and I'm dating some really guapa girls. But heck, I can't just marry some girl and raise kids and -- and -- there's gotta be something more!" Then Marvin lapsed into adolescent incoherence. But something of his feelings had come through the wild torrent of his words, and his friend nodded sagely. "Marvin," he said softly, "I read you five by five, honest to Sam I do. But gee, even interplanetary travel costs fortunes. And interstellar stuff is just plain impossible." "It's all possible," Marvin said, "if you use Mindswap." "Marvin! You can't mean that!" His friend was too shocked to avoid the exclamation. "I can!" Marvin said. "And by the Christo malherido, I'm going to!" That shocked them both. Marvin hardly ever used bad language. "But you can't," Billy said. "Mindswap is dirty!" " 'Dirty he who dirty thinks, cabron.' " "No, seriously. You don't want some sandgrubbing ole Martian inside your head? Moving your legs and arms, looking out of your eyes, touching you, and maybe even -- " Marvin cut him off before he said something really bad. "Mira," he said. "Recuerda que I'll be in his body, on Mars, so he'll be having the same embarrassments." "Martians haven't got no sense of embarrassment," Billy said. "That's just not true," Marvin said. Although younger, he was in many ways more mature than his friend. He had been an apt student in Comparative Interstellar Ethics. And his intense desire to travel rendered him less provincial in his attitudes, more prepared to see the other creature's point of view, than his friend. From the age of #, when he had learned how to read, Marvin had studied the manners and modes of many different races in the Galaxy. Furthermore, he had scored in the #th percentile in Projective Empathy. He jumped to his feet. "By jingo!" he cried, striking the palm of his left hand with his right fist, "I'll do it!" The strange alchemy of decision had transformed him. Without hesitation he returned home, packed a light suitcase, left a note for his parents, and caught the jet to New York. Ill I n New York, Marvin went directly to the Body-Brokerage House of Otis, Blanders and Klent. He was sent to the office of Mr. Blanders, a tall, athletic man in the prime of life and already, at sixty-three, a full partner in the firm. He explained to this man his purpose in coming. "Of course," Mr. Blanders said. "You have reference to our advertisement of Friday last. The Martian gentleman's name is Ze Kraggash, and he is very highly recommended by the rectors of East Skern University." "What does he look like?" Marvin asked. "See for yourself," Blanders said. He showed Marvin a photograph of a being with a barrel chest, thin legs, slightly thicker arms, and a small head with an extremely long nose. The picture showed Kraggash standing kneedeep in oozy clay, waving to someone. Printed on the bottom of the photograph were the words: "Souvenir of Mud Heaven -- Mars' Year-'Round Vacationland." "Nice looking chap," Mr. Blanders commented. Marvin nodded doubtfully. "His home," Blanders continued, "is in Wagomstamk, on the edge of the Disappearing Desert in New South Mars. It is an extremely popular tourist area, as you probably know. Like you, Mr. Kraggash is desirous of travelling, and wishes to find a suitable host body. He has left the selection entirely up to us, stipulating only mental and physical health." "Well," Marvin said, "I don't mean to boast, but I've always been considered healthy." "I can see that at a glance," Mr. Blanders said. "It is only a feeling, of course, or perhaps an intuition; but I have come to trust my feelings in thirty years of dealing with the public. Purely on that basis I have already rejected three applicants for this particular Swap." Mr. Blanders seemed so proud of this that Marvin felt impelled to say, "Have you really?" "Most certainly. You can have no conception of how frequently I must detect and eliminate misfits in this line of work. Neurothrills; criminals who wish to escape the purlieu of local law; the mentally unstable. I cull them all." "I hope that I don't fit any of those categories," Marvin said, with an embarrassed little laugh. "I can tell at once that you do not," Mr. Blanders said. "I would judge you as an extremely normal young man; almost excessively normal, if that were possible. You have been bitten by the travel bug, which is very suitable for your time of life, and is a passion akin to falling in love, or fighting an idealistic war, or becoming disillusioned with the world, and other postures of the young. It is very fortunate that you had either the native wit or the good luck to come to us, the oldest and most reliable brokerage house in the Swap business, rather than to some of our less scrupulous competitors; or worst of all, to the Open Market." TV  arvin knew very little about IVi fjjg Open Market; but he remained silent, not wishing to betray his ignorance. "Now then," Mr. Blanders said, "we have certain formalities which we must go through before we can gratify your request." "Formalities?" Marvin asked. "Most certainly. First, you must have a complete examination -- physical, mental and moral. Next, you and the Martian gentleman will both sign a Reciprocal Damage Clause. This states that any damage to your host body, whether by omission or commission, and including Acts of God, will (#) be recompensed at the rate established by interstellar convention, and (#) that such damage will be visited reciprocally upon your own body in accordance with the lex talionis." "Huh?" Marvin said. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth," Mr. Blanders explained. "Suppose you, in the Martian corpus, break a leg. Interstellar law requiries that, upon re-occupying your own body, your own leg be broken in as scientific and painless a manner as possible." "Even if it was an accident?" "Especially if it were an accident. We have found that the Reciprocal Damage Clause has cut down the number of such accidents quite considerably." "This begins to sound sorta dangerous," Marvin said. "Any course of action contains an element of danger," Mr. Blanders said. "But the risks involved in Swapping are statistically unimportant, assuming that you stay out of the Twisted World." ttT don't know very muchSabout the Twisted World," Marvin said. "Nobody does," Blanders said. "That's why you're supposed to stay out of it." Marvin nodded thoughtfully. "What else is there?" "Nothing to speak of. Just paperwork, waivers of special rights and immunities, that sort of thing. And, of course, I must give you the standard warning about metaphoric deformation." "All right," Marvin said. "I'd like to hear it." "I just gave it," Blanders said. "But I'll give it again. Watch out for metaphoric deformation." "I'd be glad to," Marvin said. "But I don't know what it is." "It's really quite simple," Blanders said. "You might consider it a form of situational insanity. You see, our ability to assimilate the unusual is limited, and these limits are quickly reached and surpassed when we travel to alien planets. We experience too much novelty; it becomes unbearable, and the mind seeks relief through the buffering process of analogizing. It forms a bridge between the accepted known and the unacceptable unknown, imbuing the intolerable unknown with a desirable familiarity. When, unable to handle the flood of data by the normal process of conceptual analogizing, the subject becomes victim to perceptual analogizing. The process is also known as Panzaism. Does that make it clear?" "No." Marvin said. "Why is it called Panazaism?" "The concept is self-explanatory," Blanders said. "Do Quijote thinks the windmill is a giant; whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. Quijotism may be defined as the perception of everyday things as rare entities. The reverse of that is Panzaism, which is the perception of rare entities as everyday things." "Do you mean," Marvin asked, "that I might think I was looking at a cow, when actually it was an Altairian?" "Precisely," Blanders said. "Ifa simple enough, once you apply yourself. Just sign here and heraj and we will get on with it." IV Yespite a bipedal frame, tfafl Martian is one of tha strangest creatures in the galaxy. Indeed, from a sensory viewpoint, the Kvees of Aldeberan, despite their double brains and special-function limbs, are close to us. It is a disturbing thing t Swap into the corpus of a Martian. Marvin Flynn found himself is a pleasantly furnished room. There was a single window through it, he gazed with Martian eyes upon a Martian landscape. He closed his eyes, since ha could register nothing except a dismaying confusion. Despite inoculations, he was beset by the nausea-producing waves of culture-shock, and he had to stand very still until it subsided. Then, cautiously, he opened his eyes and looked again. He perceived low, flat sand dunes, made up of a hundred or more distinct hues of gray. A silvery-blue wind was running across the horizon, and an ochre counter-wind seemed to be attacking it. The sky was red, and many indescribable hues were visible in the infra-red scale. In everything, Flynn saw spidery spectrum lines. Earth and sky presented him with a separate dozen palettes, some complementary, more of them clashing. There was no harmony in nature's colors on Mars. Marvin found a pair of glasses in his hand, and slipped them on. Immediately, the roar and clash of colors was reduced to manageable proportions. The numbness of shock receded, and he began to perceive other things. First, a heavy booming in his ear, and a quick rattle beneath it, like the tattoo of a snare drum. He looked around for the source of this noise, and saw nothing except earth and sky. He listened more carefully, and found that the sounds were coming from his own chest. They were his lungs and heart; sounds which all Martians lived with. Now Marvin was able to take stock of himself. He looked at his legs, which were long and spindly. There was no knee-joint; instead, the leg was pivoted at the ankle, shin, mid-thigh, and upper thigh. He walked, and admired the fluid motion of his movements. His arms were slightly thicker than his legs, and his double-jointed hands had three fingers and two opposable thumbs. He could bend and twist these in a surprising number of ways. He was dressed in black shorts and a white jumper. His chestprop was folded neatly and covered with an embroidered leather case. He was amazed at how natural it all seemed. And yet, it was not surprising. The ability of intelligent creatures to accommodate to new environments was what made Mindswap possible. Flynn was musing on this when he heard a door open behind him. He turned and saw a Martian standing in front of him, dressed in a government uniform of green and gray stripes. The Martian had reversed his feet in greeting, and Marvin quickly responded in kind. ne of the glories of Mindswap is "automatic education." In the amusing jargon of the trade: "When you take over a house, you get the use of the furnishings." The furnishings, of course, are the use of primary available knowledge in the host brain. Knowledge such as language, customs, mores and morals, general information about the area in which one lives, and so forth. This is primary-environment information; general, impersonal, useful as a guide, but not necessarily reliable. Personal memories, likes, dislikes, are, with certain exceptions, unavailable to the occupier; or available only at the cost of considerable mental effort. Again, in this area there is what appears to be a type of immunological reaction, which allows only a superficial degree of contact between disparate entities. "Soft wind," the Martian said, in the classic old Martian greeting-form. "And cloudless sky," Flynn replied. (To his annoyance, he found that his Host-body had a slight lisp.) "I am Meenglo Orichichich, of the Tourist Bureau. Welcome to Mars, Mr. Flynn." "Thanks," Flynn said. "Awfully good to be here. It's my first Swap, you know." "Yes, I know," Orichichich said. He spat on the floor -- a sure sign of nervousness -- and uncurled his thumbs. From the corridor there came a sound of heavy voices. Orichichich said, "Now then, concerning your stay on Mars -- " "I want to see the Burrow of the Sand King," Flynn said. "And, of course, the Talking Ocean." "Both excellent choices," the official said. "But first there are one or two minor formalities." "Formalities?" "Nothing too difficult," Orichichich said, his nose twisting to the left in the Martian smile. "Would you look over these papers and identify them, please?" Flynn took the proffered papers and scanned them. They were replicas of the forms he had signed on Earth. He read them through, and found that all the information had been sent correctly. "These are the papers I signed on Earth," he said. The noise from the corridor grew louder. Marvin could make out words: "Scalded egg-laying son of a frostbitten tree stump! Gravelloving degenerate!" Those were very strong insults indeed. Marvin raised his nose quizzically. The official hastily said, "A misunderstanding, a mixup. One of those unfortunate occurrences which occur even to the best-run of government tourist services. But I am quite sure that we can straighten it out in  # five gulps of a rapi, if not sooner. Permit me to ask you if -- " There was the sound of a scuffle in the corridor. Then a Martian burst into the room, with a Martian sub-official clinging to his arm and trying to stop him. 'die Martian who had burst in was extremely old, as could be told by the faint phosphorescence of his skin. His arms quivered as he pointed both of them at Marvin Flynn. "There!" he shouted. "There it is, and by treestumps I want it now!" Marvin said, "Sir, I am not in the habit of being addressed as 'it'." "I am not addressing you," the old Martian said. "I do not know nor care who or what you are. I am addressing the body which you are occupying, and which is not yours." "What are you talking about?" "This gentleman," the official said, "claims that you are occupying a body which belongs to him." He spat twice on the floor. "It is a mixup, of course, and we can straighten it out at once -- " "Mixup!" howled the old Martian. "It's an out-and-out fraud!" "Sir," Marvin said, with cold dignity, "you are under a grave misapprehension. This body was legally and fairly rented by me." "Scaly-skinned toad!" the old man shouted. "Let me at him!" He struggled with circumspection against the restraining grip of the guard. Suddenly, an imposing figure dressed entirely in white appeared in the doorway. All within the room fell silent as their gaze fell upon the feared and respected representative of the South Martian Desert Police. "Gentlemen," the policeman said, "there is no need for recriminations. We shall proceed now to the police station, all of us. There, with the help of the Fulszime Telepath, we shall penetrate to the truth, and to the motivation behind it." The policeman paused impressively, stared full into each man's face, swallowed saliva to show supreme calm, and said: "This, I promise you." Without further ado the policeman, the official, the old man, and Marvin Flynn, proceeded to the police station. They walked silently, and they shared a common mood of apprehension. It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the fiolice your troubles really begin. V A t the police station, Marvin Flynn and the others were taken directly to the dim, moist chamber were the Fulszime telepath lived. This tripedal entity, like all of his fellows from the Fulszime Planet, possessed a telepathic sixth sense, perhaps in compensation for the dimness of his other five. "All right," the Fulszime telepath said, when all were assembled before him. "Step forward, fellow, and tell me your story." He pointed a finger sternly at the policeman. "Sir!" the policeman said, straightening with embarrassment, "I happen to be the policeman." "That is interesting," the telepath said. "But I fail to see what it has to do with the question of your innocence or guilt." "But I am not even accused of a crime," the policeman said. The telepath mused for a moment, then said, "I think I understand. It is these two who are accused. Is that it?" "It is," the policeman said. "My apologies. Your aura of guilt led me to an over-hasty identification." "Guilt?" the policeman said. "Me?" He spoke calmly, but his skin was showing the typical orange striations of anxiety. "Yes, you," the telepath said. "You need not be surprised. Grand larceny is the sort of thing about which most intelligent creatures feel guilty." "Now just a minute!" the policeman shouted. "I haven't committed any grand larceny!" The telepath closed his eyes and introspected. At last he said, "That is correct. I meant to say that you will perform grand larceny." "Clairvoyance is not admissible as evidence in a court of law," the policeman stated. "And furthermore, readings of the future are a direct violation of the law of free will." "This is true," the telepath said. "My apologies." "It's quite all right," the policeman said. "When will I perform this alleged grand larceny?" "About six months hence," the telepath said. "And will I be arrested?" "No. You will flee the planet, going to a place where there is no extradition law." "Hmm, interesting," the policeman said. "Could you tell me if... But we can discuss this later. Now you must hear the stories of these men, and judge their innocence or guilt." The telepath looked at Marvin, shook a flipper at him, and said, "You may proceed." Marvin told his story, beginning with his first reading of the advertisement, and leaving out nothing. "Thank you," the telepath said, when he was through. "And now, sir, your story." He turned to the old Martian, who cleared his throat, scratched his thorax, spit once or twice, and then proceeded. I don't even know where to begin this thing, so I guess I'd better start with my name, which is Aigeler Thrus, and my race, which is Nemucthian Adventist, and my occupation, which is that I own and operate a clothing store on the planet Achelses V. Well, it's a small business and not a very good business and my store is located in Lambersa on the South Polar Cap, and I sell clothing all day to immigrant Venusian laborers, who are big, green, hairy fellows, very ignorant and very excitable and apt to fight, though I have no prejudices against them. You get to be philosophical in my business, and maybe I'm not rich, but at least I got my health (thank God), and my wife Allura is healthy too except for a mild case of tentacular fibrosis. And I got two grown sons, one of whom is a doctor in Sidneport, and the other is a trainer of Klannts. And I also got one daughter who is married, so of course that means I got a sonin-law. This son-in-law of mine I have always distrusted, since he is a fancy dresser and owns twenty pairs of chest-props, although hia wife my daughter hasn't even got a matched set of scratchers. But it can't be helped, she dug her burrow, now she has to crawl in it. But still, when a man is so interested in clothes and fancysmelling joint lubricants and similar luxuries on the salary of a moisture salesman (he calls himself a hydrosensory engineer) it makes you wonder a little. And he's always trying to scratch up extra income on the side with various foolish ventures which I have to equip him for out of my hard-earned savings which I get by selling to these big green fellows. Like last year he got hold of this novelty item, a backyard cloudmaker, and I told him, who would want it? But my wife insisted that I help him out, and sure enough he went broke. And then this year, he had another scheme, and this time it was iridescent synthetic wool seconds from Vega II, a consignment of which he somehow found in Heligoport and which he wanted me to buy. I said to him, "Look, what do my customers these Venusian loud-mouths know about fancy dressing? They're lucky if they can afford a pair of twill shorts and maybe a robe for holidays." But my son-in-law has got an answer for everything and he says to me, "Look, Papa, have I or have I not made a study of Venusian folkways and mores? The way I look at it, here are these people straight out of the backwoods, and they've got this love of ritual and dance and bright colors. So it's a natural, true or not?" Well, to make a short story even shorter, I get talked into this venture against my better judgment. Naturally, I had to see those iridescent seconds myself, because I wouldn't trust my sonin-law to judge a piece of lint. And that meant travelling halfway across the galaxy to Heligoport in Mars. So I started making the arrangements. No one wanted to Swap with me. I can't say I blame them, because nobody comes on purpose to a planet like Achelses V, unless it's immigrant Venusians who don't know any better. But I find this ad fronj this Martian, Ze Kraggash, who wants to rent his body out on account of he's taking his mind into Cold Storage for a protracted rest. It's damned expensive, but what can I do? I get a little money back by renting my own body to a friend who had been a quarentz hunter before he was bed-ridden by muscular dyscomyotosis. And I go down to the Swap Bureau and get projected to Mars. Well, imagine my sensations when it turns out there is no body waiting for me! Everybody's running around trying to find out what happened to my host body, and they even try to send me back to Achelses V ; but they can't because my friend has already left on a quarentz hunting expedition with my body. Finally they get me a body from the Theresienstadt Rent-aBody people. Twelve hours is the maximum they can allow me since they're all booked up for short-term rentals through the summer. And it's a pretty decrepit old body, as you can see for yourself, and damned expensive anyhow. So I go out and try to find out what had gone wrong, and what do I find but this tourist from Earth walking around bold as brass in the body which I have paid for, and which, according to my contract, I should be occupying at this very moment. It is not only unfair, it is also extremely aggravating to my health. And that is the entire story. nphe telepath retired to his chambers in order to ponder his decision. He returned in less than an hour, and spoke as follows: "Both of you did, in all good faith, rent, swap, or otherwise acquire, the same body, vis., the corpus of Ze Kraggash. This body was offered by its owner, the aforesaid Ze Kraggash, to each of you, and thus sale was consummated in direct violation of all laws concerned. Ze Kraggash's action must be considered criminal, both in execution and intent. This being the case, I have caused to be sent to Earth a message, requesting the immediate arrest of the aforesaid Ze Kraggash, and his detention in a place of custody until such time as his extradition can be affected. "Both of you made your purchase in good faith. However, the prior, or earliest, sale, as shown in the contractual forms, was made by Mr. Aigeler Thrus, who takes precedence over Mr. Marvin Flynn by a matter of thirtyeight hours. Therefore Mr. Thrus, as the First Buyer, is awarded custody of the Corpus; and Mr. Flynn is ordered to Cease and Desist his unlawful occupancy, and to take cognizance of the Dispossess Notice which I hereby give him, and which must be obeyed within six standard Greenwich hours." The telepath handed Marvin a Dispossess Notice. Flynn accepted it sadly, yet with resignation. "I suppose," he said, "that I had better go back to my own body on Earth." "That," the telepath said, "would be your wisest choice. Unfortunately, it is not possible at the moment." "Not possible? Why not?" "Because," the telepath said, "according to the Earth authorities, whose telepathic reply I have just received, your body, animated by the mind of Ze Kraggash, is nowhere to be found. A preliminary investigation lead us to fear that Ze Kraggash has fled the planet, taking with him your body and Mr. Aigeler's money." It took a while for it to sink in. But finally Marvin Flynn realized the implications of what had been said. He was stranded on Mars in an alien body, which he had to relinquish. In six hours, he would be a mind with no body at all, and with a poor chance of finding one. Minds cannot exist without bodies. Marvin Flynn slowly and of his own death. VI ft f arvin did not give way to despair. He gave way instead to anger, which was a much healthier emotion, though equally unproductive. Instead of making a fool of himself by weeping in the court, he made a fool of himself by storming through the corridors of the Federal Building, demanding either fair play or a damned good substitute. There was no restraining this impetuous young man. Quite in vain did several lawyers point out to him that if justice really existed there would be no need for law and lawmakers, and thus one of mankind's noblest conceptions would be obliterated and an entire occupational group would be thrown out of work. This lucid argument brought no peace to the frenzied Marvin, who gave every appearance of a man insusceptible to reason. The breath rasped and rattled in his throat as he roared his contempt for the Justice machinery of Mars. It was in this mood that he came to a door marked Bureau of Detection and Apprehension, Interstellar Division. "Aha!" Marvin muttered, and entered the office. He found himself in a small room which looked like something out of the pages of an old historical novel. Against the wall were dignified banks of old but reliable electronic calculators. Near the door was an early model thought-to-print translator. The arm chairs had the abrupt shape and pastel plastic upholstery which we associate with a more leisurely era. The room lacked only a bulky solid-state Moraeny to make it a perfect replica of a scene from the pages of Sheckley or one of the other early poets of the Age of Transmission. There was a middle-aged Martian seated in a chair throwing darts at a target shaped like a woman's bottom. He turned hastily when Marvin came in and said, "It's about time. I was expecting you." "Were you really?" Marvin asked. "Well, not really," the Martian said. "But I have found that it makes an effective opening, and tends to create an atmosphere of trust." "Then why do you ruin it by telling me?" The Martian shrugged his shoulder and said, "Look, no one's perfect. I'm just an ordinary working detective. Urf Urdorf's the name. Sit down. I think we have a lead on your missing fur coat." # 'IXhat fur coat?" Marvin  ' asked. 'Aren't you Madame Ripper de Lowe, the transvestite who was robbed last night in the Red Sands Hotel?" "Certainly not. I'm Marvin Flynn. I lost my body." "Of course, of course," Detective Urdorf said, nodded vigorously. "Let's take it point by point. Do you remember by any chance where you were when you first noticed that your body was missing? Could any of your friends have taken it as a joke? Or could you have merely misplaced it, or perhaps sent it on a vacation?" "I didn't really lose it," Marvin said. "Actually, it was stolen." "You should have said so in the first place," Urdorf said. "That tends to put the matter in a different light. I am only a detective; I have never claimed to be a mindreader." "I'm sorry," Marvin said. "I'm sorry, too," Detective Urdorf said. "About your body, I mean. It must have been quite a nasty shock." "Yes, it was." "I can well understand how you feel." "Thank you," Marvin said. They sat in companionable silence for several minutes. Then Marvin said, "Well?" "I beg your pardon?" the detective replied. "I said, 'well?'" "Oh. I'm sorry, I'm afraid I didn't hear you the first time." "That's quite all right." "Thank you." "You're extremely welcome." There was another silence. Then Marvin said, "Well?" once again, and Urdorf said, "I beg your pardon?" Marvin said, "I want it back." "What?" "My body." "Your what? Oh, yes, your body. Hmm, I daresay you do," the detective said, with an appreciative smile. "But of course, it isn't as easy as that, is it?" "I wouldn't know," Marvin said. "No, I don't suppose you would," Urdorf said. "But I can assure you that it isn't as easy as that." "I see," Marvin said. "I rather hoped you would," Urdorf said, and lapsed into silence. T his silence lasted for approximately twenty-five seconds, give or take a second or two. At the end of that time Marvin's patience collapsed and he shouted, "Goddam it are you going to do something about getting me back my body or are you going to just sit there on your goddam fat butt and talk without saying anything?" "Of course I am going to get you your body," the detective said. "Or in any case, I am going to try. And there is no reason for abuse. I am not, after all, some machine filled with tabulated answers. I am an intelligent being just like yourself. I have my own hopes and fears. And I have my own way of conducting an interview. This way may seem ineffectual to you, but I have found it extremely useful." "Have you really?" asked Marvin, chastened. "Why yes, as a matter of fact I have," the detective replied, his mild voice showing no trace of rancor. Another silence seemed about to begin, so Marvin asked, "What sort of chance do you think I have -- we have -- for recovering my body?" "A most excellent chance," Detective Urdorf replied. "In fact, I think I could go so far as to say that I am certain of success. I base this not on a study of your particular case, about which I know very little, but on the simple statistics involved." "Do the statistics favor us?" Marvin asked. "Most assuredly! Consider: I am a trained detective, conversant with all the new methods and possessing a top efficiency rating of AA-A. Yet in spite of this, during my five years with the force, I have never solved a case." "Not a single one?" "Not a single one," Urdorf said firmly. "Interesting, isn't it?" "Yes, I suppose it is," Marvin said. "But doesn't that mean -- " "It means," the detective said, "that one of the strangest runs of bad luck that I have ever heard of is statistically due to break." Marvin was nonplussed, which is an unusual sensation in a Martian body. He said, "But suppose your luck doesn't break?" "You must not be superstitious," the detective replied. "The probabilities are there; even the most casual examination of the situation should convince you of that. I have been unable to solve one hundred and fiftyeight cases in a row. You are my #th. How would you bet if you were a betting man?" "I'd stay with the run," Marvin said. C(Qo would I," the detective  admitted, with a self-deprecating smile. "But we would be betting on emotion rather than on the calculations of our intellect." Urdorf looked at the ceiling dreamily. "One hundred and fifty-eight failures! It's a fantastic record. A run like that simply has to break! I could probably sit here in my office and do nothing, and the criminal would find his way to me." "Yes sir," Marvin said politely. "But I hope you won't test that particular approach." "Well, no," Urdorf said. "I tried that with number #. No, I shall pursue your case actively. Especially since it is a sex crime, which is the sort of thing I am interested in." "I beg your pardon?" Marvin said. "There is really no need to apologize," the detective assured Mm. "One should not be embarrassed or guilty by reason of being the victim of a sex crime, even though the deepest folk wisdom of many cultures attaches a stigma to being such a victim, on the presumption of conscious or unconscious complicity." "No, no, I wasn't apologizing," Marvin said. "I was merely -- " "I quite understand," the detective said, "But you mustn't be ashamed to tell me all the bizarre and loathsome details. You must think of me as an impersonal official function instead erf as an intelligent being with sexual feeling and fears and urges and quirks and cravings -- " "What I was trying to tell you," Marvin said, "is that there is no sex crime involved here." "They all say that," the detective mused. "It is strange how the human mind is forever unable." "Look," Marvin said, "if you would take the time to read over the facts of the case, you would see that it was a case of an outright swindle. Money and selfperpetuation were the motives." "I am aware of that," the detective said. "And, were I unaware of the processes of sublimation, we could leave it at that." "What possible motive could the criminal have had?" "His motive is obvious," Urdorf said. "It is a classic syndrome. You see, this fellow was acting under a specific compulsion, for which we have a specific technical term. He was driven to his deed in an advanced state of obsessive projective narcisism." "I don't understand," Marvin said. "It is not the sort of thing which the layman is apt to encounter," the detective told him. "What does it mean?" "Well, I can't go into the entire etiology. But essentially, the dynamics of the syndrome involve a displaced self-love. That is to say; the sufferer falls in love with another, but not as other. Rather, he falls in love with the Other as Himself." "All right," Marvin said, with resignation. "Will this help us find the man who stole my body?" "Well, no," said the detective. "But it will enable us to understand him." # # I  ow soon can you begin?" I I. Marvin asked. "I have already begun," the detective replied. "I shall send for the court records, of course, and all other documents pertaining to this matter, and I shall contact all relevant planetary authorities for additional information. I will spare no effort, and I will travel to the ends of the universe if necessary or desirable. I shall solve this case!" "I'm very glad you feel that way," Marvin said. "One hundred and fifty-eight cases without a break," Urdorf mused. "Have you ever heard of such a run of bad luck? But it will end here. I mean to say, it can't go on indefinitely, can it?" "I don't suppose that it can," Marvin said. "I wish my superiors would take that view," the detective said gloomily. "I wish they'd stop calling me 'stumblebum.' Words like that, and sneers, and lifted eyebrows, all tend to shake one's confidence. Luckily for me, I have an implacable will and utter self-confidence. Or at least I did have through my first ninety or so failures." The detective brooded darkly for several moments, then said to Marvin: "I will expect your complete and utter cooperation." "You shall have it," Marvin said. "The only trouble is, I am to be dispossessed of this body in less than six hours." "Damned awkward," Urdorf said absent-mindedly. He was obviously thinking about his case, and only with difficulty did he turn his attention back to Marvin. "Dispossessed, eh? I suppose you've made other arrangements. No? Well then, I suppose you will make some other arrangements." "I don't know what arrangements to make," Marvin said gloomily. "Well, no need to argue the matter," the detective said, in a determinedly cheerful voice. "Find yourself another body somewhere; and above all, stay alive! I want you to promise me that you'll really try your level best to stay alive." "I promise," Marvin said. "And I shall proceed with your case, and I will contact you as soon as I have anything to report." "But how will you find me?" Marvin asked. "I don't know what body I'll be in, or even what planet." "You forget that I am a detective," Urdorf said, smiling faintly. "I may have my troubles in finding criminals, but I have never experienced the slightest difficulty in finding victims. So keep your chin up, don't lose the old moxie, and above all, remember to stay alive!" Marvin agreed to stay alive, since he had planned on it, anyhow. And he went out into the street with his precious time flowing away and still without a body. T T eadline in the Martian Sun- News (tri-planet edition) : Police officials on Mars and Terra revealed today the existence of a Mindswap scandal. Wanted for questioning is Ze Kraggash, species unknown, who allegedly sold, swapped, or otherwise disposed of his body to twelve Beings simultaneously. Warrants have been issued for Kraggash's arrest, and the police of the tri-planet area confidently expect to make an announcement soon. The case is reminiscent of the infamous 'Eddie Two-Head' scandal of the early #' s, in which... Marvin Flynn let the newspaper fall into the gutter. He watched as the flowing sand bore it away; the bitter ephemerality of the newsprint seemed a paradigm of his own highly conditional existence. He stared at his hands; his head drooped. " 'Ere now, 'ere now, what seems to be the trouble, eh, lad?" Flynn looked up into the kindly blue-green face of an Erlan. "I've got troubles," Flynn said. "Well then, let's hear 'em," the Erlan said, folding himself down on the curb beside Flynn. Like all of his race, the Erlan combined a quick sympathy with brusque manners. Erlans were known as a rough, witty people, much given to cheerful banter and homely sayings. Great travellers and traders, the Erlans of Erlan II were religiously required to travel in corpora Marvin told his story, right up to the disconsolate moment of the forward-surging now; the cruel and remorseless now, the hungry now, eating into his little stock of minutes and seconds, pressing forward to the time when his six hours would have elapsed, and bodyless, he would be cast into that unknown galaxy which men call death. "Garn!" the Erlan said. "Not half sorry for yourself, are you?" "You're damned right I'm sorry for myself," Flynn said, with a flash of anger. "I'd be sorry for anyone who was going to die in six hours. Why shouldn't I be sorry for myself?" "Suit yourself, cook," the Erlan said. "Some might call it bad form and all the bumf, but me, I hold with the teachings of the Guajuoie, who said; 'Is it death which snuffles near you? Strike it on the snout!' " Marvin respected all religions, and certainly had no prejudices against the widespread Antidescantine Rite. But he couldn't see how the Guajuoie's words could help him, and he said so. "Buck up!" the Erlan said. "Got yer brains and yer six hours, ain't yer?" "Five hours." "Well, then! Git up on your hind legs and show a little grit, er, cobber? Won't do yourself much good maundering around here like a bloody old lag, will you now?" "I don't suppose I will, really," Marvin said. "And yet, what can I do? I have no body, and hosts are expensive." "Too true, But did you ever fink of the Open Market? Eh?" "But that's supposed to be dangerous," Marvin said, and blushed at the absurdity of his statement. The Erlan grinned toughly. "Got the picture, eh, lad? But listen, it ain't so bad as you fink, 'long as you buck up and take aholt. Open Market's not so bad; been a lot of rot talked about it, mostly by the big swap agencies that wanna go on charging their overinflated capitalistic damned fees. But I know a bloke been working there twenty years on Short Shuffles, and he tells me most of the blokes is straight as a die. So keep your head and your chest prop tucked in tight, and pick yourself a good interman. Good luck, kid." "Wait a moment!" Flynn cried, as the Erlan folded to his feet. "What is your friend's name?" "James Virtue McHonnery," the Erlan said. "He's a tough, hard-bitten, narrow-minded little cuss, and overfond of looking upon the grape when it is red, and inclined to be smitten by black rage when in his cups. But he deals flat and he serves straight, and you couldn't ask no more than that from St. Xal himself. Just tell him that Pengle the Squib sent you, and good luck to you." Flynn thanked the Squib eagerly, embarrassing that tough yet good-hearted gentleman. Rising to his feet, he proceeded, slowly at first, then with more speed, toward the Quain, in the northwest corner of which lay the many stalls and open booths of the Open Market. And his hopes, previously near maximum entropy, began now to pulse modestly yet firmly with hope. And in the nearby gutter, tattered newspapers flowed on a stream of sand toward the eternal and enigmatic desert. UT T ev-va! Hey-ya! New bod- ies for old! Come and be serviced -- new bodies for old!" Marvin trembled when he heard that ancient street cry, so innocent in itself, yet so reminiscent of dark bedtime stories. Hesitantly he advanced into the tangled labyrinth of streets and alleys, or dead-ends and courtyards, that made up the ancient Free Market Area. And as he walked, a dozen shouted propositions assailed his aural receptors. "Harvesters wanted to harvest the crop on Drogheda! We supply you with a fully functional body complete with telepathy! All found, fifty credits a month, and a complete list of Class C-# pleasures! Special two-year contracts are now being let. Come harvest the crop on beautiful Drogheda!" "Serve in the Naigwin Army! offer, plus a few specials in junior officer ranks. All bodies will be fully equipped with Martial skills!" "What's the pay?" a man asked the salesman. "Your keep, plus one credit a month." The man sneered and turned away. "And," the barker proclaimed, "unlimited sacking right." "Well, that seems in order," the man said grudgingly. "But the Naigwins been losing this war for a decade. High casualty rate, and not much corporeal reclamation." "We're changing all that," the salesman said. "You're an experienced mercenary?" "Correct," the man said. "The name is Sean Von Ardin, and I've been in just about every major war around, plus a fair number of minor ones." "Last rank?" "Jevaldher in the army of the Count of Ganymede," Von Ardin said. "But before that I held the rank of Full Cthusis." "Well, well," the salesman said, seemingly impressed. "Full Cthusis, eh? Got papers to prove it? Okay, tell you what I can do. I can offer you a position with the Naigwins as Manatee Leader, Second Class." Von Ardin frowned and calculated on his fingers. "Let's see. Manatee Leader Second Class is the equivalent of a Cyclopiaa Demi-Vale, which is slightly better than an Anaxorean Banner King, and almost half a grade lower than a Dorian Old Boy. Which means... Hey, I'd lose an entire field grade if I joined you!" "Ah, but you didn't hear me out," the salesman continued. "You would hold that rank for a period of # days, to prove Purity of Intent, which the Naigwin political leaders are very big on. Then we would jump you three entire grades to Melanoan Superios, which would offer you an excellent chance at provisional Lance-Jumbaya, and maybe -- I can't promise this, but I think I can swing it unofficially -- maybe I can get you appointed Sackmeister for the spoils of Eridsvurg." "Well," Von Ardin said, impressed in spite of himself, "that's a pretty decent deal -- if you can swing it." "Come into the store," the salesman said. "Let me make a phone call... A arvin walked on, and listened ivx # men # f a dozen races arguing with salesmen of a dozen more. A hundred propositions were screamed in his ear. His spirits were stirred and uplifted by the vitality of the place. And the propositions he heard, though sometimes dismaying, were often intriguing: "Aphid-man wanted for the Senthis Swarm. Good pay, congenial friendships!" "Rewrite man to work on the Dirty Book of Kavengii! Must be able to empathize with sexual premises of the Midridarian race!" "Garden planners needed for Arcturus! Come and relax among the only vegetable-sentients in the galaxy!" "Expert manacler wanted for Vega IV! Opportunities also for semi-skilled restrainers! Full prerogatives!" There were so many opportunities in the galaxy! It seemed to Marvin that his misfortune was perhaps a blessing in disguise. He had wanted to travel -- but his modesty had permitted him no more than the role of tourist. But how much better, how much more gratifying it would be, to travel for a reason. To serve with the armies of Naigwin, experience life as an aphid-man, learn what it meant to be a manacler -- even to do rewrites on the Dirty Book of Kavengii. Directly ahead of him, he spotted a sign which read: "James Virtue McHonnery, licensed Short Shuffle Dealer. Satisfaction guaranteed." Standing at the waist-high counter and smoking a cigar was a tough, hard-bitten, sourmouthed little man with piercing cobalt-blue eyes. This could be none other than McHonnery himself. Silent and disdainful, scorning to spiel, the little man stood with arms folded as Flynn walked up to the booth. 'T'hey stood face to face, Flynn slack-jawed, McHonnery clam-mouthed. Several seconds of silence ensued. Then McHonnery said: "Look, kid, this ain't no goddam peep show and I ain't no goddam freak. If you got something to say, spit it out. Otherwise take a walk for yourself before I break your back." Marvin could see at once that this man was no fawning, honeymouthed body salesman. There was no hint of obsequiousness in that rasping voice, no trace of ingratiation in that down-turned mouth. Here was a man who said what he wanted to say, and took no heed of the consequences. "I -- I am a client," Flynn said. "Big deal," McHonnery harshed. "Am I supposed to turn handsprings or something?" His sardonic retort and blunt, inner-airected demeanor gave Flynn a sensation of confidence. He knew, of course, that appearances could be deceiving; but no one had ever told him what to judge by instead of appearances. He was inclined to trust this proud and bitter man. "I am going to be dispossessed of this body in a matter of hours," Marvin explained. "Since my own body has been stolen, I am in desperate need of a substitute. I have very little money, but I -- to work." McHonnery stared at him, and a sardonic grin twisted the man's tight lips. "Prepared to work, huh? Ain't that nice! And just what are you prepared to work at?" "Why -- anything." "Yeah? Can you operate a Montcalm metal lathe with lightsensitive switchboard and manvi .: j ! cull? No? Think you could handle a Quick-Greeze Particle Separator for the Rare Earths Novelty Company? Not your soil of thing, huh? I got a surgeon on Vega who wants somebody to run his Nerve-ImpulseRejection Simulator -- the old model with the double pedals. Not exactly what you had in mind? Well, we got a jazz band on Potemkin II which needs a stomachhorn man, and a restaurant near Bootes which could use a short-order cook, with working knowledge of Cthensis specialties. Doesn't ring a bell? Maybe you could pick flowers on Moriglia; of course, you'd have to be able to predict anthesis without more than a five-second variation. Or you could do spot-flesh-welding, if you've got the nerves for it, or boss a phylopod reclamation project, or draw up intermediate creeper systems, or -- But I don't guess none of them strike your fancy, huh?" Flynn shook his head and mumbled, "I don't know anything about any of those jobs." CiQomehow," McHonnery said,  "that doesn't surprise me as much as you might think. Is there anything you can do?" "Well, in college I was studying -- " "Don't give me your goddam life story! I'm interested in your trade, skill, talent, profession, ability, whatever you want to call it. What, specifically, can you do?" "Well," Marvin said, "I guess when you put it that way, I can't do anything much." "I know," McHonnery said, sighing. "You're unskilled. It's written all over you. Kid, it may interest you to know that unskilled minds are common as dirt, commoner. The market's glutted with them, the universe is crammed to overflowing with them. There is nothing you can do that a machine can't do better, faster, and a damn sight more cheerfully." "I'm sorry to hear that, sir," Marvin said, sadly but with dignity. He turned to go. "Just a minute," McHonnery said. "I thought you wanted to work." "But you said -- " "I said you were unskilled, which you are. And I said that a machine can do anything you can do better, faster, and more cheerfully; but not more cheaply." "Oh," Marvin said. "Yep, in the cheapness department, you still got an edge over the gadgets. And that's quite an achievement in this day and age." "I suppose there's a certain comfort in that," Flynn said doubtfully. "And of course, it's very interesting. But when Pengle the Squib told me to see you, I thought -- " "Hey, how's that?" McHonnery said. "You're a friend of the Squib?" "You might say that," Flynn said, avoiding an outright lie. "You should have told me that in the first place," McHonnery said. "Not that it would have changed anything, since the facts are exactly as I have stated them. But I'd have told you that there's no shame in being unskilled. Hell, all of us have to start out that way, don't we? If you do well on a Short Shuffle contract, you'll pick up skills in no time." "I hope so, sir," Flynn said, growing cautious now that McHonnery had become affable. "Do you have a job in mind for me?" "As a matter of fact, I do," McHonnery said. "It's a one-week Shuffle, which, even if you don't like it, you could do standing on your head. Not that you should have to, since it's a pleasant and compatible job, combining mild outdoor exercise with modest intellectual stimulation, all in a framework of good working conditions, enlightened management and a congenial working force." "It sounds marvelous," Flynn said. "What's wrong with it?" "Well, it's not the sort of job you can get rich at," McHonnery said. "In fact, the pay is lousy. But what the hell, you can't have everything." "What is the job?" Marvin asked. "The official job title is Ootheca Indagator, Second Class." "That sounds impressive." "Glad that you like it. It means that you hunt for eggs." "Eggs?" "Eggs. Or to be more specific, you hunt for and, upon finding, collect, the eggs of the Rook Ganzer. Think you can swing it?" "Well, I'd like to know a little more about the techniques utilized for the collecting, and also about job conditions, and -- " Tie stopped because McHonnery was slowly, sadly shaking his head. "You want the job?" "Do you have anything else available?" "No." "I'll take it" "You've made a smart decision," McHonnery said. He took a paper out of his pocket. "Here is the standard government-approved contract, written in KroMelden, which is the official language of the planet Melde II, wherein is licensed the employing company. Can you read KroMelden?" "I'm afraid not." "Well, it's just standard stuff... Company not being responsible for fire, earthquake, atomic warfare, sun going nova, acts of god or gods... Company agrees to hire you... furnish you with a Melde body... unless it finds itself unable to do so, in which case it won't... and may God have mercy on your soul." "I beg your pardon?" Flynn asked. "The last is just the standard invocation. Let me see, I think that about covers it. Your guarantee, of course, not to commit acts of sabotage, espionage, irreverance, disobedience, etc., and to furthermore eschew and desist from the practices of sexual perversion as defined in Hoffmeyer's Standard Manual of Melden Perversions. And you also guarantee to wash once every two days, and to stay out of debt, and not to become an alcoholic or insane person, and various other things to which no reasonable person could possibly object. And that about sums it up. If you have any important questions, I'll endeavor to answer them for you." "Well," Flynn said, "about those things I'm supposed to guarantee -- " "That's unimportant," Me Honnery said. "Do you want the job or not?" Marvin had his doubts. The next thing he knew, he was in a Melden body, on Melde. IX T he g a n z e r rain-forest on Melde was deep and wide. The faintest ghost of a breeze whispered among the colossal trees, slithered through the interlocked vines, and crept brokenbacked over hook-edged grass. Drops of water slid painfully down, and around the tangled foliage like exhausted runners of a maze coming to rest at last in the spongy and indifferent soil. Shadows mingled and danced, faded and reappeared, called into spurious motion by two tired suns in a moldy green sky. Overhead, a desolate therengol whistled for his mate, and heard in reply the quick ominous cough of a predatory kingspringer. And through this dolorous woodland, so tantalizingly like Earth and yet so different, Marvin Flynn moved in his unfamiliar Melden body, his eyes downcast, searching for ganzer eggs but not knowing what they looked like. All had been haste. From the moment he arrived on Melde, he had barely had a chance to take stock of himself. No sooner was he bodified than someone was barking orders in his ear. Flynn had just had time to look hastily over his four-armed, four-legged body, give his tail a single experimental flick and fold his ears across his back; then he was herded into a work gang, given a barracks number and a mess hall location and handed a jumper two sizes too big for him, and shoes which fitted tolerably well except for the left front. He signed for and was given the tools of his new trade: a large plastic bag, dark glasses, a compass, a net, a pair of tongs, a heavy metal tripod and a blaster. He and his fellow-workers were then assembled in ranks, and received a hasty indoctrination by the manager, a bored and supercilious Atreian. Flynn learned that his new home occupied an insignificant portion of space in the vicinity of Aldeberan. Melde was a thoroughly second-rate world. Its climate was rated "intolerable" on the Hurlihan-Chanz Climatic Tolerance Scale; its natural resource potentiality was classified "submarginal," and its esthetic resonance factor (unweighted) was given as "unprepossessing." "Not the sort of place," the manager said, "that one would choose for a vacation; or indeed for anything." His audience tittered uneasily. "Nevertheless," the manager continued, "this unloved and unlovely place, this solar misfortune, this cosmic mediocrity, is home to its inhabitants, who consider it the finest place in the universe." 'T'he Meldens, with a fierce pride in their only tangible asset, had made the best of their bad bargain. With the plucky determination of the eternally unlucky, they had farmed the edges of the rain forest and collected meager low-yield ores from the vast blazing deserts. Their dogged persistence would have been inspiring -- had it not invariably ended in failure. Said the manager, "This is what Melde would be were it not for one additional factor. Ganzer eggs! No other planet possesses them; no other planet so desperately needs them." Ganzer eggs were the sole export of the planet Melde. And luckily for the Meldens, the eggs were always in heavy use. On Orichades, ganzer eggs were utilized as love-objects; on Ophiuchus II, they were ground up and eaten as a sovereign aphrodisiac; on Morichades, after consecration, they were worshipped by the irrational K'tengi. Thus, ganzer eggs were a vital natural resource -- and the only one which the Meldens possessed. With them, the Meldens could maintain a tolerable degree of civilization. Without them, the race would surely perish. To acquire a ganzer egg, all one had to do was pick it up. But therein lay certain difficulties, since the ganzers objected to this practice. The ganzers were forest dwellers, remotely of lizard origin. They also were destroyers, clever at concealment, wily and ferocious, and completely untamable. These qaulities rendered the collection of ganzer eggs extremely perilous. "It is a curious situation," the manager pointed out, "and not without its paradoxical overtones. The main source of life on Melde is also the main cause of death. It is something for you all to think about as you begin your work-day. And so I say, take good care of yourselves, keep guarded at all times, look before you leap, observe every precaution with your indentured lives, and also with the costly bodies which have been entrusted to your keeping. But in addition, remember that you must fulfill your norm, since every day's work unfulfilled by so much as a single egg is penalized by the addition of an additional week. Good luck, boys!" Marvin and his fellow workers were then formed into ranks and marched into the forest on the double.  T rithin an hour they reached   their search area. Marvin Flynn took this opportunity to ask the foreman for instructions. "Instructions?" the foreman asked. "What kind of type instructions?" (He was an Orinathian deportee with no language aptitude.) "I mean," Flynn said, "what am I supposed to do?" The foreman pondered the question and at length responded 'You supposed pick eggs of ganzer." (He pronounced it 'guntser.') "I understand that," Flynn said, "But I mean to say, I don't even know what a ganzer egg looks like." "Not to worry," the foreman replied. "You know when see no mistake, yes." "Yes sir," Marvin said. "And when I find a ganzer egg, are there any special rules for handling it? I mean to say, is breakage a problem, or -- " "To handle," the foreman said, "you pick up egg, put in bag. You understand this thing yes no?" "Of course I do," Marvin said. "But also, I would like to know about daily quota expectations. Is there some sort of a quota system? Perhaps a n hourly breakdown?" "Ah!" said the foreman, a look of comprehension finally crossing his broad, good-natured face. "Of finish is like this. You pick ganzer egg, put in bag, check?" "Check," Marvin said instantly"You do so time after time until bag is full. Catch?" "I believe I do," Marvin said. "The full bag represents the actual or ideal quota. Let me just go over the steps again to make absolutely sure I've got it. First, I locate the ganzer eggs, applying Terran associations to the concept, and presumably having no difficulty in identification. Second, having located and identified the desired object, I proceed to 'put it in my basket,' by which I assume that -- " "Wait minute." The foreman tapped his teeth with his tail and said, "You put me on, huh, kid?" "Well, sir, I merely wished to ascertain -- " "You make big joke on oldplanet Orinathian yokel. You think you so smart. You ain't so smart. Remember -- nobody likes wise guy." "I'm sorry," Flynn said, swishing his tail deferentially. "Anyhow, me I tink you catch elementary rudiments of job all right so you go now perform work-labor big. Keep nose clean. Or I break six or more of your limbs, dig?" "Dig," said Flynn, wheeled and cantered into the forest and there began his search. X IV T arvin Flynn slid silently through the forest, his nostrils flared wide, his eyes extended and swivelling, their blinkrate reduced. His golden hide, scented faintly with appisthyme, twitched sensitively as his great muscles moved beneath it, apparently relaxed yet poised. The forest was a symphony of greens and grays, cut through with the occasional scarlet theme of a creeper, or the purple rarer still, the haunting oboe countermelody of an orange whipwhinger. Yet the effect was essentially somber and thought provoking, like a vast amusement park in the silent hour before dawn. But there! Right over there! A little to the left! Yes, yes, just bneath the boku tree! Is that... Could it be... Flynn parted the leaves with his right arms and bent low. There, in a nest of grass and woven twigs, he saw something that glittered like an ostrich egg encrusted with precious gems. The foreman had been right. There could be no mistaking a ganzer egg. bright in the curved and multihued ganzer surface. Shadows drifted across it like half remembered dreams, twisting and turning. An emotion welled up in Marvin of twilight and evensong, of slow cattle grazing near a crystal brook, of dusty, heartbroken cypresses. Although it wrenched his sensibilities to do so, Marvin bent down and reached out. His hand folded lovingly around the glowing orb. He pulled his hand back quickly. The glowing orb was hotter than hell. Marvin looked at it with new respect. Now he understood the purpose of the tongs with which he had been equipped. He closed them gently on the spheroid of dreams. The sphere of dreams bounced away from him like a rubber ball. Marvin galloped after it, fumbling with his net. The ganzer egg twisted and ricocheted, and bolted for thick underbrush. Marvin cast his net in desperation and fortune guided his hand. The ganzer egg was neatly netted. It lay quietly, pulsating as though out of breath. Marvin approached it cautiously, ready for any trick. Instead the ganzer egg spoke. "Look, mister," it said in a muffled voice. "Just what's eating you?" (CT)eg pardon?" Marvin said.   "Look," the ganzer egg said, "I am sitting here in a public park minding my own business when suddenly you come up and pounce on me like a lunatic, bruising me and acting like some kind of nut. Well, naturally I get a little hot. Who wouldn't? So I decide to move away because it's my day off and I don't want no trouble. So you up and throw a net arovnd me like I was a goddam butterfly or something. So I just want to know, what's the big idea?" "Well," Marvin said, "you see, you're a ganzer egg." "I'm aware of that," the ganger egg said. "Sure I'm a ganzer egg. Is there a law against that all of a sudden?" "Certainly not," Marvin said. "But as it happens, I am hunting ganzer eggs." There was a short silence. Then the ganzer egg said, "Would you mind repeating that?" Marvin did. The ganzer egg said, "Mmm, that's what I thought you said." He laughed feebly. "You're kidding, aren't you?" "Sorry, I'm not." "Sure you are," the ganzer egg said, a note of desperation in his voice. "So okay, you've had your fun. Now let me out of here." "Sorry..." "Let me out!" "I can't." "Why?" "Because I'm hunting ganzer eggs." "My God," the ganzer egg said, "this is the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life. You never met me before, did you? So why are you hunting me?" "I've been hired to hunt ganzer eggs," Marvin told him. "Look, fella, you just go around hunting any ganzer eggs a? s'i? You don't care which one?" "That's right." "And you aren't really looking for one particular ganzer egg who maybe did you a bad turn?" "No, no," Marvin said. "I've never even met a ganzer egg before." "You've never... And yet you hunt... I must be going out of my mind, I can't be hearing right. I mean, things like this just don't happen. It's like some kind of an incredible nightmare... some crazy-looking guy walking up calm as you please and grabbing you and saying, dead-pan, 'I happen to be hunting for ganzer eggs.' I mean -- look, fella, you are putting me on, aren't you?" # jf arvin was embarrassed and-- exasperated, and he wished the ganzer egg would shut up. He said gruffly, "I'm not fooling. My job is to collect ganzer eggs." "Collect... ganzer eggs!" the ganzer egg moaned, "Oh no, no, no, no! My God, I can't believe this is happening, and yet it really is happening, it really is -- " "Control yourself," Marvin said; the ganzer egg was clearly on the thin edge of hysteria. "Thank you," the ganzer egg said, after a moment. "I'm all right now. Look, could I ask you just one question?" "Hurry it up," Marvin said. "The thing I want to ask," the ganzer egg said, "do you get some kind of a charge out of this sort of thing? I mean are you some sort of pervert? I don't mean to be insulting." "That's all right," Marvin said. "No, I'm not a pervert, and I can assure you I take no pleasure in this. Believe me, I'm finding it very strange." "You're finding it strange!" the ganzer egg said, his voice rising to a scream. "How do you think I feel ? Do you think maybe I think it's natural for someone to come along like a nightmare and collect me?" "Steady," Marvin said. "Crazy," the ganzer egg whispered to himself. "He's absolutely and completely insane. May -- may I leave a note for my wife?" "There isn't time," Marvin said fii'mly. "Then will you at least let me say my prayers?" "Go ahead and say them," Marvin said. "But you'll really have to be quick about it." "Oh Lord God," the ganzer egg intoned. "I don't know what is happening to me, or why. I have always tried to be a good person, and although I am not a regular churchgoer, You surely know that true religion is in the heart. I've maybe done some bad things in my life, I won't deny it. But Lord, why this punishment? Why me? Why not someone else, one of the real bad ones, one of the criminals? Why me? And why like this? Something is collecting me like I'm some sort of a thing... and I don't understand. But I know that You are All-Wise and All-Powerful, and I know that You are good, so I guess there must be a reason... even if I'm too stupid to see it. So look, God, if this is it, then okay, this is it. But could you look after my wife and kids? And could you especially look after the little one?" The ganzer egg's voice broke, but he recovered almost at once. "I ask especially for the little one, God, because he's lame and the other kids pick on him and he needs a lot -- a lot of love. Amen." The ganzer egg choked back his sobs. His voice became abruptly stronger. "I'm ready now," he said to Marvin. "Do your damnedest, you lousy son-of-a-bitch." Tut the prayer of the ganzer   egg had unmanned Marvin completely. With eyes wet and fetlocks trembling, Marvin opened the net and released his captive. The ganzer egg rolled out a little distance and then stopped, clearly fearing a trick. "You -- you really mean this?" he asked. "I do," Marvin said. "I was never cut out for this kind of work. I don't know what they will do to me back at the Camp, but I shall never gather a single ganzer egg!" "Praise be the name of the Lord," the ganzer egg said softly. "I've seen a few strange things in my time, but it seems to me that the Hand of Providence -- " The hypothesis of the ganzer egg(known as the Interventionalist Fallacy) was interrupted by a sudden ominous crashing in the underbrush. Marvin whirled, and remembered the dangers of the planet Melde. He had been warned, but had forgotten. And now, desperately, he fumbled for his blaster, which had become entangled in his net. Violently he wrenched at it, pulled it free, heard a shrill cry from the ganzer egg -- And then he was flung violently to the ground. The blaster spun away into the underbrush. And Marvin gazed up into slit black eyes beneath a low armored forehead. No introductions were necessary. Flynn knew that he had met a full-grown adult marauding ganzer, and had met him under possibly the worst of all circumstances. The evidence was all too evident; the damning net, the tell-tale sunglasses, the revealing tongs. And closer still -- closing on his neck -- was the tooth-edged jaw of the gigantic saurian, so close that Marvin could see three gold molars and a temporary porFlynn tried to wriggle free. The ganzer pressed him back with a paw the size of a yak saddle; his cruel claws, each the size of a pair of ice tongs, bit cruelly into Marvin's golden hide. The slavering jaws gaped hideously, descended, about to engulf his entire head... XI Ouddenly time stopped! Marvin  saw the ganzer's jaws arrested in mid-slaver, his bloodshot left eye fixed in mid-blink, and his entire great body gripped in a strange and unyielding rigidity. Nearby, the ganzer egg was as motionless as a carven replica of itself. The breeze was stopped in midcareer. Trees were caught in straining postures, and a meritheian hawk was fixed in mid-flight like a dummy attached to a wire. The sun stopped its inexorable rolling flight! And in this strange tableau, Marvin stared with tremendous sensations in the direction of a single movement in the air three feet above his head and slightly to his left. It began as a whorl of dust -- broadened, expanded, expatiated, thickening at the base and becoming convex at the apex. The rotation came faster, and the figure solidified. "Detective Urdorf!" Marvin cried. For it was indeed the Martian detective with a streak of bad luck who had promised to solve Marvin's case and to return to him his rightful body. "Terribly sorry to barge in like this," Urdorf said, materializing fully and falling heavily to the ground. "Thank God you have come!" Marvin said. "You have saved me from an extremely unpleasant fate, and now if you will help me out from under this creature -- " For Marvin was still pinned to the ground by the ganzer's paw, which had taken on the rigidity of tempered steel. From beneath it he was unable to wriggle. "Sorry," the detective said, getting up and dusting himself off. "I'm afraid I can't do that." "Why not?" "Against the rules," Detective Urdorf told him. "Any displacement of bodies during an artificial induced temporal stoppage (which is what this is) could result in a Paradox, which is forbidden since it might result in a temporal implosion which might conceivably hove the result of warping the structure-lines of our continuum and thus destroy the universe. Because of this, any displacement is punishable by a prison sentence of one year and a fine of one thousand dollars." "Oh, I didn't know that." "Well, I'm afraid that's how it is," the detective said. "I see," Marvin said. "I rather hoped you would," the detective said. There was a long and uncomfortable silence. Then Marvin said, "Well?" "Beg pardon?" "I said... I meant to say, why did you come here?" "Oh," the detective said. "I wished to ask you several questions which had not occurred to me earlier, and which would assist me in the rigorous investigation and solution of this case." "Ask away," Marvin said. "Thank you. First and foremost, what is your favorite color?" "Blue." "But exactly what shade of blue? Please try to be exact." "Robin'segg blue." "Hmmm." The detective noted it down in his notebook. "And now, tell me quickly and without thinking, what is the first number that comes into your mind?" "#," Marvin replied without hesitation. "Um hum. And now, without reflection, tell me the name of the first popular song you can think of." "Orang-Utan Rhapsody," Marvin said. "Ummmm. Fine," Urdorf said, snapping his notebook shut. "I think that covers everything." was the purpose of  ' those questions?" "With this information, I will be able to test various suspects for corpus-vestigial responses. It is part of the Duulman self-identity quiz." "Oh," Marvin said. "Have you had any luck yet?" "Luck hardly enters into it," Urdorf replied. "But I can say that the case is proceeding in a satisfactory manner. We traced the thief to Iorama II, where he smuggled himself into a cargoload of flash-frozen beef destined for Goera Major. On Goera he represented himself as a fugitive from Hage XI, which won him a good deal of popular favor. He managed to raise enough money for fare to Kvanthis, where he had cached his money. Staying no more than a day on Kvanthis, he boarded the local to the Fiftystars Autonomous Region." "And then?" Marvin asked. "Then we lost track of him temporarily. Fiftystars Region contains no less than # planetary systems with a combined you can see, our work is cut out for us." "It sounds hopeless," Marvin said. "Quite the contrary, it is a very good break for us. Laymen always mistake complication for complexity. But our criminal will find no safety in mere multiplicity, which is always susceptible to statistical analysis." "So what happens now?" Marvin asked. "We continue analyzing, and then we make a projection based upon the probabilities, and then we send our projection across the galaxy and see if it goes nova... I am speaking figuratively, of course." "Of course," Marvin said. "Do you really think you'll catch him?" "I am fully confident of the results," Detective Urdorf said. "But you must have patience. You must remember that intergalactic crime is still a relatively new field, and therefore intergalactic investigation is newer still. There have been many crimes in which even the existence of a criminal could not be proven, much less detected. So in some respects, we are ahead of the game." "I guess I'll have to take your word for it," Marvin said. "But about this situation I'm in at present -- " "It is the very sort of situation I have told you to avoid," the detective said severely. "Please remember that in the future -- if you should manage to come out of this alive. Good luck, my friend." Before Marvin's eyes, Detective Urdorf revolved, faster, faster, grew dimmer, and disappeared. Time unfroze. And Marvin gazed up again into the Ganzer's slit black eyes and low armored forehead, and saw the hideous gaping jaws descending, about to engulf his entire head -- ' ' "What for?" the ganzer asked. Marvin hadn't thought that far. He heard the ganzer egg muttering, "Turn-about's fair play. And yet, he was kind to me. Still, what business is it of mine? Stick your neck out, somebody cracks your shell. And yet... "I don't want to die," Marvin said. "I didn't suppose you did," the rock ganzer said, in a not-unfriendly voice. "And, of course, you want to discuss it with me. Ethics, morals, the whole bit. But I'm afraid not. We were specifically warned, you see, never to allow a Melden to talk. We were told to just do the job and get it over with; not to personalize it. Just do it and get on to the next bit of work. Mental hygiene, really. Therefore, if you would close your eyes... The jaws moved closer. But Marvin, filled with wild surmise, cried out: "Did you say job?" "Of course, it's a job," the ganzer said. "There's nothing personal in it." He frowned, apparently annoyed at himself for having spoken. "A job! Your job is to hunt Meldens, is that it?" "Well, obviously. This planet of Ganzer isn't good for much, you see, except for hunting Meldens." "But why do you hunt them?" Marvin asked. "Well, for one thing, a ganzer egg can grow to full maturity only in the host-flesh of the adult Melden." "I say," the ganzer egg said, rolling around with embarrassment, "must we get so damned biological? I mean to say, you don't hear me talking about your natural functions, do you?" "And secondly," the ganzer continued, "our sole export is Melde hides, which are used for imperial vestments on Triana II, for good-luck charms on Nemo and for seat covers on Chrysler and deadly Melden is our sole means of maintaining a tolerable degree of civilization, and -- " "That's exactly what they told me!" Marvin cried, and quickly repeated what the manager had said to him. "My gosh!" said the ganzer. Both realized the true situation now; that the Meldens were utterly dependent upon the Ganzers, who in turn were utterly dependent upon the Meldens. These two races hunted each other, lived and died for each other, and, through ignorance of guile, ignored any relationship between each other. The relationship was utterly symbiotic, but completely unacknowledged by either race. In fact, each race pretended that it alone was a Civilized Intelligence, and that the other was bestial, contemptible and of no account. And it now occurred to both of them that they were, in equal measure, participants in the general concept of Humanity. 'T'he realization was awesome; but Marvin was still pinned to the ground by the ganzer's heavy paw. "This leaves me in a somewhat embarrassing situation," the ganzer said, after a while. "My natural tendency is to release you. But I am working on this planet under a contract, which stipulates -- " "Then you are not a real ganzer?" "No. I am a Swapper like yourself, and I come from Terra!" "My home planet!" Marvin cried. "I had guessed as much!" the ganzer replied. "An American. Probably from the East Coast, perhaps from Connecticut or Vermont -- " "New York State!!" Marvin cried. "I am from Stanhope!" "And I am from Saranac Lake," the ganzer said. "My name is Otis Dagobert, and I am # years old." And with that, the ganzer lifted his paw from Marvin's chest. "We are neighbors," he said quietly. "And so I cannot kill you, just as I am reasonably sure you would be unable to kill me, had you the opportunity. And now that we know the truth, I doubt if we will be able to perform any portion of our terrible jobs. But that is a sad thing to find out, for it means that we are doomed to Contractual Discipline; and then if we do not obey, our Companies will give us Extreme Severance. And you know what that means." Marvin nodded sadly. He knew all too well. His head drooped, and he sat in disconsolate silence beside his newly found friend. "I can think of no way out," Marvin said, after giving the matter some thought. "Perhaps we could hide in the forest for a few days; but they would be sure to find us." Suddenly, the ganzer egg spoke up. "Come now, perhaps it isn't as hopeless as you think!" "What do you mean?" Marvin asked. "Well now," the ganzer egg said, dimpling with pleasure, "it seems to me that one good turn deserves another. I could get into plenty of hot water for this... But to hell with that. I think I can find a way off this planet." Both Marvin and Otis broke into exclamations of gratitude; but the ganzer egg stopped them at once. "Maybe you won't thank me when you see what lies ahead," he said ominously. "Nothing could be worse than this," Otis said. "You'd be surprised," the ganzer egg said flatly. "You might be very surprised... This way, gentlemen." "But where are we going?" Marvin asked. "I'm taking you to meet the Hermit," the ganzer egg replied, and would say no more. He rolled purposefully away, and Marvin and Otis followed. nphrough the rain forest wild and free they marched and rolled, ever alert for danger. But no creature menaced them, and they came at last to a clearing in the forest. Here they saw a rude hut in the center of that clearing, and a humaniform creature dressed all in rags squatting in front of the hut. "That is the Hermit," said the ganzer egg. "He's quite insane." The two Terrans had no time in which to consider that information. The Hermit arose and cried, "Now stand, hold, halt! Reveal yourselves to my understanding!" "I'm Marvin Flynn," Marvin said, "and this is my friend Otis Dagobert. We want to escape from this planet." The Hermit didn't seem to hear them; he stroked his long beard and gazed thoughtfully at the treetops. In low, somber tones, he said: " 'Ere this moment came, a flight of geese Passed low o'erhead, pressing woe; The refuge and disconsolate owl did pass This hid'n place of mine, bereft Of that which nature freely gives but man denies! The stars are silent when they light our home: The trees themselves proclaim the flight of kings." "He means," the ganzer egg said, "that he had a feeling you'd be coming this way." "Is he crazy or something?" Otis asked. "The way he talks -- " "Now rede me this! I'll have no plattering roth to creep between the interstices of a mind Proclaiming treason," the hermit said. "He doesn't want you to whisper to each other," the ganzer egg translated. "It makes him suspicious." "I could figure that much out for myself," Flynn said. "So go whistle," the ganzer egg said. "I was just trying to be helpful." The hermit advanced several paces, halted, and said: "What wot ye here aroon?" Marvin looked at the ganzer egg, who remained obstinately silent. So, guessing at the meaning of the words, Marvin said, "Sir, we are trying to escape from this planet, and we have come to you for help." The hermit shook his head and said, "What barbrous tongue is this? A thick-mouthed sheep Would clothe his meaning in a sound more clear!" "What does he mean?" Marvin asked. "You're so smart, figure it out for yourself," the ganzer egg said. "I'm sorry if I insulted you," Marvin said. "Forget it, forget it." "I really am sorry. I'd appreciate it if you'd translate for us." "All right," the ganzer egg said, still a little sulkily. "He says he doesn't understand you." "He doesn't? But what I said to him was clear enough." "Not to him," the ganzer egg said. "You want to reach him, you'd better put it in meter." #CTTe? I couldn't!" Marvin said, with that instinctual shudder of revulsion which all intelligent Terran males feel at the thought of verse. "I simply couldn't! Otis, maybe you -- " "Not me!" Otis said, alarmed. "A silence swells and grows; yet honest men Speak bold, with well-formed mouth! Melikes it not What this development portends." "He's getting edgy," the ganzer egg said. "You better have a shot at it." "Perhaps you could do it for us," Otis suggested. "I'm no fag," the ganzer egg sneered. "If you want to speak, you'll have to speak for yourselves." "The only poem I can remember from school is the Rubaiyat," Marvin said. "Well, go to it," the ganzer egg said. Marvin thought, twitched and nervously said: "Behold! A pilgrim from the forest war Of race 'gainst race, does humbly implore Your aid and sustenance, and help and hope. Can you this humble earnest plea ignore?" "Very shaky," whispered the ganzer egg. "But not bad for a first attempt." (Otis was giggling, and Marvin clouted him with his tail.) The hermit replied: "Well spoken, stranger! You shall have this aid. Nay, more! For when men meet, despite their divers forms, They needs must succor each one to his own." More quickly now, Marvin replied : "I hoped, in this ancient planetoid with dreams displayed Of sunrise splendors, sunsets disarrayed, That one poor pilgrim who did pass this way Might find escape from terrors he surveyed." The hermit said: "I find thee apt : 'Tis parlous to relate In these lean times a halting tongue may work Quick mischief 'pon its saddened owner-lord." Marvin said: "Ah come, take Marvin Flynn away, and leave The Rest to wrangle! He would grieve To find his body torn and wounded; therefore now He'd like to go, whilst others stand and cheer." The hermit said: "Away then, gentlemen! Hearts high, Feet firm in stirrups, head uplifted be... And so they proceeded in singsong fashion to the hermit's hut, where they saw, hidden away under some sheets of bark, an illegal Mindsender, of an ancient and curious design. And Marvin learned that there was method in even the direst madness. For the hermit had been on this planet for less than a year, and already had made a considerable fortune by smuggling refugees to the less savory labor markets of the galaxy. It was not ethical; but as the hermit put it? "Call you it dastardly, then, the tricks I play With this my engine? Sobeit! Nay, I'll not dispute The arid-abstract trueness of your plea. Yet think upon't; this folly to refuse bad wine When chok't with desert thirst. Not so? Then why So harshly judge the salvor of your life? 'Tis damned ingratitude of most perversity -- To slap the hand that plucked Death's grip from thee!" A small amount of time passed. A job for Otis Dagobert had not been difficult to find. Despite his protestations to the contrary, the young man showed a small but very promising streak of sadism. Accordingly, the Hermit Swapped him into the mind of a dental assistant on Prodenda IX. The ganzer egg wished Marvin the best of good fortune and rolled off into the forest toward his home. "And now," the hermit said, "we come to the problem of you. It seems to me considering your personality quite obj ectively, that you have a definite aptitude as a victim." "Me?" Marvin asked. "Yes, you," the hermit replied. "A victim?" "Definitely a victim." "I'm not so sure," Marvin replied. He stated it that way out of politeness; actually, he was quite sure that the hermit was wrong. "Well, I'm sure," the hermit said. "And I daresay I've had more experience in job placement than you." "I suppose you have. I notice that you are no longer speaking in verse." "Of course not," the hermit said. "Why should I?" "Because earlier," Marvin said, "you had been speaking only in verse." "But that v as entirely different," the hermit said. "I was outside then. I had to protect myself. Now I am in my house, and therefore quite safe." "Does verse really protect you outside?" Marvin asked. "Well, what do you think? I have lived on this planet for over a year, hunted by two murderous races who would kill me on sight if they could find me. And in that time I have suffered no harm whatsoever." "Well, it's very fine, of course. But I don't quite see the relationship between your language and your safety." "I'll be damned if I see it, either," the hermit said. "I like to think of myself as a rational man; but the efficacy of verse is one thing that I am reluctantly forced to accept on faith. It works; what more can I say?" "Have you ever thought of experimenting?" Marvin asked. "I mean, speaking outside without your language of verse? You might find you don't need it." "So I might," the hermit replied. "And if you tried walking on the ocean bottom, you might find that you didn't need air." "It's not really the same thing," Marvin said. "It's exactly the same thing," the hermit told him. "But we were talking about you and victimization. I repeat, you have an aptitude, which opens the possibility of an extremely interesting position for you." "I am not interested," Marvin said. "What else do you have available?" "Nothing else," the hermit said. By a remarkable coincidence, Marvin heard at that moment a great crashing and thundering in the underbrush outside, and deduced that it was either the Meldens or the Ganzers, or both, coming in pursuit of him. "I accept the job," Marvin said. "But you're wrong." He had the satisfaction of the last word; but the Hermit had the satisfaction of the last deed. For, arranging his equipment and adjusting his dials, he closed the switch and sent Marvin off to his new career on the planet Celsus V. "vn Celsus V the giving and receiving of gifts is a cultural imperative. To refuse a gift is unthinkable; the emotion it raises in a Celsian is comparable to the incest-dread of a Terran. Normally this causes no trouble. Most gifts are white gifts, intended to express various shades of love, gratitude, tenderness, etc. But there are also gray gifts of warning, and black gifts of death. Thus, a certain public official received a handsome snout ring from his constituents. It was imperiously designed for two weeks' wear. It was a splendid object, it had only one flaw. It ticked. A creature of another race might have flung it into the nearest ditch. But no Celsian in his right mind would do that. He wouldn't even have the ring examined. Celsians live by the motto : do not look a gift in the teeth. Besides, if word of his suspicion leaked out, it would cause an irreparable public scandal. He had to wear that damned ring for two weeks. But the thing was ticking. The official, whose name was Marduk Kras, pondered the problem. He thought about his constituents, and various ways he had helped them, and various other ways he had failed them. The ring was a warning, that much was clear. It was at best a warning -- a gray gift. At worst, it was a black gift -- a small bomb of popular design, which would blow his head off after the elapse of several anxiety-ridden days. Marduk was not suicidal; he knew that he could not wear that damned ring. But he also knew that he had to wear that damned ring. Thus, he found himself facing a classic Celsian dilemma. "Would they do that to me?" Marduk asked himself. "Just because I rezoned their dirty old residential neighborhood for heavy industry, and entered into an agreement with the Landlord's Guild to raise their rents # per cent in return for a promise of new plumbing within fifty years? I mean to say, Good Lord, I've never pretended to be perfect." The ring ticked merrily away, tickling his snout and alarming his senses. Marduk thought of other officials whose heads had been blown off by dim-witted hotheads. Yes, it might very possibly be a black gift. "Those stupid molters!" Marduk snarled, relieving his feelings with an insult he would never have dared voice in public. He was feeling sorely aggrieved. You worked your hearts out for those slack-skinned, wart-nosed idiots, and what was your reward? A bomb to wear in your nose! TT'or one hectic moment he contemplated throwing the ring into the nearest chlorine tank. That would show them! And there was precedent for it. Had not the saintly Voreeg spurned the Total Offering of the Three Ghosts? Yes... But the Ghosts' Offering, according to accepted exegesis, had been a subtle attack upon the spirit of Gift-Giving, and therefore at the very core of society; for by making a Total Offering, they had precluded the possibility of any future gifts. Besides -- what was admirable for a Saint of the Second Kingdom would be execrable for a petty official of the Tenth Democracy. Saints can do anything; ordinary men must do what is expected of them. Marduk's shoulders slumped. He plastered warm mud on his feet, but it brought no relief. There was no way out. One Celsian could not stand alone against organized society. He would have to wear the ring, and wait for the mindsplitting moment when the tick stopped... But wait! There was a way! Yes, yes, he could see it now! It would take clever arrangement; but if he brought it off, he could have safety and social approval. If only that damned ring gave him time... Marduk Kras made several urgent calls, and arranged for himself to be ordered to the planet Taami II (the Tahiti of the TenStar Region) on urgent business. Not corporeally, of course. No responsible official would spend local funds to ship his body across a hundred light years when all that was required was his mind. Frugal, trustworthy Marduk would travel by Mindswap. He would satisfy the form, if not the spirit, of Celsian custom by leaving his body behind with the gift ring ticking merrily in its nose. He had to find a mind to inhabit his body during his absence. But that was not difficult. There are too many minds in the galaxy, and not enough bodies to go around. (Why this should be, no one really knows. After all, everyone was given one of each to begin with. But some people always seem to end up with more than they need, be it wealth, power, or bodies; and some with less.) Marduk got in touch with Hermit Enterprises (Bodies for Any Purpose). The hermit had just the thing for him; a clean-cut young Terr an male in imminent danger of losing his life, and willing to take his chances with a ticking nose ring. Thus Marvin Flynn came to Celsus V. TT'or once there was no need to hurry. Upon arrival, Marvin was able to follow prescribed Swapping procedures. He lay perfectly still, growing slowly accustomed to his new corpus. He tested his limbs, checked out his senses, and scanned the primary culture-configuration-load as radiated from the forebrain for analogue and similitude factors. Then he sized up the hindbrain emotional and structure factor for crux, nadir and saddlepoint Nearly all of this was automatic. He found the Celsian body a good fit, with a high aspect of jointure and an excellent main sequence random dispersion pattern. There were problems, of course; the delta curve was ab(universal Y points) were falciform rather than trapezoidal. But you had to expect that on a Type #B planet; under normal circumstances, it would never cause him any trouble. Taken all in all, it was a bodyenvironment-culture-role cluster with which he could empathize and identify. "Feels pretty good," Marvin summed up for himself. "If only that damned nose ring doesn't blow up." He got up and took stock of his surroundings. The first thing he saw was a note which Marduk Kras had left for him, tied to his wrist so he wouldn't overlook it. Dear Swapper, Welcome to Celsus! I realize that you may not feel very welcome, under the circumstances, and I regret it nearly as much as you do. But I would advise you sincerely to put all thought of sudden demise out of your mind, and concentrate instead on having a pleasant vacation. It may console you to know that the statistical incidence of death by black gift is no greater than that of being killed in a plutonium mine accident, if you happened to be a plutonium miner. So relax and enjoy yourself. My apartment and all that is in it are yours to enjoy. My body also, though I trust you will not overstrain it or keep it out too late or feed it an excess of intoxicating beverages. It has a weak left wrist, so be careful if you should have to lift any heavy weights. Good luck, and try not to worry, since anxiety never yet solved a problem. P.S. I know you are a gentleman and would not try to remove the nose ring. But I thought I should tell you that you can't anyhow because it is locked in place with a microscopic Jayverg Bonded Molecular Padlock. Good-by again, and do try to put all this unpleasantness out of mind and enjoy your two weeks on our lovely planet. Your Sincere Friend, Marduk Kras A t first Marvin was irritated by the note. But then he laughed and crumpled it up. Marduk was undoubtedly a scoundrel, but he was a likeable one, and not ungenerous. Marvin decided to make the best of his dubious bargain, forget about the putative bomb nestling just above his lip, and enjoy his time on Celsus. He went on an exploration of his new home, and was well satisfied with what he found. It was a bachelor burrow, designed for residence rather than for reproduction. Its main construction feature -- pentabrachiation -- reflected Kras's status as a public official. Less fortunate sorts had to get by with three or four gallery systems; and in the slums of North Bogger, whole families were crowded into wretched mono and duobrachiate systems. Housing reform had been promised in the near future, however. The kitchen was neat and modern, and well stocked with gourmet items. There were jars of candied annelids, and a bowl of exotic Alcyonium Salad mixture, and delicious tidbits of Tubipora, Pennatula, Gorgonia and Renilla. There was a can of Goose Barnacle in rotifer and orchid sauce, and a quick-frozen package of sweet and sour Uce. But -- how like a bachelor -- there were no staples, not even a gastropod loaf or a bottle of carbonated Ginger Honey. Wandering down the long, curving galleries, Marvin found the music room. Marduk had not stinted here. A gigantic Imperial amplifier dominated the room, flanked by two Tyrant-model speakers. Marduk used a Whirlpool semi-mix microphone, with a forty bbc. channel rejection, an "expanding" type sensediscrimination selector, with a floating throat-slot "passive" director. Pickup was by image regeneration, but there was provision for changing over to decay modulation. Although not professional in quality, it was a very good amateur rig. The heart of the system, of course, was the Insectarium. This particular one was an Ingenuator, the Super-Max model, with both automatic and manual selection and mixture controls, regulated feed and disposal, and various maximizing and minimizing features. Marvin selected a grasshopper gavotte (Korestal, # IB) and obligatto and the subtle brass accompaniment of the paired Malphigian tubules. Although Marvin's appreciation was casual, he was well aware of the virtuoso ability of this particular performer: a Blue-Striped Grasshopper, his second thoracic segment pulsating slightly, visible in his own compartment of the Insectarium. T eaning down, Marvin nodded ' in appreciation. The BlueStriped Grasshopper clicked mandibles, then turned back to his music. (He had been bred especially for treble and brilliance; a flashy performer, more showy than sound. But Marvin did not know this.) Marvin turned off the selection, flipped the status switch from Active to Dormant mode; the grasshopper went back to sleep. The Insectarium was well stocked, especially with Mayfly symphonies and the strange new cutworm songs, but Marvin had too much to explore to bother with music just now. In the living room, Marvin lowered himself into a stately old clay bank (a genuine Wormstetter), rested his head against the wellworn granite headrest, and tried to relax. But the ring in his snout ticked away, a continual intrusion to his sense of well-being. He reached down and picked at random a quick-stick from a pile on a low table. He ran his antennae over the grooves, but it was no use. He couldn't concentrate on light fiction. Impatiently he threw tire quick-stick aside and tried to make some plans. But he was in the grip of an implacable dynamism. He had to assume that the moments of his life were severely limited, and those moments were passing away. He wanted to do something to commemorate his final hours. But what was there he could do? He slid out of the Wormstetter and paced the main gallery, his claws clicking irritably. Then, coming to an abrupt decision, he went to the wardrobe room. Here he selected a new casing of goldbronze chitin, and arranged it carefully over his shoulders. He plastered his facial bristles witti perfumed glue, and arranged them en brosse over his cheeks. He applied a mild stiffener to his antennae, pointed them at a jaunty sixty degrees, and allowed them to droop in their attractive natural curve. Lastly, he dusted his mid-section with Lavender Sand, and outlined his shoulder joints with lampblack. Surveying himself in the mirror, he decided that the effect was not unpleasing. He was welldressed, but not dandified. Judging as objectively as he could, he decided that he was a presentable, rather scholarly looking young fellow. Not a Squig Star by any means, but definitely not a drunfiler. He left his burrow by the main entrance, and replaced the entrance plug. It was dusk. Stars glittered overhead; they seemed no more numerous than the myriad lights in the entrances of the countless burrows, both commercial and private, which made up the pulsating heart of the city. The sight thrilled Marvin. Surely, surely, somewhere in the endless intertwining corridors of the great city, there would be that for him which would bring pleasure. Or, at least, a soft and forgetful surcease. Thus, Marvin walked dolorously, yet with a tremulous hopefulness, toward the hectic and beckoning Main Groove of the City, there to find what chance held out for him or fate decreed. XV X T #"ith a long rolling stride and   a creaking of leather boots, Marvin Flynn strode down the wooden sidewalk. Faintly there came to him the mingled odors of sagebrush and chapparal. On either side of him the adobe walls of the town glittered under the moon like dull Mexican silver. From a nearby saloon there came the strident tones of a banjo -- Frowning deeply, Marvin stopped in midstride. Sagebrush? Saloons? What was going on around here? "Something wrong, stranger?" a harsh voice intoned. Flynn whirled. A figure stepped out of the shadows near the General Store. It was a saddlebum, a sniffling, slump-shouldered loafer with a dusty black hat crushed comically on his begrimed forehead. "Yes, something is very wrong," Marvin said. "Everything seems -- strange." " 'Tain't nothing to be alarmed about," the saddlebum reassured him. "You have merely changed your system of metaphoric reference, and the lord knows there's no crime in that. As a matter of fact, you should be happy to g: ye up those dreary animal-insect comparisons." "There was nothing wrong with my comparisons," Marvin said. "After all, I am on Celsus V, and I do live in a burrow." "So what?" the saddlebum said. "Haven't you any imagination?" "I've got plenty of imagination!" Marvin said indignantly. "But that's hardly the point. I simply mean that it is inconsistent to think like a cowboy on Earth when one is actually a sort of mole-like creature on Celsus." "It can't be helped," the saddlebum said. "What's happened is, you've overloaded your analogizing faculty, thereby blowing a fuse. Accordingly, your perceptions have taken up the task of experimental normalization. This state is known as metaphoric deformation."  Tow Marvin remembered the ' warning he had received from Mr. Blanders concerning this phenomenon. Metaphoric deformation. that disease of the interstellar traveler, had struck him suddenly and without warning. He knew that he should be alarmed but instead felt only a mild surprise. His emotions were consistent with his perceptions, since a change unperceived is a change unfelt. "When," Marvin asked, "will I start to see things as they really are?" "That last is a question for a philosopher," the saddlebum told him. "But speaking in a limited fashion, this particular syndrome will pass if you ever get back to Earth. But if you continue travelling the process of perceptual analogizing will increase; though occasional short-lived remissions into your primary situation-perception-context may be expected." Marvin found that interesting, but unalarming. He hitched up his jeans and said, "Waal, reckon a man's gotta play out the hand that's dealt to him and I ain't about to stand here all night jawing about it. Just who are you, stranger?" "I," said the saddlebum, with a certain smugness, "am he without whom your dialogue would be impossible. I am Necessity personified; without me, you would have had to remember the Theory of Metaphoric Deformation all by yourself, and I doubt that you are capable of it. You may cross my palm with silver." "That's for gypsies," Marvin said scornfully. "Sorry," the saddlebum said, without the least show of embarrassment. "Got a tailor-made?" "Got the makings," Marvin said, flipping him a sack of Bull Durham. He contemplated his new companion for a moment, then said, "Waal, yore a mangy looking critter, and it seems to me more half jackass and half prairie dog. But I reckon I'm stuck with you no matter who you are." "Bravo," the saddlebum said gravely. "You conquer change of context with that same sureness with which an ape conquers a banana." "Reckon that's a tetch highfalutin," Marvin said equably. 'What's the next move, perfesser?" 'We shall proceed," the saddlebum said, "To yonder saloon of evil repute." "Yippee," Marvin said, and strode leanhipped through the batwinged saloon doors. Within the saloon, a female attached herself to Marvin's arm. She looked up at him with a Her unfocused eyes were pencilled in imitation of gaiety; her flaccid face was painted with the lying hieroglyphics of animation. "Co'mon upstairs with me, kid," grisly beldame cried "Lotsa fun, lotsa laughs!" "It is droll to realize," the saddlebum said, "that Custom has decreed this lady's mask, proclaiming that those who sell pleasure must portray enjoyment. It is a hard demand, my friends, and not imposed upon any other occupation. For note: the fish wife is allowed to hate herring, the vegetable man may be allergic to turnips, and even the newspaper boy is permitted ed saints are required to enjoy their holy martyrdoms. Only the humble sellers of pleasure are required, like Tantalus, to be forever expectant of an untouchable feast." "Yer friend's a great little bidder, ain't he?" the termagent said. "But I like you best, baby, 'cause you make me go all mush inside." TYrom the virago's neck there # hung a pendant upon which was strung in miniature a skull, a piano, an arrow, a baby's shoe, and a yellowed tooth. "What are those?" Marvin asked "Symbols," she said. "Of what?" "Come on upstairs and I'll show you, sweety." "And thus," the saddlebum intoned, "we perceive the true unmediated confrontation of the aroused feminine nature, 'gainst which our masculine fancies seem mere baby's toys." "C'mon!" the harpy cried, wriggling her gross body in a counterfeit of passion all the more frightening because it was real. "Upstairs to bed!" she shouted, pressing against Marvin with a breast the size and consistency of an empty Mongolian saddlebag. "I'll really show ya somepin!" she cried, entwining his thews with a heavy white leg, grimy and heavily varicosed. "When ya git loved by me," she howled, "you'll damned well know you been loved!" And she ground lasciviously against him with her pudenda, which was as heavily armored as the forehead of a Tyrannosaurus. "Well'er, thank you so terribly much anyhow," Marvin said, "but I don't think just at the moment I -- " "You don't want no lovin?" the woman asked incredulously. "Well, actually, I can't really say that I do." The woman planted knobkerry fists on tom-tom hips and said, "That I should live to see this day!" But then she softened, and said, "Turn not away from Venus's sweet perfumed home of pleasure! Thou must strive, sir, to overcome this most unseemly gesture of unmanliness. Come, my lord! The bugle sounds! Mount and fiercely press thy charge!" "Oh, I rather think not," Marvin said, laughing hollowly. She seized him by the throat with a hand the size and shape of a Chilean poncho. "You'll do it now, you lousy cowardly inwarddirected goddam narcissist bastard, and you'll do it good and proper, or by Ares I'll snap your scrawny windpipe like a Michaelmas chicken!" A tragedy seemed in the making, for the woman's passion rendered her incapable of a judicious modification of her demands. Luckily the saddlebum, following the dictates of his wit if not his predilection, snatched a fan out of his gun belt, leaned forward simpering, and tapped the enraged woman on her rhinocerine upper arm. "Don't you dare hurt him!" the saddlebum said, his voice a squeaky contralto. Marvin, quick if not apt, rejoindered, "Yes, tell her to stop pawing me! I mean to say it is simply too much, one cannot even stroll out of one's house in the evening without encountering some disgraceful incident -- " "Don't cry, for God's sake, don't cry!" the saddlebum said. "You know I can't stand it when you cry!" "I am not crying!" Marvin said, snuffling. "It is just that she has ruined this shirt. Your present!" "I'll get you another!" the saddlebum said. "But I cannot abide another scene!" The woman was staring at them slack-jawed, and Marvin was able to utilize her moment of inattention by taking a pry bar out of his tool kit, setting it under her swollen red fingers, and prying himself free of her grip. Seizing the dwindling moment of opportunity, Marvin and the saddlebum sprinted out the door, leaped around the corner, broad-jumped across the street, and pole-vaulted to freedom. 'nce clear of the immediate danger, Marvin came abruptly to his senses. The scales of metaphoric deformation fell away for the moment, and he experienced a perceptual experiential remission. It was all too painfully apparent now that the 'saddlebum' was actually a large parasite beetle of the species S. Cthulu. There would be no mistake about this, since the Cthulu beetle is characterized by a secondary salivary duct located just below and slightly to the left of the subesophegal ganglion. These beetles feed upon borrowed emotions, their own having long ago atrophied. Typically, they lurk in dark and shadowy places, waiting for a careless Celsian to pass within range of their segmented maxilla. That is what happened to Marvin. Realizing this, Marvin directed at the beetle an emotion of anger so powerful that the Cthulu, victim of its own hyperacute emotional receptors, fell over unconscious in the road. That done, Marvin readjusted his goldbronze casing, stiffened his antennae, and continued down the road. TT e came to a bridge that cross"ed a great flowing river of sand. Standing on the center span, he gazed downward into the black depths which rolled inexorably onward to the mysterious sand sea. Halfhypnotized he gazed, the nose ring beating its quick tattoo of mortality three times faster than the beat of his hearts. And he thought: Bridges are receptacles of opposed ideas. Their horizontal distance speaks to us of our transcendence; their vertical declivity reminds us unalterably of the imminence of failure, the sureness of death. We push outward across obstacles, but the primordial fall is forever beneath our feet. We build, construct, fabricate; but death is the supreme architect, who shapes heights only that there may be depths. O Celsians, throw your wellwrought bridges across a thousand rivers, and tie together the disparate contours of the planet. Your mastery is for naught, for the land is still beneath you, still waiting, still patient. Celslana, you have a road to follow, but it leads assuredly to death. Celsians, despite your cunning, you have one lesson still to learn. The heart is fashioned to receive the spear. All other effects are extraneous. These were Marvin's thoughts as he stood on the bridge. And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forego pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death. Slowly he climbed to the rail, and there stood poised over the twisting currents of sand. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow detach itself from a pillar, move tentatively to the rail, stand erect, poise itself over the abyss and lean precariously outward -- "Stop! Wait!" Marvin cried. His own desire for destruction had been abruptly terminated. He saw only a fellow-creature in peril. The shadowy figure gasped, and abruptly lunged toward the yawning river below. Marvin moved simultaneously, and managed to catch an ankle. The ensuing wrench almost pulled him over the rail. But recovering quickly, Marvin attached suckers to the porous stone sidewalk, spread his lower limbs for maximum purchase, wrapped two upper limbs around a light pole, and maintained a tenacious grip with his remaining two arms. There was a moment of charged equilibrium; then Marvin's strength prevailed over the weight of the would-be suicide. Slowly, carefully, Marvin pulled, shifting his grip from tarsus to tibia, hauling without respite until he had brought that person to a point of safety on the roadbed of the bridge. All recollection of his own selfdestructive desires had left him. He strode forward and grasped the suicider by the shoulders, shaking fiercely. "You damned fool!" Marvin shouted. "What kind of a coward are you? Only an idiot or a madman takes an out like that. Haven't you any guts at all, you damned -- " He stopped in mid-expletive. The would-be suicide was facing him, trembling, eyes averted. And now Marvin perceived, for the first time, that he had rescued a woman. L ater, in a private booth in a bridgeside restaurant, Marvin apologized for his harsh words, which had been torn from him by shock rather than conviction. But the woman, gracefully clicking her claw, refused to accept his apology. "Because you are right," she said. "My attempt was the act of an idiot or a madwoman, or both. Your analysis was correct, I fear. You should have let me jump." Marvin perceived how fair she was. A small woman, coming barely to his upper thorax, she was exquisitely made. Her midbody had the true sweet cylinder curves, and her proud head sat slightly forward of her body at a heart-wrenching five degrees from the vertical. Her features were perfection from the nicely bulged forehead to the angular sweep of jaw. Her twin ovipositors were modestly hidden behind a white satin sash, cut in princess style and revealing just a tantalizing suggestion of the shining green flesh beneath them. Her legs, all of them, were clad in orange windings, draped to reveal the lissome segmentation of the joints. A would-be suicide she may have been; but she was also the most stunning beauty that Marvin had seen on Celsus. His throat went dry at the sight of her, and his pulse began to race. He found that he was staring at the white satin that concealed and revealed her hightilted ovipositors. He turned away, and found that he was looking at the sensual marvel of a long, segmented limb. Blushing furiously, he forced himself to look at the puckered beautyscar on her forehead. She seemed unconscious of his fervent attention. Unselfconsciously she said, "Perhaps we should introduce ourselves -- under the circumstances!" They both laughed immoderately at her witticism. "My name is Marvin Flynn," Marvin said. "Mine is Phthistia Held," the young woman said. "I'll call you Cathy, if you don't mind," Marvin said. Hphey both laughed again : Then Cathy grew serious. Taking note of the too-quick passage of time, she said, "I must thank you again. And now I must leave." "Of course," Marvin said, rising. "When may I see you again?" "Never," she said in a low voice. "But I must!" Marvin said. "I mean to say, now that I've found you I can never let you go." She shook her head sadly. "Once in a while," she murmured, "will you give one little thought to me?" "We must not say good-by!" Marvin said. "Oh, you'll get by," she replied, not cruelly. "I'll never smile again," Marvin told her. "Somebody else will be taking my place," she predicted. "You are temptation!" he shouted in a fury. "We are like two ships that pass in the night," she corrected. "Will we never meet again?" Marvin queried. "Time alone can tell." "My prayer is to be there with you," Marvin said hopefully. "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," she intoned. "You're mean to me," Marvin pouted. "I didn't know what time it was," she said. "But I know what time it is now!" And so saying, she whirled and darted out the door. Marvin watched her leave, then sat down at the bar. "One for my baby, and one for the road," he told the bartender. "A woman's a two-face," the bartender commented sympathetically, pouring a drink. "I got the mad-about-her-sadwithout-her blues," Marvin replied. "A fellow needs a girl," the bartender told him. Marvin finished his drink and held out his glass. "A pink cocktail for a blue lady," he ordered, "She may be weary," the bartender suggested. "I don't know why I love her like I do," Marvin stated. "But at least I do know why there's no sun up in the sky. In my solitude she haunts me like a tinkling piano in the next apartment. But I'll be around no matter how she treats me now. Maybe it was just one of those things; yet I'll remember April and her, and the evening breeze caressed the trees but not for me, and -- " "Inhere is no telling how long Marvin might have continued his lament had not a voice at the level of his ribs and two feet to his left whispered, "Hey, Meester." Marvin turned and saw a small, plump, raggedly dressed Celsian sitting on the next bar stool. "What is it?" Marvin asked brusquely. "You maybe want see thees muchacha so beautiful other time?" "Yes, I do. But what can you  "I am private investigator tracer of lost persons satisfaction guaranteed or not one cent in tribute." "What kind of an accent have you got?" Marvin asked. "Lambrobian," the investigator said. "My name is Juan Valdez and I come from the fiesta lands below the border to make my fortune here in big city of the Norte." "Sandback," the bartender snarled. "What thees theeng you call me?" the little Lombrobian said, with suspicious mildness. "I called you a sandback, you lousy little sandback," the bartender snarled. "That ees what I thought," said Valdez. He reached into his cummerbund, took out a long, double-edged knife and drove it him instantly. "I am a mild man, senor," he said to Marvin. "I am not a man quickly to take offense. Indeed, in my home village of Montana Verde de los tres Picos, I am considered a harmless man. I ask nothing more than to be allowed to cultivate my peyote buds in the high mountains of Lombrobia under the shade of that tree which we call 'the sun hat,' for these are the bes' peyote buds in all the world." "I can understand that." "Yet still," Valdez said, more sternly, "when an exploitator del norte insults me, and by implication, defames those who gave me birth and nurtured me -- why then, senor, a blinding red mist descends over my field of vision and my knife springs to my hand unaided, and proceeds from there non-stop to the heart of the betrayer of the children of the poor." "It could happen to anyone," Marvin said, "And yet," Valdez said, "despite my keen sense of honor, I am essentially childlike, intuitive and easy-going." "I had noticed that, as a matter of fact," Marvin said. "But enough of that. Now, you wish hire me investigation find girl? But of course. El buen pano en el area se vende, verdad?" "Si, hombre," Marvin replied, laughing. "Y el deseo vence al miedo!" "Pues, adelante!" And arm in arm the two comrades marched out into the night of a thousand points of a mighty host. vnce outside the restaurant, Valdez turned his mustached brown face to the heavens and located the constellation Invidius, which, in northern latitudes, points unerringly to the north-northeast. With this as a base line, he established cross references, using the wind on his cheek (blowing west at five miles per hour), and the moss on the trees (growing on the' northerly sides of decidupis trunks at one ed for a westerly error of one foot per mile (drift), and a southerly error of five inches per hundred yards (combined tropism effects). Then, with all factors accounted for, he began walking in a south-southwesterly direction. Marvin followed. Within an hour they had left the city, and were proceeding through a stubbled farming district. Another hour put them beyond the last signs of civilization, in a wilderness of tumbled granite and greasy feldspar. Valdez showed no signs of stopping, and Marvin began to feel vague stirrings of doubt. "Just where, exactly, are we going?" he asked at last. "To find your Cathy," Valdez replied, his teeth flashing white in his good-humored burnt sienna face. "Does she really live this far from the city?" "I have no idea where she lives," Valdez replied, shrugging. "You don't?" "No, I don't." Marvin stopped abruptly. "But you said that you did know!" "I never said or implied that," Valdez said, his umber forehead wrinkling. "I said that I would help you find her." "But if you don't know where she lives -- " "It is quite unimportant," Valdez said, holding up a stern musteline forefinger. "Our quest has nothing to do with finding where Cathy lives; our quest, pure and simple, is to find Cathy, That, at least, was my understanding." "Yes, of course," Marvin said. "But if we're not going to where she lives, then where are we going?" "To where she weel be," Valdez replied serenely. "Oh," Marvin said. ry'hey walked on through tower-ing mineral marvels, coming at last into scrubby foothills that lay like tired walruses around the gleaming blue whale of a lofty mountain range. Another hour passed, and Marvin again grew disquieted. But this time he expressed his anxiety in a roundabout fashion, hoping by guile to gain insight. "Have you known Cathy long?" he asked. "I have never had the good fortune to meet her," Valdez replied. "Then you saw her for the first time in the restaurant with me?" "Unfortunately I did not even see her there, since I was in the men's room passing a kidney stone during the time of your conversation with her. I may have caught a glimpse of her as she turned from you and departed; but more likely I saw only the doppler effect produced by the swinging red door." "Then you know nothing whatsoever about Cathy?" "Only the little I have heard from you; which, frankly, amounts to practically nothing." "Then how," Marvin asked, "can you possibly take me to where she will be?" "It is simple enough," Valdez said. "A moment's reflection should clear the matter for you." Marvin reflected for several moments, but the matter stayed refractory. "Consider it logically," Valdez said. "What is my problem? To find Cathy. What do I know about Cathy? Nothing." "That doesn't sound so good." "But it is only half the problem. Granted that I know nothing about Cathy; what do I know about Finding?" "What?" Marvin asked. "It happens that I know everything about Finding," Valdez said triumphantly, gesturing with his graceful terra cotta hands. "For I am an expert in the Theory of Searches!" "The what?" Marvin asked. "The Theory of Searches!" Valdez said, a little less triumphantly. "I see," Marvin said, unimpressed. "Well, that's great. I'm sure it's a very good theory. But if you don't know anything about Cathy, I don't see how any theory will help." Valdez sighed, not unpleasantly, and touched his mustache with a puce-colored hand. "My friend, if you knew all about Cathy -- her habits, friends, desires, dislikes, hopes, fears, dreams, intentions, and the like -- do you think you would be able to find her?" "I'm sure I could," Marvin said. "Even without knowing the Theory of Searches?" "Yes." "Well then," Valdez said, "apply that same reasoning to the reverse condition. I know all there is to know about the Theory of Searches. Therefore I need to know nothing about Cathy." nphey marched steadily upward, across the steepening face of a mountain slope. A bitter wind screamed and buffeted at them, and patches of hoarfrost began to appear underfoot on the path. Valdez talked about his researches into the Theory of Searches, citing the following typical cases; Hector looking for Lysander, Adam questing after Eve, Galahad reconnoitering for the Holy Grail, Fred C. Dobb's seeking the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Edwin Arlington Robinson's perquisitions for colloquial self-expression in a typically American milieu, Gordon Sly's investigations of Naiad McCarthy, energy's pursuit of entropy, God's hunt for man and yang's perusal of yin. "From these specifics," Valdez said, "we derive the general notion of Search, and its most important corollaries." Marvin was too miserable to answer. It had suddenly occurred to him that one could die in this chill and waterless wasteland. "Amusingly enough," Valdez said, "the Theory of Searches forces upon us the immediate conclusion that nothing can be truly (or ideally) lost. Consider: for a thing to be lost, it would require a place to be lost in. But no such place can be found, since simple multiplicity carries no implications of qualitative differentiation. In Search terms, every place is like every other place. Therefore, we replace the concept Lost, with the concept of indeterminate placement; which, of course, is susceptible to logicomathematical analysis." "But if Cathy isn't really lost," Marvin said, "then we can't really find her." "That statement is true, as far as it goes," Valdez said. "But of course, it is merely Ideal notion, and of little value in this instance. For operational purposes we must modify the Theory of Searches. In fact, we must reverse die major premise of the theory and re-accept the original concepts of Lost and Found." "It sounds very complicated." "Well, it's simple enough, once you understand the theory," Valdez said. "Now, to ensure our success, we must decide upon the optimum form of Search. Obviously, if both of you are actively questing, your chances of finding each other are considerably lessened. Consider two people seeking one another up and down the endless crowded aisles of a great department store; and contrast that with the improved strategy of one seeking, and the other standing at a fixed position and waiting to be found. The mathematics are a little intricate, so you will just have to take my word for it. The best chance of youher finding heryou will be for one to search, and the other to allow himselfherself to be searched for. Our deepest folk wisdom has always known this, of course." "So what do we do?" # tY have just told you!" Valdez JL cried. "One must search, the other must wait. Since we have no control over Cathy's actions, we assume that she is following her instincts and looking for you. Therefore you must fight down your instincts and wait, thereby allowing her to find you." "All I do is wait?" Marvin asked. "That's right." "And you really think she'll find me?" "I would stake my life on it." "Well... All right. But in that case, where are we going now?" "To a place where you will wait. Technically, it is called a Location-Point." Marvin looked confused, so Valdez explained further. "Mathematically, all places are of equal potentiality insofar as the chances of her finding you are concerned. Therefore we are able to choose an arbitrary LocationPoint." "What Location-Point have you chosen," Marvin asked. "Since it made no real difference," Flynn said, "I selected the village of Montana Verde de los tres Picos, in Adelante Province, in the country of Lombrobia." "That's your home town, isn't it?" Marvin asked. "As a matter of fact, it is," Valdez said, mildly surprised and amused. "That, I suppose, is why it came so quickly to my mind." "Isn't Lombrobia a long way off?" "A considerable distance," Valdez admitted. "But our time will not be wasted, since I will teach you logic, and also the folksongs of my country." "It isn't fair." "My friend," Valdez told him, "when you accept help, you must be prepared to take what one is capable of giving, not what you would like to receive. I have never denied my human limitations; but it is ungrateful of you to refer to them." Marvin had to be content with that, since he didn't think he could find his way back to the city unaided. So they marched on through the mountains, and they sang many folksongs. vnward they marched-, up the polished mirror face of a vast mountain. The wind whistled and screamed, tore at their clothing and tugged at their straining fingers. Treacherous honeycomb ice crumbled under their feet as they struggled for footholds, their buffeted bodies plastered to the icy mountain wall and moving leech-like up its dazzling surface. Valdez bore up through it all with a saint-like equanimity. "Eet ees deefecult," he grinned. "And yet -- for the love which you bear for thees woman -- eet ees all worthwhile, si?" "Yeah, sure," Marvin mumbled. "I guess it is." But in truth, he was beginning to doubt it. After all, he had only known Cathy for less than an hour. An avalanche thundered past them, and tons of white death screamed past -- inches from their strained and clinging bodies. Valdez smiled with serenity. "Beyond all obstacles," Valdez intoned, "lies that summit of accomplishment which is the face and form of the beloved." "Yeah, sure," Marvin said. Spears of ice, shaken loose from a high dokalma, whirled and flashed around them. Marvin thought about Cathy, and found that he was unable to remember what she looked like. It struck him that love at first sight was overrated. A high precipice loomed before them. Marvin looked at it, and at the shimmering ice fields beyond, and came to the conclusion that the game was really not worth the candle. "I think," Marvin said, "that we should turn back." Valdez smiled subtly, pausing on the very edge of the vertiginous descent into that wintry hell of suicidally shaped snow slides. "My frien'," he said, "I know why you say this." "You do?" Marvin asked. "Of course. It is obvious that you do not wish me to risk nay life on the continuance of your insensate and magnificent quest. And it is equally obvious that you intend to plunge on alone." "It is?" Marvin asked. "Certainly. It would be apparent to the most casual observer that you are driven to seek your love through any and all dangers, by virtue of the unyielding nature of your personality. And it is equally clear that your generous and high-spirited mentality would be disturbed at the idea of involving one whom you consider a close friend and bosom companion in so perilous a venture." "Well," Marvin began, "I'm not sure -- " "But I am sure," Valdez said quietly. "And I reply to your unspoken question as follows: "Friendship bears this similarity to love : it transcends all limits.' " t lA#' e#I ' that's very nice of  ' you," Marvin said, eyeing the precipice ahead. "But I really didn't know Cathy very well, and I don't know how well suited we would be. So all in all, maybe it would be best if we got out of here." "Your words lack conviction, my young friend," Valdez laughed. "I beg of you not to worry about my safety." "As a matter of fact," Marvin said, "I was worrying about my safety." "No use!" Valdez cried gaily. "Hot passion betrays the studied coolness of your words. Forward, my friend!" Valdez seemed determined to force him to Cathy's side whether he wanted to go or not. The only solution seemed to be a quick blow to the jaw, after which he would drag Valdez and himself back to civilization. He edged forward. Valdez edged back. "Ah no, my friend!" he cried. "Again, overweening love has rendered your motives transparent. To knock me out, is it not? 'Then, after making sure I was safe and comfortable and well-provisioned, you would plunge alone into the white wilderness. But I refuse to comply. We go on together, compadre!" And, shouldering all their provisions, Valdez began his descent of the precipice. Marvin could do nothing but follow. ITfe shall not bore the reader   with an account of that great march across the Moorescu Mountains, nor with the agonies suffered by the love-dazzled young Flynn and his steadfast companion. Nor shall we delineate the strange hallucinations which beset the travellers, nor the temporary state of insanity which Valdez suffered when he thought he was a bird and able to fly across thousand-foot drops. Nor would any but the scholarly be interested in the psychological process by which Marvin was moved, through a contemplation of his own sacrifices, to a fondness for the young lady in question, and then to a strong fondness, and then to a sensation of love, and then to an overweening passion of love. Suffice it to say that all of these things happened, and that the journey across the mountains occupied many days and brought about many emotions. And at last it came to an end. Arriving at a last mountain crest, Marvin looked down and saw, instead of ice fields, green pastures and rolling forests under a summer sun, and a little village nestled in the crook of a genie river. "Is -- is that -- " Marvin began. "Yes, my son," Valdez said quietly, "that is the village of Montana de los tres Picos, in Adelante Province, in the country of Lombrobia, in the valley of the Blue Moon." Marvin thanked his old guru -- for no other name was applicable to the role which the devious and saintly Valdez had played -- and began his descent to the Location Point where his wait for Cathy would begin. XX Tontana de los tres Picos! XV JL Here, surrounded by crystal lakes and high mountains, a simple, good-hearted peasantry engage in unhurried labor beneath the swan-necked palms. At midday and midnight one may hear the plaintive notes of a guitar echo down the crenellated walls of the old castle. Nut-brown maidens tend the dusty grape vines while a mustached caique watches, his whip curled sleepily on his hairy wrist. To this quaint memento of a bygone age came Flynn, led by the faithful Valdez. Just outside the village, on a gentle rise of land, there was an inn, or posada. To this place Valdez directed them. "But is this really the best place to wait?" Marvin asked. "No, it is not," Valdez said, with a knowing smile. "But by chosing it instead of the dusty town square, we avoid the fallacy of the 'optimum'. Also, it is more comfortable here." Marvin bowed to the mustached man's superior wisdom and made himself at home in the posada. He settled himself at an outdoor table which commanded a good view of the courtyard and of the road beyond it. He fortified himself with a flagon of wine, and proceeded to fulfill his theoretical function as called for by the Theory of Searches: viz, he Waited. Within the hour, Marvin beheld a tiny dark figure moving slowly along the gleaming white expanse of the road. Closer it came, the figure of a man no longer young, his back bent beneath the weight of a heavy cylindrical object. At last the man raised his haggard head and stared directly into Marvin' eyes. "Uncle Max!" Marvin cried. ' ' Max replied. "Would you mind pouring me a glass of wine? This is a very dusty road." Marvin poured the glass of wine, scarcely believing the testimony of his senses; for Uncle Max had unaccountably disappeared some ten years ago. He had last been seen playing golf at the Fairhaven Country Club. "What happened to you?" Marvin asked. "I stumbled into a time warp on the twelfth hole," Uncle Max said. "If you ever get back to Earth, Marvin, you might speak to the club manager about it. I have never been a com plainer; but it seems to me that the greens committee ought to know about this, and possibly build a small fence or other enclosing structure. I do not care so much for myself, but it might cause a nasty scandal if a child fell in." "I'll certainly tell them," Marvin said. "But Uncle Max, where are you going now?" "I have an appointment in Samarra," Uncle Max said. "Thank you for the wine, my boy, and take good care of yourself. By the way; did you know that your nose is ticking?" "Yes," Marvin said. "It's a bomb." "I suppose you know what you're doing," Max said. "Goodby, Marvin." And Uncle Max trudged away down the road, his golf bag swinging from his back and a number # iron in his hand as a walking stick. Marvin settled back to wait. Half an hour later, Marvin spied the figure of a woman hurrying down the road. He felt a rising sensation of anticipation, but then slumped back in his chair. It was not Cathy after all. It was only his mother. "You're a long way from home. Mom," he said quietly. "I know Marvin," his mother said. "But you see, I was captured by white slavers." "Gosh. Mom! How did it happen?" "Well, Marvin," his mother said. "I was simply taking a Christmas basket to a poor family in Cutpurse Lane, and there was a police raid, and various other things happened, and I was drugged and awoke in Buenos Aires in a luxurious room with a man standing near me and leering and asking me in broken English if I wanted a little fun. And when I said no, he bent down and clasped me in his arms in an embrace that was plainly designed to be lecherous." "Gosh! What happened then?" "Well," his mother said, "I was lucky enough to remember a little trick that Mrs. Jasperson had told me. Did you know that you can kill a man by striking him forcibly under the nose? I didn't like to do it, Marvin, although it seemed a good idea at the time. And so I found myself in the streets of Buenos Aires and one thing led to another and here I am. "Won't you have some wine?" Marvin asked. "That's very thoughtful of you," his mother said, "but I really must be on my way." "Where?" "To Havana," his mother said. "I have a message for Garcia. Marvin, have you a cold?" "No, I probably sound funny because of this bomb in my nose." "Take care of yourself, Marvin," his mother said, and hurried on. T ime passed. Marvin ate his dinner on the portico, washed it down with a flagon of Sangre de Hombre, '#, and settled back in the deep shadow cast by the whitewashed palladium. The sun stretched its golden bottom toward the mountain peaks. Down the road, the figure of a man could be seen hurrying past the inn... "Father!" Marvin cried. "Good afternoon, Marvin," his father said, startled but hiding it well. "I must say, you turn up in some unexpected places." "I could say the same for you," Marvin said. His father frowned, adjusted his necktie and changed his briefcase to the other hand. "There is nothing strange about me being here," he told his son. "Usually your mother drives me home from the station. But today she was delayed, and so I walked. Since I was walking, I decided to take the shortcut which goes over one side of the golf course." "I see," Marvin said. "I will admit," his father continued, "that this shortcut seems to have become a 'long' cut, as one might express it, for I estimate that I have been walking through this countryside for the better part of an hour, if no longer." "Dad," Marvin said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but the fact is, you are no longer on Earth." "I find nothing humorous about a remark like that," his father stated. "Doubtless I have gone out of my way; nor is the style of architecture what I would normally expect to find in New York State. But I am quite certain that if I continue along this road for another hundred yards or so, it will lead into Annandale Avenue, which in turn will take me to the intersection of Maple and Spruce Lane. From there, of course, I can easily find my way home." "I suppose you're right," Marvin said. He had never been able to win an argument from his father. "I must be getting along," his father said. "By the way, Marvin, were you aware that you have some sort of obstruction in your nose?" "Yes, sir," Marvin said, "It's a bomb." His father frowned deeply, pierced him with a glance, shook his head regretfully and marched on down the road. I #lT don't understand it," MarM. vin remarked later to Valdez. "Why are all of these people finding me? It just doesn't seem natural." "It isn't natural," Valdez assured him. "But it is inevitable, which is much more important." "Maybe it is inevitable," Marvin said. "But it is also highly improbable." "True," Valdez agreed "AIthough we prefer to call that a forced-probability; which is to say, it is an indeterminate concomitant of the Theory of Searches." "I'm afraid I don't fully understand that," Marvin said. "Well, it's simple enough. The Theory of Searches is a pure theory; which is to say that on paper it works every time. But once we attempt to make practical applications, we encounter difficulties, the foremost of which is the phenomenon of indeterminacy. To put it in its simplest terms, what happens is this: the presence of the Theory interferes with the working of the Theory. You see, the Theory cannot take into account the effect of its own existence upon itself. Ideally, Theory of Searches exists in a universe in which there is no Theory of Searches. But practically -- which is our concern here -- the Theory of Searches exists in a world in which there is a Theory of Searches, which has what we call a 'mirroring' or 'doubling' effect upon itself." "Hmm," said Marvin. "Of course," Valdez added; "we must consider lambda-chi -- the symbolic representation of the inverse ratio of all possible searches to all possible finds. Thus, when lambda-chi is increased through indeterminacy or other factors, the possibility of search-failure is rapidly reduced to a figure near zero, while the possibility of search-success expands quickly toward one." "Does that mean," Marvin asked, "that because of the effect of the Theory of Searches all searches will be successful?" "Exactly," Valdez said. "You have expressed it beautifully, though perhaps with insufficient rigor. All possible searches will be successful during the time, or duration, of the Set-Expansion Factor." "I understand now," Marvin said. "According to the theory, I must find Cathy." "Yes," Valdez said. "You must find Cathy; as a matter of fact, you must find everyone. The only limitation is the Set-Expansion Factor, or S-E." "Oh?" Marvin asked.  es can only be successful during the time, or duration, of S-E. But the duration of S-E is a variable which can last no less than # microseconds and no more than # years." "How long will S-E last in my particular case?" Marvin asked. "A lot of us would like to know the answer to that one," Valdez said, with a hearty chuckle. "I was afraid of that," Marvin said. "Science is a cruel taskmaster," Valdez agreed. Then he winked cheerfully and said, "But of course, even the cruelest taskmasters can be evaded." "Do you mean to say there is a solution?" Marvin cried. "Not a legitimate one, unfortunately," Valdez said. "Still," Marvin said, "if it works, let's try it out." "I would really rather not," Valdez said. "I insist," Marvin said. "After nil, I am the one who is Searching." "That has nothing to do with it, mathematically speaking," Valdez said. "But I suppose you would give me no peace unless I indulged you." Valdez sighed unhappily, schlepped a piece paper and a stub pencil out of his rebozo, and asked, "How many coins do you have in your pocket?" Marvin looked and replied, "Eight." Valdez wrote down the result, then asked for the date of Marvin's birth, his social security number, his shoe size, and height in centimeter. To this he gave a numerical value. He asked Marvin to pick a number at random between I and #. With this, he added several figures of his own, then scribbled and calculated for several minutes. "Well?" Marvin asked. "Remember, this result is merely statistically probable," Valdez said, "and has no other grounds for credence." Marvin nodded. Valdez said, "The Set-Expansion Factor, in your particular case, is due to expire in exactly one minute and forty-eight seconds, plus or minus five minimicroseconds." He consulted his watch and nodded in satisfaction. Marvin was about to protest vehemently about the unfairness of this, and to ask why Valdez hadn't made that vital calculation earlier. But then he looked down upon the road, now glowing a singular white against the rich blue of evening. He saw a figure moving slowly toward the posada. "Cathy!" Marvin cried. For it was she. "Search completed with # minimicro seconds of the Set-Expansion Factor unelapsed," Valdez noted. "Another experimental validation for my Search Theory." But Marvin did not hear him, for he had rushed down to the road, and there clasped the longlost beloved in his arms. And Valdez, the wily old friend and taciturn companion of the Long March, smiled tightly to himself and ordered another bottle of wine. A nd so they were together at last; beautiful Cathy, starcrossed and planet haunted, drawn by the strange alchemy of the Location-Point; and Marvin, young and strong, with his swallow's flash smile in a tanned, good-humored face; Marvin, setting out with a young man's audacity and easy confidence to conquer the challenge of an old and intricate universe; and Cathy at his side, younger than he in years, yet vastly older in her woman's inherited store of intuitive wisdom; lovely Cathy, whose fine dark eyes seemed to hold a brooding sorrow, an elusive shadow of anticipated sadness which Marvin was unaware of except to feel a great and almost overwhelming desire to protect and cherish this seemingly fragile girl with her secret which she could not reveal, who had come at last to him, a man without a secret which he could reveal. Their happiness was flawed and ennobled. There was the bomb in Marvin's nose, ticking away the inexorable seconds of his destiny, providing a strict metronomic measure for their dance of love. But this sense of foredoomedness caused their opposed destinies to twine closer, and it informed their relationship with grace and meaning. He created waterfalls for her out of the morning dew, and from the colored pebbles of a meadow stream he made a necklace more beautiful than emeralds, sadder than pearls. She caught him in her net of silken hair, she carried him down, down, into deep and silent waters, past obliteration. He showed her frozen stars and molten sun; she gave him long, entwined shadows and the sound of black velvet. He reached out to her and touched moss, grass, ancient trees, iridescent rocks; her fingertips, striving upwards, brushed old planets and silver moonlight, the flash of comets and the cry of dissolving suns. They played games in which he died and she grew old; they did it for the sake of the joyous rebirth. They dissected time with love, and put it back together longer, better, slower. They invented toys out of mountains, plains, lakes, valleys. Their souls glistened like healthy fur. They were lovers. They could conceive of nothing but love. But some things hated them. Dead stumps, barren eagles, stagnant ponds -- these things resented their happiness. And certain urgencies of change ignored their declarations, indifferent to human intentions and content to continue their work of breaking down the universe. Certain conclusions, resistant to transformation, hastened to comply with ancient directives written on the bones, stencilled on the blood, tattooed into skin. There was a bomb which needed explosion. There was a secret which required betrayal. And out of fear came knowledge and sadness. And one morning, Cathy was gone as if she had never been. one! Cathy was gone! Could it be possible? Could Life, that deadpan practical joker, be up to his disastrous tricks again? Marvin refused to believe it. He searched the confines of the posada, and he poked patiently through the little village beyond it. She was gone. He continued his search in the nearby city of San Ramon de las Tristezas, and he questioned waitresses, landlords, shopkeepers, whores, policemen, pimps, beggars and other inhabitants. He asked if they had seen a girl fair as the dawn, with hair of indescribable beauty, limbs of a previouslyunheard-of felicity, features whose comeliness was matched only by their harmony, etc. And those he questioned sadly replied, "Alas, senor, we have not seen thees woman, not now or ever in our lives." He calmed himself enough to give a coherent description, and found a road-mender who had seen a girl like Cathy travelling west in a large automobile with a bulky, cigar-smoking man. And a chimney sweep had spied her leaving town with her little gold and blue handbag. Her step had been firm. Then a gas station attendant gave him a hastily scrawled note from Cathy which began, "Marvin dear, please try to understand and forgive me. As I tried to tell you so many times, it was necessary for me -- " The rest was illegible. With the aid of a cryptanalyst, Marvin deciphered the closing words, which were: "But I shall always love you, and I hope you can find it in your heart to think of me occasionally with kindness. Your Loving Cathy." The rest of the note, made enigmatic by grief, was insusceptible to human analysis. To describe Marvin's emotion would be like trying to describe the dawn flight of the heron: both are ineffable and unspeakable. Suffice it to say that Marvin considered suicide, but decided against it. Nothing was enough. Intoxication was merely maudlin. Renunciation of the world seemed no more than the act of a peevish child. Because of the inadequacy of the attitudes open to him. Marvin struck none. Dryeyed and zombie-like he moved through his days and nights. He walked, he talked, he even smiled. He was unfailingly polite. But it seemed to his dear friend Valdez that the real Marvin had vanished in an instantaneous explosion of sorrow, and that in his place there walked a poorly modeled representation of a man. Marvin was gone; the ringer who moved in his place looked as if, in its unfailing mimicry of humanness, it might collapse at any moment from strain. T J aldez was both perplexed and  dismayed. Never had the wily old Master of Searches seen such a difficult case. With desperate energy he tried to rally his friend out of his living death. He tried sympathy: "I know exactly how you feel, my unfortunate companion, for once, when I was quite a young man, I had quite a comparable experience, and I found -- " That did nothing, so Valdez tried brutality: "Christ damn me for a winnieburne, but are ye still mawking abaht after that bit of fluff wot walked out on yer? Now by God's wounds, I tell thee this : there's women past counting in this world of ours, and the man's no man who'd curl himself up in the corner when there's good lovin' to be had without..." No response. Valdez tried eccentric distraction: "Look, look over there, I see three birds on a limb, and one has a knife thrust through its throat and a scepter clutched in its claw, and yet it sings more merrily than the others! What do you make of it, eh?" Marvin made nothing of it. Undismayed, Valdez tried to rouse his friend by piteous self-referral. "Well, Marvin, lad, the medics have taken a look at that skin rash of mine and it seems that it's a case of pandemic impetigo. They give me twelve hours on the outside, after that I cash in mv chips and make room for another man at the table. But for mv last twelve hours, what I'd like to do is -- " Nothing. Valdez, attempt to stir his friend with philosophy: "The simple farmers know best, Marvin. Do you know what they say? They say that a broken knife makes a poor walking-stick. I think you should bear that in mind, Marvin..." But Marvin absent-mindedly did not bear it in mind. Valdez swung to Hyperstrasian Ethics: "Thou considerest thyself wounded, then? But consider: Self is Ineffable and Unitary, and not Susceptible to Externalities. Therefore it is merely a Wound which was Wounded; and this, being External to the Person and Extraneous to the Insight affords no Cause for the Imputation of Pain." Marvin was not swayed. Valdez turned to psychology: "Loss of the Beloved, according to Steinmetzer, is a ritual re-enactment of the loss of the Fecal Self. Therefore, amusingly enough, when we think we mourn the dear departed, we actually are grieving the irreparable loss of our excrement." But this, too, could not penetrate Marvin's close-held passivity. His melancholic detachment from all human values seemed irrevocable; and this impression was heightened when, one quiet afternoon, his nose ring stopped ticking. It was not a bomb at all it was merely a gray warning from Marduk Kras's constituents. And thus Marvin no longer stood in imminent danger of having his head blown off. But even this stroke of good fortune did nothing to alter his robotic spirits. Quite unmoved, he noted the fact of his salvation as one might observe the passing of a cloud from the face of the sun. Nothing seemed to have any affect upon him. And even the patient Valdez, was finally led to exclaim: "Marvin, you are a goddam pain in the tail!" Yet Marvin perservered, unmoved. And it seemed to Valdez and to the good people of San Ramon that this man was beyond human recall. And yet, how little we know of the twists and turns of the human mind! For the very next day, contrary to all reasonable expectation, an event occurred which broke at last through Marvin's reserve, and inadvertently threw wide the floodgates of susceptibility behind which he had been hiding. A single event! (Though it was in itself the beginning of yet another chain of casualty -- the quiet opening move of yet another of the uncountable dramas of the universe.) It began, absurdly enough, when Marvin glimpsed a face in the crowd. There was a strange and disturbing familiarity about that face. Where had he gazed upon that line of cheek and brow, those brown eyes with their faint tilt, that firm jaw? Then he remembered; he had seen it, long ago, in a mirror. It was the true and genuine face of Marvin Flynn; his very own face and body, long sought after, long denied him. It was the actual and original corpus of the unique and only Marvin Flynn -- now animated by the criminal mind of Ze Kraggash, bodysnatcher ! Marvin's own face was sneering at him! And the real Marvin Flynn stepped forward, all passivity stripped away, his fist raised in anger. Kraggash saw him and hesitated for a moment, his (Marvin's) eyes a study in shock, his fingers betraying a fine tremor, and his downturned mouth revealing a hint of involuntary twitch. Then Kraggash whirled and fled into a narrow, dark and noisome alley. Common sense did not entirely desert Marvin Flynn. He paused at the mouth of that ominous cul-de-sac; prudence dictated that he look for assistance before venturing its hidden convolutions. But he had caught sight of a slender figure hurrying away on Kraggash's arm. It could not be... And yet, it was indeed -- Cathy! She looked back once, with no recognition in her gray eyes. Then she too disappeared into the alley's serpentine coils. Rationality has its limits, as the lemmings well know'. Marvin's emotions at this moment transcended his potentialities for self-control. He charged forward, his face flamed with insensate fury, his eyes bloodshot and unseeing, cheeks ashen, lower jaw slack as a berserker's, his upper lip drawn back in the risus sardonicus of a Malay running amok. Five blind steps he took into that strait and infamous passage. And then a flagstone gave way beneath his feet, and a section of pavement pivoted on a concealed hinge. Marvin was catapulted headlong down a winding stone chute, while above him the judas-flagstone pivoted neatly back into position. Consciousness returned with ag onizing ambiguity. Marvin opened his eyes and found that he was in an underground cell. The place was lighted only by the splutter of torches, set into paired iron embrochures on the wall. The ceiling seemed to press down upon him, stone-bellied and oppressive. From the cold granite there depended bulging growths of fungus, which hung in obscene festoons. It was a place constructed for the desolation of the human spirit, whose chill granite was the temperature of the grave, whose acoustics were designed for the highpitched shrill of pain, and whose color was the exact and sickening hue of mortality. Out of the shadows stepped Kraggash. "It would seem," the criminal drawled, "that we have played this farce long enough. The denoument approaches." "Have you then prepared your third act?" Marvin inquired steadily. "The actors have been given their cues," Kraggash responded. Negligently he snapped his fingers. Into the circle of torchlight stepped Cathy. "This," Marvin said simply, "lies beyond my comprehension." "Oh, Marvin, can I ever explain my apparent treachery?" Cathy cried, with tears dripping from her overcast gray eyes. "How can I make you understand the diverse and unpleasant reasons behind my marriage with Kraggash?" "Marriage!" Marvin cried. "I dared not tell you sooner, for fear it would anger you," Cathy said piteously. "But believe me, Marvin, he courted me with threats and indifference, and captivated me by a dark power which I cannot pretend to understand. And further, by the use of drugs and double-edged words and sly skillful movements of his hands he succeeded in bemusing my sense into a state of counterfeit passion, until I seemed to faint for touch of his damnable body and for nibblature of his detestable lips. And since during this time I was denied the comforts of religion, and therefore had no way of knowing the true from the induced, I did indeed succumb. Nor can I expect any forgiveness in this world or the next. Nor do I ask it." "Oh Cathy, Cathy, my poor Cathy!" Marvin declaimed to the weeping girl. "Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Kraggash. "A touching scene, but as ineffectual as it is apropos. But enough of this. There enters now the final actor of our farce!" Again Kraggash snapped his fingers. From the shadows stepped a masked man, clad in black from tip to toe, and carrying over his shoulder a great double-headed axe. "Good day to you, executioner," Kraggash drawled. "Forward now, and do your duty." The executioner stepped forward and tested the edges of his great axe. He drew the weapon high over his head, stoop poised for a moment; and then -- shockingly -- he began to giggle. "Strike!" Kraggash howled. "Have you taken leave of your senses, man? Strike, I tell you!" But the executioner, still giggling, lowered his blade. Then, with skilled fingers, he plucked off his mask. ( tTetective Urdorf!" Marvin  cried. "Yes, it is I," the Martian detective said. "I am sorry we had to put you through so much anxiety, Marvin; but it was our best opportunity of bringing your case to a successful conclusion. My colleague and I decided -- " "Colleague?" Marvin asked. "I refer," Urdorf said, grinning wryly, "to special agent Catherine Mulvavey." Marvin turned to Cathy. She had already pinned to her bodice the red and blue badge of a special agent in the Interplanetary Vigilance Association. "I -- I think I understand," Marvin said. "It's really simple enough," Detective Urdorf said. "In working on your case, I had, as is usual, the aid and cooperation of various other law enforcement agencies. Upon three separate occasions we came close to capturing our man ; but always he evaded us. This might have gone on indefinitely had we not tried this scheme of entrapment. The theory was sound; for if Kraggash could succeed in destroying you, he could claim your body as his own without fear of a counter-claimant. Whereas, as long as you were alive, you would continue to search for him. "Thus, we enticed you into this murderous scheme, hoping that Kraggash would take advantage of the opportunity of destroying you. The rest is history." Turning to the criminal, Detective Urdorf said, "Kraggash, have you anything to add?" The thief with Marvin's face lounged gracefully against the wall, his arms folded and his body replete with composure. "I might hazard a comment or two," Kraggash said. "First, let me point out that your scheme was clumsy and transparent. I believed it to be a hoax from the start, and entered it only on the distant possibility of it being true. Therefore, I am not surprised at this outcome." "An amusing rationalization," Urdorf said. Kraggash shrugged. "Secondly, I want to tell you that I feel no moral compunction in the slightest at my so-called crime. If a man cannot retain control of his own body, then he deserves to lose it. I have observed, during a long and varied lifetime, that men will give their bodies to any rogue who asks, and will enslave their minds to the first voice that commands them to obey. This is why the vast majority of men cannot keep even their natural birthright of a mind and body, but choose instead to rid themselves of those embarrassing emblems of freedom." U'T'hat," Detective Urdorf said, "is the classic apologia of the criminal." "That which you call a crime when one man does it," Kraggash said, "you call government when many men do it. Personally, I fail to see the distinction; and failing to see it, I refuse to live by it." "We could stand here all year splitting words," Detective Urdorf said. "But I do not have time for such recreation. Try your arguments on the prison chaplain, Kraggash. I hereby arrest you for illegal Mindswapping, attempted murder, and grand larceny. Thus I solve my #th case and break my chain of bad luck." "Indeed?" Kraggash said coolly. "Did you really think it would be so simple? Or did you consider the possibility that the fox might have another lair?" he sneered at them. "Take him!" Detective Urdorf shouted. He, Marvin and Cathy moved swiftly toward Kraggash. But even as they moved, the criminal raised his hand and drew a swift circle in the air. with fire! Kraggash put one leg over the circle. His leg disappeared. "If you want me," he said mockingly, "you'll know where to find me." As they rushed him, Kraggash stepped into the circle, and all of him vanished except his head. He winked at Marvin, then his head was gone, and nothing was left except the circle of fire. "Come on!" Marvin shouted. "Let's get him!" He turned to Urdorf, and was amazed to see that the detective's shoulders had slumped, and that his downcast face was gray with defeat. "Hurry!" Marvin cried. "It is useless," Urdorf said. "I thought I was prepared for any ruse... but not for this. The man is obviously insane." "What can we do?" Marvin shouted. 'We can do nothing," Urdorf said. "He has gone into the Twisted World, and I have failed in my #th case." "But we can still follow him!" Marvin declared, moving up to the fiery circle. "No! You must not!" Urdorf declared. "You do not understand -- the Twisted World means death, or madness... or both! Your chances of coming through it are so small -- " "I have just as good a chance as Kraggash," Marvin shouted and stepped into the circle. "Wait, you still do not understand!" Urdorf shouted. "Kraggash has no chance " But Marvin did not hear those final words, for he had already vanished through the flaming circle, moving inexorably into the strange and unexplored reaches of the Twisted World. "... thus, through the Riemann-Hake equations, a mathematical demonstration existed at last of the theoretical necessity for Twistermann's Soatial Area of Logical Deformation. This Area became known as the Twisted World, though it was neither twisted nor a world. And, by a final irony, Twistermann's allimnortant third definition (that the Area could be considered as that region of the universe which acted as an equinoise of chaos to the logical stability of the primary structure) was proven superfluous." -- Article on "The Twisted World," from the Galactic Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, #rd edition. "... therefore, the term mirror-deformation carries the sense (if not the substance) of our thought. For indeed, as we have seen, the Twisted World (sic) performs the work, both necessary and hateful, of rendering indeterminate all entities and processes, and thereby making the universe theoretically as well as practically ineluctable." -- From "Musings of a Mathematician," Edgar Hope Grief, Euclid City Free Press. B ut despite this, a few very tentative rules might be adduced for the suicidal traveller to the Twisted World: Remember that all rules may lie, in the Twisted World; including this rule which points out the exception, and including this modifying clause which invalidates the exception... ad infinitum. But also remember that no rule necessarily lies; that any rule may be true, including this rule and its exceptions. In the Twisted World, time need not follow your preconceptions. Events may change rapidly (which seems proper), or slowly (which feels better), or not at all (which is hateful). It is conceivable that nothing whatsoever will happen to you in the Twisted World. It would be unwise to expect this, and equally unwise to be unprepared for it. Among the kingdoms of probability which the Twisted World sets forth, one must be exactly like our World; and another must be exactly like our world except for one detail; and another exactly like ours except for two details; and so forth. And also -- one must be completely unlike our world except for one detail; and so forth. The problem is always prediction; how to tell what world you are in before the Twisted World reveals it disastrously to you. In the Twisted World, as in any other, you are apt to discover yourself. But only in the Twisted World is that meeting usually fatal. Familiarity breeds shock -- in the Twisted World. The Twisted World may conveniently (but incorrectly) be thought of as a reversed world of Maya, of illusion. You may find that the shapes around you are real; while You, the examining consciousness, are illusion. Such a discovery is enlightening, albeit mortifying. A wise man once asked, "What would happen if I could enter the Twisted World without preconceptions?" A final answer to his question is impossible; but we would hazard that he would have some preconceptions by the time he came out. Lack of opinion is not armor. Some men feel that the height of intelligence is the discovery that all things may be reversed, and thereby become their opposites. Many clever games can be played with this proposition; but we do not advocate its use in the Twisted World. There all doctrines are equally arbitrary, including the doctrine of the arbitrariness of doctrines. Do not expect to outwit the Twisted World. It is bigger, mailer, longer and shorter than you. It does not prove. It is. Something which is never has to prove anything. All proofs are attempts at becoming. A proof is true only to itself; and it implies nothing except the existence of proofs -- which prove nothing. Anything which is, is improbable, since everything is extraneous, unnecessary and a threat to the reason. These comments concerning The Twisted World may have nothing to do with the Twisted World. The traveller is warned. -- From "The Inexorability of the Specious," by Ze Kraggash; from the Marvin Flynn Memorial Collection. r f, he transition was abrupt, and not at all what Marvin thought it would be. He had heard stories about the Twisted World, and had hazily expected to find a place of melting shapes and shifting colors, of grotesques and marvels. But he saw at once that his viewpoint had been romantic and limited. He was in a small waitingroom. The air was stuffy with sweat and steam heat, and he sat on a long wooden bench with several dozen other people. Boredlooking clerks strolled up and down, consulting papers, and occasionally calling for one of the waiting people. Then there would be a whispered conference. Sometimes a man would lose patience and leave. Sometimes a new applicant would arrive. Marvin waited, watched. Time passed slowly, the room grew shadowy, someone switched on overhead lights. Still no one called his name. Marvin glanced at the men on either side of him, bored rather than curious. The man on his left was very tall and cadaverous, with an inflamed boil on his neck where the collar rubbed. The man on his right was short and fat and redfaced, and he wheezed with every breath. "How much longer do you think it should take?" Marvin asked the fat man, more to pass the time than in a serious attempt to gain knowledge. "Long? How long?" the fat man said. "Damned long, that's how long it'll take. You can t hurry their goddamned majesties here in the Automobile Bureau, not even when all you want is to have a perfectly ordinary driver's license renewed, which is what I'm here for." The cadaverous man laughed: a sound like a stick of wood rapping against an empty gasoline can. "You'll wait a goddamned long time, baby," he said, "since you happen to be sitting in the Department of Welfare, Small Accounts Division." Marvin spat thoughtfully on the dusty floor and said, "It happens that both of you gentlemen are wrong. We are seated in the Department, in the anteroom of the Department, to be precise, of the Department of Fisheries, I was trying to say. And in my opinion it is a pretty state of affairs when a citizen and taxpayer cannot even go fishing in a tax-supported body of water without wasting half a day or more applying for a license." The three glared at each other. (There are no heroes in the Twisted World, damned few promises, a mere scattering of viewpoints, and not a conclusion in a carload.) f  'hey stared at each other with not particularly wild surmise. The cadaverous man began to bleed slightly from the fingertips. Marvin and the fat man frowned with embarrassment and affected not to notice. The cadaverous man jauntily thrust his offending hand into a waterproof pocket. A clerk came over to them. "Which of you is James Grinnell Starmacher?" the clerk asked. "That's me," Marvin replied. "And I want to say that I've been waiting here for some little time, and I think this Department is run in quite an inefficient fashion." "Yeah, well," the clerk said, "it's because we haven't got in the machines yet." He glanced at his papers. "You have made application for a corpse?" "That is correct," Marvin said. "And you affirm that said corpse will not be used for immoral purposes?" "I so affirm." "Kindly state your reasons for acquiring this corpse." "I wish to use it in a purely decorative capacity." "Your qualifications?" "I have studied interior decorating." "State the name andor identification code number of the most recent corpse obtained by you." "Cockroach," Marvin replied, "Brood number ##A#." "Killed by?" "Myself. I am licensed to kill all creatures not of my subspecies, with certain exceptions such as the golden eagle and the manates." "The purpose of your last killing?" "Ritual purification." "Request granted," the clerk said. "Choose your corpse." The fat man and the cadaverous man looked at him with wet, hopeful eyes. Marvin was tempted, but managed to resist. He turned and said to the clerk, "I choose you." "It shall be so noted," the clerk said, scribbling on his papers. His face changed to the face of the pseudo-Flynn. Marvin burrowed a cross-cut saw from the cadaverous man, and, with some difficulty, cut the clerk's right arm from his body. The clerk expired unctuously, his face changing once again to his clerk's face. The fat man laughed at Marvin's discomfiture. "A little transsubstantiality goes a long way," he sneered. "But not far enough, eh? Desire shapes flesh, but death is the final sculptor." Marvin was crying. The cadaverous man touched his arm in a kindly manner. "Don't take it so hard, kid. Symbolic revenge is better than no revenge at all. Your plan was good; its flaw was external to yourself. I am James Grinnell Starmacher." "I am a corpse," said the clerk's corpse. "Transposed revenge is better than no revenge." "I came here to renew my driving license," the fat man said. "To hell with all you deep thinkers, how about a little service?" "Certainly, sir," said the corpse of the clerk. "But in my present condition, I can license you only to fish for dead fish." "Dead, alive, what difference does it make?" the fat man said. "Fishing is the thing; it doesn't matter so much what you catch." He turned to Marvin, perhaps to amplify that statement. But Marvin had left. -- and, after an unpersuasive transition, found himself in a large, square, empty room. nphe walls were made of steel plates, and the ceiling was a hundred feet above his head. There were floodlights up there, and a glassed-in control booth. Peering at him through the glass was Kraggash. "Experiment #," Kraggash intoned crisply. "Subject; Death. Proposition: Can a human being be killed? Remarks: This question concerning the possible mortality of human beings has long perplexed our finest thinkers. A considerable folklore has sprung up around the subject of death, have been made throughout the ages. Furthermore, corpses have been brought forth from time to time, indubitably dead, and represented as the remains of human beings. Despite the ubiquity of these corpses, no casual link has ever been proven to show that they ever lived, much less that they were once human beings. Therefore, in an attempt to settle the question once and for all, we have set up the following experiment. Step one... A steel plate in the wall flew back on its hinge. Marvin whirled in time to see a spear thrust forth at him. He sidestepped, made clumsy by his lame foot, and evaded the thrust. More plates popped open. Knives, arrows' clubs, all were flung at him from various angles. A poison gas generator was pushed through an opening. A tangle of cobras was dropped into the room. A lion and a tank bounded forward. A blowgun hissed. Energy weapons crackled. Flamethrowers coughed. A mortar cleared its throat. Water flooded the room, rising quickly. Naptha fire poured down from the ceiling. But the fire burned the lions, which ate the snakes, which clogged the howitzers, which crushed the spears, which jammed the gas generator, which dissolved the water which quenched the fire. Marvin stood forth miraculously unscathed. He shook his fist at Kraggash, slipped on the steel plating, fell and broke his neck. He was afforded a military funeral with full honors. His widow died with him on the flaming pyre. Kraggash tried to follow, but was refused the solace of suttee. Marvin lay in the tomb for three days and three nights, during which time his nose dripped continuously. His entire life passed before his eyes in slowmotion. At the end of that time he arose and moved onward. 'Pphere were five objects of limited but undeniable sentience in a place with no qualities worth mentioning. One of these objects was, presumably, Marvin. The other four were lay figures, hastily sketched stereotypes designed for the sole purpose of adorning the primary situation. The problem confronting the five was, which of them was Marvin, and which were the unimportant background figures. First came a question of nomenclature. Three of the five wished to be called Marvin immediately, one wanted to be called Edgar Floyd Morrison, and one wished to be referred to as "unimportant background figure." This was quite obviously tendentious, and so they numbered themselves from one to four, the fifth stubbornly insisting upon being called Kelly. "All right, already," said Number One, who had already taken on officious air. "Gentlemen, could we maybe stop beating our gums and bring this meeting to order?" "A Jewish accent won't help you here," Number Three said darkly. "Look," said Number One, "what would a Polack know about Jewish accents? As it happens, I am Jewish only on my father's side, and although I esteem -- " "Where am I?" said Number Two. "My God, what happened to me? Ever since I left Stanhope... "Shut up, Wop," Number Four said. "My name-a not Wop, my name-a shesa Luigi," Number Two responded swarthily. "I bin two year in your greata country ever' since I leetle boy in village San Minestrone della Zuppa, nicht wahr?" "Sheet, man," Number Three said darkly. "You ain't no dagowop stall nohow, you ain't nuttin but jes' a plain ornary provisional background figure of limited flexibility; so suppose you jes shut you mout afore I do dat little ting for you, nicht wahr?" "Listen," said Number One, "I'm a simple man of simple tastes and if it'll help any I'll give up my rights to Marvinhood." "Memory, memory," muttered Number Two. "What has happened to me? Who are these apparitions, these talkative shades?" "Oh I say!" Kelly said. "That's really bad form, old man!" "Itsa pretty goddamn disingenuous," muttered Luigi. "Invocation is not convocation," said Number Three. "But I really don't remember," said Number Two. "So I don't remember so good neither," said Number One. "But do you hear me making a big thing of it? I'm not even claiming to be human. The mere fact that I can recite Leviticus by heart don't prove nothing." "Too right it doesn't!" shouted Luigi. "And disproof don't prove any flaming thing neither." "I thought you were supposed to be Italian," Kelly said to him. "I am, but I was raised in Australia. It's rather a strange story -- " "No stranger than mine," Kelly said. "Black Irishman do you call me? But few know that I passed my formative years in a Hangchow dosshouse, and that I enlisted in the Canadian army to escape French persecution for my part in aiding the Gaullists in Mauretania. That is why -- " "Zut, alors!" cried Number Four. "One can keep silence no longer! To question my credentials is one thing; to asperse my country is another!" "Yer indignation don't prove a thing!" Number Three cried. "Not that I really care, since I choose no longer to be Marvin." "Passive resistance is a form of aggression," Number Four responded. "Inadmissable evidence is still a form of evidence," Three retorted. "I don't know what any of you are talking about," Number Two declared. "Ignorance will get you nowhere," Number Four snarled. "I refuse categorically to be Marvin." "You can't give up what you haven't got," Kelly said archly. "I can give up anything I damned well want to!" Number Four cried passionately. "I not only give up my Marvinity; I also step down from the throne of Spain, yield up the dictatorship of the Inner Galaxy and renounce my salvation in Bah'ai." "Feel better now, kid? Simplification suits my intricate nature," Number Four said. "Which of you is Kelly?" "I am," Kelly said. "Do you realize," Luigi asked him, "that only you and I have names?" "That's true," Kelly said. "You and I are different!" "Here now, just a moment!" Number One said. "Time gentlemen, time, please!" "Hold the fort!" "Hold your water!" "Hold the phone!" "As I was saying," Luigi said. "We! Us! The Named Ones of the Proof Presumptive! Kelly -- you can be Marvin if I can be Kraggasli!" "Done!" roared Kelly, over the protests of the lay figures. Marvin and Kraggash grinned at each other in the momentary euphoria of identity-intoxication. Then they flung themselves at each other's throats. Manual strangulation followed. The three numbered ones, robbed of a birthright they had never possessed, took up conventional poses of stylized ambiguity. The two lettered ones, granted an identity they had seized anyhow, tore and bit at each other, flung forth defiant arias and cringed before devastating recitations. Number One watched until he grew bored, then began playing with a lap dissolve. That did it. The whole shooting works slid away like a greased pig on roller skates coming down a solid glass mountain, only slightly faster. Day succeeded night, which succeeded in making a perfect fool of itself. Plato wrote: "It ain't whatcha do, it's the way thatcha do it." Then, deciding that the world was not yet ready for this, he scrubbed it out. Hammurabi wrote: "The unexamined life is not worth living." But he wasn't sure it was true, so he scratched it out. Gautama Buddha wrote : "Brahmins stink." But later he revised it. hey... were... locked in titanic combat, which, since it had happened, was inevitable. Marvin smote Kraggash upon the breastbone, then smote him again upon the nose-bone. Kraggash promptly changed into Ireland, which Marvin invaded as a demi-legion of Danish berserkers, forcing Kraggash to attempt a kingside pawnstorm, which stood no chance against a low flush. Marvin reached for his opponent, missed and devastated Atlantis. Kraggash swung backhanded and slaughtered a gnat. Deadly the battle raged across the steaming swamps of the Miocene; a colony of termites mourned their queen as Kraggash cometed helplessly into Marvin's sun, fragmenting at last into countless militant spores. But Marvin unerringly picked the diamond from the glittering glass, and Kraggash fell back upon Gibraltar. His bastion fell in a night when Marvin kidnapped the barbary apes, and Kraggash speeded across southern Thrace with his body in a suitcase. He was seized at the frontier of Phthistia, a country which Marvin improvised. Weakening, Kraggash became evil; becoming evil, Kraggash grew weak. In vain he invented devil-worship. The followers of Marvinity bowed down not to the idol, but rather to the symbol. Evil, Kraggash turned nasty: dirt grew beneath his fingernails, noxious tufts of hair appeared on his soul. Helpless at last Kraggash lay, the incarnation of evil, with the body of Marvin clutched in his talon. Rites of exorcism induced his final agony. A buzz saw disguised as a prayer-wheel dismembered him, a mace masquerading as a censor brained him. Kindly old Father Flynn intoned over him the last words: "Thou gettest no bread with one meat ball." And Kraggash was put into a tomb hewn out of the living Kraggash. Appropriate graffiti were carved upon his tombstone, and flowering Kraggash was planted around his grave. It is a quiet spot. To the left is a grove of Kraggash trees, to the right is an oil refinery. Here is an empty beer can, here is a gypsy moth. And just beyond is the spot where Marvin opened the suitcase and took out his long-lost body. He blew the dust off it and combed its hair. He wiped its nose and straightened its tie. Then, with seemly reverence, he put it on. A nd thus Marvin Flynn found himself back on Earth and inside his own body. He went to his home town of Stanhope, and found things unchanged. The town was still some three hundred miles from New York in physical distance, and some hundred years away in spiritual and emotional distance. Just as before there were the orchards, and the clusters of brown cows grazing against the rolling green pastureland. Eternal was the elm-lined Main Street and the lonely late-night wail of a jetliner. No one asked Marvin where he had been. Not even his best friend, Billy Hake, who assumed he had taken a jaunt to one of the regular tourist spots like Sinkiang or the lower Ituri Rain Forest. At first, Marvin found this invincible stability as upsetting as he had ever found the tranpositions of Mindswap or the deformed conundrums of the Twisted World. Stability seemed exotic to him; he kept on waiting for it to fade away. But places like Stanhope do not fade, and boys like Marvin gradually lose their sense of enchantment and high purpose. Alone late at night in his attic room, Marvin often dreamed of Cathy. He still found it difficult to think of her as a special agent of the Planetary Vigilance Association. And yet, there had been a hint of officiousness in her manner, and a glint of the righteous prosecutor in her eyes. He loved her and would always mourn her loss; but he was more content to mourn her than to possess her. And, if the truth must be told, Marvin's eye had already been caught, or recaptured, by Marsha Baker, the demure and attractive young daughter of Edwin Marsh Baker, Stanhope's leading real estate dealer. Stanhope, if not the best of all possible worlds, was still the best world Marvin had seen. It was a place where you could live without things jumping out at you and you jumping out at things. No metaphoric deformation was possible in Stanhope; a cow looked exactly like a cow, and to call it anything else was unwarrantable poetic license. And so, undoubtedly : east, west, home's the best; and Marvin set himself the task of enjoyment of the familiar, which sentimental wise men say is the apex of human wisdom. His life was marred only by one or two small doubts. First and foremost was the question: How had he come back to Earth from the Twisted World? TT e did considerable research on this question, which was more ominous than it first seemed. He realized that nothing is impossible in the Twisted World, and that nothing is even improbable. There is causality in the Twisted World, but there is also non-causality. Nothing must be; nothing is necessary. Because of this, it was quite conceivable that the Twisted World had flung him back to Earth, showing its power by relinquishing its power over Marvin. That indeed seemed to be what had happened. But there was another, less pleasant alternative. This was expressed in the Doorham Propositions as follows : "Among the kingdoms of probability which the Twisted World sets forth, one must be exactly like our world, and another must be exactly like our world except for one detail, and another exactly like our world except for two details, and so forth." Which meant that he might still be on the Twisted World, and that this Earth which he perceived might be no more than a passing emanation, a fleeting moment of order in the fundamental chaos, destined to be dissolved at any moment back into the fundamental senselessness of the Twisted World. In a way it made no difference, since nothing is permanent except our illusions. But no one likes to have his illusions threatened, and Marvin wanted to know where he stood. Was he on Earth, or was he on a replica of Earth? Might there not be some significant detail inconsistent with the Earth he had left? Might there not be several details? Marvin tried to find out for the sake of his peace of mind. He explored Stanhope and its environs, looked and tested and checked the flora and fauna. Nothing seemed to be amiss. Life went on as usual; his father tended his herds of rats, and his mother placidly continued to lay eggs. He went north to Boston and New York, then further south to the vast Philadelphia-Los Angeles area. Everything seemed in order. He contemplated sailing east across the continent on the mighty Delaware River and continuing his search in the California cities of Schenectady, Milwaukee and Shanghai. He changed his mind, however, realizing that there was no sense in spending his life trying to discover whether or not he had a life to spend. Besides, there was the possibility that, even if the Earth were changed, his memory and perceptions might also be changed, rendering discovery impossible. T T e lay beneath Stanhope's  familiar green sky and considered this possibility. It seemed unlikely: for did not the giant oak trees still migrate each year to the south? Did not the huge red sun move across the sky, pursued by its dark companion? Did not the triple moons return each month with their new accumulation of comets? These familiar sights reassured him. Everything seemed to be as it always had been. And grace, Marvin accepted his world at face value, married Marsha Baker and lived forever      Next issue's lead story is called Do I Wake or Dream?, and it's by someone you've heard of before, ft is, in fact, by the man who wrote Dune World, Under Pressure and a goodly number of other recent, memorable sciencefiction stories, Frank Herbert. Although Herbert is no stranger to Galaxy, this is by all odds the longest story of his we've been able to publish; even longer than Robert Sheckley's Mindswap in the current issue, and we give you fair warning that it's going to crowd us in spite of Galaxy's largestnumber-of-pages-in-science-fiction. Still, that's the way we have to publish this particular story. It concerns a handful of people on a long-line trip to another star, in an experimental ship guided and operated by a computer. Or so it seems. But in fact the people are not exactly what you think; the trip is not precisely what they expect; and the computer -- Well, you'll see when you read it. Herbert has in doing so he has so arranged things that it would be distinctly unfair for us to split it up into a serial. Ergo -- complete in our next: Do  Wake or Dream? It will crowd us... but we think it's going to be worth it. Also for sure is Willy Ley's column (on giant stars) and Algis Budrys's books reviews. We've got some really first-rate novelettes in stock -- Cordwainer Smith, James Blish and Norman L. Knight, etc. -- and at least one of them will be with us, as well, no doubt, as an additional short or two; but just which remain to be seen. But it will be a good issue, we're pretty sure of that. In fact, from now on it's our personal opinion that they'll all be. They also serve who only stand and wait -- wait for a way out T he sandstorms had been worse than usual that day, rattling the window panes of the Central Office Building on the planet Dexter, and sifting all afternoon over the outlying settlement of prefabs. Sandstorms were the worst feature of a climate mostly far better then that of the other colonized planets in that part of tle universe, but generally they wre restricted to a brief afternoon flurry. On such bad days, however, they blew daylong. Eusk came early, and the whine o wind and sand, sweeping in fr-om the surrounding deserts, emphasized the loneliness and romoteness of the little outpost town. Paint rasped from houses. S and drifted in streets and gardens; leveling, reclaiming human habitation back into desert and alien space. Work habits and tempers snapped. Lights had gone on early in the Central Office. Most of the personnel had left. Jim Richards had been kept late, in a windhaunted lighted emptiness, to redo some sloppily compiled reports. His wife had called three times, mostly to complain about the weather. When she called again, to say she had forgotten to get his shirts from the laundry (probably closed now), and that it was time to take Miss Sissing to the bus, he blew up. "Why the hell didn't you get my shirts?" "I wasn't feeling welL" "So send Miss Sissing for the shirts. What're servants for? Or better yet, whyn't you drive her to the bus now, and get the shirts, too? Why does it always have to be me? I work all day. Do I have to run all the errands too?" "I'm not feeling well." "You never are." "It's the beginning of the servants' vacation today," she said, even more feebly. "She's got to be there." "So let her wait a few minutes. The bus doesn't leave for hours." "You know she's got to be there early." T Y e slammed down the phone, fully determined to let Miss Sissing wait, for once. All Dexter's servants went back, four times a year, to spend their vacations on Dexter's two moons. It was generally a time of inconvenience and bad temper. No. Let Miss Sissing wait. At this point, all the office fuses blew out. With no excuse to linger in the dark, he drove home. The dark, dust-scoured streets were empty and derelict, and the toy-like little houses with their neat, artificial gardens around them looked forlorn and shuttered. Most of the other servants had presumably already been taken to the bus station. He tried to dawdle further, but the little airpropelled car suddenly refused to work properly, except at high speeds; and he found himself at home, and then driving Miss Sissing to her bus, far sooner than he had intended. Beside her, driving through the dark streets, he was aware of her pinched, spinsterish profile; the straw hat jammed over a bun of graying hair, the faded eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles. A humanoid caricature. The private life of these alien beings was unimaginable to him. What did she do on vacation? Play croquet and read bad novels? he thought, hating equally her presence and her absence. There was no doubt the servants were a convenience. They were assigned to all the couples on the base, along with a pre-fabhouse and an air-car. Since most of the newly-wed wives, like Jim's, were sick much of the time with gravity and climate, the servants were often a necessity. Miss Sissing, in some ways, was ideal. An excellent cook and housekeeper. Unobtrusive. Well, not always, really. Not if, and when, during Jim's and Barbara's frequent quarrels, he was always aware of her presence. Scrimpy prim spinster! Bad as having a mother-in-law. He dropped Miss Sissing at the bus station, a big half-empty landing field on the edge of town. There was little traffic, except for the buses, and occasional ships that stopped in from other planets. Idling his car, he watched her climb out and join all the other servants, who were still filing into the huge bare barn-like airport at the end of the field, to wait for the departure of their flight. "Night, Mr. Richards." "Night, Miss Sissing," he said grudgingly. "See you next week." He had planned to by-pass the laundry all together, and say it had been closed (heaping coals on Barbara's head), and perhaps drop in instead on Mrs. Rapp. For a drink, at least. Mrs. Rapp's husband had been the one, of that couple, who had been unable to stand the climate. He had in fact died some months ago. Mrs. Rapp had been widely and discreetly consoled ever since. But just outside the laundry, the car's motor suddenly died. He got out. While he was staring at the hood, the laundryman recognized him and brought out his shirts. In the interim, a dark figure rang at Mrs. Rapp's house, two blocks away, and went in. Jim paid for his shirts and drove home instead. The car worked perfectly again. nphe servant problem was perhaps more urgently discussed on the planet Dexter than in most suburban communities. There was no question of firing bad servants. They came with the house. Though couples might graduate to other servants and other houses, and were generally in due time reassigned to another planet (Dexter was merely the first stage, or conditioning-ground, toward future assignments in space), they had no choice in servants so long as they stayed on Dexter. Since the matching of servantto-master often seemed not only arbitrary, but downright malicious, this arrangement caused much grumbling. "I understand the government's policy of wanting to hire the local lower-life forms, and thus give us some kind of economic welcome," Jim said. The usual servants'-vacation party had gathered in his house that evening. Barbara had pulled herself together sufficiently to put on a green wool dress and rhinestone earrings. She looked now to shunt his wrath onto Where it Belonged. "But why, for instance, condemn one to a Miss Sissing, the New England spinster of outer space? Why not at least give a choice of evils?" "You rather have something blonde, and... I know you." Barbara nudged him in the ribs, not too gently. "My Miss Minnie," Ellen Seitz stout, soft, beflowered self. "Oh, dear ,,... Always hurrying, she is. She answers the phone, and leaves chicken tracks for notes. You'd think the government'd give them a secretarial course before turning them loose on us. Such a bother that girl is. She makes me nervous." Big Herb Shannon said, "That ain't the worst. Wait'll your wife starts quoting your s as gospel. Miss Fallon said do this, Miss Fallon said do that. I can't even git in bed with my wife 'thout wonderin' what Miss Fallon'd say." He chuckled, with the deep rich Southern chuckle that particularly irritated Jim. It seemed rather studied, after twenty years on various planets far from North Carolina. But then, they all had a tendency to hang on to irritating little habits. Pieces of home, perhaps. His wife, Nancy, a plucked and haggard Southern belle of fifty, with sharp eyes, chewed her nails. The Shannons had never gotten away from Dexter for long. Something always happened; Herb took to drink, Nancy had a bout of nerves. His work went poorly. They never had children. And back they came, time and again. "Oh, you hush," she said to her husband. "Ah Miss Fallon's a jewel an' you know it. But Ah wish she could make a shortcake like youah Pearl, honey," she said to Edna Ransome. "Who also, and I happen to know, listens in on my phone conversations," Edna said sharply. Her earrings swung wildly as she turned. She and Nancy Shannon were among the few healthy wives on Dexter, having both been there long enough to adjust; and the only ones, therefore, with enough ragged nervous energy to be continuously in conflict. They enjoyed contradicting each other. "I don't know how she listens. Sometimes she's rooms away... I just know she does. Like once when George called to say he couldn't be on time to drive her to the bus. She got herself a ride with Mr. Hanson before I'd even told her what George said." "The help anywheah have an undahgroun' system of communication, honey," Mrs. Shannon said. Paul Baniff, the mineralogist, sat in the comer half-listening to this familiar conversation. The only scientist in a group composed mostly of minor officials and clerks, he regarded his present company with some detachment. It was always like this, when the servants left. An outburst of personalities and complaints. But nobody ever asked the real questions. "No," he said aloud, suddenly. "There is something spooky about them. About my Bessie, anyway. I'm sure she's been looking into my files. Why, I don't know. It's mostly routine technical reports... but it's an odd thing for a mere servant... T T e stopped abruptly, as if invisibly jerked. For a moment his eyes looked totally blank, then he slowly closed his mouth. The silence stretched uncomfortably. Then Nancy Shannon began chewing her nails; Ellen Seitz chewed her eyeglasses; Herb Shannon scratched his stomach. Barbara surreptiously scratched her shoulderblades beneath the green wool dress. Little Mrs. Nugent blinked her pink-rimmed eyes, and said: "My Ella is simply marvelous with the baby." It was almost the only baby on the planet, and the silence gave her an opportunity to talk about it, almost uninterruptedly, for fifteen minutes. The others listened, occupied with their own private tics. Paul Baniff watched glumly. "If I tell her the most complicated schedule... poor baby has feeding and teething problems, you know... Out in the kitchen, Jim Richards and Edna Ransome kissed fervently. "Naughty," she said, wiping lipstick off his face. Outside, Dexter's two moons swam down to rest below the horizon, and the big searchlights around the settlement snapped on: guardians against the dark jungles and waste lands. There was nothing very dangerous out there. Dexter had no native wildlife except plants, some of which were poisonous on contact, but none of which were perambulatory or predatory. The searchlights merely made the inhabitants feel safer at night. Distant illuminations, that lit the way between houses, or between bedrooms and bathrooms, and kept off the nightmare possibility of Something unexpectedly, stealthily, crossing the cleared strip between village and wilderness. With the night searchlights on, now, they felt it safe to go home. In a flurry of farewells and last drinks, Jim's and Barbara's guests left their cosy chairs and went back to bed. It would be the Shannon's turn to entertain the next night. None of them, except perhaps Paul Baniff, the only single man and scientist, could quite bear that stretch between end-of-work and searchlights-on alone. Or even in couples... "You didn't buy enough liquor," Barbara said when they had gone. "Hell, yes, I did. You're the one. Forgot to put enough crackers and stuff." "Didn't have enough to give Paul a third drink, even." "So what? You served the same lousy crackers you've served the last three times. If you can't think of something new, get Miss Sissing to think of something." 'I can get on all right without Miss Sissing." "You're drunk and shut up," he said. "I'm not, an' if you're so hot for Miss Sissing, whyn't you marry her instead? What you should've married is a servant, not a wife..." He hit her; she broke a glass throwing it at him. Then she cried, and he put her to bed. The other marital tiffs and conversations died out into sleep, throughout the colony. Beneath the vast alien stars, the searchlights turned their comforting beams. M iss Sissing entered the doors of the airlock, where she took off her uniform and waited. Decompression took time. Coming out, she was given a notebook, and then went into the big inner room where all the other servants were already sitting at desks, scribbling. She ran quickly down the report card, grading from I (Excellent) to # (failing, hesitating only occasionally: Marital relations # Relationship with others # Follow directions # Uses spare time constructively # -- Courteous in speech and manner -- with adults # with classmates # -- Observes school and group rules # -- After some thought, she added, under Comments, "Jim's relation to the group seems improved. He can articulate his own wants better, and his ability to listen to others has deepened. He still, however, has difficulty with personal relations, and takes badly to guidance, even from his wife. There is still a marked tendency to anti-social behavior, and to aggression generally. He is careless about his work habits, and his homework. Jim is basically normal, but for the time being we recommend that he be given further special treatment and that he not be promoted to the #st grade." She put down her pen, closed the notebook and then pulled her ear thoughtfully and yawned. Neither Miss Sissing's ear nor her mouth went back to shape after these gestures. They continued to puli and stretch, as did the mouths, ears, and faces of the other servants around tire room. She handed in her report with a hand that stretched until it became a tendril; and, turning to Paul Baniff's servant, who sat next to her, let a smile run wholly around her face until the face vanished into a knob topped, whimsically, by five eyes; running idly through several changes, as someone tired of holding an unnatural position for a long time may yawn and stretch. "I suppose," she said, from a mouth that had suddenly appeared from the tip of an antennae, "that you passed Paul." "Skipped him a grade," said what-had-been Bessie. "He's getting too hard to hold. After that remark about his desk tonight, I recommended that they move him tomorrow. When are they going to promote you, by the by?" "I may get #rd grade next time, if I'm lucky," said a voice from what remained of Miss Sissing's feet. "I've been going to night school. Any more of this kindergarten, and I'd be playing with blocks, too." All around the room, the sitting shapes stretched, yawned, grew, altered, until they each nearly reached the top of the huge building. Then, single file, they walked out of the building to the waiting space bus, where they were carried off until next term to Dexter's two moons, leaving their charges asleep in the gentle night-light of the search lights. The Biggest News in Science Fiction! At last! The last and greatest story in the most famous series ever to appear in a science-fiction magazine -- The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three , Skylark of Valeron and now Skylark DuQuesne.  by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. Starts in the June # If -- on sale now -- don't miss it! Most religions offer a way to heaven. The Vorsters gave a promise of going to the stars l I '"Inhere was chaos in the face of the earth, but to the man in the Nothing Chamber it did not matter. fought for their place in the sun. Skyscrapers shot heavenward like sprouting beanstalks. The Martians mocked. The Venusians spat. Nut-cults flourished, and in a thousand cells the Vorsters bowed low to their devilish blue glow. All of this, at the moment, was of no significance to Reynolds Kirby. He was out of it. He was the man in the Nothing Chamber The place of his repose was four thousand feet above the blue Caribbean, in his hundredthstory apartment on Tortola in the Virgin Islands. A man had to take his rest somewhere.Kirby, as a high official in the U.N., had the right to warmth and slumber, and a substantial chunk of his salary covered the overhead on his hideaway. The building was a tower of shining glass whose foundations drove deep into the heart of the island. One could not build a skyscraper like this on every Caribbean island; too many of them were flat disks of dead coral, lacking the subtons of dead weight. Tortola was different, a retired volcano, a submerged mountain. Here they could build, and here they had built. Reynolds Kirby slept the good sleep. Half an hour in a Nothing Chamber restored a man to vitality, draining the poisons of fatigue from his body and mind. Three hours in it left him limp, flaccid willed. A twenty-four hour stint could make any man a puppet. Kirby lay in a warm nutrient bath, ears plugged, eyes capped, feed-lines bringing air to his lungs. There was nothing like crawling back into the womb for a while when the world was too much with you. The minutes ticked by. Kirby did not think of Vorsters. Kirby did not think of Nat Weiner, the Martian. Kirby did not think of the esper girl, writhing in her bed of torment, whom he had seen in Kyoto last week. Kirby did not think. A voice purred, "Are you ready, Freeman Kirby?" Kirby was not ready. Who ever was? A man had to be driven from his Nothing Chamber by an angel with a flaming sword. The nutrient bath began to bubble out of the tank. Rubbercushioned metal fingers peeled the caps from his eyeballs. His ears were unplugged. Kirby lay shivering for a moment, expelled from the womb, resisting the return to reality. The chamber's cycle was complete; it could not be turned on again for twentyfour hours, and a good thing, too. "Did you sleep well, Freeman Kirby?" Kirby scowled rustily and clambered to his feet. Pie swayed, nearly lost his balance, but the robot servitor was there to steady him. Kirby caught a burnished arm and held it until the spasm passed. "I slept marvelously well," he told the metal creature. "It's a pity to return." r # "You don't mean that, Freeman. You know that the only true pleasure comes from an engagement with life. You said that to me yourself, Freeman Kirby." "I suppose I did," Kirby admitted drily. All of the robot's pious philosophy stemmed from things he had said. He accepted a robe from the squat, flat-faced thing and pulled it over his shoulders. He shivered again. Kirby was a lean man, too tall for his weight, with stringy, corded arms and legs, close-cropped gray hair, deep-set greenish eyes. He was forty, and looked fifty, and before climbing into the Nothing Chamber today he had felt about seventy. "When does the Martian arrive?" he asked. "Seventeen hours. He's at a banquet in San Juan right now, but he'll be along soon." "I can't wait," Kirby said. Moodily he moved to the nearest window and depolarized it. He looked down, way down, at the tranquil water lapping at the beach. He could see the dark line of the coral reef, green water on the hither side, deep blue water beyond. The reef was dead, of course. The delicate creatures who had built it could stand only so much motor fuel in their systems, and the level of tolerance had been passed quite some time ago. The skittering hydrofoils buzzing from island to island left a trail of murderous slime in their wake. nphe U.N. man closed his eyes. And opened them quickly, for when he lowered the lids there appeared on the screen of his brain the sight of that esper girl again, twisting, screaming, biting her knuckles, yellow skin flecked with gleaming beads of sweat. And the Vorster man standing by, waving that damned blue glow around, murmuring, "Peace, child, peace, you will soon be in harmony with the All." That had been last Thursday. This was probably the following Wednesday. She was in harmony with the All by now, Kirby thought, and an irreplaceable pool of genes had been scattered to the four winds. Or the seven winds. He was having trouble keeping his cliches straight these days. Seven seas, he thought. Four winds. The shadow of a copter crossed his line of sight. "Your guest is arriving," the robot declared. "Magnificient," Kirby said sourly. The news that the Martian was on hand set Kirby jangling with tension. He had been selected as the guide, mentor, and watchdog for the visitor from the Martian colony. A great deal depended on maintaining friendly relations with the Martians, for they represented markets vital to Earth's economy. They also represented vigor and drive, commodities currently in short supply on Earth. But they were also a headache to handle -- touchy, mercurial, unpredictable. Kirby knew that he had a big job on his hands. He had to keep the Martian out of harm's way, coddle him and cosset him, all without ever seeming patronizing or oversolicitous. And if Kirby bungled it, well, it could be costly to Earth and fatal to Kirby's own career. He opaqued the window again and hurried into his bedroom to change into robes of state. A clinging gray tunic, green foulard, boots of blue leather, gloves of gleaming golden mesh -- he looked every inch the important Earthside official by the time the annunciator clanged to inform him that Nathaniel Weiner of Mars had come to call. "Show him in," Kirby said. The door irised open and the Martian stepped nimbly through. He was a small, compact man in his early thirties, unnaturally wide-shouldered, with thin lips, jutting cheekbones, dark beady eyes. He looked physically powerful, as though he had spent his gravity of Jupiter, not romping in the airy effortlessness of Mars. He was deeply tanned, and a fine network of wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes. He looked aggressive, thought Kirby. He looked arrogant. C # TT'reeman Kirby, it's a pleas- ure to see you," the Martian said in a deep, rasping voice. "The honor is mine, Freeman Weiner." "Permit me," Weiner said. He drew his laser pistol. Kirby's robot scurried forward with the velvet cushion. The Martian placed the weapon carefully on the plush mound. The robot slid across the floor to bring the gun to Kirby. "Call me Nat," the Martian said. Kirby smiled thinly. He picked up the gun, resisted the insane temptation to ash the Martian on the spot, and briefly examined it. Then he replaced it on the cushion and flicked his hand at the robot, who carried it back to its owner. "My friends call me Ron," Kirby said. "Reynolds is a lousy first name." "Glad to know you, Ron. What's to drink?" Kirby was jarred by the breach of etiquette, but he maintained an equitable diplomatic mask. The Martian had been punctilious enough with his gun-ritual, but you'd expect that with any frontiersman; it didn't mean that his manners extended beyond that. Smoothly Kirby said, "Whatever you like, Nat. Synthetics, realies, you name it and it's here. What about a filtered rum?" "I've had so much rum I'm ready to puke it, Ron. Those gabogos in San Juan drink it like water. What about some decent whiskey?" "You dial it," Kirby said with a grand sweep of his hand. The robot picked up the console of the bar and carried it to the Martian. Weiner eyed the buttons a moment and stabbed almost at random, twice. "I'm ordering a double rye for you," Weiner announced. "And a double bourbon for me." Kirby found that amusing. The rude colonial was not only selecting his own drink but one for the host. Double rye, indeed! Kirby hid his wince and took the drink. Weiner slipped comfortably into a webfoam cradle. Kirby sat also. "How are you enjoying your visit to Earth?" Kirby asked. "Not bad. Not bad. Sickening the way you people are crammed together here, though." "It's the human condition." "Not on Mars it isn't. Not on Venus either." "Give it time," Kirby said. "I doubt it. We know how to regulate our population up there, Ron." "So do we. It just took us a while to get the idea across to everybody, and by that time hope to keep the rate of increase down." C C''ou know what?" Weiner  said. "You ought to take every tenth person and feed 'em to the converters. Get some good energy back out of all that meat. over-night." He chuckled. "Not serious. Wouldn't be ethical. Just a passing joke." Kirby smiled. "You aren't the first to suggest it, Nat. And some of the others were serious." "Discipline, that's the answer to every human problem. Discipline and more self-discipline. Denial. Planning. This whiskey is damned good, Ron. How about another round?" "Help yourself." Weiner did. Generously. "Damned fine stuff," he murmured. "We don't get drinks like this on Mars. Got to admit it, Ron. Crowded and stinking as this planet is, it's got comforts. I wouldn't want to live here, mind you, but I'm glad I came. The women -- mmmm! The drinks! The excitement!" no "You've been here two days?" Kirby asked. "That's right. One night in New York, ceremonies, banquet, all that garbage, sponsored by the Colonial Association. Then down to Washington to see the President. Nice old chap. Soft belly, though. Could stand some exercise. Then this idiot thing in San Juan, a day of hospitality, meeting the Puerto Rican comrades, that kind of junk. And now here. What's to do here, Ron?" "Well, we could go downstairs for a swim, first -- " "I can swim all I like on Mars. I wan! to see civilization, not water. Complexity." Weiner's eyes glowed. Kirby abruptly realized that the man had been drunk when he walked in, and that the two stiff jolts of bourbon had sent him into a fine glow of intoxication. "You know what I want to do, Kirby? I want to get out and grub in the dirt a little. I want to go to opium dens. I want to see espers have ecstasies. I want to take in a Vorster session. I want to live the life, Ron. I want to experience Earth -- muck and all!" II The Vorster hall was in a shabby, almost intolerably seedy old building in central Manhattan, practically within spitting distance of the U.N. buildings. Kirby felt queasy about entering it; he had never really conquered his uneasiness about slumming, even now when most of the world was one vast teeming slum. But Nat Weiner had commanded it, and so it must be. Kirby had brought him here because it was the only Vorster place he had visited before, and so he didn't feel too sharply out of place. The cult was an important new force in Earthly affairs, Kirby knew -- though he didn't know much more than that. Any religious or quasi-religious movement that could grow so swiftly had to be important. In a world increasingly fragmented and chaotic, the Vorsters obviously had something. The sign over the door said in glowing but splotchy letters; Weiner snickered at the sign. "Look at that! Heal your hearts! How's your heart, Kirby?" "Punctured in several places. Shall we go in?" "You bet we shall," Weiner said. The Martian was sloshingly drunk. He held his liquor well, Kirby had to admit. Through the long evening Kirby had not even tried to match the colonial envoy drink for drink, and yet he felt hazy and overheated. The tip of his nose prickled. He yearned to shake Weiner off and crawl back into the Nothing Chamber to get all this poison out of his system. But Weiner wanted to kick over the traces, and it was hard to blame him for that. Mars was a rough place, where there was no time for self-indulgence. Terraforming a planet took a maximum effort. The job was nearly done, now, after two generations of toil, and the air of Mars was sweet and clean, but no one was relaxing up there yet. Weiner was here to negotiate a trade agreement, but it was also his first chance to escape from the rigors of Martian life. The Sparta of space, they called it. And here he was in Athens. They entered the Vorster hall. I t was long and narrow, an oblong box of a room. A dozen rows of unpainted wooden benches ran from wall to wall, with a narrow aisle down one side. At the rear was the altar, glowing with the inevitable blue radiance. Behind it stood a tall, skeleton-thin man, bald, bearded. "Is that the priest?" Weiner whispered harshly. "I don't think they're called priests," said Kirby. "But he's in charge." "Do we take communion?" "Let's just watch," Kirby suggested. "Look at all these damn maniacs," the Martian said. "This is a very popular religious movement." "I don't get it." "Watch. Listen." "Down on their knees -- grovelling to that half-pint reactor -- " Heads were turning in their direction. Kirby sighed. He had no love for the Vorsters or their religion himself, but he was embarrassed at this boisterous desecration of their shrine. Most undiplomatically, he took Weiner's arm, guided the Martian into the nearest pew, and pulled him down into a kneeling position. Kirby knelt beside him. The Martian gave him an ugly glance. Colonists didn't like their bodies handled by strangers. A Venusian might have slashed at Kirby with his dagger for something like that. But, then, a Venusian wouldn't be here on Earth at all, let alone cutting capers in a Vorster hall. Suddenly, Weiner grabbed the rail and leaned forward to watch the service. Kirby squinted through the near darkness at the man behind the altar. The reactor was on, and glowing -- a cube of Cobalt-#, shielded by water, the dangerous radiations gobbled up before they could sear through flesh. In the darkness Kirby saw a faint blue glow, rising slowly in brightness, growing more intense. Now the lattice of the tiny reactor was masked in whitish-blue light, and around it swirled a weird greenish-blue glow that seemed almost purple at its core. It was the Blue Fire, the eerie cold light of the Cerenkov radiation, spreading outward to envelop the entire room. I t was nothing mystical, Kirby knew. Electrons were surging through that tank of water, moving at a velocity greater than light in that medium, and as they moved they hurled forth a stream of photons. There were neat equations to explain the source of the Blue Fire. Give the Vorsters credit: they didn't say it was anything supernatural. But it made a useful symbolic instrument, a focus for religious emotions, more colorful than a crucifix, more dramatic than the tables of the Law. The Vorster up front said quietly, "There is a Oneness from which all life stems. The infinite variety of the universe we owe to the motion of the electrons. Atoms meet; their particles entwine. Electrons leap from orbit to orbit and chemical changes are worked." "Listen to the pious bastard," Weiner snorted. "A chemistry lecture, yet!" Kirby bit his lip in anguish. A girl in the pew just in front of theirs turned round and said in a low, urgent voice, "Please. Please -- just listen." She was such a numbing sight that even Weiner was struck dumb for once. The Martian gasped in shock. Kirby, who had seen surgically altered women before, scarcely reacted at all. Iridescent cups covered the openings where her ears had been. An opal was mounted in the bone of her forehead. Her eyelids were of gleaming foil. The surgeons had done things to her nostrils, to her lips. Perhaps she had been in some terrible accident. More likely she had had herself maimed for cosmetic purposes. Madness. Madness. The Vorster said, "The energy of the sun -- the green life surging in plants -- the bursting wonder of growth -- for this we thank the electron. The enzymes of our body -- the sparking synapses of our brains -- the beating of our hearts -- for this we thank the electron. Fuel and food, light and heat, warmth and nourishment, everything and all, rising from the Oneness, rising from the Immanent Radiance -- " The thought stunned him. How had it stolen upon him? This was no religion. This was cultism, a wildfire movement, the latest fad, here today, gone toovernight? What of it? Tomorrow or the next day would come the newest prophet, exhorting the faithful to plunge their hands into a scintillation counter's sparkling bath, and the Vorster halls would be deserted. This was no rock. This was quicksand. And yet there had been that momentary pull -- Kirby tightened his lips. It was the strain, he thought, of shepherding this wild Martian around all evening. He didn't give a damn for the supernal Oneness. The underlying unity of all things meant nothing to him. This was a place for the tired, the neurotic, the novelty-hungry, for the kind of person who would cheerfully pay good money to have her ears cut off and her nostrils slit. It was a measure of his own desperation that he had been almost ready to join the communicants at the altar. He relaxed. And in the same moment Nat Weiner burst to his feet and went careening down the aisle. "Save me!" the Martian cried. "Heal my goddam soul! Show me the Oneness!" ( # T#" neel with us, brother," the A Worster leader said equably. "I'm a sinner!" Weiner howled. "I'm full of booze and corruption! I got to be saved! I embrace the electron! I yield!" Kirby hurried after him down the aisle. Was Weiner serious? The Martians were notorious for their resistance to any and all religious movements, including the established and legitimate ones. Had he somehow succumbed to that hellish blue glow? "Take the hands of your brethren," the leader murmured. "Bow your head and let the glow enfold you." Weiner looked to his left. The girl with the surgical alterations knelt beside him. She held out her hand. Four fingers of flesh, one of some turquoise-hued metal. "It's a monster!" Weiner shrieked. "Take it away! I won't let you cut me up!" "Be calm, brother -- " "You're a bunch of phonies! Phonies! Phonies! Phonies! Nothing but a pack of -- " Kirby got to him. He dug his fingertips into the ridged muscles of Weiner's back in a way that the Martian was likely to notice. In a low, intense voice Kirby said, "Let's go, Nat We're getting out of here." "Take your stinking hands off me, Earther!" "Nat, please -- this is a house of worship) -- " "This is a bughouse! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Look at them! Down on their knees like stinking maniacs!" Weiner struggled to his feet. His booming voice seemed to batter at the walls. "I'm a free man from Mars! I dug in the desert with these hands! I watched the oceans fill! What did any of you do? You cut your eyelids off and wallowed in muck! And you -- you fake priest, you take their money and love it!" The Martian grabbed the altar rail and vaulted over it, coming perilously close to the glowing reactor. He clawed at the towering, bearded Vorster. Calmly the cultist reached out and slipped one long arm through the pinwheeling chaos of Weiner's threshing limbs. He touched his fingertips to the Martian's throat for a fraction of a second. Weiner fell like a dead man. Ill (  it re you all right now?" Kirby asked, dry-throated. Weiner stirred. "Where's that girl?" "The one with the surgery?" "No," he rasped. "The esper. I want her near me again." Kirby glanced at the slender, blue-haired girl. She nodded tensely and took Weiner's hand. The Martian's face was bright with sweat and his eyes were still wild. He lay back, head propped on pillows, cheeks hollow. They were in a sniffer palace across the street from the Vorster hall. Kirby had had to carry the Martian out of the place himself, slung across his shoulders; the Vorsters did not let robots in. The sniffer palace seemed like as good a place as any to take him. The esper girl had come over to them as Kirby staggered into the place. She was a Vorster too -- the blue hair was the tip-off -- but apparently she had finished her worship for the day, and was topping things off with a quick inhalation. With instant sympathy she had bent to peer at Weiner's flushed, sweat-flecked face. She had asked Kirby if his friend had had a stroke. "I'm not sure what happened to him," Kirby said. "He was drunk and began trouble in the Vorster place. The leader of the service touched his throat." The girl smiled. She was waiflike, fragile, no more than eighteen, nineteen. Cursed with talent. She closed her eyes, took Weiner's hand, clutched the thick wrist until the Martian revived. Kirby did not know what she had done. All this was mystery to him. Now, strength flowing back into him visibly from moment to moment, Weiner tried to sit up. He seized the girl's hand and held it. She did not attempt to break free. He said, "What did they hit me with?" "It was a momentary alteration of your charge," the girl told him. "He turned off your heart and brain for a thousandth of a second. There will be no permanent damage." ( # it T ow'd he do it? He just touched me with his fingers." "There is a technique. But you'll be all right." Weiner eyed the girl. "You an esper? You reading my mind right now?" "I'm an esper, but I don't read minds. I'm just an empath. You're all churned up with hatred. Why don't you go back across the street? Ask him to forgive you. I know he will. Let him teach you. Have you read Vorst's book?" "Why don't you just go to hell?" Weiner said casually. "No, don't. You're too cute. We got some cute espers on Mars, too. You want some fun tonight? My name's Nat Weiner, and this is my friend, Ron Kirby. Reynolds Kirby. He's a stuffed shirt, but we can give him the slip." The Martian's grip on the slender arm grew tighter. "What do you say?" The girl didn't say anything. She simply frowned, and Weiner made a strange face and released her arm. Kirby, watching, had to repress a grin. Weiner was running into trouble all over the place. This was a complicated world. "Go across the street," the girl whispered. "They'll help you there." She turned without waiting for a reply, and faded into the dimness. Weiner passed a hand over his forehead as though brushing cobwebs from his brain. He struggled to his feet, ignoring Kirby's proffered arm. "What kind of place is this?" he asked. "A sniffer palace." "Will they preach to me here?" "They'll just fog your brain a little," said Kirby. "Want to try?" "Sure. I told you I wanted to try everything. I don't get a chance to come to Earth every day." Weiner grinned, but it was a somber grin. He didn't seem to have the bounce he had had an hour ago. Of course, getting knocked out by the Vorster had sobered him some. He was still game, though, ready to soak up all the sins this wicked planet had to offer. 'IT' irby wondered whether he was making as big a mess of this assignment as it seemed. There was no way of knowing -- not yet. Later, of course, Weiner might well protest the handling he had received, and Kirby might find himself abruptly transferred to less sensitive duties in the future. That was not a pleasant thought. He regarded his career as an important matter, perhaps the only important matter in his life. He did no want to wreck it in a night. They moved toward the sniffer booth. "Tell me," Weiner said. "Do those people really believe all that crap about the electron?" "I really don't know. I haven't made a study of it, Nat." "You've watched the movement appear. How many members does it have now?" "That's plenty. We only have Mars. If you've got this many joining this nutty cult -- " "There are lots of new religious sects on Earth today," Kirby said. "It's an apocalyptic time. People are hungry for reassurance. They feel the Earth's being left behind by the stream of events. So they look for a unity, for some way out of all the confusion and fragmentation." "Let them come to Mars if they want a unity. We got work for everybody, and no time to stew about the allness of it all." Weiner guffawed. "The hell with it. Tell me about this sniffer stuff." "Opium's out of fashion. We inhale the more exotic mercaptans. The hallucinations are said to be entertaining." "Said to be? Don't you know? Kirby, don't you have first-hand information about anything? You aren't even alive. You're just a zombie. A man needs some vices, Kirby." The U.N. man thought of the Nothing Chamber waiting for him in the lofty tower on balmy Tortola. His face was a stony mask. He said, "Some of us are too busy for vices. But this visit of yours is likely to be a great education for me, Nat. Have a sniff." A robot rolled up to them. Kirby clapped his right thumb against the lambent yellow plate set in the robot's chest. The light brightened as Kirby's print-pattern was recorded. "WeTi bill your Central," the robot said. Its voice was absurdly deep: pitch-troubles on the master tape, Kirby suspected. When the metal creature rolled away, it was listing a bit to starboard. Rusty in the gut, he figured. An even chance that he wouldn't be billed. T T e picked up a sniffer mask and handed it to Weiner, who sprawled out comfortably on the couch along the wall of the booth. Weiner donned it. Kirby took the other mask and slipped it over his nose and mouth. He closed his eyes and settled into the webfoam cradle near the booth's entrance. A moment passed; then he tasted the gas creeping into his nasal passages. It was a revolting sour-sweet smell, a sulphuric smell. Kirby waited for the hallucination. There were people who spent hours each day in these booths, he knew. The government kept raising the tax to discourage the sniffers, but they came anyway, even at ten, twenty, thirty dollars a sniff. The gas itself wasn't addictive, not in the metabolic way that heroin got to you. It was more of a psychological addiction, something you could break if you really tried, but which nobody cared to try to break: like the sex addiction, like mild alcoholism. For some it was a kind of religion. Everyone to his own creed; this was a crowded world, harboring many beliefs. A girl made of diamonds and emeralds was walking through Kirby's brain. The surgeons had cut away every scrap of living flesh on her body. Her eyeballs had the cold glitter of precious gems; her breasts were globes of white onyx tipped with ruby; her lips were slabs of alabaster; her hair was fashioned from strings of yellow gold. Blue fire flickered around her, Vorster fire, crackling strangely. She said, "You're tired, Ron. You need to get away from yourself." "I know. I'm using the Nothing Chamber every other day, now. I'm fighting off a crackup." "You're too rigid, that's your trouble. Why don't you visit my surgeon? Have yourself changed. Get rid of all that stupid meat. For this I say, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption." "No," Kirby muttered. "It isn't so. All I need is some rest. A good swim, sunshine, decent amount of sleep. But they dumped that mad Martian on me." f  "he hallucination laughed shrilly, rippled her arms, performed a sinuous convolution. They had sliced away fingers and replaced them with spikes of ivory. Her fingernails were of polished copper. The mischievous tongue that flicked out from between the alabaster lips was a serpent of gaudy flexiplast. "Behold," she crooned voluptuously, "I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." "In a moment," Kirby said. "In the twinkling of an eye. The trumpet shall sound." "And the dead shall be raised incorruptible. Do it, Ron. You'll look so much more handsome. Maybe you can hold the next marriage together a little better, too. You miss her, admit it. You ought to see what she looks like now. Full fathom five thy loved one lies. But she's happy. For this corruptible one must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality." "I'm a human being," Kirby protested. "I'm not going to turn myself into a walking museum piece like you. Or like her, for that matter. Even if it's becoming fashionable for men to have it done." The blue glow began to pulse and throb around the vision in his brain. "You need something, Ron. The Nothing Chamber isn't the answer. It's -- nothing. Affiliate yourself. Belong. Work isn't the answer either. Join. Join. You won't carve yourself? All right, become a Vorster. then. Surrender to the Oneness. Let death be swallowed up in victory." "Can't I just remain myself?" Kirby cried. "What you are isn't enough. Not now. Not any more. These are hard times. A troubled world. The Martians make fun of us. The Venusians despise us. We need new organization, new strength. The sting of death is in sin, and the strength of sin is the law. Grave, where is thy victory?" A riotous swirl of colors danced through Kirby's mind. The surgically altered woman pirouetted, leaped and bobbed, flaunted the jewel-bedecked flamboyance of herself in his face. Kirby quivered. He clawed fitfully at the mask. For this nightmare he had paid good money? How could people let themselves become addicts of this sort of thing -- this tour through the swamps of one's own mind? Kirby wrenched the sniffer mask away and threw it to the floor of the booth. He sucked clean air into his lungs, fluttered his eyes, returned to reality. He was alone in the booth. The Martian Weiner was gone. IV r T"he robot who ran the sniffer palace was of no help. "Where'd he go?" Kirby demanded. "He left," came the rusty reply. "Eighteen dollars sixty cents. We will bill your Central." "Did he say where he was going?" "We did not converse. He left. Awwwik! We did not converse. I will bill your Central. Awwwik!" Sputtering a curse, Kirby rushed out into the street. He glanced involuntarily at the sky. Against the darkness he saw the lemon-colored letters of the timeglow streaming in the firmament, irregularly splotched with red : Wednesday May # # Two hours to midnight. Plenty of time for that lunatic colonial to get himself in trouble. The last thing Kirby wanted was to have a drunken, perhaps hallucinated Weiner rampaging around in New York. This assignment hadn't entirely been one of rendering hospitality. Part of Kirby's job was to keep an eye on Weiner. Martians had come to Earth before. The libertarian society was a heady wine for them. Where had he gone? One place to look was the Vorster hall. Maybe Weiner had gone back to raise some more hell over there. With sweat bursting from every pore Kirby spirited across the street, dodging the rocketing teardrops as they turbined past, and rushed into the shabby cultist chapel. The service was still going on. It didn't seem as though Weiner were there, though. Everyone obediently knelt in his pew, and there were no shouts, no screams of boozy laughter. Kirby silently loped down the aisle, checking every bench. No Weiner. The girl with the surgical face was still there, and she smiled and stretched a hand toward him. For one bizarre moment Kirby was catapulted back into his sniffer hallucination, and his flesh crawled. Then he recovered himself. He managed a faint smile to be polite, and got out of the Vorster place as fast as he could. He caught the sidewalk and let it carry him three blocks in a random direction. No Weiner, Kirby got off and found himself in front of a public Nothing Chamber place, where for twenty bucks an hour you could get wafted off to luscious oblivion. Perhaps Weiner had wandered in there, eager to try every mindsapping diversion the city had to offer. Kirby went in. T obots weren't in charge here. A genuine flesh-and-blood entrepreneur came forward, a four-hundred-pounder, opulent with chins. Small eyes buried in fat regarded Kirby doubtfully. "Want an hour of rest, friend?" "I'm looking for a Martian," Kirby blurted. "About so high, big shoulders, sharp cheekbones." "Haven't seen him." "Look, maybe he's in one of your tanks. This is important. It's U.N. business." "I don't care if it's the business of God Almighty. I haven't seen him." The fat man glanced only briefly at Kirby's identification plaque. ,r What do you want me to do, open my tanks for you? He didn't come in here." "If he does, don't let him rent a chamber," Kirby begged. "Stall him and phone U.N. Security right away." "I got to rent him if he wants. We run a public hall here, buddy. You want to get me in trouble? Look, you're all worked up. Why don't you climb into a tank for a little while? It'll do wonders for you. You'll feel like -- " Kirby wheeled and ran out. There was nausea in the pit of his stomach, perhaps induced by the hallucinogen. There was also fright, and a goodly jolt of anger. He visualized Weiner clubbed in some dark alley, his stocky body expertly vivisected for the bootleg organ banks. A worthy fate, perhaps, but it would raise hob with Kirby's reliability rating. More likely was it that Weiner, bashing around like a Chinese bull -- was that the right simile, Kirby wondered? -- would stir up some kind of mess that would be blasphemously difficult to clean up. Kirby had no idea where to look. A communibooth presented itself on the corner of the next street, and he jumped in, opaquing the screens. He rammed his identification plaque into the slot and punched for U.N. Security. The cloudy little screen grew clear. The pudgy, bearded face of Lloyd Ridblom appeared. "Night squad," Ridblom said. "Hello, Ron. Where's your Martian?" "Lost him. He gave me the slip in a sniffer palace." Ridblom became instantly animated. "Want me to slap a televector on him?"   rather he didn't know we were upset about his disappearance. Put the vector on me, instead, and keep contact. And open up a routine net for him. If he shows, notify me right away. I'll call back in an hour to change the instructions if nothing's happened by then." "Maybe he's been kidnapped by Vorsters," Ridblom suggested. "They're draining his blood for altar wine." "Go to hell," Kirby said. He stepped out of the booth and put his thumbs briefly to his eyeballs. Slowly, purposelessly, he strolled toward the slidewalk and let it take him back to the Vorster hall. A few people were coming out of it, now. There was the girl with the iridescent earshells; she wasn't content to haunt his hallucinations, she had to keep intersecting his path in real life too. "Hello," she said. Her voice was gentle, at least. "I'm Vanna Marshak. Where's your friend?" "I'm wondering that myself. He vanished a little while ago." "Are you supposed to be in charge of him?" "I'm supposed to be watching him, at least. He's a Martian, you know." "I didn't. He's certainly hostile to the Brotherhood, isn't he? That was sad, the way he erupted during the service. He must be terribly ill." "Terribly drunk," Kirby said. "It happens to all the Martians that come here. The iron bars are lifted for them, and they think anything goes. Can I buy you a drink?" he added mechanically. "I don't drink, thanks. But I'll accompany you if you want one." "I don't want one. I need one." "You haven't told me your name." "Ron Kirby. I'm with the U.N. I'm a minor bureaucrat. No, I'll correct that: a major bureaucrat who gets paid like a minor one. We can go in here." He nudged the doorstud of a bar on the corner. The sphincter whickered open and admitted them. She smiled warmly. She was about thirty, Kirby guessed. Hard to tell, with all that hardware where the face used to be. "Filtered rum," he said. V anna Marshak leaned close to him. She wore some subtle and unfamiliar perfume. "Why did you bring him to the Brotherhood house?" she asked. He downed his drink as though it were fruit juice. "He wanted to see what the Vorsters were like. So I took him." "I take it you're unsympathetic personally?" "I don't have any real opinion. I've been too busy to pay much attention." "That's not true," she said easily. "You think it's a nutcult, don't you?" Kirby ordered a second drink. "All right," he admitted. "I do. It's a shallow opinion based on no real information at all." "You haven't read Vorst's book?" "No." "If I give you a copy, will you read it?" "Imagine," he said. "A proselyte with a heart of gold." He laughed He was feeling drunk again. "That isn't really very funny," she said. "You're hostile to surgical alterations too, aren't you?" "My wife had a complete facejob done. While she was still my wife. I got so angry about it that she left me. Three years ago. She's dead, now. She and her lover went down in a rocket crash off New Zealand." "I'm terribly sorry," Vanna Marshak said. "But I wouldn't have had this done to myself if I had known about Vorst then. I was uncertain. Insecure. Today I know where I'm heading -- but it's too late to have my real face back. It's rather attractive, I think, anyway." "Lovely," Kirby said. "Tell me about Vorst." "It's very simple. He wants to restore spiritual values in the world. He wants us all to become aware of our common nature and our higher goals." "Which we can express by watching Cerenkov radiation in rundown lofts," Kirby said. "The Blue Fire's just trimming. It's the inner message that counts. Vorst wants to see mankind go to the stars. He wants us to get out of our muddle and confusion and begin to mine our real talents. He wants to save the espers who are going insane every day, harness them, put them together to work for the next great step in human progress." "I see," said Kirby gravely. "Which is?" ttT told you. Going to the stars.S. You think we can stop with Mars and Venus? There are millions of planets out there. Waiting for man to find a way to reach them. Vorst thinks he knows that way. But it calls for a union of mental energies, a blending, a -- oh, I know this sounds mystical. But he's got something. And it heals the troubled soul, too. That's the short-range purpose: the communion, the binding-up of wounds. And the long-range goal is getting to the stars. Of course, we've got to overcome the frictions between the planets -- get the Martians to be more tolerant, and then somehow re-establish contact with the people on Venus, if there's anything human still left in them -- do you see that there are possibilities here, that it isn't mumbojumbo and fraud?" Kirby didn't see anything of the kind. It sounded hazy and incoherent to him. Vanna Marshak had a soft, persuasive voice, and there was an earnestness about her that made her appealing. He could even forgive her for what she had let the knife-wielders do to her face. But when it comes to Vorst -- The communicator in his pocket bleeped. It was a signal from Ridblom, and it meant call 'die office right away. Kirby got to his feet. "Excuse me a minute," he said. "Something important to tend to -- " He lurched across the barroom, caught himself, took a deep breath and got into the booth. Into the slot went the plaque; trembling fingers punched out the number. Ridblom appeared on the screen again. "We've found your boy," the pudgy Security man announced blandly. "Dead or alive?" "Alive, unfortunately. He's in Chicago. He stopped off at the Martian Consulate, borrowed a thousand dollars from the consul's wife, and tried to rape her in the bargain. She got rid of him and called the police, and they called me. We have a five-man tracer on him now. He's heading for a Vorster cell on Michigan Boulevard, and he's drunk as a lord. Should we intercept him?" T#"irby bit his lip in anguish. "No. No. He's got immunity, anyway. Let me handle. Is there a chopper in the U.N. port?" "Sure. But it'll take you at least forty minutes to get to Chi, and -- " "That's plenty of time. Here's what I want you to do: get hold of the prettiest esper you can find in Chicago, maybe an empath, some sexy kid, Oriental if possible, something like that one who had the burnout in Kyoto last week. Plunk her down between Weiner and that Vorster place and turn her loose on him. Have her charm him into submission. Have her stall him in any way possible until I can get there, and if she has to part with her honor in the process, tell her we'll give her a good price for it. If you can't find an esper get hold of a persuasive policewoman, or something." "I don't see why this is really necessary," Ridblom said. "The Vorsters can look out for themselves. I understand they've got some mysterious way of knocking a troublemaker out so that he doesn't -- " "I know, Lloyd. But Weiner's already been knocked out once this evening. For all I know, a second jolt of the same stuff tonight might kill him. That would be very awkward all around. Just head him off." Ridblom shrugged. "Thy will be done." Kirby left the booth. He was cold sober again. Vanna Marshak was sitting at the bar where he had left her. At this distance, and in this light, there was something almost pretty about her artificial disfigurements. She smiled. "Well?" "They found him. He got to Chicago somehow and he's about to raise some hell in the Vorster chapel there. I've got to go and lasso him." "Be gentle with him, Ron. He's a troubled man. He needs help." "Don't we all?" Kirby blinked suddenly. The thought of making the trip to Chicago alone struck him abruptly as being nasty. "Vanna?" he asked. "Yes?" "Are you going to be busy for the next couple of hours?" V r T'he copter hovered over Chicago's sparkling gaiety. Below, Kirby saw the bright sheen of Lake Michigan, and the splendid mile-high towers that lined the lake. Above him blazed the local timeglow in chartreue: Wednesday May # # "Put her down," Kirby ordered. The robopilot steered the copter toward a landing. It was impossible, of course, to risk the fierce wind currents in those deep canyons; they would have to land at a rooftop heliport. The landing was smooth. Kirby and Vanna rushed out. She had given him the Vorster message all the way from Manhattan, and at this point Kirby wasn't sure whether the cult was complete nonsense or some sinister conspiracy against the general welfare or a truly profound spiritually uplifting creed, or perhaps a bit of all three. He thought he had the general idea. Vorst had cobbled together an eclectic religion, borrowing the confessional from Catholicism, absorbing some of the atheism of ur-Buddhism, adding a dose of Hindu reincarnation, and larding everything over with ultramodernistic trappings, nuclear reactors at every altar and plenty of gabble about the holy electron. But there was also talk of harnessing the minds of espers to power a stardrive, of a communion even of non-esper minds, and -- most startling of all, the big selling point -- personal immortality, not reincarnation, not the hope of Nirvana, but eternal life in the here and now present flesh. In view of Earth's population problems, immortality was low on any sane man's priority list. Immortality for other people, to consider the extension of one's own life, wasn't one? Vorst preached the eternal life of the body, and the people were buying. In eight years, the cult had gone from one cell to a thousand, The old religions were bankrupt. Vorst was handing out shining gold pieces, and if they were only fool's gold it would take a while for the faithful to find that out. The copter touched down. "Come on," Kirby said. "There isn't much time." H e scrambled down the exit ramp, turning to take Vanna Marshak's hand and help her the last few steps. They hurried across the rooftop landing area to the gravshaft, stepped in, dropped to ground level in a dizzying five-second plunge. Local police were waiting in the street. They had three teardrops. "He's a block from the Vorster place, Freeman Kirby," one of the policemen said. "The esper's been dragging him around for half an hour, but he's dead set on going there." "What does he want there?" Kirby asked. "He wants the reactor. He says he's going to take it back to Mars and put it to some worthwhile use." Vanna gasped at the blasphemy. Kirby shrugged, sat back, watched the streets flashing by. The teardrop halted. Kirby saw the Martian across the street. The girl who was with him was sultry, fullbodied, lush looking. She had one arm thrust through his, and she was close to Weiner's side, cooing in his ear. Weiner laughed harshly and turned to her, pulled her close, then pushed her away. She clutched at him again. It was quite a scene, Kirby thought. The street had been cleared. Local police and a couple of Ridblom's men were watching grimly from the sidelines. Kirby went forward and gestured to the girl. She sensed instantly who he was, withdrew her arm from Weiner, and stepped away. The Martian swung round. "Found me, did you?" "I didn't want you to do anythink you'd regret later on." "Very loyal of you, Kirby. Well, as long as you're here, you can be my accomplice. I'm on my way to the Vorster place. They're wasting good fissionables in those reactors. You distract the priest, and I'm going to grab the blue blinker, and we'll all live happily ever after. Just don't let him shock you. That isn't fun." "Nat -- " "Are you with me or aren't you, pal?" Weiner pointed toward the chapel, diagonally across the street a block away, in a building almost as shabby as the one in Manhattan He started toward it. Kirby glanced uncertainly at Vanna. Then he crossed the street behind Weiner. He realized that the altered girl was following, too. J ust as Weiner reached the entrance to the Vorster place, Vanna dashed forward and cut in front of him. "Wait," she said. "Don't go in there to make trouble." "Get out of my way, you phony-faced bitch!" "Please," she said softly. "You're a troubled man. You aren't in harmony with yourself, let alone with the world around you. Come inside with me, and let me show you how to pray. There's much for you to gain in there. If you'd only open your mind, open your heart -- instead of standing there so smug in your hatred, in your drunken Weiner hit her. It was a backhand slap across the face. Surgical alteration jobs are fragile, and they aren't meant to be slapped. Vanna fell to her knees, whimpering, and pressed her hands over her face. She still blocked the Martian's way. Weiner drew his foot back as though he was going to kick her, and that was when Reynolds Kirby forgot he was paid to be a diplomat. Kirby strode forward, caught Weiner by the elbow, swung him around. The Martian was off balance. He clawed at Kirby for support. Kirby struck his hand down, brought a fist up, landed it solidly in Weiner's muscular belly. Weiner made a small oofing sound and began to rock backward. Kirby had not struck a human being in anger in thirty years, and he did not realize until that moment what a savage pleasure there could be in something so primordial. Adrenalin flooded his body. He hit Weiner again, just below the heart. The Martian, looking very surprised, sagged and went over backward, sprawling in the street, a blank expression on his face. "Get up," Kirby said, almost dizzy with rage. Vanna plucked at his sleeve. "Don't hit him again," she murmured. Her metallic lips looked crumpled. Her cheeks glistened with fears. "Please don't hit him any more." Weiner remained where he was, shaking his head vaguely. A new figure came forward : a small leathery-faced man, in late middle age. The Martian consul. Kirby felt his belly chum with apprehension. f I 'he consul said, "I'm terribly sorry, Freeman Kirby. He's really been running amok, hasn't he? Well, we'll take jurisdiction now. What he needs is to have some of his own people tell him what a fool he's been." Kirby stammered, "It was my fault. I lost sight of him. He shouldn't be blamed. He -- " "We understand perfectly Freeman Kirby." The consul smiled benignly, gestured, nodded as three aides came forward and gathered the fallen Weiner into their arms. Very suddenly the street was empty. Kirby stood, drained and stupefied, in front of the Vorster chapel, and Vanna was with him, and all the others were gone, Weiner vanishing like an ogre in a bad dream. It had not, Kirby thought, been a very successful evening. But now it was over. Home, now. An hour and a half would see him in Tortola. A quick, lonely swim in the warm ocean -- then half an hour in the Nothing Chamber tomorrow. No, an hour, Kirby decided. It would take that much to undo this night's damage. An hour of disassociation, an hour of drifting on the amniotic tide, sheltered, warm, unbothered by the pressures of the world, an hour of blissful if cowardly escape. Fine. Wonderful. Vanna said, "Will you come in, now?" "Into the chapel?" "Yes. Please." "It's late. I'll get you back to New York right away. We'll pay for any repairs that -- that your face will need. The copter's waiting. "Let it wait," Vanna said. "Come inside." "I want to get home." "Home can wait too. Give me two hours with you, Ron. Just sit and listen to what they have to say in there. Come to the altar with me. You don't have to do anything but listen. It'll relax you, I promise that." Kirby stared at her distorted, artificial face. Beneath the grotesque eyelids were real eyes -- shining, imoloring. Why was she so eager? Did they pay a finder's fee of salvation for every lost soul dragged into the Blue Fire? Or could it be, Kirby wondered, that she really and truly believed, that her heart and soul were bound up in this movement, that she was sincere in her conviction that the followers of Vorst would live through eternity, would, live to see men ride to the distant stars? e was so very tired. He wondered how the security officers of the Secretariat would regard it if a high official like himself began to dabble in Vorsterism. He wondered, too, if he had any career at all left to salvage, after tonight's fiasco with the Martian. What was there to lose? He could rest for a while in there. His head was splitting. Perhaps some esper in there would massage his frontal lobes for a while. Espers tended to be drawn to the Vorster chapels, didn't they? The place seemed to have a pull. He had made his job his religion, but was that really good enough, he asked himself now? The sign over the door said: "Will you?" Vanna said. "All right," Kirby muttered. with the All." She took his hand. They stepped through the door. About a dozen people were kneeling in the pews. Up front, the chapel leader was nudging the moderator rods out of the little reactor, and the first faint bluish glow was beginning to suffuse the room. Vanna guided Kirby into the last row. He looked toward the altar. The glow was deepening, casting a strange radiance on the plump, dogged-looking man at the front of the room. Now greenish-white, now purplish, now the Blue Fire of the Vorsters. The opium of the masses, Kirby thought, and the hackneyed phrase sounded foolishly cynical as it echoed through his brain. What was the Nothing Chamber, after all, but the opium of the elite? And the sniffer palaces, what were they? At least here they went for the mind and soul, not for the body. "My brothers," said the man at the altar in a soft, fog-smooth voice, "we celebrate the underlying Oneness here. Man and woman, star and stone, tree and bird, all consist of atoms, and those atoms contain particles moving at wondrous speeds. They are the electrons, my brothers. They show us the way to peace -- " Reynolds Kirby bowed his head. He could not bear to look at that glowing reactor, suddenly. There was a throbbing in his skull. He was distantly aware of Vanna beside him, smiling, warm, close. Fm listening, Kirby thought. Go on. Tell me! Tell me! I want to hear. God and the almighty electron help me, I want to hear! T OF I Think of a man -- and think he's much like you -- Who cups like gems in memory's hand the stars And maybe says: "This one that blazes blue Shone down -- near crisped me! -- on the Canis wars. I was decorated: medal and three scars. Next came this yellow, Procyon; by its light I spent some gritty months in desert cars, Drank up my pay and hoped there'd be no fight. "And then to Pollux; not so bright, but warm; Just like the girl I met there -- comfort, though. Can get damned dull. My dress whites were the charm That kept her, and I shed them; shed her so. A merchant ticket hauled me, come and go, A dozen times round Castor and Capella. Castor's this green one: dazzled on the snow That slipped me up and cracked my fool patella. "I thought I liked it dirtside; learned to gamble The one sure way to win -- got paid to deal. And that got dull. I took a little amble To this one, arc-blue Regulus, to feel Once more the thrum and urge of driven steel. Sudden I hated day-star never changing And suns at night held all to one round wheel. I knew for me there'd be no life but ranging." Think then of such a man, who gems his thought With Mizar's emerald, Vega's diamond gleam, Arcturus' topaz: wealth he's fairly bought With nothing less than heartblood. Let him seem Grown old, with darting eyes whose corners teem Wrinkles to laugh like dawn or weep like dew: Hell-tested, Heaven blest: he lives his dream. Think such a man. And think he might be you. for your information  duty last year and took and transmitted so many pictures of an area in the Mare nubium (the Sea of Clouds) that this area has been dubbed Mare cognitum, (the "known sea") since then. By the time you read this, the first of a series of "lunar orbiters" is being readied for a trip to the moon. It, and its successors, will go into a tight orbit around the moon for picture-taking purposes with the specific goal of finding a landing area for the Apollo astronauts. Somewhere along the line a Surveyor spacecraft will be soft landed on the moon to transmit a panorama of the lunar landscape around the motionless device. A few years later men will do the actual on-site exploring. And then? Everybody is agreed on a number of fundamental thoughts, goals and conclusions. Of course the first landing will be followed by others, there will be a base on the moon -- or rather a minimum of two, one speaking Russian, the other English -- and there is also agreement that the main purpose of the lunar base will be research : chemistry, crystallography, electronics, metallurgy, biology and last, but by no means least, astronomy. Building an observatory on the moon will be a curious turnabout. After having done what we could with telescopes, Ranger flights, Surveyor landings and manned landings to explore the moon, the moon itself will be utilized for further astronomical exploration. Of course it is difficult to imagine a better location for an astronomical observatory than a place on the lunar surface. Since the atmosphere is negligible (at most of a density of ##, #th of ours at sea level) the seeing will be perfect all the time, not only during the two-week night, but also all day long. Only two rather small areas of the sky will not be accessible; namely the area occupied by the sun and its corona and the one occupied by the earth. But any astronomer will know in advance where the sun and the earth are going to be. Because of the lack of an atmosphere an object just above the horizon can be observed just as well as one near the zenith. And since the moon is a negligible distance from the earth, as cosmic distances go, the fixed stars will be in the customary places, existing charts can, therefore, be used without making any change at all. To make the picture even more attractive, the moon does not move fast in its orbit (# mile per second) and it needs a whole month to turn on its axis. This means that the apparent motion of fixed stars and of extragalactic objects across the lunar sky is quite slow. Any object can be kept in the field of view for an endless time ; we can start dreaming right now about what a #hour exposure of the Andromeda galaxy may show. longer you look at all the possible advantages the more it becomes clear that an astronomical observatory on the moon will be something very much worth having. Just for the sake of completeness I would like to add that this is not a new idea to astronomers. The two lunar observers Wilhelm Beer and Heinrich von Madler who had completed a #-foot chart of the moon in #, published a book explaining the features on their chart in #. In that book they included a short section on the advantages of an astronomical observatory on the moon! If the first lunar observatory is officially opened in # -- a reasonable estimate -- # years will have gone by between first dream and reality. During the latter part of these fourteen decades astronomy added to itself another branch, namely radio astronomy, something even Beer and von Madler did not dream about. There is a reason for bringing up radio astronomy even before the discussion is really underway. It is because the type of instrument used may determine the choice of locations for the observatory. Beer and von Madler had said that the lunar observatory should be on the moon's farside, so that earthlight would not interfere. They still thought that the moon had a reasonably dense atmosphere, much less dense than ours, of course, but still dense enough to make the sky light if a strongly luminous body, like the sun or the earth, was overhead. We now know better; what there is of a lunar atmosphere will not produce any optical effects. In fact an observatory using normal telescopes and astronomical cameras should be located on the lunar hemisphere visible from earth for ease in communications. But when it comes to radio astronomy the earth does interfere; not the planet itself, but the activities of its inhabitants. More and more wave bands have to be utilized for communication of all kinds and the volume of radio transmissions into and from space is bound to increase sharply. Communications satellites will be in action, weather watching satellites will send a steady stream of information to the ground, navigational satellites will broadcast their position when requested by navigators at sea. There will be all kinds of special devices, manned orbiting laboratories and so forth, in various orbits around the earth, all of them broadcasting and receiving. One worried radio astronomer has already gone on record as saying that his special branch of science will be blotted out a decade from now. But the other side of the moon is a perfect refuge for radio astronomers, since the bulk of the moon will protect their instruments from all the man-made radio noises so that they will be able to study radio noise coming in from deep space. T ot quite forty years ago some body in Germany -- probably Max Valier, but I am not sure -- sold an article on the advantages of a lunar observatory to a German weekly magazine. Since this was an illustrated family magazine the article had to have a picture to go with it and a staff artist was called in to do the job. The picture showed a magnificently rocky lunar landscape with tall and steep mountains and on one of the mountain tops there was the observatory, with three cupolas of different sizes, and three telescopes showing in the cupola slots, all three looking in the same direction. I'll admit freely that I don't know just what the lunar observatory will look like, but I know it won't look like that illustration. To begin with it will not be on a mountain top. On earth you build observatories on high mountains to have as much of the troublesome atmosphere as possible below. On the moon the favored site for an observatory would be one where the observer had a clear view down to the horizon in all directions. Since the horizon on the moon is much closer to the observer than on earth this is not a very difficult demand, the center of any large flat-floored crater will do. To an observer in the center of Archimedes, for example, the horizon would appear unmarred since even the ringwall of the crater itself would be below the horizon. On earth the cupola has the purpose of protecting the expensive instrument from the elements, rain, hail, snow and sometimes wind-blown dust and sand. On the moon protection is needed from the steady infall of micrometeorites, but it probably won't take the shape of the customary cupola. When it comes to the instrument itself the layman is apt to visualize something large and impressive, possibly a big reflecting telescope like the #-inch reflector of the Kitt Peak National Observatory not far from Tucson, or at least a #-inch refractor like that of the Lick Observatory. The answer to such ideas is a plain "no" and the reason is weight. But it may be useful to explain the two main types of optical telescopes first. The instrument astronomers call a refractor is a very large spyglass, a tube holding two lenses or rather lens systems. The purpose of the tube is two-fold; it carries the main lens at its outer end and it also keeps out stray light. Since the main lens is heavy the tube carrying it must be very strong and is heavy too, for that reason. Things are a little bit better in the case of the reflector where the main optical element is a carefully ground mirror. The mirror is located at the lower end of the tube. Since all large modern reflectors are housed in cupolas the tube does not need to keep out stray light and is, therefore, usually a lattice construction and no longer a tube in the proper meaning of the word. nphe largest refractor ever built -- with one exception that will be discussed below -- is the #-inch refractor of the Yerkes observatory, next largest is the #-inch of the Lick Observatory. The #-inch of the Paris Observatory at Meudon holds third place. Largest of the reflectors is, of course, the #-inch on Palomar Mountain, with the #-inch of Lick Observatory and the #inch on Mt. Wilson in second and third places. The customary question whether a refractor or a reflector is "better" has no short answer; Fig. #. Two possible orbits tor communication satellites around the moon. it would be like asking whether a Diesel engine or a gasoline engine is "better". It depends on the job, plus other factors. At the present state of technology we can build #-inch, #-inch reflectors, but we could not build refractors with corresponding lens diameters. The point to keep in mind, in general, as well as with specific reference to the lunar observatory, is that a larger telescope does not only produce a larger magnification. The main thing is that a larger lens, or mirror, has a larger light gathering power and can therefore reveal the existence of very faint objects, as for example very distant galaxies. In layman's language this is usually expressed by saying that the bigger telescope can "see farther" which is correct only insofar that a very faint galaxy is likely to be much farther away than a fairly bright galaxy. The light gathering ability and the resolution (alias magnification) do not increase at the same rate as the diameter of the lens or mirror increases. The resolution increases in proportion to the diameter. Hence the #-inch reflector on Palomar Mountain has a resolution twice as good as the #-inch on Mt. Wilson. But the light gathering ability increases with the square of the diameter. Therefore the #-inch can gather four times as much light as the #-inch. Hence the targets of the #-inch, and of the #-inch too, are usually distant galaxies. For observing Jupiter, which is bright enough, a much smaller instrument is very nearly as good as these giants. But now I cannot hold back any more on the problem of weight and I feel obliged to give advance warning that things will look quite bleak for a few paragraphs to come. npo begin with a historical example: Lord Rosse's "giant of Parsonstown" a # #inch reflector, had a total weight of # pounds. Its tube, made of sturdy wood and strengthened with iron hoops, alone weighed # pounds. Oh well, that was a century ago. We can build lighter now. Well, maybe we build better, but not lighter. The Kitt Peak #-inch reflector has an overall weight of # tons, without the foundation, that is. Lick's #-inch is estimated to weigh # tons (just the instrument and mounting) while the Palomar #-inch has a weight of # tons, the mirror alone weighs #J tons -- the glass disk before grinding weighed in at # tons. Nor can any comfort be derived from the weights of the bigger radio telescopes. Harvard's George R. Agassiz radio telescope near Cambridge has a #-foot dish weighing # pounds (being of extra light construction) but the total weight is # pounds. The Navy's #-foot radio telescope of Maryland Point Observatory has a total weight of # pounds, the dish alone weighs # pounds. And Great Britain's Jordell Bank radio telescope is not only the biggest fully steerable radio telescope in existence, it is also exceptionally heavy: the #-foot dish weighs # tons and the whole moveable structure adds up to # tons. Of course I am well aware of the fact that under the moon's lesser gravity less metal will provide the same structural strength A radio telescope of the same dimensions as the one at Jodrell Bank might have # tons earth weight (and weigh only # tons on the moon), but this weight would have to be lifted out of the atmosphere against the earth's gravitational pull and would then have to be soft-landed on the moon. And while a radio telescope could still be transported in pieces that could be designed with the weight carrying capacity of the then existing rockets in mind, any optical telescope has one piece that has to be transported as a whole: the mirror in the case of a reflector and the main lens in the case of a refractor. And the weight of a mirror or lens could not be reduced very much, even for use on the moon. Are we then limited to #-inch and #-inch telescopes for the lunar observatory? Not necessarily, because at one time in the past a refractor of an even larger size than the #-inch of Yerkes Observatory was built along unconventional lines. It is usually not mentioned in astronomical books for two reasons: it never did any scientific work and it was dismantled only a few years after it had been built. I t was the #-inch refractor that could be seen at the Paris Universal Exhibition of #. At the time the French considered themselves the leading nation in the manufacture of precision optical instruments. Of course when this claim was made Americans tended to mutter "Alvin G. Clark" and Germans said "Carl Zeiss", but these old rivalries are by now a thing of the past. At any event the Palais de FOptique at the Paris Exhibition was to have a very large telescope. Since the biggest instrument up to that time had been Lord Rosse's reflector -- inactive since # -- a three-meter (circa #-inch) reflector was considered first, but facilities for casting a glass disk of such size simply did not exist, not in France and not anywhere else on our planet. But an #-inch disk for a mirror could be cast, and a #-inch disk for a lens. These two facilities were combined for the #inch refractor. Since the main lens was expected to weigh close to a ton no attempts at normal mounting were made. The lens was mounted at the front end of a #-foot steel tube which was resting on the ground horizontally. The eye piece and plate holders for photographic plates, #-inches square, were in a small wheeled cart connected to the steel tube by bellows like those of an oversized camera. For focussing purposes this cart could be moved as much as five feet, its wheel resting on a short section of narrow gauge railroad track. In order to reflect starlight into the telescope a #inch thick plane mirror, with a diameter of # inches, was set 'into a vertical fork mounting. The disappointing performance of the instrument was not due to poor optics but had other reasons. No provision had been made for ventilating the steel tube properly so that the air inside the tube was probably quite humid. But the main reason was the location of the instrument; from the point of view of the observing astronomer it was undoubtedly the worst location possible. It was not many feet above sea level, on fair grounds where hundreds of searchlights were operated on and off, and near a very large city which must have been much smokier in # than it is now. Still, this type of telescope might be the thing to use on the moon. The heaviest part that would have to be transported would be the main lens, and if we have a #-inch lens in mind that means a weight (uncrated) of around # pounds. The plane mirror for reflecting starlight into the telescope could be much lighter than the one used in # and would weigh less than the main lens. Instead of using a horizontal #-inch steel tube one could drill a horizontal, or even slanting, #-inch tube through a convenient rock formation. Housing the eye piece and photographic equipment in a separate car would solve the problem of breathing for the observer. With any conventional telescope one would have the problem of either enclosing the whole telescope in an underground room with breathable air, or else exposing the whole telescope to the vacuum of the lunar surface and having the observer in a spacesuit. Neither sounds like an optimal solution, but if a telescope of that type were used, the tunnel in the rock could be a vacuum while the observers are in their enclosed cabin with an airlock to the interior of the lunar base. T'virect observation, which was the rule in the past, is now pretty much the exception and used mainly for work on other planets. Practically everything else is photographic work and if an astronomical camera is used, it can well be operated by a man in a spacesuit since his main jobs would be to aim the camera and to change plates. And astronomical cameras, fortunately, are much lighter than astronomical telescopes. Harvard's "Super Schmidt" meteor camera at Las Cruces is an #-inch camera with a total weight of # pounds. Redesigning such a camera for use on the moon could eliminate a good percentage of this weight, possibly as much as # percent. It must also be kept in mind that so far nobody had tried to design light large scale astronomical equipment, all the efforts to eliminate weight have gone into small portable telescopes. But how about reflectors with a lightweight mirror? The mirror does not have to be glass, as is the case with the #-inch and its smaller rivals. The reason why instrument makers went speculum metal mirrors to glass mirrors which were silvered (and later aluminized) was purely practical. The chemical action of the atmosphere slowly reduces the reflectivity of the mirror. Partly it is straight oxidation, partly the action of gases which are not frequent in the atmosphere, but often present, for example sulphur dioxide that is released not only by industry but by volcanoes, too. If a speculum metal mirror grew dim, it meant repolishing, which is at the very least tedious work. If a silvered or aluminized glass mirror grows dim, the glass disk is simply resilvered. But on the moon there is no atmosphere which causes trouble via unwanted chemical reactions. Could we produce an all aluminum mirror of little weight and with a diameter of, say, # inches? Of course lightweight parabolic mirrors of a diameter of # to # feet exist for various purposes, but they are not accurate enough for astronomical use. Again since no work in this direction has been carried out, we don't know whether it can be done or not. It would be a development project which might not even be very expensive. T)efore we look at the backside of the moon and the radio telescope station we might think quickly about a likely location for the visual observatory. My own suggestion is the large half crater with the beautiful name of Sinus itidum (Bay of Rainbows) at the northern edge of the Mare imbrium. There the horizon would be as smooth as it is on earth a hundred miles from the nearest shoreline at sea. Moreover, the ground would not get too hot. Most people "know" that the noonday temperature on the moon is near the boiling point of water. This information is correct, but it holds true only near the lunar equator. In the area of Sinus iridum the noonday temperature of the ground will be around # Fahrenheit. The night temperature will be as low as anywhere else, an estimated # Fahrenheit below zero, but at least the daytime temperatures do not climb as high as they do at the equator. An observatory in the center of the Sinus iridum would have a location which would correspond more or less to an observatory near Paris or Vienna as far as the astronomical view is concerned. It would be excellent for the northern stars, but would not do so well for the southern stars. The lunar equivalent of a Cape Town Observatory would be located in Clavius. It looks as if we had a choice between two observatories in two different locations or of braving the daytime heat of the equator, which would not be too difficult to beat by digging in. But two observatories seem to be a better answer just because of the workload that will indubitably descend on them. Instrument time is tightly apportioned in terrestrial observatories, and trying to observe the whole sky from just one observatory is likely to demand the impossible. Let us now consider the radio telescope on the farside of the moon. Like its optical counterpart it should be well away from the lunar equator and for the same reason. And as for its construction we have a "prototype" on earth right now: the Arecibo radio telescope which has the largest antenna dish of all, namely # feet in diameter, and weighs less per square foot than any other radio telescope, mainly because it is also, in a manner of speaking, lying flat on the ground. In its construction a natural hollow in the ground was utilized. It was not "lined with wiremesh" as one can read occasionally, but the wire mesh was suspended across the hollow in such a manner that it has the proper curved surface. The wire mesh is supported by cables to which ballast bars are tied. The ballast bars, by their weight, change the curve which a suspended cable would form naturally into a segment of a sphere. F or those who are surprised at the mention of wire mesh for the "reflector" I hasten to explain that a reflector for radio waves does not have to be a continuous surface, even though some of the smaller dishes have been made of sheet metal. It is all a question of the wavelength you are dealing with. The reflecting mirror of an optical telescope would still be opticalof tiny holes, provided that the size of each hole is less than l#th of the wavelength reflected. Since the waves of visible light are so short, this is only a point of theoretical information. But if you deal with # centimeter (circa # inch) radiowaves, holes of I centimeter in diameter are permissible, hence wire mesh can be used. Theoretically the spaces between the wires in the Arecibo telescope would have to be smaller than # centimeters and the deviation of the shape of the net has the same limit. For the radio waves to be received this is a "smooth" mirror. In reality the spacing of the wires at Arecibo is only # centimeters and the error in shape is at most # centimeters. Incidentally the Arecibo telescope can be operated as a pure radio telescope, just receiving waves that come from space, or else it can be operated as a radar telescope, sending out pulses of radio waves and catching their reflections. The structure where the radio waves are received and the radar impulses are transmitted is suspended on cables # feet above the large bowl. Of course a radio telescope of this type is not as versatile as the fully steerable Jodrell Bank equipment, but for weight reasons the radio telescope on the moon will have to be of that type. One more problem needs to be discussed. The distance between the two observatories is likely to be on the order of # miles. They have to communicate with each other and possibly also with some research outposts in other distant areas of the moon. The most practicable and also the cheapest way of doing it will be by moon-orbiting communications satellite. But because the moon's gravitational field is weak, a moon-orbiting satellite travels slowly. A satellite needing two hours to complete one orbit would be # miles above sea level in the case of the earth, the two-hour orbit for the moon is only # miles above its surface. And because of the moon's curvature it will be visible only along a rather narrow lane on the ground. It would help a little if the communications satellite were placed in a polar orbit. But a much larger orbit (see Fig. #) would be preferable. A communications satellite in a #-hour orbit would be visible, and therefore "'cable, for several hours at a time -- if it is visible from both observatories simultaneously there could be "live" communication. Otherwise storage tapes would have to be used. But a satellite in such an orbit would move much faster in the "periselenion" (closest to the moon) sector of its orbit than in the opposite, the "aposelenion" sector. This fact can be utilized in the following manner: the orbit of the communications satellite could be tilted in such a way that aposelenion is vertically above the half way point of the line connecting the two observatories. In that case the communications satellite would be above the horizon for both observatories for about # hours and would be below the horizon for one of them, or both, for only # hours. The astronomical observatory on the moon about which Beer and von Madler dreamed more than a century ago will become reality long before the current century draws to a close. But it will look quite differently from the terrestrial shape these two observers probably had in mind. by Donald H. Menzel TV Ty good friend, Willy Ley, has pointed out the usefulness of a manned observatory on the surface of the moon. We agree completely on the excellence of a lunar site, with clear, black skies by day as well as by night. The stars stand steady and untwinkling in this airless, waterless world. I do not agree with Willy Ley, however, concerning the types of telescopes to be used in this observatory, the operation of such telescopes, their location on tire surface of the moon, or the specific programs that one would use the instruments for. First of all, with reference to tire location of a radio telescope, I am not altogether convinced that the best location would be on the far side of the moon. True, such a location would be free from man-made radio noise of terrestrial origin. But this is not likely to be particularly troublesome. One must not overlook the advantages of direct communication from earth to moon that would result from an observatory located on the side turned toward the earth. In any event, we must weigh the disadvantages of having the earth available to help us in certain radio experiments. Today astronomers find the moon a big help, as it moves over this or that radio source, hiding it from view. The earth could be similarly used for a moon-based telescope. It could give us important information, for example, about the spatial distribution of radio sources on the sun or within the solar atmosphere, during those times when the earth eclipses the sun. In my opinion, the advantages of an optical observatory on the moon are even mort spectacular than those for radio astronomy. Here, Willy Ley and I concur that the observatory should be located on the earthward hemisphere. The moon's orbital velocity is irrelevant. We correct for the moon's rotation, slow though it is, by means of telescopic controls similar to those on earth True the long lunar day (or night), lasting # earthly days, would permit long exposures on certain faint objects. But the most obvious advantage to a moon-based observatory would be our ability to study the structure of the universe in light of the wavelengths that fail to penetrate the earth's atmosphere, light or energy that we would describe as far ultraviolet, or even X-rays. For such a purpose man clearly needs a reflecting telescope, not a refractor. Glass absorbs the ultraviolet light -- hence no one would ever consider building a major refractor, as Willy Ley suggests. I disagree completely when he states that today we cannot build lighter telescopes, even though we may build better ones. The basic problem is not the gravitational field of the earth, although that enters indirectly, but the gravitational field of the moon where the instrument ultimately has to operate. We have built mirrors that are much lighter than the solid glass mirrors used for the Palomar giant. A relatively thin layer of quartz melted on top of a much thicker, but stable, layer of foamed quartz gives a very rigid mirror. The weight of the mirror is a small part of the weight of the telescope as a whole. We could most certainly send to the moon a #-inch mirror or larger. But in the low gravitational field of the moon, the mirror and its supporting telescope will be subject to only one-sixth of the gravitational field of the earth. Distortions will be correspondingly less and easier to control. The telescope can be much lighter in consequence. Willy Ley seems to be concerned that the astronomer might experience difficulties operating in a vacuum. As a matter of fact, electronic receivers would carry the image from the telescope itself to underground, pressured chambers where the observer could operate in comfort. Remote control would enable him to perform all of the necessary telescope operations. In this way, we should have the enormous advantage of high resolution of a large telescope, in addition to its light-gathering power. I might mention here that the telescope I have described could not possibly function for X-ray astronomy. The X-ray telescope would look something like a giant insect's eye, an enormous honeycomb of tiny cells turning around in space to measure the intensities of cosmic X-rays coming from different directions of space. Electronic detectors would record the information. Such detectors have already been sent up into space by Dr. Herbert Friedman and his collaborators at the U. S. Naval laboratory. There they have detected Xrays emitted by various kinds of astronomical bodies. Such studies are extremely important. Willy Ley suggests that temperature considerations would indicate a preference for the location of either a radio or optical observatory at some distance from the lunar equator. The temperature of the equipment would, beyond doubt, get pretty high near the equator, if the instrument were not shielded in some way or other. I think that a very simple screen could be devised to put the instrument completely in shadow, to protect it from the sun's rays. Alternatively, one could certainly cool the instrument by circulating some fluid through it, as we do today in many industrial plants. However, if one decides to move away from the equator, for one reason or another I should most certainly recommend that the first lunar telescope be placed in the southern hemisphere, not in the northern. This is because the most interesting and significant part of our stellar universe, which such a telescope would study, lies in the southern hemisphere. Certainly Sinus Iridium would be a good location for the second moon-based optical telescope. I question very much whether the first lunar radio telescope should resemble in any way the Arecibo horizontal dish. The low gravity of the moon should make particularly desirable the construction of at least a partially steerable dish and that is what I would most certainly recommend. In any event, such a permanent dish, located far from the equator, would not be able to study the sun or the planets of the solar system. Indeed, the choice of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, as the site for the big dish was largely dictated by astronomical considerations. Finally, I should most certainly recommend that, if a radio telescope is to be built on the moon, it be located close to the optical telescope. I mention this not only to simplify the communication system, whose complexity Willy Ley elaborates, but to simplify the whole problem of logistics of a moon-based scientific station. However, despite our disagreement on details, Willy Ley and I agree completely that such an observatory will become an eventuality within the next three or four decades. I wish, moreover, to emphasize the knowledge to be gained from such an observatory and associated scienU r tific programs will contribute greatly to our understanding of the origin and ultimate destiny of our universe. by Robert S. Richardson T'here is one aspect to this business of putting an observatory on the Moon that has me worried. What are the astronomers on Luna going to use as a subject for conversation? Astronomers are not the sort of people who have a large fund of small talk. They consist mostly of grim, taciturn individuals with a gloomy outlook on life. Conversation often languishes when they gather around the dinner table at their mountaintop observatory. But there is one subject that always interests them: What is the seeing? The seeing, of course, refers to the appearance of the image in the telescope as affected by atmospheric conditions. If the seeing is bad they grumble about their luck and swear that somebody up there hates them. If the seeing is good they perk up momentarily. Now on the Moon they will always have "Seeing #" -- perfect! In fact, there won't really be any seeing. What a horrible situation. A bunch of astronomers with nothing to complain about! It is impossible for a person without telescopic experience to appreciate the extent that astronomers are handicapped by the atmosphere. A physicist or chemist works in the laboratory where conditions are under their control. But an astronomer is completely at the mercy of his environment. It is not just a clear sky that he needs. After a storm the sky may be crystal clear. But the air is so turbulent the stars are twinkling like mad. Which means that in the telescope they will be jumping all over the place. Sometimes a star will explode right in your eye! And the bigger the telescope the more adversely is it affected by seeing. There are scarcely two dozen nights in the year when a telescope like the #-inch Hale can approach the full extent of its optical power. (Curiously enough the seeing is usually improved by smoke and haze. Possibly the smoke particles reduce turbulence by loading the atmosphere. E. E. Barnard said the best view of Venus he ever had was when the sky over the Lick Observatory was brown from a forest fire.) Even on those all too rare nights when the seeing is good the atmosphere is still an obstade. For it prevents about # per cent of the light of a star from reaching the telescope. Worse still... this is the # per cent that contains some of the most valuable information about the sun and stars. Beginning in the ultraviolet at wavelength #A, the spectrum begins to weaken and at #A is gone completely, due to absorption in the ozonosphere. Further absorption due to molecules and atoms of oxygen and nitrogen continues into the X-ray region. Only recently has this "rocket ultraviolet" region become accessible to exploration. But on the airless surface of the Moon we would get all the radiation of the celestial bodies. The stars would be hard unwinking points of light set in a sky never stained by clouds. Exposure times on stellar spectra should be drastically reduced. When the seeing is bad the image of your star is dancing around on the polished face of the slit jaws instead of going into the s lit where you want it. Direct photography will also be benefited. The light in a star image will be concentrated in a tiny point on the emulsion instead of being spread over an area to form a spot. For work on the Moon the best type of optical telescope would seem to be the reflector, Approximate position of site selected for the lunar base by Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. It is near the center of the lunar face in the highlands just south of the at # E long., # N lat. (crater nearest bottom of photo), (notice that E and W here do not conform to the usual convention on lunar maps.) This would not necessarily be the site of a lunar observatory. as the reflector or mirror type of telescope can be made so much larger than the refractor or lens type. Also, the reflector is such a versatile sort of instrument compared with the refractor. Furthermore, a refractor would bring you right back to all the disadvantages of observing through the atmosphere in the violet and ultraviolet, since glass begins to absorb strongly around #A. All work in the ultraviolet has to be done with mirror systems and concave grating spectrographs. The trouble with a refractor is that you can't do anything but look through it. But astronomers never look into a telescope any more except to focus it and make sure they're set on the right object. There are very few astronomers today who are experienced visual observers, of the caliber of such greats as Schiaparelli and Antonia #i and Lowell. The only ones I can think of at the moment are Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, and Audouin Dollfus of the Meudon Observatory. At least six different people have picked out as many different sites for the lunar base. The most extensive investigation on this important problem has been made by John W. Salisbury and Charles F. Campen, Jr., of the Air Force Cambridge Research Research Notes No. #, Project #, October, #.) After a review of all the material they recommend that "location of the lunar base in the highlands would be permissible because the discontinuous layers of the rubble, rock flour and meteoric material overlying the fractured basement rock would not present a collapse hazard. The maria, on the other hand, are considered to bear near-surface cavities probably twice the size of those predicted under the volcanic theory. This added collapse hazard, when compared to the negligible collapse hazard of the highlands, makes the highlands a more favorable site for base location, and such a site is advocated in this report." In particular "... considering the probable lunar structure, surface characteristics and natural resources, it appears that the lunar base should be located in the highlands near a rille, but not near a recent large crater such as Copernicus or Kepler. Also, bearing in mind astronomical, guidance and propulsion requirements, for a base near the equator and in the center of the lunar face, a location in the highlands just south of the Hyginus Rille, near the crater Agrippa (#E long., #N lat.), is provisionally proposed for the lunar base." When it comes to making astronomical observations on the Moon we are reminded of the famous statement Lincoln made about establishing confidence with the public. At one of the poles of the Moon you can observe half the stars all of the time; at the lunar equator you can observe all of the stars half of the time; but there is no place on the Moon where you can observe all of the stars all of the time. One thing we can say: it is absolutely essential to have two lunar observatories located # apart. As seen from the north pole of the Moon the stars would appear to move in circles around a point in the zenith near the faint star # Draconis, which for want of a better object will have to serve as the North Star of the Moon. For the north polar observatory the astronomers would never be able to study stars south of the ecliptic such as Sirius, Antares or Rigel. At the south lunar pole the stars would circle around a point at the zenith near the #th magnitude star Delta Mensae. The South Star would probably be Canopus, the next brightest star to Sirius, although it is about # from the south celestial pole. From the south polar observatory the astronomers would never be able to study stars north of the ecliptic such as Capella, Vega or Arcturus. From either observatory the Sun, Earth and planets would always be near the horizon and only visible intermittently. If the two observatories were located # apart along the lunar equator, each would see half the celestial sphere at any instant. As on the Earth, the stars would rise in the east and set in the west, only their diurnal motion would be much slower, the Moon requiring # days to make a complete rotation relative to the stars. The Earth, Sun and planets would pass close to the zenith. The Sun would move even more deliberately than the stars, taking nearly # days to pass across the sky and set below the western horizon. To a casual observer the Earth would be a huge bluish globe hanging nearly motionless in the sky, although careful observation would show that it swings through an angle of about # to the east and to the west, and over a total distance of about # in a northsouth direction. Although the Earth would scarcely seem to move relative to the lunar landscape, a few hours' watching would reveal that it is moving fairly rapidly relative to the stars, passing over an angular distance equal to its width in # hours. This apparent motion of the Earth, of course, is due to the revolution of the Moon around it. If for some reason it is desirable to have the Earth in view of both observatories at all times they should be located on the equator between longitudes # E end # W. But it would probably be advantageous to have a radio telescope located on the Jar side of the Moon, where it would be shielded from manmade interference. The position of a star on the celestial sphere is designated by its right ascension and declination. The right ascensions and declinations of the stars change continually owing to a conical motion of the Earth's axis in space called precession. The direction of the north celestial pole is not fixed but describes a circle of #. # in radius in a period of # years. Right now the north celestial pole is near Alpha Ursae Minoris, the star at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. But by A.D. # the direction of the north pole will have shifted so that Alpha Cephei will be our Polaris, and around A.D. # this distinction will fall to the bright star Vega. This precessional motion of the Earth is so slow that it only needs to be taken into account in rather precise work If you wanted to set on a star tonight, and you only had its position for #, you could probably find it without bothering to bring its right ascension and declination up to date. But not on the Moon you couldn't. The axis of the Moon also describes a circle in space with a radius of only #.#, instead of #. # as in the case of the Earth. But the lunar axis precesses much faster, making a revolution in #J# years instead of # years. As a result, lunar right ascensions would change at a terrific rate. There would be no trouble in calculating them as the problem is thoroughly understood. It would just mean a little more work for the staff at the Naval Observatory. A lunar astronomical observatory has a tremendous potential. We have only touched upon a few of its major advantages. Now if the lunar astronomers can just find something to talk about... When we meet the races whose planets orbit the hundred and chemistry -- but what will their minds be like? Read by Tom Purdom In May Worlds of Tomorrow -- plus many other stories and articles -- on sale now! The machine was built for one deadly mission -- a war against its own hind! A If urdock sped across the Great Western Road Plain. High above him the sun was a fiery yo-yo as he took the innumerable hillocks and rises of the Plain at better than a hundred-sixty miles an hour. He did not slow for anything, and Jenny's hidden eyes spotted all the rocks and potholes before they came to them, and she carefully adjusted their course, sometimes without his even detecting the subtle movements of the steering column beneath his hands. Even through the dark-tinted windshield and the thick goggles he wore, the glare from the fused Plain burnt into his eyes, so that at times it seemed as if he were steering a very fast boat through moon, and that he was cutting his way across a lake of silver fire. Tall dust waves rose in his wake, hung in the air, and after a time settled once more. "You are wearing yourself out," said the radio, "sitting there clutching the wheel that way, squinting ahead. Why don't you try to get some rest? Let me fog the shields. Go to sleep and leave the driving to me." "No," he said. "I want it this way." "All right," said Jenny. "I just thought I would ask." "Thanks." About a minute later the radio began playing -- it was a soft, stringy sort of music. "Cut that out!" "Sorry, boss. Thought it might relax you." "When I need relaxing, I'll tell you." "Check, Sam. Sorry." The silence seemed oppressive after its brief interruption. She was a good car though Murdock knew that. She was always concerned with his welfare, and she was anxious to get on with his quest. She was made to look like a carefree Swinger sedan: bright red, gaudy, fast. But there were rockets under the bulges of her hood, and two fifty-caliber muzzles lurked just out of sight in the recesses beneath her headlamps; she wore a belt of five and tensecond timed grenades across her belly: and in her trunk was a spraytank containing a highly volatile naphthalic...For his Jenny was a specially designed deathcar, built for him by the Archengineer of the Geeyem Dynasty, far to the East, and all the cunning of that great artificer had gone into her construction. tC'IX'e'll find it this time, Jen'  ny," he said, "and I didn't mean to snap at you like I did." "That's all right, Sam," said the delicate voice, "I am programmed to understand you." They roared on across the Great Plain and the sun fell away to the west. All night and all day they had searched, and Murdock was tired. The last Fuel StopRest Stop Fortress seemed so long ago, so far back Murdock leaned forward and his eyes closed. The windows slowly darkened into complete opacity. The seat belt crept higher and drew him back away from the wheel. Then the seat gradually leaned backwards until he was reclining on a level plane. The heater came on as the night approached, later. The seat shook him awake a little before five in the morning. "Wake up, Sam! Wake up!" "What is it?" he mumbled. "I picked up a broadcast twenty minutes ago. There was a recent car-raid out this way. I changed course immediately, and we are almost there." "Why didn't you get me up right away?" "You needed the sleep, and there was nothing you could do but get tense and nervous." "Okay, you're probably right. Tell me about the raid." "Six vehicles, proceeding westward, were apparently ambushed by an undetermined number of wild cars sometime last night. The Patrol Copter was reporting it from above the scene and I listened in. All the vehicles were stripped and drained and their brains were smashed, and their passengers were all apparently killed too. There were no signs of movement." "How far is it now?" "Another two or three minutes." The windshields came clear once more, and Murdock stared as far ahead throuh the night as the powerful lamps could cut. "I see something," he said, after a few moments. "This is the place," said Jenny, and she began to slow down. They drew up beside the ravaged cars. His seat belt unsnapped and the door sprang open on his side. "Circle around, Jenny," he said, "and look for heat tracks. I won't be long." r T"he door slammed and Jenny moved away from him. He snapped on his pocket torch and moved toward the wrecked vehicles. The Plain was like a sandstrewn dance floor -- hard and gritty -- beneath his feet. There were many skid-marks, and a spaghetti-work of tire tracks lay all about the area. A dead man sat behind the wheel of the first car. His neck was obviously broken. The smashed watch on his wrist said #:#. There were three persons -- two women and a young man -- lying about forty feet away. They had been run down as they tried to flee from their assaulted vehicles. Murdock moved on, inspected the others. All six cars were upright. Most of the damage was to their bodies. The tires and wheels had been removed from all of them, as well as essential portions of their engines; the gas tanks stood open, siphoned empty; the spare tires were gone from the sprung trunks. There were no living passengers. Jenny pulled up beside him and her door opened. "Sam," she said, "pull the brain leads on that blue car, the third one back. It's still drawing some energy from an auxiliary battery, and I can hear it broadcasting." "Okay." Murdock went back and tore the leads free. He returned tc Jenny and climbed into the driver's seat. "Did you find anything?" "Some traces, heading northwest." "Follow them." The door slammed and Jenny turned in that direction. They drove for about five minutes in silence. Then Jenny said: "There were eight cars in that convoy." "What?" "I just heard it on the news. Apparently two of the cars communicated with the wild ones on an off-band. They threw in with them. They gave away their location and turned on the others at the time of the attack." "What about their passengers?" "They probably monoed them before they joined the pack." Murdock lit a cigarette, his hands shaking. "Jenny, what makes a car run wild?" he asked. "Never knowing where it will get its next fueling -- or being sure of finding spare parts for its auto-repair unit? Why do they do it?" "I do not know, Sam. I have never thought about it." #C r T-'en years ago the Devil Car, their leader, killed my brother in a raid on his Gas Fortress," said Murdock, "and I've hunted that black Caddy ever since. I've searched for it from the air and I've searched on foot. I've used other cars. I've carried heat trackers and missiles. I even laid mines. But always it's been too fast or too smart or too strong for me. Then I had you built." "I knew you hated it very much. I always wondered why," Jenny said. Murdock drew on his cigarette. "I had you specially programmed and armored and armed to be the toughest, fastest, smartest thing on wheels, Jenny. You're the Scarlet Lady. You're the one car can take the Caddy and his whole pack. You've got fangs and claws of the kind they've never met before. This time I'm going to get them." "You could have stayed home, Sam, and let me do the hunting." "No. I know I could have, but I want to be there. I want to give the orders, to press some of the buttons myself, to watch that Devil Car burn away to a metal skeleton. How many people, how many cars has it smashed? We've lost count. I've got to get it, JenJ ny ! "I'll find it for you, Sam." They sped on, at around two hundred miles an hour. "How's the fuel level, Jenny?" "Plenty there, and I have not yet drawn upon the auxiliary tanks. Do not worry." " -- The track is getting stronger," she added. "Good. How's the weapons system?" "Red light, all around. Ready to go." Murdock snubbed out his cigarette and lit another. "... Some of them carry dead people strapped inside," said Murdock, "so they'll look like decent cars with passengers. The black Caddy does it all the time, and it changes them pretty regularly. It keeps its interior refrigerated -- so they'll last." "You know a lot about it, Sam." "It fooled my brother with phoney passengers and phoney plates. Got him to open his Gas Fortress to it that way. Then the whole pack attacked. It's painted itself red and green and blue and white, on different occasions, but it always goes back to black, sooner or later. It doesn't like yellow or brown or two-tone. I've a list of almost every phoney plate it's ever used. It's even driven the big freeways right into towns and fueled up at regular gas stops. They often get its number as it tears away from them, just as the attendant goes up on the driver's side for his money. It can fake dozens of human voices. They can never catch it afterwards though, because it's souped itself up too well. It always makes it back here to the Plain and loses them. It's even raided used car lots -- " J enny turned sharply in her course. "Sam! The trail is quite strong now. This way! It goes off in the direction of those mountains. "Follow!" said Murdock. For a long time then Murdock was silent. The first inklings of morning began in the east. The pale morning star was a white thumbtack on a blueboard behind them. They began to climb a gentle slope. "Get it, Jenny. Go get it," urged Murdock. "I think we will," she said. The angle of the slope increased. Jenny slowed her pace to match the terrain, which was becoming somewhat bumpy. "What's the matter?" asked Murdock. "It's harder going here," she said, "also, the trail is getting more difficult to follow." "Why is that?" "There is still a lot of background radiation in these part#," she told him, "and it is throwing off my tracking system." "Keep trying, Jenny." "The track seems to go straight toward the mountains." "Follow it, follow it!" They slowed some more. "I am all fouled up now, Sam," she said. "I have just lost the trail." "It must have a stronghold somewhere around here -- a cave or something like that -- where it can be sheltered overhead. It's the only way it could have escaped aerial detection all these years." "What should I do?" "Go as far forward as you can #  and scan for low openings in the rock. Be wary. Be ready to attack in an instant." They climbed into the low foothills, Jenny's aerial rose high into the air, and the moths of steel cheesecloth unfolded their wings and danced and spun about it, bright there in the morning light "Nothing yet," said Jenny, "and we can't go much further." "Then we'll cruise along the length of it and keep scanning." "To the right or to the left?" "I don't know. Which way would you go if you were a renegade car on the lam?" "I do not know." "Pick one. It doesn't matter " "To the right, then," she said and they turned in that direction, A fter half an hour the night was dropping away behind the mountains. To his right morning was exploding at the far end of the Plain, fracturing the sky into all the colors of autumn trees. Murdock drew a squeeze bottle of hot coffee, of the kind spacers had once used, from beneath the dashboard. "Sam, I think I have found something." "What? Where?" "Ahead, to the left of ''hat big boulder, a declivity with some kind of opening at its end." "Okay, baby, make for U Rockets ready." They pulled abreast of the boulder, circled around its far side, headed downhill. "A cave, or a tunnel," he said "Go slow -- " "Heat! Heat!" she said. "I'm tracking again!" "I can even see tire marks, lots of them!" said Murdock "This is it!" They moved toward the open ing. "Go in, but go slowly," he ordered. "Blast the first thing that moves." They entered the rocky portal, moving on sand now. Jenny turned off her visible lights and switched to infra-red. An i-r lens rose before the windshield, and Murdock studied the cave. It was about twenty feet high and wide enough to accommoda':" perhaps three cars going abreast The floor changed from sand to rock, but it was smooth and fairly level. After a time it sloped upward. "There's some light ahead, ' he whispered. "I know." "A piece of the sky, I think " They crept toward it, Jenny's engine but the barest sigh with in the great chambers of rock They stopped at the threshold to the light. The i-r shield dropped again. It was a sand-and-shale canyon that he looked upon. Huge slantings and overhangs of rock hid all but the far end from any eye in the sky. The light was pale at the far end, and there was nothing unusual beneath it. But nearer... Murdock blinked. XT earer, in the dim light of   morning and in the shadows, stood the greatest junkheap Murdock had ever seen in his life. Pieces of cars, of every make and model, were heaped into a small mountain before him. There were batteries and tires and cables and shock absorbers; there were fenders and bumpers and headlamps and headlamp housings; there were doors and windshields and cylinders and pistons, carbureators, generators, voltage regulators, and oil pumps. Murdock stared. "Jenny," he whispered, "we've found the graveyard of the autos!" A very old car, which Murdock had not even distinguished from the junk during that first glance, jerked several feet in their direction and stopped as suddenly. The sound of rivet heads scoring ancient brake drums screeched in his ears. Its tires were completely bald, and the left front one was badly in need of air. Its right front headlamp was broken and there was a crack in its windshield. It stood there before the heap, its awakened engine making a errible rattling noise. "What's happening?" asked Murdock. "What is it?" "He is talking to me," said Jenny. "He is very old. His speedometer has been all the way around so many times that he forgets the number of miles he has seen. He hates people, whom he says have abused him whenever they could. He is the guardian of the graveyard. He is too old to go raiding any more, so he has stood guard over the spare parts heap for many years. He is not the sort who 'an repair himself, as the younger ones do, so he must rely on their charity and their autorepair units. He wants to know what I want here." "Ask him where the others are." But as he said it, Murdock heard the sound of many engines turning over, until the valley was filled with the thunder of their horsepower. "They are parked on the other side of the heap," she said. "They are coming now." "Hold back until I tell you to fire," said Murdock, as the first car -- a sleek yellow Chrysler -- nosed around the heap. Murdock lowered his head to the steering wheel, but kept his eyes open behind his goggles. "Tell them that you came here to join the pack and that you've monoed your driver. Try to get the black Caddy to come into range." "He will not do it," she said. "I am talking with him now He can broadcast just as easily from the other side of the pile, and he says he is sending the six biggest members of his pack to guard me while he decides what to do. He has ordered me to leave the tunnel and pull ahead into the valley." "Go ahead then -- slowly." They crept forward. 'T'wo Lincolns, a powerfullooking Pontiac, and two Mercs joined the Chrysler -- three on each side of them, in position to ram. "Has he given you any idea how many there are on the other side?" "No. I asked, but he will not tell me." "Well, we'll just have to wait then." He stayed slumped, pretending to be dead. After a time, his already tired shoulders began to ache. Finally, Jenny spoke: "He wants me to pull around the far end of the pile," she said, "now that they have cleared the way, and to head into a gap in the rock which he will indicate. He wants to have his auto-mech go over me." "We can't have that," said Murdock, "but head around the pile. I'll tell you what to do when I've gotten a glimpse of the other side." The two Mercs and the Big Chief drew aside and Jenny crept past them. Murdock stared upwards from the corner of his eye, up at the towering mound of junk they were passing. A couple well-placed rockets on either end could topple it, but the auto-mech would probably clear it eventually. They rounded the lefthand end of the pile. Something like forty-five cars were facing them at about a hundred-twenty yards' distance, to the right and ahead. They had fanned out. They were blocking the exit around the other end of the pile, and the six guards in back of him now blocked the way behind Murdock. On the far side of the farthest rank of the most distant cars an ancient black Caddy was parked. It had been beaten forth from assembly during a year when the apprentice-engineers were indeed thinking big. Huge it was, and shiny, and a skeleton's face smiled from behind its wheel. Black it was, and gleaming chromium, and its headlamps were like dusky jewels or the eyes of insects. Every plane and curve shimmered with power, and its great fishtailed rear end seemed ready to slap at the sea of shadows behind it on an instant's notice, as it sprang forward for its kill. "That's it!" whispered Murdock. "The Devil Car!" "He is big!" said Jenny. "I have never seen a car that big!" They continued to move forward. "He wants me to head into that opening and park," she said. "Head toward it, slowly. But don't go into it," said Murdock HPhey turned and inched toward the opening. The other cars stood, the sounds of their engines rising and falling. "Check all weapons system." "Red, all around." . The opening was twenty-five feet away. "When I say 'now', go into neutral steer and turn one hundred-eighty degrees -- fast, They can't be expecting that. They don't have it themselves. Then open up with the fifty-calibers and fire your rockets at the Caddy, turn at a right angle and start back the way we came, and spray the naphtha as we go, and fire on the six guards... , "Now!" he cried, leaping up in his seat. He was slammed back as they spun, and he heard the chattering of her guns before his head cleared. By then, flames were leaping up in the distance. Jenny's guns were extruded now and turning on their mounts, spraying the line of vehicles with hundreds of leaden hammers. She shook, twice, as she discharged two rockets from beneath her partly opened hood. Then they were moving forward, and eight or nine of the cars were rushing downhill toward them. She turned again in neutral steer and sprang back in the direction from which they had come, around the southeast corner of the pile. Her guns were hammering at the now retreating guards, and in the wide rear view mirror Murdock could see that a wall of flame was towering high behind them. "You missed it!" he cried. "You missed the black Caddy! Your rockets hit the cars in front of it and it backed off!" "I know! I'm sorry!" "You had a clear shot!" "I know! I missed!" They rounded the pile just as two of the guard cars vanished into the tunnel. Three more lay in smoking ruin. The sixth had evidently preceded the other two out through the passage. "Here it comes now!" cried Murdock. "Around the other end of the pile! Kill it! Kill it!" The ancient guardian of the graveyard -- it looked like a Ford, but he couldn't be sure -- moved forward with a dreadful chattering sound and interposed itself in the line of fire. "My range is blocked." tcQmash that junkheap and cover the tunnel! Don't let the Caddy escape!" "I can't!" she said. "Why not?" "I just can't l" "That's an order! Smash it and cover the tunnel!" Her guns swivelled and she shot out the tires beneath the ancient car. The Caddy shot past and into the passageway. "You let it get by!" he screamed. "Get after it!" "All right, Sam! I'm doing it! Don't yell. Please don't yell!" She headed for the tunnel. Inside, he could hear the sound of a giant engine racing away, growing softer in the distance. "Don't fire here in the tunnel! If you hit it we may be bottled in!" "I know. I won't." "Drop a couple ten-second grenades and step on the gas Maybe we can seal in whatever's left moving back there." Suddenly they shot ahead and emerged into daylight. There was no sign of any other vehicle about. "Find its track," he said, "and start chasing it." There was an explosion up the hill behind him, within the mountain. The ground trembled, then it was still once more. "There are so many tracks..." she said. "You know the one I want. The biggest, the widest, the hottest! Find it! Run it down!" "I think I have it, Sam." "Okay. Proceed as rapidly as possible for this terrain." Murdock found a squeeze bottle of bourbon and took three gulps. Then he lit a cigarette and glared into the distance. "Why did you miss it?" he asked softly "Why did you miss it, Jenny?" She did not answer immediately. He waited. TT'inally, "Because he is not an 'it' to me," she said. "He has done much damage to cars and people, and that is terrible. But there is something about him, something -- noble. The way he has fought the whole world for his freedom, Sam, keeping that pack of vicious machines in line, stopping at nothing to maintain himself that way -- without a master -- for as long as he can remain unsmashed, unbeaten -- Sam, for a moment back there I wanted to join his pack, to run with him across the Great Road Plains, to use my rockets against the gates of the Gas Forts for him... But I could not mono you, Sam. I was built for you. I am too domesticated. I am too weak. I could not shoot him though, and I misfired the rockets on purpose. But I could never mono you, Sam, really." "Thanks," he said, "you overprogrammed ashcan. Thanks a lot!" "I am sorry, Sam." "Shut up -- No, don't, not yet. First tell me what you're going to do if we find 'him'." "I don't know." "Well think it over fast. You see that dust cloud ahead as well as I do, and you'd better speed up." They shot forward. "Wait till I call Detroit. They'll laugh themselves silly, till I claim the refund." "I am not of inferior construction or design. You know that. I am just more... " 'Emotional'," supplied Murdock. "... Than I thought i would be," she finished. "I had not really met many cars, except for young ones, before I was shipped to you. I did not know what a wild car was like, and I had never smashed any cars before -- just targets and things like that. I was young and..." " 'Innocent'," said Murdock. "Yeah. Very touching. Get ready to kill the next car we meet. If it happens to be your boyfriend and you hold your fire, then he'll kill us." "I will try, Sam." The car ahead had stopped. It was the yellow Chrysler. Two of its tires had gone flat and it was parked, lopsided, waiting. "Leave it!" snarled Murdock, as the hood clicked open. "Save the ammo for something that might fight back." They sped past it. "Did it say anything?" "Machine profanity," she said. "I've only heard it once or twice, and it would be meaningless to you." T T e chuckled. "Cars actually swear at each other?" "Occasionally," she said. "I imagine the lower sort indulge in it more frequently, especially on freeways and turnpikes when they become congested." "Let me hear a machine swear-word." "I will not. What kind of car do you think I am, anyway?" "I'm sorry," said Murdock. "You're a lady. I forgot." There was an audible dick within the radio. They raced forward on the level ground that lay before the foot of the mountains. Murdock took another drink, then switched to coffee. "Ten years," he muttered, 'ten years..." The trail swung in a wide curve as the mountains jogged back and the foothills sprang up high beside them. It was over almost before he knew it. As they passed a huge, orangecolored stone massif, sculpted like an upside-down toadstool by the wind, there was a clearing to the right. It shot forward at them -- the Devil Car. It had lain in ambush, seeing that it could not outrun the Scarlet Lady, and it rushed toward a final collision with its hunter. Jenny skidded sideways as her brakes caught with a scream and a smell of smoke, and her fiftycalibers were firing, and her hood sprang open and her front wheels rose up off the ground as the rockets leapt wailing ahead, and she spun around three times, her rear bumper scraping the saltsand plain, and the third and last time she fired her remaining rockets into the smouldering wreckage on the hillside, and she came to a rest on all four wheels; and her fifty-calibers kept firing until they were emptied, and then a steady clicking sound came from them for a full minute afterwards, and then all lapsed into silence. Murdock sat there shaking, watching the gutted, twisted wreck blaze against the morning sky. "You did it, Jenny. You killed him. You killed me the Devil Car," he said. But she did not answer him. Her engine started once more and she turned toward the southeast and headed for the Fuel StopRest Stop Fortress that lay in that civilized direction. T? or two hours they drove in silence, and Murdock drank all his bourbon and all his coffee and smoked all his cigarettes. "Jenny, say something," he said. "What's the matter? Tell me." There was a click, and her voice was very soft: "Sam -- he talked to me as he came down the hill..." she said. Murdock waited, but she did not say anything else. "Well, what did he say?" he asked. "He said, 'Say you will mono your passenger and I will swerve by you'," she told him. "He said, 'I want you, Scarlet Lady -- to run with me, to raid with me. Together they will never catch us,' and I killed him." Murdock was silent. "He only said that co delay my firing though, did he not? He said that to stop me, so that he could smash us both when he went smash himself, did he not? He could not have meant it, could he, Sam?" "Of course not," said Murdock, "of course not. It was too late for him to swerve." " Y es, I suppose it was -- do you think though, that he really wanted me to run with him, to raid with him -- before everything, I mean -- back there?" "Probably, baby. You're pretty well-equipped." "Thanks," she said, and turned off again. Before she did though, he heard a strange mechanical sound, falling into the rhythms of profanity or prayer. Then he shook his head and lowered it, softly patting the seat beside him with his still unsteady hand. inioroBBio Rare Old Periodicals for Your Collection A backward time machine: the actual newspapers Americans read a century and more ago. This is living history, the eyewitness accounts of great battles the debates of famous figures. Not reproductions or facsimiles but the original newspapers themselves, suitable for framing or binding, almost mint condition except for slight age-darkening at the edges, many still uncut, shipped boxed and insured, postpaid. No duplicates. First order takes each item # issues Boston Patriot: Saturday, Sept. #, #; Sat. June #, #: Wed., Apr #, # Correspondence of late Pres. Adams. # # issues Rhode Island American  Providence Gazette, July, Aug.  Od # (various dates). #. # issues N. Y. Evening Post, March  July, #. #. Civil War issues N. Y. Daily Tribune, #-# # issues various dates. Fori Sumter doomed. Bombardment of Charlestown, Capture of Chesapeake, etc. Single copies # each (our choice), # copies # (our choice), all # copies # (if no prior sale). # copies National Gazette (Philadelphia), Apr., Oct.  Dec. #, various dates #. Send order to I. Pritchet, # Knollwood Rd., Eastchester, N.Y. Payment with order or will be sent C.O.D. for # deposit. From the collection of Robert M. Guinn Authenticity guaranteed by Galaxy Publishing Corp. A s you know, the essential conflict is between comfortable ignorance and pitiless intelligence. But it ramifies, and there are days when a man hardly knows how much of himself is on which side. Complicating the whole thing is this Heaven-sent gift of self-consciousness which distinguishes Man from the major life-forms so that a man may sit behind a machine writing words which are either proor anti-machine, realize what he is doing, and sit there blushing. And, being reasonable, we also realize that the truth is almost certainly staked out somewhere between the fortress of reaction spangled with the latest technological gimcrackery, and the shabby haven of the thinking wanderer whose favorite victim is himself. In that No Man's Land, science fiction writers of both sides meet in dim grapple without friend or foe. And if you think there is poetry in that, friend, then you have your first affair with Truth yet before you. But we were discussing books "Davy," Theodore Sturgeon said in his piece on this book for the National Review, "is a -- ." The staff of that journal cut the noun out, as did the staff of this one, and what remains of Sturgeon's Opinion can be found on the back of the reprint edition which has now come out (Ballantine Book #U#, #c, paper, by Edgar Pangborn) : "A lovely book, a rollicking book, a candenced, surprising, provocative and musical book." The South Bend Tribune compares it to Tom Jones and notes its "expert probing of the deepest and darkest areas of life -- the sexual and the tragic," a quote deserving of inscription on tablets of mud. What the book is is an autobiographical journal, by Davy with footnotes by assorted friends, of a young man's progress in the dark years of the Northeastern United States some centuries after a nuclear cataclysm which in some way drastically changed sea level and climate, while also wiping out civilization and leaving an inheritance of frequent mutant births. Because the climate is warm, loin cloths and loin cloth humor are standard. Because the times are barbaric, with New England split up into half a dozen nations of which the most advanced are just experimenting with feudalism, the social milieu is overtly puritanical, actually gross, and thus bawdy. Because the hero is a vigorous adolescent male, some of the crucial events in the book are sexual adventures. So much for the deepest and darkest areas of life. Pangborn has done a rare and wonderful thing -- a thing people are always wanting science fiction to have -- in creating a believable, impressive, vivid and memorable character. Davy overshadows his adventures by a considerable margin as he moves from his dubious past into his unknown but glorious future. I have no idea how female readers will react to him, but there is little doubt in my mind that males are delighted to identify with him, and not simply because he is such a marvelous stud and an instinctive French horn player besides. He is a man of simple needs and reactions but complicated motives, on the side of Light. In his prime, he is actively associated with an attempt to restore reason to a culture ruled by a repressive Church. What seems not to have occurred to many people -- and you may be assured Pangborn has again scored a terrific success d'estime -- is that this book achieves its marvelous effects by talking tough while following faithfully along a line of beloved cliches. Some of these charming conventions are sketched in or thrown away as the book begins to show traces of running overlength, but all of them are scrupulously registered with the reader. And what these cliches are -- from the acquisition of the golden horn through the bastard Davy's discovery of his father to the vengeance Fate exacts in payment for the horn, and that scene in which a slim, handsome youth reveals himself to be a girl in disguise -- are the cliches of the self-confident Establishment tickling itself. It occurs to me that either Richard Wagner or Gilbert and Sullivan could have used this libretto, and have, creating delicious, totally acceptable entertainment around characters and events which would actually have made the audience run in panic There are many deep and tragic events in Davy's life, true. There are deep and tragic events in Davy's world. They occur offstage or are stamped in crucial detail as they occur The attempt to revive civilization, the death of Davy's love, the civil war in which the Church takes back its hold on society... all are tags for Davy's highly personalized and severely restricted narrative. To the end, Davy remains the rebel who never threatens. His true subversions are carried on out of sight. Though you certainly wouldn't want him alone in the parlor with your daughter. he would make a titillating guest at a dinner party, castrated as he is by his inability to sire viable children, a trifle savage, of course, and, all in all, just the perfect cheap thrill. Now, you may make of that remark what you will. (It horrifies me). On the top of my head, I find a high opinion of Davy and a continuing high opinion of Pangborn which will not be altered by anything I think of this particular book. For the record, the book moved me, to the point where for some time I was completely separated from any reality of my own. I'm convinced most people wil! like the book very much and may re-read it I'm sure they'll offer it to friends as an example of outstanding work in the field. I've turned several people on to it myself. But I wonder... I wonder The Rest of the Robots, Isaac Asimov, Doubleday and Company, Inc., # pp., #, is introduced as the companion volume to Asimov's much earlier I , Robot. It is that -- a great omnibus volume containing eight short stories and the complete novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. It is also a sort of memorial to Isaac, containing much marginal notation by the author, plus a statement of purpose and an afterword in which Asimov explains that there is still one novel needed to finish his total statement about robots, but that he has been unable to work on any fiction of consequence since the summer of #. When I say "memorial," in other words, I'm echoing the mood of this book, which is more that of a scholarly attempt to achieve definition of a completed career -- or a permanently interrupted one -- than it is that of a book of entertainment. It is a fine book of entertainment, by the way, and if you have any sort of permanent library at all, this is your next need in that line. This growing practice of having story collections include voluminous notes by the author is beginning to wear on me. If the man is alive, the presumption is that these stories are new to the reader and will do their own ingratiating. If the man is dead, let someone else explain the meaning of this material which is now obviously being packaged for what it can be used for, not for what it is. In the case of this book, the effect is particularly unfortunate, since it sucks the juice out of some very vivacious writing indeed, and embalms one of science fiction's most ebullient personalities. A man should not declaim at his own funeral, not even if he does hope to be back from science writing someday. Well, however that may be, I heartily recommend this book and its author. I hope Doubleday's editorial policies are paying off in wide sales beyond science fiction in-group. Robert F. Young is one of those writers who now and then produces a memorable and much-discussed story, but is not generally considered a top-rank man as yet When I say "muchdiscussed," by the way, I obviously have to mean that the editor who buys it brags about it, and other writers talk about it in bull sessions after it comes out. Hardly anyone knows what the readers think, any more. One of these "in" stories was Goddess in Granite, the star item in The Worlds of Robert F. Young, a collection published by Simon  Schuster at # with an introduction which is really an expanded FSF blurb by Avram Davidson. Goddess is poignant, relentless, and heavily evocative, purporting to be about a man climbing an alien mountain which a lost race long ago carved into the shape of a giant sleeping nude woman. It is so effective that it led to at least one autoderivative story about a man climbing a giant tree. Etc. The other fifteen stories in this volume illustrate Young's more usual concerns, which made him a frequent contributor to If when, in an earlier incarnation, it propagandized heavily for "humanism" via sometimes painfully explicit attacks on technology as the enemy of the soul. Some rather good work came out of that now pinched-off pocket universe, and Young was one of the top operators in that genre. Simon  Schuster having neglected to give the magazine copyright notices, I cannot tell you how many of the stories are from that time. But many are from that school. Those which are not, tend to be piffle; the best example anyone would need of this is Written in the Stars, for which some special award should go to the various editors who have at least had the grace not to brag. The collection balances more toward the piffling and the propagandists tli ai it does to the compelling. There is reason to believe Young wants it that way, which is all right as long as he can walk the very fine dividing line between effective emotionalism and the ludicrous. I would wait for the paperback before attempting to reach my own evaluation, if I were you. In sometimes contentious company with Damon Knight, William Atheling, Jr. was the science fiction critic who transformed the reviewer's trade in this field. Knight, of course, did most of his work in the prozines, one assumes for money and free books as a consequence of his love, whereas Atheling's commentary, often reviewing the prozines themselves appeared in such amateur journals as Skyhook and Axe. Advent; Publishers, P. O. Box #, Chicago, duced the perfect complement to their prize-winning earlier compilation of Knight. The Issue at edited and with an introduction by James Blish, (#, # pp. with index, hardbound), is the definitive Atheling -- acidulous, assertive, categorical, conscientious and occasionally idiosyncratic. It subjects individual magazine stories to a species of analysis-in-depth for which I am sure their writers never bargained, but which possibly left some of them better men. The assumption has to be that the clods were beyond redemption in any case, and that the occasional wounded cries were symptomatic of a healthy catharsis. No bones are made about Atheling having been Blish all along, even when he was dissecting Blish. This kind of thing is from an earlier, happier time in the field, he said sententiously. In those days -- a handful of years ago -- the perfectability of science fiction was the basic assumption underlying the work ted men who rejected "mainstream" literary conventions in favor of classical literary precepts. They may have been right; certainly, they gave the field a push in a fruitful direction, and some of us will certainly never be the same. Their approach was almost exclusively destructive -- disclaimers to the contrary -- and there is just so much of this the climate will tolerate. But there was a lot to destroy, and there is this much about an encounter with the pitiless -- one rapidly discovers just what a balloon of fat one is carrying around one's indestructible core, assuming one has such a thing at all. The publishers offer this book in curious wise: "Virtually the single most necessary text for would-be writers, in or out of the science fiction field." This is horsefeather of purest ray serene; it will undoubtedly do a great many things for and to the psyches of would-be writers who suspect another Atheling in the offing, but it will not teach an unprofessional the first thing about writing. What it will teach him -- but of course, this is not a selling point -- is what discipline of the intelligence can be, and how it was once applied to one species of literary product. From this, the reader may emerge a more illuminated man, and from that he may become a more purposeful and valuable writer, but the odds are not favorable. God produces many more victims than he does Athelings. Perhaps because we all know this, The Issue at Hand is best read as a work of entertainment. As a work of entertainment, it has only one peer in its genre, and I most earnestly urge that you place your order with the publishers; asking your local bookstore to order it for you will result in confusion and delay, which you will resent after discovering what a superbly entertaining book this book is. The Biggest News in Science Fiction! At last! The last and greatest story in the most famous series ever to appear in a science-fiction magazine -- The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three , Skylark of Valeron and now Skylark DuQuesne. by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. Starts in the June # If -- on sale now -- don't miss it!  # . i  f "  I... . #...  if Distributed nationally by: # Avenue of Americas New York, N. Y. # They thought they were marooned light-years from home -- but the truth was far worse than thatl I  n alarm rang, like an oldfashioned air-raid siren. The deep voice of the Brain blared, "Strac Astrophysics is not in his cabin! Strac Astrophysics, report to your cabin immediately! The Hogan's Goat will Jump in sixty seconds." Verd tensed. He had to restrain an urge to get up. In nearly two centuries of piloting the Hogan's Goat, Verd had never lost a passenger through carelessness. Passengers were supposed to be careless. If Strac didn't reach his room Verd would have to postpone Jump to save his life: a serious breach of the customs of travel. Above the green coffin which was his Jump couch the Brain said, "Strac Astrophysics is in his cabin and protected." Verd relaxed. "Five." said the Brain. "Four. Three... In various parts of the ship, twenty-eight bodies jerked like springs released. "Oof," complained Lourdi, lying in the Jump couch next to Verd's. "That felt strange." Lourdi was Verd's wife, a mixture of many races and subdivisions of Man, bearing the delicate, willowy, beauty born of low gravity worlds. She was an experienced traveler. When she sat up in her green coffin she looked puzzled. "I've never felt anything like that before. Have you, dear?" she asked. Verd grunted as he climbed out. He was a few pounds overweight. His face was beefy, smooth and unlined and fashionably hairless. So was his scalp, except for a narrow strip of black brush which ran straight up from between his brow ridges and continued on until it faded out near the small of his back. Most of the hair had been cosmetically implanted. Neither wrinkles nor width of hair strip could tell a man's age, and superficially Verd might have been anywhere from twenty to four hundred years old. It was in his economy of movement that Verd's age showed. He did things the easy way, the fast way. He never needed more than seconds to find it, and he always took that time. He had had a long time to learn. "No," said Verd. "Let's find out what it was. Brain!" he snapped at the wall speaker. The silence stretched like a nerve. "Brain?" V erd Spacercaptain, Lourdi Coursefinder, and Parliss Lifesystems sat along one wall of the crew common room, watching the fourth member of the crew. Chanda Thinkersyst was a tall, homely woman whose major beauty was her wavy black hair. A strip two inches wide down the center of her scalp had been allowed to grow until it hung to the region of her coccyx, satin black and satin soft, gleaming and rippling as she moved. She stood before the biggest of the Brain screens, which now showed a diagram of the Hogan's Goat, and she used her finger as a pointer. "The rock hit here," she said, pointing halfway back on the spinal maze of lines and little black squares and lighted powersource symbols which represented the Jumper machinery. "It must have been there when we came out of overspace, so the meteor gun never got the chance to stop it. It burned through the Jumper and lost most of its mass in the hull. What was left lined droplets of high-speed molten metal all through the chip's Brain." Parliss whistled. He was tall, ash blond and very young. "That'll soften it up," he murmured irreverently. He winced at Chanda's glare and added, "Sorry." Chanda went on. "Of course there's no chance of repairing the Brain ourselves. There were too many points of injury, and most of them too small to find. The Brain can still solve problems and obey orders. The worst problem seems to be this motor aphasia, and I've circumvented that by instructing the Brain to use Morse code. Since I don't know the extent of the damage very precisely, I recommend we let a tug land the passengers on Earth instead of trying to land the Goat." Verd cringed at the thought of what the tug captains would say. "All right. Chanda, what is Morse code?" Chanda smiled. "Morse is English translated into dots and dashes. It was one of the first things I tried. I didn't really expect it to work, and I doubt if it would on a human patient." "Thanks, Chanda." Verd stood up and the Brain doctor sat down. "All I will have to say, group, is that we're going to take a bad loss this trip. The Brain is sure to need expensive repairs, and it looks to me like the Jumper will have to be almost completely torn out. It gave one awful discharge when the meteor hit, and most of the parts are fused -- Lourdi, what's wrong? We can afford it." Lourdi shook her head. Her delicate surgeon's fingers gripped hard at the arms of her chair. "Why not?" Verd asked gently. "We land on Earth and take a vacation while the orbital repair companies do the worrying." Lourdi Coursefinder gulped air before she could speak. "We'll have to do the worrying, dear," she said brightly. "I couldn't ask the Brain to do it, so I used the telescope myself. That's not Sol." The others looked at her. "It's not the Sun. It's a greenish-white dwarf, a dead star. I couldn't find the Sun." II "Vnce it had its orders, the Brain was much faster with the telescope than Lourdi. It confirmed her description of the star which was where Sol should have been, and added that it was no star in the Brain's catalogue. Furthermore the Brain could not recognize the volume of space around it. It was still scanning star.;, hoping to find its bearings. They sat in the crew common room drinking droobleberry juice and vodka. The two dozen passengers had been told nothing as yet, but they must have been getting restless. Interstellar law gave each passenger access at all times to the ship's Brain. Someone must know by now that the Brain was incommunicado. Lourdi stopped making rings on the tabletop. "Chanda, will you translate for me?" Chanda looked up hopefully. "Of course." "Ask the Brain to find the planet in this system which most resembles Saturn." "Saturn?" Chanda's homely face lost its hopeful expression. She turned to the Brain speaker and tapped next to it with a stylus. Almost immediately a line of hort and long white lines began moving left to right across the top of the Brain screen. The screen itself went white, cleared, showing what looked like a picture of Saturn. But there were too many gaps in the ring, and they were too well defined. Chanda said. "Fifth major planet from star. Six moons. Period, # years. Distance from Sun: # a. u. Diameter: # miles. Tyne gas giant. So?" Lourdi nodded to herself. Verd and Parliss were watching her. "Ask it to show us the second and third planets." The second planet was in its quarter phase. The Brain screen showed it looking like a large Moon, but less badly pocked, and with one major difference: an intensely bright area across the middle. Chanda translated the marching dots: "Distance # a. u. Period #. Diameter # miles. No moon. No air." The third planet -- "That's Mars!" said Lourdi. It was. And the second planet was Earth. "T believe I now know what A has happened," said Verd, speaking very loudly. Twentyseven faces looked back at him across the dining room. He was addressing crew and passengers, and he had to address them in person, for the Brain could no longer repeat his words over the speakers in the rooms. Verd discovered that he did not like public speaking. "You know that a Jumper creates an overspace in which the speed of light becomes infinite in a neighborhood of the ship. "When -- " "Almost infinite," said a passenger. "That's a popular misconception," Verd snapped. With an effort he resumed his speaking voice. "The speed of light goes all the way to infinity. If it weren't for the braking spines, which keep our speed finite by projecting almost into normal space, we'd wind up by going simultaneous -- being everywhere at once. The braking spines are those things that point out from the girdle of the ship. "Well, there was a rock in our way, inside the range of the meteor gun, when the Jumper went off. It went through the Jumper and into the Brain. "The damage it did to our Brain is secondary. Something happened to the Jumper while the rock was in there. Maybe some metal vaporized and caused a short circuit. Anyway the Goat jumped back into overspace in the other direction. The speed of light went to zero "The braking spines stuck out, or we wouldn't have come out until the bitter end of time. Well, then. In a region around the ship, the speed of light was zero. Our mass was infinite, our clocks and hearts stopped, the ship became an infinitesimally thin disc. This state lasted for no time -- in ship's time. But when it ended." A universal gasp, and then pandemonium. "Oh, my God!" "Practical joke, Marna. I must say -- " "Shut up and let him finish." The shouting died away. A last voice shouted, "But if our mass  "Only in a region around the ship!" Verd recognized the man; it was Strac Astrophysics. "Oh," said Strac, apparently shrugging off a picture of suns and galaxies snatched brutally down upon his cringing head by the Goat's infinite gravity. ttnphe zero effect has been  used before," Verd continued. "For suspended animation, for very long range time capsules, et cetera. But it has never happened to a spacecraft, to my knowledge. Our position is very bad. The Sun has become a greenish-white dwarf. The Earth has lost all its air and has become a one-face world. Like Mercury, it no longer rotates. Mercury isn't there any more. Neither is the Moon. "You can forget the idea of going home, and say good-by to anyone you knew outside this ship. This is the universe, ourselves and nobody else, and our only duty is to survive. We will keep you informed of developments. Anyone who wishes his passage money refunded is welcome to it." In a crackle of weak, graveyard laughter, Verd bobbed his head in dismissal. The passengers weren't taking the hint. Hearing the captain in person was as strange to them as it was to Verd. They sat looking at each other, and a few got up, changed their minds and sat down again. One called, "What will you do next?" "Ask the Brain for suggestions," said Verd. "Out, now!" "We'd like to stay and listen," said the same man. He was short and broad and big-footed, probably from one of the heaviest planets, and he had the roughedged compactness of a land tank. "We've the right to consult the Brain at any time. If it takes a translator we should have a translator." Verd nodded. "That's true." Without further comment he turned to Chanda and said, "Ask the Brain what actions will maximize our chance of survival for maximal time." Chanda tapped her stylus rhythmically next to the Brain speaker. The dining room seemed raucous with the sound of breathing and the stealthy shuffling of feet. Everyone seemed to be leaning forward. The Brain answered in swiftly moving dots of light. Chanda said. "Immediately replace -- Eve of Kdapt!" Chanda looked very startled, then grinned around at Verd. "Sorry, Captain. 'Immediately replace Verd Spacercaptain with Strac Astrophysics in supreme authority over ship.' " In the confusion that followed, Verd's voice was easily the loudest. "Everybody out! Everybody but Strac Astrophysics." Miraculously, they obeyed. Ill S trac was a long, tall oldster, old in habits and manners and mode of dress; a streak of black-enameled steel wool emphasized his chocolate scalp, and his ears spread like wings. Verd wondered why he didn't have them fixed, and then wondered no longer. Strac obviously made a fetish of keeping what he was born with. His hairline didn't start until the top of his forehead. His fingernails had not been removed. They must have required constant trimming. It was a wonder he didn't have a mustache! "I believe you've traveled on my ship before," Verd told him. "Have you ever said or done anything to give the Brain, or any passenger, the idea that you want to command my ship?" "Certainly not!" Strac seemed as ruffled by the Brain's suggestion as Verd himself. "The Brain must be insane," he muttered venomously. Then he looked up uneasily. "Could the Brain be insane?" "No," Chanda answered. "Mechanical Brains can be damaged, they can be destroyed, but if they come up with an answer it's the right one. If there's even the slightest doubt you'll get an 'insufficient data'." "Then why would it try to take my command?" "I don't know. Captain, there's something you should know right now." "What?" "The Brain has stopped answering questions It stopped right after the passengers left. It obeys orders if they're given in Morse, but it won't answer back." "Oh, Kdapt take the Brain!" Verd rubbed his temples with his fingertips. "Parliss. what did the Brain know about Strac?" "Same as any other passenger. Name, profession, medical state and history, mass, world of origin. That's all." "Hmph. Strac, where were you born?" "The Canyon." "Oh? Kind of lonely, wasn't it?" "In a way, yes. Three hundred thousand is a tiny population for a solar system, and there's no room for more. There's no air above the Canyon rim, of course. I got out as soon as I could. Haven't been back in almost a century." "I see." "No, Captain, I don't think you can. In the Canyon, it's the culture that's lonely. The people are constantly surrounded by others, and everybody thinks just like everybody else. You'd say there's no cultural crossfertilization. The pressure to conform is brutal." "Interesting. Strac, do you have any bright ideas that the Brain might have latched onto somehow? Or do you perhaps have a reputation so large in scientific circles that the Brain might know of it?" "No I'm sure that's not the case." "Well, do you have any ideas at all? We need them badly." "I'm afraid not. Captain, just what is our position? It seems that the biggest emergency is that everyone is dead but us. How do we cope with an emergency like that?" "We don't," said Verd. "Not without time travel, and that's impossible. Isn't it?" "Of course." "Chanda, exactly what did you ask the Brain? How did you phrase it?" "Maximize the probability of our surviving for maximum time. That's what you asked for. Excuse me, Captain, but the Brain almost certainly assumed that 'maximum time' meant 'forever'." "All right. Parliss, how long will the ship keep us going." T)arliss was only thirty years old, and was burdened with youth's habitual unsureness; but he knew his profession well enough. "A long time, Captain. Decades, maybe centuries. There's some boosterspice seeds in our consignment for the Zoo Of Earth ; if we could grow boosterspice aboard ship we could keep ourselves young. The air plant will work as long as there's sunlight or starlight. But the food converter -- well, it can't make elements. Eventually they'll get lost somewhere in the circuit, and we'll start getting deficiency diseases, and -- hmmm. I could probably keep us all alive for a century and a half. And if we institute cannibalism we could -- " "Never mind. Let's call that our limit if we stay in space. We've got other choices. Strac, none of them pleasant. "We can get to any planet in the solar system, using the photon drive. There's enough solid core in the landing rockets to land us on any world smaller than Uranus, or to land and take off from a world the size of Venus or smaller, and we can take off from anywhere with the photon drive, leaving nothing but boiling rock behind. But nothing in the system is habitable." "If I may interrupt," said Strac. "Why do we have a photon drive?" "Excuse me?" "Why does the Hogan's Goat need a photon drive? Why didn't she just use the Jumper to get from one planet to another, and the solids to get up and down?" "Oh. It's like this. The math of Jumper travel postulates a figure for the mass of a very large neighborhood, one which takes in most of the local group of galaxies. That figure is almost twice the actual rest mass in the neighborhood. So we have to accelerate until the external universe is heavy enough for us to use the Jumper." "I see." "Even with total mass conversion we have to carry an awful lot of fuel, And without the artificial gravity to protect us it would take years to reach the right velocity. The drive gives us a good one hundred gee in uncluttered space." Verd grinned at Strac's awed expression. "We don't advertise that. Passengers might start wondering what would happen if the artificial gravity went off. "Third choice. We can go on to other stars. It would take decades for each trip, but by refueling in each system we could get to a few nearby stars in the hundred and fifty years Parliss gives us. But every world we ever used must be dead by now, and the G type stars we can reach in the time we've got may have no useful worlds. It would be a gamble." Qtrac shifted uneasily in his  chair. "It would be worse than that. We don't necessarily need G type suns, we can settle under any sun that won't roast us with ultraviolet, but we do need a binary planet. They're extremely rare, you know. I would hate to gamble that we could reach one by accident. Can't you order the Brain to search out a habitable planet and go there?" "No," said Lourdi, from across the room. "The telescope isn't that good, not when it has to peer out of one gravity well into another. The light gets all bent up." "And finally," said Verd, "if we did land on an Earth-sized planet that looked habitable, and then found out it wasn't, we couldn't land anywhere else. Well what do you think?" Strac appeared to consider. "I think I'll go have a drink. I think I'll have several. I wish you'd kept our little predicament secret a few centuries longer." He stood up with great dignity and turned to the door, then spoiled the exit by turning back. "By the way. Captain, have you ever been to a one-face world? Or have your travels been confined to the habitable worlds?" "I've been to the Moon, but that's all. Why?" "I'm not sure," said Strac, and left, looking thoughtful. Verd noticed that he turned right. The bar was aft of the dining room, to the left. Gloom thickened in the nearly empty dining room. Verd fumbled in his belt pouch, brought out a white tube not much bigger than a cigarette. Eyes fixed morosely on a wall, he hung the tube between his lips, sucked through it, inhaled through the side of his mouth. He exhaled cool, thick orange smoke. The muscles around his eyes lost a little of their tension. Chanda spoke up. "Captain, I've been wondering why the Brain didn't answer me directly, why it didn't just give us a set of detailed instructions." "Me too. Have you got an answer?" "It must have computed just how much time it had before its motor aphasia became complete. So instead of trying to give a string of instructions it would never finish, it just named the person most likely to have the right answer." "That sounds right, Chanda. But why Strac? Why not me, or one of you?" "Good question," said Chanda wearily. She closed her eyes and began to recite, "Name, profession, mass, world of origin, medical history. Strac Astrophysics, the Canyon... IV ""n the next few days, each member of the crew was busy at his own specialty. Lourdi spent most of her time at the telescope. It was a powerful instrument, and Chanda told the Brain to find planets of nearby suns and hold the telescope on them while Lourdi looked. But even the nearest were only circular dots. She did manage to find the Moon -- in a Trojan orbit, trailing sixty degrees behind the Earth in its path around the Sun. Parliss spent his waking hours in the ship's library, looking up tomes on the medical aspects of privation. Gradually he was putting together a detailed program that would keep the passengers healthy for a good long time, and alive for a long time after that, with safety factors allowing for breakdown of the more delicate parts of the life-support system. Later he intended to prepare a similar program using cannibalism to its best medical advantage... but that could wait. The problem was more complex than it seemed, involving subtle physiological effects from moral shock. It wouldn't give them more than another century anyway, since the air circulator wouldn't last longer than that. Very slowly and painfully, with miniature extensible waldo machinery, Chanda searched out the tiny burns in the Brain's cortex and scraped away the charred semiconducting ash. "Probably won't do any good," she admitted grimly, "but the ash may be causing short circuits, and I certainly can't do any harm by getting it out. I wish I had some fine wire." Once he was convinced that the Jumper was stone cold dead, Verd left it alone. That gave him little to do but worry. He worried about the damage to the Brain, and wondered if Chanda was being overoptimistic. She was like a surgeon forced to operate on a friend; she refused even to consider that the Brain might get worse instead of better. Verd worried, and he very carefully checked the wiring in the manual override for the drives, moving along outside the hull in a vacuum suit. He worried about the passengers, too. They would be better off if they were given the illusion that they were helping. The log had a list of passengers, and Chanda got the Brain to put it on the screen, but the only useful professions Verd could find were: Strac Astrophysics Jimm Farmer Avran Zooman The other professions were all useless here. Taxer, Carmaker, Adman -- he was lucky to find anything at all. "All the same," he told Lourdi that night, "I'd have given anything to find a "How 'bout a Harlan Alltrades?" "On this tub? Specializing nonspecialists ride the luxury liners." He twisted restlessly in the air between the sleeping plates. "Wanta buy an aircar? It was owned by a sniveling coward -- " J imm Farmer was the heavy planet man, with long, smooth muscles and big broad feet. He had a Jinx accent, Verd guessed, which meant he could probably kick holes in hullmetal. "I've never worked without machinery," he said. "Farming takes an awful lot of machinery. Diggers, plowers, seeders, transplanters, aerators, you name it. Even if you gave me seeds and a world to grow them on I could do nothing by myself." He scratched his bushy eyebrows. For some reason he'd let them grow outward from the end of his hairline. "But if all the passengers and crew pitched in and followed directions, and if they didn't mind a little back-breaking labor, I think we could raise something . if we had a planet with good dirt and some seeds." "At least we've got the seeds," said Verd. "Thanks, Mr. Farm   er. Verd had first seen Avran Zooman walking through the hall at the beginning of the trip. Zooman was a shocking sight. His thin strip of hair was bleached-bone white and started halfway back on his scalp. His skin had faint lines in it, like the preliminary grooves made in tooled leather. Verd remembered dodging into an empty stateroom to regain his composure. Obviously this man was a member of one of those strange, nearly extinct religious orders which prohibit the taking of boosterspice. But he didn't behave like a religious nut. Verd found him friendly, alert, helpful and very likable. His thick We Made It accent was heavy with esses. "In this one respect we are lucky," Avran was saying. "Or you are lucky. I should have been lucky enough to miss my ship. I came to protect your cargo, which is a selection of fertile plant seeds and frozen animal eggs for the Zoo Of Earth Authority." "Exactly what's in the consignment?" "Nearly everything you could think of, Captain. The Central Government wished to establish a zoo which would show all the life that Earth has lost as a result of her intense population compression. I suspect they wished to encourage emigration. This is the first consignment, and it contains a male and female of every variety of domestic life on We Made It. There were to be other shipments from other worlds, including some extremely expensive mutations from Wonderland designed to imitate the long extinct 'big cats'. We do not have those, nor the useless decorative plants such as orchids and cactus, but we do have everything we need for farming. All we need is a place to plant it." "Not quite. Not unless you're carrying an all-purpose incubator for the animals." "Unfortunately I am not. Perhaps I could show how to make one out of other machinery." Avran smiled humorously. "But there is a problem. I am fatally allergic to boosterspice extract. This means that I will be dead in less than a century, which unfortunately limits the length of any journey of exploration that I can make." TT'rantically Verd tried to sort his climbing emotions before they strangled him. There was admiration that Avran could live so casually with the knowledge of imminent death, wonder that he could have achieved such a state of emotional maturity in what could be no more than fifty years. There was shame, and horror; compounded horror at the knowledge that he was flushing, and Avran could see it. Avran looked concerned. "Perhaps I should come back later." "No! I'm all right." Verd had found his tobac stick without thinking. He pulled in a deep, cooling draft of orange smoke, and held it in his lungs for a long moment. "A few more questions," he said briskly. "Does the Zoo consignment have grass seed? Is there any bacteria or algae?" "Grass, yes. Forty-three different varieties. But no bacteria, I'm afraid." "That's not good. It takes bacteria to turn rock dust into fertile soil." "Yes." Avran considered. "We could start the process with sewage from the ship, and use transplants of intestinal flora. Mix in the rock dust a little at a time. We have earthworms fortunately. It might work." "Good." "Now I have a question, Captain. What is that?" Verd followed his pointing finger. "Never seen a tobac stick?" Avran shook his head. "There's a funny tranquilizer in tobacco that helps you concentrate, lets you block out distractions. People used to have to inhale the tobacco smoke to get it. That caused lung cancer. Now we do it better. Is there any tobacco in the hold?" "I'm afraid not. Can you give up the habit?" "If I have to. But I won't like it." Verd sat for a moment after Avran had left, then got up and hunted down Parliss. "Avran claims to be allergic to boosterspice," he told him. "I want to know if it's true. Can you find out?" "Sure, Captain. It'll be in the medical record." "Good." "Why would he lie, Captain?" "He may have a religious ban on boosterspice. If so, he'd be afraid I'll shoot him full of it if I think I need him." There was no point in interviewing Strac Astrophysics again. Parliss told him that Strac spent most of his time in his room, and that he had borrowed a pocket computer from Chanda. "He must have something in mind," said Parliss. The next day he came to the cabin. "I've gone through the medical histories," he said. "We're all in good shape, except Avran Zooman and Laspia Waitress. Avran has just what he said he had. Laspia has a pair of cultured arms, no telling how she lost the old ones, and both ulnae have machinery in them. One's a dooper, one's a multirange sonic. I wonder what that sweet girl is doing armed to the teeth like that." "So do I. Did you manage to sabotage her?" "I put a power gain in her room. If she tries to shoot anyone she'll find her batteries are dead." The sixth day was the day of the mutiny. V 't Terd and Parliss were in the  crew common room going over Parliss' hundred-and-fiftyyear schedule for shipboard living, when the door opened and Chanda walked in. The first hint came from Chanda's taut, determined expression. Then Verd saw that someone was following her in. He stood up to protest, then stood speechless as a line of passengers trooped into the crew ing. "I'm sorry, Captain," said Chanda, "but we've come to demand your resignation." Verd, still standing, let his eyes run over them. The pretty auburn-haired woman in front, the one who held her arms in an inconspicuously strained attitude while the others took care not to crowd her elbows -- she must be Laspia Waitress. Jimm Farmer was also in the front rank. And Strac Astrophysics, looking acutely embarrassed, and many looked angry; Verd wasn't sure who they were angry at. He gave himself a few seconds to think. Let 'em wait it out... "On what grounds?" he asked mildly. "On the grounds that it's the best chance we have to stay alive," said Chanda. "That's not sufficient grounds. You know that. You need some criminal charge to bring against me -- dereliction of duty, sloppiness with the photon drive, murder, violation of religious tenets, drug addiction. Do you wish to make such a charge?" "Captain, you're talking about impeachment -- legal grounds for mutiny. We don't have such grounds. We don't want to impeach you, regardless." "Well, just what did you think this was, Chanda? An election?" "We're inviting you to resign." "Thank you, but I think not." "We could impeach you, you know," said Jimm Farmer. He was neither embarrassed nor angry; he was a man doing a job. "We could charge you with addiction to tobac sticks, try you and convict you." "Tobac sticks?" "Sure, everyone knows they're not addictive. The point is that there aren't any higher courts to reverse our decision." "I guess that's true. Very well, go ahead." Parliss broke in, in a harsh whisper. "Chanda, what are you doing?" His face, scalp and ears were flushed sunset red. "Quiet, Pari. I'm only doing what needs to be done." "You're out of your head with grief for that damn mechanical moron." Chanda flashed him a smoking glare. Parliss returned it. She turned away, aloofly ignoring him. Strac spoke for the first time. "Don't make us use force, Captain." "Why not? Do you idiots realize what you're asking?" Verd's self control was going. He'd been a young man when the Hogan's Goat was built. In nearly two centuries he'd flown her further than the total distance to Andromeda and back; nursed her and worried about her and lived his life in her lighted, rushing womb. What he felt must have showed in his face, for the girl with the auburn hair raised her left arm and held it innocently bent, pointed right at him. Probably the sonic; no doubt he would have been swathed in calming vibrations if her batteries had worked. But all he felt was nausea and a growing rage. "I do," Strac said quietly. "We're asking you to make it possible for us to give you back the Hogan's Goat after we're through with it." Verd jumped at him. A cold corner of his mind was amazed at himself, but most of him only wanted to get his hands around Strac's bony throat. He glimpsed Laspia Waitress staring in panic at her forearms, and then something clamped a steel hand around his ankle and jerked. Verd stopped suddenly in midair. It was Jimm Farmer. He had jumped across the room like a kangaroo. Verd looked back over his shoulder and carefully kicked him hard under the jaw. Jimm looked surprised and hurt. He squeezed! "All right," said Verd. "All right. I'll resign." VI r T"he autodoc mended two cracked ankle bones, injected mysterious substances into the badly bruised lower terminal of his Achilles tendon, and ordered a week of bed rest. Strac's plans were compatible. He had ordered the ship to Earth. Since the Goat was still moving at nearly the speed of light, and had gone well past the solar system, the trip would take about two weeks. Verd began to enjoy himself. It seemed the first time since the last Jump that he had stopped worrying for more than a few minutes at a time. He even persuaded Lourdi to cooperate with Strac. At first she would have nothing to do with the mutineers, but Verd convinced her that the passengers needed her professional help. After a week on his back he started to move around the ship, trying to get an idea of the state of the ship's morale. He did little else. He was perversely determined not to interfere with the new captain. Laspia Waitress stopped him in the hall. "Captain, I've got to take you into my confidence. I Central Government Police. There's a badly wanted man aboard this ship." And before Verd could start to humor her she produced authentic-looking credentials. "He's involved in the Free Wonderland conspiracy," she went on. "Yes, it still exists. We had reason to think he was aboard the Hogan's Goat, but I wasn't sure until he found some way to disarming me. I still don't know just who he is." Verd saw she was frightened. "I did that. I didn't want anyone wandering around my ship with concealed weapons." "You fool! How am I going to arrest him?" "Why would you arrest him? Who would you turn him over to if you did? What harm can he do now?" "What harm? He's a revolutionary, a -- a seditionist!" "Sure. He's fanatically determined to free Wonderland from the tyranny of the Central Government of Earth. Only Wonderland and the Central Government are eons dead, and we haven't a single Earthman on board. Unless you're one, and if you are nobody knows it." He left her sputtering. Surprisingly, Strac had talked to no one, except to ask questions of the crew members. If he had plans they were all his. Perhaps he wanted one last look at Earth, ancient grandmother Earth, dead now of old age. Many passengers felt the same. Verd did not. He and Lourdi had last seen Earth twelve years ago -- subjective time -- when the Goat was getting her lift support systems renovated. They had spent a wonderful two months in Rio de Janeiro, a teeming hive of multicolored human beings moving among buildings that reached like frustrated spacecraft toward the sky. Once they had even seen two Pierson's Puppeteers, natives from l'Elephant, shouldering their way unconcerned among the swarming humans, but shying like three-legged fawns at the sight of a swooping aircar. Perhaps Puppeteers survived even now, somewhere in the smoky arms of this galaxy or another. Perhaps even human beings lived on, though they must be changed beyond recognition. But Verd did not want to look on the corpse face of Earth. He wanted his memories unspoiled. He was not asked. On the fifteenth ship's-moming the Earth was a wide, brilliant crescent, brightest where the seas had dried across the sunward face and left a vast, smooth bed of salt. The sun shone with eery greenish-white radiance beyond the polarized windows. Verd and Lourdi were finishing breakfast when Strac appeared outside the one-way transparent door. Lourdi let him in. "I thought I'd better come personally," said Strac. "We'll be meeting in the crew common room in an hour. I'd appreciate it if you'd be there, Verd." "I'd just as soon not," said Verd. "Thanks anyway. Have a roast dove?" Strac politely declined and left. He did not repeat his invitation. "He wasn't just being polite," said Lourdi. "He needs you." "Let 'im suffer." Lourdi took him gently by the ears and turned him to face her -- a trick she had developed to get his undivided attention. "Friend, this is the wrong time to exercise your right to be inconsistent. You talked me into working for the usurper on grounds that the passengers need my help. Well, I'm telling you they need yours." "Dammit, Lourdi, if they needed me I'd still be captain!" "They need you as a crewman!" Verd set his jaw and looked stubborn. Lourdi let go of his ears, patted them gently and stepped back. "That's my say. Think it through , Lord and Master." Qix people sat in a circle  around the table. Verd was there, and Lourdi and Parliss and Chanda. Strac sat in the Captain's chair, under the Brain screen. The sixth man was Jimm F armer. "I know what we have to do now," said Strac His natural dignity seemed to have deepened lately; his thin, dark face didn't smile, and his shoulders sagged as if ship's gee were too heavy for him. "But I want to consider alternatives first. To that end I want you all to hear the answers to questions I've been asking you individually. Lourdi, will you tell us about the Sun?" Lourdi stood up. She seemed to know exactly what was wanted. "It's very old," she said. "Terribly old and almost dead. The Sun followed the Main Sequence all the way. After our Jumper went funny it continued to get hotter and brighter and bigger and bluer as the region of fusing hydrogen burned its way up to the surface. It could have left the Main Sequence by going supernova or by suddenly expanding into a red giant, but if it had there wouldn't be any inner planets. So the Sun expanded to a white giant, absorbed Mercury, burnt up the last of its hydrogen and collapsed. "It contracted to a white dwarf. There was unradiated heat working its way out, and heat of contraction, and there were still fusion reactions going on inside, because nuclear fusion gives heat all the way up to iron. So the Sun still gave off light, and still does, even though for all practical purposes there's no fuel left. Now it's a greenish dwarf, and still cooling. In millions of years it'll be a reddish black one." "How much radiation is being put out now?" Lourdi considered. "About the same as in our time, but it's bluer light. The Sun is much hotter than when we knew it, but all its light has to come through a smaller surface area." "Thanks, Loudi. Jimm Farmer, could you grow foodstuffs under such a star?" Peculiar question, thought Verd. He sat up straighter, fighting a horrible suspicion. Jimm looked puzzled, but answered readily. "If the air was lt# right, and I had enough water, sure I could. Plants like ultraviolet. The animals might need protection from sunburn." "Lourdi, what's the state of the galaxy?" "Lousy," she said promptly. "Too many dead stars, and most of what's left are blue-white and white giants. Too hot. I'd bet that any planet that had the right temperature for life would be a gas giant like Jupiter. The young stars are all in the tips of the galactic arms, and they've been scattered by the spinning of the Galaxy. There are still younger stars in the globular clusters. Do you want to hear about them?" "We'd never reach them," said Verd. His suspicion was a certainty. He blew orange smoke and waited, silently daring Strac to put his intention into words. "Right," said Strac. "Chanda, how is the Brain?" # #T #"ery, very sick. It might  stop working before the decade's end. It'll never last out the century, crippled as it is." Chanda wasn't looking so good herself. Her eyes were red, underlined with blue shadows. Verd thought she had lost weight. Her hair hadn't had its usual care. She continued, as if to herself, "Twice I've given it ordinary commands and gotten the Insufficient Data sign. That's very bad. It means the Brain is starting to distrust its own memory banks." "Thanks, Chanda." Strac was carrying it off pretty well, but beneath his commander's dignity he looked determined and -- frightened. If Verd was right he had reason. "Now you know everything," he said. "Any comments?" Parliss said, "If we're going star hunting we ought to stop on Pluto and pick up an air reserve. We could stay alive maybe three hundreds years that way." "Uh-huh. Anyone else?" Nobody. "Well, that's that." Strac drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. "Now you know everything. There's too much risk in searching the nearby stars. We'll have to go down. Chanda, please order the Brain to land us on the highest flat point in the noonequator region." Chanda didn't move. Nobody moved. "I knew it," Verd said, very quietly. His voice echoed in the greater quiet. The crew common room was like a museum exhibit. Everyone seemed afraid to move. Everyone but Jimm Farmer, who in careful silence was getting to his feet. "You're out of your mind." Verd paused and tried to make his voice persuasive. "Didn't you understand, Strac? The Brain put you in charge because you had more useful knowledge than the rest of us. You were supposed to find a new home for the human race." '"They were all staring at Strac with varying degrees of horror. All but Jimm, who stood patiently waiting for the others to make up their minds. "You were not supposed to give up and take us home to die!" Verd snapped. But Strac was ignoring him. Strac was glaring back at them all, with rage and contempt in his eyes. Parliss, normally Nordic-pale, was white as moonlight. "Strac, it's dead! Leave it! We can find another world -- " "You mewling litter of blind idiots!" Even Jimm Farmer looked shocked. "Do you think I'd kill us all for a twinge of homesickness? Verd, you know better than that, even if nobody else does. They were on your back, twenty-seven people and all their potential children, all waiting for you to tell them how to die. Then suddenly there was a mutiny. You're free! They're all shifted to me!" His eyes left Verd's and ranged over his shocked, silent crew "Idiots blindly following the orders of a damaged mechanical brain. Accepting everything you're told. Lourdi!" he snapped. "What does 'one face' mean?" Lourdi jumped. "It means the planet doesn't rotate with respect to its star." "It doesn't mean the planet has only one face?" "Wha-at?" ""'he Earth has a back to it." "Sure!" "What's it look like?" "I don't know." Lourdi thought a moment. "The Brain knows. You remember you asked Chanda to make the Brain use the radar to find out. Then she couldn't get it to show us the picture. We can't use the telescope because there's no light, not even infra-red. It must be terribly cold. Colder than Pluto." "You don't know," said Strac. "Well, I do. We're going down, Chanda?" "Tell us about it," said Jimm Farmer. "No." Verd spoke with all the authority he could muster. The responsibility Strac carried showed in his bent shoulders and bleak expression, in his deep, painful breathing, in his previous attempts to pass the buck to someone else. Strac must know exactly what he was doing. He must! If he didn't he couldn't have moved at all! "Tell us," Jimm repeated. His tone was flat with menace. "No. Shut up, Jimm. Or we'll let you make all the decisions from now on." Jimm thought it over, suddenly laughed and sat down. Chanda picked up her stylus and began tapping on the speaker. r I 'he Hogan's Goat lay at an odd angle, nearly in the center of a wide, ancient asteroid crater, under a small, fiercely bright sun set in a black sky. There, marring the oversized girdle with its remaining spires, was the ragged, heat-stained hole where the meteor had struck. There, extending for two thirds of her length, was the gash a rack had made along her belly in the last seconds of the landing. And at the tail, aft of the girdles, that static explosion of curved metal strips was where the photon drive had been before Strac had ordered it cut free. It had been a bad landing. Even at the start the Brain was a fraction of a second slow in adjusting the ship's gravity, so that the floor had bucked queasily under them as they dropped. Then, when the ship was already falling toward the crater, Strac had suddenly told Chanda that the photon drive had to be accessible after landing. Chanda had started tapping -- and the ship had flipped at an angle. The Hogan's Goat had never been built to land that way. Most of the passengers sported bruises. Avran Zooman had a broken arm. Without boosterspice the bone was slow to heal. A week of hard, grinding labor was nearly over. Only servomachinery now moved on the crater floor. Most of the activity centered around the huge silver tube which was aimed like a cannon at a point ten degrees above the horizon. The drive tube had been towed up against the crater wall, and a great mound of piled, heatfused earth now buried its lower end. Cables and fuel pipes joined it higher up. "Hi! Is that you, Captain?" Verd winced. "I'm on top of the crater wall," he said, because Strac couldn't locate him from the sound of his voice. The indeterminate voice had to be Strac. Only Strac would shout into a suit radio. "And I'm not the captain." Strac floated down beside him. "I thought I'd see the sights." "Good. Have a seat." "I find it strange to have to call you Verd," said the astrophysicist. "It usedto be just 'Captain'." "Serves you right for staging a mutiny -- Captain." "Of course. I always knew my unquenchable thirst for power would get me in trouble." "Don't give me that." r I 'hey watched as a tractormounted robot disconnected a fuel pipe from the drive, then rolled back. A moment later a wash of smoky flame burst from the pipe. It changed color and intensity a dozen times within a few seconds, then died as abruptly as it had begun. The robot waited for the white heat to leave the pipe, then rolled forward to reconnect it. Verd asked, "Why are you so calm all of a sudden?" "My job's over," said Strac with a shrug in his voice. "Now it's in the lap of the gods." "Aren't you taking an awful chance?" "Oh? You've guessed what I'm trying to do?" "Sure. You're using the photon drive to start the Earth spinning again." "Why?" Strac baited him. "You must be hoping there's air and water frozen on the dark side. But it seems like a thin chance. Why were you afraid to explain before?" "You put it that way -- and then ask why I didn't put it to a vote? Verd, would you have done what I did?" "No. It's too risky." "Suppose I tell you that I know the air and water is there. It has to be there. I can even tell you what it looks like, a great shallow ice dome, stratified according to freezing point, with water ice on the bottom, then carbon dioxide, and all the way up to a few shifting pools erf helium II. Surely you don't expect a one-face world to have a gaseous atmosphere? It would all freeze out on the night side. It has to." "It's there? There's air here? Your professional word?" "My word as an astrophysicist." Verd stretched like a great cat. He couldn't help himself. He could actually feel the muscles around his eyes and cheeks rippling as they relaxed, and a great grin crawled toward his ears. "You comedian!" he laughed. "Why didn't you say so?" "Suppose I kept talking." Verd turned to look at him. "You'll have thought of some of these things yourself. Can we of years to change chemically before it froze. Is there enough of it? Or did too much boil off while the Sun was a blue-white giant? Maybe there's too much, generated by volcanic action after the Moon was too far away to skim it off. Lourdi said the sun is putting out about the right amount of heat, but just how close will it be to a livable temperature? Can Jimm Farmer make us topsoil? There'll be live soil on the nightside, but can we get there if we have to? The Earth must be frozen all the way to the center by now, there can't be any radioactivity left -- but the drive could still cause serious earthquakes. Kdapt knows I've sweated over that one! Well, Captain, would you have taken all those risks?" "She blows." Traces of hyrogen, too thin to stop a meteor, glowed faintly in the destroying light of the drive. A beam like a spotlight reached out over the sharp horizon. Anything that light touched would flame and blow away on the wings of the photon wind. The drive nosed a little deeper into its tomb of lava. The ground trembled. Verd turned on his flying unit, and Strac rose after him. Together they hovered over the shaking ground. In space the drive would have been generating one hundred savage gravities. Here... almost none. Almost. Little quick ripples came running from the horizon where the drive beam pointed. They ran in parallel lines of dancing dust across the crater floor, sent rocks tumbling from the crater wall, coming closer and closer together. "Maybe I wouldn't have risked it," said Verd. "I don't know." "That's the real reason the Brain put me in charge. Did you see the oxygen ice as we went by the nightside? Or was it too dark? To you this frozen air is purely imaginary, isn't it?" "I'll take your professional word." "But I don't have to. I take one less risk than you do," Strac said. Dust danced over the shaking ground. But the ripples were less violent, and were coming less frequently now. "The Brain was damaged," Verd said softly, musing aloud. "Yes," said Strac, frowning down into the old crater. Suddenly he touched his controls and started swimming down. "Come on, Verd. In a few days we'll have air. We've got to get ready for wind and rain." mmrn t worlds of  j  Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just order on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. 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Edition is published in Braille. This Edition is also published in Living Tape by Services for the Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. by Frank Herbert by James Blish and Norman L. Knight Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. by Robert F. Young by Michael Kurland by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Old Home Month A few weeks ago (as this is written; but by the time you see it it's going to be more like a few months), the Eastern Science Fiction Association devoted its annual meeting to honoring Galaxy. There were speeches by the likes of Harry Harrison, Lester del Rey, H. L. Gold, Jack Gaughan and any number of others ; there was a handsome little placque commemorating the event, which we now have on the wall of our reception room; and we thank them. And now, if we can say this without sounding too vain, it's our turn. As you will know if you've looked at the forecast for the next issue, we propose to put out a special number for the next issue of Galaxy to commemorate its fifteenth anniversary; and this seems as good a time as any to put on record a few things we've held back from saying for a while. (This time the "we" is the editorial plural, by which is meant the present incumbent of the editorial hot-seat, namely Frederik Pohl.) TTorace Gold was the first and  longest-lasting editor of Galaxy, and he gave it a shape and policy which made a startling impact on the world of science fiction fifteen years ago. It is difficult to exaggerate that impact. One measure of it is that for most of a decade the majority of the other science-fiction magazines imitated Gold's magazine as closely as they could in one way or another. Another is that of the writers who have begun their major careers in science fiction since #, nearly every one of them was primarily a Galaxy writer. Horace Gold's notion of a proper lars, of course. Algis Budrys's book review section will be taken up by an extremely enjoyable essay (we've just finished reading it) about science fiction in # and where it has led us all; Willy Ley too sets out to reminisce, and does so in pleasant and informative style. But then you know that; his column always is. Incidentally, we've just received a copy of a new book by Willy which we think you'll like. It's called Ranger to the Moon (Signet), and what it's about is clear from the title. Discursive and fact-packed, Willy Ley always adds more to a subject than the bare bones would allow you to expect, however, and in Ranger to the Moon he tells about not only the photographtaking shot that succeeded, but about the predecessors that failed -- and why; about die Moon itself, about its explorers that are yet to come, and its explorers of another kind who made their discoveries through the eye of a telescope, at a reach of a quarter Budrys has been busy, too. For the past three years the man has taken himself out of circulation in order to be an editor, most recently on the Playboy staff; but he has put all that behind him and returned to free-lancing. He has three new novels in the works, and we expect we'll be bringing the one of them with which is science fiction to you pretty soon; meanwhile some of the finest of his earlier books are coming out in new editions --  Rogue Moon and Who?, for two -- and if you haven't read them, we suggest you do. We take it, by the way, that you enjoy his book review column as much as we do. The letters we get are what make us think so, of course. But this is a good time, perhaps, to say again what we have said before: Galaxy doesn't have a letter column, but all the same we welcome your letters. Omniscient we are not. We think that we're doing what you want us to with the magazine, but we're always grateful to be told what you think. So if the impulse comes to you to drop us a line of comment, don't put it behind you because you think we aren't interested. We are! Vitally! And the only check we have on how well we're succeeding, part from the conclusive but unanalytical reports of sales, is your letters...      science-fiction story was, and is, a story which is witty, bright and razor-edged. In order to get what he wanted, Horace Gold spared neither the writers nor himself. He had a reputation among some writers as a sort of slave-driver; but as one of the most frequently flogged of the slaves, the present editor can testify that, more often than not, the results were worth it. All that was gold, Gold saw glittering; and painfully and persistently he set about compelling writers to pan away the dross. That was the Galaxy that was; now let's talk about the present publication of the same name. When we (the undersigned, that is) took over from Gold nearly five years ago it was with the understanding that we were neither able to continue the precise editorial mix that Gold had pioneered -- nobody else could do that -- nor, as a matter of fact, did we want to. Times change. What is good in # may not be quite right for #. We have never stated in the magazine just what it was that we proposed to do differently, but perhaps by now the record speaks for itself and we need only sum it up: The Galaxy of the '#'s was a specialist magazine. What it did cover the full spectrum of science fiction. We have tried as best we could to retain some of the best of the #-odd Galaxy -- a story like Robert Sheckley's Mindswap, which we published last month, would have been right at home in any of those issues -- but also to add some of the other kinds of science fiction that have their own special merits to offer: like the current issue's Do I Wake or Dream? by Frank Herbert, which wouldn't have been at home at all. To make this sort of transition is not an easy task (frankly, we were surprised to find how difficult, chancy and slow it was). But we think we've just about managed it; and we are gratified by the letters which have come to show that a good many readers are beginning to think so too. Next issue, however, is the closest we can come to reproducing in # the kinds of science fiction that characterized Galaxy in the #'s; we've induced a majority of the top Galaxy writers of all time to contribute, as many as we can fit into a single issue (you'll find some of the names in the forecast). We mean it to express our own way of honoring H.L. Gold. And we think you'll like it. B esides the writers listed in the forecast (and a couple of others not named, if we can fit them in), we will have our regumacu hikes woes t! it    Distributed nationally by: # Avenue of Americas New York, N. Y. # They were terribly alone -- on a voyage from the Earth they had never known to the star they would never live to reachl Illustrated IM-Ie held up the severed end of a feeder tube, stared at the panel from which he had cut it. His heart was beating too fast and he could feel his hands trembling. Fluorescent red letters eight centimeters high spelled out a warning on the panel in front of him. The warning seemed a mockery after what he had just done. Bickel felt an extra sense of quiet in the ship now. Something (not someone, he thought) was gone. It was as though the molecular stillness of outer space had invaded the Earthling's concentric hulls and spread through to the heart of this egg-shaped chunk of metal hurtling toward Tau Ceti. His two companions were wrapped in this silence, Bickel saw. They were afraid to break the quiet moment of shame and anger... and relief. "What else could he do?" Bickel demanded. He held up the severed tube, glared at it. Raja Flattery, their psychiatrist-chaplain, cleared his throat, said: "Easy, John. We share the blame equally." Bickel turned his glare on Flattery, noted the man's quizzical expression, calculated and penetrating, the narrow, haughty face that somehow focused a sense of terrible superiority within remote brown eyes and upraked black eyebrows. "You know what you can do with your blame!" Bickel growled, but Flattery's words destroyed his anger, made him feel defeated. Bickel swung his attention to Timberlake -- Gerrill Timber  lake, life systems engineer, the man who should've taken responsibility for this dirty business. Timberlake, a quick and nervous scarecrow of a man with skin almost the color of his brown hair, stared at the metal deck near his feet, avoiding Bickers eyes. Timberlake's weakness -- his even when that meant saving the ship with its thousands of helpless lives -- had almost killed them all. And all the man could feel now was shame... and fear. There'd been no doubt about had gone mad, a wild runaway consciousness. It had been a sick ball of gray matter whose muscles turned every servo on the ship into a murder weapon, who stared out at them with madness from every sensor, who raged gibberish at them from every vocoder. No, there'd been no doubt -- not with three of their number murdered. The only wonder was that they'd been allowed to destroy it. Perhaps it wanted to die, Bickel thought. And he wondered if that had been the fate of the six other Project ships which had vanished into the nothingness without a trace. their umbilicus crews fail when it was kill or be killed? A tear began sliding down Timberlake's left cheek. To Bickel, that was the final blow. Some of his anger returned. He faced Timberlake, said: "What do we do now, Captain ?" The title's irony wasn't lost on either of Bickel's companions. Flattery started to reply, thought better of it. If the starship Earthling could be said to have a captain (discounting an in-service Organic Mental Core) then unspoken agreement gave that title to an umbilicus crew's life systems engineer. None of them, though, had ever used the word officially. At last, Timberlake met BicIcel's stare, but all he said was: "You know why I couldn't bring myself to do it." Bickel continued to study Timberlake, measuring the man. What shabby conceit had given them this excuse for a life system engineer? Once the umbilicus crew had numbered six -- the three here plus Ship Nurse Maida Blaine, Tool Specialist Oscar Anderson and Biochemist Sam Scheler. Now, Blaine, Anderson and Scheler were dead -- Scheler's exploded corpse jamming an access tube on the aft perimeter, Anderson strangled by a rogue sphincter lock and lovely Maida mangled by runaway cargo. Bickel blamed most of the tragedy on Timberlake. If the damn' fool had only taken the ruthless but obvious step at the first sign of trouble. There'd been plenty of warning -- with the first two of the ship's three of trouble had been obvious. And the symptoms -- exactly the same symptoms that had preceded the breakdown of the old Artificial Consciousness project back on earth -- insane destruction of people and material. But Tim had refused to see it. Tim had blathered about the sanctity of all life. Life, hah! Bickel thought. They were all of them -- even the colonists down in the hyb tanks -- expendable biopsy material, Doppelgangers grown in gnotobiotic sterility in the Moonbase. "Untouched by human hands." That'd been their private joke. They'd known their earth-born teachers only as voices and doll-size images on cathode screens of the base intercom system -- and only occasionally through the triple glass at the locks that sealed off the sterile creche. They'd emerged from the axolotl tanks to the padded metal claws of nursemaids that were servo extensors of Moonbase personnel forever barred from intimate contact with those they served. Timberlake glanced around at the familiar room in the ship's core -- Command Central -- a space twenty-seven meters long and twelve meters on the short axis. Like the ship, Com-central was vaguely egg-shaped. Four cocoon-like action couches with almost identical control boards lay roughly parallel in the curve of the room's wider end. Colorcoded pipes and wires, dials and instrument controls, switch banks and warning telltales spread patterned confusion against the gray metal walls. Here was the necessities for monitoring the ship and its autonomous consciousness -- an Organic Mental Core. Organic Mental Core, Timberlake thought, and he felt the full return of his feelings of guilt a and grief. Not human brain, oh, no. An Organic Mental Core. emism makes it easier to forget that the core once was a human brain in an infant monster -- doomed to die. We take only terminal cases since that makes the morality of the act less questionable. And we killed it. tiT'll tell you what I'm going to do," Bickel said. He looked at the Accept-and-Translate board auxiliary to the transmitter on his personal control console. "I'm going to report back to Moonbase what's happened." He turned away franOj the raped panel, dropped the severed feeder tube to the deck without looking at it. The tube drifted downward slowly in the ship's quarter gravity. "We've no code for this... this kind of emergency," Timberlake said. He moved to confront Bickel, stared angrily at the man's square face, disliking every feature of it from the closecropped blond hair to the wide mouth and pugnacious jaw. "I know," Bickel said, stepped around Timberlake. "I'm sending it clear speech." "You can't do that!" Timberlake protested, turning to glare at Bickel's back. "Every second's delay adds to the timelag," Bickel said. "As it is, it has to go more than a fourth of the way across the solar system." He dropped into his couch, set the cocoon to half enclose him, swung the transmitter into position. "You'll be blatting it to everyone on earth, including youknow-who!" Timberlake said. Because he half agreed with Timberlake and wanted to gain time, Flattery moved to a position looking down on Bickel on the couch, said: "What specifically are you going to tell them?" "I'm not about to mince words," Bickel said. He threw the transmitter warmup switches, began checking the sequence tape. "I'm going to tell 'em we had to unhook the last brain from the ship's controls... and kill it in the process." "They'll tell us to abort," Timberlake said. The merest hesitation of his hands on the tape-punch keyboard told that Bickel had heard. "And what'll you say happened to the brains?" Flattery asked. "They went nuts," Bickel said. "I'm just going to report our casualties." "That's not precisely what happened," Flattery said. "We'd better talk this over," Timberlake said, and he felt the beginnings of desperation. But Bickel threw the master switch. A skin-creeping hum filled Com-central as the laser amplifiers built up to full potential. I should stop him, Flattery thought as Bickel fed the vocotape into the transmitter. But what good would that do? We have to get the message out and clear speech is the only way. There came the click-clickclick as the message was compressed and multiplied for its laser-jump across the solar system. With a chopping motion that carried its own subtle betrayal of self doubt, Bickel slapped the orange transmitter key. He sank back as the transmit-command sequence took over. The sound of relays snapping closed dominated the ovoid room. Do something even if if s wrong, Flattery reminded himself. The rule books don't work out here. And now it's too late to stop Bickel. It came to Flattery then that it had been too late to stop Bickel from the moment their ship left its moon orbit. This directauthoritarian-violent man (or one of his backups in the hyb tanks) held the key to the Earthling's real purpose. The rest of them were just along for the ride. "How long d'you suppose it'll take Moonbase to answer?" Bickel asked Timberlake. Flattery stiffened, studied the back of Bickel's head. The question... such a nice balance of cameraderie and apology in the voice... Bickel had done that deliberately, Flattery realized. Bickel went deeper than they'd suspected, but perhaps they should've suspected. He was, after all, the Earthling's pivotal figure. "It'll take 'em a while to digest it," Timberlake said. "I still think we should've waited." Wrong tack, Flattery thought. An overture should be accepted. He brushed a finger along one of his heavy eyebrows, moved forward with a calculated clumsiness, forcing them to be aware of him. "Their first question'll be lake said. "There was no medical reason for it," Flattery said. He realized he'd spoken too quickly, sensed his own defensiveness and added: "At least, as far as I could determine." "It'll turn out to be something new, something nobody anticipated, wait and see," Timberlake said. Something nobody anticipated? Bickel wondered. Still, six other ships had vanished into silence out here -- six other ships much like their Earthling. Timberlake adjusted a dial on his console to correct a failure of automatic temperature adjustment in quad three ring nine of the ship's second shell. "We should've been buttoned down in our hyb tanks and on our way over the solar hump to Tau Ceti long ago," he muttered. "Tim, display the timelog," Flattery said. Timberlake hit the green key in the upper right comer of his board, glanced at the overhead master screen's display from the laserpulse timelog. T en months -- plus. The indefinite answer made it seem the Earthling' s computer core shared their doubts. "How long to Tau Ceti?" Flattery asked. "At this rate?" Timberlake asked. He risked a long glance away from his board. The stare he aimed at Flattery betrayed the fact he hadn't thought of that possibility, making the trip the hard way -- long and slow with a crew active all the way. "Say four hundred years, give or take a few," Bickel said. "It's the first question I fed into the computer after we disabled the drive increment." He's too crystal sharp, Flattery thought. He bears watching lest he shatter. And Flattery chided himself then: But the job Bickel has to do requires a man who can shatter. "First thing we'd better do is bring up one replacement from the hyb tanks," Bickel said. Flattery glanced to his left where the Com-central's other three action couches lay with their cocoon arms open, empty and waiting. "Bring up only one replacement, eh?" Flattery asked. "Live in here?" "We may need occasional sleep-rest periods in the cubby lockers," Bickel said and he nodded toward the side hatch into their spartan living quarters. "But Com-central's the safest spot on the ship." "What if Project orders us to abort?" Timberlake asked. "That won't be their first order," Bickel said. "Seven nations invested one helluva pile of money and effort and dreams in this business. One nation might give up immediately... seven nations, no. It could take 'em months to reach any kind of agreement." Too crystal sharp, Flattery thought. And he asked: "Who're you nominating for dehyb?" "Prudence Weygand, M.D.," Bickel said. "You think we need another doctor, eh?" Flattery asked. "I think we need Prudence Weygand, that's all," Bickel said. "She's a doctor, sure, but she can also function as a nurse to replace... Maida. She's a woman and we may need female thinking in..." "And if we have to make the trip the hard way," Flattery said. He nodded. Yes, they'd have to breed replacements for the crew. Bickel was thinking ahead, planning. "You have any objection to Weygand, Tim?" Bickel asked. "What's my opinion worth? Timberlake muttered. "You two've already decided it, haven't you?" Bickel already had turned toward his own action couch. He hesitated at the sound of anger in Timber lake's voice, then went on to the couch, pulled the full vacuum suit from the rack beneath the couch and began suiting up. He spoke without turning: "I'll take over here then while you and Raj bring her out of hyb. You'd both better suit up, too, and stay suited from at the controls... well..." He shrugged, finished sealing the suit and stretched out in his action couch. "I'll take the red switch on the count." Timberlake was caught up then in the change-over. The master board swung across on its travelers, stopped as it made junction with Bickel's console. Bickel satisfied himself the ship was functioning as well as it could without the homeostaback to watch the board as the others left Corn-central. The hatch seals hissed and there came the metallic slap of the magnetic locks as the hatch closed and resealed itself. Now, Bickel felt the ship around him as though he had neural connections to every sensor revealed on his board. The Earthling lay spread out for him -- a monstrous juggernaut... yet fragile as an egg. A Tin Egg. Among themselves, they'd called it the Tin Egg from the moment someone had noted the homonym in the name of the ship's Dutch-Siamese chief designer: Tien Aq. Something about the Tin Egg was sour -- Big Sour. It didn't make sense to Bickel that a man had to sit here in Comcentral, the strain of responsibility increasing with each heartbeat, waiting and knowing some mechanism or balancing function of the ship was headed for trouble -- yet unable to meet the problem with more than a gross, clumsy makeshift. ance had been a finely tuned neuro-servo reflex, almost automatic -- as homeostatic in response as a healthy human body. Bickel added his own question now to the long list that had been posed: Why were all the eggs put in one basket? II A s she awoke, she thought: We made it! Two hundred years across space and we made it! Excitement filled her at the thought of stepping out onto a virgin world with all its strange newness and never-before problems. Six failures were worth it The seventh try was a charm. We've succeeded. Otherwise... otherwise... Her mind bogged down in sluggishness. Otherwise was a concept with several pathways out of it. The tingle-ache of dehyb ran along the muscles of her arms and legs, produced transient knots of pain. She knew as a doctor the reasons for the pain, could rationalize the fact of it: human hybernation was a far different process from animal hibernation. Not a drop of water could remain in the body -- and you went so close to the borders of death that some contended you were suspended within death. The pains of dehyb could be explained easily enough, but no description was adequate. They had to be experienced to be understood. She tried to sit up. It was then she saw Timberlake and Flattery looking down at her where she lay on the lab shuttle. Their expressions brought otherwise to full focus. For a moment, she looked beyond them to the tubes and stimulant plugs that had been removed from functional contact with her body. Flattery restrained her. "Easy now, Dr. Weygand," he said. Dr. Weygand, she thought. Not Prudence. Not Prue. She began losing that first elation. Then Flattery began explaining in his soft, soothing voice and she knew her elation had to be put away. The contingency problem had arisen. She had been awakened for that. "Just tell me how many we lost," she said, and her throat hurt from its months of disuse. Timberlake told her. "Three dead?" she said. She didn't ask how they had died. The other problem, the contingency for which she had been prepared took precedence over mere curiosity. "Bickel requested you be brought out of hyb." "Does he know why?" she asked, ignoring the strange look Timberlake shifted from her to Flattery. "He rationalized it," Flattery said, and he wished she'd withheld these questions until they were alone. "Of course he did," she said. "But has..." "He hasn't posed the problem yet," Flattery said. "Don't push him," she said, and glanced at Timberlake. "Forget what you just heard here, Timberlake." Timberlake scowled, suddenly withdrawn and wary. Flattery bent over her right arm with a slapshot hypo in his hand. "Must you?" she asked. Then: "Yes, of course." "There's nothing for you to do right now except recuperate," he said, and pressed the slapshot against her arm. She felt the mechanism's kick and, presently, the soft spread of narcosis. Flattery and Timberlake became wavering figures haloed in light. At least Bickel' s still alive, she thought. We won't have to replace him with a backup -- take second best. And just before sinking into the downy cloud of sleep, she wondered: How did Maida die? Lovely Maida who... npimberlake watched the film of withdrawal wash over her light blue eyes. Her breathing took on soft regularity. As life systems specialist, Timberlake had checked the computer-filed tape flag for every person on the Tin Egg. He recalled that Prudence Weygand was classed superb as a surgeon -- "Superior # in tool facility." And the scale went only to #. He reflected on her strange conversation with Flattery and realized the tape hadn't told the full story. She obviously had ship functions beyond surgeonecologist... and at least one of these functions concerned Bickel. "Forget what you just heard here, Timberlake." Timberlake could still hear that cold-voiced command and he knew it didn't square with the emotional index on Prudence Weygand's tapes. There she was listed as "Place nine-d green" on the compassionate vector. In the close-quarters living of this umbilicus crew, that emotional index posed problems because of its tightly linked sex drive. With a sense of shock, Timberlake took a closer look at her feedtube spectrum on the hyb chart, saw that she'd been fed the sex suppressant anti-S drugs even under hyb. She'd been kept ready. Ready tor what? he asked himself. Flattery closed and locked her litter cocoon, said: "She'll sleep until she's almost back to normal. We'd better check her size now, too, and get her a full-vac suit out of stores. She'll need it when she comes out." Timberlake nodded, made a last check on the few remaining life-systems linkages into her litter. Flattery was acting very odd. Mysterious. "You can ignore all that conversation as she woke up," Flattery said. "Common dehyb confusion. You know how it is." But she was fed anti-S drugs in hybernation , Timberlake thought Flattery nodded toward the hatch into Com-central, said: "John's been almost four hours alone on the board. Time he got some relief." Timberlake finished his inspection of the litter gauges, turned, led the way through the hatch. Seeing the wary, thoughtful look on Timberlake's face, Flattery thought: Damn that woman's big mouth. If Tim says the wrong thing to Bickel now it could muddy the whole project. Tickel heard Flattery and Timberlake enter Com-central, but was forced to keep his attention on the big board. An odd timed pulse had appeared in the primary loops of the navigational analogue banks of the computer. It appeared and vanished with no apparent cause. Timberlake came up beside Bickel, studied the gauge which showed the timed pulse in the navigational analogue banks. "That acts like a Doppler reference pulse from the timelog," he said. "You been checking our position?" "No," Bickel said, and as he spoke the answer to this variant pulse clicked home in his mind. He had set up a telltale warning net in the computer to alert him when ship damage reached a critical point. Damage to the navigational system could be most critical -- especially internal damage. But unlike destruction of hardware, that internal damage would only betray itself by position errors. His telltale circuitry had alerted one of the ship computer's master programs. A running Doppler reference check was being made on their position. Bickel shifted to the computer board, ran a series trial on the navigational loops, read the induced resonance off the pulsing gauges. It checked. He explained what was happening. "The computer acts...almost... human," Flattery said. Bickel and Timberlake exchanged a knowing smile. Almost human, indeed! The damn' thing merely was doing what it was designed to do. Bickel had just overlooked the fact that this was in the design. "We'd better take the computer schematics and design specs and have a real skull session on what the lack of an berlake said. Bickel nodded. He was thankful then that Timberlake was, in many respects, as good an electronics man as anyone on the ship -- the necessary foundation for his specialty. There was always that almost qualification on his abilities, though. Life systems work trapped a man into a "generalist" corner. They knew plenty of biophysics, but they weren't doctors. They were adept in electronics, but fell short of that smooth juggling of variables which marked the true adept. "You ready for a break, John?" Flattery asked. "Any time. How's Prue?" "Doctor Weygand is asleep now," Flattery said. "She needs a few more hours recuperation." Why's he so formal? Bickel wondered. Raj must know I shared classes with her. She was always Prue then . Why should she suddenly he Doctor Weygand? "I'll take the board on the count," Flattery said, and they began the change of watch. Timberlake, sensing Bickel's questions, realized that Flattery's emphasis on Doctor Weygand had not been aimed at the electronics engineer. Raj was saying something to me, Timberlake thought. He was telling me that Doctor Weygand may've had medical reasons for her strange behavior. Raj is telling me to keep my mouth shut. And Timberlake found himself resenting the fact that Flattery had found the warning necessary. T)ickel closed off his link to the  controls, slipped off his couch and began exercising the stiffness out of his muscles. Remembering the classes he'd shared with Prue Weygand -- computer math, servo-sensor repair, ship function -- he recalled the woman. She was a disturbing female-plus creature, sensitive and with her feelings all too apparent. Bickel realized then that a photograph of Prue Weygand in repose would show a rather unassuming woman with regular features and a good, but not sensational figure. She was the kind who attracted male stares, though. She radiated some vital, sparking thing -- especially when she walked. Is that why I chose her? Bickel wondered. He broke off his exercises to consider the question. The Prue kind of woman presented a source of trouble in anotherwise all-male crew -- unless they all went on anti-S. But they couldn't afford to dull their faculties that way. Bickel forced this out of his mind by looking around Corncentral, focusing his attention on the ship -- Tien Aq's "Tin Egg." The ship cum computer cum hybernating colonists -- here was one set of resources that Bickel felt they could fit into a logical pigeonhole, assess and weigh and use as they needed. He sensed the ship stretching out from him in its sixteen concentric shells: a great ovoid bulk almost a mile across its long axis. Beyond the water barrier and baffles that shielded the core lay miles of corridors and tubeways, self-sealing compartments. Through it all stretched the organized clutter of material expected to make life possible for humans in an alien environment. In the hyb tanks they had two thousand adult humans, a thousand embryos and more than six thousand animal embryos -- "a full ecological spectrum." Bickel turned, looked at his own computer board. Logic told him their main chance of survival lay in the computer. His plan involved dangerous risk to the computer, but the risk was necessary. The others might fight him, but they have to come around. (, I T T ow long until Prue will be with us?" he asked. "About three hours," Timberlake said. "I want, her opinion on the post mortem," Bickel said. "I'm not satisfied with what we found in the first two brains." Timberlake shut down his couch massage, directed a probing stare at Bickel. "I went through the entire console when Brain One failed," he said. "Check it yourself." "I did," Bickel said. "A couple of things bothered me. Brain One preferred to be called Myrtle. Why? I find nothing in the memory core to diplain that -- except that Brain One was removed from a genetic monster that probably was female." "Myrtle's personal life system tested within .# of homeostatic center on the Anders Base," Timberlake said. "Her reserve life systems were in stasis and precisely on the base." "Don't let that identity preference seduce you," Flattery said. "It was for our benefit -- so we could anthropomorphize the "Yeah," Bickel said. "That's the reason they each gave, but is it the right one?" "Those brains were as perfect as any ever bom," Flattery said, and he wondered why he allowed Bickel's attitude to irritate him. "Okay, they were raised from infancy as part of the total ship-sensor-servo system. So what? They didn't know any other life or want..." "You said a couple of things were bothering you," Timberlake interrupted. "What's the other one?" "Your life systems report," Bickel said, "entry # on Myrtle. It says: 'None of the systems appear then to have been at fault.' Why'd you use that word appear, Tim? You have some doubts you couldn't enter in the report?" "Not a damn' one!" Timberlake said. "Those systems were perfect!" "Then why didn't you just say so?" "He was only being cautious," Flattery said. "If you've checked the records, you'll find my medical report confirms his findings in every respect." "Except one," Bickel said. "And what is that?" Timberlake asked. He glared at Bickel, his face flushed. A muscle worked along his jaw. Bickel ignored the signs of anger, said: "Nothing explains the internal burn damage that Raj found in those brains. 'Internal bum damage,' you say, 'especially along the overlarge axon collaterals of the afferent side.' What the devil do you mean overlarge? Overlarge compared to what?" "A main channel leading into the brain's higher centers was about four times the size of anything I'd ever seen," Flattery said. "I don't know why, but i can guess it was compensatory handle many more incoming data bits from more sensors than the normal human ever encounters. You'll note that the frontal lobes were larger, too, but... "The design specs on the Bickel said. "Compensatory growth, yeah, but I don't find word one about large axon collaterals. Not word one." "These brains had been in the system longer than any others ever examined," Timberlake said. "The literature only reports on four previously that died of natural causes." " Natural causes?" Bickel asked. "What's a natural cause "You know as well as I do," Flattery said. "Accidents. Irritant matter in the food bath. A radiation shield left down. But you'll notice that the last words from each betrayed a type of deterioration akin to schizo..." "Akin!" Bickel sneered. "That's what you see all through these damn' reports: "Something similar to...' 'A condition that reminds one of...' 'Akin to...' " He glared from Flattery to Timberlake: "The truth is we don't know what the hell goes on in an A clicking-buzzing erupted from the master board above Flattery. Bickel waited while Flattery fought out a manual temperature adjustment in an inner hold. Presently, Flattery wiped perspiration from his forehead, studied his gauges to be certain the balance was holding. "Man, that board's murder," Timberlake muttered. "I don't Flattery risked a glance away from the board, said: "You know better than that, Tim. This part of the job was child's play for a handle most ship homeostasis problems by something akin to reflex action." "Akin," Bickel said. "All right!" Flattery barked. "I was just saying -- " He broke off as the Master board grew three diagonal stripes of flashing yellow. Flattery's hands darted to the controls as Bickel shouted: "Grav shift!" and dove for his couch. Cocoon snapped closed around them and they felt the creeping, jerking weight shifts, the runaway fluctuation of the field centering system -- the unexplained gravity variance that had killed Maida. B ickel watched Flattery's hands fight the system back into balance with a surgeon's sureness. The tugging and jerking began to ease. Presently, Flattery made a fine, adjustment in the centering controls, took up as though there'd been no interruption. "Myrtle, you will recall, said: 'I have no incarnation.' That may have been the only accurate thing in her jabbering. After all, except for gray matter, she had no flesh. But then, remember, after a long silence she said: 'I'm counting my fingers.' She had no fingers, no conscious memory of fingers. And that final question: 'Why are you all so dead?' The best guess is that any meaning in these statements and questions was purely accidental." "I think she was referring to us, to the crew," Bickel said. "It's nuts, yes, but it was a direct question over the vocoders and we were the only possible audience." "Unless she was referring to the colonists in the hyb tanks," Flattery said. "They might appear dead under some..." "Myrtle had direct contact with the hyb tank sensors," Timberlake said. "She'd have known if they were alive." Bickel nodded, said: "What do you make of Little Joe roaring over every vocoder in the ship: 'I'm awake! God help me, I'm awake!" "A cry for help, perhaps," Flattery said. "Most insane raving is a cry for help in one form or another." "That leaves Harvey," Bickel said. "Harvey screamed: 'You're forcing me to be unhealthy.' " "Easy does it," Flattery said. "That was just another nonsense statement." "We all knew what it meant, though," Bickel said. "I didn't see anybody showing surprise when Harvey said; 'I've lost it!' and signed off... permanently. We'd been expecting it; you know that. And there we were with three dead brains and no spares." The bald, callous way Bickel put it sent a shuddering sadness through Timberlake and he couldn't explain it. He'd never been deeply attached to the something faintly accusing about the "ship creatures." Raja Flattery had assured him this was strictly subjective, something from his own attitudes. Raj had always been so positive that the were perfectly reconciled to their way of life, happy with their own compensations. What compensations? Timberlake wondered. Expectancy of long life? But what's three or four thousand years of living if each year is hell? Oharp, heavy G force pressed  him against the side of his couch cocoon. It struck without klaxon warning or alarm light. Cocoon safety locks sealed home. Now, red alarm lights flashed with the yellow in long webs across the master board. Flattery slammed the gravity disconnect with the heel of his left hand. G force ebbed. Yellow alarm lights winked off as their pressure switches released. A line of red alarm lights remained. "Damage to hull three, section six-fourteen," Flattery said. He began activating remote sensors to inspect the area. Without conscious thought or discussion, Bickel took over ship command, said: "Tim, take the G repeaters. Leave gravity disconnected while you trace the relays and get the system back in balance." Timberlake pulled his board close to obey. to his side, keyed for ship systems-computers control, began feeding coded demands into the core recorders. What had the ship encountered that might explain that brutal deflection? What had the automatic sensors recorded? The responders began kicking out tape almost immediately -- much too fast. "Data error," Flattery said, reading the output over Bickel's shoulder. In abrupt fury, Bickel pulled the master override stop from his core switch, jammed a set of controls, opened the core system for standard reference comparison. "You're into the core!" Flattery said, his voice sharp with fear. "You've no guide fuse or master reference. You could louse up the command routines." "Unhook that!" Timberlake shouted, lifting his head from the cocoon clamps to glare across at Bickel. "Shut up, both of you," Bickel said. "Sure, the core's delicate, but something in there's already loused up -- bad enough to kill us." "You think you've time to check some eight hundred thousand routines?" Timberlake demanded. "Don't talk nuts!" "There're specific injunctions against what you're doing," Flattery said, fighting to keep his voice reasonable. "And you know why." "Don't try to tell me my job," Bickel said. While he spoke, Bickel rolled over core memory responders, direct contact, doing it gently to avoid current backlash. "You make one mistake," Timberlake said, "and it'd take six or seven thousand technicians with a second master system and several thousand imprint relays to repair the damage. Are you ready to..." "Stop distracting me," Bickel said. "What're you looking for?" Flattery asked, interested in spite of his fear. He had realized that Bickel, conditioned to deep inhibitions against turning back, was incapable of doing anything to deprive them of one of their basic tools. "I'm checking availability of peripherals from the core memory," Bickel said. "There's got to be a bypass or pile-up somewhere. It'll show in the acquisition and phasecontrol loops of the input." He nodded toward a diagnostic meter on his board. "And here we are!" The meter's needle slammed against its pin, fell back to zero, stayed there. Qlowly, Bickel ordered a master  diagnostic routine into direct contact, forced the routine through the data reference channels as modified by new sensor input. Error branchings began clicking from his responders. Bickel translated aloud as the code figures appeared on the screen. "Core memory prediction region rendered inactive. Proton mass and scatter relative to ship coursemassspeed did not agree with prediction." Aside, Bickel said: "We're hitting something other than hydrogen and hitting it in unexpected concentrations -- partly because of our speedmass figure." "Solar winds," Timberlake whispered. "They said we..." "Solar winds, hell!" Bickel aid. "Look at that." He nodded at a code grouping as it worked its way across the screen. "Twenty-six protons in the mass," Timberlake said. "Iron," Bickel said. "Free atoms of iron out here. We're getting a plain old-fashioned magnetic deflection of the grav field." "We'll have to slow the ship," Timberlake said. "Nuts!" Bickel said. "We'll put a fused overload breaker in the G system. I don't see why the devil the designers didn't do that in the first place." "Perhaps they couldn't conceive of any force large enough to deflect the system," Flattery said. "No doubt," Bickel said, his voice heavy with disgust. "But when I think a simple cage switch with a weight in it could have prevented Maida's death." "They depended on the said. "You know that." "What I know is they thought in straight lines when they should've been thinking in the round," Bickel said. He unlocked his safety cocoon, shifted his suit to portable, launched himself diagonally across Comcentral to the Tool  Repair hatch. The weightless drifting reminded him they had a time limit on returning to gravity conditions. Too long without gravity and the crew would suffer permanent physical damage. They had perhaps an other hour and a half to be on the safe side. Bickel grabbed the hatch handle, swung out the repair traveler. He worked silently, angrily, with swift, decisive movements and presently had a cage switch clamped beside the main power cable into the grav ity generator. He made the connections to the breaker, tested the circuits with a false load, replaced the cover plate. "It'll have to be reset man ually each time," he said. He put a foot against the bulkhead, propelled himself back to his couch, locked in, glanced at Timberlake. "System balanced?" "Near as you can tell from here," Timberlake said. "Give it a try, Raj." Flattery checked to see that both Timberlake and Bickel were sealed in their cocoons, closed the gravity switch. The sound of the generators building up grew to a faint hiss that subsided as the system stabilized. Flattery felt the pressure against his sboulderblades, reached up to the board, slowly refined Timberlake's settings. "Tim," Bickel said, "I want chamber -- every sensor-tie coded for function -- and laid out in layers from gross to fine. I'll need the same thing for servo control, a complete..." "Why?" Timberlake asked. "Are you thinking of tieing in a colonist's brain?" Flattery demanded, trying to hide his feelings of increasing outrage at the idea. "A mature human brain probably wouldn't survive such a transfer," Timberlake said. And he felt shame at how much the thought had appealed to him. Every inhibition of his training cried out against such a move. stored, none of them here ever again would have to undergo the nervecrushing responsibility of that Corn-central master board. "What the hell!" Bickel snapped. "Where'd you two get that idea? Not from anything I -- said." He broke off as the high pitched hummm-buzzz-hummm room, alerting them that a message was being processed. 'T'he message-ready chime sounded. Bickel keyed the vocoder. The voice of Morgan Hempstead, United Moonbase director, rolled out of the speakers, recognizable and still with its iced iron overtones preserved Project Control. This is Morgan Hempstead. We hope you understand our distress and concern. Every decision from this point must have a prime motive of preserving the lives of yourselves and the colonists." So much for the record, Flattery thought. There are seven nations and lour races represented in the hyb tanks -- but all just as expendable as the ones who went before us. "We have several prime questions," Hempstead said. I've a few questions of my own, Bickel thought. "Why was Project Control not alerted when the first Organic Mental Core failed?" Hempstead asked. Bickel mentally logged the question. He knew the answer, but it was nothing he'd ever transmit. Hempstead knew it as well as he did. The Tin Egg had momentum as an idea that had survived six failures. Nothing short of another ultimate failure would stop it. Nothing short of desperate emergency could make them risk aborting the mission by calling for help. "Doppler reference indicates you'll be out of the solar system in approximately three hundred and sixteen days at present stabilized speed," Hempstead said. "Time to Tau Ceti: four hundred-plus years." As he listened, Bickel pictured the man behind the voice: flintlike face with gray hair and gray-blue eyes -- that aura of momentous decision even in his smallest gesture. The psych boys had called him "Big Daddy" behind his back, but they'd jumped when he commanded. Now, Bickel focused on the fact that they never again expected to see Hempstead, yet the man still could reach into their midst with his decisions. "First analysis indicates these possibilities," Hempstead said. "You could turn back to orbit is solved and new Organic Mental Cores installed. That would return us to the old problem of sterile control under less than ideal conditions. It also would remove the ship from the situation of probable cause in the making solution impossible." "He always was a long-winded bore," Timberlake said. "Second possibility," Hempstead said, "would be for you to convert to a closed ecology and continue at present speed, enlisting replacements from your hybernation tanks or breeding and raising your own crew complement. However, food would be a major problem unless you adopted a more closely integrated recycling system." "Closely integrated recycling," Flattery said. "He means cannibalism. It was discussed." Bickel turned to stare at Flattery. The idea of cannibalism was repellant, but that wasn't what had caught Bickel's attention. "It was discussed." That simple statement contained volumes of unanswered questions and hidden implications. "Third possibility," Hempstead said, "would be to build the necessary consciousness into your robo-pilot, using the ship computer as a basis. Our computations indicated you have sufficient materials, including neuron packages intended for colony robots in your stores. This is theoretically feasible." "Theoretically feasible!" Timberlake sneered. "Does he think we've never heard about all the failures in..." "Shhhh," Flattery hissed. "Project Council suggests you continue present course and speed," Hempstead said, "as long as you are within the solar system. If a solution has not been reached by then, present opinion is that you will be ordered to turn back." There followed a long silence, then:... unless you have alternative suggestions." "Fou will be ordered to turn back," Flattery thought. He turned to see how those key words sat with Bickel. They were aimed at Bickel, contrived for him, fitted specially to trigger his deepest motives. Bickel lay in thoughtful silence staring up at the speech microscope display above the vocoder, checking the accuracy of message reception. "At this time," Hempstead said, "Project Control requires a detailed report on condition of all ship systems with special reference to hybernating colonists. It is recognized that prolonging the voyage increases probability of hybernation failure. We recognize that you must replace crew losses from the tanks. Suggestions on replacements will be made upon request. We share your grief at the unfortunate accidents among you, but the Project must continue." "Detailed report on all ship systems," Timberlake sneered. "He's out of his mind." How cold was Hempstead's commiseration, Flattery thought. The phrasing betrayed the care with which it had been composed. Just enough grief; not too much. The vocoder emitted a filterdulled crackling, then: "This is Morgan Hempstead closing transmission. Acknowledge and answer our questions immediate"They left too much unsaid," Bickel said. And he sensed there'd been "deletions for reasons of policy" all through the message. The thin political line they walked had been betrayed most in what was not said. "Build consciousness into our computer," Timberlake growled. "How stupid can they get?" He glanced at Bickel. "You were on one of the original attempts honor of telling 'Big Daddy' where he can shove that idea." "That attempt flopped and badly," Bickel agreed. "But it's still the only real course open to us." Timberlake raged on as though he hadn't heard: "There who make us look like a pack of amateurs." Flattery had heard, though, and he hid a knowing smile by turning away and speaking mildly: "We all read the report." "The only part worth reading was their summation," Timberlake said. He pitched his voice in a sneering falsetto: " 'ImposIV sible of achievement at present level of technology' " "That was an excuse, not a summation," Bickel said. And less search for the artificial Consciousness Factor. There'd always been that sterile wall between his part of the group and the Station personnel, but the triple-glass walls had never hidden the smell of failure. It'd been all around the project from the beginning. They'd been lost in tangles of pseudoneuron fiber, in winking lights and the snap of relays, the hiss of tape reels and the bitter ozone smell of burnt insulation from overloaded circuits. They'd looked for a mechanical way to do what the least among them could do within his own flesh -- be conscious. And they'd failed. Over them all had hung the unspoken fear, the knowledge of what'd happened to the one project that reportedly had achieved success... and its own doom... back on the surface of earth. Timberlake cleared his throat, lifted a hand out of his couch cocoon, studied his fingernails and picked up the threads of a previous conversation: "There was no physical reason for those brains to fail. The life systems were perfect. It's as though they committed suicide... under some unknown stress." Qhe had come into Comcentral  still feeling weak and disoriented. It was obvious that the shift of dominance had gone faster than expected, though, and she had forced herself to overcome her body's weaknesses, putting on a mask of well-being and composure that she did not feel. The ovoid Com-central room should not have confused her -- she had put in too many hours of training among these dials and gauges and pipes and keyboard consoles before their departure -- but the feeling of unfamiliarity persisted. Then, as awareness increased, she saw the subtle changes in connections and controls and readouts, recognized Bickel's handiwork. All the changes were necessary to put the ship on manual, she realized, but she could feel the inadequacies of what had been done. It was then she realized the thin edge they walked, and she turned her attention to Flattery who was finishing out his shift on the big board. The signs of strain were obvious in his movements -- still exact with a surgeon's sureness, but the control betrayed its thinning energy in the way he relaxed abruptly after each adjustment of the board. He should be relieved now, she thought, but she knew she was not yet ready to have that green dial point down at her, and she wasn't sure of the conditions of Bickel and Timberlake. Timberlake radiated glum silence. "Moonbase is taking longer to answer this time than it did before," she said. "They're too busy trying to decide what our reply really means," Bickel said. "And I gave 'em some questions to answer." "Or they could be figuring out how to tell us we've bitten off more'n we can chew," Timberlake said. She heard the fear in his voice, said: "Raj has been on that board over four hours. Isn't it time somebody spelled him, Tim?" Flattery knew what she was doing, but couldn't prevent the feeling of tension from gripping his spine. There was always the possibility Timberlake couldn't take this. Timberlake felt the dryness in his mouth. Naturally, she'd assume he was giving orders here. He was the life systems man. She hadn't volunteered to take the board, either... the bitch. But maybe it was too soon after de-hyb. Metabolisms differed. She'd know her own capacities, certainly. Besides, she was scheduled to follow Bickel on the board in the normal rotation. His glance followed the Corncentral track, the way the board circled around their positions. Bickel was in number one spot, then Prue, then Flattery -- and he sat here on the end. It's my watch, Timberlake told himself. He felt perspiration start in his palms. He's taking too long, Flattery thought, and he said: "I'll give you the board on the count, Tim. I'm wearing pretty thin." Before Timberlake could protest, the count had started and his hand went automatically to the big red switch. Board and arrow came to him. Necessities of the job caught him immediately. Almost a third of the shield temperature control needed trimming to bring it into better balance. linkages for this and install automatics for the gross part of the job, he thought. Presently, he fell into the routine of the watch and realized he'd be able to take his four hours... at least. T)rudence was studying Bickei's displays and stacks of schematics. She had followed enough of what he was doing there to combine that with the programming he had handed her and conclude one major fact. The device he proposed would yield products of the Hermit e polynomials and Laguerre co-efficients of the past of the inputs. It was the same old self-reflexive circle every time they faced this problem -- where did the circle of consciousness begin? "Maybe I can handle it," she said -- "if youll define consciousness for me." "We'll leave that up to the "We're not going to touch the inner communications lines of the computer. Our auxiliary will go into it through a one-way channel, fused against backlash." "And there's no way for this auxiliary to run wild?" Flattery asked. "Its supervisory program will always be one of us," Bickel said, fighting to keep irritation from his voice. "One of us will always be in the driver's seat. We'll drive it -- like an ox pulling a wagon." "This ox won't have any ideas of its own, eh?" Flattery asked. "Not unless we solve the consciousness problem," Bickel said. "Ngaaa!" Flattery's word pounced. "And when it's conscious, what then?" he asked. Bickel blinked at him, ab, sorbing this. Presently, he said: "I... suppose it'll be like a newborn baby... in a sense." "What baby was ever bora with all the information and . stored experiences of this ship's master computer?" Flattery de! manded. Bickel' s being fed this too fast. Prudence thought. If he's kept too much off balance he may rebel or start to probe in the wrong places. He mustn't guess. "Well... the human is bom with instincts," Bickel said. "And we do train the human baby into... humanity." "I find the moral and religious aspects of this whole idea faintly repugnant," Flattery said. "I think there's sin here. If not hubris, then something equally evil." Prudence stared at him. Flattery betrayed signs of real agitation -- a flush, in his cheeks, fingers trembling, eyes bright and glaring. That wasn't in the program, she thought. Perhaps he's tired. Flattery shifted his attention from Bickel to Prudence and back. He found it increasingly difficult to hide his resentment of Bickel. Psychiatrist, heal thyself, he thought. Bickel has to take charge. I'm just the safety fuse. Flattery glanced at the false plate on his personal repeater board, thinking of the trigger beneath that plate and the mate to it in his quarters concealed by the lines of the sacred graphic on the bulkhead. "Arbitrary turn-back command ," Flattery reminded himself. That was the code signal he was the signal he must obey -- unless he judged the ship had to be destroyed before receiving that signal. A simple push on one of the hidden triggers would activate the master program in the ship's computer, open air locks, set off explosive charges. Death and destruction for crew, ship, all the colonists and their supplies. Colonists and their supplies! Flattery thought. He was too good a psychiatrist not to recognize the guilt motives behind the careful provisioning of this ship. And he was too good a divine not to see through the religious hokum to the essential rightness of his role on this project. There had to be a safety fuse. 'T'he first crude attempts at mechanical reproduction of consciousness had been made on an island in Puget Sound. The island no longer existed. " Rogue consciousness!" they had screamed. True enough. Something had defied natural laws, slaughtered lab personnel, destroyed sensors, sent slashing beams of pure destruction through the surrounding countryside. Finally, it had taken the island -- God knew where. Poof! No island. No lab personnel. Nothing but gray water and a cold north wind whipping whitecaps across it and the fish and the seaweed invading the area where land and men and machinery had been. Just thinking about it made Flattery shiver. He conjured up in his mind the image of the sacred graphic from his quarters, absorbed some of the peace from the field of serenity, the tranquility of the holy faces. Even Moonbase didn't walk too close to this project now. It was all a sham to educate ship personnel, to frustrate the eager young men and women. " Each project ship must maintain its coefficient of frustration" went the private admonition. "Frustration must come from both human and mechanical sources." They thought of frustration as a threshhold, a factor to heighten awareness. It made a weird kind of sense. Thus, there were crew members like Flattery... and Prudence Weygand, and machinery that broke down, robox repair units that had to have a human monitor every second -- and programmed emergencies to complicate real emergencies. Flattery longed to get back to his quarters, to bathe himself in the field generator there, examine the mood of the computer complex and be certain it had settled back to pure mechanism since deprived of its Organic Mental Cores. But he could not leave here yet, could not display any suspicious behavior. A terns," Prudence was saying, "how long would it take to restore communications?" "Fifteen to twenty hours," Bickel said. "We could have a jury rig in doing the job by then." Flattery looked questioningly at Timberlake. "That's about right," Timberlake agreed. for our simulator," Bickel said. "We'll raid colony stores for reels of neuron fiber, Eng multipliers and the other basic components. What we have to get is a system that simulates human nerve net function." "But will it be conscious?" Flattery asked. "All we can do is cut and try," Bickel said. "Our computer and additive principles. We're going to build a system that's strictly infinite-multiplying. Our system will produce message units that are products of many multipliers." "You make it sound so simple," Prudence said. "Connect net A to net B at points D and D prime and you get the Consciousness Factor -- CF for short." Bickel's lips thinned. "You have a better plan?" Did I push too hard? she wondered. And she spoke quickly: "Oh, I'm with you, Bickel. You obviously know all the answers." "I don't know all the answers," Bickel growled, "but I'm not going to sit out here moaning about fate... and I'm not turning back." What if we have to turn back? Flattery wondered. What do we do about Bickel's inhibition then? "Are you going to wait for Moonbase to answer?" Flattery asked. Bickel glanced at Prudence. "I'd prefer starting at once, but that means I'd miss my shift on the board... and since I'll need Tim..." "We can handle it," Flattery said. "Everything seems to be running smoothly." Prudence looked up at the big board and the inactive repeaters over her couch, wondering at her sudden feeling of chill. I'm afraid to take that board, she thought. Those thousands of lives down in the hyb tanks... all depending on right-the-first-time reacreally know what they were doing when they sent us out here? Was this the only way? For the first time since coming out of the hyb tank, she felt the old familiar pain-of-wonder, asking herself what it might've been like to've been bom into a normal family in the normal way, to have grown up in the noisy, intimate belonging of the unchosen. "You are the cream, the select few," Morgan Hempstead and his cohorts had kept reminding them. But she was one of the select few who knew where the cream had originated. Most of the medics on the ship knew. Normal biopsy tissue from a living human volunteer had been suspended in an axolotl tank, the genetic imprint triggered and the flesh allowed to grow. It produced an identical twin -- an expendable twin. Select few! she thought. Something precious was taken from us and the compensations were inadequate. She tuned the small screen at the corner of her board to one of the tail eyes, looked back toward the center of the solar system, toward the planet that had spawned them. A stabbing pang of homesickness tightened her breast, made breathing difficult. They had been moulded and motivated, twisted, trained and inhibited -- wound up like m echanical toys and sent scooting off into the darkness with their laser know where they were. And where are we? she asked herself. "Prue, you'd better take the big board," Flattery said. "You'd normally follow John." Sight of the big board's dials and gauges filled her with an abrupt anger and fear. She felt the immediacy of the emotions in a dry throat, heat in her cheeks. "I... haven't had enough time off the board... to recuperate," Flattery said, speaking hesitantly. "Or I'd..." "It's all right," she said. "I'll take it." V I n Corn-central, the sounds were those the umbilicus crew had come to accept as normal -- the crack of action couches in their gimbals, the click of an occasional relay as it called attention to a telltale on the big board. "Has Bickel unburdened himself at all about the artificial Prudence asked. She removed her attention momentarily from the master console, glanced at Flattery, her sole companion on the lonely watch. Flattery appeared a bit pale, his mouth drawn downward in a frown. She returned her attention to the console, noting on the timelog that her shipwatch had a little more than an hour yet to run. The strain was beginning to drag at her energy reserves. Flattery was taking a hell of a long time to answer, she thought... but he was famous for the ponderous reply. "He's said a little," Flattery said, and he glanced at the hatch to the computer maintenance shop where Bickel and Timberlake were working. "Prue, shouldn't we be listening in on them, making sure they..." "Not yet," she said. "They wouldn't have to know we were listening." "You underestimate Bickel," she said. "That's about the worst mistake you can make. He's fully capable of throwing a trace meter onto the communications -- as I have -- just on the off chance something interesting'll turn up." "D'you think he's started... building?" "Mostly preparation at this stage," she said. "They're collecting material. You can pretty well follow their movements by watching the power drain here on the board, the shifts in temperature sensors and the dosimeter repeaters and the drain on the robox cargo handlers." "They've been out into the cargo sections?" "One of them has... probably Tim." "You know what Bickel said tery asked. He paused to scratch an itch under his chin. "Said the biggest failure was in attention -- the experts wandering away, doing everything but keeping their attention on the main line." "That's a little too warm for comfort," she said. "He may suspect," Flattery said, "but he can't be certain." "There you go underestimating him again," she said. "Well, at least he's going to need our help," Flattery said, "and we'll be able to tell what's going on from how he needs us." "Are you sure he needs us?" "He'll have to use you for his deeper math analysis," Flattery said. "And me... well, he's going to be plowing through the von Neuman problem before he gets much beyond the first steps. He may not've faced that yet, but he'll have to when he realizes he has to get deterministic results from unreliable hardware." Qhe turned to stare at him, not ing the far away look in his eyes. "How's that again?" "He has to build with non-living matter." "So what?" She returned her attention to the board. "Nature makes do with the same stuff. Living systems aren't living below the molecular level." "And you underestimate... life," Flattery said. "The basic elements Bickel has to use are from our robot stores -- reels of quasibiological neurons and solid-state devices, nerex wire and things like that -- all of it non-living at a stage far above the molecular." "But their fine structure's as relevant to their function as any living matter's is." "Perhaps you're beginning to see the essential hubris in even approaching this problem." "Oh, come off that, Chaplain," she said. "We're not back in the Eighteenth Century making Vaucanson's wonderful duck." "We're tackling something much more complex than primitive automata," he agreed, "but our intention's the same as Vaucanson's." V# "That's absolutely not true," she said. "If we succeed and took our machine back to Vaucanson's time and showed it to him, he'd just marvel at our mechanical ability." "You miss the mark," Flattery said. "Poor Vaucanson would run for the nearest priest and volunteer for the lynch mob to do away with us. You see, he never intended to make anything that was really alive." "It's only a matter of degree, not basic difference." "He was like Aladdin rubbing the lamp compared to us," Flattery said. "And even if his intentions were the same as ours, he wasn't aware of it." "You're talking in circles," she said. "Am I, really? This is the thing that writers and philosophers have skirted for centuries with their eyes half averted. This is the monster out of folklore, Prue. This is Frankenstein's poor zombie and the Sorcerer's Apprentice. The very idea of building a conscious robot can be faced only if we recognize the implicit danger -- that we may be building a Golem that'll destroy us." "Oh, for God's sake, Raj!" Prudence said. "Have you completely forgotten that you're a scientist?" "For God's sake, I can never forget it," he said. He glared at her. His throat felt dry and burning. "You're supposed to be doing this to me, aren't you," he accused. "You're supposed to push me and test me, give me no peace. I know." How little he knows... or even suspects, she thought. Flattery stared at the curved gray metal of the bulkhead above him, seeing the tiny imperfections in the crackle pattern of its finish. He felt he was being maneuvered. She was stalking him the way a man might stalk game. Was it his soul she was after? He sensed he was in profound danger, that the idea of consciousness as something they could create might inflict itself on his soul as an incurable wound. He put a hand to his mouth. I cannot permit her to bait m and tempt me. "Raj," she whispered and there was terror in her voice. Tie whirled toward her, seeing I the streaks of light across the big board like red knife slashes. "We're almost at red-line temperature in Sector C-# of the hyb tanks," she said. "Everything I do seems to make the system oscillate." Flattery's hands flashed out to the life systems repeater switches, brought his own monitors alive. He scanned the instruments, said: "Call Tim." "Nothing I do seems to work!" she panted. He glanced at her, saw she was fighting the board, not working with it. "Call Tim!" he barked. She hit the command circuit switch with the heel of her left hand, shouted: "Tim to Corncentral! Emergency!" Again, Flattery scanned his instruments. There appeared to be three points of temperature shift outside the hyb tanks with corresponding variation inside. As Prue tried to compensate for one fluctuation, the others fell farther toward the red. He had to force himself to keep his hands off the controls. If tank temperature went into the red without dehyb precautions, there'd be deaths among the helpless occupants. Despite Prue's desperate efforts, death was approaching three sectors of the C-# tank -- some four hundred human lives in there. The hatch from the computer shop banged open. Timberlake leaped through with Bickel right behind. "Hyb tanks," Prudence gasped. "Temperature." Timberlake threw himself across Com-central into his action couch. His vacsuit rasped against the cocoon lips as he turned, grasped the traveler controls. "Give me the red switch," he snapped. "To hell with the count! I'm taking it." And he took it, the big board swinging across much too fast. "C-#," she said, sinking back and wiping perspiration from her forehead. "I've got it," he said. He scanned the dials and gauges, his fingers playing over the console. Bickel slipped into his own couch, tripped his repeaters. "It's in the hull shielding," he said. "First two layers," Timberlake said. Prudence put a hand to her throat, tried not to look at Bickel. He mustn't suspect our attention's on him, she thought. Then: Wouldn't it be monstrous irony to lose our colonists and burden ourselves with guilt before the need tor it? "That's doing it," Bickel said. She looked across to the board above Timberlake, saw the warn mg telltales winking out, the dials swinging back into norma' range. "Faulty feedback for a patch of our shell reflectors focused on C-#," Timberlake said. "The system started to oscillate and that threw the overload switches, left us wide open." "Another design failure," Bickel sneered. And such a simple problem, Bickel thought. The hull curve acted like a lens to focus energy within the ship... unless reflector and shell shielding systems compensated. Prudence traced the line of the remaining telltales, said: "C-#'s on a line with that robot stores section you were raiding. Is that all it takes to throw the ship off balance?" "Gives you a wonderful feeling of confidence in the Tin Egg's design, doesn't it," Bickel said. They didn't warn me! she thought. They cheated. Calculated emergencies, they said, just enough to keep a fine edge on your reaction abilities. Reaction abilities! ttXou overcompensated, Prue," Timberlake said. "Make minimal adjustments to avoid oscillation while you hunt for the source of your trouble. You had sensor telltales flaring right out through the ship to pinpoint where you needed shielding reinforcement." I panicked, she thought. And she said : "I guess I let myself get too tired." Even as she spoke she sensed how lame the excuse sounded. I was too intent doing the job on Flattery, she thought. I had him headed for a nice corner where he'd have to fight his way out... and I missea rne snip trouble until it was almost ready to wreck us. It occurred to her then to wonder if one of the crew had her as a "special project" to keep her abilities toned up... on edge. "Prue, you've got to remember that when the overload switches go the computer automatics are out of the circuit," Bickel said. "This thing was designed to be brought back into line by a conscious intelligence -- one of us "Oh, shut up!" she flared. "I made a mistake. I know it. I won't do it again." "No damage was done," Timberlake said. "I don't need you to defend me!" she snapped. "That's enough of that!" Bickel snapped, turning to glare at Prudence. "We'd better clear a little air, here. We're on our own, Prue. You've no idea how much on our own we are. We have to depend on each other because we sure as hell can't depend on the Tin Egg! We can't afford to snap and bite at each other." Oh, can't we now, she thought. "We're trapped on a ship that contains only one top drawer mechanism," Bickel said. "We've only one thing that functions smoothly and beautifully the way it should -- our computer. Everything else works as though it'd been designed and built by six left-handed apes." "Bickel thinks it was all deliberate," Timberlake said. Prudence caught herself in an involuntary glance at Flattery, forced her attention away from Bickel and onto Timberlake. This is far too early for Bickel to suspect, she thought. Timberlake avoided her eyes. Pie looked like a small boy who'd been caught stealing jam. Flattery broke the silence. "Deliberate?" he asked. "Yeah," Timberlake said. "He thinks the other six ships had the same kind of failure -- something Bicker s far more alert and suspicious than anyone suspected. Prudence thought. Raj or I will have to side with him; there's no other way to keep control of the situation. tery asked. "Let's not tip toe around it," Bickel said. "The thing's obvious. What feature of these ships is never mentioned in the stress analyses trying to find a cause for the six previous failures? What feature do we assume is proof against failure because there's no hint of one breaking down?" tery said. He tried to hold his voice to a bantering level, failed and thought: God help us. nickel's seen through the sham far too soon. said. "And they gave us three of the damn' things! One in service and two for back up. Never a we had three on the Tin Egg!" "Why?" Prudence asked. "To make damn' sure we got beyond the point of no return before we got the cold-turkey treatment," Bickel said. I guess I'm elected. Prudence thought. She said: "More of Project's goddamn' maneuvering! Sure. It'd be right in character." Flattery shot a startled look at her, returned his attention to the big board before Bickel noticed. "Cold turkey," Bickel said. "This ship's one elaborate simulation device with a single purpose -- and my guess is the others were the same. "Can't you see it?" Bickel asked. "Don't you recognize the purpose? It casts its shadow over everything around us. It's the only thing that makes any sense out of this charade. The secrecy, the mystery, the maneuvering -- everything's calculated to put us on a greased slide into a very special ocean. It's not just cold turkey, it's sink or swim. And the only way we can swim is to develop an artificial consciousness." VI S he wrote her name: "Prudence Weygand" at the foot of the log tape, started it rolling through the auto-recorder, made the synchronous shift to Flattery's tape as he took over the board. The counter said it was her fifteenth change of shift. Flattery squirmed in his couch, settling himself for the four hour watch. Reflections on the dial faces were hypnotic. He shook his head to bring himself to full alertness, heard the hiss of fabric as Prudence got out of her couch. She stood there a moment stretching, did a dozen deep knee bends. How easily they accept the possibility that I'm the execution er, Flattery thought. He noted how wide awake and alert Prudence appeared. This four hours on-four hours off routine could be endured as long as no serious problems arose, but it played hob with the metabolic cycle. Prudence should be headed for food and rest, but she obviously was wide awake. She glanced at Flattery, saw he was settled in for the watch, checked the repair log. Nothing was flagged urgent. That made it a bit more than twenty-five hours with nothing more than minor adjustments on the big board. Smooth. Too smooth. Danger keeps you honed to a fine edge, she thought. Extended peace makes you dull. "You'd better get something to eat and try to rest," Flattery said. "I'm not hungry." "At least try to rest." "Maybe later. Think I'll wander in and see how Bickel and Tim're doing." She looked at the big screen overhead. It was tuned to the peakcorner lenses of the computer shop. And for all the four hours of her shift it had been producing provocative sights and sounds. Bickel and Timberlake had been busy. She took one low-grav step across to the hatch-lock, let herself through and stopped to study what they had accomplished. Timberlake was nowhere in sight. And where the optical character reader had been on the big panel across from the lock now stretched a mechanical excrescence -- a piled and jutting structure of plastic blocks; Eng multiplier circuits, each sealed in plastic insulator. Linking the blocks were loops and tangles and twists of insulated pseudoneuron fiber. Bickel had heard her entrance. Without turning from his work at one end of that protruding angular construction, he said: "Take that other micro-tie viewer on the bench. I need # centimeters of the K-Ar neurofiber with random-spaced endbulbs and multisynapses. Connect it as I've indicated on that schematic labeled G-#. It should be the top one in that pile on the right end of the bench." Bickel sat down on the deck, slid a new block of Eng multipliers into position. He swung a portable micro-tie viewer across the block, leaned into the viewer's forehead rests, began making the connections. Fes, sir! she thought. "A re ' re almost ready to put '  this on an initial program," Bickel said when she had finished the assembly. He began connecting it to the newly installed Eng multiplier block, running one sheaf back to a plugboard connection on the computer panel. Prudence stepped back, studied the mechanical growth that jutted from the wall. As though she taw it for the first time, the construction abruptly took on a new meaning for her. "That's more than a set-up for analysis," she said. "That's right, doll." Bickel stood up, wiped his hands on the sides of his vacsuit, swung his own micro-manipulator and viewer to one side. "This," Bickel said, "in addition to giving us our analysis of built-in misfunction, this little 'Ox' we're driving will provide a three-way energy interchange." "You're tied into the computer," she accused, pointing to the connections to the plugboard. "Every line in that board has a diode in it," Bickel said. "Pulses can come from the computer to our test set-up, but anything going into the computer has to be coded by one of us and inserted over there." He pointed to the input heads lined up at the right corner of the wall. Prue turned to look at the overhead screen where Flattery was revealed calmly monitoring the big board. Something he had said came back to her full force: "There's nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physi cal responses, the reflections of behavior. We exist in a forest of illusion where the very concept of consciousness merges with illusion." And Prudence thought: To be conscious, you must surmount illusion. Bickel saw that where I didn't. She asked herself now how this applied to her own personal at tack on their problem. The living chemistry of the body held clues to consciousness that had never been adequately explored. Neuroregulatory shifts in biochemistry triggered by consciousness expanders and hallucinogens had beckoned to experimenters before, but never in a situation paralleling a mechanical attack on the problem. That avenue had to be explored, she knew -- but she had only one guinea pig: herself. And tests on her own body with serotonin and adrenalin fractions were dangerous. She couldn't avoid the suspicion she might be giving in to a death wish. Now, she wondered: Am I deluding myself? Is this more illusion? Or is it just an excuse not to keep up the anti-S dosage so I'll become sexually desirable to Bickel? tt r r'hat's it," Bickel said. "Let's give it a run. Prue, monitor the diagnostic board." He gestured to the panel of dials and gauges at the left of the plugboard. "I'll give each net potential of the roulette cycles a onefifth second burst from the shot generator." He moved around to the right of the test set-up, flipped switches to start the source program through the inputs. "Mark," he said. "Mark," she said as her dials registered the pulse. "Give me the mean synapse threshhold, mean endbulb threshhold and action time on each net," Bickel said. He depressed three switches simultaneously. "Interchange activated." He waited, feeling the suspense grow as a tightness in his stomach. "Interchange now showing Mitrance pulse," she said. "Net one," he said, introducing the timed burst from the shot generator. "There's a jam-up at the fifthlayer nodes," she said. "No impulses are getting through." "I'll try sweeping the roulette cycles," Bickel said. He twisted a dial. "Nothing," she said. "Still that fifth-layer jam-up." Bickel stepped back, glared at the input panel. "This is nuts! What we have here is essentially a transducer. The outputs should match!" Again, Prudence read her dials. "Your products are still zero," she said. "Any heat?" Bickel asked. "Nothing significant," she said. "Somehow, we've produced a unitary orthogonal system for each net and the total assembly," Bickel said. "And that's a contradiction. It could mean we have more than one system in each of these separate nets." "You have an unknown that's swallowing energy," Prudence said, her excitement kindling. "Isn't that our definition of..." "It isn't conscious," Bickel said. "Whatever the unknown system is, it can't be conscious... not yet. This set-up is too simple, doesn't have enough source data..." "Then it's some error in the hook-up," Prudence said. Bickel's shoulders sagged. He took a deep, tired breath. "Yeah. Has to be." "Where's your record of assembly and circuit tests?" Prudence asked. "I isolated an auxiliary storage tank," Bickel said. He gestured vaguely to his left. "It's the redflagged one. Everything's in there... including all this." He waved at the diagnostic panel. "You get something to eat and take a rest-break," she said. "I'll start tracing circuits." "We got a jam-up on the direct test," Bickel said. "It wasn't an open-circuit reaction. And the net-interchange test produces zero at the output without flagging the point of loss. The thing's a goddamn' sponge!" "It'll be some simple error," she said. Timberlake's head suddenly appeared from the hatch that led to the circuitry in the 'tweendecks crawl space. "It's down here," he said. 'With the primary sheafs. Don't do anything for a minute." He disappeared again. Meanwhile Prudence was scanning the print-out. With a sense of awe she realized that it was devoid of insignificant digits. It had been weeded down to essentials. ( t'#'oh!" Timberlake called, his  voice echoing with a hollow resonance from the crawl space. Bickel looked down, saw that only Timberlake's feet protruded into the shop now. "Found it," Timberlake said. "It's a fifty-line sheaf, single plug. Shall I pull it?" 'Where does it lead?" Bickel asked. "According to the color code it leads right down into the accessory storage banks," Timberlake said. Timberlake's feet disappeared into the crawl space. "All these banks are linked that way! Why the hell doesn't it appear on the schematics?" Bickel got down on his hands and knees at the mouth of the crawl hole, said: "Is there any kind of buffer or gating system in those lines?" A hand light wavered back and forth in the crawl space. "Yeah, by god!" Timberlake said. "How'd you know?" "Had to be," Bickel said. "This is a computer fail-safe device. Don't mess with it." Bickel rocked back on his heels, fighting a lost, sinking sensation. Those bastards! he thought. They knew we'd find this the first time we went looking into the computer's innards. They've tied our hands. "Come on out, Tim," Bickel said. "Don't change a damn' thing." He stood up, removed the blocking plugs he had inserted to isolate this storage bank. Isolate! he thought. Hah! All he'd done was change the potential at one point and insure that he wouldn't have the addresses on any of the test information they'd just sent into the system. Timber lake scooted backward out of the crawl space, stood up. "Does that make sense to you?" he asked, gesturing toward the hole. "I wish it didn't," Bickel said. "This computer has what amounts to a random address system as far as we're concerned. There'll be enormous blocks of information filed in it bit by bit in such a way that only the computer knows where it is. That's why we have so many special function routines and subroutines and sub-subroutines ad infinitum. The addresses of those we know." "The organic cores must've known where the information was," Prudence said. "And they're dead," Bickel said. TV T organ Hempstead's burst-depersonalized voice filled the control room as Bickel started the playback of the new message from Moonbase. Earthling." A long, rolling silence followed and they grew aware of the hissing of the tape as it sped across its sorting heads. Bickel glanced around the room -- Flattery at the big board yet, composed and so serenely sure of himself; Prudence in her action couch and with her eyes intent on the vocal translator at couch, eyes closed, breathing deeply. One might almost think he was asleep, but for the pulse at his temple. Bickel recognized that mannerism of Timberlake's. It meant the man was chewing over a heavy problem. "Hit it," Hempstead said. "That must be an error," Bicthat one." "We do worse ourselves sometimes," Flattery said. "On the question of defining consciousness," Hempstead said. "Reference is made to nerve barrier and threshhold data your computer. Best dive to date." "Best definition to date," Flattery said. "That's what he must have said." "New Organic Mental Core," Hempstead said. "Medical personnel are directed to abandon all such repeats in their waste of order." "There's something wrong with said. "With the translator circuits from the computer." "That goddamn' wild program we flushed through the system like a high colonic," Timberlake growled. He opened his eyes, stared accusingly at Bickel. "Abandon all such attempts," Hempstead said. "Repeat: abandon all such attempts. This is a direct order." "That sounds like him rightly enough," Prudence said. "Under no circumstances are you to attempt to make inanimate components," Hempstead said. "Try that one on your violin," Timberlake said. "Analyze course and reaction data related to mass changes," Hempstead said. "Unknown area derived mathematically." "Hash!" Timberlake snarled. "Garbage!" "Project over and out," Hempstead said. "Acknowledge year compliance." Timberlake sat up, swung his feet to the deck. "Go ahead, Bick," he said. "Acknowledge year compliance." Flattery glanced at Timberlake, returned his attention to the board. Timberlake obviously was making a bid to regain his authority. That could've been predicted. Their first setback would bring him charging out -- from fear for all those lives dependent on the life systems if not for any other reason. Flattery had watched the way Timberlake studied the life systems repeaters. Nothing wrong there... yet. But a threat to any part of the ship was a threat to all. "Was he asking us to install a new brain?" Prudence asked. "Where could we get one?" Timberlake asked. "We've already been through that," she said, looking at each of them in turn. And for the first time since taking her position with the umbilicus crew, Prudence allowed herself to wonder what it really would be like to become that fleshless embodiment, the mentality-central to a driving behemoth such as this ship. She shivered. They taunt me with blasphemy , Flattery thought. "Are you cold, Prudence?" he asked. He watches me all the time, she thought. The medical part of her faced the feminine part then, wondering if Flattery knew how she was twisting her body chemistry. "I'm quite comfortable," she said. But she wasn't comfortable. Moods of depression and elation shot through her without warning and had to be concealed. Strange psychic aches tortured her mind -- fantasies of god-like power competed with the urge of physical abasement. with a length of printer tape, said: "Garbage." "What else?" Timberlake snapped. Flattery started to speak, froze in the act while he studied the track graph on his board. He hadn't imagined it; the graph was climbing. "We've been gaining speed for several minutes," he said. "Slow... but steady." ( t Trive problems now!" Timberlake snarled. Flattery activated the drive read-out, scanned it. "No," he said. "No emission. GR level shows the normal radiation drop." "Mass register?" Bickel asked. Flattery's hands flicked over the keyboard. He scanned his gauges. "Out of register! Mass reference is out of register!" "What are your readings?" Bickel asked. "They vary through ten argos," Flattery muttered. "They don't graph back... no series-constant in the curve of change -- Fourier or otherwise. Mass is out of register with speed." "What'd Hempstead say?" Bickel demanded, looking back at the printout tape. He quoted; " 'Analyze course and reaction data related to mass changes.' If he..." "That could be garbage!" Timberlake snapped. "Still that gradual speed increase," Flattery said. "A slow increment for about four minutes now." The ship is programmed tot emergencies, Prudence thought. That's what they said. But which are emergencies from that program... and which are emergencies from... the unknown? Flattery took a comparator read-out, said: "In the past minute and eight seconds, our speed has gone up .# against the fixed reference." Bickel began shifting plugs on his computer board. His fingers danced over the keys. He checked the telltales, looked to the visual read-out screen. "It gives us wind-and-molecule analogy," he said. "If the range of individual molecular mass within a moving gas is less than that of an object in the path of the gas, the chance erf collision between gas molecules and the object follows a probabilistic curve related to the mean difference in mass." Timberlake coughed, said: "Is that thing saying our speed has raised our mass to a point where something is... colliding with us? That's nuts! We're being pushed, according to the track graph. What about things we hit, things in out path?" "Maybe it's all going our way in this sector of space," Bickel said. "We don't know." C C T)repare for retro-firing," Flattery said. "Wouldn't it be wiser to turn ship?" Timberlake asked. He kicked the manual cocoon switch and the action couch snapped securely around him. "Raj's right," Bickel said. "Use minimum change. Something's happening for which we have no base of experience." "I am starting retro with microemission," Flattery said. "Prue, monitor the track graph. Tim, watch our mass reference. I am recording for later analysis." "If there is a later," Timberlake muttered. Flattery ignored him, said: "John, monitor hull temperature and doppler comparison." "Right." Bickel cleared his throat, thinking how crude was this quartered division of functions when compared with a properly working ship-control robobrain. The umbilicus crew was a pack of limping cripples by comparison... and in a situation where they needed to run and dodge and balance with the ability of an athlete. "Starting retro," Flattery said evenly. He moved the micro-controls one notch. Action couches made a slight adjustment to the change. It registered as a creeping movement of their repeater consoles against the conduits, pipes and instruments of the fixed walls. "Track graph report," Flattery said. "Speed is dropping unevenly," Prudence said. "Fits and jerks." Bickel, watching the edge of his repeater where it aligned with the edge of a wall plate, could see the bucking movement of the ship as a series of tiny jerks. His hands on the console keys sensed a tremor in the ship. "Tell me when the graph levels off," Flattery said. "Mass reference report." "Uneven," Timberlake said. "Graph average is dropping, but the direct register is going up and down... it's .#, .#...#..." "Let me know if it levels," Flattery said. Without being asked, Bickel said: "There's a microincrease in temperature along the first quadrant, stern. Compensation system is taking care of it adequately. Doppler reference shows an actual speed decrease of .# plus." "Mark," Flattery said. "S over C confirms," Prudence said. Flattery advanced the microcontrol another notch, feeling perspiration along his back and neck collecting too fast for his suit to compensate. "Track," he said. "Graph is now dipping below the fixed reference," Prudence said. "Still dropping unevenly." "Ion reading," Flattery said. "One over four point two eight double ought one," Timberlake said. "Agreement with emission rate is positive. Retro normal." "Rate of down-graph is now even on the track," Prudence said. "Mass reference level and .#I out of agreement," Timberlake said. "Hull temperature?" Flattery said. "Holding," Bickel said, and allowed himself a deep breath. Changes in hull temperature where they should not occur, changes in their speed without a positive explanation -- these were more alarming than a physical breakdown that they could touch with their hands. F lattery heard the sigh and thought: The Tin Egg had a close call. But close to what? Does Bickel know? Did he tell us everything he got from the computer? Even so, how can we trust computer information now? But Flattery recalled another part of Hempstead's possiblygarbled message: 'Unknown area derived mathematically.' What if that were pretty close to Hempstead's actual words? Flattery asked himself. An unknown of some kind derived mathematically. The ship had encountered a massspeed problem. Bickel said: "Raj, drop the speed another two points and hold. We'll want regular checks on massspeed variations from here on out." "Complying," Flattery said. "Report in order." He turned to the microcontrols, dropped them two more notches. "Track graph declines on an even slope," Prudence said. "Mass reference agrees," Timberlake said. "Ion emission normal." "Temperature holding normal," Bickel said. "Doppler comparison is positivezero." Bickel looked at those two thin black needles of the doppler comparator. They were what put the bite in this emergency. They provided positive checks on speed through doppler reference to fixed astronomical bodies. The doppler comparison and change in speed had agreed one-for-one. "I do not understand what happened," Flattery said, "but I have the distinct feeling we were close to the brink." "The brink of what?" Prudence demanded. Fear was plain in her voice. "We were close to running wild out of the solar system," Bickel said. "Out of control, unable to maneuver. Quite likely, we were close to being hurtled into another dimension." "Without a prayer of escape," Timberlake said. "The negative transformations in grav theory," Prudence whispered. "What?" Timberlake barked. "The implicit energy exchange for enormous mass shifts near the speed of light," Prudence said. "The negative forms in the equations don't all cancel out until you build hypothetical transformations beyond the speed of light. There is a region of mass speed change wherein two bodies theoretically repel each other rather than attract." "Now," Bickel said, "how do we tell Hempstead and his boys about this without blowing the whole show?" "We've already blown the whole show," Timberlake growled. "The computer... "Isn't necessarily wrecked," Bickel said. "Our life systems still work. Ship servos and sensors appear to be in order. I get consistent replies and demands for information." "Consistent doesn't mean correct," Timberlake said. "Was Hempstead telling us to cease and desist?" Flattery asked. "If he was..." "We don't know," Bickel said. "As long as we don't know, we don't have to obey." Or disobey, Flattery thought. He said: "How is it the computer seems to function on informatranslation?" "That could mean only one band to debug," Prudence said. "If it does..." She broke off, staring at Bickel, who suddenly seemed in agony. Bickel had his eyes closed. Perspiration beaded his forehead. The circuitry was as clear in his mind as though projected there from outside himself. He had never completely disconnected which they had used for the Ox's interpretive routines. An empty sensation expanded through his chest as he realized every signal from outside into Ox into the computer -- there to translator loops. tt'#'ou didn't disconnect the plugboard from the Ox," Timberlake whispered. "But my computer read-out Bickel said. He could hear the desperation in his own voice. "Every program demand I put on the computer went through those same Ox circuits!" "You were using sub-routines with known addresses," Prudence said. "Now everything you asked for has been scattered through the entire system and lost," Timberlake said. "Has it?" Bickel asked. He opened his eyes. There was only one logical way to be certain, of course. It wouldn't do any more damage than already had been done... if there was damage. We didn't think of his cutting Flattery thought. Destroying the translator loops! Without the translator system to decode the multi-repetitive laser-burst messages, the umbilicus crew might just as well use hand signals for its messages to and from Moonbase. Carefully, because he had to be certain the first time, Bickel board, triple checked them. "What're you doing?" Timberlake demanded. "Be quiet," Prudence said, as she recognized what Bickel intended. "But he's already..." "A diagnostic routine," Bickel said. "We'll use a simulsynchronus B-register search with a repeat on our original test of the Ox circuitry. If harm has already been done, this will just go right through the same channels. It can't do any more harm." "And the B-register search could tell us where our data went," Timberlake said. "Yeah." "Are you sure?" Flattery asked. "The technique is right," Prudence said. Working quietly, triple checking, Bickel patched together the necessary program. He took a deep breath, sent the first elements of the diagnostic routine through the inputs, setting the balance of the test for off-line operation. He had to keep a constant check on this. output, put it on conditional transfer with print-out at each step in the control sequence. Tie felt breathing at his shoulI A der, looked up to see that Prudence had abandoned her action couch, knelt beside him to stare up at the read-out. "The data's been shifted, not lost," she whispered. "That's how it looks," Bickel said. "It might as well be lost!" Timberlake barked. "No," Bickel said. "The computer's fully operative as long as we route everything through the Ox." Timberlake demanded. "Come off that, Tim," Bickel said. "You helped me build that test set-up." "The incoming messages were twice," Timberlake said. "Sure." "The bits cancelled themselves out all along the line," Bickel said. "We probably didn't get a fifth of the message." "It did seem short," Prudence said. "That message is the only thing we've really lost," Bickel said. "I'll ask for a repeat on . , "Wait!" Flattery said. "Yes?" Bickel looked at him. pened to the original message?" Flattery asked. He glanced away from Corn-central, met Bickel's gaze. "And what if they were telling us to cease and desist?" "You know something," Timberlake said, "the beginning and end of Hempstead's message didn't seem to be garbled at all." "Standard call and sign-off," Bickel said. "They could be recognized and translated from the smallest fractional bits." "But the message load was lightest at the beginning," Timberlake said. "And that could be part of the explanation there. You'd get minimum cancellation. We might be able to salvage more of the message... especially in the first parts before the load jammed it up." This is exceedingly cautious tor Timherlake, Flattery thought. Is he coming around to Bickers viewpoint? Bickel found himself moving hesitantly, not knowing why, but unable to escape the logic in Timberlake's argument. He slid out the message print, shuttled it to the replay rack. If only the print had been the first step in the reception, instead of intermediate, he thought. He removed his feedback patches, sent the print directly into the Ox and then into through the Optical Character Print system and the screen above them. Hempstead's original call appeared there, and they all looked up at it. That had to be accurate, Bickel thought. There came that original long F lattery had just shifted the Com-central board to Prudence. He looked across at Timberlake, who sat on the edge of his action couch staring at a memo pad of ship paper. The thin paper rustled faintly as Timberlake folded back a page, scribbled something on a clean surface. Flattery's duty shift had exhausted him. He felt drained -- and at the same time keyed up. Apprehensive. He felt that forces were gathering over which he could have no control. They had come to no solution of the communication problem. Or of any other. Perhaps, none was possible. He looked up at the monitor screen and observed it was blank. For a moment it did not register. He looked over to the console in front of Prudence, saw that the command-circuit key pointed to "on." But the screen remained blank. That key is on! Flattery told himself. But why was the screen blank? As though she read his mind, Prudence said: "John's installed an override on the command circuit. Any idea why?" "Didn't you see where he was?" Timberlake demanded. "He was in the shop -- working on that Ox mess!" Timberlake unlocked his action couch and in almost die same motion, launched himself at the hatch to the computer maintenance shop. He wrenched at the lock dogs, but they remained immovable. "He's jammed the lock!" Timberlake said. "If he wrecks our computer..." "You noticed... so you may as well watch." It was Bickel's voice. HP hey looked up to see a view of the shop in their big screen. Bickel stood with the detritus of the initial Ox installation around him -- dangling leads, meters, neuron blocks -- all stacked precariously away from the computer wall. "Bickel, listen to reason," Timberlake said. "You can't just tear into..." "Shut up or I'll turn you off," Bickel said. He knelt with a substitute neuron block, inserted it between the Ox and the computer wall, began making connections. "Please, John," Prudence said. "If you'd..." "You're not going to stop him by talking to him," Flattery said. "Listen to Raj," Bickel said. He slipped another neuron block into place against the wall, made new connections. "Rhythm," he said. "I went to sleep on it... and it woke me up. That and your yakking. Rhythm." Another substitute neuron block went into place beneath the first two. "Describe what you're doing," Flattery said, and he motioned for Timberlake to come to his side. "Brain-vision anatomy can be reduced to the mathematical description of a scanning process," Bickel said. "It follows that any other brainfunction anatomy -- including consciousness -- should submit to the same approach. I can duplicate the alpha-rhythm cycle for a brain-scanning sweep by setting it up in the time-cycle of these neuron blocks. If I trace each rhythm from a human model and duplicate... "What's the function of each of these human rhythms?" Flattery demanded. As he spoke, Flattery scribbled a note on a pad of ship flimsy, pressed it into Timberlake's hand. Timberlake looked up to the screen, but Bickel still had his back to the video eyes that matched the screen-view. "We don't know the function for certain, do we?" Flattery said, and he motioned frantically for Timberlake to read the note. Timberlake turned his attention onto the paper, read : Again, Timberlake looked up to the screen. The Ox was taking on new shape under Bickel's hands -- reaching out to the angle of the shop against the computer wall. It began to assume a feeling of topological improbability in Timberlake's eyes -- with jutting triangles of plastic, oblongs of neuron couplers, strips of Eng multipliers... and the colorcoded leads interweaving like a crazy spectrum. Timberlake felt a hand grab his arm, shake him. He looked at the hand, followed its arm to Flattery's glaring face. Flattery gestured to the note in Timberlake's other hand. Again, Timberlake looked at the note, recognizing why he stood rooted to this spot. Around the hyb tanks? No. It would have to be through the hyb tanks. Flattery must know that. Timberlake turned his tortured gaze on Flattery, bringing the terror up to full awareness. Bickel has infected me with hia cynical scepticism, Timberlake thought. I'm afraid of what I'll find in the hyb tanks if I look too close. I'll find the tanka empty, and nothing but leads back into the computer from the tanks. And the computer will be programmed to simulate the presence of hybernating life in those tanks. The whole thing will turn out to be a monstrous hoax. I'll discover, I've been lifesystems engineer to... nothing. The thought set him shivering. I 'll use the shot-effect generator again, Bickel thought. He leaned into the organized clutter of the Ox, clipped a lead onto the temporary input, threaded the lead out and draped it to one side. The effect and the way to achieve it were still clear in his mind. He had awakened suddenly, not knowing how long he had slept, but feeling refreshed and He turned to the computer leads, linked the Ox through a buffer that would feed its impulses into a test-memory bank, connected this to one of the new bank of neuron blocks, and put the system on full interlock. "Will you at least explain what you're doing, John?" It was Flattery's voice out of the screen. Bickel glanced back, saw Prudence at the controls, Flattery sitting on the edge of an action couch -- no sign of Timberlake. But this screen's eyes didn't expose all of Com-centraL It was probable that Timberlake was trying the hatch. Well, let him, Bickel thought. "We have only ourselves to use as models for producing this Consciousness Function," Bickel said. "And everybody keeps saying we can't get into ourselves the way an engineer should to duplicate the mechanism. But, friend, there's another approach -- thoroughly tested and effective." Prudence said: "Raj?" Flattery looked at her. "I'm getting current drive on the auxiliary power supply," she said. "It's the shop," Flattery said. "John's taken a direct line to prevent us from shutting him off." He looked back at BickeL "Right?" "Right," Bickel said. "It shouldn't cause you any trouble. I've isolated the line. Your main board is still functioning." He turned back to the Ox, began tieing in a series erf timed neurofibers. 'What's the tested, effective method?" Flattery asked. He looked up at the telltales on the Comcentral board, following Timberlake's progress by the heat sensors. Timberlake was out in the second zone now, turning in toward the opposite side of the shielding and the hyb tanks. Why had Tim been so reluctant to go? Flattery wondered. Bickel finished a triple connection along the timed fibers, straightened, said: "The system you can't tear apart and examine is called a black box. If we can make a white box sufficiently similar and general in potenHal to the black box -- that is, make it sufficiently complex -- then we can force the black box, by its own operation, to transfer its pattern of action to the white box. We cross link them and subject each to identical shot-effect bursts." "What's your white box?" Flattery asked, his interest and attention caught in spite of his fears. "That thing?" He nodded toward the crazy-block construction of the Ox. "Hell, no," Bickel said. "This is nowhere near complex enough. But our entire computer system is." He's gone crazy! Flattery thought. He can't be suggesting seriously that he'd throw a scrambling shot-effect burst into the computer! Again, Flattery glanced up at the telltales. Timberlake was at the edge of the hyb tanks, moving at a maddeningly slow pace. "Then... how does the Ox function in this?" Flattery asked, returning his attention to the screen. "This is our sorter," Bickel said. "It sorts the rhythms of the system and acts as a crude kind of frontal lobes." He linked two parts of his construction by crossjacks in a patchboard, said: "There. Now to run a few tests." "Shouldn't you wait?" Flattery demanded. "Shouldn't we discuss this a bit more? What if you've made a mistake and... "No mistake," Bickel said. Flattery looked to the telltales. Timberlake was in the hyb tanks now, but he wasn't moving -- just stopped there. We set our 'organ of analysis' at too high a pitch, Flattery thought. We should've known it could run wild. What was keeping Timberlake? "Straight line test, first," Bickel said, and closed a key on the computer wall. He stared at the diagnostic-circuit dials above him. F lattery held his breath, turned slowly to look at the big board in front of Prudence. If Bickel's test loused up the central computer system, it'd show up first on the big board. The warning flashboard retained its quiet green. The steady ticking of relays through the graph counters and monitors held at an even pace. Everything appeared soothingly ordinary. "I'm getting individual nervenet responses on the separate blocks," Bickel said. "Orthogonal nerve-net response in relation to the input." Flattery kept his attention on the flashboard. If Bickel ruined the computer, the ship was dead. Most of the Tin Egg's automatic systems depended on the computer's inner lines of communication and supervisory control programs. "Didn't you hear me?" Bickel demanded. "I'm getting nervenet response! This thing'll behave like a human nervous system!" "Raj, he is!" It was Prudence, and Flattery dropped his gaze to where she was pointing. She had shifted a small corner of her own auxiliary board into a repeater system tied to Bickel's diagnosticcircuits. "Beta rhythm," she said, pointing to the scope in the center of the board. Flattery watched the sine-play of the green line on the scope, digesting what Bickel had said, what that scope implied. Black box-white box. Perhaps it was possible, theoretically, to use the entire computer as a white box to take the transfer-pattern called consciousness. But there remained many unanswered questions -- and one more vital than all the others. "What do you intend using as a black box?" Flattery asked. "Where'll you get your original pattern?" "From a conscious human brain," Bickel said. "I'm going to take one of our spare hyb tanks and adapt the electroencepholographic feedback system as a man-amplifier." He's utterly mad, Flattery thought. The shot-effect shock would kill the human subject. Bickel looked out of the screen, stared at Flattery -- realizing that the psychiatrist-chaplain had seen the possible deadliness of this proposal. Who will bell the cat? Bickel thought. He swallowed. Well , if necessary , I will. "How would you protect the subject from the shot-effect bursts?" Prudence asked. "I believe the subject will have to be fully conscious," Bickel said. "Without any medication... or narco-inhibitions." H e waited for the explosion from Timberlake. This idea was sure to outrage the conditioning of the life-systems engineer. Where was Timberlake? "Absolutely not!" Flattery exploded. "It'd be murder!" Prudence looked away from the console, met Bickel's eyes. "Be reasonable, John," she pleaded. "You're already endangering the computer with that... "The ship's still functioning, isn't it?" Bickel countered, "But if you throw a shot-effect burst through that..." She nodded toward the stacked blocks and interwoven leads of the Ox beside Bickel. "... how'll you avoid damage to the computer's core memory?" "Core memory's a fixed system and buffered," Bickel said. "I'll keep the Ox's potential below the buffer threshhold. Besides... He shrugged... we've already put shoteffect bursts through the computer without..." "And scattered information," she snapped. "We can still find that information if we use the Ox to sort the addresses for us," Bickel said. Flattery glanced at the sensors in front of Prudence. What was wrong with Timberlake? Was he injured? Unconscious? But the sensors revealed a narrow path of movement from the life-systems engineer... all of it within the hyb tank complex, though. "If I understand you correctly," Prudence said, "you'll have to add nerve-net simulation channels to the Ox until it and the computer are as complex as a human nervous system. As you build it and test it, we become more and more dependent on that juryrigged Ox monstrosity for our very lives." "It has to have a full range of sensory apparatus," Bickel said. "There's no other way." "There must be!" she said. "Where'd you get such a mad idea?" "From you," Bickel said. Shock momentarily stilled her tongue, then: "That's impossible!" "You're a female," Bickel said, "capable of biological reproduction of conscious life. In that method, you have a substrate of molecules that are capable of assuming a large number of forms... different forms. Those molecules assume a particular form in the presence of a molecule that already has that form." He shrugged. "Black boxwhite box." "What about all those lives down in the hyb tanks?" Flattery asked. "Do they have any choice in this... game?" "They already made their choice," Bickel said. "And while they're helpless, you change the rules," Flattery said. "That was one of the chances they accepted when they accepted hybernation," Bickel said. "That was their choice." Flattery abandoned the argument, pushed himself up. "What're you going to do?" Prudence asked. "Check on Tim." #C'fT#'here is Tim?" Bickel ' ' asked. "Down in the hyb tanks," Flattery said, knowing Bickel could get the answer himself --  once he consulted the shop's repeaters. "Deep in the hyb tanks?" "Of course!" "Prue!" Bickel snapped. "Try to raise him on the command circuit." She heard the urgency in Bicktel's voice, and immediately whirled to obey. There was no response from Timberlake. "You fools!" Bickel said. Flattery stopped at the tube hatch, glared up at the screen. "Who let him go down into the deep tanks?" Bickel demanded. "You blind idiots! Don't you know what he's likely to find down there?" "What do you mean?" Flattery asked. "This whole damn' ship's nothing but a simulation device," Bickel said. "There'll be nothing down there except a few crew replacements. Those tanks have to be empty!" He's wrong! Flattery thought. Or is he? The thought staggered Flattery. He saw immediately how that might pull the props out from under Timberlake -- a man tuned as fine as the rest of them for a specific function. "He'd still have the crew systems," Prudence said. She stared across the room at Flattery, feeling the loneliness -- The Tin Egg with its programmed peril might contain only a few isolated humans launched into nowhere. They wouldn't, Flattery thought. But it they'd prepare me to cheat the rest of the crew... His feet felt rooted to the deck. He swallowed in a dry throat. But it's impossible! They promised me when I discovered the actual Tau Ceti prints -- if we succeeded we could just send back the report capsule and continue as... There is no Tau Ceti planet! "Raj, are you sick?" Prudence asked. She studied him, seeing the lost, sunken look in his eyes. "The Tau Ceti planets are uninhabitable, yes," Hempstead had admitted when confronted with the evidence. "No Eden. But the universe is known to planets. You realize you can't come back here, of course. The embarrassment to your hosts." "The biopsy donors were all criminals," Flattery had said, springing his other discovery. directed," Hempstead had protested. "That is one of the reasons you can't come back, but nothing's to stop you from going on to explore and find your own Eden." Remembering the words, Flattery felt how hollow they sounded. Sham and trickery all the way, he thought. But why? IX fp'imberlake had launched himself down the metalo-plastic communications tube with a desperate haste, knowing he had to move swiftly or become stalled in an unexplainable terror. At the tubedistribution lock, he sealed the hatch behind him, snatched a robox-monkey from its rack, tuned the sensors to the track imprinted in the tube wall, slammed its wheels onto the guide marks and grabbed the handhold controls. Again, he encountered that terrifying reluctance to move, and stared up the tube, studying the long, infinity-curve of it visible through the transparent safety locks. I can't go back, he thought. With a sudden wrench, he twisted the little robox tow unit's drive to full on, let it jerk him ahead along that curving track. The wind of his passage was a dim hiss. He was like a loose piston driving down that tube. Locks opened automatically to the robox signal, closed behind him. He slowed for the protective jog through the shielding layer, twisted around through the branching outside the hyb tanks, dove back down along the flat angle that returned through the watershield and stopped in the lock chamber to the tanks. He racked the rooox, stared at the hatch. It was a big yellow oval, its seal warning in heavy Now that he was faced with it, Timberlake felt a calm submission to fate controlling his muscles. He gripped the hatch dogs, broke the seal, seeing the line of frost inside as the hatch swung open. His suit generators hummed upscale, compensating for the drop in temperature as chill air spilled out of the lock. Timberlake slipped into the lock, closed and sealed the outer hatch, turned around. A rack of heavy-duty generators hung over the inner hatch with a big warning sign above them: "EXTimberlake looped the straps of a spare generator over his shoulder, gave the thing's turbine drive a short burst to check it The generator hummed briefly. He swung the rack of them aside, broke open the next hatch, slipped through and dogged it behind him. Now, a smaller hatch greeted him, and lettered on its face: Timberlake coupled the auxiliary generator to his suit, checked both generators, adjusted them for temperature-security override. The remembered routine occupied his awareness, keeping his mind off the space beyond that hatch. Suit seals slithered under his gloved fingers as he secured them. He dropped the non-fog viewplate over his faceplate, ran a check tape along the seals. The moment of final decision had come. npimberlake forced himself to act slowly and calmly. More than his own life depended on what he did now, he told himself. Stray heat inside there could play havoc with helpless lives. He passed his suit's baffles in front of a heat sensor, studied the gauge. Zero. His gloved hands went to the dogs of the inner hatch, broke the seal. The hatch popped slightly, indicating a small difference in pressure -- nothing abnormal. He stepped through into the glittering dry chill of the first bank of hyb tanks. This was where Prudence had been. He saw her empty tank on his left, its leads dangling, the cushioned carrier still open inside. Everything around him was revealed in harsh blue cold-light. He studied the chamber. It was like a giant barrel -- an open space in the center surrounded by the smaller barrels that were the individual hybernation tanks. A grid-floored catwalk led down the open center with short ladders and handholds branching up to the separate tanks. Timberlake kicked off down the length of the tank in three low-grav jumps, caught a handhold beside the breaker lock that separated this section from the next one. He looked back. No... they weren't little barrels, he thought. The individual tanks stretched away from him -- all around -- like so many sections of gray culvert pipe waiting to be assembled into something useful... like a drain. There was no point examining the tanks in here, he knew. This was number-one section: high priority crew replacements. If there was deception, it'd be further along the line -- in one of the deeper sections. Timberlake opened the safety value at the breaker lock, swung open the hatch, let himself through, reset the mechanism to isolate the section in the event of partial damage. He looked around the new section. It was the twin of the other one except for the absence of a raided tank. Timberlake swallowed. His cheeks felt damp and cold. A place between his shoulder blades itched. Quite abruptly, he found himself remembering Professor Aldiss Warren, the lecturer in bioa goat-bearded old man with a senile sounding voice and a mind like a scimitar. Why do I think of old Warren -- now? Timberlake wondered. As though the question released a hidden awareness, he recalled the old man diverging from a seminar discussion to talk about moral strength. "You wish to test moral strength?" he'd asked. "Simple. Construct a med-computer with a public callbox attachment. Set it that anyone submitting to the computer's probes can find out to within a day or so when he'll die... of natural causes, of course. If you wish to call old age natural. Then you step back and see who uses the thing." Someone -- a feminine student in the back of the class -- had asked: "Wouldn't it take a kind of courage not to use this computer?" "Pah!" old Warren had exploded. Another student had said: "Hypothetical questions like this always bore the hell out of me." "Sure," old Warren had said. "You young toughs haven't faced the fact we could build such a med-computer -- right now, today. We've had the ability to build it for more than thirty years. It wouldn't even be very costly -- as such things go. But we don't build it." npimberlake held himself still and silent in the hyb tank, realizing why he had remembered that incident. Coming into this cold-lighted tank was like using old Warren's hypothetical death predictor. Bic.kel infected me with the certainty that this ship is not what it seems to he, Timberlake thought. He took over command, pushed me aside. The only reason for being here that was left me -- He looked up and around the tank -- was in here. If this is taken from me then Fm truly useless except as a kind of computer-shop flunky for Bickel. Yes, Bickel. Right away, Bickel. Is there anything else, Bickel? Presently, he launched himself up to an individual tank hanging low on the left curve, center. The tank was like all the others racked in curving rows around it. He activated the inner cold light, caught a handhold and bent close to the tank's inspection port. The light flickered, glowed. It illuminated the metered master tubes dropping from the tank's other side, a colorcoded sheaf of spaghetti that trailed down left and right to the figure under the light. A man's craggy profile lay there, waxy skin and faint black beard. He was like a mannequin figure -- and Timberlake thought immediately of elaborate human-size dolls racked here to maintain the pretense. Timberlake studied the lifesystems telltales above the spaghetti sheaf. They registered a faint flame of life within the tank. Timberlake made a tiny adjustment in the oxygen meter, caught the immediate feedback surge on the tank's electroencephalographic coupling. The oxygen meter reset itself. This, then, was a hybernating man. That feedback reaction with its elaborate encephalographic play, could not be programmed for the unexpected. The oxygen shift at this moment in time obviously could not have been anticipated. A human homeostate had detected it, though, and reacted correctly. Timberlake dropped down to the gridded catwalk, checked a tank opposite, and another farther down the line. He went through them at random, pausing only to check that each held a living human. One of them he recognized -- black hair, olive skin with its waxy undertone, chiseled features -- Frank Lipera, a fellow student in human engineering. Presently, Timberlake went on to the next section... and the next. He found he recognized many of the occupants. This filled him with a feeling of loneliness. He felt that he might be the keeper of a museum, guarding old relics for a brief human lifespan, sequestering beneath these blue cold-lights a share of man's culture and knowledge. He came at last to a corner of section seven, another recognizblond and germanic, pale wax skin. Timberlake read the name etched above the inspection port: Yes, it was AI Peabody, Timberlake agreed. Yet, in a way it Wasn't A#... too. It was as though the companion of Timberlake's gym classes, his opponent in handball and moon tennis, had gone away somewhere to wait. But Peabody, Alan -- K-#a proved to be a visable human within individual homeostatic reactions. He could be awakened to speak and act and think. He could be wakened to consciousness. And consciousness is a thing beyond speaking and acting and thinking, Timberlake thought. TI e loosened the handhold, dropped lightly back to the catwalk, feeling no particular need to check further. He knew with an inner certainty that all the tanks held hybernating humans. Bickel might be correct about the Tin Egg being an elaborate simulation, but in here the simulation went too far in the direction of reality for it to be anything other than what it seemed. The hyb tanks had not been larded with obvious deception. I was supposed to come through here, surprise Bickel and stop him, Timberlake thought Stop him from what? Some tiny, unregistered perception worked on the edge of Timberlake's awareness, assuring him that whatever Bickel was doing right now in the shop held no immediate danger to these helpless sleepers. Whatever Bickers doing, he must be doing it right now, Timberlake thought. I've been gone... almost on hour. He looked up at the rows of tanks. Yet, every tank I checked was functioning at peak efficiency, as though the entire system were tuned to a critical optimum. Timberlake nodded to himself. You might almost think a mental core still rode monitor on the ship's vital parts. He felt that he could almost hear the tremendously slowed oscillations of life around him. The spot between his shoulderblade had ceased to itch, but he felt painfully tired now, slightly dizzy, his body dragging at his muscles. It occurred to Timberlake then that they could be going at the problem of reproducing consciousness too literally. Will we have to install mechanisms that permit the Ox to grow tired? he wondered. We're too literal... like peasants asking the genie for three wishes. Maybe we won't like our wishes if we get them. God, I'm tired. Something moved near the far bulkhead -- a space-suited figure. For one instant of unreality, Timberlake thought that one of his hybernating charges had revived itself. Then, the moving figure came full into the glare of the cold-light and Timberlake recognized Flattery's features behind the anti-fog plate of the helmet bubble. "Tim!" Flattery called. His voice boomed from the suit amplifiers, echoed with a metallic ringing through the cold air of the tank. "Something wrong with your suit receiver?" Flattery asked, stopping in front of Timberlake. Timberlake looked down at the command set near his chin, saw that its circuit indicator light was dark. I left it off, Timberlake thought. Never even thought of turning it on. Why'd I do that? Flattery studied Timberlake carefully. The man's motions when first seen across the tank had indicated nothing seriously wrong. He moved. He seemed aware of his surroundings. "You feel all right, Tim?" Flattery asked. "Sure. Sure... I feel all right." Like three wishes, Timberlake thought. Like the three S' s of our school joke: Security, Sleep and Sex. Something touched his shoulder, and he realized he had heard the inner bulkhead open. He looked around to see Bickel standing there. "You feel up to some work, you two?" Bickel asked. "I need your help." X 'T'he three men came to the inner locks and the back passage beneath the primary computer installation and up into the shop. They slipped through, sealed the hatch. Bickel threw back his helmet. Flattery and Timberlake did the same. Bickel already was loosening his glove seals. Timberlake stared at Flattery, watching the way the man studied the jutting boxes and angles, the interwoven leads of the Ox. "Infinite counting net?" Flattery asked. "Why not?" Bickel asked. "You have it. Yqu can count beyond the number of your own total nerve supply. The Ox has to do the same." "You know the danger," Flattery said. "Some of the danger," Bickel admitted. "This ship could be one gigantic sensory surface," Flattery said. "It's receptors could achieve combinations unknown to us, could contact energy sources unknown to us." "Is that one of the theories?" Bickel asked. Flattery took a step closer to the Ox construction. "Before you do anything destructive," Bickel said, and he nodded toward the patterned confusion clinging to the computer wall with its wire tentacles, "you'd better know I'm already getting conscious-type reactions on a low scale -- the system itself activating various sensors. It's like an animal blinking its eyes -- a heat sensor here, audio there..." "That could be a random dislodge pattern due to the shot-effect bursts," Flattery said. "Not when nerve-net activity accompanies each reaction," Bickel said. Flattery digested this, feeling his conditioned fear-alertness -- the reaction for which he was but a trigger -- come to full amplitude. His mind focused on the two red keys and the self-destruction program they would ignite through the computer-links of the ship. "Tim, how tired are you?" Bickel asked. Timberlake looked at Bickel. How tired am I? Minutes ago, he had been shot through with fatigue. Now... something had keyed him up, filled him with a feeling of elation. Conscious-type reactionsl "I'm ready for another full shift," Timberlake said. "This thing's too simple yet to even approach full consciousness," Bickel said. "Most of the ship's sensors bypass the Ox circuits. Robox controls aren't connected and it has no... (.(. Tust a minutef" Flattery J snapped. They turned, caught by the anger in Flattery's voice. "You admit this goal-seeking mechanism may operate entirely outside your control," Flattery give it eyes -- and muscles?" "Raj, before we're finished, this thing has to have complete control of the ship." "To get us across the bigempty and safely to Tau Ceti," Flattery said. "You're assuming that's the ship-computer's basic program?" "I assume nothing," Bickel said. "I checked. That's the basic program." To Tau Ceti Flattery thought. He felt like both laughing and crying. He didn't know whether to tell them the truth -- the fools! But... no; that would render them less efficient. Best to play the charade out to its silly conclusion! "Can you prevent damage to the computer core?" he asked. "It'll be buffered forty ways from Sunday," Bickel said. "I've already started the buffering." "What if it develops that it's fatal to go to Tau Ceti?" Flattery asked. Why is he quibbling? Bickel wondered. Surely, he knows the answer to that. "A simple binary decision solves that," Bickel said. "We give it a turn-back alternative." "Ahhhhh," Flattery said. "The best of all possible moves, eh? But we're in the Queen's croquet game. You said it yourself. What If the Queen of Hearts changes the rules? We've no Alice in this wonderland to haul us back." A deliberately poor move somewhere along the line changing the theoretical structure of the game, Bickel thought. That a an indicated possibility. He shrugged: "Then we get sent to the headsman." Timberlake cleared his throat. He felt an overpowering curiosity to inspect and test what Bickel had built -- to trace out the circuitry and try to find why it wasn't upsetting gross computer function. "If we run into the Queen of Hearts problem," Timberlake said, "the ship stands a better chance if it's controlled by an imaginative, conscious intelligence." "Our kind of consciousness?" Flattery asked. There's what's eating him, Bickel thought. He's obviously the one charged with seeing we don't loose a killer machine in the universe. Homeostasis for a race can be different from the balance needed to keep an individual alive. But we're isolated out here -- an entire race in a test tube. "We're talking about creating a machine with a specific quality," Flattery said. "It has to operate itself from the inside, by probability, and can't be controlled by determinations from the outside. We can't determine everything it's going to do." He raised a hand as Bickel started to speak. "But we can determine some of its emotions. What if it actually cares about us? What if it admires and loves us?" Bickel stared at him. That was a beautiful idea, an audacious idea -- completely in keeping with Flattery's function as chaplain, colored by his psychiatric training, and protective of the race as a whole. "Think of consciousness as a behavior pattern," Flattery said. "What has contributed to development of this pattern? If we go back..." T Tis voice was drowned in the klaxon blare of the emergency warning. They all felt the ship lurch and the immediate weightlessness as the caged failsafe switch disconnected the grav system. Bickel drifted toward the forward end of the shop, caught a stanchion, swung himself around and kicked off toward the Corncentral hatch. He went quickly through the hatch in the same fluid motion of opening it, slammed and dogged it, hurled himself toward his couch. He locked in, swept his gaze across his repeaters. Prudence was making only minimal corrections on the big console, studying the drain gauges. Bickel saw that the computer was drawing almost eighty per cent of its power-demand capacity, began checking for fire and shorts. He heard cocoon triggers snap as Flattery and Timberlake took their places in their couches. "Computer drain," Timberlake said. "Radiation bleed-off in Stores Four," Prudence said, her voice hoarse. "Steady rise in temperature back of the second hull bulkheads...no; it's beginning to level off." She programmed for a hullsecurity check, watched the sensor telltales. Bickel looking over her shoulder at the big board, saw the implications of the flickering lights as soon as she did, said; "We've lost a section of outer shielding." "And hull," she said. Bickel lay back, keyed the repeater screen for monitoring the sensors, began an analysis outward into the indicated area, said: "You watch the board; I'll make the check." Images flickered on and out in the little screen at the corner of his board as he keyed it to new sensors farther and farther out. Halfway through Stores Four, he was staring into the star-sequinned darkness of open space. The sensor eyes revealed foam coagulant flowing into a wide, oval hole from the hull-security automatics. Out of the corner of his eye, Bickel saw Flattery running a micro-survey along the edge of the break in the hull. "It's as though it were sliced off with a knife," he said. "Smooth and even." "Meteorite?" Timberlake asked. He looked up from a check of the hyb tanks. "There's no fusing at the edge or evidence of friction heat," Flattery said. He took his hands off his board, thinking of the island in Puget Sound -- the wild destruction in the surrounding countryside. Rogue consciousness. Has it started already? he asked himself.   through the outer shielding and hull without heating them at least to half-sun?" Bickel asked. No one answered. Bickel looked at Flattery, seeing the white, drawn look to the man's mouth, thought: He knows ! "Raj," Bickel said, "what could do that?" Flattery shook his head. Bickel took a reading on the laser-pulsed timelog off his own repeaters, extracted a position assessment, noted transmissiontransmitter to his side and keyed "What're you doing?" Flattery asked. "This we'd better report," Bickel said. He began cutting the tape. "How about some gravity?" Timberlake asked. He looked at Prudence. "System reads functional," she said. "I'll try it." She thumbed the reset. The ship's normal quarter gravity pulled at them. Timberlake unlocked his cocoon, stepped out to the deck. "Where're you going?" Prudence asked. "I'm going out and have a look," Timberlake said. "Some force takes a slice off our hull without crisping the area of spreading a shatter pattern? There is no such force. This I've got to see." "Stay right where you are," Bickel said. "There could be loose cargo out there... anything." Timberlake thought of lovely Maida crushed by runaway cargo, swallowed. "What's to prevent it slicing us neatly right down the middle -- next time?" Prudence asked. "What's our speed, Prue?" Timberlake asked. "C over one five two seven," she said, "and holding." "Did... whatever it was slow us at all?" Flattery asked. Prudence ran the back check on the comparison log, said: "No." Timberlake took a deep, quavering breath, said: "A virtually zero impact phenomenon with a force effect of... what? Infinity?" He shook his head. "There's no kinetic equivalent." Bickel tripped the transmission switch, waited for the interlock, looked at Timberlake. "Did the universe begin with Gamow's 'big bang' or are we in the middle of Hoyle's continuous creation? What if they're both..." "That's just a mathematical game," Prudence said. "Oh, I know: the union of infinite mass and finite sources can be accomplished by postulating zero impact-infinite force, but it's still just a mathematical game, a cancelling-out exercise. It doesn't prove anything." "It proves the original power of Genesis," Flattery whispered. "Oh, Raj, you're at it again," Prudence said, "trying to twist mathematics to prove the existence of God." "God took a swipe at us?" Timberlake asked. "Is that what you're saying, Raj?" "You both know better than to take that attitude -- under these circumstances," Flattery said. And he thought: When they know we've achieved the stage of rogue consciousness. There's no other answer. prudence stared up at the big console, wondering what had happened to the ship. The damage had been caused by something outside the ship. There had been a faint lurch transmitted through the Tin Egg, but that had come afterward. The damage telltales already had been flaring out red and yellow. The lurch had been associated with power drain and a shift of switching equipment to the necessities of automatic damage control. Zero impact-infinite force. Something outside the ship had sliced through them like a razor through soft butter. No -- infinitely sharper. Something from outside. She put a hand to her cheek. That pointed to something beyond the dangers programmed into the ship. They'd encountered something out of the wide, blank unknown. She thought suddenly of sea monsters painted on ancient charts of the earth, of twelvelegged dragons and humanoid figures With fanged mouths in their chests. She restored a degree of calmness by reminding herself that all these monsters had faded before humanity's monkey-like inquisitiveness. Still -- something had struck the Tin Egg. She ran another visual survey of her board, noting that automatic damage control had almost completely flooded out Stores Four with foam seal. Section doors were sealed off for two layers around the damage area. Whatever had hit them, it had taken only a thin slice... this time. "Time for my watch," Flattery said. "Prue?" Flattery's words made her aware in a sudden rush of acceptance how tired she was. Her back ached and the muscles of her forearms trembled. She could remember only once before having been this tired -- after almost five hours of surgery. "On the count," she said. They shifted the big board, and Flattery scanned the instruments, preparing to fit himself into the mood of the ship. And the Tin Egg does have her moods, Flattery thought. Sometimes, he felt as though the ship carried ghosts within it -- of the sixteen men killed by accident during the construction on the moon, of umbilicus crewmembers killed by the ship's programmed savagery -- or perhaps altar. Did those bodiless brains have souls? Flattery wondered. For that matter -- it we breathe consciousness into this machinery, will our creation have a soul? "Have the automatics finished sealing the break?" Bickel asked. "All sealed," Flattery said. And he wondered: When will the rogue consciousness hit us again? "What was in Stores Four?" Prudence asked. "What'd we lose?" "Food concentrates," Bickel aid. "First thing I checked." His tone said: "You had the watch; you should've checked." "Raj, do you want us to start sharing the watch and watch?" Timberlake asked. "After I've had some rest... "After you've had some rest, you can help me in the shop," Bickel said. "We've just decided," Prudence said, "just like that -- " she snapped her fingers -- "that you can go on stirring around in the computer like a wild man?" "For Christ's sake!" Bickel said. "Haven't any of you realized yet we were supposed to use the computer as the basic element of attack?" B ickel stared around at them. Flattery busy on the board, Timberlake half asleep sitting up at his couch, Prudence glaring at him from her couch. "That's no ordinary computer," Bickel said. "It has elements we don't even suspect. It was hooked up with an Organic Mental Core for almost six years during the construction and programming of the ship. It has buffers and leads and cross ties that its own designers may not even know about!" "Are you suggesting it's already conscious?" Prudence asked. "No, I'm not suggesting it's already conscious. I'm suggesting that we've come a long way using that computer and our Ox frontal-lobe simulator. We've project did in twenty years! And we should go on with this. We're cutting a straight line through all the... "There are no straight lines in nature," Flattery said. Bickel sighed. What now? he wondered. "If you've got something to say, spit it out," Bickel said. "Consciousness is a type of behavior," Flattery said. "Agreed?" "Agreed." "But the roots of our behavior are buried so far away in the past we can't get at them directly-" "Emotion again, eh?" Bickel demanded. "No," Flattery said. "Instinct," Prudence said. Flattery nodded. "The kind of genetic imprint that tells a chicken how to crack out of its shell." "Emotions or instinct, what's the difference?" Bickel asked. "Emotions are produced by instinct. Are you still saying we can't bring the Ox to consciousness unless it has instincts cum emotions?" "You know what I'm saying," Flattery said. "It has to love us," Bickel said. He chewed at his upper lip, caught again by the beautiful simplicity of the suggestion. Flattery was right, of course. Here was a loose rein that could satisfy the failsafe requirements. It controlled without galling. "It has to have an autonomic system of emotional reactions," Flattery said. "The system has to respond with a set of physical effects of which the Ox is... aware. Something like the characteristic human muscular reactions and voice tones, the things we use to respond to emotions." Emotion, Bickel thought. The characteristic that gives us our sense of person, the thing that summates personal judgments. A process in capsule form that can occur out of sequence. Here was a break with all machine concepts of Time -- Emotion as Process, an audacious way of looking at Time. "There's nothing of ourselves about which we can be objective," Bickel said, "except our own physical responses. Remember? It's what Dr. Ellers was always saying." Flattery thought back to Ell"Bickel is 'purpose,' the force that will give direction to your search," Ellers had said. "You have substitutes, of courage. Accidents do happen. But you've nothing honed as fine as Bickel. He's a creative discoverer." Emotion, Bickel thought. How do we symbolize it and program for it? What does the body do? We're inside, in direct contact with whatever the body's doing. That's the only thing we can really be objective about. What does the body... "It has to have a completely interfunctioning body," Bickel said, seeing the whole problem and answer as an abrupt revelation. "It has to have a body that's gone through trauma and crises." He stared at Flattery. "Guilt, too, Raj. It has to have guilt." "Guilt?" Flattery asked, and wondered why the suggestion made him feel angry and half fearful. He started to object, grew conscious of a rhythmic rasping. He thought at first it was a malfunctioning alarm, realized then it was Timberlake. The life-systems engineer had reclasped himself in his action couch cocoon. He was asleep -- snoring. "Guilt," Bickel said, holding his attention on Flattery. "You want it to love us? Okay. Love's a kind of need, eh? It'll have emotions, but that means an unlimited spectrum of emotions, Raj. The spectrum includes fear." G uilt and fear, Prudence thought. Raj will have to face it. His training won't permit him to deny this. She looked at Bickel, seeing the filrned-over, withdrawn look in his eyes. "Pleasure and pain," Bickel muttered. He focused on Prudence, the sleeping Timberlake, on Flattery -- each in turn. Did they see that the Ox had to be able to reproduce itself, too? Prudence felt her pulse quickening, tore her attention away from Bickel. She put a hand to her temple, checked the pulse there, related this to her quickened breathing, to body temperature, to hungers, to stage of fatigue and awareness. The serotoninadrenalin she'd been fed in hyb was giving her an acute awareness of her bodily functions, and that awareness told her she needed chemical readjustment. "Well, Raj?" Bickel said. I must compose myself , Flattery thought, turning back onto his couch. I must appear natural and calm. He kept his eyes away from the false panel on his repeater board. Bickel was growing exceedingly alert to the tiniest clues. Flattery marked the quiet green of the flashboard, the ticking of relays through the graph counters. Everything of the ship felt soothing and ordinary -- all systems functioning. Yet, deep inside himself, Flattery felt knotted up, like an animal poised at the sound of the hunter. Bickel felt elation, a breakthrough in some inner factor that had resisted him. The ship -- its living organisms, its problems -- all were like marionettes and marionette toys. The way out was so clear to him. He'd only hinted at it before. So clear. He could see the necessary schematics stacked in his mind, like transparencies piled one on another. Four dimensional construction, he reminded himself. We have to construct a net in depth that contains complex world-line tracks. It has to absorb nonsynchronous transmissions. It has to abstract discrete patterns out of the impulse oversend. The important thing is structure -- not the material. The important thing is topology. Thafs the key to the whole damn' problem! "Prue, get us some food and coffee," Bickel said. He glanced at the chronometer beside the Com-central board, looked at Timberlake. Let him sleep. Thinking within this framework, Bickel saw, put him on a threshhold. A certain pressure here, a certain application of energy there, and he knew he would be projected into a consciousness that he had never before experienced. The realization inspired fear and awe at the same time it lured him. He turned to Flattery. "Raj," he said. "We're not conscious." "What? Huh?" It was Timberlake rousing out of his sleep, rubbing his eyes, staring straight out at Bickel. "We're not awake," Bickel said. XI Ci'fXTe're not awake." During ' ' Flattery's watch, the words haunted him. Timberlake had muttered something about, "Damn' joker!" and gone off to finish his sleep in quarters. But Flattery, dividing his attention between the console and the overhead screen that showed the shop with Prudence and Bickel at work there, felt the ship assume a curious identity in his mind. Flattery felt as though he and the other three crewmembers were merely cells of a larger organism -- that the telltales, the dials and gauges and sensors, the omnipresent visual intercom -- that all these were senses and nerves and organs of something apart from himself. "We are noi awake." We keep skirting that thought, Flattery reflected. Bickel's voice talking to Prudence in the shop -- "Here's the main trunk to handle negative feedback. Follow the color code and tie it in across there. Here's the damper circuit; We have to watch we don't introduce reverberating cycles into the random neural paths." And Prudence, talking half to herself: "The human skull encloses about fifteen thousand ed from our building blocks and the computer. We're going to wind up with more than twice that number in this... beast." Their voices were like echoes in Flattery's mind. He thought of the total ship, the great machine whose continued life required a certain optimum organization -- an ordering process. That involved entropy, certainly, because the system that was a total ship tended to settle into a uniform distribution of its energies. As far as the ship is concerned, order is more natural than chaos, Flattery thought. But we're playing the ship as though all its parts were an orchestra and Bickel the director. Bickel alone has the score to achieve the music we want. Consciousness. CTphe identity that was the ship -- their Tin Egg -- it lacked a certain integrating ability at the moment. Instead of an efficient self-regulating force, the ship was making do with the inadequate feedback system represented by four humans loosely connected to its 'nervous system.' That was one way of looking at it. But there was a point in the ship's future where damage passed beyond their ability to recover. The humans were failing to make the ship the living, dynamic and interacting system it was designed to be. Flattery felt then a deep bitterness toward the society that had sent his frail cargo into nowhere. He knew the reasons, but reasons had never prevented bitterness. "Think of society as a human construction, a very sophisticated defense mechanism Hempstead and his cohorts had said. "Society's restrictions get bred into the cells themselves by a process of selection. And these restrictions become part of the selfregulating feedback in society's governing system. There's a serious question whether humans actually can break out of their self regulated pattern. It takes audacious methods, indeed, to explore beyond that pattern." The law was stated, Flattery knew, thusly: "Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates." Flattery deliberately rapped his knuckles against the edge of his action couch to shock himself out of his reverie. He focused on the console, saw he had the usual temperature adjustments to make. The automatics could never quite hold the line. Bickel: "Watch those lengths in the time-delay circuits. You'll confuse the Ox's psychological present." Prudence: "Its what?" Bickel: "Its psychological present -- its 'specious present' -- what you experience in any given instant; that short interval you call now. Professor Ferrel -- remember old Prof Ferrel-barrel?" Prudence: "Who could forget Hempstead's son-in-law?" Bickel: "Yeah, but he wasn't stupid. We were on the satellite tracker once -- him on his side of the sterile wall and me on ours. And he said: 'Look at that thing move!' It was a shuttle ship coming in from earth. And he said: 'You know for a fact it's changing position fast as hell. But you seem to see all those position changes right now -- in the present. No sharp edges; just a flow. That's the "specious present," boy. Don't you ever forget it.' And I never did."  Prudence: "Will the... Ox really experience time?" Bickel: "It has to. Our timedelay circuits have to give it a way of internal measurement. It has to feel its own time. Otherwise, it'll be a big package of confusion." Flattery looked up into the screen, saw Bickel hook an oscilloscope to the Ox, run a pulse check. Prudence: "Aren't you likely to overload the computer, bog it down?" Bickel: "For Chrissakes, woman! You personally receive all kinds of information constantly. Doesn't your own system sort through all that information, queue it up, program it and evaluate the data?" Prudence: "But the Tin E's very existence depends on the computer. If we blunder -- " Bickel: "There's no other way. You should've realized that the instant you saw this whole ship was a set piece." Prudence (angrily) : "What do you mean? Why?" Bickel: "Because the computer's the only place where that amount of information can be stored. You see, woman, we don't have time to train a completely uneducated infant." jfefore she could answer, the transmission horn blared its warning. pass to keep its circuits from interfering with the work in the shop. The horn was a trigger that fired both Bickel and Flattery into action. Bickel threw the action switch in the shop. Flattery switch on his console, realizing with a sense of detachment that through the Ox's circuits before being displayed for them. Bickel swept his gaze across the repeater telltales in the shop, watched the needles kick over and come to rest in the normal range. There came the characterthe shop because the Ox was part of the circuitry. The sound raised a tingling sensation along Bickel's sides and arms. The gauges registered the usbursts of the message were being sorted, compared, translated and fed into the output net. Bickel glanced at the screen, saw that Flattery had the system on audio. Morgan Hempstead's voice began rolling from the vocoders: Bickel watched his gauges. The message was coming in with remarkable clarity, no garbling at all apparent now that it was routed through the Ox's circuits. There came the distinct sound of Hempstead clearing his throat. It gave Prudence a peculiar feeling to hear this ordinary sound -- a man clearing his throat. The inconsequential thing had miles to no effect other than to inform them Hempstead had been troubled by a bit of phlegm. Again, Hempstead's voice "That's an awful word -- disposition," Prudence said. She glanced at Bickel. He seemed to be taking it calmly. Flattery could feel the heavy beating of his heart, wondered if the next few words would bring that deadly "kill ship" coda signal from Hempstead. Bickel stared at the vocoder with a puzzled frown. How clear Hempstead's voice sounded -- even to the throat-clearing which from the message. He shifted his attention to the Ox's surrealistic growth on the computer wall. Again, Hempstead's voice inBickel kept his voice low, casual, said: "Prue, how'd old Big Daddy sound to you?" 'Worried," Prudence said. And she wondered why Bickel with his inhibitions against return could take this so calmly. "If you wanted to convey the emotions in some one's message, how would you do it, Prue?" Bickel said. She looked at him, puzzled. "I'd say what the emotion was or imitate the tone of the original. Why?" able to do that," Bickel said. He looked up, meeting Flattery's eyes in the screen. "Don't acknowledge that transmission, Raj." Flattery nodded.  ing better than ever?" Prudence asked uncertainly. "No," Bickel said. "It's working in a way it shouldn't be able to. The laser-burst message is stripped to bare essentials. The original voice modulations are there, theoretically, and often strong enough to recognize certain mannerisms, but subtleties are supposed to be beyond it. That last message was high fidelity." "The Ox's circuits make the system more sensitive," she said. "Maybe," Bickel said. "Was there nerve-net activity accompanying that?" Flattery asked. "A fish has nerve-net activity," Bickel said. "Nerve-net activity doesn't mean the thing's conscious." "But sensitized the way consciousness is," Flattery said. "Showing refined results out of neuro-economy the way consciousness does." Bickel nodded. "Selective raising and lowering of threshholds," Flattery said. "Threshhold control." Again, Bickel nodded. "What's this?" Prudence asked. "This thing..." Bickel pointed to the Ox. "... has just demonstrated threshhold control... the way we do when we recognize something." He looked at her. "When you lower your reception threshhold, you spread the spatio-temporal message and project it across an internal 'recognition aura' of your mental comparison system. The message is a spatio-temporal configuration which you superimpose on a recognition region. That recognition region can discriminate quite broadly between 'just right,' which is Maximum similarity, and a kind of 'blurring off you could call 'somewhat alike.' Threshhold control does the tuning for this kind of comparison." With precisely controlled motions, Bickel returned to the circuitry he had been working on rupted him. He picked up a sheaf of fibers, noting the neuron tag on them, slid the sheaf into a micro-manipulator and finished the connection to a multijack. I n Com-central, Flattery stretched out his left hand, gripped the stanchion beside his action couch until his knuckles went white. Who can tell me where my soul might be? he thought. The words of the #th Psalm slithered through his mind: " will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Have we betrayed God by making something fearful and wonderful? he wondered. "Our Father which art in heaven," he whispered. But I am in the heavens, he thought. And the heavens expose me still to spiritual risk! The sound of Bickel and Prudence working in the shop was almost a carrier wave for his thoughts. Faith and knowledge , he thought. And he sensed the eternal clash that had taken his body now as its arena -- knowledge thrusting at the boundaries of faith. And he felt the destructive emotions his faith was engineered to contain. I could end this nonsense, he thought. But we're all in the same bind and violence betrays us. "Religion and psychiatry are but two branches of the healing art." He remembered the words clearly. The lecturer in Uses of Faith, the second-year course preparing him for this role. "Religion and psychiatry share the same stem." Heal thyself, he thought. Flattery ignored the vital console in front of him, closed his eyes and gripped the stanchion fiercely. "The Lord is my shepherd," he whispered. "I shall not want" But the words had lost their power over him. There are no still waters here... or green pastures, he thought. There never had been these things for him -- or for any of them out of the axolotl tanks and There had only been the valley of the shadow of death. Every morning on his way to classes -- eleven years -- he had passed through the hatch with that warning. That omnipresent sign had set the boundaries on their untrammeled activity. It still did. The suit was like another social inhibition setting its own limits of behavior. It restricted your contact with other humans, reduced you to code tappings and depersonalized vuphones where every person became like a dancing doll on an oscilloscope screen. The omnipresent enemy was the outside -- that total absence of the things to support life, that emptiness called space. I was evil and they feared it -- constantly. A rod and staff might comfort in the presence of space, but what you dreamed about was washed air and a womb-like enclosed cell where you could divest yourself of the damnable suit. This was the true source of comfort no matter if it came from the devil himself. The only table you could count on in the presence of this enemy was a squeezebottle slid from its rack. Oil on the head could only fog a faceplate. You had to crop your hair short and keep down the natural oils with detergent. "The whole universe is a matter of chemistry and mechanics, of matter and energy," he whispered. But only God was supposed to have complete control of manipulating the matter and energy. We aren't gods, Flattery thought. We're blaspheming by trying to make a machine that thinks of itself by itself. That is why I was set to watch over this mission. We blaspheme by trying to put a soul into a machine. I should go down there now and smash the whole thing! (Crjaj!" It was Bickel's voice booming from the intercom. Flattery looked up at the screen, his mouth suddenly dry. "I'm getting independent action on the photosensory loops of the computer's record-and-store circuits," Bickel said. "Prue, check the current drain." "Normal," she said. "It's no short circuit." "It... isn't conscious," Flattery said, his voice wooden. "Agreed," Bickel said. But what the hell is it? The computer's programming itself in every..." There came a charged moment of silence, then: "Damn!" "What happened?" Prue demanded. "It stopped," Bickel said. "What... set it off?" Flattery asked. "I tied an inhibitor block into one arm of a single nerve-net simulator and sent a test pattern through it. The test evidently set up a resonant pattern that searched right through the Ox and into the computer net via the monitor connections. That's when I started getting the selfprogramming reaction." Prudence sighted along her finger, moving it to trace a thick color-coded connection that looped down from the Ox. "The monitor linkage goes only one way into record-and-store," she said. "It's buffered right there." Bickel pulled the connection she indicated. "What're you doing?" she asked. "Disconnecting," he said. "I'm going to get the pattern of the experiment out of the memory banks and analyze it before proceeding." Silence. Flattery stared up at the screen with a feeling of horror. If I destroy it now, he wonsomeone ? o outine sensor firings sent teHtale lights flickering across the computer wall. The passage of the lights produced a weird shift in the shop's illumination. The curved bulkhead opposite the computer face reflected yellow, then green, now mauve... red. The color shift passed across a chart in Timberlake's hand as he read it and compared the chart's predictions with the readings in front of him. The overhead screen showed Prudence on Com-central about midway through her watch and Flattery in his action couch. Strange he wouldn't take off for quarters, Timberlake thought. Bickel emerged from between the Ox's two branchings just as a wash of green splashed down on him from the wall. "We're missing something," he muttered. Timberlake wondered at the fear in Bickel's voice, the way the man's head turned from side to side like a caged animal. "If this thing takes off on its own, we have no control over it," Bickel said. "Raj is right" "Raj's golem and monster horror stories!" Timberlake said. "No," Bickel said. "This thing has new kinds of memories. They have only the vaguest relationship to human memories. But memories, Tim -- the nerve nets stacked in psycho spaces -- they're the patterns that create behavior. What's this thing going to do when we turn it on... if we don't give it experiences of the kind the human race has survived?" "You don't know what the racial trauma are and that's where you're hung up." The voice was Flattery's, and they looked up to the overhead screen to see him sitting still halfcocooned in his action couch and rubbing sleep from his eyes. Beyond him, Prudence maintained her vigil at the big board as though that were the only thing concerning her. Bickel suppressed a feeling of irritation with Flattery, said: "You're the psychiatrist. Isn't knowledge of trauma supposed to be one of your tools?" "You're asking about racial trauma," Flattery said. "We can only guess at racial trauma." Flattery stared out of the screen at Bickel, thinking: John's panicky. Why? Because the Ox suddenly started acting on its own? ( #TI# e have to bring this thing into being," Bickel said, looking at the Ox. "But we can't be sure what it is. This is the ultimate stranger. It can't be like one of us. And if it's different... yet alive and aware of its aliveness..." "So you start casting around in your mind for ways to make it more like us," Flattery said. Bickel nodded. "And you think we're the products of our racial and personal trauma?" Flattery asked. "You don't think consciousness is the apparent effect of a receptor?" "Dammit, Raj !" Bickel snapped. "We're within a short leap of solving this thing! Can't you feel that?" "But you wonder," Flattery said, "are we making a creature that'll be invulnerable... at least invulnerable to us?" Bickel swallowed. "You think," Flattery said, "this beast we're creating has no sexual function; it can't possibly be like us. It has no flesh; it can't possibly know what flesh fears and loves. So now you're asking : How do we simulate flesh and sex and the racial sufferings through which humans have blundered? The answer's obvious: We can't do this. We don't know all our own instincts. We can't sort the shadows and reflections out of our history." "We can sort out some of them," Bickel insisted. "We have an instinct to... win... to survive for..." He wet his lips with his tongue, looked around at the computer wall. "Perhaps that's only hubris," Flattery said. "Maybe this is just monkey curiosity and we won't be satisfied until we've been creators the way God's a creator. But then it may be too late to turn back." As though he hadn't heard, Bickel said: "And there's the killer instinct. That one goes right down into the slime where it was kill or be killed. You can see the other side of it all the time in our instinct to play it safe... to 'be practical.' " He has done something secret, Flattery thought. What has Bickel done? He has done something he's afraid of. "And guilt feelings are grafted right onto that killer instinct," Bickel said. "That's the buffer... the way we keep the instinct within limits. If we implant..." "Guilt involves sin," Flattery said. "Where do you find in either religion or psychiatry a need for sin?" "Instinct's just a word," Bickel said. "And we're a long way from tlie word's source. Why is it? We can raise fifty generations of chickens from embryo to chick in test tubes. They never see a shell. But the fifty-first generation, raised normally under a hen, still knows to peck its way out." "Genetic imprint," Flattery said. "Imprint." Bickel nodded. "Something stamped on us. Stamped hard. Oh, we know. We know these instincts without ever bringing them to consciousness. They're what lower our awareness, make us angry, violent, passionate... Again, he nodded. What has he done? Flattery asked himself, staring out of the screen. He's panicky because of it. I have to find out! "The Cain and Abel syndrome," Bickel said. "Murder and guilt. It's back there someplace... stamped inside us. The cells remember." nphey glared at each other, Bickel desperate with indecision, and Flattery's suspicions verging on certainty. He has given the Ox the means to kill, Flattery thought. His argument and his anger betray it. But kill what? Not one of us, certainly. A colonist in the hyh tanks? No. One of the stock animals! He'd dip his toe into violence first, see if the Ox could really do it. But he cannot have already made the black box-white box transfer. Prudence, dividing her attention between the control console and the clash of wills, felt herself shift farther and farther into a state of heightened awareness. She sensed Com-central's minute temperature variations, heard the constant metallic crealcings of deck and bulkheads around her, saw Flattery's growing suspicions and Bickel's desperate defensiveness, knew her own heartbeats and tiny variations in her body chemistry. It was the chemistry that fascinated her: the thought that all through this subtle play of organic and inorganic matter which she called herself, messages of which she was only dimly aware (if at all) were being transmitted and acted upon. The computer with its enormous library of data culled from a way to explore the issue Bickel had raised, and she could not resist this. Where and how were the instincts carried? While the argument between Flattery and Bickel raged, she had translated the question onto an edge-coded tape, shifted it into the computer console section of her board, tripped the action switch. This went beyond chemicalbase sequence, she knew, and into the area where knowledge of protein structure itself was only theoretical code. But if the computer gave her an answer that could be translated into a physical function, she knew she could explore the answer through new experiments on her own body. "Bickel, whatVe you done?" Flattery demanded. Prudence looked up from her console, saw Flattery, his shoulders tensed as though about to leap, staring into the screen tuned to the shop. The screen revealed Bickel and Timberlake, their backs turned, staring at the computer wall and the blocksandangles contortion that was the Ox. The hum of the computer could be felt throughout the shop and Com-central. The play of sensor and telltale lights across the board had reached a glittering tempo. Prudence put the back of her left hand over her mouth, horrified realization flooding her: He has routed the whole computer through the Ox! "What've you done?" Flattery repeated. "Nothing!" Bickel said without turning. Timberlake said : "Shouldn't we..." "Leave it alone!" Bickel snapped. In a low voice, Prudence said: "I did it I fed a question into the computer." "What question?" Bickel demanded. He pointed to a large meter above him. "Look at that current drain! I've never seen anything like it." "I traced out sixty-eight sequential steps of Fourth order bio-chemical configuration," Prudence said. "I programmed it as a comparator of optical isomers as a first step in trying to detect where and how our instincts are imprinted on us." "It's gone into tire monitor banks," Bickel said, nodding at a new play of lights on the wall. "We're getting multi-track reinforcement... "Like a man concentrating on a tough problem," Timberlake said. Bickel nodded. r  p'he output beside Prudence began hissing as tape sped from it into the strip viewer. Bickel whirled. "What're you getting." She studied the viewer, forcing calmness. "A pyramided answer," she said. "I only asked for the first four probables. It's already into the tenth step! It's the nucleic acids, all right... down there with the genetic information. But it's tracing out all the dead ends... the molecular weights and... " "It's talking it over with you," Bickel said. "It's asking your opinion. Cut in on it and eliminate the obvious dead ends as you see them." Prudence scanned back along the strip viewer, checked off useless sequences. Hydrogen catalysis... obviously not. Too much opportunity for contamination. She cut into the output tape, began deleting and feeding the tape back into the computer. Output went suddenly silent, but the play of lights against the computer wall raised to a new frenzy. Power drain showed a new surge with a pulse in it. "Are you feeding a resonant cycle into the system?" Prudence asked. She was surprised how much effort it took to hold her voice level. "That pulse is identical to the timing of the Ox's response loops," Bickel said. As he spoke, the output beside Prudence renewed its chattering. Tape surged into the strip viewer. Prudence stared at if silently. "Well, what is it?" Bickel demanded. The output tape rolled to a stop. In the abrupt hush, Prudence said: "It's linked to acid phosphatase... amino add catalysis." "Is it... consdous?" Flattery whispered. Bickel looked up at the computer wall where lights were winking out, leaving only that somnolent play of telltales -- green... mauve... gold... "No," Bickel said. "We've merely produced a computer that can program itself, concentrate all its bits of information on a problem... hunt for data even if that data comes from outside its banks." "And that isn't conscious?" Timberlake demanded. "Not the way we are," Bickel said. "You have to ask it a question before it... comes to life." "Acid phosphatase," Prudence mused. "What do we know about acid phosphatase?" "Widely distributed in the body," Flattery said. He turned, looked at Prudence as though seeing her for the first time. She would understand, of course -- almost at once. He looked up to the screen at Timberlake and Bickel. They might have to have it explained to them. He returned his attention to Prudence. How thin and tired she looked. Prudence nodded to herself, eyes glazed in thought "Body chemistry, yes," she said. "Male prostate's rich in acid phosphatase. Males store more of it than females." Flattery spoke cautiously: "Body tissue requires a minimum level before a person can be awakened." She jerked upright, met his gaze, said: "An enzyme involved in the physiology of sex and awakening." She turned away, thinking: Sex and awakening. "Is that what anti-S suppresses?" Bickel asked. "Not directly," Timberlake said. "A-S works primarily on serum phenol sulf a tase discrimination, inhibits transfer and action." Timberlake, the life-systems specialist, the biophysicist, would see it, too, Flattery thought. Flattery looked into the screen, seeing Bickel standing there so silent and thoughtful, feeling a sudden pity for the man. Such a simple fact: awakening and sex are tied together. Prudence, reviewing the experiments on her own body, kept her face turned toward the big control board, studied it without really seeing it. The ship could have gone into wild gyrations at the moment and she would have been seconds responding. As she had looked at Flattery, she had seen what he was thinking as though there were words written on his forehead. Consciousness linked to reproduction. There was no doubt of it: both came out of the same genetic well. History had washed them in the same waters, transferring the needs of one to the other. Qlowly, Bickel turned, looked M through the screen at the big laser-pulsed autolog in Corncentral recording the passage of Earth-Time. It recorded eighteen weeks, twenty-one hours and twenty-nine seconds. It clicked over another minute as he watched it. For most of those pulse-counted minutes, Bickel thought, the Tin Eggs crew had been under the pressures of a ship in peril. The danger was real, no matter its source or intent; he had only to study the report on damage accretion to confirm this. But the pressure on the umbilicus crew had started with the loss of the Organic Mental Cores. The pressure had started when they were no longer shielded by another consciousness. For the first time, Bickel turned his thoughts onto the concept of consciousness as a shield -- a way of protecting its possessor from the shocks of the unknown. It was an "I can do anything!" answer hurled at a universe that threatened you with everything. He lowered his attention to Flattery who still sat himself cocooned in the action couch, seeing the sense of defeat in the curve of the man's shoulders and the set of his face. Why is he so quick to accept defeat? Bickel wondered. It's almost as though Raj wanted defeat. The answer came to him on the heels of the question: If you're pro ammed for destruction, you hav a need for destruction. With a si v se of growing awareness, Bids ; turned to look at the Ox cons; action, focusing on the angles and blocks and the tangle of neuron connections. But I've programmed this beast for violence. Forcing himself to appear calm and natural, Bickel shifted the jackboard for a diagnostic check on the program, traced out the condition of the routine. His throat went dry as he scanned the read out. The embryo he had placed at the Ox's mercy -- it was dead. No... dead was too simple a word for what had happened to that embryo. It had been disintegrated, torn asunder, broken down to its constituent molecules. The record was all here on the tapes and discs, betraying also the reason for the destruction. Prue's question. The embryo had been subjected to a violent experiment in the computer's search for information. A violent and useless experiment. This certainly could not have produced much data -- except for some of the more grossly apparent characteristics of acid phosphatase -- and perhaps negative data about her biochemistryIt'll kill to get information, Bickel thought. It has an ability of sorts to accept motivation... if we give it motivation. "We've just lost another sensor," Prudence said, reading the telltale on her board. "Second pi, fourth ring and in behind number five shielding layer," Timberlake said. "That's damn' close to the hyb tanks." "I'll check it," Flattery said, unlocking the bottom of his couch. He swung his feet to the deck, slipped his helmet forward, but left it unsealed. "Is there a robox-R in that area?" Bickel asked. "What's the difference?" Flattery asked. "By the time we found one and traced out the control sequence..." "Are we going to check that sensor or aren't we?" Timberlake demanded. "I'm on my way," Flattery said. I mustn't let Tim pre-empt this job, he thought. I need the excuse to go past quarters for a quick check on what Bickel's done. It's something violent and dangerous. He has himself under very thin control. "Raj," Prudence said. He turned at the hatch. "That... thing down there in the shop could reproduce itself with no help from us. Every machine tool, every robox monkey, every muscle and sensor is programmed through the computer. Once the last tie-in is made... Flattery wet his lips with his tongue, ducked out through the hatch without answering her. CC'T'hat goddam' slowpoke," Timberlake said. "I should've gone myself." Prudence shifted a corner of her board to monitor Flattery's progress. She glanced up at the screen. Bickel was staring back past her at the hatch where Flattery had gone. "Prue, do you have a fix on him?" Bickel asked. "He has a prime repair dolly and he'll be at the trouble spot in another minute or so," she said. "That thing's down near the temperaturecontrol shutters in the baffle to the hyb tanks," Timberlake muttered. "Too goddamn' close to them. You getting any heat shifts on the other sensor's?" "Nothing significant," she said. Prudence flicked a switch, watching the shifting factors of temperature-weight-sound on her board, the telltales moving with Flattery. She hit another switch, said: "Raj, how much longer?" Flattery's voice came out of the overhead command vocoder: "Another minute or so." They waited in silence, listening to the sounds of Flattery' progress through the open command vocoder. Prudence activated a guide beam to the dead sensor as Flattery passed the waterbaffles. "Baffles secure?" she asked. "All secure," Flattery said. IT e dogged the last hatch, knowing the action would register in front of Prudence in Com-central. The action sent a faint fear response through him, though. He had symbolically cut himself off from the core of the ship. I'll fix this sensor and get back to quarters as soon as I can, he told himself. It'll seem natural for me to stop off there on my way back. I have to find out what Bickel' s done, but I can't make him suspicious. Flattery turned, studied his surroundings. He stood in the bulb-lock that served as a hub for outer-hull communications tubes in this sector. It was an oval for strength, about six meters across its short diameter, and seven meters deep. He oriented himself by the faint pull of ship gravity. The non-functioning sensor was up a tube that curved off at two o'clock on his right. Tube eight, ring K. The number checked. The failure would be at the five-line up there. He stared into the pale gray metal gap illuminated by cold light. A green guide beam beckoned in the tube. Pruts remembered to set the guide beam, he thought. He took the repair dolly in his left hand, made the low-grav leap across to the tube and caught its access rung. He pushed the dolly ahead of him, setting its sensors on the printed track, fed it low power to pull him into the tube. The auto lock's sphincter closed behind him. He suddenly remembered Anderson strangled in a rogue sphincter... but of course that was no problem now fact that one of the crew had to come out here and make this repair meant the dangers were of another sort -- rogue consciousness. "Something wrong?" Prudence met. She saw the telltales stop here. Flattery thought. It gave him a feeling of reassurance that she was so alert to his movements -- or lack of movements. "Nothing wrong; just being cautious," Flattery said. "You want Tim to come out and back you up?" Prudence asked. "I don't need anyone to hold my hand!" Flattery snapped, and he wondered at the sudden anger he'd thrown into that rejection. "You're at station Two," Prudence said. "There's video on Two. Check." Flattery glanced up at the ring of sensors on the tube, saw the one circled with yellow for video, waved at it as he passed. The robox-R's imprinted track curved slightly up the tube side to clear the base bulge for the next automatic lock. He went through, looked back as the transparent shutters squeezed closed behind him. The ship's core felt so far away back there. He looked forward, letting the robox unit tow him with its faint hissing growl, letting the loneliness seep through him. With an robox repair unit could have been sent on this little chore. Mobility, that was the problem. Where there were fixed automatic repair units -- along the outer hull and at the major bulkhead locks, at the baffles and core-integrity barriers -- the ship took care of itself with only a lit" ' help from its crew. But let a little thing like this come up where you needed mobility and a decision factor. Then one of the crew had to risk himself. Flattery cursed the Tin Egg's designers then. Hate poured out of him. He knew why they had done this -- the "planned increment of frustration" they called it. The ship's designers didn't have to experience the frustration. He was at station Four now, coming up on Five. "Station Five coming up," he said. "Hey!" He cut the power on the robox, braked himself against the station's ring, stared up at the overhead arc of sensors. A neat, shiny hole plugged with gray foam-coagulant occupied the position where the multi-sensor had been. The yellow-green-red code rings on the tube around the hole had not been touched. He swung his gaze around the tube and the other sensors. All appeared to be functioning. Flattery thought then of the island on Puget Sound -- sensors missing mysteriously... personnel missing. He felt cold sweat around his shoulders. Prudence's voice filled his helmet: "Anything to report?" He lowered the volume, said: "The multi-sensor seems to've been cut out in some way. It's gone. The hole's been plugged with foam." "No foam automatics in that area," Prudence said. "The things been plugged with foam anyway!" Flattery said, unable to hide the angry irritation in his voice. Prudence said: "John, I'm getting a demand drain on the computer. Is it something you're doing?" "Nothing," Bickel said. Flattery turned his head in the helmet. Bickel's voice had come in faintly as a pickup through Corn-central. Action in the computer! Flattery forced himself to act calmly, removed a replacement sensor from his robox unit's parts compartment, checked it. The thing was about three inches in diameter containing a warp-type thermal detector, standard vid-eye pickups like tiny jewels on its face, and three gridded ducts leading in to the membrance of the audio unit. Out of the corner of one eye. Flattery detected movement up the tube. He jerked upright, banged his head against the helmet liner, stared up toward station Six'. A robox-R with its tool extensors clamped tightly to its sides was moving along the tape track toward him. The thing acted sick -- speeding and slowing. His first thought was that Prudence had traced the robox remote controls for a unit in this area and was maneuvering the thing from her board. The crudity o Com-central's controls over the robox series would account for the unit's erratic behavior. "You bringing another robox in here, Prue?" Flattery asked. "No," she said. "Why?" "There's another robox-R coming down on this station." As he watched, the thing lost the tape track, relocated it. "There can't be!" she said. "Nothing at all shows on my board." The thing stopped across the sensor ring from Flattery, An augur extension jerked away from its side, reached toward the foam-plugged hole, withdrew. "Who's controlling that thing?" Flattery demanded. "Not from here," Prudence said. "And I can see both Tim and John. They're not controlling it." "You still getting drain on the computer?" Flattery whispered. "Yes." "Is the... Ox active?" Flattery asked. "Only the original circuits," bypass. The new doubled units haven't been connected." "There can't be another Robox in that area," Prudence said. "We haven't put any of the damn' things on automatic. There's nothing showing on my board. The remotes would take a day and a half at least to... "It's right in front of me," Flattery said. He watched it, fascinated. A tool arm extended with an empty sensor socket, reached toward the foam-plugged hole, retreated. A claw arm came up next. It probed the foam, drew back with a swiftness that startled Flattery. "What's it doing?" Prudence asked. "I'm not sure. It seems to be looking over the damage. Its videyes are turned toward the hole. It acts like it can't decide which tool to use." "What can't decide?" That was Timberlake, his voice faint over the Corn-central relay from the shop. "Try fixing the sensor yourself," Bickel said. Flattery swallowed in a dry throat. He lifted a feeler with a guide eye from the tool pouch on his own robox, probed into the foam plug looking for the leads from the conduit. fnstantly a whip-like extension A shot out of the other robox, trapped his arm, jerked it away. The pain in his arm where the thing had clamped on it was sharp and shocking. He dropped the tool, yelled. "What's wrong?" Prudence demanded. The whip-like extension slowly unwound, released his arm. "The thing grabbed me," Flattery said. His voice was shaky with pain and surprise. "It used its circuit probe... grabbed my arm." "It won't let you make the repair?" That was Bickel, his voice coming in loud over the helmet system, indicating he'd plugged into the command circuit from the shop. "Doesn't look like it will," Flattery said. And he wondered : Why doesn't one ot us say what this thing has to be? Why I re we avoiding the obvious? With an abrupt sense of purpose, the other robox reached out a claw arm, lifted the replacement sensor from Flattery's left hand, matched sensor and socket. Another claw arm recovered the feeler guide, fitted it to the connections of its own circuit probe. "What's it doing now?" Bickel asked. "Making the repair itself," Flattery said. The feeler came out of the hole pulling the leads. "John, what's showing on your meters?" Prudence asked. "A slight pulse from the servo banks," Bickel said. "Very faint. It's like the cycling echo of a test pulse. Are you still showing current drain in there? I don't have it here." "Drain from the mains into the computer," she said. "You should be registering it" "Negative," Bickel said. "It just fitted the new socket and sensor into the hole," Flattery said. "It brought the correct spare parts?" Bickel asked. "It took the sensor I brought," Flattery said. "It just took it from you?" Prudence asked. "That's right." "Prue, that test pulse is stronger," Bickel said. "Are you sure nothing on your board is doing it?" She scanned her console. "Nothing." "Job's finished," Flattery said. "What's the big board show, Prue?" "Sensor in service," she said. "I can see you... and it." "Try touching that new sensor, Raj," Bickel said. "The thing damn' near took my arm out the last time I tried that," Flattery objected. "Use a tool," Bickel said. "Something long. You've got a telescoping radiation probe there." Flattery looked into his robox unit, removed the telescoping probe. He extended it to its limit, reached toward the sensor, touched it. The whip-arm flashed out of the other Robox. There came a jolting shock and Flattery stared wide-eyed at the stump of the probe in his hand. The severed end drifted upward along the tube, tumbling from the force of fee blow.  berlake, proving they had fee shop's screen switched to this circuit and were watching. Flattery swallowed, spoke in a muffled voice: "If thafd been my arm..." He stared at the other robox. It sat there, quiescent, its videyes pointed toward him. We're playing with fire, Flattery thought. We don't know whafs guiding that robox. It could be a repair program we've accidentally activated. It could be something the Tin Eggs designers built into the ship. "You'd better get out of there, Raj," Prudence said. "No, wait!" Bickel said. "Raj, don't move. You hear me?" "I hear you," Flattery said. He stared at the robox, realizing the thing could cut him in half with one blow from that whipping circuit probe. The sound of distant activity came through the helmet phones to Flattery. "I should have the full computer showing here," Bickel said, "but I can't find that damn' robox anywhere on my board. There's not even pulse resonance in any of the loops to hint at the source of control." "I can't stay out here forever," Flattery whispered hoarsely, his mouth dry. "What's showing on the meters, Prue?" Bickel asked. "Still getting computer drain... and that pulse." "Raj has been outside the shields for sixteen minutes," Timberlake said. "Prue, what's the radiation tolerance level for his area?" She crossed the comparison lines against the time gauge on her main board scope, read the difference. "He should be back inside the shield lock within thirty-eight minutes." Movement up the tube caught Flattery's attention. The end of the radiation probe. It had reached the top of its energy curve, was beginning to fall back down toward the grav center in the core of the ship. As the severed end of the tool neared the other robox, the tip of one of its sensor arms -- just the tip -- turned to track the passage. That minimal activity, that watchfulness, filled Flattery with greater dread than if the robox had attacked the length of tool and torn it apart. There was a sense of waiting about the thing -- of waiting and gathering information. "Raj." It was Bickel's voice. "Yes?" "Is there any information in the computer -- even a hint -- that you might destroy it?" Did he send me out here to trap me into answering that question? Flattery asked himself. But the fear in Bickel's voice ruled out that suggestion. "Why?" Flattery asked. Bickel aleared his throat. "It was programmed to fill in the blanks in its information, Raj, and I put no limiting factor on that. The violence proves it'll stop at nothing to maintain its own informational integrity. If you pose any threat at all..." "You're saying it's conscious?" Prue asked. "Not the way we're conscious," Bickel said. "Like an animal. Aware. And with at least one drive we can recognize: self preservation." "Raj, answer the question," Prue said. She knows the answer. Flattery thought. He could hear the awareness in her voice. Why doesn't she answer it for me? "The computer may well have such information in it," Flattery said. And he thought: rm trapped! I must get back to quarters, destroy this thing... it's already out of hand. But if I move, it'll kill me. Tie stared at the other robox. There was the thing that gave the computer mobility -- the thousands of special-function utility robox units throughout the ship... even the one under his hands -- if it were shifted to automatic and keyed for program control... and if a consciousness directed it. These were what gave the Ox-cumcomputer its gonads and ovaries -- these and the computerlinked tools. "Would... it react with violence if Raj tried to move?" Prudence asked. Silence. "What about it, Bick?" Timberlake asked. "Very likely," Bickel said. "You saw the violence it used when he tried to touch that sensor." "What would you do if someone poked a finger in your eye?" Timberlake asked. "It's approaching me," Flattery said, and he felt a flicker of pride at how calm his voice sounded. "Stay put," Bickel said. "Tim! Take a cutting torch and... "I'm on my way," Timberlake said. "Raj... I think your only hope's to play dead... remain absolutely still," Bickel said. A sensor tip was in front of Flattery's eyes now and he found himself staring for a second into a baleful red and yellow glow. The tip retracted, and the robox backed off a half a meter. "Let go of your own robox," Bickel whispered. Flattery saw his own knuckles white with the force of their grip on the robox control bar. He relaxed the hand. "Gravity will set you drifting presently back down the tube," Bickel whispered. "Just let it happen. Stay limp." The motion was barely perceptible at first. "The locks are part of the central system." That was Prue's voice. "What if they don't... She didn't finish the question, but it was obvious she, too, remembered how the rogue sphincter lock had crushed the life out of Anderson. Nov, Flattery could see he definitely was drifting back. The two robox units receded up the tube. And that sensor tip remained pointed at him. The first lock passed his eyes. It had opened! But the lock's transparent leaves remained open after his passage and that ambient robox was following, hesitantly at first, then faster. The A A T klaxon blared in Flattery's helmet, transmitted through the open net from Corncentral. "Oh, Jesus!" That was Prudence. "Was the transceiver open?" That was Bickel. "The message is already into the system," Prudence said. "We left it on automatic." "Tim, where are you?" Bickel asked. "At the hub lock," Timberlake said. "Take the message, Prue," Bickel said. "Visio." Relays clicked as she shunted sently, she said : "Short and sweet. Hempstead tells us to cease ignoring communications. We are ordered to turn back and make no mistake about it. Odd choice of words: 'This is an arbitrary turn back command.' " "He knows what he can do with his arbitrary turn back command," Bickel said. At the sound of Prudence's voice, Flattery had gone cold. The chill of ice water gripped his chest. ' Arbitrary turn back command.' It was the coded order he had both dreaded and almost longed for -- the 'kill ship' command. TT'lattery felt his body knotted by frustration. Here he was out beyond the shields of the core. He had been conditioned to accept this order and execute it, sacrificing himself for the protection of the race. At this point, he couldn't muddy his mind with fanaticism. He knew the dangers to the human race from a runaway mechanical consciousness that nobody could... A yell escaped him as something grabbed his leg. "It's me, Raj." Timberlake's voice. It filled Flattery's helmet phones, but he took a moment to accept the identification emotionally. His heart was still hammering as Timberlake pulled him past the next ring of sensors. The nemesis robox increased its speed, maintained a distance of about three meters. "Shall I bum it?" Timberlake whispered. "Do nothing hostile," Flattery said. The edge of the hub chamber entered Flattery's field of vision. Timberlake's hand released Ms ankle. Flattery felt the grating thump as the hatch to the inner lock was opened. "In we go," Timberlake said. He gave Flattery a gentle tug as they drifted down into the hub chamber. A lock stanchion came in front of Flattery and he grabbed it, feeling the inertial pull as he checked his motion. That following robox had stopped at the tube exit above them, but its sensor tip remained pointed at them. Timberlake moved in front of him, cutting off the view of the robox. Flattery backed down through the lock's baffle angle, Timberlake following. The hatch was closed. Timberlake dogged it, tamed. Flattery crossed to the other hatch, breathing easier now that they were behind the shields and with a hatch between them and that robox. He grabbed the hatch dogs, twisted. They remained firmly locked. He applied more pressure. The dogs wouldn't budge. "Come on, let's go," Timberlake said. He added Ms hands to the effort The dogs remained seated as though frozen. Flattery and Timberlake looked at each other, their faceplates almost touching. Flattery's hands felt slippery with perspiration inside Ms gloves. He could smell the stink of fear within his suit. "Go... try the other hatch," Flattery said. Timberlake nodded, kicked back up to the baffle and the hatch they had just dogged. Flattery could see Timberlake's muscles lift the shoulders of the suit with the effort of trying to reopen the other hatch. It was obvious the other hatch was blocked, too. Timberlake dropped back down beside him, thumbed the command circuit switch beneath his helmet. "John." "John's temporarily off the circuit," Prudence said. "You're out of danger... immediate danger?" In short, clipped sentences, Timberlake reported. "Trapped?" she asked. "How could you be?" "Something's jammed the hatches," Flattery said. "Why's John off the circuit?" "Oh..." Pause. "He left his helmet... down there. He just yanked it off, unplugged, grabbed up a bunch of equipment and headed for quarters." "Your sensors! Where do they show hin?" Flattery demanded. Silence. Then: "In your quarters, Raj. I don't understand." "What's this equipment he took?" Timberlake asked. "A whole pile of stuff," she said, "mostly from that bin where you were working, Tim, under the middle of the bench." In my quarters, Flattery thought. Our 'organ of analysis' didn't miss a thing! "Tim, your torch," Flattery said. He pointed to the cutting torch on its tool clip at Timberlake's waist. Timberlake shook his head. "A minute ago you were saying do nothing hostile." "Give me that torch!" "No, sir, Raj. You know what's out there jamming that hatch as well as I do. Another robox unit or two or four or fifty. You had the right idea the first time. Let Bickel..." "Don't you know what Bickel's doing?" Flattery demanded, not trying to keep the desperation from his voice. "Just as well as you do, Raj. I assembled most of that gear in the center bin according to his schematics. It's a field-effect generator synchronized to a shoteffect generator. There's an electorencephalographic feedback unit... a manamplifier, he calls it." "White box-black box," Flattery said. "We've got to stop him." "Why?" "He'll wreck the computer," Flattery said. "Not that computer." T)ickel has infected him with  ' this cynicism, Flattery thought. And he said: "Then he'll kill himself." "That's his lookout, but I don't think he will," Timberlake said. "When that shot-effect hits him, his muscles will break every bone in his body!" Flattery said. "That's a hideous way to die." "Maybe if he were connected directly to the generator," Timberlake said. "But he won't be. He's going to get the shot effect through that generator's field -- attenuated, buffered." "Do you know what's in my quarters?" Flattery asked. "A snooping device of some kind," Timberlake said. "I've seen the clues on the meters." "A field sorter," Flattery said. "It's tuned to the computer, gated for output. If Bickel takes out those gate circuits..." "And he will," Timberlake said. "Now sit down and be quiet. It's our only chance." Flattery glared at him. "If Bickel turns that mechanical monster loose it could wipe out the Earth!" "Why don't you try ghost stories for a change?" Timberlake asked. "I don't have time to tell you the whole story," Flattery said. "That monster has to be stopped. You've got to take my word for it." "You're nuts," Timberlake said, but Flattery could see the idea had touched the life-systems engineer's deepest inhibitions. "You're an engineer," Flattery said. "You're a structuralist. You know Bickel's reasoning." "What're you driving at?" "He's arguing from the internal evidence of the human body," Flattery said, speaking with desperate quickness. Timberlake had to be made to try to cut them out of here! "Structure's vital to the mechanical origins -- teeth, jaw muscles, digestive system and so on. The evidence says humans are descended from carnivores. And he insists a killer instinct is an absolute necessity for a carnivore." "Are you saying a killer instinct is a necessary preliminary to consciousness?" "Bickel's saying that! I'm not." "Ahhh... you're making this up." "Give me that torch." "No." Timberlake shook his head. "I'm going to take that torch if I have to kill you to get it," Flattery said. He inched toward Timberlake. "Prue, did you hear this madman?" Timberlake asked, backing one step. The command net remained silent. "Prue?" Flattery drew himself up straight, his own words replaying in his mind. "... if I have to kill you to get it." He felt suddenly that he had been herded into a completely vulnerable corner. Killer instinct? he wondered. "Prue!" Timberlake called. Then: "Raj, snap out of it! Prue isn't answering!" Flattery had stepped backward. He felt nausea, extreme chill, a shaking in the calves of his legs and in his shoulders. Half-screened thoughts flitted about on the edge of his awareness. I'm avoiding something, he thought. Hiding my awareness from something... that... frightens... "What's wrong with you, Raj?" Timberlake demanded, and there was sudden concern in his voice. Flattery put out a hand, grasped a stanchion to keep himself from collapsing. He closed his eyes, conjured up the image of the sacred graphic imprinted on his cell in quarters -- picturing against his eyelids the field of serenity with its suggestion of holy faces and the dynamics of the overprinting that combined the religious symbols on which men had spent their faith and yearning. They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. Flattery told himself. Lord, let this strength he transformed in the renewal of our minds. Let us share thy light. The litany hung suspended in his consciousness, focused on the word "mind" and Flattery's mental image of the sacred graphic took on motion. The field of serenity and sacred symbols dissolved into writhing atoms, drew a new pattern like the outline of a great river with its watershed. F lattery opened his eyes to find the interior of this metal trap where he stood with Timberlake washed in golden light -- glaring, yet soft. Timberlake seemed unaware of the light, frozen in some private instant. And Flattery found himself caught by the wonder of that revelation -- a great river and its watershed. AH men are parts of the total stream, he thought. We are tributaries -- and our minds are tributaries, and our most private thoughts. Every pattern in the universe contributes to the whole -- some gushing like a freshet and some no more than a single touch of dew. All structure is an expression of the same law. The law was like a pulsing thread that he could experience but not express. Simplicity. He felt it in the touch of the suit's fabric against his skin, in the awareness of the washed air entering his lungs, in every sensory impression. How clean and unique was this shower of molecules upon his person and this place he occupied in the dancing pattern. "I thank thee, Lord, for this enlightenment," he whispered. And Flattery held himself in this supraliminal awareness, staring now at Timberlake. Timberlake appeared to him... , somehow dead. He moved, but his eyes behind the faceplate were like holes in skull sockets. Each movement was the stickshaped articulation of a skeleton. Remembering Prudence and Bickel -- Flattery felt they shared this deadness: eyes empty of life. Their breasts had moved with breathing, but the labored irregularity of that motion contained the same pattern (differing only in degree) as the breathing of a terminal sickness, the breathing of a dying person preserved beyond his time by artificial means. We're doomed. Flattery thought. Lord, why didst Thou enlighten me only to show me this? The skeleton-like Timberlake and dead-alive images in his memory filled Flattery with rage. He pulled himself upright against the stanchion, screamed: "You're dead! Zombies! You're already dead!" As quickly as the rage had come it fled him, and he felt himself crying softly. The feeling of enlightenment drained away. It had come in the space of ten heartbeats and left in the space of a single pulse. The golden light faded and the plasteel lock that trapped him with Timberlake was only that -- a room of too solid walls, too small, its light too' cold, and the air his suit provided was too charged with the omnipresent stinks of recycling. UD aj, you've got to control -yourself," Timberlake said. He took a deep breath, feeling the tightness in his chest. He felt faintly ill, his fear at their helplessness compounded by Flattery's near panic. He and Flattery were as trapped here as that cow embryo had been. Timberlake knew it. He thought of that helpless embryo in the Holstein section of the farm stock hyb tanks --  a bit of protoplasm attached to the life system tubes with its own special code. It had been a unique identity, and Timberlake felt he had known that particular animal -- could project its lost potential forward in his mind natural functions as a producer of energy. All that natural potential had been sacrificed, becoming merely units of cerebral excitation in the development of a mechanical consciousness. Any other function or possibility had been lost in the instant of its deliberate destruction. It had become a thing of the senses  -- unreal, receding into the past, its atoms dissipated in the Time void. There could be nothing private or individual or unique about it from that instant of death onward. Timberlake swallowed. His throat felt sore as though from remembered anguish. He knew this feeling was rooted in his training as a life systems engineer -- his inhibitions as a preserver of life. He shook his head, trying to drive out the sense of confusion. It was an unhorn creature, an animal, he told himself. It wasn't really a being the way we are beings. The physical complexity of that dead creature was enormous, yet it never could have been conscious the way we are... even if it had lived out its normal life. "Take it easy, Raj," Timberlake said. He spoke softly, as though soothing a child who had been hurt. Then, louder: "Prue?" Still no answer. She could be too busy to answer, Timberlake thought. He listened to the gentle burbling and whirring of his suit, assessing their position. Prue wasn't answering -- reason unknown. Bickel had taken off for his quarters -- obviously intent on completing the white box-black box step in his theory, transferring his own pattern of consciousness onto the white box that was the Ox-cum-computer. Would the Ox be like Bickel, then? No... Timberlake felt suddenly that he had passed beyond some major obstacle in understanding his own personal mind-brain relationship. He sensed that he had entered a new, but as yet unidentified territory. Something Bickel had said while they worked on the Ox rose up then in Timberlake's mind : "If we give this thing life, we have to remember that life is a constant variable with eccentric behavior. The life we create has to think in the round as we as in a straight line -- even if its thinking is derived from patterns on tapes and webs of pseudoneurons." The whole form of their problem arrayed itself in Timberlake's mind with the sudden force of something thrown at him. Problem and solution set themselves up as a physical arrangement and he saw the nerve nets they had built all arrayed as a series of triangular faces with a moebius twist -- prisms of celltriangles interlaced and marching with their energy flows through infinite dimensions, forming sense data and memory images outside conventional space, storing bits and altering relationships in limitless dimensional extensions. A moebius twist permitted humans to manipulate this infinite array in four dimensions. It was as though consciousness were a valve whose function was to simplify. All the complexities had to flow through it and be reduced to an orderly alignment. Energy flowed into the system at all times -- enormous amounts of energy -- sufficient to overload a conventional four-dimensional system. Overload overload overload! Down it poured through the valve of consciousness. As the load increased, the valve could deflect it... or expand to receive it. Timberlake felt that he moved up through enormous layers of fog -- layer upon layer upon layer -- until he reached a place of clarity and balance.  am awake , he thought F lattery's personal cubby was enough like his own to give Bickel a sense of familiarity, but sufficiently different to fill him with disquiet. The life system ducts appeared conventional -- a breather grid with its cap swung aside and the tube and mask clipped in their racks, the dome of repeater gauges above the action couch, atmosphere samplers normal. The sacred graphic imprinted on the bulkhead in front of the couch drew his attention. It was a compelling thing in pastel shades of blue, red and gold with a dark and wavy hypnotic overprint suggesting faces out of dreams. Bickel tore his attention from the graphic, studied the room's electronic equipment. The cubby's installations contained a surprise, and Bickel examined it carefully. No doubt about it -- the thing like a stiffened net that swung out over the couch from the side bulkhead bed impulses to a weaker, but more sophisticated version of the field generatorsorter he had designed for the black box-white box transfer. He traced the leads, found another surprise: the thing had been gated for oneway operation. It impressed its field reflections onto the cubby's occupant, but nothing of the occupant returned to the ship system. Bickel absorbed the implications of the device, nodded slowlyPresently, he stretched out on the couch, ran a short test on the generator, swinging the controls close, keeping his eyes on the gauges and the half-curve of the net-grid which swung down on its rack to a position about ten centimeters above his head. It took a few seconds for the generator's field to build up, then he felt a curious sense of watchfulness -- an observing-withoutemotion. It was like a waking dream. He thought immediately of reflector. Like a mirror in an angle of a hall to reveal people around a hidden corner -- a oneway mirror that revealed only that alert watchfulness. He saw at once that this installation gave a sensitized person the mood of the ship's computer. He felt a vague sensation as though his viscera had been exchanged for great baths of mercury, for discs and spools and tapes and print drums, that his nerve ends had been transmuted into thousands of delicate sensors reaching into strange dimensions. But it was yet a dream. The great creature of wires and pseudo-neurons, not fully awake to itself, lay watchful and alert but with its full potential still held in a rein of somnolence. The mood changed. Slowly, Bickel felt the field gear itself to his reflexes. He felt it arming him with a total-involvement program as though drawing a bow to its full capacity, marshalling his energies and throwing them suddenly into an afferent loop. With a semi-detached feeling of shock, Bickel saw his own right hand slam out and open a panel concealed by the lines of the religious graphic on Flattery's bulkhead. Behind the panel lay a trigger, red and ominous. Bickel found himself barely able to withhold his hand from that trigger. He slapped his left hand against the cut-off switch beside the couch, felt the generator's field whine down to silence. Still his fingers itched to push that red trigger. He realized then how deeply Project had infected this ship with self-destruction failsafe devices. He had been conditioned for the job... and doubtless all the other crew members, too. Then how could I resist the conditioning? he wondered. The implications filtered slowly through his awareness and he saw that he had been existing for days on a threshhold above his reflexes, permitting some, inhibiting others -- poised and waiting. For... something. Bickel stared at the red switch. That was the ship-killer to which Flattery... to which all of them had been wedded. S lowly, his palms wet with perspiration, Bickel eased himself off the couch, closed the false panel over the switch, began altering Flattery's field generator installation. The gate circuits showed up immediately on the color-coded sheafs. Bickel ripped them out, jacked in his own amplifier, began installing the black box-white box circuitry. The work went rapidly: clipin, test: clip-in, test. Now, he took the constant-energy source : a single plasticsealed block -- air-bearing motors and spools, edge-coded tapes with moebius twists for continuous-loop operation, a single output through an Eng multiplier. He checked it, saw the strong, eccentric pulse on the meter, plugged it into the circuitry. It was done... ready. A deep sense of loneliness washed through Bickel then. He returned to the couch, stretched out on it, opened the command circuit transmitter, left the receiver dead. "Now hear this," he said, thinking how his voice would roll out of the vocoders and shock the others to silence. "I'll be starting the white-box interchange in just a few seconds," Bickel said. "I've jammed the locks into quarters and my receiver's turned off. Don't waste your time trying to get in here or calling me." (Out in their lock trap, Timberlake turned, peered into Flattery's faceplate, saw the terror in the man's eyes.) "Everybody sit tight," Bickel said. "Don't try violence of any sort. That killer program's still loose in the circuits. The reason I decided to go ahead with this..." he paused, swallowed. "Tim, I'm sorry, but I got no response from two hyb tank units. I think it may've killed two colonists the way it did with the embryo. It's searching... experimenting... curious, like a monkey." (In the lock, Timberlake experienced a shortening of breath, felt himself sinking back through the layers of fog. There was a sensation like hunger in his stomach. Two colonists killed, Oh, God!) (In his position beside Timberlake, Flattery clutched a stanchion, asked himself : Where is Prue? He thought of the ship hurtling onward with no one at the big board... Prue a lifeless mass of protoplasm drifting somewhere in the control room. He closed his eyes, thinking: But I'm the ship's prime target. If it kills now, it'll kill me... to protect itself. He opened his eyes, stared around the metal walls of their trap. No way out. We've turned on the terrible genie, he thought, and we may not be able to turn it off. Then: Where is Prue?) Bickel cleared his throat, said: "Use extreme care until I've removed the killer program. Anything in the ship could be a murder instrument, do you understand? The air we breathe, the reclamation systems, robox units, any sharp edge with poison on it... anything." He depressed the first action switch, said: "Count down for field build-up starts in thirty seconds. Wish me luck." (And Flattery thought: He's committing suicide... but it may be a useless gesture.') Bickel watched the curve of gauges overhead. They registered power in the circuits, vocoder on and pulsing. A faint hum issued from the vocoder. It gave a sudden static burp. Needles slammed against pins on the monitor dials. A rasping came from the vocoder now. Slowly it resolved itself into a gutteral, almost unintelligible voice. "To kill," it said. 'Oickel studied the meters, saw the demand-drain in the computer, pulse action in the Ox circuits. It was the computer speaking on its own, all right. "To kill," it repeated, speaking more clearly this time. "To negate energy, dissolution of systems using energy in any form... symbolic approximations... non-mathematical." Bickel activated a diagnostic circuit, read the meters. No energy in the command communications circuits, pulse in the Ox, low energy drain to the computer. To kill. He stared at his board, thinking. Information conveyed out of a tape had an exact mathematical equivalent. The tape message was at least two messages. Probably many more. It was the functional message, the play of what it was supposed to do -- supply, information, add, subtract, multiply, solve for an unknown... message precisely for a human operator according to how much information was conveyed. Beyond this, Bickel wondered, what? He knew he had not energized the system or imprinted his own brand of consciousness on it. Yet, the thing acted independently. He felt himself on the edge of aborting this step, calling in the others for consultation... but the deadliness of this monster remained. To kill. Before he could change his mind, Bickel depressed the action switch on the re-worked field generator. He felt it building up around him, making his skin crawl. Every hair follicle tingled. His eyes watered and the backs of his hands trembled. He felt suspended in a basket of energy. Something was fishing for him, casting out with a net, dangling hooked lines at him. He knew this for the symbol-juggling it had to be -- the mind trying to box a new experience within known symbols. One of the nets caught him. The shot-effect burst hit him -- an infinity of sparks. I t was like an electric shock, pungent with reality. He felt himself bound up in looped spirals, being towed with an undulating rhythm. His entire sensorium had become a worm being towed through a net... no: through holes and tubes and burrows. He felt that valves opened for him and closed behind him. It was like travelling through the ship's interior access tubes. Except that he was a worm with every sense concentrated on his skin, seeing, breathing, hearing, feeling through every pore. And all the while he was being towed down that dizzy spiralling with an undulant rhythm. Labels began flashing against that sensitized skin and he saw "aural sense data" "linear accretion of information" "latent addition adjustment" "closed-system matching factor" "#, #-year memory dropoff' "total sense-quality" "internal counting mechanism" Internal counting mechanism, he thought. His worm-self grew a pseudopod, jacked the moebius energizer into a flickering board. Immediately, he felt the beat of it like another heart and the labels began flashing past faster and faster. "psychorelation form-chart"... "sense-modality interchange"... "form-outline analogue"... "infinite submatrix channel"... "sense intensity adjustment"... "data overlap network"... "approximate similarity comparison" The whole pattern of labels and valves began to make an odd kind of sense to him, a coherence within coherence... like a dream that had to be interpreted as a whole. The probability of a sufficient number of cells in the computer failing at any given moment could be given as # X # # . The fact loomed in his awareness. #-year memory dropoff. The system in which he found himself was such that it had had a probability of losing one out of every # memories through system malfunction... but classification-memory in this context meant only a part of an incident. Is this system the computer, or is it me? he wondered. The sound slammed against every pore of his sensitized skin and he momentarily blanked out. As he floated back, something whispered : "Synergy." Svnergy, Bickel thought. Cooperation in work. Synergy. Coordination. "Human consciousness," something whispered. "Definition too broad. Generalized body and specialized brain -- a relationship." Past his skin eyes swept a pattern of interlaced lines, a lacing together. It writhed and knotted and locked, put out symbols and arrows A schematic! It kept flowing past his awareness. Cell-net continuities arranged as equilateral triangles on their contact faces. Bundles of parallel circuits tripled, each functioning as a nerve net and each monitoring the other two nets in the tripled circuitry. They were grouped in afferent units at first. Each cell in a layer of a net had an excitatory linkage to each of the three synapses on the next layer. T) ickel felt himself being pushed then, herded, compressed. He became a single sensor, a videye looking down into Corn-central. All the action couches were empty and Prudence lay sprawled across the deck, oae arm stretched out toward the hatch to quarters. With a gestalt burst of awareness, Bickel realized she was near death. Minutes ! This was reaL He knew it was real. He was being shown through a ship sensor a reality within the ship. The big console above her empty couch winked and flickered. Where are Raj and Tim? Bickel asked himself. Is the ship killing them, too? The view of Com-central blanked out. Bickel floated in darkness where a voice whispered: "Do you wish to be disembodied?" Instant terror was all the answer he could give. He could not locate his muscles or control his senses. This must be something of what the mental cores experienced, he thought. They awakened to something like this... forced to learn new muscles. Am I being converted into a bodiless brain? "The universe has no center," whispered that surrounding voice. Darkness so deep It was like a total absence of energy enveloped Bickel. And silence. But I'm conscious, he thought. A disembodied consciousness? he wondered. That's impossible. There has to be a body. But a body brings many problems. Have I become part of the ship's consciousness? He sensed breathing. Someone was breathing. And heartbeats. And muscle tensions. Infinite numbers of pinpricks on countless nerve ends. A bright pulse of light -- painfully bright. A diaphanous sensation of reality seeped through his awareness. Now, he sensed himself retreating, still pounded by that multi-dimensional nerve bombardment. He felt himself pulling inward-inward-inward, a structure collapsing inward -- through the sensation-oriented skin awareness of a worm-self -- inward-inward. The nerve bombardment dulled, levelled off, and he felt himself to be merely a body of flesh and bone cocooned in a sleep couch. An emotion of terrible loss poured through him. It was as though he had glimpsed heaven and been denied entrance. Tears pressed from beneath his eyelids, rolled down his cheeks. Now, he saw what had happened to the Organic Mental Cores. The human-type brain had been prepared genetically for manipulating a limited sensory input -- selflimiting. They had thrust these human-type brains into a full-on situation, permitted them no real unconsciousness, inflicted them with the sensory input of an organism infinitely sensitive and more complex than the bodies of which they had been deprived. had grown heavier conduction fibers, added switching capacity... but it had not been enough. When the necessities of existence reached a certain fierce tempo, they shorted out their own internal connections. They died. They had been forced into hyper-consciousness by the pressures of enormous sensory data and the lonely knowledge of responsibility. They awoke to the full potential of being humans, but couldn't be humans because they'd been deprived of their autonomic emotional register, the organism. The ship had no equivalents. Prue is near death. The thought lifted into his mind from some great depth. Raj! Where was Raj? A flicker of awareness drifted through his bruised nervous system. As though through a guaze screen, he saw Flattery and Timberlake trapped in the lock, robox units holding the hatch dogs tightly closed. Raj has to get out of there to help Prue, he thought. He felt the thought go out like a free-standing program, feed Ill through a memory bank auxiliary while it gathered in the necessary data, become a reflexive pulse in control loops. The robox at the inner hatch whirled the dogs, opened the hatch and scurried aside. "Raj," he whispered. "Corncentral... quick... Prue... help." He sensed the amplified whisper booming out through the memory bank and the vocoder loops, become a roaring hiss in the lock. Flattery was already out the hatch heading down tube toward Corn-central. Bickel felt himself fading. His light that grew dimmer and dimmer, changing color as it went. It started almost violet, somewhere around # angstrom units, and traced a continuous wave shift until it flickered out at the red end. In the instant before unconsciousness, Bickel wondered if he could be dying, and he thought: Red shift ! Awareness fades like the red shift. XV S omewhere in his own consciousness, Flattery felt, an accumulation of answer-bits had poured out of their storage circuits, fed into an analyzer punched for decode and produced a terrible answer. The ship had to be destroyed -- and all its occupants with it. As the lock hatch swung open, that one thought dominated him. He hurled himself through the hatchway and down the tube. Timberlake was close behind. "You see that robox?" Timberlake panted. "What made it open up?" Flattery sped on without answering. "That voice," Timberlake said. "Was that Bickel, that voice? Sounded like Bickel." They were at the Y-branch leading down to Comcentral now, then at the hatch. Flattery opened it, slipped through. His mind raced. Kill the ship now? Destroy this wild genie they had created? Timberlake mustn't suspect and try to stop me. I must act normal, Flattery thought. I must wait my moment. Prudence lay on the deck half way between hatch and couch. Flattery knelt beside her, becoming totally physician for the necessities of this moment. Pulse thin, ragged. Lips cyanic. Liver spots at her neck where it showed within the edge of the helmet seal. He loosed the hinged helmet from the back of her neck, pressed a hand there. Skin clammy. Did she think she was fooling me? he wondered. She went off the A-S and was experimenting on her own body. Medical stores showed a gradual depletion of serotonin and adrenalin fractions. Flattery thought of the neuroreguiatory shifts, the psychic aches that would arise from manipulating body chemistry in this fashion. Prue's moods and strange behavior became clearer to him. He stood up, retrieved the emergency medical pack from its clips on the bulkhead, saw that Timberlake had taken over on the big board. What difference does it make if I save her? Flattery asked himself. But he returned his attention once more to the comatose woman, began ministering to her. He kept on checking her condition as he worked. No broken bones. No evidence of external injury he could find through her suit. Timberlake had ignored Prudence after the first glance. She was Flattery's problem. He had darted across to his action couch, shifted the big board, keyed first for open circuits. There was a sense of dullness in the equipment. He had to wait while servos hummed slowly about their work, while circuits balked and produced sluggish results. He could feel his own hairline awareness of every control and instrument, his consciousness keyed up by necessity. The interrelation of every device in this room and throughout the ship was like a complicated ballet, a pattern growing simpler and simpler in his mind even through its slowness. Timberlake made a delicate adjustment in hull-shield control, saw the resultant temperature change register on his instruments as a power shift in the radiation-cell accumulators, a miniscule shift of weight in the ship-as-a-whole brought about by adjustment in mass-temperatureproton balance. But how slow it was. And growing slower. Timberlake swung his computer board to his left side, keyed for diagnosis, got no response. Telltales were winking out on the big board. With an increasing sense of frenzy, Timberlake fought to find the trouble. Dead circuits. No answers. Keys on the main console began locking. No power in their circuits. The last light winked out. Every key on the board was locked tight, all the servos silent. There was no whisper of air circulation fans, no pulse of life to be felt in the ship. Slowly, Timberlake swung his gaze to the right, staring at the hyb-tank repeaters. The lights were dead, but the physical analogue gauges still showed feeder fluids flowing in the gross duct# of the system. The hyb tank occupants were not dead... yet. Whatever the settings had been when the board went dead, that was the balance remaining for each tank. As long as the auxiliary accumulators throughout the ship retained some power. As long as the pump motors kept running. But the delicate feedback control and adjustment was gone. ttnickel's really done it this  time," he said to Flattery. "No power... computer off. Everything's dead." All I need do is wait. Flattery thought Without power, the ship will die. But the effort of reviving Prudence had softened his determination. Living, after all, held its attractions -- even if they were only a ship full of culture-grown flesh, duplicates, expendable units. " You are humans, never doubt that," Hempstead had insisted. "What matter that you were grown from selected cell cultures of select candidates? You are still humans -- completely. This method is merely good common sense. We don't want to lose our best people if the ship has to be destroyed... as the others were." But if the ship died this way, it might not leave its capsule record to help the ones who came after... the next try. "How is she?" Timberlake asked, nodded toward Prudence. "I think she will recover." "To what?" Timberlake asked. Then: "Do you want to go see what's wrong with Bickel?" "Why bother?" The question with its tone of utter submission to fate sent anger surging through Timberlake. "Give up if you want," he said. "But if Bickel's alive he may know what he's done... and how to repair it." He pushed himself away from the couch, headed for the hatch to quarters. "Wait," Flattery said. Timberlake's rejection had stung him and he found this surprising. Have I acquired a new taste for living? Flattery wondered. God -- what dost Thou want? "You keep an eye on Prue," Flattery said. "It was chemical shock. She should stay quiet and warm. I have her suit heaters turned up. Leave them that..." He broke off as the hatch from quarters slowly opened. Bickel stumbled through it, would have fallen had he not caught a stanchion. A charred block of plastic slipped from his hands, tumbled to the deck. He ignored it, clung to the stanchion. Flattery studied him. Bickel's eyes looked like two pits with dark smudges beneath them. His skin was powder white. His cheeks showed skull depressions as though they had wasted away in months of fasting. "So your white box didn't kill you," Flattery said. "Too bad. All you did was kill the ship." Bickel shook his head, still unable to speak. The stillness of the ship had awakened him from a sleep so deep he could still feel the fog of it clinging to his mind. A profound weariness dragged at his muscles. Movement sent odd aches angling through his body, stirring this terrible torpor. The first thing to catch his attention as he had awakened had been the moebius energizer, his clever installation to give the Ox a constant source of energy reference. A fan of gray char crackled from its broken seals and its motors lay silent. The virtually frictionless motors and spools, the thousand-year units, were blobs of fused plastic and metal. It had taken several minutes for him to gather enough energy to move close to the unit and study it. His mind had labored over the simplest observations -- charred insulation on the power leads and in the timing circuits... tape spools twisted out of line. Slowly, it came to him: something had altered the power to the motors... and their synchronization. Something had tried to change the timing of this pulse... and its intensity. Forcing the movement of every muscle, he had unplugged the unit, stumbled and crawled with it back to Corn-central. The dead stillness of the ship pressed at him as he moved. Raj... Tim... somebody with his mind turned on... has to see this, he thought. But now that he had made it to Com-central, he couldn't find the energy to speak. r pimberlake recovered the fused energizer unit from the deck, studied it. Flattery crossed to Bickel's side, felt the pulse at his temple, lifted an eyelid, looked at his lips and tongue. Presently, he stooped to the med-kit, removed a slapshot and pressed it against Bickel's neck. Energy began to bum through Bickel's veins. Flattery pressed a squeezebottle against his lips, said: "Here, drink this." Something cool and tingling poured down Bickel's throat Flattery removed the bottle. Bickel found a husky halfwhisper that would serve him as voice, rasped: "Tim." Timberlake looked at him. Bickel nodded toward the energizer, began explaining what had happened. Flattery interrupted: "Do you think the black box-white box transfer was completed?" Bickel examined the question. He could feel his mind clearing under the pressure of the stimulant -- and there in his memory was the sensation that the ship was his body, that he was a creature of hard metal and thousands of sensors. "I... think so," he said. Timberlake held up the block of plastic. "But... it destroyed this and... apparently shut itself down." A thought began stirring in Bickel's mind and he said : "Could this be a message to us... a kind of ultimate message?" "God telling us we've gone too far," Flattery muttered. "No!" Bickel snapped. "The Ox telling us... something." "What?" Timberlake asked. Bickel tried to wet his lips with his tongue. His mouth felt so dry. His lips ached. "When nature transfers energy," Bickel said, "almost all that transfer is unconscious." He fell silent a moment. This was such a delicate plane of conceptualizing. It had to be handled so gently. "But most of the energy transfers for all the enormous amount of data in the Ox-computer is routed through master programs... and total consciousness would turn all of them on, force the system as a whole to suppress some while letting others through. It'd be like riding "You gave it too much consciousness?" Timberlake asked. Bickel looked at the transceiver panel of the Accept and Translate system beside his own action couch. Timberlake turned, followed the direction of Bickel's stare. Prudence stirred and moaned. Flattery bent to her. She said: "Fmmmsh." A lmost automatically, Flattery put a hand to her temple, checking her pulse. She reached up, groping, pushed Flattery's hand away from her head. She tried to sit up. Flattery helped her. "Easy now," he said. She put her hand to her throat. How sore her throat felt. She had been absorbing the conversation around her for several minutes, remembering. She remembered there had been a train of thought, frantic efforts to raise Bickel on the intercom and communicate with him. She remembered the effort and the urgency, but the precise reason for abandoning her post and rushing off to tell Bickel eluded her questing. "We have to weed false information out of our minds," Bickel said. "We're assuming a totally conscious robot, all of its activity directed by consciousness. That cannot be unless every action is monitored simultaneously." His words aroused a vague sense of anger in Prudence. He kept skirting the What was that thought? "Would it have the illusion that it's the center of the universe?" Timberlake asked. "No." Bickel shook his head, remembering: "The universe has no center." That's what it had said to him. A moment of intense despair overcame him. He felt like groaning. "Life as we know it," Timberlake said, "started evolving some When it got to a certain point, then consciousness appeared. Before that, there was no consciousness... at least in our life form. Consciousness comes out of that unconscious sea of evolution." He looked at Bickel. "It exists right now immersed in that universal sea of unconsciousness." As though Timberlake's words had released a dam, Prudence remembered the train of thought so urgent it had forced her to abandon her post to go in search of Bickel. Determinism at work in a sea of indeterminism! And she held the mathematical key to the problem. That was the train of thought. She had been trying to narrow down a new definition, mathematically stated, of quantum probability. She had sensed a three-dimensional grid forming in her awareness and a probing beam of consciousness focusing into that grid. Grid, a given volume of space, dimensions x.y.z. With the source of awareness, an invisible object (s) to find in time (# for a given operation within that volume. Again, she felt that enormous increment of consciousness and the memory of that sudden knowledge -- she had pushed her body's chemistry beyond a balance point. She remembered how the darkness had engulfed her just as the mathematical beauty, the simplicity of the thought had spread itself out in her mind ttTohn," she said, "the Ox af isn't the instrument of conmanipulator of symbols. The Ox circuits are merely something this manipulator can use to stand up tall, to know its own dimensions. The Ox is the unconscious component. A machine for transferring energy." And, still within this heightened awareness, she explained the mathematical clues that had led her to this point "A matrix system," Bickel said, remembering his own plunge into this way of attacking the problem and the blaze of consciousness that plunge had whipped up. "And sub-matrices and sub-matrices without end." Flattery stood up, seeing where these thoughts must lead, dreading the moment of action to come. He looked down at Prudence seated on the deck, seeing her flushed cheeks, the glitter in her eyes. cum Ox stand?" Flattery asked. "Have you thought of that?" Prudence met his stare, understanding now why their hyb tanks had been filled with colonists. "The colonists," she said, nodding. "A field of unconsciousness from which any unconscious can draw -- a -- ground that sustains and buoys -- and the sleeping colonists provide it." Flattery shook his head feeling angry, confused. Bickel stared beyond Prue, absorbing her words. Ideas merged and fitting orders evolved in his awareness. This ship had been armed, maneuvered, aimed and fired. He remembered Hempstead: gnomewise face, eyes glittering, and that compelling voice saying: "What matters is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground -- and, dreaming, must invoke ever new dreams." "Knowledge is pitiless," Bickel said. Prudence ignored him, keeping her attention on Flattery, aware of the psychiatristchaplain's confusion. "Don't you see it, Raj?" she asked. "To separate subject from object there has to be a background of some kind. You have to be able to see it against something. What's the background for consciousness? Unconsciousness." "Zombies," Bickel said. "Remember, Raj? You called us zombies. And why not? We've existed for most of our lives in a state of light hypnosis." Flattery knew Bickel had said something, but the words refused to link in any understandable form. It was as though Bickel had said : "Hop limbo promise the insect watering class to be erected to a first behavior preserve." The words trailed off through his mind as though they had been flashed in front of his awareness to screen him from something else. From what? A profound silence filled Comcentral broken by the sound of Prudence shifting her position on the deck. Bickel felt himself go as calm as that silence, as though some other self had waited for that silence to take the reins. The sensation lasted for a single heartbeat and expanded into a sense of well being, a relaxed poise that illuminated everything around him. It was as if one universe had been substituted for another, as if a sensory amplification of enormous intensity had been turned on his universe. He saw the stark unconsciousness in Flattery's face, in Timberlake's -- and the semi-consciousness of Prudence. Zombies, he thought. "Raj, you called us zombies," Bickel repeated. "If we were lightly hypnotized we'd appear partially dead to someone in a higher state of consciousness." "Do you have to mumble?" Timberlake demanded. Flattery glared at Bickel. He felt that the man was using real words that communication was intended, but all the meanings slipped and slithered through his mind without making connection. Prudence felt Bickel's words lifting her. "Hypnotized," Bickel said. "We accept it as normal because it's virtually the only form of consciousness we've ever seen. You've watched the Earth video. You wouldn't expect an idiot to be fooled by the commercials, but that rhythmic hammering, that repetition..." "Half dead," Prudence said. "Zombies." She said, "Zombies," Flattery thought. Her voice frightened him. Bickel saw the alertness spread through her eyes, the awakening. "We should've thought of the Bickel said. "You see what has to be done?" Prudence asked. "The energizer..." "Stimulator," Bickel said. "Stimulator," she said. "It has "Slack lines," Bickel muttered. "Sensory modules interlaced and time correlation out of phase. Dual function of signal to compensate for the system's greatly extended spread-out of sense data." Timberlake looked from one to the other. He felt a sense of dullness lifting from his mind. Slack lines... sensory modules. Symbols! Timberlake's memory shot back to their conversation about the energizer. "All the master programs dealing with translation of symbols are monitored through feedback loops linked to the A AT." He heard his own voice replaying in his mind. Symbols! Bickel saw the vitality flowing into Timberlake, said: "Think of we were saying?" It received hundreds of duplicates of the same message compressed into the modulated laser burst. It averaged out the blanks and distortions, filtered for noise, compared for probable meaning on the doubtful bits, fed the result into a vocoder and produced it at an output as intelligible sound. "It closely approximates what we do when we hear someone say something to us... then repeat it to check if we heard correctly," Timberlake said. "You're all forgetting something," Flattery said. They turned, saw Flattery at his own action couch, his hand on his own repeater console. A single red light had come alive there. Flattery stared from Bickel to Prudence to Timberlake, seeing eyes. Madness! And the deep color in their faces, their sense of excitement. "Raj, wait," Bickel said. He spoke soothingly, watching Flattery's hand poised over a key beneath that single red light. I should've known there' d be another trigger, Bickel thought. t#'V#'ou know I have to do this,  John," Flattery said. And he savored the "Ah-hah!" suspense that charged this moment, the electricity in the air like ozone. 'You have control of the situation," Bickel said. "The least you can do is hear what I have to say." "We can't turn it loose," Flattery said. Timberlake swallowed, glanced down at Prudence. How odd, he thought, that we should die so soon after coming alive. "How is it, Raj," Bickel asked, "that we can explain more about the unconscious networks of the human body than we can about the conscious?" "You're wasting time," Flattery said. "But the thing's dead," Bickel said. "I have to be sure," Flattery said. "Raj, you can't," Prudence said. "Think of all those helpless lives down in the hyb tanks. Think of..." "Think of all those helpless lives back on Earth," Flattery said. "What would we turn loose on them? John's black box-white box transfer put his life -- his entire ancestry into the computer. Don't you see that? Any of you?" Prudence put a hand to her mouth. Bickel saw alertness in Flattery, the vital consciousness expressed in every movement, realized the death-conditioning tensions had pushed him over the threshhold into something near full potential. But the new argument Flattery had produced staggered Bickel. If we restore it... awaken it... I'd be its unconscious, Bickel thought. I'd be its emotional monitor, its id, its ego and its ancestors. He swallowed. And Raj... "Raj, don't push that key," Bickel said. "I must," Flattery said. And he sensed the poignancy of his awareness -- this new vitality. "You don't understand," Bickel said. "That field generator in your cubby. You think there was no feedback from you into the system, but there was. Your voice, your prayers -- every gross or subtle reaction went back into the system through its sensors. Whatever religion is to you, that's what it'd be to the Ox. Whatever... "Whatever religion was to me." And he pushed the key. It clicked, locked. "How long do we have, Raj?" Timberlake asked. "Perhaps ten minutes," Flattery said. "And perhaps more," Bickel said. "Don't you think we should've Prudence asked. "Awake as we are now, the ship control neces sities would've been so much simpler." "Some fool would be certain to play with this ship -- just testing," Flattery said. "And we He gestured to include all four of them. "This potential we've discovered within ourselves would've been engulfed on earth, smothered, killed." He shrugged. "What are a few minutes or a few years more or less? I had a responsibility... and fulfilled it." "You had a death wish, too," Bickel said. "That, too," Flattery agreed, recognizing how the deadly impulse had helped project him into this full awareness. With that realization, Flattery began to glimpse the train of Bickel's cryptic words -- their other meaning. "There were Greeks who said that even the gods must die," Bickel said. Flattery turned, looked at the big board. It was fully alight now, not a warning telltale showing, every gauge zeroed normal. "It's programmed to take us to Tau Ceti," Bickel said. TT'lattery began to laugh, al- most hysterically. Presently, he stopped, said: "But tliere's no inhabitable planet at Tau Ceti. You know what all this is, John -- a set piece. We know what we are -- cell-culture humans! A host gave a bit of himself containing the template of the total, and the axolotl tanks did the rest. We were expendables!" He sighed, put down the urge to sink back into the deadly torpor. "They're already growing our replacements, our duplicates, building another Tin Egg for the next phase of the Project. Each failure teaches them somea continuous monitor on the computer. When I depressed that key, that also launched a capsule back toward Earth -- the complete report." "Not quite complete," Bickel said. "The ship is going to take us to Tau Ceti," Timberlake said. "But the selfdestruction program," Prudence said. And as she spoke, she saw what the others already had seen. The ship held control of its own death. It could die. And this was what had given it life. The impulse the Ox circuits... and was repressed, the way humans repressed it. The ship had come to life the way they had -- in the midst of death. Death was the background against which life could know itself. Without death -- an ending -- they were confronted by the infinite-design problem, an impossibility. All Flattery had done was to consciousness -- with a super energizer. "Nothing at Tau Ceti, you're sure?" Bickel asked. "Planets, but not inhabitable," Flattery said. A green action light began to glow on the main console. "No sense going into hyb," Bickel said. "We are happy," Prudence said. She stared at the green light. "It isn't fully conscious yet -- the ship." "Of course not," Timberlake said, and he thought how deftly she had phrased their emotional state. I would've said we are filled with joy. But joy has somewhat religious overtones. Prue's way is better. Prudence grew aware that Flattery was looking at her. "Why not?" he said. Fes, why not ? she agreed. But no woman had ever presided at a stranger birth. She crossed to the main console, switched the computer's audio pickup into the main input channel. "You," she said. She kept her hand on the switch, the new sensitivity of her skin reporting the molecular shift of metal in direct contact. They waited, knowing the outline of what was happening inside their robotic construction. That one word, internally powered by programmed curiosity and self-preservation directives, was winding its way through the asyet semi-conscious creation. Preservation -- but there were many kinds of preservation, many things to preserve. But there was only one receptor upon which "You" could impress itself. Programs were firing, new cross-links being created, comparisons and balances being made. Abruptly, the board in front of Prue went dead. Every light extinguished, every gauge at dead rest. She waggled the computer switch, got no response. The entire ship began to tremble. "Is that the self-destruction program?" Bickel asked. A single word, metallic and harsh, boomed from the vocoder above them: "Negative." r T'he ship vibration eased, resumed, cut off sharply. There came a weighted sense of drifting, a profound silence they felt extended throughout the ship. Again, the vocoder came to life, but softer: "Now, you will see on your screens a lateral view." The overhead screen and the fore bulkhead screen came alight with the identical scene: a view of a solar system, planets picked out by the telltale red arrows of computer reference. "Six planets," Flattery whispered. "Notice the pattern -- and the sky beyond." "You recognize it?" Timberlake asked. "It's the view the probes brought back," Flattery said. "The Tau Ceti system." "Why would it reproduce the probe view?" Prudence asked. "Prudence," said the vocoder. "This is not a probe view. These radiations are what I... see now around me." "We're already at Taa Ceti?" Prudence asked. "How can that be? We can't be there I " "The symbol there is an inaccuracy," said the vocoder. "ThertB and here shift according to a polarity dependent upon dimension." "But we're there!" Prudence said. "A statement erf the obvious may be used to remfcc your awareness," the vocoder said. "You were to be conveyed safely to Tau Ceti. You have arrived at Tau Ceti." "Safely!" Flattery said. "There's no place for us to land." "An inconvenience, no more." Every arrow but one on the screen winked out. "This planet has been prepared for you," said the vocoder. Bickel glanced sideways at Flattery, saw the psychiatristchaplain mopping his brow. "Something's wrong," Flattery whispered. "Nothing can be wrong," the vocoder said. "You have but to look around you. You are safe." The scene on the screens shifted. "The fourth planet," said the vocoder. "That which is prepared can be preserved." Flattery gripped Bickel's arm. "Can't you hear it?" But Bickel was staring at the view on the fore screen -- a planscreen : a green planet with atmosphere and clouds. "How did we get here?" Bickel asked. "Is it possible for me to understand?" "Your understanding is limited," said the vocoder. "Its symbols that you have given me possess strange variance with nonsymbolized reality." "But you understand it," Bickel said. nphe vocoder seemed to take on a chiding tone: "My understanding transcends all possibilities of this universe. I do not need to know this universe because I possess this universe as a direct experience." "Can't you hear it?" Flattery demanded. Bickel ignored the distraction, remembered that moment in the force of the field generator when he had faltered and fallen back from a transcendental awareness. He had not possessed the capacity. It was a built-in lack. He could only accept the accomplished fact because the evidence was visible on the viewscreen. They were coming down through clouds -- a meadow with trees beyond it and a snowcapped mountain lifted in the background. "You will find the gravity just a fraction less than that of Earth," said the vocoder. "I am now awakening the colonists in hybernation. Remain where you are until all are awake. You must be together when you make your decision." His voice rasping in a suddenly dry throat, Bickel glanced up at the vocoder, said: "Decision? What decision?" "Flattery knows," said the vocoder. "You must decide how you will worship Me." Tommy was rich, idle and fond of practical jokes. Bui he went a bit too fad 'Tommy Taylor? Oh, he's coming along fine. I visited him just the other day. Had a long talk with him. He'll be as good as new again as soon as they take the bandages off. Funny, how an expression can be born for the wrong reason, and last for centuries... He quit the Club, you know. Said he didn't want any part of it any more. As though the Club had anything to do with his misfortune! To tell the truth, we were dubious about letting him join in the first place. We're a pretty serious bunch, you know, us fellows at the Yore. Each of us is a specialist in his own right and not ordinarily inclined to bend elbows with a layman, even a filthy-rich layman who can speak six different languages. But, as Hogglewaite (he specializes in Permian rocks) said, time-travel costs like hell and we needed the money. And Tommy didn't mind. Like most playboy-inheritors of latetwentieth century family fortunes, he throws # bills to the winds like rain. Oh, we're going to miss him all right The more so because, contrary to our expectations, he never played a single one of his practical jokes on us. Y ou didn't know he was a practical-joke enthusiast? You can't know very much about him then. Some men -- like myself, -- live to tape ancient battles. Some men -- old Hogglewaite, for instance -- live to collect Permian rocks. And some men -- yourself, for instance -- live to pick the brains of people like me while we're on our coffee break so they can write technical articles for the trade journals. But Tommy Taylor lives to play practical jokes. Or at least that was his purpose in life up until a few weeks ago. At first, he was content to play them on people in the present, and then it occurred to him how much more fun -- and how much easier -- it would be to play them on people in the past. That was when he joined the Yore Club and took out a two-year lease on one of our time-bikes. (The lease has another two months.) U p until the time this awful thing happened to him, he was gone most of the time, pedaling back to every age you can think of, and playing practical jokes on this past person and that. I'm not defending him when I say that there are far worse ways for a man to work off his frustrations, and I'm not being callous either. No one can do anything in the past that, in one sense, he hasn't done already... which means that if he hasn't already done it, he won't, and that if he has, he will, whether he wants to or not. Tommy was that's all. And basically that's all anyone who ever pedals back to the past is doing. Anyway, most of Tommy's capers were little more than mischievous pranks, and did no real harm to anyone. Take the time he went back to Charlestown of the night of April #th, #, and hid Paul Revere's horse. Poor Paul was half out of his mind till he found it, but no permanent damage was done. He still made his historic ride. And then there was the time Tommy put invisible ink in the Continental Congress' inkwell on the eve of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. John Hancock was fit to be tied -- but again, no permanent damage was done. The ruse was discovered (though not its author), the inkwell was emptied and refilled, and the historic document was signed. In addition to being a master of six languages, Tommy Taylor was a master of disguise. If you don't believe it, take a look at Brueghel the Elder's "The Peasant Wedding" sometime. A good reproduction will do. That's right -- Tommy's in it. He's the musician in Red (did I mention he's an accomplished musician -- well, he is) -- the one who has the hungry look in his eyes and who needs a shave. Brueghl recorded him perfectly. Photographically, almost. Tommy loves to go to weddings -- or at least he did. Weddings provide ideal situations for practical jokes. Some of his more malicious capers, though, I can't quite go along with, even though I realize that basically he had no free will in any of the things he did. Take the innumerable times he told Balzac's creditors where Balzac was hiding, for instance. Or the time when he intercepted the one and only letter that Dante wrote to Beatrice (I guess we have Tommy to thank for The Divine Comedy'). And then there was the time he burned Carlyle's first draft of The French Revolution after John Stuart Mill finished reading it. It was the only copy poor Carlyle had, and he had to do the whole thing over again from memory. Mill blamed his housemaid, and so does history; but we at the Yore know better. Probably the most fiendish joke Tommy ever played, though, was the one he played on King Solomon. On the eve of the Queen of Sheba's arrival in Jerusalem, Tommy got a job in the royal kitchen, and everyday for the duration of the Queen's visit he slipped six grams of anti-aphrodisiac powder into the king's daily cup of goat's milk. I imagine it would come as something of a shock to Biblical scholars to know that the Song of Songs is nothing more than a wish-fulfillment reverie. But Tommy's activities in the past weren't limited to playing jokes. Not only was he a practical joker, he was also a Peeping Tom. ""jp he one is a natural outgrowth of the other, you see. You can be present at the denouement of most jokes, but not all of them. Some of them you have to view from the outside, so to speak. You've probably guessed the truth by now, but I'll unveil it anyway: Tommy Taylor was the "tailor" who peeped -- and got blinded for it. But the incident didn't happen quite the way the legend would have you believe. Legends are about as historically accurate as old Biblical movies. Tommy never dreamed the Coventry caper would backfire on him. The analogy between his surname and the occupation of the legendary victim failed to register on his mind, you see, and he took it for granted that he and the famous tailor were two different people. So, figuring that he was immune from harm, he costumed himself to conform to the period, pedaled back to ancient Coventry, hid his time-bike, and, using his own name, rented a room whose single window faced the narrowest street in town. Then he sat back to wait till Lady Godiva came riding by on her white horse. When she did, he threw open the shutters and looked -- and she almost clawed his eyes out. Now wait a minute. Don't jump to conclusions. I didn't say she tried to claw his eyes out because he looked. I know as well as you do that she probably wanted someone to look. But Tommy Taylor, remember, was a practical joker first and a Peeping Tom second. Sure, he looked -- But he also leaned out the window and, with a long pair of barber's shears, cut her hair off. Rare Old Periodicals for Your Collection A backward time machine: the actual newspapers Americans read a century and more ago. This is living history, the eyewitness accounts of great battles, the debates of famous figures. Not reproductions or facsimiles but the original newspapers themselves, suitable for framing or binding, almost mint condition except for slight age-darkening at the edges, many still uncut, shipped boxed and insured, postpaid. No duplicates. First order takes each item. # issues Boston Patriot: Saturday, Sept. #, #; Sat. June #, #; Wed., Apr. #. # Correspondence of late Pres. Adams. #. # issues Rhode Island American  Providence Gazette , July, Aug.  Oct. # (various dates). #. # issues N. Y. Evening Post, March  July, #. #. # copies National Gazelle (Philadelphia), Apr., Oct.  Dee. #, various dates. #.k Send order to I. Pritchet, # Knollwood Rd., Easfcheter, N.Y. Payment with order T or will be sent C.O.D. for # deposit. From the collection of Robert M. Guinn X Authenticity guaranteed by Galaxy Publishing Corp. T    Sfoui Information Moons go around the earths the earths go 'round the suns and all the hosts of suns circle a giant sun. F. G. Klopstock (#-#) When the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock wrote the ode from which these lines are taken, he did not indulge in poetic imagination. He just wrote down what many astronomers and philosophers of his time believed to be true. Klopstock's direct source was probably Immanuel Kant's General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, published for the first time in #. Immanuel Kant -- he happened to be born in the same year as Klopstock and survived him by one year -- not only believed in a "central sun" of the Milky Way, he even thought that we could see it in the sky. Kant's candidate for the role of the "central sun" was Sirius, the brightest star of the northern sky. Kant's reasoning, as usual, was logical and clear. Since the Milky Way does not have the same width all the way around but looks wider in the area between Cygnus and Sagittarius, it follows that our sun is not in the center, but is closer to this section of the Milky Way. Sirius, on the other hand, is in a position that could be the center; and it is also the brightest star. Of course, in order to be the central sun, it would have to be larger by far than any other star. Shouldn't this fact be immediately apparent to the eye? Kant explained why it doesn't have to be so obvious: "even if it (Sirius) were # times as large as our sun, the apparent brightness and size would be the same if it were a hundred times farther away." Since the distance to Sirius, or to any other star, was not known at the time, nobody could argue with the supposition that Sirius might be the central sun of the Milky Way. F or a full century Kant's opinion was quoted as something that was probably correct even though it could neither be proved nor disproved. But around the middle of the nineteenth century the distance to Sirius had been determined -- after a few corrections -- as being only # light years. This calculation enabled astronomers to make fairly correct guesses about the size of Sirius. It was larger than our sun, but not much larger, and many times as luminous. In short : Sirius could not be the central sun, but that did not mean that there was no central sun. By #, say, the idea of a central sun had been, as somebody phrased it, "reluctantly abandoned." Another forty years later it became clear that the Milky Way galaxy was about six times larger than had been assumed, since the galactic center and everything "behind" it -- from our point of view -- is hidden by enormous clouds of cosmic dust and gas. At that moment the idea of a central sun could have been revived on the grounds that since we cannot see the galactic center we cannot say whether there is a central sun or not. But the general progress of astronomical research prevented this argument from being uttered. It was already clear that certain objects in the sky were other galaxies and while many of them showed a definite nucleus where suns are more densely packed than in their arms, none showed a central sun. Nobody is looking for a central sun of overwhelming mass and gravitational might anymore, but a related question is still very much alive. Our galaxy is an aggregation of perhaps # of them must be the largest. Which one is it and how large is it? Slowly now, we cannot answer that question because only about one sixth of our galaxy can be directly observed. Alright then, which is the largest star in the observable portion of our galaxy? Well, yes -- now that is an interesting question. Too bad that it cannot be answered without first asking a few counter-questions. That word "largest" may be good enough when it comes to light bulbs, cigars or elephants. It is not good enough, meaning precise enough, when it comes to stars. Do you mean the brightest star, the one with the greatest luminosity? Or do you mean the star with the greatest mass, the one that would weigh most if it could be placed on a scale? Or do you mean the star with the greatest volume, the one that occupies more cubic miles of space than any other? These are three different classifications and they do not go together. S ince stars are by definition selfluminous objects we'll look earth, the crown goes to Sirius, it sends us more than twice as much light as any other star we can see. But that only means that Sirius is the brightest star in our sky, it does not mean that it is the brightest star in the observable portion of the galaxy. It is selfevident that a much brighter star which is also much farther away will look dimmer to our eyes. To get rid of the difficulty caused by the very considerable differences in distances a simplifying convention had to be introduced. It consisted of agreeing on a standard distance; the distance chosen was ten parsecs or # light years. The magnitude of a star is described as if it were that distance away, and it is called the absolute magnitude. The magnitude that we do see and which makes Sirius the brightest star Figure #. The two components of epsion Aurigae, drawn to scale, in the position they occupied in #. The short line labeled # A.U. indicates a distance of # astronomical units in our sky is the apparent magnitude. Just to clear up the terminology it has to be added that two other kinds of magnitude are mentioned in astronomical literature. One is the visual magnitude which is the same as the apparent magnitude for visual observations. But stars that radiate a great deal of blue and violet light look brighter on the photographic plate than they do to the eye and here, of course, the term photographic magnitude is used. For our discussion the photographic magnitude can be neglected. We will deal only with the "apparent (visual) magnitude" and mainly with the "absolute magnitude" the visual magnitude as it would be if seen from a distance of # parsecs. If you deal with absolute magnitudes only the relative luminosities of the stars can be expressed simply in terms of the luminosity of our sun. A star that is as luminous as our sun, no matter how faint it looks because of a long distance, would be said to have the luminosity "#". But let us look at a few examples. Sirius has a luminosity of #, that is to say that it is # times as bright as the sun. The nearest other star, alpha Centauri happens to be a binary, its brighter component, alpha Centauri A has a luminosity of #, it is just a little brighter than our sun. The other component, alpha Centauri B, is much dimmer, its luminosity is only #, Vega's luminosity is #, that of Capella is #, and that of Aldebaran is #. The star beta Centauri, second brightest star in the constellation of the Centaur, has a surprisingly great luminosity, namely #; but unlike alpha Centauri beta Centauri is # light years or #I parsecs distant. Deneb, about # parsecs away, has a luminosity of about #, Rigel, about # parsecs distant, has a luminosity of #, and Canopus, # parsecs away, has a luminosity of #. If the earth were suddenmiles from Canopus, all land life on the hemisphere pointing at Canopus would be killed, instantly and the oceans would have boiled away before the earth had time to rotate once on its axis. A close runner-up of Canopus is ypsilon Sagittarii. To the naked eye it is just a fourth magnitude star at an estimated distance of about # light years or # parsecs. Its luminosity is somewhere between # and # times that of our sun. Naturally such estimates cannot be precise; we simply cannot know how much of the light is absorbed by so-called "empty" space during a # year journey. It is entirely possible that ypsilon Sagittarii has the same luminosity as Canopus. At any event these two, at the moment, share first place as regards true luminosity among the stars in the observable region of our galaxy. Though this survey is restricted to the one sixth of our own galaxy that can be observed visually, one exception has to be made. Our galaxy has two satellite galaxies collectively known as the Magellanic Clouds. The larger of the Magellanic Clouds contains numerous clusters of stars, often imbedded in nebulosities. Many hot and bright bluewhite giants of the type of Rigel are present. It is generally assumed that Rigel type giants are the result of a recent "feeding" with cosmic dust due to a passage through a dust cloud. Since space inside the Greater Magellanic Cloud is quite dusty, all this goes together quite well. But in a cluster of the there is a supergiant surpassing anything that we can see in our section of the galaxy. It is the star called S Doradus. Because of the distance of # light years S Doradus is not visible to the naked eye, yet it is the must luminous star known. It is a variable, with an absolute luminosity ranging from # at minimum to # at maximum. This means that its average that of our sun! If it is a single star its diameter might be as may be a binary. Sergei Gaposchkin has suggested that it might be a system of two blue-white supergiants eclipsing each other during a #-year period. It has also been suggested that S Doradus was, a comparatively short time ago, a double supernova which is now fading. If S Doradus is a single star and if it follows the rules derived from our "neighborhood stars", its lifetime, at the present rate of energy expenditure, would be only # years. As far as the more luminous objects that have been dubbed "quasars" -- a contraction of the original designation "quasi-stellar objects" -- are concerned, I'm going to postpone any discussion until the time we know something about them. D etermining the surface temperature of a star is relatively easy with modem instrumentation. Measuring a star's apparent magnitude and calculating its true luminosity does not present any special difficulties and if all these factors are known it is easy to calculate the surface area of a star and to derive its diameter from the surface area. But while every star that throws radiation into space advertises its temperature, composition and size, very many star succeed in retaining a secret, namely their mass and density. As a matter of fact there is no way of determining the mass of a single star. Only if the star in question is a component of a binary -- or a multiple system -- can we find its mass by studying the orbital paths followed by the two stars. Of course in quite a number of cases close guesses can be made. If we have one star where the mass could be determined because it is a component of a binary and we then find another star of the same absolute magnitude and belonging to the same (spectral) class, it is reasonable to assume that this latter star's mass will be about the same as that of the measured star. Keeping the restriction in mind that, generally speaking, we can know only the masses of binaries we can now ask about the most massive star known. The answer is: H.D. # in the constellation Monoceros. The letters H. D. stand for "Henry Draper Catalogue", published by Harvard University during the years immediately following the first World War. But H.D. # has a name, too. It is known as Plaskett's Star, after J. S. Plaskett, the director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory at Victoria, British Columbia, who proved that this star was a binary with an orbital period of #.-I days. The combined mass of the binary turned out to be # times the mass of our sun. Both components seem to share this mass equally, or very nearly so, so that each component of Plaskett's star has a mass of # times that of the sun. Both also belong to the same spectral type (Os) and since the density of stars of that spectral type is usually only about # per cent of the sun's density they must be large in size too. If Sir Arthur Eddington is right, the two components of this binary are about as massive as a star can be. He found that a star of a mass greater than about # solar masses cannot exist. When that mass is reached the radiation pressure inside the star becomes stronger than the gravitational forces that hold the star together. A star of, say, # solar masses would be blown apart by its own radiation pressure. So far all known examples conform to Sir Arthur Eddington's calculation, even the largest stars have masses far below the two heavyweights that form Plaskett's Star.  nd that brings us to the stars with the greatest volume, collectively known as the Red Giants: Algol, Aldebaran and Arcturus. Algol is a binary consisting Figure #. Rigel is a Blue-white Giant, Aldebaran a Red Giant, Antares, Betelgeuse and Mira Ceti are Red Supergiants, and epsilon Aurigae is in a class by itself which has no name yet. !f the sun were in the center of epsilon Aurigae, the planet Saturn would move along the broken line. of two Red Giants of nearly identical mass and size. Their diameters are # times that of the sun, but their masses are only # solar masses each. Aldebaran and Arcturus are singles with diameters on the order of # solar diameters but their estimated masses are also just # solar masses. Antares, Betelgeuse and Mira Ceti are classed as Red Supergiants; their diameters, according to the late Otto Struve, are #, # and # solar diameters. But the mass of Antares is estimated as only # solar masses, Betelgeuse probably weighs # times as much as our sun and Mira Ceti not much more. But the very largest star of the observable portion of our galaxy is one that has literally never been seen. It is the supergiant epsilon Aurigae, with a diameter # times as large as that of the sun -- which, incidentally, is # miles. But if it has never been seen, how do we know that it exists and on what authority can its diameter be given? The answer can almost be guessed: because it is a component of a binary. The other component of this binary is visible, of course, and the designation epsilon Aurigae really belongs to this visible component. It was in #I when a German Lutheran pastor by the name of Fritsch, who lived in the old city of Quedlinburg, noticed that it was a variable star. Not realizing that an important discovery was within grasp he did not follow up on his observation and it was Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander in Bonn who, in #, made good visual observations of epsilon Aurigae at minimum luminosity. It became clear that epsilon Aurigae was a socalled eclipsing variable, which means a star that does not actually change its luminosity periodically as the true variables do. The apparent change is due to the fact that a less luminous star moves in front of its more luminous component, thereby making it look dimmer. Argelander noticed two facts: the orbital period was unusually long and the second component was invisible. As for the latter he probably thought that later and more powerful telescopes would show it. Other eclipses took place in #, # and #, all well observed. The last eclipse was in # with the next one due in #. The period is #.I years, the longest period for an eclipsing binary that is known. Even the eclipse itself is of impressive length; in # it began on June #. The light of the visible component diminished steadily for # days and reached its minimum during the second week of December of that year. It then stayed at minimum for # days and needed another # days to return to normal, a total eclipse duration of # days, or two years minus two weeks and two days. But all the time the smaller component remains visible, shining through the very tenuous large star! To speak of the luminous member of epsilon Aurigae as the "smaller component" is justified only because the term is used in comparison with the larger component. The smaller component is itself a supergiant with a diameter of #-# times that of the sun and a mass of about # solar masses. The mass of the large star, ten times the diameter of the smaller companion, is also about # solar masses, possibly somewhat less. This has the result that the density is the lowest known of any miles of it and compressed it into one cubic mile you would have a substance of the same density as our air at sea level. The surface temperature is at best # centigrade (# Fahrenheit) but probably less. It is too cool to be luminous. But, of course, at its center the density and the temperature must be higher. Its core should be luminous but we cannot see it; what little light there is is drowned out by the glare of the bright star. The distance to epsilon Aurigae can only be estimated, but is believed to be on the order of # light years. I t has often been said that thoroughness is the cloak of the philosopher and the scientist. Without it he feels naked and does not like to appear in public. Hence a discussion of the galactic giants would be incomplete without at least one quick glance at the galactic midgets. Just as the question about the largest star has more than one answer, the question about the smallest star does too. And again it is a case of whether "small" is meant to refer to mass, volume or luminosity. For years the star L #-# in Monoceros, discovered by Dr. being the star with the smallest volume. It would need # such stars to produce as much light as our sun does. The calculated diameter is # miles, only about # miles more than the diameter of our moon. But L #-# is a White Dwarf, its mass is # solar masses and the densitimes the density of water. But in # Dr Luyten came up with an even smaller White Dwarf, LP #-# in Taurus with a diameter of only about # miles. Its density must be about four times that of the density of L #-#. The faintest star known (not a White Dwarf) has a brightness sun. It is a companion to another faint star, registered as B.D.  # # I . It was discovered by Dr. G. Van Biesbroek and was found to have an absolute magnitude of # in red light, three magnitudes fainter than the oft quoted faint star Wolf #. The lightest known star was announced by Dr. Peter van de Camp in #. Its designation is Ross #-B, its absolute magnitude is #, its liwninosity is only #) The letters B.D. stand for Argelander's Bonner Darcbmusteruiig, the "Bonn (stellar) Census' ##, #th of the sun and the mass is l#th of the mass of the sun. The Original Inventor of Recording Tape. S everal years ago I devoted a section of my column to a discussion of the fact that all the materials needed for building a large liquid fuel rocket existed in #. I also pointed out that most of the sub-assemblies, such as centrifugal pumps, pressure bottles for gas with which to run gyroscopes and so forth were in existence at the time. Even the idea of large liquid fuel rockets had been voiced at the time. What was missing was a synthesis of the existing pieces of knowledge and hardware. Last year I repeated the story during a lecture to an engineering society in the Los Angeles area and during the social hour that followed the lecture more Ilian one engineer, engaged in space work, let out thoughtful moans which could be vocalized as: "What do we have now that could be put together for something revolutionary if only somebody had the necessary vision for a synthesis?" I regret sincerely that I cannot answer this question -- if I could I'd get myself a few patents and tell industry to negotiate with my attorney. But I can tell a story that illustrates the opposite case, that of a man who had vision and the right idea but who could not do anything with it because a needed invention or two had not yet been made. Hi name was Oberlin Smith and he should be regarded as the original inventor of recording tape, useful from kindergarten to orbiting satellites. The original publication by Oberlin Smith took place in the long defunct journel The Electrical World, issue of September #, #. His opening paragraph read: "There being nowadays throughout the scientific world great activity of thought regarding listening and talking machines (both Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison had obtained their patents for the telephone and for the phonograph about a decade earlier, in #) the readers of The Electrical World may be interested in a description of two or three possible methods of making a phonograph which the writer contrived some years ago, but which were laid aside and never brought to completion on account of a pres of other work." The first of Smith's suggestions was a possible improvement erf Edison's phonograph by inscribing the sound not on tinfoil (as Edison did) but on a "thin ribbon of iron, steel or other sub#  stance capable of being temporarily softened by heat." The ribbon was to have a width of about l# th of an inch and a probable thickness of l# th of an inch. The idea was to soften the ribbon by a heat lamp just before it reached the inscribing needle and to have the distance between recording needle and receiving reel long enough so that the ribbon would be hard again when wound on the reel. Looking back at this suggestion from the vantage point provided by the three quarters of a century that have passed, one can say that this probably would not have worked out well with a metallic ribbon but that Mr. Smith might have been quite successful if thermo-setting plastics (or even ordinary thermoplastics) had existed in his time. T)ut it is the next suggestion- that makes Oberlin Smith the original inventor of the recording tape. He proceeded to point out that an "all-electric method" is likely to be superior to a mechanical method. He wanted to pass a "cord" through a coil connected with a microphone so that "the cord becomes, so to speak, a series of short magnets grouped into alternate swellings and attenuations of magnetism." "The cord," he continued, "therefore contains a perfect record of the sound, far more delicate than the indentations in the tinfoil of the mechanical phonograph. The probable construction of the cord would be a cotton, silk or other thread, among whose fibres would be spun (or otherwise mixed) hard steel dust, or short clippings of very fine steel wire, hardened. Each piece would, of course, became a complete magnet. Other forms of the cord might be a brass, lead or other wire or ribbon through which the steel dust was mixed in melting, being hardened afterwards in the case of brass or any metal with a high melting point. Another (but too expensive), form would be a chain with each link a magnet; or, if the magnets affected each other too much when in contact, each alternate link could be of non-magnetic material." Oberlin Smith did not think that the idea of a chain, already discarded because of its probable high price, was as good as the idea of dust magnets imbedded in a thread or ribbon of nonmetallic material. And he mentioned, but discarded, the idea that it might be possible to use just a steel wire, because he doubted that the steel wire "would divide itself up properly into a number of short magnets. The magnetic influence would be distributed along the wire in a most totally depraved way, with nodal points just where they were not wanted." The reason why Smith did not follow up on his own ideas was not just the "press of other work" as he had cited in the beginning. He had run into too many practical difficulties. He had developed a machine for spinning dust into a cotton thread, but had been unable to harden steel dust because of oxidation taking place in the process. He had chopped up steel wire and found that a piece of wire had to be three or four times as long as its diameter, or else the small pieces would not become magnets, at least in his own experiments. He had tried to find information on very small magnets in contemporary books, but such information either did not exist, or else it had not been published in English. He had approached other researchers with his problem, admitting his ignorance, but "had found an equal amount of ignorance in several well-known electricians."  gain, from the vantage point of three quarters of a century later, it is easy to see what went wrong. Oberlin Smith had what he considered to be an interesting and possibly workable idea. But it was far more than that, it was a project that would require an extensive research program of several thousand scientific man hours. Realizing this to some extent, he had decided to publish his ideas, "hoping that some of the numerous experimen ters now working in this field may find a germ of good from which something useful may grow." The other experimenters did not pay any known attention to Smith's "germ", either because they realized the magnitude of the job to be done or -- more probable -- because they were busy with projects of their own. The first man who actually built a recording device along the lines suggested by Smith was the Danish inventor Valdemar Poulson who probably never saw Smith's article. One of the reasons for saying so is that Poulson did use a steel wire. His instrument was called the "Telegraphon" and it was one of the many attractions of the Paris Exposition of #. Among the important men of the time who listened to the inventor's explanation was old Emperor Franz Josef of Austria who then said into the microphone : "This new invention is most interesting to me and thank you very much for its demonstration," -- and then listened to his own voice. In all probability Franz Josef was as surprised at the sound of his own voice as everybody else who hears it for the first time. But in spite of its public success at the Exposition the "Telegraphon" remained a one-time attempt, possibly because the phonograph was reasonably well established. Well, where and when did the recording tape of today begin? It began with the German patent No. #, granted to one Fritz Pfleumer of Dresden in # who claimed the invention of recording sound on paper ticker tape that had been covered with iron dust. He actually built an apparatus for demonstration, but the first results were hardly acceptable. He offered his invention, among others, to the A.E.G. (Allgemeine Electricitats-Gesellschaft), the German counterpart of General Electric. The research chiefs of the A.E.G. reacted precisely as Oberlin Smith had hoped his contemporaries would react. They decided that this was a useful idea, but totally useless without lots of developmental work. One of the things that Mr. Pfleumer's tape did was to produce cracking noises at random intervals. They were finally traced to almost miscroscopic holes in the paper tape. Paper manufacturers had never been asked to produce thin paper that did not have miscroscopic holes and when confronted with such a request said two things: (#) that thin paper apparently was bound to have such holes and that there was nothing they could do about it; (#) if the elimination of such holes was so important, why didn't A.E.G. glue two tapes together? Each tape would have holes, but that the holes would match was most unlikely. Of course that was correct, but paper tape just was not strong enough and A.E.G. threw the project into the lap of a chemical plant in Ludwigshafen: "Find something that behaves like paper in every physical aspect but is stronger and, if possible, fireproof." That was the request. The chemists of the company felt that the final request -- namely that the tape should be fireproof -- was unreasonable. They ignored it and, in #, began to experiment with tapes of cellulose acetate. Two years later they had something that could be publicly demonstrated, the occasion was a Radio Exposition in Berlin in #. By # the factory proording tape. Ten years after the first public demonstration a new material was found, namely polyvinylchloride. And that was the recording tape we now know, based on a principle Oberlin Smith had thought up back in #. Please State My Business What marvelous gadgets! They worked every time -- specially when you didn't want them fol A Tiss Appleton, secretary and receptionist to the firm of Doublas, Rogan and Stretch, Consultants, was leaning back in her chair behind the desk in the outer office, polishing her bright red nails when the door to the broom closet opened and a man stepped out. Adjusting his purple and yellow zebra-striped suit, he strode to the desk and leered at Miss Appleton. She hurriedly sat up in the chair and pulled down her skirt. "Yes?" she almost stammered. "State my business," the man demanded. Miss Appleton recoiled. "What?" "State my business," the man in the zebra-striped suit declared, "I must." "You just came out of the broom closet," Miss Appleton said firmly. "Very interesting," the zebraman affirmed. "But there wasn't anyone in the broom closet," Miss Appleton said, trying not to scream. "Not before," the man confirmed, "after." "What?" Miss Appleton said, repeating herself. "Of course," the man said. "Obvious. Wrong tense. Not in before. In after. I," he announced proudly, "am forty-four." "Oh," Miss Appleton said weakly. "Very interesting." "Now round bluebird conversation developing is," the zebrastriped man informed her. "State my business I must. Of importance to your firmly is. Of course. I am forty-four. Accredited representative." Miss Appleton fought down a rising wave of hysteria. Doublas, Rogan and Stretch, she reminded herself, did not employ her because of her beauty alone. Her intelligence and common sense, as Mister Stretch had told her in his apartment, were important assets of the firm. Valuable business had been brought in by a lot of very peculiar people. Her job was to pacify them; not to reason why, or how they had come out of the broom closet. "Whom do you wish to see?" she asked, with her sweetest smile. "Ah, better is. Down to business we getting are. Proper person you must direct me to. I am representative (accredited), you are consultant. I am forty-four, you twenty-three are." "Twenty-two," Miss Appleton corrected without thinking. "For sure?" The man looked surprised. "Of no great importance is, but shocking mechanism error." Miss Appleton was losing the thread of the conversation. She fell back on: "Whom did you say you wished to talk to?" "He who can help me, my position considering." '"T"hat would be a psychiatrist, Miss Appleton thought., staring at the broad purple stripes on the yellow suit -- or were they yellow stripes on a... "You like garment?" the man asked, noting her gaze and pirouetting gracefully in front of the desk. "Conservative, comforting and climactic is." "V-very attractive," she said. "Give me your name, and I'll see if Mr. Stretch will see you." "Done," the zebra-man said gaily. "My name yours is." He made a grandiloquent gesture. "Yes," she said desperately, "but what is the name?" "Ah," zebra-stripe said, "Shakespeare. Famous quotation is. How fine that attracting woman like you should also so intelligent be." He pulled a small white rectangle from a pocket in his sleeve and handed it to her. It was a business card. Praz, it said, Accredited Representative, Moibly Cre., Traders Down the Years. In the lower right hand corner of the card it said #th. Miss Appleton picked up the phone and pressed the inter-office buzzer. "Mister Stretch? There's a Mister Praz out here to see you. From Moibly Cray." "Cre.," the zebra-man corrected her, "short E is." "Cre.," she said into the phone. "What's that?" Stretch's hoarse voice came over the wire. "Well, look here, Cinderella, keep him out there 'till I get my tie on. I'll buzz you in a minute, then send him in." "Y t:s, sir." She hung up. "Mister Stretch will see you in a minute," she informed Praz. "Fine is," he said. He started advancing around the desk. "Now time for gathering rosebuds in May is. Historical quotation of great age." He lunged. Miss Appleton ducked. The chair shot out from under her and sped across the room, leaving Miss Appleton on the floor. Praz settled on top of her. "Veritable rosebud," he murmured in her ear. He kissed her passionately. She tried to push him away, and idiotically found herself thinking that his suit felt very warm to the touch. He kissed her again. He seems to have had a lot of practice, she reflected. The buzzer sounded. "Mister Stretch will see you now," she said. "Ah," he said, jumping up. "Business is. I shall return. Quotation." He slid something out of an inside pocket and put it on the desk. "Present for you is," he said. Miss Appleton got up off the floor and smoothed her skirt. She looked at the object on the desk. It looked like an engraved ivory box for a long harmonica. "For you," Praz said, "Martian Dream is." He opened the door to the inner office, and went inside. Miss Appleton leaned over the box and opened it. A thin stream of water hit her in the nose. G eorge Stretch had been schooled for many years in the art of keeping his face expressionless. If the diagonal purple and yellow striping of his visitor's suit startled him, he didn't show it. As Praz approached the desk, he stood up and extended his hand. "Mister Praz," he said, "welcome." Praz examined the outstretched arm critically. "Why you bite your nails do?" he asked. Stretch jerked his arm back as if it were confronted by a scorpion about to strike. "Ha ha," he said, "hum." He sat down. Indicating a chair by his desk, he said, "Take a seat." "Do not wish," his visitor told him, "however, will borrow." Praz dropped into the indicated chair. "You business consultant are?" he asked. "That's what our card says." "Interesting. You able to handle and spread new produce are?" Stretch leaned back in his chair. "Well now, that's not our usual line, but I'm sure something can be worked out." "Of excellence is." Praz took what looked like a handle from his jacket pocket. He shook it, and a large briefcase descended from it, and remained attached. "Uew produce to show you." Stretch kept a very tight grip on the sides of his chair, and worked at keeping his face expressionless. He almost succeeded "Where," he grated, "where are you from?" Praz saw Stretch staring at the case, and understood. "Of sorrow am," he said, "of apologies. You not told were. Of course. I am forty-four." "I don't care how old you are; how did you do that trick with the briefcase?" "Illumination comes. Semantic difficulty is. Forty-four not years of age, it century. I temporal representative of firmly in fortyfourth numbered century am." "You mean, you're from the future?" "I mean that." Stretch stopped to think. He prided himself on his ability to adjust to unfamiliar situations, but he also prided himself on his ability to avoid being hoaxed. "That would explain the briefcase," he said. "But, before we settle down to business, can you offer any further proof?" "Ah! You afraid that I a confidential man might be are." Stretch sorted the sentence out. "That's right," he admitted. "Attached-case not sufficient proof. Of course. Contents of case, however, should convincing be." "Attached-case?" "To handle," Praz explained. He laid the case on the desk and opened it. It was divided into a number of closed compartments. "I show you varied produce, and, at same time, convince you of genuineness of self will." He opened the first compartment, and took out a small silver disk. "Matter duplicator is," he announced. U A matter duplicator? That would convince me." Stretch squinted at the tiny object glittering in Praz's hand and then fished in his wallet for a dollar bill. "Here," he said, extending it, "let's see you duplicate this." "Unable," Praz said, not taking the bill. "Disk only duplicate pattern imposed in manufacture will." "Oh," Stretch said. "Well, what does this one duplicate?" "Small pastries," Praz told him, "in shapes of various animals. He shook the disk, grabbing the small object that came out, and handed it to Stretch. "Taste," he said. Stretch examined the object. It was a small, perfectly formed goose, with its wings outstretched as though in flight. He weighed it tentatively in his hand and then bit off the right wing. "Animal crackers," he said, munching on the morsel, "but good, very good." When Stretch finished the goose, Praz shook another object out of the disk and handed it over. Stretch took it, but almost dropped it when he got a close look. The beast reproduced in miniature exceeded in horror of appearance the best attempts of the Hollywood monster-makers. Vicious claws terminated each of the monster's six arms; long, curved fangs protruded from the obscenely grinning mouth; and tentacles grouped about the head like a nightmare Medusa. "What on Earth is that?" Stretch demanded. "Not of Earth," Praz explained. "Andromeda from. Intelligent indigenous life form is. Excellent pets for pre-school children makes." "Oh." Stretch carefully put the beast aside. "What other products do you have to show me?" "Matter duplicator not great success is? Perhaps this more impressive will be." Praz removed a small black object from another compartment in his attached-case and threw it in the general direction of the wall. It landed, clung for a second, and then scuttled into a corner near the ceiling. Stretch glared at the formless object. It glared back with one small red eye. "What is it?" Stretch asked, averting his gaze. "Fire extincter is. Autonomous. If you flint-and-steel have, I demonstrate." Stretch pulled out his lighter and handed it to Praz, who examined it intently for a minute and then, with a twist of his finger, released the spring that held the flint in. The spring went bouncing around the room, and Praz dived after it yelling what sounded like "up beast!" Praz retrieved the spring from under the desk and stood up. He started pulling the cotton stuffing out of the lighter and arranging it in a little mound of tufts on one corner of the desk. Stretch controlled himself. "What are you doing?" he yelled softly. "Preparing kindling, starting fire for." "Won't a match do?" "Match?" "Yes, match." Stretch pulled a pack of matches out of his pocket and struck one in demonstration. The shapeless black beast on the wall scurried over to a point near the match, and neatly spat a white powder on it. The match went out. "Will do," Praz chortled, "did." He put down the lighter. S tretch looked down at his hand, where flakes of the white powder had settled on his fingers around the match. "It burns," he said. "No," Praz said, "it out is." "Not the match, my hand. That powder is burning my hand." "Put match down," Praz said, "and hands wash. Powder soluable in water is." Stretch dropped the match and, with his hands held before him like a surgeon's waiting for the rubber gloves, he fled into his private washroom in the rear erf his office. After a minute he emerged from the washroom rubbing a coating of burn ointment into his hands. "I don't know," he said, looking at Praz, "whether the twentieth century is ready for you yet." Praz looked startled. "You pleased to joke are," he said. "About what?" "Century. Twenty-two is, yes? Not twenty?" "Now, why would I joke about a thing like that? Everyone knows what year... oh." Keeping his newly greased hands well away from the red leather of the desk top, Stretch gingerly sat down. "You're serious." "Serious am," confirmed Praz. Stretch turned the desk calendar around to face Praz. "There," he said, "see for yourself. April fifteenth, #. That's A.D., of course." Praz jumped up and hastily closed the attached-case. "Serious mistake been made has," he said. He shook the handle, and the case rose and disappeared into the black handgrip. Stretch no longer doubted the authenticity of the gentleman standing before him. He rallied all of his powers of persuasion. "You mean the authorities don't permit you to sell in this... time?" he asked, ready to point out the mutual advantages of some sort of blackmarket activities. "Not question of permitting is," Praz said. "Question of possibility is. Time travel like travel in car suspended between two mountains is. Both sending and receiving stations exist must before travel between them possible becomes." "Oh," Stretch pondered over the answer. "So you can't travel back to any earlier than when the first machine was invented?" "Right is. And first machine not invented until twenty-two in number of centuries was." "But then, how did you... what are you doing here?" "One explanation possible is," Praz said, pocketing the animalcracker producer, "abortive experiment in mid twenty number century. Professor of name like Blatsky at Water Edge Institute father of time travel became unknowingly when he produce travel field for two hours. Building blown up when he attempt to turn off machine was. I inadvertently tuned to his projection became must have." Praz glanced at the fire extincter hugging the wall, decided against wasting the time necessary to retrieve it, and hurried from the office. Stretch ran after him. # # T ook, why don't we... he started. "No time." Praz trotted across the room, and entered the broom closet, slamming the door behind him. Stretch ran to the broom closet and threw open the door. It was empty. "Miss Appleton," Stretch yelled, turning around. Miss Appleton didn't answer. She was sitting at her desk in what appeared to be a hypnotic state, staring at a varicolored stream of water which jumped and danced across the top of a long, thin ivory box on top of her desk. Stretch ran across the room to the table which held the phone book. There was no Water Edge Institute listed. Something nudged at the corner of Stretch's memory. He checked. There was a Seaside Institute right outside of town. Stretch dialed their number. "Seaside Institute, good afternoon." "Good afternoon. Have you a Professor Blatsky at the Institute?" "Professor Blatsky? He's in his laboratory at the moment. Would you like to be connected with him?" "I would very much, thank you." "One moment." There was a pause. "Hello?" The voice could hardly be heard over the background noise. "Hello. Is this Professor Blatsky?" "It is. Who is this?" "My name is Stretch -- George Stretch. Listen closely, I have something very important to tell you." "Well," the voice at the other end sounded dubious, "if you say so. Wait a second, I'll turn off the apparatus -- I can hardly hear you over the noise." "No," Stretch shouted, as he heard the clunk of the earpiece being put down on the table. "Blatsky, for Chrissake listen to me Don't..." The phone went dead. After a long moment, Stretch softly hung up the phone. He jammed a big cigar in one corner of his mouth, lit it, and stared savagely at the wall. Miss Appleton was still in her trance. Stretch said a short expletive curse word experimentally. It sounded good. He repeated it, strode across the room and burst into his office. A small, black object scurried across the office wall and spat accurately at his cigar tip. The cigar instantly went out. Stretch was speechless. A decade and a half ago, just about exactly, a small group of sciencefiction writers and others were busily putting the finishing touches on a proposed new science-fiction magazine. The man in charge of the operation was H. L. Gold; the magazine was Galaxy. Well, time has passed. Due to reasons of personal health Horace Gold has had to curtail his activities, and one of the activities curtailed was editing Galaxy ; but in the decade-plus during which he was at the helm he produced a magazine which almost literally turned the field upside down. He gave us Fritz Leiber's The Big Time and Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Stetl; he published most of Robert Sheckley's earliest stories, and many of Clifford Simak's best ones. He spurred Cordwainer Smith and myself -- that is, the fellow who is now running things, Frederik Poh! -- into regular writing; and he retrieved writers like Ray Bradbury and discovered writers like Edgar Pangborn. Next issue is Galaxy's fifteenth anniversary. We propose to celebrate it with a special issue. It will have stories by all the people we've mentioned -- yes, Gold, Leiber, Asimov, Sheckley, Simak, Smith, Pohl, Bradbury and Pangborn, among others -- and we think it will be a collector's item for a long time to come... by A hotel doesn't have to be on land. There's no reason one shouldn't float in the ocean. The trouble with this one was... it didn't I The "optimum" and "maximum" densities of population that can be supported by a single planet without access to external resources have been the subjects of perennial speculation. Both terms are relative and their definitions have varied in time and space according to the conditions currently prevailing on a given world. If we accept the opinions of the inhabitants "optimum density" has been achieved and approximately maintained on sundry worlds at different times. The various estimates of "maximum density" never have been verified conclusively by actual experience but the history of our ancestral Terra during the late Twenties provides us with the closest known approach to an experimental determination. At least one thinker of the ancient world believed that the maximum density is also the optimum. We refer to the social and economic analyst Henry George... Rimstar: Introduction to Galactic Archeology (# E.C.) That the earth could maina necessary deduction from the manifest truths that, at least as far as our agency is concerned, matter is eternal and force must continue to act... Henry George: Progress and Poverty (# etc. E.C.) In the year #b, the Earth maintained in comfort a popuand they all lived happily ever after. But it wasn't easy... I I n the spring of #, Jothen Kent, who was the senior water engineer of a standby Disaster City named Gitler, Mo., was still trying to persuade Kim Wernicke to marry him. It wasn't easy. In pursuit of this campaign, he had managed to wangle a joint vacation for the two of them from the Union of Occupied Classes. That hadn't been easy, either, but love occasionally to process -- and mostly refuses tions per month. He picked her up at Starved Rock Biological Preserve, where she was an ecological surgeon. The Rock was a much coveted vacation resort in itself, for here one could see a sampling of some of the many thousands of animal and plant species which had once been allowed to run wild over the face of the Earth, all carefully housed in compartmented environments as much like the originals as human ingenuity could devise. For a population used to nothing but the megalithic cities, and the unending bamboos, giant sugarcane, hybride poplars and Monterrey pines which made up the World Forest, a place like the rock was a fairyland. Jothen wasted no time gawping at it, however; for one thing, he had seen most of it before, and as an engineer his interest in wildlife was small at best. Instead, he pushed his way as rapidly as possible through the other visitors on the mobile sightseers' highway, cherishing his surprise. Kim's sector was North American Temperate, the only remainder of that once vast, bluely sylvan, raptly still ecology anywhere on Earth; the last fragment of the realm of deer and bears and wolverines and wild tobacco and sugar maples and oaks, and quiet everywhere under smoky skies. Here, at least, it would never change, and for that reason Kim clung to it -- not for the rainbow trout in the brooks, nor for the snow that fell every year, or the squirrels which sat in the crotches of unfamiliar trees chiselling away at black walnuts, but because this was all of it that there was or ever would be, and it was permanent and immune to man in its glittering silicoid womb. Or so -- cloudily, to be sure -- Jothen saw it. He did not pretend to understand Kim well. He stepped off the highway at the base of the sector HQ tower, and finally was allowed the use of an official elevator to the sector surgeon's office. Kim came forward at once, holding out her hands. She was a tall girl of the type that was once called Canadian blonde, with long black hair, blue-green eyes, and fourcount-them-four dimples, and as usual she took his breath away. tt'#'ou're as prompt as ever," she said, smiling. "Nobody's prompt any more. But for once I'm almost ready." "Good for you. We'll need to stay on schedule -- I have rocket passes." "I know, that's why I hurried. I'm all packed. But Jo, where are we going? Is it still a mystery?" Jothen grinned. "No, not any more. We're going to Australia." "Australia!" Kim clasped her hands together like a child. "Oh, Jothen! To the Barrier-hilthon?" "No," Jothen said, drawing out his surprise to the last. "Nowhere so commonplace. Guess again." "I can't. Tell me before I kick you." "We're going to Triton Reef." . "Triton Reef! You mean -- we're going to live on the Reef -- with Tritons?" "Don't look so distressed! The Tritons welcome Drylander visitors. They've got dry, comfortable guest quarters available, with all the modern amenities. You won't live twenty-four hours a day in a scuba rig or sleep in a tidal pool." "Hmm," Kim said. "Somehow I've always thought of them as a cold and aloof sort of people -- taciturn, except with their own kind." "Nothing of the sort, I'm told. They're gay as dolphins. You'll meet dolphins, too. The Tritons will act as interpreters." On Kim's desk, the telephone sounded three musical chimes, and she turned to it with an apologetic gesture. "Kim Wernicke here." "This is the switchboard computer at the Barrier-hilthon. If you wish this conversation to be private please make the necessary preparations." "It isn't necessary; proceed." A click, a series of pings, and another voice: "This is the comII puter in charge of incoming mail. The parcel that you sent to Doctor Matouf arrived eight days ego. Doctor Matouf was absent then and has not yet returned. Shall I refer the material to Outgoing Mail to be forwarded to his Istanbul address?" "Is someone caring for the specimens?" Kim said. "Yes. We summoned an entomologist from Kookaburra Biological Preserve." "Don't forward them then. Doctor Matouf was very specific that he wanted them held at the hotel until he returns from his current field trip. The Barrierhilthon is his present base of operations." "As directed," the computer said. Came a silvery ping, then silence. "You can see why the hotel was on my mind," Kim told Jothen. "What was it all about?" "This Turkish entomologist -- Kemal Matouf, he's quite famous -- is revamping the classification of the Thysanura. That's the group that used to be called silverfish. He maintains that the structure of their blood proteins reveals new facts about their evolutionary relationships. He's asking for specimens from everywhere." "Sounds very exciting," Jothen said ironically. Hphe Great Barrier Reef is a vast platform of coral extending southward from the coast of New Guinea along the eastern shore of Australia for over one thousand miles. Parts of the platform are submerged under relatively shallow water; parts are awash at low tide; and parts rise above the high tide level as atolls and islets. The outer rampart of the Reef is a wall of coral as dense and hard as concrete, an impregnable breakwater against the battering waves of the Pacific. Inlets along the barrier give access to the maze of channels, atolls, shoals, islets and sandbanks that lie behind it. This inner zone varies in width from twenty to one hundred and fifty miles. Seaward from the outer rampart the water depth increases rapidly and finally plunges precipitously into the oceanic abysses. The Reef is an intermediate realm; a bridge between the two dissimilar worlds of dry land and open sea; the natural symbol of the Tritons who colonized it. The Reef colony was the most popular Triton community in the world, surpassing even the West Indian settlement that extended from the Bahamas to the coast of South America. It was a community more dispersed, more self-sufficient, less mechanized and less regimented than the megalopoli of the Drylanders. The Tritons were not, however, so self-sufficient as to be indifferent to the good opinion of the Drylanders, whose tectogenetic creation they were : a new human species, to exploit the sea -- with their co-evals the dolphins -- as the Drylanders never could hope to. Triton Reef could not afford to ignore the Barrier-hilthon. An observer on the outer escarpment of the Reef near the inlet known as the Lark Passage would have seen the upper portion of the Barrier-hilthon as a vari colored dome riding on the sea about five miles offshore. Actually, the Barrier-hilthon was an artificial island with its base planted in the bottom ooze at three hundred fifteen fathoms. It was an enterprise of the Transportation Corporation that provided hotel accommodations for staff of twenty thousand. Externally, its architecture was severely simple and compact -- a steel globe thirty-five hundred feet in diameter. The portion above water showed itself as a dome thirteen hundred feet high with its surface divided into twelve segments of alternating colors -- red, white, blue, white, red -- that converged toward the yellow disk of the flyport at its summit. As seen from the air it irresistibly suggested but one metaphor -- a gigantic beach ball afloat on the sea.  projecting flange four hundred feet wide girdled the Barrier-hilthon at water level. The inner zone of this flange had been converted into a "beach" of white coral sand, complete with sea shells and picturesquely contorted fragments of weatherbleached driftwood. A sea-water swimming pool occupied the zone between the beach and the upcurved outer rim of the flange. This outer rim excluded surf, sharks, and barracudas, while its curvature and overhang discouraged venturesome swimmers who otherwise might have been tempted to climb over it. Direct contact with the open sea, of a sort, was provided by large stainless steel grilles set in embrasures spaced equidistantly along the curved sea wall. Rollers that dashed themselves against the grilles entered the pool as showers of spray and smooth surges of water. Internally the Barrier-hilthon was an automated labyrinth of guest rooms, entertainment halls, service salons, escalators, moving floors, and elevators. Twenty levels each containing ten stories were reserved for these facilities; four more levels were for service installations. An indoor beach and pool encircled the hotel at the same level as the outdoor pool. Seen only by the service staff was another, hidden labyrinth between the walls and beneath the floors -- a labyrinth of pipes, cables, wave-guides, and conveyor tubes radiating from the complex of service mechanisms and their controlling computers that were stacked in a cylindrical column along the vertical axis of the Barrier-hilthon. Except when medical or dental attention was necessary the guests very seldom saw members of the service staff other than the life guards and swimming instructors on the beaches. It never occurred to them that there was something slightly eerie in this state of affairs since they had been conditioned from childhood to daily services supplied by articulate computers and other electronic devices. Situated on the second level beneath the flyport was the Master Computer that co-ordinated and supervised the subsidiary specialized computers which directed the automatic services of the Barrier-hilthon. But the Master Computer itself was supervised. In a circular control room at its core a twenty-five-man team of monitors kept constant vigil in four-hour shifts. They worked in a twilight obscurity lit only by the vidscreens and the winking luminous dots and squares on their consoles. Here the human mind impinged dn electronic circuitry. Here the monitors received reports on matters specified by them. Here decisions were made and actions initiated in situations in which the Master Computer found itself incompetent to act without instructions. r T"he Master Computer spoke with a manifold voice. It carried on twenty-five different and simultaneous conversations with the monitors. "The tropical storm over the Solomon Islands is increasing in intensity," announced the Master Computer to Monitor Nine, at the same time displaying a weather chart on the vidscreen. "It is centered over Bougainville, moving south-southwest at twenty miles per hour. Central wind velocity, fifty-five miles per hour. It may develop hurricane force. We are feeling peripheral wind and wave affects. Hurricane Advisory Alpha has been issued." "Wait twenty-four hours before issuing any further Advisories," replied Monitor Nine. "By then we'll know more about the force of the storm and its path." To Monitor Fourteen the Master Computer said, "A report has been prepared on the alleged appearances of arthropods in guest rooms. Do you wish to receive it now?" "Proceed."  "Two complaints have been received, claiming that arthropods were seen in guest rooms. The investigator interviewed the complainants and showed them life size #-V movies of various arthropods with a portable viewer. "Complaint Number One: Madame Renee Lamotte reported seeing a scorpion in her bathspray compartment. Stated that she knew it was a scorpion because, quote, it had a sting on its tail, unquote. When shown the movie of a scorpion she denied that it resembled the creature that she saw. Her comment on the movie of an earwig was negative also. By this time she was in a highly agitated condition and refused to look at any more pictures. Her husband privately advised the investigator that Madame Lamotte has had an insect phobia since seeing a so-called historical #-V drama of life during the Age of Waste, with emphasis on the prevalence of insect pests. "Complaint Number Two was filed by Mulaka Ouagadu, who reported finding a centipede in a slipper. He failed to identify the pictures of a centipede with the creature that he claims to have seen. After viewing three other pictures he refused to go on because he found them emotionally disturbing. He does not know Madame Lamotte but had heard the rumor about the scorpion. "Investigator's conclusions: Madame Lamotte is a neurotic woman who imagined that she saw an insect-like creature and called it a scorpion. Ouagadu heard the scorpion rumor, became alarmed, and also had arthropod delusions. It is the investigator's opinion that neither of the complainants, quote, are capable of distinguishing an ant from an angleworm, unquote. "No other complaints in this category have been received. End of report." "Make a general announcement to guests and service personnel," directed Monitor Fourteen, "that rumors of scorpions et cetera in the Barrier-hilthon have no foundation in fact." fp'he Master Computer said to Monitor Three, "The party of Tritons and dolphins is approaching Sector Twelve as scheduled. The necessary announcement is being made via the beach PA system." The multitude on the beach halted their activites and listened to the resonant synthetic voice that rolled from the concealed speakers on the colorful dome that towered above them. "This is the Voice of Barrierhilthon. We have made arrangements with the Tritons of Great Barrier Reef whereby you are about to receive visitors of a most unusual nature. In a few minutes some of the grilles in the sea wall of Sector Twelve will open and Tritons and dolphins will be admitted to the pool. No doubt each of you has heard many tales of various degrees of accuracy regarding Tritons and dolphins. Now you shall see them, talk to them, and obtain your information at first hand." There was a general exodus from the pool and a babble of voices rose from the beach in agitated crescendo, subsided, and was followed by an expectant silence punctuated by the rhythmic swashing of water through the grilles as billows broke against the sea wall. Abandoned beach balls and plastifoam rafts bobbed about in the pool. Three grilles slid aside with metallic clashes and disappeared into slots in the sides of their embrasures. Through these openings the spectators on the beach saw the glistening curved front of a massive turquoise-green billow unheave itself, fling itself toward them, and pour into the pool in three hissing cataracts. Three dolphins plunged through on the crests of the cataracts, their sleek arched bodies momentarily half out of the tumbling foam-flecked water. A bronze-skinned Triton child lay prone on the back of each dolphin between its head and dorsal fin, arms and legs clasping the dolphin's body. Dolphins and children vanished in a white smother of foam. Then, midway between beach and sea wall, the dolphins surfaced explosively in a tremendous power leap that carried them to ten feet into the air. At the apex of their parabolic flight the three Triton children slid sidewise from the dolphins' backs, and children and dolphins dived into the pool in unison. A burst of applause rose from the beach. With the arrival of every billow more water gushed into the pool bringing more dolphins, more Tritons. Some of the Tritons had skins of a rich brown color, some were purplish-black, some were like brown-tinted ivory, others were dappled. The pool became alive with swimming Tritons and leaping dolphins. The three grilles clashed back into position. The dolphins were quick to perceive the possibilities of the floating beach balls and butted them into the air, aiming so that the balls fell into the throng on the beach. At first this created flurries of surprise, but the onlookers rose to the occasion and flung the balls back into the pool. A lively two-way beach ball bombardment began. r T'he crowd commenced to move back into the water. Soon everyone was in the water. Even the non-swimmers were in waistdeep. Several haphazard games cf water polo got themselves organized. Triton children were instructing children from the hotel in the sport of dolphin riding. Tritons and guests raced each other to the sea wall and back -- an unequal match, it should be recorded. There were experiments in conversing with dolphins. The air rang with shouts, laughter, and splashing. A Triton girl hoisted herself from the water onto a plastifoam raft, stood erect, her black skin glistening like mobile obsidian, and emptied her gillchambers by ejecting multiple jets of water from the slits in her sides. A ring of swimmers collected around the raft, clung to its edges, and plied her with a barrage of questions. "Why did you squirt spray like that?" "I can't breathe air unless I empty the water out of my gills." "I don't see any gills." "They're inside, where you have your lungs." "How long can you stay out of water?" "I have been out as long as twenty hours." "What's your name?" "Ruvani." "Do you eat raw fish?" "Raw fish! Ugh! No! Mostly we eat from an autoserver. Sometimes we catch fish, or crabs or lobsters, or dig clams, and cook them with a fire outdoors." "A fire! Nobody is allowed to make a fire! You might set fire to The Forest!" "There isn't any forest where we make our fires. We make them with driftwood on little islands behind the Barrier. Most of them are sandbars or bare rock. Some of them have a few wild trees. They're too small to bother planting a forest on them." "What's that little rod fastened to your belt?" "That's an electric shark prod. It pulls out into a long rod -- like this. When a shark comes too close I touch him with the tip, give him a shock, and he goes away." "It's such a thin little rod. Where's the battery?" "There isn't a battery. The electricity comes out of me. Like an electric eel." "Out of you! Oh, really -- ! I don't believe it. Prove it." "All right. Put out your finger. Now I'll touch my finger to yours. I'll try to make the shock "Ouch!" "Convinced?" "Yes! My arm hurts clear up to my shoulder. Could you kill a person?" "I don't think so. I've never tried. I have killed moray eels." "Don't you feel the shock yourself?" "Not the way you did. It feels -- it's hard to say how it feels. It's a sort of thump between my shoulder blades, like being hit with a rubber hammer." "Why do you use a rod? Why don't you just touch the shark with your hand?" "Too risky. When a shark feels a shock he may lash around with his tail or bite blindly in all directions. Or he may take off like a rocket. One can't be sure of what he may do." Ruvani's ordeal -- though she bore it very well -- might have gone on for an hour, as it had often before; but this time she was interrupted. A siren wail from the PA speakers rang over the pool. "Your attention, please," a commanding voice boomed. "Your attention, please. A tropical storm is approaching from the northeast. Clear the beach and pool. Guests will please return to the hotel and remain indoors until further notice. The grilles will be opened and Tritons and dolphins will kindly return to their homes. That is all." There was a general stir of movement on the beach, but it was not a scramble. There had been something vaguely reassuring in the tone in which the computer had said "That is all," as though tropical storms were no novelty to the Barrier-hilthon. As indeed they were not; but the computer's "That is all" had not been quite candid. In fact, hazardous conditions on the beach due to the approaching storm were not likely to occur for another twenty-four hours. The object of the warning had been to move everyone to a safer location, without causing a panic, in order to avoid a danger of an entirely different nature. Ten minutes ago, the Master Computer had stunned the monitors by announcing : Ill '#'hen Jothen Kent had been ' ' flying toward Starved Rock Biological Preserve some hours previously, his attention had been focussed on the Preserve itself, his thoughts wholly centered on Kim. But now Kim was with him, they were flying to make the rocket connection at Chicago, and the Preserve lay far behind on the southwestern horizon, gleaming under a late afternoon sun. Now he was scrutinizing a puzzling phenomenon that had appeared on the skyline ahead. It resembled a low range of mountains, grayish mauve in the distance, that lay along the entire northeast quadrant. Mountains? he could see the usual forested terraces, but the bluffs that separated the terraces were bands of pastel colors. He turned to Kim. "I'm surprised to see mountains here. I thought that all of this region was as flat as a table top." Kim laughed. "Jothen! That's Chicago! Or rather, it's one comer of it." As the helicopter churned steadily across the sky, Jothen stared fascinated as the terraced ramparts seemed to rise higher and higher, and extend themselves endlessly on other hand. Even before the first architectural mountain range was overpassed, still other ridges, peaks, chasms and buttes rose beyond it. Soaring towers and masts, great glittering domes, and skeleton frameworks of new construction materialized in the blue distance. As they advanced farther, the monolothic city spread beneath them from horizon to horizon, a bewildering tracery of green terraces and tinted walls. "I suppose I shouldn't be astonished," Jothen said, rousing himself from his hypnosis with considerable effort. "I've seen some of this in photobooks. But I never appreciated the real bigness of it. I've been holed up in a Disaster City for so long that I've forgotten how jammed the rest of the world is." A great climactic pyramid reared itself before them, a Mount Everest towering above lesser peaks. The sun, low in the west, lighted its terraces and walls with a coppery glow. The forefront of a convoluted, lowering gray cloud-ceiling was gliding above it, carried toward them on the wind off Lake Michigan. As Jothen watched, a rippling misty curtain of rain descended from the cloud, blurred the outlines of the pyramid as with a veil of pearl-gray gauze, and bloomed magically with a giant rainbow ring. The circle of spectral colors formed a softly glowing frame around the pyramid. ( ( XT ow there's a perfect symbol  of our endless argument," he said thoughtfully. "A circular rainbow -- no end, no pot of gold." "And no marriage," Kid said. "This is no world for children." "Some people might think it beautiful. Look out there." "I'm looking. That overgrown pyramid underneath your symbolic rainbow is the Municipal Services Center. It serves this whole urban monstrosity -- three two by the latest count. You see only a fraction of the pyramid; most of it's out of sight, like an iceberg. It goes down to bedrock and deeper. "Somewhere inside there is the headquarters of the Civic Medical Services. I was born there. Every day, about fifteen thousand babies are born there and at each of the nine outlying regional centers. Conveniently next door, there's a branch of the Municipal Crematorium. Their total daily output is about one hundred forty thousand cremations -- a net daily population increase of ten thousand. And for what? So this frightful human termitary -- vitrolith and glastic and metal, pipes and cables and computers, escalators and elevators and moving floors -- can go on growing bigger and bigger, higher and higher, deeper and deeper, forever!" "Take it easy," Jothen said. The helicopter flew into the curtain of rain and the rainbow circle vanished. Kim plowed on without noticing. "Do you have any idea how big this town is? It runs northward to Sturgeon Bay and westward halfway across Wisconsin high points on the west wall you can see the Mississippi on a clear day. It spreads fifty or sixty miles diana, and then on up into southern Michigan. Recently it annexed Lansing. The east wall is only about fifteen miles from the west wall of Detroit. It's an ugly tumor on the face of the Earth -- and we're the viruses that created it. I don't fancy the idea of increasing the virus population. There are too damn many now." The helicopter veered around the pyramid. Only the higher pinnacles of Chicago's jagged roofscape still smoldered in the orange-red light of the fading sunset. The rain had ceased. Venus shone like a pale emerald in the blue-green ribbon of unclouded sky in the west. Along the eastward rim of the world constellations of colored lights flashed into being -- some shining steadily, others blinking a coded rhythm. They marked the far-flung flyports along the lake front, one of which sheltered their rocket shuttle. "People aren't viruses," Jothen said. "People have hearts and minds. All right, Chicago has a That's another way of saying that it possesses more than three billion minds." "Only a small percentage of which are being used for anything," Kim said. "The rest are just contented-animal minds, dreaming on warm cushions. Cozy, but -- " ( ( T) ut that's not the whole story. There are degrees of creativity. Most people are creative in some degree. Their abilities may range from a simple knack of making up stories and jingles for their children, or for decorating an apartment, up to the genius level. If there's one genius for every hundred thousand people in Chicago, that's -- mm -- three hundred thousand. On the basis of the world populahigh-level productive minds. "Of course only a relative handful is keeping us fed, housed, healthy, literate. But why stop imaginative, creative work -- some of it revolutionary, some of it trivial -- on their own initiative simply because they can't endure idleness. There are amateur mathematicians, astronomers, potters, botanists, historians. There's a group in Paris that has revived the art of printing on silicose; I've seen some of their books, and they're stunning. There's Doctor Matouf and his silverfish. Never underestimate the Doctor Matoufs. Who knows what could come of all this activity -- this spare-time, just-for-fun activity?" Kim looked at him speculatively for what seemed quite a long time. At last she said: "Jo, what led you into all this?" "My work only occupies part of my time. Mostly it's a matter of routine inspection and reports. If a leaky valve needs replacing, it's an event. The rest of the time, I read -- just-for-fun. And it seems to me that the city isn't just a malignant growth running wild. It's like the rest of the world -- a hive of creative brains. Does anyone have the right to refuse to marry and beget minds? The world needs all it can get, even if ninety-nine percent do little more than vegetate." "For your information, Jothen," Kim said deliberately, "you have a one-track mind." "If that's your argument-in-rebuttal, I can't give it a very high rating," Jothen said. "The only trouble is, any kind of No is still a No. Well, I'll stop spoiling your vacation for a while at least. We're touching down; next stop, Cedros Island -- and then the Reef." IV F rom the moment of the Master Computer's stunning announcement, the monitors were tied up in emergency actions and ia trying to locate the malfunction in the Computer that had generated the announcement. It had to be a malfunction. But it was a first-magnitude malfunction, and the monitors were taking no chances. The check-out of guests was proceeding as usual. Guests en route to the Barrier-hilthon had been halted in transit. The watertight doors of all entrances had been closed and secured. Only the check-out exits remained open. Transportation Corporation had been informed that evacuation of the hotel might be necessary. The reports relayed by the Master Computer indicated an increasing loss of co-ordination of its subsidiaries. The Barrierhilthon was sinking... The Barrier-hilthon was not sinking; it was still securely embedded in the bottom ooze... The aquaphone switchboard had ceased to function, thereby blocking underwater communication with submersible ferries and shore installations... Computer #B (in charge of Ballast) had activated all pumps at full capacity and was emptying the ballast tanks... Communications were broken between the Master Computer and Computer #B... All off-duty shifts of the maintenance staff had been recalled and the combined force was searching for the malfunction. One task force had been ordered to stop the pumps manually. The series of doors leading to the Manual Pump Control Center had been closed by Computer #B and had to be manually opened -- only to be closed again by Computer #B, doggedly following the electronic command, "Activate all pumps and keep them going until ordered to stop." As the technicians checked and counterchecked the multi-million components of the Barrierhilthon it became evident that there was not one malfunction but several. The hotel was afflicted by the computorial equivalent of schizophrenia. The monitors bypassed the Master Computer and issued a direct-line order to Maintenance Supervision: "Kill Computer #B and stop the pumps." simple matter of shutting off its power supply. Stopping the pumps was a more complex operation. There were two thousand pumps and they could be shut off only in sector units. To maintain the Barrier-hilthon's axis in a precisely vertical position it was necessary that they be stopped in a definite sequence. It was an operation that never before had been manually performed. When the newly built Barrier-hilthon had been lowered into its present position the ballast tanks had been filled under the control of the computers. Since that day only slight automatic adjustments in buoyancy were necessary to compensate for the daily tidal cycle. The possibility that the Barrier-hilthon might spontaneously attempt to become free-floating had not been anticipated; the designers had envisioned nothing more than local flooding due to structural failure. Now, during the first stages of the manual shut-down of the entire ballast-pump installation, great volumes of water continued to be discharged and the Barrier-hilthon's buoyancy increased. The guests of the hotel, still happily unaware of the disaster that was taking shape, paid little heed to the transient shudders that quivered through the steel fabric of their automated microcosm. The few who noted them ascribed them to the impact of breakers on the windward sea wall. But the monitors knew otherwise. The steel globe had detached itself from the adhesive bottom ooze and was just barely afloat in its bowl-shaped emplacement. Hphe technicians manning the pump controls lacked the smooth co-ordination of Computer #B. Their eyes were fixed on the tilt gauges, watching the axis of the Barrier-hilthon for slight departures from the vertical. Repeated minute tiltings and hasty compensations created an atmosphere of growing urgency tinged with panic. The result was a jittery, exaggerated caution and increasing slowness in their operations. Meanwhile the Barrier-hilthon floated higher and higher. The jutting flange that supported the beach and swimming pool was more than one hundred feet above water level, exposing its underside and a zone of the spherical hull encrusted with sea growths. The water from the pool poured through the grilles in noisy cascades. The docks for hydrofoil and submersible ferries, that transported guests to and from the mainland, were likewise above water level. Hotel guests were ordered to retire to their rooms, to remain there until called, and to prepare for departure. During these events a highspeed colloquy was taking place between the Barrier-hilthon's Master Computer and the Master Computer at the Triton-operated base known as the Lizard Island Complex, inside of the Reef. "Barrier-hilthon to Lizard Island. Emergency. We are about to become free-floating due to computer malfunctions. Ferry docks are above water level. Evacuation is proceeding via flyport only, imposing ten times normal load. Need all available helicopters and hovercraft." The same appeal was transmitted to Transcorp by way of Prime Center. But the Lizard Island Tritons had further plans for speeding the evacuation. "Lizard Island to Cairns' Reef. Emergency. Relay to satellite reefs. Barrier-hilthon will soon be adrift and is being evacuated. Send all submersible ferries to cooperate with aircraft. Sea is too rough for hydrofoils. Evacuees will be transferred from flyport to submersibles via rescue slings." "Lizard Island to Snake Reef. Emergency. Relay..." "Lizard Island to Osprey Reef. Emergency..." The first flights of aircraft from Lizard Island and Snake Reef arrived at the flyport an hour ahead of the flight dispatched by Transcorp from the mainland. At the same time the Barrier-hilthon swam clear of her emplacement crater. Under the mounting force of the southwesterly wind her enormous mass yielded sluggishly and began a creeping, reluctant drift toward the northeast and deeper water. All of her more massive installation -- power plant, sea water distillery, fresh water storage, sewage processing -- were in her lower levels. Her center of gravity was still below the water line. She moved with the ponderous steadiness of an iceberg, ignoring the increasing roughness of the sea. Maintenance Supervision reported to the monitors that one malfunctioning module had been located and replaced, and that automatic pump control was restored. The pumps were stopped and the hotel continued her drift with the elevation of the outdoor beach and pool -- now completely drained -- at slightly more than three hundred feet above their normal level. L izard Island received another distress call from the hotel's Master Computer. "Barrier-hilthon to Lizard Island. We have been hit by a fiftymile gust. Aerodynamic force on outdoor swimming pool flange tilted vertical axis two tenths of one degree, causing oscillation of water in indoor swimming pool, which overflowed into adjacent halls. We are draining indoor pool. Increasing wind may cause dangerous rolling. We must resubmerge partly or completely to normal level. Take a fix on our position and give us probability of sunken crags or reefs in our extrapolated course." The reply came after a momentary pause while the Lizard Island computer consulted its electronic memory and triangulated the Barrier-hilthon's position with radio direction finders. "Lizard Island to Barrier-hilthon. Existing depth charts for your location are obsolete. Recent collapse of submarine cliff and extensive mud slides have drastically altered bottom contours. Resurvey incomplete. There was a submerged granite peak very close to your extrapolated course. If its position and depth are the same as before you may collide with it whether you submerge or not." The removal of evacuees by aircraft and rescue sling was proceeding from the outdoor beach as well as from the flyport. The operation was hampered by the roughness of the sea and rising wind. The transfer from swaying rescue slings to rolling and pitching submersibles had to be made in the water by swimming Tritons, who removed the occupants of the slings in a welter of waves and foam and swam with them to the submersibles where Triton hands hauled them aboard. The rate of transfer was frighteningly slow. In four hours approximately five thousand had been evacuated, and darkness had fallen. The tossing navigation lights of submersibles clustered around the Barrier-hilthon like a swarm of red and green fireflies. The beams of their searchlights played over her striped dome, probed the air above for descending aircraft, swept to and fro over the tumbling waves. Since she had not been designed as a navigable sea-going vessel the Barrier-hilthon possessed no motive power, no rudder, and no sounding devices, obstacle detectors, or other navigation aids. The monitors were kept informed by the Lizard Island computer of their position and course with reference to the last charted position of the sunken crag. All occupants of the hotel had been advised of the probable collision and were in their rooms with the water-tight doors closed and secured. Everyone was waiting, listening for the first premonitory shock or sound. The steel globe had become, in effect, one vast, blind, intently listening entity. nphe granite crag, studded with uneven rocky fangs, was the visible portion of a larger mass that lay buried in mud and coral sand -- one corner of a great block that had been detached and upended by some ancient earthquake. Its total bulk, had it been visible, would have dwarfed the Barrier-hilthon. And it had changed in neither depth nor position. The Barrier-hilthon bore down upon the sunken menace with deliberate inexorable slowness. Her rounded side grazed its spiked and saw-edged summit. The granite plowed with grinding and crunching din through her outer and inner skins, inflicting a monstrous diagonal wound eleven hundred feet long. The rending metal emitted a jagged, rasping scream like the cry of some great beast in agony, then trailed off into a quavering squeal. Rumbling torrents of bubbles erupted from the gash and raced upward. The Barrier-hilthon reeled, and the people in her rooms were thrown upon the sloping floors. At the first impact the hotel computers reacted with lightning swiftness. Each sector of every level was sealed off from the others. The axial service stack was sealed off from the rest of the structure. The doors to the beach and the flyport were closed. Sectors of the eighth, ninth and tenth levels were flooded; the unbalanced globe changed its direction of tilt. The hotel went under swiftly. The sea poured over the sea wall and flooded the beach. The picturesque driftwood fragments floated away. A narrowing ring of foam climbed the red, white, and blue dome until the summit of the radio and video aerial atop the flyport control tower disappeared in an eddy of foam and driftwood. The pumps shifted ballast at top speed; the hotel gradually righted herself and came to rest on the oozy bottom with the top of her control tower one hundred and fifty feet below the surface. Those who had been waiting on the windswept airfield of the flyport and on the outdoor beach had been washed away and left floundering in the stormy nocturnal sea. Each felt that his last moment of life had come. But the sleek flanks of dolphins rose on either side, pressed against him, and bore him up. The hands of Tritons reached up from below, supported him, and towed him toward the wave-tossed submersibles. A preliminary report on the number of known casualties, the extent of the damage to the Barrier-hilthon, and the state of its automatic services had been delivered to the monitors by the Master Computer. The flood of telephone calls from terrified guests was being handled by computers in the lower echelons of the electronic hierarchy. A moment of silence prevailed in the control room. The submergence of the flyport aerial had closed that avenue of communication with the outside world. The thoughts of all twenty-five monitors were essentially, "What now? What do we do next?" nphe Master Computer spoke to Mon'tor One, "You have a call from the flyport control tower. Do you wish to receive it?" "The control tower! But there's no one there! We ordered everyone out before we went under." "There is someone there now. Will you take the call?" "By all means. Put them on." The face of a blonde young woman appeared on the vidscreen in front of Monitor One. A lightweight scuba mask with minuscule oxygen tanks on either side was pushed back on her forehead. "Hello, Control Room!" she called. "What has happened down there? Is it very bad?" "Bad enough, but better than we expected. But who are you and how did you get into the control tower?" "Perhaps you don't know me. I'm Dorthy Summer, head of Submarine Products Corporaderwater speedboat -- with a Triton rescue team. They're going to inspect the damage to your hull and take measurements so we can put a patch on it. As to how we got in, there's a hatch in the roof of the control tower. We came in through that." "That's the access hatch to the aerial. How did you open it without flooding the place?" "We put a scapelock over the hatch and came in." "A scapelock?" "A prefab escape airlock. Do you mind if we come down? We're practically dry by now. We won't leave a wet trail. We'd like to take a quick look around and talk to whomever is available." "I'll talk to you. We're just about to change shifts. My name's Defabio. I'll be in the Monitors' Lounge. All our transport systems are operating -- except in the flooded sectors. Watch the location maps along the way. If you get lost use the nearest house phone and ask for Guide Service. The Level Computer will give you all the information you may need." When Defabio greeted Dorthy in the Monitors' Lounge she was accompanied by a Triton whom she introduced as Tioru. Dorthy was sheathed in an insulated heat-retaining all-over suit of fluorescent orange-yellow plastic with webbing between the fingers. Tioru, like his fellow Tritons, was not chilled by prolonged exposure to water temperatures down to fifteen degrees Centigrade and was clad only in a yellow cincture. A green fiberglass cylinder with closed ends was suspended from a nylon cord around his neck. "What's in the case?" asked Defabio. "Video tape," replied Dorthy. "I suggest that it be shown on your intercom system to everyone in the hotel. Then they'll know what we propose to do. It should raise their morale, and I suspect that it needs raising." i (, A nd what do you propose totdo?" Defabio inquired. "Since this will be a project conceived and executed by Tritons I feel that Tioru should tell you." "Thank you," said Tioru, bowing slightly to Dorthy, then to Defabio. "There are two things that we can begin to do at once. First, to get all of your people out of the Barrier-hilthon. Second, to repair the damage to your hull. You have something more and the only way out, at present, is through the scapelock. We won't consider trying to get everyone out through that. It would be like draining a thousand-gallon tank through a pinhole. You'll need more scapelocks." Defabio interrupted, "That scapelock on the control tower -- how did you attach it without letting in water?" 'A scapelock is an eight-foot dome with an airlock on top. We cemented the dome to the roof with a metal-to-metal adhesive that hardens rapidly even under water. You couldn't pull it loose now without taking part of the roof with it. A built-in pump empties the water out of the dome and the airlock. We went through the airlock and opened the hatch. No problem. "We estimate that we can install five hundred scapelocks on your flyport landing field without crowding." "Five hundred! Where can you get five hundred scapelocks on such short notice?" "We have a plant on Lizard Island that makes them, and a number of other things. We have a stock of about one hundred there and have begun making more around the clock. There are fifty more stored at Cairns' Reef. We have ordered others to be brought in by unmanned rockets from Fiji and the Andaman Islands. Still others are available in the Bahamas. Perhaps we won't need five hundred. We won't know until we have clocked the operation. We'll have to cut a hole through your airfield under each scapelock. We've requested permission from Transcorp to do this. It came through half an hour ago. I have a transcript for your files." "Hold on!" protested Defabio. "The top of the control tower is one hundred and fifty feet down; the airfield, about four hundred. You can't shove people out through your scapelocks at that depth. The water's cold, and the pressure is around twelve atmospheres. They'd drown before they reach the surface. If they didn't die of fright first. This is the first time in their lives that most of them have been outside their native cities. Many of them have never been more than a few miles from their apartment until now. And about ninety percent of them can't swim." At this point Dorthy broke in. "The video tape will prepare everyone for the escape routine. And we'll put miniscubas on them. Like I'm wearing now. The little cylinders hold twenty minutes oxygen supply. They were made for Drylanders' use during brief underwater activity -- when transferring from one sub to another while both are submerged, for example." 'Tpioru continued, "Each person will receive a five minute air-pressure buildup in the scapelock. Outside there'll be a Triton or a dolphin waiting. When he emerges he'll be hauled up to a sub and through its airlock before he can count ten. He won't be exposed to the cold and pressure for long, and he won't have to go all the way to the surface. The subs will be only forty or fifty feet above your airfield. It's fortunate that you're down as deep as you are. It's blowing fifty miles an hour up above. "As soon as one sub has a capacity load it will move out and another one will move in. There'll be a traffic control system for subs set up in your control tower. We'll bring our own aquaphone T and R equipment. And we're setting up receiving centers on the mainland for your people. "Now -- casualties. How many casualties do you have?" "The casualty check is still going on," replied Defabio gloomily. "We have twenty-three deaths that we know of. And a list of fractures and dislocations a yard long. Over two hundred when I came off duty. We can't get to the ones in the flooded sectors. The rooms are tight but the halls are full of water under about twenty-eight-hundred-foot depth pressure. We can feed them via the autoservers as usual, and send in first aid materials through the parcel conveyor tubes. We can give them first aid instructions by vidphone, provide music and #-V movies, and that's all." "We'll take out the accessible casualties first," Tioru said. "The inaccessible ones will have to remain inaccessible for a while. We can't open the rooms in the flooded sectors until we can pump the water out of the halls, and we can't pump the water out of the halls until we've repaired , the hull." "There's another thing," Defabio added. "Small children and babies. We have forty-seven newborns in our maternity ward -- which is in an upper level, happily, so it's not flooded -- and swarms of older kids." "We've thought of them. We have something special. You'll see. Don't worry." "Don't worry!" Defabio said with a wry gesture; but of course he had to trust Dorthy, if not the Triton. He stood up. "This will take a full-scale meeting of the monitors to make it official, but I'll take it upon myself to approve the whole project. No one in his right mind could object. We too would like to get out of here alive. I'll put your video tape on our intra-mural network at once. You notify your Triton HQ to get the rescue operation rolling." Then he paused, looking momentarily non-plussed. He said: "How does one say 'Thank plus people?" Tioru said gently: "To begin with, you wait until there's something to thank us for." V Tphe rocket carrying Jothen and Kim had traversed five time zones and was entering the sixth. During the first half of the flight they had seen little otner than the immense expanse of open sea -- a world of blue water and armadas of clouds that, seen from an altitude of three hundred miles, were shreds of white fluff that seemed to rest on the blue. In the latter half of the flight they viewed, from an apparent altitude of five hundred feet, mile after mile of ocean that was churned into transient rosettes of foam by leaping fish -- a minute fraction of the incalculable horde beneath the surface. The sea twinkled with the flashing myriads of silver-scaled bodies. A floating fish-processing plant cruised slowly through the agitated waters, reaping a living harvest. Once they sighted a herd of whales, fringed by dolphins -- a curiously pastoral sight. Now the Zoomvision viewers showed irregular green shapes embossed upon the blue field, each bordered by a white line of beach and surf. Scattered among the lush islands were the white rings and crescents and filagree patterns of reefs and atolls. "If we're on schedule we should be near the Solomon Islands," Jothen said. "I think I can see a few of them strung out along the horizon. And there's something a bit more spectacular. Take a look, Kim." "I see some elongated islands," Kim said, "and a whirlpool of clouds coming up over the rim of the Earth. It's like a scale model of a spiral galaxy." "It's the topside of a typhoon. This one must have built up so fast that it got out of hand before the Weatherwatch boys could spike it. I hope Osprey Reef is well out of it." "Is that where the Triton family's to meet us? What do you know about them?" "Very little. There are three of them. The father's name is Storm, which I hope isn't prophetic. He's an assistant to Dorthy Summer, the head of Submarine Products. Their home is on a coral islet they call Seahorse Reef. It's part of the outer Barrier. I... I'm afraid I told Storm we might be on our honeymoon." "You," Kim said, "are absolutely incorrigible." "I've been practicing," Jothen admitted. But he was given no chance to pursue the subject further. "My viewer's gone dark," Kim announced plaintively. "So has mine. We must be starting re-entry." # CT'm sorry to have to tell you A this," Storm said, "but something has happened that alters all of our plans. We are not going to be very good hosts, I'm afraid, and your vacation may not be very restful." Jothen found it difficult not to stare at Storm's rhythmically falling tears -- all the Tritons wept mechanically when out of water, a transitional defect breeding had yet to remedy -- and his fleshy, plume-shaped auditory antennae, constantly aquiver. He did not seem to disturb Kim, but then she was used to biological oddity. "Nothing personal, I hope?" she said. "No. A disaster at the Barrierhilthon. Let's board the s-ub and then I'll tell you the whole story." Storm's Sea Dart was a slender five-man craft propelled by centrifugally driven water jets. He took her down to five fathoms and left the rocket port's harbor by an underwater exit. Here the conning tower's vidscreen showed only a dusky green obscurity. "You'll find this hard to believe, and I'll not blame you," the Triton said. "But briefly, the storm you saw, plus a computer malfunction, floated the hotel out of its moorings and drove it into a submerged cliff. It went down like a stone -- about a mile down, which isn't too bad considering that the hotel itself's thirty-five hundred feet in diameter, but bad enough. There were time -- the worst marine disaster in history, unless we can get them out." "Get them out!" Jothen said. 'But the hull -- the depth pressure -- " "The hull can take it," Storm said. "The hotel was built with a safety factor of five; it's mostly monocrystal iron fifty-six. The main problem is that the rescue area's at sixty fathoms. Needless to say we're working around the clock. And it occurred to me, Mr. Kent, that since disasters are in a sense your profession, you might like a look at what's going on." "I would indeed. Kim?" "Of course." She looked out at the murky water. "But will we be able to see anything?" "Oh, the flyport -- that's the work area -- is illuminated. I can't take you down to see the repair crew at work on the damaged hull, though. That's beyond the safe limits for this boat." The Sea Dart dived on a long slant, and the vidscreen darkened to a deep-violet-blue. A nebulous, ghostly area of greenish luminescence appeared on the screen. "There it is," Storm said. "We have lights moored all around the flyport." "Those poor people," Kim said. "It gives me claustrophobia just to think of being in that thing." "Me too," Jothen said. "Especially when I remember that you wanted to go there." "But not on a honeymoon," she said, startling from Storm a brief glance of pure bafflement. r T"he luminous area slowly expanded as the Sea Dart approached. It emerged from the aqueous haze and became the circular yellow expanse of the flyport, brightly lighted by a ring of buoyant shining globes, each reinforced with a cage-like gridwork of curved ribs. The globes were anchored around the rim of the airfield by mooring cables which were delineated by the red dots of marker lights. The field had been divided by lines of phosphorescent violet paint into a huge checkerboard whose squares were identified by shining violet numerals. Many of the squares were occupied by a scapelock -- a squat dome surmounted by a chimney-like airlock. Two of the nearer airlocks were connected to what appeared to be either thick cables or flexible pipelines that rose at a steep angle into the deep blue darkness. They undulated lazily and were studded with equidistant round red marker lights. In reply to Jothen's inquiry, Storm explained. "You might call them a pair of supersnorkel tubes. When the hull was ripped open the Barrier-hilthon lost a great volume of air. Every time we open a scapelock it loses some air. The people in the hotel consume oxygen. There is a reserve of compressed oxygen in the hotel but we want to conserve it. So air is pumped into the hotel's ventilating system through one pipeline and out of it through the other. The pipes are metal but long enough to have some flexibility. The pumps are mounted on motorized barges at the surface; they can maintain themselves in nearly constant positions against the wind and current." The dark masses of five submersible ferries hovered at a low altitude above the flyport like giant sharks -- sharks with red and green navigation lights instead of eyes. Scores of Tritons and dolphins were swimming in the space between scapelocks and ferries. With a start of surprise Jothen realized the true magnitude of the scene by observing the apparently diminutive size of the swimming shapes. Periodically a scapelock opened and disgorged a flurry of bubbles in a glow of light, to be followed by an awkwardly swimming human figure wearing a miniscuba mask. Immediately a Triton seized the swimmer and drew him rapidly upward toward a submersible. The lighted orifice of an airlock opened on the underside of the vessel's hull, the Triton thrust his protege into the opening, waited until the airlock closed, and then swam down to his assigned scapelock. A submersible freighter floated down from the upper darkness and came to rest at a level above the ferries. An oversize circular port gaped open in its belly, emitting a bluish light, and from it a scrapelock descended at the end of a cable. A squad of Tritons converged on the scapelock, accompanied it during its descent to the airfield, and guided it to the center of a numbered square. "We have been installing scapelocks since twenty-one hours last night," remarked Storm. "There are fifty scapelocks in this load. We can install a scapelock and have it operating in twenty minutes and hope to cut it to fifteen. We have slightly less than one hundred operating but the evacuation is still too slow. According to the latest report fifteen thousand tw r o hundred people have been taken out." J othen did some rapid mental arithmetic. "At that rate it will take over one hundred days to evacuate everyone." "True," replied Storm. "But the rate will increase as more scapelocks go into operation and as the teamwork improves. But we don't plan to rely on scapelocks alone. We are rushing construction of a larger model that a freighter can lock onto with its cargo airlock. Then we can deliver provisions directly into the Barrier-hilthon on a conveyor and take on a steady flow of passengers at the same time, through the same airlock, with a mobile escalator." "Provisions. That would be a problem," reflected Jothen. "How much does the hotel have?" "Not enough. Routinely they carry a two days' supply. They're rationing what they have." "I take it that the bulk food containers are too big to go through a scapelock?" "Correct." "Why not put the Barrier-hilthon on a ninety percent liquid diet? Pump it in. Through a pipeline. Soups. Purees. Low viscosity pastes. It will be faster than unloading package goods. Then the other provisions will stretch further." Storm smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand. "Of course!" he exclaimed. "We can code it Project Quickflow. We have all the heavy duty plastic pipe that we need, at Lizard Island. We were laying an underwater pipeline when the Barrier-hilthon sank." "An underwater pipeline? For what?" asked Kim. "It's a Deep Water Safari project. Its object is to pump oxygenated water to a pilot-scale slime culture at the five hundred fathom level. We transferred the Safari people down here as soon as we heard that the Barrierhilthon had gone under." After explaining the Deep Water Safari and the slime culture project to Kim and Jothen, Storm called Lizard Island and gave orders which inaugurated Project Quickflow. "We must move along," Storm said. "I have some inspections to make and you have seen everything here that -- No! You haven't! One more thing. See that flashing light?" A blue-green light was blinking rapidly at the summit of one of the scapelocks. "What does that mean?" inquired Kim. "It means that whatever comes out is to be given special care and attention," replied Storm. "We'll cruise along until we are closer to it." The scapelock was near the edge of the airfield. Storm halted the Sea Dart so that they were within fifty or sixty feet of the winking light. Three dolphins and a Triton were circling around it. The hatch of the airlock swung open, releasing the usual cloud of bubbles. A transparent sphere, ribbed with a grid of reinforcing rods, began to float out of the airlock. A miniature blinking glow panel illuminated the interior of the sphere. "It looks like one of the airfield light globes," remarked Kim. "It is one of the same type but with most of the glow lining removed, and a heater and other modifications added," Storm, said. nphe sphere was enclosed in a net bag with a line attached. A dophin darted in, seized the line in its mouth, and soared toward the nearest submersible, the sphere floating above it like a balloon. Inside the sphere, stirring restlessly in a nest of white silicose, was a small, red, wrinkled baby. "Well -- !" ejaculated Kim. "How did that happen to be in the Barrier-hilthon? It looks as if it were bom yesterday." "It may have been," agreed Storm. "Or an hour or two ago. I understand that the maternity ward had over fifty of them when the hotel sank." "What were the parents thinking of?" marveled Kim. "They must have known... Why didn't they stay at home?" "When one makes a reservation at the Barrier-hilthon three or four years in advance one doesn't stay at home," replied Storm. "One goes ahead with one's v acation and has the baby at the Barrier-hilthon. It gives the parents something to boast about. The child also, when it's older. Now, who wants to go where? I'm about to make an inspection tour of the operation inside the Barrier-hilthon. Would either or both of you care to accompany me?" Jothen spoke quickly. "I would." Kim shuddered. "Not I. I've seen enough of this gloomy underwater world. I'd rather go to Seahorse Reef and watch the surf." A call via aquaphone to the Barrier-hilthon enabled Storm to locate another Triton who agreed to convey Kim to the Reef in the Sea Dart. Jothen felt powerfully that he ought to go with her, after all; but thus far he had no reason to suppose sticking by her would advance his cause any further than parting from her for a while -- and the opportunity before him now was one that would never be repeated. Jothen experienced his first miniscuba transfer when he accompanied Storm into the Barrier-hilthon by way of the scapelock on the roof of the flyport control tower. Two recorded messages were awaiting Storm at his temporary office in the hotel. One was from Maintenance Supervision with the information that repairs to the hull had reached a stage that permitted the opening of one of the flooded sectors, Number Seven in Level Ten. The other message, from the Council of Monitors, stated: "All computer malfunctions have been traced. Total number, seven; four of them in the Master Computer. Examination of the affected modules show that the cause was the same in every case -- a short circuit caused by a small insect lying across two or more segments of the printed circuits. All were either dead or moribund when found. A specimen is being forwarded to your message receiving station. Still others have been found in the ventilation ducts. Presumably they were distributed through Hie hotel by this means. Their source is unknown." The specimen was embedded in a square of clear plastic. It was a small, bristly, silvery-white creature less than half an inch long. VI ttould things like this sink the Barrier-hilthon?" demanded Jothen incredulously. "It would seem that they did," Storm replied. "Another question: How did they come here? I wonder if the Barrier-hilthon has an entomologist among its guests?" The word "entomologist" rang a bell of memory in Jothen's mind. He said, "There might be one by the name of Doctor Kemal Matouf. Ask the Guest Register Computer if he's still here." Storm was informed by the computer that Doctor Matouf had been assigned to Room Ninety-Seven, Block Six, Zone Eight, Floor Five, Sector Seven, Level Ten; that this section of the hotel contained rooms provided with basic laboratory facilities for the convenience of guests on scientific missions; and that after the sinking of the hotel Doctor Matouf had ceased to answer his vidphone. "Sector Seven, Level Ten," repeated Storm. "That's the one that has been reopened. I'll make a survey of the situation there and we can look in on Doctor Matouf at the same time. Let's hope that he's alive." Jothen followed Storm through a maze of halls and chambers directly beneath the airfield. Here a team of Tritons was preparing a throng of hotel guests for their transit through the scapelocks. The air rang with the clamor of many voices. The Tritons were adjusting miniscubas, repeating last-minute instructions, allaying the fears of the timid. From this focus of activity an automatic elevator took Jothen and Storm to Level Ten -- a two thousand foot plunge. The halls in Sector Seven were wet and permeated by a dank fishy odor. Clean-up crews were clearing the halls of assorted fish, crabs, streamers of seaweed, jellyfish blobs, sand, and other marine miscellany. Many rooms were untenanted, with doors ajar; their occupants had been moved to vacated rooms on higher levels. Jothen stepped warily around a small octopus that lay upon the floor, squirming feebly, just as Storm halted before a closed door bearing the number #-#-#-#-#. "Here we are," said Storm. "This is the doctor's room." He pulled on the door handle but the door was immovable. "HU have to violate his privacy by unlocking his door and walking in. It's possible he may not be alive to resent it. An imperfect weld, a ruptured service conduit, and the sea would have flooded his room in an instant." Storm unlocked the watertight door and pulled it open, revealing a brightly lit and incredibly cluttered room. A swarthy, heavy-set man looked up from the trace on the ribbon of paper issuing from the infra-red spectrophotometer clamped to a built-in work table beside him. His face expressed anger. "Is it your customary behavior to burst into the rooms of others, uninvited?" he demanded. "By no means," replied Storm. "Are you Doctor Matouf?" "Of course I'm Doctor Matouf! Who are you?" "My name is Storm. I'm supervising the Barrier-hilthon rescue operation under Doctor Summer of Submarine Products. It has been impossible to get a response from you for many hours although repeated calls were made by phone. It was suspected that you might be dead." "You received no response because I disconnected the phone. Some prankster annoyed me with incessant calls about the hotel sinking. Obviously it can't sink when it's already on the bottom." "It floated free and then sank. It rolled badly a few times. Didn't you notice that?" "There was an earthquake. I noticed that. They're not uncommon in this part of the world. The spectrophotometer is securely mounted and suffered no damage, so I saw no reason to be alarmed." A sank, just look into the hall," Jothen suggested. "There's an octopus with arms a foot long just outside of your door." The doctor's only response was a look of scornful disbelief. Storm held out the plastic square containing the specimen, and said, "Several of these creatures got into the computers and caused short circuits. Then all the trouble happened. Do you know anything about it?" "Certainly I do. It's a silverfish, Lepisma saccharina, one of the commonest species of Thyaanura. I have two cultures of them here, as well as several other species. I am making a study of the blood proteins of the entire order." Further questing revealed that three cultures of saccharina had been sent to Doctor Matouf by a North American collaborator "in Hunger Rock, or perhaps it was Starved Rock"; that during Doctor Matouf's recent absence the temporary custodian of the cultures had spilled the contents of a breeding jar; and that since then the doctor's room had been inhabited by an indefinite number of roving silverfish. The insects were not exactly a surprise to Jothen, not after finding that Dr. Matouf was indeed still aboard the hotel -- though never having seen a silverfish before, he had expected something decidedly more fishlike. Nevertheless, he was pleased to see them. Besides having shipwrecked the Barrier-hilthon, the minute, primitive creatures had given him an inspiration that he was beginning to minx was almost diabolical. On departing from Doctor Matouf's room they discovered that the octopus had shifted its position and was now directly in the doorway. Storm bent over, picked it up by the tip of one tentacle, regarded the writhing mass thoughtfully, and tossed it into the hall. Jothen glanced back at Doctor Matouf. He was sitting in a state of complete immobility, wide eyed, with his eyebrows at maximum elevation. Storm and Jothen continued their tour of Sector Seven and discovered an emergency clinic established in a suite of connecting rooms. To Jothen's surprise it was staffed entirely by Tritons. It had not occurred to him that the Tritons would have their own physicians and surgeons. A steady stream of casualties flowed in for treatment. Another stream flowed out, to be transported to the Barrier-hilthon hospital in the upper levels. "Does the hospital have room for all of them?" Jothen asked. "No. It's overcrowded. The cases with minor injuries go out through the scapelocks like everyone else. Fortunately they're the majority. The cases who can't be put through a scapelock with safety are kept here. They'll have to wait until we have our lock-on two-way cargo airlock in operation. Then they can be put aboard a freighter." "What about the dead?" "The dead can wait. They're in the morgue under refrigeration." S torm's office computer had recorded two more messages for him when he and Jothen returned to Level Ten. One message was an Evacuation Progress Report : "One hundred five scapelocks in operation. Rate of transfer of evacuees, six hundred thirty per hour, fifteen thousand one hundred twenty per day. With maximum number of five hundred scapelocks rate will be sixty thousand per day. The lock-on cargo-lock will add an estimated three thousand per day." Storm rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Still not enough. At that rate it will take about four weeks to get everyone out. We'll need more lock-on cargo-locks." The second message was from the sewage processing plant: "How soon will movement of outbound cargo be feasible? We are storing compressed blocks of processed sewage solids in vacated rooms and halls immediately above us. Storage problem not yet critical but suggest early removal to mainland fertilizer plant for esthetic reasons." "How did they dispose of the processed solids under normal conditions?" Jothen inquired. "A special freighter came every day and removed the accumulation." "Isn't there some provision for discharging sewage into the sea in an emergency?" "No. The designers of the Barrier-hilthon didn't foresee this kind of an emergency any more than they foresaw that a day would come when the hotel would have to ration its food supply. And speaking of food, you must be famished. I'm keeping my promise that I would not be an ideal host. I can offer you two choices: Eat here in the hotel, in which case you'll receive a variety but in small quantity; or I can get someone to take you to our home where you may help yourself to our autoserver and have both plenty and diversity," Storm said. "I'll wait a little longer and have the plenty and diversity," Jothen decided. Besides -- he did not add -- his own personal silverfish was ready to hatch now, and, as he well knew, the Barrier-Hilthon had already had its fill of those. He made the short passage to Seahorse Reef on a hovercraft that was en route from the snorkel barges to Lizard Island. Darkness had fallen, the sky had moon flooded sky and sea. The outer Reef was a low, dark, irregular wall athwart their course. An endless succession of rollers marched out of the northeast, moonlight glistening on their rounded contours. The rollers struck the Reef at an oblique angle, creating a parade of ghostly white spume geysers that traveled along the Reef from north to south. Seaward, the flashes of rocket launchings on Osprey Reef, below the horizon, flared and died like heat lightning. Lizard Island, the Triton industrial center, lay westward ablaze with lights on the horizon of the lagoon behind the Barrier. The hovercraft deposited Jothen on Seahorse Reef and churned away across the moonlight water, riding above a misty cloud of spray hurled into the air by the downblast of its rotors. The sound of its passage receded, became a pulsing hum, and ceased. Seahorse Reef was enveloped by a hushed, moonlit serenity -- accented but not disturbed by the incessant march of spouting surf fountains that rushed along the coral ramparts of the Barrier with a rhythmic seething sound. Jothen felt that he had never seen such a luminous expanse of sea, such an immense arch of sky, such a radiant moon. TT e spotted Storm's home about  one hundred yards distant on the inner shore of the islet. It would have seemed no more than a rounded hummock of coral if its artificial nature had not been indicated by a lighted oval window and -- on its summit -- a rotating beacon that flashed alternately green and white. Sea shells crunched under his feet as he walked toward it over the sparkling coral sand. He became aware of a murmur of voices and an occasional burst of laughter. He recognized Kim's voice. He rounded a moss-covered corner of the house and discovered Kim and a Triton girl sitting on a small flat-topped peninsula of coral that extended into the lagoon like a jetty. A dolphin's head was bobbing up and down in the water, squeaking and chirping. "Oh, there you are -- finally! Jothen, this is Storm's daughter, Ruvani." The dolphin whistled sharply. "You forgot someone," Ruvani said, laughing. "Jothen, meet Molo." "My pleasure," Jothen said. "But I've still got one more urgent piece of business first, if you'll excuse me. Kim, could I speak to you a moment?" Kim allowed herself to be drawn aside readily enough, but her eyes were glinting. "What's this, Jo? Not another turn around the circular rainbow?" she asked laughing. "No. I know where the pot of gold's hidden, now." "Are you sure?" "Well, I think I'll know in a minute. I've got two questions for you, and this time I'd like you not to answer the first until I've also asked you the second. Okay?" "Well, I guess so," she said warily. "Go ahead." "The first is: Will you marry me?" Now she did look startled. "That's the first one? Hmm. Somehow I don't like that grin of yours, Jothen Kent. What's the second question?" Jothen grinned more broadly than ever. "The second is: Who sank the Barrierhilthon?" "I don't know," she said. "What do you mean, who sank it? I thought some sort of malfunction sank it. Do you mean it was a human failure?" "Both," Jothen said. "The malfunction was caused by a certain kind of wildlife that had no business running free aboard the hotel. The custodian of the wildlife was one Doctor Kemal Matouf. And one guess who he got the critters from!" Kim's face was a battleground over which amazement, consternation, anger and finally amusement pursued each other. "Jothen Kent," she said, "this is blackmail." "That," he agreed gravely, "is exactly what it is." And so they lived happily ever after -- but it wasn't easy. Exciting New Science Fiction Novel by Mack Reynolds Now In Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale nowl The big July issue of Worlds of Tomorrow also contains stories and articles by many more of your favorite science-fiction and science-fact writers. On all newsstands -- get your copy today! ead any good books lately? By and large, the first objective of fiction is to establish contact between the writer and the widest possible audience. Whether he writes to get something out of his system, to communicate something, or simply because there is money in it, the writer hopes in his heart of hearts to strike a response from the whole world. In those terms, the three outstanding writers of our immediate time are Erie Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. Probably the most successful writer the English language has ever known is Edgar Rice Burroughs. None of these gentlemen can write his way out of a paper bag, as writing is understood by three main types of literary specialists -- teachers of composition, literary critics and the other working professional writers who provide the day-in, day-out reading matter for the fiction audience. Now, whether the fault is with the understanding, or is in fact with the culprits named in the indictment, it still follows, on the basis of evidence observed over a long period of time, that any writer who attempts what is commonly called good prose, or who attempts a seriously intended comment on the human condition, or tries to plot and characterize with some attention to verisimilitude, is deliberately restricting his audience. This is self-destructive madness. But madness is the common human condition and we have all learned to live with scores of diametrically opposed compulsions, the word is "compromise," or, if you don't care for those connotations, "balance" or "maturity." Somehow, most of us work it out; almost any day, one can meet working writers who are neither Gardner, Spillane, Fleming, Burroughs nor institutionalized. Any sign of the commonly understood excellences in a piece of fiction therefore indicates one of two things. Most commonly, it indicates a craftsman consciously doing something difficult, for reasons which are not immediately explicable, are not simply logical and are the result of some often troublesome growth and change within an intelligent human being. More rarely, it indicates a man doing something he can't help, largely because it has never occurred to him to do anything that is not creative. In other words, an artist. A genius. The craftsman may produce a "better" variation on a given theme than the genius. Neither of them may produce anything anywhere near as "good" as the next genius, or craftsman. That is beside the point. The point is there are three kinds of writers; those who can't do much right except to overwhelmingly satisfy the audience, those who seriously study their trade and may very well have excellent technical justifications for what appear to be mistakes, and those who are a law unto themselves because they are extending the limits of the possible in literature. And since there are compromises in all personalities, almost all writers combine some of these aspects -- they are only more or less craftsmen, geniuses and what psychological phenomenology calls idiots savants. Furthermore, no writer sells a product which can be definitely test-run against another similar product. He sells a service -- a subjective experience -- to each individual reader. Problem : Where is there an objective basis for determining whether a piece of fiction is "bad" or "good"? T he Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick (Doubleday; #) may or may not be a good book; it is an important, beautifully controlled, smoothly created book which will twist your mind if you give it the least chance to do so. Operating on a number of levels, the top one of which is a fast-moving narrative of business rivalry in a future Earth society, it proceeds to hand you a series of jolts straight to the dark corners of the mind. Reality is, as you may know, a fragile thing; each of us has his own idea of the world and his place in it. From time to time, we get into some serious difficulty which brings home to us some drastic indication that the "world" -- that great compromise out there beyond our skin -- does not agree with our picture. At such times, we may even teeter on the brink of the awful suspicion that we have never known who or where we are, and that any previous ability to function was a lucky chain of coincidences which has now broken. Science fiction and fantasy often play on this; a typical story aimed into this area is the one in which the hero gets a clue that all the other people in the world are robots, investigates, and then discovers that he himself is a robot. In life, some of the extreme reactions people display seem to stem from the next development of this personal setback; the suspicion that nobody knows where we're at. According to our bent, we may then decide that Charles Fort was "right," and quote from him to prove the point; we may decide that there really is a God, or that God is dead -- the possible ramifications are endless, and have been worked out in great detail by such people as St. Augustine, Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, who dealt with them as hard logical questions of considerable urgency. I have no idea, of course, how deeply Dick has delved into the works of those people; more deeply than I have, no doubt. But one place I'm sure Dick has done a lot of his preliminary work on this book is in the recent work with hallucinogens, a fascinating business which has been waiting for a top-grade science fiction writer to take it up. Experiments with such subject is drugged into temporary dissociation from reality -- that is, psychosis -- normally are conducted in the presence of the experimenter, who also takes the drug and serves as the subject's "guide." He is able to communicate with the novice, is able to understand what he is undergoing, in a rough sort of way, and is to some extent capable of leading him through the labyrinth of what is, or should be according to conventional views, a totally personal and individual nightmare exploration of one unique subconscious. This phenomenon of approximately shared hallucination -- which, by the way, may very well be an artifact; a piece of preconditioning by an experimenter who is fudging Scientific Method -- has led some people toward the possibility that there is what might be called a real unreality. However all this may be in truth, it is a fact that many people who have been working with this general series of drugs are relaxed, pleasant, of the opinion that commonly accepted reality is a game, and that what they experience is not insanity but increased perception. The real reality is, for them, a place where time and perception are variable and arbitrary, but what is experienced is real, and marvelous. An important recent development in what could be called the "cult" of ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead as the revealed, allegorical description of the real reality. That is, as a bible. All this has had its share of publicity, particularly when Doctors Leary and Alpert were canned from Harvard and Aldous Huxley spent his last days proselytizing for it. Additionally, there are several informative books on the subject, of which sciousness-Expanding Drug, a recent collection of papers and essays edited by David Solomon. But I'm not here to review science-fact books, immediate appearances to the contrary. If you remember, I started to review a witty, sometimes lighthearted, and always fascinating piece of fiction by a man who has already won one Hugo award for the best science-fiction novel of the year, and just may deserve another for this one. To be glib, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is something like an A.E. Van Vogt novel as Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl might have collaborated to write it. To be truthful, it is far more than a pastiche of anything else, because Dick seems to be something of a genius and is doing what that type of writer often does -- borrowing techniques and tones from other men in order to say something entirely his own. There is also one wild scene which is a sudden infusion of pure Robert Sheckley, and I think obtrusively so, perhaps for the sheer fun of it. The remainder of the time, the whole creation resonates to the touch of the only present science-fiction writer who could possibly have done it. The basic situation is that Earth is warming rapidly; the temperature in New York City is # Fahrenheit, and on the teeming urban Earth of that time -- which is established as about one hundred years in the future, but functions exactly as our society would if it had slightly better technology -- the only things anyone really cares about are coping with or ignoring the heat and the coming extinction of all life. The UN is concerned with doing something about it, the business community is dedicated to profiting from it, and the vast consuming public is alternately chivvied or lulled by these contending forces. The UN draft laws keep operating to pick up people and push them out into the various colonies like the ones on Mars, where they all live desultory lives on the UN dole. The big stabilizing factor in this comic inferno is two-fold -- Perky Pat layouts and Can-D. Perky Pat layouts are miniature sets, in incredible detail, of the apartments, cars, analysts' offices, resorts and countrysides inhabited by two little dolls called Jerky Pat and her lover, Walt. All the colonists have them, and spend many skins -- oh, I forgot; the economy is based on truffle skins, the only uncounterfeitable substance -- on adding new pieces to them. The layouts provide nearly perfect escape, for while they in themselves are only static sets, they become pocket universes when used in conjunction with Can-D, a hallucinogen. Under the influence of the drug, all the women playing with a given layout become Pat, and all the men become Walt. The Pat and the Walt. The confusions and orgies thus possible while sitting motionless in a friendly gathering are quite something. Out of the fact that Can-D creates shared hallucinations has arisen a vague proto-religion, whose central tenet is that the Perky Pat world has some sort of validity. The colonists, who are far too busy with their layouts to do anything about their "real" environment, and who are in any case fed, clothed and sheltered N y the UN, are grappling with the notion that they are all in fact only avatars of Pat and Walt. However the Can-DPat logos, considered as the raw material for a religion, is subtly but crucially defective; the effect of Can-D wears off quickly, and in any case requires the layout; if the layout lacks as analyst's office, for example, there is no way Pat can get her head examined. To top it off, the UN permits the colonists to have layouts -- though they are illegal on Earth -- but prohibits Can-D, which must be obtained from pushers. So the use of this spiritual resource leads to accumulating guilt but no redemption. Leo Bulero, the entrepreneur who both manufactures the layouts and heads the Can-D organization, knows full well how vulnerable his position is. He is galvanized into panic when rival entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch, who departed for Proxima Centauri many years ago and was thought lost, suddenly returns and markets Choo-Z, a new hallucinogen. Choo-Z requires no layout and has UN sanction. Furthermore, its effect is apparently permanent, though it is a little hard to be sure of this. All the principal characters in this book are exposed to it at the crucial moment when Bulero confronts Eldritch, or shortly thereafter. Part of the hallucinogenetic effect is a complete disorganization of the time sense; another is totally "real" detail. Yet another is the appearance of Palmer Eldritch in everyone's hallucinations, as the hero and, in effect, God of the hallucinated universe. Since Eldritch has long ago been given stainless steel teeth, an artificial arm and artificial eyes -- the three stigmata -- it is impossible to mistake him. But, though Bulero knows, through his precognitive Perky Pat fashion consultants, that he will kill Eldritch -- or God -- in the future, he is redeemed of guilt because another attribute of Choo-Z hallucinations is that everyone develops a steel arm, steel teeth, and artificial eyes, and it is as Palmer Eldritch that he goes out to do battle with Palmer Eldritch, except that for the final third of the book it is impossible for the reader to know whether this is really real or whether it is still part of Bulero's original hallucination, or whether the whole inferno is part of the hallucination Eldritch had when first exposed to Choo-Z on Proxima's planet, or whether the whole universe, including Eldritch, book, reader and this issue of Galaxy are part of Proximan hallucination, or what. This is an approximate description of the story. If it is confusing, it is nowhere near as confused as the reader who tries to stay anchored to reality as such a tiring is understood in the usual piece of fiction. Nor can it begin to convey all the detail or any of the side-tracks Dick drops into the story as casually as Heinlein handing you a complete picture of a civilization while telling you a story about two men out after the same thing. Unlike Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which had the different purpose of being about religion, Stigmata could easily function as a holy book in itself, since in Dick's logical system it is entirely possible for a # # commercial book to publish accurate, mystically revealed word of events which not only have not yet occurred but might not ever, but nevertheless prove the beliefs which are the only true Salvation. Dick has really done it this time. Long recognized as the foremost elaborator of the involutional shock technique first introduced to science fiction by A.E. Van Vogt, he not only hits the reader with a new and disconcerting idea at measured intervals, he has created a plot which loop-the-loops back through itself so successfully that there is no real telling where it comes out. The last line of World of NullA, you may remember, was "The face was his own." Dick had added "But who was he?" and he has put a capital H on "His." Is it a good book? I couldn't tell you in a month of Sundays. Should you buy it? Hell, yes! t r The Dark Side, edited by Damon Knight (Doubleday, #) is a collection of twelve fantasy stories, mostly done in the modern, non-Gothic style whose most consistent appearance was in the early #'s magazine Unknown. That journal, as some of you know, was for a long time after its demise known as "the late, lamented Vnknown," by fond readers who found it considerably more to their liking than the involuted morbidity of the Victorian school which had given rise to such screamers as Dtacula and, from another branch of the same nightnlossoming cereus, Frankenstein. Unknown itself was the stablemate of Astounding, and partook if the sometimes-cheeky, always #nonsense engineering view of ts story problems. Vampires were dealt with in terms of their unction, not their subconscious symbolic implications; if a human nctim happened to be unavailible, a quick raid on the local lospital's blood bank would do ust as well, and even the vamjires agreed it was much neater. There's a lot to be said for it as a source of entertainment, and not for a moment should you believe that all of it left you laughing. Those of you who have not had much truck with fantasy will find some stories here that are so good they couldn't possibly be that stuff you don't like. Those of you who have been hoping for just one more issue of Unknown have now found a close approximation of it, with some skillful editorial handling and footnoting by Knight, a story of whose own would not have been omitted by any other editor. Three of the stories are from Unknown: "They," by Robert Heinlein; "Trouble With Water," by H.L. Gold, and "It," by Theodore Sturgeon. "Trouble With Water" is very funny; "They" and "It" are not. "They" attacks the same place Philip K. Dick was getting at in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and "It" is a moody, horripilating and masterfully told story about a thing that just came to life in the woods one day. There is a Ray Bradbury story, "The Black Ferris," a fantasy built around the use of a carnival ferris wheel as a sort of time machine; there is Anthony Boucher's very short, very snappy story which I think is the last word in how to come out winners if you make a deal with a demon, "Nellthu." Among favorites are "Casey Agonistes" by Richard McKenna, who could tell a masculine and yet tender story as well as anyone I've ever read, and T.L. Sherred's "Eye For Iniquity," which is about a man who could literally make money by just thinking about it. That latter story, by the way, is from Beyond, Galaxy's late, lamented stablemate of the early #'s. There is not a disappointing story in this book; there are few which anyone who likes modern science fiction would not enjoy just as well and, in some moods, better. I wish someone would do something about that. HT' he Eighth Galaxy Reader, Edited and with an introduction by Frederik Pohl (Doubleday, #), is a collection of twelve stories from this magazine, their copyright dates ranging up from #. In the order of their appearance in the book they are "Comic Inferno" by Brian Aldiss; "The Big Engine," by Fritz Leiber; "A Day on Death Highway" by Chandler Elliott; "The End of The Race" by Albert Bermel; "The Lonely Man" by Theodore Thomas; "A Bad Day for Vermin" by Keith Laumer; "Dawningsburgh" by Wallace West; "And All the Earth a Grave" by C.C. MacApp; "Hot Planet" by H al Clement; "Final Encounter" by Harry Harrison; "If There Were No Benny Cemoli" by Philip K. Dick and "Critical Mass" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. Among them you will find science fiction writing of nearly every kind, ranging from the Aldiss, which is heavily influenced by the Kingsley Amis critical construct of the same name, through such plain statements of picque with our society as the Elliott, the Bermel, the Laumer, and the MacApp, and on to "straight" sf like "Hot Planet." Fritz Leiber's story is a fine mood-builder about the wheels that really make the world go 'round. "The Lonely Man" is a very well done character study ol an engineering genius; Thomas has authored quite an accumulation of quietly good stories with staying power -- I've re-read this one several times with considerable pleasure. Philip K. Dick's story is, as usual, markedly individual, and distinguished for his ability to draw fine-line social caricatures paradoxically freighted with verisimilitude; ditto the Pohl #s Kornbluth story. I would say the book as whole reflects a sense which is best summed-up in Harry Harrison's story about an exploration team searching, against the weight of accumulating loneliness, for other races in this galaxy. They find one, at last, and deal with it intelligentiy, but not without some confusion and apprehension. Nor are the members of the team themselves quite human as we understand the term at this young point in our development. And the aliens, it turns out at the story's climax, are not truly alien, but are other men, evolved from ourselves, who long ago set out exploring and became separated from the branches of humanity represented by the team. If there is disappointment in this isolated thing, there is much to be proud of in many others, and there is the mutual purpose of, now, going exploring together in the other galaxies that lie beyond our own. There is this sense in this book, as I said, that modern science fiction reflects a dissatisfaction with things as they are, sometimes to the verge of indignation, but also retains optimism about the eventual outcome. There is something rather deeper than the recurrent strain in the "Golden Age" science fiction of the #'s -- the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface. There is no overall easy answer among the stories in this book, and not many of them attempt to deal with problems larger than those in the immediate story situation, but collected in this way they show writers and writing which have gotten markedly farther up the road toward tackling hard questions in honest ways. Sometimes it's not done more than adequate. Sometimes it's done tongue-in-cheek, sometimes it's done heart-on-sleeve. But it's done, and it's encouraging to see, and I expect most of you will agree it's worth reading.  t Now in IF! The climatic story in the most famous sf series in history #    by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.  t   Also in the August issue of IF:  A New Retie! Novelette by Keith Laumer August issue on sale now -- don't miss it! wmmmwaPLns of itl WMomm Fastest-Growing New Science-Fiction Magazine! Don't mail the coupon -- if you want to keep the magazine intact -- just Order on a plain sheet of paper -- but, however you do it, rush in your that readers call "the best thing that's happened to science fiction in a dozen years" -- the magazine that has already brought you great novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick -- novelettes and complete short novels by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, J. T. McIntosh and a dozen other favorite writers, etc. Every issue is new... exciting... enjoyable! Don't wait -- subscribe today! 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Not A Low Cost Reprint -- Yet Yours For Only #I Hus Postage # I Enclose. OCTOBER , # #c All Nfw Slofies by All Your Old Favorites in Galaxy's SHtCKlEY Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Melf Cordwainor Smith in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on th is fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp.  #T Hudson Street  New York, N.Y. #     Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away, t enclose   my check or money order for:   Q # issues for # Q # issues for #     Name    Address...    City  State Zip Code   U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. #  Please check whether Q new or Q renewal.  The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do i Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #SI ) Ray Bradbury Gravy Paiiot (The Space Merchants,) Pohl  Kornblutb Here Gather the Stars (Way Sfafionj Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Cordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumcr Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Hcinicin Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey oaiaocy Galaxy is published in French and Italian. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille. This Edition is also published In Living Tape by Services for the Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. Editor by Frederik Pohl by Cordwoiner Smith by Robert Sheckley by H. L. Gold by Edgar Pangborn by Clifford D. Simok by Fritz Leiber by Isaac Asimov by Ray Bradbury by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-ctass postage paid at New York. N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed st-smped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility (or unsolicited material All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental by Algis Budrys Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. The Daj After Tom#rrw L ooking into the future of science fiction is tricky business. Any prediction is a risk. A prediction of what so quintessentially a predictive technique as the writing of science fiction may be like at some later date than this one is not merely twice as risky: it is folly squared. But it seems to us that there are trends. And this fifteenth anniversary issue of Galaxy may be a good time to set a few remarks about them down. The first real science-fiction magazine appeared not quite forty years ago, in the spring of #. It was edited by Hugo Gernsback and its principal substance was the kind of stories Gernsback himself used to write: a sort of animated catalogue of gadgets. Granting that was what he did, he did it superbly, and as a matter of fact much of science fiction's record of accurate predictions stems from those early Gernsback-type stories: radar, television, atomic power, rockets, etc,, et al. The mixture was flavored with a heavy admixture of H, G, Wells reprints (sermons and polemics, beautifully written), and a trace of Edgar Rice Burroughs: and that tonic brightened the lives of lots of i)eo)le for nearly a decade. Then a man named Stanley G. Weinbaurn came along with a revolutionary idea. It was his thought that you could give some sort of three-dimensional reality to the characters in science-fiction stories. He was not quite so daring as to try it with his human beings, but his Martians, his Venusians and his Ganynicdan balloon-heads are still vividlycmembered as persons a third of a century later. Less than a decade later Jolin Campbell came up with a firsli and fascinating mixture: write your stories, he told his writers, as though they were going to be printed as contemporary fiction in a magazine of the #d century. And they did it; and they did it very well. L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, Lester ilel Rey and any number of otliers responded with stories that anin print on the pocketbook racks right now. And about ten ye.irs after that it was Galaxy's turn; and with H. L. Gold as ediior another new batch of ingredients were added. Thei.names were wit and relevance; and they were compounded by writers like Roh . Secrets entrusted to a few be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious Rosicrucians (AM( organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of me book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address; Scribe C.T.J. I Scribe C.TJ. j San Jose, California #  Please send me the itee book. The Mastery I of Ufe, which explains how I may learn to j use my faculties and powers of mind. Name. ert Sheckley, Fritz Leiber, Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, the late C. M. Kornbluth and others -- including most of those in this issue Well, this is an attempt to look ahead, not a history of science fiction. But oversimplified and sketchy though what we have just said may be, it illustrates a principle. Science fiction advances in a series of quantum jumps. It may seem to you from the above timetable that we are about due for another jump. It seems so to us, too; and as a matter of fact, we think we're in it rig.it now. 'I XTith negligible exceptions ' ' (Wells, Stapledon and who?), nearly every science-fiction writer up to a very few years ago made one hidden -- and indefensible -- assumption. They assumed that science changed; that the world changed ; that everything you could imagine changed, except one thing. They assumed that the human race did not change at all. And of course the human race does. It has been changing from the day the first australopithecine picked up an antelope femur and broke it over a dire-wolf's head. It is changing now, just as it has throughout the human past; the only difference is that now it is changing more rapidly than ever before. It will be changing tomorrow, too; but it will be changing faster still. It is technology that is changing us so rapidly, of course. As man remakes his environment he changes the Darwinian criteria of what, exactly, is "fittest". Calamity criers have made much of the black side of this picture: we are breeding a race of cripples, they say, pointing to what modern medicine has done to take the sting out of incurable genetic flaws. (One of the traits the human race seems to have had for a good many generations is this same habit of preserving its "unfit". How many remember that the first Neanderthal skeleton gave a very erroneous picture of the species because it chanced to be that of a middle-aged man with an advanced case of arthritis? He could not have survived by himself; he had to have been preserved, fed and cared for. The interesting thing about technological change is that its rate of growth gives every sign of being exponential. The oldest computer, if it were human, would just barely be able to vote; but in rather less than a human generation the computers have firmly and irrevocably . changed the rate of change. Visiting the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory the other day, we talked to a man named Owen Gingerich who, last Christmas, duplicated the work of Johann Kepler in determining the laws of planetary orbits. It took Kepler three or four years to work out the laws a few centuries ago. Last Christmas, using the same observed data and the same mathematical procedures, Gingerich repeated the process in eight days. Eight days of his own human time, that is. Those eight days were spent merely in setting up the problem so that a computer could solve it; and the actual operating time of the computer was twelve point four seconds. '"To those who have been reading stories by, for example. Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith in Galaxy lately, this news is no news. For that is what they and others have been writing about: Not you and we transplanted into the world of the future, but the people of the world of the future operating on their own terms. Perhaps they will think faster and more surely than we (by a factor of three years divided by twelve point four seconds, for example). Perhaps they will have traveled so far from us that even computers are no longer relevant to their lives, as Vance described in The Drag on Masters (and in the new manuscript,, just in, called Tho Last Castle, which we will be bringing you before long. They may in fact differ from us in ways that we can't as yet guess; but what is important is to realize that they will differ from us. As John Pierce says, there is only one future in a tangible sense; that is, when it gets here there will only be the one single set of events that will take place. But our discussions of the future can take the form of endless alternative worlds. We don't know which will be the "true" future -- so we might as well imagine as many as we can. Well, that's what we're bending every effort to bring you in Galaxy's future. Be specific? All right. As you can see, Robert Sheckley's back with us -- and to stay, it seems, because he's working on a batch of new ones for us right now. Cordwainer Smith is off in the South Pacific on an anthropological expedition but before he left he finished Under Old Earth which strikes us as one of his best stories ever. Keith Laumer will be coming up again; so will Isaac Asimov: so will Robert Silverberg; so will... Well, that's looking far enough ahead. The rest of the forecasting we'll leave to the writers! Forrester bad made his mind up. He was going to adjust to this mad new world even if it killed him -- again! I ver everyone in the room, or perhaps it was a park, the lighting cast shapes and symbols of color. The girl in the filmy gown had at one moment glittering pink eyes, and at the next an aura of silvery hair. The man next to Forrester had golden skin and a mask of shadow. Wisps of odor drifted past him, rosebuds following sage. There were snatches of a crystalline, far-off music. "I'm rich!" he yelled. "And alive!" No one seemed to mind. Forrester plucked one of the colorless grapes Kara had recommended to him, rose, patted the girl in the filmy dress and walked unsteadily down to the pool where the revelers splashed and swam in a naked tangle. In spite of the long post-revival indoctrinatior that had given him so many new things and removed so much trash that was old, Forrester had not lost the habit of prurience. "It's Forrester the rich man!" one of them shouted. Forrester smiled and waved. A girl cried, "Sing him a song! A song!" And they all splashed and sang: Oh, he died and died and died -- And he cried and he cried and he cried -- With his rages and his cholers he's a puzzle to the scholars. And he's got a quarter of a Forrester! Forrescer ducked without thinking, then relaxed. He allowed them to drench him with the warm, scented water. "Enjoy, enjoy!" he cried, grinning at the bare bodies. Bronze and ivory, lean or soft, every body was beautiful. He knew that none of them would think the worse of him if he touched the two snaps at throat and waist and .stepped out of his clothes to join them. But he also knew that his body would not compare well with the Adonises, would not impress the full-breasted Venuses, and so he stayed on the rim. "Drink and be merry, for yesterday we died," he called and squirted them at random with his joymaker. He didn't mind that he was not as beautiful as they. At least, not at this moment. He was happy. Nothing was troubling him. Not worry, not weariness, not fear. Not even his conscience; for, although he was wasting time, he had a right to waste time. Hara had said so. "Relax." advised Hara. "Get acclimated. Go slow. You've been dead a long time." Forrester was well content to follow his advice. In the morning he would take things seriously. In the morning he would go out into this world and make a place for himself. With unassuming pride he thought that he would do this not because he really needed to, for he had that right, but because it was proper that he should work and earn joy. He would be a good citizen. Experimentally he shouted what he thought of as a friendly obscene suggestion to one of the girls (although Hara had said that the talk of this time contained no obscenities). In return she made a charming gesture, which Forrester tried to think .of as an obscene one, and her compaiiion, stretched out at the edge of the pool, drowsily lifted his joymaker and drenched Forrester with a tingling spray that, startlingly, brought him to an instant thrill of sexual excitement and then left him replete and momentarily exhausted. What a delightful way to live, Forrester thought. He turned and walked away, followed by song: And he slept and he slept and he slept. And he wept and he wept and he wept -- Is he damning? Is he dooming? For that matter, is he human? Forrester! But he was too far away for them to splash him now, and he had seen someone he wanted to talk to. It was a girl. She had just come in and was still rather sober. She was alone. And she was quite as tall as Forrester himself. Hara would introduce him if asked, Forrester knew, since this was more or less Hara's party. But he did not at that moment see Hara. Didn't need Hara, either, he decided. He walked up to the girl and touched her on the arm. "I am Charles D. Forrester," he said. "I am six hundred and twenty-six old. I have a quarter first day out of the sleep-freeze, and I would appreciate it if you would sit down and talk to me for a while, or kiss me." "Certainly," she said, taking his hand. "Let's lie down here on the violets. Careful of my joymaker; it's loaded with something special." TTalf an hour later Hara came by and found them, lying on their backs, each with an arm under the other, heads inclined toward each other. Forrester noticed him at once, but went on talking to the girl. They had been plucking and eating the glass-clear grapes from a vine over their heads. The intoxicating fruit, the occasion and his general sense of well being combined to erase social obligations from his mind. Anyway, Hara would understand and forgive any offense. "Don't mind him, dear," Forrester said to the girl. "You were telling me not to sign up as a donor." "Or as game. A lot of greenhorns fall for that, because the money's good. But the way they get you is that you don't figure what it will cost in the long run." "That's very interesting," said Forrester, then sighed, looked away from the girl and nodded up at Hara. "You know, flara," he said, "you're a drag." "And you're a drunk," said Hara. "Hello, Tip. You two seem to be getting on well enough." "He's nice," the girl said. "Of course, you're nice too, Tip. Is it time for the champagne wine?" "Well past. That's why I came looking for you. I went to a lot of trouble to get this champagne wine for the party, and Forrester will damn well get up and drink some to show the rest of us how it's done." "You tilt," said Forrester, "and you pour." Hara looked at him more carefully, shook his head and fingered his joymaker. "Don't you remember anything I tell you?" he chided, and sprayed Forrester with what felt for a moment like an invigorating, and not at all shocking, ice-cold shower. "Not too drunk tonight. Get adjusted. Do what I tell you, will you? And now let's see about this champagne wine." Forrester got up like an obedient child and trailed after Hara toward the dispensing tables, one arm around the girl. She had pale hair, up in a fluffy crown, and the tricks of the lighting made it look as though fireflies nested in it. In the event that he ever saw Dorothy again, Forrester thought, he might have to give this sort of thing up. But for the time being it was very pleasant. And reassuring. It was hard for him to remember, when he had an arm around a pretty girl, that ninety days before his body had been a cryogenic crystal in an ambience of liquid helium, with his heart stopped and his brain still and his lungs a clot of destroyed scar tissue. He popped the cork of the champagne like a good fellow, toasted and drank. He had never seen the label before, but it was champagne all right. At Hara's request he roared the verses of The Bastard King of England amid much applause, and would not let anyone sober him though he knew he was beginning again to reel and stammer. "You decadent sods," he bellowed amiably, "you know so much! But you don't know how to get drunk." They were dancing, a linlisd circle of all tventy-odd of them with foot-stamping and sudden changes of direction, a little like a Morris dance, a little like a Paul Jones, to music like pizzicato cello and the piping of flutes. The girl cried, "Oh, Charles! Charles Forrester! You almost make an Arcadian of me!" He nodded and grinned and clung to her on his right, and to a huge creature in orange tights on his left, a man who, someone said, had just returned from Mars and was stumbling and straining in Earth's gravity. But he was laughing. Everyone was laughing. A lot of them seemed to be laughing at Forrester, perhaps at his clumsy attempts to follow the step. That was almost the last he remembered. There was some shouting about what to do with him, a proposal to sober him up, a veto, a long giggling debate while he nodded happily like a whiskered head on a spring. He did not know when the paity ended. He had a dreamlike memory of the girl leading aim across an empty way bet'een tall, dark structures like monuments, while he shouted and sang to the echoes. He remembered kissing the girl, and some vagrant aphrodisiac wisp from her joymaker that filled him with a confused emotion of mingled desire and fear. But he did not remember returning to bis room or going to sleep. And when he woke In the morning he was buoyant, rested, vigorous and alone. II '"The bed in which Forrester woke was oval, springy and gently warm. It woke him by purring faintly at him, soothingly and cheerfully. Then as he began to stir the purring stopped, and the surface beneath his body gently began to knead his muscles. Lights came on. There was a distant sound of lively music, like a Gypsy trio. Forrester stretched, yawned, explored his teeth with his tongue and sat up. "Good morning, Man Forrester," said the bed. "It is eightfifty hours and you have an appointment at nine seventy-five. Would you like me to tell you your calls?" "Not now," said Forrester at once. Hara had told him about the bed. It did not startle him. It was a convenience, not a threat. It was one more comfortable part of this very amiable world. Forrester, who had been thirtyseven years old when he was burned to death and still considered that to be his age, lit a cigarette, considered his situation carefully and decided that it was a state unmatched by any other thirty-seven year old man in the history of the world. He had it made. Life. Health. Good company. And a quarter of a million dollars. He was not, of course, as unique as he thought. But as he had not yet fully accepted the fact that he had himself been dead and was now returned to life, much less that there were it ielt unique. It felt very good. "I have just received another message for you, Man Forrester," said the bed. "Save it," said Forrester. "After I have a cup of coffee." "Do you wish me to send you a cup of coffee, Man Forrester?" "You're a nag, you know that? I'll tell you what I want and when I want it." What Forrester really wanted, although he had not articulated it even to himself, was to go on enjoying for a moment the sensation of being uncommitted. It was like a liberation. It was like that first week of basic training, in the Army, when he realized that there was a hard way to get through this hitch and an easy one, and that the easy one, which entailed making no decisions of his own and taking no iniciative, but merely doing what he was told, was like nothing so much as a rather prolonged holiday in a somewhat poorly equipped summer camp for adults. Here the accommodations were in fact sumptuous. But the principle was the same. He did not have to concern himself with obligations. He had no obligations. He didn't have to worry about making sure the kids got up for school, because he no longer had any children. He didn't have to think about whether his wife had enough money to get through the day, because he didn't now have a wife. If he wanted to, ha could now roll over, pull the covers over his head and go to sleep. No one would stop him. no one would be aggrieved. If he chose, he could get drunk, attempt the seduction of a girl or write a poem. All of his debts were paid -- or forgiven, centuries since. Every promise was redeemed -- or had passed beyond the chance of redemption. The lie he had told Dorothy about that weekend in # need trouble him no longer. If the truth now came out, no one would care; and it wa.s all but impossible that the truth should ever come out. He had, in short, a blank check on life. More than that, he had a pretty substantially underwritten guarantee of continuing life itself. He wasn't sick. He wasn't even threatened; even the lump on his leg, which he had once or twice gazed on with some worry in the days before 'nis death, could not be malignant or threatening, for if it were the doctors at the dormer would have fixed it. He need not even worry about being run over by a car -- if there were cars -- since at worst that might mean only another few centuries in the Oath of liquid helium, and then back to life -- better than ever! He had, in fact, everytliing he had ever wished for. The only things he didn't have were those he had not wished for because he already had them... e.g., family. Friends. Status. In this life of the year # A.D., Charles Forrester was entirely free. But he was not so joyous as to be blinded to the fact that this coin of his treasure had two sides. Another way of looking at it was that he was entirely superfluous. Tan Forrester," said the bed, "I must insist. I have both an urgentclass message and a personal-visit notice." And the mattress curled under him, humped itself and deposited him on the floor of the room. Staggering, Forrester growled, "What's urpnt?" "A hunting license has been taken out on you, Man Forrester. The licensee is Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, male, dipara-Zen, Utopian, eighty-six elapsed, six feet four inches import-export. He is extraterrestrial-human. No reason declared. Bonds and guaranties have been posted. Would you like your coffee now?" While the bed was speaking it had been rolling itself into a wall. It disappeared into a sphincter that closed and left no trace. It was disconcerting, but Forrester remembered Hara's instructions, searched for and found his joymaker, and said to it; "I would like my breakfast now. Ham and eggs. Toast and orange juice. Coffee, and a pack of cigarettes." "They will be delivered in five minutes, Man Forrester," said the joymaker. "May I give you the rest of your messages?" "Wait a minute. I thought it was the bed that was giving me 'We are all the same, Man Forrester. Your messages follow: Notice of personal visit: Taiko Hironibi will join you for breakfast. Dr. Hara has prescribed a euphoric in case of need, which will be delivered with your breakfast. Adne Bensen sends you a kiss. First Merchants Audit Be Trust invites your patronage. Society of Ancients states you have been approved for membership and relocation benefits. Ziegler, Durant and Colfax, attornies -- " "You can skip the commercials. What was that about a hunting license?" "A hunting license has been taken out on you, Man Forrester. The licensee is Heinzlichen Jura de -- " "You said that. Wait a minute." Forrester regarded his joymaker thoughtfully. The principle of it was clear enough. It was a remote input-output station for a shared-time computer program, with certain attachments which functioned as pocket flask, first-aid kit, cosmetic bag and so on. It looked something like a mace, or a jester's scepter. Forrester told himself that it was really no less natural to talk to something like a mace than it was to talk into something like a telephone. But at the other end of a telephone had been a human being... or at least, he reminded himself, the taped voice of what at one time had been a human being... anyway, it didn't feel natural. He said guardedly: "I don't understand all this. I don't know who these people are who are calling me up, either." "Man Forrester, the personal callers are as follows. Taiko Hironibi: Male, dendritic Confucian, Arcadian, fifty-one elapsed, six feet one inch, organizer, business political. He will bring his ow.n breakfast. Adne Bensen: Female, Universalist, Arcadian-trimmer, twenty-three declared, five feet seven inches, experiencer-homeswoman, no business stated. Her kiss follows." Forrester did not know what to expect but was pleasantly ready for anything. What he got was indeed a kiss. It was disconcerting. No kissing lips were visible. There was a hint of perfumed breath, then a pressure on his lips -- warm and soft, moist and sweet. Startled, he touched his mouth. "How the devil did you do that?" he shouted. "Sensory stimulation through the tactile net, Man Forrester. Will you receive Taiko Hironibi?" "Well," said Forrester, "frankly I don't know. Oh, hell. I guess so. Send him in... Wait a minute. Shouldn't I get dressed?" "Do you wish other rhjth'njj, Man Forrester?" "Don't confuse me. Just nc-ld on a minute," he said, rattled and angry. He thought for a minute. "I don't know who this Hirowhatsis is -- " "Taiko Hironibi, Man Forrester. Male, dendritic Confucian -- " "Cut that out!" Forrester was breathing hard. Abruptly the joymaker in his hand hissed and sprayed him with something that f( It damp for a second, then dissipated. Forrester felt himself relaxing. "Oh, God," he said, "what do I care who he is? Go ahead. Send him in. And get a move on with my breakfast, will you?" tt'V'ou'll do!" cried Taiko Hironibi. "The greatest! What a cranial index! You look, cripes, I don't know what to call it, you look like a brain. But a swinger." Charles Forrester, gravely and cheerfully, indicated a seat with his hand. "Sit down. I don't know what you want but I'm pretty sure that the joymaker had given him some kind of a tranquilizer, but he didn't mind. "Sit down, Taiko," he said. "You're the damnedest looking Japanese I ever saw." "Really?" The man looked disconcerted. He also looked quite nonJapanese: crew-cut golden hair, blue eyes. "They change you around so," he said apologetically. "Maybe I used to look different. Say! Did I get here first?" "You got here before my breakfast even." "Great! That's really great. Now, here's the thing. We're all messed up here, you have to get that straight right away. The people are .sheep. They know they're being expropriated, but do they do anything about it? Sweat, no, they sit back and enjoy it. That's what we're for m the Ned Lud Society. I lon't know your politics, Charley -- " "I used to be a Democrat, mostly." " -- Well, you can forget that. It doesn't matter. I'm registered Arcadian myself, of cour, but a lot of guys are Trimmers, maybe -- " he winked -- "maybe even something a little worse, you know? We're all in this together. Affects everybody. If you raise your kids with machines you're bound to have machine-lovers growing up, right? Now -- " "Hey!" said Forrester, losking at his wall. At a point as near as he could remember just about where the bed had disappeared, a sphincter was opening again. It disgorged a table set for two. one side bearing his breakfast, the other a complete setting but no food. "Ah, breakfast," said Taiko Hironibi. He opened a pouch in the kilt-like affair he wore and took out a small capped bowl, a plastic box which turned out to contain something like crackers and a globe which, squeezed, poured a hot, watery, greenish tea into the cup at ais place. "Care for a pickled plum?" he asked politely, removing the cap from the bowl. Forrester shook his head. Chairs had appeared beside the table, and he slid into the one placed before the ham and eggs. Next to the steaming plate was a small crystal tray containing a capsule and a scrap of golden paper on which was written ; I don't know about that champagne wine. Take this if you have a hungover. Hara To the best of Forrester's knowledge he didn't have a hangover, but the capsule looked too good to waste. He swallowed it with some of the orange juice and at once felt even more relaxed. If that were possible. He felt positively affectionate toward the blond Japanese, now decorously nibbling at a dark, withered object. It crossed Forrester's mind that the capsule, plus what the joymaker had sprayed him witli, might add up to something larger than he was ready for. He felt almost giddy. Better guard against that, he thought, and demanded as unpleasantly as he could: "Who sent you here?" "Why -- the contact was Adne Bensen." "Don't know her," snapped Forrester, trying not to grin. "You don't?" Taiko stopped eating, dismayed. "Sweat, man, she told me you'd be -- " "Doesn't matter," cried Forrester, and prepared for the killing question he had been saving. "Just tell me this. What's the advantage of my joining your society?" The blond man was clearly disgruntled. "Listen, I'm not begging you. We got something good here. You want in, come in. You want out, go." "No, don't give me an argument. Just answer the question." Forre,ster managed to light a cigarette, puffed smoke in Taiko's face. "For instance," he said, "would it be money that's involved?" "Well, sure. Everybody needs money, right? But that's not the only thing -- " Forrester said, politely but severely, restraining the impulse to giggle: "You know, I had an idea it would be like that. Well, thanks. You better be going now, Hironibi. I'll think over what you said and maybe we can get together some time. But don't you call me. Let me call you." And he bowed Taiko to the door and watched it close behind him, face straight until the Japanese was gone. Then Forrester bent over and howled with laughter. "Come man!" he shouted. "Think I'm an easy mark!" "I do not understand, Man Forrester," said the joymaker. "Are you addressing me?" "Not in this life," Forrester told the machine, still chuckling. He might look like a country cousin, but there was one sharper who had got no farther than first base. He wondered who this Adne Bensen was, who had fingered him for the swindler and sent him an electronic kiss. If she kissed in person like she kissed through sensory stimulation of the tactile net she might be worth knowing. And no problem, either. If Taiko was the worst this century could turn up, Forrester thought with pleasure and lars was safe! 'T'wenty minutes later he found his way to the street level of the building, not without arguments from this joymaker. "Man P'orrester," it said, sounding almost aggrieved, "it is better to take a taxi! Do not walk. The guaranties do not apply to provocation and contributory neghgence." "Shut up for a minute, will you?" Forrester managed to get the door open and looked out. The city of # A.D. was very lafge, very fast-moving and very noisy. Forrester was standing in a sort of driveway, a clump of ethereal, thirty-foot-high ferns in front of him partially making a twelve-lane highway packed to its margins with high-speed traffic in both directions. Occasionally a vehicle would cut in to the entrance to his building, pause before him for a moment and then move on. Taxis? Forrester wondered. If so, he was giving them no encouragemt. "Man Forrester," said the joymaker, "I have summoned death-reversal equipment but it will not arrive for several minutes. I must warn you the costs may be challenged under the bonding regulations." "Oh, shut up." It seemed to be a warm day, and Forrester was perhaps still slightly befuddled; the temptation to walk was irresistible. All questions could be deferred. Should be deferred, he told himself. Obviously his first task was to get himself oriented. And -- he prided himself -- he had been something of a cosmopolitan, back in those days before his death, as at home in San Francisco or Montreal as in New York or Chicago. And he had always made time to stroll around a city He would .itroll this one now Joymakers be damned, thought Charles Forrester, right-faced, hooked the joymaker to his belt and set off along a narrow pedestrian walk There were very few walkers It didn't do to . lake snap judgments, Forrester thought, but these people seemed soft. Perhaps they could afford to be. No doubt someone like himself, he considered soberly, seemed like a hairy troglodyte, crude, savage and flint-axed. "Man Forrester," cried the joymaker from his belt, "I must inform you that Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major has waived protest of the bonding regulations. The death-reversal equipment is on its way." He slapped it and it w'a quiet, or if it continued to bleat at him it was drowned out by the sound of the clamoring traffic. Whatever drove these cars it was not gasoline. There were no fumes. There was only a roar of air and singing tires, multiplied by hundreds and unending. The trafficway lay between tall, bright buildings, one a soft, glowing orange, one the crystalline bluegray coloi of fractured steel. In the court of a building across the trafficway he could see, dimly through the glass and the momentary gaps in the traffic, a dot of plant growth with enormous scarlet fruits On a balcony above him scented fountains played. The joymaker was addressing him again, but he could only catch art Oi it. " -- on station now, Man Forrester." A shadow passed over him and he looked up. Overhead a white aircraft of some sort -- it had no wings -- was sliding diagonally down toward him. It bore a glittering ruby insigne like the serpent staff of Aesculapius on its sides. The nearer end of it was all glass and exposed, and inside a young woman in crisply tailored blue was drowsily watching something on a screen invisible to Forrester. She looked up, gazed at him, spoke into a microphone, glanced at him again and went back to watching her screen. The vehicle took position over his head and waited, following with him as ne walked. "That's funny," said Forrester aloud. "It's a funny world," said somebody quite near him. T Te turned around. Four men were standing there, looking at him with pleasant, open expressions. One of them was very tall and very heavy. In fact, he was gross. He leaned on a cane, studying Forrester, his expression alert and interested. Forrester realized that he was the one who had spoken and, in the same moment, realized that he knew him. "Oh, sure," he said. "The Martian in orange tights." "Very good," said the Martian, nodding. He was not in orange tightr now; he wore a loose white tunic and slate-gray shorts. He wasn't really a Martian, Forrester remembered; at least, his ancestors had come from Earth. One of the other men took Forrester's hand and shook it. "You're the one with a quarter "Look me up when this is all over. I'd like to know what a fellow like you thinks of our world." He brought his knee up and kicked Forrester in the groin. Hard. Forrester felt the world explode, starting inside him. He saw that the man was stepping back, looking at him with interest and pleasure; but it was hard to watch him because the city was moving. It tilted up at an angle and the sidewalk struck him on the forehead. He rolled, clutching at his testicles, and found himself looking upward. The man from Mars said conversationally, "Don't hurry. Plenty of time for everybody." He lifted his cane and limped forward. It was quite an effort for him in Earth's gravity, after Mars, Forrester saw. The cane came down on his shoulder and upper arm, was lifted and came down again, regularly, slowly and strongly. It must have been weighted. It felt like a baseball bat. The pain in Forrester's gut was like death. His arm was numb. All in all, though, he realized quite clearly -- unable to move, watching as they passed the cane from hand to hand and the white aircraft hovered overhead, the woman's face peering patiently dovm -- all in all, it was hurting rather less than he might have expected. Perhaps it was Hara's hungover medicine. Perhaps it was just shock. He tried to speak, but his lungs were not working. He saw that someone was running toward them, someone with a black face under a green beret, but he could not keep his eyes open. He could not quite lose consciousness either, though he wanted to very much. Perhaps that was Hara's euphoric pill too. Then he felt that he was succeeding. The pain in his belly grew alarmingly, and began to recede again, and then felt nothing at all, or nothing physical. But there was something painful in his mind, something th.at whimpered. Why? Why me? Ill TTowls of laughter rolled over Forrester. A girl was screaming, "He's spinning it! He's spinning it! Gee. I think I saw the cartridge!" Forrester opened his eyes. He was in something that lurched and hummed. A girl in a tailored blue suit, her back to him, was staring at what seemed to be a window opening on a sort of arena, where the screaming girl, face flushed and happy, stamping with excitement, was standing over a blindfolded man with a gun. Forrester's aches and bruises reminded him at once of what had happened. He was surprised that he was still alive. He croaked, "Hey!" The girl in the tailored blue looked over her shoulder at him. "You're all right," she said. "Just take it easy. We'll be there in a minute." "Where?" Impatiently she moved her hand. The arena with the man and girl disappeared -- just as the man seemed to be raising the gun -- and Forrester found himself looking at blue sky and .iouds "Lift up a little," the girl in blue said. "You'll see it. There." Forrester tried to raise himself on an elbow, caught a glimpse of trees and rambling pastel buildings and fell back. "I can't lift myself up! Damn it, I've been half killed." He became aware that he was on a sort of stretcher, and that there was another one beside him. The other one was also occupied, by someone with a sheet over him. "Who's that?" he cried. "How would I know? I just bring them in, I don't write their life stories. Now relax or I'll have to put you to sleep." "You silly bitch," said Forrester precisely. "I'm not going to stand for this. I demand that you -- Wait a minute! What are you doing?" The girl had turned around, and she was holding something very like his joymaker, pointed at him. "Are you going to shut up and lie still?" "I warn you! Don't you dare!" She sighed and something cool touched his face. Forrester gathered all his strength to tell her what he thought of her, her probable sex life and this world of hers, in which arbitrary and unpleasant things were done to well to do men like himself. He couldn't. All that came out was, "Arr, a-r-r-r." He was not unconscious, but he was very weak. The girl said, "You weep me, greenie. You are a greenhorn, aren't you? I can always tell. You people wake up in the dormer and you tliink you're God's own sweat. Mother! Sure you're alive. Sure you've had the biggest break you can imagine. But do you think we care?" All this time the aircraft was slipping and turning, coming in for a landing. The girl, who one would have thought to be the pilot, paid no attention. She was very cross. She said, "Now, I know my job, and my job is to keep you alive, or keep you safely dead till they can take care of you. I don't have to talk to you." Forrester said, "A-r-r-r." "I don't even like you," she said with vexation, "and you've made me miss my favorite program. Oh, go to sleep." And she raised the joymaker again, just as Forrester felt the aircraft touch ground, and he did.  t the temperature of liquid helium chemistry stops. On this fact, and one reasonable hope, the largest industry of the late twentieth century had been built. The reasonable hope was that the progress of medicine in past years would be matched by similar progress in the future -- so that no matter what a person might die of, at some future time a way would be found to cure it, to repair it, or at least to make it irrelevant to continuing life and activity. (Including a method of repairing the damage due to freezing to that temperature.) The fact was that freezing stopped time. And the industry was Immortality, Inc. In the city of Shoggo in which Forrester had awakened, a city which was nearly nine hundred years old and enormous, a thousand acres of park along a lakefront had humped themselves into a hill. All around was flat. The hill itself was an artifact. It was, as a matter of fact, the freezing center for that part of the world. cubic yards of earth had been eaten out of the ground to make a cold-storage locker for people. When the locker was built, most of the dirt was heaped back on top of it for insulation. The differential in temperature between ground level and the heart of the frozen hill was nearly five hundred degrees, Fahrenheit, or three hundred and more in the Kelvin scale on which the dormer operated. When Forrester realized where the white aircraft had taken him he was instantly submerged in a terror he could not express. Beginning to awaken, he was still terribly weak, as though one of those sprays from the girl's joymaker had shorted out ninety per cent of his volitional muscle control. (As in fact it had) He saw the bright featureless ceiling overhead and heard the moan and click of the thousand frightening instruments that brought people back to life, and fugued into a terrifying certainty that they were going to freeze him again. He lay there, groaning inarticulately, while things were done to him. But they were not freezing him. They were just patching him up. The blood was washed away. The bruises were scrubbed with something metallic, then touched with a transparent stiff jelly in a long silvery tube that looked something like a large lipstick. His left thigh was pressed for a moment between two glowing screens which he knew to be a sort of X-ray, and a fine wash of something that glistened wet and dark was painted over his heart. This last thing made him feel better, whatever it was. He found that he was able to speak. "Thank you," he said. The young-looking, red-faced man who was working over him at that moment nodded casually, touched Forrester's navel with the end of a silvery probe, glanced at it and said, "All right, I guess we're through with you. Get up and let's see if you can walk to Hara's office." Forrester swung his legs out of the sort of low-walled crib he was in and found he could walk as well as ever. Even his bruises didn't hurt, or not much, although already he could detect what seemed to be the beginning return of pain. The red-faced man said, "You're fine. Stay out of here for a while, will you? And don't forget to see Hara, because you're in some kind of trouble." He turned away as Forrester started to ask questions. "How would I know what kind? Just go see Hara." A slim green arrowhead skipped along the floor ahead of him, guiding him to Hara's office, but actually Forrester thought he could have found it without the guide that had been provided. Once he left the emergency rooms he was in the part of the dormer he remembered. Here he had wakened out of a frozen sleep that lasted half a milennium. There he had gone every day for a week for bathing in some sort of light, warm oil that had vibrated and tingled, and made him feel drowsy but stronger each day. It was on the level below this that he had done his exercises, and in the building across the bed of poinsettias (except that these poinsettias were bright gold) that he had slept. He wondered what had become of the rest of what he thought of as his graduating class. The thawed Lazaruses were processed in batches -- fifty at a clip, at least in his group -- and although he had not spent much time with any of them there was something about this shared experience that had made him know them quickly. But when they were discharged they all went in separate directions, apparently for policy reasons. Forrester regretted they had lost touch. Then he laughed out loud. A blue-jacketed woman, walking toward him along the haU and talking into an instrument on her wrist, looked up at him with curiosity and faint contempt. "Sorry," he said to her, still chuckling, as the green beacon of light turned a corner and he followed He didn't doubt he looked peculiar. He felt peculiar. He was missing these fellowgraduates of the freezatorium with the fond, distant detachment of his high-school class. Yet it was less than forty-eight hours since he had been with them. A busy forty-eight hours, he thought. A bit frightening, too. Even wealth was not as secure a buffer against this world as he had thought. The flickering green light led him into Hara's office and disappeared. Hara was standing at the door, waiting for him. "Damned kamikaze," he said amiably, "can't I trust you out of my sight for a minute?" Forrester, who had never been a demonstrative man, seized his hand and shook it. "Jesus, I'm glad to see you! I'm mixed up. I don't know what the hell is going on, and -- " "Just stay out of trouble, will you? Sit down." Hara made a seat come out of the wall, and a bottle out of his desk. He thumbed the cork expertly and poured a drink for Forrester, saying, "I expected you under your own power this morning, you know. Not in a DR cart. Didn't the center warn you somebody was after you?" "Positively not!" Forrester was both startled and indignant. "What do you mean, after me? I had no idea -- " Tlien tardily recollection dawned. "Unless," he finished thoughtfully, "that's what the joymaker was mumbling about. It was all about bonds and guaranties and somebody named Heinz-something of Syrtis Major. That's on Mars, isn't it? Say." Recognition hardily dawned. "Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major," Hara supplied, toasting Forrester with his glass and taking a tiny sip of the drink. Forrester followed suit; it was champagne. Hara sighed and said, "I don't know, Charlie, but I don't think I'll acquire a taste for this stuff after all." "Never mind that! The Martian! The fellow in orange tights! He's the one who beat me up, he and his gang!" Hara looked faintly puzzled. "Why, of course." "And then," said Forrester, working it out in his mind, "there was this colored fellow. I mean, Negro. I guess he was a Negro -- Anyway, he came along." "There was," said Hara, "another man brought in. with you. Let's see. Graphite-gray. Hair, black, kinked. Eyes brown. Is that what you mean?" "Sure. I think he was trying to help me." "Oh," Hara said, "there's no doubt of that. Messed things up for fair, he did. He's in the freezer now. They killed him. Nitrogen batch -- we're just holding him until we get parts. There's a compatibility problem, so it might be a week or two... "Killed him?" Forrester tipped up his rubycrystal glass and drained the champagne -- heaven knevi; where Hara had found it, after Forrester had mentioned it as one of the great goods of the past -- and it was by no means appropriate to the occasion. It tickled his nose. But at least it contained alcohol, which Forrester felt he needed. He said humbly, "Please explain what happened." "Sweat, Charles, where do I start? What did you do to Henzie?" "Nothing! I mean -- well, nothing, really. I might have stepped on his feet when we were dancing." Hara said angrily, "A Marsman? You stepped on his feet?" "What's so bad about that? I mean, even if I did. I'm not sure I did. Would you blow your stack about something like that?" "Mars isn't Shoggo," Hara said patiently, "and anyway, maybe I would. Depends. Did you read your orientation book?" "Huh?"' "The book of information about the year #. You got it when you were discharged here." Forrester searc'ned his memory. "Oh, that. Maybe I left it at the party." "Well, that computes," Hara said with some disgust. "I mean figures. I'll see you get another one. Meanwhile, will you please try to bear in mind, first, that you're sort of my responsibility, second, that you don't know your way around? I'll see you get another copy of the book. Read it! Come back and see me tomorrow; I've got work to do now. On your way out stop at the discharge office and pick up your stuff." He escorted Forrester to the door, turned, then paused. "Oh. Adne Bensen sends regards. Nice girl. She likes you," he said, closed the door and was gone. F orrester completed his processing and was released by the medical section, receiving as he left a neat white folder with his name imprinted in gold. It contained four sets of documents. One was a sheaf of medical records, a second the book Hara had mentioned, slim and bronze-bound, with the title printed in luminous letters: Your Guide to the #th Century (#-# Edition) A third was what seemed to be a legal paper of some kind. At least, it was backed with a sheet of stiff blue material that gave it the look of a subpoena. Forrester remembered that the doctor who had patched him up had spoken of trouble. This looked like being the trouble, although the words were either unfamiliar in context or totally meaningless ; You, Charles Dalgleish Forrester, uncommitted, undeclared, elapsed thirty-seven years, unemployed-pending, take greeting and are directed. Requirement; To be present at Congruency Hearing, hours #, days #, months # -- It had the authentic feel of legalese, he saw with dismay. Much of the face of the single sheet of paper the blue material enclosed was covered with a sort of angular, almost readable lettering -- something like the machine script they used to put on checks, Forrester thought, and realized that that was no doubt what it was. But it had a date on it, and as that date appeared to be a week or more away, as near as Forrester could figure, he tabled it with some relief and turned to the next and last item in the folder. This was a financial statement. Attached to it was a crisp metallie slip with the same angular printing on it, but which Forrester recognized as a check. He fingered it lovingly and puzzled out the amount. It was made out to him, and it was for #. Forrester attempted to fold it -- it sprang back like spring steel -- and put it away flat in his pocket. It felt good there. He was faintly puzzled by the fact that it was some twenty thousand dollars less than he had expected. But in terms of percentage the amount didn't seem very significant, and he was cheerfully reconciled to the opinion that this society, like all societies, would do doubt have some sort of taxes. Twenty grand was, after all, an amount he could well afford as a sort of initiation fee. Feeling much more secure, he emerged into the sunlight and looked about him. It was late afternoon. The sun was to his right. Slate-blue water stretched to his left. He was looking southward over the great pinnacled mass of the city. Aircraft moved above it. Things crawled ih its valleys. The sun picked out reflections from glass and metal and, although it was still daylight, the city was already exuding a building glow of neon and fluorescence. There were at least ten million persons in Shoggo, Forrester knew. There were theaters and card parties and homes, places where he might find a friend or a lover. Or even an enemy. Down there was the girl who had kissed him last night -- Tip and the Martian and his gang, who had tried to kill him. But where? Forrester did not now virhere to begin. Alive, healthy, with almost a pocket, he felt out of things. Standing on a planet with a poptive human beings, and at least twice that number dreaming in the slow cold of the helium baths, he felt entirely alone. F rom his belt the voice of the joymaker spoke up: "Man Forrester. Will you take your messages?" "Yes," said Forrester, disconcerted. "No. Wait a minute." He took the last cigarette out of the pack he had got that morning, lit it, crumpled the pack and threw it away. He thought. Owning a joymaker was a little like having a genie with three wishes. The thing's promptness and precision disconcerted him; he felt that it demanded equal certitude from himself and did not feel up to it. He grinned to himself ruefully, admitting that he was being mack self-conscious by what he knew really to be nothing but a radio connection with some distant lash-up of cold-state transistors and ferrite cores. He said finally; "Look. You. I think what I ought to do is go back to my room and start over again from home base. What's the best way to get there?" "Man Forrester," said the joymaker, "the best way to get to the room you occupied is by cab, which I can summon for you. However, the room is no longer yours. Will you accept your messages?" "No. Wait a minute! What do you mean, no longer mine? I didn't check out." But he paused and thought, and on consideration that didn't seem to matter much. He had left nothing there. No bag, no baggage. No personal possessions, not even a shaving brush -- he wouldn't have to shave for a week or two anyway, Hara had told him. All that he had put of himself into that room was the garments he had worn last night. And those, he remembered, were disposable... and had therefore no doubt been disposed of. "What about the bill?" he asked. "The charge was paid by the West Annex Discharge Center. it is entered on your financial statement, Man Forrester. Your messages include one urgent, two personal, one notice of legal, seven commercial -- " "I don't want to hear right now. Wait a minute." Once again Forrester tried to frame the right question. He abandoned the effort. Whatever his skills, he was not a computer programmer and it was no good trying to talk like one. It seemed absurd to ask a machine for value judgments, but -- "Gripes," he said, "tell me something. What would you do, right now, if you were me?" The joymaker answered without hesitation, as though that sort of question were coming up every day. "If I were you, Man Forrester, which is to say if I were human, just unfrozen, without accommodations, lacking major social contacts, unemployed, unskilled -- " "That's the picture, all right," Forrester agreed. "So answer the question." Something was crawling underfoot. He stepped aside, out of its way, a glittering metal thing. "I would go to a tea shop, Man Forrester. I would then read my orientation book while enjoying a light meal. I would then think things over. I would then -- " "That's far enough." The metal thing, apparently espying Forrester's discarded cigarette pack, scuttled over to it and gobbled it down. Forrester watched it for a second, then nodded. "You've got some idea, machine," he said. "Take me to a tea shop!" IV 'The joymaker procured a cab for Forrester -- a wingless vehicle like the death-reversal equipment that had brought him in for repair, but orange and black instead of white; it looked like Hallowe'en. And the cab took him to the joy maker's recommendation for a tea shop. The shop was curious. It was located in an interior hall of a great, spidery building in the heart of the city. The cab flew in under a pierced-steel buttress, actually into a sort of vaulted opening at least fifty feet above ground. It halted and hovered before a baleony planted with elimbing roses, and Forrester had to step over a knife-edge of empty space. The cab did not quiver, not even when his weight left it. A girl with hair like transparent cellophane greeted him. "I have your reservation, Man Forrester. Will you follow me, please?" He did, walking behind her across a quartz-pebbled court and into the hall that was the tea room, admiring the swing of her hips and wondering just what it was that she did to her hair to make it stand out like a sculptured puffball and rob it of opacityShe seated him beside a reflecting pool, with silvery fish swimming slowly about. Even with the peculiar hairdo, she was a pretty girl. She had dimples and dark, amused eyes. He said, "i don't know what I want, actually. Anyway, who do I order from?" "We are all the same, Man Forrester," she said. "May I choose for you? Some tea and cakes?" Numbly he nodded turned and as she turned and left watched the sway of her hips with antirely different kind of interest. He sighed. This was a confusing world! TTe took the book out of the  folder he had been given at the West Annex Discharge Center and placed it on the table. Its cover was simple and direct: Your Guide to the #th Century (#-# Edition) -- Where to Go -- How to Live -- Managing Your Money  -- Laws, Customs, Folkways It was edge-indexed with helpful headings: Making Friends; Living on a Budget; How to Get the Most Out of Your Toymaker; Job Opportunities; Where to Get Needed Training... it went on and on. Forrester, flipping through the pages, was astonished to find how many of them there were. He had a good week's rea.iing here, he estimated. Obviously the first thing to do was for liim to decide what was the first thing to do. Making friends could wait a bit. He seemed already to have made more friends -- and enemies! -- than he could assimilate. Living on a budget? He smiled to himself and patted the pocket that held his check. How to get the most out of your joymaker, though. That was a good place to start, thought Forrester, opened the book to the right page and began to read. The remote-access computer transponder called the "joymaker" is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library .and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker. Essentially it is a transponder connecting you with the central computing facilities of the city in which you reside on a sharedtime self-programming basis. "Shared-time" means that many other joymakers use the same central computer -- in Shoggo, them. If you go to another city your joymaker will continue to serve you, but it must be reset to a new frequency and pulsecode. This will be done automatically when you travel by public transportation. However, if you use private means, or if for any reason you spend any time in the agricultural areas, you must notify the joymaker of your intentions. It will Inform you of any steps you must take. "Self-programming" means that the programmed software includes -- The self-programming, sharedtime girl with the dark, grave eyes brought Forrester his tea and cakes. "Thank you," he said, staring at her. He was still not quite sure of his deductions about her. He tried an experiment. "Can you give me my messages?" he asked. "Certainly, Man Forrester, if you wish," she said promptly. "Alfred Guysman wishes to see you on political business. Reverend Sam Tshumu wishes to see you on religious bus'iriess, but is at present not available and will contact you later. Adne Bensen asks you to return her mes.sage of this morning. The Nineteenth Chromatic Trust informs you that arrangements have been made for you to establish banking facilities with them -- " "That's enough," he said, tnurvelling at how nicely a sharedtime transponder could be packaged. "I'll take the rest later." There was no sugar for the tea, but it was physically hot and chemically cool at the same time -- rather like a mentholated cigarette, except that there was no particular taste associated with it. Forrester returned to his book. "Self-programming" means that the programmed software includes procedures for translating most normal variations of voice, idiom, accent and other , variable modalities into a computer-oriented simscripl and thence to the mathematical expressions on which the computers operate. As long as your personal joymaker is within reception range of your voice you may communicate via other shared-time transponders if you wish. Appropriate modulation will be established automatically. However, do not attempt to use another individual's joymaker when yours is not within range. Proper coding cannot be tissured. In the event that your joymaker is lost or damaged -- Forrester sighed and ate one of the cakes. It was rich with flavors like butter and cinnamon and others he could not identify. Pleasant but strange. Very much like this world that had been given him. ttAyTan Forrester," said the joymaker at his belt, its tones muffled by his coat and the tablecloth, "it is necessary for you to accept some messages. I have a notice of personal visit and -- " Forrester said, "Look, I'm doing what you said, right? I'm reading my book. Let me figure it out a little before you throw messages at me. Unless," he said as an afterthought, "there's something that's life-and-death." "There are no messages involving life or death, Man Forrester." "Then wait a while." He was aware -- he didn't know how long it had been going on -- that a distant wind instrument was hooting faintly. Pleasant but strange. Spiced cool breezes blew from the paneled wall, also pleasant but strange. He said hesitantly, "Joymaker, answer me a question. Why did what's-his-name, Heinzie, beat me up?" "I cannot identify the individual, Man Forrester. You were beaten up by four persons in the one recorded incident of attack. Their names were Shloino Cassavetes, Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, Edwardino -- " "That one. Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major. Or, for that matter, all of them -- why did they rumble me?" "I have a priority message regarding Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis iviajOi', Man Forrester. Perhaps it will be informative. May I give it to you?" "Oh, hell. Why not?" "Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major is protesting enforcement of guaranties and has enjoyed disbursements under his bond. You are notified, Man Forrester." Forrester said hotly, "That's what you call informative? Look, skip the damned messages and answer the question. What was that scene all about?" "You have asked three questions, Man Forrester. May I offer a synoptic reply?" "Please do, old friend." "Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, a guest in the rep-rooms utilized by Alin Hara, conceived a grievance against you, cause unstated. Calling into association Shlomo Cassavetes, Edwardino Wry and Edwardeto Wry, they; formed an ad hoc club and filed appropriate conformance in regard to bonds and guaranties. The intention was stated as murder, first phase, ad lib. The motivation was stated as grievance as to de Syrtis Major, practical joke as to the others. Conformances were recorded and the subject, that is, yourself, Man Forrester, was notified. Does that answer your three questions, Man Forrester?" "What do you think?" Forrester snapped. "Well, maybe it does. Sort of. You mean those other three finks lumped me for a joke?" "They so stated, yes, Man Forrester." "And they're still running around loose?" "Do you wish me to ascertain their present whereabouts, Man Forrester?" "No, I mean, aren't they in jail or something?" "No, Man Forrester." Forrester said, "Joymaker, leave me alone for a while. I better get back to my orientation book. I see I don't know as much as I thought I did." Forrester drank the rest of his tea, ate the rest of his cakes and plowed back into his book. To use your joymaker as telephone: You must know the ortho-name and identification spectrum of the person you wish to reach. Once you have given this information to the joymaker it will be remembered and you can then refer to the person in later calls by a reciprocal name or any other personal identification programmed into your joymaker. If you have been called by any person, the joymaker will have recorded the necessary ortho-name and identification spectrum. Simply ask the joymaker to call the person you wish to speak to. If you wish to establish a priority rating with any person, that person must so inform his joymaker. Otherwise your calls may be deferred or canceled as directed by the called person. To use your joymaker as credit card: You must know the institutional designation and account spectrum -- A belated thought percolated to the surface of Forrester's mind. Messages. Financial institutions. One of the messages had been from something that sounded like that. He sighed and looked around the room. Most of the tables were empty. But it was a targe room, and there were perhaps fifty other persons in it, all of them seated at tables in twos and threes and larger groups. Through some effect of the sound-conditioning he could not hear their voices, only the distant hooting flute nnd a faint splashing from tlc (p.int fish in the reflecting pools. He wondered if any of these fifty people would mind if he got up and walked over to them. Touching the faintly sore spots on his shoulders and neck, he decided against it. But it gave him an idea, and he turned to the section of the book on "Making Friends". "I have an urgent notice of personal visit, Man Forrester," grumbled the joymaker from his waist. "Just save it," said Forrester, preoccupied. He was startled at the length of the list of ways of making friends. Above all, there were clubs. Clubs in such profusion that he wondered even fill their rolls. Social clubs, gymnastic clubs, professional clubs. Political groups, religious groups, therapeutic groups. There was a Society of First Families of Mars, and a Loyal Order of Descendants of Barsoom Fans. There were forty-eight bird-watching groups in Shoggo alone. There were stamp-collectors and coincollectors and tax-token collectors and jet-car transfer collectors. There was something called the Society of Ancients which looked interesting, as it appeared to be an organization of persons like Forrester himself, revived from the dead heart of the freezers. Yet it was listed with such curiosities as the B.P.O.E. and the Industrial Workers of the World (Memorial Association) in small type at the end of the section. Puzzling. If it existed at all, should it not have a memberEvidently, it did not, but... "Man Forrester," shrilled the joymaker, "I must inform you of personal visitation by -- " "Wait a minute," said Forrester, suddenly looking up, startled. There was a hint of perfume in the air. Forrester put down his book, frowning. The scent was familiar. What was it? Another tactile-tape message from this Adne Bensen, whoever she might be? He felt a touch on his shoulder, then warm arms around him, a hug. These tactile tapes were certainly convincing, he thought momentarily, then realized this was not a tape. He was not merely feeling and smelling the presence of the embracing arms. He saw them, from the corner of his eye, and awkwardly, like a wrestler struggling to break a hold, he turned inside them. He saw the face of the girl from the party, very near to his. "Tip!" he cried. "My God but I'm glad to see you!" TThen you came right down to it, Forrester hardly knew the girl, barring a little friendly kissing at a party, but at this moment she was very dear to him. It was like a chance meeting in Taiwan with somebody who sat at the far end of the commuter train for years. Not a friend. Hardly even an acquaintance; but promoted by the accident of unexpected meeting to the status of near and dear. He hugged her tight. She laughed breathlessly and shook free. "Dear Charles," she gasped, "not so hard." "I'm sorry." He seated her and sank down opposite, admiring her dark hair and pale skin, her cheerful, pretty face and her figure. The others in the tea room, some of whom had turned to look at them, were losing interest and returning to their own affairs. Forrester said, "It's just that I'm so glad to see you. Tip," She looked startled, then faintly reproving. "My name is Adne Bensen, dear Charles. Call me Adne." "But last night Hara called you -- oh!" he said, remembering. "Then you're the girl who has been sending me the messages." She nodded! "Very nice messages they were," he said. "Would you like some tea?" She said, "Oh, I think not. I mean, not here, anyway. I came to see if you'd like to come to my place for dinner." "Yes!" She laughed, "You are such an impetuous man, Charles. Is that why they call you the kamikaze people? I mean, your century and all." "As to that, Adne, I don't know," he said, "because, when you come right down to it, I don't know who calls me what. I am, you might say, confused. One of the many reasons why I am pleased to see you is that I need somebody to talk to." She settled in a chair opposite him and took some tea, after all. It came without being asked for; apparently the joymaker had monitored their conversation and drawn the inferences any good waiter would draw. She threw back her filmy, puffy wrap -- it had floated around her shoulders like a cloud, but it lay back against the chair quite inconspicuously, Forrester noticed -- and revealed a deep-cut, tightfitting, flesh-colored vest or jerkin of some sort that was startling at first. At second look it was still startling. She said, "Dear Charles. Don't you ask your joymaker tilings!'" "I would except I don't know what to ask." 'Oh, anything! What do you want? Have you filed a profile?" "I don't think so." "Oh, do! Then it will tell you what programs are on, what parties you will be welcomed at, who you would wish to know. It's terrible to go on impulse, Charles," she said earnestly. "Let the joymaker help you." He discovered that his own tea cup had been replenished, and sipped it. "I don't understand," he said. "You mean I should let the joymaker decide what I'm going to do for fun?" "Of course. There's so much. How could you know what you would like?" He shook his head... But that was all of that conversation, all for then. His joymaker said suddenly, its voice "Oh, dear," said Adne, pouting. "Well let's go." joymaker again, and Forrester discovered the reason for its metallic sound. Not only his but the girl's, those of patrons at other tables, all the joymakers at once were repeating the same "Where are you going?" Forrester asked, rising with her. "To the shelter, of course! Hurry it up, Charles, will you? I hate it when I'm out in a public place in one of these things." He said, swallowing hard; "Air raid? A war?" She had his hand, tugging him along toward an exit at the rear of the tea room, where the other patrons were already beginning to stream out. "Not exactly, Charles dear. Don't you know anything?" "Then what?" "Aliens. Monsters. That's all. Now hurry, or we'll never get a seat." V A walk, an elevator ride, a short stretch through a light-walled corridor, and they came out into a great shadowy auditorium. There was just enough light to find their way to seats. It was Forrester heard heavy doors slamming. When about three-quarters of the seats were filled a man in black climbed onto the stage and said, "Thank you all for your cooperation. I'm pleased to be able to tell you that this building has achieved four-nines compliance in exactly one hundred and fortyone seconds. There was a stir of interest from the audience. Forrester, craning his neck to find the source of the P.A. system -- it seemed to murmur from all over the hall -- located it at last as the man spoke again. It was his joymaker, and all the joymakers, repeating what the man said. "This is one of the best showings we've ever had," he said warmly, "and I appreciate it. You may leave." "You mean that's all there is to it?" Forrester asked the girl. "That's all. Are you coming up to my place?" He persisted, "But -- if there's going to be a raid, or any chance of one, shouldn't we wait and see -- " "See what, Charles dear? There's no need to grovel in the ground like moles. It's just a test." "Yes, but -- " He hesitated, and followed her out of the auditorium thoughtfully. It was confusing. No one had mentioned wat to him. But when he said as much to Adne, she laughed. "VFar? Oh, Charles! You're so funny, you kamikazes! Now we've wasted enough time -- are you coming to my place for dinner or not?" He sighed. "Oh, sure," he said. I n the life that had begun with his birth in # and ended with the inhalation of a lungful of flame thirty-seven years later, Forrester had been a successful, self-sufficient and substantial man. He had a wife -- her name was Dorothy, small, blonde, a little younger than himself. He had three sons, and a job as copy chief of a technical writing service, and a reputation among his friends as a fine poker player and useful companion. Although he had missed participation in a war, he was a Boy Scout in World War II, participating in scrap-metal drives and Slap the Jap waste fat collections. As a young adult he had lived through the H-bomb hysteria of the early fifties, when every city street blossomed out with signs directing the nearest way to a bomb shelter. He had seen enough movies and television shows to know what air raid drills meant. He was not very satisfied with the one he had seen. He tried to phrase his dissatisfaction to Adne as she changed clothes behind a screen, but she was not very interested. Drills were an annoyance to her, it was clear. She came out from behind the screen, wearing something filmy and pale, and not at all practical for cooking dinner. On tlie other hand, Forrester thought. who knew how these people cooked their dinners? She rustled over to him, lifted his hand, kissed his fingers and sat down beside him, pulling her joymaker from the place by the arm of the chair where she had left it: "Excuse me, Charles dear," she said, and, to the joymaker; "Receiving messages." Forrester could not hear what the joymaker said to her because she was holding it close to her ear and had evidently somehow turn'd the volume down -- which he resolved to learn how to do. But he heard what she said to it, though it was largely incomprehensible: "Cancel. Hold Three. Comissary four, two as programmed, two A-varied." And, "That takes care of that," she said to him. "Would you like a drink?" "All right." She lifted glasses out of the well of the -- Forrester would have called it a cocktail table, and perhaps it was. He noticed her eyes were on a stack of parcels on a low table across the room. "Excuse me," she said, pouring a minty liquid for him and one for herself. "I just have to look at these things." She took a small sip of her drink and crossed to the packages. Forrester decided he liked his drink, which was not sweet and made his nose tingle. "Been shopping?" he asked. Adne was taking out clothes, small packets which might have been cosmetics, some things like appliances. "Oh, no, Charles dear. It's my job." She was preoccupied with a soft, billowy green thing, stroking it against her cheek thoughtfully. With a twist of her arms she threw it around her shoulders and it became a sort of Elizabethan ruff. "Like it, dear?" "Sure. I mean, I guess I do." "It's soft. Feel." She drew it over his face. It felt like fur, though its points thrust out again immediately they left his skin, looking starched and throny. "Or this," she said, taking it off and replacing it with what looked liked oiled silk in the box it came in, but on her shoulders disappeared entirely, except that it gave luster and color to her skin. "Or -- " "They're all beautiful," he said. "What do you mean, it's your job?" t tT'm a reacter," she said proudA ly. "Weighted nearly # million, with two-nines reliability." "Which means?" "Oh, you know. If I like things, chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that the others will too." She nodded, flushed and pleased. "And this is how you make a living?" "It's how I get rich," she corrected him. "Say!" She looked at him thoughtfully, "I wonder... Do you have any idea how many others like you have come out of the dormers? Maybe you could get a job doing the same thing I could ask." He patted her hand, indulgent and amused. "No. thanks," he said, carefully not to mention the fact that he was rich -- although, he remembered dimly, he had been far less reticent about it at the party the night before. Well, he had made a lot of mistakes at the party -- as witness his troubles with the Martian. "I never asked," said Adne, putting the things away. "How did you die, Charles?" "Why," he said, sitting down again and waiting for her to join him, "I died in a fire. As a matter of fact, I understand I was a hero." "Really!" She was impressed. "I was a volunteer fireman, you know, and there was an apartment fire one night -- it was January, witchy cold, if you stood still in the spill water you'd freeze to the ground in two minutes -- and there was a child in the upper part of the building. And I was the nearest one to the ladder." He sipped his drink, admiring its milky, golden color. "I forgot my Air-Pak," he admitted. "The smoke got me. Or the combination did -- smoke and heat. And maybe booze, because I'd just come from a party. Hara said I must have inhaled pure flame because my lungs were burnt. My face must have been, too, of course. ! mean, you wouldn't know, but I don't think I look quite the same as I used to. A little leaner now, and maybe a little younger. And I don't think my eyes were quite as bright blue." She giggled. "Hara can't help editing. Most people don't mind a tvw improvements." Dinner had arrived as his breakfast had that morning, through a servadoor in the wall. Adne excused herself for a moment while the table was setting up. She was gone more than a moment and came back looking amused. "That's that," she said without explaining. "Let's eat." f the foods served him Forrester was able to identify little or nothing. The textures were .sort of Oriental, with crisp things like water chestnuts and gummy things like sukiyaki varying the crunch of lettuce and the plasticity of starches. The flavors were queer but palatable. "You must have been one of the first to be frozen," she commented. "#? That's only a few years after the freezing began." "First on the book," he agreed. "It was because of the fire company, I guess. I know they had the new death reversal truck standing by for several months, waiting for a victim. I didn't think I'd be the one to christen it... He ate a forkful of something like creamed onions in a pastry crust and said, "It must have been confusing for Dorothy." "Your wife?" He nodded. "I wonder if there's any way I can find out about her. What she did. How the children made out. She was young when I was killed -- let's see. Thirtythree, about. I don't know if having a husband dead but frozen would let her marry again... hope she did... I mean -- " He broke off, wondering what he did mean. "Anyway," he said "Kara had some records. She lived nearly fifty more years, died in her eighties of the third massive stroke. She'd been partly paralyzed for some time." He shook his head, trying to visualize small, blonde Dorothy as a bedridden, beldame. "Had enough?" asked Adne. He came back to present time, faintly startled. "Dinner? Why, I guess so. It was delicous." She did something that caused the table to retract itself and stood up. "Come over here and have your coffee. I ordered it specially for you. Would you like some music?" He started to say, "Not particularly," but she had already started some with visions of Bartok and music-concrete. But it turned out to be something very like violins, playing something very like detached, introspective T schaikowsky . She sank back against him, and she was very warm and fragrant. "We'll have to find you a place to live," she said. He put his arm around her. "This is a condominum building," she said thoughtfully, "but I think there might be something. Do you have any preferences?" "I don't know enough to have preferences," he said, caressing her soft hair. "In a place to live, anyway." She said drowsily, "That's nice." And in the same tone, a moment later, "But I think I should warn you I'm naturalflow And this is about M-day minus four, so all I want is to be cuddled." She yawned and touched her mouth with her hand. 'Oh! Excuse me." Then she caught a glimpse of his face. "You don't mind, do you?" she asked sitting up. "I mean, i could take a pill -- Charles, why are you that color?" "Nothing, Nothing at all!" She said apologetically, "I'm sorry, but I don't know much about kamikaze ways. If there's a ritual tabu. I'm sorry." "No tabu. Just a mi,sunderstanding." He picked up his glass and held it to her. "Any more of this stuff around?" "Charles dear," she said, stretching, "there's all you want. And I have an idea." "Shoot." "I'm going to find you a place to live!" she cried. "You ju.st stay here. Order what you want." She touched something that he could not see and added, "If you don't know how, the children will show you while they're keejjing you company." What had seemed like a floorlength mural opened itself into a door. Forrester found himself looking into a bright gay room where two small children were racing each other around a sort of climbable maze. "We ate our dinner, Mim," cried one of them, then saw Forrester and nudged the other. The two looked at him with calm appraisal. "You don't mind this either, do you, Charles dear?" Adne asked. "That's another thing about being natural-flow." T here were two of them, a boy and a girl, about seven and five. Forrester guessed. They accepted him without question... Or not exactly that, thout Forreater ruefully. There were questions. "Charles! Did people really smell bad in the old days?" "Oh, Charles! You rode in automobiles?" "When the little children had to work in the coal mines, Charles, didn't they get anything to eat?" "But what did they play with, Charles? Dolls that didn't talk?" He tried his best to answer. "Well, the child-labor time was over when I lived, or almost. And dolls did talk, sort of. Not very intelligently... " "When did you live, Charles?" "I was burned to death in # -- " The little girl shrieked, "For witchcraft?" "Oh, no. No, that was hundreds of years earlier too." Charles tried not to laugh. "You see, houses used to catch on fire those days -- " "The Shoggo fire!" shouted the boy. "Mrs. Leary's cow and the earthquake!" "Well -- something like that. Anyway, there were men whose job it was to put the fires out, and I was one of them. Only then I got caught and died there." "Mim drowned once," the little girl bragged. '"We haven't died at all." "You were sick once, though," said the boy seriously. "You could have died. I heard Mim talking to the medoc." Forrester said, "Are you children in school?" They looked at him, then at each other. "I mean, are you old enough to start lessons?" The boy said, "Well, sure, Charles. Tunt ought to be doing hers right now, as a matter of fact." "So should you! Mim said -- " "We have to be polite to guests. Tunt!" The boy said to Charles, "Is there anything we can get you? Something to eat? Drink? Watch a program? Sex stini? Although I guess you ought to know," he said apologetically, "that Mim's natural-flow and -- " "Yes, yes, I know about that," Forrester said hastily, and thought. Sweet God! But being in Rome, he thought, it was what the Romans did that counted, and he would do his best. He resolved it earnestly. It was like being at a party. You got there at ten o'clock, with your collar too tight and a little grouchy at being rushed and your starched shirt-front wet where the kids splashed it when you supervised their bedtime tooth-brushing. And your host was old Sam who'd been such a drag, and his wife Myra was in one of her nouveau-riche moods. showing off the new dishmaker, and the conversation started out about politics, which was Sam's most offensive side... But then you had the second drink: And then the third. Faces grew brighter. You began to feel more at ease. The whole bunch laughed at one of your jokes. The music on the stack of records changed to something you could dance to. You began to catch the rhythm of the party... Oh, I'll try vowed Forrester, joining the children in a sort of board game played against their own joymakers. I'll catch the mood of this age if it kills me. Again. VI Y Tp betimes, and set out to conquer a world. The home that Adne found for him was fascinating -- walls that made closets as he needed them, windovs that were not windows but something like television screens -- Forrester resolutely spent no time exploring its marvels. After a disturbed night's sleep he was up and out, testing his new world and learning to cope with it. The children were marvelous. He begged the loan of them from Adne and they were his guides. They took him to the offices of the Nineteenth Chromatic Trust where a portly old Ebent'zes Scsouge gravely examined Forrester's check, painstakingly showed him how to draw against it, severely supervised his signing the necessary documents to open an account, and only at the end revealed himself by sayin, "Man Forrester, good day." They took him to a Titanian restaurant for lunch, a lark for them, a shattering test of nerve to him, for the Titanians ate only live food and he was barely able to cope with an aspic that writhed and rustled on his spoon. They showed him their playschool, where for three hours a week they competed and jdotted with their peers (their lessons were learned at home, via their child-modified joymakers), and Forrester found himself playing London Bridge is Falling Down with fourteen children and one other adult, symbolically acting out the ritual murder and entombment in the bridge's foundations that the nursery rhyme celebrated. They took him to where the poor people lived, with half-fearful giggles and injunctions against speaking to anyone, and Forrester found himself out of pocket change, having given it all away to pale, mumbling creatures with hard-luck stories about Sol-burn on Mercury and freezer insurance firms that had gone bankrupt. They took him to a park -- indoors. underground -- where the landscaping was topologically grotesque and a purling stream flowed through a hill's base and up the other side, and ducks and frogs and a feathery sort of Venusian fish ate morsels of food the children tossed them. They took him to a museum where animated, enlarged cells underwent mitosis with a plop like a cow lifting her foot from a bog, and a recreated Tyrannosaurus Rex coughed and barked and thumped its feet dangerously, its orange eyes glaring straight at Forrester. They showed him all their treasures and pleasures. But they did not show him a factory, or an office building, or a store of any size. For it did not seem that any of these existed any more. They showed him all of Shoggo until their joymakers chided them, and Forrester's own said severely: "Man Forrester! The children must be returned for their naps. And you really must receive your messages." The children looked at him with woe. "Ah, well," said Forrester, "we'll do it again another day. How do we get home from here?" "A cab," said the girl doubtfully, but the boy shouted: "Walk! We can walk! I know where we are. Ten minutes will do it. Ask your joymakers, if you don't believe me." "I believe you," said Forrester. "Then this way, Charles. Come on, Tunt." And the boy led off between two towering buildings, on the margin of a grassy strip where huge hovercraft swished by at enormous speeds. The joymaker complained, "Man Forrester, I have dichotomous instructions. Please resolve them." "Oh, God," said Forrester, tired and irritable, "what's your trouble now?" "You have instructed me to hold messages, but I have several which are high-priority and urgent. Please reaffirm holding order, stipulating a time limit if possible, or receive them now." The boy giggled. "You know why, Charles?" he demanded. "It tickles them. It's like if you have to go to the bathroom." The joymaker said, "The analog is inexact, Man Forrester. However, please allow me to discharge my message load." Forrester sighed and prepared to contemplate reality again. But something distracted him. Besides the steady whush, whush of the passing hovercraft, besides the distant chant of a choir -- they were passing some sort of church -- there was another sound. Forrester looked up. A faint tweeting sound of communications equipment was coming from a white aircraa't, glass-fronted, hanging overhead. It bore the shining ruby caduceus, and a dark-skinned man in blue was regarding Forrester gravely. Forrester swallowed. "Joymaker," he demanded, "is that a death-reversal vehicle overhead?" "Yes, Man Forrester." "Does that mean -- " He cleared his throat. "Does that mean that crazy Martian is after me again?" "Man Forrester," said the joymaker primly, "among your urgent priority messages is a legal notice. The twenty-four hour hold period having expired and appropriate notices and action having been filed and taken, the man Heinzlichen Jura de -- " "Cut it out! Is he after me?" "Man Forrester," said the joymaker, "yes. As of seventeen minutes ago, the hold period having expired then, he is." A t least the crazy Martian wasn't in sight, thought Forrester, scanning the few visible pedestrians. But the presence of the death-reversal aircraft was a poor omen. "Kids," he said, "we got troubles. I'm being chased." "Oh, Charles!" breathed the bojr, fascinated. "Will you get killed?" "Not if I can help it. Looh. Do you know any short-cuts from here? Any secret ways -- through cellars, over rooftops, you know." The boy looked at the girl. The girl's eyes got very big. "Tunt," she whispered. "Charles wants to hide." "That's it," said Forre,ster. "What about it, son? You must know some special way. Any kid would." The boy said, "Charles. I know a way, all right. But are you sure -- " "I'm sure. I'm sure!" snapped Charles Forrester. "Come on! Where?" The boy surrendered. "Follow me. You too, Tunt." They turned and dived into one of the buildings. Forrester took a last look around for Heinzlichen whatever-his-name-was. He was not in sight. Only the hovercraft thrumming past, and the few uncaring pedestrians... and overhead the man in blue in the death-reversal vehicle, staring down at him, his expression both surprised and angry. Xhen he was safely in the condominium building, the children returned to their own home to await the arrival of their mother, Forrester hurried to his apartment, closed the door and locked it. "Joymaker," he said, "you were right. I admit it. So now let's have all those messages. And take it slow." The joymaker said serenely, "Man Forrester, your messages follow. The Reverend Sam Tshumu asked you to call him, but he is no longer receiving messages. Vincenzo d' Angostura states that he is still available for legal representation but will not call again under Bar Association rules. Taiko Hironibi feels there was some misunderstanding and would like to discuss it with you. Adne Bensen sends you an embrace. A document package is in your receiving chute. Will you receive the embrace?" "Hold it a minute. Gives me something to look forward to. Who's this Reverend Sam Tshumu?" "Sam Tshumu: Male, Christian entelechist, Utopian, five feet eight inches, proselytizer, business in regard to the assault on your person by Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major." "Well. All right. What about it? What does he have to say?" "I am sorry, Man Forrester. That ends the message." "Can I call him back?" "No, Man Forrester. Reverend Sam Tshumu is at present in freeze due to injuries sustained at the same time." "That crazy Martian doesn't waste time, does he? Well, what about the other stuff? Any of it important?" "As to that, Man Forrester, f have no parameters." "You're a big help," said Forrester bitterly. "Get me a drink while I'm thinking. Uh, gin and tonic." He waited for it to appear and took a long pull. His nerves began to feel like tangled barbed-wire. "All right," he said. "Now, what was that about a package?" "You have a document package in our receiving chute, Man Forrester. Envelope. Approximately nine centimeters by # centimeters, less than one-half centimeter in thickness, weighing approximately eleven grams. Inscription; 'Mr. Charles Dalgleish Forrester, Social Security Number #-#-#, last address while living # Dulcimer Drive, received # October #. To be delivered upon revival.' Contents unknown." "Hum. Is that all it says?" "No, Man Forrester. There are machinescript handling instructions on the document. I will phonemize them as close as possible; 'Sigma triphase ooty-poot trip toe, baker tare sugar aleph, paraphase -- ' " "Yeah, well, that's enough of that. I mean, is there anything in English? Anything T could understand?" "No, Man Forrester. Faint carbonization marks are visible where the envelope has been creased. There are several minor discolorations which may represent latent human skinprints. At some time a mild corrosive liquid was spilled -- " "Say, joymaker," said Forrester, "I've got an idea. Why don't I open it up? Where'd you say it was?" T# etrieved from his receiving chute, the envelope turned out to be a letter from his wife. He stared at it and felt something tingling in the corners of his eyes. The handwriting was very strange to him. The signature was Still with atiection, Dorothy...but the hand that had formed those letters scrawled and shook, and had even abandoned her little finishing-school affectations of penmanship, the open-circle dots over the i's, the flowing crosses on the f's. He could read it only with difficulty. Dear Charles, This is, I think, the tenth or eleventh time I have written this letter to you. I seem to do it every time there is a death or bad news, as though the only gossip I have that is worth the effort to pass on for what may be another century -- or more  -- is that which has to do with troubles. Not your troubles, of course. Not any more. Usually the troubles are mine. Although t must say that really my life has not been a burden to me. I remember that you made me happy, Charles. I must tell you that I missed you terribly. But I must also tell you that I got over it. To begin with: You will want to know what you died of, I know, and perhaps the people who bring you back to life will not be able to tell you. (I am assuming that you will be brought back to life. I didn't believe it at the time -- but since then I've seen it happen.) You were burned to death in a house fire on Christie Street on October #th, #. Dr. Ten Eyck, who was with the first aid squad, pronounced you dead and. with some difficulty, persuaded them to use their deathreversal equipment to freeze you. There was some trouble about lacking glycerol for perfusion, but the whole fire company, you will be glad to know, dug into their liquor closets and came up with several bottles of bourbon... and it was that which was used as a buffer. (If you woke up with a hangover, you now know why!) There was some question as to whether too much time had elapsed, too. They thought you might have spoiled during (he discussion, you see. But as it was cold weather for October they decided to take a chance, and you were ultimately consigned to a freeze-dormer at liquid helium temperatures. Where, as I write this, you now lie . , . and where, or in one like it, I expect to be myself before long. I should tell you that I didn't pay for any of this. Your fire company insurance, it turned out, was adequate to cover all I he costs and was in fact earmarked for that purpose. If it harl been up to me I don't think I would have gone to the expen.se, Charles, because after all there were the children to raise. What can I tell you about them? They missed you very much. Vance, in particular, played truant from school for the best part of a month, forging notes to his teacher, persuading some adult -- I .suspected our cleaning woman at the time -- to phone the principal to explain his absence, before I found out about it. But then he joined a Boy .Scout troop and, as they say, developed other interests. David didn't say much. But I don't think he ever got over it. At least not during his lifetime. He joined the Peace Corps four years later and was executed by insurgents during the Huk uprising in #. Since his body was mutilated before being found he could not be frozen. So he, at least, we will never see again. Vance is now married, and is in fact a grandfather. It was his second marriage; the first was annulled. His present wife was a schoolteacher before their marriage... and they have been happy. And I really can think of nothing else to tell you about your son Vance that does not involve attempting to explain what broke up his first marriage and why his second wife could not stay in the United Slates I suppose you may meet him some dav You can ask h-im yourself. Billy, you will be astonished to learn, is now a Great Man. Let me see. He was two wlieii you died. Now he's our senator from Hawaii, and they say he will be president one day. But you will find out more about him in the history books than I can tell you, I think. Let me only say, what I know will interest you, that his first campaign was on a platform of free freezing for everyone, paid for out of Social Security funds, and you were mentioned in every speech. He won easily. And I , . am seventy-nine years old. Since you died forty years ago I cannot now remember you well enough, my Charles, to know if you will mind what I have to say next. Three years after your death I remarried. My husband -- my other husband -- was a doctor. Still is, though he is out of practice now. We have been very happy. (oj. We had two other children. Both girls. You never met him, but he is a good man, barring the tact that at one time he drank too much. He gave it up. He looks a little like you... If I remember correctly, he does. And I am now in brittle health and this is the last time I will write you this letter. Perhaps we will meet again. I wonder what it will be like. Still with affection, Dorothy Forrester put down the letter and cried: "Joymaker! Was there ever a president named Forrester?" "President of what, Man Forrester?" "President of the United States!" "Which United States is that, Man Forrester?" "Oh, for God's sakes! The United States of America. Wait a minute. First off, do you know the presidents of the United States of America?" "Yes, Man Forrester. Washington, George. Adams, John. Jefferson, Thomas -- " "Later on! starting with the middle of the #th century:" "Yes, Man Forrester. Truman, Harry S. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Kennedy -- " "Move it up! Start with around # ." Harrison E. Kaapp, Leonard. Stanchion, Karen P. Forrester, Wilton N. Tschirky, Leon -- " "Well, my God," said Forrester softly, and sat marveling while the joymaker droned on to the end of the twenty-first century, and stopped. Little two year old Willy. Baby Bill. A senator... and president. It was an unsettling idea. The joymaker said, "Man Forrester! Notice of physical visit. Adne Bensen is to see you, purpose unstated, time of arrival less than one minute." "Oh," said Forrester, "good. Let her right in." And he rehearsed what he would tell her, but not to any effect. Geneaology was not in her mind. She was angry. "You," she cried, "what the sweat do you think you're doing to my kids?" tt'llhy, nothing. I don't know what you're talking about." "Dog sweat!" The door crashed closed behind her. "Twitching kamikaze!" She flung her cape against the wall; it dropped to a chair and arranged itself in neat squares. "Pervert creep, you get a kick out of this, don't you? Want to make my kids like you! Want to change them into chatter-toothed handworking dogsweaty cowardly -- " Forrester guided her to a chair. "Honey," he said, attempting to get her a drink, "shut up a minute." "Oh, sweet! Give me that -- " She quickly produced drinks for them, without a pause in her talking. "My kids! You want to ruin them!" "Look, I'm sorry, but I didn't mean to get them in a dangerous -- " "Dangerous! Go crawl! I'm not talking about danger." "I didn't let them get hurt -- " "Sweat!" "Well, it isn't my fault if some crazy Martian -- " "Dog sweat!" She was wearing a skintight coverall which seemed to be made of parallel strands of fabric running top to bottom, held together God knew how; with every movement, as she turned, as her breast rose and fell, tiny slivers of skin showed disturbingly. "You're not even a man. What do you know about -- " "I said I was sorry. Listen, I don't know what I did wrong, but I'll make it up to them." She sneered. "No, I will! I know. There must be something they want. I've got plenty of money, so -- " "Charles, you're pathetic! You haven't got money enough to feed a sick pup -- or character enough to make him a dog. Go rot!" "Now, wait a minute! We're not married. You can't talk to me like that!" He got up and stood over her, the glass unheeded in his hand. Now he was getting angry, too. He opened his mouth to speak, gesticulating. Six ounces of icy, sticky fluid slopped into her face. She stared up at him, and began to laugh. "Oh, Charles!" She put down her own glass and tried to wipe her face. "You know you're an idiot, don't you?" But the way she said it was almost affectionate. "I'm sorry," he said. "Times, let's see, times three, anyway. getting the kids in trouble, for yelling back at you -- " She stood up and kissed him swiftly. As she reached up to him the strands of fabric parted provocatively. She disappeared into the protean cubicle of the lavatory. Forrester picked up the rest of his drink, drank it, drank hers and carefully ordered two more from the dispenser. His brows furrowed with thought. When she came back he said, "Honey, one thing. What did you mean when you said I didn't have a lot of money?" S he fluffed her hair, looking abstracted. He said persistently, "No, I mean it. I mean, I thought you knew Kara pretty well. He must have told you about me." "Oh, yes. Of course." "Well, then. I had this insurance thing when I died, see. They banked the money or something, and it's had six hundred years to grow. Like John Jones's Dollar, if you know what that was. I didn't have much to begin with, but by the time they took me out of the cooler it was lars." She picked up her new drink, hesitated, then took a drink of it. She said, "As a matter of fact, Charles dear, it was a lot more hundred thousand, Hara said. Didn't you ever look at your statement?" sev -- Two mill -- "Oh, yes." She nodded. "Look it up. You had the papers with you in the tea room yesterday." "But -- but Adne! Somebody must've -- I mean, your kids were with me when I deposited the check! It was only two hundred and some thousand..." "Dear Charles. Will you please look it up in your statement?" She stood up, looking somewhat annoyed and somewhat, he thought, embarrassed . where the devil did you put i?' It was a silly joke anyway and I'm tired of it." Numbly he stood up with her, numbly found the folder from the West Side Discharge Center and placed it in her hands What joke? If there was a joke, he didn't know what it was. She fished out the sheaf of glossy sheets in the financial report, glanced at them, began handing them to him. The first was headed Cryotherapy, Maintenance, Schedule . It bore a list of charges under headings like Annual Rental, Biotesting, Cell Retrieval and Detoxification, as well as a dozen or more recurring items with names that meant nothing to him -- SchlickTolhaus Procedures, Homiletic.s and so on. The second sheet bore a list of charges for what appeared to be financial servicing, presumably investing and supervising his capital. The third was for diagnostic procedures, there were several for what seemed to be separate surgeries, sheets for nursing car and for pharmaceuticals used... there were in all nearly thirty sheets and the totals at the bottom of each of them were impressive, but the last sheet of all took Forrester's breath away. It was a simple arithmetical statement ; galaxy Aggregate of converted assets # Aggregate of Schedules #-#: # Net due patient on discharge: # Forrester gasped and coughed and cried, half strangled: "Two medical Sweet Jesus God!" He swallowed and looked up unbelievingly. "Holy A.M.A.! Who can afford that kind of money?" Adne said, "Why, you can, for one. Otherwise you'd still be frozen." "Christ! And -- " a thought struck him -- "look at this! Even so they're cheating me! It says two hundred and sixty thousand,, and they only gave me two thirty!" Adne was beginning to look faintly angry again. "Well, after all, Charles. You did go back there for extra treatment. You might get some of that back from Heinzie, I don't know. Of course, he's protesting it because you messed things up." He looked at her blankly, then back at the statement. He groaned. "Reach me my drink," he said, and took a long pull of it. He announced, "The whole thing's doctors! People just can't have that much money." "You did," she pointed out. "Given time, people can. At compound interest, they can," "But it's -- it's -- it's medical profiteering! I don't know what they did to me, but surely there should be some attempt to control fees!" Adne took his arm and sat him down again on the couch beside her. She said with patience, but not very much patience, "Dear Charles, I wish you would learn a little something about the world before you tell us all what's wrong with it. Do you know what they did to you?" He admitted, "Well -- Not exactly, no. But I know something about what medical treatment costs." He frowned. "Or used to, anyway. I suppose there's inflation." "I don't think so. I -- I think that's the wrong word," she said. "I mean, that means things cost more because the money is worth less, right? But that isn't what happened. Those operations would have cost just as much in the nineteenth century, but -- " "Twentieth!" "Oh, what's the difference? Twentieth, then. That is, they would have cost just as much if anybody had been able to do them. Of course, nobody was." "All right, I admit I'm alive and I shouldn't kick. But still -- " Impatiently the girl selected another document from the sheaf, glanced at it and handed it to him. Forrester looked, and was very nearly sick. Full color, nearly life size, he thought at first that it was Lon Chaney made up as The Phantom of the Opera. But there was no makeup. It was a face Or what was left of one.  He gagged. "What -- What -- " "Do you see, Charles? You were in bad shape." "Me?" "Oh, yes, dear. You really must read your report. See here. Evidently you fell forward into the flames. Besides being killed "the whole anterior section of the head was destroyed. At least, the soft parts. Mm -- lucky your brains weren't cooked, at that." He saw with incredulity that this tender, charming girl was studying the photograph with as little passion as though the charred meat it represented were a lamb chop. She went on, "Didn't you say you noticed your eyes were different? New eyes." Forrester croaked, "Put that thing away." He took a swallow of his drink, regretted it, fished out what remained of his second pack of cigarettes and lit one. "I see what you mean," he said at last. "Do you? Good, deai. You know, I bet four or five hundred people worked on you. All sorts of specialists. All their helpers. Using all their equipment. They get a case like yours, it's like one of those great big enormous jigsaw puzzles. They have to put it all back together, piece by piece... only they don't have all the pieces, so they have to get or make new ones... and of course the stuff spoils so. They have to -- " "Quit it!" "You're awfully jumpy, Charles." "All right! I'm jumpy." He took a deep drag on the cigarette and asked the question that had been developing in his mind for ten minutes now. "Look. At a normal rate of expenditure -- oh, you know; the way you see me living -- roughly how long is going to last?" She looked into space and tapped her teeth. "There are those custom items of yours," she said thoughtfully. "They come high. Those things you smoke, and fowl eggs, and -- what was that other thing? The oransh juice -- " "Leaving out that kind of stuff! How long?" She pursed her lips. "Well, it depends." "Roughly! How long?" She said, "Well, maybe the rest of this week." T T e goggled at her. He repressed a laugh that sounded like a sob. The end of the week? He had been building himself up to an answer he wouldn't like... but this exceeded his expectations. He said wretchedly, "Adne -- what am I supposed to do?" "Well," she said, "you could always get a job." "Sure," he said bitterly. "Got one up your sleeve? One that To his surprise she took him half seriously. "Oh, Charles! Not that much. I mean, you're not skilled. Twenty, twenty-five thousand a day -- I don't think you can really expect more than that." He said, "You mean you can find me a job like that?" "Well, what do you think Taiko would have paid?" "Wait a minute! You mean Taiko would have given me a job? But I thought -- I mean, he said it was his club -- what did he call it, the Ned Lud Society -- " "Yes, that's right." She nodded. "But he was quite astonished at the way you acted, Charles. I don't know whether he's angry or not." "Man Forrester!" The sound of the joymaker was almost like an alarm, wakening him from sleep. It took him a minute to realize what it was, emerging from his bemused state. Then he said, "In a minute, machine. Adne, let me get this straight -- " But she was looking urgent and abashed. "Charles dear, you'd better take this message." "Man Forrester! I have a priority notice of personal visit!" "Yeah, but, Adne -- " "Charles," she said, "please take it. Or never mind. I'll tell you myself." She looked down at her hands, avoiding his eyes. "I guess I should have told you before. I think that's Heinzie coming now." "Heinzie? The Martian? The one -- " She said apologetically, "I told him to come, Charles dear. You'd really better let him in." A s Forrester admitted the man named Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major he was in the state described as "ready for anything". What this actually means is that he was totally unready. He did not know what to expect. He could feel his heart pounding; he felt that his hands were beginning to shake. Even Adne seemed stimulated; she was watching them, her small face intensely interested, and she was fumbling something out of her joymaker. A tranquilizer? No; more likely something to pep her up, thought Forrester. Whatever it was, she popped it in her mouth and swallowed before she said; "Hello, Heinzie. Come on in. I think you and Charles have met." Forrester gave her a look, then returned to Heinzlichen. He started to put out his hand, then stopped, standing on the balls of his feet, half ready to shake hands, half in something like the attack position of karate. "We've met, all right. Too damned often." Heinzlichen came in, allowed the door to close behind him, and stood still, studying Forrester like a specimen in a museum. Adne had been playing with the lights again, and mottled reds and yellows flecked his face. They fit his personal color scheme. He was a tall, fat man. His hair was red, and he wore a close-cut red beard that covered all of his face except for nose, lips and eyes, like the mask of a chimpanzee. He rubbed his beard thoughtfully while he examined Forrester's face attentively, glanced appraisingly at his arms and body, stared at the stance of his feet and finally nodded. He returned his gaze to Forrester's chest and stabbed at it with a finger. He said, "Dat is where I will kill you. Dere. In de heart." Forrester exhaled sharply through his nose. It tingled. He felt the adrenalin flushing through his blood. He opened his mouth; but Adne cut in swiftly before he could speak: "Heinzie, dear! You promised." "Promised? What promised? I promised to talk, dat's all. So let's talk." "But Charles doesn't understand how things are, Heinzie, Sit down. Have a drink." "Oh, sure I'll have a drink. You pick me out something nice. But make it fast, because I only have a couple of minutes." He returned to Forrester. "Well? You want to talk?" Forrester said belligerently, "You're damned right I want to talk. And no, Adne, I don't want a drink. Now, look here, you -- " he hesitated, finding it hard to think of the right thing to say -- "well, what I want to know is, why the devil do you want to kill me?" The Martian looked baffled. He glanced at Adne helplessly, then returned to Forrester. "Sweat, I don't know," he said. "Up dere at de party you stomped my foot and all... but I guess I just don't like you anyway. What do you want to ask a question like dat for?" "Why? It's my life!" The Martian growled, "I knew dis was a bad idea. Honey, I'm going. De more I see of dis guy, de less I like him." But Adne had her hand on his ann. "Please, Heinzie. Here." She handed him a fizzy orange drink in a thing like a brandy inhaler with a hollow stem. "You know Charles is just out of the sleep-freeze. He's kind of a slow learner, I'm afraid." him, dat's my business." But the Martian grumpily accepted the drink. The girl pressed her advantage. "Yes, but, Heinzie, dear, what's the fun of it if he doesn't know what it's all about?" "Trimmer," Heinzlichen growled. "Maybe it's more fun dat way. I can't help dinking we lose some of de important values when it's all so cut and dried." "All right, I-Ieinzie, maybe you're right, but there's such a thing as fair play, too. Why, I don't even think Charles really knows what his rights are." The Martian shook his head. "Dat's not my business eider. Dere's his joymaker; let him call up and find out." Adne winked reassuringly at Forrester, who was not in the least reassured. But she seemed more confident and relaxed now. She leaned back, sipping her drink, and said silkily. "Wouldn't it be nicer for you to talk to him about it? Tell Charles what you want to do exactly?" "Oh, dat part's all right." The Martian put down his own drink, scratched his beard thoughtfully and said: "Well, it's like dis. I want to beat him up good, and den I will stomp on his chest cage until it breaks and ruptures de heart. De reason I like to do it dat way is it hurts a lot, and you don't get near de brain. Of course," he mused, "I got to pay a little more, but de best pleasures are de ones you pay for. Cheap's cheap." Then his expression lightened -- or seemed to ; the beard hid most of his transient looks. "Anyway," he added, "maybe I can get off paying de bill. I talked to de lawyer and he said Forrester got himself in a jam wid de law when dis Oder fellow butted in, so maybe we can fight de costs. But dat doesn't matter in de long run. What de hell, if it costs it costs." S orrester nodded thoughtfully and sat down. "I believe I'll have that drink now, Adne," he said. He realized, with a certain amount of pride, that he was perfectly calm. The reason was that Forrester had come to a decision vhile Heinzlichen was talking: he had decided to go along with the gag. True, it vasn't really a gag. True, when this man said he intended to cause Forrester a lot of pain and ultimate death, he meant every word of it. But you could not spend your life in weighing consequences. You had to pretend that the chips were only plastic and did not represent real currency of any sort, otherwise you would lose the game out of nerves and panic. The very fact that the stakes were so important to Forrester was a good reason for pretending they were only make-believe. lie accepted a glass from Adne and said reasonably, "Now, let's get this straight. Did I understand you right? You talked to a lawyer before you tried to kill me?" 'Neh! Wake up, will you? All I did den was file de papers." "But you just said -- " "Listen, why don't you? De paper,s was so I could kill you -- all de usual stuff, bonds to cover de DR business, guaranties against damaging de brain and like dat. Den de lawyer was just yesterday, when I got de idea maybe I could kill you and save all de bond and guarantie money." "Excuse me. I didn't understand that part." Forrester nodded pleasantly, tipped back his glass and swallowed it down. "Another please, Adne," he said, thinking hard. It began to make a certain amount of sense, he realized. The thing you had to remember was that to these people death was not a terminal act but only an intermission. He said, "As I understand it -- I mean, if I understand it -- the legal part of this business moans you have to guarantee to pay my freezer costs if you kill me." "Nah! Not 'if'. Odderwise you got it." "So I don't have anything to say about it. The lawyer lets you kill me and I'm stuck with it." "Dat's right." Forrester said thoughtfully, "But it doesn't sound fair to me, everything considered." "Fair? Of course it's fair! Dat's de whole idea of de guaranties." "Yes, of course -- if the circumstances are noinnal. But in this case, with death-reversal out of the question..." The Martian snorted angrily. "Are you crazy?" "No, really," Forrester persisted. "You said you were going to try to get out of paying my expenses. You know more about it than I do. Suppose you succeed?" "Oh, boy! Den you have to pay dem yourself." Forrester said politely, "But you see, I don't have any money to pay them with. Ask Adne." The Martian turned to Adne with a look of unbelieving anger, but she said, "As a matter of fact, Heinzie, Charles is telling you the truth. I didn't think of it, but it's so. I mean, I haven't checked his balance... but it can't be much." "De hell with his balance! What de sweat do I care about that I just want to kill him!" "You see. Jura, if you kill me -- " "Shut up, you!" "But the way things are -- " "Dogsweat!" The Martian's face was working angrily under the mask of beard. He was confused, and mad about it. "What's de matter with you, Forrester? Why didn't you get a job?" "Well, I will. As soon as I can." "Sweat! You want to chicken out, dat's all!" "I simply didn't understand my money situation. I didn't plan it this way. I'm sorry. Jura, I really am, but -- " "Shut up!' barked the Martian. "Look, I got no more time for dis talk. I have to go to de rehearsal hall, we're doing de Schumann lieder and I'm de soloist. Answer de question. Do you want to chicken out?" "Well," said Forrester, fiddling with his glass and casting a sidelong glance at Adne, "yes." "Fink! Dogsweat fink!" "I knov# how you feel. I guess I'd feel the same way." "De hell with how you'd feci. All right, look. I'm not promising anything, but I'll talk to de lawyer again and see where de hell we stand. Meanwhile, you get a job, hear?" F orrester showed the Martian out. He was feeling elated. He stood thoughtfully at the door, testing the feeling. For a man who had just discovered he was a pauper, who had reinforced the dislike of an enemy who proposed to kill him, Forrester was feeling pretty good. Probably it was all in an illusion, he thought fatalistically. Adne was curled up on the couch, study .ing him. She had been doing something with the lights again; now they were misty blue, and her skin gleamed through the lacy strands of her coverall. Perhaps she had been doing something with that, too; it seemed to be showing more of Adne than it had earlier. Forrester excused himself and went into the little lavatory room to splash cold water on his face: And then he realized the cause of his elation. He had managed to win a point. He was not a bit sure it was a worthwhile point; he wasn't even quite sure of what he had won. But for better or for worse, he had won a small victory over Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major. For days Forrester had been a cork bobbing to the thrusts of every passerby; now he was thrusting back. He came smiling back into the room and cried: "I want a drink!" Adne was still on the couch, murmuring into her joymaker. " -- and be sure you're locked up," she was saying, "don't forget your prophylaxis and good night, Mim." She put it down and looked up at him. Her expression was sulky but entertained. "The kids?" She nodded. "My God, is it that late?" He had forgotten the passage of time. "I'm sorry. I mean, what about their dinners and all?" She looked slightly less sulky, slightly more entertained. "Oh, Charles! You weren't thinking I had to boil oatmeal or peel potatoes? They've had their dinners, of course." "Oh. Well. I guess we should be thinking about ours -- " "Not yet." Forrester said, reorienting his thinking very quickly. "All right. Then what about that drink?" "I'm not thirsty, you fool." She lifted her joymaker, looked him over with narrowed eyes, kissed the soft spot at the base of his throat and touched it with the joymaker. Forrester felt a sudden urge inside him. It was like a mild electric shock, like a whiff of mingled oxygen and musk. Adne studied him critically, then leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. A moment later he said, "Do that again." She did. Then she lay back against him with her head on his shoulder. "Dear Charles," she said, "you're such a nut." He stroked her and kissed her hair. The parallel-strand fabric did not feel coarse or wirey; lie could hardly tell it was there. "I don't know if you did the right thing with Heinzie," she said meditatively. "It's kind of -- you know. Almost chicken..." Then she turned inside his arm and kissed his ear. "I know it embarrasses you when I talk biology, but -- well, the reason I'm natural-flow, you see, is I'm a natural type of girl. Do you understand?" "Sure," he lied, hardly even hearing her. "I mean, if you want to you can take the pills and use chemosimulants and it's just about the same. But I don't do that, because if you're going to do that, you might just as well go all the way and use the joy machine." "I can see that, all right," he said, but she fended him off and added: "Slii', one doesn't have to be Cjinetimes you're at a low point, and something special hap' pens and you'd like to be at a high point. Then you can take a pill if you want to, do you see?" "Oh, yes! Say!" said Forrester, pleasantly excited, "I wonder! How would you feel about taking a pill now?" She sat up, stretched and put her arms around him. "Don't have to," she said, resting her cheek against his. "I took one when you let Heinzie in." Jith two victories in one day, thought Forrester in a mood of pleasant triumph and lassitude, this world could come pretty close to his first hopes for it after all. After the girl had gone he slept for ten good hours, and woke with the conviction that everything would come out right. The father of a president and the lover of Adne Bensen was, at least in his own eyes, a figure of much mana. There were problems. But he would cope with them. He ordered breakfast and added: "Machine! How do I go about getting a job?" "If you will state parameters, Man Forrester, I will inform you as to openings which may be suitable." "You mean what kind of job? I don't know what kind. Just so it pays -- " he coughed before he could get the figure out -- "around But the joymaker took it in stride. "Yes, Man Forrester. Please inform me further as to working conditions -- home or external; mode of payment -- straight cash or fringed; if fringe, nature permitted -- profit-sharing, stock issue, allocated earnings bonus, or other; categories not to be considered; religious, moral or political objections, not stated in your record profile, which may debar classes of employ -- ' "Slow down a minute, machine. Let me think." "Certainly, Man Forrester. Will you receive your messages now?" "No. I mean," he added cautiously, "not unless there are some life and death ones, like that Martian being out to kill me again." But there weren't. That, too, thought Forrester with pleasure, set this day off from other days. He ate thoughtfully and economically, bathed, put on clean clothes and allowed himself an extremely expensive cigarette before he tackled the joymaker again. Then he said: "Tell you what you do, machine. Just give me an idea of what jobs are open." "I cannot sort them unless you give me parameters, Man Forrester." "That's right. Don't sort them. Just give me an idea of what's going." "Very well, Man Forrester. I will give you direct crude readout of new listings as received in real time. Marking. Mark! Item, curvilinear phase-analysis major, seventy-five hundred. Item, chef, full manual, cordon-bleu experience, eighteen thousand. Item, poll subjects, detergents and stress-control appliance, no experience required, six thousand. Item, child-care domestics -- but, Man Forrester," the joymaker broke in on itself, "that clearly specifies female employment. Shall I eliminate the obviously inappropriate listings?" "No. I mean, yes. Eliminate the whole thing for now. I get the idea." But it was confusing, thought Forrester uncomfortably; the salaries mentioned were hardly higher than twentiethcentury scales They would not support a Pekingese pup in this era of joyful extravagance. "I think ni go see Adne," he said suddenly, and aloud. The joymaker chose to reply. "Very well, Man Forrester, but I must inform you as to a Class Gamma alert. Transit outside your own dwelling will be interrupted for drill purposes." "Oh. God. An air raid?" "A drill, Man Forrester." ' "Sure. Well, how long is that going to go on?" "Perhaps five minutes, Man Forrester." "Oh, well, that's not so bad. I tell you what, why don't you give me my messages while I'm waiting." "Yes, Man Forrester. There is one personal and nine commercial. The personal message is from Adne Bensen and follows." Forrester felt the light touch of Adne's hand, then the whisper of Adne's voice: "Dear Charles," her voice whispered, "see me again soon, you dragon! And you know we have to think about something, don't you? We have to decide on a name." 'XThen he reached Adne's  apartment the children let him in. "Hello, Tunt," he said. "Hello, Mim." They stared at him curiously, then at each other. Blew it again, he thought in resignation; it must be the girl that's Tunt, the boy that's Mim. But he had long since decided that if he tried to track down all his little errors he would have time for nothing else, and he was determined not to be derailed. "Where's your mother?" he asked. "Out," "Do you know where?" Forrester asked. "Uh-huh." Forrester said patiently, "Would you like to tell me?" The boy and girl looked at each other thoughtfully. Then the boy said. "Well, not particularly, Charles. We're kind of busy." Forrester had always thought of himself as a man who liked children but, although he smiled at these two, the smile was becoming forced. "I guess I can call her up on the joymaker," he said. The boy looked scandalized. "Now? While she's crawling?" Forrester sighed. "Look, fellows, I want to talk to your mother about something. How do you recommend I go about it?" "You could wait here, I guess," the boy said reluctantly. "If you have to," added the girl. "I get the impression you don't want me around. What are you kids doing?" "Well -- " the boy overruled his sister with a look and said sheepishly -- "we're having a meeting." "But please don't tell Taiko!" cried the girl. "He doesn't like our club," the boy finished. "Just the two of you?" "Sweet sweat, no!" laughed the boy. "Let's see. There are eleven of us." "Twelve!" the girl crowed. "I bet you forgot the robot again." "Maybe I did. You and me, Tunt. Four boys. Three girls. A grown-up. A Martian... and the robot. Yeah, twelve." "You mean a Martian like Heinzlichen what's-his-name?" "Oh, no, Charles! Heinzie's a dope, but he's people. This is one of the big green ones with four arms." Forrester did a double-take, then said, "You mean like in Edgar Rice Burroughs? But -- but I didn't think those were real -- " The boy looked politely interested. "Yes? What about it?" "What do you mean by 'real', Charles?" asked the girl. I n the old days before Forrester died he had been a science-lover. It had always seemed to him wonderful and exciting that he should be living in an age where electricity came from wall sockets and living pictures from a box on a bench. He had thought sometimes, with irony and pity, of how laughably incompetent some great mind of the past, a Newton or Archimedes, would have been to follow his own six-year-old's instructions about tuning a television set or operating his electric trains. So here I am, he thought wryly, the bushman in Times Square. If a not much fun. But by careful and singleminded questioning he got some glimpse of what the children were talking about. Their playmates were not "real", but they were a lot realer than, say, a BetsyWetsy doll. They were analogues -- simulacra -- the children called thern "simulogs", when pressed. The little girl said proudly that they were very good at developing inter-personal relationships. "Got that much," said Charles, "or anyway I think I do. So what does Taiko have to do with it?" "Oh, him!" "He doesn't like anything that's fun." "Says we're losing the will to cope with -- with what you said, Charles. 'Reality.' " "And all that sweat," added the girl. "Say! Would you like to hear him?" She glanced toward the viewwell, now showing a placid background scene of woody glades and small furry animals. "You mean on the television?" Forrester asked. "The what, Charles?" "On that." "That's right, Charles." "Well," said Forrester... And thought that, after all, he might as well. If worst came to worst, he could take up Taiko's offer of " a  job, assuming it was still open; and before he came to that worst he would be better off to known something about it. "Display away," he said. "What have I got to lose?" "The viewing wall, obedient to the little girl's orders, washed out the forest glade and replaced it with a stage. On it a man in a fright wig was bounding about and howling. With difficulty Forrester recognized the blond, crew-cut visitor he had so unceremoniously got rid of -- when? Was it only a couple of days ago? Taiko was doing a sort of ceremonial step dance, a couple of paces in one direction and a stomp; a couple of paces away, and another stomp. And what he was shouting seemed like gibberish to Forrester: "Lud, lords, led nobly!" (Stomp!) "Let Lud lead, lords (stomp!), lest lone, lorn lads lapse loosely (stomp!) into limljo!" (Stomp!) He faced forward and threw his arms wide. The camera zoomed in on his impassioned, tortured face. "Jeez, kids! You want to get your goddam brains scrambled? You want to be a juiceless jellyfish If you don't, then -- let Lud lead! (Stomp!) Let Lud lead! (Stomp!) Let Lud lead -- " The boy cried over the noise From the view wall: "Now he's going to ask for comments from the viewers. This is where we usually send in things to make tiim mad like. 'Go back in the freezer, you old icy cube' and 'Taiko's a dirty old Utopian!' CH course, we don't give our names." "Today I was going to send in. If it was up to people like you we'd still be swinging from our tails like apes,' " said the girl thoughtfully, "but it probably wouldn't make him very mad." Forrester coughed. "Actually, I'd just as soon not make him mad. I may have to go to work for him." The children stared at him, dismayed. The boy extinguished Taiko's image on the view-wall and cried, "Please, Charles, don't do that! Mim said you turned him down." "I did, but I may have to re consider; I have to get some kind of a job. Matter of fact, that's why I'm here." "Oh, good," said the girl. "Mim'll get you a job. Won't she, Tunt?" "If she can," the boy said uncertainly. "What can you do?" "That's one of my problems. But there has to be something; I'm running out of money." They did not respond to that, merely looked at him wide-eyed. They not only looked astonished, they looked embarrassed. At length the little girl sighed and said, "Charles, you're so sweaty ignorant I could freeze. I never heard of anybody being out of money, 'cept the Forgotten Men. Don't you know how to get a job?" "Not very well." "You use the joymaker," the boy said patiently. "Sure. I tried that." The boy looked excited. "You mean -- look, Charles, you want me to help you? Cause I will. I mean, we had that last year in Phase Five. All you have to do is -- " His expression suddenly became crafty. "Oh, sweat, Charles," he said carelessly, "let me do it for you. Just, uh, tell it to listen to me." Forrester didn't need the girl's look of thrilled shock to warn him. "Nope," he said firmly. "I'll wait for your mother to come home." The boy grinned and surrendered. "All right. Charles. I just wanted to ask it something about Mim's other, uh, friends. Well, here's what you do. Tell it you want to be tested for an employability profile and then you want recommendations." "I don't exactly know what that involves," Forrester said cautiously. The boy sighed. "You don't have to, Charles. Just do it. What the sweat do you think the joymaker's for?"  nd actually, it turned out pretty easy, although the "employability profile" testing involved some rather weird questions -- What is 'God'? Are your stools black and tarry? If you happened to be a girl, would you wish you were a boy? Assume there are Plutonians. Assume there are elves. If elves attacked Pluto without warning, whose side would you be on? Why are you better than anyone else? Most of the questions were like that. Some were worse -- either totally incomprehensible to Forrester, or touching on matters that made him blush and glance uneasily at the children. But the children seemed to take it as a matter of course, and indeed grew bored before long and wandered back to their own viewwall, where they watched what seemed to be a news broadcast. Forrester growled out the answers as best he could, having come to the conclusion that the machine knew what it was doing even if he didn't. The answers, of course, made no more sense than the questions ; tardily he realized that the joymaker was undoubtedly monitoring his nervous system and learning more from the impulses that raced through his brain than from his words, anyway. Which was confirmed when, at the end of the questions, the joymaker said: "Man Forrester, we will now observe you until you return to rest state. I will then inform you as to employability." Forrester stood up, stretched and looked around the room. He could not help feeling that he had been through an ordeal. Being reborn was nearly as much trouble as being born in the first place. The children were discussing the scene on the view-wall, which seemed to show a crashed airliner surrounded by emergency equipment, on what appeared to be a mountain-top somewhere. Men and machines were dousing it with chemical sprays and carrying out injured and dead -- if they made that distinction -- on litters, to what Forrester recognized by the ruby caduceus as death-reversal vehicles. The mountainside was dotted with what looked like pleasure craft -- tiny, bright-colored aircraft that had no visible business there, and that seemed to be occupied by sightseers. No doubt they were, thought Forrester -- reiiu'inbering the crowds that had stood by the night he was burned to death, heedless of icy spiny, icy winds and irritated police trying to push them back. "Old Hap's never going to make it," said the boy to the girl, and looked up to see Forrester. "Oh, you're done?" Forrester nodded. A drone from the view-wall saying," -- made it again, with a total to this minute of thirty-one and fiftyfive, out of a possible ninetyeight. Not bad for the Old Master! Yet Hap still trails the rookie Maori from Pore Moresby -- " "What are you watching?" he asked. "Just the semi-finals," said the boy. "How'd you make out on your tests?" "I don't have the results yet." The screen flickered and showed a new picture, a sort of stylized star-map with arrows and dots of green and gold. Forrester said, to ask for?" "Sweat, Charles! How would we know?" The boy was clearly more interested in the view-wall than in Forrester, but he was polite enough to add: "Tunt's projected life average is about teen. But of course we've got uh, more advantages," he said delicately. Forrester sat down and resigned himself to waiting for the results. The arrows and circles were moving about the star-map, and a voice was saying: " -- probe reports from #I Cygni, Proxima Centauri, Epsilon Indi and Cordoba # show no sign of artifactual activity and no change in net systemic energy levels." "Dopes!" shrilled the little girl. "They couldn't find a Martian in a mattress." " -- at Groombridge #, however, the unidentified object monitored six days ago shows no sign of emission and has been tentatively identified as a large comet, although its anecliptic orbit marks this large and massive intruder as a potential trouble spot. Needless to say, it is being headquarters in Federal City announce that they are phasing two additional monitors out of their passive orbits..." "What are they talking about?" Forrester asked the boy. "The war, of course. Shut up, won't you?" " -- Well, there's good news tonight from #H Camelopardis! A late bulletin just received from sortie-control headquarters states that the difficult task of replacing the damaged probe has beenj completed! The first of the re-, placements rushed out from BO # has achieved stellar orbit in a near-perfect, almost circular orbit, and all systems are go. Seven back-up replacements -- " "Sweat," said the girl. "What a tedious war! Charles, you used to do things better didn't you?" "In what way?" The girl looked puzzled. "More "If you call that better, maybe we did. World War Two killed think." breathed the girl. "And so far we've killed, what is it, Tunt? Twenty-two?" Forrester. The boy shook his head disgustedly. "Twenty-two individual Sirians. Isn't that rotten?" T)ut before Forrester could answer his joymaker spoke up: "Man Forrester! Your tests have been integrated and assayed. May I display the transcript on Bensen children equipment?" "Go ahead," the boy said sullenly. "Can't be any worse than that." The star-map disappeared from the wall and was replaced by shimmering sine-waves, punctuated with numbers that were quite meaningless to Forrester. "You may apply for re-evaluation on any element of the profile, if you wish. Do you wish to do this, Man Forrester?" "Hell, no." The numbers and graphs were not only meaningless but disturbing. Forrester had a flash of memory which he identified as coming from the last time a government agency had concerned itself with finding him a job -- after his discharge from the peacetime conscription term, when he joined the long lines of unemployables telling their lies to a bored State Employment Service clerk. He could almost see the squares of linoleum on the floor, the queues of those who, like himself, wanted only to collect unemployment insurance for a while, in the hope that the world would clarify itself to them. But the joymaker was talking: "Your profile, Man Forrester, indicates relatively high employability in personal-service and advocative categories. I have selected ninety-three possible openings. Shall I give you the list?" "My God, no. Just give me the one you like best." "Your optimum choice, Man Forrester, is as follows: Salary, seventeen thousand five hundred. This is rather less than your stated requirements, but an expense -- " "Hold on a minute! I'll say it's less! I was asking for ten million!" "Yes, Man Forrester. You is seventeen thousand five hundred per day. At four-day week norm, allowing for projected overtime as against health losses, sand dollars per year. Expenses are also included, however, opaddition to salary." "Wait a minute." The numbers were so large as to be dizzying. He turned to the children. year. Can I live on that?" "Sweat, Charles, sure, if you want to." Forrester took a deep breath. "I'll take it," he said. '"he joymaker did not seem particularly concerned. "Very well, Man Forrester. Your duties are as follows: Conversation. Briefing. Discussion. The orientation is timeless, so your status as a recent disfreeze will not be a handicap. You will be expected to answer questions and be available for discussions, usually remote due to habitat considerations. Some travel is indicated." "Sweat." The Bensen children showed signs of interest; the boy sat up and his sister stared wideeyed at Forrester. "Supplementary information, Man Forrester: This employer has rejected automated services for heuristic reasons. His desideratum is subjectivity rather than accuracy of data. The employer is relatively unfamiliar with human history, culture and customs -- " "It fs!" cried the girl. " -- and will supplement your ed." Forrester cut in. "Never mind that. Where do I go for my interview?" "Man Forrester, you have had it." "You mean I've got the job? But -- but what do I do next?" "Man Forrester, I was outlining the procedure. Please note the following signal." There was a mellow, booming chime. "This will indicate a message from your employer. Under the terms of your employment contract you may not decline to accept these messages during the hours of ten hundred to fourteen hundred on working days. You are further required to receive such messages with no more than twelve hours' delay even on non-worldng days." And that, thought Forrester, was that. Except for trying to find out what was bugging the kids. He said, "All right. What's eating you?" They were whispering together, their eyes on him. The boy stopped long enough to ask, "Eating us, Charles?" "Why are you acting like that?" Forrester amended. "Oh, nothing," the boy said. "Nothing important " corrected the girl. "Come on!" The little girl said, "It's just that we never knew anybody who'd work for them before." "Work for who?" "The joymaker told you, Charles! Don't you listen?" said the boy, and the girl chimed in: "Sweat, Charles! Don't you know who you're working for?" Forrester took a deep breath and glared at them. He told himself that they were only children, and that in fact he was rather fond of them; but they seemed on this particular morning to be determined to drive him mad. He sat down and picked up his joymaker. Carefully he scanned the cluster of buttons until he found the crystal-clear, rounded one he was looking for, turned the joymaker until its spraynozzle was pointing at the exposed flesh on his arm and pressed the button. Happily it was the right button. What the fine mist that danced into his wrist might be he did not know, but it achieved the expected effect. It was like a supertranquilizer; it cleared his mind, quieted his pulse and enabled him to say, quite calmly, "Machine! Just who the hell have you got me working for?" "Do you wish me to display a picture of your employer, Man Forrester?" "You damn bet I wish!" "Please observe the view-wall, Man Forrester." And observe it Forrester did; and swallowed hard, stunned. In all justice to the joymaker, Forrester was forced to admit that he had placed no restrictions on its choice of an employer for cept almost anything, but all the same he was surprised. He hadn't expected his employer to have bright green fur, or a diadem of tiny eyes, peering out of a ruff around a pointed head, or tentacles. He had not, in fact, expected it to be one of The Enemy, the race whose presence in space had scared mankind into a vast series of raid drills, weapons-programs and space probes... in short, a Sirian.       He seemed fo be reading minds. Bui whose? They certainly did not belong io anybody be knew! T ester Shay was married three months when he got his first Erector set. Thalia, noting that he felt tired and rundown, ordered him to get a checkup. Too tired and rundown to object, he went to see Dr. Peabody. "Very surprising," the physician said after an embarrassingly thorough examination. "Married three months, beautiful, affectionate bride -- but you get plenty of sleep, outdoors a lot, a moderate amount of exercise." "I do all my own marketing," said Les, who owned a wholesale grocery business. "I walk every chance I get, which is considerable. Marketing is all outdoors, you know. And I have to get to sleep early, because if I don't get up early, my competitors -- " "Exactly. And I know it's not overwork. I'm overworked myself, but I'm in tiptop condition." "How do you manage it?" asked Les, interested in a tired, rundown way. "A hobby," said Dr. Peabody. "Gardening? Raising tropical fi,sh? Golf?" "The last thing you'd expect," Dr. Peabody said, leaning forward excitedly. "I know a lot of and I've got this little smelter, see, and I break down the amalgam into silver and mercury, then sell the stuff back to the dentists. Darn near pays for itself! And fun? You ought to come visit my basement sometime!" Shambling home, Les wondered what he could take up as a hobby. Nightclubs and theaters wouldn't do. They let out too late. Besides, they weren't a hobby. Raising things was too close to his actual work; it would make him think about produce and canned goods. He did enough outdoor walking to eliminate sports. That was when he saw the Erector set in the store window. T T e stopped and studied it, looking more wistful now than tired or rundown. He had always wanted an Erector set, but his parents, believers in as the twig is bent so grows the tree, had refused to buy him one. They didn't, they explained, want their son to become a mechanic. Not, mind you, they'd added, that there was anything wrong with mechanics. But he was worthy of great things. They had also been disappointed when he went into the wholesale grocery line, were more pleased now because he was doing well in it, but that wasn't important. He still wanted an Erector set. When he got home, Thalia looked expectantly at the large, heavy box. He had bought the biggest and most expensive set, of course. "Oh, something for the house?" she asked, obviously hoping it wasn't. "Doctor said I needed a hobby or something," he explained uncomfortably. "Wonderful!" she exclaimed. "We can do it together!" "You mean you like working on Erector sets, too?" he cried. "Oh," she said. "Well, that's really a -- well, a man's hobby." She gave him the room that would some day be a nursery and he built a parachute jump, a stake truck, a windmill and a ski tow. The spring came back to his walk and the roses to his cheeks. But less than a week later, lying in bed with his bride in his arms, he could sense the old tired, rundown feeling creep up on him. "What's the matter, darling?" Thalia asked, disconcerted. "Is it the onions I had for dinner?" "Oh, no, sweetheart!" he tried to answer hastily, only it came out a slow sigh. "It's the Erector set." "The -- Erector set? Oh! The Erector set. Well, if it's broken, darling, you can always buy another." "It's not broken. That isn't the trouble," he sighed again, and turned over and moodily went to sleep. The problem was still on his mind in the pre-dawn at the market. Kale was coming in nicely and he had bought all the primes offered by the farmers. He morosely helped Arnie, his driver, load up. "What happened to the old zip?" Amie asked concernedly. "You were feeling great for a while. Down in the dumps again?" "I guess so," said Les. "Temporarily, at least. I hope." "You ought to try tooling one of these monmouths through city traffic. Gotta judge every inch of the way. Boy, you drive one and I bet you won't have a minute to -- " Les found himself listening intently, but not to Arnie's goodnatured chatter. Something was wrong. He knew it was wrong. But what? No, not like walking barefooted in spilled sugar, he mused. Though it was a little like that -- sort of gritty. But painful, too. As if he were trying to run with a sore socket in his leg. "You've got a bearing burning out," Les interrupted. Arnie took a fast glance at him. "Since when you know about motors, Boss?" "A bearing," said Les. "That's what it feels like." Les nodded at a service station up ahead. "Pull in there. I want to have it checked." '"The garageman examined the motor and found a bearing rubbed so raw that Les had to turn away in compassion and disgust. He left Arnie, puzzled enough to be silent for once, at the service station and walked alone the rest of the way to the office. Les discovered he was surrounded by sensations ranging from purrs of pleasure all the way to groans of pain. One purr came from a trim little Porscht -- new tune-up job, a little heavy on the grease, but that would thin out on the straightaway, he thought, and the unexpected thought alarmed him. Thought? He considered. It was a feeling, a very strong and explicit emotion. So was the sympathy for a passing cab that really wanted to lie down on some nice, restful junkpile. A painful click, click bothered him. He looked up. It was a tower clock, desperately clawing its way around the hours on eroded cams. Damn the sadists who would put a conscientious servant through such torture, he thought angrily. But he felt equally guilty when he came into the office and heard Miss Zeichner typing. The dogs in the escape mechanism were practically howling and the keys were moving only because her slim but powerful fingers were beating them into moving. "Leave that alone!" Les said, more sharply than he'd intended. "I mean, no more typing for today," he amended when she jumped and looked frightened. "But the filing's all done and I have a perfect mess of correspondence to get out," she objected. "If I don't do it today  "Not on that battered hulk," he told her. He called and ordered a new electric typewriter. Miss Zeichner was, as she put it, thrilled. He shrugged. She always was either thrilled or absolutely -- completely and absolutely -- shattered. But only over unimportant things. For instance, was she completely and absolutely shattered by the pained limpings and clenched-teeth determination to do a job, to keep those pistons pumping no matter what the cost; completely and absolutely thrilled by the sleek, contented murmurs, the happy little laughs of conscious strength, easy power, the cared-for feeling; or completely and absolutely dismayed by the breathless puffing under a merciless load, like -- He listened sharply. He felt more sharply still. It came from the warehouse behind the office. He sprang out of his seat savagely enough to upset Miss Zeichner again, raced into the warehouse. A valiant little fork-lift truck, overloaded by half again too many cases of canned salmon, was almost red-faced with strain. Les leaped aboard, switched off the motor, hauled out the man, shoved him against the wall and started a murderous swing. "Mr. Shay!" yelped the man. "What did I do wrong?" It was Walt's voice. Les blinked, dropped his fist, slumped. "Sorry, Walt," he mumbled. "Guess I'm all on edge today. You had that fork-lift overloaded and it -- it jarred me. Sorry." Walt picked his shirt button up off the floor. "Hell, Mr. Shay, it's all right. I'd probably feel the same if somebody was ruining my property." " Property " shouted Les, going for him again. "Things like machines -- property" Arnie, back while his truck was being repaired, caught Les from behind and held and sooth' ed him into the office. "You're all tensed up. Boss," Amie said. "I'll get you a cab and you can go home and take a hot bath and relax with your slippers and bathrobe and newspaper. How about it, huh?" "I suppose so," Les muttered. "I'm not much help today." The cab was in good shape -- that new pinion hurt a little, but it would break in soon -- and Les sat back, easing, and even joined the comfortable, unworried motor hum. T ike all affectionate brides, ' beautiful or otherwise, when their husbands come home half a day early, Thalia was flattered and coy, then concerned when he abstractedly pecked her only once to her dozens of kisses on the face and mouth and ears and neck, then relieved when he told her he wasn't sick, and finally delighted because now he could help plan the menu for tonight. "Menu?" he repeated. "The Fitches are coming for dinner." "Fitch? Fitch -- good God -- he has seventeen stores -- if I get the account -- what do you mean, menu? Cavier, bluepoints, vichysoisse, filet mignon, breast of guinea hen -- " "Darling," she said. "Mr. Fitch has an ulcer." "Ulcer," said Les. "Milk and crackers. Cottage cheese." "What about that new line of dietetic food you said you could tie up if you only had the outlets?" "Hey!" he cried. "Why'd I have to go marry you and lose the best office manager I ever had?" "Because it was one or the other. He gave her a dirty grin. "Well, I was tired of being a working girl," she 'said defensively. "Every real, honest-togoodness woman wants -- " "I know what every real, honest-to-goodness woman wants. Let's let the menu wait, because every real, honest-to-goodness man wants what every real, honest-to-goodness woman -- " She wriggled out of his arms. "And with me going frantic? I was going to phone you to pick up those dietetic foods and bring them home with you tonight. Now we'll have to get a special messenger." "Yeah," he said. "It's frustrating, but you're right. Why can't Miss Zeichner -- " "Oh, she'll learn, darling. Just give her time." "Hah!" he said. "Why, you wouldn't believe it, but -- " "The menu," she told him firmly. "And the messenger." ti'Vell, look, damn it," Les 'argued the next morning, waiting for an elevator with Thalia in the Medical Building. "Just because I didn't get the Fitch account is no reason to haul me to a psychiatrist!" "Lower your voice. People are looking," she shushed. "It isn't that and you know it, darling." . "You mean Mrs. Fitch's watch? Well, there were two damaged jewels in it!" "But to take it off her wrist right in the middle of dinner and go racing out in search of a jeweler at that time of night -- " "I got one, didn't I? And he saw the cracked one on the top and put up a battle when I hold him about the chipped one underneath, but he took the watch apart and sure enough -- " "Yes, darling. I know. That's not what's important." The elevator door opened and they got in. "Then what is?" challenged Les. She glanced at the elevator operator and whispered, "What you told me after Mr. Fitch said they couldn't wait any longer for you to get back and to send the watch -- Les! You're not listening!" But he was. He was listening very hard. "The poor thing," he said, shaking his head sadly. She looked around. Except for the operator, they were alone in the elevator. "Who?" she asked. "The elevator. When are people going to learn that too much oil -- " "That's what I mean, darling." She guided him across the corridor and opened the door to a waiting room. Shakily she said. "Now there isn't a thing to worry about." "Oh, no?" he snapped. "With imbeciles and bunglers tormenting defenseless machines that ask nothing more than to be done by as they do, living by the Golden Rule, which is more than I can say -- " "Mr. Shay?" inquired the nurse-receptionist at the desk. "You may go right in. Dr. Hyde is expecting you." "Dr. Hyde," snarled Les. "I bet he's got a silent partner named Mr. Jekyll." He flung open the door and slammed it shut behind him. head, Les lay staring up at the ceiling, blinking once a minute. Thalia inchwormed rapidly toward him until her head was under his chin. "Darling?" she said in a very little voice. He breathed slightly harder on her hair to show he was paying attention. "You know, we've only been married three months," she said, "and already we act as if we'd grown old and gray together." "Uh," he told her. "Well, I don't feel old and gray." She paused. "Do you?" "Um," he elaborated. "You just lie there," she cried angrily. "Don't you give one single, solitary thought to how -- how undesirable it makes me feel?" He forced his throat to move, then his tongue, finally his lips. "You're not." "Then what -- " She stopped, was silent for a long moment. "I'm a heel," she said against his chest. "You're trying to digest what Dr. Hyde said to you today." Les sat up abruptly with his back against the headboard, one stiff forefinger stabbing repeatedly at the mattress. "Not digest. Regurgitate." "It made sense to me, darling." "What? That I wanted to kill my father for not buying me an Erector set?" "Well, didn't you?" "Of course not! And why not my mother, too? She had just as much to do with me not getting it as he did." "The Oedipal situation." "And if I say she loused me up more than Dad ever did, you'll agree with Hyde that I'm displacing or something. Oh, no. You're not catching me in that no-exit trap. Besides, Dad bought me a bike right afterward and I had a hell of a lot more fun with it than I'd have gotten out of an Erector set. Mom had plenty to say about the danger of riding a bike in the city, but he trusted my judgment and bought one just the same." "Infantilizing you, darling," she said gently, "instead of helping you learn to accept inevitable frustrations." "Who was frustrated?" he shouted. "I loved that bike! And not only that, I didn't even think once of an Erector set till Dr. Peabody suggested I take up a hobby!" He waited. "Go ahead, say it -- I repressed the whole thing, didn't I?" "That's what Dr. Hyde said, darling." "All right, smart guy, see v.?hat you make of this. I told him the truth, every bit of it, and he says hallucinations. So I say oh, yeah, what about the water cooler over in the corner and he says what about the water cooler. And I tell him there's a tiny leak in the refrigerating coil and he takes a look, only the crack is too small to see, but in a month or two they'll have to seal it up and put in more refrigerant, you wait and see if they don't." "And in the meantime?" she asked. "We can't have you go around in this nervous state." "I know," he said miserably. "The rheostat on the electric mixer is calibrated wrong, the oil burner is feeding too fast, the bulb in the hall is about ready to blow, we got a lemon of a pre-amp in the hi-fi, the turntable is almost a full rpm too slow, and I bet there's going to be a pip of a smashup on the highway -- I don't like the way the traffic light feels." "Feels?" "Yes," he said flatly. "Feels." "Darling?" she started again. "Urn." "You know you're only personalizing these things the way you did when you were so awfully disappointed about the Erector set." "Sure, sure." "It's just a matter of accepting that emotionally." "I'm working on it." "And you don't need your mother any more. You have me." He rolled out of bed. "I never thought of that," he said, and began unbuttoning his pajama top. "Darling, what have you got in mind?" she asked, wide-eyed. "Taking a walk to clear my head. You and Hyde have all the explanations. Without the two of you to confuse me, maybe I can find the answers." C hiUed and tired, Les wandered into Mike's All Nite Garage. Mike jMDked his head out from under a car on the grease pit and asked, "Do something for you, Mr. Shay?" "No," said Les. "You fix them instead of ruining them." "That's how I make my living," Mike said cheerfully. "If they didn't ruin 'em, I wouldn't have 'em to fix." Les, about to retort in sudden rage, sat down on a fender instead and thought about Mike's philosophy. It was as if dentists hired thugs to bash in people's teeth so there would always be work, or veterinarians poisoned animals just enough to need treatment. He decided he didn't like Mike's reasoning. He also decided not to argue about it; he was tired of strange looks and counter-arguments. Mike climbed out of the pit, wiped his hands on a ball of dirty cotton waste and got into the car to start the motor. He cocked his head like a music critic listening first to one section of the orchestra and then the other. "Sounds pretty good," he pronounced. "The generator," said Les. Mike frowned. "What about the generator?" "It's undercharging." "Hell it is!" "Hell it isn't." Mike glanced at the needle and winked. "So, okay, more business." Then he scowled at Les. "How'd you know it was undercharging?" "It's a long story. You have any more jobs tonight, Mike?" "Nope. Why?" "You've got a bunch of cars on the lot. I've got ten bucks to either prove or disprove something. Deal?" "Deal," said Mike, leading the way out to the lot. By the seventh car, Mike was quiet and thoughtful. Les had found only one that murmured tranquilly and when he stated what was wrong with each, and Mike checked, Les had pinpointed the trouble exactly. "Well, how do you account for that?" Les wanted to know. Mike did some meditative scratching. "I go by ear myself, Mr. Shay. I can listen to a motor and tell pretty near what's wrong. You just got a better ear than me, that's all." "And when it isn't the motor? A lot of things in the body and chassis didn't squeak or rattle." "Yeah," said Mike. "I was thinking about them. I can't figure it out." "I can," another voice said. Les leaped. A solemn face with a slight stubble and a greasy homburg was leaning out of a car window. "Sorry, Prof," said Mike. "I didn't mean to wake you. Prof, Mr. Shay. I let the Prof sleep in the cars, provided he takes his shoes off and keeps his hat on." "My pleasure, Mr. Shay," announced the Prof. "H-hello," said Les. "You did say you could figure it out?" "No mystery at all," the Prof said. "Can you do this only with automobiles or all kinds of machinery?" "All kinds." "Then the answer is very simple." stated the Prof. "Telepathy." 'Telepathy!" "Of a very highly specialized variety." The Prof looked hopefully at Les. "Is the full explanation worth the price of a drink?" "I'll say!" exclaimed Les. yhalia opened red eyes and watched Les pick his way across the uncluttered floor to the closet. "Well?" she said. "Did you find your answers?" "Ah -- you bet," said Les, carefully dropping his clothes to the floor. "In a bottle." "Over a bottle. With the most profound -- makes your Dr. Hyde sound -- listening with the third ear when he should be using all three!" "Okay, go on," she said resignedly. "Nothing to it. I'm a specialist." "A specialist?" He sat down on the bed to tangle with his shoelaces. "A born mechanic." "Now look here, Lester Shay! If you think you're going to give up a perfectly good business to go rummaging around in cars -- " "Don't have to," he answered peacefully. "Just gotta harden myself. That's what the Prof says. He's not really a professor, only talks that way because he claims it intimidates people." "A bum!" "No, sweetheart. A different kind of specialist. Damn shoelaces!" He snapped them and kicked his shoes across the room. "His notion is that evolution always starts with simple, general types and works up to highly specialized ones." "Like born mechanics!" He smiled delightedly. "That's it. Or born mathematicians. Or born laborers. Or born artists, salesmen, farmers -- " "Bums." "Oh, just the very, very, very, good ones," he corrected her owlishly. "The others work at it, but they're not specialists. Way he puts it, the difference is in the degree of success." "And," she said, "you're a bom mechanic." "Right, Just never got a chance to start. Better this way, though. You see, I know what machines feel because I feel it, too. If I'd been doing that all these years, I'd be nothing but nerves. A lot of people don't treat machines right, you know. Feeling how the machines suffer would put me in just as bad shape as they are." She sat up interestedly. "This Prof of yours sounds bright. Did he tell you how to get rid of your -- your -- " "Affliction, darling. It's like when a surgeon goes down the street and he sees people in drastic need of operations and can't do anything about it. Couldn't club them, haul them away to the hospital, operate on them, could he?" "No, of course not." "So he has to steel himself. Or take the gardener who feels what flowers feel. And grass. Srubbery. He has to cut the flowers, mow the lawn, clip the hedges. If he felt every slash into every bit of vegetation, weeds included -- well, you can imagine." She thought. "Yes, I think I can. And what about you, darling?" "Same thing. Steel myself. The Prof says I can't take care of all the machines in the world and he's right. So I gotta shut out the cries and groans and moans of the machinery. You see?" "I see, but can you do it?" she asked worriedly. "Diversion does the trick. If I receive, I just make sure I receive something else. The Prof suggested trying people. So I did, down at the tavern." "How did you make out?" "Noisy damned place," he said. "And full of alcoholic thoughts. But I concentrated and it blanked out the screeching fan and the pump in the cellar that needs cleaning so badly -- " "People's thoughts," said Thalia uneasily. "I don't know if I like that. I know I wouldn't feel comfortable around you." He plumped up the pillow, accidentally dropped it on the floor, tired to decide whether to pick it up, realized he would fall on top of it. "Doesn't work that way at all, sweetheart. It's -- " He hunted for an analogy. "It comes out like machinery." "Like what?" she exclaimed. "Here, maybe I can show you." He stood beside the bed and gazed down searchingly at her. "Mm-fiumm. Your radiator is boiling over." "What a crude way to put it!" He continued standing there, his gaze gone remote and unseeing. "Well?" Thalia asked irritably. "How's your radiator?" "That's what I'm trying to find out," he replied in a distant voice. "And?" "It's percolating a little," he answered. She threw the covers aside. "Come on, get in," she said. "It's better than nothing." Rare #!d Periodicals for Your Collection A backward time machine: the actual newspapers Americans read a century and more ago. This is living history, the eyewitness accounts of great battles, the debates of famous figures. Not reproductions or facsimlies but the original newspapers themselves, suitable for framing or binding, almost mint condition except for sHght age-darkening at the edges, many still uncut, shipped boxed and insured, postpaid. No duplicates. First order takes each Item. # issues Boston Patriot; Saturday, Sept. #, #; Sat., June #, #; Wed., Apr. # #. Correspondence of late Pres. Adams. #. # issues Rhode Island American  Providence Gazefie, July, Aug.  Oct. # (various dates). #. , # issues N. Y. Evening Post, March  July, #. #. Civil War issues N. Y. Daily Tribune, #-#. # issues various dates. Fort Sumter doomed, Bombardment of Charlestown, Capture of Chesapeake, etc. Single copies # each (our choice), # copies # (our choice), all # copies, # (if no prior sale). # copies National Gazette (Philadelphia), Apr., Oct.  Dec. #, various dates. #. Send order to #. Pritchet, # Knollwood Rd., Eastchester, N.Y. Payment with order or will be sent C.O.D. for # deposit. From the collection of Robert M. Guinn. Authenticity guaranteed by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Tdc Mficdimf, cjfmfC ftuipck Wmt Wftm WtcH ucare? fku i(w mmpnCtafti uptiU lifww,  Uu(fiMyaeirfHr JinroieifvL w ftmtppmrucf(ifvc "mm rnmnuftfeCf JmHdtfctis (PHftefT Xidlmmcftvfui, Man mtffef tde mr imn? 'TUm lUeffOUc, , vf tnm Qc  W tde fum pfaCC macft s  'ifU Hi(in'weai(teiftif HifnedHliiafprifipf tmcamjylMmdtinCCj (c fff h cuL '"'Tkk pape oM(mc(te rcun off is sCp pc  fWHf t(le prec ipice of time tvitd wttc. ccufeUi ccOiraiey (Uy ftimintfUc rdiSfc.  (tcHdt Inyfutjpcfcu ejnfltdQm Np ftmeHPty ppmy fwid tde r Np ptfippt mtiv iftp QmmAp Mftcimyarc (QcuCa mmuyi (Cc, Jf idm w MHcd ay yduiy up mCf meeJ fiSfour information G alaxy Magazine is # years old with this issue, but my column is not, even though I was represented in Vol. I. No. #. It was an article on Flying Saucers, written at the editor's request and then considerably shortened by the same editor -- but I no longer recall just what it was he snipped out. Flying Saucers were a recent (phenomenon) at the time, stories about them had been in the daily press for about three years running. And while three years of stories without the faintest bit of evidence that would be considered as such in a court of law made me quite doubtful, one could not yet dismiss the whole thing. I did not say so in print, but I had a nagging feeling that the "saucers" would turn out to be something like the case of the "Washington D.C. hair fetishist" that occupied space in the Washington newspaper at the same time when the first flying saucer report from Boise, Idaho, made the front pages of the same newspaper which I read with great astonishment while sitting in the street car that brought me to my laboratory in College Park, Maryland, every morning. What happened was this: a girl turned up at the police station (or at the newspaper office. I don't know which, since I paid no attention to the first report) claiming that somebody had cut off a heavy strand of her beautiful blonde hair while she was riding one of these self-same street cars during the morning rush hour. The police had hardly started an investigation, when another girl told the same story. Two days later a third incident occurred. I don't know at what point the police grew suspicious, the newspapers did at about the seventh case, when the assailant was described as a young blond man -- but the damage he ha;l done was hard to sVe. That girl then admitted that she only had wanted Co get her picture into the newspaper. Then the "case" before her admitted deception and so all the way back to the first case where the loss of hair had been due to an accident -- with the afterthought that it should be exploited in some way. "VTow, eighteen years after the  first flying saucer report in the Washington papers and fifteen years after my article in the first issue of Galaxy I see a great deal of similarity in the two performances. During the second year of Galaxy's existence I contributed a few scattered articles, one on the "Loon" missile which then received a great deal of publicity (in retrospect I fail to see why), one on the African aardvark and one on the "meteoric procession" of February #, #. The last one, I admit, was written for the purpose of pointing out that there can be very strange displays in the sky that have perfectly natural causes. Of course, neither efficient aircraft nor atom bombs existed in #, hence people seeing something unusual had less reason to become jittery. The first regular column appeared in the March issue of #, the idea that I should write a regular column, ranging at random over the whole field of science, originated with Horace L. Gold, the first editor. The overall title of the column, I was told, was suggested by Theodore Sturgeon. Everything else was up to me, except that there was a rule in the beginning, that my column should resemble a newspaper column in that it consisted of a number of short items. And since Galaxy did not carry a regular "letters to the editor" feature, the letters containing scientific questions were shunted to me for incorporation in the column. As regular readers know, I still answer such letters in my column if I feel the answer might be of general interest; provided, of course, that I know the answer. But "answerable" letters do not come in frequently; the majority of the letters I receive either ask questions that have no answer (e.g. "what are quasars") or else the answer is not likely to be of general interest, as for example the title and publication date of a book my correspondent remembers incompletely. But let me backtrack a bit to the scientific news events that were recent when Galaxy was started. There was, of course, the "atom bomb" as it was then called, -he fission bomb as we call it now. To people who knew something about atomic energy it was clear that the fusion or hydrogen bomb would follow -- its development was then ordered by President Truman in January #. Two recent astronomical dscoveries had been made by the same American astronomer, Gerard P. Kuiper. They were the fifth moon of Uranus which he had named Miranda (#) and the second moon of Neptune which he had named Nereid (#). 'he active space age was still five years in the future when Vol. I., No. #. of Galaxy appeared on the newsstands. Few people knew at the time that space had already been reached, namely by Bumper No. # on February #, #. The rocket had been the fifth in a series of eight two-stage liquid fuel rockets, the first stage being an ex-German V-#, the upper stage a W AC-Corporal rocket developed in California. The upper stage reached a total altitude of # miles. It cannot be said that actual satellite plans of any kind existed at the time. A few years earlier Arthur C. Clarke had suggested the possibility of "Extra-terrestrial Relays", as he called them, in an article in the British Magazine Wireless World. These relays were three satellites in the #-hour orbit -- three "syncoms" as they would now be called. But this was mainly a suggestion pointing out what might be done in the future, it was not a detailed plan. I am hanpy to report that Arthur C. Clarke, after the first actual communications satellites had been put into orbit, received the Gold Medal of the Franklin Institute for his suggestion. But the actual satellite plans came several years later, around #. Wernher von Braun's concept of a wheel-shaped manned space station received most of the publicity. I devoted two columns to the space station concept (April and May # and then again in December #). It is still a good concept and I feel still confident that we'll build a space station of this kind at about the time of the first banding on the moon or soon afterwards. The first satellite project that was actually carried out, though with endless delay and countless heartaches, was, of course. Project Vanguard, to which the column in the September, # issue was devoted. The first astronomical discovery after Galaxy existed was that of the twelfth moon of Jupiter September #, #, before my column existed. But it was reported in my column in the August issue of #. In # he that had been "lost" was rediscovered with the aid of highspeed computers, but I had to pass this one up because I did not learn about it until about a year later. All along I had to keep in mind that considerable time would go by between the writing of a column and its appearance on the newsstands. Even when Galaxy was still on a monthly schedule that time interval was seven weeks -- and seven weeks would have required a special effort on the part of everybody, a twelve week interval was closer to normal. Hence I was never able to pay much attention to "nevs" for by the time they could have appeared in Galaxy everybody had read about them. That long interval between writing and publication caused a few other complications too. Once, for example. I had prepared a piece on new manipulating devices, steel fingers that could not only handle red-hot metal or strongly radioactive substances but could also perform feats of strength simultaneously if their operator desired. I had even obtained a set of half a dozen photographs. But about three days before sending the material to the editor, Life Magazine devoted several of its pages to the same device, needless to say with color pictures. If I had gone ahead with my own piece it would have been the coldest of cold hash (or at least would have looked that way) so I put my photographs away for filing and wrote a different column in a hurry. 'The fact that Galaxy is not a weekly -- for which I am quite grateful, otherwise -- also saw to it that a few articles never got written at all. There was one I remember: a nice thorough piece on communications satellites, carefully explaining their purpose, the way they worked, the orbits they should be in and so forth. By the time I had blocked out the piece itself and made a few diagrams. Echo I was put into orbit and was clearly visible to everybody. Now this required an additional section on "passive" communications satellites, those that only reflect radio waves without amplifying them. Naturally I had to wait for some results, nobody was quite sure at the moment how the performance of the early and naturally primitive "active" communications satellites would compare with that of the much bigger, though "passive" Echo satellite. By the time such results became known, another active communications satellite had been thrown into orbit. Always keep in mind that I could not just wait, I still had to produce a column per issue and sometimes a subject needed two successive columns. So the article on communications satellites languished while other columns (equally interesting, I hope) saw the light of day. By the time I looked at my folder on this subject again, Telstar I was orbited, got front page articles everyplace and a doublespread in Life. Then I gave up, by now communications satellites had become so thoroughly known to the public that there was no use wasting space in Galaxy on them. The same story was repeated at a somewhat later date with masers and lasers. To my knowledge this is the first time these words are mentioned in my column, but once they were intended to be a column. But the maser-laser story exhibited a strong kinship to the behavior of the mythological Hydra. Cut off one head and two new ones will grow. This is a gratifying thing as far as progress is concerned, but it can prevent a man from finishing an article he had in mind. While I could not hope to keep up with a rapidly developing story, such as the space age with its hundreds of satellites, dozens of space probes and multiple spurts of development in all possible directions, an addition to an older discovery is often a fine starting point for a survey. This is especially the case if the older discovery is of the cliff-hanger type, of which Latimeria was the prime example of the first half of the twentieth century. A few days before Christmas, #, a very strange fish had been brought ashore by a commercial fishing vessel at the port of East London on the east coast of South Africa. The fish was large-mouthed, bright blue in color, about four and a half feet long and had strangely shaped, very powerful fins. The captain of the trawler had never seen anything like this and neither had Miss M. Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of the local museum. She wrote to Professor J. L. B. Smith at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. South Africa, who was an expert on the marine fishes of the area. But there were delays, when Prof. Smith finally got to East London, the internal organs of the fish had to be thrown out for very natural reasons -- by now Miss CourtenayLatimer would probably be able to drop it into a tank of liquid nitrogen and keep it, intestinal bacteria and all, nearly indefinitely. What was left was enough to convince Prof. Smith that a most unusual discovery had been made. It was one of the fishes known to paleontologists as coelacanth, a group that had been believed to be extinct for at least The discovery was exciting for more than one reason. It was not only a "long extinct" form, it was also unusual in being much larger than any coelacanth known. The fossils usually measured only eight inches in length. A twelveinch coelacanth was a big one and one incomplete fossil indicated an over-all length of twenty inches. The living version was fifty-five inches long, which had been the main reason why Prof. Smith had been doubtful about the sketch that had been enclosed in the letter he had received from Miss Courtenay-Latimer. The shape had suggested coelacanth and nothing else, but the measurements had spoken against that conclusion. (After the Second World War was over, a sixty-inch fossil coelacanth came to light in West Germany.) Professor Smith named the fish Latimeria chalumnae, the species name was derived from the name of the river that empties into the ocean at East London. Naturally he wanted a fresh specimen. But he ran into two kinds of trouble. The first one was that the Second World War was underway and most people had other worries than supposedly extinct fishes, no matter how rare and how important to science. The second was that Smith had distributed his thousands of leaflets with a picture of the fish, a description and an offer of reward, in the wrong area. It so happens that the first specimen caught had strayed southward from its normal habitat by about # miles. Normally it can be found around the Comores Islands and the second specimen was found there, again just before Christmas, in #. Now, that the normal habitat was known, the waiting time shrank; the third specimen was caught in September # and the fourth in January #. Since the Comore Islands are French, French scientists took over and published preliminary reports on their observations and then a reasonably comprehensive popular report became possible. It appeared in the May, #, issue of Galaxy. '"The year # did not only bring additional information on the fish Latimeria, it also solved, in a rather unexpected manner, an older puzzle. During the years from # to # fossil bones had been found in southern England, near a place called Piltdown. In the end they produced a human skull, hailed as one of the earliest inhabitants of England named Eoanthropus dawsonii, or Dawson's Dawn Man. In # British paleontologists proved conclusively that the Dawn Man had been a hoax. The upper part of the skull actually was human and even fossil, but not particularly old. Now, that it is known what it is one may say of it that it does not present either a puzzle nor an insight. The lower jaw was the hoax, it was the jaw of an ape, almost certainly of an Orang-Utan. The whole jaw had been made to look and feel fossil with considerable skill and especially the teeth had been filed and otherwise treated to lose their pronounced apish character and to look like the worn teeth of a primitive human. It must have been the work of many months to accomplish this and one can only wonder why some people devote so much work and so much skill to such agob. If a painter spends a year painting a "lost old master" and another year in "aging" the painting so that he can sell it at a high price his behavior is un-ethical, despicable and criminal; but one can at least see the reason! But whoever changed the Orang-Utan jaw around neither reaped reward nor questionable fame. Of course it had been just the combination of a fairly modern skulltop and a most primitivelooking lower jaw which had made Piltdown man such a scientific puzzle. As soon as the fact that it was a forgery had been published, I started reading up on everything that had been written about Piltdown man while it was believed to be genuine. I could do most of this reading at home because my library is full of books on paleontology; a recent count revealed that I own more books on paleontology than on rockets, missiles and space travel -- due. no doubt, to the fact that paleontologists have been around for a much longer time than space scientists and had more time to write. At any event, the results were surprising. The French authors I consulted usually made short shift of Piltdown man, just mentioning the characteristics and ending up with: "more investigation is necessary". In retrospect this almost sounds as if they were suspicious, but they probably were just puzzled. An Austrian expert. Prof. Othenio Abel, devoted a great deal of space to Piltdown man, but ended up with precisely the same sentence, though in another language. British authors tried hard to fit Piltdown man in with other fossil humans and pre-humans, hut naturally without any good result. German authors did the same and one or two of them voiced a suspicion. It was not the suspicion of forgery (nobody thought of that) but possibly it was a fossil ohne Beweiskraft, a fossil that did not prove anything. What they did was to ponder the possibility that Piltdown man, when alive, had not been typical of its tribe but had been a freak. If one started with the lower jaw one should expect a somewhat smaller skullcap of different built. But possiblv just this individual had an abnormally large (for its type) skull. This did not necessarily make him a genius: even now a moron occasionally has an extra large brain, a brain that is voluminous 'but fails to function properly Or else, beginning with the skull and considering the skull as normal for its type, we had the bad luck to find the remains of an individual with a lower jaw that was a throwback to a much earlier type. Maybe, if the whole skeleton were known, some other deformities would be found. The write-ups of Piltdown man showed an extraordinary expenditure of words like "perhaps", "possibly", "if one assumes", and so forth -- quite naturally because the fossil in question was not genuine, as finally proved by the two British experts. But Piltdown man never had a column devoted to him and I no longer remember why not. I had all of the material available, most of it even at home. I can only conclude that something else which I considered to be of more interest to my readers got in the way at the time. Or possibly I felt that it had been sufficiently covered elsewhere -- people who do articles for science-fiction magazines are always aware that their readers read many other journals too.  nybody who sits back thinking about the scientific discoveries of the last fifteen years is likely to fall into the trap of believing that most of them were due to the space effort. True, the space effort is responsible for a number of them, among them things nobody expected to find, but this fifteen year period also produced great strides elsewhere. Not even all the astronomical discoveries are due to the space effort. Very early in # -- and the active space age began late in # if a reminder of the date should be necessary -- Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper pointed out that the unusual orbit of Pluto could best be explained by assuming that Pluto is a "run-away moon" of Neptune. (The same suggestion had been made in # by R. R. Lyttleton in England but had failed to attract much attention.) This was an item I expected to remain confined to astronomical journals, hence it was written up in the column for the August # issue. Another astronomical discovery was made in the process of being accomplished at the same time by the discoverer of Pluto, Dr. Clyde W. Tombaugh. But this one was connected with the space age. That there would be artificial satellites soon, and probably both Russian and American, was certain in #. Of course they would have to be tracked and one man even assumed that our military men intended to track the Russian satellites somewhat more carefully than our own. But there was a possible problem, hadn't there been a number of reports, never confirmed to be sure, about small satellites of earth? If they really existed they would confuse the trackers. The thing to do was to establish the orbits of such minor satellites, if they existed. Clyde W. Tombaugh proposed a method for such a search and designed the necessary instrumentation which was not only small enough to be carried on a truck, but sensitive enough (in a phrase that was to become famous) "to detect a white tennis ball in orbit a hundred miles from the surface, and a V-# rocket, if painted white, at the distance of the moon." In # his report was out, and I could tell of the results of the search in my column for the July, #, issue. The result had been negative, there were no minor satellites of earth so that anything that could be detected and tracked had to be artificial. Two other astronomical discoveries also have no direct connection with the space age. One is the diseovery of the mysterious "quasi-stellar objects", something that was quickly shortened to "quasars" without improving our understanding of them. The discovery of the quasars was the result of radio astronomy. And the most recent discovery, announced only four days prior to my writing this, is the result of using radar techniques. It is the discovery that planet Mercury does not have a period of rotation of # days, as Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli had announced in #. The orbital period is # days and Schiaparelli's announcement therefore meant that Mercury always points the same hemisphere toward the earth. The outcome of Schiaparelli's announcement had been several fascinating concepts: the scorched "brightside" with puddles of molten lead and tin, the permanently frozen "darkside" where the remains of the former atmosphere of the planet lay frozen on the ground and, last but not least, the interesting "twilight belt" where the sun appeared above the horizon for a few days every # days. XTow it is known that Mercury  rotates a little faster than once every # days, the preliminary figure is # days. But that means that the sun shines on every part of Mercury's surface for a fairly long time. No more permanently nearly red-hot brightside, no more permanently frozen darkside. And no more twilight belt. Mercury is still a most inhospitable planet, but it has lost the distinctive features we thought were there. Of course some of the major discoveries are the outcome of putting instruments into space. The first big discovery was that of the inner Van Allen belt in #, accomplished by Explorer I, the first American artificial satellite which, incidentally, is still in orbit. Later the outer Van Allen belt was found by another space device. Then we have the first determination of the thickness of the cloud layer of Venus, its incredible height above the surface of Venus and the measurement of the very high surface temperature of the planet, all carried out by Mariner II. We have the very sharp and detailed photographic close-ups of the surface of the moon, produced by Ranthe time you read this we may have some nice close-up photographs of Mars, transmitted over space by Mariner IV. Some of the very important discoveries other than space can only be mentioned here: increased (though still fragmentary) understanding of the inner structure of the atom; vastly increased understanding (not yet quite complete) of the basic mechanism of life and especially of heredity; and the interesting and completely unexpected discovery that at least the heaviest ones of the so-called noble gases, namely xenon and krypton, will form chemical compounds, in spite of what every chemical handbook has said for the last half century. But many of the mysteries that were written up at one time or another in my column, are still mysteries. Of the clouds of Venus, we now know the extent, but we still don't know their chemical composition, though the top layer seems to consist of ice crystals. The Red Spot of Jupiter is still unexplained, the Gegenschein is still a mystery in spite of (or rather because of) four different explanations. We still don't know when and how ball lightning will form. And the large rotating "luminous wheels" of the Indian Ocean certainly need more investigation. And I refuse to think about quasars until more is known.  I suspect, however, that the majority of these mysteries will have been explained, not another fifteen years from now but in At last! Retief's first full-length novell by Keith Laumer The galaxy's farthest-out diplomat takes on the wildest planet of all! These cHid many others in the October If -- get your copy fodayl A Better Mousehole Trouble with those blue bugs was they didn't hurt you... they did something far worse S o now Irma will be at me to do something about them blue bugs. I got to do something about Irma. Dr. West is wise too, as good as said so when him and Judge Van Anda was in today for a couple beers. Pity Dr. West is not the doctoring type doctor but just has letters and stuff. Sort of explorer people say, account of his Independent Income, gone for months till the town's forgot him and then he turns up full of what the buU was done with. I don't think the Judge knows about the blue bugs. If they bit him like they done me he'd never go to dreaming, not him up there. six feet five, (looking back at what he thinks the world used to be. Still if you was old like him, you might want big dreams more than ever, about being young. If you could teI them bugs, if you could name your own dream! No way, I guess. I take the dreams I can get. Dr. West certainly knows something. I'd no sooner drawed them beers when he starts mentioning mice. I told him, Look, I said, you do not see the Health Department climbing all over my back the way they would if I had mice. He asks me, so what is that hole in the floor below tlie liquor shelves? I had to make like hunting for it, and act surprised. Knothole, I says. Oh, knothole, he says, knothole the regal twincushioned back of my lap, how come a knothole in linoleum? So I had to say it could be mice. Judge Van Anda says Ha. I went down the bar to pass the time with Lulu who doesn't get much business in the afternoon because the light is too strong. Lulu is like blonde this week. If only I could tell the bugs to put Lulu into a dream with me! The only time they done it she turned into Irma. I can't figure that. What if Lulu got bit and had some dreams herself? I suppose Irma thinks I married her so I can't do nothing without she comes clomping in onto it? If she's solid gold why don't she move to Fort Knox? I had not hardly started talking to Lulu when Dr. West goes to booming. Desolation, he says, do you think you know what desolation is? It's the sub-Arctic tundra, he says, and me alone in that borrowed Cessna that might've got its engine tuned three or four months earlier, and no reason to be there except my itch to see more of the poor wonderful planet before they blow it up. Lulu, what do you think? What do you say desolation is? Oh, she says, maybe the Stadium, game over, crowd gone and you know, empty popcorn bags and match cards and spit. You, Al? he says to me. What's desolation? I said, oh, maybe a dark night and nobody shows you where to go. I believe Dr. West is sad in his heart in spite of that education which is over my head. It would be like him to take off in a borrowed plane for the flat side of nowhere.  I like to watch him standing by Judge Van Anda who he is always telling siddown siddown and the Judge merely says Ha. I can feel sad without no Independent Income. I am # and I have this ulcer. The tundra, says Dr. West -- a nothing of dun colors, rotting snow, and you wonder when the whole earth will look like that. No! says Lulu about to cry. Don't talk thataway! Never mind, chicken, he says, I was just bleating. S uppose you took Irma to this here Tundra and told her to walk home. Flies, she says last night, flies all over you and you drunk as a pig. God, I pretty near shut her up for good. But she just don't know no better. She don't have too much of a life with a busted-down hack like me that couldn't even last five rounds Dr. West went on about borrowing a plane from a friend has got this lodge in the north woods, and flying over the tundra till he saw like a blue spark down there. Landed and picked up the object, size and shape of a basketball he said, not really blue, more like daylight split and turned a he held it to his ear. That's when he broke off to ask me is there a basement under this part of the bar. He knows damn well it's got no basement. He was in town when I got this addition added on. Already a cellar under the main part, I didn't need another, got this part done with merely the footing and concrete under the lino, I mean if there is any excavation in forty miles Dr. West will be there watching. It's the people with an Independent Income or them with not any that get the excavation watched. Guys like me that work for a living, we are up that creek with a little bity plastic spoon and no breeze. All's I said was Hell no, this here is an addition was added on, it's got no basement. Unless somebody walled it off on you, says Judge Van Anda. You won't find a better way to dispose of a body, the Judge says, that's if you have time and materials and don't mind the labor. Well, the Judge is retired after forty years on what they call the bench, and keeps saying with his experience he ought to write detective stories. Yes sir, he says, if the walling off has been done right, proper pains taken, you can give the whole thing a very attractive finish. I guess he meant the wall. You never know, with the Judge. I must of said to him a hundred times. Look, I've said, the surprising type things that have happened to me, you ought to put them into a book if you're going to write one. He just goes hrrm hrrm and Ha. I hated him sounding off about bodies that way, account of Lulu's nerves. Before Dr. West begun his story Lulu was talking to me about that murderer over to Lincolnsville, the one that done in his whole family with a kitchen knife, and the shooting down in Jonesburg a couple weeks ago. She was real nerved up. His whole family, and with a plain kitchen knife. When the cops come for him -- Jesus, he was like asleep, it said. Lulu takes the news pretty personal, it's the woman of it. Tr. West's little blue eyes -- why, damn, they're near the same color as my bugs, like sky with the sun caught in it. Maybe the bugs are something new to science that Dr. West has to keep top secret? Then this tundra story would be the educated crappola he's obliged to shovel over it? His eyes are bloodshot like mine have been getting the last few weeks. I been losing weight too and it ain't my ulcer. The blood the bugs take out couldn't make no such difference, and them so gentle -- I float off into the dreams almost as soon as they come settle on me. I'd give anything to have another dream where Irma is like when we got married, not bony and mean but soft, brown hair with all them goldy lights, voice like country cream. When Dr. West quit talking Lulu was crying. She says she feels sometimes like everything was on top of her, usually goes to the Ladies and comes back with a rebuilt mouth and a fresh bounce to her. Lulu could put her shoes in my trunk any time. She ain't had a real happy life. Aw, who does? For young people it's always a maybe-tomorrow, for the rest, it's where-dideverything-go? The Judge, he should be happy looking across all them years of playing God and sticking people in jail? Dr. West never married, chases moonblink over the world with his Independent Income, but once he told me what he honestly craved was hearth and home, nice woman to warm his slippers and his bed, only a devil in him couldn't ever let him rest. And I have this ulcer. The Bible or somebody says if you build a better mousetrap they'll like put you on teevy. All's I got is a better mousehole. What do they give you for that? Dr. West waited till Lulu come back from the Ladies to go on with his story. He wasn't telling it for her, though, spite of her coming to sit on the stool by him and give him a feel or two for friendship's sake. Not for the Judge neither. It was for me and that hole in the floor. I could of told him they never come out till I close the bar and dim the lights. He said he smuggled the blue ball home, not a word to anyone. As a story it wasn't nothing, which is one reason I can't believe he was making it up. He kept calling the thing a sphere. I always thought a sphere was some type musical instrument. "I lhen he says home he means  ' the ram-and-shackle mansion at the edge of town with back land running up Ragged Rock Hill and Johnny Blood rattling around in the mansion being caretaker with one eye that used to be an actor and still lets go with some Shakespeare if anything startles him. He said he sent Johnny away for two months vacation to this sister in Maine who has been trying to make Johnny come to Jesus anyhow thirty-forty years, only when Johnny hears that special tone of voice he shuts the good eye and lets go with something from this Shakespeare. I wish I had the education to make with Shakespeare when Irma is at me about talking to Lulu or drinking up the profits which I never could do with this ulcer unless I would drop dead, she never thinks of that, or why don't I at least try to earn enough we would spend winters in Florida if I had any zing. Sent Johnny away, he says, and kept the sphere at room temperature. Dr. West is always talking thataway. A room don't run a temperature, or if he means hot like some room what's so scientific if somebody monkeys with the thermostack or leaves the God-damn door open? Winter in Florida for Christ's sake. The blue thing hatched one night after he'd gone to bed -- except he says it was not an egg but a figure of speech. He found the two halves in the morning not chipped like a hatched egg, just separated, like they'd been fitted together originally so good you couldn't find the joint. Nothing else disturbed, but a hole in the window-screen that looked like it was melted through, the ends of copper wire fused so the hole looked like a grommet. Judge Van Anda asked him did he keep the busted eggshell. Dr. West says. Now I did try to make it plain it was not an egg, nor do I know why I waste my experiences on you, like when I showed that comb my mermaid gave me it could of been a paper clip, all the impression it made. So it could, says the Judge kind of brisk, seeing they make such combs in Bridgeport and you can buy them in any drugstore for upwards of nineteen cents plus tax. All right, says Dr. West, so if she did happen on it in the billows off Bridgeport, God damn it, she gave it to me, didn't she? Oh, don't get red-eyed about it, says Judge Van Anda. I 'm not, says Dr. West. Al's the one with bloodshot eyes, late hours likely. He was watching me real sharp. No sir, you too, Sid, says the Judge, you look in the mirror you'll see you're redeyed like a weasel, I snow you not. Now if you could have brought home just one mermaid scale. And Dr. West says they do not have scales, no more reason to have scales than a seal or a whale or any other ocean-dwelling mammal. Ocean-dwelling mahooha, says Judge Van Anda. And I suppose, says Dr. West, back there ninety-six years ago in the little red schoolhouse the only biology you ever learned was out in the bushes during recess. Which was a friendly remark because the Judge could go hrrm reminding himself how he wants you to think he used to be. All the same I quick took them another round of beers. Lulu says, You got out of that too easy. Doc. I remember she pushed her shoulders back showing what she has got. She could put her shoes in my trunk any time. She says, Do you still have the eggshell or do you don't? I do not, says Dr. West. I do not still possess the two halves of that vehicle. Well excuse me for living, says Lulu, but she wasn't mad. She likes everybody, you could call it a weakness. And why don't you? says the Judge. As if I didn't know. Because, says Dr. West, I carried them outdoors to see them in the sun, was disturbed by the telephone, set them down in a thicket, answered the phone, at which you bent my ear for a half-hour about a detective story you plan to start writing any day. When I got back the two halves were gone. Naturally, says the Judge. Naturally. Gone, says Dr. West, from a patch of soft earth in the thicket that showed no footprints. We left it at that. Ever since, I been thinking about it. Only minutes now till closing time or I would flip my lid. Dr. West was not lying or he would of done a mermaid story. That don't mean it was the whole truth. How could anybody ever tell that like they say in the law courts? Maybe the bugs bit him before they went off through the hole in the screen? One bite would be enough to show him what it does to you. Could we sort of share them? I would like that. Something's gentled me down lately. I got no jealousy about him and Lulu going off together like they done this afternoon. I don't seem to have no angry feelings of no kind except about drowning Irma in the bathtub if it was practical. Aw, I guess I mean I might make that type joke, a man couldn't do no such thing. Besides it could be my fault Irma is like she is. How about that, Al? Anyhow I'd sooner Lulu went off with Dr. West than with say this salesman looks like a shaved pig and wants a beer. Beer. Why can't they ask for something unusual just once so I would have to think about it and stop thinking? Five minutes still to closing. It was last night Irma found me with my bugs and called them flies. I bet she believes that. It was the finest part of my dream -- gone, clobbered, and here's Irma in her nightgown come down and turned on the light, standing there all bones and bad temper saying Drunk as a pig, now I see where the profits go, all down your gut. Her that used to talk like a lady, and had them goldy lights in her hair. Flies, she says, flies everywhere. She don't know about the hole, my better mousehole, or she would of poured cleaning fluid down it, and they would of come out and fixed her little red wagon. I would not like that to happen. It's funny how gentle I feel nowadays. I used to be what they call a Ruffed Diamond. I guess Irma will have took her twenty-year grouch to bed bv now. Oh no, it wasn't like that all of them twenty years, not by no means -- but my Jesus, I'm sunnosed to be some damn Godnlmighty Apollo Valentino Rockefeller or I'm no good? I'm good in them dreams. I been seven feet tall and bronzy, ready whenever T said so. There they go again about that thing in Tonesburg where the lady shot up a radio-teevy store account she claimed the noise spoiled her dreams. Look -- things like that -- it can't mean these bugs are -- I won't have a dream tonight though. I won't, till I can get a real talk with Dr. West. Well, speak of the -- ft has come to be morning, hot and quiet outside in that golden street. I better try to think through what happened, and what Dr. West said. When he come in at closing time I seen he wanted talk same as me. I told him stick around, I closed up, doused the front lights, we carried a Jameson into the back room. He flung down a shot and said, I took Lulu up to my place. The Judge too. Johnny Blood'll be gone another couple weeks, but I suppose maybe the Judge'll be missed. Missed? I says. He says, Don't be like that, ,A#. The Judge is asleep and dreaming, Lulu is asleep and dreaming, and don't you go acting surprised on me, because I come back to talk to you. Beat-up crocks like you and me, Al, he says, we're into middle age, we can wait a mite longer for our dreams, seeing we've spent mor'n half a lifetime doing not much else. While I poured him another he said, it was Lulu brought them back to me. I asked him how come. She didn't do anything, he says, she's just overweight with a big blood pressure. They like that. They must need the blood, maybe to help them breed. Only a couple dozen came out of that sphere, but now they might have several colonies. I wasn't quite truthful, he says -- I saw them come out, and a few of them flew around me with things in the fifth pair of limbs that looked like weapons. While I held still because of that, one of them bit me and I dreamed a journey to Alpha Centauri. Maybe, he says, they always do it merely to hold us quiet so they can drink. Maybe it's from lovingkindness. I asked if it was true what he'd told us about the halves of the shell disappearing. Yes, he said, and he said that afterward he went searching and grieving all over till one night he caught a bluish gleam up on Ragged Rock Hill. He went to it, working his way through the trees with a flashlight to where he thought it had showed, and settled down to wait. Sure enough they came and gave him a dream. It breaks his heart too, the way a man can't name his own. "They come for Lulu. AU we did, he says, we turned off the lights and set by the open window. Coming for Lulu because she's right for them, they took care of the Judge too, and me. My dream was a short one, Al. I don't have much blood in me. He put down another Jameson while I told him what I been going through. He stepped over to one of the other back-room booths to pick something off the floor. He's a noticing restless man. Just a buckle like a gold rosebud off of a girl's shoe. The back room gets lively Saturday nights, and I ain't been sweeping up too good, last couple-three weeks. Only light I turned on for us was the #-watt bulb in our booth with the pink shade -- Irma chose them shades. They're real nice. You won't find no Goddamn interior desecrator that's got taste like hers. Dr. West set there playing with that gold rosebud and going slow on his Jameson while I talked. And I asked him, where do they come from? Oh, he says, outer space, where else? He was turning the buckle in and out of the light, reflecting a glow into the drink itself, a kind of glory. And he says, or else inner space. I asked him did he think the bugs had anything to do with shoulders. That's when I said. Look, couldn't my Irma have a dream? He give me no answer. I says, maybe it would change how she acts and feels about some things? Maybe, he says. We don't know, he says, we don't know much of anything. More we know, better we get at asking questions we can't answer. Then he poured himself another Jameson and after a while I went upstairs. Irma wasn't asleep. When I touched her shoulder she says, God give me patience! and flounces clear acrost the bed. I says, Irma, honey, I ain't after you thataway, I just want you should come down talk something over with I and Doc West. West? she says. That dirty old man? What for? I says, Irma, this is special, you give me lip I'm big enough to make you. You get up and fling some clothes on and you take that God-damn cold cream off your face and come down. All's we want is have a couple drinks, talk something over. Ve, she says, aren't we the   lord and master all of a sudden! You goddam right, I says, and get going. I didn't say that mean, nor she didn't take it mean, just wiped the guck off her face as meek as anything, put on slippers, and a bathrobe over her p-js, and come along. In the light of the upstairs hall I seen some of them goldy lights, I know I did. Dr. West had laid his head on his arms. Small he was, and clean as a dry stick, I don't know why she would call him a dirty old man. He hadn't finished his Jameson. I thought he was having a dream, for the bugs had eome, but he looked up and said, I brought it on us, I brought it on the world. I and some other stand what he meant by that. Irma seen the bugs and she screamed. Only five-six of them, nothing scary. I put my arms around her to gentle her. Irma, I says, all they do is give you beautiful dreams. I want you should have some like I've had. Let 'em bite a little, it don't hurt. But she screamed and tried to fight me off. She said, I don't want to, I just want -- I just want -- I didn't listen. So hell-bent she should have dreams like mine, I didn't listen. The way she was perking around, the p-js got twisted away from her little breasts, and I just hung on, too lame-brain dumb for anything else. Them little things is like when she was a girl, I used to kid her about what would the babies eat, only we never could have any. One bug lit there, and I just held her -- why, them bites don't hurt, I got a hundred onto me, they don't even itch. She didn't scream again. I felt a shock go through her and she said. Oh, oh, oh, a kind of crying like what I used to hear in bed, and her with a voice like country cream. The bug flew off. I found her mouth and kissed her. Her face sagged away from me and she was dead. I think Dr. West said, your little lady, she's asleep? I carried her over to this lounge chair, sat here with her. I don't know what to do. I remember Dr. West, he come over and stood by us, though I wanted him to go away. I know I said something about maybe some people just couldn't have such dreams. T T e says, maybe it's that, or maybe she dreamed more than us, Al. Maybe this thing gave her too big a dream for her to stand. Dreaming's a dangerous thing, he said, it's got a dark side. If the bugs shoot in something that makes the dreaming part of us blaze up, the way the rest of us can't take it -- I told him I wasn't going to try to understand it no more. I said I ought to knowed you can't make another person have a dream. It's not right, it's not right some-way. Dr. West said more, I can't just bring it back. I think he said, dreaming's not a sickness but it's like one, partly. It made the world what it is, different from ancient days, and it could unmake it. I asked him not to notify no one, just go away and leave us be. People will figure the bar is closed, they'll give us a bit of time before they start crowding in. And there was something he said about how things might even get better with the bugs taking over, if that's what they meant to do. I told him I didn't care much about the world, all's I ever wanted was to have a decent life with work I knowed how to do and a nice woman and maybe some kids. I guess that's when Dr. West went away. He's just a lonesome little guy trying to figure things out, I shouldn't of spoke harsh. See, it wasn't like I was trying to make you have my dream. You look like you was dreaming. You look real sweet, I meant to tell you. I don't know why I couldn't ever tell you.      T# They were the outcasts of Earth, and Earth had given them a destiny that fitted their terrible crimes I I  forward, Samm," said Folly. He stretched his arm out. "I can sense it!" cried Folly. "Now wiggle your fingers!" Samm wiggled them. Finstemis said nothing, but both of them caught from his mind, riding clear and wise beside them, a "sense of the situation." His "sense of the situation" could be summed up in the one-word comment, which he did not need to utter; "Foolishness!" "It is not foolishness, Finsternis," cried Folly. "Here are the threv! ot us, riding empty space where. We are people once, Earth people from Old Earth Itself. Is it foolish to remember what we used to be? I was a woman once. A beautiful woman. Now I'm this -- this thing, bent on a mission of murder and destruction. I used to have hands myself, real hands. Is it wrong for me to enjoy looking at Samm's hands now and then? To think of the past which all three of us have left behind." Finsternis did not answer; his mind was blank to both of them. There was nothing but space around them, not even much space dust, and the bluish light of Linschoten XV straight ahead. From the third planet of that star they could occasionally hear the cackle and gabble of the man-eaters. Once again Folly cried to Finsternis, "Is that so wrong, that I should enjoy looking at a hand? Samm has well-shaped hands. I was a person once, and so were you. Did I ever tell you that I was a beautiful woman once?" S he had been a beautiful woman once and now she was the control of a small spaceship which fled across emptiness with two grotesque companions. She was now a ship only eleven meters long and shaped roughly like an ancient dirigible. Finsternis was a perfect cube, fifty meters to the side, packed with machinery which could blank out a sun and contain its planets until they froze to icy, perpetual death. Samm was a man, but he was a man of flexible steel, two hundred meters high. He was designed to walk on any kind of planet, with any kind of inhabitant, with any kind of chemistry or any kind of gravity: he was designed to bring antagonists, whomever they might be, the message of the power of man. The power of man... followed by terror, followed if necessary by death. If Samm failed, Finsternis had the further power of blocking out the sun, Linschoten XV. If either or both failed. Folly had the job of adjusting them so that they could win. If they had no chance of winning, she then had the task of destroying Finsternis and Samm, and then herself. Their instructions were clear: "You will not, you will not under any circumstances return. You will not, you will not under any conditions turn back toward Earth. You are too dangerous to come anywhere near Earth, ever again. You may live if you wish. If you can. But you must not -- repeat not -- come back. You have your duty. You asked for it. Now you have it. Do not, come back. Your forms fit your duty. You will do your duty." Folly had become a tiny ship, crammed with miniaturized equipment. Finsternis had become a cube blacker than darkness itself. Samm had become a man. but a man different from any which had ever been seen on Earth. He had a metal body, copied from the human form down to the last detail. That way the enemies, whoever they might be, would be given a terrible glimpse of the human shape, the human voice. Two hundred meters high he stood, strong and solid enough to fly through space with nothing but the jets on his belt. The Instrumentality had designed all three of them. Designed them well. Designed them to meet the crazy menace out beyond the stars, a menace which gave no clue to its technology or origin, but which responded to the signal "man" with the counter-signal, "gabble cackle! eat, eat! man, man! good to eat! cacklegabble! eat, eat!" That was enough. The Instrumentality took steps. And the three of them -- the ship, the cube and the metal giant -- sped between the stars to conquer, to terrorize or to destroy the menace which lived on the third planet of Linschoten XV. Or, if needful, to put out that particular sun. Folly, who had become a ship, wa,the most volatile of the three. She had been a beautiful woman once. II (,' #'on were a beautiful woman once," Samm had said, some years before. "How did you end up becoming a ship?" "I killed myself," said Folly. "That's why I took this name. Folly. I had a long life ahead of me, but I killed myself and they brought me back at the last minute. When I found out I Vias still alive, I volunteered for something adventurous, dangerous. They gave me this. Well, I asked for it, didn't I?" "You asked for it," said Samm gravely. Out in the middle of nothing, surrounded by a tremendous lot of nowhere, courtesy was still the lubricant which governed human relationships. The two of them observed courtesy and kindness toward one another. Sometimes they threw in a bit of humor, too. Finsternis did not take part in their talk or their companionship. He did not even verbalize his answers. He merely let them know his sense of the situation and this time, as in all other times, his response was -- "Negative. No operation needed. Communication nonfunctional. Not needed here. Silence, please. I kill suns. That is all I do. My part is my business, not yours. My past is my business. All mine." This was communicated in a single terrible thought, so that Folly and Samm stopped trying to bring Finsternis into the conversations which they started up, every subjective century or so, and continued for years at a time. Finsternis merely moved along with them, several kilometers away, but well within their range of awareness. But as far as company was concerned, Finsternis might as well not have been there at all. Samm went on with the conversation, the conversation which they had had so many hundreds of times since the planoform ship had discharged them "near" Linschoten XV and left them to make the rest of their way alone. (If the menace were really a menace, and if it were intelligent, the Instrumentality had no intention of letting an actual planoform ship fall within the powers of a strange form of life which might well be hypnotic in its combat capacities. Hence the ship, the cube and the giant were launched into normal space at high velocity, equipped with jets to correct their courses, and left to make their own away to the danger.) Samm said, as he always did, "You were a beautiful woman. Folly, but you wanted to die. Why?" "Why do people ever want to die, Samm? It's the power in us, the vitality which makes us want so much. Life always trembles on the edge of disappointment. If we hadn't been vital and greedy and lustful and yearning, if we hadn't had big thoughts and wanted bigger ones, we would have stayed animals, like all the little things back on Earth. It's strong life that brings us so close to death. We can't stand the beauty of it, the nearness of the things we want, the remoteness of the things that we can have. You and me and Finsternis, now, we're monsters riding out between the stars. And yet we're happier now than we were when we were back among people. I was a beautiful woman, but there were specific things which I wanted. I wanted them myself. I alone. For me. Only for me. When I couldn't have them, I wanted to die. If I had been stupider or happier I might have lived on. But I didn't. I was me -- intensely me. So here I am. I don't even know whether I have a body or not, inside this ship. They've got me all hooked up to the sensors and the viewers and the computers. Sometimes I think that I may be a lovely woman still, with a real body hidden somewhere inside this ship, waiting to step out and to be a person again. And you, Samm, don't you want to tell me That's no name for an actual person -- Superordinated Alien Measuring and Mastery device. What were you before they gave you that big body? At least you still look like a person. You're not a ship, like me." "My name doesn't matter. Folly, and if I told it to you, you wouldn't know it. You never knew it." "How wouldn't I know?" she cried. "I've never told you my name either, so perhaps we did know each other back on Old Earth when we were still people." C#T can tell something," said Samm, "from the shape of words, from the ring of thoughts, even when we're not out here in nothing. You were a lady, perhaps highborn. You were truly beautiful. You were really important. And I -- I was a technician. A good one. I did my work and I loved my family, and my wife and I were happy with every child which the Lords gave us for adoption. But my wife died first. And after a while my children, my wonderful boy and my two beautiful, intelligent girls -- my own children, they couldn't stand me anymore. They didn't like me. Perhaps I talked too much. Perhaps I gave them too much advice. Perhaps I reminded them of their mother, who was dead. I don't know. I won't ever know. They didn't want to see me. Out of manners, they sent me cards on my birthday. Out of sheer formal courtesy, they called on me sometimes. Now and then one of them wanted something. Then they came to me, but it was always just to get something. It took me a long time to figure out, but I hadn't done anything. It wasn't what I had done or hadn't done. They just plain didn't like me. You know the songs and the operas and the stories. Folly, you know them all." "Not all of them," thought Folly gently, "not all of them. Just a few thousand." "Did you ever see one," cried Samm, his thoughts ringing fiercely against her mind, "did you ever see a single one about a rejected father? They're all about men and women, love and sex, but I can tell you that rejection hurts even when you don't ask anything of your loved ones but their company and their happiness and their simple genuine smiles. When I knew that my children had no use for me, I had no use for me either. The Instrumentality came along with this warning, and I volunteered." "But you're all right now, Samm," said Folly gently. "I'm a ship and you are a metal giant but we're off doing work which is important for all mankind. We'll have adventures together. Even black and grumbly here," she added, meaning Finsternis, "can't keep us from the excitement of companionship or the hope of danger. We're doing something wonderful and important and exciting. Do you know what I would do if I had my life again, my ordinary life with skin and toenails and hair and things like that?" "What?" asked Samm, knowing the answer perfectly well from the hundreds of times they had touched on this point. "I'd take baths. Hundreds and hundreds of them, over again. Showers and dips in cold pools and soaks in hot bathtubs and rinses and more showers. And I would do my hair, over and over again, thousands of different ways. And I would put on lipstick, in the most outrageous colors, even if nobody saw me, except for my own self looking in the mirror. Now I can hardly remember what it used to be to be dry or wet. I'm in this ship and I see the ship and I do not really know if I am a person or not any more." Samm stayed quiet, knowing what she would say next. "Samm, what would you do?" Folly asked. "Swim," he said. "Then swim, Samm, swim! Swim for me in the space between the stars. You still have a body and I don't, but I can watch you and I can sense you swimming out here in the nothing-at-all." Samm began to swim a huge Australian crawl, dipping his face to the edge of the water -- as if there were water there. The gestures made no difference in his real motion, since they were all of them in the fast trajectory computed for them from the point where they left the Instrumentality's ship and started out in normal space for the star listed as Linschoten XV. This time, something very sudden happened, and, it happened strangely. From the dark gloomy silence of the cube Finsternis, there came an articulate cry, called forth in clear human speech; Stop it! Stop moving right now. I attack. Both Samm and Folly had instruments built into them, so they could read space around them. The instruments, quickly scanned, showed nothing. Yet Folly felt odd, as though something had gone very wrong in her ship-self, which had seemed so metal, so reliable, so inalterable. She threw a thought of inquiry at Samm and instead got another command from Finsternis, Don't think. Ill S amm floated like a dead man in his gargantuan body. Folly drifted like a fruit beside his hand. At last there came words from Finsternis : "You can think now, if you want to. You can chatter at each other again. I'm through." Samm thought at him, and the thought-pattern was troubled and confused: "What happened? I felt as though the immaculate grid of space had been pinched together in a tight fold. I felt you do something, and then there was silence around us again." "Talking," said Finsternis, "is not operational and it is not required of me. But there are only three of us here, so I might as well tell you what happened. Can you hear me. Folly?" "Yes," she said, weakly. "Are we on course," asked Finsternis, "for the third planet of Linschoten XV?" F oily paused while checking all her instruments, which were more compheated and refined than those carried by the other two, since she was the maintenance unit. "Yes," said she at last. "We are exactly on course. I don't know what happened, if anything did happen." "Something happened, all right," said Finsternis, with the gratified savagery of a person whose quick-and-cruel nature is rewarded only by meeting and overcoming hostility in real life. "Was it a space dragon, like they used to meet on the old, old ships?" "No, nothing like that," said Finsternis, communicative for once, since this was something operational to talk about. "It doesn't even seem to be in this space at all. Something just rises up among us, like a volcano coming out of solid space. Something violent and wild and alive. Do you two still have eyes?" "Seeing devices for the ordinary light band?" asked Samm. "Of course we do!" said Finstemis. "I will try to fix it so that you will have a visible input." There was a sharp pause from Finsternis. The voice came again, with much strain. "Do not do anything. Do not try to help me. Just watch. If it wins, destroy me and destroy yourselves very quickly. It might try to capture us and get back to Earth." Folly felt like telling Finsternis that this was unnecessary, since the first motion toward return would trigger destruction devices which had been built into each of the three of them, beyond reach, beyond detection, beyond awareness. When the Instrumentality said, "Do not come back," the Instrumentality meant it. She said nothing. She watched Finsternis instead. Something began to happen. It was very odd. Space itself seemed to rip and leak. In the visible band, the intruder looked like a fountain of water being thrown randomly to and fro. But the intruder was not water. In the visible light-band, it glowed like wild fire rising from a shimmering column of blue ice. Here in space there was nothing to burn, nothing to make light: she knew that Finsternis was translating unresolvable phenomena into light. She sensed Samm moving one of his giant fists uncontrollably, in a helpless, childish gesture of protest. She herself did nothing but watch, as alertly and passively as she could. Nevertheless, she felt wrenched. This was no material phenomenon. It was wild unformed life, intruding out of some other proportion of space, seeking material on which to impose its vitality, its frenzy, its identity. She could see Finsternis as a solid black cube, darker than mere darkness, drifting right into the column. She watched the sides of Finsternis. On the earlier part of the trip, since they had left the people and the planoform ship and had been discharged in a fast trajectory toward Linschoten XV, Finsternis' sides had seemed like dull metal, slightly burnished, so that Folly had to brush him lightly vdth radar to get a clear image of him. Now his sides had changed. They had become as soft and thick as velvet. The strange volcano-fountain did not seem to have much in the way of sensing devices. It paid no attention to Samm or to herself. The dark cube attracted it, as a shaft of sunlight might attract a baby or as the rustle of paper might draw the attention of a kitten. With a slight tvdst of its vitality and direction, the whole column of burning, living brightness plunged upon Finsternis, plunged and burned out and went in and was seen no more. F insternis' voice, clear and cheerful, sounded out to both of them: "It's gone now." "What happened to it?" asked Samm. "I ate it," said Finsternis. "You what?" cried Folly. "I ate it," said Finsternis. He was talking more than he ever had before. "At least, that's the only way I can describe it. This machine they gave me or made me into or whatever they did, it's really rather good. It's powerful. I can feel it absorbing things, taking them in, taking them apart, putting them away. It's something like eating used to be when I was a person. That wild thing attacked me, wrapped me up, devoured me. All I did was to take it in, and now it's gone. I feel sort of full. I suppose my machines are sorting our samples of it to send away to rendezvous points in little rockets. I know that I have sixteen small rockets inside me, and I can feel two of them getting ready to move. Neither one of you could have done what I do. I was built to a'osorb whole suns if necessary, break them down, freeze them down, change their molecular structure and shoot their vitality off in one big useless blast on the radio spectrum. You couldn't do anything like that, Samm, even if ycu do have arms and legs and a head and a voice -- if we ever get into an atmosphere for you to use it in. You couldn't do what I have just done. Folly." "You're ood," said Folly, with emphasis. But she added: "I can repair you." Obviously offended, Finsternis withdrew into his silence. Samm said to Folly, "How much further to destination?" Said Folly promptly, "Seventy-nine earth years, four months and three days, six hours and two minutes, but you know how little that means out here. It could seem like a single afternoon or it could feel to us like a thousand lifetimes. Time doesn't work very well for us." "How did Earth ever find this place, anyhow?" said Samm. "All I know is that it was two very strong telepaths, working together on the planet Mizzer. An ex-dictator named Casher O'Neill and an ex-Lady named Celalta. They were doing a bit of psionic astronomy and suddenly this signal came in strong and clear. You know that telepaths can catch directions very accurately. Even over immense distances. And they can get emotions, too. But they are not very good at actual images or things. Somebody else checked it out for them." "M-m-m," said Samm. He had heard all this before. Out of sheer boredom, he went back to swimming vigorously. The body might not really be his, but it made him feel good to exercise it. Besides, he knew that Folly watched him with pleasure -- great pleasure, and a little bit of envy. Rasher O'Neill and the Lady Celalta had finished with making love. They had lain with their bodies tired and their minds clear, relaxed. They had stretched out on a blanket just above the big gushing spring which was the source of the Ninth Nile. Both telepaths, they could hear a birdcouple quarreling inside a tree, the male bird commanding the female to get out and get to work and the female answering by dropping deeper and deeper into a fretful and irritable sleep. The Lady Celalta had whispered a thought to her lover and master, Casher O'Neill. "To the stars?" "The stars?" thought he with a grumble. They were both strong telepaths. He had been imprinted, in some mysterious way, with the greatest telepath-hypnotist of all time, the Honorable Agatha Madigan, who had gone down in history as the Hechizera of Gortfalon, the only person in history to hypnotize the men and robots of a battle fleet so that it destroyed itself in open space. Casher O'Neill had also retained dim memories of a half-grown girl, incredibly lovely in a simple blue dress, lost to him somewhere beyond amnesiac stars, but in the Lady Celalta he had a companion worthy of his final talents, a natural telepath who could herself reach not only all of Mizzer but some of the nearer stars. When they teamed up together, as she now proposed, they could plunge into dusty infinities of depth and bring back feelings or images which no Go-Captain had ever found with his ship. He sat up with a grunt of assent. She looked at him fondly, possessively, her dark eyes alight with alertness, happiness, possessiveness and adventure. "Can I lift?" she asked, almost timidly. When two telepaths worked together, one cleared the vision for both of them as far as their combinded minds could reach and then the other sprang, with enormous effort as far and as fast as possible toward any target which presented itself. They had found strange things, sometimes beautiful or dramatic ones, by this method. Casher was already drinking lungs, holding his breath, letting go with a gasp, and then inhaling deeply and slowly again. In this way he reoxygenated his brain very thoroughly for the huge effort of a telepathic dive into the remote depth of space. He did not even speak to her, nor did he telepath a word to her; he ivas conserving his strength for a good jump. He merely nodded to her. The Lady Celalta, too, began the deep breathing, but she seemed to need it less than did Casher. They were both sitting up, side by side, breathing deeply. The cool night sands of Mizzer were around them, the harmless gurgle of the Ninth Nile beside them, the bright star-cluttered sky of Mizzer was above them. Her hand reached out and took hold of his. She squeezed his hand. He looked at her and nodded to her again. Within his mind, Mizzer and its entire solar system seemed to burst into flame with a new kind of light. The radiance of Celalta' s mind trailed off unevenly in different directions but there, almost # off the pole of Mizzer's ecliptic, he felt something wild and strange, a kind of being which he had never sensed before. Using Celalta's mind as a base, he let his mind dive for it. The distance'of the plunge left them both dizzy, sitting on the quiet night sands of Mizzer. It seemed to both of them that the mind of man had never reached so far before. IV The reality of the phenomenon was undoubtable. There were animals all around them, the usual categories: runners, hunters, jumpers, climbers, swimmers, hiders and handlers. It was some of the handlers who were intensely telepathic themselves. The image of man created an immediate, murderous response : "Cackle gabble, gabble cackle, man, man, man, eat them, eat them!" Casher and Celalta were both so surprised that they let the contact go, after making sure that they had touched a whole world full of beings, some of them telepathic and probably civilized. How had the beings known "man"? Why had their response been immediate? Why anthropophagous and homicidal? They took time, before coming completely out of the trance, to make a careful, exact note of the direction from which the danger-brains had shrieked their weaning. This they submitted to the Instrumentality, shortly after the incident. And that was how, unknown to Folly, Samm and Finsternis, the inhabitants on the third planet of Linschoten XV had come to the attention of mankind. Asa matter of fact, the three wanderers later on felt a vague, remote telepathic contact which they sensed as being warmhearted and human, and therefore did not try to track down, with their minds or their weapons. It was O'Neill and Celalta, many years later by Mizzer time, reaching to see what the Instrumentality had done about Linschoten XV. Folly, Samm and Finsternis had no suspicion that the two most powerful telepaths in the human area of the galaxy had stroked them, searched them, felt them through, and seen things about them which the three of them did not know about themselves or about each other. Casher O'Neill said to the Lady Celalta: "You got it, too?" "A beautiful woman, encased in a little ship?" Casher nodded: "A red-head with skin as soft and transparent as living ivory? A woman who was beautiful and will be beautiful again?" "That's what I got," said the Lady Celalta. "And the tired old man, weary of his children and weary of his own life because his children were weary of him." "Not so old," said Casher O'Neill. "And isn't that a spectacular piece of machinery they put him into? A metal giant. It felt like something about a quarter of a kilometer high. Acidproof. Cold-proof. Won't he be surprised when he finds that the Instrumentality has rejuvenated his own body inside that monster?" "He certainly will be," said the Lady Celalta happily, thinking of the pleasant surprise which lay ahead of a man whom she would never know or see with her own bodily eyes. They both fell silent. Then said the Lady Celalta, "But the third person..." There was a shiver in her voice as though she dared not ask the question. "The third person, the one in the cube." She stopped, as though she could neither ask nor say more. "It was not a robot or a personality cube," said Casher O'Neill. "It was a human being all right. But it's crazy. Could you make out, Celalta, as to whether it was male or female?" "No," said she, "I couldn't tell. The other two seemed to think that it was male." "But did you feel sure?" asked Casher. "With that being, I felt sure of nothing. It was human, all right, but it was stranger than any lost hominid we have ever felt around the forgotten stars. Could you tel!, Casher, whether it was young or old?" "No," said he. "I felt nothing -- only a desperate human mind with all its guards up, living only because of the terrible powers of the black cube, the sun-killer in which it rode. I never sensed someone before who was a person without characteristics. It's frightening." "The Instrumentality are cruel sometimes," said Celalta. "Sometimes they have to be," Casher agreed. "But I never thought that they would do that." "Do what?" asked Casher. Her dark eyes looked at him. It was a different night, and a different Nile, but the eyes were only a very little bit older and they loved him just as much as ever. The Lady Celalta trembled as though she herself might think that the all-powerful Instrumentality could have hidden a microphone in the random sands. She whispered to her lover, her master: "You said it yourself, Casher, just a moment ago." "Said what?" He spoke tenderly but fearlessly, his voice ringing out over the cool night sands. 'T'he Lady Celalta went on whispering, which was very unlike her usual self: "You said that the third person was 'crazy.' Do you realize that you may have spoken the actual literal truth?" Her whisper darted at him like a snake. At last, he whispered back : "What did you sense? What could you guess?" "They have sent a madman to the stars. Or a mad woman. A real psychotic." "Lots of pilots," said Casher, speaking more normally, "are cushioned against loneliness with real but artificially activated psychoses. It gets them through me real or imagined horrors of the sufferings of space." "I don't mean that," said Celalta, still whispering urgently and secretly. "I mean a real psychotic." "But there aren't any. Not loose, that is," said Casher, stammering with surprise at last. "They either get cured or they are bottled up in thought-proof satellites somewhere." Celalta raised her voice a little, just a little, so that she no longer whispered but spoke urgently. "But don't you see, that's what they must have done. The Instrumentality made a star-killer too strong for any normal mind to guide. So the Lords got a psychotic somewhere, a real psychotic, and sent a madman out among the stars. Otherwise we could have felt its gender or its age." Casher nodded in silent agreement. The air did not feel colder, but he got gooseflesh sitting beside his beloved Celalta on the familiar desert sands. "You're right. You must be right. It almost makes me feel sorry for the enemies out near Linschoten Fifteen. Do you see nothing of them this time? I couldn't perceive them at all." "I did, a little," said the Lady Celalta. "Their telepaths have caught the strange minds coming at them with a high rate of speed. The telepathic ones are wild with excitement but the others are just going cackle-gabble, cacklegabble with each other, filled with anger, hunger and the thought of man." "You got that much?" he said in wonder. "My lord and my lover, I dived this time. Is it so strange that I sensed more than you did? Your strength lifted me." "Did you hear what the weapons called each other?" "Something silly." He could see her knitting her brows in the bright starshine which illuminated the desert almost the way that the Old Original Moon lit up the nights sometimes on Manhome Itself. "It was Folly, and something like 'Superordinated Alien Measuring and Mastery machine' and something like 'darkness' in the Ancient Doyches Language." "That's what I got, too," said Casher. "It sounds like a weird team." "But a powerful one, a terribly powerful one," said the Lady Celalta. "You and I, my lover and master, have seen strange things and dangers between the stars, even before we met each other, but we never saw anything like this before, did we?" "No," said he. "Well, then," said she, "let us sleep and forget the matter as much as we can. The Instrumentality is certainly taking care of Linschoten Fifteen, and we two not need botlier about it." And all that Samm, Folly and Finsternis knew was that a light touch, unexplained but friendly, had gone over them from the far star region near home. Thought they, if they thought anything about it at all, "The Instrumentality, which made us and sent us, has checked up on us one more time." V few years later, Samm and Folly were talking again while Finsternis -- guarded, impenetrable, uncommunicating, detectable only by the fierce glow of human life which shone telepathically out of the immense cube -- rode space beside them and said nothing. Suddenly Folly cried out to Samm loudly: "I can smell them." "Smell who?" asked Samm mildly. "There isn't any smell out here in the nothingness of space." "Silly," thought Folly back, "I don't mean really smell. I mean that I can pick up their sense of odor telepathically." "Whose?" said Samm, being dense. "Our enemies', of course," cried Folly. "The man-rememberers who are not man. The cackle-gabble creatures. The beings who remember man and hate him. They smell thick and warm and alive to each other. Their whole world is full of smells. Their telepaths are getting frantic now. They have even figured out that there are three of us and they are trying to get our smells." "And we have no smell. Not when we do not even know whether we have human bodies or not, inside these things. Imagine this metal body of mine smelling. If it did have a smell," said Samm, "it would probably be the very soft smell of working steel and a little bit of lubricants, plus whatever odors my jets might activate inside an atmosphere. If I know the Instrumentality, they have made my jets smell awful to almost any kind of being. Most forms of life think first through their noses and then figure out the rest of experience later. After all, I was built to intimidate, to frighten, to destroy. The Instrumentality did not make this giant to be friendly with anybody. You and I can be friends. Folly, because you are a little ship which I could hold like a cigar between my fingers, and because the ship holds the memory of a very lovely woman. I can sense what you once were. What you may still be, if your actual body is still inside that boat." "Oh, Samm!" she cried. "Do you think I might still be alive, really alive, with a real me in a real me, and a chance to be myself somewhere again, out here between the stars?" "I can't sense it plainly," said Samm. "I've reached as much as I can through your ship with my sensors, but I can't tell whether there's a whole woman there or not. It might be just a memory of you dissected and laminated between a lot of plastic sheets. I really can't tell, but sometimes I have the strangest hunch that you are still alive, in the old ordinary way, and that I am alive too." "Wouldn't that be wonderful!" She almost shouted at him. "Samm, imagine being us again, if we fulfill our mission and conquer this planet and stay alive and settle there! I might even meet you and -- " They both fell silent at the implications of being ordinary-alive again. They knew that they loved each other. Out here, in the immense blackness of space, there was nothing they could do but streak along in their fast trajectories and talk to each other a little bit by telepathy. "Samm," said Folly, and the tone of her thought showed that she was changing a difficult subject. "Do you think that we are the furthest out that people have ever gone? You used to be a technician. You might know. Do you?" "Of course I know," thought Samm promptly. "We're not. After all, we're still deep inside our own galaxy." "I didn't know," said Folly contritely. "With all those instruments, don't you know where you are?" "Of course I know where I am, Samm. In relation to the third planet of Linschoten XV. I even have a faint idea of the general direction in which Old Earth must lie, and how many thousands of ages it would take us to get home, travelling through ordinary space, if we did try to turn around." She thought to herself but didn't add in her thought to Samm, "Which we can't." She thought again to him, "But I've never studied astronomy or navigation, so I couldn't tell whether we were at the edge of the galaxy or not." "Nowhere near the edge," said Samm. "We're not John Joy Tree and we're nowhere near the two-headed elephants which weep forever in intergalactic space." C( Thn Joy Tree?" sang Folly; av there was joy and memory in her thoughts as she sounded the name. "He was my idol when I was a girl. My father was a subchief of the Instrumentality and always promised to bring John Joy Tree to our house. We had a country and it was unusual and very fine for this day and age. But mister and Go-Captain Tree never got around to visiting us, so there I was, a big girl with picture-cubes of him all over my room. I liked him because he was so much older than me, and so resolute-looking and so tender too. I had all sorts of romantic day-dreams about him, but he never showed up and I married the wrong man several times, and my children got given to the wrong people, so here I am. But what's this stuff about twoheaded elephants?" "Really?" said Samm. "I don't see how you could hear about John Joy Tree and not know what he did." "I knew he flew far, far out, but I didn't know exactly what he did. After all, I was just a child when I fell in love with his picture. What did he do? He's dead now, I suppose, so I don't suppose it matters." Finsternis cut in, grimly and unexpectedly: "John Joy Tree is not dead. He's creeping around a monstrous place on an abandoned planet, and he is immortal and insane." "How did you know that?" cried Samm, turning his enormous metal head to look at the dark burnished cube which had said nothing for so many years. There was no further thought from Finsternis, not a ghost, not an echo of a word. Folly prodded him: "It's no use trying to make that thing talk if it doesn't want to. We've both tried, thousands of times. Tell me about the twoheaded elephants. Those are the big animals with large floppy ears and the noses that pick things up, aren't they? And they make very wise, dependable underpeople out of them?" "I don't know about the underpeople part, but the animals are the kind you mention, very big indeed. When John Joy Tree got far outside our cosmos by flying through space he found an enormous procession of open ships flying in columns where there was nothing at all. The ships were made by nothing which man has ever even seen. We still don't know where they came from or what made them. Each open ship had a sort of animal, something like an elephant with four front legs and a head at each end, and as he passed the unimaginable ships, these animals howled at him. Howled grief and mourning. Our best guess was that the ships were the tombs of some great race of beings and the howling elephants the immortal halfliving mourners who guarded them." "But how did John Joy Tree ever get back?" "Ah, that was beautiful. If you go into spaces, you take nothing more than your own body with you. That was the finest engineering the human race has ever done. They designed and built a whole planoform ship out of John Joy Tree's skin, fingernails and hair. They had to change his body chemistry a bit to get enough metal in him to carry the coils and the electric circuits, but it worked. He came back. That was a man who could skip through space like a little boy hopping on familiar rocks. He's the only pilot who ever piloted himself back home from outside our galaxy. I don't know whether it will be worth the time and treasure to use spaces for intergalactic trips. After all, some very gifted people may have already fallen through by accident, Folly. You and Finsternis and I are people who have been built into machines. We are now ourselves the machines. But with Tree they did it the other way around. They made a machine out of him. And it worked. In that one deep flight than we will ever go." "You think you know," said Finsternis unexpectedly. "You think you know. That's what you always do. You think you know." Folly and Samm tried to get Finsternis to talk some more, but nothing happened. After a few more rests and talks they were ready for landing on the third planet of Linschoten XV. "Xhey landed. They fought. Blood ran on the ground. Fire scorched the valleys and boiled the lakes. The telepathic world was full of the cackle-gabble of fright, hatred throwing itself into suicide, fury turning into surrender, into deep despair, into hopelessless, and at last into a strange kind of quiet and love. Let us. not tell that story. It can be written some other time, told by some other voice. The beings died by thousands and tens of thousands while Finsternis sat on a mountain-top, doing nothing. Folly wove death and destruction, uncoded languages, drew maps, showed Samm the strong-points and the weapons which had to be destroyed. Part of the technology was very advanced, other parts were still tribal. The dominant race was that of the beings who had evolved into handlers and thinkers; it was they who were the telepaths. All hatred ceased as the haters died. Only the submissive ones lived on. Samm tore cities about with his bare metal hands, ripped heavy guns to pieces while they were firing at him, picking the gunners off the gun carriages as though they were lice, swimming oceans when he had to, with Folly darting and hovering around or ahead of him. Final surrender was brought by their strongest telepath, a very wise old male who had been hidden inside a deep mountain; "You have come, people. We surrender. Some of us have always known the truth. We are Earth-born, too. A cargo of chickens settled here unimaginable times ago. A time-twist tore us out of our convoy and threw us here. That's way, vhen we sensed you far across space, we caught the relationship of eat-and-eaten. Only, our brave ones had it wrong. You eat us: we don't eat you. You are the masters now. We will serve you forever. Do you seek our death?" "No, no," said Folly. "We came only to avert a danger, and we have done that. Live on, and on, but plan no war and make no weapons. Leave that to the Instrumentality." "Blessed is the Instrumentality, whoever that may be. We accept your terms. We belong to you." t, "XThen this was done, the war was over. Strange things began to happen. Wild voices sang from within Folly and Samm, voices not their own: Mission gone. Work finished. Go to hill with cube. Go and rejoice! Samm and Folly hesitated. They had left Finsternis where they landed, halfway around the planet. The singing voices became more urgent: Go. Go. Go now. Go back to the cube. Tell the chicken-people to plant a lawn and a grove of trees. Go, go, go now to the good reward! They told the telepaths what had been said to them and voyaged wearily up out of the atmosphere and back down for a landing at the original point of contact, a long low hill which had been planted with huge patches of green turf and freshly transplanted trees even in the hours in which they flew off the world and back on it again. The bird-telepaths must have had strong and quick commands. The singing became pure music as they landed, chorales of reward and rejoicing, with the hint of martial marches and victory fugues woven in. Alan, stand up, said the voices to Samm. Samm stood on the ridge of the hill. He stood like a colossus against the red-dawning sky. A friendly, quiet crowd of the chicken-people fell back. Alan, put your hand to your right forehead, sang the voices. Samm obeyed. He did not know why the voices called him "Alan." Ellen, land, sang the rejoicing voices to Folly. Folly, herself a little ship, landed at Samm's feet. She was bewildered with happy confusion and a great deal of pain which did not seem to matter much. Alan, come forth, sang the voices. Samm felt a sharp pain as his forehead -- his huge metal forehead, two hundred meters above the ground -- burst open and closed again. There was something pink and helpless in his hand. The voices commanded, Alan, put your hand gently on the ground. Samm obeyed and put his hand on the ground. The little pink toy fell on the fresh turf. It was a tiny miniature of a man. Ellen, stand forth, sang the voices again. The ship named Folly opened a door and a naked young woman fell out. Alma, wake up. The cube named Finsternis turned darker than charcoal. Out of the dark side, there stumbled a blackhaired girl. She ran across the hill-slope to the figure named Ellen. The man-body named Alan was struggling to his feet. The three of them stood up. The voices spoke to them: "This is our last message. You have done your work. You are well. The boat named Folly conVI tains tools, medicine and the other equipment for a human colony. The giant named Samm will stand forever as a monument to human victory. The cube named Finsternis will now dissolve. Alan! Ellen! Treat Alma lovingly and well. She is now a forgetty." The three naked people stood bewildered in the dawn. "Good-by and a great high thanks from the Instrumentality. This is a pre-coded message, effective only if you won. You have won. Be happy. Live on!" Ellen took Alma -- who had been Finsternis -- and held her tight. The great cube dissolved into a shapeless slag-heap. Alan, who had been Samm, looked up at his former body dominating the skyline. For reasons which the travelers did not understand until many years had passed, the bird-people around them broke into ululant hymns of peace, welcome and joy. "My house," said Ellen, pointing at the little ship which had spat forth her body just minutes ago, "is now a home for all of us." They climbed into the successful little ship which had been called Folly. They knew, somehow, that they would find clothes and food. And wisdom, too. They did. "Ten years later, they had the proof of happiness playing in the yard before their house -- a substantial building, made of stone and brick, which the local people had built under Alan's directions. (They had changed their whole technology in the process of learning from him, and -- thanks to the efficiency and power of the telepathic priestly caste -- things learned at any one spot on the planet were swiftly disseminated to the whole group of races on the planet.) The proof of happiness consisted of the thirty-five human children playing in the yard. Ellen had had nine, four sets of twins and a single. Alma had had twelve, two sets of quintuplets and a pair of twins. The other fourteen had been bottle-grown from ova and sperm which they found in the ship, the frozen donations of complete strangers who had done their bit for the offworld settling of the human race. Thanks to the careful genetic coding of both the womb-children and the bottlechildren, there was a variety of types, suitable for natural breeding over many generations to come. Alan same to the door. He measured the time by the place where the great shadow fell. It was hard to realize that the gigantic, indestructible statue which loomed above them all had once been his own self. A small glacier was beginning to form around the feet of Samm and the night was getting cold. "I'm bringing the children in already," said Ch-tikkik, one of the local nurses they had hired to help with the huge brood of human babies. She, in return, got the privilege of hatching her eggs on the warm shelf behind the electric stove; she turned them every hour, eagerly awaiting the time that sharp little mouths would break the shell and hrunanlike little hands would tear an opening from which a humanlike baby would emerge, oddlypretty-ugly like a gnome, and unusual only in that it could stand upright from the moment of birth. One little boy was arguing with Ch-tikkik. He wore a warm robe of vegetable-fiber veins knitted to serve as a base for a feather cloak. He was pointing out that with such a robe he could survive a blizzard and claiming, quite justly, that he did not have to be in the house in order to stay warm. Was that Rupert? thought Alan. He was about to call the child when his two wives came to the door, arm in arm, flushed with the heat of the kitchen where they had been cooking the two dinners together -- one dinner for the human, now numbering thirty-seven, and the other for the bird-people, who were tremendously appreciative of getting cooked food, Irut vho had odd requirements in the recipes, such as "one quart of finely ground granite gravel to each gallon of oatmeal, sugared to taste and served with soybean milk." Alan stood behind his wives and put a hand on the shoulder of each. "It's hard to think," he said, "that a little over ten years ago, we didn't even know that we were still people. Now look at us, a family, and a good one." Alma turned her face up to be kissed, and Ellen, who was less sentimental, lifted 'ner face to be kissed too, so that her co-wife would not be embarrassed at being babied separately. The two liked each other very much. Alma came out of the cube Finisternis as a forgetty, conditioned to remember nothing of her long sad psychotic life before the Instrumentality had sent her on a wild mission among the stars. When she had joined Alan and Ellen, she knew the words of the Old Common Tongue, but very little else. Ellen had had some time to teach her, to love her and to mother her before any of the babies were born, and the re'Ttionship between the two oi' thein was warm and good. 'The three parents stood aside as the bird-women, wearing their comfortable and pretty feather cloaks, herded the children into the house. The smallest children had already been brought in from their sunning and were being given their bottles by bird-girls who never got tired of watching the cuteness and helplessness of the human infant. "It's hard to think of that time at all," said Ellen, who had been "Folly." "I wanted beauty and fame and a perfect marriage and nobody even told me that they just didn't go together. I have had to come to the end of the stars to get what I wanted, to be what I might become." "And me," said Alma, who had been "Finsternis," "I had a worse problem. I was crazy. I was afraid of life. I didn't know how to be a person. I didn't even know how to be a woman, a sweetheart, a female, a mother. How could I ever guess that I needed a sister and wife, like the one you have been, to make my life whole? Without you to show me, Ellen, I could never have married our husband. I thought I was carrying murder among the stars, but I was carrying my own solution as well. Where else could I turn out to be me?" "And I," said Alan, who had been "Samm," "became a metal giant between the stars because my first wife was dead and my own children forgot me and neglected me. Nobody can say I'm not a father now. Thirty-five, and more than half of them mine. I'll be more of a father than any other man of the human race has ever been." There was a change in the shadow as the enormous right arm swung quietly but heavily toward the sky as a prelude to the sharp robotic call that nightfall, calculated with astronomical precision, had indeed come to the place where he stood. The arm reached its height, pointing straight up. "I used to do that," said Alan. The cry came, something like a silent pistol-shot which all of them heard, but a shot without echoes, without reverberations. Alan looked around. "All the children are in. Even Rupert. Come in, my darlings, and let us have dinner together." Alma and EUen went ahead of him and he barred the heavy doors behind them. This was peace and happiness; that at last was goodness. They had no obligation but to live and to be happy. The threat and the promise of victory were far, far behind. Something killed the dinosaurs. And where's that Something now? Willow Bend, Wisconsin June #, # Dr. Wyman Jackson, Wyalusing College, Muscoda, Wisconsin My dear Dr. Jackson: I am writing to you because I don't know who else to write to and there is something I have to tell someone who can understand. I know your name because I read your book, "Cretaceous Dinosaurs," not once, but many times. I tried to get Dennis to read it, too, but I guess he never did. All Dennis ever was interested in were the mathematics of his time concept -- not the time machine itself. Besides, Dennis doesn't read too well. It is a chore for him. Maybe I should tell you, to start with, that my name is Alton James. I live with my widowed mother and I run a fix-it shop. I fix bicycles and lawn mowers and radios and television sets -- I fix anything that is brought in to me. I'm not much good at anything else, but I do seem to have the knack of seeing how things go together and understanding how they work and seeing what is wrong with them when they aren't working. I never had no training of any sort, but I just seem to have a natural bent for getting along with mechanical contraptions. Dennis is my friend and I'll admit right off that he is a strange one. He doesn't know from nothing about anything, but he's nuts on mathematics. People in town make fun of him because he is so strange and Ma gives me hell at times for having anything to do with him. She says he's the next best thing to a village idiot. I guess a lot of people think the way that Ma does, but it's not eiJ:irely true, for he does know his math. I don't know how he knows it. He didn't learn it at school and that's for sure. When he got to be # and hadn't got no farther than eighth grade, the school just sort of dropped him. He didn't really get to eighth grade honest; the teachers after a while got tired of seeing him on one grade and passed him to the next. There was talk, off and on, of sending him to some special school, but it never got nowhere. And don't ask me what kind of mathematics he knew. I tried to read up on math once because I had the feeling, after seeing some of the funny marks that Dennis put on paper, that maybe he knew more about it than anyone else in the world. And I still think that he does -- or that maybe he's invented an entirely new kind of math. For in the books I looked through I never did find any of the symbols that Dennis put on paper. Maybe Dennis used symbols he made up, inventing them as he went along, because no one had ever told him what the regular mathematicians used. But I don't think that's it -- I'm inclined to lean to the idea Dennis came up with a new brand of math, entirely. There were times I tried to talk with Dennis about this math of his and each time he was surprised that I didn't know it, too. I guess he thought most people knew about it. He said that it was simple, that it was plain as day. It was the way things worked, he said. I suppose you'll want to ask how come I understood his equations well enough to make the time machine. The answer is I didn't...! suppose that Dennis and I are alike in a lot of ways, but in different ways. I know how to make contraptions work (without knowing any of the theory) and Dennis sees the entire universe as something operating mathematically (and him scarcely able to read a page of simple type.) And another thing. My family and Dennis' family live in the same end of town and from the time we were toddlers, Dennis and I played together. Later on, we just kept on together. We didn't have a choice. For some reason or other, none of the kids would play with us. Unless we iwanted to play alone, we had to play together. I guess we got so, through the years, that we understood each other. I don't suppose there'd been any time machine if I hadn't been so interested in paleontology. Not that I knew anything about it; I was just interested. From the time I was a kid I read everything I could lay my hands on about dinosaurs and saber-tooths and such. Later on I went fossil hunting in the hills, but I never found nothing really big. Mostly I found brachiopods. There are great beds of them in the Platteville limestone. And lots of times I'd stand in the street and look up at the river bluffs above the town and try to imagine what it had been like story about a time machine, I remember thinking how I'd like to have one. I guess that at one time I thought a little about making one, but then realized I couldn't. 'TAennis had a habit of coming to my shop and talking, but most of the time talking to himself rather than to me. I don't remember exactly how it started, but after a while I realized that he had stopped talking about anything but time. One day he told me he had been able to figure out everything but time, and now it seemed he was getting that down in black and white, like all the rest of it. IMostly I didn't pay too much attention to what he said, for a lot of it didn't make much sense. But after he'd talked, incessantly, for a week or two, on time, I began to pay attention. But don't expect me to tell you what he said or make any sense of it, for there's no way that I can. To understand what Dennis said and meant, you'd have to live with him, like I did, for twenty years or more. It's not so much understanding what Dennis says as understanding Dennis. I don't think we actually made any real decision to build a time machine. It just sort of grew on us. All at once we found that we were making one. We took our time. We had to take our time, for we went back a lot and did things over, almost from the start. It took weeks to get some of the proper effects -- at least, that's what Dennis called them. Me, I didn't know anything about effects. All that I knew was that Dennis wanted to make something work a certain way and I tried to make it work that way Sometimes, even when it worke'd the way he wanted it, it turned out to be wrong. So we'd start all over. But finally we had a working model of it and took it out on a big bald bluff, several miles up the river, where no one ever went. I rigged up a timer to a switch that would turn it on, then after two minutes would reverse the field and send it home again. We mounted a movie camera inside the frame that carried the machine, and we set the camera going, then threw the timer switch. I had my doubts that it would work, but it did. It went away and stayed for two minutes, then came back again. When we developed the camera film, we knew without any question the camera had traveled back in time. At first there were pictures of ourselves, standing there and waiting. Then there was a little blur, no more than a flicker, across a half a dozen frames, and the next frames showed a mastodon walking straight into the camera. A fraction of a second later his trunk jerked up and his ears flared out as he wheeled around with clumsy haste and galloped down the ridge. Every now and then he'd swing his head around to take a look behind him. I imagine that our time machine, blossoming suddenly out of the ground in front of him, scared him out of seven years of growth. Ts were lucky, that was all. We could have sent that camera back another thousand times, perhaps, and never caught a mastodon -- probably never caught a thing. Although we would have known it had moved in time, for the landscape had been different, although not a great deal different. But from the landscape we could not have told if it had gone back in time a hundred or a thousand years. When we saw the mastodon, however, we knew we'd sent the camera back # years at least. I won't bore you with how we worked out a lot of problems on our second model, or how Dennis managed to work out a time-meter that we could calibrate to send the machine a specific distance into time. Because all this is not important. What is important is what I found when I went into time. I've already told you I'd read your book about Cretaceous dinosaurs and I liked the entire book, but that final chapter about the extinction of the dinosaurs is the one that really got me. Many a time I'd lie awake at night thinking about all the theories you wrote about and trying to figure out in my own mind how it really was. So when it was time to get into that machine and go, I knew where I would be headed. Dennis gave me no argument. He didn't even want to go. He didn't care no more. He never was really interested in the time machine. All he wanted was to prove out his math. Once the machine did that, he was through with it. I worried a lot, going as far as I meant to go, about the rising or subsidence of the crust. I knew that the land around Willow of years. Sometime during the Cretaceous a sea had crept into the interior of the continent, but had stopped short of Wisconsin and, so far as geologists could determine, there had been no disturbances in the state. But I still felt uneasy about it. I didn't want to come out into the Late Cretaceous with the machine buried under a dozen feet of rock or, maybe, hanging a dozen feet up in the air. So I got some heavy steel pipes and sunk them six feet into the rock on the bald bluff top we had used that first time, with about ten feet of their length extending in the air. I mounted the time frame on top of them and rigged up a ladder to get in and out of it and tied the pipes into the time field. One morning I packed a lunch and filled a canteen with water. I dug the old binoculars that had been my father's out of the attic and debated whether I should take along a gun. All I had was a shotgun and I decided not to take it. If I'd had a rifle, there'd been no question of my taking it, but I didn't have one. I could have borrowed one, but I didn't want to. I'd kept pretty quiet about what I was doing and I didn't want to start any gossip in the village. I went up to the bluff top and climbed up to the frame and set the time-meter for #j# million years into the past and then I turned her on. I didn't make any ceremony out of it. I just turned her on and went. I told you about the little blur in the movie film and that's the best way, I suppose, to tell you how it was. There was this little blur, like a flickering twilight. Then it was sunlight once again and I was on the bluff top, looking out across the valley. Except it wasn't a bluff top any longer, but only a high hill. And the valley was not the rugged, tree-choked, deeply cut valley I had always known, but a great green plain, a wide and shallow valley with a wide and sluggish river flowing at the far side of it. Far to the west I could see a shimmer in the sunlight, a large lake or sea. But a sea, I thought, shouldn't be this far east. But there it was, either a great lake or a sea -- I never did determine which. And there was something else as Vv'ell. I looked down to the ground and it was only three feet under me. Was I ever glad I had used those pipes! Looking out across the valley, I could see some moving things, but they were so far away that I could not make them out. So I picked up the binoculars and jumped down to the ground and walked across the hilltop until the ground began to slope away. I sat down and put the binoculars to my eyes and worked across the valley with them. There were dinosaurs out there, a whole lot more of them than I had expected. They were in herds and they were traveling. You'd expect that out of any dozen herds of them, some of them would be feeding, but none of them was. All of them were moving and it seemed to me there was a nervousness in the way they moved. Although, I told myself, that might be the way it was with dinosaurs. They all were a long way off, even with the glasses, but I could make out some of them. There w'ere several groups of duckbills, waddling along and making funny jerky movements with their heads. I spotted a couple of small herds of thescelosaurs, pacing along, with their bodies tilted forward. Here and there were small groups of triceratops. But strangest of all was a large herd of brontosaurs, ambling nervously and gingerly along, as if their feet might hurt. And it struck me strange, for they were a long ways from water and from what I'd read in your book, and in other books, it didn't seem too likely they ever wandered too far away from water. And there were a lot of other things that didn't look too much like the pictures I had seen in books. '"The whole business had a funny feel about it. Could it be, I wondered, that I had stumbled on some great migration, with all the dinosaurs heading out for some place else? I got so interested in watching that I was downright careless and it was foolish of me. I was in another world and there could have been all sorts of dangers and I should have been watching out for them, but I was just sitting there, flat upon my backside, as if I were at home. Suddenly there was a pounding, as if someone had turned loose a piledriver, coming up behind me and coming very fast. I dropped the glasses and twisted around and as I did something big and tall rushed past me, no more than three feet away, so close it almost brushed me. I got just a brief impression of it as it went past -- huge and gray and scaly. Then, as it went tearing down the hill, I saw what it was and I had a cold and sinking feeling clear down in my gizzard. For I had been almost run down by the big boy of them all -- Tyrannosaurus rex. His two great legs worked like driving pistons and the light of the sun glinted off the wicked, recurved claws as his feet pumped up and down. His tail rode low and awkward, but there was no awkwardness in the way he moved. His monstrous head swung from side to side, with the great rows of teeth showing in the gaping mouth, and he left behind him a faint foul smell -- I suppose from the carrion he ate. But the big surprise was that the wattles hanging underneath descence -- red and green and gold and purple, the color of them shifting as he swung his head. I watched him for just a second and then I jumped up and headed for the time machine. I was more scared than I like to think about. I had, I want to testify right here, seen enough of dinosaurs for a lifetime. But I never reached the time machine. Up over the brow of the hill came something else. I say something else because I have no idea what it really was. Not as big as rex, but ten times worse than him. It was long and sinuous and it had a lor of legs and it stood six feet high' or so and was a sort of sickish pink. Take a caterpillar and magnify it until it's six feet tall, then give it longer legs so that it can run instead of crawl and hang a death mask dragon's head upon it and you get a faint idea. Just a faint idea. I t saw me and swung its head toward me and made an eager whimpering sound and it slid along toward me with a sidewheeling gait, like a dog when it's running out of balance and lop-sided. I took one look at it and dug in my heels and made so sharp a turn that I lost my hat. The next thing that I knew, I was pelting down the hill behind old T yrannosaurus. And now I saw that myself and rex were not the only things that were running down the hill. Scattered here and there along the hillside were other running creatures, most of them in small groups and herds, although there were some singles. Most of them were dinosaurs, but there were other things as well. I'm sorry I can't tell you what they were, but at that particular moment I wasn't what you might call an astute observer. I was running for my life, as if the flames of hell were lapping at my heels. I looked around a couple of times and that sinuous creature was still behind me. He wasn't gaining on me any, although I had the feeling that he could if he put his mind to it. Matter of fact, he didn't seem to be following me alone. He was doing a lot of weaving back and forth. He reminded me of nothing quite so much as a faithful farm dog bringing in the cattle. But even thinking this, it took me a little time to realize that was exactly what he was -- an old farm dog bringing in a bunch of assorted dinosaurs and one misplaced human being. At the bottom of the hill I looked back again and now that I could see the whole slope of the hill, I saw that this was a bigger cattle drive than I had imagined. The entire hill was alive with running beasts and behind them were a half dozen of the pinkish dogs. And I knew when I saw this that the moving herds I'd seen out on the valley floor were not migratory herds, but they were moving because they were being driven -- that this was a big roundup of some sort, with all the reptiles and the dinosaurs and myself being driven to a common center. I knew that my life depended on getting lost somehow, and being left behind. I had to find a place to hide and I had to dive into this hiding place without being seen. Only trouble was there seemed no place to hide. The valley floor was naked and nothing bigger than a mouse could have hidden there. Ahead of me a good-size swale rose up from the level floor and I went pelting up it. I was running out of wind. My breath was getting short and I had pains throbbing in my chest and I knew I couldn't run much farther. I reached the top of the swale and started down the reverse slope. And there, right in front of me, was a bush of some sort, three feet high or so, bristling with thorns. I was too close to it and going too fast to even try to dodge it, so I did the only thing I could -- I jumped over it. But on the other side there was no solid ground. There was, instead, a hole. I caught just a glimpse of it and tried to jerk my body to one side, and then I was falling in the hole. It wasn't much bigger than I was. It bumped me as I fell and I picked up some bruises, then landed with a jolt. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I was doubled over, with my arms wrapped about my belly. My breath came slowly back and the pain subsided and I was able to take a look at where I was. The hole was some three feet in diameter and perhaps as much as seven deep. It slanted slightly toward the forefront of the slope and its sides were worn smooth. A thin trickle of dirt ran down from the edge of it, soil that I had loosened and dislodged when I had hit the hole. And about halfway up was a cluster of small rocks, the largest of them about the size of a human head, projecting more than half their width out of the wall. I thought, idly, as I looked at them, that some day they'd come loose and drop into the hole. And at the thought I squirmed around a little to one side, so that if they took a notion to fall I'd not be in the line of fire. Looking down, I saw that I'd not fallen to the bottom of the hole, for the hole went on, deeper in the ground. I had come to rest at a point where the hole curved sharply, to angle back beneath the swale top. I hadn't noticed it at first, I suppose because I had been too shook up, but now I became aware of a musky smell. Not an overpowering odor, but a sort of scent -- faintly animal, although not quite animal. A smooth-sided hole and a musky smell -- there could be no other answer: I had fallen not into just an ordinary hole, but into a burrow of some sort. And it must be the burrow of quite an animal, I thought, to be the size it was. It would have taken something with hefty claws, indeed, to have dug this sort of burrow. And even as I thought it, I heard the rattling and the scrabbling of something coming up the burrow, no doubt coming up to find out what was going on. I did some scrabbling myself. I didn't waste no time. But about three feet up I slipped. I grabbed for the top of the hole, but my fingers slid t'nrough the sandy soil and I couldn't get a grip. I shot out my feet and stopped my slide short of the bottom of the hole. And there I was, with my back against one side of the hole and my feet braced against the other, hanging there, halfway up the burrow. While all the time below me the scrabbling and the clicking sounds continued. The thing, whatever it might be, was getting closer, and it was coming fast. Right in front of me was the nest of rocks sticking from the wall. I reached out and grabbed the biggest one and jerked and it came loose. It was heavier than I had figured it would be and I almost dropped it, but managed to hang on. A snout came out of the curve in the burrow and thrust itself quickly upward in a grabbing motion. The jaws opened up and they almost filled the burrow and they were filled with sharp and wicked teeth. I didn't think. I didn't plan. What I did was instinct, I dropped the rock between my spreadout legs straight down into that gaping maw. It was a heavy rock and it dropped four feet or so and went straight between the teeth, down into the blackness of the throat. When it hit it splashed and the paws snapped shut and the creature backed away. How I did it, I don't know, but I got out of the hole. I clawed and kicked against the wall and heaved my body up and rolled out of the' hole onto the naked hillside. Naked, that is, except for the bush with 'the inch-long thorns, the one that I'd jumped over before i fell into the burrow. It was the only cover that there was and I made for the upper side of it, for by now, I figured, the big cattle drive had gone past me and if I could get the bush between myself and the valley side of the swale, ! might have a chance. Otherwise, sure as hell, one of those dogs would see me and would come out to bring me in. For a while there was no questions that they were dinosaur herders, they probably couldn't tell the difference betveen me and a dinosaur. I was ali've and could run and that would qualify me. There was always the chance, of course, that the owner of the burrow would come swarming out, and if he did I couldn't stay behind the bush. But I rather doubted he'd be coming out, not right away, at least. It would take him a while to get that stone out of his throat. I crouched behind the bush and the sun was hot upon my back and, peering 'through the branches, I could see, far out on the valley floor, the great herd had been driven together and there they were, running in a knotted circle, while outside the circle prowled the pinkish dogs and something else as well -- what appeared to be men driving tiny cars. The cars and men were all of the same color, ,-i sort of greenish gray, and the two of them, the cars and men, seemed to be a single organism. The men didn't seem to be sitting in the cars; they looked as if they grew out of the cars, as if they and the cars were one. And while the cars went zipping along, they appeared to have no wheels. It was hard to tell, but they seemed to travel with the bottom of them flat upon the ground, like a snail would travel, and as they travelled, they rippled, as if the body of the car were some sort of flowing muscle. I crouched there watching and now. for the first time, I had a chance to think about it, to try to figure out what was going on. I had come here, across more some dinosaurs, and I sure was seeing them, but under what you might say were peculiar circumstances. The dinosaurs fit, all right. They looked mostly like the way they looked in books, but the dogs and car-men were something else again. They were distinctly out of place. The dogs vere pacing back and forth, sliding along in their sinuous fashion, and the car-men were zipping back and forth, and every once in a while one of the beasts would break out of the circle and the minute that it did, a half dozen dogs and a couple of car-men would race to intercept it and drive it back again. The circle of beasts must have had roughly, a diameter of a frightened creatures. A lot of paleontologists have wondered whether dinosaurs had any voice and I can tell you that they did. They were squealing and roaring and quacking and there were some of them that hooted -- I think it was the duckbills hooting, but I can't be sure Then, all at once, there was another sound, a sort of fluttering roar that seemed to be coming from the sky. I looked up quickly and I saw them coming down -- a dozen or so spaceships, they couldn't have been anything but spaceships. They came down rather fast and they didn't seem too big and there were tails of thin, blue flame flickering at their bases. Not the billowing clouds of flame and smoke that our rockets have, but just a thin blue flicker. For a minute it looked like one of them would land on top of me, but then I saw that it was too far out. It missed me, matter of fact, a good two miles or so. It and the others sat down out in the valley. I should have known what would happen out there. It was the simplest explanation one could think of and it was logical. I think, maybe, way deep down. I did know, but my surface mind had pushed it away because it was too matter-of-fact and too ordinary. Thin snouts spouted from the ships and purple fire curled mistily at the muzzle of those snouts and the dinosaurs went down in a fighting, frightened, squealing mass. Thin trickles of vapor drifted upward from the snouts and out in the center of the circle lay that heap of dead and dying dinosaurs, all those thousands of dinosaurs piled in death. It is a simple thing to tell, of course, but it was a terrible thing to see. I crouched there behind the bush, sickened at the sight, startled by the silence when all the screaming and the squealing and the hooting ceased. And shaken, too -- not by what shakes me now as I write this letter, but shaken by the knowledge that something from outside could do this to the earth. For they were from outside. It wasn't just the spaceships, but those pinkish dogs and graygreen car-men which were not cars and men, but a single organism, were not things cf earth, could not be things of earth. I crept back from the bush, keeping low in hope that the bush would screen me from the things down in the valley until I reached the swale top. One of the dogs swung around and looked my way and I froze, and after a time he looked away. Then I was over the top of the swale and heading back toward the time machine. But half way down the slope, I turned around and came back again, crawling on my belly, squirming to the hilltop to have another look. It was a look I'll not forget. The dogs and car-men had swarmed in upon the heap of dead dinosaurs, and some cf the cars already v.'ere crawling back toward the grounded spaceships, which had let down ramps. The cars were moving slowly, for they were heavily loaded and the loads they carried were neatly butchered hams and racks of ribs. And in the sky there was a muttering and I looked up to see yet other spaceships coming down -- the little transport ships that would carry this cargo of fresh meat up to another larger ship that waited overhead. It was then I turned and ran. I reached the top of the hill and piled into the time machine and set it at zero and came home. I didn't even stop to hunt for the binoculars I'd dropped. A nd now that I am home, I'm not going back again. I'm not going anywhere in that time machine. I'm afraid of what I might find any place I go. If Wyalusing College has any need of it, I'll give them the time machine. But that's not why I wrote. There is no doubt in my mind what happened to the dinosaurs, why they became extinct. They were killed off and butchered and hauled away, to some other planet, perhaps many light years distant, by a race which looked upon the earth as a cattle range -- a planet that could supply a vast amount of cheap protein. But that, you say, happened ago. This race did once exist. But almost certainly have changed its ways or drifted off in its hunting to some other sector of the galaxy, or, perhaps, have become extinct, like the dinosaurs. But I don't think so. I don't think any of those things happened. I think they're still around. I think earth may be only one of many planets which supply their food. And I'll tell you why I think so. They were back on earth again, I'm sure, some # or I I ,# years ago, when they killed off the mammoth and the mastodon, the giant bison, the great cave bear and the sabretooth and a lot of other things. Oh, yes, I know they missed Africa. They never touc.hed the big game there. Maybe, after wiping out the dinosaurs, they learned their lesson, and left Africa for breeding stock. And now I come to the point of this letter, the thing that has me worried. Today there are just a few less in the world. By the year # tliere may be as many as six billion of us. We're pretty small, of course, and these things went in for tonnage, for dinosaurs and mastodon and such. But there are so many of us! Small as we are, we may be getting to the point where we'll be worth their while. Prevent heartbreak and hunger across the world -- each dollar sends a Food Crusade package 'The hardcover science-fiction books of today are of course published by the same people who publish the straight fiction and mysteries and westerns -- Doubleday, Simon #b Schuster and so forth. This wasn't always so; it didn't begin to be so until about the time, fifteen years ago, when this magazine's first issue began a similarly meaningful revolution on the newsstands. In #, the biggest names in sf books -- almost the only names -- were Arkham House, Fantasy Press, F.P.C.I., Gnome Press, Hadley, Prime Press and Shasta. Some of them were on their way out, but these were isolated infirmities: a commercially foolish editorial policy in one instance, the publisher's personal circumstances in another. As a group they were promising, though they were essentially one-man operations started by people who had scraped together a little capital or credit. In some hope of profit, they were in the business of reprinting what each personally considered the best magazine science fiction published to that date. What they produced was various. It varied from one company's systematic resurrection of every big name undermined by the new techniques of the #s Astounding, through Hadley's editions of such interesting but idiosyncratic pieces as L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, to Arkham House's beautifully made volumes not only of HowA. E. van Vogt's Sian and Ray Bradbury's first and best collection, Dark Carnival. They did most of their business by mail order; their ads were column inches in the prozines, mimeographed pages in the fanzines. But in any largish city you could usually find one bookstore which was not above stocking one copy each for the nut trade, and here and there you could find booksellers who boasted that they specialized in it. # was about the time when book review columns became regular features in the prozines. Before that, reviews, like books, had been occasional pieces. They had run as fillers at the bottoms of pages short on story text, and they were often obviously too thrilled at the thought that anything at all had found its way into boards. By #, the volume had not only gotten high enough to justify regular columns, it had gotten high enough to justify a nice cathartic bent of expression when a bad one came in, because the bad ones were in hopeless contrast to the good ones. C " od grant that such a luxuriant ' time will never again come to science fiction book publishing. The great board of toprank material waiting to be put into books was the bittersweet result of persistent neglect. Writers had lived, written and died without ever seeing permanent publication. Most of them were not specially conscious of great deprivation in this area, however -- not very many people knew the area existed. It was entirely possible to be a science-fiction fan in # and not realize that there had been a Golden Age just before World War II; it was only when these books began coming out that the shape and nature of that work became fully apparent. I would not want you to think that I believe some cosmic switch had clicked over in # and then back in #. Neither is it true that between these arbitrary dates Astounding Science Fiction published seventy-two issues of solid immortal literature while none of its competitors did a thing but move in place. What Astounding did do, over a period of years, was to develop and, until #, keep writers who fairly often wrote a certain broad type of story well. It was a type of story which was better received by articulate science-fiction readers of those days than was any other type of story; those same readers were now ready to buy these same stories again in book form, and it so happened that a good number of people who had never read that kind of science fiction before were able to share their taste. ence fiction had been slightly anticipated by a similar phenomenon in crime fiction, with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, emerging from the crumbled pages of Black Mask. Apparently something just before the War acted to create break out of the post-World War I shell of neverland cliches which persisted in the pulps until the middle of the #s. It may have been an echo of the same tough attitude toward life that had produced Hemingway and Steinbeck in the "mainstream" somewhat earlier. Crime stories in the new mode had been getting serious book publishing attention all during World War II. Now it was perhaps science fiction's turn. The material was there. The new publishers picked it up and made books of it. Fantasy Press went back a little farther, to publish the early E.E. Smith and Stanley Weinbaum as well as other forerunners of "modern" science fiction as these same book publishers now proceeded to define it, creating sharp distinctions from the past, and from Flash Gordon, simply by running full notices of previous publication and thus making it clear where the "good" -- the most readable -- material had come from. Centering their attention exactly on the Campbellian writers were Gnome Press and Shasta; while Shasta brought out Heinlein's Future History series, for example. Gnome was busy doing Asimov's Foundation stories. Arkham House, Sian aside, was meanwhile tending toward selections from such fantasy magazines as Weird Tales and Unknown, which had had little golden ages of their own and which Fantasy Press's program also included. Prime Press did a little of both, including collections by Lester del Rey (...And Some Were Human) and Theodore Sturgeon Without Sorcery) which split their sources mainly between Asfounding and Unknown, and by George O. Smith (Fenus Equilateral) which was without peer gram fiction. Shasta brought out the Don A. Stuart stories Who Goes There?, Cloak of Aesir), and Gnome did Van Vogt's The Mixed Men and Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories Robots Have No Tails, by "Lewis Padgett"). In other words, in the few years between the end of the war and the earliest #s, these various people with their varied resources brought out the books which are still the liver and lights of any permanent collection of good science fiction. Random House had issued its legendary Healy-McComas anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, and Crown had brought out Groff Conklin's A Treasury of Science Fiction, but Gnome had countered with Martin Greenberg's Men Against the Stars, an entry fully qualified to run in that field. If it hadn't been for the houses listed in Paragraph One of this necessarily breathless history, grown up science fiction might have taken years to find a permanent place in literature via the library catalogues. With the few exceptions mentioned immediately above, the established major houses hadn't touched anything but Verne and Wells in years, the only significant wartime exceptions being Poc'et's original paperback, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, and Viking's Portable Novels oj Science. Doth of these had been edited and one assumes fought into life by Donald Wollheim, who has gone on to do his impressive job of making bricks without stnaw for Ace paperbacks. He, Healy and McComas, Groff Conklin and a few others might eventually have succeeded by applying unremitting pressure over a long period of time. The little specialist houses, operating out of lofts, book stores and their owners' basements, cut that time dramatically short. They made the #s into boom year... from which they themselves would draw little but disaster. T)y #, these people had accomplished two major things, both suicidal. They had exhausted the supply of easily found, high-quality reprints from the magazines, and they had established the financial value of the sf book market. They had gotten to that point because you can succeed with almost any sensible small venture in publishing as long as you're not doing something the potential major competitors want to do as well. At that point, the first Science Fiction Book Club had appeared on the back cover of a prozine. Except for differences of detail, it looked and read exactly like its sister ads for the Detective Book Club, which had been riding the back covers of the crime magazines for years. Merchandising had come to the business of publishing sf books for profit, and the incidence of major company names on new sf titles had begun to rise sharply. A major publishing house has, by definition, the equipment needed to be a major publisher -- a staff of editorial specialists, a production staff which does nothing all day but buy supplies and services having to do with publishing and a sales staff which can consist of hundreds of specialists, some of them out on the road calling on bookstore owners they have known for years and others sitting home and writing punchy brochure copy. This is what these people do for a living. They have been trained for it under the impetus of believing that this is all they can do for a living. They are paid to do their one thing at least as well as their opposite numbers at the next major house. With this sort of organization, it is possible to prothing that may look and be fractionally better than the work of one busy man working for himself. If you have a hundred such specialists, they can produce, say, ten times as many things to make Once such a major organization has been put in train, it is committed by the inertia of schedules and capital investment. The sight of a major publishing company winding up to give birth to a new program is so impressive that few of its rivals can restrain themselves from following suit. Once the herd has been set in motion it must, by the nature of the beast, proceed along the line of least resistance for an indefinite period of time, leaving nothing in its wake but a stubble of grasses cropped too short to sustain life. fn the area of wholesale bookJL selling, the brief contention was thus between the specialists in science fiction and the specialists in publishing. In the area of simple packaging -- of producing at a profit a book which appears to be worth the retail customer's money -- the contest was only a little longer in the drawing out. It was in fact extended past its natural run by something like a happenstance. The merchandising machinery having gotten turned on, the various sales organizations sponsored by the major publishers immediately needed more product than the publishers themselves were yet able to furnish. So for a little while the small houses were able to supply copies to the book club operations owned more or less by their direct competitors. Thus they acquired a little more money to operate on, at the same time that their choice of production standards was sharply narrowed to the more expensive bands of the book-making spectrum. What this meant for the retail customers was that more conventional-looking science fiction books in far greater quantities had become available. Shopping for books became considerably more convenient. Book prices were reduced, in several senses; over the short terms, there was the benefit of having the specialist houses throw their stocks on the cut-rate market in an effort to get hold of additional working capital or simply to bail out. Over the long term, book prices were reduced (not absolutely, but relative to the still rising cost of production) by the combination of high-volume sales and production economies of which only major publishers are capable. In fact, the only place the sf book-reading public lost anything tangible at all was one from which the small publishers could not have rescued them, but from which the big publishers could. That was in the paucity of remaining publishable book-length material. The result was that the middle #s vere bad years for quality, and looked worse by comparison to the immediate past. The middle #s were the years in which we got the "novels" pasted together from series short stories, the "science fiction" by outside writers who had obviously seen a monster movie once and the unfortunate experiments in hapless antiquarianism reminiscent of that pioneering California company which had staked its all on Ralph Milne Farley. These were the years in which knowledgeable critics lambasted the major companies day and night. If Gnome Press had been able to bring out Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, why in Heaven's name couldn't a giant outfit like Doubleday do better than Nelson Bond's Lancelot Biggs series disguised as a novel? Answer, Doubleday wasn't about to do I, Robot -- yet. Gnome's excellently manufactured edition, with its flossy Cartier jacket making it look exactly like a big-time book, was still very much on sale. Doubleday would of course get to it in the course of time, but meanwhile there was Max Ehrlich's The Big Eye, and that was science fiction too. You could tell by the rocket on the title page. I t wasn't all bad. Gnome's City, by Clifford Simak, was the outstanding example of a pasteup that had been begging to be done. Doubleday's The Martian Chronicles dates from that time -- a beautiful Bradbury collection which owes part of its charm to the loose connecting passages between stories, which may be the fragile vestiges of earlier plans to make a novel. Simon # Schuster did take the bit in its teeth and publish an edition of Sian. Grossett # Dunlap came out with a mass-priced edition of Henry Kuttner's Fury. Frederick Fell, hitherto known as the promulgator of Oscar J. Friend's The Kid from Mars -- which is not quite as bad as its title -- began publishing the Bleiler-Dikty annual 'best" collections of magazine stories, whici served the function of providing the cinderblock base for Judith Merril to later build bigger and better for Simon # Schuster and Dell. And Twayne, another small but nevertheless full-scale publisher wh., hoped to ride up among the majors on the strength of this new boom, did something very interesting with its "Triplet" series, fostered by Fletcher Pratt and Dr. John D. Clark. These were anthologies of three novellas each by three major sf writers, who were given a loose outline of a basic story problem and a detailed description of the solar system in which it was to occur, each writer then going his own way as he saw fit. This was one attempt to create books. With all the will and budget in the world, the science-fiction magazines of that time could only supply the best of the new gout of wordage the book publishers now needed as they jockeyed for control of the market. They couldn't supply all of it, by a long shot. Perforce, the book publishers for original material so that good writers could be induced to occasionally forego the magazines as a primary market No publisher in the world ever pays more than he has to, but the major publishers have people trained to pay that minimum with checks drawn on impressive banks, and with cheerily mesmerrhetic references to the freemasonry of the arts. In this case the book publishers were not only broadening the primary market for original sf, they were now applying the coup de grace to the little specialists, as well as .shaking off the coattail riders in their own ranks. Twayne was one oi the companies which dropped out of the picture. But its program left some significant orphans. Among the ultimate results of Fletcher Pratt's brainchild was James Blish's Hugo-winning A Case oj Conscience, which ran as a long one-parter in If before expanding up to its prize book length. Two other Twayne stories, an Asimov and a Poul Anderson, appeared as serials in Astounding. In its own leflhanded way, this was the first major case of important work being fed from a book publisher into the magazines -- a complete reversal of the established precedence. A t about this same time, two  other interesting things happened. A publisher of paperback originals got on the stands with his edition of a middling-important novel before it had finished running as a serial in Astounding. And Doubleday published Cyril Kornbluth's Takeoff, a major novel by a major magazine writer, which had seen no magazine publication at all. After the inevitable stumbling start, the big book houses were getting their programs into full flight. In every other important field of magazine fiction, most of the long serials had in fact been already under contract as books. That had now become the situation in science fiction, as well, and with various ups and downs, that is the situation today. In all, it took the major houses about five years, from # to #, to make it so. After ten years, this pendulum may now be getting ready to swing back the other vay. Too many new (novels) are not former magazine serials -- however arrived at -- but puffed-up novelettes. Some of them were books all along, cut down for magazine use. But by far the greater percentage are not -- they are padded, patched together or published in a design form that makes a lousy forty thousand words stretch across too many pages which are mostly margin and elephantiasical type. They are sometimes written by thirdrate writers who are being overpaid in compensation for missing the apprenticeship that magazine work forces on its steady practitioners. These flat souffles are in turn subjected to the attentions of blurb writers and sales promotion directors who describe and package them to be more attractive and rewarding than they really are. It is my fervent hope that these easy promises will have their effect; that the second or third time the customer is induced to part with four dollars for a two-dollar experience, a certain chill will settle over the romance. In looking over the titles produced by the pioneers of # -- not all of whom were honest men with the look of far horizons in their eyes, and some of whom rooked their customers and writers unmercifully, sometimes from sheer naivete -- one is struck by how odd a professional production man for, say, Biggers #s Better  Sons Co. would find them. He might forgive them for the early "hardcover" book which was bound in limp lea::iier by the only bindery in town and looks exactly like a bible, or for the jobs which were obviously done on flatbed weekly newspaper presses. He might understand that the publishers were limited in their choices of production methods and sources of supply for such things as paper and binding cloth. He, a book designer and a professional packet copywriter might have the patience to understand that the publishers of these books had to handle those functions themselves and could not really be faulted for not having as much esthetic sense or writing ability as they had editorial judgment... #I whatever it was they had. It is after all a truism in bigtime publishing that talent is exactly as deep as frosted glass partition. What would puzzle and dismay the production man would be the frequent appearance of expensive interior halftone illusstrations -- often done in the publisher's best self-taught style -- tipped in on expensive enameled stock; the use of opulent text papers, of foundry type, of cut initials, of attempts at fullcolor reproduction of jacket designs which were often even worse than the interior illustrations. These were struggling people. They typed their own invoices, wrapped their own product and stood in line at the post office to mail it, walking back to their thirty-dollar-a-month offices with sheafs of stamps sticking out of their shirt pockets. Almost to a man, they thought they could solve problems that have wrecked the careers of professional specialists, and almost to a man they didn't even realize they had failed. They didn't even know, beyond a vague sense of something not quite right, why their books felt harder to read than a similar text composed and designed by a man drawing fifteen grand a year from Biggers Sa Better -- mostly for having on file the phone numbers of all the display type houses in town. They weren't all like that, of course. The bigger outfits, like Gnome and Shasta, farmed out most of these problems to commercial book manufacturers. Arkham House and Fantasy Press books are distinguishable from today's commercial products by the simple fact that they are among the best-looking items in your library. But there is not one in which the careful eye will not detect some trace of ingenuousness, some certain sign that the publisher concerned was copying what he remembered from the books of his youth -- the J. Allen St. John illustrations in his pre-War Grossett #e Dunlap Tarzan books, the creamy paper of the days when pulp forests were not yet the property of newspaper cartels. These are the things that catch the eye as one leafs through one of these productions. They are the signs of love, dreams and spirit, even among the scoundrels. They were fearing our world down atour.  i,:. Too ban' they weren't tearing us down tool tt"They don't build slums like they used to," VVhitey Edwards told me, reaching up for a loose corner of the flexo and pulling it down to prove his point. It domed springily over our dreg-bottomed coffee cups, revealing in the hidden space behind it the limp multicolored spaghetti of the utilities piping: gas, water, metered syntho-milk, sewage, coaxed TV, med-mist, Musik, robo-talk, robo-juice, tele, vele, elec, gelec, and such. Few of them running fat with their peculiar contributions to the good life, I judged. "That may be so," I answered, slapping aside the dodderer's hands and thumbing the blue elastic panel back in place with a fast rub along its adhesive edge. Again it decently covered the flaccid tangle of what looked like rainbow-hued sheep's gut and rubber unmentionables. "But they built Ma like a bull and she'll gore and trample you if she finds you tearing down her kitchen. It's bad enough what the giant centipedes are doing." The jumbo TV, jammed between sink and fridge flickered weak and ghostly. A gaggle of five-job wives and eight-job men were having a closed-end discussion of everything in creation on the executive patio edge of a swimming pool big enough to hide a space-to-seabottom cruiser. Their sweet eldritch cackle was unintelligible, but their state of undress was a slight counterirritant to boredom. Whitey Edwards sighed, not looking at these suburban goddesses, but squinting his rheumy eyes against the Monday sun coming up like doom over the dusty flats between Beatsville and the Henleys' happy if fragile little family castle. Earth's spotted, spitting, seething star shot its angry rays under the great awning rigged in front of our windows and door. "Once," the old boy said, shaking the headtopping that gave him his name, "they built slums solid with steel beams and heavy lath and great bloody pipes of iron and tile and lead that made 'em think twice before they tore 'em down. But now..." He sighed his wheezy grief. Whitey'd used to be a con-and-destruction worker decades back, before the robots took that over, before I was born. The TV zoomered in on a taut little job in bolero jacket and loincloth. The sound cleared for her fast happy words "... caring for this pool put my husband and I in the poolcounselor raquette... and died. I started to tell Whitey I had even more current job-sorrows than his. Since Thursday I'd been terminated from my streetsmiler's job for competing with the psychiatrists, robot and human, and for all I know with the giant centipedes. Just then my brother Dick erupted from the bed-closets, throwing clothes over his sallow nakedness like a Gypsy escaping from a Nazi gas chamber -- or as if he were a six-job man at least and not a sprint-in-the-gutter onejobber. And with that job only since Friday night after being three weeks on probationary relief. I called sweetly at him, "Are you scared a customer viill put a gush of quarters into one of your metal bandits with her own little pinkies if you're a minute late?" Dick scowled, gyrating around a stubborn trouser leg. "Don't you worry, Dickie," I kejit on. were as nervous of machinery as sex, they wanted a man to do it for them." Society, graciously, used to let people work vending and other coin operated machines, like laundromats. But now, like laundromats too, you have to pay an attendant to do it for you -- because machines are temperamental and individual enterprise is almost as holy as money and anyway, there aren't enough jobs to go around more than two or three times. Dick groggled something at me and got the door open, all set for a spring-heel take-off. But there in his way was a tiny man, dressed like a respectable beetle, with dimpled fist raised to knock. He had glasses with zoomer lenses; silver antennae quivered out of his gray hat; a flat black belly-box was his ventral carapace. He looked around, especially at the cluttered floor, as if we were a touch unsavory, but he held his ground. As Dick paused at this coleopterous apparition, Ma came charging out of the bed-closets, red in the face and black was the rest of her. She grappled Dick around the elbows and roared, "Stop! No son of mine is going out to give battle to the #st Century on an empty stomach." Grabbing a quarter orange she shoved it between his teeth like a boxer's mouthpiece and then snatching this way and that she slammed a sandwich in his one hand and a cup in the other and on the next time around poured it steaming full. "VTo one can deny that Ma  stands squarely in back of her four sons, like the manager of a quartet of fistic champions, conscious of our genius and determined that it get recognition in the form of sevenor eight job careers. Though at the moment Dick was the only one of us with any job at all, except for Tom, who lives away with his wife and two kids. But obstructions and set-backs never daunt Ma. It's not the money she's after, mostly, it's the glory of the House of Henley pitted against the whole bloody world. Pricked by tender filial warmth I eyed her -- a murderous sonpunishing behemoth but my blessed mother -- while Whitey gave her an unseen wave. He's an old admirer she tolerates ever since Pa recognized her superior nuclear power and died. Dick bit out and swallowed the meat of the orange and tongued aside the peel so as to yell that the coffee was burning his hand and what would it do to his throat? Ma ripped the fridge open against the pull of the great spring I'd fixed outside to keep it shut since the latch broke. She whisked out an icecube and tucked it in Dick's cup. The fridge door thudded shut and the spring whirred like a rattlesnake about to jump loose and strike, but it didn't. Then Dick gulped his coffee while Ma held him and screeched in his ear about using lunch hour to scout for a second job and not stalk girls. When he'd finished his drink, she gagged him with his sandwich and let him go. The beetle-man dodged aside. Dick took off with a straightline velocity that would have broken his neck and scattered his bones if we'd still been living on the twentieth floor and not in this ground-level flat they tricked us into exchanging for. The TV blinked and -- presto -- there was a soldierly file of eight-job men (tabbed for that by the digit on their left shoulder) single-footing with pleasant monotony past the golden plastic statue of a twelvejobber. Each as he reached screen-center turned head and shouted an inaudible by optimistic something at me and bared all his perfectly tended teeth in a dazzling grin. I breathed a happy sigh and got set for a spell of quiet -- at least until the centipedes decided to start scuttling -- but just then the beetle-man poked his head in and piped politely at Ma, "Good morning, Mrs. Henley, I'm your area med statistician, come to take your bloodpressure and photo-snap your insides and all for posterity, like we arranged for a week ago." Ma slowly turned her head and glared at him like a bull that spots the matador, or, more likely, a peanut-vendor strolling across the ring. The red in her face went purple and she slowly reached for the bubbling coffee flask and slowly lifted it. The beetle-man innocently watched the lethal globe ascend with its tip-tilting seething brown hemicore, as if all this were a jobindoctrination demonstration in astrophysics. Whitey started up, but I pushed him back in his chair, saying rapidly, "Not you. Even being an old friend of the family wouldn't save you from the horns at this moment." Then I rasped loud as ambulance-brakes at Ma, "Hold your hand, you murdering old frump!" She turned at once, as I'd known she would. I cited her and she charged me with the coffee flask high, very much like a small Miura, but armed in a fashion to have made Manolete himself turn pale. But I slipped her with a half veronica and as she went past I kissed her low on the back of the neck, Just at the spot where the matador's sword goes in. I whisked my arms around her beloved thick waist, and the next instant she and Whitey and I were as happy as tin larks together flitting through a sparkling star cluster, and she was pouring fresh toffee for us. But the bettle-man, never dreaming the deadly peril he'd been in, advanced another step into the kitchen and called, "Mrs. Henley, it's very needful you have your medical inspection. You're distorting area med statistics and there are drastic penalties for evading med census. No need for you to undress, just hold still now -- " I pushed the coffee flask back against the wall and I stroked Ma as I held her tight, so she didn't go quite as purple as she howled at him, "You filthy medspy! -- do you think I'll submit to your peepings and be stuff for your filt'ny pictures when I'm not granted decent human med service if I do sicken? Here I have four grand sons, supermen all -- Meaghan here, who's a master mind doctor, and Harry who's still in bed, the greatest poet in the world, and Dick the Prince of Personalities, whom you saw speeding to work and I need not comment on, and Tom, who's a bloody wonder -- and the filthy world takes so little note of them that if I go to the clinic it's only robot doctors who'll see me and never a fleshand-blood physician!" Whatever the topic of her rant, Ma always gets in a commercial for her boys. The beetle-man quivered back a little at all that, but not very far, and piped soothingly, "Mrs. Henley, there's nothing vulgar or inferior about robo med. The Secretary of Mental Health himself prefers -- " he started to take another step into the room. "That old sham!" Ma roared, palpitating in my grasp and purpling dark. "He's the same one whose minions are forever sentencing my genius son Harry to the clutches of the remedial psychiatrists." "But Mrs. Henley," the little fellow went on with rash courage, "I can see with my own eyes you're not in the best of health. An immediate medcheck -- " That gave me my opening and I shoved Ma into Whitey's arms and advanced on the beetle-man quickly, wavering my finger like a sword between his bug eyes. "You watch yourself, lad," I cried, "or they'll be terminating you for making diagnoses who are only a census-taker. That's what the licensed psychers did to me for adding only a few words of insight and wisdom Co my street-smiling." At that very moment a ghostly pattering began and swiftly grew louder. It seemed to come from everywhere. "What's that?" the little chap asked wonderingly. "The giant centipedes," I told him. T T e paled and his zoomered eyes searched the shadows under table and sink as he scuttled backwards, and just at that moment, perhaps from the floor being swayed by our movements, the great spring on the fridge came loose and went klishing across the floor very close to his feet -- a twenty-inch coil of gray wire. He leaped for the lintel of the doorway to hoist himself out of reach of the venomous monster of his imagination, but he missed and fell and went leaping off as if old Fu-Manchu's whole blessed menagerie were at his heels. In pure pity I followed him under the great awning, polkadotted now by the shadows showing through of the stuff pattering down on it, and caught up with him just beyond the mounting flake-drift. "Don't be frightened," I told him, grappling him gently and forcing him to lift his zoomers to the ragged-topped wall behind, now only four to six stories high instead of the thirty it had been a week ago. Along its roller coaster margin two sinuous many-legged great silver beasties scampered, chomping great bites out of it and raining the digested fragments down from their rear ends in concrete cornflakes. "Those are the giant centipedes," I explained. "Demolishment robots, only." I was thinking of how Harry might make a shuddery poem of them: glittery cosmic crawlers nibbling the gray rim of infinity, eating their way in toward us from the ends of the universe -- when at that instant a weightier chunk, rejected by one of the creature's delicate digestive apparatus, no doubt, came thanking down like a meteor not four feet from us, denting the hard ground and raising a geyser of dust. The beetle-man darted off a dozen more steps while I ducked back under the awning, calling to him, "Now be off with you, little official, and trouble Ma no more. She's too much for you, but let that not cast you down. Look on her as a revenant from a hardier, crueller age -- a duchess out of place." I 'd no sooner got back in the kitchen, where Ma and Whitey were chatting over their coffee, than Ellie, Dick's wife, came out of the bed-closets full-dressed with bright suitcases in her hands and a dirty dark look in her eyes. She was saying, "Listen all of you, for I'll not tell it twice, I'm leaving that one-job no-good and going back to my last husband, who's still got the three jobs I left him with when I thought to better myself by entering this house of mad pride and sloth and poets snoring," and she brushed past me, the silver spring twinging again as she chanced to kick it. "Meaghan, let her go, who can't appreciate the Prince of Personalities," Ma said to me loftily, her color down to ladylike bright pink again, but I still would have followed and argued with Ellie -- Dick didn't deserve to be deserted when he'd just got a toe on the bottom rung of the ladder, which of course was why she was leaving him though she didn't know it, a jealous nojob little wifey -- except that just then who should appear in the doorway but my eldest brothgrin and his great shoulders and his aura of three-job success -- or would it be four now? -- and saying, "Hi, Ma. Ellie leaving Dick again? Who's the tiny one hanging around outside? Housing official come to coax you once more from this death trap? Hello, Whitey. No, no coffee, Ma, I want to talk to Meaghan here. I've got something for the lad!" I knew what that meant, of course, and I was already hunched on my hands and knees, starting to fix the spring to the fridge again -- a job that might easily take the rest of the day, I decided -- when I felt Ma's kindly talons on my shoulders, lifting me up, and she saying, "Whitey'U fix that, Meaghan," and then her beloved claws were propelling me to a seat at the table flush against the blue flexo, with my cup in front of me and beyond that Tom's great face as full of a smile of eager elder-brother benignity as my cup was of steaming coffee -- Ma having poured again and dropped in a pinch of dexy (I saw her) to give me spirit. A #I the while I was thinking chiefly. What job's he found now that's so bad he won't take it himself but offer "t to me? It'd have to be pretty bad, for at last count Tom's three jobs were grinding mirrors for leisuretime astronomers who hadn't time to grind their own -- that's one -- and selling retailers a brand of all-cornsilk cancer-free cigarets with the genuine coaltar taste and the nicotine life -- that's two -- and answering for a robot answering service whenever the decibal-rating of the caller's voice began to indicate extreme rage. He still had the third job, at any rate, by the phone-rig hanging around his neck. "Meaghan," he beamed, "next to an all-girl squad of revivalist angels, there's naught so wondrous as brother-love. I got something great for you. By the by, I've Number Four myself now -- I travel in ladies' glowin-the-dark underthings." As Ma raised a cheer at that, I looked around for escape, but Whitey was squatting at the fridge and blocking the door to the outer world, as happy with his tinkering as a great-grandfather cockroach (one of which was walking up his leg) while Ma, cheering still but with a policeman's eye on me, was taking a cup of coffee big and smoking as a volcano into the bedclosets -- to fire Harry's poetic genius, no doubt, or in lieu of that toss him on his lazy feet. "Meaghan -- " Tom began, but just then his neck phone rang and he twitched it on and I could hear a voice like angry wasps. Tom listened and his face grew pink -- he takes after Ma in that -- and he said, "Certainly, madam. However -- " and then his face grew purple and he began to bubble his mouth like a fish. I leaned across the table and put my lips to the mouthpiece and shouted, "I love you dearly, unknown, indeed I do. I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that," and I tw'itched the thing off. "That won't satisfy her," Tom said when he got his right color back and his breath. "It will for twenty minutes," I told him, "and what in this world is good for any longer?" And then I added, reckless in my light-heartedness, "You were saying...?" "Meaghan," Tom began again, "I know you had this trifling street-smiler's job -- " "Not so trifling or iittle," I defended, though I hadn't intended to. "The sociologists decided people looked too tense and glum going back and forth to work and shopping and so on, so they hired folk like myself to mingle among 'em and strike up talk, casual-like, to cheer 'em up. Not quite the worst idea in the world, either." CCTes, but you went too far," Tom reminded me. "You pried into people's minds to find their real troubles and set 'em straight. That's psychers' vork, my lad, and you can't blame that august profession for resenting your competition and having you terminated." "I helped the people I talked to," I countered stubbornly. "I couldn't have talked to them at all, Tom, if I hadn't something solid to say." "I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that," Tom said. "Solid!" "I don't worry 'em or push any of their desperation buttons, though I glimpsed banks of those," I protested on. "I just encouraged 'em to widen their minds and feelings a little and get some of the comic side-wash of others' troubles and cheer up naturally." "There you've hit the nub of it," Tom asserted, wagging a finger in my face. "You tried to deliver more than your job call ed for, instead of learning to do it with a minimum of effort and finding another job to go with it, to swell your income -- and then another after that." He gave a quick look around -- to make sure Ma hadn't come back, I soon realized -- and then leaning forward said with a confidential hush, "Oh, Meaghan, my boy, I've learned so much of the world since I got away from here and Ma's no longer firing me with resentments and wild ambitions. The world's a very tidy comfortable place if only you'll remember there are three it -- and do no more than you're told and watch the smiles .and frowns of your superiors and keep your eyes open and your nostrils flared for flicker or scent of another chance to make money. Step fast, keep adding one little job to the next like beads on a necklace, and forget Ma and her wild dreams. Oh and did I tell you my Katie's got two jobs herself now too? -- and never a one she'd have had with , Ma around to hold her down." "Ma's all right," I told him .sharply. "She's got more courage and determination and vision than the four of us'll ever have together. And such a fierce selfpunishing drive I wonder she's still alive. How would you ever have got out of here to a place of your own without Ma booting you?" tt'True, true," he agreed. "Nevertheless, Ma's a hopeless romantic. She wants her four sons to be Dukes of the World, lording it over all." I couldn't help chuckling at that, "When I was still streetsmiling," I confided, "a little man, who thought he was a great romantic, opened his mind to me wanting only to escape from the prison of his life and aim a flashing sword at other men and capture with love their women -- and corral all the single girls going around loose too. After we both looked at this stirring picture a while, we realized that what he really wanted was to have all women mother him and puff him up and lead him through life like a great bobbing red balloon." "That's the way with all romantics, including Ma," Tom said, taking advantage of me straightway. "She wants her sons to be princes and kings, or board chairmen at all events, not reastarting up the success-ladder with them -- and not one with a genuine ion drive. Not realizing that the competition's too stiff for any man to dream of being more than an eight-job statistic with his peers. Or ten at most." The TV now was sailing over a great pile of gently crumpled bedclothes, which struck me as most pleasant and unlikely. Then I realized it was orbiting the Earth high above the clouds and there low in the foreground were the backs of beautifully barbered heads and now a sign flashing across the clouds: "Vacation Jaunts through Space for NineJob Heroes of Democracy." "You're right about the competition," I agreed quickly with Tom. "I'm no enemy of democracy, I'm one of its darlingest friends, but there's no question it's upped the competition more than ever it was in Earth's history. We've got more machines, more health, more freedom of movement, more education, mcwe leisure, more time for making money in our spare time, more almost equal people, and more incentives, more quick showy rewards for the quickly successful -- with the result that the competition burns us out fast enough to equalize all the longevity created by medical advance." "It doesn't seem to be burning you out," Tom observed. #XJow listen here, Tom my   boy," I continued, warming to my subject. "Isn't there something altogether crazy about a world that wants to turn everyone into merchants no matter what their natural psychological class -- a world that's turned even scientists and poets and adventurers and soldiers and priests into merchants busy selling themselves -- a world that's feared so much that the machine would take away all jobs that it's gone ape creating jobs and With each reduction in working hours paralleled by an equal or greater increase in time spent on part-time and side-line jobs -- a world that's so moneyconscious that a man who takes his eyes off the dollar for a month or a day or even ten seconds -- " "Your eyes don't look red with squinting at silver," Tom observed like a lemon. "Besides, you're deafening me." Just then Ma came lumbering daintily in again and asked Tom, "What's this wondrous jo'o you've got for Meaghan? I can't wait any longer to hear." Just as if she hadn't been hearing every word and writhing at my negativisms. I groaned as if on the verge of defeat. Tom laughed and said, "I was forgetting about that. What with Mea talking lost in the stampede. Well, it seems that the repair robots are getting unpredictable everywhere, spending too much time on some jobs and not enough on others, and passing up still others altogether. One repaired a leak so well it built an armor wall six feet thick around the leak and himself -- Fortunata, they called that one. Another found a leak and did nothing but start making identical leaks in all the pipes he followed -- until thousands of them were squirting behind him. A demolition robot started shooting rocks at a new-risen glastic building. Yet the circuits of these robots are in perfect order and they always behave properly under factory tests. So what must be done is to have a man follow each metal trouble-shooter and note every move he makes, watch his behavior day after day -- taking weeks if necessary so the robot will get used to his presence and not vary his behavior to please or confuse or harm the watcher. Oh, it's a fine sort of job -- no work at all -- sort of like what they called Sidewalk Inspecting back in the depths of history." I said, "I suppose the robots they're having the most trouble with are the ones that repair heat-tunnels and sewers and other delightful underground conduits." "How did you know that?" Tom asked me very quickly. "Old sunken spillways and aquaducts and chimneys too, though -- some of the last poking thousands of feet high into the clear heady air. A most healthful job, my boyo -- a regular mountainclimbing and spelunking vacation." I said softly, "I think I'd rather drown parboiled in this coffee cup than play psychiatric aide to a manic genius robot with a breakneck wander-urge who's waiting for his metal consciousness to brighten with its first jeweled unhuman pictures and electricity-loving impulses. The machines are coming awake, did you know that, Tom? All the machines -- " "No, it's but one machine," a softer dreamier voice, mournful as a breeze through dead leaves, cut in on me. The adolescent wraith with hair like blond spiderweb, who was Ma's poet genius and my youngest brother Harry, came drifting in from the bed-closets as if blown rather than walking. I could tell from the light-year look in his blue eyes that he'd conned his remedial psycher out of some pills. He went on, "The whole Earth is one great metal machine, a dull steel marble amongst the aggies and glassies of the other planets. If anyone ever went out there with earth-eyes and not a spaceman's, he'd see it rolling along, over and over, like a great silver shop-made tumblebug spotted with cities and wet here and there with oceans, blinking the eyes of its ice-caps and smoking its volcanos and folding and unfolding its harrow-footed space-crazy legs in time with the phases of the moon. And if you looked real close you'd see millions of fleas jumpin' off it and beginning the long fall to the nadir." At that moment the TV jumped to a #-hour satellite starward of Terra and showed us the whole moonlit Earth backed by the Milky Way, as if snared by a diamond-dewy spiderweb. Ma squeaked a proud sigh at Harry's words thus coming out illustrated. "Will you take the job?" Tom rasped at me. "Tomorrow I will for sure," I told him. "And that's all the answer you'll ever get from me -- tomorrow or any other day." TV T a tapped her hoof and flashed a rageful eye at me. "Tom," she said to him, "if Meaghan scorns it, how about Harry. Think of it, Harry, you always claim you want to be alone. Roaming those cool tunnels and sewers all by yourself except for some witless machine you'll catch onto in ten minutes. You'll have all the time and quiet in the world to create your poetry. Why, underground your poetry will sprout like roots, I'm sure, and run fast as crabgrass." "Ma," Harry said, "sooner than take that job I'd head for Beatsville today rather than tomorrow." "You wouldn't do that, Harry," Ma wailed menacingly. "Tell me you wouldn't." Ma's always prided herself that no matter how slumlike we live and close to Beatsville, we'd never get there. In Beatsville they pretend even worse than in the suburbs, pretend to be supermen and pretend to be animals, and creep each night to the electrified boundary to pick up the food and drink left for them. But Harry nodded again and then Ma began yelling at Tom that he was trying to break up what was left of her family, having splintered himself off first. Whitey came alive and flapped his hands at her cautiously, like a torero ready to jump the fence. I slitted my eyes as if I were falling asleep. Tom got red as Ma and said the hell with us, he was going for good. So Ma stamped this way and that, now roaring at Harry and me for our, sloth, now bellowing at Tom for his disloyalty. Then she lifted her arms to heaven and froze. At that instant the beetle-man popped into the doorway and pointed his antennae at her. No one saw him but me. Tom's face grew redder and he gave a snort and turned on his heel toward the door just as the beetle-man ducked out of sight. Tom had no sooner stamped out than the beetle-man popped in again behind him, waving a gray-black transparency he'd whipped from his black bellybox. "Mrs. Henley," he piped rapidly, "I got a perfect shot of all your insides, but that's all that's perfect about it. You must come to the clinic right away with me. Your heart's like a watermelon and your aorta and pulmonary like summer squash." He waggled a finger at me. "Diagnosis by a med-spector is permissable in dire emergencies." M a's face went purple. At that instant I felt the building quiver from the top down and a heartbeat later something burst through tlie awning and struck Tom as if he were a very thick spike and it a hammer driving him into the ground. Ma screamed a great single scream and took a step forward and then stiffened and fell back and I caught her in my arms and lowered her to the floor and pillowed her head. Outside I could hear the beetle-man buzzing into his neckphone for an ambulance like the fool he was -- for Tom's head was smashed to the neck. Then I was wondering how Tom's blood could have got on Ma, for there was blood on her chest and then more and more of it, like a bull fallen from the final thrust and pumping his heart out, and then I realized it was Ma's blood from her lungs, gurgling with her Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Whitey came fluttering down at her other side. Harry was standing looking at us and he was trembling, and then we heard the siren far off, and then another, and then the two of them coming closer fast, and as they came closer and their angry wailing grew louder, Harry began to tremble more, and as their sound burst into the open of the razed blocks, he cried, "I'm off to Beatsville," and he was sprinting by the time he v,ent through the door. I knew what was coming, although there was nothing I could do but hold Ma. Then I knew that what was coming had come, for there was a shout and a great squealing of brakes and a scream and a thud, and the brakes still squealing. Then Ma stopped breathing, but she still looked angry. It was a long time before anyone came in, I went on holding Ma and wiping her face clean, though it stayed red for all that. I heard one ambulance leave and then the other. Finally a doctor came in, and the beetle-man too, and the doctor looked at Ma and shook his head and said that if only she'd been med-checked regularly it need never have happened, but I told him, "You didn't know Ma." And the beetle-man buzzed into his neckphone for an ambulance back. I said, chokily, "She died brave, charging the muleta dead on, and I'm damned if I'll award society a single hoof of her, let alone the horns or the tail." No one got it. The beetle-man eyed me and took a surreptitious note. "Then for a while I was signing papers and listening to this and that, but finally they were all gone, the living and dead, and I was alone with Whitey and I remembered we ought to tell Dick. The TV was showing a great musical review with hundreds of highly talented actors and actresses, all of them sevenjob folk and this the eighth job for all of them. Flights of smiles were going back and forth across the screen, like seagulls wheeling at sunset. The concrete cornflakes were still pattering on the awning. I marched us straight under the hole the rock had made that killed Tom, and they pelted on our hair and shoulders and necks like feathery hail. We climbed the flake-drift and I paused and turned round. The giant centipedes were busily crawling back and forth, the one swinging aside most cleverly to let the other pass. They'd chewed their way here and there down to the second floor. I looked down to our shadowed doorway with the faintest flicker of TV still coming out of it, and I thought I'd like to drive a nail a mile long down through the center of that room, pinning it there forever, and engrave in the head of the nail, in letters a foot deep, "A Family Lived Here." But that was a little beyond the scope of my engineering, so pushing Whitey ahead of me, off I went to tell Dick, laughing and  Ar Five of them had come fo the pianef. Four were dead. The other had only one chance left -- to live forever! "The original combination of catastrophes had taken place five years ago -- five revolutions of this planet, HC-#d by the charts, and nameless otherwise. Six-plus revolutions of Earth, but who was counting -- any more? If the men back home knew, they might say it was a heroic fight, an epic of the Galactic Corps; five men against a hostile world, holding their bitter own for five (or six-plus) years. And now they were dying, the battle lost after all. Three were in final coma, a fourth had his yellowtinged eyeballs still open, and a fifth was yet on his feet. But it was no question of heroism at all. It had been five men fighting off boredom and despair and maintaining their metallic bubble of livability only for the most unheroic reason that there was nothing else to do while life remained. If any of them felt stimulated by the battle, he never mentioned it. After the first year, they stopped talking of rescue, and after the second, a moratorium descended on the word, "Earth." But one word remained always present. If unspoken it had to be found in their thoughts; "Ammonia." It bad come first while the landing was being scratched out against all odds on limping motors and in a battered space can. You allow for bad breaks, of course; you expect a certain number -- but one at a time. A stellar flare fries out the hypercircuits -- that can be repaired, given time. A meteorite disaligns the feeder-valves -- they can be straightened, given time. A trajectory is miscalculated under tension and a momentarily unbearable acceleration tears out the jump-antennae and dulls the senses of every man on board -- but antennae can be replaced and senses will recover, given time. The chances are one in countless many that all three will happen at once; and still less that they will happen during a particularly tricky landing when the one necessary currency for the correction of all errors, time, is the one thing that is most lacking. '"The Cruiser John hit that one chance in countless many, and it made a final landing, for it would never lift off a planetary surface again. That it had landed essentially intact was itself a near-mir u I .The five were given life for scr.ie years at least. Beyond that, oaly the blundering arrival of another ship could help, but no one expected that. They had had their life's share of coincidences, they knew, and all had been bad. That was that. And the key word was "ammonia." With the surface spiralling upward, and death (mercifully quick) facing them at considerably better than even odds, Chou somehow had time to note the absorption spectrograph, which was registering raggedly. "Ammonia," he cried out. The others heard but there was no time to pay attention. There was only the wrenching fight against a quick death for the sake of a slow one. When they landed finally, on sandy ground with sparse, ragged bluish vegetation; reedy grass; stunted tree-like objects with blue bark and no leaves; no sign of animal life; and with an almost greenish cloudstreaked sky above -- the word came back to haunt them. "Ammonia?" said Petersen heavily. Chou said, "Four percent." "Impossible," said Petersen. But it wasn't. The books didn't say impossible. What the Galactic Corps had discovered was that a planet of a certain mass and volume and at a certain temperature was an ocean planet and had one of two atmospheres; nitrogenoxygen or nitrogencarbon dioxide. In the former case, life was rampant in the latter, it was primitive. No one checked beyond mass, volume and temperature any longer. One took the atmosphere (one or the other of them) for granted. But the books didn't say it had to be so; just that it always was so. Other atmospheres were thermodynamically possible, but extremely unlikely so they weren't found in actual practice. Until now. The men of the Cruiser John had found one and were bathed for the rest of such life as they could eke out by a nitrogen carbon dioxide ammonia atmosphere. ''he men converted their ship into an underground bubble of Earth-type surroundings. They could not lift off the surface, nor could they drive a communicating beam through hyperspace, but all else was salvageable. To make up for inefficiencies in the cycling system, they could even tap the planet's own water and air supply within limits; provided, of course, they subtracted the ammonia. They organized exploring parties since their suits were in excellent condition and it passed the time. The planet was harmless; no animal life; sparse plant life everywhere. Blue, always blue ; ammoniated chlorophyll ; arnmoniated protein. They set up laboratories, analyzed the plant components, studied microscopic sections, compiled vast volumes of findings. They tried growing native plants in ammonia-free atmosphere and failed. They made themselves into geologists and studied the planet's crust; astronomers and studied the spectrum of the planet's sun. Barrere would say sometimes, "Eventually, the Corps will reach this planet again and we'll leave a legacy of knowledge for them. It's a unique planet after all. There might not be another Earth-type with ammonia in all the Milky Way." "Great," said Sandropoulos, bitterly. "What luck for us." Sandropoulos worked out the thermodynamics of the situation. "A metastable system," he said. "The ammonia disappears steadily through geochemical oxidation that forms nitrogen; the plants utilize nitrogen and reform ammonia, adapting themselves to the presence of ammonia. If the rate of plant formation of ammonia dropped two percent, a declining spiral would set in. Plant life would wither, reducing the ammonia still further and so on." "You mean if we killed enough plant life," said Vlassov, "we could wipe out the ammonia." "If we had air-sleds and wideangle blasters, and a year to work in, we might," said Sandropoulos, "but we haven't and there's a better way. If we could get our plants going, the formation of oxygen through photosynthesis would increase the rate of ammonia oxidation. Even a small localized rise would lower the ammonia in the region, stimulate Earth-plant growth further, and inhibit the native growth, drop the ammonia further and so on." They became gardeners through all the growing season. That was, after all, routine for the Galactic Corps. Life on Earth-type planets was usually of the waterprotein type, but variation was infinite and otherworld food was rarely nourishing and even more often happened (not always, but often) that some types of Earth-plants would overrun and drown out the native flora. With the native flora held down, other Earthplants could take root. Tozens of planets had been converted into new Earths in this fashion. In the process Earth-plants developed hundreds of hardy varieties that flourished under extreme condition.s -- All the better with which to seed the next planet. The ammonia would kill any Earth-plant, but the seeds at the disposal of the Cruiser John were not true Earth-plants but otherworld mutations of these plants. They fought hard but not well enough. Some varieties grew in a feeble, sickly manner and died. At that they did better than did microscopic life. The planet's bacterioids were far more flourishing than was the planet's straggly blue plant-life. The native microorganisms drowned out any attempt at competition from Earth-samples. The attempt to seed the alien soil with Earthtype bacterial flora in order to aid the Earth-plants failed. Vlassov shook his head, "It wouldn't do anyway. If our bacteria survived, it would only be by adapting to the presence of ammonia." Sandropoulos said, "Bacteria won't help us. We need the plants ; they carry the oxygen manufacturing systems." "We could make some ourselves," said Petersen. "We could electrolyze water." "How long will our equipment last? If we could only get our plants going it would be like electrolyzing water forever, little by little, but year after year, till the planet gave up." Barrere said, "Let's treat the soil then. It's rotten with amnnK)nium salts. We'll bake the salts out and replace the ammonia-free soil." "And what about the atmosphere?" asked Chou. "In ammonia-free soil, they may catch hold despite the atmosphere. They almost make it as is." They worked like longshoremen, but with no real end in view. None really thought it would work, and there was no future for themselves, personally, even if it did work. But working passed the days. The next growing season, they had their ammonia-free soil, but Earth-plants still grew only feebly. They even placed domes over several shoots and pumped ammonia-free air within. It helped slightly but not enough. They adjusted the chemical composition of the soil in every possible fashion. There was no reward. The feeble shoots produced their tiny whiffs of oxygen, but not enough to topple the ammonia atmosphere off its base. "One more push," said Sandropoulos, "one more. We're rocking it; we're rocking it; but we can't knock it over." "Their tools and equipment blunted and wore out with time and the future closed in steadily. Each month there was less room for maneuver. When the end came at last, it was with almost gratifying suddenness. There was no name to place on the weakness and vertigo. No one actually suspected direct ammonia poisoning. Still, they were living off the algal growth of what had once been ship-hydroponics for years and the growths were themselves aberrant with possible ammonia contamination. It could have been the workings of some native microorganism which might finally have learned to feed off them. It might even have been an Earthly microorganism, mutated under the conditions of a strange world. So three died at last and did so, circumstances be praised, painlessly. They were glad to go, and leave the useless fight. Chou said, in a voiceless whisper, "It's foolish to lose so badly." Petersen, alone of the five to be on his feet (was he immune, whatever it was?) turned a grieving face toward his only living companion. "Don't die," he said, "don't leave me alone." Chou tried to smile. "I have no choice. But you can follow us, old friend. Why fight? The tools are gone and there is no way of winning now, if there ever was." Even now, Petersen fought off final despair by concentrating on the fight against the atmosphere. But his mind was weary, his heart worn out, and when Chou died the next hour, he was left with four corpses to work with. He stared at the bodies, counting over the memories, stretching them back (now that he was alone and dared wail) to Earth itself, which he had last seen on a visit eleven years before. He would have to bury the bodies He would break off the bluish branches of the native leafless trees and build crosses of them. He would hang the space helmet of each man on top and prop the oxygen cylinders below. Empty cylinders to symbolize the lost fight. A foolish sentiment for men who could no longer care, and for future eyes that might never see. But he was doing it for himself, to show respect for his friends, and respect for himself, too, for he was not the kind of man to leave his friends untended in death while he himself could stand. Besides -- Besides? He sat in weary thought for some moments. While he was still alive, he would fight with such tools as were left. He would bury his friends. T T e buried each in a spot of   ammonia-free soil they had so laboriously built up; buried them without shroud and without clothing; leaving them naked in the hostile ground for the slow decomposition that would come with' their own microorganisms before those, too, died with the inevitable invasion of the native bacterioids. Petersen placed each cross, with its helmet and oxygen cylinders, propped each with rocks then turned away, grim and sadeyed, to return to the buried ship that he now inhabited alone. He worked each day and eventually the symptoms came for him, too. He struggled into his space suit and came to the surface for what he knew would be one last time. He fell to his knees on the garden-plots. The Earth plants were green. They had lived longer than ever before. They looked healthy, even vigorous. They had patched the soil, babied the atmosphere, and now Petersen had used the last tool, the only one remaining at his disposal, and he had given them fertilizer as well -- Out of the slowly corrupting flesh of the Earthmen came the nutrients that supplied the final push. Out of the Earth-plants came the oxygen that would beat back the ammonia and push the planet out of the unaccountable niche into which it had stuck. If Earthmen ever came again they would find a nitrogenoxygen atmosphere and a limited flora strangely reminiscent of Earth's. The crosses would rot and decay, the metal rust and decompose. The bones might fossilize and remain to give a hint as to what happened. Their own records, sealed away, might be found. But none of that mattered. If nothing at all was ever found, the planet itself, the whole planet, would be their monument. And Petersen lay down to die in the midst of their victory. Actually our editorial this month is our forecast, but it's on a somewhdt longer-range scale than usual. Restricting our view to the single issue coming up next, here's what it looks like now: The lead is by C. C. MacApp, a writer who hitherto has appeared in Galaxy only as the author of a couple of biting and sardonically funny short stories like And All the Earth a Grave and A Flask of Fine Arcturan. Next month's is quite different. It's an adventure story. The place is the planet Mercury. The time, some hundreds of years in the future; and the title is The Mercurymen. Pederson has done the cover for it; and if the object you see in the background looks to you like a covered wagon -- if is! It has to be, in fact -- for reasons you will discover when you read the story. Robert Silverberg will join us again next issue with a long novelette called The Warriors of Light. And we have a pointed and funny novelette by a new writer named Norman Kagan (you may remember that he was one of the "firsts" we print in every issue of our companion magazine, If, some time ago. His story then was called The Mathenauts, and it was immediately selected for "best of the year" honors). What Kagan is writing about this time is politics -- the grandest game of them all, as they say; but in Kagan's story the rules are those invented by Franz Kafka, and naturally enough the story is called Laugh Along with Franz. We also have a couple of shorts of special interest, since both mark the first and long overdue appearance of their authors in Galaxy. One is a very short one by Arthur C. Clarke (but he calls it the longest story ever written, for reasons you will see when you read it); the other is by Harlan Ellison. If they fit they'll be in! Shall We Have a Little Talk? Earth didn't just walk in and conquer planets -- there were definite rules! Why wouldn't these people cooperate? I '"The landing was a piece of cake despite gravitational vagaries produced by two suns and six moons. Low-level cloud cover could have given him some trouble if Jackson had been coming in visually. But he considered that to be kid stuff. It was better and safer to plug in the computer and lean back and enjoy the ride. The cloud cover broke up at # feet. Jackson was able to confirm his earlier sighting : there was a city down there, just as sure as sure. He was in one of the world's loneliest jobs; but his line of work, paradoxically enough, required an extremely gregarious man. Because of this built-in contradiction, Jackson was in the habit of talking to himself. Most of the men in his line of work did. Jackson would talk to anyone, human or alien, no matter what their size or shape or color. It was what he was paid to do, and what he had to do anyhow. He talked when he was alone on the long interstellar runs, and he talked even more when he was with someone or something that would talk back. He figured he was lucky to be paid for his compulsions. "And not just paid, either," he reminded himself. "Well paid, and with a bonus arrangement on top of that. And furthermore, this feels like my lucky planet. I feel like I could get rich on this one; unless they kill me down there, of course." The lonely flights between the planets and the imminence of death were the only disadvantages of this job; but if the work weren't hazardous and difficult, the pay wouldn't be so good. Would they kill him? You could never tell. Alien life-forms were unpredictable -- just like humans, only more so. "But I don't think they'll kill me," Jackson said. "I just feel downright lucky today." This simple philosophy had sustained him for years, across the endless lonely miles of space, and in and out of ten, twelve, twenty planets. He saw no reason to change his outlook now. The ship landed. Jackson switched the status controls to standby. He checked the analyzer for oxygen and trace-element content in the atmosphere, and took a quick survey of the local microorganisms. The place was viable. He leaned back in his chair and waited. It didn't take long, of course. They -- the locals, indigenes, authochtones, whatever you wanted to call them -- came out of their city to look at the spaceship. And Jackson looked through the port at them. "Well now," he said. "Seems like the alien life-forms in this neck of the woods are honest-toJoe humanoids. That means a five thousand dollar bonus for old Uncle Jackson." "Xhe inhabitants of the city were bipedal monocephaloids. They had the appropriate number of fingers, noses, eyes, ears and mouths. Their skin was a flesh-colored beige, their lips were a faded red, their hair was black, brown or red. "Shucks, they're just like home-folks!" Jackson said. "Hell, I ought to get an extra bonus for that. Humanoidissmus, eh?" The aliens wore clothes. Some of them carried elaborately carved lengths of wood like swagger-sticks. The women decorated themselves with carved and enameled ornaments. At a flying guess. Jackson ranked them about equivalent to Late Bronze Age on Earth. They talked and gestured among themselves. Their language was, of course, incomprehensible to Jackson; but that didn't matter. The important thing was that they had a language, and that their speech sounds could be produced by his vocal apparatus. "Not like on that heavy planet last year." Jackson said. "Those supersonic sons of bitches! I had to wear special earphones and mike, and it was # in the shade." The aliens were waiting for him, and Jackson knew it. That first moment of actual contact -- it always was a nervous business. That's when they were most apt to let you have it. Reluctantly he moved to the hatch, undogged, it, rubbed his eyes and cleared his throat. He managed to produce a smile. He told himself, "Don't get sweaty, member, you're just a little old Jackson, don't choke up. Remember you're just a little old interstellar wanderer -- kind of galactic vagabond -- to extend the hand of friendship and all that jazz. You've just dropped in for a little talk, nothing more. Keep on believing that, sweety, and the extraterrestrial Johns will believe right along with you. Remember Jackson's Law: All intelligent life-forms share the divine faculty of gulli'Diiity; which means that the triple-tongued Thung of Orangus V can be conned out of his skin just as easily as Joe Doakes of St. Paul." And so, wearing a brave, artificial little smile, Jackson swung the port open and stepped out to have a little talk. tW'oll now, how jhall?" Jack son asl.ed at once, just to hear the sound of his own voice. The nearest aliens shrank away from him. Nearly all of them were frowning. Several of the younger ones carried bronze knives in a forearm scabbard. These were clumsy weapons, but as effective as anything ever invented. The aliens started to draw. "Now take it easy," Jackson said, keeping his voice light and unalarmed. They drew their knives and began to edge forward. Jackson stood his ground, waiting, ready to bolt through the hatch like a jet-propelled jack-rabbit, hoping he could make it. Then a third man (might as well call them men Jackson decided) stepped in front of the belligerent two. This one was older. He spoke rapidly. He gestured. The two with the knives looked. "That's right," Jackson said encouragingly. "Take a good look. Heap big spaceship. Plenty strong medicine. Vehicle of great power, fabricated by a real advanced technology. Sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?" It did. The aliens had stopped; and if not thinking, they were at least doing a great deal of talking. They pointed at the ship, then back at their city. "You're getting the idea," Jackson told them. "Power speaks a universal language, eh, cousins?" He had been witness to many of these scenes on many different planets. He could nearly write their dialogue for them. It usually went like this: Intruder lands in outlandish space vehicle, thereby eliciting (#) curiosity, (#) fear and (#) hostility. After some minutes of awed contemplation, one autochthone usually said to his friend: "Hey, that damned metal thing packs one hell of a lot of power." "You're right, Herbie," his friend Fred, the second autochtiion, would reply. "You bet I'm right," Herbie would say. "And hell, with that much power and technology and stuff, this son of a gun could like enslave us: I mean he really could." "You've hit it, Herbie, that's just exactly what could happen." "So what I say," Herbie would continue, "I say, let's not take any risks. I mean, sure, he looks friendly enough, but he's just got too damned much power, and that's not right. And right now is the best chance we'll ever get to take him on account of he's just standing there waiting for like an ovation or something. So let's put this bastard out of his misery, and then we can talk the whole thing over, and see how it stacks up situationwise." "By Jesus, I'm with you!" cries Fred. Others signify their assent. "Good for you, lads," cries Herbie. "Let's wade in and take this alien joker like now!" So they start to make their move; but suddenly, at the last second. Old Doc (the third autochthon) intervenes, saying, "Hold it a minute, boys, we can't do it like that. For one thing, we got laws around here -- " "To hell with that," says P'red (a born troublemaker and somewhat simple to boot). " -- and aside from the laws, it would be just too damned dangerous for us." "Me'n Fred here ain't scared," says valiant Herb. "Maybe you better go take in a movie or something, Doc. Us guys'll handle this." "I was not referring to a shortrange personal danger," Old Doc says scornfully. "What I fear is the destruction of our city, the slaughter of our loved ones and the annhilation of our culture." Herb and Fred stop. "What you talking about, Doc? He's just one stinking alien; you push a knife in his guts, he'll bleed like anyone else." "Fools! Schlemiels!" thunders the wise old Doc. "Of course you can kill him! But what happens after that?" "Huh?" says Fred, squinting his china-blue pop eyes. "Idiots! Cochons! You think this is the only spaceship these aliens got? You think they don't even know whereabouts this guy has gone? Man, you gotta assume they got plenty more ships where this one came from, and you gotta also assume that they'll be damned mad if this ship doesn't show up when it's supposed to, and you gotta assume that when these aliens learn the score they're gonna be damned sore and buzz back here and stomp on everything and everybody." "How come I gotta assume that? asks feeble-witted Fred. "Cause it's what you'd do in a deal like that, right?" "I guess maybe I would at that," says Fred, with a sheepish grin. "Yeah, I just might do that little thing. But look, maybe they wouldn't. "Maybe, maybe," mimics wise old Doc. "Well, baby, v-je can't risk the whole ball game on a goddamned maybe. We can't afford to kill this alien joker or the chance that maybe his people wouldn't do what any reasonable-minded guy would do, which is namely to blow us all to hell." "Well, I suppose we maybe can't," Herbie says. "But Doc, what can we do?" "Just wait and see what he wants... II A scene very much like that, according to reliable reconstruction, had been enacted at least thirty or forty times. It usually resulted in a policy of wait-and-see. Occasionally the contactor from Elarth was killed before wise counsel could prevail; but Jackson was paid to take risks like that. Whenever the contactor was killed, retribution followed with swift and terrible inevitability. Also with regret, of course, because Earth was an extremely civilized place and accustomed to living within the law. No civilized law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don't like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished ; everybody knows that. But it still doesn't feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man's entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote. Fortunately, there was never much occasion for that sort of mess. Aliens usually caught on pretty fast. Despite the language barrier, aliens learned that you simply don't kill Earthmen. And then, later, bit by bit, they learned all the rest. "The hot-heads had sheathed their knives. Everybody was smiling except Jackson, who was grinning like a hyena. The aliens were making graceful arm-andleg motions, probably of welcome. "Well, that's real nice," Jackson said, making a few graceful gestures of his own. "Makes me feel real to-home. And now, suppose you take me to your leader, show me the town and all that jazz. Then I'll set myself down and figure out that lingo of yours, and we'll have a little talk. And after that, everything will proceed splendidly. En avanti" So saying, Jackson stepped out at a brisk pace in the direction of the city. After a brief hesitation, his new-found friends fell into step behind him. Everything was moving according to plan. Jackson, like all the other Contactors, was a polyglot of singular capabilities. As basic equipment, he had an eidetic memory and an extremely discriminating ear. More important, he possessed a startling aptitude for language and an uncanny intuition for meaning. When Jackson came up against an incomprehensible tongue, he picked out, quickly and unerringly, the significant units, the fundamental building blocks of the language. Quite without effort he sorted vocalizations into cognitive, volitional and emotional aspects of speech. Grammatical elements presented themselves at once to his practiced ear. Affixes and suffixes were no trouble: word sequence, pitch and reduplication were no sweat. He didn't know much about the science of linguistics, but he didn't need to know. Jackson was a natural. Linguistics had been developed to describe and explain things which he knew intuitively. He had not yet encountered the language which he could not learn. He never really expected to find one. As he often told his friends in the Forked Totigue Club in New York, "Waal, shukins, there just really ain't nuthin tough about them alien tongues. Leastwise, not the ones I've run across. I mean that sincerely. I mean to tell you, boys, that the man who can express hisself in Sioux or Khmer ain't going to encounter too much trouble out there amongst the stars." And so it had been, to date... Once in the city, there were many tedious ceremonies which Jackson had to endure. They stretched on for three days -- about par for the course. He knew the reason for them, of course; it wasn't every day that a traveller from Space came in for a visit. So naturally enough every mayor, governor, president and alderman, and their wives, wanted to shake his hand. It was all very understandable, but Jackson resented the waste of his time. He had work to do, some of it not very pleasant, and the sooner he got started the quicker it would be over. On the fourth day he was able to reduce the official nonsense to a minimum. That was the day in which he began in earnest to learn the local language. A language, as any linguist will tell you, is undoubtedly the most beautiful creation one is ever likely to encounter. But with that beauty goes a certain element of danger. Language might aptly be compared to the sparkling, everchanging face of the sea. Like the sea, you never know what reefs may be concealed in its pellucid depths. The brightest water hides the most treacherous shoals. Jackson, well-prepared for trouble, encountered none at first. The main language (Hon) of this planet (Na), was spoken by the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants (En-a-To-Na -- literally, men of the Na, or Naians, as Jackson preferred of think of them). Hon seemed quite a straightforward affair. It used one term for one concept, and allowed no fusions, juxtapositions or agglutinations. Concepts were built up by sequences of simple words ('spaceship' was ho-paaie-an -- boat-flying-outer-sky). Thus, Hon was very much like Chinese and Annamite on Earth. Pitch differences were employed not only intentionally to differentiate between homonyns, but also positionally, to denote gradations of 'perceived realism,' bodily discomfort and three classes of pleasurable expectation. All of which was mildly interesting but of no particular difficulty to a competent linguist. To be sure, a language like Hon was rather a bore because of the long word-lists one had to memorize. But pitch and position could be fun, as well as being absolutely essential if one wanted to make any sense out of the sentence-units. So, taken all in all, Jackson was not dissatisfied, and he absorbed the language as quickly as it could be given to him. It was a proud day for Jackson, about a week later, when he could say to his tutor: "A very nice and pleasant good morning to you, most estimable and honored tutor, and how is your blessed health upon this glorious day?' "Felicitations most ird wunk!" the tutor replied with a smile of deep warmth. "Your accent, dear pupil, is superb ! Positively gor nak, in fact, and your grasp of my dear mother tongue is little short of ur nak tai." Jackson glowed all over from the gentle old tutor's compliments. He felt quite pleased with himself. Of course, he hadn't recognized several words; ird wunk and ur nak tai sounded faintly familiar, but gor nak was completely unknown. Still lapses were expected of a beginner in any language. He did know enough to understand the Naians, and to make himself understood by them. And that was what his job required. He returned to his spaceship that afternoon. The hatch had been standing open during his entire stay on Na but he found that not a single article had been stolen. He shook his nead ruefully at this, but refused to let it upset him. He loaded his pockets with a variety of objects and sauntered back to the city. He was ready to perform the tinal and most important part of his job. HI n the heart of the business district, at the intersection of Um and Alhretto, he found what he was looking for; a real estate office. He entered, and was taken to the office of Mr. Erum, a junior partner of the firm. "Well, well, well, well!" Erum said, shaking hands heartily. "This is a real honor, sir, a very considerable and genuine privilege. Are you thinking of acquiring a piece of property?" "That was my intention," Jackson said. "Unless, of course, you have discriminatory laws that forbid your selling to a foreigner." "No difficulty there," Erum said. "In fact, it'll be a veritable orai of a pleasure to have a man from your distant and glorious civilization in our midst." Jackson restrained a snicker. "The only other difficulty I can imagine is the question of legal tender. I don't have any of your currency, of course; but I have certain quantities of gold, platinum, diamonds and other objects which are considered valuable on Earth." "They are considered valuable here, too," Erum said. "Quantities, did you say? My dear sir, we will have no difficulties; not even a blaggle shall mit or ows, as the poet said." "Quite so," Jackson replied. Erum was using some words he didn't know, but that didn't matter. The main drift was clear enough. "Now, suppose we begin with a nice industrial site. After all, I'll have to do something with my time. And after that we can pick out a house." "Most decidedly prominex," Erum said gaily. "Suppose I just raish through my listings here... Yes, what do you say to a bromicaine factory? It's in a firstclass condition, and could easily be converted to vor manufacture, or used as it is." "Is there any real market for bromicaine?" Jackson asked. "Well, bless my muergentan, of course there is! Bromicaine is indispensable, though its sales are seasonable. You see, refined bromicaine, or ariisi, is used by the protigash devolvers, who of course harvest by the solsticeseason, except in those branches of the industry that have switched over to ticothene revature. Those from a steadily -- "' "Fine, fine," Jackson said. He didn't care what a bromicaine was, and never expected to see one. As long as it was a gainful employment of some kind it filled his specifications. "I'll buy it," he said. "You won't regret it," Erum told him. "A good bromicaine factory is a garveldis hagatis, and menifoy as well." "Sure," Jackson said, wishing that he had a more extensive Hon vocabulary. "How much?" "Well, sir, the price is no difficulty. But first you'll have to fill out the ollanbrit form. It is just a few sken questions which ny naga of everyone." E rum handed Jackson the form. The first question read: "Have you, now or at any past time, elikated mushkies forsically? State date of all occurrences. If no occurrences, state the reason for transgrishal reduct as found." Jackson read no farther. "What does it mean," he asked Erum, "to elikate mushkies forsically?" "Mean?" Erum smiled uncertainly. "Why, it means exactly what it says. Or so I would imagine." "I meant," Jackson said, "that I do not understand the words. Could you explain them to me?" "Nothing simpler," Erum replied. "To elikate mushkies is almost the same as a bifur probishkai." "I beg your pardon?" Jackson said. "It means -- well, to elikate is really rather simple, though perhaps not in the eyes of the law. Scorbadising is a form of elikation, and so is manruv garing. Some say that when V#e breathe drorsically in the evening subsis we are actually elikating. Personally, I consider that a bit fanciful." "Let's try mushkies," Jackson suggested. "By all means, let's!" Erum replied, with a coarse boom of laughter. "If only one could -- eh?" He dug Jackson in the ribs with a sly elbow. "Hm, yes," Jackson replied coldly. "Perhaps you could tell me what, exactly, a mushkie is?" "Of course. As it happens, there is no such thing," Erum replied. "Not in the singular, at any rate. One mushkie would be a logical fallacy, don't you see?" "I'll take your word for it. What are mushkies?" "Well, primarily, they're the object of elikation. Secondarily, they are halfsize wooden sandals which are used to stimulate erotic fantasies among the Kutor religionists." "Now we're getting someplace!" Jackson cried. "Only if your tastes happen to run that way," Erum answered with discernable coldness. "I meant in terms of understanding the question on the form -- " "Of course, excuse me," Erum said. "But you see, the question asks if you have ever elikated mush kies forsically. And that makes all the difference." "Does it really?" "Of course! The modification changes the entire meaning." "I was afraid that it would," Jackson said. "I don't suppose you could explain what forsically means?" "I certainly can!" Erum said. "Our conversation now could -- with a slight assist from the deme imagination -- be termed a forsically designed talk." "Ah," said Jackson. "Quite so," said Erum. "Forsically is a mode, a manner It means 'spiritually-forward-leading by way of fortuitous frieindship.' " "That's a little more like it," Jackson said. "In that case, when one elikates mushkies forsically -- "  ttT'm terribly afraid you're on Jithe wrong track," Erum said. "The definition I gave you applies only to conversations. It is something rather different when one speaks of mushkies." "What does it mean then?" "Well, it means -- or rather it expresses -- an advanced and intensified case of mushkie elikidation, but with a definite nmogmetic bias. I consider it a rather unfortunate phraseology, personally." "How would you put it?" "I'd lay it on the line and to hell with the fancy talk," Erum said toughly. "I'd come right out and say: 'Have you now or at any other time dunfiglers voc in illegal, immoral, or insirtis circumstances, with or without the aid andor consent of a brachniian? If so, state when and why. If not, state neugris kris and why not.' " "That's how you'd put it, huh ?" Jackson said. "Sure I would," Erum said difiantly. "These forms are for adults, aren't they? So why not come right out and call a spigler a spigler a spey? Everybody dunfiglers voc some of the time, and so what? No one's feelings are ever hurt by it, for heaven's sake. I mean, after all, it simply involves oneself and a twisted old piece of wood, so why should anyone care?" "Wood?" Jackson echoed. "Yes, wood. A commonplace, dirty old piece of wood. Or at least that's all it would be if people didn't get their feelings so ridiculously involved." "What do they do with the wood?" Jackson asked quickly. "Do with it? Nothing much, when you come right down to it. But the religious aura is simply too much for our so-called intellectuals. They are unable, in my opinion, to isolate the simple primordial fact -- wood -- from the cultural volturneiss which surrounds it at festerhius, and to some extent at Uuis, too." "That's how intellectuals are," Jackson said. "But you can isolate it, and you find -- " "I find it's really nothing to get excited about. I really mean that. I mean to say that a cathedral, viewed correctly, is no more than a pile of rocks, and a forest is just an assembly of atoms. Why should we see this case differently? I mean, really, you could elikate mushkies forsically without even using woodl What do you think of that?" "I'm impressed," Jackson said. "Don't get me wrong! I'm not saying it would be easy, or natural, or even right. But still, you damned well could! Why, you could substitute cormed grayti and still come out all right!" Erum paused and chuckled. "You'd look foolish, but you'd still come out all right." "Very interesting," Jackson said. "I'm afraid I became a bit vehement," Erum said, wiping his forehead. "Was I talking very loudly? Do you think perhaps I was overheard?" "Of course not. I found it all very interesting. I must leave just now, Mr. Erum, but I'll be back tomorrow to fill out that form and buy the property." "I'll hold it for you," Erum said, rising and shaking Jackson's hand warmly. "And I want to thank you. It isn't often that I have the opportunity for this kind of frank, no-holds-barred conversation." "I found it very instructive," Jackson said. He left Emm's office and walked slowly back to his ship. He was disturbed, upset and annoyed. Linguistic incomprehension irked him, no matter how comprehensible it might be. He should have been able to have figured out, somehow, how one went about elikating mushkies forsically. Never mind, he told himself. You'll work it out tonight. Jackson baby, and then you'll go back in there and cannonball through them forms. So don't get het up over it, man. He'd work it out. He damned well had to work it out, since he had to own a piece of property. That was the second part of his job. E arth had come a long way since the bad old days of naked, aggressive warfare. According to the history books, a ruler back in those ancient times could simply send out his troops to seize whatever the ruler wanted. And if any of the folks at home had the temerity to ask why he wanted it, the ruler could have them beheaded, or locked up in a dungeon, or sewn up in a sack and thrown into the sea. And he wouldn't even feel guilty about doing any of those things because he invariably believed that he was right and they were wrong. This policy, technically called the droit de signeur, was one of the most remarkable features of the laissez fake capitalism which the ancients knew. But, down the slow passage of centuries, cultural processes were inexorably at work. A new ethic came into the world; and slowly but surely, a sense of fair play and justices was bred into the human race. Rulers came to be chosen by ballot, and were responsive to the desires of the electorate. Conceptions of Justices, Mercy and Pity came to the forefront of men's minds, ameliorating the old law of tooth and talon, and amending the savage bestiality of the ancient time of unreconstruction. The old days were gone forever. Today, no ruler could simply take; the voters would never stand for it. Nowadays one had to have an excuse for taking. Like for example a Terran citizen who happened to own property all legal and aboveboard on an alien planet, and who urgently needed and requested Terran military assistance in order to protect himself, his home, his means of a legitimate livelihood... But first he had to own that property. He had to really own it, to protect himself from the bleeding-hearts Congressmen and the soft-on-aliens newsmen who always started an investigation whenever Earth took charge of another planet. To provide a legal basis for conquest -- that was what the Contactors were for. "Jackson," Jackson said to himself, "you gonna sit yourself that li'l ole bromicaine factory tomorrow and you gonna own it without let or hindrance. You heah me, boy? I mean it sincerely." On the morrow, shortly before noon, Jackson was back in the city. Several hours of intensive study, and a long consultation with this tutor, had sufficed to show him where he had gone wrong. It was simple enough. He had merely been a trifle hasty in assuming an extreme and invariant isolating technique in the IV Hon use of radicals. He had thought, on the basis of his early studies, that word-meaning and word-order were the only significant factors required for an understanding of the language. But that wasn't so. Upon further examination, Jackson found that the Hon language had some unexpected recourses; affixation, for example, and an elementary form of reduplication. Yesterday he hadn't even been prepared for any morphological inconsistencies; when they had occurred, he had found himself in semantic difficulties. The new forms were easy enough to learn. The trouble was, they were thoroughly illogical and contrary to the entire spirit of Hon. One word produced by one sound, and bearing one meaning -- that was the rule he had previously deduced. But now he discovered # important exceptions -- compounds produced by a variety of techniques, each of them with a list of modifying suffixes. For Jackson, this was as odd as stumbling across a grove of palm trees in Antarctica. He learned the # exceptions, and thought about the article he would write when he finally got home. And the next day, wiser and warier, Jackson strode meaningfully back to the city. I n Emm's office, he filled out the government forms with ease. That first question --  "Have you now or at any past time, elikated mushkies forsically?" -- he could now answer with an honest no. The plural 'mushkies' in its primary meaning, represented in this context, the singular 'woman.' (The singular 'mushkie' used similarly, would denote an uncorporeal state of femininity.) Elikation was, of course, the role of sexual termination, unless one employed the modifier 'forsically.' If one did, this quiet term took on a charged meaning in this particular context, tantamount to edematous polysexual advocation. Thus, Jackson could honestly write that, since he was not a Naian, he had never had that particular urge. It was as simple as that. Jackson was annoyed at himself for not having figured it out on his own. He filled in the rest of the questions without difficulty, and handed the paper back to Emm. "That's really quite skoe," Erum said. "Now, there are just a few more simple items for us to complete. The first we can do immediately. After that I will arrange a brief official ceremony for the Property Transferral Act, and ttiat will be followed by several other small bits of business. All of it should take no more than a day or so, and then the property will be all yours." "Sure, kid, that's great," Jackson said. He wasn't bothered by the delays. Quite the contrary, he had expected many more of them. On most other planets, the locals caught on quickly to what was happening. It took no great reasoning power to figure out that Earth wanted what she wanted, but wanted it in a legalistic manner. As for why she wanted it that way -- that wasn't too hard to fathom, either. A great majority of T errans were idealist, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions -- except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were hypocrites -- a term which every race has its counterpart of. Terrans wanted what they wanted, but they also wanted that what they wanted should look nice. This was a lot to expect sometimes, especially when what they wanted was ownership of someone else's planet. But in one way or another, they usually got it. Most alien races realized that overt resistance was impossible, and resorted to various stalling tactics. Sometimes they refused to sell, or they required an infinite multiplicity of forms, or the approval of some local official who was always absent. But for each ploy the Contactor always had a suitable counter-ploy. Did they refuse to sell property on racial grounds? The laws of Earth specifically forbade such practices, and the Declaration of Sentient Rights stated the freedom of all sentients to live and work wherever they pleased. This was a freedom that Terra would fight for, if anyone forced them to. Were they stalling? The Terran Doctrine of Temporal Propriety would not allow it. Was the necessary official absent? The Uniform Earth Code Against Implicit Sequestration in Acts of Omission expressly forbade such a practice... And so on and so on. It was a game of wits Earth invariably won, since the strongest is usually judged the cleverest. But the Naians weren't even trying to fight back. Jackson considered that downright despicable. '"The exchange of Naian currency for Terran platinum was completed and Jackson was given his change in crisp #-Vrso bills. Erum beamed with pleasure, and said, "Now, Mr. Jackson, we can complete today's business if you will kindly trombramcthulanchierir in the usual manner." Jackson turned, his eyes narrowed and his mouth compressed into a bloodless downward-curving line. "What did you say?" "I merely asked you to -- " "I know what you asked! But what does it mean?" "Well, it means -- it means -- " Erum laughed weakly. " -- it means exactly what it says. That is to say -- ethybolically speaking -- " Jackson said in a low, dangerous voice, "Give me a synonym." "There is no synonym," Erum said. "Baby, you better come up with one anyhow," Jackson said, his hand closing over Erum's throat. "Stop! Wait! Ulp!" Erum cried. "Mr. Jackson, I beg of you! How can there be a synonym when there is one and only one term for the thing expressed -- if I may so express it?" "You're putting me on!" Jackson howled. "And you better quit it, on account of we got laws against willful obfuscation, intentional obstructionism, implicit superimposition and other stuff like you're doing. You hear me?" "I hear you," Erum trembled. "Then hear this: stop agglutinating, you devious dog! You've got a perfectly ordinary run-ofthe-mill analytical-type language, distinguished only by its extreme isolating tendency. And when you got a language like that, man, then you simply don't agglutinate a lot of big messy compounds. Get me?" "Yes, yes," Erum cried. "But believe me, I don't intend to numniscaterate in the slightest! Not noniskakkekaki, and you really must debruchili that!" Jackson drew back his fist, but got himself under control in time. It was unwise to hit aliens if there was any possibility that they were telling the truth. Folks on Terra didn't like it. His pay could be docked; and if, by some unlucky chance, he killed Erum, he could be slapped with a six month jail sentence. But still...  "I'll find out if you're lying or not!" Jackson screamed, and stormed out of the office. T Te walked for nearly an hour, mingling with the crowds in the slum quarters of Grath-Eth, below the gray, evil-smelling Ungperdis. No one paid any attention to him. To all outward appearances, he could have been a Naian, just as any Naian could have been a Terran. Jackson located a cheerful saloon on the corner of Niis and Da Streets, and went in. It was quiet and masculine inside. Jackson ordered a local variety of beer. When it was served, he said to the bartender, "Funny thing happened to me the other day." "Yeah?" said the bartender. "Yeah, really," Jackson said. "I had this big business deal on, see, and then at the last minute they asked me to trombramcthulanchierir in the usual manner." He watched the bartender's face carefully. A faint expression of puzzlement crossed the man's stolid features. "So why didn't you?" the bartender asked. "You mean you would have?" "Sure I would have. Hell, it's the standard cathanpriptiaia, ain't it?" "Course it is," one of the loungers at the bar said. "Unless, of course, you suspected they was trying to numniscaterate." "No, I don't think they were trying anything like that," Jackson said in a flat low, lifeless voice. He paid for his drink and started to leave. "Hey," the bartender called after him, "You sure they wasn't noniskakkekaki ?" "You never know," Jackson said, walking slump-shouldered into the street. Jackson trusted his instincts, both with languages and with people. His instincts told him now that the Naians were straight, and were not practicing an elaborate deception on him. Erum had not been inventing new words for the sake of willful confusion. He had been really speaking the Hon language as he knew it. But if that were true, then Na was a very strange language. In fact, it was down-right eccentric. And its implications were not merely curious. They were disastrous. V 'That evening Jackson went back to work. He discovered a further class of exceptions which he had not known or even suspected. That was a group of # multi-valued potentiators. These words, meaningless in themselves, acted to elicit a complicated and discordant series of shadings from other words. Their particular type of potentiation varied according to their position in the sentence. Thus, when Emm had asked him "to trombramcthulanchierir in the usual manner," he had merely wanted Jackson to make an obligatory ritual obeisance. This consisted of clasping his hands behind his neck and rocking back on his heels. He was required to perform this action with an expression of definite yet modest pleasure, in accordance with the totality of the situation, and also in accord with the state of his stomach and nerves and with his religion and ethical code, and bearing in mind minor temperamental differences due to fluctuations in heat and humidity, and not forgetting the virtues of patience, similitude and forgiveness. It vas all quite understandable. And all completely contradictory to everything Jackson had previously learned about Hon. It was more than contradictory; it was unthinkable, impossible, and entirely out of order. It was as if, having discovered palm trees in frigid Antarctica, he had further found that the fruit of tiiese trees was, not coconuts, but muscatel grapes. It couldn't be -- but it was. Jackson did what was required of him. When he had finished trombramcthulanchierering in the usual manner, he had only to get through the official ceremony and the several small requirements after it. Erum assured him that it was all quite simple, but Jackson suspected that he might somehow have difficulties. So, in preparation, he put in three days of hard work acquiring a real mastery of the # exceptional potentiators, together with their most common positions, and their potentiating effect in each of these positions. He finished, bone-weary and with his irritability index risen to # on the Grafheimer scale. An impartial observer might have noticed an ominous gleam in his china-blue eyes. Jackson had had it. He was sick of the Hon language and of all things Naian. He had the vertiginous feeling that the more he learned, the less he knew. It was downright perverse. "Hokay," Jackson said, to himself and to the universe at large. "I have learned the Naian langauge, and I have learned a set of completely inexplicable exceptions, and I have also learned a further and even more contradictory set of exceptions to the exceptions." Jackson paused, and in a very low voice said; "I have learned an exceptional number of exceptions. Indeed, an impartial observer might think that this language is composed of nothing but exceptions. "But that" he continued, "is damned well impossible, unthinkable and unacceptable. A language is by God and by definition systematic, which means it's #C gotta follow some kind of rules. Otherwise nobody can't understand nobody. That's the way it works and that's the way it's gotta be. And if anyone thinks they can horse around linguisticwise with Fred C. Jackson -- " Here Jackson paused and drew the blaster from his holster. He checked the charge, snapped off the safety and replaced the weapon. "Just better no one give old Jackson no more doubletalking," old Jackson muttered. "Because the next alien who tries it is going to get a three-inch circle drilled through his lousy cheating guts." So saying, Jackson marched back to the city. He was feeling decidedly light-headed, but absolutely determined. His job was to steal this planet out from under its inhabitants in a legal manner, and in order to do that he had to make sense out of their language. Therefore, in one way or another, he was going to make sense. Either that, or he was going to make some corpses. At this point, he didn't much care which. prum was in his office, waiting for him. With him were the mayor, the President of the City Council, the Borough President, two aldermen and the Director of the Board of Estimates. All of them were smiling -- affably, albeit nervously. Strong spirits were present on a sideboard, and there was a subdued air of fellowship in the room. All in all, it looked as if Jackson were being welcomed as a new and highly respected property owner, an adornment to Fakka. Aliens took it that way sometimes : made the best of a bad bargain by trying to ingratiate themselves with the Inevitable Earthman. "Mun," said Emm, shaking his hand enthusiastically. "Same to you, kid," Jackson said. He had no idea what the word meant. Nor did, he care. He had plenty of other Naian words to choose among, and he had the determination to force matters to a conclusion. "Mun!" said the mayor. "Thanks, pop," said Jackson. "Mun!" declared the other officials. "Glad you boys feel that way," said Jackson. He turned to Erum. "Well, let's get it over with, okay?" "Mun-mun-mun," Emm replied. "Mun, mun-mun." Jackson stared at him for several seconds. Then he said, in a low, controlled voice, "Erum, baby, just exactly what are you trying to say to me?" "Mun, mun, mun," Erum stated firmly. "Mun, mun mun mun. Mun mun." He paused, and in a somewhat nervous voice asked the mayor: "Mun, mun?" "Mun... mun mun," the mayor replied firmly, and the other officials nodded. They all turned to Jackson. "Mun, mun-mun?" Erum asked him, tremulously, but with dignity. Jackson was numbed speechless. His face turned a choleric red and a large blue vein started to pulse in his neck. But he managed to speak slowly, calmly and with infinite menace. "Just what," he said, "do you lousy third-rate yokels think you're pulling?" "Mun-mun?" the mayor asked Erum. "Mun-mun, mun-mun-mun," Erum replied quickly, making a gesture of incomprehension. "You better talk sense," Jackson said. His voice was still low, but the vein in his neck writhed like a firehose under pressure. "Mun!" one of the aldermen said quickly to the Borough President. "Mun mun-mun mun?" the Borough President answered piteously, his voice breaking on the last word. "So you won't talk sense, huh?" "Mun! Mun-mun!" the mayor cried his face gone ashen with fright. others looked, and saw Jackson's right hand clearing the blaster and taking aim at Erum's chest. "Quit horsing around!" Jackspn commanded. The vein in his neck pulsed like a python in travail. "Mun mun mun!" Erum pleaded, dropping to his knees. "Mun-mun-mun!" the mayor shrieked, rolling his eyes and fainting. "You get it now," Jackson said to Erum. His finger whitened on the trigger. Erum, his teeth chattering, managed to gasp out a strangled "Mun-mun, mun?" But then his nerves gave way and he waited for death with jaw agape and eyes unfocused. Jackson took up the last fraction of slack in the trigger. Then, abruptly, he let up and shoved the blaster back in its holster. "Mun, mun!" Erum managed to say. "Shaddap," Jackson said. He Stepped back and glared at the cringing Naian officials. He would have dearly loved to blast them all. But he couldn't do it. Jackson had to come to a belated acknowledgement of an unacceptable reality. His impeccable linguist's ear had heard, and his polyglot brain had analyzed. Dismayingly he had realized that the Naians were not trying to put anything over on him. They were speaking, not nonsense, but a true language. This language was made up at present of the single sound 'mun.' This sound could carry an extensive repei'toire of meanings through variations in pitch and pattern, changes in stress and quantity, alteration of rhythm and repetition, and through accompanying gestures and facial expressions. A language consisting of infinite variations on a single word! Jackson didn't want to believe it, but he was too good a linguist to doubt the evidence of his own trained senses. He could learn this language, of course. But by the time he had learned it, what would it have changed into? J ackson sighed and rubbed his face wearily. In a sense it was inevitable. All languages change. But on Earth and the few dozen worlds she had contacted, the languages changed with relative slowness. On Na, the rate of change was faster. Quite a bit faster. The Na language changed like fashions change "on Earth, only faster. It changed like prices change or like the weather changes. It changed endlessly and incessantly, in accordance with unknown rules and invisible principles. It changed its form like an avalanche changes its shape. Compared with it, English was like a glacier. The Na language was, truly and monstrously, a simulacrum of Heraclitus's river. You cannot step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus: for other waters are forever flowing on. Concerning the language of Na, this was simply and literally true. That made it bad enough. But even worse was the fact that an observer like Jackson could never hope to fix or isolate even one term out of the dynamic shifting network of terms that composed the Na language. For the observer's action would be gross enough by itself to disrupt and alter the system, causing it to change unpredictably. And so, if the term were isolated, its relationship to the other terms in the system would necessarily be destroyed, and the term itself, by definition, would be false. By the fact of its change, the language was rendered impervious to codification and control. Tlirough indeterminacy, the Na longue resisted all attempts to coiuuer it. And Jackson had gone from Heraclitus to Heisenberg without touching second base. He was dazed and dazzled, 'and he looked upon the officials with something approaching awe. "You've done it, boys," he told them. "You've beaten the system. Old Earth could swallow you and never notice the difference: yoU couldn't do a damned thing about it. But the folks back home like their legalism, and our law says that we must be in a state of communication as a prior condition to any transaction." "Mun?" Erum asked politely. "So I guess that means I leave you folks alone," Jackson said. "At least, I do as long as they keep that law on the books. But what the hell, a reprieve 's the best anyone can ask for. Eh?" "Mun mun," the mayor said hesitantly. "I'll be getting along now," Jackson said. "Fair's fair... But if I ever find out that you Naians were putting one over on me -- " He left the sentence unfinished. Without another word, Jackson turned and went back to his ship. In half an hour he was spaceworthy, and fifteen minutes after that he was underway. VI I n Emm's office, the officials watched while Jackson's spaceship glowed like a comet in the dark afternoon sky. It dwinand then vanished into the vastness of space. The officials were silent for a moment; then they turned and looked at each other. Suddenly, spontaneously, they burst into laughter. Harder and harder they laughed, clutching their sides while tears rolled down their cheeks. The mayor was the first to check the hysteria. Getting a grip on himself he said, "Mun, mun, mun-mun." This thought instantly sobered the others. Their mirth died away. Uneasily they contemplated the distant unfriendly sky, and they thought back over their recent adventures. At last young Erum asked, "Mun-mun? Mun-mun?" Several of the officials smiled at the naivete of the question. And yet, none could answer that simple yet crucial demand. Why indeed? Did anyone dare hazard even a guess? It was a perplexity leaving in doubt not only the future but the past as well. And, if a real answer were unthinkable, then no answer at all was surely insupportable. The silence grew, and Emm's young mouth twisted downward in premature cynicism. He said quite harshly, "Mun! Mun-mun! Mun?" His shocking words were no more than the hasty cruelty of the young; but such a statement  could not go unchallenged. And  the venerable first alderman ' stepped forward to essay a reply. "Mun mun, mun-mun," the old man said, with disarming simplicity. "Mun mun mun-rnun? Mun mun-mun-mun. Mun mun mun; mun mun mun; mun mun. Mun, mun mun mun -- mun mun mun. Mun-mun? Mun mun mun mun!" This straightforward declaration of faith pierced Erum to the core of his being. Tears sprang unanticipated to his eyes. All postures forgotten, he turned to the sky, clenched his fist and shouted, "Mun! Mun! Munmun!" Smiling serenely, the old aiderman murmured, "Mun-munmun; mun, mun-mun." This was, ironically enough,  the marvellous and frightening truth of the situation. Perhaps it was just as well that the others did not hear. -- all in the September Worlds of Tomorrow, on sale now! f I i I I I # Worlds of brings you the finest in science fiction Don't delaysend in your subscription order today of IF delivered to your door, bringing you stories by all your favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Relief stories and others appear regular!' in IF -- fast moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on tlie frontiers of the stars! still to come! 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MacApp by Norman Kagan by Robert Silverberg by Harlan Ellison by Fredarik Pohl Inexpensive Time Machines # by John Brunner by Willy Ley by Frederik Pobl by Algii Budrys Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, Hew York, N.Y. #. #o per copy Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Posestions. Elsewhere #. Secondclass postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. AH rights including translations reserved. Ail material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in Oils magazine sre fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. TiUe Re. #. . Pst Off. "lichen Hal Clement was a Boy T Scout patrol leader, which is several decades ago, one of the youngest Scouts in his troop was an under-age cub named Bob Enzmann. He was a science-fiction reader, of course. If he hadn't been, Hal Clement was, and would have converted him. He liked to read stories about the conquest of space -- in those days of the #s, a fantastic subject, which most of the wise adult world was quite ready to dismiss without a thought. But time passes, and in the couple of decades since that time Robert Enzmann grew up, studied, traveled, learned... and began to do something about conquering space for himself. He acquired degrees in geology, physics and engineering. He parachuted three times onto the Greenland ice cap; he lived for half a year at a time, with only his rifle to provide his meat and an occasional contact with a native for company, in the last wildernesses of Africa. Now he makes his home in that lesser jungle around the city of Boston, and what he does with his time now is design spaceships. By "spaceships", Dr. Robert Enzmann does not mean Mariner IV or even Apollo. By "spaceships" he means what we mean by spaceships -- you get into it, you take off, you look around and head for the nearest interesting piece of planetary real estate, and you get there in finite time, with enough reserve of fuel and supplies to look around, land, explore, take off and come back... or go on to some other place. You will be hearing more of Dr. Robert Enzmann. You may have heard more already, as a matter of fact, since while this issue of Galaxy is on the stands there will be a conference on planetology held in New York in which Enzmann will take a leading part, and if it doesn't make newspaper stories we will be much surprised. For what Enzmann is after is not merely a research program or a blueprint for future decades. What he wants to do is build this ship -- man u euverable, huge, nuclear-fueled v ' -- and to start doing it now. How immediate is "now"?  Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. Scribe J-MJ. Sin Jose. CaWomia #W. U.SA Please send me the fm book. The MmsUtj of Ljjt, which explains how I mar learn to nsc mjr faculties and powers a i mind. Name Address City Sea re ntsB Maw No oi' organizaJ.MJ. Well, says Dr. Enzmann, there are a few engineering problems that need to be worked out. Not basic science problems -- they've all been solved -- some as recently as within the past ninety days. But there is the organizational problem of assembling the skills, the tools and the raw materials; the technical problem of testing and linking them; and above all the financial problem of raising the funds necessary for what is, after all, not quite as simple a project as building a new city hall. The price tag would be something like two and first one. Second and later ships would come a little cheaper. And the time? Twenty years from start to completion is a safe and easy schedule, says Enzmann; and if we got started right away there should be no difficulty in completing it in five. In other words, if Enzmann is right -- and an impressive number of people are coming to think he is -- by the time the present program calls for manned landings on the moon, we could have a ship built that could make the round-trip to Pluto in a matter of a few weeks... and that could keep right on going to the stars. T o be sure, the technology that makes this sort of spaceship possible is something new and vast. Much of it represents recent breakthroughs in a number of fields, and quite a lot of it is classified. It is even possible that difficulties may turn up in the engineering which will change the picture, perhaps radically. Fusion power stations looked a lot easier in # than they did in #, and if they have recently begun to look a little easier again it is by virtue of considerable knowledge, attained at considerable cost, that did not exist in those early optimistic days. But it is also sure that our present space hardware has got to be a dead end. We can with great difficulty and at immense cost put together a plumber's nightmare which will pump liquid fuels into a chamber, bum them off and lumberingly project itself into orbit; but no sensible man regards that solution to space travel as economical or elegant. Enzmann's ship may not be the last word, either. But it is parsecs beyond anything that now exists outside the pages of a science-fiction magazine... and every sign indicates that we can start building it now. You've seen it in the Movies Famous Plug in and flip on the switch. The disc revolves at just the right speed -- transfixes your subject(s). Their attention is riveted to the powerful hypnotic pattern. Your every word is now more meaningful -- more effective for this professional machine greatly adds to your prestige, creates hypnotic expectancy, increases your success. A marvelous aid for hypnotizing others and for self-hypnosis. 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Read -- for the first time anywhere, how the author hypnotizes a roomful of people without their knowledge -- using a common cooking ingredient. So simple, dramatic and effective, it is worth the low price of the book alone. Order now and get the clever "Hypnotic cause the "Indirect Trance." Satisfaction Suarantesd or Money Back! # Madison Ave., New York, # NY Send the following on an Unconditional # Back Guarantee. I enclose Day Money you pay the postage. Chart sent with orders for # or more. Name The Mercurymen i 'T'em was many kilostrides rootward from the last settlement, in a part of the stalk that was not planted nor grazed because nearly half the diameter was filled with icy water and the air was cold. Nevertheless, it was not too cold for fish nor for a r.aw' Jo  s devan #Si stretcheO , sww c .ml #r... thin ibur. M ft nd they fiwo re ' s u i H: q. ; .THpK? o.   ?  T  lc s' SjslV' Jmr   v . W ; n, that Their remote ancestors had conquered Mercury -- and now the hot planet was ready to begin conquering them I some of the quadrupeds, and he loved to come here when he had free time. He lay concealed in the throat-like constriction between stalk sections. He was watching a wild tomcat fishing. The luminous moss grew feebly here, and he could barely make out the cat's dark form Inching along the giant fronds at the water's edge. He wondered why tomcats would come this far (and even farther, he knew) when, in warmer but still unsettled parts of the vine, there were lizards and mice and birds to hunt. Maybe they liked the dim light and the solitude, and the vastness of the sections. Personally, he found the size of the sections a little frightening. The one before him was a good two hundred strides in diameter, and over half a kilostride long. Now the cat was out of sight entirely, but he kept his eyes on the spot where he'd seen it last. There were no bird songs here; no sound at all except a faint trickling of water somewhere. He pulled his goatskin hood closer about his cheeks, and waited. There was a leap and a splashing. Then the cat's dark form went bounding up the steep wall. He caught just one glint of silver at its head as it disappeared into some hidden cavity. Presently he heard eating sounds. After a while he gathered himself, squirmed free of the bulbous growths which, legend said, would swell to an airtight seal in case the section were seriously punctured, and picked a way back along the near-vertical side of the next section. He plucked a vine-fruit, but it was tart and he only swallowed a few bites; they seldom ripened this far rootward. He thought he might do a little hand-fishing himself farther along, where it was warmer. But then, he ought to be getting back. The kilostrides passed. The sections were smaller, with much less water in them so he could walk nearer the bottom of the curve. The luminosity brightened. He reached sections planted to rice; then, finally, one where grass grew almost halfway up the circumference. He smelled goats ahead. At the next sectionjoint he had to let himself through a netting. As he skirted the grazing animals, the herder, a young man a few orbits older than he, called out, "You better hustle, idler! The Elders have been looking for you!" Tem grunted an acknowledgement and continued his casual pace. As First Son of the Chief, he didn't feel he should let goatherders hasten him. Nevertheless, when he was out of sight he walked faster. He couldn't imagine why the Elders would want him. The first huts came into sight. A little later a band of children spotted him and came running, babbling and shrieking, each vying to be bearer of the news. "Tem! The Chief is dying!" 'T'hey'd already bled the Chief and given him fermented rice, but even so, his face was set against the agony and his eyes were dull. It was the sickness that strikes in the right side of the belly. He raised his hand feebly and took Tern's. His voice was weak, but calm. "I affirm that you are my true First Son. I invoke the Law of the Migration." He let his hand drop and closed his eyes against the pain. Tern knelt, trying to find words. How was this possible? The strongest and wisest of the vine... hardly into middle age... He looked around at the Elders, wanting someone to tell him it wasn't so; that this was some cryptic charade, and that his father would throw off the act any instant and bound to his feet with a guffaw. But he recognized the Conclave of Death. Besides the Elders, none of the vine was present except six other first sons who were older than Tern but within the age limits for migration. One of those, a man named Buld, scowled and said harshly, "Why does he not disown this stripling, so we can elect a real Leader?" The dying man's face only tightened more, but one of the Elders said, "Do not speak blasphemy!" Each of the Elders took one step forward, signifying their intention of enforcing the Law if necessary. Buld looked sullen, but said no more. Numbly, Tern got to his feet and stood at his father's head, as the Conclave demanded. He wished he could leave to find his mother and comfort her, but of course he could not; nor could she join the Conclave. From the Book Of Truths: And within the menagerie, these things shall ye take, lest the new vine know them not: the fruits and the grains, and the fishes that swim and the fowls that fly, and the things that creep, and the tiny things and the things that suckle their young... II Qince this was a season when  the sun was already retreating Brightward (everyone kept looking apprehensively at the corona above the horizon), the migration could start as soon as it was ready. Tern had been Outside before, of course, as part of his training, but he'd only left the lock and walked a few steps on the gravel above the vine, and it hadn't seemed real. Now, ostensibly overseeing preparations (though the Elders' who'd been on their own migration to this vine, were the actual experts), he had to stay out here for twenty or thirty kilopulses at a time, and Outside was all too real. He was glad the suitmakers had done a good job on his suit. The face part was of the clearest rubber possible, with very few bubbles or white spots of undried vine latex, and the fit was good. It was awkward moving, with the weight of the backpack full of air-freshening fungus pulling him off balance. But they'd assured him he'd get used to that. They'd also promised the pleats at knee and elbow joints would stop sticking together when the latex cured a little more. He kept tilting his helmet to look up at the Stars, though it made him ill to think of such emptiness above him. He could believe the Stars were fantastically distant, all right, but were they really Gods? And if so, were they watching? For that matter, he'd never been quite dear in his mind about the relation between sun and Sunn. Was the sun Sunn's weapon? Or his dwelling? Or what? Of course Sunn could probably travel around anywhere invisibly, even to Darkside; though the Law didn't say; and asking such questions got you admonitions instead of answers. He turned and stared the way they'd be going. That was another confusing thing. The Law said you must go in the direction of your right hand as you stood facing Brightward. Clearly there was distance there, and ground to walk on, but was it a direction? One was used to two directions -- rootward and leafward. Or, to use other terms, darkward and brightward. Anyway, they had to go in this new 'direction', across an unknown number of vines, until they found an uninhabited one fit to settle. The guess was that it would be as much as four hundred kilostrides. They could go that far before the sun began to return, if they didn't lag. He saw an Elder frowning at him, and turned his attention to the work. T hey were bleeding air out of the lock now, into big rubber bags; carrying those over and squeezing the air into the menagerie. Big as that was -- with a dozen wide carts under it -- the animals, and the human couple who'd live in it to care for them, would be cramped. Most of the space was filled with the airfreshening fungus. Still, they'd bo more comfortable than he and the others, living in suits with only an occasional visit into the resters. The menagerie was the biggest airbag, by far. There were smaller one; air fresheners, the Testers, and simple bags of spare air. There were waterbags and bags of food, and bags of liquid vine latex for future use. There were two carts loaded with great sheets of rubber, already cured, for constructing the lock when they found their vine. There were loads of rope, and the precious tools. And seeds, of course. There was no assurance what would have spread to a new vine. The lock was sagging now, into the slanting tunnel that let it meet the vine at a good angle. It was time for a shift to go in. He walked over and helped push on the big end-plug until it gave way and the remaining air gushed out They trooped in, replaced the plug and held it hard against its seating. Someone opened the valve from the vine, and the lock began to fill again. Soon Tern's suit lost its rigidity and hung upon him, and the end plug would stay in place by itself. They pushed open the inner plug and entered the vine, and filed down die ramp that had been built up to the lock. It was good to be able to look in any direction and see solid walls around him again. He began unlacing his suit. He met people, all wanting to stop and talk, and excused himself politely. He was headed down vine toward his home, but there was another stop to make first. He reached the right section and paused in the throat, in sudden despair. It was strange, he thought, how it took things a while to hit. Slowly, he started down and to the right, until he was walking in the grass beside the narrow lake. Near midsection he turned right, through a fruit orchard to where some huts nestled on the curve of the vine. Neena's father sat there, turning a roast over a small fire. He looked at Tern silently for a few pulses, then said, "I'm sorry, lad, but you both knew what to expect." Tem didn't answer that. He said, "Could I see her?" Her father nodded rootward. "Two sections down, in the rice." S he must have been expecting him, for she was working near this end. He walked out and began gathering handfuls of the tall grain. It was not censorable for them to work together and talk. They worked silently for a while, then he said, "I could refuse to go. But then I'd be in Bottom Caste, and so would you if you married me. We never really talked about it, did we?" She was calmer than he expected. "No, we didn't. I suppose you'll take up with my sister. I've seen the way you look at her." He flushed. "I do not! She's four or five orbits older than I am!" She shrugged. "Anyway, I guess you don't really care much about me, or you'd find some way to take me along." He frowned at her. "What kind of talk is that? Even if we dared defy the Law, do you think the Elders are blind?" She glanced around and said in a low voice, "I'm the same size as my sister, and we look alike. I don't think any of the Elders would know the difference if I were in her suit" He was so shocked he cringed, half expecting Sunn to send a meteor and destroy die section. Slowly, he straightened. Really -- in all his experience -- Sunn had never punished anyone, preachments notwithstanding. It was always the Elders who handed out punishment. And there'd be no way they could pursue the migration. He said unsteadily, "But your sister... "I've already talked to her," afraid to go anyway." Ill nphe Elders gave the fainthearted no time to rebel. The lock's inner plug closed behind the migration like the cutting of an umbilical cord. Thirtynine men and forty-three women -- all the healthy firstborn of the vine whose ages fell between seventy and one hundred orbits -- turned and gazed across the bleak country. The hardest thing to get used to, Tem decided (after the suits and the awful emptiness above them) was the harsh lighting. One compressed glare from the sun's corona lit the uneven rock, leaving shadows so sharp-edged and black it was hard not to think they were bottomless holes. The stars, dazzling as they were, helped very little to light those shadows. Even where it was illuminated, the ground was frightening. Gravel extended for a few strides, where the vine's growth had shattered the rock; but beyond lay the undulating plain, punctuated here and there by hilb or ringwalls, dotted with loose rocks from the latter. Another disturbing thing was the silence. He could see lips move, see people clap their gloved hands together to soften the gloves, and strained his ears for the sounds. But inside his suit he could hear too much -- his harsh breath, his blood pumping. He could see bitterness in some of the others' faces. The Law did seem inequitable, requiring that the first generation bom in a new vine supply the migration, on the death of the first Chief. Why couldn't older vines send the migrations, if migrations were necessary? There was some vague principle that a colony too long in a vine might grow soft, but it seemed to him that a generation or two might go by without that, so that a vine could better afford to equip a migration. And why such long migrations? If fewer vanguard vines had to send them out, they wouldn't have to leapfrog so far to find empty vines. He could sympathize with the bitterness, for he himself was feeling for the first time -- really feeling it inside -- how cruelly they'd been thrust out; how unreachable the old vine was now. What brought it home to him was the way he'd parted from his mother. She'd come to the lock with a last present -- a newly braided belt and scabbard with his father's knife -- and she'd helped him on with his suit. They hadn't said much. He'd been almost gruff, because he was afraid she'd embrace him with everyone looking and all. She'd surely known how he felt, and she hadn't done it; but he wouldn't soon forget the look in her eyes or the little gesture of her hands as he looked back for the last time. If he'd really realized it was the last time -- that he'd never hear of her again, or know when she died -- he'd have certainly embraced her. He decided they'd stood here feeling sorry for themselves long enough. He gestured to the team he'd chosen, and bent to pick up a tow-rope of the menagerie. The others added their weight to his and the menagerie began to move. When the team was pulling together well, he turned his place over to another man and walked back along the column. The other carts were moving. One man on a tow-rope was limping, and gestured that his suit was chafing him badly. Tern transferred him to a scouting squad that was to move a little ahead. At least the man could walk gingerly, with no load to pull. He looked back to make sure there were no stragglers, then walked forward along the column. nphey were able to travel fairly straight, with only short halts to rest, for what he judged was ten kilopulses (though one's heart was a poor chronometer under this exertion). Then, glancing back, he saw there was some disturbance in the column. He started toward it. The man he'd left in charge of that unit hurried to meet him, and they touched helmets so the small metal contact-plates would carry their voices. The man said, "One of the women insists she has to visit the rester." Tem walked back with him and discovered that the miscreant was Neena. He halted, dismayed, then slowly advanced and touched helmets with her. "You must have been drinking water! Didn't your sister tell you not to until you really needed it?" "I was thirsty," she pouted, "and I didn't think..." He looked at her in exasperation. "Can't you wait until we camp?" "No!" He spun away from her, growling to himself. A fine start! The vine still in sight, and he had to make camp. Sullenly, he signaled the order, and the column closed up to the tight pattern that would conserve warmth. At least, they did it efficiently -- all of them (except Neena) remembered their teaching. Buld took the opportunity to criticize his leadership. Before they started on, he delivered a lecture in pantomime; and he kept them moving faster than he might have on the next jaunt. After a while he could see they were very tired and legitimately needed to camp. But by this time a large ringwall was looming ahead. He decided to keep on and camp just to brightward of it. Presently a long line of other objects poked above the horizon. He knew they were the leafages, at section-joints, of a vine. He hoped the lock, if any, wouldn't be in sight. There was danger that individuals might sneak away and try to enter a strange vine, even at the cost of becoming Bottom Caste among its inhabitants. That was less likely now, of course, than it would be later when people were really discouraged or sick. However, when the column was already skirting the ringwall, he saw a chasm in their path, stretching from the ringwall brightward. This was trouble. IV Tie turned over responsibility  for making camp to a man named Bannow, passed back along the column to see that things were all right and to exchange glances with Neena, then headed out to the ringwall. He climbed slowly, with frequent rests, because one was warned that if he used air too fast he might grow foolish without realizing it. The fungus should be doing well, though, with the light from the corona falling directly on his backpack. Long before he got to the top he could see that the chasm went as far as the horizon, but he kept climbing because he wanted to see the country ahead. Again, he had the experience of sudden realization. One moment, the scene was like a painting; then, abruptly, he felt the vastness. The ringwall was perhaps twenty kilostrides across. Inside, it was hollow just as he'd heard them described. It was dark in there, the light from the corona just hitting the top of the far wall, but as his eyes adjusted he could see by Starlight that the floor was deeper than outside, and smoother, though there were a few small craters. Uncomfortable, he turned away. The column was neatly camped, a cluster of toys to brightward. It was queer to see only their shadowed sides and a rim of corona light at the top of each. He looked, hesitantly, at the corona. From up here it seemed definitely bigger and brighter, especially at the base. The chasm went straight brightward, swerving once to miss a smaller ringwall. Obviously, it was the bed of an old vine, chopped off by this ringwall -- a comparatively recent meteor hit -- and left to die from there up. He couldn't see the darkward of the ringwall, but he knew the stalk would have sealed itself, sent out feelers, found its way around the new obstacle, and gone on, paralleling the old, shriveling stalk. He could see that it had drawn close so it could consume the old vine via small local roots. It had consumed it, leaving the ditch, something like two hundred strides across and nearly as deep. The new vine was only halfgrown (not inhabited, surely) but it was his first good view of a vine. Along the length, the thin layer of gravel was clearly distinguishable from solid rock. The leafages were great bursts of spear-like growth, fanning out in semicircles above each sectionjoint. Some, he knew, were fifteen times the height of a man. They were said to shade the path of the vine and, by evaporating water, keep the vine's temperature down when the sun struck here. He'd seen a piece of one once, freshly brought in; eight inches in diameter, moist and woody inside, covered outside with hard, rough very white scales. He moved on a little way to see farther ahead, and a spot of very bright light came into view on the horizon. It must be a high mountain peak, catching the sun. He considered. Theory said sunlight reflected from a mountain was safe, and wonderful for the fungus, and warm. This mountain might be a hundred kilostrides away; still, they had to go farther than that. It was a little to brightward, but by the time they got there the sun would have retreated farther. It would be a good place to camp and freshen up everyone's air, and catch up on whatever else needed doing. Besides, he wanted to see a mountain. r T"he land between, so far as he could see, had no serious barriers. There were ringwalls of various sizes, some simple hills, a few cracks. He fixed those in his mind so he could avoid them. This present chasm was the thing to worry about now. It would take too long to build a ramp across it, and the alternative of going back around the ringwall -- and passing in its cold shadow -- wasn't attractive. Could a way be cleared along the base of the ringwall itself? A thought struck him. There must have been other migrations by here, unless they'd all passed farther darkward. He went a little way down the slope, and grinned with delight. There was a path of a sort, where boulders had been moved and holes filled in. He was very lucky this time. Before continuing down, he looked around for one more thing. It was earlier in the season than the Traders appeared at the vines, but no one knew where they came from, and legend said they sometimes attacked migrations. However, there was no movement in sight, and nothing that looked like a camp, and that was the best he could do. He started toward camp. Before he'd gone far he noticed that he was breathing hard, even though he was going downhill. He began to have trouble controlling his limbs. Once, when he jumped between boulders, he misjudged and fell hard. He hauled himself up painfully. Nothing was broken, but he knew he'd overestimated his air, especially since his backpack was now turned away from the corona. He wasn't silly yet, but he might not be far from it. And -- he realized with shock -- he'd violated an elementary principle. He'd come alone. He got down safely, but by now his mind was very muggy and his limbs alternated between aching and numbness. He concentrated on getting one leg ahead of the other, stopping now and then to stand with his back to the corona, head down, almost falling asleep. He hardly knew he'd reached camp until he stumbled into it. He was vaguely aware of Buld confronting him with a scowl, but couldn't seem to keep his mind even on that. The next thing he knew Bannow and some others had a full airbag attached to the suit's intake nipple, and an empty one on the exhaust, and were squeezing ah through. His head cleared, though he was still very tired. Bannow told him, "You made a bad mistake sneaking Neena into the migration. She raised a fuss about your being gone so long, and somebody recognized her." V T here was no way Tern could have blocked a Council even if he'd tried. He called it as soon as he'd refreshed himself. There were six of the maturest men, beside himself. The cumbersome touching of helmets slowed things so he had a chance to think. He listened woodenly to Buld's argument that since he'd broken the Law, he was no longer fit to lead; and that they'd better depose him. He let them wait for his answer while he thought it out. Buld's argument was hypocritical, but how to demonstrate? He said, "Why is Buld so anxious to get rid of me? Does he want to be Leader himself?" Buld declared he was thinking of the migration. Tern said, "Buld must have gained respect for the Law quite suddenly. When my father was dying, Buld wanted him to avoid the Law by disowning me." That produced nods and one or two grins. Buld said, scowling, "That was just a suggestion to the Elders. What I wanted was a grown-up Leader. Besides smuggling in a brat who doesn't belong, this stripling has brought us too close to Brightside, and now he's got us trapped so we have to go back around this ringwall. He'll get us all killed before he's through." Tern said, "You don't know anything about how far Bright side is, or how far we can go." Buld glared at him. "My father was on the last migration too!" "He wasn't Leader," Tern said, "and no one voted for him for Chief. I'm the only one who's really trained. As far as Neena's concerned; which is better -- a girl who wanted to come, or one who was afraid to?" Buld and a couple of the others spoke of the Law again. Tern said, "If Sunn wants to punish me, he can do it right now. I'm ready." He stood up and walked a few paces away. One of the men presently came over to him, with a glance toward the corona, and said, "What about this chasm you've got us up against?" Tern went back and sat down. He thought he might get Buld to stick his tongue out a little farther. "What should we have done?" Buld said, "We should have camped farther back while someone scouted." Tem said, "By the same reasoning, we'll have to scout the other side now. Do you want the job? You can take a partner and some bags of air." Buld glared. "We've all heard how a big meteor kills a vine, and that's obviously what's happened here. Why do we have to scout the other side?" "Well," Tem said, "I wonder how you know for sure that this meteor killed this vine. What if the vine was already dead? We'd go all the way around and find we couldn't pass on that sic! either. Is that your idea of leadership?" He was glad Buld wasn't quick-witted. Buld flushed and said, "Well, I would have found out before." Bannow looked at Tem keenly and said, "Can you get us across without going around?" "Of course," Tem said casually. The vote was four to two in his favor. Afterward, he was astonished at how alert and shrewd he'd been. Eloquence had never been his strong point before. He decided that it was because Buld had been trying to take something away from him and he just didn't want to let go. r T'hey took the path he'd seen, finding only a few boulders to move, then crossed over the young vine. By now, everyone understood that he'd outsmarted Buld, and he saw many grins. That was good for morale, he decided. So was the evidence that another migration had passed this way, sometime. Tem wondered how that one had made out. He didn't dare speak often to Neena, and though the other women, misty-eyed, had adopted her, she was glum. As the march dragged on, so were others. But glumness wasn't the worst. One yvoman, taking her turn in the rester, refused to put her suit back on and had to be forced into it, screaming. She quic later, but her face worried Tem and he could feel the whole column reacting. He made camp sooner than he might have, close to a vine, hoping that would raise spirits a little. It turned out to be a mistake. While he was climbing a nearby ringwall to scout, the woman broke from camp and ran toward the vine. Others pursued. He had to stand helpless and watch the whole thing from a distance. She threw herself down, clawing at the gravel. Then, before they could reach her, she must have deliberately undone the lacings of her suit. The suit went limp, and that was all. Sick, he started down without finishing his scouting. He knew now what he should have done. He should have given her something to carry, walked her until she was exhausted, and let her leep. Another thing he'd been neglecting was religion. He'd have to appoint a preacher to talk about Sunn. It looked as if a Leader had to know and understand almost everything. On the way down, he thought, It might have been Neena. What if it had happened to Neena? 'T'hey crossed a number of vines before he saw a lock, and that was in the distance. He made sure the column didn't see it. The dazzling mountain was getting nearer, and he made a point of how they'd rest up when they got there, but some of the migration seemed to find it frightening rather than reassuring. The supplies, including the air, were holding up pretty well, but there was trouble in the menagerie. Some of the goats got sick, and one died, for no apparent reason. Finally Tern discovered that some of the air-freshening fungus was spreading into their compartment, and they were nibbling it. It wasn't supposed to be poison. Some of the birds, confined so long, were pecking others to death. They had to be separated. He'd expected conflicts among the people, but there were surprisingly few. Presently, from h own behavior, he understoo I why. He found himself withdrawing into the world of his sui paying less and less attentio to other people. One thing particularly struck him. The right arm of each suit was deeply pleated under the armpit, with an external grip so the gloved left hand could pull down and outward. That enabled the wearer to get his right arm inside. He noticed many right sleeves hanging empty before he realized he was doing the same thing himself. Thereafter, he kept his arm in the sleeve, unless he had to bring it inside to eat, drink, or scratch himself. It was odd. but the sleeve somehow felt outside the suit. VI A fter they'd crossed a few more vines, they found what was left of an old migration Tem thought it was probably the one that had built the path back there. There were no corpses in the sagging menagerie except those of cats, small birds, and fish. The goats and larger fowl were gone. There were several empty suits lying around, and four that weren't empty. There were waterbags, airbags, two resters, some air-freshener carts and some empty carts, all falling apart, the wood shrunk and warped, the rubber brittle and cracked from Sunn knew how many season's exposure. Tools, rope, and personal belongings were scattered about. It looked as if the survivors had taken what they could carry, and just walked. There was a vine within ten kilostrides, but no lock in sight. Maybe the Traders had gotten them, or maybe Sunn had swallowed them up. The column wasn't visibly much moved by the relics, but during the next camp a couple -- a man and wife who'd had to leave two young children with relatives -- quietly killed themselves. They didn't take the simple way of just opening their suits. They got knives inside, lay down together, and stabbed themselves. That shook Tern worse than anything so far. He made up his mind to reach the sunlit mountain in two marches if he possibly could, with one brief stop between. He pushed the column through the first march, crossing two closely spaced vines without even slowing, camped briefly, and bullied them on. The mountain was awesome now; stretched diagonally ahead in one long blaze of light. He could feel the warmth of it already, and his eyes ached. Nevertheless, his vision was adjusting amazingly, so he could tolerate the light, though he couldn't look directly at it. The ground was mountain-lit by now. The corona was a faint ghost, and so were the stars, though space was black as ever. He could see some of the people about to rebel at this light, and that Buld was getting ready for another try. Then he found the ideal spot. There was a large ringwall some kilostrides from the mountain, itself aglow with mountainlight. Closer to the mountain, and near this end, was a much smaller one. He could go to brightward of the smaller one, for shade from the mountain, and enjoy the twice-reflected, tamer light from the big ringwall. r-p'hey dragged to the spot and made camp. The light was stronger than any in a vine, but comfortable. There was no more hunching of shoulders against the cold as one's warmth leaked away to the sky and to darkward. The fungus fairly puffed out fresh air, and the animals grew frisky. They had the cleaned and exposed carcass of the goat that had died, and now Tem decided they could build a small fire in the menagerie and have fresh meat for once. People revived visibly. By his count of vines, they might be close to half way through their journey. Before they left here, he'd have scouted enough to make a closer guess. The lower slope of the mountain, below where the sunlight hit, could be climbed, he thought, to an elevation higher than ariy ringwall he'd seen yet. So, as soon as people were fed and resting he took Bannow and started that way. He got used to looking at the mountain through a murky part of his helmet, so the light was cut down. The mountain was probably twenty kilostrides long, and half that high at the peak. It was really a long ridge, set at an angle to the sun, and he had a feeling it was not very thick through. It curved down at each end, tapering into darkness. The upper part of it was sheer cliff, lit part way down now. Below the cliff, and barely visible with one's eyes dazzled so, was a steep but even slope, apparently of rock crumbled from the cliff by the sun's timeless hammering. Already Tem was perspiring. He touched helmets with Brannow to say, "We'd better turn from side to side so we won't melt our suits."  ctually, it didn't turn out to be that bad. They had shad from huge boulders, and could hurry across open stretches; and one could always turn his backpack to the cliff and let the fungus soak up some of the light. They kept on until they were more than halfway up the rubble slope, then the heat was finally too great. They sat down in a shadow. Gradually Tern's eyes adjusted, but it was still disappointing how little he could see of tire country. Things close by were brightly lit from the mountain, and tended to dazzle his sight Things farther away weren't lit much. He could see the two close-spaced vines they'd crossed (both squeezing around die obstacle of the mountain) and some ringwalls he remembered. In th other direction, beyond the far end of the mountain, he thought he could make out the leafages of another vine, but he wasn't sure. He said to Bannow, "I guess that ringwall would be a better vantage point after all. Maybe we can walk part way around It and climb. Bannow didn't answer. Tem drew aside and looked at him. Bannow's eyes were fixed down the slope, and when Tem followed the look he saw four suited figures, tiny in the distance moving toward the slope. They were spread out widely, each carrying something in one hand. A moment later he saw a fifth. He decided the things they were carrying were some of the sharpened stakes intended for fastening the lock onto the new vine. In addition, the fifth one dragged two airbags. Bannow started to rise, and Tem pulled him back. Bannow touched helmets. "It's Buld and his bunch! They intend to kill us!" "I know," Tem said, trying to keep the trembling anger out of his voice, "but let's stay here for a while and think. They can't see us. Remember how it was looking up?" Bannow sat down. "But we've got to get around them and get back to camp!" "How? If we climb down they'll see us, and move to intercept. We'll run out of air before they do. They've probably told the camp they were just climbing that small ringwall or something. We can't expect any help in time." "Well," Bannow demanded, "what are we going to do?" "First of all, let's act as if we didn't see them. We can go along this slope to the end of the mountain and get into shadow. They may not see us at all; and even if they do, we'll be out of their reach, so probably they'll just wait." "Then what?" "Well... at the worst, we might go clear around the mountain and get back to camp from the other end. I figure it wouldn't be more than sixty kilostrides. If we're very careful with our air, we might make it." Bannow looked very doubtful. "It'll be cold on the other side." "Maybe not. The heat may go clear through. Anyway, it's better than just sitting here, isn't it?" Bannow hesitated, but finally nodded. They went carefully, seeking shadows, but presently it became clear that Buld had spotted them. They kept on, rounded a bulge, and were in darkness. N ow even the corona-light was hidden. Gradually the stars distant gods were drawing closer to watch. To Tern's surprise, this side of the mountain was a gentle slope, with a surface much like level ground. Below them was a small ringwall, ghostly in the Starlight. He could feel his warmth leaking away, so he turned a little uphill. If there were warmth coming through the mountain, it would be nearer the top. They moved on slowly. Tem was paying close attention to the footing so he wouldn't trip, when a vaguely seen motion ahead brought him to a startled halt. Bannow had seen it too. Tem bent his head to touch helmets, but said nothing. The movement was not toward them, but up the slope from below, crossing their path. It was not a man, nor any single creature, but a vast moving pack. As well as he could make out in the dim light, the individuals stood half as high as a man and moved on many legs, though they didn't seem to have horizontal bodies like cats or goats. Finally he said, in a cautious whisper, "Do you suppose these are the things the Book speaks of? The metal things that crawl?" Bannow's voice was awed. "I don't know. Shall we turn back?" "Let's stand still for a while." The vanguard of the pack was nearing the top. Suddenly a line of light grew along the peak, toward them, so bright and so startling that Tem threw an arm before his eyes. He felt Bannow whirl away from him. He himself took a step backward and stumbled over Bannow, who'd evidently tripped with the first step. He jerked his head around to look back. The line of light was still advancing, and he pushed himself erect to run, but before he did he realized the line was not aimed at him, but was just growing along the peak. It was not a solid line, he saw as it came closer, but consisted of thin upright sticks, like a row of very bright, perfectly matched firebrands. It was not straight, but irregular, with dips and rises and gaps. Something brushed by him. He flinched, but didn't panic. Now he was surrounded by the things, which felt solid and heavy when they bumped against him, but paid him no attention. They scuttled to the peak and aligned themselves along it, thrusting up fingers or feelers into the sunlight, jostling for places in line, crowding each other where there were too many. Then there were no more around him, but farther along they still swept up. Bannow got to his feet, pawing at his suit. Tem moved close and touched helmets. The man started, then said, "Sunn! They walked right over me! I thought... is my suit punctured? I can't -- I don't hear any hiss... "You're all right," Tem told him. The suit felt rigid as ever. but there was a little roughness. "I guess they have very small daws, if any." He looked toward the peak. "They seem to eat the unlight, or drink it." A few stragglers were arriving, to push their way into line. Tem moved after one, trying to ee it There was a central body, the size of a man's head. A number of legs, each as long as Tern's arm but no thicker than a finger, grew from the body on all ides. These were flexible, and while about half of them clung to the rocks, the rest were held up so that two inches of the tips were in sunlight. Now the things were motionless except for an occasional shifting of stance or a wave of an upthrust leg. They stretched along the mountain as far as Tem could see in either direction. A very strong urge gripped him to climb and get one quick glimpse of the sun. He took a few steps before he caught himself. He looked at Bannow, then reluctantly turned to go on. There was no time to investigate this wonder now. Bannow drew alongside, wanting to talk, but Tem put off touching helmets. These creatures were apparently a form of Bfe that didn't need air; could wander at will. Could things be learned from them that would free men from dependence on the vines? Could a man, or a #mall group, find an empty vine nearby and make trips to study them? He turned to Bannow, and as he did he saw a line of luminous blobs moving up the slope toward them. He crouched, suppressing his impulse to run, but Bannow's nerve finally broke. The man whirled and ran back the way they'd come. Tem shouted uselessly, then started after him The blobs of light suddenly reacted, moving to cut Bannow off. Bannow might have outrun them, but instead he turned and ran up the slope. Tem, suddenly realizing the danger, ran as fast as he could toward him. He was too late. He saw Bannow's helmet suddenly turn blinding bright as it popped into sunlight. Bannow's eyes stared for just an instant, then snapped shut. The man clapped both hands to his face, whirled, and plunged down the slope. Tem saw him go headlong and slide. Then the suit suddenly went limp. He stopped, fighting nausea, forgetting the blobs until a knot of them gathered around Bannow's corpse. By then he could see they were men in suits, with very large backpacks that gave off the glow. Shortly, several surrounded Tern. He thought of looking for a rock to defend himself, but they didn't act threatening, though two of them held tapered, sharp-tipped swords. One of them made incomprehensible hand-signals, then, as Tem shook his head, pointed at Tern's helmet and his own, and pantomimed bringing them together. Tem nodded and they touched helmets. T he man's speech was only slightly odd. "You from a vine near here, son? What are the two of you doing up here, anyway?" Tem tried to get his voice working. "We -- I guess my friend isn't doing anything, any more." The man shrugged. "Too bad. But it would have been besten if he didn't panic. Why were the two of you up here?" Tem hesitated. Maybe he oughtn't to tell them about the migration. "Some men were trying to kill us. We came to this side of the mountain to get away." The man looked thoughtful. "Your vine very far?" "Well... quite a ways." The man studied his face and finally said, "You're from a migration. Got yourselves in some kind of trouble, and ran. Besten you not be so close-mouthed about it. We won't take you back." Tem said indignantly, "It isn't that at all!" The man scowled. "Well, we can't stand here jabbering. You can come with us, or die here." He glanced at the two with swords, then turned and went down the slope. The two armed men waited motionless. Others had taken Bannow! suit off his body, and were carrying the suit away. Tem started toward the corpse, changed hk mind, and walked after th spokesman. The line spread out again, so it was hard to see anything but the glowing backpacks. There were about thirty, all told. A little way down one of them bent to pick up a thing and carried it in one arm. Tem saw legs dangling, and realized it was one of the metal things, dead. Another man found one, and so It went all the way down the slope, until each man was carrying two or three. Finally the spokesman turned back and handed Tem a pair to carry. They were fairly heavy. Beyond the end of the slope, other figures moved about, apparently also gathering the dead things. Soon Tem saw that there were carts heaped with them. Imitating others, he went to the nearest cart and deposited the two he had. No one gave him any instructions, so he just stood. Presently they stopped looking for the things and threw over each cartload a rope net, tying it securely. Someone looked at Tem and pointed to a tow-rope. He picked it up and pulled with the others, wondering if they just wanted to get some work out of It seemed a very long time that he trudged, his hands on the rope first cramping painfully, then going numb. His feet grew clumsy. He stumbled along, knowing his air was bad. Finally he must have fallen, for the next thing he knew he was draped face-down across a cart-load, and tied on so he wouldn't slide off. The jolting ride went on for a long time. He realized that they were clear into Darkside now. Then they halted, and he managed to raise his head and saw another cliff, this one lit only by starlight, and with no rubble at its foot. There were four tunnels in the cliff, each with a clear-rubber airlock. One of the locks was open, and the carts were being rolled in. D ull as he was, the lock fascinated him. It was made more intricately than the ones he knew, with hoops along its length and pleats between. The three not in use were folded against the tunnel-mouths. His mind worked at that. Why, they must squeeze the air back into the tunnels, instead of losing it! He got a chance to observe that, as his cart was in the next batch that went in. The tunnel itself seemed to be a second lock, as it had a plug in its middle, and another at its inward end. When that was opened, light as strong as a vine's spilled in. Inside, they unloaded him and laid him on the floor, face up. Someone began unlacing his suit. A little pressure seeped out, then his helmet was pulled off and he was breathing pure, rich air. As soon as he could, he sat up and stared around at things he only gradually understood. This was evidently a great natural fissure, twisting back into a mountain, but it had been much reworked. Rock was hewed away in places. At others, walls of squared stones, cemented with latex, sealed openings or supported ceilings. A series of shelves hacked from the walls were planted with some kind of shrubs Tem didn't know. There was a stepped wall down the middle of the fissure, similarly planted. Luminous moss grew on vertical surfaces and on the ceiling. The artificial wall where the tunnels came in drew his awed attention. There were great abutments supporting massive machinery -- more metal than he'd supposed existed. Some men were turning a giant's windlass, slowly raising high a huge boulder that dangled on a rope as thick as Tern's thigh. At the other end of the wall, a similar boulder descended slowly, turning a heavy shaft to which were geared a dozen strange devices. Rods moved in and out of smooth round holes, with a hissing that could only be the intermittent escape of air under pressure. Great pulleys creaked as the monstrous ropes snaked around them. Eventually he understood that all this machinery operated the locks, squeezing air in and out. The tunnel he'd come through opened again, and the last of the expedition came in. The man who'd talked to Tem unfastened his helmet and removed it, looked around checking men and carts, and finally glanced toward Tem. He came over and said, "I'm Hannult. I'll want to talk to you later, but meanwhile I'll take you to the Young Bachelors' chamber and leave you with Oskir. He's boss there.' '"'vskir was older than Tem, blond, and large. He looked Tem in the eye without expression, then walked around him studying his suit. Finally he said, "No marvel your air got bad. Is this the besten you Vinies can do?" Tem flushed. "I've trekked two hundred kilostrides in it!" Oskir's eyes showed a trace of amusement. "With airbags and big carts of freshener, and such. What's your name, and how old are you?" Tem started to blurt out angrily that he was a Chief's first son, but saw the futility of that. He'd have a better chance of escaping if they didn't know he wanted to get back to his migration. He said sullenly, "My name's Tem. I'm seventy orbits. And a half." The amusement flickered in Oskir's eyes again. "Tell you, then. There's roast goat over there, and some milk. This ditch is for bathing, and the way you smell, besten you do that first. Hang your suit here." He indicated a peg, then waved a hand toward a low dark tunnel. "We sleep in there. You'll take the pad nearest the inlet." He turned and walked away. Tem glared at him, then hung his suit on the peg, removed his underthings and stepped into file water. It was tepid, and smelled of some pungent herb. He scrubbed himself with a wad of coarse vegetable fibre, got out, rubbed himself dry, started to dress, then decided he'd better not. He dumped the clothes in the water to soak, and went over to eat. When he'd done that, he rinsed the clothes, wrung them and spread them on the floor under his suit. Oskir and some others, deliberately ignoring him now, were squatted in a circle, gambling with odd-shaped stones. Five or six more worked on their suits or tinkered with various things. There were about twenty in the group. Tern ducked through the tunnel and found there was a spacious chamber beyond. There was no luminous moss, but enough light came in so he could see that the walls were cut into shelves and planted. The pads were spaced far apart, probably for ventilation. He lay down on the first, wincing with lameness, and tried to relax. Evidently these people didn't intend to kill him, but would he ever get a chance to escape? And if he did, what then? He wondered what Buld had told the column. Possibly that Tern and Bannow had deserted and surrendered to a vine. He wondered what would happen to Neena. For all he knew, these people might hunt down the column and plunder it. He listened to the low hum of talk in the outer chamber. These were the Traders, of course. At least they were human, though they had odd ways of living. Eventually, from exhaustion, he slept. O skir woke him by toeing him in the ribs. He rolled aside and got to his feet. He felt rested, so some time must have passed. Oskir nodded toward the tunnel. In the outer chamber were all the young men he'd seen before, plus two or three others. They stood along the walls, with an air of waiting. Oskir said, "Turn around." When Tem did so, Oskir hit him on the chin hard enough to knock him down. Tem came up like a cat, and didn't forget to poke out his left fist before swinging his right, but somehow both punches bounced off Oskir's thick forearms. Oskir hit him again. He staggered, caught his balance and tried to dodge in close. He got his left to Oskir's cheek, but not solidly, and took a hard punch he didn't even see coming. After that it was one long series of stunning blows. He fought back as well as he could, but he IX was groggy and Oskir was too strong, and too clever with his fists. Tem went down repeatedly. Each time, he hauled himself up, until finally, after a punch that didn't feel any harder than the rest, he found his legs wouldn't work. He had the will to get up, and his mind was fairly clear, but his limbs would only make uncoordinated pawing motions. They picked him up, dowsed him in the bath water, and swabbed off his face. He was still too weak to stand alone, but his thoughts were remarkably clear, if inclined to wander. He was bleeding a little from the nose and from a small cut in his upper lip, but he knew he wasn't badly marred. Most of the punches had been clean ones to the chin. He realized Oskir had deliberately avoided messing him up. He was almost strong enough now to start swinging again, but something in their attitude stopped him. They were looking at him with casual approval. Finally Oskir said, "I'm going to parley besten I can Hannult let you join." Tem glared at him. "Oh? And suppose I don't want to?" Oskir looked mildly surprised. "What else can you do? You spect we'd let you go back to a vine, now that you've seen this much?" A s the newest member of Oskir's dormitory, Tem drew the menial tasks. Every three sleep-cycles (as marked by the growth of moss along a measured path) he had to bail the bath water into bags and carry it around to prescribed places to be used for irrigation, then refill the ditch from the nearest reservoir. He had to sweep the floor, air the pads, ventilate the dormitory by using fans, fetch food, bring in fertilizer for the plants and take garbage to the fertilizer factory. He smouldered, but held his temper. Aside from his occupations, he was treated as an equal. Oskir, who seemed to know everything, personally took charge of his training. One big job was to build a new suit for himself, and he had to perform every bit of the work to Oskir's satisfaction, even if it had to be done over ten times. The backpack was complicated. Instead of a simple honeycomb of fungus, as in his old suit, this one alternated layers of fungus with layers of luminous moss, which gave enough light to keep the fungus working. There was also a better way of feeding in nutrients, and a better method of circulating the air. It was twice as heavy as the old pack. Equally fascinating was the jettison lock in the front of the suit, at waist level. It had ingenious valves so it could be worked from either outside or inside. Using little bags for body wastes, this made it possible to live in the suit for a long time. There were also improvements at the ankles and in the soles, which made for better climbing and less danger from sharp rocks. All in all, he was delighted, and he nearly blurted out that such suits would make travel between vines easy. He caught himself in time. The cycles flowed past. His despair about the migration dulled a little, so he could live with it. He was able to pretend he was content here. He wasn't quite accepted into the clique, but aside from a certain amount of joking about his Vinie origin, there was things rest there. He supposed the migration would be close to finding its vine now, if it hadn't run into bad trouble. He worried about Neena. They might put her in Bottom Caste, since she didn't belong, which would make her a virtual servant to the whole vine. He supposed Buld would get himself  ejected Chief. That thought brought up shaking hot anger; and that was one feeling that  didn't grow dull. He thought, now, that he should have killed Buld right at the start. It wouldn't have occurred to him then, of course, but that seemed to be the logic of the thing. He could have found some way to make it look like an accident. He shuddered and put that thought from his mind. S ome younger men were elevated to Oskir's group, and took over the menial chores. Tern was put to work in the shops where the metal creatures were cut apart and things made from the metal. He was a flunkey, but not the only one, and the place was so fascinating he didn't mind. Sometimes he worked a hand bellows that forced air into big rubber bags, for the smiths to use with their fires. In the vines, small open fires had been used for cooking, or to cure rubber, but that was all. These fires were even smaller, and confined within stone boxes through which thin jets of air were blown. The flame came out pointed and incredibly hot, and would even melt iron. The metal creature's legs were partly iron, but their body-cases were of some other metal. They were cut open, the insides were taken out and sorted for various metals, and the cases were hammered flat, then trimmed sixsided. The edges were heated soft and joined together. Finally, when a sheet of them was big enough, it was hammered on great anvils until it was very flat and smooth and the joints could hardly be seen. Also, using the fires and anvils, with some special tools, the smiths made all sorts of tools and weapons. There were the straight tapered swords he'd seen, and a variety of knives that made his own look crude. There were scissors; dainty ones for tailoring, large, long-handled ones for cutting tough vegetation or even metal. One tool in particular took his ye -- a saw for cutting the hard hulls of vines. Once he helped carry some new gardening tools to a branch of the cave where grains were planted. For the first time, he saw women of the cave close up. They wore ordinary clothes and looked no different from vine women. When he heard one speak, he was sure she had come from a vine. He wanted to talk to her, ask her how she'd come here, but he didn't get a chance. He worked in the smithies and at other jobs until he knew most parts of the cave, and most of their equipment. Then a time came when Oskir told him, "You'll be getting a chance to try out your suit. Hannult says besten we take you on a foray and see how you act." nphere were about forty men on the expedition, including Oskir, Tern, and half a dozen others of the dormitory. They took eight medium-sized carts, a few tools, some empty bags, and some extra air and water. They headed deeper into Darkside, and now there was something different about the ground. It was darker and harder to see in the starlight, and slick at times. He had to walk carefully. This suit held the warmth better; and, after a good twenty kilostrides, he couldn't feel any deterioration of the air. They kept going almost in a straight line until a ringway lay ahead. He studied it curiously. Not only was it low in relation to its width, but it lacked the rugged outlines he was used to. They reached the skirt and he found he was walking on gravel, among half-buried boulders. He saw signs that people had been here before, shoveling away the gravel, and that was apparently what they were going to do now. They laid out small-meshed nets of strong cord, and he was  given a shovel and told to heap gravel on one of them. When it was fairly covered, four men took hold of one side and four of the other, and rolled the load bacx and forth so that the fine stuff sifted through. They discarded the coarse stuff and started over. As the fine material piled up, they shoveled it into the boxlike carts. Tern's curiosity overcame his pride. During a rest period, he touched helmets with Oskir. "What is this for?" "Dirt." Tem flushed. "I mean, why are we getting it here?" Oskir grinned. "Cause we don't want to take it away from Vinies." In a moment he went on, "If you just take rock that's been burnt in the sun and crush it, there ain't muchen good in it. This is the besten for growing stuff, sept you can get goat manure or rotted rice or such. You got to find a ringwall like this one, in Darkside." "Oh," Tem said. "What makes this one different?" Oskir shrugged. "My father told me it was because a meteor was ice, not rock like most. It went in a ways and exploded, and threw out this fine stuff. Times, you'll dig down a ways and it feels wet, a little. This is the only one I been to. I can parley jtmakes stuff grow, all right." Tem digested that. Then, as Oskir seemed in a talkative mood, he brought up something he'd been wondering about. "You peopie never talk about Sunn. The god Sunn, I mean. You always try to explain how things happen by themselves. Don't you believe in Sunn?" Oskir pulled his helmet away and chewed on some dried meat for a while. Then he joined helmets again. "There's those talk about Sunn. I spect it's how you feel inside. I never could see much proof one way or the other. Looks to me, if there's a Sunn, he put things so they run mostly by themselves. Looks to me, people are supposed to make their own, not sit down and wait for some god to give it to them. He put plenty, sept a man, don't try." Tem drew back, uncomfortable. This might be blasphemy, but it made more sense here Outside than in a vine. It would explain how a man like Buld could just take what he wanted, Law or no Law, if no one stopped him. And keep it, if no one took it back. nphey filled seven of the carts, packed the tools and other things in the eighth cart or on top of the dirt, and started Brightward. Judging from Hannult's caution now -- sending scouts, camping in cover -- there must be some danger. Also, they seemed to be mapping, as Hannult kept making notes and sketches. Finally, when the gossip was that they were nearly out of Darkside, they made camp on a moist gravel patch that Oskir said lay over the base of a vine. They were going to get water here. While a pit was being dug, Oskir took Tern to the nearest ringwall on sentry duty. They left relays of men for contact with camp, and moved around to brightward of the ringwall before climbing. From the top, the corona was faintly visible, and Tem could see the dark line of gravel where the vine ran up-country, though there were no leafages here. He wondered if a vine seeped water all along its length. He turned to ask Oskir, and found Oskir V back to him. It occurred to him it would be very easy to pick up a rock and hit Oskir on the head. The inflated helmet was rigid, but would move easily, and (as Tem knew from more than one tumble) wouldn't protect the skull. He could roll the corpse down inside the ringwall, where they'd be a long time finding it. He owed Oskir some lumps. However, he found he didn't want to kill Oskir. He'd repay the beating sometime, as a matter of principle, but he didn't really resent it. After all, that had been a matter of principle too; a duty with Oskir. Anyway, he'd better stay with the Traders until he learned more, and at least knew where he was. Oskir turned. Tem touched helmets and asked, "That dark streak. Is that because it's moist?" "A little. Those are reservoir sections of the vine." Tem said, "What do you mean, reservoir sections? There's water in every section, even up near Brightside." "Sure," Oskir said, "but these here are full; no air space at all. They're deeper under, too, so they're safer from meteors. If a vine gets hit farther up, this water'll stay here until a new vine grows." "Oh." Oskir nodded up-country. "You can't see the first leafages from here. I spect it'd be about eighty kilostrides. That's where the vines start to have air in diem, and come up near the surface. Hey. You tell me how the Vinies decide where to put their locks." T em said, "The Law sets it. You're supposed to have at least forty leafages below the lock, but not more than eighty. That puts it in a comfortably part of the vine." He looked at Oskir, then touched helmets again. "You ever been as far up as the locks?" Oskir grinned. "I been on trading trips for the last nine orbits. Last orbit I was clear to the leaves." "What?" "Sure. Hannult took me along. Ten of us went." Tem said, "How did you stay alive?" "We didn't walk out in the un, stupid. There's ringwalls and mountains, like here, for shade. Besides, the leaves grow three times as high as here, and thick, and make a shade. Only thing is, the ground's hot in places, We found one place you could stand on a mountain and look at the sun through a thick piece of rubber." Tem snorted. Oskir said, "Your friend did, didn't he? Only thing, he didn't have enough rubber in front of him. Course, you can only look for a couple of pulses, or the rubber melts." Tem, the notion spinning in his head, began to believe. "To go all the way to Brightside!" he muttered. "And look at the sun!" Oskir chuckled. "You spect that's something? Look here." He turned and pointed the way he'd been looking before. "See that bright star, right above the horizon?" "Yes. That's really bright." "You should see Venus when it's in the sky. This one's Earth. See the real faint one, kind of yellow, right beside it? That's the moon. It goes around Earth. You know about Earth?" "Well..." Tem said. Oskir's voice was soft. "That's where people come from in the first place. Some day, we'll find out how; then we'll go see what happened to them. Maybe they're still there, but just need a little help of some kind." He stood looking for a while. "I spect it won't be in my lifetime. No more of this parley, now. We're supposed to be up here on watch." X ' ' camp, the pit was thirty feet deep. They ate, rested briefly, and joined the digging. Before long the hull of a vine showed. Now men brought a pipe, ten feet long, made of wooden strips glued together, with an iron tip honed to a slanted cutting edge. Hannult jabbed at the vine, twisted and pulled the pipe free. An iron rod was thrust in from the other end, to punch out the chunk of vine that had stuck in it. Hannult kept deepening the hole until some water, bearing chips and strings of latex, gushed out. Now the pipe was thrust clear in, and water swelled from the tip. They collected the water in bags, but to Tern's surprise they didn't seal them at first. They dumped the water into the dirtladen carts. The water soaked into the dirt, and the carts still weren't any fuller! When all the dirt was mud, they did fill the bags and seal them. Iron bars went over the mud, and the bags were tied on top. The hole in the vine plugged quickly when the pipe was removed, and they filled in the pit before leaving. There were traces of mist here and there, just above ground, and puddles that evaporated quickly. Now they turned darkward again, but angled away from the vine, to the right If Tern had his directions correct, they were headed home.  ' sixty kilostrides they met the trouble Hannult had been expecting. They were nearing a large ringwall when a scout who'd climbed it began signalling; turning his backpack toward them, then away, in a complex sequence. He was relaying something from scouts farther abound the crater. Hannult sent two men running ahead to find a hiding place, and took the column straight to the ringwall. Two other men backtracked to make sure no telltale debris had been dropped along their path. Then Hannult talked briefly with Oskir, who gathered Tem and his other young men. The column found its hidden cove, and there was a hasty transfer of good on the carts. The cart with no mud in it was fitted out with a few tools, one of the tapping-pipes, a bag of air, and two bags of water; along with some food. Oskir's bunch seized the towropes and ran around toward the dark side of the crater. They were going all out, and Tern's lungs soon burned like fire. Even this suit would never keep up, at this rate. Before long, though, they slowed to a leisure pace. The main column was getting ready to go around the bright side if that were clear, or hide if it weren't. Obviously, this single cart was a decoy. When they'd gone a little farther, Tem saw in the distance a whole army of backpack glows There must be over a hundred Oskir held the casual pace, mov ing darkward from the ringwall Presently it was clear they'd been sighted, for a dozen men broke away from the army and ran to intercept them. Oskir went on a little way, then stopped so suddenly the cart almost overran Tem. Then Oskir threw his weight forward again, and so did #  tiie others. The cart began to bounce over the rock, headed away from the strangers now. Of course they couldn't escape with the cart, but Tern supposed any time gained would be vital to Hannult. Scouts climbing the crater might pause to watch the chase. The pursuers were getting close now. Oskir dropped the rope and ran. The others went with him, but Tem had no warning. He stumbled and fell. By the time he got to his feet the raiders were nearly upon the cart They were making derisive gestures, apparently with no intention of chasing anyone so long as they got the cart and supplies. pem could still have fled, or he might just have stood there meekly, but something in the face of the nearest stranger reminded him of Buld. Shocking, unexpected fury exploded within him . He leaped to the cart and grabbed the tapping pipe; spun it so the point was toward the stranger, and lunged. The man stared for an instant, then twisted frantically. The point raked along his side, and for a split instant Tem thought he'd punctured the suit, but it only snagged and pulled free, intact. He took a step back, ready for another thrust, but all the strangers had leaped out of reach. Now each put an arm behind him and pulled, from somewhere, a sword. They spread out to surround him. He gave ground, darted to one side and menaced a man, who drew back. Beyond them he saw more men leave the army, carrying long spears that would out-reach him. The local group pressed him back slowly, gaining time. He felt very foolish now. What had he accomplished? Well, at least, he was being a good decoy, and that was the intent. But he'd soon be a dead one. His stomach felt as if it were full of gravel. Then a rock sailed past him and made one of the strangers duck. More came; obviously Oskir hadn't run far. But throwingsize rocks weren't plentiful. Tem hesitated. Shouldn't he take this second chance to run? After making such a fool of himself, he was ashamed of himself, he was ashamed to have Oskir and the others put themselves in danger. But before he could make up his mind, the strangers were suddenly retreating toward their own army. Only one of them -- the one Tem had attacked -- stayed for a moment. That one, keeping the cart between himself and Tem, ran forward and jabbed his sword into first one, then the other, bag of water. Then he grinned at Tem, made an obscene gesture, and ran after the others. Bewildered as he was, Tern had wits enough to go to the cart and press a hand over the cuts in the bags. Oskir arrived, furious, and bumped helmets! 'Tool! You might have gotten us all killed! Why didn't you follow the plan?" Tem thought about it He could hardly explain. He said meekly, "Nobody told me any plan." Oskir glared, speechless. Then the glare began to fade and finally he was grinning. "Well, besten we not stand here. Another army's coming, or they wouldn't have run like that. Likely they're loaded with plunder and the owners are chasing them. I spect you'd want to fight them, too." XI 'T'hey found Hannult before he reached the cave. He was delighted that they'd saved the cart and supplies, and if he didn't think well of the way it had happened, he didn't say so directly to Tem. However, as soon as they were home Tem was put on a crash program of learning the hand signals, also the backpacksignaling. He was told in blunt language that, while feuds of varying deadliness existed between tribes of Traders, this cave wanted none. Evidently it was considered a sport, not a hostila act, to capture carts out in th open. Sport or not, when the cave sent out the first trading expedition of the season, a few hundred kilopulses later, it was large and well-armed. Even some of the women went along to handle chores. This was more like a migration than a foray. There were carts with air-fresheners, Testers, extra air, extra water, and many empty bags. There were took and metal in sheets, rods, and bars, for trade; and bags of rock salt mined in the cave. They also had a few woven fabrics to offer, and some articles of wood, but these were just camouflage, to mask their dependence on the vines. Their own more sophisticated tools, including the vine-tapping pipes and the saws, were kept out of sight, with the weapons. To Tern's disappointment, they headed the opposite way from the migrations, slanting brightward. When they'd gone a ways he found a chance to talk to Oskir. "That mountain where I was picked up must be near here." Oskir shook his head. "We aren't that far yet That's just about the end of our territory." So they wouldn't get to Tern's old vine. He asked, "Do we trade all the way out to the newest vines?" "No. The last eight or ten belong to that bunch you tangled with. The newest are too poor to trade much, anyway. That's why we never bother with migrations, either. Sept sometimes we steal a girl or two." r T"hey passed the mountain eventually, but now only the very peak was lit, giving little warmth or light. They turned brightward to a large ringwall and made camp in a hidden niche. Oskir took Tem to one of the Testers, handed him another suit, and said, "You're picked for the trading party. Go inside and they'll fix you up." There were two men inside who helped him out of his suit, then proceeded to smear his face with greasy stuff that stained it red. A pair of goggles hid his eyes. Finally they helped him into the second suit, and he was disgusted to find that it was his old one. Later he saw that the whole trading party -- twenty men -- were similarly made up and were wearing Vinie suits. Then he understood. They didn't want the good suits seen. With two cartloads of goods, they approached the first vine. Two Elders were in the lock, pretending to be making repairs. Tem grinned. He knew the eagerness and unease they were hiding. Hannult did the bargaining, standing outside the clearest spot and gesticulating, as items were brought up singly for display. He put on a show of fierceness and weirdness. Tem, carrying an axehead to be shown, grimaced and made hostile gestures, and enjoyed the Elders' expressions. That earned him a scowl from Oskir that was half grin. When the Elders were convinced there'd be legitimate trading, the inner plug opened. Mosslight spilled out. A procession came out, bearing bags of fruit and grain, cooked fish, cooked fowl, and raw carcasses of goats. There were a few small bags of water, handled as if they were very precious. Larger bags contained liquid vine latex, which could be used as glue or for making rubber. Hannult accepted the edibles and the latex, and solemnly purchased a small bag of water, as if it were a great luxury. He concluded the trading with mysterious genuflections, and led the party away by a roundabout path. As soon as they reached camp, the women went to work on the goat carcasses. The meat was cut in strips and mauled with spikeheaded hammers, then laid out on the surface rock so the warmth would speed drying. When it was dry, it was powdered with a little alt and sealed into small bags. Oskir said it would keep a long tone. nphey worked back across the vines, re-passing the high mountain, gradually exchanging the metalware for edibles and latex, and some articles of wood. It became obvious to Tern that they wouldn't get within two hundred kilostrides of tfhe newest vine. Nevertheless, he made preparations. He found a chance to steal a saw and hide it. He got several bags of the powdered meat, too, and some grain. Water would be a problem. If he couldn't steal a bag of the right size, he might have to get it from vines, which would take him farther to darkward than he wanted to go. Tentatively, he took a small bag. Toward the end of the trading, there was much sentry duty. When sentries were being changed, he slipped away, got the stuff he'd hidden and kept on going. A fter crossing several vines, he nearly blundered into the foreign trading expedition, but they didn't see him. He detoured round them, then moved darkward and turned across country, crossing below the lock of each vine. He walked, rested, and walked, until he lost all count of the stops. He ate enough to keep up his strength, but drank sparingly. Gradually he slid into the familiar half-daze, and had to make an effort to think at all. After a while he realized the corona had made its farthest retreat and was beginning to return. He crossed yet another vine, noting with vague puzzlement that its lock was below instead of above him. Then something snapped awake in his mind. This was what he'd been looking for! He shook himself awake, sipped a little water, and turned down the vine. Buld had been afraid of the corona, or had pretended to be. If he'd taken the column darkward, his lock would be down here. When he was close to the lock he stopped, with an odd reluctance. The trek had become such a part of him, it was somehow wrong that it should be over. Yet this was a new lock. The puffs of latex where the stakes were driven into the vine hadn't collapsed yet, nor had the vine begun to grow over its wounds. He looked around at the scattered debris, and recognized some of it. Where was the menagerie? He stared back across country. Finally he saw one of the carts, tilted, with one wheel missing, its towropes sprawled where they'd fallen. They hadn't done much salvaging; even precious rope lay around. The tunnel wasn't nearly deep enough, so that the lock met the vine very near the top, and at a bad angle. At least, they were in a vine. They wouldn't starve, though they might get pretty lean if they had to live on vine-fruit. And he hadn't come here to commiserate. First of all, he had to get into the vine, and this was no place to do it. He ate and drank a little more, then squeezed the last of the water into his suit-reservoir. He salvaged some rope and started down the vine. XThat he wanted was a section  ' too cold to have been explored yet, but not too far from the lock. He settled for the twentieth one down. He chose a spot twenty strides below a leafage, and began scraping away the gravel. When he'd cleared a circle of hull, he jabbed the point of the saw in and twisted. It was very hard cutting, but he chipped out a hole and was finally able to thrust the saw through. Bits of vine blew out and thudded on his helmet, and he was spattered with strings of latex. The blast of air was like a solid thing. The hole plugged quickly and he shoved the point in again and began sawing a straight line, holding his arm out to one side to avoid the latex. The stuff set very fast, and stuck hard, out here. The cut sealed fast behind the saw, but it left a line of weakness. He sawed three sides of a rectangle big enough to drop through, suit and all. Then he paused to consider. If he sawed the fourth side, the plug might blow out and smash him like a bug. If he left part of the fourth side it might act as a hinge, so the plug would just flap Back. When he'd done that, he still had to go around the old cut again. The plug blew out with awesome force, but the hinge held. The saw was knocked from his hand and bent, but he wasn't hurt. Now the blast of air waa incredible. Latex, draining from capillaries, formed strings in a virtual tube around it, whipping madly. The blast went on so long he began to fear the whole vine was emptying. At last, though, it slackened. Eventually, he could peer in. The section was full of mist, but seemed to be clearing. The luminous moss was still glowing, though it might be dead now. He tied a rope around the hinge and let it fall inside. He tugged at the flap, and it moved slowly. Eventually, to get it shut behind him , he had to tie another rope around the free end and atrain at it When it was closed -- with the ropes still dangling -- it stayed. Oozing latex should seal it fast, and the vine would soon heal. He cut off one rope a few feet down to tie on the end of the other. Together, they reached within an easy drop of the bottom. He'd cut a little too far from the leafage, though, and had to drop into water. He felt ice crumble beneath him, but the suit protected him. Now, if what he'd been told about vines was correct, he was in good shape. He climbed toward the throat, where the bulbous growths had swollen shut like a clenched fist. If they didn't open until capillaries filled the section, he was in for a long wait However, there was evidently, as he'd been told, some other mechanism or intelligence in the vine. In not more than three or four kilopulses, the throat began to open and air poured in. When the blast lessened, he squeezed through and started up the vine. When water filled only a fourth of the diameter, he got out of his suit and hid it, taking part of his food with him. The air was chilly, but it felt wonderful to be out of the suit. He found that the vine wasn't a completely barren one. There was grass, and wild rice, and ilksects and lizards, and fish; things that had come through the seeding-shoot from some parent vine. He saw no mammals, and no birds. He'd reached territory whew he had to go cautiously, peering into each section before entering it, so he saw the seven people before they saw him. 'T'hey didn't look well-fed, and they didn't look cheerful. There were two married couples and .three single men. Tem had to think a moment to remember all their names. Should he show himself? Why not? He had to make contact sometime, and these weren't part of Buld's clique. He walked toward them and called out, "Kliv! Jellen!" The seven of them whirled and peered toward him. Then Kliv's eyes went wide. "Tem!" One of the women screamed. The whole seven fell back. Tem grinned at them. "Relax. I'm not a ghost." Kliv was the first to accept that. "Sunn!" he exclaimed, "I'll never doubt miracles again! How -- ?" Tem had already decided on a story, or a hint of one. "Ours isn't the only migration that ever travelled." Let them do some guessing. The others had come forward now. Jellen said wonderingly, "You found another migration? But we thought... Well, I see. Buld did lie, even though he didn't kill you and Bannow. He said they saw both of you vanish in bursts of flame near that mountain. Some of us doubted it and wanted to go looking for you. It almost came to a fight right then, but they'd grabbed everything that could be used for a weapon. Anyway, we didn't even know what direction to look, so... "I'm glad you didn't," Tern said. "How did things go after that?" "Bad. As soon as we were past the mountain, he led us darkward. It was cold, and we made poor time and used too much air. Then we got into some tough country and had to detour. We lost the menagerie, except for some of the fowl; and eleven more people died on the way, and six more escaped with some supplies. We think they surrendered to a vine." Tern said, "Neena?" "She stayed with us." Kliv acted a little embarrassed. "Well," Tern asked, "Whafd happened since? Why are the seven of you here alone?" Kliv said, "Buld has a grip on everything. We thought he'd probably kill us, because we spoke against him, so we ran. He hasn't come after us yet I guess he doesn't really have to." "Did any of the grain get through? And no goats." "Yes, but no goats." "You can live without goats," Tern said. He refrained from saying that, if the colony grew prosperous, there might be ways of getting goats. "How many would resist Buld if they had a chance?" "I don't know. Most of them resent him, but there's not much fight in them. They just want to forget the Outside." "How many will fight for Buld?" "His clique, and two or three more. Maybe nine all told." "Is there much fight in them ?" "Yes. They're getting most of what eggs there are, and most of the meat we salvaged. They'll fight to stay on top." "Well," Tem said, "you haven't much to lose. If you'll follow me, well get rid of Buld and make this a decent vine to live in." The two women showed distress. The men looked at each other. Finally Kliv said, "We'll go with you if you can show us we have a chance." T em left the married couples and one of the single men to improvise clubs from vine fronds and to follow a few sections behind. He, Kliv, and Jellen started up the vine, scouting each section before entering it. Twelve sections up they found two of Buld's friends, fishing with a net. They were evidently there as an outpost, as each had handy a six-foot wooden staff, sharpened at each end, evidently made from a cart. They wore knives at their belts. There were only a few clumps of fronds along that side. Tern said to Kliv, "Do you think you could creep fairly close to them?" "Maybe." "Pretend you're trying to steal their fish. Get them to chase you this way." He and Jellen found places in the convolutions of the throat, as far into the other section and as high on the sides as possible. He didn't think Buld's men would be reckless enough to pursue blindly through the throat, but if he could get them close... He raised his head enough to peer out. Kliv was going on all fours. He got within nine or ten strides before his cover played out. Then he leaped toward the bucket of fish just a few steps behind the men. The farther man glanced up and shouted. The nearer dropped the net and hurled himself toward Kliv, reaching for his knife. Kliv got a hand on the bucket, then, as the man was on top of him, swung it into the man's face, knocking him off balance. Fish spilled from the bucket. Kliv wheeled and ran with what were left. The two grabbed their spears and came after him, bellowing. Now if they only didn't look up too soon... Tern's limbs felt weak and shakey. Kliv leaped for one of the bulbous growths, and from there to a higher one. The first pursuer jumped mightily, landed on a growth, and struggled for balance as the stuff gave. His eyes fell upon Jellen, who was tensed to spring, and he jerked his spear around. Without conscious planning, Tern had already launched himself. He arced down, missing the man, but a murderous instinct made him reach out with the saw. It ripped awfully across the right shoulder and the man went down, screaming. Tem landed, tumbled, trying not to cut himself on the saw, then writhed to his feet and faced the second man. But there was no fight left in that one. He just stood, jaw hanging, spear adroop. Tem said, "Drop it!" 'T'hey bandaged the hurt one as well as they could, then got the fishnet and cut cords from it to tie both men securely. They waited for their five friends to come up, left them the prisoners and one knife, and started on. The next dozen people they met (scattered along the vine, fishing) were friendly or neutral. Tem deliberately used the shock of his reappearance, commandeering instead of asking. He added two reliable men to his advance squad. Since none were armed, he sawed a few clubs out of fronds and left his noncombatants hacking out more with a knife, with instructions to hold the upper end of a certain section. Then he climbed into the throat to scout the section. He hoisted himself to a growth, and without warning confronted two of Buld's cronies starting through. He made a move as if to retreat, hoping to draw them after him. However, after a moment of gaping, one seized the other and whispered urgently. They both turned and ran. The quickwitted one must have realized Tem would have allies, and that the thing to do was to get to Buld immediately. Tem gestured to his handful to follow him, and leaped after the pair. He drew ahead of his underfed comrades, gaining a little on the quarry. At the end of the section, he bounded far up the curve to see whether they kept going. They did. There were several people in this section, who straightened and stared. Tem yelled for them to intercept the two, but only one moved, and the fugitives threatened him off with their spears. At least, though, the man joined Tem. Two sections later Tem saw he'd lost the chase. He stopped in the throat, watching the quarry flee up the left-hand side of the fairly wide lake. In their path were about fifteen new huts, with the bulk of the colonists working around them or lounging. The two shouted at the people, threatening them with their spears. The people listlessly allowed themselves to be herded toward the other end of the section. There was a smaller group of huts there, partway up the curve. Coming at a run were Buld and four other men, all armed with spears. Tem ran down the slope, shouting. The people looked back and stopped. Buld's pair prodded them on, and now Buld was bellowing at them. Most of the people started on, staring back over their shoulders. One man broke away and ran toward Tem, then several others. Tem heard Neena scream, "Tem!" and saw her start toward him. One of the armed pair herded her back, spear poised. She turned and went with the others, face buried in her hands. 'T'em counted eight men and three women who'd escaped and were running to him. He scanned each face, and didn't think any of them were enemies. That left about twenty, mostly women, in Buld's hands. Tern went over things mentally. Not counting his own two captives, there were about thirty either with him here, or behind him in the vine. There were five or six unaccounted for, who might be farther up the vine. The eleven who'd defied Buld just now gathered around Tem. He cut off their questions. "You, and yoy. Take these women down to where the others are. You other six -- will you fight?" They all nodded. Tem looked around. Kliv was just coming through the throat. A moment later Jellen and the other three men appeared, panting for breath. Now Tem had eleven with him who'd fight, against Buld and six allies. But Buld had hostages; and if he could recruit a man or two among them, he had plenty of knives and spears. Buld had the hostages herded up near his own hut now, and his men were busy tying some of them so they couldn't escape. Tem watched with mounting frustration. He could hardly attack now. Of course Buld couldn't afford to kill the hostages -- they were his security -- but what if he killed one at a time? Or threatened to torture them? Could Tem pretend convincingly that he didn't care what happened to the hostages? No; not if Buld put it to the test. What if he just seized the vine, moved up it and left Buld penned up here? Again, Buld could use the hostages. What Tem had to do was work on Buld's nerves somehow, quickly, before he had time to think. Or, try to split away some of Buld's men. There was the fact of Tern's sudden reappearance, which must be mystifying and dismaying to Buld. While that lasted, could anything be done to amplify it? What if Tem acted like a ghost, or something else supernatural? Whatever he did, he ought to get out of this section, so Buld couldn't threaten him with the hostages. Should he go back down the vine? Buld must be wondering what was down there. Maybe he could act as if there were something frightful down there. Maybe he could even act frightened himself. Hphat began to feel promising. He said to Kliv, "How many people up the vine? Any of them hostile?" Kliv said, "I don't think so. There are just a few, tending the fowl." "How far up?" "Well, the lock's in the next section, and there are a few huts in the one beyond, then two sections with fowl in them." An idea began to stir. "The lock's in the next section? Where are the suits, and the other stuff?" "Right under the lock. We just left everything there that we didn't have use for." Tem thought hard. He turned to Jellen. "Go back downvine and get everyone here in a hurry. Act as if there's something terrible coming up the vine. Look as scared as you can, but don't explain. Can you do that?" "Yes, but -- " "I'll explain later. Hurry!" Jellen left. Tem took his other ten to the far end, across the constriction from Buld, and made a show of scouting the throat. Then he waited, acting nervous, paying little attention to Buld but staring downvine. Finally the rest of his people came hurrying into the section. He gestured them on, posted his armed men between them and Buld, got them all through the throat Buld called out, "What nonsense are you up to now?" Tem yelled, "You'd better surrender while you can." Buld laughed. "I've got these people here. You can't do anything." Tem looked as worried as he could. "You'd better let them go." He turned toward the throat turned back irresolutely, and finally hurried into the throat. He put one man where he could watch Buld and signal Tem if Buld moved. Vo ramp up to the lock had been started. Rope ladders dangled the full distance, only a little off the middle of the vine. Equipment, including suits, lay scattered about at the edge of the lake. Tem glanced back at his watchman, then chose two suits. He told the people, "Carry the rest of these upvine. Go at least five sections before you stop, then wait until I come." As they stared at him, he said harshly, "Hurry!" His own bunch stayed with him, but he told them, "Help Kliv and me into these suits, then you go upvine too. Make sure nobody comes back down. We're going to let the air out of this section." He smiled grimly at their expressions and said, "I know what I'm doing." They trotted off, and he and Kliv began the climb. When he could just see the lookout he'd left, he gestured to the man, pointed upvine and held up five gloved fingers. The man left his post and started through the section. Tem hoped he'd understand and keep going. The climb was long and nervewracking, with the ladders swaying, and carrying the saw in one hand didn't make it easier. Finally, though, Kliv reached the crude platform hung below the lock, and reached down to give Tem a hand. The inner plug came unseated easily, since there was still pressure in the lock outside, maintained by leakage. They wedged it where it couldn't swing shut, and stepped out. Getting the outer plug loose, of course, would be beyond their strength, lacking levers to pry with. He looked for a thin spot in the rubber, found one where it bulged, and poked the saw at it gingerly. He thought it would penetrate easily when the time came. Now Kliv's face showed understanding, and horror, but he didn't protest. They went to where they could peer obliquely into the section, and waited. He was gambling that Buld would come scouting without being prudent enough to bring hostages. The man would suspect a trap, of course, but he wouldn't be sure, and as time passed his nerves would get worse. If he did bring hostages, maybe he could be trapped anyway -- it should be possible to let enough air out of the section to render everyone them, then get the inner plug back in place. Time dragged. Kliv got up and paced in the lock, but Tem stayed where he was, grimly. At last Buld and another man trotted into sight, headed upvine. T)y the time Tem could see  ' them, they were a third of the way into the section. He tensed. Should he spring the trap now, or wait? He didn't know how quickly the throat would close when air started to escape. Would they have time to get back? Would Buld glance up, and understand the significance of the open inner plug? Buld stopped suddenly, eyes fixed on the spot where the suits had been. Tem leaped away from the opening, shoved KHv to safety, jabbed the saw into the thin spot. The rubber split, and tire split ran halfway around the lock. A mighty wind knocked Tem down. His suit puffed suddenly rigid. He crawled toward the vine opening, but the wind shoved him aside. He hauled himself clear of it, got to where he could see in slantingly. Buld and the other men were sprinting downvine. They went out of sight, and Tem strained his neck to see farther, but could not. He had to wait, not knowing whether they'd got clear or not, for what seemed eternity. Mist formed around him. He went to touch helmets with Kliv, but the wild air battering on his suit drowned out their voices. Finally he forced himself to sit down and wait. At long last the wind lessened, and he could push his way to the side of the opening and force his head in. The two men lay at the throat where they'd collapsed, clawing at the great growths. The throat was squeezed tight. He raised a hand to beckon Kliv, intending to say they should get inside to the platform and be ready to replace the inner plug before all the air was gone. But he hesitated, and Kliv stared at him, obviously seeing his indecision. Tem tried to sort out the muddle in his own mind. He'd come all this way to kill Buld, hadn't he? He wasn't sure. A man's motives seemed to be such mysterious things. He couldn't feel the slightest concern now whether Buld, and the other man, died or not. Maybe all he'd really wanted was to regain his leadership and prove that he was the better man. A kilopulse longer, maybe less than that, and the air in the section would be too thin. Right now, he could take Buld alive and let the colony decide what to do with him. On the other hand, Buld would always be a threat to the colony. They'd have to watch him constantly. If they ,... They? Yes, he said to himself, I'd have known it long ago if I'd stopped to think about it. I'm not of this colony any more. I'm not of the vines. As long as he didn't care one way or another, why leave Buld to worry the colony? Why even bother them with the decision? He stayed where he was and watched the bodies begin to puff. When he was sure they were dead, but before they got too ugly, he motioned Kliv and they crawled in to replace the plug. XV  s soon as the first urgencies were taken care of, he and Neena strolled a few sections below the lock. He had to assure her several times that none of the throats would suddenly squeeze shut without reason, or with diabolical reason, as they were passing through. She said, "I didn't take up with anyone else, but I want te tell you the truth. I did think about it. There was one man who paid special attention to me, and I didn't avoid him. I thought -- " She searched his face. He said nothing, and she went on, "I was sure you were dead, and I thought they'd make me Bottom Caste because I didn't belong; but if I married this man, they wouldn't" He said casually, "Was it Buld?" She colored. "No. But it was one of his friends." He said, "I don't think anyone would have blamed you. I wouldn't." They walked in silence for a while, then she said, "It does make things complicated, though. They'll think -- " She stopped and faced him. "I want to be sure you don't think it!" "Think what?" "That I just want to be the Chief's wife." He nearly smiled at that. "I don't think that. And they won't, because I'm not going to be Chief." She stared at him. "What do you mean?" "Will you try to imagine it like this? Suppose we went to another vine, the two of us, that was an easier trip from here. I don't mean a deserted vine. There'd be other people, and we wouldn't be Bottom Caste, and we'd be comfortable. We'd just be plain people. Would you come?" The bewilderment in her eyes made him put an arm around her shoulders. "Well?" he said, for he daren't waste much time. She drew back. "You mean, put on a suit again and go Outside? And leave everyone we know?" "Maybe one or two others could go with us." Suddenly she flushed. "What's gone wrong with you? Why can't you be Chief and -- and live a normal life?" "I'm not going to be Chief. I'm sorry, Neena. I want you to come with me, but I'm not going to stay." She wouldn't talk for a while, just sobbed and thrust his hands away. Finally he said, "Do you suppose you might feel differently if you had some time to think about it?" She pulled herself together. "Would we be married and live here while I think?" This time he did smile. He couldn't be angry with her; she'd been through more than any girl deserved in a lifetime. "Suppose I came back, in another orbit or two. Would you want to talk about it again?" "I don't know. You don't seem to -- to care about me at all. I feel as if you were some -- I feel as if I didn't know you." He kissed her gently on the forehead and left. He didn't look back and she didn't call after him. TTe hurried, for he had to get A to his hidden suit before anyone came looking for him. He felt badly about her, but he had to admit that his other feeling was relief. People did change. He wasn't really Tern any more. He didn t even remember, exactly, what Tern had been like. His mind grew busy with schemes for getting back to the cave. There'd be difficulty leaving the vine by the way he'd entered, without getting blown out through the hole; but with some arrangement he could do it. He'd be on short rations for the trip. And he'd have to talk fast, to convince Oskir and Hannult he hadn't given any secrets away to the Vinies. Vaguely, he wondered if it were quite normal for a young man to walk away from a really pretty girl like that... But before he was out of the vine, Neena was out of his mind. There was a whole worldful of other things to be pondered. A whole skyful, in fact.      Science-fiction writers may not be the most widely traveled human beings alive, but they're pretty dose. Talking to some of our contributors gives us a dizzying sense of what a small world it has indeed become. We don't know of any science-fiction writer who has spent much time in Antarctica, nor can we think of any who has been in mainland China -- recently -- but when you've said that you've said it all. Two current wanderers are Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance. Smith has been doing field work in anthropology among the Maoris of the southwest Pacific, Vance is working his way around the world in a westerly direction at a pace which ought to get him back to California in a year or two. In their travels both stopped briefly in Tahiti -- long enough to finish a couple of short novels; and we're pleased to be able to say we're going to be publishing both. Smith's is called Under Old Earth and H will be in the next issue. Jack Vance's The Last Castle, will run shortly thereafter. And besides their place of origin, both have one thing in common: each represents a very good writer at the top of his form... Non-Fact Article "Inexpensive Time Machines" Newl This Galaxy service saves you money and repair headaches on every time machine you buy I published by the Consolidated Galactic Federation of Consumers' Association, issue dated Jandard Year) Inexpensive Time Machines (Note: It has been our custom so far to confine our tests principally to those items most commonly purchased by our members -- as a rough working guide, products of which more than ten year. However, with the rising standard of galactic living, we have been receiving many requests for assessments of products selling in small quantities but individually representing a considerable investment of credit. Testing such products is in line with our basic aim -- the restoration of galactic craftsmanship to its pristine peak -- and the following is the first of a series which will include inexpensive faster-than-light powerboats, solar pleasure-yachts, and do-ityourself matter transmuters.) Introduction Experiments with time travel on the Asimov-Notsodusti principle were made on Logaia as long ago as #, but a string of spectacular accidents -- too notorious to be described in detail here -- led to legislation confining its use to rare and extremely costly governmentauthorized research trips. About a century ago, however (recent feedback has made the actual date so fluid as to be impossible of definition), a posthumous discussion with Einstein enabled Dr. Ajax Yak of the University of Spica to formulate the fundamental equations of petrified field theory. The light shed on the subject by his celebrated postulate that yaktion and reyaktion are equal and apposite so simplified time travel that the legislation was subsequently repealed and a limited market was opened for the private sale of time machines. Acceptable standards for the safety and performance of these machines have been laid down on Earth, Osiris, Confucius and one or two other planets, and a Galactic Standard is reportedly in draft. Unfortunately, these do not have the force of law, and we think they should -- for, as all our members will have seen, cut-price time machines are now being widely advertised and time travel is bidding fair to rival space travel as a popular vacation pastime. We cannot toa strongly advise our member against accepting the claims of advertisers without question. Brands tested Most major home-appliance manufacturers offer time machines in their current catalogues, and we hope in due course to make a thorough survey of the field. However, those offered at ten thousand credits or less are most likely to sell in large numbers, so we decided to conduct tests on two samples of each model we found available below that limit. As always, we purchased the samples anonymously through regular trade channels. We bought two samples of each of two models we found offered at discount rates below at regular and discount rates of two models whose basic price was two models sold exclusively in incidentally, being described as "imported"). In order to complete a full range of tests on all models, where necessary we bought replacements for samples that failed during the course of our survey. Appearance and finish In general all machines were of satisfactory standard, although one of the diamond instrument the gold and platinum inlay used garish" by all but one of our test panel. The inside doorhandles of the the first time we used them and had to be replaced. A #-cm length of #-kv. wave-guide tube fits the socket, and we recommend this to be substituted prior to using the machine, as waveguide tube of this calibre is not easily available in many popular historic periods. The emergency kits of tools and spares were adequate on all where the ratiocinator proved to be broken, the service manual was printed back-to-front in Arabic (presumably a computer error at the factory), and the # spare transistors were found to be lumps of contaminated polystrene. Guarantees None of the guarantees was wholly satisfactory. That offered in that it provided assured replacement of any part revealing faults due to poor workmanship during the first hundred hours of subjective occupation, but the owner was obliged to make his own arrangements for the return of the parts to the factory -- not easy on a trip of any length. We recommend taking out a policy for retemporation insurance; several companies offer these at reasonable rates. The guarantee supplied with to four hundred and forty-eight pages of small print, and required a computer evaluation to make it comprehensible. It proved to render the purchaser liable to suit by the importers of the machine if he made any claim against them for any reason whatsoever, and we feel that this should not be signed and returned to the company before use, as is stated. Power source, drive and controls plant, of high reliability and output, although the cork of the magnetic bottle failed frequently on both our samples and was difficult to replace with the Mobius wrench supplied, as the handle was too short. All the others bar one had conventional fission piles. Only the automatic dumping of exhausted fuel rods -- the others had to be cleared manually. The makers of operate an exchange service for their rods, a good idea, but as yet imperfect from the consumer's viewpoint. One of our testers was instructed to dispatch a conaignment of rods while visiting the standard target-area of #, and had to wait until #I for the replacements owing to mislabelling of the package at the factory. The single exception NiFe batteries supplemented by a pedal-driven generator. The importers claim that this provides an ideal source of exercise to toughen-up users on the way to barbaric time-zones. Our testers followed the directions supplied, but all bar one (silver medallist for weight-lifting in the last Jovian Olympics) found it necessary to rest up for a week or so n arrival. Several sustained severe muscle fatigue. In five of the six machines, the drive mechanism was a recognizable variant of the original Yak design, and any qualified service mechanic ought to be able to cure minor faults. (NB: Mechanics are not available earlier than # except to users of the ent company has launched a training scheme for native labor in a few popular vacation-zones further back. A list of these comes with the machine.) The debatable exception to the able to make a positive statement, as the petrified field was generated in a black box labelled "Not to be Opened". Attempts to inspect the interior resulted in messy, though not fatal, explosions; we consider this a serious design fault The controls on the cheaper machines, though stark, were adequate, with fair accessibility. plays make an annoying reflection in the master time-range dial and the pointer is difficult as much space on the dashboard to three-vee, piped music, sensishow outputs and perfumolator switches as it did to the actual ward and reverse lever had been mislabelled at the factory on one of our samples. Putting it over for the first trial filled the testing lab with a horde of noisy and Ill-dressed savages, later identified as Mongols, who defied our best attempts to return them to the machine and eventually had to be deported under a government  regulation forbidding unauthorized entry to the present. had a good range of controls and instruments. Inspection, however, revealed that four out of a total of eighteen instruments were not connected to anything. One of the range-finding dials had to be read in a mirror, and we feel its pointer should accordingly be made to rotate anti-clockwise to compensate. (The makers claim that it can be read directly, but if this was the intention we think they should have included a jar of liniment, suitable for stiff necks. Performance As already mentioned, the Galactic Standard has not yet been published. We took the Confueian Standard as the basis for more stringent requirements of our tests, modifying it to the Terrestrial Standard in respect of excluded zones. First we measured the radius el the petrified field (CS and TS: five metres). All passed except two. lapsed to half-size during a test jump to #, leaving the tester's head in that year and his feet in the present. Repairs were speedily effected, but unfortunately an enterprising carnival operator discovered the tester's isolated upper portion and for some eight hours before rescue was effected employed it as a novel target in his sideshow. (This was of the type known as an "Aunt Sally", where spectators received prizes for their accuracy in hurling wooden balls at him.) advertisements that the radius of their machine's field is "in accordance with the relevant Standards". One of our samples measured #.I metres, but the other never did better than # metres. expanded to # metres without difficulty, and we are recommending that this be made the minimum for the Galactic Standard. Next, we carried out tests to determine range and accuracy. The method used involves setting the controls at various readings from maximum on down, then engaging maximum power ten times in succession at each level. The CS lays down # Confucian years (about # range, with an accuracy erf plus or minus I per cent. All sustained this over limited distances (below about # years). However, none were satisfactory on longer trips. In parthe Upper Pleistocene and the other in the Triassic owing to power surges. (We replaced the pile-moderators and both performed satisfactorily after that.) ER had a repeatable extreme of Standard, but at this high powerlevel the cork kept coming out of the bottle. recorded one maximum of # years, but this was not repeatable on either sample, and the average for both was only I year # days. One sample refused to go anywhere until the fuses had been replaced with #-cm. busbars. On the other, the insulation burned out. Inspection revealed that it consisted of badly tanned animal hide. We substituted a modem synthetic and it then completed the test. Finally, we turned to the question of excluded time-zones, and here applied the TS rather than the CS because it stipulates a higher conformity with people's prejudices. Some confusion exists as to the reason for this requirement, so a word of explanation may be in order. It is often thought that the excluded zones are those highly susceptible to paradox feedback, where casual tourists might upset the chain of cause and effect. It is true that these zones are excluded, but not by us. They are patrolled by armed temporal police generally believed to be based around #, and there is no question of tourists being able to get at them. What we are now referring to are the zones enclosing events in the traditional description erf which certain pressure-groups have a vested interest. For example: the wanderings of the Children of Israel; the meditation of Buddha under the bo-tree; the Epiphany; the Sanctification of Emily Dong; the Aspiration of Bert Tuddle -- and so forth. The Standard therefore lays down that machines be fitted with automatic cut-outs, programmed in accordance with various lists selected at the wish at the user. No machine can be held to have passed the Standard unless it operates without flaw in the areas defined by at least one of these lists, of which there are some two hundred. In fact, to secure as large a share of the market as possible, the makers generally prefer to offer a basic set of twenty or more, with the others as optional extras at additional cost It would have been a prohibitively long job to try all the lists on all the machines, so we chose ten of the most popular ones, ten in average demand, and ten favored by minority groups. Our report follows: Excellent for all Western European lists including Judeo-Christian, but poor on Asiatic and only fair on the remainder. all areas except Moslem -- the Hegira cut-out failed on both samples. Good, but unlikely to be favored by Neo-Pagans, as the list of optional extras does not mention the period of Julian the Apostate. lent for Hellenists (it is made by a Greek firm), fair in all other areas. to fair in all areas, except that when operating in accordance with the Wesleyan list it proved possible to witness the composition of at least # hymns. rated. There are cut-outs, and on the surviving sample of those tested they operate astonishingly well -- all things considered. However, their action is either absolutely arbitrary, or geared to some exclusion-list not available to the testing staff. It is definite that this list does not match any of the regular Terrestrial requirements. Our testers meticulously visited every area supposed to be inaccessible. An indication of the seriousness of the fault; the unfortunate tester assigned to check on the Aspiration of Bert Tuddle returned to the present suffering from uncontrollable hysteria, and his report was delayed for three hours while we tried to make him stop laughing. Apart from the episode of the expensive machine tested -- performed well and met the various Standards applied. All the others, even though less costly, displayed faults which we regard as potentially dangerous. We therefore name as our Best Buy: at Cr. # (recommended Earthside retail price). Members prepared to sacrifice some degree of performance for other considerations may prefer for its greater comfort, while others -- perhaps those who get bored very easily -- may select for its wide range of entertainment facilities. We do not, however, feel that either should be bought without a good retemporation policy. # (maximum discount found by our purchasing agents). We became disturbed after the episode of the burning insulation (see Performance above) and sent samples of the animal hide to be identified. When it was stated to be Logaian lizardskin, we grew suspicious and carried out further inquiries. It turns out that these machines are being imported from #. They were built to the design of a self-taught "scientist" named Brong, who was left with his hands when time travel was restricted by law. Taking advantage of the recent repeal of these regulations, the importers now marketing them bought his entire surplus at a price alleged to be Cr. # apiece. We have reported this blatant profiteering to the Galactic Chamber erf Commerce. Our opinion is that even the purchase price of eighteen centicredits is too high to make them value for money. We consulted a scrapdealer and he offered us Cr. #. We hope to report users' experiences in a future issue, and shall be glad to hear from members who have purchased any erf the foregoing products. The big news in If is -- One of science-fiction's all-time greats brings you hit finest story in years -- now running in If. Don't miss itl The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress Start it now in If -- and watch for tho great novels by Keith Laumsr and Roioi Brown, Algis Budryt and othors that will make # it's best yoarl cJLaUCj.ll ona With # ranz Technological unemployment had arrived. Man had nothing to do -- except to work harder than evert Alienated Vote : "I cannot vote tor any candidate or issue. None of them seem to have anything to do with the real problems of our nation and my life. I think there is something wrong with our society which requires a more fundamental change." -- the so-called " Kafka Ballot" from the voting machines, U. S. of A. circa # and after. I T Tis Tuesday had worked out   free, so Zirkle chose to serve the machines. The mechanisms that had made most men superfluous and egged the rest on towards madness still required a few masters. The operator's saddle of N.Y.M.'s device paid ten dollars an hour, he'd have been a fool to turn it down. Though it was a pittance beside the machine's wage: twenty dollars a moment. Phantom money; the pay for a thousand unemployed, unemployable souls in the nation's Emotionally Disturbed Areas. Barbara stirred and mumbled beside him; he kissed her small happy face and pushed back the long brown hair. She was wonderful in his bed; he looked at her long pale legs for a moment and sighed, then covered them and began to dress. He tried to think about the machine because to think about her would make him want to look at her and then touch her and hold her and then he'd never get out of here. What a wonderful body! Bodies, bodies, ripe young flesh, ah!... Better bodies than minds and words; she was so quiet to strangers, silent but provocative in pullover and jeans with her long brown hair down behind her. But what she thought. How to get along with her? She was hypersensitive, and she knew she was hypersensitive and adequate; they'd gone to bed on their second date to show he cared for her and why are you such a cold son-of-a-bitch, cold, cold, I know but aren't our bodies fun, our bodies, don't think just bodies... "Michael?" she smiled up at him. "I've got to go or I'll be late, Barbara. You know." "Can't you stay. I'll go out and get us breakfast." "It's forty bucks, kid -- listen. I'll call you at twelve." "It was my fault about last night, Michael," she said faintly, then huskily. "I mean it. I ft "Okay, fine, but I really gotta go." "All right, Michael." She smiled lazily and pulled the covers up to her chin again half pout, half invitation. Oh, boy, down those stairs marry her next week but let's get going. TVownstairs it was a cold-bright November morning. Zirkle put his fists in his windbreaker against the brisk wind. The Village at this hour was shabby but sane; brick and stone and concrete buildings that were human sized, but the behemoths that hung their dead tons above everyone's heads uptown. Zirkle hardly saw them; self-obsessed, or Barbara-obsessed. He never noticed the dead handbills in the street, or sign that read "Election Day hours; #:#-#:#" beside the large brass plate; "Computer Facility : Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; New York Multiversity". With some Chock Full 'o Nuts coffee warming his middle he took the elevator up to the machine room. The brightly lit roorn was nearly silent. In the middle, of course, was the big I.C.M. alephsub-ninety; a dozen different units connected beneath the floor. At. one side a printer stuttered, tape drives raced and paused, shivering in their vacuum columns. Here was the control board, studs and buttons and little GO-boards of lights that blinked and twinkled patterns. Seated at it was the operator; an expressionless man named Kernan. A few other technicians, shirt sleeved, unshaven, moved silently about. The machine ran around the clock except for maintenance time; while Boeing or G.M. didn't have a problem, Los Alamos could always pay for some time. On the lintel of the console was the brief legend; I.C.M. is here to stay. Zirkle asked the young man what was running, to which Kernan said briskly; "Randall's replacing me -- you're programming for some kind of social thing." Zirkle shrugged; five dollars an hour was five dollars an hour. He walked out of the Machine Room past the Negress receptionist and down the corridor to the Programmer's Library. The pine-paneled, linoleumfloored, air-conditioned halls of an I.C.M. installation always made him think of a submarine, or a missile-launching site or shelter. Always the funny tension, as if the ghosts of the millions that automation had replaced inhabited the machines, as if the mechanisms had somehow taken the spirit along with the function of those useless people. The Emotionally Disturbed Areas were where zombies dwelt. I.C.M is here to stay. Zirkle thought about Barbara. There she was in front of him; beautiful and why shouldn't die be? And the old logic -- you think you can keep from getting involved. It's just more words and mucous membranes, but all of a sudden she only talks to you and you ask why not, why not? She's so much fun and you never felt so good before, to be involved in something... H alf a dozen men working in the bright room. Zirkle spotted Randall and Dr. Progoff, the Center's boss, a big, bald man who'd taken his Ph.D. in pure number theory then switched into computers and applied math. He was talking with a thin, well-dressed faculty member. " -- sampling is all finished, but how about the machine time? It won't make much sense to finish the run after the real results are in?" And then Zirkle remembered. But it was too late to register, of course, and anyway it didn't matter, they were all the same, if he voted he'd -- "Vote for Franz!" the faculty man said angrily. "What do you expect, you've alienated them from everything, even themselves? That's why I don't want you to -- " "What difference does it make?" grumbled the mathematician. "The other results have been out for days, and there'll be machines running right along with the balloting." "I'm talking about self-fulfilling prophecy -- the people silly enough to want to have voted for the winner, or uncaring enough to want to have voted for the winner, or uncaring enough to let a machine do their -- oh, never mind, never mind, I'll get the decks and the University authorization." "Fine," said Progoff. "Oh, Zirkle, please go along with Professor Lerner here. When you come back I want you to debug his program and we'll start it at, oh, say eleven, when that neutrino detection study thing is finished." Zirkle nodded, and followed tlje thin man, who seemed to be a sociologist, out to the elevators. They got on in silence, but as the car started down the older man said irritably; "Excuse me, but are you planning to vote today? Please don't lie to me." "Oh, oh, yes sir." "Well, it looks like you and I will be about the only ones that do." Outside the day was warming up. Students in bright jackets or coats moved towards the buildings. In the park and the shabby streets around the university, however, the inevitable idlers had begun to cluster. A newshad read like that as far back as he could remember. "Idiots!" grumbled Lerner. "But how can you blame them? I don't know what can be done, that's sure. There's nothing for 'em to do." 'y irkle thought about Barbara, but asked, "I've been wondering about casting a Kafka ballot, sir. It's not that I feel alienated from society, it's just that there doesn't seem to be much choice between -- " (And I'd say: will you marry me? And Barbara would say: no, but I admire your taste.) "No, no, never do that," cried Lerner, as they crossed the street. "That's the danger of the Kafka ballot -- it short circuits thinking, people feel rotten so they push the 'Franz' toggle. Originally, the idea was to find out who just didn't care to vote, and who was truly disenchanted. It backfired -- it turned out everyone is alienated and unhappy. And our system is now so complex, so limited by the international situation, so geared to accepting technical change, that we can't make fundamental changes in it, so -- more alienation, unhappiness, and four years later more Kafka ballots." The classes changed, and for a few moments they were pushed back along the corridor by a flood of students. The two managed to enter an elevator. As the door closed Zirkle murmured, "I see." (Keep her in my room if I can. Physical contact, dependence important. Story of the guy that sent his girl a love letter every day. So she married the mailman.) The doors opened, and Lemer swung out and down the corridor. A bearded student in a lab smock got on, whistling; "Girls are like pianos -- upright or grand!" the newest song of teen favorite Beatle X, the Ghana Wailer. Lemer unlocked the door to his office. "Less than fifty million voted in the last election. What happens if Franz gets a majority? What then? We'll have a complete collapse of government morale. How could Congress act, how could the President do anything, when everyone knows nobody really wants them at all?" Zirkle shrugged, it was their tough luck. He never trusted those dirty politicians. Maybe they could have a robot president? "You know, there's one thing that might apply. It's in the U.S. Constitution, but it's never been used." The two stood waiting for the elevator, burdened down with tapes and card decks. "If two thirds of the State Legislatures ask for a Constitutional Convention, Congress has to call it What the C.C. recommends is constitutional if three quarters of the state legislatures approve. If things get bad enough, it might happen. They could abolish the Presidency, cancel the Civil Rights Laws, put controls on I.C.M. and scientists and engineers. My God! They could   Lerner was silent until they were back in the Computer Facility. "It's possible, it's possible," he murmured. "The statistics on crime, drug addiction, mental illness. They could -- " he gestured out at the park, where the crowd of idlers mixed with the guitar-and-throngs set. "Look at 'em, punch-drunk, slaphappy already, surrendered -- they -- I might be one of the last sociologists. There won't be any society left to study." "Ready to get started?" rumbled Progoff behind him. The big mathematician sported a button with the legend; I.C.M. is here to stay. Lerner seemed to take heart when he saw it. "Surely, Dr. Progoff. I'd like to speak with you for a moment or two first, however." The two of them went into Progoff's office. "Mike?" said Randall, looking up from his flow charts and systems manuals. "Come on, let's take a break. I could use it." "All right," said the shaggy young man. He was feeling odd; he wanted his routine, his console and card decks; Barbara kept mixing into his thoughts. Professional life should be an algorithmn. The two young men went to the Programmer's Lounge for coffee. Zirkle liked Randall, a skinny intense young man whose only vice was getting his friends free gifts from the Book-of-theMonth, Record-of-the-Month, Fruit-of-the-Month Clubs, etc., by using his professional knowledge to alter their I.C.M. business reply cards. Randall was just asking Zirkle to his friend's apartment to watch the election returns when the lounge's ceiling speakers began to rumble. II tt'T'his ia your International Computing Machines science reporter with our special Election Day news summary, Science in the News! Stand by... Flash! N.A.S.A. scientists announce the Jove #, the sixtyseventh attempt to put a robot probe around the planet Jupiter, is completely successful. The machine is circling the giant planet in an almost perfect orbit. Werner and his rocket team are jubilant. Unfortunately, the Jove #'s telemetry system failed at power track, so we are receiving no data at all. But, as Werner has pointed out, the instruments are going round and round perfectly! N.A.S.A. will more probes for Project Jove... Congratulations are in order for the two hundred Eastinghouse Science Talent Hunt Winners! The Bronx High School of Science has the most winners, as usual, including the first five; Ephraim Goldstein, Dennis Steinross, David Einsteinmann, Keither Auerstein, and Steiner Steinstein! Steiner Steinstein, the number one man, has won a five-year Accelerated Ph.D. Scholarship to Cal Tech. Steiner's winning entry was a study of the sex life of pigeons. "Grinning, the pimply, foureyed adolescent's acknowledgment was, 'To Satan with Playmates! Give me pigeons every time!'... Tragedy in an Emotionally Disturbed Area! Tragedy struck this week at the I.C.M.'s 'Cavalcade of Wisdom', a traveling exhibit touring America's Emotionally Disturbed Areas. According to the official report: The information booklets Fortran is Fun and Your Exciting Future as an I.CM. Programmer were distributed to the crowd. The Sing-a-Song-of-Sets and Binary Math Bonanza exhibitions were also deployed, and an announcer exhorted the crowds to join I.C.M. He was answered with boos, cat-calls and cries of 'Give us real work!' 'Programming what? How to blow us all up?' and Build your own Doomsday machines, Dr. Strangelove!' Several rocks were thrown at the exhibit. A fuscillade of rotten food and other materials knocked down the announcer, whereupon the security guards opened up on the dirty non-incorporates with tear gas and machine guns. Casualties were heavy -- uh, ahem, I.C.M. has decided to discontinue the Cavalcades of Wisdom', at least temporarily. 'I can't understand why young people are reluctant to work towards progress, freedom and happiness by doing what I say as I.C.M. workers -- ' said corporate executive Allen Rosenberg. 'Programming as the ideal occupation for modem man!'... "Success Story! N.A.S.A. scientists have just finished their Progress Report to Congress on their Project Lucifer. The five Station, Project Lucifer, is the lar Project Cerberus, the temporary moon station, which came ject Apollo moon landing. Justifying Apollo, Cerberus and Lucifer, which do not seem to have yielded much of practical value, N.A.S.A chief David Sarlin cried hotly. 'You must believe in pure research -- all sorts of wonderful applications come from it in many different areas! Why, we might find a new cheap food supply, or a way to help our emotionally disturbed citizens.' Congressman Steadman asked have been devoted to food research or Disturbed Area Aid, since this might result in great advances for Dr. Sarlin's vaulted space science. Dr. Sarlin did not reply to this, but instead asked for more money for Project Coprofhile, an attempt to make the moon habitable. 'I don't care for the direction we're taking,' despaired Congressman Steadman... Automated president? A highly placed authority at Michigan Multiversity revealed today that -- " t t  utomated president? Then I.C.M. will really be here to stay," said Randall. "What're you doing after lunch?" "Huh? Working this afternoon, I suppose." Zirkle was uneasy, then recalled he had to phone Barbara. Randall explained about the special election hours, and Zirkle rejoiced; he'd spend the afternoon with his girl. "Voting?" "No, I didn't even register, I -- maybe we'd better get back." Their timing was good, a few minutes later Zirkle plunged into the debugging of Lemer's prediction program. The actual sequence was fairly short. Zirkle couldn't find any errors, though he lengthened it slightly to save some execution time. This was the work he loved; to seize a field of logical elements and processes; to order and pattern them; then refine that pattern to the limits of logic and the machine. He was a good programmer, but Barbara wasn't home when he called. Outside, in the pale warmth of a November noon, the streets and park were filled with business people, students, and the inevitable unemployed. Sometimes in the shiny corridors you forgot that New York City was itself one of the largest of the E.D.A.s. Lerner's introduction to the predictor program (to give the debugger some common sense) had noted there was precious little healthy, prosperous ground in the United States; madness or poverty; Manhattan or Appalachia; emotionally disturbed or economically depressed; the statistical chart looked like a warped, engorged and withered chessboard instead of a map; as if the logic of the plenty machine had been sickened and grown cancerous when applied to men. He stood still, wondering what to do, while the crowds surged around him. Their talk was no comfort. "I mean, the great thing about it is when you're smoking you have this great feeling, like you're really great, and when you stop smoking it doesn't go away. You still feel terrific -- " "So the guidance guy said; 'I kid you not I.C.M. is here to stay, a college degree is the least, and I'll clue you in, there won't be any jobs for less than an M.A., so you'd have to be really crazy to ask for a leave of -- " "Sure, her and her roommate, really emancipated women. If she dares bring a boy in the apartment the other one dams the door, locks it, and gets on the phone to her father. Same thing the other way -- " ( ( VT othing to do so, we drove  around in his Cadillac and asked these women for directions, then grabbed their purses. Feigenbaum wanted to beat this little old lady to death with a baseball bat, but I said -- " "Listen, Louise, let's face it, we're both seniors. It's time to stop going out with Negroes and start going out with pre-dentistry majors." Maybe she went out for something, or to go to the john. Zirkle made his way through the weary crowd across the Park. "David, I don't care, I want to spend my whole life with you and I know we can work hard enough to have a healthy marriage and bring up some healthy, un-neurotic children." He tried to stay with the students; they were twitchy but cheerful. Nevertheless he found it hard to avoid the others; business people fearing for their jobs; young men who'd never held any, baffled behind beards and guitars; worst of all those who could not comprehend any other condiones, many of them from minority groups, some of whom had been on the dole for three generations. At least here they had something to do; sing and laugh and preen themselves on grass or concrete; jeans and pullovers, flannel shirts and short shorts; a place to go, a system of behavior, people to talk to. Only on Lemer's charts was this place labeled "Failure Pool", but how many people could or cared to compete with steel and spacistors? For this was The Great New Fact of his world: most people were superfluous. Zirkle shrugged; Barbara was enough concern. And yet the problem held him. Down streets thick with browsers and the bored he sought faces touched with courage or a private cheer, but there was nothing, or perhaps he'd grown unused to gauging other men; the machine mages had little use for such skills. And Barbara wasn't there. His people success, his all-absorbing triumph outside numbers, only now he was beginning to see how important; skirts, sweaters, jeans, books and prints and Beatle X records and that was all. The room hovered silently around him, suddenly smaller; the big old drafting table they used for studying, the couch that folded out into a double bed, a bunch of snapshots from this summer taped to the wall. He could go running about now; the Co-Op, bookstore, library, three sorts of friends becoming one. But the relationship was built on trust and self-trust; pride and confidence shored it up. To go racing around would cancel it out, and besides, well, she knew what was doing, if she didn't want any more of -- but he didn't carry that through, just left a note and was down the stairs, out in the street where people tumbled past, his feet at random this Election Day, thinking about Kafka. Ill H e had read The Castle and The Trial and remembered them. He recalled the Land Surveyor, K., in The Castle hopelessly trying to reach the Castle authorities, never even really certain they existed. The Trial's poor hero was in an even worse state; ignorant of the reasons for his arrest; his captors refusing to explain or name their superiors, he spent the rest of his life in court, fighting a charge he never even knew. Kafka's world was a hideous, desolate, incomprehensible place. Yet Michael could see how Kafka might mean a great deal to some people; sometimes he found himself baffled and enraged by organizations like N.Y. M., or occasionally depressed by his work to the point where it all seemed meaningless. Alienation the feeling was called. Modem life was too big and complex; people couldn't seem to feel in touch with anything, they had no place. With automation's plenty machines, even the goal, duty and purpose of work was gone. So people felt helpless, small, and afraid. He wished he could think about these things another way, but the jargon of sociology was all he knew; Barbara and his courses required nearly all his time. This was perhaps his first walk outside the campus this year. On impulse, he stepped from the sunlit street into a bar. After his eyes had adjusted to the dark narrow crowded room, he began to casually study the other patrons. In a few minutes he had them divided up. The first sort might be nervous, but they had energy and vigor. They stood up close to the bar and talked or peered at the overhead screen, or sat at tables in the light. The others stood alone or hung back in the gloom, like the commoners of some occupied land; sullen and sly, waiting for their chance. He supposed the split was between those with some goal or satisfactory existence, and those on E.D.A. Relief or close to it He turned his attention to the screen. "Let's turn America into a Fairyland!" a smiling young man with long blond hair and pouting lips cried, "Vote the Gay Ticket! "Yes indeed, friends, we're not apologizing anymore. No indeed. In fact, we sincerely believe ours is not just an acceptable way of life, but rather a desirable, noble, and even preferable sort of existence. For one thing," he chided, "we've got the perfect solution to the population explosion!" A dim cheer, interspaced with laughter and a few cat-calls, went up in the bar. "So remember, vote the Gay Ticket, and life will be one long camping trip. Elect our candiLemer's introduction had mentioned the Homosexual Party. It was to be expected. In a fragmented world where morality had disappeared, where loyalties were hard to come by and harder to hold to, where work was without purpose and impossible to find anyway, people were desperate for any sort of meaning. Even the schizophrenics, desperate to belong, had their own society with it's clever "Com'on Behind the Wall of Glass." He raised his Schiltz and swallowed it slowly. Somebody put some money in the jukebox, and the narrow old room shook to Beatle X's "Girls Are Like Pianos -- Upright or Grand". Zirkle finished his drink and set it down. The atmosphere of the bar was thick, depressing. He went out into the afternoon. Ten blocks further north the monoliths towered all above him ; frozen explosions of brass and steel and glass. Empty this afternoon, hanging their dead tons above the street. Here were the Administrations, the Channels, the Records, The Home Offices of automated America. Away and beyond the city were the next step; the plenty machines, the behemoths -- steel clean -- where people used to be. And what were those people going to do now, those and these too, for paperpushing and cardpunching don't really mean much. Let's face it, friends, I.C.M. is most definitely here to stay. And here was a pebble in his shoe, and he couldn't fit it into an analogy in his train of thought, it hurt a little so Michael stood on one foot and let it drop out, pygmied by the giants' whose sides bore the invisible motto; I.C.M. is here to stay. He hunkered up his jacket and walked on into the wind. He was suddenly self-conscious about thinking about the Big Problems for so long. Modern man; he philosophizes but doesn't bother to vote. He knew when he began to think clever that he was running out of brain. Where do you go from here? Most people were now really superfluous, useless really, adrift in some enormous organization. The world was a Castle, life was a Trial, and why can't you get any further? Why can't you think up something ed faster and faster. S o naturally they would get rid of the government. Franz Kafka for President! Why not? The plenty machines satisfied people's material needs, and society was too fragmented, people too worldly wise to accept any ideas or enthusiasms. Consider them now, the "goals" of modem man: -- space exploration -- but outside his science-fiction friends, he knew few enthusiasts. It was another monolith, too big to like; its heroes too well molded. -- impoverished nations -- real, true, but their woes seemed too big and too old for single people to enjoy abating. And that problem was finite, and you must ask -- is our way any happier? -- scientific research -- an endless frontier, perhaps, but why bother after the ten thousandth law? -- improve our world -- so everyone lives forever, so people have as many children as possible? Everyone can wander around like this, wondering what for? He snapped back to the world and ran pell-mell across the street to a Rexall to try to call Barbara at the apartment. No answer. Her home out in Staten Island. No answer. Her crazy friend Sandra. No answer, no answer, no answer, and he pounded his fist softly against the wooden wall of the phone booth below the carved exchange: Nietzschie: God is dead. God: Nietzschie is dead. You're next! Zirkle came out of the telephone booth slowly, bought a Milky Way, and started back downtown. He tried to pick up his thoughts once again but it was difficult. He hadn't thought out this way before, and in a few moments realized why: Barbara. Before her he'd gotten most of his satisfaction and self-worth from his skill with the machines. To wonder if making sure I.C.M. is here to stay was enough meaning for a life was dangerous for someone with only that for a purpose. Barbara had set him free, or almost so. Proof: the impulse to call her. She was so wonderful. He loved to spend his time with her. And sex, yes, sex, sex, sex but also it was to do things; girls were really so nice, to kid around or study across from her or eat lunch and then go up to sport in their room. And she liked him, loved him. Oh, yes, Barbara had set him free. Oh, yeah, where was he? Destroying the aspirations of his society. All was meaningless, looked at in that funny harsh way, scientific research was, by order from The Castle, becoming a programmer to qualify as a Court Clerk in The Trial. I.C.M. is here to stay, was a grunt, a belch, as meaningful as their old slogan Think. Think about what? Are we better off since I.C.M. is here to stay? So what? Sometimes, when he was a little kid, he thought the adults were working on some sort of grand project, some wonderous task, which he would take a part in when he grew up. Now he was grown up, but there was no project. So what to do now? He walked over two blocks and down into the subway. Behind him, the enormous buildings began to cast the enormous shadows over the avenues. The wind grew colder and fiercer, and raced up and down and around the giants. IV andall's room was a big loft in an old warehouse. Zirkle had aleardy met his roommates: Bennet, the quiet cheerful English major; Oler, the crazy physics major who had to wait till the last term to learn he hated physics, and now taught highschool science to avoid the draft. But Oler was out this evening, as was Barbara when he'd visited their apartment. The room was typically collegiate, a big raw underheated dim dorm ; old wooden desks and chairs, piles of clothing, piles of food, piles of books, piles of lab equipment. Cots. An exotic liquor bottle collection. Chart of the decomposition of a manifold. Swank's "Flip Out Girl of the month." Battered old T.V. that Randall was tuning. "Get That Degree!" said the device. "Still too early for the returns," said Randall, his voice muffled from where his slim form was jack-knifed over the set. "Turn back to that," said Bennet. The English major sat on the arm of one of their big old armchairs, swinging his leg back and forth. "Fine," said Michael. I.C.M. sponsored that show, and he wanted a check on what he'd been thinking about so much. The television set roared: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Get That Degree! -- the television show that proves each week that every American without a college degree is a -- "Yes, friends, Get That Degree! is brought to you by the International Computing Machines Corporation, which also sponsors those other survey-topping (on our own surveys, that is!), those other surveytopping shows: This Will Be Your Life! and This IS the You That Is! "Worried about getting into college, folks? You should be scared stiff! With the population explosion, it is getting tougher and tougher! Not enough teachers, not enough classrooms, especially at those highly rated prestige schools! ! ! Remember that! Why, without a college degree, without those four years and that sheepskin, you won't be able to go to graduate or professional school! And without that, you're dead! No high paying job at a giant corporation! No professional status! Roaming the streets like some kind of a bum! Without that college admission, you might even be drafted, and have some Commie blow your brains out! Obviously you've got to be admitted!" he paused, staring at his audience. "Later on in the show, we'll tell you how to make sure of that thick admissions letter. No guarantees, of course, but a respectable probability. In case you miss it, be sure to write us at Princeton, New Jersey, our famous address. Don't forget our famous motto when planning tomorrow. Remember, 'I.C.M. is here to stay!' "And now, let's Get That Degree! On our show tonight are four famous people you've probably all heard about, or will hear about soon. And here they all are -- " nphe cameras dropped away from the announcer, focusing on the stage behind him. Two young men and two older ones waited quietly. "Let's start with our young people," said the excited announcer. "Here, tonight, representing higher education, is the first prize winner in the Eastinghouse Science Talent Hunt -- winning an Accelerated Ph.D. Scholarship to Cal Tech, a graduate of the New York City Bronx High School of Science, here he is folks -- Steiner Steinstein!" The wizened, bespectacled young man smiled insolently at the audience. "Nice of you to give me all this money," he said coldly. "Now let's meet the stupid uneducated bum! Leaving school at twelve, this young man did nothing but bum from town to town, take odd jobs, have as many girl friends and as much fun as he could, and learn to play the guitar. Three months ago, he won nationwide acclaim for his fantastic song hit; 'Girls Are Like Pianos -- Upright or Grand!' Here he is, folks -- Beatle X!" The cameras swung to the singer, a rough-looking youngster with his big guitar slung on his back. He smiled. "Finally, representing authority and tradition, with us are two members of the faculty of New York Multiversity. First, Dr. Progoff of N.Y.M.'s Computing Facility. Dr. Progoff?" Zirkle's boss stared at the cameras. "I want to wish both boys the best of luck, but I have special feelings for young Steiner Steinstein. America needs people like you, Steiner. The masses of our population need skilled. university-trained leaders like you." Progoff paused. "The more science, the better, of course -- I.C.M. is here to stay, ha-haso life gets so complicated we've got to have experts, guys like you to boss the bums -- uh, ungifted # around. My hat's off to you, Steiner Steinstein #" "Next," cried the announcer, "Lawrence Lemer, Assistant Professor of Sociology at N.Y.M. Dr. Lerner was one member of the committee that proposed the 'alienated vote', and an expert on our nation's unfortunate Emotionally Disturbed Areas. Dr. Lerner?" The cameras swung to Lerner's strained features. He spoke slowly"I'd rather not speak, if you'll excuse me. It's been a pleasure to be here on your program but I've been involved in the election; in fact I've a prediction program running down at the school, and I'm really exhausted." "We all understand," said the announcer slowly. Then he paused dramatically. "Okay, now let's all play Get That DegreeP' T he cameras panned in on the announcer's sweating, wildeyed face. "For those of you who've never seen our show, let me explain that Get That Degree! is the finest in modern scientific entertainment, utilizing electronic genius and middleclass morality to discover the wonderful personal potentials of our young folks. Yes, it's the enormous capacities of your youth for spontaniety, individuality, creativity and originality that interest us here at I.C.M." His voice became a monotone. "Therefore, the two contestants have spent the last three weeks choice and shortanswer questions, blacking in those little I.C.M. spaces on a dozen tests -- personality, aptitude, achievement, creativity, sociability -- everything! The results were fed into one of our I.C.M. alephsub-ninties, and now, tonight, the game will be resolved. Okay, programmers, let's see the results! Steiner Steinstein first!" A low hum mounted in pitch and rhythm, lights flashed on a giant mock computer, a siren screamed. Finally the music ceased, and behind the two young men a tremendous crystal panel glowed into life. The cameras closed on it. It read: I.C.M. Profile ; Steiner Steinstein ern Science. You will make Steiner. Perhaps you will even improve me. Because you are discoveries, you will be happy. You will meet and marry a brilliant girl, and you will have yours. Everyone will love you, have you as a card deck, running rough through my insides. "Isn't that terrific folks! Isn't "Now let's see how our bum made out. Programmers, let's have the profile on our other contestant, Beatle X!" l.C.M. Profile: Beatle X (?) I don't understand what this is about. Is this a person? Oh, well, things look black for this youngster. Though he's had a brief, ephemeral success, I see failure and disaster and doom ahead. His I. Q. is less than #. He can't program a computer or do research. Bad, bad, bad. All he cares about is making money and having fun. He will probably never have any friends. He will always be depressed. Gloom and doom. He can't solve differential equations. I pity him. He will die a long and painful death. Notice: l.C.M. results only have a respectable probability and are not to be taken as the Word of God. Low scorers might consider a career in the U. S. Army, sometimes called "the stupid man's l.C.M.". Or perhaps you are unsuited to an automated culture, and should move to another. Unfortunately, there are no others. "Isn't that terrific, folks," the announcer cried out. "The l.C.M. computer has compared these two very different, unique young men, and discovered the winner and the loser. And the winner is -- Mr., but not for long, Steiner Steinstein!" 'T , here was an enormous burst  of applause, and the orchestra played two full choruses of "My Son, the Scientist". Steiner bowed modestly in the flame of the spotlight. "Congratulations, Steiner! And for your prize, l.C.M. is happy to award you a thousand-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But what about our bum, our loser, Beatle X? Yes, folks, what about the old Beatle?" A purple spot turned the big shaggy youth's face into a death mask, his guitar into a monster's hump. He stood, shoulders slumped, in the somber cone of light, his baffled face staring at the announcer. Suddenly, the spot turned blinding white, as if it had become a laser beamed to bum the low-scorer out of existence, like a moth in a torch. "No folks, I.C.M. hasn't forgotten young X. For young Beatle X still has a chance to Get That Degree, even as you folks in the audience. And he will get it, our mass society needs trained tools and machines. So he'll do it, folks. He'd damn well better!" the announcer finished in a scream, his eyes bulging out. He paused. "Well, now," the man said cheerily, "before the Beatle tells us his decision, let's have a few words from his friends and relatives. Tell us, old folks, should young Beatle X Get That Degree?" The lights dimmed down again. On a phosphorescent screen appeared an anonymous city of enormous size. The cameras flung themselves at it, closing in on a great weary apartment tower, filmed a little with smog and filth. "This is your mother, Beatle," a thin voice quavered. "Please listen to me, dear. Go to their college if you possibly can. Please, do it for me! You made money, but who knows what will happen, who can tell? The only way to be safe is to obey and stay with the big corporations, they're too big to hurt you -- I wasn't, I can't, I'm old and weak and tired, help me, do what they say -- " Another voice, gruff and bitter. "This is your old family doctor, Dr. McCaulley. You listen to I.C.M., they have the money and the power. Go to college, you need that degree, you can't get a job and the world doesn't care, you'll drop dead or go crazy like that, nothing matters -- " "This is your brother's friend Harold, Beatle. You remember me, don't you. I -- I went crazy, there wasn't any work if you weren't a professor, all we could do was hang around and get government money and I wasn't worth anything, it just didn't seem to matter to anybody or me either, nothing to do and sad all the time, might as well -- but I.C.M. helped me, Preg, really they did, a hundred thousand on endocrine treatments and I'm all right now, I'm fine and you don't want to go crazy, it's no fun and bad, do what they say, save yourself before -- " "Look at him, folks!" the Master of Ceremonies chortled. "I'll be surprised if he doesn't go for a Ph.D.!" And indeed the young singer was shaking, one shoulder twitching constantly as if to let fall some terrible burden. His guitar had dropped from his limp hand and rested at his feet. B ennet, shaking with another emotion, strode to the television set and switched channels. More charts, counting boards, and calm-faced men, one of whom murmured; "The slowest election in thirty years, only two per cent of the returns in, but our computer says it looks like ft Randall had grunted when Bennet had switched stations, but now he refocused his attention on the screen. The English major and Zirkle exchanged a slow look, but said nothing. Zirkle slumped wearily in his chair. Another part of the same picture, Michael told himself. When things get big they get complicated, so you've got to have an elite of experts (like himself), with high, moral and good motivation. Also, the program crudely tried to counter the violent anti-intellectualism of the alienated, or at least blunt it. But as the pressure gets higher, the sell gets cruder, of course. He glanced across at Bennet, who was still smiling oddly. "What's so funny?" asked Zirkle lightly. "Nothing much. That program, in a way. They talk about the "Kafka Ballot." Well, Get That Degree is a Kafka joke. They ought to call it Laugh Along with Franz." Zirkle stared across at the other young man, but Bennet returned his gaze evenly and kept on smiling. He'd heard a lot of odd notions, but Kafka as a comedian? The writer of The Castle and The Trial and "Metamorphasis"? Oh, well, the City was an Emotionally Disturbed Area, and college students, English majors especially... "Listen, I want to get some air," said Bennet, getting up. Zirkle nodded and followed him downstairs. Outside the street was wide and empty, cold and clean and bright under the lamps this November night. The moon lay full halfway up the sky, dull orange. There was no wind, but Zirkle buttoned his jacket and both young men walked quickly, Bennet working harder to keep up with the husky, nerve-taunted math major. Zirkle kept his hand in his knife pocket, for New York City had become quite dangerous after dark. Some of his physics friends had built themselves laser guns in the labs. "What did you mean about that program being a big Kafka joke?" Michael asked Bennet truculently. Bennet was silent for a moment. "You haven't taken much lit, have you? It'd take a while to explain -- " "No," said Zirkle, a little tightly. "My major takes # points all by itself, and I've got a job and my girl -- you met Barbara, didn't you?" He hesitated, ready to plung off down a street toward home. But five minutes more? What had Bennet meant? "But anyhow I did read the two important books. Bleak, oppressive -- how can you call Kafka funny?" ttT see," said Bennet "You A didn't read Amerika, did you? Ummm, and in a survey course they try to simplify everything. And after all, Kafka really did have a lot to say about the condition of alienation." "So?" "Okay, so now I want you to forget science for a few minutes. Just get away from that point of view and take a look around you!" "Come on!" Bennett looked at him sincerely. "To a philosopher, science as a way of looking at things, the I.C.M. approach, is really pretty limited. Consider some of the basic questions. Nobody knows why he's here on earth. Nobody knows why people are here, or if they're behaving in the 'right' way. Nobody knows, except in a very vague way, what'll happen in the future -- say a minute from now. You don't know what God is, or what he wants, or why the universe is here." "That's philosophy -- " "Sure it is. And I think I've seen you with your girl enough to know you care at least a little about such questions -- " "Well... Zirkle's tone was wary and weary in the street. He tried to see what was coming in Bennet's eyes, but that game was useless, as he'd learned a dozen years before. "Well, what? What about those questions -- and everyone knows about them, and thinks about them, don't kid yourself, smart guy. "Well," Bennet continued sarcastically, then went on in a normal tone of voice, "Well, most people today say -- so what. I get along all right, eat, drink, make love -- that's enough for me. I'll leave stuff like that alone. "Scientists, engineers, the guys at I.C.M., have a few small answers to the important questions, so naturally they think they have 'em all. And one way or another, they've fitted the modem world around those answers. "In the last few years, lots of people haven't been satisfied with the first answer. They've tried to take up the second, but for most of 'em, the 'scientific world' is unbearable -- students going nuts trying to become physicists, those that automation unemploys feeling worthless, the 'unintellectually gifted' getting frustrated. People who have chosen lives without pleasure or satisfaction -- alienated people." Ctvkay, take it easy on the ''lecture," Zirkle told the other young man, although he was becoming excited. Bennet didn't explain everything, but what he said made sense, more sense than -- "Now what Kafka did as a writer was to play games with those terrible fundamental questions I was talking about -- what is life? Who is God?, and so on. The terrible guilt we all sometimes feel and can't explain is like the accused's crime in The Trial. The Land Surveyor in The Castle who can never reach his superiors or find out what they want -- well, if you've ever worked in a large organization  "Still, I don't think he's so funny -- " "That's because you're thinking as the Land Surveyor, not as the author. Kafka jokes by fantastic exaggeration, like The Trial that goes on for a man's whole life." "Still I don't see -- " "Did you ever read his "Investigations of a Dog?" It's all about this dog philosopher, trying to solve the Greatest Problem of Canine Philosophy: Will the food still come down if dogs don't keep watering the earth? Only whenever he thinks he's beginning to get anywhere on the solution, this other dog from across the street comes to visit him and gets him so excited he can't think afterwards about the great problem for hours. "You see, the dog hasn't a chance of solving the problem, it's an impossible problem, because the dog hasn't the smallest notion of what his real relationship to his superiors (man and the Universe) really is. Kafka's laughing at us, smiling at our notions of what are the big problems, what God is and what he wants, what are and aren't distractions. It's the cast of 'Laugh Along with Franz'. Like that silly show we just watched -- as steins could help each of us with the problems of our lives." "Okay," said Michael. "Sure, sure, now I see, everyone so grimly certain they have the answer -- " He slackened the pace a little. The streets were deserted, the moon and stars making them dimly luminous. Across the dark nation, in a hundred thousand voting booths, Franz was roaring. "And the Kafka ballot -- you think that's another joke? If no one has faith in the government and everyone's depressed -- " "I really don't know," the English major confessed. "In a way, to me, it is. But I don't know, I don't want to apply my philosophy that far. That problem is too big and strange and real." Michael looked across at him, but the other boy stayed silent. P resently they came around a corner and were back at the apartment. Neither one cared to speak anymore. They climbed the stairs wearily. Zirkle stopped just inside the door and said good-by to the others. "Hey, Michael, remember Lerner's program, the one you were debugging this, morning?" asked Randall, his lean face peaking out from behind a massive old armchair. "Well, if I'm right, they got the results back from the multiversity and put them on about twenty minutes ago." He gestured at the screen. "With five per cent of the vote in, the computers said the alienated vote would be a plurality." "Well, I guess it's still too early to really tell," said Zirkle dully, knowing he lied. "I guess I'll be seeing you in class tomorrow, Toby." "Right-o." "Nice talking to you, Bennet," Zirkle said. "Anytime, Zirkle. Be seeing you." "Sure. G'by." Michael was out in the street before he realized he should have called ahead. He shrugged and went on eagerly through streets somehow wearier than himself. He'd thought too much, he could feel himself needing Barbara, all the rest seemed foolishness. And what had came of it, anyhow? Beside the monoliths uptown, and again watching Get That Degree, he'd felt a powerful impulse to switch his major, get away from the machines perhaps even quit, school. But he'd have to think of some real alternates before he'd do anything. And all this new swim of ideas. Maybe in stories people made sudden definite decisions, took violent action. Not him. Oddly, in the dynamic modem world, with the greatest freedom of action in history, everyone in everyway, became cautious, demuring, passive. But what would happen when Franz was elected. Stupid! he told himself... Franz Kafka was running. The president would be the real candidate with the greatest number of votes. The alienated voters wouldn't be getting anything, wouldn't be saying anything. Or would they? Yes, he could see it, Bennet had been too cautious. The alienated voters were casting the strongest ballot of all. They were laughing along with Franz. 'Tphe scientists, the government, including both parties, the big corporations and big universities. There was little choice among them, for a vote or for a life. Together, they'd created automation and the Economically Depressed Areas, Get That Degree! and the Emotionally Disturbed Areas. Democrat or Republican. I.C.M. or California Multiversity, the differences were only superficial. Those who'd voted for Kafka had taken a real stand, showed their dissatisfaction with the whole mess. The politicians wouldn't make long speeches about apathy to the electorate; instead, they'd have to defend were angry and frustrated and said it. More than that, they'd asserted that they had personal problems of their own, concerns that were important to them alone and to which the great social structures were irrelevant. The Kafka Ballot was no solution. But perhaps it was the first step in a new approach. Automation and the Cold War, space flight and over-population -- modern problems were too big, they could do little now but terrify and frustrate. The alienated vote could give people a chance to say how they felt; to relax, to 'laugh with Franz." Zirkle thought of Judo. Sometimes you won by relaxing. That was what the Kafka Ballot was. A request for freedom, to let each person find his own answers in his own way. Not that he had any, at least not yet. But at least he had a clearer eye. So he knew how important it was that Barbara should be waiting for him, and she was. For nearly a minute after he came in he simply watched her in silent pleasure, smiling happily. In those seconds she tried to tell him about the letter that had come for him at ten, how the machines had made a mistake about him, not recorded his registration, so that he had effectively vanished from the school: they'd cancelled his I.D., bursar receipt, and class admission tickets, taken back his scholarship awards, and sent him a Draft notice. And she'd been excited and been running round for him all day, trying to get someone in authority to admit that he existed. She was tired and a reaction of annoyance at him had set in, but he didn't let it come out that way. He embraced her powerfully (a lot of that was needed), and teased her anger into ardour, so her fury was exhausted in amourous combat. Afterwards, staring up at the ceiling with Barbara slumbering warmly beside him, Michael thought of what the machines had done. Perhaps the devices had not really made a mistake at all, but perhaps in some dark aspect were aware... His fatigue explained such foolishness. "Kizme," mumbled Barbara in the darkness, and he did. Hovering on the threshold of sleep, his arm around her, Michael wondered, as he would always wonder, what it really was all about, what he really was here for, and finally, what would happen tomorrow and after that. He awoke before his girl the next day, to silence and grayness. His eyes touched his library of manuals and texts and tapes, and he hovered on depression. But then he looked at Barbara, and realized with a happy start how nice it was to wake up next to her. A little while later, he was not too unsettled to learn that Franz Kafka had been elected Presiyour information M y mail consists not only of letters, bills, announcements and ads, it also offers a fair share of news releases of all kinds. One of these was a summary of statistics on the connection of smoking with lung cancer, nice statistics that did not mention exhaust fumes from motor vehicles even once. Some tentative opinions, for both medical and legal, were appended, requiring careful reading; so careful in fact that I let my cigar go out while wading through them. After re-lighting it I sat back and remembered. The first World War lasted from #-# -- which in terms of my own life spanned the ages from eight to twelve. Of course I did not yet smoke myself then, but I remember the complaint's of the adults, mainly those of my own grandfather and his friends and neighbors. These complaints did not deal with the fact that their sons and nephews and younger brothers were in the frontlines; that was a fate one had to accept. The complaints were about the butter ration (one ounce per adult per week) and the impossibly bad quality of the cigars and cigarettes -- if they were available at all. One neighbor of the do-it-yourself type announced that mixing one third of tobacco with one third of dried willow leaves and one third of walnut leaves produced a smokable mixture. Of course I now know how lucky they all were since animal fats like butter contribute to heart attacks and as for smoking -- but you know that story. O ne of my habits is that I am fond of old books and I now suspect that handling paper several hundred years old has some horrible medical consequences yet unknown -- their discoverer may just be waiting for computer time -- but in the meantime I learn things and write historical essays from time to time. And one such essay, that has been in the back of my mind for quite some time, happens to be about tobacco. There are four useful plants of American origin that have conquered the world. They are the potato, maize (or Indian com), the tomato (once suspected of being poisonous, but what would the Italians be doing without it?) and finally the "healthful aromatick herbe" tobacco. There are some countries, mainly around the Mediterranean, where the potato plays a minor role. There are others, like northern Europe, where maize is considered fine poultry feed. Some countries, mainly in Asia, still do without tomatos. But there is no country on this planet which has refused tobacco. No other plant, or product, has ever conquered the world so quickly. Of course there are several species of the tobacco plant. The one that produces nearly all the smoking tobacco for the western world, bearing the botanical name Nicotiana tabacum, originally grew in South America, Mexico and the West Indies. The North American species is Nicotiana rustica which is not cultivated in North America any more, but in the Soviet Union and Asia minor. It produces the kind of tobacco the Russians call makhorka. The best looking flowers are those of Nicotiana sylvestris, so this species is cultivated for ornamental purposes. Contrary to what you may have read somewhere there is no native species of Nicotiana in Africa or anywhere else in the world with a single exception: Nicotiana suaveolens and its relatives of North Australia. When the Europeans came to the western hemisphere they found the natives smoking. Few of them, if any, were sufficiently learned to know that inhaling the smoke of certain herbs was an old invention and that it just so happened that it was not done in Europe at the time. To them smoking was something marvelous that they had never seen or even heard about. Of course they tried it. The Spaniards that had gone to Cuba and Mexico tried the native cigars, consisting of tobacco leaves wrapped in a dry palm leaf. The English that had gone to Roanoke Island tried the pipe and one of them, the mathematician Thomas Hariot (he returned with Sir Francis Drake) later wrote that "the fumes... not only preserve the body, but if there are obstructions it breaks them up. By this means the natives keep in excellent health, without any of the grievous diseases which often inflict us in England." I ncidentally, it is said that it was Thomas Hariot who taught Sir Walter Raleigh to smoke, at any event Hariot smoked at an earlier date than Raleigh. One wonders what happened to them the first time they tried. We have a classical description of the results of a first encounter with tobacco smoke from the pen of the famous Swiss physician Conrad Gesner of Zurich. Gesner, official city physician, was then working on a book on plants, with special attention to their medicinal value. He wrote innumerable letters to other learned men, asking for specimens and pictures of plants that did not grow in and near Zurich. One of his correspondents, Occo by name, sent him a tobacco leaf and while Gesner did not live to finish his book on plants, the report on his experiments that he sent to Occo has been preserved. The letter was written in #, the original language is Latin. In translation, the pertinent portion reads: The leaf which Funke received from you has been sent to me, I assume you got it from France. Since you did not give its name and did not describe its effects (the original used the word "virtues") I decided to test it myself by chewing but without swallowing the juice. Even a small portion of the large leaf had such an effect that I was like drunk and staggered as if I tried to walk on deck of a ship that travelled rapidly down river. A second and third try had the same result. I then recalled having read that an American herb is reported to have a similar effect but that the natives use it every day for fumigation. I crumbled a portion of the leaf and dropped it onto glowing charcoal and pulled the smoke into my mouth by using a funnel. I felt nothing unpleasant except a sharp taste. The following day I inhaled a large quantity of the smoke and felt some vertigo, though less than after chewing the leaf. The plant has a wonderful power of producing a kind of peaceful drunkenness... I feel certain that it is the same plant which the French have named Nicotiana after their ambassador Nicot. If you have a few more leaves please send me some more so that I can complete my investigation. As far as is known Gesner did not receive additional leaves, but he mentioned the effects of tobacco smoke several times later, he seems to have been very much intrigued by it, both as a person and as a physician. Before going on with the history of tobacco in Europe I have to add a few words about smoking before the discovery of America. The first and oldest witness is the Father of History, Herodotus, who reported that the Scythians carried red-hot stones into a tent, sprinkled hemp seed over the glowing stones and enjoyed inhaling the smoke. Roman legionnaires became acquainted with the smoking of hemp leaves (hashish, marihuana) repeatedly in history. Still another kind of smoking is mentioned in a poem of Spanish origin, dated #, which states: "they say that lavender has the virtue of dispelling sleep and of giving strength to those who inhale its smoke." I VTo one man, of any specific ' nationality, introduced tobacco in Europe. Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen and Englishmen were all engaged in the New World. All of them encountered tobacco, most of them started to smoke and any number of un#) One of the German Herbals of the sixteenth century menUons a use of lavender that sounds more reasonable to us: "Take a vase of clay and  ut Into It layers of the blossoms of avendula and the leaves of Centlfolia. Put Allspice among the leaves and a little salt. In winter place the vase on top of a hot stove and a pleasant smell will pervade the room." known sailors must have taken seeds home. The historical problem is also complicated by two facts of Nature. One is that tobacco seeds are small, an empty inkhom used as a container would hold enough seeds to seed acres of it. The second is that the plant itself is pretty, nobody would plant tomato plants for decoration, but tobacco plants were and still are so used. When Edmund Howes wrote in his "Generali Chronicle of England", published in #, that: "Tobacco was first brought and made known in England by Sir Iohn Hawkins, about the yeare #, but not used by Englishmen in many yeeres after..." he just summarized local tradition and that tradition was probably correct. The testimony of a Spanish physician, Dr. Monardes of Sevilla, printed in #I emphasizes this point too. "This herb commonly called Tabaco is a very ancient herb known among the Indians, chiefly those of New Spain. After taking possession of these countries our Spaniards, being instructed by the Indians, availed themselves of this herb... A few years ago it was brought over to Spain, to adorn gardens so that with its beauty it would afford a pleasing sight, rather than that its marvelous virtues were taken into considerOne of the earliest published pictures of the tobacco plant; from Monardes' Newts of the Now-found World e, printed in London in #. ation. Now we use it to a greater extent for the sake of its virtues than for its beauty..." Since the plant came "quietly" and often, nobody troubled noting down dates, Dr. Monardes "a few years ago" can mean six years or twelve or even twenty. It happens to be known that tobacco was grown in Portugal in # and from Portugal it came to France. But the introduction into France came with a flourish and two people fought for the honor of having introduced it. It is mainly because of the fact that one man cried out in print "I did it first" that we know the details. He was Andre Thevet, born at Angouleme in #. He joined the Franciscan order and accompanied a French expedition to South America as ship's chaplain in #. He spent a total of three months at what is now Rio de Janeiro, joined in a short expedition to La Plata and then returned to France where he wrote a book, published in #. Its title was Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommee Amerique, using the word "antarctic" quite loosely to mean "south of the equator". It may be this book that Gesner had read. Thevet not only described the cigars of the South American Indians, he also said that he had tried it himself and mentioned (from hearsay) that tobacco was smoked in pipes in Canada. But he did not say (in his book) that he brought samples of the leaves, or seeds, back with him. 'T'he other side of the story deals with Monsieur Jean Nicot, bom in # as the son of a notary public and sent to Paris for his education. Jean Nicot did well in public life; in # he was sent to Portugal as the French ambassador. One version has it that he saw the plant growing in the prison garden, another that it was cultivated in the Royal Garden of Lisbon -- it probably grew in both places. Nicot heard about its medicinal value, started experimenting, and after effecting some cures in Lisbon he dispatched leaves, seeds and instructions for use t the king of France, Francois I, and the queen-mother Catherine de Medici. The instructions were to use it as snuff. Francois I suffered from recurrent headache and was "marvellously cured" by the use of snuff (sinus trouble?). Catherine did not mind that tobacco was referred to as herbe de la Reine, the queen's herb, and tobacco culture in France started in #. In #I Nicot returned to France and by # botanists referred to tobacco as Nicotiane. Frater Andre Thevet exploded with indignation and wrote another book, published in #, claiming that he had brought tobacco seeds with him on his return from Brazil in #, that he had raised the plants and named them herbe Angoulmoisine, a name derived from the name of his birthplace. And he complained bitterly that "somebody who has not even made a voyage" attached his name to the plant. Well, it is perfectly clear what Nicot did, it is also certain that Thevet was the first Frenchman to write about tobacco. But most French historians do not believe his later claim that he raised it in France. They are probably justified, for the existence of the plant on French soil would have become known quickly, at least among physicians. A s regards England Sir John Hawkins probably was the first to bring in seeds, at least the date fits in with the existence of places where Nicotiana rustica was grown soon after. The superior Central and South American Nicotiana tabacum came somewhat later. Its first description, in England, that is, can be found in a work never printed. Its died in #, the manuscript is preserved in the Diocesan Library at Derry, Ireland. I am quoting the following passages after Dr. Berthold Laufer who was curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, now the Chicago Museum of Natural History. It is not known to me whether Dr. Laufer made these excerpts himself or whether "English Chronology" have been published somewhere. At any event this is what Harrison wrote down under the heading #: In these daies the taking-in of the smoke of the Indian herbe called 'Tabaco", by an instrument formed like a little ladell, whereby it passeth from the mouth into the hed and stomach, is gretlie taken-up and used in England, against Rewmes and some other diseases ingendred in the longes and inward partes, and not without effect... The herbe is comonly of the height of a man, garnished with great long leaves like the paciens, bering seede... the herbe it self yerely coming up also of the shaking of the seede. The colour of the floure is carnation, resembling that of lemmon in forme: the roote yellow, with many fiilettes, and therto very small in comparison, if you respect the substauns of the herbe. This is an eye-witness description of Nicotiana tabacum which could not have come from the Roanoke colony. Of course by then it was grown in Portugal. Spain and France so that the seeds that were planted in England might not have cross the Atlantic. The early history of tobacco in England is even more dramatic than in France. In France it was merely a question of one man claiming a priority he could not prove. In England the king himself, James I, reached for the goosequill to write A Counterblaste to Tobacco, published in #. # "The ApUh Art of Tatting", an illustration from on early anti-tobacco pamphlet. Jant fo make clear what the author felt, the artist included the figure of an ape. Now to the corrupted basenesse of the first use of this Tobacco, doeth very well agree the foolish and groundlesse first entry thereof into this Kingdome. It is not so long since the first entry of this abuse amongst us here... It was neither brought in by King, great Conquerour, nor learned Doctor of Phisicke. With the report of a great discovery for a Conquest, some two or three Savage men, were brought in, together with #) The complete text can be found In most large libraries under the title English Reprints, compiled by Edward Arber, London #. this Savage custome. But the pitie is, the poore wilde barbarous men died, but that vile barbarous custome is yet alive, yea in fresh vigor... James I, being king, could do more than publish an energetic condemnation. He could raise the import tax and did. Under Queen Elizabeth the import tax had been two pence per pound, # pence, a mere # per cent increase. This nearly ruined the Virginia colony that depended on tobacco. Bermuda which tried to live on tobacco growing, also fared poorly. King James finally solved his problem in a not unusual manner, by creating a monopoly. No tobacco imports were allowed, except from Virginia, and nobody was permitted to sell tobacco, except those persons who held a special royal warrant created for this purpose. The warrant could be obtained for a fee of # pounds and it had to be renewed every year by payment of a like amount. A fter the raising of the import tax, which happened in #, and before the creation of the monopoly precisely twenty years later, tobacco was quite expensive in London. It was sold by placing a silver coin on one scale and putting loose tobacco on the other until the scales balanced. (Things haven't changed too much. I just found out that my cigars, which cost a quarter a piece, need two quarter coins to balance on the postage scale.) In spite of the high price business was flourishing, as can be found out from a book with the unlikely title The Honestie of this Age, Prooving by good circumstance that the world was never honest  till now, written by a "Servant to the Kings most excellent Maiestie" by the name of Barnabee Rych. He said that in and near London there are # shops, by very conservative estimate, that "doth vent Tobacco" and that it would be "an ill customed shoppe that taketh not that every tobacco shop sells only day. "Let us reckon thus, # halfe Crowns a day, amounteth just to # poundes a yeare. Summa totalis, All spent in smoake During the seventeenth century quite a number of gentlemen stated publicly that the tobacco grown in England was inferior to that grown in the colonies. That statement would have made sense if the English tobacco had all been Nicotiana rustica and that of the American colonies Nicotiana tabacum. But both types were grown in England, and Virginia grew Nicotiana rustica only, as far as one can find out. Hence one may suspect that the gentlemen who made these statements either tried to please the king, or else that they had holdings in the colonies. Charles II who ruled from # to # simply forbade planting of tobacco in England, so as to favor the colonies. His Justices of peace could order the destruction of tobacco plants and of ground where the plants grew. (Herb gardens for medicinal purposes were exempt.) The Justices were also instructed to watch for people cutting walnut leaves (!) for adulterating tobacco. The fine for cutting any kind of leaves for pound of leaves. It is interesting that Charles II still exempted herb gardens because he must have grown up with the barrage of pamphlets that either praised the medicinal value of tobacco to the sky or "proved" that it had never done anybody any good. James I, in his Counterblaste had written that the so-called virtues were just based on fashion and imitation. "For such is the corruption of envie bred in the brest of every one, as we cannot be content unlesse we imitate every thing that our fellowes doe, and so proove our selves capable of every thing whereof they are capable... He went on to say: "If a man smoke himself to death with it, O then some other disease must beare the blame for that fault." An anonymous Englishman in # had even gone so far in condemnation of tobacco that he put the lines Better be chokt with English hemp, than poisoned with Indian Tobacco on the title page of his pamphlet. Charles II presumably had concluded that tobacco might have medicinal value since many doctors said so. He wisely paid attention to the financial aspects only. 'TT'he introduction of tobacco on the European continent was unaccompanied by such turbulence, presumably because France was the pace setter and if the king of France was in favor of the new herb no lesser person should have an opinion. Apparently much tobacco was imported into the Netherlands and Lower Germany from the Iberian peninsula in the form of "ropes" of dry leaves which were packed in baskets. Now the Spanish word for basket is canastro and for some time the tobacco itself was called canaster; the Germans then shortened this to Knaster. But while the generals of Frederick the Great just meant pipe tobacco when they bought Knaster in a store, the word now means an inferior tobacco, a home-cured weed good only for pipes and to be smoked outdoors. In Italy everything went peacefully too. The plant itself was introduced, as a botanical novelty, twice, in #I by Prospero Cardinal Santa Croce who had seen it in Portugal while on a diplomatic mission, and once by Nicolo Tomabuoni in about # who saw it in Paris, also while on a diplomatic mission. Smoking was brought to Italy by the Cardinal Crescenzio in about #, he had learned it in England. The Catholic Church took a stand in the tobacco questhreatened excommunication to anyone who would smoke inside a church. In Russia, as usual, things went from one extreme to the other. In # the Grandduke of Muscovy forbade the use and sale of tobacco, on the grounds that many subjects spent all their money on tobacco and vodka and, when drunk, set their houses afire because of carelessness in smoking. The penalty was slitting of the nostrils, in minor cases only a severe whipping. However, the edict did not apply to foreigners residing in Moscow, the results of a law that applied to some people, but not to all of them, is easy to imagine. But the day was saved for Russian smokers when Peter the Great ascended the throne in #. Pyotr Alekseyevitch, to call him by his native name, had become a smoker in England. And he had also learned of the monopoly decreed by James I. He was interested in both aspects of the case and, being a practical man, made an agreement with the Marquis of Carmarthen who acted for an English company. The English company got the right tobacco into Russia every year. The Czar received # pound sterling, and the Russians were free to smoke, all earlier edicts and laws having been revoked by the Czar. Well, that is an outline of the conquest of the earth as performed by an American plant. And I don't even have to think of a good ending for this column, because Lord Byron was kind enough to supply me with one: Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe, When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe; Like other charmers, wooing the caress, More dazzlingly when daring in full dress; Yet thy true lovers more admire by far Thy naked beauties -- Give Don't miss the new Worlds of Tomorrow! by Philip K. Dick Author of The Mon in the High Castle, etc. And now In every Issue of Worldi of Tomorrow, e riot by adonoo fiction' loading historian -- Thoso and many othor writing starlet and features in Worlds of Tomorrow -- retires your copy at year favorite newsstand, or subscribe today! The Brotherhood provided men with a morolity and a dream -- and a threat of doom, tool I I f Acolyte Third Level Christopher Mondschein had a weakness, it was that he wanted very badly to live forever. The yearning for everlasting life was a common enough human desire, and not really reprehensible. But Acolyte Mondschein carried it a little too far. "After all," one of his superiors found it necessary to remind him, "your function in the Brotherhood is to look after the wellbeing of others. Not to feather your own nest. Acolyte Mondschein. Do I make that clear?" "Perfectly clear, Brother," said Mondschein tautly. He felt ready to explode with shame, guilt and anger. "I see my error. I ask forgiveness." "It isn't a matter of forgiveness, Acolyte Mondschein," the older man replied. "It's a matter of understanding. I don't give a damn for forgiveness. What are your goals, Mondschein? What are you after?" The Acolyte hesitated a moment before answering -- both because it was always good policy to weigh one's words before saying anything to a higher member of the Brotherhood, and because he knew he was on very thin ice. He tugged nervously at the pleats of his robe and let his eyes wander through the Gothic magnificence of the chapel. They stood on the balcony, looking down at the nave. No service was in progress, but a few worshippers occupied the pews anyway, kneeling before the blue radiance of the small cobalt reactor on the front dais. It was the Nyack chapel of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, third largest in the New York area, and Mondschein had joined it six months before, the day he turned twenty-two. He had hoped, at the time, that it was genuine religious feeling that had impelled him to pledge his fortunes to the Vorsters. Now he was not so sure. He grasped the balcony rail and said in a low voice, "I want to help people, Brother. People in general and people in particular. I want to help them find the way. And I want mankind to realize its larger goals. As Vorst says -- " "Spare me the scriptures, Mondschein." "I'm only trying to show you -- " "I know. Look, don't you understand that you've got to move upward in orderly stages? You can't go leapfrogging over your superiors, Mondschein, no matter how impatient you are to get to the top. Come into my office a moment." "Yes, Brother Langholt. Whatever you say." Mondschein followed the older man along the balcony and into the administrative wing of the chapel. The building was fairly new, and strikingly handsome -- a far cry from the shabby slumarea storefronts of the first Vorster chapels, a quarter of a century before. Langholt touched a bony hand to the stud, and the door of his office irised quickly. They stepped through. I t was a small, austere room, dark and somber, its ceiling groined in good Gothic manner. Bookshelves lined the side walls. The desk was a polished ebony slab on which there glowed a miniature blue light, the Brotherhood's symbol. Mondschein saw something else on the desk: the letter he had written to District Supervisor Kirby, requesting a transfer to the Brotherhood's genetic center at Santa Fe. Mondschein reddened. He reddened easily; his cheeks were plump and given to blushing. He was a man of slightly more than medium height, a little on the fleshy side, with dark coarse hair and close-set, earnest features. Mondschein felt absurdly immature by comparison with the gaunt, ascetic-looking man more than twice his age who was giving him this dressing-down. Langholt said, "As you see, we've got your letter to Supervisor Kirby." "Sir, that letter was confidential. I -- " "There are no confidential letters in this order, Mondschein! It happens that Supervisor Kirby turned this letter over to me himself. As you can see, he's added a memorandum." Mondschein took the letter. A brief note had been scrawled across its upper left corner: "He's awfully in a hurry, isn't he? Take him down a couple of pegs. R. K." The acolyte put the letter down and waited for the withering blast of scorn. Instead, he found the older man smiling gently. "Why did you want to go to Santa Fe, Mondschein?" "To take part in the research there. And the -- the breeding program." "You're not an esper." "Perhaps I've got latent genes, though. Or at least maybe some manipulation could be managed so my genes would be important to the pool. Sir, you've got to understand that I wasn't being purely selfish about this. I want to contribute to the larger effort." "You can contribute, Mondschein, by doing your maintenance work, by prayer, by seeking converts. If it's in the cards for you to be called to Santa Fe, you'll be called in due time. Don't you think there are others much older than you who'd like to go there? Myself? Brother Ashton? Supervisor Kirby himself? You walk in off the street, so to speak, and after a few months you want a ticket to utopia. Sorry. You can't have one that easily, Acolyte Mondschein." "What shall I do now?" (( T)urify yourself. Rid yourself of pride and ambition. Get down and pray. Do your daily work. Don't look for rapid preferment. It's the best way not to get what you want." "Perhaps if I applied for missionary service," Mondschein suggested. "To join the group going to Venus -- " Langholt sighed. "There you go again! Curb your ambition, Mondschein!" "I meant it as a penance." "Of course. You imagine that those missionaries are likely to become martyrs. You also imagine that if by some fluke you go to Venus and don't get skinned alive, you'll come back here as a man of great influence in the Brotherhood, who'll be sent to Santa Fe like a warrior going to Valhalla. Mondschein. Mondschein, you're so transparent! You're verging on heresy, Mondschein, when you refuse to accept your lot." "Sir, I've never had any traffic with the heretics. I -- " "I'm not accusing you of anything," Langholt said heavily. "I'm simply warning you that you're heading in an unhealthy direction. I fear for you. Look -- " He thrust the incriminating letter to Kirby into a disposal unit, where it flamed and was gone instantly. "I'll forget that this whole episode ever happened. But don't you forget it. Walk more humbly, Mondschein. Walk more humbly, I say. Now go and pray. Dismissed." "Thank you, Brother," Mondschein muttered. His knees felt a little shaky as he made his way from the room and took the spiral slideshaft downward into the chapel proper. All things considered, he knew he had got off lightly. There could have been a public reprimand. There could have been a transfer to some not very desirable place, like Patagonia or the Aleutians. They might even have separated him from the Brotherhood entirely. It had been a massive mistake to go over Langholt's head, Mondschein agreed. But how could a man help it? To die a little every day, while in Santa Fe they were choosing the ones who would live forever -- it was intolerable to be on the outside. Mondschein's spirit sank at the awareness that now he had almost certainly cut himself off from Santa Fe for good. T T e slipped into a rear pew and stared solemnly toward the cobalt-# cube on the altar. Let the Blue Fire engulf me, he begged. Let me rise purified and cleansed. Sometimes, kneeling before the altar, Mondschein had felt the ghostly flicker of a spiritual experience. That was the most he ever felt, for, though he was an acolyte of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, and was a second-generation member of the cult at that, Mondschein was not a religious man. Let others have ecstasies before the altar, he thought. Mondsruein knew the cult for what it was: a front operation masking an elaborate program of genetic research. Or so it seemed to him, though there were times when he had his doubts which was the front and which the underlying reality. So many others appeared to derive spiritual benefits from the Brotherhood -- while he had no proof that the laboratories at Santa Fe were accomplishing anything at all. He closed his eyes. His head sank forward on his breast. He visualized electrons spinning in their orbits. He silently repeated the Electromagnetic Litany, calling off the stations of the spectrum. He thought of Christopher Mondschein living through the ages. A stab of yearning sliced through him while he was still telling off the middling frequencies. Long before he got to the softer X-rays, he was in a sweat of frustration, sick with the fear of dying. Sixty, seventy more years and his number was up, while at Santa Fe -- Help me. Help me. Help me. Somebody help me. I don't want to diet Mondschein looked to the altar. The Blue Fire flickered as though to mock him by going out altogether. Oppressed by the Gothic gloom, Mondschein sprang to his feet and rushed out into the open air. II T Te was a conspicuous figure, in his indigo robe and monkish hood. People stared at him as though he had some supernatural power. They did not look closely enough to see that he was only an acolyte, and, though many of them were Vorsters themselves, they never managed to understand that the Brotherhood had no truck with the supernatural. Mondschein did not have a high regard for the intelligence of laymen. He stepped aboard the slidewalk. The city loomed around him, towers of travertine that took on a greasy cast in the dying reddish glow of a March afternoon. New York City had spread up the Hudson like a plague, and skyscrapers were marching across the Adirondacks; Nyack, here, had long since been engulfed by the metropolis. The air was cool. There was a smoky tang in it; probably a fire raging in a forest preserve, thought Mondschein darkly. He saw death on all sides. His modest apartment was five blocks from the chapel. He lived alone. Acolytes needed a waiver to marry, and were forbidden to have transient liaisons. Celibacy did not weigh heavily on Mondschein yet, though he had hoped to shed it when he was transferred to Santa Fe. There was talk acolytes at Santa Fe. Surely not all the breeding experiments were done through artificial insemination, Mondschein hoped. No matter now. He could forget Santa Fe. His impulsive letter to Supervisor Kirby had smashed everything. Now he was trapped forever cm the lower rungs of the Vorster ladder. In due course they would take him into the Brotherhood, and he would wear a slightly different robe and grow a beard, perhaps, and preside over services, and minister to the needs of his congregation. Fine. The Brotherhood was the fastest-growing religious movement on Earth, and surely it was a noble work to serve in the cause. But a man without a religious vocation would not be happy presiding over a chapel, and Mondschein had no calling at all. He had sought to fulfill his own ends by enrolling as an acolyte, and now he saw the error of that ambition. Tie was caught. Just another  Vorster Brother, now. There were thousands of chapels all over the world. Membership in the Brotherhood was something Not bad, in a single generation. The older religions were suffering. The Vorsters had something to offer that the others did not: the comforts of science, the assurance that beyond the spiritual ministry there was another that served the Oneness by probing into the deepest mysteries. A dollar contributed to a local Vorster chapel might help pay for the development of a method to assure immortality, personal immortality, right in the here and now flesh and blood world. That was the pitch, and it worked well. Oh, there were imitators, lesser cults, some of them rather successful in their small way. There was even a Vorster heresy now, the Harmonists, the peddlers of the Transcendent Harmony, an offshoot of the parent cult. Mondschein had chosen the Vorsters, and he had a lingering loyalty to them, for he had been raised as a worshipper of the Blue Fire. But -- Someone jostled him on the slidewalk. Mondschein felt a hand slap against his back, dealing him a hard jolt that almost knocked him down. Staggering a bit. he recovered and saw a broad-shouldered man in a simple blue business tunic moving swiftly away. Clumsy idiot, Mondschein thought. There's room for everyone on the walk. What's his hellish hurry? Monschein adjusted his robes and his dignity. A soft voice said, "Don't go into your apartment, Mondschein. Just keep moving. There's a quickboat waiting for you at the Tarrytown station." No one was near him. "Who said that?" he demanded tensely"Please relax and cooperate. You aren't going to be harmed. This is for your benefit, Mondschein." He looked around. The nearest person was an elderly woman, fifty feet behind him on the slidewalk, who quickly threw him a simpering smile as though asking for a blessing. Who had spoken? For one wild moment Mondschein thought that he had turned into a telepath, some latent power breaking through in a delayed maturity. But no; it had been a voice, not a thoughtmessage. Mondschein understood. The stumbling man must have planted a two-way Ear on him with that slap on the back. A tiny metallic transponding plaque, perhaps half a dozen molecules thick, some miracle of improbable subminiaturization -- Mondschein did not bother to search for it. e said, "Who are you?" "Never mind that. Just go to the station and you'll be met." "I'm in my robes." "We'll handle that, too," came the calm response. Mondschein nibbled his lip. He was not supposed to leave the immediate vicinity of his chapel without permission from a superior, but there was no time for that now, and in any event he had no intention of bucking the bureaucracy so soon after his rebuke. He would take his chances. The sidewalk sped him ahead. Soon the Tarrytown station drew near. Mondschein's stomach roiled with tension. He could smell the acrid fumes of quickboat fuel. The chill wind cut through his robes, so that his shivering was not entirely from uneasiness. He stepped from the slidewalk and entered the station, a gleaming yellowish-green dome with lambent plastic walls. It was not particularly crowded. The commuters from downtown had not yet begun to arrive, and the outward bound rush would come later in the day, at the dinner hour. Figures approached him. The voice coming from the device on his back said, "Don't stare at them, but just follow behind them casually." Mondschein obeyed. There were three of them, two men and a slim, angular-faced woman. They led him on a sauntering stroll past the chattering newsfax booth, past the bootblack stands, past the row of storage lockers. One of the men, short and square-headed with thick, stubby yellow hair, slapped his palm against a locker to open it. He drew out a bulky package and tucked it under one arm. As he cut diagonally across the station toward the men's washroom, the voice said to Mondschein, "Wait thirty seconds and follow him." The acolyte pretended to study tiie newsfax ticker. He did not feel enthusiastic about his present predicament, but he sensed that it would be useless and possibly harmful to resist. When the thirty seconds were up, he moved toward the washroom. The scanner decided that he was suitflashed. Mondschein entered. "Third booth," the voice murmured. The blond man was not in sight. Mondschein entered the booth and found the package from the locker propped on the seat. On an order, he picked it up and opened the clasps. The wrapper fell away. Mondschein found himself holding the green robe of a Harmonist Brother. r T"he heretics? What in the world -- "Put it on, Mondschein." "I can't If I'm seen in it -- " "You won't be. Put it on. We'll guard your own robe until you get back." He felt like a puppet. Shrugging out of his robe, he put it on a hook while he donned the unfamiliar uniform. It fit well. There was something clipped to the inner surface: a thermoplastic mask, Mondschein realized. He was grateful for that. Unfolding it, he pressed it to his face and held it there until it took hold. The mask would disguise his features just enough so that he need not fear recognition. Carefully, Mondschein put hl own robe within the wrapper and sealed it. "Leave it on the seat," he wa told. "I don't dare. If it's lost how will I ever explain?" "It will not be lost, Mondschein. Hurry, now. The quickboat's about to leave." Unhappily, Mondschein stepped from the booth. He viewed himself in the mirror. His face, normally plump, now looked gross: bulging cheeks, stubbly jowls, moist and thickened lips. Unnatural dark circles rimmed his eyes as though he had caroused for a week. The green robe was strange, too. Wearing the outfit of heresy made him feel closer to his own organization than ever before. The slim woman came forward as he emerged into the waiting room. Her cheekbones were like knife blades, and her eyelids had been surgically replaced by shutters of fine platinum foil. It was an outmoded fashion of the previous generation; Mondschein could remember his mother coming from the cosmetic surgeon's office with her face transformed into a grotesque mask. No one did that any more. This woman had to be at least forty, Mondschein thought, though she looked much younger. "Eternal harmony, Brother." Mondschein fumbled for the proper Harmonist response. Improvising, he said, "May the Oneness smile upon you." "I'm grateful for your blessing. Your ticket's in order, Brother. Will you come with me?" She was his guide, he realized. He had shed the Ear with his own robe. Queasily, he hoped he would get to see that garment again before long. He followed the slim woman to the loading platform. They might be taking him anywhere -- Chicago, Honolulu, Montreal -- The quickboat sparkled in the floodlit station, graceful, elegant, its skin a burnished bluish-green. As they filed aboard, Mondschein asked the woman, "Where are we going?" "Rome," she said. Ill IV Tondschein's eyes were wide as the monuments of antiquity flashed by. The Forum, the Colosseum, the Theater of Marcellus, the gaudy Victor Emanuel Monument, the Mussolini Column -- their route took them through the heart of the ancient city. He saw, also, the blue glow of a Vorster chapel as he whizzed down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and that struck him as harshly incongruous here in this city of an older religion. The Brotherhood had a solid foothold here, though. When Gregory at his Vatican palace, he could still draw a crowd of hundreds of thousands of cheering Romans, but many of those same Romans would melt from the square after viewing the Pope and head for the nearest chapel of the Brotherhood. Evidently the Harmonists were making headway here too, Mondschein thought. But he kept his peace as the car sped northward out of the city. "This is the Via Flaminia," his guide announced. "The old route was followed when the electronic roadbed was installed. They have a deep sense of tradition here." "I'm sure they do," said Mondschein wearily. It was mid-evening by his time, and he had had nothing to eat but a snack aboard the quickboat. The ninety-minute journey had dumped him in Rome in the hours before dawn. A wintry mist hung over the city; spring was late. Mondschein's face itched fiercely beneath his mask. Fear chilled his fingers. They halted in front of a drab brick building somewhere a few dozen miles north of Rome. Mondschein's face itched fiercely beneath his mask. Fear chilled his fingers. They halted in front of a drab brick building somewhere a few dozen miles north of Rome. Mondschein shivered as he hurried within. The woman with platinum eyelids led him up the stairs and into a warm, brightly fit room occupied by three men in green Harmonist robes. That confirmed it, Mondschein thought; I'm in a den of heretics. nphey did not offer their names. One was short and squat, with a sallow face and a bulbous nose. One was tall and spectrally thin, arms and legs like a spider's limbs. The third was unremarkable, with pale skin and narrow, bland eyes. The squat one was the oldest, and seemed to be in charge. Without preamble he said, "So they turned you down, did they?" "How -- " "Never mind how. We've been watching you, Mondschein. We hoped you'd make it. We want a man in Santa Fe just as much as you want to be there." "Are you Harmonists?" "Yes. What about some wine, Mondschein?" The acolyte shrugged. The tall heretic gestured, and the slim woman, who had not left the room, came forward with a flask of golden wine. Mondschein accepted a glass, thinking dourly that it was almost certainly drugged. The wine was chilled and faintly sweet, like a middling-dry Graves. The other took wine with him. "What do you want with me?" Mondschein asked. "Your help," said the squat one. "There's a war going on, and we want you to join our side." "I don't know of any wars." "A war between darkness and light," said the tall heretic in a mild voice. "We are the warriors of light. Don't think we're fanatics, Mondschein. Actually, we're quite reasonable men." "Perhaps you know," said the third of the Harmonists, "that our creed is derived from yours. We respect the teachings of Vorst and we follow most of his ways. In fact, we regard ourselves as closer to the original teachings than the present hierarchy of the Brotherhood. We're a purifying body. Every religion needs its reformers." Mondschein sipped his wine. He allowed his eyes to twinkle maliciously as he remarked, "Usually it takes a thousand years for the reformers to put in their appearance. This is only #. The Brotherhood's hardly thirty years old." '"T"he squat heretic nodded. "The pace of our times is a fast one. It took the Christians three hundred years to get political control of Rome -- from the time of Augustus to that of Constantine. The Vorsters didn't need that long. You know the story: there are Brotherhood men in every legislative body in the world. In some countries they've organized their own political parties. I don't need to tell you about the financial growth." "And you purifiers urge a return to the old, simple ways of thirty years ago?" Mondschein asked. "The ramshackle buildings, the persecutions, and all the rest? Is that it?" "Not really. We appreciate the uses of power. We simply feel that the movement's become sidetracked in irrelevancies. Power for its own sake has become more important than power for the sake of larger goals." The tall one said, "The Vorster high command quibbles about political appointments and agitates for changes in the income tax structure. It's wasting time and energy fooling around with domestic affairs. Meanwhile the movement's drawn a total blank on Mars and Venus -- not one chapel among the colonists, not even a start there, total rejection. And where are the great results of the esper breeding program? Where are the dramatic new leaps?" "It's only the second generation," Mondschein said. "You have to be patient." He smiled at that -- counselling patience to others -- and added, "I think the Brotherhood is heading in the right direction." "We don't, obviously," said the pale one. "When we failed to reform from within, we had to leave and begin our own campaign, parallel to the original one. The long-range goals are the same. Personal immortality through bodily regeneration. And full development of extra-sensory powers, leading to new methods of communication and transportation. That's what we want -- not the right to decide local tax issues." Mondschein said, "First you get control of the governments. Then you concentrate on the long-range goals." "Not necessary," snapped the squat Harmonist. "Direct action is what we're interested in. We're confident of success, too. One way or another, we'll achieve our purposes." 'T'he slim woman gave Mondschein more wine. He tried to shake her away, but she inhe drank. Then he said, "I presume you didn't waft me off to Rome just to tell me your opinion of the Brotherhood. What do you want from me?" "Suppose we were to get you transferred to Santa Fe," the squat one said. Mondschein sat bolt upright. His hand tightened on the waneglass, nearly breaking it. "How could you do that?" "Suppose we could. Would you formation from the laboratories there and transmit it to us?" "Spy for you?" "You could call it that." "It sounds ugly," Mondschein said. "You'd have a reward for it." "It better be a good one." The heretic leaned forward and said quietly, "We'll offer you a tenth-level post in our organization. You'd have to wait fifteen years to get that high in the Brotherhood. We're a much smaller operation; you can rise in our hierarchy much faster than where you are. An ambitious man like you could be very close to the top before he was fifty." "But what good is it?" Mondschein asked. "To get close to the top in the second-best hierarchy?" "Ah, but we won't be second best! Not with the information you'll provide for us. That will people will desert the Brotherhood for us when they see what we have to offer -- all that they have, plus our own values. We'll expand rapidly. And you'll have a position of high rank, because you threw your lot in with us at the beginning." Mondschein saw the logic of that. The Brotherhood was swollen already, wealthy, powerful, topheavy with entrenched bureaucrats. There was no room for advancement there. But if he were to transfer his allegiance to a small but dynamic group with ambitions that rivaled his own -- "It won't work," he said sadly. "Why?" "Assuming you can wangle me into Santa Fe, I'll be screened by espers long before I get there. They'll know I'm coming as a spy and they'll screen me out. My memories of this conversation will give me away." The squat man smiled broadly. "Why do you think you'll remember this conversation? We have our espers too, Acolyte Mondschein!" IV nphe room in which Christopher Mondschein found himself was eerily empty. It was a perfect square, probably built within a tolerance of hundredths of a ing at all in it but Mondschein himself. No furniture, no windows, not so much as a cobweb. Shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, he stared up at the high ceiling, searching without success for the source of the steady, even illumination. He did not know what city he was in. They had taken him out of Rome just as the sun was rising, and he might be in Jakarta now, or Benares, or perhaps Akron. He had profound misgivings about all this. The Harmonists had assured him that there would be no risks, but Mondschein was not so sure. The Brotherhood had not attained its eminence without developing ways of protecting itself. For all the assurances to the contrary, he might well be detected long before he got into those secret laboratories at Santa Fe, and it would not go happily for him afterward. The Brotherhood had its way of punishing those who betrayed it. Behind the benevolence was a certain streak of necessary cruelty. Mondschein had heard the stories : the one about the regional supervisor in the Philippines who had let himself be beguiled into providing minutes of the high councils to certain antiVorsterite police officials. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Mondschein had heard that the man had been taken to Santa Fe to undergo the loss of his painreceptors. A pleasant fate, never to feel pain again? Hardly. Pain was the measure of safety. Without pain, how did one know whether something was too hot or too cold to touch? A thousand little injuries resulted: burns, cuts, abrasions. The body eroded away. A finger here, a nose there, an eyeball, a swatch of skin -- why, someone could devour his own tongue and not realize it. A yT ondschein shuddered. TheL'-seamless wall in front of him abruptly telescoped and a man entered the room. The wall closed behind him. "Are you the esper?" Mondschein blurted nervously. The man nodded. He was without unusual features. His face had a vaguely Eurasian cast, Mondschein imagined. His lips were thin, his hair glossily dark, his complexion almost olive. There was something of a fragile look to him. "Lie down on the floor," the esper said in a soft, furry voice. "Please relax. You are afraid of me, and you should not be afraid." Mondschein gave it a try. He settled on the yielding, rubbery floor and put his hands by his sides. The esper sank into the lotus position in one corner of the room, not looking at Mondschein. The acolyte waited uncertainly. He had seen a few espers before. There were a good many of them now; after years of doubt and confusion, their traits had been isolated and recognized more than a hundred years ago, and a fair amount of deliberate esper-to-esper mating had increased their number. The talents were still unpredictable, though. Most of the espers had little control over their abilities. They were unstable individuals, besides, generally high-strung, often lapsing into psychosis under stress. Mondschein did not like the idea of being locked in a windowless room with a psychotic esper. And what if the esper had a malicious streak? What if, instead of simply inducing selective amnesia in Mondschein, he decided to make wholesale alterations in his memory patterns? It might happen that -- "You can get up now," the esper said brusquely. "It's done." "What's done?" Mondschein asked. The esper laughed triumphantly. "You don't need to know, fool. It's done, that's all." The wall opened a second time. The esper left. Mondschein stood up, feeling strangely empty, wondering somberly where he was and what was happening to him. He had been going home on the slidewalk, and a man had jostled him, and then -- A slim woman with improbable cheekbones and eyelids of glittering platinum foil said, "Come this way, please." "Why should I?" "Trust me. Come this way." TV Tondschein sighed and let her lead him down a narrow corridor into another room, brightly painted and lit. A coffin-sized metal tank stood in one corner of the room. Mondschein recognized it, of course. It was a sensory deprivation chamber, a Nothing Chamber, in which one floated in a warm nutrient bath, sight and hearing cut off, gravity's pull negated. The Nothing Chamber was an instrument for total relaxation. It could also have more sinister uses: a man who spent too much time in a Nothing Chamber became pliant, easily indoctrinated. "Strip and get in," the woman said. "And if I don't?" "You will." "How long a setting?" "Two and a half hours." "Too long," Mondschein said. "Sorry. I don't feel that tense. Will you show me the way out of here?" The woman beckoned. A robot rolled into the room, bluntnosed, painted an ugly dull black. Mondschein had never wrestled with a robot and he did not intend to try it now. The woman indicated the Nothing Chamber once more. This is some sort of dream, Mondschein told himself. A very bad dream. He began to strip. The Nothing Chamber hummed its readiness. Mondschein stepped into it and allowed it to engulf him. He could not see. He could not hear. A tube fed him air. Mondschein slipped into total passivity, into a fetal comfort. The bundle of ambitions, conflicts. dreams, guilts, lusts, and ideas that constituted the mind of Christopher Mondschein was temporarily dissolved. In time, he woke. They took him from the Chamber -- he was wobbly on his legs, and they had to steady him -- and gave him his clothing. His robe, he noticed, was the wrong color: green, the heretic color. How had that happened? Was he being forcibly impressed into the Harmonist movement? He knew better than to ask questions. They were putting a thermoplastic mask on his face, now. I'm to travel incognito, it seems. In a short while Mondschein was at a quickboat station. He was appalled to see Arabic lettering on the signs. Cairo, he wondered? Algiers? Ankara? Mecca? r T"hey had reserved a private compartment for him. The woman with the altered eyelids sat with him during the swift flight. Several times, Mondschein attempted to ask questions, but she gave him no reply other than a shrug. The quickboat landed at the Tarrytown station. Familiar territory at last. A timesign told Mondschein that this was Wednesday, March #, #, # hours Eastern Standard Time. It had been late Tuesday afternoon, he remembered distinctly, when he crept home in disgrace from the chapel after getting his comeuppance over the matter of a transfer to Santa Fe. Say, # hours. Somewhere he had lost all of Tuesday night and a chunk of Wednesday morning, about fifteen hours in all. As they entered the main waiting room, the slim woman at his side whispered, "Go into the washroom. Third booth. Change your clothes." Greatly troubled, Mondschein obeyed. There was a package resting on the seat. He opened it and found that it contained his indigo acolyte's robe. Hurriedly he peeled off the green robe and donned his own. Remembering the face-mask, he stripped that off too and flushed it away. He packed up the green robe and, not knowing what else to do with it, left it in the booth. As he came out, a dark-haired man of middle years approached him, holding out his hand. "Acolyte Mondschein!" "Yes?" Mondschein said, not recognizing him, but taking the hand anyway. "Did you sleep well?" "I -- yes," Mondschein said. "Very well." There was an exchange of glances, and suddenly Mondschein did not remember why he had gone into the washroom, nor what he had done in there, nor that he had wom a green robe and a themoplastic mask on his flight from a country where Arabic was the main language, nor that he had been in any other country at all, nor for that matter that he had stepped bewildered from a Nothing Chamber not too many hours ago. He now believed that he had spent a comfortable night at home, in his own modest dwelling. He was not sure what he was doing at the Tarrytown quickboat station at this hour of the morning, but that was only a minor mystery and not worth detailed exploration. Finding himself unusually hungry, Mondschein bought a hearty breakfast at the food console on the lower level of the station. He bolted it briskly. By eight, he was at the Nyack chapel of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, ready to aid in the morning service. Brother Langholt greeted him warmly. "Did yesterday's little talk upset you too much, Mondschein?" "I'm settling down now." "Good, good. You mustn't let your ambitions engulf you, Mondschein. Everything comes in due time. Will you check the gamma level on the reactor, now?" "Certainly, Brother." Mondschein stepped toward the altar. The Blue Fire seemed like a beacon of security in an uncertain world. The acolyte removed the gamma detector from its case and set about his morning tasks. V r T"he message summoning him to Santa Fe arrived three weeks later. It landed on the Nyack chapel like a thunderbolt, striking down through layer after layer of authority before it finally reached the lowly acolyte. One of Mondschein's fellow acolytes brought him the news, in an indirect way. "You're wanted in Brother Langholt's office, Chris. Supervisor Kirby's there." Mondschein felt alarm. "What is it? I haven't done anything wrong -- not that I know of, anyway." "I don't thinly you're in trouble. It's something big, Chris. They're all shaken up. It's some kind of order out of Santa Fe." Mondschein received a curious stare. "What I think they said was that you're being shipped out there on a transfer." "Very funny," Mondschein said. He hurried to Langholt's office. Supervisor Kirby stood against the bookshelf on the left. He was a man enough like Langholt to be his brother. Both were tall, lean men in early middle age, with something of an ascetic look about them. Mondschein had never seen the Supervisor at such close range before. The story was that Kirby had been a U.N. man, pretty high in the international bureaucracy, until his conversion fifteen or twenty years ago. Now he was a key man in the hierarchy, possibly one of the dozen most important in the entire organization. His hair was clipped short and his eyes were an odd shade of green. Mondschein had difficulty meeting those eyes. Facing Kirby in the flesh, he wondered how he had ever found the nerve to write that letter to him, requesting a transfer to the Santa Fe labs. Kirby smiled faintly. "Mondschein?" "Yes, sir." "Call me Brother, Mondschein. Brother Langholt here has said some good things about you." He has? Mondschein thought in surprise. Langholt said, "I've told the Supervisor that you're ambitious, eager, and enthusiastic. I've also pointed out that you've got those qualities to an excessive degree, Stations of the Spectrum And there is light, before and beyond our vision, for which we give thanks. And there is heat, for which we are humble. And there is power, for which we count ourselves blessed. Blessed be Balmer, who gave us our wavelengths. Blessed be Bohr, who brought us understanding. Blessed be Lyman, who saw beyond sight. Tell us now the stations of the spectrum. Blessed be long radio waves, which oscillate slowly. Blessed be broadcast waves, for which we thank Hertz. Blessed be short waves, linkers of mankind, and blessed be microwaves. Blessed be infrared, bearer of nourishing heat. Blessed be visible light, magnificent in angstroms. (On high holidays only: Blessed be red, sacred to Doppler. Blessed be orange. Blessed be yellow, hallowed by Fraunhofer's gaze. Blessed be green. Blessed be blue for its hydrogen line. Blessed be indigo. Blessed be violet, flourishing with energy.) Blessed be ultraviolet, with the richness of the sun. Blessed be X-rays, sacred to Roentgen, the prober within. Blessed be the gamma, in all its power, blessed be the highest of frequencies. We give thanks for Planck. We give thanks for Einstein. We give thanks in the highest for Maxwell. In the strength of the spectrum, the quantum and the holy angstrom, peacel in some ways. Perhaps you'll learn some moderation at Santa Fe." Stunned, Mondschein said, "Brother Langholt, I thought my application for a transfer had been turned down." Tirby nodded. "It's been opened again. We need some control subjects, you see. Nonespers. A few dozen acolytes have been requisitioned, and the computer tossed your name up. You fit the needs. I take it you still want to go to Santa Fe?" "Of course, sir -- Brother Kirby." "Good. You'll have a week to wrap up your affairs here." The green eyes were suddenly piercing. "I hope you'll prove useful out there, Brother Mondschein." Mondschein could not make up his mind whether he was being sent to Santa Fe as a belated yielding to his request, or to get rid of him at Nyack. It seemed incomprehensible to him that Langholt would approve the transfer after having rejected it so scathingly a few weeks before. But the Vorster high ones moved in mysterious ways, Mondschein decided. He accepted the puzzling decision in good grace, asking no questions. When his week was up, he knelt in the Nyack chapel one last time, said goodby to Brother Langholt, and went to the quickboat station for the noon flight westward. He was in Santa Fe by midmorning. The station there, he noticed, was thronged with bluerobed ones, more than he had ever seen in a public place at any one time. Mondschein waited at the station, eyeing the immensity of the New Mexican landscape uneasily. The sky was a strangely bright shade of blue, and visibility seemed unlimited. Miles away Mondschein saw bare sandstone mountains rising. A tawny desert dotted with grayish-green sagebrush surrounded the station. Mondschein had never seen so much open space before. "Brother Mondschein?" a pudgy acolyte asked. "That's right." "I'm Brother Capodimonte. I'm your escort. Got your luggage? Good. Let's go, then." A teardrop was parked in back. Capodimonte took Mondschein's lone suitcase and racked it. He was about forty, Mondschein guessed. A little old to be an acolyte. A roll of fat bulged over his collar at the back of his neck. They entered the teardrop. Capodimonte activated it and it shot away. "First time here?" he asked. "Yes," Mondschein said. "I'm impressed by the countryside." Tt's marvelous stuff, isn't it? Life-enhancing. You get a sense of space here. And of history. Prehistoric ruins scattered all over the place. After you're settled, perhaps we can go up to Frijoles Canyon for a look at the cave dwellings. Does that kind of thing interest you, Mondschein?" "I don't know much about it," he admitted. "But I'll be glad to look anyway." "What's your specialty?" "Nucleonics," Mondschein said. "I'm a furnace-tender." "I was an anthropologist until I joined the Brotherhood. I spend my spare time out at the pueblos. It's good to step back into the past occasionally. Especially out here, when you see the future erupting with such speed all around you." "They're really making progress, are they?" Capodimonte nodded. "Coming along quite well, they tdl me. Of course, I'm not an insider. Insiders don't get to leave the center much. But from what I hear, they're accomplishing great things. Look out there. Brother -- that's the city of Santa Fe we're passing right now." Mondschein looked. Quaint was the word that occurred to him. The city was small, both in area and in the size of its buildings, which seemed to be no higher than three or four stories anywhere. Even at this distance, Mondschein could make out the dusky reddish-brown of adobe. "I expected it to be much bigger," Mondschein said. "Zoning. Historical monument and all that. They've kept it pretty well as it was a hundred years ago. No new construction's allowed." Mondschein frowned. "What about the laboratory center, though?" "Oh, that's not really in Santa Fe. Santa Fe's just the nearest big city. We're actually about forty miles north," said Capodimonte. "Up near the Picuris country. Still plenty of Indians there, you know." 'T'hey were beginning to climb, now. The teardrop surged up hillside roads, and the vegetation began to change, the twisted, gnarled junipers and pinyon pines giving way to dark stands of Douglas fir and ponderosas. Mondschein still found it hard to believe that he was soon to arrive at the genetic center. It goes to show, he told himself. The only way to get anywhere in the world was to stand up and yell. He had yelled. They had scolded him for it -- but they had sent him to Santa Fe anyhow. To live forever! To surrender his body to the experimenters who were learning how to replace cell with cell, how to generate organs, how to restore youth. Mondschein knew what they were working on here. Of course, there were risks, but what of that? At the very worst, he'd die -- but in the ordinary scheme of events that would happen anyway. On the other hand, he might be one of the chosen, one of the elect. A gate loomed before them. Sunlight gleamed furiously from the metal shield. "We're here," Capodimonte announced. The gate began to open. Mondschein said, "Won't I be given some kind of esper scanning before they let me in?" Capodimonte laughed. "Brother Mondschein, you've been getting a scanning for the last fifteen minutes. If there were any reason to turn you back, that gate wouldn't be opening now. Relax. And welcome. You've made it." VI T he official name of the place was the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences. It sprawled over some fifteen square miles of plateau country, every last inch of it ringed by a well-bugged fence. Within were dozens of buildings -- dormitories, laboratories, other structures of less obvious purpose. The entire enterprise was underwritten by the contributions of the faithful, who gave according to their means, a dollar here, a thousand dollars there. The center was heart and core of the Vorster operation. Here the research was carried out that served to improve the lives of Vorsters everywhere. The essence of the Brotherhood's appeal was that it offered not merely spiritual counselling -- which the old religions could provide just as well -- but also the most advanced scientific benefits. Vorster hospitals existed now in every major population center. Vorster medics were at the forefront of their profession. The Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance healed both body and soul. And, as the Brotherhood did not attempt to conceal, the greater goal of the organization was the conquest of death. Not merely the overthrow of disease, but the downfall of age itself. Even before the Vorster movement had begun, men had been making great progress in that direction. The mean life expectancy was up to eighty-odd now, about ninety in some countries. That was why the Earth teemed with people despite the stringent birth-control regulations that were in effect almost everypeople, now, and the birth rate, though dropping sharply, was still greater than the death rate. The Vorsters hoped to push the life expectancy still higher, for those who wanted longer lives. A hundred, a hundred twenty, a hundred fifty years -- that was the immediate goal. Why not two hundred, three hundred, a thousand later on? "Give us ever-lasting life," the multitudes cried, and flocked to the chapels to make sure they were among the elect. Of course, that prolongation of life would make the population problem all the more complex. The Brotherhood was aware of that. It had other goals designed to alleviate that problem. To open the galaxy to man -- that was the real aim. nphe colonization of the universe by humankind had already begun, several generations before Noel Vorst founded his movement Mars and Venus both had been settled, in differing ways. Neither planet had been hospitable to man to begin with; so Mars had been changed to accommodate man, and man had been changed to survive on Venus. Both colonies were thriving now. Yet little had been accomplished toward solving the population crisis; ships would have to leave Earth day and night for hundreds of years in order to transport enough people to the colonies to make a dent in the multitudes on the home world, and that was economically impossible. But if the extrasolar worlds could be reached, and if they did not need to be expensively terraformed before they could be occupied, and if some new reasonably economical means of transportation could be devised -- "That's a lot of ifs," Mondschein said. Capodimonte nodded. "I don't deny that. But that's no reason not to try." "You seriously think that there'll be a way to shoot people off to the stars on esper power?" Mondschein asked. "You don't think that that's a wild and fantastic dream?" Smiling, Capodimonte said, "Wild and fantastic dreams keep men moving around. Chasing Prester John, chasing the Northwest Passage, chasing unicorns -- well, this is our unicorn, Mondschein. Why all the skepticism? Look about you. Don't you see what's going on?" Mondschein had been at the research center for a week, now. He still did not know his way around the place with any degree of confidence, but he had learned a great deal. He knew, for example, that an entire town of espers had been built on the far side of the dry wash that cut the center in half. Six thousand people lived there, none of them older than forty, all of them breeding like rabbits. Fertility Row, they called the place. It had special government dispensation for unlimited childbearing. Some of the families had five or six children. T hat was the slow way of evolving a new kind of man. Take a bunch of people with unusual talents, throw them into a closed environment, let them pick their own mates and multiply the genetic pool -- well, that was one way. Another was to work directly on the germ plasm. They were doing that here too, in a variety of ways. Tectogenetic microsurgery, polynuclear moldwere trying everything. Cut and carve the genes, push the chromosomes around, get the tiny replicators to produce something slightly different from what had gone before -- that was .the aim. How well was it working? That was hard to tell, so far. It would take five or six generations to evaluate the results. Mondschein, as a mere acolyte, did not have the equipment to judge for himself. Neither did most of those he had contact with -- technicians, mainly. But they could speculate, and they did, far into the night. What interested Mondschein, far more than the experiments in esper genetics, was the work on lifespan prolongation. Here, too, the Vorsters were building on an established body of technique. The organ banks provided replacements for most forms of bodily tissue; lungs, eyes, hearts, intestines, pancreases, kidneys, all could be implanted now, using the irradiation techniques to destroy the graft-rejecting immune reaction. But such piecemeal rejuvenation was not true immortality. The Vorsters sought a way to make the cells of the body regenerate lost tissue, so that the impulse toward continued life came from within, not through external grafts. Mondschein did his bit. Like most of the bottom-grade people at the center, he was required to surrender a morsel of flesh every few days as experimental material. The biopsies were a nuisance, but they were part of the routine. He was a regular contributor to the sperm bank, too. As a non-esper, he was a good control subject for the work going on. How did you find the gene for teleportation? For telepathy? For any of the paranormal phenomena that were lumped under the blanket term of "esp?" Mondschein cooperated. He played his humble part in the great campaign, aware that he was no more than an infantryman in the struggle. He went from laboratory to laboratory, submitting to tests and needles, and when he was not taking part in such enterprises he carried out his own specialty, which was to serve as a maintenance man on the nuclear power plant that ran the entire center. I t was quite a different life from that in the Nyack chapel. No members of the public came here -- no worshippers -- and it was easy to forget that he was part of a religious movement They held services here regularly, of course, but there was a professionalism about the worship that made it all seem rather perfunctory. Without some laymen in the house, it was hard to remain really dedicated to the cult of the Blue Fire. In this more rarefied climate, Mondschein felt some of his seething impatience ebb away. Now he no longer could dream of going to Santa Fe, for he was there, on the spot, part of the experiments. Now he could only wait, and tick off the moments of progress, and hope. He made new friends. He developed new interests. He went with Capodimonte to see the ancient ruins, and he went hunting in the Picuris Range with a lanky acolyte named Weber, and he joined the choral society and sang a lusty tenor. He was happy here. He did not know, of course, that he was here as a spy for heretics. All that had been deftly erased from his memory. In its place had been left a triggering mechanism, which went off one night in early September, and abruptly Mondschein felt a strange compulsion take hold. It was the night of the Mesop Sacrament, a feast that heralded the autumn solstice. Mondschein, wearing his blue robe, stood between Capodimonte and Weber in the chapel, watching the reactor glare on the altar, listening to the voice intoning, " The world turns and the configutations change. There is a quantum jump in the lives of men, when doubts and fears are left behind and certainty is born. There is a flash as of light -- a surge of inward radiation, a sense of Oneness with -- " Mondschein stiffened. They were Vorst's words, words he had heard an infinity of times, so familiar to him that they had cut grooves in his brain. Yet now he seemed to be hearing them tor the first time. When the words "a sense of Oneness" were pronounced Mondschein gasped, gripped the seat in front of him, nearly doubled up in agony. He felt a sensation as of a blazing knife twisting in his bowels. "Are you all right?" Capodimonte whispered. Mondschein nodded. "Just -- cramps -- " He forced himself to straighten up. But he was not all right, he knew. Something was wrong, and he did not know what. He was possessed. He was no longer his own master. Willy-nilly, he would obey an inner command whose nature he did not at the moment know, but which he sensed would be revealed to him at the proper time, and which he would not resist. S even hours later, at the darkest hour of night, Mondschein knew that the time had come. He woke, sweat-soaked, and slipped into his robe. The dormitory was silent. He left his room, glided quietly down the hall, entered the dropshaft. Moments later he emerged in the plaza fronting the dormitory buildings. The night was cold. Here on the plateau, the day's warmth fled swiftly once darkness descended. Shivering a little, Mondschein made his way through the streets of the center. No guards were on duty; there was no one to fear, in this carefully selected, rigorously scanned colony of the faithful. Somewhere a watchful esper might be awake, seeking to detect hostile thoughts, but Mondschein was emanating nothing that might seem hostile. He did not know where he was going, nor what he was about to do. The forces that drove him welled from deep within his brain, beyond the fumbling reach of any esper. They guided his motor responses, not his cerebral centers. He came to one of the information-retrieval centers, a stubby brick building with a blank windowless facade. Pressing his hand against the doorscanner, Mondschein waited to be identified; in a moment, his pattern was checked against the master list of personnel, and he was admitted. There flowered in his brain the knowledge of what he had come to find: a holographic camera. They kept such equipment on the second level. Mondschein went to the storeroom, opened a cabinet, removed a compact object six inches square. Unhurriedly, he left the building, sliding the camera into his sleeve. Crossing another plaza, Mondthe longevity building. He had been there during the day, to give a biopsy. Now he moved quickly through the irising doorway, down a level into the basement, entered the small room just to his left. A rack of photomicrographs lay on a workbench along the rear wall. Mondschein touched a knuckle to the scanner-activator, and a conveyor belt dumped the photomicrographs into the hopper of a projector. They began to appear in the objective of the viewer. A T ondschein aimed his camera and made a hologram of each photomicrograph as it appeared. It was quick work. The camera's laser beam flicked out, bouncing off the subjects, rebounding and intersecting a second beam at #. The holograms would be unrecognizable without the proper equipment for viewing; only a second laser beam, set at the same angle as the one with which the holograms had been taken, could transform the unrecognizable patterns of intersecting circles on the plates into images. Those images, Mondschein knew, would be three-dimensional and of extraordinarily fine resolution. But he did not stop to ponder on the use to which they might be put. He moved through the laboratory, photographing everything that might be of some use. The camera could take hundreds of shots without recharging. Mondschein thumbed it again and again. Within two hours he had made a three-dimensional record of virtually the entire laboratory. Shivering a little, he stepped out into the morning chill. Dawn was breaking. Mondschein put the camera back where he had found it, after removing the capsule of holographic plates. They were tiny; the whole capsule was not much bigger than a thumbnail. He slid it into his breast pocket and returned to the dormitory. The moment his head touched the pillow, he forgot that he had left his room at all that night. In the morning, Mondschein said to Capodimonte, "Let's go to Frijoles today." "You're really getting the bug, aren't you?" Capodimonte said, grinning. Mondschein shrugged. "It's just a passing mood. I want to look at ruins, that's all." "We could go to Puye, then. You haven't been there. It's pretty impressive, and quite different from -- " "No. Frijoles," Mondschein said. "All right?" They got a permit to leave the center -- it wasn't too difficult for lower-grade technicians to go out -- and in the early part of the afternoon they headed westward toward the Indian ruins. The teardrop hummed along the road to Los Alamos, a secret scientific city of an earlier era, but they turned left into Bandelier National Monument before they reached Los Alamos, and bumped down an old asphalt road for a dozen miles until they came to the main center of the park. I t was never very crowded here, but now, with summer over, the place was all but deserted. The two acolytes strolled down the main path, past the circular canyonbottom pueblo ruin known as Tyuonyi, carved from blocks of volcanic tuff, and up the winding little road that took them to the cave dwellings. When they reached the kiva, the hollowedout chamber that once had been a ceremonial room for prehistoric Indians, Mondschein said, "Wait a minute. I want to have a look." He scrambled up the wooden ladder and pulled himself into the kiva. Its walls were blackened by the smoke of ancient fires. Niches lined the wall where once had been stored objects of the highest ritual importance. Calmly and without really understanding what he was doing, Mondschein drew the tiny capsule of holograms from his pocket and placed it in an inconspicuous comer of the lefthandmost niche. He spent another moment looking around the kiva, and emerged. Capodimonte was sitting on the soft white rock at the base of the cliff, looking up at the high reddish wall on the far side of the canyon. Mondschein said, "Feel like taking a real hike today?" "Where to? Frijolito Ruin?" "No," Mondschein said. He pointed to the top of the canyon wall. "Out toward Yapashi. Or to the Stone Lions." "That's a dozen miles," Capodimonte said. "And we hiked there in the middle of July. I'm not up to it again, Chris." "Let's go back, then." "You don't need to get angry," Capodimonte said. "Look, we can go to Ceremonial Cave instead. That's only a short hike. Enough's enough, Chris." "All right," Mondschein said. "Ceremonial Cave it is." He set the pace for the hike, and it was a brisk one. They had not gone a quarter of a mile before the pudgy Capodimonte was out of breath. Grimly, Mondschein forged on, Capodimonte straggling after him. They reached the ruin, viewed it briefly, and turned back. When they came to park headquarters, Capodimonte said that he wanted to rest a while, to have a snack before returning to the research center. "Go ahead," Mondschein said. "I'll browse in the curio shop." TTe waited until Capodimonte was out of sight. Then, entering the curio shop, Mondschein went to the communibooth. A number popped into his brain, planted there hypnotically months before as he lay slumbering in the Nothing Chamber. He put money in the slot and punched out the number. "Eternal Harmony," a voice answered. "This is Mondschein. Let me talk to anybody in Section Thirteen." "One moment, please." Mondschein waited. His mind felt blank. He was a sleep-walker now. A purring, breathy voice said, "Go ahead, Mondschein. Give us the details." With great economy of words Mondschein told where he had hidden the capsule of holograms. The purring voice thanked him. Mondschein broke the contact and stepped from the booth. A few moments later, Capodimonte entered the curio shop, looking fed and rested. "See anything you want to buy?" he asked. "No," Mondschein said. "Let's mm  go. Capodimonte drove. Mondschein eyed the scenery as it whizzed past, and drifted into deep contemplation. Why did I come here today, he wondered? He had no idea. He did not remember a thing -- not a single detail of his espionage. The erasure had been complete. nphey came for him a week later, at midnight. A ponderous robot rumbled into his room without warning and took up a station beside his bed, the huge grips ready to seize him if he bolted. Accompanying the robot was a hatchet-faced little man named Magnus, one of the supervising Brothers of the center. "What's happening?" Mondschein asked. "Get dressed, spy. Come for interrogation." "I'm no spy. There's a mistake, Brother Magnus." "Save the arguments, Mondschein. Up. Get up. Don't attempt any violence." Mondschein was mystified. But he knew better than to debate the matter with Magnus, especially with eight hundred pounds of lightning-fast metallic intelligence in the room. Puzzled, the acolyte quit his bed and lipped on a robe. He followed Magnus out. In the hallway, others appeared and stared at him. There were guarded whispers. Ten minutes later, Mondschein, found himself in a circular room on the fifth floor of the research center's main administration building, surrounded by more Brotherhood brass than he had ever expected to see in one room. There were eight of diem, all high in councils. A knot of tension coiled in Mondschein's belly. "The esper's here," someone muttered. They had sent a girl, no more than sixteen, pasty-faced and plain. Her skin was flecked with small red blotches. Her eyes were alert, unpleasantly gleaming, never still. Mondschein despised her on sight, and he tried desperately to keep the emotion under rein, knowing that she could seal his fate with a word. It was no use: she detected his contempt for her the moment she came into the room, and the fleshy lips moved in a quick twitching smile. She drew her dumpy body erect. Supervisor Magnus said, "This is the man. What do you read in him?" "Fear. Hatred. Defiance." "How about disloyalty?" "His highest loyalty is to himself," the esper said, clasping her hands complacently over her belly. "Has he betrayed us?" Magnus demanded. "No. I don't see anything that says he has." Mondschein said, "If I could ask the meaning of -- " "Quite," Magnus said witheringly. Another of the supervisors said, "The evidence is incontrovertible. Perhaps the girl's making a mistake." "Scan him more closely," Magnus directed. "Go back, day by day, through his memory. Don't miss a thing. You know what you're looking for." T)affled, Mondschein looked in  appeal at the steely faces about him. The girl seemed to be gloating. Stinking voyeur, he thought. Have a good scan! The girl said thinly, "He thinks I'm going to enjoy this. He ought to try swimming through a cesspool some time, if he wants to know what it's like." "Scan him," Magnus said. "It's late and we may have many questions to answer." She nodded. Mondschein waited for some sensation telling him that his memories were being probed, some feeling as of invisible fingers going through his brain. There was no such awareness. Long moments passed in silence, and then the girl looked up in triumph. "The night of March #'s been erased." "Can you get beneath the erasure?" Magnus asked. "Impossible. It's an expert job. They've cut the whole night right out of him. And they've loaded him with countermnemonics all the way down the track. He doesn't know a thing about what he's been up to," the girl said. The Supervisors exchanged glances. Mondschein felt perspiration soaking through his robe. The smell of it stung his nostrils. A muscle throbbed in his cheek, and his forehead itched murderously, but he did not move. "She can go," Magnus said. With the esper out of the room, the atmosphere grew a little less tense, but Mondschein did not relax. In a bleak, hopeless way, he felt that he had been tried and condemned in advance for a crime whose nature he did not even know. He thought of some of the perhaps apocryphal stories of Brotherhood vindictiveness: the man with the pain centers removed, the esper staked out to endure an overload, the lobotomized biologist, the renegade supervisor who was left in a Nothing Chamber for ninety-six consecutive hours. He realized that he might find out very shortly just how apocryphal those stories were. Magnus said, "For your information, Mondschein, someone broke into the longevity lab and shot the whole place up with a holograph. It was a very neat job, except that we've got an alarm system in there, and you happened to trip it."   Cir, I swear, I never set foot  inside -- " "Save it, Mondschein. The morning after, we ran a neutron activation analysis in there, just as a matter of routine. We turned up traces of tungsten and molybdenum that brushed off you while you were taking those holograms. They match your skin pattern. It took us a while to track them to you. There's no doubt -- same neutron pattern on the camera, on the lab equipment, and on your hand. You were sent in here as a spy, whether you know it or not." Another supervisor said, "Kirby's here." "I'd like to know what he's got to say about this," Magnus muttered darkly. Mondschein saw the lean, longlimbed figure of Reynolds Kirby enter the room. His thin lips were clamped tightly together. He seemed to have aged at least ten years since Mondschein had seen him in Langholt's office. Magnus whirled and said with open irritation, "Here's your man, Kirby. What do you think of him now?" "He's not my man," said Kirby. "You approved his transfer here," Magnus snapped. "Maybe we ought to run a scan on you, eh? Somebody worked a loaded bomb into this place, and the bomb's gone off. He handed a whole laboratory away." "Maybe not," Kirby said. "Maybe he's still got the data on him somewhere?" "He was out of the center the day after the laboratory was entered. He and another acolyte went to visit some ancient Indian ruins. It's a safe bet that he disposed of the holograms while he was out there." "Have you tracked the courier?" Kirby asked. "We're getting away from the point," said Magnus. "The point is that this man came to the center on your recommendation. You picked him out of nowhere and put him here. What we'd all like to know is where you found him and why you sent him here. Eh?" Kirby's fleshless face worked wordlessly for a moment. He glowered at Mondschein, then stared in even greater hostility at Magnus. At length he said, "I can't take responsibility for shipping this man here. It happens that he wrote to me in February, asking to be transferred out of normal chapel duties and sent here. He was going over the heads of his local administrators, so I sent the letter back suggesting that he be disciplined a little. A few weeks later I received instructions that he be transferred out here. I was startled, to say the least, but I approved them. That's all I know about him." AyTagnus extended a forefinger and tapped the air. "Wait one moment, Kirby. You're a Supervisor. Who gives you instructions anyway? How can you be pressured into making a transfer when you're in high authority?" "The instructions came from higher authority." "I find that hard to believe," Magnus said. Mondschein sat stock still, enthralled by this battle between Supervisors despite his own predicament. He had never understood how he had managed to get that transfer, and now it began to seem as though no one else understood it, either. Kirby said, "The instructions came from a source I'm reluctant to name." "Covering up for yourself, Kirby?" "You're taking liberties with my patience, Supervisor Magnus," said Kirby tightly. "I want to know who put this spy among us." Kirby took a deep breath. "All right," he said. "I'll tell you. All of you be my witness to this. The order came from Vorst. Noel Vorst called me and said he wanted this man sent here. Vorst sent him. Vorst! What do you make of that?" IX r T'hey were not finished interrogating Mondschein. Waves of espers worked him over, trying to get beneath the erasure, without success. Organic methods were employed too: Mondschein was shot full of truth serums old and new, everything from sodium pentothal on up, and batteries of hard-faced brothers questioned him rigorously. Mondschein let them strip his soul bare, so that every bit of nastiness, every selfseeking moment, everything that made him a human being stood out in bold relief. They found nothing useful. Nor did a fourhour immersion in a Nothing Chamber yield results: Mondschein was too wobbly-brained to be able to answer questions for three days afterward. He was as puzzled as they were. He would gladly have confessed the most heinous of sins; in fact, several times during the long interrogation he did confess, simply to have it over with, but the espers read his motives plainly and laughed his confessions to scorn. Somehow, he knew, he had fallen into the hands of the enemies of the Brotherhood, and had concluded a pact with them, a pact which he had fulfilled. But he had no inner knowledge of any of that Whole segments of his memory were gone, and that was terrifying to him. Mondschein knew that he was finished. They would not let him remain at Santa Fe, naturally. His dream of being on hand when immortality was achieved now was ended. They would cast him out with flaming swords, and he would wither and grow old, cursing his lost opportunity. That is, if they did not kill him outright, or work some subtle form of slow destruction on him. A light December snow was falling on the day that Supervisor Kirby came to tell him his fate. "You can go, Mondschein," the tall man said somberly. "Go? Where?" "Wherever you like. Your case has been decided. You're guilty, but there's reasonable doubt of your volition. You're being expelled from the Brotherhood, but otherwise no action will be taken against you." "Does that mean I'm expelled from the church as a communicant too?" "Not necessarily. That's up to you. If you want to come to worriiip, we won't deny our comfort to you," Kirby said. "But there's no possibility of your holding a position within the church. You've been tampered with, and we can't take further chances with you. I'm sorry, Mondichein." Mondschein was sorry too, but relieved as well. They would not take revenge on him. He would lose nothing but his chance at life everlasting -- and perhaps he might even retain that, just as any other common worshipper did. He had forfeited, of course, his chance to rise in the Vorster hierarchy. But there was another hierarchy too, Mondschein thought, where a man might move more swiftly. The Brotherhood took him to the city of Santa Fe proper, gave him some money, and turned him loose. Mondschein headed immediately for the nearest chapel of the Transcendent Harmony, which turned out to be in Albuquerque, twenty minutes away.  'X#'e've been expecting you," Y ' a Harmonist in flowing green robes told him. "I've got instructions to contact my superiors the moment you show up." Mondschein was not surprised at that. Nor was he greatly astonished to be told, a short while later, that he was to leave by quickboat for Rome right away. The Harmonists would pay his expenses, he was informed. A slim woman with surgially altered eyelids met him at the station in Rome. She did not look familiar to him, but she smiled at him as though they were old friends. She conveyed him to a house on the Via Flaminia, a few dozen miles north of Rome, where a squat-sallowfaced Harmonist Brother with a bulbous nose awaited him. "Welcome," the Harmonist said. "Do you remember me?" "No, I -- yes. Yes" Recollection flooded back, dizzying him, staggering him. There had been three heretics in the room that other time, not just one, and they had given him wine, and promised him a place in the Harmonist hierarchy, and he had agreed to let himself be smuggled into Santa Fe, a soldier in the great crusade, a warrior of light, a Harmonist spy. "You did very well, Mondschein," the heretic said unetuously. "We didn't think you'd be caught so fast, but we weren't sure of all their detection methods. We could only guard against the espers, and we did a fair enough job of that. At any rate, the information you provided was extremely useful." "And you'll keep' your end of the bargain? I'm to get a tenthlevel job?" "Of course. You didn't think we'd cheat you, did you? You'll have a three-month indoctrination course, so you can attain insight into our movement. Then you'll assume your new duties in our organization. Which would you prefer, Mondschein -- Mars or Venus?" "Mars or Venus? I don't follow you." "We're going to attach you to our missionary division. You'll be leaving Earth by next summer, to carry on our work in one of the colonies. You're free to choose the one you prefer." Mondschein was aghast. He had never bargained for this. Selling out to these heretics, only to get shipped off to an alien world and likely martyrdom -- no, he had never expected anything like that. Faust didn't expect toe troubles either, Mondschein thought coldly. He said, "What kind of trick is this? You've got no right to ask me to become a missionary!" "We offered you a tenth-level job," the Harmonist said quietly. "The option of choosing what division it would be in remained with us." Mondschein was silent, though there was a fierce throbbing in his skull. He could walk out -- and be nothing. Or he could submit, and be -- what? Dead in six weeks, as likely as not. "I'll take it," he said. His words sounded like a cage clanging shut. The Harmonist nodded. "I thought you would," he said. He turned to leave, then paused. He asked curiously, "Did you really think you could name your own position -- spy?" A      "Repent Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman "Repent, Harlequin I" said the Ticktockman... but the time for repentance was past 'T'here are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know "where it's at", this: "The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, possee comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it." -- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" That is the heart of it. Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning. The end will take care of itself. TJecause it was the very world- it was, the very world they had allowed it to become, for months his activities did not come to the alarmed attention of The Ones Who Kept the Machine Functioning Smoothly, the ones who poured the very best butter over the cams and mainsprings of the culture. Not until it had become obvious that somehow, someway, he had become a notoriety, a celebrity, perhaps even a hero for what Officialdom inescapably tagged "an emotionally disturbed segment of the populace," did they turn it over to the Ticktockman and his legal machinery. But by then, because it was the very world it was, and they had no way to predict he would happen -- possibly a strain of disease long-defunct, now, suddenly reborn in a system where immunity had been forgotten, had lapsed -- he had been allowed to become too real. Now he had form and substance. He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades ago. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain middleclass circles it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful. In others, there was only sniggering, those strata where thought is subjugated to form and to ritual, niceties, proprieties. But down below, ah, down below, where the people always needed their saints and sinners, their bread and circuses, their heroes and villains, he was considered a Bolivar; a Napoleon; a Robin Hood; a Dick Bong (Ace of Aces); a Jesus; a Jomo Kenyatta. And at the top -- where, like socially attuned Shipwreck Kellys, every tremor and vibration threatens to dislodge the wealthy, powerful and titled from their flagpoles -- he was considered a menace; a heretic; a rebel; a disgrace; a peril. He was known down the line, to the very heartmeat core, but the important reactions were high above and far below. At the very top, at the very bottom. So his file was turned over, along with his time-card and his cardioplate, to the office of the Ticktockman. The Ticktockman: very much over six feet tall, often silent, a soft purring man when things went timewise. Even in the cubicles of the hierarchy, where fear was generated, seldom suffered, he was called the Ticktockman. But no one called him that to his mask. You don't call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called the Master Timekeeper to his mask. "This is what he is," said the Ticktockman with genuine softness, "but not who he is. This time-card I'm holding in my left hand has a name on it, but it is the name of what he is, not who he is. This cardioplate here in my right hand is also named, but not whom named, merely what named. Before I can exercise proper revocation I have to know who this what is." To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks, all the commex, even the mineez, he said, "Who is this Harlequin?" He was not purring smoothly. Timewise, it was jangle. However, it was the longest single speech they had ever heard him utter at one time -- the staff, the ferrets, the loggers, the finks, the commex, but not the mineez, who usually weren't around to know, in any case. But even they scurried to find out -- Who is the Harlequin? TTigh above the third level of the city, he crouched on the humming aluminum-frame platform of the air-boat (foof! airboat, indeed! swizzleskid is what it was, with a tow-rack jerry-rigged) and stared down at the neat Mondrian arrangement of the buildings. Somewhere nearby, he could hear the metronomic left-rightleft of the #:# P.M. shift, entering the Timkin roller-bearing plant in their sneakers. A minute later, precisely, he heard the softer right-left-right of the #:# A.M. formation going home. An elfish grin spread across his tanned features, and his dimples appeared for a moment. Then, scratching at his thatch of auburn hair, he shrugged within his motley, as though girding himself for what came next, and threw the joystick forward, and bent into the wind as the air-boat dropped. He skimmed over a slidewalk, purposely dropping a few feet to crease the tassels of the ladies of fashion, and -- inserting thumbs in large ears -- he stuck out his tongue, rolled his eyes and went wugga-wuggawugga. One pedestrian skittered and tumbled, sending parcels every which way, another wet herself, a third keeled slantwise and the walk was stopped automatically by the servitors till she could be resucitated. It was a minor diversion. Then he swirled away on a vagrant breeze and was gone. Hiho. As he rounded the cornice of the Time-Motion Study Building, he saw the shift, just boarding the slidewalk. With practiced motion and an absolute conservation of movement, they sidestepped up onto the slowstrip and (in a chorus line reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley film of the antediluvian #'s) advanced across the strips ostrich-walking till they were lined up on the expresstrip. Once more, in anticipation, the elfin grin spread, and there was a tooth missing back there on the left side. He dipped, skimmed, and swooped over them. And then, scrunching about on the air-boat, he released the holding pins that fastened shut the ends of the home-made pouring troughs that kept his cargo from dumping prematurely. And as he pulled the trough-pins, the airboat slid over the factory workers and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of jelly beans cascaded down on the expresstrip. lions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the sidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coo coo newness. Jelly beans! nphe shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks; after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of boards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering. And then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, and still laughing and popping little jelly-bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle. But... The shift was delayed seven minutes. They did not get home for seven minutes. The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes. Quotas were delayed by inoperative slidewaKrs for aeven minutes. He had tapped the first domino in the line, and one after another, the others had fallen. The System had been seven minutes' worth of disrupted. It was a tiny matter, hardly worthy of note. But in a society where tile single driving force was order and unity and promptness and clocklike precision and attention to the clock, reverence of the gods of the passage of time, it was a disaster of major importance. So he was ordered to appear before the Ticktockman. It was broadcast across every channel of the communications web. He was ordered to be there at #:# dammit on time. And they waited, and they waited. But he didn't show up till almost tenthirty, at which time he merely sang a little song about moonlight in a place no one had ever heard of, called Vermont, and vanished again. But they had all been waiting since seven, and it wrecked hell with their schedules. So the question remained: Who is the Harlequin? But the unasked question (more important of the two) was : how did we get into this position, where a laughing, irresponsible japer of jabberwocky and jive could disrupt our entire economic and cultural life with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of jelly beans? Jelly for God's sake beans! This is madness! Where did he get the money to buy a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of jelly beans? (They knew it would have cost that much, because they had a team of Situation Analysts pulled off another assignment, and rushed to the slidewalk scene to sweep up and count the candies, and produce findings, which disrupted their schedules and threw their entire branch at least a day behind.) Jelly beans! Jelly... beans? Now wait a second -- a second accounted for -- no one has manufactured jelly beans for over a hundred years. That's another good question. More than likely it will never be answered to your complete satisfaction. But then, how many questions ever are? T he middle you know. Here is the beginning. How it starts : A desk pad. Day for day, and turn each day. #:# -- open the mail. #:# -- appointment with planning commission board. #:# -- discuss installation progress charts with J. L. #:# -- pray for rain. #:# -- lunch. And so it goes. "I'm sorry, Miss Grant, but the time for interviews was set at #:#, and it's almost five now. I'm sorry you're late, but those are the rules. You'll have to wait till next year to submit application for this college again." And so it goes. "I couldn't wait, Fred. I had to be at Pierre Cartain's by #:#, and you said you'd meet me under the clock in the terminal at #:#, and you weren't there, so I had to go on. You're always late, Fred. If you'd been there, we could have sewed it up together, but as it was, well, I took the order alone... And so it goes. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Atterley: in reference to your son Gerold's constant tardiness, I am afraid we will have to suspend him from school unless some more reliable method can be instituted guaranteeing he will arrive at his classes on time. Granted he is an exemplary student, and his marks are high, his constant flouting of the schedules of this school make it impractical to maintain him in a system where the other children eem capable of getting where they are supposed to be on time mnd so it goes. A.M. "I don't care if the script is good, I need it Thursday!" P.M. "You got here late. The job's taken. Sorry." "God, what time is it, I've gotta run!" And to it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight. Until it becomes more than a minor inconvenience to be late. It becomes a sin. Then a crime. #:#:# midnight, the office of the Master Timekeeper will require that all citizens to submit their time-cards and cardioplates for processing. In accordance with ing the revocation of time per capita, all cardioplates will be keyed to the individual holder and -- What they had done was devise a method of curtailing the amount of life a person could have. If he was ten minutes late, he lost ten minutes of his life. An hour was proportionately worth more revocation. If someone was consistently tardy, he might find himself, on a Sunday night, receiving a communique from the Master Timekeeper that his time had run out, and he would be "turned off" at high noon on Monday, please straighten your affairs, sir. And so, by this simple scientific expedient (utilizing a scientific process held dearly secret by the Ticktockman's office) the system was maintained. It was tiie only expedient thing to do. It was, after all, patriotic. The schedules had to be met. After all, there was a war on! But wasn't there always? #XJ#W that is really disgust' ing," the Harlequin said, when pretty Alice showed him the wanted poster. "Disgusting and highly improbable. After all, this isn't the days of desperadoes. A wanted poster!" "You know," Alice noted, "you speak with a great deal of inflection." "I'm sorry," said the Harlequin humbly. "No need to be sorry. You're always saying 'I'm sorry'. You have such massive guilt, Everett, it's really very sad." "I'm sorry," he repeated, then pursed his lips so the dimples appeared momentarily. He hadn't wanted to say that at all. "I have to go out again. I have to do something." Alice slammed her coffee-bulb down on the counter. "Oh for God's sake, Everett, can't you stay home just one night! Must you always be out in that ghastly clown suit, running around annoying people?" "I'm -- " he stopped, and clapped the jester's hat onto his auburn thatch with a tiny tingling of bells. He rose, rinsed out his coffee-bulb at the tap, and put it into the drier for a moment. "I have to go." She didn't answer. The faxbox was purring, and she pulled a sheet out, read it, threw it toward him on the counter. "It's about you. Of course. You're ridiculous." He read it quickly. It said the Ticktockman was trying to locate him. He didn't care, he was going out to be late again. At the door, dredging for an exit line, he hurled back petulantly, "Well, you speak with inflection, tooF' Alice rolled her pretty eyes heavenward. "You're ridiculous." The Harlequin stalked out, slamming the door, which sighed shut softly, and locked itself. There was a gentle knock, and Alice got up with an exhalation of exasperated breath, and opened the door. He stood there. "I'll be back about ten-thirty, okay?" She pulled a rueful face. "Why do you tell me that? Why? You know you'll be late! You know it! You're always late, so why do you tell me these dumb things?" She closed the door. On the other side, the Harlequin nodded to himself. She's right. She's always right. Fll be late. I'm always late. He shrugged again, and went off to be late once more. TTe had fired off the firecracker rockets that said: I will attend the #th annual International Medical Association Invocation at #:# P.M. precisely. I do hope you will join me. The words had burned in the sky, and of course the authorities were there, lying in wait for him. They assumed, naturally, that he would be late. He arrived twenty minutes early, while they were setting up the spiderwebs to trap and hold him, and blowing a large bullhorn, he frightened and unnerved them so that their own moisturized encirclement webs sucked closed, and they were hauled up, kicking and shrieking, high above the amphitheater's floor. The Harlequin laughed and laughed, and apologized profusely. The physicians, gathered in solemn conclave, roared with laughter, and accepted the Harlequin's apologies with exaggerated bowing and posturing, and a merry time was had by all, who thought the Harlequin was a regular foofaraw in fancy pants; all, that is, but the authorities, who had been sent out by the office of the Ticktockman, who hung there like so much dockside cargo, hauled up above the floor unseemly fashion, of the amphitheater in a most (In another part of the same city where the Harlequin carried on his "activities", totally unrelated in every way to what concerns here, save that it illustrates the Ticktockman's power and import, a man named Marshall Delahanty received his turn-off notice from the Ticktockman's office. His wife received the notification from the gray-suited minee who delivered it, with the traditional "look of sorrow" plastered hideously across his face. She knew what it was, even without unsealing it. It was a billetdoux of immediate recognition to everyone these days. She gasped, and held it as though it were a glass slide tingled with botulism, and prayed it was not for her. Let it be for Marsh, she thought, brutally, realistically, or one of the kids, but not for me, please dear God, not for me. And then she opened it, and it was for Marsh, and she was at one and the same time Horrified and relieved. The next trooper in the line had caught the bullet. "Marshall," she screamed, "Marshall! Termination, Marshall! OhmiGod, Marshall, whattl we do, whattl we do, Marshall, omigodmarshall..." and in their home that night was the sound of tearing paper and fear, and the stink of madness went up the flue and there was nothing, absolutely nothing they could do. (But Marshall Delahanty tried to run. And early the next day, when turn-off time came, he was deep in the forest two hundred miles away, and the offices of the Ticktockman blanked his cardioplate, and Marshall Delahanty keeled over, running, and his heart stopped, and the blood dried up on its way to his brain, and he was dead that's all. One light went out on his sector map in the office of the Master Timekeeper, while notification was entered for fax reproduction, and Georgette Delahanty's name was entered on the dole roles till she could re-marry. Which is the end of the footnote, and all the point that need be made, except don't laugh, because that is what would happen to the Harlequin if ever the Ticktockman found out his real name. It isn't funny.) nphe shopping level of the city was thronged with the Thursday-colors of the buyers. Women in canary yellow chitons and men in pseudoTyrolean outfits that were jade and leather and fit very tightly, save for the balloon pants. When the Harlequin appeared on the still-being-constructed shell of the new Efficiency Shopping Center, his bullhorn to his elfishly laughing lips, everyone pointed and stared. He berated them. "Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you t hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees. Down with the Ticktockman!" Who's the nut? most of the shoppers wanted to know. Who's the nut oh wow I'm gonna be late I gotta run... And the construction gang on the Shopping Center received an urgent order from the office of the Master Timekeeper that the dangerous criminal known as the Harlequin was atop their spire, and their aid was urgently needed in apprehending him. The work crew said no, they would lose time on their construction schedule, but the Ticktockman managed to pull the proper threads of governmental webbing, and they were told to cease work and catch that nitwit up there on the spire with the bullhorn. So a dozen and more burly workers began climbing into their construction platforms, releasing the a-grav plates, and rising toward the Harlequin. After the debacle (in which, through the Harlequin's attention to personal safety, no one was seriously injured), the workers tried to re-assemble and assault him again. But it was too late. He had vanished. It had attracted quite a crowd, however, and the shopping cycle was thrown off by simply hours. The purchasing needs of the system were therefore falling behind, and so measures were taken to accelerate the cycle for the rest of the day, but it got bogged down and speeded up and they sold too many floatvalves and not nearly enough wegglers, which meant that the popli ratio was off, which made it necessary to rush cases and cases of spoiling Smash-O to stores that usually needed a case only every three or four hours The shipments were bollixed, the trans-shipments were mis-routed, and in the end, even the swizzleskid industries felt it "Don't come back till you have him!" the Ticktockman said, very quietly, very sincerely, extremely dangerously. They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search  seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used Bertillon. They used cunning. They used guils. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn't help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology. And what the hell : they caught him. After all, his name was Everett C. Marm, and he wasn't much to begin with, except a man who had no sense of time. UD epent, Harlequin !" said the Ticktockman. "Get stuffed!" the Harlequin replied, sneering. "You've been late a total of sixty-three years, five months, three weeks, two days, twelve hours, forty-one minutes, fiftynine seconds, point oh three six one one one microseconds. You've used up everything you can, and more. I'm going to turn you off." "Scare someone else. I'd rather be dead than live in a dumb world with a bogey man like you." "It's my job." "You're full of it. You're a tyrant. You have no right to order people around and kill them if they show up late." "You can't adjust. You can't fit in." "Unstrap me and I'll fit my fist into your mouth." "You're a non-conformist." "That didn't used to be a felony." "It is now. Live in the world around you." "I hate it. It's a terrible world." "Not everyone thinks so. Most people enjoy order." "I don't, and most of the people I know don't." "That's not true. How do you think we caught you?" "I'm not interested," said the Harlequin." "A girl named pretty Alice told us who you were." "That's a lie." "It's true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong, she wants to conform, I'm going to tum you off." "Then do it already, and stop arguing with me." "I'm not going to turn you off." "You're an idiot!" "Repent, Harlequin," said the Ticktockman. "Get stuffed." So they sent him to Coventry. And in Coventry they worked him over. It was just like what they did to Winston Smith in #, which was a book none of them knew about. But the techniques are really quite ancient, and so they did it to Everett C. Marm, and one day quite a long time later, the Harlequin appeared on the communications web, appearing elfish and dimpled and bright-eyed, and not at all brainwashed, and he said he had been wrong, that it was a good, a very good thing indeed, to belong, and be right on time hip-ho and away we go, and everyone stared up at him on the public screens that covered an entire city block, and they said to themselves, well, you see, he was just a nut after all, and if that's the way the system is run, then let's do it that way, because it doesn't pay to fight city hall, or in this case, the Ticktockman. So Everett C. Marm was destroyed, which was a loss, because of what Thoreau said earlier, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and in every revolution, a few die who shouldn't, but they have to, because that's the way it happens, and if you make only a little change, then it seems to be worthwhile. Or, to make the point lucidly: ttTTh, excuse me, sir, I, uh,  don't know how to uh, to tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a little, uh, bit off." He grinned sheepishly. "That's ridiculous!" murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask. "Check your watch." And then he went into his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee. Worlds of the finest in science fiction id in your subscription order today ered to your door, bringing you stories by fr favorites in science fiction! His celebrated Relief stories and others appear regularly in IF -- fast-moving, comic yarns of diplomatic skullduggery out on the frontiers of the stars! still to come! And now -- The Best of the Top Name Writers -- Robert A. Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, Hal Clement, Lester del Rey contribute to IF. -- and a Preview of Tomorrow's Best Each issue of IF brings you a brand-new writer, making his debut in science fiction in IF. u Use this order  blank or order  by letter -- but J don't deltyl IF -- Subscription Department #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. # Yes, send me the next # issues of IF! I enclose #. Name Address City State Zip No (Outside of N. and S. America add I .# for postage) Offer void after Dec. #, # Tiat sane man would be a writer? Consider that he has to please himself; he may claim he does not care what he writes or how, but he must write to sell, and that elementary need alone operates to shape his choice of word-arrangements. He may claim that he does not care if he sells... but you can see where that leads. The writer who doesn't care is the least free of all writers, and often a suffering slave to his own notions of excellence. Then he has to get past an editor, who is in turn conscious of his publisher. To an at least appropriate degree, and often to a point of paranoia, the three of them are conscious of what they believe the reader wants. In many cases, there is the background influence of the distributor, who is dogmatically sure of what will sell and is often in a position to influence everything from cover design to content. The distributor is in turn marginally conscious of the retailer -- the storekeeper in whose power it lies to bury a magazine behind a stack of competitors, or to return a bundle unopened, unsold. But let us assume that the writer's words, however shaped by conscious and unconscious modifications at all these levels, have been published, sold, and are now held before a reader's eyes. Can the reader read? What influences in his life have made certain words compellingly significant to him? Never mind the twelve-year-old who has stumbled across his first unabridged dictionary, and the certifiable maniac who underscores the words he likes in the publications he likes; these are the extreme cases. But they are significant; you cannot tell me that an individual sufficiently word-conscious to read for pleasure has not developed a complex tangle of reflexes triggered by words. This tangle is not the same as anyone else's, and therefore no reader reads what the writer has written. Not only are words an arbitrary code with less than perfect accuracy, so are letters only arbitrary marks on paper. I can read German, for instance -- but not in the quasimedieval characters of the #'s. Some groups of letters are difficult for people to read accurately -- if your name is Bulger, Swensen, Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Brown or Frederic Wakeman, or if you are quite accustomed to receiving mail addressed to Algis Burdys, you know exactly what I mean. If you have a name that ends in "s," or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands. People have certain predispositions when deciphering the code we call language -- in fact, we mis-call it, for in this case we are discussing literation -- one of the more infuriating of which is an apparently universal tendency to call one very clangorous sf novel "Rouge Moon." (A man who wanted me to hire him once devoted three single-spaced pages to telling me what a great book that was, and not once in some twenty detailed references to its title and specific scenes therein did he even accidentally tumble to the fact that the publisher had called it Rogue Moon. Yet he wanted the job very badly.) And then, poor chap, the writer has gotten his work out into print, and at least some of his readers -- as frail, as tangled inside -- are critics. Critics think they know everything that went on in the writer's mind, and where he did not say what he intended to say. They correct his arrangements for him before he even makes them, and then they write essays about them. I, fortunately, am a book reviewer. I only know all about editing, publishing, book production, distribution and the difference between making and missing the distributor's tie (not an item of accessory apparel, in this case). I would not dream of telling you what goes on in the mind of any specific writer. I have some understanding of what goes on in my own mind, of course, when I am being a writer, and would be remiss if I did not ascribe my habits and prejudices to the people whose books I review. All this I write down, and send off to my editor, who marks it up and sends it to his printer, who hands it to his composing room foreman, etc., etc., and after a while you get it, complete with occasional typographical errors and idiosyncratic editing, and you understand it, don't you? A X ortals and Monsters (Ballantine #U#, #c, paper original) is the third collection of short stories by Lester del Rey, Robots and Changelings, also from Ballantine, having intervened between this one and... And Some Were Human. These are stories written since #; their sources are diverse. Of the twelve pieces here, five are from Galaxy; three are from Astrounding, and the rest from other sources including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In other words, del Rey's work has adapted itself to the requirements of every major market in the past twenty-five years of this field. Or has it? Generally speaking, there are no basic differences in the essential natures of these stories; it is impossible to guess where each first appeared simply on the basis of its text. They vary a little bit -- not much -- in their degree of success on their own terms. They vary less than that from the tone and approach taken in his earliest work. That includes some of the best fantasy Unknown ever published, as well as a considerable canon of robot stories which began with the poignant and gentle "Helen O'Loy" at almost the same time, to the week, when Eando Binder's "I, Robot" (the lurching, hollow short story, not Isaac Asimov's later series eventually collected under that name) was demonstrating the uses of bathos. Finally, the entire body of del Rey's work differs less from other kinds of stories he has done under other names than it does from most of the science fiction that has appeared during that time. From the beginning of his career to date, del Rey has remained his own individual. He has listened respectfully to various editorial dicta, thoughtfully considered the requirements of his market, chosen the editors he will work for and then has sat down to write his story so that it came out a del Rey story, of a piece with del Rey and with what del Rey feels. In the last analysis, he writes for himself, and for his readers. Consequently, he has lasted longer, and done more good work, than hundreds of practitioners who have come charging over the horizon. His touch as a storyteller is quiet. The typical del Rey character is an individual who is trying to do the decent thing to the best of his ability. The typical del Rey story problem is that of a good and faithful being trying to understand a complex situation which prevents his immediately knowing the decent thing to do. When he writes a story whose problem becomes apparent only in the last paragraphs, this is frequently the nature of his "trick" ending -- the mood is not shock but sorrow; the payoff is not in some irrevocable destruction of this personality but in the reader's realization that even a decent individual must pay the price of ignorance. Normally, del Rey even then leaves an opening for the protagonist to grow and go on in, and even his worst losers retrieve something -- call it dignity. The few exceptions to this general rule are noteworthy for two things ; the Willfully vicious thing they have done to merit their eventual punishment, and that punishment, which is nothing so simple as being shot in the gut with a blaster -- when it arrives, tion. I believe the reason for all these qualities is a simple one. Del Rey's world runs deeper and clearer than most, following its own course, suffering foolishness but not fools, ignoring the ignorant but not ignorance. In a society of other-directed people, twisting and turning toward today's chosen practicality, the truly proud and independent man is a marvel to behold. When he chooses to create, his creations cannot help but take on some of that attribute, and in turn give us our chance to assimilate as much of it as we can. At the very least, what his stories offer is a refreshing change. It is up to the reader to provide whatever it is that needs refreshing and is still not beyond it. In this particular collection, the story which most clearly spells this out is "Return Engagement," a blend of science fiction and fantasy which not only takes mankind's present general desolation as its problem but then offers an explanation and a solution which is completely valid on its own terms. These three extremely difficult things are done with economy and a skill to which del Rey does not draw your attention. Others have tried to accomplish as much within a novel, and failed. For contrast, there's "And it Comes Out Here." a lighthearted time-paradox story. As it happens, the hero's plans could not possibly have worked out if the future society for which he is in part responsible were not truly, ultrahumanly decent. "Instinct" is one of the finest robot stories ever written. It is the epitome of everything del Rey does in this sub-genre, from its characterizations of the robots' diverse and sophisticated personalities to his understanding of what a robot, even a highly educated and apparently fully human robot, must be and do. But perhaps I'm leading you to think of this author as a sweet, kindly chap with a little twinkle in his eye and an attitude that stands four square with the traditions of hearth and home. That impression will be seriously undermined not only by the blurbs Ballantine has applied to this package but by such stories as "Seat of Judgment" and "Lady of Space," as well as by much in the remaining selections. The thing that makes his stories so good is the same thing that makes his public personality so striking that no editorial staff has been able to resist sketching it in their descriptive copy. He sees very few things the way most people do. He sees them clearly, and he says so. You will be amazed how deep these gentle stories cut. There is no writer in this field who is more steadfast in practicing the rule that fiction is first of all entertainment, nor one who believes more strongly that turns of technique are to be learned for the purpose of clearing away all signs of technique between story and reader. There is plainly nothing in his code that says the result must be bland. This is a book you will not regret buying. A nd now we are going to consider a book you should not buy. It is time we had an example which is made horrible not by the lack of intelligence but the lack of application; in short, a book with decent people in it, representing the work of some people I know are decent, which is nevertheless indecent. Robert Silverberg is the selfcontained, cerebral and charming man to whom the del Rey collection described above is dedicated. He knows the sciencefiction field and a great many other things to exhaustion, and he writes and sells a minimum of fifty thousand words -- call it the equivalent of a commerial novel -- each week, using a platoon of pseudonyms who are the major factors in a great many different markets for commercial writing. He is in the business of giving value for money, and he is an outstanding success at that. Still quite young, he was a prominent fiction fan in the early #s and then turned to this professional field first before exponding his career onward. He (till appears in the magazines frequently enough to maintain the appearance of a full-time career. In actual fact, of course, every word he now sells here is an interruption in his main schedule, and in many senses a labor of love. Chilton has now brought out a collection of his earliest stories under the title To Worlds Beyond (#) with a foreward by Isaac Asimov and a very good brief introduction by the author. (The book is coincidentally, dedicated to Lester and Evelyn del Rey.) There are nine stories altogether in this #-page volume, all from the years # through '#. Chilton, which includes many juveniles in its program, does not ay that this is another one, but I think it's realistic to consider that these selections, four from Imagination and Super-Science with the remainder from Astounding, Galaxy and Infinity, have been chosen with an eye toward that market. The tone of the selling copy on the jacket flap is appropriately gee whiz. Of the stories, "The Old Man" and "Misfit" are rather bad, and "Collecting Team" is not much better. As a class, they share the attribute of each being about one simple idea which gets very little in the way of development r -- although two of these are supposed to be "surprise" stories -- suspense. Respectively they describe -- but do not tell an adult enough about -- a spaceship captain who is superannuated at the age of nineteen, a man who must find his wife on a high-gravity world whose acclimated humans despise him, and a zoo ship piloted by humans which finds itself trapped on a planet which turns out to be a zoo maintained by aliens. As a class, these stories end where the writers Silverberg was reading as a fan would have begun them. "Double Dare" the Galaxy selection -- "Certainty" and "Mind for Business", represent some rather good work in a direct line of descent from the gimmickanecdotes Astounding has already enjoyed. As a class, these are stories which are difficult to do markedly well, but which by their nature cannot be raised beyond the level of anecdote. Finally, we have "The Overlord's Thumb," "New Men For Mars" and '"Ozymandas," in that rising order of adult quality. All of them represent some attempt to grapple with real problems. The first concerns itself with the day when an unwittingly guilty Earthman may stand accused in an alien court -- an event which is bound to occur sooner or later -- and we have a choice of pulling him out by force majeur or letting him take his chances with a code of justice we do not subscribe to. Silverberg makes the humanistic choice -- lets him be found guilty and take his punishment -- but vitiates his own point by having the punishment turn out to be something the convict himself can overcome by physical force. Furthermore, the premise is not essentially science fictional; the locale is simply Hungary or East Germany written differently since the aliens are totally humanoid. "New Men For Mars" is about two rival colonies on that planet. One of them, under official sponsorship, is a completely terraformed dome populated by educated and sophisticated people who cannot exist unprotected when away from it. The other, a private venture of which the official bodies are hostile, is nothing like as flossy and is populated almost exclusively by transplanted Andean tin miners who have little to recommend them except for their native ability to live in a thin, cold atmosphere. Silverberg demonstrates rather honestly and conclusively that education and admirable personalities can be left for later, and that even the fractional advantage of not having to run quite so fast for an air suit is the crucial one. I'm afraid he's right in postulating that the people who are not most attractive to society on Earth will get all the subsidies for work on Mars, and that this will prove to be a serious error. But in this # story, he takes too long to decide he's made his point; the reader is well ahead of him, especially since the story is written in the time-honored manner (with the protagonist loving the slick colony at once) which tells all of us who have read more than three pulp stories that something Will Happen to Change His Mind. "Ozymandias" is a fair story, wry and convincing in its characterizations. An exploration team, half scientific and half military, finds a totally desolated but once civilized planet. On it, the scientists discover an intelligent robot who quickly learns their speech and is able to tell them the complete history of this otherwise bare desert world and the high-level culture whose home it was. The scientists, already irritated by their ship's military commander, keep their tremendous archeological discovery to themselves. This piece of action, which is a moot likelihood in real life, has to be supported with exact characterization and motivation in any story that proposes to use it believably. Silverberg is not known for bothering very much in precisely those areas of technique. But he does here, because he absolutely must, and proves that when he must, he can do it well. He does something of the same for the military people, who now discover Ozymandias the robot for themselves and seize him for their purposes, since the robot can also reel off the specs for all the super-weapons which wasted this world in the first place. But having gone that far, he ends with a cliche -- having seized the robot and his information, the military will now go home and start the escalation of events which will inevitably destroy Earth as this planet was destroyed. Or so, at least, believe the scientists who have been our viewpoint characters all along, and who now slump into ineffectuality with a bitterness and a kind of damp resignation which seem repugnant to me as an adult and are not likely to do anything more than that for adolescents. In a way, it would be almost better if Silverberg had not bothered to do one part of this story so well. Well, no. He was right to do it -- good work is never wasted, and is going to have its cumulative effect on a writer's later endeavors. But considering this particular story as a thing in itself, the immediate result is a heightening of disappointment. This book is interesting ! cause is represents precisely tfct kind of thing that happens when a publisher produces a bocfc only because he wants to do  book. I find it impossible to bolieve he wanted to do this particular book. The tone of A# jacket copy is adolescent; tho Asimov introduction, on the othsr hand sounds like some of Isaac's marvelous party conversation, full of personal asides and bounce, utterly charming and, in this context, irrelevant. On the other hand, each story is preceded by a useful, restrainedly short and uneffusive blurb which serve to give pattern and cohesion to the selection of stories, which are very well balanced against each other. On the fourth hand, we ar# told three times (once in Asimov's introduction, twice by Chilton's blurb writers) that Silverberg's wife is beautiful. She is -- in fact, she looks as if she had been painted by Degas -- but this information is of no relevance to your reading of these stories, nor did we really need to know, three times, that she is an electronics engineer, especially since there is no specially detailed electronics in any of these stories. Ultimately, a prize must go to the art director for producing a jacket so stark that he could rescue himself only by emphasizing the R in "worlds," thus indicating only that he was unable to start over from scratch; to the assistant editor who put in a full and precise acknowledgement of previous copyright -- in the place where he forgot to supply a table of contents (there is none, anywhere in the book); and to the jacket blurb writers, again, who were so strained for something to say that they felt moved to tell us Robert Silverberg is known as "Bob, to his science fiction fans around the world." With these advertisements for carelessness, schilophrenia and editorial boredom all over the book, who in the world can be expected to invest four dollars in its author's work? R andom House has a curious item, The Cook, which is a novel worth its # and is bylined Harry Kressing, which is pointedly acknowledged to be a pseudonym. The Cook may be read as fantasy -- it being carefully picked out in threads of allegory and symbolism -- or as science fiction, if one allows that gastronomy is a science. My feeling is that it is -- at least as must so as the brand of sociology which has made so many words in this field. What the book really is is an exercise in the sort of writing that has been on the ascendant Lord of The Fliee and Nigel Dennis did Cards of Identity. It is die new Gothic fantasy, drawing for its effects not cm the superstitious lore of Transylvanian peasants but on the up-to-date explorations of the human psyche, which is of course another thing entirely. The Cook, as a matter of fact, owes a great deal to the tenyear-old Cards of Identity. That book began with a mysterious but purposeful stranger's deliberately getting a stately old English family so confused as to its identity that it willynilly, step by step lost its hold on the real situation, became convinced that it was the domestic staff of the manor and thus permitted the stranger to move in as lord of the manor and celebrated his accession with an enormous levee at which the actual owners of course labored night and day as the servants of this cuckoo's invited sycophants. The book went on from there, working all this out in considerable filigree; The Cook, which is not as elaborate iTl any particular but is therefore more convincing, stops at that point, with the party going on ad perpetuum and Conrad, who began as the cadaverous new cook, grown monstrously fat and marned to the equally elephantine daughter of the house. It may not seem possible to you -- if you haven't read Cards -- that such a story could be believed even for a minute. It can, as The Cook demonstrates. With steps so unobtrusive that he seems fairly sympathetic at first, Conrad Venn settles into the isolated rural community as the newly hired servant of one of the two leading families. With at first impressive and then terrifying competence he then becomes sole master of all he surveys simply by being more capable and less good-hearted than anyone else. Some of Kressing's best characters are the members of the misfortunate Hill family, who are childishly, shyly eager to win his favor and approval. If at any time they had remembered who they were supposed to be, or had felt at ease in the roles they were originally intended by birth and social pressure to play, Venn could not have done anything with them. But they are not at ease. They are conscious of an inferior sophistication, of their questionable but immutable drive to climb higher in social position even though they feel unworthy of the place they already occupy. The allegory is on a very real problem which England has been facing since before World War II and which has become extremely important since then; its application is rather more broad than that. In effect, Kressing may be said to have boiled Cards of Identity down to its essentials, making it unnecessary for you to dig out a copy of the earlier book unless you take enjoyment from graceful, elaborate writing. I do not see that he has contributed anything to the story, beyond a good and less fanciful prose and a few starkly individual scenes, not all of which hold up except as allegory. The scene in which Conrad drives away a rival cook, Brogg, is genuinely horripilating. But then you stop to wonder how a Brogg so resourceless came to be a Brogg so highly placed as to merit Conrad's attention... especially in view of the fact that Brogg almost literally gives Conrad the weapon and the instructions which enable Conrad to undo him. And Kressing goes on to throw in some pretty broad hints that Venn is Satan -- which takes some of the push out of the story -- and to sketch in a number of scenes he might have taken more time on. But if you like this kind of story at all, or if you have so far not had an opportunity to try one, you will not find a better in the immediate  worlb m jm ssisH! (As many ds in o .mes -- .otnbinecl Retail Value u  to #) Retail # #. end OccidM! n uiiholofy. patterns or ana. Retail #. Retail #. Here it m exciting opportunity lor you (# odd any two of that# mattiva tats to your homo library. All ara indicative of the high quality of aalectiona that are available to you at a mombar of the Book Find Club. The coupon la your passport to reading advantures that range from the mysteries of the world's major religions to the excitement of A provocative beat eeller. And at a member, the savings on the books you want to own will average ## and morel . To receive the two sets for only S#S, you need only agree to accept four more booka in the coming year from among the many that will be offered to you month by month. (Most books have a retail price of about # and you will havo the opportunity to obtain thorn at substantial membership savings.) Then, when you complete the introductory offer, you will bonus selection lts for every third book you buy. Fill out the coupon end return it to us today. You can receive as many as # volumes with an. immediate savings of up to #. ce Goloxy, #I Hud, oo St, N.Y., NX # Yeu atay onroll me and aend the # reference worlta indicated below lor only M SS ipius postage and handling. I agree to buy four additional selections or alternates trees the wide range of booka thaf will be made available to me In the coming year a! substantial savings. Whan t do net want the current soleetlon-or prefer to order another bookI may do so on the convenient tors provided for this purpose. l may csncsl my membership at any time alter purchasing the lour additions! books. B#-#M#T  " Reference works #. Mr. Mrs. Miss City . He sought a place in this wondrous world of tomorrow... and found it working for Man's deadliest enemyl IX T? arrester could have carried on  his new duties anywhere. But he didn't want to, he wanted to return to the nest; and there in his room he wrestled with the joymaker and the viewwall and emerged with some sort of picture of what the Sirians were, and what they were doing on Earth. As it turned out, they were neither tourists nor diplomats. They were prisoners. Some thirty years earlier the first human vessels had made contact with the outposts of the HU name was Forrester, and he had been burned to death. But not permanently... for the medical science of six centurios of progress had learned how to freeze a man at the instant of dying, hold him in the slow, dreamless calm of the liquid helium chambers... and bring him back to Ufa with all hb mortal wwunds healed and hb body as strong and healthy as it had ever been. He might die gain -- but the same science that had brought him back to life could do it again, end again. He was, in fact, immortal. And so was all the world. Brave worldl thought Forrester, mazed and delighted, and set out to enjoy his new life; and within hours of waking eg, on his first day in the new life, he was killed again. Why? It had been senseless -- an unprovoked beating. He was put back together gain and turned loose; but he was out of money, and needed a job; and the fine new world no longer looked so fine. But Forrester had friends to help him -- a girl, Adne; her two children; a few others. Hey showed him how to apply for a job; he did; he got it -- and discovered that bb new employer was an alien from a planet of the star Sirius, sworn enemy of everything on Earth! Sirian civilization -- a civilization much like human in the quality of its technology, quite inhuman in the appearance of its members and in their social organization. The human exploring party, investigating an extrasolarian planet, had encountered a Sirian ship nosing about a ringlike structure orbiting that planet. Forrester, having learned that much, had already discovered some enormous gaps in his knowledge. Why hadn't somebody said something to him about men exploring extrasolar space? Where was this system? And what was the orbital ring? It puzzled and confused Forrester; evidently it was not a Sirian structure, and it certainly was not Man's. But he avoided the proliferation of questions and stuck to the straight line of the first encounter with the Sirians. The Earth ship was loaded for bear. Having found bear, it pushed all the buttons. The commander may or may not have been given discretion about the chances of alien contact and what to do when and if it happened. He wasted no time in contemplating choices, though. Everything the Earth ship owned lashed out at the squat, uneven Sirian vessel -- lasers and shells, rockets and energy-emitting decoys to confuse and disrupt its instruments. The Sirians didn't have a chance. Bar a few who were found still alive in space tanks -- their equivalent of suits -- they all died with their ship. The Earthmen brought them warily aboard, then turned tail and fled for home. (Years later a remote-operated probe cautiously returned to look at the scene. They discovered that even the wreckage of the Sirian ship was gone, apparently retrieved by Someone. Whereupon the probes fled too.) Fourteen Sirians had survived the attack. Eleven of them were still alive and on Earth. Forrester, watching the picture-story of the Sirians spread across his view-wall while the joymaker stolidly recited the facts of their exile, could not help a twinge of sympathy. Thirty years of imprisonment! They must be getting old now. Did they hope? Did they despair? Were their wives and kiddies waiting back in the nest, or hatching-pond, or burrow? The joymaker did not say, it only said that the Sirians had been thoroughly studied, endlessly debated -- and released. Released to house arrest. The Parliament of Ridings had passed laws about the Sirians. First, it was from that moment cardinal policy to avoid contact with their home planet. It was possible that the Sirians would not attack even if they discovered Earth -- but it was certain that they wouldn't if they didn't. Second, the Sirians now in captivity could never go home. Third -- Earth prepared for the attack they hoped would not come. So the Sirians were spread across the face of the Earth, one to a city. They were provided with large subsidies, good living quarters, everything they could want except the freedom to leave and the company of their kind. Every one of them was monitored -- not with a mere joymaker. Transponders linked to the central computing nets were surgically built into their very nervous systems. Their whereabouts was on record at every moment. They were informed as to the areas forbidden to them -- rocket landing grounds, nuclear power stations, a dozen other classes of installations. If they ignored the warning, they were reminded. If they failed to heed the reminder, they got a searing jolt of pain to the central nervous system to emphasize it. If that did not stop them, or if for any reason their transponders lost contact with the central computer, they would be destroyed at once. Three of them already had been. At that moment the mellow chime sounded, the view-wall flickered and changed its picture and Forrester was face to face with his employer. I t was just like the picture he had seen befofe. Maybe it was the same Sirian. But it was looking at him now, or seemed to be, though it was hard to tell with the dozens of tiny eyes that rimmed its upper parts, and it spoke to him. "Your name," it said in hollow, unaccented English, "is Charles Dalgleish Forrester and you work for me and you call me S Four." It sounded like a robot talking. More like a robot than the joymaker itself. "Right, S Four," said Forrester. "You tell me about yourself." It sounded like a reasonable request. "All right, S Four. Where do you want me to begin?" "You tell me about yourself." The tentacles were rippling slowly, the circlet of tiny eyes winking at random like the lights on a computer. He had been wrong about the sound of the voice, Forrester decided. It was more like a dubbed-in foreign film on the Late Show. Back when there were foreign films. And Late Shows. "Well," said Forrester ruminatively, I guess I can start with when I was bom. It was the #th of March, #. My father was an architect, but at that time hs was working as a project supervisor for the W.P.A. My -- " "You will tell me about W.P. A.," interrupted the Sirian. "It was a government agency designed to relieve unemployment during the depression. You see, at that time there were period cyclic imbalances in the economy -- " "You will not lecture me," interrupted the Sirian, "and will explain terms for which letters W.P.A. are function of entity." Dashed, Forrester tried to put in concrete terms the business of the New Deal's work relief programs. Only concrete terms would do. The Sirian was distinctly not interested in Forrester's digressions into economic theory. Probably he liked his own theories better. But he seemed interested in, or at least did not interrupt, a couple of jokes about leafraking and falling down when someone kicked the broom a W.P.A. worker was leaning on. The Sirian listened impassively, the girdle of eyes twinkling, for half an hour by the clock; then said, cutting through Forrester's description of a high-school graduation, "You will tell me more at another time," and was gone. And Forrester was well enough pleased. He had never talked to a Sirian before. A lthough the children were romantically thrilled, Adnedid not approve. Not in the least. "Dear Charles," she said reasonably, "They're the enemy. People will say you are doing an evil thing." "If they're so dangerous, why aren't they in concentration ramps?" "Charles! You're acting kamikaze again!" "Or why isn't there a law against working for them?" She sighed and nibbled what looked like a candied violet, regarding him with fond concern. "Oh, Charles. Human society is not merely a matter of law. You have to remember principle. There are certain standards of what is good and what is bad, and civilized people comply with them." Forrester grumbled. "Yes, I understand that. It's good when anybody jumps on me. It's bad when I try to do anything about it." "Kamikaze, Charles! I'm simply trying to point out to you that Taiko -- for instance -- would pay you at least as much as this filthy Sirian for a socially useful job -- " "Sweat Taiko!" shouted Forrester, making her laugh with his malaprop anger. "I'm going to do this by myself!" So Adne left him there on friendly terms, but she left him nonetheless; had an engagement in connection with her employment, she said, and Forrester did not know enough about her job to question it. He hadn't found an opportunity to ask what her "crawling" date had been, nor did he see a chance to bring up her suggestion about picking a name. She volunteered nothing, and he was just as well pleased. Besides, he wanted to talk more with the children With their help he was learning more about the Sirian than the Sirian would be able to learn about him. The kids frothed with information. It wasn't difficult to master all the facts they had on tap, for there were not many real facts about Sirians to learn. All the hostages on Earth were of the same sex, for example, but there was a good deal of argument about what that sex was. Nor was their family structure at all clear. Whatever their relationships on the planet from which they came, none of them had ever given any signs of being particularly depressed over being separated from the near and dear. Forrester took the information in grudgingly; he could not help thinking there should have been more of it. He said, "Do you mean to tell me that the only time we've ever seen them is this one time when we wiped out their exploring party?" "Oh, no, Charles!" The boy was indulgent with him. "We long-range spied their home planet once, too. But that's dangerous. Anyway, that's what they say; so they stopped it. If it was up to me I would have kept it up." "And like in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti," added the girl. "The what?" The boy chortled. "Oh, yeah. That was a fun one! We had it on our class evaluation trip." "Sweat!" cried the girl excitedly. "Say! Maybe Forrester would like to go with us if we do it again. I'd like to!" Forrester felt a sensation of committing himself to more than he liked. He said uncertainly, "Well, sure. But I don't have much time right now. I mean, these are my working hours -- " "Oh, sweat, Charles," said the boy impatiently, "it doesn't take time. I mean, you don't go anywhere in space. It's a construct." "Only it was kind of real, too," added the girl. "But it's all just tapes now," explained the boy helpfully. "Show him!" crowed the girl excitedly. "Mira Ceti! Please, Tunt, you promised!" The boy shrugged, cocked aa eye thoughtfully at Forrester, then leaned forward. He spoke into his junior joymaker and touched a button on his teaching desk. At once the cluttered children's room disappeared, and they were surrounded by a wall of hot, swirling gray and incandescent orange. It cleared... And at once Forrester and the two children were seated in the bridge of a spaceship. The toys were gone, the furnishing replaced by bright metal instruments and flickering, whistling gauges. And outside crystal panels surged the devastating chromosphere of a sun. F orrester shrank back instinctively from the heat before he realized that there was none. It was illusion. But it was perfect. "By God!" he cried admiringly. "How does that work?" "Sweat. I don't know," scoffed the boy. "That's ninth-phase stuff. Ask your joymaker." "Well, machine? How about it?" The calm voice of the joymaker replied at once, "The phenomenon you are currently inspecting, Man Forrester, is a photic projection on a vibratory curtain. An interference effect produces a virtual image on the surface of an optical sphere with the nexus of yourself and your three companions as its geometric center. This particular construct is an edited and simplified reproduction of scansion of a Sirian exploration vessel in a stellar atmosphere, to wit -- " "That's enough," interrupted Forrester. "I liked the kid's answer better." But the boy said tautly, "Knock it off, Charles. We're tarting! See, there's this Sirian high-thermal scout vessel and we're about to run into it." A harsh male voice rasped: "Tractor ship Gimmel! Your wingmate has an engine disfunction! Prepare to lock, grapple and evacuate crew!" "Are!" cried the boy. "Start search procedures, Tunt! Keep a watch, Charles!" His hands flashed over the keyboard -- it had not been there a moment before, but it was operative; when he energized a circuit, their make-believe "ship" responded. He put it through a turn; the "virtual" sun-ship heeled sharply and sped through fountains of flaming gas. Forrester could not repress his admiration at the perfection of the illusion. Everything was there, everything but the heat and the feeling of motion -- and gazing at the images around him, Forrester could almost feel the surge and shudder of their ship as it responded to the boy at the controls. Clearly they were part of a squadron on some adventurous, unspecified mission. Forrester saw nothing that resembled a Sirian -- saw nothing at all, in fact, but the serpents and coils of gas through which they hurtled. But he was conscious of illusory vessels around them. A spatter of command signals came through the speaker as other "ships" talked back and forth. A panel showed their position in plan and elevation as they swam through the stripped-atom gases of Mira Ceti's ocean of fire. Forrester ventured to say: "Uh, Tunt. What am I supposed to be doing again?" "Just use your eyes!" the boy hissed, attention riveted to the controls. "Don't mix me up, man!" But his sister was shrieking: "I see it! I see it, Tunt! Look over there!" "Oh, sweat," he groaned in despair. "Will you ever learn to make a report?" She gulped. "I mean, wingmate sighted, vector oh-seven-oh, I guess. Depression -- um -- not much." "Prepare to grapple!" roared the boy. Through the incandescent sworl a fat slug of a ship appeared, vanished and appeared again. It was black against the roundings. Black on its metal skin, black in its ports, black even at the tail where a rocket exhaust discharged dark gases into the brightness around them. The rocket cut off as a labored voice gasped through the speaker: "Hurry it up, Gimmel! We can't hold out much longer!" They jockeyed close to the stranded "ship", buffeted this way and that by the flaming gas. Forrester stared open-mouthed. There was the ship, derelict and helpless. And beyond it, swimming faintly toward them through the chromosphere, something that was bright even in this explosion of radiation, something that loomed enormous and fearsome... "Holy God," he cried, "it's a Sirian!" And the whole picture shivered and winked away. They were back in the children's room. For a moment Forrester was almost blind; then his strained optic centers began to register again. He saw the viewwalls. the furnishings, the children's familiar faces. The expedition was over. "Fun?" demanded the girl, jumping up and down. "Wasn't it, Charles? Wasn't it fun?" But her brother was staring disgustedly at a readout on his desk. "Tunt," he grumbled, "you should know better. Don't you see the tally? We were late locking up. There was a crew of three there, and two of them are scored dead... and we never even got to see the Sirian at all." "I'm sorry, Tunt. I'll look better next time," the little girl said repentantly. "Oh, it's not you." He glared past her at Forrester and said bitterly, "They set the norms for a three-person mission. As if he was any help." 'T'houghtfully Forrester picked up the mace of his joymaker, selected a button, pointed it at the base of his skull, just behind the ear, and squirted. He was not sure he had picked the right joyjuice for the occasion; what he wanted was something that would make him tranquil, happy and smart. What he got was more like a euphoriac, but it would serve. He said humbly, "I'm sorry I messed it up for you." "Not your fault. Should have known better than to take you, anyway." "But I wish we'd seen the Sirian," said the little girl wistfully. "I think I did. A big, bright ship? Coming toward us?" The boy revived. "Really? Well, maybe that's not so bad, then. You hear that, monitor?" He listened to a -- to Forrester -- inaudible voice from his teaching machine, then grinned. "We got a tentative conditional," he said happily. "Take it again next week, Tunt. For record." "Oh, wonderful!" Forrester cleared his throat. "Would you mind telling me exactly what it was we just did?" he asked. The boy put on his patient expression. "It was a simulated mission against the Sirian exploring party in the chomosphere of Mira Ceti. I thought you knew that. Basically a real observation, but with the contact between our ships and theirs variably emended." "Oh. Uh-huh." The boy looked quizzically at him. He said, "The thing is, Charles, we get graded on these simulations. But it's all right; it didn't hurt us." "Sure." Forrester could feel the beginnings of an idea asserting themselves. No doubt it was the spray from the joymaker, but -- "Could you do the same trick with some other things about the Sirians? So I could get a better look at them? Maybe the original encounter, for instance?" "Neg." The boy glared at his sister. "It's Tunt's fault, of course. She cried when the Sirians got killed. We have to wait to take the pre-briefing over when we're older." The little girl hung her head. "I was sad," she said defensively. "But there's other things we can do, Charles. Would you like to see the coconut on the Moon?" "The what?" "Oh, sweat. Well just show you." The boy scratched his ear thoughtfully, then spoke to his junior joymaker. The view-walls clouded once again. "It's supposed to be another artifact like the one the Sirians were searching for in Mira Ceti's atmosphere," he said over his shoulder, manipulating his teaching machine as he spoke. "Don't know much about it, really. It's not Sirian. It's also not ours. Nobody knows whose they are, really, but there are lots of them around -- and the Sirians don't seem to know any more about them than we do. They're old. And this is the nearest one." 'T'he view-walls cleared to show the lunar Farside. They were near the terminator line, with crystalline white peaks and craters before them, the jet black of a lunar night to one side. They were looking down into the shallow cup of a crater where figures were moving. "This is just tape," the boy said. "No participation. Just look as long's you want to." There was a clump of pressure huts in the crater. Perhaps they were laboratories or housing for scientists, or for whoever it was that was studying the "artifact" in the center of the screen -- or perhaps had been studying it once, and given it up. It did indeed look like a coconut. As much as it looked like anything. It was shaggy, and rather eggshaped. Its tendrils of -- whatever they were -- were not organic, Forrester thought. At least they were almost glassy in their brightness, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in a spray of color. By the scale of the huts it appeared to be about the size of a locomotive. "It's empty, Charles," volunteered the girl. "They all are." "But what are they?" The girl giggled. "If you find out, tell us. They'll make us twelfth-phase for sure!" But the boy said kindly, "Now you know as much as anybody does." "But the Sirians must -- " "Oh, no, Charles. The Sirians are late arrivals. Like us. And that thing's been there just the way it is now, for no less than a couple gigayears." He switched off the scene. "Well," he said brightly. "Anything else you want to know?" There was indeed. But Forrester had grasped the fact that the more he knew, the more he was going to realize how little that knowledge was. Astonishingly enough, it had not really occurred to him before this that a lot of things had been happening to the human race while he was lying deep in the liquid-helium baths of the West Side Facility. It was like a story in a magazine. You turn a page. Ten years have passed; but you know perfectly well that they weren't important; because if they were, the author would have told you about them. But far more than ten years had passed. And they were important, all right. And there was no Author to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. X An the third day of his job  Forrester had been six days out of the freezer. He felt as But he was learning. Yes, he told himself -- gravely gratulatory -- he was doing all his homework, and it was only a question of time until all answers were revealed to him and he took his proper place in this freemasonry of heroes. Meanwhile working for the Sirian was not at all disagreeable. The social pressure against Mb Job came only from Adne, and he had seen very little of her since that first day. He missed her; but he had other things on his mind. The Sirian -- it had agreed to allow Forrester to think of it as a male, although it did not concur the diagnosis and would not explain further -- was curious, insatiable but patient When Forrester could not answer questions it permitted him to take time to look them up. Its orientation, surprisingly enough, was all to the past It volunteered an explanation -- well, a sort of explanation. In its view, it said, the present state of any phenomenon was a mere obvious derivative of some prior state; and it was the prior states of mankind that it wanted to know about. It crossed Forrester's mind that if he were a war captive on a planet of alien enemies, the sort of knowledge that he would try to acquire would have more to do with arms and defense strategies. But he was not a Sirian, and he had decided not to bother trying to think like one. That was obviously beyond his powers. So he answered questions about Madison Avenue ad agencies and the angst that surrounded a World Series, and every day called up his bank to verify that his day's salary had been deposited. It had finally penetrated to Forrester that money was still dollars would have bought him -- and in fact, had bought him -- something very like a quarter of and services, even by #th century standards. It was not die dollar that had been inflated. It was the standard of fiving. There were so many things that a dollar could now buy... And he had been buying quantities of them. He could even, he discovered, have managed to live out his life lars -- just as he could have in #, say -- provided he had lived at a # level. No robot servants. No extensive medical services -- above all, no use of the freezer facilities and their concomitant organ banks, prostheses antientropic chemical flushings and so forth. If he had eaten no costly custom-prepared foods, had not traveled, had acquired no expensive gadgets... if he had, to be exact, lived exactly the life of a #th century peasant, he could have made it last. But not now. It was gone now. All gone except for a few tens of thousands left in the account at the Nineteenth Chromatic, plus what the Sirian paid to his account every day. It was about enough to pay his standard joymaker fees for a couple of weeks, maybe. If he was careful. Forrester was resigned to it, though. He didn't mind it particularly -- at least, he didn't mind his bankruptcy, since it lay within his power to work and make more money than he had ever dreamed of anyway. What he minded very much was the fact that he had been a joke -- him lars. And he minded most of all the fact that Adne had shared in that joke. Because dimly, like a faint, pre-dawn glow in the desert, he could see the foretaste of a time when Adne could be very important to him. Was already very important to him, he thought wryly. At least in a potential sort of way. He wondered again what she had meant about that business of choosing a name... and why, he suddenly thought, she had not called him. But what was important to him, Forrester realised, was not necessarily important to anyone else. For now, he was a sort of apprentice to Hfe. For now, he would wait, and work, and learn. For now he would not push his luck. Forrester had learned modesty, if he had learned nothing else. At that point Forrester had not yet discovered that, in one particular and quite unpleasant way, he was on his way to becoming the most important man in the world. X#'hat mostly confused Forrester about his Sirian employer was that the creature seemed preoccupied. Forrester even asked his joymaker about it. "Can you clarify your question, Man Forrester? What ia there about the behavior of Alphard Four Zero-zero Trimate which puzzles you?" "Just call him 'the Sirian', will you? Anyway, he has a funny way of talking." "Perhaps that lies in my computation, Man Forrester. Tho Sirian language is tenseless and quasi-Boolean. I have taken the liberty of translating it into approximately #th-century English modes of speech, but if yon wish I can give you a more liberal rendering, or -- " "No, it's not that. He seems to have something on his mind." There was a pause of a second or two. Even Forrester knew enough to remark this occurrence; for the computer facilities to hesitate or search for an answer meant that the problem was something remarkable. But all the joymaker said was: "Can you give me an instance, Man Forrester?" "Not really. Well, he has m doing some odd things. Is it rigbt for him to want to hypnotic me?" Pause again. Then the joymaker said, "I cannot say, Man Forrester. But I advise you to be cautious." Well, cautious he was, Forrester reflected. But he was also puzzled. The Sirian did not repeat its suggestion of hypnotizing Forrester -- "to secure in depth referents, plus buried traumas of former time" -- but it was hard to figure out. It capriciously had him talking about the #th century at one time, explaining the Arian-Athanasian wars of two and a half millenia before at another. (But not until Forrester had begged time out to research the heresies involved in the distinction between the words "homoousian" and "homoiousian" -- without, however, really getting the problem straight.) It kindly volunteered to assume his joymaker as part of his expenses. It refused to allow him to charge it for travel expenses on a trip to the deepest vaults of Shoggo, where he was looking up records of the abandoned pressure-dome settlements on Saturn. "Capricious" was the word. It occurred to Forrester that the Sirian might simply be lonesome. But it rejected his offer t come visit it in its quarters. And as far as he was able to tell it showed no interest in the fate of its dozenodd compatriots also in exile on Earth. "You explain common law marriage." And gamely Forrester tried to describe to a Sirian the drives of sexual impulse and family needs which had brought about a formal institution to regularize irregular conduct. "There exist trading stamps!" boomed the hollow, empty voice; and Forrester did his best to clarify the complexities of retail supermarket sales. "You have or have not violated legislative compulsion programs," stated the Sirian; and that was the most prolonged session of all. Try as he would, Forrester could not seem to get across the idea of a personal ethic -- of laws that on did not violate, because they were morally right, and laws that everyone violated if they posibly could, because they were morally irrelevant. He found himself feeling sorry for the Sirian. Its homework was even more arduous than his own. But Forrester's homework could not be neglected. He ordered his joymaker to display the records of the long-range reconnaissance of the Sirian planet. He had been thinking of the Sirians as a paper tiger, but h saw fangs. Englobed by fortresses, with fast and mighty vessels of war flitting about like wasps, the whole Sirian system was a vast network of armament. There were a dozen planets in all, two of them in Trojan orbit with Sirius B, the rest normal satellites of the great white star. All were inhabited. All were defended. Earth's reconnaissance drones had been lucky enough -- or unlucky enough -- to find themselves observing and taping what seemed to be war games. The Sirians took their war games seriously. Edited and compressed, they showed a waste of creature and armament which only a massive war effort could justify. A hundred of the great ships were damaged, some destroyed. A fleet of them converged on an icy satellite of one of the outlying planets... and the satellite was melted into glowing slag. There was no more after that. Clearly the operators of the drones had felt that enough was enough. It was less dangerous to leave the Sirians unwatched than to run the risk of attracting attention with the drones. Forrester did not offer again to visit the Sirian in his quarters. .n the seventh day of his new life, Forrester arose to the promptings of his bed, ordered a standard low-cost breakfast (it was, as a matter of fact, far tastier than his hand-hewn specials), checked his messages and started to work. With some pride in his expertise he commanded the joymaker to select and mark a course to the buried vastnesses of the American Documentation Institute. The green-glowing arrows sprang to life at his feet. He followed them out the door, into a sort of elevator cab (but it moved laterally as well as up and down), out the cab, in another building, through a foyer clattering with old-fashioned punchcard sorters, into a vault where his employer had shown a certain interest in some centuriesold records. His joymaker said abruptly, "You will inform me about the term 'space race'." Forrester took his eyes from the old microfilm viewer. "Hello, Sirian Four," he said. "I'm busy looking up the beginnings of the Ned Lud Society, as you asked me. It's pretty interesting, too. Did you know they used to break up computers and -- " "You will discontinue Ned Lud Society research and state motives which led two areas of this planet to compete in reaching the Moon." "All right. In a minute. Just let me finish what I'm doing." There was no answer. Forrester shrugged and returned to the viewer. The Luddites appeared to have taken themselves a great deal more seriously when they first started: where Taiko postured and coaxed, his predecessors had done the Carrie Nation bit with the axes, chopping up computing machines with the war-cry, "Men for men's jobs! Machines for bookkeeping!" As he read he forgot about the call from his employer. Then -- "Man Forrester!" cried his joymaker. "I have two urgent notices of intention for you!" It was the master computing center this time, not the deep, remote, echoless voice of the Sirian. Forrester groaned. "Not again!" "Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major -- " "I knew it," Forrester muttered. " -- states that he has reactivated his hunting permit. You are notified, Man Forrester, so please be guided accordingly." "I'm guided, I'm guided. What is the other one?" "Man Forrester, it is from Alphard Four Zero-zero Trimate," said the joymaker; then, unbending slightly, "or, as you call him, Sirian Four: A notice to terminate employment. Guarantees are met and notice paid. Reason: Failure to comply with reasonable request of employer, to wit, research questions concerning early U.S. and U.S.S.R. space probe motivation." Forrester squawked: "Wait a minute! That sounds like -- you mean -- hey! I'm fired!" "Man Forrester," said the joymaker, "that is correct. You are fired." A fter the first shock had worn off, Forrester was not particularly sorry, although his feelings were hurt. He had thought he was doing as good a job as could be done. Considering the job. Considering the employer. Nevertheless, it had had its disadvantages, including the barely polite remarks Adne had been passing about working for the enemy. So with a light heart Forrester dismissed the Sirian from his mind and informed the joymaker he wanted another job. Quite rapidly he had one: Standby machine monitor for the great sub-lake fusion generating station under Lake Michigan. It paid very well, and the work was easy. It was not for twenty-four hours that Forrester discovered that the premium pay was due to the fact that at unpredictable intervals severe radiation damage was encountered. His predecessor in the job -- in fact, all of his predecessors -- were now blocks of lowtemperature matter in the great lakeside freezers, awaiting a discovery of a better technique for flushing the radioactive poisons out of their cells; and the joymaker candidly informed him that their probable wait for thawing and restoration, which depended on the pace at which certain basic biophysical discoveries were likely to be made, was estimated to be of the order of magnitude of two thousand years. Forrester blew his top. "Thanks!" he grated. "I quit! What the devil do they need a human being down here for?" "In the event of cybernetic failure," said the machine promptly, "an organic overseer may retain the potential of voice connection with the central computing facility, proving an emergency capability -- " "It was only a rhetorical question. Forget it. Say," said Forrester, punching the elevator button that would bring him up to the breather platform at the lake's surface and thence back to the city, "why didn't you tell me this job would kill me?" "Man Forrester," said the machine gravely, "you did not ask me. Excuse me, Man Forrester, but you have summoned an elevator. Your relief is not due for three hours. You should not leave your station unattended." "No, I shouldn't. But I'm going to." "Man Forrester! I must warn you -- " "Look. If I read the plaque on the surface right, this particular installation has been in service for like a hundred and eighty years. I bet the cybernetic controls haven't failed once in all that time. Right?" "You are quite correct, Man Forrester. Nevertheless -- " "Nevertheless my foot. I'm going." The elevator door opened; he entered: it closed behind him. "Man Forrester! You are endangering -- " "Oh, shut up. There's no danger. Worst that would happen would be that it might stop working for a while. So power from the city would come from the other generators until it got fixed, right?" "Yes, Man Forrester, but the danger -- " "You argue too much. Over and out," said Forrester. "Oh, except one thing. Find me another job." ut the joymaker didn't. Time passed, and it still didn't. It didn't speak to him at all. Back in his room, Forrester demanded of the joymaker: "Come on, what's the matter? You computers don't have human emotions, do you? If I hurt your feelings I'm sorry." But there was no answer. The joymaker did not speak. The view-walls would not light up. The dinner he ordered did not appear. The room was dead. Forrester conquered his pride and went to Adne Bensen's apartment. She was not there, but the children let him in. He said, "Kids, I've got a problem. I seem to have blown a fuse or something in my joymaker." They were staring at him, bemused. After a moment Forrester realized he had blundered in on something. "What is it, Tunt? Another club meeting? How about it, Mim?" They burst out laughing. Forrester said angrily, "All right. I didn't come here for laughs, but what's the joke?" "You called me Tunt!" the boy laughed. His sister giggled with him. "And that's not the worst, Tunt. He called me Mim! Charles, don't you know anything?" "I know I'm in trouble," Forrester said stiffly. "My joymaker doesn't work any more." Now their stares were roundeyed and open-mouthed. "Oh, Charles!" Obviously the magnitude of the catastrophe had overwhelmed their defenses. Whatever it was that had been occupying their minds when he came in, they were giving him their whole attention now. He said uncomfortably, "So what I want to know is, what went wrong?" "Find out!" cried Mim. "Hurry, Tunt! Poor Charles!" She gazed at him with compassion and horror, as at a leper. The boy knew what practical steps to take -- at least, he knew enough to be able to find out what Forrester had done wrong. Through his pedagogical joymaker the boy queried the central computing facilities, listened with eyes wide to the inaudible response and turned to stare again at Forrester. "Charles! Great sweat! You quit your job without notice!" "Well, sure I did," said Forrester. He shifted uneasily in his seat. "All right," he said, to break the silence. "I did the wrong thing huh? I guess I was hasty." "Hasty!" "Stupid," Forrester amended. "I'm sorry." "Sorry!" "If you just keep repeating everything I say," said Forrester, "you might drive me crazy, but you won't be exactly helping me. I goofed. All right. I admit it." The boy said, "Yes, Charles, but didn't you know you forfeited your salary? And you didn't have anything much else, you know. A couple Kbucks sequestrated for the freezers, but not much loose cash. And so you're -- " The boy hesitated, forming the words with his lips. "You're broke," he whispered. I f those were not the most frightening words Forrester had ever heard, they certainly were well up in the running. Broke? In this age of incredible plenty and high-velocity spending? He might as well be dead again. He sank back in his chair and the little girl sprang helpfully forward and ordered him a drink. Forrester took a grateful swallow and waited for it to hit him. It didn't hit him. It was, of course, the best the girl could get for him on her own joymaker, and it had about as much kick as lemon pop. He put it down carefully and said : "See if I've got this straight... I didn't pay my bills, so they turned off the joymaker. Right?" "Well, I guess you could say that." "All right." Forrester nodded. "So the first thing I have to do is reestablish my credit. Get some money." "Right, Charles!" cried the girl. "That'll fix everything up!" "So how do I do that?" The two children looked at each other helplessly. "Isn't there anything I can do?" "Well, sure, Charles. Sweat, there's got to be! Get another job, I guess." "But the joymaker wouldn't get me one." "Sweat!" the boy gazed thoughtfully at his joymaker, picked it up, shook it, then put it down again. "That's bad. Maybe when Mim comes home she can help you." "Really? Do you think she'll help?" "Well, no. I mean, I don't think she'd know how." "Then what do I do?" The boy looked worried and a little scared. Forrester was pretty sure he looked the same way himself. Certainly that was how he felt. Of course, he told himself, Hara might help him once more; certainly he'd had the practice. Or Taiko might be sportsman enough to get over his snub and reopen the invitation to work for the Luddites. But he was pretty sure that neither of these possibilities represented any very hopeful facts. The little girl wandered thoughtfully away, not looking at Forrester, and began muttering into her joymaker -- back to the game he had interrupted, Forrester thought with totally unjustified bitterness. He knew it was unjustified. These were only children, and he had no right to expect them to handle adult problems that at least one adult -- himself -- couldn't handle at all. The boy said suddenly, "Oh, one other thing, Charles. Mim says Heinzie's out after you again." "Don't I know it." But it didn't seem much of a threat, compared with the disaster of insolvency. "Well, you see, you've got a problem there," the boy said. "If you don't have your joymaker you won't have any warning when he's around. And also there's something about the DR equipment you might not know. You have to have some credit rating or they won't freeze you at all if you're killed. You know. There's always the chance that you'll do something that annuls the bond so Heinzie, or whoever, might protest payment -- then they'd be in trouble. I mean, they don't want to get stuck with a stiff that can't pay up." "I appreciate their difficulty." "I just thought you'd like to know." "Oh, you were right." Forrester's glance wandered. "Mim -- whatever your name is. You! What are you doing?" The girl looked up from her joymaker, her face flushed with excitement. "Me, Charles?" "Yeah. Didn't I hear you mention my name just now?" "Sure, Charles. I was proposing you for membership in our club. You know, we told you about it." "Nice of you," said Forrester bitterly. "Has it got a dining room?" "Oh, it's not that kind of a club, Charles. You don't understand. The club will help you. Already they've made a suggestion." He looked skeptical. "Is that going to help?" "Sweat, yes! Listen. Tars Tarkas just said: 'Let him seek in the dead sea bottoms and the ancient cities. Let him join the haunted hosts of old Jasoom.' " Forrester puzzled over the message drearily. "It doesn't mean anything to me," he said. "Of course it does! Clear as the crawlers on the Farside coconut, don't you see? He thinks you ought to hide out with the Forgotten Men!" XI I t was only ten minutes walking from the children's home to the great under-building plazas and warrens where the Forgotten Men lived. But Forrester had no guide this time, nor was there a joymaker to display green arrows to guide him, and it took him an hour. He dodged across an avenue of grass between roaring hovercraft, his life in his hands, and emerged under a hundredstory tower where a man came humbly toward him. He looked vaguely familiar. "Stranger," the man said, softly pleading, "Ah've had a tumble lahf. It all started when the mahns closed and my wahf Murry got sick -- " "Buddy," said Forrester, "have you got a wrong number." The man stepped back a pace and looked him up and down. He was tall, lean and dark, his face patient and intelligent. "Aren't you the fella Ah panhandled with those two little kids?" he said accusingly. "Gave me fifty bucks, Ah think." "You remember good. But that was when I had money; now I'm broke." Forrester looked around at the tall buildings and the greensward. They did not seem hospitable. "I'd be obliged to you," he added, "if you'd tell me where I can sleep tonight." The man glanced warily around, as if suspicious of some kind of a trick, then grinned and stuck his hand out. "Welcome to the club," he said. "Name's Whitlow. Jurry Whitlow. What happened?" "I got fired," said Forrester. Jerry Whitlow commiserated, "Could happen to anybody, Ah guess. You know, Ah noticed you didn't have a joymaker, but Ah didn't think much about it. Figured, sweat, he's just a damn greenhorn, prob'ly forgot to take it with him. But you got to get yourself one raht away." "Why?" "Whah Sweat, man! Don't you know you're fur game for anybody on the hunt? They come down here, take one look around and they see you're busted -- hell, man, you wouldn't last out the day." He unclipped his own joymaker -- or what Forrester had taken to be a joymaker -- and proudly handed it over. "Fake, see? But it looks lahk the real thing. Fool anybody. Fooled you, Ah bet." It had, as a matter of fact. But actually, Forrester saw with surprise, it wouldn't fool anyone at all, not at close range. It was far too light to be a joymaker, apparently whittled out of some organic plastic and painted in the patterns of a joymaker. "Of course, it don't work." Whitlow grinned. "But on the other hand Ah don't have to pay rent on it. Keeps 'em off pretty good. Didn't have that, one of these perverts that get they kicks from total death'd come down here and tag me the first thing." Gently he pulled it out of Forrester's hand and looked at him calculatingly. "Now, you got to get one just lahk it and, damn, you hit lucky first tahm. Theah's a fellow two houses over makes them to sell. Friend o' mahn. Ah bet he'll give you one for -- hell! Maybe little as a hundred dollars!" Forrester started to open his mouth. "Maybe even eighty!... Seventy-fahv?" "Whit," said Forrester simply, "I haven't got a dime." "Sweat!" Whitlow was awed. Then he shrugged. "Well, hell, Ah guess we can't let you get killed for a lousy fifteen bucks. Ah'll get you fixed up on spec." "Fifteen?" Whitlow grinned. "That's without mah commission. Come on with me, boy. You got some ropes to learn!" 'T'he Forgotten Men lived on the castoffs of the great world overhead, but it did not seem to Forrester that they lived badly. Jerry Whitlow was not fat, but he was obviously not starving, either. His clothes were clean and in good repair, his attitude relaxed. Why, thought Forrester, it might even turn out that I'll like it here, once I learn my way around... Whitlow was a first-rate teacher. even though he never stopped talking. He conducted Forrester through under-building mazes and footbridges Forrester had not even seen, his mouth going all the while. Mostly it was the story of his life: " -- laid off at the mahns when Ah was sixteen. Out of work, Chuck, and me with a family to support. Well, we made out, kahnd of, until mah wahf Murry got sick and we had to go on the relief. So a gov-ment man came around and put me on the Aydult Retraining and gave me tests and, Chrahst, Chuck, you know Ah scored so hah Ah just about broke the scales. So then Ah went back to school and -- " He stopped and glanced apprehensively overhead. They were between buildings, under a tiny square of open sky. He grabbed Forrester and dragged him swiftly back into the cellar where the joymaker-maker had kept his shop. "Watch out!" he whispered fiercely. "They's a reporter up there!" The word meant nothing to Forrester, but the tone carried the message. He ran one way, Whitlow the other. The joymaker's shop had been in a sort of vermiform appendix to the plumbing of an apartment-complex, where some installation had been designed into the plans, was outmoded, removed -- and the space left vacant. The little man who sold the joymakers occupied a sort of triplex apartment -- three rooms on three levels -- and out of it and around it ran, for some reason, a net of empty four-foot tunnels. Down one of them Whitlow fled. Down another ran Forrester. It was dark. The footing was uneven. But Forrester hurried down it, stooped over to avoid banging his head, until tire blackness was total and he fell to the rough floor, gasping. He still did not know what he had been running from, but Whitlow's fear was contagious. And it reawakened a hundred old pains; until this moment he had almost forgotten the beating he had taken the first day out of the freezer, but the exertion made every dwindling ache start up again. He had now been a Forgotten Man for exactly two hours. Time passed, and the silence was as total as the darkness. Whatever it was that Whitlow had feared, it did not seem to be pursuing here. It would take a human stoat to pursue a human rabbit in this warren, he thought; and in the darkness maybe even the rabbit would develop claws. It had been bad enough when all he had to fear was the crazy Martian. Now... He sighed, and turned over on the rough, cast-stone floor. He wondered wistfully what had become of all the furnishings and gadgets he had bought so recklessly for the apartment he no longer owned. Shouldn't there be some sort of trade-in allowance? But if there was, he did not have the skill to claim it. Nor did he own a working joymaker to help him with instructions. He wondered if Hara would help him out at this last juncture, and resolved to go looking for the doctor. After all, it was in a way Hara's responsibility that he was in this predicament... "No," said Forrester in the darkness, aloud and very clearly. It wasn't Hara's responsibility at all. It was his own. If there was one thing that he had learned in his two hours as a Forgotten Man, it was that there were no responsibilities any more that were not his own. This was not a world where a protective state provided for its people. It was a world of the individual; he was the captain of his fate, the master of his soul -- And the prisoner of his failings. By the time he heard Whitlow cautiously calling his name, Forrester had come to terms with the fact that he was all alone in a cold and uncaring world. Cautiously they tiptoed out of  the pipes, across a hoverway and under a huge building that was supported on a thousand elliptical pillars, set in beds of grass. What light kept the grass growing came from concealed fixtures in the ten acres of roof over their heads. Whitlow, regaining the appearance of confidence, led the way to one particular pillar that held a door, marked in glittering red letters: Emergency Exit. He poshed it open, shoved Forrester inside and closed it behind them. "Whew," he said cheerfully. "That was close, but we're all rht now. You beginning to get hungry?" Forrester had been about to ask questions, but that totally diverted his attention. "Yes" Whitlow grinned. "Figured," he said. "Well, Ah've got just the thing for you, prob'ly. Ah've got a steady clahent in this building, fellow who used to work with me at the Labs, back before. He's on diet programming now, see, and he always manages to slip me something out of the expurimental allowance. So let's see -- " He rummaged in a cupboard, and emerged with a pair of thermal-covered hot dishes. They opened to a touch and displayed a steaming, fragrant dinner for two. "Damn, he done better than ever! Looks lahk smoked oysters Milanese! Sink your teeth in this. Chuck. Ah guarantee you won't do better at the Senate of the Twelve Apostles!" While he wolfed down the food, Forrester glanced about him to discover what sort of place he was in. It seemed to be an air-raid access to the underground park from the building above, no longer used because since the beginning of the Sirian threat complete new facilities had been excavated at the fivehundred-foot subterranean level. But this little forgotten vestige of a completely stocked shelter remained, and as no one else had any use for it Whitlow had taken it for his own. It was temperature controlled; it had lights and plumbing; and, as Forrester had already seen, it was provided with food storage facilities. All Whitlow had to do was furnish the food. Forrester leaned back, relaxed, trying to summon up the energy to eat a chocolate mousse and half-listening to Whitlow's stream of talk; " -- so then when Ah got out of M. Ah. T. they weren't vurry many jobs open for coal-mahning engineers, of course. So Ah went back and took mah master's in solid-state electornics. Then Bell Labs sent they recruiter up to scout our prospects and he made me this offer, and Ah went into the Labs at nahn thousand to start. Sweat, man, things looked good. Murry was puttin' on weight and the kids were fahn. But Ah'd had this little cough for some tahm, and -- " "Whit," said Forrester, "hold off on that a minute, will you? I want to ask you something. Why did we hide from that reporter?" Whitlow looked startled. "Ah'm sorry," he apologized after a minute. "Ah keep forgetting what a greenhorn you are. You don't know about these reporters." "No, I don't." "Well, all you have to know is seeing one of them's poison. Whah, that's lahk a vulture hovering over a hill. You just know they's going to be a corpse down below. See, they've got this Freedom of the Press thing, so when cense he got to tell the reporters raht away. And he's got to fahl a complete plan of action, see, so the reporters can be raht there when the blood starts flahing, because they tape it all and they put it on the view-walls. Specially if the killer's in one of the tournaments. Fella from the National Open was here last week and, God, they was reporters hanging out of every cloud -- " "I think I understand," said Forrester. "You mean if you can keep out of the way of the reporters, you can probably keep out of the way of the assassins, too." "Stands to reason, don't it?" "I don't know what stands to reason," Forrester said humbly. He was beginning to wish he had not been so quick to follow the advice of Adne's children, so reluctant to wait and expose himself to more of Adne's gentle scorn. He felt a quick surge of anger. How dare the world treat his life so lightly! But if it had not been for this world he would not have a life at all; would have stayed dead with a lungful of smoke and fire, centuries before, his body now no more than a soft place in the ground. He leaned back and let himself be lulled by Whitlow's continuing story of his own adventures : " -- so then Ah went to the comp'ny doctor and he told me Ah had it, all raht. The Big C. Well! Scared! But we had this comp'ny freezer plan at the Labs and Ah reported in to the medics. 'Sheeoot,' they said. 'Lung cancer, hey? Well, you lay raht down here and we'll freeze your bones -- " Relaxing, half listening, Forrester found himself getting drowsy. It had been a very strange day, he thought; but then he stopped thinking and fell asleep. I n order to live successfully as a panhandler, you had to exercise special care in picking your "clients", Whitlow said. The worst thing you could do was guess wrong. There was always the chance you might sidle up to somebody and hit him for a touch -- and then find out that he was some jet-set happy-boy looking for an economical murder to commit, one that might get him out of the problem of paying for the victim's repairs an ' one with double thrills, since there was always the chance that the victim would stay dead. To avoid that you had to study each prospective mark carefully. No one came down here on business. The best ones were the rubberneck tourists. They usually came in pairs; and of any two, the one who was being shown around could safely be figured for a greenhorn -- himself too fresh out of the freezers, or back from the starways, to be eager for murder as yet. The problem there was to make an accurate assessment of the one who was doing the showing. "That's whah Ah picked you, Chuck. Ah wasn't worried about the little boy. Though you can be vurry surprised." And of course, everything they did was more or less illegal, so you had to watch out for the coppers. The coppers would not trouble you unless they saw you actually breaking the law or unless you were wanted for something. Then they would trouble you very much indeed. Forrester's first contact with one of the coppers came as he was on the point at bracing a woman alone, Whitlow hiding behind a flowering Hlac bush and coaching him in whispers. "See thur, Chuck, what sh did? Threw away a cigarette butt. Well, that's ten to one she's Nahnteen Eighty or earlier, so go get 'er, boy!" But Forrester had taken no more than a single step before Whitlow's piercing whistle stopped him: "Copper!" The copper was seven feet tall, uniformed in blue, swinging what looked like a nightstick but was not. Forrester had been warned: It was a sort of joymaker, full of anesthetic sprays and projectile weapons. And it had seen him. It strolled right up to them, swinging the stick. It stopped and looked Whitlow in the eyes, right through the lilac blooms. "Good morning, Man Whitlow," it said courteously and moved on to Forrester. It stared silently into his eyes. Then: "Nice day, Man Forrester," it said, and moved away. "How'd he know?" gasped Forrester. "Retina pattern. Don't worry about it; if he wanted you for anything he'd have you by now. Just give him a minute to get out of saht." The woman prospect was gone then. But there were plenty of others. Keeping out of the way of coppers, trying to learn Whitlow's skills at estimating the potentials of a mark, Forrester found that the time passed. Nor was it the most disagreeable way he had spent a day. The weather was warm and dry, the growing plants were scented, the people he hit up were no worse than the average run. Forrester took five dollars from a pretty girl in a sort of mirror-bright bikini, fifty from a man who had brought his pet animal -- it was a little silk-furred monkey -- down to the under-building park to run free, and seemed to accept Forrester's touch as a form of rent for the use of the premises. Forrester paid back Whitlow's outlay for the fake joymaker and found himself with cash money in his pocket. As he could see no particular need for spending much of it, he began to feel solvent again. Then Whitlow's hawk eyes brightened and he whispered tautly: "Eeow! Look over thur, will you? We've got ourselfs a lahv one now!" On the fringe of a bed of tall gladioli a man had stepped out o i a hovercar and dismissed it. He seemed young, although you couldn't really tell. He moved idly across the grass, like a sightseer. His gait was peculiar, and he wore an expression of grave joy as he minced toward them. "Look how he walks!" exulted Whitlow. "I am looking. What about it?" "Whah, Chuck, he's out of low-gee! Thur's a fella just back from a long trip if Ah ever saw one, and probly loaded with pay. Sic 'im!" Forrester accepted Whitlow's diagnosis unquestioningly. He marched up to the spaceman and said clearly: "My name is Charles D. Forrester, and due to my ignorance of the customs of this time I've lost all my money and have no work. If you could possibly spare me some cash I would be deeply indebted to you." Whitlow appeared magically at his elbow. "That goes for me too, boss," he said sorrowfully. "We both in pretty bad trouble. If you could be kahnd enough to help us now we'd be eternally grateful." The man stopped, his hands in his pockets, neither surprised nor disturbed. He turned to face them with grave interest. "Sorry to hear that, gentlemen," he said. "What seems to be your problem, sir?" "Mahn? Well, it's just about lahk Forrester here. Mah name's Whitlow, Jurry Whitlow. It starts way back when Ah was firstborn, working in the mahns in West Virginia. They closed down, and -- " The spaceman was not only polite but patient. He listened attentively through all of Whitlow's long story, and to as much of Forrester's as Forrester thought worth telling. He commiserated with them, wrote their names down and promised to look for them again if he ever came back this way. He was, in short, an ideal prospect -- not only a spaceman, but one of the rotating crews who manned the right-angle communications satellites that whirled out around the sun at ninety degrees to the ecliptic, furnishing interferencefree radio relay facilities for the whole solar system. The job paid well, but that was only part of it. Because of the energy budget for matching orbits with the rightangle satellites, the crews were relieved only at six-month intervals, and came back with a fortune in their pockets and a mad hunger for company; and Whitlow and Forrester walked away from him with two thousand dollars apiece. That night they ate their dinner in a restaurant. Over Whitlow's protests Forrester insisted on standing treat. The restaurant was a hangout for Forgotten Men -- and Forgotten Women. It was something like a private home, something like an automat. You had full joymaker service in it, but in order to make it work you had to feed money into a slot. The prices caused Forrester's scalp to prickle, but he reassured himself that he was just learning the ropes and experience was worth paying for; so at Whitlow's suggestion they started with a squirt of joy apiece (fifty dollars a shot), then cocktails (forty), then five), then more drinks, and about then Forrester began to lose count. He remembered something that looked like meat but wasn't -- it seemed to be coated with a sort of vanilla fudge, though it was bloody inside -- and then they began drinking in earnest. They were not alone. The place was crowded. Whitlow seemed to know everyone there, an assembly that hailed from seven continents, six centuries and one or two extraterrestrial planets and moons. There was a huge red-faced man named Kevin O'Rourke na Solis Lacis who gave Forrester a shock until they exchanged names, for he remembered Heinzie the Assassin. The reason was good, when Forrester found it out: They were both Martians. O'Rourke, however, was a poet. As a matter of principle he refused to accept the bribes of what he called the iron-headed state. Probing, Forrester discovered that he was talking about foundation grants, which were available to poets in almost any quantity; but O'Rourke spurned them all. He had been briefly involved with the Ned Lud Society -- but they were as bad as the iron-heads, he declared. All Earth was a disaster area. Let the Sirians take it away! "So why don't you go back to Mars?" Forrester inquired, politely enough; but the Martian took it as an insult, glowered and lumbered away across the room. "Don' worry 'bout heem," said the pretty little dark girl who had somehow come to be leaning against Forrester's shoulder, helping him drink his drink. "He be back. Certainement." There was a certain United Nations quality to the gathering, Forrester was discovering. Apart from a few odd-balls like the Martian poet, the bulk of the Forgotten Men seemed to come from nearly his own time. Had the hardest time fitting in, he supposed -- and the hardest time earning money. But it was not always that The tiny dark girl, for instance, had originally been a ballet dancer from Czechoslovakia, shot as a Chinese Bolshevik counterrevolutionary in #, frozen at great peril by the Khrushchevite underground, revived, killed seven times since in one way or another and revived each time. Her reasons for hiding out with the Forgotten Men had nothing to do with money -- she was loaded, Whitlow whispered, had made a collection of gold and gems from admirers in a dozen countries over the centuries, and owned them with their pyramiding value now. But one of her assassinations had produced some cell changes in the brain, and now she awoke each time convinced that Stalinist agents lurked abroad, waiting for her. She did not exactly fear them. She objected to the idea of being killed somewhat as Forrester, in the old days, had objected to going to the dentist: You didn't really worry about it, but you were pretty sure it would be unpleasant. As someone who had seen each of seven centuries, Forrester found her fascinating -- and she was beautiful as well. But she quickly became so drunk her reminiscences stopped making sense. He got up for another drink and found himself lurching slightly. Only slightly, he was sure; but somehow when he got the drink it spilled all over a lean, old, nearly bald man who grinned and nodded and said, "Tenga dura, signore! E predoso!" "You're right," said Forrester, and sat down beside him. Whitlow had pointed him out as they entered, as a sort of curiosity; he had actually been bom before Forrester himself. He had been a hundred and seven years old when, in #, he had died of an embolism. The embolism could have been repaired at once, but the ravages of age could not. Not then. After six centuries in the dreamless liquid-helium sleep his original stake had multiplied to the point where the trustees of the freezer had decided to revive him; but there had been only money enough to give him operational youth. Not much had been done cosmetically; and it had taken everything he had. "I bet you've had an interesting life," Forrester told him solemnly, finishing what remained in his glass. The man gave him a grave nod. "Signore," he said, "durante la vita mia prima del morte, era un uomo grande! Nel tempo del Duce -- ah! Un maggiore del esercito, io, e dappertutto le donne mon mi dispiace!" Whitlow patted the old man on the shoulder and led Forrester away. 'Tore-brain damage," he whispered. "But he was talking in Italian." #'Sure, Chuck. He can't leam raht, that's what he's doing here. You know, they ain't many jobs for a fella that can't talk lahk the rest of us." The Martian lurched past them, his head twisted sidewise toward diem. Whether he had been listening or not Forrester could not say, but he was declaiming: "Talk like de rest. Live like de rest. Life for de state for de state knows what's best." The whole party was coming to life, thought Forrester, flushed and happy. A small man in a green ruff -- it seemed to be an imitation of the Sirian coloration -- cried: "And what's best? Adolf Berle asked it half a millenium ago: 'What does a corporation want?' And the state has become a corporation!" The ballet dancer hiccoughed and opened glazed and angry eyes. "Stalinist!" she hissed, and returned to sleep; and Forrester dug deep for hundred-dollar bills, and fed them to the joymaker slots for more drinks all around. TT'orrester was perfectly aware that he was rapidly depleting his last thousand dollars. In a way, it pleased him. He was drunk enough, euphoric enough, to let tomorrow face toworrow's fears. However badly the next day began, it could not be worse than this one had been. He saw advantages even in being a Forgotten Man: You could spend yourself into pennilessness, but not into bankruptcy; you could never go into debt, since you had no credit to begin with. Wise Tars Tarkas! Excellent kids, to have found him such fine advice! "Eat!" he cried, shaking off Whitlow's cautionary whisper. "Drink! Be merry! For tomorrow we die, again!" "Domani morire!" shrilled the old Italian, uptilting his glass of heaven-knows-how-costly grappa that Forrester had provided for him, and Forrester returned the toast. "Listen, Chuck," said Whitlow uneasily. "You better take it slow. We don't get a mark lahk that space fella every day." "Whit, shut up. Don't be a grandma, will you?" "Well, it's your money. But don't blame me if you're broke again tomorrow." Forrester smiled and said clearly, "You make me sick." "Now, cut it out raht there!" blazed Whitlow. "Whur'd you be if it wasn't for me? God damn, Ah don't have to take this kind of -- " But the Martian with the Irish name interrupted them. "Hey, you fellows! Dat's enough, dere. You got to buy drinks yet" As Whitlow cooled off Forrester turned to inspect him; something had been on his mind. "You," he said. "How come you talk like that?" "Like what, 'like dat I ? Yo tink dere's something funny about de way I talk?" "Yeah, matter of fact. Why?" But something had occurred to the Martian. He snapped hit fingers. "Wait a minute! Forrester, is dat what you said your name was?" "That's right. But we're talking about you -- " "You should learn not to interrupt dat way," reproved Kevin O'Rourke na Solic Lacis. "What I want to tell you is dis. Dere's a Sirian been around looking for you." "Sirian? One of the green fellows?" Fuzzily Forrester tried to concentrate, but it was not much fun. "You mean S Four?" "How de hell would I know his number? He came around in one of dem pressure-cloaks, but I could tell he was a Sirian. I saw plenty of dem." "Probably wants to sue me for breach of contract," Forrester said bitterly. "He's welcome; there's plenty of others." "No, I don't tink so, because -- " "Cut it out," interrupted Forrester. "You know, I hate the way you Martians keep changing the subject. What I want to know is why you all talk like that. This other one that wants to kill me, he had the same Kraut accent, but in his case it figured. But you talk the same way and you're Irish, right?" Kevin O'Rourke stared at him disapprovingly. "Forrester, you're drunk. What de hell's 'Irish'?" H ow long the party lasted Forrester did not know. He remembered a long harangue in which the drunken ballet dancer was trying to explain to him that the accent was Martian, not German; something to do with which got them out of the habit of hearing certain frequencies. He had a clear memory of reaching into his pocket one time and coming up empty; and a fuzzy, frightening recollection of something bad that had happened. But it was all hazy and distant, and it came back to him only in random patches. What he knew for sure was that when he woke up the next morning he was back in the rough-hewn tunnel next to the joymaker shop. How he had gotten there he had no idea. And he was alone. Except, that is, for the granddaddy of all hangovers. He dimly remembered that Whitlow had warned him about that, too. There were no autonomic monitoring devices on the public joymaker, Whitlow had said. He would have to decide for himself when he had enough, because the joymaker would not stop service at the point of no return -- not as long as the money held out. Apparently it had held out too long. He shook his head miserably. The movement sent cascades of pain down the back of his skull. Something bad had happened. He tried half-heartedly to recall it, but all that would come to his memory was a mosaic of mass terror. Something had broken up the party with drunken men and women racing around in terror, even the Italian and the ballerina rousing themselves enough to flee. But what? He was not sure; and suspected that he would rather not remember, not just now.  He lurched to the end of the tunnel, climbed down metal steps and pushed a door aside. He stood gazing out over the plantings, in a warm breeze in which he took no pleasure at all. It was daylight and, except for a distant swish of hovercar traffic there was no sound of anyone around. It was too soon to judge, on the basis of less than twenty-four hours' experience. And no doubt his troubles were all his own fault. But Forrester was ready to concede that life with the Forgotten Men was not his place m this new world either. If he had any place at all. But as he was alive, he had no choice but to go on living. Forrester sighed, turned and walked into the ruby metal arms of a copper. "Man Forrester," it said, staring into his eyes, "good morning and I have a message for you." "Nothing I want to hear," said Forrester. "Let go." "As to that," said the copper, "I do not know, Man Forrester, but the message is as follows: Will you care to accept re-employment by Sirian Four?" "No!" shouted Forrester. "My God, no!" The copper said courteously, "Thank you, Man Forrester," and strolled away. Forrester stood glowering after it. Re-employment! He'd rather work for a cobra. Much rather; a cobra was at least from the right planet, and if it struck it would kill only a single man, not a world; and at that moment, looking up for what seemed to him no particular reason, a glimpse caught out of the comer of the eye, perhaps a shadow, Forrester saw a flyer overhead. He froze, turned, started to run. The crazy Martian? Some other enemy? He didn't know, and didn't care to learn. But the aircraft was not after him. I t hesitated above him, and Forrester saw a face looking out -- a face which he recognized, although not complete with an identity as yet. The eyes looked at him thoughtfully. Then it dipped and slid away, and landed. It landed across the hoverway, and the man got out. He was carrying something that looked like a whip. Around the pylons of the tapering bright yellow building across the hoverway Forrester saw Whitlow walking toward him. So did the man from the aircraft. He was waiting for Whitlow. He stood there, politely poised, while Whitlow ambled across the grass, and turned and saw him. Whitlow never had a chance to run. The thing that looked like a whip was a whip. The man seemed to shake it gently, and its tip hissed out to touch Whitlow, and curled around his neck, and flung him violently to the ground. The man pulled back with the whip, an expression of eager pleasure on his friendly face; and Forrester recognized him. It was their benefactor, the spaceman back from his right-angle flight. Over the whush of the hovercars Forrester could hear Whitlow cream. Whitlow tried frantically to get up, still screaming, and was slashed to earth again; tried again, and shook as the whip flicked blood from his neck; tried again, and was thrown down; and stopped trying. Forrester turned and ran, as fast he he could run. He was sobbing. I have a right to be, he thought, half crazed. No one could watch a friend whipped to death unmoved, even if death were only temporary. And for Whitlow it would not be temporary, for he was a Forgotten Man, without hope. Like Forrester. He stopped. There ahead of him was another flyer, and outside it was something that glistened and shone. It looked a little like an atombomb cloud, a little like an icecream cone made of glittering chrome. It rested on ducted jets that swept it across a bed of stormtossed poppies toward Forrester, fast, so fast that he could only stare at it. For inside it, behind an inset band of crystal, was a ring of staring bright green eyes. It was a Sirian. His Sirian. And it was reaching out to touch him with something that glittered and stung. 'JT'onrester laughed to himself,T staring down at the bright golden countryside below him. The voice from behind him said, "Dear Charles, you're an idiot." He turned, grinning. "Because I'm laughing, Adne? It's just that it was such a stupid mistake." "Oh, it was all of that," she agreed. She still stayed inside that foolish space suit. It nettled Forrester. It was bad enough that he could have been so panicky and confused as to think her a Sirian, but at least she could come out and sit beside him on this flight they were taking to -- to -- "I forget where we're going," he said apologetically. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. He must have had an even worst hangover than he thought. "Sweat, sweet! You can't remember anything." "I wish you'd come out and talk to me." "Talk?" Her laugh was gently mocking. "All right, I wish you'd come out and -- " "Charles! How fast you're getting over your kamikaze ways! A week ago you wouldn't have talked like that." "I wouldn't?" Forrester contern plated the thought. He was honestly puzzled; he couldn't redly remember what he would have talked like a week ago. He sighed and leaned back, staring into Adne's lovely, bright green eyes. He felt dizzy, sick and extremely confused. He wondered if his mind was breaking down -- not that it would have been any wonder if it were. Certainly he had been through enough. He felt tired. He felt both sleepy and taut; like an insomniac; sitting there, watching Adne's expression behind the band of crystal in her wild spacesuit, he was almost fainting from fatigue. Or something like fatigue. Little bolts of pain struck at the base of the skull, muscle spasms knotted his neck muscles. His eyes were gritty and sore. But when he closed them they sprang open again; he felt a flush of strength into his body, and sat up -- and was at once dizzyingly weary again. It was confusing. It was also frightening. He found minutes passing that he had not marked; looked to see Adne regarding him, looked again and she was somewhere else, bending over something in her conical suit; but he had not seen her move. He thought objectively: I'm having delusions. It had been going on for some time. Had he not thought Adne was trying to stab him with something like a hypo? Even thought that Adne was not Adne, but one of the aliens from Sirius, menacing Earth? But it was all too complex for him to sort out, and he was dizzy and sick. He saw only flashes, heard only bursts of sound. The whir of the flyer's rotors; and a metallic whining of gears as a port was opened. Why was a port opened? What was he doing standing here on the ground, on a hot, baked flat place of parched dead grass? Why was Adne getting into it? He heard the rotors again, and looked out; they were still flying over the endless fields of food for the cities. But it was queerly night. He turned to ask Adne, but she was hiding from him. "Damn you!" he cried. Or sobbed, or perhaps both; but she didn't answer. He flung himself petulantly down on the seat. His head was splitting with pain. "Damn you," he whispered, and slept. 'X#'hen he woke up the flyer ' ' was standing at the side of the hoverway. As near as he could tell, it was the exact spot from which he had taken off. He staggered to his feet. "Adne?" he called. But there was no answer, and in a way he had not expected one. He remembered parts of what had happened. It had been confusing. It had lasted a long time -- it seemed to be day again. It was very strange that he had dreamed so complex and pointless a dream. Of course, that was assuming it was a dream. But even waking, there seemed to be no point to the whole experience; he could not think what should come next for him, and wandered out of the flyer. When he was standing on the grassy border of the hoverway he realized he was also ravenously hungry. Strangely, the practical problem that presented was almost a relief. He searched his pockets, to see what might be left of the largesse from his friend, the whipmurderer. Nothing. But he had expected that, and he did what he knew he had been going to do all along. He headed for Adne's condominium. Of course, she might not have been in, or she might not have admitted him. But she was. And she did. She didn't act too happy about it, though. "All right," she said, "come on in." He sat down, ill at ease, aware that besides being hungry, and hungover, he was also far from clean. He cast about in his mind for something that would give her a chance to invite him to eat. "I had a funny experience," he said. She grunted over her shoulder, fingering her joymaker and watching the view-wall. "I thought you were with me on a trip yesterday," he said. "You weren't, were you?" "Charles, will you shut up a minute?" Her attention was on the walL It glowed into life and showed a scene of dried, seared grasses, and a place where something heavy had ground into the earth; while a voice was saying in sonorous mourning: " -- escaped orbital patrols and must be assumed to be on its way to Sirius itself. No information is available as to how the Sirian managed to avoid the built-in electronic defenses against escape. There must have been human complicity to carry the alien to the site of the disused space vessel, but no joymaker monitors have registered any such event. The implications, of course -- " Adne turned to him, her face blank. "Sweat!" she cried. "That's terrible. "What did you want to ask me?" "Oh, nothing. Something about whether or not you were with me yesterday," said Forrester, "but I don't have to. It wasn't you. I know who it was now." won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add slate sales tax, il any. The designs shown above arc the only ones we offer I # First Year V Security-Prestige"In our first calendar year we did a gross of S#. Without constant help from the Duraclean borne office such growth never would have been possible." # in One Month saK'-.-sttsaSsw J. F. A. Texas # for # Hours Work "I have done hotels, studios, restaurants and churches. That is where the big money is. Example: One Saturday, # in #I hours. 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Down into Old Earth the Lord hastened -- to do one great last deed, and die I I need a temporary dog For a temporary job On a temporary place Like Earth! -- Song from The Merchant of Menace I nphere were the DouglasOuyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives -- even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives -- against different kinds of geophysics which real II men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again. This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it. Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries -- opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins. r T'he Lady Ru had said, a few centuries before: "Scraps of knowledge have been found. In the ultimate beginning of man, even before there were aircraft, the wise man Laodz declared, 'Water does nothing but it penetrates everything. Inaction finds the road.' Later an ancient lord said this: "There is a music which underlies all things. We dance to the tunes all our lives, though our living ears never hear the music which guides us and moves us. Happiness can kill people as softly as shadows seen in dreams.' We must be people first and happy later, lest we live and die in vain." The Lord Sto Odin was more direct. He declared the truth to a few private friends: "Our population is dropping on most worlds, including the earth. People have children, but they don't want them very much. I myself have been a three-father to twelve children, a two-father to four, and a one-father, I suppose, to many others. I have had zeal for work and I have mistaken it for zeal in living. They are not the same. "Most people want happiness. Good: we have given them happiness. "Dreary useless centuries of happiness, in which all the unhappy were corrected or adjusted or killed. Unbearable desolate happiness without the sting of grief, the wine of rage, the hot fumes of fear. How many of us have ever tasted the acid, icy taste of old resentment? That's what people really lived for in the Ancient Days, when they pretended to be happy and were actually alive with grief, rage, fury, hate, malice and hope! Those people bred like mad. They populated the stars while other, secretly or openly. Their plays concerned murder or betrayal or illegal love. Now we have no murder. We cannot imagine any kind of love which is illegal. Can you imagine the Murkins with their highway net? Who can fly anywhere today without seeing that net of enormous highways? Those roads are rained, but they're still here. You can see the abominable things quite clearly from the moon. Don't think about the vehicles that ran on those roads, the people filled with greed and rage and hate, rushing past each other with their engines on fire. They say that fifty thousand a year were killed on the roads alone. We would call that a war. What people they must have been, to rush day and night and to build things which would help other people to rush even more! They were different from us. They must have been wild, dirty, free. Lusting for life, perhaps, in a way that we do not. We can easily go a thousand times faster than they ever went, but who, nowadays, bothers to go? Why go? It's the same there as here, except for a few fighters or technicians." lie smiled at his friends and added, "... and Lords of the Instrumentality, like ourselves. We # for the reasons of the Instrumentality. Not ordinary people reasons. Ordinary people don't have much reason to do anything. They work at the jobs which we think up for them, to keep them happy while the robots and the underpeople do the real work. They walk. They make love. But they are never unhappy. "They can't bet" The Lady Mmooa disagreed, "Life can't be as bad as you say. We don't just think they are happy. We know they are happy. We look right into their brains with telepathy. We monitor their emotional patterns with robots and scanners. It's not as though we didn't have samples. People are always turning unhappy. We're correcting them all the time. And now and then there are bad accidents, which  even we cannot correct. When people are very unhappy, they scream and weep. Sometimes they even stop talking and just die, despite everything we can do for them. You can't say that isn't real!" "But I do," said the Lord Sto Odin. "You do what?" cried Mmona. "I do say this happiness is not real," he insisted. "How can you," she shouted at him, "in the face of the evidence? Out evidence, which we of the Instrumentality decided on a long time ago. We collect it ourselves. Can we. the Instrumentality, be wrong?" "Yes," said the Lord Sto Odin. '"T'his time it was the entire circle who went silent. Sto Odin pleaded with them. "Look at my evidence. People don't care whether they are onefathers or one-mothers or not. They don't know which children are theirs, anyhow. Nobody dares to commit suicide. We keep them too happy. But do we spend any time keeping the talking animals, the underpeople. as happy as men? And do underpeople commit suicide?" "Certainly," said Mmona. "They are preconditioned to commit suicide if they are hurt too badly for easy repair or if they fail in their appointed work." "I don't mean that. Do they ever commit suicide for their reasons, not ours?" "No," said the Lord Nuru-or, a wise young Lord of the Instrumentality. "They are too desperately busy doing their jobs and staying alive." "How long does an underperson live?" said Sto Odin, with deceptive mildness. "Who knows?" said Nuru-or. "Half a year, a hundred years, maybe several hundred years." "What happens if he does not work?" said the Lord Sto Odin, with a friendly-crafty smile. "We kill him," said Mmona, "or our robot-police do." "And does the animal know it?" "Know he will be killed if he does not work?" said Mmona. "Of course. We tell all of them the same thing. Work or die. What's that got to do with people?" The Lord Nuru-or had fallen silent and a wise, sad smile had begun to show on his face. He had begun to suspect the shrewd, dreadful conclusion toward which the Lord Sto Odin was driving. But Mmona did not see it and she pressed the point. "My lord," said she, "you are insisting that people are happy. You admit they do not like to be unhappy. You seem to want to bring up a problem which has no solution. Why complain of happiness? Isn't it the best which the Instrumentality can do for mankind? That's our mission. Are you saying that we are failing in it?" "Yes. We are failing." The Lord Sto Odin looked blindly at the room as though alone. He was the oldest and wisest, so they waited for him to talk. He breathed lightly and smiled at them again. "You know when I am going to die?" "Of course," said Mmona, thinking for half a second. "Seventy-seven days from now. But you posted the time yourself. And it is not our custom, my Lord, as you well know, to bring intimate things into meetings of the Instrumentality." "Sorry," said Sto Odin, "but I'm not violating a law. I'm making a point. We are sworn to uphold the dignity of man. a bland hopeless happiness which has prohibited news, which has suppressed religion, which has made all history an official secret. I say that the evidence is that we are failing and that mankind, whom we've sworn to cherish, is failing too. Failing in vitality, strength, numbers, energy. I have a little while to live. I am going to try to find out." The Lord Nuru-or asked with sorrowful wisdom, as though he guessed the answer : "And where will you go to find out?" "I shall go," said the Lord Sto Odin, "down into the Gebiet." Ct'Hphe Gebiet -- oh, no!" cried several. And one voice added, "You're immune." "I shall waive immunity and I shall go," said the Lord Sto Odin. "Who can do anything to a man who is already almost a thousand years old and who has chosen only seventy-seven more days to live?" "But you can't!" said Mmona. "Some criminal might capture you and duplicate you, and then we would all of us be in peril." "When did you last hear of a criminal among mankind?" said Sto Odin. "There are plenty of them, here and there in the offworlds." "But on Old Earth itself?" asked Sto Odin. She stammered. "I don't know. There must have been a criminal once." She looked around the room. "Don't any of the rest of you know?" There was silence. The Lord Sto Odin stared at them all. In his eyes was the brightness and fierceness which had made whole generations of Lords plead with him to live just a few more years, so that he could help them with their work. He had agreed, but within the last quarter-year he had overridden them all and had picked his day of death. He had lost none of his powers in doing this. They shrank from his stare while they waited with respect for his decision. The Lord Sto Odin looked at the Lord Nuru-or and said, "I think you have guessed what I am going to do in the Gebiet and why I have to go there." "The Gebiet is a preserve where no rules apply and no punishments are inflicted. Ordinary people can do What they want down there, not what we think they should want. From all I hear, it is pretty nasty and pointless, the things that they find out. But you, perhaps, may sense the inwardness of these things. You may find a cure for the weary happiness of mankind." "That is right," said Sto Odin. "And that is why I am going, after I make the appropriate official preparations." Ill fo he did. He used one of  ' the most peculiar conveyances ever seen on Earth, since his own legs were too weak to carry him far. With only twoninths of a year to live, he did not want to waste time getting his legs re-grafted. He rode in an open sedanchair carried by two Roman legionaries. The legionaries were actually robots, without a trace of blood or living tissue in them. They were the most compact and difficult kind to create, since their brains had to be located in sheets of incredibly fine laminations, imprinted with the whole life experience of an important, useful and long-dead person. They were clothed as legionaries, down to cuirasses, swords, kilts, greaves, sandals and shields, merely because It was the whim of the Lord Sto Odin to go behind the rim of history for his companions. Their bodies, all-metal, were very strong. They could batter walls, jump chasms, crush any man or underperson with their mere fingers, or throw their swords with the accuracy of guided projectiles. The forward legionary, Flavius, had been Head of FourteenB in the Instrumentality -- an espionage division so secret that even among Lords, few knew exactly of its location or its function. He was (or had been, till he was imprinted on a robotmind as he lay dying) the director of historical research for the whole human race. Now he was a dull, pleasant machine carrying two poles until his master chose to bring his powerful mind into bright, furious alert by speaking the simple Latin phrase, understood by no other person living, Summa nulla est. The rear legionary, Livius. had been a psychiatrist who turned into a general. He had won many battles until he chose to die, somewhat before his time, because he perceived that battle itself was a struggle for the defeat of himself. Together, and added to the immense brainpower of the Lord Sto Odin himself, they represented an unsurpassable team. "The Gebiet," commanded the Lord Sto Odin. "The Gebiet," said both of them heavily, picking up the chair with its supporting poles. "And then the Bezirk," he added. "The Bezirk," they chimed in toneless voices. Sto Odin felt his chair tilt back as Livius put his two ends of the poles carefully on the ground, came up beside Sto Odin and saluted with open palm. "May I awaken?" said Livius in an even, mechanical voice. "Summa nulla est," said the Lord Sto Odin. I ivius' face sprang into full animation. "You must not go there, my Lord! You would have to waive immunity and meet all dangers. There is nothing there yet. Not yet. Some day they will come pouring out of that underground Hades and give you men a real fight. Now, no. They are just miserable beings, cooking away in their weird unhappiness, making love in manners which you never thought of -- " "Never mind what you think I've thought. What's your objection in real terms?" "It's pointless, my lord! You have only bits of a year to live. Do something noble and great for man before you die. They may turn us off. We would like to share your work before you go away." "Is that all?" said Sto Odin. "My Lord," said Flavius, "you have awakened me too. I say, go forward. History is being respun down there. Things are loose which you great ones of the Instrumentality have never even suspected. Go now and look, before you die. You may do nothing, but I disagree with my companion. It is as dangerous as space-three might be, if we ever were to find it, but it is interesting. And in this world, where all things have been done, where all thoughts have been thought, it is hard to find things which still prompt the human mind with raw curiosity. I'm dead, as you perfectly well know, but even I, inside this machine brain, feel the tug of adventure, the pull of danger, the magnetism of the unknown. For one thing, they are committing crimes down there. And you Lords are over-looking them." "We chose to overlook them. We are not stupid. We wanted to see what might happen," said the Lord Sto Odin, "and we have to give those people time before we find out just how far they might go if they are cut off from controls." "They are having babies!" said Flavius excitedly. "I know that." "They have hooked in two illegal instant message machines," shouted Falvius. Sto Odin was calm. "So that's why the Earth's credit structure has appeared to be leaking in it# balance of trade." "They have a piece of the congohelium!" shouted Flavius. "The congohelium!" shouted the Lord Sto Odin. "Impossible! It's unstable. They could kill themselves. They could hurt Earth! What are they doing with it?" "Making music," said Flavius, more quietly. "Making what ?" "Music. Songs. Nice noise to dance to." The Lord Sto Odin sputtered, "Take me there right now. This is ridiculous. Having a piece of the congohelium down there is as bad as wiping out inhabited planets to play checkers." "My Lord," said Livius. "Yes?" said Sto Odin. "I withdraw my objections," said Livius. Sto Odin said, very drily, "Thank you." "They have something else down there. When I did not want you to go, I did not mention it. It might have aroused your curiosity. They have a god." Hphe Lord Sto Odin said, "If this is going to be a historical lecture, save it for another time. Go back to sleep and carry me down." Livius did not move. "I mean what I said." "A god? What do you call a god?" "A person or an idea capable of starting wholly new cultural patterns in motion." The Lord Sto Odin leaned forward, "You know this?" "We both do," said Flavius and Livius. "We saw him," said Livius. "You told us, a tenth-year ago, to walk around freely for thirty hours, so we put on ordinary robot bodies and happened to get into the Gebiet. When we sensed the congohelium operating, we had to go on down to find out what it was doing. Usually, it is employed to keep the stars in their place -- " "Don't tell me that. I know it. Was it a man?" "A man," said Flavius, "who is re-living the life of Akhnaton." "Who's that?" said the Lord Sto Odin, who knew history, but wanted to see how much his robots knew. "A king, tall, long-faced, thick lipped, who ruled the human world of Egypt long-long before atomic power. Akhnaton invented the best of the early gods. This man is reenacting Akhnaton's life step by step. He has already made a religion out of the sun. He mocks at happiness. People listen to him. They joke about the Instrumentality." Livius added, "We saw the girl who loves him. She herself was young, but beautiful. And I think she has powers which will make the Instrumentality promote her or destroy her some day in the future." "They both made music," said Flavius, "with that piece of the congohelium. And this man or god -- this new kind of Akhnaton, whatever you may want to call him, my Lord -- he was dancing a strange kind of dance. It was like a corpse being tied with rope and dancing like a marionette. The effect on the people around him was as good as the best hypnotism you ever saw. I'm a robot now, but it bothered even me." "Did the dance have a name?" said Sto Odin. "I don't know the name," said Flavius, "but I memorized the song, since I have total recall. Do you wish to hear it?" "Certainly," said the Lord Sto Odin. Flavius stood on one leg, improbable angles and began to sing in a high, insulting tenor voice which was both fascinating and repugnant: Jump, dear people, and I'll howl for you. Jump and howl and Til weep for you. I weep because I'm a weeping man. I'm a weeping man because I weep. I weep because he day is done. Sun is gone. Home is lost. Time hilled dad. I killed time. World is round. Day is run. Clouds are shot. Stars are out. Mountain's fire. Rain is hot, Hot is blue. I am done.  So are you. Jump, dear people, for the howling man. Leap, dear people, for the weeping man. I'm a weeping man because I weep for you! "Enough," said the Lord Sto Odin. Flavius saluted. His face went back to amiable stolidity. Just before he took the front ends of the shaft he glanced back and brought forth one last comment: "The verse is skeltonic." "Tell me nothing more of your history. Take me there." "nr'he robots obeyed. Soon the chair was jogging comfortably down the ramps of the ancient left-over city which sprawled beneath Earthport, that miraculous tower which seemed to touch the stratocumulus clouds in the blue clear nothingness above mankind. Sto Odin went to sleep in his strange vehicle and did not notice that the human passers-by often stared at him. The Lord Sto Odin woke fitfully in strange places as the legionaries carried him further and further into the depths below the city, where sweet pressures and warm, sick smells made the air itself feel dirty to his nose. "Stop!" whispered the Lord Sto Odin, and the robots stopped. "Who am I?" he said to them. "You have announced your will to die, my Lord," said Flavius, "seventy-seven days from now, but so far your name is still the Lord Sto Odin." "I am alive?" the Lord asked. "Yes," said both the robots. "You are dead?" "We are not dead. We are machines, printed with the minds of men who once lived. Do you wish to turn back, my lord?" "No. No. Now I remember. You are the robots. Livius, the psychiatrist and general. Flavius, the secret historian. You have the minds of men, and are not men?" "That is right, my Lord," said Flavius. "Then how can I be alive -- I, Sto Odin?" "You should feel it yourself, sir," said Livius, "though the mind of the old is sometimes very strange." "How can I be alive?" asked Sto Odin, staring around the city. "How can I be alive when the people who knew me are dead? They have whipped through the corridors like wraiths of smoke, like traces of cloud; they were here, and they loved me, and they knew me, and now they are dead. Take my wife, Eileen. She was a pretty thing, a brown-eyed child who came out of her learning chamber all perfect and all young. Time touched her and she danced to the cadence of time. Her body grew full, grew old. We repaired it. But at last she cramped in death and she went to that place to which I am going. If you are dead, you ought to be able to tell me what death is like, where the bodies and minds and voices and music of men and women whip past these enormous corridors, these hardy pavements, and are then gone. How can passing ghosts like me and my kind, each with just a few dozen or a few hundred years to go before the great blind winds of time whip us away -- how can phantoms like me have built this solid city, these wonderful enwhich never go dim? How did we do it, when we pass so swiftly, each of us, all of us? Do you know?" 'Tphe robots did not answer. Pity had not been programmed into their systems. The Lord Sto Odin harangued them, none the less : "You are taking me to a wild place, a free place, an evil place, perhaps. They are dying there too, as all men die, as I shall die, so soon, so brightly and simply. I should have died a long time ago. I was the people who knew me, I was the brothers and comrades who trusted me, I was the women who comforted me, I was the children whom I loved so bitterly and so sweetly many ages ago. Now they are gone. Time touched them, and they were not. I can see everyone that I ever knew racing through these corridors, see them young as toddlers, see them proud and wise and full with business and maturity, see them old and contorted as time reached out for them and they passed hastily away. Why did they do it? How can I live on? When I am dead, will I know that I once lived? I know that some of my friends have cheated and lie in the icy sleep, hoping for something which they do not know. I've had life, and I know it. What is life? A bit of play, a bit of learning, some words well-chosen, some love, a trace of pain, more work, memories, and then dirt rushing up to meet sunlight. That's all we've made of it -- we, who have conquered the stars! Where are my friends? Where is my me that I once was so sure of, when the people who knew me were timeswept like stormdriven rags toward darkness and oblivion? You tell me. You ought to know! You are machines and you were given the minds of men. You ought to know what we amount to, from the outside in." "We were built," said Livius, "by men and we have whatever men put into us, nothing more. How can we answer talk like yours? It is rejected by our minds, good though our minds may be. We have no grief, no fear, no fury. We know the names of these feelings but not the feelings themselves. We hear your words but we do not know what you are talking about. Are you trying to tell us what life feels like? If so, we already know. Not much. Nothing special. Birds have life too, and so do fishes. It is you people who can talk and who can knot life into spasms and puzzles. You muss things up. Screaming never made the truth truthful, at least, not to us." "Take me down," said Sto Odin. "Take me down to the Gebiet, where no well-mannered man has gone in many years. I am going to judge that place before I die." They lifted the sedan-chair and resumed their gentle dogtrot down the immense ramps down toward the warm steaming secrets of the Earth itself. The human pedestrians became more scarce, but undermen -- most often of gorilla or ape origin -- passed them, toiling their way upward while dragging shrouded treasures which they had filched the uncatalogued storehouses of Man's most ancient past. At other times there was a wild whirr of metal wheels on stone roadway; the undermen, having offloaded their treasures at some intermediate point high above, sat on their wagons and rolled back downhill, like grotesque enlargements of the ancient human children who were once reported to have played with wagons in this way. A command, scarcely a whisper, stopped the two legionaries again. Flavius turned. Sto Odin was indeed calling both of them. They stepped out of the shafts and came around to him, one on each side. "I may be dying right now," he whispered, "and that would be most inconvenient at this time. Get out my manikin meee!" "My Lord," said Flavius, "it is strictly forbidden for us robots to touch any human manikin, and if we do touch one, we are commanded to destroy ourselves immediately thereafter? Do you wish us to try, nevertheless? If so, which one of us? You have the command, my Lord." IV TTe waited so long that even the robots began to wonder if he died amid the thick wet air and the nearby stench of steam and oil. The Lord Sto Odin finally roused himself and said: "I need no help. Just put the bag with my manikin meee on my lap." "This one?" asked Flavius, lifting a small brown suitcase and handling it with a very gingerly touch indeed. The Lord Sto Odin gave a barely perceptible nod and whispered, "Open it carefully for me. But do not touch the manikin, if those are your orders." Flavius twisted at the catch of the bag. It was hard to manage. Robots did not feel fear, but they were intellectually attuned to the avoidance of danger; Flavius found his mind racing with wild choices as he tried to get the bag open. Sto Odin tried to help him, but the ancient hand, palsied and weak, could not even reach the top of the case. Flavius labored on, thinking that the Gebiet and Bezirk had their dangers, but that this meddling with manikins was the riskiest thing which he had ever encountered while in robot form, though in his human life he had handled many of them, including his own. They were "Manikin, Electro-encephalographic and endocrine" in model form, and they showed in miniaturized replica the entire diagnostic position of the patient for whom they were fashioned. Sto Odin whispered to them. "There's no helping it. Turn me up. If I die, take my body back and tell the people that I misjudged my time." Just as he spoke, the case sprang open. Inside it there lay a little naked human man, a direct copy of Sto Odin himself. "We have it, my Lord," cried Livius, from the other side. "Let me guide your hand to it, so that you can see what to do." Though it was forbidden for robots to touch manikins meee, it was legal for them to touch a human person with the person's consent. Livius's strong cupro-plastic fingers, with a reserve of many tons of gripping power in their human-like design, pulled the hands of the Lord Sto Odin forward until they rested on the manikin meee. Flavius, quick, smooth, agile, held the Lord's head upright on his weary old neck, so that the ancient Lord could see what the hands were doing. "Is any part dead?" said the old Lord to the manikin, his voice clearer for the moment. The manikin shimmered and two spots of solid black showed along the outside upper right thigh and the right buttock. "Organic reserve?" said the Lord to his own manikin meee, and again the machine responded to his command. The whole miniature body shimmed to a violent purple and then subsided to an even pink. "I still have some all-around strength left in this body, prosthetics and all," said Sto Odin to the two robots. "Set me up, I tell you! Set me up." U # re you sure, my Lord," said Livius, "that we should do a thing like that here where the three of us are alone in a deep tunnel? In less than half an hour we could take you to a real hospital, where actual doctors could examine you." "I said," repeated the Lord Sto Odin, "set me up. I'll watch the manikin while you do it." "Your control is in the usual place, my Lord?" asked Livius. "How much of a turn?" asked Flavius. "Nape of my neck, of course. The skin over it is artificial and self-sealing. One twelfth of a turn will be enough. Do you have a knife with you?" Flavius nodded. He took a small sharp knife from his belt, probed gently around the old Lord's neck and then brought the knife down with a quick, sure turn. "That did it!" said Sto Odin, in a voice so hearty that both of them stepped back a little. Flavius put the knife back in his belt. Sto Odin, who had almost been comatose a moment before, now held the manikin meee in his unaided hands. "See, gentlemen!" he cried. "You may be robots, but you can still see the truth and report it." They both looked at the manikin meee, which Sto Odin now held in front of himself, his thumb and fingertip in the armpits of the medical doll. "Watch what it reads," he said to them with a clear, ringing voice. "Prosthetics!" he shouted at the manikin. The tiny body changed from its pink color to a mixture. Both legs turned the color of a deep bruised blue. The legs, the left arm, one eye, one ear and the skull-cap stayed blue, showing the prostheses in place. "Felt pain!" shouted Sto Odin at the manikin. The little doll returned to its light pink color. All the details were there, even to genitals, toenails and eyelashes. There was no trace of the black color of pain in any part of the little body. "Potential pain!" shouted Sto Odin. The doll shimmered. Most of it settled to the color of dark walnut wood, with some areas of intense brown showing more clearly than the rest. "Potential breakdown -- one day!" shouted Sto Odin. The little body went back to its normal color of pink. Small lightnings showed at the base of the brain, but nowhere else. V "I'm all right," said Sto Odin. "I can continue as I have done for the last several hundred years. Leave me set up on this high life-output. I can stand it for a few hours, and if I cannot, there's little lost." He put the manikin back in its bag, hung the bag on the door-handle of the sedan-chair and commanded the legionaries, "Proceed!" The legionaries stared at him as if they could not see him. He followed the lines of glance and saw that they were gazing rigidly at his manikin mee. It had turned black. "Are you dead?" asked Livius, speaking as hoarsely as a robot could. "Not dead at all!" cried Sto Odin. "I have been death in fractions of a moment, but for the time I am still life. That was just the painsum of my living body which showed on the manikin meee. The fire of life still burns within me. Watch as I put the manikin away... " The doll flared into a swirl of pastel orange as the Lord Sto Odin pulled the cover down. They looked away as though they had seen an evil or an explosion. "Down, men, down," he cried, calling them wrong names as they stepped back between their carrying shafts to take him deeper under the vitals of the earth. Tie dreamed brown dreams while they trotted down endless ramps. He woke a little to see the yellow walls passing. He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human. "I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age," he murmured, but the voice was weak and the robots did not hear him. They were running downward on a long meaningless concrete ramp which had become filmed by a leak of ancient oil, and they were taking care that they did not stumble and drop their precious master. At a deep, hidden point the downward ramp divided, the left into a broad arena of steps which could have seated thousands of spectators for some never-to-occur event, and right into a narrow ramp which bore upward and then curved, yellow lights and all. "Stop!" called Sto Odin. "Do you see her? Do you hear it?" "Hear what?" said Flavius. "The beat and the cadence of the congohelium, rising out of the Gebiet. The whirl and the skirl of impossible music coming at us through miles of solid rock? That girl whom I can already see, waiting at a door which should never have been opened? The sound of the starborne music, notdesigned for the proper human ear?" He shouted, "Can't you hear it? That cadence. The unlawful metal of congohelium so terribly far underground? Dah, dah. Dah, dah. Dah. Music which nobody has ever understood before?" Said Flavius, "I hear nothing, saving the pulse of air in this corridor, and your own heartbeat, my Lord. And something else, a little like machinery, very far away." "There, that!" cried Sto Odin, "which you call 'a little like machinery,' does it come in a beat of five separate sounds, each one distinct?" "No. No, sir. Not five." "And you, Livius, when you were a man, you were very telepathic? Is there any of that left in the robot which is you?" "No, my Lord, nothing. I have good senses, and I am also cut into the subsurface radio of the Instrumentality. Nothing unusual." "No five beat? Each note separate, short of prolonged, given meaning and shape by the terrible music of the congohelium, imprisoned with us inside this much-too-solid rock? You hear nothing?" The two robots, shaped like Roman legionaries shook their heads. "But I can see her, through this stone. She has breasts like ripe pears and dark brown eyes that are like the stones of freshcut peaches. And I can hear what they are singing, their weird silly words of a pentapaul, made into something majestic by the awful music of the congohelium. Listen to the words. When I repeat them, they sound just silly, because the dread-inspiring music does not come with them. Her name is Santuna and she stares at him. No wonder she stares. He is much more tall than most men, yet he makes this foolish song into something frightening and strange. Slim Jim. Dim him. Grim. And his name is Yebayee, but now he is Sun-boy. He has the long face and the thick lips of the first man to talk about one god and one only. Akhnaton." "Akhnaton the pharaoh," said Flavius. "That name was known in my office when I was a man. It was a secret. One of the first and greatest of the more-thanancient kings. You see him, my Lord?" "Through this rock I see him. Through this rock I hear the delirium engendered by the congohelium. I go to him." The Lord Sto Odin stepped out of the sedan chair and beat softly and weakly against the solid stone wall of the corridor. The yellow lamps gleamed. The legionaries were helpless. Here was something which their sharp swords could not pierce. Their oncehumah personalities, engraved on their micro-miniaturized brains, could not make sense out of the all-too-human situation of an old, old man dreaming wild dreams in a remote tunnel. Qto Odin leaned against the wall, breathing heavily, and said to them with a sibilant rasp: "These are no whispers which can be missed. Can't you hear the five-beat of the congohelium, making its crazy music again? Listen to the words of this one. It's another pentapaul. Silly bony words given flesh and blood and entrails by the music which carries them. Here, listen. Try. Vie. Cry. Die. Bye. This one you did not hear either?" "May I use my radio to ask the surface of Earth for advice?" said one of the robots. "Advice! Advice! What advice do we need? This is the Gebiet and one more hour of running and you will be in the heart of the Bezirk." He climbed back into the sedan chair and commanded, "Run, men, run! It can't be more than three or four kilometers somewhere in this warren of stone. I will guide you. If I stop guiding you, you may take my body back to the surface, so that I can be given a wonderful funeral and be shot with a rocket-coffin into space with an orbit of no return. You have nothing to worry about. You are machines, nothing more, are you not? Are you not?" His voice shrilled at the end. Said Flavius, "Nothing more." Said Livius, "Nothing more. And yet -- " "And yet what?" demanded the Lord Sto Odin. "And yet," said Livius, 'T know I am a machine, and I know that I have known feelings only when I was once a living man. I sometimes wonder if you people might go too far. Too far, with us robots. Too far, perhaps, with the underpeople too. Things were once simple, when everything that talked was a human being and everything which did not talk was not. You may be coming to an ending of the ways." "If you had said that on the surface," said the Lord Sto Odin grimly, "your head might have been burned off by its automatic magnesium flare. You know that there you are monitored against having illegal thoughts." "Too well do I know it," said Livius, "and I know that I must have died once as a man, if I exist here in robot form. Dying didn't seem to hurt me then and it probably won't hurt next time. But nothing really matters much when we get down this far into the earth. When we get this far down, everything changes. I never really understood that the inside of the world was this big and this sick." "It's not how far down we are," said the Lord crossly, "it's where we are. This is the Gebiet, where all laws have been lifted, and down below and over yonder is the Bezirk, where laws have never been. Carry me rapidly now. I want to look on this strange musician with the face of Akhnaton and I want to talk to the girl who worships him, Santuna. Run carefully now. Up a little, to the left a little. If I sleep, do not worry. Keep going. I will waken myself when we come anywhere near that music of the congohelium. If I can hear it now, so far away, think of what it will be like when you yourselves approach it!" He leaned back in his seat. They picked up the shafts of the sedan-chair and ran in the direction which they had been told. VI r'hey had run for more than an hour, with occasional delays when they had tricky footwork over leaking pipes or damaged walkways, when the light became so bright that they had to reach in their pouches and put on sun-glasses, which looked very odd indeed underneath the Roman helmets of two fully-armed legionaries. (It was even more odd, of course, that the eyes were not eyes at all; robot eyes were like white marbles swimming in little bowls of glittering ink, producing a grimly milky stare.) They looked at their master and he had not yet stirred, so they took a corner of his robe and twisted it firmly into a bandage to protect his eyes against the bright light. The new light made the yellow bulbs of the corridor fade out of notice. The light was like a whole aurora borealis compressed and projected through the basement corridor of a hotel left over from long ago. Neither of the robots knew the nature of the light, but it pulsed in beats of five. The music and the lights became obtrusive even to the two robots as they walked or trotted downward toward the center of the world. The air-forcing system must have been very strong, because the inner heat of the earth had not reached them, even at this great depth. Flavius had no idea of how many kilometers below the surface they had come. He knew that it was not much in planetary distance, but it was very far indeed for an ordinary walk. The Lord Sto Odin sat up in the litter quite suddenly. When the two robots slowed, he said crossly at them: "Keep going. Keep going. I am going to set myself up. I'm strong enough to do it." He took out his manikin meee and studied it in the light of the minor aurora borealis which repeated itself in the corridor. The manikin ran through its changes of diagnoses and colors. The Lord was satisfied. With firm old fingers he put the knifetip to the back of his neck and set his output of vital energies at an even higher level. The robots did what they had been told. The lights had been bewildering. Sometimes they made walking itself difficult. It was hard to believe that dozens or hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human beings had found their way through these uncharted corridors in order to discover the inmost precincts of Bezirk, where all things were allowed. Yet the robots had to believe it. They themselves had been here before and they scarcely remembered how they had found their way the other time. And the music ! It beat at them harder than ever before. It came in beats of five, ringing out the tones of the pentapaul, the fiveword verse which the mad catminstrel C'paul had developed while playing his c'lute some centuries before. The form itself con firmed and reinforced the poignancy of cats combined with the heartbreaking intelligence of the human being. No wonder people had found their way down here. In all the history of man, there was no act which could not be produced by any one of the three bitterest forces in the human spirit -- religious faith, vengeful vainglory or sheer vice. Here, for the sake of vice, men had found the undiscoverable deep and had put it to wild, filthy uses. The music called them on. This was very special music. It came at Sto Odin and his legionaries in two utterly different ways by now, reverberating at them through solid rock and echoing, re-echoing through the maze of corridors, carried by the dark heavy air. The corridor lights were still yellow, but the electromagnetic illuminations, which kept time to the music, made the ordinary lighting seem wan. The music controlled all things, paced all time, called all life to itself. It was song of a kind which the two robots had not noticed with such intensity on their previous visit. Even the Lord Sto Odin, for all his travels and experiences, had never heard it before. It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium -- metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the bum and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an aircarried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone. Sto Odin woke and stared sharply forward, seeing nothing but experiencing everything. "Soon we shall see the gate and the girl," said he. "You know this, man? You who have never been here before?" Livius had spoken. "I know it," said the Lord Sto Odin, "because I know it." "You wear the feathers of immunity." "I wear the feathers of immunity." "Does that mean that we, your robots, are free too, down in this Bezirk?" "Free as you like," said the Lord Sto Odin, "provided that you do my wishes. Otherwise I shall kill you." "If we keep going," said Flavius, "may we sing the underpeople song? It might keep some of that terrible music out of our brains. The music has all feelings and we have none. Nevertheless, it disturbs us. I do not know why." "My radio contact with the surface has lapsed," said Livius irrelevantly. "I need to sing too." "Go ahead, both of you," said the Lord Sto Odin. "But keep on going, or you die." The robots lifted their voice in song : I eat my rage. I swallow my grief. There's no relief From pain or age. Our time comes. I work my life. I breathe my breath. I face my death Without a wife. Our time comes. We undermen Shove, crush and crash. There'll be a clash And thunder when Our time comes. '"T'hough the song had the barbarous ancient thrill of bagpipes in it, the melody could not counter or cancel the sane wild rhythm of the congohelium beating at them, now, from all directions at once. "Nice piece of sedition, that," said the Lord Sto Odin drily, "but I like it better as music than I do this noise which is tearing its way through the depths of the world. Keep going. Keep going. I must meet this mystery before I die." "We find it hard to endure that music coming at us through the rock," said Livius. "It seems to us that it is much stronger than it was when we came here some months ago. Could it have changed?" asked Flavius. "That is the mystery. We let them have the Gebiet, beyond our own jurisdiction. We gave them the Bezirk, to do with as they please. But these ordinary people have created or encountered some extraordinary power. They have brought new things into the Earth. It may be necessary for all three of us to die before we settle the matter." "We can't die the way you do," said Livius. "We're already robots, and the people from whom we were imprinted have been dead a long time. Do you mean you would turn us off?" "I would, perhaps, or else some other force. Would you mind?" "Mind? You mean, have emotions about it? I don't know," said Flavius. "I used to think that I had real, full experience when you used the phrase summa nulla est and brought us up to full capacity, but that music which we have been hearing has the effect of a thousand passwords all said at once. I am beginning to care about my life and I think that I am becoming what your reference explained by the word 'afraid'." "I too feel it," said Livius. "This is not a power which we knew to exist on Earth before. When I was a strategist someone told me about the really indescribable dangers connected with the Douglas-Ouyang planets, and it seems to me now that a danger of that kind is already with us, here inside the tunnel. Something which Earth never made. Something which man never developed. Something which no robot could out-compute. Something wild and very strong brought into being by the use of the congohelium. Look around us." He did not need to say that. The corridor itself had become a living, pulsing rainbow. They turned one last loop in the corridor and they were there -- The very last limit of the realm of distress. The source of evil music. The end of the Bezirk. They knew it because the music blinded them, the lights deafened them, their senses ran into one another and became confused. This was the immediate presence of the congohelium. There was a door, immensely large, carved vith elaborate Gothic ornament. It was much too big for any human man to have had need of it. In the door a single figure stood, her breasts accented into vivid brights and which poured from one side of the door only, the right. They could see through the door, into an immense hall wherein the floor was covered by hundreds of limp bundles of ragged clothing. These were the people, unconscious. Above them and between them there danced the high figure of a male, holding a glittering something in his hands. He prowled and leaped and twisted and turned to the pulsation of the music which he himself produced. "Summa nulla est," said the Lord Sto Odin. "I want you two robots to be keyed to maximum. Are you now to top alert?" "We are, sir," chorused Livius and Flavius. "You have your weapons?" "We cannot use them," said Livius, "since it is contrary to our programming, but you can use them, sir."  "I'm not sure," said Flavius. "I'm not at all sure. We are equipped with surface weapons. This music, these hypnotics, these lights -- who knows what they may have done to us and to our weapons, which were never designed to operate this far underground?" "No fear," said Sto Odin, "I'll take care of all of it." He took out a small knife. When the knife gleamed under the dancing lights, the girl in the doorway finally took notice of the Lord Sto Odin and his strange companions. She spoke to him, and her voice rode through the heavy air with the accents of clarity and death. tc W# ho are y u " s  e sa ' ' ' "that you should bring weapons to the last uttermost limits of the Bezirk?" "This is just a small knife, lady," said the Lord Sto Odin, "and with this I can do no harm to anyone. I am an old man and I am setting my own vitality button higher." She watched incuriously as he brought the point of the knife to the nape of his own neck and then gave it three full, deliberate turns. Then she stared and said, "You are strange, my Lord. Perhaps you are dangerous to my friends and me." "I am dangerous to no one." The robots looked at him, surprised, because of the fullness and the richness of his voice. He had set his vitality very high indeed, giving himself, at that rate, perhaps no more than an hour or two of life, but he had regained the physical power and the emotional force of his own prime years. They looked at the girl. She had taken Sto Odin's statement at full face value, almost as though it were an incontrovertible canon of faith. "I wear," Sto Odin went on, "these feathers. Do you know what they signify?" "I can see," she said, "that you are a Lord of the Instrumentality, but I do not know what the feathers mean..." "Waiver of immunity. Anyone who can manage it is allowed to kill me or to hurt me without danger of punishment." He smiled, a little grimly. "Of course, I have the right to fight back, and I do know how to fight. My name is the Lord Sto Odin. Why are you here, girl?" "I love that man in there -- if he is a man any more." She stopped and pursed her lips in bewilderment. It was strange to see those girlish lips compressed in a momentary stammer of the soul. She stood there, more nude than a newborn infant, her face covered with provocative, off-beat cosmetics. She lived for a mission of love in the depths of the nothing and nowhere: yet she remained a girl, a person, a human being capable, as she was now, of an immediate relation ship to another human being. "He was a man, my Lord, even when he came back from the surface with that piece of congohelium. Only a few weeks ago, those people were dancing too. Now they just lie on the ground. They do not even die. I myself held the congohelium too, and I made music with it. Now the power of the music is eating him up and he dances without resting. He won't come out to me and I do not dare go into that place with him. Perhaps I too would end up as one more heap on the floor." A crescendo of the intolerable music made speech intolerable for her. She waited for it to pass while the room beyond blazed a pulsing violet at them. When the music of the congohelium subsided a little, Sto Odin spoke: "How long has it been that he has danced alone with this strange power coursing through him?" "One year. Two years. Who can tell? I came down here and lost time when I arrived. You Lords don't even let us have clocks and calendars up on the surface." "We ourselves saw you dancing just a tenth-year ago," said Livius, interrupting. She glanced at them, quickly, incuriously. "Are you the same two robots who were here a while back? You look very different now. You look like ancient soldiers. I can't imagine why... All right, maybe it was a week, maybe it was a year." "What were you doing down here?" asked Sto Odin gently. "What do you think?" she said. "Why do all the other people come down here? I was running away from the timeless time, the lifeless life, the hopeless hope that you Lords apply to all mankind on the surface. You let the robots and the underpeople work, but you freeze the real people in a happiness which has no hope and no escape." "I'm right," cried Sto Odin, "I'm right, though I die for it!" "I don't understand you," said the girl. "Do you mean that you too, a Lord, have come down here to escape from the useless hope that wraps up all of us?" "No, no, no," he said, as the shifting lights of the congoheEum music made improbable traceries across his features. "I just meant that I told the other Lords that something like this was happening to you ordinary people on the surface. Now you are telling me exactly what I told them. Who were you, anyhow?" e girl glanced down at her unclothed body as though she were aware, for the first time, of her nakedness. Sto Odin could see the blush pour from her face down across her neck and chest. She said, very quietly: "Don't you know? We never answer that question down here." "You have rules?" he said. "You people have rules, even here in the Bezirk?" She brightened up when she realized that he had not meant the indecent question as an impropriety. Eagerly she explained, "There aren't any rules. They are just understandings. Somebody told me when I left the ordinary world and crossed the line of the Gebiet. I suppose they did not tell you because you were a Lord, or because they hid from your strange war-robots." "I met no one, coming down." "Then they were hiding from you, my Lord." Sto Odin looked around at his legionaries to see if they would confirm that statement but neither Flavius nor Livius said anything at all. He turned back to the girl. "I didn't mean to pry. Can you tell me what kind of person you are? I don't need the particulars." "When I was alive, I was a once-born," she said. "I did not live long enough to be renewed. The robots and a Subcommissioner of the Instrumentality took a look at me to see if I could be trained for the Instrumentality. More than enough brains, they said, but no character at all. I thought about that a long time. 'No character at all.' I knew I couldn't kill my self, and I didn't want to live, so I looked happy every time I thought a monitor might be scanning me and I found my way to the Gebiet. It wasn't death, and it wasn't life, but it was an escape from endless fun. I hadn't been down here long -- " she pointed at the Gebiet above them -- "before I met him. We loved each other very soon and he said that the Gebiet was not much improvement on the surface. He said he had already been down here, in the Bezirk looking for a fun-death." "A what?" said Sto Odin, as if he could not believe the words. "A fun-death. Those were his words and his idea. I followed him around and we loved each other. I waited for him when he went to the surface to get the congohelium. I thought that his love for me would put the fundeath out of his mind." "Are you telling me the whole truth?" said Sto Odin. "Or is this just your part of the story?" She stammered protests but he did not ask again. The Lord Sto Odin said nothing but he looked heavily at her. She winced, bit her lip, and finally said, through all the music and the lights, very clearly indeed, "Stop it. You are hurting me." The Lord Sto Odin stared at her, said innocently, "I am doing nothing," and stared on. There was much to stare at. She was a girl the color of honey. Even through these lights and shadows he could see that she had no clothing at all. Nor did she have a single hair left on her body -- no head of hair, no eyebrows, probably no eyelashes, though he could not tell at that distance. She had traced golden eyebrows far up on her forehead, giving her the look of endless mocking inquiry. She had painted her mouth gold, so that when she spoke, her words cascaded from a golden source. She had painted her upper eyelids golden too, but the lower were black as carbon itself. The total effect was alien to all the previous experiences of mankind: it was lascivious grief to the thousandth power, dry wantonness perpetually unfulfilled, femaleness in the service of remote purposes, humanity enraptured by strange planets. He stood and stared. If she were still human at all, this would sooner or later force her to take the initiative. It did. She spoke again, "Who are you? You are living too fast, too fiercely. Why don't you go in and dance, like all the others?" She gestured past the open door, where the ragged unconscious shapes of all the people lay strewn about the floor. "You call that dancing?" said the Lord Sto Odin. "I do not. There is one man who dances. Those others lie on the floor. Let me ask you the same question. Why don't you dance yourself?" "I want him, not the dance. I am Santuna and he seized me once in human, mortal, ordinary love. But he becomes Sun-boy, more so every day, and he dances with those people who lie on the floor -- " "You call that dancing?" snapped the Lord Sto Odin. He shook his head and added grimly, "I see no dance." "You don't see it? You really don't see it?" she cried. He shook his head obstinately and grimly. Qhe turned so that she looked  into the room beyond her and she brought her high, clear penetrating wail which even cut through the five-beat pulse of the congohelium. She cried: "Sun-boy, Sun-boy, hear mef" There was no break in the quick escape of the feet which pattered in the figure eight, no slowing down the fingers which beat against the shimmering nonfocus of the metal which was carried in the dancer's arms. "My lover, my beloved, my man!" she cried again, her voice even more shrill and demanding than before. There was a break in the cadence of the music and the dance. The dancer sheered toward them with a perceptible slowing down of his cadence. The lights of the inner room, the great door and the outer hall all became more steady. Sto Odin could see the girl more clearly; she really didn't have a single hair on her body. He could see the dancer too; the young man was tall, thin beyond the ordinary suffering of man, and the metal which he carried shimmered like water reflecting a thousand lights. The dancer spoke, quickly and angrily: "You called me. You have called me thousands of times. Come on in, if you wish. But don't call me." As he spoke, the music faded out completely, the bundles on the floor began to stir and to groan and to awaken. Santuna stammered hastily, "This time it wasn't me. It was these people. One of them is very strong. He cannot see the dancers." The Sun-boy turned to the Lord Sto Odin, "Come in and dance then, if you wish. You are already here. You might as well. Those machines of yours -- " he nodded at the robotlegionaries -- "they couldn't dance anyhow. Turn them off." The dancer started to turn away. "I shall not dance, but I would like to see it," said Sto Odin, with enforced mildness. He did not like this young man at all -- not the phosphorescence of his skin, the dangerous metal cradled in his arm, the suicidal recklessness of his prancing walk. Anyhow, there was too much light this far underground and too few explanations of what was being done. "Man, you're a peeper. That's real nasty, for an old man like you. Or do you just want to be a man?" The Lord Sto Odin felt his temper flare up. "Who are you, man, that you should call man man in such a tone? Aren't you still human, yourself?" "Who knows? Who cares? I have tapped the music of the universe. I have piped all imaginable happiness into this room. I am generous. I share it with these friends of mine." Sunboy gestured at the ragged heaps on the floor, who had begun to squirm in their misery without the music. As Sto Odin saw into the room more clearly, he could see that the bundles on the floor were young people, mostly young men, though there were a few girls among them. They all of them looked sick and weak and pale. Sto Odin retorted. "I don't like the looks of this. I have half a mind to seize you and to take that metal." The dancer spun on the ball of his right foot, as though to leap away in a wild prance. The Lord Sto Odin stepped into the room after Sun-boy. Sun-boy turned full circle, so that he faced Sto Odin once again. He pushed the Lord out of the door, marching him firmly but irresistably three steps backward. "Flavius, seize the metal. Livius, take the man," spat Sto Odin. Neither robot moved. S to Odin, his senses and his strength set high by the severe twist upward which he had given his vitality button, stepped forward to seize the congohelium himself. Made one step and no more: he froze in he doorway, immobile. He had not felt like that since he last time the doctors put him in a surgery machine, when they found that part of his skull had developed bone-cancer from old, old radiation in space and from the subsequent effects of sheer age. They had given him a prosthetic half-skull and for the time of the operation he had been immobilized by straps and drugs. This time there were no straps, no drugs, but the forces which Sun-boy had invoked were equally strong. The dancer danced in an enormous figure-# among the clothed bodies lying on the floor. He had been singing the song which the robot Flavius had repeated far up above, on the surface of the Earth -- the song about the weeping man. But Sun-boy did not weep. His ascetic, thin face was twisted in a broad grin of mockery. When he sang about sorrow it was not sorrow which he really expressed, but derision, laughter, contempt for ordinary human sorrow. The congohelium shimmered and the aurora borealis almost blinded Sto Odin. There were two other drums in the middle of the room, one with high notes and the other with even higher ones. The congohelium resonated : boom -- boom -- doom -- doom -- room! The large ordinary drum rattled out, when Sun-boy passed at and reached out his fingers: ritiplin, ritiplin, rataplan, rttiplin The small, strange drum emitted only two notes, and it almost croaked them: kid-nork, kidnork, kid-nork! As Sun-boy danced back the Lord Sto Odin thought that he could hear the voice of the girl Santuna, calling to Sun-boy, but he could not turn his head to see if she were speaking. Sunboy stood in front of Sto Odin, his feet still weaving as he danced, his thumbs and his palms torturing hypnotic dissonances from the gleaming congohelium. "Old man, you tried to trick me. You failed." The Lord Sto Odin tried to speak, but the muscles of his mouth and throat would not respond. He wondered what force this was, which could stop all unusual effort but still leave his heart free to beat, his lungs to breathe, his brain (both natural and prosthetic) to think. The boy danced on. He danced away a few steps, turned and danced back to Sto Odin. "You wear the feathers of immunity. I am free to kill you. If I did the Lady Mmona and the Lord Nuru-or and your other friends would never know what happened." If Sto Odin could have moved his eyelids that much, he would have opened his eyes in astonishment at the discovery that a superstitious dancer, far under ground, knew the secret business of the Instrumentality. "You can't believe what you ire looking at, even though you see it plainly," said Sun-boy more seriously. "You think that a lunatic has found a way to work wonders with a piece of the congohelium taken far underground. Foolish old man! No ordinary lunatic would have carried this metal down here with out blowing up the fragment and himself with it. No man could have done what I have done. You are thinking. If the gambler who took the name Sunboy is not a man, what is he? What brings the power and music of the sun so far down under ground? Who makes the wretched ones of the world dream in a crazy, happy sleep while their life spills and leaks into a thousand kinds of times, a thousand kinds of worlds? Who does it, if it is not mere me? You don't have to ask. I can tell perfectly well what you are thinking. I'll dance it for you. I am a very kind man, even though you do not like me." The dancer's feet had been moving in the same place while he spoke. Suddenly he whirled away, leaping and vaulting over the wretched human figures on the floor. H e passed the big drum and touched it: rrtiptm, rataplan ! Left hand brushed the little drum: kid-nork, kid-nork! Both hands seized the congohelium, as though the strong wrists were going to tear it apart. The whole room blazed with music, gleamed with thunder as the human senses interpenetrated each other. The Lord Sto Odin felt the air pass his skin like cool wet oil. Sun-boy the dancer became transparent and through him the Lord Sto Odin could see a landscape which was not earth and never would be. "Fluminescent, luminescent, incandescent, fluorescent," sang the dancer. "Those are the worlds of tire Douglas-Ouyang planets, seven planets in a close group, all travelling together around a single sun. Worlds of wild magnetism and perpetual dustfall, where the surfaces of the planets are changed by the forever-shifting magnetism of their erratic orbits! Strange worlds, where stars dance dances wilder than any dance ever conceived by man -- Planets which have a consciousness in common, but perhaps not intelligence -- planets which called across all space and all time for companionship until , me the gambler, came down to this cavern and found them. Where you had left them, my Lord Sto Odin, when you said to a robot: " 'I do not like the looks of those planets,' said you, Sto Odin, speaking to a robot a long time ago. 'People might get sick or crazy, just looking at them,' said you, Sto Odin, long, long ago. 'Hide the knowledge in some out of the way computer,' you commanded, Sto Odin, before I was bom. But the computer was that one, that one in the comer behind you, which you cannot turn to see. I came down to this room, looking for a fun-suicide, something really unusual which would bang the noddies when they found I had gotten away. I danced here in the darkness, almost the way I am dancing now, and I had taken about twelve different kinds of drugs, so that I was wild and free and very very receptive. That computer spoke to me, Sto Odin. Your computer, not mine. It spoke to me, and you know what it said? "You might as well know, Sto Odin, because you are dying. You set your vitality high in order to fight me. I have made you stand still. Could I do that if I were a mere man? Look. I will turn solid again." With a rainbow-like scream of chords and sounds, Sun-boy twisted the congohelium again until both the inner chamber and the outer bloomed with lights of a thousand colors and the deep underground air became drenched with music which seemed psychotic, because no human mind had ever invented it. The Lord Sto Odin, imprisoned in his own body with his two legionary-robots frozen half a pace behind him, wondered if he really were dying in vain and tried to guess whether he would be blinded and deafened by this dancer before he died. The congohelium twisted and shone before him. Sun-boy danced backward over the bodies on the floor, danced backward with an odd cadenced run which looked as though he were plunging forward in a wild, competitive footrace when the music and his own footsteps carried him back, toward the center of the inner room. The figure jumped in an odd stance, face looking so far downward that Sun-boy might have been studying his own steps on the floor, the congohelium held above and behind his neck, legs lifting high in the cruel highkneed prance. The Lord Sto Odin thought he could hear the girl calling again, but he could not distinguish words. The drums spoke again: ritiplin, ritiplin, rataplan! and then kid-nork, kid-nork, kid-nork! The dancer spoke as the pandemonium subsided. He spoke, as his voice was high, strange, like a bad recording played on the wrong machine : "The something is talking to you. You can talk." The Lord Sto Odin found that his throat and Kps moved. Quietly, secretly, like an old soldier, he tried his feet and fingers: these did not move. Only his voice could be used. He spoke, and he said the obvious: "Who are you, something ?" Sun-boy looked across at Sto Odin. He stood erect and calm. Only his feet moved, and they did a wild, agile Kttle jig which did not affect the rest of his body. Apparently some kind of dance was necessary to keep the connection going between the unexplained reach of the Douglas-Ouyang planets, the piece of the congohelium, the more than human dancer and the tortured blissful figures on the floor. The face, the face itself was quite composed and almost sad. "I have been told," said Sunboy, "to show you who I am." TJe danced around the drums  rataplan, rataplan! kidnork-nork, kid-nork, kid-norknork! He held the congohelium high and wrenched it so that a great moan came out. Sto Odin felt sure that a sound as wild and forlorn as that would be sure to reach the surface of the earth many kilometers above, but his prudent judgment assured him that this was a fanciful thought, gestated by his personal situation, and that any real sound strong enough to reach all the way to the surface would also be strong enough to bring the bruised and shattered rock of the ceiling pouring down upo r their heads. The congohelium ran down the colors of the spectrum unti' it stopped at a dark, wet liver red, very close to black. The Lord Sto Odin, in thrd momentary near silence, found that the entire story had been thrust into his mind without being strung out and articulated with words. The true history of this chamber had entered his memory sidewise, as it were. In one moment he knew nothing of it; in the next instance it was as if he had remembered the whole narrative for most of his life. He also felt himself set free. He stumbled backward three or four steps. To his immense relief, his robots turned around, themselves free, and accompanied him. He let them put their hands in his armpits. His face was suddenly covered with kisses. His plastic cheek felt, thinly and dimly, the imprint, real and living, of female human lips. It was the odd girl -- beautiful, bald, naked and golden-lipped -- who had waited and shouted 'rom the door. Despite physical fatigue and the sudden shock of intruded knowledge, the Lord Sto Odin knew what he had to say. "Girl, you shouted for me." "Yes, my Lord." "You have had the strength to watch the congohelium and not to give in to it?" She nodded but said nothing. "You have been strong-willed enough not to go into that room?" "Not strong-willed, my Lord. I just love him, my man in there." "You have waited, girl, for many months?" "Not all the time. I go up the corridor when I have to eat or drink or sleep or do my personals. I even have mirrors and combs and tweezers and paint there, to make myself beautiful, the way that Sun-boy might want me." The Lord Sto Odin looked over his shoulder. The music was low and keening with some emotions other than grief. The dancer was doing a long, slow dance, full of creeping and reaches, as he passed the congohelium from one hand to the other. "Do you hear me, dancer?" called the Lord Sto Odin, the Instrumentality once more coursing through his veins. The dancer did not speak nor seem to change his course. But kid-nork, kid-nork said the little drum, quite unexpectedly. "He, and the face behind him -- they will let the girl leave if she really forgets him and this place in the act of leaving. Won't you?" said Sto Odin to the dancer. Ritiplin, rataplan said the big drum, which had not sounded since Sto Odin was let free. "But I don't want to go," said the girl. "I know you don't want to go. You will go to please me. You can come back as soon as I haye done my work." She stood mute so he continued. "One of my robots, Livius, the one imprinted by a psychiatrist general, will run with you, but I command him to forget this place and all things connected with it. Summa nulla est. Have you heard me, Livius? You will run with this girl and you will forget. You will run and forget. You too will run and forget, Santuna my dear, but two Earthnychtherons from now you will remember just enough to come back here, should you wish to, should you need to. Otherwise you will go to the Lady Mmona and learn from her what you should do for the rest of your life." "You are promising, my Lord, that in two days and nights I can come back if I even feel like it." "Now run, my girl, run. Run to the surface. Livius, carry her if you must. But run! run! run! More than she depends upon it." Santuna looked at him very earnestly. Her nakedness was innocence. The gold upper eyelids met the black lower eyelids as she blinked and then brushed away wet tears. "Kiss me," she said, "and I will run." He leaned down and kissed her. She turned, looked back one last time at her dancer-lover, and then ran long-legged into the corridor. Livius ran after her, gracefully, untiringly. In twenty minutes they would be reaching the upper limits of the Gebiet "You know what I am doing?" said Sto Odin to the dancer. This time the dancer and the force behind him did not deign to answer. Said Sto Odin, "Water. There is water in a jug in my litter. Take me there, Flavius." The robot-legionary took the aged and trembling Sto Odin to the litter. T he Lord Sto Odin then performed the trick which changed human history for many centuries to come and, in so doing, exploded an enormous cavern in the vitals of the earth. He used one of the most secret ruses of the Instrumentality. He triple-thought. Only a few very adept persons could triple-think, when they were given every possible chance of training. Fortunately for mankind, the Lord Sto Odin had been one of the successful ones. He set three systems of thought into action. At the top level he behaved rationally as he explored the old room; at a lower level of his mind he planned a wild surprise for the dancer with the congohelium. But at the third, lowest level, he decided what he must do in the time of a single blink and trusted his autonomic nervous system to carry out the rest. These are the commands he gave: Flavius should be set on the wild-alert and readied for attack. The computer should be reached and told to record the whole episode, everything which Sto Odin had learned, and should be shown how to take countermeasures while Sto Odin gave the matter no further conscious thought. The gestalt of action -- the general frame of retaliation -- was clear for thousandths of a second in Sto Odin's mind and then it dropped from sight. The music rose to a roar. White light covered Sto Odin. "You meant me harm!" called Sun-boy from beyond the Gothic door. "I meant you harm," Sto Odin acknowledged, "but it was a passing thought. I did nothing. You are watching me." "I am watching you," said the dancer grimly. Kid-nork, kidnork went the little drum. "Do not go out of my sight. When you are ready to come through my door, call me or just think of it. I will meet you and help you in." "Good enough," said the Lord Sto Odin. Flavius still held him. Sto Odin concentrated on the melody which Sun-boy was creating, a wild new song never before suspected in the history of the world. He wondered if he could surprise the dancer by throwing his own song back at him. At the same instant, his fingers were performing a third set of actions which Sto Odin's mind no longer had to heed. Sto Odin's hand opened a lid in the robot's chest, right into the laminated controls of the brain. The hand itself changed certain adjustments, commanding that the robot should within the quarter-hour, kill all forms of life within reach other than the commandtransmitter. Flavius did not know what had been done to him; Sto Odin did not even notice what his own hand had done. "Take me over to the old computer," said Sto Odin to the robot Flavius. "I want to discover how the strange story which I have just learned may be true." Sto Odin kept thinking of music which would even startle the user of the congor helium. He stood at the computer. His hand, responding to the triple-think command which it had been given, turned the computer up and pressed the button. Record this scene. The computer's old relays almost grunted as they came to the alert and complied. "Let me see the map," said Sto Odin to the computer. Far behind him, the dancer had changed his pace into a fast jog-trot of hot suspicion. The map appeared on the computer. "Beautiful," said Sto Odin. nphe entire labyrinth had become plain. Just above them was one of the ancient, sealed-off anti-seismic shafts -- a straight, empty tubular shaft, two hundred meters wide, kilometers high. At the top, it had a lid which kept out the mud and water of the ocean floor. At the bottom, since there was no pressure other than air to worry about, it had been covered with a plastic which looked like rock, so that neither people nor robots which might be passing would try to climb into it. "Watch what I am doing!" cried Sto Odin to the dancer. "I am watching," said Sun-boy and there was almost a growl of perplexity in his sung-forth response. Sto Odin shook the computer and ran the fingers of his right hand over it and coded a very specific request. His left hand -- preconditioned by the triplethink, coded the emergency panel at the side of the computer with two simple, clear engineering instructions. Sun-boy's laughter rang out behind him. "You are asking that a piece of the congohelium be sent down to you. Stop! Stop, before you sign it with your name and your authority as a Lord of the Instrumentality. Your unsigned request will do no harm. The Central Computer up top will just think that it is some of the crazy people in the Bezirk making senseless demands." The voice rose to a note of urgency, "Why did the machine signal 'received and complied with' to you just now?" The Lord Sto Odin lied blandly, "I don't know. Maybe they will send me a piece of the congohelium to match the one that you have there." "You're lying," cried the dancer. "Come over here to the door." Flavius led the Lord Sto Odin to the ridiculous-beautiful Gothic archway. The dancer was leaping from foot to foot. The congohelium shone a dull alert red. The music wept as though all the anger and suspicion of mankind had been incorporated into a new unforgettable fugue, like a delirious atonal counterpoint to Johann Sebastian Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto. "I am here." The Lord Sto Odin spoke easily. "You are dying!" cried the dancer. "I was dying before you first noticed me. I set my vitality control to maximum after I entered the Bezirk." "Come on in, then," said Sunboy, "and you will never die." Sto Odin took the edge of the door and let himself down to the stone floor. Only when he was comfortably seated did he speak: "I am dying, that is true. But I would rather not come in. I will just watch you dance as I die." "What are you doing? What have you done?" cried Sun-boy. He stopped dancing and walked over to the door. "Search me if you wish," said the Lord Sto Odin. "I am searching you," said the dancer, "but I see nothing but your desire to get a piece of the congohelium for yourself and to out-dance me." At this point Flavius went berserk. He ran back to the litter, leaned over, and ran toward the door. In each hand he carried an enormous solid-steel bearing. "What's that robot doing?" cried the dancer. "I can see your mind but you are not telling him anything! He uses those steel balls to break obstructions -- " He gasped as the attack came. Q uicker than the eye could follow the movement, Flavius' sixty-ton-capacity arm whistled through the air as he flung the first steel missile directly at Sun-boy. Sun-boy, or the power within him, leapt aside with insect speed. The ball plowed through two of the ragclothed human bodies on the floor. One body said whooi as it died, but the other body let out no sound at all: the head had been tom off in first impact. Before the dancer could speak, Flavius flung the second ball. This time the doorway caught it. The powers which had immobilized Sto Odin and his robots were back in operation. The ball sang as it plunged into the doorway, stopped in mid-air, sang again as the door flung it back at Flavius. The returning ball missed Flavius' head but crushed his chest utterly. That was where his real brain was. There was a flicker of light as the robot went out, but even in dying Flavius seized the ball one last time and flung it at Sun-boy. The robot terminated operation and the heavy ball, flung wild, caught the Lord Sto Odin in the right shoulder. The Lord Sto Odin felt pain until he dragged over his manikin meee and turned all pain off. Then he looked at the shoulder. It was almost totally demolished. Blood from his organic body and hydraulic fluid from his prosthetics joined in a slow, heavy stream as the liquids met, merged and poured down his side. The dancer almost forgot to dance. Sto Odin wondered how far the girl had gone. The air pressure changed. "What is happening to the air? Why did you think about the girl? What is happening?" "Read me," said the Lord Sto Odin. "I will dance and get my powers first," said Sun-boy. For a few brief minutes it seemed that the dancer with the roncrohelium would cause a rockfall. The Lord Sto Odin, dying, closed his eyes and found that it was restful to die. The blaze and noise of the world around him remained interesting, but had become unimportant. The congohelium with a thousand shifting rainbows and the dancer had attained near-transparency when Sun-boy came back to read Sto Odin's mind. "I see nothing," said Sun-boy worriedly. "Your vitality button is too high and you will die soon. Where is all that air coming from? I seem to hear a faraway roar. But you are not causing it. Your robot went wild. All you do is to look at me contentedly and die. That is very strange. You want to die your way when you could live unimaginable lives in here with us!" "That is right," said the Lord Sto Odin. "I am dying my way. But dance for me, do dance for me with the congohelium, while I tell you your own story as you told it to me. It would be a pleasure to get the story straight before I die." The dancer looked irresolute, started to dance, and then turned back to the Lord Sto Odin. "Are you sure you want to die right away? With the power of what you call the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which I receive right here with the help of the congohelium, you could be comfortable enough while I danced and you could still die whenever you wished. Vitality buttons are much weaker than the powers which I command. I could even help to lift you across the threshold of my door..." "No," said the Lord Sto Odin. "Just dance for me while I die. My way." IX nphus the world turned. Mil- lions of tons of water were rushing toward them. Within minutes the Gebiet and the Bezirk would drown as the air whistled upward. Sto Odin noted contentedly that there was an air-shaft at the top of the dancer's room. He did not allow himself to third-think of what would happen when the matter and antimatter of the congohelium were immersed in rushing salt water. Something like forty megatons, he supposed, with the tired feeling of a man who has thought a problem through long, long ago and remembers it briefly only after the situation has long passed. Sun-boy was acting out religion before the age of space. He chorused hymns, he lifted his eyes and his hands and his piece of the congohelium to the sun; he played the rattle of whirling dervishes, the temple bells of the Man on the Two Pieces of Wood and the other temple bells of that saint who had escaped time simply by seeing it and stepping out of it. Buddha, was that his name? And he went on to the severe profanities which afflicted mankind after the Old World fell. The music kept measure. And the lights, too. Whole processions of ghostly shadows followed Sun-boy as he showed how old mankind had found the gods, and the sun, and then other gods. He pantomimed man's most ancient mystery -- that man pretended to be afraid of death, when it was life that never understood it. And as he danced, the Lord Sto Odin repeated his own story to him : "You fled the surface, Sunboy, because the people were stupid clods, happy and dull in their miserable happiness. You fled because you could not stand being a chicken in a poultry house, antiseptically bred, safely housed and frozen when dead. You joined the other miserable, bright restless people who sought freedom in the Gebiet. You learned about the drugs and their liquors and their smokes. You knew their women, and their parties, and their games. It wasn't enough. You became a gentleman-suicide, a hero seeking a fun-death which would stamp you with your individuality. You came on down to the Bezirk, the most forgotten and loathesome place of all. You found nothing. Just the old machines and the empty corridors. Here and there a few mummies or bones. Just the silent lights and the faint murmur of air through the corridors." "I hear water now," said the dancer, still dancing, "rushing water. Don't you hear it, my dying Lord?" "If I did hear it, I wouldn't care. Let's get on with your story. You came to this room. The weird door made it look like a good place for a fun-death, such as you poor castaways liked to seek, except that there was not much sport in dying unless other people know that you did it intentionally, and know how you did it. Anyway, it was a long climb back up into the Gebiet, where your friends were, so yo-u slept by this computer. "In the night, while you slept, as you dreamed, the computer sang to you: T need a temporary dog For a temporary job On a temporary place Like earth! When you woke up you were surprised to find that you had dreamed an entire new kind of music. Really wild music which made people shudder with its delicious evil. And with the music, you had a job. To steal a piece of the congohelium. "You were a clever man, Sunboy, before the trip down here. The Douglas-Ouyang planets caught you and made you a thousand times cleverer. You and your friends, this is what you told me -- or what the presence behind you told me, just a half hour ago -- you and your friends stole a subspace communicator console, got a fix on the Douglas-Ouyang planets, and got drunk at the sight. Iridescent, luminescent. Waterfalls uphill. All that kind of thing. "And you did get the congohelium. The congohelium is made of matter and antimatter laminated apart by a dual magnetic grid. With that the presence of the Douglas-Ouyang planets made you independent of organic processes. You did not need food or rest or even air or drink any more. The DouglasOuyang planets are very old. They kept you as a link. I have no idea of what they intended to do with Earth and with mankind. If this story gets out, future generations will call you the merchant of menace, because you used the normal human appetitiousness for danger to trap other people with hypnotics and with music." "I hear water," interrupted Sun-boy. "I do hear water!" C # YT ever mind," said the Lord ' Sto Odin, "your story is more important. Anyhow, what could you and I do about it? I am dying, sitting in a pool of blood and effluvium. You can't leave this room with the congohelium. Let me go on. Or perhaps the Douglas-Ouyang entity, whatever it was -- " "Is," said Sun-boy. " -- whatever it is, may just have been longing for sensuous companionship. Dance on, man, dance on." Sun-boy danced and the drums talked with him, rataplan, rataplan! kid-nork, kid-nork, norld while the congohelium made music scream through the solid rock. The other sound persisted. Sun-boy stopped and stared. "It is water. It is." "Who knows?" said the Lord Sto Odin. "Look," screamed Sun-boy, holding the congohelium high. "Look!" The Lord Sto Odin did not need to look. He knew full well that the first few tons of water, mud-laden and heavy, had come frothing down the corridor and into their rooms. "But what do # do?" screamed the voice of Sun-boy. Sto Odin felt that it was not Sun-boy speaking, but some relay speaking from the power of the Douglas-Ouyang planets. A power which had tried to find friendship with man, but had found the wrong man and the wrong friendship. Sun-boy took control of himself. His feet splashed in the water as he danced. The colors shone on the water as it rose. Ritiplin, tiplin! said the big drum. Kid-nork, kid-nork, said the little drum. Boom, boom, doom, doom, room, said the congohelium. The Lord Sto Odin felt his old eyes blur but he could still see the blazing image, of the wild dancer. "This is a good way to die," thought he, as he died. X F 'ar above, on the surface of the Planet, Santuna felt the continent itself heave beneath her feet and saw the eastern horizon grow dark as a volcano of muddy steam shot up from the calm blue sunlit ocean. "This must not, must not happen again!" she said, thinking of Sun-boy and the congohelium and the death of the Lord Sto Odin. "Something must be done about it," she added to herself. And she did it. In later centuries she brought disease, risk and misery back to increase the happiness of man. She was one of the principal architects of the Rediscovery of Man, and at her most famous she was known as the Lady Alice More. Courting Time What a grand thing it would be, if he were the only man in the world -- and they were the only Group I I nside the great ballroom, two hundred guests swept around the floor in the vast complex patterns of Djalan Gambir's latest creation, a stately, flowing variation on the Viennese Waltz punctuated by variations on some of the less inhibited Oriental, Spanish and African dances. As was the custom, each invitation had included a learning program, designed for home computers, which had taught each guest his role in Djalan's choreography. The hospitality of the Zest family was elaborate, expensive- -- and flawless. Verino Schell stood by the wine bowl trying to look brooding and mysterious while the other males his age were all out on the floor yelling and making erotic motions at the girls. To fit him into the party at the last minute, Leeba Zest had unfortunately been forced to get him the invitation of one of her older male friends. Most of his partners in the waltzes were women old enough to be his mother, and whenever the dancing became a little strenuous, the program gently eased him to the sidelines. His hungry eyes were locked on the three husbands and four wives of the Zest family, and the stocky, animated figure of Djalan Gambir. He looked at Leeba more than he should have. All around him murmuring voices stabbed at his heart. "Did you hear? George says it's definite. They'll announce Djalan's going to marry the family on Sunday." "I hear Rafe has a judge standing by. As soon as the other six agree -- bam!" "John, Rafe and Kelios can't wait to get somebody to take the girls out again. Sometimes I think I should have tried a group marriage." For the first time in his life he was staring defeat in the face. For the first time in his life he had looked at something he wanted -- Leeba's body, Leeba's blonde hair, Leeba's sensitive face and shrewd, appraising eyes -- and he had known with all his being he could never have it. Sometime before the end of the four day party Rafael Zest was producing here in Ibadan, Djalan Gambir was going to propose to the Zest family, and six spouses were going to accept with pleasure. And Leeba was going to acquiesce for the good of the family. Djalan Gambir was better equipped to take Gus's place in the Zest group marriage, to be the lover and the playboy who gave the girls a good time, than any man in the Solar System. # C IT ow can you have enough hope to even try?" Leeba had asked him. "We're tormenting ourselves for nothing. I'll help you, but what good will it do? Everybody in the family knows you're too involved in your music. Even if you were the kind of husband we need -- don't you think they know you only want to marry them so you can marry me? They aren't stupid, Veri." The music faded. According to the program, there would now be a half hour devoted to improvisation. Most of the dancers bowed to their partners and headed for the winebowl. His heart pounded. He had noted this period when he studied his program. Djalan Gambir led Margaret Zest onto the dance floor. On the balcony a small woodwind section shrieked the first raucous notes of a modern Chinese courting dance. Margaret put her hands behind her head and Djalan began stamping around her in a wide circle. Verino stepped toward the dance floor. Unnerving images flashed across his consciousness. Djalan Gambir bedding in one night three women whose pleasures every sane male in the Solar System considered the ultimate in erotic experience... Djalan Gambir at twenty-three winning undying fame by descending alone into the terrifying atmosphere and gravity of Jupiter... Djalan Gambir pursued by the women of six continents and four space colonies... turning down a thousand invitations a year... teaching the human race how to dance, how to play, how to enjoy... He danced between Margaret and Djalan. Tossing back the thick conductor's forelock he affected, he faced Djalan and stamped hard twice. The hall stirred. Dancing contests were common, but few men challenged the finest amateur dancer in the Solar System. If Djalan was surprised, he didn't show it. He stamped back and bowed. Take her. Show us what you can do. Margaret smiled. Her face said she was revelling in the fantasy as much as he had guessed she would. In the center of a great stage two men were competing for her attention. She was the mother of the Zest family, the wife in charge of raising the children, and according to Leeba she did her job well not because she particularly liked children, but because she had an intense compulsion to do something meaningful with her life. From the way she had studied him as he came down the reception line, he was certain she was intense about other things. She couldn't have been more frank if she had asked him for a tape of his last sexual performance. Small, serious, almost dull, as a wife of the Zest family her erotic experience had been vastly superior to what she might have enjoyed with the kind of husband she would have attracted if she had chosen monogamy. TTe clapped for faster music.  The dancers still on the floor retreated to the sidelines. "Hold on, Margaret!" "I held on to Djalan, I can hold on to you!" His arms slid around her and they hurtled toward the far wall He shouted for the wildest dances he knew. Cellos sang. Drums clattered. Brass and woodwind made harsh, savage noises. With every dance their bodies became less and less in hibited. The hall whirled around consciousness with his tall form and laughing face, he accelerated the tempo until they were both moving at a pace which should have exhausted them, and then he held them there monotonously, repeating one simple step over and over, until her head went back, and her smile fixed, and he knew he had induced total abandon. He broke the rhythm so suddenly she gasped. Laughing his biggest laugh, whirled them down the hall and spun her off the end of his arm at Djalan Gambir. Djalan caught her without missing a beat. Soon the amateurs were doing a ballet so slow, intricate and beautiful Verino the professional musician choked on his own pleasure. Behind him he heard spectators murmuring. His own performance had been crude compared to this. It didn't matter. For the rest of her life, if he had succeeded, every time Margaret thought of frenzied excitement she would think of Verino Schell. Modern social dancing was a language and a physical pleasure, but it was also a drug, a stimulant and an anti-inhibitant as potent in expert hands as heroin oi alcohol. A modern expert could achieve in minutes the personality changes primitive dancers had achieved only after hours and days. He approached Fileesa Zest during the bufet supper. She and John Zest, the artist, were standing by a winebowl with half a dozen guests. A large, friendly girl, Fileesa was the Zest careewoman, a first-rate historian and socio-economic forecaster. , He had met her several times at the Zest apartments, during the months when he had been giving Leeba private music lessons, and they had easily become friends. "Hello, Veri," Fileesa greeted him. "That was quite a performance. Do you treat all the girls that way?" J ohn Zest studied him over his wine glass. The rest of the group looked at him with polite curiosity. By now everyone at the party knew who he was and why he was there. "Only the ones I can get close to," he said. "What's the latest on the economic outlook?" "Just as dull as ever. I was just telling everyone it looks like the U.S. minimum wage will be twenty-seven thousand by the end of the year." He shook his head. "Every time it goes up another thousand I get two thousand more people trying to join one of my choirs. And I've got more groups already than I can handle." "Can't you organize bigger groups?" "I've already got two groups with over a thousand voices. When they get bigger than that one conductor can't handle them." Her eyes lit up. Locating obstacles to economic progress was one of her specialties. "What if you had better equipment? Have you seen Corrington's new Com mand and Control unit?" "I've looked at everything on the market." "This just went on the market last month." A few minutes later they realized they were the only people left in the group. John was on the other side of the wine bowl heatedly defending his theories about art and the others had all drifted away one by one. The conversation had gotten technical without either of them noticing it. "I've done it again," Fileesa said. "Have I been boring you, too?" "I'm as guilty as you are." He hesitated and then decided he could be straightforward. "You know I like serious talk just as much as you do -- unlike Djalan." She scowled. "Are you going to propose to us?" "Yes." "You're making a mistake." "You won't vote for me? I've been hoping you would." "What about your work? You can't give that up! You're only beginning." "I've thought about all that. Believe me -- I've spent the last three months trying to make up my mind about this. I'll cut back to composing and doing concerts just for the record. I'm doing more work than I want to anyway. I'd rather do less and have time to think about it." "You'd still have to spend hours a day studying. Even if you eventually did nothing but record, you still need to do all the conducting you're doing now. You need the experience. You could be one of the finest conductors since recording! If you marry us, you'll just be a talented amateur." Kelios Zest was striding toward them across the dance floor. "Let's talk about it when we've got time," he said. "When can I see you alone?" "Leeba isn't -- " He turned to greet Kelios. "I'll call you tomorrow." TZ' elios and Terita were the host and hostess on the antigravity platform he was assigned to for the midnight ride through Nigeria's famous mahogany forests. There was a big crowd around them -- attracted by Terita -- but he maneuvered into the inner circle without provoking more anger than he could joke off. He had seen Terita's voluptuous image hundreds of times. He had never met her, however, until they shook hands in die reception line. In person she looked oddly unpretentious, more like a girl you could romp with than a love goddess. She stayed at the railing and as the platform drifted over the trees she kept pointing to the birds and animals and making exciting comments. By the time the four platforms turned back toward the hotel, he was standing beside her and they were taking turns imitating the wildlife they saw. He loved the way she laughed. When she doubled over with her arms wrapped around her just below her famous breasts, laughing with her whole body like a child, he almost forgot that on the platform just ahead Leeba was the hostess and Djalan Gambir was not quite the host. Kelios didn't enjoy their antics. He was usually a lively, friendly naan, but according to Leeba he definitely wanted Djalan Gambir for a husband. The father of the family, Margaret's partner in the important task of rearing sixteen children, Kelios thought the best recreation in the world was a book or a learning program; after a year and a half without Gus -- who had died in a speedboat crash -- he was looking forward to weekends spent in the peace and quiet of his study. He looked brooding and thoughtful throughout most of the ride. When Terita teased him about his long face, he smiled tightly and eventually moved to the other side of the platform. Leeba phoned Verino's room just before he went to bed. She looked depressed. "I just had a goodnight drink with Teri," he said. "I think she likes me." "Don't get overconfident. We've got a long way to go." "Have I got Djalan worried yet?" "He never gets worried. He just wishes you weren't here." She shook her head. "You always have a good time, don't you? I wish I could enjoy this." "I haven't enjoyed anything since the last time I touched you." Her face softened. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. If you couldn't put up a good front, we wouldn't stand a chance." "What can I do about John, Rafe and Kelios?" "That's what makes me feel helpless. If it were just the girls and if we had more time... If I hadn't promised you I'd try, and if it were somebody less resourceful than you, I'd tell you to go home right now." T Tis arms quivered as he automatically started to reach out and comfort her. His body ached with desire. Telephones were among the many things love had made him hate. "I'll think of something," he said. "Don't give up on me, Leeb. Put the pressure on this brain of mine and it always comes up with something." "I wish I could believe you. I thought I'd accepted living without you, but now it looks even bleaker than it did. I don't know if I can do it. I always thought emotions like that were a myth, but now I look at the future and I get cold." He blew her a kiss. "Go to bed. When we wake up tomorrow, we'll know exactly what to do." After she hung up he stared at the blank screen. He had almost suggested monogamy again. If she felt that way, perhaps he should have. But they had been over all that. Complex societies created complex people -- and complex people had complex needs. He might be necessary, but so were John, Rafe and Kelios. He went to bed but he was too excited to sleep. The Zest family pounded on his consciousness as if they were voices in an unbearably complex piece of music. The phone woke him up just before noon. He answered it without turning on the screen. "Verino? Rafe Zest. Did I wake you up? I'm sorry. Can you come up to my suite?" He shook the sleep out of his brain. "Give me twenty minutes." "Right." He got up and told the hotel control unit he wanted breakfast. He still felt over stimulated. He had felt this way before, but he couldn't place why or when. It was a strange mood and it bothered him. Yesterday's events had been interesting, but they hadn't been more inherently exciting than the work and pleasure which crowded all his days. Rafe had installed a portable command and control unit in front of his living room couch. When Verino entered the room, he was speaking Chinese to one of the screens arranged along the front of the cabinet. He looked up and waved his guest to a chair. Two other screens were blinking to let him know he had calls waiting. V erino's Chinese was rusty. He thought he heard something about contacting the greatest living Chinese poet, and he caught the Chinese for "Let me run it through the computer" -- which Rafe promptly did -- but that was all he understood. This was a big year for the family money maker. To celebrate fifty years of economic progress, in January the General Assembly had decreed that the year # was to be a year of general festivity, the World Fair Year. For the first time in history every man, woman and child alive was supposed to take a trip around the world. All the cities and nations of the Earth were vying for the attention of six cent of the gross, in addition to his innumerable other enterprises, Rafe was promoting nine cities, including Paris and Ibadan. This year, for the first time, the Zest family income was supposed  o prospect which was probably of some importance to a man such as Djalan Gambir who had lived for twenty-two years as a perpetual guest. Rafe switched off the Chinese call. "I'm sorry! When I called you, it was quiet!" He switched on two screens at once and started talking German while he studied the tapes coming out of the computer and the teletype. " Aui Wiedersehen." Rafe switched off the screens and stood up. "X calls only," he told the unit. "Would you like a drink, Veri?" "I think I'll stick to coffee." Rafe stabbed a finger at the suite control unit. "Send out a pot of coffee!" He dropped the computer tape and instantly picked up a piece of sculpturer's plastic which was lying on an end table. Even when he was relatively idle, he had to be constantly reshaping some part of the world. "John and Kelios and I had a conference this morning. We decided I'd better talk to you." Verino pushed back his forelock. "What's on your mind?" He still felt odd. What was bothering him? Why couldn't he classify his own emotions? "Don't think we don't like you," Rafe said. "Everybody in the family likes you. If we could fit you in, we'd be proud to have you in the family. You'd bring us as much honor as John or Fileesa. You haven't accomplished what they have, but you will. It shows." He held the plastic in front of his chest and squeezed it flat between his palms. "You can't get us to marry you by coming here and turning your charm on the girls. We need a certain kind of person and you don't fit the equation. If we let you try to take Gus's place, it would be the biggest mistake you or we ever made." "I've thought about that -- " CtT know what you told Fileesa. She agrees with me. In a year you'd be working as hard as ever. You can't help it. And what happens to us? Do you think I want a wife nagging me to take her out when I've got a big project accelerating? Because the guy that took Gus's place has a big concert this weekend?" Verino's heart jumped violently. His eyes widened. Leeba! He had felt this way the morning after the night he first met Leeba! "Do you think Fileesa wants a husband who'll be busy when she decides it's time she let herself go and had a fling? We chose group marriage to get away from that kind of thing." Verino stood up. On the cabinet screens were blinking. Through the window he could see the fantastic shapes of new hotel and apartment buildings rising above the forest -- buildings that wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been for Rafe and the family that supported Rafe. It was incredible! No wonder he hadn't understood his own feelings! "You don't understand," he said. "I'm in love. You can't reason with love. You can say yes or no, but you can't reason with it." "That's another thing. Leeba -- " He threw up his hands. An immense choir towered above his head. Thousands of voices, seven soloists -- eight! include Gus -- all the joyous, triumphant, complex life of the Twenty-First Century... the wealth... the planets... mankind confounding the pessimists and mastering the challenge created by its own inventiveness... men and women developing personalities and institutions complex enough to match the complexities of the environment men and women had created... "Not Leeba! You! Your family! The Twenty-First Century!" Rafe stared at him as if he'd suddenly gone crazy. He backed toward the door. Nothing he could say could express it. Hallellujahs thundered in his brain. They would hear what he was hearing! They would feel what he was feeling! "Where are you going?" Rafe yelled at his back. "What's wrong with you? We can't marry you!" nphe jet back to Cleveland was crowded with tourists but he hardly noticed. Dictating furiously, on fire with emotion, he pieced together the music he needed from his memory and from the libraries he could contact from the plane. Wherever he had to, he altered it and wrote connecting passages. He didn't have time to write anything original. Even if he'd had the time, no composer who had ever lived could have written what he wanted. The Corrington people were efficient. The Command and Control unit he had ordered from the plane was waiting for him in his rehearsal hall. He sat down at the console and started to work. The computer gave him a cost estimate, including transportation, in less than four minutes. Assuming he only had to pay the soloists, and half the other voices would pay him, his credit balance would just cover it. He put the computer to work making reservations. While it was doing that, he vocally programmed it to hunt down the soloists he wanted, and to contact the people who would help him assemble the two thousand voices he needed. As Fileesa had told him, the unit could take raw information and deliver it to any person in the world with whatever psychological coloring the operator ordered. Time was a raging monster gnawing at his back. He rehearsed until his body ached and the scores blurred in front of the performers' eyes. Half the choir thought he needed a psych checkup; singers stamped out proclaiming the project was impossible; effects which were child's play for the individual performer had to be coordinated by the conductor with hands, feet and elbows -- and by Saturday night two thousand voices rang with the passion and energy of his vision. "This will be one of the marvels of the Fair," he told them just before they left for Ibadan. "It may be one of the events of the century. You'll be watching tapes of it for the rest of your lives." Their faces said they believed him. He might be mad, but he was the kind of madman people followed. The climax of the Zest party was the most elaborate entertainment Djalan Gambir had ever created, a long variation on Romeo and Juliet, in costume, and with parts for every guest. Before the day ended, every family friend and hanger-on would receive a total escape into fantasy, all the fighting, drinking, loving, pageantry and tragedy any human psyche could possibly need. An. the roof of the hotel, mill ing through a detailed recreation of a section of Verona, the guests were beginning to immerse themselves in the fantasy. The gravity had been reduced by ten per cent, just enough to make the oldest muscles feel fresh and youthful, and in the middle of the crowd John Zest and a dozen other men were en ergetically imitating the brawling Montagues and Capulets. Leeba pointed her fan at the horizon. "What's that?" Rafe followed her arm. "By my troth!" His hand leaped to his sword hilt. By his usual enthusiasm he had become a Renaissance gallant the moment he stepped into the afternoon sun. "Verino! Now what?" Leeba covered her open mouth with her hand. All over the mock city people turned to look. John and his companions noticed the commotion and stopped hacking each other long enough to see what was happening. Djalan and Rafe exchanged ominous glances. A flock of anti-gravity platforms was drifting toward the roof. At the center of a moving amphitheatre four platforms high, alone on a platform of his own, Verino Schell stood behind some kind of control unit and his long arms moved in time with a full orchestra and the soft moaning of thirty choirs. The platforms encircled the roof. The Renaissance lords and ladies looked up and chattered excitedly. Erect and solemn, Verino floated above the crowd to the exact center of the roof. Rafe marched through the crowd and pointed his sword at Verino. "What is this, Verino? Who gave you the -- " Verino threw out his arm. A single tenor voice speared the afternoon. The chorus moaned frantically. 'Tf you don't leave, we'll call the police!" Verino's arms leaped out. He told the control unit something and lights flashed on the cabinet. One after another seven voices announced their presence. Rafe shook his sword. Leeba gasped and looked up with sudden comprehension. The eight voices interwove in complex, unexpected patterns, each one singing a song of its own. Verino kicked a pedal in the bottom of the control unit and the choir sprang into life. Suddenly the air was full of Bach, The Heavens Laugh, The Earth Rejoices. Leeba ran forward and grabbed Rafe's arm. "It's us. Listen to it! Listen!" Djalan Gambir tightened his grip on Margaret's arm. "He told Rafe he loves us," Margaret whispered. "It's incredible." Rafe lowered his sword. "What good will it do?" Twelve feet above his head the thunder of the gods mingled with the noise their luck -- and four men and women led the celebration. "Listen to him anyway!" Leeba yelled. "Give him that much! Look what he's done for us!" "We can't marry him. We'll stir ourselves up for nothing." r T'he music roared on. Awed and subdued, the Zest family stared at the gigantic mirror Verino had created. They wanted him to stop and they couldn't turn away. Beside the reality beating on their ears, the masquerade on the roof suddenly seemed empty. In all their years of careful, trained listening, nothing like this had ever assaulted their emotions. To create the right expression for his vision, Verino had collaborated with the masters of ten centuries. Sullivan's Celebration for Universal Disarmament; the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's last symphony; the masses and requiems of Bach, Brahms, Vivaldi and Berlioz; the great music created during this last half century, when the human race had finally been liberated from drudgery and ignorance -- he had put it all together in a work so complex and awesome it was as if all those generations had labored with this moment in mind. He was showing them what they were. He had hung the TwentyFirst Century in the sky. Shortly after sundown, hours after the storm had appeared on the horizon, all the platforms except Verino's began to float toward the stars. Bits and pieces of music mingled as if representatives of all the centuries had appeared in the heavens. High in the air, just as the last platform faded from view, the music reached a far off climax. Verino bowed to his audience. Even in the flickering torchlight he could see he had overpowered them. Terita was actually sobbing. On the edge of the roof Rafe was shaking his head. Fileesa stood up and applauded. Rafe stood up with her, and then John and Kelios. Everyone on the roof was applauding! The noise rolled up to him as if they were two thousand instead of two hundred. A strange cry touched the edge of his consciousness. Something shiny flew at him through the torchlight. He ducked and metal clattered on the platform behind him. All over the roof women screamed. Djalan Gambir ran out of the crowd and leaped at the platform. His fingers gripped the edge and held. Verino stared at the clutching fingers. He looked back and saw a sword lying beside the control unit. Djalan swung himself forward and then somersaulted backward and leaped onto the platform. Rage distorted his face. He pulled his sword from its scabbard and charged. Verino threw up his hands. A vivid picture of Djalan descending toward Jupiter in a tiny, cramped sphere flashed across his mind. Djalan had risked his life so he could rise from obscurity to world fame and now imprisonment for the Zest fortune. Years of pleasant living hadn't changed his basic personality. T'Yjalan lunged and Verino hopped out of the way. Down below he could hear all the commotion of a general panic. John, Rafe and Kelio were running toward the platform. Fileesa was screaming like a lunatic. He grabbed the sword Djalan had thrown at him. Djalan growled and lunged. Verino jumped back and raised the long, unwieldy Renaissance weapon to something resembling the on guard position. He had never handled a sword or a fencing foil in his life. Djalan lunged again. Verino hacked at the oncoming blade. Steel slithered along steel. The hard, brutallooking point missed his chest by half an inch. "You'll go to jail, Djalan!" "I'll kill you." Djalan lunged. Verino parried clumsily and saw the other point slide under his blade and plunge toward his stomach. He leaped back three feet before he knew what had happened. Djalan stamped forward and lunged again. The platform tilted. Verino lurched to one side. Holding his sword with both hands, he beat down Djalan's blade. His heart was thumping with panic. Hands were clinging to the end of the platform, but the others weren't as athletic as Djalan. He pressed Djalan's blade against the platform. For a moment they glared at each other. "This is ridiculous! What are you trying to do?" Djalan jumped back and freed his sword. The platform lurched again. Verino stumbled and Djalan stepped forward and lunged. Rafe came over the side of the platform. Something hard thudded on Verino's head and neck. His sword fell out of his hand. He moaned and toppled over. ttTt's the only solution," Rafe A said. For once the Solar System's leading entrepemeur didn't look enthusiastic. "It's expensive and I'm not happy with it -- a ten spouse family is getting unwieldy -- but you forced us into it. Nobody wants to give either of you up. Even the girls won't give Djalan up after he risked going to jail for us. I'm certain Djalan thought about that, of course. He claims he was overcome by passion." He shook his head. "Are you sure you two didn't plan this?" "If you'd seen that point com ing toward you," Verino said, "you wouldn't ask that. Have you picked out the girl yet?" Rafe grinned. "There's a girl it my office in Benares that John and I have been eyeing for months. The girls don't exactly like somebody that young joining the group, but they know they can't argue. The competition will do them good. You'll see. Married life is no party." "Will it be a triple wedding?" "Right. In two weeks. Do you think you can work up the music for us?" Verino stared out the window at the mahogany forest. "Sure " "Isn't it enough time? You did the other thing in two days." Two weeks... Was he doing the right thing? Suppose his emotions weren't as strong as he had thought they were? What about that blonde in his chamber chorus who had been making eyes at him for the last few months? He hardly knew these people! "It's fine, Rafe. Plenty of time." He stuck his hands in hi pockets so Rafe couldn't see they were shaking. If it had been happening to someone else, he would have laughed. Ten minutes after his proposal had been accepted, and he had the bridegroom jitA couple of years ago a rather astonishingly good complete short science-fiction novel came in, and when we printed it we made the prediction that it might well win science fiction's annual award of merit, the Hugo. As it turned out, we were right: The story was Jack Vance's The, Drag on Masters, and it, with its lovely illustrations by Jack Gaughan, decorated our August, # issue. Now we have a new one by Vance coming up in our next. The name of it is The Last Castle, and it takes place right here on Earth -- but on an Earth in the very remote future, where the strongpoints of humanity are immense castles, each with its surrounding square miles of feudal territory; where men have developed strange alliances and antagonisms with the Meks, the Birds -- and each other. In every story Jack Vance writes, there is poetry and color. This is no exception. Is it as good as The Dragon Masters? We'll say this much -- it is very, very good. As to the rest, why not come around next issue and see for yourself? Of course, we'll have the usual array of additional stories and departments to back it up -- a fine novelette by Frank Herbert called The Primitives, another by Robert Silverberg called Lazarus Come Forth!, features by Algis Budrys and Willy Ley... We think April, #, will be a good issue -- and, as a matter of fact, we think # is going to be full of good issuesl for Four information The Wreck of French Republic, and aH of Europe (where the same year was called # A.D.) was trying to recover from the wars they had fought against this republic. Italy had been overwhelmed by the French. The areas now known as Belgium and The Netherlands were ruled by the French too and Prussia and Austria, as well as Spain, had been forced to sign peace treaties they did not like at all. The only major power in western Europe that had not been defeated was Great Britain. In fact, in some respects it was than it had been when the French Republic had been founded. The British fleet had defeated the French whenever they met, Great Britain's colonial possessions had grown by annexing former French colonies and, while the French had fought battles all over the map of Europe, the British had extended their trade and achieved general prosperity. One other place was prosperous too, the independent seaport of Hamburg. Hamburg had been a seaport ever since it had been founded. While it had never been poverty stricken, it had not become important until (and because of) the American Revolutionary War. Some quirk of commercial fate had channelled lots of trade through Hamburg because the Thirteen Colonies wanted to be independent. The many wars against revolutionary France had brought additional trade to Hamburg and while Hamburg's commercial interests had been opposed to those of Great Britain in # and for a few yean after, both now pulled the same commercial rope. Hamburg got all the trade that would have gone to Holland under normal conditions. But there was a problem: the available cash did not match the increase of the trade volume. It is reported that the banks had to charge an interest rate of # per cent for loans, which was about equal to the profits the merchants would have made if they had had enough cash on hand. But the sea captains that carried the merchandise -- most of them Scandinavians -- wanted to be paid. And while the local .banks could get almost any interest rate they charged, they were handicapped by lack of cash too. Logically the merchants of Hamburg sent out a cry for help to the bankers of London. And the latter were only too pleased to help; it was a clear-cut case of one hand washing the other. The London bankers, in a very short time, got the sum of # it was in gold coins, the remainder consisted of bars of gold and silver which the City of Hamburg could use to mint their own coin. The problem was to get the treasure to Hamburg. While there was no longer a French fleet there were still French ships prowling the North Sea and the Channel. A commercial vessel traveling under military escort would only attract attention. The Londoners decided on using a vessel which they had captured from the French a few years earlier. It was a fast-sailing and heavily armed warship named La Lutine -- the English had not even bothered to change the name. The gold and silver were quietly loaded in barrels and boxes which did not betray their contents by their appearance. The cargo might as well have been so many barrels of salted herring and boxes of soap. L a Lutine carried the unusually large crew of # men, many of them armed to repel a possible enemy attack. She was ready to sail early in October #. The captain waited for a few days for good weather and cast off a few hours after sunset on October # th. The weather was good, the wind was favorable and by midnight the ship -- which had sailed from Yarmouth, the easternmost point of England -- had covered more than half the distance. But then a strong storm came from the northeast, blowing in the direction of Holland. Several hours later the stormblown ship reached the string of islands to the north of Holland -- presumably its original coastline -- and ran aground near the island of Terschelling. La Lutine capsized immediately and sank. Only two of its large crew survived. The merchants of Hamburg must have managed somehow to survive their financial crisis. The merchants and bankers of London quietly approached Lloyd's of London, which had insured vessel and cargo, and collected. And the two surviving sailors spread the tale of the gold. The government of the Batavian Republic -- which was the name of Holland at the moment -- acted promptly by declaring that the treasure on board the sunken vessel was government property. But that is the only action the government took; for some reason nobody was in a hurry. Two years later an order was issued to try and salvage the money. This order went to the local authorities and they ascertained that the wreck was accessable at low tide. Hence local fishermen were sworn in and told .to see what they could do. The fishermen went to work with oyster forks and long-handled nets and succeeded in exworth of gold bars and coins X marks the spot, as usual, in this case a waiting for skilled and ingenious rescuers. during the summer and fall of #. But during the winter #-# currents shifted and in the spring of # La Lutine was no longer visible. In fact she had been covered up with a layer of sand estimated to have been # or # feet in thickness. In # Napoleon was finally defeated. Peace was established and with it a new Kingdom of the Netherlands, ruled by Willem Frederik of Orange who called himself Willem I. Of course he knew the story of La Lutine but seems to have been convinced all along that salvage was impossible. When approached by a group of Dutch merchants and bankers in #I he chartered a "Privileged Salvage Company" without hesitation, merely stipulating that one half of everything recovered was to be handed over to the crown. While the new company sent experienced men to Terschelling to study the situation and to make recommendations about the procedure to be followed, Lloyd's of London and the financial community felt glum. The war was over. The gold on board La Lutine was British gold. And even though it was located in Dutch waters they had hoped to get it back one day. They petitioned their king -- George IV -- who approached Willem I. Willem wanted to show that he was England's friend and did not really believe that the treasure could be salvaged. The thing to do was to issue an edict that the money on board of La Lutine was British Crown Property. George IV, in turn, conferred the property to Lloyd's, and Lloyd's made an arrangement with the Privileged Salvage Company which now represented British interests. But the signing of the various documents was the only thing that did happen; La Lutine was buried under a layer of sand that seemed to grow thicker every year. From #, the year the transfer of the property had taken place, until # nothing happened at all. The "asset" of  could not be approached. But in # the currents shifted again. Now the sea began to take away the sand it had piled up for half a century. In # the wreck became actually accessible and men wearing the newly invented diving suits went to work. Tphey happened to have access to the place where the gold bars had been stored, and within three months they recovered But then came the winter and a new shift of currents. In Spring # the wreck was covered with sand again, but the layer was only a few feet thick and the divers thought that they could continue, at least in a few places around the wreck. For a while they were right. During # and I# they recovered dollars worth of gold. But die sand layer grew in thickness and by the end of # the work was discontinued. But this was also the time when a new profession, the engineer, was in the ascendancy. Engineers are naturally of the opinion that obstacles can be overcome by good engineering. After all, they had invented a workable diving suit and meanwhile they had also invented dredging devices with buckets on endless chains. Such "digging ladders" as they were called, steam-powered, of course, should be able to do the job. The mechanical diggers would remove the sand and then the divers would be able to do the fine work and remove the gold. Operation Steam Dredge got underway in #. The concept had been correct, it was merely a case of the currents being stronger. Also the currents worked twenty four hours a day all year round, while the dredging operation worked only in summer and in good weather. The result of seven years of work consisted of # dollars in gold coins. It was disheartening and the only solace consisted in the sure knowledge that the treasure was there. The Privileged Salvage Company did not chase a rumor that might or might not be true, it just battled difficulties that might diminish again. And, after all, the engineers built new machines all the time. At some time better machinery and better conditions would come together. Every year a new attempt was made but the success was negligible; the salvaged precious metal paid only a few per cent of the cost. In # the companydeclared officially that it no longer considered the venture possible and asked to be released from its contract. The financial circles of London remained optimistic, and one can hardly differ. It was a fact that there were left in the wreck. The depth of the water was virtually negligible any good diver could put in three to four hours of work at that depth. The sand was the only problem and where the digging ladders had failed suction pumps ought to be successful. A firm specializing in such work, the "National Salvage Association", felt certain of both its financial strength and its engineering ability and offered a contract to Lloyd's and to the Dutch Company. It said, in substance, that the National Salvage Association would salvage the treasure of La Lutine at its own expense and would keep # per cent of the gold recovered, # per cent would go to Lloyd's and # per cent to the Dutch group. Since the Dutch group had given up hope, even # per cent was a windfall it would mean ish actually recovered the treasure. The managers of Lloyd's reasoned the same way and both signed the contract. The National Salvage Association did not waste money on trying what had been tried before. It was ridiculous that divers spend time under water trying to pick out single coins from the sand. The job of the divers was obviously to guide the machinery that would do all the actual work. A n available steamship was adapted for the specific job of recovering La Lutine' s gold. A large wire-mesh cage was built at the stern of the salvage vessel, overhanging the stern for a distance of about # feet. A large pipe that could be lengthened or shortened and that had a diameter of about two feet, was attached amidships. Underwater electric lamps were hanging from cables to provide illumination for the divers, and hooks and grapples also hung overboard so that the divers could attach heavy objects -- say a money barrel that was still intact -- to be hoisted aboard. (A few gun barrels, an anchor and the ship's bell were salvaged that way.) But the main plan of action relied on the pipe which was connected with a powerful suction pump. The water and sand sucked up through that pipe was conveyed Fig. #. Contemporary drawing of the attempts of salvaging the treasure of La Lutine before the first World War. into the wire-mesh cage at the stem of the vessel. The water and the sand would thereby be discharged into the sea, but anything else, especially loose coins, would stay in the cage, to be collected at intervals. It was all very carefully thought out: the suction pump would gradually "excavate" the wreck so that the divers could go to work in the ship's interior and all incidental salvage was purely mechanical. The work began in #I and everything looked promising. There had been only one unknown factor and that was the amount of sand that the current would deposit on and around the wreck. It turned out that the current carried more sand per hour than the suction pump could remove. Well, if the current was the real culprit there was still another way. One could change the path of the current and one did not even need new equipment. If a channel at the bottom of the shallow sea provided a short cut for the flow of the current, no new sand would be deposited on the wreck. It was even possibile that some sand would be removed. After carefully checking the path of the current and studying all the associated problems the solution emerged. It would need a channel running in a certain direction which had to be slightly over # feet long. The channel would also have to be fairly deep, so that the total amount of sand to be moved would, be suction pump on board the salvage vessel could handle the job, if given time. Unfortunately the weather was generally bad in the area all through # so that the total number of hours during which the vessel could work was just about #. But in the spring of # the job was finished and all the calculations had been proved correct. After the channel had been finished the wreck of La Lutine could be exposed quickly. By July # the midship section was accessable and the divers reported that there was a gap in the hull. It was too small to enter but the divers could reach in and feel around and they were sure that they felt stacked bars of metal. The next step was, obviously, that the gap had to be widened so that the divers would be able to enter the hold of the ship and do the job for which everything else had been only preliminaries. Several days later the divers went back to the wreck, this time equipped with tools to widen the hole, trailing cables for hoisting the treasure aboard the salvage vessel. A sight they tried not to believe greeted them. Of course the removal of the sand had created a hollow in the bottom... and the wreck had turned and slid into the hollow, with the gap in the hull at the bottom! I don't know whether compressed air drills existed in #. They would have been the tool to use under the circumstances all that had to be done was to make a sufficiently large hole in the undamaged side of the hull that was then topmost. Of course the National Salvage Association did not tell in fine detail just what they did -- no use giving pointers to competitors. At any event they resumed work during the spring of #, without issuing any statements except the obvious one in August # that operations would be suspended for the duration of the war. To everybody's surprise work was not resumed after the first World War, or if anything was done it must have been on such a minor scale that the newspapers did not say anything. To the best of my knowledge are still there -- I shall refrain from paging Arthur C. Clarke at this point. One discovery of sunken treasure is enough per person. Besides, the gold of La Lutine does not need to be discovered. Even if currents of the sea should have shifted the position of the wreck it must be in an area corresponding to about a city block. The two remaining questions are whether the recovery will still be worthwhile and how we would go about it nowadays. The first question can be answered relatively easily. Gold in # would be worth about considered as metal, that is. If the pieces were in new condition when they were loaded aboard the ship they would have a stiH higher value as collector's items, lars. As the finds of perfectly preserved Spanish doubloons in sunken ships just south of Cape Kennedy have proved once more, gold coins do not deteriorate in sea water. In short, the salvage of the hoard of La Lutine would be worthwhile if the salvage operations can be carried out for less rent purchasing power. Whether that can be done would depend on the thickness of the sand layer on the wreck right now and the distance in feet from the surface of the North Sea at high tide to the wreck. A modern salvage operation would probably try to keep the currents away from the wreck by building a wall around it. It would be quite similar to any dam building operation, by dropping blocks of anything that is cheap and will not float. Once the wreck has been walled in there are two possibilities. The more intriguing one would be to build up this wall to a few feet above high-tide level, making the wall waterproof with sheets of bitumen and concrete and pumping out the "well" so that salvage workers can go to work. But this would be the more expensive solution -- and this also happens to be an area where storm-driven floods grow ten or twelve feet taller than normal high tide. But one can work very nicely under water, if the water is quiet and not too deep. Of all the known sunken treasure ships the famous La Lutine rests at the shallowest depth. And a wall around the wreck would keep the water quiet. Maybe there are some people sitting around right now in Amsterdam or in London thinking about salvage. ven if there aren't, it is still possible that the Dutch will salvage the treasure of La Lutine as a by-product of another project. The string of islands along the Dutch coast, collectively known as the West Frisian Islands, indicates, as has been said, the original coastline. The portion of the North Sea between this string of islands and the mainland is known as the Waddenzee and is quite shallow, though it is made difficult by fast-flowing currents. Ever since Dutch engineers succeeded in recovering the area covered for centuries by the Zuider Zee, another set of Dutch engineers and scientists has been dreaming about dams from Den Helder on the mainland to the island of Texel, then a dam from Texel to the next island (Vlieland), then one between Vlieland and Terschelling, one from Terschelling to Ameland and finally one from Ameland to the mainland. At the moment this is not even a project, in spite of (or possibly because of) cost estimates that have been made. But eventually it will be done. And after it has been done La Lutine will become accessible again. And her gold may help to amortize the cost of the dam-building project a little bit faster than cautious actuaries, who have to ignore such possibilities, have The wars were long oyer, but something remained of all their noisy strife -- A single mote of red dust drifted down upon the sampler-to-be, and Old Sally Ivanov blew it away with a single imprecation of one syllable. The older women of the Mars colonies used such words as freely as their men, but eight-year-old Ilisiveta was more offended than words could tell. More, anyhow, words to tell. The proprieties evolve swiftly at the frontier, and the second and third generations, not having occasion to match the strength of the first pioneers, exceed them in virtue. Ilisiveta made a mental note to tell her mother that Grandmother had used "that word" again and returned to the task at hand -- a Pennsylvania Dutch apron upon which she was tatting a number of square orange flowers. She was bored, oh how she was bored! It was Sunday afternoon, the very dullest hour of the dullest day of the week, and Ilisiveta couldn't even suit-up for an hour's play out-of-locks because of the tempest -- the tempest! Her grandmother was bent over the utility table, squinting at a piece of nylon on which she was tracing free-hand, a Moorish arabesque from a photostat made at the Jefferson Library. The red shadows of the dust storm formed their own more masterful arabesques upon the white field of the cloth, as the squalls of grit continued to beat against the dome of Nevsky Colony. It had been going on like this for three days now. "Close the wall, Ilisa," the old woman commanded. Ilisiveta rose and went to the power panel recessed in the short hallway (which at night converted into her own bedroom) and flicked on the WallSouth switch. The Nightlight knob above, controlling intensity and tone, was preset to her grandmother's preference: White, Bright. Instantly the wall which the dome of the colony had been visible became opaque, and the ceiling lighted up. "Where does all the dust come from?" Old Sally asked rhetorically. "It can't get in through the airlocks, so where does it come from?" "People bring it in on their suits," Ilisiveta explained indulgently; but her grandmother seemed not to have heard at all. She was erasing one of the lines of the arabesque, which had swerved off un-Moorishly in order to avoid another speck of dust. "If you used the projector, Grandmother -- " Ilisiveta began. "If I used the projector, Granddaughter, it wouldn't be handicraft." T T andicraft! Ilisiveta gave an audible sigh. Embroidery and ceramics and such were good enough for old pension-women who had done their thirty-years' service for the colony or borne six children. But was it for little girls who had four hours of homework still ahead of them on Sunday afternoon? Who would be much happier diddling with their own designs, however crude, instead of copying these dull patterns from old books? Who might have been out-oflocks playing, if it weren't for the dreary, the eternal Martian dust storm? No, Ilisiveta concluded in silence, it wasn't. "My eyes hurt..." she said, laying her embroidery hoop aside. Then, feeling that maybe this wasn't enough : "And I should do my homework." Instead of snapping at her, Old Sally laid down her own hoop and came over to sit down by her granddaughter on the tuckawny. "I know how you're feeling, my dear. Even when I was a little girl and there were so many more things that had to be done, Sunday afternoons could be damn boring." She laid her dry old hand on Tlisiveta's, and the little girt, though she loved her grandmother dearly, could not help but feel a little shiver -- of what? of revulsion? dread? -- at the long blue vein that snaked across the woman's rough skin. "It wouldn't be boring if we could see a movie," Ilisiveta suggested, with, it seemed to her, Machiavellian slyness. "What movie would you like to see, darling?" "Oh, you know..." The old woman's face clouded over. "Oh, Ilisiveta, you've seen that one a hundred times. You don't want to see it again." "I do! Oh, Grandma, please ?" "Very well then, but you'll have to set up the projector and run it yourself." "I don't know how!" "Then it's time you learned." Sally spent ten minutes supervising the operation that would have taken herself two to perform. A large plastic tile was removed from the floor, and the storage file (which the Ivanovs shared with the family on the level below) rose to the full height of the ceiling -- some five and a half feet -- with a pretty mechanical purr. Ilisiveta took out the movie projector from the bottom of the file and carried it to the utility table. She rummaged through the box of microfilm for the cylinder coded H-# (the number stood for the year it had been printed) and stuck this into the appropriate slot in the machine. It threaded itself. A light indicated that it was ready to project. Only then did Ilisiveta recall that the screen had gone down the chute last week to Repairs and hadn't yet returned, but she solved this problem without even a word to her grandmother. Taken out of its hoop and affixed to the wall with magnetic clasps, Sally's sampler-to-be made a perfectly satisfactory screen. She adjusted the Nightlight to Dimmest, Gray. There only remained for her or press the green button on the projector. Ilisiveta wasn't really interested in the first three minutes of the movie. There was only the ship, looking like any other ship (if anything it was rather old fashioned), and the approach to the planet, which, though inherently dramatic, could be seen in more spectacular versions at school or even at home on the teevee. Then, suddenly, he was there -- Ilisiveta's grandfather, Dmitri Alexeyitch Ivanov, dead these many years but here now, smiling, young, and tanned. In a close-up shot, Dmitri Alexeyitch Ivanov waved his hand at the camera, and in the background a palm tree rustled its peculiar leaves in the wind. A palm tree! What a beautiful strange thing that was. There were, of course, no palm trees on Mars, and the sight of it here had all the mythic fascination for Ilisiveta that a tapestry of unicorns would have had for a girl of antiquity. For a precious moment the camera in the hands of the amateur cameraman (Sally, most likely) slipped and one could catch a glimpse of the sea (and of Dmitri's chest, peeling from sunburn). The sea was blue. I lisiveta pressed the red button, and the image froze on the cloth. In the brightest patches of the picture, where the sunlight glinted off the water, the incomplete arabesque on the backside of the nylon became visible, like a watermark or a message written in milk and onion juice. "How big was the sea?" Ilisiveta asked. "Well, my dear, you've seen the maps." "Yes, but... But they're just maps." "The sea was very big. How can I say how big? There in much sea as you can see of the moss-fields from Mount America." Mount America, despite its grandiloquent title, was hardly more than a hill, though by Martian standards it was a very high hill -- eight hundred feet at its crest -- and considered something of a scenic wonder. "That big!" "Bigger," Old Sally said gravely, caught up now herself in the spirit of reminisce. But her eyes were fixed not so much on the sea as on the frozen image of her husband, his stocky chest and broad chin, the one red with the sunburn he had got after only two days on Earth, the other tan with the characteristic tan of Mars. He had been only twenty-four then and but two years out of Mars medschool. He was, for both Sally and Ilisiveta, though in a different way for each, the very image of masculine perfection. "Let's go on," Sally said. She had learned that memories are savored best when they are not lingered upon. Ilisiveta pushed the green button, and the camera had no sooner righted itself than Dmitri and the palm tree vanished, and the honeymooners (for one could see at a glance that that's what they were) appeared armin-arm on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Sally Ivanov's hair was fiery red instead of yellowish-gray, and a stiff wind kept whipping it into her face. Beyond them, a great dome covered the city, through which a sky of perfect blue (laced rather queerly with the traceries of an arabesque) glowed jewel-like. Mars had never witnessed a blue like the blue of that sky, and Ilisiveta, caught up in that simpler spectacle, hardly afforded a glance for the panorama of the great, jumbled city. "You'd never believe," Sally was saying, with a touch of bitterness, "how much trouble it was getting our visas for the States. If it hadn't been for all the publicity we got in the Phillipines and the other neutral countries, I'm sure they'd have never let us in. It took an act of .Congress, would you believe it? And I was born in Oregon! But it wasn't on my account we got in, it was because of Mitya. He was the hero of the moment, you know. For discovering the serum. The newspapers and magazines had a big appetite for heroes and not too much regard for truth, so it was Mitya got all the credit. I suppose, after all, it was good that he did -- otherwise, we could hardly have afforded a honeymoon there. The round-trip fare was some impossible amount -- about a hundred thousand freemars each -- more than any of us colonists could have earned in a lifetime. It was the magazine that paid it for us. We weren't supposed to smile or wave at any photographers except the three that were always with us from the magazine. But Mitya was always cheating. He'd wave at anyone." Sally laughed quietly. vn the screen, Dmitri was laughing too, even more quietly. Then he bent down to kiss his newlywed bride. No sooner had their lips parted than he swung around to face the camera, no longer smiling. Even without sound, you could tell by the parting of his lips what word he had said. If you knew such words in Russian. "That's when they called him a name, isn't it?" "Yes. It was a very bad name; I don't think they meant for him to hear it." "It was because he was Russian?" "Oh, in Russia they called us just as bad names. It wasn't because he was Russian or I was American -- it was because we were Martians. Our revolution had only been two years before, and neither Russia or the States had recognized us officially. We were the first Free Martian citizens ever to come back to Earth. I never knew which they resented more -- our being free and not caring about the Cold War -- or our being a Russian and an American married to each other." The next few scenes passed without commentary from Sally: the Statue of Liberty, decrepit, its torch-bearing arm fallen away; the storefronts of Fifth Avenue as the Ivanovs whizzed along on the central # mph pedestrian ramp; the antique, antiseptic beauty of Kennedy Airport. Then came the brief sequence along the Pennsylvania turnpike: the jeering, gesticulating had been almost identical crowds and almost identical posovs were hoarding their film for the nicer things. There, now, was the close-up of the woman who had tried to hit Sally with the poster. Ordinarily that woman would have been thought rather pretty, but as the camera had immortalized her she was monstrous. Ilisiveta knew this woman very well, for she had returned to her often in nightmares, and she closed her eyes until she was sure that the monster would be gone. When she opened them, the room had become absolutely dark. The projector was dead, and the Dimmest, Gray light in the ceiling was extinguished as well. The air was tense with a terrible sound, the sound of silence. "The Converters," Ilisiveta whispered, and in the same instant the emergency units came on. The air circulators circulated air again, and a dim light began flashing the emergency signal overhead. The doors whooshed open so that nobody might be trapped inside in the event (and this was quite unthinkable) the emergency units should also go out. "It's the tempest," Sally said. "It's put a big drain on the power." Ilisiveta was very excited (there had been only one failure before in her whole life) and she wanted to rush out into the corridors of Level H ( the Ivanovs, being a prominent family, lived near the surface and enjoyed an authentic, not a televised, view of the dome) where she might relish the disaster more fully. But she knew it would not do to leave her grandmother alone at such a time, and then, before she could invent any sort of excuse, the main Converters turned on again, and the crisis was over. On the nylon screen the nightmarish face of the woman from Pennsylvania vanished behind the blue uniform of a policeman. f ,ld Sally ordered the pro jector to be turned off. Like most of the colonists over fifty (and Sally was thirty years past fifty), she had a bad heart. Though having lasted this long, it couldn't be thought as bad as all that. Nevertheless she needed a moment of calm after such a fright as this. The Converters were the very lifeblood, the heartbeat, as it were, of the Nevsky Colony and all the other colonies of Mars or anywhere -- Titan. Ganymede, Venus, Eros. It was the converters that had made the establishment of the colonies, and later their independence, possible, for it gave them an almost inexhaustible source of power. With # per cent efficiency, a converter could transform matter, any scrap of waste, into electrical energy. Here they provided power enough to grow vast hydroponic cultures, mine the meager deposits from the Martian hills, and to manufacture whatever was absolutely necessary and a few things that were only nice. They were wonderful machines, and Sally, like every colonist, was grateful to them; but it was galling to think that your life was so entirely dependent on their smooth operation and that without them there would not even be air to breathe, or heat, or life. After her two tranquilizers had taken hold, however, Sally seemed agreeable to let the movie show go on. It would indeed have been a great cruelty to have brought it to a halt just then, for the next sequence, photographed at the Bolshoi, was the chief reason Ilisiveta had wanted to watch the old movie still once more. It was a dream as sweet as the preceding nightmare had been bitter. From out a glade of unreal trees three women advanced in dresses. They drifted like the mist, touching only the tips of their toes to the floor, lifting now those slim legs as easily as one would draw a breath of air. They drifted so in a wide circle and then they disappeared. A single woman stepped from behind the largest of the unreal trees. Her arms floated languidly, like the arms of a person (though Ilisiveta had never seen such a thing) a person totally enveloped in water. But what her movements most suggested (and Ilisiveta could not have been expected to know this) was a swan. The little girl sighed. "It looks so easy. I wish..." "Don't be deceived by looks, Ilisa. The man who took us there, Ambassador Barnum I think his name was, he explained that those girls start learning to dance like that when they're no older than you, and they study every day for ten years before they can do some of those things right. Even then it's only a few who are good enough to go on stage. He said their feet would be bloody from walking on their toes that way, and they could never eat the things they liked. It was harder than being in the Army. Harder than being on Mars almost." "But, still I wish -- " "There's no use making wishes like that, Ilisa," Sally said in her sternest tone. And yet, she thought to herself, why, if not for the very same reason, the quest of this illusive Terran beauty, did she herself continue her copying, her embroideries, her castings? She so seldom met with a success, and yet these vanities had robbed the utilitarian side of things (to which side she had devoted the best and major part of her life and strength) of all its attractiveness for her. She lusted for the ineluctable. A nd now it seemed that she -- or the film, which Ilisiveta must have seen on the average of once a month -- had communicated that same insatiable appetite to her granddaughter -- and that simply would not do. If an old woman chose to waste the rest of a useless life on nostalgic trifles, that was one thing; it was quite another when eight-year-old Ilisiveta spent hours alone in the bathroom trying to stand on her toes like the ballerinas of the Bolshoi Ballet. Someday, perhaps, there would be room on Mars for theaters and artists and room in the colonists' lives for the more arduous forms of leisure. But it wouldn't be in Ilisiveta's day, and the sooner she learned that lesson the better. They saw the rest of the film through in silence: the storm over the Caspian; Bernini's colonnade in front of St. Peter's (they hadn't been allowed to take a movie of their audience copter ride above the Alhambra. There were a dozen more glimpses of Dmitri and Sally Ivanov, a waving hand, a smile. a dress whipping about in the wind. Ilisiveta had seen these scenes innumerable times, and yet now they occasioned a strange new thought, a question that was really beyond her years to ask or answer: was the beautiful woman in that movie, radiant with health and happiness, the same person as eighty-yearold Sally Ivanov? Was that Ilisiveta's grandmother? There was nothing in the body or the face of that decrepit woman that indicated a kinship. And yet, later that night, after her parents had come home from their jobs and she was lying in her bed in the hallway, listening (as usual, after a bad dust storm) to her grandmother coughing in the bathroom, it seemed to Ilisiveta that perhaps they were one and the same person, continuous from then to now, and that she had only been able to see the transitional Sally Ivanovs, the mother, the widow, the hospital matron, the grande dame, instead of only the extreme ends the red and violet, of the spectrum of her womanhood, then she would have been able to recognize the bride that still lived on beyond the body's and time's betrayal. This effort of empathy was for Ilisiveta a triumphant achievement of imagination, but like most triumphs it was quickly dissipated. No sooner had the old woman herself emerged from the tiny watercloset into the hallway than the whole structure came tumbling down under the sheer weight of the actual aged flesh. Ilisiveta's grandmother could be nobody else but Ilisiveta's grandmother. "Have I been keeping you awake with my coughing?" "Oh no. I've been keeping myself awake." "With thoughts of what, my dear?" Smiling, for she supposed the girl was recalling that glimpse of Tatianova, and now it did not seem so terrible a thing for her to have daydreams of being a ballerina. "... Nothing. Of nothing." The old woman rested a hand on the Wall-South switch. "Do you mind -- just for a minute?" Ilisiveta said nothing, and Sally turned the switch to Off. Immediately the living-room wall became transparent. "Thank heaven," the old worn an whispered. The dust storm was over. Both of them were quiet in view of the spectacle of the Martian night-sky, intense with stars, perhaps the most awesome sight on that planet. "There's Cancer," Ilisiveta said, pointing, "and there's Leo the Lion, and there's -- " "Earth," said the old woman. A new book packed with current Information on the moon-and-space program and its scientific byproducts -- and an adventure into speculation... This book is a "must" for anyone associated with, or interested in, the space program. Written by Neil P. Ruzlc, editor and publisher of Industrial Research magazine, the book presents a lucid case for the exploration and exploitation of our natural satellite. It considers such areas as: research In the lunar vacuum; manufacturing operations on the moon; mining the surface of the moon; observing and probing the universe from the moon; using the moon as a base In the search for life beyond earth; and stimulating the economy through technological transfer. and mall) Send copies of "The Case tor Going to the Moon at #J# for a single copy or # for two or more copies.  Chock enclosed.  Bid me. name address' city state zip code "Earth? Where?" Ilisiveta wondered if maybe this were a joke. It didn't sound like a joke, and her grandmother wasn't smiling. She was, in fact, crying. Earth was, at the very best, a swirl of dust in the emptiness of space, invisible from Mars even to astronomers. The very Converters that had made life possible here and on the other planets had made it impossible on Earth. Indeed, they bad made Earth impossible. In a war that had lasted some few seconds, the Converters had simply converted Earth into pure energy -- with a # per cent residue of dust. Old Sally Ivanov made no reply to her granddaughter's question. It became rather... well, uncomfortable being there in the room with her -- the oldest woman on Mars and the last person anywhere who had ever seen and touched and smelt and actually walked on the planet on which the human race had originated and on which, so nearly, it had perished. In her own inept and eightvear-old way, Ilisiveta did the best she could to comfort the old woman. "But, Grandmother," she said, "there is no Earth." Where the Changed Ones Go The Planet Vena s hated human beings. To survive, a human had to become something eisei I T he Venusian boy danced nimbly around the patch of Trouble Fungus behind the chapel, avoiding the graygreen killer with practice ease. He hop-skipped past the rubbery bole of the Limblime Tree and approached the serried row of jagged nameless stalks that lined the back garden. The boy grinned at them, and they parted for him as obligingly as the Red Sea had yielded to Moses some time earlier. "Here I am," he said to Nicholas Martell. "I didn't think you'd be back," the Vorster missionary said. The boy -- Elwhit -- looked mischievous. "Brother Christopher said I couldn't come back. That's why I'm here. Tell me about the Blue Fire. Can you really make atoms give light?" "Come inside," Martell said. The boy represented his first triumph since coming to Venus, and a small triumph it was, so far. But Martell did not object to that. A step was a step. There was a planet to win, here. Inside the chapel the boy hung back, suddenly shy. He was no more than ten, Martell guessed. Was it just wickedness that had made him come here? Or was he a spy from the chapel of heretics down the road? No matter. Martell would treat him as a potential convert. He activated the altar and the Blue Fire welled into the small room, colors dancing against the boards of the groined wooden ceiling. Power surged from the cobalt cube, and the harmless, dramatic radiations wrung a gasp of awe from Elwhit. "The fire is symbolic," Martell murmured. "There's an underlying oneness in the universe -- the common building-blocks, do you see? Do you know what atomic particles are? Protons, electrons, neutrons? The things everything's made up of?" "I can touch them," Elwhit said. "I can push them around." "Will you show me how?" Martell was remembering the way the boy had parted those knifeblade-sharp plants in back. A glance, a mental shove, and they had yielded. These Venusians could teleport, he was sure of it. "How do you push things?" Martell asked. But the boy shrugged the question aside. "Tell me more about the Blue Fire," he said. "Have you read the book I gave you? The one by Vorst? That tells you all you need to know." "Brother Christopher took it away from me." "You showed it to him?" Martell said, startled. "He wanted to know why I came to you. I said you talked to me and gave me a book. He took the book. I came back. Tell me why you're here. Tell me what you teach." A If artell hadn't imagined that his first convert would be a child. He said carefully, "The religion we have here is very much like the one that Brother Christopher teaches. But there are some differences. His people make up a lot of stories. They're good stories, but they're only stories." "About Lazarus, you mean?" "That's right. Myths, nothing more. We try not to need such things. We're trying to get right in touch with the basics of the universe. We -- " The boy lost interest. He tugged at his tunic and nudged at a chair. The altar was what fascinated him, nothing else. The glistening eyes roved toward it. Martell said, "The cobalt is radioactive. It's a source of betas -- electrons. They're going through the tank and knocking photons loose. That's where the light comes from." "I can stop the light," the boy said. "Will you be angry if I stop it?" It was a kind of sacrilege. Martell knew. But he suspected that he would be forgiven. Any evidence of teleporting activity that he could gather was useful. "Go ahead," he said. The boy remained motionless. But the radiance dimmed. It was as if an invisible hand reached into the reactor, intercepting the darting particles. Telekinesis on the subatomic level! Martell was elated and chilled all at once watching the light fade. Suddenly it flared more brightly again. Beads of sweat glistened on the boy's bluish-purple forehead. "That is all," Elwhit announced. "How do you do it?" "I reach." He laughed. "You can't?" "Afraid not," Martell said. "Listen, if I give you another book to read, will you promise not to show it to Brother Christopher? I don't have many. I can't afford to have the Harmonists confiscate them all." "Next time," the boy said. "I don't feel like reading things now. I'll come again. You tell me all about it some other time." He danced away, out of the chapel, and went skipping through the underbrush, heedless of the perils that lurked in the deepshadowed forest beyond. Martell watched him go, not knowing whether he was actually making his first convert or whether he was being mocked. Perhaps both, the missionary thought. X Jicholas Martell had come to  Venus ten days before, aboard a passenger ship from Mars. He had been one of thirty passengers aboard the ship, but none of the others had cared for Nicholas Martell's company. Ten of them were Martians, who did not care to share the atmosphere Martell breathed. Martians, now that their planet had been cozily terraformed, preferred to fill their lungs with an Earthside mix of gases. So had Martell, once, for he was a native Earthman himself. But now he was one of the changed ones, equipped with gills in good Venusian fashion. i lot gills, truly: they would serve no function under water. They were high-density filters, to strain the molecules of decent oxygen from the Venusian air. Martell was well adapted. His metabolism had no use for helium or the other inerts, but it could draw sustenance from nitrogen, and had no real objections to fueling on CO# for short spells. The surgeons at Santa Fe had worked on him for six months. It was forty years too late to make adjustments on Martellovum or Martell-fetus, as was the normal practice in fitting a man for life on Venus, so they had done their work on Martell the man. The blood that flowed in his veins was no longer red. His skin had a fine cyanotic flush. He was as a Venusian born. There had been nineteen Venusians of the true blood aboard the ship, too. But they felt no kinship for Martell, and had forced him to withdraw from their presence. The crewmen had set up Martell's cradle in a storage chamber, with gentle apologies: "You know those Venusians, Brother. Give them the wrong kind of look and they're at you with their daggers. You'll stay here. You'll be safer hare." A thin laugh. "You'll be even safer, Brother, if you head for home without ever setting foot on Venus." Martell had smiled. He was prepared to let Venus do its worst f J enus had martyred several ' dozen members of Mart ell's religious order in the past forty years. He was a Vorster, or, more formally a member erf the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, and he had attached himself to the missionary wing. Unlike his martyred predecessors, Martell was surgically adapted to live on Venus. The others had had to muffle themselves in breathing-suits, and perhaps that had limited their effectiveness. The Vorsters had made no headway on Venus at ah, though they were the dominant religious group on Earth, and had been for more than a generation. Martell, alone and adapted, had taken upon himself the long-delayed task of founding a Venusian order of the Brotherhood. Venus had given Martell a chilly welcome. He had blanked out in the turbulence of the landing, as the ship plunged through the cloud layer. Then he had recovered and sat up. a thin man with a wedge-shaped face and pale, hooded eyes. Through the port he had his first glimpse of Venus: a flat, muddy-looking field, stretching perhaps half a mile, with trunked ugly trees whose massed bluish leaves had a sinister glint. The sky was gray, and swirling clumps of low lying clouds formed whorling patterns against the deeper background. Robot technicians were bustling from a squat, alien-looking buildng to service the ship. In the landing station, a lowcaste Venusian stared at the Vorster with blank indifference, taking his passport and saying coolly "Religious?" "That's right." "How'd you get in?" "Treaty of #," Martell said. "A limited quota of Earthside observers for scientific, ethical or -- " "Spare me." The Venusian pressed his fingertip to a page of the passport and a visa stamp "Nicholas Martell. You'll die here, Martell. Why don't you go back where you came from? Men live forever there, don't they?" "They live a long time. But I have work here." "Fool!" "Perhaps," Martell agreed calmly. "May I go?" "Where are you staying? We have no hotels here." "The Martian Embassy will look after me until I'm established." "You'll never be established," the Venusian said. Martell did not contradict him. He knew that even a lowcaste Venusian regarded himself as superior to an Earthman, and that a contradiction might seem a mortal insult. Martell was not equipped for dagger-dueling. And, since he was not a proud to swallow any manner of abuse for the sake of his mission. The passport man waved him on. Martell gathered up his single suit case and passed out of the building. A taxi, now, he thought. It was many miles to town. He needed to rest, and to confer with the Martian Ambassador, Weiner. The Martians were not particularly sympathetic to his aims, but at least they were willing to countenance Martell's presence here. There was no Earth Embassy, not even a consulate. The links between the mother planet and her proud colony had been broken long ago. npaxis waited at the far side of the field. Martell started across. The ground crunched beneath his feet, as though it were only a brittle crust. The planet looked gloomy. Not a hint of sun came through those clouds. His adapted body was functioning well, though. Hardly anyone but robots seemed to be about at the spaceport. Venus was a sparsely populated planet, with hardly more seven widely spaced towns. The Venusians were frontiersmen, legendary for their haughtiness. They had room to be haughty, Martell thought. Let them spend a week on teeming Earth and they might change their ways. "Taxi!" Martell called. None of the robocars budged from their line. Were even the robots haughty here, he wondered? Or was there something wrong with his accent? He called again, getting no response. Then he understood. The Venusian passengers were emerging and crossing to the taxi zone. And, naturally, they had precedence. Martell watched them. They were high-caste men, unlike the passport man. They walked with an arrogant swaggering gait, and Martell knew they would slash him to his knees if he crossed their path. He felt a bit of contempt for them. What were they, anyway, but blue-skinned samurai, border lairds after their proper time, childlike self-appointed princelings living a medieval fantasy? Men who were sure of themselves did not need to swagger, nor to surround themselves with elaborate codes of chivalry. But yet they were impressive as they paraded across the field. More than custom separated the high-caste and the low-caste Venusians. They were biologically different. The high-caste ones were the first comers, die founding families of the Venus colony, and they were far more alien in body and mind than Venusians of more recent vintage. The early genetic processes had been unsubtle. The first colonists had been transformed virtually into monsters. Close to eight feet tall, with giant pores, and pendulous red gill-bunches at their throats, they were alien beings who gave little sign that they were the great great grandchildren of Earthmen. Later in the process of colonizing Venus, it had become possible to adapt men for the second planet without varying nearly so much from the basic human model. Both strains of Venusians, since they arose from manipulation of the germ plasm, bred true; both shared the same exaggerated sense of honor and both were now alien strains, inII wardly and outwardly, in mind and in body. But those whose ancestry went back to the most changed of the changed ones were in charge, making a virtue of their strangeness and the planet was their private playground. Martell watched as the high caste ones drove off. No taxis remained. The ten Martian passengers of the ship were getting into a cab on the other side of the depot. Martell returned to the building. The lowcaste Venusian glowered at him. Martell said, "When will I be able to get a taxi to take me to town?" "You won't. They aren't coming back today." "I want to call the Martian Embassy, then. They'll send a car for me." "Are you sure they will? Why should they bother?" "Perhaps so!" Martell said evenly. "I'd better walk." The look he got from the Venusian was worth the gesture. The man stared in surprise and Shock. And possibly, admiration, mingled somewhat with patronizing confidence that Martell must be a madman. Martell left the station. He began to walk, following the narrow ribbon of a road, letting the unearthly atmosphere soak deep into his altered body. I t was a lonely walk. Not a sign of habitation broke the belt of vegetation on either side of the highway, nor did any vehicles pass him. The trees, somber and eerie with their bluish cast, towered over the road. Their knifeblade-Iike leaves glimmered in the faint diffused light. There was an occasional rustling sound in the woods, as of beasts crashing through the thickets. Martell's mind hummed with plans. He would establish a small chapel and let it be known what the Brotherhood had to offer: life eternal and the key to the stars. The Venusians might threaten to kill him, as they had killed previous missionaries of the Brotherhood, but Martell was prepared to die, if necessary, that others might have the stars. His faith was strong. Before his departure, the high ones of the Brotherhood had personally wished him well : grizzled Reynolds Kirby, the Hemispheric Coordinator, had grasped his hand, and then had come an even greater surprise as Noel Vorst himself, the Founder, a legendary figure more than a century old, had come forth to tell him in a soft, feathery voice, "I know that your mission will bear fruit, Brother Martell." Martell still tingled with the memory of that glorious moment. Now he strode forward, buoyed by the sight of a few habitations set back from the road. He was at the outskirts, then. On this pioneer world, pioneer habits held true, and the colonists did not build their homes close together. They spread sparsely over a radiating area surrounding the main administrative centers. The man-high walls enclosing the first houses he saw did not surprise him; these Venusians were a surly lot, who would build a wall around their entire planet, if they could. But soon he would be in town, and then -- Martell came to a halt as he saw the Wheel hurtling toward him.  Tis first thought was that it  had broken free from some vehicle. Then he realized what it was: no fragment of machinery, but Venusian wildlife. It surged over a crest in the road, a hundred yards in front of him, and came plunging wildly toward him at about ninety miles an hour. Martell had a clear though momentary glimpse: two wheels of some horny substance, mottled orange and yellow, linked by a box-like inner structure. The wheels were nine feet across, at least; the connecting structure was smaller, so that wheel-rims projected around it. Those rims were razor-sharp. The creature moved by ceaselessly transferring its weight within that central housing, developing terrific momentum. Martell leaped back. The Wheel hurtled past him, missing his toes by inches. Martell saw the sharpness of the rim and felt an acrid odor sting his nostrils. If he had been a bit slower, the Wheel would have sliced him in two. It traveled a hundred yards beyond him. Then, like a gyroscope running amok, it executed a turn in an astonishingly narrow radius and came shooting back toward Martell. The thing's hunting me, he thought! He knew many Vorster combat techniques, but none of them were designed to cope with a beast like this. All he could do was keep side stepping and hope that the Wheel could not make sudden compensations in its course. It drew near; Martell sucked in his breath and leaped back once again. This time the Wheel swerved ever so slightly. Its leading lefthand edge sliced through the trailing end of Martell's blue cloak, and a ribbon of cloth fluttered to the pavement. Panting, Martell watched the thing swing round for another try, and knew that it could indeed correct its course. A few more passes and it would split him. The Wheel came a third time. Martell waited as long as he dared. With the outer blades only a few feet away, he broadiumped -- into the path of the creature. Earthbom muscles carried him twenty feet in the light gravity. He more than half expected to be bisected in midjump, but when his feet touched ground he was still in one piece. Whirling, Martell saw that he had surprised the beast. It had turned inward, toward the place where it had expected him to be, and had passed through his suitcase. The suitcase had been sliced as though by a laser beam. His belongings were scattered on the road. The Wheel, halting once more, was coming back. What now? Climb a tree? The nearest one was void of limbs for the first twenty feet. Martell could not shinny to safety in time. All he could do was keep hopping from side to side in the road, trying to outguess the creature. He knew that he could not keep that up much longer. He would tire, and the Wheel would not, and the slashing rims would pass through him and spill his altered guts on the pavement. The Wheel came. Martell sidestepped it again and heard it whistle past. Was it getting angry? No, it was just an insensate brute looking for a meal, hunting in the manner some perverse nature had designed for it. Martell gasped for breath. On the next pass -- Quddenly he was not alone.  A boy appeared, running out from one of the stockaded buildings at the crest of the hill, and trotted alongside the Wheel for a few paces. Then -- Martell did not see how it was done -- the Wheel went awry and toppled, landing on one disk with the other in the air. It lay there like a huge cheese blocking the road. The boy, who could not have been much more than ten, stood by it, looking pleased with himself. He was low-caste, of course. A highcaste one would not have bothered to save him. Martell realized that probably the lowcaste boy had had no interest in saving him either, but simply had knocked the Wheel over for the sport of it. Martell said, "I offer thanks, friend. Another moment and I'd have been cut to ribbons." The boy made no reply. Martell came closer to inspect the fallen Wheel. Its upper rim was straining to right itself, clearly an impossible task. Martell looked down, saw a dark violet cyst near the center of one wheel writhe and open. "Look out!" the boy cried, but it was much too late. Two whip-like threads burst from the cyst. One wrapped itself around Martell's left thigh, the other around the boy's waist. Martell felt a blaze of pain, as though the threads were lined with acid edged suckers. A mouth opened on the inner surface of the Wheel. Martell saw jections beginning to chum in anticipation. But this was a situation he could handle. He had no way of stopping the headlong plunge of the Wheel, for that was mere mechanical energy at work; but presumably the creature's brain carried an electrical charge, and the Vorsters had ways of altering current flows in the brain. It ' was a mild form of esping, within the threshold of nearly anyone who cared to master the disciplines involved. Ignoring the pain, Martell seized the tightening thread with his right hand and performed the act of neutralization. A moment later the thread went slack and Martell was free. So was the boy. The threads did not return to the cyst, but remained lying limp in the roadstill; the rippling homy plate of the upper wheel subsided. The thing was dead. Martell glanced at the boy. "Fair enough," he said. "I've saved you and you've saved me. So now we're even." "The debit is still yours," replied the boy with strange solemnity. "If I had not rescued you first, you never would have lived to rescue me. And it would not have been necessary to rescue me, anyway, since I would not have come out onto the road, and therefore -- " Martell's eyes widened. "Who taught you to reason like that?" he asked in amusement. "You sound like a theology professor." "I am Brother Christopher's pupil." "And he is -- ?" "You'll find out. He wants to see you. He sent me out here to fetch you." "And where will I find him?" "Come with me." T artell followed the boy to-- ward one of the buildings. They left the dead Wheel in the road. Martell wondered what would happen if a carload of high-caste came along and had to shove the carcass out of the way with their own aristocratic hands. They passed through a burnished coppery gate that slid open at the boy's approach. Martel! found himself approaching a simple wooden A-frame building. When he saw the sign mounted above the door, he was so amazed that he release his grip on his sundered suitcase, and for the second time in ten minutes his belongings went The sign said : Martell's knees felt watery. Harmonists? Here ? The green-robed Harmonists were heretics, offshoots of the original Vorster movement. They had made some progress on Earth for a while, and had even seemed to threaten the parent organization, but for more than twenty years now they had been nothing but an absurd little splinter group of no significance. It was inconceivable that these heretics, who had failed so utterly on Earth, could have established a church here on Venus, something that the Vorsters themselves had been unable to do. It was impossible. A figure appeared in the doorway -- a stocky man in early middle age, about sixty or so, his hair beginning to gray, his features thickening. Like Martell, he had been surgically adapted to Venusian conditions. He looked calm and self-assured. His hands rested lightly on a comfortable priestly paunch. He said, "I'm Christopher Mondschein. I heard of your arrival, Brother Martell. Won't you come in?" Martell hesitated. Mondschein smiled. "Come, come. Brother. There's no peril in breaking bread with a Harmonist, is there? You'd be mincemeat now but for the lad's bravery. And I sent him to save you; you owe me the courtesy of a visit. Come in. Come in. I won't meddle with your soul. Brother. That's a promise." Ill rrhe Harmonist place was unassuming but obviously permanent. There was a shrine, festooned with the statuettes and claptrap of the heresy, and a library, and dwelling-quarters. Martell caught sight of sev eral Venusian-bodies at work in the rear of the building, digging what might be the foundations of an extension. Martell followed the older man into the library. A familiar row of books caught his eye: the works of Noel Vorst, handsomely bound, the expensive Founder's Edition. Mondschein said, "Are you surprised? Don't forget that we accept the supremacy of Vorst too, even if he spurns us. Sit down. Wine? They make a fine dry white here." "What are you doing here?" Martell asked. "Me? That's a terribly long story, and not entirely creditable to me. The essence of it is that I was a young fool and let myself get maneuvered into being sent here. That was forty years ago and I've stopped resenting what happened by now. It was the finest thing that could have happened to me in my life, I've come to realize, and I suppose it's a mark of maturity that I was able to see -- " Mondschein's garrulity irritated Martell. He cut in : "I don't want your personal history, Brother Mondschein. I meant, how long has your order been here?" "Close to fifty years." "Uninterruptedly?" "Yes. We have eight shrines here and about four thousand communicants, all of them lowcaste. The high-casters don't deign to notice us." "They don't deign to wipe you out, either," Martell observed. "True," said Mondschein. "Perhaps we're beneath their contempt." "But they've killed every Vorster missionary that's ever come here," Martell said. "Us they devour, you they tolerate. Why is that?" "Perhaps they see a strength in us that they don't find in the parent organization," suggested the heretic. "They admire strength, of course. You must know that, or you'd never have tried to walk from the landing station. You were demonstrating your strength under stress. But of course it would rather have spoiled your demonstration if that Wheel had slashed you to death." "As it very nearly did." "As it certainly would have done," said Mondschein, "if I had not happened to notice your predicament. That would have terminated your mission here rather prematurely. Do you like the wine?" Martell had barely tasted it. "It's not bad. Tell me, Mondschein, have they really let themselves be converted here?" "A few. A few." "Hard to believe. What do you people know that we don't?" "It isn't what we know," Mondschein said. "It's what we have to offer. Come with me into the chapel." "I'd rather not." "Please. It won't give you a disease." O eluctantly Martell allowed himself to be led into the sanctum sanctorum. He looked around with distaste at the ikons, the images, and all the rest of the Harmonist rubbish. At the altar, where a Vorster chapel would have had the tiny reactor emitting blue Cerenkov radiation, there was mounted a gleaming atomsymbol model along which electron-simulacra pulsed in blinding, ceaseless motion. Martell did not think of himself as a bigoted man, but he was loyal to his faith, and the sight of all this childish paraphernalia sickened him. Mondschein said, "Noel Vorst's times, and his accomplishments mustn't be underrated. He saw the culture of Earth fragmented and decadent, saw people everywhere escaping into drug addictions and Nothing Chambers and a hundred other deplorable things. And he saw that the old religions had lost their grip, that the time was ripe for an eclectic, synthetic new creed that dispensed with the mysticism of the former religions and replaced it with a new kind of mysticism. A scientific mysticism. That Blue Fire of his! A wonderful symbol, something to capture the imagination and dazzle the eye. As good as the Cross and the Crescent -- even better because it was modern, it was scientific, it could be comprehended even while it bewildered. Vorst had the insight to establish his cult and the administrative ability to put it across. But his thinking was incomplete." "That's a lofty dismissal, isn't it? When you consider that we control Earth in a way that no single religious movement of the past has ever -- " Mondschein smiled. "The achievement on Earth is very imposing, I agree. Earth was ready for Vorst's doctrines. But why did he fail on the other planets, though? Because his thinking was too advanced. He didn't offer anything that colonists could surrender their hearts and souls to." "He offers physical immortality in the present body," Mnrtell said crisply. "Isn't that enough?" "No. He doesn't offer a mythos. Just a cold quid-pro-quo, come to the chapel and pay your tithe and you can live forever, maybe. It's a secular religion, despite all the litanies and rituals that have been creeping in. It lacks poetry. There's no Christ-child in the manger, no Abraham sacrificing Isaac, no spark of humanity, no -- " "No simplistic fairy-tales," said Martell in a brusque tone. "Agreed. That's the whole point of our teaching. We came into a world no longer capable of believing the old stories, and instead of spinning new ones we offered simplicity, strength, the power of scientific achievement -- " "And took political control of most of the planet, while also establishing magnificent laboratories that carried or. advanced research in longevity and esping. Fine. Fine. Admirable. But you failed here. We are succeeding. We have a story to tell, the story of Noel Vorst, the First Immortal, his redemption in the atomic fire, his awakening from sin. We offer our people a chance to be redeemed in Vorst and in the later prophet of Transcendent Harmony, David Lazarus. What we have is' something that captures the fancy of the low-casters, and in another generation we'll have the highcasters too. These are pioneers, Brother Martell. They've cut all ties with Earth and they're starting over on their own, in a society just a few generations old. They need myths. They're shaping myths of their own here. Don't you think that in another century the first colonists of Venus will be regarded as supernatural beings, Martell? Don't you think that they'll he Harmonist saints by then?" T jTartell was genuinely stariVjL tied. "Is that your game?" "Part of it." 'All you're doing is returning to fifth-century Christianity." "Not exactly. We're continuing the scientific work, too." "And you believe your own teachings?" Martell asked. Mondschein smiled strangely. "When I was young," he said, "I was a Vorster acolyte, at the Nyack chapel. I went into the Brotherhood because it was a job. I needed a structure for my Hfe, and I had a wild hope of being sent out to Sante Fe to become a subject in the immortality experiments, and so I enrolled. For the most unworthy of motives. Do you know, Martell, that I didn't feel a shred of a religious calling? Not even the Vorster stuff -- stripped down, secular -- could get to me. Through a series of confusions that I still don't fully understand, and that I won't even begin to explain to you, I left the Brotherhood and joined the Harmonist heresy and came here as a missionary. The most successful missionary ever sent to Venus, as it happens. Do you think the Harmonist mythologies can move me if I was too rational to accept Vorster thinking?" "So you're completely cynical in handing out this nonsense about saints and images. You do it for the sake of preserving your power. A peddler of nostrums, a quack preacher in the back woods of Venus -- " "Easy," Mondschein warned. "I'm getting results. And, as I think Noel Vorst himself might tell you, we deal in ends, not in means. Would you like to kneel here and pray a while?" "Of course not." "May I pray for you, then?" "You just told me you don't believe your own creed." Smiling, Mondschein said, "Even the prayers of an unbeliever may be heard. Who knows? Only one thing is certain: you'll die here, Martell. So #I pray for you, that you may pass through the purifying flame of the higher frequencies." "Spare me. Why are you so sure I'll die here? It's a fallacy to assume that simply because all previous Vorster missionaries have been martyred here, #'H be martyred too." "Our own position is uneasy enough here. Yours will be impossible. Venus doesn't want you. Shall I tell you the only way you'll possibly live more than a month here?" "Do." "Join us." "Don't be absurd. Do you really think I'd do that." "It isn't beyond possibility. Many men have left your order for mine -- myself included." "I prefer martyrdom."  cTn what way will that beneAfit anybody? Be reasonable, Brother. Venus is a fascinating place. Wouldn't you like to live to see a little of it? Join us. You'll learn the rituals soon enough. You'll see that we aren't such ogres." "Thank you," said Martell. "Will you excuse me now?" "I had hoped you would be our guest for dinner." "That won't be possible. I'm expected at the Martian Embassy, if I don't meet any more local beasts in the road." Mondschein looked unruffled by Martell's rejection of his offer -- an offer that could not have been made, Martell thought, with any great seriousness. The older man said gravely, "Allow me at least to offer you transportation to town. Surely your pride in your own sanctity will permit you to accept that." Martell smiled. "Gladly. It'll make a good story to tell Coordinator Kirby -- how the heretics saved my life and gave me a ride into town." "After making an attempt to seduce you from your faith." "Naturally. May I leave?" "It'll be a few moments until I can arrange for the car. Would you like to wait outside?" Martell bowed and made a grateful escape from the heretical chapel. Passing through the yard, a cleared space some fifty feet square bordered by scaly, grayishgreen shrubbery whose thick-petalled black flowers had an oddly carnivorous look. Four Venusian boys, including Martell's rescuer, were at work on an excavation. They were using manual tools, shovels and picks, which gave Martell the uncomfortable sensation of having slid back into the nineteenth century. Earth's gaudy array of gadgetry, so conspicuous and so familiar, could not be found here. The boys glared coldly at him and went on with their work. Martell watched. They were lean and supple, and he guessed that their ages ranged from about nine to fourteen, though it was hard to tell. They looked alike enough to be brothers. Their movements were graceful, almost elegant, and their bluish skins gleamed lightly with perspiration. It seemed to Martell that the bony structure of their bodies was even more alien than he had thought; they did improbable things with their joints as they worked. Abruptly, they tossed their picks and shovels aside and joined hands. The bright eyes closed a moment. Martell saw the loose dirt rise from the excavation pit and collect itself in a neat mound some twenty feet behind it. They're pushers, Martell thought in wonder. Look at them ! Brother Mondschein appeared at that precise moment. "The car is waiting, Brother," he said smoothly. IV As he entered the Venusian city, Martell could not take his mind from the casual feat of the four boys. They had sqpoped a few hundred pounds of loose soil from a pit, using esp abilities, and had smugly deposited it just where they wanted it to go. Pushers! Martell trembled, with barely suppressed excitement. The espers of Earth were a numerous tribe, now, but their talents were mainly telepathic, not extending in the direction of telekinesis to any significant degree. Nor could the development of the powers be controlled. A program of scheduled breeding, now in its fourth or fifth generation, was intensifying the existing esp powers. A gifted esper could reach into a man's mind and rearrange its contents, or probe for the deepest secrets. There were a few precogs, too, who ranged up and down the time sequence as though all points along it were one point. But they usually burned out in adolescence, and their genes were lost to the pool. Pushers -- teleports -- who could move physical objects from place to place -- were as rare as phoenixes on Earth. And here were four of them in a Harmonist chapel's back yard on Venus. New tensions quivered in Martell. He had made two unexpected discoveries on his first day: the presence of Harmonists on Venus, and the presence of pushers among the Harmonists. His mission had suddenly taken on devastating new urgency. It was no longer merely a matter of gaining a foothold on an unfriendly world. It was a matter of being outstripped and surpassed by a heresy thought to be in decline. The car Mondschein had provided dropped Martell off at the Martian Embassy, a blocky little plaza that seemed to be the entire town. The Martians breathed Earth-type air, and they did not care to adapt themselves to Venusian conditions. Once he entered the building, therefore, Martell had to accept a breathing-hood that would protect him against the atmosphere of the planet of his birth. rylie Ambassador was Freeman Nat Weiner. He was about twice Martell's age, perhaps even older -- close to ninety, even. His frame was powerful, with shoulders so wide they seemed out of proportion to his hips and legs. Weiner said, "So you're here. I really thought you had more sense." "We're determined people, Freeman Weiner." "So I know. I've been studying your ways for a long time." Weiner's eyes became remote. "More than sixty years, in fact. I knew your Coordinator Kirby before his conversion, did he ever tell you that?" "He didn't mention it," Martell said. His flesh crept. Kirby had joined the Vorster Brotherhood about twenty years before Martell had been born. To live a century was nothing unusual these days. Vorst himself was surely into his thirteenth or fourteenth decade. But it think of such a span of years. Weiner smiled. "I came to Earth to negotiate a trade deal, and Kirby was my chaperone. He was with the U.N. then. I gave him a hard time. I was a drinker, then. Somehow I don't think he'll ever forget that night." His gaze riveted on Martell's unblinking eyes. "I want you to know, Brother, that I can't provide any protection for you if you're attacked. My responsibility extends only to Martian nationals." "I understand." "My advice is the same as it's been from the start. Go back to Earth and live to a ripe old age." "I can't do that, Freeman Weiner. I've come with a mission to accomplish." "Ah, dedication! Wonderful! Where will you build your chapel?" "On the road leading to town. Perhaps closer to town than the Harmonist place." "And where will you stay until it's built?" "I'll sleep in the open." "There's a bird here," Weiner said. "They call it a shrike. It's as big as a dog, and its wings look like old leather, and it has a beak like a spear. I once saw it dive from five hundred feet at a man taking a nap in an open field. The beak pinned him to the ground." Unperturbed, Martell said, "I survived an encounter with a Wheel today. Perhaps I can dodge a shrike too. I don't intend to be frightened away." Weiner nodded. "I wish you luck," he said. V uck was about all Martell was going to get from the Ambassador, but he was grateful even for that. The Martians were cool toward Earth and all it produced, including its religions. They did not actually hate Earthmen, as the Venusians of both castes appeared to do; the Martians were still Earthlike themselves, and not changed creatures whose bond with the mother world was tenuous at best. But the Martians were tough, aggressive frontiersmen who looked out only for themselves. They served as gobetweens for Earth and Venus because there was profit in it; they accepted missionaries from Earth because there was no harm in it. Martell left the Martian Embassy and set about his tasks. He had money and he had energy. He could not hire Venusian labor directly, because it would be an act of pollution for a Venusian even of the low caste to work for an Earthman, but it was possible to commission workmen through Weiner. The Martians, naturally, received a fee for serving as agents. Workmen were hired and a modest chapel was erected. Martell set up his pocket-sized reactor and readied it for use. Alone in the chapel, he stood in silence as the Blue Fire flickered into glowing life. Martell had not lost his capacity for awe. He was a worldly man, no mystic; yet the sight of the radiation streaming from the water-shielded reactor worked its magic on him, and he dropped to his knees, touching his forehead in the gesture of submission. He could not carry his religious feeling to the stage of idolatry, as the Harmonists did, but he was not without a sense of the might of the movement to which he had pledged his life. The first day, Martell simply carried out the ceremonies of dedication. On the second and third and fourth, he waited hopefully for some low-caster who might be curious enough to enter the chapel. None came. Martell did not care to seek worshippers, not just yet. He preferred that his converts be voluntary, if possible. The chapel remained empty. On the fifth day, it was entered -- but only by a frog-like creature ten inches long, armed with wicked little horns on its forehead and delicate, deadly-looking spines that sprouted from its shoulders. Were there no life-forms on this planet that went without armor or weaponry, Martell wondered? He shooed the frog out. It growled at him and lunged at his foot with its horns. Martell drew his foot back barely in time, interposing a chair. The frog stabbed at the wood, sank inch-deep with the left hom; when it withdrew, an iridescent fluid trickled down the leg of the chair, burning a pathway through the wood. Martell had never been attacked by a frog before. On the second try, he got the animal out the door without suffering harm. A pretty planet, he thought. erNie next day came a more cheering visitor: the boy Elwhit. Martell recognized him as one of the boys who had been teleporting dirt behind the Harmonist place. He appeared from nowhere and said to Martell, "You've got Trouble Fungus out there." "Is that bad?" "It kills people. Eats them. Don't step in it. Are you really a religious?" "I like to think so." "Brother Christopher says you shouldn't be trusted, that you're a heretic. What's a heretic?" "A heretic is a man who disagrees with another man's religion," Martell said. "I happen to think Brother Christopher's the heretic, as a matter of fact. Would you like to come inside?" The boy was wide-eyed, endlessly curious, restless. Martell longed to question him about his apparent telekinetic powers, but he knew it was more important at the moment to snare him as a convert. Questions at this point might only frighten him away. Patiently Martell explained what the Vorsters had to offer. It was hard to gauge the boy's reaction. Did abstract concepts mean anything to a ten-yearold? Martell gave him Vorst's book, the simple  text. The boy promised to come back. "Watch out for the Trouble Fungus," he said as he left. A few days passed. Then the boy returned, with the news that Mondschein had confiscated his book. Martell was pleased at that, in a way. It was a sign of panic among the Harmonists. Let them turn Vorster teachings into something forbidden, and he'd win all of Mondschein's four thousand converts away. Two days after Elwhit's second visit, Martell had a different caller, a broad-faced man in Harmonist robes. Without introducing himself he said "You're trying to steal that boy, Martell. Don't do it." "He came of his own free will." "The child has curiosity. But he's the one who'll suffer if you keep allowing him to come here. Turn him away the next time, Martell. For his own sake." "I'm trying to take him away from you for his own sake," the Vorster replied quietly. "You'll destroy him," said the Harmonist. "Turn him away." Martell did not intend to yield. Elwhit was his opening wedge into Venus, and it would be madness to turn him away. Later that same day there came another visitor, no friendlier than the horned frog. He was a burly Venusian of the lower caste, with armpit-daggers bristling on both sides of his chest. Hehad not come to worship. He pointed to the reactor and said, "Shut that thing off and dispose of the fissionables within ten hours." A #T artell frowned. "It's necessary to our religious observance." "It's fissionables. Not allowed to run a private reactor here." "There was no objection at customs," Martell pointed out. "I declared the cobalt-# for what it vas and explained the purpose. It was allowed through." "Customs is customs. You're in town now. I say no fissionables. You need a permit to do what you're doing." "Where do I get a permit?" asked Martell mildly. "From the police. I'm the police. Request denied. Shut that thing off." "And if I don't?" For an instant Martell thought the self-styled policeman would stab him on the spot. The man drew back as though Martell had spat in his face. After an ugly silence he said, "Is that a challenge?" "It's a question." "I ask you on my authority to get rid of that reactor. If you defy my authority you're challenging me. Clear? You don't look like a fighting man. Be smart and do as I say." He went out. Martell shook his head sadly. Law enforcement a matter of personal pride? Well, it was only to be expected. More to the point: they wanted his reactor off, and without the reactor his chapel would not be a chapel. Could he appeal? To whom? If he dueled with the intruder and slew him, would that give him the right to run the reactor? He could hardly take such a step anyway. Martell decided not to give up without a struggle. He sought the authorities, or what passed for authorities here, and after spending four hours waiting to be admitted to the office of a minor official he was told clearly and coldly to dismantle his reactor at once. His protests were dismissed. Weiner was no help either. "Shut the reactor down," the Martian advised. "I can't function without it," said Martell. "Where'd they get this law about private operations of reactors?" "They probably invented it to take care of you," Weiner suggested amiably. "There's no help for it, Brother. You'll have to shut down." Martell returned to the chapel. He found Elwhit waiting on the steps. The boy looked disturbed. "Don't close," he said. "I won't." Martell beckoned him inside. "Help me, Elwhit. Teach me. I need to know." "What?" "How do you move things around with your mind?" "I reach into them," the boy said. "I catch hold of what's inside. There's a strength. It's hard to say." "Is it something you were taught to do?" "It's like walking. What makes your legs move? What makes them stand up underneath you?" # f"artell simmered with fruswhat it feels like?" "Warm. On top of my head. I don't know. I don't feel much. Tell me about the electron. Brother Nicholas. Sing the song of photons to me." "In a moment," Martell said. He crouched down to get on the boy's eye-level. "Can your mother and father move things?" "A little. I can move them more." "When did you find out you could do it?" "The first time I did it." "And you don't know how you -- " Martell paused. What was the use? Could a ten-year-old boy find words to describe a telekinetic function? He did it as naturally as he breathed. The thing to do was to ship him to Earth, to Santa Fe, and let the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences have a look at him. Obviously that was impossible. The boy would never go, and it would hardly be proper to spirit him away. "Sing me the song," Elwhit prodded. "In the strength of the spectrum, the qitantum, and the holy angstrom -- " The chapel door flew open and three Venusians entered: the police chief and two deputies. The boy pivoted instantly and skittered past them, out the back way. "Get him!" the police chief roared. Martell shouted a protest. It was useless. The two deputies pounded after the boy, into the yard. Martell and the police chief followed. The deputies closed in on the boy. Abruntly, the meatier one was flmning through the air, legs kicking violently as he headed for the deadly patch of Trouble Fungus in the underbrush. He landed hard. There was a muffled groan. Trouble Fungus, Martell had learned by watching it, moved quickly. The carnivorous mold would devour anything organic; its sticky filaments, triggering with awesome speed, went to work instantly. The deputy was trapped in a network of loops whose adhesive enzymes immediately began to operate. Struggling only made it worse. The man thrashed and tugged, but the loops multiplied, stapling him to the ground. And now the digestive enzymes were coming into play. A sweet, sickly odor rose from the Trouble Fungus clump. Martell had no time to study the process of dissolution. The man caught in his fatal collars of slime was close to death, and the surviving deputy, his face almost black with fear and rage, had drawn a knife on the boy. Elwhit knocked it out of his hand. He tried to gather strength for another cast into the fungus patch, but his face was sweatspeckled, and bunching muscles in his cheeks told of the inward struggle. The deputy rocked and swayed, resisting the telekinesis. Martell stood frozen. The police chief bounded forward, knife on high. "Elwhit #" Martell screamed. Even a telekinetic has no way of defending himself against a stab in the back. The blade went deep. The boy dropped. In the same moment, with the pressure withdrawn, the deputy slipped and fell on his face. The chief seized the wounded, convulsing boy and hurled him into the Trouble Fungus. He landed beside the soft mass of the dead deputy, and Martell watched in horror as the sinister loops locked into place. Sickness assailed him. He ran halfway through the disciplinary techniques before his mind would work properly again. T)y then, the police chief and his deputy had recovered their calmness. With scarcely a look at the two dissolving corpses, they seized Martell and hauled him back into the chapel. "You killed a boy," Martell said, breaking loose. "Stabbed him in the back. Where's your honor?" "I'll settle that before our court, priest. The boy was a murderer. And under the spell of dangerous doctrines. He knew we were closing you down. It was a violation to be here. Why isn't that reactor off?" Martell groped for words. He wanted to say that he did not intend to accept defeat, that he was staying on here, determined to fight even to the point of martyrdom despite their order that he shut up shop. But the vert had smashed his will. "I'll shut the reactor down," he said hollowly. "Go and do it." Martell dismantled it. They waited, exchanging pleased glances when the light flickered out. The deputy said, "It isn't a real chapel without the light burning, is it, priest?" "No," Martel replied. "I'm closing the chapel too, I guess." "Didn't last long." "No." The chief said, "Look at him with his gills flapping. All tricked out to look like one of us, and who's he fooling? We'll teach him." They moved in on him. They were burly, powerful men. Martell was unarmed, but he had no fear of them. He could defend himself. They neared him, two nightmare figures, grotesquely inhuman, their eyes bright and slitted, inner lids sliding tensely up and down, small nostrils flickering, gills atremble. Martell had to force himself to remember that he was a monster as much as they; he was a changed one now. Their brother. "Let's give him a farewell party," the deputy said. "You've made your point," said Martell. "I'm closing the chapel. Do you need to attack me, too? What are you afraid of? Are ideas that dangerous to you?" A fist crashed into the pit of his stomach. Martell swayed, caught his breath, forced himself to remain cool. The edge of a hand chopped at his throat. Martell slapped at it, deflected it and seized the wrist. There was a momentary exchange of ions and the deputy fell back, cursing. "Look out! He's electric!" "I mean no harm," said Martell mildly. "Let me go in peace." Hands went to daggers. Martell waited. The Venusians dropped back, matter end here. They had, after all, succeeded in throttling the Vorster mission. Now they appeared to have qualms about dealing with the defeated missionary. "Get yourself out of town, Earthman," the police chief grumbled. "Go where you belong. Don't come mucking around here with your phony religion. We aren't buying any." VI np'here was no blackness quite like the black of the night sky of Venus, Martell thought. It was like a layer of wool swathing the vault of the heavens. Not a hint of a star, not a flicker of a moonbeam, cut through that arch of darkness overhead. Yet there was light, occasional and intermittent : great predatory birds, hellishly luminous, skewered the darkness at unpredictable moments. Standing on the rear veranda of the Harmonist chapel, Martell watched a glowing creature soar past no higher than a hundred feet up. It was near enough for Martell to see the row of hooked claws that studded the leading edges of the curved, back-swept wings. "Our birds have teeth as well," said Christopher Mondschein. "And the frogs have horns," Martell remarked. "Why is this planet so vicious?" Mondschein chuckled. "Ask Darwin, my friend. It just happened that way. You've met our frogs, then? Deadly little beasts. And you've seen a Wheel. We have amusing fish, too. And carnivorous fungi. But we are without insects. Can you imagine that? No land arthropods at all. Of course, there are some delightful ones in the sea -- a kind of scorpion bigger than a man, a sort of lobster with disturbingly large claws -- but no one goes into the sea, here." "I understand why," Martell said. Another luminescent bird swooped down, skimmed the trees, and rocketed away. From its flat head jutted a glowing fleshy organ the size of a melon, wobbling on a thick stem. Mondschein said, "You wish to join us after all?" "That's right." "Infiltrating, Martell? Spying?" Color came to Martell's cheeks. The surgeons had left him with the flush reaction, although he turned a dull gray when affected now. "Why do you accuse me?" he asked. "Why else would you want to join us? You were haughty about it last week." "That was last week. My chanel is closed. I saw a boy who trusted me killed before my eyes. I have no wish to see more such murders." "So you admit that you were guilty in his death?" #tT admit that I allowed himHto jeopardize his life," Martell said. "We warned you of it." "But I had no idea of the cruelty of the forces that would strike at me. Now I do. I can't stand alone. Let me join you, Mondschein." "Too transparent, Martell. You came here bristling with the urge to be a martyr. You gave up too soon. Obviously you want to spy on our movement. Conversions are never that simple, and you're not an easily swayed man. I suspect you, Brother." "Are you esping me?" "Me? I don't have a shred of ability. Not a shred. But I have common sense. I know a bit about spying, too. You're here to sniff." Martell studied a gleaming bird high against the dark backdrop. "You refuse to accept me, then?" "You can have shelter for the night. In the morning you'll have to go. Sorry, Martell." No amount of persuasion would alter the Harmonist's decision. Martell was not surprised, nor greatly distressed; joining the Harmonists had been a strategy of doubtful success, and he had more than half expected Mondschein to reject him. Perhaps if he had waited six months before applying. He remained aloof while the little group of Harmonists performed evening vespers. They were not called "vespers," of course, but Martell could not avoid identifying the heretics with the older religion. Three altered Earthmen were stationed at the mission, and the voices of the two subordinates joined with Mondschein's in hymns that seemed offensive in their religiosity and yet faintly moving at the same time. Seven lowcaste Venusians took part in the service. Afterward, Martell shared a dinner of unknown meat and acrid wine with the three Harmonists. They seemed comfortable enough in his presence, almost smug. One, Bradlaugh, was slim and fragilelooking, with elongated arms and comically blunt features. The other, Lazarus, was robust and athletic, his eyes oddly blank, his skin stretched masktight over his broad face. He was the one who had visited Martell's ill-fated chapel. Martell suspected that Lazarus was an esper. no "Are you related to the Lazarus?" Martell asked. "His grand-nephew. I never knew the man." "No one seems to have known him," said Martell. "It often occurs to me that the esteemed founder of your heresy may have been a myth." F aces stiffened around the table. Mondschein said, "I met him once, a few weeks after I changed from a blue tunic to a green one. He came to see me as I was about to undergo surgery to fit me for Venus. An impressive man, he was: tall and commanding, with an air of majesty." "Like Vorst," Martell said. "Very much like Vorst. Natural leaders, both of them." Martell said, "Vorst came to me. Just before my operation. It seems to be the custom." "A reassuring custom," said Mondschein. He rose. "Brothers, good night." Martell was left alone with Bradlaugh and Lazarus. An uncomfortable silence followed; after a while Bradlaugh said stiffly, "I'll show you to your room." The room was small, with a simple cot. Martell was content. Fewer religious symbols decorated the room than there might have been, and it was a place to sleep. He took care of his devotions quickly and closed his eyes. After a while, sleep came -- a thin crust of slumber over an abyss of turmoil. The crust was pierced. There came the sound of laughter, booming and harsh. Something thumped against the chapel walls. Martell struggled to wakefulness in time to hear a thick voice cry, "Give us the Vorster!" He sat up. Someone entered his room: Mondschein, he realized. "They're drunk," the Harmonist whispered. "They've been roistering all over the countryside all night, and now they're here to make trouble." "The Vorster!" came a roar from outside. Martell peered through his window. At first he saw nothing: then, by the gleam of the lightcells studding the chapel's outer walls, he picked out seven or eight titanic figures, striding unsteadily back and forth in the courtyard. "High-casters!" Martell gasped. "One of our espers brought the word an hour ago," said Mondschein. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. I'll go out and calm them." "They'll kill you." "It's not me they're after." said Mondschein, and left. A f artell saw him emerge from the building. He was dwarfed by the ring of drunken Venusians, and from the way they closed in on him, Martell was certain that they would do him some harm. But they hesitated. Mondschein faced them squarely. At this distance, Martell could not hear what they were saying. A parley of some sort, perhaps. The big men were armed and reeling. Some glowing creature shot past the knot of figures, giving Martell a sudden glimpse of the faces of the high-caste men: alien, distorted, terrifying. Their cheekbones were like knifeblades; their eyes mere slits. Mondschein, his back to the window now, was gesticulating, no doubt talking rapidly and earnestly. One of the Venusians scooped up a twenty-pound boulder and lobbed it against the mission's whitewashed wall. Martell nibbled a knuckle. Fragments of conversation came to him, ugly words : "Let us have him... we could take you all... time we crushed all you toads..." Mondschein's hands were upraised, now. Imploringly, Martell wondered, or was he simply trying to keep the Venusians at bay? Martell thought of praying. But it seemed a hollow, futile gesture. One did not pray for direct reward, in the Brotherhood. One lived well, and served the cause, and reward came. Martell slipped into his robe and went outside. Never before had he been this close to a group of highcasters. There was a rank odor about them, an odor that reminded Martell of the scent of the Wheel. "What do they want?" Martell asked. Mondschein gaped at him. "Go back inside! I'm negotiating with them!" One of the Venusians unfurled a sword. He drove it a foot into the spongy earth, leaned on it and said, "There's the priestling now! What are we waiting for?" Mondschein said helplessly to Martell, "You shouldn't have come out. There might have been a chance to quiet them." "They'll destroy your whole mission here if I don't pacify them. I've got no right to bring that on you." "You're our guest," Mondschein reminded him. Martell did not care to accept the charity of heretics. He had come to the Harmonists, as they had guessed, in the hope of spying; that had failed, as had the rest of his mission here, and He would not hide behind Mondschein's green robe. He caught the older man's arm and said, "Go inside. Fast!" Mondschein shrugged and disappeared. Martell swung round to face the Venusians. "Why are you here?" he asked.  gob of spittle caught him in the face. Without speaking directly to him, one Venusian said, "We'll skewer him and throw him in Ludlow Pond, eh?" "Hack him! Spit him!" "Stake him out for a Wheel!" Martell said, "I came here in peace. I bring you the gift of life. Why won't you listen? What are you afraid of?" They were big children, he saw, revelling in their power to crush an ant. "Let's all sit down by that tree. Allow me to talk to you for a while. I'll take the drunkenness out of you. If you'll only give me your hand -- " "Watch out!" a Venusian roared. "He stings!" Martell reached for the nearest of the giants. The man leaped back with a most ungallant display of edginess. An instant later, as though to atone for bolting that way, his sword was out, a glittering anachronism nearly as long as Martell itself. Two Venusians drew their daggers. They strutted forward, and Martell filled his altered lungs with alien air and waited for the shedding of his no-longer red blood, and then suddenly he was no longer there. "How did you get here?" Ambassador Nat Weiner asked. "I wish I knew," said Martell. The sudden brightness of the Martian's office stabbed at Martell's eyes. He still could see the descending blades of the fearsome swords, and he was rocked by a sensation of unreality, as though he had left one dream to enter another in which he was dreaming yet a different thread. "This is a maximum-security building," said Weiner. "You have no right to be here." "I have no right even to be alive," replied the missionary flatly. B roodingly, Martell considered retreating to Earth to tell Santa Fe what he knew. He could go to the Vorst Center, where, less than a year ago, he had gone into a room as an Earthman, to be turned by whirling knives and lashing lasers into an alien thing. He could request an interview with Reynolds Kirby, and let that grizzled, thin-lipped centenarian know that the Venusians had telekinesis, that they could deflect a Wheel or throw an attacker into Trouble Fungus or speed a living human figure safely across five miles and pass him through walls. Santa Fe would have to know. The situation looked bad. Harmonists snugly established on Venus, and the place chock full of teleports -- it could mean a disastrous blow to Vorst's master plan. Of course, the Vorsters on Earth had made great gains too. They were masters of the planet. Their laboratories had run simulated lifespans that showed a tally of three to four hundred years, without organ replacement -- simple regeneration from within, amounting to a kind of immortality. But immortality was only one Vorster goal. The other was transport to the unreachable stars. And there the Harmonists had their big lead. They had teleports who already could work miracles. Given a few generations of genetic work, they might be sending expeditions to other solar systems. Once you could move a man five miles in safety, it was only a quantitative jump, not qualitative, to get him to Procyon. Martell had to tell them. Santa Fe called to him -- that vast sprawl of buildings where technicians split genes and laboriously pasted them back together, where e#per families submitted to an endless round of tests, where bionics men performed wonders beyond comprehension. But he did not go. A personal report seemed unnecessary. A message cube would do just as well. Earth now was an alien world to Martell, and he was uneasy about returning to it, living in breathing-suits. He balked at making the return journey. Through the good offices of Nat Weiner, Martell recorded a cube and had it shipped to Kirby at Santa Fe. He remained at the Martian Embassy while waiting for his reply. He had set forth the situation on Venus as he understood it, expressing his great fear that the Harmonists have the stars. In time Kirby's reply arrived. He thanked Martell for his invaluable data. And he expressed a calming note: the Harmonists, he said, were men. If they were to reach the stars, it would be a human achievement. Not theirs, not ours, but everyone's, for the way would be opened. Did Brother Martell follow that reasoning, Kirby asked? Martell felt quicksand beneath him. What was Kirby saying? Means and ends were hopelessly jumbled. Was the purpose of the order fulfilled if heretics conquered the universe? In distress, he stood before the improvised altar in the room Weiner had given him, seeking answers to unaskable questions. A few days later he returned to the Harmonists. TV T artell stood with Christopher Mondschein by the edge of a sparkling lake. Through the clouds came the dull glow of the masked sun, imparting a faint gleam to the waterthat-was-not-water. It was not that trickle of sunlight that made the water sparkle, though. It teemed with luminous coelenterates that lined its shallow bottom. Their tentacles, waving in the currents, emitted a gentle greenish radiance. There were other creatures in the lake, too. Martell saw them gliding beneath the surface, ribbed and bony, with gnashing jaws and metallic fins. Now and then a snout split the water and a slim, ugly creature whipped twenty yards through the air before subsiding. From the depths came writhing suckertipped tendrils that belonged to monsters Martell did not care to know. Mondschein said, "I thought I'd never see you again." "When I went out to face the Venusians?" "No. Afterward, when you holed up with the Martians. I thought you were making arrangements to go back to Earth. You know it's hopeless to try to plant a Vorster chapel here." "I know," Martell said. "But I've got that boy's death on my conscience. I can't leave. I lured him into visiting me, and he died for it. He'd be alive if I had turned him away. And I'd be dead if you hadn't had one of your other little Venusians teleport me to safety." "Elwhit was one of our finest prospects," Mondschein said sadly. "But he had this streak of wildness -- the thing that brought him to us in the first place. A restless boy, he was. I wish you had left him alone." "I did what I had to do," Martell replied. "I'm sorry it worked out so awfully." He followed the path of a sinuous black serpent that swept from right to left across the lake. It extended telescoping arms in a sudden terrifying gesture and enveloped a low-flying bird. Martell said carefully, "I didn't come back here to spy on you. I came back here to join your order." Mondschein's domed blue forehead wrinkled a little. "Please. We've been through all this already." "Test me! Have one of your espers read me! I swear it, Mondschein I'm sincere." "They've embedded a pack of hypnotic commands in you in Santa Fe. I know. I've been through it myself. They sent you here to be a spy, but you don't know it yourself, and if we probed you we might have trouble finding out the truth. You'll soak up all you can about us, and then you'll return to Santa Fe and they'll toss you to a debriefing esper who'll pump it all out of you. Eh?" "No. Not at all." "Are you sure?" "Listen," said Martell, "I don't think they did anything to my mind in Santa Fe. I came to you because I belong on Venus. I've been changed." He held out his hands. "My skin is blue. My metabolism is a biologist's nightmare. I've got gills. I'm a Venusian, and this is where the changed ones go. But I can't be a Vorster here, because the natives won't have it. Therefore I've got to join you. Do you see?" Mondschein nodded. "I still think you're a spy." "I tell you -- ". "Stay calm," said the Harmonist. "Be a spy. That's quite all right. You can stay. You can join us. You'll be our bridge, Brother. You'll be the link that will span the Vorsters and the Harmonists. Play both sides, if you like. That's exactly what we want." vnce again Martel felt the foundations giving way beneath his feet. He imagined himself in a dropshaft with the gravity field suddenly gone: falling, falling, endlessly falling. He peered into the mild eyes of the older man and perceived that Mondschein must be in the grip of some crazy ecumenical scheme, some private fantasy that -- He said, "Are you trying to put the orders back together?" "Not personally. It's part of the plan of Lazarus." Martell thought Mondschein was referring to his own assistant. He said, "Is he in charge here or are you?" Smiling, Mondschein replied, "I don't mean my Lazarus here. I mean David Lazarus, the founder of our order." "He's dead." "Certainly. But we still follow the course he mapped for us half a century ago. And that course envisages the eventual reuniting of the orders. It has to come, Martell. We each have something the other wants. You have Earth and immortality. We have Venus and teleportation. There's bound to be a pooling of interests, and possibly you'll be one of the men who'll help to bring it about." "You aren't serious!" "As serious as I know how to be," said Mondschein. The amiable mask dropped away. "Do you want to live forever, Martell?" "I'm not eager to die. Except for some overriding purpose, of course." "The translation is that you want to live as long as you can, with honor." "Right." "The Vorsters are getting nearer to that goal every day. We have some idea what's going on in Santa Fe. Once, about forty years ago, we stole the contents of an entire longevity lab. It helped us, but not enough. We didn't have the substratum of knowledge. On the other hand, we've made some strides too. Will it be worth a reunion, do you think? We'll have the stars -- you'll have eternity. Stay here and spy, Brother. I think -- and I know Lazarus thought -- that the fewer secrets we have, the faster our progress will be." Martell did not reply. A boy emerged from the woods -- a Venusian boy, possibly the one who had saved him from the Wheel, perhaps the dead Elwhit's brother. They looked so interchangeable in their strangeness. Instantly Mondschein's manner changed. He donned a bland smile. "Bring us a fish," he told the boy. "Yes, Brother Christopher," he said. 'T'here was silence. Veins throbbed on the boy's forehead. In the center of the lake, the water boiled, white foam splashing upward. A creature appeared, scaly and dull gold in color. It hovered in the air, ten feet of frustrated fury, its great underslung jaw opening and closing impotently. The beast soared toward the group on the shore. "Not that one!" Mondschein gasped. The boy laughed. The huge fish slipped back into the lake. An instant later, something onalescent throbbed on the ground at Martell's feet, a toothy, snapping thing a foot and a half long, with fins that nearly were legs, and a fan-like tail in which wicked spikes stirred and quivered. Martell leaped away, but he was in no danger, he realized. The fish's skull caved in as though smitten by an invisible fist, and it lay still. Martell knew terror in that moment. The slender, laughing boy, who had so mischievously pulled that monster from the waters and then this equally deadly Httle thing, could kill with a flicker of his frontal lobes. Martell stared at Mondschein. "Your pushers -- are they all Venusians?" "All." "I hope you can keep them under control!" "I hope so too," Mondschein replied. He seized the dead fish carefully by a stubby fin, holding it so the tail-spikes pointed away from him. "A great delicacy," he said. "Once we remove the poison sacs, of course. We'll catch two or three more and have a devilfish dinner tonight to celebrate your conversion." rr"'hey gave him a room, and they gave him menial jobs to do, and in their spare time they instructed him in the tenets of Transcendent Harmony. Martell found the room sufficient and the labor unobjectionable. It was more difficult to swallow the theology. He could not pretend, to himself or to them, that it had any meaning for him. Warmed-over Christianity, a dollop of Islam, a tinge of latter-day Buddhism -- all spread over a structure borrowed shamelessly from Vorst. It was an unpalatable mixture for Martell. There was syncretism enough in the Vorster teachings, but Martell accepted those because he had been born to them. They began with Vorst, accepting him as a prophet just as Christianity respected Moses and Islam honored Jesus. But, of course, there was the later dispensation, represented by the figure of David Lazarus. Vorster writings made no mention of Lazarus. Martell knew of him only from his studies in the history of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, which mentioned Lazarus in passing as an early supporter of Vorst's and then an early dissenter. But Vorst lived; and, so said both groups, he would live forever, in tune with the cosmos,  the First Immortal. Lazarus was dead, a martyr to honesty, cruelly betrayed and slain by the domineering Vorsters in their moment of triumph on Earth. The Book of Lazarus told the sad story; "Lazarus was trusting and without guile. But the men whose hearts were hard came upon him and slew him in the night, and fed his body to the converter so that not even a molecule remained. And when Vorst learned of their deed, he wept and said, I wish you had slain me instead, for now you have given him an immortality he can never lose..." Martell could find nothing in the Harmonist scriptures that was actually discreditable to Vorst. Even the assassination of Lazarus itself clearly was shown to be the work of underlings, carried out without Vorsfs knowledge or desire. And through the writings ran an expression of hope that one day the faith would be reunited, though it was stressed that the Harmonists must submit to unity only out of a position of strength, and in complete equality. A few months before, Martell would have regarded their pretensions as absurd. On Earth they were a pipsqueak movement, losing members from year to year. Now, among them if not entirely of them, he saw that he had badly underestimated their power. Venus was theirs. The high-caste natives might boast and swagger, but they were no longer the masters. There were espers among the downtrodden lower caste Venusians -- pushers, no less -- and they had given their destinies into Harmonist hands. Martell worked. He learned. He listened. And he feared. The stormy season came. From the eternal clouds there burst tongues of lightning that set all Venus ablaze. Torrents of bitter rain flailed the flat plains. Trees five hundred feet tall were ripped from the ground and hurled great distances. From time to time, high-casters arrived at the chapel to sneer or to threaten, and in the shrieking gales they roared their blustering defiance, while within the building grinning low-caste boys waited to defend their teachers if necessary. Once, Martell saw three high-caste men thrown twenty yards back from the entrance as they tried to break in. "A stroke of lightning," they told one another. "We're lucky to be alive." In the spring came warmth. Stripping to his alien skin, Martell worked in the fields, Bradlaugh and Lazarus beside him. He did not yet teach at all. He was well versed by now in the Harmonist teachings, but it was all from the outside in, and a seemingly impermeable barrier of skepticism prevented it from getting deeper. Then, on a steamy day when sweat rolled in rivers from the altered pores of the four former Earthmen at the Harmonist chapel, Brother Leon Bradlaugh joined the blessed company of martyrs. It happened swiftly. They were in the fields, and a shadow crossed above them, and a silent voice within Martell screamed, "Watch out!" T Te could not move. But this  was not his day to die. Something plummeted from the sky, something heavy and leather-winged, and Martell saw a beak a yard long plunge into Bradlaugh's chest, and there was the fountaining of coppery blood. Bradlaugh lay outstretched with the shrike on him, and the great beak was withdrawn, and Martell heard a sound of rending and tearing. They gave the last rites to what was left of Bradlaugh. Brother Christopher Mondschein presided, and called Martell to his side afterward. "There are only three of us now," he said. "Will you teach, Brother Martell?" "I'm not one of you." "You wear a green tunic. You know our creed. Do you still think of yourself as a Vorster, Brother?" "I -- I don't know what I am," answered Martell. "I need to think about this." "Give me your answer soon. There's much to be done here, Brother." Martell did not realize that he would know within a day where he really stood. A day after Bradlaugh's funeral, the regular thrice weekly passenger ship from Mars arrived. Martell knew nothing of it, until Mondschein came to him and said, "Take one of the boys in the car, and do it quickly. A man needs saving!" Martell did not ask questions. Somehow, news had traveled down a chain of espers, and it was his task simply to obey. He entered the car. One of the little Venusian acolytes slipped in beside him. "Which way?" Martell asked. The boy gestured. Martell thumbed the starter. The car sped down the road, toward the airport. When they had gone two and a half miles, the boy grunted a command to halt. A figure in a blue tunic stood by the side of the road, his back to the bole of a mighty tree. Two suitcases lay open on the highway, and a razor-backed beast with a flattened snout and boar-like tusks was rooting through them, while its mate charged the newly arrived Vorster. The boy hopped from the car. Without sign of strain, he caused the two animals to rise and slam into trees on the far side of the road. They dropped to the ground, looking dazed but determined. The boy levitated them again and struck their heads together. When they fell this time, they swung round and fled into the underbrush. Martell said, "Venus always seems to welcome newcomers like that. My greetings committee was a thing called a Wheel, which I hope you never meet. I'd be in ribbons now except that a Venusian boy was kind enough to teleport it over on its side. Are you a missionary?" r T n he man seemed too dazed to reply immediately. He knotted his hands together, released them, adjusted his tunic. Finally he said. "Yes -- yes." "Surgically changed, then?" "That's right." "So am I. I'm Nicholas Martell. How are things in Santa Fe, Brother?" The newcomer's lips tightened. He was a fleshless little man. a year or two younger than Martell. He said, "How can that matter to you, if you're Martell? Martell the heretic? Martell the renegade?" "No," Martell said. "I -- " He fell silent. His hands tensely smoothed the fabric of his Harmonist green tunic. His cheeks were burning. He realized painfully the truth about himself, that the change in him had worked inward from with out, and suddenly he could not meet the gaze of his altered successor in the Venus mission, and he turned, staring into the thicket of the no longer very alien forest. Eye of an Octopus Their job on Mars was to look for Martian remains. They had not expected to find MartiansJ t was a well. Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden bent over the lip, peering down into the jet darkness. Their balloon-tired motorcycle lay forgotten on the talcum sand, fine pink sand that stretched endlessly away to the flat horizon, borrowing its color from the sky. The sky was the color of blood. It might have been a flaming Kansas sunset; but the tiny sun was still at the zenith. The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was Mars. It stood four feet above the sand, roughly circular, perhaps three yards across. The weathered stones were upright blocks, a foot tall by five inches wide by perhaps a foot thick. Whatever the material of those stones, they seemed to glow with a faintly blue inner light. "It's so human!" said Henry Bedrosian. His voice held a touch of bewildered frustration, echoed by his dark, chisel-nosed face. Chris Luden knew what he meant. "It's natural. A well's like a lever or a wheel. There aren't many changes you can make, because it's too simple. Did you notice the shape of the bricks?" "Yes. Odd. But they could still be man-made." "In this air? Breathing nitric oxide, drinking red fuming nitrie acid? But -- " Chris drew, a deep breath -- "why complain? It's life, Harry! We've discovered intelligent life!" "We've got to tell Abe." "Right." But it was a long moment before either moved. They stood leaning over the well, vivid green pressure suits against pink sand and dark red horizon, peering down into the blur of darkness at the bottom. Then they turned to the Mars mobile. r jfe landing vehicle stood like an upright steel ballpoint pen. Its bottom half was three spreading legs, a restarting solid rocket and a spacious cargo hold, two-thirds empty now. The upper half was the return-to-orbit stage. Far away across the crescent dunes was a white patch, the jettisoned drag chute. The Marsmobile, a glorified two-seater motorcycle with big round tires and a number of special modifications, putt-putted up to a landing leg and stopped. Henry got off and climbed to the cabin to call Abe Cooper in the ion-driven returnto-Earth vehicle. Chris Luden mounted to the cargo hold and rummaged through a disorganized hash of necessities until he had a long coil of thin line, a metal bucket and a heavy rock hammer, all treated to resist the corrosive atmosphere. He dropped the objects net to the Marsmobile and climbed down. "Now we'll see," he told himself. Henry descended the ladder. "Abe's having kittens," he reported. "He says if we don't call him every five minutes he'll come down after us. He wants to know, how old is the well?" "So do I." Chris brandished the hammer. "We'D knock a chip off and analyze rt Let's   yy goThe well was a mile and a half from the ship, and not of a conspicuous color. Probably they would have lost it if they hadn't left a flag to mark it. "Let's see how deep it is first," said Luden. He put the hammer in the bucket for a weight, tied a line to the handle and let it fall. In the eery silence of the Martian desert they waited. The rope was nearly gone when the bucket struck something. In a moment the ghost of a splash came floating up from the depths. Henry marked the line so they could measure how deep it had gone. It looked about three hundred feet. They hauled it up. The bucket was half full of a cloudy, slightly oily fluid. Chris handed it to his partner. "Harry, you want to take this back and analyze it?" Henry's dark face grinned around the pointed beard. "I'll match you for it. We both know what it's gonna be." "Sure, but it has to be done. Even." They matched fingers. Henry lost. He rode back to the ship, the bucket dangling from the edge. The stone which formed the well might have been quartz, or even some kind of unveined marble. It had been too badly weathered, too finely scored and polished and etched by the patient sand grains, to tell what it was. Chris Luden picked a likely looking block and brought the hammer down hard on what seemed to be a crack. He did it three times. The hammer was ruined. Luden shifted the hammer this way and that to examine the uneven, dulled edge and flattened corners. His blue eyes held a puzzled look. He knew the government might have quibbled about the weight of a tool for the Mars Project, but never the cost or quality. Here on Mars that hammer was worth must be made of some hard, durable steel alloy. Then -- He cocked his head in his helmet, tasting a strange idea. "Harry!" "Yeah?" "How you doing?" "I'm just coming in the airlock. Give me five minutes to find out that this stuff is nitric acid." "Okay, but do me a favor. Have you got your ring?" "The diamond horseshoe? Sure." "Bring it back with you, outside your suit. Outside, that is." "Now wait a minute, Chris. That's a valuable ring. Why not use your own?" "I should have thought of that! I'll just take off my pressure suit and -- Uh! Can't seem to get my helmet unfastened -- " "Stop! Stop! I get the point." There was a click as Henry's radio went off. Luden sat down to wait. r TPhe sun was sliding toward the horizon. They had landed shortly before sunset yesterday, so they knew how suddenly the desert could turn from pink to midnight black, and how little light the insignificant moons gave. But sundown was four hours away. The dunes all faced the same way, perfect crescents, as regular as if hand made. Something must shape the winds here, causing them to blow always in one direction, like Earth's trade winds and the dunes would crawl across the sands, slower than snails, following the winds. How old were the stones against his back? If they were really -- a strange and silly thought, but Chris wouldn't have volunteered for the Mars Project if he were not half a romantic -- if they were really diamond, they must be terrible old, to be worn by mere sand. Far older than the pyramids, and revered ancestor to the Sphinx. Maybe the race that carved those stones had since perished. Science fiction writers often assumed an extinct Martian race. Why, perhaps the well had originally held water -- "Hello, Chris?" "Here." "It's dirty nitric acid, not too strong. Next time you'll believe me." "Harry, they didn't send us here to make astute guesses. They did all the guessing when they built the ship. We came to find out for sure, right? Right." "See you in ten minutes." Luden let his eyes drift back across the desert. It was a moment before he realized what had caught his eye. One of the dunes was irregular. The curves were wrong, asymmetrical. The normal crescent had left one sprawling, trailing arm. It stood out like a pear in a line of apples. He had ten minutes, and the dune wasn't far. Luden got up and started walking. He stood under the dune and looked back. The well was clearly visible. The distance was even shorter than he had thought. He had been deceived by the nearness of the horizon. The lip of the dune was some fourteen feet high. What had distorted it? An upthrusting spire of rock, perhaps, not quite high enough to show through the sand. They could find it with the sonar later. It had to be under the one sprawling, twisted arm of sand. "Chris! Where the hell are you? Chris!" Chris jumped. He'd forgotten Henry. "Look due south of the well and you'll see me." "Why don't you stay where you're put, you idiot? I thought you'd been buried by a sandstorm." "Sorry, Harry. I got interested in something." Chris Luden was now standing on the twisted arm of sand. He sounded preoccupied. "Try scratching the blocks of the well with your ring." "That's an odd thought," Henry laughed. "Do it." Silence. Luden felt the wind, looked down at the sand, tried to imagine what obstruction had dropped it here. Something not necessarily very large. It would not be beneath the dune; it would be on the windward side... at the beginning of the arch...there. "I scratched it, Chris. There's a scratch all right. So that effectively takes... ooops. Aaargh! Chris you're doomed! Only death can save you from my wrath!" "Why are you irritated with -- " "My diamond! It's ruined!" "Relax. You could replace it one block from the well." "Say, that's true. But we'll need the laser to cut it loose. They must have used diamond dust for the cement, too. And the fuel to get it back -- " "Harry, do me a favor. Bring -- " "That last favor cost me a three thousand dollar ring!" "Bring the Marsmobile here. I want to do some digging." "Be right there." A minute later Henry stop- ped the machine alongside Chris's green suit. His smile showed that the scratches on his ring had not permanently scarred his psyche. "Where do we dig?" "Right where I'm standing." The Marsmobile was equipped with two down-thrusting compressed air jets for getting over steep obstructions. A large tank under the vehicle's belly held the heavily compressed air, compressed directly from the thin Martian atmosphere by the motor. Henry turned on the jets and hovered over the spot where Chris had been standing, shifting his weight to keep the machine in place. Sand sprayed out in sheets. Chris ran to get out from under, and Henry grinned and doubled the thrust to send the fine grains showering over him. In half a minute the pressure became too low. Henry had to land. The Marsmobile shuddered and vibrated as its motor struggled to refill the pressure chamber. "I hate to ask," said Henry, "but what's the point of all this?" "There's something solid down there. I want you to expose it." "Okay, if you're sure we're in the right place. We've got six months of time to waste." They wasted a few minutes silently watching the Marsmobile fill its pressure tank. "Hey," said Henry. "You think we could stake a claim on this diamond mine?" Chris Luden, sitting on the steep side of the dune, thoughtfully scratched the side of his helmet. 'Why not? We haven't seen any live Martians, and it's for sure that nobody else has a claim. Sure we'll file our claim. The worst they can do is disallow it." "One thing. I didn't mention it before because I wanted you to see for yourself, but the heck with it. One of those blocks is covered with deep scratches." "They all are." "Not like these. These are deep, and they're all at fortyfive degree angles, unless my imagination is fooling me. They're too fine to be sure, but I think it's some kind of writing." And without waiting for an answer, Henry took off on the air jets. He was good at it. He was like a ballet dancer. You could see Henry shifting weight, but the scooter never seemed to move. Something was emerging from the sand. Something not a rock. Something like a piece of modern metal sculpture, with no use and no meaning but with a weird beauty nonetheless. Something that had been a machine and was now -- nothing. Henry Bedrosian balanced above the conical pit his jets had dug. The artifact was almost clear now. Something else showed beside it. A mummy. nphe Marsmobile settled on the last of its air. Chris plunged down the side of the pit as Henry climbed off. The mummy was humanoid, about four feet long, with long arms, enormous fragile tapered fingers, and a traditionally oversized skull. No fine detail was visible; it had all been worn away. Chris couldn't even be sure how many fingers the -- humanoid had had. One hand still held two; the other only one, plus a fattened opposable thumb. No toes showed on the feet. The thing lay face down. The artifact, now uncovered, showed more detail. Yet the detail had no meaning. Thick bent metal bars, thin twisted wires, two enormous crumpled circles with something rotted clinging to what had been their rims -- and then Henry's imagination clicked, the same visual knack that had gotten him A's in topology, and he said, "It's a bicycle." "You've lost your mind." "No, look. The wheels are too big, but -- " It was a fantastically distorted bicycle, with wheels eight feet across, a low dwarf-sized saddle and a system of gears to replace the chain. The gear ratio was very low. The saddle was almost against the rear wheel, and a tiller bar, now bent to scrap, had been fixed to the hub of the front wheel. Something had crumpled the bicycle like a crush-proof cigarette pack in a strong man's hand, and then nitric acid rust had done its worst to the metal. "Okay, it's a bicycle," said Chris. "It's a Salvador Dali bicycle, but still a bicycle. They must have been a lot like us, hmmm? Bicycles, stone wells, writing -- " "Clothing." "Where?" "It must have been there. He's less worn around the torso, see? You can see the wrinkles in his skin. He must have been protected until his clothes rotted away." "Maybe. He kind of ruins our lost race theory, doesn't he? He couldn't possibly be more than a couple of thousand years old. Hundreds would be more like it." "Then he drank nitric acid after all! Well, that blows our diamond mine, partner. He's got to have living relatives," Henry said. "We can't count on their being too much like us. These things we've found -- clothing, writing, wells -- they're all things any intelligent being might be forced to invent. And parallel evolution might explain the biped shape." "Parallel evolution?" Henry repeated. "Like the eye of an octopus. Lt's nearly identical in structure to a human eye. Yet an octopus isn't remotely human. And look at most marsupials, you can't tell them from their mammal counterparts. Well, let's try to pick him up." Any archeologist would have shot them down in cold blood. The mummy was as light and dry as cork, and he showed no tendency to come apart in their hands. They strapped him gently over the luggage box and climbed on themselves. Chris drove back slowly and carefully. Chris stood on the first rung of the ladder, adjusting the mummy's balance on his left shoulder. "We'll have to spray him with plastic before takeoff," he said. "Do we have any plastic spray?" "I don't remember any. We'd better take lots of pictures in case it does come apart." "Right. There's a camera in the cabin." Chris started up, and Henry followed. They got the relic to the airlock without mishap. "I've been thinking," said Henry. "That nitric acid wasn't diluted, exactly, but there was water in it. Maybe this guy's chemistry can extract the water from nitric acid." ,r T"hey put the mummy gently on a pile of blankets and began searching for the camera. After five frustrating minutes Chris deliberately banged his head against a wall. "I took it out to catch the sunset last night. It's in the cargo hold." "So get it." Henry stood in the airlock, watching as Chris went down the ladder. After a moment in the cargo space Chris started up with the camera strap over his shoulder. "I've been thinking too," said Chris, his voice seemingly dissociated from his climbing figure. "Diamond can't be that plentiful here. And carving it into blocks must have been real hard labor. Why diamonds? And why write on a well?" "Religious reasons? Maybe they worship water." "That's what I was thinking." "Of course you were. That plot's as old as Lowell." Chris had reached the top. They squeezed into the airlock and waited for it to cycle. The door opened. Both men had their helmets off by this time, and they both smelled it at once. Something chemical, something strong -- Thick, greasy smoke was pouring up from the ancient corpse. Henry reacted first. He sprang for the double boiler in the small kitchen corner. The bottom half was still full of water; he snatched it up and threw the water over the smoldering Martian mummy while with his other hand he turned on the water faucet to get more. The mummy went off like a napalm bomb. T I enry leaped away from the exploding flames and his head rammed something flat and very hard. He went down with his eyes full of leaping light. Immediately he sat up, knowing that something urgently needed doing but unable to remember what. He saw Chris, still in vacuum suit except for the helmet, run through the multicolored flames, pick the mummy up by the ankles and throw it into the airlock. Chris hit the "Cycle" button. The inner door swung shut. Then Chris was bending over him. "Where does it hurt, Harry? Can you talk? Can you move?" Henry sat up again. "I'm okay." Chris expelled a gusty breath. Henry stood up a little shakily. His head ached. The fumes in the cabin weren't intolerable, and already the air plant was whining its eagerness to make the air pure and scentless. Red smoke from the open outer airHere is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decea. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. I Galaxy Publishing Carp.  #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi j record of Music from Mathema tics right away. I enclose check  or money order for #. Name S Address # City  State Zip Code... I (Offer good fa U. S. A. oniyj hole, outside the ship, dying away. "What made him explode?" he wondered. "The water," said Chris Luden. "What a wild chemistry he must have! I want to be there when we meet a live one." "But what about the well? We know he used water," Henry protested. "Yes, he did. He sure as hell did. And did you know that an octopus eye is identical to a human eye?" "Sure. But a well is a well, isn't it?" "Not when its a crematorium, Harry. What else could it be? There's no fire on Mars, but water must dissolve a body completely. And wouldn't I like to know what the morticians charge their customers for those cut diamond building blocks! The hardest substance known to man or Martian! An everlasting monument to the dear departed?"  full year's worth of these columns has now marched past, like a herd of migratory fern trees. It is time to recapitulate, and to explain. First let me explain. Some of you have expressed a certain bewilderment at the tone I take; the occasional bursts of disrespect, the sometimes sly and illucid asides. "What is he trying to say?" they ask, thus betraying the fact we never speak of -- that a review column these days must first of all be a vehicle for a philosophy of literature, and only secondarily a guide to my ideas on how your book money should be spent. Well, my philosophy is much involved with the mutually interesting fact that somewhere in every publishing house there is a man who sees the making and distributing of books as a business. He is called the business manager; he can change policy, fire editors and thus excommunicate writers, dictate the production and promotion budget and thus stand responsible for the # price-tag on a book produced for eighty-seven cents and promoted for a dollar. While his immortal breed lives, all authors, editors and readers are involved in a business transaction no different from those involving canned soup or painted turtles. That is the essential fact -- all philosophizing, hero worship, collecting of incunabula, fine talk of hobbyistic fellowship, all, all, are mere detail. These people want your money. To get it, they will hire the services of editors whose personalities and intelligence may be more or less attractive, may reflect more or less love or knowledge of the field, but are governed in effect by what is happening in the market. Not in the temple -- in the market. Writers know this -- perhaps only on those difficult days of the fiscal month, but they know it. Again, it is fashionable in one construct of writingship to take the view that we are all brethren and sistern; all valiant, all virtuous. This view of "D'Ye Ken John Peel?" being sung around the sacred flame by a twinkling band is maintained principally by people who get farther at literary politics than they do behind typewriters. (This is a fact gathered by personal observation over a period of years, and you might as well believe it.) It is noteworthy, to me, that the writers who continue to satisfy the public year in and out are solitary warlocks, eschewing most pretenses at gentility, seeking out the company of only a selected few of their own kind, and then hardly for the purpose of scratching each other's backs. Rightly or wrongly, these people are aware that what they sell for money is the same thing that gives them a species of private ecstasy. They do not always like themselves or each other. For money and for the joy of having created, they are in competition with each other -- that is, with other warlocks. All others, they disdain. They are in competition with the same few they care to know; though they have different ways of expressing it, some rough and some smooth, some sapient and some naive, they all know it and respect and hate each other for it, and go a long way to zing each other or to help each other in various rough ways that have nothing to do with chaining the daisy. Without reference to actual objective talent or mort of recognition, they are the ones who make the cloud eat the moon and the wheat to burst forth from the thaw, and their pride is such that they die each time they muff. I n part, this is because they are convinced they are in a field -- whatever their particular field -- where so many lesser creatures do bad work and sing hosannah about it in lapping voices. There is a sort of blind war between them and the marshmallow-suckers, whatever their field; like all solitary things, be they demons or angels, they must contend with the fact that the suckers will band together, thus making the conflict more or less even. Out of that conflict and out of the nature of proud things and the nature of sexton beetles come terribly good writing, exciting bad writing, smoothly glib writing and a great deal of incidental dross from people who can do it well enough to sell but haven't been around long enough to learn whether they are makers or users. Out of the results of all this come the "trends" and "directions" in "literature" -- that is, out of what the makers make well, and out of what the users can sup from it to keep themselves alive until the next good thing is made. From this rabble of people under arms, some of them wearing parts of salvaged kit from either army, all of them "writers," the editors make their selections and the publishers package their products -- that is, they bet on various remedies of warlock, various twinings of sucker, and the stability of various compromises that have been reached as C models a book on what B has done in relation to an apparently purely new thought by A, which A may have thrown away in the core of an otherwise worthless short story written because he was promised the price of his rent in exchange for any # words that would justify his name on the cover. y I hope you have always known it is these ways; that indepen dent of any thrill of invention or discovery you may exchange among you -- reader, writer, editor, publisner -- there is the forest ferment of creativity as a thing in itself, and also the purse-lipped feasting and surreptitious salivating, and the simple arithmetic of money. I hope you have long ago guessed that what ties it all together is that we are all as much enemies as we are friends -- that we take from each other and prey on each other as well as give and confer; that there is real terror in the heart of a broken warlock and the heart of the sucker who hears his tread about him, real avarice in how they regard each other. In their lives is grubbiness as well as real delight and glory; the difference between a maker's story of treachery and a user's is that the maker has in fact been a traitor in his life at some time, and his life is in his chosen peers -- his treacheries as well as his vengeances were conducted on his kind and himself. As were his loves. And all this is sold for money, by him as well as by those too polite to betray or to love, but not too modest to peek. Clear? Ah, well, perhaps by this time next year... Out in the context of the above, let us recapitulate. I would like to announce the first annual Galaxy Bookshelf awards for pre-eminence in impressing me with one's work during the past fiscal year. These are given for work published in book form, irrespective of any previous publication outside that format. The actual awards consist of one heartfelt oath of envy, each, and are collectible at the first mutual opportunity following this announcement : Philip K. Dick, for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the best science-fiction novel of the year. (I notice they are calling it some kind of halfconscious failure, friend.) Poul Anderson, for Time and Stars, the best collection of the year; for "Escape From Orbit," the best short story of the year, as published in that collection. (That's two oaths, one of them in Lithuanian.) Doubleday # Company, Inc., for The Rest of The Robots (an omnibus of Isaac Asimov), the single most useful publishing idea of the year. Donald A. Wollheim, of Ace Books, for doing his job. Ultimo, I extend an apology to various people I have slighted and insulted in these pages over the past year; forgive me -- I misunderstood you. A yf"any, many years ago, Avram- Davidson and I were inthe same racket, he on his side of the street, I on mine. I speak of the men's true adventure writing business; in my case, "true". He was superb -- an exhaustive researcher combined with a masterful prose technician, better, if possible, at that than he was at fantasy or sf (though he recoils to see that judgment here). His articles, mainly for the old Cavalier, were genuinely valuable and striking pieces of reportage on such things as the charge of the Light Brigade -- which he did better in his compass than The Rason Why did in its -- and such conscientious, painstaking jobs as his piece on Sam Woodfill, the World War I American soldier who ought to have been as well-known as Alvin York. I inject myself into this review of Avram's Masters of The Maze (Pyramid) for three reasons, of which the first is that I was typical of all of the people I knew in that racket except Avram. I hope I do not totter publishing empires by admitting that we made it all up about Richthofen having been shot down because he had his mind on a masochistic blonde. We rolled our eyes in dumbstruck wonder when we saw Avram actually writing to real people for personal reminiscences on his famous subjects, and traveling great distances to check his facts on the spot. I cannot imagine he made a profit on it, and I doubt his editors realized what accounted for his accomplishments. The second reason is that the "true" adventure writer who serves as the human protagonist for Masters of The Maze is of the more numerous breed -- a hack stuck in his groove, seeking yet one more variation on "LoveStarved Arabs Raped Me Often," chirping too hard on his bottle and wanting nothing to do with the dying organization of old men who have for so long guarded Earth against the subtle invasion of the Chulpex. The Chulpex are one of the most real, more horrifying menaces from parallel worlds dreamed up by a science-fantasy writer. John Schoenherr's cover captures one precisely; when I read the book, they put me in mind of the crunch of dried shrimp, but I would not like to have the jaws necessary to crunch a Chulpex. The bare bones of the plot are soon-enough told: the Chulpex are inhuman, intelligent and avaricious. They live in a parallel world. A dimensional maze connects many parallel universes, obeying its own geometry, providing crossover doorways at odd and unexpected places. On Earth, an obscure sub-organization of Masonry has for many years been guarding all the exits from the maze -- which, by the way, is where Ambrose Bierce went -- but all these people are very old. The hack writer is the closest living relative of one of them, and he is inveigled into taking up his inheritance as a guardian before he fully understands it. Because he is ignorant, a particularly avaricious freelance Chulpex slips by him on its way to found a dynasty of its own -- a privileged Chulpex guard with ineluctable jealousy, bearing such wonderful herd-bull names as Arristemurriste and Arrettagor retta. In his hunt forflight from the maverick, Nathaniel Gordon (who may be a friendly gibe at Randall Garrett, but see below) reaches such places as the land of the Red Fish People, which is eminently a place where Ambrose Bierce would have loved to spend his declining years. With the aid of these Polynesoid but Siniacally scientific people a tender maid and others of her gender, Gordon enjoys lots of luck and a sort of glorifying desperation which makes him one of the Masters of the Maze and thus fit company for LaoTze (who, with Appolonius of Tyana, Benjamin Bathurst and sundry ilk, exists at the Center of the maze). Then he goes off to accomplish the destruction of the Chulpex, and of a right-wing Terrestrial statesman who planned to use the Maze. Noone -- no one -- but Avram Davidson could have made of this wreck-save-the-world plot a thing of such polished beauty (if the Baroque is beautiful to you). It wafts of the incense of scholarship for its own sake, of reference both classical and fannish, of the ridiculous device which is in fact the only plausible assertion, once you reflect on it -- I mean, who else but Appolonius and Benjamin Bathurst... you follow me? I mean -- well, hell he made me believe it -- this has got to be the oldest sf plot of them all, and to it Davidson has brought the storehouse of his mind, overturned it and made a kaleidoscope. "Communist Chulpex Ate My Wife" Nate Gordon muses as he renounces the detached life of the Masters and thinks he is going to die. He goes to live instead for six days with the Lost Tribes on the shore of the river Sambatyon, walking across when it rests on the Sabbath, and could you have written that? You could know about hairy chested men's adventure titles, and conceivably the Lord would then let you live long enough to also know about the Sambatyon, but could you have put them both within a paragraph of each other in a novel partially about the Masonic Order and incidentally about the political workings of a Southern town? I do not promise you that you will enjoy this novel, and if you do not. I hope you will not weary yourself by plugging through it regardless. Though it is good as a novel it still has marks of the short story writer all over it -- some of them, as indicated, fascinating. But aside from being a very fine piece of light reading, it promises a lot for the Davidson novels of the future, and this is, in the style of the back-page ads in the magazines we used to work, Your Chance To Get In On The Ground Floor. T)y stretching a point only -' slightly, we could say that all three books reviewed this time concern themselves with Earth's lonely guardians. Davidson's Nate Gordon is the traditional Poor Frightened Civilian who picks up the trailed string and finds himself ultimately unravelling the Universe; Keith Laumer's Retief is his direct opposite number. Galactic Diplomat, Doubleday, #, is a collection of nine Retief stories, from If, and all we ever deduce about Retief the man is that something inside him can't help but be affected by the fact that his name is "fighter" pronounced backwards. Not one blessed other thing are we told about what he is, as distinct from what he does. What he does is solve a lot of problems involving a lot of alien races who worship gods named Uk-Ruppa Tooty; where he works is in the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, usually as a nominal flunky to ambassadors named Nitworth. Nitworth (or whoever) blimps his way into trouble with one of these exotic races, either by believing what their rulers tell him or by trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Retief coolly, patiently -- and daringly -- repairs the damage by being either in touch with the common people or by contravening Nitworth's stupid interpretation of Earth's policy (which is also left totally unexplained). Retief is always right and Nitworth always gets the credit. Retief is in short and in this aspect, a combination of James Bond and Passepartout. James Bond and Alexander Botts? Marlon Brando and Dr. Zorba? I must confess I enjoyed the daylights out of this book, without for an instant being able to distinguish between one story and the next, or any other Retief stories. The copyright dates range faithfully up through the years from #, and I am sure there will be several items here you have missed. I would wait for the paperback, since four bucks is a lot for nine shots from the same angle, but I may have underestimated your fondness. Yominic Flandry (of Flandry of Terra, a collection of novelettes by Poul Anderson Chilton, #) walks the middle way; lonely, self-assured, concerned with his personal integrity in the service of Earth's corrupt empire, a trace more physical than cerebral -- but very physical -- he is the sort of series adventure hero who undermines himself because he is too real to have had so many things happen to him. But if you do not pause to wonder about this, the stories about him are good -- have been good since they started coming out in Planet when Anderson was much younger and presumably had not yet stopped to think that someday his whipcord-slim, perfectly handsome hedonistic hero would stop to think: "Well -- I suppose it all serves the larger good. It must. Our noble homosexual Emperor s ays so himself ." The quote is from "The Game of Glory," opening story in this volume. It was first published in #. "A Message in Secret" is from #, and the concluding story, which takes up half the book, is "The Plague of Masters," #. Back in the days when Flandry first appeared, he was overshadowed by Anderson's Planet novelettes about thallasocrats and autocthones on the ruddy seas and plains of Mars. As "A. A. Craig," Anderson was turning out these more than adequate variations on the theme of Leigh Brackett, and so were as many other Planet writers as were able. Flandry -- modelled faintly after The Saint, not much after Northwest Smith and certainly not after Brackett's Rhiannon -- was nothing much more than a change of pace, and as I recall he did not strike the proper spark in faithful sf adventure readers (me). This now seems a great pity, though Chilton is repairing my oversight for me, this being the second Flandry book from them. Anderson, as you must know, writes adventure stories with all the trappings -- dramatic weather, fantastic but solid settings usually with a touch of the second-derivative nostalgic to them (the cities are like Robin Hood's Nottingham; the freeman foresters among the giant trees of "Plague" remind one of Flash Gordon's Arborea), sloeeyed ladies of pantherish grace or Amazonian warrior-maids fighting two-handed, and much exploitation of Anderson's physical and social science background, which permits the hero to be arcanely physical in relation to technology. He rides a knee-steered motorcycle into battle with the motorized nomads of the great steppes of the planet Altai; in the same story, "A Message in Secret," he flies in the clutch of a giant aeromedusa which metabolizes hydrogen. The balance has tipped. Flandry is not too seriously out of tune with the sort of thing Anderson does most often these days, and assuming you like stories about heroes like, Matt Helm -- as distinguished from stories about heroes like Nero Wolfe -- you might like Flandry rather more than you do Nicholas Van Rijn, though I personally see no need to prefer one over the other. In "The Game of Glory," Flan dry's assignment is to find and kill an agent of the Merseian Empire, Earth's rival. Earth is corrupt, its empire great, the graft so pervasive that Flandry's methods for staving off the Long Night yet one more generation are always on the cheap. In #, ("A Message in Secret"), the writing is not as good. Too, Flandry does some flatly incredible things, such as instantly being able to ride one of those handlebar-less motorbikes at # kilometers per hour, which I suppose Retief could get away with, but then he smirks out the secret of how he got the vital message to Terra, and that's not like him. Perhaps he didn't care whether the bike would kill him; perhaps he was ruffled enough at missing the girl to want to preen a little about the message. "The Plague of Master's" is about a freelance effort of Flandry's -- he is not even on assignment when he investigates the mystery of Unan Besar, the Malaysian planet. Nor has he any clear reason for deciding it's too suspicious to pass up. Having discovered that the government of Unan Besar is a technocracy based on the crude fact that only the biochemists control the supply of monthly antidote pills for the planet's bacteriological noison, he goes off wenching and adventuring very cleverly, with a girl picked up in Act Two, and his only real object for the longest time is to get oi #s to stay alive with, when nothing essential prevented his playing Act Eight as Act Three. With the Arboreans -- sorry; the Ranauans -- he overthrows Ming the -- no, Tuan Sola Bandang -- and... Well, I would not have you think I'm being snide at Anderson's expense. But for one reason or another, the devil-maycare hero of the earliest stories became the socially conscious inner-directed man of #, the seeker out of extracurricular adventure in #. What he gave away prodigally in his first flush of manhood he regrets in his prime, and now he takes It. Perhaps he thinks his own Long Night is coming. I hope not. I like him; he is not the young merchant-adventurer or technol ogist, nor the hotblood popinjay however deadly, one encounters so often in Anderson's settings these days. They are all indubitably heroes, and I recognize them, admire them, and will read about them in preference to many other things. But I like Flandry because he is trying to do his best with really very few skills or backstops in a very complicated world; he does it so much better than I do that I can pleasurably delude myself he is like me.      In the Imagieon The world was imaginary, but it was vital to his survival -- as a relief from the world around himl T'andor leaned back on the warm silk of the lounge and stretched, letting his eyes wander up to the high ceiling of his palace and then drop down to the blonde who knelt at his feet. She was putting the finishing touches on his carefully manicured toenails while the voluptuous brunette with the mobile hips and the full red mouth leaned forward to pop another grape into his mouth. He studied the blonde, whose name was Cecily, and thought about the other service she had performed for him last night. That had been nice... very nice. But today he felt bored with her. just as he was bored with the brunette whose name he couldn't remember at the moment, and with the cuddly redheaded twins and with... Dandor yawned. Why were they all so damn worshipful and always so eager to please? It was almost, he thought with a wry grin, as though they were products of his imagination, or rather -- and he almost laughed aloud -- of that greatest of all man's inventions, the Imagieon. "There now, don't they look nice?" Cecily said, sitting back to admire his finished pedicure with pride. Dandor looked at the ten shining objects of her gaze and grimaced. It made him feel pretty silly. Then Cecily made him feel kissing his right foot with passionate red lips. "Oh, Dandor! Dandor, I love you so much," she murmured. Dandor resisted the temptation to use one of his newly pampered feet to give her a healthy kick on her round little bottom. He resisted it because even at times like this, when his life with these women began to seem unreal, he tried to be as kind as possible to them. Even when their worship and adoration threatened to bore him to death, he tried to be kind. So instead of kicking Cecily, he yawned. The effect was almost the same. Her blue eyes widened in fear, and the brunette raised wide eyes from the grape she was peeling, her lips starting to tremble. "You... you're going to leave us, aren't you?" Cecily asked. He yawned again and patted her head absentmindedly. "Just for a little while, darling." "Oh, Dandor!" the brunette wailed. "Don't you love us?" "Of course I do, but -- " "Dandor, please don't go," Cecily begged. "We'll do anything to make you happy!" "I know," he said, getting to his feet and stretching. "You're both very sweet. But somehow I just feel drawn to -- " "Please stay," the brunette pleaded, falling at his feet. "We'll have a party with champagne. Any kind of pleasure you desire. We'll go get the other girls... #I dance for you..." "I'm sorry, Daphne," he said, finally remembering her name, "but you girls are beginning to seem unreal to me. And when that hapens. I must go." "But -- " Cecily was crying so hard she could hardly get the words out -- "when you leave us... it's a-almost... as Although we were... turned off." Her words saddened him a little because in a way it was true. When he left it was almost like turning them off. But true or not, he couldn't do anything about it because he felt himself being drawn irresistibly toward that other world. He took one last look around at the incredible luxury of his palatial palace, at the beauty of his women and at the warm sun shining through the windows, and then he was gone. Hphe first tiling he heard when he came out of the Imagicon was the howling of the wind and the first thing he felt was the numbing cold. The net thing that assaulted his ears was the rasping screech of his wife's voice. "So you finally came out of it, did you?" Nona was yelling. "It's about time, you good-for-nothing little runt!" So he was really back on Nestrond, back on the coldest hell of a colonial world in any universe. He had often thought that he would never return. But here he was... back on Nestrond and back with Nona. "You've been gone long enough!" Nona said. She was a big, raw-boned woman with stringy black hair, a broad, flat face with thin lips and uneven, yellowish teeth. God but she's ugly, he thought as he stared at her. Beside her, Cecily and the others are goddesses. "It's a good thing you got back 'cause the ice wolves is actin' up and we need frozen ice moss for the fire and..." Dandor just stood there and listened as she went on with the long list of chores that needed doing. Why, he wondered, didn't she get one of her boy friends from down at the mines to do these things? He knew without being told that her lovers had been around while he was "gone." Nona was as faithless as she was ugly. And since there were twenty men to every woman on this planet, she had plenty of opportunity. "... and the cattleshed needs a new roof," she finished. When he didn't answer immediately, she thrust her face close to his. "Did you hear me? I said there's things to be done!" "Yes, I heard you," he said. "Then don't stand there like an idiot. Sit down and eat your breakfast and then get out and get to work!" Breakfast was a thick, greasy piece of rancid pork and a bowl of lukewarm grits. Dandor choked on it but finally forced it down. Then he put on his thermal suit and furs and started for the door. "Here, stupid!" Nona said, picking up a face mask from a pile of litter on the table and flinging it at him. "You want to freeze your nose off?" He slapped the mask on quickly so she wouldn't see the anger on his face, opened the door and plunged out. The wind hit him in the face, hurling jagged ice crystals against his mask. Nestrond! My God, why Nestrond? He thought longingly of the comparative warmth of the cabin as he stared out at the bleak landscape. He thought of the black box that was the Imagicon. It sat in the one clear corner of the cabin and was the only way back to... But no, he couldn't go back yet. There were too many things to be done here. So with an axe over his shoulder, he started across the frozen waste to the ancient peat bog where they cut their fuel. All morning long, with the wind raging at him and the bitter cold making every breath an aching torment in his chest, he cut and stacked the frozen peat. Then when the pale yellow sun peeked through the clouds of ice crystals for a moment and he saw it was almost directly overhead, he tied up a large bundle of the brick-like slabs and hoisted it onto his shoulder for the trip back to the miserable huts of Nestrond. Nona slapped a bowl of thin soup and a piece of stale bread down in front of him and called it lunch. He ate in silence and then went out behind the cabin to spend the afternoon digging the new cesspool. This made the work of the morning seem like a rest cure. The ground had been frozen since Nestrond first started to roll around its inadequate sun. By evening, his back and legs and thighs ached tormentingly. With only a foot of ground excavated, he had to give up when night fell and staggered back toward the cabin with only one thought in mind... sleep. nphe howl that wrenched him from his first troubled slumber seemed to come from the deepest pits of hell. "Wha... what's that?" he asked. "Ice wolves, you fool!" Nona screeched. "They're after the cattleshed! Get out there and stop them!" Dandor staggered to his feet and fumbled for his clothes as another howl rent the night. He reached for his laser rifle while Nona yelled again. "Hurry up! Those things can rip logs off a shed like it was kindlin'." He was out the door then with flashlight in one hand and rifle in the other. He saw them at once. There were two of the six-legged terrors. One of them was raised up on its four bactlegs, its massive jaws ripping at the timber of the shed. Dandor could hear the terrified bellow of the cattle inside. He ploughed through the snow toward the creature. It heard him and turned fiery red eyes in his direction. It kept on slashing at the logs for a second and then whirled and came at him in great leaping bounds. Caught by surprise, he had no time to drop the flashlight and lift the laser rifle to fringe position. He had to fire from the hip and the beam caught the monster in the shoulder. It wasn't good enough. He sidestepped as the huge body hurtled past him and then blasted its head off. Then he almost died himself as the decapitated thing went slithering through the snow, spurting blood everywhere. He almost died because for a split second he had forgotten its mate. He remembered only when the creature struck him from behind and sent him sprawling on the frozen ground. The monstrous beast was on top of him and he screamed as a claw ripped flesh away from his thigh and the powerful jaws moved toward his throat. The flashlight had been flung from his hand but the real rifle was still resting in its sling attached to his shoulder. He found the trigger and fired at full power. The laser beam tore off a leg and haunch of the ice wolf, and it fell away from him as he blasted it again. Then blackness closed in over him. When he came to, he was lying on the table in the cabin. Nona and a strange man were bending over him. "Well, you got yourself in a pretty mess this time!" Nona said as his eyes opened. "That leg is going to have to come off," the stranger said. "Are you a doctor?" Dandor asked in a husky croak. "Only one this side of Alpha Centaury," the man said. "The pain... can't you give me something for the pain?" "I gave you the last morphine I had. Back on Earth we might have saved that leg, but here -- " He made a helpless gesture. White-hot flame seemed to envelop the slashed leg. Dandor winced and then saw the half smile on Nona's lips as she said, "With no more morphine or anything else, cutting off that leg is gonna hurt like hell, ain't it, Doc?" "I got some whiskey in my car," the doctor said. "I'll go get it." T T e went hobbling off, and Nona leaned over Dandor and looked into his eyes. "It's really gonna hurt, sweetie. It's gonna hurt like it hurt me all those times when you went off and left me. When you went off in your black box." "No, Nona, no! It didn't hurt you. You're not -- " He almost said she wasn't capable of being hurt. But he stopped, because he didn't know for sure if that were true. "With only one leg, you're not gonna be able to get in that damn thing by yourself," she said. "You're gonna have to stay here and be nice to me." "Nona!! No, you don't understand!" He started to plead with her, but then the doctor was back with a quart of whiskey and his black bag. "Here, drink this fast," the man said, handing Dandor the bottle. He drank deeply and quickly. But it didn't help much. As the doctor cut and sawed, Dandor was surehis screams would burst his skull. At times he wondered why his curses didn't snap the straps that held him down or drive off the two tormentors bending over him. "Well, I guess that's it," the doctor was saying when the agony dragged him up into consciousness again. "We're gonna have to cauterize this stump or he'll bleed to death. I ain't got nuthin' but fire to do it with either. Come help me heat up the poker, woman." Dandor came fully awake as he caught the over-the-shoulder look Nona gave him and saw her eyes dart toward the Imagicon. It was almost as though she had said aloud, "You'll belong to me now... only to me. There won't be no more of that goin' off." But she couldn't! How could she? Through the haze of morphine, alcohol and pain, Dandor tried to ask himself... why should she treat him this way? He couldn't think of any answer. And as they hurried off to prepare the cauterizing iron for the bloody stump of his leg, the black coffin-like shape of the Imagicon filled his eyes and his mind. If the pain hadn't already been more than reason could bear, he wouldn't have had the courage to roll off the table and begin crawling toward the black box, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The black box Somehow he knew it representer' a surcease from pain, a promise of ultimate safety. He reached it without their being aware of his actions, and by making a supreme effort, he pulled himself up high enough to press his palm against the sensor that identified him instantly and was the only thing in this or any other universe that could open it. He collapsed, more dead than alive, into the Imagicon and it closed silently over him. Then there was a bright, warm world around him, and bright young faces above him. t"vh, Dandor, darling! Darling," Cecily cried, put ting her soft, warm arms around him. "Sweetheart, you've come back!" Daphne whispered. "We're so happy to see yen"' the redheaded Terri murmured "We're so happy to see you!" her twin, Jerri, repeated. "And I'm the happiest of all!" Dandor assured them, gazing down at his leg... at his perfectly whole, intact leg which felt no pain whatever. "Thank God! Thank God, I'm back!" The Imagicon had worked! It had worked once again! It had taken him to the world of imagination and back again to reality... to wonderful, wonderful reality! talking about me? Because America is no longer ashamed to talk about me and other children with birth defects. And America is doing something to stop birth defects through March of Dimes treatment and research. # # Dandor sat up and looked around at his own warm, marvelous world. It was the world of Earth in #, the world a hundred years after The Plague, the Plague which had attacked the male genes and reduced the male population to a few thousand and made each man the center of an eager and worshipful harem of women. Many of the surviving men had not been able to stand the strain. Too many years of adoration, too many years of having everything and every woman they wanted had proved too much for them. Then there had come the Imagicon, the invention that made any world a man desired seem absolutely real. Some men had used it to create even more exotic and wonderful worlds than the one they lived in, but that had been only more of a good thing and had made them more dissatisfied than ever. Daf.dor had been wise. With his Imagicon, he had created an entirely different kind of world... a world of cold and terror called Nestrond. Dandor had known a great truth. What good was paradise without something to compare it to? Without a taste of hell from time to time, how could a man appreciate heaven? Everybody knows Mulligan. He's the fellow that turned the Solar System upside down and shook itl # Cvurs is essentially a tragic age," the Chief said, polishing his Dunhill pipe against tile side of his Roman nose; "so we refuse to take it tragically." "Very well put, sir," I ventured to comment. "But this man," he went on, tapping with his pipe-stem the #-D xograph of Mulligan Mondrian on his desk, "refuses to take our age even seriously. Because of his jeux d'esprit, Thai rice-production is off thirty per cent. Coffee is twelve dollars a pound. We've had stiff notes from Canada, Korea and the midget sword in the halls of the UN, egged on by one of Mondrian's monstrous jests. What will he do next? We cannot wait to see. Find the man, Himmel; and I'll get you a GS-#. Fail, and I'll guarantee you steady work weeding lawns for the Sahara Reclamation Authority." "Sir!" I said. I double-timed out to the waiting jet. Twenty minutes later, I was unfolding my credentials in the office of a Terre Haute high school. "Felix Himmel, special agent of the Federation of Federal Investigative Agencies, Bureaus, and Committees," I announced to the brunette, richly curved school secretary. "Tell me all you know about Mulligan Mondrian, class of '#." "I danced with Sweet Mulligan at the junior prom, the happiest night of my life," she said. She closed her eyes and hummed a snatch of Moonrust. I patted her cheek to recall her to the present. "Mulligan had class," she said. "He rode to school in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith phaeton. His chauffeur wore steel-gray gauntlets and called Mulligan mein Herr. Once he let me sit at his table in the school cafeteria. We had a sturdy little Burgundy with our sloppy joes." She sighed and slipped a folder under my arm. "His records, Felix." "Business first, my small," I murmured, peeling her importunate fingers from the back of my neck. I flipped through the file. "H'm, what's this?" Signed by the teacher who'd served as head of the English Department and third-assistant basketball coach (Defense) during my subject's high school career, it was a memo reporting: "Mulligan has got the Athalete's Foot." Some sleuth's-instinct led me to slip this bit of paper into my pocket. "Later, sweetness," I said, freeing myself, unlocking the door, and closing it firmly behind me. I made down the hall to interview the incumbent of the Mulligan Mondrian Memorial Chair of Classical Sanskrit. Swami Jairamdas T. Chattopadhyaya, though having no English, did speak Malayalam, which I'd had drummed into my head during that mess on the Malabar Coast. Swamiji, characteristically inverted in the Rirshasana posture, explained that his department had been endowed as Mondrian's parting gift to his high school; and that the presentation had been made with the stipulation (unique, so far as I know, in Hoosier secondary education) that each future student, as prerequisite to graduation, maintain satisfactory grades during the four-year course. Chatt's only hint as to Mondrian's present whereabouts was a terse, "Look to the stars." nphe department plane took me next to Monte Carlo, where I spoke with the nowretired teacher who'd served as Dean of Boys during the Mondrian years at Central High. I learned a bit more about Sweet Mulligan's Bunny-Herd, that corps of sketchily attired drum majorettes who had attended the lad in study hall and at basketball games. Nothing more. "I should enjoy helping you Federal fellows find Mondrian," my host testified, enriching my tulip-glass yet again with his exquisite brandy. He frowned as a shadow passed over the patio. "You must find him," he said. "But all I can tell you, Mr. Himmel, is that hunting after white whales was always Mondrian's chief sport. When you catch up with him, I wager he'll be holding his harpoon poised to puncture something pale, fat and smug. Why don't you inquire at the University? It was always one of his favorite fishing-grounds."  Plump and pale, but no longer proud was the night custodian of the student lounge at Indiana University's Department of Xenology, in the School of Overskies Studies. Once splendid in tenure, lately President of the Big Ten University, the custodian now wore Iron Man overalls and chewed Brown's Mule as he related to me the Scandal of Double-oh-naught. "Eldritch, Mr. Himmel, how that gentle-talkin' broth of a lad warmed his way into our hearts; only to destroy 's." Mondrian's researches in Martian philology were from the first so insightful ("though it's been proved his best translations were cribs from the works of Elbert Hubbard") that his professors eagerly accepted the boy's offer to take on the task of reading proof for The Loose-Leaf Enchiridion of Demotic and Hieratic Martian Epigraphy, a prestige journal in its field. Under the proofreadership of Mulligan Mondrian, the Enchiridion, originally a biennial, began appearing daily; and with both a morning and an evening edition. The subscription list, eleven man entered upon his work, forced a press-run of half a million copies before the unfortunate President of the University, casually leafing through a current issue, discovered to his horror ("my each particular hair stood on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine; and you better believe it!") that proofreader Mondrian had tunneled into Jordan Hall, home of the Kinsey Institute, to secure entertaining copy. The young journalist had run. as serials, the confidential sexdiaries of three dozen historical figures, living and dead; and had illustrated them with fourcolor selections from the pornographic art of five continents and three planets. Despite an amicus-brief arguing that the youngster's limerick sequence. Mars is a FourLetter Word, represented a giant step forward in epigraphic exegesis. Mondri an got the brush, the President his broom. II forking on the clue that my ' ' subject preferred a scarce Canadian whiskey, I picked un his trail in Ottawa. My plants in the Ministry of External Affairs could not (or would not) reveal how Mondrian obtained Canadian citizenship, nor why Parliament commissioned the callow youth to carry on ethnographic surveys in the far north. "Muktuk Mulligan," as he was dubbed by his adoring, all-girl scientific team, headed into the permafrost country so late in the year that seasoned arcticists warned that he'd be caught by the first blizzards. As indeed he was. Mondrian and his staff were forced to huddle together through the winter in a trapper's hut on Victoria Island. (Floor plans of the hut have recently appeared in a popular publication. The reader is directed to "Playboy's High-Latitude Hideaway," Ptayboy, vol. #, no. #; March '#.) The explorers' return, none the worse for their privations, amazed the scientific world, as did Mondrian's announcement of his discovery of a race of Spanishspeaking Eskimos inhabiting a previously uncharted island in Viscount Melville Sound. By the time the chilled "Eskimos" (a busload of Texican migrant agricultural workers recruited from Michigan tomato-fields on the pretext they'd be paid #c a peck for gathering reindeer moss) had been rescued from their "island" (a Dow Styrofoam raft constructed by Mondrian for the purpose of his hoax), the adventurer had sold his memoirs to half a dozen newspapers, including the New York Times ("Northern Community Preserves Tradition of Cervantes, de Vega"), Pravda ("Refugees from Falangist Revanchism Battle Snow, Ice"), and The National Insider ("HotBlooded Northmen Sleep Raw.) The Republican Canadian Mounted Police traced Mondrian to Hong Kong, where they lost their man. Drawing upon chased a suggestion that Hong Kong is convenient to Seoul, where a year ago there had rested on the lawn before the Presidential Palace a pearl of great price. Built by Krupp of Essen for Korea's inchoate force de frappe, the spaceship Prince of Heaven was the first of the bubbleships, a vessel that commanded the power of a forcefield to float it, a steeland vacuum balloon, up through the expensive first three hundred miles of the gravity-well to a launching-pad within the suburbs of space. M. Jules d'Harnoncourt Pak. Commissioner of the Surete Na tionale de Coree, spoke to me: C C Hphat damned fellow with the beard properly seduced our National Assembly, speaking the French of a Racine with the vigor of a Voltaire. Lying in his excellent teeth, he maintained that he'd discovered on Ganymede celadon gravefurnishings dating from the earliest Silla Dynasty. This was dizzy stuff to our legislators, who had just been introduced to La Gloire; and who had thereupon passed a law making compulsory the teaching of our history as Nation Number One, beginning : "Hwanung, son of the Creator, visited a Korean pine-forest in # B.C., from which date our years are yet reckoned. The distinguished tourist there surprised a lovely virgin, just transformed from hairy beardom to smooth womanhood. Hwanung breathed upon the girl, conceiving by his respiratory art Tang'un, born some fifteen minutes later as the first King of Korea. Officially. "Well, now," Commissioner Pak continued. "This bewhiskered youth, whom I most sincerely believe to have been camelspawn Mulligan Mondrian, represented that he required our spaceship (everybody's incometax for the next ten years) to explore Heaven more completely, there to search out the starry homeland of the founder of our Hermit Kingdom. "So we gave him our SS Prince of Heaven, cheering wildly and singing our Chant National, a song with the same tune, and on this occasion much the same spirit, as the Auld Lang Syne caroled by inebriated Western boulevardiers on #I December. "Mulligan Mondrian had appointed as his co-emissary to the gods the teen-aged and nubile daughter of our President." M. Pak sighed. "No bear, she. Although from the manner in which Mondrian breathed upon her I should not be entirely amazed were she to give birth in season to a new King of Con. Be that as it may, our visitor and his tender lieutenant rose skyward, followed by our agnostic prayers. More kimchi, Himmel-Sonsang?" Regretting my first, I declined a second serving of this Korean piece de resistance, a sort of sauerkraut blended with soysauce and lent authority by mature fish. I was flying to the moon, and had been warned to prepare for the journey by ingesting a low-residue diet. Moonside, I munched Turns and drove by rented crawler to Eratosthenes Station in the south Aprennines. It was there, on pretext of searching for traces of the moon-insect swarms described by W.H. Pickering in #, that Mondrian mined ice from a fossil glacier, purchased calcium carbide from a Chinese sourdough working the Marco Polo quarries and with the help of his Korean girl-friend blended the two to produce acetylene gas, which he hydrated and hydrogenated to manufacture a very fair grade of ethyl alcohol. (The curious reader is invited to use the margin of the page to work out the equations of this amusing reaction, not forgetting to utilize finely-divided nickel as catalyst.) Mondrain watered down the juice from his chemical plant for sale to the Russian station at Copernicus as Smirnoff Vodka, accepting in payment Soviet diamonds from the pipes of Mount Dyson. Just before his moonshine plant was raided by the Lunar Authority's Revenue Agents, Mondrian escaped, leaving behind the Korean President's daughter and taking with him both his ill-gotten diamonds and the Soviet scientific team's junior selenologist, Sonia Nebitskaya Suslik, whom he had won at blackjack. A s footnote, it will be remembered that the Lunar Authority's men claim to have discovered in Mondrian's abandoned bubblehut more than a thousand living individuals of a mantis-like creature, each the length of a man's hand, each having eight twelve-jointed legs and four rudimentary wings. When the agents burst into the bubblehut, according to their subsequent report, these lunar arthropods attempted to communicate by scratching elaborate geometrical designs in the dust of the furniture. These were, needless to say, the controversial Mondrian Mantes. No specimen of this insect has yet been examined by a trustworthy xenologist, inasmuch as in his amazement Captain (now Private) Finnian Fenn had left Mondrian's airlock wide open. Abandoning their efforts at graphic communion, the entire company of mantes hopped off to disappear in the shadows of the Sinus Aestuum ("Bay of Summer"), singing in telepathic chorus. "It was very like," Pvt. Fenn told me, "a marching-band of tiny glockenspiels." Their ship stocked with frozen dinners and foul-weather gear, Mulligan Mondrian and Miss Sonia Nebitskaya Suslik set out for Pluto, counting on the superiority of their Korean vessel to win them a planetfall never before achieved. Captain Mondrian's first cisMartian task was to re-christen his stolen vessel the Star Ship Kalman, painting on her bow the name of his personal hero, that #th-century foe of censorship and King of Hungary, Kalman the Book-Lover. Why did Mondrian undertake so arduous a journey? I asked just this question of Miss Suslik, whom I met in the Virgo Room of the Constellation Club, in Atlantic City. "Chust for laughs," Miss Suslik suggested. She recalled that Mondrian had with him an enormous banner of the Peoples' Republic of Albania, which he would often wave about his head in the ship's lounge, shouting ribald, pseudoStalinist slogans; and that he had among his papers a passport issued by that most Plutonian of nations. My guess is that he amused himself by picturing the discomfiture of those U.S. and Soviet astronauts who would someday reach the farthest island of our solar sea only to find the double-headed eagle of their pipsqueak adversary already in possession. As to the tedium of the trip, "We were nod," Miss Suslik reported to me, blushing prettily across her Pavlov Fizz, "always wavink flags." Somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune, the SS Kalman received a Mayday call in standard Morse. Surprised to hear English spoken (so to speak) so far from home, the Kalman's skipper radared in on the signal. '-p'he ship that appeared on his viewscreens was, to employ Mondrian's meiosis, another breed of cat. The paradox of an extrasolar beings having recourse to an Earthly call for help was explained when Mondrian visited the alien ship. Its sole passenger, whom we now refer to as the Brunswick Creature, had just left our planet; and had come down with one of those tourista complaints that so often vex the delicate traveler. Mondrian consoled the Brunswick Creature as best he could, then returned to the Kalman to get a can of white powder from the medicine cabinet in ship's head. He allowed Miss Suslik to accompany him back to the Creature's vessel, it being locked to the Kalman by an access-tub. The testimony that follows is transcribed from a tape-recording of Miss Suslik's debriefing, held at the Virgo Room, Atlantic City, where the junior selenologist was abandoned by her whilom protector. It may be helpful to hold in mind the fact that the Russian girl was blonde, blue-eyed and contoured a perfect #-#-#; that her tongue struck English consonants with the sweetness of a lovingly plucked, far-off balalaika; and that the girl had three advanced degrees in xenography and four double Pavlovs at the time of our interview. I quote the tape: HI MM EL : "Please describe, Miss Suslik, the physical appearance of the Creature." Mr. Himmel, I have seen on the Tay Bay, where people hurl globes at standink-on-their-ends clubs? Okay? Da. Bowlink. So. Such a ball, so big..." flect that Respondent standing (very prettily) on tiptoe, holds her right hand approximately three meters from the carpet." like for fingers? Outside of Creature all shiny black. Slot all fuzzy white. Creature talked Russian and English, creaky squeaky, like had sore t'roat. Voice from out of slot. Had learned from Chicago. Had visited. Had watched 'round. Also in Minsk." Nebitskay, ascertain what manner of information this surreptitious surveillance was designed to adduce?" (Translation difficulty resolved as) : writer and professional greedy." (Translation difficulty resolved as) : HPhe next several responses consist largely of semantic quibbles between myself, darling Sonia and the bartender of the Constellation Club. In precis: The Brunswick Creature is hermaphroditic (or, as Mondrian said, "ACDC, with portable power"). It utilizes its single orifice, or omnipore, for ingestion of food and drink, for excretion, for reproduction ("they extrude, secrete and exult," Sonia Nebitskaya explained, "but only in private"), for sensing the environment with a battery of transducers (rather like a photocopy machine, the Creature sees only items it engulfs, its omnipore being studded with eyes and coated with a luminescent membrane) and for sound-production. This settled, back to the tape. o' drinks. How, Sonia sweet, did your companion propose to assist the creature?" crawl into Creature's mouth-etc. With flashlight, he look around inside. He call me to hand in can of white powder. I hand in can of white powder. Mulligan sift white powder around inside Creature, like salting giant clam. Comes out." Mondrian, who after all had studied xenology at the prestigious School of Overskies Studies, have any explanation of the Brunswick Creature's distress?" tell Creature, 'Man, you got worst case Athlete's Foot of the Orifice I ever seen.' Creature then explain how he got exposed. Outside Japanese tea-house, he sees line of shoes, look like succulent lizards of his native land. Hungry, tired of biscuits and Spam, he eats shoes. 'Stringy,' he writes in notebook. 'No star for Japanese inn.' Then, one day later, is Creature sick. Cannot see, excrete, extrude, exult or talk plain." of white powder that Mondrian scattered inside the Brunswick Creature?" for Athlete's Foot. Sweet Mulligan has same trouble, but ( snicker ) wit' him, does not interfere wit' extrudink, exultink, secretink, etc." was Mondrian's medication effective?" Creature all good again! And so happy! He say, Anyt'ing you Wan', Baby, iss yours!" an reply to the Creature's offer of carte blanche?" card, Sweet Mulligan reply, T got good healt', dirty mind and good lookink woman. What more could ex-EagleScout esk? My momma, she said I wouldn't be satisfied wit'out little green fence around the world; but I'm pretty heppy now, t'ank you very much. Here, if you want to do somet'ink for me, Creaturefella, maybe you stop, say "Hello" next time you're in Solar System.' And Sweet Mulligan card, which he insert in Brunswick Creature." wrought) : "Did you see that card, Miss Suslik? Do you know Mulligan Mondrian's present whereabouts?" know where iss Sweet Mulligan, you t'ink I be sitting in stinkink Atlantic City wit', no offense, capitalist jackal?" reply to Mondrian?" 'Here is to get me,' he say; and give Sweet Mulligan small box with toggle-switch, designed for being operated inside orifice but okay with fingers in a pinch. 'Give me a ring any time, Doc,' Brunswick Creature say; and then 'Good-by;' and we go back to SS Kalman and to Pluto and Atlantic City, in that order. And when I come out after powderink my nose, he iss gone." Thus far the record. I've failed to get hold of either Mulligan Mondrian or that toggle-box wherewith the Brunswick Creature can be talked to. And the woodpile is still out there. A ppearing some three weeks ago, squeezed out of nowhere like so many Fred Hoyle hydrogen atoms, wooden stakes three-by-thirty miles in crosssection, painted Nile green, began to circle the Earth, three hundred miles up. These fence-posts interfere with astrogation, agriculture and man's contemplation of his universe. Though the Chief's taken me off the Mondrian case, I've still got a vital mission. I'm weeding out the centers of the O's in the message we're planting in the Sahara Desert Reclamation Area. Grassy fields each some fifty miles long-by-wide, shaped to be visible from space, our ninety-four oases spell out Mother Earth's plea to her wandering Mondrian: Don't miss Heinlein's greatest novel since Stranger in a Strange Land The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein Now in IF -- make sure you get your copies early! Serial Mankind was rich beyond avarice and to all intents and purposes immortal... and it was doomed I ynce, many years before (it was actually several centuries, counting the deep-freeze time), little Chuck Forrester had caused a three-car auto smash that put two people in the hospital. He had done it with his little slingshot, lying out in the tall grass next to his house in Amityville, taking shots at the cars on the highway. His aim was too good. He hit one. He got a state policeman in the eye. The cop had lost control, jumped into the opposite lane, sideswiped a convertible and skidded into a station wagon. Nobody died; the policeman didn't even lose his eye, though it Hfe name was Forrester, and he had been burned to death. But not permanently... for the medical science of six centuries of progress had learned how to freeze a man at the instant of dying, hold him in the slow, dreamless calm of the liquid helium chambers... and bring him back to life with all his mortal wounds healed and his body as strong and healthy as it had ever been. He might die again -- but the same science that had brought him back to life could do it again, and again. He was, in fact, immortal. And so was all the world. Brave world! thought Forrester, amazed and delighted, and set out to enjoy his new life; and within hours of waking up, on his first day in the new life, he was killed again. Why? It had been senseless -- an unprovoked beating. He was put back together again and turned loose; but he was out of money, and needed a job; and the fine new world no longer looked so fine. But Forrester had friends to help him -- a girl, Adne; her two children; a few others. They showed him how to apply for a job; he did; he got it -- and discovered that his new employer was an alien from a planet of the star Sirius, sworn enemy of everything on Earth! He lost the job and lost his money, and found himself with the poor unfortunates of the #th Century called "The Forgotten Men". The one friend he made there was brutally kiiid before his eyes. Then the Sirian he had worked for found him, and tricked him into making it possible for the Sirian to escape Earth -- presumably to gather a war fleet to begin Earth's invasion! was close for a while; and as it happened they didn't think to look around the neighborhood for kids with slingshots. The accident went down on the books as due to a pebble thrown up by a passing car. But Chuck didn't know that. For a solid year afterward he woke up in a sweat of fear every night, and all his days were horrors of anticipating being caught. It was just so now. It was perfectly clear to Forrester that he was the one who had helped the Sirian circumvent the electronic defenses that kept the aliens bound to Earth. He could work it out step by step in his mind. The Sirian had shopped around until it found a human being ignorant enough, and pliable enough, to be unsuspicious. It had contrived to program him to fly it to the site of an obsolete, but still workable, spaceship. The Sirian had been unconscious, or in whatever state in a Sirian passed for unconscious, so that the electronic alarms would register nothing. It had commanded him to load it aboard the ship and launch it into space. And he had done as he was commanded, in the fuzzy-minded suggestibility it had doped him into. Perfectly clear! He could see every step. And if he could, certainly others could. All they had to do was take the trouble to think it through, and certainly all the world was thinking hard about the Sirians. The view-all was full of news: special investigating teams ransacking the site of the take-off for clues, a hundred new probes launched to guard the perimeter of the Solar System. Condition Yellow alert declared and everyone cautioned to remain within easy distance of a raid shelter at all times. Forrester kept waiting for the hand to fall on his shoulder and the voice to cry: "You, Forrester! You are the man!" But it did not come... # j eanwhile, the flap over the escape of Sirian Four had had one good effect, and that was that Adne was so interested in the excitement that she became friendly to Forrester again. She even fed him, let him clean himself up in her bath and, as the children were off on some emergency drill with their age-peers, gave him their room to sleep in when it became obvious he was near collapse. Voices woke him -- Adne's and a man's. " -- mostly for the kids, of course. I'm not so worried for myself." "Natch, honey. God! At a time like this! Just when the Society's ready to swing." "It wouldn't be so bad, but it makes you wonder about a lot of other things. I mean, really, how could they let that thing escape?" A masculine growl: "Hah! How? Haven't I been telling you how? It's letting machines do men's work! We've put our destiny in the hands of solid-state components, so what do you expect? Don't you remember my White Paper last year? I said, 'Guarding men's liberties is a post of honor and only the honored should hold it.' " Forrester sat up, recognizing the voice: Taiko Hironibi. The Luddite. "I thought you were talking about the coppers," said Adne's voice . "Same thing! Machines should do machine work, men should do men's -- hey, what's that?" Forrester realized he had made a noise. He stood up, feeling ancient and worn, but somewhat better than before he slept, and was coming out toward them even before Adne answered Taiko. "It's only Charles. Come in here, Charles, why don't you?" Taiko was standing before the viewwall, joymaker in his hand. His thumb was on one of the studs, and apparently he had just been giving himself a shot of one brand or another of euphoria. Even so, he glowered at Forrester. "Oh, don't be like that," said Adne. "Huh," said Taiko. "If I can forgive him, you can forgive him. You have to make allowances for the kamikaze ages." "Hah," said Taiko. But the euphoria prevailed -- either that from the joymaker, or the spice of danger that was sweeping them all. Taiko clipped the joymaker to his belt, rubbed his chin, then grinned. "Well, why not? All us human beings have to stand together now, right? Put 'er there." Gravely they shook hands. Forrester felt altogether ridiculous doing it; he was not sure what he had done to offend Taiko in the first place, he was not particularly anxious to be forgiven by him now. Although, he reminded himself, Taiko had once offered him a job, and a job was something he needed. Though with the Sirian threat so urgent and imminent now it was at least an open question whether the Ned'Lud Society would need any more workers... It could not hurt to find out. Before he could change his mind, Forrester said rapidly: "I want you to know, Taiko, that I've been thinking a lot about what you said. You were right, of course." Taiko's eyes opened. "About what?" "About the danger of the machines, I mean. What I think is, men should do men's work and machines should do machine work." "Yes?" "There's only one computer you can trust." Forrester tapped his skull with a forefinger. "The one up here." "Sure, but -- " "It just bums me up." said Forrester angrily, "to think that they left the safeguarding of our planet to solid-state components! If only they'd listened to you!" TX#"ith part of his attention For ' rester could hear a smothered giggle from Adne, but he ignored it. "I want you to know." he cried, "that I've come to some conclusions over the last few days, and I'm for the Ned Lud Society a hundred per cent. Let me help, Taiko! Call on me for anything!" Taiko gave the girl a look of absent-minded puzzlement, then returned to Forrester. "Well," he said, "I'm glad to hear that. I'll keep that in mind, if anything comes up." It took all of Forrester's selfcontrol to keep his expression friendly and eager; why was Taiko being so slow? But Adne rescued him. Suppressing her g : ggles, she said excitedly: "Say, Taiko! Why don't you give Charles a job with the Society? it." Taiko frowned and hesitated, but Forrester didn't give him a nobly. "I meant what I said; glad to help." Taiko shrugged after a second and said, "Well, fine, then, Forrester. Of course, the money's not much -- " "Doesn't matter a bit!" cried Forrester. "It's what I want to do! Uh, how much?" "Well, basic scale is twentysix thousand -- " "A day?" "Sure, Forrester." "It doesn't matter," said Forrester largely. "I only want to serve any way I can." And, exultant, he allowed himself to be given a drink to celebrate, which he enlarged to be a meal, Adne tolerantly amused. And all the while the view-all was displaying scenes of alarm and panic unheeded. Forrester had not forgotten that he had betrayed the Earth to the Sirians, he had only submerged that large and unpleasant thought in the smaller, but more immediate, pleasure of having escaped from the Forgotten Men. He drank a warm, minty froth and ate nut-like little spheres that tasted like crisp pork; he accepted a spray of a pinkly evanescent cloud from Adne's joymaker that made him feel about seventeen again -- briefly. Tomorrow would be time enough to worry about what he had done to the world, he thought. For today it was enough to be eating well and to have a place in the scheme of mankind. But all his worries came back to him when he heard his name spoken. It was Taiko's joymaker that spoke it, and it said: "Man Hironibi! Permit an interruption, please. Are you in the company of Man Forrester, Charles Dalgleish?" "Yes, sure," said Taiko, a beat before Forrester opened his mouth to plead with him to deny it. "Will you ask Man Forrester to speak his name, Man Hironibi?" "Go ahead, Forrester. It's to identify you, see?" TT'orrester put down the cup of frothed mint and took a deep breath. This pink cloud of joy might as well never have been. He felt every year of his age, even the centuries in the freezer. He said, because he could think of no excuse for not saying it: "Oh, all right. Charles Dalgleish Forrester. Is that what you want?" Promptly the joymaker said: "Thank you, Man Forrester. Your acoustic pattern is confirmed. Will you accept a message of fiscal change?" That was quick, thought Forrester, clutching at a feeling of relief; the thing only wanted to asknowledge his new job! "Sure." "Man Forrester," said Taiko's joymaker, "your late employer, now permanently removed from this ecology, left instructions to disburse his entire residual estate as follows: to the League for Interspecial Amity, one million dollars; to the Shoggo Central Gilbert and Sullivan Guild, Fraternity of Peace Clubs, five seven hundred sixtythree thousand one hundred forty-two dollars, estimated as of this moment -- mark -- to be transferred to the account of his last employee as of date of removal, to wit yourself. I am now so transferring this sum. Man Forrester. You may draw on it as you wish." Forrester sank weakly back against the cushions of Adne's bright, billowy couch. He could not think of anything to say. "God bless," cried Adne, "you're rich again, Charles! Why, you lucky creature!" "Sure are," echoed Taiko, grasping his hand warmly. Forrester could only nod. But he was not really sure that he was so lucky as he seemIt was a lot of money, even in this age of large numbers! It would keep him in comfort for a long time, surely; it would finance all sorts of pleasures and pursuits; it would remove him from the whim of Taiko's pleasure and insure him against a relapse to the Forgotten Men. But what would happen, Forrester thought painfully, when someone asked, first, who that late employer happened to be -- and why that employer, before returning to his native planet circling around the star Sirius, had so lavishly rewarded Charles Forrester? XV t'V#'ou look tired, Charles," said Adne kindly. "Sweat, his wealth worries him," said Taiko, grinning. "You ought to come with us and relax," Adne nodded. "It's everybody's duty to keep fit -- now more than ever," Taiko urged. "You're being very good to me," Forrester said gratefully. But what he really wanted was to sit in that room and watch the view-wall. One by one the remote monitoring stations of Earth's defense screen were reporting in, and although the report from each one of them so far was the same -- "No sign of the escaped Sirian" -- Forrester wanted to stay with it, stay right in that room watching that viewwall, until there was some other report. To make sure that Earth was safe, of course. But also to find out, at the earliest possible moment, if the (hopefully) recaptured Sirian gave out any information about his accomplice... "Well, we're going crawling," said Adne. "And we really ought to take off right now." Forrester said irritably, "Wait a minute, what did they just say about Groombridge #?" "They said what they've been saying for a week, dear Charles. That thing they spotted is only a comet. Are we going to crawl or aren't we?" Taiko said humorously, "Charles is still a little dazed with his new loot. But look, old buddy, some of us have got things to do." Forrester took his eyes from the view-wall's star map and looked at Taiko, who winked and added: "Now that you're on the team, you ought to learn the ropes." "Team?" said Forrester. "Ropes?" "I have to do a communication for the Society," Taiko explained. "You know. What you used to call a widecast. And as you're on the payroll now you ought to come along and see how it's done, because frankly -- " he nudged Charles -- "it won't be too long before you're doing them yourself." "But first we crawl," said Adne, "so shall we the sweat get going?" S o they hustled Forrester along, muttering and abstracted as he was, until he realized that he was attracting attention to himself. He stopped, because he didn't want to do that. It might be, thought Forrester, that the right and proper thing for him to do was to go to someone in authority -- if he ever found anyone in authority in this work!, except maybe the joymaker -- and say, frankly and openly, "Look, sir. I seem to have done something wrong and I wish to make a statement about it. Under what I guess was hypnosis I made it possible for that Sirian to escape, thus blowing the whole security of the human race forever." Confess the whole thing, and take his medicine. Yes, he thought, some time I probably had better do just that. But not right now. Meanwhile he tried to look as much like everybody else as he possibly could, and if this required him to be thrilled but casual about the danger of an invasion fleet of Sirians appearing in the sky at any moment to crush Earth, then he would do his best to seem thrilled but casual. "Well," he cried gaily, "we sure had a good run for our money! Best little old masters of the planet I ever saw! But may the best race win, right?" Adne looked at him, then at Taiko, who shrugged and said, "I guess he's still a little shook." Dampened, Forrester concentrated on observing what was going on around him. Taiko and the girl were bringing him to a part of Shoggo he had not previously visited, south along the shore to what looked like a left-over World's Fair. Their cab landed and let them out in a midway bustling with groups and couples in holiday mood, surrounded by buildings with a queer playtime flavor. Nor was the flavor confined to the build ings. The place was a carnival of joy and what Forrester at once recognized as concupiscence. The aphrodisiac spray that individual joymakers dispensed in microgram jolts was here a mist hanging in the air. The booths and displays were shocking to Forrester, at first, until he had a few deep breaths of the tonic, the invigorating air. Then he began at last to enjoy himself. "That's better," cried Adne, patting him. "Down this way, past the Joy Machine!" Forrester followed along, observing his surroundings with increasing relaxation and pleasure. The place was a horticultural triumph as well as everything else. Flowers and grasses grew out of the ground he walked on and the margins at his sides; out of elevated beds that leaned out to the midway with emerald grapes and bright red luminous berries; out of geometrical plantings that hung on the sides of the buildings. Even on the walk itself, among the happy humans, there were what looked like shrubs bearing clusters of peach and orange-colored fruits -- but they moved. They stumped clumsily and slowly about on rootlike legs. "In here," said Adne, clutching at his arm. "Hurry up!" cried Taiko, shoving him. They entered a building like a fort, and went down a ramp surrounded by twinkling patterns of light. The concentration of joymaker spray was a dozen times stronger here than in the open air. Forrester began to feel lightheaded, and to look at Adne with more interest than he would have believed that day would allow him in anything but Sirians. Adne leaned close to nibble his ear; Taiko laughed in pleasure. They were not alone, for there was a steady stream of people going down the ramp with them, fore and aft, all flushed-faced and excited. Forrester abandoned himself to the holiday. "After all," he shouted to Adne, "what does it matter if we're going to be wiped out?" "Dear Charles," she answered, "shut up and take your clothes off." Surprised, but not very, Forrester saw that the whole procession was beginning to shed its outer garments. Shaggy vests and film-and-net briefs, they were lining the floor, where busy glittering little cleaning creatures tugged them away into disposal units. "Why not?" he laughed, and kicked off his slippers at one of the cleaners, which reared back on its wheels like a kitten and caught it in mid-air. The crowd rolled down the ramp, shedding clothes at every step, until they were in a sort of highvaulted lounge and the noise of laughter and talk was loud as a lynching. And then a door behind them closed. The cloying joymaker scent whisked away. Streams of a harsher, colder essence poured in upon them; and at once they were all standing there, nearly nude and cold sober. C harles Forrester had had something less than four decades of actual life -- that is to say, of elapsed time measured by lungs that breathed and a heart that beat. The first part of that life, measured in decades, had taken place in the twentieth century. The second part, measured in days, had taken place after more than half a millenium in the freezing tanks. Although those centuries had sped by tracelessly for Forrester, they represented real time to the world of men; each century a hundred years, each year # days of twenty-four hours. Of all that had happened in those centuries Forrester had managed to learn only the smallest smattering. He had not learned, even yet, what powers this century could pack into a wisp of gas. Playing with the studs of his joymaker or submitting to the whims of his friends, Forrester had tasted a variety of intoxicants and euphorics, wake-up jolts and sleepy jolts. But he had never before tasted the jolt that drugged no senses but sharpened them all. Now he stood in this room, Taiko on one side of him and Adne in the circle of his arm surrounded by half a hundred other men and women; and was fully awake and sensing for the first time in his life. He turned to look at Adne. Her face was scrubbed bare, her eyes were looking at him unwinkingly. "You're nasty inside," she said. What she said was the exact equivalent of a slap in the face, and Forrester accepted it as such. He growled, "You're a trollop. I think your children are illegitimate, too." He had not intended to say anything of the sort. Taiko said, "Shut up and crawl." Over his shoulder and without passion, Forrester said: "You're a two-bit phoney without an ounce of principle or a thought in your head. Butt out, will you?" To his surprise, Adne was nodding in agreement; but she said: "Pure kamikaze, just like the trash you come from. Vulgar and a fool." He hesitated, and she said impatiently, "Come on, kamikaze. Let it out. You're jealous too, right?" Theirs was not the only argu ment going on; there was a bitter rumble of insult and vituperation all around them. Forrester was only marginally aware of it; his whole attention was concentrated on Adne, on the girl he had thought he might be in love with, and his best efforts were devoted to trying to hurt her. He snapped, "I bet you're not even pregnant!" She looked startled. "What?" "All that talk about picking a name! You probably just wanted to trick me into marrying you." She stared at him blankly, then with revulsion. "Sweat! I meant our name. Charles, you talk like an idiot." Taiko shrilled, "You're both idiots! Crawl." F orrester spared him a glance. Curiously, Taiko was down on his knees. For the first time Forrester realized that the floor was damp -- no, not damp, muddy. A thin gruel of softly oozing mud was pouring in from apertures in the wall. Others were getting down into the mud, too; and for possibly the thousandth time since being taken from the freezer Forrester found himself torn between two choices of puzzles to try to solve. What was going on here, exactly? And what the devil did Adne mean by "our" name? But she tugged at him impatiently, slipping down to wallow in the porridgy substance. "Come on," she cried. "You're not doing it right, but come on, you sweaty kamikaze!" All the while the air was being recharged with the stimulant, if it was a stimulant, that had opened the gates of his senses he thought, or a super-benzedrine; he was seeing a whole new spectrum, hearing batshrieks and subsonic roars, smelling, tasting, feeling things that had been out of his reach before. He perceived clearly that this was some sort of organized ritual he was in, understood that one of its purposes, at least, was to allow the release of tensions by saying whatever the inner mind had wanted to say, and the outer censor in the brain had forbidden. Allow it? He couldn't stop it! He listened to the things he was saying to Adne and realized that at a later time, in an undrugged moment, he would be appalled. But he said them. And she nodded gravely and replied in kind. "Jealous!" she shrieked. "Typical manipulative ownership! Filthy inside, trashy!" "Why shouldn't I be jealous? I loved you." "Harem love!" sneered Taiko from beside him. The man was lying full length in the mud now -- it had reached a depth of several inches and seemed to have stopped there. "She's a brainless blot of passions but she's human and how dare you try to own her?" "Fake!" howled Forrester. "Go pretend you're a man! Bust up some machines!" He was furious, but in a part of his mind he was alert enough and analytical enough to be surprised that he wasn't impelled to hit Taiko. Or Adne, for that matter. What he was impelled to do was to say wounding things, as true and hurtful as he could make them. He looked around him and saw that he was the only one still on his feet. The others were all full-length in the mud, writhing and creeping. Forrester dropped to his knees. "What's this damn foolishness all about?" he demanded. "Shut up and crawl," grunted Taiko. "Get some of the animal out of you." And Adne chimed In: "You're spoiling it for all of us if you don't crawl! You have to crawl before you can walk." Forrester leaned down to her. "I don't want to crawl!" "Have to. Helps you get out the rot. The secrets that fester -- of course, you kamikazes like to decay." "But I don't have -- " And Forrester stopped, not because he voluntarily chose to stop talking just then but because what he had been about to say was not true, and he simply could not say it. He had been about to say that he had no secrets. He had, in fact, more secrets than he could count; and one very large one which appalled him because his mouth wanted to blurt it out even while his brain screamed No! If he stayed in this room one more moment, Forrester knew, he would shout at the top of his voice the fact that he had been the one who helped the Sirian escape and thus made it a good gambling bet that the whole world of men would be destroyed. Dripping mud, panting, mumbling to himself, Forrester climbed to his feet and forced himself to run -- a staggering, broken-field run that dodged flailing limbs and leaped over writhing bodies, that carried him through the angry rumble of the crawlers and out into a dressing chamber where he was sluiced down with fragrant spray, dried with warm blasts of air and bathed in hot light. Fresh garments appeared before him, but he took no pleasure in them. He had forgotten for a moment, but now he remembered again. He was the man who had destroyed the Earth. At any moment he would be found out... And what his punishment might be, he dared not think. ( ( TV yT an Forrester," cried the--voice of a joymaker, "during the period of interrupted service a number of messages accumulated for you, of which the following three priority calls are urgent." "Wait up," said Forrester, startled. But there it was. Rummaging through the neatly folded heap of tee-shirt and Turkish pants, there was the macelike shape of a joymaker. "Ho," he said. "I've got you again, eh?" "Yes, Man Forrester," the joymaker agreed. "Will you receive your messages?" "Um," said Forrester. Then, cautiously, "Well, I will if any of them are of great urgency at this very moment. I mean, I don't want somebody coming in here and blowing my brains out while I'm talking to you." "No such probability is evident," said the joymaker primly. "Nevertheless, Man Forrester, there are a number of highly important messages." Forrester sat down on a warmed bench and sighed. He said meditatively, "The thing is this, joymaker. I never seem to get to the end of a question, because two new questions pop up while I'm still trying to find the answer to the first one. So what I would like to do right now, I would like you to get me a cup of black coffee and a pack of cigarettes, right here in this nice, warm, safe room, and then I would like to drink the coffee and smoke the cigarettes and ask you some questions. Now, can I do that without dying for it?" "Yes, Man Forrester. However, it will take several minutes for the coffee and cigarettes to be delivered, as they are not stock items in this facility and must be -- " "I understand all that. Just get them. Now." Forrester stood up and drew the baggy pants over his legs, thinking. At last he nodded to himself. "First question," he said. "I just came out of a place where Adne Benson and a bunch of other people were wallowing in mud. What was that all about? -- I mean," he added hastily, "in a few words, what is it called and why do people do it?" "The function is called a 'crawl session', Man Forrester, or simply 'crawling.' Its purpose is the release of tensions and inhibitions for therapeutic purposes. Two major therapies are employed: First, there is a chemical additive in the air which suppresses inhibitors of all varieties, thus making it possible to articulate, and thus to relieve, many kinds of tensions. Second, the mere act of learning to crawl all over again is thought to provide benefits. I have on immediate access, Man Forrester, some thirty-eight papers on various aspects of the crawl session. Would you care to have me list them?" "Not in the least," said Forrester. "That's fine; I understand that perfectly. Now, second question." There was a thunk; a receptacle opened beside him; Forrester reached in and took out a steaming and very large cup of coffee covered with a plastic lid. He worried the lid off, sought and found the cigarettes and lighter that accompanied the coffee, lit up, took a sip of coffee and said: "Adne Benson said something to me about choosing a name. I interpreted this to mean that she was, uh, well, pregnant. I mean, I thought she meant a name for a baby; but actually it was something else. Reciprocal names? What are reciprocal names?" "Reciprocal names, Man Forrester," lectured the joymaker, "are chosen, usually by two individuals, less typically by larger groups, as private designations. A comparible institution from your original time, Man Forrester, might be the 'pet' name or nickname by which a person addresses his or her spouse, or child, a close friend; however, the reciprocal name is used by each of the persons in addressing the other." "Give me a for instance," Forrester interrupted.  maker obediently, "in the universe of Adne Bensen and her two children the reciprocal names are 'Tunt' -- a form of address from one child to the other -- or 'Mim', when Miss Bensen addresses or is addressed by a child. As mentioned, this is not typical since more than two persons are involved. A better example from the same demesne would be that between Adne Bensen and Dr. Hara, where the reciprocal designation between them is 'Tip'. Are those adequate for instances, Man Forrester?" "Yeah, but what's this about Hara? You mean he and Adne had a pet name?" "Yes, Man Forrester." "Yeah, but -- Well, skip it." Forrester glumly put down his coffee; it didn't taste as good as he had thought it would. "Sounds confusing," he muttered. "Confusing, Man Forrester?" "Yeah. I mean, if you and I have the same name, how do we know which one -- oh, wait a minute. I see. If you and I have a name, then if you use it, obviously you mean me. And if I use it, I have to mean you." "That is correct, Man Forrester. In practice it does not appear that much confusion arises." "All right, the hell with that, too. Let's see." Forrester frowned at his cigarette; that didn't taste particularly good, either. He was unable to decide whether the reason was that he had lost the taste for coffee and cigarettes, or whether these were simply miserable examples of their kind, or whether what tasted bad was his mood. He dropped the cigarette into the rest of the coffee and said irritably, "Question three : Now that I have you again, and plenty of money, is there some way I can keep from foolishly losing it all again? Can we like work out a budget?" "Certainly, Man Forrester. One moment. Yes. Thank you for waiting. I have obtained a preliminary investment schedule and prospectus of probable returns, and by investing a major fraction of your holdings in the Sea of Soup, with diversification in power, computation and euphoric utilities, you should have a firm annual income in excess thousand dollars. This can be prorated by week or by day, if you wish, and automatic limits placed on the amounts you can spend or hypothecate. In this way it will be possible -- Man Forrester!" Forrester was startled. "What the devil's the matter with you?" "Your instructions, Man Forrester! Urgent priority override: statement made earlier that you are in no immediate danger of death is no longer true. Man Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, having filed appropriate bonds and guaranties -- " "Oh, no!" cried Forrester. "Yes, Man Forrester! Coming through the crawl chamber right now, armed, armored and looking for you!" F orrester snapped tight the baggy trousers, tucked in the pullover, slipped his feet into sandals and hooked the joymaker to his belt. "Out!" he barked. "Which way?" "This way, Man Forrester." An opening in the wall widened like a pair of parentheses and Forrester bolted through it. A lounge, a ramp, an open double door and he was out into the midway again, with the bright sun pounding down on him, the gay crowds staring at him casuallyHe glanced around: yes, there was the DR vehicle, shining white overhead, its attendant with chin on hand gazing into space. "Where's Heinzie?" he cried. "Following, Man Forrester. Do you wish to fight him here?" asked the joymaker. "Hell, no!" "Where would you prefer, Man Forrester?" "You idiot, I don't want to fight him at all. I want to get away from him." He was attracting attention from the crowd, he saw. Their expressions were no longer vacant but puzzled, and beginning to be hostile. The joymaker said hesitantly, "Man Forrester, I must ask you to be specific. Do you wish to avoid combat with Man Heinzlichen permanently?" "That's the idea," Forrester said bitterly, "but I see it's a little late for that now." Because the Martian was churning out of the double doors of the crawling building and heading straight for him. "Oh, well," said Forrester. "Easy come, easy go."  T'he Martian planted himself in front of Forrester, puffing. He said, "Hello, dere. Sorry I kept you waiting so long." "You didn't have to hurry on my account," said Forrester cautiously. He was scanning the Martian carefully for weapons, but there didn't seem to be anything. He was wearing what looked like a wig, close blond curls that hugged his scalp, surrounded his ears and jawline and went down in back to the nape of his neck, but otherwise he was unchanged in appearance from the last time Forrester had seen him. And he did not even carry a stick. His joymaker was clipped to his belt; his hands were empty and hung loosely at his sides. "Veil," said the Martian, "you were with de Forgotten Men, you know, and den I had other things to do. Anyway, here we are so let's get it over with. Okay?" Forrester said honestly, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do." "Fight, you fool!" cried the Martian. "What de hell do you think you're supposed to do?" "But I'm not even mad," Forrester objected. "Dog sweat!" roared the Martian. " am! Come on, fight, will you?" But his hands still hung at his side. Forrester shifted position cautiously, sparing the time for a glance around. The crowd was definitely interested now, forming a neat ring around them ; Forrester thought he could see bets being made on the outcome. The DR man overhead was watching them carefully. At least, Forrester thought, if I let him kill me they'll just freeze me up again. And then they'll put me together later on. And maybe the freezer isn't such a bad place to be for a while, until this business with the Sirians gets straightened out... "Are you going to fight or not?" the Martian demanded. Forrester said, "Uh, one question." "Veil?" "The way you talk. I had an argument about that the other day -- " "You're stalling! What's de matter with de way I talk?" "It's a sort of German accent, I thought, but this other Martian was Irish and he talked the same way -- "Irish? German?" Heinzlichen looked baffled. "Look, Forrester, pressure, you understand? You lose some of de high frequencies, dat's all. I don't know what 'German' or 'Irish' is." "Say, that's interesting!" Forrester cried. "You mean it's not an accent, really?" "I mean you wasted too much of my time already!" the Martian cried, and leaped for his throat. And right there, in the bright midway with the ambulatory plants jolting past him and the crowds cheering and shouting, Forrester found himself fighting for his life. The Martian was not only bigger than he was, the damned skunk was stronger! Fleetingly Forrester blazed with anger: how dare the Martian be stronger? What about the supposition that light-gravity inhabitants would lose their muscle tone? Why was he not able to crush this flimsy, light-G creature with a single blow? But he was not; the Martian was on top of him, systematically thudding his head against the paving of the midway. It was Forrester's good fortune that the flooring was a resilient rubberlike substance, not concrete; all the same he was developing a headache and his senses were spinning. And the Martian added insult to injury: "Get up and fight!" he bawled. "Dis is no fun!" That was the limit of Forrester's civilization. He screamed in rage and surged up; the Martian went flying. Forrester was up and after him, flinging himself on top of him, a knee in the Martian's throat; he saw the Martian's joymaker loose by his side and caught it up -- grabbed it, clubbed it, smashed the macelike large end against the Martian's skull. It rang like bronze. Even in his rage Forrester felt a moment's astonishment; but clearly the closecropped blond wig was not merely hair. "Louse!" roared Forrester, enraged all over again; the Martian had prepared himself for this battle by wearing a helmet! He shortened his stroke and clubbed the Martian across the face. Blood spurted; teeth broke. Again and again, and the Martian tried to cry out but could not; again, again -- Behind him the voice of the attendant from the DR cart said, "All right, all right, that's enough. I'll take care of him now." Forrester rocked back on his haunches, panting hoarsely, staring at the terrible ruin he had made of the Martian's face. He managed to gasp, "Is -- is he dead?" "They don't come any deader," said the DR man. "Would you move a little bit? -- Thanks. All right, he's mine now. Wait here for the copper, please; he'll VX#'hat happened next for For'  rester was hazy. He had a confused memory of returning to the lavatory facilities of the crawl room and getting cleaned up again, fresh clothes, a shower, a steam of reviving gases that woke him up and cleared his head. But when he was out of the room the fog returned. It was not the drain of his efforts that muddled his thinking, or the pain of his headache where Heinzie had bashed it against the pavement. It was pure psychic shock. He had destroyed a human life. Not really, he told himself at once. Not now. A short rest in the freezer and then he's good as new! But it didn't register with him; he was still in shock. Adne was waiting for him, with Taiko; they had seen the fight and had stayed to help him get straightened out afterward. Help him or help the Martian, Forrester thought bitterly; it probably didn't matter to them which. Nevertheless he was grateful for their help. Adne took him to her own home, left him there a minute, returned with the news that his apartment was ready for him again and escorted him there. And left him there with Taiko, who wanted to talk. "Nice fight, Charles. Shook you up, of course -- hell, I remember my own first one. Nothing to be ashamed of. But listen, if you're going to come to work for the Society you've got to pull yourself together." Forrester sat up and looked at Taiko. "What the devil makes you think I want to work for the Luddites?" "Come on, Charles. Look, take a shot of bracer, will you? That green stud, there on the handle -- " "Will you get out of here and leave me alone?" "Oh, for sweat's sake," cried Taiko impatiently. "Look, you said you wanted to help out with the Society's program, right? Well, there's no time to waste! This is the chance we've been waiting for, man! Everybody's got the Sirians on their minds; they'll be diving into the freezers so fast the teams won't be able to handle them, and that's when those of us who can face the world realistically will have a chance to take action. We can get rid of the machine menace once and for all if we -- " Taiko hesitated and gave Forrester a thoughtful look. Then he said: "Well, never mind that part of it just yet. Are you with us or against us?" Forrester contemplated the problem of trying to explain to Taiko that his interest in the Ned Lud Society had been only an interest in making enough money to live on, and that when the Sirian had left him ninetyhad evaporated. It did not seem worth the effort, so he said: "I guess I'm against you." "Charles," said Taiko, "you make me sick! You of all people! You, who have suffered so much from this age. Don't you want to try to cure the evils of machine domination? Don't you want -- " "I'll tell you what I want," said Forrester, rousing himself. "I want you to go away -- fast!" "You're not yourself," said Taiko. "Look, when you get straightened out, give me a call. I'll be hard to reach, because -- Well, never mind why. But I'll leave a special channel for you. Because I know you, Charles, and I know that you'll have to decide to end these cowardly times and give Man back his -- All right! I'm going!" When the door had closed behind him Forrester stared into space for more than an hour. Then he rolled over and went to sleep. His only regret was that sooner or later he would have to wake up. X TThat Forrester could not un ' derstand was why it was taking them so long to arrest him. He began to see just why a criminal might give himself up. The waiting was hard to endure. Ten times an hour he reached for the joymaker to say, "I am the one who helped the Sirian escape. Report me to the police," and ten times each hour he stopped himself. Not now, he said. Tomorrow, no doubt, or maybe even a few minutes from now; but not just now. From time to time the joymaker informed him of messages -- forty-five of them the first day alone. Forrester refused to accept them all. He didn't want to see anyone until -- until -- well, he didn't want to see anyone at the moment. (He could not make up his mind at just what moment the world would so clarify itself to him that he in it again; but he always knew that that time was certainly not yet.) He explored the resources of his apartment, the joymaker and his own mind. He ate fantastic meals and drank odd foaming beverages that tasted like stale beer or celery-flavored malted milks. He listened to music and watched canned plays. He wished desperately for a deck of cards, but the joymaker did not seem to understand his description of them and so solitaire was denied him; but he found almost the same anesthesia in reading and reading over again what scraps of written matter he had on hand. His late wife's letter he practically memorized; his briefing manual to this century he studied until his fingers were weary from turning the pages. On the second day there were nearly seventy messages. Forrester refused them all. At his direction the joymaker displayed for him selected news pictures on the view-wall. The only subject Forrester would allow himself an interest in was the progress of the trouble with the Sirians. There was strangely little news after the first day -- negative reports from drone patrols in every quadrant of the heavens, a diminishing flow of projections and estimates of when an attack might be expected. The consensus seemed to be, not for several weeks at least. Forrester could not understand that at all. He remembered quite distinctly that Sirius was something like fifty light-years away, and the joymaker confirmed that no way had been found to exceed the speed of light. But finally he gathered that it was thought the Sirians had some sort of faster-than-light message capability, as did Earth for that matter, and even if the fleeing Sirian might not make it back to his own planet he might send a message. And it was a possibility, at least, that some wandering Sirian war patrol might be near Sol. But none made itself evident; and on the third day there were only a dozen messages for Forrester; and he refused them all. What he did with most of his time was sleep. lars and perfect health. He could think of nothing better to spend either of them on. (t Toymaker! Tell me what I P did wrong with Adne." "Wrong in what sense, Man Forrester? I have no record of antisocial acts." "Don't split hairs with me. I mean, why didn't she like me after the first few days?" The joymaker began to answer with statements about hormone balances, imprinting and the ineluctable components of emotions, but Forrester was having none of it. "Get me a beer," he ordered, "and give me specific answers. You hear everything?" "Right, Man Forrester. Except when instructed otherwise." "All right. I offended her. How?" "I cannot evaluate the magnitude of the offenses, Man Forrester, but I can list certain acts which would appear to be significantly greater than others. Item, you refused her offer of a reciprocal name." "That was bad?" Forrester asked. "It is offensive by social convention, Man Forrester, yes." The glass of beer appeared by Forrester's couch; he tasted it and made a face. "No, not that," he said. "What was that other thing, the beer with some kind of rasperry sauce?" " Berlinerweisse , Man Forrester?" "Yeah, get me one of those. Go on with the list." "Item, your actions when Man Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major filed intent to kill you were considered contemptible in certain lights." "Didn't she understand that I just wasn't used to the way things go now?" "Yes, Man Forrester, she did. Nevertheless she considered your behavior contemptible. Item, you allowed yourself to become impoverished. Item, you criticized her for a relationship with other males." The large goblet of pale beer appeared with a little flask of dark-red syrup; Forrester decanted the syrup into the beer and sipped it It too tasted terrible, but he had run out of things to ask for and drank it. "It was only that I loved her," he said irritably. "There are aspects to the syndrome love' which we cannot distinguish, Man Forrester." ttTT ell. I don't expect you to. You're a machine. But I thought Adne was a woman." "I can only surmise from the evidence of her responses that she did not comprehend or accept your behavior either, Man Forrester." "I have to admit you've got a point there," sighed Forrester, putting down the goblet and getting up to roam around. "Well, never mind." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then waved a hand; a mirror appeared and he studied his face in it. He looked like a bum. Hair unkempt, beard beginning to grow again. "Oh, hell," he said. The joymaker made no answer. What Forrester really wanted to know -- whether anyone had come to suspect him of being the one who had let the Sirian escape -- he dared not ask. The questions he did ask, on the other hand, turned out to have answers as confusing as the questions were. Even simple questions. He had asked after his friend among the Forgotten Men, Jerry Whitlow, for example. He had not been surprised to find out that Whitlow was dead -- he had seen that happen; or to learn that his revival was problematical ; but he still did not know what the joymaker meant by saying Whitlow was "returned to reserve." It seemed to mean that Whitlow's body had been used as raw material, perhaps in one of the organic lakes like the "Sea of Soup" from which the world's food supplies came; but Forrester was too repelled by that notion to follow it any farther, and even so he could not understand why Whitlow's revival would then be "problematical". "How many messages today, joymaker?" he asked idly. "There are no messages for you today, Man Forrester." Forrester turned to look at the thing. That was a welcome surprise -- and change was welcome -- but it was worrisome, too. Had everyone forgotten him? "No messages?" "None that you have not already refused, Man Forrester." "Doesn't anyone want to talk to me?" "As far as indicated by the message log, Man Forrester, only Man Taiko wishes to talk to you. He left special instructions in regard to forwarding of communications. But that was six days ago." Forrester was startled. "How the devil long have I been here?" "Nineteen days, Man Forrester." He took a deep breath. Nineteen days! How little his so-called friends cared for him! he told himself with self-pity. If they really liked him they would have broken the door down if necessary. But it was not all bad. Nineteen days? But surely if he were going to be arrested for helping the Sirian escape it would not have taken this long. Was it safe to assume the heat was off? Did he dare go back into the world of men? He made up his mind rapidly; and before he could change it, acted at once. "Joymaker! Get me cleaned up. Shave, bath, new clothes. I'm going outside!" T Tis resolve lasted him through  the cleaning-up process and into the condominium hall, but then it began to dissipate. No one was in the hall; there were no sounds. But to Forrester it seemed like a jungle trail with unknown dangers on every side. He ordered an elevator cab to take him to slideway level and when the door opened he entered it cautiously, as though an enemy might be lurking inside. But it too was empty. And so -- he found a moment later -- was the wide hovercraft street. There was simply nothing there. Forrester stared around, unable to believe what he saw. No pedestrians -- well, that was understandable. There were seldom very many, and he had no idea what time of day it was. No hovercraft? That was harder to accept. Even if for a moment none were in sight, he should be able to hear the hissing roar of their passage somewhere in the city. But to see no aircraft, no sign of life at all -- that was flatly unbelievable. Where was everybody? He said, with a quaver in his voice: "Get me a cab." "One will arrive in two minutes, Man Forrester." And it did -- a standard automated air cab; and Forrester still had not seen a human being. He climbed in quickly, closed the door and ordered it to take him up -- not up to any place in particular, just up, so that he could see farther in all directions. But no matter how far he looked, no one was there. Words forced themselves out: "Joymaker! What happened?" "In what respect, Man Forrester?" the machine benignly asked. "Where did everybody go? Adne? The kids?" "Adne Benson and her children, Man Forrester, at present are being processed for storage in Sublake Emergency Facility Nine. However, it is not as yet known whether space will be available for them there on a permanent basis, and so the location must be considered tentative pending the completion of additional facilities -- " "You mean they're dead?" "Clinically dead, Man Forrester. Yes." "How about -- " Forrester cast about in his mind -- "let's see, that Martian. Not Heinzie, the one with the Irish name, Kevin O'Rourke; is he dead too " "Yes, Man Forrester." "And the Italian ballerina I met at the restaurant where the Forgotten Men hung out?" "Also dead, Man Forrester." "What the hell happened?" he shouted. The joymaker replied carefully, "Speaking objectively, Man Forrester, there has been an unforecast increase in the number of commitments to freezing facilities. More than ninety-eight point one per cent of the human race is now in cryogenic storage. In subjective terms, the causes are not well established but appear to relate to the probability of invasion by extra-Solarian living creatures, probably Sirian." "You mean everybody committed suicide?" "No, Man Forrester. Many preferred to be killed by others; for example, Man Hfeinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, who, you will recall, elected to be killed by you." Forrester sank back against the seat. "Holy sweet heaven," he muttered to himself. Dead! Nearly the whole human race, dead! It was more than he could take in at once. He sat staring into space until the joymaker said apologetically, "Man Forrester, do you wish to select a destination?" "No -- wait a minute, yes! Maybe I do. You said ninetyeight per cent of the human race is dead." "Ninety-eight point one, yes, Man Forrester." "But that means there are some who are still alive, right? Are there any I know?" "Yes, Man Forrester. Certain classes are still in vital state in large proportion because of special requests made for their services -- e.g., medical specialists working in the freezer stations. Also there are others. One you know is Man Taiko. He is not only in vital state but has, as you know, given special instructions in regard to receiving messages from you. Another is the Reverend Sam Tshumu, and another -- " "Never mind any other," chied Forrester. "And never mind messages, either. Just take me to Taiko, right away! I want to see someone who's alive!" Because -- went the unspoken corollary -- he didn't want to see the ruins left by the dead. Not as long as he was so completely convinced that it was himself who had killed them. T)ut as it turned out, the cab did not take him to see Taiko after all. It did what it could. The joymaker programmed it properly enough, and Forrester found himself high in a building of bright ruby crystal, at a door inscribed The Ned Lud Society. Inside was what he supposed was the latterday equivalent of an office -- though it was warm and damp and a fountain played among ferns in it. But no one was inside. "What the devil's the matter with you, joymaker?" he demanded. "Where's Taiko?" "Man Forrester," said the joymaker, "there is an anomaly here. My records indicate Man Taiko's presence at this place, but clearly they are wrong. My records have never been wrong before." "Well, let me talk to him. You said he'd left special instructions -- " "Yes, Man Forrester." Pause. Then Taiko's voice came on: "That you, Charles? Glad to hear from you. I'm busy now, but I'll be in touch when I get a chance -- only don't refuse my message this time, will you?" That was all. "Wait a minute," cried Forrester. "Taiko!" The joymaker interrupted him. "Man Forrester, that was a recording." Forrester growled profanely. He walked around the office, examining it, but without finding anything that would help him locate Taiko. "Well, hell," he said. "Let's see. You said somebody else I knew was still alive?" "Reverend Sam Tshumu is still alive, Man Forrester." "And who is Reverend Sam Tshumu? I mean, don't give me all his statistics; just tell me what makes you think I know him." "Acquaintanceship is indicated from the fact that he endeavored to make contact with you at the time of your first emerging from cryogenic storage, Man Forrester. However, Man Tshumu may not be contacted directly at present. If you wish to see him or speak with him you may communicate with the warden of the Shoggo Municipal Detention Facility." .Forrester swore. "Anybody else?" "Man Forrester, Edwardino Wry is also ambient. Do you consider that he is known to you?" "I doubt it, because I never heard of the son -- wait a minute. Was he one of the ones that beat me up?" "Yes, Man Forrester." "Well, I don't want to see him. Forget it, joymaker," said Forrester. "I guess I'll just wait for Taiko." Hp'hree or four times he thought he saw people, but he was only able to get close to one of them and it said civilly, "We are not human, Man Forrester. We are merely a special-purpose service unit diverted to aid at the cryogenic facilities." It had looked like a pretty young blonde in a bikini, perhaps a barmaid somewhere, Forrester thought; but was too dispirited to inquire. Apart from those there was no one in sight in Shoggo. He walked aimlessly, shaking his head. His long days of self-imposed exile had let most of the guilt evaporate from him. He no longer felt either fearful of discovery or humiliated. The Sirian had used him as a tool, true, but if it had not been him it would have been someone else. Anyway, he was more concerned about this world. The year # was a great disappointment to him. He could think of no other age when the response of the populace to a threat of death would have been such universal suicide. It was simply crazy... Of course, he reminded himself, death was not the same to these people as it had been to his contemporaries. Death was no longer necessarily permanent. It was like fleeing to a neutral country to sit out a war, and heaven knew there were lots of #th century examples of that. Nevertheless, in Charles Forrester's opinion the world of # A.D. simply was not behaving well. It was chicken. Forrester filled his lungs and shouted: "You are all cowards! The world's better off without you!" His voice echoed emptily among the tall, hard building faces. "Man Forrester," said the joymaker, "were you addressing me?" "I was not. Shut up," said Forrester. "No, cancel that. Get me a cab." And when it came he took it back to the broad hovercraft way where he and Jerry Whitlow had hidden out as two of the Forgotten Men. But there were no more Forgotten Men in evidence, not wherever he looked, no matter how loud he called out. "Take me to Adne Bensen's home," he commanded, and the cab flew him into the entrance port at the mid-tower level of the building they had shared, but there was no one visible there either. Not in the streets, not in the halls, not even in the apartment, after Forrester had commanded the joymaker to let him in. He ordered himself a meal and sat on the edge of a sort of couch in the children's room, feeling put upon and sad. When he had finished eating he said: "Joymaker, try getting Taiko for me again." "Yes, Man Forrester... There is no new message, Man Forrester." "Don't give me that! Say it's priority, like you're always doing to me." "You do not have the authority to classify a message priority, Man Forrester." "I do if I say I'm planning to kill him," Forrester said cunningly. "You have to notify him of my intentions, right?" "I do indeed, Man Forrester, but not until you have filed appropriate bonds and guaranties. Until you have done so your notice cannot be effective. Do you wish to file, Man Forrester?" "Well," said Forrester, thinking ing documents, "I guess not, no. Isn't there any way I can get through to him?" The joymaker said, "I have a taped message from him which I can display on the view-wall if you wish, Man Forrester. It is not, however, directly addressed to you." "Display the son of a gun then," ordered Forrester. "And make it snappy!" "Yes, Man Forrester." The view-wall lighted up obediently; but what appeared on it was not Taiko Hironibi. It was a tall, largely built woman with a commanding presence who said: "Girl Goldilocks and Terror of Bears!" Torrester was startled. "What the devil!" he cried. But the voice went on : "Bears! Think of bears. Great biting creatures, shaggy-haired, smell of animal sweat and rot. A bear can kill a man -- crunch, crush his head, smash, crash his spine, zip, rip his heart." At every word the woman's image acted out crunching, smashing, ripping. "Hey," said Forrester, "I didn't order any bedtime stories!" The joymaker said, with almost a tone of apology, "Man Forrester, there is a technical difficulty. I suggest you permit this tape to finish." And meanwhile the woman was orating : "A girl child, little as you. Littler. Little as you used to be when you were little. Call the girl... give her a name... let her be called, oh, Goldilocks. Golden hair; locks of gold. Sweet, small, defenseless girl." Forrester snarled: "Will you turn this damn thing off?" "Man Forrester," admitted the joymaker, "I can't. Please be patient." "Imagine this girl doing a naughty thing!" cried the womanm. "Imagine her going where she should not go, where her motherfather told her not to go. Imagine her rejecting their wise counsel!" Forrester sank back on the couch and said glumly, "If you can't turn it off, at least get me a drink while I'm waiting. Scotch and water." "Yes, Man Forrester." The view-wall was showing real bears now, large and ferocious grizzlies, while the woman chanted : "And Goldilocks goes to the bear lair -- roaring, biting, slashing bears! But they are not home. "They are not home and she eats their food. She sits where they sit, lies where they lie, and sleeps. "She sleeps, and the bears come home!" Forrester's drink appeared; he tasted it and glowered, for it was not Scotch. As best as he could tell from the flavor, it was a sort of salty applejack. "The bears come home! The bears come home and their muzzles foam; the bears come back ready to attack, the bears come in with their jaws agrin! "Red eyes glowing! (She sleeps, unknowing.) "Claws that rend (is this the end?), paws that break (she starts to wake) , teeth that bite -- "And Goldilocks opens her eyes, screams loudly, leaps to her feet and takes flight." The woman on the view-wall paused, staring sorrowfully straight into Forrester's eyes. Her oratorial stance relaxed; her eyes seemed to lose their dramatic glow, and she said conversationally: "Now, you see? What a terrible thing to happen to a little girl, and all because she rejected her parents. She ran and ran and ran and ran, a long, long time, and then she got back to her fathermother and promised never to reject them again, and made a good adjustment. Now please prepare to answer questions on the theme: "Is it wise to take chances on going to places your father mother do not approve?" She smiled, bowed and vanished. The joymaker said, "Man Forrester, thank you for waiting. There are certain nexial recursions not operative at the present time. Shall I attempt to display the Taiko tape again?" "Oh, that explains it! No, thanks. Just tell me one thing," said Forrester. "Tell me how I can get myself nicely, but not painfully, killed. Because I feel left out of things. I want to be in the freezer too." "That is not possible, Man Forrester." "Don't give me that! It's got to be possible -- everybody else did it, right? And I can see why. Nobody for company, the machines breaking down -- " "We are not breaking down, Man Forrester." "That's your opinion. Anyway, all I have to do is call a deathreversal car and cut my throat, right? Then I'm dead and it's up to you-all to freeze me." "No, Man Forrester. You may not do this. If you are killed in any way you will be revived at once, even if only on external heart-lung apparatus." "The devil you say! Why?" "Because, Man Forrester, you are about to be arrested. The coppers are coming for you now." 'T'wo coppers boiled into the room and manhandled him out into the corridor to the fly-in, where a police cab was waiting for him. They thrust him into it and watched as it soared away with him. He shouted out to them vainly: "Wait! Come back! I didn't do anything!" "That is to be determined, Man Forrester," said a voice from a speaker grille over his head. "Meanwhile, please come with us." The "please" was totally sensefree, of course: Forrester had no choice. "But what did I do?" he begged. "Your arrest has been ordered, Man Forrester," said the quiet, unemotional voice of the central computation facility. "Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?" "You bet!" Forrester stared around fearfully. There was no one at the controls, but there didn't seem to be a need for anyone; the car was sliding rapidly through the air toward the lake front. "Your arrest has been ordered, Man Forrester," repeated the computer voice. "Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?" "Damn it, I just said I did!" They were over blue water and mo''ng fast. Forrester hammered the fleshy part of his fist agains a window experimentally, bu naturally enough the glass die not break. It was just as well, o course: there was no place fo him to go. "Your arrest," said the com puter voice calmly, "has beei ordered, Man Forrester. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?" Forrester swore furiously and hopelessly. They were approach ing a metal island in the lake and the arcraft was dropping toward it. "All I want," he said "is to know what the devil's go ing on. Joymaker! Can you tel me what this is all about?" Bu' the mace clipped to him onlj, said: "We are all the same. Mar: Forrester. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?" By the time the aircraft landed Forrester had regained con trol of himself. Obviously some thing was wrong with the centra' computation facilities, but equally obviously there was nothing much he could do about it now When two more coppers, waiting on the hardstand for the police car to alight, seized his arms and pulled him out of the door, he did not resist. The coppers' grip was quite unbreakable and their strength far greater than his own He saw no human being and no other automata, while he was herded like livestock down through underground passages, under the lake waters, until finally he was pushed into a door that locked behind him. He was in a cell. It held a bed, a chair and a table, nothing else. Or nothing that was visible; its wall were mined with the usual electronic maze, however, because a voice said at once: "Man Forrester, message." "Drop sick," said Forrester. "No, I don't want a precis of the charge against me." But the message which followed was not the repetitious drone of the faulty machines. It was Taiko's voice, and a wall of the cell sprang into light to show his face. "Hi, there, Chuck," he said. "You said you wanted to see me. Forrester exhaled sharply. "Thank God," he said. "Look, Taiko, something's gone wrong with the machines and I'm in jail!" Taik'o bland face creased in a smile. "Number one," he said, "there's nothing wrong with the machines -- in fact, something's going right with them! And number two, of course you're in jail. Who do you think brought you here?" "Here? You mean you're here too?" Taiko grinned and nodded. "Not more'n fifty meters away, pal. So now we come right down to it. Are you with the Ned Lud Society or are you against it? Because this is our chance. Everything's so stirred up for fear of a Sirian invasion that we can straighten things out the right way. Know what I mean by the right way?" "Smash the machines?" Forrester guessed. "You mean, you and I -- " "Oh, not just you and I," said Taiko triumphantly. "We've got a lot of help we didn't have before. See?" And he touched a control, and the field of view dropped back and widened. Taiko did indeed have a lot of help. There were perhaps a dozen of them, or almost, Forrester saw dazedly. They were in the same room with Taiko. One or two of them were human or robot. The others were neither. The others looked out at Forrester through eyes that were a circlet of gleaming green dots. They were Sirians. "You see, pal," said Taiko, "we've got something going for us. Our friends here may be funny looking, but they're organic. Working with them we can get rid of the machine problem once and for all, dig? So are you with us or against us?" Forrester tried to answer and could not; things were happening too fast for him again. There were too many factors to consider, and he didn't understand any of them. Destroy the machines? Well, yes; maybe Taiko was right. But turn over the world to the Sirians? Taiko said impatiently, "Doesn't matter, of course. If you're with us, good. If you're not -- there's nothing you can do about it! But come on up here and we'll talk it over, hear?" And there was a faint click, and the door of Forrester's cell sprang open, and a line of pale glowing green arrowheads pointed the way for him to walk. TT'orrester marched like a man in a dream. He kept wishing Adne were there for him to talk to (but she was deep in the liquid-helium sleep of death), or that someone, anyone, some person with knowledge and kindness would tell him what to do. I wish I'd tried to find Dorothy, he said to himself. Or Wilton. I wish -- Wishes didn't help. He was hundreds of meters under the surface of the lake in a world that was dissolving around him. When he reached the end of his walk and found Taiko, looking fretful, exhausted and triumphant, waiting for him, it was as though the dream had turned into a nightmare and he was its helpless captive. "Yes or no, ' cried Taiko. "You want to help?" "I don't know," Forrester said humbly. "Will you explain it to me?" One of the Sirians moved restlessly, but did not speak. Its circlet of green eyes winked like gems, dimmed only faintly by the sheen of the plastic envelope that kept it from the attack of Earth's atmosphere. "Sweat, man," groaned Taiko. "I don't have time for this! You know what we're doing? We've recruited half of central computation already. It's tricky work, but we're doing it. Another week and we'll have the whole damned complex of machine thinking destroyed -- then mankind can take care of itself!" "With these?" asked Forrester. "And what about their friends out in space?" The Sirians looked on impassively. Taiko frowned. "Don't fret yourself about them," he said. "They're just technical advisors. I'm the one that's running this show, and don't forget it; when we finish busting up the machines they're going home." Forrester sat down, trying to understand, and not succeeding very well. He heard Taiko's harsh, staccato voice go on and on -- the Sirians had bargained with him and come to a treaty; once Earth's machine computation facilities were destroyed they would go back to their own distant planet and stay there. Their only interest in Earth was as a threat. Without machines it would be no threat... "I don't trust them," muttered Forrester, more to himself than to Taiko. But he could not help but be impressed with Taiko's prospects. ' ' loosed the escaping Sirian into space, he won Taiko's hardest battle for him. The Earth responded predictably by rushing into the familiar safety of frozen death, waiting for the danger to pass -- or anesthetized against the shock and trouble that would come if it did not. So many were gone that the few remaining living humans who possessed any organization or purpose were the medical personnel of the freezers themselves. And Taiko. Taiko saw his chance. Alone he could not isolate the machineintelligence circuits that he detested. But with help he could, for everyone who might stop him was deep in frozen sleep. Where to find help?? Why, the other Sirians, of course. They had the technical skill, they had the motivation -- and they had not followed the great bulk of the world's population into cryogenic death. After all, why should they? If the Sirians did invade, they at least had nothing to fear. "So all we have to do," cried Taiko, "is break up the computers. Then my friends here go home, and we start waking up the human race again -- a little at a time. The ones who are sympathetic, the ones who want man to be free again. The oth ers -- " "Well, pal, what do you think? They like being where they are. Maybe we'll just leave them." He laughed suddenly. "Be a good joke on them, at that. They wanted to die, we'll let them!" Forrester was suddenly jumpy. "Taiko," he said, "I have to think. Maybe you're right. Bui I've just now come to the con elusion that I don't know enough about this world to know whethc I'm for it or against it." Taiko waved a hand largely. "Take your time. The jail's yours. Just remember, there's nothing you can do anyway." And he went back to his Sirians, and their huddling over the remote controls of the central computation facility. Forrester went out into the bright, empty corridors of Shog go's underwater jail and faced his decisions. Item, clearly there was something wrong with a world in which people elected to die at the first serious challenge. But one the other hand -- item -- who was T aiko to make the world's decisions for it? He saw a bright light ahead and walked toward it, and it was sunlight. Sunlight shining down a shaft, and a white death-reversal car humming quietly to itself as it waited. Waited for what? There was an attendant, but it was not human. At Forrester's hail it said, "Man Forrester, your arrest has been ordered. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?" "You're a broken record, machine," he sighed, and sat down. Somewhere in the near distance there was a whir and gasp of some kind of machine working, but he could not see its source, and lacked the energy to look for it. The trouble with trying to make a decision, he saw, was that he really didn't have a decision to make. There was no way out of this place without Taiko's consent, and Taiko's consent would be given only to Taiko's friends. "I might as well join 'em," he said aloud. But the curious thing was, he didn't want to. As soon as it became clear to him that he had only one choice to make, that choice became abhorrent. "Hello, Mr. Forrester," said a voice from somewhere out of sight. i r Tphe voice came from a small hospital-type room, where a man lay on a bed. He was heavily bandaged, and beside him was a whirring machine that seemed coupled to his body. "I thought I heard you talking to the DR machine," he said. "Remember me? I'm Sam Tshumu." Forrester came closer, frowning. "I -- I don't think so." But something was nagging at his mind. "Oh," he said, remembering. "You tried to get in touch with me. But I don't think we've ever met." "You sure, Mr. Forrester?" And then Forrester leaned over him and saw a dark brown face, almost hidden by the bandages, with only bright black eyes look ing out at him. "My God," he said. "Yes! You were the one who kept those you doing here?" Tshumu might have smiled; it was almost impossible to tell, with the bandages, but there was a movement at the corners of his eyes. "That's what I'm doing here, Mr. Forrester. I interfered when I shouldn't have, so I'm under arrest. I'm the only one still here, you see, because our friend Taiko has special plans for me. I'm a Utopian, and we've had our disagreements in the past." "What do you mean, special plans?" The eyes were filled with pain. "I'm dead, Mr. Forrester. They brought me back on a temporary basis to face trial, but I'm not self-viable; without the heartlung equipment I'd be really dead. Only that's not good enough for Taiko. He wants me to be dead permanently." "Wait a minute," said Forrester. "You got killed protecting me, right? Then you were frozen. But they've propped you up with this machine so you can be put on trial, because what you did was against the law?" "That's right, Mr. Forrester." "And now Taiko wants to kill you? I mean, really kill you?" "That's right. When he's finished here he will leave and flood the whole installation. Maybe somebody will find me sooner or later, but not soon enough to help." Forrester rocked back. "Why, that -- " He stopped. He simply did not know a word strong enough to apply. "And all because you don't agree with him about the Luddites?" "Because he's crazy, Mr. Forrester," whispered Tshumu. The breathy sound of the heart-lung machine changed its rhythm. "I'm sorry," said Tshumu faitly, "but I'm about to pass out. You see, Mr. Forrester, it's all up to you -- now -- " And that was all. # #X#'ait a minute!" cried For' ' rester. "Don't leave me now! Tell me what to do!" But the eyes were closed, and the only sound was the whir and hiss of the machine. "My God!" whispered Forrester. If only there were something he could do... And suddenly he knew there was. He did not wait to think about whether it was a good idea or not. He did not stop to contemplate whether it would work or not. He turned his back on the man in the bed and marched back to the DR car. "Machine," he cried. "I'm not allowed to die, right? If I were dead, you'd have me revived right away?" "Man Forrester," said the tall, intellectuallooking robot that stood beside the car, "your arrest has been ordered. Would you like a precis of the charge against you?" "What I would like is an insurance policy," said Forrester tightly. "But I guess I'll take a chance this one time without one. Let's hope it's only your speaking circuits that are all messed up!" And he reached into the DR car and fumbled in the nest of first-aid equipment. What he wanted was easy to find; it was a scalpel, four inches long and razor sharp. "Machine, do your duty," he cried, and with a rapid motion slit his throat. The pain was astonishing, but it lasted for only a moment. And then the world roared thinly at him, and slipped dizzyingly away. XX CtT was dreaming," murmured Forrester into the warm, comfortable darkness, "of committing suicide. Funny! I want to live..." "You'll live. Chuck," said a familiar voice. Forrester opened his eyes and gazed into the eyes of Hara. He thrust himself up. "Taiko!" he cried. "The Sirians! I've got to tell you -- " "You already told us, Chuck," said Hara. "They're taken care of. The Sirians are under lock and key, and Taiko's under guard right now, telling a computer what he did so that they can undo it." "Oh." As though the words were a magic spell unleashing pain, Forrester felt a sudden pang at his throat, reached up and touched it and found it covered with soft plastic film. He slumped back, looking at Hara's patient, weary faoe. There was something he had to get straight with this man, he knew. Something about Adne... and something he had to get straight with Adne, too, if he ever saw her again. "The DR machines worked, then," he said, remembering. "Brought you right here, with a priority order to patch you up and send you back. But as soon as you were patched you started talking, and they called me." Hara sat down and put his hands on his knees. "You're not too crazy about me, are you, Chuck? Adne said you resented the fact that I was the father of one of her kids." "One of them?" Forrester cried. "My God, that woman's -- " He stopped himself. It took an effort. After a moment he said, "I only hope I did the right thing. But maybe Taiko was right; this world is rotten clear through." "Oh, we all are. Chuck," said Hara easily. "Didn't you know that? Everybody is, always. The whole history of the progress of the human race is the record of people trying to be better than they are." "I don't understand you," said Forrester. Then; "But there's a lot I don't understand. And I guess it's important for the machines to be going again, and the world warned, in case the Sirians attack." "It's important if they attack, sure. And twice as important if they don't. Get some rest. Chuck," said Hara, getting up. "And think about something, if you will. You can't go back. Don't think the world made a wrong turning somewhere a centhere's no such thing as a wrong turning." He stopped in the doorway. "We're going to start reviving people pretty soon," he mentioned. "Most of them were panicked, and they'll be all right once they're vital again. It ought to be Adne's turn in about a week." And he was gone, leaving Forrester to consider the next week, the next year, the next century -- And, as it turned out, the next fifty millennia, in all of which he was alive, busy and well. Because he lived happily ever after, as did they all. Far out in space, eons distant in time, all of humanity is reborn on a planet that men never knew -- for a race of aliens! 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We've awarded cash in hundred-and-thousand-dollar units to retirees, sewing women, farmers, salesmen, war veterans, office workers, clerks, secretaries people who never before dreamed of having the kind of money that movie stars make. This announcement is an invitation to you, as a reader of this publication, to find out for yourself if you have the talent to win up to # in cash. If you are over # and like to play word games of any kind, the information below may lead you to thousands of dollars in extra cash that you may use as you wish. Mrs. H. C. Despain, Houston, Tex., won # in cash in one month. Members of our Club win cash prizes at home, just by solving puzzles and entering Club contests. They turn an educational and enjoyable hobby into pure profit. You can too! only limited competition. Only members of the Club may compete and win. In # we offered our members #. We actually paid out more cash than we said we would -- #I #, to be exact. In #, we again offered #. 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All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guirni Co, Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat OH. A s this is written, the city of New York is tying itself in knots because of a strike of the Transport Workers Union. All of the city subways, and nearly all of its buses, are idle. Workers can't get to their jobs; shopper can't get to stores; salesmen can't call on their customers; theatergoers can't reach the plays for which they have bought tickets months in advance -- in a word, the normal operations of the city have stopped. All of this costs money. The current guess is that the paralysis of the city is costing it something like # a day -- or substantially more than the combined expense of the space program, the war in Vietnam and Medicare put together. I t is our opinion that this is only a beginning, because it begins to look clear to us that the real squeeze brought about by automation is going to express itself -- has already begun to express itself -- in a wave of strikes such as we've never seen before. True, automation is not technically an issue in this strike. with the machines -- the "Headless Horseman", as Mike Quill called it -- when the subways installed the first automated train a few years ago. At union insistence the Transit Authority provided a standby motorman on the train, whose principal efforts consisted of walking from one end of the train to the other each time it came to the end of its run. The automated train was destroyed accidentally in a fire after a year's trial -- apparently to the unspoken relief of all parties. There has been no announcement of any plan to build another, but we would judge that its ghost haunts the negotiating tables. Nearly all the subway jobs involved are relatively unskilled -- changemakers, conductors, station guards, motormen -- with only a comparatively small number involved in maintenance, repair, construction and other more technically demanding jobs. And this is the edge that cuts. The subway workers have not been through the automation shakeout, when a large number of repetitive jobs are obsoleted and the jobs that are left require more training and more skill. In other words, their productive capacity has not yet been multiplied by the machine factor. This produces two opposed points of view, both of them unarguable. Say the subway adminstrators and the public at large; These jobs just don't call for that kind of money, and besides it would make the expense of running the subways ridiculously high. Say the subway workers: Other people putting in the same hours earn much more; we have to live in the same world with them, we have to compete with them to buy what we want in the stores, and we can't do it unless we make as much money as they do. This is the classical formula for the hardest-fought wars: both sides are right I s there any way to avoid more and even worse strikes that this one in the transition to the Cybernetic Age? We doubt it very much. Certainly what is happening now is not the final struggle; in fact the issues haven't even been joined. The present subway strike is only a taste of what will come when "Headless Horsemen" are beginning to come out of the shops for all the major routes -- and that day cannot be far off. Remember the newspaper strike of a couple years ago. That one was indeed fought on the issue of automation; but we have it on the word of the man who designed the systems that triggered the strike, Eugene Leonard, that it was the wrong fight at the wrong time over the wrong issues -- because the systems that caused die strike were already obsolete at the time. Not long ago we took part in a radio program with the aforesaid Gene Leonard, along with Arthur Elias of the Institute for Scientific Information and Henry Simon of Simon #s Schuster, talking about the future of the publishing business in the Cybernetic Age. We started by discussing automatic typesetting, and it took exactly twelve minutes by the studio clock before we had reached a proposal for high-speed facsimile machines which would produce a book to your order, anywhere in the world. In twelve minutes we not only got rid of the human linotype operator, but abolished the linotype itself and went on to obsolete the printing press, the binderies, the warehouses and the publishing house's road salesmen. Is such a new kind of publishing technologically feasible right now? Certainly. Is it likely to come into being in the next few years? Certainly not -- cultural lag doesn't permit us to move that fast -- but it, or something like it, is surely the shape of the publishing business some time in the future. We tend to think of automation's effect on our own jobs in terms of a wilier, cheaper competitor to do the same things we're doing right now. In the event it isn't going to be like that at all. An analogy: Suppose we resurrected some twelfth-century armaments expert and asked him how he thought we should employ the resources of modern technology to build weapons. No doubt he would be delighted; at once he would proceed to the fabrication of sharper lances, springier bows, truer shafts; and just how far would his troops get against H-bombs or napalm grenades? Unfortunately, our own outlook on our own jobs is largely medieval. The long lines of girls who used to assemble radio components don't get replaced by speedier machine assembles; they get put out of business entirely by printed circuits. The stockbreeders who used to export power to the cities in the form of draft animals weren't hurt by competition from more efficient breeders. They simply ceased to have a market when the cities began exporting power to the farms, in the form of tractors and trucks. Just so, in the long run (which may be measured in years or even months, these days), the bank tellers and retail clerks and accounting departments are not as likely to be replaced by whirring black boxes which accept ten-dollar bills and return change as they are to be retired completely by new electronic credit systems. The machines don't confine themselves to doing our jobs faster and more reliably -- and cheaper. They make it unncessary for a great many of our jobs to be done at all. !F eanwhile, we have the strikes. More and more of them, we would bet; worse and worse strikes, costing us more and more money. (Each day's loss to New York under the current subway strike would build a couple dozen handsome new schools.) As long as Smith, operating at a job with only his own decisionmaking power, lives next door to Jones, whose decision-making power and consequent productivity is multiplied by the machine factor, they'll go on; because Smith eats as many pork chops in a year as Jones, his children wear out as many clothes, his car uses as much gas -- and he wants as much money. Postponing this revolution or slowing it down isn't going to make us very well indeed; let's swallow it and get it over! VtmeiiFBacon  Why were these men great? witt Ijxanklimk How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve ;Jf greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers s'"" Wm within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune ourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravita... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. (ropy of 'The Maa Of ' Life" -- lJgirtJoo. A nonprofit organiza... tion. AddresJ: scrfb# J.M.J. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name. AddressCityTheir castle was the last outpost of civilized man -- and it was doomed to fall! Until almost the last moment the factions among the castle clans were squabbling as to how Destiny properly should be met. The gentlemen of most prestige and account elected to ignore the entire undignified circumstance and went about their normal purnpoward the end of a stormy summer afternoon, with the sun finally breaking out under ragged black rain clouds, Castle Janeil was overwhelmed and its oooulation destroyed. suits, with neither more nor less punctilio than usual. A few cadets, desperate to the point of hysteria, took up weapons and prepared to resist the final assault. Others still, perhaps a quarter of the total population, waited passively, ready -- almost happy -- to expiate the sins of the human race. In the end death came uniformly to all; and all extracted as much satisfaction in their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford. The proud sat turning the pages of their beautiful books, or discussing the qualities of a century-old essence, or fondling a favorite Phane. They died without deigning to heed the fact. The hot-heads raced up the muddy slope which, outraging all normal rationality, loomed above the parapets of Janeil. Most were buried under sliding rubble, but a few gained the ridge to gun, hack, stab, until they themselves were shot, crushed by the half-alive powerwagons, hacked or stabbed. The contrite waited in the classic posture of expiation, on their knees, heads bowed, and perished, so they believed, by a process in which the Meks were symbols and human sin the reality. In the end all were dead: gentlemen, ladies, Phanes in the pavilions; Peasants in the stables. Of all those who had inhabited Janeil, only the Birds survived, creatures awkward, gauche and raucous, oblivious to pride and faith, more concerned with the wholeness of their hides than the dignity of their castle. As the Meks swarmed over the parapets, the Birds departed their cotes. They screamed strident insults as they flapped east toward Hagedorn, now the last castle of Earth. F our months before, the Meks had appeared in the park before Janeil, fresh from the Sea Island massacre. Climbing to the turrets and balconies, sauntering the Sunset Promenade, from ramparts and parapets, the gentlemen and ladies of Janeil, some two thousand in all, looked down at the browngold warriors. Their mood was complex : amused indifference, flippant disdain, over a substratum of doubt and foreboding. All these moods were the product of three basic circumstances : their own exquisitely subtle civilization, the security provided by Janeil's wall and the fact that they could think of nothing to do to alter the circumstances. The Janeil Meks had long since departed to join the revolt. There only remained Phanes, Peasants and Birds from which to fashion what would have been the travesty of a punitive force. At the moment there seemed no need for such a force. Janeil was deemed impregnable. The walls, two hundred feet tall, were black rock-melt contained in the meshes of a silver-blue steel alloy. Solar cells provided energy for all the needs of the castle, and in the event of emergency food could be synthesized from carbon dioxide and water vapor, as well as syrup for Phanes, Peasants and Birds. Such a need was not envisaged. Janeil was self-sufficient and secure, though inconveniences might arise when machinery broke down and there were no Meks to repair it. The situation, then, was disturbing but hardly desperate. During the day the gentlemen so inclined brought forth energy-guns and sport-rifles and killed as many Meks as the extreme range allowed. After dark the Meks brought forward power-wagons and earth-movers, and began to raise a dike around Janeil. The folk of the castle watched without comprehension until the dike reached a height of fifty feet and dirt began to spill down against the walls. Then the dire purpose of the Meks became apparent, and insouciance gave way to dismal foreboding. All the gentlemen of Janeil were erudite in at least one realm of knowledge. Certain were mathematical theoreticians, others had made a profound study of the physical sciences. Some of these, with a detail of Peasants to perform the sheer physical exertion, attempted to restore the energy-cannon to functioning condition. Unluckily, the cannon had not been maintained in good order. Various components were obviously corroded or damaged. Conceivably these components might have been replaced from the Mek shops on the second sub-level, but none of the group had any knowledge of the Mek nomenclature or warehousing system. Warrick Madency Arban (which is to say. Arban of the Madency family on the Warrick clan) suggested that a workforce of Peasants search the warehouse. But in view of the limited mental capacity of the Peasants, nothing was done and the whole plan to restore the energy-cannon came to naught. The gentlefolk of Janeil watched in fascination as the dirt piled higher and higher around them, in a circular mound like a crater. Summer neared its end, and on one stormy day dirt and rubble rose above the parapets, and began to spill over into the courts and piazzas. Janeil must soon be buried and all within suffocated. It was then that a group of impulsive young cadets, with more elan than dignity, took up weapons and charged up the slope. The Meks dumped dirt and stone upon them, but a handful gained the ridge where they fought in a kind of dreadful exaltation. Fifteen minutes the fight raged and the earth became sodden with rain and blood. For one glorious moment the cadets swept the ridge clean. Had not most of their fellows been lost under the rubble anything might have occurred. But the Meks regrouped, thrust forward. Ten men were left, then six, then four, then one, then none. The Meks marched down the slope, swarmed over the battlements, and with somber intensity killed all within. Janeil, for seven hundred years the abode of gallant gentlemen and gracious ladies, had become a lifeless hulk. nphe Mek, standing as if a A specimen in a museum case, was a man-like creature native, in his original version, to a planet of Etamin. His tough rustybronze hide glistened metallically as if oiled or waxed. The spines thrusting back from scalp and neck shone like gold, and indeed they were coated with a conductive copper-chrome film. His sense organs were gathered in clusters at the site of a man's ears; his visage -- it was often a shock, walking the lower corridors, to come suddenly upon a Mek -- was corrugated muscle, not dissimilar to the look of an uncovered human brain. His maw, a vertical irregular cleft at the base of this "face', was an obsolete organ by reason of the syrup sac which had been introduced under the skin of the shoulders, and the digestive organs, originally used to extract nutrition from decayed swamp vegetation and coelenterates, had atrophied. The Mek typically wore no garment except possibly a work apron or a tool-belt, and in the sunlight his rustbronze skin made a handsome display. This was the Mek solitary, a creature intrinsically as effective as man -- perhaps more by virtue of his superb brain which also functioned as a radio transceiver. Working in the mass, by the teeming thousands, he seemed less admirable, less competent: a hybrid of sub-man and cockroach. Certain savants, notably Mominglight's D.R. Jardine and Salonson of Tuang, considered the Mek bland and phlegmatic, but the profound Claghom of Castle Hagedom asserted otherwise. The emotions of the Mek, said Claghom, were different from human emotions, and only vaguely comprehensible to man. After diligent research Claghom isolated over a dozen Mek emotions. In spite of such research, the Mek revolt came as an utter surprise, no less to Claghom, D. R. Jardine and Salonson than to anyone else. Why? asked everyone. How could a group so long submissive have contrived so murderous a plot? The most reasonable conjecture was also the simplest: the Mek resented servitude and hated the Earthmen who had removed him from his natural environment. Those who argued against this theory claimed that it projected human emotions and attitudes into a non-human organism, that the Mek had every reason to feel gratitude toward the gentlemen who had liberated him from the conditions of Etamin Nine. To this, the first group would inquire, "Who projects human attitudes now?" And the retort of their opponents was often: "Since no one knows for certain, one projection is no more absurd than another." II C astle Hagedom occupied the crest of a black diorite crag overlooking a wide valley to the south. Larger, more majestic than Janiel, Hagedorn was protected by walls a mile in circumference, three hundred feet tall. The parapets stood a full nine hundred feet above the valley, with towers, turrets and observation eyries raising even higher. Two sides of the crag, at east and west, dropped sheer to the valley. The north and south slopes, a trifle less steep, were terraced and planted with vines, artichokes, pears and pomegranates. An avenue rising from the valley circled the crag and passed through a portal into the central plaza. Opposite stood the great Rotunda, with at either side the tall Houses of the twenty-eight families. The original castle, constructed immediately after the return of men to Earth, stood on the site now occupied by the plaza. The tenth Hagedom had assembled an enormous force of Peasants and Meks to build the new walls, after which he demolished the old castle. The twenty-eight Houses dated from this time, five hundred years before. Below the plaza were three service levels: the stables and garages at the bottom, next the Mek shops and Mek living quartos, then the various storerooms, warehouses and special shops: bakery, brewery, lapidary, arsenal, repository, and the like. nphe current Hagedom, twentysixth of the line, was a Claghom of the Overwheles. His seXanten yellow, black piping Haude, Quay, Idelsea, Esledune, Salomon, Roseth. Beaudry dark blue, white piping Onwane, Zadig, Prine, Fer, Susune. Overwhele gray, green, red rosettes Claghorn, Abreti, Woss, Hinken Zumbeld. Aure brown, black Zadhause, Fotergil, Marune, Baudune, Godaiming, Lesmanie Isseth purple, dark red ' Mazeth, Floy, Luder-Hepman, Uegus, Kerrithew, Bethune. The first ; Hagedorn'. gentleman of the castle, elected for life, Is known The elan chief, selected by the family elders, bears the name of his clan; thus: 'Xanten', 'Beaudry', 'Overwhele', 'Aure', Tsseth' -- both clans and clan chiefs. The family elder, selected by household heads, bears the name of his family. Thus 'Xdelsea', 'Zadhause', 'Bethune', 'Claghorn', are both families and family elders. The remaining gentlemen and ladles bear first the clan, then the family, then the personal name. Thus: Aure Zadhause Ludwick. abbreviated to A. Z. Ludwick, and Beaudry Fer Darlane, abbreviated to B. F. Darlane. lection had occasioned general surprise, because O.C. Charle, as he had been before his elevation, was a gentleman of no remarkable presence. His elegance, flair, and erudition were only ordinary; he had never been notable for any significant originality of thought. His physical proportions were good; his face was square and bony, with a short straight nose, a benign brow, narrow gray eyes. His expression was normally a trifle abstracted -- his detractors used the word 'vacanf . But by a simple lowering of the eyelids, a downward twitch of the coarse blond eyebrows, it at once became stubborn and surly, a fact of which O.C. Charle, or Hagedorn, was unaware. The office, while exerting little or no formal authority, exerted a pervasive influence, and the style of the gentleman who was Hagedorn affected everyone. For this reason the selection of Hagedom was a matter of no small importance, subject to hundreds of considerations, and it was the rare candidate who failed to have some old solecism or gaucherie discussed with embarrassing candor. While the candidate might never take overt umbrage, friendships were inevitably sundered, rancors augmented, reputations blasted. O. C. Charle's elevation represented a compromise between two factions among the Overwheles, to which clan the privilege of selection had fallen. The gentlemen between whom O.C. Charle represented a compromise were both highly respected, but distinguished by basically different attitudes toward existence. The first was the talented Garr of the Zumbeld family. He exemplified the traditional virtues of Castle Hagedorn: he was a notable connoisseur of essences, he dressed with absolute savoir, with never so much as a pleat nor a twist of the characteristic Overwhele rosette awry. He combined insouciance and flair with dignity. His allusions and turns of phrase. When aroused his wit was utterly mordant. He could quote every literary work of consequence; he performed expertly upon the ninestringed lute, and was thus in constant demand at the Viewing of Antique Tabards. He was an antiquarian of unchallengeable erudition and knew the locale of every major city of Old Earth, and could discourse for hours upon the history of the ancient times. His military expertise was unparallelled at Hagedorn, and challenged only by D. K. Magdah of Castle Delora and perhaps Brusham of Tuang. Faults? Flaws? Few could be cited: over-punctilio which might be construed as waspishness; an intrepid pertinacity which could be considered ruthless. O. Z. Garr could never be dismissed as insipid or indecisive, and his personal courage was beyond dispute. Two years before a stray band of Nomads had ventured into Lucerne Valley, slaughtering Peasants, stealing cattle, and going so far as to fire an arrow into the chest of an Isseth cadet. O.Z. Garr instantly assembled a punitive company of Meks, loaded them aboard a dozen power-wagons and set forth in pursuit of the Nomads, finally overtaking them near Drene River, by the ruins of Worster Cathedral. The Nomads were unexpectedly strong, unexpectedly crafty, and were not content to turn tail and flee. During the fighting O.Z. Garr displayed the most exemplary demeanor, directing the attack from the seat of his power-wagon, a pair of Meks standing by with shields to ward away arrows. The conflict ended in a rout of the Nomads. They left twentyseven lean black-cloaked corpses strewn on the field, while only twenty Meks lost their lives. Garr's opponent in the election was Claghorn, elder of the Claghorn family. As with O.Z. Garr, the exquisite discriminations of Hagedorn aoriMy came to Claghorn as easily aa swimming to a fish. He was no less erudite than O.Z. Garr, though hardly so versatile, his principal field of study being the Meks, their physiology, linguistic modes, and social patterns. Claghom's conversation was more profound, but less entertaining and not so trenchant as that of O.Z. Garr. He seldom employed the extravagant tropes and allusions which characterized Garr's discussions, preferring a style of speech which was almost unadorned. Claghorn kept no Phanes; O.Z. Garr's four matched Gossamer Dainties were marvels of delight, and at the viewing of Antique Tabards Garr's presentations were seldom outshone. The important contrast between the two men lay in their philosophic outlook. O.Z. Garr, a traditionalist, a fervent exemplar of his society, subscribed to its tents without res ervation. He was beset by neither doubt nor guilt; he felt no desire to alter the conditions which afforded more than two thousand gentlemen and ladies lives of great richness. Claghorn, while by no means an Expiationist, was known to feel dissatisfaction with the general tenor of life at Castle Hagedorn, and argued so plausibly that many folk refused to listen to him, on the grounds that they became uncomfortable. But an indefinable malaise ran deep, and Claghorn had many influential supporters. When the time came for ballots to be cast, neither O.Z. Garr nor Claghorn could muster sufficient support. The office finally was conferred upon a gentleman who never in his most optimistic reckonings had expected it: a gentleman of decorum and dignity but no great depth; without flippancy, but likewise without vivacity; affable but disinclined to force an issue to a disagreeable conclusion: O.C. Charle, the new Hagedorn. Six months later, during the dark hours before dawn, the Hagedorn Meks evacuated their quarters and departed, taking with them powerwagons, tools, weapons and electrical equipment. The act had clearly been long in the planning, for simultaneously the Meks at each of the eight other castles made a similar departure. T'he initial reaction at Castle Hagedorn, as elsewhere, was incredulity, then shocked anger, then -- when the implications of the act were pondered -- a sense of foreboding and calamity. The new Hagedorn, the clan chiefs, and certain other notables appointed by Hagedorn met in the formal council chamber to consider the matter. They sat around a great table covered with red velvet: Hagedorn at the head; Xanten and Isseth at his left; Overwhele, Aure and Beaudry at his right; then the others, including O. Z. Garr, I. K. Linus, A. G. Bernal, a mathematical theoretician of great ability, B. F. Wyas, an equally sagacious antiquarian who had identified the sites of many ancient cities: Palmyra, Lubeck, Eridu, Zanesville, Burton-on-Trent, Massilia among others. Certain family elders filled out the council: Marune and Baudune of Aure; Quay, Roseth and Idelsea of Xanten; Uegus of Isseth, Claghorn of Overwhele. All sat silent for a period of ten minutes, arranging their minds and performing the silent act erf psychic accommodation known as 'intression'. At last Hagedorn spoke. "The castle suddenly is bereft of its Meks. Needless to say, this is an inconvenient condition to be adjusted as swiftly as possible. Here, I am sure, we find ourselves of one mind." He looked around the table. All thrust forward ivory tablets to signify assent -- all save Claghom, who however did not stand it on end to signify dissent. Isseth, a stern white-haired gentleman magnificently handsome in spite of his seventy years, spoke in a grim voice. "I see no point in cogitation or delay. What we must do is clear. Admittedly the Peasants are poor material from which to recruit an armed force. Nonetheless, we must assemble them, equip them with sandals, smocks and weapons so that they do not discredit us, and put them under good leadership: O. Z. Garr or Xanten. Birds can locate the vagrants, whereupon we will track them down, order the Peasants to give them a good drubbing and herd them home on the double." Xanten, thirty-five years old, extraordinarily young to be a clan chief, and a notorious firebrand, shook his head. "The idea is appealing but impractical. Peasants simply could not stand up to the Meks, no matter how we trained them." The statement was manifestly  This Is only an approximate translation ana rails to capture the pungency of the language. Several words have no contemporary equivalents. 'Skirkling as to send skirkling', denotes a frantic pell-mell flight in all directions accompanied by a vibration or twinkling or a Jerking motion. To 'volith' is to toy Idly with a matter, the implication being that the person involved is of such Jovian potency that all difficulties dwindle to contemptible triviality. 'Raudelbogs' are the semi-intelligent beings of Etamin Four, who were brought to Earth, trained first as gardeners, then construction laborers, then sent home m disgrace because of certain repulsive habits they refused to forgo. The statement of O. Z. Garr. therefore, becomes something like this: Were power-wagons at hand, I'd volith riding forth with a whip to send the raudelbogs skirkling home." accurate. The Peasants, small andromorphs originally of Spica Ten, were not so much timid as incapable of performing a vicious act.  dour silence held the table. O. Z. Garr finally spoke. "The dogs have stolen our powerwagons, otherwise I'd be tempted to ride out and chivvy the rascals home with a whip." "A matter of perplexity," said Hagedorn, "is syrup. Naturally they carried away what they could. When this is exhausted -- what then? Will they starve? Impossible for them to return to their original diet -- what was it, swamp mud? Eh, Claghom, you're the expert in these matters. Can the Meks return to a diet of mud?" "No," said Claghom. "The organs of the adult are atrophied. If a cub were started on the diet, he'd probably survive." "Just as I assumed." Hagedorn scowled portentously down at his clasped hands to conceal his total lack of any constructive proposal. A gentleman in the dark blue of the Beaudrys appeared in the doorway: he poised himself, held high his right arm, bowed. Hagedorn rose to his feet. "Come forward, B. F. Robarth; what is your news?" For this was the significance of the newcomer's genuflection. "The news is a message broadcast from Halycon. The Meks have attacked; they have fired the structure and are slaughtering all. The radio went dead one minute ago." All swung around, some jumped to their feet. "Slaughter?" croaked Claghom. "I am certain that by now Halcyon is no more." Claghom sat staring with eyes unfocused. The others discussed the dire news in voices heavy with horror. Hagedorn once more brought the council back to order. "This is clearly an extreme situation; the gravest, perhaps, of our entire history. I am frank to state that I can suggest no decisive counter-act." Overwhele inquired, "What of the other castles? Are they secure?" Hagedorn turned to B. F. Robarth : "Will you be good enough to make general radio contact with all other castles, and inquire as to their condition?" Xanten said, "Others are as vulnerable as Halcyon: Sea Island and Delora, in particular, and Maraval as well." Claghom emerged from his reverie. "The gentlemen and ladies of these places, in my opinion, should consider taking refuge at Janeil or here until the uprising is quelled." O thers around the table looked at him in surprise and puzzlement. O. Z. Garr inquired in the silkiest of voices: "You envision the gentlefolk of these castles scampering to refuge at the cock-a-hoop swaggering of the lower orders?" "Indeed I do, should they wish to survive," responded Claghom politely. A gentleman of late middle-age, Claghom was stocky, strong, with black-gray hair, magnificent green eyes, a manner which suggest great internal force under stem control. "Flight by definition entails a certain dimunition of dignity," he went on to say. "If O. Z. Garr can propound an elegant manner of taking to one's heels, I will be glad to learn it, and everyone else should likewise heed, because in the days to come the capability may be of comfort to all." Hagedorn interposed before O Z. Garr could reply. "Let us kec to the issues. I confess I cannc see to the end of all this. The Meks have demonstrated themselves to be murderers. How can we take murderers back into our service? But if we don't -- well, to say the least, conditions will be austere until we can locate and train a new force of technicians." "The spaceships!" exclaimed Xanten. "We must see to them at once!" "What's this?" inquired Beaudry, a gentleman of rock-hard face. "How do you mean: 'see to them'?" "They must be protected from damage! What else? They are our link to the Home Worlds. The maintenance Meks probably have not deserted the hangars, since, if they propose to exterminate us, they will want to deny us the spaceships." "Perhaps you care to march with a levy of Peasants to take the hangars under firm control?" suggested O. Z. Garr in a somewhat supercilious voice. A long history of rivalry and mutual detestation existed between himself and Xanten. "It may be our only hope," said Xanten. "Still -- how does one fight with a levy of Peasants? Better that I fly to the hangars and reconnoiter. Meanwhile, perhaps you, and others with military expertise, will take in hand the recruitment and training of a Peasant militia." "In this regard," stated O. Z. Garr, I await the outcome of our current deliberations. If it develops that here lies the optimum course, I naturally will apply my competences to the fullest degree. If your own capabilities are best fulfilled by spying out the activities of the Meks, I hope you will be large-hearted enough to do the same." The two gentlemen glared at each other. A year previously their emnity had almost culminated in a duel. Xanten, a gentleman tall, cleanlimbed, nervously active, was gifted with great natural flair, but likewise evinced a disposition too easy for absolute elegance. The traditionalists considered him sthross', indicating a manner flawed by an almost imperceptible slackness and lack of punctilio: not the best possible choice for clan chief. Xanten's response to O. Z. Garr was blandly polite. "I shall be glad to take this task upon myself. Since haste is of the essence I will risk the accusation of precipitousness and leave at once. Hopefully I return to report tomorrow." He rose, performed a ceremonious bow to Hagedom, another all-inclusive salute to the council and departed. Ill TTe crossed to Esledune House where he maintained an apartment on the thirteenth level : four rooms furnished in the style known as Fifth Dynasty, after an epoch in the history of the Altair Home Planets, from which the human race had returned to Earth. His current consort, Araminta, a lady of the Onwane family, was absent on affairs of her own, which suited Xanten well enough. After plying him with questions she would have discredited his simple explanation, preferring to suspect an assignation at his country place. Truth to tell, he had become bored with Araminta and had reason to believe that she felt similarly -- or perhaps his exalted rank had provided her less opportunity to preside at glittering social functions than she had expected. They had bred no children. Araminta's daughter by a previous connection had been tallied to her. Her second child must then be tallied to Xanten, preventing him from siring another child. Xanten doffed his yellow council vestments. Assisted by a young Peasant buck, he donned dark yellow hunting-breeches with black trim, a black jacket, black boots. He drew a cap of soft black leather over his head, slung a pouch over his shoulder, into which he loaded weapons: a coiled blade, an energy gun. Leaving the apartment he summoned the lift and descended to the first level armory, where normally a Mek clerk would have  The population ot Castle Hagedorn was fixed; each gentleman and each lady was permitted a single child. H by chance another were bom he must either find someone who had not yet sired to sponsor it, or dispose of It another way. The usual procedure was to give the child into the care of the Explationists. served him. Now Xanten, to his vast disgust, was forced to take himself behind the counter, and rummage here and there. The Meks had removed most of the sporting rifles, all the pellet ejectors and heavy energy-guns. Air ominous circumstance, thought Xanten. At last he found a steel sling-whip, spare power-slugs for his gun, a brace of fire grenades, a high-powered monocular. He returned to the lift, rode to the top level, ruefully considering the long climb when eventually the mechanism broke down, with no Meks at hand to make repairs. He thought of the apoplectic furies of rigid traditionalists such as Beaudry and chuckled. Eventful days lay ahead! Stopping at the top level he crossed to the parapets, proceeded around to the radio room. Customarily three Mek specialists connected into the apparatus by wires clipped to their quills sat typing messages as they arrived. Now B. F. Robarth stood before the mechanism, uncertainly twisting the dials, his mouth wry with deprecation and distaste for the job. "Any further news?" Xanten asked. B. F. Robarth gave him a sour grin. "The folk at the other end seem no more familiar with this cursed tangle than I. I hear occasional voices. I believe that the Meks are attacking Castle Delora." '""ilaghorn had entered the room  behind Xanten. 'T)id I hear you correctly? Delora Castle is gone?" "Not gone yet, Claghom. But as good as gone. The Delora walls are little better than a picturesque crumble." "Sickening situation!" muttered Xanten. "How can sentient creatures perform such evil? After all these centuries, how little we actually knew of them!" As he spoke he recognized the tactlessness of his remark; Claghom had devoted much time to a study of the Meks. "The act itself is not astounding," said Claghom shortly. "It has occurred a thousand times in human history." Mildly surprised that Claghom should use human history as referent to a case involving the sub-orders, Xanten asked: "You were never aware of this vicious aspect to the Mek nature?" "No. Never. Never indeed." Claghom seemed unduly sensitive, thought Xanten. Understandable, all in all. Claghom's basic doctrine as set forth during the Hagedor selection was by no means simple, and Xanten neither understood it nor completely endorsed what he conceived to be its goals; but it was plain that the revolt of the Meks had cat the ground out from under Claghom's feet. Probably to the somewhat bitter satisfaction of O. Z. Garr, who must feel vindicated in his traditionalist doctrines. Claghom said tersely, "The life we've been leading couldn't last forever. It's a wonder it lasted as long as it did." "Perhaps so," said Xanten in a sootfling voice. "Well, no matter. All things change. Who knows? The Peasants may be planning to poison our food... I must go." He bowed to Claghom, who returned him a crisp nod, and to B. F. Robarth, then departed the room. He climbed the spiral staircase -- almost a ladder -- to the cotes, where the Birds lived in an invincible disorder, occupying themselves with gambling at the game of quarrels, a version of chess, with rules incomprehensible to every gentleman who had tried to understand it. Castle Hagedom maintained a hundred Birds, tended by a gang of long-suffering Peasants, whom the Birds held in vast disesteem. They were garish garrulous creatures, pigmented red, yellow, blue, with long necks, jerking inquisitive heads, an inherent irreverence which no amount of discipline or tutelage could overcome. Spying Xanten, they emitted a chorus of rude jeers: Inane "Somebody wants a ride! Heavy tiling!" "Why don't the selfanointed two-footers grow wings for themselves?" "My friend, never trust a Bird! We'll sky you, then fling you down on your fundament!" "Quiet!" called Xanten. "I need six fast, silent Birds, upon an important mission. Are any capable of such a task?" "Are any capable, he asks!" "A ros ros ros! When none of us have flown for a week!" "Silence? We'll give you silence, yellow and black!" "Come then. You. You. You of the wise eye. You there. You with the cocked shoulder. You with the green pompon. To the basket." Jhe Birds designated, jeering, grumbling, reviling the Peasants, allowed their syrup sacs to be filled, then flapped to the wicker seat where Xanten waited. "To the space depot at Vincenne," he told them. "Fly high and silently. Enemies are abroad. We must learn what harm if any has been done to the space ships." "To the depot then!" Each Bird seized a length of rope tied to an overhead framework; the chair was yanked up with a jerk calculated to rattle Xanten's teeth, and off they flew, laughing, cursing each other for not supporting more of the load, but eventually all accommodating themselves to the task and flying with a coordinated flapping of the thirty-six sets of wings. To Xanten's relief, their garrulity lessened ; silently they flew south, at a speed of fifty or sixty miles per hour. The afternoon was already waning. The ancient countryside, scene to so many comings and goings, so much triumph and so much disaster, was laced with long black shadows. Looking down, Xanten reflected that though the human stock was native to this soil, and though his immediate ancestors had maintained their holdings for seven hundred years, Earth still seemed an alien world. The reason of course was by no means mysterious or rooted in paradox. After the Six-Star War, Earth had lain fallow for three thousand years, unpopulated save for a handful of anguished wretches who somehow had survived the cataclysm and who had become semi-barbaric Nomads. Then seven hundred years ago certain rich lords of Altair, motivated to some extent by political disaffection, but no less by caprice, had decided to return to Earth. Such was the origin of the nine great strongholds, the resident gentlefolk and the staffs of specialized andromorphs. Xanten flew over an area where an antiquarian had directed excavations, revealing a plaza flagged with white stone, a broken obelisk, a tumbled statue. The sight, by some trick of association, stimulated Xanten's mind to an astonishing vision, so simple and yet so grand that he looked around, in all directions, with new eyes. The vision was Earth re-populated with men, tile land cultivated, Nomads driven back into the wilderness. At the moment the image was far-fetched. And Xanten, watching the soft contours of old Earth slide below, pondered the Mek revolt which had altered his life with such startling abruptness. Claghom had long insisted that no human condition endured forever, with the corollary that the more complicated such a condition, the greater its susceptibility to change. In that case the seven hundred year continuity at Castle Hagedorn -- as artificial, extravagant and intricate as life could be -- became an astonishing circumstance in itself. Claghom had pushed his thesis further. Since change was inevitable, he argued that the gentlefolk should soften the impact by anticipating and controlling the changes -- a doctrine which had been attacked with great fervor. The traditionalists labeled all of Claghom s ideas demonstrable fallacy, and cited the very stability of castle Hfe as proof at its viability. Xanten had inclined first one way, then the other, emotionally involved with neither cause. If anything, the fact of O. Z. Carr's traditionalism had nudged him toward Claghom's views. Now it seemed as if events had vindicated Claghom. Change had come, with an impact of the maximum harshness and violence. There were still questions to be answered, of course. Why had tiie Meks chosen this particular time to revolt? Conditions had not altered appreciably for five hundred years, and the Meks had never previously hinted dissatisfaction. In fact, they had revealed nothing of their feelings -- though no one had ever troubled to ask them -- save Claghom. T ie Birds were veering east to avoid the Ballarat Mountains, to the west of which were the ruins of a great city, never satisfactorily identified. Below lay the Lucerne Valley, at one time a fertile farm land. If one looked with great concentration the outline of the various holdings could sometimes be distinguished. Ahead, the spaceship hangars were visible, where Mek technicians maintained four spaceships that were jointly the property of Hagedom, Janeil, Tuang, Mominglight and Maraval, though, for a variety of reasons, the ships were never used. The sun was setting. Orange light twinkled and flickered on the metal walls. Xanten called instructions up to the Birds: "Circle down; alight behind that line of trees, but fly low so that none will see." Down on stiff wings curved the Birds, six ungainly necks stretched toward the ground. Xanten was ready for the impact. The Birds never seemed able to alight easily when they carried a gentleman. When the cargo was something in which they felt a personal concern, dandelion fluff would never have been disturbed by the jar. Xanten expertly kept his balance, instead of tumbling and rolling in the manner preferred by the Birds. "You all have syrup," he told them. "Rest: make no noise; do not quarrel. By tomorrow's sunset, if I am not here, return to Castle Hagedom and say that Xanten was killed." "Never fear!" cried the Birds. "We will wait forever!" "At any rate till tomorrow's sunset!" "If danger threatens, if you are pressed -- a ros ros ros! Call for the Birds!" A ros We are ferocious when aroused!" "I wish it were true," said Xanten. "The Birds are arrant cowards, this is well known. Still I value the sentiment Remember my instructions, and be quiet above all! I do not wish to be set upon and stabbed because of your clamor." The Birds made indignant sounds. "Injustice, injustice! We are quiet as the dew!" "Good." Xanten hurriedly moved away lest they should bellow new advice or reassurances after him. IV passing through the forest, he I came to an open meadow at the far edge of which, perhaps a hundred yards distant, was the rear of the first hangar. He stopped to consider. Several factors were involved. First, the maintenance Meks, with the metal structure shielding them from radio contact, might still be unaware of the revolt. Hardly likely, he decided, in view of the otherwise careful planning. Second, the Meks, in continuous communication with their fellows, acted as a collective organism. The aggregate functioned more completely than its parts, and the individual was not prone to initiative. Hence, vigilance was not likely to be extreme. Third, if they expected anyone to attempt a discreet approach, they would necessarily scrutinize most closely the route which he proposed to take. Xanten decided to wait in the shadows another ten minutes, until the setting sun shining over his shoulder should most effectively blind any who might watch. Ten minutes passed. The hangars, burnished by the dying sunlight, bulked long, tall, completely quiet. In the intervening meadow long golden grass waved and rippled in a cool breeze. Xanten took a deep breath, hefted his pouch, arranged his weapons, strode forth. It did not occur to him to crawl through the grass. He reached the back of the nearest hangar without challenge. Pressing his ear to the metal he heard nothing. He walked to the corner, looked down the side: no sign of life. Xanten shrugged. Very well then; to the door. He walked beside the hangar, the setting sun casting a long black shadow ahead of him. He came to a door opening into the hangar administrative office. Since there was nothing to be gained by trepidation, Xanten thrust the door aside and entered. The offices were empty. The desks, where centuries before underlings had sat, calculating invoices and bills of lading, were bare, polished, free of dust. The computers and information banks, black enamel, glass, white and red switches, looked as if they had been installed only the day before. Xanten crossed to the glass pane overlooking the hangar floor, shadowed under the bulk of the ship. He saw no Meks. But on the floor of the hangar, arranged in neat rows and heaps, were elements and assemblies of the ship's control mechanism. Service panels gaped wide into the hull to show where the devices had been detached. Xanten stepped from the office out into the hangar. The spaceship had been disabled, put out of commission. Xanten looked along the neat rows of parts. Certain savants of various castles were expert in the theory of space-time transfer; S. X. Rosenhox of Maraval had even derived a set of equations which, if translated into machinery, eliminated the troublesome Hamus Effect. But not one gentleman, even were he so oblivious to personal honor as to touch a hand to a tool, would know how to replace, connect and tune the mechanisms heaped upon the hangar floor. When had the malicious work been done? Impossible to say. Xanten returned to the office, stepped back out into the twilight, walked to the next hangar. Again no Meks; again the spaceship had been gutted of its control mechanisms. Xanten proceeded to the third hangar, where conditions were the same. At the fourth hangar he discerned the faint sounds of activity. Stepping into the office, looking through the glass wall into the hangar, he found Meks working with their usual economy of motion, in a near silence which was uncanny. Xanten, already uncomfortable because of skulking through the forest, became enraged by the cool destruction of his property. He strode forth into the hangar. Slapping his thigh to attract attention he called in a harsh voice, "Return the components to place! How dare you vermin act in such a manner?" f  'he Meks turned about their blank countenances, studied him through black beaded lensclusters at each side erf thenheads. "What?" Xanten bellowed. "You hesitate?" He brought forth his steel whip, usually more of a symbolic adjunct then a punitive instrument, and slashed it against the ground. "Obey! This ridiculous revolt is at its end!" The Meks still hesitated, and events wavered in die balance. None made a sound, though messages were passing among them, appraising the circumstances, establishing a consensus. Xanten could allow them no such leisure. He marched forward, wielding the whip, striking at the only are where the Meks felt pain: the ropy face. "To your duties," he roared. "A fine maintenance crew are you! A destruction crew is more like it!" The Meks made their soft blowing sound which might mean anything. They fell back, and now Xanten noted one standing at the head of the companionway leading into the ship: a Mek larger than any he had seen before and one in some fashion different. This Mek was aiming a pellet gun at his head. With an unhurried flourish Xanten whipped away a Mek who had leapt forward with a knife, and without deigning to aim fired at and destroyed the Mek who stood on the companionway, even as the slug sang past his head. The other Meks were nevertheless committed to an attack. All surged forward. Lounging disdainfully against the hull, Xanten shot them as they came, moving his head once to avoid a chunk of metal, again reaching to catch a throw-knife and hurl it into the face of him who had thrown it. The Meks drew back, and Xanten guessed that they had agreed on a new tactic: either to withdraw for weapons or perhaps to confine him within the hangar. In any event no more could be accomplished here. He made play with the whip and cleared an avenue to the office. With tools, metal bars and forgings striking the glass behind him, he sauntered through the office and out into the night. He did not look behind. The full moon was rising, a great yellow globe casting a smoky saffron glow, like an antique lamp. Mek eyes were not well adapted for night seeing, and Xanten waited by the door. Presently Meks began to pour forth, and Xanten hacked at their necks as they came. The Meks drew back inside the hangar. Wiping his blade Xanten strode off the way he had come, looking neither right nor left. He stopped short. The night was young. Something tickled his mind : the recollection of the Mek who had fired the pellet gun. He had been larger, possibly a darker bronze, but, more significantly, he had displayed an indefinable poise, almost authority -- though such a word, when used in connection with the Meks, was anomalous. On the other hand, someone must have planned the revolt, or at least originated the concept of a revolt in the first place. It might be worthwhile to extend the reconnaissance, though his primary information had been secured. X anten turned back and crossed the landing area to the barracks and garages. Once more, frowning in discomfort, he felt the need for discretion. What times these were when a gentleman must skulk to avoid such as the Meks! He stole up behind the garages, where a half-dozen power-wagons lay dozing. Xanten looked them over. All were of the same sort, a metal frame with four wheels and an earth-moving blade at the front. Nearby must be the syrup stock. Xanten presently found a bin containing a number of containers. He loaded a dozen on a nearby wagon and slashed the rest with his knife, so that the syrup gushed across the ground. The Meks used a somewhat different formulation; their syrup would be stocked at a different locale, presumably inside the barracks. Xanten mounted a power-wagon, twisted the 'awake' key, tapped the 'Go' button, pulled a lever which set the wheels into reverse motion. The power-wag Power-wagons, like the Meks, were originally swamp-creatures from Etamin #. They were great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung Into a rectangular frame and protected from sunlight, insects and rodents by a synthetic pelt. Syrup sacs communicated with their digestive apparatus, wires led to motor nodes in the rudimentary brain. The muscles were clamped to rocker arms which actuated rotors and drive-wheels. The power-wagons were economical, long-lived and docile, and so they were principally used for heavy cartage earth-moving, heavy-tillage, and other arduous jobs. on lurched back. Xanten halted it and turned it so that it faced the barracks. He did likewise with three others, then set them all in motion, one after the other. They trundled forward. The blades cut open the metal wall of the barracks, the roof sagged. The power-wagons continued, pushing the length of the interior, crushing all in their way. Xanten nodded in profound satisfaction, returned to the power-wagon he had reserved for his own use. Mounting to the seat, he waited. No Meks issued from the barracks. Apparently they were deserted, with the entire crew busy at the hangars. Still, hopefully, the syrup stocks had been destroyed. Many might perish by starvation. From the direction of the hangars came a single Mek, evidently attracted by the sounds of destruction. Xanten crouched on the seat and as it passed, coiled his whip around the stocky neck. He heaved; the Mek spun to the ground. Xanten leapt down, seized its pellet-gun. Here was another of the larger Meks, and now Xanten saw it to be without a syrup sac, a Mek in the original state. Astounding! How did the creature survive? Suddenly there were many new questions to be asked; hopefully a few to be answered. Standing on the creature's head, Xanten hacked away the long antenna quills which protruded from the back of th Meks' scalp. It was now insulated, alone, on its own resources;, a situation certain to reduce thel most stalwart Mek to apathy. "Up!" ordered Xanten. "Into the back of the wagon!" He cracked the whip for emphasis. The Mek at first seemed disposed to defy him, but after  blow or two obeyed. Xanten climbed into the seat, started the power-wagon, directed it to the north. The Birds would be unable to carry both himself and the Mek -- or in any event they would cry and complain so raucously that they might as well be believed at first. They might or might not wait until the specified hour of tomorrow's sunset As likely as not they would sleep the night in a tree, awake in a surly mood and return at once to Castle Hagedom. All through the night the power wagon trundled, with Xanten on the seat and his captive huddled in the rear. 'T'he gentlefolk of the castles, for all their assurance, disliked to wander the countryside by night, by reason of what some derided as superstitious fear. Others cited travelers benighted beside mouldering ruins and their subsequent visions: the eldritch music they had heard, or the whimper of moon-mirkins, or the far horns of spectral huntsmen. Others had seen pale lavender and green lights, and wraiths which ran with long strides through the forest; and Hode Abbey, now a dank tumble, was notorious for the White Hag and the alarming toll she exacted. A hundred such cases were known. While the hard-headed scoffed, none needlessly traveled the countryside by night. Indeed, if truly ghosts haunt the scenes of tragedy and heartbreak, then the landscape of Old Earth must be home to ghosts and specters beyond all numbering; especially that region across which Xanten rolled in the power-wagon, where every rock, every meadow, every vale and swale was crusted thick with human experience. The moon rose high. The wagon trundled north along an ancient road, the cracked concrete slabs shining pale in the moonlight. Twice Xanten saw flickering orange lights off to the side, and once, standing in the shade of a cypress tree, he thought to see a tall quiet shape, silently watching him pass. The captive Mek sat plotting mischief, Xanten well knew. Without its quills it must feel depersonified, bewildered, but Xanten told himself that it would not do to doze. The road led through a town, certain structures of which yet stood. Not even the Nomads took refuge in these old towns, fearing either miasma or perhaps the redolence of grief. The moon reached the zenith. The landscape spread away in a hundred tones of silver, black and gray. Looking about, Xanten thought that for all the notable pleasures of civilized life, there was yet something to be said for the spaciousness and simplicity of Nomadland... The Mek made a stealthy movement Xanten did not so much as turn his head. He cracked his whip in the air. The Mek became quiet.  #I through the night the powerwagon rolled along the old road, with the moon sinking into the west. The eastern horizon glowed green and lemonyellow, and presently, as the pallid moon disappeared over the distant line of the mountains the sun came up. At this moment, Xanten spied a drift of smoke off to the right. He halted the wagon. Standing up on the seat he craned his neck to spy a Nomad encampment about a quarter-mile distant. He could distinguish three or four dozen tents of various sizes, a dozen dilapidated power-wagons. On the hetman's tall tent he thought to see a black ideogram which he thought he recognized. If so, this would be the tribe which not long before had trespassed on the Hagedom domain, and which O.Z. Garr had repulsed. Xanten settled himself upon the seat, composed his garments, set the power-wagon in motion and guided it toward the camp. A hundred black-cloaked men, tall and lean as ferrets, watched his approach. A dozen sprang forward and whipping arrows to bows aimed them at his heart. Xanten turned them a glance of supercilious inquiry, drove the wagon up to the hetman's tent, halted. He rose to his feet. "Hetman," he called. "Are you awake?" The hetman parted the canvas which closed off his tent, peered out and after a moment came forth. Like the others he wore a garment of limp black cloth, swathing head and body alike. His face thrust through a square opening: narrow blue eyes, a grotesquely long nose, a chin long, skewed and sharp. Xanten gave him a curt nod. "Observe this." He jerked his thumb toward the Mek in the back of the wagon. The hetman flicked aside his eyes, studied the Mek a tenthsecond, returned to a scrutiny of Xanten. "His kintl have revolted against the gentlemen," said Xanten. "In fact they massacre all the men of Earth, Hence we of Castle Hagedom make this offer to the Nomads. Come to Castle Hagedom! We will feed, clothe and arm you. We will train you to discipline and the arts of formal warfare. We will provide the most expert leadership within our power. We will then annihilate the Meks, expunge them from Earth. After the campaign, we will train you to technical skills, and you may pursue profitable and interesting careers in the service of the castles." The hetman made no reply for a moment. Then his weath-l ered face split into a ferocious grin and he spoke in a voice which Xanten found surprisingly well-modulated. "So your beasts have finally risen up to rend you! A pity they forebore so long! Well, it is all one to us. You are both alien folk and sooner or later your bones must bleach together." Xanten pretended incomprehension. "If I understand you aright, you assert that in the face of alien assault, all men must fight a common battle; and then, after the victory, cooperate still to their mutual advantage; am I correct?" T he hetman's grin never wavered. "You are not men. Only we of Earth soil and Earth water are men. You and your weird slaves are strangers together. We wish you success in your mutual slaughter." "Well then," declared Xanten, "I heard you aright after all. Appeals to your loyalty are ineffectual, so much is clear. What of self-interest then? The Meks, failing to expunge the gentlefolk of the castles, will turn upon the Nomads and kill them as if they were so many ants." "If they attack us, we will war on them," said the hetman. "Otherwise let them do as they will." Xanten glanced thoughtfully even now, to accept a contingent of Nomads into the service of Castle Hagedorn, this to form a cadre from which a larger and more versatile group may be formed." From the side another Nomad called in an offensively jeering voice: "You will sew a sac on our backs where you can pour your syrup, hey?" Xanten replied in an even voice, "The syrup is highly nutritious and supplies all bodily needs." "Why then do you not consume it yourself?" Xanten disdained reply. The hetman spoke. "If you wish to supply us weapons, we will take them, and use them against whomever threatens us. But do not expect us to defend you. If you fear for your lives, desert your castles and become Nomads." "Fear for our lives?" exclaimed Xanten. "What nonsense! Never! Castle Hagedom is impregnable, as is Janeil, and most of the other castles as well." The hetman shook his head. "Any time we choose we could take Hagedom, and kill all you popinjays in your sleep." "What?" cried Xanten in outrage. "Are you serious?" "Certainly. On a black night we would send a man aloft on a great kite and drop him down on the parapets. He would lower a line, haul up ladders and in fifteen minutes the castle is taken." Xanten pulled at his chin. "Ingenious, but impractical. The Birds would detect such a kite. Or the wind would fail at a critical moment... All this is beside the point. The Meks fly no kites. They plan to make a display against Janeil and Hagedorn and then, in their frustration, they will go forth and hunt Nomads." The hetman moved back a step. "What then? We have survived similar attempts by the men of Hagedorn. Cowards all! Hand to hand, with equal weapons, we would make you eat the dirt like the contemptible dogs you are." Xanten raised his eyebrows in elegant disdain. "I fear that you forget yourself. You address a clan chief of Castle Hagedom. Only fatigue and boredom restrain me from punishing you with this whip." "Bah," said the hetman. He crooked a finger to one of his archers. "Spit this insolent lordling." 'T'he archer discharged his arA row, but Xanten had been expecting some such act He fired his energy gun, destroying arrow, bow, and the archer's hands. He said, "I see I must teach you common respect for your betters; so it means the whip after all." Seizing the hetman by the scalp, he coiled the whip smartly once, twice, thrice around the narrow shoulders. "Let this suffice. I cannot compel you to fight, but at least I can demand decent respect from scuttling dung beetles." He leapt to the ground and, seizing the hetman, pitched him into the back of the wagon alongside the Mek. Then, backing the powerwagon around, he departed the camp without so much as a glance over his shoulder, the thwart of the seat protecting his back from the arrows of the hetman's stunned subjects. The hetman scrambled erect, drew his dagger. Xanten turned his head slightly. "Take care! Or I will tie you to die wagon, and you shall run behind in the dust." The hetman hesitated, made a spitting sound between his teeth, drew back. He looked down at his blade, turned it over, sheathed it with a grunt. "Where do you take me?" Xanten halted the wagon. "No farther. I merely wished to leave your camp with dignity, without dodging and ducking a hail of arrows. You may alight. I take it you still refuse to bring your men into the service of Castle Hagedorn?" The hetman once more made the spitting sound between his teeth. 'When the Meks have destroyed the castles, we shall destroy the Meks. Then Earth will be cleared of star-things for all time!" "You are a gang of intractable savages. Very well, alight, return to your encampment. Reflect well before you again show disrespect to a Castle Hagedom clan chief." "Bah," muttered the hetman. Leaping down from the wagon, he stalked back down the track toward his camp. He did not look back. VI A bout noon Xanten came to Far Valley, at the edge of the Hagedorn lands. Nearby was a village of Expiationists: malcontents and neurasthenics in the opinion of castle gentlefolk, and a curious group by any standards. A few had held enviable rank; certain others were savants of recognized edudition; but others yet were persons of neither dignity nor reputation, subscribing to the most bizarre and extreme of philosophies. All now performed toil, no different from that relegated to the Peasants, and all seemed to take a perverse satisfaction in what by castle standards was filth, poverty and degradation. As might be expected, their creed was by no means homogenous. Some might better have been described as 'nonconformists', and others still, a minority, argued for a dynamic program. Between castle and village was little intercourse. Occasionally the Expiationists bartered fruit or polished wood for tools, nails, medicaments; or the gentlefolk might make up a party to watch the Expiationists at their dancing and singing. Xanten had visited the village on many such occasions and had been attracted by the artless charm and informality of the folk at their play. Now, passing near the village, Xanten turned aside and followed a lane which wound between tall blackberry hedges and out upon a little common, where goats and cattle grazed. Xanten halted the wagon in the shade, saw that the syrup sac was full. He looked back at his captive. "What of you? If you need syrup, pour yourself full. But no, you have no sac. What then do you feed upon? Mud? Unsavory fare. I fear none here is rank enough for your taste. Ingest syrup or munch grass, as you will ; only do not stray overfar from the wagon, for I watch with an intent eye." The Mek, sitting hunched in a comer, gave no signal that it comprehended. Nor did it move to take advantage of Xanten's offer. Xanten went to a watering trough. Holding his hands under the trickle which issued from a lead pipe, he rinsed his face, then drank a swallow or two from his cupped hand. Turning, he found that a dozen folk of the village had approached. One he knew well, a man who might have become Godaiming, or even Aure, had he not become infected with expiationism. Xanten performed a polite salute. "A. G. Philidor. It is I, Xanten." "Xanten, of course. But here I am A. G. Philidor no longer; merely Philidor." Xanten bowed. "My apologies. I have neglected the full rigor of your informality." "Spare me your wit," said Philidor. "Why do you bring us a shorn Mek? For adoption, perhaps?" This last alluded to the gentlefolk practice of bringing over-tally babies to the village. "Now who flaunts his wit? But you have not heard the news?" "News arrives here last of all. The Nomads are better informed." "Prepare yourself for surprise. The Meks have revolted against the castles. Halcyon and Delora are demolished, and all killed; perhaps others by this time." Philidor shook his head. "I am not surprised." "Well, then, are you not concerned?" Philidor considered. "To this extent. Our own plans, never very feasible, become more far-fetched than ever." "It appears to me," said Xanten, "that you face grave and immediate danger. The Meks surely' intend to wipe out every vestige of humanity. You will not escape." Philidor shrugged. "Conceivably the danger exists... We will take counsel and decide what to do." "I can put forward a proposal which you may find attractive," said Xanten. "Our first concern, of course, is to suppress the revolt. There are at least a dozen Expiationist communities, with an aggregate population of two or three thousand -- perhaps more. I propose that we recruit and train a corps of highly disciplined troops, supplied from the Castle Hagedorn armory, led by Hagedorn's most expert military theoreticians." philidor stared at him incredulously. "You expect us, the Expiationists, to become your soldiers?" 'Why not?" asked Xanten ingeniously. "Your life is at stake no less than ours." "No one dies more than once." Xanten in his turn evinced shock. "What? Can this be a foriher gentleman of Hagedom speaking? Is this the face a man of pride and courage turns to danger? Is this the lesson of history? Of course not! I...need not instruct you in this; you are as knowledgeable as I." Philidor nodded. "I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite : a mosaic each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race." Xanten made an airy gesture. A. G. Philidor, you over-simplify grievously. Do you consider me obtuse? There are many kinds of history. They interact. You emphasize morality. But the ultimate basis of morality is survival. What promotes survival Is good, what induces mortef action is bad." 'Well spoken!" declared Philidor. "But let me propound a parbeings destroy a creature who otherwise will infect all with a fatal disease? Yes, you will say. Once more. Ten starving beasts hunt you, that they may eat. Will you kill them to save your life? Yes, you will say again, though here you destroy more than you save. Once more: a man inhabits a hut in a lonely valley. A hundred spaceships descend from the sky, and attempt to destroy him. May he destroy these ships in self-defense, even though he is one and they are a hundred thousand? Perhaps you say yes. What then if a whole world, a whole race of beings, pits itself against this single man? May he kill all? What if the attackers are as human as himself? What if he were the creature of the first instance, who otherwise will infect a world with disease? You see, there is no area where a simple touchstone avails. We have searched and found none. Hence, at the risk of sinning against Survival, we -- I, at least; I can only speak for myself -- have chosen a morality that at least allows me calm. I kill -- nothing. I destroy nothing." "Bah," said Xanten contemptuously. "If a Mek platoon entered this valley and began' to kill your children, you would not defend them?" Philidor compressed his lips, turned away. Another man spoke. "Philidor has defined morality. But who is absolutely moral? Philidor -- or I, or you -- might in such a case desert his morality." Philidor said, "Look about you. Is anyone here you recognize?" X anten scanned the group. Nearby stood a girl of extraordinary beauty. She wore a white smock and in the dark hair curling to her shoulders she wore a red flower. Xanten nodded. "I see the maiden O. Z. Garr wished to introduce into his menage at tiie castle." "Exactly," said Philidor. "Do you recall the circumstances?" "Very well indeed," said Xanten. "There was vigorous objection from the Council of Notables -- if for no other reason than the threat to our laws of population control. O. Z. Garr attempted to sidestep the law in this fashion. 'I keep Phanes,' he said. 'At times I maintain as many as six, or even eight, and no one utters a word of protest. I will call this girl a Phane and keep her among the rest.' I and others protested. There was almost a duel on this matter. O. Z. Garr was forced to relinquish the girl. She was given into my custody and I conveyed her to Far Valley." Philidor nodded. "All this is correct. Well -- we attempted to dissuade Garr. He refused to be dissuaded, and threatened us with his hunting force of perhaps thirty Meks. We stood aside. Are we moral? Are we strong or weak?" "Sometimes it is better," said Xanten, "to ignore morality. Even though O. Z. Garr is a gentleman and you are but Expiationists... Likewise in the case of the Meks. They are destroying the castles, and all the men of earth. If morality means supine acceptance, then morality must be abandoned!" Philidor gave a sour chuckle. "What a remarkable situation! The Meks are here, likewise Peasants and Birds and Phanes, all altered, transported and enslaved for human pleasure. Indeed, it is this fact that occasions our guilt, for which we must expiate. And now you want us to compound this guilt!" "It is a mistake to brood overmuch about the past," said Xanten. "Still, if you wish to preserve your option to brood, I suggest that you fight Meks now, or at the very least take refuge in the castle." "Not I," said Philidor. "Perhaps others may choose to do so." "You will wait to be killed?" "No. I and no doubt others will take refuge in the remote mountains." Xanten clambered back aboard the power-wagon. "If you change your mind, come to Castle Hagedom." He departed. The road continued along the valley, wound up a hillside, crossed a ridge. Far ahead, silhouetted against the sky, stood Castle Hagedorn. X anten reported to the council. "The spaceships cannot be used. The Meks have rendered them inoperative. Any plan to solicit assistance from the Home Worlds is pointless." "This is sorry news," said Hagedorn with a grimace. "Well then -- so much for that." Xanten continued. "Returning by power-wagon I encountered a tribe of Nomads. I summoned the hetman and explained to him the advantages of serving Castle Hagedom. The Nomads, I fear, lack both grace and docility. The hetman gave so surly a response that I departed in disgust. "At Far Valley I visited the Expiationist village, and made a similar proposal, but with no great success. They are as idealistic as the Nomads are churlish. Both are of a fugitive tendency. The Expiationists spoke of taking refuge in the mountains. The Nomads presumably will retreat into the steppes." Beaudry snorted. "How will flight help them? Perhaps they gain a few years -- but eventually the Meks will find every last one of them; such is their methodicity." "In the meantime," O. Z. Garr declared peevishly, "we might have organized them into an efficient combat corps, to the benefit of all. Well, then, let them perish! We are secure." "Secure yes," said Hagedom gloomily. "But what when the power fails? When the lifts break down? When air circulation cuts off so that we either stifle or freeze? What then?" O. Z. Garr gave his head a grim shake. "We must steel ourselves to undignified expedients, with as good a grace as possible. But the machinery of the castle is sound, and I expect small deterioration or failure for conceivably five or ten years. By that time anything may occur." Claghorn, who had been leaning indolently back in his seat, spoke at last: "Essentially this is a passive program. Like the defection of the Nomads and Expiationists, it looks very little beyond the immediate moment." O. Z. Garr spoke in a voice carefully polite. "Claghorn is well aware that I yield to none in courteous candor, as well as optimism and directness: in short, the reverse of passivity. But I refuse to dignify a stupid little inconvenience by extending it serious attention. How can he label this procedure 'passivity'? Does the worthy and honorable head of the Claghorns have a proposal which more effectively maintains our status, our standards, our self-respect?" claghorn nodded slowly, with  a faint half-smile which O. Z. Garr found odiously complacent. "There is a simple and effective method by which the Meks might be defeated." "Well then!" cried Hagedom. "Why hesitate? Let us hear it!" Claghorn looked around the red velvet-covered table, considered the faces of all: the dispassionate Xanten, Beaudry, with his burly, rigid, face muscles clenched in an habitual expression unpleasantly like a sneer; old Isseth, handsome, erect and vital as the most dashing cadet; Hagedom troubled, glum, his inward perplexity all too evident; the elegant Garr; Overwhele, til inking savagely of the inconveniences of the future; Aure, toying with his ivory tablet, either bored, morose or defeated; the others displaying various aspects of doubt, foreboding, hauteur, dark resentment, impatience; and in the case of Floy, a quiet smile -- or as Isseth later characterized it, an imbecilic smirk -- intended to convey his total disassociation from the entire irksome matter. Claghorn took stock of the faces, and shook his head. "I will not at the moment broach this plan, as I fear it is unworkable. But I must point out that under no circumstances can Castle Hagedom be as before, even should we survive the Mek attack." "Bah!" exclaimed Beaudry. "We lose dignity, we become ridiculous, by even so much as discussing the beasts." Xanten stirred himself. "A distasteful subject, but remember! Halcyon is destroyed, and Delora and who knows what others? Let us not thrust our heads in the sand! The Meks will not waft away merely because we ignore them." "In any event," said O. Z. Garr, "Janeil is secure and we are secure. The other folk, unless they are already slaughtered, might do well to visit us during the inconvenience, if they can justify the humiliation of flight to themselves. I myself believe that the Meks will soon come to heel, anxious to return to their posts." Hagedom shook his head gloomily. "I find this hard to believe. Very well then, we shall adjourn." '"T"he radio communications system was the first of the castle's vast array of electrical and mechanical devices to break down. The failure occurred so soon and so decisively that certain of the theoreticians, notably I. K. Harde and Uegus, postulated sabotage by the departing Meks. Others remarked that the system had never been absolutely dependable, that the Meks themselves had been forced to tinker continuously with the circuits, that the failure was simply a result of bad engineering. Harde and Uegus inspected the unwieldy apparatus, but the cause of failure was not obvious. After a halfhour of consultation they agreed that any attempt to restore the system would necessitate complete re-design and re-engineering, with consequent construction of testing and calibration devices, and the fabrication of a complete new family of components. "This is manifestly impossible," stated Uegus in his report to the council. "Even the simplest useful system would require several technician-years. There is not even one single technician to hand. We must therefore await the availability of trained and "In retrospect," stated Isseth, the oldest of the clan chiefs, "it is clear that in many ways we have been less than provident. No matter that the men of the Home Worlds are vulgarians! Men of shrewder calculation than our own would have maintained inter-world connection." "Lack of 'shrewdness' and 'providence' were not the deterring factors," stated Claghorn. "Communication was discouraged simply because the early lords were overrun with HomeWorld parvenus. It is as simple as that." Isseth grunted, and started to make a rejoinder, but Hagedom said hastily, "Unluckily, as Xanten tells us, the spaceships have been rendered useless. While certain of our number have a profound knowledge of the theoretical considerations, again who is there to perform the toil? Even were the hangars and spaceships themselves under our control." O. Z. Garr declared, "Give me six platoons of Peasants and six powerwagons equipped with high-energy cannon, and I'll reMekgain the hangars. No difficulties there!" Beaudry said, "Well, here's a start, at least. I'll assist in the training of the Peasants, and though I know nothing of cannon operation, rely on me for any advice I can give." Hagedorn looked around the group, frowned, pulled at his chin. "There are difficulties to this program. First, we have at hand only the single powerwagon in which Xanten returned from his reconnaissance. Then what of our energy cannons? Has anyone inspected them? The Meks were entrusted with maintenance, but it is possible, even likely, that they wrought mischief here as well. O. Z. Garr, you are reckoned an expert military theoretician. What can you tell us in this regard?" "I have made no inspection to date," stated O. Z. Garr. "Today the 'Display of Antique Tabards' will occupy us all until the 'Hour of Sundown Appraisal'." He looked at his watch. "Perhaps now is as good a time as any to adjourn, until I am able  'Display of Antique Tabards': 'Hour of Sundown Appraisal': the literal sense of the first term was yet relevant; that of the second had become lost and the phrase was a mere formalism, connoting that hour of late afternoon when visits were exchanged, wines, liqueurs and essences tasted: in short, a time of relaxation and small talk before the more formal convivialities of dining. to provide detailed information in regard to the cannons." H agedorn nodded his heavy head. "The time indeed grows late. Your Phanes appear today?" "Only two," replied O. Z. Garr. "The Lazule and the Eleventh Mystery. I can find nothing suitable for the Gossamer Delights nor my little Blue Fay, and the Gloriana still requires tutelage. Today B. Z. Maxelwane's Variflors should repay the most attention." "Yes," said Hagdom. "I have heard other remarks to this effect. Very well then, until tomorrow. Eh, Claghom, you have something to say?" "Yes, indeed," said Claghorn mildly. "We have all too little time at our disposal. Best that we make the most of it. I seriously doubt the efficacy of Peasant troops; they are like rabbits against wolves. What we need, rather than rabbits, are panthers." "Ah, yes," said Hagedorn vaguely. "Yes indeed." "Where, then, are panthers to be found?" Claghorn looked inquiringly around the table. "Can no one suggest a source? A pity. Well then, if panthers fail to appear, I suppose rabbits must do. Let us go about the business of converting rabbits into panthers, and instantly. I suggest that we postpone all fetes and ipectacles until the shape of our future is more certain." Hagedorn raised his eyebrows, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. He looked intently at Claghorn to ascertain whether or not he joked. Then he looked dubiously around the table. Beaudry gave a rather brassy laugh. "It seems that erudite Claghorn cries panic." O. Z. Garr stated: "Surely, in all dignity, we cannot allow the impertinence of our servants to cause us such eye-rolling alarm. I am embarrassed even to bring the matter forward." "I am not embarrassed," said Claghom, with the full-faced complacence which so exasperated O. Z. Garr. "I see no reason why you should be. Our lives are threatened, in which case a trifle of embarrassment, or anything else, becomes of secondary importance." O. Z. Garr rose to his feet, performed a brusque salute in Claghom's direction, of such a nature as to constitute a calculated affront. Claghom, rising, performed a similar salute, this so grave and overly complicated as to invest Garr's insult with burlesque overtones. Xanten, who detested O. Z. Garr, laughed aloud. O. Z. Garr hesitated, then, sensing that under the circumstances taking the matter further would be regarded as poor form, strode from the chamber. T ie Viewing of Antique Tabards, an annual pageant of Phanes wearing sumptuous garments took place in the Great Rotunda to the north of the central plaza. Possibly half of the gentlemen, but less than a quarter of the ladies, kept Phanes. These were creatures native to the caverns of Albireo Seven's moon: a docile race, both playful and affectionate, which after several thousand years of selective breeding had become sylphs of piquant beauty. Clad in a delicate gaue which issued from pores behind their ears, along their upper arms, down their backs, they were the most inoffensive of creatures, anxious always to please, innocently vain. Most gentlemen regarded them with affection, but rumors sometimes told of ladies drenching an especially hated Phane in tincture of ammonia, which matted her pelt and destroyed her gauze forever. A gentleman besotted by a Phane was considered a figure of fun. The Phane, though so carefully bred as to seem a delicate girl, if used sexually became crumpled and haggard, with gauzes drooping and discolored, and everyone would know that such and such a gentleman had misused his Phane. In this regard, at least, the women of the castles might exert their superiority. They did so by conducting themselves with such extravagant provocation that the Phanes in contrast seemed the most ingenious and fragile of nature sprites. Their life-span was perhaps thirty years, during the last ten of which, after they had lost their beauty, they encased themselves in mantles of gray gauze and performed menial tasks in boudoirs, kitchens, pantries, nurseries and dressing rooms. The Viewing of Antique Tabards was an occasion more for the viewing of Phanes than the tabards, though these, woven of Phane-ga uze, were of intricate beauty in themselves. The Phane owners sat in a lower tier, tense with hope and pride, exulting when one made an especially splendid display, plunged into black depths when the ritual postures were performed with other than grace and elegance. During each display highly formal music was plucked from a lute by a gentleman from a clan different to that of the Phane owner. The owner never played the lute to the performance of his own Phane. The display was never overtly a competition and no formal acclamation was allowed, but all watching made up their minds as to which was the most entrancing and graceful of the Phanes, and the repute of the owner was thereby exalted. The current Viewing was delayed almost half an hour by reason of the defection of the Meks, and certain hasty improvisations had been made necessary. But the gentlefolk of Castle Hagedom were in no mood to be critical and took no heed of the occasional lapses as a dozen young Peasant bucks struggled to perform unfamiliar tasks. The Phanes were as entrancing as ever, bending, twisting, swaying to plangent chords of the lute, fluttering their fingers as if feeling for raindrops, crouching suddenly, gliding, then springing upright straight as wands, finally bowing and skipping from the platform. T T alfway through the program a Peasant sidled awkwardly into the Rotunda, and mumbled in an urgent manner to the cadet who came to inquire his business. The cadet at once made his way to Hagedorn's polished jet booth. Hagedom listened, nodded, spoke a few terse words and settled calmly back in his seat as if the message had been of no consequence, and the gentlefolk of the audience were reassured. The entertainment proceeded. O. Z. Garr's delectable pair made a fine show, but it was generally felt that Lirlin, a young Phane belonging to Isseth Floy Gazuneth, for the first time at a formal showing, made the most captivating display. The Phanes appeared for a last time, moving all together through a half-improvised minuet. Then they performed a final half-gay, half-regretful salute and departed the rotunda. For a few moments more the gentlemen and ladies would remain in their booths, sipping essences, discussing the display, arranging affairs and assignations. Hagedom sat frowning, twisting his hands. Suddenly he rose to his feet. The rotunda instantly became silent. "I dislike intruding an unhappy note at so pleasant an occasion," said Hagedom. "But news has just been given to me, and it is fitting that all should know. Janeil Castle is under attack. The Meks are there in great force, with hundreds of power-wagons. They have circled the castle with a dike which prevents any effective use of tiie Janeil energy-cannon. "There is no immediate danger to Janeil, and it is difficult to comprehend what the Meks hope to achieve, the Janeil walls being all of two hundred feet high. "The news nevertheless is somber, and it means that eventually we must expect a similar investment -- though it is even more difficult to comprehend how Meks could hope to inconvenience us. Our water derives from four wells sunk deep into the earth. We have great stocks of food. Our energy is derived from the sun. If necessary, we could condense water and synthesize food from the air -- at least I have been so assured by our great biochemical theoretician X. B. Ladisname. Still -- this is the news. Make of it what you will. Tomorrow the Council of Notables will meet." #TX#ell, then," said Hagedom ' ' to the council, "for once let us dispense with formality. O. Z. Garr: what of our cannon?" O. Z. Garr, wearing the magnificent gray and green uniform of the Overwhele Dragoons, carefully placed his morion on the table, so that the panache stood erect. "Of twelve cannon, four appear to be functioning correctly. Four have been sabotaged by excision of the power-leads. Four have been sabotaged by some means undetectable to careful investigation. I have commandeered a half-dozen Peasants who demonstrate a modicum of mechanical ability, and have instructed them in detail. They are currently engaged in splicing the leads. This is the extent of my current information in regard to the cannon." "Moderately good news," said Hagedom. "What of the proposed corps of armed Peasants?" "The project is under way. A. F. Mull and I. A. Berzelius are now inspecting Peasants with a view to recruitment and training. I can make no sanguine projection as to the military effectiveness of such a corps, even if trained and led by such as A. F. Mull, I. A. Berzelius and myself. The Peasants are a mild ineffectual race, admirably suited to the grubbing of weeds, but with no stomach whatever for fight # mg. Hagedom glanced around the council. "Are there any other suggestions?" Beaudry spoke in a harsh angry voice, "Had the villains but left us our power-wagons, we might have mounted the cannon aboard! The Peasants are equal to this, at least. Then we could roll to Janeil and blast the dogs from the rear." "These Meks seem utter fiends!" declared Aure. "What conceivably do they have in mind? Why, after these centuries, must they suddenly go mad?" "We all ask ourselves the same," said Hagedorn. "Xanten, you returned from reconnaissance with a captive: have you attempted to question him?" "No," said Xanten. "Truth to tell, I haven't thought of him since." "Why not attempt to question him? Perhaps he can provide a clue or two." Xanten nodded assent. "I can try. Candidly I expect to learn nothing." "Claghom, you are the Mek expert," said Beaudry. "Would you have thought the creatures capable of so intricate a plot? What do they hope to gain? Our castles?" # #'T'hey are certainly capable of precise and meticulous planning," said Claghorn. "Their ruthlessness surprises me -- more, possibly, than it should. I have never known them to covet our material possessions, and they show no tendency toward what we consider the concomitants of civilization: fine discriminations of sensation and the like. I have often speculated -- I won't dignify the conceit with the status of a theory -- that the structural logic of a brain is of rather more consequence than we reckon with. Our own brains are remarkable for their utter lack of rational structure. Considering the haphazarded manner in which our thoughts are formed, registered, indexed and recalled, any single rational act becomes a miracle. Perhaps we are incapable of rationality. Perhaps all thought is a set of impulses generated by one emotion, monitored by another, ratified by a third. In contrast the Mek brain is a marvel of what seems careful engineering. It is roughly cubical and consists of microscopic cells interconnected by organic fibrils, each a monofilament molecule of negligible electrical resistance. Within each cell is a film of silica, a fluid of variable conductivity and dielectric properties, a cusp of a complex mixture of metallic oxides. The brain is capable of storing great quantities of information in an orderly pattern. No fact is lost, unless it is purposely forgotten, a capacity which the Meks possess. The brain also functions as a radio transceiver, possibly as a radar transmitter and detector, though this again is speculation. "Where the Mek brain falls short is in its lack of emotional color. One Mek is precisely like another, without any personality differentiation perceptible to us. This, clearly, is a function of their communicative system. It would be unthinkable for a unique personality to develop under these conditions. They served us efficiently and -- so we thought -- loyally, because they felt nothing about their condition, neither pride in achievement, nor resentment, nor shame. Nothing whatever. They neither loved us nor hated us. Nor do they now. It is hard for us to conceive this emotional vacuum, when each of us feels something about everything. We live in a welter of emotions. They are as devoid of emotion as an ice-cube. They were fed, housed, maintained in a manner they found satisfactory. Why did they revolt? I have speculated at length, but the single reason which I can formulate seems so grotesque and unreasonable that I refuse to take it seriously. If this after all is the correct explanation..." His voice drifted away. "Well?" demanded O. Z. Garr peremptorily. "What then?" "Then -- it is all the same. They are committed to the destruction of the human race. My speculation alters nothing." H agedorn turned to Xanten. "All this should assist you in your inquiries." "I was about to suggest that Claghorn assist me, if he is so inclined," said Xanten. "As you like," said Claghom, "though in my opinion the information, no matter what, is irrelevant. Our single concern should be a means to repel them and to save our lives." "And -- save the force of 'panthers' you mentioned at our previous session -- you can conceive of no subtle weapon?" asked Hagedorn wistfully. "A device to set up electrical resonances in their brains, or something similar?" "Not feasible," said Claghom. "Certain organs in the creatures' brains function as overload switches. Though it is true that during this time they might not be able to communicate." After a moment's reflection he added thoughtful: "Who knows? A. G. Bernal and Uegus are theoreticians with a profound knowledge of such projections. Perhaps they might construct such a device, or several, against a possible need." Hagedorn nodded dubiously, and looked toward Uegus. "Is this possible?" Uegus frowned. " 'Construct? I can certainly design such an instrument. But the components -- where? Scattered through the storerooms helter-skelter, some functioning, others not. To achieve anything meaningful I must become no better than an apprentice, a Mek." He became incensed, and his voice hardened. "I find it hard to believe that I should be forced to point out this fact! Do you hold me and my talents then of such small worth?" Hagedorn hastened to reassure him. "Of course not! I for one would never think of impugning your dignity." "Never!" agreed Claghom. "Nevertheless, during this present emergency, we will find indignities imposed upon us by events, unless now we impose them upon ourselves." "Very well," said Uegus, a humorless smile trembling at his Bps. "You shall come with me to the storeroom. I will point out the components to be brought forth and assembled, you shall perform the toil. What do you say to that?" "I say yes, gladly, if it will be of real utility. However, I can hardly perform the labor for a dozen different theoreticians. Will any others serve beside myself?" No one responded. Silence was absolute, as if every gentleman present held his breath. Hagedorn started to speak, but Claghom interrupted. "Pardon, Hagedorn, but here, finally, we are stuck upon a basic principle, and it must be settled now." Hagedorn looked desperately around the council. "Has anyone relevant comment?" "Claghorn must do as his innate nature compels," declared O. Z. Garr in the silkiest of voices. "I cannot dictate to him. As for myself, I can never demean my status as a gentleman of Hagedom. This creed is as natural to me' as drawing breath ; if ever it is compromised I become a travesty of a gentleman, a grotesque mask of myself. This is Castle Hagedorn, and we represent the culmination of human civilization. Any compromise therefore becomes degradation; any expedient diminution of our standards becomes dishonor. I have heard the word 'emergency' used. What a deplorable sentiment! To dignify the rat-like snappings and gnashings of such as the Meks with the word 'emergency' is to my mind unworthy of a gentle man of Hagedorn!" A murmur of approval went around the council table. C laghom leaned far back in his seat, chin on his chest, as if in relaxation. His clear blue eyes went from face to face, then returned to O. Z. Garr whom he studied with dispassionate interest. "Obviously you direct your words to me," he said. "I appreciate their malice. But this is a small matter." He looked away from O. Z. Garr, to stare up at the massive diamond and emerald chandelier. "More important is the fact that the council as a whole, in spite of my earnest persuasion, seems to endorse your viewpoint. I can urge, expostulate, insinuate no longer, and I will now leave Castle Hagedorn. I find the atmosphere stifling. I trust that you survive the attack of the Meks, though I doubt that you will. They are a clever resourceful race, untroubled by qualms or preconceptions, and we have long underestimated their quality." Claghom rose from his seat, inserted the ivory tablet into its socket. "I bid you all farewell" Hagedorn hastily jumped to hi feet, held forth his arms imploringly. "Do not depart in anger, Claghorn! Reconsider! We need your wisdom, your expertise." "Assuredly you do," said Claghom. "But even more you need to act. upon the advice I have already extended. Until then we have no common ground, and any further interchange is futile and tiresome." He made a brief allinclusive salute and departed the chamber. Hagedorn slowly resumed his seat. The others made uneasy motions, coughed, looked up at the chandelier, studied their ivory tablets. O. Z. Garr muttered something to B. F. Wyas who sat beside him, who nodded solemnly. Hagerdon spoke in a subdued voice : "We will miss the presence of Claghorn, his penetrating if unorthodox insights... We have accomplished little. Uegus, perhaps you will give thought to the projector under discussion. Xanten, you were to question the captive Mek. O. Z. Garr, you undoubtedly will see to the repair of the energy cannon... Aside from these small matters, it appears that we have evolved no general IX plan of action, to help either ourselves or Janeil." Marune spoke. "What of the other castles? Are they still extant? We have had no news. I suggest that we send Birds to each castle, to learn their condition." Hagedom nodded. "Yes, this is a wise motion. Perhaps you will see to this, Marune?" "I will do so." "Good. We will now adjourn for a time." nphe Birds were dispatched by Marune of Aure and one by one returned. Their reports were similar: "Sea Island is deserted. Marble columns are tumbled along the beach. Pearl Dome is collapsed. Corpses float in the Water Garden." "Maraval reeks of death. Gentlemen, Peasants, Phane -- all dead. Alas! Even the Birds have departed!" "Delora: a ros ros ros! A dismal scene! No sign of life to be found!" "Alume is desolate. The great wooden door is smashed. The eternal Green Flame is extinguished." "There is nothing at Halycon. The Peasants were driven into a pit." "Tuang: silence." "Mominglight : death." r J' , hree days later, Xanten constrained six Birds to a lift chair. He directed them first on a wide sweep around the castle, then south to Far Valley. The Birds aired their usual complaints, then bounded down the deck in great ungainly hops which threatened to throw Xanten immediately to the pavement. At last gaining the air, they flew up in a spiral. Castle Hagedorn became an intricate miniature far below, each House marked by its unique cluster of turrets and eyries, its own eccentric roof line, its long streaming pennon. The Birds performed the prescribed circle, skimming the crags and pines of North Ridge. Then, setting wings aslant the upstream, they coasted away toward Far Valley. Over the pleasant Hagedorn domain flew the Birds and Xanten: over orchards, fields, vineyards, Peasant villages. They crossed Lake Maude with its pavilions and docks, the meadows beyond where the Hagedom cattle and sheep grazed, and presently came to Far Valley, at the limit of Hagedom lands. Xanten indicated where he wished to alight. The Birds, who would have preferred a site closer to the village where they could have watched all that transpired, grumbled and cried out in wrath and set Xanten down so roughly that had he not been alert the shock would have pitched him head over heels. Xanten alighted without elegance but at least remained on his feet. "Await me here!" he ordered. "Do not stray; attempt no flamboyant tricks among the liftstraps. When I return I wish to see six quiet Birds, in neat formation, lift-straps untwisted and untangled. No bickering, mind you! No loud caterwauling, to attract unfavorable comment! Let all be as I have ordered!" The Birds sulked, stamped their feet, ducked aside their necks, made insulting comments just under the level of Xanten's hearing. Xanten turned with a final glare of admonition and walked down the lane which led to the village. The vines were heavy with ripe blackberries and a number of the girls of the village filled baskets. Among them was the girl O. Z. Garr had thought to pre-empt for his personal use. As Xanten passed, he halted and performed a courteous salute. "We have met before, if my recollection is correct." r T"'he girl smiled, a half-rueful, half-whimsical smile. "'Your recollection serves you well. We met at Hagedom, where I was taken a captive. And later, when you conveyed me here, after dark, though I could not see your face." She extended her basket. "Are you hungry? Will you eat?" Xanten took several berries. In the course of the conversation he learned that the girl's name was Glys Meadowsweet, that her parents were not known to her, but were presumably gentlefolk of Castle Hagedom who had exceeded their birth tally. Xanten examined her even more carefully than before but could see resemblance to none of the Hagedom families. "You might derive from Castle Delora. If there is any family resemblance I can detect, it is to the Cosanzas of Delora -- a family noted for the beauty of its ladies." "You are not married?" she asked artlessly. "No," said Xanten, and indeed he had dissolved his relationship with Araminta only the day before. "What of you?" She Shook her head. "I would never be gathering blackberries if I were. It is work reserved for maidens. Why do you come to Far Valley?" "For two reasons. The first to see you." Xanten heard himself say this with surprise. But it was true, he realized with another small shock of surprise. "I have never spoken with you properly and I have always wondered if you were as charming and gay as you are beautiful." The girl shrugged and Xanten could not be sure whether she were pleased or not, compliments from gentlemen sometimes setting the stage for a sorry aftermath. "Well, no matter. I came also to speak to Claghom." "He is yonder," she said in a voice toneless, even cool, and pointed. "He occupies that cottage." She returned to her blackberry picking. Xanten bowed, proceeded to that cottage the girl had indicated. claghom, wearing loose kneelength breeches of gray homespun, worked with an axe chopping faggots into stove-lengths. At the sight of Xanten he halted his toil, leaned on the axe, mopped his forehead. "Ah, Xanten. I am pleased to see you. How are the folk of Castle Hagedom?" "As before. There is little to report, even had I come to bring you news." "Indeed, indeed?" Claghom leaned on the axe handle, surveyed Xanten with a bright blue gaze. "At our last meeting," went on Xanten, "I agreed to question the captive Mek. After doing so I am distressed that you were not at hand to assist, so that you might have resolved certain ambiguities in the responses." "Speak on," said Claghom. "Perhaps I shall be able to do so now." "After the council meeting I descended immediately to the storeroom where the Mek was confined. It lacked nutriment; I gave it syrup and a pail of water, which it sipped sparingly, then evinced a desire for minced clams. I summoned kitchen help and sent them for this commodity and the Mek ingested several pints. As I have indicated, it Was an unusual Mek, standing as tall as myself and lacking a syrup sac. I conveyed it to a different chamber, a storeroom for brown plush furniture, and ordered it to a seat. "I looked at the Mek and it looked at me. The quills which I removed were growing back; probably it could at least receive from Meks elsewhere. It seemed a superior beast, showing neither obsequiousness nor respect, and answered my questions without hesitation. "First I remarked: 'The gentlefolk of the castles are astounded by the revolt of the Meks. We had assumed that your life was satisfactory. Were we wrong?' " 'Evidently.' I am sure that this was the word signaled, though never had I suspected the Meks of wit of any sort. " "Very well then,' I said. 'In what manner?' " 'Surely it is obvious. We no longer wished to toil at your behest. We wished to conduct our fives by our own traditional standards.' "The response surprised me. I was unaware that the Meks possessed standards of any kind, much less traditional standards." Claghom nodded. "I have been similarly surprised by the scope of the Mek mentality." "I reproached the Mek: 'Why kill? Why destroy our lives in order to augment your own?' As soon as I had put the question I realized that it had been unhap. pily phrased. The Mek, I believe, realized the same; however, in reply he signaled something very rapidly which I believe was : We knew we must act with decisiveness. Your own protocol made this necessary. We might have returned to Etamin Nine, but we prefer this world Earth, and will make it our own, with our own great slipways, tubs and basking ramps.' C t r T'his seemed clear enough, but I sensed an adumbration extending yet beyond. I said, 'Comprehensible. But why kill, why destroy? You might have taken yourself to a different region. We could not have molested you.' " 'Infeasible, by your own thinking. A world is too small for two competing races. You intended to send us back to Etamin Nine.' " 'Ridiculous! I said. "Fantasy, absurdity. Do you take me for a mooncalf? " 'No,' the creature insisted. 'Two of Castle Hagedom's notables were seeking the highest post. One assured us that, if elected, this would become his life's aim. " 'A grotesque misunderstanding,' I told him. 'One man, a lunatic, can not speak for all men!' " 'No? One Mek speaks for all Meks. We think with one mind. Are not men of a like sort?' " "Each thinks for himself. The lunatic who assured you of this tomfoolery is an evil man. But at least matters are clear. We do not propose to send you to Etamin Nine. Will you withdraw from Janeil, take yourselves to a far land and leave us in peace?' " 'No. Affairs have proceeded too far. We will now destroy all men. The truth of the statement is clear: one world is too small for two races.' " 'Unluckily then, I must kill you,' I told him. 'Such acts are not to my liking, but, with opportunity, you would kill as many gentlemen as possible.' At this the creature sprang upon me, and I killed it with an easier mind than had it sat staring. "Now you know all. It seems that either you or O. Z. Garr stimulated the cataclysm. O. Z. Garr? Unlikely. Impossible. Hence, you, Claghom, you! have this weight upon your soul!" Claghorn frowned down at the axe. "Weight, yes. Guilt, no. Ingenuousness, yes; wickedness, no." Xanten stood back. "Claghom, your coolness astounds me! Before, when rancorous folk like O. Z. Garr conceived you a lunatic -- " "Peace, Xanten!" exclaimed Claghorn irritably. "This extravagant breast-beating becomes maladroit. What have I done wrong? My fault is that I tried too much. Failure is tragic, but a phthisic face hanging over the cup of the future is worse. I meant to become Hagedom, I would have sent the slaves home. I failed, the slaves revolted. So do not speak another word. I am bored with the subject. You can not imagine how your bulging eyes and your concave spine oppress me." "Bored you may be," cried Xanten. "You decry my eyes, my spine -- but what of the thousands dead?" "How long would they live in any event? Lives are as cheap as fish in the sea. I suggest that you put by your reproaches and devote a similar energy to saving yourself. Do you realize that a means exists? You stare at me blankly. I assure you that what I say is true, but you will never learn the means from me." Ct'Maghom," said Xanten, "I flew to this spot intending to blow your arrogant head from your body -- " But Claghom, no longer heeding, had returned to his wood-chopping... "Claghom!" cried Xanten. "Xanten, take your outcries elsewhere, if you please. Remonstrate with your Birds." Xanten swung on his heel, marched back down the lane. The girls picking berries looked at him questioningly and moved aside. Xanten halted, looked up and down the lane. Glys Meadowsweet was nowhere to be seen. In a new fury he continued. He stopped short. On a fallen tree a hundred feet from the Birds sat Glys Meadowsweet, examining a blade of grass as if it had been an astonishing artifact of the past. The Birds for a marvel had actually obeyed him and waited in a fair semblance of order. Xanten looked up toward the heavens, kicked at the turf. He drew a deep breath and approached to Glys Meadowsweet. He noted that she had tucked a flower into her long loose hair. After a second or two she looked up and searched his face. "Why are you so angry?" Xanten slapped his thigh, seated himself beside her. " 'Angry? No. I am out of my mind with frustration. Claghom is as obstreperous as a sharp rock. He knows how Castle Hagedom can be saved but he will not divulge his secret." Glys Meadowsweet laughed -- an easy merry sound, like nothing Xanten had ever heard at Castle Hagedom. "Secret? When even I know it?" "It must be a secret," said Xanten. "He will not tell me." "Listen. If you. fear the Birds will hear it, I will whisper." She spoke a few words into his ear. Perhaps the sweet breath befuddled Xanten's mind. But the explicit essence of the revelation failed to strike home into his consciousness. He made a sound of sour amusement. "No secret there. Only what the prehistoric Scythians termed 'bathos'. Dishonor to the gentlemen! Do we dance with the Peasants? Do we serve the Birds essences and discuss with them the sheen of our Phanes?" " 'Dishonor' then?" She jumped to her feet. "Then it is also dishonor for you to talk to me, to sit here with me, to make ridiculous suggestions!" "I made no suggestions!" protested Xanten. "I sit here in all decorum -- " "Too much decorum, too much honor!" With a display of passion which astounded Xanten, Glys Meadowsweet tore the flower from her hair, hurled it at the ground. "There. Hence!" "No," said Xanten in sudden humility. He bent, picked up the flower, kissed it, replaced it in her hair. "I am not over-honorable. I will try my best" He put his arms on her shoulders, but she held him away. "Tell me," she inquired with a very mature severity, "do you own any of those peculiar insectwomen?" "I? Phanes? I own no Phanes." With this Glys Meadowsweet relaxed and allowed Xanten to embrace her, while the Birds clucked, guffawed and made vulgar scratching sounds with their wings. X T he summer waned. On June # Janeil and Hagedom celebrated the Fete of Flowers, even though the dike was rising high around Janeil. Shortly after, Xanten flew six select Birds into Castle Janeil by night and proposed to the council that the population be evacuated by Bird-lift -- as many as possible, as many who wished to leave. The council listened with stony faces and without comment passed on. Xanten returned to Castle Hagedom. Using the most careful methods, speaking only to trusted comrades, Xanten enlisted thirty or forty cadets and gentlemen to his persuasion, though inevitably he could not keep the doctrinal thesis of his program secret. The first reaction of the traditionalists was mockery and charges of poltroonery. At Xanten's insistence, challenges were neither issued nor accepted by his hot-blooded associates. On the evening of September # Castile Janeil fell. The news was brought to Castle Hagedom by excited Birds who told the grim tale again and again in voices ever more hysterical. Hagedom, now gaunt and weary, automatically called a council meeting; it took note of the gloomy circumstances. "We then are the last castle! The Meks cannot conceivably do us harm; they can build dikes around our castle walls for twenty years and only work themselves to distraction. We are secure; but yet it is a strange and portentous thought to realize that at last, here at Castle Hagedorn, live the last gentlemen of the race!" Xanten spoke in a voice strained with earnest conviction: "Twenty years -- fifty years -- what difference to the Meks? Once they surround us, once they deploy, we are trapped. Do you comprehend that now is our last opportunity to escape the great cage that Castle Hagedom is to become?" " "Escape', Xanten? What a word! For shame!" hooted O. Z. Garr. "Take your wretched band, escape! To steppe or swamp or tundra! Go as you like, with your poltroons, but be good enough to give over these incessant alarms !" "Garr, I have found conviction since I became a 'poltroon'. Survival is good morality: I have this from the mouth of a noted savant." "Bah! Such as whom?" "A. G. Philidor, if you must be informed of every detail." v. Z. Garr clapped his hand to  his forehead. "Do you refer to Philidor the Expiationist? He Is of the most extreme stripe, an Expiationist to out-expiate all the rest! Xanten, be sensible, if you please!" "There are years ahead for all of us," said Xanten in a wooden voice, "if we free ourselves from file castle." "But the castle is our life!" declared Hagedom. "In essence, Xanten, what would we be without the castle? Wild animals? Nomads?" "We would be alive." O. Z. Garr gave a snort of disgust, turned away to inspect a wall-hanging. Hagedom shook his head in doubt and perplexity. Beaudry threw his hands up into the air. "Xanten, you have the effect of unnerving us all. You come in here, inflict this dreadful sense of urgency, but why? In Castle Hagedom we are as safe as in our mother's arms. What do we gain by throwing aside all -- honor, dignity, comfort, civilized niceties -- for no other reason than to slink through the wilderness?" "Janeil was safe," said Xanten. "Today where is Janeil? Death, mildewed cloth, sour wine. What we-gain by 'slinking is the assurance of survival. And I plan much more than simple 'slinking'." "I can conceive of a hundred occasions when death is better than life!" snapped Isseth. "Must I die in dishonor and disgrace? Why may my last years not be passed in dignity?" Into the room came B. F. Robarth. "Councilmen, the Meks approach Castle Hagedom." Hagedom cast a wild look around the chamber. "Is there a consensus? What must we do?" Xanten threw up his hands. "Everyone must do as he thinks best! I argue no more: I am done. Hagedorn, will you adjourn the . council so that we may be about our affairs? I to my 'slinking'?" "Council is adjourned," said Hagedom, and all went up to stand on the ramparts. Up the avenue into the castle trooped Peasants from the surrounding countryside, packets slung over their shoulders. Across the valley, at the edge of Bartholomew Forest, was a clot of power-wagons and an amorphous brown-gold mass: Meks. Aure pointed west. "Look -- there they come, up the Long Swale." He turned, peered east "And look, there at Bambridge: Meks!" By common consent, all swung about to scan North Ridge. O. Z. Garr pointed to a quiet line of brown-gold shapes. "There they wait, the vermin! They have penned us in! Well then, let them wait!" He swung away, rode the lift down to the plaza, crossed swiftly to Zumbeld House, where he worked the rest of the afternoon with his Gloriana, of whom he expected great things. 'T'he following day the Meks formalized the investment. Around Castle Hagedom a great circle of Mek activity made itself apparent: sheds, warehouses, barracks. Within this periphery, just beyond the range of the energy cannon, power-wagons thrust up mounds of dirt. During the night these mounds lengthened toward the castle; similarly the night after. At last the purpose of the mounds became clear: they were a protective cover above passages or tunnels leading toward the crag on which Castle Hagedorn rested. The following day several of the mounds reached the base of the crag. Presently from the far end began to flow a succession of power-wagons loaded with rubble. They issued, dumped their loads and once again entered the tunnels. Eight of these above-ground tunnels had been established. From each trundled endless loads of dirt and rock, gnawed from the crag on which Castle Hagedorn sat. To the gentlefolk who crowded the parapets the meaning of tile work at last became clear. "They make no attempt to bury us," said Hagedorn. "They merely mine out the crag from below us!" On the sixth day of the siege, a great segment of the hillside shuddered, slumped, and a tall pinnacle of rock reaching almost up to the base of the walls collapsed. "If this continues," muttered Beaudry, "our time will be less than that of Janeil." "Come then," called O. Z. Garr in sudden energy. "Let us try our energy cannon. We'll blast open their wretched tunnels, and what will the rascals do then?" He went to the nearest emplacement, shouted down for Peasants to remove the tarpaulin. Xanten, who happened to stand nearby, said, "Allow me to assist you." He jerked away the tarpaulin. "Shoot now, if you will." O. Z. Garr stared at him uncomprehendingly, then leapt forward, swiveled the great projector about so that it aimed at a mound. He pulled the switch; the air crackled in front of the ringed snout, rippled, flickered with purple sparks. The target area steamed, became black, then dark red, then slumped into an incandescent crater. But the underlying earth, twenty feet in thickness, afforded too much insulation; the molten puddle became white-hot but failed to spread or deepen. The energy cannon gave a sudden chatter, as electricity shortcircuited through corroded insulation. The cannon went dead. O. Z. Garr inspected the mechanism in anger and disappointment. Then, with a gesture of repugnance, he turned away. The cannons were clearly of limited effectiveness. Two hours later, on the east side of the crag, another great sheet of rock collapsed, and just before sunset, a similar mass sheared from the western face, where the wall of the castle rose almost in an uninterrupted line from the cliff below. At midnight Xanten and those of his persuasion, with their children and consorts, departed Castle Hagedorn. Six teams of Birds shuttled from the flight deck to a meadow near Far Valley, and long before dawn had transported the entire group. There were none to bid them farewell. XI A week later another section of the east cliff fell away, taking a length of rock-melt buttress with it. At the tunnel mouths the piles of excavated rubble had become alarmingly large. The terraced south face of the crag was the least disturbed; the most spectacular damage having occurred to east and west. Suddenly, a month after the initial assault, a great section of the terraces slumped forward, leaving an irregular crevasse which interrupted the avenue and hhrled down the statues of former notables emplaced at intervals along the avenue's balustrade. Hagedorn called a council meeting. "Circumstances," he said in a wan attempt at facetiousness, "have not bettered themselves. Our most pessimistic expectations have been exceeded. A dismal situation! I confess that I do not relish the prospect of toppling to my death among all my smashed belongings." Aure made a desperate gesture. "A similar thought haunts me! Death -- what of that? All must die! But when I think of my precious belongings I become sick. My books trampled! My fragile vases smashed! My tabards ripped! My rugs buried! My Phanes strangled! My heirloom chandeliers flung aside! These are my nightmares." "Your possessions are no less precious than any others," said Beaudry shortly. "Still they have no life of their own; when we are gone, who cares what happens to them?" M a rune winced. "A year ago I put down eighteen dozen flasks of prime essence; twelve dozen Green Rain; three each of Balthazar and Faidor. Think of these, if you would contemplate tragedy!" "Had we only known!" groaned Aure. "I would have -- I would have..." His voice trailed away. O. Z. Garr stamped his foot in impatience. "Let us avoid lamentation at all costs! We had a choice, remember? Xanten beseeched us to flee; now he and his like go skulking and foraging through the north mountains with the Expiationists. We chose to remain, for better or worse, and unluckily the 'worse' is occurring. We must accept the fact like gentlemen." To this the council gave melancholy assent. Hagedorn brought forth a flask of priceless Rhadamanth, and poured with a prodigality which previously would have been unthinkable. "Since we have no future -- to our glorious past!" HHhat night disturbances were noted here and there around the ring of Mek investment; flames at four separate points, a faint sound of hoarse shouting. On die following day it seemed that die tempo of activity had lessened a trifle. But during the afternoon a vast segment of the east cliff fell away. A moment later, as if after majestic deliberation, the tall east wall split off, toppled, leaving the backs of six great houses exposed to the open sky. An hour after sunset a team of Birds settled to the flightdeck. Xanten jumped from the seat. He ran down the circular staircase to the ramparts, came down to the plaza by Hagedorn's palace. Hagedorn, summoned by a kinsman, came forth to stare at Xanten in surprise. "What do you do here? We expected you to be safely north with the Expiationists!" "The Expiationists are not safely north," said Xanten. "They have joined the rest of us. We are fighting." Hagedorn's jaw dropped. "Fighting? The gentlemen are fighting Meks?" "As vigorously as possible." Hagedorn shook his head in wonder. "The Expiationists too? I understood that they had planned to flee north." "Some have done so, including A. G. Philidor. There are factions among the Expiationists just as here. Most are not ten miles distant. The same with the Nomads. Some have taken their powerwagons and fled. The rest kill Meks with fanatic fervor. Last night you saw our work. We fired four storage warehouses, destroyed syrup tanks, killed a hundred or more Meks, as well as a dozen power-wagons. We suffered losses, which hurt us, because there are few of us and many Meks. This is why I am here. We need more men. Come fight beside us!" Hagedorn turned, motioned to the great central plaza. "I will call forth the folk from their Houses. Talk to everyone." T he Birds, complaining bitterly at the unprecedented toil, worked all night, transporting gentlemen, who, sobered by the imminent destruction of Castle abandon all scruples and fight for their lives. The staunch traditionalists still refused to compromise their honor, but Xanten gave them cheerful assurance; "Remain here then, prowling the castle like so many furtive rats. Take what comfort you can in the fact that you are being protected ; the future holds little else for you." And many who heard him stalked away in disgust. Xanten turned to Hagedorn. "What of you? Do you come or do you stay?" Hagedorn heaved a deep sigh, almost a groan. "Castle Hagedorn is at an end. No matter what the eventuality. I will come with you." ryVhe situation suddenly had altered. The Meks, established in a loose ring around Castle Hagedorn, had calculated upon no resistance from the countryside and little from the castle. They had established their barracks and syrup depots with thought only for convenience and none for defense; raiding parties, consequently, were able to approach, inflict damages and withdraw before sustaining serious losses of their own. Those Meks posted along North Ridge were harassed almost continuously and finally were driven down with many losses. The circle around Castle Hagedorn became a cusp; then two days later, after the destruction of five more syrup depots, the Meks drew back even farther. Throwing up earthworks before the two tunnels leading under the south face of the crag, they established a more or less tenable defensive position, but now instead of beleaguering, they became the beleaguered, though still fighting. Within the area thus defended the Meks concentrated their remaining syrup stocks, tools, weapons, ammunition. The area outside the earthworks was floodlit after dark and guarded by Meks armed with pellet guns, making any frontal assault impractical. For a day the raiders kept to the shelter of the surrounding orchards, appraising the new situation. Then a new tactic was attempted. Six light carriages were improvised and loaded with bladders of a light inflammable oil, with a fire grenade attached. To each of these carriages ten Birds were harnessed, and at midnight sent aloft, with a man for each carriage. Flying high, the Birds then glided down through the darkness over the Mek position, where the fire bombs were dropped. The area instantly seethed with flame. The syrup depot burnt; the powerwagons, awakened by the flames, rolled frantically back and forth, crushing Meks and stores, colliding with each other, adding vastly to the terror of the flames. The Meks who survived took shelter in the tunnels. Certain of the floodlights were extinguished and, taking advantage of the confusion, the men attacked the earthworks. After a short bitter battle, the men killed all the sentinels and took up positions commanding the mouths of the tunnels, which now contained all that remained of the Mek army. It seemed as if the Mek uprising had been put down. nphe flames died. The human warriors -- three hundred men from the castle, two hundred Expiationists and about three hundred Nomads -- gathered about the tunnel mouth and, during the balance of the night, considered methods to deal with the immured Meks. At sunrise those men of Castle Hagedorn whose children and consorts were yet within the castle went to bring them forth. With them, upon their return, came a group of castle gentlemen : among them Beaudry, O. Z. Garr, Isseth, and Aure. They greeted their onetime peers, Hagedorn, Xanten, Claghom and others, crisply, but with a certain austere detachment, which recognized that loss of prestige incurred by those who fought Meks as if they were equals. "Now what is to happen?" Beaudry inquired of Hagedorn. "The Meks are trapped but you can't bring them forth. Not impossibly they have syrup stored within for the power-wagons. They may well survive for months." O. Z. Garr, assessing the situation from the standpoint of a military theoretician, came forward with a plane of action. "Fetch down the cannon -- or have your underlings do so -- and mount them on power-wagons. When the vermin are sufficiently weak, roll the cannon in and wipe out all but a labor force for the castie. We formerly worked four hundred, and this should suffice." "Ha!" exclaimed Xanten. "It gives me great pleasure to inform you that this will never be. If any Meks survive they will repair the spaceships and instruct us in the maintenance and we will then transport them and Peasants back to their native worlds." "How then do you expect us to maintain our lives?" demanded Garr coldly. "You have the syrup generator. Fit yourself with sacs and drink syrup." C arr tilted back his head stared coldly down his nose. "This is your voice, yours alone, and your insolent opinion. Others are to be heard from. Hagedorn, is this your philosophy, that civilization should wither?" "It need not wither," said Hagedorn, "provided that all of us -- you as well as we -- toil for it. There can be no more slaves. I have become convinced of this." O. Z. Garr turned on his heel, swept back up the avenue into the castle, followed by the most traditionalminded of his comrades. A few moved aside and talked among themselves in low tones, with one or two black looks for Xanten and Hagedorn. From the ramparts of the castle came a sudden outcry; "The Meks! They are taking the castle! They swarm up the lower passages! Attack, save us!" The men below stared up in consternation. Even as they looked the castle portals swung shut. "How is this possible?" demanded Hagedorn. "I swear all entered the tunnels!" "It is only too clear," said Xanten bitterly. "While they undermined, they drove a tunnel up to the lower levels!" Hagedorn started forward as if he would charge up the crag alone, then halted. "We must drive them out! Unthinkable that they pillage our castle!" "Unfortunately," said Claghorn, "the walls bar us as effectually as they did the Meks." "We can send up a force by Bird-car! Once we consolidate, we can exterminate them!" Claghorn shook his head. "They can wait on the ramparts and flight-deck and shoot down the Birds as they approach. Even if we secured a foothold there would be great bloodshed : one of us killed for every one of them. And they still outnumber us three or four to one." Hagedorn groaned. "The thought of them revelling among my possessions, strutting about sences -- it sickens me!" "Listen!" said Claghom. From on high they heard the hoarse yells of men, the crackle of energy-cannon. "Some of them, at least, hold out on the ramparts!" Xanten went to a nearby group of Birds who were for once awed and subdued by events. "Lift me up above the castle, out of range of the pellets, but where I can see what the Meks do!" "Care, take care!" croaked one of the Birds. "Ill things occur at the castle." "Never mind! Convey me up, above the ramparts!" 'T'he Birds lifted him, swung in a great circle around the crag and above the castle, sufficiently distant to be safe from the Mek pellet-guns. Beside those cannon which yet operated stood thirty men and women. Between the great Houses, the rotunda and the palace, everywhere the cannon could not be brought to bear, swarmed Meks. The plaza was littered with corpses: gentlemen, ladies and their children -- all those who had elected to remain at Castle Hagedorn. At one of the cannon stood O. Z. Garr. Spying Xanten he gave a shout of hysterical rage, swung up the cannon, fired a bolt. The Birds, screaming, tried to swerve aside, but the bolt smashed two. Birds, car, Xanten, fell in a great tangle. By some miracle, the four yet alive caught their balance and a hundred feet from the ground, with a frenzied groaning effort, they slowed their fall, steadied, hovered an instant, sank to the ground. Xanten staggered free of the tangle. Men came running. "Are you safe?" called Claghom. "Safe, yes. Frightened as well!" Xanten took a deep breath, went to sit on an outcrop of rock. "What's happening up there?" asked Claghom. "All dead," said Xanten, "all but a score. Garr has gone mad. He fired on me." "Look! Meks on the ramparts!" cried A.L. Morgan. "There!" cried someone else. "Men! They jump!... No, they are flung!" Some were men, some were Meks whom they had dragged with them; with awful slowness they toppled to their deaths. No more fell. Castle Hagedorn was in the hands of the Meks. Xanten considered the complex silhouette, at once so familial and so strange. "They can't hope to hold out. We need only destroy the sun-cells, and they can synthesize no syrup." "Let us do it now," said Claghom, "before they think of this and man the cannon! Birds!" He went off to give the orders, and forty Birds, each clutching two rocks the size of a man's head, flapped up, circled the castle and presently returned to report the sun-cells had been destroyed. Xanten said, "All that remains is to seal the tunnel entrances against a sudden eruption, which might catch us off guard -- then patience." "What of the Peasants in the stables -- and the Phanes?" asked Hagedorn in a forlorn voice. Xanten gave his head a slow shake. "He who was not an Expiationist before must become one now." Claghom muttered, "They can survive two months at most -- no more." But two months passed, and three months, and four months. Then one morning the great portals opened, a haggard Mek stumbled forth. He signaled: "Men: we starve. We have maintained your treasures. Give us our lives or we destroy all before we die." Claghom responded : "These are our terms. We give you your lives. You must clean the castle, remove and bury the corpses. You must repair the spaceships and teach us all you know regarding them. We will then transport you to Etamin Nine." "The terms you offer are accepted." F ive years later Xanten and Glys Meadowsweet, with their two children, had reason to travel north from their home near Sande River. They took occasion to visit Castle Hagedorn, where now lived only two or three dozen folk, among them Hagedorn. He had aged, so it seemed to Xanten. His hair was white; his face, once bluff and hearty, had become thin, almost waxen. Xanten could not determine his mood. They stood in the shade of a walnut tree, with castle and crag looming above them. "This is now a great museum," said Hagedom. "I am curator, and this will be the function of all the Hagedorns who come after me, for there is incalculable treasure to guard and maintain. Already the feeling of antiquity has come to the castle. The Houses are alive with ghosts. I see them often, especially on the nights of the fetes... Ah, those were the times, were they not, Xanten?" "Yes indeed," said Xanten. He touched the heads of his two children. "Still, I have no wish to return to them. We are men now, on our own world, as we never were before." Hagedorn gave a somewhat regretful assent. He looked up at the vast structure, as if now were the first occasion he had laid eyes on it. "The folk of the future -- what will they think of Castle Hagedorn? Its treasures, its books, its tabards?" "They will come, they will marvel," said Xanten. "Almost as I do today." "There is much at which to marvel. Will you come within, Xanten? There are still flasks of noble essence laid by." "Thank you no," said Xanten. "There is too much to stir old memories. We will go our way, and I think that we will do so immediately." Hagedorn nodded sadly. "I understand very well. I myself am often given to reverie these days. Well then, good-by, and journey home with pleasure." "We will do so, Hagedorn. Thank you and good-by," said Xanten, and turned away from Castle Hagedorn, toward the He was raised as a freak in the slums of a galaxy owned by aliens -- because he was that contemptible creature, a Man! fictions' most exciting new writing team I by Keith Laumer and Rosel G. Brown In the same issue: In the Temple of Mars, by Fred Saberhagen; The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein; and many more! Don't miss the big April issue of IF, on sale at all newsstands now!  idudryd U ntil I find Rudyard Kipling's model for style and plot structure, I have to assume he really was that rare bird, the innovator. Any attempt to assign him a fairly high order of creative accomplishment has got to have the backing of science-fiction readers, since so many of our best storytellers work as if they had absorbed a great deal from him. There is Heinlein, there is Poul Anderson, there are any number of lesser luminaries -- there is Kipling himself, and very much like Cordwainer though more like Heinlein in "With the Night Mail," or like Avram Davidson in "Wireless." Honest craftsmen, all, and givers of value for money; names any reader is happy to see blurbed on a magazine cover. Dune (Chilton; # text pages, several appendices, a glossary, a biographical dictionary and a map, #) is Frank Herbert's bid to have his name stand among them. Herbert is that exasperating creature, the writer of great promise. In the #'s he wrote Under Pressure, subsequently titled The Dragon in The Sea and #st-Century Sub in various editions. In that hypnotically fascinating book, he displayed a variety of uncommon gifts: intelligence, sophistication, a capacity for research and the ability to write clean prose as an unobtrusive but effective vehicle for a cleanly told story. Good as it was. Under Pressure would have benefitted by having both its opening and closing chapters edited down ruthlessly; other than that, there was nothing to quarrel with. Once he was under weigh with his real story, and clear up to the point where his submarine voyagers were home and the prose had nearly run out, he sustained a narrative drive any storyteller of any time or tradition would have admired. His approach then was rather similar to that which Alistair MacLean was just beginning to promulgate in the world of suspense literature -- hit 'em with everything but the kitchen sink, then give 'em the sink, and when they raise their heads, drop the plumber on 'em. It was fast, very #th century pragmatic style: "Said the captain: 'There's a smell of carrion in the reactor room.' Broke in the navigator: 'We're aground!' " In context, this was daringly direct technique, used with a magnificent disdain for the first novelist's usual bugaboo, self-consciousness. On reading Under Pressure in first publication, all that another writer for the same market could think about was that next time Herbert would obviously solve his one remaining problem -- his inability to start a story on the first page and end it on the last -- and then look out, Charlie. And then Herbert caught The Disease. The Disease, harking back to Para. #, is what happens to a writer if he draws wrong conelusions from the fact that Kipling also managed to publish "The Army of a Dream." We do not see our own mistakes, and we do not profit from the mistakes of others; we seek profit by trafficking according to what we think we saw. Frank Herbert is back, with the same intelligence, sophistication and knack for doing his homework. He has shaken off his seemingly interminable fascination with the story-ized lecture. Clinging to the Kipling template, it is as if he had finally paged forward to the greener years in his set of the Complete Works. There is not one moment, one character in Dune that speaks of Frank Herbert's time and what could have been done about it but was left undone. From first to last, the book is concerned with the time of Paul Atreides, yclept Muad'Dib, hight The Prophet of Dune, Emperor of the Universe and bastard son of Duke Leto. The time lives. It breathes, it speaks, and Herbert has smelt it in his nostrils. If the little foureyed clerk of Victoria's day could or can see what was in Herbert's marrow when he first conceived Dune perfect in his mind, that easily wounded mouth would have quirked and those narrow shoulders would have drooped a little before the congratulations came out. But we are not yet the omnipathetic departed, and we have to simply read the words. What we find, dulling the fine creation and shrouding it as surely but not as stingingly as the storms of Paul's Arrakis, are the words -- the twisting, sub-plotted, ravelled edge of unhemmed selvage at the margins of the strong whole cloth. Herbert has chucked MacLeanism, he has chucked Kipling's mistake; but instead of seeing his own mistake he has elaborated it. Being intelligent and sophisticated, he has made the elaboration most enjoyable. But if he thinks -- if you think -- that the reason Dune turns flat and tails off at the end is because even fmir hundred pages cannot encompass it properly, please consider instead the possibility that # pages would have sufficed even for an epic. The odyssey is not that long. Nor Beowulf, ' nor the narrative of the New Testament. M ost of you have surely read it by now, or parts of it -- I can count on the fingers of one hand the interesting books I had not read by the time the reviews hit print, and why should you be any different? So you know that it is the story of the child of scorn, outcast among his own people, raised by desert wolves, product of a mystical union long ago foretold, who comes from the hinterland as Messiah with legends and fierce beasts at his beck, to reclaim not only his own stolen heritage and the reputation of his mother but also the lost birthright of all the downtrodden everywhere. Robert Heinlein would call it the Little Tailor story, I believe; whatever you call it, it is the stulf of legend. Herbert has dressed it with fantastic industry. The sandworld of Arrakis is detailed down to every last bit of its ecology; the society of the desert-dwelling Fremen is convincingly described to its minutiae -- the amount Herbert had to know and transmit about their local adaptations of the universal Semitic language (and what he had to know about the universal language, and linguistics in general) is worth at least one Ph.D. and the Chair of Philology at a ' good New England college. The universal society, which hangs on Arrakis continued production of melange for Spacers' Guild to live on -- to say nothing of the age-old protomessianic activities of the Bene Gesserit -- are almost as closely detailed. (The appendices, which set it all forth in expository prose, are not to be believed unless seen and marvelled at). To this, add bard Gurney Halleck's instrain on the baliset ad libitum and ex tempore; the tortured Wellington Yeuh, the two Mentats, the various slithy toves of House Harkonnen, and even the industrious Princess Irulan... But what comes of all these people? In the disaster that seems to destroy House Atriedes -- and casts Paul and Jessica out upon the desert, and at last gets the story back into motion after a skillfully elaborated but zeromomentum hiatus following Chapter One -- Gurney and Thufir Hawat, the Atreides mentat, are cast adrift from the dead Duke Leto and seemingly from their allegiance to House Atreides. They almost instantly acquire new allegiances, reserving only the right to kill Jessica, whom they mistake for a traitress. They are elaborately set in motion on new courses, just as if each were the hero of another story altogether; the wordage is effective, but meanwhile time is fleeting, the story of Paul Muad'Dib is dissipating. When at last this pair of subplots ties back into the story of Paul and moves forward along a truly tragic course after tens of thousands of words as they raise their knives to strike Jessica down, Paul steps out from behind the hangings and says: "No, fellows, it was all a mistake," and they say "Oh -- 'scuse me, Ma'am," and go away. They are, in a word, blown. From the time of the Harkonnonen raid on Arrakis, they move the story fortle. Herbert was juggling too many people, too many sub-plots. Clearly, too, he had made the reader too many promises he was not able to keep when it came time to pay off, whatever his original plan. The thudding anti-climaxes of Hawat's and Halleck's failure to do anything dramatic -- even wet their pants -- when push comes to shove with Jessica, are by no means the most glaring cases of this. As the book begins to exhaust Herbert's sheer ability to transcribe his idea, one thihg after another is tossed off lamely. Shaddam IV, Emperor of the Universe, arrives on Arrakis only because Herbert has not yet developed a way for Paul to force the Spacers' Guild to transport him in chase of the master quarry. At least, I could see no other reason for such a transcendent monarch to pitch his tent on the only dangerous ground in all Creation. When Shaddam's fall comes, it comes almost casually -- after all, Herbert has known for months, perhaps years, what his payoff scene will be, and he has had much time to grow bored with it. What a light puff of breeze it takes to collapse the Imperial dynasty, and how quickly it is all told, compared to the many pages in which Paul and Jessica simply walk, their footfalls, fearful of awakening the sandworms, no lighter than the dry rustle with which a galactic society is overthrown. It is all there, mind you -- all that matters, anyway. But it is told, in the end, not shown, and truly effective villains suddenly simper and melt; fierce men and cunning statesmen and seeresses, all bend before this new Messiah, who, sad to say, has the milkwhite pallor of the wan Christ that # years of religiosity have chromolithographed for us, and none of the bum and brawn of the carpenter of Galilee. Too much time was spent in showing us the boy and his playmate tutors; too much time was spent in showing us his mother. She is noble and tight-lipped, but in fact she is an essentially foolish creature who collapses at the first true challenge. Nevertheless, she continues to be discussed as if she were important for some intrinsic worth of her own personality, though, true, she also does nothing after all those words of build-up toward one short scene. But he could have saved it; he could have, if he hadn't -- incredibly -- had Paul's infant son killed offstageO') Paul and Chani, his leman, recover beautifully. They go off into the universal dawn hand-in-hand, as if the child of the Messiah were nothing more than something a pair of adolescents had left on the grass and now would deny if called to claim it; as if any child were no more than that. You can make a lot of mistakes in a book, in a career, in a life, and still come out pretty well when the average is totted up. But it seems to me that you cannot be so busy saving a world that you cannot hear an infant shriek. N ow Rick Raphael cannot carry Herbert's shoes when it comes to prose or creating people; in fact, there has been fortunately little prose and dialogue like that in Code Three (Simon  Schuster, #) since Arcot, Wade and Morey. I forget whether it was Damon Knight or Jim Blish who first remarked on the painful banter that passes for wit and humor in this kind of story about technicians: "Hey," Clay called out, "I've got a real hot doll in Toronto, and I'll gladly sell her phone number for a proper price." "Wouldn't want to hurt you, Clay," the other officer replied. "If I called her up and took her out, she'd throw rocks at you the next time you drew the run. It's all for your own good." Quod erat demonstrandum, he averred learnedly, a disclaiming grin creasing his broadjawed face as his blunt-fingered, competent hands began dealing with the fouled ribbon. Oddly enough, unless there is some great conspiracy -- and that's not impossible -- real airmen and astronauts really do talk to each other that way. At least, they do if we are to believe such pseudodocumentary novelists as Hank Searls and such reporters as ex-Planet letterhack Martin Caidin, who are forever quoting them thus in such books as The Big X, Thunderbirds and Everything But the Flak. This subschool of literature -- the interchangeable novel and biography of the #th century engine-driver, sometimes slopping over into something like sf but really like the Gus Wilson's Model Garage stories -- has been making good money of late ( The Pilgrim Project, Marooned) and it was only a matter of time before someone tried technocentric procedural fiction on the science-fiction magazines. Of all the attempts, I think Raphael's stories of the throughway police of the future are the most successful, and they are what is gathered here, out of three pieces. In the future here given, all North America is laced by great highways -- fixed, not rolling -- on which ordinary civilians drive cars capable of # mph and more. Obviously, some sort of super-cop and super-car are required to keep these incompeof the time, this is accomplished with such cars as Beulah, crewed by such trios as Sergeant Ben Martin, Trooper Clay Ferguson and Medical Surgical Officer Kelly Lightfoot, the latter a girl of curious description. (See farther). Beulah is an accident ward, fire engine, jail, armored car, wrecker and pursuit vehicle all in one; she cruises on ten-day patrols, her crew sleeping and eating on board, on eleven-month tours of duty. In the first third of the book, she chases down a pair of bank robbers ducking on and off the transcontinental road, pursuing over great distances and at enormous speeds. In the second third, she deals with an attempt to fix a speeding ticket. These simple threads of story are followed along in documentary fashion; we are told every detail of Beulah's equipment, we have explained to us the political situation -- no single nation could afford to support the roads required to contain the constantly faster cars being turned out by industry, and thus there is a North American Thruway Authority -- and while the main thread is being spun, we are shown numerous day-to-day occurrences, each of them quite real-sounding, all apparently worked out in keen detail on the basic postulate. We are shown the relationships between crew as instrument of duty and crew as individuals -- Ben Martin is the daddy, Clay is the young son sowing his wild oats, Kelly Lightfoot is remarkably like Clarissa MacDougal in the presence of the Laird. Whom to hold to account for the fact that all this is repeated, from third to third, as the novelettes are pasted together? Nobody, I suppose -- it seems to be inherent in the genre that all the switches get read off repeatedly, and what the hell, maybe the reader doesn't remember from one page to the next. Whom do we go to for redress against the following sort of prose? "... creating impossible situations toward uniform safety control." "Within the five-mile-wide bands of the thruways -- all federally owned land by each of the three nations -- " "... designed almost identically from models on the moon run -- "The olive-skinned red head grinned at him... (I told you she was curiously described). u... a complete dispensary, one that would have made... even the light-surgery rooms of earlier-day hospitals proud." That's all within the first dozen pages, mind you -- after a while, the mind numbs, or one realizes one is in an alternate universe. The latter possibility seems likely r though Raphael keeps tripping over the assertion that somehow you can get Grandma to drive # mph but you can't build a plane she'd feel safe -- and be safer -- handling, I don't believe it for a second. And the notion of Canada and Mexico having so much surplus capital that they can not only support their own Thruway portions but can pitch in to help out Old Yankee Imperialismo, thus making the Thruways possible... Somehow, the social revolution Raphael would need to explain this is not to be found in these pages. And how to explain that in all that roadbed, there was not room for some control device that would at least touch a charged wand to a powerplant and short out the ignition? Is it feasible to declare repeatedly that rising speed capabilities for grandma s car are to be met by raising speed limits? Is it, in the last analysis, logical to even consider building a new police car, known as The Bomb, capable of speeds in excess of # mph? One, I doubt the engineering that will permit it to rise twenty feet on on its air cushions and yet not become truly airborne at that forward velocity. A loaf of white bread would have considerable lift capabilities at that speed, and the smooth contour of the Bomb -- Raphael causes me to visualize it as a B-# fuselage -- ought actually to brispointed up and forward, drag chute cubbies and, most certainly, parachute ejection seat tracks for the hapless crew. And yet -- and yet this unworkable monster in this unworkable world does, at last, draw real blood. Ben Martin, married to Kelly Lightfoot in the final third, dies testing it (He -- that is, Raphael -- gives all the wrong reasons, but he too knows it won't work, and hopes "they" will hurry up soon with the not foolproof, terribly dumb family car Raphael plans to foist on the civilians he can't get to drive airplanes). He dies because except for himself and Clay Ferguson, who like all patrolmen have gotten the equivalent of graduate degrees before being allowed on the force, all other patrolmen are either ignorant or psychotic, by Raphael's own description of them, except when they utter man-to-man dialogue. But he does die, and it is a shocking thing despite Kelly's Susan Hayward reaction. Mind you, now, Beulah, Ferguson, Lightfoot, the Thruways and Authority are the heroes of this story; they could not exist in their dedication and cameraderie without the motorist, and they all depend on each other for life itself. Now: "She's right," Ferguson said bitterly, "it wasn't fair to kill him so that the stupid lemmings could be held back from the sea for an instant. The miserable rotten, driving lemmings." He spat into the dirt. You know what Raphael was trying to do, all along, all that weary, painful way? He was trying to say something; move somebody, show somebody. Now, I can't presume to say what that something and somebody might be. But Ferguson's response is # degree away from what the good hero of the engine-driver novel should do. He is stripping himself of all the defenses these heroes put up; he is trampling the Errol Flynn tradition that you risk your neck for fun, the Heinlein tradition that the roads must roll because civilization needs them, the C. S. Forrester tradition that you do your duty 'cause you're steadfast but stupid. He has turned his back on Nevil Shute, and on Venus Equilateral, and for all I know is speaking for Boskone. Of course, in all those years of education it never occurred to him to patrol # mph highways sion of Beulah, so perhaps he, like Grandma, is a creature of curious inhibitions and neurotic reflexes. But it was nice -- it was real, with the crack of reality, when he opened up like that; it is too much to hope for a plain statement from Raphael, but a truth of some kind... that turned out to be possible. Which makes Code Three -- of all the unlikely contenders -- more genuinely a realized story on its own terms than Dune is on its terms. We are talking about two different sets of standards, of course, but, still...      Hardly a month goes by without some fresh and revelatory breakright now, at this moment in time, control our own genetic chemistry enough to shape our bodies -- and brains! -- into the exact form we wish, certainly we can say, right now, that that time is in the foreseeable future. Assume it is here. Assume we can rebuild a fertilized ovum, almost at the moment of conception, according to any genetic blueprint we like. What do we do with that power? In the next Galaxy Frank Herbert begins a two-part serial that traces out some of those answers for us. In his world life is shaped o a p'on; death is not so much a termination of a life as the withdrawal from the market of a no longer competitive artifact; power lies in the hands ot thousands of individuals, any one of whom can destroy any other person alive on the earth or all of them. The title is Heisenberg's Eyes, and we think you'll put it right up there with such other famous Frank Herbert classics as Dune and The Dragon in the Sea. What else? The last of Robert Silverberg's 'Blue Fire" novelettes, to begin with; this one called Open the Sky Hayden Howard s The Eskimo Invasion. Shorts to fill; Willy Ley's column; Algis Budrys attent, ongetting book reviews. We also have on hand a handsome selectwhy Paul Anderson, Jack Vance, Keith Laumer, Gordon R. Dickson, James Blish and Norman L. Knight to choose from over the next few issues to name but a few -- so it looks like a pretty good year The Crystal Prison The Old People knew what was best for the kids of forty and under. Too bad the children didn't appreciate it! # A T y Great Granny will trade three balls of gray string, big as grapefruit," Jack said to the girl. He was an #-year-old boy -- in Oldlands you didn't become a young man or woman until #, or a voter until #. The new antibiotics, carcinophages and cell-restorers had upped life expectancy to # years. Jack had a narrow sunny face and brown crew-cut hair, but he looked plump because he was wearing a suit lined with thick foam rubber, so he wouldn't break a bone or a priceless chair if he bumped anything, and colored white, so any dirt he got on it would show. A month ago he had discovered in the #-foot-deep swimming pool that it floated beautifully, but Great Granny had given him thetreatment of "You're worrying me into a heart attack before I'm #." Around his neck was a silver dollar with a glistening listen-whisper jutting up by his jaw. trade her two string-balls, one red, one green, for them," Candy replied. "They're big as the Temple oranges of Holy Florida and the green has a gold thread in it." At #, Candace had long black hair and a slim face like amused moonlight, but you could hardly see it because of the black burnoose her Great Great Aunt made her wear against sunburn and to assure she'd reach # properly modest. She had once tried to give up wearing it indoors, outside her bedroom. But only once. "Little girls of # are not to be seen, especially their legs." You could, however, see the gleam of her silver collar. "That's trading # yards for about #," Jack objected, prompted by his listen-whisper. "How many knots have your string-balls got hidden in them?" Candy demanded, prompted by hers. "#," Jack admitted. "Granny had me count." While their mouths were saying these things, their eyes were saying something else. It was strange. # C A Tine have only #," CandyLV.L sneered. "No deal, unless you throw in the broken birdcage... or some tea bags." "My knots are all square knots " Jack began, but then his listen-whisper blatted audibly. "You're possessions-mad, Grace! That would violate senior citizens' fair-trading laws." "You and your dirty string, all knots!" Candy's blatted back. The teen-agers faced each other across a road wide enough for two oldsters' electric wheelchairs to pass. Behind each of them was a large handcart piled high with choice oldster treasures arranged very neatly. From their collars silver wires trailed back past de-thorned bushes up deinsected tidy green hills to two sweet cottages, smothered in artificial flowers, which smiled at each other like camouflaged tanks across the narrow road. Behind each cottage stood a larger storage barn. Some progressive oldsters let their youngsters play and run errands and record diet-and-health gossip and do trading deals on collars only radio-linked to home. But wired collars seemed wisest to most, including Jack's and Candy's guardians. True, a girl had recently been strangled when her wire snagged in a tree she was climbing and she slipped. But she shouldn't have been climbing the tree. You always had to pay a price for safety and freedom from worry. Besides, although the Oldlands police snagged # of # runaway youngsters headed for Freeshore, there was always that risk too. The close-clipped vacuumed landscape was dotted at #yard intervals with #-foot gray pillars like the trunks of giant pines identically lightning-blasted. Although the sun shone brightly and the blue sky was gay with cirrus clouds, the air was somewhat stuffy, very still, and smelled just a touch of old newspapers, sour milk and soap. This was because of the invisible glasstic roof Which was supported by the pillars and kept out of Oldlands all dangerous weather, including draughts. # 'on't gape and dawdle, k) Jack," his listen-whisper prompted. He said to Candy, "I've got all # back issues of Garbage Art and Junk Beautiful." "I've got them too," she retorted. "Your Gran just wants more storage space." "Liar," Jack said. His hand held at his side, he crooked a finger at the girl. They pulled their carts closer together and knelt down in front of them, so they were hidden from the cottages. "What are you doing, Candace?" her listen-whisper demanded. "Don't block the road, boy," was Great Granny's contribution. "About those tea bags," the girl said quickly toward Jack. "I have # copies of the Geriatric Observer and Daily Diet to trade -- just the sort of newspaper to spread over plastic tablecloth covers to keep them from getting dull." "Well," Jack replied loudly, "I have # tea bags -- used, of course, but dried out nicely." He wasn't looking at Candy, he was letting down a large hinged door in the bottom of his cart. "Those might be acceptable," Candy bargained. "My Great Great Aunt seldom uses fresh tea bags. The used ones make her feel more saving." She said this reverently, but her lips were laughing, especially when she saw the wrinkled gray tea bags neatly lined up on a shelf of Jack's cart, like mummified mice. Then her eyes became wild with excitement as Jack drew a life-size figure out of the false bottom of his cart and sat it beside him. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from exclaiming and she wagged the other hand and her eyes implored. Jack snatched an antique aluminum coughdrop box from a pocket in his bump-proof white suit. From it he quickly took a bumblebee on a two-inch thread with a square of Stick-Tite tape at the other end, which he rapidly stuck to his collar just by the whisperlisten. The bee buzzed madly and its wings rattled against the silver metal. "Oh, a bee!" Candy squealed in terror, leaning forward so that her listen-whisper was close to Jack's. "It must have got in from the Wall," Jack shrilled frightenedly. Both of them were grinning. "Lovely bee," Candy said with her lips as it buzzed close to them. From the cottages up the hills came faintly the sound of windows being slammed shut. TT er voice masked to the listen whispers by the buzzing, Candy whispered, "Oh, she's beautiful, Jack. I wouldn't have made her nearly as beautiful." She was referring to the robot duplicate of herself sitting by Jack and dressed in pearl-gray sweater, slacks and sandals. "No, you wouldn't," Jack whispered back gruffly. "And you would have been wrong, so that's why I had to build her." "Can I hear her talk?" 'Yes, once, but then you got to work fast," Jack said curtly. He felt the figure's side for a button under the sweater, then pressed. The robot Candy blinked her eyes and smiled -- a little sadly, Candy fancied -- and nodded her head and softly said, "Yes." "That's about all her vocabulary," Jack admitted, "except for repeating things people tell her." " 'Yes' is the only word she'll need with G-G Aunty," Candy said. "Her repeat-talk will let her do trading and dietgossip." She was already turned away and letting down a door in the bottom of her cart. Jack reached in his secret compartment for what looked like a thick green rug, rolled up tight. Then he looked at the robot, dressed almost identically to the first, which Candy had produced. "Hey, I'm not that good-looking," he objected, his eyes a bit dreamy. At that moment the bumblebee stung him on the chin, but he hardly winced. "Says you," Candy replied smugly. "You remember to steal your key?" Jack growled, holding out his hand. Candy wrinkled her nose and dropped a silver key in his palm, then turned around. "I made him look just like you," she said. "I'll admit I couldn't have installed the servomotors and batteries without your help." "I couldn't have done the cybernetic circuits without yours, Jack said. By that time her silver collar had been unlocked from her neck and snapped around her robot's. The robot-Candy looked unhappy at that. Silly, Candy told herself, robots can't feel. Then she had Jack's key and was fitting it into the tiny keyhole in the back of his collar. I n a lull in the bee's buzzing, Jack's whisper-listen blatted quaveringly, "Jack, my boy, can you speak?" "Yes," Jack and his robot replied simultaneously. "Are you dead, son?" the emotional voice went on. "Yes," the robot-jack responded, but Jack overrode that with, "No, Great Granny, but that awful bee is still menacing us," whereupon the bee buzzed madly again as if on cue. "Good boy," Jack called to it. His collar was around his robot's neck now. Candy whipped off her black burnoose while Jack lost time squirming out of his white antibump suit. For a moment all four were dressed alike in gray and looked like two pairs of identical twins. Then it was Candy's robot who was dressed like an Arab girl, black-cloaked and hooded, while with some difficulty they wormed the cumbersome foam-rubber suit onto the Jack robot. Candy looked at the two silver keys in her hand. Somewhere down the road a siren sounded faintly. She slipped one key each into the pockets of the two robots. Jack frowned and almost said something, but instead captured the bumblebee, still straining for freedom, in the antique coughdrop box. "Not until Freeshore, old boy," he told the insect. "Are you holding out, Candace?" G-G Aunty demanded from the whisper-listen and then at the robot's reply, "Good, just keep your hood shut. It won't be much longer -- we've called the police." "It can't sting you through the rubber. Cover your face with your arms, boy, and pray," Great Granny contributed. The siren sounded again, much closer now, reverberating against the invisible glasstic sky. "Come on!" Jack whispered sharply, grabbing up the green cylinder. Together he and Candy wormed their way, like soldiers infiltrating, between the bushes, away from the cottages and the siren, until they had some concealment behind them and a wide long lawn ahead. Then he unrolled the cylinder until it looked exactly like a thick green rug about # feet by # and the same color as the grass. In one corner was a gray metal square set with two buttons and a joystick. Jack hit one of the buttons and the carpet stiffened flat and hard. "It's a bomb, Candy!" Jack cheered softly. "An electronic cyclone. Crawl aboard." ' As they did that, Jack explained, "Dad smuggled it to me through a friend of his who's a free trader." J ack's widowed father and Candy's divorced mother had both had, separately, to leave Oldlands for Freeshore many years before. They had tried to take their children with them, but there had been a custody fight and as generally happens in the Oldlands courts, the oldest litigants had won out -- especially in this case because neither Jack's father nor Candy's mother were yet of voting age; Candy's mother had been under thirty -- a child. And because rich Oldlands almost always won out in the courts against money-poor Freeshore. When he and Candy were stretched side by side, Jack hit the second button. The green carpet lifted four inches and hovered. Air sucked in at the .front end of the carpet hissed down The strange ship rocked a little, not much. Just then a bullet-snouted blue police car nosed into sight on the road behind them, traveling at least # miles an hour. With a final blast of its siren, it carefully braked to a stop between the junk carts. Up from it stood four spry oldsters in blue, their heads hooded with mesh like beekeepers'. One held in his heavily gauntleted hands an insect spray, the second an insect rifle, the third a pinpoint death-ray. The fourth lifted a bullhorn to his masked mouth. His voice rang from the glasstic sky: "Bee at targe! Bee at large! Where's the person around here reported a bee at large?" Then he looked down. "Oh, was it you kids?" Jack and Candy gripped hands and grinned at each other as they heard their robots answer together, "Yes." This was instantly followed by the listen-whispers on the silver rings blatting, "We'll tell you all about it, officers. Come home, Candace. Come home, Jack," and by another two obedient calls of "Yes." Then Jack pulled back on the joystick, and the carpet leaned forward, air hissed from the back end too, and it went skimming off across the green lawn. It lifted over the bushes and arrowed between the gray pillars and swung wide of the senior citizens' dormitories and cottages that kept whipping into view. He said in her ear. "You know, #I miss Great Granny." "And I'll miss G-G Auntie," she replied. "They weren't really bad, just terribly scared and lonely." He nodded. "And maybe a little possessive too," he added, almost doubtfully. She said, "I'm bothered about our robots. We thought they'd just fool G-G and G-Gran long enough to let us get to Freeshore. But now I think they'll go on fooling them forever. And then -- I know this is foolish -- they'll be as unhappy as we were." He said, "If they ever do grow minds, they can escape to Freeshore too. You left them their keys." And then there was only the rusing wind and the flashing pillars and the dizzying lawns and musty cottages as they sped, faster and faster, toward Freelands and wild bees and wild spiders and wild tigers, and firecrackers and loud jazz and the open life and open sky and danger and spaceships and the stars... had been martyred. What would they do now that he was revived? I Lazarus was trusting and without guile. But the men whose hearts were hard came upon him and slew him in the night, and fed his body to the converter so that not even 'a molecule remained. And when Vorst learned of their deed, he wept and said, I wish you had slain me instead, for now you have given him an immortality he can never lose. -- The Book of Lazarus M ars Monotrack One, the main line, ran from east to west like a girdle of concrete flanking the planet's western hemisphere. To the north lay the Lake District with its fertile fields; to the south, closer to the equator, was the belt of throbbing compressor stations that had done so much to foster the miracle. The discerning eye could still make out the old craters and gouges of the landscape, hidden now under a dusting of sawtooth grass and occasional forests of pine. The gray concrete pylons of the monotrack marched to the horizon. Spurs carried the line to the settlements of the outlands, and they were always adding new spurs as the new settlements sprouted. Logistically, it might have been simpler to have all the Martians live in One Big City. But the Martians were not that sort of people. Spur #Y was being added now, advancing in ungainly bounds toward the new outpost of Beltram Lakes. Already the pylon foundations had gone up threequarters of the way from Mono One to the settlement. A vast pylon-layer was working its way through the countryside, gobbling up sand from ten yards down and spewing out concrete slabs that it stapled into the ground. Gobble, splew, staple, and move on -- gobble, spew, staple. The machine moved rapidly, guided by a neatly homeostatic brain that kept it on course. Behind it came the other machines to lay track between the pylons and string the utility lines that would follow the same route. The Martian settlers had many miracles at their command, but them, not yet, and so the lines microwave kickover of usable electric power wasn't one of had to get strung. The monotrack system was intended for heavy-duty transportation. The Martians used quickboats, like everybody else, for getting themselves from place to place. But the slim little vehicles weren't much use in the shipment of construction materials, and this was a planet under construction. Now that the reconstruction phase was over, the Terraformers were gone. Mars was a bosky dell, here in this year of Grace #, and now the task was to plant a civilization on the finally hospitable planet. The Martians They had passed their frontiersman stage and were settling down to enjoy the pleasures of a good commercial boom. And the monotrack marched on, mile after mile, skirting the seas, rimming the lakes and rivers. rrhe dogwork was done by clever machines, but men rode herd on the machinery. You never could tell when the homeostasis would slip ever so slightly and your pylon-layer would go berserk. It had happened a few days ago, and somehow the cutoff relays and been blanked out of the circuit, and before anyone could do anything there were sixteen miles of pylons crisscrossing Holliman Lake -- eight hundred feet under water. Martians hate wastefulness. The machines had shown that they were not entirely trustworthy, and thereafter they were watched. Watching over the construction of this particular spur of Monotrack One was a lean, sunbronzed man of sixty-eight named Paul Weiner, who had good political connections, and a plump redhaired man named Hadley Donovan, who did not Redheads were rare on Mars for the usual statistical reasons. Plump men were rare too, but not so rare as they once had been. Life was softer these days, and so were the younger Martians. Hadley Donovan was amused by the antics of his gun-toting elders, with their formal etiquette, their theatrically taut bodies, their sense of high personal importance. Perhaps it had been necessary to wear those poses in the pioneer days on Mars, Donovan thought, but all that had been over for thirty years. He had allowed himself the luxury of a modest paunch. He knew that Paul Weiner felt contempt for him. The feeling was mutual. The two men sat side by side in a landcrawler, edging through the roadless landscape twenty miles ahead of the pylon-layingrig. Transponders bleeped at appropriate intervals; on the control board in front of them, colors came and went in an evanescent flow. Weiner was supposed to be monitoring the doings of the construction rig behind them; Donovan was checking out the planned route of the track, hunting for pockets of subsurface mushiness that the pylon-builder would not be clever enough to evaluate. D onovan was trying to do both jobs at once. He didn't dare let a political appointee like Weiner have any real responsibility in the work. Weiner was the nephew of Nat Weiner, who stood high in ruling councils, was a hundred-and-some years old, and went to Earth every few years to have the Vorsters pluck out his pancreas or his kidneys or his carotid arteries and implant handy artificial substitutes. Nat Weiner was going to live forever, probably, and he was gradice up with members of his family. And Hadley Donovan, trying to oversee a job that really required two men's full attention, felt vague desperation as he scanned his own board and covertly glanced over at Weiner's every thirty seconds or so. Something was glowing purple on the Anomaly Screen. Donovan wondered about it, but he was too busy with his own part of the job to mention it, and then Weiner was drawling, "I got something peculiar over here, Donovan. What do you make of it, Freeman?" Donovan kicked the crawler to a halt and studied the board. "Underground rock vault, looks like. Three-four miles off the track." "Think we ought to take a look?" "Why bother?" Donovan asked. "The track won't come anywhere near it." "You aren't curious? Might be a treasure vault left by the Old Martians." Donovan didn't dignify that with a reply. "What do you think it is, then?" Weiner asked. "Maybe it's a cave carved by a underground stream. You think so? All that sub-surface water Mars had before they Terraformed it? Rivers flowing under the desert?" Feeling the needles, Donovan said, "It's probably just a crawlspace left by the Terraforming engineers. I don't see why -- oh, hell. All right. Let's go investigate. Shut the whole project down for half an hour. What do I care?" He began throwing switches. It was a foolish, pointless interruption, but the older man's curiosity had to be satisfied. Treasure cave! Underground stream! Donovan had to admit that he couldn't think of any rational reason why there'd be such a pocket of open Space underground here. Geologically, it didn't make much sense. They cut across to it. It turned out to be about twenty feet down, with undisturbed-looking grass growing above it. Some doserange pinging confirmed that the vault was about ten feet long, a dozen feet wide, eight or nine feet deep. Donovan was convinced that it had been left by the Terraformers. But it wasn't on the charts, at any rate. He summoned a dig-robot and put it to work. I n ten minutes the roof of the vault lay bare : a slab of green fusion-glass. Donovan shivered a little. Weiner said, "I think we got ourselves a grave here." "Let's leave it. This isn't our business. We'll report it and -- " "What do we have here?" Weiner asked, and slipped his hand into an opening. He seemed to be caressing something within. Quickly he drew his hand back as a yellow glow spread over the top of the vault A voice said, "May the blessing of eternal harmony be on you, friends. You have come to the temporary resting-place of Lazarus. Qualified medical assistance will revive me. I ask your help. Please do not attempt to open this vault except with qualified medical assistance." Silence. The voice said again, "May the blessing of eternal harmony be on you, friends. You have come to the temporary -- " "A voice-cube," Donovan murmured. "Look!" Weiner gasped, and pointed to the clearing vaultroof. The glass, lit from below, was transparent now. Donovan peered down into a rectangular vault. A thin, hawk-faced man lay on his back in a nutrient bath, feed-lines connected to his limbs and trunk. It was something like a Nothing Chamber, but far more elaborate. The sleeper wore a smile. Arcane symbols were inscribed on the walls of the chamber. Donovan recognized them as Harmonist symbols. That Venusian cult. He felt a stab of confusion. What had they stumbled on here? "The temporary resting-place of Lazarus," the voice-cube said. Lazarus was the prophet of the Harmonists. To Donovan, all of these religions were equally inane. He would have to report this discovery, now, and there would be delay in the construction project, and he himself would be pushed unwantedly into prominence, and -- And none of it would ever have happened if Weiner had been dozing off as usual. Why had he noticed the anomaly? "We better tell somebody about this," Weiner said. "I think it's important." II I n a small jungle-fringed building on Venus, eight men who were not men faced a ninth. All wore the cyanotic blue skins of Venus, though only three had been born with those skins. The others were surgical products, Earthmen converted to Venusians. Not just their bodies had been converted, either. The six changed ones had all been Vorsters at one time in their spiritual development -- that is, followers of the influential religious and political movement formally known as the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance. The Vorsters were the most powerful figures on Earth. But this was not Earth but Venus, and Venus was in the hands of a Vorster heresy, the Harmonists, sometimes called the Lazarites after their martyred founder, David Lazarus. Lazarus, the prophet of Transcendent Harmony, had been put to death by Vorster underlings seventy years before. Now, to the consternation of his followers -- "Brother Nicholas, may we have your report?" asked Christopher Mondschein, the head of the Harmonists on Venus. Nicholas Martell, a slender, dogged man in early middle age, stared at his eight colleagues wearily. In the last few days he had little sleep, and many profound jolts to his equilibrium. Martell had made the round trip to Mars to check on the astonishing report that had flashed to the three planets not long before. He said, "It's exactly as the news story had it. Two workmen coming upon a vault while supervising the construction of a monotrack spur." "You saw the vault?" asked Mondschein. "I saw the vault. They've got it cordoned." "What about Lazarus?" "There was a figure inside the vault. It matched the image of Lazarus in Rome. It resembled all the portraits. The vault's a sort of Nothing Chamber, and the figure is hooked up inside. The Martian authorities have checked the circuitry of the vault and they say that it's likely to blow sky-high if anybody tampers with it." ( (,  nd the figure," persisted a hollow-faced man named Emory. "The figure is Lazarus?" "Looks like Lazarus," Martell said. "You must remember I never saw Lazarus in the flesh. I wasn't bom yet when he died. It he died." "Don't say that," Emory snapped. "This is a hoax. Lazarus died, all right. He was fed to the converter. There's nothing left of him but loose protons and electrons and neutrons." "So it says in our Scripture," declared Mondschein warily. He closed his eyes a moment. He was the oldest man present; he had been on Venus almost sixty years, and had built this branch of the movement to its present dominant position. He said, "There is always the possibility that our text is corrupt." "No!" The outburst came from Embry, young and conservative. "How can you say that?" Mondschein shrugged. "The early years of our movement, Brother, are shrouded in doubt. We know there was a Lazarus, that he worked with Vorst at Santa Fe, that he quarreled with Vorst over procedure and was assassinated, or at least put out of the way. But all that was a long time ago. There's no one left in the movement ' that was directly associated with Lazarus. We aren't as longlived as the Vorsters, you know. So if it happened that Lazarus wasn't stuffed into a converter, but simply carried off to Mars in suspended animation and plugged into a Nothing Chamber for sixty or seventy years -- " There was silence in the room. Martell gave Mondschein a ridelong glance of distress. It was Emory who finally said, "What if he's revived and claims to be Lazarus? What happens to the movement?" Mondschein replied, "We'll face that when we get to it. According to Brother Nicholas, there seems to be some doubt as to whether the vault can be opened at all." "That's correct," Martell said. "If it's wired to explode when tampered with -- " "Let's hope it is," put in Brother Claude, who had not spoken. "For our purposes, the best Lazarus is a martyred Lazarus. We can keep the tomb as a shrine, and send pilgrimages there, and perhaps get the Martians interested. But if he comes back to life, and begins to upset things -- " "What is in that vault is not Lazarus," Emory said. M ondschein stared at him in amazement. Emory seemed ready to crack apart. "Perhaps you'd better rest a while," Mondschein suggested. "You're taking this much too much to heart" Martell said, "It's a disturbing business, Christopher. If you had seen that figure in the vault -- he looks so angelic, so confident of resurrection -- " Emory groaned. Mondschein furrowed his brow a moment, and in response the door opened and one of the native Venusians entered, one of the espers the Harmonists had been collecting so long on Venus. "Brother Emory is tired, Neerol," Monschein said. The Venusian nodded. His hand closed on Emory's wrist, dark purple against deep indigo. A nexus formed; there was a momentary neutral flow; sluices opened somewhere within Emory's brain. Emory relaxed. The Venusian led him from the room. Mondschein looked round at the others. "We have to operate under the assumption," he said, "that the genuine body of David Lazarus has turned up on Mars, that our book is in error about his fate, and that there's at least the possibility that the body in that vault can be brought to life. The question is, how are we going to react?" Martell, who had seen the vault and who would never be quite the same, said, "You know I've always been skeptical of the charismatic value of the Lazarus story. But I see this as operating to our advantage. If we can gain possession of the vault, and make it the symbolic center of our movement -- something to capture the public imagination -- " "Exactly," Claude said. "It's always been our big selling point that we've got a mythos. The competition's got Vorst and his medical miracles, Santa Fe and all that, but nothing to stir the heart. We've had the martyrdom of Lazarus, and it's helped us take control of Venus, which the Vorsters never were able to do. And now, with Lazarus himself come forth from the dead -- " "You miss the point," said Mondschein thinly. "What turned up on Mars doesn't tally with the myth. Lazarus isn't supposed to be resurrected in the flesh. He was blasted to atoms. Suppose archaeologists found that Christ had really been beheaded, not crucified? Suppose it came to light that Mohammed never set foot in Mecca? We've been caught with our mythology askew -- if this is really Lazarus. It could destroy us. It could wreck all we've built" '"p'hirty miles from the quaint A old city of Santa Fe, the sprawling laboratories of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences rose within a ring of dark mountains. The Center was the headquarters of the Brotherhood's scientific arm, and the mainspring of the entire movement. Here whirling knives and lashing lasers transformed living creatures into alien flesh. Here technicians laboriously manipulated genes. Here families of espers submitted to an endless round of experiments, and bionics men prodded their subjects mercilessly toward a new realm of existence. The Center was a mighty maohine, bristling with purposefulness. Inconceivably old men were at the heart of the machine. The core of the movement was the domed building near the main auditorium, Where Noel Vorst lived when at Santa Fe. Vorst, the Founder, acknowledged a century and a quarter of life. There were those who said that he was dead, that the Vorst who occasionally appeared at the chapels of the Brotherhood was a robot, a simulacrum. Vorst himself found this amusing. More of him was metal than flesh, at this point, but he was undeniably alive, with no immediate plans for dying. If he had planned to die, he never would have gone to the trouble of founding the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance. There had been hard years at first; it is not pleasant to be deemed a crackpot. Among those who had deemed Vorst a crackpot in those days was his present second-in-command, the Hemispheric Coordinator, Reynolds Kirby. Kirby, a minor official in the U.N. in the time before the international tentacles of the Vorster movement had made the U.N. unnecessary, had stumbled into the Brotherhood at a time of personal stress, looking for something to cling to in a storm. That had been in #. He was still clinging, seventy-five years later. By now he was virtually Vorst's alter ego, an adjunct of the Founder's souL T he Founder had been less than candid with Kirby about this Lazarus enterprise, though. For the first time in many years, Vorst had held the details of a project entirely to himself. Some things could not be shared. When they were matters concerning David Lazarus, Vorst held them in pectore, unable to take even Kirby into his confidence. The Founder sat cradled in a webfoam net that spared him most of gravity's pull. Once he had been a vigorous, dynamic giant of a man, and when he had to he could wear that set of attributes even now, but he preferred comfort. It was necessary to spare his strength. His plan had fulfilled itself well, but he knew that without his guiding presence it might all yet come to nothing. Kirby sat before him, thinlipped, grizzled, his body like Vorst's a patchwork of artificial organs. The Vorster laboratories no longer needed such clumsy devices to prolong youth. Within the last generation, they had managed to stimulate regeneration from within, the body's own rebirth, always the most preferable way. Kirby had come along too early for that; so had Vorst. For them, organ replacement was the road to conditional immortality. With luck, they might last two or three centuries, undergoing periodic overhauls. Younger men, those who had joined the movement in the last forty years, might hope for several hundred years more than that. Some now living, Vorst knew, would never die. Vorst said, "About this Lazarus thing -- " His voice came from a vocoder box. The larynx had gone sixty years ago. The effect was naturalistic enough, though. "We can infiltrate our men," Kirby said. "I can work through Nat Weiner. We'll get a bomb clapped onto that vault and give Mr. Lazarus his eternal repose." "No." "No?" "Of course not,' Vorst said. He lowered the shutters that lubricated his eyes. "Nothing must happen to that vault or the man who's in it. We'll infiltrate, all right. You'll have to use your pull with Weiner. But not to destroy. We're going to bring Lazarus back to life." "We're -- " "As a gift to our friends the Harmonists. To show our enduring affection for our brothers in the Oneness." Kirby said. Muscles   roiled in his fleshless face, and Vorst could see him making adrenal adjustments, trying to stay calm in the face of this assault on his sense of logic. "This is the prophet of the heretics," Kirby said quietly. "I know that you've got your reasons for encouraging their growth in certain places, Noel. But to give them back their prophet -- it doesn't make sense." Vorst tapped a stud in his desk. A compartment opened and he drew forth the Book of Lazarus, the heretic scripture. Kirby seemed a little startled to find it here, in the stronghold of the movement. "You've read this, haven't you?" Vorst asked. "Of course." "It's enough to make you weep. How my shameless underlings hunted down this great and good man David Lazarus and did away with him. One of the most blasphemous acts since the Crucifixion, eh? The blot on our record. We're the villains in the Lazarus story. Now here's Lazarus, pickled on Mars for the last seventy years. Not physically annihilated after all, despite what this book says. Fine. Splendid! We throw all the resources of Santa Fe into the task of restoring him to life. The grand ecumenical gesture. Surely you know that it's my hope to re-unite the sundered branches of our movement." ly. "You've been saying that for sixty or seventy years, Noel. Ever since the Harmonists split away. But do you mean it?" "I'm sincere in all things," said Vorst lightly. "Of course I'd take them back. On my terms, naturally -- but they'd be welcome. We all serve the same ends in different ways. Did you ever know Lazarus?" "Not really. I wasn't very important in the Brotherhood when he died." "I forget that," Vorst said. "It's hard for me to keep everyone positioned in his temporal matrix. I keep sliding forward and backward. But certainly: you were coming to the top as Lazarus was moving away. I respected that man, Kirby. I grieved when he died, wrongheaded as he was. I intend to redeem the Brotherhood from its stain by bringing Lazarus back to life. He's appropriately named, wouldn't you say?" Tirby picked up a bright metallic sphere from the desk, a paperweight of some sort, and fingered it. Vorst waited. He kept the sphere there so that his visitors could handle it and discharge their tensions into it; he knew that for many who came before him an interview with Vorst was like a trip to the top of Mount Sinai to hear the Law. And only very highest command had access to the Founder, too. Vorst found it charming. He watched Reynolds Kirby struggling with himself. At length Kirby -- the only man on the whole planet who could use Vorst's first name to him -- said thickly, "Dammit, Noel, what kind of a game are you playing?" "Game?" "You sit there with that grin on your lips, telling me you're going to revive Lazarus, and I can see you juggling world-lines know what it's all about. What's your motive? Isn't this man better off dead?" "No. Dead he's a symbol. Alive he can be manipulated. That's all I'll say." Vorst's blazing eyes found Kirby's troubled ones and held them. "Do you think I'm senile at last, perhaps? That I've held the plan in my mind so long that it's rotted in there? I know what I'm doing! I need Lazarus alive, or -- or I wouldn't have begun this. Get in touch with Nat Weiner. Gain possession of the vault, I don't care how. We'll do our work on Lazarus here at Santa Fe." "All right, Noel. Whatever you say." "Trust me." "What else can I do?" K irby wheeled himself out of the room. Vorst, relaxing, fed hormones to his blood stream and closed his eyes. The world wavered. For an instant he found himself drifting, and it was #I all over again, and he was building cobalt-# reactors in a sordid basement and renting little rooms as chapels for his cult. He recoiled, and was whirled forward, dizzyingly, toward the border of now and a little beyond it. Vorst was a lowgrade esper, his skills humble indeed, but occasionally his mind did strange things. He looked toward the brink of tomorrow and desperately anchored himself. With a decisive jab of his fingers Vorst opened his deskcommunicator and spoke briefly to an interne in the burnout ward, without identifying himself. Yes, the Founder was told, there was an esper on the verge of burnout. No, she wasn't likely to survive. "Get her ready," Vorst said. "The Founder's going to visit her." Vorst's assistants clustered round, readying him for his journey. The old man refused to accept immobility, and insisted on leading the most active kind of existence possible. A drop-shaft took him to ground level, and then, sheltered by the cavalcade of flunkies that accompanied him everywhere, the Founder crossed the main plaza of the compound and entered the burnout ward. Half a dozen sick espers, segregated by thick walls and shielded by protective members of their own kind, lay at the verge of death. There were always those for whom the powers proved overwhelming, those who eventually seized more voltage than they could handle, and were destroyed. From the very beginning Vorst had concentrated on saving them, for he hated waste of any sort, and these were the espers he needed most badly. The salvage record was good, nowadays. But not good enough. Vorst knew why the burnouts happened. The ones who went were the floaters, insecurely anchored in their own time. They drifted back, forth, seesawing from past to present, unable to control their movements, building up a charge of temporal force that ultimately blasted their minds. It was a dizziness of the 'time-sense, a deadly vertigo. Vorst himself had felt flashes of it. For ten years, nearly a century ago, he had considered himself insane, until he understood. He had seen the edges of time, a vision of futurity that had shattered him and remade him. And that, he knew, had been only a hint of what the real espers experienced. T he burnout case was young and female and Oriental: a fatal combination, it seemed. A good eighty per cent of the burnouts were of Mongoloid stock, generally adolescent girls. Those who had the trait didn't last far into adulthood. This one must have been about sixteen, though it was hard to tell; she could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty-five. She lay twisting on the bed, her body almost bare, clawing at the bedclothes in her agony. Sweat gleamed on her yellow-brown skin. She arched her back, grimaced, fell back. Her breasts revealed by the disarray of her robe, were like a child's. Blue-clad Vorsters, awed by the presence of the Founder, flanked the bed. Vorst said, "She'll be gone in an hour, won't she?" Someone nodded. Vorst moved himself closer to the bed. He seized the girl's arm in his wizened fingers. Another esper stepped in, placed one hand on Vorst, the other on the girl, providing the link that Vorst required. Suddenly he was in contact with the dying girl. Her brain was on fire. She jolted backward and forward in time, and Vorst jolted with her, drawn along as a hitchhiker. Light flared in his mind, as though lightning danced about him. Yesterday and tomorrow became one. His thin body quivered like a buffeted reed. Images danced like demons, shadowy figures out of the past, dark avatars of tomorrow. Tell me, tell me, tell me, Vorst implored! Show me the path! He stood at the threshold of knowledge. For seventy years he had moved step by step this way, using the contorted and tortured bodies of these burnouts as his bridges to tomorrow, pulling himself forward by his own bootstraps along the worldline of his great plan. Let me see, Vorst begged! The figure of David Lazarus bestrode the pattern of tomorrow, as Vorst knew it would. Lazarus stood like a colossus, come forth to an unexpected resurrection, holding his arms out to the greenrobed brethren of his heresy. Vorst shivered. The image wavered and was gone. The frail hand of the Founder relaxed. "She's dead," Vorst said. "Take me away." IV O ne old man had given the word, and another obeyed, and a third was approached for a favor. Nat Weiner of the Martian Presidium was always willing to oblige his old friend Reynolds Kirby. They had known one another for more years than they cared to admit, since the time that a bumptious young Weiner, coming to Earth to swing a trade treaty, had made life hectic for the slightly older Kirby whom the U.N. had appointed as his guide and guardian. Weiner, like nearly all Martians was neither Vorster nor Harmonist. Martians had little use for cults, and steered a neutral and profitable course. On Earth, by now, the Vorsters amounted to a planetary government, since their influence was felt everywhere. It was simple good sense for Mars to retain open lines to the Vorster high command, since Mars had business to do with Earth. Venus, the planet of adapted men, was a different case. No one could be too sure what went on there, except that the Harmonist heresy had established itself pretty securely in the last thirty or forty years, and might one day speak for Venus as the Vorsters spoke for Earth. Weiner had served a tour of duty as Martian Ambassador to Venus, and he thought he understood the blueskins fairly well. He didn't like them very much. But he was past feeling any strong emotion. He had left that behind with his hundredth birthday. At staggering cost, Reynolds Kirby in Santa Fe spoke face-toface with Weiner, and begged a favor of him. It was twelve years since they had last met -- not since Weiner's last visit to the rejuvenation centers at Santa Fe. It wasn't customary for unbelievers to be granted the use of the rejuvenation facilities there, but Kirby had arranged for Weiner and a select few of his Martian friends to come down for periodic treatments, as a favor. ' ' clearly that Kirby was silently accepting promissory notes for those favors, and that the notes would be taken down for repayment one of these days. That was all right; the important thing was to survive. Weiner become a Vorster, if he had to, in order to have access to Santa Fe. But of course that would have hurt him politically on Mars, where both Vorsters and Harmonists were generally looked upon as subversives. This way he had the benefits, without the risks; and he owed it to his old friend Kirby. Weiner would go quite a distance to repay Kirby for that service. The Vorster said, "Have you seen the alleged Lazarus vault yet, Nat?" "I was out there two days ago. We've got a tight security guard on it. It was my nephew that found it, you know. I'd like to kill him." "Why?" "All we need is finding the Harmonist muck-a-muck out by Beltran Lakes. Why couldn't you people have buried him on Venus, where his own people are?" "What makes you think we buried him, Nat?" "Aren't you the ones who killed him? Or put him into a freeze, or whatever you did to him?" "It all happened before my time," Kirby said. "Only Vorst knows the real story, and maybe not even him. But surely it's Lazarus's own supporters who tucked him away in that vault, don't you think?" "Not at all," Weiner replied. "Why would they get their own story garbled? He's their prophet. If they put him there, they should have remembered it and preached his resurrection, yes? But they were the most surprised ones of all when he turned up." Weiner frowned. "On the other hand, the message that was recorded with him is full of Harmonist slogans. And there are Harmonist symbols on the vault. I wish I understood. Better still: I wish we'd never found him. But why are you calling, Ron?" "Vorst wants him." "Wants Lazarus?" "That's right. To bring him back to life. We'll take the whole vault to Santa Fe and open it and revive him. Vorst wants to make the announcement tomorrow, all-channel hookup." CC' Ton can't Ron. If anybody I gets him, it ought to be the Harmonists. He's their prophet. How can I hand him to you boys? You're the ones who supposedly killed him in the first place, and now -- " "And now we're going to revive him, which as everyone knows is beyond the capabilities of the Harmonists. They're welcome to try, if they want, but they simply don't have our kind of laboratory facilities. We're ready to revive him. Then we'll turn him over to the Harmonists and he can preach all he wants. Just let us have access to that vault." "You're asking for a lot," Weiner said. "We've given you a lot, Nat." Weiner nodded. The promissory notes had fallen due, he realized. He said, 'The Harmonists will have my head for this." "Your head's pretty tightly attached, Nat. Find a way to give us the vault. Vorst will be pretty rough on us all if you don't." Weiner sighed. "His will be done." But how, the Martian wondered when contact had broken. By force rrtajeure? Hand over the vault and to hell with public opinion? And if Venus got nasty about it? There hadn't been an interplanetary war yet, but perhaps the time was ripe. Certainly the Harmonists wanted -- and had every right to have -- their own founder's body. Just last week that convert Martell, the one who had come to Venus to plant a Vorster cell and ended up in the Harmonist camp, had been here to see the vault, Weiner thought, and had tentatively sketched out a plan for taking possession. Martell and his boss Mondschein would explode when they found out that the relic of Lazarus was being shipped to Santa Fe. It would have to be handled delicately. Weiner's mind whirred and clicked like a computer, presenting and rejecting alternate possibilities, opening and closing one circuit after another. It was not seniority alone that kept the Martian in power. He was agile. He had gained considerably in craftiness since the night when, a drunken young yokel, he ran amok in New York City. T hree hours and a great many thousand dollars' worth of interplanetary calls later, Weiner had his solution worked out satisfactorily. The vault was Martian governmental property, as an artifact Therefore Mars had an important voice in its disposal. However, the Martian government recognized the unique symbolic value of this discovery, and thus proposed to consult with religious authorities of the other worlds. A committee would be formed: three Harmonists, three Vorsters, and three Martians of Weiner's selection. Presumably the Harmonists and Vorsters would look out for their own cult's welfare, and the Martians on the committee would maintain an imperturbable neutrality, assuring an impartial judgment. Of course. The committee would meet to deliberate on the fate of the vault. The Harmonists, naturally, would claim it for themselves. The Vorsters, having made public their offer to employ all their superscience to bring Lazarus back to life, would ask to be given a chance to do so. The Martians would weigh all the possibilities. Then, Weiner thought, would come the vote. One of the Martians would vote with the Harmonists -- for appearance's sake. The other two would come out in favor of letting the Vorsters work on the sleeper, under rigorous supervision to prevent any hanky-panky. The fiveto-four vote would give the vault to Vorst. Mondschein would yelp, of course. But the terms of the agreement would allow a couple of Harmonist representatives to get inside the secret labs at Santa Fe for a little while, and that would soothe them somewhat. There would be a little grumbling; but if Kirby kept his word, Lazarus would be revived and turned over to his partisans. And how could the Harmonists possibly object to that? Weiner smiled. There was no problem so knotty that it couldn't be untied. Given a little thought, that is. He felt pleased with himself. If he had been forty years younger, he might have gone out for a roistering celebration. But not now. V i-' "Suspicious?" Christopher Mondschein asked. "It's a chance to see their setup. I haven't been in Santa Fe since I was a boy. Why shouldn't I go?" "There's no telling what might happen to you there. They'd love to get their hands on you. You're the kingpin of the whole Venusian movement." "And they'll lase me to ashes with three planets watching, eh? Be realistic, Nicholas. When the Pope visits Mecca, they take good care of him. I'm in no danger in Santa Fe." "What about the espers? They'll scan you." "I'll have Neerol with me as a mindshield," Mondschein said. "They won't get a thing. I'll stack him up against any esper they have. Besides, I have nothing to hide from Noel Vorst. You of all people ought to realize that. We took you in, even though you were loaded with Vorster spycommands. It was in our interest to tell Vorst how far we had gone." Martell took a different approach. "By going to Santa Fe you're putting the blessing of our order on this alleged Lazarus." "Now you sound like Brother Emory! Are you telling me it's a phony?" "I'm telling you that we ought to treat it as one. It contradicts our own legend of Lazarus. It may be a Vorster plant calculated to throw us into confusion. What do we do when they hand us a walking, talking Lazarus and let us try to reshape our entire order around him?" "It's a touchy matter, Nicholas. We've built our faith on the existence of a holy martyr. Now, if he's suddenly unmartyred -- " "Exactly. It'll crush us." "I doubt that," Mondschein said. The old Harmonist touched his gills lightly, nervously. "You aren't looking far enough ahead, Nicholas. The Vorsters have outmaneuvered us so far, I admit They've gained possession of this Lazarus and they're about to give him back to us. Very embarrassing, but what can we do? However, the next moves are ours. If he dies, we simply revise our writings a bit. If he lives and tries to meddle, we reveal that he's some sort of simulacrum cooked up by the Vorsters to do mischief, and destroy him. Score a point for us -- our original story stands and we reveal the Vorsters as sinister schemers." "And if he's really Lazarus?" Martell asked. Mondschein glowered. "Then we have a prophet on our hands, Brother Nicholas. It's a risk we take. I'm going to Santa Fe." n Earth, the Noel Vorst Center throbbed with morethan-usual activity, as preparations continued for the arrival of the cargo from Mars. An entire block of the laboratory grounds had been set aside for the resuscitation of Lazarus. For the first time since the founding of the Center seventy years before, video cameras would be allowed to show the worlds a little of its inner workings. The place would be full of strangers -- even a delegation of Harmonists. To old-line Vorsters like Reynolds Kirby, that was almost unthinkable. Furtiveness had become a matter of course for him. The command, though, had come from Vorst himself, and no one could quarrel with the Founder. "I believe that it's time to lift the lid a little," Vorst had said. Kirby was doing some lid-lifting of his own as the great day drew near. He was troubled by certain blanks in his own memory, and by virtue of his rank as second in command he went searching through the Vorster archives to fill them in. The trouble was, Kirby could not remember much about David Lazarus' pre-martyrdom career, and he felt that it was important to know something more than the official story. Who was Lazarus, anyway? How had he entered the Vorster picture -- and how had he left it? Kirby himself had enrolled in #, kneeling before the Blue Fire of a cobalt reactor in New York. As a new convert, he had not been concerned with the politics of the hierarchy, but simply with the values the cult had to offer: stability, the hope of long life, the dream of reaching the stars by harnessing the abilities see mankind explore the other solar systems, but he did not make that accomplishment the central yearning of his life. Nor did the chance of immortality -- ster converts -- seem all that delicious to him. What drew him to the movement, at the age of forty, was merely the discipline that it offered. His pleasant life lacked structure, and the world about him was such chaos that he fled from it into one synthetic paradise after another. Along came Vorst offering a sleek new belief that snared Kirby totally. For the first few months he was content to be a worshipper. Soon he was an acolyte. And then, his natural organizational abilities demonstrating themselves, he found himself moving rapidly upward in the movement from post to post until by the time he was eighty he was Vorst's right hand, and very much concerned with his own personal survival. According to the official story, the martyrdom of David Lazarus had taken place in #. Kirby had been a Vorster for thirteen years then and was a District Supervisor in charge of thousands of Brothers. So far as he could remember, he had never even heard of Lazarus as of #. A few years later, the Harmonists, the heretical movement, had begun gaining strength, decking themselves in green robes and scoffing at the craftily secular power-orientation of the Vorsters. They claimed to be followers of the martyred Lazarus, but even then, Kirby thought, they hadn't talked much about Lazarus. Only afterward, as Harmonist power mounted and they stole Venus from Vorst, did they push the Lazarus mythos particularly hard. The whole thing had an annoyingly ex-postfacto ring to it. Why is it, Kirby wondered, that I who was a contemporary of Lazarus should never have heard his name? He walked toward the archives building. It was a milk-white geodesic dome, sheeted with some toothy fabric that gave it a sharkskin surface texture. Kirby passed through a tiled tunnel, identified himself to the robot guardians, moved toward and past a sphincter-door, and found himself in the olive-green room where the records were kept. He activated a query-stud and demanded knowledge. Drums whirled in the depths of the earth. Memory films came round, offered themselves to the kiss of the scanner, and sent images floating upward to the waiting Kirby. Glowing yellow print appeared on the readerscreen. A potted biography, scanty and inadequate: ondary Chicago, A.B. Harvard, '#, Ph.D. (Anthropology) Harvard '#. (###) # ft # ins. # pounds, dark eyes and hair, no dis. scars. bridge chapel ###. Acolyte status conferred ###... There followed a list of the successive stages by which Lazarus had risen through the hierarchy, culminating with the simThat was all. It was a lean, spare record, not a word of elaboration, no appended commendations such as Kirby knew festooned his own record, no documentation of his disagreement with Vorst. Nothing. It was the sort of record, Kirby thought uncomfortably, that anyone could have tapped out in five minutes and inserted in the archives... yesterday. He prodded the memory banks, hoping to fish up some added detail about the arch-heretic. He found nothing. It was not really a valid cause for suspicion. Lazarus had been dead for a long time, and probably the record-keeping had been sketchier in those early days. But it was upsetting, all the same. Kirby made his way out of the building. Acolytes stared at him as though Vorst himself had gone striding by. No doubt some of them felt the temptation to drop to their knees before him. If they only knew, Kirby thought darkly, how ignorant I am after seventy-five years with Vorst. It they only knew. VI T he glass vault of David Lazarus, transported intact at considerable expense from Mars, rested in the center of the operating room, under the watchful eyes of the video cameras mounted in the walls and ceiling. A carefully planted forest of equipment surrounded the vault: centrifuges, surgistats, scanners, enzyme calibrators, laser scalpels, retracters, impacters, thorax rods, cerebral tacks, a heart-and-lung bypass, kidney surrogates, mortmains, biopticons, elsevirs, a Helium II pressure generator and a monstrous, glowering cryostat. The display was impressive, and it was meant to be. Vorster science was on display here, and every awesome-looking superfluity in the place had its part in the orchestration of the effects. Vorst himself was not present That, too, was part of the orchestration. He and Kirby were watching the event from Volt's office. The highest-ranking member of the Brotherhood present was plump, cheerful Capodimonte, a District Supervisor. Beside him stood Christopher Mondschein of the Harmonists. Mondschein and Capodimonte had known each other briefly during Mondschein's short, spectacularly unsuccessful career as a Santa Fe acolyte in #. Now, though, the Harmonist was a terrifying figure, his changed body concealed by a breathing-suit but still nightmarish and grotesque. A native-born Venusian, looking even more bizzare, clung to Mondschein like a skin graft. The visiting Harmonists seemed tense and grim. The television commentator said, "It's already been determined that the atmosphere of the vault is a mixture of inert gases, mainly argon. Lazarus himself is in a nutrient bath. Espers have detected signs of life. The tumblers of the vault lock were opened yesterday in the present of the delegation of Venusian Harmonists. Now the inerts are being piped out, and soon the sensitive instruments of the surgeons will reach the sleeping man and begin the infinitely complex process of restoring the life-impulses. Vorst laughed. K irby said, "Isn't that what'll happen?" "More or less. Except the man's as alive as he'll ever be, right now. All they need to do is open the vault and yank him out." "That's not dramatic." "Probably not," the Founder agreed. Vorst folded his hands across his belly, feeling the artificials throbbing mildly inside. The commentator reeled off acres of descriptive prose. The spidery array of instruments surrounding the vault was in motion now, arms and tendrils waving like the limbs of some being of many bodies. Vorst kept his eyes on the altered face of Christopher Mondschein. He hadn't really believed that Mondschein would return to Santa Fe. An admirable person, the old man thought. He had borne adversity well, considering how he had been bamboozled into his life's career forty years ago -- virtually kidnapped by the Harmonists and turned into a spy for them, and packed off to Venus as a missionary after his spy mission had been more or less successfully completed. "The vault's open," Kirby said. "So I observe. Now watch the mummy of King Tut rise and walk." "You're very light-hearted about this, Noel." "Mmmm," the Founder said. A smile flickered on his thin lips a moment. He made minute adjustments to his hormone flow. On the screen, the vault opening was almost completely obscured by the instruments that had dived into the chamber to embrace the sleeper. Suddenly there was faint motion in the vault. Lazarus stirred! The martyr returned! "Time for my grand entrance," Vorst murmured. A #I was arranged. A glistening tunnel transported him swiftly to the operating room. Kirby did not follow. The Founder's chair rolled serenely into the room just as the figure of David Lazarus groped its way out of sixty years of sleep and rose to a sitting position. A quivering hand pointed. A rusty voice strained for coherence. "V-V-Vorst!" Lazarus gasped. The Founder smiled benevolently, lifted his fleshless arm in greeting and blessing. Delicately, an unseen hand slipped a control rod and the Blue Fire flickered along the walls of the room to provide the proper theatrical touch. Christopher Mondschein, his altered face impassive behind his breathing-mask, clenched his fists angrily as the glow enveloped him. Vorst said, "And there is light, before and beyond our vision, for which we give thanks. "And there is heat, for which we are humble. "And there is power, for which we count ourselves blessed... "Welcome to life, David Lazarus. In the strength of the spectrum, the quantum, and the holy angstrom, peace, and forgive those who did evil to you!" Lazarus stood. His hands found and grasped the rim of his vault. Inconceivable emotions distorted his face. He muttered, "I -- I've slept." "Sixty years, David. And those who rebuked me and followed you have grown strong. See? See the green robes? Venus is yours. You head a mighty army. Go to them, David. Give them counsel. I restore you to them. You are my gift to your followers. And he that was dead came forth... loose him, ' and let him go." Lazarus did not reply. Mondschein stood agape, leaning heavily on the Venusian at his side. Kirby, watching the screen, felt a tingle of awe that washed away his skepticism for the moment. Even the chatter of the television commentator was stilled by the miracle. The glow of the Blue Fire engulfed all, rising higher and higher, like the flames of the Twilight reaching toward Valhalla. And in the midst of it all stood Noel Vorst, the Founder, the First Immortal, serene and radiant, his ancient body erect, his eyes gleaming, his hands outstretched to the man who had been dead. All that was missing was the chorus of ten thousand, singing the Hymn of the Wavelengths while a cosmic organ throbbed a paean of joy. A nd Lazarus lived, and walked among his people again, holding converse with them. And Lazarus was greatly surprised. He had slept -- for a moment, for the twinkling of an eye. Now sinister blue figures surrounded him, Venusians, hooded like demons against the poisonous air of Earth, and hailed him as their prophet. All about rose Vorst's metropolis, dazzling buildings that testified to the present might of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance. The chubby Venusian -- Mondschein, was it? -- pressed a book into Lazarus' hands. "The Book of Lazarus," he said. "The account of your life and work. "And death?" "Yes, your death." "You'll need a new edition now," Lazarus said. He smiled, but he was alone in his mirth. He felt strong. How had muscles failed to degenerate in his long sleep? How was it that he could rise and go among men, and make vocal cords obey him, and his body withstand the strain of life? He was alone with his followers. In a few days, they would take him back to Venus with them, where he would have to live in a self-contained environment. Vorst had offered to transform him into a Venusian; but Lazarus, stunned that such things were possible at all, was not sure that he cared to become a gilled creature. He needed time to ponder all this. The world he had so unexpectedly re-entered was very different from the one he had left. S ixty-odd years. Vorst had taken over the whole planet now, it seemed. That was the direction he had been heading in, back in the Eighties, when Lazarus had begun to disagree with him. Vorst had begun with a religio-scientific movement when Lazarus had joined it. Hocus-pocus with cobalt reactors, a litany of spectrum and electron, plenty of larded-on spiritualism, but at the bottom a bluntly materialistic creed whose chief come-on was the promise of long (or eternal) life. Lazarus had gone for that. But soon, feeling his strength, Vorst had begun to slide men into parliaments, take over banks, utilities, hospitals, insurance companies. Lazarus had opposed all that Vorst had been accessible, then, and Lazarus remembered arguing with him against this deviation into finance and power politics. And Vorst had said, The plan calls for it." "It's a perversion of our religious motives." "It'll get us where we want to   go. Lazarus had disagreed. Quietly, gathering a few supporters, he had established a rival group, while still nominally retaining his loyalty to Vorst. His apprenticeship with Vorst made him an expert on founding a faith. He proclaimed the reign of eternal harmony, gave his people green robes, symbols, reformist fervor, prayers, a developing liturgy. He could not say that his movement had become particularly powerful beside the Vorst machine, but at least it was a leading heresy, attracting hundreds of new followers each month. Lazarus had been looking toward a missionary movement, knowing that his ideas had a better chance of taking root on Venus and perhaps Mars than Vorst's. And on a day in # men in blue robes came to him and took him away, blanking out his guard of espers and stealing him as easily as though he had been a lump of lead. After that he knew no more, until his awakening in Santa Fe. They told him that the year was #, and that Venus was in the hands of his people. Mondschein said, "Will you let yourself be changed?" "I'm not sure yet. I'm considering it." "It'll be difficult for you to function on Venus unless you let them adapt you." Perhaps I could stay on Earth." Lazarus suggested. "Impossible. You've got no power base here. Vorst's generosity will stretch only so far. He won't let you remain here after the excitement of your return dies down." ; 'You're right." Lazarus sighed. "I'll let myself be changed, then. I #I come to Venus and see what you've accomplished." "You'll be pleasantly surprised," Mondschein promised. T azarus had already been sufficiently surprised for one incarnation. They left him, and he studied the scriptures of his faith, fascinated by the martyr's role they had written for him. A book of Harmonist history told Lazarus his own value: where the Brotherhood's religious emotions crystallized around the remote, forbidding figure of Vorst, the Harmonists could safely revere their gentle martyr. How awkward it must be for them that I'm back, Lazarus thought! Vorst did not come to him while he rested in the Brotherhood's hospital. A man named Kirby came, though, frosty-faced with age, and said he was the Hemispheric Coordinator and Vorst's closest collaborator. "I joined the Brotherhood before your disappearance," Kirby said. "Did you ever hear of me?" "I don't believe so." "I was only an underling," Kirby said. "I suppose you wouldn't have had reason to hear of me. But I hoped your memory would be clear, if we ever had met. I've got all these intervening years to cope with, but you can look back across a clean slate." "My memory's fine," Lazarus said evenly. "I've got no recollection of you." "Nor I of you. That's the odd thing. If you were so important to the movement, why hadn't I heard of you, Lazarus?" The resuscitated man shrugged. "I can't tell you that. I was there. I worked beside Vorst. I had disputes with him. That much is beyond question. Eventually I split with him. I founded the Harmonists. Then I -- disappeared. And here I am. Do you have trouble believing in me?" 'Terhaps I've been tampered with," Kirby said. "I wish I remembered you." L azarus lay back. He stared at the green, rubbery walls. The instruments monitoring his life-processes whirred and clicked. There was an acrid odor in the air: asepsis at work. Kirby looked unreal. Lazarus wondered what sort of maze of pumps and trestles held him together beneath his thick, warm blue robe. Kirby said, "You understand that you can't remain on Earth, don't you?" "Of course." "Life will be uncomfortable for you on Venus unless you're changed. We'll do it for you. Your own men can supervise the operation. I've talked to Mondschein about it. Are you interested?" "Yes," Lazarus said. "Change me." They came the next day to turn him into a Venusian. He resented the public nature of the operation, but it was idle to pretend that his life was his own any more, anyway. It would take several weeks, they said, to effect the transformation. Once it had taken months to do it. They would equip him with gills, fit him out to breathe the poisonous muck that was the atmosphere of Venus, and turn him loose. Lazarus submitted. They carved him, and put him back together again, and readied him for shipment. Vorst came to him, featheryvoiced and shrunken, but still a commanding figure, and said, "You must realize I had no part in your kidnapping. It was totally unauthorized -- the work of zealots." "Of course." "I appreciate diversity of opinion. My way is not necessarily the only right way. I've felt the lack of a dialogue with Venus for many years. Once you're installed communicate with me from time to time." Lazarus said, "I won't close my mind against you, Vorst. You've given me life. I'll listen to what you have to say. There's no reason why we can't cooperate, so long as we respect each other's sphere of interests." "Exactly! Our goal is the same, after all. We can join forces." "Warily," Lazarus said. "Warily, yes. But wholeheartedly." Vorst smiled at him and departed. r T"he surgeons completed their work. Lazarus, now alien to Earth, journeyed to Venus with Mondschein and the rest of the Harmonist retinue. It was in the nature of a triumphant homecoming, if one can be said to come home to a place where one has never been before. Green-robed brethren with bluish-purple skins greeted him. Lazarus saw the Harmonist shrines, the holy ikons of his order. They had carried the spiritualistic element further than he had ever visualized, practically deifying him; but Lazarus did not intend to correct that. He knew how precarious his position was. There were men of entrenched power in his organization who secretly might not welcome a prophet's return, and who might give him a second martyrdom if he challenged their vested interests. Lazarus moved warily. "We have made great progress with the espers," Mondschein told him. "We're considerably ahead of Vorst's work in that line, so far as we know." "Do you have telekinesis yet?" "For twenty years. We're building the power steadily. Another generation -- " "I'd like a demonstration." "We have one planned," Mondschein said. They showed him what they could do. To reach into a block of wood and set its molecules dancing in flame -- to move a boulder through the sky -- to whisk themselves from place to place -- yes, it was impressive. It defied comprehension. It certainly must be beyond the abilities of the Brotherhood on Earth.  J'he Venusian espers cavorted for Lazarus, hour after hour. Mondschein, sedate and complacent, gleamed with satisfaction, spoke of thresholds, levitation, telekinetic impetus, fulcrums of unity, and other matters that left Lazarus baffled but encouraged. He who had returned pointed to the gray bands of clouds that hid the heavens. "How soon?" Lazarus asked. "We're not ready for interstellar teleport yet," Mondschein replied. "Not even interplanetary, really, though one shouldn't be any harder than the other. We're working on it. Give us time. We'll succeed." "Can we do it without Vorst's help?" Lazarus asked. Mondschein's complacence was punctured. "What kind of help can he give us? I've told you, we're a generation ahead of his espers." "And will espers be enough? Perhaps he can supply what we're missing. A joint venture -- Harmonists and Vorsters collaborating -- don't you think the possibilities are worth exploring, brother Christopher?" Mondschein smiled blandly. "Why, yes, yes, of course. Certainly they're worth exploring. It's an approach we hadn't considered, I admit, but you give us a fresh insight into our problems. I'd like to discuss the matter with you further, after you've had a chance to settle down here." ,... , Lazarus accepted Mondschein s flow of words graciously. He had not, though, been away so long that he had forgotten how to read the meanings behind the meanings. He knew when he was being humored. O n Santa Fe, with the unaccustomed invasion of Harmonists at its end. things returned to normal. Lazarus was come forth and loose upon the worlds, and the television men had retreated, and work went on. The tests, the experiments, the probing of the mysteries of life and mind -- the ceaseless tasks of the Vorster inner movement. Kirby said, "Was there ever really a David Lazarus, Noel?" Vorst glowered up at him out of a thermoplastic cocoon. Hardly had the surgeons finished with Lazarus than they had gone to work on the Founder, who was suffering from an aneurism in a twice-reconstituted blood vessel. Sensors had nailed the spot, subcutaneous scoops had exposed it, microtapes had been slammed into place, a network of thread and looping polymers replacing the dangerous bubble. Vorst was no stranger to such surgery. He said, "You saw Lazarus with your own eyes, Kirby." "I saw something come out of that vault and stand up and talk rationally. I had conversations with it. I watched it get turned into a Venusian. That doesn't mean it was real. You could build a Lazarus, couldn't you, Noel?" "If I wanted to. But why would I want to?" "That's obvious. To get control of the Harmonists." "If I had designs against the Harmonists," Vorst explained patiently, "I would have blotted them out fifty years ago, before they took Venus. They're all right. That young man, Mondschein -- he's developed nicely." "He isn't young, Noel. He's at least eighty." "A child." "Will you tell me whether Lazarus is genuine?" Vorst's eyes fluttered in irritation. "He's genuine, Kirby. Satisfied?" "Who put him in that vault?" "His own followers, I suppose." Ill "Who then forgot all about it?" "Well, perhaps my men did it. Without authorization. Without telling me. It happened a long time ago." Vorst's hands moved in quick, agitated gestures. "How can I remember everything? He was found. We brought him back to life. I gave him to them. You're annoying me, Kirby." TZ"irby realized that he was treading a field salted with mines. He had pushed Vorst as far as Vorst could be pushed, and anything further would be disastrous. Kirby had seen other men presume too deeply on their closeness to Vorst, and he had seen that closeness imperceptibly withdrawn. "I'm sorry," Kirby said. Vorst's displeasure vanished. "You overrate my deviousness, Kirby. Stop worrying about Lazarus' past. Simply consider the future. I've given him to the Harmonists. He'll be valuable to them, whether they think so now or not. They're p indebted to me. I've planted a good, heavy obligation on them. Don't you think that's useful? They owe me something now. When the right time comes, I'll cash that in." Kirby remained mute. He sensed that somehow Vorst had altered the balance of power between the two cults; that the Harmonists, who had been on a rising curve ever since gaining possession of Venus and its rich lode of espers, had been brought to heel. But he did not know how it had been accomplished. And he did not care to try again to learn. Vorst was using his communicator. He looked up at Kirby. "They've got another burnout," he said. "I want to be there, Come with me, yes?" "Of course," Kirby said. He accompanied the Founder through the maze of tubes. They emerged in the burnout ward. An esper lay dying, a boy this time, perhaps Hawaiian, his body jerking as though he were skewered on cords. Vorst said. "A pity you've got no esping, Kirby. You'd see a glimpse of tomorrow." "I'm too old to regret it now," Kirby said. Vorst rolled forward and gestured to a waiting esper. The link was made. Kirby watched. What was Vorst experiencing, now? The Founder's lips were moving, almost writhing in a kind of sneer, pulling back from the gums with each twitch of the esper's body. The boy was shuttling along the time-track, so they said. To Kirby that meant nothing. And Vorst, somehow, was shuttling with him, seeing a clouded view of the world on the other side of the wall of time. Now... now... back... forth... F or a moment, it seemed to Kirby that he, too, had joined the linkup and was riding the time-track as the esper's other passenger. Was that the chaos of yesterday? And the golden glow # f tomorrow? Now -- now -- damn you, you old schemer, what have you done to me? -- Lazarus, rising above all else, Lazarus who wasn't even real, only some android stew cooked up in an underground laboratory at Vorst s command, a useful puppet, Kirby thought, Lazarus had grasped tomorrow and was stealing it -- The contact broke. The esper was dead. "We've wasted another one," Vorst muttered. The Founder looked at Kirby. "Are you sick?" he asked. "No. Tired." "Get some rest. Six history spools and climb into a relaxer tank. We can ease up now. Lazarus is off our hands." Kirby nodded. Someone drew a sheet over the dead esper's body. In an hour the boy's neurons would be in refrigeration some  where in an adjoining building. Slowly, walking as if eight centuries and not just one weighed upon him, Kirby followed Vorst from the room. Night had fallen, and the stars over New Mexico had their peculiar hard brightness, and Venus, low against the mountainous horizon, was the brightest of all. They had their Lazarus, up there. They had lost a martyr, and had gained a prophet. And, Kirby was beginning to realize, the whole tribe of heretics had been swept neatly into Vorst s pocket. The old man was damnable! Kirby huddled down into his robe and kept pace, with an effort, as Vorst wheeled himself toward his office. His head ached from that brief, unfathomable contact with the esper. But in ten minutes it was slowly beginning to get better. He thought of going to a chapel to pray. But what was the use? Why kneel before the Blue Fire? He need only go to Vorst for a blessing -- Vorst, his mentor for eight decades. Vorst, who could make him feel still like a child. Vorst, who had brought Lazarus forth from the dead.   With the world on the brink of destruction, clearly there was only one place to turn for helpl "n the morning of the night before, a flight of jets went screaming across the sky like insane banshees in search of human blood. I woke up feeling as though I had been put through a meat grinder with dull teeth. I raised myself gingerly on one elbow but fell back immediately, fighting off the waves of pain and nausea of my hangover. I wanted to go back to sleep but knew that if I did I'd probably dream again, and I couldn't face the kind of dreams I'd been having lately. Besides, time was running out and I had to keep searching the streets of Los Angeles until I found them. I had to find them. I had to find them before it happened. And when the American ultimatum on Berlin ran out, I had good reason to think the balloon was going to go up. Their existence on Earth was only a rumor, a vague, unreliable rumor that a ship from outer space had landed, its passengers come to save Earth from impending atomic war. But the rumor had enough force to have caused a group of us to search for the extraterrestrials for the last month. Our searching had all been in vain, however, until that morning when I lay in bed and stared at tlie ceiling. Then it suddenly came to me where I would find them. I had been looking in the wrong places. I had gone to observatories and scientific gatherings, expecting them to announce themselves there or at least be present. But now I realized these weren't the sort of places to look in Los Angeles. What, I asked myself, was the most notable feature of this sprawling city by the sea? Its varied cults and oddball religions, of course! Where else would a stranger to this world and this city go to make themselves known? It would be the most natural thing of all to go to the churches. So I spent the afternoon and early evening in futile quest. I made my way from the Church of the Great White Brotherhood to the Temple of the Green Dolphin and on to the Tabernacle of Christian Capitalism, but as darkness closed in I was still looking. And then suddenly I thought I had found it. The sign on the U.F.O., and in smaller printing underneath, Hear the Space People Speak Tonight. I started to enter but found my way blocked by a small man in a red toga and sandals who held a clicking geiger counter out in front of him. "The rays... the rays," he muttered, running the instrument up and down my clothes. "The rays are getting worse!" "What rays?" I asked, visions of strontium # swimming through my head. "The rays! The zero rays from their ships! They're everywhere! You can't see the ships but the rays are everywhere... everywhere!" "Are they dangerous?" I asked. "Dangerous? Dangerous?" He looked at me wildly. "What do you mean dangerous?" His way of repeating everything was disconcerting. "I mean are the rays harmful?" I said. "Harmful? Harmful?" He giggled and hurried away. I walked on into the building, looking around for any signs of zero rays, but finding nothing except a little dust and a thin young man wearing hornrimmed glasses was speaking to a group of about thirty people. I found a seat and listened to him talk. "Captain Linda-Ray, a beautiful young woman from the planet Solacon, which is on the other side of the sun from Earth and can't be seen from here, took me on a four-hour trip to her lovely world. The ship in which we traveled operated on solar emanations from the bodies of the Solaconians and went at a speed in excess of ten thousand miles an hour." Very odd, I thought, and scratched my chin in puzzlement. "Captain Linda-Ray introduced me to the Supreme Ruler of Solacon, a gorgeous six-foot blonde named Dora-Ray, who told me that her people have been waiting ten T thousand years to contact Earth to warn us about fluoridated water and atomic radiation." Somehow this didn't sound like the kind of extraterrestrials I had in mind. This group's chemistry was bad and their astronomy worse. "Excuse me, please," said a small woman with silvery hair, raising a white-gloved hand. "Please," the young man said in an annoyed tone, "you may ask questions when I've finished." Then he went on with his story. "I asked Dora-Ray why they hadn't gotten in touch with Earth before. 'Because,' she said, looking at me pointedly, 'we have been waiting for a man who could understand and interpret our knowledge of the people on Earth.' " "I stared at her, not quite willing to believe what she seemed to be saying. 'You mean...? " 'I mean you are that man,' Dora-Ray told me, placing her hands on my shoulders. 'You, Simon Hudson, are that man!' "I hope I'll prove worthy of your great trust,' I said humbly, although in all modesty I knew she was right. There was no one else on this planet who was capable of understanding the magnificent sweep of their knowledge." Oh boy, I thought, we're in bad shape if he's Earth's greatest brain! T T e went on in the same reasonable voice, saying even more unreasonable things. " 'You must begin work at once,' she said. You have only ten hours in which to learn everything we know so that you may teach it to your people. In ten hours, Solacon will again be on the other side of the sun where it cannot be reached for another fifty years.' " T#ut how can even I learn so much in so short a time?' I asked. " 'We will help you with our hypno-robot subliminal teacher,' she said with a smile. "Dora-Ray and her two head scientists, Lena-Ray and RitaRay, accompanied me through their crystal-glass city to the huge laboratory where I saw machines and instruments undreamed of by our scientists, by means of which they had made discoveries which disprove everything our scientists claim to know. In this great laboratory, I was placed upon a foam-cushioned hypno-couch that relaxed my body and brain and prepared it to receive the vast stores of their knowledge. "Dora-Ray stood beside me and looked deep ito my eyes. "When you awaken, you will be once again on your home planet,' she said softly as sleep began to steal over me. 'We hope much from you, O Great Man of Earth! Do not fail us! Do not fail me!' " 'Fear not, I will not fail you,' I promised as my eyes closed. 'But will I ever see you again?' " 'Perhaps... if you prove worthy of us,' she said and the room faded away. "In what seemed only seconds, I was opening my eyes and finding myself in the middle of Sunset Boulevard with frightened people all around me. " 'A flying saucer! We saw a flying saucer!' a woman cried, and I could only smile. " 'I'm sure you did," I said, and ran to catch a bus to take me home, a changed and far, far wiser man than I had been before." The thin young man smiled and reached into a briefcase and produced a book. "And what of that wisdom the Solacons entrusted to me to impart to the people of Earth? How can you gain your share of this supreme wisdom? You will find it all here in my book, Wisdom From A Flying Saucer, which is on sale in the lobby for only # a copy. I urge you, friends, not to pass up this great opportunity to read and absorb this knowledge." Some knowledge, I thought, as Simon Hudson left the platform amid scattered applause. "Excuse me," the woman in the white gloves said. "I am quite well acquainted with the solar system and there is no such planet as Solacon. And may I also point out that due to the varying rotation of the planets, none of them is always on the other side of the sun." "Sit down!" someone shouted. "It's not your turn yet." "Yes, who do you think you are?" Simon Hudson demanded. "What right have you to mess up my story?" "Yeah, what do you know about space anyhow?" another voice asked. "Well, you see," the woman said, and I noted that she was very young despite her silvery hair, "it so happens that I recently landed from a spaceship and -- " "So what?" demanded a baldheaded man in the front row. "A lot of us have recently landed from spaceships. I'm from Saturn myself. You'll just have to wait your turn." "But I really am from -- " "Repent! Repent!" screeched a female voice from behind us. "The Flying Saucers are God's angels sent to watch over us in these Last Days. Repent! Repent! Repent before it is too late!" This was more like it, I thought, turning to look at the woman. At least she knows these are the Last Days even if she isn't aware this is The Night Before. Qhe was dressed in a long white  robe and held a white Bible lifted over her head. "Revelations #:# tells us of the mighty angel with a rainbow at his head sent to save mankind. The Flying Saucers are those mighty angels! They are watching us! Their eyes are upon us in the market place, in the counting house, in the places where women dance with their naked bodies glistening before pop-eyed men! Their eyes are upon us as we smoke the devil's stick we call cigarettes and when we drink the hell-poison we call whiskey! Their eyes are upon us always! Oh yes, Lord, the eyes of Your angels are upon us even in the sweltering lust of our carnal beds!" Somewhat to my surprise, no one paid the slightest attention to this outburst. The expressions on their faces indicated they thought she was being a trifle unscientific, but personally I thought she had a nice feeling for vituperation. But now that she had subsided, I turned back to the platform and saw there a small, hollow-eyed man who was talking too. "... my program... the program given me by the Grand Coordinator, Polius, of the Andromeda Sector of the Galactic Union is this: First, all money must be called in and replaced by a new exchange system. This will be preceded by a gathering of all industrial and other leaders of the world to form the Cosmic Cooperative and Friendship Union. The Union will then issue work units to everyone which will take the place of money. "If you have read my book, Cosmic Cooperation from U.F.O.'s, you already know that among the Cosmos there is no crime, immodesty, hunger or sex. War has long ago ceased to be a menace, and they do not live in huge, crowded cities as we do, but each in his own beautiful garden in which grow hundreds of beautiful flowers with perfumes so rare and strange that -- " "I beg your pardon," the silvery haired woman said, "but I must point out that you have made several basic mistakes in your description of our society. In truth, we have done away with crime and hunger, but as for sex... well, we certainly haven't done away with that and I don't think we'd care to. As for war, we -- " "Why don't you quit butting in?" the man on the stage asked heatedly. "Wait until it's your AAW,  turn. "I was only trying to correct -- " "Sit down and shut up!" "Wait your turn!" "But, please, I should like to tell the people of Earth that -- " "Please, madam," the moderator said, banging his gavel on the table. "We are all anxious to bring our messages to the people of Earth. You will just have to wait your turn to speak!" A nother man took over the dais immediately. "I am a member of a small group that has been in touch with the Space People and feel that the world can only be saved through the aid of these vastly superior beings. I want to play this tape for you. It is part of a radio conversation I had with the captain of a flying saucer." He placed the spool on the player and a voice began to speak in slightly stilted English. "I am Lelan. I am what you people of Earth think of as the head of government on the planet Nobelia. I speak to you across the parsecs in order to bring you news, both good and bad. The good news is that a new age is about to begin for you through us. We have already contacted the President of the United States, the Pope of the Catholic Church and other world leaders. Unfortunately, they have chosen to ignor us and so we have had to act through this wise man who is playing this tape for you. "In the future, R. Spencer Jason will become your leader and we will deal with you through him. But before this new age can begin, we must save you from the influence of the vicious inhabitants of the planet Zeno. All Earth knowledge will become obsolete as we give you new information, and all good things will be free in the days that follow after we drive the Zenonians from among you. "But first we must warn you that the Zenonians will stop at nothing to prevent our saving Earth. It is they who control all the governments of all your nations. It is they who have brought all evil to your planet! It is they who control the Communist world plot. Adolph Hitler was a Zenonian and so are those who are attempting to fluoridate the water of America. J. Edgar the Zenonians are the worst menace your beloved country has ever faced. Listen to this man, J. Spencer Jason, who is to be your new leader. Look around you for people who appear strange! Look for people who act and dress strangely! Examine the man next to you! Beware! You shall hear from us again!" I turned and looked at the guy next to me.jHe looked at me. He was a rather strange looking duck. He looked just like the type who would plot against J. Edgar Hoover if he thought he could get away with it. I edged away from him just as he started edging away from me. I turned to look at the man on my other side, and he was edging away from me too. It was just as well. He looked like he might be a Zenonian too. A discussion period followed and finally I got a chance to give them my impression of U.F.O.'s. I told them it seemed to me they always showed up after we had set off H-bombs or made space flights. "In fact," I said, "I think Earth is a giant mental institution in which the human race has been incarcerated for its own good, and every time we start rattling the bars, our keepers come hurrying down to take a look." No one cared much for that theory and I was escorted to the door none too politely. I didn't really care because I had already decided none of these space people were the ones I was seeking. r T"he headlines on the comer newsstand were worse than ever. They were so bad that even the average man in the street was beginning to pay attention and look nervous. And there was so much traffic that I wondered if decided to head for the hills. I was scared myself, so scared that I seriously considered making a run for it. It was only what I knew about the casings of those new #-megaton weapons that kept me from it. What was the use? At least here in the city, one would go quickly. Back in the mountains, death would be slower and more painful as fallout from cobalt casings poisoned the atmosphere. No, I wasn't going to run, but it looked as though I wasn't going to find the E.T.'s either. I didn't feel that any of the other searchers had had any better luck than I, and there wasn't much time left. I stopped and had a few drinks at a bar and then just sort of drifted along until I came to another church. A church would be as good a place as any when the bombs came. The one I picked was behind a painted over storefront window which proclaimed it The Church of the Open Word. I went inside and found a seat on a hard wooden bench between a large, brawny man whose chest and shoulders bulged out of a sweaty T-shirt and a pregnant blonde girl whose uncurled and uncombed hair hung down limply over her ears and forehead in a tangled mass. She smelled almost as strongly of bleach as the man did of perspiration. For a moment I wondered why I had come into this place. If I had been sober I wouldn't have. This wasn't the kind of church one might expect to find E.T.'s. I looked around and decided no one looked much holier than I did. Maybe they were all here to await the end of the world like me. They were leaning forward, bodies tense, mouth open, radiating an emotional heat that turned the crowded little room into a humid jungle of emotion. Suddenly the lights at the front of the room went up and the dirty yellow walls with their long strips of peeling paint disappeared. A tall, floridly handsome man stepped into the spotlight. He was dressed in a wellcut, expensive suit, his hair was long and flowing and his face was wreathed in a benigh smile. He faced the crowd with the absolute assurance of a man who knows he has his audience right in the palm of his hand from the very start. "Let us pray!" he said, raising his hands, and every head in the place was lowered. "Let's not just bend our heads... let's really pray!" I bent my head with all the others, and while we sat there, the man on the podium began to sing, softly at first and then rising to a bellow. "Keep on Praying 'Til You Pray Right Through!" "Come on now, let's pray the way we always do here at the Church of the Open Word," he exhorted us. "Let's have group prayer! Let's have our out loud praying that always prays right through." There was a sibilant whisper from the congregation. "Don't just mumble! How do you expect the Lord to hear you if you don't pray loud enough for Him to hear you way up in Heaven?" Everyone prayed a little louder. "Our Father Who art in heaven... our Father Who art in Heaven..." For some reason I couldn't remember any more. I wanted to pray but the words weren't there. Maybe I had spent too much time with slide rules and engineering formula. "Oh God... don't let the war start! Don't let us destroy the world! Don't let the world come to an end! Don't..." minister shouted. For some reason I had expected the people around me to be praying the same thing I was. I thought they were here to pray for peace, but as their individual words penetrated my consciousness, I knew they weren't. Words were bubbling out of the blonde next to me. "Hallowed be Thy name. Don't let him find out! Oh God, don't let Jim find out! Don't ever let him find out about Kenny and me that night in the garage! Don't let that nosey old woman next door tell him about seeing us! He'll kill me, Lord, if he finds out! And I won't ever do it again! I promise! It wasn't like the other times, Lord... it wasn't like with Fred and Andy. This time it just sort of happened. Lord. If you just don't let Jim find out, I'll never do it again with no other man. Never, never, never, Lord!" "... Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven..." I muttered, remembering a little more. "Don't let them push the buttons! Hold back their hands! Don't let them kill us all! Please, God!" "Give us this day, our daily bread..." squeaked a tiny, bespectacled man in the next row. "Don't let me lose my job, God! Please, don't let me lose it! I'm too old to get another one, and what with Grace and the kids..." "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," rumbled the big man on my other side. "If I could only get a little rest at night... then I wouldn't always be so tired and I could take her places like she wants. But I can't sleep, Lord, because I keep remembering... I keep remembering those kids in the back seat of that car I forced off the road one night... those screams when the fire... Oh God, the fire! God forgive me! Forgive me!" "For Thine is the Kingdom -- " It was all coming back now, just as I had known it as a boy when my mother used to tuck me into bed and tell me about the sweet Christ and our Blessed Mother Mary. Why had she ever left me? Why had she gone off and left Dad and me alone in that split-level nightmare of a house? "Don't let the war start! Please, don't let it!" "... and the Power and Glory... don't let me die, Lord ! Don't let me die!" It was the flashily dressed brunette in the row ahead. "Please don't let the cancer kill me! It hurts so much, but I can stand it if you just don't let it kill me! Keep me alive... let me live for a little while longer!" tt'fT#'e're all going to die to' ' morrow, I thought wildly, and she's praying to live a little longer. What's the matter with these people? Don't they know? Can't they understand what's going to happen? "Now and forever," a little girl's voice came through. "I love you, God, but why don't you make my Mommie and Daddy stop fighting and live together again? "Amen." The voice was old and quavery. "Don't let them send me to the home, God. I know I'm not much use around the house, but I don't eat very much and I've only got a few more years and I want to spend them with them." "If Jim finds out he'll kill me... and he'll kill Kenny too. And anyway, Lord, it wasn't much fun 'cause we were in too much of a hurry. Jim will kill me and I don't wanna be killed for something that wasn't even fun! If he'd killed me for Fred or Andy, that would have been kinda fair, but not for Kenny, please, Lord!" "Don't let me lose my job ." "It hurts... it hurts so much, Lord." "Don't let them start the war!" "I know I get on their nerves, but..." "Mommie! Mommie! I want my Mommie!" "I won't never do it again with nobody but Jim. Even if I don't like it with him, I won't do it with nobody else, Lord! And how can he tell the baby isn't his? Maybe it is for all I know, Lord. I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" "It hurts, but I don't want to die!" "I don't want to die!" "I don't want to die! Don't let them start it!" And then suddenly I was standing up and screamThen I was running up the aisle to get away from the sound of their voices, the sound of people who didn't have time to worry about the end of the world because their own piddling little troubles were more important. "Why can't I get through to them? Why won't they listen to me?" an anguished voice broke through my anger. It was a vaguely familiar voice and I looked around for its owner. "I've tried so hard. I've talked to so many people, but no one seems to believe me, and it's so important that they do." "You! It couldn't be you!" I said as I saw the woman who had been at the flying saucer meeting, the small, silvery haired woman with the white gloves. She was huddled in the very last row, praying out loud like the others. "You? Is it you?" I asked, looming over her. "Are you the one I've been looking for?" "You've been looking for me?" , She had a slight accent but I couldn't identify it as any I had heard before. "Why have you been looking for me?" "Because..." I was looking down at her hands and all of a sudden I understood the reason for die white gloves. They served to partially disguise the fact that she had six fingers on each hand. "You are from the... where are your friends? I must talk to your friends." She shook her silvery head. "I have no friends... not on this world." # #T) ut... but you couldn't- have come alone... not all that distance alone." She got up and by mutual consent we walked out the door of the Church to the Open Word. "I did not come alone," she said, "but my companions were killed when our spaceship crashed. All the compartments except mine were flooded. I made myself stay there until I learned your language, thinking that then I would be able to communicate with you and everything would be all right, but for three weeks now I have talked but no one has listened... no one!" We were out in the street now, and although it was long past midnight, the traffic was bumper to bumper. The sheep of the city had finally smelled the wolf of war coming and were trying to outrun him. "I'm listening," I said. "I will receive your message for Earth, the message that will save -- " "That will save us, I hope," the woman said. "You see, I came here to request the help of your people in -- " "You what?" I stared at her with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Even now, at the very last minute, I had expected some kind of miracle from the ship which had come halfway across the universe. "We came here for help," she said. "We thought that perhaps another people... a people with a more spiritual background might be able to tell us how to save ourselves from " "From what?" I asked as she hesitated. "From a planetwide war that will wipe us all out. We thought that another point of view would help, give us some hint of -- " She stopped and stared up at me. "You mean that you... you too?" "Yes, we too," I said and tried to keep back the sobs that were threatening to choke me. "I should have known! I've been visiting your churches, trying to get in touch with your spiritual leaders, but I've felt... felt the same sickness here as on my home planet. I guess I just refused to face it." "Just as I refused to face the fact that there wouldn't be any last minute miracle," I said. "The dragon's teeth are sown and -- " "When? How soon?" "Very soon," I said. "Just before dawn, I think." er shoulders sagged. "We came so far. We came so very far, and now to find this -- " There wasn't anything I could say so I reached out and took her hand. "I'm sorry." She smiled a very small smile, and for the first time I noticed that she was beautiful. "Do you have anything to do before -- before your world comes to an end?" she asked. "No, not now," I said sadly. "Then perhaps we could spend the time together?" "Yes, I'd like that." "Let's just walk," she said, and her six fingers gripped my five tightly as we began to walk silently into the last black dark of The Night Before. # Title #. United Mates Code). #. Date of filing: October #. #B#. #. T Ue Millcatlon . GAaxy New York. New York #. #. Location of headquarters or general business ofllMs of L'ditor Hudson Street. New York, New York #. Names and addresses of publisher editor and  h , aoi Publisher: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street. New York New York #  EdiWr: Frrterik Pohl. #I Hudson Street. New York, New York #. Managing Editor: None. #. Owner Galaxy Publishing Lor poration, #I Hudson Street. New York. New York #; Robert M. Guinn (sole stekholder), #I Hud son Street, New York New York #. #. Known bondholders, mortgages and other Mount ' holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or othar seOTrltles None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholders or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or . such trustee is acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant s full Iraowleage ana as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appe upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that r a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation bare been Included in paragraphs # and # whes the interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no copies each issue during preceding # months: nz,#. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid circulation: #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #; Single issue nearest filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, o,#V; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. D. Free distribution (Including samples) by mall, carrier or other means: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months None; Single issue nearest to filing date. None; E. Total distribution (sum of C ! and D): Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single Issue nearest to filing date, #. F. Office use. left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Average no. copies each Issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown in A) ; Average no copies each issue during preceding # months, # ; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. I certify that the statement made by me above are correct and complete. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher. for your information A t one time in my career -- it was in summer, # -- I was asked to write an introductory article for a special issue of a German movie magazine. That special issue was for the premiere of the first large scale space-travel movie, Fritz Lang's Girl in the Moon. Having worked myself into a poetical mood by thinking of the past and of the future simultaneously, I conceived the idea of the "three ears of astronomy". During the first, the pre-telescopic era, astronomers could only determine the positions of the fixed stars in the sky and the movements of the planets among them. They could neither hope to find the sizes of the planets -- if, indeed, they differed in size -- nor could they expect to find out any of the distances. Then came the second era, that of the telescope. It first proved that the planets were solid bodies, it made it clear that they were of different sizes, it established their distances and finally it even found the distances to some of the nearer fixed stars. But then the question of the surface conditions on the various planets came up, and the most determined efforts with the telescope, and later with spectroscope and camera, only produced "educated guesses" and speculation. It was rarely possible to draw a line between the two. Therefore I wrote that the second era had succeeded in solving all the unsolved problems of the first era -- but had created a number of problems of its own. Ah, but the third era, the era of space-going devices! That third era would solve all the problems posed by the second era. More in the spirit of tolerance than out of conviction, I added that the third era might pose some problems of its own. Well, we are in the early stages of that third era by now. Some problems that were inherently insoluble for the second era, like the appearance of the far side of the moon, have been nicely solved. Quite a number of other things have happened too, and, taking refuge in that half sentence that the "the third era might pose problems of its own", I can sav that I foresaw this fact. But I did not expect new problems to crop up right at the outset of the space age. Nor did I expect that space age astronomy would re-design the whole inner solar system. As far as the inner portion of the solar system is concerned, literally every member of it, including our own Earth, has been changed around. Let us begin with the planet nearest the sun, Mercury. TV Mercury has always been a "difficult object", to use the cautious language of the astronomer. At the very best the angular distance of Mercury from the sun is # degrees and # minutes of arc. That means that, as seen from the Earth, Mercury is always close to the sun. It can therefore only be seen in a sky that is illuminated by the sun, Fig. #. Tfie Brightside of Mercury os drawn by G. V. Schiaparelli and later by E. M. Antoniadi. either at dusk or at dawn. And, of course, you have to have a horizon that is free of clouds and haze. It is an interesting fact that Nicholas Copernicus knew of the existence of Mercury only second-hand; late in life he complained that he had never seen it himself. Yet the light coming from Mercury, even though it is only reflected sunlight, is by no means weak. If we could have Mercury in the midnight sky it would outshine Sirius. It is the proximity to the sun that causes all the problems. At one time the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli decided that one could gain a little by observing Mercury in daylight. Of course the sky would be still brighter, but at least the planet would be high in the sky so that our atmosphere would not be so much in the way. The idea proved to be so useful that in # Schiaparelli could announce -- with the king and Queen of Italy in the audience, no less -- that Mercury had a period of rotation that matched its period of revolution, hence that it always turned the same face to the sun, just as the moon does with earth. With that lecture, the concept of Mercury that survived until last year was born. Not quite half of the planet was never reached by the sun's rays; there the leftovers of the original atmosphere would be lying frozen on the ground. And not quite half of the planet's surface was ever under the fierce rays of the nearby sun, and tin and lead, if present, would form shimmering puddles on the hot rock. Between these two extremes there was the promisecrammed Twilight Belt, illuminated but hardly heated by slanting sunlight for a few days of every Mercurian year that lasts only # days. This concept was fine and logical and firmly established for threescore and ten years. And then what happened? Then they started bouncing radar impulses off Mercury and found Fig. #. The beginning of the earth's "magnetic tail". The figures give distances in thousands of miles, measured from the center of the Earth. that Mercury is slowly turning on its axis. Its year is still # days, but its day is only about # days. The result, of course, is that both the sunlit side and the dark side wander slowly around the planet. The sunlit side will still be very hot, but it will get a chance to cool off. And the dark side will become the sunlit side at regular intervals -- which means that there can be no remnants of the Mercurian atmosphere left. All the gases that might have existed there once must have escaped into space a long time ago. While I was contemplating the problem of how to re-write the section on Mercury in my Conquest of Space, a reader sent me something that was labeled "an unpoetic fragment", with permission to quote but with simultaneous insistence on "no screen credits, please!" The Mercury section reads: Not even now a Twilight Zone, The darn thing rotates, just like home. But I feel obliged to add that "home is still a thousand times more comfortable -- at least to us. Well, the discovery of the rotation of Mercury may have destroyed a few cherished concepts, but after all this is progress. Didn't space age astronomy neatly solve the problem of Mercury? Well, yes, but... T)ut there is the problem of some pictures. Schiaparelli, when at the height of his career, drew a chart of the brightside of Mercury (Fig. #.) Some fifteen years later the Greek-bom French astronomer Eugenios-Marie Antoniadi also drew a chart of the brightside of the planet. Except for the fact that Antoniadi filled in some areas, like the oval on the lower right of the drawing, with a uniform gray shade, the two drawings are alike. But if Mercury rotates, how can this be explained? Well, there is a possible explanation, and it has to do with what Percival Lowell termed a "presentation". When observing Mars, Lowell had to keep in mind that the rotation of Mars is a bit slower than that of the earth. If you had a certain view of Mars at # P.M. on a . given night, that same view would not occur at # P.M. the following  Fig. #. Mars, as drawn by Antoniadi in #, showing a dost storm obscuring almost one quarter of the disk of the planet. night, but at about #:# P.M. Then you had the same view in the telescope -- the same "presentation". Now Schiaparelli's drawing shows one specific presentation of Mercury. Antoniadi's drawing is evidently the same presentation. But why are there no other drawings of other presentations, since Mercury rotates? If one assumes that the other hemisphere of Mercury is devoid of outstanding features and therefore looks just like a blur, these two drawings can be reconciled with a rotation : they both would show the only "presentation" where something can be seen. If anybody should tell me that this is merely an excuse I made I up in a hurry I would have to accept the accusation. We'll simply have to wait and see what additional work will turn up. In the meantime this explanation has to serve -- because there is no other. Progressing to the next planet, Venus, the changes brought about by space age astronomy are less disappointing -- or more so, depending on what you believed before. When I heard my first lectures on astronomy I learned that there were two views of Venus. One had the classical name of panthatassa (meaning "all ocean") and according to this view Venus was completely covered by water. There might be a few small islands, but a large land mass could not exist. If there were one, it would cause vertical currents in the atmosphere and these currents would break up the uniform cloud layer which every observer complained about. The other view did admit land masses, but not dry land masses. Land masses there might be, but everything would be swampy, covered with shallow lakes. In a few elevated areas there might be stretches of dripping jungle. And who could tell what weird animals might walk or crawl around in the eternal greenish dusk? In the interval between the two world wars a third view of Venus was conceived. One could have the unbroken cloud layer, which was the main fact known about Venus, without endless oceans. One could have the same clouds if Venus were completely dry, with all the water in its atmosphere in the form of vapor, while on the ground, at a temperature above the boiling point of water, endless dust storms were raging. Space probe Mariner II showed that the surface temperature of Venus is # degrees Fahrenheit, so that the third view was proved to have been closest to the mark. Science-fiction writers realized that a whole shelf of nice Venus stories was suddenly obsolete, and my "unpoetic fragment" echoes their disappointment: Bye-bye mermaids and dripping jungles Dinosaurs, large swamps and similar bungles. In fact, bye-bye Venus -- you beutiful tease Till you explain those # degrees. As a matter of fact much more than those # degrees have to be explained. According to the findings of Mariner II, the atmospheric pressure at the ground must be ten to twenty times that of our atmosphere at sea level. The lower limit of the cloud layer would lie at about # miles, which is higher than the highest clouds (except for temporary volcanic clouds) in our own atmosphere. But the mass of Venus is about #I per cent of the mass of our planet. How can Venus hold on to such an extensive atmosphere with a smaller mass -- and, in addition to that, be closer to the sun? Somebody should put a computer or two to work on that problem. progressing to the Earth, space age astronomy has not changed its surface, of course. But it has shown that the earth has a number of things we have literally never seen. Until airplanes climbed to high altitudes we had no idea of the existence of the so-called jetstream in our atmosphere. And until the first American satellite, Explorer I, climbed beyond # miles we had no idea of the radiation belt, now known as the Inner Van Allen Belt. When a friend of mine, a physicist, informed me of the discovery of the belt by long distance call from Washington and told me about the electrons and protons from the sun that were trapped there by the earth's magnetic field, I said something like: "One should have thought of that, shouldn't one?" and received the reply: "You and thirty-seven others!" Fact is that nobody did until it was discovered. Then everything was suddenly crystal clear and obvious. Since then something else invisible has been discovered and it goes under the name of the "wake in the solar wind" or else the "magnetic tail". (Fig. #) There is a steady stream of subatomic particles, mainly protons and electrons, leaving the sun. This has been dubbed the solar wind. The Earth, with its pronounced magnetic field, must disturb the smooth flow of the solar wind, in the manner in which a rock in a shallow creek disturbs the flow of the water. The situation near Earth is shown in the diagram. As the solar wind encounters the Earth's magnetic field there is an interaction that has been labeled the shock wave. Just behind the shock wave there is an area of uncertainty; in some cases the Earth's magnetic field is more energetic than the particle of the solar wind, in other cases the particles are more energetic. But then comes the clearcut superiority of the geomagnetic field which can be pentrated only by very energetic particles, so-called "cosmic rays". As shown in the diagram the geomagnetic field forms a spreading cone, pointing away from the sun. But with increasing distance from the Earth the field must grow weaker and the particles of the solar wind more or less retain their energy. Hence at one point the area of disturbance in the solar wind must grow narrower and finally peter out. In short, the "magnetic tail" cannot be of indefinite length. A few satellites specifically designed to investigate this question have been sent up. Originally Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. Later the name was changed into Interplanetary Explorer satellites. Unfortunately one of them did not attain the orbit into which it was supposed to go and therefore the measurements are incomplete. Most experts feel sure that the "magnetic tail" reaches beyond the orbit of the moon, but nobody can tell how far. Electrons and protons by the bucket and gallon Produce the two belts named after Van Allen, But this moment the general wail Is: How long is our magnetic tail? E ven in the case of the moon space age astronomy has produced a problem, in addition to providing a great deal of information. When astronomers were asked in the past about the probable appearance of the backside of the moon they would answer unanimously that there was no reason to suppose that the moon's farside would differ significantly from the side we can see from earth. A Russian rocket launched on "Sputnik Day" -- October #, # -- succeeded in taking a few pictures that showed a portion of the moon's farside. The pictures were few in number, they were not very good, and the sole transmission of them that could be achieved was full of "snow". But what there was seemed to bear out the general idea: the backside of the moon looked generally like the visible side. But on July #, #, the Russians launched another space ed the moon on July # at a distance of # miles and took pictures for an hour and eight minutes. The Russians then waited distance from the moon. On July # they sent the radio order to start transmission and a stream of pictures came back to the earth from a distance that had grown to # miles. They comprise a total of about three surface, with much of it on the farside. These pictures are good and clear and they show that the moon's farside is marked up by a profusion of impact craters, just like the visible hemisphere. However they do not show any of the large gray mare plains which are visible with the naked eye. Center ef picture in Slant range Extant In miles Center ef picture in Martian Slant range (miles) Extent In E. to W. miles N. to #. Latitude Longitude (degrees) (degrees) #. # # # . # # # . # # # .  # # # . -- # # # . -- # # # . -- # # # . -- # # # . -- # # #. -- # # #. -- #I # #. -- # # #. -- # # #. -- #I # #. -- # # # . -- # # # . -- # # # . -- #I # #. -- #I # #. focused on nightslde of Mars, useless #. same #. same Why our moon has mare plains on one hemisphere and not on the other -- disregard the fact that one is the visible hemisphere and the other is not, that is probably accidental -- is something that will need explanation at one time. At the moment it is one of the puzzles produced by space age astronomy. And now we come to Mars. On July #, #, space probe Mariner IV passed the planet Mars after a flight from earth that had taken # days. The space probe was instrumented to take # pictures of the planet and everybody concerned had #J# months during which to worry whether everything would go well. Could one rely on instruments that were exposed to space conditions for that length of time and that could not even be tested while underway? And somebody exacerbated the atmosphere by pointing out that the space probe might well collide with the inner moon of Mars, Phobos. Since one could not be sure of the precise hour of the fly-by and since Phobos needs only # hours and # minutes to complete one orbit around its planet one simply could not make sure of avoiding Phobos, especially since the closest approach to the planet was at about the distance of Phobos. In theory there was a safety margin of a few hundred miles, but no one could be sure that the course of the space probe would be that precise. Well, Phobos was missed, the cameras functioned, Mariner IV disappeared behind Mars, measuring the density of its atmosphere in the process, and after it had reappeared the transmitter began sending the pictures to earth, over a distance of more to be a point by point transmission because of the long distance, so it took about six hours for every picture to be completed by the transmitter. The first of the pictures showed the rim of Mars and something next to it that could either be a high flying cloud or merely an imperfection in the system. But the next pictures brought a surprise; Mars looked like the moon in these pictures. There were large and apparently old craters, there were smaller and probably younger craters; it was simply and plainly a moonscape we saw. I might say right here that this similarity was unduly enhanced by the fact that the pictures were in black and white. Seen through the telescope, Mars is the most colorful of all planets, with white polar caps, yellowish desert areas, dark areas that look gray or greenish, and an occasional white cloud, probably consisting of ice crystals. If the Mariner pictures had been in color they would not have looked quite as strange. As the pictures progressed the areas photographed shrank in size (see table) so that the features showed up better. But it was always the same -- craters, craters, craters. Pictures # and # should show a "canal" that can be seen on many maps. They didn't. Of course one could say that the time of the fly-by was the wrong season for Mars, a season where the "canals" always are weak. Or one might say that the space probe was so close, only about # miles from the point to be photographed, that a canal would not show up because it would be lost among the detail photographed. Still, that leaves the question of just what is a canal as unanswered as it has always been. That Mars should be covered with craters was, by itself, not too surprising because of the vicinity of the planet to the asteroid belt. In fact it had even been predicted by an amateur, Donald Lee Cyr by name, more than fifteen years ago. But the overwhelming number of craters was still a surprise. It indicated that the cratBig Business There was no doubt that these men attached great value to human life. ers were not worn down by erosion, and while it has always been agreed that Mars does not have much water, there had also been the agreement that it had some water, while these pictures looked as if it had none at all. There is a discrepancy here that will need explaining. XT ow as the space probe went J' "behind" Mars there was a chance of measuring the density of the Martian atmosphere. The value obtained was much lower than anybody had expected. In the past the figure usually given was: pressure at ground level somewhat like ours # feet up. More recently, because of measurements and calculations by Gerard P. Kuyper, the answer was modified to read: like ours at # or # feet. But Mariner IV reported figures that made this like ours at # feet or even at # feet. This, unfortunately, ruins the beautiful deep-blue sky Chesley Bonestell painted for my book The Exploration of Mars and my correspondent, with reference to these pictures, rhymed : The Mariner fly-by has laid bare The little canal that wasn't there. Ditto skies of azure hue Chesley must be feefing blue. and concluded : Quick, let's write about Saturn, Ora nut, Jupiter Before science makes us feel stupfdor. Those cold facts. I'm trying to resist 'em -- Give me back my dear old Solar System! Well no. I can't bring the "old" solar system back, but I can point out that even the Mars measurements leave some room for doubt So the pressure at ground level right, measurements are measurements. But how about those dust storms that have been seen? Fig. # shows a drawing made by E. M. Antoniadi in #. At that time the whole disk of Mars was hazy, but Antoniadi succeeded in making out the detail shown, except for an area of about one quarter of the visible surface where he left a blank space and wrote matiere jaune into it, "yellow matter". It was a duststorm obscuring an enormous area. Does that tally well with a I don't know the answer. All I can do it to sit back and trust to the proverb that time will tell! #(nphe moment for action is here, suh," Colonel Big Jack belched, stabbing a foul cigar at me. "The time for talk has been here and gone. Let me tell you fellers that I am not going to just sit still on this here pocket of little old gold forever, no-sir-ree-bob." Colonel Big Jack Farquard was one of the most obnoxious men in mid-Twientieth Century America. He was a man almost completely without redeeming feature. He was ugly, uncouth, about most of the things that most people consider count. His dress consisted of white linen suits, cowboy hats and a brace of loaded six-guns with which he had shot at least three people in public, none fatally (in public). He was my employer. "Now lookee here," he said to Princely Soames, the man who had arranged this job for me. "The propaganda campaign has been goin' on for over twenty years now. I spent nine hundred boy. I expect to see me some results, boy. You expect I been nitpickin' around with other stuff and forgot all about this thing, boy?" Princely Soames looked calm and collected. But the collection was only half deposited. Soames knew as well as I did that Big Jack could ruin his life -- or take it, if he thought Soames had caused him to lose nine hundred Soame's fine aristocratic nostrils quivered like those of a finely bred race horse. "Big Jack,'-' Soames said, "I disagree with you." Big Jack nodded, and smiled to expose his gold-capped teeth. He didn't waste his money on yes-men, but I could almost see him thinking: This better be good, boy. "The public is still too interested in space travel for us to make our move," Soames said simply. howled at the top of his voice. He hurled his white Stetson to the thick carpet that floored this office, fortunately sound-proofed (and spy-proof). T)ig Jack stomped his Stetson" out of shape with his handcarved boots, howling and hurling curses at the gods. He stopped at last, panting for breath. He was almost ninety years old, although with his doctors and the research institutes he financed he could have fooled somebody else's doctor into thinking he was fifty. "Sp-a-ace travel, by damn!" he said at last. "Old man LeCzem has got a goodun in that, ain't he?" Soames frowned slightly. "Remember, sir, that LeCzern's campaign to promote space travel has been going for forty years." "Don't I just know it, though. Don't I just, boy." Big Jack's eyes narrowed like a mountain cat getting ready to pounce. "He gives away a little money to them crackpots in rocket societies, gives a phone call to that Hitler runt, buys up a few down at the heels airplane factories, and what's he got? I'll tell you what he's got -- he got four hundred And who told me that they didn't think space travel would go over?" "I did," Soames admitted. "At that time, my technical information was deficient. You know we both went on Professor Sledgeman's opinion that a rocket could not operate in the vacuum of space because it wouldn't have anything to push against." "Professor Sledgeman," Big Jack snorted. "Professor of Dead Languages at some two-bit college in Florida. Why ask him about rockets?" "That's what he asked, too, but he finally accepted our hundred thousand dollar retainer. Human error, I'm afraid:' "And there was another human error when you suckered me into this time-travel business," Big Jack said darkly. I sat back in my chair. I had been a bit uncomfortable while these two men discussed other matters. But at last they were getting at what concerned me. ( ( 'T'ime travel is going to be very big, sir," Soames said. "That isn't merely my personal opinion -- everything points to it." "Big?" Colonel Big Jack stomped to the desk, and rummaged through some papers before coming up with the one he wanted. "You say 'big'. In the last fully accounted year, the U.S. government spent exactly twenty-three thousand, one hundred and three dollars and no cents on time travel at cost plus twenty per cent -- which of course I tossed back in to keep 'em interested. The projects in France and England and Pakistan ain't worth mentioning. There ain't no money in secret projects, by damn! The public has got to be sold on 'em, so the money can be spent out in the open!" "We were right about atomic power," Soames pointed out. "We are making money off of that." Big Jack nodded slowly. "A little, boy, a little." He waited. "I know it was my thought that the use of atomic power would help speed time travel development by making the present unlivable, and I feel I still may be correct." "You're going to be correct all right," Big Jack said. Deliberately he tore his cigar in two, pinched some tobacco up and put it into his mouth. He chewed. "I'm through underwriting all these propagandists like them two fellers -- what's their names? -- uh, one's Blackberry and the other's Fishy -- I'm through trying to sell people on how great the past was. What's the use in them fellers we got on the payroll who are all the time writing about how much better silent pictures were than talkies? Now you got this new feller writing about how much better radio was than TV. Next you'll be telling them that dying used to be better than it is now!" "Yes, we're doing that. Covering every angle as it were." "But hell, man, where's it all going?" Big Jack asked, hands stretched to the screened-off stars. "People are just experiencing the past vi-car-i-ous-ly. Damned vicious habit, that vicar-i-ous-ness. Un-American! We LY go backr Big Jack emphasized the last line by pounding the butt of one six-gun on the desk. "Am I to suppose, Colonel Farquard," I said at last, "that this is where I come in?" "Yes, suh, Dr. Moribund," Big Jack said civilly. "You are correct. I do declare I feel that you, and you alone, suh, can be the making of Texatime, Ltd." I savored the title of Farquard's proposed company. "Texas Time, Limited. A good name." ttXTaturally, I got the best  brains money can buy to think up names. 'Course it ain't really Limited. Going to be a corporation. Have to say (A Corporation) in small print after the name. The main thing is to suggest that time is running out, and fast." "It certainly will be running out fast if I arrange the explosion of that cobalt bomb," I remarked. "Right," Big Jack said. He spat the small wad of tobacco into the wastebasket. "Now here's my plan... Imperceptibly, Soames and I gathered in closer. "You get them to test that cobalt bomb in outer space, and then you see to it that it explodes in too low an orbit," Big Jack said, simplifying the plan I had worked out with some of his technical people. I nodded. "As a respected member of the aerospace team, I should be able to arrange that easily." "Keeno! Now remember not to explode the cobalt thing too low on account of that would wipe out the human race, and colored too. And naturally enough, I don't want that, being human myself. Haw-haw-haw!" "Quite," said Soames. "I understand. I will explode ft at the exact point where the radioactive particles will rain down to wipe out human life within approximately a year." "That's it, boy." I was "boy" now; I was working for him. "Now I'm pretty sure this timetravel thing can be developed And it's sure everybody will be putting big money into trying to make it work so's we can get the hell outa here before it's too late, and that's all she wrote. I reckon there's a chance it can't be deing on this, and what the hell, I've lived a full life." He nudged me in the ribs. T et me assure you," I said to him, "that time travel can and will be developed. As a matter of fact, I've traveled in time myself." Big Jack's eyes narrowed with his instinctive animal cunning. "Why, you ain't joshing, are you, boy?" "No," I said. "I come from 'the future', roughly speaking. Actually I am not the real Dr. Moribund at all. I have replaced him in order to prevent you from doing your particular bit to make the Earth uninhabitable. Others will have to deal with all your competition in this goal." Big Jack got it instantly. "Say, you mean if I contaminate the world, I'll ruin a lot of your property, make it worthless." "Yes," I confirmed. "And you came back to stop me yourself?" "Yes," I admitted a bit sheepishly. "I suppose I should have hired an expert but there is a time when one does not delegate authority." "And you're figuring on stopping me how?" Big Jack asked, smooth as silk. Something about him made me erating anti-life processes. "It is necessary for Big Jack to complete his plans for contaminating Earth, so that I may complete my plans," Soames said. "I've devoted one of my years and thirty of yours to them." Big Jack laughed with seeming good nature. "I always figured you had some kind of ace up your sleeve. What is it, suh?" "My plan is to get salvage rights to the dead planet," Soames announced. "You come from the future too!" I blurted. Soames shook his finely wrought head. "No, no, I am from outside. An alien. Inhabitant of another star system's civilization. Disguised, of course." "You want me to go on ahead with getting that cobalt baby set off?" Big Jack asked, thinking that over. "Yes," said Soames. "After that, the planet will have to be deserted, either by evacuation of the populace via time, or possible space travel, or by the death of all the inhabitants. The latter is best, incidentally, since I have several ready markets for the unspoiled, bacteria-free corpses." "You're showing a lot of your cards, Princely," Big Jack drawled. "No, I have no paranormal means of 'brain-washing you, or of committing overt acts of violence against you, as you would find out all too soon. I can't allow Dr. Moribund to kill you. Big Jack, so -- I'm offering to split up this world with you three ways. In essence, I am offering you partnership in, shall we say, Earth Salvage, Inc." Big Jack said it first. I took longer, but I long ago admitted my weaknesses and occasional vacillation from my own patriotic ideals. I repeated Big Jack's words. "I want in," I said to the alien Soames. "Done," he said. It was the kind of crime a man could take pride in -- hoisting a diamond from Mars with a girl from the past I I nphe sinking of the Soviet pro- paganda ship for the sole purpose of stealing the Mars diamond was a typical Conrad Rumel (alias Swimmer) crime: a gigantic nose-thumbing for profit. And Swimmer had the gigantic nose for it, plus a hair line that crowded his eyebrows, small gray-green eyes, a chin that almost vanished into his neck and a wide thick-lipped mouth like a hungry sea bass. When he was seventeen, Swimmer had decided his physical ugliness left him only one suitable career -- crime. He came from a family noted for professional specialists -- mathematicians, surgeons, physicists, teachers, biochemists. It was no surprise then that Swimmer chose to specialize. His specialty was underwater crime. He'd had his first gill mask and equalizer suit at the age of five (the gift of a father who preferred him out of sight) and there'd soon been no doubt that Swimmer was at home in his chosen element. Good breeding had marked him, though: he drew the line at bloodshed and murder. If there was any single modus operandi stamp on Swimmer's crimes (beyond touches that betrayed physical cowardice) it was bizarre humor. It's noteworthy that he sank the Soviety ship in shallow water when only five men of the anchor watch were aboard (the others being ashore at an official Mexican fiesta-reception) and the five were all on deck. Swimmer had thoughtfully provided an open carton of a product called "Flotation Falsies" which bobbed to the surface and provided the bouyancy on which the five Russians made their way safely to a nearby beach. By the nature of the crime and his subsequent actions, Swimmer had hoped to involve a professional mobster named Bime Jepson. Disposal of the Mars diamond was going to be no easy matter and Swimmer's sense of honor insisted he owed this to Jepson. Their last mutual enterprise had gone exceedingly sour, costing Jepson a bundle which he quoted at #. Jepson's reaction then came as a surprise. ttnphis is a diamond?" he sneered, staring at the object in his hands. The stone was bluish-white, cloud-surfaced, about the size and shape of a medium cantaloupe. "Are you nuts or something?" Jepson demanded. "This is... is..." His one-track mind struggled for a suitable word. "This is a rock. This is a chunk of nothing!" His narrow blue eyes glared with anger. They stood in the bedroom of Jepson's suite on the #th floor of the Mazatlan Hilton. Corner windows opened to a view of the ocean and city, colors blaring and gaudy in the bright Mexican afternoon. Jepson lifted his attention from the stone. He fixed his gaze on the dark-haired oversize gnome of a man who had brought this unpleasantness. The man was a walking reminder of their last encounter -- all that money sunk into an invention by one of Swimmer's professional uncles, Professor Amino Rumel. Uncle Professor's project was a time machine of uncertain function. Apprised of the device by Swimmer, Jepson had conceived fiie idea of a sortie into the past backed by a crew with modem arms, the object being to raid the treasury of Knossos. (One of Jepson's mistresses had read a work of fiction in which this treasure figured.) After all those megabucks, Uncle Professor had pronounced the machine as requiring "much more development." "It didn't work," was Jepson's summation. And he was a man who did not like to be thwarted. Only the fact that Uncle Professor was "one of them" (legitimate) and the latent hope that the device might yet be made to work had prevented Jepson from committing bloody violence. Now, here was this creep-nephew, Swimmer, back with more trouble. Swimmer had read the signs of anger. He said: "Jep, I swear that's..." "You swear nothing! This ain't no diamond! A diamond's sometiling with... something you can..." "Jep, let me explain about..." "Ain't you been warned never to interrupt me, Swimmer?" Swimmer retreated a short step toward the door. "Now, don't go getting excited, Jep." Jepson threw the stone onto the unmade bed behind him. "A diamond!" he sneered. "Jep, that rock's worth..." "Sharrup!" His heart pounding, Swimmer took two steps backward, stood pressed against the door facing Jepson. This was not going at all as he had anticipated. "I should call in the boys and teach you a little manners," Jepson growled. "How many times I gotta tell you don't interrupt?" Jepson scowled. "Only reason the boys let you in was you told 'em you heisted a diamond too hot for you to handle. Everybody knows how big hearted I am. I'm here to help my friends with little matters like that. But I ain't here to help my friends with... with... I ain't here to be woke up every time some beadhbum finds a big pebble what's good for nothing but tying around somebody's neck so they should sink!" CC'-'on I say something, Jep?" Swimmer pleaded. "Say anything you want, but say it somewheres else. I want you should get outa here and -- " "Jep!" Swimmer pleaded. "Interrupt me once more, Swimmer, and I lose my temper." By its lack of inflection, Jepson's voice managed to convey a profound menace. Swimmer nodded silently. He hadn't anticipated instant rage from Jepson. Everything depended on being able to explain. "You think I don't recognize this rock?" Jepson asked. Swimmer shook his head from side to side. "This is the Mars diamond," Jepson said. "Diamond! It's the rock them Ruskie's brung back in their spaceship. It was in their floating museum out in the harbor just yesterday. I seen it there myself. Does that answer all your questions, Swimmer?" "But it's worth maybe ten million dollars!" Swimmer blurted. "Everybody said... "It ain't worth ten Mexican cents! Didn't you see all them charts and things in with it?" Swimmer patted a breast pocket of his permadry suit and a dollop of water trapped there spurted out onto the rug. He gulped, said: "I brought them, too. The diagrams, everything." "Then you shoulda known better," Jepson snarled. "There ain't no diamond cutter in the world'd touch this thing. Ain't no cutter wouldn't recognize it in the first place. And in the second place, them charts show why this diamond can't be cut without it breaks into chips worth maybe two-bits apiece. It's impossible to cut this thing, you dumbhead! And in the third place, this is what they call a cultural relic of Mars what the Russkies and every cop in the world's gonna be looking for soon's they find it missing. And you hadda bring it here!" For Jepson, this was a long speech. He stopped to collect his thoughts. Stupid creep Swimmer t Swimmer stood trembling with the desire to speak and the fear of what might happen if he did. Jepson looked out the window, returned a speculative stare to Swimmer. "Haw'd you heist it?" "I sank the boat. While everybody was splashing around topside, I went in with a gill mask and burner, opened the case and took off across the bay. It was easy." Jepson slapped his forehead with the heel of his right hand. "You sunk the boat!" He sighed. "Well, I'm gonna do you a favor. Not because I wanta, but because I hafta. I'm gonna see this rock finds its way back into the bay near the Russky boat like maybe it fell overboard. And you ain't never gonna mention this thing again, right?" "Jep," Swimmer said, speaking with desperate urgency, "maybe I know a cutter." J epson studied him, interested in spite of the lessons from past experiences with Swimmer. "A cutter who could handle this rock? A cutter who'd even try it?" "She'll work any rock, Jep. And she won't recognize it and she won't care where it came from." "She?" Swimmer wiped his forehead. He had Jepson's interest now. Maybe Jepson would come along after all. "That's right, she," Swimmer said. "And there isn't a cutter in this world can hold a candle to her." "I never heard of no dame cutter," Jepson said. "I din't think they had the nerves for it." "This is a brand new one, Jep." "A new cutter," Jepson mused. "A dame. Is she a looker?" "I doubt it, but I've never seen her." "You've never seen her, but you've got her?" "I've got her." "Awwww," Jepson said. He shook his head. "I find it interesting you have a new cutter on the string, but nobody can cut this rock. You seen them charts. The Russkies don't make mistakes like that. This rock is for nobody. It can't be cut." "I think this cutter can do it," Swimmer said. The stubborn set to Swimmer's mouth whetted Jepson's interest. It wasn't like Swimmer to be stubborn in the face of determined opposition. "Where you got this cutter?" Jepson asked. Swimmer wet his lips with his tongue. This was the ticklish part, Jepson's temper being what it was. "You remember my uncle Amino and his advice for you to be patient about... "Ahhh, hah!" Jepson barked. He pointed to the door. "Out! You hear me, creep? Out!" "Jep, the time machine works!" Cilence dragged out for a dozen  heartbeats while Swimmer wondered if he had timed that revelation correctly, and while Jepson reminded himself that this possibility was one of the reasons he hadn't obliterated Swimmer. Presently, Jepson said: "It works?" "I swear it, Jep. It works, but the controls aren't too... well, accurate. Sometimes my uncle says it balks and... it doesn't go precisely where you want." "But it works?" Jepson demanded. "It brought back this cutter," Swimmer said. "From perhaps twenty or thirty thousand years ago. A muscle twitched on Jepson's left cheek and his jaw line went hard. "I thought you said your cutter dame was a expert." Swimmer took a deep breath, wondering how he could explain paleolithic culture to a man like Jepson. The patois of the underworld didn't fit the job. "You ain't got nothing to say?" Jepson asked. "I'm quoting my uncle, who's a very truthful man," Swimmer said "According to myuncle, the people of this dame's culture made all their tools out of stone. They have what my uncle calls an intuition about stones and working with them. He's the one said she could cut the Mars diamond." Jepson frowned. "Did Uncle Professor fall off the legit? He put you up to this job?" "Oh, no! None of my family know how I... ahh, make my living." Jepson groped backward with one foot, found the edge of the bed, sat down. "How much more loot does Uncle Professor need to fix his machine?" "You have it all wrong, Jep. It isn't a matter of loot. My uncle says there are local anomalies and force-time variations and that it very likely will be impossible ever to steer the machine very close to a time mark." "But it works?" "With these limitations." "Then why ain't I heard about it? Thing like this, seems it'd be more important than any Mars diamond. Why ain't it big news?" "My uncle's trying to determine if his force-time variation theory is correct. Besides, he has a plan to present his stone-age woman before a scientific meeting and he's collecting supporting evidence. And he says he's having trouble teaching her how to talk. She thinks he's some kind of god." "I'm beginning to be very interested in what you tell me," Jepson said. "So say some more." "You're not mad any more, Jep?" "I've said unkind words. So? Maybe I'm entitled. Leave us now say that interest has overcome my unhappiness. You sure your uncle didn't plan this little job?" Qwimmer shook his head. "Un cle Amino wouldn't take any part of action like this. He's cubed. No, this was mine. After our -- you know -- I was on the shorts. I figured to do this one for the ready and cut you in because... well, I owe it to you. You'll get your bundle back with interest. And this is a job with style, Jep. The Mars diamond -- impossible to cut. But we cut it." "And who's to believe?" Jepson said. He nodded. "You think this gal of your Uncle Professor's can do it?" "I ran into Uncle Amino up in Long Beach. He was there buying equipment when the Russian ship made port and the Mars diamond was big news. Uncle Amino read this part about it being impossible to cut and he laughed. He said his gal could cut it into a watch fob for Premier Sherdakov if she wanted. That's the first I knew about the gal and about the machine working. He's been keeping it pretty secret, as I explained. Well... what he said, that's what gave me the idea. I questioned my uncle; he was serious. This stoneage gal can do it. He insists she can." Jepson nodded. "If he says this cutter can do it, perhaps... just perhaps, mind you, we could do business. It don't go until I see for myself, though." Swimmer allowed himself a deep sigh. "Well, naturally, Jep." Jepson pursed his lips. "I tell you a thing, Swimmer. You ain't done this entirely outa kindness for me. You heist this rock, you maybe start a international incident, but you ain't got no way to get die rock outa Mexico." Swimmer stared at his feet, suppressed a smile. "I guess I didn't fool you a bit, Jep. I have to get the rock up north. I have to get the cutter away from my uncle and I need a place where she can work. I need organization. You have organization." "Organization is expensive," Jepson said. Swimmer looked up. "We deal?" "Seventy-five and twenty-five," Jepson said. "Ahhh, Jep! I was thinking fifty-five, forty-five." At the look in Jepson's eyes, he said: "Sixtyforty?" "Sharrup before I make it eighty-twenty," Jepson said. "Just be glad you got a friend like me who'll help when you need." in this thing," Swimmer said, fighting to keep the hurt and anger from his voice. "The split's -- " "The split stands," Jepson said. "Seventy-five and twenty-five. We don't argue. Besides, I'm nuts even to listen to you. Every time you say dough I buy trouble. This time, I better get some of my investment back. Now, you go out and tell Harpsy to slip the" dolls some coin and send 'em packing. We gotta concentrate on getting this rock over the border. And that is gonna take some doing." II nphe chalet nestled furtively wren-brown within the morning shadows of pines and hemlocks on a lake island. The lake itself was a sheet of silvered glass reflecting upside down images of the island and a dock on its south shore. Two airboats had been brought up under the trees and hidden beneath instiflage netting. Seated in shadows above the dock, a man with a blast-pellet swagrifle puffed nervously on an alerto cigaret. Two other men, similarly armed and similarly drugged to eye-darting sensitivity, patrolled the island's opposite shore. The sounds of an argument could be heard coming from within what had been the chalet's dining room and now was a juryrigged workshop. It was only one of many arguments that had consumed considerable time during the past five days of harried flight northward from Mazatlan. Swimmer, for one, was sick of the arguing, but he knew of no non-violent way to silence his uncle. Things were not going at all as he had planned. First, there had been the disconcerting discovery that a Mexican boy had identified him from mug files as the man who had walked out of the water wearing a normal business suit (permadry) and gill mask and carrying a "white rock." Jepson's organization had smuggled Swimmer over the border concealed in a freight load of canteloupes. One of the canteloupes had been hollowed out to hold the diamond. Next, Swimmer's uncle -- alerted by the front-page hullabaloo -- had absolutely balked at cooperating in anything his wayward nephew wanted. Jepson had lost his temper, had given terse orders to his boys and here they all were now -- somewhere in Canada or northern Minnesota. Arguing. Only one of the dining room's occupants had failed to participate in the arguments. She answered to the name of Ob (although her own people had called her Kiunlan, which translated as Graceful Shape). iunlan-Op stood five feet one inch tall. Professor Amino Rumel's lab scales had placed her weight at one hundred twenty-seven pounds nine ounces. Her blue-black hair had been drawn back and tied with a red ribbon. She had a low forehead and large, wide-set blue-gray eyes. Her nose was flat and with large nostrils. Both chin and mouth were broad, the lips thick. Fifteen welted red scars down the left side of her face told the initiated that she had seen fifteen summers and had not yet littered. A simple brown pullover dress belted at the waist covered her heavy-legged body, but failed to conceal the fact that she had four breasts. This feature had first attracted Swimmer's fascinated attention. He had then noted her hands. These bore thick horn callouses over palms and fingers and along the inner edges of the fingers -- even occasionally on the backs of the fingers, especially around the nails. Ob stood now beside a bench that had replaced the chalet dining room's table. One of her hands rested on die back of a high stool drawn up to the bench. The Mars diamond lay on a cushioned square of black velvet atop the bench. The stone's milky surface reflected a faint yellow from the spotlight hanging close to it on a gooseneck. As the argument progressed, Ob's attention shifted fearfully from speaker to speaker. First, there were many angry noises from Gruaaack, the super devilgod who was called Proff Ess Orr. Then came equally loud and angry noises from the big stout devil-god called Jepp, the one whose eyes blazed with the threat of unknown terrors and who obviously was superior over all the others in this place. Sometimes there were softer sounds from the smaller creature who had accompanied the devil god Jepp. The status of this creature was not at all clear. He appeared to Ob to be vaguely human. The face was not at all unpleasant. And he seemed to share some of Ob's fears. She thought perhaps the other creature was a human snared like herself by these terrible beings. "Yes, she's a genius at shaping stones!" Uncle Professor blared. "Yes! Yes! But she's still a primitive creature whose understanding of what we want is definitely limited." He paced back and forth in front of Ob and the bench, a bald, skinny little man trembling with indignation. Thieves, assassins, kinappers, he thought. How could Conrad have become associated with such a crew? Coming on him in his lab that way, crating his equipment without a by-your-leave and spiriting him off to this remote place. "You through yakking?" Jepson asked. "No, I am not," Uncle Professor said. He pointed to the diamond on the bench. "That... that is no ordinary diamond. That is the Mars diamond. Turning such a priceless stone over to..." "Sharrup!" Jepson said. Creeps with their stupid arguments, he thought U ncle Professor glanced at his nephew. There's been some bad moments during the past few days of their furtive journey. Again, the Professor wondered about nephew Conrad. Could the boy have been deceived by Jepson? The man was a criminal and that obviously was where all his money came from -- all the money provided to develop the time machine. Was it possible this Jepson had dragged poor Conrad into this nefarious scheme through some terrible threat? In a quiet voice, Jepson said: "Did you or din't you tell your nephew the Swimmer here that your gal could cut this Mars rock?" "Yes, I said that; I said she could cut any stone, but... "So awright. I want she should cut." "Will you please try to understand?" the Professor pleaded. "Ob undoubtedly can cut your stone. But any idea of facets and from a given gem -- this probably is outside her understanding. She's accustomed to functiorlal artifacts, to simpler purposes in her..." "Simple, Schmimple!" Jepson snarled. "You're stalling. What's it, huh? D'you lie about this dame? Alla stories I ever see 'bout creeps like her, the guys did the stone cutting and the dames sat around caves hiding from tigers they got teeth six feet long." "We're going to have to revise our previous hypotheses about stone-age divisions of labor," the Professor said. "As nearly as I can make out from Ob, women made the tools and weapons while the men did the hunting. Their society was matriarchal with certain women functioning somewhat like priestesses. CaveMothers, I believe it would translate." "Yeah? I ain't so sure. What about them things?" "Things?" The Professor peered at Jepson with a puzzled frown. "She's got four of 'em!" Jepson barked. "I think you're trying to pass off some freak as..." "Oh," the Professor said. Four, yes. That's very curious. human female births today demonstrate a condition of more than two mammaries. Heretofore, there've been three major hypotheses: one, mutation; two, absorbed sibling, and three, ahh... throwback. Ob is living proof of the third case. Multiple births were more frequent in her time, you see? It's quite simple: female were required to suckle more infants. A survival characteristic that gradually disappearas multiple births declined." "You don't say." Jepson growled. "George was particularly elated," the Professor said, "since he had maintained the third case." "George? Who is George?" Jepson demanded. "My associate, Professor George Elwin," the Professor said. "You didn't tell me about no George," Jepson said. "When I was sinking all that loot in your atupid machine, there wasn't no George around. Who's he, your new mark?" "Mark?" The Professor glanced at Swimmer back to Jepson. Swimmer tried to swallow in a dry throat, sensing how near Jepson was to a violent explosion of rage. Swimmer found it odd that his uncle couldn't see the danger. "I don't really see where my associate is any concern of yours," the Professor said. "But if..." "How many people know about that time machine -- " Jepson pointed to the large crate in the comer behind him -- " and about this Ob dame?" "Well, you know, of course, and... "Don't get smart with me, creep! Who knows?" T he Professor stared at him, aware at last of the suppressed rage. Professor Rumel's mouth felt suddenly dry, Criminals such as this could be most violent -- murderously so, at times. "Well, aside from those of us here in this room, there are Professor Elwin and very likely two or three of George's assistants. I didn't impose any special strictures of secrecy other than to suggest we'd wait for the complete investigation before publishing our... "How come this George?" Jepson demanded. "Well, my dear sir, someone with the proper training had to go to Northern France and seek the archeological authentication. Inevitably, there will be cries of fraud, you know." Jepson screwed his face into a puzzled frown. Archeo...  What's this Northern France bit?" The Professor's face came alight with the glow of a man launched on his favorite subject. "You may not know it, Mr. Jepson, but paleolithic artifacts bear markings that are, in some respects, as distinctive as the brushstrokes of a master painter. Now, under strictly controlled archeological conditions, we're seeking some of Ob's work in situ where she originally made it." "Yeah?" Jepson said. "You see, Mr. Jepson, as nearly as we can determine, Ob came from the region just east of Cambrai in Northern France. This is something more than an educated guess. We have several pieces of evidence -- a scrap of obsidian which Ob -- you see how I got her name... my little joke: Ob for obsidian... well, this piece of obsidian she carried on her when we picked her up is of a type common in the region we've selected. There was also plant pollen on her person, types of clay soil in the mud on her feet and a photograph of the background landscape which we took as we snatched Ob from... "Yeah," Jepson said. "So only a few of us know about her." "Quite," the Professor said. "I'm sure you can see why we decided to delay any publication and prevent idle speculation. Nothing destroys the essential character of scientific endeavor more than Sunday supplement romanticizing." "Yeah," Jepson said. "Just like you tol' me." "And there's the ethical problem," the Professor said. "Some people may question the morality of our bringing this human being out of her natural habitat in the past. I, personally, incline to the theory that Ob's timestream diverted from ours at the moment of her removal from her -- and our -- personal past. However, if you..." "Yeah, yeah!" Jepson barked. Keerist! he thought. The old creep could yak all day about nothing. Big words! Big words! Didrit mean a thing. Ill S wimmer looked from one to the other and marveled at the low level of communication between his uncle and Jepson. The Professor might just as well be talking to Ob for all the sense he was making. Swimmer fingered the gill mask in his pocket, thinking of it as a back-door way of escape should things get completely out of hand here. "As I was about to say," the Professor said, "if you consider the equation of historical interference as one element of your total..." "Yeah!" Jepson exploded. "That's very interesting. But what I wanna know is why can't I show this Ob dame a rock and say I want some other rock cut likewise and such and so? She could do the thing like that, ain't it?" The Professor sighed and threw up his hands. He'd thought he'd penetrated Jepson's strange jargon, conveyed some of the problems to the man, but not a bit of it appeared to have gotten through. "Din't you say die was a expert?" Jepson demanded. "Given time," The Professor said in a patient, long-suffering tone, "I do believe Ob could make one of the finest diamond cutters in the world. We've a few industrial diamond chips in the lab and part of our examination of her involved seeing what she could do with them. She needed no more than a glance to see the natural cleavage lines. No fumbling or mistakes. Just one praccal glance. But I wish to warn you -- the measure of her understanding may be seen in the fact she thought the diamonds too hard for practical purposes." "But she worked them rocks okay?" "If that's what you want to call it." "Did she have any better tools than we got here?" Jepson motioned to the rack at the rear of the bench, the cutter's vice clamped to one end. "Not as good." "She know how to use them tools?" "She has a natural tool sense and she's quite awed by our equipment. She's an intuitive worker. You might say she lives the stone. Indeed, she appears to project ideas of life and animism into the stones she works." "Yeah," Jepson said. "So let's get busy." He turned and studied Ob. Che lowered her gaze under the U presure of that stare from the angry devil-god. Ob felt she understood what was wanted of her. She had a much better grasp of the language than she had permitted the devil-gods to suspect. The training imparted by her Cave Mother fitted well here: "When dealing with devil-gods and spirits, give them the obedience and subservience they demand. But dissemble, always dissemble." A pang of homesickness shot through her and her lower lip trembled, but she suppressed the emotion. A female trained to the cave-motherhood and the creation of living tools did not give way, even before devil-gods. And there was work to do here, creation for which she had been trained. Beyond her understanding of the devil-gods' words, there were much more direct ways of divining their desires. They had brought her into the presence of their wondrous tools and they had set up the stone as for a sacrifice. The stone was one of the difficult, very hard ones, and its grain had been criss-crossed and twisted by unimaginable forces. But Ob could see the points of entry and the manner in which the work should progress. "Tell her what she should do," Jepson said. I refuse to have any more to do with this," the Professor said. Swimmer blanched. "Nobody," Jepson said in a low, cold voice, "but nobody refuses what I say do. You, Uncle Professor, will get across to your cutter dame what it is she should do. You will do this or I will permit you to watch my boys cut up your creep nephew here into exceedingly small pieces. We wouldn't want the fishes should choke while they are disposing of him. Do I make myself plain?" "You wouldn't dare," the Professor said. But even as he spoke he sensed that Jepson would indeed dare. The man was a criminal monster... and they were at his mercy. Swimmer "stood trembling. Now, he regretted ever having started this exploit. The gill mask in his pocket was useless. Jepson would never let him get off this island alive if there were the slightest upset in his plans. Grudgingly, the Professor said: "Just what is it you want me to do, Mr. Jepson?" "We been through all that!" Jepson snarled. "Get your dame started on this rock. The bigdomes say it can't be cut. So let's see her cut it." "It's on your head," the Professor said. "Yeah," Jepson said. "So do." S wimmer took a deep breath as the Professor turned toward Ob. It was obvious to Swimmer now that Jepson had plans of his own concerning the cutter dame. The Mars diamond was merely a preliminary. Swimmer suspected he shortly would have no place in Jepson's plans. And people who had no place in Jepson's plans sometimes disappeared. As these thoughts went through Swimmer's mind, Ob looked at him with such a weight of shared understanding that he wondered if the ancients had possessed a telepathic faculty which had been lost in the genetic ebb and flow of the ensuing eons. And he wondered suddenly at the terrors this poor creature must be undergoing -- and hiding so well. She'd been snatched from her place and time, taken forever from her friends. There could be no sending her back; the time machine couldn't be controlled that well. And here she was now, in Jepson's hands. Something would have to be done about Jepson, Swimmer thought. He shivered with fear of what he had to do... and the fear of what would happen if he failed in any step. "Ob," the Professor said. Ob looked at Gruaaack, trying to convey by her waiting silence the almost frantic desire to please. Thank whatever benign spirits might hover near this place, the devil gods were through fighting, she thought. "Ob," the Professor repeated, "look at this stone." He pointed to the Mars diamond on its bed of black velvet. Ob looked at the stone. The Professor spoke slowly and distinctly: "Ob can you work this stone?" Such a difficult stone, Ob thought. But there was a way. The devil-god Gruaaack must know this. It was a test then. The devil-god was testing her. "Ob. Work. Stone," she said. Swimmer marveled at the throaty quality of her voice. "First, you must cut off a small piece of the stone," the Professor said. Yes, it is a test, Ob thought. Everyone knows the work progresses a small chip at a time. This was such a difficult stone, though. The first cut would be somewhat larger than usual. Still, the cut would remove a small enough piece. "Small. Piece," she agreed. "Do you have the tools you need?" the Professor asked. He indicated the vise, jeweler's mallet and wedges on the bench. Another test, Ob thought. "Need. Wa. Ter," she said. "Need. Ongh-ongh." "What the devil's a ong-ong?" Jepson asked. "I never heard no cutter ask for a ong-ong." "I've no idea," the Professor said. "She's never used the term before." He turned a puzzled frown on Jepson. "Surely you must see now how limited our communication really is. There exists such a wide gap in..." "So get 'er a ong-ong!" Jepson barked. Ob looked from one devil-god to the other. They must have ongh-ongh, she thought. Wherever there was fire there was onghongh. She looked at Swimmer, seeing only the fear in him. He must be another human like herself. She turned her attention to Gruaaack. Could this be another test? It was very puzzling. She picked up the Mars diamond in one horn-calloused hand, drew a finger along it. "Ongh-ongh." The Professor shrugged. "Oh, you get ongh-ongh," he said. Ob sighed. Another test. She clasped the Mars diamond in both hands headed for the chalet's living room. There was a fire-hole in the living room ; she had smelled it and seen it. The living room had been furnished with heavy rustic furniture and Mexican fabrics. The colorful upholstery filled Ob with awe. What manner of animal could have produced such skins? She wondered. Devil-god land must possess many terrors. Two of Jepson's boys sat at a round table near the windows overlooking the lake. They were eating and playing poker. A fire had been layed in the stone fireplace and Ob headed directly toward it, trailed by Jepson, the Professor and Swimmer. The boys looked up from their game and one said: "Get a load of that shape. Gives me the creeps." "Yeah," his companion said, and looked at Jepson. "What's she doin' with the rock, boss?" Jepson spoke with an offhand, casual tone, keeping his attention on Ob. "Shamip." The boys shrugged and went back to their game. vb knelt at the fireplace, scoop ed out a small handful of ashes. "Ongh-ongh," she said. She rested the diamond on the hearth, spat into the ashes, kneaded a bit of black mud which she transferred to the diamond. Her homy hands worked the mud into the stone's surface. "What's she doon?" Jepson demanded. "I'm sure I don't know," the Professor said. "But ongh-ongh appears to be ashes." Jepson fixed his attention on the diamond which was now a Mack-streaked mess. Ob picked It up, walked to the room's east windows. She lifted the diamond to the sun, studied it. Yes, she thought, the light of Mighty Fire passed through this stone and was dimmed and cut Into stPange patterns by the onghongh. She rubbed the stone, removing some of its black cover, wiped her hands on the brown dress, again held the diamond to Mighty Fire. It was as she had expected, the technique taught her bv tbe. t'QTre Mother. Lines of ongh-ongh on the stone's surface betrayed tiny flaws and these lines provided a fixed reference against which to study the interior contours. "I believe this must be some sort of religious prelude to the actual work," the Professor said. Swimmer looked at him, glanced at Jepson, then moved up behind Ob. He bent, peered up at the stone in her hands, seeing the coruscating light and the patterns revealed by the ash coating. Ob turned, seeing him close there. She ventured a shy smile which was quickly erased as she darted glances at Jepson and the Professor. Swimmer straightened, grinned. Again, he was rewarded by that shy smile. It gave a momentary lightness to her heavy features. "Strange," the Professor said. "Sun worship, very likely. I must delve into her religious beliefs more..." "When's she gonna cut out this crap and get to cutting?" Jepson demanded. "Ob. Work," she said. She turned, led the way back into the workroom, returned the stone to its square of velvet. Swimmer started to move up dose, was stopped by a hand gripping his shoulder. He turned, looked up at Jepson. "I want you should stay back outa the way, boy," Jepson said. Swimmer shivered. He had sensed ultimate rejection in the man's voice. A bird chose this moment to sing outside the room's south window: "Willow, willwill, willow." Ob looked to the window, smiled. The birdsong was familiar, a voice she understood. He was saying: "This is my ground, my bush." She turned, met Jepson's harsh stare. "Cut that damn rock!" Jepson said. She cringed. There was death in that voice. She had heard it distinctly. The Professor adjusted the spotlight above the bench, touched Ob's arm. She looked up, surprised to find fear in his eyes, too. Gruaaack afraid? All was not as it appeared with the devil-gods! Her mind churning, she bent to the stone, rested it in the visestand, turned it -- gently, precisely -- locked it in place. Such wonderful tools they had, these devil-gods. Jepson moved around beside the bench where he could command a clear view of her work. He wiped his hands against his sides to remove the perspiration. He had watched cutters at their work before. Time always seemed to stretch out during that first cut -- dragging, dragging -- while tensions mounted and the cutter drew on the nervous energy to make the single tap... just right. Expecting this, Jepson found Ob's actions stupefying. IV Qhc searched a moment among  the wedges racked on the bench, selected one and rested it on the diamond. She lifted the mallet in her other hand. Jepson waited for the long drawn-out positioning and shifting of the wedge. He jumped as she brought the mallet down without changing that first, apparently casual placement. Crack! A long narrow piece of the Mars diamond fell to the bench. Crack! Another, slightly smaller this time. Crack! Jepson came out of his shock as a third chip clattered to the bench. "Wait!" he shrieked. Crack! Ob eased the vise, turned the diamond slightly. Crack! "Tell her to wait!" Jepson bleated. Crack! The Professor found his voice. "Ob!" She turned, still holding mallet and wedge firmly, waited for Gruaaack's command. "Stop work," the Professor said. Dutifully she lowered her hands. Jepson pursed his lips, made a low sound: "Whooooeeee." He picked up the largest chip, turned it in the light. "The rock that couldn't be cut, eh? Whooooeeee." He dropped the chip to the bench, drew a dart pistol from a shoulder holster, pointed it at Swimmer. "No hard feelings, Swimmer," he said. "But you are excess baggage. And Uncle Professor needs a lesson that he should do like he's told." "You wouldn't!" the Professor whispered. Jepson darted a glance at the Professor. I n this instant, Swimmer acted from desperation, leaping sideways and kicking at the gun hand. Muscles hardened from years of swimming slammed the toe of his shoe into Jepson's hand. The gun went pffwt! as it left the hand. A dart buried itself in the ceiling. The gun clattered across the room. Ob stood for a frozen second, horrified by Swimmer's action against the devil-god. But she had heard the death in the devilgod's voice and she knew that even the will-will willow bird would attack a human if given enough reason. Why then couldn't a human attack a devilgod? As Jepson opened his mouth to call his boys, Ob brought a fist crashing down onto his head. There was a sound like the dropping of a ripe melon and a sharp snap of Jepson's neck broke. He collapsed with a soft thud. Swimmer dove for the fallen dart pistol, scooped it up, crouched facing the door to the living room, listening with every sense for a sign that the disturbance had been heard. "My word!" the Professor said. Only the ordinary sounds ol the house penetrated the room footsteps from one of the bedrooms overhead, the creak of bedsprings, a faucet being turned on, somebody whistling. Swimmer turned. Ob stood staring down at Jepson. A look of dawning wonder covered her face. Swimmer crossed to Jepson, bent, examined him. "Dead," he said. He straightened, smiled reassuringly at Ob. It was a reassurance he did not feel, however. "We're in the soup, Uncle," he said. "If any of the boys come in..." The Professor fought down a shudder. "What shall we do?" ij "We have one chance," Swimmer said. "Ob, help me get this carcass behind your bench." He bent, started to drag Jepson's body. Gently, Ob brushed him aside, lifted Jepson's body with one hand through the belt. The dead man's head lolled; his arms dragged on the floor. Swimmer swallowed, indicated where he wanted the body deposited. They propped Jepson in a comer, moved the bench to conceal him. "My word," the Professor whispered. "She's strong as an ox!" "Now listen carefully," Swimmer said. "Ob must go right on working as though nothing had happened. I'll try to get into the lake. If I can, once under water, I can get away and bring help." He passed Jepson's dart pistol to the Professor. "Keep this in your pocket. Don't use it unless you have to." "This is dreadful," the Proffessor said. "It'll be more dreadful if you don't do this just the way I say," Swimmer rasped. "Now, put that gun in your pocket." The Professor gulped, obeyed. "Now get her back to work," Swimmer said. The Professor nodded, faced Ob. "You... work... stone," he said. She remained motionless, studying him, wondering at the tone of command the human had used against this devil-god. Could a human command devilgods? "Please, Ob," Swimmer said. 'Work the stone." Something near worship was in  her eyes as she looked at Swimmer. "You. Want. Ob. Work?" she asked. "You work," Swimmer said. He patted her arm. Again that shy smile touched her mouth. She turned back to the bench and the diamond. "Ob. Work?" she asked. Swimmer looked at his uncle. The man's eyes appeared glazed with shock. "Uncle?" Swimmer said. The Professor shook his head, met Swimmer's eyes with something like attention. "If anyone asks for Jep," Swimmer said, "he went for a walk and left you to supervise Ob cutting the rock. Got that?" The professor gulped. "I quite understand, Conrad. I must dissemble, tell falsehoods. But do hurry. This is most distasteful." Crack! Ob chipped another piece from the diamond. Crack! Swimmer permitted himself a deep breath. He had no time to be afraid or remember that he was a physical coward. The lives of his uncle and this strangely attractive primitive woman depended on him. He composed his features, slipped out of the room and down the side passage to the kitchen. It was empty, but someone had left a pot of water boiling. A spicy steam odor followed him across the room as he left himself out the back door. A soft breeze rustled the pines overhead. He looked up, checked the position of the sun -- still forenoon. There was motion along the shore to his right and left -- two guards. Swimmer forced himself to a casual, strolling pace toward the lake, aiming for a point midway between the guards. A fallen tree reached across the sand into the water there, its dead limbs sprayed out into air and water. He sat down on the sand beside the tree and within inches of the water, tossed a cone into the lake as though in idle play. The guards ignored him after one searching glance. Swimmer waited, wondering why he found Ob so attractive. He decided at last that she was the only woman who'd ever really looked at him without some degree of revulsion. The guards strolled toward him, turned and patrolled away. Both had their backs to him now. Swimmer whipped out his gill mask, brought it down over his head, slipped into the water among the tree's branches, submerged. Years of practice made the action almost noiseless. Slowly, he worked himself out into the lake, staying close to the bottom. His permadry suit billowed around him, and he pulled the hidden cords to tighten it Presently he was in deep water. He twisted his shoe heels. Flippers emerged from the toes. With a strong, steady stroke, he struck out for the opposite shore, guiding himself by the compass on the back of his wristwatch. Strange emotions churned in him, not the least being a sense of cleansing at the realization that he was cutting himself off from his criminal past. The code was explicit: you did not inform on your fellows -- no matter the provocation. But he had to inform. Otherwise a woman who was suddenly very important to him might die. IV W hen Swimmer looked back on it, that afternoon which the authorities referred to as "the day we broke up the Jepson Gang" contained shadows of dreamlike unreality criss-crossed with currents of profound immediacy. There was the comparative quiet of the lake crossing under water. That was routine and hardly counted. He emerged around a point hidden from the island and there was a brief dogtrot through trees and buckbrush to a dirt track, its sides piled high with duff blown there by skimmer fans. The track led to a rural road where he was picked up by a farm truck with outsize aprons and a hover-blast like a hurricane. The face of the farmer failed to register -- but his voice, a whining twang, lingered for years, and there was a dark brown mole over the second knuckle of his right hand. It seemed important to Swimmer, reflecting upon it later, that the farmer was hauling a load of cabbage which smelled of fresh dirt. Worry over Ob kept Swimmer jittery and on the edge of the truck's seat. The farmer called him "neighbor" and complained about the price of fertilizer. The man asked Swimmer only one question: "Where y' going, neighbor?" "To town." Town, according to a sign at its edge, was Ackerville, population #. The farmer dropped Swimmer across the street from a tall building which obviously dated from before the turn of the century: It presented a monotonous face of glass and aluminum. A plaque over the entrance revealed that it was the administrative center for Crane CountyA whistle hooted for noon as Swimmer entered the building and followed arrow signs to the Sheriff's Office. He was to remember the place afterward chiefly for the smell of its halls (pine disinfectant) and the tall, skinny sheriff in a conservative business suit and western hat, who said as Swimmer entered the office: "You'd be Conrad Rumel. Ralph Abernathy just called from his truck and said he brought you into town." The fact that a farmer in Northern Minnesota could identify him that easily helped Swimmer to understand the terrifying efficiency in which he was abruptly immersed. Armed deputies appeared in the door behind him. They appeared surprised that he carried no weapons. He was hustled into a maple-paneled office that looked out through a wall of windows onto the street corner where the farmer had dropped him. Ralph Aberrtathy. There was no face in his memory to go with the name. Swimmer wondered how he could've ridden in the truck with the farmer and not remember the face. Obi The danger! T he Sheriff wanted to know about the Mars diamond. Swimmer had to repeat his story three times for the Sheriff and deputies, another time for a bald, white-bearded fat man identified as the County Prosecutor. They seemed unconcerned about the urgency, kept dragging out new questions. Abruptly, there were many more men in the room. Sheriff and County Prosecutor faded into the background. The newcomers deferred to a Wallace MacPreston, a thin little rail not over five feet two inches tall, iron gray hair and a wide mouth set in a perpetual halfsmile that never reached his large blue eyes. "I am a special assistant to the President," MacPherson said. Swimmer didn't have to ask President of what? MacPreston then launched into his own line of questioning. Some were the same questions the Sheriff and deputies had asked, but MacPreston was also concerned about how Swimmer had sunk the Soviet propaganda ship. Was Swimmer aware he'd cracked the ship in half? Had that been his intention? What had guided him in placement of the explosive charges? How large was each charge? Why? What type of detonator? How far had he retreated to avoid the compression shock? What clues in the ship's design had betrayed its weak points? What particular burner had he chosen to cut open the diamond box? Why had he selected that particular time for the operation? Gradually, Swimmer grew aware of faces in the crowd around MacPreston. One particularly caught his attention: a square-faced hulk of a man at MacPreston's left -- eyes like brown caverns above a hooked nose, dark straw hair wisping away to twin bald spots at the temples. This man betrayed an obvious interest in the details of how Swimmer had sunk the ship. But none of these people appeared to grasp the urgency, the danger to Ob... and Uncle Amino. MacPreston went over Swimmer's story... and over it... and over it... and over it. The position of the diamond box -- how had that guided him in placement of the explosives? "Look!" Swimmer suddenly raged. "Don't any of you realize what'll happen if Jepson's boys find out he's dead?" "Jepson's boys aren't going anywhere," MacPreston said. "But they'll kill Ob... and my uncle," Swimmer said. "Doubtful," MacPreston said. "Now, about this Ob. You say your uncle picked her up with a time machine?" Swimmer had to explain then about the time machine, Jepson's money, about the break-through, tire inaccurate controls. With every new question to answer, he could feel time running out for Ob and his uncle. "Time machine," MacPreston sneered. The hook-nosed man tugged at MacPreston's sleeve. MacPreston looked up, said: "Yeah, Mish?" "Outside," the man said. "Wanta talk." They left the room. M ore time raced past. Swimmer began to lose all hope. MacPreston and his companion returned followed by an Army general and a Ranger colonel. The Colonel was speaking as they entered: "Three hundred and eighty men, counting the singlescooters and manjets, plus the twenty-five flying tanks the Marines are sending; that should do it" "What about him?" the General asked, and he nodded toward Swimmer. "Rumel goes with us," MacPreston said. "You heard what the President said." "We still have three hours of daylight," the Colonel said. "That's plenty of time." "Do you need transportation? the General asked. "We'll use our limousine MacPreston said: "Stay high and out of it until we send the signal," the General said. "I don't suppose you're armored." "A Presidential limousine -- you're joking!" MacPreston said. "Yeah, well I still want you out of it until the shooting's over," the General said. "No telling what armament a mob like that'll have." "What shooting?" Swimmer asked. "We're going in and rescue your uncle and your stone-age woman friend," MacPreston said. He shook his head. "Time machine." Swimmer took two deep breaths, said: "You know where they are?" "We have a plan of the house from the architect," MacPreston said. He started to turn away, looked back at Swimmer. "One of Mish's boys just handed I me the damndest report I've ever seen in my life -- from a Professor Elwin in Cambrai, France. You know this Elwin?" "I know who he is," Swimmer said. And he stilled his own questions in the hope these people would launch themselves into their promised action. "Time machine," MacPreston muttered, but there was awe rather than doubt in his voice. Swimmer felt something grab his left wrist, looked down to find the wrist connected by handcuffs to the right wrist of the hooknosed companion -- Mish. the man said, staring hard at Swimmer. "Wanta talk to you sometime, Rumel, about that Mazatlan operation. For one man, that was a dilly." President. Army. Rangers. Marines. He had the feeling that he was lost in a mad pinball machine, about to be bounced from bumper to bumper while MacPreston shouted. "Tilt! Tilt! Tiltr "Let's roll it,"' Levinsky said. V ' I "'he combined force dove into A the lake island out of the afternoon sun, screaming in like a swarm of angry insects onto an enemy hive. Army armored single-scooters formed a solid ring around the beach perimeter. Marine flying tanks darkened the sky. Leaping Rangers in manjets popped up and down through the pines. To Swimmer, watching from the rear of the limousine which hovered at about seven thousand feet southeast of the scene, the orderly pandemonioum was an insane game. He found it difficult to associate any of his own actions with this result. Had it not been for his fear over Ob, Swimmer knew he'd have found the whole thing ludicrous. The limousine dropped down to three thousand feet, moved in closer. Swimmer glanced at MacPreston on his right. "Are they..." "Dunno yet," MacPreston said. "Pretty good operation, eh, Mish?" "Too damn many of 'em," Levinsky growled. "Wonder they aren't falling all over each other." "What do you think, Rumel?" MacPreston asked. "What?" "Is it a good operation?" They're nuts, Swimmer thought. He said: "I agree with Mr. Levinsky. Jepson couldn't have had more than twenty of his men down there... from my count. I'd have held the armor out farther and gone in with fifty men." "Where would you have hit?" MacPreston asked. "Right on top of the house." Levinsky nodded. The limousine dropped to five hundred feet above the lake's southeast shore. Swimmer could hear scattered rifle shots. Each one sent an agony of fear through him. Ob... A man-made serenity returned to the island, a shocked silence broken only by faint shouts heard across the hush of water. A line of men with their hands in the air was marched onto the island's dock through a cordon of single-scooters. Something buzzed from the limousine's dash. "That's it," MacPreston said. "Let's go." r T'he limousine slanted in to the patch of open ground beside the chalet. Its hover jets raised a cloud of pine-needle duff that settled slowly after the motors were silenced. MacPreston opened his windown, sneezed from the dust. A Ranger captain ran up, saluted, spoke through the window. "All secure, sir. Professor Rumel and the -- ah -- woman are safe in the house." Swimmer allowed himself a deep sigh. "What were the casualties?" Levinsky demanded. "Sir?" The Ranger captain bent to peer in at Levinsky. "The casualties!" Levinsky snapped. "We have ten wounded, sir. Eight from our own cross-fire. Nothing serious, though. And we killed two of the -- uh -- men here. Wounded four others." MacPreston touched a button beside him. The limousine's bubbletop swung back with a hiss of hydraulic mechanism. "Fifty men right on top of the house," Levinsky muttered. "Would've been plenty." "Well, Captain," MacPreston said, "bring Professor Rumel and the woman out here. I'm anxious to meet them." The Ranger captain fidgeted. "Well, sir... you know we had orders to handle her and the Professor with kid gloves and we -- "So bring them out here!" "Sir, the woman refuses to leave her work." "Her work?" "Sir, Professor Rumel says she'll take orders only from his nephew there." The Captain nodded toward Swimmer. Swimmer absorbed this silently, but with a strong upswing of good humor. He liked this Captain. He liked MacPreston. He liked Levinsky and all this damn fool mob of fighting men. Swimmer was surprised to come out of this reverie and find Levinsky and MacPreston staring at him. "What didn't you tell us?" Levinsky asked. About Ob working on the diamond, Swimmer thought. He swallowed, said: "I think she likes me." "So?" MacPreston said. "So that's good," Swimmer said. "From the description, she sounds like a freak," MacPreston said. "What's good about it?" Swimmer suddenly did not like MacPreston. The emotional reaction was apparently quite evident in the glare Swimmer turned on the Presidential assistant. "Maybe the description's wrong," MacPreston said. "Wally," Levinsky said, "why don't you shut up?" I n the embarrassed silence which followed. Swimmer looked at Levinsky, reflecting: Ob a freak? She's no more a freak than I am! So she has extra equipment. In her day, that was an advantage. And it isn't her fault she was snatched out of her day. She didn't ask to be brought here and have people sneer at her. Just because of the way she looks. She's a normal and healthy human female. Probably a lot more normal and healthy than this MacPreston jerk! MacPreston, his face flushed with anger, turned to the Ranger captain, said: "She refuses to come out here?" "Sir, the Professor insists she'll only take orders from his nephew. I'm... I hesitate to use force." "Why?" MacPreston demanded. "Don't you have enough men for the job?" "Sir, there's a bench in there must weigh four hundred pounds. They hid this Jepson behind it. We wanted to move the bench to see if Jepson was really dead. Sir, she lifted that bench with one hand." "A four hundred pound bench? With one hand?" "Yes, sir. Oh... and Jepson was really dead, sir. Skull crushed. According to the Professor, she did that with one blow of her fist." "Her fist?" MacPreston turned his outraged stare onto Swimmer. "Rumel, what kind of female is that in there?" "Just an ordinary, normal woman," Swimmer said. "But -- " "Nothing unusual at all about her!" Swimmer said. "In her day, she may even have been a ninety seven pound weakling. She didn't ask to be brought here, MacPreston. She didn't ask to have people pronounce stupid judgments on her appearance." MacPreston studied Swimmer's face, noting every detail of it from the low hairline to the vanishing chin. Presently he said: "Sorry, Mr. Rumel. My error." Swimmer nodded, thinking : She'll only fake orders from me. A crazy elation filled him. He felt his left wrist being lifted by the handcuffs, looked down to see Levinsky unlocking the cuff. "Mish, what're you doing?" MacPreston asked. "Isn't it obvious?" Levinsky asked. "Now, wait a minute, Mish," MacPreston said. "I sympathize with your request, and the President does, too. But there are large obstacles. This man has committed crimes which no other man -- " "He's the best demolition man I ever met," Levinsky said. "But we have the Russians to think about!" MacPreston said unhappily. "We'll give 'em Jepson," Levinsky said. "Jepson's dead. He can't object... or dispute our story." Swimmer massaged his wrist where the handcuff had been, stared from MacPreston to Levinsky. Their conversation made no sense to him. The Ranger captain, still standing beside the limousine, appeared equally puzzled. "But Rumel has been identified!" MacPreston said. "So?" Levinsky said. "So the Russians'!! know he was involved. What use can he be to you after that? He has a face -- excuse me, Mr. Rumel, but it's true -- that a Minnesota farmer could identify after seeing it only twice in the newspapers. How could you hide that from the Russians?" #'T'Von't be stupid, Wally! I L" never wanted to use him that way. I want his knowledge, his experience. I want him in the academy." "But if we don't hand him over to prosecution with the rest of that mob -- " "What if we claim he was our agent all along? What if we say he infiltrated the Jepson mob for us?" "You said it yourself, Mish. They know who the expert was. They know who sank that boat." "So?" MacPreston frowned. "You heard what the President said," Levinsky said. "If Rumel proves cooperative, and if we deem it advisable after our field investigation -- " "I don't like it." "The Russians won't like it, either. Especially when we give them back their diamond and the Jepson gang, what's left of it." "The boat!" "We'll apologize about the boat." Give them back their diamond. Swimmer thought. Oh, God! And Ohs' in there cutting that rock into little pieces! "I'll have to think about it," MacPreston said. "Discomfitting the Russians would give me just as much pleasure as it would you. But there are other considerations." He looked up at the Ranger Captain. "Well, whafre you standing there for?" "Sir?' "Take us to Professor Rumel and this... woman." "Sir, I've... I think we'd better hurry." "Why?" "Well, sir, it's what I've been trying to... sir, this work she won't leave -- she's cutting up that Mars diamond." Swimmer had not suspected MacPreston could move that fast. The limousine's door was slammed open. MacPreston grabbed his arm, and they were out and running -- up the chalet's front steps with armed men in uniform leaping aside, through the door and into the living room. Overturned chairs, broken windows, a bullet-splintered wall: all testified to the violence of the attack. A cordon of guards was opened to the hall leading into the workroom. MacPreston stopped short. Swimmer bumped into him, was bumped in turn by Levinsky who was right on their heels. "That sound," MacPreston said. Swimmer recognized it. The sound came from the hallway. Crack! Crack! Crack! MacPreston released Swimmer's arm, advanced on the hall like a bull preparing to charge. A nudge from Levinsky sent Swimmer following after. He felt he was being escorted to his execution, and found it odd how their feet kept to the rhythm of Ob's chipping. Into the workroom they paraded. The place appeared untouched by the military's violence except for a shattered window at their left. Professor Amino Rumel stood beside the window. He turned as his nephew entered, said: "Conrad! Thank heaven you're here. She won't do a thing I say." M acPreston stopped a good six feet from where Ob was working. He stared at the square brown figure, noting the intense concentration in every line of her back, the play of muscles. Swimmer and Levinsky stopped behind him. Crack! Crack! The Professor advanced on Swimmer. "There's been the most dreadful confusion," he said. "In heaven's name, Rumel, stop her!" MacPreston rasped. "I've tried," the Professor said. "She pays no attention to me." "Not you!" MacPreston roared Crack! The Professor drew himself up, stared at MacPreston. "And who," he asked, "might you be?" He turned oddly pleading eyes on Swimmer. It was obvious that MacPreston had remembered about the four-hundred-pound bench being lifted with one hand. Swimmer tried to find his voice. His throat felt as though it had been seared with a hot poker. Slowly he brushed past MacPreston, touched Ob's arm. Ob dropped mallet and wedge, whirled on Swimmer with a glare that sent him retreating one quick step. At sight of him, though, a smile stretched her mouth. The smile held a radiant quality that transfixed Swimmer. "Ob, you can stop the work now," Swimmer whispered. Still smiling, she moved close to him, put a calloused forefinger to his cheek in the silent invitation of the cave, testing the emotion she read on his face. There were no scars on the cheek to count his years -- and the skin was so sweetly, excitingly soft... like one of the Cave Mother's babies. Still, he appeared to understand the fingerplay. He drew her aside, brushed a lock of hair away from her cheek, touched her scars. Ob wanted to take his hand, lead him to the bench and show him the work, but she feared to break the spell. "Even with the bullets flying around," Professor Rumel said, "she paid no attention. Just went right on, as though -- " His voice trailed off. Presently he said: "Dear me. She wouldn't know about bullets." Swimmer heard the voice as though it came from a dream. Part of him was aware that MacPreston and Levinsky had gone to the bench, that they were bent over it muttering. What he read on Ob's face made all of that unimportant. The words of the Cave Mother came back to Ob: "#fs all right to play with the males and sample them, but when the time comes for permanent mating, my magic will tell you which one to choose. You'll know at once." How wise the Cave Mother had been to know such a thing, Ob thought. How potent was the Cave Mother's magic! Qwimmer felt that he had come  alive, been reborn here in this room, that behind him lay a whole misplaced segment of nonexistence. He wanted to hug Ob, but suspected she might respond with painful vigor. She'd have to be cautioned about her strength before she broke his ribs. He sensed also that she might not have the inhibitions dictated by current culture. He could imagine her reacting with complete abandon if he should kiss her. Slowly he pulled away. Ob saw his reluctance, thought: He thinks of the devil-gods. We must distract the devil-gods, occupy them with other things. Then perhaps they'll take their thunder-magic elsewhere, and leave mortals to the things which interest mortals. But Swimmer had just begun to think about consequences. He found himself filled with wonder that he had never before worried about the legal consequences of his actions. The Mars diamond had attracted him, he realized, because it was a romp, a lark, a magnificent joke. But after what had happened to the rock, MacPreston and Levinsky would have to throw him to the Russians. They couldn't just hand over a mess of chips and say: "Sorry, fellows... it came apart." Everything had come apart -- and Swimmer was struck speechless bv fear of what might happen to Ob. Consequences no longer could be ignored. Levinsky and MacPreston were engaged in a heated argument. "This is a catastrophe, I tell you!" MacPreston said. "Wally, you're being an ass," Levinsky said. "But what can we tell the Russians?" Exactly, Swimmer thought. What can we tell the Russians? "That's just it," Levinsky said. "This prehistoric female has solved that problem for us. She's made us a propaganda weapon we can parade before the whole world!" "You'd just -- ' "Certainly! There isn't a person in the world who'll fail to get the point." Levinsky lowered his voice. "The uncuttable diamond, don't you see? And we can say we planned it this way. We give 'em the Jepson gang and -- " He pointed to something hidden by MacPreston's body. "... and an object lesson." Cwimmer found himself overcome by curiosity. He headed for the bench, but Ob darted ahead, shouldered MacPreston aside and turned with something glistening in her hands. "Ob. Work," die said. "For... you." With a sense of shock and awe, Swimmer accepted the object from her, understanding then what Levinsky had meant by "object lesson." The thing Ob had fashioned from the Mars diamond was a spearhead -- delicately balanced and with exquisite workmanship. It lay in Swimmer's hands, warm and glittering. "You... want?" Ob asked. Tovr Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we dont think so. We think they'll be better!  Galaxy Publishing Corp. ;#I Hudson Street  Mw York. N.Y. # t # Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I en- close my check or money order for:   # issues for #  # issues for #   Name J  #  Address #   City  State Zip Code   U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. # Please check whether Q new or # renewal.  Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C 'Mel I Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritx Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #I Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mind swap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Devise and Conquer What luck that the democracies were destroying themselves! The only real problem was -- what made them stop? Qergei Vladimirov sat at the  steering wheel near the bustling street corner, conscious of the hurrying crowd, the new-style cars, a huge sign reading "CloseOut Sale," and P. Grulov. P. Grulov was in the passenger's seat beside him. P. Grulov was a small man with thick glasses and an air of absolute rightness. When P. Grulov spoke, subordinates nodded eager agreement. When he commanded, they sprang to obey. When he was irritated, they cringed. Sergei Vladimirov was a subordinate of P. Grulov and P. Grulov was irritated. "Look there," snapped Grulov. "Do you see that across the street? What sort of incompetence is this? We leave you in charge for a year and a half, because we trust you. We raise your pay and rank, heap medals on you, give your family a nice house to live in -- and this is how you repay us! You bunglar, explain that to me!" Grulov angrily pointed across the street. Vladimirov looked where he pointed. "There is a crowd of shoppers, but nothing unusual." "Nothing unusual! Look there! Do you see those two men? There they go, arm-in-arm!" Vladimirov groaned. "I see them." "This is an American city, is it not?" "Yes, comrade." Vladimirov could feel the iron jaws of logic begin to close on him. "And these," said P. Grulov, making a gesture to indicate the crowd, "are Americans, are they not?" "Yes. Yes, that is true." "And there are two kinds of Americans, are there not?" "Well, comrade -- about that." "No evasion. Remember your teachings at the Special School. There are two kinds of Americans. Name them." Vladimirov groped mentally for some way out. "Capitalists and workers, exploiters and -- " P. Grulov's voice carried a bite. "None of that! You evade. I am speaking of your teachings at the Special School." "Oh." "There are two kinds of Americans. Name them." "Exploiters, and -- and exploited." "Very good. Now be more specific." Vladimirov drew a deep breath. "Those of European, and those of African descent." mirov. Why go around the problem? Speak out! Why do you hesitate? Look here, my friend, this is the Americans' problem. You don't have to worry about it. Let them twist and turn. You don't need to find soft words and easy expressions. Not European and African, Vladimirov. White and black. There, now we have it. Think blunty. Be more than blunt. Call a spade a dung-fork. You are a satboteur, Vladimirov. It is your job to throw matches into other peoples' racial gasoline." He eyed Vladimirov sharply. "That is right, is it not?" Vladimirov nodded miserably. "Yes, Comrade Grulov." P. Grulov scowled. "Or am I being too subtle for you? Let me be more plain about it. America, Vladimirov, is made up of many races. Ideally they will all separate like a pack of mixed dogs and cats and tear each other to pieces. Divide and conquer, you see?" Vladimirov gripped the steering wheel, and nodded. P. Grulov went on. "At home, there are some who disagree. I am happy for you that you are not one of them, Vladimirov." Vladimirov swallowed nervouslyGrulov said, "Ideally, from the Americans' viewpoint, these different races will all say, 'I'm American. Nobody better try to turn me against my country, or I'll smash his head." Vladimirov nodded dutifully. "Yes, that is what the Americans want." "You realize," said P. Grulov, "that they have been very fortunate. They have had a very large measure of that. We are alone here, and I can say it. They have been truly 'the melting pot of races.' You know that?" "I know it." "Let us be very realistic, Vladimirov. How have they been able to do this? First, they have had 'a great deal of work that needed to be done. Second, they had a frontier. Third, they had a philosophy. The philosophy struggles on under great ideological handicaps; tile frontier is gone, except for a little piece here and there, mostly in Alaska; and the abundance of work, Vladimirov, is running out, thanks to the new machinery and the automation. The melting pot was a blast furnace, in tiie memory of living men. What is it now? All that is left is the remaining heat from the past, and the American philosophy which tries to keep it going. It is not enough I am talking to you very frankly. Ideas are essential, but they alone are not enough. They must be implemented, made real, provided with actual material means. This American melting-pot has been a real thing, a very real frustration to us. It is a cliche, it is hackneyed, it is a set of words used so often the meaning is all but rubbed off, but nevertheless, it has been a real thing. But now the heat is almost out. Now is our chance! Now is the time to drive in the wedges! Now is the time to find the planes of cleavage and split all these races wide open. American against American, Vladimirov. And what do you do but slump here with your hands on the wheels and mutter excuses! Speak up for yourself! What are your plans? How will you make up for this disgraceful defeat, it we permit you to try? Do you think we have grown so broad-minded we will not punish incompetents and worse? Do you know how quickly you can lose your rewards? Speak up!" "Comrade -- " "Why have you failed? Look!" He pointed: "And look there!" He pointed again. "Don't sit there staring at the instruments! Look out! See where I point!" Miserably, Vladimirov raised his head, and looked out vaguely at the shoppers going by. Furiously, P. Grulov commanded. "Focus your eyes! Look at these people. Now, you see what I mean?" Tfladimirov forced himself to V obey, and gradually he saw. "There," said Grulov, "go two young men, talking intently. They have some plan, perhaps for a sale of merchandise. They are making a 'deal.' To use your weak-kneed phrase, Vladimirov, one is 'of European descent,' and the other is 'of African descent' Right?" Vladimirov groaned. "No. You don't understand -- " "I understand well enough. It is your job to keep them at each other's throats. You have the money, you have the training, you have the false identity, so your acts can never be traced back to us -- " "Comrade -- " "And I come over here, to check discreetly, and what do I find? Here they are, walking around in each other's arms! There go three women, chattering like hens! There is no selfconsciousness, no stiffness! Look over there! This time, two men, well-dressed, talking casually. And, great ghost of -- " "Comrade," pleaded Vladimirov, "I meant well. But a terrible misfortune befell us." "Horrible! Horrible!" roared Grulov. "This time it is a whole group, all going off on a picnic together! And no one is doing anything!" "I couldn't help it," Vladimirov was pleading. "Shut up!" snapped Grulov, abruptly getting control of himself. "This is incredible! I can see what you are up against. But it is a very simple matter to fix, just the same." "No," said Vladimirov earnestly, "that's just it. It isn't simple. It's tricky. It's so subtle you don't know who's behind it, or if anybody is behind it. It's a very trucky, underhanded, peculiarly American -- " "Sh-h!" Grulov looked around. "No need to get hysterical, comrade. We have our duty, and it is very simple, and we will do it. Now, at the moment, I don't see any suitable opportunity, but there will be one, and I will show you. I have experience at this. Start the car." Vladimirov shook his head resignedly, and did as he was told. P. Grulov said, "There is a simple little key word, Vladimirov, and if you only use it at the right time, you can set off an explosion. There are, in fact, several key words that can be fired off in various directions, like rockets. But for this present problem, one specific key word in particular is suitable. I will show you how to use it. Be ready to drive off at once. This is a very crude technique, Vladimirov, but it is, at least, sure to work." Vladimirov braced himself to make one more attempt to explain the trouble, but Grulov said, "Ah, here we are. Splendid." A tall, extremely dark young man was coming down the sidewalk. Grulov threw his coat in the back seat, yanked his tie to one tide, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, sprang out, took his hat off and put it on aslant. He swaggered across the sidewalk. In a loud voice, he said, "Out of my way you -- " And then P. Grulov used the key word. The young man glanced at him in puzzlement, then smiled uncertainly, "I am dark, aren't I?" Grulov looked momentarily stunned. Recovering fast, he shouted, "Tell me to get off the sidewalk, will you, you -- " In quick succession, he spat out halfa-dozen powerful adjectives, and tacked a key word on the end. The young man looked at him blankly, then shook his head in wonderment and shoved past. Grulov shouted insults after him, freely mixed with key words. Nothing happened. Now genuinely furious, Grulov accosted an extremely dark young matron, screaming insults at her. An elderly red-faced man, chewing tobacco and carrying a large cane, reversed the cane, shot it out, caught Grulov around the neck by the crook and yanked him away from the woman, who walked past with her nose in the air. Grulov, rubbing his neck and staggering, stared after the woman, unable to speak. The crowd moved on again. A burly man paused to snap at Grulov, "Just where in the hell have you spent the last year and a half?" Another passerby said menacingly, "Better go home and sleep it off, buddy. The market in used nightmares is damned low around here right now." A third, an imposing man with broad shoulders and pale complexion, gripped Grulov by the shirt front and growled, "Use that word on me and see what happens." A fourth bystander, who had been lounging against a telephone pole, now straightened up and growled. "Seems to me there was something funny about his accent. Let's hear him say all that over again." Vladimirov set the parking brake and shot out of the car. Explaining earnestly that his friend didn't mean it, that he had these spells now and then, that he was sick, that he was under the influence of strong drink, and that he wouldn't do it again, Vladimirov got Grulov safely back into the car. ' I 'he people on the sidewalk followed his departure with hard glares, as Vladimirov shot away from the curb and got lost in the traffic. When they were well away from the place, on the way back to his apartment, Vladimirov stopped at a drugstore for iodine, liniment, sore-throat remedies and other supplies. Then he parked his car in the lot near the apartment, helped Grulov, who had yet to say a word, into the elevator, then down the corridor and into the apartment. There he painted Grulov's various scratches, and gave him a large spoonful of the sore-throat remedy. Grulov gagged and choked. "Phew." He sat up, looked around, and whispered, "Incredible. Who would have believed it?" Then he sank back dizzily. Vladimirov loosened Grulov's shirt, picked up the bottle of liniment, and eyed the label, which read: "... its soothing warmth penetrates deep into sore and aching muscles... Vladimirov poured some into his hands, winced, and went to work on the dazed Grulov with it. Grulov suddenly got his voice back: "What are you doing to me? Where am I? Nothing you can do will make me talk!" "Steady, comrade," said Vladimirov, his hands burning, "You are among friends." It was some moments before the situation became clear to Grulov, who suffered further temporary confusion as Vladimirov explained that the liniment was really all right, and showed Grulov the label, with the words "for external use only," and the warning that it was illegal to drink it. Grulov wonderingly stared at the label, massaged his throat and sat up. He straightended his glasses regretfully. "I apologize to you, Comrade Vladimirov. You truly had difficulties. I see that now." "It has been very discouraging," Vladimirov agreed. "It is incredible. I do not look forward to reporting this. You, at least, were spared that problem, since there was to be no contact -- nothing that could possibly be traced." "For which, frankly, I was grateful. And yet, very uneasy. Word of this should have been sent back at once." "Yes." Grulov got up gingerly. "Fantastic. Our plans plainly count on them to fly at each other's throats. Instead, here they are, going around arm-in-arm. Yet it looked so promising a little while ago! The melting-pot must have had more heat in it than we thought. Look here, Vladimirov, what did it? Was it the civilrights movement?" Vladimirov shook his head sadly, thinking of the shock still ahead for Grulov. Grulov said hopefully, "Something purely local, perhaps? Something others of your group may not have run into?" "No, comrade. It came out very quietly. With no fanfare. It was very subtle. Very underhanded: Maybe it hit me first, I don't know. But it's widespread now." Grulov said, with a sort of nervous dread, "It wasn't -- ah -- ah -- 'brotherly love,' was it?" "Not that I know of." "Government action! The courts, perhaps?" "No. All these things had their effect, but it wasn't this that hurt." "An 'executive order,' perhaps ?" "No, comrade." "Some new 'grass-roots' movement?" "No." "Was it the churches, then?" "Not that I know of. As I say, all these things had their influence. They were troubles to us. But we were making progress anyway." P Grulov frowned. "This is a very serious problem. Vladimirov. Here we have an ideal situation from our viewpoint. Splits and divisions in our opponent s camps are to be encouraged -- quietly and unobtrusively, of course. This was made to order for us." Exasperatedly, Grulov said. "With automation, with nine jobs for ten people, we could count on it to get worse." Plaintively, he added. "Is that not true, Vladimirov?" Vladimirov said patiently, "It is true, Comrade Grulov." "And what has happened? How has this great store of trouble and embarrassment in our opponent's camp vanished into thin air? How has it just disappeared?" Gently, Vladimirov said, "I understand your feelings, Comrade Grulov. It is very sad." Grulov blew his nose and sat I down. "You are sparing me some I blow, Vladimirov. All right. Let's have it. Obviously they have outgeneraled us. How did they do it?" ' Vladimirov reached into the paper bag from the drugstore. Grulov eyed the. iodine, liniment, and sore-throat medicine, and winced. Vladimirov handed him a waspwaisted bottle with a shiny goldedged green label bearing in large and beneath the slogan "Suddenly you don't burn!" Squinting at this, Grulov discovered that the bottle held soand-so many ounces, contained such-and-such chemical constituents and was a long-lasting quick-acting lotion for the "positive protection of sunburn, by nature's own tested remedy." Grulov put the bottle down and looked up questioningly at Vladimirov, who handed him a second bottle like the first, except and had the slogan, "When sunburn is no problem." Grulov felt a pulse beat at his forehead, swallowed hard, and set the second bottle by the first. "Surely, Vladimirov -- " Vladimirov shook his head. "Steady, Comrade. This is the way the Americans do things. They must have figured the whole thing was basically caused by differences in the amount of heat and sunlight over a long period -- so they worked out a way to control the process at will." "You don't mean to tell me -- " "I'm not trying to tell you anything, comrade, except that this whole problem, that promised to blow their whole country up into one huge anarchy, has all been kicked out from under our feet by a couple bottles of sun-cream." "Are you sure it works?" "Try it." P. Grulov sat and glared at die bottles as if they were enemies. Finally he reached out, and tering to himself, he rolled up his sleeves, poured some into his hand, and smeared it on his forearm. Vladimirov handed him a paper towel, and Grulov wiped off the excess. Gradually, his forearm came to look as if he had spent a solid summer on the beach. Grulov smeared on some more cream. Then another dose. Grimly determined to test the potential of the stuff, he repeated the treatment till his arm was blacker than anything Vladimirov had seen before. A long session at the sink then convinced Grulov that soap didn't budge it. Vladimirov held out the UNAfter half-a-dozen applications of this, he was back where he had started from. V ladimirov said apologetically, "You can imagine what it was like, Comrade. The capitalists have, of course, been selling sun-tan cream for a long time. There has even been stuff that would give you a tan without the sun. This cream here was advertised as operation on 'Nature's own principle of solar protection.' It sold in huge quantities. There's another version, Naturally sportsmen smeared it on good and thick. Then, comrade, if some other sportsman who didn't know about it came along and used a key-word, he got flattened. Meanwhile, young people took to using it as a prank. The demand was unprecedented. ing at around seventeen-fifty a bottle." "I can see you certainly had a problem," admitted Grulov, staring at the bottle. "What was there to do? It went from bad to worse, until the situation became so confused that if I used a key-word in a mixed crowd, I never knew who would hit me." Grulov shook his head gloomily. Vladimirov added wearily, "Undoubtedly, comrade, it was the cursed 'profit motive' at work. Our loss is some capitalist's gain." "It seems incredible that such disastrous things could happen without reaching our ears." "Would members of our provocation units break discipline to report? And then, who wished to be the one to bear the bad news? Worse yet, seeing it from the outside, who would really know what was happening until it was too late?" For a considerable time, Vladimirov and Grulov sat in gloom, then at last, Vladimirov said hesitantly, "They still have unemployment." "It isn't enough. In a struggle like this, any advantage to either side tilts the balance, and tends to accumulate new advantages. Most of the energy the Americans #S# wasted in this problem is now freed. They can apply it to other things. We must have some compensating advantage, or -- " Vladimirov snapped his fingers. He rummaged through a bureau drawer, and handed Grulov a large brown pill-bottle. Grulov scowled. "And what is this?" "We have, at times, had -- ah -- difficulties with certain of our Asian comrades." Grulov winced. "But what has this bottle to do with that?" "Read the label." before conferences." "What's this?" said Grulov. "They came out with it a few months ago. The Americans use these pills at contract talks." "What can we do with them? And how do you pronounce that trade name?" "Well, as for what we can do, I was thinking if we invited the Chinese comrades to a banquet, ground up several dozen of these pills and put them in the food... The name on the bottle is pronounced 'Sweet Reason,' comrade." " 'Sweet Reason,' " murmured Grulov. He looked from the bottle to Vladimirov. "You are not fooling me? These will work?" "I understand that they have worked for coal miners and operators, longshoremen and ship omners and even for the executives and workers at a factory out west, where they had been bombing and shooting each other for seventeen years." He hesitated. "Of course, as for whether they will work on the Chinese comrades -- " "Anything would be worth trying," said Grulov. "They cost a dollar eightynine cents a bottle. I think there are fifty pills to a bottle." G rulov dug into his pocket. "Get a big supply. You may have to go from store to store. Several dozen bottles would not be too many." Vladimirov started out. "Wait," said Grulov, "there is one other thing." "Yes, comrade?" "The Americans seem very thorough in the drug line. And -- there is no escaping it -- I s till have to report that we have failed here. Is there anything that you could -- say -- squirt at your superior, and then he is reasonable? Feeding him pills might be too slow." Vladimirov looked intent. "I hadn't thought of that." P. Grulov lay back, and winced with pain. "Think about it now," he said testily. "Keep your eyes open, for a change." Vladimirov blinked. "Yes, Comrade Grulov." "Don't just stand there," snapped P. Grulov, getting back into form. "Move." Vladimirov gently shut the door. If, he told himself fervently, he only could find such a drug, he knew exactly who to try it out on and intrigue on the fantastic RiverworW! by Philip Jose Farmer Exciting novelet# of a galaxywide war by C. C. MacApp Sam Markowitz's latest article in his fascinating now series, science article by R. S. Behardson and many more, at hi the May Worhh of Tomorrow -- on solo now! ttT got to raise," said Robert ("Bob") Johnson. He looked me hard in the eye. "It's going to cost you another two grand to see 'em." Bluff? A murmur riffled around the moon-igloo. Henry ("Hen") Titus scratched his three-days-old beard thoughtfully. Old Bill Moss sucked on his dead pipe. A. M. ("Mel") Forester and Warren ("Two Moose") Burgess exchanged questioning looks. I stole a glance at the anomal us -- or, as the clever little instruction booklet explains it, "fishy" -- motion gauge on my Marlowe reel. The needle was all the way down flat, below the zero mark. My eyes went back at the table. The atmosphere was tense. There were chips worth sixteen thousand new dollars in the pot, and you can buy a lot of eggs for your beer with that kind of money. Everybody was long gone except me and Bob. What he had showing was a pair of tens, against my nine and king of clubs. I took another peek at my hole cards, just to be sure, and they hadn't changed; ten, jack and queen of clubs. On the other hand, two thousand dollars might be the difference between meeting my tax bill and going to jail come next April. I took a deep breath. "Okay," I said. "It's one hell of a way to catch fish, but I #I call you." A t precisely that instant my special automatic recoil hooksetting Marlowe marvelrod straightened out with a whi-i-ing and the reel siren started howling like a wolf that's latched onto a big moose and wants help. The scene in the igloo came apart. The poker game was forgotten. I jumped straight up and darn near put a hole in the roof, what with that weird light gravity you keep forgetting about. Mel and Two Moose grabbed their poles and started checking gauges. Bob Johnson said a word that I won't repeat here. You wouldn't think a Texas oilman could get that involved in a poker game; sixteen thousand wasn't much more than a shoeshine tip in his books. Old Bill Moss was the only one who kept his head. By the time I came down he was standing over my rod, cool as a Canadian trout watching the dials go around. He looked up at me and took the pipe out of his mouth. "Might jes' be a big 'on, " he says calmly. "I set yore reel to keep three pounds drag on the line. You figurin' on playin' it by hand?" I started to say something, but then it leaped and we all crowded against the wall of the igloo to see. It went up on a long curve, the kind of curve that these scientist fellows call a parabola -- anyhow, that's what the computer engineer called it when I ran off the film from the rod on the flight back to Earth. I asked him what that meant, and he wiggled his hands like all the spaceboys do when they're talking about sex. That was sort of how I felt watching it jump, too, if you follow me. At least I guess I used to feel that way about girls. It soared up past the point where you thought sure it would have to start falling now, and on up out of the crater shadow into that serrated, fish-knife sunlight and glittered all red and gold. It kept on going up until, for a shake there, I thought it might be going to hit escape velocity and get away from me into outer space. And then at last it started to come down again. When it smacked the moondust, Old Bill squinted at the spot carefully and said. "Might jes' be a record fish, that." It was. A half hour later I finally landed my piece of moonshine, and back in the igloo stretched it out on the table alongside twenty-seven inches of tape from the hilt of Mel's rod -- a good three inches better than the old record. That was held, as every real fisherman knows, by Frank R. Thornton, and he got it on the very first moonshine ever caught, back in #. Bob broke out the whiskey. Co there you have the true story  of how I caught the world's -- no, better say the universe's -- record moonshine. Needless to say, it was the thrill of my life. Moonshining is undoubtedly the most exciting and challenging of all sports. Only thirty-five of these strange creatures have been caught to date, and any moonshine is a trophy fish, not to speak of the magnificent specimen mounted in the place of honor over my fireplace in Wikkinikkiw, Michigan. Of course, some people don't think a moonshine is a fish, rightly speaking. But I've got my answer ready for that one. When the biologist who came up from Michigan State to see mine shook his head and said no, no, it was a gobbledegook-snark, or whatever it is biologists call moonshines, I lugged my tackle box in from the back porch and without a word showed him a red and yellow Lucky #. He looked at it and then at my fish on the wall and then back at the Lucky #, and after a while he went away looking vexed. There's no denying the resemblance, like it or not -- and mostly, I understand, the scientist fellows don't. That's not the only thing they don't like about moonshines, either. But this isn't any scientific study. What I aim to do is tell you, speaking as one fisherman to another, something about moonshining as a sport: how it got started, what tackle and techniques to use and things like that. You may never have a chance to use the information -- trips to the moon are a mite expensive yet -- but you can always dream, can't you? And you'll be ready, just in case. Last spring I wouldn't have given a wormy bluegill for my chances, but now I've got twenty-seven inches of moonshine over my fireplace. The universal record. What did it weigh? People are always asking me that, and I expect you're no different. It isn't an easy question to answer though, because, when you think about it, you'll see it all depends on where you do the weighing. On the ship coming home my moonshine weighed exactly as much as I did, that is to say, nothing. But on Jupiter it would tip the scales at better than seventy pounds, or that was what my engineer friend claimed. I got to considering, and asked him to make up this chart, which I'll simply pass along to you to look over: Record LargoRecord CutRecord month Bass throat Trout Moonshine Moon # # # Mercury # # # Venus # # # Earth # #. #. Mars # # # Jupiter # # Saturn # # # Uranus # # Neptune # # # Pluto t The scientist fellows don't seem to know much about Pluto. T et's start with the history of moonshining, then. Mostly. I reckon we don't know how our favorite sports got started. Probably the first fisherman looked more like a bear than he did like you or me. Who's to say? But we can say what the first man who fished for moonshines looked like, and exactly how he came to do it. He was, and is, Frank R. Thornton, a vice-captain on the Mars run these days, and I guess you'd have to call him one of the universe's dedicated fishermen. The story goes that one day back in '#, as he was making repairs on a moontractor, his right hand picked up a pair of pliers and before he knew what it was doing, had turned a cotter pin into a pretty good double-barbed hook. Any real fisherman has had similar experiences. I myself am forever doodling musky on business papers, for instance. Well, once he saw what he'd done Frank was hooked, so to speak. Remember, he'd been up there the better part of a year, nine whole months without any fishing. The next thing was line. In no time at all the supply chest was minus one spool of fine grade copper wire. So then he only needed rod, reel, something to use for bait, and something to fish in. Once you've seen the way moondust ripples under convection currents you'll understand that this last requirement, something to fish in, wasn't as much of a problem as it might seem. And any true fisherman has looked over a mudpuddle critically once or twice in his life. So much for that. What about bait? As Frank pointed out later on, success in fishing is nine-tenths a matter of what you put on the hook -- as the amateur with his electronic iunk learns when he's standing next to the old pro who's pulling them in on manual tackle. But Frank hadn't any idea what he was fishing for, and consequently no notion of all of what to use, even supposing he'd had some handy. Which he didn't. You could dig around on the moon for a long time without coming up with an earthworm, you know. Still, he'd gone too far to quit now. His fisherman's blood was up. After giving the matter a little thought, Frank decided his best bet was snatch fishing. AT aybe I'd better explain what that is for the benefit of the young and ignorant. In snatch fishing the fisherman ties a weight to the end of a line and attaches a bunch of hooks, usually three or four, a few inches apart down by the weight. He swings the line good -- you can tell an expert by the fact that he spins the line against the heel of his hand, while your inexperienced fisherman goes at it like a cowboy roping steers -- and throws it out behind a school of fish, or into a likely spot. Then he yanks the line hard through the school and hopes like high heaven that he foul hooks something good for supper. That was what Frank decided to do. It took care of rod, reel and bait at one blow. Only, of course -- and that was the big point! -- he didn't really expect to catch anything. He was just a badly frustrated fisherman pretending for all he was worth. Consequently, when something hit his line and started in fighting like a five pound sandbass, he thought that was just pretended too, a good dream. When it leaped and he saw it, a living, twenty-four inch, red and gold Lucky #, complete with eyespot, he thought the moon had finally gotten to him: lunacy, you know. But when he showed his moonshine to the rest of the boys and they saw it too -- unh! He didn't know what to think. I've heard that particular exploration party didn't accomplish even close to the amount of mapping it was supposed to do. They didn't catch any more moonshines, either, of course. Doubting biologists to the contrary, the technique of moonshining boils down to one curious fact: though you've got to make the effort, you can't catch a moonshine if you intend to. whatever you like, that's how it works. For my part, I've had a rather similar experience with lots of earthside fish. It's only after you've lost all faith and keep on throwing out that plug out of sheer contrariness that they decide to hit. And why not? might be a firstclass survival trait. The biologists ought to Hunk about that some. A nyhow, you have to catch your moonshine by accident, so to speak. But you still have to be working at it. This means that a girlie magazine or deck of cards can be an important addition to your tackle box, more important than that fifteen-dollar Reflex-revolvo spinner, for example. You set out your line -- and what a whopping cast you can make on the moon! Someday I'm going to take my fly rod up there -- and then sit down to a little serious poker to put you in the right frame of mind, preoccupied, but still interested in fishing. The rest may not be as much luck as you'd suppose. Every now and then I wonder how many of my record moonshine's twenty-seven inches are due to the fact that I was getting way over my head. A word of caution here: certain types of minds simply aren't suited to moonshining. If you're the sort of fellow who in betting this year's tax money away is likely to think, Now, surely this will make me preoccupied enough to catch' and so on -- give it up, friend. You'll never land your moonshine. Whether thinking like that is a sign of intelligence or of just plain deviousness, doesn't matter; it's no good either way. Most biologists' minds seem to work in some such a complicated and fishless way, I might add. Tough luck. For them -- good for fishermen. As for tackle, you'll need the new automatic equipment. I know, I know. I hate it too. You can tell a fisherman from a boob by the fact that the latter has more brains in the butt of his rod than under his fly-covered hat. Earthside, I use, as a rule, a rebuilt antique Pfleuger bait caster, with the antibacklash ripped out, and one of the old fiberglass rods. But on the moon you need the fancy equipment to do some of your thinking for you. At the least, you need either lures (and moonshines will apparently take any kind of lure except a Lucky #) with proximity hooking, or a hooksetting rod. Even with all the dude equipment, though, you can always tell the expert from the amateur. As Old Bill Moss pointed out to me, the amateur is likely to set his pole with a terrific curve in it, bent through maybe ten degrees pi arc, under the mistaken notion ttiat the bigger recoil will set the hook solidly. What it's more Kkely to do is tear the poor fish's jaw off, of course. I bent the tip of my marvelrod over an inch and a half to two inches, no more. Bill bent his less than an inch. B ut the amount and kind of equipment you can take is pretty much limited by the weight restrictions on your spaceship. I had to leave a tacklebox full of tested-and-true fish-getters behind, in the first mate's locker at the Cape -- where, I'm happy to say, they were waiting safe and sound on my return. But it was that or the whiskey. This brings me to another big point. Probably the most difficult thing about moonshining, next to achieving the right frame of mind, is getting there. Compared to the moon, Lost Lake with its two-hundred pound trout is in your back yard. Basically, you can go to the moon in one of three ways. First, you can join the space service, which is how Frank Thornton did it. Of course, you have to be born with the right aptitudes and to start working at it young, or you're out of luck. Or second, you can belong to one of the seven sportsman's clubs that make yearly expeditions to the moon, like Bob Johnson, Hen Titus, Mel Forester and Warren Burgess -- or else be the club's fishing pro. like Old Bill Moss. That way you don't have to have your the rest of them, just expert knowledge. Third and last, but of course not least, you can work your pants to the bone for some politician on the Space Committee, on a dog's mess and breaks his hip, for example, your buddy in Washington will call you at #:# a.m. and say: "Hank, I hear there's a vacancy on the next moonrocket for one fisherman, fare prepaid and uncancellable. Somehow I don't think anybody but you is going to have the right clearances to get aboard, you understand me? But you'll have to make it to the Cape by noon." Then the only thing that really holds you up is explaining to the Bttle woman that this time she doesn't have to pack you a lunch. Arguing with a sleepy woman is like dragging a big catfish out of the weeds. I think most of us will agree that my third route to the moon is the most practical one, all things considered. True, you're may never slip up. But even if he doesn't you're still helping to promote democracy, which is something we sportsmen especially should be concerned about. And there's always a chance, friend. Anything can happen. In that case, you too might find yourself, beyond your wildest dreams, on tomorrow's moonrocket, Marlowe marvelrod (or whatever you make is) in hand, mapping out strategy. I've got a record twenty-seven inches ol moonshine on my wall, but to a fisherman with the right frame of mind the sky's the Emit. Rumor has it Frank Thornton is trolling a Mobius spoon on the Mars run. I for one wouldn't like to bet against him. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. 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Through a series of carefully planned assignments, you learn as you write -- guided by our own specially organized textbooks. Your assignments are painstakingly edited and revised by our staff of instructors, themselves all professional writers. Under our supervision, an instructor works with you by mail, much as a producer or editor works with an established writer. Do you have an aptitude for writing? To help you (and us) decide whether you've got the stuff to be a writer, we have worked up a revealing aptitude test. The coupon below will bring you a copy, along with a #-page School brochure. If your test indicates aptitude, you are eligible to enroll in the School. You are, however, under no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport, Connecticut I am interested in finding out whether I have an aptitude for writing. Please mail me, without obligation, a copy of your writing aptitude test and information about the courses you offer. Mr. Mf s Age M ss (please print) Street City Zone County State . Accredited by Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council.  galaxy June T# # i MiyilTrCI guaranteed for You've seen it in the Movies Famous Plug in and flip on the switch. The disc revolves at just the right speed -- transfixes your subject(s). Their attention is riveted to the powerful hypnotic pattern. Your every word is now more meaningful -- more effective for this professional machine greatly adds to your prestige, creates hypnotic expectancy, increases your success. A marvelous aid for hypnotizing others and for self-hypnosis. Has #" hypnotic disc, switch, handle, instructions and a high quality, silent, trouble-free motor Revealingly tells guarded secret techniques to cause the "Indirect Trance". Subjects are hypnotized without their knowledge. Learn amazing shortcuts, make hypnosis fast and easy. Discover the safe, fast "nerve pressure" technique... the "failing back" test, others. 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Unbreakable vinyl, # rpm Extended Play -- "Kit" is complete with Satisfaction Guaranteed or Money Back! # Madison Ave., New York, # NY Send the following on an Unconditional # Day Money Back Guarantee, t enclose  , you pay the postage. Chart sent with orders for # or more. Name Address. City .State. Qaiao Galaxy is published in French and Italian. The U. S. Edition is published in Brailie, This Edition is aiso published in Living Tape by Services for the Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. EdHor Science Editor Associate Editor by Hayden Howard by Robert Silverberg by Frank Herbert by Arthur Porges by Sonya Dorman by John Brunner by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Posessions. Elsewhere #. Secondclass postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. Ail stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similiarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.SA. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. r Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Looking Ahead to # 'T'he other day we got a note from Horace Gold, enclosing a ten-year-old clipping with the suggestion that we might want to write an editorial about it. He was right. We do. The clipping came from Coronet, issue of October, #; it was an article entitled# Look at Your Life -- Ten Years from Today. It was written by Leo Cherne, executive director of the Research Institute of America, "as told to" Ray Joseph -- meaning that Joseph did the writing on the basis of what Cherne predicted. What did Cherne predict? "The sun will heat your house, a jet engine will power your two cars -- and atomic radiation will preserve food in a kitchen that disappears," said Coronet's blurb. So far the score is zero; but as we go deeper into the article we come across a lot of better guesses. TransAtlantic jet travel in five hours? Right on the nose. Wide use of contraceptive pills? Check. Color television sets costing # or less? Very close; they're coming onto the market now. Short of reprinting the whole article, it is hard to select the exact predictions that succeeded and those that failed and compile a box score, but in general for every guess that was wrong about the'technology of "tomorrow", there was at least one other guess that was amazingly right. These mat minds tvere Rosicrucians. 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Name AddressCity State Solar-heated houses, jet automobile engines, nuclear-powered ocean liners -- wrong; but plastic back-yard swimming pools, "increasingly complex business machines" and space vehicles in orbit, absolutely right. Mr. Cherne looks very good as a prophet... until you come to consider another class of predictions made in his # forecast. For example, these : "The most profound change to take place in the world will be the elimination of world war... You will have peace." "By #, the U.S. will have come successfully through a depression in which # will have been unemployed." "Strikes will be rare." A s anyone who reads the daily newspapers knows, we don't have peace, we didn't have the depression... and we do have strikes. Oh, that we do; lots of them. What went wrong? Perhaps the difference is as simple as the difference between the "hard" sciences and the "soft" ones -- technology is intrinsically predictable, social changes are intrinsically not. But even if we don't have a science of social behavior, it is useful to try to observe patterns if they exist; and there is a glimmering of a pattern here. Why do we not have peace? Because the nations of the world decline to give up any meaningful part of their Godgiven right to do whatever they, in their own sole judgment, think they might enjoy. Why do we still have staggeringly costly strikes? Because trade unions and employers behave no more sensibly than foreign ministers. But why did we not have the depression? Because as soon as one threatened, and each time one threatened, government spending and government tax relief was increased to flood the economy with money. Of Cherne's social predictions that went wrong, two rested on his opinion that large groups would order their activities on the basis of long-range results. He was optimistic, and he was wrong. The third rested on his estimate that a similar large group could not respond quickly enough to a short-range challenge. 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A Correspoudenee Institution Please send me. free of cost or obligation, your sample lesson and illustrated booklet 'Oportunities in Accounting," AddreH..., County... City...State Zip No...  Workimr  Occupation Houn A.M P.M. I too The Opfimen could Idfl any man in the world, or ail of them. But Something killed OptimenI '"Tiey would schedule a rain for this morning, Dr. Thei Syengaard thought. Rain always aiakes the parents uneasy... not to mention what it does to the doctors. A gust of winter wetness rattled against the window behind his desk. He stood, thought of muting the windows, but the Durants -- this morning's parents -- might be even more alarmed by the unnatural silence on such a day. Dr. Svengaard stepped to the window, looked down at the thronging foot traffic -- day shifts going to their jobs in the megalopoHs, night shifts headed toward their tumbled rest. There was a sense of power and movement in the comings and goings of the people in spite of their troglodyte existence. Most of them, he knew, were childless Sterries... sterile. They came and they went, numbered, but numberless. He had left the intercom open to his reception room and he could hear his nurse, Mrs. Washington, distracting the Durants with questions and forms. Routine. That was the watchword. This must all appear normal, casual routine. The Durants and all the others fortunate enough to be chosen and to become parents must never suspect the truth. Dr. Svengaard steered his mind away from such thoughts, reminding himself that guilt was not a permissible emotion for a member of the medical profession. Guilt led inevitably to betrayal... and betrayal brought messy consequences. The Optimen were exceedingly touchy where the breeding program was concerned. Such a thought with its hint of criticism filled Svengaard with a momentary disquiet. He swallowed and allowed his mind to dwell on the Folk response to the Optimen: They are the power that loves us and cares for us. With a sigh, he turned away from the window, skirted the desk and went through the door that led via the ready room to the lab. In the ready room, he paused to check his appearance in the mirror; gray hair, dark brown eyes, strong chin, high forehead and rather grim lips beneath an aqualine nose. He'd always been rather proud of the remote dignity in his appearancecut and had come to terms with the need of adjusting the remoteness. Now, he softened the set of his mouth, practiced a look of compassionate interest. Yes, that would do for the Durants -- granting the accuracy of their emotional profiles. XTurse Washington was just  ushering the Durants into the lab as Dr. Svengaard entered through his private door. The skylights above them drummed and hissed with the rain. Such weather suddenly seemed to fit the room's mood: washed glass, steel, plasmeld and tile... all impersonal. It rained on everyone. And all humans had to pass through a room such as this... even the Optimen. Dr. Svengard took an instant dislike to the parents. Harvey Durant was a lithe six-footer with curly blond hair, light blue eyes. The face was wide with an apparent innocence and youth. Lizbeth, his wife, stood almost the same height, equally blonde, equally blue-eyes and young. Her figure suggested valkyrie robustness. On a silver cord around her neck she wore one of the omnipresent Folk talismen, a brass figure of the female Optiman, Calapine. The breeder cult nonsense and religious overtones of the figures did not escape Dr. Svengaard. He suppressed a sneer. The Durants were parents, however, and robust -- living testimony to the skill of the surgeon who had cut them. Dr. Svengaard allowed himself a moment of pride in his profession. Not many people could enter the tight little group of subcellular engineers who kept human variety within bounds. Nurse Washington paused in the door behind the Durants, said; "Dr. Svengaard, Harvey and Lizbeth Durant." She left without waiting for acknowledgements. Nurse Washington's timing and discretion always were exquisitely correct. "The Durants, how nice," Dr. Svengaard said. "I hope my nurse didn't bore you with all those forms and questions. But I guess you knew you were letting yourselves in for all that routine when you asked to watch. Didn't you?" "We understand," Harvey Durant said. And he thought: Asked us to watch, indeed! If this old fake thinks he can pull his little tricks on us, he's got a surprise coming! Dr. Svengaard noted the rich, compelling baritone of the man's voice. It bothered him and added to his dislike of the couple standing before him. "We don't want to take any more of your time than absolutely necessary," Lizbeth said. She clasped her husband's hand and , through their secret code of finger pressures said : Do you read him? He doesn't like us. Harvey's fingers responded : He's a Sterrie prig, so full of pride in his position that he's half blind. But we know our rights 'and won't let him take advantage of us. The woman's no-nonsense tone annoyed Dr. Svengaard. She already was staring around the lab with quick,' searching looks.  must keep control here, he thought. He crossed to them and shook hands. Their palms were sweaty. To the experienced doctor, this was an excellent sign. Nervous. Good, Dr. Svengaard thought. The sound of a viapump at his left seemed reassuringly loud to him then. You could count on the pump to make parents nervous. That was why the pumps were loud. Dr. Svengaard turned toward the sound, indicated a sealed crystal vat on a force-field stand near the lab's center. The pump sound came from the vat. "Here we are," Dr. Svengaard said. T izbeth stared at the vat's   milky transluscent surface. She wet her lips with her tongue. "In there?" "And as safe as can be," Dr. Svengaard said. He cherished the small hope then that the Durants might yet leave, go home and await the outcome. Harvey took his wife's hand, patted it. He, too, stared at the vat. "We understand you've called in this specialist," he said. "Dr. Potter," Svengaard said. "From Central." He glanced at the nervous movements of the Durants' hands, noting the omnipresent tatooed index fingers which announced their gene type and station. They could add the coveted "V" for viable now, he thought, and he suppressed a momentary jealousy. "Dr. Potter, yes," Harvey said. Through their hands, he signaled Lizbeth: "Notice how he said Central?" How could I miss it? she asked. Central, she thought. The place conjured pictures of the lordly Optimen, but this made her think of the Cyborgs who secretly opposed the Optimen, and the whole thing filled her with profound disquiet. She could afford to think of nothing but her son now. "We know Potter's the best there is," she said, "and we don't want you to think we're just being emotional and fearful..." "... but we're going to watch," Harvey said. And he thought: This stiff-necked surgeon had better realize we know our legal rights. "I see," Dr. Svengaard said. Damn these fools! he thought. But he held his voice to a soothing monotone as he said: "Your concern is a matter of record. I admire it. However, the consequences..." He left the vords hanging there, reminding them that he had legal rights, too. He could make the cut with or without their permission, and couldn't be held responsible for any upset to parents. Public Law # was clear and direct. Parents might invoke it for the right to watch, but the cut would be made at the surgeon's discretion. The human race had a planned future which excluded genetic monsters and wild deviants. Harvey nodded, a quick and emphatic motion. He gripped his wife's hand tightly. Bits of Folk horror stories and official myths trickled through his mind. He saw Svengaard partly through this confusion of stories and partly through the clandestine forbidden literature grudgingly provided by the Cyborgs to the Parents Underground -- through Stedman and Merck, through Shakespeare and Huxley. His youth had fed on such a limited past that he knew superstition could not help but remain. Lizbeth 's nod came slower. She knew what their chief concern here had to be, but that was still her son in the vat. "Are you sure," she asked, deliberately baiting Svengaard, "that there's no pain?" The extent of the Folk nonsense which bred in the necessary atmosphere of popular ignorance filled Dr. Svengaard with resentment. He knew he'd have to end this interview quickly. The things he might be saying to these people kept intruding in his awareness, interfering with what he had to say. "That fertilized ovum has no nerve trains," he said. "It's physically less than three hours old, I.? its growth retarded by controlled nitrate respiration. Pain? The concept doesn't apply." The technical terms would have little meaning to them. Dr. Svengaard knew -- other than lo emphasize the distance betw'een mere parents and a submolecular engineer. "I guess that was rather foolish of me," Lizbeth said. "The... it's so simple, not really like a human yet." And she signaled to Harvey through their hands: What a simpleton he is! As easy to read as a child. Rain beat a tarantella against the skylight. Dr. Svengaard waited it out, then: "Ah, now -- let us make no mistakes." And he thought what an excellent moment it was to give these fools a catechism refresher. "Your embryo may be less than three hours old, but it already contains every basic enzyme it'll need when fully developed. An enormously complicated organism." Harvey stared at him in assumed awe at the greatness which could understand such mysteries as the shaping and moulding of life. II wo days ago, selected gametes from Harvard and herself had been united there, gripped in stasis, allowed to go through limited mitosis. The process had produced a viable embryo -- not too common a thing in their world where only a select few were freed of the contraceptive gas and allowed to breed and only a rare number of those produced viables. She wasn't supposed to understand the intricacies of the process, and the fact that she did understand had to be hidden at all times. They -- the genetic Optimen of Central -- stamped savagely on the slightest threat to their supremacy. And they considered knowledge in the wrong hands to be the most terrible threat. "How... big is... he now?" she asked. "Diameter less than a tenth of said. He relaxed his face into a smile. "It's a morula and back in the primitive days it wouldn't yet have completed its journey to the uterus. This is the stage when it's most susceptible to us. We must do our work now before the formation of the trophoblast." The Durants nodded in awe. Dr. Svengaard basked in their respect. He sensed their minds fumbling over poorly remembered definitions from the limited schooling they'd been permitted. Their records said she was a creche librarian and he an instructor of the young -- not much education required for either. Harvey touched the vat, jerked his hand away. The crystal surface felt warm, filled with subtle vibrations. And there was that constant thiap-thiap-thiap of the pump. He sensed the deliberateness of that annoying sound, reading, the way he'd been trained in the Underground, the subtle betrayals in Svengaard's manner. He glanced around the laboratory. Glass pipes, square gray cabinets, shiny angles and curves of plasmeld, omnipresent gauges like staring eyes. The place smelled of disinfectants and exotic chemicals. Everything about the lab carried that calculated double purpose -- functional in design but constructed in such as way as to awe the uninitiated. Lizbeth focused on the one mundane feature of the place she could recognize for certain -- a tile sink with gleaming faucets. The sink sat squeezed between two mysterious constructions of convoluted glass and dull gray plasmeld. The sink bothered Lizbeth. It represented a place of disposal. You flushed garbage into a sink for grinding before it was washed into the sewage reclamation system. Anything small could easily be dumped into a sink and lost. Forever. Anything. # out of watching," she said. Damn! Dr. Svengaard thought. There was a catch in her voice. That little catch, that hesitation was betrayal. It didn't fit with her bold appearance. Overemphasis on maternal drive in her cutting... no matter how successful the surgeon had been with the rest of her. "Our concern is for you as much as for your child," Dr. Svengaard said. "The trauma..." "The law gives us the right," Harvey said. And he signaled to Lizbeth: The whole pattern's more or less what we anticipated. Trust this clod to know the law, Dr. Svengaard thought. He sighed. Statistical prediction said one in one hundred thousand parents would insist despite all the subtle and not so subtle pressures against it. Statistics and visible fact, however, were two distinct rnatters. Svengaard had noted how Harvey glared at him. The man's cutting had been strong on male protectiveness -- too strong, obviously. He couldn't stand to see his mate thwarted. Doubtless he was an excellent provider, model husband, never participated in Sterrie orgies -- a leader. A Clod. "The law," Dr. Svengaard said, and his voice dripped rebuke. "also requires tliat I point out the dangers of psychological trauma to the parents. I was not suggesting I'd try to prevent you from watching." "We're going to watch," Lizbeth said. Harvey felt a surge of admiration for her then. She played her role so beautifully, even to that catch in her voice. "I couldn't stand the waiting otherwise," Lizbeth said. "Not knowing..." Dr. Svengaard wondered if he dared press the matter -- perhaps an appeal to their obvious awe, a show of Authority. One look at Harvey's squared shoulders and Lizbeth's pleading eyes dissuaded him. They were going to watch. "Very well," Dr. Svengaard sighed. "Will we watch from here?" Harvey asked. Dr. Svengaard was shocked. "Of course not!" What primitives, these clods! But he tempered the thought with realization that such ignorance resulted from the carefully fostered mystery that surrounded gene shaping. In a calmer tone, he said: "You'll have a private room with a closed-circuit connection to this lab. My nurse will escort you." Nurse Washington proved her competence then by appearing in the doorway. She'd been listening, of course. A good nurse never left such matters to chance. "Is this all we get to see here?" Lizbeth asked. Dr. Svengaard heard the pleading tone, noted the way she avoided looking directly at the vat. All his pent-up scorn came out in his voice as he said : "What else is there to see, Mrs. Durant? Surely you didn't expect to see the morula." Harvey tugged at his wife's arm, said: "Thank you. Doctor." Once more, Lizbeth's eyes scanned the room, avoiding the vat. "Yes, thank you for showing us... this room. It helps to see how... prepared you are for... every emergency." Her eyes focused on the sink. "You're quite welcome, I'm sure," Dr. Svengaard said. "Nurse Washington will provide you with the list of permissable names. You might occupy part of your time choosing a name for your son if you've not already done so." He nodded to the nurse. "See the Durants to Lounge Five, please." Nurse Washington said: "If you'll follow me, please?" She turned with that air of overworked impatience which Svengaard suspected all nurses acquired with their diplomas. The Durants were sucked up in her wake. S vengaard turned back to the vat. So much to do -- Potter, the specialist from Central, due within the hour... and he wouldn't be happy about the Durants. People had so little understanding of what the medical profession endured. The psychological preparation of parents subtracted from time better devoted to more important matters... and it certainly complicated the security problem. Svengaard thought of the five "Destroy After Reading" directives he'd received from Max Allgood, Central's boss of T-Security during the past month. It was disturbing, as though some new danger had set Security scurrying. But Central insisted on the socializing with parents. The Optimen must have good reason, Svengaard felt. Most things they did made wonderful sense. Sometimes, Svengaard knew, he fell into a feeling of orphanage, a creature without past. All it took to shake him from the emotional morass, though, was a moment's contemplation: They are the power that loves us and cares for us. They had the world firmly in their grip, the future planned -- a place for every man and every man in his place. Some of the old dreams -- space travel, the questing philosophies, farming of the seas -- had been shelved temporarily, put aside for more important things. The day would come, though, once they solved the unknowns behind submolecular engineering. Meanwhile, there was work for population of workers, suppressing deviants, husbanding the genetic pool from which even the Optimen sprang. Svengaard swung the meson microscope over the Durant vat, adjusted for low amplification to minimize Heisenberg interference. One more look wouldn't hurt, just on the chance he might locate the pilot-cell and reduce Potter's problem. Even as he bent to the scope, Svengaard knew he was rationalizing. He couldn't resist another search into this morula which had the potential, might be shaped into an Optiman. The wonderous things were so rare. He flicked the switch, focused. A sigh escaped him : "Ahhh -- " So passive the morula at low amplification ; no pulsing as it lay within the stasis -- yet so beautiful in its semi-dormancy... so little to hint that it was the arena of ancient battles. Svengaard put a hand to the amplification controls, hesitated. High amplification posed its dangers, but Potter could readjust minor marks of meson interference. And the big look was very tempting. He doubled amplification. ST nlargement always reduced the appearance of stasis, 'fhings moved here, and in the unfocused distances there were flashes like the dartings of fish. Up out of the swarming arena came the triple spiral of nucleotides that had led him to call Potter. Almost Optiman. Almost that beautiful perfection of form and mind that could accept the indefinite balancing of Life through the delicately adjusted enzyme prescriptions. A sense of loss pervaded Svengaard. His own prescription, while it kept him alive, was slowly killing him. It was the fate of all men. They might live two hundred years, sometimes even more... but in the end the balancing act failed for all except the Optimen. They were perfect, limited only by their physical sterility, but that was the fate of many humans and it subtracted nothing from endless life. His own childless state gave Svengaard a sense of communion with the Optimen. They'd solve that, too... some day. He concentrated on the morula. A sulfur-containing amino acid dependency showed faint motion at this amplification. With a feeling of shock, Svengaard recognized it -- isovalthine, a genetic marker for latent myxedema, a warning of potential thyroid deficiency. It was a disquieting flaw in the otherwise near-perfection Potter would have to be alerted. Svengaard backed off amplification to study the mitochondrial structure. He followed out the invaginated unit-membrane to the flattened, sac-hke cristae, returned along the external second membrane, focused on the hydrophilic outer compartment. Yes... the isovalthine was susceptible to adjustment. Perfection might yet be for this morula. Flickering movement appeared at the edge of the microscope's field. Svengaard stiffened, thought: Dear God, no! He stood frozen at the viewer as a thing seen only eight previous times in the history of geneshaping took place within his field of vision. A thin line like a distant contrail reached into the cellular structure from the left. It wound through a coiledcoil of alpha helices, found the folded ends of the polypeptide chains in a myosin molecule, twisted and dissolved. Where the trail had been now lay a new structure about four Angstroms in diameter and a thousand Angstroms long -- sperm protamine rich in arginine. All around it the protein factories of the cytoplasm were undergoing change, fighting the stasis. realigning. Svengaard recognized what was happening from the descriptions of the eight previous change system was becoming more complex -- "resistant." The surgeon's job had been made infinitely more complex. Potter will be furious, Svengaard thought. Svengaard turned off the microscope, straightened. He wiped perspiration from his hands, glanced at the lab clock. Less than two minutes had passed. The Durants weren't even in their lounge yet. But in those two minutes, some force... some energy from outside had made a seemingly purposeful adjustment within the embryo. Could this be what's stirred up Security... and the Optimen? Svengaard wondered. He had heard this thing described, read the reports... but actually to have seen it himself! To have seen it... so sure and purposeful... He shook his head. No! It was not purposeful! It was merely an 'accident, chance, nothing more. But the vision wouldn't leave him. Compared to that, he thought. how clumsy my efforts are. And I'll have to report it to Potter. Hdll have to shape that twisted chain... if he can now that it's resistant. Full of disquiet, not at all satisfied that he had seen an accident, Svengaard began making the final check of the lab's preparations. He inspected the enzyme racks and their linkage to the computer dosagecontrol. Plenty of cytochrome bs and P# hemoprotein, a good reserve store of ubiquinone and sulfhydryl, arsenate, azide and oligomycin, sufficient protein-bound phosphohistidine. He moved down the line -- acylating agents, a store of (#, #-dinitrophenol) and the isoxazolidon-# groups He turned to the physical equipment, checked the meson scalpel's micromechanism, read the life-system gauges on the vat and the print-out of the stasis mechanism. All in order. It had to be. The Durant embryo, that beautiful thing with its wondrous potential, was now resistant -- a genetic unknown... if Potter could succeed where others had failed. Ill Tr. Vyaslav Potter stopped at the Records Desk on his way into the hospital. He was faintly tired after the long tube-shunt from Central to Seatac Megalopolis; still he told an off-color joke about primitive reproduction to the gray-haired duty nurse. She chuckled as she hunted up Svengaard's latest report on the Durant embryo. She put the report on the counter, stared at Potter. He glanced at the folder's cover, looked up to meet the nurse's eyes. #s it possible? he wondered. But... no. She's too old. Wouldn't even make a good playmate. Anyway, the bigdomes wouldn't grant us a breeding permit. And he reminded himself: Zeek gene-shaping had gone through a brief popularity in the region of Timbuctu Megalopolis during the early nineties. It produced curly black hair, a skin one shade lighter than milk chocolate, soft brown eyes and a rolypoly face of utmost benignity, all on a tall, strong body. A Zeek. A Vyaslav Potter. It had yet to produce an Optiman, male or female, and never a viable gamete match. Potter had long since given up. He was one of those who'd voted to discontinue the Zeek. He thought of the Optimen with whom he dealt and sneered at himself : There but for the brown eyes... But the sneer no longer gave him a twinge of bitterness. "You know," he said, smiling at the nurse, "these Durants whose Emb I have this morning -- I cut them both. Maybe I've been in this business too long." "Oh, go on with you. Doctor," she said with an arch turn of her head. "You're not even middleaged. You don't look a day over a hundred." He glanced at the folder. "But here are these kids bringing me their emb to cut and I..." He shrugged. "Are you going to tell them?" she asked. "I mean that you had them, too." "I probably won't even see them," he said. "You know how it is. Anyway, sometimes people are unhappy with their cut. Sometimes they wish they'd had a little more of this, less of that. They tend to blame the surgeon. They don't understand, can't understand the problems we have in the cutting room." "But the Durants seem like a very successful cut," she said. "Normal. Happy. Perhaps a little over-worried about their son, but..." "Their genotype is one of the most successful," he said. He tapped the record folder with a forefinger. "Here's the proof : they had a viable with potential." He lifted a thumb in the time-honored gesture for Optirnan. "You should be very proud of them," she said. "My family's had only fifteen viables in a hundred and eighty-nine years, and never an... She repeated Potter's thumb gestuf'e. He pursed his lips into a moae of commiseration, wondering how he let himself get drawn into these conversations with women, especially with nurses. Itwas that little seed of hope that never died, he suspected. It was cut from the same stuff that produced the wild rumors, the quack "breeder doctors" and the black market in "true breed" nostrums. It was the thing that sold the little figurines of Optiman-Calapine because of the unfounded rumor that she had produced a viable. It was the thing that wore out the big toes of fertility idols from the kisses of the hopeful. His moue of commiseration became a cynical sneer. Hopeful! If they only knew. "Were you aware the Durants are going to watch?" the Nurse asked. T T is head jerked up and he glared at her. "It's all over the hospital," she said. "Security's been alerted. The Duran ts've been scanned and they're in Lounge Five with closed circuit to the cutting room." Anger blazed through him. "Damn it to hell! Can't they do anything right here?" "Now, Doctor," she said, stiffening into the prim departmental dictator. "There's no call to lose your temper. The Durants quoted the law. That ties our hands and you know it." "Stupid damn law," Potter muttered, but his anger had subsided. The law! he thought. More of the damn masquerade. He had to admit, though, that they needed the law. Without Public Law #, people might ask the wrong kinds of questions. And no doubt Svengaard had done his bumbling best to try to dissuade the Durants. Potter assumed a rueful grin, said; "Sorry I snapped like that. I've had a bad week." He sighed. "They just don't understand." "Is there any other record you wish. Doctor?" she asked. Rapport was gone, Potter saw. "No, thanks," he said. He took the Durant folder, headed for Svengaard's office. Just his luck: a pair of watchers. It meant plenty of extra work. Naturally! The Durants couldn't be content with seeing the tape after the cut. Oh, no. They had to be on the scene. That meant the Durants weren't as innocent as they might appear -- no matter what this hospital's Security staff said. The public just did not insist any more. That was supposed to've been cut out of them. The statistical few who defied their genetic shaping now required special attention. And Potter reminded himself :  did the original cut on this pair. There was no mistake. He ran into Svengaard outside the latter's office, heard the man's quick resume. Svengaard then began babbling about his Security arrangements. "I don't give a damn what your Security people say," Potter barked. "We've new instructions. Central Emergency's to be called in every case of this kind." They went into Svengaard's office. It pretended to be wood paneling -- a corner room with a view of flowered roof gardens and terraces built of the omnipresent three-phase regenerative plasmeld, the "plasty" of the Folk patois. Nothing must age or degenerate in this best of all Optiman worlds. Nothing except people. "Central Emergency?" Svengaard asked. "No exceptions," Potter said. He sat in Svengaard's chair, put his feet on Svengaard's desk and brought the little ivory-colored phone box to his stomach with its screen only inches from his face. He punched in Security's number and his own code identification. Qvengaard sat on a comer of the  desk across from him appearing both angry and cowed. "They were scanned, I tell you," Svengaard said. "They were carrying no unusual devices. There's nothing unusual about them." "Except they insist on watching," Potter said. He jiggled the phone key. "What's keeping those ignoramuses?" Svengaard said: "But the law..." "Damn the law!" Potter said. "You know as well as I do that we could route the view signal from the cutting room through an editing computer and show the parents anything we want. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why we don't do just that?" "Why... they... ahh..." Svengaard shook his head. The question had caught him off balance. Why wasn't that done? The statistics showed a certain number of parents would insist on watching and... "It was tried," Potter said. "Somehow, the parents detected the computer's hand in the tape." "How?" "We don't know." "Weren't the parents questioned and..." "They killed themselves." "Killed them... How?" "We don't know." "We don't know!" Potter echoed sarcastically. A heavy masculine voice came from the phone: "Who're you talking to?" Potter focused on the screen, said : "I was talking to Sven. This viable he called me on..." "It is a viable?" "Yes! It's a viable with the full potential, but the parents insist on watching." "I'll have a full crew on the way by tube in ten minutes," said the voice on the phone. "They're at Friscopolis. Shouldn't take 'em more than a few minutes." Svengaard rubbed dry palms against the sides of his working smock. He couldn't see that face on the phone, but the voice sounded like Max Allgood, TSecurity's boss. "We'll delay the cut until your people get here," Potter said. "The records are being faxed to you and should be on your desk in a few minutes. There's another..." "Is that embryo everything we were told?" asked the man on the phone. "Any flaws?" "A latent myxedema, a projective faulty heart valve, but the -- " "Okay, I'll call you after I've seen the..." "Damn it to hell!" Potter erupted. "Will you let me get ten words out of my mouth without interrupting?" He glared into the screen. "There's something here more important than flaws and the parents." Potter glanced up at Svengaard, back to the screen. "Sven reports he saw an outside adjustment of the arginine deficiency." A low whistle came from the phone, then: "Reliable?" "Depend on it." "Did it follow the pattern of the other eight?" Potter glanced up at Svengaard, who nodded. "Sven says yes." "They won't like that." "I don't like it." "Did Sven see enough to get any... new ideas on it?" Svengaard shook his head. "No," Potter said. "There's a strong possibility it isn't significant," the man on the phone said. "In a system of increasing determinism..." "Oh, yes," Potter sneered. "In a system of increasing determinism you get more and more indeterminism. You might as well say in a foofram of increasing haggersmaggle..." "Well, it's what they believe," he said. "So they say. I believe Nature doesn't like being meddled with." Potter stared into the screen. For some reason, he recalled his youth, the beginning of his medical studies and the day he'd learned how very close his genotype had been to the Optiman. He found that the old core of hatred had become mildly amused tolerance and C#micism. "I don't see why they put up with you," the man on the phone said. "Because I was very close," Potter whispered. He wondered then how close the Durant embryo would be. I'll do my best, he thought. The man on the phone cleared his throat, said: "Yes, well I'll depend on you to handle things at your end. The embryo ought to provide some verification of the outside inter..." "Don't be a total ass!" Potter snapped. "The emb will bear out Svan's report to the last enzyme. You tend to your job; we'll do ours." He slapped the cut-off, pushed the phone back onto the desk and sat staring at it. "Pompous damned... no -- he's what he is because he's what he is. Comes from living too close to them. Comes from the original cut. Maybe I'd be an ass too if that's what I had to be," he observed cynically. Svengaard tried to swallow in a dry throat. He'd never before heard such an argument or such frank talk from the men who operated out of Central. He was more than a little surprised. "Shocked you, eh, Sven?" Potter asked. He dropped his feet to the floor and waited for the man in front of him to answer. Svengaard shrugged. He felt ill at ease. IV potter studied the man. Sven- gaard was good within his limits, but he lacked creative imagwithout that special quality he was often a dull too. "You're a good man, Sven," Potter said. "Dependable. That's what your record says, you know. Dependable. You'll never be anything else. Weren't meant to be. In your particular niche, though, you're it." Svengaard heard only the praise, said; "It's good to be appreciated, of course, but... "But we have work to do." "It will be difficult," Svengaard said. "Now." "Do you think that outside adjustment was an accidental thing?" Potter asked. "I... I'd like to believe that..." Svengaard wet his lips with his tongue. "... it wasn't determined, that no agency..." "You'd like to lay it to uncertainty, to Heisenberg," Potter said. "The principle of uncertainty. Some result of our own meddling. Everything an accident in the capricious universe." Svengaard felt stung by a quality of harshness in Potter's voice, said: "Not precisely. I meant only that I hoped no super casual agency had a hand in it." "God? You don't really mean you're afraid this is the action of a deity?" Svengaard looked away. "I remember in school," he said. "You were lecturing. You said we always have to be ready to face the fact that the reality we see will be shockingly different from anything our theories led us to suspect." "Did I say that? Did I really say that?" "You did." "Something's out there, eh? Something beyond our instruments. It's never heard of Heisenberg. It isn't uncertain at all. It moves." His voice lowered. "It moves directly. It adjusts things." He cocked his head to one side. "Ah, hah! The ghost of Heisenberg is confounded!" Svengaard glared at Potter. The man was mocking him. He spoke stiffly: "Heisenberg did point out that we have our limits." "You're right," Potter said. "There's a caprice in our universe. He taught us that. There's always something we can't interpret or understand... or measure. He set us up for this present dilemma, eh?" Potter glanced at his finger watch, back to Svengaard. "We tend to interpret everything around us by screening it through that system which is native to us. Our civilization sees indeterminately through the eyes of Heisenberg. If he taught us truly, how can we tell whether the unknown's an accident or the deliberate intent of God? What's the use of even asking?" Svengaard spoke defensively; "We appear to manage... somehow." potter startled him by laughing, head tipped back, body shaking with enjoyment. The laughter subsided and presently Potter said: "Sven, you are a gem. I mean tiiat. If it weren't for the ones like you, we'd still be back in the muck and mire, running from glaciers and sabertooth tigers." Svengaard fought to keep anger from his voice, said; "What do they think this arginine adjustment is?" Potter stared at him, measuring, then: "Damned if I haven't underestimated you, Sven. Apologies, eh?" Svengaard shrugged. Potter was acting oddly today -- astonishing reactions, strange eruptions of emotion. Do you know what they say about this?" he asked. "You heard Max on the phone," Potter said. So that was Allgood, Svengaard thought. "Certainly, I know," Potter growled. "Max has it all wrong. They say gene-shaping inflicts itself on nature -- on a nature that can never be reduced to mechanical systems and, therefore, to stationary matter. You can't stop the movement, see? It's an extended system phenomenon, energy seeking a level." "Extended system?" he asked. Potter looked up at the man's scowling face. The question focused Potter's attention abruptly on the differences in thought patterns between those who lived close to Central and those who touched the Optiman world only through reports and second-hand associations. We are so different. Potter thought. Just as the Optimen are different from us and Sven here is different from the Sterries and breeders. We're cut off from each other... and none of us has a past. Only the Optimen have a past. But each has an individual past... selfishly personal... and ancient. "Extended system," Potter said. "From the microcpsmos to the macrocosmos, they say all is order and systems. The idea of matter is insubstantial. All is collisions of energy -- some appearing large, swift and spectacular, some small, gentle and slow. But this too is relative. The aspects of energy are infinite. Everything depends on the viewpoint of the observer. For each change of viewpoint, the energy rules change. There exists an infinite number of energy rules, each set dependent on the twin aspects of viewpoint and background. In an extended system, this thini from outside assumes the aspect of a node appearing on a standing wave. That's what they say." Svengaard slipped off the desk, stood in a rapture of awe. He felt that he'd had a fleeting glimpse, a wisp of understanding that penetrated every question he might ask about the universe. Could that be what it's like to work out of Central? he wondered. "That's a great summation, isn't it?" Potter demanded. He stood up. "A truly great idea!" A chuckle shook him. "You know, a guy named Diderot had that idea. It was around # or thereabout. They spoon-feed it to us now. Great wisdom!" "Maybe Diderot was one of them," Svengaard ventured. Potter sighed, thinking: How ignorant a man can become on a diet of managed history. He wondered then how his own diet had been adjusted and managed. "Diderot was one of us," Potter growled. Qvengaard stared at him, shocked to silence by the man's blasphemy. "It comes down to this," Potter said. "Nature doesn't like being meddled with." A chime sounded beneath Svengaard's desk. "Security?" Potter asked. "That's the all clear," Svengaard said. "They're ready for us now." "Central's Security hotshots are all in place," Potter said. "You will note that they didn't stoop to report to you or to me. They watch us too, you know." "I've nothing to hide," Svengaard said. "Of course you haven't," Potter said. He moved around the desk, threw an arm across Svengaard's shoulders. "Come along. It's time for us to put on the mask of Archeus. We're going to give form and organization to a living body. Veritable gods, we are." Svengaard felt himself still lost in confusion. "What'll they do to the Durants?" he asked. "Do? Not a damn thing, unless the Durants force it. The Durants won't even know they're being watched. But Central's little boys will know everything that goes on in that lounge. The Durants won't be able to belch without the gas being subjected to a full and complete analysis. Come along." But Svengaard held back. "Dr. Potter," he asked, "what do you think introduced that arginine chain into the Durant morula?" "I'm closer to you than you think," Potter said. "We're fighting... instability. We've upset the biological stability of the inheritance patterns with our false isomers and our enzyme adjustments and our meson beams. We've underminded the chemical stability of the molecules in the germ plasm. You're a doctoi. Look at the enzyme prescriptions we all have to take -- how profound the adjustment we have to make to stay alive. It wasn't always that way. And whatever set up that original stability is still in there fighting. That's what I think." V "The cutting-room nurses positioned the vat under the enzyme console, readied the tubes and the computer-feed-analysis board. They worked quietly and efficiently as Potter and Svengaard examined the gauges. The computer nurse racked her tapes and there came a brief whirring as she tested her board. Potter felt himself filled with the wakeful anxiety that always came over him before surgery. He knew it would give way presently to the charged sureness of action, but he felt snappish at the moment. He glanced at the vat gauges. The Krebs cycle was holding at #, a good sixty points above death level. The vat nurse came over to examine his breather mask. He checked his microphone: "Mary had a little lamb -- its fleece was black as hades -- the surgeon took the credit for -- a joke on all the ladies." He heard a distinct chuckle from the computer nurse, glanced at her, but she had her back to him and her face already hidden by hood and mask. The vat nurse said: "Microphone working. Doctor." He couldn't see her lips moving behind her mask, but her cheeks rippled as she spoke. Svengaard flexed his fingers in their gloves, took a deep breath. It smelled faintly of ammonia. He wondered why Potter always joked with the nurses. It seemed demeaning, somehow. Potter moved across to the vat. His sterile suit crinkled with a familiar snapping hiss as he walked. He glanced up at the wall screen, the replay monitor which showed approximately what the surgeon saw and which was the view watched by the parents. The screen presented him with a view of itself as he turned his forehead pickup lens toward it. Damn parents, he thought. They make me feel guilty. He returned his attention to the crystal vat now bristling with instruments. The pump's churgling annoyed him. Svengaard moved to the other side of the vat, waiting. The breather mask hid the lower half of his face, but his eyes appeared calm. He radiated a sense of steadiness and reliability. How does he really feel? Potter wondered. And he reminded himself that in an emergency there wasn't a better cuttingroom assistant than Sven. "You can begin increasing the pyruvic acid," Potter said. Svengaard nodded, depressed the feeder key. The computer nurse started her reels turning. They watched the gauges as the Krebs cycle began rising -- #... #... #... #... #... #... #... Now, Potter told himself, the irreversible movement of growth has started. Only death can stop it. "Tell me when the Krebs cycle reaches one hundred and ten," he said. He swung the scope and micromanipulators into place, leaned into the rests. Will I see what Sven saw? he wondered. He knew it wasn't likely. The lightning from outside had never struck twice in the same place. It came. It did what no human hand could do. It went away. Where? Potter wondered. '"The inter-ribosomal gaps swam into focus. He scanned them. boosted amplification and went -- there was the situation Sven had described. The Durant embryo was one of those that could cross over into the more-thanhuman land of Central... if the surgeon succeeded. The confirmation left Potter oddly shaken. He shifted his attention to the mitochondrial structures, saw the evidence of the arginine intrusion. It squared precisely with Sven's description. Alpha-helices had begun firming up, revealing the telltale striations at the aneurin shifts. This one was going to resist the surgeon. This was going to be a tough one. Potter straightened. "Well?" Svengaard asked. "Pretty much as you described it," Potter said. "A straightforward job." That was for the watching parents. He wondered then what Security was discovering about the Durants. Would this pair be loaded down with search and probe devices disguised as conventional artifacts? Possibly. But there were rumors of new techniques being introduced by the Parents Underground... and of Cyborgs moving out of the dark shadows which had hidden them for centuries. If there were Cyborgs at all. Potter was not convinced. Svengaard spoke to the computer nurse: "Start backing off the pyruvic." "Backing off pyruvic," she said. Potter swung his attention to the priority rack beside him, checked the presentation -- in the first row the pyrimidines, nucleic acids and proteins, then aneurin, riboflavin, pyridoxin, pantothenic acid, folic acid, choline, inositol, sulfhydryl... He cleared his throat, lining up his plan for the attack on the morula's defenses. "I will attempt to find a pilot cell by masking the cysteine at a single locus," he said. "Stand by with sulfhydryl and prepare an intermediary tape for protein synthesis." "Ready for masking," Svengaard said. He nodded to the computer nurse who racked the intermediary tape into position with a smooth sureness. "Krebs cycle?" Pottei asked. "One hundred and ten corning up," Svengaard said. Silence. "Mark," Svengaard said. Again Potter bent to the scope. "Begin the tape," he said. "Two minims of sulfhydryl." Olowly Potter increased ampli fication, chose a cell for the masking. The momentary clouding of intrusion cleared away and he searched the surrounding cells for clues that mytosis would take off on his directed tangent. It was slow... slow. He'd just begun and his hands felt sweaty in their gloves. "Stand by with adenosine triphosphate," he said. Svengaard presented the feeder tube in the micromanipulators, already. This was going to be a tough one. ter said. Svengaard depressed the feeder key. The whirring of the computer tapes sounded overly loud. Potter lifted his head momentarily, shook it. "Wrong cell." he said. "We'lltry another one. Same procedure." Again he leaned into the scope and the rests, moved the micromanipulators, pushing amplification up a notch at a time. Slowly he traced his way down into the cellular mass. Gently... gently... The scope itself could cause irreversible damage in here, Ahhh, he thought, recognizing, an active cell deep in the morula. Vat-stasis had produced only a relative slowing in here. The cell was the scene of intense chemical activity. He recognized doubled base pairs strung on a convoluted helix of sugar phosphate as they passed his field of vision. His beginning anxiety had passed and he felt the old sureness with the often repeated sensation that the morula was an ocean in which he swam, that the cellular interior was his natural habitat. "Two minims of sulfhydryl," Potter said. "Sulfhydryl, two minims," Svengaard said. "Standing by going to inhibit the exchange reaction in the mitochondrial systems. Start oligomycin and azide." Svengaard proved his worth then by complying without hesitation. The only sign that he recognized tihe dangers in this procedure was a question: "Shall I have an uncoupling agent redy?" "Stand by with arsenate in number one," Potter said. "Krebs cycle going down," the computer nurse said. "Eightynine point four." "Intrusion effect," Potter said. "Give me point six minim of azide." Svengaard depressed the key. "Point four minim oligomycin," Potter said. "Oligomycin, point four," Svengaard said. Potter felt that he lived now only through his eyes on the microscope and his hands on the micromanipulators. His existence had moved into the morula, fused with it. His eyes told him that peripheral mitosis had stopped... as it should under these ministrations. "I think we have it," he said. He planted a marker on the scope position, shifted focus and seeking the hydroxyl deformity, the flaw that would produce a faulty heart valve. Now he was the artist, the master cutter. The pilot cell was determined. Now he moved to reshape the delicate chemical factory of the inner structure. "Prepare for the cut," he said. Ovengaard armed the meson  generator. "Armed," he said. "Krebs cycle seventy-one," the computer nurse said. "First cut," Potter said. He let off the single, aimed burst, watched the tumbling chaos that followed. The hydroxyl appendage vanished. Nucleotides reformed. "Hemprotein P-#," Potter said. "Stand by to reduce it with globular proteins that formed before him, watching for biologically active molecules. Now! Instinct and training combined to tell him the precise instant. "Two and a half minims of P-#," he said. A corner of turmoil engaged a group of polypeptide chains in the heart of the cell. "Reduce it," Potter said. feeder key. He couldn't see what Potter saw, but the surgeon's forehead lens reproduced a slightly off-parallax view of the scope field. That plus Potter's instructions told of the slow spread of change in the cell. "Krebs cycle fifty-eight," the computer nurse said. "Second cut," Potter said. "Armed," Svengaard said. Potter searched out the myxedema-latent isovalthine, found it. "Give me a tape on structure," he said. "S-(isopropylcarboxymethyl) cystein." Computer tape hissed through the reels, stopped, resumed at a slow, steady pace. The isovalthine comparison image appeared in the right quadrant of Potter's scope field. He compared the structures, point for point, said: "Tape off." The comparison image vanished. "Krebs cycle forty-seven," the computer nurse said. Potter took a deep, trembling breath. Another twenty-seven points and they'd be in the death range. The Durant embryo would succumb. He swallowed, aimed off the meson burst. Isovalthine tumbled apart. "Ready with cycloserine," Svengaard said. Ahhh, good old Sven, Potter thought. You don't have to tell him every step what to do. "Comparison on D-#-aminoisoxazolidon-#," Potter said. The computer nurse readied the tape, "Comparison ready." The comparison image appeared in Potter's view field. "Check," he said. The image vanished. "One point eight minims." He watched the interaction of the enzymic functional groups as Svengaard administered the cycloserine. The amino group showed a nice, open field of affinity. its niches. ( # rebs cycle thirty-eight point six," the computer nurse said. We'll have to chance it, Potter thought. This embryo won't take more adjustment. "Reduce vat stasis to half," he micro-feed on ten minims of pyruvic acid." "Reducing stasis," Svengaard said. And he thought: This will pyruvic acid feeders. "Give me the Krebs cycle on the half point," Potter said. "Thirty-five," the nurse said. "Thirty-four point five. Thirtyfour. Thirty-three point five." Her voice picked up speed witli a shocked, breathlessness: "Thirty-three... thirty-two... thirty-one... thirty... twentynine... To any bookstore or Dept. #-GA-# Garden City, New York I'm not much for coupons, but I can't get enough of stories by Damon Knight, Philip Jose Farmer, Brian W. Aldiss, Richard Wilson, Harry Harrison, Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, Lester Del Rey, C. C. MacApp, Larry Niven, John Brunner, and R. A. Lafferty. I understand they have contributed the most exciting stories of the year to The Ninth Galaxy Reader. Send it right away. You'll pay the postage. I'm enclosing my check or money order for # as payment in full. name # of Galaxy's best hard covers. Can an SF fan find a better to clip? Idoubleday "Release all stasis," Potter said. "Present the full amino spectrum with activated histidine. Start pyridoxin -- four point two minims." Svengaard's hands sped over the keys. "Back-feed the protein tape," Potter ordered. "Give it the full matic." Tapes hissed through the reels. "It's slowing," Svengaard said. "Twenty-two," the computer nurse said. "Twenty-one nine... twenty-two... twentyone nine... twenty-two one... twentytwo two... twenty-two one... twenty-two two... Twenty-two three... twenty-two four... twenty-two three... twenty-two four... twenty-two five... twenty-two six... twenty-two five... Potter felt the see-saw battle through every nerve. The morula was down at the edge of the death range. It could live or it could die in the next few minutes. Or it could come out of this crippled. Such things happened. When the flaw was too gross, the vat was turned off, flushed out. But Potter felt an identification with this embryo now. He felt he couldn't afford to lose it. "Mutagen desensitizer," he said. Svengaard hesitated. The Krebs cycle was following a slow sine curve that dipped perilously into the death cycle now. He knew why Potter had made this decision, but the carcinogenic peril of it had to be weighed. He wondered if he should argue the step. The embryo hung less than four points from a deadly plunge into dissolution. Chemical mutagens administered at this point could shock it into a spurt of growth or destroy it. Even if the mutagen treatment worked, it could leave the embryo susceptible to cancer. "Mutagen desensitizer!" Potter repeated. "Dosage?" Svengaard asked. "Half minim on fractionalminim feed. I'll control it from here." Svengaard shifted the feeder keys, his eyes on the Krebs-cycle repeater. He'd never heard of applying such drastic treatment this close to the borderline. Mutagens usually were reserved for the partly-flawed Sterrie embryo, a move that sometimes produced dramatic results. It was like shaking a bucket of sand to level the grains. Sometimes the germ plasm presented with a mutagen sought a better level on its own. They'd even produced an occasional viable this way... but never an Optiman. Potter reduced amplification, studied the flow of movement in the embryo. Gently, he depressed the feeder key, searched for Optiman signs. The cellular action remained unsteady, partly blurred. "Krebs cycle twenty-two eight," the computer nurse said. Climbing a bjt, Potter thought. "Very slow," Svengaard said. Potter maintained his vigil within the morula. It was growing, expanding in fits and starts, fighting with all the enormous power concentrated in its tiny domain. "Krebs cycle thirty point four," Svengaard said. "I am withdrawing mutagens," Potter said. He backed off the microscope to a peripheral cell, desensitized the nucleo-proteins, searched for the flawed configurations. The cell was clean. potter traced down into the coiled-coil helices of the der. "Krebs cycle thirty-six eight and climbing," Svengaard said. "Shall I start the choline and aneurin?" Potter spoke automatically, his attention fixed on the cell's gene structure. "Yes -- start them." He completed the scope tracing, shifted to another peripheral cell. Identical. Another cell -- the same. The altered gene pattern held true, but it was a pattern. Potter realized, which hadn't been seen in humankind since the second century of gene shaping. He thought of calling for a comparison to be sure. The computer would have it, of course. No record was ever lost or thrown away. But he dared not... there was too much at stake in this. He knew he didn't need the comparison, though. This was a classic form, a classroom norm which he had stared at almost daily all through his medical education. The super-genius pattern that had caused Sven to call in a Central specialist was there, firmed up by the cuttingroom adjustments. It was close-coupled, though, with a fully stable fertility pattern. The longevity basics lay locked in the configurations of the gene structure. If this embryo reached maturity and encountered a fertile mate, it could breed healthy, living children without the interference of the gene surgeon. It needed no enzyme prescription to survive. It would outlive ten standard humans without that prescription... and with a few delicate enz#mic adjustments might join the ranks of the immortals. The Durant embryo could father a new race -- like the live-forevers of Central, but dramatically unlike them. This embryo's progeny might fit themselves into the rhythms of natural selectivity... completely outside Optiman control. It was the template pattern from which no human could deviate top far and live, yet it was the single thing feared most by Central. Every gene surgeon had this drummed into him during his education: Natural selectivity is a madness that sends its human victims groping blindly through empty lives." Optiman reason and Optiman logic, must, of necessity, do the selecting. As though he straddled Time, Potter felt the profound certainty that the Durant embryo, if it matured, would encounter a fertile mate. This embryo had received a gift from outside -- a wealth of sperm-arginine, the key to its fertility pattern. In the flood of mutagen which opened this embryo's gene patterns had shaken down into a stable form no human dared attempt. Why did I introduce the mutagens just then? Potter wondered. I knew it was the needed thing. How did I know? Could I have been an instrument of some other force? "Krebs cycle fifty-eight and climbing steadily," Svengaard said. potter longed for the freedom to discuss this problem with Svengaard... but there were the damnable parents and the Security people... watching Was it possible anyone else had seen enough and knew enough of this pattern to realize what had happened here? he wondered. Why did I introduce the mutagens? "Can you see the paLtern yet?" Svengaard asked. "Not yet," Potter lied. The embryo was growing rapidly now. Potter studied the proliferation of stable cells. It was beautiful. "Krebs cycle sixty-four seven," Svengaard said. Vve waited too long, Potter thought. The higdomes of central will ask why I waited so long to kill this embryo. I cannot kill it! It's too beautiful. Central maintained its power by keeping the world at large in ignorance of the ruling fist, by doling out living time in the form of precious enzyme prescriptions to its half-alive slaves. The Folk had a saying: In this world there are two worlds -- one that works not and lives forever; one that lives not and works forever. Here in a crystal vat lay a tiny ball of cells, a living creature less diameter, and it carried the full potential of living out its life beyond Central's control. This morula had to die. They'll order it killed, Potter thought. And I will be suspect, finished. And if this tbmg did gef loose in the world, what then? What would happen to ene surgery? Would we go back to correcting minor defects... the way it was before we started shaping supermen? Supermen! In his mind, he did what no voice could do: he cursed the Optimen. They were enormous power, instant life or death. Many were geniuses. But they were as dependent on the enzymic fractions as any clod of the Sterries or Breeders. There were men as Breeders... and among the surgeons. But none of these could live forever, secure in that ultimate, brutal power. "Krebs cycle one hundred even," Svengaard said. "We're over the top now," Potter said. He risked a glance at the computer nurse, but she had her back to him, fussing with her board. Without that computer record, it might be possible to conceal what had happened here. With that record open to examination by Security and by the Optimen, it could not be hidden. Svengaard had not seen enough. The forehead lense only approximated the full field vision. The vat nurses couldn't even guess at it. Only the computer nurse with her tiny monitor screen might know... and the full record lay in her machine now -- a pattern of magnetic waves on strips of tape. VI tthat's the lowest I've ever the embryo," Svengaard said. "How low?" Potter asked. "Twenty-one nine," Svengaard said. "Twenty's bottom, of course, but I've never heard of an embryo coming back from below twenty-five before, have you?" "No," Potter said. "Is it the pattern we want?" Svengaard asked. "I don't want to interfere too much yet," Potter said. "Of course," Svengaard said. "Whatever happens, it was inspired surgery." Inspired surgery! Potter thought. What would this dolt say if I told him what I have here? A totally viable embryo! A total. Kill it, he'd say. It'll need no enzyme prescription and it Can breed true. It hasn't a defect... not one. Kill it, he'd say. He's a dutiful slave. The whole sorry history of gene shaping could be justified by this one embryo. Bui the minute they see this tape at Central, the embryo will be destroyed. Eliminate it, they'll say... because they don't like to use words too close to kill or death. Potter bent to the scope. How lovely the embryo was in its own terrifying way. He risked another glance at the computer nurse. She turned, mask down, met his gaze, smiled. It was a knowing, secretive smile, the smile of a conspirator. Now she reached up to mop the perspiration from her face. Her sleeve brushed a switch. A rasping, whirring scream came from the computer board. She whirled to it, grated: "Oh, my God!" Her hands sped over the board, but tape continued to hiss through the transponder plates. She turned, tried to wrestle the transparent cover from the recording console. The big reels whirled madly under the cover plate. "It's running wild!" she shouted. "It's locked on erase!" Svengaard yelled. He jumped to her side, tried to get the cover plate off. It jammed in its tracks. Potter watched like a man in a trance as the last of the tape flashed through the heads, began whipping on the take-up reels. "Oh, Doctor, we've lost it!" the computer nurse wailed. potter focused on the little monitor screen at the computer nurse's station. Did she watch the operation closely? he asked himself. Sometimes they follow the cut move by move... and computer nurses are a savvy lot. If she watched, she'll have a good idea what we achieved. At the very least, she'll suspect. las that tape erasure really an accident? Do I dare? She turned, met his gaze. "Oh, Doctor, I'm so sorry," she said. "It's all right, nurse," Potter said. "There's nothing very special about this embryo now -- aside from the fact that it will live." "We missed it, eh?" Svengaard asked. "Must've been the mutagens." "Yes," Potter said. "But without them it would have died." Potter stared at the nurse. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw a profound relief wash over her features. "I'll cut a verbal tape of the operation," Potter said. "That should be enough on this embryo." And he thought: When does a conspiracy begin? Was this such a beginning? There was still so much this conspiracy required. No knowledgeable eye could ever again look at this embryo through the microscope without being a part of the conspiracy... or a traitor. "We still have the protein synthesis tape," Svengaard said. "That'll give us the chemical factors by reference -- and the timing." Potter thought about the protein synthesis tape. Was there danger in it? No. It was only a reference for what had been used in the operation... not how anything had been used. "So it will," Potter said. "So it will." He gestured to the monitor screen. "Operations finished. You can cut the direct circuit and escort the parents to the reception room. I'm very sorry we achieved no more than we did, but this'll be a healthy human." "Sterrie?" Svengaard asked. "To soon to guess," Potter said. He looked at the computer nurse. She had managed to get the cover off at last and had stopped the tapes. "Any idea how that happened?" "Probably solenoid failure," Svengaard said. "This equipment's quite old," the nurse said. "I've asked for replacement units several times, but we don't seem to be very high on the priority lists." And there's a natural reluctance at Central to admit anything can wear out, Potter thought. "Yes," Potter said. "Well, I daresay you'll get your replacements now." Did anyone else see her trip that switch? Potter wondered. He tried to remember where everyone in the room had been looking, worried that a Security monitor might've been watching her. It Security saw that, she's dead. Potter thought. And so am I. CC'The technician's report on repairs will have to be part of the record on this case," Svengaard said. "I presume you'll..." "I'll see to it personally, Doctor," she said. Turning away. Potter had the impression that he and the computer nurse had just carried on a silent conversation. He noted that the big screen was now a gray blank, the Durants no longer watching. Should I see them myself? he wondered. If they're part of the Underground, they could help. Something has to be done about the embryo. Safest to ge it out of here entirely, but how? "I'll take care of the tie-off details," Svengaard said. He began checking the vat seals and life systems repeaters, dismantling the meson generator. Someone has to see the parents, Potter thought. "The parents'll be disappointed," Svengaard said. "They gen erally know why a specialist is called in... and probably got their hopes up." The door from the ready room opened to admit a man Potter recognized as an agent from Central Security. He was a moonfaced blond with features one tended to forget five minutes after leaving him. The man crossed the room to stand in front of Potter. Is this the end for me? Potter wondered. He forced his voice into a steady casual tone, asked: "What about the parents?" "They're clean," the agent said. "No tricky devices -- conversation normal -- plenty of small talk, but normal." "No hint of the other things?" Potter asked. "Anyway they could've penetrated Security without instruments?" "Impossible!" the man snorted. "Doctor Svengaard believes the father's overly endowed with male protectiveness and the mother has too much matemalism," Potter said. "The records show you shaped 'em," the agent said. "It's possible," Potter said. "Sometimes you have to concentrate on gross elements of the cut to save the embryo. Little things slip past." "Anything slip past on this one today?" the agent asked. "I understand the tape's been erased... an accident." Does he suspect? Potter asked himself. The extent of his own involvement and personal danger threatened to overwhelm Potter. It took the greatest effort to maintain a casual one. "Anything's possible of course," Potter said. He shrugged. "But I don't think we have anything unusual here. We lost the Optishape in saving the embryo, but that happens. We can't win them all." "Should we flag the embryo's record?" the agent asked. He'll still fishing, Potter told himself. He said: "Suit yourself. I'll have a verbal tape on the cut pretty soon -- probably just as accurate as the visual one. You might wait and analyze that before you decide." "I'U do that," the agent said. Ovengaard had the miscroscope off the vat now. Potter relaxed slightly. No one was going to take a casual, dangerous look at the embryo. "I guess we brought you on a wild goose chase," Potter said. "Sorry about that, but they did insist on watching." "Better ten wild goose chases than one set of parents knowing too much," the agent said. "How was the tape erased?" "Accident," Potter said. "Worn equipment. We'll have the technical report for you shortly." "Leave the worn equipment thing out of your report," the agent said. "I'll take that verbally. Allgood has to show every report to the Tuyere now." Potter permitted himself an understanding nod. "Of course." The men who worked out of Central knew about such things. One concealed personally disquieting items from the Optimen. The agent glanced around the cutting room, said: "Some day we won't have to use all this secrecy. Won't come any too soon for me." He turned away. Potter watched the retreating back, thinking how neatly the agent fitted into the demands of his profession. A superb cut with just one flaw. Too neat a fit, too much cold logic, not enough imaginative curiosity and readiness to explore the avenues of chance. If he'd pressed me, he'd have had me, Potter thought. He should've been more curious about the accident. But we tend to copy our masters -- even in their blind spots. Potter began to have more confidence of success in his impetuous venture. He turned back to help Svengaard with the final details, wondering : How do I know the agent's satisfied with my explanation? No feeling of disquiet accompanied the question. I know he's satisfied, but how do I know it? Potter asked himself. He realized then that his mind had been absorbing correlated gene information -- the inner workings of the cells and their exterior manifestations -- for so many years that this weight of data had fused into a new level of understanding. He was reading the tiny betrayals in gene-type reactions. I can read people! It was a staggering realization. He looked around the room at the nurses helping with the tieoff. When his eyes found the computer nurse, he knew she had deliberately destroyed the record tape. He knew it. T izbeth and Harvey Durant walked hand in hand from the hospital after their interview with the Doctors Potter and Svengaard. They smiled and swung their clasped hands like children off on a picnic -- which in a sense they were. The morning's rain had been shut off and the clouds were being packed off to the east, toward the tall peaks that looked down on Seatac megalopolis. The overhead sky showed a clear cerulean blue with a goblin sun riding high in it. A mob of people in loose marching order was coming through the park across the way, obviously the exercise period for some factory team or labor group. Their uniformed sameness was broken by flashes of color -- an orange scarf on a woman's head, a yellow sash across a man's chest, the scarlet of a fertility fetish dangling on a gold loop from a woman's ear. One man had equipped himself with bright green shoes. The pathetic attempts at individuality in a world of gene-stamped sameness stabbed through Lizbeth's defenses. She turned away lest the scene tear the smile from her lips, asked: "Where'll we go?" "Hmmm?" Harvey held her back, waiting on the walk for the group to pass. Among the marchers, faces turned to stare enviously at Harvey and Lizbeth. All knew why the Durants were here. The hospital, a great pile of plasmeld behind them, the fact that they were man and woman together, the casual dress, the smiles -- all said the Durants were on breeder leave from their labors. Each individual in that mob hoped with a lost desperation for this same escape from the routine that bound them all. Viable gametes, breeder leave -- it was the universal dream. Even the known Sterries hoped, and so they patronized the breeder quacks and the manufacturers of doombah fetishes. They have no pasts, Lizbeth thought, focusing abruptly on the common observation of the Folk philosophers. They're all people without pasts and only the hope for a future to cling to. Somewhere our past was lost in an ocean of darkness. The Optimen and their gene surgeons have extinguished our past. Even their own breeder leave lost its special glow in the face of this. The Durants might not be constrained to leap up at the rising bell and hurry apart to their labors, but they were still people without a past. And their future might be lost in an instant. The child being formed in the hospital vat... in some small way it might still be part of them, but the surgeons had changed it. They had cut it off sharply from its past. T izbeth recalled her own par' ents, the feeling of estrangement from them, of differences which went deeper than blood. They were only partly my parents, she thought. They knew it. And I knew it. She felt the beginnings of estrangement from her own unformed son then, an emotion that colored present necessities. Whafs the use? she wondered. But she knew what the use was -- to end forever all this amputation of pasts. The last envious face passed. The mob became moving backs, bits of color. They turned a corner and were gone, cut off. Is it a corner we've turned and no coming back? Lizbeth wondered. "Let's walk to the cross-town shuttle tube," Harvey said. "Through the park?" she asked. "Yes," Harvey said. "Just think -- ten months." "And we can take our son home," she said. "We're very lucky." "It seems like a long time -- ten months," Harvey said. Lizbeth answered as they crossed the street and entered the park. "Yes, but we can come see him every week when they shift him to the big vat -- and that's only three months away." "You're right," Harvey said. "It'll be over before we know it. And thank the powers he's not a specialist or anything else. We can raise him at home. Our work time'll be reduced." "That Doctor Potter's wonderful," she said. As they talked, their clasped hands moved with the subtle pressures and finger shifts of the secret conversation -- the NoSpoken-Word hand code that classified them as couriers of the Parents Underground. "They're still watching us," Harvey signaled. "I know." "Svengaard is out -- a slave of the power structure." "Obviously. You know, I had no idea the computer nurse was one of us." "You saw that, too?" "Potter vas looking at her when she tripped the switch." "Do you think the Security people saw her?" "Not a chance. They were all concentrated on us." "Maybe she's not one of us," Harvey signaled. And he spoke aloud; "Isn't it a beautiful day. Let's take the floral path." L izbeth's finger pressures answered: "You think that nurse is an accidental?" "Could be. Perhaps she saw what Potter'd accomplished and knew there was only one way to save the embryo." "Someone will have to contact her immediately then." "Cautiously. She might be unstable, emotional -- a breeder neurotic." "What about Potter?" "We'll have to get people to him right away. We'll need his help getting the embryo out of there." "That'll give us nine of Central's surgeons," she said. "If he goes along," Harvey signaled. She looked at him with a smile that completely masked her sudden worry. "You have doubts?" "It's only that I think he was reading me at the same time I read him." "Oh, he was," she said. "But he was slow and lame about it compared to us." "That's how I read him. He was like a first reader, an amateur stumbling along, gaining confidence as he went." "He's untrained," she said. "That's obvious. I was worried you'd read something in him that escaped me." "I guess you're right." Across the park, dust had shattered the sunlight into countless pillars that stood up through an arboretum. Lizbeth stared at the scene as she answered: "No doubt of it, darling. He's a natural, someone who's stumbled onto the talent accidentally. They do occur, you know -- have to. Nothing can keep us from communicating." "But they certainly try." "Yes," she signaled. "They were very intent on it there today -- probing and scanning us in that lounge. But people who think mechanically will never guess -- I mean that our weapons are people and not things." "It's their fatal blind spot," he agreed. "Central's carved out the genetic ruts with logic -- and logic keeps digging the ruts deeper and deeper. They're so deep now they can't see over the edges to the outside." "And that wide-wide universe out there calling to us," she signaled. A yTax Allgood, Central's chief of Tachy-Security, climbed Administration's plasmeld steps slightly ahead of his two surgeon companions as befitted the director of the Optimen's swift and terrible hand of power. The morning sun behind the trio sent their shadows darting across the white building's angles and planes. They were admitted to the silver shadows of the entrance portico where a barrier dropped for the inevitable delay. Quarantine scanners searched and probed them for inimical microbes. Allgood turned with the patience of long experience in this procedure, studied his companions -- Boumour and Igan. It amused him that they must drop their titles here. No doctors were admitted to these precincts. Here they must be pharmacists. The title doctor carried overtones which spread unrest among the Optimen. They knew about doctors, but only as ministers to the mere humans. A doctor became a euphemism in here, just as no one said death or kill or implied a machine or structure could wear out. Only new Optimen in their acolyte apprenticeship, or meres of young appearance served in Central, although some of the meres had been preserved by their masters for remarkable lengths of time. Boumour and Igan both passed the test of youthfulness, although Boumour's face was of tiiat pinched-up elfin type which tended to suggest age before its time. He was a big man with heavy shoulders, powerful. Igan looked lean and fragile beside him, a beaked face with long jaw and tight little mouth. The eyes of both men were Optiman color -- blue and penetrating. They were probably near-Opts, both of them. Most Central surgeonnharmacists were. The pair moved restlessly under Allgood's gaze, avoiding his eyes. Boumour began talking in a low voice to Igan with one hand on the man's shoulder moving nervously, kneading. The movement of Boumour's hand on Igan's shoulder carried an odd familiarity, a suggestion to Allgood that he had seen something like this somewhere before. He couldn't place where. The quarantine probing-scanning continued. It seemed to Allgood that it was lasting longer than usual. He turned his atten#S tion to the scene across from the building. It was strangely peaceful, at odds with the mood of Central as Allgood knew it. Allgood realized that his access to secret records and even to old books gave him an uncommon knowledge about Central. The Optiman demesne reached across leagues of what had once been the political entities of Canada and northern United States. It occupied a rough circle some seven hundred kilometers in diameter and with two hundred levels below ground. It was a region of multitudinous controls -- weather control, gene control, bacterial control, enzyme control. Human control. I n this little corner, the heart of Administration, the ground had been shaped into an Italian chiaroscuro landscape -- blacks and grays with touches of pastels. The Optimen were people who could barber a mountain at a whim: A little off the top and leave the sideburns. Throughout Central, nature had been smoothed over, robbed of her dangerous sharpness. Even when the Optimen staged some natural display, it lacked an element of drama which was a general lack in their lives. Allgood often wondered at this. He had seen pre-Optiman films and recognized the differences. Central's manicured niceties seemed to him all tied up with the omnipresented triangles indicating pharmacy outlets where the Optimen might check their enzyme prescriptions. "Are they taking a long time about it or is it just me?" Boumour asked. His voice carried a rumbling quality. "Patience," Igan said. A mellow tenor there. "Yes," Allgood said. "Patience is a man's best ally." Boumour looked up at the Security chief, studying, wondering. Allgood seldom spoke except for effect. He, not the Optimen, was the conspiracy's greatest threat. He was body and soul with his masters, a super puppet. Why did he order us to accompany him today? Boumour wondered. Does he know? Will he denounce us? There was a special ugliness about Allgood that fascinated Boumour. The Security chief was a stocky little Folk mere with moon face and darting almond eyes, a dark bush of hair low on his forehead -- a Shangcut by the look of his overt gene markers. Allgood turned toward the quarantine barrier, and with a sudden feeling of awakening Boumour realized the man's ugliness came from within. It was the ugliness of fear, of created fear and personal fear. The realization gave Boumour an abrupt sensation of relief which he signaled to Igan through finger pressures on the man's shoulder. Igan pulled away suddenly to stare out away from the building where they stood. Of course Max Allgood fears, he thought. He lives in a mire of fears, named and nameless, just as the Optimen do. Poor creatures. The scene across from Central began to impress itself on Igan's senses. Here, at this moment, it was a day of absolute Spring, planned that way in the lordly heart of Weather Control. Administration's steps looked down on a lake, round and perfect like an enameled blue plate. On a low hill beyond the lake, plasmeld plinths stood out like white stones: elevator caps reaching down into the locked fastness of the Optiman quarters below -- two hundred levels. Far beyond the hill, the .sky began to turn dark blue and oily. It was streaked suddenly with red, green and purple fires in a rather flat pattern. Presently, there came a low clap of contained thunder. Across the reaches of Central, some Upper Optiman was staging a tame storm for entertainment. '"The storm was the first thing Allgood had seen this day to fit his interpretation of Central's inner rhythms. Things of an ominous nature set the pattern for his view of Central. People vanished into here never to be seen again and only he. Allgood, the chief of Tachy-Security, or a few trusted agents knew their fate. Allgood felt the thunderclap keyed to his mood, a sound that portended absolute power. Under the storm sky now turning acid yellow and dispersing the air of Spring, the plinths on the hill above the lake became pagan cenotaphs set out against a ground as purple-green as camomile. "It's time," Boumour said. Allgood turned to find the quarantine barrier lifted. He led the way into the Hall of Counsel with its shimmering adamantine walls above ranks of empty plasmeld benches. The trio moved through tongues of perfumed vapor that swayed aside as they breasted them. Optiman acolytes wearing green canes fastened at the shoulders with diamond lanulas came from side shadows to pace them. Worked into the green of their robes were shepherd's pipes of platinum and they swung golden thuribles that wafted clouds of antiseptic pink smoke into the air. Allgood kept his attention on the end of the hall. A giant globe as red as a mandrake stem hung in walking beams there. It was some forty meters in diameter, vith a section folded back like a segment cut from an orange to reveal the interior. This was the Tuyere's control center, the tool of strange powers and senses with which they watched and ruled their minions. Lights flashed in there, phosphor greens and the blue cracklings of arcs. Great round gauges spelled out messages and red lights winked response. Numbers flowed on beams through the air and esoteric symbols danced on ribbons of light. Up through the middle like the core of the fruit stretched a white columni supporting a triangular platform at the globe's center. At the points of the triangle, each in a golden plasmeld throne, sat the Optiman trio known as the Tuyere -- friends, companions, elected rulers for this cenbary and with seventy-eight years yet to serve. It was a wink of time in their lives. An annoyance. Often a disquieting one because they must face realities which all other Oprimen could treat as euphemisms. The acolytes stopped some twenty paces from the red globe, but continued swinging their thuribles. Allgood moved one pace ahead, motioned Boumour and Igan to halt behind him. The Security chief felt he knew just how far he could go here, that he must go to the limits. They need me, he told himself. But he held no illusions about the dangers in this interview. Allgood looked up into the globe. A dancing lace of power placed a deceptive transparency over the interior. Through that curtain could be seen shapes, outlines -- now clear, now enfolded. "I came," Allgood said. Boumour and Igan echoed the greeting, reminding themselves of all the protocol and forms which must be observed here. Always use the tiame of the Optiman you address. If you do not know the name, ask it humbly. Allgood waited for the Tuyere to answer. Sometimes he felt they had no sense of time, at least of seconds and minutes and perhaps not even of days. It might be true. People of infinite lives might notice the passing seasons as clock ticks. IX '"The throne support turned, presenting the Tuyere one by one. They sat in clinging transluscent robes, almost nude, flaunting their similarity to the meres. Facing the open segment now was Nourse, a Greek god figure with blocky face, heavy brows, a chest ridged by muscles that rippled as he breathed. How evenly he breathed! With what controlled slowness! The base turned, presented Schruille, the bone slender, unpredictable one with great round eyes, high cheeks and a flat nose above a mouth which seemed always pulled into a thin line of disapproval. Here was a dangerous one. Some said he spoke of things which other Optimen could not. In Allgood's presence, Schruille had pnce said "death," although referring to a butterfly. Again, the base turned -- and here was Calapine, her robe girdled with crystal plastrons. She was a thin, high-breasted woman with golden brown hair and chill, insolent eyes, full lips and a long nose above a pointed chin. Allgood had caught her watching him strangely on occasion. At such times he tried not to think about the Optimen who took mere playmates. Nourse spoke to Calapine, looking at her thi'ough the prismatic reflector which each throne raised at a shoulder. She answered, but the voices did not carry to the floor of the hall. Allgood watched the interplay for a clue to their mood. It was known among the Folk that Nourse and Calapine had been bedmates for periods that spanned hundreds of mere lifetimes. Nourse had a reputation of strength and predictability, but Calapine was known as a wild one. Mention her name and likely someone would look up and ask : "What's she done now?" It was always said with a touch of admiration and fear. Allgood knew that fear. He had worked for other ruling trios, but none who had his measure as did these three... especially Calapine. The throne base stopped with Nourse facing the open segment. "You came," he rumbled. "Of course you came. The ox knows its owner and the ass its master's crib." So it's oin to be one of those days, Allgood thought. Ridicule! It could only mean they knevir how we had stumbled... but didn't they always? Calapine swiveled her throne to look down at the meres. The Hall of Counsel had been patterned on the Roman Senate with false columns around the edges, banks of benches beneath glittering scanner eyes. Everything focused down onto the figures standing apart from the acolytes. Looking up, Igan reminded himself he had feared and hated these creatures all his life -- even while he pitied them. How lucky he'd been to miss the Optiman cut. It'd been close, but he'd been saved. He could remember the hate of his childhood, before it had become tempered by pity. It'd been a clean thing then, sharp and real, blazing against the Givers of Time. came as requested to ' report on the Durants," Allgood said. He took two deep breaths to calm his nerves. These sessions were always dangerous, but doubly so since he'd decided on a double game. There was no turning back, though, and no wish to since he'd discovered the doppelgangers of himself they were growing. There could be only one reason they'd duplicate him. Well, they'd learn. Calapine studied Allgood, wondering if it might be time to seek diversion with the ugly Folk male. Perhaps here was an answer to boredom. Both Schruille and Nourse indulged. She seemed to recall having done that before with another Max, but couldn't remember if it had helped her boredom. "Say what it is we give you, little Max," she said. Her woman's voice, soft and with laughter behind it, terrified him. Allgood swallowed. "You give life, Calapine." "Say how many lovely years you have," she ordered. Allgood found his throat contained no moisture. "Almost four hundred, Calapine," he rasped. Nourse chuckled. "Ahead of you stretch many more lovely years if you serve us well," he said. It was the closest to a direct threat Allgood had ever heard from an Optiman. They worked their wills by indirection, by euphamist subtlety. They worked through meres who could face such concepts as death and killing. Who have they shaped to destroy me? Allgood wondered. "Many little tick-tock years," Calapine said. "Enough!" Schruille growled. He detested these interviews with the underclasses, the way Calapine baited ' the Folk. He swiveled his throne and now all the Tuyere faced the open segment. Schruille looked at his fingers, the ever youthful skin, and wondered why he had snapped that way. An enzymic imbalance? The thought touched him with disquiet. He generally held his silence during these sessions -- as a defense because he tended to get sentimental about the pitiful meres and despise himself for it afterward. Boumour moved up beside Allgood, said: "Does the Tuyere wish now the report on the Durants?" Allgood stifled a feeling of rage at the interruption. Didn't the fool know that the Optimen must always appear to lead the interview? "The words and images of your report have been seen, analyzed and put away," Nourse rumbled. "Now it is the non-report that we wish." Non-report? Allgood asked himself. Does he think we've hidden something? "Little Max," Calapine said. "Have you bowed to our necessity and questioned the computer nurse under narcosis?" Here it comes. Allgood thought. He took a deep breath, said : "She has been questioned, Calapine." Igan took his place beside Boumour, said: "There's something I wish to say about that if I... "Hold your tongue, pharmacist," Nourse said. "We talk to Max." #fgan bowed his head, thought: How dangerous this is! And all because of that fool nurse. She wasn't even one of us. No cyborg-of-the-register knows her. A member of no cell or platoon. An accidental, a Sterrie, and she puts us in this terrible peril! Allgood saw that Igan's hands trembled, wondered: What's driving these surgeons? They can't be such fools. "Was it not a deliberate thing the nurse did?" Calapine asked. "Yes, Calapine," Allgood said. "Your agents did not see it, yet we knew it had to be," Calapine said. She turned to scan the instruments of the control center, returned her attention to Allgood. "Say now why this was." Allgood sighed. "I have no excuses, Calapine. The men have been censured." "Say now why the nurse acted thus," Calapine ordered. Allgood wet his lips with his tongue, glanced at Boumour and Igan. They looked at the floor. He looked back to Calapine, at her face shimmering within the globe. "We were unable to discover her motives, Calapine." "Unable?" Nourse demanded. "She... ahh... ceased to exist during the interrogation, Nourse," Allgood said. As the Tuyere stiffened, sitting bolt upright in their thrones, he added: "A flaw in her genetic cutting, so the pharmacists tell me." "A profound pity," Nourse said, settling back. Igan looked up, blurted: "It could've been a deliberate selferasure, Nourse." That damn fool! Allgood thought. But Nourse stared now at Igan. "You were present, Igan?" "Boumour and I administered the narcotics." And she died, Igan thought. But we did not kill her. She died and we'll be blamed for it. Where could she have learned the trick oi stopping her own heart? Only Cyborgs are supposed to know and teach it, "Deliberate... self-erasure?" Nourse asked. Even when seen indirectly, the idea held terrifying implications. "Max!" Calapine said. "Say now if you used excessive... cruelty." She leaned forward, wondering why she wanted him to admit barbarity. "She suffered nothing, Calapine," Allgood said. alapine sat back disappointed. Could he be lying? She read her instruments; Calmness. He wasn't lying. "Pharmacist," Nourse said. "Explain your opinion." "We examined her carefully," Igan said. "It couldn't have been the narcotics. There's no way..." "Some of us think it was a genetic flaw," Boumour said. "There's disagreement," Igan said. He glanced at Allgood, feeling the man's disapproval. It had to be done, though. The Optimen must be made to know disquiet. When they could be tricked into acting emotionally, they made mistakes. The plan called for them to make mistakes now. They must be put off balance -- subtly, delicately. "Your opinion. Max?" Nourse asked. He watched carefully. They'd been getting poorer models lately, doppelganger degeneration. "We've already taken cellular matter, Nourse," AUgood said, "and are growing a duplicate. If we get a true copy, we'll check the question of genetic flaw." "It is a pity the doppelganger won't have the original's memories," Nourse said. "Pity of pities," Calapine said. She looked at Schruille. "Is this not true, Schruille?" Schruille looked up at her vithout answering. Did she think she could bait him the way she did the meres? "This woman had a mate?" Nourse asked. "Yes, Nourse," Allgood said. "Fertile union?" "No, Nourse," Allgood said. "A Sterrie." "Compensate the mat e," Nourse said. "Another woman, a bit of leisure. Let him think she was loyal to us." Allgood nodded, said: "We are giving him a woman, Nourse, who will keep him under constant surveillance." A trill of laughter escaped Calapine. "Why has no one mentioned this Potter, the genetic engineer?" she asked. "I was coming to him, Calapine," Allgood said. "Has anyone examined the embryo?" Schruille asked, looking up suddenly. "No, Schruille," Allgood said. "Why not?" "If this is a concerted action to escape genetic controls, Schruille, we don't want members of the organization to know we suspect them. Not yet. First, we must learn all about these people -- the Durants, their friends. Potter... everyone." "But the embryo's the key to the entire thing," Schruille said. "What was done to it? What is it?" "It is bait, Schruille," Allgood said. "Bait?" "Yes, Schruille, to catch whoever else may be involved." "But what was done to it?" "How can that matter, Schruille, as long as we can... as long as we have complete control over it." "The embryo is being guarded most adroitly, I hope," Nourse said. "Most adroitly, Nourse." "Send the pharmacist Svengaard to us," Calapine ordered. "Svengaard... Calapine?" Allgood asked. "You need not know why," she said. "Merely send him." "Yes, Calapine." Ohe stood up to signify the end  of the interview. The acolytes turned around, still swinging their thuribles, prepared now to escort the meres from the hall. But Calapine was not finished. She stared at Allgood, said: "Look at me. Max." He looked, recognizing that strange, studying set to her eyes. "Am I not beautiful?" she asked. Allgood stared at her, the slender figure with its outlines softened by the robe and curtains of power within the globe. She was beautiful as were many Optiman females. But the beauty repelled him with its threatening perfection. She would live indefinitely, already had lived forty or fifty thousand years. But one day his lesser flesh would reject the medical replacements and the enzyme prescriptions. He would die while she went on. His lesser flesh rejected her. "You are beautiful, Calapine," he said. "Your eyes never admit it," she said. "What do you. Cal?" Nourse asked. "Do you want this... do you want Max?" "I want his eyes," she said. "Just his eyes." Nourse looked at Allgood, said : "Women." His voice held a note of false cameradderie. Allgood stood astonished. He had never heard that tone from an Optiman before. "I make a point," Calapine said. "Don't interrupt my words with male jokes. In your heart of hearts. Max, how do you feel about me?" "Ahhhh," Nourse said. He nodded. "I shall say it for you," she said as Allgood remained mute. "You worship me. Never forget that. Max. You worship me." She looked at Boumour and Igan, dismissed them with a wave of her hand. Max Allgood lowered his eyes, feeling the truth in her words. He turned, and with the ecolytes flanking them, proceeded to lead Igan and Boumour out of the hall. As they emerged onto the steps, the acolytes held back and the barrier dropped. Igan and Boumour turned left, noting a new building at the end of the long esplanade which fronted Administration. They saw its machicolated walls, the openings fitted with colored filters which sent bursts of red, blue and green light upon the surrounding air, and they recognized that it blocked the way they had intended to take out of Central. A building suddenly erected, another Optiman toy. They saw it and planned their steps accordingly with the automatic acceptance that marked them as regulars in the Optiman demesne. The meres and inhabitants of Central seemed to know their way through the arabesques of its roads and streets by an instinct. The place defied cartographers because the Optimen were too subject to change and whim. "Igan!" It was Allgood calling from behind them. They turned, stood still, waiting for him to catch up with them. Allgood planted himself in front of them, hands on hips, said: "TeU me, do you worship her, too?" "Don't speak foolishness," Boumour said. "No," Allgood said. His eyes appeared to be sunk in pockets above the high cheekbones. "I belong to no Folk cult, no breeder congregation. How can I worship her?" "But you do," Igan said. "Yes!" "They are the real religion of our world," Igan said. "You do not have to belong to a cult or carry a talisman to know this. Calapine merely told you that, if there is a conspiracy, those belonging to it are heretics." "Is that what she meant?" "Of course." "And she must know what is done to heretics," Allgood said. "Without a doubt," Boumer said. X Qvengaard had seen this building in the tri-casts and entertainment vids. He'd heard descriptions of the Hall of Counsel -- but actually to be standing here at the quarantine wall with the copper sheen of sunset over the hills across from it... he'd never dreamed this could occur. Elevator caps stood out like plasmeld warts on the hillcock in front of him. There were other low hills beyond with piled buildings on them that could have been mistaken for rock outcroppings. A lone woman passed him on the esplanade, pulling a groundeffect cart filled with oddly shaped bundles. Svengaard found himself worried about what the bundles might contain, but he knew he dared not ask or show undue curiosity. The red triangle of a pharmacy outlet glowed on a pillar beside him. He passed it, glanced back at his escort. He had come halfway across the continent in the tube with an entire car to himself except for the escort, an agent from TSecurity. Deep into Central they'd come, the gray-suited TSecurity agent always beside him. Svengaard began climbing the steps. Already Central was beginning to weigh on him. There was a sense of something disastrous about the place. Even though he suspected the source of the feeling, he couldn't shake it off. It was all the Folk nonsense you could never quite evade, he'd decided. The Folk were a people for the most part without legends or ancient myths except where such matters touched the Optimen. In the Folk memories. Central and the Optimen were fixed with sinister omens compounded of awesome fear and adulation. Why did they summon me? Svengaard asked himself. The escort refused to say. They were stopped by the wall and waited now, silent, nervous. Even the agent was nervous, Svengaard saw. Why did they summon me? The agent cleared his thread: "Have all the protocol straight?" "I think so," Svengaard said. "Once you get into the hall, keep pace with the acolytes who'll escort you from there. You'll be interviewed by the Tuyere -- Nourse, Shruille and Calapine. Remember to use their names when you address them individually. Use no such words as death or kill or die. Avoid the very concepts if you can. Let them lead the interview. Best not to volunteer anything." Svengaard took a trembling breath. Have they brought me here to advance me? he wondered. That must be it. I've served my apprenticeship under such men 'as Potter and Igan. I'm being promoted to Central. "And don't say doctor," the escort said. "Doctors are pharmacists or genetic engineers." "I understand," Svengaard said. "Allgood wants a complete report on the interview afterward," the agent said. "Yes, of course," Svengaard said. The quarantine barrier lifted. "In you go," the agent said. "You're not coming with me?" Svengaard asked. "Not invited," the agent said. He turned, went down the steps. Ovengaard swallowed, entered  the silver gloom of the portico, stepped through to find himself in the long hall with an escort of six acolytes, three to a side, swinging thuribles from which pink smoke wafted. He smelled the antiseptics in the smoke. The big red globe at the end of the hall dominated the place. Its open segment showing flashing and winking lights, with moving shapes inside, fascinated Svengaard. The acolsrtes stopped him twenty paces from the opening and he looked up at the Tuyere, recognizing them through the power curtains -- Nourse in the center flanked by Calapine at left and Schruille. "I came," Svengaard said, mouthing the greeting the agent had told him to use. He rubbed sweaty palms against his best tunic. Nourse spoke with a rumbling voice: "You are the genetic engineer, Svengaard." "Thei Svengaard, yes... Nourse." He took a deep breath, wondering if they'd caught the hesitation while he remembered to use the Optiman's name. Nourse smiled. "You assisted recently in the genetic alteration of an embryo from a couple named Durant," Nourse said. "The chief engineer at the cutting was Potter." "Yes, I was the assistant, Nourse." "There was an accident during this operation," Calapine said. There was a strange musical quality in her voice, and Svengaard recognized she hadn't asked a question, but had reminded him of a detail to which she wanted him to give his attention. He felt the beginnings of a profound disquiet. "An accident, yes... Calapine," he said. "You followed the operation closely?" Nourse asked. "Yes, Nourse." And Svengaard found his attention swinging to Schruille, vho sat there brooding and silent. "Now then," Calapine said, "you will be able to tell us what it is Potter has concealed about this genetic alteration." Svengaard found that he had lost his voice. He could only shake his head. "He concealed nothing?" Nourse asked. "Is that what you say?" Svengaard nodded. "We mean you no harm, Thei Svengaard," Calapine said. "You may speak." Svengaard swallowed, cleared his throat. "I..." he said. "... the question... I saw nothing... concealed." He fell silent, then remebered he was supposed to use her name and said : "Calapine," just as Nourse started to speak. Nourse broke off, scowled. Calapine giggled. Nourse said: "Yet you tell us you followed the genetic alteration." "I... wasn't on the microscope with him every second," Svengaard said. "Nourse. I... uh... the duties of the assistant -- instructions to the computer nurse, keying the feeder tapes and so on." "Say now if the computer nurse was a special friend of yours," Calapine ordered. "I... she'd... Svengaard wet his lips with his tongue. What do they want? "We'd worked together for a number of years, Calapine. I can't say she was a friend. We worked together." "Did you examine the embryo after the operation?" Nourse asked. Qchruille sat up, stared at Sven gaard. "No, Nourse," Svengaard said. "My duties were to secure the vat, check life-support systems." He took a deep breath. Perhaps they were, only testing him after all. But such odd questions! "Say now if Potter is a special friend," Calapine ordered. "He was one of my teachers, Calapine someone I've worked with on delicate genetic problems." "But not in your particular circle," Nourse said. Svengaard shook his head. Again he sensed menace. He didn't know what to expect. Perhaps the great globe would roll over, crush him, reduce his body to scattered atoms. But no -- the Optimen couldn't do that. He studied the three faces as they becam eclear through the power curtains, seeking a sign. Clean, sterile faces. He could see the genetic markers in their features -- they might be any Sterries of the Folk except for the Optiman aura of mystery. Folk rumor said they were sterile by choice, that they saw breeding as the beginning of death; but the genetic clues of their features spoke otherwise to Svengaard. "Why did you call Potter on this particular problem?" Nourse asked. Svengaard took a tight, quavering breath, said: "He... the embryo's genetic configuration... near-Opt. Potter is familiar with our hospital. He... I have... genetic engineer." "Say now if you are friendly with any other of our pharmacists," Calapine said. "I work with them when they come to our facility," Svengaard said. "Calapine," Nourse supplied. A trill of laughter shook her. A dark flush spread up from Svengaard's collar. He began to feel angry. What kind of test was this? Couldn't they do anything but sit there, mocking, questioning? Anger gave Svengaard command of his voice and he said; "I'm only head of genetic engineering at one facility, Nourse -- a lowly district engineer. I handle routine cuttings. When something requires a specialist, I follow orders and call a specialist. Potter was the indicated specialist for this case." "One of the specialists," Nourse said. "One I know and respect," Svengaard said. This time he didn't bother adding the Optiman's name. "Say now if you are angry," Calapine ordered, and there was that musical quality in her voice. "I'm angry." "Say why." "Why am I here?" Svengaard asked. "What kind of interrogation is this? Have I done something wrong? Am I to be censured?" Nourse bent forward and placed his hands on his knees. "You dare question us?" Svengaard stared at the Optiman. In spite of the tone of the question, the square, heavyboned face appeared reassuring, calming. "I'll do anything I can to help you," Svengaard said. "Anything. But how can I help or answer you when I don't know what you vant?" Calapine started to speak, but stopoed when Nourse raised his hand. "Our most profound wish that we could tell you," Nourse said. "But surely you know we can have no true discourse. How could you understand what we understand? Can a wooden bowl contain sulphuric acidYou must trust us. We seek what is best for you." XI  sense of warmth and gratitude permeated Sv.engaard. Of course he trusted them. They were the genetic apex of humankind. And he reminded himself: They are the power that loves us and cares for us. Svengaard sighed. "What do you wish of me?" "You have answered all our questions," Nourse said. "Even our non-questions are answered." "Now, you will forget everything that has happened here between us," Calapine said. "You will repeat our conversation to no person." Svengaard cleared his throat. "To no one... Calapine?" "No one." "Max Allgood has asked that I report to him on -- " "Max must be denied," she said. "Fear not, Thei Svengaard. We will protect you." "As you command," Svengaard said. "Calapine." "It is not our wish that you think us ungrateful of your loyalty and services," Nourse said. "We are mindful of your good opinion and would not appear cold nor callous in your eyes. Know that our concern is for the larger good of humankind." "Yes, Nourse," Svengaard said. It was a gratituitous speech, its tone disturbing to Svengaard, but it helped clear his reason. He began to see the direction of their curiosity, to sense their suspicions. Those were his suspicions now. Potter had betrayed his trust, had he? The business with the accidentally destroyed tape had not been an accident. Very well -- the criminals would pay! "You may go now," Nourse said. "With our blessing," Calapine said. Svengaard bowled. And he marked that Schruille had not spoken or moved during the entire interview. Svengaard wondered why this fact, of itself, should be a suddenly terrifying thing. His knees trembled as he turned, the acolytes flanking him with their smoking thuribles, and left the hall. 'T'hey watched until the barrier dropped behind Svengaard. "Another one who doesn't know what Potter achieved," Calapine said. "Are you sure Max doesn't know?" Schruille asked. "I'm sure," she said. "Then we should've told him." "And told him how we knew?" she asked. "I know the argument," Schruille said. "Blunt the instrument, spoil the work." "That Svengaard, he's one of the reliable ones," Nourse said. "It is said we walk the sharp edge of a knife," Schruille said. "When you walk the knife, you must be careful how you place your feet." "What a disgusting idea," Calapine said. She turned to Nourse. "Are you still hobbying daVinci, dearest?" "His bmsh stroke," Nourse said. "A most exacting discipline. I should have it in forty or fifty years. Soon at any rate." "Provided you've placed each step correctly," Schruille said. Presently, Nourse said : "Sometimes, Schruille, you allow cynicism to carry you beyond the bounds of propriety." He turned, studied the instrument gauges, sensors, peek-eyes and read-outs across from Calapine on the inner wall of the globe. "It's reasonably quiet today. Shall we leave the control with Schruille, Cal, and go down for a swim and a pharmacy session?" "Body tone, body tone," Schruille complained. "Have you ever considered doing twenty-five laps of the pool instead of twenty?" "You say the most astonishing things of late," Calapine said. "Would you have Nourse upset his enzyme balance? I fail completely to understand you." "Fail to try," Schruille said. "Is there anything we can do for you?" she asked. "My cycle has plunged me into dreadful monotony," Schruille said. "Is there something you can do about that?" Nourse looked at Schruille in the prismatic reflector. The man's voice with its suggestion of a whine had grown increasingly annoying of late. Nourse was beginning to regret that community of tastes and bodily requirements had thrown them together. Perhaps when the Tuyere's service was done... "Monotony," Calapine said. She shrugged. "There's a certain triumph in well-considered monotony," Nourse said. "That's Voltaire, I believe." "It sounded like the purest Nourse," Schruille said. "I sometimes find it helpful," Calapine said, "to invoke a benign concern for the Folk." "Even among ourselves?" Schruille asked. "Consider the fate of the poor computer nurse," she said "In the abstract, naturally. Can you not feel sorrow and pity?" "Pity's a wasteful emotion," Schruille said. "Sorrow is akin to cynicism." He smiled. "This will pass. Go to your swim. When the vigor's on you, think of me... here." Nourse and Calapine stood, ordered the carrier beams into position. "Efficiency," Nourse said. "We must seek more efficiency in our minions. Things must be made to run more smoothly." Schruille looked up at them waiting for the beams. He wanted only to be free of the wanton rambling of their voices. They missed the point, insisted on missing it. "Efficiency?" Calapine asked. "Perhaps you're right." Schruille no longer could contain the emotions at war within him. "Efficiency's the opposite of craftsmanship," he said. "Think on that!" 'The place was a pumping staCalapine slid down and away vithout answering, leaving Schruille to close the segment. He sat alone at last within the green-blue-red winking of the control center -- alone except for the glittering eyes of scanners activated along the upper circle of the globe. He counted eiThtyone of them alive and staring at him and at the responses of the globe. Eighty-one of his fellows -- or groups of his fellows -- were out there observing him and his work as he observed the Folk and their work. The scanners imparted a vague uneasiness to Schruille. Before the Tuyere's service, he could never remember watching the control center or its activities. Too much that was painful an i unthinkable occurred here. Were they former masters of the control center, curious about how the new trio dispatched its duties? Who were the watchers? Schruille dropped his attention to the instruments. In moments like this he often felt like Chen Tzu-ang's "Master of Dark Truth" who saw the whole world in a jade bottle. Here was the jade bottle -- this globe. A flick of the power ring on the arm of his throne and he could watch a couple making love in Warsopolis, study the contents of an embryo vat in Greater London or loose hypnotic gas with taming suggestions into a warren of New Peking. The touch of a key and he could analyze the .shifting motives of an entire work force in the megalopolis of Roma. Searching within himself, Schruille could not find the impulse to move a single control. He thought back, trying to remember how many scanners hnrl watched the first years of the Tuyere's service. He was sure it had never exceeded ten or twelve. But now -- eighty-one. # should've warned them about Svenaard, he thought. I could' ve said that we shouldn't rely on the assumption there's 'a special Providence for fools. Svenaard is a fool who disturbs me. But Nourse and Calapine would've defended Svengaard. He knew it. They'd have insisted the man was reliable, honorable, loyal. They'd wager anything on it Anything? Schruille wondered. Is there something they might not wager on Svengaard's loyalty? Schruille could almost hear Nourse pontificating; Our judgment of Svengaard is the correct one. And that, Schruille thought, is what disturbs me. Svengaard worships us... as does Max. But worship is nine-tenths fear. In time, everything becomes fear. Schruille looked up at the watching scanners, spoke aloud: "Time-time-time... Let that chew at their vitals, he thought. T he place was a pumping station for the salvage reclamation system of Seatac megalopolis. It lay at the eleven hundred foot level on the spur line that sent byproduct irrigation water into Grand Coulee system. A four-story box of sampling pipes, computer consoles and access catwalks aglow with force-buoyed lights, it throbbed to the pulse of the giant turbines it controlled. The Durants had come down through the personnel tubes during the evening rush hour, moving in easy random stages that insured they weren't followed and that they carried no tracer devices. Five inspection tubes had passed them as clean. Still, they were careful to read the faces and actions of the people who jostled past. Most of the people were dull pages, hurried, intent on their own business. Occasionally, they exchanged a mutual reading-glance with another courier, or identified subofficials with the fear goading them on Optiman errands. No one noticed a couple in workman brown, their hands clasped, who emerged onto Catwalk Nine of the pumping station. The Durants paused there to survey their surroundings. They were tired, elated and more than a little awed at having been summoned into the control core of the Parents Underground. The smell of hydrocarbons filled the air around them. Lizbeth sniffed. Her silent conversation through their clasped hands carried overtones of tension. Harvey worked to reassure her. "It's probably our Glisson we're to see," he said. "There could be other Cyborgs with the same name," she said. "Not likely." He urged her out onto the catwalk, past a hover light. They took a left branching past two workmen reading pitot gauges, their faces in odd shadows created by the lights from below. Lizbeth felt the lonely exposure of their position, signaled: "How can we be sure they aren't watching us here?" "This must be one of our places," he said. "You know." "How can it be?" "Route the scanners through editing computers," he said. "The Opts see only what we want them to see then." "It's dangerous to feel sure of such things," she said. Then; "Why have they summoned us?" "We'll know in a few minutes," he said. The walk led through a dustexcluding lock port into a tool bunker, gray walls punctured by outlets for transmission tubes, the inevitable computer controls blinking, ticking, chuckling, whirring. The place smelled of a sweet oil. As the port clanged shut behind the Durants, a figure came from their left and sat on a padded bench across from them. T'he Durants stared silently, recognizing and repelled by the recognition. The figure's outline suggested neither man nor woman. It looked planted there in the seat, and as they watched, it pulled thin cables from pockets in its gray coveralls, plugged the cables into the computer wall. Harvey brought his attention up to the square, deeply seamed face and the light gray eyes with their stare of blank directness, that coldly measured observation which was a trademark of the Cyborg. "Glisson," Harvey said. "You summoned us?" "I summoned you," the Cyborg said. "It has been many years, Durant. Do you still fear us? I see that you do. You are late." "We're unfamiliar with this area," Harvey said. "We came carefully;" Lizbeth said. "Then I taught you well." Glisson said. "You are reasonably good pupils." Through their clasped hands, Lizbeth signaled: "They're so hard to read, but something's wrong." She averted her eyes from the Cyborg, chilled by the weighted stare. No matter how she tried to think of them as flesh and blood, her mind could never evade the knowledge that such bodies contained miniaturized computers linked directly to the brain, that the arms were not arms but prosthetic tools and weapons. And the voice -- such a clipped-off unemotional quality. "You should not fear us, Madame," Glisson said. "Unless you are not Lizbeth Durant." Harvey failed to repress the snap of anger, said: "Don't talk to her that way! You don't own us." "What is the first lesson I taught you after you were recruited?" Glisson asked. Harvey brought himself under control, forced a rueful smile onto his mouth. "To hold our tempers," he said. Lizbeth's hand continued to tremble in his. "That lesson you did not learn well," Glisson said. "I overlook your fallibility." Through their hands, Lizbeth signaled : "It was prepared for violence against us." Harvey acknowledged. "First," Glisson said, "you will report on the genetic operation." There was a pause while the Cyborg changed its jacked connections to the computer wall. "Do not be distracted by my work, I distribute tools -- thus." It indicated the bunker, "this space, which appears on their screens as a chamber filled with tools, will never be investigated." A bench slid from the wall to the Durants' right. "If you are fatigued, sit," Glisson said. The Cyborg indicated its cable linkage to the wall computer. "I sit only that I may carry on the work of this space while we speak." The Cyborg smiled, a stiff rictus to signify that the Durants must realize such as Glisson did not feel fatigue. Harvey urged Lizbeth to the bench. They sat as he signaled: Caution. Glisson's maneuvering us. Something's being hidden." jlisson turned slightly to face them, said: "A verbal, factual, complete report. Leave out nothing, no matter how trivial it may seem to you. I have limitless capacity for data." They began recounting what they had observed of the genetic operation, taking up from each other on cue without a break as good couriers were taught to do. Harvey experienced the odd feeling during the recital that he and Lizbeth became part of the Cyborg's mechanism. Questions came so mechanically from Glisson's lips. Their answers felt so clinical. He had to keep reminding himself: This is our son we discuss. Presently, Glisson said: "There seems no doubt we've another self-viable. Your evidence virtually completes the picture. We have other data, you know." "I didn't know the surgeon was one of us," Lizbeth said. There was a pause while Glisson's eyes went even blanker than usual. The Durants felt they could almost see the esoteric formulae flitting through Glisson's thinking-banks. It was said the Cyborgs composed most of their thoughts only in higher math, translating to common language as it suited them. "The surgeon was not one of us," Glisson said. "But he soon will be." What strategic formula produced those words? Harvey wondered. "What about the computer tape on the operation?" he asked. "It's destroyed," Glisson said. "Even now, your embryo is being removed to a safe place. You will join him soon." A mechanical chuckle escaped the Cyborg's lips. Lizbeth shivered. Harvey felt the tension of her through their hands. He said: "Is our son safe?" "Safe," Glisson said. "Our plans insure that safety." "How?" Lizbeth asked. "You will understand soon," Glisson said. "An ancient and reliable way of safe concealment. Be assured: self-viables are valuable weapons. We do not risk our valuable weapons." Lizbeth signaled: "The cut -- ask now." Harvey wet his lips with his tongue, said: "There are... when a Central surgeon's called in, usually it means the embryo could be cut to Optiman. Did they... is our son..." Glisson's nostrils flared. The face took on a look of hauteur that said such ignorance insulted a Cyborg. The clipped voice said : "We would require a complete tape record, including the enzymic data even to guess. The tape is gone. Only the surgeon knows the result of the operation for certain. We have yet to question him." Lizbeth said: "Svengaard or the computer nurse might've said something that..." "Svengaard is a dolt," Glisson said. "The computer nurse is dead." "They killed her?" Lizbeth whispered. "How she died isn't important," Glisson said. "She served her purpose." W'th his hand, Harvey signaled: "The Cyborgs certainly had something to do with her death." "I saw," she answered. Harvey said: "Are you... vill we be allovred to talk to Potter?" "Potter will be offered full Cyborg status," Glisson said. "Talking will be his decision... afterward." "We want to know about our son!" Lizbeth flared. Harvey signaled frantically : "Apologize!" "Madame," Glisson said, "let me remind you the so-called Optiman cut is not a state to which we aspire. Remember your vows." S he squeezed Harvey's hand to silence his signals, said: "I'm sorry. It was such a shock to learn... the possibility... "Your emotional excesses are taken into account as a mitigating circumstance," Glisson said. "It is well, therefore, that I warn you of a thing to happen. You will hear things about your son which you must not let excite you." "What things?" Lizbeth whispered. "An outside force of unknown origin sometimes interferes with the anticipated course of a genetic operation," Glisson said. "There is reason to believe this happened with your son." "What do you mean?" Harvey asked. "Mean!" Glisson sneered. "You ask questions to which there are no answers." "What does this... thing do?" Lizbeth supplied. Glisson looked at her. "It behaves somewhat in the fashion of a charged particle, penetrates the genetic core and alters the structure. If this has happened to your son, you may consider it beneficial because it apparently prevents the Optiman cut." The Durants digested this. Presently Harvey said: "Do you require more of us? May we go now?" "You will remain here." They stared. "You will wait for further orders," Glisson said. "But we'll be missed," Lizbeth said. "Our apartment, they'll -- " "We've raised doppelgangers to play your roles long enough for you to escape Seatac," Glisson said. "You can never go back. You should've known this." Harvey's lips moved, then: "Escape? What's... why are..." "There is violence," Glisson said. "Even now. The death-wish cults win have their day." The Cyborg raised its gaze toward the ceiling. "War... blood... killing. It will be as it was before when the skies flamed and the earth ran molten." Harvey cleared his throat. Wars... before. Glisson gave the impression that wars had been recent, perhaps gnly yesterday. And for this Cyborg that might be true. It was said that Glisson's grandsir had fought in the OptimanCyborg war. No one of the Underground Folk knew how many identities Glisgon had lived. "Where'll we go?" Harvey asked. He signaled Lizbeth not to interrupt. "A place has been prepared." The Cyborg arose, unplugged its linkage with the computer panel, said: "You will wait here. Do not attempt to leave. Your needs will be provided for." V Glisson left by the lock port and it sealed with a heavy thump. tt'They're as bad as the Op' timen," Lizbeth signaled. "The day will come when we're free of both them and the Opts," Harvey said. "It'll never happen," she said. "Don't say that!" he ordered. "If only we knew a friendly surgeon," she said. We could take our son and run." "That's foolishness! How could we service the vat without machinery for..." "I've that machinery right inside me," she said. "I was... born with it." Harvey stared at her, shocked speechless. "I dcpi't want the Cyborgs or the Opts controlling our son's life," she said, "regulating his mind with hypnotic gas, making duplicates of him for their own purposes, pushing him and leading him and..." "Don't work yourself into a state," he said. "You heard him," she said. "Doppelgangers! They can regulate anything -- our very being! They can condition us to... to... do anything! For all we know, we've been conditioned to be here right now!" "You're being unreasonable." "Unreasonable? Look at me! They can take a piece of my skin and grow an identical copy. Me! Identical! How do you know I'm me? How do you know I'm the original me? How do I know?" He gripped her free arm and for a moment had no words. Presently, he forced himself to relax, shook his head. "You're you, Liz. You're not flesh grown from a cell. You're... all the things we've shared... and been... and done together They couldn't duplicate memories... not that with a doppelganger." She pressed her cheek against the rough fabric of his jacket, wanting the comfort of it, the tactile sensation that told her body he was here and he was real. "They'll make doppelgangers of our son," she said. "That's what they're planning." "Then we'll have many sons." "For what reason?" She looked up at him, her lashes damp with unshed tears. "You heard what Glisson said. Something from outside adjusted our embryo. What was it?" "Soiliebody must know." "I know you," he said. "You want to think it's God." "What else could it be?" "Anything -- chance, accident, some higher order manipulator. Maybe someone's discovered something they're not sharing." "One of us? They wouldn't!" "Nature, then," he said. "Nature asserting itself in the interest of Man." "Sometimes you sound like a cultist!" "It isn't the Cyborgs," he said. "We know that." "Glisson said it was beneficent." "But it's genetic shaping. That's blasphemy to them. Physical alteration of the bioframe, that's their way." "Like Glisson," she said. "That robot with flesh." Again, she pressed her cheek against him. "That's what I fear -- they'll do that to our son... our sons." "The courier service outnumbers the Cyborgs a hundred to one," he said. "As long as we .stick together, we'll win." "But we're just flesh," she said, "and so weak." "And we can do something all those Sterries together can't do," he reminded her. "We can perpetuate our own kind." "What does it matter?" she asked. "Optimen never die." tcQvengaard waited for night  and checked the area through the observation screens in his office before going down to the vat room. In spite of the fact that this was his hospital and he had a perfect right here, he was conscious of doing a forbidden thing. The significance of the ir terview at Central hadn't escaped him. The Optimen wouldn't like this. But he had to look in that vat. He paused in the darkness of the vat room, stood there near the door, realizing with a sense of detachment that he had never before been in here without the full blaze of lights. There were only the glow bulbs behind gauges and telltales now -- faint dots and circles of luminescence by which to orient himself. The thrap-thrap-thrap of viapumps created an odd contrapuntal rhythm w'hich filled the gloom with a sense of urgency. Svengaard imagined all the embryos in there (twenty-one at the morning count) their cells reaching out, doubling and redoubling in the strange ecstasy of growth -- becoming unique, distinct, discrete individuals. Not for them the contraceptive gas that permeated Folk breathing spaces. Not yet. Now, they could grow almost as their ancestors had grown before the genetic engineers. Svengaard sniffed. His nostrils, instinctively alerted by the darkness, sensed the amniotic saltiness of the air. From its odor, this room could almost have been a primal seashore with life burgeoning in its ooze. Svengaard shuddered and reminded himself: I'm a submolecutar engineer, a gene surgeon. There's nothing strange here. But the thought failed to convince him. He pushed himself away from the door, headed down the line looking for the vat with the Durant embryo. In his mind lay the clear memory of wbat he had seen in that embryo -- the intrusion that had flooded the cells with arginine. Intrusion. Where had it originated? Was Potter correct? Was it an unknown creator of stability? Stability... order... systems. Extended systems... infinite aspects of energy that left all matter insubstantial. These suddenly were frightening thoughts here in the whispering gloom. He stumbled against a low instrument stand, cursed softly. His stomach felt tight with the urgency of the viapumps and the real urgency in the fact that he had to finish here before the duty nurse made her hourly rounds. An insect shape, shadow against shadows, stood out against the wall in front of him. He froze and it took a moment for him to recognize the familiar outlines of the meson microscope. Svengaard turned to the luminous numbers on the vats -- twelve, thirteen, fourteen... fifteen. Here it Was. He checked the name on the tag, reading it in the glow of a gauge bulb : "Durant." Something about this embryo  had the Optimen upset and Security in an uproar. His regular computer nurse was gone -- where, nobody could say. The replacement walked like a man. Svengaard wheeled out the microscope, moving gently in the darkness, positioned the instrument over the vat, made the connections by feel. The vat throbbed against his fingers. He rigged for scanning, bent to the viewer. Up out of the swarming cellular mass came a hydrophilic gene segment. He centered on it, the darkness forgotten as he pushed his awareness into the scopelighted field of the viewer. Meson probes slid down... down into the mitochondrial structure. He found the alpha-helices and began checking out polypeptide chains. A puzzled frown creased his brow. He switched to another cell. Another. The cells were low in arginine -- he could see that. Thoughts brushed their way through his mind as he peered and hunted: How could the Durant embryo, of all embryos, be low on arginine? Any normal male would have more sperm protamine than exchange system carry no hint of Optiman? The cut wouldn't make this much difference. Abruptly, Svengaard sent his probes down into the sex identifiers, scanned the overlapping helices. Female! He straightened, checked number and tag. "Fifteen. Durant." Svengaard bent to the inspection chart, read it in the gauge glow. It showed the duty nurse's notations for the eighty-first hour. He glanced at his watch: still twenty minutes before she made the eighty-second hour check. The Durant embryo could not possibly be female, he thought. Not from Potter's operation. Someone had switched embryos, he realized. One embryo would activate the vat's life-system responses much like another. Without microscopic examination, the change couldn't be detected. Who? In Svengaard's mind, the most likely candidates were the Optimen. They'd removed the Durant embryo to a safe place and left a substitute. Why? Bait, he thought. Bait. Who are they trying to catch? He straightened, mouth dry, heart pumping rapidly. A sound at the wall to his left brought him whirling around. The vat room's emergency computer panel had come to life, tapes beginning to turn, lights winking. A read-out board clattered. But there was no operator! Svengaard whirled to run from the room, collided with a blocky, unmoving shape. Arms and hand:: gripped him with unmerciful pressure and he saw beyond his captor, a section of the vat room wall open with dim light there and movement. Then darkness exploded in his skull. geatac Hospital's new compu ter nurse got Max Allgood on the phone after only a short delay while Security traced him. Allgood's eyes appeared sunken. His mouth was pulled into a thin line. "Yes?" he said. "Oh, it's you." "Something important's come up," she said. "Svengaard's in the vat room examining the Durant embryo under microscope." Allgood rolled his eyes. "Oh, for the love of... Is that why you got me out of... is that why you called me?" "But there was a noise and you said..." "Forget it." "I tell you there was a commotion of some kind in that room and now Doctor Svengaard's gone. I didn't see him go." "He probably left by another door." "There is no other door." "Look, sweetie, I have half a hundred agents tiiere covering that room like a blanket. A fly couldn't move in that room without our scanners picking it up." "Then check with them to see where Svengaard's gone." "Oh, for... "Check." "All right!" Allgood turned to his hot line, got the duty agent. The computer nurse could hear him through her open line. "Where's Svengaard?" A muffled voice responded: "Just went in and examined the Durant embryo under miscrocope, then left." "Went out the door?" "Just walked out." Allgood's face came back onto the computer nurse's screen. "You hear that?" "I heard, but I've been down at the end of the hall ever since he went in. He didn't come out." "You probably turned your back for five seconds." "Well..." "You did, didn't you?" "I may've looked away just for a second, but..." "So you missed him." "But I heard a commotion." "If there was anything wrong, my men would've reported it. Now, forget this. Svengaard's no problem. They said he'd probably do this and we could ignore it. They're never wrong about such things." "If you're sure." "I'm sure." "Say, why are we so interested in that embryo?" "You don't need to know, sweetie. Get back to work and let me get some sleep." She broke the connection, still wondering about the noise she had heard. It had somided like something being hit.  llgood sat staring at the blank screen after the nurse signed off. Noise? Commotion? He formed a circle with his mouth, exhaled slowly. Crazy damn female! Abruptly, he stood up, turned back to his bed. The doxie playmate he'd brought in for the night lay there in the rosy light of a gloom dispeller, half awake, looking at him. Her eyes under long lashes filled him with sudden rage. "Get the hell out of here!" he roared. She sat upright in the bed, wide awake, staring. "Out!" he said, pointing to the door. She tumbled out of bed, grabbed her clothing and ran out the door, a flash of pink flesh. Only when she'd gone did AOgood realize who she'd reminded him of -- Calapine, a dull Calapine. He wondered at himself then. The Cyborg had said the adjustments they made, the instruments they'd implanted, would help him control his emotions, permit him to lie with impunity even to Optimen. This outburst now -- it frightened him. He stared down at one of his slippers abandoned on the gray rug, its mate vanished somewhere. He kicked the slipper, began pacing back and forth. Something was wrong. He could feel it. He'd lived almost four hundred lovely years, most of them in Optiman service. He had a well-trained instinct for rightness and wrongness. It was survival. Something was wrong. Had the Cyborg lied to him? Was he being used for some trick of their own? He stumbled over the slipper. Noiee. Commotion. With a low curse, he returned to the hot line, got his duty agent. The man's face on the screen looked like an infant -- puffy lips and big, eager eyes. "Go down to that vat room and inspect it," Allgood said. "The fine tooth. Look for signs of a commotion." "But if anybody sees us..." "Damn it to hell! Do as I say!" "Yes, sir!" The agent clicked off. Allgood threw off his robe, all thought of sleep forgotten, ran through a quick shower and began dressing. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Before leaving his quarters he put out a call to have Svengaard picked up and brought in for questioning. XV T)y eight a.m., the streets and speedwalks of Seatac's industrial district-north swarmed with machine and foot traffic -- the jostling impersonals of people following the little strungout channels of their private concerns. Weather control had said the day would be held to a comfortable seventy-eight Fahrenheit with no clouds. An hour from now, as the day settled into its working tempo, traffic would become more sparse. Dr. Potter had seen the city at that pace many times, but he had never before been immersed in the shiftbreak swarm. He was aware that the Parents Underground had chosen this time for its natural concealment. He and his guide were just two more impersonals here. Who would notice them? This didn't subtract, though, from his fascinated interest in a scene that was new to him. A big female Sterrie in the green-white striped uniform of a machine-press operator in the heavy industry complex pushed past him. She looked to Potter like a B#iG#-cut with cream skin and heavy features. On a gold loop in her right ear she wore a dancing doll breeder fetish. Almost in lock step behind her trotted a short man with hunched up shoulders carrying a short brass rod. He flashed an impish grin at Potter as they passed, as much as to say: "Here's the only way to get through a crowd like this." Potter's guide turned Potter aside onto the step-down walk and then into a side street. The guide was an enigma to Potter, who couldn't place the cut. The man wore a plain brown service suit, coveralls. He appeared reasonably normal except for a pale, almost sickly skin. His deeply set eyes glittered almost like lenses. A skull cap concealed his hair except for a few dark brown strands that looked almost artificial. His hands when they touched Potter to guide him felt cold and faintly repellent. The crowd thinned here as the step-down walk rounded a corner into a by-way canyon between two towering windowless buildings. There was dust in this cavernous street, rising up and almost concealing a distant tracery of bridges. Potter wondered at the dust. It was as though the director of local weather allowed dust here in an unconscious passion for naturalness. A bulky man hurried past them and Potter was caught by the look of his hands -- thick wrists, bulging knuckles, homed callouses. He had no idea what work could cause such deformity. he guide steered them now onto a succession of drop walks and into the cave of an alley. The swarm was left behind. A feeling of detachment seized Potter. He felt he was reliving an old and familiar experience. Why did I come with this person? he wondered. The guide wore the wheeled blazon of a transport driver on his shoulder, but he'd said right out he was from the Parents Underground. "I know what you did for us," he'd said. "Now we will do something for you." A turn of the head. "Come." They'd talked only briefly after that, but Potter had known from the first the guide had correctly identified himself. This was no trick. Then why did I accept the invitation? Potter asked himself. Certainly it wasn't for the veiled promises of extended life and instant knowledge. There were Cyborgs behind this, of course, and he suspected this guide might be one of them. Most of the Optimen and Servant Uppers tended to discount the Folk rumors that Cyborgs did exist, but Potter had never joined the cynics and scoffers. He could no more explain why than he could explain his presence here in this alley-cave walking between dark plasmeld walls illuminated by the ghost flicker of overhead glowtubes. Potter suspected he had at last rebelled against one of the three curses of their age -- moderation, drugs and alcohol. Narcopleasures and alcohol had tempted him in their time... ". and finally moderation. He knew it wasn't normal for the times. Better to take up with one of the wild sex cults. But pointless sex without even the faint hope of issue had palled on him, although he knew this for a sign of final dissolution. The alley opened into one of the lost squares of the megalopolis -- a triangular paving and fountain that looked to be real stone, green with the slime of ages. The Optimen don't know about this place, Potter thought. They despised stone which eroded and wore away -- in their time. Regenerative plasmeld was the thing. It stood unmoved and unmoving for all time. The guide slowed as they reached the open air. Potter noted a faint smell of chemicals about the man, oily sweetness, and a tiny scar running diagonally down the back of his neck into his collar. Why didn't he try to blackmail me into coming? Potter wondered. Could he be that sure? Could anyone know me that well? "We have a job for you," the guide had said. "An operation you must perform." Curiosity is my weakness. Potter thought. That's why I'm here. The guide put a hand on Potter's arm, said: "Stop. Wait." '"The tone was conversational, calm, but Potter felt hidden tensions. He looked up and around. The buildings were windowless, faceless. A wide door stood out in the angle of another alleyway ahead. They had come almpst around the fountain without encountering another person. Nothing stirred or moved around them. There was only the faint rumbling of distant machinery. "What is it?" Potter whispered. "Why're we waiting?" "Nothing," the guide said. "Wait." Potter shrugged. His mind veered back to the first encounter with this creature. How could they know what I achieved with that embryo? It must be the computer nurse. She's one of them. The guide had refused to say. I came because I hoped they could help me solve the mystery of the Durant embryo, he thought. They were the source of the arginine intrusion -- thafs what I suspect. He thought of Svengaard's description -- a contrail-like intrusion. It had deposited argininerich sperm protamine through the coiled alpha-helices of the embryo's cells. Then had come the operation -- the cysteine masked, neutralized with sulfhyoligomycin and azide... the exchange reaction inhibited. Potter stared up at the patch of blue sky framed by the buildings around the square. His mind, concentrated on the Durant cutting, had encountered a new idea. He no longer saw the sky. His awareness was back within the swarming cell structure, following the mitochondrial systems like an undersea hunter. "It could be repeated," Potter whispered. "Silence," the guide hissed. Potter nodded. On any embryo 'ad all, he thought. The key's the arginine flooding. I could duplicate that myself on the basis of Sven's description. Gods! We embryos! And every one of them selfviable! He took a deep breath, dismayed by the realization that -- with the record tape erased -- his memory might be the only container of that entire operation and its implications. Svengaard and the computer nurse could have only part of it. They hadn't been in there, immersed in the heart of the cell. duce what had happened and be able to reproduce the operation from the partial records, but only if he were to set the problem. Who would ever take up this problem? Not the Optimen. Not that dolt Svengaard. The guide tugged at Potter's arm. Potter looked down into that flat, chill-eyed face with its lack of genetic identification. "We are observed," the guide said in an oddly depersonalized tone. "Listen to me very carefully. Your life depends on it." potter shook his head, blinked. He felt removed from his own person, become only a set of senses to record this man's words and actions. "You will go through that door ahead of us," the guide said. Potter turned, looked at the door. Two men carrying paperwrapped parcels emerged from the alley in front of it, hurried around the square opposite them. The guide ignored them. Potter heard a babble of young voices growing louder in the alley. But the guide did not pay any attention to these either. "Inside that building, you will take the first door on your left," he said. "You will see a woman there operating a voicebox. You will say to her : 'My shoe pinches.' She will say: 'Everyone has troubles.' She will take care of you from there." Potter found his voice; "What am I supposed to do if she's not there?" "Then go through the door behind her desk and out through the adjoining office into a rear hall. Turn left and go to the rear of the building. You will find there a man in a loader supervisor's uniform, striped gray and black. When you find him, you will repeat the procedure with him." "What about you?" Potter asked. "That is not your concern. Quickly, now!" The guide gave him a push that sent him hurtling forward. Potter stumbled toward the door just as a woman in a teacher's uniform emerged from the alley leading a file a children across between him and the bolt hole. Potter's shocked senses took in the scene -- children, all diessed in tight shorts that revealed their long flamingo legs. They were all around him suddenly and he was bulling his way through toward the door. Behind him, someone screamed. Potter lurched against the door, found the handle, turned and looked back. His guide had gone around to the opposite side of die fountain which concealed him now from the vaist down, but what remained visible was enough to make Potter gasp and freeze. The man's chest was bare, revealing a single milky white dome from which blazed a searing light. Potter turned left and saw a line of men emerging from another alley to be crisped and burned down by that searing light. The children were shouting, crying, falling back into the alley from which they had emerged, but Potter ignored them, fascinated by this slaughter-machine which he'd thought was a human being. One of the guide's arms lifted, pointed overhead. From the extended fingers, lancets of searing blue stabbed upward. Where the light terminated, aircars tumbled from the sky. The air all around had become an ozone-crackling inferno punctuated by explosions, screams, hoarse shouts. Potter stood there watching, unable to move, forgetful of his instructions or the door or his hand upon the door's handle. Return fire was coming now at the guide. His clothing shriveled, vanished in smoke to reveal an armored body with muscles that had to be plasmeld fibers. The ravening beams continued to blaze from his hands and chest. potter found he no longer could bear to watch. He wrenched the door open, stumbled through into the relative gloom of a yellow-walled foyer. He slammed the door behind him as an explosion rocked the building. The door rattled. On his left, a door vas flung open. A tiny blue-eyed blonde woman stood there staring at him. Potter found himself oddly recognizing the markers of her genetic cut, reassured by the touch of humanity in these tiny betrayals. He could see the cabinet of a voicebox in the room behind her. "My shoe pinches," Potter said. She gulped, "Everyone has troubles." "I am Dr. Potter," he said. 'T think my escort has just been killed." She stepped aside, said: "In here." Potter lurched past her into an office with lines of empty desks. His mind was a turmoil. He felt shaken to his roots by the implications of the violence he had just witnessed. The woman took his arm, herded him toward another door. "Through here," she said. "We'll have to go into the service tubes. That's the only way. They'll have this place surrounded in minutes." Potter stopped, figuratively dug in his heels. He hadn't counted on violence. He didn't know what he had expected, but not that. "Where're we going?" he demanded. "Why do you want me?" "Don't you know?" she asked. "He... never said." "Everything'll be explained," she said. "Hurry." til you tell me," he said. A raw street oath escaped her lips. She said: "If I must I must. You're to implant the Durant embryo in its mother. It's the only way we can get it out of here." "In the mother?" "In the ancient way," she said. "I know it's disgusting, but it's the only way. Now hurry!" Potter allowed himself to be herded through the door. I'll the control center, their Survey Globe, the Tuyere occupied the thrones on the pivoting triangle, reviewing data and reviewing data -- correlating, deducing, commanding. The #degree scan of curved wall available to each of them flashed with data in numerous modes -- pictorially in the spying screens, as probability function in mathematical read-outs, as depth-module decision analogues, as superior inferior unit apportionments pictured in free-flowing pyramids, as visual reports reduced to cubed grids of binaries according to relative values, as motivational curves weighted for action reaction and presented in flowing green lines... In the upper quadrants, scanner eyes glittered to show how many of the Optimen were sitting-in on the globe's activity -- there were over a thousand this morning. Calapine worried the prescription ring on her left thumb, felt the abortive hum of power in it as she twisted and slid it along her skin. She felt restless, full of demands for which she could find no names. The duties of the globe were becoming repellant. her companions hateful. In here. Time settled into more of a continuous blur without days or nights. Every companion she had ever known grew to be the same companion, merged, endlessly merged. "Once more have I studied the protein synthesis tape on the Durant embryo," Nourse said. He glanced at Calapine in the reflector beside his head, drummed the arm of his throne with fingers that moved back and forth on the carved plasmeld. "Something we've missed, something we've missed," Calapine mocked. She looked at Schruille, caught him rubbing his hands along his robe at his thighs, a motion that seemed filled with stark betrayal of nervousness. "Now it happens I've discovered the thing we missed," Nourse said. A movement of Schruille's head caught Nourse's attention. He turned. For a moment, they stared at each other in the prisms. Nourse found it interesting that Schruille betrayed a tiny skin blemish beside his nose. Odd, Nourse thought. How could one of us have a blemish such as that? Surely there, could be no enzymic imbalance. "Well, what is it?" Schruille demanded. "You've a blemish beside your nose," Nourse said. chruille stared at him. "You deduce this from the embryo's tape?" Calapine asked. "Eh? Oh... no, of course not." "Then what is it you've discovered?" "Yes. Well... it seems rather obvious now that the operation Potter performed may be repeatable -- given that general type of embryo and proper administration of sperm protamine." Schruille shuddered. "Have you deduced the course of the operation?" Calapine asked. "Not precisely, but iii outline, yes." "Potter could repeat it?" she asked. "Perhaps even Svengaard." "Guard and preserve us," Calapine mfuttered. It was a ritual formula whose words seldom caught an Optiman's conscious attention, but she heard herself this time. The word "preserve" stood out as though outlined in fire. She whirled away. "Where is Max?" Schruille asked. The whine in Schruille's voice brought a sneer to Nourse's lips. "Max is working," Nourse said. "He is busy." Schruille looked up at the watching scanners, thinking of all their fellows behind those lensed eyes -- the Actionists seeing events as a new demand upon their talents, not realizing what violence might be unleashed here; the Emotionals, fearful and complaining, rendered almost ineffective by guilt feelings; the Cynics, interested by the new game (most of the watchers, Schruille felt, were Cynics) ; the Hedonists, angered by the current sense of urgent emergency, worried that such matters interfered with their enjoyments, and the Effetes, looking in all this for something new at which to sneer. Will we now develop 'a new party? Schruille asked himself. Will we now have the Brutals, all sensitivity immured by the needs of self preservation? Nourse and Calapine haven't faced this as yet. Again he shuddered. "Max calls," Calapine said. "I have him in my transient screen." Schruille and Nourse flicked their channel duplicators, looked down at Allgood's swarthy, solid, muscular figure in the transient screen. "I report," Allgood said. Calapine watched the Security chief's face. He appeared oddly distracted, fearful. "What of Potter?" Nourse asked. Allgood blinked. "Why does he delay his answer?" Schruille asked. "It's because he worships us," Calapine said. "Worship is a product of fear," Schruille said. "Perhaps there's something he wishes to show us, a projection or an evidential subdatum. Is that it. Max?" TV Tax Allgood stared out of the screen, looking from one to the other. They'd gotten tied up in that lost-time sense again, the endless word play and disregard for Time in the quest for data, data, data -- that side effect of endless life, the suprainvolvement in trivia. This time, he hoped it would go on forever. "Where is Potter?" Nourse demanded. Allgood swallowed. "Potter has... temporarily eluded us." He knew better than to lie or evade. "Eluded?" Schruille asked. "How?" Nourse asked. "There was... violence," Allgood said. "Show us this violence," Schruille said. "No," Calapine said. "I will take Max's word for it." "Do you doubt Max?" Nourse a.sked. "No doubts," Schruille said. "But I will see this violence." "How can you?" Calapine asked. "Leave if you wish," Schruille said. He measured out his words ; "I... will... see... this... violence." He looked at Allgood. "Max?" Allgood swallowed. This was a development he had not anticipated. "It happened," Nourse said. "We know that, Schruille." "Of course it happened," Schruille said. "I saw the mark where it was edited out of our channels. Violence. Now I wish to bypass the safety valve which protects our sensitivities." He snorted. "Sensitivities!" Nourse stared at him, noting that all traces of a whine had gone from Schruille's voice. Schruille looked up at the scanners, saw that many were winking off. He was disgusting even the Cynics, no doubt, A few remained, though. Will they stay through to the end? he wondered. "Show the violence. Max," Schruille ordered. Allgood shrugged. Nourse swiveled his throne around, putting his back to the screen. Calapine put her hands over her eyes. "As you command," Allgood said. His face vanished from the screen, was replaced by a high view looking down into a tiny square between windowless buildings. Two tiny figures walked around a fountain in the square. They stopped and a close-up showed the faces -- Potter and an unknown, a strange looking man with frighteningly cold eyes. Again the long view. Two other men were emerging from an alley carrying paper-wrapped packages. Behind them trooped a file of children with an adult monitor in teacher's uniform. Abruptly Potter was lurching, pushing through the children. His companion was running the other way around the fountain. Schruille risked a glance at Calapine, caught her peeking between her fingers. li shrill, piercing cry from the screen brought his attention jerking back. Potter's companion had become a thing of horror, clothing fallen away, a milky bulb arising from his chest to flare with brilliant light. The screen went blank, came alive again to a view from a slightly different angle. A quick glance showed that Calapine had dropped all pretense of hiding her eyes, was staring at the screen. Nourse, too, vatched through his shoulder prism. Another blaze of light leaped from the figure in the screen. Again the screen went blank. "It's a Cyborg," Schruille said. "Know that as you watch." Again the scene came alive from a different angle and this time from very high. The action in the plasmeld canyon was reduced to a movement of midges, but there was no difficulty in finding the center of violence. Lancets of blazing light leaped upward from a lurching figure in the square. Aircars exploded and fell from the sky in pieces. One Security vehicle plummeted in behind the Cyborg. A pulsing beam of coherent light emerged from it to cut a smoking furrow down the side of a build ing. The Cyborg whirled, lifted a hand from which a blinding blue finger seemed to extend into infinity. The finger met the diving car, split it in half. One half hit a building, ricocheted and smashed into the Cyborg. shape in the square. In a second, a reverberating explosion shook the scene. Schruille looked up to find tlie nSrr'io of watching scanners complete, every lensed eye blazing red. Calapine cleared her throat. "Potter went into that building on the right." "Is that all you can say?" Schruille asked. Nourse swiveled his throne, glared at Schruille. "Was it not interesting?" Schruille asked. "Interesting?" Nourse asked. "It is called warfare," Schruille said. A llgood's face reappeared on  the screen, looking up at them with a veiled intensity. He's naturally curious at our reaction, Schruille thought. "Do you know of our weapons. Max?" Schruille asked. "This talk of weapons and violence disgusts me," Nourse said. "What is the good of this?" "Why do we have weapons if they were not intended for use?" Schruille asked. "Do you know the answer. Max?" "I know of your weapons," Allgood said. "They are the ultimate safeguard for your persons." "Of course we have weapons!" Nourse shouted. "But why must we... "Nourse, you demean yourself," Calapine said. Nourse pushed himself back in his throne, hands gripping the arms. Demean myself! "Let us review this new development," Schruille said. "Cyborgs we knew existed. They have eluded us consistently. Thus, they control computer editing channels and have sympathy among the Folk. Thus, we see, they have an Action Arm which can sacrifice... I say sacrifice a member fcff the good of the whole." Nourse stared at him, wideeyed, drinking the words. "And we," Schruille said, "we had forgotten how to be thoroughly brutal." "Faaahl" Nourse barked. "If you injure a man with a weapon," Schruille said, "which is the responsible party -- the weapon or the one who wields it?" "Explain yourself," Calapine whispered. hruille pointed to Allgood in the screen. "There is our weapon. We've wielded it times without number until it learned to wield itself. We've not forgotten how to be brutal, we've merely forgotten that we are brutal." "What rot!" Nourse said. "Look," Schruille said. He pointed up to the watching scanners, every one of them alive. "There's my evidence," Schruille said. "When have so many watched in the globe?" A few of the lights began to wink out, but came back as the channels were taken over by other watchers. Allgood watching from the screen felt the thrill of complete fascination. A tight sensation in his chest prevented deep breaths, but he ignored it. The Optimen facing violence! After a lifetime playing with euphemisms. Allgood found the thought of this almost unacceptable. It had teen so swift. But then these were the live-forevers, the people who could not fail. He wondered then at the thoughts which raced through their minds. Schruille, the usually silent and watchful, looked down at Allgood, said: "Who else has eluded us. Max?" Allgood found himself unable to speak. "The Durants are missing," Schruille said. "Svengaard has not been found. Who else?" "No one, Schruille. No one." "We want them captured," Schruille said. "Of course, Schruille." "Alive," Calapine said. "Alive, Calapine?" Allgood asked. "If it's possible," Schruille said. Allgood nodded. "I obey, Schruille. "You may get back to your work now," Schruille said. The screen went blank. Qchruille busied himself with the controls in the arm of his throne. "What're you doing?" Nourse demanded and he heard the petulance in his own voice, despising it. "I remove the censors which excluded violence from our eyes except as a remote datum," Schruille said. "It is really time that we observed the reality of our land." Nourse sighed. "If you feel it's necessary." "I know it's necessary." "Most interesting," Calapine said. Nourse looked at her. "What do you find interesting in this obscenity?" "This exhilaration I feel," she said. "It's most interesting." Nourse whirled away from her, glared at Schruille. He could see now that there definitely was a skin blemish on Schruille's face -- beside his nose. Dont miss science fiction's most exciting new writing team in their first great story! He was an outcast among the alien hordes of the galaxy because he was pure-bred Man! by Keith Laumer  Rosel G. Brown Now running in If -- the magazine readers call "the greatest thing that's happened to science fiction in twenty years!" T X #hen Lieutenant Garret got ' ' the summons from the Control Room, his first thought was that the captain had died. What else could account for the excited note in the ensign's voice? He swung himself out of his berth, zipped through the passage and snapped: "What is it, Luis? Drug no good? Is the captain -- " Garcia looked at him so blankly that Garret bit off the end of his question. "Drug?" the boy repeated. He seemed almost dazed. "No, it's They were infefligent and worthy of Man's respect. Too bad that they were a valuable commodityl not the skipper. I wanted permission to change course. You'll think I'm crazy. Lieutenant, but so help me, we're almost ramming an S-#. It's hardly four degrees off our course-vector." "An S-#! We should be that lucky! The last was taken eleven -- no, fourteen years ago. You must be hallucinating, boy." "That's what I figured at first. But the sail began to show up on the micro-screen. A big one, if I'm not seeing things. Damned big." He heard the lieutenant whistle softly, and knew why. In #, a whaler -- or beachcomber -- who ' found a large chunk of that mysterious substance, ambergris, was a fortunate fellow, sure to make a lot of money from his discovery. In #, a comparable but even rarer and more valuable windfall was the taking of an S-#, or Solar Sailor. The first had been spotted in #. It knocked the world of science off balance for years to follow. The notion that any organism could live and grow in airless, irradiated, non-temperatured space was so novel and hard to accept that the crew of the Hakluyt were long called hoaxers, who with fake photos were amusing themselves at the public's expense. However, after several more of the weird creatures had been seen, the evidence built up beyond doubting. It was no longer possible to deny the truth. T he S-#, like the Portugese Man of War of Earth's seas, consists of a jelly-like body from which sprouts a sail that reacts to the pressure of light. The organism apparently lives by ingesting cosmic dust much as whales utilize plankton. It can furl or twist its sail -- something never observed, but inferred -- but quite slowly, having no muscles as such, and so guides its movement in space. Obviously, it must avoid getting trapped in a strong gravitational field, since it could never escape, and would either crash on a planet or be immolated in a sun. Of necessity, it cruises only where the impact of photons against the sail dominates the pull of matter. Since all attempts to communicate with the organism were failures, the Galactic Council reluctantly classified it as a lower animal of inconsiderable consciousness, and lawful game. As for the sail, the source of the creature's commercial value, it is the most remarkable fabric to be found in the whole galaxy, and almost beyond price. Thin and light as the finest spider-silk, it is stronger than the toughest synthetics, from nylon-gamma to durette ; and can be cut only with It is fireproof, waterproof and unaffected by any chemical reagent, however concentrated. It is also a near-perfect conductor of electricity, having a resistance close to zero at all temperatures. Finally, the material shimmers rainbowlike under radiation of every wavelength, from cosmic rays to the longest members of the AM band. Whether for the most precise instruments or tlie en, the fabric is so much in demand, and so scarce, that the price must be set by public auction. Every attempt at duplication in the laboratory failed; and it is thought that the missing factor may be time. It might take an S-# a thousand years to grow its sail, one molecule at a time, under the rays of many classes of stars, in the hard vacuum of space -- and such conditions aren't to be simulated in any laboratory. The note of excitement in Alvarez' voice was now accounted for. Aside from the basic drama of the find, the boy saw barriers dropping in all directions. He saw, too, in his mind's eye, the lovely face of Julia Marlowe, whose father was a senior member of the Galactic Council, and not likely to let his daughter marry a penniless ensign. She was fond enough of the boy, approving his darkly handsome face and muscular body; but she spent more on cosmetics and perfume than he earned. She was beautiful, gay, generous and sweet, but there was plenty of her father's iron in the girl, and she would never settle down to live on love alone. But now that he was about to be one-third owner of a huge S-# sail... arret had been studying the image on the screen, his pale, glittering eyes a glacial blue. "You're right, by God -- I didn't believe it until this minute! Luis, do you know what that lovely beastie out there means to us?" The lieutenant knew what it meant to him, all right. He was over age in grade, and soon to be retired on the usual pittance. A first-rate fighting man, brave, quick-witted and up to every dirty dodge of battle, it was only his lack of self-control that kept him from climbing. Thick-set, blocky, with hot, intolerant eyes, he always preferred a blow to a word: tops in a messy brawl, but never seeing more than ten minutes ahead. "Do I?" the ensign replied to Garret's question. "It means a three-way split. If the captain lives," he added quickly. "And then I can ask Julia to marry me." "Good for you," the lieutenant said, only half-hearing. He was thinking what his own share would do. No more worry about living on his retirement pay, or taking some job that exploited his former rank and cluster of decorations. A life of luxury was now the prognosis: wine, women -- he could do without song; the rustle of large denomination bills was the most musical sound of all. "Well," Alvarez said, grinning hugely. "What are we waiting for? They say a laser beam in that big bluish spot just off center kills the thing dead. And no risk of hurting the sail -- as if anything could." "Right. Move in now. We should be within range in an hour. The first in fourteen years," he murmured gloatingly. "They may be practically extinct, even with the few taken. Or bunched up in some other galaxy; the ones captured here might be real wanderers." He made some careful measurements with the micrometers, and said in an exultant voice: "I make the dimensions of this sail as giving five hundred square feet. And it should bring in a lot more than the last, because they've gone hell -- if this doesn't net us twice that at the auction, I'll eat the jelly part -- no bread!" The ensign manipulated the controls, and the ship began to converge on the S-#. Then the captain's voice, weak but lucid, came over the intercom. "Lieutenant Garret," it said. "Please come to my quarters at once. Alvarez, too." ttCay," the boy said. "The new  drug's working. He sounds fine. Kill or cure, the medicos said, and they were right. He'd be dead without it -- you saw how bad he was." "This is a lucky day all around," the lieutenant said. "One quickie course in Medical Techniques, and you save the skipper's life; not bad. Well, put the ship on auto again, and let's go. This news ought to complete the cure." When they came in. Captain Ling was struggling to a sitting position; his eyes were feverishly bright, and he panted. "There's Something outside," he gasped. "It's been communicating with me -- mentally." They gaped at him. "What is?" the boy demanded. "An S-#," the captain said. "Didn't you spot it? What kind of a watch you two keeping while I -- never mind. Maybe it's still too far off. Anyhow, it was telling a friend. 'I'm going to die soon; the Killers are near, and must have detected me. We can't communicate with them, and they always destroy us; I don't know why. Good-by -- " I didn't get the other's name, if it has one. It was so far away... another galaxy. I think. Yet they were in touch instantly." "You're hallucinating. Captain." Garrett said. "You know very well that nobody's ever talked to an S-#. They're just space jellyfish -- lower animals. Weird and wonderful, but no more intelligent than a worm." Ling propped himself up, lips narroding. "Is there an S-# out there or not?" "Yes, sir," the lieutenant admitted reluctantly. He gave the captain a lowering stare. "Telepathy is known to occur among humans. It's not subject to control, but does exist You must have caught some of my thoughts -- or Luis's. That has to be it." Ling looked bewildered; he was still very ill, and not thinking clearly. He sank back in his bunk, breathing heavily. "Maybe you're right, but we must be sure. Don't kill it; you mustn't. That's an order," he said, his voice hardening. "But, Captain," his exec protested. "The S-# is officially classified as a lower animal, subject to capture -- legitimate game. Your order is actually illegal. I don't have to remind you, sir, what such a find is worth. Your share would be at least -- " "Never mind that," Ling snapped. "I'm in command. Lieutenant. If an order's illegal, you know the regulations; obey it, and complain later. I shouldn't have to point that out to an officer of your experience." "But we'll lose the thing!" Garret said angrily. "Maybe you don't care, but I'm not passing up a fortune -- one of the few a serviceman can get. Everything else the civvies latch on to, while we must settle for wages!" Ling's eyes widened at Garret's tone, but he merely said quietly: "You can follow it for a while. Maybe I can make contact again." "I'm sure it was the new drug. Captain," Alvarez sugge.sted. "You were so far gone we took a chance on that new stuff -- the psychic energizer. It gave you hallucinations." ( C T ut it was all so clear -- and logical." Ling said, almost to himself. "They live very slowly compared to us, sailing from one universe to another -- across those incredible gaps we haven't dared to tackle yet. They avoid matter; maybe that's why we've found so few. They daren't get trapped by a gravity field. That small mass of theirs -- it takes milennia to build up from cosmic dust down into usable food. Their thoughts are too sluggish for us, and their motions, too. They just can't signal in time to ask our mercy. Helpless -- it's a terrible thing. If only I could slow my thinking down to match... we can record speech, and run that at any speed, but thought..." He closed his eyes. "Just how will you make contact, then?" Garret demanded sullenly. "We can't follow it forever; we have a deadline of our remember?" "I don't know," the captain admitted, without opening his eyes. "I'm all muddled up right now. Nothing's coming through at the moment." Then his lids snapped up. "There's only one way, but it's obvious enough. You'll have to give me more of the new drug." "But, Captain," Alvarez objected. "That's risky. You were lucky once. Why push it?" "I have to. If that's the stuff to stir up nerve endings or get them synchronized somehow with an S-#'s thoughts, I have to try it. I won't have it on my conscience that I let a highly intelligent being get killed by my crew. And a noble being, too. If you could have felt its personality! No hatred of us; a pure spirit..." "I'd be pure, too, just floating alone in space," Garret said sourly. "But I have to live on Earth, and that costs money." "You don't know what you're saying," Ling said. "You're not that callous. And there's more. They can't do anything; no organs for manipulation, but what minds! I could hear this one; he was building up a mathematical system. My specialty -- and he lost me after the first five postulates! Think what we could learn! The theorem he was working towards would have unified electricity, gravitation, magnetism, elasticity, the nucleus -- sounds wild, but I believe. I really do believe!" "Not all math has practical significance," Garret said. "Granted. But consider this one point. They've licked the communications problem. By some kind of thought exchange they converse over distances we can hardly conceive. When one buds -- that's how they reproduce -- the two drift apart for maybe fifty thousand years. The acceleration may be only .#I meters per second squared, but you know how that builds up the velocity in time -- simple integration. Yet father -- and -- call it 'son' -- have no trouble talking across the void. Think how we need such a technique. Light's too slow for anything out of the piddling solar system itself. And we're stymied with it." He sat up again, jaw out. "I don't have to convince you, damn it. Ensign -- give me the drug again : that's an order!" There was no resisting the command, not in this navy. The boy looked at Garret, who scowled, then shrugged. yT rhen the second dose had  ' been injected, the two men waited impatiently for a reaction. It came more quickly this time. As soon as the captain began to recover, he said: "I'll prove it to you. If I can receive from the S-#, it can receive from me. I'll -- I'll ask it to signal." "Captain, that's crazy," said Garret. "What kind of signal could it give? It can't talk. It can't shoot off flares..." "I'll ask it to furl its sail." Garret hesitated. "We'll watch," he promised. And watch they did, for hours, while the prospect of the money began to grow larger in both their minds. rez. "More than that. Twice that much." "And it's all out there waiting for us. Can't get away. #onder if it's smart enough to run anyway? Not that it could; you move pretty slow, sailing that way, with just a push from light-beams. It's as good as ours, no matter what. Then he gulped, staring at the micrometer dial, which was zeroed in on the sail's upper righthand corner. "Oh, no!" "What?" the lieutenant barked, bringing his thoughts back from a pleasure-palace on Rigel II, where a little money bought delights unknown on earth. "It's furling! So help me God, it is -- look! We'd better tell the captain right away." He reached for the intercom, but Garret put a thick hand on his wrist. "Hold it a minute. We need to make sure. Give it more time -- while we talk." T)ut for many minutes they said nothing; just stared as the sail, curling very slowly, as a flower might, began to bring one corner down. After the motion left no doubt, Alvarez stirred restlessly; again the lieutenant restrained him. "Listen," he said. "I'll make this linear -- not a curve. And strictly negative on the memorycube. I'll deny .saying it, officially." His dark face was grim. "All r'ght; the thing's signalling; it has some sense. But it's not human -- not like us; just a damned jelly-fish. No matter what the Single Universe cloudheads say, I don't call every weird blob my brother just because it knows the multiplication table! There's a fortune out there a real life for us. Gonna let it get away?" "B -- but," the boy stammered. "What about communication? That's just as valuable. We could make a pile." "We? Don't be stupid! The lab boys would have to work on the S-# for years, maybe. And after they get the idea, how long to duplicate it? And who knows even if the drug would act the same on another guy? We could have long, gray beards before it's all worked out -- and still have no claim, either." He gave the ensign a steady, cold stare. "I'll talk to the captain; you back me -- okay?" Alvarez hesitated briefly, then said: "Okay." "Let's go down; we can talk some more on the way." They entered the cabin, and Ling peered at them. "Sick," he mumbled. "Damned stuff hits my guts now." He managed to sit up. "Well? What happened? You must have seen it. The S-# told me it had furled." "I'm sorry, Captain," Garret said, his face open and honest, gaze steady. "Nothing happened. We watched very closely. Not the slightest sign of a signal. In fact, the thing opened its sail further and was moving off our course -- running away, obviously. Or trying to; but it's just too slow. An animal reaction, I'd say. Lower animal escaping instinctively. You had hallucinations from that drug. Right, Alvarez?" His face pale, the boy said: "That's right. Captain. No sign of any intelligent response. You must have dreamed up the whole exchange. It's a pity," he sighed. "I should have known," Ling said bitterly, settling back in his bunk. "Some mighty good men tried to communicate -- like Duclaux of the old Josiah Willard Gibbs -- and couldn't get through. Just a drug, after all. Well," he said, looking at them owlishly, "I've held up your jackpot long "Our jackpot," Garret said. "And it's a big one. Captain. Y our share will buy you that estate you've mentioned so often -- that, and a whole lot more." "I'd sooner have found what I thought was out there. But at least my conscience is clear." utside the cabin, the two officers exchanged glances. "His conscience is clear," the lieutenant said. "And mine isn't credits." He put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Your people have a saying I like: "Take what you want -- and pay for it." "I know that one," Alvarez said wryly. "My father uses it quite a bit. And then Mother tells him: 'Ah, but when the bill finally comes, it may be too high.'" For a moment, as he spoke, his face, normally round and boyish, seemed old. "On the other hand, sometimes the bill never comes," Garret infoimnaition and the 'T'elegraph, telephone, radio, Kodak and Telstar have it in common that they are coined words, invented for the purpose of naming something that did not exist before, and most people know that they are coined words. for But few are aware that the word "gas" is a coined word too, which differs from the others mainly in being much older, about three hundred and fifty years by now. No precise figure can be given because it is not known when it was coined. But we do know who coined it, namely the Flemish physician and experimenter Jan Baptista van Helmont. He was born in Brussels, probably in # and died at Vilvoorde, not far from his birthplace, probably in #. If Jan Baptista van Helmont had lived a century or two later, he would have been a greater scientist than he managed to be in his time. Van Helmont was a man of original ideas who made experiments never before performed, but he was handicapped by the general lack of chemical and physical knowledge of his time. One of van Helmont's original experiments -- he is halfjokingly referred to as the "father of hydroponics" because of it -- was to plant a small willow tree in a soil-filled tub. The soil had been carefully weighed before it was placed in the tub and nothing was ever added to it but plain water. Five years later the tree had gained # pounds but the soil had lost only two ounces -- at least that is how van Helmont's figures translate into our system. A van Helmont of # or # would then have started an investigation into what the plant had "eaten" during those five years; the actual van Helmont concluded that the water had "hardened" into wood and leaves and quickly retrogressed to early Greek philosophical speculation. But the tree-growing experiment was a side-issue. One of the investigations carried out by van Helmont dealt with a gas formed when wood was burned (our CO # ) and he came to the conclusion that this was something different from air, though similar in many respects. Since Ihe normal vocabulary had words only for solid and liquid substances but lacked a word for substances like air, he coined the word "gas", from the Greek chaos the original meaning of which is "unformed". At first the wotxi gas was meant to be used for gases other than air (which, of course, was assumed to be homogeneous) but soon air was included. Unfortunately at a later date, say from # until well into the nineteenth century, English-writing authors fell into the habit of writing "air" where we would say "gas". Joseph Black called carbon dioxide "fixed air", Henry Cavendish called hydrogen "flammable air" and others referred to nitrogen as "dephlogisticated air". Van Helmont's accomplishment was all but forgotten for a while. His works were published after his death (in #) under the overall title Ortus medicinae (The Garden of Health) since he considered himself mainly a physician. But he has to be mentioned first when it comes to the exploration of the physical behavior of gases, for he gave them their name. "The second man to be considered was a botanist, though only later in his life. Born in Scotland on December #, # the boy was baptized by his father (an Anglican parson) Robert Brown, and in time Robert Brown began to study medicine. He then joined the army as a medical officer but gradually drifted into botany which was then closely allied to medicine. As a botanist he became famous for discovering that every plant cell has a nucleus. In fact he invented the term, using the diminutive of nuca, the Latin word for "nut". But much of his fame rests on another discovery, one that has absolutely nothing to do with botany, though Robert Brown thought at first that it did. One day in # he looked at pollen floating in water. With the aid of his microscope, which he probably used because he intended to identify the pollen by their size and shape, he saw that they were in steady motion. It was an irregular motion, not leading anywhere, but they would not hold still for a moment. The fact that pollen behaved like this when immersed in water was new and Brown looked for an explanation. It occurred to him quickly. Pollen grains, after all, were not dead matter. Fern or other plants would sprout from them in time. Since they were alive, the steady zig-zagging motion was caused by the "life force" which they harbored. To us this is no explanation at all but an expression of a mistaken belief, but in # it could still be advanced. It so happened that Brown, at a later date, observed the same kind of motion on particles of dye suspended in water. These particles certainly were not alive and never had been. Robert Brown dutifully reported his discovery in a scientific journal and admitted that he could not explain it. It is an interesting sidelight that Albert Einstein still wrestled with the mathematics of the explanation. Actually the explanation for the "Brownian motion", as it came to be called was already ia existence at the time the discovery was made. Brown either did not know about it, or else did not believe it. It is also possible that he knew of the explanaticm but did not think that it applied to his observation. That explanation was the atomic theory of John Dalton, first announced in # and published with much detail in #. Dalton's idea that all matter had to consist of atoms was an outgrowth of the belief held by Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton that gases had to consist of discrete  particles. And both Boyle and Newton had been impressed by work done by the Italian Evangelista Torricelli. Since Torricelli lived from # to #, this brings us right back to the time of van Helmont, when most of the fundamental discoveries still had to be made. T#' vangelista Torricelli was thirty years of age when he read the works of Galileo Galilei. Needless to say that he was much impressed, as was everybody who actually read Galilei's works, instead of just picking out a few sentences for the purpose of disputing them. Four years later he went to the Villa Arcetri (near Florence) where Galileo Galilei was "imprisoned" and stayed on as secretary and companion to the old and blind man. Galilei died three months later. But during that time there had been a discussion between the two that led to the work that made Torricelli famous. Galilei still believed in the horror Vacui, as it was then called, the notion that "Nature abhors a vacuum". There was "proof" for this. If you dipped a tube into water and then pulled a piston up the tube, the water rose in the tube. It could not stay behind, because in doing so a vacuum would have been created and since Nature did not permit a. vacuum to exist, the water had to follow the piston. But ordinary engineering experience, accumulated while building tall buildings, said that water could not be raised by more than # feet in this manner. Galileo Galilei suggested that Torricelli look into this problem. Torricelli did and began to reason. Powerful winds could topple trees, hence air could exert a pressure. Wind pressure was a lateral phenomenon, but maybe air always exerted pressure downward. If so the pressure might only be enough to push water to a height of # feet, but not more. That happens to be inconveniently large for easy experimentation; but there was a much heavier liquid known, namely mercury. Torricelli filled a bowl with mercury and then filled a glass tube, closed at one end, with the same metal. Then he turned the glass tube upside down and into the bowl of mercury. Some of the mercury promptly flowed from the tube info the bowl, but not very much. A column of mercury, # inches tall, remained in the glass tube. Evidently air pressure was equivalent to the weight of # inches of mercury and the empty space above the mercury in the tube had to be that impossibility : a vacuum. It is called a Torricellian vacuum to this day, even though it is not a very good vacuum because it contains mercury vapor. This simple experiment produced a scientific revolution. If the air could exert only so much pressure it meant that it had only so much weight. This, in turn, meant that the atmosphere had to have only a certain height -- and the concept of the air ocean was born. Blaise Pascal in France began to think about it and reasoned that, if that were true, the air pressure on top of a high mountain should be less than the air pressure in the lowlands. Pascal lived in the Auvergne and there was a mountain handy: the Puy-de-Dome. Since he was chronically sick the idea of climbing a mountain did not appeal to him -- though the exercise might have done him a lot of good -- and he charged his younger brother-in-law, one Monsieur Perier, with the task of carrying a Torricellian tube to the peak of the mountain. This was done in # and it was found that the air pressure on top of the Puy-de-Dome (its height is # feet) was actually less by about six inches than at its foot. Knowing this one could try to calculate the depth of the air ocean, or the height of the atmosphere and it was Dr. Ekimond Halley in England who was one of the first to try to do so, proclaiming a threelayered atmosphere with a total height of # miles. One man who was much intrigued by these findings was Otto von Guericke (#-#), Burgomaster of the city of Magdeburg. Intent on producing a vacuum he invented an air pump and in #, in Regensburg, he gave the spectacular demonstration consisting of two teams of horses trying to pull apart a metallic sphere, consisting of two hemispheres, from vhich the air had been evacuated. Otto von Guericke carefully studied air pressure and when, on December #, # he found that the air pressure was unusually low he predicted a storm -- which promptly happened the following day. "D obert Boyle, bom in December # at Lismore Castle, Ireland, was one of the many children of the Earl of Cork. He was just thirty years old when he heard of von Guericke's air pump. He and his assistant, a then twenty-two year old young man by the name of Robert Hooke who later became Secretary of the Royal Society, tried to build a pump like von Guericke's and ended up with a better one. Boyle knew, of course, that air can be compressed and he was interested in the relationship between volume and pressure. To find out he built a kind of adaptation of Torricelli's tube, a tube in which gas could be compressed by the weight of mercury. If he started out with a given volume of air and then doubled the amount of mercury the air was compressed to half its original volume. As he put it in an appendix to his original publication (#): "It is evident, that as common air, when reduced to half its Rg. #, Two mercury-filled glass tubes that shook the scientific world. At left Torricelli's tube, the later barometer, at right Robert Boyle's tube for compressing air. wonted extent, obtained near about twice as forcible a spring as it had before; so this thus comprest air being further thrust into this narrow room, obtained thereby a spring about as strong again as that it last had, and consequently four times as strong as that of the common air. And their is no cause to doubt, that if we had been here furnished with a greater quantity of quick-silver and a very strong tube, we might, by a further compression of the included air, have made it counterbalance the pressure of a far taller and heavier cylinder of mercury." What later became known as "Boyle's law" was simply the fact that tripling the pressure reduced the volume to one third, quadrupling it reduced the volume to one quarter and so forth. Boyle drew the logical conclusion: the air must consist of discrete particles with a vacuum between them. If you exerted pressure you forced the particles to be closer to each other. With all his experiments about the "spring" of compressed air, Boyle lost sight of his original idea, namely to see whether a mercury column more than # inches in height would be counterbalanced. And he never gave a single thought to temperature. It was the French physicist Edme Mariotte who realized that Boyle's law held strictly true only if the temperature of the air did not change. Mariotte had learned that a volume of air expanded if the temperature increased and shrank if the temperature decreased -- a discovery which finally led to the production of liquefied gases with all their numerous applications. As may be expected, Boyle's law, in French textbooks, is "Mariotte's law", and I am voting on the side of the French. ir)y the year #, then, it had  been established that air had weight, that a vacuum was possible, that air could be artificially compressed into a smaller space and, finally, that it expanded when heated and contracted when cooled and that all that only made sense if one assumed that it consisted of separate particles. A solid, like lead, or a liquid, like water, did not seem to consist of separate particles since they could not be compressed. For a while, even after Mariotte, nobody noticed that a red-hot iron bar had a larger volume than a cold one. The next chapter in the history of the gases is purely chemical. Jan Baptista van Helmont had discovered carbon dioxide, a gas other than air. Hydrogen was the next gas to be discovered. That there is a "flammable air" is first mentioned in the works of a Frenchman named Turquet de Mayerne -- in the posthumous edition of his work, published in #. But the early investigator of hydrogen -- though he cannot be called its discoverer -- was Henry Cavendish. He was bom in Nice on the Rivieria in #I because his mother. Lady Anne Cavendish, had gone there for her health. Henry Cavendish attended Cambridge University, but without obtaining a degree; he was interested in knowledge, not in degrees or titles. He also was a very strange man in all his habits. He could speak to only one person at a time and that only when that person was known to him and was male. Later in life he refused even to be in the same room with a woman and gave his instructions to his maids in writing. To round Black stands for nitrogen, open circles for oxygen, arrows indicate direction of motion and (by their length) the velocity of motion. out the picture he acquired two enormous inheritances from older relatives when he was himself over fifty: the fortunes were so large that the French physicist Jean Baptiste Biot called him: le plus riche de tous les savants et le plus Savant de tous les riches, which can be (inadequately) translated as: "the richest of all the savants and the most knowledgeable of all the rich". And since he used far less than the interest on his fortune, he died being the largest depositor in the Bank of England. Cavendish died at the age of seventy-nine -- when he felt death approaching he sent his servants away so that he might die alone -- and left a scientific legacy of work accomplished in astronomy, meteorology, metallurgy and a few other fields, but mainly chemistry. As for hydrogen, he had obtained it from metals by the action of acids, had carefully collected it over mercury and named it "flammable air from metals". He not only knew that it was flammable, he knew that it was far lighter than air -- thereby establishing that different gases had different densities. He burned hydrogen, producing water and proved that way that water was not an element. It was already known that air consisted of at least two gases, nitrogen (discovered in # by the Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford) and oxygen (discovered by Anton e Laurent Lavoisier in # or #), and Cavendish found out that these two gases, merely mixed normally, could be forced into a chemical compound by the passage of electric sparks. But no matter how much oxygen he added to a sample of nitrogen, there always remained a bubble that would not combine. It was argon, Cavendish missed an important discovery by a hair. These discoveries, plus a few others (like the one by the French chemist Joseph Louis Proust -- #-# -- that each chemical compound contains its elements in definite proportions) paved the way for John Dalton, who arrived at the conclusion that all matter, and not just gases, had to consist of atoms. Of course it was thought at first that only two atoms would get together for the simpler compounds. The "fixed air" of Joseph Black was thought to have the formula CO (instead of CO # ), and water was believed to be HO (instead of H # O). But even so it was impractical to talk about an "atom" of water, or a "compound atom" as some phrased it. It was Count Amadeo Avogadro (#-#) who coined the term molecule, the meaning being "small bundle". He also suggested that even the elements came in molecules, containing more than one atom as a rule. Strangely enough the atomic theory of Dalton, which constituted a scientific revolution, was accepted quietly -- while Avogadro's idea of molecules, which was merely a refinement, caused violent opposition. A fter this interlude, during  which gases were treated mainly as chemicals, physics began to reassert itself. The turning point was around the middle of the nineteenth century. An important point was that both Avogadro and Andre Marie Ampere (#-#) had independently arrived at the conclusion that a given volume of a gas, at a given temperature, would contain the same number of atoms (molecules) regardless of the nature of the gas. Natxmally, that brought up the question; how many? Again we have to backtrack. Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles (#-#), the invenFig. #. The "mejn free path". The length of the path travelled between colMsions Is never the same twice running but it averages out to the theoretical mean free path. tor of the hydrogen-filled balloon, had discovered in # that gases shrank at a definite rate when cooled. For each degree centigrade of heat they lost, they also lost one # part of the volume. If this rule held true all the way, they should have no volume at aU at a temperature of minus # centigrade. A long time later, in #, Lord Kelvin #) went back to this discovery, suggesting that at minus # centigrade the gas might have lost all of its energy, not its volume, and that this temperature should be used as a starting point for a temperature scale that avoided the nuisance of "below zero" degrees. From then on things moved fast. In # the German physicist Rudolph Clausius (#) invented a new concept. A. gas, he said, consists of "atoms" in steady motion, flying in all directions. Hence they must collide quite often. But while the distance between collisions would not be the same, there should be an average distance between collisions, that average distance depending on both density and temperature. This average distance is now known in English as the "mean free path". In # the Scottish mathematician James Clark Maxwell (#) began to think about these problems. Maxwell felt that even for a given temperature the speed of the molecules would not be uniform. Some would move faster than the norm, and others more slowly; and it was only the average of these different velocities that corresponded to the temperature. Raise the temperature and you get a higher average molecular velocity, but a specific molecule might move at a rate corresponding to a temperature twenty degrees lower. While Maxwell, sitting in Cambridge, pursued these thoughts, Ludwig Boltzmann (#-#), professor at the University of Vienna, conceived the same idea. Consequently the kinetic theory of gases that emerged from their separate goosequills was later referred to as the MaxweUBoltzmann theory. The theory contained the explanation of Brownian motion. We can't see the molecules as they move and collide, but if we have a body small enough to be kicked around by them, and large to be visible in the microscope, we see "Brownian motion". That it was first observed in water was an accident, but the explanation is the same. But we still have not answered the earlier question how many gas molecules are there in a given volume. It was Joseph Loschmidt (#-#), also of the University of Vienna, who tackled the problem. Publication of his results took the form of a lecture delivered during the Twenty-Second Session of the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna on October #, #. The lecture had the somewhat surprising title: "On the Size of Air Molecules". Loschmidt explained that he used this term because the difference in weight of oxygen and nitrogen molecules is minor, so that they could be averaged to hypothetical air molecules. Now, he said, we are dealing with three values. One is the number of molecules per cubic centimeter -- this we'll call N. Then we have the length of the mean free path, which we'll call L. And finally we have the diameter of the molecule which we'll call D. L. will be shorter as the values for N and for D become larger. S o far everything was quite  clear. If the number of molecules per unit volume is larger, there will be more collisions. But there will also be more collisions if the molecules themselves are larger. Hence his main interest was in the size of the molecules; all else would follow from that. Maxwell had calculated that the mean free path for a nitrogen molecule would be (at # centigrade) ## inch, equiva(We now know that the value is Loschmidt thought that Maxwell's figure was a bit too small so he picked ## which is too large. So each moving molecule moves through a volume of space which is cylindrical with the length of the cylinder being L, or Maxwell's "corrected" figure, while the diameter of this cylinder is equal to the still unknown diameter D of the molecule. Trying to determine D, Loschmidt assumed that the molecules in a liquefied gas touch each other. This was quite a simplification, and even if the molecules were strictly spherical and touched each other there would still be # per cent of the total volume that would be empty. Just to corriplicate matters, it was still impossible to liquefy air at the time Loschmidt lectured. Hence he could not know the volume occupied by one gram of liquefied air. He assumed a value by comparison with those gases that could be liquefied in his day. He concluded that the diameter of an air molecule was just slightly less, by three per cent, er. This, he said, was not a correct value but he felt sure that it was "neither ten times too large nor ten times to small." In that he was correct; his value was only three times too large. Strangely enough he did not take the step to calculate the number of molecules in a cubic centimeter of air, but following his method that figure comes out as ## per cubic centimeter. But Loschmidt had overestimated both the size of the molecule and the length of the mean free path ; the true number of molecules per cubic centimeters is # times as large. Usually this is called Avogadro's number. In order to honor Loschmidt for his pioneering effort the number of molecules per mol (the quantity of compound weighing as many grams as its molecular weight, or # grams in the case of oxygen) is called "Loschmidt's number", although he did not calculate it. That writers, even of textbooks, sometimes call Loschmidt's number Avogadro's number is sad, but true. Just console yourself with the thought that "gas" Where they came from was far off in space. Where they were going was to rule the world of Mankindl I Qnowblindness stalked him like a spectral white bear. Through his arctic sunglasses, Dr. Joe West's eyes winced. His forehead ached from the penetrating white glare. Across the dazzling ice, shadow-shapes of children and squatty men romped on all fours. They were pretending to be bears, roaring and giggling as the bears devoured the children. Watching from their summer parkas with hoods turned back, the horde of swollen women exposed their squinting babies to the arctic sun. It had been three days since the event, the birth. For two days since Dr. West concluded these people could not be Eskimos, he had been trying to leave. Escape still seemed to be too strong a word to use. "Today we go," Dr West said (asked). "Soon-soon we go," Edwardluk agreed pleasantly; his was the only dog team in the encampment, only seven dogs and over a hundred Eskimos. "Soon as this person's leg is better." "Your leg is better. Last sleep." Dr. West squinted down at his stethoscope, which dangled from Edwardluk's thick neck, "I gave you my heartears, and you said your leg felt better. You said we would go today." "Eh-eh," Edwardluk laughed, politely agreeing with whatever the whiteman was saying, "leg is better than yesterday. Eh-eh, you are better. Each day you like us better. Tomorrow you like us better still." "I like you now," Dr. West tried to restrain the irritation in his voice. "As soon as we travel to the whitemen, I'll tell them how much you helped me. As I've been telling you, the airplanes will drop much food for this camp. We must go!" "Eh-eh," Edwardluk suddenly seemed to agree with enthusiasm. "Soon as we kill seals to feed dogs, we go!" ITdwardluk trotted toward his tent, and Dr. West followed with long strides, unable to believe this sudden activity. "First we fill our bellies." Edwardluk flopped down on an ancient sealskin and shouted impressively for his wife to cut meat, of which there was little, although the Canadian Cultural Sanctuary Commission had re-stocked the Boothia District with twin-birth seals. "Then we sleep." "But now is our chance to hunt seals," Dr. West protested, pointing with his recoilless rifle toward the shore-ice where a crack had opened, where seals could rise. "Hunt seals," Edwardluk agreed like an echo and added helpfully; "Good dream protect us from bad ice. Good dream help you like us better tomorrow." With downcast eyes, Edwardluk smiled like a shy little boy and handed Dr. West a thawing glob of seal liver as if it were a Valentine. "Best piece for you." Edwardluk's smiling eyes narrowed as his massive jaw crunched through the partially frozen meat. Gulping, he swallowed and crunched and gulped. His eyes closed with pure joy. His head sagged down. As easily as a tired child, he slept. Dr. West's strong young hands tightened on his recoilless rifle. These people are so obliging, so innocent, so damned lovable, it would be imfwssible to shoot. Damn! Damn, damn, damn! If I am a prisoner, he thought, I can escape. I can esdape whenever I chose to use -- threaten to use force. Dr. West's contradictory grin, which also made him attractive to women who were more selective than Eskimo women, his uncertain grin cracked his chapped lips. If I am a prisoner, his thoughts echoed, I can esdape. definition I cannot escape. Damn! That's a neurotic thought. I've got to escape. He stared down at the scrap of meat which attracted flies to Edwardluk's small hand. These people lacked the gargantuan appetites of Eskimos. Also contrary to Eskimos, there were too many small children. More than the environment could support. The disproportionate number of children indicated a rapid increase in population. After # days with these people. Dr. West had written down too many observations. What he observed three nights ago was the absolute end. If I don't leave now, I may never leave. Grinning, grimacing, he shook his head. Damn! Got to escape. TTe glanced from the snoring Edwardluk to the sleeping dogs. Yesterday when he tried to order these people to help him prepare a sled, giggling they had diverted him from leaving. Marthalik had rubbed urgently against him, peeping up with sweet narrow eyes, urging him to come back into the tent ducking imder his waving arms of anger. He felt trapped. In her hood the wrinkled face erf the baby had flopped back and forth, and begun to cry. From Dr. West's inexplicable rage, the people had averted their faces like hurt children, and his determination to use force, to seize a sled and a prisoner had dissolved in embarrassment, remorse, a dark tent and gentle whispering with Marthalik. Yesterday. Today. In the white glare his eyelids itched. Dr. West knew if he was going to travel he should already have left. These women, these incredibly wonderful women. I've got to escape now! Simultaneously, he felt like laughing and crying. Beyond the shore-ice and the dark crack, gleamed the veined sea-ice with distant islands glittering, icebergs. God help me! I have to cross that! He knew the Canadian Cultural Sanctuary Guard Post must be somewhere beyond that glowing horizon. #P Five years ago during his Alaskan Eskimo population survey Dr. West had learned how difficult it was for a Kabloona, a whiteman, to handle Eskimo dogs, but he had done it. I can do it now if the dogs are harnessed to the sled. Flies buzzed above Edwardluk's sleeping smile, and his massive jaw moved. He was dreaming. These people, Marthalik, all of them, Dr. West had noticed how animated their faces were when they slept, as if their dreams were reality. But reality to Dr. West was burning eyelids and the shock of the #rd night. Got to escape. Must outsmart Edwardluk. Quietly, Dr. West rolled up his sleeping bag. He slid his arm through the sling of his recoilless rifle, the only rifle in the encampment since the disappearance of Edwardluk's "brother", who had owned a rusty rifle and a rusty personality to match, and seemed more like a real Eskimo with his boasting and scratching. He had been troubled by lice. But these people had no lice. These people had no tuberculosis. They were not Eskimos. II Tr. West hefted his pack. Heavy-laden he started the no long walk across the ice toward the distant icebergs in the polar gulf. He hoped he was setting a trap for Edwardluk. Dr. West's original intention liad been to take one of these remarkable people back with him, and there was still that possibility, that possibility -- With each step, the silicone rubber membranes in Dr. West's boots exhaled fog. Yet he waded with dry feet through shimmering puddles of melt-water across the thawing sea-ice. Like a giant, he strode over eroding streambeds on the ice. Fresh water trickled toward dark leads where the sea surged, where seals could rise. This summer ice was rotting, dangerous. He opened the vents in his outer parka because to perspire also was dangerous. "Bad, bad-bad," Edwardluk had said, "for whiteman to walk alone on sea-ice." Then you come rescue me, Dr. West thought and walked on and on. The icebergs seemed no closer, but when Dr. West looked back he saw that the encampment had miniaturized into a cluster of dots. Like a midget, a midge, a dark speck. Dr. West plodded endlessly across the flat sea-ice. He hoped Edwardluk was watching, massive jaw beginning to sag with m worry. Dr. West was gambling, possibfy his life, that Ekiwardluk would grunt with decision, hitch the dogs to the sled and come out from that cluster of specks. CtT)iggest 'skimo camp ever!" the nervous bush pilot had marveled when he set Dr. West down on the ice # days ago. "Where'd they all come from? Out you go. Dr. No-Name. Can't risk me license, even for all those plump little reasons waving to me out there. Got to take off." The expatriate Englishman's gaze had swept the vast aretic sky. "Cultural Sanctuary's patrol aircraft's likely airborne now, and hot after our vanished radar blip. Serious charges, landing on the Boothia Peninsula. Got to take off. Me aircraft's me life!" The self-taught pilot, an exR.A.F. ground crewman, had not reappeared in two weeks as promised, or in three weeks, or in four weeks. Crashed, Dr. West suspected. If radar-tracked and arrested, the pilot would have blabbed by now, and a Cultural Sanctuary patrol plane would have swooped low, searching for Dr. West. Dr. West's application for a Landing Permit had been denied by the Cultural Sanctuary Commission in Ottawa. Not even Overflight Permits were being granted anywhere near the North Magnetic Pole. Dr. West suspected that politics or professional jealousy was behind the refusal. Perhaps the ethnological bigwigs at McGill University wanted first look at the rumored population increase but hadn't got around to it yet. Surely they didn't think Dr. Joseph West, former Director of Oriental Population Problems Research at the University of California, now unemployed, had become a smuggler of transistor radios and steel tools which could culturally dislocate the Boothia Eskimos. There was little evidence of recent cultural smuggling to these people. Dr. West shook his head. If what he had observed continued, these people were more apt to dislocate the world than viceversa. His pack-straps sawed into his shoulders. His feet plodded on and on across the sea-ice. He squinted at the sky, although he had given up all hope of being arrested, rescued by a Cultural Sanctuary aircraft. The only way of carrying his warning message to the Outside seemed to b through hopeful physical exertion, plus guile if Edwardluk fell into his trap. A bove the peak of the iceberg, a flock of dark fulmars whirled. Around the berg gleamed broken ice and dark water where sea birds could feed. Dr. West w!as surprised that he did not sight a single seal as he circled behind the berg. Now he was out of view from the camp. Dr. West hoped Edwardluk was harnessing the dogs. If his friendship talk was genuine, he'll come to rescue me. If not, he'll come to recapture me. But there was a third possibility, unfortunately. Edwardluk might simply go to sleep -- because he didn't give a damn. From his pack, Dr. West took out a pad of caribou skin and sat down. Rifle propped against his thigh, he waited. The trap was set for Edwardluk. And waited. Cold rose through the ancient caribou skin pad into Joe West's haunches. Restlessly, he remembered his Alaskan Eskimos had used bear skin pads because they were thicker. But these Boothia people owned no polar bear skins. They said they never killed their father-bear, and Dr. West was inclined to believe them. The cold enfolded him. From the corner of his eye a small part of the white background trotted across his field of vision. It was an arctic fox, plume-tailed and oblivious. Suddenly the white fox stared at him or past him. Dr. West felt a creeping urge to look behind his own back. He remembered that the Eskimos refer to the white fox as the bear's dog. On the sea-ice, the fox follows the polar bear, dependent on the bear's kills. The Eskimos say: "Fox on ice, look behind you quick, is bear." Turning his head Dr. West squinted at each white mound and fuzzy shadow. At point blank range, he knew a piolar bear would appear more cream-colored than the ice. A black spot would be the nose of the polar bear. The Eskimos say: "Bear hold white paw over nose, bear gone, eh-eh. Bear still there." "Ha!" Dr. West shouted, standing up. The immense white backgroimd remained immobile. From the white mounds, a polar bear's head did not rise weasel like on its long neck. "Spooked myself. These people talk too much about bears." Dr. West twisted his chilled face in another grin. He didn't want to remember Edwardluk's wideeyed face above the seal oil lamp. T ike Eskimos, these people en tertained themselves with night stories. Thick neck tilting from side to side, his eyes closing in ecstasy, Edwardluk had grunted like a bear. "Grandfather of the sky!" Edwardluk's suddenly hoarse voice had creaked. "Sharpen your hvinger. We -- your children -- prepare for you. Open your jaws!" Dr. West blinked his eyes and shivered. If their grandfather was a bear-spirit, that was all right with Dr. West. Who was he to deride anyone's totems or religious beliefs? But after # days, what grated his nerves was the continuously nonanthropomorphic theology of their night stories. These people had things backward, he thought. The mythology of other Eskimos, real Eskimos, presented bear-spirits as merely helping or hmdering man. Man was the endpurpose. But in these people's stories the bear seemed the end-purpose. The People helped the bear. The People prepared the seals, the rocks, the airplanes, for the bear. This was not the bear on the ice. This was a bear in the sky. The purpose of all life seemed to funnel into the bear. What their bear symbolized. Dr. West had not found out, but he had had enough experience with real bears to suspect that a hungry polar bear makes little distinction between a prone man and a seal. He remained standing, clutching his rifle. The non-appearance of seals in the open water around this iceberg suggested that a real bear was near. Dr. West's eyes watered with the strain of trying to see everything and distinguishing less and less in the white glow of the ice. The cold soaked up through his feet His leg bones became conductors of the cold. Sometimes he stood motionless, forgetting to stamp his feet. His vision and time blurred. The fulmars cried out in alarm and whirled dark wings upward into the sky, and Dr. West's eyes widened. He turned. He laughed with relief. A line of black specks across the ice became dogs pulling a distant sled. Dr. West sat down on his caribou skin pad, but his heart was thudding with suppressed excitement, and he stood up. Peering, suddenly he cursed. '"There was more than one man approaching. A man trotted ahead of the sled. The dark bulge on the sled was a second man, probably Edwardluk. Far behind, a third man plodded over the ice. Three men were more than Dr. West had bargained for, even though he had the only gun. By the time they were close Dr. West still had not decided what to do. "He was watching you!" Edwardluk shouted happily. "Up there he was watching you." Dr. West stared up at the peak of the iceberg. If Edwardluk was referring to an actual bear, it was invisible to Dr. West. He squinted at the dogs, who lay down; they had not scented a bear. "Seen us coming." Edwardluk made a circling motion with his wide face and stubby nose, and Dr. West supposed the bear had circled out of sight behind the berg. "We come to carry back your seals," Edwardluk said innocentlyThe second man stood smiling at the sky. The third man still was approaching. They seemed unarmed. In their fur parkas they reminded Dr. West of three childhood teddy-bears. They had been kind and hospitable to Dr. West, and now he couldn't quite bring himself to point the rifle. He didn't want to threaten them with harsh words which would bring hurt expressions to their child-like faces. He didn't want to kidnap a prisoner. Swiftly he rationalized that it might be dangerous to take a prisoner. The prisoner might chew through his bonds while Dr. West slept. Let some anonymous expedition seize the first laboratory specimen. "There is a dead seal under the edge of the ice," Dr. West blurted, pointing with his rifle barrel and walking behind their backs to the sled. Their harpoons still were lashed to the sled. "Eh-eh," Edwardluk's voice agreed politely to the lie. "There is a seal but my eyes don't see it yet." Dr. West's shivering hands were tying his pack and sleeping bag on the sled. "Hal" Dr. West shouted at the dogs as he flopped on the sled, and to his surprise and relief the dogs lurched forward before he could use the whip. They dashed past the startled face of the third man. Back to camp was where the dogs were hurrying. Slashing the whip with all his strength. Dr. West manged to turn the leader toward the ice horizon. '"The sled passed in an arc through the shouting range of the running men, but Dr. West managed to whip the dogs away, the sled weaving a snakelike course beyond the iceberg with Edwardluk running far behind. I have escaped. Dr. West thought inaccurately. The terrible global significance of what he had observed about these people he had not fully analyzed. Mainly he was fleeing from what happened on the #rd night, and from his contradictory desire to go back to them. To the women -- He clung to the sled undulating over the ice. The wonder of the #rd night. The dogs were running uncontrollably. The shock of the #rd night. The sled bounced over a pressure ridge. The women -- If he let go he would fall off the sled and go back. He laughed with bewilderment. It was these women who would be too much for the world. Dr. West's only intimate experience with women had been limited to a high school girl a year older than he but equally flustered, several indistinct sorority girls who might have been the same girl several times, four or five student nurses when he was in Med school, including one he vividly remembered plump and unadorned in unexpected glory, six or seven lab technicians, the last leaving him unbearably guilty and resolving to give up sex, followed by a tired old waitress in Cambridge, Mass., a dozen sprightly R.N.'s and doctor-chasers, the hospital administrator's fiancee who laughed when he asked her to take him seriously, followed by a tired old cocktail waitress in Berkeley, California, paralleling the story of his life, earnest female graduate students at U.C. in Public Health, Anthropology and Genetics, a gorgeous Ph.D. in Population Statistics who for unstatistical reasons decided against marriage, followed by his population research expedition to the Alaskan tundra and a giggling Eskimo woman of whom the only thing memorable was her aroma, the same gorgeous Ph.D., telling him that his theory of Arctic Human Ecology should be recognized beyond the scientific community and he should become more 'assertive, which he was to an arch-eyebrowed interviewer from McCalTs Magazine and a round-eyed interviewer from Good Housekeeping who kept calling him a boy-wonder, and the same gorgeous Ph.D. congratulating him in the nicest way that she could for his appointment as the Director of Oriental Populations Problems Research at the University of California, a period of overwork, the same gorgeous Ph.D. commiserating him for being unexpectedly ousted as Director by that determiner of all large research grants, the Secretary of Defense, followed by a tired old barmaid in Moosejaw Saskatchwan and a unscheduled airline stewardess in Coppermine, Northwest Territories, five hundred forbidden air miles from the Boothia Peninsula. These remarkable women on the Boothia Peninsula were so much more -- I'm crazy to be leaving, he thought. He clung to tlie bounding sled, trying to blank out the #rd night and his incredible first experience with Mafthalik. '"yhe sled runner jammed in broken ice. The sled almost capsized as it abruptly stopped. His sunglasses slid down his nose. Blinking, Dr. West slid off the sled, hoisted the runner free and shouted at the dogs, who surged forward. Dr. West found himself loping behind the sled, trying to overtake it, running. He fell, dislodging his glasses as he lunged through the blinding white glare, almost seizing the sled, skidding across a puddle of melt-water. Springing up, running hard and shouting angrily at the dogs, he had thought they would stop, but they were veering off to the left, and their loose gait accelerated to an excited rush as if they had scented a seal. His commanding shouts grew shrill. Desperately he ran a shorter course to head them off, but they were bounding too fast, the lightened sled skipping behind them. Without the sled he was helpless, hopeless. His eyesight whirled with blinding lights. He tripped. Kneeling upward, gasping with breathless panic, he unslung his rifle. In the glare, his twitching eye could barely distinguish the front sight as it shook back and forth. Aiming ahead of the dogs he fired. Unchecked, the dogs ran into the blinding distance. He fired and fired. A dog turned end for end, biting its rump as the other dogs dragged it along. A dog in front of the sled yelped and was mounted by the sled-runners as the team swept on. Dragging two writhing dogs and the swerving sled, the dog team charged on like troops into battle. The leader abruptly stopped as he reached an open lead and the sled skidded sideways braked only by the bodies of the two wounded dogs from sliding into the dark water and engulfing them all. 'The dog team stood looking back at Dr. West, their breath fogging. If there had been a seal, it was long gone. Kabloona, you panicked. Dr. West blundered toward the team's watching eyes and steaming grins. His unprotected eyes were shimmering and blurring but he had to recapture the sled before he could go back to search for his dark glasses. One dog lay limply entangled with the sled. The other whined and sniffed its shattered spine. The sled dogs watched, their tongues lolling out of great grins, while he pointed the rifle muzzle at the wounded dog's ear, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. His hand trembling. Dr. West cut through the leather traces and freed both dogs. Squinting against the whiteness, he tried to see back along the sled runners' trail all the way to the indistinct pressure ridge where he thought he had fallen, where he had lost his glasses. He was afraid Edwardluk and the other two would have heard the shots, but they should be a long way off near the iceberg. Surely that was a different iceTo reduce the glare, he slit his handkerchief and tied it across his eyes. Almost blinded, he shouted at the dogs, pushed the sled, yelled, cursed, flailed with the whip while dogs dodged in every direction, and suddenly the dog team darted, curved and flowed along their back-trail toward the pressure ridge. He intended to allow himself one minute to search for his sunglasses. "Kabloona, here are your snow eyes!" Edwardluk stood, holding the dark glasses above his head. Dr. West tore off the handkerchief, but did not see the other two men in ambush. "Hand me the glasses." Dr. West did not point the rifle directly at Edwardluk. TT dwardluk's small hand extended the sunglasses. "Bad dogs run away," his voice murmured, and he ducked his head as if ashamed. He shuffled his mukluks on the ice. "This poor person couldn't run fast enough permit this poor person to -- " "I cannot return to camp," Dr. West interrupted. "I must go find the other whitemen now." "The other whitemen," Edwardluk agreed like an echo, and his real thinking emerged circuitously. "Bad ice. Two dogs no more. We like you. We help you always. When ice is safe, we go. Tomorrow. Each day you will like us better." Dr. West became aware of movement behind him, talked fast. "I cannot go back. I'll help you. I'll tell the whitemen your babies are hungry. I'll send food. Because I like you," he insisted, rapidly. "I like you. Great bear eat me if I lie." Edwardluk looked up, and his shy smile widened. "Eh-eh. you want to go, we go! Someday we People help the whitemen. When we are many, help much. Help whitem.en of whole world." Like a tiny giant, Edwardluk spread his arms and laughed, unaware that the world is # miles in circumference at the Equator, whitemen, yellow-whitemen and black-whitemen, that their vast machines rumble and lurch toward the stars. "Ha!" Edwardluk shouted at the dogs and cracked the whip. The sled rushed off carrying Dr. West, and Edwardluk, running alongside, shouted: "There is the mountain." "Which direction is the Post?" Dr. West meant the Cultural Sanctuary Guard Post, whose radar the bush pilot had tried to avoid. "Eh-eh, my brother has been there, and this person's eyes turned inward see. On a line past the mountain past the island three -- four sleeps. The whitemen will see this person helping you." IV "The dogs soon tired, and Dr. West trotted beside the sled toward the gleaming horizon. Slipping, tiring, he jammed the muzzle of his rifle into the ice as he fell and rose muttering, staggering after the relentlessly glidding sled. He was encased in perspiration as he slogged into the blinding sun. The idea came to him in his exhaustion. If Edwardluk's plan was to wear him out and then seize the rifle -- When the sled snagged on a pressure ridge. Dr. West lay on the sled. The dogs lay down. "Eh-eh!" Edwardluk scampered about with seemingly inexhaustible energy trying to sight a seal, forcing two of the harpoon shafts into the ice, erecting a tattered caribou skin windbreak. "Eh-eh, you rest in camp. This person talk to seal, eh-eh." He hefted the last harpoon. He walked into the distance. The wind hissed over the ice, bending the caribou skins into a funnel, a wind-funnel directed at Dr. West's congealing body. Edwardluk had vanished. Shivering, Dr. West ceased to know he was shivering until his ears awoke him to the distant grunting of the polar bear. "Eh-eh," Edwardluk's voice laughed. "He don't find no seals either." The dogs' voices whined, but their tone was not hunger. Dr. West's e#relids seemed glued together. The dog's voices whined with fear. Alaskan Eskimo dogs would have been roaring with eagerness to rush along the scent of the polar bear, he thought. These dogs were whining. Dr. West slid his fingers under his sunglasses to his throbbing eyelids. Overpowering light penetrated although his eyes were closed. His head ached with pain messages from his overloaded optic nerves. When he tried to open his eyes, he gasped, drowned in dazzling liquid light. He was snowblind. "The distant bear emitted a hoarse cough. Dr. West's hand tightened on his rifle. When a bear is hungry enough, he thought, it will stalk sled dogs lying on the ice like seals. When a bear is starving it sees nothing but seals, and I am blind. "Eh-eh," Ekiwardluk's voice laughed, "nothing but seals. Give me the rifle. Big noise will tell bear we are not seals." "I win hold the rifle," Dr. West replied; he was afraid the rifle was all he had, snowblind and helpless. "I know how to work it." "This person knows how to work it," Edwardluk volunteered, and Dr. West could hear him moving closer. "My brother had one and he shot it all the time." But not at bears. Dr. West thought. "At bears," Edwardluk's voice persisted. "My brother shot a bear and that is why he vanished. It was bad for him to kill a bear." Prior to this Edwardluk's story had been that his brother had vanished while travelling to get more presents from the whitemen of the big whalekayak, the whitemen with beautiful red stars on their caps. "You would not shoot the bear even if I gave you the rifle," Dr. West riiplied, clinging to the rifle. "Eh-eh," agreed Eldwardluk, this person is not a bear-killer like my brother. This person would only shoot a loud noise so the bear hears we are not seals." He shuffled away. Dr. West clicked off the safetycatch. The recoilless rifle boomed, kicking viciously. There had been ice in the barrel, but it had not burst. "I have frightened the bear." Now there was no need for Edwardluk to have the rifle. "If this person had the rifle, a seal could be shot." Edwardluk's voice moved closer. "There are three harpoons". Dr. West replied. "But your eyes are bad," Edwardluk began circuitously. "I will not give you the rifle." Further away the polar bear made a strange mooing noise. "This person watched you while you sleep," Edwardluk said, as if this was more important than the circling bear. "Eheh, asleep you frown, you twist. In the emcampment it was this way also. You look unhappy when asleep. My brother was that way. Even with arms around woman, your sleep-face is unhappy. Are all whitemen unhappy when they sleep?" "How the hell should I know?" Dr. West slung his rifle over his back and crawled blindly on to the sled. "Let's go!" "Whitemen do not shoot the People?" Edwardluk asked. "As if we are dogs?" "No, I was frightened when I shot the dogs. I thought they were running away. I thought they were leaving me alone to die. I only shoot things that are leaving me to die." J oe West clung on the dragging sled, his head muffled in a darkness of caribou skin, his eyes throbbing and flashing lights of pain. Once he heard Edwardluk shouting to someone, and his stomach contracted. He dreamed Edwardluk had circled back to the encampment. No escape. Then he realized Edwardluk had merely admonished the dogs. The sled was moving sporadically as if the dogs were exhausted. Motionless, Dr. West was awakened by the distant crackwhoosh of a recoilless rifle. Whitemen? Dr. West's fingers clawed along the oddly thin stock of hisrifle. He was holding on to a harpoon shaft. "My rifle. He's stolen my rifle." The dogs whined, hungrily straining, but the sled creaked immovably because Edwardluk had anchored it to the ice so that the dogs could not rush forward at the sound of the shot, which meant seal-meat. Edwardluk's plodding return and a dragging sound were overwhelmed by the roaring lunges of the dogs. Edwardluk was feeding the dogs first, hurling thuds of meat within their harnessed range. Then he was beating them off. "No more! Got no more!" "Here is the warm liver." Edwardluk must have carried it under his parka. "Eat. This person left a little blubber by the water for the bear. Eat. The great bear will see how we helped the bear. Eat. Soon this person shoots a bigger seal. You eat. Where we are, many wide cracks and soon another seal. Then this person will eat." From the distance rose a longdrawn howling roar like a giant, insane. "My God! Was that the bear?" "This person don't know. The bear, it was the bear. A little taste of blubber wake up bear's stomach. Eh, eh," Edwardluk laughed nervously. "Bear want to eat world." "Give me my rifle," Dr. West demanded angrily. "Eh-eh, he is only a bear." Edwardluk clicked the rifle's safety on or off; there was no way for Dr. West's ears to tell which. Edwardluk's voice diminished as he moved away. "Bear don't like man's smell. Once my brother's rifle don't work, and he lie still and bear sniff him and go away." The snarling was the dogs. are you doing?" Dr. West meant: don't leave me alone. " -- to shoot another seal. Dogs not fed enough to sleep, only enough to fight each other. This person must look for another seal." Edwardluk added with practicality: "Your smell will keep the bear away from dogs. Before very long this person come back." Dr. West groped on the sled for the harpoon shaft, clutching it. "Best thing is sleep," Edwardluk's voice said, softer, but closer. Instead of leaving, Edwardluk squatted down so close Dr. West could feel his radiated warmth next to him and could hear his excited breathing. "The important thing, will the whitemen like us?" Edwardluk blurted. "We don't harm anybody. We helped you. We want to help everybody because -- we know. You frown, you twist when you sleep. But we sleep happy all with same dream because we are here, we are there, we know why." Edwardluk's voice hoarsened with emotion, with joy, and his hand gently closed on Dr. West's wrist. The great bear will come down when there are enough of us and -- " Dr. West had stiffened involuntarily, and Edwardluk stopped, as if sensing rejection. Again, Dr. West knew what Edwardluk was thinking: you don't like us. For # days Dr. West had been bombarded by the love and mythology of these people. They wanted -- needed -- to be liked. If these people were not caged in this Cultural Sanctuary, Dr. West wondered, would they be scurrying door to door, knocking and disturbing housewives with their joyful apocalyptic message? "He will come," Edwardluk's voice insisted, "when we have covered the world for him!" Edwardluk's grip tightened on Dr. West's wrist. "Our bodies will reward him for our birth." Edwardluk's voice rose in confidence and joy. "His great hunger is for us, for us. To this world and all worlds, he comes." Edwardluk released his grip, standing up. His foot-steps shuffled away over the ice. The dogs whined with hunger and hope of seal meat. Through the wind drifted the distant grunting of the bear, and the wind hissed across the sled. Under the icy caribou skins. Dr. West lay shivering. Eskimos say real life, dream life, begins while sleeping cold, dreaming cold, awakened into sleep like a wolf inhaling the scents, like a caribou hearing the most distant sounds, like a hand feeling... V Touring the #rd night he had camped with these people in an overcrowded tent where their stench congealed in leaden cold; his only desire had been for sleep. He pushed away the smoothly bare arm. Tired and still apprehensive of venereal disease and lice, he did not want any anonymous and greasy Eskimo girl. "Eh-eh," her faceless voice giggled. "Marthalik." "Go away. I want sleep." But with warming excitement he discovered he was becoming -- he had become a lover of an intensity he had never experienced. His mounting ego said: Superman, you're getting out of it what you put into it. But he overpraised himself. Smoothbellied and moving indescribably, Marthalik was the lover, he discovered. Marthalik. In Marthalik's arms he dreamed the bear was approaching. He laughed in his sleep. Unique. Marthalik might have become his Cleopatra, his Goddess Calypso who imprisoned Ulysses in her island bed. He might have become an odd wanderer with an Eskimo wife. But when he went out to help search for Edwardluk's "brother", Marthalik had not accompanied him. She was not feeling well. Thinking of her warmth, he had trudged away with a dozen Eskimos. Camped in the lee of a cliff, Edwardluk had persisted in offering his sister or his wife; Dr. West was too sleepy to recognize which. Worn by Edwardluk's generosity, anxious not to hurt anyone's feelings. Dr. West said: "Oh, hell," and embraced her. Wonderful surprise! She was as wonderful as Marthalik. They all were. This went on and on. These wonderful women could conquer the world. He laughed in his sleep. Even on the #rd day, when he noticed that Marthalik, his first slender girl of the #rd night, now appeared slightly thick-waisted and heavy-gaited, he could not forsee the reason the age-population curve in this encampment was skewed so drastically to children and babies. During the #rd night a girl gave birth to a son. Dr. West tried to believe he confused one girl with another. They all looked so much alike. This girl could not be Marthalik. Holding her mewing baby under her chin smiling proudly, she reassured him. "Eh, this person is Marthalik." Her baby appeared to be typical Eskimo baby fathered by an Eskimo. There was a typical mongoloid blue spot near the base of the spine. Even Eskimo babies are born with blue eyes. He kept telling himself he could not be the father. Marthalik could not be the mother. This was a full term baby, which should take approximately nine months. A thirty-day gestation period should be impossible for a human being. It would be catastrophic for humans enmasse. These people cannot be Eskimos. What are they? Ohivering into wakefulness,  awakened by whining dogs. Dr. West sat up on the anchored sled. The grunting sound, like an approaching hog, was the polar bear. With his finger and thumb. Dr. West peeled one eyelid open and gasped with pain, stabbed by the blinding white light. His eyes flooded with tears. Along the sled he groped for the two harpoons. "Edwardluk!" he shouted, and the vast emptiness of sea-ice swallowed his voice and returned like a false echo the grunting of the bear. His hand gripped the harpoon shaft. Best weapon for a blindman? To his own surprise he laughed. A bit shrilly, but he laughed. Turning his head to follow the pig-like noises of the bear, he extended the harpoon. "Come on you invisible spook! I'm a man, not a seal." His pounding heart, his surging andrenilin, had given him back his warmth, his liveness. He laughed with surprise that he was not afraid. Much closer than before, the bear growled. The dogs yelped, violently thrashing the anchored sled, concealing any sounds of the bear. In this uncertain moment Dr. West re-evaluated. These doge were straining to escape. Escape was simple! His atavistic flow of courage froze. With the hurried gasps of a civilized man. Dr. West dropped the harpoon and unsheathed his short-bladed skinning knife. Of course the dogs would run, he thought. They would drag the sled away, carrying him. The bear growled. Tight-muscled with fright. Dr. West lurched across the straining sled, fumbled back along the rail until his hand found the taut anchor strap. His knife slashed. "The strap broke, the lunging dogs yanking the sled from under him. He fell on his elbow on the ice, momentarily stunned by his stupidity as the clamor of the fleeing dog team faded into the distance. He couldn't escape, 'ne thought. Was he predestined to -- ? "Edwardluk!" Dr. West started to rise, and was warned by a cavernous growl. He remained in a crouching posture, turning his head in the direction from which the sound had emerged. He was facing upwind, and an odor of rotten meat became noticeable, but now he couldn't hear the bear. The bear must be motionless, staring at him. Gradually, Dr. West sank down on the ice, his knife hand under his shoulder as he flattened out on the ice, his vulnerable stomach pressed against the ice, his legs pressed together, his shoulders hunched protectively about his neck. His chest pressed against the ice, his heart thudding against the ice. He could hear the hiss-hiss of its breathing, the bear's shuffling advance. Dr. West made no new attempts to open his eyes. He tried to see backward into his concrete-block cottage in California. It became a sunlit fortress. Behind the locked door, behind the multi-colored dusty books on the top shelf lay his .# magnum Ruger Blackhawk revolver, heavy hog-leg single-action revolver, gleaming thick cylinder stuffed with six bullets looking fat as thumbs, packed with exp! osive -- emptiness. The bear snorted. Motionless on the ice, Dr. West suppressed his breathing. He remembered Alaskan Eskimo hunters laughing how they had behaved in such situations. Prostrate before their bears, they had lived to joke. "Don't breathe," Eskimos say. "Bear never kills dead man." The polar bear's stench engulfed him. Above him poised the hiss-hiss of its breathing. There was a gurgling sound, the ravenous contractions of its digestive system. As forcibly as the blunt end of a baseball bat, the polar bear nosed his thigh, trying to turn him over. Desperately, he wanted to lunge away but lay in fear the bear's quick paw would smash him like a seal if he moved. He wanted to leap away with a nightmare shriek as the bear's nose clubbed his thigh, his hip, shoving to turn him over, to expose his vital belly. Resisting, Dr. West tried to sag against the ice, to keep his belly down. With an eager grunt and a series of hisses, the bear's nose burrowed under him, pushing up his hip. He twisted, was clamped --  The shriek apd muscular spasm ballooned to his consciousness. His thigh, the bear's jaws! With the squawling vitality of any animal being devoured alive, the former Dr. West writhed, striking theknife blade across the hard muzzle of the polar bear. With a startled woof, the bear's jaws opened. Dr. West's body rolled away slashing the air and screaming defiance like a cornered animal. Backing away, gasping, he hacked the air with the knife while the shuffling sounds of the bear departed. He became aware of the throbbing of his thigh. Gummed eyelids torn open, he faced blindly into the whiteness and listened through his own harsh breathing for the silent bear, and remembered who he was. Dr. West's fingers explored the slippery twitching remnants of his thigh muscle. Hard-jawed, he toumiqueted his belt around his thigh and gasped. "Edwardluk," he gurgled. "Edwardluk, Edwardluk!" he yelled. There was no Edwardluk. "Edwardluk! Edwardluk!" His voice thickened. His head seemed to sail away, and he muttered and twisted, resisting. If he fell into shock, he thought, in this cold he would be dead. Dead, dead, irretrievably dead. All gone. Finished. Nothing. From hissing wind emerged a scraping sound approaching. Edwardluk's voice wheezed, "Dogs turn away from water too late. Sled float. Curlytail drown. Loafer drown." All Edwardluk could talk about was the dogs. "Hump drown. Wind Runner drown." Edwardluk slid darkness and warmth down over Dr. West's head and shoulders; Edwardluk was giving him his outer parka. "White Eye drown." Edwardluk was prodding his leg, wrapping his leg in something jelly-like within wet fur. "Fished out dogs. Cut up. Eheh," Edwardluk laughed feebly, "much good dog meat for everyone. This person cut open Wind Runner and White Eye for bear." With crunching sounds, Edwardluk was breaking apart the sled, rebuilding it into a tiny man-sled. Gently, Edwardluk's hands tied Dr. West on the sled. T)lind, Dr. West knew they were microscopic specks in the enormity of sea-ice, shore-ice and ice-shaped mountain-islands. "We go!" With a grunt, Edwardluk strained at the harness, and the jolting hours moved through chills and sleep and fever, becoming days of blind agony without end. Edwardluk's soft voice tried to soothe. "Eat-eat." He was pressing chewed dog meat into Dr. West's mouth. Edwardluk would shout: "Ha! Forward, dogs!" and Edwardluk's stubby legs would tramp forward, endlessly dragging the man-sled with its raving burden. Dr. West. "The bear," Dr. West would gasp. "Got to warn them." The Canadian Cultural Sanctuary Commission became twelve pairs of eyes surrealistically floating in a jury box. "Please believe me." The population pressure among nations, in the amoeba-like growing struggles of the population masses of the world, these multiplying Eskimos will be the Bomb for whatever nation makes use of these. "Believe me, they're not Eskimos." In his delirium, Marthalik's face rose smiling. He clung to her body. The droning of the airplane transformed snowflakes into parachutes drifting down with swaying food packages. As absurdly as Pop Art, these were forth. Massive jaws crunching. "Too many Eskimos." For these happy people what did the bear symbolize? "Don't feed the bear!" he shrieked. The giggling Eskimo women were stuffing ovulation suppressant pills into their ears. Their bellies inflated. The Earth tipped. From the darkness of space opened the jaws. "The bear!" he shrieked. In more lucid moments. Dr. West clutched his swollen thigh and thought what a good man Edwardluk was. Laughing, straining, uncomplaining, that was the Eskimo image. They were cheerful people who fought no wars. It was true. So true. Men of goodwill all over the world would not let the Eskimos starve no matter how many Eskimos... VI '"The headwind carried the smell of fuel oil smoke, the barking of dogs. "Carry the poor bloke into the storehouse where it's dark. I'll take the rag off 'is blinkers. Coo! Eyes like bloody sores!" The man's voice was the perpetual employee. Dr. West thought dazedly, another Englishman imported to Canada in the population struggle. The French-speaking Canadians were outbreeding the rest two to one, gaining numerical control in spite of English immigration. French Separatists no longer spoke of separations but of P'rench as the required language in all of Canada's schools. Dr. West's eyes throbbed like hammer blows into his skull. His snowblind eyes -- "Kerosene eye drops I always says," the ex-Londoner's voice was croaking. " 'Ere comes the Commissioner. Kerosene eye drops for snowblindness." "No, wait!" Dr. West gasped. "Leave my eyes alone. I'm a doctor. I need special treatment. I must be flown to a hospital with -- with Eldwardluk." "If you're a doctor, where's your kit?" the Cultural Sanctuary Commissioner's voice accused. "You're another cultural smuggler. You smuggling bastards won't leave the world's best people alone, not for a minute! You're the third smuggler I've caught in my district this year." "No steel fishhooks, no transistor batteries on 'im," the exLondoner protested. "Coo! Commissioner, look at 'is leg!" The Commissioner evidently bent over Dr. West's leg because there was a retching sound. "Gangrene." "Dog bite him," Edwardluk's voice volunteered. "Bad leg. This person drag him on little sled -- that many sleeps." Edwardluk must be holding up stubby fingers, feigning ignorance of counting. "Dogs drown. This person drag him all way from Mountain Bay." "Thom Bay? That's an extremely difficult and hazardous -- my man, you've completed an epic journey!" The Commissioner panted with pleasure. "You're a hero." T Te must be shaking Edward- luk'.s hand, and Edwardluk giggled with embarrassment. "Pulled wliitemen long way. People hungry. He say much food here." "No one will starve," the Commissioner said warmly. "Emergency Family Allowances will be authorized. Survival always is more important than # selfsufficiency. If necessary we'll even paradrop a Family Allowance for every Family Head on the Boothia District Roster!" "Eh-eh??" Edwardluk's voice laughed in confusion. "Will you help us? Many-many people hungry!" Edwardluk must be spreading his stubby arms. "Many people. Here his markerbook." "I'll be damned!" Fromthe sounds, the Commissioner must be thumbing through Dr. West's notebook. "He count people. Say not enough seals." Edwardluk expounded. "He count babies. Say more hungry quick." "We'll make our own population survey. This man evidently is deranged. He appears to be dying." "We help Whiteman. He say all wliitemen will like us because we help him." Earnestly, Edwardluk must be pressing his hand on his chest. "This poor person carry whiteman all this way. Pull sled like dog," Edwardluk laughed nervously. "You're a better man than the whitemen!" The Commissioner was bubbling with enthusiasm for his Elskimos. "You've made an epic journey; there will be food for everyone. Boothia District will gain proper notice if you will speak thus on the C.B.C. The telly, the picture box. "Tell them of the hunger." "People hungry," Edwardluk repeated wistfully enough to melt the hearts of any T.V. audience. "Babies hungry." Dr. West gritted his teeth. There was no use attempting to speak now. The Commissioner would not listen because he was in no mood for an "attack" against the Eskimos. Later -- This Commissioner emotionally would reject unpleasant facts. Finally when the Canadian Cultural Sanctuary Commissioners' noses were rubbed in the evidence, in the sinister implications of a one-month gestation period, both the Commission and the Canadian Government would temporize. Dr. West thought. "Forcible birth control? Surely not in a free nation! No matter what you say, they're as human as I am," this Commissioner would protest. "What would you wish us to do, let these good, happy, cooperative people starve? The real moral issue bethoughts had a dream-hke reality. "Coo! Is he d#ung?" said a voice which penetrated Dr. West's delirium.  nd Eskimos have Asian identifications. Dr. West dreamed the U. N. General Assembly with outraged shouts and dark faces rising against a rumor that Canada was planning "Eskimo family limitation." "Sterilization!" "Imperialist suppression!" To aid tlie starving and disadvantaged Eskimos, the Chinese Federation of Nations would offer Cultural Assistance. Roaring airplanes from Asia, from Europe, from embarrassed America would parachute food throughout the spreading Arctic while the people multiplied and multiplied. "Eh-eh, we fill world," Edwardluk had explained weeks ago with lovable simplicity, "until bear comes." Death gnawed Dr. West's leg, and he tried to sit up while Edwardluk's gentle hands held him down. "Must speak," Dr. West gasped, thinking: I must live. "I must speak." "You sleep now," Edwardluk was whispering, holding him down. "He come." In his delirium. Dr. West could hear the galactic runting of the Galactir Consumer Report No. #: Automatic Twin-Tube Wishing Machine Don'f wasfe your credits! Consult this handy buying guide before you purchase -- or you may pay dearly! published by CortGalFedConAss, (Note: this forms part of our series of reports on products not yet in very general demand, but representing a substantial investment of credit -- cf. our recent tests of inexpensive time machines.) Introduction We have received many letters asking what we think of twintube wishing machines. Typical is the following: "I'm overworked and underpaid. Sometimes it seems there are only two choices left to me -- the third, suicide, wouldn't help because I can't keep up the pa # rments on suicide insurance. "Either I'll have to have myself twinned so I can moonlight a second job -- and I don't know what I could do that would cover the payments on the twinning -- or else I'll have to go ten per cent deeper into hock and buy a wishing machine. At Cr. # or so they aren't cheap, but on the other hand the idea of making everything for ourselves seems wonderful. My wife says yes, get one, because it would be living like our ancestors used to, completely selfsufficient (we have strong pioneer traditions here on New Frontier), but I said no, I guess there may be a catch, let's wait Not everyone, alas, has that much good sense. Over the past decade scores of news stories have testified to the fate of hasty purchasers who succumbed to wild advertising claims. Swamped by debt, Ebenezer J. Younghusband of Venable's World boasted to his friends that he'd seen a way out of his difficuties. He mortgaged his grandchildren's earning capacity to buy a wishing machine. He envisaged making and selling uranium-# on a rising market to recoup his expenditure. Three tiiousand casualties occurred, mostly fatal, when he allowed # kg. to accumulate in the hopper. Likewise, rendered desperate the problem of supporting her eleven children, widowed Mrs. Honoria Quonsett of Hysteria sold six of her offspring to an illegal service agency and invested in a wishing machine, thinking she could redeem them when it had stabilized her affairs. The machine she was able to affordwas inadequately insulated against feedback from the user's subconscious, and -- since she was naturally concerned with her children's fate above all  -- began to manufacture duplicates of them. The more frantic she grew, the more the machine churned out. As even the finest machine is unable to create a fully functioning human, something like # imbeciles are now a charge on the Hysterian government, and Mrs. Quonsett is permanently hospitalized. So, if you're considering buying a wishing machine, bear three points in mind: the advertisers' claims are exaggerated; extreme care is always necessary in use; and -- most important of all -- these machines are machines, not magic wands! Background Immediately Charlie Voluminous MacDiomnaid, a century or so ago, turned "transmutation without radiation" from a votecatching slogan into a practical reality. All technically advanced planets began to dream of shortcircuiting the conventional manufacturing processes and creating articles at need from crude matter and raw energy. In # the first notable step towards this goal was accomplished accidentally on Cocahymnia, when Abdul Fidler gave up trying to describe the instruments he wanted to play his famous "Catastrophe Suite" and had himself spliced directly into the computer-operated controls of a woodwind factory. Further development led to one of the two essential elements of a modern manufacturing complex: the visualizer tube, which extracts from the mind of the person in charge the characteristics of the desired product. The necessity for a second controlling element emerged when Fidler discovered that human musicians couldn't play the in.struments he had devised. For his "Variations on the Theme of Planetary Collision" he attempted to surpass his earlier achievement and create a superior musician, too. The lifeform resulting had an enormous brain, incredibly acute hearing, # pairs of hands and sufficient mouths to play #I wind instruments at once. On seeing it, Fidler let out a cry of joy approximately a sixth of a tone below G flat in altissimo, and the creature -- so sensitive it could not endure this deviation from perfect pitch -- manipulated him until he was .screaming exactly on the note. The loss of his talent was a severe blow to galactic music, but his death established the need for the moderator tube, charged with powers of judgement regarding the feasibility and permissibility of the product. Not unexpectedly, the immense range of the human imagination meant that the early installations had to be huge. The pilot version covered about a hectare of ground. However, though such size confined the process to commercial undertakings, partial success was better than none and soon factories working on these principles were a common sight on prosperous planets. The ultimate target -- providing private consumers with home appliances that they need only switch on and think into -- appeared as remote as ever until the genius of Gordian Bludgeon, a factory-hand on Odin, broke the deadlock. One day, during a five-minute period of random thinking intended to clear his mind for a changeover from family spaceboats to sanitary appliances, he snapped his fingers and started to concentrate on the idea of an automatic twin-tube wishing machine no larger than a robochef. It is pointless to deny that like so many geniuses Bludgeon enjoyed imperfect mental stability. However, it is indisputable that wishing machines for home use would not yet be available. Though refinements have subsequently been incorporated, every machine we saw was a modification of his original version. Chief among the refinements, incidentally, is the elimination of a circuit he included because his former girl-friend had just married the factory manager. It is now illegal to describe in print what this was intended to do, but by reading between the lines of the distorted account in Harold Knockermaker's Bludgeon the Man any averagely aggressive male should be able to figure it out. Brands tested We found a total of seven wishing machines that fitted the sti'ict definition of "twin-tube" (i.e. having both a visualizer and a moderator) and "automatic" (i.e. not requiring the preliminary insertion of ready-made parts). All of them cost in the region of Cr. #. Cheaper models are on offer, but they lack the moderator tube. They should not be bought under any circumstances. The fact that Eblis is currently quarantined from the rest of the galaxy and languishing under the most savage dictatorship in history is directly attributable to the purchase by a Mrs. Phobia Luncheon of such a machine. Her five-year-old son Elgin, in a tantrum over the refusal of an ice cream soda, started the machine and set it to making nucleararmed robot soldiers two meters tall, with whose aid he overran the planet and set up a drugstore with a soda fountain a kilometer long. (He is expected to die of malnutrition in about #, but it is impossible to estimate how many of Eblis's population will survive him.) These are the models we tested, and the chief slogans used to advertise them: Plenty in the Home." Golden Touch." ey can or can't buy." one is on the make!" dreams of avarice." turing." "There is no God but Allah; however, the profit is entirely yours." on inspection, proved to be identical except for the nameplate affixed to the front of the cabinet. The former costs Cr. # more than the latter. The makers refused to comment on this. Appearance and finish With the following qualifications the finish of the products was rated "acceptable" by our test panel. ly twice as big as the largest of the others, and the makers recommend that the first use it be put to after purchase is the construction of an extra room to hold it. The output hopper supplied imposed an arbitrary limit on the size of articles manufactured. Anything larger than approx. # X # meters came out concertinaed. In the end we sent for one of the range of non-standard oversize hoppers available at extra charge. (We tried making our own with the machine, but the tolerances were of the order of two micrometers and the controls were insufficiently precise.) with excerpts from the Koran, and was time-switched to prevent its use when the owner was supposed to facing Mecca for prayer. Five periods of nonavailability per day, each lasting fifteen minutes, may constitute a drawback in the view of non-Moslems. smaller than the others in every respect including its visualizer cap, which fitted only one of our test panel (an eight-yearold boy chosen for the vividness of his imagination). We had to substitute the cap from the basuser's chair was rated "very uncomfortable" by the entire panel, and we had to pack it with foam padding before anyone could sit through a production cycle. ed us several problems. Our attention had already been caught by the curious advertising copy The attractive gray cabinet was finished in a manner we had not previously encountered. When touched, it humped and rubbed against the hand, at the same time secreting a gummy fluid with a strong smell resembling banana-oil. The output (no hopper was fitted) was on top of the casing and could only be reached by a stepladder. The controls were on two boards at opposite ends of the housing, which meant that unless the user's reach exceeded # m. and he had had the foresight to install wall-mirrors to reflect the dials he had to walk back and forth all the time. This was rendered difficult by the hard flat bench, tilted at #, fitted in place of a user's chair. Also there was no visualizer cap; #I separate leads had to be attached to the head with suctioncups, and the handbook advised shaving before use. Instruction ixtanuals, etc. Handbooks were supplied with five of the machines. That for the adjustment will be required for at least one Earth Standard Year." But see below, Performdid not, which seemed odd. We used the same for both. That cation: "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, let no harm befall users of this machine!" Again, see below. instructions except a swing-ticket attached to the on-off switch, which read: "Any fault that develops in this machine can easily be rectified by having it produce a replacement part." We should like to repeat the comment of our eight-yearold, but this publication has to go through the galactic mails. admirable idea. Unfortunately the text in # of them (the exception being High Canal Martian) referred to a model discontinued four years ago. been produced on the machine by an inexperienced operator. It was a handsome volume of about # pages, of which all but the first # were blank. Guarantees ject to the deletion (don't forget to thumbprint it in the margin) of the clause which runs: "The manufacturers will not be held liable for (a) the products of a diseased imagination; (b) operation of the machine by a minor; (c) death, disablement or disfigurement of any user by hisher productions." None of the other guarantees was worth the permafilm they ter alia, "Omission of five-timesdaily prayer voids this warran"We reserve the right to cancel this or any other ostensible warranty at out entire discretion." at least the virtue of honesty (we think); it ran simply: "We decline responsibilities, all shapes, all sizes, all colors." Power source and mode of operation As stated above, all wishing machines on sale are similar to Bludgeon's original concept. The and forth over a sloping bench), puts on a cap connected to the shaves scalp and attaches #I leads), adjusts manual controls to broad categories of mass, switches on the power and concentrates on visualizing the appearance and performance of a known end-product, or the performance of something desired but not hitherto invented. This eventually appears in the output hopper, or not, as the case may be. useful extra: a warning bell on the moderator to indicate if production of the article had been vetoed. With the slower mable to hang around hopefully for an hour or more before realizing that nothing would emerge. draw domestic current on planets where a piped-plasma grid exists; otherwise they require a portable fusion plant. The off solar or other energy sources, but performance on anything but plasma is unsatisfacing solar energy, required #)# hours steady concentration to produce a meal for two people, which the hungry tester then immediately devoured. unique in having to be primed with # kg. of technetium (this is apparently what the advernishing this initial load is about Cr. #; however, an efficient auxiliary circuit kept the level of fuel constant, using thermal energy from the air of the room, providing sufficient downtime was allowed. Performance Theoretically a wishing machine will make almost anything, subject to the veto of the moderating tube. In practice, the latter is by no means consistent, and what you get out depends anyhow on how good you are at concentrating. (It also depends on how good the visualizer tube is at sifting conscious from subconscious mental images.) It was clearly impossible to attempt a cross-section of users' desires. We settled for three groups of tests. First, we had to establish that everyday requirements could be met. We instructed the testers to make (a) a meal for two people which they personally enjoyed; (b) clothing for themselves, from hat to shoes; (c) an item of household equipment, preferably furniture. All passed, with the following qualifications: Food produced on the initial sisted knives, forks and teeth, and its piece of furniture (a table) proved to be of collapsed steel. We had to send for a crane to remove it from the output hopper. Investigation showed that the Durability control needed adjustment; it was set to "#I per cent". A setting of I produced edible food and # produced usable furniture, in later runs. Clothing manufactured on the and waterproof, but when we sent out a lady tester in the garments she had made, to see how well they wore, the next we heard of her she was in jail on a charge of indecent exposure. Her and all other female clothing produced by this machine turned perfectly transparent one hour after putting on. A complaint to the makers produced an apology and a statement to the effect that the factory-hand in charge of this batch had been sent for psychotherapy to eliminate his Peeping Tom syndrome. All the testers who ate meals ized with acute food poisoning. ed enormous extra effort before it would produce food uncontaminated with bromine and arsenic and of any other color than purple (though some of our testers found purple steak and potatoes attractive visually, they tasted bad), or clothing less than # cm. in thickness, devoid of fibreglass scales and with sleeves less than # m. long. Second, we had to establish that it was economical to produce household durables available through more conventional channels. We tried for a threevee set, and an airconditioner. In all cases it was cheaper (sometimes # per cent cheaper) to buy commercially. Hovever, the following points should be noted: sponse to a tester who claimed not to have the faintest notion how a three-vee set works, produced one in working order, superior to any we have ever seen, and based on what proved to be a radical new means of receiving broadcast signals. We are working on this and hope shorty to market a commercial version, which may go some way towards making up the anticipated deficit in next year's balance sheet. (See "Message from your Chairman", this issue.) thing, but merely repeated what the tester was visualizing at the time. We had to fire one tester whose set depicted a positively obscene episode from "Peyton Planet". And those from the DOreceive only Mecca, Medina and New Cairo. The airconditioners mostly worked okay, except for the INminutes' operation the room was fuU of the reek of chlorine; inspection showed that a minature transmuter had been set into the housing, which was busy getting rid of the oxygen in favor of chlorine, bromine, iodine and inert gases. Finally we had to determine how safe the machines were. There is no galactic standard yet, but an Earthside law lays down that the moderator must prevent the creation of "any noxious or vicious article, object or creature whatsoever." Cut-outs built into the moderator are supposed to enforce this. In practice, it's clear that definitions vary. Even on the best make infectious bacteria (see Obituary, inside back cover). And our eight-year-old, using the make a spanking machine, from which his parents were rescued in a state of extreme exhaustion; a suit of battle armor, his own size, in which to make good his escape; and enough sleepy-gas to blank out the ConGalFedConAss Building as he was leaving. Our performance tests of the clusive. We were tempted to abandon them when we discovered that although insulation against subconscious feedback left something to be desired on all the machines, the insulation on this one tended to filter out conscious images and let subconscious ones go through. (The events which led us to this impression need not be gone into as the tests were abortive.) However, we felt we owed it to our members to determine whether the extravagant claim Our change of address, noted on the inside front cover, stems largely from our persistence. We decided to make up a cyclic tape for some article of which any family is likely to consume large quantities, and run it until the machine stopped working. Our first choice was paper handkerchiefs, but the machine's vulnerability to subconscious associations compelled the Greater Greater New York Public Health Authority to step in. (We are glad to learn, just before press-time, that the influenza epidemic is officially "under control".) It was then suggested that the item of which a family consumes most is money. This choice had the secondary advantage that the use of a wishing machine to make Galactic currency is counterfeiting, and if the machine's moderator permitted an illegal act we would be compelled to inform our members that it was an offence to buy one. We regret to announce that on this test the machine performed flawlessly. Our calculations show that the technetium will run out when the pile of bills now covering the site of our former headquarters is about # meters high, unless a strong wind gets up, so the machine is not in fact "inexhaustible", but this is a slim consolation. (Anyone finding windblown bills, incidentally, is requested to forward them to the office of our Attorney for the Defense before the first of next month.) We learn from the Superdrstrict Attorney's staff that an investigation has been made into space-going factory parked about a thousand parsecs outside the galaxy in the direction of Andromeda. The authorities are proceeding on the assumption that it represents an economic assault by the dominant civilization of M-#. The design of it accords with the known characteristics of that race: they would be very comfortable on the sloping bench provided for the user, they have arms and eyes at both ends of their bodies and are extremely tall, so would be able to operate the divided controls as well as to fish the end-product out of the top, and they prefer an atmosphere of chlorine, iodine, neon and argon. buy this machine! Apart from its being capable of an illegal act (counterfeiting), our advice is that it can only be properly controlled by an Andromedan. If you meet anyone who claims to have had no trouble with an INonce to the nearest office of the Galactic Bureau of Investigation. He's probably an Andromedan spy. A a you know, the problem with life is that nobody understands the situation. Nonetheless, we have to get through it as best we can. If there is a scheme to it all, it is sufficiently complex and covers sufficient spacetime so that only God could account for it. It is one of the primary purposes of commercial entertainment -- and of art -- to compensate us for the fact that none of us are God. It is the function of a statue to capture some small slice of something that we say is real, and hold it frozen for us to walk around and look until we are satisfied that we understand it. It is the function of a commercial novel, of the sort to which most science-fiction novels belong, to provide what Murray Leinster long ago called a "pocket universe." In this universe, the rules rapidly become comprehensible, or an assurance is quickly given that the rules will become comprehensible. There is a protaganist -- a hero, comes the reader's particular property, and whose movements, troubles and triumphs become the reader's own. In this way and for some little space of time, the reader inhabits a comprehensible world, and escapes from the real one. This escapeinto an organized delusion -- if you will, a systematic lie -- is distinguishable from psychosis only by the fact that you can walk into a store and buy a package of it, the package having been provided by someone who deals in this service. As you know, psychosis is frowned upon, whereas reading is normall acceptable. Thus commerce does confer a certain absolution on us all. Some kinds of books are automatically more popular than others, just as some individual books are more popular than others of their same kind. This means, apparently, that there are fashions in psychosis, just as there are degrees to which individual books please their readers -- that is to say, provide a delusional system yummier than someone else's delusional system. It might even be possible to psychoanalyze a particular period of human history by running one's finger down a list of the best sellers. Thus, simple statistics and grubby pennies and dimes lay us all upon the psychiatrist's couch. Never doubt that some day some earnest Ph.D. candidate will not do all this for us; hopefully, not in my time or yours. For now, come rummage through some pockets with me. ne of the simplest and most common pocket universes is the one in which life is fast, society is run on about as many rules as apply to tick-tack-toe, and if you're imhappy you can go shoot somebody. To this end, Joseph E. Levine has made a motion picture called The Tenth Victim, from a short story by Robert Sheckley, and Ballantine in turn has had Sheckley novelize the screenplay. (The original story, of course, appeared in Gafaxy. The movie stars Marcello Mastroianni as a pleasant but essentially inept huntsman in a world where aggressions have been channeled into a kind of game described as "a safety valve for humanity's latent agressive instincts." His particular opponent in this story is Ursula Andress. Ursula is a quite proficient huntress. We first meet her as she guns down her ninth victim, using a rapid-fire bra. Their names in this story are Catherine and Marcello. By the rules of the lottery in which registered citizens of this future world acquire the right to hunt each other, and to retire to fame and riches after two have now been more or less randomly chosen to compete. Society, in this xmiverse, is so organized that nothing stands in their way, and a number of institutions exist to aid and encourage them in their endeavors. There are no legal bars to their activities -- there are almost no places on Earth where they may not take pot shots at each other with guns, bombs, knifes or armed helicopters -- and this is true to the point where the average poor citizen in the street normally doesn't even have any warning that somebody is liable to set off a bomb to get the man beside him. Accordingly, despite whatever rationale the author of such a work may offer, what this is is kids playing cops and robbers. In order to take this sort of story seriously, one must suspend considerably more disbelief than one needs in order to read a book such as The Three Musketeers. This is not a serious problem -- the public eats up this kind of thing every day without blinking an eye; nevertheless, the Italian moviemakers, and thus Sheckley following along behind the script, have chosen to make this story a vehicle for satire in the Italian manner typified in such famous productions as La Dolce Vita and Syi. As you may have noticed, in order to understand La Dolce Vita and you have to be "in." Otherwise you are in serious danger of losing some of the subtleties and the really masterful symbolic touches which make an indifferent and often boring story into a masterpiece of art. Now personally, I have actually had the privilege of seeing a roomful of these "in" people at a private preview showing of Syi, and I must say it took them two or three hours to decide what the masterful touches were. My opinion is that if I have marched down to a drug store and handed somebody #c for a book or into a movie house and handed somebody # to have the silver screen do most of my imagining for me -- badly -- I would prefer to get my return for value received on the spot, and without the need to go hunt up # others of my own kind in order to arrive at a consensus. Thus my tendency on being handed a book is to simply read it and notice while I am doing so whether I'm enjoying myself or not. My buying judgments of books lined up on a rack and offered for sale are formed on the same basis. I look at the cover design, I read the title, I read the blurbs. I turn the book over and skim rapidly over the back cover copy which, if carefully read, often tells me entirely too much about some of the surprises the author has planned to hand me, and then I am liable to flip a few pages and run my eye along a few paragraphs, just to see how well acquainted the writer is with prose. My thinking in this area is that the publisher either is or is not a good professional and that the writer either is or is not the same, and what I am I after here, after all, is a professional service. Thus in glancing at Ballantine's package on The Tenth Victim, I find a very well executed jacket which tells me: "a bullseye view of guns and lovers! Robert Sheckley's chiUing futurama of legalized manslaughter." As you may have noticed, the package describes a book rather different from the book actually contained within its covers. There is no hint of satire, nor of symbolism. There is a picture of Urusla Andress with the crosshairs of a gunsight centered somewhere south of her navel, and if this is satire I will take broccoli. So, rectitudinously ignoring the reams of promotional literature which Ballantine sends to its review list, I plowed into this book and read it as I would have had I stumbled across it at the comer bookie's. Read as a genuinely proffered pocket universe, this is a reasonably good chase novel which suffers from the fact that its protaganist, Marcello, doesn't really want to do any shooting, and doesn't really care if he gets shot or not. Ursula Andress, last prominently seen as the bikinied Honey in the motion picture Dr. No, goes through this book in the guise of Catherine just as deadpan as she was in the Ian Fleming movie, but without the utterly redeeming quality of being outstandingly visible. There are some very nice, funny touches in the story. I don't know who contributed them, but Sheckley is quite capable of extremely good tongue-in-cheek deadpan humor on his own hook. There are some improbable and yet interesting visual effects described, as when the hut in which Marcello is resting is hooked to a helicopter and transported bodily to the Roman Coliseum, where its sides fall away in order that the climatic shooting of Marcello by Catherine may be covered by network television and dressed up as a Spectacular with the addition of ballet dancers and other marvelous effects. Nevertheless, you are liable to be disappointed by this book, no matter which way you approach it. If you wish to acquire in permanent form, a previously received cinematographic impression, you will get most of it from the inserted section of movie stills showing such things as Catherine's exploding brassiere and Marcello at the camp of the sun worshippers. (You are liable to be confused, as I was, by seeing that in the photo captions Ursula Andress is called Christine, that in the back cover blurb, she is called Catherine -- which is the style I have been following, in my own slipshod way -- and that in the actual text, which is presumably the way either Shecklfey or Joseph E. Levine wanted it, she is called Caroline. But obviously it doesn't matter.) If you are of legalized murder (not manslaughter), you are going to be put off by the book's rather flaky final chapters. This book is primarily interesting not for what it is but for what it represents; the successful translation of a Galaxy Magazine short story called "Seventh Victim" into a major motion picture, starring some extremely expensive and skilled actors, using the resources of a major production company. This is not common, and probably represents Sheckley's accession, at last, into the larger world of high-paying, internationally accepted commercial work. There have been a number of very flossy sciencefiction movies made, but this one is one of the very few in which money was spent on actors as well as production values. Most important, this motion picture represents the first clearly obvious top-line production effort by the European moviemakers and crews who have been taken up by the highly verbal "in" crowd -- as a result, you may be sure that The Tenth Victim, and with it Robert Sheckley, will receive a great deal of critical attention, and that a number of imitations will be attempted. I am very glad to see this, because it represents a potential exploration of another world into w'hich category magazine science fiction, and other category magazine science-fiction writers can expand. ne of the favorite pocket universes is the one in which nameless and overwhelming horror lurks behind every closet door and under every antimacassar. Some years ago, Theodore L. Thomas wrote a short story called "The Clone", which might very well have been called "The Thing from the Drain". He and Kate Wilhelm have now expanded this to a novel of the same title, and Berkley has published it. The clone is a living organism which results from a chance combination of lifeless ingredients in the catch basin of a Chicago drain. By a perfectly believable combination of circumstances these various chemicals are warmed and nurtured to the point where a living cell begins to feed, react to stimuli and multiply. It then grows through the Chicago sewer system -- and I am perfectly prepared to believe it has been there for years -- chomping voraciously on everything it considers edible. Because its chemistry is somewhat different from ours, when it chomps on people, or, rather, absorbs them into its tissue, it rejects approximately seventy per cent of their water content... Thus while these people and the reader dissolve, a freshet of slightly brackish water pours from the advancing line of clone tissue working its way through flesh and muscle, blood and bone, eating the animal-organic clothing worn by the unfortunate victim, rejecting such items as cotton. After a while, all that remains is a puddle of water with a Tshirt floating in it. When you translate this into a department storeful of victims, with the clone grown up to the point where it covers an area miles square, this becomes a flood, a cataract, a torrent of warmish, mineral laden water cascading down the stairways, escalators into the street and choking the gutters. As the clone consumes its food supply, it begins to hunt for new sources of energy and nutriment. It develops the ability to shoot pseudopods in all directions. It develops the ability to extract nourishment from materials it had previously disdained, such as the lath behind a plaster wall, and the various other organic material associated with building materials. As a result, not only people but buildings, and all the other accoutrements of normal civilization, begin to totter and dissolve into the green heaving mass of the insenate clone. This story of the thing that makes a mockery of all the works of Man and Man himself, in part because it is omnipotent, in larger part because it deserves no respect and is therefore. aU the more unreasonable in its pKDwer, is one of the favorite pocket psychoses with which people have been titillating themselves for generations. In times earlier than that, of course, the function of the clone was subsumed under the lesser duties of certain gods. This present example, to my mind is a very good one. My reasons for thinking so are that someone has worked out the chemistry of the clone, (Thomas is not only a patent attorney but an M.I.T. graduate), and the personalities of some of the characters who come in contact with the clone, (Kate Wilhelm does well with people under stress), with a quiet, technical competence that makes them rather convincing. There are few people in this book who run around screaming that this whole thing is a visitation for the Sins of Mankind, and there are few people who waste a great deal of time describing the green monstrosity as "Evil!" A great many of them quietly and systematically analyze the beast's properties and behavior patterns even while it is eating them. This may not make for obvious screaming tension, but I think it creates a more enduring impression of what happens to people in the face of something that guzzles them up despite aU their piety and wit. There is a hero in this story of course, and a heroine. They spend very little time clutching at each other, and in fact quite often are nowhere near each other as they move around the dty of Chicago in the course of various attempts at rescue and battle. There is no particular vindication of a personal creed in the final victory over the clone. That is to say, when the clone is finally subdued, it does not prove the smart young technician Right, nor does it prove superstition Wrong. This is a sort of horror-procedural novel, in which people do more or less the best they can more or less consistently, and some of them turn out to be very heroic, while others turn out to be prosaic. This is mostly nice circumstantial writing, of the sort that either Wilhelm or Thomas do very well all by themselves. I think that if you are going to read yourself a book describing a world which is in some way preferable to this one because the monsters in it are visible and describable, that this is a book for you. F inally we have The Squares of the City by John Brunner (Ballantine). Even more pernicious than the sophistry that life is like chess is the fallacy that a chess game is like a story. I was going to discourse with you at great length on the crucial differences between life and chess, as I see them, but after many pages of winding up to do so, I discovered on reaching the back end of Brunner's book that he was going to make all those points himself all along. This move on Brunner's part was particularly startling since the inside and outside of the book are plastered with urgent references to the fact that the entire plot of the book is modeled on an actual chess game played in Havana in # between the mastem Steinitz and Tchigorin. The publishers and Brunner seem convinced that this alone removes all doubt we have a literary classic on our hands. Although Brunner understands about life and chess, he seems not to have understood about chess and stories. Possibly this entire thing is a response to a years-old complaint by James Blish who, in reviewing a Poul Anderson short story written around an imaginary chess game -- which Blish found particularly uninspiring -- complained that if you were going to do this kind of thing at all you should at least have the wit to use an actual game, and furthermore not a pedestrian one. Brunner seems to have taken up this challenge, and in his preface says things like this; "Following an introductory section, the action of the story goes moveformove with a famous chess game, every piece on the board having a human counterpart." (Italics Brunner's). "Ever since Lewis CarroU wrote Through the Looking Gl, fantasy authors have been fascinated by the chess game fantasy. I honestly believe this is the most successful of its kind so far... I do not think there is any artificiality or contrivance apparent, and this story can be read on either of two levels -- by the chess addict with the game beside him for reference, or by anyone else for its own sake." Well, I don't know about the chess addict, since I am not one, but I seriously doubt the second half of Brunner's proposition. Read as a story for its own sake, this is a confusing, overpopulated, almost unindentifiable-with story set in a city which seems to have been created for the sole purpose of letting Brunner set a "human chess game" in motion upon it. As you know, there are thirtytwo pieces on a chess board, and in the particular game used as a model here there were thirtyeight moves. Even for a book which occupies # pages of very closely set text, it has too many plot turns, too many characters to follow. As usual when a commercial author of average competence attempts to write a book this long, around as ambitious a plan as this, many parts of the final third of the book are skimpy narrations of events which would have been detailed with loving care and attention had they occurred in the earlier parts of the manuscript when the author was still fresh. This is not to say that the average commercial writer is not as skilled as the average writer of novels projected for a more ambitious reason. It is to say that if he writes for a living at commercial rates, he does not have time enough, and that he will save himself a number of ambitious failures, and considerable grief and heartache, if he takes this factor into account. He will also not participate in what often uncomfortably amounts to an ingratiating and naive attempt to take money from the reader under false pretenses. Now I have been questioned in the past about my tendency to review not only the text of a book, but the blurbs thereon and all the other appurtenances such as forewords, afterwords, indexes and appendices which go to make up the entire package. However, it seems to me -- as it does to you -- that when we walk into a store with the intention of spending money on books, what usually determines our choice is what the books look like, and what written information is immediately and readily available to us on its outside surfaces, rather than anything that may be going on inside. Thus I want to know what justification Ballantine has for blurbing this as "one of the ten best science fiction novels of the year." I want to know why it wasn't nine, or eleven, or one hundred and forty-four. I want to know why Ballantine has seen fit to append to the back cover a statement which goes into paroxysms of delight that the last times they described something as "one of the ten best" they were speaking of Edgar Pangborn's Davy, a reprint, and of Leiber's The Wanderer, a book that could not miss with the coterie readership, for coterie reasons. This novel is not one of the ten best of anything. It is an interesting, professionally written, more or less professionally produced package selling for #c, and that is all it it. The author does not have the previous reputation of either Pangborn or Fritz Leiber (who won a Hugo for himself and Ballantine with The Wanderer'), and it is frankly and objectively not in the class of a book written by the two previously named commercial artists. Brunner is a workaday technician with an exaggerated sense of how much of his intelligence and awareness of the world gets translated into the prose he turns out. These are as close to being verified facts as opinions can ever be, and I'm a little bit disappointed in Ballantine. Ballantine, which previously participated in the screw-up on the name of the heroine in The Tenth Victim, has this time screwed up the name of the hero throughout the Page One blurb on The Squares of the City. Without fail, they call him "Haklyut" five times. They never do call him "Hakluyt" which is not only what the author calls him, but what the author knew and was careful to note in the story itself as a famous name. I will be damned if I will let this type of editorial carelessness go by unnoticed. It is important that the packages be professionally and carefully done, because if they are not, a worthy text may suffer for it. Even if the text is not worthy (Shackley's may be, Brunner's not only may be, but at least represents an enormous amount of labor, a high degree of intelligence and considerable personal involvement), a series of slipshod packages from a publisher will impair the sales, and thus the popularity and reputation, of other writers whose books appear under the same imprint. In their choice of blurbs, blurb writers, editors, and of any previous reviews they may wish to quote on the covers of their books, the publishers speak not only for the book contained therein, but for themselves, for all the writers on their list, and for aU writers generally, in more or less that order of effectiveness. It costs no more to do it right than it does to do it wrong. As far as the story itself goes, there is considerable interesting thinking to be derived from it. Boyd Hakluyt is a traffic analyst -- a man whose specialty is that of analyzing the flowi of human beings and their personal and service vehicles through a city, for the purpose of arriving at intelligent plans for channelling this flow. The work done as a result of Hakluyt's professional service does not consist merely of putting up a new throughway or a stop sign; various unobtrusive psychological devices such as making a street a little bit more attractive to drive through, or a little bit less so, are used to increase or decrease the speed with which traffic will feed along a given route. Furthermore, the layout of a street system can be used to create areas in which it is more natural to put up one kind of shopping center, or residential area, in preference to any other. I find this an interesting occupational specialty, and consider it a legitimate vehicle for science-fiction exploration. There are also a very few but effective scenes which attain a certain pictorial splendor, such as the climactic looting and destruction in the city to which Hakluyt has come. The city is Ciudad Vados, in the fictional Latin American country of Aguazul. Ciudad Vados, like contemporary Brasilia, is an artificially created city carved new and shiny out of previously barren ground at the decree of a strong and single-minded ruler. Ciudad Vados is, in the story, famous throught the world as the most modem city on the face of the Earth, and of course was planned exhaustively before ever a stick was cleared or footing dug. In consequence, the expectation was that the city would be a flawless place in which to live, work and govern. In actual practice however, the construction of the city, and the subsequent drain on the resources of the countryside, have displaced and discommoded the native peasant population of Aguazul. Some of these peasants have remained out in the countryside, or in the older, organically evolved cities of the land, where they live in squalor and discontent. Others have moved into the city, and set up markets, shacks, warrens and rookeries of tin, plywood and paper wherever they can find room to do so -- in one instance, interlacing their squalid dwellings among the supporting girders under the main monorail station. Like mantis eggs and tent caterpillar cocoons on a rock crystal mulberry tree carved for a Chinese emperor's delectation, these pests and infestations cause no end of anguish to Vados, the dictator who originally decreed this plea.sure dome, and furnish no end of kindling for various political flare-ups which go on and on in Ciudad Vados just as if it were, for example, Brasilia. Hakluyt takes it as his contract to simply solve the traffic flow problems. Vados takes it as his job to create artificial traffic flows right through the areas of peasant infestation, so as to furnish a convenient, modem, up-to-date, and most important, outside excuse to wipe out the paisanos. Hakluyt gets caught up in the vicious political quarrels which are taking place between the representatives of Vado's adherents and the representatives of the peasantry. Eventually the peasants rise in revolt, and there is a lot of hurrahing and shouting, from which Hakluyt begins to flee, but to which he returns at the last moment because he has become transformed from the detached, neutral, salaried expert to a human being more or less passionately involved in the fate of people as distinguished from the flow of traffic units. From the point of view of literary criticism, Hakluyt's transformation comes too late, too abruptly, apparently because the book was getting to be too damn long. His love interest, which was aroused briefly at the very beginning of the book, is not at all convincing when it recurs at the end. It seems to recur at the end only because, what the hell, you've got to have a love interest. What happens in between is considerably clumsier than one might like to have it. If you were going to plot a story to correspond to a chess game, in which pieces moved to#  ward the removal from the board of themselves or of other pieces, and if some of them are at the very outset of the game assigned an arbitrary order of importance which has nothing to do with any capacity for growth but only with arbitrary abilities to change position, you are going to have a whole lot of monolithic characters introduced who are built up to considerable extent only to be wiped off suddenly by murder, suicide and kidnapping. When this has to happen to ten or a dozen principal characters, let me assure you that the tenth victim seems nowhere near as interesting in his agony as did the first. What happens if we strip away the chess game gimmick is that the protoganist, who tells the story in the first person, is really a nasty young man who happens to have a marketable skill, and who is forever insisting upon his rights, who is sent to a country that does not exist and a city that does not exist to deal with people who do not exist, and who thinks of all of them, very nearly to the absolute utter very end, as just so many units. There is nothing in particular here to catch and hold the reader's involvement in a universe which he might like to enter. In fact, he is led to suspect that if he did enter it, Hakluyt would be standing there with his clipboard, sharply questioning him as to his motives, point of origin and destination -- three questions that people who read books are hoping to escape answering. Pocket universes are all well and good. I am fond of them, both commercially and personally, but pocket universes should not have signs all over them reading "Pocket Universe!" and pocket universes should not have a visible fold down the middle. Your First Book on the AppRed Philosophy Shows You The Rood To A Better Life With Fewer Problems. Just Get It, Read It, And Use It. Send check or money order to Dept. #, Hubbard Communications Office # West #th. Street, Suite No. #I New York City, New York, #I When I Was Miss Dow Once it was a human being -- now if preyed on theml 'These hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean, also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain lobe, we live in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other games like most living creatures. Eventually, we're all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more. After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scientists. The warden and some of the other elders put on faces to greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores, even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms, smiles and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my shape, too. The Warden says to me, "It's about time you made a change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas." My Uncle (by the Warden's fourth conjunction) made himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how it could profit us. I protest to the Warden, "I'm educated and trained as a scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathematics and other studies." My Uncle says, "You have to do it. There's only one way for us to get along with them," and he runs his fingers through his long blonde hair. My Uncle's not an educated person, but highly placed, politically, and while Captain Dow is around my Uncle retains this particular shape. The Captain is shipping out soon, then Uncle will find some other features, because he's already warned that it's unseemly for him to be chasing around in the face of a girl after the half-bearded boys from the space ships. I don't want to do this myself, wasting so much time, when the fourteen decimals even now are clicking on my mirrors. The Warden says. "We have a pattern from a female botanist, she ought to do for you. But before we put you into the pattern tank, you'll have to approximate another brain lobe. They have two." "I know," I say, sulkily. A botanist. A she! "Into the tank," the Warden says to me without mercy, and I am his to use as he believes proper. I spend four days in the tank absorbing the female Terran pattern. When I'm released, the Warden tells me, "Your job is waiting for you. We went to a lot of trouble to arrange it." He sounds brusque, but perhaps this is because he hasn't conjoined for a long time. The responsibilities of being Warden of Mines and Seeds come first, long before any social engagement. I run my fingers through my brunette curls, and notice my Uncle is looking critically at me. "Haven't you made yourself rather old?" he asks. "Oh, he's all right," the Warden says. "Thirty-three isn't badly matched to the Doctor, as I understand it." Dr. Arnold Proctor, the colony's head biologist, is busy making radiograph pictures (with his primitive X-rays) of skeletal structures : murger birds, rodents, and our pets and racers, the kootos -- dogs to the Terrans, who are fascinated by them. We breed them primarily for speed and stamina, but some of them carry a gene for an inherited structural defect which cripples them and they have to be destroyed before they are full grown. The Doctor is making a special study of kootas. He gets up from his chair when I enter his office. "I'm Miss Dow, your new assistant," I say, hoping my long fingernails will stand up to the pressure of punch keys on the computer, since I haven't had much practise in retaining foreign shapes. I'm still in uncertain balance between myself and Martha Dow, who is also myself. But one does not have two lobes for nothing, I discover. "Good morning. I'm glad you're here," the Doctor says. He is a nice, pink man, with silver hair, soft-spoken, intelligent. I'm pleased, as we work along, to find he doesn't joke and wisecrack like so many of the Terrans, though I am sometimes whimsical. I like music and banquets as well as my studies. Though absorbed in his work. Dr. Proctor isn't rude to interrupters. A man of unusual balance, coming as he does from a culture which sends out scientific parties that are ninety per cent of one sex, when their species provides them with two. At first meetings he is dedicated but agreeable, and I'm charmed. "Dr. Proctor," I ask him one morning. "Is it possible for you to radiograph my koota? She's very fine, from the fastest stock available, and I'd like to breed her." "Yes, yes, of course," he promises with his quick, often absent, smile. "By all means. You wish to breed only the best." It's typical of him to assume we're all as dedicated as he. My Uncle's not pleased,. "There's nothing wrong with your koota," he says. "What do you want to X-ray her for? Suppose he finds something is wrong? You'll be afraid to race or breed her, and she won't be replaced. Besides, your interest in her may make him suspicious." "Suspicious of what?" I ask, but my Uncle won't say, so I ask him, "Suppose she's bred and her pups are cripples?" The Warden says, "You're supposed to have your mind on your work, not on racing. The koota was just to amuse you when you were younger." I lean down and stroke her head, which is beautiful, and she breathes a deep and gentle breath in response. "Oh, let him go," my Uncle says wearily. He's getting disgusted because they didn't intend for me to bury myself in a laboratory or a computer room, without making more important contacts. But a scholar is born with a certain temperament, and has an introspective nature, and as I'm destined to eventually replace the Warden, naturally I prefer the life of the mind. "I must say," my Uncle remarks, "you look the image of a Terran female. Is the work interesting?" "Oh, yes, fascinating," I reply, and he snorts at my lie, since we both know it's dull and routine, and most of the time is spent working out the connections between my two brain lobes, which still present me with some difficulty. TV T y koota bitch is subjected to a pelvic radiograph. Afterwards, I stand on my heels in the small, darkened cubicle, looking at the film on the viewing screen. There he stands, too, with his cheekbones emerald in the peculiar light, and his hair, which is silver in daylight, looks phosphorescent. I resist this. I am resisting this Doctor with the Xray eyes who can examine my marrow with ease. He sees Martha's marrow, every perfect corpuscle of it. You can't imagine how comforting it is to be so transparent. There's no need to pretend, adjust, advance, retreat or discuss the oddities of my planet. We are looking at the X-ray film of my prized racer and companion to determine the soundness of her hip joints, yet I suspect the Doctor, platinum-green and tall as a tower, is piercing my reality with his educated gaze. He can see the blood flushing my surfaces. I don't need to do a thing but stand up straight so the crease of fat at my waist won't distort my belly button, the center of it all. "You see?" he says. I do see, looking at the film in the darkness where perfection or disaster may be viewed, and I'm twined in the paradox which confronts me here. The darker the room, the brighter the screen and the clearer the picture. Less light! and the truth becomes more evident. Either the koota is properly jointed and may be bred without danger of passing the gene on to her young, or she is not properly jointed, and cannot be used. Less light, more truth! And the Doctor is green sculpture -- a little darker and he would be a bronze -- but his natural color is pink alabaster, "You see," the Doctor says, and I do try to see. He points his wax pencil at one hip joint on the film, and says, "A certain amount of osteo-arthritic buildup is already evident. The cranial rim is wearing down, she may go lame. She'll certainly pass the defect on to some of her pups, if she's bred." This koota has been my playmate and friend for a long time. She retains a single form, that of koota, full of love and beautiful speed; she has been a source of pleasure and pride. Dr. Proctor, of the pewter hair, will discuss the anatomical defects of the koota in a gentle and cultivated voice. I am disturbed. There shouldn't be any need to explain the truth, which is evident. Yet it seems that to comprehend the exposures, I require a special education. It's said that the more you have seen, the quicker you are to sort the eternal verities into one pile and the dismal illusions into another. How is it that sometimes the Doctor wears a head which resembles that of a koota, with a splendid muzzle and noble brow? Suddenly he gives a little laugh and points the end of the wax pencil at my navel, announcing: "There. There, it is essential that the belly button onto the pelvis, or you'll bear no children." Thoughts of offspring had occurred to me. But weren't we discussing my racer? The radiograph film is still clipped to the view screen, and upon it, spreadeagled, appears the bony Rorschach of my koota bitch, her hip joints expressing doom. I wish the Doctor would put on the daylight. I come to the conclusion that there's a limit to how much truth I can examine, and the more I submit to the conditions necessary for examining it, the more unhappy I become. 'Tr. Proctor is a man of such perfect integrity that he continues to talk about bones and muscles until I'm ready to scream for mercy. He has done something that is unusual and probably prohibited, but he's not aware of it. I mean it must be prohibited in his culture, where it seems they play on each other, but not with each other. I am uneasy, fluctuating. He snaps two switches. Out goes the film and on goes the sun, making my eyes stream with sensitive and grateful tears, although he's so adjusted to these contrasts he doesn't so much as blink. Floating in the sunshine Fve become opaque. He can't see anything but my surface tensions, and I wonder what he does in his spare time. A part of me seems to tilt, or slide. "There, there, oh dear. Miss Dow," he says, patting my back, rubbing my shoulder blades. His forearms and fingers extend gingerly. "You do want to breed only the best, don't you?" he asks. I begin within me a compulsive ritual of counting the elements; it's all I can do to keep communications open between my brain lobes. I'm suffering from eclipses: one goes dark, the other lights up, that one goes dark, the other goes nova. "There, there," the Doctor says, distressed because I'm quivering and trying to keep the connections open; I have never felt clogged before. They may have to put me back into the pattern tank. Profoundly disturbed, I lift my face, and he gives me a kiss. Then I'm all right, balanced again, one lobe composing a concerto for virtix flute, the other one projecting, "Oh Arnie, oh Arnie." Yes, I'm okay for the shape I'm in. He's marking my joints with his wax pencil (the marks of which can be easily erased from the film surface) and he's mumbling, "It's essential, oh yes, it's essential." Finally he says, "I guess all of us colonists are lonely here," and I say, "Oh yes, aren't we," before I realize the enormity of the Warden's manipulations, and what a lot I have to learn. Evidently the Warden triple-carded me through the Colony Punch Center as a Terran. I lie and say, "Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Oh, Arnie, put out the light," for we may find some more truth. "Not here," Arnie says, and of course he's right. This is a room for study, for cataloguing obvious facts, not a place for carnival. There are not many places for it, I discover with surprise. Having lived in glass all my life I expect everyone else to be as comfortable there as I am but this isn't so. Just the same we find his quarters, after dark, to be comfortable and free of embarrassment. You wouldn't think a dedicated man of his age would be so vigorous, but I find out he spends his weekends at the recreation center hitting a ball with his hand. The ball bounces back off a wall and he hits it and hits it. Though he's given that up now because we're together on weekends. "You're more than an old bachelor like me deserves," he tells me. "Why are you an old bachelor?" I ask him. I do wonder why, if it's something not to be. He tries to explain it to me. "I'm not a young man. I wouldn't make a good husband, I'm afraid. I like to work late, to be undisturbed. In my leisure time, I like to make wood carvings. Sometimes I go to bed with the sun and sometimes I'm up working all night. And then children. No. I'm lucky to be an old bachelor," he says. A rnie carves kaku wood, which soft enough to permit easy carving. He's working on a figure of a murger bird, whittling lengthwise down the wood so the grain, wavy, full of flowing, wedgeshaped lines, will represent the feathers. The lamp light shines on his hair and the crinkle of his eyelids as he looks down and carves, whittles, turns. He's absorbed in what he doesn't see there but he's projecting what he wants to see. It's the reverse of what he must do in the viewing room. I begin to suffer a peculiar pain, located in the nerve cluster between my lungs. He's not talking to me. He's not carressing me. He's forgotten I'm here, and like a false projection, I'm beginning to fade. In another hour perhaps the film will become blank. If he doesn't see me, then am I here? He's doing just what I do when absorbed in one of my own projects, and I admire the intensity with which he works: it's magnificent. Yes, I'm jealous of it. I burn with rage and jealousy. He has abandoned me to be Martha and I wish I were myself again, free in shape and single in mind. Not this sack of mud clinging to another. Yet he's teaching me that it's good to cling to another. I'm exhausted from strange disciplines. Perhaps he's tired, too; I see that sometimes he kneads the muscles of his stomach with his hands, and closes his eyes. The Warden sits me down on one of my rare evenings home, and talks angrily. "You're making a mistake," he says. "If the Doctor finds out what you are, you'll lose your job with the colony. Besides, we never supposed you'd have a liaison with only one man. You were supposed to start with the Doctor, and go on from there. We need every credit you can bring in. And by the way, you haven't done well on that score lately. Is he stingy?" "Of course he isn't." "But all you bring home in credits is your pay." I can think of no reply. It's true the Warden has a right to use me in whatever capacity would serve us all best, as I will use others when I'm a Warden, but he and my Uncle spend half the credits from my job on sulfadiazole, to which they've become addicted. "You've no sense of responsibility," the Warden says. Perhaps he's coming close to time for conjunction again, and this makes him more concerned about my stability. My Uncle says, "Oh, he's young, leave him alone. As long as he turns over most of those pay credits to us. Though what he uses the remainder for. I'll never know." I use it for clothes at the Colony Exchange. Sometimes Arnie takes me out for an evening, usually to the Laugh Tree Bar, where the space crews, too, like to relax. The bar is the place to find joy babies; young, pretty, planet-born girls who work at the Colony Punch Center during the day, and spend their evenings here competing for the attention of the officers. Sitting here with Amie, I can't distinguish a colonist's daughter from one of my friends or relatives. They wouldn't know me, either. Once, at home, I try to talk with a few of these friends about my feelings. But I discover that whatever female patterns they've borrowed are superficial ones; none of them bother to grow an extra lobe, but merely tuck the Terran pattern into a corner of their own for handy reference. They are most of them on sulfas. Hard and shiny toys, they skip like pebbles over the surface of the colonists' lives. Then they go home, revert to their own free forms, and enjoy their mathematics, colors, compositions, and seedings. "Why me?" I demand of the Warden. "Why two lobes? Why me?" "We felt you'd be more efficient," he answers. "And while you're here, which you seldom are these days, you'd better revert to other shapes. Your particles may be damaged if you hold that woman form too long." h, but you don't know, I want to tell him. You don't know I'll hold it forever. If I'm damaged or dead, you'll put me into the cell banks, and you'll be amazed, astonished, terrified, to discover that I come out complete, all Martha. I can't be changed. "You little lump of protagon," my Uncle mumbles bitterly. "You'll never amount to anything, you'll never be a Warden. Have you done any of your own work recently?" I say, "Yes, I've done some crystal divisions, and re-grown them in non-established patterns." My Uncle is in a bad mood, as he's kicking sulfa and his nerve tissue is addled. I'm wise to speak quietly to him, but he still grumbles. "I can't understand why you like being a two-lobed pack of giggles. I couldn't wait to get out of it. And you were so dead against it to begin with." "Well, I have learned," I start to say, but can't explain what it is I'm still learning, and close my eyes. Part of it is that on the line between the darkness and the brightness it's easiest to float. I've never wanted to practise only easy things. My balance is damaged. I never had to balance. It's not a term or concept that I understand even now, at home, in free form. Some impress of Martha's pattern lies on my own brain cells. I suspect it's permanent damage, which gives me joy. That's what I mean about not understanding it. I am taught to strive for perfection. How can I be pleased with this, which may be a catastrophe? Arnie carves on a breadth of kaku wood, bringing out to the surface a seascape. Knots become clots of spray, a flaw becomes wind-blown spume. I want to be Martha. I'd like to go to the Laugh Tree with Arnie, for a good time, I'd like to learn to play cards with him. You see what happens' Amie is, in his way, like my original self, and I hate that part of him, since I've given it up to be Martha. Martha makes him happy, she is chocolate to his appetite, pillow for his weariness. I turn for company to my koota. She's the color of morning, her chest juts out like an axe blade, her ribs spring up and back like wings, her eyes are large and clear as she returns my gaze. Yet she's beyond hope; in a little time, she'll be lame; she cannot race any more, she must not mother a litter. I turn to her and she gazes back into my eyes, dreaming of speed and wind on the sandy beaches where she has run. "Why don't you read some tapes?" Arnie suggests to me, because I'm restless and I disturb him. The koota lies at my feet. I read tapes. Every evening in his quarters Arnie carves, I read tapes, the broken racer lies at my feet. I pass through Terran history this way. When the clown tumbles into the tub, I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first it seems that's all there is, but you learn to see beneath the comic costumes. While I float on the taut line, the horizon between light and dark, where it's so easy, I begin to sense what is under the costumes: staggering down the street dead drunk on a sunny afternoon with everyone laughing at you; hiding under the veranda because you made blood come out of Pa's face; kicking a man when he's in the gutter because you've been kicked and have to pass it on. Tragedy is w'hat one of the Terrans called being a poet in the body of a cockroach. (tTTave you heard the rumor?" Arnie asks, putting down the whittling tool. "Have you heard that some of the personnel in Punch Center aren't really humans?" "Not reaUy?" I ask, putting away the tape. We have no tragedy. In my species, family relationships are based only on related gene patterns; they are finally dumped into the family bank and a new relative is created from the old. It's one form of ancient history multiplying itself, but it isn't tragic. The koota, her utility destroyed by a recessive gone, lies sleeping at my foot. Is this tragedy? But she is a sitigh' form, she can't regenernlo (I lost limb, or exfoliate brain tissue. She can only return my gaze with her steadfast and affectionate one. "What are they, then?" I ask Amie. "If they're not human?" "The story is that the local life forms aren't as we really see them. They've put on faces, like ours, to deal with us. And some of them have filtered into personnel." Filtered! As if I were a virus.  "But they must be harmless," I say. "No harm has come to anyone." "We don't know that for a fact," Amie replies. "You look tired," I say, and he comes to me, to be soothed, to be loved in his flesh, his single form, his search for the truth in the darkness of the viewing cubicle. At present he's doing studies of murger birds. Their spinal cavities are large, air-filled ovals, and their bone is extremely porous, which permits them to soar to great heights. The koota no longer races on the wind-blown beaches; she lies at our feet, looking into the distance. The wall must be transparent to her eyes, I feel that beyond it she sees clearly how the racers go, down the long, bright curve of sand in the morning sun. She sighs, and lays her head down on her narrow, delicate paws. I look into the distance too: bright beaches and Amie, carrying me from his ship. But he will not carry me again. Arnie says. "I seem to be tired all the time." He puts his head on my breast. "I don't think the food's agreeing with me, lately." "Do you suffer pains?" I ask him, curiously. "Suffer," he mutters. "What kind of nonsense is that, with ' analgesics. No I don't suffer. I just don't feel well." He's absorbed in murger birds, kaku wood, he descends into the bottom of the darks and rises up like a rocket across the horizon into the thin clarity above, while I float. I no longer dare to breathe I'm afraid of disturbing everything. I do not want anything. His head lies gently on my breast and I will not disturb him. "Oh. My God," Amie says, and I know what it's come to, even before he begins to choke, and his muscles leap although I hold him in my arms. I know his heart is choking on massive doses from his eyes and they begin to go dark while I tightly hold him. If he doesn't see me as he dies, will I be here? I can feel, under my fingers, how rapidly his skin cools. I must put him down, here with his carvings and his papers, and I must go home. But I lift Arnie in my arms, and call the koota, who gets up rather stiffly. It's long after dark, and I carry him slowly, carefully, home to what he called a crystal palace, where the Warden and my Uncle are teaching each other to play chess with a set some space captain gave them in exchange for seed crystals. They sit in a bloom of light, sparkling, their old brains bent over the chessmen, as I breathe open the door and carry Amie in. First, my Uncle gives me just a glance, but then another glance, and a hard stare. "Is that the Doctor?" he asks. I put Amie down and hold one of his cold hands. "Warden," I say, on my knees, on eye level with the chessboard and its carved men. "Warden, can you put him in one of the banks?" The Warden turns to look at me, as hard as my Uncle. "You've become deranged, trying to maintain two lobes," he says. "You cannot reconstitute or recreate a Terran by our methods, and you must know it." "Over the edge, over the edge," my Uncle says, nov a blond, six-foot, hearty male Terran, often at the Laugh Tree with one of the joy babies. He enjoys life, his own or someone else's. I have, too, I suppo.se. Am I fading? I am, really, just one of Arnie's projections, a form on a screen in his mind. I am not, really, Martha. Though I tried. "We can't have him here," the Warden says. "You better get him out of here. You couldn't explain a corpse like that to the colonists, if they come looking for him. They'll think we did something to him. It's nearly time for my next conjunction, do you want your nephew to arrive in disgrace? The Uncles will drain his bank." The Warden gets up and comes over to me. He takes hold of my dark curls and pulls me to my feet. It hurts my physical me, which is Martha. God knows Amie, I'm Martha, it seems to me. "Take him back to his quarters," the Warden says to me. "And come back here immediately. I'll try to see you back to your own pattern, but it may be too late. In part, I blame myself. If you must know. So I will try." Yes, yes, I want to say to him; as I was, dedicated, free; turn me back into myself, I never wanted to be anyone else, and now I don't know if I am anyone at all. The light's gone from his eyes and he doesn't see me, or see anything, does he? I pick him up and breathe the door out, and go back through the night to his quarters, where the lamp still burns. I'm going to leave him here, where he belongs. Before I go, I pick up the small carving of the murger bird, and take it with me, home to my glass bridge where at the edge of the mirrors the decimals are still clicking perfectly, clicking out known facts; an octagon can be reduced, the planet turns at such a degree on its axis, to see the truth you must have light of some sort, but to see the light you must have darkness of some sort. I can no longer float on the horizon between the two because that horizon has disappeared. I've learned to descend, and to rise, and descend again. I'm able to revert without help to my own free form, to re-absorb the extra brain tissue. The sun comes up and it's bright. The night comes down and it's dark. I'm becoming somber, and a brilliant student. Even my Uncle says I'll be a good Warden when the time comes. The Warden goes to conjimction; from the cell banks a nephew is lifted out. The koota lies dreaming of races she has run in the wind. It is our life, and it goes on, like the life of other creatures.      Noturolly next issue will have the conclusion of Heisenberg's Eyes by Frank Herbert. We don't have to tell you much about that; you can read Part One in this issue and see for yourself. But there's The Pipers of Dis, by James Blish and Norman L. Knight. The Earth is pockmarked with a number of what look like molformed hills and valleys -- in Canada, in Arizona, in Africa, omong other places; from the air they reveal themselves to be meteorite craters. The youngest of them is tens of thousands of years old, but what would happen if that sort of planet-gouging meteorite were to strike the Earth today? Or worse still, a few centuries in the future, when the Earth's population approaches the That's what Blish and Knight are writing about in the next issue. Then there's Keith Laumer -- Brian Aldiss -- Willy Ley's For Your Information and Algis Budrys's Galaxy Bookshelf; and there'll be more stories, too. As many as we can fit into the # pages that makes Galaxy science fiction's biggest bargain! Open The Shy His disciples ruled three worlds. Then he gave them away -- to win a universe! I "The surgical amphitheater was a chilly horseshoe lit by a pale violet glow. At tire north end, windows on the level of the second gallery admitted frosty New Mexico sunlight. From where he sat, overlooking the operating table, Noel Vorst could see the bluish mountains in the middle distance beyond the confines of the research center. The mountains did not interest him. Neither did what was taking place on the operating table. But he kept his lack of interest to himself. Vorst had not needed to attend the operation in person, of course. He knew already that a successful outcome was improbable. So did everyone else. But the Founder was # years old, and thought it useful to appear in public as often as his strength could sustain the effort. It did not do to have people think he had lapsed into senility. Down below, the surgeons were clustered about a bare brain. Vorst had watched them lift the dome of a skull and thrust their scalpels of light deep into the wrinkled gray mass. There were of tissue, and an infinity of axonal terminals and dendritic receptors. The surgeons hoped to rearrange the synaptic nets of that brain, altering the protein-molecular switchgear to render the patient more useful to Vorst's plan. Folly, the old man thought. He kept his pessimism to himself and sat quietly, listening to the pulsing of the blood in his own glossy artificial arteries. What they were doing down there was remarkable, of course. Summoning all the resources of modern microsurgery, the leading men of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences were altering the protein-protein molecular recognition patterns within a human brain. Twist the circuits about a bit; change the transsynaptic structures to build a better link between preand postsynaptic membranes; shunt individual synaptic inputs from one dendritic tree to another; in short, reprogram the brain to make it capable of doing whatever Noel Vorst wanted. Which was to serve as the propulsive force needed to hurl a team of explorers across the gulf of light-years to another star. I t was an extraordinary project. For some fifty years the surgeons here at Vorst's Santa Fe research center had prepared for it by meddling with the brains of cats and monkeys and dolphins. Now they had at last begun operating on human subjects. The patient on the table was a middle-grade esper, a precog with poor timebinding ability; his life expectancy was on the order of six months, and then a burnout could be anticipated. The precog knew all about that, which was why he had volunteered to be the subject. The most skilful surgeons in the world were at work on him. There were only two things wrong with the project, Vorst knew; It was not likely to succeed. And it was not at all necessary in the first place. You do not tell a group of dedicated men, however, that their life's work is pointless. Besides, there was always the faint hope that they might artificially create a pusher -- a telekinetic -- down there. So Vorst dutifully attended the operation. The men on the amphitheater floor knew that the  Founder's numinous presence was with them. Though they did not look up toward the gallery where Vorst sat, they knew the withered but still vigorous old man was smiling benignly down on them, cushioned against the pull of Earth by the webfoam cradle that sheltered his ancient limbs. The lenses of his eyes were synthetic. The coils of his intestines had been fashioned from laboratory polymers. The stoutly pumping heart came from an organ bank. Little remained of the original Noel Vorst but the brain itself, which was intact though awash with the anticoagulants that preserved it from disabling strokes. "Are you comfortable, sir?" the pale young acolyte at his side asked. "Perfectly. Are you?" Vorst answered in a bantering tone. The acolyte smiled at Vorst's little joke. He was only twenty years old, and full of pride because it was his turn to accompany the Founder on his daily round. Vorst liked young people .-'bout him. They were tremendously in awe of him, naturally, hut they managed to be warm and respectful without canonizing him. Within his body there throbbed the contributions of many a young Vorster volunteer: a film of lung tissue from one, a retina from another, kidnejrs from a pair of twins. He was a patchwork man, and he carried the flesh of his movement about with him. "The surgeons were bending low tover the exposed brain down there. Vorst could not see what they were doing. A pickup embedded in a surgical instrument relayed the scene to a lambent screen on the level of the viewing gallery, but even the enlarged image did not tell Vorst much. Baffled and bored, he retained his look of lively interest all the same. Quietly he pushed a communicator stud on his armrest and said, "Is Coordinator Kirby going to get here soon?" "He's talking to Venus, sir." "Who's he speaking to? Lazarus or Mondschein?" "Mondschein, sir. I'll teU him to come to you as sOon as he's off." Vorst smiled. Protocol suggested that such high-level negotiations be carried on at the administrative level, between the executives and not between the prophets. So the second-in-commands were speaking: Flemispheric Coordinator Reynolds Kirby on behalf of the Vorsters of Earth, and Christopher Mondschein for the Harmonists who ran Venus. But in time it would be necessary to close the deal with a conference between those most closely in tune with the Eternal Oneness, and that would be the task of Vorst and Lazarus... to close the deal... II A tremor pulled Vorst's right hand into a sudden claw. The acolyte swung around attentively, ready to jab buttons until he had restored the Founder's metabolic equilibrium. Grimly Vorst compelled the hand to relax. "I'm all right," he insisted... to open the sky... They were so close to the end, now, that it had ajl begun to seem like a dream. A century of scheming, playing chess with unborn antagonists, rearing a fantastic edifice of theocracy on a single slender, arrogant hope -- Was it madness, Vorst wondered, to wish to reshape the pattern of history? Was it monstrous, he asked himself, to succeed? On the operating table, the patient's leg came swimming up out of a sea of swathing and kicked fitfully and convulsively at the air. The anesthetist's fingers played over his console, and the esper who was standing by for such an emergency went into silent action. There was a flurry of activity about the table. In that moment, a tall, fragilelooking old man entered thegallery and presented himself to Vorst. "How's the operation going?" Reynolds Kirby asked. "The patient just died," said Vorst. "Things seemed to be going so well, too." Iirby had not expected much of the operation. He had discussed it fully with Vorst the day before; though he was no scientist himself, the Coordinator tried to keep abreast of the work being done at the research center. His own sphere of responsibility was administrative; it was Kirby's job to oversee the farflung secular activities of a religious cult that virtually ruled the planet. The Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, springing from a humble start, had captured the imaginations of Earth's sical immortality and its dream of reaching the stars. It was almost ninety years since Kirby himself had been converted, and he had watched the cult grow mighty. Political power, though it was useful to wield, was not supposed to be the Brotherhood's goal. The essence of the movement was its scientific program, centering on the facilities at Santa Fe. Here, over the decades, an unsurpassable factory of miracles had been constructed, lubricated by the tithing Vorsters on every continent. And the miracles had been forthcoming. The regeneration processes now insured a predictable lifespan of three or four centuries for the newborn; perehaps more, for no one could be certain that immortality had been achieved until a few millennia of testing had elapsed. The Brotherhood could offer a reasonable facsimile of life eternal, at any rate, and that was a sufficient redemption of the promissory note on which the whole movement had been founded a hundred years before. The other goal, though -- the stars -- had given the Brotherhood a harder pursuit. TV yTan was locked into his solar system by the limiting velocity of light. Chemical-fueled rockets and even ion-drive ships simply took too long to get about. Mars and Venus were within easy reach, but the cheerless outer planets were not, and the round trip to the nearest star would take a few decades by current technology, nine years even at the very best. So man had transformed Mars into a habitable world, and he had transformed himself into something capable of inhabiting Venus. He mined the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, paid occasional visits to Plutcj, and sent robots down to examine Mercury and the gas giants. And looked hopelessly to the stars. The laws of relativity governed the motions of real bodies through real space, but they did not necessarily apply to the events of the paranormal world. To Noel Vorst, it had seemed that the only route to the stars was the extra-sensory one. So he had gathered espers of all varieties at Santa Fe, and for generations now had carried on breeding programs and genetic manipulations. The Brotherhood had spawned an interesting variety of espers, but none with the talent of transporting physical bodies through space. While on Venus the telekinetic mutation had happened spontaneously, an ironic byproduct of the adaptation of human life to that world. Venus was beyond direct Vorster control. It, too, had come under a theocracy, but its rulers were the Harmonists, a Vorster heresy founded # years before by one David Lazarus. Lazarus had been quickly martyred, or so it had been thought until a dozen years ago, when his living but suspended body turned up in a crypt on Mars. Technicians at Santa Fe had revived him, and he now was on Venus, directing the cult that had flourished so well there during his years of slumber. The Harmonists of Venus had the pushers that Vorst needed to reach into the galaxy. They showed little interest, though, in collaborating with the Vorsters on an expedition. For mMkm weeks, now, Reynolds Kirby had been negotiating with his opposite number on Venus, attempting to bring about an agreement. Meanwhile the surgeons at Santa Fe had never given up their dream of creating pushers out of Earthmen, thus making the cooperation of the unpredictable Venusians unnecessary. The synaptic rearrangement project, flovering at last, had come to the stage where a human subject would go under the beam. #Tt wont work," Vorst had.said to Kirby. "They're still fift' years avay from anything." "T don't understand it, Noel. The Venusians have the gene for telekinesis, don't they? Why can't we just duplicate it? Considering all we've done with the nucleic acids -- " Vorst smiled. "There's no 'gene for telekinesis' as such, you know. It's part of a constellation of genetic patterns. We've been rying consciously to duplicate it for thirty years, and we aren't even close. We've also been trying a random approach, since that's how the Venusians got the ability. No luck there either. And then there's this synapse business: alter the brain itself, not the genes. That may get us somewhere, eventually. But I can't wait another fifty years." "You'll live that long, surely." "Yes," Vorst agreed, "but I still can't wait any longer. The Venusians have the men we need. It's time to win them over." Patiently Kirby had wooed the heretics. There were signs of progress in the negotiations, now. In view of the failure of the operation, the need for an agreement with Venus was more urgent. "Come with me," Vorst said, as the dead patient was wheeled away. "They're testing that gargoyle today, and I want to watch." Kirby followed the Founder out of the amphitheater. Acolytes were close by in case of trouble. Vorst, these days, rarely tried to walk any more, and rolled along in his cradling net of webfoam. Kirby still preferred to use his feet, though he was nearly as ancient as Vorst. The sight of the two of them promenading through the plazas of the research center always stirred attention. "You aren't disturbed over the failure just now?" Kirby asked. "Why should I be? I told you it was too soon for success." "What about this gargoyle? Any hope?" "Our hope," Vorst said quietly, "is Venus. They already have the pushers." "Then why keep trying to develop them here?" "Momentum. The Brotherhood hasn't slowed down in a hundred years. I'm not closing any avenue now. Not even the hopeless ones. It's all a matter of momentum." Kirby shrugged. For all the power he held in the organization -- and his powers were immense -- he had never felt that he held any real initiative. The plans of the movement were generated, as they had been from the first, by Noel Vorst. He and only he knew what game he was playing. And if Vorst died this afternoon, with the game unfinished? What would happen to the movement then? Run on its own momentum? To what end, Kirby wondered? 'hey entered a squat, glittering little building of irradiated green foamglass. An awed hush preceded them: Vorst was coming! Men in blue robes came out to greet the Founder. They led him to the room in the rear where the gargoyle vas kept. Kirby kept pace, ignoring the acolytes who were rea'dy to catch him if he stumbled. The gargoyle was sitting enmeshed in lacy restraining ribbons. He was not a pretty sight. Thirteen years old, three feet tall, grotesquely deformed, deaf, crippled, his corneas clouded, his skin pebbled and granulated. A mutant, though not one produced by any laboratory; this was Hurler's Syndrome, a natural and congenital error of metabolism, first indentified scientifically two and a half centuries before. The unlucky parents had brought the hapless monster to a chapel of the Brotherhood in Stockholm, hoping that by bathing him in the Blue Fire of the cobalt reactor his defects would be cured. The defects had not been cured, but an esper at die chapel had detected latent talents in the gargoyle, and so he was here to be probed and tested. Kirby felt a shiver of revulsion. "What causes such a thing?" he asked the medic at his elbow. "Abnormal genes. They produce metabolic error that results in an accumulation of mucopolysaccharides in the tissues of the body." Kirby nodded solemnly. "And is there supposed to be a direct link with esping?" "Only coincidental," said the medic. Vorst had moved up to study the creature at close range. The Founder's eye-shutters clicked upward as he peered forward. The gargoyle was humped and folded, virtually unable to move its limbs. The milky eyes held a look of pure misery. To the euthanasia heap with this one, Kirby thought. But yet Vorst hoped that such a monster would take him to the stars! "Begin the examination," Vorst murmured.  pair of espers came forward, general-purpose types; a slick young woman with frizzy hair, and a plump, sad-faced man. Kirby, whose owfn esping facilities were deficient to the point of nonexistence, watched in silence as the wordless examination commenced. What were they doing? What shafts were they aiming at the huddled creature before them? Kirby did not know, and he took comfort in the fact that Vorst probably did not know either. The Founder wa.sn't much of an esper himself. Ten minutes passed. Then the girl looked up and said, "Loworder pyrotic, mainly." "He can push molecules about?" Vorst said. "Then he's got a shred of telekinesis." "Only a shred," the second esper said. "Nothing that others don't have. Also low-order communication abilities. He seems to be sitting there telling us to kill him." "If it were up to me, I'd recommend dissection," said the girl. "The subject certainly wouldn't mind." Kirby shuddered. These two bland espers had peered within the mind of that crippled thing, and that in itself ould have been enough to dirivd their souls. To see, for an empathic moment, what it was like to be a thirteen-year-old human gargoyle, to look out upon the world through those clouded eyes -- I But they were all business, these two. They had merged minds with monstrosities before. Vorst waved his hand. "Keep him for further study. Maybe he can be guided toward usefulness. If he's really a pyrotic, take the usual precautions." The Founder whirled his chair around and started to leave the ward. At that same moment an acolyte came hurrying in, bearing a message. He froze at the unexpected sight of Vorst wheeling toward a collision with him. Vorst smiled paternally and guided himself around the boy, who went limp with relief. The acolyte said, "Message for you. Coordinator Kirby." Kirby took it and jammed his thumb against the seal. The envelope popped open, seemingly of its own volition. The message was from Mondschein . ominously. Ill "T rorst said, "I was insane, you ' know. For sometliing like ten years. Later I discovered what the trouble was. I was suffering from time-float?" The pallid esper girl's eyes were very round as she gazed at him. They were alone in the Founder's personal quarters. She was thin, loosedimbed, thirty years old. Strands of black hair dangled like painted straw down the sides of her face. Her name was Delphine, and in all the months that she had served Verst's needs she had never become accustomed to his frankness. She had little chance to; when she left his office after each session, other espers erased her recollection of the visit. She said, "Shall I turn myself on?" "Not yet, Delphine. Do you ever think of yourself as insane? In the difficult moments, the moments when you start ranging along the time-line and don't think you'll ever get back to now?" "It's pretty scary sometimes." "But you get back. That's the miraculous thing. You know how many floaters I've seen bum out?" Vorst asked. "Hundreds. I'd have burned out myself, except that I'm a lousy precog. Back then, though, I kept breaking loose, drifting along the timeline. I saw the whole Brotherhood spread out before me. Call it a vision, call it a dream. I saw it, Delphine. Blurred around the edges." "Just as you told it in your book?" "More or less," said the Founder. "The years between # and # -- those were the years I had the visions worst. When I was #, it started. I was just an ordinary technician, a nobody, and then I got what could be called divine inspiration, except all it was was a peek at my own future. I thought I was going crazy. Later I understood." The esper was silent. Vorst shuttered his eyes. The memories glowed in him: after years of internal chaos and collapse, he had come from the crucible of madness purified, aware of his purpose. He saw how he could reshape the world. More than that: he saw how he had reshaped the world. After that, it was just a matter of making the beginning, of founding the first chapels, dreaming up the rituals of the cult, surrounding himself with the scientific talent necessary to realize his goals. Was there a touch of paranoia in his purpose, a bit of Hitler, a tinge of Napoleon, a tincture of Gengis Kahn? Perhaps. Vorst complacently viewed himself as a fanatic and even as a megalomaniac. But a cool, rational megalomaniac, and a successful at nothing to gain his ends, and he was just enough of a precog to know that he was going to gain them. TTe said, "It's a big responsibility, setting out to transform the world. A man has to be a little daft to attempt it or even to think he can attempt it. But it helps to know what the outcome must be. One doesn't feel so idiotic, knowing that he's simply acting out the inevitable."' "It takes the challenge out of life," said the esper. "Ah, Delphine, you touch the gaping wound! But you'd know, of course. How dreary it is to be playing out your ovn script, aware of what's ahead. At least I've had the mercy of uncertainty in the small things. I can't see very much myself, so I have to hitchhike with floaters like you, and the visions aren't clear. But you see clearly, don't you, Delphine? You've been along your own world-line. Have you seen your own burnout yet, Delphine?" The esper's cheeks colored. She looked at the floor silently. "I'm sorry, Delphine," Vorst said. "I had not right to ask tliat. I retract it. Turn on for me. Delphine. Do your trick. Take me along. I've said too much today." Shyly, the girl composed herself for her great effort. She had more control than most of her kind, Vorst knew. Whereas most of the precogs eventually slipped their moorings, Delphine had clung to her powers and her life and had reached what was, for her kind of esper, a ripe old age. She would burn out, too, one day, when she overreached herself. But up to now she had been invaluable to Vorst, his crystal ball, the most helpful of all the floaters who had aided him in plotting his course. And if she could hold out just a while longer, until he saw his route past the final obstacles, the long journey would end and they both could rest. She released her grip on the present and moved into that realm where all moments are nov. Vorst watched, and waited, and felt the girl taking him along as she began her time-shuttling. He could not initiate the journey himself, but he could follov. Mists enfolded him, and he swung dizzily along the line of time, as he had done so often before. He saw himself, here and here, and saw others, shadowfigures, dream-figures, lurking behind the curtains of time. I azarus? Yes, Lazarus was  there. Kirby, too. Mondschein. All of them, the pawns in the game. Vorst saw the glow of otherness and looked out upon a landscape that vas neither Earth nor Mars nor Venus. He trembled. He looked up at a tree eight hundred feet high, with a corona of azure leaves against a foggy sky. Then he was ripped away, and hurled into the stinking confusion of a rain-spattered city street, and stood before one of his early chapels. The building was on fire in the rain, and the smell of scorched wet wood assailed his nostrils. And then, smiling into the stunned parched face of Reynolds Kirby. And then -- The sense of motion left him. He slipped back into his own matrix of time, making the adrenal adjustments that compensated for his exertions. The floater lay slumped in her chair, sweat-flecked, dazed. Vorst summoned an acolyte. "Take her to her ward," he said. "Have them work on her until she comes back to her strength." The acolyte nodded and lifted the girl. Vorst sat motionless until they were gone. He was satisfied with the session. It had confirmed his own intuitive ideas of his immediate direction, and that was always comforting. "Send me Capodimonte," Vorst said into the communicator. "The chubby blue-robed figure entered a few minutes later. When Vorst was in Santa Fe, one did not waste time in getting to his quarters after a summons. Capodimonte was the District Supervisor for the Santa Fe region, and was customarily in charge here except when such figures as Vorst or ' Kirby were in residence. Capodimonte was stolid, loyal, useful. Vorst trusted him for delicate assignments. They exchanged quick, casual benedictions now. Then Vorst said, "Capo, how long would it take you to pick the personnel for an interstellar expedition?" "Inter -- " "Say, for departure later this year. Run the specs off at Archives and get together a few possible teams." Capodimonte had recovered his aplomb. "What size teams?" "All sizes. From two persons to about a dozen. Start with an Adam-and-Eve pair, and work up to, say, six couples. Matched for health, adaptability, compatibility, skills and fertility." "Espers?" "With caution. You can throw in a couple of empaths, a couple of healers. Stay away from the exotics, though. And rememIV ber that these people are supposed to be pioneers. They've got to be flexible. We can do without geniuses on this trip, Capo." "You want me to report to you or to Kirby when I've made the lists?" "To me, Capo. I don't want you to utter a syllable about this to Kirby or anyone else. Just get in there and run off the groups as we've already programmed them. I'm not sure what size expedition we'll be sending, and I want to have a group ready that'll be self-sufficient at any level, two, four, eight, whatever it turns out to be. Take two or three days. When you've done that, put half a dozen of your best men to work on the logistics of the trip. Assume an esper-powered capsule and go over the optimum designs. We've had decades to plan it; we must have a whole arsenal of blueprints. Look them over. This is your baby. Capo." "Sir? One subversive question, please?" "Ask it." "Is this a hypothetical exercise I'm doing, or is this the real thing?" "I don't wnow," said Vorst honestly. The man nodded, turned and left the room. nphe blue face of a Venusian looked out of the screen, alien and forbidding; but its owner had been bom an Earthman, and the terrestrial heritage betrayed itself in the shape of the skull, the set of the lips, the thrust of the chin. The face was that of David Lazarus, founder and resurrected head of the cult of Transcendent Harmony. Though he was the arch-heresiarch, Lazarus owed his resurrection to the skill of his cult's rivals, the Vorsters. He owed his Venusian features to Vorster skill, too. Twelve years ago, after his dramatic return to life, the miracle-men of Sante Fe had equipped Lazarus to breathe the poisonous air of the planet where his followers now made their headquarters. Vorst had conferred often with Lazarus in those twelve years. And always the two prophets had allowed themselves the luxury of full visual contact. It was monumentally expensive to bounce not only voices but images dovn the chain of relay stations that led from Venus to Earth, but expense meant little to these men. Vorst insisted. He liked to see Lazarus' transformed face as they spoke. It gave him something to focus on during the long dulltime lags in their conversations. Even at the speed of light, it takes a while for a message to get from planet to planet. Even a simple exchange of views took more than an hour. Comfortable in his nest of webfoam, Vorst said, "I think it's time to unite our movement, David. We complement one another. There's nothing to gain from further division." "There might be something to .lose by union," said Lazarus. "We're the younger branch. If your reabsorbed us, we'd be svallowed up in your hierachy." "Not so. I guarantee you that your Harmonists will remain fully autonomous. More than that: I'll guarantee you a dominant role in policy setting." "What kind of guarantee can you offer?" "Let that pass a moment," Vorst said. "I've got an interstellar team ready to go. They'll be fully equipped in a matter of months. I mean fully equipped. They'll be able to cope with anything they meet. But they have to have a way of getting out of the solar system. Give us a push, David. You've got the personnel, now. We've monitored your experiments." T azarus nodded, his gill-bunches quivering. "I won't deny what we've done. We can push a thousand tons from here to Pluto. We can keep the same mass going right to infinity?" "How long to get to Pluto?" "Fast. I won't tell you exactly how fast. But let's just say the stars are in reach. Have been for the last eight or ten months. We could get a ship there in -- oh, let's call it a year. Of course, we'd have no way of maintaining contact. We can push, but we can't talk across a dozen lightyears. Can you?" "No," said Vorst. "The expedition would be out of contact the moment it got past radio range. It would have to send back a conventional relay ship to announce its safe arrival. We wouldn't know for decades. But we have to try. Give us your men, David." "You realize it would burn out dozens of our mct promising youngsters?" "I realize. Give us your men an#rway.  We understand techniques for repairing burnouts. Let them push the ship to the stars, and when they drop in their tracks we'll try to fix them up again. That's what Santa Fe is for." "First drive them to exhaustion, then patch them together?" Lazarus asked. "That's ruthless. Are the stars that important? I'd rather see these boys develop their powers here on Venus and remain intact." "We need them." "So do we." Vorst made use of the interval to flood his body with stimulants. He was tingling, palpitating with vigor by the time his reply was due. He said, "David, I own you. I made you and I want you. I put you to sleep in # when you were nothing, an upstart, and I brought you back to life in # and gave you a world. You owe me everything. Now I'm calling that obligation. I've been waiting a hundred years to reach this position. You people finally have the espers who can send my people to the stars. Whatever the personal cost at your end, I want you to send them." The strain of that speech left Vorst dizzy with fatigue. But he had time to recover. Time to think, to vait for the reply. He had made his gamble, and now it was up to Lazarus. Vorst did not have many cards left to play. '"The blue-faced figure in the screen was motionless; Vorst's words had not even reached Venus yet. Lazarus' reply was a long time in coming. He said, "I didn't think you'd be so blunt, Vorst. Why should I be grateful to you for reviving me, when you jammed me in that hole in the first place? Oh, I know. Because my movement was insignificant When you took me away from it, and a major force when you brought me back. Do you take credit for that too?" A pause. "Never mind. I don't want to give you my espers. Breed your own, if you want to get to the stars." "You're talking foolishness. You want the stars too, David. But you don't have the technical facilities, up there in the back woods, to equip an expedition. I do. Let's join forces. It's what you yourself want to do, no matter how tough you talk now. Let me tell you what's holding you back from agreeing to join me, David. You're afraid of what your own people will do to you when they find out you've agreed to cooperate. They'll say you've sold out to the Vorsters. You're frozen in a position you don't believe, just because you don't have real independence. Assert yourself, David. Use your powers. I put that planet into your hands. Now I vant you to repay me." "How can I go to Mondschein and Martell and the others and tell them that I've meekly agreed to submit to you?" Lazarus asked. "They're restless enough at having had a resurrected martyr slapped down on top of them. There are times when I expect them to martyr me again, and this time for good. I need a bargaining point." Vorst smiled. Victory was in his grasp now. He said, "Tell them, David, that I offer you supreme authority over both worlds. Tell them that the Brotherhood not only will welcome the Harmonists back, but that you'll be made the sole head of both branches of the faith." "Both?" "Both." "And what becomes of you?" Vorst told him. And once the words were past his lips, the Founder sank back, limp with relief, knowing that he had made the final move in a game a century old, and that it had all come out in the right way. V "O eynolds Kirby was with his therapist when the summons came to go to Vorst. The Hemispheric Coordinator lay in a nutrient bath, an adapted Nothing Chamber whose purpose was not oblivion but revivification. If Kirby had chosen to escape into temporary nothingness, he could have sealed himself off from the universe and entered complete suspension. He had long since outgrown the need for such amusements, though. Now he was content to loll in the nutrient bath, restoring the vital substances after a fatiguing day, while an esper therapist combed the snags from his soul. Ordinarily, Kirby did not tolerate interruptions of such sessions. At his age, he needed all the peace he could get. He had been born too early to share the quasi-immortality of the younger generations; his body could not snap back to vitality the way a #nd-century man's body could, for he had not had the benefit of a century of Vorster research when he was born. There was one exception to Kirby's rule, however: a summons from Vorst took precedence over everything, even a session of needed therapy. The therapist knew it. Deftly he brought the session to a premature close and fortified Kirby for his return to the tensions of the world. In less than half an hour, the Coordinator was on his way to the white dome-roofed building where Vorst made his headquarters. Vorst looked shaky. Kirby had never seen the Founder look so drained of strength. The vault of Vdrst's forehead was like the roof of a skull, and the dark eyes blazed with a peculiar discomfiting intensity. A low pumping sound was evident in the room: Vorst's machinery, feeding strength to the ancient body. Kirby took the seat toward which Vorst beckoned him. Strong fingers in the upholstery grasped him and began to knead the tension out of him. Vorst said, "I'll be calling a council meeting in a little while to ratify the steps I've just taken. But before the entire group gathers, I want to discuss things with you." Tirby's expression was guarded. After decades with Vorst, he could supply an instant translation: I've done something authoritarian, Vorst was saying, and I'm going to call in everybody to rubber-stamp an okay on it, but first I'm going to force a rubber-stamping out of you. Kirby was prepared to acquiesce in whatever Vorst had done. He was not a weak man by nature, but one did not dispute the doings of Vorst. The last one who had seriously attempted to try was Lazarus, who had slept in a box on Mars for sixty years as a result. Into Kirby's wary silence Vorst murmured, "I've talked to Lazarus and closed the deal. He's agreed to supply us with pushers, as many as we need. It's possible we'll have an interstellar expedition on its way by the end of the year." "I feel a little numb at that, Noel." "Anticlimatic, isn't it? For a hundred yeart you move an inch at a time toward that goal, and suddenly you find yourself staring at the finish line, and the thrill of pursuit becomes the boredom of accomplishment." "We haven't landed that expedition on another solar system yet," Kirby reminded the Founder quietly. "We will. We will. That's beyond doubt. We're at the finish line now;' Capodimonte's already running personnel checks for the expedition. We'll be outfitting the capsule soon. Lazarus' bunch will cooperate, and off we'll go. That much is certain." "How did you get him to agree, Noel?" "By shovdng him how it will be after the expedition has set out. Tell me: have you given much thought to the goals of the Brotherhood once we've sent that first expedition?" Kirby hesitated. "Well -- sending more expeditions, I guess. And consolidating our position. Continuing the medical research. Carrying on with all our current work." "Exactly. A long smooth slide toward utopia. No longer an uphill climb. That's why I won't stay around to run things any longer." "What?" "I'm going on the expedition," Vorst said. I f Vorst had ripped off one of his limbs and clubbed him to the floor with it, Kirby would not have been more amazed. The Founder's words hit him with an almost physical jolt, making him recoil. Kirby seized the arms of his chair, and in response the chair seized him, cradling him gently until his spasm of shock abated. "You're oing?" Kirby blurted. "No. No! It's beyond belief, Noel. It's madness." "My mind's made up. My work on Earth is done. I've guided the Brotherhood for a century, and that's long enough. I've seen it take control of Earth, and by proxy I have Venus too, and I have the cooperation if not exactly the support of the Martians. I've done all I've intended to do here. With the departure of the first inter.stellar expedition, I will have fulfilled what I'll be so gaudy as to call my mission on Earth. It's tb-ne to be moving along. I'll try another solar system." "We won't let you go." Kir!y said, astounded by his own words. "You can't go! At your age -- to get aboard a capsule bound for -- " "If I don't go," said Vorst, "there will be no capsule bound for anywhere." "Don't talk that way, . Noel. You sound like a spoiled child threatening to call the party off if we don't play the game your way. There are others bound up in the Brotherhood too." To Kirby's surprise, Vorst looked merely amused at the harsh accusation. "I think you're misinterpreting my words," he said. "I don't mean to say that unless I go along. I'll halt the expedition. I mean that the use of Lazarus's espers is contingent on my leaving. If I'm not aboard that capsule, he won't lend his pushers." For the second time in ten minutes Kirby was rocked by amazement. This time there was pain, too, for he was aware that there had been a betrayal. "Is that the deal you made, Noel?" "It was a fair price to pay. A shift of power is long overdue. I step out of the picture; Lazarus becomes supreme head of the movement; you can be his vicar on Earth. We get the espers. We open the sky. It works well for everybody concerned." "No, Noel." "I'm weary of being here. I want to leave. Lazarus wants me to leave, too. I'm too big, I overtop the entire movement. It's time for mortals to move in. You and Lazarus can divide the authority. He'll have the spiritual supremacy, but you'll run Earth. The two of you will work out some kind of communicant relation between the Harmonists and the Brotherhood. It won't be too hard; the rituals are similar enough. Ten years and any lingering bitterness will be gone. And I'll be a dozen light-years away, safely out of your path, unable to meddle, living in retirement. Out to pasture on World X of System Y. Yes?" CtT don't believe any of this,fiNoel. That you'd abdicate after a century, go swooshing off to nowhere with a bunch of pioneers, live in a log cabin on an unknown planet at age # -- " "Start believeing it," said Vorst. For the first time in the conversation the old whiplash tone returned to his voice. "I'm going. It's decided. In a sense, I have gone." "What does that mean?" "You know I'm a very loworder floater. That I plan things by hitchhiking with precogs." "Yes." "I've seen the outcome. I know how it was, and so I know how it's going to be. I leave. I've followed the plan this far -- followed and led, aU in one, heels over head through time. Everything I've done. I've had a hint beforehand. From founding the Brotherhood right to this moment. So it's settled. I go." Kirby closed his eyes. He struggled for balance. Vorst said, "Look back on the path I've traveled. Was there a false step anyvhere? The Brotherhood prospered. It took Earth. When we were strong enough for a schism, I encouraged Harmonist heresy." "You encouraged -- " "I chose Lazarus for what he had to do, and filled him full of ideas. He was just an insignificant acolyte, clay in my hands. That's why you never knew him in the early days. But he was there. I took him. I molded him. I got his movement going in opposition to ours." "Why, Noel?" "It didn't pay to be monolithic. I was hedging my bets. The Brotherhood was designed to win Earth, and it did, but the same principles didn't -- couldn't -- appeal to Venus. So I started a second cult. I tailored that one for Venus, and gave them Lazarus. Later I gave them Mondschein too. Do you remember that, in #? He was just a greedy little acolyte, but I saw the strength in him, and I nudged him around until he found himself a changed one on Venus. I built that entire organization." ( (  nd you knew that they'd come up with pushers?" Kirby asked incredulously. "I didn't know. I hoped. All I knew was that, setting up the Harmonists was a good idea, because I saw that it had been a good idea. Follow? For the same reason I took Lazarus away and hid him in a crypt for sixty years. I didn't know why, at the time. But I knew it might be useful to keep the Harmonist martyr in my pocket for a while, as a card to play in the future. I played that card twelve years ago, and since then the Harmonists have been mine. Today I played my last card: myself. I have to leave. My work is done, anyway. I'm bored with running oi.it the skein. I've juggled everything for a hundred years, setting up my own opposition, creating Conflicts designed to lead to an ultimate synt'nesis, and that synthesis is here, and I'm leaving." .After a long silence Kirby said, "You humiliate me, Noel, by a.s'ring me to ratify a decision that's already as immutable as the tides and the .sunrise." "You're free to oppose it at the council meeting." "But you'll go anyway?" "Yes. I'd like your support, though. It won't matter to the eventual outcome, but I'd still rather have you on my side than not. I'd like to think that you of all people understand what I've been doing all these years. Do you believe there's any reason for me to stay on Earth any longer?" "We need you, Noel. That's the only reason." "Now you're the one who's being childish. You don't need me. The plan is fulfilled. It's time to clear out and turn the job over to others. You're too dependent on me, Ron. You can't get used to the idea that I'm not going to be pulling the strings forever." "Perhaps that's it," admitted Kirby. "But whose fault is that? You've surrounded yourself with yes-men. You've made yourself indispensable. Here you sit at the heart of the movement like a sacred fire, and none of us can get close enough to be singed. Now you're taking the fire away." "Transferring it," said Vorst. "Here: I've got a job for you. The members of the council will be arriving in six hours. I'm going to make my announcement, and I suppose it'll shake everybody else the way it shook you. Go off by yourself for the next six hours and think about all I've just said. Reconcile yourself to it. More: don't just accept it, but approve of it. At the meeting, stand up and explain not simply why it's all right if I go, but why it's necessary and vital to the future of the Brotherhood that I go." VI I n a leafy glade on Venus, the pushers were at their sport. An avenue of vast trees unrolled toward the pearly horizon. Their jagged leaves met overhead to form a thick canopy. Below, on the muddy, fungusdotted ground, a dozen Venusian boys with bluish skins and green robes exercised their abilities. At a distance several larger figures watched them. David Lazarus stood in the center of the group. About him were the Harmonist leaders : Christopher Mondschein, Nicholas Martell, Claude Emory. Lazarus had been through a great deal at the hands of these men. To them, he had been only the name of a martyr, and they had had to adjust to his return. It had not been easy. There had been a time when Lazarus thought they would put him to death. That time was past, nov, and they abided by his wishes. But, because he had slept so long, he was at once younger and older than his lieutenants, and sometimes that interfered with the excercising of his full authority. He said, "It's settled. Vorst vill leave and the schism will end. I'll work something out with Kirby." "It's a trap," said Emory gloomily. "Keep away from it, David. Vorst can't be trusted." "Vorst brought me back to life." "Vorst put you in that crypt in the first place," Emory insisted. "You said so yourself." "We can't te sure of that," Lazarus replied, though it was true that Vorst himself had admitted the act to him in their last conversation. "We're only guessing. There's no evidence that -- " Mondschein broke in, "We don't have any reason to trust Vorst, Claude. But if he's really and verifiably aboard that capsule, what de we have to lose by pushing him to Betelgeuse or Procyon? We're rid of him, and we'll be dealing with Kirby. Kirby's a reasonable man. None of that damnable super-deviousness about him." "It's too pat," Emory insisted. "Why should a man with Vorst's power just step down voluntarily?" "Perhaps he's bored," said Lazarus. "There's something about absolute power that can't be understood except by someone who holds it. It's dull. You can enjoy moving and shaking the world for twenty years, thirty, fifty -- but Vorst's been on top for a hundred. He wants to move along. I say take the offer. We're well rid of him, and we can handle Kirby. Besides, he's got a good point. Neither his side nor ours can get to the stars without the help of the other. I'm for it. It's worth the try." .  ' ward the pushers. "We'll lose some of them, don't forget. You can't push a capsule to the stars without overloading the pushers." "Vorst has offered rehabilitation services," said Lazarus. "One other point," Mondschein remarked. "Under the new detente, we'd have access to Vorster hospitals ourselves. Just as a purely selfish matter, I'd like that. I think the time has come to turn away from haughtiness and give in to Vorst. He's willing to check out. All right. Let him go, and look for our own advantage with Kirby." Lazarus smiled. He had not hoped to win Mondschein's support that easily. But Mondschein was old, past ninety, and he was hungry for the care that Vorster medics could give him, care that was not to be had on rugged Venus. Mondschein had seen the Santa Fe hospitals himself, when he was a young man, and he knew what miracles they could perform. It was not a terribly worthy motive, thought Lazarus. But it was a human motive, at least, and Monschein was human behind his gills and blued skin. So are we all, Lazarus realized. Though they aren't. He looked toward the pushers. They were fifth and sixth generation Venusians. The seed of Earth was in them, but they were far removed from the original stock. The genetic manipulations that had first adapted mankind for life on Venus bred true; these boys were something other than human by this time. They were intent on their games. It was little effort for them to transport objects great distances now. They could send each other around Venus virtually instantaneously, or hurl a boulder to Earth in an hour or tvo. What they could not do was transport themselves, for they needed a fulcrum to do their pushing with. But that was minor. They could not flit from place to place on the strength of their own powers, but they could thrust each other about. Lazarus watched them : appearing, disappearing, lifting, throwing. Only children, not yet in full command of their powers. What strengths would be theirs when they were fully mature, he wondered? And how many would die to send mankind beyond his present boundaries? A saw-winged bird, faintly luminous in the midday dusk, shot diagonally across the sky just above the treetop canopy. One of the young pushers looked up, grinned, caught the bird and sent it whirling half a mile through the clouds. A squawk of rage, distant but audible, filtered back. Lazarus said, "The deal is closed. We help Vorst, and Vorst goes. Etone?" "Done," said Mondschein quickly. "Done," Martell murmured, scuffing at the grayish moss that festooned the ground. "Claude?" Lazarus asked. Emory scowled. He peered at a long-limbed boy, returning from a jaunt to some other continent, who materialized no more than six yards away. Emory's narrow-featured face looked dark with tension. "Done," he said. 'yhe capsule was an obelisk of beryllium steel, fifty feet high, an uncertain ark to send across the sea of stars. It contained living quarters for eleven, a computer of uncomfortably awe-inspiring abilities and a subminiattwized treasury of all that was worth salvaging from two "Prepare the capsule," Vorst had instructed Brother Capodimonte, " as though the sun were going nova next month and we had to save what was important." Capodimonte, who had been an anthropologist before turning to the Brotherhood, had his own ideas about the contents of such an ark, but he kept them separate from his concept of what Vorst required. Quietly, a subcommittee of Brothers had planned the interstellar expedition on a someday-far-away basis decades ago, and had replanned it several times, so that Capodimonte had the benefit of the thinking of other men. That was a comfort to him. There were troublesome elements of mystery about the project. He did not, for example, know the nature of the world to which the pioneers were bound. No one did. There was no telling, at this distance, whether it really could harbor Terran-style life. Astronomers had founds hundreds of planets scattered through other systems. Some could dimly be picked up by telescopic sensors; others could only be inferred from computations of disturbed stellar orbits. But the planets were there. Would they welcome Earthmen? Only one planet out of nine in Earth's own system was naturally habitable, not a cheering prognosis for other systems. It had taken two generations of hard work to terraform Mars; the eleven pioneers would hardly be able to do that. It had taken the highest genetic skiUs to convert men into Venusians; that, too, would be beyond the range of the voyagers. They would have to find a suitable world, or fail. Espers in the Santa Fe retinue said that suitable worlds existed. They had peered into the heavens, reached forth their minds, made contact with tangible and habitable planets out there. Illusion? Deception? Capodimonte was in no position to determine that. O eynolds Kirby, troubled by the project from first to last, said to Capodimonte, "Is it true that they don't even know what star they'll be aiming for?" "That's true. They've detected some kind of emanations coming from somewhere. Don't ask me how. The way this thing is planned, our espers will supply the guidance and their pushers will supply the propulsion. We find, they heave." "A voyage to anywhere?" "To anywhere," Capodimonte agreed. "They rip a hole in the sky and shove the capsule through. It doesnt travel through normal space, whatever normal space is. It lands on this world that our espers claim to have connected with out there, and they send a message back, telling us where they are. We get the message about a generation from now. But meanwhile we'll have sent other expeditions. A one-way journey to nowhere. And Vorst is the first to take it." Kirby shook his head. "It's hard to believe, isn't it? But evidently it's going to be a success." "Oh?" "Yes. Vorst had his floaters out there looking, you see. They tell him that he arrived safely. the dark, because he knows in advance that he's not running any risks." "Do you believe that?" asked Capodimonte, .shuffling through his inventory sheets. "No." Neither did Brother Capodimonte. But he did not quarrel with the role assigned to him. He had been at the council meeting where Vorst had announced his stunning intention, and he had heard Reynolds Kirby rise and eloquently argue the case for allowing the Founder to depart. Kirby's thesis had been a sound one, within the context of nightmare that this whole project embraced. And so the capsule would leave, powered by the joint efforts of some blue-skinned boys, and guided on a thread through the heavens by the roving minds of Brotherhood espers. And Noel Vorst would never walk the Earth again. I t was the day of departure. Chill winter winds raked New Mexico on this late-December day. The capsule stood in a desert flat a dozen miles from the inner compound of the Santa Fe research center. From here to the horizon it was a wilderness of sagebrush and juniper and pinyon pine; and in the distance the bowl of mountains rose. Though he was well insulated, Reynolds Kirby shivered as the wind assailed the plateau. In another few days, the year # would be dawning, but Noel Vorst would not be here to welcome it. Kirby was not accustomed to that idea yet. The pushers from Venus had arrived a week ago. There were twenty of them, and since it was inconvenient for them to live in breathing-suits all their time on Earth, the Vorsters had erected a little bit of Venus for them. A domed building not far from the capsule housed them; it was pumped full of the poisonous muck that they were accustomed to breathing. Lazarus and Mondschein had come with them, and were under the dome now, getting everything prepared. Mondschein would remain after the event, to undergo an overhauling in Santa Fe. Lazarus was going back to Venus in a couple of days. But first he and Kirby would face each other across a conference table and hammer out the first clauses of the new entente. They had met once, twelve years ago, but not for long. Since Lazarus' arrival on Earth, Kirby had spoken briefly to him, and had come away with the feeling that the Harmonist prophet, though strong-willed and purposeful, would not be difficult ultimately to reach understandings with. He hoped not. Now, on the wintry plateau, the high leaders of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance were gathering to watch their leader vanish. Kirby, glancing around, saw Capodimonte and Mangus and Ashton and Langholt and all the others, dozens of them, spiralling down the echelons into the middle levels of the organization. They were all watching him. They could not watch Vorst, for Vorst was in the capsule already, along with the other members of the expedition. Five men, five women, and Vorst. All of the others under forty, healthy, capable, resilient. And Vorst. The Founder's quarters aboard the capsule were comfortable, but it was lunacy to think of that old man plunging into the universe like this. Qupervisor Mangus, the Eu uropaan Coordinator, stepped to Kirby's side. He was a .#m.all, sharp-featured man who, like most of the other leaders of the Brotherhood, had served in its ranks over seventy years. "He's actually going," Mangus said. "Soon. Yes. No doubt of it." "Did you speak to him this morning?" "Briefly," Kirby said. "He seems very calm." "He seemed very calm when he blessed us last night," said Magnus. "Almost joyful." "He's putting down a great burden. You'd be joyful too if you could be translated into the sky and shrug off your responsibilities." Magnus said, "I wish we could prevent this." Kirby turned and looked bluntly at the little man. "This is a necessary thing," he said. "It must happen or the movement will founder of its own success." "I heard your speech before the council, yes, but -- " "We've reached the fulfillment level of our first evolutionary stages," said Kirby. "Now we need to extend our mythology. Symbolically, Vorst's departure is invaluable to us. He ascends into the sky, leaving us to carry on his work and go on to new purposes. If he remained, we'd begin to mark time. Now we can use his glorious example to inspire us. With Vorst leading the way to the new worlds, we who remain can build on the foundation he bequeathes us." "You sound as though you believe it." "I do," said Kirby. "I didn't, at first. But Vorst was right. He said I'd understand why he was going, and I came to sec it. He's ten times as valuable to the movement doing this than he would be if he remained." Magnus murmured, "He isn't content to be Christ and Mohammed. He has to be Moses too, and also Elijah." "I never thought I'd hear you speak of him so coarsely," said Kirby. "I never did either," Magnus replied. "Dammit, I don't want him to go!" Kirby was astonished to see tears glistening in Magnus' pale eyes. "That's precisely why he's leaving," Kirby said, and then both men were silent. apodimonte moved toward them. "Everything's ready," he announced. "I've got the word from Lazarus that the pushers are in series." "What about our guidance people?" Kirby asked. "They've been ready for an hour." Kirby looked toward the gleaming capsule. "Might as well get it over with, then." "Yes," Capodimonte said. "Might as well." Lazarus, Kirby knew, was waiting for a signal from him. From now on, all signals would come from him. But that thought no longer disturbed him. He had adjusted to the situation. He was in command. Symbolic regalia cluttered the field -- Harmonist ikons, a big cobalt reactor, the paraphernalia of both the cults that now were merging. Kirby gestured to an acolyte, and moderator rods were withdrawn. The reactor surged into life. The Blue Fire danced high above the reactor, and its glow stained the hull of the capsule. CoUl light, Cerenkov radiation, the Vorster symbol, sparkled on the iilaleau, and all through the walrhmg multitude ran the soimIn of devotion, the whispered litanies, was tlie murmured recapilnliitionn of the stations of th sii'(lnim. While the man who had devised those words sat hidden within the walls of that teardrop of steel in the center of the gathering. The flare of the Blue Fire was the signal to the Venusians in their nearby dome. Now was their moment to gather their power and hurl the capsule outward, planting man's hand on a new world in the stars. "What are they waiting for?" Magnus asked querulously. "Maybe it won't happen," said Capodimonte. Kirby said nothing. And then it began to happen. IX irby had not quite known what to expect. In his fantasies of the scene, he had pictured a dozen capering Venusians dancing around the capsule, holding hands, their foreheads bulging with the effort of lifting the vehicle and hurling it out of the world. But the Venusians were nowhere to be seen; they were off in their dome, several hundred yards away, and Kirby suspected that they were neither holding hands nor showing outward signs of strain. In his reveries, too, he had imagined the capsule taking off the way a rocket would, rising a few feet from the ground, wobbling a bit, rising a little more, suddenly soaring up, crossing the sky on a potent trajectory, dwindling, vanishing from sight at last. But that was not the way it was really to be, either. He waited. A long moment passed. He thought of Vorst, making landfall on some other world. An inhabited world, perhaps? What would be Vorst's impact, when he came to that virgin territory? Vorst was an irresistible force, terrifying and unique. Wherever he went, he would transform all that was about him. Kirby felt sorry for the ten hapless pioneers who would have the benefit of Vorst's immediate guidance. He wondered what kind of colony they would build. Whatever it was, it would succeed. Success was in Vorst's nature. He was hideously old, but he had frightening vitality still locked within him. The Founder seemed to relish the challenge of beginning anew. Kirby wished him well. "There they go," Capodimonte whispered. It was true. The capsule was still on the ground, but now the air about it wavered, as though stirred by heat waves rising from the parched sandy soil. Then the capsule was gone. That was all. Kirby stared at the empty place where it had been. Vorst had been taken up into the heavens, and a gateway to somewhere had been opened. "There is a Oneness from which all life stems," someone said gently behind Kirby. "The infinite variety of the universe we owe to -- " Another voice said, "Man and woman, star and stone, tree and bird -- " Another said, "In the strength of the spectrum, the quantum, and the holy angstrom -- " lirby did not remain to listen to the familiar prayers, nor did he pray himself. He looked briefly at the bareness in the desert once more, and then upward at the harsh blue sky, already deepening toward nightfall. It was done. Vorst was gone, his scheming ended so far as Earth was concerned, and now it was the turn of lesser men. The way was open. Humanity could spill out across the heavens. Perhaps. Perhaps. Alone in this great assembly of the faithful Kirby turned his back on the now sacred spot from which Vorst had made his ascent. Very slowly, a tall figure whose late-afternoon shadow stretched for yards, Kirby walked away from the place where Noel Vorst had been, and toward the place where David Lazarus was waiting for him. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. (.I (M liy  mmI) No. CF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpdid. Add stale sales tax, if any. I lir designs shown above are ihe only ones we offer! 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Knight .tml many more! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh No. GM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep ' # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All PostpaidAdd state sales t-ax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! gaLxy Galaxy is published in French and Italian. The U. S. Edition is published In Braille. This Edition is also published in Living Tape by Services for the Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. Editor Science Editor by Keith Laumer by James Blish and Norman L. Knight by Hayden Howard Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Mgr. by Frank Herbert by R. A. Lafferty by George Henry Smith by Brian W. 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Ob G  ante nphe other day Hal Clement, Willy Ley and the undersigned took part in a closed-circuit television panel discussion before seven thousand teachers in convention assembled in New York City. What the science teachers were interested in was finding ways to be more effective in teaching their classes; what we were interested in was showing that science fiction can help in this. (Apparently it really does. The more scientists we meet, the more we become convinced that early reading of sf is one of the greatest spurs to an interest in a scientific career.) In the course of the conversation Hal Clement described What he calls The Game -- the game, known to all science-fiction writers and most sf readers, of making accurate deductions from an inaccurate statement. That's what science fiction is all about. The author is entitled to One Big Lie. 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E rei  d Incubus Opium Science-fiction Marquis Fromm, Erich Intercourse Orgies Sodomy  Morn i --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  -- Hawthorn Books, # Fifth Avenue, I Dept. G-# , New York, N.Y. #I I must experience thrill after thrill from this shockingly frank book or I'll return it . within # days for full refund. I save all postage and shipping charges. Print . N I at , (#) M The Body Builders Tired of being a #-pound weakling? Just buy yourself the Body Beautiful! I TT e was a big bruiser in a GenA dye Mark Seven Sullivan, the luxury model with the ninepoint sensory system, the highestpriced Grin-U-Matic facial expression attachment on the market and genuine human hair, mustache and all. He came through the dining room entry like Genghis Kahn invading a Swiss convent. If there'd been a door in his way he'd have kicked it down. The two lads walking behind him -- an old but tough-looking utility model of Liston and a fairly new Wayne -- kept their hands in their pockets and flicked their eyes over the room like buggy whips. The head waiter popped out with a stock of big purple menus, but the Sullivan went right past him, headed across toward my table like a field marshal leading a victory parade. Lorena was with me that night, looking classy in a flossed-up Dietrich that must have set her back a month's salary. She was in her usual mood for the usual reason: she wanted to give up her job at Cent-Prog and sign a five-year marriage contract with me. The idea left me cold as an Eskimo's tombstone. In the first place, at the rate she burned creds, I'd have to creak around in a second-hand Lionel with about thirty per cent sensory coverage and an undersized power core; and in the second, I was still carrying the torch for Julie. Sure, Julie had nutty ideas about Servos. According to her, having a nice wardrobe of specialized outfits for all occasions was one step below cannibalism. "You and that closet full of zombies!" she used to shake her finger under my nose. "How could a girl possibly marry you and never know what face she'd see when she woke up in the morning!" She was exaggerating, but that was the way those Organo-Republicans are. No logic in 'em... After all, doesn't it make sense to keep your organic body on file in the Municipal Vaults, safe out of the weather, and let a comfortable, late-model Servo do your walking and talking? Our grandparents found out it was a lot safer and easier to sit in front of the TV screen with feely and smelly attachments than to be out bumping heads with a crowd. It wasn't long after that that they developed the contact screens to fit your eyeballs, and the plug-in audio, so you began to get the real feel of audience participation. Then, with the big improvements in miniaturization and the new tightchannel transmitters, you could have your own private man-onthe-street pickup. It could roam, seeing the sights, while you racked out on the sofa. Of course, with folks spending so much time flat on their backs, the Public Health boys had to come up with gear to keep the organic body in shape. For a while, people made it with parttime exercise and home model massage and feeding racks, but it wasn't long before they set up the Central File system. Heck, the government already had everything about you on file, from your birth certificate to your fingerprints. Why not go the whole hog and file the body too? "f course, nobody had expected what would happen when the quality of the sensory pickups and playbacks got as good as they did. I mean the bit the eggheads call "personality gestalt transfer". But it figured. A guy always had the feeling that his consciousness was sitting somewhere back of his eyes; so when the lids were linked by direct hookup to the Servo, and all the other senses tied in -- all of a sudden, you were there. The brain was back in Files, doped to the hairline, but you -- the thing you call a mind -- was there, inside the Servo, living it up. And with that kind of identification, the old type utilitarian models went out of style, fast. People wanted Servos that expressed the real inner man -- the guy you should have been. With everybody as big and tough as they wanted to be, depending on the down payment they could handle, nobody wanted to take any guff off anybody. In the old days, a fellow had to settle for a little fender-bending; now you could hang one on the other guy, direct. Law Cent had to set up a code to cover the problem, and now when some bird insulted you or crowded you off the Fastwalk, you slugged it out with a Monitor watching. Julie claimed it was all a bunch of nonsense ; that two Servos pounding each other didn't prove anything. She could never see that with perfect linkage, you were the Servo. Like now: The waiter had just put a plate of Consomme au Beurre Blanc in front of me, and with my high-priced Yum-gum palate accessory, I'd get the same high class taste thrills as if the soup was being shoved down my Org's mouth in person. It was a special mixture, naturally, that lubricated my main swivel and supplied some chemicals to my glandular analogs. But the flavor was there. And meanwhile, the old body was doing swell on a nutrientdrip into the femoral artery. So it's a little artificial maybe -- but what about the Orggies, riding around in custom-built cars that are nothing but substitute personalities, wearing padded shoulders, contact lenses, hearing aides, false teeth, cosmetics, elevator shoes, rugs to cover their bald domes. If you're going to wear false eyelashes, why not false eyes? Instead of a nose bob, why not bob the whole face? At least a fellow wearing a Servo is honest about it, which is more than you can say for an Orggie doll in a foam-rubber bra -- not that Julie needed any help in that department. I dipped my big silver spoon Must man die to release his inner consciousness? Can we experience momentary flights of the soul -- chat is, become one with the universe and receive an influx of great Understanding? The shackles of the body -- its earthly limitations -- can be thrown off and man's mind can be attuned to the Infinite Wisdom for a flash f a second. During this brief interval intuitive knowledge, great inspiration, and a new vision of our life's mission are had. Some call this great experience a psychic phenomenon. But the ancients knew it and taught it as Cosmic Consciousness -- the merging of man's mind with the Universal Intelligence. Let this Free Book Explain This is not a religious doctrine, but the application of simple, natural laws, which give man an insight into the great Cosmic plan. They make possible a source of great joy, strength, and a regeneration of man's personal powers. Write to the Rosicrucians, an age-old brotherhood of understanding, for a free copy of the book "The Mastery of Life." It will tell you how, in the privacy of your own home, you may indulge in these mysteries of life known to the ancients. Address: Scribe U.A.H. Please Include Your Zip Coda in and had the first sip just under my nose when the Sullivan slammed my arm with his hip going past. I got the soup square in the right eye. While I was still clicking the eyelid, trying to clear the lens, the Liston jarred my shoulder hard enough to rattle my master solenoid. Normally, I'm a pretty eventempered guy; it's my theory that the way to keep a neurotronic system in shape is to hold the glandular inputs to a minimum. But, what with the big event coming up that night, and Lorena riding me hard on the joys of contract life, I'd had a hard day. I hopped up, overrode the eye-blink reflex, made a long reach and hooked a finger in the Liston's collar going away. "Hold it right there, stumblebum!" I gave the collar a flick to spin him around. T T e didn't spin. Instead, my A A elbow joint made a noise like a roller skate hitting loose gravel; the jerk almost flipped me right on my face. The Liston did a slow turn, like a ten-ton crane rig, looked me over with a pair of yellow eyes that were as friendly as gun barrels. A low rumbling sound came out of him. I was a little shook but mad enough not to let it bother me. "Let's have that license number," I barked at him. "There'll be a bill for the eye and another one for a chassis checkup!" The Wayne had turned too, and was beetling his brows at me. The big shot Sullivan pushed between the two of them, looked me over like I was something he'd found curled up in a doorway. "Maybe you better kind of do a fade, Jasper," he boomed loud enough for everybody in the restaurant to hear. "My boys got no sense of humor." I had my mouth open for my next mistake when Lorena beat me to it: "Tell the big boob to get lost, Barney; he's interrupting what I was saying to you." The Sullivan rolled an eye at her, showing off his independent suspension. "Shut your yap, sister," he said. That did it. I slid my left foot forward, led with a straight left to the power pack, then uppercut him with everything I was able to muster. My right arm went dead to the shoulder. The Sullivan was still standing there, looking at me. I was staring down at my own fist, dangling at my side. Then it dawned on me what was wrong. For the moment, I'd forgotten I was wearing a light sportmodel body. z" " ully Fishbein, my business manager, Servo-therapist, drinking buddy, arena trainer and substitute old-maid aunt had warned me I might pull a stunt like tfiis some day. He was a Single-Servo Socialist himself, and in addition to his political convictions, he'd put a lot of time and effort into building me up as the fastest man with a net and ' mace in show business. He had an investment to protect. "I'm warning you, Barney," he used to shove an untrimmed hangnail under my nose and yell. "One day you're gonna get your reflexes crossed and miss your step on the Fastwalk -- or gauge a close one like you was wearing your Astaire and bust the neck of that Camera you wasted all that jack on. And then where'll you be, hah?" "So I lose a hulk," I'd come back. "So what? I've got a closet full of spares." "Yeah? And what if it's a total? You ever heard what can happen to your mind when the connection's busted -- and I do mean busted -- like that?" "I wake up back in my Org body; so what?" "Maybe," Gully would shake his head and look like a guy with dangerous secrets. "And maybe not..." Xhile I was thinking all this,  ' the Sullivan was getting his money's worth out of the GrinU-Matic. He nodded and rocked back on his heels, taking his time with me. The talk had died out at the tables around us. Everybody was catching an ear full. "A wisey," die Sullivan says, loud. "What's the matter, Cheapie, tired of life outside a repair depot?" "What do you mean, 'Cheapie'?" I said, just to give my Adam's apple a workout. "This Arcaro cost me plenty... and this goon of yours has jarred my contacts out of line. Just spring for a checkup and I'll agree to forget the whole thing." "Yeah." He was still showing me the expensive grin. "I'll bet you will, pint-size." He cocked an eye at the Wayne. "Now, let's see, Nixie, under the traffic code, I got a couple courses of action, right?" "Cream duh pansy and let's shake a ankle, Boss. I'm hungry." Nixie folded a fist like a forty pound stake mallet and moved in to demonstrate his idea. "Nah." The Sullivan stopped him with the back of his hand against his starched shirt-front. "The guy pops me first, right? He wants action. So I give him action. Booney." He snapped his fingers and the Liston thumbed a shirt stud. "For the record," the Sullivan said in a businesslike voice. "Notice of Demand for Satisfaction, with provocation, under Section #-b, Granyauck #-#." I heard the whir and click as the recorder built into the Liston's thorax took it down and transmitted it to Law Central. All of a sudden my mouth was dry. Sometimes those Servo designers got a little too realistic. I tapped a switch in my lower right premolar to cut out the panicreaction circuit. I'd been all set for a clip on the jaw, an event that wouldn't be too good for the Arcaro, but nothing a little claim to LawCent wouldn't fix up. But now it was dawning like sunrise over Mandalay that Big Boy had eased me into a spot -- or that I'd jumped into it, mouth first. I'd hit him. And the fact that he'd put my consomme in my eye first wouldn't count -- not to LawCent. He had the right to call me out -- a full-scale Servo-to-Servo match -- and the choice of weapons, ground, time, everything was his. Ctnpell the manager to clear floor number three," the Sullivan rapped out to the Wayne. "My favorite ground." He winked at Lorena. "Nine kills there, baby. My lucky spot." "Whatever you say," I felt myself talking too fast. "I'll be back here in an hour, raring to go." "Nix, Cheapie. The time is now. Come as you are; I ain't formal." "Why, you can't do that," Lorena announced. Her voice tapes were off key, I noticed; she had a kind of shrill, whiney tone. "Barney's only wearing that little old Arcaro!" "See me after, doll," the Sullivan cut her off. "I like your style." He jerked his head at the Wayne. "I'll take this clown bare-knuck, Mixie, Naples rules." He turned away, flexing the oversized arms that were an optional extra with the late-model Gendyes. Lorena popped to her feet, gave me the dirtiest look the Dietrich could handle. "You and that crummy Arcaro." She stuck it in me like a knife. "I wanted you to get a Flynn, with the -- " "Spare me the technical specs, kid," I growled. I was getting the full picture of what I'd been suckered into. The caper with the soup hadn't been any accident. The timing was perfect; I had an idea the Liston was wired a lot better than he looked. Somebody with heavy credits riding on that night's bout was behind it; somebody with enough at stake to buy all the muscleServos he needed to pound me into a set of loose nerve ends waving around like worms in a bait can. Busting the Arcaro into a pile of scrap metal and plastic wouldn't hurt my Org physically -- but the trauma to my personality, riding the Servo, would be for real. It took steel nerve, cast-iron confidence, razor-edge reflexes and a solid killer's instinct to survive in the arena. After all, anybody could lay out for a Gargantua Servo, if that was all it took; the timing, and pace, and ringcraft that made me a winner couldn't survive having a body pounded to rubble around me. I'd be lucky if I ever recovered enough to hold a coffee cup one-handed. The Floor Manager arrived, looking indignant; nobody had called him to okay the fracas. He looked at me, started to wave me off, then did a double take. "This is the agressor party?" The eyebrows on his Menjou crawled up into his hairline. "That's right," I give it to him fast and snappy. "The bum insulted my lady-friend. Besides which, I don't like his soupstrainer. After I break his rib cage down to chopsticks, I'm going to cut half of it off and give it to the pup to play with." After all, if I was going to get pulverized, I might as well do it in style. The Sullivan growled. "You can talk better than that." I pushed up close to him; my nose was on a level with the diamond stickpin in his paisley foulard. "What's your name, Big Stuff? Let's have that registration." "None of your pidgin, Wisey." He had a finger all ready to poke at me, saw the Monitor coming up ready to quote rules, used it to scratch his ear instead. The big square fingernail shredded plastic off the lobe; he was a little more nervous than he acted. That cinched it: he knew who I was -- Barney Ramm, light-heavy champ in the armed singles. U A ssembly and serial num--bers, please," the Monitor said. He sounded a little impatient. I could see why he might. It was customary for a challenger to give with the plate data without being asked -- especially a floor-vet like Sullivan. He was giving the official a dirty look. "Where's Slickey?" he growled. "He doesn't come on for another fifteen minutes," the Monitor snapped. "Look here -- " "You look here, Short-timer," the Sullivan grunted. The Wayne moved up to help him give the fellow the cold eye. He glared back at them -- for about two seconds. Then he wilted. The message had gotten through. The fix was in."Where's the men's room?" I piped up, trying to sound as frisky as ever, but at the moment my mind felt as easy to read as a ninety-foot glare-sign. "Eh?" The Monitor cut his eyes at me, back at the Sullivan, back to me, like a badminton fan at a championship match. "No," he said. He pushed out his lips and shook his head. "I'm ruling -- "Rule my foot." I jostled him going past. "I know my rights." I kept going, marched across the dance floor to the discreet door back of the phony palm tree. Inside, I went into high gear. There was a row of coin-operated buffing and circuit-checking machines down one wall, a power core dispenser, a plug-in recharge unit, a nice rack of touch-up paints, a big bin of burned-out reflex coils, and a dispenser full of replacement gaskets with a sign I skidded past them, dived through an archway into the service area. There were half a dozen padded racks here, loops of power leads, festoons of lube conduit leading down from ceiling-mounted manifolds. A parts index covered the far wall. There was no back door. "Kindly take (click) position numbered one," a canned voice cackled at me. "Use the console provided to indicate required services. Say, fellow, may I recommend this week's special, Slideeze, the underarm lubricant with a diff -- " I slapped the control plate to shut the pitch off. Coming in here suddenly didn't seem as cute as it had ten seconds earlier. I was cornered -- and an accident on a lube-rack would save any possible slip-up on the floor. A little voice about as subtle as a jack-hammer was yelling in my ear that I had half a minute, if I was lucky, before a pair of heavies came through the door to check me out... It was three quick steps to the little stub wall that protected the customers from the public eye. I flattened myself against the wall beside it just as big feet clumped outside. The door banged open. The Wayne wasn't bothering about being subtle. I wasn't either. I hooked his left instep, spun in behind him, palmed his back hard. He hit face-first with a slam like two garbage flats colliding, and started looping the loop on the tiled floor. Those Waynes always did have a glass jaw. I didn't stick around to see if anybody heard him pile in; I jumped him, slid out through the door. The Liston was standing on the other side of the palm, not ten feet away. I faded to the right, saw another door. The glare sign it over for about as long as it takes a clock to say 'tick' and dived through. Ill E ven under the circumstances it was kind of a shock to find myself standing there staring at pink and turquoise service racks, gold-plated perfume dispensers, and a big display rack full of strictly feminine spares that were enough to make a horse blush. Then I saw her. She was a neat-looking Pickford -- the traditional models were big just then. She had fluffy blonde hair, and her chassis covers were off to the waist. I gaped at her, sitting there in front of the mirror, then gulped like a seal swallowing a five-pound salmon. She jumped and swiveled my way, and I got a load of big blue eyes and a rosebud mouth that was opening up to scream. "Don't yell, lady!" I averted my eyes -- an effort like uprooting saplings. "The mob's after me. Just tell me how to get out of here!" I heard feet outside. So did she, I guess. "You -- you can go out through the delivery door," a nice little voice said. I flicked an eye her way. She was holding a lacy little something over her chest. It slipped when she pointed and I got an eyeful of some of the nicest moulded foamplastic you'd care to see. "Thanks, baby; you're a doll," I choked out and went past her, not without a few regrets. The door she'd showed me was around a corner at the back. There was a big carton full of refills for the cosmetics vendor beside it, with the top open. On impulse, I reached in and grabbed one going past. The door opened into an alley about four feet wide, with a single-rail robo-track down the center for service and delivery mechs. The wall opposite was plain duralith; it went up, a sheer rise without a foothold for a gnat. In both directions the alley was a straight shot for fifty feet to a rectangle of hard lateafternoon sunlight. I could take my choice. Something clattered to the right. I saw a small custodial cart move jerkily out of a doorway, swing my way, picking up speed. I started to back away; the thing was heavy enough to flatten my Arcaro without slowing down. Then a red light blinked on the front of the thing. It made screechy noises and skidded to a stop. "Kindly clear the rail," a fruity voice hooted. "This is your busy Sani-mat Service Unit, bringing that Sani-mat sparkle to another satisfied customer!" A kind of idea formed up somewhere under my hairpiece. I eased around to the side of the machine, a tight squeeze. It was a squatty, boxy job, with a bunch of cleaning attachments racked in front and a good-sized bin behind, half full of what it had been collecting. I got the lip up, climbed up as it started forward again, and settled down in the cargo. It was lumpy and wet, and you could have hammered the aroma out into horseshoes. I guess the world has made a lot of progress in the last few decades, but garbage still smells like garbage. I estimated I'd covered a hundred feet or less, when the cart braked to a sudden stop. I heard voices; something clicked and a hum started up near my left ear. "Kindly clear the rail," the tape said. "This is your Sanimat Service Uuwwrrr -- " The cart jumped and I got another faceful of garbage. Somebody -- it sounded like the Wayne -- yelled something. I got set, ready to come out swinging as soon as the lid went up. But the voices faded out, and I heard running feet. The cart started up, bumped along clucking to itself like a chicken looking for a place to drop an egg. I rode it along to its next client's back door, then hopped out, legged it to a public screen booth and dialled Gully's number. IV I caught him in a cab, just dropping in past a mixed-up view of city skyline tilting by in the background. His eyes bugged out like a Chihuahua when I told him -- a de luxe feature of the four-year-old Cantor he always wore. "Barney, you nuts?" He had a yelp like a Chihuahua too. "The biggest bout of your career coming up tonight, and you're mixing in a free brawl!" He stopped to gulp and ran his eyes over me. "Hey, Barney! You're wearing an Arcaro. You didn't -- " "The fracas wasn't my idea," I got in quick while he was fighting the Cantor's tonsils back in line. "Not exactly, anyway. I took off out the back way, and -- " "You did what?" The yelp was up into the supersonic now. "I beat it. Ducked out. Scrammed. What do you think I was going to do, stay there and let that elbow squad pull the legs off me like a fly?" "You can't run out on a registered satisfaction, Barney!" Gully leaned into his sender until all I could see were two eyes like bloodshot clams and a pair of quivering nostrils. "You, of all people! If the Pictonews services get hold of this, they'll murder you!" "This hit squad will murder me quicker -- and not just on paper!" "Paper's what I'm talking about! You're the aggressor party; you poked the schlock! You cop a swiftie on this, and you're a fugitive from LawCent! They'll lift your Servo license, and it'll be good-by career! And the fines -- " "Okay -- but I got a few rights too! If I can get to another Servo before they grab me, it'll become my legal Corpus operandi as soon as I'm in it. Remember, that Satisfaction is to me, Barney Rum, not to this body I'm wearing. You've got to get me out of here, and back to my apartment -- " I felt my mouth freeze in the open position. Fifty feet away across the Fastwalk the Liston and a new heavy, a big, patched-up Baer, had come out of a doorway and were standing there, looking over the crowd. Those boys were as hard to shake loose as gum on a shoe sole. I ducked down in the booth. "Listen, Gully," I hissed. "They're too close; I've got to do a fast fade. Try to fix it with LawCent to keep their mitts off me until I can change. Remember, if they catch me, you 'can kiss your ten per cent goodby." "Barney, where you going? Whattaya mean, ten per cent? It ain't the cookies I'm thinking about!" "Think about the cookies, Gully." I cut contact and risked a peek. The two goons were still there, and looking my way. If I stepped out, they'd have me. And if I stayed where I was, sooner or later they'd get around to checking the booth... I was still holding something in my hand. I looked at it: the cosmetics kit I'd grabbed on the way out of the ladies' room at the Troc. The lid flipped back when I touched the little gold button at the side. There were nine shades of eye shadow, mouth paint, plastic lens shades in gold, green and pink -- some dames have got screwy ideas about what looks attractive -- spare eyebrows and lashes, a little emergency face putty, some thimble-sized hair sprays. I hated to ruin a hundred cee wig, but I gave it a full shot of something called Silver Ghost. The pink eyes seemed to go with the hair. The spray was all gone, so it was too late to bleach out a set of eyebrows, so I used a pair of high-arched black ones, then used a gingery set for a mustache. I thought about using one of the fake spit-curls for a goatee, but decided against it. The Arcaro had a nice-sized nose on it, so I widened the nostrils a little and added warts. I risked another peek. The boys were right where I left them. My jacket was a nice chartreuse job with cerise strips and a solid orange lining. I turned it inside out, ditched the yellow tie, and opened my shirt collar so the violet part showed. That was about all I could do; I opened the door and stepped out. I'd gone about three steps when the Camera looked my way. His mouth dropped open like a power shovel getting ready to take a bit out of a hillside. He jammed an elbow into the Liston and he turned around and his mouth fell open. I got a glimpse of some nice white choppers and a tongue like a pink sock. I didn't wait to catch the rest of the reaction: I sprinted for the nearest shelter, a pair of swinging doors, just opening to let a fat Orggie out. I dived past him into a cool, dark room lit by a couple of glowing beer ads above a long mirror with a row of bottles. I charged past all that, slammed through a door at the back, and was out in an alley, looking at the Wayne. He went into a halfcrouch and spread his arms. That was the kind of mistake an amateur toughie would make. I put my head down and hit him square under his vest button. It wasn't the best treatment in the world for the Arcaro, but it was worse for the Wayne. He froze up and made a noise like frying fat, with his eyeballs spinning like Las Vegas cherries. Between the fall in the john and the butt in the neuro center, he was through for the day. I got my legs under me and started off at a sort of cripple's lope toward the end of the alley. My balance and coordination units were clicking like castanets. I richocheted off a couple of walls, made it out into the Slowwalk, and jigged along in a crabbed semicircle, making jerky motions with my good arm at a cab that picked then to drop a fare a few yards away. The hackie reached out, grabbed my shoulder and hauled me inside. Those boys may be built into their seats and end at the waist, but they've got an arm on them, I'll give 'em that. "You look like you got a problem there, Mac," He looked me over in the mirror. "What happened, you fall off a roof?" "Something like that. Just take me to the Banshire Building, fast." "Whatever you say, Bud. But if I was you, I'd get that servo to a shop as quick as I could." "Later. Step on it." "I'm doing a max and a half now!" "Okay, Okay, just don't waste any time." He muttered to himself then, while I got the bent cover off my reset panel and did what I could to rebalance my circuitry. My double vision cleared a little, and the leg coordination improved enough so I managed to climb out unassisted when he slammed the heli in hard on the roof deck. "Be five cees," the cabbie grunted. I paid him. "Stick around a few minutes," I said. "I'll be right back." "Do me a favor, Clyde; throw your trade to the competition." He flipped the flag up and lifted off in a cyclone of over-rewed rotors. I spat out a mouthful of grit and went in through the fancy door with the big gold B. Gus, the doorman came out of his cage with his admiral's hat on crooked; he hooked a thumb over his shoulder and got his jaw all set for the snappy line. I beat him to it. "It's me, Barney Ramm. I'm incommunicado to avoid the fans." "Geeze, Mr. Ramm? Wow, that Arcaro won't never be the same again. Looks like your fans must of caught you after all." He showed me a bunch of teeth that would have looked at home in a mule's face. I lifted a lip at him and went on in. V Ty apartment wasn't the plushest one in the JBanshire, but it was fully equipped. The Servo stall was the equal of anything at Municipal Files. I got enough cooperation out of my legs to hobble to it, got the Arcaro into the rack with the neck plate open and the contacts tight against the transfer disk. A pull on the locking lever, and I was clamped in tight, ready for the shift. I picked the Crockett; it was rugged enough to handle the Sullivan, and didn't have any fancy equipment installed to have to look out for. It was a little tough coding the number into the panel, but I made it, then slammed the transfer switch. I've never gotten used to that wild couple of seconds while the highspeed scanner is stripping the stored data off one control matrix and printing it on another one linking it in to the Org brain back between my real ears in the cold files down town. It was like diving into an ocean of ice-cold darkness, spinning like a Roman candle. All kinds of data bits flash through the conscious level: I was the Arcaro, sitting rigid in the chair, and I was also the Crockett, clamped to a rack in the closet, and at the same time I could feel the skull contacts and servicing tubes and the cold slab under me in the Vault. Then it cleared and I was hitting the release lever and stepping out of tlie closet and beginning to The Arcaro looked pretty bad, sagging in the stall, with the phoney eyebrows out of line and the putty nose squashed, and the right shoulder humped up like Quasimodo. It was a wonder it had gotten me back at all. I made myself a promise to give it the best overhaul job money could buy -- that was the least I could do. Then I headed for the front door. The Sullivan would get a little surprise when I found him now. I gave my coon-skin cap a pat as I went by the hall mirror, palmed the flush panel open and ran smack into four large cops, standing there waiting for me. I t was a plush jail house, as jails go, but I still didn't like it. They shoved me into a nice corner cell with a carpet, a tiled lube cubicle in the corner, and a window with a swell view of Granyauck -- about # feet straight down. There were no bars, but the wall was smooth enough to discourage any human flies from trying it. The turnkey looked me over and shook his head. He was wearing the regulation Police Special, a dumb-looking production job halfway between a Kildare and a Tracy -- Spence, that is. I guess ' os have to have a unite' ., out the sight of a couple dozen identical twins standing around kind of gives a fellow a funny feeling -- like Servos were just some kind of robot, or something. "So you're Barney Ramm, huh?" the cop shifted his toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. "You shunt of tried to handle four cops at once, Buddy. Your collision insurance don't cover that kind of damage." "I want my manager!" I yelled as loud as I could, which wasn't very loud on account of a kick in the voice box I got following up too close on a cop I had tossed on his ear. "You can't do this to me! I'll get the lot of you for false arrest!" "Relax, Ramm." The jailer remind me he had it. I shied off; a shot from the hot end of that would lock my neuro center in a hard knot. "You ain't going no place for a while," the cop stated. "Commissioner Malone wouldn't like it." "Malone? The Arena Commissioner? What's he got -- " I stopped in the middle of the yell, feeling my silly look freeze in place. "Yeah," the cop said. "Also the Police Commissioner. Seems like Malone don't like you, Ramm." "Hey!" a dirty idea was growing. "The satisfaction against me: who filed it?" The cop went through the motions of yawning. "Lessee... oh, yeah. A Mr. Malone." "The dirty crook! That's illegal! I was framed!" "You slugged him first, right?" The cop cut me off. "Sure, but -- " "Ain't a Police Commissioner got as much right as anybody else to defend hisself? Any reason he's got to take guff off some wisenheimer, any more than the next guy? You race him at the light, he'll lock bumpers with you every time!" "I've got to get out of here," I shouted him down. "Get Gully Fishbein! He'll post the bond! I've got a bout at the Garden in less than four hours! Tell the judge! I guess I've got a couple rights!" "You ain't going to make no bout in no four hours." The cop grinned like Sears foreclosing on Roebuck. "You'll be lucky if you get out before Christmas Holidays start, in September." "If I don't," I said, "you can start scanning the help-wantedcripple column. That's what you'll be when me and my twenty-thousand Cee Charlemagne finish with you, you dumb flatfoot!" He narrowed his eyes down to pinpoints -- an extra-cost feature that the taxpayers had to spring for. "Threats, hah?" His voice had the old gravel in it now. "You run out on a Satisfaction, Buster. That's trouble enough for most guys." "I'll show you trouble," I started, but he wasn't through yet. " For a big tough arena fighter, you got kind of a delicate stomach, I guess. We also got you for resisting arrest, damaging public property, committing mayhem on the person of a couple honest citizens, Peeping Tom and shop lifting from the ladies' john. You're set for tonight, pal -- and a lotta other nights." He gave me a mock salute and backed out; the glass door clinked in my face while I was still trying to get my arm back for a swing. nphe watch set in my left wristwas smashed flat, along with the knuckles. Those Granyauck cops have got hard heads. I went over to the window and checked the sun. It looked like about half past four. At eight P.M. the main event would go on. If I wasn't there, the challenger would take the title by default. He was an out-of-town phoney known as Mysterious Marvin, the Hooded Holocaust; he always fought with a flour sack over his ' After tonight, he'd be i: ght-liecy champ, bagged he ' and all -- and I'd be a busted has-been, with my accounts frozen, my contract torn up, my Servo ticket lifted, and about as much future as a fifth of Bourbon at a Baptist Retreat. It was the finish. They had me. Unless... I poked my head out and looked down the wall. It was a sheer drop to a concrete loading apron that looked about the size of a blowout patch from where I stood. I felt my autonomies kick in; my heart started thumping like an out-of-round drive shaft, and my throat closed up like a crap-shooter's fist. I never had liked heights much. But with my Servo locked in a cell -- and me locked in the Servo -- VI I took a couple turns up and down the cell. It was an idea the boys talked about sometimes, waiting in the service racks before a bout: what would happen if the plastic-foam and wiresponge information correlation unit where the whole brain pattern was recorded got smashed flat -- wiped out -- while you were in it? It would be like dreaming you fell -- and hit. Would you ever wake up? The Org body was safe, back in the Vaults, but the shock -- what would it do to you? There were a lot of theories. Some of the guys said it would be curtains. The end. Some of them said your Org would go catatonic. I didn't know, myself. If the wheels knew, they weren't spreading it around. And there was just the one way to find out for sure. If I stayed where I was, incommunicado, I was finished anyway. Better to go out in style. Before I could change my mind, I whirled, went to the window and swung my legs over the sill. Behind me, I heard somebody yell, "Hey!" I tried to swallow, couldn't, squeezed my eyes shut, and jumped. For a few seconds, it was like a tornado blowing straight up into my face; then it was like being spread-eagled on a big, soft, rubbery mattress. And then -- I was drowning in a sea of rancid fat. I took a deep breath to yell, and the grease in my lungs clogged solid. I tried to cough, and couldn't do that either. Little red skyrockets started shooting around back of my eyes like a fire in a fireworks factory. Then the lights ran together and I was staring at a long red glare strip set in a dark ceiling a few inches above my face. I could feel tubes and wires dragging at my arms and legs, my neck, my eyelids, my tongue... I was moving, sliding out into brighter light. A scared-looking face was gaping down at me. I made gargly noises and flapped my hands -- about all I could manage under the load of spaghetti. The guy leaning over me jumped like a morgue attendant seeing one of his customers sit up and ask for a light, whicn wasn't too far off, maybe. My bet had paid off. I was awake, back in my organic body in slot number #-Ga#b in the Municipal Body Files. The next half hour was a little hectic. First they started some kind of a pump, and then I could breathe -- a little. While I coughed, twitched, groaned, itched, throbbed and ached in more places than I knew I had, the file techs fussed over me like midwives delivering a TV baby. They pulled things out, stuck things in, sprayed me, jabbed me, tapped and tested, conferred, complained, ran back and forth, shone lights in my eyes, hit me with little hammers, poked things down my throat, held buzzers to my eats, asked questions and bitched at each other in high, whining voices like bluebottle flies around a honey wagon. I got the general idea. They were unhappy that I had upset the routine by coming out of a stage three storage state unannounced. "There are laws against this sort of thing!" a dancey little bird in an unhealthy-looking Org body kept yelling at me. "You might have died! It was sheer good fortune that I happened to have slipped back in the stacks to commune with myself, and heard you choking! You frightened me out of my wits!" Somebody else shoved a clipboard in front of me. "Sign this," he said. "It's a release covering CentFiles against any malpractice or damage claims." "And there'll be an extra service charge on your file for emergency reprocessing," the dancey one said. "You'll have to sign that, and also an authorization to transfer you to dead storage until your next of kin or authorized agent brings in the Servo data -- " I managed to sit up. "Skip the reprocessing," I said. "And the dead storage. Just get me on my feet and show me the door." "Hows that? You're going to need at least a week's rest, a month's retraining, and a complete reorientation course before you can be released in Org -- " "Get me some clothes," I said. "Then I'll sign the papers." "This is blackmail!" Dancey did a couple of steps. "I won't be held responsible!" "Not if you cooperate. Call me a cab." I tried walking. I was shakey, but all things considered I didn't feel too bad -- for a guy who just committed suicide. Files had kept me in good condition. There was a little more argument, but I won. Dancey followed me out, wagging his head and complaining, but I signed his papers and he disappeared -- probably to finish communing with himself. I n the cab, I tried to reach Gully again. His line was busy. I tried Lorena. A canned voice told me her line was disconnected. Swell. All my old associates were kind of fading out of sight, now that I was having troubles with the law. But maybe Gully was just busy getting me a postponement. In fact, he was probably over at the Garden now, straightening things out. I gave the hackie directions and he dropped me by the big stone arch with the deep-cut letters that said The usual crowd of fight fans were there, forty deep. None of them gave me a look; they had their eyes on the big, wideshouldered Tunneys and Louises and Marcianos, and the hammedup Herkys and Tarzans in their flashy costumes and big smiles, with their handlers herding them along like tugs nudging liners into dock. The gateman put out a hand to stop me when I started through the turnstile. "It's me, Harley. Barney Ramm," I said. A couple of harness cops were standing a few feet away, looking things over. "Let me through; I'm late." "Hah? Barney -- " "Keep it quiet; I'm a surprise." "Where'd you dig up that outfit? On a used-Servo lot?" He looked me over like an inspector rejecting a wormy side of mutton. "What is it, a gag?" "It's a long story. I'll tell it to you some time. Right now, how's about loaning me a temporary tag? I left my ID in my other pants." "You pugs," he muttered, but he handed over the pass. I grabbed it. "Where's Lou Mitch, the starter?"! asked him. "Try the Registry Office." I shoved through a crowd of weigh-in men, service techs and arena officials, spotted Lou talking to a couple of trainers. I went over and grabbed his arm. "It's me, Mitch, Barney Ramm. Listen, where's Gully? I need -- " "Ramm, you bum! Where you been? Where'd you pick up that hulk you got on? Who you think you are, missing the press weighin? Get downstairs on the double and dress out? You got twenty minutes, and if you're late, so help me, I'll see you busted out of the fight game!" "Wha -- who, me? Hold it, Lou, I'm not going out there in this condition! I just came down to -- " "Oh, a holdup for more dough, huh? Well, you can work that one out with the promoter and the Commissioner. All I know is, you got a contract, and I've got you billed for nineteen minutes from now!" I started backing away, shaking my head. "Wait a minute, Lou -- " He jerked his head at a couple of the trainers that were listening in. "Grab him and take him down to his stall and get him into his gear! Hustle it!" I put up a brisk resistance, but it was all wasted effort. Ten minutes later I was standing in the chute, strapped into harness with knots tied in the straps for fit any a copy of the Afternoon Late Racing Special padding my helmet up off my ears, listening to the mob in the stands up above, yelling for the next kill. Me. nphey can talk all they want about how sensitive and responsive a good Servo is, but there's nothing like flesh and blood for making you know you're in trouble. My heart was kicking hard enough to jar the championship medal on my chest. My mouth was as dry as yesterday's cinnamon toast. I thought about making a fast getaway over the barrier fence, but there was nobody outside who'd be glad to see me except the cops; besides which, I had a mace in my right hand and a fighting net in the left, and after all, I was Barney Ramm, the champ. I'd always said it was the man inside the Servo, not the equipment that counted. Tonight I had a chance to prove it -- or a kind of a chance; an Org up against a fighting Servo wasn't exactly an even match. But hell, when was it ever even? The whole fight game was controlled, from top to bottom, by a few sharpies like J. J. Malone. Nobody had ever slipped me the word to take a dive yet, but I'd stretched plenty of bouts to make 'em look good. After all, the fans paid good creds to see two fine-tuned fighting machines pound each other to scrap under the lights. An easy win was taboo. Well, they'd get an unexpected bonus tonight when I got hit and something besides hydraulic fluid ran out. And then the blast of the bugles caught me like a bucket of ice water and the gate jumped up and I was striding through, head up, trying to look as arrogant as a hunting tiger under the glare of the polyarcs, but feeling very small and very breakable and wondering why I hadn't stayed in that nice safe jail while I had the chance. Out across the spread of the arena the bleachers rose up dark under the high lateevening sky streaked with long pink clouds that looked as remote as fairyland. And under the pooled lights, a big husky Servo was taking his bows, swirling his cloak. He was too far away, over beyond the raised disk of the Circle, for me to be sure, but it looked like he was picking a heavy duty prod and nothing else. Maybe the word had gone out that I was in Org; or maybe he was good.  T'hen he tossed the cape to a handler and came to meet me, sizing me up on the way through the slit in his mask. Maybe he was wondering what I had up my sleeve. If he was in on the fix, he'd be surprised to see me at all. He'd been expecting a last-minute sub, or just a straight default. If not, he'd have been figuring on me wearing my Big Charley, packed with all the booster gear the law allows. Instead, all he saw was an ordinary-looking five foot eleven frame with medium-fair shoulders and maybe just a shade too much padding at the belt line. The boys back at Files had done right by me, I had to admit. The old Org was in better shape than when I'd filed it, over a year ago. I felt strong, tough and light on my feet; I could feel the old fighting edge coming on. Maybe it was just a false lift from the stuff the techs had loaded me full of, and maybe it was just an animal's combat instinct, an item they hadn't been able to dream up an accessory to imitate. Whatever it was, it was nice to have. I reached the concrete edge of the Fighting Circle and stepped up on it and was looking across at the other fellow, only fifty feet away and now looking bigger than a Bolo Combat Unit. With the mask I wasn't sure, but he looked like a modified Norge Atlas. He was running through a fancy twirl routine with the prod, and the crowd was eating it up. There was no law that said I had to wait for him to finish. I slid the mace down to rest solid in my palm with the thong riding tight above my wrist and gave the two foot club a couple of practice swings. So much for the warm-up. I flipped the net out into casting position with my left hand and moved in on him. It wasn't like wearing a Servo; I could feel sweat running down my face and the air sighing in my lungs and the blood pumping through my muscles and veins. It was kind of a strange alive feeling -- as if there was nothing between me and the sky and the earth and I was part of them and they were part of me. A funny feeling. A dangerous, unprotected feeling -- but somehow not entirely a bad feeling. Tie finished up the ham act when I was ten feet from him, swung to face me. He knew I was there, all right; he was just playing it cool. Swell. While he was playing, I'd take him. I feinted with the net, then dived in, swung the mace, missed him by half an inch as he back-pedaled. I followed him close, working the club, keeping the net cocked. He backed, looking me over. "Ramm -- is that you in that get-up?" he barked. "Naw -- I couldn't make it, so I sent my cousin Julius." "What happened, you switch brands? Looks like you must of got cut-rate merchandise." He ducked a straight cut and whipped the prod around in a jab that would have paralyzed my neuro center if he'd connected. "New secret model a big outfit's trying out under wraps," I told him . He made a fast move, and a long, slim rod I hadn't seen before whipped out and slapped me under the ribs. For a split second I froze. He had me, I was finished. A well-handled magnetic resonator could deGauss every micro-tape in a Servo -- and his placement was perfect. But nothing happened. There was a little tingle, that was all. Then I got it. I wasn't wearing a Servo -- and magnets didn't bother an Org. 'Tphe Atlas was looking as confused as I was. He took an extra half-second recovering. That was almost enough. I clipped him across the thigh as he almost fell getting back. He tried with the switch again, sawed it across my chest. I let him; he might as well tickle me with a grass stem. This time I got the net out, snarled his left arm, brought the mace around and laid a good one across his hip. It staggered him, but he managed to spin out, flip the net clear. "What kind of shielding you got anyway, Ramm?" the Atlas growled. He held the rod out in front of his face, crossed his eyes at it, shook it hard and made one more try. I let him come in under my guard, and the shaft slid along my side as if he was trying to wipe it clean on my shirt. While he was busy with that, I dropped the net, got a two-handed grip in the mace, brought it around in a flat arc and laid a solid wallop right where it would do him the most good -- square on the hip joint. I heard the socket go. He tried to pivot on his good leg, tottered and just managed to stay on his feet, swearing. I came in fast and just got a glimpse of the electro-pod coming up. Concentrating on the magnetic rod, I'd forgotten the other. I tried to check and slide off to the right, but all of a sudden blinding blue lights were popping all over the sky. Something came up and hit me alongside the head, and then I was doing slow somersaults through pretty purple clouds, trying hard to figure which side was up. Then the pain hit. For a couple of seconds I scraped at my chest, reaching for circut breakers that weren't there. Then I got mad. It was as if all of a sudden, nothing could stop me. The Atlas was a target, and all I wanted was just to reach it. If there was a mountain in the way, I'd pick it up and throw it over my shoulder. A charging elephant would be a minor nuisance. I could even stand up, unassisted -- if I tried hard enough. I got the feel of something solid under my hands, groped and found some more of it with my feet, pushed hard and blinked away the fog to see the Atlas just making it back onto his good leg. I had to rest a while then, on all fours. He stooped to twiddle a reset for emergency power to the damaged joint, then started for me, hopping hard enough to shake the ground. A little voice told me to wait... He stopped, swung the prod up, and I rolled, grabbed his good leg, twisted with everything I had. It wasn't enough. He hopped, jabbed with the prod, missed, and I was on my feet now, feeling like I'd been skinned and soaked in brine. My breath burned my throat like a blow torch, and all round the crowd roar was like a tidal wave rolling across a sinking continent. I backed, and he followed. I tried to figure the time until the pit stop, but I didn't know how long I'd been out here; I didn't have a timer ticking under my left ear, keeping me posted. And now the Atlas was on to what was going on. I knew that, when he reached for the show-knife strapped to his left hip. Against a Servo, that particular tool was useless, but he could let the cool night air into an Org's gizzard with it, and he knew it. Then my foot hit the edge of the paved circle and I went down, flat on my back on the sand. r T' I he Atlas came after me, and I scrambled back, got to my feet just in time. The knifeblade hissed through the air just under my chin. "You've had it, Ramm," the Atlas said, and swung again. I tried to get the club up for a counter-blow but it was too heavy. I let it drop and drag in the sand. Through a dust-cloud we were making, I saw the Atlas fumbling with his control buttons. Tears welled up in his eyes, sluiced down over his face. He didn't like the dust any better than I did. Maybe not as well... I felt an idea pecking at its shell; a dirty idea, but better than none. The mace was dangling by its thong. I slipped it free, threw it at him; it clanged off his knees and I stooped, came up with a handful of fine sand and as he closed in threw it straight into his face. The effect was striking. His eyes turned to mud pockets. I stepped aside, and he went right past me, making swipes at the air with the big sticker, and I swung in behind him and tilted another handful down inside his neckband. I could hear it grate in the articulated rib armor as he came around. "Ramm, you lousy little -- " I took aim and placed a nice gob square in his vocabulary. He backed off, pumping emergency air to clear the pipes, spouting dust like Mount Aetna, but I knew I had him. The mouth cavity on just about every Servo in the market was a major lube duct; he had enough grit in his gears to stop a Continental Siege Unit. But his mouth was still open, so I funneled in another double handful. He stopped, locked his knee joints, and concentrated on his problem. That gave me my opening to reach out and switch his main circuit-breaker off. He froze. I waited half a minute for the dust to clear, while the crowd roar died away to a kind of confused buzzing, like robbed bees. Then I reached out, put a finger against his chest, and shoved -- just gently. He leaned back, teetered for a second, then toppled over stiff as a lamp post. You could hear the thud all the way to the student bleachers. I held on for another ten seconds, just to make it look good, then kneeled over on top of him. (, , T) ut I was too late," Gully Fishbein's voice was coming up out of a barrel; a barrel full of thick molasses syrup somebody had dumped me into. I opened my mouth to complain and a noise like "glug" came out. "He's awake!" Gully yelped. I started to deny it, but the effort was too much. "Barney, I tried to catch you, but you were already out there." Gully sounded indignant. "Cripes, kid, you should of known I wouldn't let 'em railroad you!" "Don't worry about Ramm," a breezy voice jostled Gully's aside. "Boy, this is the story of the decade! You figure to go up against a Servo again in Org, when you get out of the shop -- I mean hospital? How did it feel to take five thousand volts of DC? You know the experts say it should have killed you. It would have knocked out any Servo on the market -- " "Nix, Baby!" Gully elbowed his way back in again. "My boy's gotta rest. And you can tell the world the Combo's out of business. Now anybody can afford to fight. Me and Barney have put the game back in the hands of the people." "Yeah! The sight of that Atlas, out on its feet -- and Ramm here, in Org, yet, with one finger... " I unglued an eyelid and blinked at half a dozen fuzzy faces like custard pies floating around me. "We'll talk contract with you, Fishbein," somebody said. "... call for some new regulations," somebody said. "... dred thousand cees, first network rights." "... era of the Servo in the arena is over..." "... and maybe not just in the arena." "... hear what Malone says about this. Wow!" "Malone," I heard my voice say, like a boot coming out of mud. "The cr... crook. It was him... put the Sullivan... up to it... " "Up to nothing, Barney," Gully was bending over me. "That was J. J. hisself in that Servo! And here's the payoff. He registered the satisfaction in his own name -- and of course, every fighter in his stable is acting in his name, legally. So when you met Mysterious Marvin and knocked him on his duff you satisfied his claim. You're in the clear, kid. You can relax. There's nothing to worry about." "Oh, Barney!" It was a new voice, a nice soft little squeal of a girl-voice. A neat little Org face with a turned-up nose zeroed in on me, with a worried look in the big brown eyes. "Julie! Where -- I mean, how... ? " "I was there, Barney. I see all your fights, even if -- even if I don't approve. And today -- oh, Barney, you were so brave, so marvelous, out there alone, against that machine..." She sighed and nestled her head against my shoulder. "Gully," I said. "Exactly how long have I got to stay in this place?" "The Servo-tech -- I mean the doc -- says a week anyway." "Set up a wedding for a week from today." J ulie jumped and stared at me. "Oh, Barney! But you -- you know what I said... about those zombies... " "I know." "But, Barney..." Gully didn't know whether to cry or grin. "You mean... ?" "Sell my Servos," I said. "The whole wardrobe. My days of being a pair of TV eyes peeking out of a walking dummy and kidding myself I'm alive are over." "Yeah, but Barney -- a guy with your ideas about what's fun -- like skiing, and riding the jetboards, and surfing, and sky-diving -- you can't take the risks! You only got the one Org Body!" "I found out a couple of things out there tonight, Gully. It takes a live appetite to make a meal a feast. From now on, whatever I do, it'll be me doing it. Clocking records is okay, I guess, but there's some things that it takes an Org to handle." "Like what?" Gully yelled, and went on with a lot more in the same vein. I wasn't listening, though. I was too busy savoring a pair of warm, soft, live lips against mine. I , Harad IV, Chief Scribe, declare that this my writing may be shown only to priests of rank vithin the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church and to the Elders Elect of the Council of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, because here are contained matters concerning the four Vile Heresies that may not be seen or spoken among the people. F or a Proper Consideration of the newest and vilest heresy, we must look in perspective over the events of history. Accordingly, let us go back to the First Year of our epoch when the World Darkness was banished by the Huge God, our truest, biggest Lord, whom all honor and greatly fear. From this present year, # H.G., it is impossible to recall what the world was like then. But from the few records still surviving we can gather something of those times and even perform the Mental Contortions necessary to see how the events must have looked to the sinners then involved in them. The world on which the Huge God found himself was full of I people and their machines, all of them unprepared for his visit. There may have been a hundred thousand times more people than there are now. The Huge God landed in what is now the Sacred Sea, upon which in these days sail some of our most beautiful churches dedicated to his name. At that time, the region was much less pleasing, being broken up into many states possessed by different nations. This was a system of land tenure practiced before our present policies of constant migration and evacuation were formed. The rear legs of the Huge God stretched far down into Africa -- which was then not the island it now is -- almost touching the Congo River, at the sacred spot marked now by the Sacrificial Church of Basoko-Aketi-Ele, and at the sacred spot marked now by the Temple Church of Aden, obliterating the old port of Aden. Some of the Huge God's legs stretched above the Sudan and across what was then the Libyan Kingdom, now part of the Sea of Elder Sorrow, while a foot rested in a city called Tunis on what was then the Tunisian shore. These were some of the legs of the Huge God on his left side. On his right side, his legs blessed and pressed the sands of Saudi Arabia, now called Life Valley, and the foothills of the Caucasus, obliterating the Mount called Ararat in Asia Minor, while the Foremost Leg stretched forward to Russian lands, stamping out immediately the great capital city of Moscow. The body of the Huge God, resting in repose between his mighty legs, settled mainly over three ancient seas, if the Old Records are to be trusted, called the Sea of Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Nile Sea, all of which now form part of the Sacred Sea. He eradicated also with his Great Bulk part of the Black Sea, now called the White Sea, Egypt, Athens, Cyprus and the Balkan Peninsula as far north as Belgrade, now Holy Belgrade, for above this town towered the neck of the Huge God on his First Visit to us mortals, just clearing the roofs of the houses. As for his head, it lifted above the region of mountains that we call Ittaland, which was then named Europe, a populous part of the globe, raised so high that it might easily be seen on a clear day from London, then as now the chief town of the land of the Anglo-French. It was estimated in those first days that the length of the Huge God was some four and a half thousand miles, from rear to nose, with the eight legs each about nine hundred miles long. Now we profess in our Creed that our Huge God changes shape and length and number of legs according to whether he is Pleased or Angry with man. In those days, the nature of God was unknown. No preparation had been made for his coming, though some whispers of the millenium were circulating. Accordingly, the speculation on his nature was far from the truth, and often extremely blasphemous. IT ere is an extract from the noA A torious Gersheimer Paper, which contributed much to the events leading up to the First Crusade in #I H.G. We do not know who the Black Gersheimer was, apart from the meaningless fact that he was a Scientific Prophet at somewhere called Cornell or Carnell, evidently a Church on the American Continent (then a differently shaped territory). "Aerial surveys suggest that this creature -- if one can call it that -- which straddles a line along the Red Sea and across southeast Europe, is non-living, at least as we understand life. It may be merely coincidence that it somewhat resembles an eightfooted lizard, so that we do not necessarily have to worry about the thing being malignant, as some tabloids have suggested." Not all the vile jargon of that distant day is now understandable, but we believe "aerial surveys" to refer to the mechanical flying machines which this last generation of the Godless possessed. Black Gersheimer continues: "If this thing is not life, it may be a piece of galactic debris clinging momentarily to the globe, perhaps like a leaf clinging to a football in the fall. To believe this is not necessarily to alter our scientific concepts of tire universe. Whether the thing represents life or not, we don't have to go all superstitious. We must merely remind ourselves that there are many phenomena in the universe as we conceive it in the light of twentieth-ceitury science which remain unknown to us. However painful this unwanted visitation may be, it is some consolation to think that it will bring us new knowledge -- of ourselves, as well as of the world outside our solar system." Although terms like "galactic debris" have lost their meaning, if they ever had one, tire general trend of this passage is offensively obvious. An embargo is being set up against the worship of the Huge God, with a heretical God of Science set up in his stead. Only one other passage from this offensive mishmash need be considered, but it is a vital one for showing the attitude of mind of Gersheimer and presumably most of his contemporaries. "Naturally enough, the peoples of the world, particularly those who are still lingering on the threshold of civilization, are full of fear these days. They see something supernatural in the at rival of this thing, and I believe that every man, if he is honest, will admit to carrying an echo of that fear in his heart. We can only banish it, and can only meet the chaos into which the world is now plunged, if we retain a galactic picture of our situation in our minds. The very hugeness of this thing that now lies plastered loathsomely across our world is cause for terror. But imagine it in proportion. A centipede is sitting on an orange. Or, to pick an analogy that sounds less repulsive, a little gecko, six inches long, is resting momentarily on a plastic globe of the Earth which is two feet in diameter. It is up to us, the human race, with all the technological forces at our disposal, to unite as never before, and blow this thing, this large and stupid object, into the depths of space from whence it came. Good night." jVTy reasons for repeating this I I initial blasphemy are these : that we can see here in this message from a member of the World Darkness traces of that original sin which -- with all our sacrifices, all our hardships, all our crusades -- we have not yet stamped out. That is why we are now at the greatest Crisis in the history of tire Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, and why the time has come for a Fourth Crusade. The Huge God remained where he was, in what we now refer to as the Sacred Sea Position, for a number of years, absolutely unmoving. For mankind, this was the great formative period of Belief, marking the establishment of the Universal Church, and characterized by many upheavals. The early priests and prophets suffered much that the Word might go round the World, and the blasphemous sects be destroyed, though the Underground Book of Church Lore suggests that many of them were in fact members of earlier churches who, seeing the light, transferred their allegiances. The mighty figure of the Huge God was subjected to many puny insults. The Greatest Weapons of that distant age, forces of technical charlatanry, were called Nuclears. These were dropped on the Huge God -- without having any effect, as might be expected. Walls of fire burnt against him in vain. Our Huge God, whom all honor and fear, is immune from earthly weakness. His body was clothed as it were with Metal -- here lay the seed of the Second Crusade -- but it had not the weakness of metal. His coming to earth met with immediate response from nature. The old winds that prevailed were turned aside about his mighty flanks and blew elsewhere. The effect was to cool the center of Africa, so that the tropical rain forests died and all the creatures in them. In the lands bordering Caspana (then called Persia and Kharkov, say some old accounts), hurricanes of snow fell in a dozen severe winters, blowing far east into India. Elsewhere, all over the world, the coming of the Huge God was felt in the skies, and in freak rainfalls and errant winds, and month-long storms. The oceans also were disturbed, while the great volume of waters displaced by his body poured over the nearof beings and washing away ten thousand dead whales. The land too joined in the upheaval. While the territory under the Huge God's bulk sank, preparing to receive what would later be the Sacred Sea, the land roundabout rose up, forming small hills, such as the broken and savage Dolomines that now guard the southern lands of Ittaland. There were earthquakes and new volcanoes and geysers where water never spurted before and plagues of snakes and blazing forests and many wonderful signs that helped the Early Fathers of our faith to convert the ignorant. Everywhere they went, preaching that only in surrender to him lay salvation. Many Whole Peoples perished at this time of upheaval, such as the Bulgarians, the Egyptians, the Israelites, Moravians, Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Mountain ' Turks, as well as most of the South Slavs, Georgians, Croats, the sturdy Vlaks, and the Greeks and Cypriotic and Cretan races, together with others whose sins were great and names unrecorded in the annals of the church. The Huge God departed from the world in the year #, or some say #. (This was the First Departure, and is celebrated as such in our Church calendar -- though the Catholic Universal Church calls it First Disappearance Day.) He returned in #, great and aweing be his name. T ittle is known of the period  when he was absent from our Earth. We get a glimpse into the mind of the people then when we learn that in the main the nations of Earth greatly rejoiced. The natural upheavals continued, since the oceans poured into the great hollow he had made, forming our beloved and holy Sacred Sea. Great Wars broke out across the face of the globe. His return in #I halted the wars -- a sign of the great peace his presence has brought to his chosen people. But the inhabitants of the world at That Time were not all of our religion, though prophets moved among them, and many were their blasphemies. In the Black Museum attached to the great basilica of Omar and Yemen is documentary evidence that they tried at this period to communicate with the Huge God by means of their machines. Of course they got no reply -- but many men reasoned at this time, in the darkness of their minds, that this was because the God was a Thing, as Black Gersheimer had prophesied. The Huge God, on this his Second Coming, blessed our Earth by settling mainly within the Arctic Circle, or what was then the Arctic Circle, with his body straddling from northern Canada, as it was, over a large peninsula called Alaska, across the Bering Sea and into the northern regions of the Russian lands as far as the River Lena, now the Bay of Lcnn. Some of his rear feet broke far into the Arctic Ice, while others of his forefeet entered the North Pacific Ocean -- but truly to him we are but sand under his feet, and he is indifferent to our mountains or our Climatic Variations. As for his terrible head, it could be seen reaching far into the stratosphere, gleaming with metal sheen, by all the cities along the northern part of America's seaboard, from such vanished towns as Vancouver, Seattle, Edmonton, Portland, Blanco, Reno, and even San Francisco. It was the energetic and sinful nation that possessed these cities that was now most active against the Huge God. The weight of their ungodly scientific civilization was turned against him, but all they managed to do was blow apart their own coastline. Meanwhile, other natural changes were taking place. The mass of the Huge God deflected the earth in its daily roll, so that seasons changed, and in the prophetic books we read how the great trees brought forth their leaves to cover them in the winter, and lost them in the summer. Bats flew in the daytime and women bore forth hairy children. The melting of the ice caps caused great floods, tidal waves and poisonous dews, While in one night we hear that the waters of the Deep were moved, so that the tide went out so far from the Malayan Uplands (as they now are) that the continental peninsula of Blestland was formed in a few hours of what had previously been separate Continents or Islands called Singapore, Sumatra, Indonesia, Java, Sydney, and Australia or Austria. With these powerful signs, our priests could Convert the People, speedily enrolled into the Church. This was the First Great Age of the Church, when the word spread across all the ravaged and transformed globe. Our institutions were formed in the next few generations, notably at the various Councils of the New Church (some of which have since proved to be heretical). XTe were not established with' ' out some difficulty. Many people had to be burned before the rest could feel the faith Burning in Them. But as generations passed, the True Name of the God emerged over a wider and wider area. Only the Americans still clung largely to their base superstition. Fortified by their science, they refused Grace. So in the Year #I the First Crusade was launched, chiefly against them but also against the Irish, whose heretical views had no benefit of science. The Irish were quickly Eradicated, almost to a man. The Americans were more formidable, but this difficulty served only to draw the people closer and unite the Church further. This First Crusade was fought over the First Great Heresy of the Church, the heresy claiming that the Huge God was a Thing not a God, as formulated by Black Gersheimer. It was successfully concluded when the leader of the Americans, Lionel Undermeyer, met the Venerable World Emperor-Bishop, Jon II, and agreed that the messengers of the Church should be free to preach unmolested in America. Possibly a harsher decision could have been forced, as some commentators claim, but by this time both sides were suffering severely from plague and famine, the harvests of the world having failed. It was a happy chance that the population of the world was already cut by more than half, or complete starvation would have followed the reorganization of the seasons. In the churches of the world, the Huge God was asked to give a sign that he had witnessed the great victory over the American unbelievers. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. He answered the prayers in # by moving swiftly forward only a comparatively Small Amount and lying Mainly in the Pacific Ocean, stretching almost as far south as what is now the Antarter, what was then the The Tropic of Capricorn, and what had previously been the Equator. Some of his left legs covered the towns along the west American seaboard as far south as Guadaljara (where the impression of his foot is still marked by the Temple of the Sacred Toe), ineluding some of the towns such as San Francisco already mentioned. We speak of this as the First Shift; it was rightly taken as a striking proof of the Huge God's contempt for America. Hphis feeling became rife in America also. Purified by famine, plague, gigantic earth tremors and other natural disorders, the population could now better accept the words of the priests, all becoming converted to a man. Mass pilgrimages were made to see the great body of the Huge God, stretching from one end of their nation to the other. Bolder pilgrims climbed aboard flying airplanes and flew over his shoulder, across which savage rainstorms played for a hundred years Without Cease. Those that were converted became More Extreme than their brethren older in the faith across the other side of the world. No sooner had the American congregations united with ours than they broke away on a point of doctrine at the Council of Dead Tench (#). This date marks the beginning of the Catholic Universal Sacrificial Church. We of the Orthodox persuasion did not enjoy, in those distant days, the harmony with our American brothers that we do now. The doctrinal point on which the churches split apart was, as is well known, the question of whether humanity should wear clothes that imitated the metallic sheen of the Huge God. It was claimed that this was setting up man in God's Image; but it was a calculated slur on the Orthodox Universal priests, who wore plastic or metal garments in honor of their maker. This developed into the Second Great Heresy. As this long and confused period has been aptly dealt with elsewhere, we may pass over it lightly here, mentioning merely that the quarrel reached its climax in the Second Crusade, which the American Catholic Universals launched against us in #. Because they still had a large preponderance of machines they were able to force their point, to sack various monasteries along the edge of the Sacred Sea, to defile our women and to retire home in glory. Since that time, everyone in the world has worn only garments of wool or fur. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. It would be wrong to emphasize too much the struggles of the past. All this while, the majority of people were peacefully about their worship, being sacrificed regularly, and praying every sunset and sunrise (whenever they might occur) that the Huge God would leave our world, since we were not worthy of him. The Second Crusade left a trail of troubles in its wake. The next fifty years were, on the whole, not happy ones. The American armies returned home to find that the heavy pressure upon their western seaboard had opened up a number of volcanoes along their biggest mountain range, the Rockies. Their country was covered in fire and lava, and their air filled with stinking ash. Rightly, they accepted this as a sign that their conduct left much to be desired in the eyes of the Huge God (for though it has never been proved that he has eyes, he surely Sees Us). Since the rest of the world hacf not been Visited with punishment on quite this scale, they correctly divined that their sin was that they still clung to technology and to the weapons of technology which was against the wishes of God. With their faith strong within them, every last instrument of science, from the Nuclears to the Canopeners, was destroyed, and a hundred thousand virgins of the persuasion were dropped into suitable volcanoes as propitiation. All who opposed these enlightened acts were destroyed, and some were even ceremonially eaten.  ' faith applauded our brothers' whole-hearted action. Yet we could not be sure they had purged themselves enough. Now that they owned no weapons and we still had some, it was clear we could help them in their purgation. Accordingly, a mighty armada of one hundred and sixtysix wooden ships sailed across to America, to help them suffer for the faith -- and incidentally to get back some of our loot. This was the Third Crusade of #, under Jon the Chubby. While the two opposed armies were engaged in battle outside New York, the Second Shift took place. It lasted only a matter of five minutes. In that time, the Huge God turned to his left flank, crawled across the Atlantic as if it were a puddle, moved over Africa, and came to rest in the south Indian Ocean, demolishing Madagascar with one rear foot. Night fell Everywhere on earth. When dawn came, there could hardly have been a single man who did not believe in the power and wisdom of the Huge God, to whose name belongs all Terror and Might. Unhappily, among those who were unable to believe were the contesting armies who were one and all swept under a Wave of Earth and Rock as the God passed. In the ensuing chaos, only one note of sanity prevailed -- the sanity of the Church. The Church established as the Third Great Heresy the idea that any machines were permissible to man against the wishes of God. There was some doctrinal squabble as to whether books counted as machines. It was decided they did, just to be on the safe side. From then on, all men were free to do nothing but labor in the fields and worship, and pray to the Huge God to remove himself to a world more worthy of his might. At the same time, the rate of sacrifices was stepped up, and the Slow-Burning Method was introduced (#). Now followed the great Peace, which lasted till #. In all this time, the Huge God never moved ; it has been truly said that the centuries are but seconds in his sight. Perhaps mankind has never known such a long peace, four hundred years of it -- a peace that existed in his heart if not outside it, because the world was naturally in Some Disorder. The great force of tire Huge God's progress halfway across the world had altered the progression of day and night to a considerable extent. Some legends claim that before the Second Shift, the sun used to rise in the east and set in the west -- the opposite of today's natural order. Gradually, this peaceful period saw some re-establishment of order to the seasons, and some cessation of the floods, showers of blood, hailstorms, earthquakes, deluges of icicles, apparitions of comets, volcanic eruptions, miasmic fogs, destructive winds, blights, plagues of wolves and dragons, tidal waves, yearlong thunder storms, lashing rains and sundry other scourges of which the scriptures of this period speak so eloquently. The Fathers of the Church, retiring to the comparative safety of the inland seas and sunny meadows of Gobiland in Mongolia, established a new orthodoxy well calculated in its rigor of prayer and human burnt-offering to invite the Huge God to leave our poor wretched world for a better and more substantial one. So the story comes to the present -- to the year #, only a decade past as your scribe writes. In that year, the Huge God left our earth! O ecall, if you will, that the  First Departure in # lasted only twenty months. Yet the Huge God has been gone from us already half that number of years! We need him Back. We cannot live without him, as we should have realized Long Ago had we not blasphemed in our hearts! g f music of Her is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John E. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today.  Galaxy Publishing Carp, jj #I Hudson Street,  New York City #  Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi i record of Music from Mathemaj tics right away. I enclose check  or money order for #. i I Nam I i Address I City  State Zip Cade... (Offer good in U. S. A. Only) On his going, he propelled our humble globe on such a course that we are doomed to deepest winter all the year; the sun is far away and shrunken; the seas Freeze half the year; icebergs march across our fields; at midday, it is too dark to read without a rush light; nothing will grow. Woe is us! Yet we deserve everything we get. This is a just punishment, for throughout all the centuries of our epoch, when our kind was so relatively happy and undisturbed, we prayed like fools that the Huge God would leave us. And now he has. I ask all the Elders Elect of the Council to brand those prayers as the Fourth and Greatest Heresy, and to declare that henceforth all men's efforts be completely devoted to calling on the Huge God to return to us at once. I ask also that the sacrifice rate be stepped up again. It is useless to skimp things just because we are running out of women. I ask also that a Fourth Crusade be launched -- fast, before the air starts to freeze in our nostrils! -- Brian W. Aldiss for your information A Sunday afternoon during which periods of heavy downpour and mere rain chased one another through the hours until darkness made me resolve to straighten out my library. This is a recurring but nonperiodic resolution that invariably miscarries, though the reasons are not always the same. This time it miscarried because I came across a book I had never really read : Robert Drury's Journal, "printed for Tho. Won-all, at Judge Coke's Head, near the Temple-Exchange Coffee-House in Fleet Street, London," in #. Robert Drury, a shipwrecked British sailor, had been in Madagascar as a captive for fifteen years, until rescued by Capt. was not really what the name implies, because it was written by him from memory after his return "on eight Quires in Folio, each of near an hundred Pages", that had to be "contracted" by an editor. Madagascar is not "the land of the man-eating tree" since there is no such thing. But it is the home of impressive plants and of many very interesting animals, and I was curious what an obviously intelligent but scientificabout them. In that respect the book was a disappointment, for Drury speaks only of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs -- "eaten only be the very Poor" -- and the only zoological item is a statement that the large "serpent" is without venom. He does apologize at one point, saying that a "person of Curiosity" might have made many observations but that he did not, partly because he was too young (about # when he got there) and partly because his status as a slave forced him to think of day-today things most of the time. But -- and this is what happens when you clean up your library -- I also came across another volume, namely No. # of the Memoires de T Academie Malgache, printed in # and written by Professor C. Larnberton, dealing with an especially interesting aspect of the fauna of Madagascar, namely its "subfossil" animals. The word "subfossil" is one of those terms that is difficult to explain. It refers to bones that are not yet old enough to have become trye fossils. But that does not say anything definite about their age. Depending on climate, area and circumstances, "sub-fossil" might mean as little as # years or as much as # years and even more. In the case of the sub-fossil bones of Madagascar the age limits are probably # years at one end and # years at the other. One important fact should be mentioned right now: there are no human remains among these bones. # T adagascar is one of the large islands on our globe. It is about # miles long with an average width of # miles (# miles at the widest point) and an area of # square miles. It could have been discovered about the year # B.C. when a party of Phoenicians in the pay of the Egyptian ruler Necho sailed south along the east coast of Africa, rounded the southern tip of the continent and reached Egypt again by sailing through the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) into the Mediterranean. But the Phoenicians, like all the sailors of antiquity, sailed within the sight of land if at all. possible and therefore passed the #-mile wide Mozambique Channel that separates Madagascar from the African continent without ever guessing that there was land to their left. At that time Madagascar was, in all probability, still uninhabited by men. The dates of the first discovery and of the first settlements are not known. Most of the later inhabitants were of Malayo-Polynesian stock. And there were a few early Arab settlements; the first Westerner to see the island was the Portuguese captain Diego Diaz on August #, # A.D. Whatever was known about Madagascar prior to # must have come from Arab sources, including the first reference to the island in a western book, namely the travel book of Marco Polo which was written, or rather dictated, in #. He had not been been there himself and the dependence on Arab sources is shown by the statement that "the inhabitants are Saracens, or followers of the law of Mohammed." The numerous other inhabitants are not mentioned at all. While the location and the size of the island are given correctly, everything else Marco Polo says about Madagascar is wrong. What he does say -- namely that elephants abound, that wild boars, giraffes and asses are numerous -- applies to the African mainland on the other side of the channel. Presumably his Arabs had told him about life on their far southern outposts without being too specific of what was where. As a source for the early history of Madagascar, Marco Polo's book is without value, but this chapter contains the first western mention of the "rukh" (the Roc of the Arabian Nights ) as a bird that flies to Madagascar "from the southern regions" at a certain season. "Persons who have seen this bird assert that when the wings are spread, they measure sixteen paces in extent, from point to point; and that the feathers are eight paces in length, and thick in proportion." Marco Polo then went on to say that the Great Khan, being very curious about such a huge bird, sent messengers to the island under a pretext. When the messengers returned they brought with them a feather of the rukh, "positively affirmed to have measured # spans, and the quill part to have been two palms in circumference." It is now generally believed that the "feather" brought to the Great Khan was actually the frond of a Raphia palm. When dry these fronds do look like enormous bird feathers, though their size is only about half of what the report says. The somewhat surprising point is that Marco Polo, a merchant used to weights and measures, made no effort to reconcile the different figures he had heard about. If we take a "pace" to be about three feet, then the eight paces of the first story are about # feet, while the # spans of the "feather" are about # feet. To western readers the Roc is known from the tales of Scheherazade only, and it would be nice if it were possible to establish a date for them. Unfortunately this can not be done because they were not collected into a whole until quite late, during the fifteenth century of our calendar. The earliest mention of the existence of these tales is in Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems by Abu-al-Hasan Ali al-Mas'udi who died in # A.D. The learned al-Mas'udi had no use for them, he called them the Book of the Thousand Khurafas ("whoppers") and just to maintain the reputation of the Arabs he said that they were translations from the Persian and the Greek. It was not so much the foreign origin of the tales that annoyed al-Mas'udi; as a strict Mohammedan he was against any kind of fiction. Even now some of the stricter sects of the Mohammedans are said to condemn all books that are not either religious of strictly factual, such as medical works. The chance mention of the tales is even less helpful since nobody has the faintest idea of whether the tales referred to by alMas'udi are the ones we know or whether he had another set of tales in mind. In the Arabian Nights the Roc appears in Sindbad's second voyage, and no location is given, except that it was an island in a tropical climate. Because of Marco Polo's remarks Sinbad's island was identified with Madagascar by later commentators. Of course nobody took either Marco Polo's Arab sources or the unknown compiler of the tales of Sindbad seriously; but why Madagascar? There was no answer to that question. But as time went on Madagascar continued to contribute stories of large birds. probably the earliest one in modern times is a short remark in the Histoire de la Grande Isle de Madagascar, published in # by the French colonizer Admiral Etienne de Flacourt, who lived on Madagascar for some time and also compiled a dictionary of the Malagassy language. He just said that there was a very large bird living in the loneliest places of the island and laying eggs like an ostrich egg. The natives, he added, call this bird vouroupatra, but since the native word for bird is voron either the admiral or his printer misspelled at least one letter. Etienne de Flacourt's remark was disregarded. Nobody was too much interested in a large bird that did not seem to interfere with any human activity. During the decade from # to # Europeans travelling to the island -- most of them Frenchmen -- suddenly came across enormous egg shells. One saw a half shell being used as a bowl. He tried to buy it, but the natives needed it too badly and would not sell. A few years later, in #, a traveller named Goudot found remains of large eggs and took them with him to Paris. At about the same time a French merchant named Dumarele saw a nearly whole egg. He later told the story to the ship's doctor of H.M.S. Geyser, one John Joliffe, who entered it in his private journal as follows: Leven, on the north-west of the egg, the production of an un"M. Dumarele casually mentioned... that he saw at Port island, the shell of an enormous known bird inhabiting the wilds of the country, which held the almost incredible quantity of thirteen wine quart bottles of fluid!!!, he having himself carefully measured the quantity. It was of the colour and appearance of an ostrich egg, and the substance of the shell was about the thickness of a Spanish dollar, and very hard in texture. It was brought on deck by the natives to be filled with rum, having a tolerably large hole at one end, through which the contents of the egg had been extracted, and which served as the mouth of the vessel. M. Dumarele offered to purchase the egg from the natives, but they declined selling it, stating that it belonged to their chief, and that they could not dispose of it without his permission. The natives said the egg was found in the jungle and observed that such eggs were very very rarely met with, and that the bird which produces them is still more rarely seen." Thus doctor Joliffe in #. He did not doubt Dumarele's word and admitted that there might be such eggs, but thought it equally possible that Dumarele had been "imposed upon by the roguery of the natives." In London they were less skeptical because in # Sir Richard Owen had received a large bone from New Zealand which he found to be the leg bone of a very large ostrich-like bird, the first of the moas to become known. If New Zealand had been inhabited by enormous birds, why not Madagascar? Its existence became "official" in #I when the French merchant Captain Abadie found three eggs and some bone fragments on the southwest coast of the island and brought them to the Adademie des Sciences in Paris. The largest of the eggs measured about #)# by # j # inches, indicating a capacity equal to half a dozen ostrich eggs or nearly # hen's eggs. The bones hinted at an ostrich-like bird, but larger. In order to have a handy and international label for the still poorly known big bird from Madagascar, the French naturalist Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire named it Aepyornis, from the Greek words I aipys ("high" or "tall") and ornis ("bird"), adding maximus as a generic name. This would translate as "the tallest of the tall birds" but this was a mistake. Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire assumed twice the dimensions of the living ostrich, making Aepyomis # feet tall; actually, as we now know, the bird carried its head only about ten feet above the ground. Some of the New Zealand moas were taller (and some more recently discovered South American and African forms may have been taller still), but Aepyornis was probably the most massive bird that ever lived : a full grown specimen may have weighed close to # pounds. Ponds and swamps later yielded bones of Aepyornis in a perfect state of preservation. There were three species of Aepyornis. Aepyornis hildebrandtii was hardly larger than an African ostrich, though more massive. The second, Aepyornis medius was bigger and Aepyornis maximus, the largest. TTverybody, after the gigantic u -y eggs of Aepyornis with their #  gallon capacity had been definitely established, was agreed that the egg of the Roc had been discovered. They were enormous in size and they were found precisely where Marco Polo's Arab sources said: namely on Madagascar. But this identification left two questions open. One was the more scientific one of when Aepyornis became extinct, the other wondered about the statement that the Roc was supposed to have looked like an eagle; Aepyornis certainly did not look that way. As regards the time of its extinction we can probably accept Etienne de Flacourt's statement that they were still alive in #, even though the admiral had not seen them himself. Remember that the French merchant Dumarele was also told -- in about # -- that the birds could still be seen, though very rarely. One of the reasons why this does not sound incredible is the way Dumarele talked about the egg as if it had been a fresh egg that had been emptied of its natural contents by the native for the purpose of making a large jug. It is possible, therefore, that the last survivors of the Aepyornis tribe still existed a little over a century ago. Since then the swampy forests inhabited by the birds seem to have been drained or disappeared for natural rea#. Skeleton of Aepyornis maximum. sons. At any event the chance of still discovering survivors is so close to zero that one doesn't have to think about it. Now for the other question: if the egg of the Roc was the egg of Aepyornis, how come the fully grown bird was described as having the shape of an eagle, or at least a flying bird? The early Arabs that had established settlements or trading posts on Madagascar must have seen them from time to time, though probably only from a distance because the Arab settlements were at the coast while the birds lived inland. I am not digressing if I speak about the feathers for a moment. , The surviving types of such birds, from the New Zealand kiwi to the South American rhea, usually have hair-like feathers. The decorative "plumes" of the African ostrich are an exception. It is very likely, therefore, that the large birds of Madagascar also had hair-like feathers, producing an egg-shaped outline of the body, with a neck and two legs sticking out. Unfortunately we don't know whether the neck was naked or covered with feathers. At any event the outline of Aepyomis, stalking around in a shallow lake with its head down looking for food might well have reminded the Arabs of a chick. But if these large birds, not too clearly seen, were chicks, then the "full grown" bird would have to have about the dimensions of the Roc with an assumed wingspread of about # feet. One did not have to actually see the full grown bird. The sight of its monstrous "chicks" was enough to start the story. r T"he fauna of Madagascar must have undergone quite considerable changes during the last thousand years. A thousand years ago all three species of Aepyornis certainly were still alive and so was Mullerornis, a large flightless bird related to the cassowary, of about the same dimensions as today's ostrich. A large tortoise, named Testudo grandidieri, must have been rather common a thousand years ago. Its carapace measured more than three feet in length and since all large land tortoises are edible the reason for the disappearance of this type does not need a natural catastrophe to be explained. In fact, it may not have disappeared completely. Every once in a while there is a story that is best and most easily explained by such a large and now rare tortoise. The current crocodile is identical with that of Africa, though somewhat smaller; but a larger form, called Crocodylus robustus, with a skull #J# feet in length, is now extinct. The hippopotamus of Madagascar does not seem to have been mentioned by anybody -- unless it went under the. mistaken name of giant hog -- but sub-fossil bones indicate that the animal was a good deal smaller than the living African version. But the typical animals of Madagascar are the lemurs, ranging in size from that of a rat to a very large cat. They are primates like monkeys, apes and people, but they are at the bottom of the primate hierarchy. Most are nocturnal, producing plaintive moans and cries and having large eyes that glow weirdly when a beam of light strikes them. That they struck observers, even professional zo#. The Indris, largest living lemur (over three feet tall) and also the nearest living relative of Megaladapis. ologists, as weird is indicated even by their scientific name, for "lemurs" is derived from the Latin lemures, which meant the shades of the dead, or ghosts. The size range mentioned applies to the living forms only. There were others that were larger, and I feel quite sure that one of them provided Scheherazade with another ingredient for many of her tales: the afreets. Classical writers of the Arab  world have occasionally tried to classify the non-material beings of their mythology, the djinns, ghouls, afreets and so forth, the question being whether they are of Adam's seed or not. It is all quite unclear. The angels are taken to be a special creation of Allah; the others are permitted to exist. But the authors seem to have been uncertain not only in their ideas but in their terminology as well and since this is not my field I am going to use a sentence often used by al-Mas'udi when he was called upon to make a decision. He would then write: "some say this, some say that, God knows best." But in general the djinns seem to be personified dust swirls that materialize into something dreadful. The afreets give the impression of being somewhat more substantial, "with teeth like stones, with eyes like lamps." Of course the afreets were pure imagination. There was nothing in nature that would suggest such a being. There wasn't, that is, until scientists began to find sub-fossil bones, mainly in the southern part of Madagascar. Then the Transactions of the Royal Society of London received a paper by Forsyth Major entitled: "On Megaladapis madagascariensis, an extinct gigantic #. Skull of Mcgalttdapis cdwardsi. Lemuroid from Madagascar." This was in #; ten years later there was definite evidence that this form had been the smallest of three species. The largest, called Megaladapis Edwaidsi, was first described by Dr. Ludwig Lorenz von Liburnau in the publications of the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna (#). The age of the large now-extinct lemuroids is once more "sub-fossil"; they were certainly still alive at the time Julius Caesar reformed the calendar. And a passage in Etienne de Flacourt's book, talking about an animal with the wonderful name of tratratratra -- "as big as a twoyear-old calf, with a round head and a man's face: the forefeet like an ape's and the hindfeet also like an ape's, with frizzy hair and a short tail" -- must refer to one of the large lemuroids, though the specific form may not be known yet to science. Professor Lamberton, who has made a tentative reconstruction, showed the Megaladapis in a four-footed position, but he had to say that a good deal of his reconstruction is hypothetical. One of the unknown factors is the number of vertebrae in the spinal column. The skull is well known, as are the hands and feet, but there seems to be no specimen that was found complete and some mistakes are therefore possible. But even if (which is not certain yet) Megaladapis often walked on all fours, a lemuroid is likely to straighten out on occasion, even if it might have had to hold on to a tree trunk or tree branch to do so. In an upright position even the smallest species of Megaladapis was taller than a man. Admiral de Flacourt said that his tratratratra is as afraid of people as people are of it. But its appearance was not trust-inspiring and just imagine the feelings of an Arab (or any other stranger to Madagascar) of the year #, say, when he ran into a Megaladapis at night. There it stood, vaguely man-like in shape when upright, with man-like hands, black or at least dark in color, with large fangs hanging out of its mouth and its eyes gleaming in the light of the man's torch. "With teeth like rocks and eyes shining like lamps..." Since each was afraid of the other there was mutual flight, but one cannot blame the man for assuming that he had "escaped". He probably thanked Allah for his delivery and then went to his fellow traders to tell what he had seen -- and now the concept of the afreet that may have existed before acquired a bodily shape.      When Jack Vance won his Hugo for The Dragon Masters, it was for a story which had originally appeared in Galaxy. Over the years, many of Jack's best-loved stories have been in this magazine -- most recently The Last Castle in our April issue -- and it is our pleasure to report that the end is not yet in sight. Next issue has his newest novel. In it he continues the vendetta of a man bred for vengeance against the Demon Princes who rule the outlaw reaches of the Galaxy. It's called The Palace of Love -- and love, you will see, can be a terribly deadly weapon! Anne McCaffrey joins us for the first time next issue, too, with The Ship Who Killed. Larry Niven has a novelette of Mars (with craters!) and the men who will explore it, called How the Heroes Die. And we'll have Willy Ley and Algis Budrys, of course, with their regular columns, and as many other stories as we can squeeze in. One of which will, we hope, be the Arthur C. Clarke A Recursion in Metastories which we announced some months ago. To those who have been waiting patiently, our apologies -- but you know it isn't easy to find a spot for what its author calls the longest story ever written! (In spite of the fact that it actually runs something under a thousand words... ) R The city was packed with people -- and if was doomed fo destruction! I I t was late in the summer of # that Biond Smith -- who was and would remain chief of the Disaster Plans Board until the moment he allowed a disaster to get away from him -- called Jothen Kent home from an Australian vacation by announcing the end of the world. Jothen, who had been bubbling away contentedly in a scuba rig off Triton Reef, had waited eight years for that vacation, but as senior water-engineer of a standby city -- one that stood empty until some threatened part of the world's had to be decanted into it -- he knew all along that he was subject to recall, by storm, by earthquake, by famine or by something he had not been trained to imagine. On the other hand, he did not see what good a stand-by city would be at the end of the world, so he was a little resentful at the interruption. One look at Biond, however, and he was worried. World Directors, it was axiomatic, never sounded scared. But Biond was at best nervous and distracted. And small wonder. As the story came out of him in small blurts and pieces of sentences, it began to appear to Jothen that he did have a real block-buster on his hands. "Or a planetbuster," Biond agreed. "This is going to be a fearful business, Jothen. I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later, but still and all we've never been really prepared for it. We wouldn't have been... Damn, I'd better tell you what I'm talking about." "It wouldn't hurt," Jothen said, watching Biond worriedly. "Well, it's like this. We're going to be hit by a meteor. One hell of a meteor -- effective diameter more than a mile." "That doesn't sound very big." "My God Jothen! There's been nothing like it since the Siberian meteorite, eight centuries back, and that was probably rather small. Really we've been very lucky to have gotten away without a major hit for so long. It's going to fall in Canada, and there will be nothing left of the Northwest after that. Nothing!" "From a bolide only a mile across? It must be coming in fast -- but, Biond, I don't have any expertise in this area. What do we know about this thing?" Tiond picked up a stylus and began doodling nervously. "A fair question. Its name is Flavia, after the wife of the astronomer who discovered it, long ago. It was one of those odd little asteroids that used to scare people by coming within every so often and then got lost before anybody'd worked out its orbit. Physically, it's a granite tetrahedron about fourteen miles along the long axis and about eight miles in diameter at the waist. We think it's a crustal fragment of Neferetete II, the big asteroidal protoplanet of which Ceres was probably a moon." Biond threw the stylus down and stared belligerantly at Jothen. "But not one word of this stuff does us any good. We might as well not know it at all." "I'm not so sure," Jothen said with careful calmness. "You said that it's a mile across -- and then, you said it's eight miles across, the short way. Are you trying to break it up, Biond?" "God knows we're trying to break it up," Biond said, with bitter energy. "We thought we might bomb it, but when we thought about what might happen when a radioactive cloud three hundred miles in diameter hit us, we gave up that idea. the rock down to the bottom and planting charges in it, for a start -- three of them killed already -- in the hope of fragmenting it, spreading it out. And I think we can us lasers on one side of it, to boil off some of it and deflect it a little by. vapor pressure. "But when it hits, Jothen, when it hits, it's going to be about a mile in diameter all the same. And do you know what that means, Jothen? Do you know what's going to become of our history-long effort to accommodate all our people? It will all come to nothing, Jothen. Nothing." "It'll be bad, I don't doubt that. But why that bad?" "I have to exaggerate," Biond admitted, "otherwise I can't hope not to be surprised. Physically, only central Canada and the Great Lakes area are likely to suffer direct shock. But that means the destruction of about fifty moderate-sized cities and maybe ten large ones. I can see very little hope of saving the Twin Cities complex, for instance, even though a lot of it will probably be left standing; communications and supplies are going to be knocked out for a long time. Sheer structural damage is only the beginning of the story. That's why I'm going to need your city right away and all the other stand-by cities in the Middle West." "Obviously," Jothen said. "You'll have to evacuate the Twin Cities, and so on." "Oh, yes, but it's worse than that, Jothen -- much worse. We're also going to have to evacuate the Chicago group." "It can't be done!" "My sentiments exactly. However, there it is. Any impediments in your town? Just what shape is Gitler in, anyhow?" "Loaded," Jothen said with a sudden shock of realization. "The Jones Convention is still going on there -- or should be -- if nothing's disbanded it ahead of schedule, while I was in Australia." "No, not that I've heard," Biond said. "A relatively small family convention, I seem to recall, though. That's to our advantage." "Yes, I think I can get them all out of town in no more than three weeks." "One week," Biond said. "Biond, that really is impossible. Sure it's a small family -- them in Gitler, and my staff is small." "One week," Biond said stonily. "Get 'em out. By the end of three weeks, I'll be well started moving in refugees from Chicago. But I don't want any of the Joneses trampled in the rush, either. Get on it, Jothen. Our friend Flavia is on her way -- and she won't wait." A torrent of faces poured  down the penstock of Goring Boulevard distorted with roars of almost religious joy and capped with funny hats. From a glastic-clad overlook just under the roof of the street, Jothen tried to keep his mind on his job, but failed miserably. He had never before seen so many people in all his life, and he did not know whether to be fascinated or terrified. Like most of the world's thousands of small towns, the leafshaped, half-buried sprawl of Gitler, Mo., had been depeople comfortably, but until the Jones Convention it had never been used. Its echoing, dustless emptiness would have seemed oppressive to the ordinary citizen of the pullulating world, but to Jothen, who had spent his working life in Gitler, it was normal. The handful of some ten thousand technicians who maintained the stand-by city -- pending disaster -- was simply swallowed up in the general desertion. They had their own selfsufficient village just under the city's flyport, complete and static -- for children had to leave when they came of age, so that Gitler would not build up an indigenous population of its own -- but on duty they almost never saw each other in groups of more than two or three at a time. In the world at large, that much privacy, impossible except in one's own apartment, would in fact have been a little frightening. But Jothen belonged to the world's privileged class; he was not used to crowds. The Jones Convention went by him regardless, like an avalanche. Plump boys plunking two-stringed kithera, wild-eyed old men charging through the air on super-charged autocrutches, fat sterile women parading squeakily, talking animaldolls with heads like babies and twitchingly animated grotesque family totems of all kinds -- many so tall that their idiot heads bumped along the roof of the boulevard -- went by singing old synthetic songs in old forgotten keys or clinging to dangerous floats blazoned UP lowed by complicated selfblowing kites, pennons and balloons in the shapes of crucifixes, germs, ancestors, birds, insects, hobbits, automobiles, reprints, guardian angels, clotheslines, codas, dragons, horses, taxes and other mythological monsters. "Funny, aren't they?" Alva McGee said, behind Jothen's back. "They scare me, Alva. What are we going to do with all these madmen?" T cGee looked shrewdly at  Jothen, but had nothing more to say for the moment; and Jothen realized suddenly that McGee was as big a puzzle to him as the Joneses. Finding the man assigned to him as an "administrative assistant" for the evacuation of the Joneses had been a surprise, and not entirely a welcome one, particularly after Jothen discovered that McGee's qualifications for the job included the title of Mayor but did not include any special knowledge of the water system or any of the rest of the fine structure of Gitler. Even his title was baffling. No city had had a mayor or been otherwise independent of the over-riding ecology and economy of the over-ridden world, for nearly as many centuries as Jothen had fingers. Apparently, the presence of McGee represented only some last-minute notion of Biond Smith's that the stand-by city's crew would need help with their paper work. It was a notion Jothen somewhat resented, if it was correct. And whatever the answer to this puzzle, Jothen did not judge McGee capable of much help. His specific technical ignorance simply added pedagogy to the press of Jothen's other duties. That much, Jothen could manage to resent from scratch. "They're not as mad as all that," McGee said equably. "They're noisy, but why not? -- they're having a good time. These family conventions are the citizens' one big chance in a lifetime to cut loose and behave almost as anti-socially as they could have every day, back in the Age of Waste." Jothen groaned inwardly. McGee's occasional fits of history were already a cross to him. "It amazes me that Prime Center allows them at all -- the Conventions, I mean," he said. "Therapy, my boy, therapy. Besides, they give Transcorp a golden opportunity to process or more at once, instead of one at a time. All perfectly rational." Jothen pointed to the dolls and banners. "Those are rational?" "No, but they're helpful," McGee said, "if you know what to look for. All those things are just rags and tags of quasi-religious traditions -- a kind of Jungian-Gravesian substrate, decorated with vague memories of lesser cults. They imply all sorts of beliefs, not all of them quite extinct: reincarnation, racial memory, ancestor worship, telepathy, historical fatalism, traditional supernaturalism, momism -- " " Whoa  " Jothen said desperately, quite unaware of the totem he was himself calling upon. " -- but the Joneses don't know any of that. Lucky for us; if worse comes to worst, those things give us handles to manipulate them by." "Good. Go manipulate them, Alva. I've got to check the water, the food, the power supplies from top to bottom and help the rest of the city's operating crew make Gitler ready for occupancy. In the meantime, I want the Joneses gotten out, by any form of transportation you think convenient -- the tubes would probably be best, but check Transcorp for advice. If you need any help, you can always call me; I'll be aloft. All clear?" "As you command, effendi." McGee made an exaggerated bow and started to leave. Then he thought better of it. He said, "Jothen, have you ever heard of a ward-heeler?" "No. What is it? Another Jones totem?" "Not precisely. See you later. I won't call unless I have to." He slipped away, quietly for so tubby and talkative a man. Below, the torrent of faces poured along as noisily as ever. Jothen was relieved to be able to get away from them both. Nevertheless, maybe McGee was going to have his uses after all. To do him justice, he had already eased Jothen's worries a little, by reminding the harried engineer that some moderately large proportion of the Joneses -- perhaps as many as twenty-five percent -- probably did not need to be sent home at all. As members of a chiefly North American clan, that many probably lived within the areas due to be affected by the arrival of Fla via; and there would be no sense in shipping them back there. Since their specialties (those of them who were employed) would no longer be needed at home, a lot of them would simply be exported right back to Gitler. It would take a little paper-and computer-work to identify this sub-group; but that was precisely the kind of thing that McGee was supposed to be good at, while the very idea itself had not occurred to Jothen. It had occurred, however, to one Fongavaro Jones. II I t was, in fact, the main reason why Fongavaro was at the moment hiding in one of the deepest service tunnels of Gitler, feeling like a hunted man. He was not exactly hunted, yet, though he was looking forward to it. Instead, he was stalking a Rest Stop, just for the practice, since again he did not expect that there would be anyone in it. Not yet. Fongavaro was classified by systems specialist and hence, like Jothen, was one of those most fortunate of all citizens, a man with a job. But there tire resemblance ended. He looked rather more like an orangutan, a stocky, muscular man with long arms and large hands. In his native city -- Tananarive, in Madagascar -- he probably would have attracted no attention; but in these dim, empty corridors he was a startling, perhaps even a fearsome figure. Of this he was well aware. Moreover, he was counting on it. If the usual Jones was as crazy as Jothen took them all to be -- which was doubtful -- then in this too, Fongavaro was a specialist. A great part of his life had been spent in the labyrinthine service tunnels between the walls and under the floors of Tananarive, and he was thoroughly suited for it; in an earlier age, he might have been a spelunker. Beyond the avermild case of agoraphobia, he actively enjoyed living at the bottom of a hole. The pleasure had been completely unconscious, simply because, until very recently, nothing had ever suggested any other way of living to him; he had been as adjusted as a mole. Then had come the journey to the Jones Convention -- his first venture outside his own city, his first sight of the whole blue void of the sky, his first projection into nothingness on a jet plane, his first direct encounter with the boundless expanses of the sea and of the World Forest. Until it happened', he had thought of the trip only as a sort of longer, duller version of a tubeways jaunt from one Madagascan village to another. He had of course known that he would have to fly part of the way to Gitler, but he had never dreamed that it would be like that. He spent the whole air trip falling, falling helplessly out of his chair, desperately nauseated, struggling not to look out the window, feeling stifled and trapped by his harness, fighting against the pills and injections they tried (successfully once or twice) to give him and, above all, raging at how his own body, his own ignorance, his own gullibility, his own manhood had betrayed him. The ordeal had been terrifying beyond belief -- but worse than that, it had been humiliating... totally humiliating. He had no intention of ever facing it again. The early recall of the Joneses startled him a little, but did not dismay him. He had already known precisely what he was going to do, as soon as he found that there was no official place in Gitler for him (which he had also expected). It was simplicity itself to hole up in the service tunnels of Gitler, in a sector that had never been occupied by the Joneses or anyone else. The system was not identical with that of Tananarive, but the similarities were close enough for his purposes. r T"he Rest Stops, here as at home, were located at strategic points throughout the network for the convenience of the maintainence staff, when they were on tours of inspection. Except that they had no windows, the Stops differed little from the average man's apartment: eight rooms with complete living facilities, including autoservers, so that staffmen could remain on tour for days at a time without having to return to the home technie village under the flyport. In a mostly empty stand-by city, no keys to the Stops were needed. As long as Fongavaro could stay clear of Gitler's own crew, in short, he had it made. He could go underground and stay there. With the second general announcement, however -- that Gitler was soon to be occupied by a still greater horde than the Joneses, this time of refugees -- he was less pleased. As was usual procedure every day and around the clock in any working, occupied city, two-and three-man teams would now be fanning out through the tunnels to check the utilities, and the Rest Stops would be needed. From now on, Fongavaro knew, he would have a tough time remaining undiscovered. All the same, he was never going to go back to Tananarive -- not for Jothen Kent, nor for Jones herself. To prevent that, any alternative was thinkable. The next Rest Stop was before him at the end of the corridor, its closed iris door looking as cozy as the entrance to a burrow. He stopped just around the bend and listened. No, there was nobody inside -- the little green telltales showed that -- but nevertheless he thought he had heard a movement. There it was again. Footsteps -- one set of them. Somebody was behind him. The steps were confident, unhurried and not at all furtive. Fongavaro did not think that he was being stalked. It was probably just a service man. But from here on, the corridor was a blind alley. All right, let him come on. Fongavaro glided silently through the Rest Stop door, which irised shut as silently behind him. The telltale, of course, turned yellow; but that couldn't be prevented -- and besides, the newcomer would probably welcome the idea of company. He was going to get it. Any alternative was thinkable N ot much more than three Smith's spoilage crew toiled clumsily in their vacuum suits, chewing steadily in Flavia's vitals with prolapse drills. They had less than two weeks left to break up the asteroid, before the lasers would focus on her remaining mass and turn her into a lopsided sunlet; but thus far, even with the loss of three lives, they had not succeeded in doing much more to her than spoiling her shape. An alarm sounded in their ped. It was time for another blast on tire Earthward side of the planetoid. Inevitably, some of the resulting pieces would take off for Earth a good deal faster than Flavia herself was already travelling, but that would just have to be borne, since it would concomitantly slow as well as lighten the main mass. There was a thudding jar deep in the rock, a soundless flash of yellow light, a slowly spreading cloud of dust in the eternal sunlight. The men went back to work. Somehow Flavia did not look a single inch smaller to them than she had before. TTis honeycomb helmet unacA " customedly heavy on his head and shoulders, Jothen rode up a secondary utility stack toward Gitler's main distribution center. The Joneses, once out of his sight, were also almost out of his mind except en masse, as an abstract complex of technical problems; but those were quite complex enough to suit him. He would let McGee deal with the Joneses as people, as long as possible. He stopped at the next way station and phoned Piscetti, his chief of operations. "Everything's normal on the lines," Piscetti reported. "But of us -- Guivrec Krantz." "My God. Who... where -- " "I don't know who. Where, in Rest Stop BB-#, way down in the bottom levels, strictly nonresidential and always were. He was strangled. It looks like he was taken by surprise, because there's no sign of a struggle." "All the rest of our people accounted for, I hope?" "Yes," Piscetti said. "I checked that right away -- none of them has been anywhere near that area in at least a year. It has to have been one of those crazy Joneses, somehow or other." "Crazy is the word for it. See what else the computer can give you. The man may have given himself away in some way -- a minor arrest, a lost ration-card, some other such bit of business. Anybody who's got a special record of any sort." "I'll try it," Piscetti's voice said dubiously. "All right. I'd like to stop him fast if we can. We've got enough trouble as it is. I'm going on up to Distribution, and I'll call you from there." Nearly in shock -- for though Guivrec had not been a close friend, he had known the man casually, and the maintainance crew was jealous of its own -- Jothen resumed his ride up the stack. It discharged him at last into the throbbing darkness of the distribution center, its gloom relieved only here and there by the little stars of telltales and safelights. It was not a reassuring place to be under the circumstances, familiar though it was. He felt distinctly uneasy, and his eyes kept darting off into comers. Knotted across the far-away ceiling were the complexes of pipes which tapped shunts from the main overhead supply line. That colossal feeder -- so large in diameter that it could accommodate a six-man personnel capsule and now and then actually did -- served chiefly to bring in Gitler's water supply direct from the water table up north, but that Was far from all that it carried. It also bore food, fuels, rock slurries and almost every other kind of supplies or semi-processed materials which could be moved in the form of self-contained peristaltic packages. Most of this material either originated with or had been routed through the Municipal Services Center in the Kansas City complex. The pipeline was Gitler's jugular vein. At the moment, there seemed to be something wrong with the sound that it was making. Jothen doubted that he ought to be alarmed... at least as yet. Though he knew most of its moods as well as a crechemother knows the noises of a nursery, it seemed' logical to him that the master conduit might make a sound new to him, when it was approaching peak load -- as in preparation for the refugee influx it was now doing for the first time in its history. After all, until the Joneses had arrived, it had effectively just been sitting there since Gitler was built, seventy years ago; the burden of the technie village alone was small. Still, it was second nature in him, just as it would have been with a creche-mother, to check such matters. Climbing through the dimness to a cat-walk where there was a slave meter-board for the Traffic computer, he called for a read-out on pressures, rates of flow and what kinds of loads Kansas City said it was sending. F or an eternal fifteen seconds, he found it impossible to believe what he saw. Maybe it was not, after all, as bad as it seemed. As a last precaution, he asked for a Chicago manifest for the day. Then he pushed every red button in sight. The Joneses -- all but one of them -- heard nothing but the continued bawling of the public address system, directing them to the tubeways and, then, Jothen's voice calling for McGee. But the work areas, the machinery decks, the utility stacks, the technician's village and homes all jangled and squalled with leather-lunged alarm. After a while, lights on " the slaw board showed that Jothen's emergency staffmen were coming onto their posts; but it was several minutes more, before the phone rang to bring in McGee's voice. "What's the matter, Jothen? Everything's going swimmingly down here -- or at least it was until now." "You may have to swim for it in earnest," Jothen said grimly. "Where are you concentrating your people?" "At the tubeway stations, just as you suggested." "Yes, but which ones? The main outgoing depots, in the sub-basement?... That's what I was afraid of. The thing is, there's a very good chance that our prime feeder line up here is going to show a major break in about ninety minutes." "How come? It's hardly ever been used!" "That's probably the trouble," Jothen said. "Evidently there was a small flaw to begin with, or else it crystalized out during disuse -- and I suppose the first strains, after the Joneses came in, made it worse. Anyhow there's a weak patch where a shunt goes off toward the flyport fuel tanks. I still think it's nothing we couldn't handle normally, but Chicago is shipping us a big bolus of pre-melted gallium as a moderator to start our main nuclear pile with, and when that hits that bend -- " "Why didn't your computer show that shipment long ago?" McGee broke in irritably. "It hasn't come onto the Kansas City block yet; I just picked it up off the dispatcher's waybill from Chicago. Anyhow we'll get nowhere arguing with it; it's on the way." "All right, but it still seems like a sloppy way to run a pipeline. What do you want me to do?" "Get everybody up to the roof," Jothen said. "We'll have to evacuate them from the flyport and from the terraces, too. Luckily there's plenty of roof space and no air traffic to speak of." es -- in ninety minutes? Miracles aren't my specialty, Jothen." "We won't have to evacuate them in that time, just get them aloft. You may have ten extra minutes, even after the main breaks. It'll probably be that long before the liquid parts of the load cascade down to you. I'm hoping some of the gallium will solidify fast enough to block off some of the semi-hard junk in the pipe, but I can't count on it -- its melting point is around eighty-five, and the temperature up here is only fifteen degrees below that right now. Better move fast -- and good luck." "Thanks," McGee said, with more than a hint of irony. J othen cut over to another line. "Piscetti, Jothen here. Any chance of our moving a nuggetgrade coal hopper into the shunt room in time to catch -- ?... Too bad. Okay, in that event the first thing I want is a fluted baffle over the shunt-room drain, so the gallium won't plug it; check storage for something light enough to truck in here fast. Set it up so that it slants the stuff off into the utility stack... Yes, but I'd rather have to chip spray out of the stack than try to free metal chunks from a roomful of frozen valves... "Damn it, I know we ought to drain the aero fuel, but we'll need it up there for the incoming evacuation ferries -- and besides, where'd you suggest draining it to? Do you want it stored under a jet of hot gallium?... Right. Now -- I'm closing the living areas in ten minutes and putting all public stairs and walkways off limits to the crew, to give McGee queue space; we'll use the stacks only. Also, there'll be a gas alarm in thirty minutes for the work areas; whatever that stew from the pipes generates when it mixes, we dor want to breathe it. Got all th .? Timing starts in fifteen seconds... Mark." "Mark," Piscetti said unemotionally, and his light went out. Overhead, the great pipeline gave a premonitory groan. Jothen yanked the power jack out of the slave board, resettled the honeycomb helmet and ran for cover, hoping that the master computer had eavesdropped and understood his timing instructions. It took him four minutes plus to make the main gallery overlooking the pump hall. Fronted with polarized, laminated glastic, the gallery was theoretically immune to heat shock, and to most mechanical insults. If it wasn't, Jothen would be allowed only a few seconds of life to regret it; he had to stay here until the accident arrived, since the gallery held the only gang board he could have hoped to have reached beforehand. Pulling down his gas mask, he checked the timing: yes -- the computer was clocking both deadlines. The hot line from Kansas City was producing a silent red scream. He snapped it open. "Gitler, are you aware that a capsule of molten gallium -- " "Yes," Jothen said grimly. "Why didn't you stop it, KC?" "It had crash priority. What's the matter, can't you handle it?" "No -- but now we've got to try. Get off the line, we've got troubles enough." h ;m mi"Very well, Gitler. However, please record that we're shunting the river around you as of now." "What!" Jothen shouted. "Listen, get me a senior monitor up there -- this is no time for computer handling. We can't do without the river -- " "This is monitor control." "But... how do we drain off this mess you sent us, then?" "You'll have to store it," KC said primly. "Store it in what?" "Your problem, Gitler. We can't allow you to contaminate the water table downstream. Good luck. Out." "Out upon you, you -- " The KC line went dead. "Piscetti -- Piscetti!... Oh, damn... Master computer! Give me a radio-active storage deadhead!" "Radio storage tanks are sealed," Gitler's computer said. "Open them, and reroute all drainage channels for receipt of sewage." "No access," the computer said. "Radio storage is under gency dumping of nuclear wastes." J othen shut the mike off for a moment and swore. Obviously he could not dump the city's two working power piles; that would leave the whole of Gitler without electricity. But on the other hand, what choice did he have? He had to get rid of the incoming garbage somehow, and the river was closed to him. "Dump the technie village pile in -- let me see -- twelve minutes after the mark. Dump the city's stand-by pile three minutes thereafter, barring a countermanding order from me and nobody else. At eighteen minutes, shunt all city effluent into the radio storage tanks. And give me a rate-of-fill estimate for the tanks, keyed to radiation hazard for personnel in the subbasements." "Minirads for personnel will be reached in fourteen minutes after the mark," the computer said, with perfect indifference. "Radio storage capacity will fill and reseal at two hours aught two minutes. Subbasements will be uninhabitable for personnel thereafter for approximately twenty-eight thousand, five hundred and thirty-nine years, give or take four years." "That's no good. Advise Kansas City River Control that we will overflow hot onto the water table after one hour unless they let us spill into the river instead and give them a complete rundown on what isotopes to expect, halflives and all. Don't tell me, tell them. Also, tell Radio-Census Washingtongrad we're going to have a long-term hot spot underground here, same data. Mark and move on all orders when I switch out." "Ready to mark," the computer said, almost as disinterestedly as Piscetti. "All right. Out." Another call light lit. It was Piscetti back again. "Hello, Jothen, glad I located you. I've been picking up your program. But I've got something else, too. I think we've identified the murderer." Jothen was astonished to discover that he had forgotten all about the death of Guivrec. "Who is it?" "A Madagascan technie named Fongavaro Jones. He tried to join our maintenance staff a day or so after he got here, but Tananarive -- that's his home town -- wouldn't release him. Then he disappeared, and there have been unexplained small drains on the Rest Spots in the murder area ever since." "Sounds convincing." "There's more. The news leaked out somehow, and the rest of the Joneses have been blowing up the rumors in the usual way. The last version I heard was that a homicidal maniac is on the loose with a laser metal-cutter. They say he's already killed and dismembered fifteen people." "I'm not surprised," Jothen said grimly. "No, but it's still feeding back. Fongavaro evidently has been listening in from one Rest Stop or another, because he now seems to have the idea he can frighten everybody away -- maintainence staff included -- and have the city all to himself. He just tried to broadcast a general warning, something very grisly about the Stalker Who Strikes Unseen -- wonder what he's been reading lately? Anyhow, the computer intercepted it, compared the voice with the one recorded on the transfer application, and there we were. It's Fongavaro, all right." "And psychotic for sure. Put a squad after him, but don't risk them unnecessarily -- that area's due to be flooded. I'd rather have him just kept below than captured if there's no other alternative." "Will do. Be sure you get out yourself." "Right. Out." A sharp hiss from the shunt room made him jump, but it was only the discharge lock, splitting lengthwise to emit a capsule whose green cocarde said it contained pine-nut flour. It lay quiescent on its receiving truck for a moment like a fat, white worm, its flexible sides still glistening with the water that had pushed it into Gitler. Then the truck hummed away with it along the tracks toward the community kitchens. The groan he had heard earlier must have been in response to the arrival of that load; evidently the crystallized spot in the main line was in even worse shape than he had feared. The discharge lock had already closed, and at the moment the usual torrent of water was rushing along the line in its usual silence -- but that wouldn't last. He glanced at the clocks: only three minutes to go! It seemed impossible that so much time had already passed; yet now that he was watching the tumblers and sweep-hands, they seemed to freeze into immobility. The last sixty seconds were the longest in his life. Was it never going to happen -- The line groaned once more. Then, with a crack like the snapping of a treebole, the main line split. Water jetted out of it. Under the intense pressure behind it, the jet was as smooth and hard as a sheet of glass; and it shattered like glass when it hit the baffle over the drain. The air in the hall became one solid, terrible shriek. Were it not for the glastic barriers, the sound alone would have killed him. He looked quickly over his shoulder to make sure that the one-man lift to the flyport control tower was still standing open and ready. At that instant, the noise stopped. In the aching, intolerable silence, the crack in the main lengthened, and something white came swelling out of it like an obscene balloon -- the gallium capsule or a pseudopod of it. Jothen did not wait for the sequel. He was into the little drum-shaped lift and shooting skyward in six seconds flat. Beneath him, the computer stolidly continued to watch, filming a miscalculation it could have prevented, had anybody had time to ask it esoteric and unlikely questions about rareearth chemistry. As the hot spray of silvery metal hit the moist air of the shunt room, most of the trivalent stuff converted to the sesquioxide. The air seethed. Spitting like dragon's poison, the oxide flakes struck the baffle, which was magnesium only slightly alloyed to prevent burning. As it splashed over the baffle, the dragon's spittle reduced to metallic gallium again, promptly and violently. The explosion shook the top levels of Gitler like a temblor. Jothen's car, the compressed air on which it was riding snatched out from under it, slammed to a stop halfway to the flyport control tower. Trembling and swearing, Jothen began to climb the rest of the way. Anyhow, he thought so much for Fongavaro Jones. He had never before had so prompt an answer. From somewhere behind him, a shot pierced his temporary deafness and ricocheted, squealing away from the riser three inches from his left foot, leaving a bright weal in the metal. Ill I t had been easy enough for Fongavaro to come by the gun. Except for the very small and inexperienced police squad -- half of which was already hunting for him -- nobody in Gitler went armed, of course; but here, as in Tananarive and in every other city, there was a small cache of sidearms in every fifth Rest Stop, stored there for the technics' use against the possibility of a really major riot. Though he had never fired a gun and expected to continue to prefer strangulation, Fongavaro had appropriated a pistol early on, just in case. It would probably have been rather more difficult for him to say exactly when he had come to believe that Jothen Kent was the principal agent of all his troubles. In one sense, the realization had swept over him, when he had listened in on the Gitler official's directions for hunting him down or allowing him to drown. At least, it was then that en Kent would now be only selfdefense. But in another sense, it seemed to him that he had always known it. After all, it must have been Kent who had turned down his original petition to be transferred to Gitler's working crew; surely no computer would have been entrusted with an application so important. It was on Kent's order that the Joneses were being evacuated, obviously a transparent maneuver to ship Fongavaro home by force under cover of a fake emergency -- what sane man would believe that story about a giant meteor? -- no matter how many other people's civil rights were violated in the process. And surely it must have been Kent who had cunningly alerted the computer to any possible further message from the fugitive. Fongavaro knew something about computers and had carefully and cleverly worded his warning to get it past any mechanical intelligence that lacked the guidance of a human enemy. But for Kent, it couldn't have failed. In any event, it was now perfactly clear that Fongavaro could not hope to have Gitler to himself while Jothen Kent was alive. Without Kent the evacuation of the Joneses would fall apart -- this McGee, with whom Kent was trying to confuse him, was obviously only some sort of minor politician or other flunky -- then be easy to panic. In addition, the hounding of Fongavaro himself would stop, deprived of the leadership of the one man who was really out to get him. It all made perfect sense. Avoiding the patrols and getting out of the subbasements was simple. After all, he could hear every order that Kent issued, even those that didn't seem to bear directly on hunting him down. For the same reason, finding where Kent was working and was planning to go next had been equally easy. Fongavaro worked his way cautiously up the utility stack, stalking the stalker. The explosion threw him and enraged him. He had not expected Kent to be ready to destroy a part of the city to get him. He was almost as surprised to see his prey erupt from the lift-shaft in mid-air, so to speak, and go on up toward the flyport on foot. But he was determined to let nothing that Kent could do rattle him -- nothing! Regaining his footing, he pointed the gun. Of course, he missed and nearly lost hold of the little automatic, to boot. But it did not look like he had missed by much. He took aim again, this time using both hands. "Fongavaro!" That was Kent's voice, echoing down the stack. It was bound to be a trick. "Fongavaro! Cut it out, man! Don't you want to get out of this alive?" "I'm not getting out," Fongavaro said -- to his own surprise, for he had not meant to answer at all. "You can't scare me away -- " "Then you're being a damn fool. The main feeder line's broken, and the city's flooding. Throw away the gun and come on aloft with me. I'll help you if I can. There are planes up there, waiting to take you all home." At the word "planes," the whole of the stack washed out into a red blur, and Fongavaro's ears roared with the pulsing of his own blood. Through the pounding confusion, he heard the gun go off... but when he could see again, Jothen Kent had vanished. r T"he providential emergency exit debouched Jothen into a section of the city with which he was unfamilar -- and worse, it was empty. It appeared to be a residential area, perhaps the topmost one under the technie village. The air of the street was full of settling dust, which confused him further, since he had never seen such a thing before. He could only guess that it was some aftermath of the explosion and was glad his gas mask was in place. There was of course no way to lock the emergency exit, and he wasted no time seeking ways to jam or block it. His only impulse was to run. He did not like being shot at. But run to where? In the distance, he heard a compound rumble of many voices, some of them shouting. That might just be the sound of a column of Joneses, being led up motorstairs toward the roof. If so, there might be one or two of his own men there who would be armed; or at worst, he ought to be able to lose himself in the crowd. Panting, he took off. There was a blurred yell, hardly human, behind him and then another shot. How many rounds did that gun have in it, anyhow? He remembered, not too certainly, that the standard automatic was a high-velocity weapon that bit tiny splinters of lead azide off the end of a roll of plastic-fill tape; if Fongavaro had one of those, it was good for a least a hundred tries at Jothen before even a dub at guns would have to try to reload it or throw it away. Jothen promptly tried to run faster, but short of free flight he was already making better time than he would have thought possible before. He careened around a circle of silently watching coupon shops, all as empty of merchandise as they were of people, and slowed down at the main entrance to another utility stack. It was sealed -- by his own order. But the crowd noise now seemed quite close. Cutting down a deserted avenue, he found himself charging now into an exchange plaza. His heart gave a bound of hope. The plaza was full of pushing, flushed, scared figures in torn costumes -- some carrying or tugging at quarreling or squalling children, others dragging baggage they had never had to tote before, still others finding it difficult to shuffle their own two feet. From the midst of the mob, two broad spiral escalators, twined around each other like twinned genes, wound upward through the remote roof, packet with restive Joneses. He tried to work his way through them and was indignantly shoved back at, until the people around him took second looks at him and saw the honeycomb helmet. Then they gave way, but slowly and sullenly. The Gitler crew was not, it was painfully clear, very popular around here at the moment. Slow though his progress was, Jothen should have been pleased with it, for he was surely quite buried in this mass of flesh now. But instead he felt stifled, he himself on the verge of panic. Sweating, he went on shouldering his way forward, trying to pull through the gas mask thick, wet air that had no odor but completely refused to move into his lungs. The helmet jolted suddenly on his head and shoulders as he jammed himself onto the nearest escalator: somebody had tried to punch him where it usually counted. Then he was on the stairs and being swung up and up, around and around, and the plaza was fading into a lake of bent heads and angry upturned faces. Breathing a long sigh of relief, he looked back at the boulevard by which he had come galloping into this press. F ongavaro was standing there, the street empty behind him, his monkey body and ragged filth marking him off from the other costumes almost as readily as the neat, viscious little gun in his hand. Jothen felt an impulse to thumb his nose; but at the same moment, the foreshortened Madagascar raised the pistol at the end of both long arms and fired it squarely at Jothen's head. How could he tell which of all these stair-riders -- The helmet! Even among all these unintelligibly costumed people, there could be no mistaking that bulging, functional carapace; it said Gitler to all the Joneses, and Jothen to Fongavaro, like a scarlet tattoo. And Jothen did not dare take it off, even if the spiral swath of bodies around him had left any cranny in which to hide it; it was now his only contact with Piscetti, with McGee, with the crew, with the world-at-large. Where the hell was the armed squad? How long was this damned go-around motor-stair ride going to take? How far up -- Splat! The sound of the automatic was only a stitch in the fabric of the crowd's noise, but Jothen -- and probably Jothen alone -- could hear it all to well. He flinched helplessly inside the honeycomb, feeling as though the whole front of his helmeted head was one enormous target. But Fongavaro, amazingly, did not seem to think he was getting anywhere at all. Jamming the still-potent gun somewhere inside his rags, he scuttled almost on his knuckles along the fringes of the mob until he came upon a fat and fussy old Jones in a Pierrot suit who seemed to be trying to load his life's possessions into a battered but still floating autocrutch. Dumping the oldster and the luggage with a single brutal sweep of his forearms, Fongavaro straddled the machine and scooted in a long, wabbly parabola toward the top of the motor-stair tree. The hole in the ceiling swallowed Jothen, before he saw the end of that crazy ride. He was just as glad, but he knew better now than to draw any deep breaths; he was still on the run. The next level was the floor of the technie village, quiet and bucolic and familiar ordinarily. Now it was a shambles. The overflow Joneses -- out of sight and hence out of mind of Gitler's few and tentative police -- were making up for the loss of their totems and baggage by looting the technie's homes. There was nobody around to prevent them or even to herd them back toward the roof; they were spreading out all through the level, giggling, singing and throwing bottles at each other. Fuming with indignation, Jothen threw a leg over the stairs to get back down to the floor; somebody had to break up this orgy -- Splat! Another poisonous, explosive little bullet flew by his helmet and drove him back to his main interest: flight. Casting frantically about for the shot's source, Jothen saw Fongavaro rowelling his autocrutch, riding tail-up and sidewise, out of the mouth of a ventilator shaft about half a mile away. The Madagascan's expression was unreadable at this distance, but his whole posture telegraphed black murder in any language. There had to be some way out of this cul-de-sac. It was ridiculous that Fongavaro should be able to make better time through the pores and doors of Gitler than Jothen himself could. The technies' access shaft to the flyport control tower had to be on this level. If only he could bull his way off these damn stairs -- Like a scuba diver, Jothen rolled over the moving handrail of the stairs and dropped to the floor of the village. Fongavaro banked around the stairs and swooped down over the heads of his scampering cousins; but he was having a hard time with the lurching autocrutch, which had not been designed for aerobatics. He overshot Jothen so fast that he nearly rammed into the far side of the square. While he was still fighting to regain control of his clumsy metal broomstick, more than half of the lights dimmed and went out, to a groan of dismay from the Joneses. The computer, restricted now to battery power, was economizing. The sudden gloom was just what Jothen needed. By the time Fongavaro was in condition to look for his quarry again, Jothen was already in the lift. IV C C IT Xl. as anybody got a gun?" In the control tower, heads turned blindly toward Jothen, with the tense impatience of men distracted from serious work by nonsense. Then one of the crew recognized him. "I think there are some signal pistols up here, Mr. Kent. If they're still operative. We don't expect to need them." "Won't do. I mean a gun I can kill somebody with." "Kill somebody -- ? No, sir, nothing of that sort?" the tower man said stiffly, and went back to work. Only one other operator had been listening to the brief exchange with less than half of his attention. His expression clearly showed that he thought he had probably missed a key word somewhere. Jothen sighed and looked out over the flyport. From here he could see no trace of the explosion, unless he counted a small but rapidly rising column of white smoke from a ventilator head about a mile away. The rest was silence. Beginning right at the edge of the flyport, the Monterrey pines, hybrid poplars, bamboo and giant sugar-cane -- the food of the world -- covered the whole of Gitler, marching solemnly down the terraces and Chinese Avails and joining the rest of the World Forest so smoothly that the city's edges were impossible to define from the air. From here, the world was in a pastoral sleep. Overhead, the autumn dusk was deepening, soft and clear. There was no moon, but already the night gave promise of a blaze of stars with, of course, no sky-glare to mock them. Among one constellation's scatter of suns -- he could not tell which -- Jothen could make out several distant moving lights: probably the first planes of the ferry fleet. Transcorp had moved fast, as usual. Evidently McGee had also moved fast. A growing murmur of many voices, like a distant sea, told Jothen that a surf of Joneses was already out on the roof of that city. He could see several amoeboid batches of them, dim and sad in their drooping finery, clumping together like slime-molds on the flyport's staging apron; but most of them were invisible, masked by the trees. That accounted in part for the uneasy edge to the susurrus. Ordinarily, nobody was allowed in the World Forest but Rangers and repairmen of the Pipeline Corps, and the Joneses doubtless were finding the open air and the towering silent woods disquieting. "Let's stick together, friends and clansmen!" McGee's voice bellowed suddenly. He was using a bullhorn, but even so his voice was tinny with the distance. "Don't wander, don't wander! There's grandfathers in them trees! Stay by the flyport -- don't get left behind!" "Up your Jones!" a much tinier voice shouted. A ragged chorus returned the cheer. "That's it! Up Joneses! Stay close!" McGee seemed to be managing -- so far, so good. But what had happened to Fongavaro? And why was it so dark? The Joneses should find it easier to stick close to the flyport if they could see its lights, but those were steadily going out. Even the beacons were mostly dead. Jothen pulled his cheek-mike into place to reassume direction of his city and found that that, too, was dead. The computer's economy measures were becoming drastic. It could not be faulted for that; battery power does not last very long. But the power failure was damn dangerous and would complicate the evacuation; even if the motorstairs continued to work, for instance, the ferries would have to land blind, by And no wonder McGee was using a bullhorn instead of the public address system. The man was resourceful, that had to be granted. I t got slowly darker, despite the emerging stars. The Forest whimpered, as if remembering the ghosts of long-extinct animals. Underfoot, something thumped -- a secondary explosion? -- and the murmuring of the Joneses grew louder. They were already confused by the conflicting orders, angry at having had their fun cut off and probably still making everything worse with the undertow of rumor. And now, also, they were becoming afraid of the strange noises and the deepening night. Something like a bat -- or what Jothen imagined might be like a bat -- swooped suddenly in front of his face. It took him a moment to realize that the thing was actually some distance away; and then, that it was Fongavaro on his autocrutch. He was flying very badly. That was not surprising, for the fan-driven prosthetic machines had never been designed for the open air; but the wild way he was lurching around the sky could not be entirely the fault of the crutch. He was fighting not only the machine, but himself: terror fugatis. Jothen looked away. There was nothing he could do now; he had gone as far as he could go. He switched his headset to the emergency channel; it responded with a gratifying hum. "McGee?" It would not have surprised him had the putative Mayor never heard of the emergency channel; but McGee responded at once. "Hello, Jothen -- where the hell have you been? Never mind, noisy down here. Have to talk to you later." "Hold on -- " "Sorry. Got my hands full of Joneses. Are the ferries coming?" "Yes, on the way. Are you -- " "Good. Hold fast. Out." While Jothen spluttered, the bullhorn began to sound again. Torches began to light, too, some of them among the trees. "Fire in the Forest?" Jothen bawled into his cheek-mike, but there was no answer. More Joneses poured out onto the flyport and into the woods. The tower deck rumbled under Jothen's feet. Then, there was light. First the tops of the trees turned silvery. Then, on the roofs, the blackness became stippled with tiler's dots, as hundreds of thousands of white faces turned skyward. A long moan rolled through the Joneses like a comber. Jothen too looked up. A falling star, so immense that it might have been a falling sun, was streaking with preternatural slowness over the city, lighting the whole landscape with a garish blue-white glare. The side of a nearby ferry, just settling in for a landing, gleamed in the glow as though a searchlight were playing upon it. The light seemed to be what Fogavaro had been waiting for. Either he had dropped the gun or had forgotten it in his fear of the open sky and the mechanical besom he was a-stride of. Instead, he swerved toward the immobile giant of the control tower and came bulleting directly at the broad windows. The noise of the meteor's passage had already reached the ground, a loud rumbling like the thunder of distance artillery. Cries of awe and fright rose from the Forest to meet it. For a wild instant, Jothen wondered if this were the monster Flavia herself, ahead of schedule and far too far to the south; but in the same second he realized that it was probably only one of the fragments Biond Smith's crew had chipped off the asteroid -- a small one, probably no more than a hundred tons. Two thirds of the way across the sky, the meteor exploded, blindingly. Fiery streaks rayed away, nearly to the horizon. Fongavaro, almost close enough now for Jothen to see his features, jerked his craft upward, halfrolled, and ran side-on into a descending ferry. The ferry, only dented, lurched and righted itself, but the autocrutch disintegrated. Its bright fragments and the sprawling black figure of Fongavaro Jones rained down from Heaven together toward Chaos and Dis, in a blast of sound from the exploded bolide that made the explosion in the shunt room seem like it had been only a warning slap. Fongavaro's long nightmare of falling had come true and now was ended. nphe cries of the Joneses grew louder, edged with hysteria. On the flyport apron, a woman's voice was screaming, "The end of the world! Grandfather is fallen! The end of the world!" Jothen, shaking, tried again to call McGee and then Piscetti; but if either replied, their voices were drowned out in an enormous waterfall that seemed to have gotten started in his earphones. When he got his sight back, he saw why: the passage of the meteor had left a broad trail of glowing white vapor stretched across the sky like an infernal rainbow. The ionized wake had completely wiped out radio reception, probably all across the spectrum. Below, the torches began to swirl. The crowd noise was rising to a roar. The dented ferry, rocking on its fans, was settling to the apron, and another was coming in. Too late, Jothen thought numbly. They're goin to panic. And there was exactly nothing that he could do about it, even had he had any idea of how to proceed. The shadowy figures of the tower stand-by crew, mustered to replace the out-of-action computer, were already bustling in the gloom around him, ready to assist the ferry landings the moment radio contact should be established -- or perhaps they were using FM and had never lost contact in the first place. He would have to give them whatever helping hand he could -- Another meteor bloomed in the night sky, rumbling like a thunderhead. It was not as big as the first, but the Joneses were by now in no mood to be discriminating. Then Jothen heard McGee's voice cutting across the din, his bullhorn turned up to full amplification -- a gargantuan bellow that must have been audible even in the still airborne ferries. Astonishingly, the Mayor was singing. Had he gone mad too? Raise the totems, Gott soil Hue ten, Fa-lafa-de-rol and cordon bleu! Jericho immune to tootin', Mighty Mothe, we love you! Or so Jothen heard it -- surely these couldn't really be the words. But the Joneses seemed to recognize them: a family hymn? Scattered voices took up the song, and then, many more. "That's it, Joneses! All together now!" The second meteor blew up. Under the light and noise, and that of the ferries' fans, the singing became defiantly louder. Hubbard's husband, Hubba's wife, Smith's disaster, Brown's dismay, Faithful shepherd, A-OK! Jothen heard himself emit a nervous giggle and suppressed it angrily. Dammit, that surely wasn't how the words went! He tried to pay attention to something that mattered. Six or seven ferries were on the ground now, and Joneses were pouring out of Immortality is within your grasp. The Cryonics Society of New York Inc. is the leading non-profit organization in the field of cryogenic interment. This involves freezing people immediately after death, in the hope of restoring them to full life, health, and youth sometime in the future. We have a practical program of action, which enables the individual to commit himself to this idea in a meaningful fashion. For detailed information write -- Cryonics Society of New York, Inc., # Creston Avenue, Bx. New York #. the Forest toward them, led by a tiny, frenetically waving figure. McGee seemed to be leading some kind of a snake dance onto the tarmac. A third and a fourth meteor arched across the sky together, roaring. The crowd howled back its challenge. The first ferry was loaded and taking off again. Near several of the others, Joneses about to board were ceremonially snuffing out torches in upended metal drums that seemed to have materialized by magic for just this purpose. Another ferry buzzed off, then another. "All right, neighbors! Everybody now! Hit it!" The piper's charges raised their voices in a deafening chorus. Nothing else in the world could have been heard above such a choir, not even a major earthquake -- by now there must have involved, spread out all over the roofs; it was as though Hell itself were singing. Distance muddled the hymn into a shapeless, tuneless thunder, but Jothen could still hear McGee; bombs us, Devils hearstle at our bones -- Still the jolly heartside chorus : Love us all, and up your Jones! The sky was full of planes. And then, suddenly, the flyport lights went on. Whether or not Piscetti had gotten the floods under control, the master computer had reached the end of its allotted clock-time and had restored power to the city. The evacuation of the Jones Convention would keep right on going, for many days -- but the crisis was over. Useless, tubby McGee had piped his rats aboard. J othen had stopped shaking by the time he had gotten back to his office, but he could not honestly have described himself as unshaken. He was glad -- God knew -- that it was all essentially over, but there were still major questions that he could not begin to answer for himself. He sat down at his disordered console and thought about them conscientiously, but not to much purpose. He still had no notion of how he was going to cope -- both practically and emotionally -- with the Chicago influx, after having spent most of his adult life virtually alone in so heavily populated a world. He had not done very well this time; indeed, he had damn near gotten himself killed, and the city was in terrible shape. He felt both incompetent and oppressed. It seemed that there was no such thing as a single crisis. Every one was a fall of dominoes. It took a lot of footwork just to stay abreast of them. He noticed with a start that the line to Prime Center was blinking at him. Numbly, he opened it. "Jothen?" Biond Smith's voice said. "Here. Hullo, Biond." "How did it go? KC tells me you're having a terrible scramble. Did you get the Joneses moving?" "They're on their way," Jothen said. He was surprised to hear that Biond, too, sounded oppressed. Evidently World Directors also had their troubles. "Good. Was McGee of any use? He's fairly good with paper, I've found." "He was invaluable," Jothen said. "Especially during the meteor shower." "Meteor shower?" Biond said, his voice cracking slightly. "Did those fragments come down as far south as Gitler? Obviously they did. Damn, somebody's miscalculated; I'll have to get on that. And now we get to the meat of the matter -- Flavia, and the real evacuations. You'd better keep McGee there, as long as he was helpful. He doesn't know a dyne from a dinosaur, of course, but all the same these ward-heeler types have their uses. I'm one myself. Glad you're all right, Jothen. Bye." The line went dead. Taking a deep breath, Jothen set his face and his soul in order and went out to meet his world -- or his doom. Maybe by now there wasn't any difference. But somehow he felt that he would be more on top of things, if only he could figure out what a "ward-heeler" was.  H  The Award-Winning Author of A Case of a A trip to Mars in a tree-house!  # B by Hal Clement (author of Ice World, Mission of Gravity, etc.) B fl B A Complete Short Novel B  All these and many more in the August IF, on sale now. Don't miss it! The Children went to Earth. They played some childish games -- and the Earthmen called them History! nphere is one period of our World History that has aspects so different from anything that went before and after that we can only gaze back on those several hundred years and ask: "Was that ourselves who behaved so?" Well, no, as a matter of fact, it wasn't. It was beings of another sort who visited us briefly and who acted so gloriously and abominably. This is the way it was: nphe Children had a Long Afternoon free. They could go to any of a dozen wonderful places, but they were already in one. Seven of them -- full to the craw of wonderful places -- decided to go to Eretz. "Children are attracted to the oddest and most shambling things," said the Mothers. "Why should they want to go to Eretz?" "Let them go," said the Fathers. "Let them see -- before they be gone -- one of the few simple peoples left. We ourselves have become a contrived and compromized people. Let the Children be children for half a day." Eretz was the Planet of the Offense, and therefore it was to be (perhaps it recently had been) the Planet of the Restitution also. But in no other way was it distinguished. The Children had received the tradition of Eretz as children receive all traditions -- like lightning. Hobble, Michael Goodgrind, Ralpha, Lonnie, Laurie, Bea and Joan they called themselves as they came down on Eretz -- for these were their idea of Eretzi names. But they could have as many names as they wished in their games. An anomalous intrusion of great heat and force! The rocks ran like water where they came down, and there was formed a scarp-pebble enclave. It was all shanty country and shanty towns on Eretz -- clumsy hills, badly done plains and piedmonts, ragged fields, uncleansed rivers, whole weedpatches of provinces -- not at all like Home. And the Towns! Firenze, Praha, Venezia, Londra, Colonia, Gant, Roma -- why, they were nothing but towns made out of stone and wood! And these were the greatest of the towns of Eretz, not the meanest. The Children exploded into action. Like children of the less transcendent races running wild on an ocean beach for an afternoon, they ran wild over continents. They scattered. And they took whatever forms first came into their minds. Hobble -- dark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan. Michael Goodgrind -- a brokennosed bull of a man. How they all howled when he invented that first form! Ralpha -- like young Mercury. And Lonnie -- a fall giant with a golden beard. Laurie was fire, Bea was light, Joan was moon-darkness. But in these, or in any other forms they took, you'd always know that they were cousins or brethren. T onnie went pure Gothic. He had come onto it at the tail end of the thing and he fell in love with it. "I am the Emperor!" he told the people like giant thunder. He pushed the Emperor Wenceslas off the throne and became Emperor. "I am the true son of Charles, and you had thought me dead," he told the people. "I am Sigismund." Sigismund was really dead, but Lonnie became Sigismund and reigned, taking the wife and all the castles of Wenceslas. He grabbed off gangling old forts and mountain-rooks and raised howling Eretzi armies to make war. He made new castles. He loved the tall sweeping things and raised them to a new height. Have you never wondered that the last of those castles -- in the late afternoon of the Gothic -- were the tallest and oddest? One day the deposed Wenceslas came back, and he was possessed of a new power. "Now we will see who is the real Emperor!" the new Wenceslas cried like a rising storm. They clashed their two forces and broke down each other's bridges and towns and stole the high ladies from each other's strongholds. They wrestled like boys. But they wrestled with a continent. Lonnie (who was Sigismund) learned that the Wenceslas he battled was Michael Goodgrind wearing a contrived Emperor body. So they fought harder. There came a new man out of an old royal line. "I am Jobst," the new man cried. "I will show you two princelings who is the real Emperor!" He fought the two of them with overwhelming verve. He raised fast-striking Eretzi armies, and used tricks that only a young Mercury would know. He was Ralpha, entering the game as the third Emperor. But the two combined against him and broke him at Constance. They smashed Germany and France and Italy like a clutch of eggs. Never had there been such spirited conflict. The Eretzi were amazed by it all, but they were swept into it; it was the Eretzi who made up the armies. Even today the Eretzi or Earthers haven't the details of it right in their histories. When the King of Aragon, for an example, mixed into it, they treated him as a separate person. They did not know that Michael Goodgrind was often the King of Aragon, just as Lonnie was often the Duke of Flanders. But, played for itself, the Emperor game would be quite a limited one. Too limited for the children. r T"he girls played their own roles. Laurie claimed to be thirteen different queens. She was consort of all three Emperors in every one of their guises, and she also dabbled with the Eretzi. She was the wanton of the group. Bea liked the Grande Dame part and the Lady Bountiful bit. She was very good on Great Renunciations. In her different characters, she beat paths from thrones to nunneries and back again; and she is now known as five different saints. Every time you turn to the Common of the Mass of Holy Women who are Neither Virgins nor Martyrs, you are likely to meet her. And Joan was the dreamer who may have enjoyed the Afternoon more than any of them. Laurie made up a melodrama -- Lucrezia Borgia and the Poison Ring. There is an advantage in doing these little melodramas on Eretzi. You can have as many characters as you wish -- they come free. You can have them act as extravagantly as you desire -- who is there to object to it? Lucrezia was very well done, as children's burlesques go, and the bodies were strewn from Napoli to Vienne. The Eretzi play with great eagerness any convincing part offered them, and they go to their deaths quite Lonnie made one up called The Pawn-Broker and the Pope. It was in the grand manner, all about the Medici family, and had some very funny episodes in the fourth act. Lonnie, who was vain of his acting ability, played Medici parts in five succeeding generations. The drama left more corpses than did the weren't so sudden or showy; the girls had a better touch at the bloody stuff. Ralpha did a Think Piece called One, Two, Three -- Infinity. In its presentation he put all the rest of the Children to roast grandly in Hell; he filled up Purgatory with Eretzi-type people -- the dullards; and for the Paradise he did a burlesque of Home. The Eretzi use a cropped version of Ralpha's piece and call it the Divine Comedy, leaving out a lot of fun. Bea did a poetic one named the Witches' Bonfire. All the Children spent many a happy evening with that one, and they burnt twenty thousand witches. There was something satisfying about those Eretzi autumnal twilights with the scarlet sky and the frosty fields and the kine lowing in the meadows and the evening smell of witches burning. Bea's was really a pastoral piece. A ll the Children ranged far except Hobble. Hobble (who was Vulcan) played with his sick toys. He played at Ateliers and Smithies, at Furnaces and Carousels. And often the other Children came and watched his work, and joined in for a while. They played with the glass from the furnaces. They made gold-toned goblets, iridescent glass poems, figured spheres, goblin pitchers, glass music boxes, gargoyle heads, dragon chargers, princess salieras, figurines of lovers. So many things to make of glass! To make, and to smash when made! But some of the things they exchanged as gifts instead of smashing them -- glass birds and horses, fortune-telling globes that showed changing people and scenes within, tuned chiming balls that rang like bells, glass cats that sparked when stroked, wolves and bears, witches that flew. The Eretzi found some of these things that the Children discarded. They studied them and imitated them. And again, in the interludes of their other games, the Children came back to Hobble's shops where he sometimes worked with looms. They made costumes of wool and linen and silk. They made trains and cloaks and mantles, all the things for their grand masquerades. They fabricated tapestries and rugs and wove in all sorts of scenes : vistas of Home and of Eretz, people and peacocks, fish and cranes, dingles and dromedaries, larks and lovers. They set their creations in the strange ragged scenery of Eretz and in the rich contrived gardens of Home. A spark went from the Children to their weaving so that none could tell where they left off and their creations began. Then they left poor Hobble and went on to their more vital games. 'Tphere were seven of them (six, not counting the backward Hobble), but they seemed a thousand. They built themselves Castles in Spain and Gardes in Languedoc. The girls played always at Intrigue, for the high pleasure of it, and to give a causus for the wars. And the wars were the things that the boys seldom tired of. It is fun to play at armies with live warriors; and the Eretzi were live... in a sense. The Eretzi had had wars and armies and sieges long before this, but they had been aimless things. Oh, this was one field where the Eretzi needed the Children. Consider the battles that the Children engineered that afternoon : Gallipoli -- how they managed the ships in that one! The Fathers could not have maneuvered more intricately in their fourdimension chess at Home. Adrianople, Kunovitza, Dibra, Varna, Hexamilion! It's fun just to call out the bloody names of battles. Constantinople! That was the one where they first used the big cannon. But who cast the big cannon for the Turks there? In their histories the Eretzi say that it was a man named Orban or Urban, and that he was Dacian, or he was Hungarian, or he was Danish. How many places did you tell them that you came from, Michael Goodgrind? Belgrad, Trebizond, Morat, Blackheath, Napoli, Dornach! Cupua and Taranto -- Ralpha's armies beat Michael's at both of those. Carignola -- Lonnie foxed both Michael and Ralpha there, and nearly foxed himself. ( Y ou didn't intend it all that way, Lonnie. It was seven-cornered luck and you know it!) Garigliano where the sea was red with blood and the ships were like broken twigs on the water! Brescia! Ravenna! Who would have believed that such things could be done with a device known as Spanish infantry? Villalar, Milan, Pavia! Best of all, the sack of Rome! There was a dozen different games blended into that one. The Eretzi discovered new emotions in themselves there -- a deeper depravity and a higher heroism. Siege of Florence! That one called out the Children's every trick. A wonderfully well played game! Turin, San Quentin, Moncontour, Mookerhide! Lepanto! The great sea-siege where the castled ships broke asunder and the tall Turk Ochiali Pasha perished with all his fleet and was drowned forever. But it wasn't so forever as you might suppose, for he was Michael Goodgrind who had more bodies than one. The fish still remember Lepanto. Never had there been such feastings. Alcazar-Quivar! That was the last of the excellent ones -- the end of the litany. The Children left off the game. They remembered (but conveniently, and after they had worn out the fun of it) that they were forbidden to play Warfare with live soldiers. The Eretzi, left to themselves again, once more conducted their battles as dull and uninspired affairs. You can put it to a test, now, tonight. Study the conflicts of the earlier times, of this high period, and of the time the followed. You will see the difference. For a short two or three centuries you will find really well contrived battles. And before and after there is only ineptitude. ften the Children played at ' ' Jealousies and raised up all the black passions in themselves. They played at Immoralities, for there is an abiding evil in all children. Maskings and water-tarnivals and balls, and forever the emotional intrigue! Ralpha walked down a valley, playing a lute and wearing the body of somebody else. He luted the birds out of the trees and worked a charm on the whole countryside. An old crone followed him and called, "Love me when I'm old." "Sempremai, tuttavia," sang Ralpha in Eretzi or Earthian. "For Ever, For Always." A small girl followed and called, "Love me when I'm young." "Forever, for always," sang Ralpha. The weirdest witch in the world followed him and called, "Love me when I'm ugly." "For always, forever," sang Ralpha, and pulled her down on the grass. He knew that all the creatures had been Laurie playing Bodies. But a peculiar thing happened : the prelude became more important than the play. Ralph fell in love with his own song, and forgot Laurie who had inspired it. He made all manner of music and poem -- aubade, madrigal, chanson; and he topped it off with one hundred sonnets. He made them in Eretzi words, Italy words, Languedoc words, and they were excellent. And the Eretzi still copy them. Ralpha discovered there that poetry and song are Passion Deferred. But Laurie would rather have deferred the song. She was long gone away and taking up with others before Ralpha had finished singing his love for her, but he never noticed that she had left him. After Hobble, Ralpha was the most peculiar of them all. I n the meanwhile, Michael Goodgrind invented another game of Bodies. He made them of marble -- an Eretzi limestone that cuts easily without faulting. And he painted them on canvas. He made the People of Home, and the Eretzi. He said that he would make angels. "But you cannot make angels," said Joan. "We know that," said Michael, "but do the Eretzi know that I cannot? I will make angels for the Eretzi." He made them grotesque, like chicken men, like bird men, with an impossible duplication of humeral function. And the Children laughed at the carven jokes. But Michael had sudden inspiration. He touched his creations up and added an element of nobility. So an iconography was born. All the Children did it then, and they carried it into other mediums. They made the Eretzi, and they made themselves. You can still see their deep features on some of those statues, that family look that was on them no matter what faces they wore or copied. Bronze is fun! Bronze horses are the best. Big bronze doors can be an orgy of delight, or bronze bells whose shape is their tone. The Children went to larger things. They played at Realms and Constitutions, and Banks and Ships and Provinces. Then they came down to smaller things again and played at Books, for Hobble had just invented the printing thing. Of them all, Hobble had the least imagination. He didn't range wide like the others. He didn't outrage the Eretzi. He spent all his time with his sick toys as though he were a child of much younger years. The only new body he acquired was another one just like his own. Even this he didn't acquire as did the other Children theirs. He made it laboriously in his shop, and animated it. Hobble and the Hobble Creature worked together thereafter, and you could not tell them apart. One was as dull and laboring as the other. nphe Eretzi had no effect whatsoever on the Children, but the Children had great effect on the Eretzi. The Children had the faculty of making whatever little things they needed or wanted, and the Eretzi began to copy them. In this manner the Eretzi came onto many tools, processes, devices and arts that they had never known before. Out of ten thousand, there were these: The Astrolabe, Equatorium, Quadrant, Lathes and Traversing Tools, Ball-Bearings, Gudgeons, Gig-Mills, Barometers, Range-Finders, Cantilever Construction, Machine-Saws, ScrewJacks, Hammer-Forges and Drop-Forges, Printing, Steel that was more than puddled Iron, Logarithms, Hydraulic Rams, Screw-Dies, Spanner-Wrenches, Flux-Solder, Telescopes, Microscopes, Mortising Machines, Wire-Drawing, Stanches (Navigation-Locks), Gear Trains, Paper Making, Magnetic Compass and Wind-Rhumb, Portulan Charts and Projection Maps, Pinnule-Sights, Spirit-Levels, Fine Micrometers, Porcelain, Fire-Lock Guns, Music Notation and Music Printing, Complex Pulleys and Snatch-Blocks, the Seed-Drill, Playing Cards (the Children's masquerade faces may still be seen on them), Tobacco, the Violin, Whisky, the Mechanical Clock. They were forbidden, of course, to display any second-aspect powers or machines, as these would disrupt things. But they disrupted accidently in building, in tooling, in armies and navies, in harbors and canals, in towns and bridges, in ways of thinking and recording. They started a thing that couldn't be reversed. It was only the One Afternoon they were here, only two or three Eretzi Centuries, but they set a trend. They overwhelmed by the very number of their new devices, and it could never be simple on Eretz again. Hphere were many thousands of Eretz days and nights in that Long Afternoon. The Children had begun to tire of it, and the hour was growing late. For the last time they wandered off, this time all Seven of them together. In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff. "Let's tumble the hairy Eretzi," shouted Ralpha. "Let him not stand in the way of Kings!" For Ralpha was King of Bulgaria that day. But they did not tumble the Pilgrim. That man knew how to handle his staff, and he laid the bunch of them low. It was nothing to him that they were the high people of the World who ordered Nations. He flogged them flat. "Bleak Children!" that Pilgrim cried out as he beat them into the ground. "Unfledged little oafs! Is it so that you waste your Afternoon on Earth? I'll give you what your Fathers forgot." Seven-colored thunder, how he could use that staff! He smashed the gaudy bodies of the Children and broke many of their damnable bones. Did he know that it didn't matter? Did he understand that the bodies they wore were only for an antic? "Lay off, old Father!" begged Michael Goodgrind, bleeding and half beaten into the earth "Stay your bloody bludgeon. You do not know who we are." "I know you," maintained the Pilgrim mountainously. "You are ignorant Children who have abused the Afternoon given you on Earth. You have marred and ruined and warped everything you have touched." "No, no," Ralpha protested -- as he set in new bones for his old damaged ones -- "You do not understand. We have advanced you a thousand of your years in one of our afternoons. Consider the Centuries we have saved you! It's as though we had increased your life by that thousand years." "We have all the time there is," said the Pilgrim solidly. "We were well and seriously along our road, and it was not so crooked as the one you have brought us over. You have broken our sequence with your meddling. You've set us back more ways than you've advanced us. You've shattered our Unity." "Pigs have unity!" Joan shouted. "We've brought you diversity. Think deep. Consider all the machines we have showed you, the building and the technique. I can name you a thousand things we've given you. You will never be the same again." "True. We will never be the same," said the Pilgrim. "You may not be an unmixed curse. I'm a plain man and I don't know. Surety is one of the things you've lost us. But you befouled us. You played the game of Immoralities and taught it to us earthlings." "You had it already," Laurie insisted. "We only brought elegance instead of piggishness to its practice." Immoralities was Laurie's own game, and she didn't like to hear it slighted. "You have killed many thousands of us in your battles," said the Pilgrim. You're a bitter fruit -- sweet at the first taste only." "You would yourselves have killed the same numbers in battles, and the battles wouldn't have been so good," said Michael. "Do you not realize that we are the higher race? We have roots of great antiquity." "We have roots older than antiquity," averred the Pilgrim. "You are wicked Children without compassion." "Compassion? For the Eretzi?" shouted Lonnie in disbelief. "Do you have compassion for mice?" demanded Ralpha. "Yes. I have compassion for mice," the Pilgrim said softly. "I make a guess," Ralpha shot in shrewdly after they had all repaired their damaged bodies. "You travel as a Pilgrim, and Pilgrims sometimes come from very far away. You are not Eretzi. You are one of the Fathers from Home going in the guise of an Eretzi Pilgrim. You have this routine so that sometimes one of you comes to this world -- and to every world -- to see how it goes. You may have come to investigate an event said to have happened on Eretz a day ago." Ralpha did not mean an Eretzi day ago, but a day ago at Home. The High Road they were on was in Coele-Syria not far from where the Event was thought to have happened, and Ralpha pursued his point: "You are no Eretzi, or you would not dare to confront us, knowing what we are." "You guess wrong in this and in everything," said the Pilgrim. "I am of this Earth, earthy. And I will not be intimidated by a gangle of children of whatever species! You're a weaker flesh than ourselves. You hide in other bodies, and' you get earthlings to do your slaughter. And you cannot stand up to my staff! "Go home, you witless weanlings!" and he raised his terrible staff again. "Our time Is nearly up. We will be gone soon," said Joan softly. r T"he last game they played? They played Saints -- for the Evil they had done in playing Bodies wrongly, and in playing Wars with live soldiers. But they repented of the things only after they had enjoyed them for the Long Afternoon. They played Saints in hair-shirt and ashes, and revived that affair among the Eretzi. And finally they all assembled and took off from the high hill between Prato and Firenze in Italy. The rocks flowed like water where they left, and now there would be a double scarp formation. They were gone, and that was the end of them here. There is a theory, however, that one of the Hobbles remained and is with us yet. Hobble and his creature could not be told apart and could not finally tell themselves apart. They flipped an Eretzi coin, Emperors or Shields, to see which one would go and which one would stay. One went and one stayed. One is still here. But, after all, Hobble was only concerned with the sick toys, the mechanical things, the material inventions. Would it have been better if Ralpha or Joan stayed with us? They'd have burned us crisp by now! They were damnable and irresponsible children. f  'his short Historical Monograph was not assembled for a distraction or an amusement. We consider the evidence that Children have spent their short vacations here more than once and in both hemispheres. We set out the theses in ordered parellels and we discover that we have begun to tremble unaccountably. When last came such visitors here? What thing has beset us during the last long Eretzi lifetime? We consider a new period -- and it impinges on the Present -- with aspects so different from anything that went before that we can only gasp aghast and gasp in sick wonder: "Is it ourselves who behave so? "Is it beings of another sort, or have we become those beings? "Are we ourselves? Are these our deeds?" There are great deep faces looking over our shoulder, there are cold voices of ancient Children jeering "Compassion? For Earthlings?", there is nasty frozen laughter that does not belong to our species.      The Look Do you have trouble understanding women's fashions? Here's the key! ((Ts this the place?" Sam TayA lor asked, staring at the rather undistinguished building on a side street in Paris. "It certainly doesn't look like much." "Maybe not," Jim Harper said, "but it's the salon of the world's leading style designers, Raymond and Anton." "And you still think they're to blame?" "You've seen the birth rate statistics," Jim said. "You know what the women who follow their styles look like." "Yes, I've seen the wwomen," Sam almost choked on the word. "But I just can't see all this as a plot. Why would they do it?" "Do you remember the song called 'Anatole of Paris' that Danny Kaye used to do years ago?" Jim asked. "Remember how he describes all the horrible things he has done to women in the name of fashion, tells of all the incredibly ugly clothes he has persuaded them to wear. The song ends with a line explaining why he does it. 'I do it,' he says, 'because I hate women.' " "But, Jim, you can't believe women would deliberately follow such..." "My friend, there is only one urge in the human female which is stronger than the urge to marry and reproduce, and that is the urge to look exactly like every other woman... the irresistable impulse to follow fashion's dictates." "You mean like that?" Sam asked, nodding toward two apparently hunchbacked young women hobbling by on feet long since deformed by their needlepointed shoes. "Yes," Jim said. "Women are being led to destruction by letting themselves be made so horrible to look at that men can't stand them." Sam shuddered as two more monstrosities minced past with bulges in all the wrong places. "What can we do? We're just a couple of newspaper men. If the governments of the world are helpless, what can we expect to do?" "I have an idea,"' Jim said. "I'm going to prove to those two in there that no matter what they do to women, there will always be some men who can stomach them." Sam gulped. "You don't... you don't mean us?" "Good Lord, no!" Jim said. "I swore off when they brought out the pinhead look. But I've been looking around and asking questions and I've found a guy... the sexiest, woman chasingest sailor there ever was... and we've challenged Raymond to a test. Jerry will be along in a minute and then we'll go on in." IVTeanwhile, inside the build'  ing, Anton and Raymond were in conference. "Now, Anton, don't be anymore nasty than you have to," Raymond said. "Things are going rather well." "No, they're not! We've failed!" Anton wailed, wringing his hands. "In March we introduced the pinhead effect, and in April that delightful rubber lip look, but still..." "We've made gains. You know we have." Raymond said firmly. "We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that women will wear anything or change their physical appearance in any way as long as it's the style." ' "But we haven't succeeded until... " "Until right now!" Raymond interrupted triumphantly. "Now New Look or the Sack Look or ly the most devastating, the most daring thing any of us has done yet." "I know," Anton pouted, "but I can't help feeling that..." "Even you will be convinced as soon as those two horrible men get here with their friend.' "What horrible men?" "Those two reporter things... the ones who have been writing all those nasty stories about our creations." "The Americans?" "Yes... and they're bringing a sailor with them." "A sailor? Oh, how lovely!" Anton clapped his delicate hands together. "You behave, you hear? I've arranged a test and I don't want you lousing it up." "What kind of test?" Raymond giggled. "See the curtain over there? Our newest model is behind it, and I've done the work on her myself. Need I say more?" Anton's eyes widened and then he giggled too. "You mean... ?" "Yes. They actually think they can stop us." J im Harper and Sam Taylor entered the salon. Walking between them was a tall, curlyhaired, craggy-faced young man in the dress blues of an American sailor. "Here we are... uh... gentlemen," Jim said confidently. "This is our champion, Jerry Blake." " Delighted to meet you, Jerry," Raymond gushed, extending a limp white hand which the sailor ignored. "His shipmates call him 'Make Out,' " Jim explained. "We've brought him here to save the human race from a fate worse than death." "Oh really, it's hardly that bad," Raymond tittered. "For us it is," Jim said, "but there are some men who will always be able to stand women no matter what you do to them." "And Jerry is one of those?" Raymond asked. "That's right. Make Out, tell them what you think of feminine beauty." The tall boy shrugged. "Beauty? Who needs it? As long as dames has got the equipment for the main event, who cares? I remember one time I met this old bag down in Rio, and... well, like the fella says, you can always throw a flag over her face and do it for Old Glory." "Good boy!" Sam grinned, slapping him on the back. "Is your model ready?" Jim asked. "Indeed she is," Raymond said. "She's waiting over there behind that curtain to show your friend our newest creation... "Go get 'er, Make Out!" Jim said. "And remember, the fate of mankind may depend on what you do now." "Yes, my boy, it's for more than Old Glory this time," Sam added. The sailor grinned and strode nonchalantly across the room and disappeared behind the curtain. Seconds later there was a choking, retching sound and Make Out Jerry Blake staggered toward them, his face ashen and contorted with revulsion. "What's the matter?" Jim demanded, the color draining from his face. Jerry didn't say a word. He just became violently sick on the luxurious carpeting of the salon before reeling dizzily out of the building. everything I predicted for it," Raymond said smugly. Jim and Sam looked at each other, stricken. "How long," Sam asked, "do you think it would take for a man to drink himself to death?" "I don't know," Jim said "but let's go find out." "Oh, come now, boys," Anton simpered as they moved toward the door. "There's always us, you know." "Yes, we know," Sam said. "God help the human race!" tC"Yhen door had closed behind them, Raymond turned to Anton. "Delicious! Delightful! Wasn't that just perfect?" "Beautiful!" Anton agreed. "We've done it! We've found the way!" "And the best part is, they still don't know who we are or why we're doing it," Raymond said as he stripped off his false eyelashes and removed the lower half of his face. "Let's make the call right now," Anton said, lifting off his blonde wig to free his long, green tenactles. "Let's send the alert message." "Yes," Raymond agreed, "Let's inform Alpha Centauri that the planet Earth will be depopulated and ready for colonization within the next hundred years!" A few copies of hard-bound first editions of stories from Galaxy, mint condition, brand-new. Some are now out of print and hard to find -- but take your pick while they last! The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl  C. M. Kornbluth, originally published In Galaxy as Gravy Planet. Hard-cover first edition, #. The Demolished Man. by Alfred Bester, one of the most tallced-about st novels of all time. #. The World That Couldn't Be and others from Galaxy, stories by de Camp, Simak, Knight, etc., edited by H. L. Gold. #. Order by letter, enclosing check or money order for amount indicated. Postage paid. Sorry, orders from U.S. only. Heisenberg's Eyes All the Earth belonged to the Optimen -- who didn't know what to do with it! T o Svengaard, raised in the ordered world of the Optimen, the idea that they were fallible came as heresy. He tried to put it out of his mind and his ears. To be fallible was to be subject to death. Only the lower orders suffered thus, not the Optimen. How could they be fallible? He knew the surgeon sitting across from him in the pale dawn light that filtered through narrow slots in a domed ceiling. The man was Toure Igan, one of Central's surgical elite, a person to whom only the most delicate genetico-medical problems were posed. The room they occupied was a tight little space stolen between What Has Gone Before -- For more generations than anyone could remember, the world had been perfectly stable -- because every newborn child was genetically tailored to fit a certain standard pattern, so that the people at large were made up of replaceable parts, and their rulers, the Optimen, lived practically forever. But one unborn human embryo, hours old, threatened to destroy the whole millenia-old system. It was mortal... but it was also, at least in potentiality, a superman as potent as the Optimen themselves. If the new life was allowed to be born there was no telling what the results would be. Cautious in their immortality, the Opitmen determined to destroy if -- But they could not! Someone had hidden it away! the walls of an air-system cap, servicing the subterranean warrens of the Cascade Complex. Svengaard sat in a comfortable chair, but his arms and legs were bound. Other people were using the space, crowding past the little table where Igan sat. The people carried oddly shaped packages. For the most part they ignored Igan and his companion. Svengaard studied the dark, intense features of the Central surgeon. Crease lines in the man's face betrayed the beginnings of enzymic failure. He was starting to age. But the eyes were the blue of a summer sky and still young. "You must chose sides," Igan had said. Svengaard allowed his attention to wander. A man passed carrying a golden metallic ball. From one of his pockets protruded a short silver chain on which dangled a breeder fetish in the shape of a lingan. "You must answer," Igan said. Svengaard looked at the wall beside him -- plasmeld, the inevitable plasmeld. The space stank of disinfectants and the ersatz garden effect of air-purifier perfumes. People continued to pass through the narrow room. The sameness of their garments began to weigh on Svengaard. Who were these people? They were members of the Underground, that was obvious. But who were they? A woman touched him, crowding past. Svengaard looked up into a white smile in a black face, recognized a Zeek female, a face like Potter's but the skin darker... a surgical mistake. She wore a bracelet of human hair on her right wrist. It was blonde hair. Svengaard stared at the bracelet until the woman rounded the curve of the room out of his sight. A said. "You must believe me. Your own life depends on it." My own life? Svengaard wondered. He tried to think about his own life, identify it. He had a tertiary wife, little more than n playmate, a woman like himself whose every request for a breeder permit had been denied. For a moment he couldn't picture her face, lost the shape of it in memories of previous wives and playmates. She isn't my life, he thought. Who is my life? He was conscious of a fatigue that went to the bone, and a hangover from the narcotics his captors had administered during the night. He remembered the hands seizing him, that gasping look into a wall that could not be a door but was, the lighted space beyond. And he remembered awakening here with Igan across from him. "I've held nothing back," Igan said. "I've told you everything. Potter barely escaped with his life. The order's already out to get you. Your computer nurse is dead. Many people have died. More will die. They have to be sure, don't you understand? They can leave nothing to chance." What is my life? Svengaard asked himself. And he thought now about his comfortable apartment, the artifacts and entertainment reels, the reference works, his friends, the safely ordinary routine of his position. "But where would I go?" "A place has been prepared." "No place is safe from them" Svengaard said. In saying this, he sensed for the first time the depth of his own resentment against the Optimen. "Many places are safe," Igan said. " They merely pretend to supersensual perception. Their real powers lie in machines and instruments, the secret surveillance. But machines and instruments can be twisted to other purposes. And the Optimen depend on Folk to do their violence." Svengaard shook his head. "This is all nonsense." "Except for one thing," Igan said, "they are as we -- variously human. We know this from experience." "But why would they do these things you accuse them of?" Svengaard protested. "It's not sensible. They're good to us." "Their sole interest is in maintaining themselves," Igan said. "They walk a tightrope. As long as there's no significant change in their environment, they'll continue living... indefinitely. Let significant change creep into their lives and they are like us -- subject to the whims of nature. For them, you see, there can be no nature -- no nature they don't control." "I don't believe it," Svengaard said. "They're the ones who love us and care for us. Look at all they've done for us." "I have looked." Igan shook his head. Svengaard was being more pig-headed than they'd expected. He screened out contrary evidence and stuck to the old formulas. "You want them to succumb," Svengaard accused. "Why do you want this?" "Because they've deprived us of evolution," Igan said. Qvengaard stared at him. # "What?" "They've made themselves the only free individuals in our world," Igan said. "But individuals don't evolve. Populations evolve, not individuals. We have no population." "But the Folk..." "Yes, the Folk! Who among us are allowed to mate?" Igan shook his head. "You're a gene surgeon, man! Haven't you identified the pattern yet?" "Pattern? What pattern? What do you mean?" Svengaard pushed himself up in the chair, cursed his bindings. His arms and legs felt numb. "The Optimen hold to one cardinal rule of mating," Igan said. "Return to the standard average. They allow a random interchange with the standard average organism to suppress development of unique individuals. Such few unique individuals as occur are not allowed to breed." Svengaard shook his head. "I don't believe you," he said. But he could feel the beginnings of doubt. His own case -- no matter which mate he Chose, the breeding permit was denied. He'd examined the genetic matchings himself, had seen configurations he would've sworn were viable -- but the Optimen said no. "You do believe me," Igan said. "But look at the long lives they give us," Svengaard said. "I can expect almost two hundred years." "Medicine does that, not the Optimen," Igan said. "Delicate, careful refinement of the enzymic prescription's the key. That plus a prescribed life in which emotional upset is held to a minimum. Selected exercises and a diet chosen for your specific needs. It could be done for almost anyone." "Indefinite life?" Svengaard whispered. "No! But long life, much longer than we get now. I'm going on four hundred years, myself -- as are several of my contemporaries. Almost four hundred lovely years," he said, remembering Calapine's vicious phrase... and Nourse's chuckle. "Four hundred -- you?" Svengaard asked. "I agree it's nothing compared to their many thousands," Igan said. But almost anyone could have these years, except they don't permit it." "Why?" Svengaard asked. "This way they can offer the bonus years to the selected few," Igan said, " -- a reward for service. Without this rule they have no coin to buy us. You knew this! You've been trying to sell yourself to them for this coin all your life." S vengaard looked down at his bound hands. Is that my life? he wondered. Fettered hands? Who will buy my fettered hands? "And you should hear Nourse chuckle at my pitiful four hundred years," Igan said. "Nourse?" "Yes! Nourse of the Tuyere, Nourse the Cynic, Nourse of the more than forty thousand years!" "I've seen Nourse," Igan said. "Why do you think Nourse is a Cynic?" Igan demanded. "There're older Optimen, much older. Most of those aren't Cynics." "I don't understand," Svengaard said. He stared at Igan, feeling weak, battered, unable to counter the force of these words and arguments. "I forget you're not of Central," Igan said. "They classify themselves by the tiny bit of emotion they're permitted. They're Actionists, Emotionals, Cynics, Hedonists and Effetes. They pass through cynicism on their way to hedonism. The Tuyere already's well occupied in pursuit of personal pleasure. There's a pattern here, too, and none of it's good." Igan studied Svengaard, weighing the effect of his words. Here was a creature barely above the Folk. He was medieval man. To him, Central and the Optimen were the "Primum Mobile" in control of all celestial systems. Beyond Central lay only the Empyrean home of the Creator... and for the Svengaards of the world there was little distinction between Optiman and Creator. Both were higher than the moon and totally without fault. "Where can we run?" Svengaard asked. "There's no place to hide. They control the enzymic prescriptions. The minute one of us walks into a pharmacy for renewal, that's the end." "We have our sources," Igan said. "But why would you want me?" Svengaard asked. He kept his eyes on his bindings. "Because you're a unique individual," Igan said. "Because Potter wants you. Because you know of the Durant embryo." The Durant embryo, Svengaard thought. What's the significance of the Durant embryo? It all comes back to that embryo. He looked up, met Igan's eyes. "You find it difficult to see the Optimen in my description of them," Igan said. "Yes." "They're a plague on the face of the earth," Igan said. "They're the earth's disease!" Svengaard recoiled from the bitterness of Igan's voice. "Saul has erased his thousands and David his ten thousands," Igan said. "But the Optimen erase the future."  blocky hulk of a man squeezed past the narrow space beside the table, planted himself with his back to Svengaard. "Well?" he asked. The voice carried a disturbing tone of urgency, just in that one word. Svengaard tried to see the face, but couldn't move far enough to the side. There was just that wide belted back in a gray jacket. "I don't know," Igan said. "We can spare no more time," the newcomer said. "Potter has completed his work." "The result?" Igan asked. "He says successful. He used enzymic injection for quick recovery. The mother will be ready to move soon." A thick hand moved over the shoulder to point a thumb at Svengaard. "What do we do with him?" "Bring him," Igan said. "What's Central doing?" "Ordered arrest and confinement of every surgeon." "So soon? Did they get Dr. Hand?" "Yes, but he took the black door." "Stopped his heart," Igan said. "The only thing. We can't let them question one of us. How many does that leave us?" "Seven?" "Including Svengaard?" "Eight then." "We'll keep Svengaard restrained for the time being," Igan said. "They're beginning to pull their special people out of Seatac," the big man said. Svengaard could see only half of Igan's face past the newcomer, but that half showed a deep frown of concentration. The one visible eye looked at Svengaard, disregarded him. "It's obvious," Igan said. "Yes -- they're going to destroy the megalopolis." "Not destroy sterilize." "You've heard Allgood speak of the Folk?" "Many times. Vermin in their warrens. He'll step on the entire region without a qualm. Is everything ready to move?" "Ready enough." "The driver?" "Programmed for the desired response." "Give Svengaard a shot to keep him quiet, then. We won't have time for him once we're on the road." Svengaard stiffened. The bulky back turned. Svengaard looked up into a pair of glistening eyes, gray, measuring, devoid of emotion. One of the thick hands lifted, carrying a springshot ampule. The hand touched his neck and there was a jolt. Svengaard stared up at that faceless face while the fuzzy clouds closed around his mind. His throat felt thick, tongue useless. He willed himself to protest, but no sound came. Awareness became a tightening globe centered on a tiny patch of ceiling with slotted openings. The scene condensed, smaller and smaller -- a frantic circle like an eye with slotted pupils. He sank into a cushioned well of darkness. T izbeth lay on a bench with ' Harvey seated beside her, steadying her. There were five people here in a cubed space no bigger than a large packing box. The box had been fitted into the center of a normal load on an overland transporter van. A single glowtube in the corner above her head illuminated the interior with a sickly yellow light. She could see Doctors Igan and Boumour on a rough bench opposite her, their feet stretched across the bound, gagged and unconscious figure of Svengaard on the floor. It was already night outside, Harvey had said. That must mean they'd come a goodly distance, she thought. She felt vaguely nauseated and her abdomen ached around the stitches. The thought of carrying her son within her carried a strange reassurance. There was a sense of fulfillment in it. Potter had said she likely could do without her regular enzymes while she carried the embryo. He'd obviously been thinking the embryo would be removed into a vat when they reached a safe place. But she knew she'd resist that. She wanted to carry her son full term. No woman had done that for thousands of years, but she wanted it. "We're picking up speed," Igan said. "We must be out of the tubes onto the skyway." "Will there be check points?" Boumour asked. "Bound to be." Harvey sensed the accuracy of Igan's assessment. Speed? Yes -- their bodies were compensating for heavier pressure on the turns. Air was coming in a bit faster through the scoop ventilator under Lizbeth's bench. There was a new hardness to the groundeffect suspension, less bounce. The turbines echoed loudly in the narrow box, and he could smell unburned hydrocarbons. Check points? Security would use every means to see that no one escaped Seatac. He wondered then what was about to happen to the megalopolis. The surgeons had spoken of poison gas in the ventilators, sonics. Central had many weapons, they said. Harvey put out an arm to hold Lizbeth as they rounded a sharp corner. He didn't know how he felt about Lizbeth carrying their son within her. It was odd. Not obscene or disgusting... just odd. An instinctive response had come to focus within him, and he looked around for dangers from which he could protect her. But there was only this box filled with the smell of stale sweat and oil. "What's the cargo around us?" Boumour asked. "Odds and ends," Igan said. "Machinery parts, some old art works, inconsequential things. We took anything we could pirate to make a seemingly normal load." Inconsequentials, Harvey thought. He found himself fascinated by this revelation. Inconsequentials. They carried parts to things that might never be built. L izbeth's hand groped out, found his. "Harvey?" He bent over her. "Yes, dear?" "I feel... so... funny." Harvey cast a despairing look at the doctors. "She'll be all right," Igan said. "Harvey, I'm afraid," she said. "We're not going to get through." "That's no way to talk." Igan said. She looked up, found the gene surgeon studying her across the narrow space of the box. His eyes were a pair of glittering instruments in a slim, supercilious face. no is he a Cyborg,, too? she wondered. The cold way the eyes stared at her broke through her control. "I don't care about myself!" she hissed. "But what about my son?" "Best calm yourself, madam," Igan said. "I can't," she said. "We're not going to make it!" "That's no way to act," Igan said. "Our driver is the finest Cyborg available." "He'll never get us past them," she moaned. "You'd best be quiet," Igan said. Harvey at last had an object from which to protect his wife. "Don't talk to her that way!" he barked. Igan spoke in a long-suffering tone: "Not you too, Durant. Keep your voice down. You know as well as I do they'll have listening stations along the skyway. We shouldn't be speaking now unless it's absolutely necessary." "Nothing can get past them tonight," Lizbeth whispered. "Our driver is little more than a shell of flesh around a reflex computer," Igan said. "He's programmed for just this task. He'll get us through if anyone can." "If anyone can," she whispered. She began to sob -- wracking, convulsive movements that shook her whole body. "See what you've done!" Harvey said. Igan sighed, brought up a hand containing a capsule, extended the capsule to Harvey. "Give her this." "What's that?" Harvey demanded. "Just a sedative." "I don't want a sedative," she sobbed. "It's for your own good, my dear," Igan said. "Really this could dislodge the embryo. You should remain calm and quiet this soon after the operation." "She doesn't want it," Harvey said. His eyes glared with anger. "She has to take it," Igan said. "Not if she doesn't want it." I gan forced his voice into a reasonable tone. "Durant, I'm only trying to save our lives. You're angry now and you..." "You're damn right I'm angry! I'm tired of being ordered around!" "If I've offended you, I'm sorry Durant," Igan said. "But I must caution you that your present reaction is conditioned by your gene shaping. You've excess male protectiveness. Your wife will be all right. This sedative is harmless. She's hysterical because she has too much maternal drive. These are flaws in your gene shaping, but you'll both be all right if you remain calm." "Who says we're flawed?" Harvey demanded. "I'll bet you're a Sterrie who's never... "That's quite enough, Durant," the other doctor said. It was a rumbling, powerful voice. Harvey looked at Boumour, noted the pinched-up elfin face on the big body. The surgeon appeared powerful and dangerous, the face strangely inhuman. "We cannot fight among ourselves," Boumour rumbled. "We may be getting near the check point. They're sure to have listening devices." "We aren't flawed," Harvey growled. "Perhaps you're right," Igan said. "But you're both reducing our chances of escape. If one of you breaks up at that check point, that's the end of us." He shifted his hand, extended the capsule to Lizbeth. "Please take this, madame. It contains a tranquilizer. Quite harmless, I assure you." Hesitantly, Lizbeth took the capsule. It felt cold and gelatinous against her fingers -- repulsive. She wanted to hurl the thing at Igan, but Harvey touched her cheek. "Maybe you'd better take it," he said. "For the baby." She brought up her hand, popped the capsule against the back of her tongue, gulped it. It must be all right if Harvey agreed. But she didn't like the hurt, baffled look in his eyes. "Now relax," Igan said. "It's fast acting -- three or four minutes and you'll feel quite calm." He sat back, glanced down at Svengaard. The trussed figure still appeared to be unconscious, chest rising and falling in an even rhythm. TT'or what felt like a long time now, Svengaard had been increasingly aware of hunger and a swooping, turning motion that rolled his body against a hard surface. There was a sensation of swiftness about the motion. He smelled human perspiration, heard the roar of turbines. The sound was beginning to press on his consciousness. There was light, dim and fuzzy, through uncooperative eyelids. He felt a gag biting his lips, bindings on hands and feet. Svengaard opened his eyes. For a moment he failed to focus. Then he found himself staring up at a low ceiling, a tiny glowtube in the corner with a speaker grill beneath it bulging beside a dull ruby call light. The ceiling seemed too close to him, and there was a blurred shadow shape to his right. A leg stretched across him. The single light emitted a yellow glow that almost failed to dispel the darkness. The ruby light began winking, red fire flashing on and off. "Check point!" Igan hissed. "Silence everyone!" They sensed the van begin to slow. Its air suspension became softer and softer. The turbines whined downscale. They rocked to a stop, and the turbines whispered into stand-by. Svengaard's gaze darted around the enclosure. A rough bench above him to his right... two figures seated on it. A sharp edge of metal protruded from the bench support beside his cheek. Softly, gently, Svengaard moved his head toward the metal projection, felt it touch flesh through the gag. He gave a gentle push of his head upward, and the gag pulled down slightly. The projection scratched his cheek, but he ignored it. Another gentle tug and the gag lowered another turned his eyes, checking his surroundings, saw Lizbeth's face above him to the left, her eyes closed, hands in front of her mouth. There was a sense of suspended terror about her. Again, Svengaard moved his head. There were voices somewhere in a remote distance -- sharp sounds of questions, murmurous answers. Lizbeth's hands lowered to reveal her mouth. The lips moved soundlessly. The sound of talking had stopped. Slowly the van began to move. Svengaard twisted his head. The binding of his gag broke free. He coughed it from his mouth, shouted: "Help! Help! I'm a prisoner! Help!" I gan and Boumour leaped with shock. Lizbeth screamed : "No! Oh, no!" Harvey surged forward, crashed a fist into Svengaard's jaw, fell on him with one hand over the man's mouth. They held their positions in an agony of listening as the van continued to gather speed. Igan took a trembling breath, looked across into the wide staring eyes of Lizbeth. The voice of their driver came through the speaker grill: "What is the trouble? Can't you observe the simplest precautions?" The dispassionate, accusing quality of the voice chilled Harvey. He wondered about the driver then, why the creature took this tone rather than telling them if they'd been exposed. Svengaard felt limp and unconscious beneath him, Harvey realized. He experienced a wild desire to throttle the surgeon here and now, could almost feel his hands around the man's throat. "Did they hear us?" Igan whispered. "Apparently not," the driver rasped. "No sign of pursuit. I presume you'll not permit another such lapse. Please report on what happened." "Svengaard wakened from the narcotic sooner than we expected." "But he was gagged." "He... managed to get the gag off... somehow." "Perhaps you should kill him. Obviously he will not take reconditioning." Harvey pushed himself off Svengaard. Now that the Cyborg had made the suggestion, he no Who was it up there in the van's cab? Harvey wondered. Cyborgs tended to sound alike, that computer personality with its altitude of logic so far above the human. This one, though, came through even more remote than usual. "We'll... consider what to do," Igan said. "Svengaard is again secure?" "He's been taken care of." "No thanks to you," Harvey said, staring at Igan. "You were right over him." Igan's face paled. He remembered his frozen immobility after that leap of fear. Anger surged through him. What right had this clod to question a surgeon? He spoke stiffly: "I regret that I'm not a man of violence." "Something you'd better learn," Harvey said. He felt Lizbeth's hand on his shoulder, allowed her to guide him back onto their bench. "If you have more of that knockout stuff, maybe you'd better use another dose of it on him before he wakes up again." Igan suppressed a sharp reply. "In the bag under our bench," Boumour said. "A reasonable suggestion." Woodenly, Igan groped for a slapshot, administered it to Svengaard. A gain the driver's voice barked through the speaker: "Attention! We must not presume from the lack of immediate and obvious pursuit that they failed to hear the outcry. I am executing Plan Gamma." "Who is that driver?" Harvey whispered. "I didn't see which one they programmed," Boumour said. He studied Harvey. That had been an appropriate question. The driver did sound odd, much more so than the usual Cyborg abnormality. They'd said the driver would be a programmed reflex computer, a machine designed to give the surest response to achieve their escape. Who did they choose for that program? "What's Plan Gamma?" Lizbeth whispered. "We're abandoning the prepared escape route," Boumour said. He stared at the forward wall of their box. Abandoning the prepared route... which meant they'd be completely dependent now upon the abilities of the Cyborg driver... and whichever scattered cells of the Underground remained and were available. Any one of those cells could've been compromised, of course. Boumour's usually stolid nature began to entertain odd wisps of fear. "Driver!" Harvey called. "Silence," the driver snapped. "Stick to the original plan," Harvey said. "They have the medical facilities there if my wife..." "Your wife's safety is not the overriding factor," the driver said. "Elements along the prepared route must not be discovered. Do not distract me with your objections. Plan Gamma is being executed." "Easy does it," Boumour said as Harvey surged forward, supporting himself with a hand on the bench. "What can you do, Durant?" Harvey sagged back onto the bench, groped for and found Lizbeth's hand. She squeezed it, signaled : "Wait. Don't you read the doctors? They're frightened too... and worried." "I'm worried about you," Harvey signaled. So her safety -- and presumably ours -- aren't the overriding concern, Boumour thought. What then is the overriding concern? What program controls our computer-in-ilesh? Y Artly Nourse of the Tuyere occupied a throne in the Survey Globe, his attention on the rays, the winking lights and gauges, the cascading luminescences that reported affairs of the Folk. A telltale told him it was night outside in this hemisphere -- darkness that spread across the land from Seatac to the megalopolis of N'Scotia. He saw the physical darkness as a sign of frightening events to come and wished Schruille and Calapine would return. The visual-report screen came alight. Nourse turned to face it as Allgood's features appeared there. The Security boss bowed to Nourse. "What is it?" Nourse asked. "Seatac Checkpoint East reports a van with an odd load of containers has just gone through, Nourse. Its turbines carried masking mutes which we deciphered. The mutes concealed sounds of breathing -- five persons hidden in the load. Voices cried out from within as the van pulled away. Acting on your instructions, we put a drop marker onto the van and now have it under observation. What are your orders?" It begins, Nourse thought. While I'm alone here it begins. Nourse looked to the instruments covering the checkpoints. Seatac East. The van was a moving green pinpoint on a screen. He read the banked binaries describing the incident, compared them with a total-plan motivational analysis. The probability analogues he derived filled him with a sense of doom. "The voices have been identified, Nourse," Allgood said. "The voice prints were... "Svengaard and Lizbeth Durant," Nourse said. "Where she is, her husband cannot be far away," Allgood said. Allgood's logical little announcements began to annoy Nourse. He contained the emotion while noting the man had overlooked the use of the Optiman's name-in-address. It was a small sign, but significant, especially when Allgood appeared not to notice his own lapse. "Which leaves us two unidentified," Nourse said. "We can make an educated guess... Nourse." Nourse glanced at his probability analogues, said: "Two of our wayward pharmacists." "One may be Potter, Nourse." Nourse shook his head. "Potter remains in Seatac." "They may have a portable vat, Nourse, and that embryo with them," Allgood said, "but we failed to detect appropriate machinery." "You would not hear the machinery being used," Nourse said. "Or, hearing it, you would not identify it." VTourse looked up to the banks  of scanners -- every one of them alive -- showing the Qptimen observing their Survey Globe. Night or day, the watching channels were jammed. They know what I mean, he thought. Are they disgusted, or is this just another interesting aspect of violence? As could have been predicted, Allgood said: "I fail to understand Nourse's meaning." "No need," Nourse said. He looked at the face in the screen. So young it appeared, but Nourse had begun to notice a thing: There was much youngness in Central, but no youth. Even the Sterrie servants betrayed this fact to the unveiled eye. He felt himself to be like the Sterrie Folk suddenly, watching each other for evidence of aging, hoping by comparison that their own appearance prospered. "What are Nourse's instructions?" Allgood asked. "Svengaard's outcry indicates he's a prisoner," Nourse said. "But we must not overlook the possibility this is an elaborate ruse." "Shall we destroy the van, Nourse?" "Destroy... Nourse shuddered. "No! Not yet. Keep it under surveillance. Put out a general alert. We must discover where they're headed. Every contact they make must be noted and marked down for attention." "If they elude us. Nourse, it could..." "You've flagtapped the appropriate enzyme prescriptions?" "Yes, Nourse." "Then they cannot run far... or long." "As you say, Nourse." "You may go," Nourse said. He watched the screen long after it had turned blank. Destroy the van? That would be an ending. He felt then that he did not want this game to end -- ever. A curious feeling of elation crept through him. T he globe's entrance segment swung below him. Calapine entered, followed by Schruille. They rode the climbing beam to their seats on the triangular dais. Neither spoke. They appeared withdrawn, oddly calm. Nourse thought of a controlled storm as he looked at them -- the lightning and the thunder contained so that it might not harm their fellows. "Is it not time?" Calapine asked. A sigh escaped Nourse. Schruille activated the sensor contact with the scanners in the mountains. There was moonlight suddenly in the receiving screens, the sounds of nightbirds, a rustling of dry leaves. Far off across moon-frosted hills lay lines and patches of lights tracing the coast and harbors of the megalopolis and the multi-level skyway networks. Calapine stared at the scene, thinking of jewels and casual baubles, the playthings of idleness. She'd not had the inclination in several centuries to indulge in such toys. Why should I think of them now? she wondered. These are not toys. Nourse examined the binary pyramids, the action analogues showing the course of Folk activity within the megalopolis. "All is normal... and in readiness," he said. "Normal!" Schruille said. "Which of us?" Calapine whispered. "I have seen the necessity longest," Schruille said. "I will do it." He rolled a looping ring in the arm of his throne. As he moved it, he was appalled by the simplicity of the action. This ring and the powers it controlled had been at hand for eons, an unsensitive linkage of machinery. All it took was a simple turning motion, a hand and the will behind the hand. Calapine watched the scene in her screens -- moonlight on hills, the megalopolis beyond, an animated toy subject to her whims. The last cadre of special personnel had departed, she knew. Irreplaceable objects that might be damaged had been removed. All was ready and doomed. Winking flares began to appear through the necklaces of light -- golden yellow flares. The Tuyere's screens blurred as sonics vibrated the distant scanners. Lights began going out. Across the entire region, the lights went out -- in groups and one by one. A low green fog rolled across the running the hills. "presently no lights were visible. Only the green fog remained. It continued to creep out beneath the impersonal moon, moving out and across and through until it remained and nothing more. Schruille watched the stacked numerical analogues, the unemotional reporters which merely counted, submitted deductions of sortings, remainders... zeroes. Nothing showed Folk dying in the tubes and warrens, in the streets... at their labors... at their play. Nourse sat weeping. They are dead, all dead, he thought. Dead. The word felt peculiar in his mind, devoid of personal meaning. It was a term that could be applied to bacteria perhaps... or to weeds. One sterilized an area before bringing in lovely flowers. Why do I weep? He tried to remember if he'd ever wept before. Perhaps there was a time when I wept, he thought. But it was so long ago. Ago... ago... ago... time... time... wept... wept. They were words suddenly without meaning. That's the trouble with endless life, he thought. With too much repetition, everything loses meaning. Schruille studied the green fog in his screens. A few repairs, and we'll be able to send in new Folk, he thought. We'll repopulate with Folk of a safer cut. He wondered then where they'd find the safer Folk. The globe's analysis boards revealed that the Seatac problem was only one of many such pockets. Symptoms were everywhere the same. He could see the flaw. It centered on the isolation of one generation from another. Lack of traditions and continuity became an obsession with the Folk... because they seemed to communicate no matter what repressions were tried. Folk sayings would crop up to reveal the deep current beneath. Schruille quoted to himself: "When God first created a dissatisfied man, He put that man outside Central." But we created these Folk, Schruille thought. How did we create dissatisfied men? He turned then and saw that Calapine and Nourse were weeping. "Why do you weep?" Schruille demanded. But they remained silent. XX  X There the last skyway ended, ' ' the van took the turn away from the undermountain tube and held to the wide surface track on the Lester by-way. It led upward through old tunnels to the wilderness reserve and breeder-leave resorts along an almost deserted air-blasted roadbed. There were no slavelights up here -- only the moon and the stabbing cyclops beam of the van's headlight. An occasional omnibus passed them on the downtrack, the passenger seats occupied by silent, moody couples, their breeder leave ended, heading back to the megalopolis. If any of them focused on the van, it was dismissed as a supply carrier for the resorts. On a banked curve below the Homish Resort Complex, the Cyborg driver made a series of adjustments to his lift controls. Venturis narrowed. Softness went out of the ride. Turbines whined upward to a near destructive keening. The van turned off the roadbed. Within the narrow box that concealed them, Harvey Durant clutched the bench with one hand and Lizbeth with the other as the van lurched and bounced across the eroded mounds of an ancient railroad right of way, crashed through a screen of alders and turned onto a game track that followed the right of way upward through buck brush and rhododendrons. "What's happening?" Lizbeth wailed. The driver's voice rasped through the speaker: "We have left the road. There is nothing to fear." Nothing to fear, Harvey thought. The idea appeared so ludicrous he had to suppress a chuckle which he realized might be near hysteria. The driver had turned off all exterior lights and was relying now on the moon and his infrared vision. The cyborg-boosted vision revealed the trail as a snail track through the brush. The van gulped this track for two kilometers, leaving a dusty, leaf-whirling wake to a point where the game trail intersected a forest patrol road -- a cleared track matted with dead salal and bracken from the passage of the patrol vehicles. Here, it turned right like a great hissing prehistoric monster, labored up a hill, roared down the other side and to the other side and to the top of another hill where it stopped. Turbines whined down to silence, and the van settled onto its skids. The driver emerged, a blocky stub-legged figure with glittering prosthetic arms attached for its present needs. A side panel was ripped off and the Cyborg began unloading cargo, tossing it indiscriminately down through a stand of hemlock into a deep gully. XXrithin their compartment, Y " Igan lurched to his feet, put his mouth near the speakerphone and whispered: "Where are we?" Silence. "That was stupid," Harvey said. "How do you know why he's stopped?" Igan ignored the insult. It came after all from a semi-educated dolt. "You can hear him shifting cargo," Igan said. He leaned across Harvey, pounded a palm against the compartment's side. "Whats 'going on?" "Oh, sit down," Harvey said. He put a hand on Igan's chest, pushed. The surgeon stumbled backward onto the opposite bench. Igan started to bounce back, his face dark, eyes glaring. Boumour restrained him, rumbled : "Serenity, friend Igan." Igan settled back. Slowly, a look of patience came over his features. "It's odd," he said, "how one's emotions have a way of asserting themselves in spite of..." "That will pass," Boumour said. Harvey found Lizbeth's hand, clutched it, signaled: "Igan's chest -- it's convex and hard as plasmeld. I felt it under his jacket." "You think he's Cyborg?" "He breathes normally." "And he has emotions. I read fear on him." "Yes... but..." "We will be careful." Boumour said: "You should place more trust in us, Durant. Doctor Igan had deduced that our driver would not be moving cargo unless certain sounds were safe." "How do we know who's moving cargo?" Harvey asked. A look of caution fled across Boumour's massive calm. Harvey read it, smiled. "Harvey!" Lizbeth said. "You don't think the... "It's our driver out there," Harvey reassured her. "I can smell the wilderness in the air. There's been no sound of a struggle. One doesn't take a Cyborg without a struggle." "But where are we?" she asked. "In the mountains, the wilderness," Harvey said. "From the feel of the ride, we're well off the main by-ways." Abruptly, their compartment lurched, slid sideways. The single light was extinguished. In the sudden darkness, the wall behind Harvey dropped away. He clutched Lizbeth, Whirled, found himself looking out into darkness... moonlight... their driver a blocky shadow against a distant panorama of the megalopolis with its shimmering networks of light. The moon silvered the tops of trees below them, and there was a sharp smell of forest duff, resinous, dank, churned up by the van and not yetsettled. The wilderness lay silent as though waiting, anolyzing the intrusion. "Out," the driver said. T he Cyborg turned. Harvey saw the features suddenly illuminated by moonlight, said: "Glisson!" "Greetings, Durant," Glisson said. "Why you?" Harvey asked. "Why not?" Glisson asked. 'Get out of there now." Harvey said: "But my wife isn't..." "I know about your wife," Durant. "She's had plenty of time since the treatment. She can walk if she doesn't exert herself." Igan spoke at Harvey's ear: "She'll be quite all right. Sit her up gently and help her down." "I... feel all right," Lizbeth said. "Here." She put an arm over Harvey's shoulder. Together they slipped down to the ground. Igan followed, asked: "Where are we?" "We are someplace headed for someplace else," Glisson said. "What is the condition of our prisoner?" Boumour spoke from within the compartment: "He's coming around. Help me lift him out." "Why've we stopped?" Harvey asked. "There is steep climbing ahead," Glisson said. "We're dropping the load. A van isn't built for this work." Boumour and Igan shouldered past them carrying Svengaard and propped him against a stump beside the track. "Wait here while I disengage the trailer," Glisson said. "You might be considering whether we should abandon Svengaard." Hearing his name, Svengaard opened his eyes, found himself staring out and down at the distant lights of the megalopolis. His jaw ached where Harvey had struck him, and there was a throbbing in his head. He felt hungry, thirsty. His hands were numb beyond the bindings. A dry smell of evergreen needles filled his nostrils. He sneezed. "Perhaps we should get rid of Svengaard," Igan said. "I think not," Bouraour said. "He's a trained man, a possible ally. We're going to need trained men." Svengaard looked toward the voices. They stood beside the van which was a long silvery shape behind a stubby double cab. A wrenching of metal sounded there. The trailer slid backward on its skids almost two meters before stopping against a mound of dirt. Glisson returned, squatted beside Svengaard. "What is our decision?" the Cyborg asked. "Kill him or keep him?" Harvey gulped, felt Lizbeth clutch his arm. "Keep him yet awhile," Boumour said. "If he causes no more trouble," Igan said. "We could always use his parts," Glisson said. "Or grow a new Svengaard and retrain it." The Cyborg stood. "Not always successful, though. An immediate decision isn't necessary. It is a thing to consider." Svengaard remained silent, frozen by the emotionless clarity of the man's speech. A hard, brutal rrtan, he thought. A tough man, prepared for any violence. A killer. "Into the cab with him then," Glisson said. "Everyone into the cab. We must get..." The Cyborg broke off, stared out toward the megalopolis. C vengaard turned toward the  strings of blue-white light glittering far away and cold. A winking golden flare had appeared amidst the lights on his left. Another blazed up beyond it -- a giant's bonfire set against the background of distant, moonfrosted mountains. More yellow flares appeared to the right. A shook him, jarred a sympathetic metal dissonance from the van. "What's happening?" Lizbeth hissed. "Quiet," Glisson said. "Quiet and observe." "Gods of life," Lizbeth whispered, "what is it?" "It is the death of a megalopolis," Boumour said. Again sonics rattled the van. "That hurts," Lizbeth whimpered. Harvey pulled her close, muttered: "Damn them!" "Up here it hurts,' Igan said, "Down there it kills." Green fog began emerging from the wilderness some ten kilometers below them. It rolled out and down like a furious downy sea beneath the moon, engulfing everything -- hills, the gem-like lights, the yellow flares. "Did you think they would use the death fog?" Boumour asked. "We knew they would use it," Glisson said. "I suppose so," Boumour said. "Sterilize the area." "What is it?" Harvey demanded. "It comes from the vents where they administered the contraceptive gas," Boumour said. "One drop on your skin is the end for you." Igan moved around, stared down at Svengaard. "They are the ones who love us and care for us," he mocked. "What's happening?" Svengaard asked. "Can you not hear?" Igan asked. "Can you not see? Your friends the Optimen are sterilizing Seatac. Did you have friends there?" "Friends?" There was a broken quality to Svengaard's voice. He turned back to stare at the green fog. The distant lights had all been extinguished. Again, sonics chattered through them, shook the ground, rattled the van. "What do you think of them now?" Igan asked. Ovengaard shook his head, un able to speak. He wondered why he had no sensory fuse system to shut off this scene. He felt chained to awareness through sense organs gone abnormal beyond any previous experience... a permissive aberration. His senses were deceiving him, that was it. This was a special case of self-deception. "Why don't you answer me?" Igan asked. "Leave him alone," Harvey said. "We've griefs of our own. Haven't you any feelings?" "He sees it and does not believe," Igan said. "How could they?" Lizbeth whispered. "Self-preservation," Boumour rumbled. "A trait our friend Svengaard doesn't seem to have. Perhaps it was cut out of him." Svengaard stared at the rolling green cloud. So silent and stealthy it was! The great reach of darkness where once there had been light and life filled him with a raw awareness of his own mortality. He thought of friends down there -- the hospital staff... embroyos... his playmatewife. All destroyed. Svengaard felt emptied, incapable of any emotion -- not even grief. He could only question: What was their purpose? "Into the cab with him," Glisson said. "On the floor in the rear." Ungentle hands lifted Svengaard -- he identified Boumour and Glisson. The driver's unemotional quality confused Svengaard. He had never before encountered quite that abstract detachment in a human being. They pushed him onto the floor of the van's cab. The sharp edge of a seat brace dug into his side. Feet came in around him. Someone put a foot on his stomach, recoiled. The turbines came alive. A door was slammed. They glided into motion. Svengaard sank into a kind of stupor. Lizbeth seated above him heaved a deep sigh. Hearing it, Svengaard was roused to a feeling of compassion for her, his first emotion since the shock of seeing the megalopolis die. Why did they do it? he asked himself. Why? In the darkness, Lizbeth gripped Harvey's hand. She could see in an occasional patch of moonglow the outline of Glisson directly ahead of her. The Cyborg's minimal movement, the sense of power in every action, filled her with growing disquiet. The scar of her operation itched. She wanted to scratch, but feared calling attention to herself. The Courier Service had been a long time building its own organization, deceiving both the Cyborgs and the Optimen. They'd done it partly through self-effacement. Now, in her fear, she sank back into that treatment. Through their hands, Harvey signaled: "Boumour and Igan, I read them now. They're new Cyborgs. Probably just a first linkage with implanted computers. They're just learning the price, shedding their normal human emotional reactions, learning to counterfeit emotion." She absorbed this, seeing them through Harvey's deduction. He often read people better than she did. She reread what she had seen of the two surgeons. "Do you read it?" he signaled. "You're right. Yes." "It means a total break with Central. They can never go back." "That explains Seatac," she signaled. She began to tremble. "And we can't trust them," Harvey said. He pressed her close, soothing her. r T"'he van labored up through the foothills, skirting open meadows, following ancient tracks, an occasional streambed. Shortly before dawn, it swerved left down a firebreak and into a stand of pines and cedars, squeezed its way through a narrow lane there with its blowers kicking up a heavy cloud of forest duff behind. Glisson pulled to a stop behind an old building, moss on its sides, small curtained windows. Pseudo ducks, with a weedy patina and grass-grown signs that they hadn't been animated in years, made a short file near the building -- pale moonfigures in the light of a single bulb high up under the building's eaves. Turbines whined to silence. They could hear then the hum of machinery and looking toward the sound saw the dull silver outline of a ventilator tower among the trees. A door at the corner of the building opened. A heavy-headed man with a big jaw, stoopshouldered, emerged blowing his nose into a red handkerchief. He looked old, his face a mask of subservience. Glisson said: "It's the sign. All is safe here... for the moment." He slipped out, approached the old man, coughed. "A lot of sickness around these days," the old man said. His voice was as ancient as his face, wheezing, slurring the consonants. "You're not the only one with troubles," Glisson said. The old man straightened, shed the stooped look and subservient manner. "S'pose you're wanting a hidey hole," he said. "Don't know if it's safe here. Don't even know if I oughta hide you." "I will give the orders here," Glisson said. "You will obey." The old man studied Glisson a moment, then a look of anger washed over his face. "You damn Cyborgs!" he said. "Hold your tongue," Glisson said, his voice flat. "We need food, a safe place to spend the day. I shall require your help in hiding this van. You must know the surrounding terrain. And you will arrange other transportation for us." "Best cut it up and bury it," the old man said, his voice surly. "Been a hornet's nest stirred up. Guess you know that." "We know," Glisson said. He turned, beckoned to the van. "Come along. Bring Svengaard." presently the others joined him. Boumour and Igan supported Svengaard between them. The bindings on Svengaard's feet had been released, but he appeared barely able to stand. Lizbeth walked with the bent-over care that said she wasn't sure her incision had healed, despite the enzymic speed-up medication. "We will lodge here during daylight," Glisson said. "This man will direct you to quarters." "What word from Seatac?" Igan asked. Glisson looked at the old man, said : "Answer." The oldster shrugged. "Courier through here couple of hours ago. Said no survivors." "Any report on a Dr. Potter?" Svengaard croaked. Glisson stared at Svengaard. "Dunno," the old man said. "What route he take?" Igan cleared his throat, glanced at Glisson, then at the old man. "Potter? I believe he was in the group coming out by the power tubes." The old man flicked a glance at the ventilator tower growing more distinct among the trees by the second as daylight crept across the mountains. "Nobody come through the tubes," he said. "They shut off the ventilators and flooded the tubes with that gas first thing." He looked at Igan. "Ventilators been going again for about three hours." Glisson studied Svengaard, asked: "Why are you interested in Potter?" Svengaard remained silent. "Answer me!" Glisson ordered. Svengaard tried to swallow. His throat ached. He felt driven into a corner. Glisson's words enraged him. Without warning, Svengaard lurched forward, dragging Igan and Boumour, lashed out at Glisson with a foot. The Cyborg dodged with a blurring movement, caught the foot, jerked Svengaard from the two surgeons, whirled, swung Svengaard wide and released him. Svengaard landed on his back, skidded across the ground, stopped. Before he could move, Glisson was standing over him. Svengaard lay there sobbing. "Why are you interested in Potter?" Glisson demanded. "Go away, go away, go away," Svengaard sobbed. Glisson straightened, looked around at Igan and Boumour. "You understand this?" Igan shrugged. "It's emotion." "Perhaps a shock reaction," Boumour said. Through their hands, Harvey signaled Lizbeth: "He's been in shock, but this means he's coming out of it. These are medical people! Can't they read anything?" "Glisson reads it," she answered. "He was testing them." Glisson turned around, looked squarely at Harvey. The bold understanding in the Cyborg's eyes shot a pang of fear through Harvey. "Careful," Lizbeth signaled. "He's suspicious of us." "Take Svengaard inside," Glisson said. Svengaard looked up at their driver. Glisson, the Durants called him. But the old man from the building had labeled Glisson a Cyborg. Was it possible? Were the half-men being revived to challenge the Optimen once more? Was that the reason for Seatac's death? Boumour and Igan lifted him, checked the fetters on his hands. "Let's have no more foolishness," Boumour said. Are they like Glisson? Svengaard asked himself. Are they, too, part man, part machine? And what about the Durants? Svengaard could feel the teardampness in his eyes. Hysteria, he thought. Coming out of shock. He began to wonder at himself then with an odd feeling of guilt. Why does Potter's death strike me more deeply than the death of an entire megalopolis, the extinction of my wife and friends? What did Potter symbolize to me? T oumour and Igan half carried, half walked him into the building, down a narrow hall and into a poorly lighted, gloomy big room with a ceiling that went up to bare beams two stories above. They dropped him onto a dusty couch -- bare plastic and hydraulic contour shapers that adjusted reluctantly. The light came from two glowglobes high up under the beams. It exposed oddments of furniture scattered around the room and mounds of strange shape covered by slick, glistening fabric. A table to his left, he realized, was planks. Wood! A contour cot lay beyond it, and an ancient rolltop desk with a missing drawer, mismatched chairs. A stained, soot-blackened fireplace with an iron crane reaching across its mouth like a gibbet occupied half the wall across from him. The entire room smelled of dampness and rot. The floor creaked as people moved. Wood flooring! Svengaard looked up at tiny windows admitting a sparse gray daylight that grew brighter by the second. Even at its brightest he knew it wouldn't dispel the gloom of this place. Here was sadness that made him think of people without number -- dead, forgotten. Tears rolled down his cheeks. What's wrong with me? he wondered. There came a sound from the yard of the van's turbines being ignited. He heard it lift, leave... fade away. Harvey and Lizbeth entered the room. Lizbeth looked at Svengaard, then at Boumour and Igan who had taken up vigil on the cot. With her crouched, protective walk, she crossed to Svengaard, touched his shoulder. She saw his tears, evidence of humanity, and she wished then that he were her doctor. Perhaps there was a way. She decided to ask Harvey. "Please trust us," she said. "We won't harm you. They are the ones who killed your wife and friends, not us." Svengaard pulled away. How dare she have pity on me? he thought. But she had reached some chord in him. He could feel himself shattering. Oppressive silence settled over the room. Harvey came up, guided his wife to a chair at the table. "It's wood," she said, touching the surface, wonder in her voice. Then: "Harvey, I'm very hungry." "They'll bring food as soon as they've disposed of the van," he said. She clutched his hand, and Svengaard watched, fascinated by the nervous movement of her fingers. Glisson and the old man returned presently, slamming the door behind them. The building creaked with their movement. "We'll have a forest patrol vehicle for the next stage," Glisson said. "Much safer. There's a thing you all should know now." The Cyborg moved a cold, weighted stare from face to face. "There was a marker on top of the van's load section which we abandoned last night." "Marker?" Lizbeth said. "A device for tracing us, following us," Glisson said. "Ohhh!" Lizbeth put a hand over her mouth. "I do not know how closely they were following," Glisson said. "I was altered for this task, and certain of my devices were left behind. They may know where we are right now." Harvey shook his head. "But why..." "Why haven't they moved against us?" Glisson asked. "It's obvious. They hope we'll lead them to the vitals of our organization." Something like rage came into the Cyborg's features. "It may be we can surprise them." I n the Survey Room, the great globe's instrumented inner walls lay relatively quiescent. Calapine and Schruille of the Tuyere occupied the triple thrones. The dais turned slowly, allowing them to scan the entire surface. Kaleidoscopic colors from the instruments played a somnolent visible melody across Calapine's features -- a wash of greens, reds, purples. She felt tired, with a definite emotion of self pity. There was something wrong with the enzymic analyzers. She felt sure of it, wondering if the Underground had somehow compromised the function of the pharmacy computers. Schruille was no help. He'd laughed at the suggestion. Allgood's features appeared on a call screen before Calapine. She stopped the turning dais as he bowed, said: "I call to report, Calapine." She noted the dark circles under his eyes, the drugged awareness in the way he held his head stiffly erect. "You have found them?" Calapine asked. "They're somewhere in the wilderness area, Calapine," Allgood said. "They have to be in there." "Have to be!" she sneered. "You're a foolish optimist, Max." "We know some of the hiding places they could've chosen, Calapine." "For every one you know, they've nine you don't know," she said. "I have the entire area ringed, Calapine. We're moving in slowly, checking everywhere as we go. They're there, and we'll find them." "He babbles," she said, glancing at Schruille. Schruille returned a mirthless smile, looked at Allgood through the prismatic reflector. "Max, have you found the source of the substitute embryo?" "Not yet, Schruille." He stared up at them, his face betraying his obvious confusion at the militancy and violence of his Optimen. "Do you seek in Seatac?" Calapine demanded. Allgood wet his lips. "Out with it!" she snapped. Ahhh the fear in his eyes. "We're searching there, Calapine, but the..." "You think we were too precipitate?" she asked. He shook his head. "You're acting strangely," Schruille said. "Are you afraid of us?" He hesitated, then: "Yes, Schruille." "Yes, Schruille!" Calapine mimicked. Allgood looked at her, the fear in his eyes tempered by anger. "I'm taking every action I know, Calapine." S he marked a sudden precision in his manner behind the anger. Her eyes went wide with wonder. Was it possible? She looked at Schruille, wondering if he had seen it. "Max, why did you call us?" Schruille asked. "I... to report, Schruille." "You've reported nothing." Hesitantly, Calapine brought up her instruments for a special probe of Allgood, stared at the result. Horror mingled with rage in her. Cyborg! They had defiled Max! Her Max! "There's only need for you to obey us," Schruille said. Allgood nodded silently. "You!" Calapine hissed. She leaned toward the screen. "You dared! Why? Why, Max?" Schruille said: "What..." But in the shocked instant of her questions, Allgood had seen that he was discovered. He knew it was his end, could see it in her eyes. "I saw... I found the doppelgangers," he stammered. An angry twist of her hand rolled one of the rings on her thome arm. Sonics sent a shock wave chattering across Allgood, blurred his image. His lips moved soundlessly, eyes staring. He collapsed. "Why did you do that?" Schruille asked. "He was Cyborg!" she grated and pointed to the evidence of the instruments. "Max? Our Max?" He looked at the instruments, nodded. "My Max," she said. "But he worshipped you, loved you." "He does nothing now," she whispered. She blanked the screen, continued to stare at it. Already the incident was receding from her mind. "Do you enjoy direct action?" Schruille asked. She met his gaze in the reflector. Enjoy direct action? There was indeed a kind of elation in... violence. "We have no Max now," Schruille said. "We'll waken another doppleganger," she said. "Security can function without him for now." "Who'll waken the doppelganger?" he asked. "Igan and Boumour are no longer with us. The Pharmacist, Hand, is gone." "What's keeping Nourse?" she asked. "Enzymic trouble," Schruille said, a note of glee in his voice. "He said something about a necessary realignment of his prescription. Bonellia hormone derivatives, I believe." "Nourse can awaken the doppelganger," she said. She wondered momentarily then why they needed the doppelganger. Oh, yes. Max was gone. C C nphere's more to it than merely awakening Max's duplicate," Schruille said. "They're not as good as they once were, you know. The new Max must be educated for his role, fitted into it gently. It could be weeks... months." "Then one of us can run Security," she said. "You think we're ready for it?" Schruille asked. "There's a thrill in this sort of decision making," she said. "I don't mind saying I've been deeply bored during the past several hundred years. But now... now I feel alive, vital, alert, fascinated." She looked up at the glowing banks of scanner eyes, a full band of them, showing their fellow Optimen watching activities in the Survey Room. "And I'm not alone in this." Schruille glanced up at the glittering arctic circle of the globe's inner wall. "Aliveness," he murmured. "But Max... he is dead-" "Any Max can be replaced," she said. She looked at Schruille, turning her head to stare past the prism. "You're very blunt today, Schruille. You've spoken of death twice that I recall." "Blunt? I?" He shook his head. "But I didn't erase Max." She laughed aloud. "My own reactions thrill me, Schruille!" "And do you find changes in your enzymic demands?" "A few. What is that? Times change. It's part of being. Adjustments must be made." "Indeed," he said. "Where'd they find a substitute for the Durant embryo?" she asked, her mind shooting off at a tangent. "Perhaps the new Max can discover," Schruille said. "He must." "Or you will grow another Max," Schruille said. "Don't mock me, Schruille." "I wouldn't dare.' Again she looked directly at him. "What if they produced their own embryo for the substitution?" Schruille asked. She turned away. "In the name of all that's proper, how?" "Air can be filtered clean of contraceptive gas," Schruille said. "You're disgusting!" "Am I? But haven't you wondered what Potter concealed?" "Potter? We know what he concealed." "A person devoted to the prevention of life... such as that is," Schruille said. "What did he hide in his mind?" "Potter is no more." "But what did he conceal?" "You think he knew the source of the... outside interference?" "Perhaps. And he would know where to find an embryo." "Then the record will show the source as you have already said yourself." "I've been reconsidering." S he stared at him in the prism. "It's not possible." "That I could reconsider?" "You know what I mean -- what you're thinking." "But it is possible." "It isn't!" "You're being stubborn, Cal. A female should be the last person to deny such a possibility." "Now, you're being truly disgusting!" "We know Potter found a selfviable," Schruille pressed. "They could have many self-viables -- male and female. We know historically the capabilities of such raw union. It's part of our natural ancestry." "You're unspeakable," she breathed. "You can face the concept of death, but not this," Schruille said. "Most interesting." "Disgusting!" she barked. "But possible," Schruille said. "The substitute embryo wasn't self-viable!" she pounced. "All the more reason they it for one that was, eh?" "Where would they find the vat facilities, the chemicals, the enzymes, the... "Where they've always been." "What?" "They've put the Durant embryo back into its mother," Schruille said. "We can be certain of this. Would it not be equally logical to leave the embryo there to begin with -- never remove it never isolate the gametes in a vat at all?" Calapine found herself speechless. She sensed a sour taste in her mouth, realized with a feeling of shock that she wanted to vomit. Something's wrong with my enzyme balance, she thought. She spoke slowly, precisely: "I am reporting to pharmacy at once, Schruille. I do not feel well." "By all means," Schruille said. He glanced up and around at the watching scanners: a full circle of them. Delicately, Calapine eased herself out of her throne, slid down the beam to the lock segment. Before letting herself out, she cast a look up at the dais, faintly remembering. Which Max was erased? she asked herself. We've had many of him... a successful model for our Security. She thought of the others, Max after Max after Max, each shunted aside when his appearance began to annoy his masters. They stretched into infinity, images in an endless system of mirrors. What is erasure to such as Max? she wondered. I am an unbroken continuity of existence. But 'a doppelganger doesn't remember. A doppelganger breaks the continuity. Unless the cells remember. Memory... cells... embryos. She thought of the embryo within Lizbeth Durant. Disgusting, but simple. So beautifully simple. Her gorge began to rise. Whirling, Calapine dropped down to the Hall of Counsel, ran for the nearest pharmacy outlet. As she ran, she clenched the hand that had slain Max and helped destroy a magalopolis. ttOhe's sick, I tell you!" Harvey bent over Igan, shaking him out of sleep. They were in a narrow earth-walled room, ceiling of plasmeld beams, a dim yellow glowglobe in one corner. Sleeping pads were spread against the walls, Boumour and Igan on two of them foot to foot, the bound form of Svengaard on another, two of the pads empty. "Come quickly!" Harvey pleaded. "She's sick." Igan groaned, sat up. He glanced at his watch -- almost sunset on the surface. They'd crawled in here just before daylight and after a night of laboring on foot up seemingly endless woods trails behind a Forest Patrol guide. Igan still ached from the unaccustomed exercise. Lizbeth sick? She'd had three days since the embryo had been placed within her. The others had healed this rapidly, but they hadn't been subjected to a night of stumbling along the rough forest trails. "Please hurry," Harvey pleaded. "I'm coming," Igan said. And he thought: Listen to his tone change now that he needs me. Boumour sat up opposite him, asked: "Shall I join you?" "Wait here for Glisson," Igan said. "Did Glisson say where he was going?" "To arrange for another guide. It'll be dark soon." "Doesn't he ever sleep?" Boumour asked. "Please!" Harvey begged. "Yes!" Igan snapped. "What're her symptoms?" "Vomiting... incoherent." "Let me get my bag." Igan retrieved a thick black case from the floor near his head, glanced across at Svengaard. The man's breathing still showed the even rhythm of the narcotic they'd administered before collapsing into sleep themselves. Something had to be done about Svengaard. He slowed them down. Harvey pulled at Igan's sleeve. "I'm coming! I'm coming!" Igan said. He freed his arm, followed Harvey through a low hole at the end of the room and into a room similar to the one they'd just vacated. Lizbeth lay on a pad beneath a single glowglobe across from them. She groaned. Harvey knelt beside her. "I'm right here." "Harvey," she whispered. "Oh, Harvey." Igan joined them, lifted a pulmonometer sphagnomometer from his bag. He pressed it against her neck, read the dial. "Where do you hurt?" he asked. "Ohhhh," she moaned. "Please," Harvey said, looking at Igan. "Please do something." "Stand out of the way," Igan said. Harvey stood up, backed off two steps. "What is it?" he whispered. Igan ignored him, taped an enzymic vampire gauge to Lizbeth's left wrist, read the dials. "What's wrong with her?" Harvey demanded. I gan unclipped his instruments, restored them to his bag. "Nothing's wrong with her." "But she's..." "She's perfectly normal. Most of the others reacted the same way. It's realignment of her enzymic demand system." "Isn't there some..." "Calm down!" Igan stood up, faced Harvey. "She barely needs any prescription material. Pretty soon, she can do without altogether. She's in better health than you are. And she could walk into a pharmacy right now. The prescription flag wouldn't even identify her." "Then why's she..." "It's the embryo. It compensates for her needs and protects itself. Does it automatically." "But she's sick!" "A bit of glandular maladjustment, nothing else." Igan picked up his bag. "It's all part of the ancient process. The embryo says produce this, produce that. She produces. Puts a certain strain on her system." "Can't you do anything for her?" "Of course I can. She'll be extremely hungry in a little while. We'll give her something to settle her stomach and then feed her. Provided they can produce some food in this hole." Lizbeth groaned : "Harvey?" He knelt beside her, clasped her hands. "Yes, dear?" "I feel terrible." "They'll give you something in a few minutes." "Ohhhh." Harvey turned a fierce scowl up at Igan. "As soon as we can," Igan said. "Don't worry. This is normal." He turned, ducked out into the other room. "What's wrong?" Lizbeth whispered. "It's the embryo," Harvey said. "Didn't you hear?" "Yes. My head aches." Igan returned with a capsule and a cup of water, bent over Lizbeth. "Take this. It'll settle your stomach." Harvey helped her sit up, held her while she swallowed the capsule. She took a quavering breath, returned the cup. "I'm sorry to be such a..." "Quite all right," Igan said. He looked at Harvey. "Best bring her in the other room. Glisson will return in a few minutes. He should have food and a guide." Y Tarvey helped his wife to her feet, supported her as they followed Igan into the other room. They found Svengaard sitting up staring at his bound hands. "Have you been listening?" Igan asked. Svengaard looked at Lizbeth. "Yes." "Have you thought about Seatac?" "I've thought." "You're thinking of releasing him?" Harvey asked. "He slows us too much," Igan said. "And we cannot release him." "Perhaps I should do something about him," Harvey said. "What do you suggest, Durant?" Boumour asked. "He's a danger to us," Harvey said. "Ahh," Boumour said. "Then we leave him to you." "Harvey!" Lizbeth said. She wondered if he'd suddenly gone mad. Was this his reaction to her request that they seek Svengaard as her doctor? But Harvey was remembering Lizbeth's moans. "If it's him or my son," he said, "the choice is easy." Lizbeth took his hand, signaled: "What're you doing? You can't mean this!" "What is he, anyway?" Harvey asked, staring at Igan. And he signaled Lizbeth: "Wait. Watch." She read her husband then, pulled away. "He's a gene surgeon," Harvey said. His voice dripped scorn. "He's existed for them. Can he justify his existence? He's a nonviable, non-living non-entity. He has no future." "Is that your choice?" Boumour asked. Svengaard looked up at Harvey. "Do you talk of murdering me?" he asked. The lack of emotion in his voice surprised Harvey. "You don't protest?" he asked. Svengaard tried to swallow. His throat felt full of dry cotton. He looked at Harvey, measuring the bulk of the man, the corded muscles. He remembered the excessive male protectiveness in Harvey's nature, the gene-error that made him a slave to Lizbeth's slightest need. "Why should I argue," Svengaard asked, "when much of what he says is true and when he's already made up his mind?" "How will you do it, Durant?" Boumour asked. "How would you like me to do it?" Harvey asked. "Strangulation might be interesting," Boumour said, and Harvey wondered if Svengaard, too, could hear the Cyborg clinical detachment in the man's voice. "A simple snap of the neck is quicker," Igan said. "Or an injection. I could supply several from my kit." TT arvey felt Lizbeth trembling against him. He patted her arm, disengaged himself. "Harvey!" she said. He shook his head, advanced on Svengaard. Igan retreated to Boumour's side, stood watching. Harvey knelt behind Svengaard, placed his fingers around the surgeon's throat, bent close to the ear opposite his audience. In a whisper audible only to Svengaard, Harvey said: "They would as soon see you dead. They don't care one way or another. How do you feel about it?" Svengaard felt the hands on his throat. He knew he could reach up with his bound hands and try to remove those clutching fingers, but he knew he'd fail. There was no doubting Harvey's strength. "Your own choice?" Harvey whispered. "Do it, man!" Boumour called. Only seconds ago, Svengaard realized, he'd been resigned to death, wanted death. Suddenly, that wish was the farthest thing from his desires. "I want to live," he husked. "Is that your choice?" Harvey whispered. "Yes!" "Are you talking to him?" Boumour asked. "Why do you want to live?" Harvey asked in a normal voice. He relaxed his fingers slightly, a subtle communication to Svengaard. Even an untrained person could read this. "Because I've never been alive," Svengaard said. "I want to try it." "But how can you justify your existence?" Harvey asked, allowing his fingers to tighten. Svengaard looked at Lizbeth, sensing at last the direction of Harvey's thoughts. He glanced at Boumour and Igan. "You haven't answered my question," Boumour said. "What are you discussing with our prisoner?" "Are they both Cyborgs?" Svengaard asked. "Irretrievably," Harvey said. "Without human feelings -- or near enough to it that it makes no difference." "Then how can you trust them with your wife's care?" Harvey's fingers relaxed. "That is a way I could justify my existence," Svengaard said. Harvey removed his hands from Svengaard's throat, squeezed the man's shoulders. It was instant communication, more than words, something that went from flesh to flesh. Svengaard knew he had an ally. Tjoumour crossed to stand over ' them, demanded: "Are you going to kill him or aren't you?" "No one here's going to kill him," Harvey said. "What've you been doing?" "Solving a problem," Harvey said. He kept a hand on Svengaard's arm. Svengaard found he could understand Harvey's intent just by the pressure of that hand. It said: "Wait. Be still. Let me handle this." "And what do you intend for our prisoner?" Boumour demanded. "I intend to free him and put my wife in his care," Harvey said. Boumour glared at him. "And if that incurs our displeasure?" "What idiocy!" Igan blared. "How can you trust him when we're available?" "This is a fellow human," Harvey said. "What he does for my wife will be out of humanity and not like a mechanic treating her as a machine for transporting an embryo." "This is nonsense!" Igan snapped. But he realized then that Harvey had recognized their Cyborg nature. Boumour raised a hand to silence him as Igan made to go on. "You have not indicated how you will do this if we oppose it," he said. "You're not full Cyborgs," Harvey said. "I see fears in you yet and uncertainties. It's new to you, and you're changing. I suspect you're very vulnerable yet." Boumour backed off three steps, his eyes measuring Harvey. "And Glisson?" Boumour asked. "Glisson wants only trustworthy allies," Harvey said. "I'm giving him a trustworthy ally." "How do you know you cah trust Svengaard?" Igan demanded. "Because you have to ask, you betray your ineffectiveness," Harvey said. He turned, began unfastening Svengaard's fetters. "It's on your head," Boumour said. Harvey freed Svengaard's hands, knelt and removed the bindings from his feet. "I'm going for Glisson," Igan said. He left the room. T  arvev stood up, faced Svengaard. "Do you know about my wife's condition?" he asked. "I heard Igan," Svengaard said. "Every surgeon studies history and genetic origins. I have an academic knowledge of her condition." Boumour sniffed. "There's Igan's medical kit," Harvey said, pointing to the black case on the floor. "Tell me why my wife was sick." "You're not satisfied with Igan's explanation?" Boumour asked. He appeared outraged by the thought. "He said it was natural," Harvey said. "How can sickness be natural?" "She has received medication," Svengaard said. "Do you know what it was?" "It had the same markings as the pill he gave her in the van," Harvey said. "A tranquilizer he called it then." Svengaard approached Lizbeth, looked at her eyes, her skin. "Bring the kit," he said, nodding to Harvey. He guided Lizbeth to an empty pad, finding himself fascinated by the idea of this examination. Once he had thought of this as disgusting; now the idea that Lizbeth carried an embryo in her in the ancient way held only mystery for him, a profound curiosity. Lizbeth sent a questioning look at Harvey as Svengaard eased her back onto the pad. Harvey nodded reassuringly. She tried to smile, but a strange fear had come over her. The fear didn't originate with Svengaard. His hands were full of gentle assurance. But the prospect of being examined frightened her. She could feel terror warring with the drug Igan had given her. Svengaard opened the kit, remembering the diagrams and explanations from the study tapes of his school years. They had been tire subject of ribald jokes then, but even the jokes helped him now because they tended to fix vital facts in his mind. "Cling to the wall, for if you fall " You then must learn to do the crawl!" In his memory, he could hear the chant and the uproarious burst of laughter. Svengaard bent to his examination, excluding all else but the patient and himself. Blood pressure... enzymes... hormone production... bodily secretions. Presently, he frowned. "Is something wrong?" Harvey asked. Boumour stood, arms folded, behind Harvey. "Yes, do tell us," he said. "Menstrual hormone complex is much too high," Svengaard said. And he thought: "Cling to the wall... "The embryo controls these changes," Boumour sneered. "Yes," Svengaard said. "But why this shift in hormone production?" "From your superior knowledge, you'll now tell us," Boumour said. Ovengaard ignored the mocking k' tone, looked up at Boumour. "You've done this before. Have you had any spontaneous abortions in your patients?" Boumour frowned. "Well?" Svengaard said. "A few." He supplied the information grudgingly. "I suspect the embryo isn't firmly attached to the endometrium," Svengaard said. "To the wall of the uterus," he said, recognizing Harvey's need for explanation. "The embryo must cling to the uterus wall, and this is prepared for by hormones that are present during the menstrual cycle." Boumour shrugged. "Well, we expect to lose a certain percentage." "My wife is not a certain percentage," Harvey growled. He turned, focused a glare on Boumour that sent the man retreating three steps. "But these things happen," Boumour said. He looked at Svengaard, who was preparing a slapshot ampule from Igan's kit. "What're you doing?" "Giving her a little enzymic stimulation to produce the hormones she needs," Svengaard said. He glanced at Harvey, seeing the man's fears and need for reassurance. "It's the best thing we can do now, Durant. It should work if her system hasn't been too upset by all this." He waved a hand indicating their fright, the emotional stress, the exertion. "Do whatever you think you should," Harvey said. Svengaard administered the shot, patted Lizbeths arm. "Try to rest. Relax. Don't move around unless it's necessary." Lizbeth nodded. She had been reading Svengaard, seeing his genuine concern for her. His attempt to reassure Harvey had touched her, but there were fears she couldn't suppress. "Glisson," she whispered. Svengaard saw the direction of her thoughts, said: "I won't permit him to move you until I'm sure you're all right He and his guide will just have to wait." "You won't permit!" Boumour sneered. As though to punctuate his words, the ground around them rumbled and shook. Dust puffed through the low entrance, and, like a magicians trick, Glisson materialized there as the concealing dust settled. A t the first sign of disturbance, Harvey had dropped to the floor beside Lizbeth. He held her shoulders, shielded her with his body. Svengaard still knelt beside the medical kit. Boumour had whirled to stare at Glisson. "Sonics?" Boumour hissed. "Not sonics," Glisson said. The Cyborg's usually flat voice carried a singsong twang. "He has no arms," Harvey said. They all noticed it then. From the shoulders down, where Glisson's arms had been, now dangled only the empty linkages for Cyborg prosthetic attachments. " They have sealed us in here," Glisson said. Again that singsong twang, as though something about him had been broken. "As you can see, I am disarmed. Do you not think that amusing? Do you see now why we could never fight them openly? When they wish it, they can destroy anything... anyone." "Igan?" Boumour whispered. "Igans are easy to destroy," Glisson said. "I have seen it. Accept the fact." "But what'll we do?" Harvey demanded. "Do?" Glisson looked down at him. "We will wait." "One of you could stand off an entire Security force to get Potter away," Boumour said. "But all you can do now is wait?" "Violence is not my function," Glisson said. "You will see." "What'll they do?" Lizbeth hissed. "Whatever they wish to do," Glisson said. tt r T"here, it is done," Calapine said. She looked at Schruille and Nourse in the reflectors. Schruille indicated the kinesthetic analogue relays of the Survey Globe's inner wall. "Did you obsei've Svengaard's emotion?" "He was properly horrified," Calapine said. Schruille pursed his lips, studied her reflection. A session with the pharmacy had restored her composure, but she occupied her throne in a subdued mood. The kaleidoscopic play of lights from the wall gave an unhealthy cast to her skin. There was a definite flush to her features. Nourse glanced up at the observer lights. The span of arctic wall glowed with a dull red intensity, every position occupied. With hardly an exception, the Optiman community watched developments. "We have a decision to make," Nourse said. "You look pale, Nourse," Calapine said. "Did you have pharmacy trouble?" "No more than you." He spoke defensively. "A simple enzymic heterodyning. It's pretty well damped out." "I say bring them here now," Schruille said. "To what purpose?" Nourse asked. "We have the pattern of their flight very well fixed. Why let them escape again?" "I don't like the thought of unregistered self-viables -- who knows how many? -- running loose out there," Schruille said. "Are you sure we could take them alive?" Calapine asked. "The Cyborg admits ineffectiveness against us," Schruille said. "Unless that's a trick," Nourse said. "I don't think so," Calapine said. "And once we have them here we can extract the information we need from their raw brains with the utmost precision." Nourse turned, stared at her. He couldn't understand what had happened to Calapine. She spoke with the callous brutality of a Folk woman. She was like an awakened ghoul, as though violence were her rising bell. What is her setting bell? he wondered. And he was shocked at his own thought. "If they have means of destroying themselves?" Nourse asked. "I remind you of the computer nurse and a sad number of our own surgeons who appeared to be in league with these criminals. We were powerless to prevent their self-destruction." (, i T T ow callous you are, Nourse," Calapine said. "Callous? I?" He shook his head. "I merely wish to prevent further pain. Let us destroy them ourselves and go on from here." "Glisson's a full Cyborg," Schruille said. "Can you imagine what his memory banks would reveal?" "I remember the one who escorted Potter," Nourse said. "Let us take no risk. His quietude could be a trick." "A contact narcotic in their present cell," Schruille said. "That's my suggestion." "How do you know it'll work on the Cyborgs?" Nourse asked. "Then they could escape once more," Schruille said. He shrugged. "What matters it?" "Into another megalopolis," Nourse said. "Is that it?" "We know the infection's widespread," Schruille said. "Certainly, there were cells right here in Central. We've cleaned out those, but the..." "I say stop them now!" Nourse snapped. "I agree with Schruille," Calapine said. "What's the risk?" "The sooner we stop them the sooner we can return to our own pursuits," Nourse said. "This is our pursuit," Schruille said. "You like the idea of sterilizing another megalopolis, don't you, Schruille?" Nourse sneered. "Which one this time? How about Loovil?" "Once was enough," Schruille said. "But likes and dislikes really have nothing to do with it." "Let us put it to a vote then," Calapine said. "Because you're two to one against me, eh?" Nourse said. "She means a full vote," Schruille said. He looked up at the observation lights. "We've obviously a quorum." Nourse stared at the indicators knowing he'd been neatly trapped. He dared not protest a full vote -- any vote. And his two companions appeared so sure of themselves. "This is our pursuit." "We've allowed the Cyborgs to interfere," Nourse said, "because they increased the proportion of viables in the genetic reserve. Did we do this merely to destroy the genetic reserve?" Schruille indicated a bank of binary pyramids on the globe's wall. "If they endanger us, certainly. But the issue is unregistered sef-viables, their possible immunity to the contraceptive gas. Where else could they have produced the substitute embryo?" "If it comes down to it, we don't need any of them," Calapine said. "Destroy them all?" Nourse asked. "All the Folk?" "And raise a new crop of doppelgangers," she said. "Duplicates don't always come true," Nourse said. "Nothing limits us," Schruille said. "Our sun isn't infinite," Nourse said. i C'VT'e'll solve that when the ' ' need arises," Calapine said. "What problem can defy us? We're not limited by Time." "Yet we're sterile," Nourse said. "Our gametes refuse to unite." "And well they do," Schruille said. "I'd not have it otherwise." "All we wish now is a simple vote," Calapine said. "A simple vote on whether to capture and bring in one tiny band of criminals. Why should that arouse major debate?' Nourse started to speak, thought better of it. He shook his head, looked from Calapine to Schruille. "Well?" Schruille asked. "I think this little band is the real issue," Nourse said. "One Sterrie surgeon, two Cyborgs and two viables." "And Durant was ready to kill the Sterrie," Schruille said. "No." It was Calapine. "He wasn't ready to erase anyone." She found herself suddenly interested in the train of Nourse's reasoning. It was his logic and reason, after all, which had always attracted her. Schruille, seeing her waver, said: "Calapine!" "We all saw Durant's emotions," Nourse said. He waved at the instrument wall in front of him. "He would've killed no one. He was... educating Svengaard, talking to Svengaard with his hands." "As they do between themselves, he and his wife," Calapine said. "Certainly!" "You say we should raise a new crop of doppelgangers," Nourse said. "Which seed shall we use? The occupants of Seatac, perhaps?" "We could take the seed cells first," Schruille said, and he wondered how he had been put so suddenly on the defensive. "I say let's vote on it. Bring them here for full interrogation or destroy them." "No need," Nourse said. "I've changed my mind. Bring them here... if you can." "Then it's settled," Schruille said. He rapped the signal into his throne arm. "You see, it's really very simple." "Indeed?" Nourse said. "Then why do Calapine and I find ourselves suddenly reluctant to use violence? Why do we long for the old ways when Max shielded us from ourselves?" r T" , he Hall of Counsel had not seen such a gathering since the debate over legalizing limited Cyborg experiments on their own kind some thirty thousand years before. The Optimen occupied a rainbow splashing of multicolored cushions on the banks of plasmeld benches. Some appeared nude, but most out of awareness of such a gathering's traditional nature came clothed in garments of their immediate historical whims. There were togas, kilts, gowns and ruffs, three-cornered hats and derbies, G-strings and muumuus, fabrics and styles reaching back into prehistory. Those who could not jam into the hall watched through half a tered around the upper line of the walls. It was barely daylight over Central, but not an Optiman slept. The Survey Globe had been moved aside, and the Tuyere occupied a position on the front bench center at the end of the hall. The prisoners had been brought in on a pneumoflot tumbril by acolytes. They sat on the tumbril's flat surface, immobilized within dull blue plasmeld plastrons that permitted only the shallowest of breaths. As she looked down on them from her bench, seeing the five figures so rigidly repressed, Calapine permitted herself a faint pity for them. The woman -- such terror in her eyes. The rage in Harvey Durant's face. The resigned waiting in Glisson and Boumour. And Svengaard -- a look of wary awakening. Yet Calapine felt something was missing here. She couldn't name the missing thing, felt it only as a negative blankness within herself. Nourse is right, she thought. These five are important. Some Optiman up near the front of the hall had brought a tinkle-player, and its little bell music could be heard above the murmurous whispering of the throng in the hall. The sound appeared to grow louder as the Optimen quieted in anticipation. The tinkle-player was stilled in mid-melody. It grew quieter and quieter in the hall. Despite her fear, Lizbeth stared around her in the growing silence. She had never before seen an Optiman in the flesh -- only on the screens of the public announcement system. (In her lifetime it'd been mostly the members of the Tuyere, although older Folk mentioned the Kagiss trio preceding them.) They looked so varied and colorful -- and so distant. She had the demoralizing feeling that nothing of this moment had happened by chance, that there was a terrifying symmetry in being here, now, with this company. icnphey are completely immobilized," Schruille said. "There's nothing to fear." "Yet they are terrified," Nourse said. And he recalled suddenly a moment out of his youth. He'd been taken to an antiquary's home, one of the hedonists proudly displaying his plasmeld copies of lost statues. There'd been a giant fish, one headless figure on a horse (very daring, that), a hooded monk and a man and woman clasped in a mutual embrace of terror. The man and woman, he realized now, had been recalled by the faces of Lizbeth and Harvey Durant. They are, in a way, our parents, Nourse thought. We spring from the Folk. Calapine realized abruptly what it was she missed here. There was no Max. He was gone, she knew, and she wondered momentarily what had happened to him. Outgrew his usefulness, she decided. The new Max must not be ready yet. Odd that Max should go just like that, she thought. But the lives of the Folk were like gossamer. One day you saw them; the next day you saw through the place where they had been. I must ask what happened to Max. But she knew she wouldn't ever get around to that. The answer might require a disgusting word, a concept where even euphemisms would be repellent. "Pay particular attention to the Cyborg Glisson," Schruille said. "Isn't it strange that our instruments reflect no emotions from him?" "Perhaps he has no emotions," Calapine said. "Hah!" Schruille barked. "Very good." "I don't trust him," Nourse said. "My grandsir spoke of Cyborg tricks." "He's virtually a robot," Schruille said. "Programmed to respond with the closest precise answer to preserve his being. His present docility is interesting." "Isn't it our purpose to interrogate them?" Nourse asked. "In a moment," Schruille said. "We will peel them down to the raw brain and open their memories to our examination. First, it is well to study them." "You're so callous, Schruille," Calapine said. A murmurous agreement spread upward through the hall. Schruille glanced at her. Calapine's voice had sounded so strange then. He found himself filled with a sudden disquiet. Glisson's Cyborg eyes moved, heavy-lidded, coldly probing, glistening with their lensed alterations that expanded his spectrum of visibility. "Do you see it, Durant?" he asked, his voice chopped into bits by short breaths.  Harvey found his voice. "I... can't... be... lieve... it." "They are talking," Calapine said, her voice bright. She looked at the Durant male, surprised by a look of loathing and pity in his eyes. Pity? she wondered. A glance at the tiny repeater bracelet on her wrist confirmed the assessment of the Survey Globe. Pity. Pity! How dare he pity me! "Har... vey," Lizbeth whispered. TT'rustrated rage contorted Harvey's face. He moved his eyes, could not quite swing them far enough to see her. "Liz," he muttered. "Liz, I love you," "This is a time for hate, not love," Glisson said, his detached tone giving the words an air of unreality. "Hate and revenge," Glisson said. "What are you saying?" Svengaard asked. He'd listened with mounting amazement to their words. For a time he'd thought of pleading with the Optimen that he'd been a prisoner, held against his will, but a sixth sense told him the attempt would be useless. He was nothing to these lordly creatures. He was foam in the backwash of a wave at a cliff base. They were the cliff. "Look at them as a doctor," Glisson said. "They are dying." "It's true," Harvey said. Lizbeth had pressed her eyes closed against tears. Now her eyes sprang open, and she stared up at the people around her, seeing them through Harvey's eyes and Glisson's. "They are dying," she breathed. It was there for the trained eyes of an Underground courier to read. Mortality on the faces of the immortals! Glisson had seen it, of course, through his Cyborg abilities to see and respond, read and reflect. "The Folk are so disgusting at times," Calapine said. "They can't be," Svengaard said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice, and Lizbeth wondered at it. The voice lacked the despair she could have expected. "I say they are disgusting!" Calapine intoned. "No mere pharmacist should contradict  ft me. Boumour stirred out of a profound lethargy. The as yet alien computer logic within him had recorded the conversation, replayed it, derived corollary meanings. He looked up now as a new and partial Cyborg, read the subtle betrayals in Optiman flesh. The thing was there! Something had gone wrong with the live-forevers. The shock of it left Boumour with a half-formed feeling of emptiness, as though he ought to respond with some emotion for which he no longer had the capacity. "Their words," Nourse said. "I find their conversation mostly meaningless. What is it they're saying, Schruille?" "Let us ask them now about the self-viables," Calapine said. "And the substitute embryo. Don't forget the substitute embryo." UT ook up there in the top J row," Glisson said. "The tall one. See the wrinkles on his face?" "He looks so old," Lizbeth whispered. She felt a curiously empty feeling. As long as the Optimen were there -- unchangeable, eternal -- her world contained a foundation that could never tremble. Even as she'd opposed them, she'd felt this. Cyborgs died... eventually. The Folk died. But Optimen went on and on and on... "What is it?" Svengaard asked. "What's happening to them?" "Second row on the left," Glisson said. "The woman with red hair. See the sunken eyes, the stare?" Boumour moved his eyes to see the woman. Flaws in Optiman flesh leaped out as his gaze traversed the short arc permitted him. "What're they saying?" Calapine demanded. "What is this?" Her voice sounded querulous even to her own ears. She felt fretful, annoyed by vague aches. A muttering sound of discontent moved upward through the benches. There were little pockets of giggling and bursts of peevish anger, laughter. We're supposed to interrogate these criminals, Calapine thought. When will it start? Must I begin it? She looked at Schruille. He had scrunched down in his seat, glaring at Harvey Durant. She turned to Nourse, encountered a supercilious half-smile on his face, a remote look in his eyes. There was a throbbing at Nourse's neck she had never noticed before. A mottled patch of red veins stood out on his cheek. They leave everything to me, she thought. XyCTith a fretful movement of ' ' her shoulders, she touched her bracelet controls. Lambent purple light washed over the giant globe at the side of the hall. A beam of the light spilled out from the globe's top as though decanted onto the floor. It reached toward the prisoners. Schruille watched the play of light. Soon the prisoners would be raw, shrieking creatures, he knowledge for the Tuyere's instruments to analyze. Nothing would remain of them except nerve fibers along which the burning light would spread, drinking memories, experiences, knowledge. "Wait," Nourse said. He studied the light. It had stopped its reaching movement toward the prisoners at his command. He felt they were making some gross error known only to himself, and he looked around the abruptly silent hall wondering if any of the others could identify the error or speak it. Here was all the secret machinery of their government, everything planned, ordained. Somehow, the inelegant unexpectedness of naked Life had entered here. It was an error. "Why do we wait?" Calapine asked. Nourse tried to remember. He knew he had opposed this action. Why? Pain ! "We must not cause pain," he said. "We must give them the chance to speak without duress." "They've gone mad," Lizbeth whispered. "And we've won," Glisson said. "Through my eyes, all my fellows can see -- we've won." "They're going to destroy us," Bourmour said. "But we've won," Glisson said. "How?" Svengaard asked. And louder: "How?" "We offered them Potter as bait and gave them a taste of violence," Glisson said. "We knew they'd look. They had to look." "Why?" Svengaard whispered. "Because we've changed their environment," Glisson said. "Little things, a pressure here, a shocking Cyborg there. And we gave them a taste for war." "How?" Svengaard asked. "Instinct," Glisson said. The word carried a computed finality, a sense of inhuman logic from which there was no escape. "War's an instinct with humans. Battle. Violence. But their systems have been maintained in delicate balance for so many thousands of years. Ah, the price they paid -- tranquility, detachment, boredom. Comes now violence with its demands, and their ability to change has atrophied. They're heterodyning, swaying farther and farther from that line of perpetual life. Soon they'll die." "War?" Svengaard had heard the stories of the violence from which the Optimen preserved the Folk. Wax. "It can't be," he said. "There's some new disease or..." "I have stated the fact as computed to its ultimate decimal of logic," Glisson said. Calapine screamed: "What're  J they saying?" She could hear the prisoners' words distinctly, but their meaning eluded her. They were speaking obscenities. She heard a word, registered it, but the next word replaced it in her awareness without linkage. There was no intelligent sequence. Only obscenities. She rapped Schruille's arm. "What are they saying?" "Soon we shall question them and discover," Schruille said. "Yes," Calapine said. "The very thing." "How is it possible?" Svengaard breathed. He could see two couples dancing on the benches high up at the back of the hall. There were couples embracing, making love. Two Optimen began shouting at each other on his right -- nose to nose. Svengaard felt that he was watching buildings fall, the earth open and spew forth flames. "Watch them!" Glisson said. "Why can't they just compensate for this... change?" Svengaard demanded. "Their ability to compensate is atrophied," Glisson said. "And you must understand that compensation itself is a new environment. It creates even greater demands. Look at them! They're oscillating out of control right now." "Make them shut up!" Calapine shouted. She leaped to her feet, advanced on the prisoners. Harvey watched, fascinated, terrified. There was a disjointed quality in her movement, in every response -- except her anger. Rage burned at him from her eyes. A violent trembling swept through his body. "You!" Calapine said, pointing at Harvey. "Why do you stare at me and mumble? Answer!" Harvey found himself frozen in silence, not by his fear of her anger, but by a sudden overwhelming awareness of Calapine's age. How old was she? Thirty thousand years? Forty thousand? Was she one of the originals -- eighty thousand or more years old? "Speak up and say what you will," Calapine commanded. "I, Calapine, order it. Show honor now, and perhaps we will be lenient." Harvey stared, mute. She seemed unaware of the growing uproar all around. "Durant," Glisson said. "You must remember there are subterranean things called instincts which direct destiny with the inexorable flow of a river. This is change. See it around us. Change is the only constant." "But she's dying," Harvey said. Calapine couldn't make sense of his words, but she found herself touched by the tone of concern for her in his voice. She consulted her bracelet linkage with the globe. Concern! He was worried about her, about Calapine, not about himself or his futile mate! She turned into an oddly enfolding darkness, collapsed full length on the floor with her arms outstretched toward the benches. A mirthless chuckle escaped Glisson's lips. "We have to do something for them," Harvey said. "They have to understand what they're doing to themselves!" Schruille stirred suddenly, looked up at the opposite wall, saw dark patches where scanners had been deactivated, abandoned by the Optimen who couldn't jam into the hall. He felt an abrupt alarm at the eddies of movement in the crowd all around. Some of the people were leaving -- swaying, drifting, running, laughing, gigging... But we came to question the prisoners, Schruille thought. The hysteria in the hall slowly impressed itself on Schruille's senses. He looked at Nourse. Nourse sat with eyes closed, mumbling to himself. "Boiling oil," Nourse said. "But that's too sudden. We need something more subtle, more enduring." Schruille leaned forward. "I have a question for the man Harvey Durant." "What is it?" Nourse asked. He opened his eyes. "What did he hope to gain by his actions?" Schruille asked. "Very good," Nourse said. "Answer the question, Harvey Durant." Nourse touched his own bracelet. The purple beam of light inched closer to the prisoners. "I didn't want you to die," Harvey said. "Not this." "Answer the question!" Schruille blared. Harvey swallowed. "I wanted to... " "We wanted to have a family," Lizbeth said. She spoke clearly, reasonably. "That's all. We wanted to be a family." Tears started in her eyes, and she wondered then what her child would have been like. Certainly, none of them were going to survive this madness. "What is this?" Schruille asked. "What is this family nonsense?" "Where did you get the substitute embryo?" Nourse asked. "Answer, and we may be lenient." Again the burning light moved toward the prisoners. "We have self-viables immune to the contraceptive gas," Glisson said. "Many of them." "You see?" Schruille said. "I told you so." "Where are these self-viables?" Nourse asked. He felt his right hand trembling. "Right under your noses," Glisson said. "Scattered through the population. And don't ask me to identify them. I don't know them all. No one does." "None will escape us," Schruille said. "None!" Nourse echoed. "If we must," Schruille said, "we'll sterilize all but Central and start over." ' 'over?" Glisson asked. "What?" Schruille screamed the word at the Cyborg. "Where will you find the genetic pool from which to start over?" Glisson asked. "You are sterile -- and terminating." "We need but a cell to duplicate the original," Schruille said, his voice sneering. "Then why haven't you duplicated yourselves?" Glisson asked. "You dare question us?" Nourse demanded. "I will answer for you then," Glisson said. "You've not chosen duplication because the doppelganger is unstable. The trend of the duplicates is downward -- extinction." Calapine heard scattered words -- "Sterile... terminating... unstable... extinction..." They were hideous words that crept down into the depths where she lay watching a string of fat sausages parade in glowing order before her awareness. They were like seeds with a lambent radiance moving against a background of oiled black velvet. Sausages. Seeds. She saw them then not precisely as seeds, but as encapsulated life -- walled in, shielded, bridging a period unfavorable to life. It made the idea of seeds less repellent to her. They were life. "We don't need the genetic pool," Schruille said. Calapine heard his voice clearly, felt she could read his thoughts. Words out of one of the glowing sausages forced themselves upon her: We have enough by ourselves. Feeble, short-lived Folk are a disgusting reminder of our past. They 'are pets, and we no longer need pets. "I've decided what we can do to these criminals," Nourse said. He spoke loudly to force his voice over the growing hubub in the hall. "We will apply nerve excitation a micron at a time. The pain will be exquisite and can be drawn out for centuries." "But you said you didn't want to cause pain," Schruille shouted. "Didn't I?" Nourse's voice sounded worried. # don't feel well, Calapine thought. # need a long session in the pharmacy. Pharmacy. The word was a switch that turned on her consciousness. She felt her body stretched out on the floor, pain and wetness at her nose where it had struck the floor in her fall. "Your suggestion contains some merit, however," Schruille said. "We could restore the nerves behind our ministrations and carry on the punishment indefinitely. Exquisite pain forever!" "A hell," Nourse said. "Appropriate." "They're insane enough to do it," Svengaard rasped. "How can we stop them?" "Glisson!" Lizbeth said. "Do something!" But the Cyborg remained silent. CC'TT'his is something you didn't anticipate, isn't it, Glisson?" Svengaard said. Still the Cyborg held to silence. "Answer me!" Svengaard grated. "They were just suppose to die," Glisson said, voice dispassionate. "But now they could sterilize all the earth except Central and go on in their madness by themselves," Svengaard said. "And we could be tortured forever!" "Not forever," Glisson said. "They're dying." A cheer went up from the Optimen at the rear of the hall. None of the prisoners could turn to see what had aroused the sound, but it added a new dimension to the sense of urgency around them. Calapine lifted herself from the floor. Her nose and mouth throbbed with pain. She turned toward the tumbril, saw a commotion among the Optimen beyond it. They were leaping on benches to watch some excited activity hidden in their midst. A naked body lifted suddenly above the throng, turned over and went down again with a sodden thump. Again a cheer shook the hall. What' re they doing? Calapine wondered. They're hurting each other -- themselves ! She wiped a hand across her nose and mouth, looked at the hand. Blood. She could smell it now, a tantalizing smell. Her own blood. It fascinated her. She crossed to the prisoners, showed the hand to Harvey Durant. "Blood," she said. She touched her nose. Pain! "It hurts," she said. "Why does it hurt, Harvey Durant?" She stared into his eyes. Such sympathy in his eyes. He was human. He cared. Harvey looked at her, their eyes almost level because of the tumbril's position above the floor. He felt a profound compassion for her suddenly. She was Lizbeth; she was Calapine; she was all women. He saw the concentrated intensity of her attention, the here-now awareness which  excluded everything except her need for his words. "It hurts me, too, Calapine," he said, "but your death would hurt me more." 't'or an instant, Calapine  thought the hall had grown still around her. She realized then that the noises of the throng continued unabated. She could hear Nourse chanting: "Good! Good!" and Schruille saying: "Excellent! Excellent!" She realized then that she had been the only one to hear Durant's hideous words. It was blasphemy. She'd lived thousands of years suppressing the very concept of personal death. It could not be said or conceived in the mind. But she had heard the words! She wanted to turn away, to believe those words had never happened. But something of the attention she had focused on Harvey Durant held her chained to his meaning. Only minutes ago, she had been where the seed of life spanned the eons. She had felt the wild presence of forces that could move within the mitochondrial structures of the cells. "Please," Lizbeth whispered. "Free us. You're a woman. You must have some compassion. What have we done to harm you? Is it wrong to want love and life? We didn't want to harm you." Calapine gave no sign that she heard. There were only Harvey's words playing over and over in her mind: "Your death... your death... your death... your death..." Odd flickerings of heat and chill surged through her body. She heard another cheer from the crowd in the far benches. She felt her own sickness and growing awareness of the cul de sac in which she had been trapped. Anger suffused her. She bent to the tumbril's controls, punched a button beneath Glisson. The carapaces of the shell which held the Cyborg began closing. Glisson's eyes opened wide. A rasping moan escaped him. Calapine giggled, punched another button on the controls. The shells snapped to their former position. Glisson gasped. She turned to the controls beneath Harvey, poised a finger over the buttons. "Explain your disgusting breach of manners!" Harvey remained frozen in silence. She was going to crush him! Svengaard began to laugh. He knew his own position, the firstclass second-rater. Why had he been chosen for this moment -- to see Glisson and Boumour without words, Nourse and Schruille babbling on their bench, the Optimen in little knots and eddies of mad violence, Calapine ready to kill her prisoners and doubtless forget it ten seconds later? His laughter went out of control. "Stop that laughing!" Calapine screamed. Svengaard trembled with hysteria. He gasped for breath. The shock of her voice helped him gain a measure of control, but it still was immensely ludicrous. "Fool!" Calapine said. "Explain yourself." Svengaard stared at her. He could feel only pity now. He remembered the sea from the medical resort at Lapush and he thought he saw now why the Optimen had chosen this place so far from any ocean. Instinct. The sea produced waves, surf -- constant reminder that they had set themselves against eternity's waves. They could not face that. "Answer me," Calapine said. Her hand hovered above his shell's controls. O vengaard could only stare at  her and at the Optimen in their madness beyond her. They stood exposed before him as though their bodies had been opened to spill twisting entrails on the floor. They have souls with only one scar, Svengaard thought. It was carved on them day by day, century by century, eon by eon -- the increment of panic that their blessed forevemess might be illusion, that it might after all have an ending. He had never before suspected the price the Optimen paid for infinity. The more of it they possessed, the greater its value. The greater the value, the greater the fear of losing it. The pressure went up and up... forever. But there had to be a breaking point. The Cyborgs had seen this but had missed the real consequences. The Optimen had themselves hemmed in with euphemisms. They had pharmacists, not doctors. Because doctors meant sickness and injury, and that equalled the unthinkable. They had only their pharmacy and its countless outlets never more than a few steps from any Optiman. They never left Central and its elaborate safeguards. They existed as perpetual adolescents in their nursery prison. "So you won't speak," Calapine said. "Wait," Svengaard said as her hand moved toward the buttons beneath him. "When you've killed all the viables and only you remain, when you see yourselves dying one by one, what then?" "How dare you?" She said. "You think to question an Optiman whose experience of life makes yours no more than that!" She snapped her fingers. He looked at her bruised nose, the blood. "Optiman," Svengaard said. "A Sterrie whose constitution will accept the enzyme adjustment for infinite life... until destruction comes from within. I think you want to die." Calapine drew herself up, glared at him. As she did, she became aware of a sudden odd silence in the hall. She swept a glance around her, saw intent watchfulness in every eye focused upon her. Realization came slowly. They see the blood on my face. "You had infinite life," Svengaard said. "Does that make you intelligent? No. You merely lived longer, had more time for experience and education. Very likely, most of you are educated beyond your intelligence, else you'd have seen long ago that this moment was inevitable -- the delicate balance destroyed, all of you dying." Calapine took a step backward. His words were like painful knives burning into her nerves. "Look at you!" Svengaard said. "All of you sick. What does your precious Pharmacy do? I knew without being told: it prescribes wider and wider variant prescriptions, more frequent dosages. It's trying to check the oscillations because that's how it's programmed. It'll go on trying as long as you permit it... but it won't save you." S omeone screamed behind her: "Silence him!" The cry was taken up around the hall, a deafening chant, foot stamping, hands pounding: "Silence him! Si-lence him! Calapine pressed her hands to her ears. She could still feel the chant through her skin. And now she saw Optimen start down off the benches toward the prisoners. She knew bloody violence was only a heartbeat away. They stopped. She couldn't understand why and dropped her hands away from her ears. Screams rained down on her. The names of halfforgotten deities were invoked. Eyes stared at something on the floor at the head of the hall. Calapine whirled, saw Nourse writhing there, foamy spittle around his mouth. His skin was a mottled reddish purple and yellow. Clawed hands reached out, scraped the floor. "Do something!" Svengaard shouted. "He's dying!" Even as he shouted, he felt the strangeness of his words. Do something His medical training surfaced and spoke no matter what happened. Calapine backed away, put out her hands in a warding gesture as old as witchcraft. Sehruille leaped up, stood on the bench where he'd been sitting. His mouth moved soundlessly. "Calapine," Svengaard said"If you won't help him, release me so I can do it." She leaped to obey, filled with gratitude that she could give this hideous responsibility to another. The restraining shells fell away at her touch. Svengaard leaped down, almost fell. His legs and arms tingled from the long confinement. He limped toward Nourse, his eyes and mind working as he moved. Mottled yellow in the skin -- most probably 'an immune reaction to pantothenic acid and a failure of adrenalin suppression. The red triangle of a Pharmacy outlet glowed on the wall at his left above the benches. Svengaard stooped, picked up Nourse's writhing form, began climbing toward the symbol. The man was a sudden dead weight in his arms, no movement except a shallow lifting of the breast. Optimen fell back from him as though he carried plague. Abruptly, someone above him shouted: "Let me out!" The mob turned away. Feet pounded on the plasmeld. They jammed up at the exits, clawed and climbed over one another. There were screams, curses, hoarse shouts. It was like a cattle pen with a predator loose in the midst of the animals. Part of Svengaard's awareness registered on a woman at his right. He passed her. She lay stretched across two banks of seats, her back at an odd angle, mouth gaping, eyes staring, blood on her arms and neck. There was no sign of breath. He climbed past a man who dragged himself up the tiered benches, one leg useless, his eyes intent on an exit sign and a doorway which appeared to be filled with writhing shapes. Ovengaard's arms ached from  his load. He stumbled, almost fell up the last two steps as he eased Nourse to the floor beside the Pharmacy outlet. There were voices down behind him now -- Durant and Boumour shouting to be released. Later, Svengaard thought. He put his hand to the door control on the Pharmacy outlet. The doors refused to open. Of course, he thought. I'm not an Optiman. He lifted Nourse, put one of the Optiman's hands to the control. The doors slid aside. Behind them lay what appeared to be the standard presentation of a priority rack -- pyrimidines, aneurin... Aneurin and inositol, he thought. Got to counteract the immune reaction. A familiar flow-analysis board occupied the right side, with a gap for insertion of an arm and the usual vampire needles protruding from their gauges. Svengaard tripped the keys on the master flow gauge, opened the panel . He traced back the aneurin and inositol feeders, immobilized the others, thrust Nourse's arm beneath the needles. They found veins, dipped into flesh. Gauges kicked over. Svengaard pinched off the return line to stop feedback. Again the gauges kicked over. Gently, Svengaard disengaged Nourse's arm from the needles, stretched him on the floor. His face was now a uniform pale white, but his breathing had deepened. His eyelids flickered. His flesh felt cold, clammy. Shock, Svengaard thought. He removed his own jacket, put it around Svengaard, began massaging the arms to restore circulation. Calapine came into view on his right, sat down at Nourse's head. Her hands were clasped tightly together, knuckles white. There was an odd clarity in her face, the eyes with a look of staring into distances. She felt she had come a much farther distance than up from the floor of the hall, drawn by memories that would not be denied. She knew she had gone through madness into an oddly detached sanity. The fed ball of the Survey Globe caught her eye, the egg of enormous power that did her bidding even now. She thought about Nourse, her many-times playmate. Playmate and toys. "Will he die?" she asked. She turned to watch Svengaard. "Not immediately," Svengaard said. "But that final burst of hysteria... he's done irreparable damage to his system." He grew aware that there were only muted moans and a very few controlled commands in the hall now. Some of the acolytes had rallied to help. "I released Boumour and the Durants and sent a plea for more... medical help," Calapine said. "There are a number of... dead... many injured." Dead, she thought. What an odd word to apply to an Optiman. Dead... dead... ddad... S he felt then how necessity had forced her into a new kind of living awareness, a new rhythm. It had happened down there in a burst of memories that trailed through forty thousand years. None of it escaped her -- not a moment of kindness nor of brutality. She remembered all the Max Allgoods, Seatac... every lover, every toy... Nourse. Svengaard glanced around at a shuffling sound, saw Boumour approaching with a woman limp in his arms. There was a blue bruise across her cheek and jaw. Her arms hung like sticks. "Is this Pharmacy outlet available?" Boumour asked. His voice held that chilled Cyborg quality, but there was shock in his eyes and a touch of horror. "You'll have to operate the board manually," Svengaard said. "I keyed out the demand system, jammed the feedback." Boumour stepped heavily around him with the woman. How fragile she looked. A vein pulsed thickly at her neck. "I must concoct a muscle relaxant until we can get her to a hospital," Boumour said. "She broke her own arms -- contramuscular strain." Calapine recognized the face, remembered they had disputed mildly about a man once -- about a playmate. Svengaard moved to Nourse's right arm, continued massaging. The move brought the floor of the hall into view and the tumbril. Glisson sat impassively armless in his restraining shell. Lizbeth lay at one side with Harvey kneeling beside her. "Mrs. Durant!" Svengaard said, remembering his obligation. "She's all right," Boumour said. "Immobilization for the past few hours was the best thing that could've happened to her." Rest thing! Svengaard thought. Durant was right-, these Cyborgs are as insensitive (as machines. "Si-lonce him," Nourse whispered. Svengaard looked down at the pale face, saw the broken veins in the cheeks, the sagging, unresponsive flesh. Nourse's eyelids flickered open. "Leave him to me," Calapine said. Nourse moved his head, tried to look at her. He blinked, having obvious trouble focusing. His eyes began to water. Calapine lifted his head, slid under him until he rested on her lap. She began stroking his brow. "He used to like this," she said. "Go help the others... doctor." "Cal," Nourse said. "Oh, Cal... I... hurt." CC'X#'hy do you help them?"   Glisson asked. "I don't understand you, Boumour. Your actions aren't logical. What use is it to help them?" He looked up through the open segment of the Survey globe at Calapine sitting alone on the dais of the Tuyere. The lights of the interior played a slow rhythm across her face. A glowing pyramid of projected binaries danced on the air in front of her. Glisson had been released from his shell of restraint, but he still sat on the tumbril, his arm connections dangling empty. A medicouch had been brought in for Lizbeth Durant. She lay on it, with Harvey seated beside her. Boumour stood with his back to Glisson looking up into the globe. His fingers moved nervously, clenching, opening. There was a streak of dried blood down his right sleeve. The elfin face held a look of puzzlement. Svengaard came in from behind the globe, a slowly moving figure in the red shadows. Abruptly, the hall glared with light. The main globes had gone on automatically as darkness fell outside. Svengaard stopped to check Lizbeth, patted Harvey's shoulder. "She will be all right. She's strong." Lizbeth's eyes followed him as he moved around to look into the Survey Globe. Svengaard's shoulders sagged with fatigue, but there was a look of elation in his face. He was a man who'd found himself. "Calapine," Svengaard said, "that was the last of them going out to hospitals." "I see it," she said. She looked up at the scanners, every one lighted. Something more than half of the Optimen were under restraint -- mad. Thousands had died. More thousands lay sorely injured. Those who remained watched their globe. She sighed, wondering at their thoughts, wondering how they faced the fact that all had fallen from the tight wire of immortality. Her own emotions confused her. There was an odd feeling of relief in her breast. "What of Schruille?' she asked. "Crushed at a door," Svengaard said. "He's... dead." She sighed. "And Nourse?" "Responding to treatment." what's happened to you?" Glisson demanded. His eyes glittered as he stared up at Calapine. Calapine looked down at him, spoke clearly: "We've undergone an emotional stress that has altered the delicate balance of our metabolism." she said. "You tricked us into it. The evidence is quite clear -- there's no turning back." "Then you understand," Glisson said. "Any attempt to force your systems back into the old forms will result in boredom and a gradual descent into apathy." Calapine smiled. "Yes, Glisson. We'd not want that. We've been addicted to a new kind of... aliveness that we didn't know existed." "Then you do understand," Glisson said, and there was a grudging quality to his voice. "We broke the rhythm of life," Calapine said. "All life is immersed in rhythm, but we got out of step. I suppose that was the outside interference in those embryos -- rhythm asserting itself." "Well then," Glisson said, "the sooner you can turn things over to us, the sooner things will settle down into..." "To you?" Calapine asked scornfully. She looked out into the quick contrasts of the hall's glaring light. How black and white it all was. "I'd sooner condemn us all," she said. "But you're dying!" "So are you," Calapine said. Svengaard swallowed. He could see that the old animosities would not be suppressed easily. And he wondered at himself, a second-rate surgeon who had suddenly found himself as a doctor, ministering to people who needed him. Durant had seen that -- the need to be needed. "I may have a plan we could accept, Calapine," Svengaard said. "To you we will listen," Calapine said, and there was affection in her voice. She studied Svengaard as he searched for words, remembering that this man had saved the lives of Nourse and many others. We made no plans for the unthinkable, she thought. Is it possible that this nobody who was once a target for kindly sneers can save us? She dared not let herself hope. "The Cyborgs have techniques for bringing the emotions into a more or less manageable stasis," Svengaard said. "Once that's done, I believe I know a way to dampen the enzymic oscillations in most of you." Calapine swallowed. The scan ner-eye lights above her began to flash as the watchers signaled for her to let them into the communications channels. They had questions, of course. She had questions of her own, but she didn't know that she could speak them. She caught a reflection of her own face in one of the prisms, was reminded of the look in Lizbeth's eyes as the woman had pleaded from the tumbril. "I can't promise infinite life," Svengaard said, "but I believe many of you can have many more thousands of years." "Why should we agree to help them?" Glisson demanded. There was a measuring quality in her voice, a hint of the querulous. "You're failures, too!" Svengaard said. "Can't you see that?" He realized he had shouted with the full power of his disillusionment. "Don't shout at me!" Glisson snapped. So they do have emotions , Svengaard thought. Pride ,... anger... "Are you still suffering under the delusion that you're in control of this situation?" Svengaard asked. He pointed to Calapine. "That one woman up there could still exterminate every non-Optiman on earth." "Listen to him, you Cyborg fool!" Calapine said. "Let's not be too free with that word fool," Svengaard said. He stared up at Calapine. "Watch your tongue, Svengaard," Calapine said. "Our patience is not infinite." "Nor is your gratitude, eh?" Svengaard said. A bitter smile touched her mouth. "We were talking about survival," she said. Svengaard sighed. He wondered then if the patterns of thought conditioned by the illusion of infinite life could ever be truly broken. She had spoken there like the old Tuyere. But her resiliency had surprised him before. The outburst had touched Harvey's fears for Lizbeth. He glared at Svengaard and Glisson, tried to control his terror and rage. This hall awed him with its immensity and its remembered bedlam. The globe towered over, him, a monstrous force that could crush them. "Survival, then," Svengaard said. "Let us understand each other," Calapine said. "There are those among us who will say that your help was merely our due. You are still our captives. There are those who'll demand you submit and reveal your entire Underground to us." "Yes, let us understand each other," Svengaard said. "Who are your prisoners? Myself, a person who was not a member of the Underground and knows little about it. You have Glisson, who knows more, but assuredly not all. You have Boumour, one of your escaped pharmacists, who knows even less than Glisson. You have the Durants, whose knowledge probably goes little beyond their own cell group. What will you gain even if you milk us dry?" "Your plan to save us," Calapine said. "My plan requires cooperation, not coercion," Svengaard said. "And it will only give us at continuation, not restore us to our original condition, is that it?" Calapine asked. "You should welcome that," Svengaard said. "It would give you a chance to mature, become useful." He waved a hand to indicate their surroundings. "You've frozen yourselves in immaturity here! You've played with toys! I'm offering you a chance to live!" Is that it? Calapine wondered. Is this new aliveness a byproduct of the knowledge that we must die? "I'm not at all sure we'll cooperate," Glisson said. TTarvey had had enough. He  leaped to his feet, glared at Glisson. "You want the human race to die, you robot! You! You're another dead end!" "Prattle!" Glisson said. "Listen," Calapine said. She began sampling the communications channels. Bits of sentences poured out into the hall -- "We can restore enzymic balance with our own resources!"... "Eliminate these creatures!"... "What's his plan? What's his plan?"... "Begin the sterilization!" his plan?"... "How long do we have if... "There's no doubt we can..." Calapine silenced the voices with a flick of a switch. "It will be put to a vote," she said. "I remind you of that." "You will die, and soon, if we don't cooperate," Glisson said. "I want that fully understood." "You know Svengaard's plan?" Calapine asked. "His thought patterns are transparent," Glisson said. "I think not," Calapine said. "I saw him work on Nourse. He manipulated a dispensary to produce a dangerous overdose of aneurin and inositol. Remembering that, I ask myself how many of us will die in the attempt to arrest this process we can all feel within ourselves. Would I have risked such an overdose upon myself? How does this relate to the excitement we feel? Will any of us, having tasted excitement, wish to sink back into a non-emotional... boredom?" She looked at Svengaard. "These are some of my questions." "I know his plan," Glisson sneered. "Quell your emotions and implant an enzymic dispensary within each of you. Make Cyborgs of you." A tight grin etched a line of teeth in Glisson's face. "It's your only hope. Accepting it, you will have lost to us at last!" Calapine glared down at him. Harvey was caught by the carping meanness in Glisson's voice. His own schism from the Underground had always known the Cyborgs were too calculating and narrow-minded to be trusted with purely human decisions, but he had never before seen the fact so clearly demonstrated. "Is that your plan, Svengaard?" Calapine demanded. Harvey jumped up. "No! That's not his plan!" Svengaard nodded to himself. Of course! A fellow human, and a father would know. "You pretend to know what I, a Cyborg, do not know?" Glisson asked. Svengaard looked at Harvey with raised eyebrows. "Embryos," Harvey said. Svengaard nodded, looked up at Calapine. "I propose to keep you continually implanted with living embryos," he said. "Living monitors that will make you adjust to your own needs. You will regain your emotions, your... zest for life, this excitement you prizg... "You propose to make of us living vats for embryos?" Calapine asked, wonder in her voice. "The gestation process can be delayed for hundreds of years," Svengaard said. "With proper hormone adjustment, this can be applied even to men. Caesarian delivery, of course, but it need not be painful... or frequent." Calapine weighed his words, wondering why she felt no disgust at the suggestion. Once she had felt disgust at the realization that Lizbeth Durant carried an embryo within her; but Calapine realized now her disgust had been compounded of jealousy. Not all the Optimen would accept this, she knew. Some would hope for a return to the old ways. She looked up at the globe's telltales. No one had escaped the poisoning excitement, though. They would have to understand that everyone was going to die... sooner or later. Choice of time was all they had. We didn't have immortality after all, she thought, only the illusion. We had that, though... for eons. "Calapine!" Glisson said. "You're not going to accept this... this foolish proposal?" The mechanical man is outraged at 'a living solution, she thought. She said: "Boumour, what do you say?" "Yes," Glisson said, "speak up, Boumour. Point out the illogicality of this... proposal." Boumour turned, studied Glisson, glanced at Svengaard and the Durants, stared up at Calapine. There was a look of secret wisdom in Boumour's pinched face. "I can still remember... how it was," he said. "I... think it was better... before I... was changed." "Boumour!" Glisson said. Hit him in his pride, Svengaard thought. Glisson glared up at Calapine with mechanical intensity. "It's not yet determined that well help you!" "Who needs you?" Svengaard asked. "You've no monopoly on your techniques. You'd save a little time and trouble, that's all. We can find embryos." Glisson stared from one to the other. "But this isn't the way it was computed You're not supposed to help them!" The Cyborg fell silent, eyes glassy. "Doctor Svengaard," Calapine said, "could you give us elite, viable embryos such as the Durant's? You saw the arginine in trusion. Nourse believes this possible." "It's possible," Svengaard said. He considered. "Yes, it's... probable." Calapine looked up at the scanners. "If we accept this offer," she said, "we go on living. You feel it? We're alive now, but we can remember a recent time when we weren't alive." "We'll help if we must," Glisson said, and there was that carping tone in his voice. Only Lizbeth, realizing her own bucolic docility in pregnancy, recognizing the flattening tenor of her emotions, suspected the logidal fact which had swayed the Cyborg. Docile people could be controlled. That's what Glisson was thinking. She could read it in him, understanding him fully for the first time now that she knew he had pride and anger. Calapine, reading on the Survey Globe's wall the mounting pressure of a single question from her Optiman audience, set up the analogues for an answer. It came swiftly for the scanners to see: "This process could provide eight to twelve thousand years of additional life even for the Folk." "Even for the Folk," Calapine whispered. They'd discover this, she knew. There could be no more Security now. Even the Survey Globe had been shown to have flaws and limits. Glisson knew it. She could tell this, reading his silent withdrawal down there. Svengaard certainly would realize it. Possibly even the Durants. She looked at Svengaard, knowing what she had to do. It would be easy to lose the Folk in this moment, lose them completely. "If it is done," Calapine said, "it will be done for anyone who wishes it -- Folk or Optiman." This is politics, she thought. This is the way the Tuyere would do it... evert Schruille. Especially Schruille. Clever Schruille. Dead Schruille. She could almost hear him chuckling. "Can it be done for the Folk?" Harvey asked. "For anyone," she said, and she smiled at Glisson, letting him see how she'd won. "I think we can put it to a vote now." Once more, she looked up at the scanners, wondering if she'd gauged her people correctly. Most of them would see what she'd done, of course. But there'd be some clinging to the hope they could restore complete enzymic balance. She knew better. Her body knew. But some might choose to try that dangerous course back to boredom and apathy. "Green for acceptance of Doctor Svengaard's proposal," she aid. "Gold against." Slowly, then with cumulating speed, the circle of scanner lights changed color -- green... green... great washes of it with only here and there a dot or pocket of gold. It was a more overwhelming acceptance than she'd expected, and this made her edgy, suspicious. She trusted her voting instincts. Overwhelming acceptance. She consulted the globe's instruments, read the presentation of the answer: "The Cyborg can be maneuvered through its belief in the omnipotence of logic." Calapine nodded to herself, thinking of her madness. And Life cannot be totally maneuvered against the interests of living, she thought. #C'T'he proposal is accepted," she said. And she found she did not like the sudden pouncing look on Glisson's face. We've overlooked something, she thought. But we'll find it... once we're newly adjusted. Svengaard turned to look at Harvey Durant .allowed himself a broad grin. This was like the operating room, he thought. One shaped minutia, and the broad pattern followed. It could be done with precision even as it was done down in the cell. Harvey weighed Svengaard's grin, read the emotional betrayals on the man's face. All the faces around him carried their own exposure in this instant, all open to be read by a courier trained in the Underground. It was a standoff between the powerful. The Folk might yet have a chance -- thousands of years of chance... if Calapine were to be believed -- and she believed it herself. The genetic environment had been shaped into a new pattern, and he could see it. This was an indefinite pattern, full of indeterminancy. Heisenberg would've liked this pattern. The movers themselves had been moved (and changed) by moving. "When can Lizbeth and I leave here?" Harvey asked. ## r Who is Human? West was known as the murderer of Eskimos -- But now one of his victims was trying to kill him! I S tinging snow particles shot across the dim igloo. The three men and the woman blinked at the small bright hole which appeared in the snow wall. The muffled sound from outside must have come from a rifle. Dr. West smiled wryly and slid off the sleeping-ledge on to the icy floor. "I believe we've finally found Peterluk." A second spray of snow, accompanied by a distant rifle report, brought Councilor LaRue erect in the igloo. "Mon dieu, the man is berserk -- or has formidable humor." He heaved his bulk toward the low exit tunnel. Head and shoulders committed, he changed his mind and buttocked against Dr. West. "No doubt this Peterluk shoots only at strangers?" Both whitemen glanced up at their guide. The young Esk, with a smile as quizzical as an Eskimo's, was kneeling on the skincovered ledge, poking his finger into the upper bullet hole. "Get down here," Dr. West said, and the Esk peered down at them, smiled like a Cheshire cat in the dimness of the igloo and slid down beside them, his hand groping. The Esk grunted with pleasure, having discovered an unidentifiable glob of meat which the escaped Peterluk had discarded. The young Esk's chewing sounds were punctuated by Eevvaalik's tubercular coughing from the other sleeping platform. Even now while some people walked on the Moon, others lived like this. In the cold stench, Eewaalik sat trimming the seal oil lamp as intently as if her husband, Peterluk, were not shooting into the igloo. C # 'C' ewaalik, a bullet might hit you," Dr. West said. "Come down here." With a sliver of bone, Eewaalik expertly pressed the smoking end of the wide cotton-grass wick into the oval pool of seal oil, so that the smoke faded away and the line of flame brightened. Such soapstone lamps only could be seen in use here in the Cultural Sanctuary. Another shot smashed through the igloo. Eewaalik made no move to lie down with the two whitemen, Smiling, she turned her head away from the two whitemen hiding on the floor. "Bullets of this person's husband have eyes." Councilor LaRue laughed as politely as if he were at a banquet in Montreal. "Madam, this Peterluk, I'm sure he is a wonderful shot. I want to ask you -- " LaRue paused as a spitting sound, a fourth rifle bullet, passed through the snowwall. Sharp snow particles had struck his face. He smiled. With the natural ability of the born politician, Councilor LaRue already spoke modern-Eskimo as well as most of the Cultural Sanctuary guards. LaRue was anti-Sanctuary. Dr. West had hoped to spend several weeks if necessary showing Councilor LaRue the potential menace of the population explosion in the Sanctuary. Dr. West had hoped to convince LaRue that not all of these people were Eskimos, that few of them were Eskimos. "Tell your husband we surrender," LaRue murmured, brushing snow from his face. "That means don't shoot any more. We -- we whitemen will go away. "We will leave at once." The flickering flame-line from the lamp reflected on her greasy face. She smiled. Her teeth were worn to stumps. Dr. West knew she was # years old. "Tell him to stop shooting," LaRue's voice was repeating. "It is not a woman's place to advise her husband." Eewaalik bowed her head, and a fifth shot spat through the igloo. Peterluk take?" Dr. West hopefully asked her. "Only the bullets in his rifle?" "My husband has long eyes. When your airplane was smaller than a petrel-bird, already my husband had packed the sled. His big dogs became smaller than lemmings." "But he made a circle and came back," Dr. West said, looking hopefully around the jumbled interior of the igloo. "Did he forget his box of bullets?" Snow sprayed inward, and a new little eye appeared in the wall of the igloo. "Number five," muttered LaRue, his count already understandably inaccurate. "He has sufficient bullets." Eewaalik smiled to herself. ' This person wished to travel with her husband. But he said this person too sick. He said, if Dr. West in the airplane, this person should bare arm." "An injection for your fever -- the needle?" "Eh-eh," she laughed in agreement. "The iron needle." "I will give the injection. I will make the sickness go away -- if you will go outside and wave to him to stop Shooting." Eewaalik bowed her head, she was too courteous to disagree but -- Dr. West wondered what had happened to the pilot they'd left tying down the ski-plane. No matter which way the gale was blowing, the Englishman should be able to hear the shots. Their three rifles were in the plane. "Number six," sighed LaRue, as snow sprayed down on Dr. West's face. "Madam, please go outside and ask your husband to stop the shooting. Tell him we only wanted to question him, we only wanted to ask him where all these new people are coming from." They glanced at the Esk. The Esk smiled as if he realized he had become the subject of the conversation. "My babies," Eewaalik laughed. LaRue politely ignored this remark. "Now if you would go outside, Madam, and tell him -- oh!" This bullet ripped across the caribou skin cover on the sleeping platform past LaRue's face. "Mon dieu! You -- " Councilor LaRue's hand closed around the Esk's arm -- "you go out and tell him to stop shooting." 'vbediently, the Esk crawled  out through the tunnel to the little entry dome where their outer parkas were hung, and they could hear him struggling into his stiff parka. "He's much shorter than we are. Peterluk will notice this man's a fellow Eskimo," the Councilor muttered. "After all, they know each other." Dully, they heard the ninth shot. No hole appeared in the igloo. Dr. West scrambled along the snow tunnel to the entry and blinked at the dark object on the snow-glare. He thrust his head forward, then retracted it as a bullet kicked up snow. Whirling inside the entry dome, he seized a coiled line with a massive bone-splint tied to a stone. It was for snagging the floating body of a seal. As Dr. West yanked the body of the Esk toward the entry, the body shuddered, and the tenth shot echoed against Dr. West's eardrums. Dr. West sank to his stomach. The eleventh shot splattered through the entry wall, leaving a pair of holes slightly higher than his shoulders. He winced. Eleven shots meant Peterluk had more than a clip of ammunition, possibly a cardboard box of #, probably several boxes; damn, more likely a whole wooden case of bullets! Prone, from his low angle Dr. West noticed with swelling anger that one of the shots had tom off the top of the Esk's skull. The line falling from his hands, Dr. West scurried backward along the tunnel into the foxhole center of the igloo. "Peterluk killed him." The Councilor sprang to his feet, grabbed Eewaalik by the shoulder, pulled her down on to the floor. "Why? Why is your "He did not tell this person." "Is he afraid to tell us where the Esks came from?" Dr. West asked. "Is that why he kept running away?" "This person -- " Eewaalik firmly removed herself from LaRue's grip and climbed back up on the sleeping platform as bullet number twelve spattered wet snow across the igloo. Compulsively she trimmed the seal oil lamp. "This person's husband has said he does not like so manymany people. Too many people spoil the hunting." "But we do not come to shoot seals," Councilor LaRue protested, and he squirmed on the icy floor, suddenly directing his anger to Dr. West. "You -- if I -- if my Uncle had not listened to you, I would be in my warm office. My secretary would be bringing me hot coffee et croissants. Instead I am being fired upon, frozen, murdered by savage -- by voters. I do not think all the maniacs are out there. I think the maniac is you!" II Councilor LaRue's uncle was Etienne LaRue, grand old man of Canadian politics, whose political leadership sprang from the days when French Separatists put bombs in mail boxes. Solidified by his # years, Etienne LaRue's hatreds were the Conservative Party, the English language and the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuaries which prevented Quebec's exploitation of the Far North. Old Etienne LaRue's saurian hatred of the Cultural Sanctuaries was the reason Dr. West had turned to him -- after Dr. West's warning report had been ignored by the Cultural Sanctuary Commissioners. When Dr. West had told of the frightening significance of the population increase in the Cultural Sanctuaries, the Commissioners had been more impressed by his description of the hunger, the increasing scarcity of warm clothes. To Dr. West's dismay the Commissioners voted to temporarily resume the old Family Allowances and ordered one relief plane to airdrop packages and baby clothes. One Commissioner twisted an evasion into a boast. "While a temporary ecological imbalance may have appeared on the Boothia Peninsula, basically this shows the value of the Cultural Sanctuaries. It proves that our pioneering Far North Eskimos, freed from servile dependence on industrial civilization, not only can survive, but can increase." "But the way they are increasing is not -- human," Dr. West exclaimed. "Even the mutation explanation is insufficient." Dr. West then had made the mistake of boring busy men with detailed observations. When he attempted to hypothesize internal differences between Eskimos and Esks and to retell the Esk's own views as to their origin, he was met by raised eyebrows and growing suspicion of his sanity. "Dr. West, your so-called evidence seems to be Eskimo myths and your -- intuition." "Yes, I admit there is insufficient medical evidence as yet. That is why we need a study team; an autopsy, dissections must be carried out at once." "Dr. West, would you have us arrest a Boothia Eskimo so you could cheerfully vivisect him like a dog," a Commissioner laughed unpleasantly, "because you think he is not human?" "No!" Df. West now found himself accused of being a racist. "Eskimos are just as human as I am," another Commissioner exclaimed in righteous anger. "But I'm not talking about Eskimos," Dr. West had shouted. "Can't you understand, I'm talking about Esks. Esks and Eskimos are not the same." "Anyone who breeds faster is sub-human, is that what you're saying? I move we waste no more time with this man," the Commissioner continued. "Gentlemen, a little sidelight on Dr. West's veracity -- his sanity. You know of Dr. West's limp, his leg injury, his six-month's hospitalization, which he flamboyantly attributes to an attack by a Polar Bear. But our Sanctuary guard reports the Eskimos confided to him that Dr. West actually was bitten by a sled dog. I move we adjourn." S eething with frustration. Dr. West had taken the plane to Montreal. Dr. West had hobbled into the office of Etienne LaRue, the powerful politician, so old he was now a statesman, who hated the Whole Cultural Sanctuary concept and listened with open lips. To Dr. West's surprise, the old conclude that the Esks were not human than was Dr. West. " Voila , now we get rid of them! Those wild Eskimos are no better than dogs, their morals -- Dogsin-the-manger is what they are." The old man clutched Dr. West's arm. "All that land up there locked in Eskimo Sanctuaries -- " Dr. West knew the Frenchspeaking population of Canada had been increasing rapidly. "They are not human, those Eskimos," the old man repeated. "Look at their faces, like grinning devils, I dream of them. Slanteyed devils! I wake myself up. They are evil spirits!" Whether the old man was superstitious, racially prejudiced, a senile paranoid, or all three, any assistance which might help stem the population explosion in the North. Theoretically, its consequences might cover the World. The old man smiled: "My nephew will head the investigation." Now the portly nephew of Etienne LaRue was squirming on the icy floor of the igloo. u M on dieu, that is the tenth J-fl. shot," Councilor LaRue laughed' unhappily. "That savage has enough ammunition to drive both the English and French from Canada! I am cold and I do not want to die. Listen, I think we should break through the opposite wall of the igloo and run for it." "To where?" Dr. West demanded, "To the plane. Don't be cowardly. Eskimos are all poor Shots." "The pilot has tied the plane down," Dr. West retorted. "You heard him shout the wind was too strong to take off or do anything. Listen, it's blowing a gale right now. Running all the way down there would only attract Peterluk's fire. He would shoot into the plane." "Too much logic. We go! A brave pilot will taxi and take off into the hurricane itself if the bullets are chasing him." LaRue paused. "Where is that fool? He said he'd come up here to the igloo." "He's damn cold if he's still inside the plane. I hope he's still alive. I hope Peterluk hasn't already been down to the plane." "My friend," Councilor LaRue blurted, unexpectedly flopping his arm around Dr. West's shoulders, "so do #. So do I. This igloo is as cold as a crypt. Poof. That was bullet number eleven. See, it passed completely through the snow bench. He is firing lower. I do not care; I no longer wish this Eskimo's vote," LaRue laughed nervously. On the sleeping platform, Eevvaalik coughed and spat blood. "Doctor, in your fanciful distinction," LaRue said, "is she an Eskimo or an Esk?" "She is an Eskimo. Of these people, only Eevvaalik has had T.B., the only one. Esks do not appear to be subject to tuberculosis. They don't even have lice! Bacteria and parastic organisms may not have had time to adjust to differences between Eskimos and Esk metabolisms." "Fine words and a theory of which you admit you have no proof. Did you not tell my uncle that Esks appear like swallows from the mud? Something like that. You have confused the old man -- and me. I saw all of those people back in the camp where you picked up the guide, rest his soul, and they were the cleanest, the most helpful Eskimos I have seen in my many trips to the North. Certainly, they are human! Are you insane? Everyone in my family knows my uncle is insane. I wish I were in my warm office." "I wish it were true," Dr. West muttered as bullet number # zipped through the igloo from a new angle. # A nyway, I don't need you to tell me Eevvaalik is an Eskimo," LaRue said. "It was you who showed me the old cenlist, when the government still had the compassion to give the Family Allowance and let the Far North Eskimos buy modern tools. Her fingerprints. Her chest x-rays. This Eewaalik and Peterluk, they were numbered children of those families who fled to the Boothia Penninsula -- " "Yes, and where are their families now?" Dr. West answered. "Nearly forty Eskimo adults and children who were on the old Family Allowance census rolls have vanished. Only these two -- " LaRue looked up at Eewaalik. He smiled winningly. "Eewaalik, where are your father and mother, your sisters and brothers?" "All dead. Burned." "Burned?" LaRue turned to Dr. West. "Don't tell me she also is referring to the legend of the Burned Place we flew over." "Yes. The blackened circle in the granite rock, the Burned Place." Dr. West laughed wryly. "If you believe the bright newly created legends, it is where the Grandfather of the Esks appeared and burned those who disobeyed him." Shaking his head, LaRue smiled up at Eewaalik. "I think you are much wiser than Peterluk. You understand more than your husband who runs away. I will open a little hole for you in the side of the igloo. Then you can shout to your husband, 'Do not shoot. These whitemen are friends.' " Eewaalik smiled back. "A good husband does not listen to his wife when there are others nearby to hear them." "Then go out to him! Tell him to stop shooting." "This person would obey and be shot -- if she was one of her stupid children from the big camp." Eewaalik wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "But she is not. She is Eewaalik!" "And Peterluk also is different," Dr. West added questioningly, hoping somehow she could lead LaRue to realize that Eskimos are not Esks. "Eh-eh, my husband also is braver than those meek children in the camps. Our bellies are hungrier. We do not like to be told what to do. My husband needs big room to hunt." This boasting would convince no one there was a difference. Dr. West persisted, "why won't Peterluk tell us if these people's night stories are true? Why won't he tell us where they come from?" "Eh-eh," Eewaalik laughed. "Why do you men always want to ask my husband? This is a woman's question, where babies come from." "All these people were not bom here?" Dr. West asked as another leading question. "I am the mother!" Ill E ven Dr. West stared up at her in disbelief, as she laughed. "I am grandmother, the greatgrandmother; I am barren now, but they began from me." "Then the legend of the man who fell from the sky, whose back split open so that he bore a son, that is false?" "Who can say what is false? Peterluk was only a boy-man then, and how could he recognize his Grandfather?" The woman shook her head with distaste. "No, it would have been better if a bear was his Grandfather. His Grandfather! I was but a young girl who had borne only one child. Peterluk, how obediently he hunted meat to feed his Grandfather! Like dog, Peterluk dragged the sky iron from his Grandfather. His Grandfather-creature was so big we were afraid to run away." "Then his Grandfather was not a man," Dr. West persisted, finally thinking this might lead to some evidence of extra-terrestrial origin. "My husband saw a man. If he had wanted to see a bear, the thing would have looked like a bear. What did I see? One night Peterluk loaned me to his Grandfather. I lay on the skins looking up as his Grandfather moved toward me. I tried to see a man." Then Eevvaalik laughed in derision. "No man. He took out something. It was not part of him. It was made of -- glass. It looked like -- like when you gave me the injection but much bigger. Oh, so bad! I was a young girl and very frightened." "Artificial insemination!" Dr. West exclaimed. "Disgusting," Councilor La Rue protested. "Was that fiend a scientist? What is going on up here in the North?" LaRue rose toward Eevvaalik. "I do not approve of any tampering with the human body. What evil did this man do to you?" "Eh? I was a surprised girl when I became sick in the stomach only two days later and swelled up and had my baby in a month!" Eevvaalik grinned and gestured crudely. "That glass tube! That one, that Grandfather, eheh, after that he kept after me. I was no more use to Peterluk, always I was heavy with babies. I was too tired to haul the sled, or gather driftwood, or chew skins. As a wife for Peterluk I was being ruined. Too many children were crying for food. In a year I bore more children than I have fingers! Peterluk was only a boy-man then and slow to anger in those days, but one night -- " She stopped as if the memory frightened her. "It is better to believe all these people began when his Grandfather's back was split open." Dr. West noticed where she was looking. Across the igloo at a stone axe. "That Eskimo, he has stopped shooting," LaRue ventured. "Perhaps Peterluk is going away. West, why don't you carefully look out." T 'here was a deafening, reverberating rifle shot from the entry. The two men leaped up on opposite sleeping platforms on either side of the tunnel entry. Dr. West grabbed the stone axe. "If he comes in, we both jump him." Somehow the bullet had passed the length of the tunnel and across the floor where they had been crouching without striking either man. "My husband," Eewaalik called. "We have two visitors. One is waiting on each side above the door hole." Peterluk's hoarse voice entered the tunnel. "Tell the whitemen to come outside." Dr. West shook his head at Eewaalik. "They are afraid you will kill them," she called, and carefully began trimming the lamp. After a while Peterluk shouted, "Tell them to come out or I will break a hole in the side of the igloo and shoot them where they are lying." Neither whiteman spoke. Dr. West clutched the stone axe, hoping Peterluk would do just that -- chop his way into the igloo. Then Peterluk would have to set his rifle down -- or hold it with one hand and give Dr. West an instant to counter-attack. Finally, Eewaalik called, "My husband, you had better do it, or go away and not do it." "Woman, close your mouth!" Peterluk sounded as if he had put his head into the tunnel. The three people in the igloo sat there waiting. Dr. West imagined he could hear Peterluk's hoarse breathing. "Children who grow big as a man in five winters are very good," Eewaalik said finally. "But too many. Children have children so quick, too many. Never enough seals. When this person was a little girl, my mother told me it was a hungry winter and I was born, and she would have left me out on the ice but changed her mind because meat was found. Eh-eh, customs were wiser in those days, less hunger, enough new babies were left on the ice. Better not too many girls to feed. We need more hunters and less hungry babies." Neither man commented.  C C'#'ou better come out,"  Peterluk's voice called. "You better hurry. Many people coming, and they will kill you. You better come out and run away." Neither man moved. Simpleminded liar, Dr. West thought, picturing Peterluk's wide-cheeked visage. No people. "Those many people from the big camps wouldn't kill anybody," Eewaalik snorted. "They want everyone to like them, but there are too many of them." "Come out." Peterluk called, "The people are coming closer. Soon it will be too late." Neither man moved or reacted to this painfully obvious trap. "All these people talk about is their Grandfather Bear from the sky," Eewaalik said, and added with outrage, "They are not Christians!" A shot resounded outside the tunnel entrance, but there was no sign the bullet passed through the igloo. "All they talk about," Eewaalik sneered, "is -- soon so many of them that their Grandfather will come down from the sky. This person thinks he will merely eat them. That is what should be expected, if he is a bear. These people are not Christians." There were three shots in quick succession. "He must be firing in another direction," LaRue hissed. "Toss me the axe." LaRue rose on his knees on the sleeping platform. With the handle of the axe he began knocking a hole in the roof of the igloo above his head, high enough up so that Peterluk would have to scramble up on the side of the igloo if he were to shoot in at them. Two more shots were fired. Then a fusillade of shots. Light bursting through the roof as snow chunks fell inside. Standing up on the sleeping platform, LaRue thrust his head up through the hole in the igloo. "Mon dieu" like a turtle LaRue ducked his head back inside as more shots reverberated. " Mon dieu, hundreds of Eskimos. He is shooting them." Again LaRue poked up his head through the hole. "They are coming to rescue us I think. Ah, so many of them coming, like lemmings. He is shooting them, but they know no fear." Now, between the shots, Dr. West could hear them calling to each other. "They have him! They have seized him. They have taken away his rifle." LaRue pulled down his head into the igloo. "They have rescued us I hope. There are so many of them, we might as well go outside in any case and congratulate them." IV ' ' out of the tunnel into the blinding snowlight, he recognized Peterluk standing among the Esks. None were holding him. Peterluk stared at the two whitemen from the igloo, whirled and began to run. "Stop him," Dr. West shouted. A few Esks reached out halfheartedly. Peterluk brushed past them. They didn't try to stop him. He was escaping. He was running wildly in a direction midway between plane and ridge. Dr. West hobbled after him, staggered, his leg cramping, and looked back for help. LaRue was standing among the Esks shaking their hands. LaRue obviously wasn't going to run after Peterluk, and Dr. West definitely did not want LaRue to shoot Peterluk, who still might explain the origin of the Esks. Already gasping for breath, Dr. West changed his course to the direction from which the original bullets had entered the igloo. Since Peterluk's sled and dogs were not visible he thought they might be concealed behind the ridge. It was probable Peterluk had fired the first shots from up there. Dr. West's left thigh muscles jerked like a poorly constructed android's. It was true that he had been bitten by a polar bear, not a dog, and his thigh contained a great white square of plastic surgery. As he limped through the wind, his patched muscles warmed and gained rhythm. He scrambled up the snow-covered ridge. The dogs growled at him. Closer than the dogs was spread a worn caribou skin on which Peterluk must have lain. Fired cartridges gleamed. Dr. West cursed, wondering if the three rifles were still in the plane. "Damn!" Everything he did seemed to draw him deeper into a trap. Undoubtedly Peterluk had shot the pilot. Now j Peterluk probably had turned off, ran to the plane to get another rifle. peering back over the ridge, Dr. West could see the plane but no Peterluk. What did this mean? If Peterluk had sniped the pilot from a distance, if Peterluk had not entered the plane, then he might not realize the rifles were in the plane. Peterluk probably believed they had rifles. The reason Peterluk had not broken into the igloo and shot them down like mice in a nest, Peterluk probably drought whitemen would have enough sense to have their rifles with them. Now Peterluk must be running for cover, circling back ' toward his sled. Dr. West ran to the sled with virtually no limp, seized the w whip, beat back one snarling dog with the handle, then freed the sled. With the long whiplash, he snapped the lazier dogs to their feet and was driving the sled forward. He had the dogs in good control when Peterluk appeared along the back-side of the ridge. Peterluk ran away from the pursuing sled until he was exhausted, falling. He lay facedown on the snow. The dogs sniffed him, as Dr. West rammed his knee on Peterluk's back and tied his hands behind his waist. There was no resistance. He tied Peterluk's feet as Peterluk lay breathing hoarsely. "Why did you shoot at us?" "Too many," Peterluk gasped, "too many." When the sled carrying Peterluk reached the igloo, Dr. West smiled prematurely at LaRue. "Listen to this. Peterluk, tell him." "Not real people. Not real Eskimos. So it was not bad to kill them." "It is bad!" LaRue exploded. were you trying to kill us, the pilot, a whiteman?" "This person dreamed the airplane held the Man-Who-WasBitten-by-a-Dog." Peterluk indicated Dr. West by pointing with his stubby nose. "This person also dreamed guards with him!" "No guards. Peterluk is afraid of Cultural Sanctuary Guards because they have police functions and because -- " Dr. West stared down at the bound Eskimo -- "last winter on the ice he shot three Esks." "On the ice not enough seals," Peterluk explained. "A few winters ago many seals but now Peterluk is starving. So many people this person can't even find one old breathing hole in the ice; there are so few seals left. Too many people." "You murderous savage," LaRue said. "You can't simply point your rifle like God with a thunderbolt and reduce the number of people." "Eh-eh?" Peterluk laughed, confused. "Three young men from the big camp, on ice they killed a seal. This person's belly told him to take the seal. Eh-eh, anyway their families not miss them, there are so many. They look like us but they are not Innuit, not Eskimos." tT)eterluk, tell what you saw fall from the sky," Dr. West insisted, but LaRue, squatting down, grabbed Peterluk by the front of his parka. "Savage, I have done you no wrong!" LaRue shouted, "Why did you shoot at me, a whiteman?" "Nothing from sky. Too many people." Peterluk muttered, defensively closing his eyes. "Yes', too many people," Dr. West insisted to LaRue. "Listen, on the ridge Peterluk told me that he started to drive his sled away, to escape from the whitemen. He thought we would arrest him because he'd killed three Esks. Then he had a better idea," Dr. West said with irony, staring at the Esks all around them. "There was an Esk camp to the south, so he would shoot the whitemen, and the police would think the Esks had done it, and the police would take away the Esks." "Too many," Peterluk repeated. "You see," said Dr. West to LaRue. "You have seen the big camp. From the plane you have seen other camps dotting the coast. There are too many." "Too many?" LaRue exploded. "Eight of them lying dead because they tried to save us, because they walked forward empty-handed like heroes and took away this maniac's gun! Too many? There are not enough Eskimos! There should be more Eskimos. They saved our lives. These wonderful people saved our lives." "But something must be done -- " "Are you one of those birthcontrol fiends?" LaRue said. "Who are you to decide who lives and vho is not to be born? These people saved my life, and I'll tell my Uncle Etienne. These people need food. They need warm clothes. You see there aren't enough skins to go around. Look at these poor people shivering in the snow, but they saved my life. Look at that man lying there wounded, but he's smiling. Don't tell me these Eskimos aren't human, they're the most human people of all." "But they're not human!" Dr. West shouted, "That's the terrible part, they're not human." "Who are you to say who is human?" LaRue roared. "These people act gooder than you. I'll fly that plane! I'll report to my uncle these people need to be freed. You call this a Cultural Sanctuary? I say it's a starvation cage!" T aRue banged his fist into his palm. "It's an extermination cage. If those Cultural Sanctuary Commissioners are plotting birth control, we'll put a stop to that. My uncle controls a lot of votes. Mon dieu, these people have votes! My uncle will make sure these Eskimos have the opportunity to vote." Stunned, Dr. West stared at the blinding snow. Bringing a politician to the Cultural Sanctuary had become a terrible mistake. The crying of a new baby pierced Dr. West's conscience. Even here on the snow another Esk woman had given her monthly birth. The world's glacier-huge population problem would become a tidal wave. His face blank, Dr. West knew the Esks were increasing so fast they could in one life-time submerge the human population of the world. Dr. West in his utter frustration felt like crying too. Mean Immortality For Everyone -- Right Now! With Victor Borge, Long John Nebel, R. C. W. Ettinger, Frederik Pohl and others -- complete Plus stories and features by Sam Moskowitz and other features! B npen years have passed, and we are at a milestone. Delacorte Press, which incidentally is Dell's hardcover arm, has published Judith Merril's #th AnNo anthology claiming to be the "best" of anything can be wholly honest in its title. There has been no serious attempt to gloss this fact for a number of years, now, but it bears my repeating it. This is Judith Merril's choice from an expanding variety of sources, as tempered by the circumstance of rights and permissions, the wishes of her editors and whatever policy judgment Delacorte has made in regard to science fiction. These are things it would be well to keep in mind in going through the book, for the most marked feature of all in this volume is the one that has been showing up for many years but never so strongly -- that is, Miss Merril's tendency to make the contents explain something about the current development of the field. (She calls it the emergence of a pattern). There are approximately # items here. The ones written in such a way that one might immediately expect them to be pieces of entertainment are : "Automatic Tiger" by Kit Reed, Richard Wilson's "The Carson Effect," "The Shining Ones" by Arthur C. Clarke, "Pacifist" by Mack Reynolds, "Sonny" by Rick Raphael, "The Pirokin Effect" by Larry Eisenberg, "The Twcrlik" by Jack Sharkey, "Problem Child" by Arthur Porges, Morgan Kent's "Family Portrait,." "A Miracle Too Many" by Philip H. Smith and Alan E. Nourse, "The Last Lonely Man" by John Brunner, and Robert Rohrer's "The Man who Found Proteus." There are varying degrees of quality -- none of them stunningly high, though I am rather fond of "The Carson Effect," "The Pirokin Effect," "A Miracle Too Many," and "The Last Lonely Man." The first of these is about human behavior the day before the world is due to end: the second is an ethnic joke about signals from Mars and chopped liver, and the third is about a doctor who really can heal the sick. Only the fourth, by the way, contains what T take to be a genuine honest-to-God sciencefiction idea of novelty and merit. Brunner has thought of a new way to confer a sort of immortality, by personality-transference. He has worked out the social consequences of something which just may in fact be possible, and though he fails to do much more than the obvious once he has brought it to that point, he has nevertheless gotten it to the point of logical development, which is more than can be said, really, for most of the other stories named above. It seems to have been a year in which even the authors who work in a fairly straightforward manner were content to exercise varying degrees of charm and talent in dressing up the first two-thirds of their stories -- or what would have been considered only the first two-thirds of their stories a few years ago. The book also includes such pieces as "The New Encyclopaedist" by Stephen Becker, "Gas Mask" by James D. Houston, "A Sinister Metamorphosis" by Russell Baker, "Descending " by Thomas M. Disch, "Be of Good Cheer" by Fritz Leiber, James T. Farrell's "A Benefactor of Humanity," "Synchromocracy" by Hap Cawood, and a poem called "The Search" by Bruce Simonds, all of which are not so much stories at all as they are tracts, usually illustrations of the wellknown fact that the machines are taking over and that many people have failed to fit themselves for living with anything more complicated than a strikeanywhere match. Although some, such as "Be of Good Cheer," are written ingratiatingly, and others such as "Synchromocracy" and "The New Encyclopaedist" are extremely good fun, not one is anywhere near as much a source of entertainment and pleasure as it is an assertion of the author's view of the world, whether you like it or not. This is the group of stories among which Bob Dylan would find the ones he liked, if he had time. More or less, finally, we have some stories which, whether I like them or not, hit me hard as sheer pieces of systematic and powerful imagination. These are "The Legend of Joe Lee" by John D. MacDonald, "The Last Secret Weapon of the Third Reich" by Josef Nesvadba, "Decadence" by Romain Gary, "It Could be You" by Frank Roberts, Roger Zelazny's "A Rose For Ecclesiastes," "The Terminal Beach" by J. G. Ballard, "The Wonderful Dog Suit" by Donald Hall, "The Mathenauts" by Norman Kagan, "The Red Egg" by Jose Maria Gironella, "The Power of Positive Thinking" by M. E. White, Robert Wallace's "A Living Doll," "Training Talk" by David R. Bunch, and finally "Yachid and Yechida" by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I don't know whether all of these are stories or not, but they are written by people who seem qualified to say whatever it is that they have chosen to say. John D. MacDonald can write his way out of any paper bag you care to construct, and his story of the two kids in their hotrod is in some ways the story of one kind of kid anywhere, and if set in lyrics -- well, as a matter of fact, MacDonald does provide lyrics for the Top # transcription. "Decadence" is transformed from a routine story about a gangster who gets culture by the fact that Gary is one of the few people -- like the late Richard McKenna -- who has lived a good chunk of hardedged life before uttering judgment upon it; and while "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" is marvelously good only by the standards of people who think that words have an immediate and dramatic effect on society, this story of a genius human-poet communicating with the dying Martian race is daring, often moving, and betrays an acquaintance with the genuine strength of language, not as distinguished from but as congruent with its beauty. "The Terminal Beach" is another of J. G. Ballard's evocations of desolation and the organic power of environment over both his protaganist and his reader. I will think a good deal more of Ballard after he has written just one complete story, with a beginning, middle and end -- just to prove he can do it, you understand, before he goes back to wooing himself -- but one cannot ignore a writer who can make you feel heat and thirst, and then make you dismiss them as trifling compared to the real problem (whatever that may be). "The Wonderful Dog Suit" and "The Power of Positive Thinking" as well as "A Living Doll," are pretty slight stuff, but they are short, and each of them makes its small point only once or twice before it stops, in which format these points are seen to be briefly interesting. "Training Talk" brings forth two children and a father straight out of Theodore Sturgeon, which is very good, though one wishes Sturgeon had also been studied before Bunch chose his ending. "The Mathenauts" may or may not be comprehensible. The glossary provided for us by Miss Merril and Delacorte is rather badly scrambled, but I suspect that if one knew the mathematical terminology and the abstract concepts involved somewhat more thoroughly than one does know them, this would be both a funny and a science-fictional story. "The Last Secret Weapon of the Third Reich" is a very good piece of moralistic science fantasy in the tradition of Carel Capek, and "Yaehid and Yechida" is the kind of scholarly proposition put forward as either an intellectual tool or toy by scholars of the Torah. Of all the stories in this book it is the one that I felt actually had something uncommon to say, despite the fact that so many others in these pages clamor vigorously that they too, or if not they, then their authors, are important. A great many of the stories in this Tenth Annual Anthology are in the mode of the literary magazine, bursting with insights of the vigor possible only to those who have had time to think intensely and talk much among themselves, and with any luck will establish such reputations that they will never have to deal with the world at all. Miss Merril's interdictory notes between selections assume hypothesis of transmitted learning is proven, that it's a shame what they're doing to krebiozen and that the general run of writer could be a scientist or a real philosopher if he spent but five minutes a day increasing his wordpower. Most of all, however, as noted and implied, Miss Merril seems to think that the long-awaited merger of science fiction into the "mainstream" is being signalled by the appearance of so much, compilable material in the "literary" magazines, as if fantasy and allegory had just now entered that mode. And the touchstone of quality -- the criterion for the "best" when she now discovers an example in one of the more prosaic sources from which she m drew her first collections -- now seems to be the degree to which the candidate work resembles this umbilicentric standard. Though we have a milestone here, I think it marks a place more on Miss Merril's road, and less on science fiction's. XTou would have thought there was no conceivable new switch on the "Universe" story. The slower-than-light interstellar spaceship, pursuing its way through the weary centuries, its crew losing touch with all reality save the interior of their vessel... Well, you know the story, and its unhappy downhill round, its exciting struggles between the barbarian tribes which develop in its disparate compartments, and then, if the writer is so minded, the ultimate flash of hope as the good guys win out and prepare to meet their future on some noble, if erroneous basis. Many hands have worked at improving Heinlein's impeccable statement of this theme. Not one of them till now has gotten anywhere farther. But The Watch Below by James White (Ballantine) does it. It does it by introducing another vessel into the story; and, as the story switches back and forth between the alien starship and the closed, mobile environment of the Terrestials who are equally embarked on an immense, imponderable journey, White uses the differences and the similarities between the two to tell a moving, genuinely optimistic story. Perhaps you have been wondering what is meant by the term "storyteller" when it appears in this column. All right -- a storyteller is someone with the gift of involving his audience closely in an adventure with a beginning, middle and clear-cut ending which logically and satisfactorily fulfills the promise of the preceding parts. To be a storyteller, a writer must be able to not only pose a real-sounding problem involving people or things worth saving, he must also be able to either solve it or show that there is no solution for very good reasons. By the rules played in these pages, neatness counts. The writer is not allowed to bring in moral judgments, what "everyone knows" about the condition of the world or dogma of any sort. His characters may of course believe in these things, or they would not seem like people; but no individual who sets out to create a pocket universe is allowed the luxury of evading his responsibilities behind a bunch of mere words, no matter how skillfully spoken or how comforting their message. He is very definitely, as you can see, allowed to solve problems, and it is by this trait that he is most readily distinguishable from some of his cousins in the Word game. White has been very neat in this book. His aliens are actually part of a fleet of people and livestock fleeing from the destruction of their solar system. Passengers and livestock may sleep in suspended animation until a suitable new world is found for this water-dwelling race, but the crew of the guide spaceship cannot. They discover to their horror very early in their journey that repeated suspensions and revivals produce mindlessness, and so they have no choice but to mate, beget and educate children and try to keep their purpose alive. The solar system toward which they are driving is, of course, ours. Meanwhile, on Earth during World War II, a tanker is torpedoed and technically sunk. But because of its buoyant compartments, it sinks only a certain distance below the surface and then hangs precariously suspended, drifting about the oceans of the world, written off and forgotten. There are people trapped inside, and as the situation gradually comes home to them, they have no choice but to find ways of creating light, food, air and buoyancy, and to try to stay alive until they are rescued or some other unlikely event frees them. White gives them considerably less to work with that Defoe ever gave Robinson Crusoe. The tanker was running empty and is therefore buoyant (White justifies this). The tanker does contain some snacks of beans, welding equipment together with oxygen and acetylene tanks, and very few other odds and ends. In otherwords, he has posed a problem just this side of impossibility, and the solution worked out by the trapped handful of people therefore seems both legitimate and properly arduous. Like the aliens, the Terrestrials must breed and educate their children if anything worthwhile of them is to survive and return once more to the main line of its destiny. Like the aliens, the Terrestrials have their dissidents, their impractical dreamers, their engineers both conservative and radical who are charged with maintaining their environment and attempting to modify it favorably; and in the end both aliens and terrestrials survive and take up the other end of the thread that broke many years earlier. But they cannot do it except with each other's help. The aliens, landing in the oceans of Earth, create a great furor in the world. Only because they rescue the descendants of the original tanker-trapped Terrestrials are they able to find anyone who will understand their problem and interpret it to the rest of the world. You can say to yourself all you like that nothing good and decent ever happens in the world, and that we are all going to hell. But you cannot read this book and find any place where White has lied to you in demonstrating that this is not necessarily true. You will note that he does not say that it is easy. And, just incidentally, this is very nice writing when considered simply as prose and as an attempt to involve the reader's emotions. I had not up to now thought of White as a writer whose work was worth watching for, but we all live and learn. son Marshall has long been thought of as a minor classic in the field. This short, over-condensed novel of a lost Cro-Magnon race in Antarctica has now been issued by Chilton, and some of you may be wondering if it is worth buying. I quote to you a paragraph from page #: "(The Neanderthal) belonged to one of the lowest races of human kind. Although his intelligence was far greater than the highest apes, he was still far below such brutish people as the African bushman and the New Zealand Maori. As yet he had never felt the slightest urge toward beauty -- he understood it not at all -- consequently it had never been bred into his face. The process of sexual selection which, had he desired, would have refined his features and given him at least the smooth comeliness of an African savage..." From there on, you must guide yourself. A lien Kim Lang is one of the writers who has contributed a great many good stories to the field without anyone's taking particular notice of him. He has been working at it for a long time, but he has never piled up the frequency of appearance which builds fan clubs. The other thing it helps to do is to get a few books published, and this is now being done. Wild and Outside (Chilton) is his first. Perhaps because he has been writing for such a long time (the jacket copy credits him with "some two hundred short stories") it reads more like the thirtieth minor effort of the man who long ago stopped feeling the need to prove that he was good. Flashes of the old compulsion to do more than required can still be seen in the work, but the invention is flagging and the plot is a combination of known surefire elements put together by rule of thumb rather than by visceral instinct. The great days are behind the author, and he reports to his typewriter as to a timeclock rather than an assignation. But, you say, this is a first novel. You are quibbling, say I, but you do give me hope. Wild  and Outside is a story about undercover baseball playing on an alien planet in order to bring about a technological revolution through the use of atomic power and sex. The hero is Eddie Keenan, otherwise, when surgically disguised, known as Iddilcinnin, the warrior Iron Wrists of the barbaric planet Melon. He is sent by Earth's Maieutic Service to undermine the despotism of the Mysteriarch Mirandagor and bring technology and succor to Prince Ida of the East. Keenan, late of the world champion Mets, learns to fight with a stick, cope with the proto-feudal society in which he finds himself, and, journeying through such perils as the dread Limbo Marsh and fighting off the terrible Pipers, he and his team of Rinkydinks accomplish their purpose aided by My Lady-Eyes-of-Dawn and a variety of other people including Old Mule, the Wasp, et cetera. The mood switches from hilarity nearly to tragedy and back again with a fine recollection of L. Sprague DeCamp's Viagens series, including a nubile Brazilian engineer, and the book is good but minor and fleeting fun. Not minor league. You can tell there is an old pro at work here -- an old pro much too experienced to feel that a first novel ought to be more ambitious. Maybe he doesn't care whether anyone recognizes Allen Kim Lang's name from one story to the next, as long as the stories remain enjoyable. What a truly alien thought! All right, Chilton, now the next step is to put together a short story collection by this man. You can call it Wild Modesty. D aniel Keyes' Flowers For Algernon -- which won a Hugo as a novelette, was a noteworthy television play and is now being made into a motion picture -- is being brought out as a novel by Harcourt, Brace # World, Inc. It is very good. Keyes, a veteran of the New York public school teaching rat race and presently an English instructor at Wayne State University, former assistant editor of Marvel Science Fiction, peers out from his jacket photograph as if he expected you to make some absolutely flabbergasting proposition to him. The wary look is occasioned by his knowing ahead oi time that whoever you are or whatever your intentions he will not be able to keep from doing his best for you at whatever cost. A gentle and observant man, Keyes has done much with the story of Charlie Gordon, the retarded adult who is brought to and beyond full intellectual maturity by an experimental operation before lapsing back into the stuporous but gentle world whence he came. On principle, I don't believe a novelette can be made into a novel. But this exception is instructive, because Charlie's essentially simple story can be used to hold up a mirror to a great many features of society and of human nature without becoming attenuated. This probably means that it is a real story, a genuine piece of life freed from the stone, various, beautiful and not new but even rarer, honest. Meanwhile, Keyes shows us the social worker, the experimental psychologist and the ordinary people concerned with Charlie and with Algernon, the mouse whose apparent favorable response to the same sort of experimental procedure led to the experiment on Charlie. These are all shown as rounded figures. There is no one in this story who does not display both "good" and "bad" exactly as people do in getting from one end of this world to the other. Charlie's real problem does not become immediately apparent, nor is his universe made smaller than the whole world, nor does he solve his problem. But neither is it better that he failed. He wins, and he loses. The world wins and loses with him. In order to be this kind of storyteller -- one who at least by implication takes the whole world for the universe he proposes to create -- you have got to know your field inside out, you have got to know a great deal about people and about the particular human situation you propose to describe, and you have got to have a great deal of functional faith in yourself. These are the qualities which normally contribute to the making of a writer all of us know is great. The only quality Keyes has not demonstrated is an ability to repeat this sort of performance time and again, with more successes and stirring failures than dull disappointments. Keyes hasn't published very much at all -- he has published remarkably little fiction, and there are no indications that he is going to publish very much in the future. If this is a beginning, then what a beginning it is, and if it is the high point in a very short career, then what a career. Could you write for television? I y Max Shulman p J. rankly, T don't know. Blit this I do know: I often paid # and more for scripts turned out by people who should have been arrested for impersonating writers. Mow such people got to be high-priced TV writeis is not .is mysterious as it seems. Television is an insatiable maw into which m i i pis must be fed at a rate unprecedented in the history of entertainment. 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Printed in the U.SA By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. W hat would you say caused World War I? Scihool children learn; "The First World War was caused by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo... " Military historians think it was because of the German General Staff's erroneous appraisal of its strategy and strength. Others tell us it was because of Germany's need for colonies... or because the build-up of armies went so far that sooner or later they were bound to be used. Four different "causes", you see. But which of them was the cause? There's an important new book which casts light on this question. The name of it is Philisophical Foundations of Physics, by Rudolf Carnap, and it was called to our attention by its editor, Martin Gardner, a favor for which we are grateful. Does it answer the question raised above? Not exactly... but in the way we have come to expect scientific progress to resolve questions, it disposes of it all the same -- not by answering it, but by showing we are asking the wrong question. Carnap is a philosopher, and one of the characteristics of that trade is that its best practitioners are less interested in making you agree with their conclusions than they are in having you come to conclusions of your own. It is our conclusion (not necessarily Carnap's) that to look for the "causes" of real-world events, and particularly of human events, is much like attempting to isolate the demons w'hich inhabit lunatics. As Carnap says -- speaking not of human events, but of science: "Exactly what does the cause-and-effect relation mean? In everyday life, the concept is certainly a vague one. Even in science, it is often not clear what a scientist means when he says that one event has 'caused' another... It is easy to see how men of primitive cultures could suppose that elements in nature were animated, as they themselves were, by souls that willed certain things to happen." A great deal of scientific thought is carried on by means of model-making. Some gifted people doubt the propriety of this -- there are dangers "Ths tieid's ha'I ;"sl been left V#ca:i. '.Viftio thtt hoys .n tne cffice learned J was #'.n,"'S. fw.' i'. Miey gave me tbeir widest Rrins. One ihiig they didn't Ki:uw: I had made up my mi d sametime b?::k to take LaSalle training that would qualify me for a better job.  My study paid off so fast it surprised even me -- I was picked for that shiny promotion over every one's head. Who wouldn't be smiling with a neat new # increase!" Btory from LaSalle graduates who have rapidly climbed the ladder of success. 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Refrigeration ) Accounting n Trontporlotlon low and Heating O Bookkeeping Q Rote and Toriffi Q Oietel Q Real Estate Name Age Addrew County City A Suto Zip No. Oeenpadon Working Honrs...A.M P.M. in confusing the model with the real thing -- but the process still goes on, very usefully and attractively, as it has since Euclid wrote his Elements # years ago. With a mathematical model, or a logical model, or a geometric model we can perform whatever operations we like and be sure that the results will follow logically and causually from our assumptions. But this is only possible because our assumptions are by definition true. We don't need to test them against observed "fact", because logical modalities are all the "fact" we need for logical systems. In this way we can make the calculation that out of a suitably large number of spins of a balanced coin, half will be heads and half will be tails. (If we make the actual test and find the results come out wrong, so powerful is the model that we at once realize the coin could not have been "balanced".) Similarly we deduce that the sum of the angles of a triangle must be exactly #. We might test it, if we wish to -- Carl Gauss is supposed to have tried it with three mountains in Germany -- but even if we were to find a discrepancy it would not interfere with the workings of the model. High-school students would still be able to do their trig homework according to the same Euclidean laws. But of course, if we found out that large triangles were different from those we experience in daily life in that respect, we might begin to suspect that there was not really a one-to-one correspondence between model and reality. And so there is not. Logical modalities do not necessarily operate in the real world. As Einstein said, "So far as the theorems of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they are not about reality." S o what caused World War I? Well, that's a question we're not prepared to answer definitely. But we have a notion that it was caused largely by causality. People in authority, making models, imposing concepts of causality on the real world of human events, came to certain conclusions about what would happen if. Turned out they were wrong. Things didn't happen as they planned -- and a great many people died in the collapse of their models. And we have a notion, too, may come about in much the Official Rand McNally Map taken from actual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed #I x ##". Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. Kirth Gersen was pledged to murder the man he hated one whose cruelest I X Then one asked Kirth Ger ' sen to explain the drives which led him across the galaxy, he found it difficult. He was gentle... but he was a killer... especially the weapon was love! He was urbane, informed and cultured... but he was remorseless. To questions about the seeming contradictions of his character, he would respond: "There's really no mystery. I've been trained to a certain function. It's all I know. To justify the training, to fulfill my life, I exercise the function. It's as simple as that." To one who knew the general outlines of Gersen's past, this explained much. The five "Demon Princes" joining for the historic raid on Mount Pleasant Iiad destroyed or enslaved five thousand men ' and women. Among the handful of survivors were Rolf Gersen and his young grandson. Such an experience must alter anyone's life; yet others had known tragedy and terror but were not changed, felt neither rage nor hate. "My grandfather felt the rage and hate," Kirth Gersen would reply in rather a flippant tone of voice. "So far as I'm concerned the hate is abstract." This could be even more disturbing to a questioner: "Are you then just a mechanism? This is mindlessness, to be the instrument of someone else's hate!" The answer -- with a grin: "That's not quite accurate. My grandfather trained me or, rather, had me trained, and I am grateful to him. Without the training, I would be dead." "Fie must have been a terrible man, so as to warp a child's mind!" "Fie was a dedicated man. Fie loved me and assumed I shared his dedication. I did and I do." "But what of the future? Is revenge all you want from life?" " ' Revenge'? I don't think so. I have only one life to live and I know what I hope to achieve." "But why not try to achieve the same goals through a lawful agency? Isn't this a better way?" "There isn't any lawful agenaltogether effective." "Then why not bring the issues before the people of the Concourse, and the other important worlds? You have the energy; you have more than enough money. Isn't this better hands?" Then Gersen had no rational counter-arguments. "These aren't my talents," he would say. "I work alone, at what I do best." II n the practice of "what he did  best" Kirth Gersen approached the planet Aloysius. Landing formalities at Aloysius were as rigorous as those of Sarkoy were lax. At a distance shell", Gersen announced his intention to land, identified himself and his ship, gave references, explained the reasons for his visit and was allowed to approach the "second shell" at a Here he waited while his application was studied, his references checked. He was then ordered down into the "third shell" a hundred thousand miles above the planet, and here, after a brief delay, he was given landing clearance. The formalities were irksome, but not to be avoided. Had Gersen neglected to halt at the first shell, weapons would have been trained on his ship. Had he failed to heed the second shell, a Thribolt gun would have fired a salvo of adhesive paper disks at his ship. He had then failed to halt, he and his ship would have been destroyed. Gersen complied with all necessary regulations, received clearance and landed at the Dorgan Central Spaceport. New Wexford lay twenty miles north, a city of crooked streets, steep hills and old buildings of almost medieval aspect. The banks, brokerage houses, exchanges occupied the center of the city, with hotels, shops and agencies on the surrounding hills, and some of the finest private homes in the Oikumene scattered about the surrounding countryside. Gersen checked into the vast Congreve Hotel, bought newspapers, ate a placid lunch. The life of the city flowed past him: mercantilists in their consciously archaic garb; aristocrats from Boniface, anxious only to return; occasionally a citizen of Cuthbert, conspicuous for the eccentric flair of his garments and his glossy depilated head. Earthfolk at the Congreve could be identified by somber garments and an indefinable self-assurance -- a quality the citizens of the outer worlds found exasperating, no less than the geocentric term "outer worlds" itself. Gersen relaxed. The atmosphere of New Wexford was soothing. Everywhere were reassuring evidences of solidity, good-living, law and order. He liked the steep streets, the stone and iron buildings, which now, after more than a thousand years, could no longer be denigrated as "self-conscious quainterie", the Cuthbertian epithet. ersen had paid one previous visit to New Wexford. Two weeks of discreet investigation had pointed to one Jehan Addels of Trans-Space Investment Corporation as an economist of extraordinary resource and acumen. Gersen had called Addels by public telephone, blanking his own image. Addels was a youngish man, slight of body, with a long quizzical face, a balding scalp which he had not troubled to have rehaired. "Addels here." "I am someone you don't know; my name is irrelevant. I believe you are employed by Trans-Space?" "Correct." "How much do they pay you?" "Si.xty thousand, plus some fringe benefits," Addels replied without embarrassment, though lie was talking to a stranger over a blank screen. "Why?" "I'd like to hire you in a similar capacity at a hundred thousand, with a monthly raise of a thousand and a bonus every "The terms are appealing," Addels replied drily. "Who are you?" "I prefer to remain anonymous," said Gersen. "If you insist, I'll meet you and explain as much as you like. Essentially, what you need to know is that I am not a criminal. The money I want you to handle has not been acquired contrary to the laws of New Wexford." "Hm. How much is the sum in question? What securities are represented?" "Whisht!" breathed Jehan Addels. "Where -- " a flicker of annoyance crossed his face, and he broke off his sentence: Jehan Addels liked to think of himself as imperturbable. He continued. "This is an extraordinary amount of money. I can't believe it was accumulated by conventional means." "I haven't said this. The money came from Beyond, where conventions don't exist." Addels smiled thinly. "And no laws. Hence, no legality. And no criminals... Still, the source of your funds is no concern of mine. Exactly what do you wish done?" "I want the money invested to yield income, but I want to call no attention to the money. I want no rumors, no publicity. I want the money invested without causing even a ripple of notice." "Difficult." Addels reflected a moment. "Not impossible, however, if the program is properly planned." "This is at your discretion. You will control the entire operation, subject to an occasional suggestion from me. Naturally you may hire a staff, though the staff is to be told nothing." "Small problem there. I know nothing." "You are agreeable to my terms?" "Certainly, if the whole business is not a hoax. I can't avoid becoming an extremely wealthy man, both from my salary and from investments I can make collateral with yours. But I will believe it when I see the money. Presumably it is not counterfeit." "Your own fake-meter will assure you of this." Addels. "An enormous sum, which might well be expected to tempt even an honest man. How do you know I won't embezzle from you?" "I understand that you are not only a cautious man, but a man of discipline. Also, you should have no inducement to embezzle. Otherwise I have no safeguards." Jehan Addels gave his head a crisp nod. "Where is the money?" "It will be delivered wherever you like. Or you can come to the Congreve Hotel and pick it up yourself." "The situation is not all that simple. Suppose I should die overnight? How would you recover your money? If you should die, how would I learn of the fact?. What disposition would I then make of this vast sum, presuming that it exists?" "Come to Suite # at the Congreve Hotel. I'll give you the money, and we'll make arrangements for any immediate contingencies." J ehan Addels appeared in Gersen's suite half an hour later. He inspected the money which was contained in two large cases, checked a few of the notes with his fake-meter, and shook his head in awe. "This is a tremendous responsibility. I could give you a receipt, but it would be a meaningless formality." "Take the money," said Gersen. "Tomorrow, include in your will an instruction that in the event of your death the money is mine. If I die, or if I do not communicate with you within a year, use the income for charitable purposes. But I expect to be back in New Wexford within two or three months. Hereafter, I will communicate with you only by telephone, using the name Henry Lucas." "Very well," said Addels, rather heavily. "I think this takes care of all contingencies." "Remember, absolute discretion! Not even your family must know the details of your new occupation." "As you wish." The next morning Gersen departed Aloysius for Alphanor; now, three months later, he was back in New Wexford, again at the Congreve Hotel. Going to a public telephone, blanking the screen as before, he tapped out Jehan Addels's call-number. The screen burst into a pattern of green leaves and pink briar roses. A female voice spoke: "Braemar Investment Company." "Mr. Henry Lucas to speak to Mr. Addels." "Thank you." "Addels's face appeared on the screen. "Addels." "This is Henry Lucas." Addels leaned back in his chair. "I am happy -- and I may say relieved -- to hear from you." "The line is clear?" Addels checked his anti-eavesdrop meter and blinker light. "All clear." "How are matters progressing?" "Well enough." Addels proceeded to describe his arrangenunts. He had paid the cash into ten numbered accounts in as many hanks, five in New Wexford, five on Earth, and was gradually converting the cash into income-producing investments, using enormous delicacy to avoid sending tremors along the sandpapered nerves of the financial world. "I had not comprehended the magnitude of the job when I undertook it," said Addels. "It is simply staggering! Mind you, I am not complaining! I could not ask for a more interesting or more challenging job. But inly is like jumping into water  without getting wet. I am putj ting together a staff merely to . handle details of investigation and management. Eventually, for maximum efficiency, I think we will be forced to become a bank, or perhaps several banks. "Whatever is most appropriate," said Gersen. "In the meantime I have a special job for you." Addels instantly became wary. "And what is this job?" "Recently I've been reading that the Radian Publishing Company, which publishes Cosmopolis, is in financial difficulties. I would like you to buy control." Addels pursed his lips. "I can do this without difficulty, of course. In fact, I can buy outright. Radian is on the verge of bankruptcy. But you should know that, as an investment, this is not an attractive buy. They have been losing money steadily for years, which of course is why they can be had so easily." "In this case we will buy as a speculation and try to put things right. I have a particular reason in wishing to own it." Addels hastily disavowed any intent to act counter to Gersen's wishes. "I merely want you to be under no misapprehensions. I will start acquiring Radian stock tomorrow." Ill jVyTurchison's Star, Sagitta # the Star Directory, lay out in the galactic plane behind Vega, thirty light-years beyond the Pale. It was one of a cluster of five vari-colored suns: two red dwarfs, a blue-white dwarf, a peculiar unclassifiable blue-green star of medium size and a yellow-orange G#, which was Murchison's Star. Murchison, the single planet, was somewhat smaller than Earth, with a single huge continent cincturing the world. A searing wind blew dunes around the equatorial zone, mountainous highlands sloped gradually to the polar seas. In the mountains lived aborigines, black creatures of unpredictable characteristics. By turns they were murderously savage, torpid, hysterical or cooperative. In the latter mood they served a useful purpose, supplying dyes and fibers for the tapestries which were one of Murchison's principal exports. The factories which produced the tapestries were concentrated about the city Sabra and employed thousands of female operatives. These were supplied by a dozen slaving concerns, chief among whom was Gascoyne the Wholesaler. By virtue of efficient inventory control Gascoyne was able to give his customers efficient service at reasonable prices. He made no effort to compete with the specialty houses and dealt mainly in slaves in the Industrial and Agricultural classifications. At Sabra his principal business was in Industrial F-# Selecteds: women unprepossessing or past the first bloom of youth, but warranted to be of good health and agility, cooperative, diligent and amiable. Such were the terms of Gascoyne's Ten-Point Guaranty. In two such slaves, Kirth Gersen hoped to find a clue to another of the Demon Princes. Sabra, on the shore of the north polar sea, was a drab haphazard city with a heterogeneous population whose main goal was to earn sufficient money to go elsewhere. The coastal plain to the south was studded with hundreds of peculiar volcanic stubs, each crowned with a bristle of liver-colored vegetation. Sabra's single distinction was Orban Circus, an open area at the heart of the city centered on one of these volcanic stubs. The Grand Murchison Hotel occupied the crest of the stub; around the circus were the most important establishments of the planet: Wilhelm's Trade Hotel, the Tapestry Mart; the depot of Gascoyne the Wholesaler, Odenour's Technical Academy, Cady's Tavern, the Blue Ape Hotel, the Hercules Import Company, the warehouse and showroom of the Tapestry Producer's Cooperative, the Sportsman Supply and Trophy House, Gambel's SpaceShip Sales, the District Victualling Company. Sabra was a city large enough and wealthy enough to need protection from raiders and freebooters, even though it fulfilled fi service to the folk who lived beyond the Pale. Thribolt batteries were constantly manned l)y members of the City Militia, and ships coming in from space wtre regarded with intense suspicion.   ersen, approaching with circumspection, radioed down to the spaceport and was directed into a landing orbit. At the spaceport he. was subjected to inteiTogation by members of the local Deweaseling Brigade, who were reassured by Gersen's Pharaon. Weasels -- the agents of ed space in Locater #B's; these chose to risk Beyond. Gersen for once could afford to be candid. He stated that he had come to Sabra to locate a woman brought here twenty or more years bcfoi'e by Gascoyne the Wholesaler. The Deweaselers, watching the pips and bulbs on their truth machine, exchanged sardonic glances, amused by this excess of quixotry, and waved Gersen forth to the freedom of the city. The time was midmorning.  Gersen registered at the Grand Murchison Hotel on top of the Orban Stub, which was crowded almost to capacity with tapestry buyers, commercial salesmen from the Oikumene and sportsmen intent on stalking the Bower Mountain aborigines. Gersen bathed and changed into a local costume of scarlet plush pantaloons and a black jacket. Descending to the dining room he ate a lunch of local sea produce: seaweed salad, a dish of local molluscs. Directly below was the depot and offices of Gascoyne the Wholesaler: a rambling structure of three stories enclosing a central courtyard. An enormous pink and blue sign across the facade read: Select Slaves for any Purpose with a pair of handsome women and a stalwart man depicted below. At the bottom of the sign a message read: Gascoyne's #Poini Warranty is Justly Pam oasl Gersen finished his lunch, descended to the circus and started to walk over to Gascoyne's Mart. T Te was lucky enough to find Gascoyne himself available and was ushered into a private office. Gascoyne was a handsome, well-built man of indeterminate age, with dark curly hair, a dashing black mustache, expressive eyebrows. His office was simple and informal, with a bare floor, an old wooden desk, an information screen showing evidence of much use. On one wall hung a plaque with Gascoyne's famous ten-point guaranty limned in gold leaf and surrounded by scarlet festoons. Gersen explained the purpose of his visit. "About twenty-five years ago, give or take five years, you visited Sarkovy, where you bought a pair of women from a certain Kakarsis Asm. Their names were Inga and Dundine. I am anxious to locate these women. Perhaps you would be good enough to search them out in your records." "Gladly," said Gascoyne. "I can't say as I recall the circumstances, but -- " He went to the information bank, worked the knobs and dials a moment, evoking flashes of blue light and a sudden grinning visage which flickered away. Gascoyne shook his head despondently. "Might as well be a stone for all the use it gives me. I must have it repaired... Well, we shall see. This way, if you please." He took Gersen into a back room lined with ledgers. "Sarkovy. I go there seldom. A pestilent world, the home of a wicked race!" He searched his ledgers, one year after another. "This must be the trip. So long ago! Thirty years! Now, let us look. My, my, how this old ledger brings back the memories! 'Good old days' is not just a banality... What were the names again?" "Inga, Dundine. I don't know their last names." "No matter. Here they are." He copied numbers upon a slip of paper, went to another ledger, turned to the numbers in question. "They were both sold here on Murchison. Inga went to Qualag's Factory. You know where that is? Third along the right bank of the river. Dundine went to Juniper Factory, across the river from Qualag's. I trust these women were not friends or relatives? Like any other, my business has its disagreeable aspects. At Qualag's and Juniper the women live wholesome productive lives, but certainly they are not pampered. Still, who is in this life?" And raising his eyebrows, he made a deprecatory gesture around his austere office. Gersen gave his head a wry shake of sympathy. He thanked Gascoyne and departed. Q ualag's Factory was a halfdozen four-story buildings around a compound. Gersen entered the lobby of the main office, which was hung with sample tapestries. A pallid male clerk with varnished blond hair came to inquire his business. "Gascoyne tells me," said Gersen, "that thirty years ago Qualag's purchased a female named Inga, on your invoice #V#. Can you tell me if this woman is still employed by you?" The clerk shuffled off to search his records, then went to an intercom and spoke a few words. Gersen waited. Into the office came a tall placid-faced woman with heavy arms and legs. The clerk said petulantly: "Gentleman here wants to know about Inga, B#-AG#. There's a yellow card on her with two white clips but I can't find the reference." "You're looking under Dormitory F. The B#'s are all Dorm A." The woman located the correct reference. "Inga. B#-AG#. Dead. I remember her very well. An Earthwoman giving herself all style of airs. Complained constantly of this and that. She came to the dye-works while I was recreation counsellor. I remember her well. She worked in blues and greens, and it put her off; she finally threw herself into a vat of dusty-orange. That's long ago. My, how time flies." Leaving Qualag's, Gersen crossed the river by a bridge and walked to the Juniper Factory, which was somewhat larger than Qualag's. The office was similar, though with a brisker atmosphere. Gersen again put his question, this time in connection with Dundine. But the clerk was not cooperative and refused to check the records. "We aren't allowed to give out such information," said the clerk, looking disdainfully at Gersen from the altitude afforded him by his position behind the counter. "Let me discuss the matter with the manager," said Gersen. "Mr. Plusse owns the factory. If you will be seated I will announce you." Gersen went to examine a tapestry ten feet wide by six feet high, representing a flowered field on which stood hundreds of fanciful birds. "Mr. Plusse will see you, sir." A yTr. Plusse was a small surly '-man with a white top-knot and eyes of blue agate. Clearly he had no intention of obliging Gersen or anyone else. "Sorry, sir! We have our production to consider. Trouble enough with the women as it is! We do our best for them; we provide good food and recreational facilities, bathe them once a veek. Still it's impossible to keep them satisfied." "May I ask if the woman still works for you?" "It makes no difference if she does or not. You would not be allowed to disturb her." "If she is here, if she is the woman I am looking for, I'll be glad to recompense you for any inconvenience." "Hmf. Just a moment." Mr. Plusse spoke into the intercom. "Is not there a Dundine in wicker-stitching? What's her current index?... Hmf... I see." He returned to Gersen, whom he now regarded in a thoughtful new light. "A valuable employee. I can't have her badgered. If you insist on speaking to her, you'll have to buy her. The Without a word Gersen put down the money. Mr. Plusse licked his small pink mouth. "Hmf." He spoke into the intercom. "With a minimum of commotion, bring Dundine to this office." Ten minutes passed, while Mr. Plusse ostentatiously made notations on a chart. The door opened; the clerk entered with a large-bodied woman in a white smock. Her features were big and moist; her hair short, mouse brown, crimped and tied with string. Wringing her hands apprehensively she stared from Mr. Plusse to Gersen and back again." "You are leaving our service," said Mr. Plusse in a dry voice. "This gentleman bought you." Dundine looked at Gersen with bright fear. "Oh, what do you plan to do with me, sir? I'm useful and well here! I do my work. I don't want to go out on the back farms. I wouldn't want to do this, and I'm too old for barge work." "Nothing like that, Dundine. I've paid Mr. Plusse off, you're a free woman now. You can go back to your home if you like." Tears sprang into her eyes. "I don't believe it." "It's true." "But -- why did you do this?" Dundine's face wavered between bewilderment and fear. "I want to ask you a few questions." Dundine turned her back, bent her head over her hands.  fter a moment Gersen asked, Is there anything you want to bring with you?" "No. Nothing. If I was wealthy I'd take that little tapestry on the wall, the little girls dancing. I did the wickering on that tapestry and I was all that fond of the thing." "What is the price?" Gersen asked Mr. Plusse. "That is our Style #, which the tapestry. "Come, Dundine," he said shortly. "Best that we start off." "But my good-bys! My dear friends!" "Impossible," said Mr. Plusse. "Do you wish to disturb the other women?" Dundine sniffed and rubbed her nose. "There's my bonuses I haven't taken. It's three recreation half-periods. I'd like to give them to Almerina." "That can't be done, as you know. We never allow transfers or bartering of bonus units. If you wish, you may use them now, before your departure." Dundine looked uncertainly toward Gersen. "Do we have time? It seems a shame to let them go to waste... but I suppose it makes no difference now." They walked along the river road back toward the center of town, with Dundine casting timid glances toward Gersen. "I can't imagine what you want of me," she said tremulously. "I'm certain I've never known you in my life." "I'm interested in what you can tell me of Viole Falushe." "Viole Falushe? But I know no such person. I can tell you nothing." Dundine stopped short, her knees shaking. "Are you going to take me back to the factory?" "No," said Gersen hollowly. "I won't take you back." He looked at her in deep discouragement. "Aren't you the Dundine who was kidnapped with Inga many years ago?" "Oh yes. I'm Dundine. Poor Inga. I've never heard of her since she went to Qualag's. They say it's ever so dreary at Qualag's." Gersen's mind raced back and forth. "You were kidnapped and brought to Sarkovy?" "Yes, indeed, and oh, what a time we had! Riding the steppes on those bouncing old wagons!" "But the man who kidnapped you and brought you to Sarkovy -- that was Viole Falushe, or so I am told." "Him!" Dundine's mouth twisted as if she had bitten into something sour. "His name wasn't Viole Falushe!" And Gersen belatedly recalled that his informant, Kakarsis Asm, had told him the same. The man who had sold Inga and Dundine had not used the name "Viole Falushe" at that time. "No, no," said Dundine in a soft voice, looking far back down her life. "That wasn't any Viole Falushe. It was that nasty little Vogel Filschner." IV  #I the way back into the Oikumene, in fragments and ejaculations, bits from here, oddments from there, Dundine told her story, and Gersen gave over trying to elicit a connected narrative. Expansive, inflated with freedom, Dundine talked with enthusiasm. She knew Vogel Filschner -- yes, indeed! She knew him well. So he changed his name to Viole Falushe? Small wonder, after the shame his mother must feel. Though Madame Filschner had never enjoyed the best of reputations, and no one had ever known Vogel Filschner's father. He had attended school with Dundine, two classes ahead. "Where was this?" asked Gersen. "Why, at Ambeules!" declared Dundine, surprised that Gersen did not already know the story as well as herself. Though Gersen knew Rotterdam, Hamburg and Paris, he had never visited Ambeules, a suburb of Rolingshaven on the west coast of Europe. Volgel Filschner had always been a strange, brooding boy, according to Dundine. "Extremely sensitive," she confided. "Ripe always for a great rage or eyefuls of tears. One never knew what Vogel might do!" And for a space she fell silent, shaking her head in marvel at the deeds of Vogel Filschner. "Then when he was sixteen, and I but fourteen, a new girl came to school. Oh, she was a pretty thing! Jheral Tinzy was her name, and who but Vogel Filschner should fall in love!" But Vogel Filschner was grubby and unsavory. Jheral Tinzy, a girl of sensitivity, found him repulsive. "WTio could blame her?" mused Dundine. "Vogel was an eerie boy. I can see him yet: tall for his age, and somewhat thin, with a round belly and a round bottom, like head to the side, watching all with his dark burning eyes! They watched, they saw all, they never forgot a thing -- Vogel Filschner's eyes! I must say that Jheral Tinzy used him heartlessly, laughing and gay the while! She drove poor Vogel to desperation, this is my belief. And that man Vogel took up with -- I can't recall his name. He wrote poetry, very strange and daring. He was thought ungodly, though he had patrons in the upper classes. Those days so long ago, so tragic and so sweet! Ah, if I could live them again, what changes there would be!" At this point Dundine went into a nostalgic reminiscence. "Even now I can smell the air from the sea! Ambeules, our old district, is on the Gaas, and this is the loveliest part of the city, though by no means the richest. The flowers are unimaginable! To think that I have seen no flowers for thirty years, except for those I myself worked." And now nothing must do but that Dundine should examine her tapestry which she had draped upon the back bulkhead of the saloon. presently she returned to the subject of Vogel Filschner. "The most morbidly sensitive of youths! The poet egged him on. And truth to tell, Jheral Tinzy humiliated Vogel dreadfully. Whatever the cause, Vogel performed his terrible deed. There were twenty-nine girls in the choral society. Every Friday night we sang. Vogel had learned to operate a spaceship -- it was a course all the boys took. So Vogel stole one of those little Locater ships, and when we came out from choral practice to the bus, it was Vogel who drove us away. He took us to the spaceship and made us all get aboard. But it was the one night Jheral Tinzy had not come to practice. Vogel had no knowledge of this until the last girl left the bus, and he was like a stone statue. Too late then! He had no choice but to flee." Dundine sighed. "Twenty-eight girls, pure and fresh as little flowers. How he dealt with us! We knew he was strange, but ferocious as a wild beast? No, never. How could we girls imagine such things? For reasons best known to himself he never used us in bed -- Inga thought he was sulking because he had failed to capture Jheral. Godelia Parwitz and Rosamond -- I can't think of her name -- they tried to hit him with a metal implement, though it would have been the death of all had they succeeded, for none of us knew how to guide the ship. He punished them in a dreadful manner so that they cried and sobbed. Inga and I told him he was a wicked monster to act so. He only laughed, did Vogel Filschner. 'A wicked monster, am I? I'll show you a wicked monster!' And he took us to Sarkovy and sold us to Mr. Asm. "But first he stopped at another world and sold ten girls who were the least weU-favored. Then Inga and I and six others who hated him the most were sold on Sarkovy. Of the others, the most beautiful, I know nothing. Thanks to Kalzibah, I have been succored." D undine wanted to return to Earth. At New Wexford Gersen furnished her a wardrobe, a ticket to Earth and funds sufficient to keep her in comfort the rest of her life. At the spaceport she embarrased him by falling on her knees and kissing his hands. "I thought to die and have my ashes scattered on a far planet! How was I so lucky? With so many other poor creatures, why did Kalzibah select me for his favor?" The same question, in different terms, had been troubling Gersen himself. With his wealth, he might have bought the whole of Qualag and Juniper and every factory on Sabra and brought each of the wretched women to their homes. But what then? he asked himself. Sabra tapestries were in demand. New factories would be established, new slaves imported. A year later all would be as before. Still... Gersen heaved a sigh. The universe abounded with evils. No one man could defeat them all. Meanwhile Dundine was wiping her eyes and apparently preparing to fall on her knees once more. Gersen said hastily, "One request I wish to make of you." "Anything, anything!" "You plan to return to Rolingshaven?" "It is my home.' ' "You must not reveal how you were brought from Sabra. Tell no one! Invent any wild tale. But do not mention me. Do not mention that I asked you of Vogel Filschner." "Trust me! The fiends of hell can tear forth my tongue, even then I will not speak!" "Good-by then." Gersen departed hastily before Dundine could again demonstrate her gratitude. At a public telephone he called Braemar Investment Company. "Henry Lucas to speak to Mr. Addels." "A moment, Mr. Lucas." Addels appeared on the screen. "Mr. Lucas?" Gersen allowed his image to go forth. "All continues to go well?" C t A s well as could be expected. My problems arise only from the sheer mass of our money. I should say, your money." Addels permitted himself to smile. "But gradually I am training an organization. Incidentally, Radian Publishing Company is ours. We had it cheaply, because of the circumstances I mentioned previously." "No one has been inquisitive? There have been no questions, no rumors?" "To the best of my knowledge, none. Zane Publishing Company bought Radian; Irwin and Jeddah own Zane; a numbered account at a Pontefract bank owns Irwin and Jeddah. Braemar Investment is the numbered account. Who is Braemar Investment? Ostensibly it is I." "Well done!" said Gersen. "You could not have managed better." Addels acknowledged the praise with a stiff nod. "I must say once more that Radian seems a poor investment, at least on the basis of past performance." "Why has it been losing money? Everyone seems to read Cosmopolis. I see it everywhere." "Perhaps this is so. Nevertheless circulation has slowly been declining. More significantly, the typical reader no longer is a decision-maker. The management has been trying to please everyone, including the advertiser. As a result the magazine has lost its flair." "There would seem to be a remedy for the situation," said Gersen. "Hire a new editor, a man of imagination and intelligence. Instruct him to revitalize the magazine, without regard for advertisers or circulation, sparing no reasonable expense. When the magazine regains its prestige, circulation and advertisers will return fast enough." "I am relieved that you preface the word 'expense' with 'reasonable'," said Addels in his driest voice. "I still am not accustomed to dealing with millions as if they were hundreds." "No more am I," said Gersen. "The money means nothing to me, except that I find it uncommonly useful. One other matter. Instruct the Cosmopolis head office -- I believe it is located in London -- that a man named Henry Lucas will be sent to the editorial offices. Represent him as an employee of Zane Publishing if you like. He is to be put on the payroll as a special writer, who will work when and where he chooses, without interference." "Very well, sir. I will do as you require." V ersen, who had lived nine years on Earth, nevertheless felt something of an outworlder's exhilaration as he hung above the great globe awaiting his clearance from Space Security. Finally it arrived, with precise landing instructions, and Gersen dropped down to the West Europe spaceport at Tarn. He passed through sanitation procedures and health inspection, the most stringent of the Oikumene, punched appropriate buttons at the Immigration Control console and finally was allowed to proceed about his business. He rode to London by tube and registered at the Royal Oak Hotel, a block off the Strand. The season was early autumn; the sun shone through a high thin overcast. Old London, permeated with the vapors of antiquity, shone like a fine gray pearl. Gersen's clothes were in the Alphanor style, fuller in cut and richer in color than the clothes of London. On the Strand he went into a gentleman's outfitter, where he selected a fabric, then stripped to his underwear and was measured by photonic scanners. Five minutes later he was delivered his new garments: black trousers, a jacket of dark brown and beige, a white blouse and black cravat. Inconspicuous now, Gersen continued along the Strand. Dusk came to the sky. Every planet had its distinctive dusk, thought Gersen. The dusk of Alphanor, for instance, was an electric blue, gradually fading to the richest of ultramarines. Sarkovy dusk was a dead dismal gray, with a tawny overtone. Dusk at Sabra had been brown-gold, with domains of color around the other stars of the cluster. The dusk of Earth was dusk as it should' be: soft, heather-gray, soothing, an ending and a beginning. Gersen dined at a restaurant which had maintained an unbroken tenancy of over seventeen hundred years. The old oak beams, fumed and waxed, were as stout as ever. The plaster recently had been scraped of twenty layers of white-wash and refinished, a process which occurred every hundred years or so. Gersen's thought reverted to his youth. He had visited London twice with his grandfather, though for the most part they had lived at Amsterdam. There never had been dinners such as this, never leisure or idleness. Gersen shook his head sadly as he recalled the exercises to which his merciless grandfather had put him. A wonder that he had stood up to the discipline. Gersen bought a copy of Cosmopolis and returned to the hotel. He went into the bar and, sitting at a table, ordered a pint of Worthington's Ale, brewed at Burton-on-Trent as had been the case for some two thousand years. He opened Cosmopolis and glanced at the first page. It was easy to understand why the magazine had become moribund. There were three long articles: Have Earthmen Become Less Virile? Patricia Poitrine : New Toast of the Smart Set. A Clergyman's Guide to Spiritual Renewal. Gersen flicked through the pages, then laid the magazine aside. He drained the mug and went up to his room. I n the morning he visited the editorial offices of Cosmopolis and asked to speak to the personnel director. This was Mrs. Neutra, a brittle black-haired woman wearing a great deal of preposterous jewelry. She showed no inclination to speak to Gersen. "Sorry, sorry, sorry. I can't consider anything or anyone at this moment. I'm in a flap. Everybody's in a flap. There's been a shakeup; no one's job is any good." "Perhaps I had better speak to the editor-in-chief," said Gersen. "There was to have been a letter from Zane Publishing, and it should have arrived." The personnel director made a gesture of irritation. "Who or what is Zane Publishing?" "The new owners," said Gersen politely. "Oh." The woman pushed among the papers on her desk. "Maybe this is it." She read. "Oh. You're Henry Lucas." "Yes." "Hmm... Piff puff... You're to be a special writer. Something we just don't need at the moment. But I'm only Personnel Director. Oh hell, fill out the application, make an appointment for your psychiatric tests. If you survive, and you probably won't, show up a week from tomorrow for your orientation course." Gersen shook his head. "I don't have time for any of these formalities. I doubt if the new owners have much sympathy with them." "Sorry, Mr. Lucas. This is our inflexible program." "What does the letter say?" "It says to put Mr. Henry Lucas on the payroll as special writer." "Then please do so." "Oh, double bing-bang hell! If this is how things are going to go, why have a personnel director? Why have psychiatric tests and orientation courses? Why not just let janitors put out the rag?" The woman seized a form, wrote with swift strokes of a flamboyant quill-pen. "Here you are. Take it in to the managing editor, he'll arrange your assignment." The managing editor was a portly gentleman with lips pursed in a worried pout. "Yes, Mr. Lucas. Mrs. Neutra just called me. I understand you have been sent here for a position by the new ownership." "I've been associated with them for a long time," said Gersen. "But all I want at this moment is whatever identification you supply your special correspondents, so that if it ever becomes necessary I can demonstrate that I'm an employee of Cosmopolis." "The managing editor spoke into an intercom. "On your way out, step into Department #A, and your card will be prepared." He leaned morosely back into his chair. "It seems that you are to be a roving reporter, responsible to no one. A very nice billet, if I may say so. What do you propose to write about?" "One thing or another," said Gersen. "Whatever comes up." The managing editor's face sagged with bewilderment. "You can't go out and write a Cosmopolis article like that! Our issues are programmed months ahead! We use public opinion polls to find out what subjects people are interested in." "How can they know what they're interested in if they haven't read it?" asked Gersen. "The new owners are throwing public opinion polls away." The managing editor shook his head sadly. "How will we know what to write about?" "I have an idea or two. For instance, the Institute could stand an airing. What are its current aims? Who are the men of Degrees #, #, #? What information have they suppressed? What of Tyron Russ and his anti-gravity machine? The Institute deserves a comprehensive study. You could easily devote an entire issue to the Institute." The editor nodded curtly. "Don't you think it's a bit -- well, intense? Are people really interested in these matters?" "If not they should be." "Easily said, but it's no way to run a magazine. People don't want to really understand anything. They want to think they have learned without the necessity of application. In our 'heavy' article we try to supply keys and guides, so at least they'll have something to talk about at parties. But go on. What else do you have in mind?" "I've been thinking of Viole Falushe and the Palace of Love. Exactly what goes on at this establishment? What face does Viole Falushe show, what name does he bear when he comes in from Beyond? Who are his guests at the Palace of Love? How have they fared? Would they care to return?" "An interesting topic," the editor admitted. "A bit close to the knuckle perhaps. We prefer to stay away from sensationalism and -- shall we say? -- the grim facts of reality. Still I've often wondered about the Palace of Love. What in the world does go on? The usual, I suppose. But no one knows for sure. What else?" "That's all for now." Gersen rose to his feet. "In fact, I'll be working on this story myself." The managing editor shrugged his shoulders. "You seem to have a free hand." ersen immediately rode the sub-channel tube to Rolingshaveri, arriving at the vast Zone Station a few minutes before noon. He crossed the murmuring white-tiled lobby, past slideways He paused at a kiosk to buy a map, then went to a cafe and settled himself at a table with a stein of beer and plate of sausages. Gersen had lived long in Amsterdam and had passed through the Zone Station on several occasions, but of the city Rolingshaven he knew little. As he ate he studied the map. Rolingshaven was a city of considerable extent, divided into four principal municipalities by two rivers, the Gaas and the Sluicht, and the great Evres Canal. At the north was Zummer, a rather grim district of apartment towers and careful malls laid out by some neat-minded city council of the far past. On the Heybau, a promontory hooking out into the sea, was the famous HandeUial Conservatory, the wonderful Galactic Zoo and the Kindergarten. Zummer otherwise was lacking any interest. South, across the Sluicht was the Old City, a teeming confusion of small shops, inns, hostels, restaurants, beer caverns, bookstalls, huddled offices, askew little houses of stone and timber, dating from the Middle Ages. It was a district as chaotic and picturesque as Zummer was stark and dull; and here as well Vi;as the ancient University, overlooking the fish market along the banks of the Evres Canal. Ambeules lay across the canal: a district of nine hills covered with homes and a periphery given to wharves, warehouses, shipyards, mud-flats from which were dredged the famous Flamande Oysters. The great Gaas estuary separated Ambeules from Dourrai, a district of somewhat lower hills again covered with small homes, with the great industries and fabrication plants straggling along the shore and southward. This was the city where Viole Falushe, or more accurately, Vogel Filschner, had lived and w'here he had committed his first great crime. The exact locale was Ambeules, and Gersen decided to base himself in this area. Finishing beer and sausages he rode an escalator to the third level above, where a local tubecar whisked him south under the Eves Canal to Ambeules Station. He rode to the surface and, looking right and left through the hazy radiance which Characterized the region, approached the old woman who managed a newsstand. "Which is a good hotel nearby?" The old woman pointed a brown finger. "Up Hoeblingasse to the Rembrandt Hotel. As good as any in Ambeules. Of course if its elegance you require, then you must go to the Hotel Prince Franz Ludwig, in Old Town, the finest in Europe with prices to match." Gersen chose the Rembrandt Hotel, a pleasant old-fashioned structure with public rooms paneled in dark wood, and was taken to a suite of high-ceilinged rooms overlooking the great gray Gaas. "T'he day was still young. Gersen rode a cab to the Mairic, where he paid a small fee atid was given access to the City Directory. He ran the record back to #. The screen spun to the letter F, Fi, and finally to the name Filschner. At this time three Filschners were listed. Gersen made notes of the addresses. He likewise found two Tinzys and made similar notes. Then he dialed to the current li.stings and found two Filschners and four Tinzys. One of the Filschners and one of the Tinzys had maintained the same address across the years. Gersen next visited the office of the Ambeules Helton, and on the strength of his Cosmopolis card was given access to the morgue. He brought the index to the screen, scanned it for the name of Vogel Filschner, found a code number, coded and punched the Show button. The tale was much as Dupdine had told, though in condensed form. Vogel Filschner was described as "a boy given to spells of brooding and wandering alone by night." His mother, Hedwig Filschner identified as a beautician, professed herself amazed at Vogel's outrageous deed. She described him as a "good boy, though very idealistic and moody." Vogel Filschner had had no close friends. In the biology laboratory he had been teamed with a lad named Roman Haenigsen, the school chess champion. They had played an occasional game of chess during the lunch hour. Roman evinced no astonishment at Vogel's crime: "He was a fellow who hated to lose. Whenever I beat him, he would go savage and throw aside the pieces. Still, it amused me to play with him. I don't like people who take the game frivolously." Vogel Filschner was not a frivolous boy, thought Gersen. A photograph appeared : the kidnapped girls, grouped in a picture identified as the "Philidor Bohus Choral Society". In the front row stood a plump smiling girl in whom Gersen recognized Dundine. Among the girls would be Jheral Tinzy, and Gersen checked the face against the caption. Jheral Tinzy was the third girl in the fourth row. Not only did a girl in the third row obscure her face; she also had turned her head aside at the time the photograph was taken, and what could be seen of her face was indistinct. There was no photograph of Vogel Filschner. The file ended. So much for that, thought Gersen. Vogel Filschner's identity with Viole Falushe was not widely apprehended in Ambeules, if not at all. As verification, Gersen dialed for the file on Viole Falushe, the Demon Prince, but only a single reference excited his interest: "Viole Falushe at various times has implied that his original home was Earth. On several occasions a rumor has reached us to the effect that Viole Falushe has been seen here in Ambeules. Why he should wish to haunt our unexciting district is a question which cannot be answered, and the rumors appear to be no more than an insane hoax." ersen departed from the newspaper offices and went to stand in the street. The gendarmerie? Gersen decided against approaching them. Unlikely that they could tell him more than he already knew. Unlikely that they would if they could. Additionally, Gersen had no desire to arouse official curiosity. Gersen checked the addresses he had noted, as well as the location of the Philidor Bohus Lyceum, against his map. The Lyceum was the nearest, at the far side of Lothar Parish. Gersen signaled a three-wheeled auto-cab and was conveyed up one of the nine hills through a district of small detached houses. Some were constructed in the ancient fashion, of glazed dark red brick and a high pitched roof of milk glass tiles, others in the new "hollow trunk" style : narrow concrete cylinders two thirds below the ground. There were houses of artificial sandstone compressed as a unit from molded soil; houses of pink or white panels surmounted by crimped metal domes; houses of laminated paper, with transparent roofs electrically charged to repel dust. The bulbs of uni-cast glass or glass-metal so common among the worlds of the Concourse had never won acceptance among the folk of western Europe, who compared them to pumpkins and paper lanterns and called the people who lived in them "non-human futurians". The cab discharged Gersen before the Philidor Bohus Lyceum, a grim cube of synthetic black stone flanked by a pair of smaller cubes. The director of the lyceum was Dr. Willem Ledinger, a bland large-bodied man with taffy-colored skin and a lank lock of yellow hair which wound around his scalp in a most peculiar manner. Gersen wondered at the man's audacity thus to present himself before several thousand adolescents. Ledinger was affable and unsuspicious, readily accepting Gersen's statement that Cosmopolis wished to present a survey of contemporary young people. "I don't think there's much to write about," said Ledinger. "Our young people are, if I must say it, unexceptionable. We have many bright students and at least our fair quota of dullards." Gersen steered the conversation to students of the past and their careers; from here it was an easy connection to the subject of Vogel Filschner. "Ah, yes," mused Dr. Ledinger, patting his yellow top-knot. "Vogel Filschner. I haven't heard his name for years. Before my time, of course; I was a mere instructor across the city at Hulba Technical Academy. But the scandal reached us, never fear! Faculties have big ears. What a tragedy! To think of a lad like that going so far wrong!" "He never returned to Ambeules, then?" "He'd be a fool to do so. Or to advertise his presence, at any rate." "Do you have the likeness of Vogel Filschner among your records? Perhaps I might do a separate piece upon this peculiar crime." rudgingly Dr. ledinger admitted that photographs of Vogel Filschner were on file. "But why rake up old nastiness? It is like breathing into graves." "On the other hand, such an article might identify the rogue and bring him to justice." "Justice?" Dr. Ledinger curled his lip in disbelief. "After thirty years? He was a hysterical child. No matter what his crime, by this time he has made redemption and found peace. What could be gained by bringing him to what you call 'justice'?" Gersen was somewhat startled by Dr. Ledinger's vehemence. "To dissuade others. Perhaps there is a potential Vogel Filschner among your students this very instant." Dr. Ledinger smiled wistfully. "I don't doubt it an instant. Certain of these young rascals -- well, I won't tell tales out of school. And I won't supply you with the photographs. I find the idea completely objectionable." "Is there a yearbook for the year of the crime? Or better, the previous year?" Dr. Ledinger looked at Gersen a moment, his affability slowly disappearing. Then he went to his wall, plucked a volume from the shelves. He watched quietly as Gersen turned the pages and finally came upon the photograph of the Girls' Choral Society he had already seen. Gersen pointed. "There is Jheral Tinzy, the girl who rebuffed Vogel and drove him to his crime." Dr. Ledinger examined the picture. "Think of it. Twenty-eight girls -- snatched away Beyond. Their lives blasted. I wonder how they fared." "Whatever became of Jheral Tinzy? She was not among the group, if you recall." Dr. Ledinger examined Gersen with suspicion. "You seem to know a great deal about the case. Have you been completely candid with me?" Gersen grinned. "Not altogether. I am principally interested in Vogel Filschner, but I don't want anyone to know I'm interested. If I can get the information I need discreetly, with no one the wiser, so much the better." "You are a police officer? Or Gersen displayed his identification. "Here is my sole claim to fame." "Hmmf. Cosmopolis plans to publish an article on Vogel Filschner? It seems a waste of paper and ink. No wonder Cosmopolis has lost prestige." "What of Jheral Tinzy? You have her photograph in your files?" "Undoubtedly." Dr. Ledinger laid his hands upon the desk, to signal that the interview had reached its end. "But we cannot open our confidential files haphazardly. I am sorry." Gersen rose to his feet "Thank you, in any case." "I have done nothing to help you," said Dr. Ledinger stonily. VI 'ITogel Filschner had lived with  his mother in a narrow little house at the eastern end of Ambeules, bordering on a dingy district of warehouses and transportation depots. Gersen climbed the embroidered iron steps, touched the button, faced the inspection eye. A woman's voice spoke. "Yes?" Gersen spoke in his most confident voice: "I am trying to locate Madame Hedwig Filschner, who lived here many years ago." "I know no one of that name. You must consult with Ewane Clodig, who owns the property. We only pay rent. Ewane Clodig, whom Gersen found in the offices of Clodig Properties, consulted his records. "Madame Hedwig Filschner? The name is familiar, but I don't see it on my list... Here it is. She moved, let me see, thirty years ago." "You have her present address?" "No, sir. That is too much to ask. I have not even a forwarding address from thirty years ago... But it comes back! Is .she not the mother of Vogel Filschner, the boy slaver?" "Correct." "Well then, I can tell you this. When the deed was known, she packed her belongings and disappeared, and no one has heard of her since." J heral Tinzy's old home was a tall octagonal structure of the so-called Fourth Palladian style, situated halfway up Bailleul Hill. The address corresponded to one which Gersen had noted in the current directory; the family had not changed its residence. A handsome woman of early middle age ansv.?ered the door. She wore a gay peasant smock, a flowered scarf around her head. Gersen appraised the woman bcfote he spoke. She returned a gaze so direct as to be bold. "You're Jheral Tinzy?" Gersen asked tentatively. "Jheral?" The woman's eyebrows arched high. "No. No, indeed." She gave a sardonic bark of laughter. "What a strange thing to ask. Who are you?" Gersen produced his identification. The woman read, returned the card. "What makes you think I am Jheral Tinzy?" "She lived here at one time. She would be about your age." "I'm her cousin." The woman considered Gersen more carefully than ever. "What did you want with Jheral?" "May I come in? I'll explain." The woman hesitated. As Gersen came forward she made a (uick motion to restrain him. Then, after a dubious glance over her shoulder, she moved aside. Gersen entered a hall with a floor of immaculate white glass tiles. On one hand was the display wall characteristic of middle-class European homes. Here hung a panel intricately inlaid with wood, bone and shell -- Lenka workmanship from Nowhere, one of the Concourse planets, a set of perfume points from Pamfile; a rectangle of polished and perforated obsidian : -- one of the so-called 'supplication slabs' from Lupus #; a small tapestry of exquisite design and workmanship. Gersen paused to examine it. "This is a beautiful piece. Do you know where it came from?" "It's very rich," agreed the woman. "I believe it came from off-world." "It looks to me like a Sabra piece," said Gersen. TTrora the upper floor came a ' harsh call: "Emma? who is there?" "Awake already," muttered the woman. She raised her voice. "A gentleman from Cosmopolis, Aunt." "We wish no magazines!" cried the voice. "I am explicit!" "Very well. Aunt. I'll tell him so." Emma signaled Gersen into a sitting room, jerked her head toward the source of the voice. "Jheral's mother. She is not well." "A pity," said Gersen. "Where, incidentally, is Jheral?" Emma turned her bold glance on Gersen. "Why do you want to know?" "To be candid, I'm trying to locate one Vogel Filschner." Emma laughed soundlessly and without mirth. "You've come to the wrong place to find Vogel Filschner. What a joke!" "You knew him?" "Oh yes. He was in the class under mine at the Lyceum." "You haven't seen him since the kidnapping?" "Oh, no. Never. Still, it's strange that you should ask. Emrna hesitated, smiling tremulously as if in embarrassment. "It's like a cloud passing over the sun. Sometimes I look around, sure that I've glimpsed Vogel Filschner -- but he's never there." "What happened to Jheral?" Emma seated herself, looked far back down the years. "You must remember that there was much publicity and outcry. It was the greatest outrage in memory. Jheral became pointed at; there were unpleasant scenes. Several of the mothers actually slapped and abused Jheral; she had snubbed Vogel, driven him to crime, hence shared his guilt. I must admit," said Emma reflectively, "that Jheral was a heartless flirt. She was simply adorable, of course. She could bring the boys with one little sidelook -- like this." Emma demonstrated. "Such a rascal. She even flirted with Vogel -- pure sadism, because she couldn't bear the sight of him. Ah, the detestable Vogel! Every day Jheral would come home from school to tell us another of Vogel's enormities. How he dissected a frog and then, after wiping his hands on a paper towel, ate his lunch! How badly he smelled, as if he never changed his clothes! How he would boast of his poetic mind and try to impress her with his magnificence! It's true. Jheral with her tricks incited Vogel -- and twentyeight other girls paid the price." "And then?" "Great indignation. Everyone turned against Jheral, as perhaps they had always longed to do. Jheral finally ran away with an older man. She never returned to Ambeules. Not even her mother has the slightest idea of where she is." Into the room rushed a blazing-eyed old woman with a mane of flying white hair. Gersen jumped behind a chair to avoid her charge. "What do you do, asking questions in this house? Be off with you! Hasn't there been trouble enough? I don't trust your face, you are like all the rest! Out, never return! Scoundrel! The audacity, entering this house with your filthy questions..." Gersen left the house as expeditiously as he was able. Emma started to accompany him to the door; but her aunt, hobbling forward, shoved her aside to prevent her from going. The door closed; the nearhysterical ranting became muffled. Gersen heaved a deep breath. A virago! He had been lucky to escape without any scratches. A t a nearby cafe Gersen drank a flask of wine and watched the sun sink toward the sfea. An excellent possibility, of course, that the entire line of investigation, beginning with the notice in the Avente newspaper, was a wild-goose chase. To date, the only link between Viole Falushe and Vogel Filschner was the opinion of Kakarsis Asm. Emma Tinzy apparently believed that she had seen Vogel Filschner in Ambeules; Viole Falushe might well enjoy the dangerous pleasure of returning to the scenes of his childhood. If so, why had he not revealed himself to his old acquaintances? Although it seemed that Vogel Filschner had made precious few friends or acquaintances in any event. Jheral Tinzy perhaps had made the wisest of decisions when she took herself away from Ambeules. Viole Falushe had a notoriously long memory. His one friend had been Roman Haenigsen, the chess champion. Somewhere also had been mention of a poet who had incited Vogel Filschner to excess... , Gersen called for a directory, and searched for the name Haenigsen. There it was; the book almost fell open to the name. Gersen copied the address and asked directions from a waiter. It appeared that Roman Haenigsen lived hardly five minutes' walk away. Finishing his wine, Gersen set off through the waning sunlight. The house of Roman Haenigsen was the most elegant of the houses he had visited this day: a three-story structure of metal and melt-stone panels, with electric windows to go transparent or opaque at a spoken word. Haenigsen was only just arriving home when Gersen turned into the walkway: a small brisk man with a large head and prim meticulous features. He peered sharply at Gersen and asked his business. Candor in this case seemed more useful than indirection. Gersen said: "I am making inquiries in regard to your old classmate Vogel Filschner. I understand that you were almost his only friend." "Hm," said Roman Haenigsen. He thought a moment. "Come inside, if you will, and we will talk." He took Gersen into a study decorated with all manner of chess memorabilia : portraits, busts, collections of chessmen, photographs. "Do you play chess?" he asked Gersen. "I have played on occasion, though not often." "Like anything else, one must practice to keep in fighting trim. Chess is an old game." He went to a board, disarranged the chessmen with affectionate contempt. "Every variation has been analyzed; there is a recorded game to illuminate the results of any reasonable move. If one had a sufficiently good memory he would not need to think to win his games; he could merely play someone else's winning game. Luckily, no one owns such a memory but the robots. Still, you did not come here to talk of chess. Will you take a glass of liquor?" "Thank you." Gersen accepted a crystal goblet containing an ineh of spirits. "Vogel Filschner! Strange to hear that name once more! Is his whereabouts known?" "This is what I am attempting to learn." O Oman Haenigsen gave his head a wry shake. "You will learn nothing from me. I have neither seen him nor heard from him since' #." "I had hardly expected that he would return in his old identity. But it's possible -- " Gersen paused as Roman Haenigsen snapped his fingers. "Peculiar!" said Haenigsen. "Each Thursday night I play at the Chess Club. Perhaps a year ago I noticed a man standing under the clock. I thought, surely that's not Vogel Filschner? He turned, I saw his face. It was a man somewhat like Vogel, but far different. A man of fine appearance and poise, a man who had nothing of Vogel's hang-dog surliness. And yet, since you mention it, there was something to this man, perhaps his manner of holding his arms and hands, which reminded me of Vogel." "You haven't seen this man since?" "Not once." "Did you speak to him?" "No. In my surprise I must have halted to stare, but then I hurried on past." "Can you think of anyone Vogel might wish to see? Did he have friends other than yourself?" Roman Haenigsen pursed his lips wryly. "I was hardly his friend. We shared a laboratory table ; I played him an occasional game of chess, which he often won. Had he applied himself he might have taken the championship. But he cared only for mooning over girls and writing bad poetry in imitation of a certain Navarth." "Ah. Navarth. This is the poet whom Vogel Filschner sought to emulate." "Unfortunately. In my opinion Navarth was a charlatan, a bombast, a man of the most dubious attitudes." "And what became of him?" "I believe he still is about, though hardly the man he was thirty years ago. People have grown wise. Studied decadence no longer shocks as it did when I was a lad. Vogel naturally was entranced and went through the most ludicrous antics in order to identify with his idol. Yes, indeed. If anyone is to blame for the crimes of Vogel Filschner it is the mad poet Navarth!"  n the following day Gersen ' iaid a second visit to the offices of the Helion. The dossier on Navarth was enthusiastic and ample, reporting scandals, improprieties, defiances and outrageous pronouncements across a period of forty years. The initial entry dealt with an opera presented by students of the university, with libretto by Navarth The first performance was declared an infamy, and nine stiuients were expelled from the university. Thereafter Navarth's career soared and collap.sed, resurged, recollapsed, at last with finality. For the past ten years he had resided aboard a houseboat on the Gaas estuary, near the Fitlingasse. Gersen tubed to Station Hedrick on Boulevard Castel Vivence, surfaced into the commercial and shipping district of Ambeules, beside the Gaas estuary. The district roiled with the activity of agencies, warehouses, offices, wharves, buffets, restaurants, wine shops, fruithawkers, news kiosks, dispensaries. Barges nosed into docks to be unloaded by robots; drays rumbled along the boulevard ; from below came the vibration of freight moving by tube. At a sweet-shop Gersen inquired for the Fitlingasse and was directed east along the boulevard. Automatic open-sided passenger-wagons served the boulevard, with patrons riding on benches facing the street. Gersen rode a mile, two miles, with the Gaas on the right hand. The bustle diminished: the imposing blocks and masses of the commercial district gave way to threeand four-story structures of vast age, queer narrow-windowed buildings of melt-stone or terracotta panels, stained a hundred subtle colors by smoke and salt air. Occasionally the wagon passed vacant areas, where only weeds grew. Through these gaps could be seen the next street to the north, on a somewhat higher level than Boulevard Castel Vivence, with tall apartment buildings pressed tightly against each other. The Fitlingasse was a narrow gray alley striking off up the hill. Gersen alighted and almost at once observed a hulking twostoried houseboat moored to a dilapidated dock. A wisp of smoke drifted up from the chimney. Someone was aboard. ersen took stock of the surroundings. Hazy sunlight played on the estuary; on the far shore thousands of houses with brown tile roofs stood in ranks down to the water's edge. Elsewhere were unused wharves, rotting piles, a warehouse or two, a saloon with purple and green windows extending over the water. On the dock a girl of seventeen or eighteen sat tossing pebbles into the water. She gave Gersen a brief dispassionate stare, looked away. Gersen turned back to consider the houseboat. If this were Navarth's residence he enjoyed a very pleasant prospect -- though the wan sunlight, the brown roofs of Dourrai, the rotting wharves, the lapping water invested the scene with melancholy. Even the girl seemed somber beyond her years. She wore a short black skirt, a brown jacket. Her hair was dark and rumpled, whether from wind or neglect could not be known. Gersen approached and inquired, "Is Navarth aboard the houseboat?" She nodded without change of expression and watched with the detachment of a naturalist as Gersen descended the ladder to the landing, then crossed an alarming gangplank to the foredeck of the houseboat. Gersen knocked at the door. There was no response. Gersen knocked again. The door was flung violently open. A sleepy, unshaven man peered forth. His age was indeterminate; he was thin, spindle-shanked, with a twisted beak of a nose, rumpled hair of no particular color, eyes which though perfectly set gave the impression of looking in two directions at once. His manner wild and truculent. "Is there no privacy left in the world? Off the boat, at once! Whenever I settle for a moment's rest, some sheepfaced functionary, some importunate peddler of tracts insists on pounding me out of my couch. Will you not depart? Have I not made myself clear? I warn you, I have a trick or two up my sleeve!" Gersen tried to speak to no avail. When Navarth reached within he hastily retreated to the dock. "A moment of your time!" he called. "I am no functionary, no salesman. I am named Henry Lucas, and I wish -- " Navarth shook his skinny fist. "Not now, not tomorrow, not in the total scope of the future, nor at any time thereafter do I wish to make your acquaintance. Be off with you! You have the face of a man that brings ill news; a gnasliing blacktooth grin. These matters are clear to me; you are fey! I want nothing of you. Go away." With a leer of evil triumph he swung the gangplank away from the landing, re-entered the houseboat. Gcrsen returned to the dock. The girl sat as before. Gersen looked back down at the houseboat. He asked in a wondering voice: "Is he always like that?" "He is Navarth," said the girl, as if this were all that need be said. crsen went to the sal oon and drank a pint of beer. The bartender was a quiet watchful man of great height with an imposing stomach, and either knew, nothing aljout Navarth or did not choose to reveal what he knew. Gersen gleaned no information. He sat thinking. A half hour passed. Then going to the telephone directory, he looked in the classified section under 'Salvage'. An advertisement caught his eye: Joban Salvage and Tow Tugs -- Crane Barge -- Diving Equipment No job too large or too small Gersen telephoned and made his needs known. He was assured that on the morrow the equipment he required would be at his service. The following morning a heavy ocean-going tug drove up the estuary, turned, eased into the mooring next to Navarth's houseboat, with a bare three feet between. The mate bawled orders to the seamen; lines were flung up to the dock and dropped over bollards. The tug was securely moored. Navarth came out on the deck, dancing with fury. "Must you loom so close? Take that great hulk away! Do you intend to thrust me into the dock?" Leaning on the railing of the tug. Gersen looked into Novarth's upturned face. "I believe I spoke a few words to you yesterday?" "I recall very well. I requested your departure, and here you are again, more inconveniently than before." "I wonder if you would give me the pleasure of a few minutes conversation? Perhaps there might be profit in it for you." "Profit? Bah! I have poured more money out of my shoe than you have spent. I require only that you take your tug elsewhere." "Certainly. We are here but for a few minutes." Navarth gave a pettish nod. At the far side of the tug the diver Gersen had hired was climbing back aboard. Gersen turned to Navarth. "It's very important that I speak to you. If you would be so good as to -- " "This 'importance' exists from a single point of view. Be off with you and your mammoth tug!" "At once," said Gersen. He nodded to the diver, who touched a button. Under the houseboat sounded an explosion ; the houseboat shuddered, began to list. Navarth ran back and forth in a frenzy. From the tug grapples were lowered and hooked to the houseboat's rub-rail. "Apparently there has been an explosion in your engine room," Gersen told Navarth. "How can this be? There has never been an explosion before! There is not even an engine. I am about to sink!" "Not so long as you are supported by the lines. But we are leaving in one minute, and I must cut loose the grapples." "What?" Navarth threw up his arms. "I will go to the bottom, together with the boat! Is this your desire?" "If you recall, you yourself ordered me to leave," said Gersen in a reasonable voice. "Hence -- " he turned to the crewmen -- "throw off the grapples! We depart!" "No, no!" bellowed Navarth. "I'll sink!" "If you invite me aboard your boat, if you talk to me and help me compose an article I'm writing, then that's a different matter," said Gersen. "I might be disposed to help you through this misfortune -- even, perhaps, to the extent of repairing your hull." "Why not?" stormed Navarth. "You are responsible for the explosion!" "Careful, Navarth! That's at the very verge of slander! Remember there are witnesses!" "Bah! What you have done is piracy and extortion. Writing an article, indeed! Well, then -- why didn't you say so in the first place? I too am a writer! Come aboard; we will talk. I am always grateful for some small di version; a man without friends is a tree without leaves." Gersen jurnped down upon the houseboat; Navarth, now all amiability, arranged chairs where they caught the full play of the pallid sunlight. He brought forth a bottle of white wine. "Sit then; make yourself at ease!" He opened the bottle, poured, then leaning back in his chair drank with pleasure. His face was placid and guileless, as if all the racial wisdom had passed through leaving no perceptible traces. Like Earth, Navarth was old, irresponsible and melancholy, full of a dangerous mirth. "You are a writer then? I may say you do not correspond to the usual image." ersen produced his Cosmopolls identification. "Mr. Henry Lucas," read Navarth. "Special writer. Why do you come to me? I am no longer heeded, my vogue is a memory. Discredited, penurious. Where was my offense? I sought to express truth in all its vehemence. This is a danger! A meaning must be uttered idly, without emphasis. The listener is under no compulsion to react, his customary defenses are not in place, the Meaning enters his mind. I have much to say about the world, but every year the compulsion dwindles. Let them live and die: it is all one to me. What will you write about?" "Viole Falushe." Navarth blinked. "An interesting topic, but why come to me?" "Because you knew him as Vogel Filschner." "Hm. Well, yes. This is a fact not generally known." With fingers suddenly limp. Navarth poured more wine. "What specifically do you wish?" "Knowledge." "I sugggest," said Navarth, suddenly brisk, "that you seek the information at its source." Gersen nodded agreement. "Well enough, if I knew where to look. But what if he is off Beyond, at his Palace of Love?" "This is not the case. He is here on Earth." As soon as Navarth spoke he seemed to regret his ingenuousness and frowned in irritation. Gersen leaned back, his doubts and misgivings dissolved. Vogel Filschner and Viole Falushe were one; here was a man who knew him in both identities. Navarth had become uneasy and resentful. "A thousand topics more interesting than Viole Falushe." "How do you know he's on Earth?" Navarth made a sound of grand scorn. "How do I know anything? I am Navarth!" He pointed to a wisp of smoke on the sky. "I see that, I know." Fie pointed to a dead fish, floating belly upward. "I see that, I know." He raised the bottle of wine, held it up against the sunlight. "I see that, I know." Gersen reflected a moment in silence. "I am in no position to criticize your epistemology," he said at last. "In the first place, I don't understand it. Have you no more explicit knowledge of Viole Falushe?" Navarth attempted to lay his finger slyly alongside his nose, but miscalculating, prodded his eye. "There is a time for bravado and another for caution. I still do not know the point of your article." "It is to be a judicious document, without exaggeration or apology. I intend that the facts shall speak for themselves." XTavarth pursed his lips. "A  dangerous undertaking. Viole Falushe is the most sensitive of men. Do you recall the princess who detected a pea under forty mattresses? Viole Falushe can smell out a slur in a blind infant's morning invocation to Kalzibah. On the other hand, the world revolves; the carpet of knowledge unrolls. Viole Falushe has given me no cause for gratitude." "Your appraisal of his character then is negative?" asked Gersen cautiously. Navarth could control himself no longer. He drank wine with a grandoise gesture. "Negative indeed. Were I to give all orders, what a retribution I would create!" He slumped back in his chair, pointed a skinny finger toward the horizon, spoke in a hushed monotone; "A pyre tall as a mountain, and Viole Falushe at the top! Platforms surrounding for ten thousand musicians. With a single glance I strike the fire. The musicians play while their whiskey boils and their instruments melt. Viole Falushe sings soprano..." He poured more wine. "A wistful vision. It can never be. I would be content seeing Viole Falushe drowned or dismembered by lions." "You evidently are well acquainted." Navarth nodded, his gaze fixed on the past. "Vogel Filschner read my poetry. An imaginative youth, but disoriented. How he changed, how he expanded! To his imagination he added control; he is now a great artist." "Artist? What manner of artist?" Navarth dismissed the question as irrelevant. "Never could he have arrived at his present stature without art, without style and proportion! Do not be deceived! Like myself he is a simple man, with the clearest of goals. Now you -- you are the most complicated and opaque of men. I see a corner of your mind, then a black film shifts. Are you an Earthman?... But tell me nothing." Navarth waved his hands as if to intercept any answer Gersen might feel called upon to make. "There is too much knowledge already in the world; we use facts as crutches, to the impoverishment of our senses. Facts are falsehoods, logic is deceit. I know a single sjstem of communication: the declaiming of poetry." "Viole Falushe is also a poet?" "He has no great art with words," grumbled Navarth, unthe conversation. "When Viole Falushe visits Earth, where does he stay? Here with you?" Navarth stared at Gersen unbelievingly. "This is a sorry thought." "Where then does he stay?" "Here, there, everywhere. He is as elusive as air." "How do you seek him out?" "That I never do. He occasionally visits me." "And has he done so recently?" "Yes, yes, yes. Have I not implied as much? Why are you so interested in Viole Falushe?" "To answer this would be to inflict a fact upon you," said Gersen with a grin. "But it's no secret. I represent Cosmopolis magazine and I wish to write an article on his life and activities." "Hmmf. A popinjay for vanity is Viole Falushe. But why not ask him directly?" "I would like to do so. First I must make his acquaintance." "Nothing is easier," declared Navarth, "provided you pay the fees." "Why not? I am on a liberal expense account." "VTavarth jumped to his feet,  suddenly full of enthusiasm. "We will need a beautiful girl, young, unsullied. She must project a particular quality of scintillance, a susceptibility, a fervor, an urgency." He looked vaguely here and there, as if in search of something he had lost. Up on the dock he spied the girl whom Gersen had seen the day before. Navarth put fingers to his mouth, produced a shrill whistle, signaled the girl to approach. "She'll do very vell." "Is this an unsullied young scintillant?" asked Gersen. "She seems more of a guttersnipe." "Ha ha!" cawed Navarth. "You will see! I am weak and cachectic, but I am Navarth; old as I am women bloom under my touch. You shall see." The girl came aboard the houseboat and listened to Navarth's program without comment. "We go forth to dine. Expense means nothing, we shall exalt ourselves with the finest. Prepare yourself then with silks, with jewels, with your most precious unguents. This is a wealthy gentleman, the finest of fellows. What is your name once more?" "Henry Lucas." "Henry Lucas. He is impatient. Go then, prepare yourself." The girl shrugged. "I am prepared." "You are the best judge of this," declared Navarth. "Inside then, while I consult my wardrobe." He glanced at the sky. "A yellow day, a yellow night. I will wear yellow." He led the way into his saloon, which was furnished with a wooden table, two chairs of carved oak, shelves stuffed with books and oddments, a vase containing several stalks of pampas grass. Navarth reached into a cabinet for a second flagon of wine, which he opened and banged upon the table, along with glasses. "Drink." With this he disappeared into the next room. Gersen and the girl were left alone. He examined her covertly. She wore the black skirt of yesterday, w'ith a black shortsleeved blouse, sandals, no jewelry or skin-tone, which on Earth was not currently fashionable. The girl had good features, though her hair was a tangle. She was either extremely poised or vastly indifferent. On impulse Gersen took a comb from Navarth's wash-stand and. going to the girl, combed her hair. After a single startled glance she stood quiet and passive. Gersen wondered what went on in her mind. Was she as mad as Navarth? "There," he said at last. "You look somewhat better!" Navarth returned, wearing a maroon jacket several sizes too large, a pair of yellow shoes. "You have not tasted the wine." He filled three glasses brimming. "A merry evening in prospect! Here, the three of us; three islands in the sea, on each island a castaway soul: we go forth together, and what shall we find?" Gersen tasted the wine: a fine heady moscato; he drank. Navarth poured the wine down his throat as if he were emptying a bucket into the estuary. The girl drank, without a tremor, without display of emotion. A strange girl -- thought Gersen. Somewhere behind the grave face was flamboyance. What stimulus could bring it forth? What would cause her to laugh? "Are we ready then?" Navarth looked inquiringly from the girl to Gersen, then threw open the door and ushered them graciously forth. "In search of Viole Falushe!" '"T'he Hotel Prince Franz Ludwig was the most elegant rendezvous of Rolingshaven. The main foyer was enormous: it measured two hundred feet on a side, a hundred feet to the ceiling. Golden light exuded from twelve chandeliers; a deep golden-brown carpet enriched with subtle patterns covered the floor. The walls were covered with silk of pale blue and yellow; the ceiling depicted scenes from a medieval court. The furnishings were of an intricate antique style, solid yet graceful, with cushions of rose or yellow satin, the woodwork lacquered a muted gold. On marble tables stood eight-foot urns from which a profusion of flower overflowed; beside each table stood a smartly uniformed page boy. Here was a sumptuous intricacy which could be found nowhere but on old Earth. Never before had Gersen entered a place so grand. Navarth selected a couch near an alcove where a quartet of musicians played a set of capriccios. Navarth summoned a page and ordered champagne. "Is this where we seek Viole Falushe?" asked Gersen. "I have seen him here on several occasions," said Narvarth. "We shall be on the alert." Sitting in the murmurous golden room they drank champagne. The girl's black skirt and blouse, her bare brown legs and sandals, through paradox or improbable juxtaposition, seemed neither tawdry nor unsuitable. Gersen was puzzled. How had she managed the transformation? Navarth spoke of this and that; the girl said little, or nothing; Gersen was content to let events go at their own pace. Indeed, he found himself enjoying the outing. The girl had put down considerable wine, but showed no effects. She seemed interested in the people who moved through the great foyer, but in a spirit of detachment. At last Gersen asked, "What is your name? I don't know how to speak to you." "The girl did not respond immediately. Navarth said, "Call her what you like. This is my custom. Tonight she is Zan Zu from Eridu." The girl smiled, a brief flicker of amusement. Gersen decided that she was not, after all, a lackwit. "Zan Zu, eh? Is this your name?" "It's as good as any other." "The champagne is finished, an excellent vintage. We go to dine!" Navarth rose to his feet and gave his arm to the girl. Crossing the foyer, they descended four broad stairs into the dining room, which . was no less magnificent than the foyer. Navarth ordered dinner with enthusiasm and finesse. Never had Gersen enjoyed a finer meal -- one which made him regret the limits imposed by the capacity of his stomach. Navarth ate with voracious enjoyment. Zan Zu of Eridu, as Gersen now thought of the girl, ate delicately, without interest. Gersen watched her sidelong. Was she ill? Had she recently undergone some great sorrow, or shock? She seemed composed enough -- too composed, considering the wine she had drunk: moscato, champagne, the various wines Navarth had ordered to accompany dinner. Well, it made no difference to him, Gersen reflected. His business was with Viole Falushe. Though here at the Hotel Prince Franz Ludwig, in the company of Navarth and Zan Zu, Viole Falushe seemed unreal. With an effort Gersen brought himself back to the business at hand. How easy to be seduced by richness, elegance, exquisite food, the golden light of chandeliers! He asked, "If Viole Falushe is not to be found here, where do you propose to look?" "I have no set scheme," Navarth explained. "We must move as the mood takes us. Do not forget that Viole Falushe long ago regarded me as an exemplar. Is it not reasonable to suppose that his program will merge with our own?" "Reasonable indeed." "We will test the theory." They lingered over coffee, trifles of fragrant pastry, quartergills of krystallek. Then Gersen paid the dinner check, well over Hotel Prince Franz Ludwig. "Now where?" asked Gersen. Navarth ruminated. "We are somewhat early. Still, at Mikmak's Cabaret there is always arnusement of one kind or another, if only in watching the good burghers at their decorous case." Trom Mikmak's Cabaret, they  moved to Paru's, on to Der Fliegende Hollander, thence to the Blue Pearl. Each new tavern and cabaret seemed somewhat less genteel than the previous. From the Blue Pearl Navarth led the way to the Sunset Cafe on the Boulevard Castel Vivence in Ambeules, thereafter to a succession of waterfront dives, beer cellars and dance-halls. At Zadiel's All-World Rendezvous, Gersen interrupted one of Navarth 's dissertations. "Is if here that we can expect Viole Falushe?" "Where else but here?" demanded the mad poet, now somewhat drunk. "Where the heart of Earth beats the thickest blood! Thick, purple, smelling of must: like crocodile blood, the blood of dead lions. Never fear! You will see your man!... What was I discussing? My youth, my squandered youth! At one time I worked for Tellur Transit, investigating the contents of lost suitcases. Here, perhaps, I gained my deepest insight into the structure of the human soul." Gersen. sat back in his chair. In the present circumstances passive weariness was the optimum course. To his surprise he found himself slightly drunk, though he had attempted moderation. The colored lights, the musics, Navarth's wild talk were probably no less responsible than the alcohol. Zan Zu was as remote as ever. Looking sidelong at her, as he had tended to do all evening, Gersen wondered: what goes on in this umbral creature's mind? What does she hope from life? Does she daydream, does she yearn for a handsome lover, does she ache to travel, to visit the outworlds? From the ancient cathedral on Flamande Heights twelve reverberating strokes of the bass bell. "The hour is midnight," croaked Navarth. He rose swaying to his feet, looked from Gersen to the girl. "Now we proceed." "Where now?" asked Gersen. Navarth pointed across the street, to a long low pavilion with an eccentric roof and festoons of green lights. "I suggest the Celestial Harmony Cafe, the rendezvous of travelers, spacemen, offworld wanderers, wayward vagabonds such as ourselves." the Celestial Harmony ' Cafe they walked, Navarth declaiming upon the poor quality of life in present day Rolingshaven. "We are stagnant, slowly decaying! Where is our vitality? Drained to the outworlds! We have bled our life away! On Earth remain thesickly, the depraved, the cryptic thinkers, the sunset wanderers on the mudflats, the paranoids and involutes, the great epicures, the timid dreamers, the medievalists!" "You have traveled the Oikumene?" Gersen inquired. "Never has my foot lost contact with the soil of Earth!" "In which of the categories, then, are you included?" Navarth waved his arms on high. "Have I not inveighed against categories? Here is the Celestial Harmony Cafe. We arrive at the peak of the evening!" They entered, threaded their way to a table, and Navarth instantly ordered magnum of champagne. The cafe was crowded; voices, clatter, and shuffle competed with boisterous jigs played by an orchestra of fife, concertina, euphonium and banjo, while the clientele danced, cavorted, kicked and pranced after the modes familiar to them. A long bar on a level somewhat higher than the main floor ran the width of the building. Men standing at the railing were silhouetted against the orange and green lights of the bar. At the tables of the main floor sat men and women of every age, race, social condition and degree of sobriety. Most wore European garments, but not a few displayed the costumes of other regions and other worlds. Hostesses formal and self-appointed roved here and there, soliciting drinks, dispensing ribald repartee, arranging assignations. The musicians presently took up other instruments: a baritone lute, viola, flute and tymponet, with which they accompanied a troupe of tumblers. Navarth drank champagne with indefatigable zest. Zan Zu from Eridu looked this way and that, whether from interest, uneasiness or a sense of suffocation Gersen could not be sure. Her knuckles were white where she held the goblet. She turned her head suddenly, met his gaze; her lips quivered in the faintest possible ghost of a smile. Or an embarrassed grimace... She raised the goblet, sipped her champagne. Navarth's gaiety was at its height. He sang to the music, tapped the table with his fingers, reached to embrace the hostesses, who sidestepped with an air of boredom. As if struck by a new thought he turned to consider Zan Zu, then inspected Gersen, as if puzzled why Gersen were not more enterprising. Gersen could not resist another glance at Zan Zu, and whether through wine, the colored lights, the ambiance of the evening, the guttersnipe tossing pebbles from a dock was gone. Gersen stared at her. The transformation was astonishing. She was magic, a creature of entrancing intensity. XT avarth was watching, gaiety  suddenly abandoned. Gersen turned, Navarth looked quickly away. What am I up to? Gersen wondered. What is Navarth up to? Reluctantly Gersen rejected the concepts which had surged up into his mind. He settled back into his chair. Zan Zu, the girl from Eridu, looked somberly down at her goblet. With relief? Sadness? Boredom? Gersen was at a loss to decide. The ways of the girl's mind seemed important indeed. What was he getting into, he asked himself with a pang of bitter anger. He glared at Navarth, who met his gaze blandly. Zan Zu sipped her champagne. Navarth intoned: "The Vine of Life grows a single melon. The color of the heart is unknown until the rind is split." Gersen looked out across the tables. Navarth filled his goblet; Gersen drank. Navarth was right. For a gain so wild, so delicious, so magic, there must be an initial abandon, a burning of bridges. What of Viole Falushe? What of his basic momentum? And as if in response to the thought Navarth seized his arm. "He has just come in." Gersen roused himself from his brooding. "Where?" "There. At the bar." Gersen scanned the line of men who stood along the railing. Their silhouettes were nearly identical. Some looked this way, some that; some held mugs or flasks; others leaned with elbows on the railing. "Which is Viole Falushe?" "See the man who watches the girl? He can see no one else. He is fascinated." Gersen searched along the line of men. None seemed to be paying any great attention. Navarth whispered in a husky voice : "She knows! She is even more aware than I!" Gersen glanced at the girl, who seemed uneasy; her fingers fumbled with the stem of the goblet. As he watched, she glanced across the room at one of the dark shapes. How she had divined the attention was beyond Gersen's comprehension. A waiter approached the girl, spoke into her ear: Gersen could not hear what was said. Zan Zu looked down at the champagne goblet, twisted the stem between her fingers. She came to some decision and putting her hands on the table rose to her feet. Gersen felt a surge of passion. Ignoble to sit quietly, to allow this to happen! He had been affronted. He was being pillaged of something which, while it had never belonged to him, nevertheless was his own. With a spasm of terror he wondered if it were too late. He lurched forward. He put his arm around the girl's waist, drew her down upon his lap. She turned him an astounded glance, like one suddenly waking from sleep. "Why did you do that." "I don't want you to go." "Why not?" Gersen could not bring himself to speak. Zan Zu sat passively, if somewhat primly. Gersen noticed that there were tears in her eyes, that her cheeks were wet. Gersen kissed her cheek; Navarth gave vent to a mad cacchinnation. "Never, never does it end!" Gersen put Zan Zu back on her chair, but held his hand over hers. "What never will end?" he asked in an even voice. "I too have loved. But what of that? The time for love is past. Now there will be trouble, of course. Do you not understand the sensitivity of Viole Falushe? He is as strange and delicate as a fern frond. He cannot bear deprivation; it sets his teeth on edge and makes him ill." "This did not occur to me." "You have acted altogether wrongly," scolded Navarth. "His thoughts were totally for the girl. You need only have followed her, and there would have been Viole Falushe." "Yes," muttered Gersen. "True. True. I now understand that." He glowered at the wine goblet, then back at the line of silhouettes. Someone was watching; he could sense the attention. There was trouble on the way. He was not in optimum condition, he had not trained in weeks. Additionally he was halfdrunk. A man walking past seemed to slip. He reeled into the table, upset wine into Gersen's lap. He looked into Gersen's face with eyes the color of bone. "Did you trip me, you sneak? I've a mind to spank you like a child." Gersen studied the man. He had a slab-sided face, closecropped yellow hair, a short neck as wide as his head. His body was stocky and muscular, the body of a man who spent much of his life on one of the heavy planets. "I don't believe I tripped you," said Gersen. But sit down. Join us for a glass of wine. Ask your friend to join us, as well." The white-eyed man paused to consider a moment. He came to a decision. "I demand an apology!" C tertainly," said Gersen. "It was on the tip of my tongue. If in any way I am responsible for causing you inconvenience, I am sorry." "This is not enough! I despise foul baboons like yourself who insult one, then think to smirk themselves free of the consequences." "This is your privilege," said Gersen. "Despise whom you like. But why not bring your friend over to join us? We could find much to talk about. You are from which world?" He raised his glass to drink. The white-eyed man struck down the glass. "I insist that you leave the premises. You have offended me sufficiently." Gersen looked across the white-eyed man's shoulder. "Your friend comes, in spite of your asinine braying." The white-eyed man turned to look; Gersen kicked at his knee, hacked at the bulwark of a neck. Seizing one of the man's arms. Gersen heaved and sent him spinning across the dance floor. The w'hite-eyed man bounced erect without effort and came back in a running crouch. Gersen pushed a chair into his face; the whiteeyed man swept it aside, while Gersen struck him in the stomach. This was ribbed with muscle and hard as oak. The whiteeyed man hunched his shoullers, jumped for Gersen, but four bouncers had appeared. Two propelled Gersen to the rear entrance and ejected him; two more escorted the white-eyed man to the front entrance. Gersen stood disconsolately in the street. The entire evening was a botchery. What had got into him? The white-eyed man might well be circling the building to find him. Gersen stepped back into the shadows. After a moment he started cautiously around to the front. At the corner waited the white-eyed man. "Dog's meat. You kicked me, you struck me. It is my turn." "Best that you go your way," said Gersen in a mild voice. "I am a dangerous man." "What do you think of me?" The white-eyed man approached; Gersen backed away, in no mood for rough-housing. He carried weapons, but on Earth killing was not taken lightly. The white-eyed man sidled forward. Gersen's heel came in contact with a bucket. He picked it up, slung it into the whiteeyed man's face and was quickly around the corner. The whiteeyed man came after him. Gersen held out his hand to display his proiac. "See this? I can kill you." The white-eyed man stood back, teeth glinting in a show of absolute contempt. ersen went to the front of the Celestial Harmony Cafe, the white-eyed man following at a distance of thirty feet. The table was vacant. Navarth and Zan Zu were gone. The lounging figure at the railing? Lost among the others. The white-eyed man waited beside the building. Gersen reflected a moment. Then slowly, as if in a reverie, he moved off down the boulevard and turned into a dark side street. He waited. A minute passed. Gersen slid twenty feet farther along to a more favorable position, all the time watching the gap where street met boulevard. But no one passed in front, no one came to investigate. Gersen waited ten minutes, watching both ways, presently craning his neck to peer up, on the chance that his enemy was coming over the roofs. At last he returned to the boulevard. The botchery was complete. The white-eyed man, the most immediate link with Viole Falushe, had not bothered to pursue Gersen's acquaintance. Seething with frustration, Gersen rode out Boulevard Castel Vivence to the Fitlingasse. The tug had departed; the houseboat, once more sound of hull, rode dark and silent on the water. Gersen alighted from the cab, went out on the dock. Silence. Lights from Dourrai glinted on the estuary. Gersen shook his head in mournful amusement. What more could be expected from an evening with a mad poet and a girl from Eridu? He returned to the cab and was conveyed to the Rembrandt Hotel. His quest had begun badly... but he had all the time in the world.      Every man on Mars was a hero -- but some heroes were more brave and daring than others! I nly sheer ruthlessness could have taken him out of town alive. The mob behind Carter hadn't tried to guard the Marsbuggies, since Carter would have needed too much time to take a buggy through the vehicular airlock. They could have caught him there, and they knew it. Some were guarding the personnel lock, hoping he'd try for that. He might have; for if he could have closed the one door in their faces and opened the next, the safeties would have protected him while he went through the third and fourth to the outside. On the Marsbuggy he was trapped in the bubble. There was room to drive around in. Less than half the prefab houses had been erected so far. The rest of the bubbletown's floor was flat, fused sand, empty but for scattered piles of foam-plastic walls and ceilings and floors. But they'd get him eventually. Already they were starting up another buggy. They never expected him to run his vehicle through the bubble wall. The Marsbuggy tilted, then righted itself. A blast of breathing air roared out around him, picked up a cloud of fine sand and hurled it explosively away into the thin, poisoned atmosphere. Carter grinned as he looked behind him. They would die now, all of them. He was the only one wearing a pressure suit. In an hour he could come back and repair the rip in the bubble. He'd have to dream up a fancy story to tell when the next ship came... Carter frowned. What were they -- At least ten wind-harried men were wrestling with the wall of a prefab house. As Carter watched, they picked the wall up off the fused sand, balanced it almost upright and let go. The foam-plastic wall rose into the wind and slapped hard against the bubble, over the tenfoot ' rip. Carter stopped his buggy to see what would happen. Nobody was dead. The air was not shrieking away but leaking away. Slowly, methodically, a line of men climbed into their suits and filed through the personnel lock to repair the bubble. A buggy entered the vehicular lock. The third and last was starting to life. Carter turned his buggy and was off. Top speed for a Marsbuggy is about twenty-five miles per hour. The buggy rides on three wide balloon-tired wheels, each mounted at the end of a five foot arm. What those wheel's can't go over, the buggy can generally hop over on the compressed air jet mounted underneath. The motor and the compressor are both powered by a Litton battery holding a tenth as much energy as the original Hiroshima bomb. Carter had been careful, as careful as he had had time for. He was carrying a full load of oxygen, twelve four-hour tanks in the air bin behind him, and an extra tank rested against his knees. His batteries were nearly full; he would be out of air long before his power ran low. When the other buggies gave up he could circle round and return to the bubble in the time his extra tank would give him. His own buggy and the two behind him were the only such vehicles on Mars. At twentyfive miles per hour he fled, and at twenty-five miles per hour they followed. The closest was half a mile behind. Carter turned on his radio. He found the middle of a conversation. " -- Can't afford it. One of you will have to come back. We could lose two of the buggies, but not all three." That was Shute, the bubbletown's research director and sole military man. The next voice, deep and sarcastic, belonged to Rufus Doolittle, the biochemist. "What'll we do, flip a coin?" "Let me go," the third voice said tightly. "I've got a stake in this." Carter felt apprehension touch the nape of his neck. "Okay, Alf. Good luck," said Rufus. "Good hunting," he added maliciously, as if knew Carter was listening. "You concentrate on getting the bubble fixed. I'll see that Carter doesn't come back." Behind Carter, the rearmost buggy swung in a wide loop toward town. The other came on. And it was driven by the linguist, Alf Harness. A  ost of the bubble's dozen'--men were busy repairing the ten-foot rip with heaters and plastic sheeting. It would be a long job but an easy one, for by Shute's orders the bubble had been deflated. The transparent plastic had fallen in folds across the prefab houses, forming a series of interconnected tents. One could move about underneath with little difficulty. Lieutenant-Major Michael Shute watched the men at work and decided they had things xinder control. He walked away like a soldier on parade, stooping as little as possible as he moved beneath the dropping folds. He stopped and watched Gondot operating the airmaker. Gondot noticed him and spoke without looking up. "Mayor, why'd you let Alf chase Carter alone?" Shute accepted his nickname. "We couldn't lose both tractors." "Why not just post them on guard duty for two days?" "And what if Carter got through the guard? He must be determined to wreck the dome. He'd catch us with our pants down. Even if some of us got into suits, could we stand another rip in the bubble?" Gondot reached to scratch his short beard. His fingertips rapped helmet plastic, and he looked annoyed. "Maybe not. I can fill the bubble anytime you're ready, but then the airmaker'll be empty. We'll be almost out of tanked air by the time they finish mending that rip. Another'll finish us." Shute nodded and turned away. All the air anyone could use -- tons of nitrogen and oxygen -- were right outside; but they were in the form of nitric oxide gas. The airmaker could convert it three times as fast as men could use it. But if Carter tore the dome again, that would be too slow. But Carter wouldn't. Alf would see to that. The emergency was over -- this time. And so Lieutenant-Major Shute could go back to worrying about the emergency's underlying causes. His report on those causes had been finished a month ago. He had reread it several times since, and always it had seemed complete and to the point. Yet he had the feeling it could be written better. He ought to make it as effective as possible. What he had to say could only be said once, and then his career would be over and his voice silenced. Cousins had sold some fiction once, writing as a hobby. Perhaps he would help. But Shute was reluctant to involve anyone else in what amounted to his own rebellion. Yet -- he'd have to rewrite that report now, or at least add to it. Lew Harness was dead, murdered. John Carter would be dead within two days. All Shute's responsibility. All pertinent. The decision wasn't urgent. It would be a month before Earth was in reach of the bubbletown's sending station. A T ost of the asteroids spend most of their time between Mars and Jupiter, but it often happens that one of them crosses a panet where theretofore it had crossed only an orbit. There are asteroid craters all over Mars -- old eroded ones, sharp new ones, big ones, little ones, ragged and smooth ones. The bubbletown was at the center of a large, fairly recent crater four miles across : an enormous, poorly cast ash tray discarded on the reddish sand. The buggies ran over cracked glass, avoiding the occasional tilted blocks, running uphill toward the broken rim. A sky the color of blood surrounded a tiny, zenith. Inevitably Alf was getting closer. When they crossed the rim and started downhill they would pull apart. It was going to be a long chase. Now was the time for regrets, if there ever was such a time. But Carter wasn't the type, and he had nothing to be ashamed of anyway. Lew Harness had to die; had as much as asked to die. Carter was only puzzled that his death should have been provoked so violent a reaction. Could they all be -- the way Lew had been? Unlikely. If he'd stayed and explained -- They'd have torn him apart. Those vulpine faces, with the distended nostrils and the bared teeth! And now he was being chased by one man. But that man was Lew's brother. Here was the rim, and Alf was still well behind. Carter slowed as he went over, knowing that the way down would be rougher. He was just going over the edge when a rock ten yards away exploded in white fire. Alf had a flare pistol. Carter just stopped himself from scrambling out of the buggy to hide in the rocks. The buggy lurched downward, and -- like it or not -- Carter had to forget his terror to keep the vehicle upright. The rubble around the crater's rim slowed him still further. Carter angled the buggy for the nearest rise of sloping sand. As he reached it, Alf came over the rim, a quarter mile behind. His silhouette hesitated there against the bloody sky, and another flare exploded, blindingly bright and terrifyingly close. Then Carter was on the straightaway, rolling down sliping sand to a flat horizon. The radio said, "Gonna be a long one. Jack." Carter pushed to transmit. "Right. How many flares do you have left?" "Don't worry about it." "I won't. Not the way you're throwing them away." Alf didn't answer. Carter left the radio band open, knowing that ultimately Alf must talk to the man he needed to kill. The crater which was home dropped behind and was gone. Endless flat desert rose before the buggies, flowed under the oversized wheels and dropped behind. Gentle crescent dunes patterned the sand, but they were no barrier to a buggy. Once there was a Martian well. It stood all alone on the sand, a weathered cylindrical wall seven feet high and ten in circumference, made of cut diamond blocks. The wells and the slanting script written deep into their 'dedication blocks' were responsible for the town's presence on Mars. Since the only Martian ever found -- a mummy centuries dead, at least -- had exploded at the first contact with water, it was generally assumed that the wells were crematoriums. But it wasn't certain. Nothing was certain about Mars. "Tie radio maintained an eery silence. Hours rolled past; the sun slid toward the deep red horizon, and still Alf did not speak. It was as if Alf had said everything there was to say to Jack Carter., And that was wrong! Alf should have felt the need to justify himself! It was Carter who sighed and gave up. "You can't catch me, Alf." "No, but I can stay behind you as long as I need to." "You can stay behind me just twenty-four hours. You've got forty-eight hours of air. I don't believe you'll kill yourself just to kill me." "Don't count on it. But I won't need to. Noon tomorrow, you'll be chasing me. You need to breathe, just like I do." "Watch this," said Carter. The O-tank resting against his knee was empty. He tipped it over the side and watched it roll away. "I have an extra tank," he said. He smiled in relief at his release from that damning weight. "I can live four hours longer than you can. Want to turn back?" "No." "He's not worth it, Alf. Your brother was nothing but a queer." "Does that mean he's got to die?"' "It does if the son of a bitch propositions me. Maybe you're a little that way yourself?" "No. And Lew wasn't queer till he came here. They should have sent men and women." "Amen." "You know, lots of people get a little sick to their stomachs about homosexuals. I do myself, and it hurt to see it happening to Lew. But there's only one type who goes looking for 'em so he can beat up on 'em." Carter frowned. "Latents. Guys who think they might turn queer themselves if you gave 'em the opportunity. They can't stand queers around because queers are temptation." "You're just returning the compliment." "Maybe." "Anyway, the town has enough problems without things like that going on. This whole project could have been wrecked by someone like your brother." "How bad do we need killers?" "Pretty badly, this time." S uddenly Carter knew that he was now his own defense attorney. If he could convince Alf that he shouldn't be executed, he could convince the rest of them. If he couldn't -- then he must destroy the bubble or die. He went on, talking as persuasively as he knew how. "You see, Alf, the town has two purposes. One is to find out if we can live in an environment as hostile as this one. The other is to contact the Martians. Now there are just fifteen of us in town -- " "Twelve. Thirteen when I get back." "Fourteen if we both do. Okay? Each of us is more or less necessary to the functioning of the town. But I'm needed in both fields. I'm the ecologist, Alf. I not only have to keep the town from dying from some sort of imbalance, I also have to figure out how the Martians live, what they live on, how Martian life forms depend on each other. You see?" "Sure. How 'bout Lew? Was he necessary?" "We can get along without him. He was the radio man. At least a couple of us have enough training to take over communications." "You make me so happy. Doesn't the same go for you?" Carter thought hard and fast. Yes, Gondot in particular could keep the town's life-support system going with little help. But -- "Not with the Martian ecology. There isn't -- " "There isn't any Martian ecologyJack, has anyone ever found any life on Mars besides that man-shaped mummy? You can't be an ecologist without there being something to make deductions from. You've got nothing to investigate. So what good are you?" Carter kept talking. He was still arguing as the sun dropped into the sea of sand and darkness closed down with a snap. But he knew now it was of no use. Alf's mind was closed. II T)y sunset the bubble was taut,   and the tortured scream of incoming breathing-air had dropped to a tired sigh. LieutenantMajor Shute unfastened the clamps at his shoulders and lifted his helmet, ready to jam it dovn fast if the air was too thin. It wasn't. He set the helmet down and signalled thumbs-up to the men watching him. Ritual. Those dozen men had known the air would be safe. But rituals had grown fast where men worked in space, and the most rigid was that the man in charge fastened his helmet last and unfastened it first. Now suits were being removed. Men moved about their duties. Some moved toward the kitchen to clean up the vacuum-induced havoc so Hurley could get dinner. Shute stopped Lee Cousins as he went by. "Lee, could I see you a minute?" "Sure, Mayor." Shute was "the Mayor" to all bubbletown. "I want your help as a writer," said Shute. "I'm going to send in quite a controversial report when we get within range of Earth, and I'd like you to help me make it convincing." "Fine. Let's see it." The ten streetlamps came on, dispelling the darkness which had fallen so suddenly. Shute led the way to his prefab bungalow, unlocked the safe and handed Cousins the manuscript. Cousins hefted it. "Big," he said. "Might pay to cut it." "By all means if you find anything unnecessary." "I'll bet I can," Cousins grinned. He dropped on the bed and began to read. Ten minutes later he asked, "Just what IS the incidence of homosexuality in the Navy?" "I haven't the faintest idea." "Then it's not powerful evidence. You might quote a limerick to show that the problem's proverbial. I know a few." "Good." A little later Cousins said, "A lot of schools in England are coeducational. More every year." "I know. But the present problem is among men who graduated from boys' schools when they were much younger." "Make that clearer. Incidentally was your school coeducational?" "No." "Any queers?" "A few. At least one in every class. The seniors used to use paddles on the ones they suspected." "Did it help?" "No. Of course not." "Okay. You've got two sets of circumstances under which a high rate of homosexuality occurs. In both cases you've got three conditions : a reasonable amount of leisure, no women, and a disciplinary pecking order. You need a third example." "I couldn't think of one." "The Nazi organization." "Oh?" "I'll give you details." Cousins went on reading. He finished the report and put it aside. "This'll cause merry hell," he said. "I know." Ct'The worst thing about it is your threat to give the whole thing to the newspapers. If I were you I'd leave that part of it out." "If you were me you wouldn't," said Shute. "Everyone who had knew they were risking everything that's happened. They preferred to let us take that risk rather than risk public opinion themselves. There are hundreds of Decency Leagues in the United States. Maybe thousands, I don't know. But they'd all come down on the government like Ill harpies if anyone tried to send a mixed crew to Mars or anywhere else in space. The only way I can make the government act is to give them a greater threat." "You win. This is a greater threat." "Did you find anything else to cut out?" "Oh, hell yes. I'll go through this again with a red pencil. You talk too much, you use too many words that are too long and you generalize. You'll have to give details, or it'll lose its impact." "I'll be ruining some reputations." "Can't be helped. We've got to have women on Mars -- and right now. Rufe and Timmy are building up to a real spitting fight. Rufe thinks he caused Lew's death by leaving him, and Timmy keeps taunting him with it." "All right," said Shute He stood up. He had been sitting erect throughout the discussion, as if sitting at attention. "Are the buggies still within radio range?" "They can't hear us, but we can hear them. Timmy still is keeping busy working the buggy's radio." "Good. I'll keep him on it until they go out of range. "Shall we get dinner?" T)hobos rose where the sun had set, a scattering of moving dots of light, like a crescent of dim stars. It grew brighter as it rose: a new moon becoming a half moon in hours. Then it was too high to look at. Carter had to keep his eyes on the triangle of desert lit by his headlights. The headlight beams were the color of earthly sunlight, but to Carter's Mars-adapted eyes they turned everything blue. He had chosen his course well. The desert ahead was flat for more than seven hundred miles. There would be no low hills rising suddenly before him to trap him into jet-jumping in faint moonlight or waiting for Alf to come down on him. Alf's turnover point would come at high noon tomorrow, and then Carter would have won. For Alf would turn back toward the bubble, and Carter would go on into the desert. When Alf was safely over the horizon, Carter would turn left or right, go on for an hour, and then follow a course parallel to Alf's. He would be in sight of the bubble an hour later than Alf, with three hours in which to plan. Then would come the hardest part. Certainly there would be someone on guard. Carter would have to charge past the guard -- who might be armed with a flare pistol -- tear the bubble open and somehow confiscate the supply of O-tanks. Ripping the bubble open would probably kill everyone inside, but there would be men in suits outside. He would have to load some of the Oranks on his buggy and open the stopcocks of the rest, all before anyone reached him. What bothered him was the idea of charging a flare pistol. But perhaps he could just aim the buggy and jump out. He would have to see. His eyelids were getting heavy, and his hands were cramped. But he dared not slow down, and he dared not sleep. Several times he had thought of smashing the come-hither in his suit radio. With that thing constantly beeping, Alf could find him anytime he pleased. But Alf could find him anyway. His headlights were always behind, never catching up, never dropping away. If he ever got out of Alf's sight, that comehither would have to go. But there was no point in letting Alf know that. Not yet. Stars dropped into the black western horizon. Phobos rose again, brighter this time, and again became too high to watch. Diemos now showed above the steady shine of Alf's headlights. Quddenly it was day, and here  and there were thin black shadows pointing to a yellow horizon. Stars still glowed in a red-black sky. There was a crater ahead, a glass dish set in the desert, not too big to circle around. Carter angled left. The buggy behind him also angled, if he kept turning like this, Alf couldn't help but gain on him. Carter sucked water and nutrient solution from the nipples in his helmet and concentrated on steering. His eyes felt gritty, and his mouth belonged to a Martian mummy. "Morning," said Alf. "Morning. Get plenty of sleep?" "Not enough. I only slept about six hours, in snatches. I kept worrying you'd turn off and lose me." For a moment Carter went hot and cold. Then he knew that Alf was needling him. He'd no more slept than Carter had. "Look to your right," said Alf. To their right was the crater wall. And -- Carter looked again to be sure -- there was a silhouette on the rim, a man-shaped shadow against the red sky. With one hand it balanced something tall and thin. "A Martian," Carter said softly. Without thinking he turned his buggy to climb the wall. Two flares exploded in front of him, a second apart, and fae frantically jammed the tiller bar hard left. "God damn it, Alf! That was a Martian! We've got to go after it!" The silhouette was gone. No doubt the Martian had run for its life when it saw the flares. Alf said nothing. Nothing at all. And Carter rode on, past the crater, with a murderous fury building in him. I t was eleven o'clock. The tips of a range of hills were pushing above the western horizon. "I'm just curious," Alf said, "but what would you have said to that Martian?" Carter's voice was tight and bitter. "Does it matter?" "Yah. The best you could have done was scare him. When we get in touch with the Martians, we'll do it just the way we planned." Carter ground his teeth. Even without the accident of Lew Harness' death, there was no telling how long the translation plan would take. It involved three s'teps: sending pictures of the writings on the crematory wells and other artifacts to Earth, so that computers could translate the language; writing messages in that language to leave near the wells where Martians would find them; and then waiting for the Martians to make a move. But there was no reason to believe that the script on the wells wasn't from more than one language or from the same language as it had changed over thousand of years. There was no reason to assume the Martians would be interested in strange beings living in a glorified balloon, regardless of whether the invaders knew how to write. And could the Martians read their own ancestors' .script? An idea... "You're a linguist," said Carter. No answer. "Alf, we've talked about whether the town needed Lew, and we've talked about whether the town needs me. But how about you? "Without you we'd never get the wellscript translated." "I doubt that. The CalTech computers are doing most of the work, and anyhow I left notes. But so what?" "If you keep chasing me you'll force me to kill you. Can the town afford to lose you?" "You can't do it. But I'll make you a deal if you want. It's eleven now. Give me two of your O-tanks, and we'll go back to town. We'll stop two hours from town, leave your buggy, and you'll ride the rest of the way tied up in the air bin. Then you can stand trial." "You think they'll let me off?" "Not after the way you ripped the bubble open on your way out. That was a blunder, Jack." "Why don't you just take one tank?" If Alf did that, Carter would get back with two hours to spare. He knew, now, that he would have to wreck the bubble. He had no alternative. But Alf would be right behind him with the flare gun... "No deal. I wouldn't feel safe if I didn't know you'd run out of air two hours before we got back. You want me to feel safe, don't you?" It was better the other way. Let Alf turn back in an hour. Let Alf be in the bubble when Carter returned to tear it open. C Charter turned him down," said Timmy. He hunched over the radio, holding his earphones with both hands, listening with every nerve for voices which had almost faded away. "He's planning something," Gondot said uneasily. "Naturally," said Shute. "He wants to lose Alf, return to the bubble and wreck it. What other hope has he?" "But he'd die too," said Timmy. "Not necessarily. If he killed us all he could mend the new rip while he lived on the O-tanks we've got left. I think he could keep the bubble in good enough repair to keep one man alive." "My Lord! What can we do?" "Relax, Timmy. It's simple math." It was easy for Lieutenant-Major Shute to keep his voice light, and he didn't want Timmy to start a panic. "If Alf turns back at noon, Carter can't get here before noon tomorrow. At four he'll be out of air. We'll just keep everyone in suits for four hours." Privately he wondered if twelve men could repair even a small rip before they used up the bottled air. It would be one tank every twenty minutes... but perhaps they wouldn't be tested. "Five minutes of twelve," said Carter. "Turn back, Alf. You'll only get home with ten minutes to spare." The linguist chuckled. A quarter mile behind, the blue dot of his buggy didn't move. "You can't fight mathematics, Alf. Turn back." "Too late." "In five minutes it will be." "I started this trip short an O-tank. I should have turned two hours ago." Carter had to wet his lips from the water nipple before he answered. "You're lying. Will you stop bugging me? Stop it!" Alf laughed. "Watch me turn back." i His buggy came on quickly. ; It was noon, and the chase would not end. At twenty-five miles per, two Marsbuggies a quarter of a mile apart moved serenely through an orange desert. Chemical stains of green rose ahead and fell behind. Crescent dunes drifted by, as regular as waves on an ocean. The ghostly path of a meteorite touched the northern horizon in a momentary white flash. The hills were higher now, humps of smooth rock-like animals sleeping beyond the horizon. The sun burned small and bright in a sky reddened by nitric oxide and, near the horizon, blackened by its thinness to the color of bloody India ink. Had the chase really started at noon? Exactly noon? But it was twelve thirty now, and he was sure that was too late. Alf had doomed himself -- to doom Carter. But he wouldn't. "Great minds think alike," he told the radio. "Really?" Alf's tone said he couldn't have cared less. "You took an extra tank." "No I didn't. Jack." "You must have. If there's one thing I'm sure of in life, it's that you are not the type to kill yourself. All right, Alf, I quit. Let's go back.' ' "Let's not." "We'd have three hours to chase that Martian." A flare exploded behind his buggy. Carter sighed raggedly. At two o'clock both buggies would turn back to bubbletown, where Carter would probably be executed. But suppose I turn back now? That's easy. Alf will shoot me with the flare un. He might miss. If I let him choose my course. I'll die for certain. Carter sweated and cursed himself, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't deliberately turn into Alf's gun. At two o'clock the base of the range came over the horizon. The hills were incredibly clear, almost as clear as they would have been on the Moon. But they were horribly weathered, and the sea of sand lapped around them as if eager to finish them off, to drag them down. Carter rode with his eyes turned behind. His watch hands moved on, minute to minute, and Carter watched in disbelief as Alf's vehicle continued to follow. As the time approached and reached two thirty. Carter's disbelief faded. It didn't matter, now, how much oxygen Alf had. They had passed Carter's turnover point. "You've killed me," he said. No answer. "I killed Lew in a fistfight. What you've done to me is much torture. You're a demon, Alf." "Fistfight my aunt's purple asterisk. You hit Lew in the throat and watched him drown in his own blood. Don't tell me you didn't know what you were doing. Everybody in town knows you know karate." "He died in minutes. I'll need a whole day!" "You don't like that? Turn around and rush my gun. It's right here waiting." We could get back to the crater in time to search for that' Martian. That's why I came to Mars. To learn what's here. So did you, Alf. Come on, let's turn back." "You first." But he couldn't. He couldn't. Karate can defeat any hand-tohand weapon but a quarterstaff, and Carter had quarterstaff training too. But he couldn't charge a flare gun! Not even if Alf meant to turn back. And Alf didn't. IV  faint whine vibrated through the bubble. The sandstorm was at the height of its fury, which made it about as dangerous as an enraged caterpillar. At worst it was an annoyance. The shrill, barely audible whine could get on one's nerves, and the darkness made street lamps necessary. Tomorrow the bubble would be covered a tenth of an inch deep in fine. Moon-dry silt. Inside the bubble it would be darker than night until someone blew the silt away with an O-tank. To Shute the storm was depressing. Here on Mars was Lieutenant-Major Shute, Boy Hero, facing terrifying dangers on the frontiers of human exploration! A sandstorm that wouldn't have harmed an infant. Nobody here faced a single danger that he had not brought with him. Would it be like this forever? Men traveling enormous distances to face themselves? There had been little work done since noon today. Shute had given up on that. On a stack of walls sat Timmy, practically surrounding the buggypickup radio, surrounded in turn by the bubble's population. Timmy stood up as Shute approached the group. "They're gone," he announced, sounding very tired. He turned off the radio. The men looked at each other, and some got to their feet. "Tim! How'd you lose them?" Timmy noticed him. "They're too far away, Mayor." "They never turned around?" "They never did. They just kept going out into the desert. Alf must have gone insane. Carter's not worth dying for." Shute thought -- But he was once. Carter had been one of the best: tough, fearless, bright, enthusiastic. Shute had watched him deteriorate imder the boredom and the close quarters aboard ship. He had seemed to recover when they reached Mars, when all of them suddenly had work to do. Then, yesterday morning -- murder. Alf. It was hard to lose Alf. Lew had been little loss, but Alf -- Cousins dropped into step beside him. "I've got that redpencil work done." "Thanks, Lee. I'll have to do it all over now." "Don't do it over. Write an addendum. Show how and why three men died. Then you can say, T told you so.' " "You think so?" "My professional judgment. When's the funeral?" "Day after tomorrow. That's Sunday. I thought it would be appropriate." "You can say all three services at once. Good timing." To all bubbletown. Jack Carter and Alf Harness were. dead. But they still breathed -- 'he mountains came toward them: the only fixed points in an ocean of sand. Alf was closer now, something less than four hundred yards behind. At five o'clock. Carter reached the base of the mountains. They were too high to go over on the air jet. He could see spots where he might have landed the buggy while the pump filled the jet tank for another hop. But for what ? Better to wait for Alf. Suddenly Carter knew that that was the one thing in the world Alf wanted. To roll up alongside in his buggy. To watch Carter's face until he was sure Carter knew exactly what was to come. And then to blast Carter down in flames from ten feet away and watch while a bright magnesium-oxidizer flare burned through his suit and skin and vitals. The hills were low and shallow. Even from yards away he might have been looking at the smooth flank of a sleeping beast -- except that this beast was not breathing. Carter took a deep breath, noticing how stale the air had become despite the purifier unit, and turned on the compressed air jet. The air of Mars is terribly thin, but it can be compressed; and a rocket will work anywhere, even a compressed-air rocket. Carter went up, leaning as far back in the cabin as he could to compensate for the loss of weight in the O-tanks behind him, to put as little work as possible on gyroscopes that were meant to spin only in emergencies. He rose fast, and he tilted the buggy to send it skating along the thirty-degree slope of the hill. There were flat places along the slope, but not many. He should reach the first one easily... A flare exploded in his eyes. Carter clenched his teeth and fought the urge to look behind. He tilted the buggy backward to slow himself down. The jet pressure was dropping. He came down like a feather two hundred feet above the desert. When he turned off the jet, he could hear the gyros whining. He turned the stablizer off and let it run down. Now there was only the chugging of the compressor, vibrating through his suit. Alf was out of his buggy, standing at the base of the mountains, looking up. "Come on," said Carter. "What are you waiting for?" "Go on over if you want to." "What's the matter? Are your gyros fouled?" "Your brain is fouled. Carter. Go on over." Alf raised one arm holding it out stiffly. The hand showed flame, and Carter ducked instinctively. The compressor had almost stopped, which meant the tank was nearly full. But Carter would be a fool to take off, before it was completely full. You got the greatest acceleration from an air jet during the first seconds of fhght. The rest of the flight you got just enough pressure to keep you going. But -- Alf was getting into his buggy. Now the buggy was rising. barter turned on his jet and went up. He came down hard, three hundred feet high, and only then dared to look down. He heard Alf's nasty laugh, and he saw that Alf was still at the foot of the mountains. It had been a bluff! But why wasn't Alf coming after him? The third hop took him to the top. The first downhill hop was the first he'd ever made, and it almost killed him. He had to do his decelerating on the last remnants of pressure in the jet tank! He waited until his hands stopped shaking, then continued the rest of the way on the wheels. There was no sign of Alf as he reached the foot of the range and started out into the desert. Already the sun was about to go. Faint bluish stars in a redblack sky outlined the yellow hills behind him. Still no sign of Alf. Alf spoke in his ear, gently, almost kindly. "You'll just have to come back. Jack." "Don't hold your breath." "I'd rather not have to. That's why I'm telling you this. Look at your watch." It was about six thirty. "Did you look? Now count it up. I started with forty-four hours of fresh air. You started with fifty-two. That gave us ninety-six breathing hours between us. Together we've used up sixty-one hours. That leaves thirty-five between us. "Now, I stopped moving an hour ago. From where I am it's almost thirty hours back to base. Sometime in the next two and a half hours, you've got to get my air and stop me from breathing. Or I've got to do the same for you."  It made sense. Finally, everything made sense. "Alf, are you listening? Listen," said Carter and he opened his radio panel and, moving by touch, found a wire he'd located long ago. He jerked it loose. His radio crackled deafeningly, then stopped. "Did , you hear that, Alf? I just jerked my come-hither loose. Now you couldn't find me even if you wanted to." "I wouldn't have it any other way." Then Carter realized what he'd done. There was now no possibility of Alf finding him. After all the miles and hours of the chase, now it was Carter chasing Alf. All Alf had to do was wait. Darkness fell on the west. V garter went south, and he went " immediately. It would take him an hour or more to cross the range. He would have to leap-frog to the top with only his headlights to guide him. His motor would not take him uphill over such a slope. He could use the wheels going down, with luck, but he would have to do so in total darkness. Diemos would not have risen; Phobos was not bright enough to help. It had gone exactly as Alf had planned. Chase Carter to the range. If he attacks there, take his tanks and go home. If he chooses to cross, he may be killed. Take his tanks. If he makes it, show him why he has to come back. Time it so he has to come back in darkness. If by some miracle he makes it this time -- well, there's always the flare gun. Carter could give him only one surprise. He would cross six miles south of where he was expected and approach Alf's buggy from the southeast? Or was Alf expecting that too? It didn't matter. Carter was beyond free will. The first jump was like jumping blindfolded from a ship's airlock. He'd pointed the headlights straight down, and as he went up he watched the circle of light expand and dim. He angled east. First he wasn't moving at all. Then the slope slid toward him, far too fast. He back-angled. Nothing seemed to happen. The pressure under him died slowly, but it was dying, and the slope was a wavering blur surrounded by dark. It came up, clarifying fast. The landing jarred him from coccyx to cranium. He held himself rigid, waiting for the buggy to tumble end-for-end down the hill. But the buggy was tilted at a horrifying angle, it stayed. Carter sagged and buried his helmet in his arms. Two enormous hanging tears, swollen to pinballs in the low gravity, dropped onto his faceplate and spread. For the first time he rewhen a kick to the kneecap would have put him out of action and taught him a permanent, memorable lesson. Snatching the buggy instead of surrendering himself for trial. Driving through the bubble -- making every man on Mars his mortal enemy. Hanging around to watch what would happen -- when, perhaps, he could have run beyond the horizon before Alf came out the vehicular airlock. He clenched his fists and pressed them against his faceplate, remembering his attitude of mild interest as he sat watching Alf's buggy roll into the lock... Time to go. Carter readied himself for another jump. This one would be horrible. He'd be taking off with the buggy canted thirty degrees backward...  ait a minute. Thdre was something wrong with that picture of Alf's buggy as it rolled toward the lock surrounded by trotting men. Definitely something wrong there. But what? It would come to him. He gripped the jet throttle and readied his other hand to flip on the gyros the moment he was airborne. -- Alf had planned so carefully. How had he come away with one O-tank too few? And -- if he really had every thing planned -- how did Alf expect to get Carter's tanks if Carter clashed? Suppose Carter crashed his buggy against a hill, right now, on his second jump. How would Alf know? He wouldn't, not until nine o'clock came and Carter hadn't shown up. Then he'd know Carter had crashed somewhere. But it would be too late! Unless Alf had lied. That was it, that was what was wrong with his picture of Alf in the vehicular airlock. Put one O-tank in the air bin and it would stand out like a sore thumb. Fill the air bin and then remove one tank, and the hole in the hexagonal array would show like a full moon in a clear, black sky. There had been no such hole. Let Carter crash now, and Alf would know it with four hours in which to search for his buggy. Carter swung his headlights up to normal position, then moved the buggy backwards in a deadslow half circle. The buggy swayed but didn't topple. Now he could move down behind his headlights... VI NTiner oclock. If Carter were  wrong then he was dead now. Even now Alf might be unfastening his helmet, his eyes blank with the ultimate despair, still wondering where Carter had gotten to. But if he were right... Then Alf was nodding to himself, not smiling, merely confirming a guess. Now he was deciding whether to wait another five minutes on the chance that Carter was late, or to start searching now. Carter sat in his dark cabin at the foot of the black' mountains, his left hand clutching a wrench, his eyes rivited on the luminous needle of the direction finder. The wrench had been the heaviest in his tool box. He'd found nothing sharper than a screwdriver, and that wouldn't have penetrated suit fabric. The needle pointed straight toward Alf. , And it wasn't moving. Alf had decided to wait. How long would he wait? Carter caught himself whispering, not loudly. Move, idiot. You've got to sdarch both sides of the range. Both sides and the top. Move. Move! Ye gods! Had he shut off his radio? Yes, the switch was down. Move. The needle moved. It jerked once, infinitesimally, and he was quiet. It was quiet a long time -- seven or eight minutes. Then it jerked in the opposite direction. Alf was searching the wrong side of the hills! And then Carter saw the flaw in his own plan. Alf must now assume he was dead. And if he, Carter, was dead, then he wasn't using air. Alf had two hours extra, but he thought he had four! The needle twitched and moved -- a good distance. Carter sighed and closed his eyes. Alf was coming over. He had sensibly decided to search this side first; for if Carter was on this side, dead, then Alf would have to cross the range again to reach home. Twitch. Twitch. He must be at the top. Then the long, slow, steady movement down. Headlights. Very faint, to the north. Would Alf turn north? He turned south. Perfect. The headlights grew brighter... and Carter waited, with his buggy buried to the windshield in the sand at the base of the range. Alf still had the flare gun. Despite all his certainty that Carter was dead, he was probably riding with the gun in his hand. But he was using his headlights, and he was going slowly, perhaps fifteen miles per hour. He would pass... twenty yards west... barter gripped the wrench. Here he comes. There was light in his eyes. Don't see me. And then there #A wasn't. Carter swarmed out of the buggy and down the sloping sand. The headlights moved away, and Carter was after them, leaping as a moonie leaps, both feet pushing at once into the sand, a second spent in flying, legs straddled and feet reaching fonvard for the landing and another leap. One last enormous kangaroo jump -- and he was on the Otanks, falling on knees and forearms with feet lifted high so the metal wouldn't clang. One arm landed on nothing at all where empty O-tanks were missing. His body tried to roll off onto the sand. He wouldn't let it. The transparent bubble of Alf's helmet was before him. The head inside swept back and forth; sweeping the triangle created by the headlights. Carter crept forward. He poised himself over Alf's head, raised the wrench high and brought it down with all his strength. Cracks starred out in the plastic. Alf looked up with his eyes and mouth all wide open, his amazement unalloyed by rage or terror. Carter brought the weight down again. There were more cracks, longer cracks. Alf winced and -- finally -- brought up the flare gun. Carter's muscles froze for an instant as he looked into its hellish mouth. Then he struck for what he knew must be the last time. The wrench smashed through transparent plastic and scalp and skull. Carter knelt on the Otanks for a moment, looking at the unpleasant thing he'd done. Then he lifted the body out by the shoulders, tumbled it over the side and climbed into the cabin to stop the buggy. Tt took him a few minutes to find his own buggy where he'd buried it in the sand. It took longer to uncover it. That was all right. He had plenty of time. If he crossed the range by I # :#, he would reach bubbletown on the last of his air. There would be little room for finesse. On the other hand, he would be arriving an hour before dawn. They'd never see him. They would have stopped c.xpecting him, or Alf, at noon tomorrow -- even assuming they didn't know Alf had refused to turn back. The bubble would be empty of air before anyone could get into a suit. Later he could repair and fill the bubble. In a month Earth would hear of the disaster: how a meteorite had touched down at a corner of the dome, how John Carter had been outside at the time, the only man in a suit. They'd take him home, and he could spend the rest of his life trying to forget. He knew which tanks were his empties. Like every man in town, he had his own method of arranging them in the air bin. He dumped six and stopped. It was a shame to throw away empties. The tanks were too hard to replace. He didn't know Alf's scheme. He'd have to test Alf's empties individually. Already Alf had thrown some away. (To leave space for Carter's tanks?) One by one. Carter turned the valve of each tank. If it hissed, he put it in his own air bin. If it didn't, he dropped it. One of them hissed. Just one. Five O-tanks .He couldn't possibly make a thirty-hour trip on five O-tanks. Somewhere, Alf had left three O-tanks where he could find them again. Just on the off chance -- just in case something went terribly wrong for Alf and Carter captured his buggy. Carter still wouldn't go home alive. Alf must have left the tanks where he could find them easily. He must have left them near here; for he had never been out of Carter's sight until Carter crossed the range, and furthermore he'd kept just one tank to reach them. The tanks were nearby, and Carter had just two hours to find them. In fact, he realized, they must be on the other side of the range. Alf hadn't stopped anywhere on this side. But he could have left them on the hillside during his jumps to the top... In a sudden frenzy of hurry. Carter jumped into his buggy and took it up. The headlights shov his progress to the top. '"The first red rays of sunlight found Lee Cousins and Rufe Doolittle already outside the bubble. They were digging a grave. Cousins dug in stoic silence. In a mixture of pity and disgust he endured Rufe's constant compulsive flow of words. "... first man to be buried on another planet. Do you think Lew would have liked that? No, he'd hate it. He'd say it wasn't worth dying for. He wanted to go home. He would have, too, on the next ship..." The sand came up in loose, dry shovelfuls. Practice was needed to keep it on the shovel. It tried to flow like a viscous liquid.' "I tried to tell the Mayor he'd have liked a well burial. The Mayor wouldn't listen. He said the Martians might not -- Heyr Cousins' eyes jerked up, and the movement caught them -- a steadily moving fleck on the crater wall. Martian! was his first thought. What else could be moving out there? And then he saw that it was a buggy. To Lee Cousins it was like a corpse rising from its grave. The buggy moved like a blind thing down the tilted blocks of old glass, touched the drifted sand in the crater floor, all while he stood immobile. At the corner of his eye he saw Doolittle's shovel flying wide as Doolittle ran for the bubble. The buggy grazed the sand, then began reclimbing the crater. Cousins' paralysis left him, and he ran for the town's remaining buggy. The ghost was moving at half speed. He caught it a mile beyond the crater rim. Carter was in the cockpit. His helmet was in his lap clutched in a rigid death-grip. Cousins reported, "He must have aimed the buggy along his direction finder when he felt his air going. Give him credit," he added and lifted a shovelful from the second grave. "He did that much. He sent back the buggy." J ust after dawn a small biped form came afound a hill to the east. It walked directly to the sprawled body of Alf Harness, picked up a foot in both delicate-looking hands and began to tug the corpse across the sand, looking rather like an ant tugging a heavy breadcrumb. In the twenty minutes it needed to reach Alt's buggy the figure never stopped to rest. Dropping its prize, the Martian climbed the pile o empty Otanks and peered into the air bin, tlicn down at the body. But there was no way such a small, weak being could lift such a mass. The Martian seemed to remember something. It scrambled down the O-tanks and crawled under the buggy's belly. Minutes later it came out, dragging a length of nylon line. It tied each end of the line to one of Alf's ankles, then dropped the loop over the buggy's trailer attachment knob. For a time the figure stood motionless above Alf's broken helmet, contemplating its work. Alf's head might take a beating riding that way; but as a specimen Alf's head was useless. Wherever nitric oxide gas had touched moisture, red fuming nitric acid had formed. By now the rest of the body was dry and hard, fairly well preserved. The figure climbed into the buggy. A little fumbling, surprisingly little, and the buggy was rolling. Twenty yards away it stopped with a jerk. The Martian climbed out and walked back. It knelt beside the three O-tanks which had been tied beneath the buggy with the borrowed nylon line, and it opened the stopcocks of each in turn. It leapt back in horrid haste when the noxious gas began hissing out. Minutes later the buggy was moving south. The O-tanks hissed for a time, then were Three reasons why If is your best buy in SF! by J. T. McIntosh by Larry Niven by Gordon R. Dickson Plus many other stories and features... the biggest bargain in science fiction today! Don't miss the new If# on sale nowl The author calls this "the longest sf story ever written." Clever of us to get on a single page! Sear Itr #iau Vn afraia tout Idea-ls not at all original' Stories about writers vliose work # aiiaTS SlaBlSilssed before they can even oonplete It go back at least to B. a. ITeUa's  Antlolpator. About once a week X receive a ns beginningi Vm otnM imr Uaa M Wt n aU erlitoil. stirln atmt writan hos work la alwaya plastarlMfl tofort r ovaa ooapltte it e back ot Isest to So #e VoUa'ji Thg totietoator #bMt MO a vsok I jroeilTO a ca betfialie agwMk ton aia nilt w oMn aioAivioia bolero tbor ovoo tnottto  ge tosti ot least gtttop loot MSt t(MI Teui-s. Serrte r SeUsv, SaF Bottar luck next tiotel Yours Vorrla K Voblua. saiter '  Better luck next tine t Xours, Vorrls K. Hoblus, Bdltor The shell folk roamed around the galaxy in ships of steel. In fact, they were the ships! F?very diverted synapse in Hel' va's shell-encased body vibrated' in unconditional revolt against the autocracy of Central Worlds Service. "AU haste, all haste," she snarled in her impotent revolt to her sister ship, the # , on the private ship-to-ship band on which not even Cencom could eavesdrop. The Seld-Ilsa snorted unsympathetically. "You're doing something which is more than I can say in Mediatior Service; I've spent weeks and weeks on end waiting for them to make up their minds w'hich planetary crisis is most crucial. By the time we get there, critical mass has been reached, and we have a helluva mess to clean up." "You think MedServ doesn't procrastinate?" Helva retorted sharply. "Why Jennan and I... " and she stopped, startled to have been able to mention his name. lisa took advantage of the brief pause and grumbled on, oblivious to Helva's stunned silence. "You'd think they'd've briefed use better in training. When I think of the situations I've already encountered that were never even mentioned! Theory, procedure, technique, that's all we were handed. Not a single practical suggestion. Just garbage, garbage, trivial garbage. They don't need brain ships, they need computers!" The # ranted on. "Stupid, senseless, unemotional computers." TT elva spotted the fallacies in the #'s complaints, but remained quiet. She and lisa had been classmates, and she knew from past experience the voids in the other's personality. "I heard," the # said confidentially, "that your mission has to do with that blue block building in the hospital annex." Helva adjusted her right fin scanner, but the oblong structure was devoid of any unusual feature that would indicate its contents. "Have you heard when I'm supposed to hasten away from here again?" she asked lisa hopefully. "Can't talk now; here comes Seld back. See you around." Helva watched as the #'s brawn-half ascended to the airlock and the SI-# lifted off Regulus Center Base. Seld had partied with Jennan in Helva one time when both ships were down at Leviticus IV. Seld had a passable bass, as she recalled it. Envy briefly touched her. She flicked back to the ambiguous hospital annex, savagely wondering what kind of emergency this would be. And would she remain an X-designate the rest of her service life? She had set down at the end of tlie great Regulus field, the farthest edge from the Service Cemetery. Despite her resignation to Jennan's loss, despite Theoda's healing tears, Helva could not bring herself to grind more salt into her sorrow with proximity to Jennan's grave. Perhaps in a century or so... Consequently, waiting around on Regulus was painful. And with the # gone, she could no longer divert her pain into anger at the prolonged wait she must endure. "KH-#, your "brawn" is on her way with assignment tape," Cencom alerted her. Helva acknowledged the message, excitement stirring within her. It was almost a relief to receive a double-initial call, the pleasure overriding her twinge of regret that her "brawn" partner was feminine. It was a relief, too, to experience any emotion after the numbing of Jennan's death. The Annigoni experience had broken her apathy. A groxmd car zipped out from the direction of the massive Control and Barracks complex, skidding to a stop at her base. Without waiting, Helva lowered the lift and watched as a tiny figure hefted three pieces of baggage onto the platform. "K" meant to stay a while, Helva decided. The lift ascended, and shortly her new "brawn" was framed in the open lock, sky. "Kira of Canopus requesting permission to board the XH#," said the young woman, saluting smartly toward Helva's position behind the titanium bulkhead. "Permission granted. Welcome aboard, Kira of Canopus." The girl kicked the limp lump of a fabric bag unceremoniously aboard. But she carefully carried the other two back to the pilot's cabin. The odd-shaped one Helva identified, after a moment's reflection, as an ancient, stringed instrument called a guitar. Naturally they'd send me someone musically oriented, she thought, not at all sure she was pleased with this infringement on her most cherished memories of Jennan. She ruthlessly suppressed this unworthy thought with the admonition that the majority of Service personnel were musically oriented. The infinite possibilities of the art passed travel time admirably. Tira flipped open the other compact case, and Helva, surreptitiously peeking, noticed it was full of vials and other medical equipment. Kira inspected the contents with quick fingers and, closing the case, strapped it with care against the rigors of acceleration on the shelves behind the bed. Kira was, in form and nature as well as sex, the antithesis of Jennan. Since she was in a carping mood, Helva wondered how much of that was intentional. But that would mean Cencom had more sensitivity than Helva decided, privately, they were computationally blessed with. Kira of Canopus couldn't weigh more than # kilos fully suited. Her narrow face with slanted cheekbones had a delicacy which appeared ill-suited to bear the euphemism of "brawn" for the mobile half of a Service ship partnership. Her hair, dark brown, was braided tightly in many loops around her long oval skull. Her eyes, wide set and almond shaped, were of a clear, cool, deep green, thickly lashed. Her fingers, slim and tapering, were as dainty as her narrow feet, oddly graceful in heavy shipboots. Her movements, swift and sure, were quicksilver, full of restless energy, dartingly inquisitive. Kira reentered the main cabin. Helva, used to Theoda's lethargic movements, had to adjust quickly. Kira inserted the order tape, locking it into its niche in the pilot's board. As the code ran through, a startled exclamation was wrung from Helva. "Three hundred thousand babies?" Kira's laugh was a staccato arpeggio of mirth. "Assignment Stork, by the holies!" "You're only temporary?" questioned Helva, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. Even on brief acquaintance, there was a magnetism about Kira that appealed to Helva. Kira smiled wryly. "This assignment will take some time. Only thirty thousand are collected already. Even in this day and age, it takes time to make babies." "I haven't got facilities..." Helva began aghast at the thought of becoming a nursery. She broke off as the tape elaborated on the condition of the proposed cargo. "Babies in ribbons?" Kira, who had had previous briefing on their mission, laughed at Helva's outraged reaction. The tape continued remorsefully, and Helva understood the significance of the miles of plastic tubing and tanks of fluid which had been placed in her not overgenerous cargo spaces. In the system of the star Nekkar, an unexpected radiation flare had sterilized the entire population of its newly colonized planet. A freak power failure had resulted in the total loss of the planet's embryo banks. The KH-#'s mission was to rush embryos to Nekkar from planets which had answered the emergency call. II T n the very early days of space travel, when man had still not walked on Mars or Jupiter's satellites, a tremendous advance had been made in genetics. A human fetus in its early stages was transferred from one womb to another, the host mother bringing the child to term and giving it birth without having an actual relationship to it. A second enormous stride forward in propagating the race of man occurred when a male sperm was scientifically united with a female ovum. Fertilization was successful, and the resultant fetus was brought to term, the child growing to normal, wellbalanced maturity. It became a requirement of those in hazardous professions or those with highly desirable dominant characteristics of intelligence or physical perfection to donate sperm and ova to what became known as Race Conservation Agency. As civilization expanded onto newer, rawly dangerous worlds, the accepted custom was for young men and women to leave reaching their majority. It was good sense to have such a viable concentration of genetically catalogued seed available. So that, given a lack say, in a generation of a particularly desirable ethnic group, sufficient additional embryos could be released to restore the ecological balance. On an individual basis, the young wife, untimely widowed, might bear her husband's children from his seed on file at the of certain pronounced genetic characteristics to perpetuate a family name or business, would apply to the bank. There were, of course, ridiculous uses made the thrall of hysteria over a noted spaceranger or artist would if the male in question was agreeable. But naturally-conceived children were the rule rather than the exception. Helva herself had been the naturally inseminated child of her parents. The fact that some obscure birth defect had tendered her a grotesque, physical cripple was one of those curious, unpredictable accidents not even the most careful practice of prenatal care and obstetrics could avoid. She had been enlisted by her parents in Central Worlds' Brain-ship Service. By the time she was three months old, she had been transferred to a shell which, by means of by-passing the damaged synapses connecting brain impulses to extremities, had enabled Helva to start her education as the controlling agency of a sleek, powerful spaceship. Central Worlds as a repository in case of just such an emergency as had arisen at Nekkar: the inability of individuals to propagate the race. An appeal Elarth to locate and deliver #, # fertilized ova of genetic type had # on hand and had forwarded the call to all major tral Worlds, asking for contributions which the KH-# would pick up and deliver to Nekkar. Ill "yhe tape ended with a silent hold cue to Helva. It took her a moment to realize that, though she had the mission information, she had received nothing on her partner. No matter how temporary this assignment, it would take time; and some basic biography would be essential for Helva to function effectively in partnership with Kira. Obediently she cut the tape, activating a record-store for the balance for later playback. It would appear there were many unusual factors in this assignment. Central Worlds moved in mysterious ways, itself to sustain. "Well," Helva exclaimed to end the brief silence after the mission portion of the tape was silent. "I hadn't expected motherhood at my tender age. I see I had underestimated the demands Central Worlds makes of its minions." Her attempt at levity touched off a violent response in Kira, and Helva wondered what under a first magnitude star had she got for a partner. "Read this tape on me before we proceed with the mission," Kira said in a dead voice, all her previous vivacity wiped out. She slammed the store button, shunting the mission tape to the ship files, and inserted a second reel. With an almost savage twist she turned on the audio, sitting stiffly erect and motionless as the tape played back, either deaf or impervious to the biograph. Kira Falemova Mirsky of Canopus had finished all but a year of "brawn" training. She came of a Service-oriented family which had brought up ten generations to illustrious, once exalted, careers in Central Worlds' service branches. She had left the Training School on marital leave which had lasted two years, ending at her husband's death. A long term of hospitalization and therapy followed, during which time the tape noted that Kira had asked for and taken medical training, but did not reapply for "brawn" education. She had responded to a high level request to take this temporary assignment as her training had matched perfectly the needs of this particular emergency. Then followed a rattle of personal indices, emotional, psychological and educational which Helva translated, as she was expected to, to mean that Kira Mirsky of Canopus would make an unusually fine "brawn" if She gave herself half a chance. The tape ended abruptly, as if there should be more. The omission, probably on the last tag of the mission reel, seemed to sing out its absence far louder than the tritest concluding evaluation or recommendations. Central Worlds had many devious facets, and perhaps such an obvious omission was one. Surely Kira sensed it. That damned biograph left too much unsaid, particularly apparent to a "brawn" trainee. Helva's mind danced with the possibilities and gnawed mental teeth against the silent holdcue. In the meantime, Helva was faced with a very awkward situation, her new partner still with anticipation and predisposed by Central Worlds to make a bad first adjustment to Helva. Helva made a rude, sibilant noise and was relieved to see Kira react in surprise to it. "Brains they got?" Helva demanded contemptuously. "I don't call that a proper tape. They forgot half the garbage anyway. Ssscheh!" and she repeated her exasperation noise. "Oh, well, I expect we'll do fine together, if only because they left out the usual nonsense. Besides, the mission is temporary." Tira said nothing, but the woodenness left her slender body as if an anticipated ordeal had been cancelled. She swallowed hard, licking her lips nervously, still unsure of her position, having steeled her nerves for something unpleasant. "Let's get the cargo aboard and turn me into a rocking ship." Kira rose, her body awkward, but she managed to smile at Helva's column. "With pleasure. Have your holds been outfitted?" " 'With yards and yards of lacing and a bicycle built for two on it,' " Helva replied, quipping from an ancient patter song. She was determined to establish a comfortable empathy. Kira's smile was less tentative, and her body motion became more fluid. "Yes, it would look like that, I guess." "Of course I've never seen a bicycle built for two..." "Or a purple cow?" and Kira giggled girlishly. Helva ignored the nervous edge to the laughter, grateful the "brawn" did have such an active, if misplaced, sense of humor. "Hmmm. Purple cow, my dear bravm, is an all too apt analogy for our present occupation. And don't tell me I'll have room for # mechanical teats in the cargo space Central Worlds saw fit to give us." "Oh, no," Kira laughed. "We don't have but the first hundred thousand accounted for as of the time the tape was cut. We'll swing out from Regulus towards Nekkar, picking up donations as we go, deliver them within the four-week time limit, when the fetuses must be either implanted or decanted, and swing around the Wheel until we do meet the quota." Helva knew this from the tape. "Three hundred thousand isn't a very big number for a that needs to expand." "My dear KH-#," Kira savored the name, "the word 'temporary,' particularly when used by our beloved Service, has elastic qualities of infinite expansion. Also, another team, with drone transports, is recruiting orphans from unsooialized worlds to insure the proper age variations. But born children aren't our concern." "The heavens be praised!" Helva muttered under her breath. She did not have room to transport active live bodies, and her one tragic experience with overcrowding as she outran Ravel's exploding sun was not likely to recommend a similiar occurrence. Kira smiled back at Helva over her shoulder, as she contacted the Hospital Unit to request transfer. Will you activate the pumping equipment?" she asked Helva, who was in the process of doing just that. "The miles of plastic tubing, once filled with the tiny sacs of fertilized ova, would contain the nutritive and amniotic fluids necessary for the growth of the embryos. The continuous ribbon of tiny compartments, each with its minute living organism, was prepared for the voyage with the caution and care of a major surgical operation on a head of planet. Each segment must contact an intake point for the nutritive fluid and an outgo valve for the dispersal of wastes. Each meter of ribbon was inspected to insure the proper contact was made. The ribbon and its fluids as well as the encasing tube buffeted the embryos with more invulnerability against the rigors of space travel than had they been carried in a natural womb. As long as the KH# made the journey to Nekkar within the four weeks, all # fetuses would live to be born. It became apparent to Helva that Kira was dedicated in a detached, if professional, way to the assignment. Central Worlds might be relying on a maternal instinct as additional insurance for the mission. Helva, to her inner amusement, found herself, the pituitarily inhibited shellperson, rising nobly to the challenge. Kira, obviously young enough to someday enjoy motherhood, was completely uninvolved. Yet the affinity Helva felt towards these minute voyagers was basically a shell reaction. They were, after all, encapsulated as she was, the difference being that they would one day burst from their scientific husks, as she never could nor even desired to. Still, she felt a growing protectiveness, above and beyond the ordinary, towards her passengers. The situation didn't appear to touch Kira's psyche, and that puzzled Helva. She struggled to identify the coldness of Kira's reaction and could not. Then the technicians who had effected the installation of the precious cargo withdrew, and Helva was busy with the mechanics of take-off. It was a pleasure to have a passenger who knew how to take care of herself. Not that Theoda had been a burden in the psychological sense of the word, but Kira knew the procedures, and Helva did not need to spare a thought towards her. Take-off was under minimum thrust, not that the triply-buffeted embryos could suffer damage had she blasted off with all power, but Helva preferred to take no unnecessary chances, and there was plenty of time to reach Nekkar in Bootes' sector. IV Thirst planet of call would be  Talitha where fortythousand future citizens of Nekkar had been prepared. After lift, Kira made a careful check on all circuits in the nursery, confirmed her findings with Helva's remote monitors and informed Cencom that they were clear of Regulus and driving towards Talitha. The formalities ended, Kira swung slowly around in the gimballed pilot's chair. Her slenderness lost in the padded armchair, she seemed both too fragile and too young for her responsibilities. "The larder is well stocked," Helva suggested. Kira stretched leisurely, slewing her shoulders around to ease the taut muscles across her back. She shook her head sharply, sending a shower of hair fasteners slithering across the cabin as her braids came tumbling out of the coronet. Helva watched fascinated. Shoulder-length hair was the common fashion among spacewomen. The tips of Kira's braids brushed the floor. Whatever maturity she possessed departed with the severe coiffeur. Like the prototype of an ancient fantasy creature, Kira rose from the pilot's chair and moved across the deck to the galley. "You wouldn't by any remote computational factor stock a beverage known as coffee?" Kira asked wistfully. Helva chuckled, remembering a similar plea from a med officer named Onro. It seemed to be an occupational necessity. "I have three times as much as normal service inventory suggests," Helva assured her. "Oh," Kira's eyes rolled upwards in mock rapture, "you know! The ship that brought me here was a provincial transport from Draconis and hadn't a drop on board. I nearly perished," she exclaimed with lavish emo tion. Kira flipped open the proper cabinet and broke the heatseal, sniffing deeply as the fragrant aroma arose from the heating liquid. She gulped down a sip, grimacing against the heat. With an expression of intense relief, she leaned against the counter. "You and I are going to do nobly together, Helva. I'm sure of it." Helva caught the rasp of fatigue in the lilting voice. Would she always receive passengers in the advanced stages of exhaustion? Or was something the matter with Helva that all her visitors tended to fall asleep once aboard her? As a nursery ship this could be an asset, Helva thought acidly. "It's been a long day for you, Kira. Why don't you get some rest? I'm staying up anyway." Kira chuckled, knowing that the brainships never slept. She glanced towards the cargo holds. "I'll listen with all ears perked," Helva reassured her. "I'll just finish my coffee and take a short snooze," Kira agreed. At the cabin door she turned back towards Helva's column, cocking her head slightly, her green eyes sparkling. "Helva, do you peek?" Her expression was prim to the pursing of her lips. "I assure' you," Helva replied with great dignity, "I am a very properly mannered ship. Scout." "I shall expect you to conduct yourself decorously at all times as behooves a person in your position in life," Kira replied so haughtily, that Helva imagined her pedigree sprinkled with royal ancestors. Head high, Kira stepped into her cabin only to trip on one of her swinging braids and tumble into the room. Helva was sorely tempted to get a glimpse of Kira's face. "Don't you dare look in!" Kira exclaimed, her voice breaking with laughter. Helva had promised nothing about turning off sound, and Kira got to her feet, giggling softly. In a very short while only the sound of a sleeper's shallow, slow breathing broke the stillness of the ship. T T elva took out of file the portion of the tape which followed the hold-cue. The excerpt was brief and enigmatic. "Scout Mirsky is a practicing Dylanist, accepting this assignment in Central World Service without suspension of her craft. Accordingly she is not to be permitted shore leave on the following planets as her activities constitute an infringement of planetary laws restricting proselytization of government groups and or an embarrassment to Central World Service: Ras Algothi. Das Alhague and Sabek. Subject Scout and Ship designate are not, repeat are not, to approach planets or stars Baham and Homan in the Pegasus Sector or planets of stars Beid and Keid in the Eridanus Sector." Nothing could be clearer than that, but the reasoning behind such restrictions was unfathomable. And Kira was a practicing Dylanist, whatever that was. The name had a familiar ring, and the guitar which Kira cherished suggested a musical group of some sort. Well, mused Helva, she'd let it come up in conversation naturally. The six days to Talitha were livened by Kira's rapid switches of mood and manner, from gamin to queen, welcome to Helva after both Theoda's stolidness and as counterpoint to her painful memories of Jennan. Helva literally did not know what Kira would do next. However, when it came time to check passengers, Kira was deftly professional and painstakingly thorough. Dubhe, the second planet on their tour, called in to confirm a contribution of forty thousand fertilized ova, to be ready at the touchdown. Kira at Dubhe, arriving at the same figure simultaneously with Helva. Child she might look, child she might play, but Kira's working mind was sharp and accurate. The transfer at Talitha went without undue incident because Kira's acute attention to detail averted the one possible accident. An attendant, too eager to finish his assignment, tripped over the leads to a fluid tank in the now crowded cargo hold. Kira lit into him with a furious catalogue of his ancestors, his present worth, his future career potential and his probable imminent demise if he repeated his awkwardness. She did so in three languages, other than Basic, that Helva knew and several that had the advantage of sounding even more vicious. Yet the minute she had exhausted her choler, she turned, coolly collected, to the head of the detail with apologies. Once lifted from Talitha, Kira shook loose the pins that held her braids and settled in the pilot's chair with a sigh of relief. "I caught three of your descriptions of him, but the others were beyond me." "I find that old Terran Russian, mixed with liberal neumagyarosag, is extremely vitriolic in sound," Kira said with a satisfied smile. "Actually I was only repeating a recipe for a protein dish called paprikash. It sounds much, much worse, doesn't it?" She grinned broadly at Helva, her green eyes wide. "Effective, too. The oaf positively blanched." "Thom..." Kira cut off her words, pressing her lips firmly together, her face, for one tiny moment, showing inner pain. "I think," she murmured, closing her eyes, "I'm hungry." Her voice was breathless, like a child's. "And," her eyes flashed open, her face composed again, "I think I shall make paprikash! Since, you realize, I have just furiously remembered the accurate recipe." She danced across the floor. "Taught me by an old gypsy." She waggled her finger at Helva. "Promise not to peek. It's a family secret." She pivoted on her toes, round and round into the galley, laughing breathlessly as she caught the counter for support. "Doesn't it smell heavenly?" Kira demanded of Helva, later pausing with the dish raised to Helva's column. "Be better with noodles and thick cmsty bread. Hmm!" she mumbled happily over a full mouth. "Oh, perfect. I have not lost my touch." She touched her fingers to her lips, releasing a kiss to the air in the extravagance of gustatory enjoyment."Marvelous." She curled her legs under her on the wide pilot's chair and ate quickly, licking her fingers occasionally when the stew splashed. "You make me wish I wasn't nourished by a bunch of flagons," Helva remarked. "I've never seen anyone enjoy the simple business of eating as much as you do. And you don't seem to suffer from excess calories." Kira shrugged negligently. "Excellent metabolism. Absolutely unalterable. That's me!" That fleeting edge of bitterness crept into the gay voice. T T elva began to suspect that these sudden switches of mood were less the product of a naturally volatile spirit than the elaborate defenses of a badly hurt woman, struggling to suppress her pain by overriding all references to it. Helva remembered how carefully the guitar case had been stowed in the closet. Not so much as a hint had Kira made that it was there, silently waiting. Was this out of deference to Helva's recent tragedy? For surely Kira knew of Jennan's death and the legends that had already begun to cling to the #. Or was Kira avoiding the guitar for a reason of her own? Kira finished her meal. The dish lay on her lap. Her face was brooding, eyes fixed on a spot at the base of the control console. Her whole attitude was apathetical and unhealthy. Helva knew she must break this mood. Kira had somehow been touched on too vital a point -- despite the overtly innocuous conversation -- to help herself. Softly, without conscious choice from her wealth of musical references, Helva began to sing an old air: Music for a while Shall all your cares beguile; Wond'ring how your Pains were eased. '"How my pains are eased?" hissed Kira, her eyes great, green globes glittering with hatred on the titanium column. "Do you know how my pain will be eased?" She was on her feet in such violent upward heave that there seemed to be no intermediate motion of rising. Tall in fury, Kira frightened Helva with the sudden strength in the slight body. "In death! In arms straight up, wrists turned towards Helva so that she saw the thin white scars of arterial cuts. "You..." Kira's arms dropped rigid to her sides. "You had the chance to die. No one could have stopped you. Why didn't you? What kept you living after he died?" the girl demanded with trenchant scorn. Helva drew in her breath sharply, against the tantalizing memory of an anguished desire to dive into the clean white heart of Ravel's exploding sun. "Do you realize that even, if a person wants to die, it is not allowed! Not allowedP' Kira began to pace wildly, graceful even in this savage mood. "No. You promptly are subjected to such deep conditioning you cannot. Anything else is permitted in our great society except the one thing you really want -- if it happens to be death. Do you realize that I have never been left alone in tliree years? And now..." Kira's face was contorted in ugly anger and contempt, "... now you're my nursemaid. And don't think for one moment I'm not aware you have had a confidential report on my emotional instability." "Sit down," Helva ordered coldly and activated the final section of the mission tape with its restriction. As the import of the message reached Kira, she did sit, slumped lifeless in the pilot's chair, her face drained of all emotion. "I'm sorry, Helva. I'm really sorry," she raised trembling hands in apology. "I just didn't believe they would leave me alone at last." "They are very good at conditioning," Helva remarked softly. "They must be, and they have to be. They can't have ships or people going rogue from grief. But I think they have let you alone. They've merely made sure you can't get to those few worlds where ritual suicide is permitted, like Baham, Homan, Beid and Keid. And they can't allow you to commit suicide because the ethos of Central Worlds is dedicated to extending life and propagating it wherever and whenever possible. I'm a living example of the exto go to sustain a human life. the same ethos. For you to seek suicide means a breakdown in this ethos which cannot be permitted. Even the Pegasus and Eridani planets limit the conditions under which suicide is condoned and proscribe certain grotesque ceremonies to insure that only the most desperate attempt it. "You'd think," Helva sighed with exasperation, "they'd figure out someway to alleviate loss, since Death is the one thing the great and glorious Central Worlds hasn't been able to cure." ira's tumbled hair hid her ''face from Helva's view. Even the slim fingers were motionless. The girl had abandoned herself to grief, and suddenly Helva was immeasurably irritated with this immolation in self-pity. True enough, she had been tempted to suicide, but her conditioning had held. She had keened her loss to black space, but she had lifted with Theoda to Annigoni and gone on with the business of living. Just as Theoda had after her own tragedy. As many people had all over the universe and throughout time. When her medical advisors had realized that Kira was wallowing in sorrow, they should have applied a block -- oh, no, not when Kira had nearly finished "brawn" training; Helva remembered that factor. She had been made block-resistant, so the only therapy was intensive conditioning. They couldn't erase, only inhibit. Helva looked dispassionately at her "brawn," furious at her situation, realizing that Central Worlds had known exactly what they were asking of Helva when they assigned Kira to her. That, too, was part of the ethos. Use what you have that wiU get the job done. "Kira, what is a Dylanist?" The lowered head jerked up, the curtaining hair falling away from the face. The scout blinked and turned to stare at Helva's bulkhead. "Well, that is the last question I would have expected," she said in a quiet voice. She gave a little snort of laughter and then tossed her head, shaking her hair out of her way. She looked at Helva thoughtfully, speculatively. "All right. I'll absolve you of the guilty crime of psychotherapy. Altho'," Kira began pointing an accusatory finger at the column, "I was coerced to make this mission, and I thought it awfully suspicious that you were to be my ship." "Yes, that would follow logically, wouldn't it?" Helva agreed calmly. Kira laid a slim hand on the bulkhead, on the square plate that was the only access to Helva's titanium shell within the column. It was a gesture of apology and entreaty, simple and swift. Had Helva been aware of sensory values, it would have been the lightest of pressures. "A Dylanist is a social commentator, a protestor, only with music. A skilled Dylanist, and I wasn't one..." (from the emphasis on the pronoun, Helva assumed that Kira considered her husband. Thorn, had been one) "... can make so compelling an argument with melody and words that what he wants to say becomes insinuated into the subconscious." "Subliminal song?" Helva questioned. "Well, haven't you been haunted by a melody?" Kira paused at the door of her cabin. "Hmmm, yes, I have," Helva agreed, not sure that the theme from Rovolodorus' Second Celestial Suite was exactly what Kira had in mind. Still the point was well taken. "A really talented Dylan stylist," Kira continued, returning with the guitar case, "can create a melody with a message that everyone sings or hums, whistles, spits or drums in spite of himself. Why, you can even wake up in the morning with a good Dylan-styled song singing in your head. You can imagine how effective that is when you're proselytizing for a cause." Helva roared with laughter. "No wonder you'd be considered an embarrassment to Central Worlds on the Ophiuchus circuit." Kira grinned impishly. "I got the chapter, verse and section on that, plus what a waste of time, talent and ability that could be put to worthwhile use in service to C.W." Che made a face as she struck chords, sour from long disuse. She tightened the keys, tuning the chords up from the bass string, her expression unexpectedly tender as she worked. She struck a tentative chord, tightened the E string a fraction more and nodded satisfaction at the resulting, mellow sound. With flashing strong fingers she wove a pattern of chords and notes, drawing more volume from the instrument than its fragile structure suggested. To Helva's amazement, she recognized an ancient Bach fugue just as Kira struck an angry discord, clamping both hands on the strings to keep them from resonating. "Achh," she exclaimed, sharply flapping her hands and then clenching them into tight fists. "I haven't played since... " She struck a major chord, then modulated to a diminishing minor. "I remember we spent one entire night -- till noon the next day, actually -- trying to analyze an early Dylan song. The trouble was, you weren't supposed to analyze Dylan. You had to feel him, and if you tried to parse what he was saying into Basic or into psychological terms, it... it was meaningless. It was the total imagery of the music and the words that made the gut react. That was the whole purpose of his style. When the gut reacts, the mind gets the whiplash, and another chip is knocked off the solid block within." "I'd say his work might be good therapy," Helva remarked dryly. Kira flashed her an angry look which dissolved into a grin. She made her guitar laugh. "The trouble with therapy is you tend to find too many confusing alternative meanings to the simplest notions and words, and then you're so confused, you suspect everyone and everything." And Kira's guitar echoed the pitch of her words derisivelyA red warning light flashed on the panel simultaneously with an impulse to Helva's internal monitors. The guitar was the sole occupant of the pilot's chair, and Kira was halfway down the passageway to the number three hold before Helva could activate her own visual check. Kira paused at the door long enough to assess the damage, before she spun to the further hold where their additional supplies were stored. The clumsiness of the technician had, to all scrutiny, been remedied at the time of the accident by securing the tubing in the demijohn of nutritive fluid. What had not been apparent at that time was that the closure at the other end of the line had been loosened. Sufficient fluid had dripped away from the weakened joint to register on the telltale. Helva anxiously checked with her magnified vision along the section of embryos that tank serviced. There was loss at the joint but the ribbon was still fuU. Kira was back with new tubing and joints. Deftly she removed the faulty equipment, careful in her transfer to prevent air bubbles seeping in along the ribbon. Then Kira carefully checked the entire length of ribbon and each minute sac under magnification to make certain there were no visible bubbles or disruptions to the contact between sac top and the nutritive nipple fastening. Then she checked the joints in the other ribbons, each line, each flask, every connection. It was a job of several hours duration, but she made no attempt to hasten the process. Reassured, she and Helva did another check of the internal monitors before she closed the hatch. "I should have cut him up and made him into the paprikash. That would have served him right!" Kira muttered as she disappeared into the privacy of her cabin. Helva eavesdropped until she heard the slow, even breathing. All the while, the stiU guitar stared back at her from the pilot's scat, threads of that haunting melody taunting Helva as she watched. V A t Dubhe, Kira listened on an  elaborate spectrum inspection of the disturbed ribbon to make sure none of the several thousand fetuses within the strand had suffered impairment. Whatever emotional problems tormented Kira, she held them apart from her professional life. Her objectivity was appreciated by Helva the more because she had had a glimpse of Kira's personal turmoil. The KH-# sped onward from Dubhe to Merak where another twenty thousand waited. On the short voyage between Dubhe and Merak, neither Kira nor Helva mentioned what Helva styled "the paprikash incident." Kira did not put the guitar away either, but spent some time every "evening" giving Helva additional samples of Dylanist wit and social penetration, from the ancient dream songs of the Protest Decade in early. Atomic history to examples of contemporary protests. When the call from Ahoth came, it interrupted Kira's masterful rendition of a very early Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind." Kira laid aside her guitar carefully and answered the call, her face registering polite surprise at the origin. "Fifteen thousand?" she repeated for confirmation and received what Helva felt was an unnecessarily curt rejoinder and cut off. While Kira had been dealing with the call, Helva had activated the ship's memory files for facts on the planet. "That's odd," she remarked. "How so?" asked Kira, jotting down eta computations. "There's no record of their having a bank. Grim planet. In a highly unstable volcanic period. Use a lot of molten mining techniques. Highest mortality rate in the Central Worlds." "I think," commented Kira dryly, "you'd better see what Cencom has to say about our landing there." "It's not on the restricted list, Kira," Helva replied, but she activated the tight beam. "Alioth?" Cencom exclaimed, surprised out of its formal voice. "The mayday didn't go out to them as we have no record of a bank there. Ethnically speaking it's possible. Hold." Kira cocked an eyebrow at Helva. "They're checking with I know who. Two gets you one they abort the call." "Two gets me one of what?" jibed Helva. "KH," Cencom returned. "Proceed to Alioth. No bank listed, but traders report improvements in mining techniques indicate technological advances at proper level for race propagation. Religious hierarchy powerful, so do not antagonize. Repeat, do not antagonize. And report soonest." "You just lost two whatever it was you bet," Helva taunted. "Okay," Kira said with a shrug. "Filmbank have any clips?" T Telva flashed them on theviewer. The first were aspects of the small spaceport. The main city was dominated by an enormous temple against the side of an extinct volcano: the broad multiple steps leading to it reminding Helva of a ziggurat. She didn't much care for worlds with a religious hierarchy, but she appreciated the fact that her opinion was at the moment jaundiced. Too many religions were gloom and doom. Alioth, fourth planet of its solar system, was far enough out from its primary to get little of its brightness, and its volcanic era predisposed it to Dantean excesses. One last scene showed a procession of torch-bearing, cowled figures crossing a huge central plaza in front of the temple. "A truly cheerless place," Kira commented, making a face. "Well, with only fifteen thousand, we won't have to stay long." She strummed a gay time to counteract the morbid pictures. "They are in the ethnic group required by Nekkar," Helva remarked dubiously. "Can't  see a thing with all those hoods," Kira said. "You don't suppose the embryos come complete with cowl, do you? Thafd be a facer for the Nekkarese," she giggled, adding a guitar laugh. "You should say, born with a caul." Kira threatened Helva with the guitar, then made her inspection of the three holds. "This extra fifteen thousand will crowd us a little with the # at Merak," Kira mused as she worked. "Alioth is spatially alligned with Nekkar. We can make it there with time to spare. Then, hoiyotoho off on another stork run." Kira straightened, wrinkling her nose in Helva's direction. "Hoiyotoho is utterly inappropriate to a stork run." "For you, maybe, but not for me. I am, after all, an armored maid." "Ha!" Kira barked, and she fell silent as she peered through a magnifying lens at a joint. When the two had finished the inspection, Kira paused at the galley, reaching absently for coffee. She wandered, moody for the first time in nearly a week, into the main cabin and plunked herself down on the pilot's chair, curling her feet under her and sitting quietly, only the curling vapor of the heating coffee moving. "Stork run!" she said finally. "D'you realize, Helva, I'm the same ethnic group, too? Those pieces of life are the children of people like me. Only unlike me. Because they have left seed, and I have none." "Don't be ridiculous," Helva snapped, hoping to ward off a Kiran explosion. "You fulfilled reached your majority, didn't you?" "No," Kira laughed back. "No, I didn't. I had met Thorn by then, and I was going to have all my children. I didn't need any agency to insure the propagation of those chromosomes that are essentially Kira Falernova Mirsky of Canopus. As a matter of fact," she said sardonically, "I even wrote wit and drollery, with candid cracks about the uncanned child." She swung the chair around to face Helva, her eyes narrowed in self-contempt. "One of the many items my so-censored biograph left out was that my only child died ahoming, from his mother's womb untimely ripped, ripping it and rendering her completely barren." Kira spanned her tiny hips with slender hands. "No life in these loins, ever... not implanted nor impregnated. No nothing of Thorn or all we had together. That," and she snapped her finger, "for our supreme egotistical self-assurance." It was for such accidents that nations from every young adult. It was pointless to remind Kira of this. She was all too patently aware of her folly. "That's why I returned to medicine after Thorn's death rather than to the Service. But all my studies proved that there was no rebirth in me nor birth for me. Science can do many wonders, make many adjustments, but not that." She sighed heavily, but her bitterness was not as frantic as that first explosion. Helva wondered if Kira had resigned herself to barrenness as e had not, from appearances, resigned herself to living. "Which is why, dear Helva, it is ironic for me, of all people, to be assisting this particular cargo around the Great Wheel." Helva refrained from any remarks. Kira finished her coffee and retired to rest. Within a few hours, there would be Merak to deal with, then on to Alioth. VI '"They cleared Merak in record time, the technicians being both quick and careful. Alioth was only a few days onward before the last hop to Nekkar. Scout and ship had now achieved a pleasant routine in which Helva filled gaps in her classical and ancient musical repertoire with Kira's comprehensive acquaintance with folk music from old Terra and the early colonial periods of the now major worlds. Helva woke Kira just before touchdown on Alioth. The scout dressed quickly in a somber tunic, braiding her hair so closely to her scalp Helva wondered her head didn't ache. Touchdown was not auspicious. To begin with, the spaceport was overshadowed by the jagged, glowing peaks of Alioth's active continental spine. They were told to touch down some distance from the small rectangular building that housed what control and administration the unhospitable planet required. Kira protested they were too far from the building to effect a quick transfer and was brusquely informed she was to await the arrival of a ground vehicle. It took its time in arriving, a huge transport truck loaded with cowled figures which took positions around Helva's base, elbow to elbow. Their attitude was suspiciously belligerent, their presence an insult to a ship bearing Helva's markings. "What is the meaning of mounting a guard on a scout ship in Central Worlds Medical Service?" Kira demanded in firm tones of control tower. "For the protection of your cargo." At this moment, the charge officer of the guard contingent requested permission to enter tlic scout ship. "Well?" Helva asked softly of Kira. "I don't see we have much choice, but I suggest you tape this audio and visual and encode it back to Regulus." "My thought, too," Helva agreed thoughtfully. "I think I'll play silent." "A good idea," Kira admitted, adjusting a contact button on her cloak. There were many backward planets, where the partnership of the mobile "brawn" scout and his "brain" ship was improperly understood. On such worlds it often had been to the advantage of the partners to keep the "brain's" abilities unknown until needed, if needed. The button would allow Helva , to keep in sight and sound contact with Kira. The officer, an ominous, tall figure in its black cowl, appeared at the airlock which Helva opened. The man, his face unseen, towered above Kira. A thin hand was extruded from the draperies and made a gesture towards breast and hidden face that could be interpreted as a salute of sorl. Kira responded in kind, waiting for him to speak first. "Second Watch Officer Noneth," he finally intoned. "Medical Scout Kira of Canopus," Kira replied with dignity. Helva did not fail to note that the girl clung to her planetary designation rather than a ship-partner identity as KH-#. "Your presence is required at High Temple to discuss the donation," Noneth said in hollow, measured tones. "Time is of the essence in a transfer of this nature," Kira began smoothly. "Time," intoned the officer, "is at the disposal of Him Who Orders. It is at his command you are to come." "The seed is ready for shipment?" Kira asked, insistent on some information. A shudder rippled the fabric surrounding the figure on Noneth. "Do not blaspheme." "Unintentional, I assure you," Kira said, calmly refusing to offer further apology. "Come," ordered the officer in a voice of command that crackled with authority. "He Who Orders bids you come, woman," a sepulchral, harsh voice echoed shrilly through the tiny cabin. ira won another mark of respect from Helva, when she gave no indication of surprise at that awesome bellow. The scout's eyes flicked briefly over the smooth, oval fastening on Noneth's hood. Helva as well as Kira recognized the device for what it was, a twoway control similar to the one Kira wore -- a type issued only through the Scout Service. There'd be a nova of a scandal when Central Worlds discovered who was distributing these restricted designs on backward planets. "The order must be obeyed. The Temple itself has spoken," Noneth cried in a voice quavering with reverance. "Dally not." The Temple was feminine, Helva realized, having appraised the timbre of the voice. "I am under orders," Kira began evasively. "That is the Eternal Truth." Noneth replied, nodding as Kira apparently responded in a manner consonant with solemn accord, his religion. He raised his hand in a stylized gesture and added, "May Death come to you at the moment of your triumph." Kira, about to make a graceful obeisance, halted and stared up at the hidden face, her eyes wide with shock. "May Death come to you at the moment of your triumph?" she murmured. The blood drained from her face. "Is not Death the greatest of blessings?" asked the priest, mildly surprised at her ignorance. It was all Helva could do to remain silent, but a deep instinct stifled her half-formed groan of protest. It took little extra interpolation to surmise that Death on Alioth would be the greatest of blessings: relief from the terrible drudgery, the grim and gloomy aspect of the planet with its hovering smoking mountains. The normal perils of molten mining plus the daily anxiety of a volcano emerging and erupting underfoot had emphasized the brevity of existence until the emiAasis had swung towards Death as a welcome respite from grinding toil and miserable conditions. Was Cencom out of its alleged mind, when it did not ban Kira from landing on Alioth, knowing her compulsion? She wouldn't even have to strain against her conditioning. "Yes, Death is the greatest of blessings. That is Eternal Truth," Kira repeated, trancelike. "Come with me," Noneth enjoined, gently persuasive, his gaunt hand beckoning to Kira. "Come," echoed the sepuchral voice greedily. The ground car had no sooner left the base of the KH-# than the guard began to move. "She will see Him Who Orders," one sighed enviously. "The bare-faced harlot will be given an unjust Reward. Now! Up the lift and let us secure the cargo. Think of it! Thousands more to die to expiate the sin against Him Who Orders." "That was sufficient for Helva. She locked the lift controls and slid the airlock securely tight. Curse, hammer, buffet though those Aliothites might, Helva was invulnerable against such weapons as Alioth's technology possessed. She activated the tight beam to Cencom. Alioth would rue the day its religious hierarchy decided to hijack the cargo of a Service Ship. Much less kidnap its scout. Dispassionately Helva took account of the matter of Kira's departure. The girl had, in the extremes of grief, sought death. But Helva doubted Kira would betray her service. For one thing, she couldn't, although the Aliothites didn't realize the ship was capable of independent thought and action. Having enticed the scout away, they assumed the ship was grounded, impotent, and they could take their time forcing the scout to accede to their designs on the embryos. I could just leave, Helva thought. If Death is the reward these zealots seek, then I have no compunctions about burning the guard detail to its due merits. But I cannot leave this "brawn". Not yet. I have time. What was the matter with Cencom? They were never around when you needed them! And why in the name of little apples did they permit Kira to land on a death-dedicated planet? You idiot, Helva told herself, because they didn't know that's the way the religion turned. The ground rumbled beneath her. Far to the north a fireball zoomed heavenward, bursting in a shower of lighted fragments. Other fireworks followed as well as more ominous movement beneath Helva's tailfins. She held herself ready for an instant lift-off if her balance was shaken beyond normal recovery in her stabilizers. Somewhere to the northeast, another volcano answered the first. Helva saw the ground car carrying Kira reach the central building, and she muttered, ineffective mental commands for Kira to snap out of her trance and switch on the contact button. The guard, impervious to the massed eruptions, kept right on trying to force the lift mechanism. Their cowls kept falling from their faces, and they kept replacing them as if a bareface were indecent. The red light from the fireballs which continued to light the sky illuminated gaunt, ascetic faces, dirty with ingrained volcanic dusts, dull-eyed from improper nutrition and continual fatigue. Kira alighted from the transport and, flanked by guards, was escorted to a smaller vehicle which disappeared from Helva's augmented vision into the complex of city buildings. The transport turned back to the field and Helva. One more enterprising guard urged his fellows to bring a gantry rig against the ship. This they did, slowly and with much effort, wheeling the unwieldy frame from a far side of the field. Helva watched the performance with grim amusement. Their own fault for insisting we set down so far from the facilities of the port. Perhaps they couldn't see in the gloom of Alioth's perpetual twilight that the lock was closed tight, too. She tried to rouse Cencom on the tight beam, cursing at the delay, furious she was unable to reach Kira on the contact. "Contact button," she muttered to herself, recalling the anomalous appearance of one on Noneth's hood. Now, if it were actually either Service issue of an imitation, she ought to be able to use it. And that Temple female had utilized one to second Noneth's commands to Kira. Helva wasted no time in throwing open the wide-wave on the contact band. As hastily, she closed it, dazed with the resultant chaotic kaleidoscope of sight and sound that besieged her unsuspecting senses. Mentally reeling from the impact, she wondered painfully how she had managed to get several hundred thousand contacts at once. Quickly she scanned the scurrying guards, still trying to wrestle the gantry frame to her. Each one had a button securing his hood at the throat, "Great glittering galaxies," moaned Helva. "That Temple female's got them by the throat. This religion must be composed of schizoids to deal with that kind of chaos." T Tolding tightly to her sanity, Helva opened the band a fraction, wincing at the confusion of sound and sight. She tried to focus in on one contact alone, but felt herself drowning in the myriad pictures that returned. It was like trying to focus on a pinpoint through the faceting of a fly's eyeball. Grimly she diminished the band into one small area, forcing herself to accept only one of the conflicting and overlapping images that returned to her. She cut out the sound completely. Fortunately every wearer in the selected segment was converging on one location, crossing a huge plaza, crowded with gyrating, swaying cowled figures, their robes flapping around them as they approached the wide deep steps that led up the side of the dead volcano. This was the ziggurat Helva had noticed in the tape clip. Suddenly everything and every figure tilted. It took Helva a moment to realize she too was rocking with the earthquake as three more volcanoes spewed out their guts skjrward. She waited, alert, lest the instability of the spaceport field became too critical for her to remain planetbound. An ecstatic, moaning roar wafted through the air which was becoming hazy as the earth's minute shift released gases from narrow fissures in the floor of the plaza. Helva, already confused, did not at first catch the significance of the gas or the fact that the ululation was reaching her ship's outer ears, not issuing from the dumb contact circuits. Frantically Helva increased power in the tight beam, desperately trying to raise Cencom over the volcanic interferences. Simultaneously she cut in the narrow contact, not able to risk losing Kira. Everyone in the plaza was now waving arms aloft, hoods thrown back from joyful faces raised to the sparkfilled, gas-fogged skies. Then the Aliqthites wheeled, ducking their heads to breathe deeply of the rising gas fumes. Incredulous Helva watched as more and more people pushed and crowded around the fissures, inhaling deeply, staggering away, faces rapt, arms aloft, movements erratic. Stunned, Helva realized that the gases were either hallucinogenic or euphoric, deadly dangerous as senses were dulled to the perils of wandering in the open iduring mass volcanic eruptions. Yet the exposed plaza was rapidly filling with bodies either already intoxicated or frantically trying to achieve it. The significance of gas eruptions in the plaza before the Temple of this demoniac religion was not lost on Helva. This effect was known and calculated by the temple hierarchy. Helva was revolted and enraged by such a depraved government, and she redoubled her efforts to locate Kira and her escort. They would have to leave the vehicle and enter the plaza on the south side. One multiexposed group caught her searching eyes. There couldn't be two such slender, hoodless figures on this mad planet. Kira was just entering the plaza, her inexorable progress towards the ziggurat steps impeded by the jerking, jolting freak-inebriates. Frenzied, Helva widened the band, trying to skip from contact to contact, forward towards Kira. The effect was maddening, like seeing thousands of film tapes all interlocking fuzzily, playing on the same master screen. For the first time in her life, Helva felt vertigo and nausea of the mind .Her sense of impending disaster deepened as she tried to reach Kira before she entered the Temple of Death. Placed as it was on top of the massive ziggurat, right ne.xt to the old volcano, it must be heavy with hallucinogenic gases. Helva thanked the Service for the small blessing that Kira had been desensitized to such hazards as hallucinogens, but she was as immobile in her trance as if she were susceptible. T T elva groaned at her inability to reach Kira, spiritually or I)hysically. "Ooooh," an answering groan rose from the multitude. "The Temple weeps," the cry went up, garbled from a thousand throats. Even the guards at the spaceport, wrestling with the gantry frame, echoed the .chant. "Oh," Helva gasped, and her surmise that she was broadcasting to all Aliothites was confirmed, as her exclamation was n (I #)# the crowd. She had hec'n mistaken for the voice of their Temple female. Oblivious to the multivision, Helva stared at the cylindrical lop of the Temple and recognized what she had not consciously identified before. The cylinder was a ship on its long axis, nose and fins buried in the lava of the old eruption. The Temple entrance was nothing more than an airlock, and by that entrance, Helva could trace the faintly visible designation of a Central Worlds brain ship. As clear as the day she had heard it, the day Jennan had died, Helva recalled what Silvia, the #, had told her about another grief-stricken ship. The # had turned rogue after the death of her scout on the metalheavy planet of a white dwarf. Where better to hide than a red-dark violent world, so conducive to the immolation of grief? Or had the #, aimed at the fiery maw of the erupting volcano, somehow been deflected from the seething cone at the last moment to be lodged immovably in the lava flow at its base? Had the # turned her tortured mind on the grim world and urged thousands to die in expiation for the death of its beloved? The requirements of her duty were suddenly lucid to Helva, and the plans to discharge it sprang to mind. Unconsciously and with the genius of sheer desperation, Helva began to sing, her voice a deep caressing baritone, coloring her resonances with minor-keyed longing, suspending reason to the dictates of sheer instinct. Death is mine, mine forever. She intoned, repeating the phrase a third above, as the responsive Aliothites chanted the first phrase in obedient mimicry. It was like having an incredibly well-rehearsed world-chorus at your disposal. Helva immediately exploited the phenomenon ruthlessly : Sleep I cannot, rest eludes me. And down a fifth: Dreams to plague me, tortured I. Up to an augmented seventh as the chorus chimed in on a dissonance, calculated to raise inner hackles and pierce the gut with longing: Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die. Helva sang, her voice sliding into the edged timbre of a harsh yearning tenor. Down again to the original musical phrase, but this time the baritone quality was tinged with scorn : Death is mine, mine forever. Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die. The last word became a vibrant crescendo of derision, diminishing to a mocking whisper, long after the supporting chorus had completed its cry on the augmented seventh. #Cencom calling KH-#, will you acknowledge? official voice of Regulus Base Cencom broke through Helva's fantastic musical improvisation. "Mayday, mayday," Helva replied in a jolting soprano on both tight beam and the Aliothite contact band. The chorus obediently shrilled out the resounding emergency challenge. Helva caught her breath, as she saw Kira stagger with instinctive reaction to the cry. "Mayday?" Cencom blasted back. "Who the hell is Dylanizing on Alioth?" With a shock, Helva realized that was exactly what she was doing, Dylanizing. Her appeal to Kira, though couched musically -- music being the one medium she subconsciously hoped would reach the entranced scout -- had crystallized further into the subliminal form of a Dylanesque protest. Exultant, she knew how to manipulate this to her own ends. With a barely perceptible increase in tempo, she repeated her first phrase, no longer a longing legato, but a mocking staccato. As the chorus responded idiotically true to its model, she hurriedly reported to Cencom. "Alioth's religious head is the rogue ship #; the religious motivation is deatii!" "The scout, where is your scout?" Cencom crackled back as near panic as it would ever come. "What is the release word for the #?" Helva hissed, then chanted the second phrase for her Dylan, again packing Up the tempo so that the beat as well as the sound had urgency to it. "Why are you Dylanizing? Report!" Cencom demanded, outraged. "Don't bother me. The release word!" Helva snarled. She jumped her voice an octave and a half, switching registers to , heldcntenor, her phrase ringing through the plaza in an arrow of sheer emotion-packed sound to pierce the trance of her scout. Kira's guard was lurching now, half-dazed by the treacherous fumes that filled the plaza. They had Kira by the arms, and Helva trapped in the background of the mighty chorus, couldn't tell whether they were restraining Kira or hanging onto her for support. She alone was unaffected by the hallucinogen. "Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die!" Helva's tenor rang, scornfully, lashing viciously at Kira's deathwish. "You fool," Cencom mouthed in sheer rage, "don't say that! She wants to die!" the tight beam in a strident soprano. Then projected her voice, bitterly powerful, angrily compelling, thundering the protest. "Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die!" The phrase echoed tauntingly through the plaza. The chorus, unable to imitate the incredible pitch of Helva's voice, dropped to the lower octave. The challenge rocked back across the plaza, punctuated by the massive thunder of erupting volcanoes. With a sudden, soundless, soul-shattering wrench, the massed glimpses of chaos dissolved, and Helva was suddenly of single sight, in a darkly curtained chamber, unevenly lit by red braziers. Increasing her dark vision, Helva penetrated the gloom, her attention focused on the hideous object that dominated the room. n a raised, black basaltic slab lay the decomposig remains of what had once been a man. Its teeth were bared whitely through the decayed flesh in a travesty of a smile. The tendons of his neck were stark ridges, and the cartilage of his isophagus ended in the indestructible fabric of a scout coverall. His bands, crossed on the chest cavity, crumpled by a massive fatal blow, were linked by the intertwined post-mortal growth of fingernails. This, Helva knew, was the #'s dead "brawn". And Helva was watching through Kira's contact button. A wailing chant filled the chamber, a meaningless mournful dribble of sound, emanating from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The mad "brain", still encased in its indestructible titanium shell, had all circuits open, keening, oblivious to everything. In as soundless a whisper as she could broadcast, Helva mutterel swiftly to Kira. "It's the rogue #. It's gone mad. It's got to be destroyed." It was easier somehow for Helva, knowing what she must do, to think of the # as an impersonal "it," rather than the female' the "brain" once was. Kira swayed, making no reply. For one paralyzing demisecond, Helva wondered if the girl had inadvertently opened the contact, if Kira were still no in the thrall of the powerful deathwish. Had Helva's Dylan protest pierced Kira's self-destructive trance with its mockery? Had Helva succeeded in jolting her "brawn" to sanity? The release word would be no mortal use if she did not have her mobile "brawn's" cooperation to immobolize the rogue. With slow steps Kira approached the bier and its ghastly occupant. The keening grew louder, the mumbling became articulated. "He has been taken. He Who Orders has been taken," chanted the #, and the crowd echoed the chant as readily as they had Helva's. "He is gone. Seber is gone." Again, not again, helpless! Helva cried, her mind overwhelmed by her hopelessness. Eerily another sound was superimposed over the #'s wail. "Now that dwarf presents a definite problem, Lia," the wowing, muffled words could barely be distinguished. "I wouldn't be surprised . " It was a man's voice, Helva realized, played back at a lagging speed which distorted the words into a yawing parody. The ship was broadcasting, had broadcasted this tape so often until Seber's tapped voice was as decayed as his corpse. Kira continued to sway in her graceful circumnavigation. "Speak, oh Seber, in singing tones that they servant, Kira, may hear the music of thy beloved voice," Kira crooned, making an obeisance to the column behind which lay the shell of the mad #. T T elva managed with superhuman effort to suppress the cry of intolerable relief at the cues Kira was feeding her. tight beam just as the #'s crooning broke off abruptly. Helva could almost feel the ship's held breath. Delay! Delay! Where was Cencom ! "Lia, the interference on my contact is incredible. Can't you clear up the relays? That dwarf is wreaking havoc..." Even Kira jumped involuntarily as Helva, deepening her voice to a baritone approximation of Seber's, adlibbed frantically. "Can't seem to read you clearly. Lia? Lia? You got wires crossed?" "Seber? Seber?" shrieked the rogue ship, her voice wild with incredulous hope. "I'm trapped. I'm trapped. I was thrown off course when the edge of the volcano blew. I tried to die." Kira was fumbling with the draperies at the bulkhead. Her escorts, roused from their euphoria as they sensed sacrilege, dove towards Kira. Her swift hand caught one on the voice box in a deadly hhop. She ducked under the other man, using her body to throw him against the bier so squarely that his head cracked ominously against the stone, and he slumped down. "KH, the release is na-thomte-ah-ro, watch the pitch!" And Helva, knowing she was in effect executing one of her own kind, broadcast the release word into the #. As the syllables with their pitched nuances Immortality is within your grasp. The Cryonics Society of New York Inc. is the leading non-profit organization in the field of cryogenic interment. This involves freezing people immediately after death, in the hope of restoring them to full life, health, and youth sometime in the future. We have a practical program of action, which enables the individual to commit himself to this idea in a meaningful fashion. For detailed information write -- Cryonics Society of New York, Inc., # Creston Avenue, Bx. New York #. HI activated the release of the access panel, Kira caught the plate, reached in deftly and threw th,e valve that would flood the inside of the shell with anaesthesia. "I can't see you, Seber. Where are... and the #'s despairing wail was stilled in longedfor death. Kira whirled, the panel clinking behind the concealing draperies as cowled figures lurched into the main cabin from the quarters behind. "Hold!" Helva commanded in Lia's voice. "He Who Orders has decided. Take the barefaced woman back to the ship. Such blasphemous seed is not for the chosen of Alioth." Kira, again trancelike, followed the dazed hoods back down the steps. "Helva, what in hell's name is happening there?" Cencom demanded within the #. "He has decided," the fanatical mob in the plaza groaned and swayed in the thrall of the hallucinogenic fumes. "Helva!" snapped Cencom. "Oh shut up all of you," snapped Helva, schizoidically. "He has ordered. That is Eternal Truth." She watched just long enough to be sure that the reeling, freak-drunk Aliothites would not interfere with Kira's return. How they could, Helva couldn't imagine, for they were dropping by the hundreds, exhausted by fumes and frenzy, "I demand to know why you have deliberately abbrogated specific restrictions in your journey tape regarding Dylanistic... " "Demand be Dylanized," Helva cut them off angrily. "The end justifies the means, and might I remind you that for some reason unknown forever to God and man, your list of clude Alioth as by the fingernails of thatGod they should have!" Cencom sputtered indignantly. "Control yourself," Helva suggested acidly. "I found your long-lost rogue, and I have killed her. And I have touched on the release therapy for your precious Kira of Canopus. What more do you want of one "brain" shell? Huh?" Cencom maintained silence for sixty stunned seconds. "Where is Kira?" Helva could swear Cencom sounded contrite. "She's all right," Helva muttered. "Put her on." "She's all right!" Helva repeated with weary emphasis. "She's on her way back from the Temple." The spaceport rocked under a multiple eruption north of the city just as the vehicle bearing Kira screeched to a halt at the lift. Helva unlocked the mechanism, and Kira lept on before the guards came to their senses. The ground danced under the ship's stabilizers, and as Kira dove from airlock to pilot's couch, Helva slammed the lock shut and precipitiously lifted from grim Alioth. IX I n the tail scanners they saw the guards retreating to safety as the gantry tumbled leisurely down. Bright jewels dotted the receding planet as it gave them a volcanic sendoff. "Scout Kira of the KH-# reporting," the slender girl said crisply to Cencom, shedding the cloak. Helva half-expected a shower of hairpins to follow but Kira remained tautly erect before the tight beam. She gave a terse report, demanding to know why traders had not reported the )resencc of Service-type contact buttons plainly visible on every Aliothite. And why, which was a far more criminal omission, the hallucinogenic gas eruptions had not been reported. "Hallucinogenic gas?" Cencorn echoed weakly. Such instances vere the nightmares of colonization, as entire populations could be subjected to illegal domination by such emissions, as indeed had happened on Alioth. "I recommended strongly that all traders dealing with Alioth in the last fifty years be questioned as to their motives in suppressing such information from Central Worlds. And discover who was the semi-intelligent CW representative who cleared this freak-off planet for colonization." Cencom was reduced to incoherent sputters. "Stop gargling," Kira suggested sweetly, "and order an allhaste planet therapy team here. You've got an entire society to reorient to the business of living. We'll file a comprehensive report from Nekkar, but now I've got to inspect our children. That was a rough takeoff. Over and out." And Kira closed the tight beam down. With a fluid motion she propelled herself to the kitchen, shaking her braids free and massaging her scalp with rough fingers. "My head is pounding!" she exclaimed, reaching for coffee. "That gas was unbelievably malodorous." She leaned wearily against the counter, her shoulders sagging in fatigue. Helva waited, knowing Kira was sorting her thoughts. "The closer I got to that temple, the deeper the terrible miasma of grief. It was almost visible, Helva," she said and then added scathingly, "and I wallowed in it. Until that Dylan of yours reached me, Helva." Her eyes widened respectfully. "The hair on the back of my neck stood up straight. That final chord got me, right here," she groaned, jabbing at her abdomen with a graphic fist. "Thom would have given strings from his guts to compose such a powerful Dylan." Her shoulders jerked in a violent muscle spasm. "That awful corpse!" She closed her eyes and shuddered, shaking her head sharply to rid herself of the effect. "I think..." she murmured, her eyes narrowing with selfappraisal, "I think I had done the same thing to Thom." "I think perhaps you had," Helva agreed softly. Kira sipped at her coffee, her face tired but alive, the mask of vivacity replaced by an inner calm. "I have been so stupid," she said with trenchant selfcontempt. "Not even Cencom is infallible," Helva drawled. Kira threw back her head in a whoop of laughter. "That's Eternal Truth!" she crowed, dancing back into the main cabin. TTelva watched this victory dance, immeasurably pleased with the outcome of the affair as far as Kira was concerned. She could not regret that she had had to kill one of her own peers. The Lia had died years before with her scout: that tortured remnant had peace at last, and so had Kira. She and Helva would continue together on their stork run, picking up the seeds from... Helva let out a yip of exultation, utterly astonished at the solution that had risen from her subconscious. Kira stared at her, startled. "What hit you?" "It's so ridiculously simple I can't imagine someone never suggested it to you. Or maybe they did, and you rejected it." "I'll never know unless you tell me what it is," Kira replied caustically. "One of the facets of your grief psychosis..." "I'm over it now," Kira interrupted Helva, eyes flashing angrily. "... Ha to that. One of the facets has been the lack of progeny from your seed and Thorn's? Right?" The scout's face turned stark!y white, but Helva plunged on. "Neither set of your parents was stupid enough to have igSo their seed is on file. Take some of your mother's and his father's and..." Kira's eyes widened, and her jaw dropped, her face lighting with incredible radiance. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Delicately she stretched out her hand, touching the access panel softly. Helva was ridiculously, embarassingly delighted at her acceptance of the idea. Then Kira drew her breath in sharply, her face concerned. "But for you... wouldn't you take your mother's and..." "No," Helva said sharply, then added more gently, "that won't be necessary." She knew in mind and heart now that the resolution of grief is highly individual: that both she and Kira had reached it by different means, just as Theoda had. Kira looked unaccountably stricken, as if she had no right to take the solution Helva offered if Helva did not, too. "After all," the ship chuckled, "there aren't many women," and Helva used the word proudNew books Sam Moskowitz An anthology of stories by the most influential authors of science fiction within the last four decades. Twentytwo stories are included, in chronological order, from Edward E. Smith's "The Vortex Blasters" to Philip Jose Farmer's "Mother." # Here are in-depth biographical and critical studies of the twenty-two major science fiction authors represented in Modern Masterpieces. A final chapter summarizes the work of new authors who may become the harbingers of tomorrow's science fiction literature. # vaumes at your bookstore now. Cleveland and New York ly, knowing that she had passed as surely from girlhood to woman's estate as any of her mobile sisters, "who give birth to # babies at one time." Kira dissolved into laughter, crowing with delight over Helva's analogy. She snatched up her guitar, strumming a loud introductory arpeggio. Then the two, ship and scout, surprised the sparkling stars with a swinging Schubert serenade as they sped towards Nekkar and deliverance. for your iriformation I f you have a bit of a radium compound and a sample of a beryllium compound in a glass tube something very interesting takes place, even though it cannot be seen directly. We now know that the disintegrating radium atoms disgorge alpha particles which, in turn, knock neutrons out of the beryllium atoms. Such a radium-beryllium tube, therefore, becomes a source of neutrons. The discovery that a mixture of radium and beryllium compounds emits a peculiar kind of "radiation" was made by several researchers in # or #. They all noticed that the "radiation" was capable of pushing protons out of substances rich in hydrogen, such as paraffin. But at first they could not explain just what was going on. The one who did explain it -- thereby becoming the discoverer of the neutron that had not been known to exist -- was Sir James Chadwick in #. Two years later Enrico Fermi and his co-workers in Italy began to use such radium-beryllium tubes to irradiate all kinds of elements with neutrons to see what would happen. When they got to uranium they observed peculiar effects that seemed to indicate the presence of radioactive atoms with an atomic weight higher than that of uranium, the heaviest element then known. The news that "trans-uranian" elements had been created, excited the "radioactive group", as they called themselves, the team of Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. They, too, began to irradiate uranium and thorium with neutrons from radium-beryllium tubes; and they, too, obtained "trans-uranian" elements which they named eka-osmium, ekairidium and eka-platinum. What all of them had really done was to split the uranium atom, but five years had to go by until they realized what had really happened. Why the long delay. Of course Otto Hahn, who finally did arrive at the truth, was the first to ask himself that question. The simple answer is that the uranium and thorium atoms behaved in a manner that was not only completely unexpected but also somewhat incredible. The next question vould be why this was an unexpected behavior, and the answer to that one is that the whole history of research had never given the faintest indication that anything like that might be in the future. f course the whole story be" gins with Dimitri Ivanovitch Mendeleyev in #. About # different chemical elements were known at the time, and Mende I am well acquainted with Otto Halm's thoughts because I have tust Itelshed translating his autobiography; it wHl be published by Charles Scribner's Seals In the Fall of # under the ttUe Otto Hahn, A Scientific Antobiography. La Ce Pr Nd Sm X Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb X Fig. #. A portion of the Periodic Table as it would have looked in # if the importance of the atomic number had been known then. leyev wondered whether they could be classified in some manner, just as animals and plants had been classified. When Mendeleyev thought about the problem, he did not know that this had been tried twice before (by the Frenchman Alexander Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois in # and by the Englishman John Alexander Newlands in #) ; nor did he know that the German Dr. Luther Meyer was engaged in the same task at the same time. Mendeleyev had two criteria 'in mind. One was the atomic weight, the other the number of valences of each element -- that is, the number of other atoms an atom can hold. Leaving out the lightest element, hydrogen, Mendeleyev began with lithium that can combine with one other atom. Beryllium came next. Its atom could combine with two other atoms. Then came boron that could combine with three other atoms and after that carbon that could combine with four others. Going along that way Mendeleyev found a series ofl-#-#-#-#-I valences, and the next set of elements repeated this series, which is the reason why we still speak of a "periodic" table. The periods after the first two sets of seven each were longer than seven links which did not worry him. What was worrisome was that the elements, when arranged in this manner, usually produced columns of elements with similar chemical characterAtnmie number Name Symbol Atomic Weight Name of Discoverer and Year of Discovery Lanthanum La # Mosander, Cerium Ce # Klaproth and Berzelius, Praseodymium Pr # Auer von Welsbach, Neodymium Nd # Auer von Welsbach, Promethium Pm #. Marinsky and Glendenin, Samarium Sm # de Boisbaudran, Europium Eu # Demarcay, Gadolinium Gd # Marignac, Terbium Tb # Mosander, Dysprosium Dy #I de Boisbaudran, Holmium Ho # Soret, Erbium Er # Mosander, Thulium Tm # Cleve, Ytterbium Yb # Marignac, Lutetium Lu # Urbain, istics. Usually, that is, but not all the time; and in #I Mendeleyev took the daring step of disregarding atomic weight in a few cases and of leaving gaps in his table. These gaps, he declared, represented elements still to be discovered; they were next to the known elements aluminum, boron and silicon; and Mendeleyev, using the Greek root eka (in the meaning "to the side of"), labelled the empty spaces ekaaluminum, eka-boron and ekasilicon. They were discovered quite soon. In # eka-aluminum became gallium, in # ekaboron became scandium and in # eka-silicon became germanium. After such a success in prediction nobody could doubt that Mendeleyev's Periodic Table was valid. But while all doubts about the validity of the system were ruled out, that did not mean that there were no trouble spots. In some places things did not fit well, which probably meant undiscovered elements. Then there was a cluster of elements that were collectively known as the "rare earth elements" (now referred to as the lanthanides after their first Fig. #. The six lightest atoms, from the more than ephemeraf muonium via hydrogen, double-weight hydrogen, triple-weight hydrogen, 'Might" helium to normal helium. representative, see Table I as a memory refresher) which were very similar to each other chemically and which also upset a neat and orderly arrangement no matter how one tried to fit them in. Finally there was the problem of a few new elements in the area of the heavyweights. In # Marie Sklodowska-Curie had found two new elements, polonium with an atomic weight of # and radium with an atomic weight of about #. While Mme. Curie is mainly known for the discovery of these two elements, she would be nearly as famous for other work, even if polonium and radium had been found by others. She proved that "Becquerel's rays" (discovered by Antoine Becquerel in #) were emitted by the uranium in the compounds he used and that thorium (discovered in # by Jons Jacob Berzelius) also emitted radiation. Finally it was Mme. Curie, who coined the term "radioactivity". '"T'he discoveries of the Curies ' prompted a large number of the new generation of scientists to go after radioactive substances. There was Bertram B. Boltwood (#-#) in America who discovered a new clement called "ionium". There was Friedrich Ernst Dorn in Germany (#-#) who showed in # that radium did not emit radiation only but also a gas that was entered into the Periodic Table as niton -- it formed the bottom of the column of noble gases helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon that had Ramsay during the last halfdecade of the nineteenth century. himself (#-#); there was Ernest Rutherford (#-#), a native of New Zealand working in Canada and ending his life as Lord Rutherford of Nelson (after his birthplace). There was Hans Geiger (#-#), who worked with Rutherford and whose name is attached to the most important single instrument in atomic research, and there was Otto Hahn (born #), who worked with both Rutherford and Ramsay. There was, somewhat later, Niels Bohr (#) of Denmark and Enrico Fermi (#-#) of Italy. There was, in addition to Ramsay, a large British contingent of which Frederick Soddy (#-#), Sir Joseph Thomson (#-#), Henry GwynJeffries Moseley (#-#) and Sir James Chadwick (born #) became the most famous. Before we go on it will be useful to look at Fig. #. It shows a section of the Periodic Table as it would have looked in # if the table had then been drawn with the principles now known to be important. Especially the bottom line is important. Four radioactive elements were known: radium, actinium, thorium and uranium. It was not quite clear then what their order should be, and it was suspected that there might be more. Then Boltwood contributed his "ionium". Otto Hahn began his career by discovering what he called "radio-thorium". At a later date he added an element he called "meso-thorium," and a little later he had to realize that he was dealing with two elements that were logically called meso thoriumI and mesothorium-#. Then he found one that he called uranium-X that proved to be quite a nuisance as far as experimentation wtih radioactive substances were concerned. In # Otto Hahn acquired an assistant by the name of Lise Meitner, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer in Vienna who found that academic circles in Berlin discriminated against her -- not because she was Jewish, but because she was a woman! Female scientists were not yet accepted, and the great Emil Fisdier told Hahn that he could have her as an assistant only if she promised to stay in their own laboratory and never to betray her presence to the (male) students of the university. Together they discovered Protactinium. In the meantime still other "elements" had put in an appearance: there was actinium-B and actinium-X, there was thorium-B, thorium-X and thoriumC. Rutherford began to suspect that atomic transformations seemed to be going on right under the eyes of the investigators, and Boltwood began to talk of a decay chain which probably ran from uranium via ionium and possibly thorium to radium and from there to lead. Of course this violated the fundamental rule of chemistry that elements are (a) independent and (b) unchangeable. Chemists who went after their own discoveries in their own fields began to make jokes about modern alchemists who tried to transmute metals,i. and they were openly indignant when Hahn and others could not show them "samples" of mesothorium-# or uranium-X. The fact that Hahn, in practically every publication, had to stress that he worked with quantities too small to be weighed shows how strange the new "radiochemistry" must have looked to "ordinary" chemists. A #I quibbling aside, the multi tude of radioactive elements posed a problem. Where did they fit into the Periodic Table? Mendeleyev's table had proved its worth for the non-radioactive elements. Therefore the radioactives had to fit into it somewhere. But by # nearly fifty such substances had been found. Even if you cut that number in half by assuming that many of them bore two different names because they had been discovered independently by different researchers and assuming further that a few mistakes had been made -- even two dozen recently discovered radioactive elements just could not be accommodated by the table. It was Frederick Soddy, in #, who found the answer. These radioactive elements all differed from each other as far as radiation was concerned. Some emitted one kind of rays and others another kind, and those that emitted the same kind differed in intensity. But many of them were alike in their chemical characteristics, and the Periodic Table dealt with chemical elements. Hence many of the radioactive elements belonged in the same place in the table. Greek for "same place" is eisos topos; the concept of isotopes had been born. And just at about the same time Henry Gwyn-Jeffries Moseley -- also a Rutherford pupil -- almost single-handedly revolutionized the table itself. He demonstrated that all elements behaved properly under Rb Sr Y Zr Nb MO To Ru Rh Pd Cs BQ Hf To W Re Os Ir Pt Fr Ra X X X X X --  -- Lq Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy HO Er Tm Yb Lu AC Th Pa U Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf E Fm Mv No Lw Fig. #. Some portion of the Periodic Table as in Fig. #. as it looks In #. X-ray analysis if one sorted them by the number of electric charges in their nuclei. The number of charges -- called "atomic number" . -- was the important thing; the atomic weight was secondary. Now the table acquired the form shown in Fig. #. There could not possibly be an element between actinium (# # ) and thorium (##) since one cannot have half a charge; but there was room for an unknown element between thorium and uranium (##). Element ##I was the protactinium of Hahn and Meitner. The recognition of the existence of isotopes and the arrangement by atomic number had not only saved Mendeleyev's table against the onslaught of the radioactives, it had greatly improved it. Now, knowing what to look for, one could think a little less gropingly about the structure of the atom. Rutherford had shown in the meantime that the "alpha particle" shot out by radium was actually the nucleus of a helium atom. It was also clear that the so-called beta rays were actually electrons. Rutherford, in a lecture to chemists who still looked at all this with a mixture of wonder and helplessness, made an interesting comparison. When an atom breaks down, he said, it is similar to firing a howitzer. The alpha particle is the shell; the smoke (still material but tenous by comparison) is represented by the electrons called beta rays; while the flash of light from the howitzer compares to the gamma rays which are true radiation and not particles. Now the idea of how an atom was constructed was this: the helium atom has the atomic number # which means that two electrons orbit the nucleus. The nucleus theh should consist of two positively charged protons. But the atomic weight of helium is #, hence there have to be four protons in the nucleus. But since the nucleus only has two unit charges there must also be two electrons in that nucleus, neutralizing two of the four protons. Of course one could raise all kinds of questions about this. But these seemed to be the observed facts, and the purpose of a theory is to explain the observed facts, not to doubt them. In #, as has been told. Sir James Chadwick discovered experimental facts which could only be explained by assuming the existence of a sub-atomic particle that was as massive as a proton but lacked an electric charge, a neutral particle to be named neutron. And Werner Heisenberg in Germany said immediately and apparently with a sigh of relief, that this would eliminate the electrons in the nucleus. The alpha particle would simply consist of two protons and two neutrons which would explain both the charge and the mass. In the same year "heavy hydrogen" (with mass #) was discovered, and interest shifted from the heaviest elements in the table to the lightest. rjig. # shows how, according to our knowledge of today, the six lightest isotopes are built. Ordinary helium has its two protons and two neutrons in the nucleus and is a stable element. But there is a helium isotope, called tralphium, with only one neutron in the nucleus. This is an unstable isotope, of mass #. Hydrogen also has an isotope of mass #, called tritium, with two neutrons and one proton. Like helium of mass # it is unstable, but hydrogen of mass # (deuterium) and ordinary hydrogen are stable. Below ordinary hydrogen one more "element" has been added recently. Its nucleus consist of a "muon" (also called mu-meson), and "muonium" might be considered an isotope of hydrogen. But since a muon lasts only is the shortest-lived of all the short-lived isotopes. All this was necessary as background for the answer to the question of why it took so long to recognize the fission of uranium for what it was. In # Rutherford had succeeded for the first time in actually transmuting an element by bombarding nitrogen atoms. Some of the atoms were struck by alpha particles, losing protons from their nuclei in the process. Assuming that the alpha particle itself was absorbed by the nucleus, the following had taken place: # N #  #He# , ##  iHi or, in words: a nitrogen nucleus of atomic number # and mass # had absorbed a helium nucleus (## of mass #), forming an oxygen nucleus (## of mass #) and a hydrogen nucleus. This very first successful experiment showed what could happen. The addition of an alpha particle would raise the atomic number of the new nucleus by #; the loss of an alpha particle would lower it by #. Of course the new nucleus might be imstable and shoot out a proton (lowering the atomic number by #) or else it might shoot out an electron (which means that one of the neutrons in the nucleus had changed into a proton) which would raise the atomic number by #. In short, all the changes that were observed in the course of time, and there were very many of them, changed the atomic number by I or by #, up or down in the table. If bombardment with alpha particles, and later with neutrons, had produced a new element, the researcher would look at the table in both directions for I or # numbers and then try chemical tests to see where the newly created isotope belonged. It was all perfectly clear. 'yhe new elements produced by the neutron bombardment of uranium therefore must have slid down two places, turning into isotopes of thorium, or, by continued decay, isotopes of radium. Or else they had moved up a place or two -- three at the very most -- and filled the spaces above ##; ## would then be eka-rhenium, ## ekaosmium and ## eka-iridium. Actually the uranium atom had broken into ## barium and ## krypton, forming several radioactive isotopes of each. Look at Fig. I again and you'll see that barium is located above radium, which means that they are chemically similar. Uranium fission produced radioactive isotopes with radium-barium characteristics; it was much easier to assume that the new radioactive Atomic number Name Symbol Atomic Weight Name of Discoverer and Year of Discovery Actinium Ac Debierne, Thorium Th # Berzelius, Protactinium Pa Hahn and Meitner, Uranium U # Klaproth, Neptunium Np McMillan and Abelson, Plutonium Pu Seaborg et al... Americium Am Seaborg et al... Curium Cm Seaborg et al., Berkelium Bk Seaborg et al... Californium Cf Seaborg et al., Einsteinium E Ghiorso et al... Fermium Pm Studier et al., Mendelevium Mv Ghiorso et al... Nobelium No Team at Berkeley, Lawrentlum Lw Ghiorso et al., isotopes were radium isotopes. But Hahn and Strassmann became doubtful. In a repiort published early in # they concluded with the words: "speaking as chemists we feel obliged to say that the new substances are not radium but barium." In another report, only a few months later, they definitely said that the new isotopes were barium, but still maintained that eka-rhenium, eka-osmium, etc. had been found. Actually they were isotopes of lanthanum and yttrium, which were not recognized because the chemical methods used were aimed at finding elements with characteristics similar to the platinum metals. American researchers who had far better facilities and were already armed with the knowledge that uranium broke down into medium-heavy elements also had a difficult time. They had produced element ## (neptunium) and ## (plutonium), and according to the rules neptunium should be chemically similar to rhenium and plutonium to osmium. They were not -- and the problem was cleared up only after the second world war. Somebody might have guessed the truth, but I don't know who did it first. Element ## (actinium) is located on the table below ## (lanthanum), and lanthanum starts the strange series of the rare elements. Actinium, we know, starts a similar series; the elements from # to # (see Table II and Fig. #) are now collectively called the actinides, and the tables resumed with the still undiscovered element ##. As Fig. # show.s, element Poul Anderson is an editor's delight -- always reliable, always inventive, always great fun to read. Unfortunately for all of us, the rascal took a large part of last year off to wander around Europe, to the detriment of all our inventories. With pleasure, though, we welcome him back in the next issue. The cover is from his story, which is entitled Door to Anywhere -- and that's what it is: a door to any place in the universe... which unfortunately kills the people who pass through! Hayden Howard brings us another Esk story. The Modern Penitentiary. Willy Ley's column deals with the sound of meteorites. There'll be a novelette by Larry Niven called At the Bottom of a Hole -- a gravity hole, that is; namely the surface of a planet -- plus Algis Budys's book reviews and whatever else we can squeeze into what still remains the most pages of any science-fiction magazine in the world... ## should be chemically similar to ##, hafnium, element ## should be similar to ##, tantalum, and so forth. Of course it is not to be expected that any of the elements beyond the actinides will be stable. But it can he hoped that they will have isotopes that last long enough for an investigation of their chemical characteristics. And if ## then turns out to be similar to ## and ## similar to ##, Mendeleyev's table will have passed its final test. Too Many Esks Dr. West's main purpose in life was to save the Earth from an invasion no one else suspected! I ringing above the opened  ' harbor-ice, the immense flock of male sandpipers crowded down on the thawing tundra. With menacing squeaks, the fragile sandpipers hopped at each other. Flurrying wings, they battled for nesting territories close to the tiny pond. Too many sandpipers? Dr. Joe West rested beside his heavy pack and tried to force his thoughts ahead to the Arctic harbor, where the ragged tents were crowding. A squeaking sandpiper fled past his boot. Dr. West's imagination recoiled from the harbor. He stared into the tiny pond, where wriggling swarms of mosquito larvae already were pupating. Already there was a bloody whine behind Dr. West's ear. He slapped the back of his neck. "Dammit, I don't want to end up like a criminal;" Through the mosquitos, he focused his binoculars against the bleak natural harbor. "I don't want to be a martyr." The distant' growling of the tractor-truck trundling food cases out of the beached L.S.T. was punctuated by a gun shot. Probably some bearded amateur humanitarian shooting at a seagull! Dr. West glared through his binoculars at the flamboyant amateur lettering across the hull of the chartered land"No matter how many you feed there'll be more." Dr. West shook his head in a haze of mosquitos and refocused his binoculars at the tent-city rimming the harbor like dirty snow. With its explosive rate of growth, the tents would spread all the way inland to this pond before -- Dr. West blinked. His nervous system tingled from surfacing childhood guilt as he recognized through the binoculars, magnified and in compressed perspective beside a distant plywood cabin, the uniformed man, Mountie -- Police Inspector -- Canadian policeman -- cop, cop, cop! n the surface. Dr. West knew the problem was how to distribute the aerosol spray cans to the Esks without being traced. The depths of his problem were more disturbing. He had landed his float plane on LaRue Lake, the long pond located an hour's hike inland across the boggy tundra. No secrecy there. Two seaplanes and an amphibian already were tied up like spiders as if their pilots expected wind. Evidently the lake was safer than the exposed harbor. A grinning Esk had peered out of a single tent, probably a guard for the planes. Many muddy boot prints converged on deeper tracks, a trail left by all the airborne whitemen who had hurried to inspect the multiplying Esks. Through his binoculars. Dr. West studied the cop -- the Mountie walking away from the plywood cabin and its tall radio mast. Striding past stacked supply crates, the Mountie went down the beach . toward the bearded characters lolling in front of the L.S.T. Liked a beached whale, the landing ship vomited the tractor-truck with another load of food cases. Up to the tents of the Esks, no one seemed to be guarding the supplies. Perhaps during the past winter the R. C. M. P. had discovered that the Esks were more obedient, less tempted to thievery even than Eskimos. Dr. West frowned. Hordes of Esk children were romping around the boxes. Dr. West could not see any guards. He put away his binoculars. Glancing at the vast Arctic sky, he hoisted his pack, heavy with the disguised containers of aerosol spray. He plodded straight into the village. Concealment was impossible anyway. While the children scampered around him. Dr. West walked stiffly to meet the Mountie, who was striding up from the beach, in a swarm of mosquitos. "Sir, I recognize... you are Dr. Joseph West." The Mountie managed to seem glad to see him. "As you predicted, sir, we've a rapidly growing community." The Mountie had a warm handshake. "It is... it is an honor, sir, to meet you. Sir, I've always considered you as the... the discoverer of these -- people. A pleasure to meet you. Why don't we continue on to my cabin. Your flight, walking from the lake, you must be tired and hungry, sir." He reached to relieve Dr. West of the weight of his pack. "Thank you," Dr. West muttered with embarrassment, allowing the Mountie to take the surprisingly heavy pack. For the moment, the Mountie was too courteous to ask if he had a Landing Permit. No doubt the politician, LaRue, had warned the R. C. M. P. to be on the lookout for Dr. West. Inside the cabin, mosquitos hummed across plywood walls lined with books, stereo components and photosatellite maps of the Boothia Peninsula. Evidently the Mountie expected a permanent assignment here. "Here's my Landing Permit." Dr. West handed it over with a belligerent smile. "Surprised?" "No, sir. Headquarters radioed me to be expecting your aircraft." The Mountie acted like a solid type who would not expose his surprise, even if a little green man from Uranus four-lettered on his R. C. M. P. hat. During tea and mosquitos. Dr. West opened his heavy pack. He lifted out a tape recorder, a strobe light with the largest size battery pack and a bulky battery-operated #mm movie camera. Due to efficient forethought, all this equipment used the same size cylindrical interchangeable batteries. None of the equipment would work, because each battery enclosed and concealed an aerosol spray can. Dr. West glanced from the tape recorder to the Mountie's mildly interested expression. "I'm looking for Eevvaalik," Dr. West announced, and the Mountie's eyelids flickered. I t was Dr. West who had been surprised whenhis application for a Landing Permit finally was granted. The Esks had become a political football, and footballs bounce both ways. A year ago. Cultural Sanctuary guards would have kept Dr. West out, but -- In the Canadian Parliament, after listening to impassioned attacks by members of LaRue's party against the Whole Cultural Sanctuary Commission concept and its incapability of caring for the exploding Esk population, the M.P.'s had refused to pass the annual appropriation for the Boothia Peninsula Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary. When carry-over funds were exhausted, the Sanctuary Guards had to be withdrawn, and smiling politicians. Life photographers, amazed gynecologists and disturbed Family Allowance administrators had landed on LaRue Lake and plodded across the tundra to gawk at the Esks. The Canadian government's Family Planning nurses already had reported that the Esks showed discouragingly negative attitudes toward customary birth control techniques. When the rumor reached Ottawa that Family Planning nurses were injecting Esk women with a six-month ovulation-delay hormone and assuring the women it was a flu shot, there was more outraged oratory from old Etienne LaRue in Parliament. The nurses were withdrawn. Landing Permits were limited. Dr. West's application was not answered. Ignored rather than specifically denied by some cautious clerk. Dr. West had suspected the bureaucrats still were holding their fingers up to test the winds of change. Dr. West's past reputation in population control research for the U. S. Defense Department was enough for LaRue to demand he be kept out. In Canada, from one side blew the dinosaur's breath of old Etienne LaRue, opposing any population limitation for the Esks or anyone else. Whether the Esks might vote for his party was unimportant, he said. On the other side were increasingly disquieted bureaucrats and politicians responsible for the food, clothing and wellbeing of the rapidly increasing Esks. Unless something sensible were done, taxes would have to increase. Eventually, addressed to Dr. West, a Landing Permit was issued with an illegible signature. Some bureaucrat hoped to remain anonymous. "You're quite lucky, sir," the Mountie was saying, "to locate her. Eevvaalik was brought to this camp two weeks ago. Our doctor tells me she is quite ill, T.B." The thought flashed through Dr. West's mind, when he fled from the Boothia Peninsula, he must take Eevvaalik with him. Kidnapping? Last winter, Eevvaalik refused to go. Now would she harshly scream and fight and cough? This might be his last chance. In California, he could get professional help in interrogating her. Depth hypnosis aided by pentathol injections might expose what Eevvaalik claimed she could not bear to remember. Unreasonably, sometimes she claimed all the Esks were her children. What had created the first Esk? Locked in her greasy head -- II CC"This way, sir." As the Mountie led him through the aimless crowds of grinning Esks toward Eevvaalik's tent. Dr. West knew he ought to add kidnapping to his crimes. He was already suspected of it. The day before he took off from California, an inside page of the San Francisco Chronicle had carried excerpts from Etienne LaRue's latest speech in Montreal. As an addendum to florid attacks upon Canada's birthcontrol clinics, public schools, and parking problem, Etienne LaRue demanded to know why the government had not investigated the kidnapping last winter of an Eskimo, a certain Marthalik, now reported to be held against her will in California. ly with Dr. West to California. She was an Esk, not an Eskimo. The only one of her uncounted children Dr. West had brought with her might be his son. Not yet three years old, the smiling boy already managed understandable English. Terrifyingly, he was as large and agile and mature as a #-year-old boy, or any other #-year-old Esk. "In this tent," the Mountie was saying. "Eevvaalik?" The tents were Canadian Army surplus and looked it. Eevvaalik crouched in the dim corner beside her hollowed stone seal-oil lamp, empty. Dr. West unslung his heavy pack. "Eh-eh," she laughed, immediately recognizing him. "It is The-Whiteman-Who-Was-Bitten-By-A-Dog." Coughing, she gasped: "Tell this person of her husband." "Peterluk has much to eat. He has a warm place to sleep," Dr. West answered. "The Government would not let me go in to see him." "A good place," Eevvaalik said hopefully. "This person wishes to be there also." Silently, the Mountie left the tent. Mosquitos whined. Dr. West smiled at Eevvaalik as he knelt beside her and felt lier pulse. In a way he was sorry that her weakness had drained away her crusty ind(iendence. Probably she was the only real Eskimo in the camp. "Y ou would like it in Ottawa," he said, meaning California, beginning to think she would go with him to the plane with no trouble at all. "Eh-eh," she laughed. "What is this warm prison called?" "The New Ottawa Reformation Center. They say each person has his own igloo in the tower." Dr. West laid his hand on her brow, wishing he had brought a thermometer. "Peterluk needs a woman," Eevvaalik laughed. "This person will be stronger soon." She slapped her bony chest. "This pTson can still do it with Peterluk the way he likes." She managed a feeble leer at Dr. West. "So you take this person to her husband." "Soon-soon," Dr. West sighed, regretting he had not even brought a sleeping injection from his medical bag which now seemed so far away in the plane on LaRue Lake. Ignoring the mosquitos, leather-skinned old Eevvaalik slept. "This tent seemed the only ' place where Dr. West could escape the thousand eyes. Swiftly, he opened the back of the tape recorder, took out the batteries. Prying off the top of a cylindrical battery, he removed a small, orange aerosol can With his heavy-bladed hunting knife he dug hard-packed filth-clotted gravel from the floor of the tent. He refilled the battery with gravel. Jamming on the top, he fitted the battery back into the tape recorder. By the time he had operated on all the batteries in the tape recorder, in the battery pack for the strobe light and in the battery-powered camera, he had # aerosol cans labelled He was sweating with haste and fright as he removed the rigidity boards from the square pack, dovetailed the boards together and opened the little packageof box nails. He hammered the box together using the butt of his hunting knife. The outside of the box was likely looking invoice number. If he had planned all of this sooner, if he had made the terrible decision earlier. Dr. West thought, he might have planted this box in the freight car to Churchill on Hudson Bay or in the L.S.T. when it was being loaded. He might have avoided this risk. But here he was. No excuse, even now, ahead of the Government's plan to resettle the Esks, he might have been able to place these terrible cans in the next food shipment and never come to the Boothia Peninsula. But here he was. "What makes me do these things?" It was as dim outside as it would ever be. The crazy orange sun was looping down to the horizon and would rise without setting.' Dr. West withdrew his head into the tent. Leaving the photographic equipment on the gravel floor, he fitted the wooden box containing the aerosol cans into his pack. Their spray would not kill mosquitos. When he tried to walk past hordes of playing children, they followed him. Like Eskimo children they didn't keep regular sleeping hours. Here it was midnight. They ran ahead of him toward a stack of unopened #. Children swarmed ahead of him onto the crates, giggling. Little girls hummed and flapped their skinny arms. My iod, I can't really do it, Dr. West thought. Let the Canadian government do it. They've got to, eventually. But most Canadian economists insisted the country was underpopulated. He thought of China, India -- still increasing. More disillusioning, in the U.S. during #-# when use spread the birth-rate had started down. Then the Pentagon had become frantic because the future supply of scientists and soldiers was diminishing in comparison with unfriendly countries whose birth rates remained high. U. S. economists became disturbed because production was geared to a population growth rate of about # per year, and this slump to a # population increase might be leading toward a recession. Increased space spending and accelerated pump priming were not taking up the slack. There would not be enough future consumers, unless, as one of the less inhibited tele-commentators put it: "The opinion media embark on a massive educational program of mother-priming." Four children became the minimum family size in advertisements. Income tax deductions were raised to # for the first child, another # for the second, an additional # for the third and on up. Publicity was given to patriotically large families. New excise taxes increased the costs of birth-control pills. The population growth rate increased to more than #. In defiance of a vast array of birth-control methods available in the richest country in the world, the U.S. population was now increasing at # per tion would double in # years. This rate increase was tortoise-slow compared with the Esks. #Chat got for us?" The ' 'roundly innocent face of an Esk boy peeked over the supply crates close to Dr. West, and the suddenly grinning boy opened his little hands; he was a clown. "Nothing. Everything." Dr. West answered. Laughing, all the children began jabbering at once. Their modern Eskimo dialect seemed cruder, clumsier than Dr. West remembered from a year ago. With only other Esks as their models for growing up so quickly, would each generation be simpler, more crudely hewn than the last? Dr. West asked if any of them could read. He pointed to the marks on the boxes. None of the children grasped what he meant. They didn't know about reading. Dr. West thought they would not have time to learn. They would be adults and breeding by the time they were # years old. Could they learn to read? How long would they live? No one knew yet. Some of the first generations # years ago had shown a slight grasp of abstractions. Was this a declining ability? Those first Esks had two real Eskimos, Peterluk and Eewaalik, as models. Now these children saw only other inexperienced Esks as their models for growing up. "Do you hunt walrus?" Dr. West asked. "Play at hunting walrus? Harpoon? Seal?" "Wal-rus?" Already these #year-old and #-year-old children, who looked like #yearolds, didn't know what walrus were. Due to the outspreading population pressure around this harbor where the supplies were landed, Esk children might not even see a seal. A little girl climbed onto Dr. West's lap. "Tell me of our grandfather in the sky." "Once there was a great white bear who looked down from the stars," Dr. West began, but since he last was on the Boothia Peninsula the myth must have been crystallized in a new order, because the children giggled and began telling him the story. "That star. That star." They were pointing, but in the sunfaded Arctic night the star was invisible to Dr. West. "That star flying to this place closer all the time," the boy explained patiently. "That is how we began. Grandfather bear send part of himself ahead. He say be fruitful and multiply and prepare this place for me." "What does fruitful mean?" Dr. West asked. "Multiply?" "Don't know yet," the boy answered solemnly. "But -- when we have covered the world. Grandfather bear will come. And once again all of us will become one. It will feel so good." The children giggled and laughed and clapped their hands, echoing: "Will feel so good." Ill L ike children everywhere, their attention was shifting. They lost interest in Dr. West and ran away to play. Dr. West listened to their shrill voices in the distance, while he removed the wooden box of aerosol spray cans from his pack and left it among the bigger wooden crates. He walked away, his heart beating faster instead of slower. What are you doing? Dr. West's young-old face twisted as if a spear was probing his heart. I'm doing what has to he done now. What can't be done after the Esks have spread through the Canadian population. But do you know what you are doing? Dr. West blindly hurried away, thinking of Marthalik's gently smiling face across the breakfast table in California. Anxious to please him, she had repeated that she was glad not to be bothered with a baby: "I dream about many babies. Something -- Grandfather Bear from the sky? Silly dream." Like the waxing moon her restlessness returned each month, and she cried out in her sleep; but to him she laughed with anbarrassment: "Eh-eh, it feels strange not to have a baby every month. Feels strange not to accomplish anything." At the start of the experiment, Dr. West had sat with his arms around her, both of them inhaling the bacterial endospores. In # hours Marthalik had run a temperature of # degrees; his temperature had been #. For a few days she mentioned vague internal itchings. Then her obvious symptoms vanished. She had "recovered." But each childless month her restlessness returned more forcibly. Now in her dreams, which she would or could not describe, she shouted -- in anger? At him? Do you know what you are doing to these people psychologically? Dr. West pushed into Eevvaalik's tent and shoved his photographic equipment into his pack. I can't even predict all their physical reactions to this pathogen. He winced at the thought of children playing with the orange cans. Endospores of the bacteria were "sleeping" in these aeroteria had been repeatedly tested on chimps and humans while he was Director of Oriental Population Problems Research at the University of California. A mildly virulent strain, but bred to be resistant to the range of antibiotics available in certain nations, their infection tended to cause a swelling of the Fallopian tubes. In four to five years some of the original test women in California began having babies again, although timewise more widely spaced. Here was the potentiality for controlling the population growth of other nations, secretly, unilaterally. The research had been funded by a Defense Department grant. By the time the young, contributing scientists discovered their first gray hairs, their enthusiasm had faded. Dr. West was particularly susceptible to guilt feelings. After he jockeyed into the Director's job. Dr. West diverted bacterial research to a characteristic not in the Pentagon's original specifications. It was a limiting, time-space characteristic which was a triumph of bacterial genetics. The bacteria were genetically altered until they exhibited consistently selfattenuating virulency. Self-attenuating, like the ripples from a stone dropped into a pond, as the bacterial infection spread outward through the population its virulency would spread outward to nothing. It could not infect the world. From a single source, it could not even engulf a small country. This had disappointed the Pentagon, as Dr. West bitterly recalled. The Defense Department reduced several of its financial grants to the University, a warning slash on the wrist. The University's lifeblood was government-financed research, so it became vital that Dr. Joseph West should resign as Director of Oriental Population Problems Research. X  rith a little "pencil-andcan-of-beans" research grant. Dr. West had returned to Arctic endocrinology. Camping with what he thought were Eskimos, he felt secretly relieved to be out as Director. Trying to act like an organization man had been raising hell with his blood pressure. But these Eskimos didn't act like the Eskimos he remembered from his previous trips to the Arctic. Slowly like a blind man, he clumsily "saw" that they were not. Then Marthalik, the girl he had been sleeping with, swelled up an gave birth within a month. A month? When he had returned to California with Marthalik, the men in population research thought his report was a practical joke -- until Marthalik gave birth at monthly intervals. Then he got professional cooperation. Marthalik was the only Esk on whom the population-limiting bacteria had been tested. A time-threat appeared. Dr. West had to act quickly, when he learned the Canadian Government was preparing to resettle the Esks throughout the North. From a scientific point of view he knew he had acted too quickly, insanely. One Esk was not a valid sample. All members of a species will not react the same way to a new disease. In his mind, on a graph, a bell-shaped curve confronted him. Individual reactions tend to group along a bellshaped curve. On the lip of the "bell" a few have surprisingly slight reactions to a disease. The great majority of people along the hump of the curve have the typical illness. A few down the other side of the bell-curve suffer violent reactions. Dr. West's face tightened like a death mask. If the virulent side of the bell graph had a cut-off appearance with a population line rising straight up from maximum virulency, the researcher would be looking at an abstract line of corpses. "God, forgive me!" Dr. West couldn't know where Marthalik's mild reaction would fit on a bellshaped curve of the entire infected Esk population.  tell you  had to act now before these people sdattered. Dr. West wondered if he had spoken out loud. "We will go now," Dr. West said quietly, and he knelt beside Eevvaalik and began to help her up. "Eh-eh, this person stand by herself." Eevvaalik swayed while he supported her arm, and as she shuffled across the tent floor she was temporarily halted by a paroxysm of coughing, and then she continued on out into the garish Arctic day-night under her own power. "Eh-eh, big sky." Her legs sagged, and Dr. West supported her while the mosquitos whined. D r. West knew he was going to need strong help to carry Eewaalik all the way across the tundra to his plane. He hoped the Mountie was asleep. Quietly, Dr. West drafted four Esks. Unquestioningly they tried to obey him. Finally, two of the Esks understood -- observed from him how to form a carrying-chair of their interlocked hands for Eewaalik. The other two Esks wandered along behind. Dr. West was beginning to think he would get away with Eewaalik. The Mountie blundered toward them, his hair still rumpled with sleep, his eyes blinking in the weak midnight sunglow. Dr. West realized that an Esk must have been instructed to watch constantly, and the Esk had run to awaken the Mountie. "Sir, if she is so ill," the Mountie mumbled, "you'd best take her to my cabin." He added apologetically: "Our doctor isn't here. Gone to Walrus Point Encampment two sleeps ago. Put her in my cabin. I'll send a boy for our doctor's reserve kit, if you want to give her something." Dr. West started to speak and couldn't. It was now or never. The Mountie blinked at the pair of Esks. "You, you, walk slow. Carry old woman to big cabin." "Eh? Not old," Eewaalik protested faintly as they carried her off and away from Dr. West. "Sir, you'll want some tea." The Mountie's hand closed on Dr. West's arm and steered him toward the cabin. It was as if the Mountie knew how Marthalik had been removed to California and didn't intend to let Dr. West fly off with Eewaalik as well. Dr. West felt suddenly old. As he v.?a!ked, he resisted the urge to glance toward the stack of crates. Had the Esk spy witnessed him hiding the box of spray cans and thought to teU the Mountie of the little box the Whiteman had left among the crates? "You, you put her on the floor. Over there by stove," the Mountie was ordering the Esks as they went into the cabin. To Dr. West the Mountie smiled wanly. "I'm not afraid of a little T.B." "Eevvaalik's was an arrested case of T.B.," Dr. West said. "What was the doctor -- how was the doctor treating her?" "Don't know, sir. I thought antibiotics cured that sort of thing nowadays, but -- are the germs, sir, getting ahead of us? I'd thought she was better." "Have you seen T.B. among the Esks?" It was a rhetorical question. Dr. West was nerving himself to walk defiantly out of the cabin and hike to his plane. "None, sir. Esks all seem sound as Canadian dollars," the Mountie laughed wearily. "Healthier than the rest of us." "And multiplying a hell of a lot faster," Dr. West blurted, realizing he was going to stay and see it out to the end no matter what happened. "One chap had a crate fall on his foot today, sir. Bloody mess. He's not complaining of much pain, but Esks don't," the Mountie's sleepy voice rambled on. "Bloody mess. Sir, since the doctor may not be back for days, I was hoping you'd have a look at this injured Esk, Not now, sir. After you've slept. Dr. West knew the Mountie didn't intend for him to leave. He was the mouse. Was the Mountie the cat? He sat down on the corner bunk. Swirling with # hours of e.-hau.stion. Dr. West slept among the whirling mosquitos. IV rhen Dr. West awoke, there ' ' was an intermittent hissing noise within the cabin. He opened his eyes and watched the Mountie moving around in the cabin with one arm upraised, waving a little orange can. A masking odor of artificial pine trees drifted down upon Dr. West's face. Breathing quickly. Dr. West raised himself on one elbow. The Mountie lowered the orange-colored aerosol spray can. "You've had a good sleep, sir. Canned bacon for breakfast, sir?" Dr. West couldn't open his mouth to answer. His contracting stomach was about to crawl out of his mouth as he watched the Mountie using the Mosquito Spray. "Any time I wake up," the Mountie's voice chatted on, "I call that meal my breakfast. I miss not having fried seal liver. This spray must be the slowacting kind. Ah, see that mosquito! Still circling around like a Skua. Skua's a fierce gull. Nearest thing we have to a vulture. Sir, do you want your eggs sunny-side up? Those bearded chaps from New York may think themselves better than uniformed men, but the girl, skinny little thing -- she's the cook in their landing ship, made me a present of these dozen eggs. A uniform always appeals to the women, sir. Never fails. Made me a present of this strawberry jam. How many pieces of bacon will you be having, sir?" He sprayed near the frying pan. The overpowering odor of frying bacon whirled around as Dr. West blundered outside and threw up before an interested audience of young Esks. They were impressed by his dry heaves for a few moments. Then, giggling, a boy chased a girl through the crowd, spraying her face with the mist from an orange can. She was inhaling a spores. When Dr. West went back into the bacon-reeking cabin, the mosquitos were whining unabated. The spray was harmless to mosquitos. Eewaalik was awake. Squatting in the corner, she was devouring Dr. West's unfinished breakfast. "Here, sir, a good cup of tea will swish out the stomach, I always say." The Mountie cheerfully waved his hand at a mosquito. "When you feel fit, I hope you'll take a look at the Esk with the crushed foot." The mountie evidently intended to keep Dr. West as long as he could. Dr. West knew the Mountie had been in communication with his superiors by radio. Were they belatedly checking out the "kidnapping" of Marthalik? That might necessitate telephone calls to authorities in California. Reputedly the R. C. M. P. were sticklers as to legal procedure, careful as to the rights of a suspect. '"This Mountie might think Dr. West was attempting to make off with Eewaalik, but proof to a judge would be difficult if Dr. West denied that intent. Temporary impasse -- After inspecting the crushed foot of the grinning Esk, Dr. West told the Mountie he wanted to walk to his plane to get his medical bag. Instead, the Mountie sent an Esk to get it. In that irritating moment. Dr. West hoped this damned, smug Mountie would be susceptible to the endospores from the aerosol can. In males the infection sometimes produced uncomfortable and embarrassing symptoms like prostatitus. In # hours he would know -- I n # hours the Mountie appeared crestfallen. Presumably his latest radio conversation indicated the R. C. M. P. had not yet convinced a judge that a crime had been committed. No warrant had been issued. Dr. West felt like telling the Mountie to go to hell. He felt like walking off to his plane without looking back. He might get away with it. "Sir, there's a woman having a bit of trouble giving birth." With so many Esks around all day, the Mountie produced one inescapable case after another for Dr. West. "Serves her right for having one every month!" "I know you don't mean that, sir. She's a mother." "Of course she's a supermother." "Sir?" "She'll produce so many children that your children won't have room to sit down." "I'm a bachelor, sir." "You're a human being. You'll be one of an inundated species." "Sir, are you talking about birth control? We were warn -- An # Tway it doesn't seem to do any good. The Family Planning nurses said the Esk women "And just what did the nurses do to prevent it?" To this question the Mountie colored with embarrassment. "This and that, sir. Pills and all. When they found out what the pills were for, the Esk women threw the pills away." "There are other female methods than pills." "I'm a bachelor, sir. I -- not instructed in the R. C. M. P." "Like diaphragms?" Dr. West continued maliciously at this Victorian-Uniformed Mountie. "Diaphragms," Dr. West repeated. "I suppose those wouldn't be practical if the women resisted. And intrauterine devices, little curlycues of plastic or stainless steel. Even with cooperative women there is a # expulsion rate. Did the nurses try hormone injections on the Esk women? Technically, science is equipped to control births in any number of ways. Some hormone injections prevent ovulation for six months. Didn't they try injections?" "Sir, now these Esk women won't even let the doctor hypo them for blood tests, or measles preventative shots, or -- " "You mean some fool told them what the birth control injections were for?" V "Sir, you can't inject people against their vill." The Mountie's face was sweating. "You can't just seize people and inject them from having babies. Our whole Canadian democratic system  -- " The Mountie sat down red-faced. "Let me take your temperature," said Dr. West. "I'm all right, sir. I'm never ill." The Mountie's temperature was already #, and there was no way to know how much higher it would rise. "I'm all right, sir. Do you think an outsider has brought in the flu? Those bearded types in the L.S.T., they do a lot of coughing. I've eaten several meals with them. I'm never ill, sir, but I'm concerned about our Eskimos." The Mountie peered out the door. "They used to be quite susceptible, sir. Back in # we had severe influenza which started in Baffinland. We tried to quarantine. We watched it spread on he map..." "I'll go out," Dr. West said, cautiously. The Mountie opened his mouth as if to protest. Whether from concern that Dr. West also might be a flu carrier or that Dr. West might make an unauthorized departure, the Mountie did not say. D r. West observed some of the children were sitting rather than racing around. When he dipped his thermometer in the alcohol tube, women squeaked with fright and edged away. Apparently the women were afraid he was preparing to inject them with a new kind of no-baby needle. This was confirmed by the laughter of the men. Children were giggling. After much instruction and demonstration to ensure they did not bite off the thermometer, Dr. West began taking the children's temperatures. Most of this small group were running temperatures of # to #. The  Mountie appeared behind him, breathing hard and keeping away from the Esks. Mosquitos clustered on his blotchy face. "Sir, do you think --  I think I shall order an immediate quarantine of this village." From a distance, the Mountie told certain men to carry his words through the village, guards should be appointed and so forth. While Esks might be more obedient than Eskimos, as the day dragged on Dr. West observed several groups departing. The guards protested, gestured, tried to explain. But Esks never use force. The Esks accepted life as cheerfully and non-combatively as if it were a dream soon to be ended. Soon guards and departees all were laughing. The guards waved goodbye. The departees trudged north along the coast toward one of the smaller camps. They had no sleds, no dogs. The Esks bred so much faster, that the dogs had become a rare minority, mainly eaten. Most of the accessible seals had been killed. The younger Esks wore only war-surplus khaki. When winter returned, Dr. West thought, there would be misery and death. The miseries predicted for the world by Malthus: "the constant tendency of all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it" would be demonstrated upon the Esks as if in a speeded-up movie of the next # years of the human population explosion. Soon. Dr. West knew the Esk population would not achieve starvation-balance with its harsh Arctic environment because humanitarians would continue to send in food -- to fuel new babies. The Esks would spread south. "At the least, this epidemic will slow the birth-rate," Dr. West muttered in self-justification, "and give the Canadian government time to formulate a policy, before the Western Hemisphere is overrun." He realized he was talking to himself again and closed his mouth. Western Hemisphere overrun sounded -- ridiculous. At least this epidemic will demonstrate, tor the first time on a large group, what planned population control can 'accomplish. "Quickly, cheaply, almost humanely -- " By the next day. Dr. West's confidence was shaken. Most of the Esks showed symptoms of the disease, but mild symptoms on the bell-shaped curve. Marthalik's must have been a severe case. A few Esks showed temperatures of as much as #. Unfortunately, Esks were more resistant than humans. Not only were they completely immune to T.B., they were only mildly affected by this population control disease. I t was the Mountie who was sick. His temperature had risen to # degrees. Dr. West discovered the bearded humanitarians in the of over #I to #. The two Life photographers were confined to their tent. The blearyeyed Mountie radioed for airborne medical help. Dr. West stared down at old Eewaalik shivering in the blankets of what had been Dr. West's bed. Her temperature was approaohing # degrees. He lost his nerve and began to cool her with damp rags. He forced aspirin between her dry lips. She whined at the bitter taste. "Let this -- person," she protested, " -- find happiness. Do not... do things. No. Eh-eh." She laughed or coughed. "You not sick -- don't know." He tried to force another aspirin. "Pah!" she spat it back. "You don't know." Unexpectedly, she said: "You don't even know -- this person is the mother of everybodyEh-eh." "Yes, I know that." Dr. West knelt beside her. He glanced at the tape recorder, but the batteries were filled with gravel. "I know you are the mother. Who is the father? What did he look like?" "Terrible, this person feels terrible," Eewaalik moaned. "This person, eh-eh, won't remember until you make her feel so good." Even now, was she still teasing him, holding back her knowledge for some last advantage? Dr. West did not know. Eewaalik was prattling about her youth, when she was a young girl. "Eh-eh, in those days, few Itmuit (Eskimos), many seals. This person asleep with full belly." "Want to sleep," she cried out in sudden anguish, "Help me! Want to sleep." By contrast, the Mountie kept getting out of bed. He staggered between the window and the radio closet, where his twoway radio equipment was housed. "Sir, until the medical plane gets here, and it never will, what with fog and carburetor difficulties and false promises, sir, we've got to do something for these people." "They're not as sick as you are." "Sir, the old woman looks like she's dying." "Not likely," Dr. West answered with more confidence than he felt. "She -- and you are the two with the highest temperatures." "I'm responsible for all these people, sir. I should have kept this disease from spreading. The operator at Seal Camp says the fever has already reached there. Says some of my people arrived there yesterday. Why don't you do something, you're a doctor, or were a doctor." The Mountie staggered back to the radio closet without waiting for a reply. Dr. West bent over the fitfully sleeping Eevvaalik. He had started both Eevvaalik and the Mountie on a course of terramycin capsules, to keep down any secondary bacterial infections. Against the bacteria now spreading its poison through the narrow tube-structures of their bodies there was a specific anti-botic, but he did not have it. It would not have been available to him without a risky theft from one of the guarded laboratories in California. It was a classified military secret, as were the bacteria in the spray cans. Dr. West smiled bitterly. For conspiring with others to "borrow" a starter sample of this population-control bacteria, for stealing a military secret, he was already liable to prosecution by the U. S. Government. If the spray cans and the bacteria were traced to him, and he was taken back to the U.S., -- he remembered what happened to men who stole other military secrets -- "Now the radioman at Stone Bay says it's popped up there." The Mountie was clumsily charting the new locations of the illness on his wall map. "It's what we did during the flu epidemic," he muttered ineffectively. "The date of appearance and where the visitors came from. I keep telling them to cut off every camp from every other camp. Spreads and spreads." VI "Xhe next day the promised medical plane still had not even taken off. Engine distributor trouble was reported, and the Mountie blundered around the cabin, flopping down on the bed and sleeping fitfully. By now, radio operators up and down the coast were comparing virulency of the disease in their respective encampments. The bacteria had spread south from one coastal camp to the next, until mild cases were reported in the fifth camp. Only a few mild cases in the fifth camp. "Here, they had it worse, but they're getting better." The Mountie looked out the doorway. The Esks at their camp were becoming more active. The disease was running its course. At Dr. West's suggestion, the flying boat was diverted to another camp. The Mountie seemed to want the flying boat here first, but he agreed, temporarily. The next day as his fever declined, the Mountie put more detail into his chart -- as if a map showing the spread of the disease magically could control the disease. "I can't understand this," the Mountie said. "It seems to have stopped going south. In the fifth encampment, they say there are visitors from the fourth encampment but no one in the fifth encampment has it bad enough to matter. A few slight fevers. Do you think it's halted here?" He pressed his thick finger against the map. "Yes." Dr. West winced; a clue was stalking him. On each of the five encampments to the south, the map contained the Mountie's scrawled date for the reported arrival of visitors. "Everyone's done a terrible job of not keeping visitors out, sir. More inefficient than during the flu. So many more people now, but it's no excuse, sir." In the village immediately south of them about # of the Esks reportedly had been sick -- in the second village, # to #, in the third village, in the fourth village, # and in the fifth village there were only a few with a mild fever or other symptoms. "As it went south, it died out," the Mountie murmured. "It's not like flu, is it, sir?" "No, it isn't," Dr. West agreed. Staring at the opposite extension of the disease on themap in a northerly direction. Dr. West began to have a trapped feeling. A clue as to the origin of the disease was beginning to take shape on the map. "The two villages nearest to the north of us had it as bad as we did," the Mountie said, talking to himself. "Then it faded, weaker in each of the next five villages. So it took a total of seven villages to wear it out going north, but five going south." He turned and stared at Dr. West. "In two north camps where they had it as bad as we did," the Mountie said, "their radio operators both report they noticed orange cans, mosquito spray cans like we've been using here." utside, there was the roar of the big medical flying boat circling tire harbor for a landing. The Mountie's face widened with relief, and he walked back into his radio closet and closed the door. Dr. West knelt by Eevvaalik's sleeping form. As he lifted her wrist to feel her pulse, he knew she was dead. When the Mountie came out of the radio closet, he stared at her, then at Dr. West's drawn face. "She's not the only one dead, sir. I didn't want to disturb you before the plane arrived, but about a dozen people are dead at the camp to the north of us. Mostly older people." "The last of the real Eskimos," Dr. West blurted and felt sick, as if not just this Mountie, but the vhole world, were closing in on him. "I think so, sir. I think the disease was strongest where the spray cans were, sir. Here and in the two camps to the north where visitors carried mosquito spray cans. I've had men on the look out for cans in the other camps, but no sign of them. I know the disease is mildest in the camps furthest away from the cans. You're a doctor. How do you explain that, sir?" "Probably a bacteria with self-attenuating virulency," Dr. West answered with calm desperation. "I've never heard of that, sir." "There's a lot you haven't heard of!" Then Dr. West managed to control his voice. "Think of microscopic blobs like strings of grapes, typical bacteria each excreting tissue-destroying poison as an incidental by-product, The toxin is what makes the person feel sick. Virulent bacteria, we say." Dr. West stared out the open door to the harbor where the flying boat had landed; nov the Mountie had reinforcements. "Where was I? Bacteria multiply so rapidly, a new generaof bacteria within a person," Dr. West laughed unexpectedly. "There is the possibility of hundreds of bacterial mutations. Bacteria with slight genetic alterations. Here is the surprising thing. A single mutated bacterium may be "born" which excretes less poison and for some reason arouses less resistance in the body of the person. It and its descendants may be able to multiply more quickly through '#I '# (#d ed) Listing by author, story contents page. Over # issues (# titles) from US, UK, etc. Corrected expanded Massachusetts #. the next few bodies than the previous bacteria of its species. The mutated bacteria win the competition. Bacteria compete for living space, too. These less virulent but more fertile bacteria squeeze out their old-fashioned relatives and take over." "From the poisonous ones, sir? Like the meek shall inherit the earth. Hardly that, sir?" "In self-attenuating bacteria that is what has happened," Dr. West laughed as if in triumph. "The less poisonous had a builtin survival advantage. They've spread through the Esks with less and less symptoms, until they could infect the world -- with no noticeable effect." "The bacteria, sir?" The Mountie was staring at the map. "Surprising to me, sir. The opposite would be so much worse." "You mean more and more virulent mutations. For some bacteria this does happen. It makes no difference to the bacteria as long as multiplication proceeds most rapidly." Dr. West watched the airmen walking up the beach toward him. His voice faded: "Like it or not, life's basic chemical command simply is to survive and multiply." "It is true there will be too many Esks, sir." The Mountie was staring at him. "Is that what you're really thinking?" "What do you think? This planet was yours first! They're only Esks." "Perhaps, sir, but this is a civilized country." The Mountie's eyes scrutinized Dr. West, "Are you saying Esks are not fully human, sir? Saying things like that. Hitler soothed his Germans to pop off the Jews, by saying -- other races... Are you saying Esks aren't human?" D r. West retorted: "#-day gestation period, and you still think Esks are human? Those stupid, bearded kooks in the L.S.T.," Dr. West gasped, "they are the humans. Stupidly feeding a new and competing species -- Esks. Human? The Esks? No, not human unless monthly births from each Esk woman is a historically human characteristic. Mutated humans? Hell, no! In an Esk there are too damn many neat mutations at one time. They aren't human. You are the humanitarian idiots bringing food so the Esks can multiply until -- " "Sir, we can't let people starve! Listen, sir, those bearded chaps in the L.S.T., at least they obeyed the law and handed me approved invoices, lists of all the food they brought in. All imports approved. That is required by law. Look at these approved lists on my desk. Shipping number # is for # cartons of prefolded paper diapers. It is not for a little wooden box full of bloody cans of Dr. West looked away as the Mountie's voice rose. "The Esks brought the box to me." The Mountie's voice broke as if in pain. "I said, open it. How could I know? I said, just what I need, mosquito spray. I took a can. I said, you chaps take the rest. Sir, I even showed them how to press the knob on top to make the spray come out. Sir, I didn't -- the bloody hell. What was in those cans? People died. People died." Mosquitos whined around the two men. Dr. West's mouth was so dry he couldn't answer. "People died, sir. People died." The Mountie looked down at the lump of bedcovers where Eevvaalik's body lay. "But you didn't even get sick. sir," the Mountie blurted. "I think you brought those spray cans from California, sir. The R. C. M. P. will trace them back to where they were manufactured. You needn't speak without advice from your couaselor-at-law. Sir -- " The Mountie's voice trailed off, and he stared out the cabin door. For days they had been flying through Dr. West's consciousness like savage-beaked Skuas. Now they fell at his feet. The worst had happened. There was nothing more he could do. Dr. West's face twisted in a smile of numb relief as the cheery pilots and doctors from the flying boat blundered into the cabin and shook hands all around. The Mountie was too courteous to mention they were shaking hands with a murderer. They all sat down and had tea.  Latest word on the controversial "Immortality Through  s Freezing" program which may bring us eternal life now  g by R. C. W. Ettinger I g by Lin Carter g g plus many other stories and features in the November Worlds of Tomorrow. g g On sale now -- don't miss it! g "T'his time we're talking about four books which not only proffer some sort of merit of their own but also make some representation about the condition and progress of science fiction as a form of literature. Accordingly, they're going to be reviewed not only as things in themselves but for their value as guides to those who may feel they don't know too much about tire field and might consider purchasing them in an effort to learn something. Or, putting it another way, for their value as gifts to people whom you would like to introduce to the field. World's Best Science Fiction: #, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr (Ace Books, is, apposite to Judith Merril's annual anthologies, the other respectable and apparently regular compilation of what its title claims to be. The previous or # version in this series has even been certified by Miss Merril's crediting some of its contents for her own book -- a breathtaking play -- and in general was so well received that I regretted passing up the opportunity to put in my dissenting oar at the time. There are fifteen selections in this current volume, and one is at once struck by the thought that it was a lean year in which only fourteen sf stories published in English everywhere in the world were better than Harlan Ellison's " 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", or, going on with the same sort of arithmetical negativism, Vernor Vinge's "Apartness" or Joseph Green's "The Decision Makers", Lin Carter's "Uncollected Works" or Christopher Anvil's "The Captive Djinn." You see where arithmetic leads us. An immediate third of the contents of this book is made up of stories which will not on inspection seem to be outstanding. "Apartness", "Repent, Harlequin!" and "The Decision Makers" share the quality of being about solidly acceptable ideas; one, that segregation is bad, two, that regimentation is bad, three, that colonialism is fallacious, dangerous and bad. In # when Leslie Charteris was scoring off the Establishment in the course of telling his Saint stories, this was daring stuff in commercial fiction. But even in #, it was necessary for potboilerlevel crime drama to do more with the plot than provide an occasion for a philosophical point to be made. Now, I'm aware that there's a whole generation who thinks that this kind of rudimentary social consciousness is deep stuff, but if we are considering this book as something to show an outsider, chances are he will be a bit foozled that these primitive statements are considered enough to make an outstanding science-fiction story. More or less similarly, the Lin Carter story is distressingly slight, considering what H. G. Wells did with "Brownlow's Newspaper", and "The Captive Djinn" is a technical trickery thing about the clever Earthman who gets away from the stupid aliens who capture him. As you know, this piece usually depends on the aliens living with so improbable a technology that the sophisticated Earthman is bound to win at whatever word length the author desires. This particular example stacks the cards so openly, and so clumsily, that it makes a dubious choice for any anthology let alone one with these pretensions. Good, solid science fiction is represented in this collection by Arthur C. Clarke's "Sunjammer", James H. Schmitz's "Planet of Forgetting" and "Masque of the Red Shift" by Fred Saberhagen. These are stories about real scientific problems, or at least possible real problems that could crop up in the future, and represent the kind of story which justifies the existence of science fiction as a distinct genre. Clifford D. Simak's "Over the River and Through the Woods" is a very good example of the kind of story no genre minds contain. Human and warm, founded on a genre concept -- in this case, time travel -- it is an altogether attractive story without being a particularly startling one. And . Larry Niven's "Becalmed in Hell" and, even more so, David I. Masson's "Traveler's Rest" are what I think most people will recognize as uncommon science-fiction stories. In both of them the author has created a sense of actually having stood at the heart of his situation, looked it over thoroughly and then brought back to us an immediate sense of how it feels to, one, explore Venus, and, two, live in a world of time-distortion. The latter is particularly engrossing in this respect, and represents major talent. Finally, Ron Goulart's "Calling Dr. Clockwork" and Fritz Leiber's "The Good New Days" are founded in our life and times as extended into the future, but intelligently so ; the Goulart is even less of an obvious tilt at windmills than the Leiber. Either one of them is head and shoulders in sophistication over what Happens when some bright young man sets out to prove that he too has something to say. It's not a bad anthology, in other words, and contains some rewarding moments. Unlike the Merril, it does not draw some of its "best" selections from sources which are not normally directed to or supported by science-fiction readers. But it echoes the same taste, loading its contents far out of statistical conformity to the proportion of inept social protest actually published in the sf magazines. It doesn't and can't, therefore, be the "best" of science fiction. It can reflect what its editors think science fiction ought to be, or worse, it can be the false face they think will most ingratiate the field with strangers. This has always been a mistake, and I see no reason not to think it will be a mistake again. Orbit I (Putnam) is a collection of original science-fiction stories, edited by Damon Knight and introduced with the words "Here are the nine best new science-fiction stories I could find in eight months of reading manuscripts." Knight, of course, is known to be one of the most knowledgeable editors and critics in this field, and any such statement must be followed by an exemplary compilation, or what's Heaven for? And as a matter of fact, these are each in its own way attractive stories, each with its flash of ingenuity, each with its dash of charm, or Damon would not have liked it. In other words, the Berkley paperback edition will be well worth its price. The hardcover version meanwhile has its troubles with hardcover standards. What I mean by that inflammatory remark is best inferred from the following additional quote: "All I had in my mind was to try to put together a collection of unpublished stories good enough to stand beside an anthology of classic science fiction." That is the standard this book does not quite attain, though the attempt is brave. Three of these stories are froth: Allison Rice's "The Loolies Are Here," Sonya Dorman's "Splice of Life," and Thomas M. Disch's "Five Eggs." They are froth because in treatment or theme they are deliberately trivial; comments on, rather than illustrations of, housewife problems, hypochrondriac problems, and poetaster problems. They are well turned out; the Rice is a funny thing, "Splice of Life" is suitably unsettling, and "Five Eggs" does have that moment of charm etcetra mentioned above. But it seems odd to have it implied they are one-third of the best sf the editor saw in eight months. The jacket copy says one year. Poul Anderson, James Blish, and Richard McKenna are each represented by exactly the kind of story for which his name is recognized and valued. Respectively, "The Disinherited", "How Beautiful with Banners" and "The Secret Place." McKenna's is about time travel, love and maturation. Blish's is about exobiology, sexuality and intelligence. Anderson's is about xenanthropology, politics and moral courage. I found the Blish a little bewildering, as I sometimes do with Blish stories -- the author seems to have a very clear idea of the scientific situation on which his plot revolves, and he is ruthlessly disciplined in telling a story which could occur only in that situation, but I think there are times when he does not let laymen in enough on how they would feel if this were happening to them, rather than to the educated protagonist. This may or may not be a quibble. I'm very much aware of the fact that historically this is the science fiction. And it's a very well written story, and carries something of an emotional charge. But I get the feeling that I'm reading it through a sheet of slightly tinted glass, and because it nevertheless conveys so much to me, I wish there were no barriers at all. I may of course be asking Blish to be a different author, in which case I withdraw the wish. In the case of McKenna, I think we have a minor story by a major writer, and in the case of Anderson, we have a kind of story which is so hard to write, I think, that only Andersonattempts it regularly. Only Anderson's successful attempts provide the reference that enables me to say this story of the man doing the necessary cruel thing, and being hated for it, is not as good as some others I've seen. Nevertheless, just as we had no one better than McKenna for writing about masculine love, and we have no one better than Blish for writing hard stories of physical science, we have no one better than Anderson for writing about intelligent motivations in the historical future. So to this extent, modified by these judgments on these individual examples, these three are representative of the best that science fiction can do in each of these three of the many kinds of science fiction. Another common type of science fiction is the kind concerned with the places where we will live. One of the older conventional places is within an existing larger galactic empire to which we are newcomers, and in this type Kate Wilhelm's "Stares Flonderans" is a pretty good example of thinking, in the sense that she has concerned herself with a very real possible problem. However, this is the kind of story in which all the characters are mouthpieces, discussing some inexplicable mystery of vital importance to them, while actually performing no actions. What action does occur is scenesetting by the author, who provides, at intervals, visible illustrations of that same mystery. Forward progress thus is zero. Finally the author pushes a couple of new characters and some additional scenery on stage; thus the actual nature of the problem is revealed, and what you suddenly realize is that the story that ought to have started there, and arisen from it, is thus lost. It was good thinking, nice thinking, but now another attempt will have to be made. Keith Roberts's "The Deeps" is about people living beneath the sea, a fairly new -- or at least newly rediscovered -- locale. Roberts's treatment of it is extremely effective; the enchantment of 'the deeps,' the undercurrent of tension and fear that prolonged diving brings to those of us who attain maturity on land, our incredulous observation of the natural ease with which our children take to it and find entirely different fascinations in it, thus disquieting us more than if we ourselves found only revulsion -- all these things are in this story. This brings us to the special case of Virginia Kidd, who, as this book tells us, was formerly married to James Blish and collaborated with him on many stories and novels published under his byline. In "Kangaroo Court", one does find many of the devices and approaches which are typical of a Blish story, as well as a quality of competence and self-trust which is accepted as a matter of course in work signed by an established name. In this unique context, it shows up as what we would call "daring" in a new writer. In other words, there is evident knowledge that there are things you should leave out as well as things you must put in. "Kangaroo Court" is about marsupial aliens who return to Earth to check on the progress of a colony they planted on this planet millenia ago. By introducing the fact that the aliens travel by an experimental faster-than-light ship, and that relative to them the colony was planted only a few months ago, the author in one swoop accomplishes the introduction of a great many potent story-turns. The aliens must face the fact that the planet now belongs to autochthonous mammals. We in turn have to face the fact that all unbeknownst to us we have been containing and abrading a large chunk of an alien ecology and have in a sense participated in the final stages of its decay to sub-intelligent levels. However, as in the Blish story, there is a sense of the last-act performers being conscious of a four-alarm fire backstage. There is also the immediate appearance of a villain whose villainy is pretty much unmotivated except in terms of cliche. He is a one-viewpoint man without past or future -- a fetish dropped from the sky to worry the three-dimensional characters. Too, the narrative pacing is bad -- there either needs to be more buildup toward the ending or, perhaps preferably, less detail beforehand, so that the need for a tacked-on trip to Australia does not arise. The actual story all takes place aboard the landed alien spaceship where marsupial and mammal sit in deliberation over the two viewpoints on the situation. Even so, this is very nearly a major story, by an undoubtedly important writer, representing a definite gain to the field. What Damon Knight has put together here, then, is a book that represents science fiction well but not to any extraordinary extent. He has come up with some solid stories, some well written trifling stories, and one or two uncommon stories, though none that ring so well as to be clearly and obviously the "best" of anything. The question then follows naturally: Am I perhaps asking too much when I suggest as strongly as I do that a "best" story proclaim itself outstanding not only in relation to its immediate company but in relation to all science-fiction writing? Well, on the face of it, I'm asking it to do more than its editors strictly promise. But whatever the right or wrong of this matter, there have clearly been stories and writers that have been responsible for the shape of this field, in the sense that they have uncovered for us new possibilities in the craft and new areas into which the general body of this field might advance. This sense of progression, this feeling that there is indeed a quality of intrinsic excellence which reveals itself without regard to relative merits, possesses many of us, I think. Sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes as a source of general compulsion toward a half-realized ideal. Being what it is, it frequently takes on the tones of intransigent frustration and makes us sound very grumpy indeed when we call for its evocation. And thus we segue naturally into two books created by Sam Moskowitz. These are Seekers of Tomorrow and Modern M'asterpieces of Science Fiction, released simultaneously by World. Seekers of Tomorrow is a compilation of Moskowitz's short biographies of science-fiction writers. Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction is an anthology of stories by those same writers. Taken together, they represent an item of scholarship and dedication, and a potential keystone for any understanding of the field on the part of someone lately come to it. Moskowitz is a master of denotation. He will find a fact hidden from all other unaided eyes at a distance of a hundred yards, and he will write it down. In preparing these volumes for publication, he states that he reread "the entire science-fiction output of every science fiction writer discussed... As a prelude to writing this book, every science fiction magazine containing original material ever published in the English language was collected (as well as hundreds in foreign languages), and thousands of the key books, bulletins, newspaper clippings and related items were assembled. Quite literally, it took thirty years of reading and collecting to make the writing of this book possible." This from the introduction to Seekers of Tomorrow, which contains biographies of Edward E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, John Wyndham, Eric Frank Russell, L. Sprague De Camp, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Philip Jose Farmer and Mort Weisinger. (Mr. Weisinger's name was entered here out of order by the reviewer). There is only one name here that one could really cavil with, though I think both Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth might have had more extensive inclusion. The biographies are very interesting, and certainly contain a number of uncommon facts which tend to explain the individual creative approaches of these writers. There may be times when Moskowitz's approach, in his introductions, in the biographies and in his general treatment, infuriates you, as when he refers to John Campbell's "deluded" readers, or says than he bargained for" after making a considerable effort to get into World War II. You must remember that Moskowitz is a master of denotation. He wouldn't know a connotation if it snapped at his ankle, which is something that happens quite often. Moskowitz's personal approach leads to other easily visible attributes, some of which are a real pleasure to argue with, as when he says the T. S. Stribling's "The Green Splotches" is a story about an atomicpowered space rocket. Well, it isn't. It's a story about green splotches. But it is true that the fake Cesare Ruano was mining radium, though his spaceship seemed to react sharply to light-pressure, thus making it obviously the place where Arthur C. Clarke found the idea for "Sunjammer." As you might gather, Moskowitz's approach to the history and evolution of this field is this "tune detective" approach. A diffusionist if there ever was one, he is concerned with tracing every story ever published to its origin in half a phrase thrown away in a story by Miles J. Breuer, which story itself of course is based on a paragraph in S. P. Meek. That anyone ever got an idea from some place other than a previous story found in an earlier issue in the Moskowitz complete collection is not allowed even as a theoretical talking point, and each such structure of investigation is based on assertion of impeccable research. Thus it is with glee that one discovers such boo-boos as the claim that Robert Heinlein wrote a story called "Delilah and the Spacemen's Rigger" or that Steven Vincent Benet is the author of something called "By the Place of the Gods." When he confuses Arthur C. Clarke's "Loophole" with another story, he is clearly making a mistake of his own, rather than being blamed for the very bad proofreading which abets the less frequent lapses in his nevertheless impressive memory. Make no mistake about it -- quibbling aside, Moskowitz knows, and transmits, at least as much about the history of science fiction and its evolution, as anyone possibly could. Though his bias is not the common bias and is therefore easily visible, his bias is probably no stronger than anyone else's would be. There is an incredible amount of love and patience embodied in these books. The idea of the two books as a device for telling us a great deal about the writers, the stories and the forces which add up to "modern" science fiction is  a stunner. A few people might have gotten all of this together in their heads, but I cannot imagine anyone else who would have gotten it out on paper, and for that reason alone Moskowitz has fulfilled his function and his ambition, though not as flawlessly as he might like or might assert. Nevertheless he has done the humanly possible, which as you know is sometimes incredibly difficult to do. The stories contained in Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction are: "The Vortex Blasters", "Night", "A Logic Named Joe", "Requiem" (the good story of Edmond Hamilton), "With Folded Hands", "Adaptation", "The Witness", "The Command", "Kindness", "We Also Walk Dogs", "The Enchanted Village", "Liar!", "Microcosmic God", "Huddling Place", "Coming Attraction", "Doorway into Time", "We Guard the Black Planet!", "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton", "Wake for the Living", "Before Eden" and "Mother", I think that with the exception of the Hamilton "Requiem" (as distinguished from Heinlein's good story of the same name), there are few stories here which need the author's byline conjoined with them to be immediately recognizable. They are not always the obvious stories -- for example, one would not ordinarily mention "Metamorphosite" when speaking of Eric Frank Russell and then run "The Witness" instead -- but on the other hand I'm very glad to see "A Logic Named Joe." In addition, as you've gathered, Moskowitz includes much matter on stories and writers not given the full treatment. I think, everything taken in its place, provided you could not get hold of a copy of Adventures in Time and Space (in the first edition) you could do a lot worse in representing the field than to pass out a copy of Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction, which despite the promise of the jacket does gain considerably by containing no contribution from the earnest Mr. Weisinger, whose biography in Seekers of Tomorrow will justify whatever evil one might care to think of him. Or haven't you read any Superman D.S. publications lately? I have. As for Seekers of Tomorrow taken as a whole, there is no other book like it. If you're at aU interested in this field to the extent of wanting to know something about who writes it and why, you have, got to have it. You have to have Moskowitz with it, but that's not as bad as it may sound. The field is full of opinionated people, or haven't Sixteen years ago, a book was published which predicted the appearance of Homo Novis, the next spectacular, upward leap in man's evolution. It blazed the trail through the confusions and misunderstandings about the nature of man and his mind to make the achievement possible by presenting the thoroughly researched and precise technology for clearing the mind of the unknowns that caused man's aberrative behavior. That book Ron Hubbard. In those sixteen years, all over the world in the organizations of ScienAnd so, now, the men of the future are already among us, hard at work building the civilization of tomorrow. They are coming out of Saint Hill in England. They are the men who no longer have a reactive mind. They are the masters of themselves and their environment. They are the Clears. credible future. Send your check or money order for # to: The Hubbard Scientology Organization in New York of by j. T. McIntosh They didn't wear clothes because they didn't dare -- and for the sarhe reason they could never hope to return home! I tfVText, please," Stevens call ed, and the guard at the door opened it. The small, tubby man who entered was frightened out of his wits. He was also naked. But then, so was Stevens, so were the two guards, so were Evans and Anna and Jonina. He wasn't the odd man out. "Hammett, isn't it?" said Stevens, picking up his stethoscope. "Yes, sir." Even Hammett's eyebrows were shivering. "Don't worry," Stevens said mildly. "If you're okay, you've nothing to worry about. If you're a Faker -- " "I'm me, sir," said Hammett earnestly. Jonina came to draw a blood sample from his arm, and at one and the same time he tried to look at her and not look at her. Some of the older people, even after a month of total nudity all the time everywhere, still hadn't gotten used to it and never would. "Well, that's what we're going to find out," said Stevens. "You don't use pincers now, do you?" Hammett asked apprehensively. "No, that doesn't work any more." "And no... survival tests, like holding a guy's head under water?" "They don't work any more either." "And no... " involuntarily he glanced at Jonina, who was withdrawing the needle, and instantly looked away as embarrassed as if he'd been caught looking through a keyhole "... no... sex?" "That worked for only two days," Stevens sighed. Hammett looked slightly relieved, but only slightly. It was no use listening to the little man's heart, really, for if he was a Faker he could make it race exactly as it was doing. All the same, as a doctor, Stevens liked to form an impression from a long list of symptoms -- and the fact that Hammett's heart sounded as it did went with the fact that Hammett reacted as he did when Jonina bent over him to make it a little less likely that he was a Faker. The blood tests weren't much use either, yet if the Fakers had got Hammett in the last hour or two, the blood sediment rate would be significant. They could take over the body and the brain instantly, but the blood had a will of its own. ' I 'he detection team tried dozens of brief tests on Hammett, shot questions at him and examined his brainwaves -- in short, they ran a random sample of tests which had caught Fakers out in the past. They were fully aware, however, that the most useless thing they could do was use tests which had previously caught Fakers out... Evans, who had been working at the other end of the clinic on a set of answers from Hammett, suddenly thought of something and waddled back to the group. Evans, the oldest of the tec team, was pale and paunchy and not enthusiastic about Operation Birthday Suit. If, like Stevens and the two girls, you were young and slim and well-formed, you still might not like it -- but you had less reason positively to dislike it, Evans considered. "Thought of something, Tom?" Stevens said hopefully. Evans nodded and asked Hammett: "Who was Black Beauty?" "Black Beauty?" Hammett echoed blankly. The two girls, both working on samples, stopped and turned to look at Hammett, who had gone pale and looked, if anything, even more frightened. "Good question, Tom," Stevens commented. "Well, Hammett?" The little man licked his lips. "The Mona Lisa?" he said. "Some dame in a poem? A play?" The atmosphere in the clinic changed. "Just wait in there, Hammett, will you?" Stevens said, pointing to one of the soundproof cells which had been constructed out of the former changing cubicles. Hammett went so pale that scars unsuspected before, showed on his face. "For Pete's sake. Doctor," he begged, "don't do anything rash. I'm me, I tell you -- " "We'll find out," Stevens said evenly. One of the guards pushed the little man into a cell and made sure the door was properly shut. "Funny," Jonina said. "Nothing medical or scientific works. This blood is just ordinary human blood. Yet a simple little question like that works -- " "I don't really think he's a Faker," Stevens said. "Neither do I," said Anna.  nna was small and dark, Jonina tall and blonde. Jonina was a nurse, and Anna a physicist. Jonina looked twenty-one and was in fact eighteen. Anna looked eighteen and was actually twenty-four. She was unofficially engaged to Stevens. "I'm not so sure," said Jonina thoughtfully. "When I was standing over him just now and he made like a shy middle-aged adolescent, I got the idea it must be an act. Seemed a bit overdone... I guess it might be worth having him back and trying the temptress routine. I'm game, though he's rather a repulsive little man... Anna?" Anna shrugged. "Nothing that stops working ever works again," Stevens said. "But we've nothing to lose." He nodded to the guards, and they brought Hammett back. "Doctor," he croaked. "I'm not much of a reader, see, not an educated man... Whoever Black Beauty is, I guess you know all about her, but not everybody knows as much as you. I mean, it could be a dame or coal or a black diamond or " He stopped as Jonina put her arms round him. The team, and most of the victims, had elected to treat this sort of thing as comedy. Of course, it ceased to be funny when Fakers were caught this way. But the rest of the time... well, anything went if you could treat it as pure farce. Anna joined in, and they made smoke blow out of the little man's ears. But he didn't think it was fun. He was sick with embarrassment. It was a moment of exquisite relief for him when he was allowed to go back to his cell. "Well?" said Stevens. "Yes," said Jonina. "No," said Anna, at the same time. Then they started to argue. No man could really be that way, Jonina said. He was exaggerating. Anna said Jonina was just a kid and when she was a little older and had a little more experience with men, she'd know they could be any way. Jonina said well maybe Anna would know about that, but when she necked with a man, any man, she expected a lot more genuine uninhibited male reaction. Anna, refusing to be drawn, asked coolly how often Jonina necked with little fat men old enough to be her father and how often she thought Hammett in the last fifteen years had had two naked girls trying to seduce him. "Break it up, girls," Stevens sighed. "Let's leave him there for a while and finish this batch." To the guard at the door he said: "Next, please." A skinny youth entered. "Who is Black Beauty?" Stevens shot at him. The youth blinked. "A horse in a kids' story. A horse that -- " "Okay. You can go." Surprised, because these tests could take hours, the youth went out. The other three were surprised too. "Taking a chance, aren't you?" said Evans. "We don't know that the Fakers don't know about Black Beauty. They could easily -- " "I want to try that question on as many people as possible before the Fakers find the answer. In half an hour it'll be useless. If Hammett is a Faker, they already know the question, and in two minutes they'll have the answer. Even if he isn't, the news will be all over the colony that we're asking about Black Beauty -- " "We could tell everybody not to breathe a word of it," said Jonina. Stevens smiled wryly. "That would be as good as a broadcast. Next, please," he said quietly. II 'he guard opened the door again. A girl came in, a small girl rather like Anna. "Sonia?" said Stevens. He couldn't remember her surname. "That's right." She was not nervous. She smiled at Jonina and Anna, who did not smile back. Again Stevens decided in the first seconds that he was not dealing with a Faker. Sonia was enjoying herself, enjoying being the center of attention. She had a moderately pretty face that would not, a month ago, have attracted much notice in the domed city. But she had the figure for Operation Birthday Suit "Just one question, Sonia," said Stevens, and asked it. The girl grinned. "If I weren't so modest, I'd say it could be me," she observed. "Now the right answer," said Stevens patiently. "Well I'll be polite and say Anna here." "Quit stalling." "Black Beauty?" Stevens nodded to the guard. Sonia not only protested, she tried to fight. Anna, who didn't like her and made no secret about it, chopped her hard on the back of the neck, and after that she was bundled into a second cell with no trouble. "But she's not a Faker," Anna said when the door was closed. "She's a louse, but not a Faker." "Don't kids read about Black Beauty any more?" Stevens said, frowning. "Is it a dud question?" "No," said Evans, Anna and Jonina, more or less together. "Next, please," said Stevens. The youth who entered was rather between Hammett and Sonia in attitude. He was nervous, and yet he was excited too. This regular examination was the biggest thing in the lives of the # Procarpan colonists at the moment. It was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. They feared it and felt a mighty relief when it was over once again. But it also, in a macabre way, gave some of the colonists a terrific kick to pass the test, to prove they were human. R ight away Stevens said: "Who is Black Beauty?" "A horse," said the youth. "A horse that drew a London cab, and -- " "Okay," said Stevens. "You can go." After he had gone, the other three looked at him in doubt. Relying on a single question was a big gamble. Answering their unspoken question, Stevens said: "He's a technician. He has skills that can't be picked up in a few weeks. If he were a Faker, he'd be found out in a couple of hours." Evans still looked doubtful. "We can't afford to cut corners, Steve." "We can't afford not to. We've got three hundred ten to keep testing. We haven't caught a Faker in a week -- and if the past record is anything to go by, there must be about half a dozen new Fakers in that time, not counting any we might have missed before. I guess we may have to skip the people we know aren't Fakers, like us six and the Director and the technicians and engineers, and concentrate for a while on the unskilled... Right, next, guard." "That's the lot," said the guard. "We'll have Hammett back, then." It had seemed, when Hammett first came in, that he couldn't possibly be more scared. But that had been proved wrong. Fright had become fear, then terror, and now absolute desperation. "All right," said Stevens, "you can go." Hammett scuttled out before he could change his mind. "Why the heck did you let him go?" Jonina demanded. She was ruffled -- she was the one who had said he might well be a Faker. "They don't know human terror," Stevens said. "If he were a Faker, he couldn't act like that because he wouldn't know how. Fakers have experienced a lot of things here, but not -- " "You're wrong, Steve," said Evans quietly. "What about the people taken over by Fakers?" Could there be greater fear?" Jonina shuddered, but Stevens was unimpressed. "It's quick. Usually they don't even see the white worm. If they do, they either manage to kill it or they run. If they run, they're either caught in a second or they escape. What the Fakers see is not suspense terror, but escape terror. Hammett didn't look the way a man would look when trapped by a worm." Evans nodded slowly. Qonia was brought out. She was still annoyed, but confident now. "You might have given me a chance," she protested. "Black Beauty -- sure, a horse. A horse in kids' books." Stevens made a gesture, Anna screamed, the nearest guard brought up his gun and fired. Sonia collapsed like an empty sack, dead before she started to fall. "Well, well," said Evans in a hushed tone. "I hope you knew what you were doing, Steve." "She wasn't a Faker, Arthur," Anna whispered. She was the only person in the colony who called Stevens Arthur. Everybody else called him Steve, except when linking him with Evans. Then they were Stevens and Evans. "Let's just wait, huh?" said Stevens, curt with her for once. They aU stared down at the body on the floor. The gun the guard had used killed instantly but without any visible injury. Apart from her crumpled position, the girl on the floor might merely have been asleep. They scarcely moved for ten minutes. They were all, including the two guards, remembering that three of the people destroyed as Fakers had not been Fakers at all... At last, to the immense relief of all of them, the faint green tinge that proved she was a Faker began to appear under the girl's skin. "Give that to the lab boys," Stevens said, indicating the corpse. The guards carried it out. "Well, you spotted her -- but how?" said Evans. "When she went into the cubicle, she just didn't know who Black Beauty was. Some things you forget temporarily, like a name or an address -- but if you know Black Beauty was a horse, you don't forget that. If you do, you don't suddenly remember it." "So what happened?" Stevens face went grim. "A Faker among us went to the library. Or found out from somebody in the colony. I'm going to see the Director about that now." Ill '"Xhe Director was working on a chess problem when Stevens walked in on him. Like everyone else he was stark naked, even in his private room. "Well, Steve?" the Director asked. "Caught one," Stevens said. "Good. About time," said the Director pleasantly. "Who have we lost?" "Girl called Sonia. I don't remember her other name." "I know her. Small, dark. Poor kid. Did you send the corpse to the labs?" "Of course." "Good. One of these days they'll turn up something. They're asking for a live Faker, by the way." Stevens pursed his lips. "When we find Fakers, we don't dare do anything but blast them. That way we kill any extra worms they're carrying. Besides, their strength -- " "I know, I know. You could strap suspects in chairs before starting the tests, couldn't you?" "That wouldn't stop the worms coming out if they saw a chance. Director, there's something I want done right away." He explained the Black Beauty test and added: "I've been to the library. There isn't a copy of the book, and I couldn't find a mention in any of the encyclopedias, except under Sewell -- and that would be no use to anyone who didn't know where to look in the first place." "So?" "So some Faker among us asked somebody." "And you want to spot the Faker. Right." He turned to tlie intercom and gave orders. An immediate exhaustive check was to be made. Who had asked whom about Black Beauty? The orders made it clear, in case anyone thought he might be buying trouble, that nobody was interested in the person who had inswered the question -- only in the person who had 'asked. When he had finished giving the orders, the Director turned back to Stevens. "Any ideas about tlieir method of communication yet?" he asked. "The lab boys swear it isn't telepathy." S tevens shook his head. "All any of us can guess is that it's an extra sense we can't conceive... suppose a certain race had never had hearing, they'd wonder how we could communicate. They'd notice we moved our lips and work on the possibility that we were using a kind of sign language. But then they'd find that we didn't have to look at a person's lips to get the message -- " "What kind of sense would work in a soundproof, lightproof, radiationproof room? The lab boys insist no telepathic waves could get through that shielding." Stevens shrugged. "We know it happens. Anything any Faker knows, learns, can do, every other Faker instantly knows, has learned, can do. That's why it gets harder and harder to spot them... Director, can't we drop Operation Birthday Suit? It isn't helping any more, and in some ways it's hindering -- " "How?" "Well, though the young people soon get used to it, the older folks don't. They tend to seek privacy. They stay alone as much as possible. And that's just playing into the Faker's hands. Besides, nakedness means every inch of all of us is vulnerable all the time, and a worm merely has to get close enough to strike -- through the ground straight into bare feet maybe -- " "Clothes never gave any protection. They don't need bare skin. They can strike through anything." "Okay, forget that point if you like." The Director thought for a moment and then shook his head. "No," he said. "We can't drop it. We know that the Fakers used to carry spare worms under their clothes, on their sjtin, in their pockets. Now worms have to emerge from the body, and that takes time. Maybe not much time, but still time. Another thing is, you know a Faker who has just taken over doesn't move quite right, the muscles jump, there's a flush -- we've spotted seven that way, remember." "But only one in the last three weeks," Stevens argued. "I think they've beaten that too -- " "How?" "Well, obviously when a worm strikes and flows into a human body, there must be conflict for a time -- minutes if not hours. Although the brain seems to be blotted out instantly, the body fights on longer. The blood fights longest of all -- we calculate that seven hours after substitution, high. But the Fakers have long since found how to keep this conflict masked. They stop the flush, force the muscles to relax, and any internal fight that's going on proceeds without visible sign." '"The Director nodded slowly. "Maybe, maybe. But we stay in the buff. You won't shift me, Steve. In overalls a single Faker could carry enough worms to take over a whole dormitory before the guards could do a thing. Naked, on your own estimate, Fakers can't carry more than two or three spare worms." Stevens nodded grudgingly. "Another thing, then -- don't you think the library should be closed? Sure, it's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but take the present case... If we ask a question that catches Fakers, all the others have to do is go to the library and find the answer." "There are three girls checking everybody who uses the library and when, Steve." "Sure, but we've never yet caught a Faker that way. At tiie same time, the availability of the library means -- " "No, Steve," said the Director definitely. "The library has to remain open for about half our personnel an#rway -- you, your staff, the scientists, the recorders. I can't see that closing it to the others, which would be very difficult administratively, would make much difference." Stevens nodded even more grudgingly. "I have to get back," he said. "There's another batch lined up by this time." "Goes on all the time, doesn't it? Steve, any suggestions you've got. I'll listen." What in hell's the good of listening and then saying no? Stevens thought but didn't say. Not for the first time, another thought formed in his mind; The Director always had perfectly good reasons for doing the wrong thing, but with some other man in charge of the Procarpan dome colony, tlie Faker problem might well have been beaten long since. Stevens made one more try: "Well, why can't we make one big room somehow and all live in it? That way the Fakers could never get at anybody on their own -- " The Director was shaking his head again. "Our materials are cruelly limited. We have nothing but what we landed with. Steve, what nobody is ever going to understand when we get back -- if we get back -- is that in this colony there's just no way of stopping Faker worms getting at people. Crowding everybody together would merely help them to take over scores of people quickly, silently, instead of the odd one now and then. We can't send people round in twos or threes or fours, because if half of them are Fakers, we're simply sentencing the other half. The only weapon that really works is the guns, and the best use we can make of them is to give them to guards who patrol the whole area, search for worms and take note when two people come too close..." He stopped and added rather irritably: "Surely your job is more vital than anything I can do? If you could only find a simple, quick, infallible test that would show whether any man or woman was possessed or not -- " "Quite," Stevens retorted. "If only you hadn't been in such a hurry to teach the Fakers everything we know, it would have been easy. As it is, it's getting close to impossible." Giving the Director no opportunity to answer, he strode out. IV T eft on his own, the Director ' put the chessboard aside and thought for a moment. Had he made mistakes? Was he still making them? Well, obviously, mistakes had been made in the beginning. But how could they have been avoided, save by second sight? The Director liked to think on paper. He drew a pad toward him and wrote: I still feel that though this is probably the most desperate and horrifying situation any group of people have ever faced, there must be a simple solutionwhich we are missing. He read through what he had written, tore it up and started again: When we came, we set up a settlement by standard procedure. The ship was left in orbit, sealed and unmanned, and we all came do-wn in the tenders. The air, though temporarily breathable, kills in twenty-four hours, so first we set up the Standard Poisonous Atmospheres Dome. Then we dismantled five of the tenders, sealed the sixth, and set up a standThe floor of the dome was soft earth. We have not yet found rock or stone on Procarpa. Perhaps that is the real cause of the trouble. It was assumed, as it always is, that we'd use local material. We brought all we actually need, including food and prefabricated living accommodations. However, in the usual course of events a settlement such as this would gradually have been transformed by the use of local raw materials, wood, stone,rock or metal. Permanent buildings would be erected, the floor inside the dome would be paved, and so on. But in our early days, all the work was done inside the dome, and only occasional scouting parties went out to explore. They found no rock in thevicinity, no living creatures except plants, and the trees of Procarpa are too small, thin and sappy to be of much use as a building material. Then came the Fakers -- and now we dare not send parties outside the dome. The last that were sent did not return. Could Stevens be right? Was it all his fault? Definitely not, the Director decided firmly. When humans met an entirely unknown form of life, it mit prove in the end that the best thing they could have done was shoot on sight. But that didn't mean they should always shoot on sight. Obviously not. He wrote : After weeks of preliminary work we were utterly astonished when one day a man appeared -- outside the dome. If he had worn a mask, if he had been humanoid, if he had even been signific.antly different from us, his appearance would not have cau.sed such a sensation. The startling thing was that as far as we could see he was exactly like us, and wearing clothes the same as ours. We let him in, of course, since that was what he clearly wanted. Since he could breathe air we could not, we expected that our air would be poinsonous to him and that we would have to take him out again almost at once. But he didn't seem to notice the difference. At close cjuarters, he wasn't a man after all. He was merely a fair copy. And we guessed at once that the highest life form of Procarpa was capable of fantastic mimicry. Pie and his kind, unknown to us, had been watching us through the dome, and at least one had fashioned himself on us. He could not talk. Apparently he had no heart, and he did not breathe. What appeared to be clothes were part of the creature himself. Simple tests showed he had intelligence comparable to our own. He made no objection to examination. He was a non-vertebrate protoplasmic mystery... his body turned out to consist of white flesh rather like that of some fish, but with the property of being soft or hard at will. We could not, of course, dissect or vivisect him without declaring war on his race -- we presumed, rightly, that he was not unique. To say that we were interested is an understatement. We had found the most adaptable form of life yet known, perhaps the most adaptable in the galaxy. We were still more interested when we noticed, after he had been with us for a few hours, that he was now an exact copy of a human being -- except that his clothes were stiU part of him. The change had been gradual. But now he had hair, instead of a dark area of flesh the color of hair. His eyes, his hands, his mouth, his nails, his nostrils were now like ours -- and he was breathing. We offered him food, and he ate it. Then, as an experiment, one of the lab technicians stripped and showed him what a human body really looked like. At once he began to change. In an hour he was a perfect, naked, human male. What had looked like clothes were incorporated in him... Well, what else could have been done, then? We were not, thought the Director, positively not wrong to do exactly as we did. We're supposed to be a research station, aren't we, a colony set up to find out about a chosen world? The Procarpan was given clothes and shown how to put them on. He picked up things with uncanny rapidity... perhaps this was the first hint of warning. We had been talking to him, of course, and by this time he was talking back. He had no difficulty in imitating human speech. Indeed, he did this so well that he answered every remark in an exact copy of the speaker's voice. It was when a girl from the kitchen came to take away the dishes that he made his first direct request He had no difficulty in making himself clear. He had noticed that there were two types of human. He wanted the waitress to take off her clothes so that he could examine her. It was funny, the Director thought, in view of the situation in the colony during the last month, what difficulty this caused at the time. The waitress was scandalized. The scientists, interested to see if the Procarpan would now turn himself into a woman given the necessary information, were all for the experiment. But the girl refused point-blank and stormed out. The only women present at the time were a doctor and a physicist, neither youthful and both understandably modest. A call went out for volunteers, and several soon appeared. But they all proposed to go no further than to wear a bikini. The scientists explained patiently that this, in the circumstances, was no use. The volunteers said bikini or nothing, but they didn't mean this literally. In fact, they withdrew. Eventually it was a young nurse, Terry Walter, who agreed. And it was the greatest mistake of her short life. The Director wrote: We were rather disappointed at the result, or rather lack of result. The Procarpan merely looked at the girl from all angles, touched her lightly once or twice, and appeared to have lost interest. And he stayed as he was. The sequel came two hours later -- and it was almost as startling as the Procarpan's first appearance. A naked Terry Walter was seen outside the dome. She was admitted and given clothes. The real Terry Walter was summoned -- and the two were more similar than identical twins. They spoke in the same voice... but there the resemblance broke down, since the real Terry knew everything she had always known, and the fake Terry knew only what the male Procarpan in the laboratory knew. This was astonishing enough. The first Procarpan had not been outside the dome. Yet two hours after he saw Terry Walter, an exact copy appeared from outside. Of course we saw the significance of this. The Procarpans were not only adaptable, they were telepaths. More than that, the fake Terry knew, had apparently heard and seen, all that the male Procarpan knew. And a simple test soon showed that whatever the fake Terry was told, he instantly knew. The Director paused for a moment and then wrote reluctantly : To give him full credit. Dr. Arthur Stevens immediately advised caution. He came to me and pointed out that we were not merely entertaining two possibly dangerous aliens of unknown (hough obviously vast potential, but also their entire race. Every Procarpan -- and there might be apparently had access to all that one of them experienced. Perhaps they were not really a race of individuals at all, but a single entity with individual members. And we were keeping practically nothing secret from them. I told Stevens that we must find out all we possibly could about the Procarpans. We must continue teaching them our language so that they could tell us aliout themselves. Tills they never did... The Director looked for a long time at those last four words. V C C "NT ext, please," Stevens called. And so it went on. An exhaustive test, and even then not necessarily a conclusive one, could take an hour. Average, say forty minutes. The team could scarcely work more than fourteen hours a day. That meant twenty-one tested a day. And there were three hundred nine colonists. There had been a lot more. Originally there had been #I colonists. Sixty-two had been possessed by Fakers, who had been detected and destroyed. Or rather, # had been destroyed, # of whom had been Fakers... Jonina had come up with some thing this time. She gave the electrician who entered an ordinary wooden pencil, new, hexagonal, unsharpened. The electrician, Saunders, said ; "Where d'you get hold of that? Haven't seen one for years. Certainly never thought we'd brought any with us." "I found a box of twelve," Jonina said, "and that's the only one out of it. We can be quite certain there isn't another in the dome." Saunders was puzzled. "What about it? What do you want me to do with it?" "Write your name." "Huh?" Involuntarily he looked around. "What are you looking for?" "Well, I guess there isn't such a thing as a sharpener in the colony. I'll need a knife, a razor or something." "Okay," Stevens said. "You can go." Among the three of them who remained when he had left -- the guards were instructed to act as much as possible like robots, doing and saying nothing but what they were told -- the familiar excitement began to grow. Were they really on to something? "Think it's definitive?" Jonina asked. "We'll have a better idea when Anna gets back." As Stevens spoke, Anna came in. "I couldn't find a picture or an explanation in the library," she said. "The encyclopedias don't mention pencils at all. The dictionary merely says 'old-fashioned form of stylus." "So maybe it will work," Stevens said thoughtfully. He picked up the pencil. "A thing like this could beat the Fakers. We could have everybody in here in an hour or two... Jonina, run after Saunders and warn him under no circumstances to say a word about this test to anybody." Jonina left hurriedly. "We could improve the test," Stevens went on. "Not mention what the pencil is for?" Evans suggested. "Not even give a clue by asking people to write their name?" "No, I guess we have to do that -- a lot of our own people will need that slight clue to remind them what a pencil is. But with that, they'll know. There can't be anybody here who didn't use pencils as a kid. No, I was thinking of two other things. Anyone got a knife?" vans gave him a scalpel. "You're not going to sharpen it, surely? That would give the whole thing away..." He broke off as he saw what Stevens was doing. In gold on the red pen were the words : carefully cut out "pencil". "No use letting them know what to look for," he said. "Anna, have you any red nail varnish?" Anna rolled her eyes. "Men," she said succinctly. "I wonder why we bother... We're supposed to be getting married, and he's never noticed I don't use nail lacquer. Jonina uses it. Fingers and toes. And it's about that shade." Evans was puzzled. "You'd hardly need to cover up that shaved bit, would you?" he said. "To a Faker, that would only add to the mystery." "That's not what I had in mind." Anna had looked in Jonina's handbag. "Here you are." Stevens held the pencil with one end up. "You can see the lead. A smart person who had never seen or heard of a pencil might see the core and guess what it was for, and then it wouldn't be hard to work out that the wood had to be cut immmm away to make a point. Let's make it a little more difficult, shall we?" Carefully he lacquered the two ends of the pencil. When the lacquer dried there was no sign of the graphite. "I really think we've got something," Evans said quietly. "How about a two-minute snap test, everybody in line, guards on the job, no talking?" "Go ahead," Stevens said. "Get on the intercom." "Are we telling the Director?" "No. The fewer people who know what's going on the better." He frowned. "Jonina's taking her time..." J onina caught up with Saunders in the long corridor that linked the living quarters with the lab block. Since there were guards at each end, there was little or no danger here. The white worms that could turn humans into Fakers were about eight inches long and slightly less than two inches thick. They were not, fortunately, tremendously mobile. Thus although when they did manage to strike they could penetrate the victim's skin in practically no time and take over completely within two or three seconds, anyone who saw them in time could escape. It was useless to stamp on them or grasp them -- the worm always won such encounters. If you didn't have a gun you ran. Fortunately, too, in their worm form the Fakers were not particularly adaptable. They could change color but not their shape to any great extent. It was assumed that the worm form was the irreducible Faker physical minimum, designed for possession, not adaptation. The worms could penetrate most fabric as if it were not there, but metal completely defeated them and wood in good condition was nearly as effective a barrier, especially if it was painted. So the labs and kitchens and living quarters, constantly patrolled by men and women with stun guns, were reasonably safe. Worms that did get in were almost certain to be seen and destroyed. And although they took chances and never in any circumstance left any person they had possessed, if indeed this was possible for them, the destruction of individual worms evidently did matter to them. The chances they took to possess humans were seldom suicidal. The snags from the humans' angle were that all Fakers in human form carried in their bodies, undetectable, two or three worms capable of further conquests, and that in the dome it was impossible always to remain indoors. What had been brought and set up was, after all, only a skeleton settlement, incapable without building materials of some kind of modification, adaptation or expansion. Besides, three-quarters of the colonists were fully occupied one way or another in the fight to counter and contain the Fakers, and the rest were engaged in essential services. It might be possible, by total concentration, to halt possession by Fakers. But it wasn't possible to do that and everything else. Oaunders turned inquiringly as  Jonina came up behind him. "That test," Jonina said breathlessly. "You mustn't breathe a word about it to anybody. If anybody asks, you know nothing." "Sure," said the electrician. Then his attention was caught. It wasn't surprising. Well-endowed at any time, Jonina, breathing deeply, made a remarkable spectacle. "What's it worth not to tell.?" Saunders murmured. "Don't be crazy." He put his arms round her and tried to kiss her. For a moment Jonina, who was not exactly inhibited, did not resist. Saunders was young and not unattractive, and what was a kiss between people who were not even friends? Then suddenly she had a moment of purest terror. Often this must be how it happened. Nudity gave some sort of excuse for playfulness. You didn't have to be young. You didn't have to be of different sexes. Any time two people met in a nonpublic spot, a certain boisterous horseplay would seem anything but suspicious. And then... two bodies pressed together, breast against breast, abdomen against abdomen... Even the second or two of resistance would be cloaked. A girl, a man held by strong arms would try to make a perfectly natural breakaway -- while something passed from one body through another. She reacted, violently. She used her knee, both hands, her head, an elbow. She made quite a mess of the playful technician. And in doing so she satisfied herself completely that it hadn't really been necessary. Her terror dissolved. "You'll keep quiet," she said. It would be some time before he could speak. "Well, I'm sorry," she said mildly, "but with this sort of thing going on, anyone who steps out of line deserves anything he gets." She waited until he could walk, then left him. When he did get his breath back, he didn't speak. He would never be a friend of hers. She started back to the clinic. Oo that they could never tell us about themselves. This they never did... It was possible, the Director thought, that there was nothing to tell. The Fakers were # parasites, their life goal being to imitate. Perhaps they had no remembered history. Perhaps, with each new race they learned to imitate, the past was cancelled. Well, he might as well bring the summary up to date. The two imitation humans lived among us for weeks learning. Their powers of assimilation were remarkable. In no time they had vocabularies better than average, became quite indistinguishable from real humans, were even considered as humans. We liked them. They soon knew everyone in the colony by name, talked with them, learned their history. They were the best listeners we had ever known. The fake Terry Walter was particularly popular -- though, as we learned afterwards, her extensive relations with the men in the colony were in the sexual sense innocent... Our discovery of the next step in the Faker campaign was accidental. We might never have discovered what was happening at all, or only when it was far too late. A friend of the real Terry came directly to me. She was puzzled. She and Terry had known each other for a long time. They had a strictly private word game of their own, one they had never shared with anyone. Now suddenly Terry didn't any more. We thought at first that the real and fake Terry were having some fun with us, as twins do. We brought them together. We found that one of them, no matter how good a copy, could still be identified as a Procarpan. Blood and other samples removed from her responded exactly like human samples at first. But in a matter of minutes or hours they changed, attempting to turn into something else... We realized the gravity of the situation. Both Procarpans were locked up. The creature who had been the real Terry was exhaustively questioned. It was beyond doubt that her body had been taken over somehow by the Procarpans. And how many more? That was when the testing started. Well, how could anyone have guessed, the Director thought, that the Procarpans had two totally different techniques of imitation? Making themselves look like humans, even actually existing humans, had been relatively harmless. Anyway, there had been only two of them. The question of admitting to the dome five hundred Procarpans looking like humans had never arisen. But finding that a human had become a Procarpan was a different matter. We tried to restore Terry. We asked the Procarpan inside her to bring her back, to leave her. He, she or it merely went on with the stubborn, hopeless pretense of being Terry. We tried drugs. We even tried torture. Nothing happened except that when the Faker realized that we were never going to stop, that Terry W'alter, possessed, would never be free among us again, she decided to die. She died. We could not stop her. Significantly, however, we noticed the typical green tinge after death which apparently is an infallible sign. The two imitation humans died too. But now we were alerted: how many other Fakers were already among us? We started testing. Then it was easy. Friends asked questions which only the real person could answer. There were, we found, already four Fakers among us. We tried to restore the victims, but apparently Fakers never let go -- if they are capable of letting go. We don't know. It must be admitted that though we saw the horror of situation, it was some time before we saw the complete danger. The trouble was every Falser knew everything which had ever been said or done in the presence of any Faker, or the two imitation humans. They were the people they seemed to be, and therefore no medical test worked. Somewhere in their body, as we now know, there was a white worm  -- but we have never found any way of establishing this short of execution... But because at first it was so easy to spot Fakers, most of us assumed it would always be so. We were wrong. It was not long before a male Faker could graphically describe a baseball game, demonstrate golf shots, tell off-color stories, and describe actual locations on Earth. Soon a girl Faker could react to clothes, perfume, obscenity, compliments exactly like a real girl. For a time actual sexual intercourse was definitive -- but only for a time. Pain worked briefly. So did tests based on creative sense of humor, for the Fakers could only imitate humor, not initiate it. Unfortunately, many humans are similar. We soon found out about the worms. It was after that that I ordered total nudity all the time, after a plump woman Faker in blouse and slacks was found to be carrying seventeen worms oii her body, to say nothing of any others that might have been in it. Soon we reached a stage when we could test a suspect for an hour and not be sure. Everything which had worked before was known and rendered useless. Skills were still beyond the Fakers. No Faker can play the piano -- but they can sing and whistle, and they know all the tunes the average person knows, all the words. Now we're in the position where we're not so much trying to beat the Fakers as beat ourselves -- think of important, vital, significant, definitive things which, so far, we've missed... The Director took a fresh sheet and wrote firmly: My only mistake, the only one which can be held against me, was not ordering withdrawal from this world the last time I could be certain that every Faker among us had been detected. Unless we find a storybook solution that totally nullifies the Fakers, Procarpa must certainly be abandoned. But obviously we cannot take this scourge with us. It could be the end of the human race; perhaps before this the Fakers have totally eradicated other races, here or elsewhere. Besides, from our own point of view, we should not wish to be imprisoned in a ship with such an enemy... He had thought that through and made up his mind. It was possible that the problem could very easily be beaten on a ship. The Fakers might depend on a supply of worms and be incapable of quick procreation off Procarpa. Perhaps on a ship the problem would sink to negligible proportions. But perhaps it wouldn't. The Fakers apparently could learn nothing they hadn't been taught. And the settlers had been careful not to teach them about space travel. It wasn't really a heroic, noble, selfless decision. If they couldn't get off Procarpa without Fakers among them, it obviously wasn't worth getting off Procarpa at all. VI ' 'happened?" said Stevens as Jonina returned. Her moment of terror, and the whole brief episode, was now quite unimportant. "Nothing," she said. Evans had just finished arranging an immediate snap test of the entire personnel, except the Director, when the intercom buzzed. He came back to the group at the other end of the clinic, his face grave. "That Black Beauty query," he said. "Nobody told anyone anything." Stevens frowned. "That means that whoever told has been taken over already," he said. "Well... let's get started. The organization for such a snap test had been worked out long ago. Everybody in the colony would be in the open, spaced out, watched by guards. There would be no talking. People tested and passed would go back to their places. If the test worked and went on working -- and those were big ifs -- they would spot every Faker at present in the colony. The first ten men and women knew at once what the red object was and knew it had to be sharpened. The eleventh was puzzled, and just as the six people in the room were becoming nearly certain she was a Faker, she suddenly realized: "Oh, it's a pencil." The thirteenth turned the pencil over and over, tried to write with it, pressed the shaved spot in the hope that a stylus would pop out, felt for catches, tried to unscrew it. He acted exactly like any human being presented with a writing tool unfamiliar to him. But Stevens had to back his judgment... There was the usual tense period of waiting. The man on the floor might have died simply for the crime of not recognizing a pencil, never having used one as a child. He hadn't. He was a Faker. In their relief and excitement, the four testers hugged eadi other. Jonina (who had already forgotten all about Saunders) even hugged the two guards, who were usually completely ignored. ' I 'hey had a test which worked. ' No Faker knew what to do with the pencil, and this time, owing to the precautions taken, there was no way for the Fakers to find out. If any of the men and women armed and appointed as guards was a Faker, there could be a bloody gun battle -- but this was unlikely, since the Fakers played their parts so perfectly that a Faker who was a guard would act like a guard up to the moment of discovery. The testing went on. The next Faker knew, of course, that it was no use pressing the shaved spot. He tried licking the pencil. They didn't wait this time to make sure he was a Faker. They bundled the corpse into one of the cubicles and went on testing. But he was a Faker all right. The next Faker demanded ink. Evidently the Fakers had decided by this time that the red stick was simply a very primitive pen, and they knew about ink. He was shot too and pushed into a cubicle. There were some near things with people who were not Fakers. One girl of seventeen, the youngest person in tire colony -- brought along because her mother, father and brother were there -- seemed to have no idea what the red stick could be. Stevens would have given the signal to have her shot but for the fact that he knew her brother and parents were in the colony. If she had become a Faker, could they possibly have failed to spot it? So they gave her every chance. Could it be that lead pencils were now so old-fashioned that the youngest people had never used, seen, or heard of them? Yet Jonina, who had thought of the test, was only eighteen. Finally it clicked. The girl had seen sharpened pencils but did not know them in their unsharpened form. She did not know they could come that way. Altogether, they spotted and killed seven Fakers. The very last was a Faker; he had chosen to remain in this position so that he would have the very maximum chance of finding out something in time to save himself. But all he had managed to figure out was that since the red stick did not write by itself, since it did not unscrew and evidently was not used with ink or paint, it must be an instrument which worked in conjunction with a special surface, like chalk on a blackboard or an etching needle on metal. He therefore asked for "the right paper"... When they had confirmed that he had been a Faker, the tec team members were jubilant. They had not expected such success. For some time now all the countered. "I must see the Director," Stevens said. "To give him the test too?" Evans said meaningly. "That as well. But mainly because now, if we take real emergency measures, we can beat the Fakers. Never let anybody out of the sight of at least three other people, even for an instant. Keep everybody squatting in the open if necessary. After all, we're under a dome." T Te put a call through. "It's a breakthrough," he told the Director jubilantly. "We figured out a test... of course it won't work again, after today, but we know as of now there are no Fakers left in the colony. How about that. Director?" There was a moment's pause. Then the Director's voice exploded on them: "Fool! Get over here right away." And the line went dead. They looked at each other. "The Director?" said Evans. "Could he be -- ?" "No," said Stevens positively. "And if he were, he wouldn't step out of line by blaming us for catching Fakers." "All the same," said Evans, "we'll all go with you, Steve." They went to the Director's room. He had calmed down a little. He was disappointed now rather than angry. First, however, Stevens gave him the pencil. "Oh, that?" he said. "Did that work? The Fakers didn't know it had to be sharpened? Steve, we've missed a great chance. You should have told me you had something... Are you sure this won't work again?" Stevens shrugged. "Pretty certain. The Fakers will take over somebody or other within hours. Now that the test is over and everybody's dispersed, the pencil probe will be freely discussed -- a Faker could find out what he wanted to know without even asking directly." "We've missed a great chance," the Director repeated gloomily. "This could have got us off the planet." The team exchanged glances. "You're prepared to abandon the colony, then?" said Stevens. "What choice is there? No one else would come here. We've found no natural resources anyway, and the atmosphere is poisonous. Colony Control wouldn't finance more than a base here, even without Fakers. As it is -- I decided some time ago we must abandon the colony the moment we can be sure we're absolutely clean -- " "Then you might have told us," Evans said. "It's up to you to tell me when you have -- " "Director, it's foolish to expect anyone to work in the dark," said Stevens bluntly. "Anyway, we know we're clean now. Why not -- " "No, it's useless," said the Director wearily. "We need at least two tenders to take everybody off. Even then people will be packed like sardines in conditions that can't be maintained for more than an hour or two. By the time we've rebuilt a second tender, there will be Fakers among us again." "If we line up everybody and never let people even go to the bathroom except in sixes... " Stevens said. Director shook his head impatiently. "A second tender can't be reassembled that way." "Then why not do it in two trips? We know the ship is clean since the Fakers have no machines and wouldn't work ours anjrway. Take a tested batch up and then test the second batch." "I'm not going to withdraw until we can all withdraw," said the Director flatly. Again the team exchanged glances. No one had more cause than they to know that the Director's handling of the whole situation had not been perfect. But he was the Director. Things had to be done his way. He was like the captain of a ship -- in final command. "Well, I guess it's no use arguing," said Stevens. "I take it you're going to have a second tender restored and then, when everything's ready, you want another definite test?" "Another short test," the Director corrected. "If it takes half an hour per person, that's too long. That means seventy-five hours to load each tender, and we can't shut up one fifty people in a tender for more than a few hours... What I want is this. We rebuild a tender, get everything complete and then aU line up. Before anybody has to eat or drink or sleep, before the Fakers have a chance to do anything entirely new, you get everybody positively cleared and into the two tenders. That means a quick test like the one you've just used. Hell, you've proved it's possible. Why can't you do it again?"  s far as the team, back in the clinic, was concerned, this question was easy to ask but very difficult to answer. They discussed the matter without the guards, though the guards were safe. A password system was employed. This worked perfectly on a small scale, in research teams and with a few trusted guards, but human nature prevented it from working in the colony at large. Such a system had been tried several times, and it had always broken down. In any large group there were always some who had to tell... Evans said: "Sure, when a simple little thing like the pencil test works, it suddenly looks for about five minutes as if tliis problem wouldn't give an average-grade moron much trouble. But the fact is we can test and test for days and let every Faker in the colony through the net." "I think," Jonina remarked, "that the first thing to figure out is some nasty accident that might happen to the Director." Stevens nodded. "I know what you mean." "Do you?" There was a strange quality in her voice that made them all look at her. She was tense as a high diver before a leap. "We're the testers," she said meaningly. "Suppose we find the Director is a Faker?" "But he isn't," said Stevens. "He's wrong, but he's no Faker." "Does that make a difference?" Jonina said. Then they saw exactly what she meant. They saw, too, why she made the suggestion while the guards were not present. They had to kill Fakers. If they made mistakes, it was too bad. No one could hold them responsible, any more than a surgeon could be held responsible when the patient died. "No," said Anna abruptly. "That wouldn't help. At the present moment, I guess the Director's right." "Huh?" Evans exclaimed. "Yes, right. If the final stage is anything but a quick all-ornothing test, the Fakers have time to see what's happening and try something new." "Such as?" She shrugged. "With their abilities, do you think they couldn't figure out something -- if they saw defeat staring them in the face?" They didn't. fn five days the tender was JLready. Every inch of it was tested during assembly, in case the Fakers could be metal and plastic as they could be human beings. (But if so, surely the battle was over and the Fakers had won?) When ready, it was sealed, like the other tender. There were no worms in either of them. Routine tests had" identified no new Fakers, and there might be none. But the work of reassembling the tender, and the consequent disorganization and strain on the remaining accommodations, meant opportunities which must, Stevens decided grimly, have resulted in the creation of at least six new Fakers. The Director -- and Anna -- were right. It was impossible, on a long-term basis, to keep a colony under a dome running and have all the top brains engaged in a fight against the Fakers and at the same time ensure that nobody was ever alone or in twos or threes, anyway, in a standard settlement with only earth as raw material. Talks went on every day on the final test. The Director sometimes attended, and the scientists working on the problem from other angles, were consulted. Generally it was agreed that something like the pencil test must be the answer. It had to be something that every human knew about, and no Faker. Therefore it had to be something which had no day-to-day part in the life of the colony and which would not have been discussed. Following the success of the fountain pen was considered. Apart from the fact, however, that no pen could be found in the colony, the test was finally decided to be inadequate. Although one or two Fakers might not show sufficient familiarity with a pen, the third or fourth would have figured it all out. There had never been a baby's bottle in the colony. But again, every test based on such an object seemed too easy. "V To Faker, given combustibles,  would know how to light a fire -- at least, so it was assumed. Would every human? Could the team see the difference, in a practical test, between a human with only theoretical knowledge of lighting fires and a Faker with only theoretical knowledge of lighting fires? Mechanical tests, earlier, had been very effective. The snag was that the Fakers, although they had never shown more than average mechanical aptitude, had become better at some of these tests than the least apt humans. Earlier, too, tests based on the fact that the Fakers had no original sense of humor had worked. But many humans had no individual sense of humor either. They had learned to laugh at certain words, certain situations, certain behaviors. They laughed because others laughed. Given a test designed to grade their appreciation of the comic, they came out lower than the Fakers -- who were better at imitation than any human. Thousands of things were considered. Every possible test, even those constructed on impeccable principles, had a hole. Every human had to pass. Every Faker had to fail. A series of tests was postulated: tests of mechanical aptitude, sense of humor, selfconsciousness and other human characteristics and capacities. Yet suppose some rated like a Faker on all tests -- did that prove he was a Faker? Unfortunately, no. The first idea came from Anna -- and it was not a test. She pointed out a mistake they had been making right from the beginning. An understandable but stupid mistake. Always, the moment they were sure a suspect was a Faker, they executed him. Naturally, it was impossible to take chances once a Faker was discovered. But this meant that the Fakers always knew the key question. Suppose the pencil test had been included with others. Suppose no interest had been shown when a suspect failed to do anything with the pencil. Suppose he had been executed ten minutes later. The Fakers would never have known their precise mistake. So it was agreed that when the key question was found. Fakers would not be executed instantly. The team would wait, acting as casually as possible, until something else happened which might be a mistake. Thus the value of the test might be preserved. On the fifth day Anna said: "Suppose we put the clock forward two months?" It took the other three some time to work out what she meant. T?ven then, her idea, like Jonina's, aroused no initial enthusiasm. It did not seem to be definitive. It did not call for positive enough reaction. There must be a great deal about it in the library. The subject must surely have been discussed freely in the colony, in the hearing of Fakers. Then, too. Fakers who failed the test early would pass on information which would enable later Fakers to pass. Nevertheless, the four members of the team batted the idea around in their minds, did some checking in the library, and began to see how the plan might work. The great virtue of the idea was the vast opportunity it gave Fakers to go wrong. Humans, with their background, their experience, their seventeen (at least) years of life, could scarcely get completely on the wrong track. Although they might not know certain things, they could not possibly make any positive mistakes. It was not as simple as the pencil test. It would need equipment. It would need a specially prepared testing room, the contents of which must be kept secret. True, the second Faker would know all about them. But could he react correctly, even knowing? Gradually they came to believe he could not. "But," said Jonina glumly, "the Director will put his foot in it somehow." "No, he won't," Stevens assured her. "You know him -- " "This is how we'll work it. The Director, who won't know a thing about the test, will be tested first. He'll be first in the first ship." The other three brightened. "Then," Stevens went on, "the pilots, engineers, technicians. If anything happens, the two tenders can be sealed and take off it "Leaving us behind," Evans remarked quietly. "Quite. But that shouldn't happen. We'll have Fred and Charlie with us. There shouldn't be more than a dozen Fakers among us in all. The rota will be random so that they can't be the last dozen, or anything like that. You know what the Fakers are like. They'll go on pretending, right to the end." "We hope," said Evans. "Steve, will it really work?" Stevens took a piece of paper from his pocket. "I took a leaf out of the Director's book and worked this out on paper," he said. "These are the reasons why I think Anna's test will work." They read : #. It is an essentially human thing. #. Many reactions, many human reactions, are possible, but how could the Fakers guess any of them? (except those mentioned in books). #. All humans have childhood memories of it. No Fakers have any knowledge of it at all, save from adults. #. Fakers will know what Fakers have done in the test room, but not what any humans have done. he day came. The two tenders stood ready, inside the dome. When they took off, the dome would be destroyed. This, they all believed, was important. Fakers found an intelligent community and imitated it. Possibly, once the humans had left they would go on pretending to be a human colony. And that might eventually be serious. But with the dome destroyed, with everything within it destroyed -- there would be an explosion triggered by the atmospheric pressure change soon after the dome went -- the Procarpans would have neither cause nor opportunity to go on pretending to be humans. Between the tenders was a small steel hut with no vindows and a single door. Inside the hut were Stevens, Evans, Jonina and two guards. Outside were Anna and two more guards. Around the hut and the tenders stood three hundred two people. There had never been a crowd quite like this. They were all quite naked, and they didn't make a sound. The guards among them had orders to shoot anyone who spoke. Anna was amused to see that the Director was quite nervous. He wanted to speak to her, but the rules were strict. He too would be shot if he tried to communicate. Inside, Stevens said: "Well, this is it. If the Fakers have found out what we're doing, if they manage to get through this test, we'll just have to beat them on the ship." "But the Director said... " Jonina began. Stevens smiled. "The Director is first in line. Once the seal is broken and he's in the tender, we'll decide what's to be done." He nodded to the guard at the door, and the Director came in. One by one, the Director first, men and women emerged from the testing room and walked to the tenders. They went to tenders A and B alternately, so that overcrowding would not be too serious until the end. Fakers were spotted and, after a misleading period of pretense, executed. No mistakes were made. No one who was not a Faker failed the test. And there was plenty of reason to believe that no one who was passed it. Like the pencil test, it was working. They could see that. As in the pencil test, successive Fakers tried different things, and certain aspects of the testing had to be dropped once they knew the right answers. But the Fakers could not learn enough to get through. Gradually the crowd thinned. Anna was picking people for testing at random, so that the Fakers in the crowd could not determine the order of selection. If they could, they might give themselves a better chance of passing the test. They might, too, decide that the last half dozen or so should all be Fakers and take over guards and team. The crowd dwindled to a hundred, then fifty, then twenty. And suddenly Anna burst into the testing room. "Worms!" she screamed. "Hundreds of them!" They rushed out. All over the area within the dome, worms were oozing from the ground. The guards killed them as they came -- but still they came. The remaining colonists leaped in a mad dance of survival. Two jumped the wrong way, were captured by worms, and were ruthlessly cut down. Stevens shouted and one tender door closed. Another shout and the four members of the team, the guards, and eleven colonists still not tested dashed to the other tender. Within seconds they were off the surface of the planet. "The pilot protested. "Look, ' I'm in charge of this ship, not you," he said. "In a few minutes you will be," said Stevens. "But you must realize that while eleven people are still untested, I have to be in charge. And I need the control room. It's the only space there is." "You haven't seen the way we're crammed in this ship. People are literally piled on top of each other in the lockers, even in the machine room. Believe me, the Black Hole of Calcutta must have been a luxury hotel compared with this." "The ventilation here is adequate," Stevens retorted. "Nobody will die. Now you fly the ship. I'm finishing the testing in here." The team and the guards knew what to do. The first of the last eleven entered. It was a girl, a very frightened girl. "We'ye lost the props," Stevens said. "So we'll have to do this in words. Suppose I wore a green suit and boots, wore a green hood, and had a long white beard. Suppose I had white fur round the edges of the suit. Who would I be?" She stared at him blankly. Patiently he described the garb again. "Green?" she said. "Green, or yellow." "Not red?" "Okay, suppose it was red." "You'd be Santa Claus." "Could I have another name?" "Well... St. Nicholas?" They began to relax, as they always did when they became sure they were testing a human, not in the presence of a Faker. The Fakers did not know about St. Nicholas. But earlier, satisfied from other evidence -- they did not ask questions in the same order -- that the suspect was a Faker, they had killed him the moment he mentioned St. Nicholas. Since then no Faker had mentioned the name. "Could I have still another name?" Stevens asked. The girl was puzzled for a moment. Then she tried tentatively: "Father Christmas?" They sent her to join the other humans packed like sardines. "I don't get it," the pilot said. "On that, can you be sure?"I"that Father Christmas isn't mentioned in any of the reference books as the personification of Christmas. Santa Claus is, and so is St. Nicholas." "Seems a heck of a small thing to go on," the pilot commented. "Maybe not so small... but we don't have to rely on that. There's lot's more. Funny, the mistletoe bit never worked at all. They knew all about that. The point of this thing is, it's the end of October and the colony didn't exist last Christmas. There hasn't been a lot of talk about Christmas in the colony, and there's no commercial campaign to keep reminding us how many shopping days there are till Christmas." "But it must have been mentioned," said the pilot. "Sure it's been mentioned -- often. But there are no kids in the Colony. Christmas when it did come wasn't going to be anything much. There would be only token presents, no cards, no turkey, no snow. We'd have held a mild sort of celebration. Nobody was looking forward to Christmas particularly, because nothing much was going to happen. So why talk about it?" "Well..." said the pilot. "Now do you mind if we get on?" The next suspect, also a girl, was asked: "What do you eat at Christmas?" She told them, quite confidently. She knew all about Christmas. She had seen about twenty of them -- well, say seventeen, since she wouldn't remember much about the first two or three. And when she happened to mention pouring vodka over the pudding and setting it alight, Stevens passed her, although vodka was hardly traditional. They had had two pieces of luck in the test. They had expected success with mistletoe (there was of course none in the colony), with various parts of the Christmas story, with snow, yule logs, reindeer, turkeys, crackers, punch bowls and all the other things particularly associated with the old-fashioned, traditional Christmas. But of course chance operated. And somehow the Fakers had altogether missed hearing about Father Christmas. They could not know the Christmas family ritual, for who would describe in detail what everybody knew? Even pictures of Santa Claus were only in black and white... Also, they had picked something up wrong. They had heard vaguely about burning brandy at an old-fashioned Christmas feast. But they didn't know it was poured over the pudding first. A young man entered. He talked about Santa Claus, but not about Father Christmas. He knew all about adult Christmases, with paper hats and cocktails and mistletoe, but he was a little vague about the hanging-up-stockings ritual. He knew about burning brandy, but seemed to think it was poured into a small chalice and burned like, say, incense, as part of what was fundamentally a religious festival... The body was pushed out into space. He was the last Faker. There had been eleven in all... T?xhaustive tests on the ship convinced Stevens and the Director that there was not a Faker on board. They could be satisfied they were right, because, in space again, all the humans could be expected to know what to do in a spaceship and no Faker could. The Director said: "Your test worked, Steve, and you can accept my assurance that you and Anna will get full credit. But honestly, wasn't the fact that it worked so well really luck? Couldn't it have failed utterly?" "No," said Stevens, "it couldn't. There's a whole body of experience, and emotion, round a thing like Christmas. Sure, if one Faker had seen one genuine Christmas, the whole thing would have flopped. As it was, if some angles didn't work, others were bound to work. And they went on working because we never let the Fakers know where they'd gone wrong." He didn't want to talk about it any more. It was over. Anna was waiting for him in the games room, and curiously, but understandably, she would be far more attractive in a halter and shorts than she had been without them... "It had to work," he said, speaking the epitaph on the Fakers. "In an adult colony, two months before Christmas, how could anything the Fakers had heard enable them to guess what a child's Christmas on Earth is like? How could they talk convincingly of a child's feelings, even as a long-gone, distant thing? The bliss, the excitement of opening parcels on Christmas morning?" He grinned. 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This Edition is also published in Living Tape by Services for the Blind, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. Editor Science Editor by Poul Anderson by Hayden Howard by Larry Niven by Jack Vance by John Brunner by Robin Scott by R. A. Lafferty by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Subscription Manager bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations re served. All material submitted must be accompanied by selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between char acters and actual poisons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Oil. im mt me The Dark Continents o? Your Mind maintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Accept this RooV Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life," Address: Scribe B.B.J. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A.  j  Scribe: B.B.J. I San Jose, California #, U.S.A.  I Please send copy of booklet,  I "The Mastery of Life" which S j  shall read as directed. ! i N ante !  Address t  City j j State  Please Include Your Zip Code s f all the New Masters of sci ence fiction that have turned up in the past decade or two, the man called Cordwainer Smith surely ranks among the highest. His first story appeared in a small-circulation magazine published on the West Coast in the late #Q's; it was called Scanners Live in Vain, and it is perhaps the chief reason why that magazine is remembered. One story... that was all anyone had seen from him, and for several years there were no more. Then, gradually, others began to appear. A short story here; a year or so later, a novelette there. Readers began to look for his name. In his stories, which were a wonderful and inimitable blend of a strange, raucous poetry and a detailed technological scene, we began to read of human beings in worlds so far from our own in space in time that they were no longer quite Earth (even when they were the third planet out from Sol), and the people were no longer quite human, but something perhaps better, certainly different. Most of Cordwainer Smith's stories appeared first in this magazine, a circumstance which has given us a good deal of pride over the years. But with an even greater measure of sorrow we have to say that there will be few more of them, perhaps none at all. I n the hot August of # Paul Linebarger died. One of the most closely guarded secrets in science fiction was that Cordwainer Smith and Dr. Paul Linebarger of Johns Hopkins and the State Department were one and the same man. He was a fascinating man, and a warm and friendly one. His background was -- there is no other word for it -- unique : godson of Sun Yat Sen, confidante of rulers of half Asia, consultant to American foreign policy. He was not a man who could readily be spared. He is deeply missed, for his stories and for himself.  VU A Long Play Record Album That Will Astound You! This Album is made up of actual interviews from (only three IP's per customer). American Music Library, Inc. # W. #th St., New York, N. Y. # Please rush m e Long John Nebel's "The Flying Saucer Story" Record A!bum(s). I am enclosing # plus a #c handling charge for each album ordered. INama Address City State Zip Coda Children in Hiding All the Babies were healthy in every way... except in their minds, where Something lurked! ttiyrr. Murphy is here," said lv A 'dig speaker on the desk. "The special investigator from Earth. I'm sending him in right away." Hans Lammergeier, Chief Administrator of the Status Two colony planet Landfall, jolted out of his obsessive brown study. He'd been thinking about the same problem as usual, of course. On Landfall (population Earth, atmosphere, climate and period of rotation "acceptable") there was only one real problem. He shot out a hand and tapped the switch on the desk which turned the wall on his left briefly into a mirror. He looked himself over, adjusting the collar of his old gray jacket, thrusting a stray lock of hair back where it belonged over his growing bald patch, making the normal ineffectual gestures of an overworked colonial administrator faced with an important visitor. For one moment before cutting the mirror, he stared at his appearance. Hans Lammergeier, age sixty-one. Forehead lined, eyes sunken, hair graying and falling out -- Earthside, you'd say ninety, maybe a hundred. And he was far past the stage at which he could contrive to make himself look merely experienced and grave. Damn the Babies! The door squeaked open. Guiltily he shut off the mirror and rose, extending his thin, knobbly hand across his desk. "Mr. Murphy!" he said in his best approximation of a warmly welcoming tone. "I'm Lammergeier, of course. Please sit down." Mr. Murphy was a typical Earthman: shorter than Lammergeier, sallow, with dark hair and a suspicion of imminent fatness. Earthside diet had been starchy for five generations, and it tended to show before the population reached middle age. But he was in glowing good health despite that; his clothes were impeccable, and Lammergeier would not have undertaken to guess his age closer than ten years. Overcrowded, underfed -- that was the prediction. The colonists would have the edge everywhere : more room, more food, more clean natural air... And look at the two of us! Damn the Babies! But Lammergeier swallowed his instinctive reaction and did no more than resume his own seat. A IT urphy, setting a memocase on the desk's forward rim, looked around him with some distaste. Lammergeier didn't blame him for that. The office hadn't been redecorated in fourteen years, and there was a crack across the ceiling which occasionally shed white dust when the foundations settled another Murphy the logical climax of what he'd seen on his way from the spaceport: potholed roads, weed-thick fields, tumbledown houses... Suddenly conscious of how well he fitted his setting, in this jacket that hadn't been cleaned for six months and was anyhow far older than any garment should decently be allowed to become, Lammergeier cleared his throat. "I must -- uh -- apologize for the appearance of my home world, Mr. Murphy. The air of neglect, which you've doubtless remarked on, is solely due to the matter which compelled us to ask for your assistance." Recalling the wrangling that had preceded the decision -- the expressions of shame at confessing failure after the grand promises on which their colony had been set afloat -- he grimaced. Murphy shrugged and made a tiny adjustment to one of the controls on his memocase. "I was advised during my briefing of the magnitude of the trouble," he said. His voice was as oily as his fat-taut skin. "But until I saw it with my own eyes I found it incredible that half the available resources of a planet as potentially rich as Landfall should be absorbed into -- h'm -- what does actually absorb it. You are -- check me if the situation has altered since I was first briefed non-productive individuals!" Lammergeier felt the first beads of sweat prickle on his skin. What he'd expected from Earth he hadn't been sure. At the very back of his mind, perhaps, after his long and bitter struggle to persuade his Planetary Council that they must doff their pride and appeal to Earth, he'd nursed a fantasy of some team of miracle workers, who would thunder out of the sky in the latest interstellar cruiser and instantly solve the Babies problem before deciding to settle here themselves. Instead... S truggling to be both polite and firm, he said, "That's hardly a fair way to put it, Mr. Murphy. The future of our colony was predicted on a certain available supply of manpower -- and womanpower too, I needn't stress that. What would you have had us do? Dig mass graves and shovel the Babies in by the tens of thousands?" "According to what I was told," Murphy said, "they're effectively mindless, and there are millions of them. They must be the direct cause of the poor maintenance I've observed in your buildings and roads, and doubtless elsewhere that I shall discover later. Moreover, the average daily calorie intake of your people is lower than that of Earth, a shocking display of mismanagement, in view of the fact that our population is now alor not?" "Yes! But -- " Lammergeier's forehead was now so damp he could not refrain from mopping it. He registered Murphy's disapproval of his using a handkerchief that would be returned to his pocket, instead of a hygienic tissue delivered at once to a disposall. And ignored it. "Bear with me while I try and make clear how it looks to us," he requested. "From Earth, I don't contest it must seem to reflect mismanagement. But -- "Oh, I'll have to go back to the beginning. Landfall has been established as a Status Two colony since the middle of last century. During our immigration period, nothing but nothing happened to cast doubt on our assumption that it would turn out a perfectly habitable world." "You say 'our' assumption," Murphy murmured. "You were here at the time, then?" Galaxy! Do I look that ancient to him? In the nick of time Eammergeier spotted the betraying twist on Murphy's mouth and bit back his indignant denial, A needier. But I don't have to rise to his baiting. "I employ the word merely to emphasize the deep involvement everyone here feels with the fate of the colony." There -- that was a diplomatic way of putting it! "You will hardly have overlooked that the pre-colonial stage was masterminded direct from Earth, and the government of the time was surely no less concerned for the fate of its intending emigrants than the present one which has sent you here to advise us." Was that a wince from Murphy? Lammergeier couldn't be certain. Hoping the jab had found its mark, he hurried on. "The -- ah -- epidemic, if that's what it is, which began twenty years ago came without warning. The birth of several infants who after a period of months, if not years, turned out to be subnormal could hardly have been detected while they were still unweaned, could it?" "Interesting local dialectal variant you just used," Murphy as 'several!' " gin with!" Lammergeier was reddening. "This thing has been going on for twenty years!" "And in the whole of that time, no normal infant has been born on this planet?" "Well... no." Lammergeier forced out the admission in a whisper. From where Murphy was sitting, it must look like insanity to send for help only now, when the situation was out of control. Yet how could he hope to explain the real state of affairs? He, even he who had fought and won that bitter argument in the Council over so many years, felt the most violent revulsion Babies and starting a fresh generation with adopted children from some other planet. That was the wildest idea voiced during the debate, but also the most promising. And didn't that sum up their predicament! In any case, suppose it happens all over again with the descendants of the newcomers? Murphy's eyes had wandered around the room again. Now he pointed at a faded chart hanging lopsidedly from a single pin in the wall at Lammergeier's back. "What's that?" Lammergeier craned around and felt a stab of surprise. That map had been there for so long, he'd ceased to register its existence -- it was a background detail. In a tone of mild wonder, he said, "Why it shows the course of the epidemic from the first township at which it was reported, to the limit of its spread." "Which was the whole inhabited area of the planet." "Er -- yes, I'm afraid so," Lammergeier confirmed miserably. "Fantastic," Murphy muttered. "I was reading stats of some of the advertising material distributed during Landfall's colonial phase. It makes a sorry contrast with the actual state of affairs. Well, let's not rake over dead ash right now. I shall need to see the consequences of the phenomenon with my own eyes." ' I 'here was only one place to take him, of course. 'Lammergeier took him there, in a wheezing car forty-odd years old held together by string, wire and the patient attention of its eightyyear-old driver. The arrival of Murphy had lent Lammergeier a fresh viewpoint, and now he thought with a shock of dismay: Why, we're a planet of old folks' Nowhere on Landfall was there a functioning human being younger than the age of about forty. And the youngest were forty the way he was sixty: looking and feeling half as old again, one foot already in the grave. He stifled the realization and spoke aloud, pointing through the car's windshield at a building which was looming ahead. "That's the Babies' Home for the capital and environs. The present population is about eight thousand. But as you see we're having to add a new wing." Murphy scowled and said nothing. He didn't in fact speak again until they were in the lobby of the building. Lammergeier had had no chance to phone through and warn the staff of their arrival -- the phone cables were out again and no one could be spared to fix them until next week. Actually, they walked straight into the middle of an event which was heartbreakingly typical of the whole calamitous mess. At the reception desk, flanked by two uniformed policemen, a woman in a shabby dress stood clinging desperately to a child of about six or seven, far too heavy for her to carry yet cradled tightly in her arms. Facing her were a nurse with a lined, weary face under a mop of gray hair and a bald elderly doctor in a once-white coat. Lammergeier whispered to Murphy, "Wait here a second, and I'll get the director to conduct you around personally." "No!" Murphy raised a hand, eyes on the scene at the reception desk. "What's going on?" "Well, I assume she's what we call a 'hider'," Lammergeier explained. "Despite the fact that we don't get normal children any longer, the maternal instinct seems to be insuppressible. I suppose the two things must go together: our reluctance to face hard facts and stop trying to keep these useless Babies alive, and the refusal of so many women to part with their children. Of course, it would be ridiculous to allow them to stay with their parents. The planet's economy is rocky enough already. If members of our labor force were compelled to take time every day -- and night -- to attend to their children, things would be impossible. We tie up plently of workers by adopting the centralized system, but at least the loss of the economy is concentrated in certain district and confined to certain professions." "It's compulsory to bring children in to these establishments, then?" "Oh, yes. It has been for almost fifteen years. But like I said, you still get these 'hiders'." Murphy nodded. "The children -- the Babies -- are literally helpless, are they? Even when they attain the advanced age at which the oldest must be by now -- say twenty?" "Completely helpless," Lammergeier said. "They're exactly like babies, which is what we call them. They have to be fed, changed, lifted up and down from bed to floor so they can play a bit -- they show interest in bright colors and moving toys, but that's the absolute limit of their mental attainments." Abruptly the woman at the desk burst into hysterics. The policeman gently but firmly separated her from the Child, handed it over to the nurse, and marched her out, still screaming as though her throat would split. Lammergeier and Murphy stood in silence till she was gone. fTphen Murphy shook his head. "Fantastic. I'm sorry, but I find all this incredible. With the advantages of a planet that's still virgin over most of its surface, to wind up in this plight!" "You don't understand," Lammergeier sighed. "Maybe not. After all, I come from Earth, where a nonproductive individual is a luxury we barely tolerate at all. Certainly we wouldn't tolerate twenty per cent of them in the population, nor would we go to such elaborate lengths to enable their survival!" "But there's nothing apparently wrong with them!" Lammergeier barked. "To all outward appearance they're healthy, they're organically sound; If some way could be found of bringing their intelligence up to -- if not full adult status -- at any rate bright idiot level, we could let them look after themselves, and what's more we'd get work out of them. They represent a tremendous potential increment to our work force! Get them out of their beds where they lie like vegetables, and we'd be back on our original development schedule within half a century!" "And that's the miracle you're expecting me to work?" Murphy demanded coldly. "Well -- not you exactly. But we hoped that with Earth's vast store of knowledge and skills we haven't had time to bring forward on Landfall..." "I presume," Murphy said with biting irony, "you've been too busy to calculate the mere time it would take to process bies, even granting such a process could be devised!" "I -- uh -- I imagine it would take years, at least," Lammergeier stammered. "At least," confirmed Murphy. "I am not here to wave a magic wand and bring your idiot children out of their overgrown creches, as you appear to imagine. I'm here simply and solely to evaluate the situation and make a recommendation as to the future visibility of our colony on Landfall. Now if that's understood, shall we proceed?" I t was fortunate for Lammergeier that from that point on he could hand over the job of explaining things to Murphy. Director Chen and Matron Hobday had all the facts at their tonguetips, where Murphy liked them. He trailed behind as they recited the statistics, identified the rooms, the endless corridors, the life-support system which took the worst of the burden off the adult staff. Everything seemed to blur into an endless sequence of babies and Babies: the mewling puling infants and the puling mewling adolescents, a kind of blasphemy against human form in their mindless oblivion. He only returned to full awareness when they paused before a door he recognized. It was a little more stained, and the paint was more chipped than the last time he'd seen it, five years ago. But it was the same door. And the same paint. "And this room houses the first of them," Director Chen was saying. "You'll perhaps have noticed that this is the oldest wing of the building; the remainder is entirely a series of more recent extensions. When the very first of the -- ah -- victims were identified, they were brought here for observation, and apart from minor alterations necessitated by their growing older and larger, their quarters are the same that they've always known." "Such darlings they are, too!" exclaimed Matron Hobday, who added uncomfortably when Murphy stared at her, "Well -- in their own way, you know!" Chen, frowning, made to open the door. Murphy stopped him with a gesture and betrayed apprehension. "Ah -- are they of normal adult size now?" he asked. "Oh yes. Within the Landfall range of height and weight." "And they're completely unaggressive? I mean, I should have thought that an infantile mind in an adult body was likely to lead to at least occasional outbursts of bad temper, which might be rather destructive." "No, that's one thing I can safely say we've never observed," Chen assured him. "Had the condition led to violent tantrums I'm sure we'd have been in touch with you much earlier than this." "I see." Murphy rubbed his chin. "And something else. How many adults and near-adults are there at present?" "Over -- shall we say fifteen years of age?" Chen suggested. On Murphy's nod, he counted to himself. "Approximately... There was a peak, you see, about two years after the knowledge of our problem became widespread. Our fertile parents all knew their heredity was good -- they'd been checked for it as a matter of routine -- so they futilely attempted to beat the odds. Later, the mood changed, and now most people have given up trying. A case like the one you saw downstairs on your arrival is a rarity these days, though as recently as three years agoit would have been commonplace." "Good, that's all I wanted to know." Murphy pointed at the door. "Shall we go in?" Nervously, Lammergeier followed behind. Beyond the door, things were much as he had last seen them, apart from more wear and tear. The Babies, adults in everything except mentality, were being put down for their daytime rest. The floor was marked with traces of their presence, some of the traces none too savory; but they themselves were all in their oversize cots, cooing or complaining according to temperament. Two hefty male nurses and one woman were just settling the last of them down. Lammergeier stifled a cry of adjmiration for their devotion; any of the Babies would have outweighed him, and it must be a terrible task lifting and lowering them several times daily. The nurses were surprised at the entrance of their director and his companions, but they refrained from asking questions, completed their work on a nod from Chen, and went out with curious glances. r T"he instant the door was shut, Murphy marched over to the bed of the nearest Baby and stared down at him, naked except for a huge diaper. He set his memocase on the high metal rail intended to prevent the Baby toppling out of bed if he rolled in his sleep.  "And these are the creatures you've saved to keep alive and well for twenty years," he murmured, touching the controls on the case. "I have to grant that they seemed physically sound." "Oh, they are!" Chen hastened to assure him. "They've had the best diet, the best medical care -- not that they need much of that; they're astonishingly healthy. If only we could find a way to spark their intelligence!" "You say they're quite moronic?" Murphy said, stressing the last word. "Completely! Not one of them has ever progressed to the stage of uttering a recognizable word. They coo and cry, and that's the limit of their aspirations." "I think you must be crazy," Murphy said with abrupt coldness, letting the case fall beside him to the full stretch of his arm. He turned to confront them directly. Lammergeier pushed forward. "So we're crazy, are we?" he blurted, unable to restrain himself any longer. "We should have killed them off and buried them by the thousand, should we? Oh, probably it looks that simple from Earth! But these are our kids. And this is out planet, that we've sweated and slaved over all our lives! How the hell do you think we could bring ourselves to face the need to exterminate them because they aren't even useful as animals, then pack our gear and quit Landfall forever for fear it might happen again? We couldn't! And it's no damned good trying to make out we ought to have done!" "No, I wouldn't say that," Murphy agreed. "Man is hardly a perfect rational animal, is he?" Lammergeier shook his head dumbly. "But I didn't mean that," Murphy pursued. "What I meant was that you're crazy to think that these Babies are mindless." Chen reacted first to that. He took half a pace forward. "But I assure you, Mr. Murphy, on the basis of years of experience, that that's the case! I've run every test I ever heard of. I traced every wild speculation I could locate about nonverbal intelligence, in the hope they might represent a mutation with some other faculty equally serviceable and equally human. I drew a blank!" "Then that's where you made your worst mistake," Murphy shrugged. "I don't see that there's much wrong with these young men around us." "Of course you can't see what's wrong!" Lammergeier raged. "That's the whole point!" "Then how about this? Murphy snapped. He rounded on the nearest Babies and clapped his hands together. "Hey, you! Get up! You've spent long enough lounging around having all your wants attended to! There's work to be done -- move" The Babies turned their heads. There was a sound of sighing. Then, one by one, they stretched, yawned and vaulted over the sides of their cots to land bouncing on the floor; nineteen specimens of healthy, muscular adulthood absurdly garbed in off-white loincloths and safetypins. T ammergeier, Chen and Matron Hobday were rooted to the spot, eyes goggling. Lammergeier found his tongue first. "But -- ! Did you know about this already?" Murphy gave a faint smile. "You might say that," he conceded. "Then -- is the problem widespread?" "Getting wider all the time." Murphy sounded secretly amused. Taking it for a patronizing comment on the stupidity of colonials, Lammergeier felt a surge of anger. "Well, if the problem's already known elsewhere, and you came able to solve it with no more than a curt tone of voice -- " "And this," Murphy put in, hefting the memocase. "The hell with your gadgetry! What I want to know is, why Earth let us stew in our own juice when they could have had the courtesy to let us in on the secret!" Lammergeier wanted to stamp until the floor gave away. "Oh, shut up," Murphy said wearily. "They don't know about it on Earth, so how could they have told you! You there?" The tallest Baby scratched his stomach absently. "What's this work you want done, boss?" he inquired in a clear tenor voice. "What the hell do you think?" Murphy snarled, "There are three grown to full size now. You could have done this job years ago. Head Office shouldn't have had to send me to kick you off your beds! Go on, start making up for lost time!" The Baby shrugged, put out both hands, and proceeded to tear Lammergeier limb from limb. "And clear up behind you!" Murphy added, as he bent to the memocase -- which of course was not one. ead Office from Operative "Murphy" ( date untransliterable ) planet "Landfall" (coordinates untranscribable ) : When my grave-digging details get through, the situation here will be back on schedule. The ostensible failure of the project seems to have been due to nothing more than an excess in the mother-love component of the planetwide broadcast from the mind-blanketer. This appears to have been set too high for fear the natives would fight back against the Babies when the latter showed their hand. The precaution was needless, and what's more it backfired! instead of resenting the burden the Babies placed on them, practically everyone on the planet lavished such care and adoration on the little monsters the psychological trigger intended to respond to parental hatred was never tripped. Consequently they stayed the way they were a full five years after they could have taken over. In any case, the drain on the planet's resources and the exhaustion of al'l the intelligent adults of the "native species would have rendered more than token resistance impossible. We can certainly go ahead with confidence. Speaking of which -- how are things on "Earth?" I've heard so much about it I'd like to see it some time! -- John Brunner Immortality is within your grasp. The Cryonics Society of New York Inc. is the leading non-profit organization in the field of cryogenic interment. This involves freezing people immediately after death, in the hope of restoring them to full life, health, and youth sometime in the future. We have a practical program of action, which enables the individual to commit himself to this idea in a meaningful fashion. For detailed information write -- Cryonics Society of New York, Inc., # Creston Avenue, Bx. New York #. He was the worst criminal the world had ever seen -- and his jailer was in love with him! I A lone in the comfortable apart ment which was his cell. Dr. Joe West chewed the inside of his cheek in self-torment. Quivering, his scalpel exposed the tiny pituitary gland of the Arctic Ground Squirrel. "Blind fools!" His real guilt was so much worse than the angry orators in the United Nations General Assembly had shouted. Racial murder? Unpredictably, twenty-two Canadian Eskimos had died. The Ottawa court convicted him of murder. "I'm guilty of worse." His face twisted. Less than # of the Esk women had developed the planned uterine infection. Not a single Esk died. Their resistance to human pathogens was so much stronger than he expected. The Esks continued happily eating and breeding and breeding and breeding -- "Damn me! Instead of me controlling their birth-rate, I'm their Santa Claus!" It was his murder trial which attracted world-wide attention and aid to the hungry Esks. Ironically, it was his trial which awakened humanitarians and politicians to the plight of the overcrowding Esks. Rapidly multiplying Esks were starving. Both the outraged Chinese and the embarrassed United States were air-delivering food, baby clothing, portable barracks. "Blind fools! Like providing food and shelter for lemmings." Dr. West's youthful face winced, gaunt as a pensioner's. The last rumor Dr. West had overheard as he was led to his bullet-proof glass booth in the Ottawa courtroom for sentenchad "evacuated" more than one hundred starving "Eskimos," surely Esks, from Canada's Boothia Peninsula. Like an infectious boil, the population pressure of the Esks had burst. "God! What's happening out there?" Trapped in the New Ottawa Reformation Center, Dr. West knew he should make a second attempt to escape -- at once. His cell was frighteningly comfortable. Safe as a womb. Already the friendly Staff were changing him. Outside the Esks would change the world. 'T'he hiss of increasing air pressure alerted Dr. West that the outer door to his suite was being opened. Ignoring the Ceiling Lens, Dr. West hastily wrapped the dissected squirrel in metallic-green Christmas paper; he was not allowed newspapers. Dropping to his knees, he hid the squirrel under the compressor. As he lurched to the sofa, his abdominal incision tugged. His heart thudded more quickly than the compressor pumping coolant through frosty copper tubes past his work counter to the huge insulated cage. It was an ingenious but scary means of escape. Peering out through the double glass window of the cage, a single chilled Arctic Ground Squirrel ( Citellus undulatus ) still resisted hibernation. The other squirrels slept under the sawdust. This lonely squirrel shrank back as the inner door to Dr. West's suite moved open and Nona walked in with a therapeutic smile. His pulse racing, Dr. West couldn't remember whether he'd shaved. Every day for a week, at #:# a.m. she had entered his suite, made his bed, done his dishes and tried cheerful conversation. Her blue uniform no longer reminded Dr. West of a guard or airline stewardess. Through his insane glass wall, he was staring at her eyes. "Merry Christmas, Student," Nona laughed, but her selfassurance visibly fell away. "This is supposed to be a present to you from the Staff. But I don't know what's in this package." She wasn't smiling now. "I didn't have anything to do with it." Dr. West reached for the package, which was wrapped in grinning Santa Claus paper. He felt as if he could almost reach Nona through his imaginary glass wall. His fingers closing around the bottle-shaped package touched her hand. His muscles tightened. After a year alone in Territorial Prison, and then in the bulletproof glass booth while on trial, and then in Classification Prison, always alone and cut off, Dr. West could not quite break through the illusion there was a glass wall -- "Gurgles like a fifth of rye," he remarked with a weak smile, cautiously shaking the package. "I doubt that." Nona sat herself down on the coffee table, still breathing hard as if she had been hurrying to her hour-aday appointment with him. Always she seemed to be perched on the coffee table, her knees pressed together, her hand tugging down her blue uniform skirt. "That's Christmas on your head," Dr. West stammered, not sure what he meant to say. Her silvery flower-shaped hair decoration of foil, tinsel and yellow-green mistletoe rustled as she raised her face with dimpled pleasure. "Thank you," she said. After a moment she said, "There's still a package in your hand." Dr. West's fingers stripped down the red and white Santa Claus paper, exposing the clear glass neck; he laughed with confusion. "A fifth of gin?" He stared at something worm-shaped and pink drifting back and forth in the alcohol. "I'll be damned! It's my appendix." "I'm sorry!" Nona blurted. "What a horrid thing for the Medical Officer to send." At her upturned face, Dr. West blinked, more surprised by her shocked reaction than by the fact that the Medical Officer would send him back his appendix for Christmas. Dr. West's smile hardened as he silently read the note: Mr. West, our pathologist reports -- . II 'Tphat first night in his suite, Dr. West had lain waiting for his fever to rise. The dull pain spread. His abdominal muscles became rigid. He vomited, crawling toward the bathroom. As he had hoped, the Ceiling Lens was transmitting, and thirty floors below in the basement where # tally screens were banked, the Night Observer noticed and telephoned the Medical Officer. Dr. West had expected to be rushed out of his solitary cell into the elevator, and down, then out through the icy Canadian night to the hospital building. Apparently that was someone's plan. Perhaps an orderly had been bribed. The rectangular hospital seemed to have more escape possibilities than these tall cylindrical towers of the New Ottawa Reformation Center. From a distance the towers had resembled concrete grain elevators. His first glimpse, as the armored car delivered him toward the penitentiary, had shifted from the towers to the Canadians massing in the sleet. a placard read. Flailing their signs, the screaming mob broke through the police line and halted the armored mered against the bullet-proof pressed against the glass, recognized Dr. West. "Kill the bastard!" Dr. West had closed his eyes. They were right. Shivering inside warm Tower ## that first night, finally alone in his solitary suite, still shivering Dr. West had hung up his gray denim trousers, and the capsule fell out of his cuff. He had blinked at it. On the pink irony he thought the capsule might contain cyanide from his witnessed his trial and conviction for genocide and were outraged there no longer was a death penalty in Canada. Their dead Eskimos were lovable people, easily idealized. "Tool of capitalist genocide!" "Communist fiend!" the confused Canadians had shouted after him. ever it contained. Dr. West had gulped the capsule and lain down. His actual crime, his ineffectiveness was more terrible The numbing of death did not come. As his temperature rose and his symptoms proliferated, stood for appendix. Someone was trying to get him out. Someone must believe him. TT'ever engulfed him in delirium. A potent capsule! He imagined he saw Eskimos entering his suite, and he shouted with terror. The Medical Officer's fingers were pressing his rigid abdomen. "Nurse, best take a thermometer reading from this chap." The massive whiteness of a polar bear loomed over the Medical Officer's shoulder, and Joe West had yelled. To his dismay, instead of carrying him out to the hospital, gauze-masked monsters wheeled a portable operating table into his suite. "Best give the patient a spinal." Mirrored in the reflector of the portable overhead light they were turning his body. Their yellowish rubber hands gleamed. A grease pencil marked a line from his navel to his hip. He felt the numb tugging of the scapel. When the appendectomy was complete, a masked face had bent over him. "I say, West, your appendix appears remarkably healthy. In retrospect, your symptoms all seem rather odd. You've made me feel the fool. Was this another one of those unnecessary operations?" The Medical Officer had turned away. "Best deliver his appendix to the pathologist." Now, for a Christmas present, or a warning, the Medical Officer had returned his appendix in a bottle with a note. Mr. West, our pathologist reports that a foreign substance, probably ingested, raised your white blood count and induced other symptoms typical of peritonitis. As 'a former medical man, you may have a more specific explanation? Why not feign a brain tumor next time? We would welcome the exercise. Merry Christmas from the Staff, New Ottawa Reformation Center. P.S. Looking forward to your continued presence during the New Year. Tpvr. West's bitter grin sagged while he turned his head from side to side as if searching for a window to the Outside. Windowless concrete. He stared past Nona at the concave wall and violently stiffened, his fist crushing the note. Her voice intruded: "Did he write one of his funny notes?" "Funny? My sense of humor's dead. I'm dead. Don't waste your hour in here with me. Don't waste the taxpayers' money. Get out, dammit!" Instantly he was sorry -- and terribly lonely. She looked up at him. To his surprise, she moved toward him, smiling. He stiffened. "Get out. While you can, go!" he shouted. "Get out. I can't stand your -- is it sympathy?" She edged toward the door but turned around, her face solemn. "If you want, you can apply for someone else, a different social Therapist." "No! What choice has a rat in a trap?" He looked her up and down. "Bait, is that what you are? Get out." "After you've been here a while," she answered softly, "you'll realize this is like your home. You'll feel differently. Please, if you want to -- you can apply for a different -- " "No, dammit, I want to get out of here! At least you -- get out!" After he had caught his breath, he realized she was still standing there. Trying to hold his voice from trembling, he said: "You don't scare very easily, do you?" "Sometimes. But not of you." "I'm sorry. But I've got to get out of here. I forget you have problems, too. Here you are a woman alone all day with us murderers and maniacs." "I'm not alone." "Do you mean that physically or spiritually? Outside, they'd lynch me," Dr. West said finally. "In here you people try to make me feel comfortable but won't even tell me the news." Wryly he smiled. "There was a prophetess named Cassandra. Now I know why she wailed. A man, a prophet, would have battered his head against a marble pillar. Cassandra could fortell what was going to destroy Troy, but no one would listen. She warned them not to drag the wooden horse into Troy. No wonder she wailed. Helplessly knowing what is going to happen, but not being able to do anything is so much more painful than not knowing!"  C A ren't you being rather dramatic," she remarked. "That wooden horse, isn't it in a school book about Greece?" Turning away from his tormented face, she walked into the kitchenette and opened the sliding door which concealed his sink and electric stove. She boiled water. "Instant coffee?" "So you're the unshakable type," he laughed bitterly. "Must help in a madhouse like this." "I believe in living along from day to day." She sat down on the other end of the sofa and smiled at him over her steaming cup. "Now that you've had your tantrum for this day, I'm going to tell you something which may give you a second one." "No, I'm through," he said, smiling faintly. "Your child psychology has overpowered me." "The Pharmacist asked me to ask you -- " she put down her coffee cup -- "if a hypodermic was, shall we say, overlooked and left in your cell. During the first three nights after your appendix operation the nurse gave you sleeping injections. In a government institution like this everything has to be accounted for -- even if it's all used up like a one-shot disposable hypo. Anyway, the nurse must have become confused in her equipment count. A used hypo is missing. Of course she had other patients to visit, but you're the newest in this tower; and this has never happened before, so the Pharmacist wonders, if you still have the hypo, would you return it?" "I haven't any hypo." "Good. I'll ask the Recreation Officer if he'll start the search in someone else's suite. The Administratrix has told him to search, so he has to search." "That's all right." Dr. West leaned back on the sofa. "The Recreation Officer can start here. I won't feel persecuted. He's my buddy," Dr. West bluffed and nodded at the insulated cage, the compressor, the centrifuge, the gleaming glass equipment, all of which the Recreation Officer cheerfully and ingeniously had acquired for him -- with Dr. West's own impounded funds. T'vr. West's heart palpitated as he remembered the dissected squirrel concealed under the compressor. But he went on talking. "The Recreation Officer showed the Administratrix my hibernation-study proposal. I may be repeating old metabolic and glandular research, but it's more therapeutic for me than weaving baskets. He says he got her approval by suggesting Tower ## surely must be more enlightened than Alcatraz -- some prison where they once let an old lifer raise canaries. So the Recreation Officer's my buddy, and I raise squirrels. He's welcome to search. When is he likely to?" "He'll probably start someplace else." She put down her coffee. "At least two students who've been sick and visited by the nurse are former drug addicts and might steal hypos, I suppose." She looked solemnly at him, and he was surprised how small she really was. Her hand on the couch was fragile compared with his. "The truth is", she laughed, "some men in this tower are -- rather scary. That's why in your suite I feel so much better -- with you." Dr. West recognized the pitch, the helpless bit, and he almost smiled with pleasure. He not only felt protective, he felt almost possessive. From the sofa, she looked up at him, smiling with her eyes as if she knew that he knew, and he felt his imaginary glass wall dissolving. Ill # #TT#'hat are you smiling  ' about?" she said. "I was just thinking that we -- " The outer door hissed. Dr. West's muscle contracted like a criminal's caught in the act. The inner door shoved open. "May I come in?" said the Recreation Officer, already in and sniffing his toothbrush mustache in his most characteristic gesture. He had an old face, but his mustache and hair were black with dye. "I can come back later." His unreadable gaze bounced off Nona's face, and he stared at Dr. West. "I've been asked, shall we say ordered, to search for a small useless, uh, item in your suite." Dr. West grinned. "Nona told me it was a hypo. Feel free to search away. I'll help any way I can, but I haven't got a hypo for you. I wish there was a prison grapevine so I could tell you who's got the hypo." The Recreation Officer failed to smile. To Dr. West's surprise the Recreation Officer's usually sly sense of humor was gone, blank.  ' "Would it be possible to start with another suite?" Dr. West asked apologetically. "This is my therapeutic hour. You said you could come back later." "No, I'm already here, so I'll start here," the Recreation Officer replied. "She can vacuum this dirty floor whether I'm here or not." Dr. West tried again. "Sir, if you could come back later, after Nona's gone -- I need to talk with you alone." Dr. West was careful not to glance toward the compressor. Beneath it the dissected squirrel was hidden, and Dr. West was afraid Nona's reaction would be revulsion when it was found. He thought the Recreation Officer's reaction would have been no more than mild interest if the dissected squirrel had been in plain sight on the work counter. T Tnfortunately, Dr. West had  concealed the dead squirrel, as if guilty of something. Now ) the Recreation Officer's reaction when he found the bloody package might be suspicion. Dr. West knew the Recreation Officer lacked the medical background to put two and two together. But if the squirrel were shown to the Medical Officer, that intelligent man would recognize this was not merely a squirrel autopsy. The squirrel had been cut open for another purpose. The Medical Officer would ponder this problem, and knowing Dr. West's controlling motivation was escape -- " -- in the kitchenette," the Recreation Officer was saying, opening and closing drawers. "You haven't even done his dishes yet, Nona." He opened a cupboard. "A more logical hiding place for a hypo would be -- the bathroom." Dr. West began to perspire. He knew he needed to maneuver both of them out of the suite in order to dispose of that dissected squirrel. If the Recreation Officer continued searching, eventually he would discover the body of the squirrel. The Recreation Officer spent a surprisingly long time banging around in the bathroom. All it contained was a medicine cabinet, toilet, basin and tub. The bathroom was located in the narrow inner end of the suite. Whenever he had sat in the tub Dr. West could hear the eight elevators humming up and down the central shaft of the cylindrical tower. His thirtieth floor suite was shaped like an eighth of a pie. The center of the pie was occupied by the huge open shaft, which contained the elevators and the air-conditioning ducts. The elevators were codecontrolled. To escape without an elevator would be a long fall. The Recreation Officer emerged from the bathroom, smiling beneath his toothbrush mustache. "I took the liberty of searching your medicine cabinet." His smile widened. "I deduce from the bottles and tubes that you suffer from piles." His smile spread so wide it almost appeared malicious. "Not a very romantic ailment for a world famous Arctic adventurer. Or for a convicted mass murderer." Dr. West blinked with surprise. Until now, the Recreation Officer always had treated him with human respect, never mentioned his crime. "You've murdered more people," the Recreation Officer remarked, "than the rest of the Students in this tower combined, and you top it off by stealing a worthless one-shot hypo." "I haven't got your hypo." "You're a disgusting example of futility. Do you know, if you'd simply applied for a hypo, if you needed a hypo, I would have purchased you a dozen. But during your second or third night in the tower you didn't know that yet, did you? So you stole one." Tvr. West did not reply. He was wondering if the Recreation Officer had just planted a hypo in the bathroom. From a friend, the Recreation Officer inexplicably had turned into tormentor. "I brought you scalpels, didn't I," the Recreation Officer persisted. "Enough scalpels to butcher a dozen women." "Please, sir," Nona protested. "Don't you approve of humor?" the Recreation Officer asked. "You and I are both on the Staff -- to assist in therapy, to make the Students happy. Isn't that right?" The Recreation Officer strode across the room toward the entry and kicked Dr. West's bed. "What do they expect me to do. split the mattress to find your hypo?" "I haven't got the hypo." Dr. West stepped forward, his sweating face twisted in an answering smile. "From what I've been told, the policy of this prison, excuse me, educational institution, toward the so-called Student is -- " " -- to treat the disturbed student with respect", the Recreation Officer interrupted in a singsong voice. "Make him feel this is home. Rebuild his feeling of inner worth. Nona, have you been reciting your book to this filthy murderer?" "No, she hasn't, Dad," Dr. West retorted, smiling harder, losing control. "You did, remember? Where's your warm FatherImage today? The student is to be drawn into a warm familylike relationship and, I quote, encouraged to lower his defensive barriers. In the Ottawa Reformation Center he is considered reborn. It is the purpose of the Staff to offer the Student so warm and reassuring an emotional environment that he will find the inner support he failed to feel in his childhood. Strengthened, basically changed, he can return to society. Isn't that right, Dad?" "Back off!" The Recreation Officer spoke like an angrily barking dog. "Because you're younger, stronger, more sarcastic doesn't mean you can't be spanked! Figuratively spanked -- no. Literally spanked!" He walked away from Dr. West, lifted the top of the insulated hibernation cage and plunged his arm into it. The one conscious squirrel jumped aside and squealed with fright. For the last minute, Dr. West I had been considering goading the Recreation Officer to such anger he would stop the search and rush out of the suite. But now Dr. West's heart was hammering, his fists clenched, and he realized his own self-control was so uncertain that the Recreation Officer might be successfully goading him. Perhaps the Recreation Officer's strange behavior was intended to goad him to violence. Then would he be transferred? Was that the Recreation Officer's intent? Nona, her face pale, her lips narrow, was shaking her head in warning at Dr. West. Silently they watched while the Recreation Officer distastefully lifted out a handful of sawdust. "What a stench! I noticed it as soon as I entered your suite. Are you sure they're not decaying instead of hibernating?" The Recreation Officer reached deeper into the cage. "This stench, is it to discourage us from looking for the hypo? Is it dead?" By the tail, the Recreation Officer raised a hibernating ground squirrel. "Since you formerly were an expert on Arctic ecology, among other things, I would have expected you to play with something more typically Arctic. Such as those beastly little lemmings which you reputedly compared to Eskimos." "To Esks. I explained to you the differences between Eskimos and Esks. I talked for hours when you listened so sympathetically, Dad," Dr. West added savagely. "You ought to be intelligent enough to differentiate between Eskimos and Esks. As for lemmings, they don't hibernate." The Recreation Officer shrugged, dropped the limp squirrel back into the cage. "Dear me, you're right. You told me no Arctic animal truly hibernates -- except these putrid ground squirrels. I'm not going to search through this stinking mess for the hypo. I'm going to recommend that the contents of this cage be emptied down the incinerator." "I haven't got the hypo," Dr. West repeated, watching the Recreation Officer step to the wider end of the suite where the compressor chugged erratically. Concealed under the compressor was the dissected squirrel. The compressor unit vibrated against the white concrete wall. The wall was smooth concrete, slightly concave because it also was the outer wall of the tower. Like a cylindrical concrete grain elevator, the tower had no windows, and its exterior construction was both economical and escape-proof, and functional in other ways . The Recreation Officer glanced Irom the compressor to the concave wall spread out behind it like a wide-angle screen. "This noisy compressor must intrude into the corner of the picture. Or do you never turn on the projector any more? For emotionally disturbed students like you I recommend a minimum of two hours per day." The Recreation Officer smiled infuriatingly at him. IV D r. West stepped violently toward the compressor, the Recreation Officer and the blank wall. At first, while recovering from his appendectomy, he had lain for hours watching the moving scenery on that wall, his only window. Trying to ignore the subliminal cartoons pressing him back against childhood, his favorite escape had been following movies of the surf flashing white along the Northern California coastline on the wall. At first he'd stared helplessly. The artificial window had been his only release from claustrophobia. "Nona, don't leave," Dr. West said, without looking back, knowing she was still sitting on the coffee table. This caused the Recreation Officer to glance back at her. Dr. West's hand darted into the compressor case. The compressor unit consisted of an electric motor humming at high R.P.M.'s and revolving a series of larger and larger gears, the largest turning least rapidly and most powerfully, forcing the piston of the air compressor in and out no faster than a frightened heart. Last week, when Dr. West had assembled this jerrybuilt contraption, he had set an oiling can to drip at five minute intervals on the moving elbow of the compressor, and now, in this instant, his hand reset the nozzle of the can to dribble rapidly. As the Recreation Officer turned back to the compressor, a fine mist of oil rose against his blue uniform. Dr. West already was walking away. There was a moment of silence as if the Recreation Officer had not yet realized what had happened. "Your damned machine is leaking! There's little droplets all over my coat." At this, Dr. West turned back. "Either oil or coolant. If it's coolant -- the coolant is strongly alkaline, irritating to the lungs." He wrapped his handkerchief protectively around his hand and rushed at the compressor, turning his head aside, as if from poison gas, holding his breath while he readjusted the oiler to its former rate of one drop of oil every five minutes. "The coolant will decompose cloth. It should be soaped off the skin as soon as possible." The Recreation Officer sniffed the back of his hand and glared from Dr. West to Nona. "The least you could do is help me search," he accused her. "Damn, my hand is burning!" Seated on the low coffee table, Nona stared down at her own hands, cupped on her lap. "Sir, my job's to maintain a close relationship with my Students. The Administratrix never asks us to involve ourselves in searches." "You have the soul of a -- They let anybody into Civil Service these days!" The Recreation Officer dashed out of the suite, scrubbing his hand with his handkerchief, and the elevator hummed. itT'm sorry," Nona murmured."He's never acted before as if making a search was -- beneath his dignity. Normally he's a nice man. Maybe he's having problems outside -- "Oh, sure. Nice man." Dr. West sat down on the sofa in order to stop shaking. "The Staff has to stick together." "I'm telling you the truth. I've never seen him like this." Suddenly she smiled. "On duty, we're supposed to be saints and let you Students have all the tantrums." Perched on the low coffee table, she pressed her legs togethed and tugged down at her skirt. She was peering toward the compressor. "Is that a Christmas present underneath? Sort of green shiny paper." "You'll have to wait till Christmas to find out," Dr. West said and reached forward, seizing her hand before she could stand all the way up and escape to look under the compressor. Pulled forward off balance, she raised her eyebrows as she smiled at him, and plumped down beside him on the sofa. "You didn't need to let go of my hand." Dr. West grinned with embarrassment, knowing he should try to get her to leave the suite as quickly as possible, so he could dispose of the squirrel. "Do you think my ex-buddy, the Recreation Officer, is likely to pop back in here unannounced?" She shrugged, jiggling her shirt waist. "He might." She smiled, glancing at him from the corners of her eyes. "I don't think he will, though. He probably went down to the basement to wash and gulp coffee and brood. This was supposed to be his free hour. That's why he was assigned to help search. Next hour he has to be smiling again and sympathetic because he must face his next appointment with another of you exasperating Students." "Exasperated is the word. I feel like I'm in a fishbowl." Dr. West jerked his head at the Ceiling Lens. Nona looked up, then down as if she was staring through thirty floors to the basement. "Privacy is mostly in your head. There are # screens down there, but only one observer on duty since the budget cut. Mainly the observer keeps his attention on the red-tagged screens, the new admissions. After all, they're the men most apt to set their suites on fire or slash their wrists or -- uh, develop appendicitis." D r. West almost smiled at that. Then he asked a leading question. "When the clock says it's night, and the luminous panels dim, and finally I turn out my reading light, there's still a dim red glow in the dark. I deduce I'm also spied on by infrared transmission?" "You are a bashful one! The night observer has only one set of eyes. He's worked here for years, and he's seen everything. He's so bored, he's slyly wired one telly to watch outside hockey games." She giggled. "It takes my own inside alarm system to get any protection from him." Dr. West laughed in surprise. "Inside alarm? Don't tell me, if a buxom member of the Staff is grabbed by a Student and squeezed, does that set off her built-in electronic alarm button, gongs clanging, red lights flashing -- " "You tease! That depends on the member of the Staff. Nona stood up unexpectedly. As if in pain, Dr. West leaped to his feet, reaching for her elbow. But her other hand pressed lightly against his chest, and her gaze shifted from his eyes to someplace over his shoulder. "The clock says your time's up." "Listen, Nona, seriously, I need you now." He was startled that he was begging. "I wish I could stay, but I'm hired to look after my students equally. I wish I could stay, but my ll:#-till-#:# man is expecting me. It's his hour. He's a terribly nervous, disturbed old man. He has no inner resources at all. He's sitting there expecting me -- " "But what about my hour? That damned Recreation Officer used up my whole hour bumbling around in here. Listen you wouldn't understand that I've been hung up in -- hell. I've been dead until today, and now I need you." She stepped close to him. "I'll be back tomorrow. Since you're described in the Files as a cerebral type, you can get along," she teased, then added seriously: "I'm so happy you came out of your withdrawal." She smiled Staff were making bets you would turn into a vegetable." "A vegetable? Listen, tell your I I :#-till-# :# man I'll trade my whole hour tomorrow for thirty of his minutes today, now." "I'm flattered -- I think. But lie's unadaptable. I'll dicker with him for you, but don't hold your breath. I won't be back for at least a half hour, if at all -- lover." "Dammit, Nona," Dr. West almost grabbed for her, then laughed wryly, trying to hide himself behind a sense of humor. "You're playing with dynamite. Nona, is that what you love -- playing with human dynamite?" "That's my job. I'm supposed to civilize you." She winked and went out through the hissing door. V  lone, but perhaps not unseen,  Dr. West was careful not to glance at the Ceiling Lens. To conceal what he wanted to do, he knew that turning off the lights in the suite during waking hours would be the wrong move. That simply would attract the attention of the observer. Innocently he ambled toward the compressor, knelt and removed the gleaming green package, and walked to the sink. He went through the motions of washing the dishes Nona had neglected to wash, and in the sink he cut the ground squirrel into quarters and ground it down the disposal, all the while bending over the sink, obscuring his actions from the observer, who might be watching, but more likely not. Dr. West did not glance at the hiding place of the steel needle he had removed from the hypo. The needle was sticking in the fiberboard partition between the kitchenette and the bathroom. He had extracted the nail which originally supported the lightly framed print of a voyageur portaging a canoe. The screw-in base of the hypodermic needle now served the same purpose as had the head of the nail. Thus the needle was concealed in plain sight. Two weeks ago, Dr. West had smashed the relatively large plastic plunger of the hypo for which they now were searching and flushed it down the toilet. While in bed after his appendectomy, he had confused the nurse in her hypo count. Like the old shell game. Having stolen a full hypo rattier than the empty they thought was missing, he had injected its content into his empty nose-drops bottle, which stood on a shelf in the medicine cabinet next to his eye-drops bottle, which he had filled with a second sedative injection the following night while the nurse's attention was distracted by a white wad of paper he had ricocheted off the concave wall -- after telling the nurse he had seen a white mouse in his cell. Now Dr. West visualized the Ceiling Lens above his head without looking at it. If he stacked the kitchen chair on top of the coffee table and climbed up and taped a paper towel over the Ceiling Lens, the blank-out probably would attract the attention of the observer, who might send someone to investigate which would be most embarrassing. A shy and difficult man, Dr. West wanted privacy. He needed privacy. Even the bathroom lacked privacy. There was a separate Ceiling Lens in there. Dr. West blinked in realization. The Staff all had said there were # telly screens in the basement. The tower was # stories high with # pie-shaped suites to a floor, so that there must be # suites. But there were two Ceiling Lenses per suite, one in the main room, one in the bathroom, so why weren't there # screens in the basement? Wrong! He had forgotten the third Ceiling Lens in the entrance passageway between the inner and outer doors. It was to reveal attempted escapes or ambushes by Students who had gained the code for opening the inner door. Why weren't there # screens in the basement? A s his hypothesis germinated, Dr. West smiled. One Ceiling Lens was in the main room of the studio apartment, the second in the bathroom and the third in the entry hall next to the bathroom in the narrow end of the semi-pie-shaped suite, a total of three Ceiling Lenses per suite. Therefore, there should be # times # telly screens in the basement, a total of # screens. But there were only # screens. Dr. West squinted, trying to visualize how the designers of the remote T.V. system managed to project # pictures to only # receiving sets. He nodded. From each suite # pictures were transmitted onto one screen. In televising baseball games, it was customary to show the pitcher winding up and at the same time in the comer of the screen show a separate picture from a separate camera of the runner taking his lead off of first base. Dr. West assumed that the pictures from his bathroom and from the entry hall were projected as overlaps in two corners of the main picture from his suite. Thus, very likely there were two privacy spots within the main room of his suite. But which two corners of the four comers of the screen, which two corners of the main room would contain this privacy overlap? Unfortunately, the shape of the main room was not square and could not fill a square telly screen. From the concave, white outside wall of the suite, the two side walls tapered inward. The slice of pie narrowed where the bathroom and the entry hall stood side-by-side, both abutting the central elevator shaft. If, on the telly screen, the bathroom and entry hall were moved down and out to the corners of the screen, there would be only a partial overlap because the main room was narrowest at the top of the screen. But there still would be some overlap -- some place to hide from the Observer. Dr. West walked into the bathroom. It was about eight feet long. At is wider end, it was five feet wide. He glanced out at the kitchenette in the main room. On the T.V. screen, if the bathroom were moved down into the unfilled corner of the screen, it would overlap with the china cabinet, the dumbwaiter pipe which delivered frozen foods and his refrigerator. Since the private actions Dr. West had in mind couldn't be conducted in such a small refrigerator, he walked to the other side of the main room, near the inner entry door. The entry hall also appeared to be five feet wide, and he supposed it was the same length as the bathroom, eight feet. He looked back. The coffee table, sofa, easy chair and standing lamp were grouped near the center of the main room. Beside him, his bed already stood against the side wall, but exposed because it was too far down on the T.V. screen. It was too near the wide, white projection wall to be in the telly overlap. Qtanding with his back to the  bed and his calves pressed against the foot of the bed, imperceptably Dr. West pushed the bed' along the side wall until the head of the bed was near the entry door. If he moved the bed and closer, Nona wouldn't be able to squeeze through the partially blocked door. Nevertheless, virtually the entire bed should be concealed by the overlapping picture transmitted from the entry hall. In the upper left hand corner of the telly screen in the basement, the bed would be hidden... he hoped. Because he was by training a conscientious man, he began to cross-check. He stared at the entry door. Perhaps, the Ceiling Lens in the entry hall only operated when someone was entering? Not likely. More threatening was the probability that the suite could be scanned. By throwing a switch, the Observer could shift the overlapping pictures from the upper corners of the screen to the lower corners. With so many unknowns and variables, there might be even more embarrassing possibilities. "Dammit, there's more than one way to skin a cat." Dr. West smiled with excitement, hurried across the suite to his work counter and collected a ball of twine, a scalpel and some safety pins. On his trip back to the bed he dragged his wooden work chair. Listening for the hiss of the outer door, he pushed down the pillow and set up the chair on top of the bed. He tied two chair legs to the tubular iron head of the bedstead. Hastily, he stretched a string from the high back of the anchored chair down over the bed to its tubular iron foot. Fumbling with knots, spreading blankets over the string, pinning blankets together, pinning edges of blankets to the mattress, he worked as rapidly as a camper when the raindrops begin to fall. His face contracted with uncertainty. That two-faced, unpredictable Recreation Officer might return -- The outer door hissed, and Dr. West jumped like a man awakened by an alarm clock. Across the suite he carried the scalpel he had used to cut string to the work counter and turned, breathing hard, as the inner door opened. "Surprise," she laughed. "My ll:#-till-#:# man was so grumpy when I asked him why he hadn't shaved he said I was a worse nagger than his daughter. My heavens, he would have given you the rest of his hour. But he'll feel differently tomorrow, so I traded him your hour tomorrow for his # minutes left You're looking at me like my eye-shadow's on upside-down." She giggled. "I talk too much. I don't know why I should be in a tizzy, but whenever -- well, we don't really know each other. We're friends, but we're still sort of -- strangers." As Dr. West walked toward her, she stepped sideways, and the back of her leg came in contact with the bed. She whirled, startled. tCAyTy heavens! A tent!" She pealed with laughter. "A tent," she giggled. "I'm going to have to explain a few things to you. You're so new here you don't know the rules." Then her laughter stopped. "I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at the tent. I think it's cute." Dr. West took hold of her upper arm. "You don't need to look so serious and earth-shaking," she breathed. "Life should be fun. It is fun, a tent! You are the most ingenious man I ever did see. Safety pins! A tent flap. Wasn't Omar Khayyam a tentmaker, too?" She put her head inside the tent "Oops, am I psychic? I never did make your bed. I talk too much, don't I?"' Head first she vanished into the tent, as Dr. West's hand guided her. Forgetting even a sidewise glance at the door, Dr. West followed, the tent shaking as he disappeared under the blanket room. From the Ceiling Lens only the tent was visible. "My heavens," her voice emerged from the tent, "a chair for a tent pole! Not so fast! It's crowded in here. You have lots of ingenuity, but... Oh." "I'm sorry, such a hurry," Dr. West's voice gasped. "More than a year I've been alone, Nona, trapped in jails alone." "That's all right, lover. Let me rub your neck, your back and in a little while -- " "A year is so long for a live man. No, a dead man." "Well, now, I wouldn't say you were quite dead," she giggled. "But a whole year! A year passes. What's a year." He laughed wryly, "I shouldn't fed sorry for myself. Those Mars expeditions were gone far more than a year, and married men at that Listen, I feet better. I can take anything." "Now you're cheering up. Already you're changing for the better. I may not accomplisUi much in life," she said, "but at least I'm accomplishing something when you smile, student. Squeeze me. This your chance to change, and you'll change, really change and return to the world. We Canadians do like to think we're somewhat enlightened. After you graduate, lover -- remember me." CC Graduate, hell!" Dr. West's '"-voice blurted. "Sentenced to life!" "No, you're not. You can't be. All Ottawa sentences are indeterminate." "I'm not a fool! I know I'll never be freed." "You have the same right," her voice exclaimed unsurely, "to graduate as any other student. I'm sure you must. Why else would the staff go to all the trouble and expense of getting you all that equipment, the cage, the compressor? It's occupational therapy. The Recreation Officer -- " "That two-faced psycho? Not only did he try to humiliate me in front of you, he showed a vicious attitude toward you." "Please," she protested, "you already have enough adjustment problems without developing a persecution complex. The Recreation Officer just had a bad day. Even Recreation Officers are human." "He's not your husband, is he?" "What? What a stupid and unexpected question! Certainly he's not my husband. Just because I have a ring on my finger doesn't mean -- well, why don't you simply try to enjoy life here in your suite." "And don't ask personal questions," Dr. West's voice filled in. "No, I'm happy to answer personal questions. We're in an awfully personal position right now, and you can get as personal with me as you want -- if you'll promise me you'll let the Recreation Officer start out again tomorrow with a clean slate. All is forgiven?" "Could it be that he's jealous of me?" "Uh-uh. I'm also Den Mother to five other students. Pie's never acted this way before. I'm sure he's not jealous. I only know the man in a professional way, and he's rather old and quite professional." "Not today he wasn't professional," Dr. West's voice insisted, "He didn't even finish searching my suite. What has he got, a triple personality? At first, after my appendix operation, he showed no real interest in me. He wanted me to take up microscopy as a hobby merely because Tower ## happened to have an unused microscope." "Yes, my microscope boy graduated. He has a technical job in Sasketchawan Oil Fields," she said proudly. "Oil core drilling samples are full of the tiny shells of -- He wrote me a beautiful letter." "I told the Recreation Officer, for my occupational therapy I didn't want to weave baskets," Dr. West's voice swept on. "I wanted to review a line of research begun when I was Director of Oriental Population Problems Research at the University of California." VI # C T jf y heavens, what has population problems got to do with hibernation?" "Nothing, except that birth and growth and hibernation all are dependent on glandular activity. My original medical specialty was endocrinology. Glands. But as I was saying -- all of a sudden the Recreation Officer took a personal interest in me, went to great trouble to acquire equipment for me, told me how he cut through red tape. We had long talks. He was interested in the squirrels. I thought he was my buddy." "He just got up on the wrong side of his bed this morning. His bunk, perhaps," she laughed. "He's a retired naval officer. Your navy, by the way. But he's Canadian born." "Born in hell," Dr. West's voice muffled. "Mmm, that's better. Don't nibble too hard. Forget, mm, everything. Think about me. Has all that isolation made you too sensitive? See -- you're ticklish. Lover, that big white square, that scar on your leg -- ?" "You're warm and smooth, the end of the world." "What do you mean by that?" "I don't know," Dr. West's voice breathed. "My heavens, you're certainly trying to find out," her voice squealed in delighted alarm. Dr. West's voice hoarsened. "Listen, I feel, Nona, Nona -- " "Yes, that's it, wonderful -- " From the tent for a little while there was no coherent conversation and finally quietness. "Darling, so nice -- " her voice sighed. "So relaxed." "Nona, I feel wonderful," Dr. West's voice laughed. "Let's you and me break out of this prison." "Now that you've regained your self-confidence," her voice teased him. "Don't get so overconfident. I still work here. I like it here. Youare my student, my job." "To charm us cons away from reality?" his voice laughed. ' ' of those gigantic penitentiaries in the States -- with # criminal types, all supposedly male? March, march! No privacy. Fellow prisoners to teach you better ways to stick shave and aren't as -- ahem -- sympathetic as I am. Now would you trade places?" "You do have nice smooth skin," his voice exhaled. "But here I've never seen another prisoner. When I tapped on the walls, nobody answered." "Which would you rather have? her voice insisted. "We're really all in solitary, the # men in this tower, and in how many other towers." "Ten towers," she said. "It's not solitary unless you think of it as solitary." "# men. How many women? Divide by #?" "You always try to be too precise," her voice laughed. "Our men are changing and graduating all the time. The average stay is less than a year. Thousands and thousands." Hex; voice grew serious. "I think of a stream of men being reborn." "I think of thieves and murderers, criminals, myself, crouched in their cells waiting for you." His voice rose. "Listen, I'll never get out of here. For political reasons, I'll never make it." "Oh shut up. Don't act so egotistical. If you want to act like a pessimistic, guilt-tortured little boy, go ahead and roll in your own mess." In the blanket tent rose the bulge of a head. "Until you take a more positive attitude, you jolly well won't roll on the sheets with me." "You mean it, don't you?" His voice softened, then exclaimed with wry laughter, "I understand too well! So simple but I don't know how effective. Solitary confinement is the stick, and you're the carrot. I've been given donkey ears." "You stubborn donk," her voice laughed, "don't you see any further than your big nose? You men in here can't be deeply changed by rewards and punishments. Outside, carrots and sticks certainly failed to civilize you or you wouldn't be in here. All your life you've been rewarded and punished but you wouldn't conform and you ended in here." "I need to get out. There is a great need for me to get out. Outside, the Esks are -- " "Sweet, harmless, law-abiding people. There's no use talking about Eskimos in here. Listen, we want you to like it in here. Lover, when you adjust -- We love you." ( t TV T y God, Nona, are you go"-'-'-ing to give me the Family bit? The Recreation Officer already shoveled it on me -- during his friendly period." Dr. West's voice rose with anger. "The Staff is my family. I am provided with a new childhood, loving and secure, so that I can grow up to the world again. Strengthened by my secure second childhood, or is that the wrong terminology? With new inner security we criminals graduate from our prison families into the world to be law-abiding and patient and sympathetic with our fellow man. Bugles, please!" "It works. The family-group produces the -- " "Yes, Mom. But Dad was nasty today. Was he cranky because he thought I wanted to get in bed with you?" "You don't need to be that sarcastic," her voice said. "I'm sorry. But my eloquence gets -- poisonous. How can you bring yourself to lie beside a maniac like me? The Civil Service ought to give you a medal. If you're supposed to feel motherly toward me, you don't have to. Just leave me, please." "I love you." "I should accept that as it is, now. You also love five other men in five other suites." "Yes, I love men. I love women. I love my children. I try to love everybody." "Next you'll tell me you also have a husband to love. I was hoping -- and I wasn't so jealous of my five invisible cellmates," Dr. West's voice stammered, "but I was hoping that ring on your third finger left hand was just for show." "Every evening after work I take the monorail back to the apartment district. Did you get much of a look at Ottawa?" "I saw those angry people waving signs at me." "I have three children, three little girls. The oldest, she puts the T.V. dinners in the oven before I get home. After supper I help them with their homework. On the rug even the second grader mutters at her homework. The older two have begun to giggle about boys, and the oldest is only in sixth grade, my heavens. Then we watch TV, and no one wants to go take the first bath. When my angels are asleep, I think -- they're another day older and stronger and wiser, I hope. I sit watching TV. Me, Pm another day older. I crawl into bed." "I wish I were there with you." "You are. Squeeze me hard. You're in bed  with me now." ttnphat wasn't all that I meant," Dr. West's voice replied. "At the moment I feel more protective than amorous." "You needn't be. I can get along very well, thank you," she said. "Except when my children were helpless babies, I always worked, worked as an I.B.M. operator, even when my husband was working." Her voice for the first time rose in anger. Her voice tried again more softly. "My husband was a nice guy, he really was. I didn't just love him because he was the father of my children. He was a sweet guy, not scheming, not adjustable the way we have to be. Everything's changing faster and faster, and he got quieter every time they automated away his job. What did I do? Did I give him inner strength? No. I began to earn more money than he did. He said less and less. When I brought my -- our kids home from my father's into the kitchen, I ran to turn off the gas." Her voice sank. "I tried to give him artificial respiration. "It wasn't until then, after then," her voice laughed unhappily, "I learned what brief animals we are. You're all schemers. If you and I were Outside, don't expect a dinner date downtown and a cinerama will make me -- owe you anything just because I haven't got a husband. You understand me?" "So you got the perfect job here. No, I'm oversimplifying you." "Yes, I'm simple. I'm just a simple bundle of mother love. Always cheery. Pardon me for sounding cynical with you, but my other students happen to be such uneducated children. They wouldn't understand." "Or notice you're not perfect, I hope," Dr. West laughed. "I hope not. You're our only hope. Don't hurt us. You are too powerful. Without your personal love this would be solitary confinement, and we convicts would go insane. Right now you are miraculously changing me and five other men." D r. West's voice suddenly probed. "If any of your prisoners fail, I mean, are released and then hold up a liquor store, do you have such a masochistic and guilty view of yourself that you believe you are responsible for the failure of this man?" "I don't understand you." "As with the failure of your husband." "What are you saying?" "Nona, do you think you are so godawful powerful that if we cons fail it is because of something you did or didn't do?" "I don't understand. Not one of my students has become a recidivist. I've worked here four years. Twenty-two of my students have graduated. None have had any trouble with the law." "You misunderstood my question." "Of course, I'm holding my breath about a few of my boys," she said. "They all get pretty fair jobs because we've retrained them, and the government subsidizes, pays their employers during the first year." "So they get along without you?" Dr. West's voice laughed suddenly. "Marry girls just like you?" "You are a flatterer. My students write to me, some of them, and I save the letters and photos. One boy is going with a woman a little bit older than he is, but very pretty. I shouldn't have said that. What I meant to say was she looks enough like me to be my sister." "No doubt the government wishes you could be divided more than six ways." "Silly. The whole purpose of the government's reformation policy is to help them -- you -- stand on their own feet when they go Outside. Someday, you'll -- now you stop that," her voice sighed languidly. "Nona, you're so warm, so smooth -- " "I think you just want me to stop preaching at you." "Nona, what I want -- " "Lover, turn your wrist the other way. My heavens! If your wristwatch is correct, and I'm sure it is, your borrowed time is up." "You aren't going to leave me like this?" "Sort of let me up, lover. Where's my bra? You're lying on it." "But I was just beginning." "But you've no more time today," she laughed. "Be here tomorrow? On second thought, I won't be back till Wednesday. You traded away tomorrow. Oh, there's a run in my stocking. Now stop that! You can wait till Wednesday, lover." The blanket tent shook, and Nona's legs swung out. She fumbled for her shoes. "Where's my comb?" Zipping up the hip of her blue skirt, she clicked on high heels to the door. There was a departing hiss as the inner door opened and closed. Dr. West was alone. D r. West emerged from the blanket tent. He stared blankly at the huge cage where the Arctic ground squirrels slept in artificially induced hibernation. Then he smiled and squinted up at the artificial afternoon in his suite. The luminous ceiling panels were synchronized to a clock and rheostate. There also was an panels alone the evening would come gradually, and then night. Then Tuesday. On Wednesday morning at #:# -- He smiled down at the coffee table where she had sat looking up at him. He hurried to dismantle the tent, folding the blankets, his pulse racing, his face hot with suppressed memory. For an instant he pictured her inside the tent, moving. The view was too powerful, and he laughed and shook his head and blinked his eyes. "Wednesday, Wednesday, hurry up, Wednesday." He vaulted over the couch, grinning. Tomorrow was only Tuesday but -- "When Tuesday's here, can Wednesday be far behind?" He reached for a glass tube on his work counter and grinned at the bunsen burner in his lab set up. He felt young. If he softened the glass tubing, bending, twisting the glass, he could make something for her. "A glass giraffe to make her laugh?" Behind him, the inner door hissed open. With a surge of warmth, wanting to believe she had returned already, Dr. West whirled. "Surprise," the Recreation Officer said. "I'm off-duty now -- doctor. Before you get too well adjusted in here I'm to deliver this." Beneath his toothbrush mustache, the Recreation Officer forced a smile as he flapped down a manila folder on the coffee table. "You wanted news of the world, didn't you?" Cf 'et out." Dr West stared at  the folder with its projecting newspaper clippings as if he was looking at a snake. Obviously it did not come from the Staff. It was from Outside. "I'm sorry," the Recreation Officer's voice said. "I apologize for my eccentric performance this morning. Nothing personal, really." "Get out, and take it with you." Dr. West felt no desire to open the folder. "I'm not trying to frame you, Doctor. I'm the one who should be disciplined -- for bringing these clipping into your suite." "You tried to trigger me to violence during your so-called search. You tried to wash me out. I assume you're trying again. Get out!" "It's a pity no one will leave you alone," the Recreation Officer remarked. "Look, we can be frank. I've done two things at great personal risk. One, during my search their morning I disconnected the audio bug to your suite. Two, this noon in the basement I damn near electrocuted myself. Your Ceiling Lens no longer is transmitting. Instead, I've spliced a projector to your transmission line in the basement. If the observer should happen to inspect your telly screen, he'll see what you were doing two days ago. Your screen is showing a replay of your old micro-video tape, # hours long. I hope you weren't doing anything suspicious during the last # hours since I started my video tape recorder. I hadn't time to review # hours of tape." The Recreation Officer pointed at the manila folder. "In any case, now you don't need to try to earn brownie points in here by claiming you don't want to break the rules. No one is watching you. Sit down and read a year's clippings. What has really happened during this year you've been isolated in a series of jails? Weren't you the doctor who was so concerned about the Esks increasing?" "Right now, I don't give a damn what's happening Outside. Get out." "She's all heart, Nona really is," the Recreation Officer said slyly. "She's the best woman in Tower ##. I don't blame you for forgetting your purpose in life." "What are you trying to do? Goad me to break out of here?" "I don't know. I'm not paid to think. I'm sure this tower is escape-proof. You should be intelligent enough to get yourself moved." The Recreation Officer began spreading clippings from the New York Times, MacLean's Magazine, Life, Time, American Medical Journal, Arctic Review, completely covering the coffee table. "I'm supposed to say to you: hospital or the Cold Room. You're the one with brains!" nphe Recreation Director spread more clippings on the work counter and more clippings on top of the insulated cage. "I didn't realize so much had been written in the last year about the Esks," the Recreation Officer's voice went on. "I suppose all of these are from a clipping service. Here's a tear sheet from the Bulletin of Population Scientists. Someone let slip -- you used to be editor." "Get out!" "They didn't tell me exactly why you were discharged from your position at the University of California or why you returned to the Arctic. But I'm beginning to understand why you tried to infect the Esks. The newspaper accounts at the time of your trial simplified you for the simple minds of their simple readers as simply a murderous maniac. But noV the New York Times seems to be having second thoughts on the matter." "Get out!" Dr. West's voice rose with alarm as the Recreation Officer actually did walk out of the suite, leaving Dr. West alone with hundreds of clippings and articles staring whitely at him from the terrifying world Outside. Dr. West chewed his cheek in selftorment. Until today with Nona he had been preparing for the future with almost suicidal calm. Now he didn't want to take any risks. All he wanted was Wednesday, when Nona would return. Swaying, Dr. West imagined himself gathering up the clippings, eyes averted. Without reading, he would soak the clippings in the bath-tub, tearing and squeezing the paper into dying lumps. He would not read what other men were thinking about the Esks, the research that must be going on, perhaps the frightened admissions in scientific circles that he might be right, that the terrible thing he had attempted was justified. "I won't read! I'm a prisoner and safe. Tear them up and flush them down the toilet without reading -- " "That heartless son-of... Dr. West was under such stress he was speaking out loud. "Mysterious, lousy wretches who're paying him. I won't read. What do you want me to do? I can't hoist the world on my shoulders. I already dropped it. Very funny." Dr. West stared down at the clippings on the coffee table. His flashing arm swept clippings fluttering onto the floor. "I refuse to destroy myself. I will not read." Dr. West dropped to his knees and hands on the floor, his head throbbing as he read of the multiplying Esks. An agnostic, he began to pray for guidance. VTo one entered Dr. West's suite the next day, which was Tuesday. Not by happenstance, the Recreation Officer had telephoned to the Tower from outside saying he had the flu and would not be reporting for duty for a day or two. Nona did not enter Dr. West's suite because of the exchange of his Tuesday hour to her #:#till-# :# man. She paused outside Dr. West's suite and did not enter and went on to the adjoining cell. In the basement the Observer, monitoring the red-tagged screens, yawned and glanced at a hockey magazine. At #:# p.m. when Nona went off-duty she hurried to the monorail because the hair-dresser's would close at #:#. In the highspeed car suspended above the city, as Nona found a seat she recognized the Man, the back of his head, the Man. A week before, this short-haircut Man had sat down beside her. At first she hadn't realized his conversation about Ottawa joawa-.--ito fcecot tusbr ##"t' f# a  Brd. as'ac# ila ,# v Alr K'il nls.of " # ana?" IgfS ? f   a, r tastes. to " Reformation Center was more than casual. Then she had become quite abrupt, because her first loyalty, her life was tied up in the Reformation Center, and she was afraid the Man might be someone preparing to bribe her. She had left the car so she would pot have to hear where his conversation was leading. Now, the same Man, shorthaircut, was sitting in front of her. When she got off and rode the escalator down to ground level, she hoped he wasn't following. In the evening, after supper,  Nona played jacks with her smallest daughter on the floor, ' u # VAtrt 'mm. fiesr A? CdS' Wtea. few jHr while the Tuesday TV news blared half-heard everyday topics: the Maoists, unemployment, the Third Mars Expedition, hockey fights, the underprivileged Esks who were being resettled in Tibet. "Mommy, your new hair-do is so pretty." At this, Nona laughed with pleasure. "Now go to bed." And soon she slept herself. Wednesday morning at #:#, Nona entered Dr. West's suite with her hair up and gleaming and her heart beating unexpectedly. She stopped. Stripped to the waist, Dr. West was lying on his back on top of his bed, his jaw sagging like a dead man's, his eyes closed as if he were sleeping. "My God, he isn't breathing! His heart -- ?" Ohe rushed to telephone the  Medical Officer. She ran back. Her frantic hands shook Dr. West's body. The push of her hand against his terribly cool chest stimulated a shallow gasping breath, then nothing. "Please, please." She flung herself upon him, mouth to mouth, trying to breathe for him, endlessly. With exhaustion, her own heart was fluttering. Her fingernails were fastened to his cold flesh. "Keep going," hissed the Medical Officer's voice. "First I'm going to give him a shot of adrenalin." After awhile the Medical Officer said: "Get off. I'm going to attempt external heart massage." A half hour later, sweating, the Medical Officer stood back. "This is the man who feigned appendicitis." He stared at the thermometer. "# degrees, and only one or two shallow breaths per minute. If the room temperature sank to # degrees, I suppose his body temperature would follow it down. The crazy fool induced this somehow. For a reason." "Do something for him!" Nona protested. "I'm going to telephone the hospital." "No, first telephone the Tower Administratrix. She's in command here." For the first time, the Medical Officer looked around the suite and noticed the shambles. "Bloody butcher shop!" On the work counter lay the opened squirrels. Beside them stood centrifuge and red-brown, stained glass tubing. "He was a murderous maniac," the Medical Officer's voice croaked. "No, he wasn't. They were hibernating. They didn't feel anything," Nona gasped. "I don't believe he cut them open. I mean, he cut them open with a purpose." "He bloody well did," the Medical Officer muttered, stooping to pick up a hypodermic needle from the floor. "No plunger. Used rubber bulb from this nose drops bottle. This is the needle from that missing hypo. May have injected a sedative to start the downward metabolic slide." The Medical Officer's fingers turned the rubber bulb insideout. "A goo, an extract. Of course he would have been aware that massive injection of any foreign concentration from glandular protein, such as a hibernating squirrel's, will produce a lethal fever reaction. Foreign protein in a human being should be fever. Quite odd. No fever, just the opposite." "Do something!" Nona's voice protested. "For all you know, he may die any minute." "This involves legal as well as medical decisions." The Medical Officer appeared relieved when the Tower Administratrix arrived. r  'he Medical Officer laughed nervously. "Quite diabolically, this man has trapped us something he wishes." He tried to explain. "Human life is sacred, we say, so we have to save him." "We have no right to increase his chances of escape. It would be unwise to take him to the hospital building," the Administratrix replied. "I was so long in arriving here because I received a telephone call from the police at the border of the States. They searched the luggage of what turned out to be our Recreation Officer from this Tower -- with his mustache shaved off. They found, #-# in small bills." "I believe the medical problem the former Dr. West has prepared for us is this" the Medical Officer muttered. "If we leave him as he is, he will die. Alternately, if we attempt to bring him out of his hypotherma! coma he will die." "My God," Nona breathed. "You already shot him with adrenalin to bring him out of it." "A natural mistake. I'm hoping -- it already appears that he has not reacted to it -- I hope. Perhaps he has buffered his system against such an eventuality -- I hope. As I was saying, if we try to bring him out of it, his metabolic activity will increase. His system will begin to react in a typical defensive manner to the foreign protein, and his temperature will rise. This will increase the violence of his reaction to the protein, further raising his temperature. A selfdestroying reaction. Violently, his body will attempt to defend itself against the foreign protein, raising his temperature higher and higher until he dies." "No doubt he planned this in order to be taken to the hospital building." The Tower Administratrix asked, "Could we simply leave him here? Assign a nurse." The Medical Officer smiled at this. "Much more than a nurse is needed if we really believe in saving human life regardless of cost. His life processes should be monitored. I suspect his body now is in a delicate equilibrium. His metabolism is too sluggish to react to the foreign protein. No reaction, no disease. What is needed is speedy consultation with experts in human hibernation research, who may know how, who may have the equipment to bring him out of this condition alive. In the States, hibernation research is being conducted in connection with the Space Program, I believe at the University of California." (, C Q (.range coincidence," the Tower Administratrix said. "Not a coincidence. According to his files this man formerly was director of a medical research program at the University of California. Population control. Do you think, interlocking medical staffs with their hibernation space transit program?... An attorney in California may be waiting to file habeas corpus, legal trickery, bail." "I wasn't suggesting that," the Medical Officer said. "I simply was suggesting we make a reasonably humane effort to keep this man alive. Surely he can be adequately guarded in our own hospital building. I want to telephone the University of California. Perhaps a complete change of blood -- " The Tower Adiminstratrix shook her head. "Look for a note," she said sharply to Nona. "Suicide. A note." On the coffee table lay a manila folder. Nona opened it. Empty. Swiftly she looked around the suite. Something white showed under the huge insulated cage and Nona knelt down, reaching under. A newspaper clipping had fallen behind the cage, and her "You didn't smuggle this in, did you?" the Administratrix asked Nona. "The Recreation Officer!" The Administratrix turned toward the Medical Officer. "If people outside could bribe the Recreation Officer so easily, how much easier to bribe underpaid orderlies in the hospital! You yourself determined that this student's so-called appendicitis attack was feigned in order to get him out of my Tower and into the hospital." The Medical Officer shrugged. "He'll die here." Nona's hand clamped on the Administratrix's arm. "You're not going to let him die." "Is that a question? I'm sure it's not intended as an order," the Administratrix replied. "Nona, this is my responsibility. I know you. I know you're thinking, somehow you failed him. You didn't. This man's urge to escape was too strong. He has taken too big a gamble. He can't escape." "You can't let him die," Nona repeated. IX tcnphe best guarded buildingoutside of the Tower," the Administratrix murmured, "is the Cold Room. There, no decision would be irrevocable. It starts a new problem but -- " "That would be the place for him, the safest place." The Medical Officer stared down at Dr. West. "He ignored my warning when I sent him back his appendix in a bottle. Such powerful motivation is driving him. Alive, conscious, he would try again to escape. I think we are agreed this strident has shown himself not amenable to therapeutic reformation. The Cold Room -- " "But he's not an incorrigible," Nona protested. "He hasn't attacked the staff." She turned from the Administratrix to confront the Medical Officer. "You both want to evade -- " "I'm wholly in agreement with the A.dministratrix," the Medical Officer continued. "The man has shown himself to be dangerous, suicidal. No regard for his own life. How much regard would you expect him to show for yours?" "I believe he is essentially a good man. Better than you!" Nona retorted, but they weren't listening. "To preserve his life in the Cold Room," the Administratrix addressed the Medical Officer, "I assume he should be cryofiled as quickly as possible. The legal steps can be justified postfacto." "Yes, before irreversible physical deterioration takes place," the Medical Officer apologized in Nona's direction. "In five or ten years when we learn how to thaw them out -- " "You can't do this without a court hearing," Nona cried. "The two of you standing there can't convict, sentence and execute him." "Execute is an unfair word." Instead of growing angry, the Administratrix put her arm around Nona. "It's noft your fault. I'm sorry you're emotiontionally involved with this man, hut then you're emotionally involved with so many of them. That's why you are so good." "Please!" Nona stepped back. "Nona, there's nothing you can do," the Medical Officer said. "Nona, you still have five. Do your best for them." "You damn weak bootlicker!" Nona cried at him. "Would you tell that to a mother whose baby has died? Would you say, so what, you still have five?" "If you need to shout, Nona, do so at me," the Administratrix said, lowering her head. "Forget that I am your superior. If you want to accuse me, do so. It is I who must bear the responsibility. "You did your best for him. You only had him -- was it two weeks?" The Administratrix's hand closed around Nona's wrist. "Now go home, take the rest of the day off, tomorrow off, all week off. You are our best. All I can hire is an untrained substitute to take care of your students until you return. But don't feel guilty about your absence." Without looking at Dr. West's body, Nona walked out of the suite. She went to her #-#-to#:# man as if nothing had happened. The day, the night -- r T'at night on TV a politician stated that the anticipated increase of Eskimos would be a blessing. They could be trained as government nurses and guards. Eskimos needed less pay from the taxpayers. Increase would be good for Canada, which still had plenty of room. Nona could not sleep remembering Dr. West. In the morning when she en tered the Tower, Nona went to the office of the Administratrix. "Nona, you're looking unwell." The Administratrix stood up behind her desk. "I couldn't sleep, thinking he may have tricked us." Nona said slowly, "How do you know the body in the drawer in the Cold Room is his? Perhaps his real plan was a switch of bodies." "Well, surely -- " the Administratrix blurted. "The Cold Room is guarded," Nona pressed on, "the drawers are locked. But last night who worked in the cryogenic preparation room? Who prepared the body?" "I don't know. One of the orderlies!" The Administratrix grabbed the phone. "I want to go with you to identify the body," Nona said. The Cold Room consisted of tiers of numbered drawers. As the Guard unlocked the drawer, Nona memorized the number. When she looked down at Dr. West's wax-pale face, Nona shivered ."Yes, that is the man." Now she could tell exactly where he was. 'Tphat night in the mono-rail car, to her alarm the Man with the short haircut was not there. The night before, still numb from the terrible scene beside Dr. West's body, she had sat down beside the short-haircut Man -- deliberately. He had seemed perceptibly disturbed, trapped, hiding behind his newspaper while she told him she didn't want money, she wanted Dr. West to be removed from the Cold Room. "There are thousands of drawers in there," he had murmured. "Find out the drawer number." And he had left the car at the next stop. Tonight he was not in the mono-rail car, nor waiting at her stop. As she walked past the magazine rack and the soda fountain, a dark young man tried to pick her up. She kept walking. "What is the number?" he was murmuring. She paused in the crowd by the bus stand. "I won't tell you the number of his cryo-drawer until you show proof," she said slowly, "that there is someone qualified to bring him out of the Cold Room and then out of his -- hibernation." The dark young man seemed startled. "I'll find out," he said and walked away. Nona watched him thread his way through the crowd into the icy night. Her face felt old with determination. Dr. West or whoever he was -- the man who built the tent with chair and blanket -- he was hers, still in her care. Her jaw hardened. Her teeth felt as if they were about to crack. It was' even possible that these two men, short haircut and dark young man, were maneuvering to kill Dr. West. They might be some of those emotional Calynch Dr. West. Or might be rescuers. She knew she must deal with them with great caution. As Nona stepped out into the razor-sharp Canadian night, the stars were glittering like ice. She tipped her head high. Invisible up there she knew U.S. astronauts were supposed to be coasting on the long voyage to Mars, in their hibernation capsules. "It truly is possible to rescue a man from hibernation." In the cold she hugged her body feeling hope as when she had carried each of her unborn children. Breathing hard, Nona stared in the direction of the New Ottawa Reformation Center. "You'll get out," she whispered. I'll get you out." -- Hayden Howard BAtlS rvn April #, #, a very bright meteor flashed across the sky over the northeastern states. I am sorry to say that I missed seeing it. But several professional astronomers did see it and they estimated the altitude as about # miles. One newspaper reporter who saw it too wrote a fine report in which he remarked that what impressed him most about the fiery display was its complete silence. Since the altitude was over # miles it would have been miraculous if there had been any sound. But while this particular case is simple and clear-cut there have been many occasions where chance observers of large meteors did report sounds, following immediately or very soon after the flash in the sky. In some cases the sound was compared to a pistol shot, in others to a volley or rifle shots; one observer said that his particular meteor made a sound like that produced by tearing stiff paper. Most observers compared it to plain thunder. Did they report correctly, or did they ascribe chance sounds produced by something else at what they considered to be the right time to the meteor that was actually soundless? I once worked with a man whose favorite conclusion was: "at this point we need a mathematical analysis." It became a catch phrase around the laboratory for two reasons. One, it did not matter too much what was under discussion to make him ask for a mathematical analysis and, two, he never made that analysis himself but assigned it to whoever was within reach and not obviously busy with something else. But at this point I have to call for a mathematical analysis myself... but I can assure the reader that it will be simple. Meteors heat up when they enter the earth's atmosphere because they moy'e so fast that the air in their flight path cannot get out of the way and is compressed, just as if that air were enclosed in a cylinder and the moving meteorite were the piston. Of course, some of the heat generated by this compression is transferred to the meteorite, and at an altitude of # # miles it has become hot enough to glow and to be visible. The altitude at which the glow becomes visible is almost unaffected by the size of the body. Only a rather massive meteorite, weighing twenty pounds or more, may penetrate to an altitude of, say, # miles before becoming visible. Having a larger mass it needs more time to be heated up to the necessary temperature. The typical shooting stars, cosmic dust grains, become visible when they are # miles up and usually disappear at an altitude of about # miles. By then they have been consumed completely. The larger ones -- with an original weight of an ounce latitudes. or so -- will penetrate to about # or even # miles above the ground before they are consumed. The large ones with an original weight of a pound or more will actually reach the ground. T aving stated the observed  facts about meteors, the next step is to have a look at the speed of sound. Regardless of what many people think -- and even regardless of what they may have been taught by teachers who were not up to date -- the speed of sound in air does not depend on the density of the air but only on its temperature. In warm air sound travels faster. The difference between sea level air and stratospheric air amounts to almost precisely # miles per hour. It is because sea level air is denser than stratospheric air that the mistake was made of considering the density a factor. Since it is the temperature that actually counts, the average speed' of sound, for middle latitudes, is higher in summer than in winter. (See diagram, Fig. #.) But for many practical purposes the difference is rather minor. If we produced an explosion at an altitude of # miles an observer at "ground zero", that is, directly below the explosion, would hear the sound # seconds after the explosion in summer, and # seconds after the explosion in winter. In the table to follow summer and winter conditions have been averaged to # seconds for ground zero. For an explosion at an altitude of # miles the figures would be #I seconds in summer and # seconds in winter. But we are not quite finished with the problem of speed of sound and density of the atmosphere. When the statement was made that the speed of sound depended on the temperature it was, of course, assumed that the air is dense enough to carry sound at all. If the density is very low, which means that the molecules are rather far apart, you no longer get any sound waves, even with an explosion that would be rather noisy in denser air. In our atmosphere this is the case for any altitude above The density of the Martian atmosphere at ground level was found by Mariner IV to be only I per cent of sea level density on earth. The ground level density of the Martian atmosphere, therefore, corresponds to our atmosphere at an altitude of # # miles. The Martian atmosphere Is barely capable of carrying sound, but the noise of an explosion at the surface would be carried by the ground too. Time to Ground In seconds (rounded off to nearest half seecmd) Altitude above ground in miles # ## # # # # #. # # #, # # # # miles. Meteors, then, can produce sound effects only below # miles. Of course this calculation contains a few assumed values that might be slightly different in reality; some experts therefore put the limit at # miles instead of #. To be safe let us deal with a maximum altitude of # miles only. It is now quite easy to calculate how much time will go by between a noiseproducing event at a certain altitude and the arrival of the sound on the ground. The table gives the results. In the first column, marked #, it is assumed that the observer is directly below the noise source. But in reality this would be a rare event. The line from the noise source to the observer may form an angle of # with the ground; or the noise source might be even closer to the horizon, say at an elevation of only #. The table also gives the times for these two slant ranges. As can be seen from the table, the sound produced by a meteor at an altitude of # miles and # above the horizon will need about # l  minutes to reach the observer. An explosion # miles above the ground and # above the horizon will be heard on the ground after a minute and # seconds. It is therefore very likely that an observer, even if he does hear the sound produced by a high meteor, will not connect the two events. Being used to the idea that thunder follows lightning within a few seconds he will connect any chance noise that occurs within # or # seconds with the meteor. But this does not mean that each and every report of noise produced by a meteor was the result of a mistake in judgment. There are a few famous cases where there can be no doubt. Tarly in May, #, a report that numerous stones had fallen from the sky reached the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Up to then the Academy had been very skeptical about such stories and had tended to deplore them rather than to investigate them. But only a few years earlier Ernst Friedrich Florens Chladni had published a report on stones and irons that in all probability had fallen from the sky that had made an impression on a number of members of the Academy. So it was decided to send a younger member of the Academy, Jean Baptiste Biot, to the place where the phenomenon had been observed. It was the small town of L'Aigle in the Departement de I'Orne, # miles west of Paris. Biot first established the time. It had been I P.M. local time on the #th day of April #. The sky had been clear except for one small cloud. Loud sounds like explosions had been heard for a period of # to # minutes; everybody agreed that they came from above and since this cloud was the only cloud in the sky it seemed to be the logical source of the noise. Immediately afterward # stones were seen to fall. The largest that was found weighed # pounds, but most were smaller; the smallest pieces collected weighed less than half an ounce. Biot noted that stones could be found only in an elliptical area one hour's journey in width and about #J# hours' journey in length. Biot referred to the time it took to walk across and along the area; about # by # miles. Since the cloud produced by the explosion, of the meteorite cannot have been very large, it probably was less than three miles from the ground to be visible and the noise would reach the ground in # # seconds. This time it was nearly vertically overhead. That the noise was actually produced by the exploding meteorite cannot be doubted, the only doubtful statement is that the explosions lasted "from # to # minutes". This seems too long by several minutes, but might be explained by putting the statements of different observers at different slant ranges together. They each heard the same set of explosions but at slightly different times. Another famous old case is the meteorite of Ensis-Heim, in Alsace. It was actually seen to fall, between #I A.M. and noon on November #, #, and eyewitnesses said that there was a loud crash of thunder and a prolonged noise from afar, a description that sounds very much like what we now know as sonic boom. It made a hole five feet in depth, was dug up and weighed -- # pounds -- and then taken to the village church. It so happened that King Maximilian I was there at the time. He ordered the stone to be brought to his casfslonaembomterlldrtgeallefmrdl.toi-iaorgiirifrifin Fig. #. Contemporary Drawing of the # Meteorite Fall. The inscription above the picture reads: "Of the thunder stone that fell in the #nd year near Ensiheim." The township on the left is labelled "Ensisshem" and the place in the background "Battenhem", -- "hem" (pronounced halm) is local dialect for "heim" (pronounced hyme), both meaning "home". tie where he knocked off two pieces, one to send to Duke Sigismund of Austria and one for himself. Then he ordered the stone to be preserved without further damage in the church. After a long time it was moved to the City Hall; at any event it was preserved for centuries. At that time there already existed a forerunner of the newspapers of a later date. Bibliophiles know this forerunner under the name of Einblattdtuck, a German term meaning one-sheet-print. An Einblattdruck was printed when a special event was to be reported; a large percentage of them deal with comets and the "meaning" of the appearance of one. But this event also rated an Einblattdmck. As customary it showed in a woodcut of the event (Fig. #) on top, with a description underneath. It would be nice to know whether the artist who made the woodcut had been an eyewitness. If he was, the sky must have been cloudy that day. 'T'o round off this short sur vey the most recent major fall of meteorites must be mentioned. It is known as the Sikhote-Alin meteorite fall after the name of the mountain range in eastern Siberia where the impact took place. The date was February #, #, and the local time was #:# A.M. The sky was cloudless. Professor E. Krinov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences described the event as follows: "A scintillating ball of fire with a luminous tail and sparks sped for several seconds across the cloudless sky in broad daylight. The bolide was so bright that it blinded the eyes of people watching it and it cast moving shadows. In its wake there remained a wide gray band of dust that was seen for several hours. Some minutes after the fireball disappeared powerful detonations were heard, resembling explosions or the firing of heavy guns." The actual impact point was quickly spotted from the air because the area was still covered with snow; the places where the fragments of the meteorite had hit looked brownish as they do in summer. Expeditions set out from both Vladivostok and Khabarocsk for a preliminary survey. They found over # impact craters ranging in size from #J# feet to # feet and # holes less than #J# feet in diameter that had been produced by the fragments. Fragments could be found everywhere. Some fragments had struck trees so that the angle of impact could be established directly. The gray dust that had hovered in the air after the passage of the body had settled in the meantime and was partly recovered from the ground with the aid of powerful magnets. It proved to consist of round globules of iron that had formed in midair. Some of them had fused together and most of them could be seen only with a strong magnifying glass. It could be calculated later on that the meteorite must have entered our atmosphere with a relative velocity of # miles per second. The original weight must have been on the order of # tons. The pieces sent to Moscow for examination had a total weight of # (metric) tons. The investigation of these pieces not only gave the chemical composition (# per cent iron; # per cent nickel; # per cent cobalt; # per cent phosphorus and # per cent sulfur) but it also showed why this metorite had broken up as thoroughly as it had. It was not a homogeneous mass of meteoric iron but instead consisted of pieces that seem to have been fused together by pressure or heat some time in the distant past. Moreover the iron parts were often separated by thin layers of a mineral called schreibersite which is a compound of iron and phosphorus. These mineral layers provided natural lines of cleavage. Presumably the meteorite had already broken apart during the passage through the air. The larger fragments that might still have weighed a ton, or more then broke apart . when they struck the rocky ground. I have selected these three cases of meteoric noise because they represent three different types of noise production. The noise heard over L'Aigle was, in all probability, produced by the breakup of the meteorite after it had traversed the upper layers of the atmosphere more or less in one piece. It is unfortunate that we know nothing of the angle of the flightpath in this case; the stones that fell from the cloud fell vertically or very nearly so and obviously with subsonic speeds. In the case of the older fall in Alsace the description sounds as if the meteorite reached the ground intact, having travelled with supersonic speed almost until impact. What the people heard was the noise of the impact and then the sonic boom produced earlier. The Siberian meteorite of # must have moved with subsonic speed by the time it became visible because nothing that could be ascribed to a sonic boom is mentioned. The sound resembling the noise of artillery fire that was heard was caused by the not quite simultaneous impacts of many fragments. If the sky had been cloudy at the time the impact noises would have produced a prolonged thunderous roar because of the reflection of the sound waves from clouds at different heights. And now we can sum up the whole problem of noises produced by meteors. If the noise-producing event -- e. g., the breakup of the meteorite -- takes place above # (or #) miles nothing will be heard because no sound waves can be produced. If a bright meteor passes overhead at a height of less than # miles with an impact point a long distance away, a kind of faint thunder might be heard, but more than a minute after the phenomenon has been seen. This is the situation when mistakes are most likely to be made, with random Fig. #. Sketch Map of the Area of the # Meteorite Fall. The distance of the impact point from Vladivostok is about # miles. noises ascribed to the meteor and its real noise being disregarded. But an observer situated only a few miles from the impact point of a large meteorite might hear all three kinds of noise: the "boom" of the supersonic passage through the atmosphere, the noise of the breakup if it occurs and finally the sound of the impact. -- Willy Ley If You're a Subscriber --  -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not contain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let us know what it is. And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Today? At the Bottom of a Hole What good's a planet? It's nothing but the bottom of a gravity hole in space -- unless it's a hiding place! I 'T'welve stories below the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing pastures and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer's Asteroid. Five miles above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers, alive with the tiny red glints of self-guided tractors. Lucas Gamer was half daydreaming, letting his eyes rove the solid sky. At the Belt government's invitation he had entered a bubbleworld for the first thne, combining a vacation from United Nations business with a chance at a brand new experience -- a rare thing for a man of seventeen decades old. He found it pleasantly kooky to look up into a curved sky of fused rock and imported topsoil. "There's nothing immoral about smuggling," said Lit Shaeffer. The surface overhead was dotted with hotels, as if the bubbleworld were turning to city. Garner knew it wasn't. Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter's occasional need for an Earthlike environment. Belters don't need houses. A Belter's home is the inside of his pressure suit. Gamer returned his attention to his host. "You mean smuggling's like picking pockets on Earth?" "That's just what I don't mean," Shaeffer said. The Belter reached into his coverall pocket, pulled out something flat and black and laid it on the table. "I'll want to play that in a minute. Gamer, picking pockets is legal on Earth. Has to be, the way you crowd together. You couldn't enforce a law against picking pockets. In the Belt smuggling is against the law, but it isn't immoral. It's like a flatlander forgetting to feed the parking meter. There's no loss of self-respect. If you get caught you pay the fine and forget it." "Oh." "If a man wants to send his earnings through Ceres, that's up to him. It costs him a straight thirty per cent. If he thinks he can get past the goldskins, that too is his choice. But if we catch him we'll confiscate his cargo, and everybody will be laughing at him. Nobody pities an inept smuggler." "Is that what Muller tried to do?" "Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar. Then he did something stupid. He tried to whip around a hole. "He must have been on course for Luna when we found him. Ceres was behind him with the radar. Our ships were ahead of him, matching course at two gee. His mining ship wouldn't throw more than point five gee, so eventually they'd pull alongside him no matter what he did. Then he noticed Mars was just ahead of him." "The hole." Garner knew enough Belters to have learned a little of their slang. "The very one. His first instinct must have been to change course. Belters learn to avoid gravity wells. A man can get killed half a dozen ways coming too close to a hole. A good autopilot will get him safely around if, or program an in-and-out spin, or even land him at the bottom, God forbid. But miners don't carry good autopilots. They carry cheap autopilots, and they stay clear of holes." , "You're leading up to something," Gamer said regretfully. "Business?" "You're too old to fool." Sometimes Garner believed that himself. Sometime between the first world war and the blowing of the second bubbleworld, Garner had learned to read faces as accurately as men read print. Often it saved time -- and in Gamer's view his time was worth saving. "Go on," he said. "Muller's second thought was to use the hole. An in-and-out spin would change his course more than he could hope to do with the motor. He could time it so Mars would hide him from Ceres when he curved out. He could damn near touch the surface, too. Mars' atmosphere is as thin as a flatlander's dreams." "Thanks a lot. Lit, isn't Mars U. N. property?" "Only because we never wanted it." Then Muller had been trespassing. "Go on. What happened to Muller?" "I'll let him tell it This is his log." Lit Shaeffer did something to the flat box, and a man's voice spoke. ' II A pril #, #. The sky it flat, the land is flat, and they meet in a circle at infinity. No star shows but the big one, a little bigger than it shows through most of the Belt, but dimmed to red, like the sky. It's the bottom of a hole. I must have been crazy to risk it. But I'm here. I got down alive. I didn't expect to, not there at the end. It was one crazy landing. Imagine a universe half of which has been replaced by an ochre abstraction, too distant and far too big to show meaningful detail, moving past you at a hell of a clip. A strange, singing sound comes through the walls, like nothing you've ever heard before, like the sound of the wings of the angel of death. The walls are getting warm. You can hear the thermosystem whining even above the shriek of air whipping around the hull. Then, because you don't have enough problems, the ship shakes itself like a mortally wounded dinosaur. That was my fuel tanks tearing loose. All at once and nothing first, the four of them sheered their mooring bars and went spinning down ahead of me, cherry red. That faced me with two bad choices. I had to decide fast. If I finished the hyperbola, I'd be heading into space on an unknown course with what fuel was left in my inboard cooling tank. My lifesystem wouldn't keep me alive more than two weeks. There wasn't much chance I could get anywhere in that time, with so little fuel, and I'd seen to it the goldskins couldn't come to me. But the fuel in the cooling tank would get me down. Even the ships of Earth use only a little of their fuel in getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth. But what then? I'd still have two weeks to live. I remember the old Lacus Solis base, deserted seventy years ago. Surely I could get lifesystems working well enough to support one man. I might even find enough water to turn some into hydrogen by electrolysis. It was a better risk than heading out into nowhere. Right or wrong, I went down... The stars are gone, and the land around me makes no sense. Now I know why they call planet-dwellers "flatlanders". I feel like a gnat on a table. I'm sitting here shaking, afraid to step outside. Beneath a red-black sky is a sea of dust, punctuated by scattered, badly cast glass ash trays. The smallest, just outside the port, are a few inches in diameter. The largest are miles across. As I came down the deep radar showed me fragments of much larger craters under the dust. The dust is soft and fine, almost like quicksand. I came down like a feather, but the ship is buried to halfway up the lifesystem. I set down just beyond the lip of one of the largest craters, the one which houses the ancient flatlander base. From above, the base looked like a huge, transparent raincoat discarded on the cracked bottom. It's a weird place. But I'll have to go out sometime; how else can I use the base lifesystem? As Uncle Bat told me, stupidity carries the death penalty. I'll try to go outside tomorrow. A pril #, #.tMy clock says it's morning. The sun's around on the other side of the planet, leaving the sky no longer bloody. It looks almost like space if you remember to look away from gravity, though the stars are dim, as if seen through fogged plastic. A big star has come over the horizon, brightening and dimming like a spinning rock. Must be Phobos, since it came from the sunset region . I'm going out. Later: A sort of concave glass shell surrounds the ship where the fusion flame splashed down. The ship's lifesystem, the half that shows above the dust, rests in the center like a frog on a lilypad in Confinement Asteroid. The splash-down shell is all a spider web of cracks, but it's firm enough to walk on. Not so the dust. The dust is like thick oil. The moment I stepped onto it I started to sink. I had to swim to where the crater rim slopes out like the shore of an island. It was hard work. Fortunately the splash-down shell reaches to the crater rock at one point, so I won't have to do that again. It's queer, this dust. I doubt you could find its like anywhere in the system. It's meteor debris, condensed from vaporized rock. On Earth, dust this fine would be washed down to the sea by rain and turned to sedimentary rock, natural cement. On the Moon there would be vacuum cementing, the bugaboo of the Belt's microminiaturization industries. But. here, there's just enough "air' r to be absorbed by the dust surface... to prevent vacuum cementing... and not nearly enough to stop a meteorite. Result: it won't cement, nohow. So it behaves like a viscous fluid. Probably the only rigid surfaces are the meteor craters and mountain ranges. Going up the crater lip was rough. It's all cracked, tilted blocks of volcanic glass. The edges are almost sharp. This crater must be geologically recent. At the bottom, half submerged in a shallow lake of dust, is bubbletown. I can walk okay in this gravity; it's something less than my ship's gee max. But I almost broke by ankles a couple of times getting down over those tilted, slippery, dust-covered blocks. As a whole the crater is a smashed ash tray pieced loosely together like an impromptu jigsaw puzzle. The bubble covers the base like a deflated tent, with the air-making machinery just outside. The airmaker is in a great :ube of black metal, blackened oy seventy years of Martian atmosphere. It's huge. It must have been a pain to lift. How :hey moved that mass from Earth to Mars with only chemical and ion rockets, I'll never know. Also, why? What was on Mars that they wanted? If ever there was a useless world, this is it. It's not close to Earth, like the Moon. The gravity's inconveniently high. There are no natural resources. Lose your suit pressure, and it'd be a race against time, whether you died of blowout or of red, fuming nitric acid eating your lungs. The wells? Somewhere on Mars there are wells. The first expedition found one in the nineteen nineties. A mummified something was nearby. It exploded when it touched water, so nobody ever knew more about it, including just how old it was. Did they expect to find live Martians? If so, so what? Outside the bubble are two two-seater Marsbuggies. They have an enormous wheelbase and wide, broad wheels, probably wide enough to keep the buggy above the dust while it's moving. You'd have to be careful where you stopped. I won't be using them anyway. The airmaker will work, I think, if I can connect it to the ship's power system. Its batteries are drained, and its fusion plant must be mainly lead by now. Thousands of tons of breathing air are all about me, tied up in nitric oxide, NO # . The airmaker will release oxygen and nitrogen and will also pick up what little water vapor there is. I'll pull hydrogen out of the water for fuel. But can I get the power? There may be cables in the base. It's for sure I can't call for help. My antennae burned off coming down. I looked through the bubble and saw a body, male, a few feet away. He's died of blowout. Odds are I'll find a rip in the bubble when I get around to looking. Wonder what happened here?  pril #, #. I went to sleep at first sunlight. Mar's rotation is just a fraction longer than a ship's day, which is convenient. I can work when the stars show and the dust doesn't, and that'll keep me sane. But I've had breakfast and done clean-ship chores, and still it'll be two hours before sundown. Am I a coward? I can't go out there in the light. Near the sun the sky is like fresh blood, tinged by nitric oxide. On the other side it's almost black. Not a sign of a star. The desert is flat, broken only by craters and by a regular pattern of crescent dunes so shallow that they can be seen only near the horizon. Something like a straight lunar mountain range angles away into the desert; but it's terribly eroded, like something that died a long time ago. Could it be the tilted lip of an ancient asteroid crater? The Gods must have hated Mars, to put it so close to the middle of the Belt. This shattered, pulverized land is like a symbol of age and corruption. Erosion seems to live only at the bottom of holes. Later: Almost dawn. I can see red washing out the stars. After sundown I entered the base through the airlock, which still stands. Ten bodies are sprawled in what must have been the village square. Another was halfway into a suit in the administration building, and the twelfth was a few feet from the bubble wall, where I saw him yesterday. A dozen bodies, and they all died of blowout. Explosive decompression if you want to be technical. The circular area under the bubble is only half full of buildings. The rest is a carefully fused sand floor. Other buildings lie in stacks of walls, ceilings, floors, ready to be put up. I suppose the base personnel expected others from Earth. One of the buildings held electrical wiring. I've hooked a cable to the airmaker battery and was able to adapt the other end to the contact on my fusion plant. There's a lot of sparking, but the airmakers works. I'm letting it fill the stack of empty Otanks I found against a pile of walls. The nitrogen is draining into the bubble. I know now what happened to the flatlander base. Bubbletown died by murder. No question of it. When nitrogen started pouring into the bubble, I saw dust blowing out from the edge of town. There was a rip. It was sharp edged, as if cut by a knife. I can mend it if I can find a bubble repair kit. There must be one somewhere. Meanwhile I'm getting oxygen and water. The oxygen tanks I can empty into the lifesystem as they fill. The ship takes it back out of the air and stores it. If I can find a way to get the water here I can just pour it into the john. Can I carry it here in the Otanks? Ill April #, #. Dawn. The administration building is also a tape library. They kept a record of the base doings, very complete and so far very boring. It reads like a ship's log sounds, but more gossipy and more detailed. Later I'll read it all the way through. I found some bubble plastic and contact cement and used them to patch the rip. The bubble still wouldn't inflate. So I went out and found two more rips just like the first. I patched them and looked for more. Found three. When I got them fixed it was nearly sunup. The O-tanks hold water, but I have to heat them to boil the water to get it out. That's hard work. Question: is it easier to do that or to repair the dome and do my electrolysis inside? How many rips are there? I've found six. So how many killers were there? No more than three. I've accounted for twelve inside, and according to the log there were fifteen in the second expedition. No sign of the goldskins. If they'd guessed I was here they'd have come by now. With several months' worth of air in my lifesystem, I'll be home free once I get out of this hole.  pril #, #. Two more rips in the bubble, a total of eight. They're about twenty feet apart, evenly spaced around the transparent plastic fabric. 'It looks like at least one man ran around the dome slashing at the fabric until it wasn't taut enough to cut. I mended the rips. When I left the bubble had started swelling with air. I'm halfway through the town log, and nobody's seen a Martian yet. I was right, that's what they came for. Thus .far they've found three more wells. Like the first, these are made of cut diamond building blocks, fairly large, very well worn, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Two of the four have dirty nitric acid at the bottoms. The others are dry. Each of the four has a "dedication block" covered with a queer, partially eroded writing. From a partial analysis of the script, it seems that the wells were actually crematoriums; a deceased Martian would explode when he touched water in the nitric acid at the bottom. It figures. Martians wouldn't have fire. I still wonder why them came, the men of the base. What could Martians do for them? If they wanted someone to talk to, someone not human, there were dolphins and killer whales right in their own oceans. The trouble they took! And the risks! Just to get from one hole to another! A pril #, #. Strange. For the first time since the landing, I did not return to the ship when the sky turned light. When I did start back the sun was up. It showed as I went over the rim. I stood there between a pair of sharp obsidian teeth, staring down at my ship. It looked like the entrance to Confinement Asteroid. Confinement is where they take women when they get pregnant: a bubble of rock ten miles long and five miles across, spinning on its axis to produce one gee of outward pull. The children have to stay there for the first year, and the law says they have to spend a month out of each year there until they're fifteen. I've a wife named Letty waiting there now, waiting fof the year to pass so she can leave with our daughter Janice. Most miners, they pay the fatherhood fee in one lump if they've got the money; it's about sixty thousand commercials, so some have to pay in installments, and sometimes it's the woman who pays; but when they pay they forget about it and leave the women to raise the kids. But I've been thinking about Letty. And Janice. The monopoles in my hold would buy gifts for Letty, and raise Janice with enough left over so she could do some travelmg, and still I'd have enough commercials left for more children. I'd have them with Letty, if she'd agree. I think she would. How'd I get onto that? As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, my ship looks like the entrance to Confinement -- or to Farmer's Asteroid, or any underground City. With the fuel tanks gone there's nothing left but the drive and the lifesystem and a small magnetically insulated cargo hold. Only the top half of the lifesystem shows above the sea of dust, a blunt steel bubble with a thick door, not streamlined like a ship of Earth. The heavy drive tube hangs from the bottom, far beneath the dust. I wonder how deep the dust is. The splashdown shell will leave a rim of congealed glass around my lifesystem. I wonder if it'll affect my takeoff? Anyway, I'm losing my fear of daylight. Yesterday I thought the bubble was inflating. It wasn't. More rips were hidden under the pool of dust, and when the pressure built up the dust blew away and down went the bubble. I repaired four rips today before sunlight caught me. One man couldn't have made all those slashes. That fabric's tough. Would a knife go through it? Or would you need something else, like an electric knife or a laser? A pril #, #." I spent most of today reading the bubbletown log. There was a murder. Tensions among fifteen men with no women around can grow pretty fierce. One day a man named Carter killed a man named Harness, then ran for his life in one of tire Marsbuggies, chased by the victim's brother. Neither came back. They must have run out of air. Three dead out of fifteen leaves twelve. Since I counted twelve bodies, who's left to slash the dome? Martians? In the entire log I find no mention of a Martian being seen. Bubbletown never ran across any Martian artifact, except the wells. If there are Martians, where are they? Where are their cities? Mars was subjected to all kinds of orbital reconaissance in the early days. Even a city as small as Bubbletown would have been seen. Maybe there are no cities. But where do the diamond blocks come from? Diamonds as big as the well material don't form naturally. It takes a respectable technology to make them that big. Which implies cities -- I think. That mummy. Could it have been hundreds of thousands of years old? A man couldn't last that long on Mars, because the water in his body would react with the nitric oxide around him. On the Moon, he could last millions of years. The mummified Martian's body chemistry was and is a complete mystery, barring the napalmlike explosion when water touched it. Perhaps it wtas that durable, and perhaps one of the pair who left to die returned to cut the dome instead, and perhaps I'm seeing goblins. This the place for it. If I ever get out of here, you try and catch me near another hole. A pril #, #. The sun shows clear and bright above a sharp-edged horizon. I stand at the port looking out. Nothing seems strange any more. I've lived here all my life. The gravity is settling in my bones; I no longer stumble as I go over the crater lip. The oxygen in my tanks will take me anywhere. Give me hydrogen, and you'll find me on Luna, selling my monopoles without benefit of a middleman. But it comes slowly. I can get hydrogen only by carrying water in the base O-tanks and then electrolyzing it into the fuel cooling tank, where it liquefies. The desert is empty except for a strange, rosy cloud that covers one arm of horizon. Dust? Probably. I heard the wind singing faintly through my helmet as I returned to the ship. Naturally the sound can't get through the hull. The desert is empty. I can't repair the bubble. Today I found four more rips before giving up. They must circle the bubble all the way 'round. One man couldn't have done it. Two men couldn't. It looks like Martians. But where are they? They could walk on the sand, if their feet were flat and broad and webbed... and there'd be no footprints. The dust hides everything. If there were cities here the dust must have covered them ages ago. The mummy wouldn't have shown webbing; it would have been worn away. Now it's starlessly black outside. The thin wind must have little trouble lifting the dust. I doubt it will bury me. Anyway the ship would rise to the surface. Gotta sleep. A pril #, #. It's oh four hundred by the clock, and I haven't slept at all. The sun is directly overhead, blinding bright in a clear, red sky. No more dust storm, no The Martians exist. I'm sure of it. Nobody else was left to murder the base. But why don't they show themselves? I'm going to the base, and I'm taking the log with me. IV I 'm in the village square. Oddly enough, it was easier making the trip in sunlight. You can see what you're stepping on, even in shadow, because the sky diffuses the light a little, like indirect lighting in a dome city. The crater lip looks down on me from all sides, splintered shards of volcanic glass. It's a wonder I haven't cut my suit open yet, making that trip twice a day. Why did I come here? I don't know. My eyes feel rusty, and there's too much light. Mummies surround me, with faces twisted by anguish and despair and with fluids dried on their mouths. Blowout is an ugly death. Ten mummies here, and one by the edge of town, and one in the admin building. I can see all of the crater lip from here. The buildings are low bungalows, and the square is big. True, the deflated bubble distorts things a little, but not much. So. The Martians came over the lip in a yelling swarm or a silent one, brandishing sharp things. Nobody would have heard them if they yelled. But ten men were in a position to see them. Eleven men. There's a guy at the edge... no, they might have come from the other direction. But still, ten men. And they just waited here? I don't believe it. The twelfth man. He's half into a suit. What did he see? I'm going to go look at him. By God, I was right. He's got two fingers on a zipper, and he's pulling down. He's not half into a suit, he's half out of it! No more goblins. But who cut the dome? The hell with it. I'm sleepy. pril #, #. A day and a half of log to Catch up on. My cooling tank is full, or nearly. I'm ready to try the might of the goldskins again. There's air enough to let me take my time, and less chance of a radar spotting me if I move slowly. Good-by, Mars, lovely paradise for the manic depressive. That's not funny. Consider the men in the base. Item: it took a lot of knives to make those slits. Item: everyone was inside. Item: no Martians. They would have been seen. Therefore the slits were made from inside. If someone was running around making holes in the bubble, why didn't someone stop him? It looks like mass suicide. Facts are facts. They must have spread evenly out around the dome, slashed, and then walked to the town square' against a driving wind of breathing-air roaring out behind them. Why? Ask 'em. The two who aren't in the square may have been dissenters; if so, it didn't help them. Being stuck at the bottom of a hole is not good for a man. Look at Earth's insanity records. I am now going back to a minute-to-minute log. Ready to prime drive. The dust won't hurt the fusion tube, nothing could do that, but backblast might damage the rest of the ship. Have to risk it. #. The first shot of plutonium didn't explode. Priming again. The drive's dead. I can't understand it. My instruments swear the fusion shield is drawing power, and when I push the right button the hot uranium gas sprays in there. What's wrong? Maybe a break in the primer line. How am I going to find out? The primer line's way down there under the dust. I've sprayed enough uranium into the fusion tube to make a pinch bomb. By now the dust must be hotter than Washington. How am I going to repair that primer line? Lift the ship in my strong, capable hands? Swim down through tire dust and do it by touch? I haven't anything that'll do a welding job under ten feet of fine dust. I think I've had it. Maybe there's a way to signal spread on the dust... if I could find something black to spread around. Have to search the base again. Nothing in the town. Signaling devices in plenty, for suits and Marsbuggies and orbital ships, but only the laser was meant to reach into space. I can't fix a seventy-year-old comm laser with spit and wire and good intentions. I'm going off minute-to-minute. There's be no takeoff. A pril #, #.   I've been stupid. Those ten suicides. What did they do with their knives after they were through cutting? Where did they get them in the first place? Kitchen knives won't eut bubble plastic. A laser might, but there can't be more than a couple of portable lasers in the base. I haven't found any. And the airmaker's batteries were stone dead. Maybe the Martians kill to steal power. They wouldn't have fire. Then they took my uranium, for the same reason, slicing my primer line under the sand and running it into their own container. But how would they get down there? Dive under the dust? Oh. I'm getting out of here... I made it to the crater. God knows why they didn't stop me. Don't they care? They've got my primer fuel. They're under the dust. They live there, safe from meteors and violent temperature changes, and they build their cities there too. Maybe they're heavier than the dust, so they can walk around on the bottom. Why, there must be a whole ecology down there! Maybe onecelled plants on top, to get energy from the sun, to be driven down by currents in the dust and by dust storms, to feed intermediate stages of life. Why didn't anybody look'? Oh, I wish I could tell someone! I haven't time for this. The town O-tanks won't fit my suit valves, and I can't go back to the ship. Within the next twentyfour hours I've got to repair and inflate the bubble or die. I wonder how long it would take a Martian to get over the rim and down here to the bubble? Wondering won't help. I could still be seeing goblins. it pril #, #. I strolled up to the rim to see if my ship was still there. The Martians might have dragged it into the dust. They hadn't, and there's no sign of tampering. Am I seeing goblins? I could find out. All I'd have to do is peep into the base fusion plant. Either there's a pile there, mostly lead by now... or the pile was stolen seventy years ago. Either way the residual radiation would punish my curiosity. I'm watching the sun rise through the bubble wall. It has a strange beauty, unlike anything I've seen in space. I've seen Saturn from an infinity of angles when I pulled monopoles in the rings, but it can't compare to this. Now I know I'm crazy. It's a hole! I'm at the bottom of a lousy hole! The sun writes a jagged white line along the crater rim. I can see the whole rim from here, no fear of that. No matter how fast they move, I can get into my suit before they get down to me. It would be good to see my enemy. Why did they come here, the fifteen men who lived and died here? I know why I'm here: foi love of money. Them too? A hundred years ago the biggest diamonds men could make looked like coarse sand. They must have come after the diamond wells. But travelwas fiendishly expensive then.Could they have made a profit? Or did they think they could develop Mars the way they developed the asteroids? Ridiculous! But they didn't have my hindsight. And holes dan be useful... like the raw lead deposits along Mercury's dawnside crescent. Pure lead, condensed from dayside vapor, free for the hauling. We'd be doing the same with Martian diamonds if it weren't so cheap to make them. Here's the sun. An anticlimax: I can't look into it, though it's dimmer than the rock miner's sun. No more postcard scenery til -- Wups. I'd never reach my suit. One move and the bubble will be a sieve. Just now they're as motionless as I am, staring at me without eyes. I wonder how they sense me? Their spears are poised and ready. Can they really puncture bubble fabric? But the Martians must know their own strength, and they've done this before. All this time I've been waiting for them to swarm over the rim. They came out of the dust pool in the bottom of the crater. I should have realized the obsidian would be as badly cracked down there as elsewhere. They do look like goblins. V TT'or moments the silence was broken only by the twin humming of a nearby bumblebee and a distant tractor. Then Lit reached to turn off the log. He said, "We'd have saved him if he could have held out." "You knew he was there?" "Yah. The Deimos scope watched him land. We sent in a routine request for permission to land on U. N. property. Unfortunately flatlanders can't move as fast as a drugged snail, and we knew of no reason to hurry them up. A telescope would have tracked Muller if he'd tried to leave." "Was he nuts?" "Oh, the Martians were real enough. But we didn't know that until it was too late. We saw the bubble inflate and stay that way for awhile, and we saw it deflate all of a sudden. It looked like Muller' d had an accident. And that's why I'm telling you all this, Garner. As First Speaker for the Belt Political Section, I hereby confess that two Belt ships have trespassed on United Nations property." "You had good reasons." "You'd have been proud of him Garner. He didn't run his suit; h'e knew perfectly well it was too far away. Instead, he ran toward an O-tank full of water. The Martians must have slashed the moment he turned, but he reached the tank, stepped though one of the holes and turned the O-tank on the Martians. In the low pressure it was like using a fire hose. He got six before he fell." "They burned?" "They did. But not completely. There are some remains. We took three bodies, along with their spears, and left the others in situ. You want the corpses?" "Damn right." "Why?" "What do you mean, Lit?" "Why do you want them? We took three mummies and three spears as souvenirs. To you they're not souvenirs. It was a Belter who died down there." "I'm sorry, Lit, but those bodies are important. We can find out what a Martian's made of before we go down." "Go down." Lit made a rude noise. "Luke, why do you want to go down there? What could you possibly want from Mars? "Abstract knowledge." "For what?" "Lit, you amaze me. Why did Earth to go to space in the first place, if not for abstract knowledge?"  #"ords crowded over each  ' other to reach Lit's mouth. They jammed in his throat, and he was speechless. He spread his hands, made frantic gestures, gulped twice, and said, "It's obvious!" "Tell me slow. I'm a little dense." "There's everything in space. Monopoles. Metal. Vacuum for the vacuum industries. A place to build cheap without all kinds, of bracing girders. Free fall for people with weak hearts. Room to test things that might blow up. A place to learn physics where you can watch it happen. Controlled environments --  " "Was it all that obvious before we got here?" "Of course it was!" Lit glared at his visitor. The glare took in Garner's withered legs, his drooping, mottled, hairless skin, the decades that showed in his eyes -- and Lit remembered his visitors age. " . , . Wasn't it?" The Great Powers of Earth could not be friends. But they had to be allies against I had spent a couple of weeks in Berlin on one of those Armed Forces Committee boondoggles in the late sixties -- sixty-eight, I think it was; and I retained a basic familiarity with tlie town. I got a cab at Tempelhof airport without being recognized and was at the Hotel am Zoo twenty minutes after my plane had landed. I'm no longer a young man, and I was grateful for the rapidity of the trip. There'd been a leak somea common foe! where. Maybe from the passenger manifest. A reporter was on me as soon as I had signed the register. "What brings you to Berlin, Senator Charles?" His English was heavily accented, but easy and idiomatic. "Sorry, son. No interviews." "Just a few moments. Senator. I'd like a statement on the French withdrawal..." I cut him off with a closedmouth smile and a shake of the head. I'd been a working journalist for many years before I entered politics, and I could sympathize with him. But I couldn't afford to advertise my presence in Berlin at this point. It was unfortunate that I had been recognized. I glanced at my watch as I followed the bellgirl to the drop chute. Too late for the morning editions; I had perhaps twelve hours before the afternoon papers would announce my visit to the city. They would be sure to use the word "mysterious". Thirty-five years after the end of the Second World War, Berlin was still an occupied city and still divided. The press was highly sensitive to visits from officials of the "protecting powers."  r'he bellgirl let me into my I suite and dismissed the man who had brought my single twosuiter. I waved the girl away, refusing her somewhat weary professional offer and tipping her ten marks. She shrugged, her smooth shoulders eloquent through the translucent material of her abbreviated costume, and went back to her station in the lobby to seek more adventurous new arrivals. I opened the twosuiter and poured myself a very small drink from the bottle of Jack Daniels nestled in its leather case. I sipped as I changed from my rumpled traveling clothes, washed and removed my hairpiece. You don't see many balding men these days, and I weighed the consequences : without the hairpiece I would stand out a bit; with it I would be easy to recognize, and I might have a good deal more trouble shaking the press. But without it, I might have trouble corivincing Semyinov, who no Boubt had studied my dossier as assiduously as I had his. who I was. I doped the backing and pressed the hairpiece carefully back in place. I would have to use other measures if I hoped to circumvent the press. I checked the locks on my briefcase for the fortieth time since my departure from Washington that noon and left my room for the drop chute. I swung off on the floor above the lobby and walked slowly down the single flight. Halfway down I spotted them, three reporters and a photographer, smoking and chatting, glancing from time to time toward the drop chute they expected me to exit from. I turned silently and headed back up the stairway. Down the first-floor corridor was an emergency exit and another pair of stairs, this one gray and utilitarian. A moment later, and I was out in the cool, damp night of a Central European September. r T"he Kurfurstendamn hadn't changed much since '#, maybe more neon, if that were possible. I had no trouble finding my way to the Uhlandstrasse U-Bafan stop, and I picked up a city map at the news kiosk by the entrance to the subway. Twenty minutes brought me up into the northern part of the city, the old French Sector, and I left the subway at Seestrasse. I was the only passenger to leave the train, and I stopped by the lighted ticket booth to check my map for Frauenf elder Weg. The people in Washington had said it was no more than a ten minute walk. I took twenty, doubling back several times to check for any sign of surveillance. I'm no expert at these things, but when I finally walked up to the gate of the little villa at number #, I was pretty sure that no one had followed me. I rang and was admitted by one of those faceless young men in diplomatic gray who seem to be interchangeable parts in the vast machinery of government, the ones who present you with briefing papers at Defense Department meetings and program computers in the underground Whitehouse and meet you at the gate down at Sandia or over at Vandenberg. They didn't have names, only functions. Semyinov was already there, pacing the floor and wondering, no doubt, what the chort the whole thing was about. I recognized him right away from the pictures I'd been shown. There was no mistaking the high, sloped forehead and the heavy, dark-rimmed glasses. The Russians still considered hairpieces "western decadence," just as they had neckties in the thirties, but Semyinov's suit displayed an impeccable tailoring that would have shocked his predecessors in the Politbureau four decades ago. The man in the gray suit left us, and I introduced myself. Semyinov's English was as impeccable as his dress and as stiff as his bearing. "Senator Charles, I protest this irregular meeting. I am instructed to inform you that I have followed your instructions about secrecy only because the request came to my government directly from your President." Oemyinov refused the cigarette K' J I offered him and remained standing stiffly, when I seated myself in one of the Nigerianmodern chairs which contrasted so distressingly with the Gothic decor of the villa. "Calm down, Mr. Semyinov. Our desire for maximum secrecy for this meeting is fully justified, and you know as well as I do that you can come over here to West Berlin by elevated without any kind of border check, something I cannot do if we were to meet in your backyard." Semyinov had made his statement and had nothing to add. I went on, and as I talked I removed the tiny contoured probe from the back of my wristwatch and inserted it into the proper slot on my briefcase, deactivating the incendiary device that would have destroyed the contents had the brief case been tampered with. "Mr. Semyinov, I have here some photographs that will interest you." I flopped the first eight-by-ten glossy down on the coffee table in front of me. "As you can see from this and the following photographs, this is a highly sophisticated subminiature pulse-transceiver. It is someyour Garoshny-# missile decoy transmitters." The mention of the Garoshny# got to him, and Semyinov bent his long frame into the chair beside me and hunched over the photographs to study them. Like me Semyinov is no technician, but his job in the Politbureau is analogous to mine on the Armed Forces Committee, and we both have a pretty fair degree of familiarity with the hardware of defense. Still, it must have been a shock to him to discover that we knew enough about the Gatoshny # to comI know # was shocked when I learned that we had clear evidence that the Soviets had the details of our decoy system. Let's face it, the decoys on both sides are probably the' most secret aspect of our protective offensive missile system. They can serve to multiply the images on a radar detection screen a hundred-fold. Riding in the nose of an incoming missile, .they can screw up your defense system by overloading it. I could see that Semyinov was shocked, and for just a moment I felt sympathy for him. But Semyinov was still fighting. "I know nothing of these devices you mention, and I am quite certain this is nothing of Soviet manufacture." I kept him on the hook a little longer. "Mr. Semyinov, this device -- and a number of others identical to it -- have been found buried at crucial junction points in our early-warning telling system. They have been induction wired into the telling cables themselves, and they are designed so that a remote signal will trigger their operation." Semyinov started to protest his ignorance again, but I cut him off. "You know what these little boxes do when they're cut in?" Semyinov looked up from the photographs, and I answered my own question. "They feed a phony signal to our early-warning centers, Mr. Semyinov. They can make our radar screens lie to us. They can fill our status boards with false information. They can make it look to us 'as if you people have launched your entire arsenal at us!" Semyinov was white with shock. He dropped all pretence of formality. "But we have not done this thing Senator Charles. Why should we do such a thing? You would retaliate. You would..." His voice dropped off as he began to consider the possibilities of the situation. Then, slowly, his voice low, through teeth clenched in anger, he muttered: "... verolomniye Kitaytse!" I know very little Russian, but I caught the word Kitaystsy -- "Chinese," and I knew what was going through Semyinov's mind. That's what our intelligence people had thought too, at first. Who else would want to trigger an all-out exchange of nuclears between the Americans and the Russians? Who else had nothing to lose and everything to gain by tire mutual destruction of the two nuclear behemoths? By the virtual depopulation of the civilized world? But our intelligence analysts were wrong, and so was Semyinov. "No," I said. "It's not the Chinese." I pulled more photographs out of my briefcase. "We found this in August near we found the first of the decoy transceivers. It was alive then." Qernyinov took a good look at  the thing in the photograph and shuddered. Everybody does when they see it for the first time. It was the size of a badger and heavily furred except for its obscenely pink snout. It had rows of grinding teeth fronted by tusk-like incisors. It had six legs, two of which were equipped with opposable digits, the others with sharp, slashing claws. A long, prehensile tail terminated in a vicious, spike-like projection. It was a nightmare of a thing, a mixture of out-sized mole and weasel and ape. And then there were the eyes. Even in death, there was malevolence there, and intelligence. "What is this... thing?" "We don't know. When we found it, it had been stunned by the blow of a steer's hoof. It had been feeding on another steer it had slaughtered. There was a hole nearby, a burrow of sorts, that led down to the buried telling-circuit junction box." Semyinov pushed the photographs away in disgust. "What are you implying, Senator Charles, that this... this thing had something to do with the decoy transceivers?" "I'm not implying," I said. "I'm stating. Let me tell you the rest of the story. The local sheriff who found the animal put in a call to the Springfield field office of the F.B.I.; one of their agents took a look and got in touch with the Defense Department and a zoologist at the University of Champaign. The sheriff packed the animal, which he thought was dead, into a wire cage and drove with it to Rantoul Air Force Base,and the zoologist took a look at it. He nearly lost the index finger from his right hand." Semyinov looked at the photograph again and nodded. I went on: "The F. B. I. man got the cage door closed before the 'thing could get out, but before he or the zoologist knew what was happening, the thing committed suicide." "Suicide!" "Yes. It was intelligent. It's hard to see in this photograph, but there is a little pouch just below the neck, in front. Like the pouch on a marsupial. The thing reached in its pouch with one paw and pulled a little tube out. Here, in this picture. "Then it shot itself in the head." S emyinov left the little villa on Frauenfelder Weg first, and I gave him a good half-hour to get clear of the area before I headed back to the U-Bahn for the ride in to the Ku'damm. I was tired to the bone, but satisfied. Semyinov's shocked reaction seemed genuine, and unless I was very much mistaken, he would be back in Moscow within a few hours, and the hunt would be on. I could only hope they would find what we found: the decoy transceivers and the animals. I abandoned my suitcase and my bottle of Jack Daniels at the Hotel am Zoo and spent the night in a little pension on Knesebeckstrasse. I was on the first flight for Frankfurt the next morning, and by noon I was back in Washington and reporting to the President. "How did it go, Allan?" The President looked terribly tired. "Well enough, Mr. President" I looked at his worn face, seeing lines that anxiety had etched so deeply around the eyes and mouth. "I think Semyinov bought it." The President rose from his massive desk and turned to stare out at the grounds down toward Pennsylvania Avenue. There were children playing there, probably the President's grandchildren. He shrugged and turned back to me, his arms outstretched, palms upward. "It's a long shot, and we're gambling everything we've got." I picked up my hat and started for the door. The President's arms dropped to his sides, and that famous smile erased the anxiety from his face for a split second. "Good-by Allan. And thank you." "Not at all, Mr. President." I next saw President Canfield standing in an empty field of corn stubble a couple of hundred yards behind the Little Whitehouse on his Kansas farm. It was late in October, a month almost to the day from my meeting with Semyinov in Berlin. The President had called me that morning, and I had ridthe President's personal flitter along with his Whitehouse staff chief, the Secretary of Defense and a translator from the National Security Council. The President looked old and lonely standing there amid the stubble, his overcoat billowing in the blast from the flitter's thrusters. We touched down only long enough to take him aboard, and then we were off at maximum speed, headed north by northwest. We sat pretty much in silence for the six-hour trip. The President read from his capacious brief case, occasionally making penciled notations. The rest of us slept or played cribbage or simply sat and watched Canada slip away # feet beneath us and then the sea, gray and cold. We picked up a fighter escort south of Anchorage, altered course slightly to the west and began to lose altitude. St. Paul's in the Pribilofs is a desolate place, all gray rock and grayer sky and still grayer water; but the Navy had done its best with foam and fiberglass, and our quarters -- while certainly not luxurious -- were comfortable enough. I shivered during the jeep ride in from the landing flat and thought of the bellgirl in the Hotel am Zoo. Well, I had my bottle of Jack Daniels with me, and that would be creature comfort enough on this trip too. The Soviet party arrived within minutes after we did. MinisterPresident Nikolev had brought Semyinov and three others with him. One I recognized as Defense Minister Marshal Kaganov. The second man, the translator, was a stranger to me. But the third man to enter our foam-walled meeting room I knew very well indeed. I had hoped Alexi would be a member of the party, and -- since he was the Soviet's number one expert on early warning systems -- it was only logical that he come along. Still, I had not communicated directly with him since the Disarmament Conference of '#, and I was surprised at how he had aged. I guess I have aged too, and for the same reasons. I hardly dared look at Alexi. But he is a cool one, and when he was sure no one could observe, he lowered one eyelid at me in the barest suggestion of a wink. The summit conference went as we had hoped. The two heads of state quickly agreed on the extreme nature of the threat. The Soviets had found a considerable number of the decoy transceivers, and their telling-circuit inspection crews had come across the mangled remains of two of the sixlegged creatures in the Kazakhstan area, both apparently the victims of wolves. Minister-President Nikolev was convinced -- as we had hoped he would be -- that the strange creatures, wherever they had come from, had intended to trigger a nuclear blowup as a convenient method of eliminating most of the indigenous life on earth and softening up the planet for conquest. Nikolev is a fairly typical power-handler -- and a Russian -- and you could see that deep down inside he rather admired the cleverness of the plan. After all, Russian politics since the Middle Ages has revolved around such Byzantine plotting: set A against B and then when they've pretty well destroyed each other, move in and pick up the pieces. ' I "here were a lot of details, A mostly worked out by the Secretary of Defense and Marshal Kaganov. But the first part of the agreement was clear. Total nuclear disarmament with mutual inspection, except for watchdog forces around the Chinese perimeter, and these were and Soviet-Satellite missile batteries. The second part of the agreement would require more study, but there was basic agreement in principle: the two great former nuclear powers would devote their common resources to space research. As President Canfield put it: "We've stopped these things here this time, but they won't give up, and I'd rather face a showdown somewhere out in space than here on earth. We've got to get together the wherewithall to go out there to meet them." The conference broke up after a day and a half, and the first inspection teams set about their work within two days. I rode back with the President as far as Chicago, took the Lake Central flitter down-state to Champaign-Urbana and taxied in to the University. I found Nathan sitting in his workshop surrounded by bits of micro-electronics and the remains of salami sandwiches, as usual indiscriminately mixed. Together we walked across the campus to the Life Sciences Building to find George. Once in the fastness of George's spacious zoo, the chittering of his experimental animals lending a kind of homey sound to the conversation, I tilted back my chair, took a long pull on my absolute alcohol and grapefruit juice cocktail and filled my fellow conspirators in. "It's done," I said. "It went pretty much the way we planned it. I saw Semyinov in Berlin in September. He got the point, and the Soviet's own imagination did the rest, helped of course by your gadgets," I bowed toward Nathan, "and the animals," I bowed toward George. Both men had grins on their faces like someone had just told them they had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I lifted my beaker and saluted them. "You've done it, gentlemen!" Nathan drank deeply, looked at me a moment and then at George. "I only wish Alexi could be with us now," he said.      Next issue brings Hayden Howard's powerful series about the Eskimo Invasion to a place and time far removed from the Boothia peninsula and the Esks. The title of the story will tell you that; it's called. Our Man in Peking. And if you think you'll have any trouble finding the issue we might mention that the story, and the issue, are decorated with a handsome cover by Jack Gaughan. Naturally we'll also bring you the conclusion of Jack Vance's The Palace of Love -- in which we get to see the Palace, and the man who owns it. Since both of these are pretty solid pieces of work and will fill up a lot of pages, it's a little tricky to try to tell you what else will be in the issue -- but we've got stories in type, ready to go, by Philip K. Dick, Richard Wilson, Poul Anderson, Christopher Anvil, to name only a few... Why not come around next issue and see for yourself? D obert Heinlein's new novel -is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Putnam's, #). Very much like the Heinlein novels of old, its character is somewhere near Sixth Column and If This Goes On... This is the recent If magazine story of a successful revolution on the Moon; the separation of the vigorous, unconventional colony from the hidebound world which gave it birth. The action is fast, the characterizations are engaging, the detail of the revolution is believable and apparently similar to the truth -- it is handled with all of Heinlein's expertise for dirt-level politics, snappy dialogue and a sense of an actual living society. There has not been as evenly paced a Heinlein novel in some time; if the book does read as if Heinlein felt he were going over old ground and were just a little too detached from these particular people and their particular variant on a familiar situation, this is nevertheless a more homogeneous piece of construction than, for example. Stranger in a Strange Land. It has the virtue of self-consistency in a very important place -- the place in which the reader puts the book down to catch a few hours' sleep, having been trapped by it shortly after dinner, and then picks it up again as soon as he can, confident that its nature will not have altered radically while his back was turned. The Moon on which this story takes place has for quite some time been a prison colony -- a dumping ground for the criminals and antisocials of the three principal cultures -- North Amererican, Russian and Chinese. There are leavenings from all the other nations of the world, which seems to have struck some sort of more or less viable international balance following a short nuclear war. An "apolitical" Authority has been set up to administer the Moon, whose inhabitants have tunneled underground, set up hydroponic farms and generally established a tough but feasible way of life, based on agriculture and the fact that there are two men for every woman. It becomes obvious to these people that even though most of them are no longer prisoners working out sentences, they are very much on the short end of the stick. They are forced to do all their trading through the Authority, which fixes prices and runs the catapult which fires grain canisters Earthward. Properly aroused, they revolt. What follows thereafter is a story of the diplomatic maneuvering and the ballistic hurtlement required to make the Earth accept the Moon as a sovreign nation. What goes before is the underground scheming required to get a bunch of vaguely dissatisfied farmers to accept the various strictures they must impose on themselves if the revolution is to succeed. On this level, the book is political science fiction -- we have no one at all who can write it anywhere near as well as Heinlein can -- and as such it constitutes a sort of allegorical manual for political action, as well as a reprise and transliteration of classic techniques. The outstanding feature of literary interest is that the revolutionary triumvirate contains one individual who is a computer. I haven't read a more matter-offact, believable description of an individual with an electronic neurophysiology. Mike -- who goes on to create the personality of Adam Selene, and also of Adam's staff of office assistants -- may in fact be the most fully realized individual in the story. He certainly would have been if Heinlein had chosen to also give him maneuverability. As it is, he is a voice on the telephone and a human picture on a TV screen, and this is often quite enough to make him be a human being. Another member of the triumvirate is Professor de la Paz, who plays diplomat in relation to Mike the politician. Tying the two together, and taking responsibility for making a conscious individual of Mike, is Manual Garcia O'Kelly, the more or less self-taught computer technician. In this story he is Heinlein's practical man-of-all-work figure, the naturally bright but not too articulate and not particularly well educated chap who can always be counted upon to do something in the right direction very quickly. There is also a stunning blonde named Wyoming, who is placed very close to the councils of the revolution. But she never quite makes it, either as a person or as an effective force; she is something of a catalyst, and does little work besides that. Every revolution must have its angel, but she does not seem to really have the stuff. From the point of view we're working with today, this is a book about people who do something about their troubles. More specifically, it is a book about a small group of people who come to an awareness, mistaken or not, that they ought to do something about their society even if it means doing a certain amount of cheating and lying to fellow members of that same society, on the premise that most people don't know what's good for them. And that having a clear idea of what's good for most people is a license to cheat, provided one cheats on behalf of something larger than one's self. It's also possible to rotate this entire proposition -- to look at the book as if it were in fact the human viewpoint story of a computer's wholly successful attempt to manipulate his environment and fulfill his own personality. In that view, O'Kelly, de la Paz and Wyoming are no more than prosthetic devices, not much different from the wholly fictitious Adam Selene personality. All the people in the book are prosthetic, used for the purpose of creating a climate more favorable for the computer, which, having accomplished this purpose, then puts them all away in a closet as far as its own awareness is concerned. This would explain Mike's puzzling cessation of intercourse with the human characters in this story, who are never again able to communicate with him once the revolution has been accomplished. Either way, this is a book about strong personalities doing things about their situation. They may not be right, but they act as if they were, and they keep plugging away. They recognize -- or, if you prefer, they believe -- that the majority of people are comfort-oriented; that they will not move until they are pushed, and that when they move they follow a line of least resistance. In short, whoever the actual hero of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress might be, the actual villain is inertia. This is precisely the opposite of the situation reflected in the books written by such newer and spectacular writers as Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard. A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific educacation. In this way, when the world disaster -- be it wind or water -- comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water. This precondition is at the root of every important J. G. Ballard creation and is so fundamental to it that it does not need to be put into words. Being buried as it is, it both does not call attention to itself and permits the author's characters to produce the most amazing selfdestructive reactions while making reasonably intelligent and somewhat intellectual mouthnoises. Oddly enough, this is a review of Thomas N. Disch's The Genocides (Berkley). But it's rather difficult to speak of the Disch without prior reference to Ballard as the master of the inertial science-fiction novel, just as it is difficult to speak of Ballard without remarking that his work seems to be part and parcel of the science-fiction renaissance currently going on in England. There is considerably more vigor and talent in operation than ever before on that side of the Atlantic. A great many skilled and intelligent people have suddenly taken to writing this kind of story and have evoked a sharp reader response. This may in fact be the shape of tomorrow's science fiction generally -- hell, it may be the shape of today's science fiction -- and it's only natural that some of the younger writers over here will begin picking up on this cue. Thus, Disch. Thus, too, Disch's publication by Berkley, whose science-fiction editor, Damon Knight, for years was the outstanding representative of this mode of sf writing in America, when it was a minor undercurrent in the big streams of Engineers-Can-Do-Anything school of science fiction. It was Knight who began the paying of serious attention to Ballard, and it is Berkley which is in the forefront of this kind of sf publishing in this country. Knight being also the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and heavily influential in a variety of areas accessible by that route, I don't think there's much question but that with so much energy, high talent and dedication devoted to the promulgation of this mode, we'll be seeing quite a bit of this kind of thing. Let us then see what we have exemplified by The This book is the story of probably the last surviving human beings on an Earth which has been in effect plowed up and seeded by mysterious extraterrestial beings who treat the planet as a farm. They act through the agency of automatic mahere, as Genocides. chines which incinerate everything -- cities, cows and people -- that will not further the growth of more and more planets. The aliens themselves do not appear, though we are given one of their interoffice memos as a sort of footprint on the beach, to show that operations are being conducted by something other than Man. The characters in this story are mostly farmers -- a small, embattled band led by a religious fanatic who believes the Plant (which is soon discovered to be one single alient plant, creating its own interlacings of hollow subterranean root tunnels) was sent by God, but that it is his duty to God to fight the Plant. So he attempts to grow corn in the wilderness and provides for his people through such expedients as giinding up all strangers into sausage for Thanksgiving dinner. This attempt fails; the automatic incinerators, cruising about the world, locate him, kill most of the people and drive the survivors into a cave, and then down into the root system. Here they survive for a time, while his half-brother sons Buddy and Neil try to find ways to deal with Orville, who will be the old man's successor at reigning in Hell. Living parasitically in the root system, which warms and nourishes them, the thirty survivors become pests on the Plant. There is a little political mish-mash, some adultery, license, and one striking example of gluttony. More than anything else, there is a great deal of stupidity as these people permit the environment to control them entirely, and finally overwhelm them. Almost all of them die, though the actual examples of violence in this book are relatively few. There is relatively much action restricted to coming and going; trudging up and down the furrows of cornfields in the backbreaking attempts to push back the Plant; running after the escaping cattle; scurrying into the cave; finally wallowing up and down the root-tunnels -- Disch asserting, as he must, that roots don't have to be solid to support six-hundred-foot trees with leaves the size of billboards. This is a run, hide, slither, grope and die book, much like The Drowned World except that the encroaching seas are of vegetation, and presumably the world disaster is not entirely of mindless, God-like origin. Unlike The Wind From Nowhere, the disaster does not arbitrarily come to an end the instant the last surviving work of Man has been wiped off the face of the Earth. You have surely heard by now that this is u very good, and an important book. The verbal formula I get from various respectable acquaintances of mine is that you would never have thought that Disch could have produced anything this good. The verbal formula I get from other respectable friends of mine, wedded to the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man, is that the book is unrelieved trash, ineptly written, pretentious, inconsistent and sophomoric. I personally feel that it reflects a deep and dedicated study of the trappings of a book everybody says is good. It is, as a matter of fact, almost exactly the novel one would expect Thomas Disch to have written; a pudding full of borrowed symbology raisins and can't-miss verbalization; little burst of imaginery in which incinerators are likened to Volkswagens and are thus made deceptively harmless in the minds of the rather dumb, resigned victims. This kind of second-derivative reading is going to be more and more with us, just as schoolboy history compositions are always careful to mention # and #. Disch is such an apt pupil that he has not surprisingly become a strong candidate for salutatorian, and it is understandable why the Chamber of Commerce is predicting a brip.lit future for him ic. non as he r." s into the real woild. He nmy even make it. But what is int resting about this book is that in bring so unflaggingly derivative of an emerging mode, and in having been effective nevertheless to have so much good opinion behind it, it demonstrates the vitality and strength of that mode whether you like it or not. I t's not going to be easy to arrive at a snappy verdict on this general new kind of science fiction. For one thing, it's fundamentally different from most previous writing in the field -- until you go back to the H. G. Wells of "The Country of the Blind" and "Aepyornis Island". (In fact I can see a book called Cartography of Chaos, some ten years from now, using the new mode as a demonstration that all U. S. science fiction between say # and I# did not derive from classical sources, and that the importance of J. G. Ballard rests in his having singlehandedly returned the field to its main stem). But for purposes of groping closer to the truth, I would like to consider Roger Zelazny's This Immortal. This is an Ace paperback and serves to remind me that Ace is where Philip K. Dick found his first home as a novelist, and that Ace is also G. C. Edmondson's publishers. Soon enough, Zelazny will find himself dealing with glossier packages. Meanwhile, Ace has once again managed to produce an extremely interesting and undeniably important book. This Immortal is set on an Earth which, after a catastrophic nuclear war, fell within the political bounds of a humanoid civilization based on the Vegan solar system. This setting accomplishes a number cf things beyond the immediate nullification of a large amount of property and industrial capacity. It allows for the presence in the story of a numrequirement met in Brian Aldiss's Greybdard by the rumors of animal-people in the shrubbery, and it has brought the center of civilization and thinking back to the Mediterranean Basin. Thus, in several swoops, This Immortal fulfills many of the conditions required by the new mode. It evokes legends, it is actively regressive in a number of senses, including the special one met by the revived giant saurians in Ballard's The Drowned World, and it conveys a very strong sense that the works of Man and the thoughts of Man may not be very considerable at all when viewed in a real light. Certainly, science in this world is very little but technology, and the technology is peripheral. Cannibal tribes carry rifles, and the disassembly of the Great Pyramid is being filmed with a working force of actors, in order that the film may be run backward as a dramatization of the Pyramid's building. But these little trappings of Man, the tooluser, are expedients or auxiliaries to which an educated and cultured man may put his hand when the necessity arises. This is exactly the sort of civilization which would regard the aeropile as an excellent and an amusing end in itself, and would regard any offer to found an industry upon it as being a project for signalling around the world with enlarged baby rattles. Earth is a museum planet, whose curator is an odd sort of chap named Conrad Nimikos, who just happens to be immortal and has consequently created and abandoned a variety of identities in the past. It's Conrad who makes all the difference in this book. Conrad seems to fit the Greek ideal -- as I understand the Greek ideal. He seems to understand that disaster is Man's lot. He also understands that struggle is Man's lot, and so though he may rage at heaven, and go into a an earthquake has killed his beloved, he keeps this event separate in his mind from his duty. Duty operates on several levels; one of them is his present assignment, which is guiding an influential Vegan around the Earth. Another level is his duty to Earth. In a previous avatar, he has founded and energetically directed a movement to break down the then current Vegan practice of using Earth's resorts as pleasure domes. Now, having made that point, he is about to abandon a coexistent attempt to bring emigre Earthmen back from their heady preoccupation with Vegan society, where the crumbs they gather appear to them preferable to life on Earth. He is consequently involved with a variety of adventures, including a spell of being captured by cannibals whose witch doctor has made an artificial vampire of mindless insensibility and overwhelming puissance. Here is a symbol of Man's helplessness and technology's perversion if there ever was one. The trouble with its endurance as a symbol is that it gets the tar whipped out of it, as it logically should once somebody has had the forethought to slip it a little strychnine. The human winner in this instance is not Conrad, who is very fast and deadly with his hands as well as his mind, but Hassan, a professional assassin who is sometimes Conrad's friend and sometimes his adversary. I think if we're looking for symbols, Hassan's purpose in this book is to provide a contrast between the educated deadly man at one point Conrad kills a killing machine -- a fighting robot which Hassan uses for a sparring partner and cannot himself overcome. This is a story of adventures and perils, high intrigue, esthetics, politics -- in other words, of a world both external and internal. It is set up to be easily eligible for the kind of treatment the new mode would give it, and yet it is utterly charming, optimistic, and infinitely bettereducated. The immediate problem in this book -- the relationship of Earth to Vega -- is solved too neatly. It's perhaps fitting that a novel largely concerned with the Aegean view of life should solve its major complication with a god from a machine, but it's bad practice nevertheless. However, while the Disch does a fair job of weaving its spell around you, and convincing you that really, it's all downhill, the Zelazny does a superb job of offhandedly showing that such a view of life is a passing fit, and that there is considerably more on the other side. Oversimplifying, you might say that The Genocides is based on intricately worked out, deliberate self-limitation, while This Immortal is based on thoroughly understood, inexhaustible engagements with one's own grasp. The two writers involved seem to be just about equally talented within their own chosen horizons, but Zelazny I thing it going to prove to be the important and in fact the enduring one of the two -- one of the most solid talents to show up in their field in years -- because his horizon is goddamn much bigger. -- Algis Budrys Just Published! Critical studies of James Joyce's Ulysses, edited by Judy-Lynn Benjamin. Introduction by Thomas F. Staley, distinguished editor of the James Joyce Ouarterly. # stimulating essays filled with fresh Insights into this #thcentury classic. Special hardcover edition of # numbered copies, # each. Paper, # each. Order from -- The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma # Palace of Love Gersen ransacked Earth to find his enemy... but the trail led across the sfarways to the Palace of Love! IX j t ten o'clock the following morning Gersen returned to the houseboat. All was changed. The sun was yellow and warm. The sky, shining with the blue of Earth, was flecked here and there with fair-weather clouds. Navarth sat hunched on his foredeck, sunning himself. Gersen descended the ladder, walked along the landing. He stopped by the gangplank. "Ahoy. May I come aboard?" Navarth slowly turned his head, inspected Gersen with the hooded yellow eyes of a sick chicken. He shifted his gaze to watch a string of barges sliding silently along on jets of ionized water. He spoke in an To one purpose had Kirth Gersen dedicated his life; To revenge himself against the massacre of his family by the Demon Pri nces of Space. For that he had trained himself in the arts of assassination and intrigue; for that he had given up all thought of happiness, marriage and home. Two of them were vanquished at his hands, but others remained. He followed the trail of the next on his list -- Viole Falushe, proprietor of the galaxy-feared Palace of love -- across half a dozen solar systems until it came to the ancient planet of Earth itself. There, posing as a reporter of the newsmagazine which in fact he owned, Gersen enlisted the aid of the drunken, half-mad poet Navarth to set a trap for Viole Falushe. For bait he used a strange and beautiful girl... But Falushe escaped the trap, and Gersen was left without his prey. even voice: "I have no sympathy for persons of weak liver, who raise their sails only to drift downwind." Gersen took the remark as implicit permission to board the boat. "My shortcomings aside, what eventuated last night?" Navarth querulously brushed away the question. "We have strayed. The quest, the undertaking -- " "What quest? What undertaking?" " -- leads by a devious route. First there is sunlight. The road is broad and white, but soon it narrows. At the end is an awesome tragedy. A thousand mindsplitting colors, possibly the sunset. If I were young once more, how I would alter events! I have been blown by winds like a bit of trash. You will find it the same. You failed to seize the occasion! Each change comes a single time -- " Gersen found the remarks uninspiring. "All this to the side, did you speak last night to Viole Falushe?" Navarth raised a skinny hand in the air, the palm cupped forward. "Tumult! A reel of shapes! Angry faces, flashing eyes, a struggle of passions! I sat with a roaring in my ears." "What then of the girl?" "I agree in every respect.  Magnificent." "Where is she? Who is she?" Navarth's attention became fixed upon an object in the water : a white and gray seagull. Evidently he planned no meaningful responses. Gersen went on patiently: "What of Viole Falushe? How did you know he would be at the Celestial Harmony Cafe?" "Nothing could be simpler. I told him that we would be there." "When did you inform him?" Navarth made a fretful movement. "Your questions are tiresome. Must I set my watch by yours? Must I wisely consult with you? Must I -- " "The question seemed simple enough." "We live by different referents. Transpose if you like; I cannot." Navarth was plainly in a cantankerous mood. Gersen said soothingly, "Well then, for one reason or another, we missed Viole Falushe last night. How do you suggest that we find him now?" "I make no more suggestions. What is your concern with Viole Falushe?" "You forget that I have already explained this to you." "To be sure. Well, as to arranging a meeting, this is no great problem. We will invite him to a small banquet, perhaps." Something in Navarth's tone,  or perhaps the quick glittering glance which accompanied the words, put Gersen on his guard. "You think he would attend?" "Certainly, if it were a carefully planned affair." "How can you be sure? How do you know definitely that he is on Earth?" Navarth raised a monitory finger. "Have you ever watched a cat walk through the grass? At times it halts with one paw raised and calls out. Is there a reason to these sounds?" Gersen could not trace the linkage of ideas. He said patiently, "What of this party, or banquet, whatever it is to be?" "Yes, yes, the party!" Navarth had become interested now. "It must be exquisitely arranged, and it will cost a great "For one party? One banquet? Who is to be invited? The population of Sumatra?" "No. A small affair of twenty guests. But arrangements must be made and quickly. I am a source, an inspiration for Viole Falushe. In sheer majesty he has excelled me. But I will prove that in a smaller compass I am superior. What is away more in an hour." "Very well," said Gersen. A day's income, he reflected. "I will need a week. A week is hardly enough, but we dare delay no longer." "Why not?" "Viole Falushe returns to the Palace of Love." "How do you know?" Navarth looked off across the water. "Do you realize that a crook of my finger disturbs the fathest star? That every human thought disturbs the psychic parasphere?" "This is the source of your knowledge, pychic perturbations?" "As good a method as any other. But now as to the party: there are conditions. Art implies discipline. The more excellent the art, the more rigorous the discipline. Hence you must concede to certain limitations." "What are they?" "First the money. Bring me "Yes, of course. In a sack?" Navarth gave an indifferent wave of the hand. "Secondly, I am in charge of arrangements. You may not interfere." "Is this all?" "Thirdly, you must conduct yourself with restraint. Otherwise you will not be invited!" "I would not care to miss this party," said Gersen. "But I too will make conditions. First, Viole Falushe must be present." "Never fear as to that! Impossible to keep him away!" "Secondly, you must identify him to me." "No need. He . will identify himself." "Third, I want to know how you plan to inyite him." "How else? I call him by telephone, just as I call my other guests." "What is his number code?" "He can be reached by codGersen nodded. "Very well. I will bring you your money at once."   ersen returned to the Rem ' brandt Hotel, where he ate a reflective lunch. How mad was Navarth? His spasms of lunacy alternated with periods of canny practicality, both somehow conducing to Navarth's convenience. The call code yielded it with suspicious facility. Gersen could no longer restrain his curiosity. He went to a nearby booth, blanked the lens, touched the buttons. The presentation appeared: the outline of a startled human face. A voice spoke. "Who calls?" Gersen frowned, bent his head forward. The voice spoke again: "Who calls?" It was Navarth's voice. Gersen said, "I wish to speak to Viole Falushe." "Who calls?" "One who wishes to make his acquaintance." "Please leave your name and call number. In due course you may receive a return call." And Gersen thought he heard a poorly suppressed chuckle. Thoughtfully he left the booth. It was galling to be outwitted by a mad poet. He went to the Bank of Vega, called for cash. He packed the notes into a case and returned by cab out Boulevard Castel Vivence to the Fitlingasse. As he alighted he saw Zan Zu, the girl from Eridu, emerging from a fishmonger's shop with a paper cornucopia full of fried smelt. She wore her black skirt, and her hair was a tousle, but some of the magic of two nights before still hung about her. She went to sit on an old baulk and, looking out across the estuary, munched the fish. Gersen thought she appeared tired, listless, a trifle haggard. He proceeded to the houseboat. Navarth took the money with a noncommittal grunt. "The party then, seven days hence." "Have you issued invitations?" "Not yet. Leave all to me. Viole Falushe will be among the guests." "I presume you will call him "Of course." Navarth nodded three times, with great gravity. "Where else?" "And Zan Zu -- she is to come?" " 'Zan Zu'?" "Zan Zu, the girl from Eridu." "Oh -- that one. It might not be wise." X r I 'he man's name was Hollister Hausredel; his position, registrar at the Philidor Bohus Lyceum. He was a man of early midde age, with an almost total lack of distinguishing characteristics. He wore modest gray and black and lived in one of the Sluicht apartment towers with his wife and two small children. Gersen, deciding that his business with Hausredel would go best at maximum distance from the school, approached him as he left the tube escalator a hundred yards from his apartment building. "Mr. Hausredel?" "Yes?" Hausredel was somewhat startled. "I wonder if we might talk for a moment or two." Gersen indicated a nearby coffee bar. "Perhaps you would have a cup of coffee with me." "What do you want to talk about?" "A matter concerning a service you can do for me, to your profit" The talk went without difficulty. Hausredel was more flexible than his superior, Dr. Willem Ledinger. On the following day Hausredel met Gersen at the coffee bar, with a large paper envelope. "Here we are. All went well. You have the money?" Gersen passed across an envelope. Hausredel opened the flap, counted, tested one or two of the notes with his fake-meter. "Good. I hope I have helped you as much you have helped me." And shaking Gersen's hand warmly, he departed from the coffee bar. Gersen opened the envelope. He extracted two photographs copied from those in the school archives. For the first time Gersen saw the face of Vogel Filschner. It was a sullen face. Black eyebrows canted down over burning black eyes, the mouth hung in a discontented droop. Vogel had not been a handsome boy. His nose was long and lumpy, his cheeks were puffy with baby fat, his black hair was overlong and even in the photograph seemed unclean. A more striking contradiction to the popular image of Viole Falushe was hard to imagine. But of course this was Vogel Filschner at the age of fifteen, and many changes had undoubtedly taken .place. The other picture was that of Jheral Tinzy. A delightfully pretty girl. Her black hair was glossy, her mouth pursed as if she were restraining a mischievous secret. Gersen studied the picture at length. It afforded him rather more perplexity than illumination, inasmuch as the face in the photograph was almost exactly that of Zan Zu, the girl from Eridu. Thoughtfully Gersen examined the remaining material in the envelope. It was information regarding other members of Vogel Filschner's class with their present whereabouts, when it was known. Gersen returned to the picture of Jheral Tinzy. The coquetry was absent in the face of Zan Zu. Otherwise one was a replica of the other. The resemblance could not be accidental. Gersen rode by tube to Station Hedrick in Ambeules, took the now familiar route up the Boulevard Castel Vivence. The time was early evening; sunset color still lingered along the estuary. The houseboat was dark; no one responded to Gersen's rapping. He tested the button. The door slid open. ersen entered; the lights came aglow. He went to Navarth's telescreen. The code, #. The crafty Navarth! To the side was an index. Gersen looked through the listings, finding nothing of interest. He scrutinized the wall, the underside of the shelf, the top molding of the telescreen, on the chance that Navarth might have noted down a number he did not care to entrust to his index, finding nothing. From the shelf Gersen took down an untidy portfolio, containing ballads, odes, dithyrambs: A Growl for Gruel, The Juices I have Tramped, I Am a Darting Minstrel, They Pass!, Drusilla's Dream, Castles in the Clouds and the Anxieties of Those Who Live Directly Below by Reason of Falling Objects and VPastes. Gersen put the poems aside. He inspected the bedrooms. On the ceiling of that occupied by Navarth was the photograph of a naked woman, twice life-size, arms high and outspread, legs extended and stretched apart. hair afloat, as if she were engaged in a vigorous leaping calisthenic. Navarth's wardrobe contained a fantastic assortment of costumes of every style and color. On a shelf were hats, caps, and helmets. Gersen explored the drawers and cabinets, finding many unexpected objects, but none which seemed to bear upon the matter at hand. There were two other small bedrooms, both finished in a rather spartan manner. One of these was pervaded with faint sweet perfumes, violet, or lilac. In the other was a desk. Here, by a window overlooking the estuary, Navarth evidently created his poetry. The desk was crammed with notes, names, apostrophes and allusions -- a discouraging volume of material which Gersen did not even trouble to explore. He returned to the main saloon and, pouring himself a glass of Navarth's fine moscato, dimmed tire lights, settled into the most comfortable chair. An hour passed. The last traces of afterglow departed the sky; the lights of Dourrai glistened on the waves. A dark shape became visible, a hundred yards offshore: a small boat. It approached the houseboat; there was the rattle of oars being shipped and footsteps on the deck. The door slid back. Zan Zu entered the half-dark saloon. She gasped in fear and sprang back. Gersen caught her arm. "Wait, don't run away. I've been waiting to talk to you." an Zu relaxed, came into the saloon. Gersen turned up the lights. Zan Zu sat warily on the edge of a bench. Tonight she wore black trousers, a dark blue jacket; her hair was tied back with black ribbon; her face was white and wan. Gersen looked at her a moment. "Are you hungry?" She nodded. "Come along then." In a nearby restaurant she ate with an appetite which nullified Gersen's doubts as to the state of her health. "Navarth calls you Zan Zu. Is that your name?" "No." "What is your name?" "I don't know. I don't think I have a name." "What? No name? Everyone has a name." "I don't." "Where do you live? With Navarth?" "Yes. For as long as I remember." "And he has never told you your name?" "He has called me by many names," said Zan Zu somewhat ruefully. "I rather like not having a name. I am anyone I wish to be." "Who would you like most to be?" She flashed Gersen a sardonic glance, gave her shoulders a shrug. Hardly a talkative girl, thought Gersen. She asked a sudden question : "Why are you interested in me?" "For various reasons -- some complicated, some simple. To begin with, you're a pretty girl." Zan Zu considered the statement a moment. "Do you think so indeed?" "Hasn't anyone else told you as much?" "No." Strange, thought Gersen. "I talk to very few men. Or women. Navarth tells me there is danger." "What kind of danger?" "Slavers. I don't want to be a slave." "Understandable. Aren't you afraid of me?" "A little." Gersen signaled a waiter. After consultation he ordered a large piece of cherry torte floating in whipped cream, which was set before Zan Zu from Eridu. "Well, then," said Gersen, "have you been to school?" "Not a great deal." Gersen learned that Navarth had taken her here and there to odd corners of the world: remote villages and islands, gray cities of the north, resorts of Sinkiang, the Sahara Sea, the Levant. There had been an occasional tutor, seasons at somewhat unusual schools, much reading of Navarth's books. "Not a very orthodox education," Gersen remarked. "It suits me well enough." "And Navarth -- what is his relationship to you?" "I don't know. He has always been there. Sometimes he is -- " she hesitated -- "Sometimes he is kind; other times he seems to hate me. I don't understand him. But then, I am not particularly interested. Navarth is Navarth." "He's never mentioned your parents?" "Never." "Haven't you asked him?" "Oh yes. Several times. When he is sober he becomes flamboyant: 'Aphrodite rose from sea foam. Lilith was the sister of an ancient god. Arrenice sprang to life when lightning struck a rose tree.' And I may select a source at my own discretion." Gersen listened, surprised and amused. "When Navarth is drunk, or when he is exalted with poetry he tells me more. But perhaps it is less. He frightens me. He speaks of the 'journey'. I ask 'journey where?' and he won't say. But it must be something terrible... I don't want to go." She fell silent. The conversation, so Gersen" noticed, had not diminished the gusto with which she had attacked the torte. "Has he ever mentioned a man named Viole Falushe?" "Perhaps. I have not listened." "Vogel Filschner?" "No. Who are these men?" "The same man. Using different names. Do you remember, at the Celestial Harmony Cafe, the man who stood by the railing?" Zan Zu looked down into her coffee cup, gave a slow thoughtful nod. "Who was he?" "I don't know. Why do you ask?" "Because you started to go to him." "Yes. I know." "Why? If you don't know him?" The girl twisted the cup back and forth, watching the swirls of black liquid. "It's hard to explain. I knew he was watching me. He wanted me to come. Navarth had brought me there. And you were there. As if everyone wanted me to go to him. As if I were -- something to be sacrificed. I was dizzy. The room was unsteady. Perhaps I had drunk too much wine. But I wanted to have all over with. If this were my fate, I would know... But you wouldn't let me go. I remember this much. And I -- " She stopped and took her hands away from the coffee cup. "Anyway, I know you mean me no harm." Gersen said nothing. Zan Zu asked tentatively, "Do you?" "No. Are you finished?" 'TT'hey returned to the houseboat, which was as they had left it. "Where is Navarth?" Gersen asked. "He prepares for his party. He is tremendously excited. Since you have come all is different." "And after I left the Celestial Harmony Cafe the other night, what happened?" Zan Zu frowned. "There was talk. It seems there were lights in my eyes, orange and green blurs. The man came to the table and stood looking down at me. He spoke to Navarth." "Did you look at him?" "No. I don't think so." "What did he say to Navarth?" Zan Zu shook her head. "There was a sound in my ears, like rushing water, or the roar of the wind. I didn't hear. The man touched my shoulder." "And after that -- what?" Zan Zu grimaced. "I don't remember... I can't remember." "She was drunk!" cried out a voice. Navarth rushed into the saloon. "Carefully drunk! What are you doing aboard my private houseboat?" "I came to learn how you are spending my money." "All is as before. Now depart at once." "Come, come," said Gersen. patiently. "This is a cavalier tone to take to the man who repaired your houseboat." "After first stoving it in? Bah! Has there even been an act to equal it?" "I understand that in your mouth you contrived a few outrages of your own." " 'In my youth'?" sputtered Navarth. "I have contrived outrages all my life!" "What of the party?" "It is to be a poetic episode, an exercise in experential art. I think it best that you do not attend this particular party, as -- " "What? I'm paying for it! If I don't come, give me back my money." Navarth flung himself petulantly into a chair. "I expected you to take this line." "I'm afraid so. Where is the party to be held?" "We meet at the village Kussines, twenty miles to the east. The rendezvous is precisely at the hour of two in the afternoon, in front of the inn. You must wear harlequinade and a domino." "Viole Falushe is to come?" "Indeed, indeed. Have I not made all clear?" "Not altogether. All are to wear dominoes?" "Naturally." "How will I recognize Viole Falushe?" "What a question to ask. How can he hide? Black radiation hangs about him. He exudes a dread sensation." "These qualities may be obvious," said Gersen. "Still -- how else may he be identified?" "You must determine this at the time. At the moment, I do not know myself." XI  t ten minutes before the apI I pointed hour Gersen parked his rented air-car in a meadow on the outskirts of Kussines and alighted. A cloak concealed the harlequinade; he carried the domino in his pocket. The afternoon was soft and sunny, fragrant with the exhalations of autumn. Navarth could hardly have hoped for a finer day, thought Gersen. He checked his garments carefully. The harlequinade offered little scope for concealment, but Gersen had made the best of the situation. Inserted horizontally into his belt was a blade of thin keen glass, the buckle serving as a handle. Under his left arm hung a projac; in his right sleeve was poison. Thus encumbered, Gersen swept his cloak about him and marched into the village: a collection of ancient black iron and meltstone structures on the shore of a small lake. The setting was bucolic and charming, almost medieval. The inn, perhaps the newest structure of the village, was at least four hundred years old. As Gersen approached a young man in gray and black stepped forward. "For the afternoon party, sir?" Gersen nodded and was led to a dock at the edge of the lake where a canopied boat awaited. "Domino, please," said the young man in uniform. Gersen donned the mask, stepped aboard the boat and was conveyed to the opposite shore. It seemed that he was one of the last to arrive. At a semicircular buffet stood perhaps twenty other guests, all selfconscious in their costumes. One who could only be Navarth came forward, divested Gersen of his cloak. "While we wait, taste this vintage; it is supple and light and will amuse you." Gersen took the wine and stepped aside. Twenty men and women. Which was Viole Falushe? If he were present, he was not readily apparent. A slender young woman stood stiffly nearby, holding her goblet as if it contined vinegar. Navarth had allowed Zan Zu to the party after all, thought Gersen. Or dragooned her into coming, to judge her attitude. He counted. Ten men, eleven women. If parity of sexes were to be observed, there still remained at least one man to arrive. Even as Gersen counted, the white-canopied punt drifted into the dock and a man stepped ashore. He was tall and lean. His manner combined indolent ease with a taut wariness. Gersen inspected him carefully. If this were not Viole Falushe, he must be considered the most likely candidate. The man slowly approached the group. Navarth hurried forward with a crouch that was almost servility and took the cloak which the man tossed to him. With the cloak hung on its peg and a goblet of wine in the newcomer's hand, Navarth's ebullience returned. He waved his arms, walked back and forth with long springing strides. "Friends and guests, all are now arrived. A chosen group of nymphs and under-gods, poets and philosophers. Notice, as we stand here in the meadow, our patterns of orange and red, and black and red; we contrive an unconscious pavanne! We are performers, participants and spectators at the same time! The frame within which spontaneity is confined -- the theme, so to speak -- is that which I have ordained; the variations, the intricacies, counterplay and development are our mutual concern. We must be subtle and free, carefully reckless, at all times consonant; our figures must never leave the chord!" Navarth held his goblet up into a shaft of sunlight, drank with a grand flourish, pointed dramatically through the trees. "Follow me!" Fifty yards away was a charabanc with a tasseled yellow canopy, sides enameled in red, orange and green. Benches cushioned in bright orange plush ran along the sides. In the center kneeling marble satyrs supportted a marble slab on which were dozens of bottles of every size, shape and color, all containing the same soft wine. The guests climbed aboard, and the charabanc slid off, silent and easy on its repulsion skids. 'T'hrough a beautiful park drifted the charabanc. Magnificent vistas opened to all sides. The guests gradually discarded restraint; there was conversation and laughter, but most were content to sip the wine and enjoy the autumn scenery. Gersen scrutinized each man in turn. The last man to arrive still seemed the most likely candidate for the identity of Viole Falushe; Gersen thought of him as Possibility No. #. But at least four others were tall, lean, dark, composed : Possibilities No. #, No. #, No. # No. #. The charabanc halted, and the group stepped down into a meadow sprinkled with purple and white asters. Navarth, hopping and skipping like a young goat, led the group under a grove of tall trees. The time was now about three o'clock. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the masses of golden leaves, to play upon a great rug of tan and golden silk with a border of graygreens and blues. Beyond stood a silken pavilion supported by white spiral poles. Spaced around the rug were twenty-two tall peacock-tail chairs. Beside each stood an antique tabouret of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl and cinnabar, with a vermilion bowl of crystalized spice on each. Working by some mysterious rationale Navarth arranged his guests in the splendid chairs. Gersen found himself at one end of the rug with Zan Zu several chairs distant, and the various Possibilities at the far side. From somewhere came music, or more accurately, near-music: a succession of wry quiet chords, sometimes so soft as to be unheard; sometimes so complex as to be equivocal and perplexing, progression, always of a haunting sweetness. Navarth took his own place, and all sat quietly. From the pavilion came ten young girls naked but for golden slippers and yellow roses over their ears. They bore trays on which were goblets of heavy green glass, containing the same delicate wine as before. Navarth remained in his chair; the other guests were content to do likewise. Sun-drenched yellow leaves floated down to the golden rug; an aromatic odor hung in the air. Gersen sipped his wine cautiously; he could not afford to be lulled, soothed. Close at hand was Viole Falushe, a situation for kept the letter of his promise. Where was the "aura of black radiation" Navarth had mentioned? It seemed to hang heaviest around Possibilities No. #, No. # and No. #, but in this regard Gersen was disinclined to trust his parapsychic powers. A tension, an expectancy, began to be felt. Navarth sat crouched in the chair, as if already bemused. The naked girls, dappled by sunlight and leaf-shadows, poured wine, moving slowly, as if walking under water. Navarth lifted his head, as if hearing a voice or a far sound. He spoke in an exultant voice, and the vagrant chords seemed to match themselves to the rhythm of his speech, creating music. "Some here have known emotion in many phases. No one can know every emotion, for these are both infinite and fugitive. Some here are unaware, untouched, unexplored -- and know it not even themselves. See me! I am Navarth, called the mad poet! But is not every poet mad? It is inevitable. His nerves are conductive and transport uncontainable gushes of energy. He fears. How he fears! Fie feels the movement of time; between his fingers it is a warm pulsing, as if he grasped an exposed artery. At a sound -- a distant laugh, a ripple of water, a gust of wind -- he becomes sick and faints -- because never, in all the extent of time can this sound, this ripple, this gust recur. Here is the deafening tragedy of the 'journey' which we all undertake! Would the mad poet want it any differently? Never exulting? Never desperate? Never clasping life against his bare nerves?" Navarth leapt to his feet and danced a jig. "All here are mad poets. If you would eat, the delicacies of the world await. If you would reflect, sit in your chairs and watch the fall of the leaves. Notice how slow is their motion; here time has slowed on our behalf. If you would exalt yourself, this magnificent vintage never cloys nor stupefies. If you would explore erotic proximities, or middle distances, or indistinct horizons -- bowers and dells surround us." His voice descended an octave; the chords became measured and slow. "There can be no light without shade, no sound without silence. Exultation skips along the verge of pain. I am the mad poet, I am Life! Hence, by the inevitable consequences, Death is here as well. But where Life cries out its meanings, Death sits quiet. Look then among the masks!" And Navarth pointed from one silent harlequin to another, around the circle. "Death is here, Death watches Life. It is not witless, aimless Death. It is Death with a snuff-cap, intent on a single candle. So -- do not fear, unless you have cause to fear..." Navarth turned his head. "Listen!" From far away came a merry sound: music. It grew louder and louder still, and into the glade marched four musicians -- one with castanets, one with guitar and two fiddlers -- and they played the most impelling and merry jigs, enough to set the pulses racing. Suddenly they stopped short in their music. The castanet player brought forth a flute, and now the music was a heartbreaking melancholy. And playing in this fashion they moved off through the trees and presently were lost to hearing. The soft indecisive chords went on as before, without beginning or end, as easy and natural as breathing. ersen had become uneasy. Circumstances were moving beyond his control. In his harlequinade, he felt inept. Was this another of Navarth's crafty plays? Were Viole Falushe to stand before him now and announce himself, Gersen could never act. The autumn air was heavy with haze, the wine had made him maudlin. He could never spill blood on the magnificent rug of tawny tan and gold. Nor even on the carpet of golden leaves beyond. Gersen leaned back in his chair, amused and disgusted with himself. Very well then. For the moment he would sit , and reflect. Some of the other guests were stirring. Perhaps Navarth's talk of death had chilled them, for they moved tentatively and carefully. Gersen wondered to whom Navarth had referred, in his talk of death... The girls moved sedately along the line of chairs, pouring wine. As one bent near Gersen he caught the scent of her yellow rose; straightening, she smiled at him and passed on to the next guest. Gersen drank the wine. He leaned back in the chair. Even if he had become detached and passionless, he could yet speculate. Certain of the guests had risen to their feet and, leaving their high-backed chairs, mingled and talked in soft husky voices. Possibility No. I stood brooding. Possibility No. # stared fixedly at Zan Zu. Possibility No. #, like Gersen, sprawled in his chair. Possibilities No. # and No. # were among those talking. Gersen looked toward Navarth. What next? Navarth's intention must extend beyond the instant. What more had he planned? Gersen called to him. Navarth turned aside reluctantlyGersen asked, "Is Viole Falushe here?" "Tish!" exclaimed Navarth. "You are a monomaniac!" "I have been told as much before. Well, is he here?" "I have invited twenty-one guests. Counting myself, twentytwo are present. Viole Falushe is here." "Which is he?" "I don't know." "What? You don't know?" Gersen sat upright, aroused from his lethargy by Navarth's double-dealing. "We must have no misunderstanding, Navarth. from me, agreeing to fulfill certain conditions." "And I have done so," snapped Navarth. "The simple truth is that I do not know in what semblance Viole Falushe currently walks. I knew the boy Vogel Filschner well. Viole Falushe has altered his face and manner. He might be one of three or four. Unless I were to unmask this group, send away those I recognized until one remained, I could not give you Viole Falushe." "Very well. This we shall do." avarth would not submit.L  "My life might well be slid from my body by one route or another. I object to this. I am a mad poet, not a lummox." "Immaterial. This is how we will act. Be so kind as to summon your candidates into the pavilion." "No, no!" creaked Navarth. "It is impossible. There is an easier way. Watch the girl! He will go to her. And then you will know." "A half-dozen might go to her." "Then claim her. Only one man would challenge you." "And if no one challenges?" Navarth held out his arms. "What can you lose?" Both turned to look toward the girl. Gersen said, "What can I lose indeed? What is her relationship to you?" "She is the daughter of an old friend," declared Navarth suavely. "She is, in effect, my ward. I have been at pains to nurture her and bring her nicely to maturity." "And this now accomplished, you offer her here and there to passing strangers?" "The conversation becomes tiresome," said Navarth. "Look. A man approaches the girl!" Gersen swung around. Possibility No. # had approached Zan Zu and was talking in a manner unmistakably ardent. Zan Zu listened politely. As in the Celestial Harmony Cafe Gersen felt a surge of emotion. Lust? Jealousy? Protective instinct? Whatever the nature of the urge, it compelled him to step forward and join the two. "You are enjoying the party?" Gersen asked with factitious good-fellowship. "A wonderful day for such an outing. Navarth is a magnificent host; still he has introduced me to no one. What is your name?" Possibility No. # answered courteously: "Navarth doubtless has good reason for the neglect; best that we do not divulge our identitites." "Sensible," said Gersen. He turned to Zan Zu. "Still, what is your opinion?" "I have no identity!" Possibility No. # suggested : "Why not approach Navarth and inquire his thoughts on the subject?" "I think not. Navarth would become confused. He has propounded a fallacy. He seems to advocate intimate relationships between walking costumes. Is this feasible? I doubt it. Certainly not at the level of intensity Navarth would insist upon." "Quite so, quite so," said Possibility No. #. "Be a good fellow and leave us to ourselves. The young lady and I were enjoying a private discussion." "My apologies for interrupting you. But the young lady and I already had planned to gather flowers from the meadow." "You are mistaken," said Possibility No. #. "When all wear harlequinade, error is easy." "If there has been error, it is for the best, as I prefer this delightful young flower-picker to the last. Be so good as to excuse us." possibility No. # was amiability itself. "Really, my good fellow, your facetiousness has run its course. Surely you must see that you are intruding?" "I think not. In a party of this sort, where experienceis to be clasped to the naked nerves, where Death walks, there is wisdom in flexibility. Notice the woman yonder. She appears loquacious and prepared to discuss every subject in your repertory. Why not join her and chat away your heart's content?" "But it is you she admires," said Possibility No. # brusquely. "Be off with you." Gersen turned to Zan Zu. "Apparently you must make the choice. Conversation or wildflowers?" Zan Z u hesitated, looking from one to the other. Possibility No. # fixed her with a gaze of burning intensity. "Choose -- if there indeed is a choice -- between this lout and myself. Choose -- but choose carefully." Zan Zu demurely turned to Gersen. "Let us pick flowers." Possibility No. # stared, looked away toward Navarth as if to call upon him to intercede, then thought better of it and walked away. Zan Zu asked, "Are you really anxious to pick wild flowers?" "You know who I am?" "Of course." "I don't care to pick wild flowers, unless you do." "Oh... What then do you want of me?" Gersen found the question hard to answer. "I do not know myself." Zan Zu took his arm. "Let us go to look for flowers, and perhaps we will find out." Gersen looked around the group. Possibility No. # watched from a distance. Possibilities No. I and No. # appeared to pay them no heed. He started off through the trees, Zan Zu leaning on his arm. Gersen put his arm around her waist; she sighed. Possibility No. # gave a quick jerk of the shoulders and, by this motion, seemed to cast off restraint. He came after Gersen with soft portentous strides. In his hand he carried a small weapon. Behind, so Gersen saw in near-instantaneous glimpse, stood Navarth, looking after, his posture a curious superimposition of shame on glee. ersen pushed Zan Zu to the ground, ducked behind a tree. Possibility No. # halted. He turned toward Zan Zu and, to Gersen's shocked amazement, pointed his weapon. Gersen leapt from behind the tree, struck the man's arm; the weapon threw a sear of energy into the ground. The two confronted each other, eyes blazing. There was a shrill blast of whistle and from the forest come the thud of heavy feet. Gendarmes swarmed forth, a dozen or more, urged by a lieutenant in a golden helmet and a furious old man in brocaded gray. Navarth stepped forward haughtily. "What is the meaning of this intrusion?" The old man, who was short and overweight, bounded forward to shake his fist. "What the devil are you up to, trespassing upon my private property? You are a jackanapes! And these naked girls -- an absolute scandal!" In a stem voice Navarth demanded of the lieutenant: "Who is this old rogue? What right does he have to intrude upon a private party?" Now the old man, stepping forward, discerned the rug, and went pale. "Behold!" he wispered huskily. "My priceless silk Sikkim rug! Spread out for these rascals to cavort upon. And my chairs, oh my precious Bahadurs! What else have they stolen?" "This is balderdash!" stormed Navarth. "I have rented these premises and hired the furniture. The owner is Baron Caspar Heaulmes, who is at a sanitarium for his health." "I am Baron Caspar Heaulmes!" cried the old man. "I do not know your name, sir, behind that ridiculous mask, but I perceive you to be a blackguard! Lieutenant, do your duty. Take them all away. I insist on the fullest investigation!" Navarth threw his hands into the air and argued the case from a dozen viewpoints, but the lieutenant was inexorable. "I fear I must take all into custody. Baron Heaulmes is making a formal complaint." Gersen, standing to the side, had been watching with great interest, simultaneously noting the movements of Possibilities No. #, No. #, No. #. Whichever was Viole Falushe -- and it would seem to be Possibility No. # -- he would be sweating heavily at this moment. Once he were arrested and taken into court, his identity must become known. Possibility No. I stood dour and dismal; Possibility No. # was carefully assessing the situation, looking this way and that; Possibility No. # seemed unconcerned, even amused. The lieutenant by this time had seized Navarth, charging him with trespass, theft, offenses against public morality and simple assault -- the last arising from his attempt to kick Baron Heaulmes. The remaining gendarmes now commenced to herd the guests toward a pair of carcel wagons which had descended to the meadow. Possibility No. # loitered at the edge of the group and, taking advantage of Navarth's obstreperous behavior, slipped behind a tree. Gersen raised up a shout; a pair of gendarmes looked around, bawled peremptory orders and marched forward to conduct Possibility No. # to the carcelwagons. Possibility No. # jumped back among the trees. When the gendarmes ran in pursuit there came a dire flash of radiation; once, twice, and two men lay dead. Possibility No. # sprinted away through the forest and was lost to view. Gersen gave chase, but halted after a hundred yards, fearing ambush. Shedding mask, he ran to the semi-circular buffet beside the pond, where he found and donned his cloak. The punt ferried him across the lake to the outskirts of Kussines. Five minutes later he reached his air-car and took it aloft. He hovered several minutes, searching the air-space. If Possibility No. # had arrived by air-car, be must likewise be taking himself aloft. And also, thought Gersen, patrol craft would be converging on the scene of the murders. One man in harlequinade looked much like another; the sooner he was gone the better. And Gersen flew full speed back toward Rolingshaven. n October # Navarth, having  paid exemplary damages of Heaulmes, was discharged from the court, which likewise dismissed charges against Navarth's guests. Gersen met Navarth on the mall in front of the Justice Courts. Navarth at first made as if he would pass without deigning to recognize Gersen, but Gersen finally was able to divert him to the table of a nearby cafe. "Justice, bah!" Navarth made a grimace toward the courts. "Think of it! Money I must pay that vindictive and sanctimonious unmentionable! He should have indemnified me! Did he not disrupt the party? What did he hope to gain, running forth from the forest like that?" Navarth paused to moisten his throat with the beer Gersen had ordered. "It is enough to turn a man sour." He set the mug down with a thump and turned a yellow glance toward Gersen. "What do you want of me now? Another exercise in bathos? I warn you, I will not be so malleable a second time." Gersen displayed the newspaper articles dealing with the event. Navarth refused to look at them. "A wretched lot of nonsense, sheer scurrility. You journalists are all alike." "I notice that yesterday a certain Ian Kelly was murdered." "Yes, poor Kelly. Did you come to the arraignment?" "No." "Then you missed your chance, because among the crowd was Viole Falushe. He is the most sensitive of men and cannot forget an injury. Ian Kelly was unlucky enough to resemble you in size and manner." Navarth shook his head ruefully. "Ah, that Vogel! He detests frustration as a bee sting." "Do the police know the murderer is Viole Falushe?" "I told them he was a man I met in a bar. What else could I say?" Gersen had no reply to make. He indicated the article once more. "Twenty names are listed. Which refers to Zan Zu?" Navarth made a contemptuous gesture toward the article. "Select as you like. One is as accurate as the next." "One of these names must refer to her," said Gersen. "Which?" "How should I know what name she chooses to supply the police? I believe I will drink more beer. The argument has parched my throat." "I see here a 'Drusilla Wayles, age #'. Is this she?" "Quite possibly, possibly indeed." "And this is her name?" "Merciful Kalizbah! Must she own a name? A name is a weight! A chain to a set of uncontrolled circumstances. To own no name is to own freedom! Are you so stolid then that you cannot imagine a person without a name? She is what one chooses to call her." "Strange," said Gersen. "She exactly resembles the Jheral Tinzy of thirty years ago." Navarth jerked back in his chair. "How do you know this?" "I have not been idle. For example, I have produced this." Gersen produced a dummy Cosmopolis. From the cover peered the face of young Vogel Filschner, superimposed upon the outline of a tall ominous gray figVogel Filschner as I knew him -- Navarth. #VT avarth seized the dummy, ' read the article aghast. He raised his hands to his head. "He'll kill us all! He'll drown us in dog vomit! He'll grow trees in our ears!" "The article seems balanced and judicious," said Gersen. "Certainly he can take no offense at facts!" Navarth read further and went into a new paroxysm of dismay. "You have signed my name! I never wrote all that!" "It's all true." "The more so! When is this to be published?" "In a week or two." "Impossible. I forbid it." "In that case, return me the money I lent you, that you might finance your party." " 'Lent'?" Navarth was shocked anew. "That was no loan! You paid me, you hired me to produce a party, at which Viole Falushe would be present." "You did neither. Baron Heaulmes, it is true, truncated your party, but this is no affair of mine. And where was Viole Falushe? You can point to the murderer, but this means nothing to me. Please return the money." "I cannot! I have spent money like water! And Baron Heaulmes demanded his pound of flesh." "Well, return to me the nine left." "What? I have no such sum on hand!" "Perhaps we can set aside a portion as your payment for this article, but -- " "No, no! The article must not be published!" "Best that we have a complete understanding," said Gersen. "You have not told me all." "For which I am grateful. You have published the rest." Navarth kneaded his forehead. "These have been terrible days. Have you no pity for poor old Navarth?" Gersen laughed. "You plotted to get me killed. You knew that Viole Falushe would attempt to possess Drusilla Wayles, or Zan Zu, whatever her name. You knew that I would not allow it. Ian Kelly paid his life in my place." "No, no, nothing like that! I hoped you would kill Viole Falushe!" "You're a devious villain. What of Drusilla, how was she to fare? Did you consider her?" "I consider nothing," said Navarth huskily. "I cannot allow myself to ponder. If I lifted the partition between my two brains for so much as an instant..." "Tell me what you know." T T #"ith extreme reluctance Na ' varth obeyed. "I must go back to Vogel Filschner once more. When he kidnapped the choral society, Jheral Tinzy escaped. That you know. But she was the cause of the crime, and the parents of the other girls blamed her. It became very hard, very rough. There were threats, names called in public..." Navarth had come under similar attack. One day he proposed to Jheral Tinzy that they run away together. Jheral, bitter and disillusioned, was in a mood for anything. They went to Corfu where they spent three years, and every day Navarth loved Jheral Tinzy more ardently than the day previously. One terrible day Vogel Filschner appeared at the door of their little villa. He was no longer the old Vogel, though his appearance was much the same. He stood more erect, but the most striking change was his new per-, sonality. He had become hard, sure, firm. His eyes were bright, his voice assured. Evil-doing clearly was good for him. Vogel made a great show of amity to Navarth. "Past is past. Jheral Tinzy? I want nothing from her. She has given herself to you; she is sullied. I am fastidious in this respect; I take no woman fresh from another man's use. Be assured, she never will know an iota of my love... She should have waited. Yes. She should have waited, because she might have known I would return. But now my love for Jheral Tinzy is gone." Navarth was somewhat reassured. He brought out a bottle; they sat in the garden, ate oranges, drank ouzo. Navarth became very drunk and fell asleep. When he awoke Vogel Filschner was gone. Jheral Tinzy was gone as well. A day later Vogel Filschner reappeared. Navarth was in a frenzy. "Where is she? What have you done with her?" "She is well and safe." "What of your promise? You told me you had no more love for her!" "This is true. The promise shall be kept. Jheral will never know my love, nor the love of any other man. Do you underestimate my emotion, poet? Love can turn to hate in a flicker of time. Jheral will serve, and serve well. She would not gratify my love, but she will appease my hate." Navarth threw himself at Vogel Filschner, but Vogel vaulted over the wall, and Navarth was left alone. 'VTine years later Viole Falushe  made contact with Navarth by telescreen, but now his face was blanked. Navarth heard only his voice. Navarth asked for the return of Jheral Tinzy, and Viole Falushe agreed. Two days later a child three years old was brought to Navarth. Viole Falushe called again. "I have done as I promised. You have Jheral Tinzy again." "Is it her daughter?" "It is Jheral Tinzy, this is all you need know. I put her into your charge. Keep her, nurture her, guard her, see that she remains undefiled -- for one day I will return for her." The screen went dead. Navarth turned to inspect the girl. Even now he could see her resemblance to Jheral. What to do? Navarth considered the child with mingled emotion. He could regard her neither as a daughter nor as a manifestation of his former love. He felt antagonism. There would always be a bittersweet ambiguity in their relationship, for Navarth was unable to love impersonally. The object of his love must relate to himself. Navarth exemplified his contradicting impulses in his rearing of the girl. He fed her and provided shelter, both of the most casual and desultory sort. Otherwise the girl was independent. She became moody and uncommunicative; she made no friends and presently gave up asking questions. As she matured her resemblance to Jheral Tinzy became ever more striking. She was Jheral Tinzy indeed, and her presence tormented Navarth with memories of the past. A dozen years passed, but Viole Falushe had made no appearance. Still Navarth never dared hope that Viole Falushe had forgotten; indeed he became ever more depressed with the certainty that Viole Falushe would presently arrive and take the girl away. He tried from time to time to acquaint the girl with the danger represented by Viole Falushe, but his approach varied with his mood, and he was never sure that she understood him. He attempted to seclude her, a task rendered difficult by the girl's unpredictable habits, and he took her off to remote corners of the Earth. When the girl was sixteen, they lived in Edmonton, Canads, the goal of hordes of pilgrims who came to gaze upon the Sacred Shin. Navarth reasoned that there, among the interminable festivals, processions and sacerdotal rites, they might well live unnoticed. But Navarth was wrong. Viole Falushe by some means knew his whereabouts! One night the telescreen lit up to show a tall figure standing against a flashing blue background which obscured his features. Navarth nevertheless recognized Viole Falushe and despondently called out "Show" to the telescreen. "Well, Navarth," said Viole Falushe. "What do you do in the Holy City? Have you become a devout Kalziban that you live almost in the shadow of the Shin?" "I study," muttered Navarth. "I derive a sense of purpose from the pervasive zeal." "And what of the girl? I refer to 'Jheral'. She is well, I trust?" "She was in fair condition last evening. I haven't seen her since." Viole Falushe stared fixedly at Navarth, with only the glitter of his eyes giving dimension to his silhouette. "Is she pure?" "How would I know?" demanded Navarth crossly. "I can't watch her day and night. In any event, what affair is it of yours?" If anything, the intensity of Viole Falushe's glance increased. "It is my affair in all respects, to such a degree as you would never imagine!" (tXT'our language is extrava gant," sniffed Navarth. "I can hardly believe you to be serious." Viole Falushe laughed softly. "Some day you will visit the Palace of Love, old Navarth. Some day you will be my guest." "Not I!" declared Navarth. "I am a new Antaeus; never may I detach my toe from Earth. If necessary I will fall flat on my face and cling with both hands!" "Well, then, summon the girl. Call 'Jheral' before the screen so that I may see her." An odd note had entered Viole Falushe's voice: sweetness and tenderness burdened with an almost insupportable rage. "How can I call her when I don't know her whereabouts? She may be prowling the streets, or canoeing on the lake, or lying in someone's bed -- " A hoarse sound interrupted Navarth. But Viole Falushe's voice was mild. "Never say that, old Navarth. She was given into your care; I intended that you give her proper instruction. Have you done so? I suspect not." "The best instruction is living itself," declared Navarth bluffly. "I am no pedant, as you well know." There was a moment's silence. Then Viole Falushe said: "Do you know why I put the girl in your care?" "My own motivations confuse me," said Navarth. "How should I know yours?" "I will tell you. Because you know me well. You know what I require without explicit instructions." Navarth blinked. "I had not considered the matter in this light." "Then, old Navarth, you are remiss." "I have heard this accusation a hundred times." "But now you know what I expect. I hope you will repair your neglect." r y'he screen went dead. Navarth in a fury of frustration and resentment went striding out along the Great Nave, that avenue extending from the Plaza of Beatitudes to the Temple of the Shin. But the press of pilgrims irked him, and he took refuge in a teahouse, where he drank four cups of strong tea before he was sufficiently composed to think. Specifically, Navarth wondered, what did Viole Falushe expect? He had a romantic interest in the girl, he wanted her inculcated, preconditioned, receptive. Navarth could not restrain a wild cackle of mirth, which aroused surprised glances from the other patrons of the teahouse, most of them blackclad pilgrims. Viole Falushe wanted him to make the girl conscious of the great honor which awaited her; he wanted her preconditioned, predisposed, already fervent. The pilgrims, fresh from ceremonies at the temple, were regarding him with suspicion. Navnrth jumped to his feet, departed the tearoom. There was no further reason to remain in Edmonton. As soon as possible he took the girl back to Rolingshaven. Once or twice he mentioned Viole Falushe to the girl, in a tone of dejection, for now he had come to think of the girl as doomed; to such effect that on one occasion the girl ran away. Fortuitously the event occurred immediately before one of Viole Falushe's visits to Earth. When he telephoned Navarth demanding to see the girl, Navarth was forced to blurt forth the truth. Viole Falushe spoke in a mild voice: "Best that she be found, Navarth." But Navarth made no attempt to find the girl until he was sure Viole Falushe had departed from Earth. Here Gersen interposed a question: "Could you be sure?" Navarth attempted to evade the question but finally admitted that Viole Falushe, during his visits to Earth, could be telephoned at a particular code number. "Then you could call him now?" "Yes, yes, of course," snapped Navarth. "If I wanted to do so, which I do not." He continued his story, but now be became cautious, using many flamboyant gestures, shifting his yellow glance all around with only an occasional flicker for Gersen. It seemed that when Gersen appeared on the scene, Navarth sensed that here might be a weapon to be used against Viole Falushe (an aspect to the account that Navarth left unspoken). With the utmost caution, committing no overt acts, always leaving himself lines of retreat, Navarth tried to arrange for the discomfiture or destruction of Viole Falushe. Events however superseded his plans. "And now," quavered Navarth, pointing a long finger at the Cosmopolis dummy, "this!" "You believe Viole Falushe would react unfavorably to the article?" "Indeed, indeed! He is the least forgiving of men; it is the key to his soul!" "Perhaps then we had best discuss the article with Viole Falushe himself." "What benefit can derive from that? He will merely have more time to generate a suitable response." z' " ersen pondered. "Well, then, it seems that we had best publish the article in its present form." "No, no!" cried Navarth. "Have I not made all clear? He would punish us in equivalence to his annoyance, and he uses a subjective judgment! This article would offend him to an unprecedented fury; he hates his childhood, he only comes to Ambeules to gloat and work mischief on his old enemies. Do you know what happened to Rudolph Radgo, who jeered at Vogel Filschner's pimples? Rudolph Radgo's face is a garden of carbuncles, through Sarkoy poison. There was Maria, who moved her seat because Vogel's rheums and snivelings upset her. Maria now lacks all trace of a nose. Twice she has had grafts, twice she has suffered the loss of her new member. She is not to have a nose for all her life. So you see, it is not wise to offend Viole Falushe!" Navarth craned his neck. "What are you wiiting?" "This is interesting new material; I am incorporating it into the article." Navarth threw his hands up so wildly that his chair almost overturned. "Have you no prudence?" "Perhaps if we discussed the article with Viole Falushe he might authorize its publication." "It's you who are mad, not I!" "We can only try." "Very well," croaked Navarth. "I have no choice. But I warn you, I disavow all connection with the article!" "As you wish. Shall we make our call here, or at the houseboat?" "At the houseboat." They left the plaza, rode the tube to Ambeules, and were conveyed to the Fitlingasse by surface wagon. The houseboat floated serene and quiet on the estuary. "Where is the girl?" asked Gersen. "Zan Zu, Drusilla, whatever her name?" Navarth refused to answer. Gersen's question, so he implied, was like asking the color of the wind. He hopped on down the ladder, jumped aboard the boat and, with a desperate, tragic gesture, flung wide the door. He stalked to the telescreen, pushed buttons, spoke a muffled activant word. The presentation sprang to life: a single frail lavender flower. Navarth turned. "He is available. When he's off Earth the pattern is blue." They waited. From the telescreen came a wisp of tender melody, then after a moment or two a voice: "Ah, Navarth, my ancient companion. With a friend?" "Yes, an urgent matter. This is Mr. Henry Lucas, representing Cosmopolis magazine." "A journal with an honored tradition! But have we not met? There is about you a disturbing familiarity." "I was on Sarkovy recently," said Gersen. "As I recall, your name was in the air." "A miasmic planet, Sarkovy. Nevertheless, one with a certain macabre beauty." Navarth spoke. "I have had a misunderstanding with Mr. Lucas, and I wish specifically to disavow responsibility for his actions." "My dear Navarth, you alarm me! Mr. Lucas is surely a man of courtesy." "You shall see." "As Navarth has mentioned, I work for Cosmopolis," said Gersen. "In fact, I am a senior official. One of our writers prepared a rather sensational article. I suspect the writer of overenthusiasm and therefore checked with Navarth, who reinforced my doubts. It seems that the writer came upon Navarth in an exalted mood and, on the basis of a casual word, went to enormous lengths of research and produced the article." "Ah yes, the article. You have it with you?" Gersen displayed the dummy. "It is included here. I insisted on checking the facts, apparently to good avail. Navarth insists that our writertook the most extreme liberties. He feels that in all fairness you should be allowed to authenticate the afticle before publication." "Sound notion, Navarth! Well, then, allow me to examine this alarming effusion. I'm sure it can't be all that grim." XV ersen slipped the magazine into the transcription rack. Viole Falushe read. From time to time he made sudden apparently involuntary noises: hisses between the teeth, small throaty sounds. "Turn the page, please." His voice was light and mild. Presently he said: "Yes, I have finished." There was a moment's silence, then he spoke again, and now the voice, superficially jocular, rang with a tinny overtone. "Navarth, you have been singularly reckless, even for an exhilarated poet." "Bah," mutter Navarth. "Did I not disassociate myself from this entire farrago?" "Not completely. I notice matters which are magnified and distorted in a manner possible only to a mad poet. You have been indiscreet." Navarth said bravely, "Candoris never indiscreet. Truth, which is to say, the reflection of life, is beautiful." "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," said Viole Falushe. "I for one find little beauty in this abusive article. Mr. Lucas is quite correct in seeking my reaction. The article may not be published." For some fantastic reason Navarth saw fit to grumble. "What good is notoriety if your friends are unable to profit from it?" "Exploitation of notoreity and humiliation of your friends are not identical," spoke the mild voice. "Can you imagine my distress if this article appeared and exposed me to ridicule? I would be forced to demand amends from all concerned, which is only simple justice. Since by an act of yours, my feelings are injured, then by other acts you must atone until my feelings are whole again. It is not enough to assert that I am over-sensitive. If you hurt me, then you must assuage the hurt, no matter how disproportionate the effort." "Truth reflects the cosmos," argued the mad poet. "To expunge truth, one must destroy the cosmos. This is the disproportionate act!" "Aha!" declared Viole Falushe. "But the article is not necessarily truth! It is a point of view, an image or two snatched out of context. I, the person most intimately concerned, denounce the point of view as a flagrant distortion." "I would like to make a suggestion," said Gersen. "Why not allow Cosmopolin to present the real facts; or that is to say, the facts from your point of view? No doubt you have a statement to make to the folk of the Oikumene, who are fascinated by your exploits, whether or not they approve of them." ' Falushe. "Such an article would seem self-inflation or worse, a rather spurious apologia. Basically I am a modest man." "But are you not tn artist as well?" "Certainly. On the truest and noblest scale. Artists before me have conveyed their assertions by abstract symbology; the spectators or audience has always been passive. I use a more poignant symbology, essentially abstract but palpable, visible and audible -- in short, a symbology of events and environments. There are no spectators, no audience, no passivity. There are only participants. They encounter experience at its keenest. No man has dared conceive on so vast a scope before!" Here Viole Falushe gave a slow strange chuckle. "With the exception, perhaps of my megalomaniac contemporary Lens Larque, though his concepts are less fluid than my own. But I dare to say it: I am perhaps the supreme artist of history. My subject is Life. My medium is Experience. My tools are Pleasure, Passion, Pungency, Pain. I arrange the total environment, in order to suffuse the total entity. This of course is the rationale of my estate, popularly known as 'the Palace of Love'." Gersen nodded sagely. "Precisely what the folk of the Oikumene are anxious to learn! Rather than publish a vulgar expose of this sort -- " Gersen tapped the dummy with the back of his hand -- Cosmopolis would like you to explain your thesis. We want photographs, charts, odor swatches, sound impressions, portraits. Above all, we want your expert analysis." "Possible, possible." "Good. To this end let us meet together. Name a time and a place and I will be there." "The place? Where else? The Palace of Love. Each year I welcome a group of guests. You shall be in the current contingent, and mad old Navarth as well." "Not I!" protested Navarth. "My feet have never yet lost contact with Earth. I do not care to risk the clarity of my vision." Gersen also demurred. "The invitation, though tempting, is not particularly convenient. I would prefer to meet you tonight, here on Earth." "Impossible. On Earth I have enemies, on Earth I am a shadow. No man can point and say, 'There stands Viole Falushe.' Not even my dear friend Navarth, from whom I have learned much of value. A lovely party, that, Navarth! Magnificent, worthy of a mad poet. However, I am disappointed in the girl I gave you to nurture, and I am disappointed in you. You have exercised neither the tact, the imagination, nor the creative direction for which I had hoped. Consider the girl, in the light of what she is and what she might be! I had expected a new Jheral Tinzy: gay and grave, sweet as honey, tart as lime, with a brain full of stars, ardent yet innocent. What do I find? A wanton, a hoyden, a sour-faced ragamuffin, completely irresponsible and undiscerning. Imagine! In preference to me, she chose a certain Ian Kelly, an insolent, unworthy person, far better dead. I find the situation incomprehensible. The girl clearly has not been well trained. Surely she knows of me and my interest in her?" "Yes," said Navarth mulishly. "I have pronounced your name." "Well, I am not quite satisfied, and I am sending her elsewhere, for corrective training by less gifted but more disciplined tutors. I think it likely that she will join us at the Palace of Love... Ah, Navarth? You spoke?" "Yes," said Navarth in a dull voice. "I have decided to take advantage myself of your invitation. I will visit your Palace of Love." "All very well for you artists," said Gersen hurriedly. "But I am a busy man. Perhaps a brief conference here on Earth -- " "But I have already left Earth," said Viole Falushe in a voice of gentle reproach. "I hang here in orbit only until I hear that my plans for the young minx have been implemented. So you must come to the Palace of Love." The violet flower flashed green, faded and shifted to a delicate pale blue. The connection had been broken. T avarth sat sprawled in his ' chair a long two minutes, head askew, chin on his chest. Gersen stood looking out the window, sensible of a sudden new hollowness. Navarth lurched to his feet, went out on the front deck. Gersen followed. The sun was setting into the estuary; the tiled roofs of Dourrai glowed bronze; the rotting black wharves and docks stood forth in queer shapes and angles. All was invested with an unreal melancholy. Gersen presently asked, "Da you know how to reach the Palace of Love?" "No. He will inform us. He has a mind like a filing cabinet; no detail evades him." Navarth swung his arms indecisively and then went inside, to return with a tall, slender blackgreen bottle and two goblets. He broke off the seal and poured. "Drink, Henry Lucas, whatever your name, whatever your trade. Within this bottle is the wisdom of the ages, tincture of Earth-gold. Nowhere is tipple to equal this; it is unique to old Earth. Mad old Earth, like mad old Navarth, yields it best in its serene maturity. Drink of this precious elixir, Henry Lucas, and count yourself fortunate. Normally it is reserved for mad poets, tragic pierrots, black angels, heroes about to die..." "Cannot I be counted among these?" muttered Gersen. As was his habit Navarth raised the goblet into the sunlight, of which only a few smoky orange rays remained. He tossed half a cupful into his mouth, stared out across the water. "I leave Earth. The withered leaf is lifted by the wind. Look, look, look!" In sudden excitement he pointed to the somber sun-trail along the estuary. "The road ahead, the way we must go!" Gersen sipped the liquor, which seemed to explode into a spray of multicolored lights. "There is no doubt but what he has taken the girl?" Navarth's mouth twisted awry. "I have no doubt as to this. He will punish her, hissing like a serpent. She is Jheral Tinzy anc once again she has rebuffed him... So once again she will return to her infancy." "You are sure she is Jheral Tinzy? Not someone who resembles her closely?" "She is Jheral Tinzy. There are significant differences, it is true. Jheral was frivolous and a trifle cruel; this one is somber, pensive and never thinks of cruelty. But she is Jheral Tinzy." They set, each occupied with his own thoughts. Dusk fell across the water; lights commenced to shine from the far slopes. A uniformed messenger alighted from his air-car, descended the ladder. He called from the landing: "A delivery for 'the poet Navarth.' " Navarth lurched to the gangplank. "I am he." "Thumbprint here, please." Navarth returned with a long blue envelope. Slowly he withdrew the enclosure. At the top was the lavender flower of the screen presentation-. The message read: ' Go Beyond to Sirneste Cluster. in Aquarius Sector. Deep within the cluster hangs the yellow sun Miel. The fifth planet is Sogdian, upon which, at the south of the hour-glass continent, you will discern the city Atar. In one month's time go to Rubdan Ulshaziz at his agency and say: "I am guest to the Margrave." ' ' by fatalism, Navarth boarded Gersen's Distis Pharaon. Standing in the saloon, looking right and left, he spoke in a tragic voice: "So at last it has happened! Poor old Navarth, pried away from his source of strength! See him now -- a huddle, a sack of tired bones. Navarth! You failed to discriminate in your company! You befriended wa:  and criminals and journalists; for your tolerance you are to be wafted away into space." "Compose yourself," said Gersen. "It's not all that bad." As the Pharaon lifted from Earth Navarth gave a hollow groan, as if a spike were being driven into his foot. "Look out the port," suggested Gersen. "See old Earth as you have never seen it before." Navarth inspected the great blue and white globe and reluctantly agreed that the vista was of majestic dimension. "Now Earth recedes," said Gersen. "We point ourselves toward Aquarius, we engage the intersplit. Suddenly we are insulated from the universe." Navarth pulled at his long chin. "Strange," he admitted. "Strange that this shell can convey us so far so fast. Somewhere there is mystery. It impels one to theosophy: to the worship of a space-god, or a god of light." "Theory dissolves the mystery, though it lays bare a cryptic new stratum. Quite likely there is an endless set of these layers, mystery below mystery. Space is foam, matter particles are nodes and condensations. The foam fluxes, at varying rates. The average activity of these minuscles fluxes is Time." Navarth cautiously moved across the ship. "It is all very interesting. Had I followed an early bent, I might have been a great scientist." The voyage proceeded. Navarth was a rather trying companion, ebullient one moment, morose the next. At one time he simultaneously became afflicted with claustrophobia and agoraphobia and lay on a settee with his feet bare and a cloth pulled over his head. On other occasions he sat by the port watching the stars pass, crowing with amazement and glee. Another time he became interested in the working of the intersplit, and Gersen explained it as well as he could: "Space-foam is whorled into a spindle. The pointed ends crack and split the foam, which has no inertia. The ship, inside the whorl, is insulated from the effects of the universe; the slightest force propels it at an unthinkable rate. Light curls through the whorl, so we have the illusion of seeing the passing universe." "Hmm," mused Navarth. "How small can the units be made?" Gersen knew no definite answer. "Quite compact, I suppose." "Think! If you carried one on your back you would become invisible!" each breath." "Unless a person anchored himself. Why isn't this done?" "The intersplit would break the connection; no anchor would hold." VTavarth argued the point at ' length and lamented his previous ignorance. "Had I known previously of this marvelous device, I might have contrived a useful new machine!" "The intersplit has been known for a long time." "But not to me!" And Navarth went off to brood. Through the hither stars of Aquarius flew the Pharaon. The Pale, that invisible barrier theoretically separating order from chaos, fell behind. Ahead glowed Simeste Cluster, two hundred stars like a swarm of bright bees, controlling planets of every size and description. Gersen located Miel with some difficulty, and presently the fifth planet Sogdian hung below, of Earth-size and atmospheric type, like most of the settled planets. The climate appeared temperate; the polar ice was of small extent; the equatorial zone showed expanses of desert and jungle. The hour-glass continent was evident at once, and the macroscope located the city of Atar. Gersen sent down a request for landing clearance. It received no acknowledgment, which Gersen. took as a sign that landing formalities were unknown. He settled towards the planet, and Atar spread below: a small pink and white city surrounding an inlet of the ocean. The space port was operated in the manner standard at all the outer worlds : as soonas Gersen had landed, two port officials approached, exacted a fee and departed. There were no deweaselers, a sign that the world was not a haven for pirates, raiders and slavers. No public conveyance was available, so Gersen and Navarth walked a half-mile to the town. The people of Atar, darkskinned folk, with hair dyed orange, wearing white pantaloons and wide complicated white turbans, regarded them with great curiosity. They spoke an incomprehensible language, but Gersen by dint of repeating, "Rubdan Ulshaziz? Rubdan Ulshaziz?" presently learned the whereabouts of the man he sought. Rubdan Ulshaziz operated an import and export agency near the ocean. He was a bland, dark-skinned man dressed like the others in loose pantaloons and turban. "Gentlemen, I welcome you. Will you drink punch?" He poured out tiny cuplets of thick cold fruit syrup. "Thank you," said Gersen. "We are guests of the Margrave and were instructed to come to you." tCvf course, of course!" Rubdan Ulshaziz bowed. "You will now be conveyed to the planet where the Margrave has his little estate." Rubdan Ulshaziz favored them with a lewd wink. "Excuse me a little moment; I will instruct the person who is to conduct you." He disappeared behind a portiere, presently to return with a dourseeming man with close-set eyes who puffed nervous clouds of smoke from an acrid cheroot. Rubdan Ulshaziz said, "This is Zog, who will escort you to Rosja." Zog blinked, coughed, spat a shred of tobacco to the floor. "He speaks only the language of Atar," continued Rubdan Ulshaziz. "He will not be able to offer a description of your destination. Are you ready?" "I need equipment from my spaceboat," said Gersen. "And the spaceboat itself, is it safe?" "As safe as if it were a tree. I will go bond on this. If you do not find all correct upon your return, seek out Rubdal Ulshaziz and demand an accounting. But what do you wish from your ship? The Margrave furnishes everything, even to new garments." "I need my recorder," said Gersen. "I plan to take photographs." Rubdal Ulshaziz made a suave gesture. "The Margrave supplies all equipment of this sort, the most modern cominbations. He wants his guests to arrive unburdened by possessions, though he is indifferent to their psychic baggage." "In other words," said Gersen, "we are not to carry any personal belongings with us?" "None whatever. The Margrave supplies everything. His hospitality is all-inclusive. You have locked, sealed and coded your spaceship? Good! Then from this moment forward you are a guest of the Margrave. If yiu will occompany Fendi Zog... " He signaled Zog with a peremptory twist of the hand; Zog inclined his head; Gersen and Navarth followed him to an open area behind the warehouse. Here was an air-car of a design unfamiliar to Gersen and, so it seemed, to Zog as well. Sitting at the controls, Zog tested first one operator then another, squinting at the rather haphazard arrangement of knobs, grips and voice sensors. Finally, as if tiring of the uncertainty, he pushed at a cluster of finger-flicks. The air-car jerked aloft, darted across the tree-tops, with Zog crouched at the controls and Navarth calling out in wrath. Zog finally took command of the air-car; they flew twenty miles south across the cultivated plots and stock-pens surrounding Atar, to a field on which rested a late-model Baumur Andromeda. Once again Zog betrayed signs of uncertainty. The air-car swooped, bucked, wallowed, finally sank to rest; Navarth and Gersen alighted with alacrity. Zog signaled them toward the Andromeda; they climbed aboard, and the port closed behind them. Through a transparent panel in the partition separating saloon from the forward compartment, they saw Zog settling himself at the controls. Navarth called out an instant protest; Zoz squinted back through the panel, bared yellow teeth in what might have been meant as a smile of reassurance and drew a curtain. The magnetic lock clicked shut on the intervening door. Navarth sank back in dismay. "Life is never so sweet until it becomes a hazard. What a sour trick for Vogel to play on his old preceptor!" Gersen indicated the pleated burlap screen which covered the ports. "He also wants to preserve his mystery." Navarth shook his head in bewilderment. "What use is knowledge to minds benumbed by fright? Why do we wait? Does Zog consult the Operator's Manual?" "T'he Andromeda lurched and ' rose at an, alarming rate, almost hurlingGersen and Na- varth to the floor, and Gersen grinned to hear Navarth's roar of protest. The sun Miel, as it could be glimpsed through the burlap, swung right and left, then rolled down and out of sight below the hull. Off through the cluster flew the Andromeda, and it seemed as if Zog changed course several times, whether from inaccuracy, poor spacemanship or a desire to confuse his passengers. Two hours passed. A yellowwhite sun bulked large behind the screened ports. Below hung a planet the configuration of which could not be discerned by reason of the curtain. With an impatient ejaculation, Navarth went to pull the curtain aside. A crackle of blue sparks struck out at his fingertips; Navarth fell back with a startled cry. "This is an imposition!" he exclaimed. "Ill usage indeed!" From an unseen diaphragm a recorded voice spoke: "As cherished guests, you will wish to please your host .by adhering to certain standards of courtesy and restraint It is not necessary to define these standards; they will be clear to all persons of delicacy. The stimulus provides a jocular reminder to the insensitive or thoughtless." Navarth made a surly sound in his throat. "There's a smug dog for you. What harm in peering forth from the port?" "Evidently the Margrave hopes to conceal the location of his headquarters," said Gersen. "Balderdash. What is to prevent a man searching the cluster until he finds the Palace of Love?" "There are hundreds of planets," Gersen pointed out. "Very likely other discouragements as well." "He need fear no intrusion from me," sniffed Navarth. The Andromeda settled upon a field surrounded by bluegreen gum trees, of distinctly terrestrial derivation. Zog immediately unsealed the port, a process which Gersen watched first with amazement, then quizzical amusement. Wary of unseen microphones, he communicated none of his ideas to Navarth. ry'hey alighted into the morning glare of a yellow-white sun, much like Miel in color m and radiance. The air was pungent with the odor of the gum trees and native vegetation; shrubs with lustrous black stalks, black and scarlet leaf-disks; blue spikes with fluttering dark blue vanes, puffs of cottony membrane enclosing tomatored nodes. There were also clumps of terrestrial bamboo and grass and a thicket of blackberry bushes. "Bizarre, bizarre," muttered Navarth, looking about. "There is fascination to be found on these far worlds!" "This is almost like Earth," said Gersen. "But other areas may be dominated by local plants; then you will see the truly bizarre." "No scope even for a sane poet," grumbled Navarth. "But I must put aside my individuality, my pitiful small cell of sentience. I have been snatched from Earth, and no doubt my bones will root in this strange soil." He picked up a clod, crushed it between his fingers, let the fragments fall to the ground. "It looks like soil, it feels like soil -- but it is starstuff. We are far from Earth. What? And we are to be marooned as well, with neither a crust nor a bottle of wine?" For Zog had returned within the Andromeda and was sealing the port. Gersen took Navarth's arm. hustled him across the meadow. "Zog has a reckless temperament; he may take off on intersplit and carry away ship, meadow, shrubs, grass and two passengers, if we stand too near. Then you could well sing of bizarre circumstances." But Zog raised the ship on its ionic pencils; Gersen and Navarth watched it dwindle into the bright, blue sky. "So here we are, somewhere in Sirneste Cluster," said Navarth. "Either the Palace of Love is nearby or Viole Falushe has performed another of his grotesque jokes." Gersen went to the edge of the meadow, looked through the screen of trees. "Grotesque joke or not, here is a road. It must lead somewhere." They set out along the road, between hedges of tall black rods with scarlet leaf disks clattering and chattering in the wind. The road wound around a knob of black schist, swung up a steep rise; gaining the crest they looked out upon a valley and a small city only a mile or two distant. "Is this the Palace of Love?" wondered Navarth. "Hardly what I had expected: far too neat, too precise. And what are those circular towers?" The towers to which Navarth referred rose at regular intervals across the city. Gersen could only suggest that they contained offices or apartments, or perhaps served to house civic functionaries. A s they started down the hill, a vehicle approached at a great rate: a bumping thudding platform supported by rolling air-cushions. Standing at the controls was a gaunt, stern person in a brown and black uniform, who on closer inspection proved to be a woman. She halted the car and inspected the two with a skeptical gaze. "You are the Margrave's guests? Step aboard, then." Navarth took exception to the woman's tone. "Were you supposed to meet the ship? This is inefficiency; we were forced to walk!" The woman gave him a scornful half-smile. "Get aboard, unless you care to walk more." Gersen and Navarth climbed aboard, Navarth fuming with indignation. Gersen asked the woman, "What city is that?" "It is City Ten." "And what is your name for this planet?" "I call it Fool's-World. Other folk may call it what they like." Her mouth snapped shut like a trap. She swung the vehicle around and started back down the road, the bladders pounding, Gersen and Navarth clinging tight to avoid being hurled into the ditch. Navarth bawled orders and instructions, but the woman drove even more furiously and did not slow until they entered the city by a curving, tree-shaded avenue; whereupon her pace became extremely sedate, and Gersen and Navarth were exposed to the curious stares of the city's inhabitants. These were a people without distinctive peculiarity, other than the fact that the heads of the men were shaved clean as an egg, eyebrows, scalp, and beard; while the women affected an elaborate coiffure of long varnished spikes, occasionally tipped with flowers or other ornaments. Both men and women wore garments of extravagant cut and color and carried themselves with a peculiar mixture of swagger and furtiveness; speaking emphatically in low voices, laughing in loud brash bays, only to stop short, look in all directions, then continue with their mirth. The vehicle passed one of the towers Navarth had noted: a structure of twenty stories, each apparently consisting of six wedge-shaped apartments. Navarth spoke to the woman: "What is the purpose of the towers which rise so prominently?" "It is where the taxes are collected," was the reply. "Aha then, Henry Lucas, you are correct. The towers house civic functionaries." The woman turned Navarth a gray glance. "They do, indeed. Indeed and indeed." Navarth paid her no further heed. He pointed to one of the numerous cafes along the boulevard, patronized principally by men. "These rascals have much idle time," Navarth noted. "See how they loll and take their tipple! Viole Falushe is less than harsh with his subjects, if such they be!"  T'he vehicle swung into a tumI around, halted before a long two-floored building. On the verandah sat a number of men and women in various costumes, obviously outworlders. "Off then, shag-heads!" said the woman driver tersely. "Here is the inn; I have done my stint." "Incompetently, and in a surly manner," declared Navarth, rising and preparing to alight. "Your own head, incidentally, would never be the worse for a few changes. Perhaps a full beard, as a start." The woman touched a button; the bed of the vehicle tilted; Navarth and Gersen were forced to jump to the ground. The vehicle departed, with Navarth making an insulting gesture at the woman's back. A footman came forward to meet them. "You are guests of the Margrave?" "This is correct," said Navarth. "We have been invited to the Palace." "During the wait, you will be housed at the inn." "Wait? Of what duration?" demanded Navarth. "I assumed that we would be taken directly to the Palace." The footman bowed. "The Margrave's guests assemble here; all go forth together. I presume there are five or six others yet to come, this being the usual number. May I show you to your rooms?" Gersen and Navarth were conducted to cubicles eight feet on a side, each containing a low narrow bunk, a wardrobe, a lavatory, ventilated only by the lattice in the door. Navarth was housed next to Gersen, and his complaints were clearly audible. Gersen smiled to himself. For reasons known best to himself, such was the style in which Viole Falushe wished his guests to wait. Within the wardrobe were Earth-style garments of a light crisp fabric. Gersen washed, removed his beard with a depilatory, changed into fresh garments and went out upon the verandah. Navarth had preceded him and already was holding forth to the eight people, four men and four women, who sat there. Gersen took a seat to the side and considered the group. Beside him sat a portly gentleman wearing the black neck band and beige skin tone currently fashionable on the Mechanics Coast of Lyonesse, one of the Concourse planets. He was, so Gersen discovered, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures named Hygen Grote. His companion, Doranie, almost certainly not his wife, was a cool, wide-eyed blonde woman with only an ultrafashionable hint of bronze skin luster. A pair of serious young women sat quietly to the side: sociology students at Sea Providence University near Avente. Their names were Tralla Callob and Momice Whill; they seemed awed, half alarmed and sat close to each other, feet flat on the floor, knees pressed tight together. Tralla Callob was not unattractive, though she seemed unaware of this and took no pains to make the most of herself. Momice Whill was victimized by over-large features and a truculent conviction that every man in the group intended assault upon her chastity. More relaxed was Margray Liever, a middle-aged woman from Earth who had won first prize in a television contest: her 'heart's desire.' She had chosen a visit to Viole Falushe's 'Palace of Love'. Viole Falushe had been amused and obliging. Torrace daNossa was a musician, a man of sophistication and elegance, perhaps a trifle soft, more than a trifle vain, with an effortless ease of manner which made meaningful conversation difficult. He was visiting the Palace of Love preparatory to composing an opera entitled The Palace of Love. Lerand Wible was a marine architect of Earth, who recently had constructed a sailboat of ultimate design. The fin was osmium, the sails were tall air foils of metal-plated foam, selfsupporting and unstayed. Sails and fin extended at opposite diameters of a metal slip-ring; the hull floated upright, in its most efficient hydro dynamic posture. Both hull and fin were coated with a water-repellent, reducing skin friction to a minimum, while ducts expelled air to minimize turbulence. Wible had met Viole Falushe in connection with his fanciful scheme for a sea-going palace, ringshaped to enclose a central lagoon. Skebou Diffiani was a taciturn man with a head of coarse black hair, a black, tightly curled beard, an expression conveying disdain and suspicion of all the others. He was a native of Quantique, which went far to explain his aloof manner. His occupation was day-laborer. His inclusion in the group could be explained only as a caprice of Viole Falushe. Margray Liever had been the first to arrive, five of the long local days before. Then Tralla and Momice had come, then Skebou Diffiani. Lerand Wible and Torrace daNossa were next, followed by Hygen Grote and Doranie. Navarth plied all with questions, pacing the verandah, darting side-glances right and left. But no one knew more than he did; none knew where lay the Palace of Love or the time of departure. The uncertainty troubled no one. In spite of the constricted chambers, the hotel was reasonably comfortable, and there was the city to be explored: a puzzling, mysterious city, with latencies and undercurrents some of the guests found fascinating, others disturbing. A gong summoned the group to lunch, which was served on a back court under black, green and scarlet trees. The cuisine was uncomplicated : pastry wafers, poached fish, fruit, a cool pale green beverage, cakes of spiced currants. During the meal six new guests arrived and were brought immediately to the court for lunch. They were Druids of parently consisted of two families, though such relationships were shrouded in secrecy. There were two Druids, two Druidesses, two adolescents. All wore similar garments: black gowns, black cowls, long-toed black slippers. Druids Dakaw and Pruitt were tall and saturnine; Druidess Wust was thin, sinewy, with a hollow cheeked face, Druidess Laidig was portly and imposing. The lad Hule was sixteen or seventeen, extremely handsome, with sallow clear skin and dark eyes. He spoke little and smiled never, surveying all with a troubled gaze. age, was likewise pale, with something of the same troubled gaze, as if she constantly strove to balance sets of irreconcilable relationships. nphe Druids sat together, ate hurriedly with cowls drawn forward and only occasional mutters of conversation. After lunch, when the guests returned to the verandah, the Druids came purposefully forward, introduced themselves with brave cordiality and took seats among the others. Navarth came to question them, but their evasiveness was a match for his curiosity, and he learned nothing. The talk became general, reverting, as it always did, to the city, the name of which was either City Ten or Kouliha. The subject of the towers arose. What was their function? Did they contain business offices, as Doranie suggested, or were they residences? Navarth reported the explanation of the woman in the uniform -- that the towers were tax-gathering agencies -- but the rest of the group found the idea far fetched. Diffiani made the somewhat brutal assertion that the towers were brothels: "Notice! Early in the morning girls and young women arrive; later the men come!" Torrace daNossa said, "The hypothesis is one which leaps to mind, but the women leave when they will. And they seem to include every stratum of society, which is hardly typical." Hygen Grote gave a sly wink to Navarth. "There is a simple way to resolve the question. I suggest that we deputize one of our number to make direct inquiry." Druidesses Laidig and Wust snorted and drew their cowls close around their faces; the girl Druids Dakaw and Pruitt looked off in different directions. Gersen wondered why the Druids, notoriously prim, had ventured on the journey to the Palace of Love, when their sensibilities could not but fail to be outraged. Mysteries everywhere... A few minutes later Gersen and Navarth went for a stroll through the city, examining stalls, stores, workshops and residences with the untroubled curiosity of tourists. The people watched them with indifference and perhaps a tinge of envy. They seemed prosperous, gentle, easy of disposition. Still Gersen sensed a pervading quality he could not define. Nothing so coarse as fear, or discord, or anxiety... A wide tree-shaded cafe tempted Navarth; Gersen pointed out that they lacked money. Navarth brushed the matter aside and insisted that Gersen join him for a glass of wine. Gersen shrugged, followed Navarth to a table. Navarth signaled the proprietor. "We are guests of the Margrave Viole Falushe; we have no coin of the city. We intend to patronize your cafe, and you may send the account to the hotel for collection." The proprietor bowed punctiliously. "It shall be as you wish." "Then we will drink a flask of whatever wine you consider suitable for this time of day." "At once, sir." The wine was served, a pleasant beverage which Navarth found somewhat too delicate. They sat watching folk walk past. Directly opposite rose one of the cryptic towers, which now, in the middle afternoon, showed no great activity. Navarth summoned the proprietor to order another flask of wine and, indicating the tower, asked, "what goes on in yonder tower?" The proprietor seemed puzzled by the question. "It is like all the rest. Where we pay our taxes." "But why so many towers? Would not a single tower suffice?" Now the proprietor was amazed. "What, sir? For so many people as live here? Hardly possible!" Coming next month in IF! Great new science-fiction novel by the author of Who? and many more! by Algis Budrys Robert Silverberg J. T. McIntosh Lin Carter -- and many others! Read America's favorite science-fiction magazine. If! #? With this Navarth was forced to be satisfied. Returning to the hotel they found that two more guests had arrived, both men of Earth: Harry Tanzel of London, Gian Mario of no fixed address. Both were well favored men, tall, keenfaced, dark-haired, of ages not immediately apparent. Tanzel was perhaps the handsomer of the two; Mario was more energetic and vital. The local day was a long twenty-nine hours. When night finally arrived the guests retired without protest to their cubicles, only to be awakened at midnight by a gong and summoned to a midnight meal. p'he following morning saw the arrival of Zuly, a tall langorous dancer from the world Valhalla, Tau Gemini VI. She comported herself with the most exquisite mannerisms, to the suspicion and perturbation of the Druids, especially young Hule who could not keep his eyes away from the woman. Immediately after the morning meal Gersen, Navarth and Lerand Wible went walking beside the canal which ran behind the hotel. Today appeared to be a holiday. The people of the city wore garlands. Some were drunk; others sang songs in praise of Arodin, evidently a folk-hero or ruler. "Even on a holiday," said Navarth, "they go to pay their taxes." "Nonsense," said Wible. "When do men go to pay taxes with so jaunty a step?" The three paused to watch men going and coming from the tall tower. "Definitely, it is a brothel. It can be nothing else." "But so public. So industrious? We may be misled by appearances." "Conceivably. Do you wish to enter the place?" "No, indeed! If brothel it is, I am unfamiliar with their methods and might perform some unorthodox act, to the discredit of us all." "You are unusually cautious." "I am on a strange planet," sighed Navarth. "I lack the strength I derive from the soil of old Earth. But I am curious; we shall resolve the question once and for all. Come." He led the way to the pavilion, where they had been served the day before, and scanned the tables. A portly middle-aged gentleman in a wide-brimmed, green hat sat looking off along the boulevard, a small jug of wine at his elbow. Navarth approached him. "Your pardon, sir. As you can see, we are strangers here. One cr two of your customs puzzle us, and we wish to leam how matters stand." The middle-aged man heaved himself erect and after a moment's hesitation pointed to the other chairs. "I will explain as best I can, though there is small mystery here. We do as best we can and live according to our lights." Navarth, Gersen and Wible seated themselves. "First of all," Navarth inquired, "what is the function of that tower yonder, where so many people go in and out?" "Ah, there. Yes. That is our local agency of tax collection." "Tax collection?" asked Navarth, with a triumphant glance at Wible. "And the folk who go in and out pay taxes?" "Exactly. The city is under the wise sponsorship of Arodin. We are prosperous because taxes suck away none of our wealth." i  t this Lerand Wible made a skeptical sound. "How is this possible?" "Is it not the same elsewhere? The money collected is the money which otherwise would be spent on frivolity. The system is beneficient to all. Every girl of the region must serve five years, performing a stipulated number of services per day. Naturally the more attractive girls fulfill their quota sooner than those who are plain, and there is consequently a considerable incentive to maintaining pulchritude." "Aho!" said Wible. "A civic brothel!" His informant shrugged. "Call it what you wish. There is no diminution of resource; the yield is devoted to civic expense; there is no outcry atjthe collection of tax, and the tax collectors find their work not irksome; or if they do, they can make in-lieu payments -- which usually happens should the girl wed before her service is complete. Then, of course, we have our obligation to Arodin, which each of us discharges by the payment of a two-year-old child. Thereupon we pay no more taxes, except for an occasional special assessment." "No one complains when their child is taken?" "Usually not. The child is taken to a creche immediately after birth, so that no bonds of affection are formed. Folk breed children early to discharge their obligation as rapidly as possible." Wible exchanged glances with Navarth and Gersen. "And what happens to the children?" "They go to the account of Arodin. The unsuitables are sold to the Mahrab; the satisfactory serve at the great Palace. I gave a child ten years ago; I now owe tax to no one." TV T avarth could contain him' self no longer. Leaning forward in his chair he pointed a knobby finger. "So this is why you sit here blinking so smugly in the sun? Where is your guilt?" " 'Guilt'?" The man raised his hands to adjust his wire-brimmed hat in puzzlement. "There is no guilt. I have performed my duty. I gave my child; I patronize the civic brothel twice a week. I am a free man." "While the child you gave is now a ten-year-old slave. Somewhere he, or she, toils that you may sit here with your belly on your lap!" The man rose to his feet, face pink with fury. "This is incitement, a serious offense! What then do you do here, you plucked, foolish old fowl? Why do you come to this city if you don't fancy our ways?" "I did not select your city as a destination," said Navarth with dignity. "I am a guest to Viole Falushe and remain here only pending his notification." The man laughed: a harsh throbbing chortle. "This is the outworld name for Arodin. You come to the Palace, and you have not even paid!" He pounded the table once with his fist and marched out of the cafe. Other patrons who had been listening pointedly turned their backs. Presently the three returned to the hotel. Even as they arrived the thud of the bladder-buggy sounded at the end of the boulevard. It rumbled up to the hotel, halted. A man alighted, turned to help down a young woman who, ignoring the hand, jumped to the ground. Navarth gave a raucous cry of surprise. The young woman, attired in fashionable Alphanor-style garments, was Navarth's erstwhile ward, known as Zan Zu, Drusilla and otherwise. Navarth took her aside, pelted her with questions: what had happened to her; where had she been pent? Drusilla could tell him little. She had been shoved into an aircar by the white-eyed man, conveyed to a space-vessel, placed in the custody of three grim women. Each of them wore a heavy gold' ring. After the poison sprayed from the rings was demonstrated upon a dog, no further threats or warnings were necessary. D rusilla was taken to Avente on Alphanor, lodged at the splendid Hotel Tarquin. The women were watchful as hawks, speaking seldom, never more than two or three feet away, the gold rings a sinister glitter. They took her to concerts, restaurants, fashion shows, cinematic displays, museums and galleries. They urged her to buy clothes, to tone her skin, to make herself chic -- all of which Drusilla resisted, from sullen perversity. Whereupon the women bought the clothes, toned her skin, arranged her hair. Drusilla retaliated by sagging, drooping, contriving to look as uncouth as possible. Finally the women took her to the space port. They boarded a space ship which conveyed them to Sirneste Cluster and the planet Sogdian. They arrived at the agency of Rubdan Ulshaziz at Atar simultaneously with another guest for the Palace of Love, Milo Ethuen, who stayed in Drusilla's company for the remainder of the journey. The three women came as far as the Kouliha space field, then returned to Atar with Zog. Navarth and Gersen looked around to inspect Ethuen, who sat on the verandah with the others: a man not unlike Tanzel and Mario, with a brooding face, dark hair, and long arms. The manager of the hotel came forth upon the verandah. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that your wait is at an end. The guests of the Margrave are assembled ; you must now set forth on your journey to the Palace of Love. Please ney to the Palace of Love. "Please follow me; I will conduct you to your conveyance." is now available in paperback for #c. ;;This revolutionary book concerns the possibility of scientifically extending ! !;human life by freezing the body immediately after death. It is for those J; Lwho have the imagination and courage to reject the inevitability of death. #; #; or send a check or money order to -- j Cryonics Society of New York, Inc. # Washington Avenue Brooklyn, New York # Ever wonder why aliens were so much smarter than us? Here's why! titled Critical Observations of a Parallel Culture on a Neighboring World, and Evaluations of Extract from the Day Book: "Where," we asked the Information Factor at Camiroi City Terminal, "is the office of the "Isn't any," he said cheerfully. "You mean that in Camiroi City, the metropolis of the chairman Paul Piper asked with disbelief. "Isn't any office of it. But you're poor strangers, so you deserve an answer even if you can't frame your questions properly. See that elderly man sitting on the bench and enjoying the sun? He'll make you one." "Perhaps the initials convey a different meaning on Camiroi," said Miss Munch the first surrogate chairman. "By them we mean -- " "Parent Teachers Apparatus, of course. Colloquial English is one of the six Earthian languages required here, you know. Don't be abashed. He's a fine person, and he enjoys doing things for strangers. He'll be glad to make We were nonplusssed, but we walked over to the man indicated. "We are looking for the local second surrogate chairman. "We were told that you might help us." "Oh, certainly," said the elderly Camiroi gentleman. "One of you arrest that man walking there, and we'll get started with it." "Do what?" asked our Mr. Piper. "Arrest him. I have noticed that your own words sometimes do not convey a meaning to you. I often wonder how you do communicate among yourselves. Arrest, take into custody, seize by any force physical or moral, and bring him here." "Yes, sir," cried Miss Hanks our third surrogate chairman. She enjoyed things like this. She arrested the walking Camiroi man with force partly physical and partly moral and brought him to the group. der," the elder Camiroi said to the one arrested. "Grab three more, and we'll get started. Let the lady help. She's good at it." Our Miss Hanks and the Camiroi man named Meander arrested three other Camiroi men and brought them to the group. "Five. It's enough," said the elderly Camiroi. "We are hereby into random action. Now, how can we accommodate you, good Earth people?" "But are you legal? Are you five persons competent to be a Piper. "Any Camiroi citizen is competent to do any job on the planet of Camiroi," said one of the Camiroi men (we learned later that his name was Talarium), "otherwise Camiroi would be in a sad shape." "It may be," said our Miss Smice sourly. "It all seems very informal. What if one of you had to be World President?" "The odds are that it won't come to one man in ten," said the elderly Camiroi (his name was Philoxenus). "I'm the only one of this group ever to serve as president of this planet, and it was a pleasant week I spent in the Office. Now to the point. How can we accommodate you." "We would like to see one of your schools in session," said our Mr. Piper. "We would like to talk to the teachers and the students. We are here to compare the two systems of education." "There is no comparison," # said old Philoxenus, " -- meaning no offense. Or no more than a little. On Camiroi, we practice Education. On Earth, they play a game, but they call it by the same name. That makes the confusion. Come. We'll go to a school in session." "And to a public school," said Miss Smice suspiciously. "Do not fob off any fancy private school on us as typical." "That would be difficult," said Philoxenus. "There is no public school in Camiroi City and only two remaining on the Planet. Only a small fraction of one per cent of the students of Camiroi are in public schools. We maintain that there is no more reason for the majority of children to be educated in a public school than to be raised in a public orphanage. We realize, of course, that on Earth you have made a sacred buffalo of the public school." "Sacred cow," said our Mr. Piper. "Children and Earthlings should be corrected when they use words wrongly," said Philoxenus. "How else will they learn the correct forms? The animal held sacred in your own near orient was of the species bos buba lus rather than bos bos, a buffalo rather than a cow. Shall we go to a school?" "If it cannot be a public school, at least let it be a typical school," said Miss Smice. "That again is impossible," said Philoxenus. "Every school on Camiroi is in some respect atypical." ' " school. with the Camiroi students was a violent one. One of them, a lively little boy about eight years old, ran into Miss Munch, knocked her down, and broke her glasses. Then he jabbered something in an unknown tongue. "Is that Camiroi?" asked Mr. Piper with interest. "From what I have heard, I supposed the language to have a harsher and fuller sound." "You mean you don't recognize it?" asked Philoxenus with amusement. "What a droll admission from an educator. The boy is very young and very ignorant. Seeing that you were Earthians, he spoke in Hindi, which is the tongue used by more Earthians than any other. No, no, Xypete, they are of the minority who speak English. You can tell it by their colorless texture and the narrow heads on them." "I say you sure do have slow reaction, lady," the little boy Xypete explained. "Even subhumans should react faster than that. You just stand there and gape and let me bowl you over. You want me analyze you and see why you react so slow?" "No! No!" "You seem unhurt in structure from the fall," the little boy continued, "but if I hurt you I got to fix you. Just strip down to your shift, and I'll go over you and make sure you're all right." "No! No! No!" "It's all light," said Philoxenus. "All Camiroi children learn primary medicine in the first grade, setting bones and healing contusions and such." "No! No! I'm all right. But he's broken my glasses." "Come along Earthside lady, I'll make you some others," said the little boy. "With your slow reaction time you sure can't afford the added handicap of defective vision. Shall I fit you with contacts?" "No. I want glasses just like those which were broken. Oh heavens, what will I do?" "You come, I do," said the little boy. It was rather revealing to us that the little boy was able to test Miss Munch's eyes, grind lenses, make frames and have her fixed up within three minutes. "I have made some improvements over those you wore before," the boy said, "to help compensate for your slow reaction time." "Are all the Camiroi students so talented?" Mr. Piper asked. He was impressed. "No. Xypete is unusual," Philoxenus said. "Most students would not be able to make a pair of glasses so quickly or competently till they were at least nine." "How rapidly do you read?" Miss Hanks asked a young girl. "One hundred and twenty words a minute," the girl said. "On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minutes," Miss Hanks said proudly. "When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousand words a minute," the girl said. "They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I've learned to read almost slow enough." "I don't understand," said Miss Hanks. i i T V) you know anything about Earth History or Geography?" Miss Smice asked a middle-sized boy. "We sure are sketchy on it, lady. There isn't very much over there, is there?" "Then you have never heard of Dubuque?" "Count Dubuque interests me. I can't say as much for the City named after him. I always thought that the Count handled the matters of the conflicting French and Spanish land grants and the basic claims of the Sauk and Fox Indians very well. References to the Town now carry a humorous connotation, and 'School-Teacher from Dubuque' has become a folk archetype." "Thank you," said Miss Smice, "or do I thank you?" "What are you taught of the relative humanity of the Earthians and the Camiroi and of their origins?" Miss Munch asked a Camiroi girl. "The other four worlds, Earth (Gaea), Kentauron Mikron, Dahae and Astrobe were all settled from Camiroi. That is what we are taught. We are also given the humorous aside that if it isn't true we will still hold it true till something better comes along. It was we who rediscovered the Four Worlds in historic time, not they who discovered us. If we did not make the original settlements, at least we have filed the first claim that we made them. We did, in historical time, make an additional colonization of Earth. You call it the Incursion of the Dorian Greeks." "Where are their playgrounds?" Miss Hanks asked Talarium. "Oh, the whole world. The children have the run of everything. To set up specific playgrounds would be like setting S table-sized aquarium down in the depths of the ocean. It would really be pointless."  us from Earth, specifically from Dubuque, Iowa, were in discussion with the five mem"How do you maintain discipline?" Mr. Piper asked. "Indifferently," said Philoxenus, "Oh, you mean in detail. It varies. Sometimes we let it drift, sometimes we pull them up short. Once they have learned that they must comply to an extent, there is little trouble. Small children are often put down into a pit. They do not eat or come out till they know their assignment." "But that is inhuman," said Miss Hanks. "Of course. But small children are not yet entirely human. If a child has not learned to accept discipline by the third or fourth grade, he is hanged." "Literally?" asked Miss Munch. "How would you hang a child figuratively? And what effect would that have on the other children?" "By the neck?" Miss Munch still was not satisfied. "By the neck until they are dead. The other children always accept the example gracefully and do better. Hanging isn't enif ployed often. Scarcely one child in a hundred is hanged." "What is this business about slow reading?" Miss Hanks asked, "I don't understand it at all." "Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading," Philoxenus said. "He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got wordperfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later." "You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?" "The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning." "Ah, would you call your schools liberal?" Mr. Piper asked. "I would. You wouldn't," said Philoxenus. "We do not on Camiroi, as you do on Earth, use words to niean their opposites. There isbiothing in our education or on our world that corresponds to the quaint servility which you call liberal on Earth." "Well, would you call your education progressive?" "No. In your argot, progressive, of course, means infantile." "How are the schools financed?" asked Mr. Piper. "Oh, the voluntary tithe on Camiroi takes care of everything, government, religion, education, public works. We don't believe in taxes, of course, and we never maintain a high overhead in anything." "Just how voluntary is the tithing?" asked Miss Hanks. "Do you sometimes hang those who do not tithe voluntarily?" "I believe there have been a few cases of that sort," said Philoxenus. "And is your government really as slipshod as your education?" Mr. Piper asked. "Are your high officials really chosen by lot and for short periods?" "Oh yes. Can you imagine a person so sick that he would actually desire to hold high office for any great period of time? 'Are there any further questions?" "There must be hundreds," said Mr. Piper, "But we find difficulty putting them into words." "If you cannot find words for them, we cannot find answers. miroi system of education is inferior to our own in organization, in buildings, in facilities, in playgrounds, in teacher conferences, in funding, in parental involvement, in supervision, in ingroup out-group accommodation adjustment motifs. Some of the school buildings are grotesque. We asked about one particular building which seemed to us to be flamboyant and in bad taste. 'What do you expect from second-grade children?" they said, "It is well built: even if of peculiar appearance. Second-grade children are not yet complete artists of design." "You mean that the children designed it themselves?" we asked. "Of course," they said. "Designed and built it. It isn't a bad job for children." Such a thing wouldn't be permitted on Earth. roi system of education somehow produces much better results than does the education system of Earth. We have been forced to admit this by the evidence at hand. anomaly as yet unresolved beWe give here, as perhaps of some interest, the curriculum of the Camiroi Primary Education. Playing one wind instrument Simple drawing of objects and numbers. Singing. (This is important. Many Earth people sing who cannot sing. This early instruction of the Camiroi prevents that occurrence.) Simple arithmetic, hand and machine. First Acrobatics. First riddles and logic. Mnemonic religion. First dancing. Walking the low wire. Simple electric circuits. Raising ants. (Eoempts, not earth ants). Playing one keyboard instrument. Drawing, faces, letters, motions. Singing comedies. Complex arithmetic, hand and machine. Second acrobatics. First jokes and logic. Quadratic religion. Second Dancing. Simple defamation (Spirited attacks on the character of one fellow student, with elementary falsification and simple hatchet-job programming.) Performing on the medium wire. Project electric wiring. Raising bees. (Galelea, not earth bees.) Playing one stringed instrument. Reading and voice. (It is here that the student who may have fallen into bad habits of rapid reading is compelled to read at voice speed only.) Soft stone sculpture. Situation comedy. Simple algebra, hand and machine. First gymnastics. Second jokes and logic. Transcendent religion. Complex acrobatic dancing. Complex defamation. Performing on the high wire and the sky pole. Simple radio construction. Raising, breeding and dissecting frogs. (Karakoli, not earth frogs.) History reading, Camiroi and galactic, basic and geological. Decadent comedy. Simple geometry and trigonometry, hand and machine. Track and field. Shaggy people jokes and hirstute logic. Simple obscenity. Simple mysticism. Patterns of falsification. Trapeze work. Intermediate electronics. Human dissection. History reading, Camiroi and galactic, technological. Introverted drama. Complex geometries and analytics, hand and machine. Track and field for fifth form record. First wit and logic. First alcoholic appreciation. Complex mysticism. Setting intellectual climates, defamation in three dimensions. Simple oratory. Complex trapeze work. Inorganic chemistry. Advanced electronics. Advanced human dissection. Fifth Form Thesis. The child is now ten years old and is half through his primary schooling. He is an unfinished animal, but he has learned to learn. Reemphasis on slow reading. Simple prodigious memory. History reading, Camiroi and galactic, economic. Horsemanship (of the Patrushkoe, not the earth horse.) Advance lathe and machine work for art and utility. Literature, passive. Calculi, hand and machine pankration. Advanced wit and logic. Second alcoholic appreciation. Differential religion. First business ventures. Complex oratory. Building-scaling. (The buildings are higher and the gravity stronger than on Earth; this climbing of buildings like human flies calls out the ingenuity and daring of the Camiroi children.) Nuclear physics and post-organic chemistry. Simple pseudo-human assembly. History reading, Camiroi and galactic, cultural. Advanced prodigious memory. Vehicle operation and manufacture of simple vehicle. Literature, active. Astrognosy, prediction and programming. Advanced pankration. Spherical logic, hand and machine. Advanced alcoholic appreciation. Integral religion. Bankruptcy and recovery in business. Conmanship and trend creation. Post-nuclear physics and universals. Transcendental athletics endeavor. Complex robotics and programming. History reading, Camiroi and galactic, seminal theory. Consummate prodigious memory. Manufacture of complex land and water vehicles. Literature, compenduous and terminative. (Creative bookburning following the Camiroi thesis that nothing ordinary be allowed to survive.) Cosmic theory, seminal. Philosophy construction. Complex hedonism. Laser religion. Conmanship, seminal. Consolidation of simple genius status. Post-robotic integration. History reading, Camiroi and galactic, future and contingent. Category invention. Manufacture of complex lightbarrier vehicles. Construction of simple asteroids and planets. Matrix religion and logic. Simple human immortality disciplines. Consolidation of complex genius status. First problems of post-consciousness humanity. First essays in marriage and reproduction. History construction, active. Manufacture of ultra-light-barrier vehicles. Panphilosophical clarifications. Construction of viable planets. Consolidation of sjmple sanctity status. Charismatic humor and pentacosmic logic. Hypogyroscopic economy. Penentaglossia. (the perfection of the fifty languages that every educated Camiroi must know including six Earthian languages. Of course the child will already have colloquial mastery of most of these, but he will not yet have them in their full depth.) Construction of complex societies. World government. (A course of the same name is sometimes given in Earthian schools, but the course is not of the same content. In this course the Camiroi student will govern a world, though not one of the first aspect worlds, for a period of three or four months.) Tenth form thesis. The child will now be fifteen years old and will have completed his primary education. In many ways he will be advanced beyond his Earth counterpart. Physically more sophisticated, the Camiroi child could kill with his hands an Earth-type tiger or a cape buffalo. An Earth child would perhaps be reluctant even to attempt such feats. The Camiroi boy (or girl) could replace any professional Earth athlete at any position of any game, and could surpass all existing Earth records. It is simply a question of finer poise, strength and speed, the result of adequate schooling. As to the arts (on which Earthlings sometimes place emphasis) the Camiroi child could produce easy and unequaled masterpieces in any medium. More important, he will have learned the relative unimportance of such pastimes. The Camiroi child will have failed in business once, at age ten, and have learned patience and perfection of objective by his failure. He will have acquired the techniques of falsification and conmanship. Thereafter he will not be easily deceived by any of the citizens of any of the worlds. The Camiroi child will have become a complex genius and a simple saint; the latter reduces the index of Camiroi crime to near zero. He will be married and settled in those early years of greatest enjoyment. The child will have built, from materials found around any Camiroi house, a faster-thanlight vehicle. He will have piloted it on a significant journey of his own plotting and programming. He will have built quasi-human robots of great intricacy. He will be of perfect memory and judgment and will be well prepared to accept solid learning. He will have learned to use his whole mind, for the vast reservoirs which are the unconscious to us are not unconscious to him. Everything in him is ordered for use. And there seems to be no great secret about the accomplishments, only to do everything slowly enough and in the right order: Thus they avoid repetition and drill which are the shriveling things which dull the quick apperception. The Camiroi schedule is challenging to the children, but it is nowhere impossible or discouraging. Everything builds to what follows. For instance, the child is eleven years old before he is given post-nuclear physics and universals. Such subjects might be too difficult for him at an earlier age. He is thirteen years old before he undertakes category invention, that intricate course with the simple name. He is fourteen years old when he enters the dangerous field of panphilosophical clarification. But he will have been constructing comprehensive philosophies for two years, and he will have the background for the final clarification. We should look more closely at this other way of education. In some respects it is better than our own. Few Earth children would be able to construct an organic and sentient robot within fifteen minutes if given the test suddenly; most of them could not manufacture a living dog in that time. Not one Earth child in five could build a faster-than-light vehicle and travel it beyond our galaxy between now and midnight. Not one Earth child in a hundred could build a planet and have it a going concern within a week. Not one in a thousand would be able to comprehend pentacosmic logic. 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But master scientists laboring to ensure that civilization would be preserved during the dark ages to come, established twin "Foundations" at opposite ends of the Galaxy, to form the nucleus of a new civilization, and in time to unite across the Galaxy to form a new... a stronger... a more enduring Second Empire. In Foundation and Foundation and Empire, we follow the course of the First Foundation an it rekindles the light of civilization in an everincreasing portion of the Galaxy -- and as it In confronted by its greatest crisis: a dangerous soul-consuming desire is conquest of the Galaxy! Within a decade, he tyrannized the entire Galaxy -- except for the Second Foundation. And this became his mania -- to find and conquer the Second Foundation. Everything in the Galaxy must be his!...  February # # c by Hayden Howard by Philip K. Dick by iU Uli Seated :Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin,' Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G.Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. 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More About Being Bad A t the World Science Fiction Convention for #, hdd in Cleveland, Ohio, in September, the producers of a new sciencefiction television show called Star Trek appeared, bearing pilot films, samples of costumes, a brace of writers and their own good selves. They were greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm from the fans and well they should have been, because a power of money had gone into some handsome sets, and a power of talent had been invested in preparing the scripts. On the strength of the sample displayed in Cleveland, and knowledge that sudh writers as Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison and others were writing stories for the show, the Cleveland Convention voted it a special plaque for excellence. Then the regular TV season rolled around, and the real Star Trek shows (not the pilots; TV people like to play a little game with pilots, which seldom if ever are truly representative of the real thing, so it was to be expected that the actual prqduct Moskowitz completes his definitive study of Science Fiction. This is the last in a four-volume series that critically surveys the major writers of science fiction during the past three hundred years and anthologizes representative examples of their work. Included in this distinguished collection are "Voyage to the Moon" by Cyrano de Bergerac, "Eternal Adam" by Jules Verne, "The Country of the Blind" by H. G. Wells, "The Los Amigos Fiasco" by A. Conan Doyle, and Stanley G. Weinbaum's "The Lotus Eaters." # pages# Masters of Modern Science Fiction "... devotes individual chapters to #I authors... fills a void in our knowledge of current writers..." # pages#Library Journal Shapers of Science Fiction "One could not want a more detailed and fascinating account... no one has surveyed the roots of science fiction as well as Mr. Moskowitz; probably no one ever will; possibly, no one can." # pages# Galaxy "... an exceptionally fine job of showing how modern science fiction developed..." -- Analog  # pages# Cleveland and New York would be shoddier, cheaper and duller) hit the air, and... good heavens, what unorthodoxy! The regular shows were just as good as the pilots! It looked as though there were finally going to be a regular science-fiction series on television that we wouldn't have to explain away as a cheap imitation of the real thing; something some of us might turn to for enjoyment. Enjoy it while you can, fellows. As of yesterday the word was out: Star Trek will be off the air shortly after you read this. It just didn't make it in the ratings. Once again the high priests of TV programming having saved us from the danger of viewing anything not instantly comprehensible by a dull pre-schooler. The reason is the old familiar one: At the time-slot when Star Trek was presented for viewing, the other shows had a larger share of the audience. Now, it is a fact -- not unknown to TV executives -- that the way to build up your share of the audience is to appeal to the most immature and least well educated groups in the country, because there are more of them, Sfar Trek made the mistake of appealing to a comparatively literate group: that is, ten-yearolds would probably like it, but six-year-olds would not. Please understand us: Stat, Trek was a fun show, worth encouraging, but not necessarily the best show ever produced. Science fiction is capable of far more challenge and drama than even Star Trek ever dreamed of using. We wouldn't mind if it were being cancelled for something better; but all experience indicates that there is at least a .# probability that it win be cancelled for something worse. And so the TV wise men have won another victory in their ceaseless battle to stamp out thought in the American mind... Unless, of course, there's a lastminute reprieve. If enough people wrote letters to the National Broadcasting Company, or the local stations carrying Star Trek, or even to the sponsors, it miht get them to give this promising show a chance to show what it can do. But they probably won't. They've got other things on their minds -- such as trying to figure out why the biggest rating smash success in recent months was a tenyear-old movie.      Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! 'Grasp the inner power of your mind I Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life I Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... , Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Franci Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. MasLife" -- No obA nonD.B.J. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address He was dropped info Red China on a mission he didn't know -- with his life a forfeit if he failed! I H unted by the F.B.I. as a convicted mass murderer . and concealed by the Central Intelligence Agency for some damnable purpose, Dr. Joe West plodded across the dark runway. His footsteps clumped toward the silhouette of the aircraft. His legs felt impossibly heavy. Swollen. But he thought his legs were as thin aS when he was an undernourished scholarship student at Harvard Med School. Imaginary heavy legs? Dr. Joe West's mouth split in a confused grin. Psychosomatic elephantiasis? What had the C.I.A. given him? T Tis face was prison-thin as  he plodded toward the aircraft. Staring at the cavernous air intakes under the variable sweep wings, Dr. West recognized the bomber as the last of the air breathers. Take-off is rocket assisted, too many G's for my circulatory system, he thought dully. Probably when # miles per hour or some godawful starting speed was attained, the bombers ramjets would become operative, and it would flash like a torch through the night. Too fast! The exertion of walking made him gasp. His heartbeats faltered. At his side his C.I.A. bodyguard urged him on, and the distance to the bomber became excrutiating. Imaginary heavy legs? Imaginary was what one of the excitedly smiling faces in the Harvard Circle had assured him. But in another room in the basement of C.I.A. headquarters, another doctor had reassured him that any slight swelling of his legs was merely a mild side effect of a mild sedative. Contra'dictory liars! Had they saved him or traded him off? His legs dragged like anchors as the Air Force ground crew boosted Dr. West up the steel ladder toward the belly of the intruder bomber. In his bemused condition, the tiny orifices pitting the stainless steel skin of the bomber looked like pores. This damned airplane was designed to fly too low, too fast! Did the pores exude sweat to protect its fuselage from the meteoric blaze of air friction? Several of these dorCt want to burn, he thought, almost panicking as they shoved him up into a confining metal tunnel in the aircraft. As he crawled, the glittering close walls hummed against his eardrums and clinked and echoed. Someone was crawling close behind him. His legs dragging. Dr. West crawled with the strength of his arms and shoulders. His damned legs felt twenty pounds overweight. His muscles shivered. His eyes blinked. His mouth twisted. Mild sedative? Like heck! He felt as disoriented as if he'd undergone narcohypnosis. His straining arms pulled him into the cramped electronic counter-measures capsule of the bomber. Unexpectedly his head bumped the low ceiling, and his eyes widened with claustrophobia. The angry world closed on him like a fist. He tried to turn. Not enough room for two men in here! But a nameless Major was struggling in beside him. Massive and radiating het, the Major grunted. The pressure door clunked shut, sealing them in. Like twins in a womb they squirmed and politely elbowed each other. Dr. West realized they were seated facing backward toward the tail. Against him, the Major's shoulder twisted; and the Major's blue eyes loomed so close, they blurred. "Let me fix your crash -- I mean -- safety harness." The Major's laugh was high pitched for such a huge man. "Here's your crash helmet, you C.I.A. bum! They -- " A metallic shriek exploded. Lurching forward, the bomber howled along the rimway, hurled itself. Facing backward. Dr. Joe West felt his eyeballs bulge as acceleration dragged the nylon straps into his chest. Gawking down at the one tiny heatinsulated viewplate between his boots, he glimpsed discolored clouds. The dark mountains of the California coastline were backlighted by the sunrise. Incongruously, obscenely, the sunrise sank into the mountains. Dr. West realized the bomber had activated its ramjets. It was out-speeding the turning Barth. The dawn drowned. The darkening Pacific Ocean glittered as this lone bomber hurried to overtake the night. Only in darkness could its cargo survive. T he Air Force Major squirmed. "Hope you ' -- I mean -- Central Intelligence -- you spooks can't just send us off and kill us -- without telling us the mission?" The Major's laughter rose like the safety valving of a steam boiler. "The generals shook our hands too much. The brass didn't level with us at the briefing." "I wasn't at the briefing," Dr. West muttered. "Why don't you C.I.A spooks use your own black planes?" the Major laughed explosively. "The way your Deputy Director is buddying around with the President, your Central Intelligence already owns more manned aircraft that the Air Force. So send one of your own black clungot damn few of them." Dr. West didn't know what to answer. His head hurt. "That was a controDed-environment tank they hoisted into our bomb bay," the Major's voice persisted. "Too heavy. Hell of a long take-off run. Heavy spray tank. Too heavy. So tell me we're going to spray crops." n The Major shovelled sarcasm. 'T mean -- the Air Force is not officially at war, you Imow. I can't speak for the C.IJl. Have your spooks got Presidential approval for this mission? Does he know what's in the spray tank?" "He may. I don't," the Major laughed, squirming, tiying to readjust the leather holster on his hip. Dr. West contorted his body, trying to give the Major leBibw room. The Major was lowing too explosive a personaHty, and it was difficult to estimate fiow he would react if he recognized Dr. West At least the Majot; was not piloting the bomber. Dr. West wet his dry lips. nphe aircraft's flight steadied.  Autopilot's switched' to astro-inertial guidance," the Major said. TJp front Colonel Neller can take his nap. But I got a personal reason for finding out what's in the spray tank." Dr. West wished the Major would chut upl Speechless, Dr. West shook his head. Hfe eardrunis were killing him. Strapped to his side as closely as a Siamese twin, the Major eyeballed him. "You feel okay?" Dr. West blinked at the Major's enormously dose face. Plainly the Major had not recognized him from the T.V. news, and Dr. West tried to relax. Sometimes when people recognized Dr. West, they tried to kill him. "The Colonel up there in the control module and you and me, all three in the hot seat," the Major persisted. "We'll fry together, so what's in the spray tank?" Dr. Joe West furrowed his brow. Clumsily, he tried to scratch his armpit without elbowing the Major. Within his nylon flying suit Dr. West's body was perspiring in the padded cotton rags of a Chinese commune worker, deceased. He couldn't remember if he had been told what was in the ray tank. Something alive was crawling up his ribs. Hungrily, it bit. Dr. West's face lifted in his pained grin. Evidently for authentidty the Central Intelligence Agency had salted his rags with genuine Chinese Communist fleas. Another bite! Grinning like a befuddled skeleton. Dr. West imagined when his last drop of blood had been drunk, the fleas would arise in unison and jshout: "Paper Tiger!" Then in glorious self-defense and in order to preserve international peace, the fleas would infiltrate the Major. But the Major would not be another Burma, or Pakistan, The Major's profile, twelve inches from the Doctor's eyes, appeared massive and forbidding. His teth ere grinding with tension. The Major would not negotiate with fleas. Or men. The Major's thick forefinger poked the black box on the Doctor's lap. "That's wired to the spray tank. Hey, this dial is at # degrees! Is that Fahrenheit? That's the temperature of the human body. What has the C.I.A. got us carrying? "How should I know," Dr. West's mouth answered as if it had been trained. "I'm only a biotechnician who twists the dials and gets shot." But he knew he was a medical doctor! "I'm not even C.I.A." That was true. Even his mouth wanted to disassociate him from the C.I.A. "I wasn't even at the flight briefing." "All they showed us was a turning point at the end of our fuel range." The Major opened his hand, then flattened it like a wing and thrust! "Target a couple of himdred miles inland on the deck -- minimum altitude. The Chicomms are more apt to knock us down with a tree or a hut roof or a radio tower than with A. A. missiles," the Major laughed, his forehead beaded with sweat. "I need to know what's in the spray tank and to know it now." He unzipped the front of his flying suit. D r. West's throat clicked, not much of a laugh. Here he was with ' an agricultural commune costume concealed under his fl # dng suit, and the Major in Air Force blues. He hoped this was only an oversight, a t # rpical lack of coordination between the Air Force and the C.I.A. as to escape dress. Their costumes didn't match. Obviously one man could not eject without the other. Aircraft this fast didn't carry parachutes. "What's in the spray -- " "If the plane is hit -- " The two men spoke simultaneously, but the Major proved to be the more courteous. He answered the Doctor's question. "If we're hit, blooie!" The Major's teeth flashed white. "I mean if we're only damaged." "They'll never touch us. You're not setting in one of your blackpainted C.I.A. clunkers now. This is the real Air Force. The Chinks haven't upgraded their A.A. missiles in ten years." Dr. West scratched his flea bites and supposed the Major probably was accurate. For the last fifteen years the Chinese had been concentrating their limited industrial capacity on solid fuel I.C.B.M.'s with big, dirty hundred-megaton warheads. Their successful strategy had been continual infiltration and limited warfare. Their moves were shielded by blackmail based on the avowed Chinese policy of massive nuclear retaliation. The Chinese did not bother with modem antiaircraft or antiI.C.B.M. systems. In the U.N. General Assembly the Chinese representative alternately stated that no umbrella was needed for and that all umbrellas are futile. When he was in a benevolent mood, the Chinese representative would smile and state that huge countries like the United States and the Chinese Confederation of Nations were equally vulnerable. In the back of Dr. West's skull he realized, remembered this aircraft was aimed much deeper than a few hundred miles into China. It would be penetrating far beyond its fuel point of no return. II #CA yrajor, rephrasing my ques--tion, what happens to us if the plane has, say, mechanical difficulties?" "Doc, you don't sound very confident about the maintenance procedures of your Air Force. Suppose we have a quadruple flame-out right now over the Pacific," the Major laughed. "Forward in the control module, lonely old Colonel Neller pulls a lever. Blooie! His capsule ejects. Our sealed capsule ejects straight up, and at the top of the arc we get all loose and weightless like we're modern young guys in the Space Corps and not obsolete, old, manned-aircraft personnel. Our drogue chute opens, then our big chute jerks open, and we come down to Earth. No sweat. We float in a whole Pacific Ocean of sweat. What I need to know is what's in our spray tank, Doc?" Dr. West sat rigid. The Major twice had addtessed him as "Doc". "What dirty soup is in our spray tank. Doc," the Major's voice persisted. Dr. West couldn't speak. He was afraid, in a moment the Major would say, oat to mouse : "Doc, is your last name West?" "You feel okay," the Major's voice asked. Dr. West pointed at his mouth, made swallowing gestures, shook his head. He couldn't speak, nauseated. Violently he had been denounced in the U.N. General Assembly. Both the United States and Canada had been implicated and denounced by a dozen oriental countries. That was ten years ago when there still were individual oriental nations. The Chinese People's Republic had put on the biggest dramatic production, giving humane refuge to several hundred Eskimo survivors. Canadian and American lynch mobs had demonstrated outside Dr. West's pirison. "Save our Eskimos," they chanted. "Everyone has a right to live." Their waving signs demanded an end to genocide. "An end to murder," their eager young voices shouted as they battered at the prison gates. "Give us Dr. West! Kill him!" Dr. West bowed his head. It was true. He was a murderer. He had been convicted of genocide. The Canadian prison had closed on him like a softly smothering fist. The ramjet bomber howled and shuddered, and Dr. West realized it was slanting down into the denser atmosphere. Already the bomber was more than halfway across the Pacific. The viewplate between his boots was black as the night beneath, mirroring his eyes. #TThat's in the spray tank. Doc?" The Major sounded personally concerned. "You're too old to be a C.I.A. biotechnician. I mean -- they're kids in their twenties, just knob twisters. You're someone big. When those C.I.A. spooks shoved you into the aircraft, one of them slipped his tongue. I heard him call you 'Doc'. So I figured you got a Ph.D. Maybe you're even a member of the Harvard Circle in the C.I.A. You must know what we're flying into -- " To Dr. West's relief the Major was proceeding along the wrong track. He still had not recognized Dr. West. "That spray tank was airlifted into Edwards Air Force Base in a big old C#," the Major persisted. "Word is the C# came from Arkansas. Pine Bluff, Arkansas. An arsenal there. Even I know that's where they breed the microbes. You're a top scientist or C.I.A. or both." The Major slapped his pistol holster. "You're not expendable like me. I mean this mission must be crucial. Is this the beginning? The spray tank? Are we going to "No one will die." "No one will die -- like hell!" the Major exploded. "We'll be crossing the Chink coastline in a few minutes. In a few more minutes we'll reach our turn around point. We can't go any farther, and by that time something will happen, courtesy of you C.I.A. spooks. I don't even think I want it to happen! The President said we would never be first to use germ warfare!" "What do you want?" The Doctor's fear and rage and frustration exploded against the Major. "You're damned hysterical for an obsolete military mind who has been eating out of the public trough for twenty years? What do you want? A nice clean antiseptic hydrogen bomb?" "Just tell me the mission, Doc." The Major's voice became surprisingly patient. "Colonel Neller and I got a right to know what we're risking our lives for. That spray tank may be warmed to # degrees, but it's no nutrient solution for babies. There's no three-eyed Chink dragon monster swimming in that tank. I mean -- " The Major closed his eyes. Evidently the Major was listening to the Colonel through the intercom. He peered at Dr. West. "Instruments indicate we just crossed the Chinese coastline north of Canton." "Hey!" the Major exclaimed. "Less than fifteen minutes, and we got to turn around. Doc, what are your orders? You better start spraying!" Dr. West sat there. "When the red light comes on -- on this box -- the sequence will begin." He remembered that much. The aircraft shuddered as it rammed through the thickening atmosphere. A fiery glow engulfed the viewplate beneath the Doctor's feet. We must be down on the deck, the Doctor thought, imagining mountains and radio towers and cliffs looming ahead. The bomber was dependent upon the precise functioning of its terrain-following radar. "You'd better press that spray button! We're nearing our fuel point of no return," the Major shouted louder than was necessary. An excited smile began squirming across his face. "There's no time left. Do it. Give it to him. We're as low as we can fly. Dust Mao Ill's armpits. God help the Chinese and all of us!" Dr. West glanced at the trembling face. The Major's reactions seemed to be oscillating between excitement and revulsion. "We're gonna give it to 'em! What are we giving the Chinks? Q-fever?" the Major's voice raced on. "Pneumonic plague when you press that black box on your lap? Mutated scrub typhus? Terrific! Terrible! I can see the black box is set for fifteen minutes spray duration. God! That's a long time. Fifteen minutes! Flying slowed down to # miles per hour, fifteen minutes makes a spray line # miles long! "I'm not stupid," the Major shouted. "There's ten hours of nig;it over South China. Ten hours before the sun dries out your aerosol microbes. Ten hours of damp night while the sleeping Chinese breathe. For ten hours the wind will blow. You C.I.A. spooks always know which way the wind is blowing. Even if its blowing only ten miles per hour across our spray line, that's a hundred miles the aerosol fog will sweep before the daylight comes. The Chinks! God; What's the incubation period?" Dr. West did not know what to answer. 'T'm not stupid," the Major laughed excitedly. We even studied arithmetic in the Air Academy. Five hundred miles of spray line multiplied by the wind carrying the fog a hundred miles across the line, covers five thousand square miles. No, that's fifty thousand square miles! How many sleeping Chinks in our fifty thousand square miles?" "Unfortunately, very few," Dr. West retorted, but immediately regretted it. "Very few? Like we're not really flying over China?" the Major laughed, and his face twisted in an agonized grin. "Wish the radar that's tracking us was our own. I wish this was an exercise over the Pacific. I mean -- like when I was in the last B-#'s, and I was so young I was unkillable. Hey, Colonel," he laughed, pressing the throat button of bis beimet mie. "L;aionei, leii me this mission is an exercise." The Major stopped talking. Listening, he closed his eyes. He coughed. The Major coughed uncontrollably. The Major's huge face whirled. "You C.I.A. bum," he yelled into Dr. West's face. "The aircraft's captured by it's autopilot. Colonel says he's smashed the auto pilot, and he still can't gain control. Hidden somewhere on this aircraft is another operating autopilot. For some reason you want to make sure we can't come home." C onsciously, Dr. West had not known this. But he must have known this was a one-way flight because his organism experienced neither violent surprise nor additional fear. With disappointment. Dr. West wondered whether, with all the political pressure the Harvard Circle of the C.I.A. had exerted to remove him from prison, after all the valuable time the Harvard Circle had spent to rejuvenate him and to carry out parapsychological tests, after he had begun to think he was important again, they had decided he was no better than an expendable technician. Wasted. Expendable. On the black box on his lap the red light flickered. Without thought, his thumb pressed the button as if it had been trained. "Drop the spray tank!" the Major was insisting into his throat mike. "Save fuel. Save minutes. Listen, Colonel, we're not working for the C.I.A. -- " Abruptly the Major closed his mouth as if the Colonel had said something equally abrupt to him. From his holster, the Major hauled out the heavy .# automatic pistol. At a range of six inches, its muzzle hole looked big enough to fall into. But Dr. West's thumb remained on the button. He ignored the , gun. "I'm not going to blow your brains out," the Major gasped. "I wanted to see what you'd do. The Colonel thinks it's possible the Air Force brass agreed to let the C.I.A. do this to us. If that's patriotism, I'm an orphan." '"The bomber howled and bucked through updrafts. Dr. West knew the aircraft was laying a trail of aerosol fog across the formerly desolate mountains of South Central China. "They should have told us," the Major blurted. "I'm a professional. I should have been given the chance to volunteer. The Colonel and me, we're going to complete this spray run on the chance that the Air Force did agree to -- sell us out. You C.I.A. spook, we've decided to complete the spraying mission." The Major waved the almost prehistoric .# automatic ineffectually. "Now do you feel better or worse?" Dr. West surreptitiously had managed to raise his thumb from the button. At first his thumb had not wanted to release the button, as if it had an overtrained, one-track mind of its own. The flickering red light stayed on, and Dr. West knew the spraying was continuing anyway. Probably if he never had pressed the button, a back-up mechanism would have initiated the spraying. Probably he was not only expendable; he was superfluous. Dr. West's mouth twisted with the quick pain of his thoughts. The Major had just stated that the Colonel and he had "decided" to complete the spraying mission. But the aircraft was flying itself, predestined as a missile. It would be too cruel to point out to the Major that no room had been allowed for human decisions. Plainly, the Major needed to believe he had 'decided." The Major still was clinging to his illusion of free decision. "I would like to blow yoiir brains out," the Major repeated and savagely hand operated the slide mechanism, ejecting an unfired cartridge from the automatic pistol. Pr. West looked away. He wondered if other military personnel still wore .# automatics. His own grandfather had kept one beneath his folded T shirts in the top drawer. Way back in World War II, his grandfather had carried it at Kasserine Pass. He said he never fired it. Vaguely, Dr. West remembered that the .# Colt Government automatic had been Model #. #? Three generations of officers must have carried these hand-cannons. Before the First World War, this very heavy caliber automatic had been designed to knock  down charging bolo-waving Moro tribesman, oir so his granndfather had said. The spraying aircraft bucked savagely, whether from an antiaircraft missile explosion or a mountain updraft Dr. West did not know. The Major cursed, and Dr. West smiled because it felt good to know that someone else was mor frightened than he was. The Major was quite a character. The Major appeared to be about forty-five years old and obsolete. He had picked the wrong Armed Service. There now were five Armed Services competing for younger men. The most clean-cut young men who wanted to completely leave this crowded world volunteered for the Space Corps and made worldtelevised crash landings on the Martian craters. More subtle young men with a flair for foreign languages joined the C.I.A., which had acquired its own subdeliver its armored vehicles and heavily armed guerilla war experts. The Navy still owned shoals of nuclear subs and its hulking aircraft carriers and the arrogant Marines. The Army had managed to acquire a transport air force and aerial cavalry and to retain some big tanks, which were used in parades, and control of tactical and defensive missiles. The poor old Air Force was left with its vast seedbeds planes and obsolete interceptors, only a dozen of these operational ramjet bambers, and the Major and his .#. C#Tf by any chance you C.I.A. A turncoats have rigged the autopilot to deliver our aircraft to the Chinks," the Major blurted, 'T will blow your brains out." 'Tf we land anywhere we'll be too lucky," Dr. West retorted. "Right now we're spraying across the interior of China. The people down there have been indoctrinated for two generations that we bring germ warfare. They'll greet us with yells and shrieks and fingernails and sharp hoes." At this, the Major showed his Ill big teeth. "You're full of fun and games." He thudded his .# automatic across his knee. "Chinks won't make me apologize and curse my country on international television. Your two C.I.A. I jerks, what were their names, Johnson and Mitsui? Pitiful performance. Doesn't the C.I.A. issue cyanide capsules? Couldn't those two jerks swallow? In the Air Force we don't need cyanide capsules." He waved his .# like a magic wand. "If we crash. I'll use the first five bullets on Chinks, and then -- " Dr. West remembered that the .# automatic holds a seven-iot clip. He remembered the tortured face of Johnson. The televised faces of Johnson and Mitsui had been bounced off Telstar satellite, and they were seen confessing to everything from dropping virulent hepatitus bombs to potato bugs. Their agonizing scenes had set record Neilson Ratings for their nonpaying sponsor, the Chinese Federation of Nations, and sold American mothers on some of the positive advantages of isolationism. The aircraft quivered. The red light on the black box on Dr. West's lap flickered out. The spray run was complete. As if on cue, the bomber exploded. D r. West, who had rejected the mob, who had made the hard moral decision for Eskimo genocide, who had faced his conviction and the angry fist of the world opinion, now screamed for life. In total darkness his body whirled, slower and slower. He floated in his nylon safety harness, weightless as a drowned man. Ah abrupt jolt whiplashed his neck. The swooping side-toside, revolving, swinging, rocking slamined his head against the wall of the capsule. Dr. West finally realized the capsule had been ejected from the bomber and the capsule's parachute already had opened. In the hoarse breathing descending pendulum silence of the capsule, Dr. West's hand crept to his slippery mouth. He bit his hand. The capsule was descending regardless of what he did. The explosion, the ejection from the bomber had been programmed. The smiling faces in the Harvard Circle of the Central Intelligence Agency had delivered him to China. "Why me? I never volunteered for this," he said. "You C.I.A. wretches, my narcohypnosis has worn pff. You may think you conditioned my responses like an experimental animars. IVe got news for you. It's worn off. I'm free!" Whatever program was in his skull, as it emerged Dr. West determined he would snafu it, foul it up. 'I'll sell out; I'll bug out. I owe no allegiance to a country who would do this to a man. I've got one ambition, to save my neck and to hell with you!" The capsule struck the earth. Dr. West raised his head in the blinding darkness of the capsule. He shook the Major's slack shoulder. A gurgling sound -- With shock. Dr. West felt his foot was wet. He groped down. Too much liquid to be blood. The gurgling sound was more distinct when he stopped breathing. Water was leaking into the smashed bottom of the capsule. ing, Dr. West thought. Instead of striking the mountainsides in this formerly desolate western interior of Szechuan Province, the capsule must have descended into a precipitious river valley where water was -- This is what Dr. West thought. -- Szechuan Province? Until now he had not remembered the landing was to be in Szechuan Province. "Memory -- triggered!" He realized the landing of the capsule had unblocked data the C.I.A. had drilled into his memory. Now he could even visualize the map. The terrain, changing sets of spy-in-sky photographs were riffled before his inner eyes. The slender fingers of Dr. George Pruning had paused beside an oval dot on the aerial photo. "Another new irrigation reservoir." Dr. Bruning's calmly intelligent face smiled across the table at him. D r. George Bruning was no medical doctor. He was a former boy wonder, a former geophysicist, a former scientific astronaut, whose two lovable children and smiling wife and publicity in Life Mag had resulted in his election to The House of Representatives. His political defeat by a movie star two years later resulted in his appointment to the President's Scientific Advisory Staff. He was photographed playing croquet with the President. He was promoted to Chief Scientific Advisor. The unexpected defection of Australia to Neutralism resulted in wholesale firings in the Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. George Bruning was appointed by the President as Deputy Director of the C.I.A. George might be inexperienced in the use of cloak and dagger, but he soon V W showed himself to be an or . ganizer. His own agency emerged within the Agency and gained  the newspaper label 'Harvard Circle". By a noncoincidence, V not only had Dr. George Brun' ing and his four top assistants j attended Harvard as undergrad' uates, so had the President of the United States. 'So what's the big deal?" Dr.  West hissed, struggling to unbuckle his nylon safety harness. No explanation, but odd details emerged from the outer layer of his memory -- instructions. He remembered that there was a special landing kit attached under the seat. A detail, but it was a remarkable feat of memV r ory because he had never looked under the seat. His hand felt it though. He could visualize its contents laid out on a white table. Total partial recall. "You miserable wretches, you're rationing me details." Dr. West's hands lifted the metal kit and attached it to a prearranged hook inside the voluminous padded jacket of his Chinese worker's costume. "You're all very stupid if you think I can pass for a Chinese just because I'm a student of oriental population problems." Dr. West knew his laughter was frightened with hysteria. "Unfortunately I've a pale prison complexion like a Swede, big brown eyes like an Italian and a long jawbone like a Scotsman." Plainly he was outfitted in this agricultural commune costume for some reason other than to pass as a Chinese at close range. Water continued to gurgle into the capsule. Dr. West's nostrils detected the faint, yet fetid odor that emanates from steams polluted by humanity. There were no sounds of people outside the capsule. Not even a frog croaked in the night outside. TTrom his escape kit. Dr. West's  hand detached a small, heavy, no larger than a woman's compact, radio. He knew it was was an automatic signal sender. In order to extend the aerial his hands were trained to locate the upper air vent in the darkness, to twist it open and project the aerial like a collapsible fishing rod into the Chinese night. Dr. West crouched in the blackness of the capsule with his legs in the rising water and his thumb on the signal-switch of the miniaturized ionospheric-;ricochet radio beacon. He knew it was broadcasting a continuous signal to someone. He suposed his body had been trained in a mock-up of this ejection capsule, but he couldn't remember that yet. "You chose me, but you didn't trust me. Only part of my memory, part of my conditioning has been unblocked. But I won't wait for the cues like a trained dog. I'm going to tear apart your conditioning, Sammy." Dr. Sammy Wynoski had been a medical doctor, and before that, by a noncoincidence, Sammy W#moski had been an imdergraduate at Harvard. Joe West had not attended Harvard as an undergraduate, but he had received a partial scholarship to the Harvard Graduate School of Medicine. An inarticulate, intense kook named Sammy Wynoski had roomed next to him during his final years. Dr. Joe West had returned to the Coast to specialize in endocrinology, which led to research in Arctic ecology, which led to population control research d to the exalted position of Director of Oriental Population Problems Research at the University of California, from which job he was canned, and back to the Arctic where he had enough courage to uncover the real cause of the Eskimo population explosion and to try to do something positive before it was too late. For this, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. For this, had the C.I.A. freed him? During those hectic years, Dr. Sam Wynoski had been quietly specializing in chemopsychiatry, with an increasing number of week-end jobs as a medical consultant to the Central ' lAtelligence Agency. When good old Han'Erdman George Bruning was appointed Deputy Director, Sammy Wynoski answered his country's call, his Harvard school buddy's phone call, and became a full-time member of the Harvard Circle of the C.I.A. Thus Dr. Joe West and Dr. Sammy Wynoski met after ten phis X years in the basement of C.I.A. headquarters. They were at opposite ends of a hypodermic needle which Dr. Sam Wynoski apologetically inserted into Dr. Joe West's arm. Auh -- career, Joe," Dr. Sam W#moski had said. "That -- uh -- prison haircut looks real fuzzy." Dr. West had been in no condition to answer. "You bunch of amateurs," Dr. West muttered, crouching in the flooding capsule. "Have you got any plan?" Then the Major groaned. Dr. West's pulse rate jumped. His wrist gave a nervous jerk of its own volition. "We do -- something!" the Major's voice blurted, and he whispered : "Any Chinks out there? -- What you doing?" "Nothing," Dr. West's voice replied soothingly. "Our best hope is to stay in the capsule." For some reason, his fingers twisted his wristwatch to the underside of his wrist. Damn capsule -- flooding," the Major grunted. We got to get out of here fast." From the thraidiing, it sounded as if the Major was having difficulty disengaging himself from his safety harness and assorted intercom wires and oxygen tubes. TVe stay here!" Dr. West's voice stated, his pulse rate accelerating as if teadying him for violent comGat. He realized -- he remBered, when he tipped back his wrist as He was now doings an injectioa needle emerged from his wiistwatch. lf the faceless airman becomes uncooperative," Dr. Sammy Wynosld had explained, simply prick him with the wristwatch needle." Otherwise Dr. West was to wait. He was not to kill the faceless airman until the proper strategic moment. Dr. West began to shiver. He had not remembered this until now. He had no intention of murdering die Major. He had no intention of murdering anyone, not even a Chinese. "Those sons of bitdies!" Dr. West blurted, in his memory studjdng Dr. Sammy Wynoski's apologetic face. "Yeah," the Major wheezed, probably also referring to the C.I.A. and the two men collided in the darkness. Dr. West realized he almost had jabbed the Major with the needle watch. With 'his other hand. Dr. West tried to tmbuckle the wristband. His fingers wouldn't obey him. His fingers struggled against his orders. He felt as frustrated as a spastic as he gasped and sloshed about in the water. The wristwatch fell off his wrist. Success! One victory against the Harvard Circle. #i;iou all right?" the Major  demanded. "Yes, fine. I feel much better. Let's get out of here. You're in command. Major." "I'm going to unbolt the hatch." "Hadn't we better wait in the capsule?" "But you just said -- let's get out," the Major hissed, perplexed. Dr. West was contradicting himself. "The ignorant Chinese peasants can't reach us, can't torture us if we're in the capsule." Dr. West's mouth talked fast. "Yes, they'll think the capsule is one of Aeirs. Our best hope is for the People's Militia to reach us. Still better is for the Maoist police to find us before the people lynch us. The capsule isn't sinking anymore. The water isn't rising. Probably we're mired in a rice paddy. Our only hope is to stay in the capsule." "You gone crazy or something? A minute ago you wanted out. Get out of this capsule!" The Major bodily shoved Dr. West through the hatch into the mud. Under Dr. West's submerged hands was the bristly feel of newly transplanted rice seedlings. He lifted his gaze up a steeply terraced mountainside to the night sky. Behind him, the Major thrashed out of the capsule into the mud and sloshed about in the darkness. With a gasp and a curse, the Major slipped off the crumbling edge of the narrow terrace into the rice paddy below. Those terraced rice paddies were little wider than a man's arm span. The capsule had not descended into a river valley. Dr. West saw that they had landed on a mountainside so steep that all this terracing would have been uneconomic for men. Immense labor would be required for the limited number of catties of rice the mountain could produce. The odors of the terrace makers permeated the night air. "Stinks like human -- fertilizer," the Major scramlbled back up the hand-packed mud slope. "Not Chinese." In his memory Dr. West visualized photographs of only five years ago showing these mountain desolate and dry, completely imeconomic for rice cultivation. During the last two or three years, incredible energy had been expended on these mountain terraces. The mountains were too steep, the terraces too small for efficient use of machinery. Human cultivators would consume too much rice, more energy laboring here than the submarginal rice harvests would replace. Yet these mountains had been laboriously terraced, magically irrigated, freshly handplanted with bristly new rice seedlings. "The moon is rising." Like glittering liquid steps, the terraced rice paddies shimmered down the mountainside into the dark canyon. "I smell smoke," the Major down there." Dr. West did not bother to disagree with him. Turning, he looked for the dim whiteness of another giant parachute, but there was no sign of Colonel Neller's escape capsule. IV T he Major held up his diining wet hand, feeling for the direction of the night breeze. God! I'm afraid the wind is coming from where we sprayed. Hell of a note if we get infected by our own spray. Got to move out of here fast!" Again, Dr. West did not bother to disagree with him. Dr. West's hand reached into his nylon flying suit and on into his commune worker's rags, where his fingers closed on the handle of a dagger he had not known was sheathed there. The Major pulled at his shoulder. "Move out! You may be innoculated, but I'm not." "You don't need to be afraid of this microbiological," Dr. West's voice replied smoothly. "Originally it was an unpredictable bacteria infection of the staph-strep group. When I was Director of Oriental Population Problem Research at U.C. the Defense Department gave us a contract. We were to breed a variety of mutated strains, resistant to the usual antibiotics." "Let's go." The Major shrilled. "Listen carefully," Dr. West's voice continued. "The particular strain in our aerosal spray is believed harmless to humans. Fred Gatson, vho was on my staff at U.C. as my Chief Bacteriologist, is convinced that adequate tests have been conducted. This strain only affects -- " "Let's go, let's go!" the Major interrupted. "A mild infection settles in the Fallopian tubes and in the spermatic ducts." "Sterilized," the Major grunted in partial imderstanding. "Kill 'em before they're born. Yeah, kill Chinks before they're conceived. Yeah, typically C.I.A. Let's get the hell out of here." "Not Chinese. No need to leave." Dr. West was remembering the cherubic face of Dr. Fred Gatson. Recent Harvard grad, Fred Gatson had been even yoimger than Dr. West when their were the big wheels in Oriental Population Problems Research. When Dr. Joe West was fired as Director, amazingly. Dr. Fred Gatson had been appointed to replace him. Second surprise, when the C.I.A. "freed" Joe West from his life sentence and imprisoned him in the basement of C.I.A. headquarters, Dr. Fred Gatson bashfully reappeared. It turned out Fred had scrambled still higher up the ladder of success. Dr. Fred Gatson was now a member of the Harvard Circle of the C.I.A. Facing Dr. West, Fred appeared xmcomfortable, but determined. Fred mostly described his most recent mutation of the staph-strep population control bacteria. "Quite strategic." "It doesn't affect people," Dr. West's voice repeated reassuringly to the Major. "You don't need to fear personal sterilization. The bacterial mutation is quite specific. It only affects Esks. "Eskimos? They're people. Same species. So it will affect me. You're lying so I won't panic," the Major blurted. "I have no intention of panicking. Let's get away from this capsule! Double-time! If Chink peasants catch us here where we sprayed -- I mean -- we won't father anything. They'll butcher us. Right now I'm not worried about my virility. Let's get out of here." -Te Major's heaving chest made a close target, but Dr. West managed to uncurl his own fingers from the handle of the concealed dagger. Those C.I.A. fellows were determined he should kill someone. Dr. West was equally determined he would not kill anyone. "We'll have to take the escape radio," Dr. West's voice said. "What radio are you talking about?" "Continuous signal sender." Dr. West removed it from the capsule. It barely filled the palm of his hand. Hope returned to the Major's voice. "The C.I.A. is looking out for us! C.I.A. snatchplane going to pick us up? Or is this a guerrilla wave length?" "Guerrilla -- " Dr. West lied; it was the communications wave length of the Maoist Police. "Let's go!" The Major was pulling at him again, making Dr. West's involuntary nervous system clench as if he had been conditioned to kill -- "Doc, our best chance is to get far, far away from this capsule before daylight shows it to the Chinks down there." The Major needed to clutch at any hope. "Then we hide and wait for the guerrillas." . Dr. West tried to keep up with the Major as he lumbered and splashed along the terraces. Joe West suspected there were few, if any, Chinese asleep down there in the canyon. His legs dragged. His legs felt so heavy -- His hand refused to let go of it, but he wanted to throw away the signal sender. Why should he obediently give himself up to the Maoist police? Dr. West couldn't make his fingers let go of the signal sender. "They really conditioned the carrying of this radio into my skull. "What?" The Major looked back. "Nothing." Joe West staggered on. With devilish energy, the Major began clambering up the sides of terraces, ascending the mountain like a monkey up a giant staircase. Dr. West's legs grew heavier and heavier, and he gasped for breath, dragging himself up over terraces mainly by the strength of his arms. His leg felt like swollen corpses. "Mental elephantiasis? Imaginary heavy legs? Hell!" Dr. West wondered when he would remember exactly what they had done to his legs. "Hurry up," the Major hissed from far above. T) ut Joe West already was exhausted. He gasped for breath, and his heart thudded heavily. As he struggled to climb over the lip of a terrace into the paddy, the muddy signal sender slipped out of his hand. The tiny radio slid back down the terrace wall. Dr. West clung there, then triumphantly bellied over into the rice paddy leaving the radio. His hands wanted to scramble back down and search for the signal sender. "Oh, but you can't make me do it. No C.I.A. assassins give me orders." He crawled forward across the paddy and struggled up the terrace above, leaving the radio lost in the darkness. "To hell with Harvard! I'm free." The Major came sliding back down. "Let me help you. That's okay, you're not in shape. Let's go. I won't leave you. Doc." The Major unmercifully hoisted Joe West to his feet. Supporting him, urging him, dragging him, the Major hauled Joe West up the terraced side of the mountain. Dr. West's legs kept sagging. "That's okay, do your best," the Major gasped. "We're Americans. We'll stick together." Dr. West wondered what the Major would say if and when he discovered Dr. West wore a Chinese commune worker's clothes under his nylon flying suit. "Doc, Doc! Hey, where's the little radio?" The Major began to shake him to search his outer pockets. "In my hand. No, I dropped it." "You dropped it?" the Major shrilled. "You just dropped our only chance." The Major scrambled back down the terrace, leaving Dr. West lying in the mud, listening to the Major slosh about below him. There was not one could find that signal sender in the dark. Dr. West lay there listening to his own uneven heartbeat. His heart sounded like ah candidate for an electronic pacemaker. "Best way to beat the Harvard Circle -- for my heart to stop." Dr. West stared up at the mcon; the Harvard Circle peered down at him from his imagination. Dr. George Bruning -- Deputy Director, C.I.A. Dr. Sammy Wynoski -- Chemopsychiatrist. Dr. Fred Gatson -- Population control expert; basteriologist. But there were two more members of the Harvard Circle! Dr. West's irregularly beating heart cued one of them out of his blocked memory. Tr. Einar R. Johansen had not been an acquaintance of Dr. West's, but Dr. West had recognized him in the basement of C.LA. headquarters. Dr. Johansen was easily recognizable. Photographs of such a pioneer heart surgeon frequently had appeared in medical journals. No doubt the horse-faced surgeon had once studied at Harvard, but more recently Dr. Johansen had been awarded a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from M.I.T. He was better known now as a neurosurgeon than as a heart surgeon, and still better known for his press conferences. He was the doctor who said: "The older I get, the softer my head, so the more I soak up. I learn more now than when I was a kid of forty. At this rate, when I'm eighty I'll revolutionize medicine." This enraged the A.M.A. On popscience T.V. shows, Dr. Johansen played with electric eels without wearing rubber gloves. He was ingeniously grounded against electrocution. He was the first surgeon"' to design and install an electronic heart pacemaker which was powered by the patient's neuron electricity. No internal batteries to wear out, no wires to fray, "My pacemaker lasts as long as the patient. Eh? Yes, longer!" The A.M.A. disapproved of such jovially irresponsible talk. Dr. Johansen's pictures no longer appeared in medical journals. His smiling horse face appeared in space journals. N.A.S.A. had retained him as a consultant to the BioPower project. The goal was a subminiature solid state transmitter utilizing a lifetime powet supply from the electrical energy of the astronaut's body. Where had the transmitter been implanted, the leg, the buttock? Dr. West's teeth gleamed in the moonlight. Some unlikely spot. Dr. West remembered Dr. Johahsen's wrinkled face bending over him. An operating table? "Before I'm through, sir," the old voice croaked, "You'll be a veri-, table electric eel. Hah!" Then the anesthetic engulfed him. Tr. West lay in the muddy --rice paddy. His legs adied He knew that Harvard Circle had not gone to all that trouble just to install a duplicate signal sender in his leg. High below the stars an aircraft droned overhead, its red and green wing lights flitting. Dr. West knew the C.I.A. had not commandeered an Air Force ramjet to fly him over China merely to spray the Esks. An expendable technician could do that. Yet the plan must have something to do with the Esks. The C.I.A. had selected him, and he was the man with the most unpopular theory about the Esks. He was the man who had been convicted of attempted genocide of the Eskimos. He was the most impopular man in the world. If the Maoist police caught him alive, if they recognized him as Dr. West, the mass murderer of the helpless Eskimos, the Chicomms wouldn't kill him if they realized he was Dr. West. The Chinese Federation of Nations jo#rfuHy would use him for political purposes. Other American had confessed to anything. Dr. West knew he was no stronger than they. He smiled with the ultimate fear and fumbled into his layers f wet clothing for the dagger. The Maoists would have enjoyed parading him. Even Mao nor photographed for three years, had expressed the desire to face "the murderous Dr. West, eye to eye!" Dr. West struggled to remove the dagger from its sheath. "Those fools, those stupid C:I.A. fools!" If the Chicomms took him alive, their glib diplomats would use him like acid to dissolve any last world goodwill the United States had managed to retain. Piously the Chinese representative would tell the General Assembly: "Any nation who would parachute the murderous convict Dr. West upon another nation must be guilty of more than germ warfare, more than genocide -- " Dr. West spat in the mud. He was imable to make his hand draw out the dagger. "You poor thing. You're as helpless as an imperialist potato bug complete with implicating little parachute and U.S. insignia on your wing covers. Even the C.I.A. can't be that stupid. They must see one move beyond what I'm seeing. The Major emerged grunting over the edge of the terrace. "Foimd it. I'll carry the signal sender now." Dr. West opened his mouth. He wanted to tell the Major tiiat the signal sender was tuned for the Maoist police wavelength, but he couldn't get the words out. Instead he followed the Major across the rice paddy and up the next terrace, and the next, and the next -- The Major came back and helped him again. "Do your best. Easy does it, old man." Dr. West was not an old man, at least he had been a vigorous young man when he was sentenced to prison. But his legs were an old man's legs, unbelievably heavy. "When we get to the top," the Major gasped, "I'm hoping there'll... uninhabited canyon on the other side. We can hide until... guerrillas trace... our radio signal." "In China, no place is uninhabited any more," Dr. West said. "You got the wrong attitude... mustn't give up... your C.I.A. guerrillas... come for us." The Major 'raised the tiny radio signal sender, which was squeaking their location to any Maoist police radio location finding equipment within a radius of fifty miles. By the time the Major had half carried Dr. West to the top of the mountain range, the moon was rapidly descending toward the mountains of Sinkiang. The flat top of the ridge glittered the moon's reflection. "Irrigation reservoir up here," the Major gasped. "Look at the big pipes and hoses and pumps. Never knew the Chinks had it in 'em!" "That's a high-voltage power line leading down into your uninhabited canyon," Dr. West said. "Doesn't mean there's Chinks down there. Never give up!" The Major led the way down the other side of the mountain. V '"They fell down terraces, slosh' through rice paddies, tripped over irrigation pipes, slid down endless terraces into the faintly humming canyon. This was how the Maoists had forced impossible mountains to yield rice crops. At the bottom of the canyon the power line led to an atomic generator plant. At the bottom of the canyon, the two men scrambled over an enormous concrete pipe. Dr. West heard the water rushing inside. With unlimited atomic-electric power the Chinese were piping water across vast distances. With an unlimited number of obedient hands, the Maoists had ordered terracing of mountains previously considered "impossible for wet-rice cultivation." Impossible these tiny rice paddies were for Chinese commune workers who needed # to # calories of rice-energy per day. If Chinese tended these inefficient vertical fields, they would need to eat the entire harvest in order to survive and mul-. tiply. There would be no surplus. But Dr. West knew that these tiny paddies were handtended by beings who could not only survive, but dould labor from dawn to dark and multiply like rabbits on only # calories of rice-energy per day! As the Major led the way across the dark canyon, he stumbled over the sleeping body of the Maoist solution to the agricultural problem. "Don't stangle him. Don't kill him," Dr. West hissed. "The man's an Esk." But the Major tightened his grip on the gurgling throat "Got to kill him. Would yell for help." "He's sure to be an Esk. I assume he's descended from at least three generations of Maoist conditioning. I believe if I ordered this Esk to go back to sleep, he would go back." "You assume -- you believe," the Major panted angrily. "I know -- he stinks like a Chink." There was a vertebral crunch, and the body shuddered and quivered like a dying fish. "He was a Chink." Dr. West did not try to explain how he knew the man was an Esk merely by standing near him. It was a feeling. "A very useful trick," Dr. George Bruning. Deputy Director of the C.I.A., had remarked. "You have a sixth sense there, Joe." Dr. West followed the Major down the canyon alcmg the side of the roaring concrete pipe. Someone, perhaps a thousand miles away, turned a rheostatic switch which electro magnetically opened giant valves, and the roar of irrigation water within the pipe increased. Ahead of Dr. West, the sky grew white with dawn. T he Major's gaze darted frantically from side to side. He appeared to be seardiing for a place of concealment, but all the natural vegetation in the canyon had been gathered, plucked, uprotted to feed the miserable cooking fires of the Esks. The two men threaded their way among sleeping lumps of cloth. Around dead fires, the faces of the sleeping Esks were animated, twitching, smiling, baring their teeth, seemingly more alive than when the Esks were conscious. Clutching his .# as though it were his mother's hand the Major tiptoed on, then looked back. It was evident he wanted to turn back. The further down the canyon they went, the more numerous the sleeping Esks. The brightening dawn illuminated the Mijor's frightened face. He kept glahdng up at the terraced imiountainsides for some place to hide. Yet he stubbornly continued down the canyon. In the canyon, sleeping clumps of men, women, children lay -- clustered together for warmth -- all around the two quietly walking men. The Major's hand closed on Dr. West's shoulder, transmitting his shivering fear to the Doctor. "Tell me they're Eskimos." the Major breathed. "If they're Chinese -- " "Chinese would be awake and screaming at us right now," Dr. West whispered. "The Esks don't pay much attention to us. Observe, the Esks sleep intensely, as if they're on another planet when they're asleep. Look at that smiling face. We've tried truth drugs, but no human has been able to learn what dreams the Esks have. Awake, the Esks don't know. It is as if the Esks lead two lives, concurrently yet separately. That is why the Chinese word for them is Dream Persons." A buzzer sounded, resounded up and down the canyon. Blankly, the Esks stood up. There was none of the yawning and stretching, eye-rubbing and giggling, hawking and spitting which would have characterized real Arctic Eskimos or Chinese or Americans. The awakened faces of the Esks became expressionless. The men and some of the women started climbing the steep trails among the rice terraces, their hoes already in their hands. Efficiently they did not urinate until they stood in the rice paddies. Up there on the terraces, the Esks began hoeing without breakfast. "What do we do now?" the Major whispered, still shivering as if he expected to be assailed by screaming Chinese with upraised hoes. "Do you think they've sent someone off to telephone for the Chinese soldiers?" He pointed at an overhead wire. Dr. West smiled down at the Esk children crowding around them. When he smiled at them, their blank faces reflected his smile, lighting up with joy almost like children's faces anywhere. Dr. West squatted down and tried to talk with them, using the Central Eskimo dialect he had learned in the Arctic. He tried introducing Cantonese words, then Mandarin Chinese. He looked up at the Major and shrugged and wearily smiled and shook his head. "These people -- the Esks -- have increased since I identified them in the Arctic ten years ago. Individually, they -- each generation -- has deteriorated as to outward awareness. The original little group I studied in the Arctic were excellent imitators of the Eskimos. But these people, these children, they're almost nonverbal. They're not imitating the Chinese. They're not trying very hard to imitate anything human." A heavily pregnant woman prodded one of the circle of boys and made upward motions with her hands. Evidently the boy was big enough; he should be up there working on the rice terraces. He appeared to be about ten years old. "That boy is about a year old," the Doctor said. "The wonderful and terrible thing is that these people's bodies mature so much more efficiently than ours. Their prenatal development is as perfectly straight forward as if God had had a plan -- this time." Tr. West became excited as he always did when he launched into the subject that had overwhelmed his life. "Why should our human fetuses take nine months to be born. Because of our evolutionary history on this planet, the growth of our embryos follows the old paths. Gills appear and are absorbed. An obsolete tail begins and disappears. Primitive appendages from our evolutionary past are recapitulated. This is our heriof changing life forms on this Earth." Dr. West hurled the bitter question no one could answer, "Now we are among people whose babies are bom in a month and mature in three years. That does not reflect the evolutionary history on this planet. Now tell me if the Esks are human?" "You murderer!" the Major hissed unexpectedly. "Finally I've figured out who you are. You genocidal maniac! You've ot to be Dr. West. On the T.V. news, your escape, a couple of months ago. You narrow maniac, are you telling me the Eskimos aren't human?" "These Esks aren't. The Eskimos are, if there are any real Eskimos still alive. Don't tell me even a calloused military mind like yours has been softened by the 'Esks are Eskimos, love the Eskimos campaign." "You murdered hundreds of Eskimos. Look at these little children. We just sprayed 'em," the Major bleated, as if it had been a death spray. The children scrambled about unconcernedly. A little girl clung to Dr. West's leg. "Don't tell me that little girl isn't human," the Major said. "She is human. Look at her little hands, ears, eyes." "You were happier when you thought we were spraying Chinese children," Dr. West retorted. The Major made an abrupt move with his .# and let his arm drop down hopelessly. "YouVe insane, criminally insane! Your were convicted of genocide and sent to a prison for the criminally insane. The Eskimos are the world's happiest, most cooperative people." "And you believe that murderers should be executed," Dr. West challenged, hoping the Major would fire the gun, kill him, foul up all the intricate, unknown plans of the C.I.A. "These are people," the Major pressed. "Call them Esks or Eskimos, they're just as human as we are. Right home at Edwards Air Force Base, whole crews of happy Eskimos are working at the base, more all the time. Wonderful, ob'edient, happy people, and you teU me they're not human." #'#"ou sound like a bleeding  heart of a Maoist," Dr. West retorted. "A rehash of the half-truths when I was cruxifexcoriated before the United Nations General Assembly. You're remembering the Chinese Communist Party Line." "You're the traitor. Genocidal maniac is the truth," the Major added more calmly: "That whole U.S. Administration was voted out of office at the next election." "A lot of voters believed the Communist Party line. It's funny now. My guilt rubbed off all over when only I made the decision. If you believe the Chinese fulminations of ten years ago, I made old Adolph Eichmann look like an innocent saint. I was the threat to all the yellow skins and brown and black. I was the racial butcher." "... because the Eskimos weren't bothering anybody." The Major couldn't keep his voice steady. "It wasn't their fault that radio active cesium is concentrated by the lichen-caribou food chain. The Eskimos always had eaten caribou. None of you wise-guy, know-it-all doctors told them not to -- " "The extreme mutational theory has no basis in fact. When will you stop confusing Eskimos with Esks?" "They're the same. It's a word trap, a phoney word trap to justify your plan for world genocide of the Eskimos. The Eskimos can't help it if they've started multiplying fast." "Major, you don't know anything, except what you've recalled in bits and pieces from old T.V. newscasts of ten years ago when you had a mental age of about ten and weren't paying much attention. How old do you think I was then? How old do I look now?" The Major blinked. "You're damn well preserved -- in prison you weren't in the sun. In prison is where you'll go if we ever get out of here. Right now I need you. You talk to these people. Tell them to hide us. Tell them we will free them from the Chinese. We'll give them self-determination, food, real clothing, medical supplies if they'll hide us from the Chinese." "Oh, brotherl" Dr. West laughed savagely. "You are terrified! Why not promise them guns and ammunition?" "Sure, we'll drop guns. Some of their people must be the guerrillas." "Don't you wish it were so?" Dr. West taunted. "These people aren't Eskimos. These people aren't human. These are Esks. Throw away your expectations of human behavior. Esks don't behave that way. Do you see any Chinese guards? Humans this miserable would need guards. Esks aren't human. They don't revolt. They feel no need to be guerrillas. Or to vote. They don't need to. They're getting their way. They're getting what they want -- or what something out there wants for them. "Tell them to hide us. That's an order." our world." "Tell them to hide us, damn you!" The Major's .# was raised again. "Where can they hide us? Under their ' bodies?" "They must have houses someplace." The Major peered about, Qhrugging, gesticulating, Dr.  West tried to communicate with some of the women. "They say to climb over that ridge, that hill to the next valley," he lied. "They say hide on the hill." He regretted his lie as they struggled up the terraces. His mouth had lied before he had a chance to think. It was as if the Harvard Circle of the C.I.A. had drummed into his skull that he must go to a hilltop. The signal sender would have more range from a high place. Was that it? His heavy legs ached and dragged. His heart thudded. He was exhausted. He couldn't make it all the way to the top of the mountain. It was a mountain of endless terraces, giant steps too big for any man. The world whirled dazzlingly bright as Dr. West fell in the mud. "You got to get up." The Major was pulling at him. "Saw a copter out there. A little speck, zigging around like it's looking for something. You don't think the Chicomms are tuned in on our guerrilla wave length?" Dr. West started up at the muddy little signal sender in the Major's huge hand. "Possible." That was the truth. In fact, it was the understatement of the year. The C.I.A. radio was tuned to the Maoist frequency. "How do I turn this thing off without busting it?" "Don't turn it of Probably the helicopter is simply supervising the Esks," Dr. West's mouth lied. "To turn it off, you break it. The signal sender will be broken, done for, and so will -- " "All right, let's go, we can still reach the top." The Major tried boosting him up the slippery wall of a terrace. "Got to reach the top. Irrigation pumps up there, I think. Can hide underneath. Won't be seen from air." The Major wheezed and gasped for breath, plainly feeling his forty-plus years and a candidate for a coronary. Dr. West fell again. "Leave me." He had difficulty enunciating the words. "I don't want you to die for me." "No, got to help you. In spite of everything we're on the same side, Doc." With strength and tenderness, the Majot helped Dr. West climb. "Some time -- when you got time -- you got to prove to me those Esks down there are different from: Eskimos. I don't believe it. I'll never believe it." VI W hen the two men finally wormed under the throbbing irrigation pump on the crest of the hill. Dr. West regained his breath and spoke intently through the roar of the pump. "If you could compare their chromosomes under the electron microscope, if you were a keen observer, you would see that recipe which guides the growth of an Esk, in too neat, too perfect, too repetitive among different individuals to be -- human." Deaf to a maniac's ravings, the Major peered out, clutching his .# savagely as if it were an antiaircraft weapon. "The copter's moving to a new position, like they're -- sure as hell -- looking for something." "The simplest misexplanation is yours, that the Esks are mutated Eskimos." Dr. West continued talking at cross-purposes to the Major. "Occam's Razor, an old scientific rule of thumb, suggests if there are several possible explanations for a mystery, pick the simplest. Mutated Eskimos is the simplest explanation. It is the most conservative explanation. It is the explanation picked by so-called reputable physioligists. It is the explanation people want to continue to believe." "The copters moving out over the valley where we were -- " The Major stopped. The Doctor's hand closed around the dagger within his layers of clothing, and he kept talking as though each sentence might be his last. "Mutations usually involve a single trait or related set of traits. But any honest study of the Esks shows they differ from human, beings in hundreds of ways, physiologically and psychologically." "The copter is moving from position to position like the # Tre trying to get a radio-location fix on us. Do you think this signalsender -- " "And the Esk child acts happier and more cooperative than a human child and efficiently grows into an adult in three years. Eating only six hundred calories of food a day, an adult Esk outworks a Chinaman. And breed, breed like lemmings I For what purpose are the Esks overrunning the Earth? Why are the Chinese, we, everyone letting the Esks multiply?" "The copter's heading in our direction." "The simplest misexplanation is that the Chinese are using the Esks for politico-economic purposes. The Esks ease the Chinese agricultural problem. The Esks produce farm surpluses. The Esks produce a favorable balance of trade. The Esk manpower freed Chinese manpower to police India. But all this is the superficial explanation. It does not reveal the underlying -- " Copter straight for us!" The Major began smashing the signal sender with the butt of his .#. Dr. West could not stop talking. He expected to be stilled for ever. "Even our President seems to believe the simpleheaded explanation that the Chinese are using, breeding, the Esks as part of the endless war, simple power politics. But I believe the Esks are using the Chinese!" T he clattering wail of the jetcopter chewed through the roar of the pump. Under the iron pump, as if cued by the soimds of the helicopter, Dr. West's hand pulled down the zipper, opening the Air Force blue nylon and freeing the quilted Chinese blue cotton within. The copter squatted down. It was small, with a plastic bubble cocli The Major stared from the two heads inside to his .# to Dr, West. As the copter engine squealed to a stop, the Major stared unbelieving at Dr. West. "YouVe got on a coolie costume. All planned! Nothing for me. Good god, what was intended for me? Dr. West tried to release his own fingers from the dagger han die inside the padded Chinese coat. "I don't know. I swear to you I don't know." iThe black boots of a Maoist policeman sprang from the cop ter to the Chinese mountain top and ran toward the pump. The Major rolled, firing his boom .  V'  "I; w I! I ' x:  y e  r f   . , . V . " .a h J  Z"  V't Av X  z' 'X " 'I  #'  X X '   X ' x ing, deafening .# automatic three times. The Major's wideeyed face twisted back toward Dr. West, but the round eye of the .# followed too slowly. With surgical precision, Dr. West's hand thrust the dagger into the auricle of the Major's heart. Dr. West, the man, sobbed. Helpless anguish lay within his body which he could not control. A Chinese hand disengaged his fingers from the dagger. HT iu," exclaimed the excited, young Cantonese voice above Dr. West's body. 'Where could he have gotten such a dag"My eyes can see it is a Mark torted. "This foreign devil may have killed an Inner Officer to get it. Or it was stolen; but these official daggers are numbered It number on the blade -- it is a low and important number!" "Liu, with care we should ger was issued to him." The young Cantonese voice thickened. "Great care, and yet he is only wearing commune clothing, and he has the white corpse-face of a typical Big-Nose, and yet there is the radio signal to explain. See, here is the little transmitter. The other Big-Nose must have smashed it. Extensive photographs should be taken for the record or our buttocks may be burnt." The black boots ran back to the copter. the copter pilot nudged Dr. West with his boot toe. "Did you understand our words?" Dr. West feigned unconsciousness. "He does. He understands us," the copter pilot called. The younger man with the camera backed off, and the copter pilot followed. Like doctors in consultation, in sinister whispers they argued. Then the young Maoist policeman advanced warily toward the paHent is with great regret official regulations require u to fiihd your wrists to your ankles," he blurted. "I, for one, would never do such a thing." With professional expertise, he knotted the rope. The rope was not tight. The young Maoist policeman had been careful not to interfere with Dr. West's circulation. Having already tied him so he could not walk, the two men had to hoist Dr. West and carry him to the helicopter. 'Tor a thin man -- very heavy!" the young one gasped. "Big bones. Primitive skeleton. Typical Big-Nose," the pilot retorted. "Did you notice the wrists of the dead one are hairy as an apes!" The young voice echoed the racial disgust. "Weak, blue eyes. Shot at me twice." "Three times. So close to your belly even a drunken sot Imperialist should not miss. Either you are dead or there was something wrong with his bullets." As the helicopter scuttled upward, it side-slipped violently. Its door flew open. The sack in which the Maoist policeman had collected the battered signal sender, the dagger, Dr. West's C.I.A. "escape kit" and the .# slid across the dented aluminum floor, disgorging its contents. The young policeman fell to his knees, snatching at these sliding objects. The copter lurched upward, slamming the door shut, and the Major's head flopped against Dr. West's boimd foot and wrist. The Major's blue eyes were white rimmed in death. Dr. West closed his own eyes. Whiplashes of self-flagdlation slashed through the numbness inside his skull. J caii rationalize that those master minds in Harvard Cir cle killed him. When he turned the muzzle of the .# tne, all my vainglorious hopes that he would kill me turned intq lies. Instinctively I dodged from the nothingness oi death. My mind and body joined in thrusting the dagger with all my strength as if he were an enemy. God help my friends! My hand would have killed him even if I had been free from narcohypnosis, and I may have been free. The copter tilted. Dr. West stared down at the truncated mountain peaks. The guys in the Harvard Circle should be happy now. The Chinese have me. Tiny reservoirs, thin pipelines, in every direction the Chinese world was terraced and glittering with microscopic rice paddies. Ten years ago these had been 'barren mountains, but now the myriad, multiplying hands of the Eks were dhhngihg the world. Ten years ago in the Arctic, I thought I was free to act like God. I thought I realized the implications of the group of Eskimos on the Boothia Peninsula, who suddenly and mysteriously had outgrown their food supply. The Canadian Government began parachuting additional Family Allowance to them. More and more planes, more and more food drops begat more and more Eskimos. The authorities in Ottawa labelled my on-the-spot estimate of the birth rate impossible. When I went on to Washington and tried to report the even more sinister evidence I had collected as to the origin of the Esks and finally asserted they were not Eskimos, the official reaction was Oh, youre Dr. West who was fired from some population study at the University of California. No wonder you were fired; youre -- uh -- obviously emotionally disturbed.' By the next summer the damned fools in Ottowa and Waslungton were sending icebreakers towing whole barge loads of food. Human life is sacre(T they said. No one must starve There were plans to relocate the surplus Eskimos, distributing them throughout the North. By now Canadian Government officials admitted that the birth rate of the Boothia Eskimos was '"startling"; but they said "we can hardly drown the little beggars just because their mothers refuse to swallow birth-control pills." With a bush planeload of luggage, I flew back to the Boothia Peninsula before the food barges could get through the shore ice. Heaving made my decision, I felt a tremendous freedom to act. Gambling with peoples lives is everyday work for doctors. At that time the staphyloccocus strains which specifically infect the Fallopian tubes and spermatic ducts had not been fully tested on a broad sample of human beings. "The Jime sun melted the snowbanks. The insects and birds appeared, and the Eskimos gathered to await the unloading of the barges. Laughing and frolicking, the Eskimos played with the aerosol cans labelled mosquito spray, which Dr. West was handing out to them. Of the two thousand Eskimos, the largest concentration of Eskimos the North had ever seen, less than one hundred showed any symptoms of infection. The other # turned out to be Esks. The Esks turned out to be immune to the ordinary human infections. Of the hundred real Eskimos, twenty-two died. They should not have died, but they died from this minor staphylococcus infection. The hunt lyas on. There I stood. The tragedy became much greater than my Hie or death or the death of the twentytwo Eskimos, It was my trial for attempted genocide that brought the attention of the world upon the plight of the rapidly increasing 'Esks. The Swedes and Russians sent food. In the United Nations General Assembly the oriental bloc seized upon my guilt and made it the guilt of Canada and the United States. The Chinese and other nations sent massive aid, and the evacuation of surplus Eskimos to them and pay the transportation costs began. The Esks spread -- That is my crucial guilt, that my actions aided the spread of Esks. I should have ended myself then. I would not have lived alone! The helicopter veered, and far below was exposed the gray overcast that shrouds any modern city. The copter pilot chattered through his radio to the ground. Baring his teeth, Dr. West lunged at the door of the helicopter. As his skull rammed the door outward, his eyes glimpsed nothingness. Surprisingly strong hands dragged his head and shoulders back into the helicopter. "Liu, this one would have fallen to his ancestors -- but he paused.' The blades of the helicopter ' whirled through the thickening smog. The continuous squealing agony of its jet engine lowered. With a bounce that slammed Dr. West's face against the floor, the copter landed ; and the Maoist policeman kicked the door open. "You're my responsibility no more," the young policeman laughed with relief, and Dr. West was dragged out of the copter by noisy, black-uniformed, young Chinese. "The Interrogator must think this Big-Nose is a big fish," a girl's voice excitedly laughed. Another voice asked: "Has proper caution been taken to telephone Peking, Capital of the A second girl's voice laughed : "Liu, you handsome pilot, where are you studying tonight?" An inhaling gasp quieted the black-uniformed crowd on the heli-roof of the massive concrete police headquarters. "Has no protection been taken against infection? You are all quarantined! Orderly, place the assassin on the cart. No, don't wheel him this way. Take him down through the freight elevator." Dr. West was to recognize this cold voice again after he had been stripped, sprayed, fumigated and pricked for a blood sample. He lay on a cold operating table. "Cover him with a sheet." It was the voice of the Interrogator. The ceiling was enamelled white. "Make him comfortable with a # c.c. injection." Dr. West began to relax. He felt warmer. The effect was similar to a narcotic the Harvard Circle had administered. "You will be interested to know that a large proportion of the working people in the United States and the intellectuafs and the medical people, such as yourself, as you no doubt know, are in sympathy with the peace-loving aims of the Chinese Federation of Nations. When I say interested I mean you will be interested to know that we already had been notified of your war-mongering flight by many highly placed sources in the United States. The exact flight plan of your intruding aircraft was known to us, and proper authorities had been notified, and of course your obsolete aircraft was tracked by our radar and our excellent interceptors, which could have shot it down at any time had such an order been given." Dr. West listened to the intense voice but had difficulty following its meanings. "You will be interested to know that in a few hours our excellent medical technicians will have positively identified the aerosol spray which descended from your aircraft, and no doubt they already have several cures for it. You need not fear symptoms from your own exposure to the spray. We will innoculate you against its effects. To confirm our already excellent diagnosis, please tell us what nonfiltrable virus is involved?" D r. West awakened slightly. He had assumed, guessed, that a bacterial agent of the staph-strep group had been used. This bacterium should be easily recognizable by culturing and microscopic inspection. Why was the Interrogator talking about a nonfiltrable virus? Pathologists and technicians tend to blame a nonfiltrable virus when "What virus were you forced to spray against your will upon helpless women and children. Each word you speak will save the life of a child." Dr. West knew that the only effective resistance when undergoing interrogation is to say nothing. As in a psychological test, anything you say, lie or truth, will be filed and crossfiled, so that the more you lie, the more clearly the watery rings of truth will rise through the pool of lies. Dr. West tried to say nothing. But his mouth opened. As his mouth began to speak, Dr. West realized that this would not be a dialogue between himself and the Interrogator. Three points of view were present. The third was speaking from his mouth now. The Harvard Circle had entered the interrogation room -- in spirit, a damn treacherous spirit! T am Dr. Joseph West,' his mouth announced. "Ten years ago I attempted to exterminate the Eskimos." What was the Harvard Circle trying to do to him? "We are aware of who you are." Then the Interrogator whispered something aside to someone else. "Answer our questions please' the Interrogator continued. "Do not volunteer extraneous information. We know everything already. Answer our questions quickly," the Interrogator's voice rose. "What is the viral agent?" "I am Dr. West," his mouth repeated. "Dr. Joseph West. This can be easily checked. No doubt there are photographs of me in your news archives. Dr. Joseph West -- I was convicted of Eskimo genocide. I am acknowledged to be the greatest expert on the Esks, Eskimos, Dream Persons as you term them. During my years in prison I was allowed to continue my research." This last was a lie. Dr. West had vegetated in prison. "Answer the question! What is the virus?" The Interrogator sounded nervous. "What's the virus?". Dr. West stared at the ceiling grill. Something had winked, reflected light, a glass lens behind the grill. No doubt they were filming and recording. He tried to move his arm, but it was strapped, and something was pressing into his wrist. No doubt his pulse and perspiration reactions were being taped. The Harvard Circle really might have notified Chinese Communist agents in the United States that his aircraft was coming over! forgery! Your pulse becomes abnormally fast," the Interrogator's voice said. "You feel guilt and fear -- but be assured we will do nothing to harm you. We bow down before the immortal thoughts of our Grandfather Mao : 'All men should be treated both with justice and mercy. Therefore feel free to tell us the virus!"   pulse rate was rage! Those C.I.A. spooks callously had prepared him to murder the Major as one minor maneuver. The spraying, the ejection, the dagger, the signal sender, the stabbing -- all were intended to increase Dr. West's chances of being taken alive by the Maoist Police. All were intended to give him an aura of importance. "I am Dr. Joseph West," his mouth repeated with sickening fatuousness. "Damn it!" Dr. West shouted. "How the hell do I know what I was in that spray. They let me think it was a bacterial agent to sterilize the Esks, to demonstrate to you that selective sterilization of the Esks is possible. And it is possible!" "Good, we are glad to hear that you will cooperate. In t#rpical fashion, your Central Intelligency Agency has tricked you. What virus do you think the spray contained?" "Virus? How the hell should I know? I doubt if it is a virus, but I'll give you three guesses. One, a virus with a long incubation period. In about #I days the Esks will undergo interesting changes. Personality reversal. Cute. Changed into what they really are. They'll tear you apart." Dr. West gasped for breath, unsure whether he or the Harvard Circle was lying now. "Number two," he laughed. "The spray could consist of distilled water. No wonder your medical personnel are baffled. But don't let it baffle you. It means the spray run was a decoy. The C.I.A. wanted to use an Air Force plane to attract your attention to something or distract your attention from something. The State Department in Washington did not want the C.I.A. Warhawks to use a real bacterial spray that would force you toward retaliation. So, distilled water? Does that make Peking feel safer? "Number three," Dr. West laughed in confusion. "This is the possibility to worry you tonight. You"H never sweat it out of me because I don't know what it is, except to say that the men in the Harvard Circle get up very very early in the morning, and when they go to this much trouble to deliver a man to China, they must have one hell of a reason." rrhe Interrogator made a sad '  sighing sound. "Please, but you must tell us the truth. Dr. scientist who searches for Truth. Ten years ago when you made your free decision to eliminate the Dream Persons, you acted upon it freely because you believed it was the Truth. In China you would never have been considered a criminal because you believed in Truth. You could -- you still can live here freely to work and study. In the Chinese Federation of Nations we give honor and assistance to all searchers after Truth. As our Grandfather Mao once said: (May a thousand blossoms bloom, a thousand schools of thought contend.) Only in China are you free to speak the truth. What virus did your Central Intelligence Agency force you to spray upon the peace-loving peoples of the world This soothing flow of words continued until Dr. West began to drowse. He was physically exhausted. The third party to the trilogue, the Harvard Circle, refused to feed new answers into his mouth. It was as if the start of the interrogation had cued from his skull his oral self-identification as I)r. Joseph West, famous genocide, expert on Esks. Now the Harvard Circle wanted to say no more at this time. Or he had forgotten what he was supposed -- "You can sleep as soon as you tell all about the virus. Dr. West." The Interrogator resorted to flashing lights and buzzers and, after an indeterminate period of time, to small electric shocks. Once or twice Dr. West tried to argue, vaguely aware that his voice was incoherent. Suddenly he screamed; his breath squawled! God, what were they doing to him? heard his voice squawk. Torture had cued the next communication from the Harvard Circle. his hoarse voice repeated over and over. No matter what they did to him, try as he could, he was unable to tell the Interrogator what the message was. "Stop them, stop them. I don't know." "Of course we cannot actually take him to our beloved Chairman," the Interrogator's voice agreed with someone equally invisible. "Apologies that so much time has been spent; a little more time will be needed; electrocranial acupuncture is required if we are to free the core of truth in this man. It seems that rigid blockades have been placed in his memory, perhaps hypnotically." Oblivion. 'There were black silk slippers ' on his bare feet. He lay in a different room. He was wearing a coarse gray cloth uniform. His head ached. When he raised his fingers to his head, he found his hair had been shaved off and there were a number of bumps, little knobs, on his scalp. He could find no evidence of torture on his body. His legs ached and appeared swollen, but this probably was due to... he knew but couldn't remember What had caused his swollen legs. Perhaps the unaccustomed exercise of struging up and down mountain rice-terraces? An intense-faced Chinese hurried into the white room. The man inhaled, standing very straight in his gleaming, black silk robe, which was the historical Chinese costume Maoist officials had reassumed in recent years. Dr. West recalled that the color black symbolized virtue, and the embroidered dragons, good luck and power. Coarse blue cotton uniforms were for the troops. "Time is flowing past." The man added with a typical interrogator's ploy: "Everything is known." In recognition of that intense voice. Dr. West's body winced, and it was with a drying mouth that he tried to answer back like a punished adolescent. "If you know everything -- you are too prescient to be the -- Interrogator. You should be God or Mao "That is a sacrilegious statement to your god and to Mao the center of the world." "Then I have been flown to Peking?" "You have been disinfected both externally and internally," the Interrogator replied. "You have the honor..." But a man in a thick, leaden apron with goggles on his forehead resembling a second set of eyes interrupted. "Ah, -- we need him for an hour now." Dr. West recognized the man's profession as X-ray specialist. Very funny. Did they intend to X ray his internal organs for bombs? "Later! It is too late. The time has been set." In the Interrogator's voice there was irritation and strain, and he turned back to Dr. West and managed a conspiratorial smile. "You are the first foreigner in three years to be so honored. This you will remember and cherish. You can drink your tea later." "Ta-tung!" the Interrogator shouted : "The eastern sky reddens. The sun rises And in China the line of Maos has come! They strive for the welfare of the people. They are the great saviours of the people!" Two men dressed in black silk who appeared to be minor officials trundled in on a low vehicle with four padded seats. Dr. West thought it resembled an electric cart for a golf foursome. The golf cart was followed by half a dozen bored soldiers. They stood scratching inside their padded blue uniforms while the two men in black bowed imenthusiastically toward the Interrogator. "Ready? We only have the office for ten minutes." "He can understand everything you say," the Interrogator snapped. One official glanced at his wristwatch, then wearily rolled his gaze to the ceiling. "You should have notified me of that fact in writing." It was plain that the Interrogator had much less influence here in Peking.  A s the electric cart trundled along endless concrete corridors, the soldiers lagged further and further behind; and Dr. West realized the building must cover acres of ground, a veritable Pentagon. Even seated in the cart, he was in pain from his swollen legs. The electric cart whirred on and on. His head felt as if a fist were tightening inside. Apparently the Interrogator's electric needles had failed to discharge any vard Circle must have planned one sight, one reaction which would cue a synapse in the recesses of his brain, releasing the message to his conscious mind. It seemed obvious whom he was being taken to see, face to face. His pulse was racing as if his body expected to be cued to violent action. If there was a message in his? skull. Dr. West thought it must be a dandy to justify the maneuvers of the Harvard Circle. Again, he remembered the blue eyes of the Major widening. Good God, the Major's voice cried. What was intended for me? Dr. West began to shiver uncontrollably. He wanted to jump off the cart. The smiling faces closed in on him : Dr. George Bruning, Deputy Director of the C.I.A.; Dr. Sammy Wjmoski, chemophychiatrist; Dr. Fred Gatson, bacteriologist; Dr. Einar Johansen, neurosurgeon. But there had been another member of the Harvard Circle.  Tom Randolph, a narrow-eyed man who chain-smoked cigarettes as if he had a death wish, had become a full professor of parapsychology at Duke University at age twenty-six. In the basement of C.I.A. headquarters. Dr. West had recognized Tom's offkilter face. While Joe West had been a graduate medical student at Harvard, Tom Randolph had been the undergrad, who led the protest march which culminated in the dynamiting of the Quad. The crazy kid should have ended in jail instead of as a Ph.D lars of Defense Department money for extra sensory research. Surprisingly, Tom Randolph had resigned to take a seemingly less important position. Thisi was with the Central Intelligence Agency when the President of the United States appointed fdlow Harvard ynan George Bruning as Deputy Director. To Dr. West, the memory of Tom Randolph's narrow eyes inspecting him as if he were as expendable as a bomb was terrifying. Tom Randolph's voice had rasped. "Remember, Joe, when we were young wise-guys at Harvard and you scared hell out of me at a drinking party. That's what turned me on extra-sensory research." D r. Joe West felt claustrophobia even tighter than when he was trapped in the aircraft capsule, and he tried to climb off the electric cart. But they were too strong for him. The carved dragon doors opened, and the dwarfed man behind the huge desk glanced up. He wore a simple, agricultural commune costume. West's mouth immediately announced. "You are a double." The man blinked and glanced at the Interrogator's shocked face. The Interrogator whirled, screaming at Dr. West that he was insulting the Chairman of the World, the Father of the Chinese Federation of Nations. For a moment Dr. West experienced the weird feeling that he had been about to explode. The faces of the Harvard Circle, electric eels, Bio-Power, heavy  legs, for those sons of bitches a bomb that walked like a man and Another official appeared from a side door. "Quiet please. Clear the room. Your scheduled time is over. The room is needed." The man behind the desk rose obediently and departed. Even before the Interrogator was able to stop screaming, a third official appeared with soldiers. "Lieutenant, investigate ' this foreign prisoner's documentlocator number. Update his Sparrow Folder and file in Pending." Some afternoons Dr. West was taken from his cell to a waiting room. Through tiie swinging door to the main waiting room he glimpsed nervous men in Indonesian garb with briefcases and weary men in western suits who sat on benches day after day. Sometimes he recognized the Australian Premier. When janitors began sweeping the floor, the men with briefcases would file out and Dr. West would be taken back to his cell. Once a Lieutenant peered through the bars: "Ah, I hoped I'd locate you eventually. AcccMTding to records transferred ftotxs, Szediuan Province, the #day incubation period for unknown infectious disease is over. Now you can be shot." ne sleeping period he was awakened, and a barber shaved him. Dr. West protested. "This is the wrong time to go to the waiting room." After a month in the cell block, Dr. West tended to become irritable whenever the freedom of normal routine was disturbed. An electric cart transported him to his waiting room and to his surprise into the main waiting room where the janitors were emptying the ash trays and on into the empty office with the large desk where he had last seen the Interrogator and on along a hall into a large-roomed apartment which was dim because the man was watching television. At the end of the news program, the man switched off the T.V. set by remote control. "Is this Dr. Joseph West?" "Yes, Chairman. His file has been placed on the tea table at your left hand." "Some years ago when I still believed there was a purpose to be served by personally making speeches, I announced to the world that I wanted to meet you eye to eye. Dr. West. The implication then was that I would righteously tear you limb from limb. The occasion was my address to the United Nations General Assembly on the subject of the attempted genocide of the Eskimos by you and persons unknown, such as the United States government." Dr. West made no attempt to from the Harvard Circle emerged from his mouth, but now Dr. George Brunings voice was echoing in his memory: "Listen and man speaks of his strengths and beliefs; soon his contradictions and weaknesses will stick out like handles by which you can seize him." padded chair. Dr. West saw that Mao HI was not wearing a simple commune costume. He was engulfed in an ornate black silk robe embroidered with a traditional dragon. "Tonight while I was watching television coverage of the latest C.I.A. intruder aircraft to crash, I was reminded of an intelligence brief on my desk some months ago. This extrapolated a minimum of facts into a theory that a Dr. West had been delivered to China because I once had expressed a desire to meet him. This amused me at the .time. It would be better for your President to communicate with me directly. I am a busy man and cannot deal with minor intermediaries." Dr. West observed the awkward position of Mao Ill's right wrist and left leg. Although Mao man, evidently he had suffered a paralytic stroke. Probably about three years ago when he vanished from the public eye. "The intruder aircraft which crashed tonight was a converted passenger transport painthis precise voice. "It contained an estimated # Eskimos, confined in a dozen large parachute ejection capsules. After the crash, the capsules saved many of the corpses from burning." D r. West straightened mentally, glimpsing the unknowable faces of the Harvard Circle. What was going on? # Eskimos mur-' dered. to be parachuted into the mountainous region of Szechuan Province where our Dream Persons now comprise more than # of the population. The bodies of these Eskimos, or American Dream Persons, were dressed in commune costumes. They were equipped with machine pistols, plastic explosives, miniature radios and related equipment as if the C.I.A. intended that they organize guerrilla warfare. As my grandfaither, Mao Tise-taig, often said: 'The guerrilla is the fish who swims among the people.' But to swim among our Dream Persons would be more frustrating." to hear his own voice. "Times have changed since my grandfather was Chairman. He had no Dream Persons to perplex him. Surely you C.I.A. assassins do not really believe that American Eskimos or even a more sentient strain of American Dream Persons could arouse our Dream Persons." This was a statement rather than a question. Like other leadmonologue. "It is not psychologically possible for Dream Persons to take the aggressive initiative necessary for revolution. Your Eskimos cannot arouse our Dream Persons because there is nothing to arouse. If your heavily armed corpses are not Eskimos, if they are American Dream Persons the joke is even stranger. This is like sending the blind to teach the blind how to see." Dr. West felt physically ill, suspecting the black aircraft had been purposely crashed by the Harvard Circle. The planeload of Esks might be simply to remind the Chinese that the C.I.A's Esk expert was filed away somewhere in a Peking prison. Had those Harvard know-it-alls murdered # Esks as another little move in the attempt to place an American face to face with Mao... Marxist-Maoists are antiing, "because we have faith in mankind's ability to find new food supplies, new living space beneath the sea, new planets. There cannot be too many Chinese when there is so much work to be done. For the present, there cannot be too many Dream Persons. It is strange that the C.I.A. would send you to China. From the beginning you have had a closed mind concerning the Esks. Dr. West, what rational message could you possibly bring?" D r. West stood there swaying. He did not know. If the Harvard Circle had given him a or buried too deep in his skull. He stood face to face with Mao cued... Marxist-Maoist position regarding the origin of the Dream that the renewed thermonuclear testing by Russia in the Arctic during the # O's caused the mutation. No other nation would have both the vicious deviationist disregard for hum #; tte technological clumesVI plode weapons so uhecteffly filthy with radioactive cesium." This cued the one-track in Dr. West's mind. "The mutation theory has no basis in fa -- " "The lichens, the little plants on Arctic rocks, were contaminated with radioactive cesium," Mao Ill's voice swept on emotionally, drowning Dr. West's voice. "The lichens were like rice to the herds of caribou, and radioactive cesium concentrated in certain organs of these extinct beasts who were eaten by the Eskimos, who are an Oriental People. Don't tell me there was no mutation!" dently emotionally involved with his interpretation of the Esks. "The most important mutation in the world took place on the Boothia Peninsula in the Canadian Northwest Territories. An oriental child was born." "Even though there were not Three Wise Men in attendance, even though no angels sang' "the metabolism of this child wan at least three times as efficient, and he matured in one fifth as many years as other children. Whenever this precocious Eskimo mated, from each conception to the time of birth was only a month." Near Mao Ill's rit hand gleamed a glass of water. He looked at it longingly. "The rapid multiplication of these Dream Persons has proved vital to the ritful growth of the Chinese Federation of Nations. My original decision to rescue the Eskimos from imperialist genocide has been proven correct." Mao Ill's right hand jerked, and he stared at Dr. West. "I recall from the United Nations discussions of ten years ago, your own theory of the origin of that first Dream Person was more unlikely and -- sinister. "I was the first; I was encamped on the Boothia Peninsula within five years after the event took place." Dr. West spoke quickly. "I interviewed the Eskimos who -- " "There is no need for you to deterrupted. "You have attempted to justify your mass murder on many occasions. I, for one, would be equally disturbed if I believed your theory." A Tao Ill's right hand made a tentative movement toward the glass of water. "At the present time it is to the advantage of the Chinese Federation of NaDream Persons at the very least." "And drown the world!" "Are you worried about the disappearance of hairy, Anglo-Saxon man? Because the Dream Person's traits invariably are domihaps the world would be a happier and more peaceful place if all peoples were absorbed by the Dream Persons? Are you sure there is not already a political . splinter group in the United States which has decided I am a Dream Person, a degenerate Eskimo? It is not true. Dream Persons are remarkably unqualified for the violent leadership that is necessary in the world today." Awkwardly, Mao Ill's paralyzed right hand attempted to reach the glass. "The Chinese people and all the peace-loving peoples of the world know that the vicious racist American propaganda campaign is to delude the Chinese Federation of Nations into giving up our greatest source of economic growth, the Dream Persons!" Dr. West watched the shivering hand. Instinctively, because he was a fellow human being his eyes wanted Mao Ill's hand to be able to reach, to grasp the glass of water. ed the glass in his hand. Shuddering, he raised it to his lips. When he had finished, an attendant stepped from the shadows to take the glass. "No, no," Mao time I will not drop it." Dr. West's eyes concentrated on the cautiously moving hand on its long journey with the empty glass down toward the table. The glass clunked on the table. "Ah! You see I am making great improvement. Until tonight I always broke the glass. Iam informed you originally were a medical doctor who attempted to save Hves rather than destroy them? If so, you will understand the importance in my condition of such a sudden improvement. It was as if a voice in my head was telling my hand to move downward. Amazingly, my hand obeyed. No doubt new nerve wires have been growing as my doctors promised, growing past the dead spot in my brain, and tonight contact is made! Look at this. I am going to raise my arm. Soon, you will see, soon I will stand before the people again. I will astound the world with my words. This is the greatest moment in history of the world!" IX XThile Dr. West's eyes watchup. 'T am standing!" Fall, you big-mouthed, little tyrant! Dr. West thought. setting the table and glass. Attendants sprang from the shaddier's hand closed on Dr. West's elbow to lead him from the room. Tell them to leave me alone! Dr. West thought. gasped. Tell them to bring me a chair! collapsed on his couch. Dr. West sat down. His heavy legs were twitching, and he was reminded of Galvani's early experiments with electricity and a frog's legs. His legs tingled. His face felt liumb with shock. Those incredible Harvard medicine men! Heavy legs, electric eels, biopMDwer, jarapsychology, this was why they had connived to maneuver an American into close proximity with the Chairman of the Chinese Federation of Nations, the ruler of four fifths of the population of the world. Within how many feet of Dr. West was afraid he was a poor choice. Had the Harvard Circle selected him because Mao Dr. West eye to eye? Dr. West knew he was a helluva choice. When he was a med student at Harvard, Joe West had irritated Sammy Wynoski. "That's not But Joe West had possessed a certain empathy and power of suggestion that sometimes extended its corona to more imaginative and gullible persons such as undergrad Tom Randolph. Professor Tom Randolph's experiments at Duke University in which one soldier attempted to control another hadn't satisfied the Defense Department. Now Dr. West remembered Tom Randolph's excuse. human's biopower to broadcast his thoughts through his neuron-electrical system is simply too weak." But a man with biological batteries as powerful as an electric eel's installed in his swollen legs, Dr. West thought, such a man from a close distance... Tell them to hrin me a hiss oi water. 'Bring him a glass of water," his couch. Because there were no peculiar reactions from the other Chinese in the room. Dr. West concluded that he had been neatly conditioned to direct his control at only Tell them to prepare a couch for me. Tell them you believe I have a healing power. When I am neat you, your paralysis is cured. When the water was brought. Dr. West was afraid to drink. It might be poisoned. He knew he would have to suppress such fears. Now every move would be into the unknown. When the couch was brought. Dr. West was afraid to sleep. What was going on in Mao Ill's head? The man had not spoken or moved since -- said. "What do you wish to speak about?" Oeep until I awaken you. Dr. West lay there staring up at the triumphantly grinning faces of the Harvard Circle. Dr. George Bruning, boy wonder, geophysicist, astronaut, political climber, and buddy of the President. Dr. Sam Wynoski, chemopsychiatrist. Dr. Fred Gatson, bacteriologist and ladder climber. Dr. Einar Johansen, neurosurgeon and electric eel fancier. Dr. Tom Randolph, parapsychologist. You C.I.A. master minds. Dr. West thought so gently that Mao ceeded in planting your man in Peking. But am I your man? You may have implanted general guidelines in my skull such as "love America." But you could never prepare me for all the quick and unexpected decisions a new dictator must make. I have a feeling I am free now -- to do what I want. Soon we'll find out. Like any pinball machine, the fun was in frying to heat if. But like no ether, if was frying to beat you tool Retu rn I t was not an ordinary gambling casino. And this, for the police if S.L.A., posed a special problem. The outspacers who had set up the casino had placed their massive ship directly above the tables, so that in the event of a raid the jets would destroy the tables. Efficient, officer Joseph Tinbane thought to himself morosely. With one blast the outspacers left Terra and simultaneously destroyed all evidence of their illegal activity. And, what was more, killed each and every human gameplayer who might otherwise have lived to give testimony. He sat now in his parked aircar, taking pinch after pinch of fine imported Dean Swift inchkenneth snuff, then switched to the yellow tin which contained wren's relish. The snuff cheered Match him, but not very mudh. To his left, in the evening darkness, he could make out the shape of the outspacers' upended ship, black and silent, with the enlarged walled space beneath it, equally dark and silent -- but deceptively so. 'We can go in there," he said to his less experienced companion officer, "but it'll just mean getting killed." We'll have to trust the robots, he realized. Even if they are clumsy, prone to error. Anyhow they're not alive. And not being alive, in a project as this, constituted an advantage. "The third has gone in," officer Falkes beside him said quietly. The slim shape, in human clothing, stopped before the door of the casino, rapped, waited. Presently the door opened. The robot gave the proper code-word and was admitted. "You think they'll survive the take-off blast?" Tinbane asked. Falkes was an expert in robotics. "Possibly one might. Not all, though. But one will be enough." Hot for the kill, officer Falkes leaned to peer past Tinbane; his youthful face was fixed in concentration. "Use the bull-horn now. Tell them they're under arrest. I see no point in waiting." "The point I see," Tinbane said, "is that it's more comforting to see the ship inert and the action going on underneath. We'll wait." "But no more robots are coming." "Wait for them to send back their vid transmissions," Tinbane said. After all, that comprised evidence -- of a sort. And at police HQ it was now being recorded in permanent form. Still, his companion officer assigned to this project did have a point. Since the last of the three humanoid plants had gone in, nothing more would take place, now. Until the outspacers realized they had been infiltrated and put their typical planned pattern of withdrawal into action. "All right," he said, and pushed down on the button which activated the bull-hom. L eaning, Falkes spoke into the bull-hom. At once the bullHis voice, from the bull-hom, disappeared as the initial takeoff surge roared through the primary jets of the outspacers' ship. Falkes shrugged, grinned starkly at Tinbane. It didnH take them lony his mouth formed silently. As expected no one came out. No one in the casino escaped. Even when the structure which composed the building melted. The ship detached itself, leaving a soggy, puddled mass of waxlike matter behind it. And still no one emerged. All dead, Tinbane realized with mute shock. "Time to go in," Falkes said stoically. He began to crawl into his neoasbestos suit, and, after a pause, so did Tinbane. Together, the two officers entered the hot, dripping puddle which had been the casino. In the center, forming a mound, lay two of the three humanoid robots; they had managed at the last moment to cover something with their bodies. Of the third Tinbane saw no sign; evidently it had been demolished along with everything else. Everything organic. I wonder what they thought -- in their own dim way -- to be worth preserving, Tinbane thought as he surveyed the distorted remnants of the two robots. Something alive? One of the snail-like outspacers? Probably not. A gaming table, then. "They acted fast," Falkes said, impressed. "For robots." "But we got something," Tinbane pointed out. Gingerly, he poked at the hot fused metal which had been the two robots. A section, most likely a torso, slid aside, revealed what the robots had preserved. A pinball machine. Tinbane wondered why. What was this worth? Anything? Personally, he doubted it. I n the police lab on Sunset Avenue in downtown Old Los Angeles, a technician presented a long written analysis to Tinbane. "TeU me orally," Tinbane said, annoyed; he had been too many years on the force to sutteci through such stuff. He returned the clipboard and report to Iho tall, lean police technician. "Actually it's not an ordinary; construct," the technician said, glancing over his own report, as if he had already forgotten it; his tone, like the report itself, was dry, dull. This for him was obviously routine. He, too, agreed that the pinball machine salvaged by the humanoid robots was worthless -- or so Tinbane guessed. "By that I mean it's not like any they've brought to Terra in the past. You can probably get more of an idea directly from the thing; I suggest you put a quarter in it and play through a game." He added, "The lab budget will provide you with a quarter which we'll retrieve from the machine later." "I've got my own quarter," Tinbane said irritably. He followed the technician through the large, overworked lab, past the elaborate -- and in many cases obsolete -- assortment of analytical devices and partly brokenapart constructs to the work area in the rear. There, cleaned up, the damage done to it now repaired, stood the pinball machine which the robots had protected. Tinbane inserted a coin; five metal balls at once spilled into the reservoir, and the board at the far end of tiie machine lit up in a variety of shifting colors. "Before you shoot the first ball," the technician said to him, standing beside him so that he, too, could watch, "I advise you to take a careful look at the terrain of the machine, the components among which the ball will pass. The horizontal area beneath the protective glass is somewhat interesting. A miniature village, complete with houses, lighted streets, major public buildings, overhead sprintship runnels... not a Terran village, of course. An Ionian village, of the sort they're used to. The detail work is superb." .Bending, Tinbane peered. The technician was right; the detail work on the scale-model structures astounded him. "Tests that measure wear on the moving parts of this machine," the technician informed him, "indicate that it saw a great deal of use. There is considerable tolerance. We estimate that before another thousand games could be completed, the machine would have to go to the op. Their shop, back on lo. Which is where we understand they build and maintain equipment of this variety." He explained, "By that I mean gambling layouts in general." What's the object of the game?" Tinbane asked. "We have here," the technician explained, "what we call a fullshift set variable. In other words, the terrain through which the steel ball moves is never the same. The number of possible  combinations is -- " he leafed through his report but was unable to find the exact figure -- "anyhow, quite great. In the millions. It's excessively intricate, in our opinion. Anyhow, if you'll release the first ball you'll see." Depressing the plunger, Tinbane allowed the first ball to roll from the reservoir and against the impulse-shaft. He then drew back the springloaded shaft and snapped it into release. The ball shot up the channel and bounced free, against a pressurecushion which imparted swift additional velocity to it. he ball now dribbled in des' cent, toward the upper perimeter of the village. "The initial defense line," the technician said from behind him, "which protects the village proper, is a series of mounds colored, shaped and surfaced to resemble the Ionian landscape. The fidelity is quite obviously painstaking. Probably made from satellites in orbit around lo. You can easily imagine you're seeing an actual piece of that moon from a distance of ten or more miles up. The steel ball encountered the perimeter of rough terrain. Its trajectory altered, and the ball wobbled uncertainly, no longer going in any particular direction. "Deflected," Tinbane said, noting how satisfactorily the contours of the terrain acted to deprive the ball of is descending forward motion. "It's going to bypass the village entirely." The ball, with severely decreased momentum, wandered into a side crease, followed the crease listlessly, and then, just as it appeared to be drifting into the lower take-up slot, abruptly hurtled from a pressure-cushion and back into play. On the illuminated backboard a score registered. Victory, of a momentary sort, for the player. The ball once again menaced the village. Once again it dribbled through the rough terrain, following virtually the same path as before. "Now you'll notice something moderately important," the technician said. "As it heads toward that same pressurecushion which it just now hit. Don't watch the ball; watch the cushion." Tinbane watched. And saw, from the cushion, a tiny wisp of gray smoke. He turned inquiringly toward the technician. "Now watch the ball!" the technician said sharply. Again the ball struck the pressure-cushion inounted slitly. before the lower taKe-up dot. This time, however, the cushion failed to react to the ball's impact. Tinbane blinked as the ball rolled harmlessly on, into the take-up slot and out of play. "Nothing happened," he said presently. "That smoke that you saw. Emerging from the wiring of the cushion. An electrical short. Because a rebound froni that spot placed the ball in a menacing position -- menacing to the village." "In other words," Tinbane said, "something took note of the effect the cushion was having on the ball. The assembly operates so as to protect itself from the ball's activity." He had seen this before, in other outspacer gambling gear: sophisticated circuitry which kept the gameboard constantly shifting in such a way as to seem alive -- in such a way as to reduce the chances of the player winning. On this particular construct the player obtained a winning score by inducing the five steel balls to pass into the central layout: the replica of the Ionian hamlet. Hence the hamlet had to be protected. Hence this particular strategically located pressure-clushion required elimination. At least for the time being. Until the overall configurations of topography altered decidedly. CCJothing new there the technician said. "YouVe seen it a dozen times before; I've seen it a hundred times before. Let's say that this pinball machine has seen ten thousand separate games, and each time there's been a careful readjustment of the circuitry directed toward rendering the steel balls neutralized. Let's say that the alterations are cumulative. So by now any given player's score is probably no more than a fraction of early scores, before the circuits had a chance to react. The direction of alteration -- as in all outspacer gambling mechanisms -- has a zero win factor as the limit toward which it's moving. Just try to hit the village, Tinbane. We set up a constantly repeating mechanical ballrelease and played one hundred and forty games. At no time did a ball ever get near enough to do the village any harm. We kept a record ' of the scores obtained. A slight but significant drop was registered each time." He grinned. So?" Tinbane said. 'So nothing. As I told you and as my report says." The technician paused, then. "Except for one thing. Look at this." Bending, he traced his thin finger across the protective glass of the layout, toward a construct near the center of the replica village. A photographic record shows that with each game that particular component becomes rnore articulated. It's being erected by circuitry underneath -- obviously. As is every other change. But this configuration -- doesn't it remind you of something?" "Looks like a Roman catapult," Tinbane said. "But with a vertical rather than a horizontal axis." "That's our reaction, too. And look at the sling. In terms of the scale of the village it's inordinately large. Immense, in fact; specifically, ifs not to scale, "It looks as if it would almost hold -- " "Not almost," the technician said. "We measured it. The size of the sling is exact; one of those steel balls would fit perfectly into it." "And then?" Tinbane said, feeling chill. "And then it would hurl the ball back at the player," the lab technician said calmly. "It's aimed directly toward the front of the machine, front and upward." He added, "And it's been virtually completed." T he best defense, Tinbane thought to himself as he studied the outspacers' illegal pinball machine, is offense. But whoever heard of it in this context? Zero, he realized, isn't a low enough score to suit the defensive circuitry of the thing. Zero won't do. It's got to strive for less than zero. Why? Because, he decided, it's not really irioving toward zero as a limit; it's moving, instead, toward the best defensive pattern. It's too well designed. Or is it? "You think," he asked the lean, tall lab technician, "that the outspacers intended this?" "That doesn't matter. At least not from the immediate standpoint. What matters is two factors: the machine was exported -- in violation of Terran law -- to Terra, and it's been played by Terrans. Intentionally or not, this could be, in fact will soon be, a lethal weapon." He added, "We calculate within the next twenty games. Every time a coin is inserted, the building resumes. Whether a ball gets near the village or not. All it requires is a flow of power from the device's central helium battery. And that's automatic, once play begins." He added, "It's at work building the catapult rit now, as we stand here. You better release the remaining four balls, so it'll shut itself off. Or give us permission to dismantle it -- to at least take the power-supply out of the circuit." "The outspacers, don't have a very high regard for human life," Tinbane reflected. He was thinking of the carnage created by the ship taking off. And that, for them, was routine. But in view of that wholesale destruction of human life, this seemed unnecessary. What more did this accomplish? Pondering, he said, "This is selective. This would eliminate only the game-player." The technician said, "This would eliminate every gameplayer. One after another." "But who would play the thing," Tinbane said, "after the first fatality?" "People go there knowing that if there's a raid the outspacers will bum up everyone and ever#rthing," the technician pointed out. "The urge to gamble is an addictive compulsion; a certain tjrpe of person gambles no matter what the risk is. You ever hear of Russian Roulette?" Tinbane released the second steel ball, watched it bounce and wander toward the replica village. This one managed to pass through the rough terrain; it approached the first house comprising the village proper. Maybe I'll get it, he thought savagely. Before it gets me. A strange, novel excitement filled him as he watched the ball thud against the tiny house, flatten the structure and roll on. The ball, although small to him, towered over every building, every structure, that made up the village. -- Every structure except the central catapult. He watched avidly as the ball moved dangerously close to the catapult, then, deflected by a major public building, rolled on and disappeared into the take-up slot. Immediately he sent the third ball hurtling up its channel. "The stakes," the lab technician said softly, "are high, aren't they? Your life against its. Must be exceptionally appealing to someone with the right kind of temperament." "I think," Tinbane said, "I can get the catapult before it's in action." "Maybe. Maybe not." "I'm getting the ball closer to it each time." The technician said, "For the catapult to work, it requires one of the steel balls; that's its load. You're making it increasingly likely that it'll acquire use of one of the balls. You're actually helping it." He added somberly, "In fact it can't function without you; the gameplayer is not only the enemy, he's also essential. Better quit, Tinbane. The thing is using you." "I'll quit," Tinbane said, "when I've gotten the catapult." "You're damn right you will. You'll be dead." He eyed Tinbane narrowly. "Possibly this is why the outspacers built it. To get back at us for our raids. This very likely is what it's for." "Got another quarter?" Tinbane said. I n the middle of his tenth game a surprising, unexpected alteration in the machine's strategy manifested itself. All at once it ceased routing the steel balls entirely to one side, away from the replica village. Watching, Tinbane saw the steel ball roll directly -- for the first time -- through the center. Straight toward the proportionally massive catapult. Obviously the catapult had been completed. "I outrank you, Tinbane," the lab technician said tautly. "And I'm ordering you to quit playing." "Any order from you to me," Tinbane said, "has to be in writing and has to be approved by someone in the department at inspector level." But, reluctantly, he halted play. "I can get it," he said reflectively, "but not standing here. I have to be away, far enough back so that it can't pick me off." So it can't distinguish me and aim, he realized. Already he had noted it swivel slightly. Through some lens-system it had detected him. Or possibly it was thermotropic, had sensed him by his body heat. If the latter, then defensive action for him would be relatively simple: a resistance coil suspended at another locus. On the other hand it might be utilizing a cephalic index of some sort, recording all nearby brain-emanations. But the police lab would know that already. 'What's its tropism?" he asked. The technician said. "That assembly hadn't been built up, at the time we inspected it. It's undoubtedly coming into existence now, in concert with the completion of the weapon." Tinbane said thoughtfully, "I hope it doesn't possess equipment to record a cephalic index." Because, he thought, if it did, storing the pattern would be no trouble at all. It could retain a memory of its adversary for use in the event of future encounters. Something about that notion fritened him -- over and above the immediate menace of the situation. "I'll make a deal," the technician said. "You continue to operate it until it fires its initial shot at you. Then step aside and let us tear it down. We need to know its tropism; tins may turn up again in a more complex fashion. You agree? You'll be taking a calculated risk, but I believe its initial shot will be aimed with the idea of use as feedback; it'll correct for a second shot... which will never take place." Should he tell the technician his fear? "What bothers me," he said, "is the possibility that it'll retain a specific memory of me. For future puiposes." 'What future purposes? It'll be completely torn down. As soon as it fires." Reluctantly, Tinbane said, "I think I'd better make the deal." I may already have gone too far, he thought. You may have been right. 'he next steel ball missed the catapult by only a matter of a fraction of an inch. But what unnerved him was not the closeness; it was the quick, subtle attempt on the part of the catapult to snare the ball as it passed. A motion so rapid that he might easily have overlooked it; "It wants that ball," the technician observed. "It wants you." He, too, had seen. With hesitation, Tinbane touched the plunger which would release the next -- and for him possibly the last -- steel ball. "Back out," the technician adSdsed nervously. "Forget the deal; stop playing. We'll tear it down as it is.' We need the tropism," Tinbane said. And depressed the plunger. The steel ball, suddenly seeming to him huge and hard and heavy, rolled unhesitatingly into the waiting catapult; every contour of the machine's topography collaborated. The acquisition of the load took place before he even understood what had happened. He stood staring. "Run!" The technician leaped back, bolted; crashing against Tinbane, he threw him bodily away from the machine. With a clatter of broken glass the steel ball shot by Tinbane's right temple, bounced against the far wall of the lab, came to rest under a work table. Silence. After a time the technician said shakily, 'It had plenty of velocity. Plenty of mass. Plenty of what it needed." Haltingly, Tinbane stood up, took a step toward the machine. 'T)on't release another ball," the technician said warningly. Tinbane said, 'T don't have to." He turned, then, sprinted away. The machine had released the ball itself. I n the outer office, Tinbane sat smoking, seated across from Ted Donovian, the lab chief. The door to the lab had been shut, and every one of the several lab technicians had been bull-homed to safety. Beyond the closed door the lab was silent. Inert, Tinbane thought, and waiting. He wondered if it was waiting for anyone, any human, any Terran, to come within reach. Or -- just him. The latter thought amused him even less than it had originally; even seated out here he felt himself cringe. A machine built on another world, sent to Terra empty of direction, merely capable of sorting among all its defensive possibilities until at last it stumbled onto the key. Randomness at work, through hundreds, even thousands of games... through person aftei person, player after player. Until at last it reached critical direction, and the last person to play it, also selected by the process of randomness, became welded to it in a contract of death. In this case, himself. Unfortunately. Ted Donovan said, "We'll spear its power source from a distance; that shouldn't be hard. You go on home, forget about it. When we have its tropic circuit laid out we'll notify you. Unless of course it's late at night, in which case -- " "Notify me," Tinbane said, "whatever time it is. If you will." He did not have to explain; the lab chief understood. "Obviously," Donovan said, "this construct is aimed at the police teams raiding the casinos. How they steered our robots onto it we don't of course know -- yet. We may find that circuit, too." He picked up the already extant lab report, eyed it with hostility. "This was far too cursory, it would now appear. 'Just another outspacer gambling device.' The hell it is." He tossed the report away, disgusted. "If that's what they had in mind," Tinbane said, "they got what they wanted; they got me completely." At least in terms of hooking him. Of snaring his attention. And his cooperation. "You're a gambler; you've got the streak. But you didn't know it. Possibly it wouldn't have worked otherwise." Donovan added, 'but it is interesting. A pinball machine that fits back. That gets fed up with steel balls rolling over it. I hope they don't build a skeet-shoot. This is bad enough." "Dreamlike," Tinbane murmured. "Pardon?" "Not really real." But, he thought, it is real. He rose, then, to his feet. "I'lrdo what you say; I'll go on home to my conapt. You have the vidphone number." He felt tired and afraid. "You look terrible," Donovan said, scrutinizing him. "It shouldn't get you to this extent; this is a relatively benign construct, isn't it? You have to attack it, to set it in motion. If left alone -- " "I'm leaving it alone," Tinbane said. "But I feel it's waiting. It wants me to come back." He felt it expecting him, anticipating his return. The machine was capable of learning and he had taught it -- taught it about himself. Taught it that he existed. That there was such a person on Terra as Joseph Tinbane. And that was too much. T Then he unlocked the door   of his conapt the phone was already ringing. Leadenly, he picked up the receiver. "Hello," he said. "Tinbane?" It was Donovan's voice. "It's encephalotropic, all right. We found a pattern-print of your brain configuration, and of course we destroyed it. But -- " Donovan hesitated. "We also found something else it had constructed since the initial analysis" "A transmitter," Tinbane said hoarsely. "Afraid so. Half-mile of broadcast, two miles if beamed. And it was cupped to beam, so we have to assume the two-mile transmission. We hav.e absolutely no idea what the recdisei: consists of, naturally, wHfeffier it's even on the surface or not Probably is. In an office somewhere. Or a hover-car such as they use. Anyhow, now you know. So it's decidedly a vengeance weapon; your emotional response was unfortunately correct. When our doubledome experts looked this over they drew the conclusion that you were waited-for, so to speak. It saw you coming. The instrument may never have functioned as an authentic gambling device in the first place; the tolerances which we noted may have been built in, rather than the result of wear. So that's about it." Tinbane said, "What do you suggest I do?" " Do'P" A pause. "Not much. Stay in your conapt; don't report for work, not for a while." So if they nail me, Tinbane thought, no one else in the department will get hit at the same time. More advantageous for the rest of you; hardly for me, though. "I think I'll get out of the area," he said aloud. "The structure may be limited in space, confined to S.L.A. or just one part of the city. If you don't veto it." He had a girl friend, Nancy Hackett, in La Jolla; he could go there. "Suit yourself." He said, "You can't do anything to help me, thou." "I tell you what," Donovan said. "We'll allocate some funds, a moderate sum, best we can, on which you can function. Until we track down the damn receiver and find out what it's tied to. For us, the main headache is that word of this matter has begun to filter through the department. It's going to be hard getting crack-down teams to tackle future outspacer gambling operations... which of course is specifically what they had in mind. One more thing we can do. We can have the lab build you a brain-shield so you no longer emanate a recognizable template. But you'd have to pay for it out of your own pocket. Possibly it could be debited against your salary, payments divided over several months. If you're interested. Frankly, if you want my personal opinion, I'd advise it." "All right,'! Tinbane said. He felt dull, dead, tired and resigned; all of those at once. And he had the deep and acute intuition that his reaction was rational. "Anything else you suggest?" he asked. "Stay armed. Even when you're asleep." 'What asleep?" he said. "You think I'm going to get any sleep? Maybe I will after that machine is totally destroyed." But that won't make any difference, he realized. Not now. Not after it's dispatched my brain-wave pattti to something else, something we know nothing about. God knows what equipment it might turn out to be; outspacers show up with all kinds of convoluted things. T T e hung up the phone, walked into his kitchen, and, getting down a halfempty fifth of Antique bourbon, fixed himself a whiskey sour. What a mess, he said to himself. Pursued by a pinball machine from another world. He almost -- but not quite -- had to laugh. What do you use, he asked himself, to catch an angry pinball machine? One that has your number and is out to get you? Or more specifically, a pinball machine's nebulous friend... Something went tap tap against the kitchen window. Reaching into his pocket he brought out his regulation-issue laser pistol; walking along the kitchen wall he approached the window from an unseen side, peered out into the night. Darkness. He could make nothing out. Flashlight? He had one in the glove compartment of his aircar, parked on the roof of the conapt building. Time to get it A moment later, flashlit in hand, he raced downstairs, back to his kitchen. The beam of the flashlight showed, pressed against the outer surface of the window, a buglike entity with projecting elongated pseudopodia. The two feelers had tapped against the glass of the window, evidently exploring in their blind, mechanical way. The bug-thing had ascended the side of the building; he could perceive the suction-tread by which it clung. His curiosity, at this point, became greater than his fear. With care he opened the window -- no need of having to pay the building repair committee for it -- and cautiously took aim with his laser pistol. The bug-thing did not stir; evidently it had stalled in midcycle. Probably its responses, he guessed, were relatively slow, much more so than a comparable organic equivalent. Unless, of course, it was set to detonate; in which case he had no time to ponder. He fired a narrow-beam into the underside of the bug-thing. Maimed, the bug-thing settled backward, its many little cups releasing their hold. As it fell away, Tinbane caught hold of it, lifted it swiftly into the room, dropped it onto the floor, meantime keeping his pistol pointed at it. But it was finished functionally; it did not stir. Laying it on the small kitchen table he got a screwdriver from: the tool-drawer beside the sink, seated himself, examined the object. He felt, now, that he could take his time; the pressure, momentarily at least, had abated. It took him forty minutes to get the thing open; none of the holding screws fitted an ordinary screwdriver, and he founi himself at last using a common kitchen knife. But finally he had it open before him on the table, its shell divided into two parts: one hollow and empty, the other crammed with components. A bomb? He tinkered with exceeding care, inspecting each assembly bit by bit. No bomb -- at least none which he could identify. Then a murder tool? No blade, no toxins or micro-organisms, no tube capable of expelling a lethal charge, explosive or otherwise. So then what in Gods name did it do? He recognized the motor which had driven it up the side of the building, then the photoelectric steering turret by which it oriented itself. But that was all. Absolutely all. From the standpoint of use, it was a fraud.  w Or was it? He examined his watch. Now he had spent an entire hour on it; his attention had been diverted from everything else -- and who knew what that else might be? "VJervously, he slid stiffly to his feet, collected his laser pistol, and prowled throughout the apartment, listening, wondering, trying to sense something, however small, that was out of its usual order. It's giving them time, he realized. One entire hour! For whatever it is they're really up to. Time, he thought, for me to leave the apartment. To get to La Jolla and the hell out of here, until this is all over with. His vidphone rang. When he answered it, Ted Donovan's face clicked grayly into view. "We've got a department aircar monitoring your conapt building," Donovan said. "And it picked up some activity; I thought you'd want to know." "Okay," he said tensely. "A vehicle, airborne, landed briefly on your roof parking lot. Not a standard aircar but something larger. Nothing we could recognize. It took right off again at great speed, but I think this is it." "Did it deposit anything?" he asked. "Yes. Afraid so." Tight-lipped, he said, "Can you do anything for me at this late point? It would be appreciated very much." 'What do you suggest? We don't know what it is; you certainly don't know either. Were open to ideas, but I think well have to wait imtil you know the nature of the -- hostile artifact." Something bumped against his door. Something in the hall. "I'll leave the line open," Tinbane said. "Don't leave; I think it's happening now." He felt panic, at this stage; overt, childish panic. Carrying his laser pistol in a numb, loose grip he made his way step by step to the locked front door of his conapt, halted, then unlocked the door and opened it. Slightly. As little as he could manage. An enormous, unchecked force pushed the door further; the knob left his hand. And, soundlessly, the vast steel ball resting against the halfopen door rolled forward. He stepped aside -- he had to -- knowing that this was the adversary; the dummy wallclimbing gadget had deflected his attention from this. He could not get out. He would not be going to La Jolla now. The great massed sphere totally blocked the way. Returning to the vidphone he said to Donovan, "I'm encapsulated. Here in my own conapt." At the outer perimeter, he realized. Equal to the rough terrain of the pinball machine's shifting landscape. The first ball has been blocked there, has lodged in the doorway. But what about the second? The third? Each would be closer. "Can you build something for me?" he asked huskily. "Can the lab start working this late at night?" "We can try," Donovan said. "It depends entirely on what you want. What you have in mind? What do you think would help?" He hated to ask for it. But he had to. The next one mj,ght burst in through a window, or crash onto him from the roof. "I want," he said, "some form of catapult. Big enough, tough enough, to handle a spherical load with a diameter of between four and a half and five feet. You think you can manage it?" He prayed to god they could. "Is that what you're facing?" Donovan said harshly. "Unless it's an hallucination," Tinbane said. "A deliberate, artificially induced terror-projection, designed specifically to demoralize me." "The department aircar saw something," Donovan said. "And it wasn't an hallucination; it had measurable mass. And -- " He hesitated. "It did leave off something big. Its departing mass was considerably diminished. So it's real, Tinbane." "That's what I thought," Tinbane said. get the catapult to   you as soon as we possibly can," Donovan said. "Let's hope there's an adequate interval between each -- attack. And you better figure on five at least." Tinbane, nodding lit a cigarette, or at least tried to. But his hands were shaking too badly to get the lighter into place. He then got out a yellow-lacquered tin of dean's own snuff, but found himself unable to force open the tight tin; the tin hopped from his fingers and fell to the floor. "Five," he said, "per ame." "Yes," Donovan said reluctantly, "there's that." The wall of the living room shuddered. The next one was coming at him from the adjoining apartby Algis Budrys A New Relief Novelette by Keith Laumer by Richard Wilson Plus many others in the February issue of IF -- on sale now! Coming in March -- Special Hugo Issue A( the # World Science Fiction Convention IF was given the annual 'Hugo' award as the world's leading science-fiction magazine. The March Issue will be a special number to celebrate the award. Including stories by th writers who also won Hugos this year: Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, etc. March IF on sole February #rd -- don't miss iti 'J-W A #.   #  A '  . #  CT) ,rr: r f. r # iSftV i; I t is simply impassible to find an article on crossbows or medieval warfare that neglects to mention that the Second Lateran Council, in #, forbade the use of the crossbow to Christians except for hunting or against infidels -- and that Pope InnocenFig. #. Picture of a crossbow from a Roman grave In France. reaffirmed this prohibitus est. Britisih writers, as a rule, add the information that the crossbow was introduced in England in # by the invading Normans, but that it never became as popular in England as it was on the continent. While saying aU this, most writers create the impression -- and seem to be under that impression themselves -- that the crossbow must have been a fairly recent invention at the time the Lateran Council adjourned. Since it is certain that crossbows existed at a i. much earlier time, it is logical to assume that the weapon achieved a sudden surge in popularity around the year #, leading to ecclesiastical measures. Such sudden surges are usually the result of an improvement of some kind, and the most likely improvement for that period was the introduction of a steel bow instead of a wooden bow. If the older crossbows had wooden bows, they either had to be so large as to be unwieldy or, if small enough, both their range and their penetrating power must have been inferior to the normal bow. As a matter of fact British writers have occasionally wondered in print why the crossbow became popular at all. Even at the height of its development a crossbow bolt did not carry much Fig. #. Tbe Greek gasfrophefes, oldest known picture of a crossbow. fartjier thaa an arrow from a longbow, and both could penetrate a shield that a man could carry. Moreover, a good longbow man could get off ten arrows in the time a crossbow man could shoot three bolts. All true; but a man who had never used a crossbow would be a good shot after three weeks of five hours of training every day, while an archery apprentice with a longbow was still a beginner after the same amount of practice. So there was a good reason for the popularity of the crossbow, after the introduction of steel had made it at least equal in power to a heavy longbow in the hands of a strong man. It is true that references to crossbows prior to the famous edict of the Lateran Council are rare, but they exist. Roman writers had occasionally mentioned a weapon they called manuballista or aicuhallista... but there could be some doubt whether the term actually referred to crossbows. Considered aS a word, 'manuballista just meant a device that threw something and that a warrior held in (or operated with) his hands, and that still left many possibilities open. But such doubts were resolved in #. During that year a Roman burial monument with bas reliefs was found near Polignac sur Loire in France; it was later brought to the museum at Puy, and artists could sketch the bas reliefs. Among them was an unmistakable crossbow, complete with pharetra, the Roman term for a quiver, as shown in Fig. #. Unfortunately the artist who made the bas relief must have been poorly acquainted with the weapon, for most of the things one would dearly like to know are simply not shown. It is not clear, for example, whether this crossbow was bent by hand or whether a medhanical device of some kind was needed. And the most interesting part, the lock mechanism, is hardly indicated. Nor can the age of the monument be established. Its location in France indicates that the burial took place while the Romans extended over all of western Europe, but this leaves a leeway of several centuries. F rtunately we are on much firmer ground with another ancient crossbow (Fig. #.) that goes under the Greek name of gastrophetes; it is a bit disappointing that this impressivesounding word just means "belly gun." But at least there is a reason for this name. The "belly gun" was cocked by resting the front end (F) of the slide on the ground and leaning the body weight on the semicircle between the two pieces L and R, which may have been resting on the shoulders of the man while shooting the weapon. We know about the gastrophetes from what is left of the writings of one Ktesibios. Though there were several people by that name, it is pretty certain that the Ktesibios in question is the one who lived during the reign of Ptolemy Fig. #. Philon's eufhytonon, top view. Physkon (#-# B.C.), which makes him a contemporary of Philon of Byzantium, another writer who has supplied us with some information about the weapons then in use. Philon's Belopoiika -- also known as his Fourth Book on Mechanics -- did not say anything about crossbows, at least not in the portions of his work that we still have. But he wrote at length about catapults. The Greek experts who had the Prussian Academy of SciFig. #. The lock of Philon's catapult. ences reissue the work (Greek original with German translation) in # pointed out that Philon's style was clumsy and redundant and that he often sounds pleased that he managed to explain something. Personally I wonder whether Philon's clumsy and redundant style was the result of trying hard to explain difficult concepts to practical men who were handy with tools but not literary lights. At any event Philon carefully described two of the weapons of his time, the euthytonon and the palintonon. They were fairly much alike, except that the euthytonon (see Figs. # and #) shot large arrows while the palintonon threw round stones. Very likely the euthytonon was used for pointblank shooting when the enemy actually attacked, wihile the palintonon was used to harrass the enemy while he was behind fortified positions. The construction of the euthytonon was quite advanced, and Philon's description makes one thing quite clear: it was not a large crossbow. In the crossbow, from the gastrophetes to the modern target crossbow, the energy is stored into bending something flexible, wood or steel. In the euthytonon, and in all similar weapons that were built for the next sixteen centuries to come, the arms are not flexible but rigid. The energy is stored in skeins, of cord, or strips of rawhide or horsehair that are twisted around the end of these rigid arms. The bow is not bent -- in fact, there is no bow to begin with -- but elastic skeins are twisted. As the pictures show, the weapon was wound up by means of a small windlass. Two ratchet hooks saw to it that the weapon did not become unwound just because a hand slipped on the spokes of the windlass. The final catch (Fig. #) consists of a hook that admits the string of the catapult but could not hold it under tension. It is made secure by sliding a piece of metal (black in Fig. #) under it. To discharge the weapon this piece of metal was yanked out or knocked out by a hammer blow. Fig. #. The 'revolving nut" of the medieval crossbow. A mechanism involving a sudden jerk or blow was, of course, impossible with a portable weapon since it would spoil the aim. The crossbow makers of the middle ages came up with a different mechanism that is usually referred to as the 'revolving nut" (Fig. #). While the crossbow is being bent, or wound up, or cocked, the revolving nut has the position shown at left. The string of the bow, still being tensed, slowly turns it until it has reached the position shown at right, at which point a steel piece at the bottom goes into action Fig. #. German crossbow with cocking lever that gave support while shooting. and locks it. This strip of steel is connecti SVith the trigger. The trigger of a crossbow used to be laige, and in most models the triggei: was not slowly pulled back as in modern firearms, but lifted in the direction of the stock of the crossbow. Now, the whole point of the crossbow was that it was powerful. Its string could not simply be pulled back by the action of four fingers as in an ordinary bow. To bend a crossbow needed at the very least both hands of the sharpshooter; this led to f ur r Fig. #. Oneirmed torsion engine or catapult. the strange distinction of a "one foot crossbow" and a "two feet crossbow." The one foot crossbow had a stirrup attached to its front end. The crossbow man placed this stirrup on the ground, put one foot into it and pulled the string up with both hands until it caught in the revolving nut. For the more powerful "two feet crossbow" both feet were needed to steady the weapon. For this reason the bow was attached right to the front end of the stock so that the crossbow man could place one foot on each side of the stock when bending the bow. For the still more powerful versions even this was not enough. They were equipped with a small windlass or a so-called cranequin, a wind-up device that was placed on top of the crossbow prior to cocking it. Of course it had to be removed prior to shooting, which did not increase the frequency with which bolts could be thrown against the enemy. Somewhat simpler was a cocking lever of which Fig. # shows an interesting variation. The picture shows the starting position and it is quite obvious how the lever worked. But then, once the crossbow was cocked, the lever (which could also be detached completely) was folded down over the front end to provide a support. With a #-inch lever the support was too ort for shooting while standing, but it had just the right length for shooting from a kneeling position. Since crossbows of the more powerful types had ranges up to # yards, especially when shot by the defenders of a castle or a walled city who had the advantage of an elevation of thirty feet or more over the attackers, the sdege engines that were the descendants of the euthytonon and palintonon had to have a slightly longer range, say # yards or better. Ciege engines, ballistas and  catapults, blidas and springards, mangonals and trebuchets -- they have a multitude of names, and in most cases we can be sure what a manuscript really means only if we have a sketch to go along with the description. There are at least two reasons for the multitude of names: Italian words that may have had Latin Fig. #. The sTtp-hook for releasing a siege engine. or Greek roots originally were adapted by the French fo their own tongues, then the Germans took either the Italian or the French form, and sometimes both, and Germanized them. Then, twenty or fifty years later somebody would translate the term into German, not always skillfully. In addition to this problem of overlapping languages, pride played a role. Some small army, say, had two large siege engines of which they were, naturally, quite proud. So they were given names, like ships. But if these names were in any way unusual, a chronicler half a century later and living elsewhere, might think that these were special types of siege engines. Mistaken translations and misunderstood names lengthened the lists. The same thing happened, a few centuries later, with real guns, until finally the gunnery master of the city of Frankfurt am Main, Leonhart Fronsperger by name, cried out in despair: 'Of all the guns that are pulled into the field there are just eight types, four wall breakers and four field pieces, and even if you give a thousand names to them there . are still just eight and not more." Master Gunner Fronsperger classified his guns by the weight of shot; we'll have to classify the siege engines by types to get anywhere. The confusion must have started early because an otherwise very competent book states that there were only two types originly: one which the Romans called caiapultus and the Greeks Katapeltes and another one which the Romians called ballista and the Greeks lithoholos, Fig. #. CounterweigTif engine, also known as Trebuchet. Now, lithoholos is easy to translate; it means "stone thrower" -- that would be the palintonon of Philon. As for the word katapeltes an attempt at translation is a little more difficult. There was a very similar Greek military term that meant "to overrun" (an eny position) ; but the name may; be derived from the two Greek, words for "down" and for "shield." In .  either case one is rdninded of Philon's euthytonon. But from the engineering point of view the arrow-shooting and the stonethrowing devices were one and the same thing. Both looked like crossbows; both had rigid arms and were wound by means of a windlass. And in both the energy was stored by twisting skeins of a flexible material. Since it was torsion that did the work, the whole family of siege engines -- "and even if they bore a thousand names" -- should be referred to as the "torsion engines." A one-armed torsion engine, the ones called "catapults" in historical novels and movies, is shown as Fig. #. Here a very large "spoon" had its handle inserted in a horizontal skein of rawhide strips and, when released, struck a horizontal and padded member. The main advantage of this type of weapon was that almost anything could be put into the hollow of the spoon: rocks, inflammable substances, trussed-up dead animals and anything else that might be handy. In all of these siege engines all the tension just prior to shooting was sustained by a single rope. In the movies a burly but somehow noble looking warrior stands by with a sharp sword or a hefty battle axe to sever this rope. In reality the armorers of the middle ages used the slip-hook (Fig. #) that parted reliably when yanked sideways and that could be reused any number of times. A nd now we come to the second type of siege engine, called trebuchet by the French and blida (pronounced like "bleeder") by the Germans. Technically this was a counterweight engine (Fig. #.) A sturdy wooden basket with a heavy metal frame was filled with rocks, then the long throwing arm was pulled down by means of a winch, and the missile was placed on a spoon or basket at the end. Many medieval pic'tures show a sling attached to the end of the throwing arm, and it is stated that this Sling extended the length of the arm and therefore the range. But since such a sling had to open at just the right moment I have severe doubts that it was used often. In a small model which I helped to build when I was in high school the sling simply never opened. For this reason I look at pictures of trebuchets with slings as "artist's concepKtions" that picture an idea rather than reality. The final type of siege engine, Fig. #, went under names like espringale, espringold or springarde. Here the energy was stored by bending a piece of wood which, when released, would strike a heavy spear and propel it over a range comparable to that of other such devices. It probably could not be aimed well, but it had the advantage that it was easy to build on the spot. The armorer only had to carry a rope, a winch with ratchet and a sliphook, and the spears, of course. But this was the only type of siege engine which resembled the bow and the crossbow in function by storing the energy in bending wood. The torsion engines, though they resembled crossbows in appearance were something different. But the crossbow probably took its shape from them; the first crossbows indubitably were just extra heavy bows mounted on a stock. The gastrophetes of Ktesibios is the earliest example of which we have documentary evidence. But the crossbow did not become important until more than a thousand years later when somebody, flexing a fine sword, thought of substituting a steel bow for the OO All they wanted was an end to war -- and they got If...  endlesslyl ipvt. #st Class Henry Cassidy viewed . a substance in his soup. "Might be rubber." He brushed an army of flies away for closer inspection. "Or mule. Or a piece of shoe. "My God!" he yelled. "I'm tired of this! Crawlin' through the stinkin' jungle. With the fever, the bugs and garbage to eat! All over Korea, the Mekong Delta, and now South America. Why can't the big shots not bother poor devil's that've got six kids?" Cassidy dumped his soup and jumped on its pannikin. This act of subversion was observed by Mstr. Sgt. Lawrence Smith, dog-robber to Capt. Tim,othy Haggerty of the U.S.A.F. The sergeant was given to thinking. The more he thought the more he found worth thinking about. He had four kids and a bullet in his left leg somewhere. Capt. Haggerty's plane was shot from under him that day. He reached camp by crawling miles through swamps and cane fields, dodging alligators and sharpshooters the while. That night, as he helped Haggerty change from a mud-soaked uniform, Sgt. Smith talked. "It's not too wild a dream, sir," he concluded, knees quaking. "Senator Tom Walsh of Montana once suggested the same thing." Haggerty should have had the sergeant courtmartialed, but he was too exhausted. He held out a badly scratched hand instead. At breakfast, Tim Haggerty banged the table, achieved silence, dismissed the waiters, locked the mess hall door, and made a proposal. At first his fellow officers listened in puzzled silence. Soon their jaw muscles tightened. A few jumped to their feet. The time had come for dramatics. Haggerty tossed a lock of sandy hair out of his eyes, unbuckled his pistol holster, and tossed it among the coffee cups. "Who cares whether the new American frontier is at the Rio Grande, the Isthmus of Panama or the River Plate?" he said quietly. "Who the hell asked for this war anyway?" He answered his question with four-letter words, repeated the answer, and finally told his listeners what the answer had been. "Let those responsible fight it out," he shouted. "Let's get out of this sweating hell. Are you with me?" "Treason!" blurted a whitefaced second looie. "Poetic justice!" whooped a sunburned veteran of four undeclared wars. "We can't lick the damned spicks any more'n they can lick us. This will be a trial by combat, like in the Middle Ages when things got deadlocked. I'm for it." "Louis Pinedo runs the BraziloArgentine circus," a third flyer cut in. "His men think he's Dioss little brother. Let's see what he says." S everal hours later a dozen U.S. jets headed for the upper Amazon on a tip wangled from Intelligence. They spotted Pinedo's scarlet fighter. They forced it to land. Haggerty approached the ship, forelock aslant. "ue passe, hombre? Pinedo inquired as he clambered out of the cockpit, hands in air. (He was chubby and blond; not the dashing lady killer Tim had expected.) Haggerty told him. Pinedo considered until his cigarette burned stained fingertips. "Bueno.'" "December #?" "jBxceenfe." "Junction of the Rios Brazos and Amazon?" 'Porque no?"' "Keep in touch, Capiian. Sorry to have delayed you." "De nada. The Argentine bowed grandly. Tim realized he might be a lady killer after all. S enate and House were in night session on December #, struggling to provide more guns and butter before the Christmas recess. Helicopters drifted over the Capitol. Pedestrians paid little attention. Eggbeaters were common sights, particularly since they had been retired from the front after proving too vulnerable to sharpshooters. At midnight, Haggerty tossed a bomb into the Senate chamber. Sgt. Smith did likewise in the House. Both missiles released puffs of smoke. Congressmen panicked and flung themselves against locked corridor doors. A few rushed the visitors' galleries. They wilted on the stairs or as they beat on carved panels. Lights snapped. Helicopters landed softly on snow. Men in gas masks hopped out with stretchers. They stowed the relaxed legislators. In ten minutes the squadron had sped southward with a great rattling. came out of shock they found the White House also raided during a late cabinet meeting. The first horrified reaction was that the Spaniards were at the door, as the British once had been. Soon, however, word filtered from Buenos Aires that similar raids had been made on the Casa Rosada and the headquarters of the Organization of American States. There was nmning to and fro by the Establishments. Politicians raved. A-bomb threats were heard once more. But both armies remained bivouacked near the Equator. Gradually the populace of two continents began to chuckle as the Smith-Haggerty-Pinedo plan dawned on Men in the Streets. The Yankee sense of humor was tickled past bearing. Latin Americans were convulsed. Even those who might have rallied in support of the status quo talked, instead, about another Battle of the Century. The smiling conspirators had miles of bleachers built in that green valley where the Brazos and the Amazon meet. Refrigerated river boats brought endless tons of food and drink. Transport and hotel facilities were arranged. Bullet-proof shields were erected to protect spectators. Seats soon were selling at scalpers' prices. Even blase Europeans and recently ' bruised Asiatics contributed their share of ticket money. Africans tried to stand aloof but eventually were caught up in the spirit of the thing. The Inter-American War, en # lives, was turned overnight into the greatest sporting event since Nero. C ame the dawn of Washington's Birthday. "Fair, hot and humid," said the Weather Man in Rio. "By rigid training," Haggerty announced over a worldwide TV hookup, "each team has reduced its total weight by nearly five tons. Their original uniforms have had to be discarded because they became so large at the beltlines. The U. S. team favored this change until it was learned that their opponents also would get new outfits. Then they claimed a foul. However, a Book of Rules prepared by Hank Cassidy provides that no competitor shall be handicapped by excess equipment, such as #-pound packs, for example, so the claim was disallowed. "Now it will be exactly # a.m., when you hear the time tone. The great moment has come. A thousand intrepid warriors, if we include Legislative and Administrative Assistants for each solon, are taking the field. "The Yankees are in blue walking shorts and crash helmets; the Latins in gold-bordered serapes and sombreros. They are armed, all according to the Book of Rules, with sawed-off shotguns, cattle prods, tear gas bombs, machetes, bolas, blackjacks, rusty cavalry sabers, jacS handles and switchblade ImiveS. "Marching ahead of their respective armies came President Wilfred Manchester Jones and Presidente Ernesto Blanco-Machado. They have met in the center of the field. They're shaking hands. They seem to be whispering together. Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen of the worldwide television audience, until I can find out exactly what's going on... "There's been a slight delay," Tim reported some minutes later. "President Jones has asked permission to make a speech. Referee Pinedo is consulting the Book of Rules... He's nodding... A filibuster is in the making, I fear... Yes. That's right. The next voice you hear will be that of the President of the United States of North America. White mane flowing in the pampas wind, Jones poured forth oratory through countless loudspeakers. For five long minutes he was listened to. Then a quarerites yelled for action. When the President ran out of breath and saliva the Presidente demanded equal time on the network. Pinedo and Haggerty conferred anxiously in front of the cameras, then spread their hands. Equal time? Sacrosanct! By ones, two, scores, hundreds, found to be vacant, Haggerty, thousands, the gallery sought Pinedo and Smliitjh having deshade from palm trees where purparted to apply themselves and veyors of hot dogs, pizza, frijoles their abundant gate receipts to and strange drinks did business, the business of reorganizing Reporters and commentators bankrupt nations of the hemisplayed cards or dozed. Haggerty, phere. Pinedo, et al, collapsed with Cassidy was nearly trapped by laughter under the grandstand. outraged customers as he ran When Blanco-Machado conout with a final ,bag of coins, eluded a three-hour harangue, but at this point the weather the Senate floor leader, a onedefied the Weather Man and time Mississippi hog-caller, arose swept the region with a #-mile to chant. gale and #-inch deluge. Night got its equatorial jump Despite the storm, those bedon the stadium as Senator Johnraggled statesmen talked on, son of Nebraska started his replodding hoarsely through their ply to Senator Romas of Minas last filibuster lest worse befall. Gerais. The embattled hosts apEven to this day, Indians of plauded impartially as Romas the Amazon, poling their canoes yielded to another dim figure through bayous, pause at the that rose to reply to his reply. roll of distant thunder and whisOnlookers hurled a final showper: "'Eschucate! Great White er of pop and pulque bottles and Fathers still talk." a is now available in paperback for #c. I This revolutionary book concerns the possibility of scientifically exI I tending human life by freezing the body immediately after death. I  It is for those who have the imagination and courage to reject the I I Ask for it at your nearest bookstore, or send check or money  I order to --  Cryonics Society of New York, Inc.  # Washington Avenue  I Brooklyn, New York #  They Hiloriated When I I I Hyperspaced For Earth I I t  I I I I i "Nobody Earthwards!" they chortled i -- but onwards indefatigably I flew! I I t I t I can-RussianChinese commanders, and now he was clearly visiOphey hilariated when he hyperble to Earth's monitors. From  spaced toward Earth. their posts in the Light, staked "Nobody Earthwards," they out in a parking orbit in Cislunar snickerly advised. Territory like a space-age AmBut Young Harmish heeded brose Lightship, they saw him in not, being of stubborn stock, and his spaceship, looking at himself onwards indefatigably toward the in a Harmishlength mirror. He planet near Sol ringed by all that did not know until much later orbiting post-Sputnik junk. that from the time the Light pickHe flew alone in his two-man ed him up he was also under conship, fearless to the point of foolstant surveillance by U.N. teams hardiness because his mission was who reported directly to the Secto kidnap the SecretaryGeneral retary-General. of the United Nations. The Sec Gen was a Ugandan, Young Harmish had long been N.K. Mboto, a former puisne had been named for its Ameripala. Mboto kept peace by running the world by the book and fining the hell out of anybody who messed around with what he had come to consider his-byGod Charter. Mboto spoke and swore fluently in Russian, Mandarin and midcountries' rulers were frankly afraid of him. It was no wonder, then, that they, not to mention Britain, Cuba, Paraguay and most of the others, had given up their sovereignty and put their trust and safekeeping in the hands of an incredibly strengthened United Nations. Though Young Harmish did was linked to the Auxorean equivalents, the ethervid and the spyfax. By using them to study Earth fashions, Y. Harmish had familiarized himself with every detail of terrestrial costuming. Now he summoned garments out of the fabroid machine and put them on. In the mirror, he saw himself as the very embodiment of a dashing Earth-style blade. His high, hard collar glistened. His slim-jim four-in-hand was pierced by a diamond stickpin. His belt-in-back jacket was stylishly leather-patched at elbows and cuffs, and his knickers draped fashionably over clocked woolen stockings which were set off by buckled oxfords. His pleated white-on-white irt shone; and his derby hat, from which grew a long Tyrolean feather, sat jauntily on his head. What Y. Harmish had failed to realize, of course, was that while he was in hyperspace the wellknown krono effect had come into play, distorting the eras. The fashions he had seen were a mishmash of the centuries, as if Men's Wear Magazine had been afflicted with incurable nostalgia and Voue with deja va. Satisfied with himself, Yoimg Harmish gave a final glance at the landing coordinates, took up his London-rolled umbrella and strode to the exit. He stepped out on the campus of a imiversity whose students lately had been described as stokers of a hotbed of social action. Plan One was afoot. T hree days later, after a series of frustrations that left him more convinced than ever that Mboto was the man his planet needed, Harmish gave up his preliminary skirmishing and flew to the slablike building on the East River in New York. He felt it was time to go to the top. Harmish parked a few feet over the north flowerbed and headed for the front door, of the Secretariat Building, where a tanned, lean young man was about to go in. Harmish bowed and said : "My pardon extends to you, sir, but these are the Untied Nations?' He knew the English remarkably, he felt. The man he addressed moved his gaze up from Harmish's shoes, knickers and pleated shirt to his feathered derby, then back to the pleasantly boyish, smiling face. "These are they," the man said. "What are you, the Shangri-La delegation?" "Negatively. Auxor, to which I am, does not yet represent itself at the Untied Nations, disfortunately. Savvy?" "I guess, so pal. My name's Scally. Just get in?" "Momentarily, Scally-sir. Yes, I-Harmish have made arrival. Young Harmish, to elongate. Relict of Late Harmish, the father, and Old Harmish, grandsir. Auxorean appelatory custom." 'Good for you, son," Scally said. "Look, do you have to present your credentials to Mboto right away? How about a little drink to celebrate your safe arrival? Being a native, I may be in a position to give you a few tips." Harmish looked pleased. "Deliriously, sir." He remembered an ad. "Yellow gin, perhaps. Distinguished quencher, it is written." "Any color at all, pal," ScaUy said. He steered Harmish past a guard with a wave of a press card and took him. up the escalator to the delegates lounge. "Yellow gin for my friend," he told the bartender, "and a brown bourbon for me." Though Jim Scally had a debonair way he was known to his associates as a bitter man who drank more than was good for him. The folding of his paper was only the latest in a series of kicks in the teeth he'd received from life. A messy divorce earlier had left him paying endless alimony to a Tasmanian girl who'd won custody of their two children and who, by returning to her family home in Hobart, had effectively denied him visitation rights. These and a dozen other tough breaks were obviously what had driven Jim Scally to drink. A gentle conspiracy operated in Scally's favor at the U. N. The conspirators included doormen, guards, press officers and rei)orters and certain high-ranking members of the Secretariat. I f anybody was going to be technical about it, Scally had lost his accreditation months ago when his newspaper went out of business, and no other news organization hired him. He apparently was able to hang on by doing P.R. work and handling an occasional string assignment. Thanks to the conspiracy, he had the run of the U.N., including the bar. But the bar demanded cash. 'I'll get this one," Scally said. "Unless -- " "Oh, I demand to pay," Harmish said. "What currency employs itself at the Untied Nations -- gold?" "No, no; good old United -- Untied States dollars will do "Dollars and pence, yes. returns itself to me now." Harmish took out a thick wallet. "Not pounds, pal. That's English. A good old American tendollar bill would do the trick." Harmish withdrew a tendollar bill, American. Presently, as a Trusteeship Council meeting ended and increasing numbers of people lined the bar, the two moved to a table at the side, Harmish with a second gin and Scally with his third bourbon. Scally said: "Harmish, pal, I've got to straighten you out. You have no idea of the complexity of New York life. You need a first secretary to handle your business and social affairs." Harmish was quick to agree. "I nominate you secretary-wallah." "I accept," Scally said as promptly. "But before we go into the petty details -- salary, expense account, bonuses -- I'd better know more about you so you get our money's worth. First, exactly where is Auxor?" "Auxor coextends the land mass of my planet. Water encroaches all remaining.' Scally swallowed some bourbon as if to help him grasp the concept. 'Wou mean Auxor is a -- a planet? You mean you came here in a -- a spaceship, like astronauts -- cosmonauts?" "Having spyfaxed same, imdoubtably," Harmish said. "It figures," Scally said, re-examining the assortment of clothing the other wore so proudly. "You came alone?" "Solely Harmish. They hilariated when I hyperspaced for Earth. They disparaged so minor a terminus. 'Nobody Earthwards,' they snickerly advised. 'Is backwater of Galaxy,' they scornheaped. But Harmish, of perseverent bent, pioneerized. Bottoms up, Soally-sir." "Mud in your eye. So you're a spaceman, Harmish! I'll be damned. The funny thing is, I believe you. Every sockeyed killable -- cockeyed syllable." A n incredibly beautiful girl came in with members of an Asian delegation. "Enchantment," Harmish said. "Depends on your point of view," Scally said. "Once I married the stenographer to an overseas delegation. Disenchantment. Are you married, Harmish?" "Uxoriously, sir, to every eligible woman." "Whoa!" Scally said. "How could that be?" "By means of the sexually pervasive interconsciousness effect, better. You read all their minds, know all their sensations?" Harmish wriggled. "Exactly. Who needs marriage?" "Some do, sometimes, even if burned once. How does this "All Auxoreans are mentally joined," Harmish said. "The well known mindlink. In addition, the male-female link works like your country's Operation Match." "You mean the computer that finds two young people of similar interests?" "The same. But in Auxor all is done by mentality." "Is every male linked to every female?" "Please! No barbarians we! Only non-marrieds. Once a compatibility has been established and marriage consummated, or an extramarital relationship contracted, the partners are taken "Then you're not married, ex"To exactize, no. One day, when the conditions are right, and our antennas are attuned, the contact will be made and I too will have been eliminated from eligibility. I'll have found a wife." "Meanwhile you're getting the message from all these gorgeous dames? How does it feel?" Harmish wriggled again as his attention was called to the sensation. "Impossibly describable. Let me show." And he handed Scally a metallic skullcap. "This connects you with Intergal." "Intergal?" "Intergalactic Transmissions. Being Auxorean, I imrequire artificial aids, but for you a booster." II S cally carefully put the skullcap on the back of his head, where it seemed to grip his scalp with a half dozen little fingers. There was a rush of overpowering sensation, as if the sky and everything in it were falling directly on him. Then this eased, and he felt as if he were standing on a tall cliff overlooking the sea. It was a sea of women, and their hair was the waves. They seemed to be standing, facing him, their eyes fixed on his with intense interest. He felt that even if he could make out a face on the far horizon, he'd be able to see clearly into her eyes. The long hair of these myriads of standing, waiting women, moving in the lit wind, was of many colors and tones and heightened the illusion that he was at the edge of thQ sea. An intoxicating perfume crt jjifi cliff to him, and there was sileiice except in his mind. The, voices spoEe tenderly, passionately, inquiringlly, wonderingly. But he thought he also recognized some voices similar to a particular one he had known : aloof, disdainful, belittling. With a shudder he shut these out. For a moment it was as if he had been in contact with Hobart, Tasmania. Then James Franklin Scally heardfeltreceivedknew her. One in the multitude was coming through to him. Jim Scally tingled with a thrill of appreciation, almost of recognition. She bathed him in comfort. She warmed him in the corridors of his heart which had long been ice. Could this be the girl he'd always wanted? Impossible. A quirk of interstellar communication. A sensation arranged by a stranger who perhaps was an enemy. He tried to put the feeling away. He was getting soft. But he didn't remove the metallic skullcap. There was a phrase: Fve been looking for you! and he didn't know whether she had said it, or he, or both. He knew then that he had been looking for her -- in all the wrong places. In New York and London and Brazzaville. In Moscow and Peking and Dar es Salaam. In Kodiak and Kuwait and Tel Aviv. In all the places the news had taken him. And now for the first time he'd looked beyond Earth and had found her. Across the vastness her presence came. An aura. No, it was a name -- Aura. He had an impression of slimness, of young excitement tempered with maturity, of fine-boned beauty, of yearning. She was youth and light and hope, an end to searching. His impression of a sea of women had yielded a single isle of peace, of love deep and enduring... And all that was wrong with it was that it was impossible. T Te deliberately broke the con' tact, snatching off the skullcap. Aura lingered in his mind for a moment, then was gone. What a hoax! "Intergal" indeed! Scally dismissed her for the phantom she was by swallowing the remains of his drink and loudly demanding another. My solace comes in whiskey glasses," he said and handed the skullcap back to Harmish. The alien shrugged. "Reject her if you like, but not me." Maybe it was the drink, it seemed to Scally that there were times when Harmish's speech was more idiomatic than quaint. "Leaving the women out of it," Scally said brusquely, "do you mean you don't know what it is to be alone in your mind -- to have privacy of thought?" "Never alone," Harmish said. 'The global Auxorean consciousness comfortingly extends beyond the stars. They speak to me constantly, and I to them." "That must be maddening." "You do not tire of yourself, I assume, and we do not tire of ourselves. It is the Auxorean way of life." "I guess it beats television." "You've absoluted it," Harmish said. "Take another drink. We commence to be brothers beyond the stars." Harmish and Scally drank. The alien looked calculatingly at the Earthman and said : "As brothers, let me desist you from the idea that I peacebound come. Au contraire." "Au confrare?" Scally said. He appeared to be quite awash. "Bent on conquest, are you? Good. There's been too much noodling around, peacewise. I'll help you. If there was a war I could be a correspondent. Always wanted to be a war correspondent but never got the chance. No war, you know." "How sad. But war is not my purpose. My aim is to take away your Secretary-General." "Oh, that's a good one," Scally said admiringly. "Kidnap Mboto. Snatch him right out of his own front yard. That's sure one daring plan, fellow conspirator." Harmish nodded. He'd done intensive research, he said, in evaluating Mboto's credentials, and was convinced that the Sec Gen was the only man who could solve the Auxoreans' crisis. "Tell me more," Scally said, drinking up. S o Harmish told him about his campus visit and his subsequent trip to two Central American countries. He admitted ruefully that he'd been misled by the ethervid and spyfax about the extent of the campus "revolt." The word obviously had different connotations on the campus and in Latin America. It had also been Young Harmish' s intention on the campus to take advantage of alienation, which was making one of its periodic comebacks, as a pilot project for his larger plan. Young Harmish, by definition an alien, was naturally encouraged. Who was more fitted than alien he to lead a revolt of the alienated -- this potent lot of potential leaders? But Young Harmish, despite he cries of "Churu.'", "Frehef.'" and "Up the rebels!", was cut dead on the campus. His message, unaccompanied by song or electric guitar and minus the big amplified beat, was obviously in the wrong bag. The few who did heai: told him politely, without empathy, that he wasn't what was happening; at least not to them. In fact one shaggy young man, to whom Y. Harmish confided a plan to storm the Administration Building, told him: "My God, man, we're not that alienated!" Besides, the shaggy young man added, this was dead week; people were cramming for final exams. The student had also told him: "You talk funny, man." Hurt and puzzled but persevering, Harmish had flown from the campus to the Central American nation of Baranoia, whose leader was the tyrant Lopez-Diaz. Baranoia was on the border of another bothersome little country called Paranoohe, whose leader was the dictator Avila-Perez. Harmish was received courteously by Lopez-Diaz, who took him to a cafe in the square of the capital city. The Baranoians, Who had been rehearsed, cheered and sang when Lopez-Diaz appeared in the square with his guest and continued to cheer as they went into the cafe and reappeared on the balcony, where they could dine in privacy. They began their meal with Rob Ro # ts. Lopez-Diaz did not drink the local wine; he used virtually none of the shoddy native products. The ceremonial cheering ended. The typical street noises of a Latin American capital in ferment rose to their ears. The con versation on the balcony was punctuated by sounds of breaking glass, gunshots. Chanting, sirens and an occasional scream. TT ncouraged by the obvious unrest, Harmish waited only until the second round of Rob Roys to offer the use of an Auxorean bomb to Lopez-Diaz. (Scally wanted to know about the bomb. Harmish said it wasn't much -- jiist a Class # reservoirdigger, with a radiation trap that collected all the bad Geigers and jettisoned them perpendicularly into space. It had been Harmish's larger plan, he confided, to test Mboto's reaction to a crisis. If Mboto dealt with it adequately, Harmish would then make his move.) The Baranoian leader appeared to give very careful consideration to the offer of the bomb and what might lie behind it. Finally he said: "You ask me, senor, whether I will drop your bomb on the capital of my hated rival, Avila-Perez of Paranoche? Whether, in the vernacular of the Norteamericano, I will put my money where my mouth is?" Harmish, excited to eloquence, said: "That is precisely the ask I put to you." Lopez-Diaz hesitated a moment longer, then said decisively: 'Alas, the answer must be no." Harmish was stunned. "You decline because you unwish to isit such suffering on fellow human beings?" LfOpez-Diaz snorted. "There Isn't a humanitarian bone in my I)ody. My reason is simple: I fear Mboto." "An ignoble answer," Harmish 'ouchsafed peevishly. "Perhaps. But consider my position and that of my hereditary enemy, Avila-Perez. We have much in common, as we learned when we met by chance in a night club in New York. AvilaPerez and I discussed our nearly identical problems at the club and later at the home of two 'adies, and again in the U.N. bar during a recess of the international conference that had taken us north." "And you concluded?" "That the world is big enough for both of us, considering the presence in it also of Mboto -- Mboto the savage-once-removed, the saint-and-destroyer, who would not hesitate to eliminate either or both of our countries to prevent more extensive destruction. That Mboto is one to be feared and admired. A practical man first, an idealist second." Harmish showed his disappointment. He said: "These cannot be the words of Lopez-Diaz, the Protector of Baranoia, as I have heard him called, the notorious Latam dictator who threatens night and day to obliterate the oppressor, to counterinvade the Commie foe, to inquisit the infiltrator." 'Look, senor, I talk big but I don't want war. Mboto'd kill me -- literally. I'm just an old-fashioned rabble rouser whose way is to. exhort the populace now and then to make them feel better about being poorer than the people of Paranoche. Mboto understands this. Meanwhile he and the U.N. are helping us catch up with Paranoche by sending machinery and medicine, technicians and teachers and others who seem genuinely concerned about us." He shrugged. "This appeals to my romantic nature. You can't fight love." Frustrated, Harmish said: "I will offer my bomb to AvilaPerez to drop on Baranoia." Lopez-Diaz laughed. "He will tell you the same as I, my friend. He too stands in mortal fear of that sweet but murderous peacekeeper, Mboto." A nd Avila-Perez did tell Harmish the same, too, in the most courteous way, when the alien flew to the capital of Paranoche in the private plane of LopezDiaz as a distinguished, if discomfited, guest of The Protector. AvilaPerez told him Mboto fortunately understood that the horrendous threats Avila-Perez made again Baranoia were for internal consumption. He also said that he, Avila-Perez, much as he liked Harmish and appreciated his offer, would have him put to death before he would risk the possibility of conflict with Baranoia. Harmish expressed consternation. "And well you might," the leader of Paranoche said. "I expressed similar consternation, my friend, when for some niinor peccadillo of mine Mboto blacked us out for a week. Utter quarantine. I didn't know there was such a Light did it. No communications of any kind witii the rest of the world. Demoralizing, like solitary confinement." "When?" Harmish asked. "Three years ago. Then just as the quarantine was lifted we were hit by Hurricane Hildy. With no warning from the U.N. weather service, or anywhere else, there was no chance to get the crop in early. So naturally, because we're a onecrop economy and because that crop equals thirty per cent of own gross national product, we were knocked flat on our economic backs for longer than I care to remember. Mboto doesn't fool around. He scares the pants off me, if you want to know the whole truth, and I refuse to give him any excuse to make an example of me." "You admit cowardice?" Harmish asked. "I'm a live coward," AvilaPerez told him."Whpt I am saying to you, with all due respect, is go peddle your bomb to some other slob. This one knows better than to tangle with the Sec Gen." Harmish left Paranodhe and, in a thoughtful mood, headed for New York, home of the United Nations and of Mboto, its Secretary-General. Ill I t was almost like a stage entrance. Harmish had just finished describing his Latin-American fiascoes to Scally in the U.N. bar when the Sec Gen came in alone and joined them. Mboto had never been one to stay aloof in his luxury quarters high atop the Secretariat Building. He roamed all parts of his domain like a fearless and friendly but awesome lord. He sat down with Harmish and Scally and told a waiter who rushed over: "Two more of the same for these gentlemen and a Bloody (pardon the expression. Steward, I see you are British) Mary for me." "No offense taken. Your Excellency," the waiter said and went off to the service bar. Scally started to get up respectfully, but a powerful black hand pushed him down into his chair. "A new face in our midst?" the Sec Gen asked. "An imagmative new costume, anyway. Somebody must have invented time travel; he looks #th century." "He's an alien," Scally said. "We're all aliens here," Mboto said. "Even you in what you call your country, you breaker of pacts with the Red Man." "Touche, Chief," Scally said. "I don't defend our lousy past." "You should avoid calling an African 'Chief,' " the Sec Gen said. "He may be sensitive about his tribal background." Scally grinned as the waiter came with the drinks. "It's a fact. Harmish is literally an alien, from an extraterr -- from deep in space, like." "If that's journalese," Mboto said, "you speak it with a quaint descriptive flavor." "It's not journalese. It's just that if you'd drunk as much Bourbon as I have, your theech might be spick, too." Mboto turned to Harmish. "You can tell that our waspish friend here is subconsciously a minority-hater. Spick, indeed. Let's introduce ourselves. I'm Mboto, Secretary-General of the United Nations." "Untied Nations," Scally muttered, slumping. Harmish beamed across the table. "Exhilarated, sir. You are the he I have light-yeared to acquaintance. I, Y. Harmish, relict of but revanent to, one hopes, Auxor. In truth an alien, but adaptable, I vouchsafe." "Maybe we should close the bar," Mboto said. "It's raising hell with the language." "Humor?" Harmish asked, straining. "Irony? I limp behind, uncomprehensive." "Your candor does your credit. What brought you across the trackless void?" Scally muttered : "Trackless, hell. Harmish, he track'um. Lord. Big wheel back home, Harmish be." "And honored here as well, Scally. I think we close'um bar, though; you drinkum too much firewater. My word, tongue blong along you, him flappum too much altogether." "Big kidder. I hope," Scally said, subsiding. '"The Sec Gen turned back to  Harmish, who had been listening with agonized attention, and asked: "What did bring you across the void, trackless or otherwise, which we primitives of Earth have yet to probe in depth?" "An unworthy motive, perhaps. now that you have impinged on me with favor," Harmish said. He took out of his breast pocket a curious device and held it toward the Sec Gen. "All sincere, I display this." "You must be as drunk as Scally," Mboto said. "Negatively. Alcohol fails to permeate one of my metabolic type. The grains but convert themselves to energy potential, known on Auxor as Enerpo." The Sec Gen said: "You seem to have the advantage of me, if only linguistically. But, having seized yourself of the situation, as we diplomatic types say, you must have an agenda. What is your pleasure, Mr. Chairman?" Harmish rolled his eyes. "Distract me not," he said. "My pleasure awaits my return to Auxor. My duty is another thing -- the abduction of you." "Foolhardy adventure," Mboto said. "I have only to lift an eyebrow, and hidden guards who watch my every fnovement will reap you like so much wheat. Will you reconsider, Y. Harmish? Or must the first interstellar alien be a dead alien?" Harmish seemed unafraid. "Perhaps you misunderstand. What points itself at you is no weapon except in the economic sense. Y. Harmish offers no violence but -- a job. That which you have mistaken as a weapon is tiie Auxorean equivalent of your phenomenon yclept credit card. But with exception that no statement presents itself. Phenomenon is portable programmer of plenty. Wish-fulfillment device. Translator of dreams." It was then that Harmish explained in 'his quaint way that he was offering the Secretary Generalship of Auxor to Mboto because Auxor was adrift in indecision, mediocrity, apathy, anomie, apartness ("Just don't call it Apartheid," the Sec Gen said) and other modern manifestations that were threatening to plunge it into a new dark age, or worse, into oblivion. "Sounds hke Earth, preMboto," Scally said. "Why not use your own Enerpo gadget to fix things up?" Harmish sighed. Then, with fetching modesty he explained that he had tried -- that he himself was the equivalent of the SecretaryGeneral of Auxor. He paused for reaction, but the others merely waited for him to go on. hagrined, Harmish said the  universal mindlink nullified the effect of any device, mechanical or psychological, that an Auxorean -- even he -- might use against another. Harmis'h said: "True, Auxor's most active minds are hereditarily immune to the mindlink, but they languish in durance, along with their owners. The gumption people, the vital ones, go to jail. The rest are a lot of sorries, apathetic, unimaginative." "But surely there are those whose energy is channeled productively," Mboto said. "Those who have made scientific, medical, artistic advances." "Nothing is artistic about Auxor any more. Anyone with an idea knows it will be instantly absorbed into the mass consciousnes. It would be as if -- name one of your planet's great works, widely copied -- " "Mona Lisa, David..." "Perfectly. As if the Da Vinci or the Michelangelo, coextensively with the moment of its completion, was already globally copied. As if a googolplex of reproductions came into being simultaneously. Incentive is destroyed." "I can see that," Mboto said; "but what could I possibly do about it?' "Yours is a powerful mind. We've tasted it, imknown to you. We foimd its power suprawestern, supraglobal; it transcends that of civilized man's; it has potentialities unexplored by you or your fellow men. Your mind is strong enough to share itself with a selected number of Auxoreans, as an experiment; to inspire them to rise from torpor; to infect them with Mbotolike dignity and ego; to show that a tribal man, whose concepts were those of the group, could grow to be a supremely individual person, an artist of mankind' Only a powerful alien mind, such as Mboto's, screened against the Auxorean mindlink by its alien nature, could be effective, Harmish insisted with an eloquence that again made him sound quite un-Harmishlike. It appealed to the savage in Mboto, who hadn't had to smash a rebellion or destroy a dictator in a loon's age. In a way it was unfortunate that he no longer had to worry about Earth. Mboto could leave the U.N. in good conscience, he knew. The world would be in hands as competent as his own. By unspoken arrangement, Mboto's successor had already been picked and and therefore ail others. The successor-designate was a strong-willed man with an abhorrence to war as deep as his  own. A further asset was that he also represented a nonwhite race. He was a man called Ohiro Kashawa, who was born to radiation-crippled parents in # in a target of opportunity called Hiroshima. Ohiro Kashawa was widely respected and popularly known as O.K. But there was an unfilled wan that Mboto had on Earth. Arboto told Harmish: "Five years ago, I would havr been tempted. That was when j went out in public more oftei. than I do now. Occasionally i still found myself seated nex to the kitchen door in some fash ionable restaurant. But there': been progress. Not giant strides, but an encouraging amount. Slowly I was accepted in these restaurants. Not because of my skin, mind you, but because of my position. Then I became more fashionable than the restaurants and the 'in' people began to eat where I ate, even at Spanish Charlie's in East Harlem. I don't eat out any more, at all. Now I have a bigger ambition than to sit comfortably in a restaurant." This was news to ScaUy. "What's that, sir?" he asked. Mboto looked as modest as Scally had ever seen him. The Sec Gen took a deep breath and said, looking down at the table: "I want to resign from the U.N., settle here and be the first Negro president of the United States." There was a long silence. Then Scally asked: "How could that be? You're not a citizen." "I was bom in the U.S. Embassy in Kampala and had dual Uganda-U.S. citizenship until I was #, when I chose to be a IV Ugandan. You forget that when I became Secretary General the Congress of the United States restored my U.S. citizenship to me. Not honorary, but actual citizenship. I'm well over # and as fit to be president as you are, Scally, my fine white American friend." "I remember now," Scally said. But, still -- " 'Still you question my motives," the Sec Gen said. "Is it more than vanity, you ask? I think it is. Look at the history of America's dark-skinned people. Look where they grow up -- Little Rock, Selma, Harlem, Watts. Look at the vast number of potential geniuses who never had a chance. Many have overcome handicaps of color or poverty to develop their talent. You know their names as well as I. But think of the thousands of other potential geniuses who died -- physically or spiritually -- because they never survived the misery and hopelessness of a Negro ghetto." "But if you were in the White House -- ?" "Obviously," Mboto said, "I'd be their inspiration. The beginning of fulfillment. Everything else would be detail." Scally sat in silence, contemplating the future. "I'll stay on Barth," Mboto told Harmish. 'he crestfallen Harmish said: "My crest has fallen. Is all lost? Mboto said: "You can't have me or O.K., but I'd like to help you." "You must help me," Harmish pleaded. "All that I have described to you is secondary -- something we could survive. The deeper threat is one I've been ashamed to tell. Asihamed for myself -- my people." "And what' is that?" Mboto asked kindly. "Forget your shame if hdp is possible." "Sterility," Harmish said. "Of course!" Scally said, coming to. "All those women -- that sea of women I imagined I saw when I put on your skull cap." "A symbol, merely," Harmish said. "Sure, a symbol -- a symptom of what's wrong. Among the impressions I had was a lack of fulfillment. An emptiness. A yearning. Sure, they marry -- but what's the ultimate fulfillment for a woman? A child -- children. The only eternity anyone can be sure of." Harmish looked surprised. "You've absoluted it," he said. "Right. They can't, or won't have children -- " "Can't," Harmish said. "Because they despise their men. They're psychologically unable to bear . children in a world so sunk in mediocrity that it'd be a living death. They'd rather see the race die than perpetuate it as it is." Scally subsided again. Mboto said: You'd like me to change all that? Alone? I'm flattered. I'll match my virility with any man's, but I don't really think I'm up to repopulating a planet." Harmish looked hurt. 'You misunderstand. I expect no insemination from you, unless you choose individually. We are monogamous." "I joked where I should not have," Mboto said. "It's a serious matter. You need an expert to make an on-the-spot study and do whatever is necessary to shake them out of their skins. You need a renaissance -- literally a rebirth. A born leader. A man with a passion for living. Someone to provide an example. But I've told you Why I can't go. Take Scally." "Scally? Esteemed, but ineffectual Scally?" "Don't scornheap, Harmish," Mboto said. "Scally can help you if any Earthman can. He's tough enough to be ruthless, but he writes mystical, beautiful and often hopeful poetry. The Hammarskjold influence, I except. There's nothing in his personal life to keep him here, and it's about time he had some happiness. I understand the Auxorean maidens are not to be sneezed at." "Sneezed at?" Harmish asked. "Idiom. I mean they're pretty swell, aren't they? By and large?" "Swell? Large? They do. They are. In places. Yes." "So take him. Just don't tell the Security Council or the New York Times." "But he lacks experience," Harmish protested. A yrboto laughed. "He has more theoretical and practical experience than Ohiro Kashawa and me combined. That means he's an all-round expert in geopolitics, not to mention economics, linguistics, anthropology and psychology. He was the first Schweitzer Scholar at The Maxwell School. I'm sure he hasn't told you he's James Franklin Scally, Ph.D., summa cum laude, of the same class that produced a Secretary of State and a Governor of New York. Nor has he become a bum since. Don't think he's one-tenth as drunk or ineffectual as he may appear. Let me tell you a secret. Young Harmish, as one Secretary-General to another. I've been a party to your conversation with Scally since it began. There's a microphone sewed into his lapel and a receiver elsewhere, as there always is when Scally's on a mission. Not quite Auxor's interconnected consciousness, but good enough for our purposes. Let me tell you another secret: "Scally is now and has been since I came here from Kampala the number three man in the United Nations, right after O.K. Only you and the three of us know it. This gave Scally the freedom neither O.K. nor I had to talk to people in crises and to Unove relatively unnoticed to trouble spots. Scally's interventions, proposed by me to the Security Council but drafted by Scally, have settled half a dozen crises in the past five years. "You may have heard of the abortive coup at Qatif. Or the incident of the Andalusian Fog. Or the short-lived Battle of the Land Bridge at Bering. Or the most explosive of all, the Siege of Novaya Zemlya. Any of these could have erupted into a global war, an Earthdestroying war. But Scally flew to each. While he was digging out the reportable facts for his paper, he gave the U.N. the unpublishable background and made his recommendations for a settlement. O.K. and I then went through the motions of acting on it, but it was really Scally's solution.' Y. Harmish looked with new respect at JamesFranklin Scally, putative sot, who now grinned and said: "Who bespeaks me? What name blong along Scallysir dost thou take in yain? Another bourbon, Innkeeper, an you love me. I'll go anywhere, at any lime, and talk to anyone in the interests of peace. Who else said that? Make it a double, Innkeeper. One to get ready and two for the road." "He's not nearly as non compos as he sounds," Mboto said. "He is fairly sozzled but withal he's literate, perceptive and fairminded. He had too small a chance on Barth; terrestrial posterity passed him by until O.K. and I discovered him, and then we had to keep him a secret to preserve his effectiveness. There may be thousands more like him, undiscovered; maybe we can find them. , Meanwhile let's give Scally a chance to be himself on Auxor." Harmish and Scally looked at each other with new eyes. "I guarantee him," Mboto said. T).ack on Auxor then. Young Harmish asked the Hon. James Franklin Scally, after thejr'd disembarked and were getting accustomed to the pleasantly lesser gravity: "How are things. Your Excellency?" Jim Scally, Ph.D., SecretaryGeneral Designate of Auxor, inhaled shallowly, experimentally. He could breathe the air, or whatever it was. A little spicy, maybe, but he'd had to make do with a lot worse, such as the stuff in the Lincoln Tunnel in rush hour and a sandstorm in the Sinai Peninsula. "How's it smell, Jim?" Harmish asked, and his guest noticed the improvement in his language. "I think you'll find it not too bad." Scally saw that they were crossing a parklike public square, through which people strolled leisurely, enjoying the warmth of a sun that was bigger and duller than Earth's. Like his friend Harmi, they were people of recognizable shapes, including shapely female people. "It agrees to me so far," Scally found himself saying. "Glad to hear it." Harmish was using good colloquial speech, tion of all time will be held at the Hofal Commodore in New York City on Jona #rd-#th, #. It will commemorate the first flying saucer sighting, made by Kenneth Arnold exactly twenty years earlier. Featured guests will include Kenneth Arnold, Ray Palmer, Ivan Sanderson, James Moseley, Howard Monger, Gray Barker, and many other famous person, f alities in the field of flying saucer re search. Dept #-#, Fort Lee N. J. # id Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Chrisitmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # )ostpaid -- send in the coupon today. I Galaxy Publishing Corp. I #I Hudson Street,  New York City #  Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi I record of Mtisxc from MathemorJ tics right away. I enclose check I or money order for #.  Nome I Address I CHy  Slate Zip Code... J (Offer good in U, S, A. Only) r m m ib m h la mi hi m ih hr hr rh h hr hr mb hr hr rr Soallx policed again. He was the one wWo was ieaking pidgin, or wblatever construction Y. Hamlin had employed on Earth. Scally tried to correct this. Recalling the farewell party the United Nations Correspondents Association had given for him, without knowing his mission, he said: "They hilariated when I hyperspaced for Auxor. Nobody Auxorwards, they snickerly advised." "More fools they," Harmish said. "We get debriefed in the Headquarters building across the park. A formality only." Scally nodded in confident tranquility. One of the female Auxoreans had caught his eye and was smiling at him. He stopped and grabbed Harmish's arm. She was smiling and communicating! She was the slim, lovely, comfortgiving girl whose mind had flown to his out of the sea of women. Was she wordlessly telling him her name was Aura? Now he knew the hope her wordless message had expressed. She was destined to be his partner in the mission to unsterilize Auxor. He saw Harmish nodding corroboration and he knew she'd be there when he returned to the square from Headquarters. And be knew that she knew. It was America's most guarded Secret Weapon. Unfortunately its backfire threatened us fool G eneral Pier S. Hardesty placed his finger on the map. "Here, at Karnak City. A twenty-hour bombardment, and bombing round the clock until I say 'Stop.' Also at the road junction north of Hellcat Pass. I want the defenses there plastered." Bums, the artillery officer, shook his head. "We can do anything you want to Karnak City. But we can't hit that road junction till we either capture both ends of the iass or get some kind of position on the south slope of the Hellcat Mountains. There's a little matter of lofting those shells over that mountain range." "What's tiie matter?" Hardesty demanded. "You've got # mm. howitzers running out your ears." "Yes, sir. But the shells have a somewhat different trajectory from what you might expect I'd like to take the lot of these #'s and -- " Burns told in short language what he would like to do with them. Hardesty listened critically, then shook his head. "You couldn't do it," he said. "They wouldn't fit. Personally, I'd like to -- " The air officer put in, in a purring voice, "If Colonel Bums feels that his artillery can't make it over the foothills, I'm sure we can plaster this road junction, General. With anj kind pf implosive, incendiary oi distnaciwt you care to use." "What we're up against is a collection of ihialf-staryed, communized fanatics here, and semilunatic do-gooders at home," said the general. "Personally, I'd like to take these Kazang rebels and slauter the lot of them. But they pop down holes like rats, bob up somewhere dse, to put a bullet through the back of your head, and if we give them what they deserve, everybody's afraid their coreligionists will rise up and the thing will spread instead of ending." He shook his head. "So -- we're using distractants only." Yes, sir," said the air officer. "Well, we can reach that road junction, sir." Burns, the artillery officer, said, "Live distractants. They have to hit the junction with a reasonable facsimile of pinpoint accuracy." "We can -- " Without jarring "Ah." "Parachutes won't work. Vaned containers induce nausea and make a bad psychological effect. Our #'s have a rotating base and tip, stabilized canister and proximity-controlled shortlife superrotating pop-out blades. They land the load genfy." The air officer snorted. "But at the beginning, this same load starts off how? It's shot out oi a gunJ Burns nodded. "Using microtimed charges and safety vents to insure smooth acceleration, with internal cushioning in the canister, rocket-assist units, and a barrel proportioned to fit a coast-defense gun instead of an honest howitzer. These #'s may burn the ears off an artilleryman now and then, but they don't hurt the charge." The air officer shodk his head in disgust. "What a war." G eneral Hardesty eyed him speculatively. "Can you airdrop these distractants on that road junction?" "Well, sir -- " "Our canisters," said Burns helpfully, "are armored, to prevent unfortunate incidents." The air officer said in disgust, "No, sir. I'm afraid we can't compete under those conditions. Not yet, at least." . "All right," said Hardesty. "Let's get this mess straightened out and get squared away. First we hit Karnak City. Twentyhour bombardment and bombing around the clock, until I'm satisfied they've had it. There's, three battalions of the Kazang Death's Head Elite Guard holed up in there, and they aim to make a house-to-house defense and then afterward claim we desecrated the temple when thex left. We want to be sure thexVe well softened up before we move "Yes, sir. As -- the charges?" "A, B and C, but no D. I have to reserve D for that road junction." He eyed Bums coldly. "Sir," said Burns, "the #'s just won't reach that junction. That's all there is to it. But if you decide to soften it up with A and B distractants, out of #-S howitzers, we can do that for you." Hardesty nodded. "All right. Hit the pass with A and B for a couple of hours, then walk on back and plaster the junction." "When we move up later," said Burns, "we can hit the junction with all the D you want. Ah, that is, with as many D canisters as you can load." "All right. That will have to do it. " Bums saluted and left at a trot. The air officer saluted and ran off in a different direction. A perspiring individual in fatigues, with "Correspondent" sewed at his shoulder, scribbled frantically in a notebook and eased closer to the scowling general. "Ah -- General Hardesty. May I ask, sir, how do you feel about the effectiveness of this new and advanced means of -- er -- settling international conflicts?" "IVe been directed to use it," said the general, "and I'm using it." "Yes, sir, but how do you feel? What is your assessment of the effectiveness of this method?" Hardesty squinted at the correspondent like a large dog eyeing a small porcupine. The fellow was a nuisance, all rit. And there was no question but that Hardesty could obliterate him. But in the process, he might collect some painful mementos that would fester for a long time afterward. "It works," said Hardesty abruptly, "in the short run. In the long run, I foresee some difficulties." "H'm. Might I ask, sir -- " "I can't tell you what's going to go wrong without tending to precipitate the very thing I want to avoid. Just stick around. You'll see." "M'm." the correspondent was scribbling fast in his notebook. The general suddenly wondered how much of that was going to be legible later and how many illegible sections would be bridged over by the corresiondent's imagination. He glanced at his watch and saw that there were still a few moments till the #'s opened up and the air arm went into action. He frowned back at the notebook. "What system of shorthand is that you're using?" 'Shortland? Oh, my own, general. I leave out all the vowels; and capitals, and don't bother with the punctuation." The general nodded. 'Just as I thought." Underfoot, the ground jumped. A few moments later someone shouted, "Drones out, sir!" The general nodded. A thunderous concussion rolled out across the flat green land and echoed back from the hills ahead. There was a continuous trembling underfoot. Dark forms blurred into the sky, to vanish in the direction of Kamak City, the Kazangs' ancient capital and religious center. With a roar, the aircraft began to take off. Someone shouted, "Drones transmitting, sir!" The general nodded and walked fast for the TV shack. The correspondent stayed close at his heels. "Sir!" shouted the correspondent. "Would you say this new and more sophisticated means of -- ah -- settling disputes is an outgrowth of the spectacular increase in our productive capacity, consequent upon progressive scientific and , technological advances, and the rationalization of productive methods?" "I suppose so." "Would you say that it represents a hopefxil development in relations between states and differing ideological systems and viewpoints?" "That I don't know." The general ducked past a guard and through a doorway. Behind him, there was an angry outburst as the guard stopped the correspondent. The general ran down a flight of steps, turned a comer, went by another guard, and through another doorway. Before him were about a dozen big TV screens, arranged in a semicircle, with operators adjusting the screens for clarity and speaking through headphones to the dronecontrollers overhead. Roughly half of the screens were already lit. The nearest lighted screen showed a street of small shops, with a trench across the street, the heaped-up dirt forming a parapet, and the crowded figures of Kazang rebels armed with tommy-guns and bazookas peering out over the dirt. Down the street, others looked out from barricaded shops. One of the men pointed up and shouted, as a small parachute drifted down, supporting some kind of dangling burden. Instantly a fanatical-looking soldier raised his gun and shot at it, creating a dazzle of flying fragments and a splash of something dark on the front of the parapet. A second soldier bent over the parapet, straightened, and shouted something. The first soldier took aim toward another parachute drifting down. A third soldier changed grips on his gim, and smashed the first soldier over the head. he small parachute drifted  closer, and was immediately snatched from the air. For an instant, its burden was clear on the screen -- a bottle suspended on a cord and labeled: Govt. Issue For offensive use only. More and more parachutes were drifting down, and more and more enemy troops were rising from holes to snatch them out of the air. Officers appeared, shouting furiously, to be hit on the head by drifting bottles labeled, 'Govt. use only." The populace was now reappearing in the streets, to snatch at drifting bottles. Discipline and order were clearly giving way, save where one grim and burly officer dealt out a savage harangue and then cautiously tried a sip from a bottle, and spat it on the ground. Obviously he was warning that it must be poison. Now, however, a surprised look crossed his face, and he tried again. He raised his eyebrows, took off his hdmet, eyed the bottle with a frown, and tried a third sip. More small parachutes were now drifting down, marked with concentric stripes, where the first had been in solid colors. These latter bore small cartons lettered: Govt. Issue For offensive use only. Caution: May be harmful to your health. The general watched alertly. Surely in his religious capital something would happen to prevent the distractants from working unhindered. But if it was going to happen, it would have to happen fast. The troops had not left their posts as yet, but they were making good use of every drifting opportunity as it wafted by. Now came a third set of parchutes, marked with varicolored rays and bearing boxes of assorted sizes, that troops and populace alike tore open, at first warily, and then with wild abandon. Inside was a variety of different things, some boxes holding big flashlights that lit up brightly, others containing box cameras, M# and others clocks, already showing the correct time. All of these things were somewhat large and breakable, but useful, and good by local standards. The general glanced from screen to screen. To his experienced eye, it now seemed clear that resistance in Karnak City would fold up without any serious struggle. So much for that. But there was still the pass on his left front. Once he had that, and the road junction beyond, any counterattack would have to proceed by awkward detours. But the road junction was held by an enemy general who knew exactly what the situation was, and he was there in person. F rom behind General Hardisty came the sound of loud arguing, and then the correspondent, shoving passes and authorizations back into his pocket, thrust into the room and stopped to stare at the screens. From his face, it was evident that he had heard the theory of this procedure but had never seen it in action before. 'Ah -- ah -- General," said the correspondent. "Ah -- this is a bombardment with A, B, and C charges?" "Correct." "But no D charges?" "That's right. No D." "A is -- ah -- " "Liquor." "And B?" "Cigarets. C is bulky breakable objects of local value." "Why bulky and breakable?" "When the enemy soldier has something bulky and breakable that he values and wants to hang onto, it cramps his style considerably. Picture yourself trying to fight a war with a portable TV in one hand." "I see. What is a D charge?" "Stick around. You'll see." ' "And the object of this 'distraction attack' is -- ?" "According to the book: 'Vast quantities of wealth and productive effort are expended in the production of munitions, only a tiny fraction of which ever strike a living target. Much is wasted, even in attacks upon inanimate objects. Where these objects are hit, valuable structures are destroyed and must be replaced at considerable expense by the victors, when they occpy the conquered territory. A railroad, for instance, destroyed in the attack, must be replaced in the occupation. This all creates much waste and duplication of effort. Desirable objects, however, like the Trojan horse, will be actively sought by the populace, and each one will, in effect, strike its target. A more desirable way to block a road or railroad is to place thereon an object of great value to the defender, who will feel impelled to remove it carefully. Much can be accomplished by using objects of local value to block facilities of rtational value. In this way, one interest in the country can be led to oppose another. By judicious use of this method, a chaotic situation may be created wherein the united enemy fragments into local groups. Since enemy is involved, the actual aggressor using this method incurs comparatively little ill-feeling. It is a method which, of course, can by effectively use only by a highly productive and well organized power, with highly developed technology and reliable and flexible transportation system.' " The correspondent wrote urgently in his notebook, then looked up. "Arid this method is what we're using?" "Exactly." "What if someone shoots at our men?" "If it's serious, shoot back." "Doesn't that create ill will?" Te general shrugged. "Con sider this present setup. An inefficient but at least anti-communist government is overthrown by fanatical communist rebels, who seize the capital and drive the legitimate but inefficient government to the coastal city from which they now rule what's left of the country. The efficient but communist rebels take over, have a blood purge, exterminate anyone unfortunate enough to have possessions and make so much bad feeling that they're afraid of being overthrown themselves, so they efficiently create a murderous dictatorship. Meanwhile, the legitimate government invokes our mutualdefense treaty and urges us to come in and slaughter every rebel Kazang with a head on his shoulders. Are you under the impression that anybody can do anything in such a setup without creating bad feeling of some kind?" The correspondent blinked. "Yes, I see." He scribbled desperately in his notebook, and the general said, "Why not a tape recorder?" "I had one, but I got too close to one of those # mm. howitzers. Now, general, when you explained the theory of distraction warfare, you said 'according to the book.' Is there another explanation?" "Sure. Have you ever heard of Sheridan's ride?"  "I've heard of it, but I don't' know what it was." . "Sheridan's troops were defeated by a Confederate force under the command of Early. Sheridan was away at the time, but rode to the battlefield, turning his retreating troops back as he went. When he reached the battlefidd, he found Early's troops, who were suffering from want and hunger, plundering his camp. While they were still iu a state of disorder, Sheridan attacked and routed them. Throughout history, armies capable of standing great deprivation have been torn apart by sudden plenty and then qxiickly defeated. This has almost always happened by accident. The present idea is to use it on purpose, So far, it seems to be working. But believe me, it goes against the grain." "But, doesn't this method strengthen the enemy?" "What -- liquor, cigarets and cameras, delivered to him when he needs maximum alertness? Strengthen him? How?" "Don't you ever use food?" "Certainly, after we've got control of the place, or for some definite purpose. The idea is to cause the maximum distraction at just the time he can least afford it, if you follow me." The correspondent frowned, and nodded. The general glanced briefly at the screens, then looked back at the correspondent. Somewhere, the general had heard the saying, "He is a fool who cannot hide his wisdom." Now, was this correspondent really such a dolt as he seemed to be, or was he merely seeming to be a dolt in order to get his victim to lower his guard. And then what would happen? Would he send back such a report that the dogooderg would all complain because the poor Kazang rebels were being fed liquor instead of a balanced diet? "Ah -- " said the correspondent -- " these reports of immoral practices -- " "What reports of immoral practices?" "There have been rumors." "Get to the point." "Well, it's said that on some battlefields, beautiful women have been driven along ahead of the troops." "That was the Kazang's stunt, not ours." "H'm. Well -- " "The general glanced at his ' watch. A few moments before, he'd noticed another screen flicker on. That view was of the pass. Out of the comer of his eye, he took occasional glances at the screen as the correspondent asked more and yet more questions : Was this method moral? Was it humane? Wasn't it really, in a way, more cruel than to shoot a man? Was it iair? Meanwhile, disorganization at the pass progressed rapidly. Now the attacking troops approached, ignoring the liquor with a disinterest that spoke volumes for the regulation chemical in their bloodstreams that would make them sick if they drank that particular brand. And then the troops were in the pass. Somewhere the TV observers watched the effect of the bombardment further ahead, taking pains to see that the bombardment was accurate, as usual, and that it was having a real and not only an imagined effect. But that collection of staggering dnmks, guns lost or slung at their shoulders, packs bulging and bottles in both hands gave testimony that Intelligence had correctly estimated the tastes and psychology of the Kazang ordinary soldier. The best general officer of the Kazang, back at that crossroad, was another matter. Again General Hardisty glanced at his watch... so don't you feel," the correspondent was saying, "that really this is a heartless and callous exploitation of human weakness, human frailty, to subvert the mind and morals of your opponent from his true loyalty, to degrade..." "Phew," said the general. "Not enemy, but opponent. How did you degrade an opponent who delights in torture, who in peacetime considers himself clever if he strains ditch-water for a particular type of intestinal parasite, then bribes a servant to put it in his competitor's food? We are supposed to use only the most knightly of methods, while our own men are carried off by the thousands, bloated from barbed darts, smeared with the dung of specially infected monkeys? Is that your argument?" "Well, of course, they are primitive. It's up to us -- " The conviction was gaining ground with the general that this particular correspondent actually was a real, genuine, Grade-A boob. In that case, the fellow's boobishness could be put to use. "... if not more honorable," he was saying now, "to first send them a note stating clearly your own intentions and frankly asking them for theirs. Then you could offer them, freely and openly, an equivalent amount of goods to what you are using now. That is, if they would agree to step back a distance, as it were. Then, they would get something, and we would get something, and it would be honest and aboveboard, and both would profit." "How?" "Why, in that they would give a little, and we would give a little, and -- " "And when they wanted more, they'd grab territory, and we'd bribe them to give part of it back again?" "Well, what's the difference between that and this present method?" "This present method does not give them what they need to make trouble. It gives them what the individual soldier momentarily wants. What they need and what they, want can be two entirely different things. We use that fact to split them wide open. While they're split wide open, we move in... Before they know what hit them, we do our best to set up an honest government, which is something this country hasn't seen for the last one thousand years." The correspondent appeared momentarily dazed. The general glanced at his watch, and frowned. "Outside, the artillery should be getting set pretty soon to let fly with those D-charges. Better stay down here when they load them." The correspondent looked crafty and shot out the door and up the stairs. '"The general shook his head. A ' genuine boob. Already, on one of the screens, the first of the gigantic howitzers was roll ing toward the pass. By the time the fellow got to the spot where the big howitzers had been, they'd be set up elsewhere, and the view would then be coming in on the screen. The general watched the screen with interest. Aleardy the road junction was coming into view as the drones moved forward. For such a valuable piece of real estate, it didn't look like much. To left and right, the north-south road, a long strip of dust, stretched out over the moimtain slopes, high above the low, wet ground. Straight ahead, the east-west' road gradually descended from the pass onto the one reasonably solid causeway through swamp and jungle to the neighboring state of Cuchang. The Cuchang and Kazang mutually despised each other, and if one threatened to make progress, the other kicked his feet out from under him out of sheer jealousy. But, having the same religion, they obviously might unite to flatten any outsider with the gall to bring a new idea into the region. It followed, the general concluded, that he had better get a firm grip on that nearby narrow gateway from Cuchang into Kazang. Unfortunately, the Kazang had a general of their own who had already got a grip on this road center and intended to keep it himself. How to pry him loose? Already, the screens showed that the pass, from end to end, and the nearby slopes dominating it were in friendly hands. Already, the bombardment of the road center -- using these shells originally intended to shoot supplies into besieged outposts -- was producing awhirl of gaily colored parachutes. But not a single individual reached out to sample the temptations offered him. Obviously the enemy general had his troops well under control. There was a faint distinct jolt underfoot. Someone murmured, "There go the nine-fifteens." On the screen, a new type of shell spun down, the sunlight flashing on its whirling rotors. Then another and another dropped down, till they seemed to be landing everywhere. General Hardisty watched closely. This was the acid test. From behind him, a familiar voice said, 'Those are the D charges?" "Yes." The correspondent said, "What's going on?" He sounded intent and serious. The general said, "Whoever has that crossroad controls whether troops move north and south on that road and whether they go east and west on the Cuchang road." "Can't they go. cross-country?" of course, but the  country is bad. The Kazang general who had that road junction wants to hold it till help can come across from Cuchang. We want to take it away' from him. But he's dug in. If he can hold it till the Cuchang get their armor across, he can make trou ble for us. We have to split hia( position wide open now. Once we break up his position, we can get through to blow up the causeway. This will present the Cuchang with something of a problem." "But how are you going to capture that position, if their general can keep his troops in order? But, then, how can he control -- " General Hardisty watched the screens. "Either he's convinced them that anything we send is poisoned, or he's got some special troops who'll shoot anyone they see so much as reach for the stuff." "So these D charges are to crack their resistance?" "That's the idea." "What are they? Explosives?" "No." "Gas shells? Tear gas?" "No." "You say they're live, right?" "That's right." "Hordes of plague rats?" Hardesty snorted. "That would be bright, wouldn't it? We're here, too. Wouldn't it be shrewd of us to start a thing like that with us in the middle of it?" "Then what is inside?" "Bear in mind, we supply what they want. Not necessarily what they need, but what they want. What does any soldier of any nationality, with weeks of hard labor and deprivation behind him, and stuck in some desolate hole -- what does he want?" "I don't -- " On a nearby screen, a tall figure appeared out of the ground, walked slowly out toward one of the brightly-colored "ells," and turned to shake his fist. He appeared to be looking out of the screen almost straight at Hardisty. Silver insignia glinted at his collar as he glared angrily back toward the pass. Then he bent at one of the shells, worked a release of some kind, and the top swung up. A slender woman in a long black dress slit up both sides rose up out of the shell and threw her arms around him. G eneral Hardisty glanced at the correspKDndent. "That's his wife. We captured her two weeks ago." He studied the correspondent's face. "We only get the best value out of these D shells toward the end of a campaign, and a lot depends on Intelligence." The correspondent stared at the screen. Men were appearing from the earth like ants and snapping open the big shells. Out of each climbed someone the men seemed very glad to see. "How do they know -- " "Each of those shells has a loudspeaker; each one is labeled, l! and this bombardment was preceded by dropping leaflets and an armored broadcast speaker." The general smiled. "So now you see, we reunite families, and promote romance, at considerable expense to ourselves. Isn't that considerate of us?" The screen had taken on the look of a huge picnic. Into the midst of this reunion dropped a barrage of freshly heated food, swinging on parachutes. And in the midst of the confusion, there raced down the road in a cloud of dust half-a-dozen loaded jeeps with no drivers visible. The first four blew up. The last two bounced, crashed, swerved, made it to the crossroad and started back. "Remote-control," said the general. "To check for mines." The two remaining jeeps again roared up the road, and this time successive little groups of jeeps boiled up the road after them, bristling with guns. Behind the jeeps came a gigantic howitzer. From the direction of the jungle swamp and Cuchang, a big tank crawled up the road. Then, as the driver got a look at the howitzer, the tank turned aroimd and headed back to Cuchang again. "Just barely in time," said the general. The correspondent was still staring at the reunited families, : ' t. ' feasting on the specially provided meal fired at them in place of bullets. "Phew," he said. "Now I see it. It's all calculated. They always get what they want when it so happens that what they want will wreck their position. Holy ff Then his eyes widened even further. The general nodded. Not a boob after all, he thought. Now, had he earlier just made believe he was a boob? Or had he actually been one, and now the shock had jolted him out of it? "And," said the correspondent, "fiaf's the flaw!" "The what?" "What's wrong with this. The lang-range drawback of the short-range advantages you spoke of." The general nodded slowly. "And what is that?" "What happens," said the correspondent slowly, "is we make this too satisfactory, too painless. Just suppose -- " The general listened critically. Here it came. The very thing that he had to throw out of his mind every night in order to get a little sleep. # # T Tere we are," said the correspondent, "trying not to be brutal. We've hit on a system that actually makes it pleasant for the opposition to get beat. It's an expensive method, but wars are always expensive. The difference with our method is it's comparatively bloodless and even pleasant. It's designed to make no unnecessary enemies. Half the trouble in the world comes from the enemies you made in the last fight." "Yes," said the general. "That's it. And -- " "And," said the correspondent, "now that we've got this comparatively bloodless, pleasant way of waging war, this is still ruinously expensive, however, what do we do if -- " The general nodded. "Go on." "What do we do," the correspondent concluded, "if we make it so pleasant that everyone wants to fight us." On the screen, the liquor bottles whirled past like snowflakes in a blizzard. The correspondent listened alertly, and the general listened with him. But no one stepped forward to provide an answer to that question. r '    --    Results of an Experiment Conducted by Thomas M. Disch  John T. Sladek   tion of Drake's classical "Massless Muon" experiment (the experiment in which a massless muon was annihilated, producing, as Hawakaja had earlier observed, Ihe supposed "isotron"), a new particle was observed, having a mass of #, a charge of # and a spin of #. This particle has been termed the "nullitron." An Important Breakthrough At first the nullitron was thought to be a neutrino -- or massless, uncharged particle with a spin of  Vl -- but when the experiment was repeated using a gyroscopically balanced nubium target in place of the old, fixed frimium one, the spin was calculated to be zero. Though having no mass, the particle cannot be truly termed subatomic, for it appears to bd about one meter in diameter, perfectly roxmd and rather shiny Its red color can be explained by the well known "red-shift" or. "Doppler" effect, caused by the fact that no matter from what vantage the particle is viewed, it seems to be retreating from( the observer uniformly at the speed of light. Whence the Nullitron? Whither Bound? The nullitron call be produced experimentally only under the most favoring circumstances. AI cyclotron one mile in circumference filled with alternate solid blocks of lead and quicksilver is useful but 'not essential. Of uton the part of the investigator to discover them. With the discovery of the antinullitron a great leap forward has been made in the general area of investigation concerning the nuUitron. A Great Leap Forward Like the nullitron itself, the anti-nullitron has a mass of #, a charge of # and a spin of #, but, unlike the nullitron, it is green and cubical. The most careful measurements (obtained by passing the nullitrons and anlinullitrons through a dense field of spinning neutrinos, upon which they have curiously little effect, or none) show that the cubical anti-nullitrons are of exactly equal volume to the spherical nullitrons. No satisfactory explanation has yet been offered for this phenomenon. Theoretical considerations lead to the inexorable if highly unlikely conclusion that nullitrons and anti-nullitrons exist everywhere in nature. Indeed, the universe can be said to be drenched The first nullitron was observed, In point of fact, on the isle of Ibiza, where the Investigators had repaired for a brief holiday. For three successive afternoons, while sleeping on the beach, Mr. Sladek had vivid dreams of swarms of nullitrons that formed Into rings, biting each other's tails and eventually melting into butter. with them. Due to the laws of conservation, however, they are rarely observable in their natural state, since the nullitrons cancel out the anti-nullitrons and vice versa. Not without Significance This does not mean, however, that the nullitron is not without significance. On the contrary, the nullitron is known to be in constant interaction with all known subatomic particles. A nullitron can join with a neutrino to form an antineutrino and with an anti-neutrino to form a neutrino. These interactions (and many more besides) are occurring constantly in nature, but (due again to the laws of conservation) can never be observed directly, only inferred. Aside from their "color," the nullitron family possesses certain other "secondary" characteristics: The sound of two nullitrons colliding from opposite directions is a whirring noise, very much like that of a defective electric fan. (Such as the fan to be found in Room #B in the Las Palmas hotel in Ibiza.) The collision of two anti-nullitrons, by contrast, produces exactly the same sound with the exception that in profile upon an oscilloscope the trouts of one pattern correspond perfectly to the crests of the other, and vice versa. The result, from an auditory joint of view, is a perfect silence, which may account for the fact that the nuUitron has waited so long to be discovered. Uses of the NuUitron In respect to taste, the nullitron, despite its striking red hue, has a distinct flavor of licorice, while the anti-nullitron tastes like nothing so much as the unripe berries of the juniper. Further investigations are being carried out in this fruitful field, and already manufacturers of dietetic foods have expressed interest in the possible commercial uses. The chief problem confronting industry is the extraction of nullitrons from their "potential field" in sufficient quantity. Of the possible employment in warfare (and particularly whether a "nullitron-bomb" is feasible at this point or in the near future) nothing can be said with any confidence. Space, Time, and the NuUitron One of the most curious aspects of the nuUitron is its relatively short life. In all cases observed the nuUitron was instantly and utterly annihilated at the moment of its creation. This was not apparent during the early investigations, because the demolished nuUitron is instantly replaced by another identical nuUitron, indistinguishable from its "parent" in all respects. The first task which presented itself to investigators after the discovery of the nuUitron itself was the splitting of the nuUitron into subparticles. This experiment consisted simply of catching nullitrons and hurling them with considerable force against a floor. While too little energy in the "nuUitronbeam" thus formed can cause a troublesome wobble, too much force will result in excessive bouncing -- the by now weU known "Bounce Effect." This troublesome elasticity is most easily overcome by first embedding the nuUitron in a casing of pi-mesons and then "letting Nature take its inevitable course." While over seventeen thousand separate types of subnullitronic particles have been discovered by this method as of the time of this report, the difficulty in distinguishing between these different types was great, since all the different subtypes created by this method appeared to be identical. Clearly, a more sophisticated approach was needed. The method finally arrived at by trial and error was as follows: While one investigator holds the nullitron in both his hands, tKe other investigator either sits upon it or strikes it a sharp blow with a molybdenum hammer. Two main categories of subnull particles are produced so: the "situpons" and the "others." The "sit-upons" consist of isons (small, blue and round); nisons (smaller, two dimensional particles of a curious rice color); and nuU-nisons (extremely tiny, orange and of fanciful shapes). The "others" are more varied, falling into two main subgroupings -- the isotrons and the phlogistons. The isotrons are medium-sized, ovoid, semi-massless particles which upon creation can be observed to tend immediately to the nearest light source (at Las Palmas this was a single, bare, #-watt bulb) and buzz about it until swatted or consumed by anti-isotrons. Countless "other" particles were observed, ranging in size from ## inch to the great phlogistons, which are fully # kilometers in diameter, though in mass equivalent to an electron. Only one phlogiston has been produced experimentally. This particle, being photophiliac, sped immediately toward the sun at an estimated velocity .# the speed of light. A Possible Explanation of Matter? The single phlogiston produced in this last, and definitive, experiment may eventually afford us an explanation of the nature of matter. On its collision with the sun, the phlogiston was annihilated, as well as the sun, and a number of interesting photographs were taken. While it is still too early to begin to speculate on this phenomenon, one may look forward to the day when, with a fuller understanding of the wonderful nullitron, we shall possess a new and more comprehensive explanation of the nature of our "solar system" if not of "matter" by Keith Laumer This and many others in the February Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale nowl Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne We detested Today -- so naturally we edited Yesterday to suit us! been on some tall   ones," said Gregory Smirnov of the Instiute, "but we've never stood on the edge of a bigger one than this, nor viewed one with sihakier expectations. Still, if the calculations of Epiktistes are correct, this will work." "People, it will work," Epikt said. This was Epiktistes the Ktistec machine? Who'd have believed it? The main bulk of Epikt was five floors below them, but he had run an extension of himself up to this little penthouse lounge. All it took was a cable, no more than a yard in diameter, and a functional head set on the end of it. And what a head he chose! It was a sea-serpent head, a dragon head, five feet long and copied from an old carnival float. Epikt had also given himself human speech of a sort, a blend of Irish and Jewish and Dutch comedian patter from ancient vaudeville. Epikt was a comic to his last his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever bom. But he was serious about this project.   ditions," the machine Epikt said as though calling them to order. "We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes. For our test plot, we have taken that portion of our own middle-sized city that can be viewed from this fine vantage point. If the world in its past-present continuity is changed by our meddling, then the face of our city will also change instantly as we watch it. "We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world : eight humans and one Ktistec machine, myself. Remember that there are nine of us. It might be important." The nine finest minds were: Epiktistes, the transcendent machine who put the "K" in Ktistec; Gregory Smirnov, the large-souled director of the Institute; Valery Mok, an incandescent lady scientist; her over-shadowed and over-intelligent husband Charles Cogsworth; the humorless and inerrant Glasser; Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius; Willy McGilly, a man of unusual parts (the seeing third finger on his left hand he had picked up on one of the planets of Kapteyn's Star) and no false modesty; Audifex O'Hanlon; and Diogenes Pontifex. The latter two men were not members of the Institute (on account of the Minimal Decency Rule), but when the finest minds in the world are assembled, these two cannot very well be left out. "We are going to tamper with one small detail in past history and note its effect," Gregory said. "This has never been done before openly. We go back to an era that has been called 'A patch of light in the vast gloom,' the time of Charlemagne. We consider why that light went out and did not kindle others. The world lost four hundred years by that flame expiring when the tinder was apparently ready for it. We go back to that false dawn of Europe and consider where it failed. The year was #, and the region was Spain. Charlemagne had entered alliance with Marsilies, the Arab king of Saragossa, against the Caliph Abd ar-Rahmen of Cordova. Charlemagne took such towns as Pamplona, Huesca and Gerona and cleared the way to Marsilies in Saragossa. The Caliph accepted the situation. Saragossa should be independent, a city open to both Moslems and Christians. The northern marches to the border of France should be permitted their Christianity, and there would be peace for everybody. "This Marsilies had long treated Christians as equals in Saragossa, and now there would be an open road from Islam into the Frankish Empire. Marsilies gave Charlemagne thirty-three scholars (Moslem, Jewish and Christian) and some Spanish mules to seal the bargain. And there could have been a cross-fertilization of cultures. "But the road was closed at Roncevalles where the rearguard of Charlemagne was ambushed and destroyed on its way back to France. The ambushers were more Basque than Moslems, but Charlemagne locked the door at the Pyrenees and swore that he would not let even a bird fly over that border thereafter. He kept the road closed, as did his son and his grandsons. But when he sealed off the Moslem world, he also sealed off his own culture. "In his later years he tried a revival of civilization with a ragtag of Irish halfscholars, Greek vagabonds and Roman copyists who almost remembered an older Rome. These weren't enough to revive civilization, aiid yet Charlemagne came close with themi Had the Islam door remained open, a real revival of learning might have taken place then rather than four hundred years later. We are going to arrange that the ambush at Roncevalles did not happen and that the door between the two civilizations was not closed. Then we will see what happens to us." "Instrusion like a burglar bent," said Epikt. "Who's a burglar?" Glasser demanded. "I am," Epikt said. "We all are. It's from an old verse. I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind downstairs if you're interested." "We set out a basic text of Hilarius," Gregory continued. "We note it carefully, and we must remember it the way it is. Very soon, that may be the way it was. I believe that the words; will change on the very page of this book as we watch them. Just as soon as we have done what we intend to do." 'The basic text marked in the open book read: "The traitor Gano, playing a multiplex game, with money from the Cordova Caliph hired Basque Christians (dressed as Saragossan Mozarabs) to ambush the rear-guard of the Frankish force. To do this it was necessary that Gano keep in contact with the Basques and at the same time delay the rear-guard of the Franks. Gano, however, served both as guide and scout for the Franks. The ambush was effected. Charlemagne lost his rear-guard, his scholars and his Spanish mules. And he locked the door against the Moslem world," That was the text by Hilarius. "When we, as it were, push the button (give the nod to Epiktistes), this will be changed," Gregory said. "Epikt, by a complex of devices which he has assembled, will send an Avatar (party of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction) , and something will have happened to the traitor Gano along about sundown one night on the road to Roncevalles." "I hope the Avatar isn't expensive," Willy McGilly said. 'When I was a boy we got by to, but the arts have never, bn with a dart whittled out of slipin meaner shape. Painting of pery elm wood." three schools only, all of them "This is no place for humor," bad. Sculpture is the heaps-ofGlasser protested. "Who did you, msted-metal school and the obas a boy, ever kill in time. Wilscene tinker-toy erectives. The ly?"  only popular art, graffiti on "Lots of them. King Wu of the mingitorio walls, has become undent Hardy of our own country, "The only thinkers to be King Marcel of Auvergne, the thought of are the dead Teilphilosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It's hard de Chardin and the still a good thing we got them. They born Sartre, Zielinski, Aichinger. were a bad lot." Oh well, if you're going to laugh "But I never heard of any of there's no use going on." them, Willy," Glasser insisted. "All of us here are experts "Of course not. We killed on something," Cogsworth said, them when they were kids." "Most of us are experts on every"Enough of your fooling, Wilthing. We know the world as it ly," Gregory cut it off. is. Let us do what we are going "Willy's not fooling," the mato do land then look lat the world." chine Epikt said. "Where do you "Push the button, Epikt!" Grethink I got the idea?" gory Smirnov ordered. '"Regard the world," Aloysius From his depths, Epiktistes the said softly. "We see our own midKtistec machine sent out an dle-sized town with half a dozen Avatar, partly of mechanical and towers of pastel-colored brick, partly of ghostly construction. We will watch it as it grows or Along about sundown on the road shrinks. It will change if the world from Pamplona to Roncevalles, changes." on August #th of the year #, "There's two shows in town I the traitor Gano was taken up haven't seen," Valery said. "Don't from the road and hanged on a let them take them away! After carob tree, the only one in those all, there are only three shows groves of oak and bench. And all in town." things therafter were changed. "We regard the Beautiful Arts which we also taken as basicLdone?" Louis Lobachevski texts," Audifax O'Hanlon said, demanded. "I can't see a change "You can say what you want in an # d:hing." "The Avatar is back and reports his mission accomplished," Epikt stated. "I can't see any change in anything either." "Let's look at the evidence," Gregory said. The thirteen of them, the ten humans and the Ktistec, Chresmoeidec and Proaisthematic machines, turned to the evidence and with mounting disappointment. "There is not one word changed in the Hilarius text," Gregory grumbled, and indeed the basic text still read: "The king Marsilies of Saragossa, playing a multiplex game, took money from the Caliph of Cordova for persuading Charlemagne to abandon the conquest of Spain (which Charlemagne had never considered and couldn't have affected); took money from Charlemagne in recompense for the cities of the Northern marches being returned to Christian rule (though Marsilies himself had never ruled them) ; and took money from everyone as toll on the new trade passing through his city. Marsilies gave up nothing but thirty-three scholars, the same number of mules and a few wagonloads of book-manscripts from the old Hellenistic libraries. But a road over the mountains was opened between the two worlds; and also a sector of the Mediterranean coast became open to both. A limited opening was made between the two worlds, and a limited reanimation of civilization was affected in each." "No, there is not one word of the text changed," Gregory grumbled. "History followed its same course. How did our experiment fail? We tried, by a device that seems a little cloudy now, to shorten the gestation period for the new birth. It would not be shortened." "The town is in no way changed," said Aloysius Shiplap. "It is still a fine large town with two dozen imposing towers of varicolored limestone and midland marble. It is a vital metropolis, and we all love it, but it is now as it was before." "There are still two dozen good shows in town that I haven't seen," Valery said happily was afraid that something might have happened to them." "There is no change at all in the Beautiful Arts as reflected in the reviews here that we have taken as basic texts," said Audifax O'Hanlon. "You can say w'hat you want to, but the arts have never been in finer shape." "It's a link of sausage," said the machine Chresmoeidy. " 'Nor know the road who never ran it thrice,' " said the machine Proaisth. "That's from an old verse; I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind in England if you're interested." "Oh yes, it's the three-cornered tale that ends Where it begins," said the machine Epiktistes. "But it is good sausage, and we should enjoy it; many ages have not even this much." # #XTrhat are you fellows babbling about?" Audifax asked without really wanting to know. "The art of painting is still almost incandescent in its bloom. The schools are like clustered galaxies, and half the people are doing some of this work for pleasure. Scandanavian and Maori sculpture are hard put to maintain their dominance in the field where almost everything is extraordinary. The impassionedcomic has released music from most of its bonds. Since speculative mathematics and psychology have joined the popular performing arts, there is considerably more sheer fun in life. "There's a piece here on Pete Teilhard putting him into context as a talented science-fiction writer with a talent for outre burlesque. The Brainworld Motif was overworked when he tackled it, but what a shaggy comic extravaganza he did make of it! And there's Muldoom, Zielinski, Popper, Gander, Aichinger, Whitecrow, Hornwhanger -- we owe so much to the juice of the cultists! In the main line there are whole congeries and continents of great novels and novelists. "An ever popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, maintains its excellence. Travel Unlimited offers a ninety-nine day art tour of the world keyed to the viewing of the exquisite and hilarious miniatures on the walls of its own rest-rooms. Ah, what a copious world we live in!" "It's more grass than we can graze," said Willy McGilly. "The very bulk of achievement is stupefying. Ah, I wonder if there is subtle revenge in my choice of words. The experiment, of course, was a failure, and I'm glad. I like a full world." "We will not call the experiment a failure since we have covered only a third of it," said Gregory. "Tomorrow we wiU make our second attempt on the past. And, if there is a present left to us after that, we will make a third attempt the following day." "Shove it, good people, shove it," the machine Epiktistes said. "We will meet here again tomorrow. Now you to your pleasures, and we to ours." 'The people talked that evening ' away from the machines where they could make foolish conjectures without being laughed at. "Let's pull a random card out of the pack and go with it," said Louis Lobachevski. "Let's take a purely intellectual crux of a little later date and see if the changing of it will change the world." "I suggest Ockham," said Johnny Konduly. "Why?" Valery demanded. "He was the last and least of the medieval schoolmen. How could anything he did or did not do affect anything?" "Oh no, he held the razor to the jugular," Gregory said. "He'd have severed the vein if the razor hadn't been snatched from his hand. There is something amiss here, though. It is as though I remembered when things were not so stark with Ockam, as theugh, in some variant, Ockham's Terminalism did not mean what we know that it did mean." "Sure, let's cut the jugular," said Willy. "Let's find out the logical termination of Terminalism and see just how deep Ockham's razor can cut." "We'll do it," said Gregory. "Our world has become something of a fat slob; it c I o # ts; it has bothered me all evening. We will find whether purely intellectual attitudes are of actual effect. We'll leave the details to Epikt, but I believe the turning point was in the year # when John Lutterell came from Oxford to Avignon where the Holy See was then situated. He brought with him fifty-six propositions taken from Ockham's Commentary on the Sentences, and he proposed their condemnation. They were not condemned outright, but Ockham was whipped soundly in that first assualt, and he never recovered. Lutterell proved that Ockham's nihilism wals a bunch of nothing. And the Ockham thing did die away, echoing dimly through the little German courts where Ockham traveled peddling his wares, but he no longer peddled them in the main markets. Yet his view point could have sunk the world if, indeed, intellectual attitudes are of actual effect." "We wouldn't have liked Lutterell," said Aloysius. "He was humorless and he had no fire in him, and he was always right. And we would have liked Ockham. He was charming, and he was wrong, and perhaps we will destroy the world yet. There's a chance that we will get our reaction if we allow Ockham free hand. China was frozen for thousands of years by an intlectual attitude, one not nearly so unsettling as Ockham's. India is hypnotized into a queer stasis which calls itself revolutionary and which does not move -- h # notized by an intellectual attitude. But there was never such an attitude as Ockham's." So they decided that the former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in France, and that he should not arrive there to lance the Ockham thing before it infected the world. # # T et's get on with it, good peopie," Epikt rumbled the next day. "Me, I'm to stop a man getting from Oxford to Avignon in the year #. Well, come, come, take your places, and let's get the thing started." And Epiktistes's great sea-serpent head glowed every color as he puffed on a seven-branched pookadooka and filled the room with wonderful smoke. "Everybody ready to have his throat cut?" Gregory asked cheerfully. "Cut them," said Diogenes Pontifex, "but I haven't much hope for it. If our yesterday's essay had no effect, I cannot see how on English schoolman chasing another to challenge him in an Italian court in France, in bad Latin, nearly seven hundred years ago, on fifty-six points of unscientific abstract reasoning, can have effect." "We have perfect test conditions here," said the machine Epikt. "We set out a basic text from Cobblestone's History of Philosophy. If our test is effective, then the text will change before our eyes. So will every otheTj text, and the world. "We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world," the machine Epiktistes said, "ten humans and three machines. Remember that there are thirteen of us. It might be important." "Regard the world," said Aloysius Shiplap. "I said that yesterday, but it is required that I say it again! We have the world in our eyes and in our memories. If it changes in any way, we will know it." "Pusih the button, Epikt," said Gregory Smirnov. From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent our an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. And along about sundown on the road from Mende to Avignon in the old Languedoc district of France, in the year #, John Lutterell was stricken with one more sickness. He was taken to a little inn in the mountain coimtry, and perhaps he died there. He did not, at any rate, arrive at Avignon. # #Tid it work, Epikt? Is itLdone?" Aloysius asked. "Let's look at the evidence," said Gregory. The four of them, the three humans and the ghost Epikt who was a kachenko mask with a speaking tube, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment. 'There is still the stick and the five notches in it," said Gregory. "It was our test stick. Nothing in the world is changed." "The arts remain as they were," said Aloysius. "Our picture here on the stone on which we have worked for so many seasons is the same as it was. We have painted the bears black, the buffalos red and the people blue. When we find a way to make another color, we can represent birds also. I had hoped that our experiment might give us that other color. I had even dreamed that birds might appear in the picture on the rock before our very eyes." "There's still rump of skunk to eat and nothing else," said Valery. "I had hoped that our experiment would have changed it to haunch of deer." "All is not lost," said Aloysius. "We still have the hickory nuts. That was my last prayer before we began our experiment. 'Don't let them take the hickory nuts away,' I prayed." They sat around the conference table that was a large flat natural rock, and cracked 'hickory nuts with stone fist-hammers. They were nude in the crude, and the world was as it had always been. They had hoped my magic to change it. "Eiikt has failed us," said Gregory. "We made his frame out of the best sticks, and we plaited his face out of the finest weeds and grasses. We chanted him full of magic and placed all our special treasures in his cheek pouches. So, what can the magic mask do for us now?" "Ask it, ask it," said Valery. They were the four finest minds in the world -- the three humans, Gregory, Aloysius and Valery (the only humans in the world unless you count those in the other valleys), and the ghost Epikt, a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. "What do we do now, Epikt?" Gregory asked. Then he went around behind Epikt to the speaking tube. "I remember a woman with a sausage stuck to her nose," said Epikt in the voice of Gregory. "Is that any help?" "It may be some help," Gregory said after he had once more taken his place at the flat-rock conference table. "It is from an old (What's old about it? I made it up myself this morning) folk tale about the three wishes." "Let Epikt tell it," said Valery. "He does it so much better than you do." Valery went behind Epikt to the speakmfe tube and blew smoke through it from the huge loose black-leaf uncured stogie that she was smoking. "The wife wastes one wish for a sausage," said Epikt in the voice of Valery. "A sausage is a piece of deer-meat tied in a piece of a deer's stomach. The husband is angry that the wife has wasted a wish, since she could have wished for a whole deer and had many sausages. He gets so angry that he wishes the sausage might stick to her nose forever. It does, and the woman wails, and the man realized that he had used up the second wish. I forget the rest." "You can't forget it, Epikt!" Aloysius cried in alarm. "The future of the world may depend on your remembering. Here, let me reason with that damned magic mask!" And Aloysius went behind Epikt to the speaking tube. "Oh yes, now I remember," Epikt said in the voice of Aloysius. "The man used the third wish to get the sausage off his wife's nose. So things were the way they had been before." "But we don't want it the way it was before!" Valery howled. "That's the way it is now, rump of skunk to eat, and me with nothing to wear but my ape cape. We want it better. We want deer skins and antelope skins." "Take me as a mystic or don't take me at all," Epikt signed off. "Even though the world has always been so, yet we have intimations of other things," Gregory said. "What folk hero was it who made the dart? And of what did he make it?" "Willy McGilly was the folk hero," said Epikt in the voice of Valery, who had barely got to the speaking tube in time, "and he made it out of slippery elm wood." "Could we make a dart like the folk hero Willy made?" Aloysius asked. "We gotta," said Epikt. "Could we make a slinger and whip it out of our own context and into -- " "We gotta," said Epikt. "Could we kill an Avatar with it before he killed somebody else?" Gregory asked excitedly. "We sure will try," said the ghost Epikt who was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. "I never did like those Avatars." You think Epikt was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube! There was a lot more to him than that. He had red garnet rocks inside him and real sea salt. He had powder made from beaver eyes. He had rattlesnake rattles and armadillo shields. He was the first Ktistec machine. "Give me the word, Epikt," Aloysius cried a few moments later as he fitted the dart to the slkiger. "Fling it! Get that Avatar fink!" Epikt howled.  long about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the Road from Nowhere to Eom, an Avatar fell dead with a slippery-elm dart in his heart. "Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?" Charles Cogsworth asked in excitement. "It must have. I'm here. I wasn't in the last one." "Let's look at the evidence," Gregory suggested calmly. "Damn the evidence!" Willy McGilly cussed. "Remember where you heard it first." "Is it started yet?" Glasser asked. "Is it finished?" Audifax O'Hanlon questioned. "Push the button, Epikt!" Diogenes barked. "I think I missed part of it. Let's try it again." "Oh, no, no!" Valery forbade. "Not again. That way is rump of skimk and madness."      Hayden Howard's stories of the Eskimo invasion of the world come to their climax in the next issue of Galaxy with a complete short novel called The Purpose of Life. We've been reading the mail on this unusual series with unusual Interest; apparently the cumulative effect of the series has been to arouse both curiosity and excitement. What are the Esks? How did they come to Earth? And, above all, why? WeVe happy to tell you that in the next issue of Galaxy you'll get all the answers... You'll also get an unusually good novelette by Keith Laumer called Thunderhead. Curious thing about Laumer. Best known for his mordant and comic Jetief series, he Isn't usually thought of as the kind of writer who can evoke emotions. But we have it on the testimony of some rather hard-bitten readers that now and then he has been able to move them very deeply; and we have a notion that Thunderhead is the kind of story that will do that again. We've also a specially bright and bushy-tailed bunch of short pieces by Kris Neville, Christopher Anvil, C. C. MacApp and others -- some of them will likely fit in the next issue, though we don't yet know which. Good issue. We recommend it. He had tracked his quarry across the galaxy. Revenge was near -- if only he could learn which man was his foe! XX B ehind the hotel waited a long omnibus with six bladder wheels and a canopy of rosy pink silk. Amid banter, laughing and repartee, the guests -- eleven men, ten women -- climbed aboard and settled themselves upon cushions of purple satin. The bus trundled across the canal and away to the south; Kouliha with its tall towers was left behind. For an hour the guests rode past carefully tended farms and orchards, toward a line of woodTo one purpose had Keith Gersen dedicated his life: To revenge himself against the Demon Princes of space who had massacred his parents when he was a child For that he had trained himself in the arts of assassination and intrigue. For that he had given up the comforts of home and family. Two of the Demon Princes he had already destroyed, but others remained alive, and of them all the deadliest and most hated was Viole Falushe. Gersen followed the trail of Falushe across the galaxy ... and missed him at every turn. On ancient Earth he set a trap and baited it with the loveliest girl he had ever seen; Falushe escaped It. But with the aid of the half-mad, drunken poet Novarth, Gersen was able to penetrate the stronghold of Falushe; he obtained an invitation to Falushe's notorious Palace of Love. There was one drawback. He had secured entry to the Palace of Love. But he had an uneasy suspicion that Falushe knew all about him. Would he be able to get out again as easily? ed hills, and speculation was rife as to the exact location of the Palace of Lrove. Hygen Grote went so far as to push into the forward compartment and make inquiry of the gaunt woman in the brown and black uniform who was driving. Hygen Grote was rebuffed and returned to 'his seat grinning ruefully and shaking his head. Up into the hills rolled the bus, under tall, umbrella-shaped trees with glossy black trunks and green-yellow leaf-hsks. From somewhere in the distance came the hldodious hooting of treedweRing creatures. Enormous white motl fluttered through the shade, whidh became ever more dank, ever more pungent with the reek of lichens and largeleafed shrubs. At the ridge the road broke out into a dramatic blaze of sunlit. Ahead spread a vast blue ocean. The bus plunged down a steqp straight road and halted at a dock. Here waited a glass-hulled yacht with blue decks and a white metal superstructure. Four stewards in dark blue and white uniforms assisted the guests from the bus, conducted them to a building of white coral blocks. Here they were asked to change into new garments: white yachting costumes, with rope sandals, loose white linen caxs. The Druids protested vigorously on doctrinal grounds. They flatly refused to part with their cowls; and so they boarded the yacht, the men attired in white trousers and jackets, the women in white skirts and jackets, with heads encowled in black as before. Te time was sxmset; the yacht would not get under way until the morrow. The passengers assembled in the saloon, where they were served Earth-t#rpe cocktails, and presently dinner. The two younger Druids, Hule er more loosely than their parents, thereby incurring reprimands. After dinner the three yoimg men, Mario, Tanzel and Ethuen, played deck tennis with Tralla and Momice. Drusilla huddled disconsolately near Nayarth, who conducted the strangest of converittons with Druidess Laidig. Gersen sat to the side watching, propounding speculations, wondering where his responsibilities lay and to whom. From time to time Drusilla wistfully looked across the saloon toward him. Clearly she dreaded the future -- with good reason, thought Gersen. He could think of no way to reassure her. Zuly the dancer, supple as a white eel, walked around the deck with daNossa. Skebou Diffiani the Quantique stood by the rail, thinking the mysterious thoughts of his race, with an occasional contemptuous glance toward daNossa and Zuly. to Drusilla, followed by Hule, who seemed to find Drusilla ated, had been tasting wine. She wore her cowl artfully disarranged to show her curly brown hair. The situation did not evade the notice of Druidess Laidig -- who, however, was unable to detach herself from Navarth. Margary Liever chatted with Hygen Grote and his companion Doranie, tmtil Doranie became bored and went to saunter along the deck. To Hygen Grote's annoyance, she was joined there by Lerand Wible. The Druids were the first to bed, followed by Hygen Grote and Doranie. Gersen went out on the deck to look up at the sky, where the stars of Simeste Cluster blazed. To the south and east heaved the waters of an ocean whose name he did not know. Not far distant Skebou Diffiani leaned on the rail, looking across the same ocean. Gersen returned within. Drusilla had gone to her stateroom. On the sideboard the stewards had arranged a collation of meats, cheese, fowl, aspic, a selection of wines and liquors. Zuly conversed in low tones with daNossa. Margary Liever now sat alone, a vague smile on her face; was she not achieving her heart's desire? Navarth had become somewhat drunk and was swaggering about, spoiling for an opportunity to produce a dramatic scene. But everyone else was relaxed and gave him no scope. Navarth finally threw up his hands and went off to bed. Gersen, after a last look aroxmd, followed. G ersen awoke to the pitch and roll of the yacht. The time was shortly after dawn. Sunlight slanted into the cabin throu the section of hull above the waterline. Below, dark blue water surged past, not yet illuminated by the sun. Gersen dressed and went to the saloon, to find himself the earliest riser. Land lay four or five miles off the starboard beam : a narrow beach, a wooded foreshore backed by low hills, with the hint of purple mountains in the distance. Gersen helped himself to breakfast at the buffet. As he ate other guests appeared, and presently the entire complement sat in the saloon, devouring grills and pastries, drinking hot beverages, marveling at the scenery and the easy motion of the yacht. After breakfast Gersen went out upon the deck, where he was joined by Navarth, foppish in his white yachting costume. The day" was perfect; sunlight glinted on the blue swells; clouds soiared above the horizon. Navarth spat over the side, contemplated the sun, the sky, the sea. "The journey begins. It must start like this, innocent and pure." Gersen understood Navarth's meaning well enough. He made no comment. Navarth spoke again, in a voice even more gloomy. "No matter what else you say of Vogel, he knows how to do a thing well." Gersen inspected the gold buttons on 'his jacket. They seemed no more than buttons. In response to Navarth's puzzled stare he said mildly, "Such articles 'have been known to conceal spy-cells." Navarth laughed hoarsely. "Not likely. Vogel may well be aboard, but he won't be eavesdropping. He'd be afraid of hearing something unpleasant." "You think he's aboard, then?" "He's aboard, no fear. Would he miss an experience like this? Never! But whidi is he?" Gersen considered. "He's not you nor I, nor the Druids. He's not Diffiani." "He would not be Wible, a different t # rpe altogether, too fresh and fair and round. He would not be daNossa, though it's barely possible. Barely xK)ssible he's one of the Druids. But I think not." "That leaves only three. The tall dark men." "Tanzel, Mario, Ethuen. He could be any of these." They turned to consider the three men. Tanzel stood at the bow, looking ahead across the ocean. Ethuen sat sprawled in a squirmed in mingled embarrassment and pleasure. Mario, the last to arise, had just finished breakfast and was stepping out on deck. Gersen tried to matdi each of them to what he knew of Viole Falushe. Each was tense, yet elegant. Each mit have been Possibility No. #, the murderer in harlequinade who had fled on long legs from Navarth's iarty. "Any could be Viole Falushe," said Navarth. "And what of Zan Zu -- Drusilla -- whatever her name?" "She is doomed." Navarth threw his hands up in the air and stalked away. Gersen looked toward Drusilla, as he had decided to think of her. She stood talking to Hule, the young Druid, who in the fervor of the moment had let fall his cowl. A handsome lad, thought Gersen: earnest, with a look of internal tension which women must eventually find provocative. Indeed Drusilla was examining him with some interest. Druidess Wust barked a sharp order. Hule guiltily snapped up his cowl and slunk away. Gersen went over to Drusilla. She gave him a look of wary welcome. "Were you surprised to see us at the hotel?" Gersen asked. She nodded. "I had never expected to see you again." After a moment's hesitation she asked, "What's going to happen to me? Why am I so important?" G ersen. still in doubt regarding spy-cells, spoke cautiously: "I don't know what will happen. I will protect you, if I can. You're important because you resemble a girl Viole Falushe once loved and who scorned him. He may be aboard the yadit; he may be one of the passengers. So you must be very careful." Drusilla turned a fearful look around the deck. "Which one?" "You remember the man at Navarth's party?" "Yes." "He will be a man like that." Drusilla winced. "I don't know how to be careful. I wish I were someone else." She looked over her shoulder. "Can't you take me away?" "Not now." 'Why did it have to be me." "I mit answer if I knew who you were to begin with. Zan Zu? Drusilla Wayles? Jheral Tinzy?" "I'm none of them," e said in a dolorous voice. "Who are you?" "I don't know." "You don't have a name?" "The man at the dock saloon called me Spooky. That's not Smuch of a name. I'll be Drusilla Wayles." She looked at him carefully. "You're not really a journalist, are you?" "I am Henry Lucas, a monomaniac. And I mustn't talk to you too much. You know why." Drusilla's face lost its momentary animation. "If you say so." "Try to identify Viole Falushe," said Gersen. "He will want you to love him. If you don't, he'll hide 'his anger, but you may know by a glance, a threat, a look on his face. Or while he flirts with someone else he will watch to see if you notice." Drusilla pursed her lips doubtfully. "I'm not very discerning." "Do your best, but be careful. Don't bring trouble on yoursdf. Here comes Tanzel." 'ood morning, good morning," said Tanzel breezily. He spoke to Drusilla. "You look as if you've lost your last friend. That's not the case, you know, not with Harry Tanzel aboard! Cheer up! We're off to the Palace of Love!" Drusilla nodded. "I know." "Just the place for a pretty girl. I'll personally diow you all the sights, if I can fight off my competitors." Gersen laughed. "No competition here. I can't take time from my job, mudh as I'd like to.' "Job? At the Palace of Love? Are you an ascetic?" "Simply a journalist. What I see and hear will show up in Cosmopolis "Keep my name out of it!" warned Tanzel facetiously. "Someday #I be a married man; I'd never live down that kind of fame." "I'll be discreet." "Good. Come along now." Tanzel took Drusilla's arm. "I'll help you with your morning constitutionial. Fifty times around the deck!" They walked off, Drusilla with a last forlorn glance over her shoulder at Gersen. Navarth sidled up. "There's one of them. Is he the man?" don't know. He's starting strong." 'hree days the yacht plied the sunny seas. For Gersen they were three pleasant days, though the hospitality came from a man he intended to kill. There was an effortless quality to the hours, a dreamlike isolation. Each person's characteristic style was intensified, becoming a thing larger than life. Attitudes and rigidities relaxed. Hule allowed his cowl to hang loose and finally discarded it altogether; same, whereupon Zuly in a spirit of cool mischief offered to arthen, with a sigh of hedonistic abandon, assented. So Zuly shaped and clipped, to accentuate to the amazement of all the men aboard. Druidess Laidig cried out in anger; Druidess Wust clicked her tongue; the two Druids were startled; but all the others begged them not to browbeat the girl. Such was the atmosphere of ease and gayety that Druidess Laidig at last fell to laughing at Navaraway quietly. Not long after, Druidess Laidig allow'ed her own cowl to hang loose, as presently did Druid Dakaw. Druid Pruitt and Druidess Wust held to the full rigor of their habit, but tolerated the delinquency of the others with no more than an occasional disparaging glance, or muttered sarcasm. Tralla, Mornice and Doranie, noting the attention paid to the younger girls, became extremely enthusiastic and gay. Clearly none planned to rebuff any attempted gallantry. Each afternoon the yacht halted to drift on the ocean. All who chose plimged into the clear water, while others went below to watch through the glass hull. These latter included the older Druids, Diffiani (who participated in no activity except eating and drinking), Margray Liever, who professed a fear of deep water, and Hygen Grote, who could not swim. The others, even Navarth, donned the swimsuits provided by the yacht and splashed in the warm ocean. A t dusk of the second evening, Gersen took Drusilla to the bow, refraining from any intimacy or contact which might infuriate Viole Falushe, should he be watching. Drusilla seemed to feel no such constraint, and Gersen became aware, with a bittersweet pang, that the girl was in some degree infatuated with him. V Jv. Gersen, as susceptible as anyone else, fought back his inclinations. Even if he succeeded in destroying Viole Falushe, what then? There was no place for Drusilla in the harsh future he had laid out for himself. Still, the temptation remained. Drusilla, with her somber moods, her sudden flashes of joy, was fascinating. But circumstances were as they were, and Gersen kept his conversation to the business at hand. Drusilla had noticed nothing. Mario, Ethuen, Tanzel -- all plied her with attention. As Gersen had instructed, she showed favoritism to none. Even as they stood in the bow watching the sunset Mario came to join them. After a moment or two Gersen excused 'himself, and returned to the promenade. If Mario were Viole Falushe, it would not do to antagonize him. If he were not, then Viole Falushe, watching balefully from elsewhere, would be reassured that Drusilla preferred no single person.   The morning of the fourth day found the yacht cruising among small islands lush with vegetation. At noon the yacht approached the mainland and drifted up to a dock. The voyage was over. The paengers disembarked regretfully, with many a backward glance; Margray Liever frankly wept. In a structure beside the dock the guests were issued new garments. For the men there were loose velvet blouses in the softest and richest of colors: moss green, cobalt blue, dark maroon, with loose black velvet trousers fastened below the knees with scarlet ribbons. The women received the same style blouses in paler shades, with striped matching skirts. All were issued soft velvet berets, square, loose, with an intriguing tassel. When all had reassembled, they were served limch, then ushered to a great wooden wagon with six green and gold wheels, a dark green canopy supported by spiral posts of a beautiful dark wood. The wagon set off along a coastal road. Late in the afternoon the track veered inland, over rolling grassy hills spangled with flowers, and the ocean was lost to sight. Soon there were trees, tall and solitary, much like Earth trees, but conceivably indigenous; then clximps and groves. At dusk the wagon halted beside one such grove. The guests were conducted to a hostel built high in the treetops, led along swaying walkways to small wicker tree houses. S upper was served on the ground to the lit of a great crackling fire. The wine seemed stronger than usual, or perhaps all were in a mood to drink. Everyone seemed larger than life; the twenty-one were the only people alive in the universe. Toasts were drunk, including several to "our unseen host." The name Viole Falushe was never mentioned. A troupe of musicians appeared, with fiddles, guitars, pipes. They played wild wailing tunes which set the heart pounding and the head swaying. Zuly leapt to her feet and improvised a dance as wild and abandoned as the music. Gersen forced himself to sobriety. At times like this it was most important to watch. He saw Lea moment later she sidled away and off into the shadows, and he too was gone. The Druids and Druidesses were rapt with the dancing, sitting with heads back, eyes halfclosed. Only Hule noticed. He looked thoughtfully after the two, then crept quietly up to Drusiha and whispered in her ear. Drusilla smiled. She turned a flicker of a glance toward Gersen and said something in a soft voice. Hule nodded without enthusiasm and seated himself close beside her. Presently he put his arm around her waist. A half-hour passed. With only Gersen seeming to notice, Wible eyes brigit and mouth soft. It seemed that only a moment later Druidess Laidig bethought herself Something was amiss, something was new and different; Druidess Laidig could sense this much, but there was nothing else to see... Her suspicious lulled, she returned to her enjoyment of the music. Gersen watched Mario, Ethuen, Tanzel. They sat with Tralla and Mornice, but it seemed as if their eyes wandered toward Drusilla. Gersen chewed his lip. Viole Falushe -- if indeed he were among the guests -- did not seem disposed to yield his identity. Wine, music, firelight! Gersen leaned back, aware of giddiness. Who among the group was watchful? Who attentive? -- that person would be Viole Faludie! Gersen saw no one who seemed other than relaxed. Druid Dakaw was asleep. Druidess Laidig was nowhere to be seen. Skebou Diffiani also had disappeared. Gersen chuckled and leaned toward Navarth to share the joke, then thought better of it The fire became embers; the musicians wandered away like figures in a dream. The guests roused themselves and went by swaying walkways to their wicker cabins. If other assignations had been made, if other trysts were kept, Gersen had no knowledge of them. I n the morning the guests asseinbled for breakfast to find that the wagon was gone, and there was speculation as to what mode of transport next would be , offered them. After breakfast a steward pointed out a path. "There we will go. I have been requested to guide. If all are ready, I suggest that we set off, for there is far to go before evening." Hygen Grote spoke in an astonished voice. "You mean to say we walk? "Exactly this, Lord Grote. There is no other way to our destination." "I never expected all this backGrote. "I thought that when we were invited to the Palace of Love, an aircar simply took us there." "I am only a servant. Lord Grote; I can offer no explanation." Grote turned away, not completely pleased. But he had no choice. Presently his spirits rose, and he was the first to start singing an old walking song of his fraternity at Lublinken College. Over low hills, through glades and groves, went the path. They walked over a wide meadow, startling a number of white birds into flight; they descended a valley to a lake, where lunch awaited them. The steward would not allow an over-long rest. "There is still far to go, and we cannot walk fast for fear of tiring the ladies." "I'm already tired," snapped the Druidess Wust. "I don't intend to move another step." "Anyone who wishes may return," said the steward. "The path is plain, and there is a staff to assist you along the way. But now it is time for the rest of us to go on. It is afternoon, and a wind is rising." Indeed a breeze with a hint of coolness blew small wavelets across the lake, and the western sky was paved with herringbone clouds. Druidess Wust elected to continue with the group, and all set off along the shore of the lake. Presently the path turned aside, moimted a slope and struck off across a parkland of tall trees and long grass. On and on trudged the party, with the wind at their backs. With the sun declining behind a range of mountains they halted for pastries and tea. Then off once more, with the wind sighing through the branches. As the sun sank behind the moimtains the party entered a dank, heavy woods, which seemed all the darker for the going of the sun.  The pace was slow. The older women were tired, though only Druidess Wust complained. Druidess Laidig wore a grim expression while Margray Liever strolled along with her customary small smile. Hygen Grote had lapsed into sulky silence, except for an occasional terse word to Doranie. The woods seemed endless; the wind, now distinctly cool, roared through the upper branches. Dusk fell over the mountains; at last the party stumbled into a clearing to find a rambling old forest lodge of timber and stone. The windows glowed with yellow lights, smoke drifted from a diimney; within must be found warmth and food and good cheer. A nd so it was. The tired travelers, climbing stone steps to the porch, entered a vast, beamed parlor, with bright rugs on the tloor and a roaring blaze in the fireplace. Some of the group sank gratefully into deep chairs, others chose to go to their rooms to refresh themselves. Once again new clothing was issued: for the men black trousers and sihort jacket with a dark brown cummerbimd; for the ladies long trailing black gowns with white and brown flowers for the hair. Those who had bathed and dressed returned to the parlor, to the envy of those who still sat tired and dirty. Presently all had bathed and changed into the new dark garments. Mulled wine and served, and presently a hearty forest dinner: goulash, bread and cheese, red wine; and all the toil of the day was forgotten. After dinner the guests gathered around the firlace to sip liquors. Now the talk was loud and brave, everyone speculating as to where lay the Palace of Love. Navarth struck a dramatic pose in front of the fire. 'Tt is plainl" he cried in a great brassy voice. 'Dr is it not? Does not everyone imderstand, or is it left to old Navarth, the poet, to illuminate?" "Speak, Navarth!" called Ethuen. "Reveal to all your insights; why cherish them for your private pleasure?" "I have never had that intention. All will know what I know; all will feel what I feel. We are midway along the journey! Here is where the carelessness, the amplitude, the clam ease depart. The winds arose at our back and hurried us through the woods. Our refuge is medievalism!" "Come now, old man," chaffed Tanzel. "Speak so we can imderstand you." "Those who understand me will do so; those who cannot will never do so. But all is clear. He knows, he knows!" Bruidess Laidig, impatient with hyperbole, spoke crossly. "He knows what? Who knows what?" "What are we all but perambulatory nerves? The artist knows the linkage of nerve with nerve!" "Speak for yourself," muttered Diffiani. Navarth performed one of his extravagant gesticulations. "He is a poet like myself! Did I not teach him? Every pang of the soul, every wry ache of the mind, every whisper of blood -- " ' 'Navarth ! N avarth ! ' groaned Wible. "Enough! Or at any rate, something different. Here we are in this strange old lodge, a perfect refuge for ghosts and wipwarks." Druid Pruitt spoke sententiously, "This is our lore; each man and each woman is a living seed. When his planting time comes, he is delved and covered and finally comes forth as a tree. And each soul is distinct. There are birches and oaks and lavengars and black paneys -- " The talk proceeded. The younger and more energetic folk explored the ancient structure and played hide-and-seek in the long hall, among the billowing amber curtains. Druidess Laidig became uneasy and craned her neck to find to her feet and went off, looking here and there, presently to reDruidess Laidig muttered something to the Druidess Wust, who jumped up and went off down the hall. There were loud echoing voices in the hall, then silence. A moment later Wust returned with Hule, Who seemed sullen. 'Three minutes later Drusilla came back to the saloon. Her face was flushed, her eyes alive with something between mirth and mischief. The dark gown suited her beautifully; she had never looked more beautiful. She crossed the room and slipped into the seat beside Gersen. "What happened?" he asked. "We played a game in the hall. I hid with Hule and watched, as you told me, to see who would be most angered." "And who was?" "I dont know. Mario says he loves me. Tanzel was laughing, but he was annoyed. Ethuen said nothing and would not look at me." "What were you doing, that they should be angry? Don't forget it's dangerous to thwart people." Drusilla's mouth drooped. "Yes. I forgot. I should feel fritened... I do feel frightened, when I think about it. But you will take care of me, won't you?" "I will if I can." "You can. I know you can." "I hope I can. Well, what was going on to annoy Mario, Tanzel and Ethuen?" "Nothing very much. Hule and I sat on an old couch that was turned backwards. Hule wanted to kiss me, and I let him. The Druidess found us and embarrassed Hule dreadfully. She called me names: 'harlot!' 'Lilith!' 'nymph!'" Drusilla imitated Wust's peculiar grating voice to an exactitude. "And all heard?" "Yes. All heard." "Who seemed the most upset?" Drusilla shrugged. "Sometimes I think one, then the other. Mario seems the softest. Ethuen has the least humor. Tanzel is sometimes sarcastic." Obviously, thought Gersen, there had been much which he had missed. "Best that you do not hide with anyone, not even Hule. Be pleasant to each of the three, but prefer none." Drusilla's face became bleak and drawn. "I am frightened, really. When I was with the three women I thought I might run away. But I feared the poison in their rings. Do you think they would have killed me?" "I don't know. But for now, go to bed and sleep. And open your door to no one." Drusilla rose to her feet. With a final cryptic glance at Gersen she went to the stairs, ascended to the balcony and entered her chamber. One by one the group dwindled, and at last Gersen sat alone gazing into the dying fire, waiting for he knew not what. The balcony lights were dim; a balustrade obscured his vision. A shape drifted up to the door of one of the chambers, which quickly opened and closed. Gersen waited another hour, while the fire became embers and the wind blew spatters of rain against the dark windows. There wasno further activity. Gersen went to his own bed. "The chamber Which had received the visitor, so Gersen noted the next morning, was that of Tralla Callob, the sociology student. He watched to see upon whom her eyes rested, but could be sure of nothing. This morning all wore similar costumes: gray suede trousers, a black blouse, a brown jacket, an intricate black hat Which was almost a helmet, with ear-flaps flaring rakishly outward. Breakfast, like the meal of the nig'ht before, was simple and substantial. As they ate the pilgrims cast appraising glances at the sky. Ragged patches of mist blew over the mountain; directly overhead was a thin overcast, breaking at the east into tattered clots of nimbus, an outlook not too cheerful. After breakfast the steward marshaled the pilgrims, evading questions put to him. "How far must we walk today?" -- this from Hygen Grote. "I really don't know, sir. I have never heard the distance mentioned. But the sooner we start, the sooner we arrive." Hygen Grote gave a despondent snort. "This certainly wasn't what I expected. Well, I'm as ready as I'll ever be." The path led south from the clearing; all turned to take a final look at the somber old lodge before it passed from si#it. For several hours the trail wound through the woods. The sky remained overcast; the graymiauve light which penetrated the trees invested the moss, the ferns, the occasional pale flowers, with a peculiarly rich color. Rocky outcrops began to be seen, with black and red lichen; everywhere were fragile little growths not dissimilar to the fungus of Earth, but taller and many-tiered', exhaling a bitter, old ale smell when crushed. The path began to rise, the woods fell below. The pilgrims found themselves on a rockstrewn slope, with mountains looming to the west. At a stream they paused to drink and catch their breath, and the steward distributed sweet biscuits. To the east spread the forest, gloomy and dark; above loomed the mountain. Hygen Grote again deprecated the difficulty of the way, to which the guide made the blandest of replies: "There is much in what you say, Lord Grote. But as you know, I am only a servant, with orders to make the journey as convenient and interesting as possible." "How can trudging these weary miles be interesting or convenient?" grumbled Grote, to be answered by Margray Liever: "Come now, Hygen. The scenery is delightful. Look at the view. And did you not enjoy the romantic old lodge? I did." "I am sure that this is the hope of the Margrave," said the steward. "And now. Lords and Ladies, best that we continue." '"The trail slanted up the mountain slope; soon Druidess Laidig and Doranie were falling behind, and the steward courteously slowed the pace. The path entered a stony gulch, and the ascent became less steep. Lunch was brief and austere, consisting of soup, biscuits and sausage. Then once again the pilgrims set off along the trail. Wind began to strike down the mountainside, a few cold gusts at a time; overhead, dark gray clouds raced to the east. Up the bleak mountainside plodded the pilgrims; and the city of Kouhila, the glass-hulled yacht, the green and gold wagon were only remote memories. Margray Liever remained cheerful, and Navarth swxing along grinning as if at some malicious joke. Hygen Grote gave up complaining, saving 'his breath for the exertion of moving up-hill. Halfway through the afternoon a rain squall drove the party to shelter under a jut of rock. The sky was dark; an unreal gray lit washed the landscape. The pilgrims in their costumes of black and umber were as if derived from the same stxme and soil as the mountain itself. The trail entered a stony gorge. The pilgrims plodded forward in silence, the badinage and gentilities of the first few days put aside. There was another brief shower which the steward ignored, for the light was waning. The gorge widened, but the way ahead was blocked by a massive stone wall, topped by a row of iron spikes. The steward went to a black iron postern, raised a knocker, let it fall. After a long minute, the portal creaked back, to reveal a crooked old man in black garments. The steward addressed the pilgrims. 'Here is where I leave you. The path lies beyond; you need only follow. Make the best haste posable, because darkness is not far away." One by one the group passed throu the gap; the portal clanged shut behind them. For; a moment they milled uncertainly, looking this way and that. The steward and the old man had gone; there was; none to direct them. Diffiani pointed: "There, the path. It leads up toward the height." P ainfully the pilgrims proceeded. The path traversed a stony barren, crossed a river, once more slanted up through the blowing wind. Finally, just as the light failed, the path came out on the ridge. Diffiani, in the lead, pointed ahead. "Lits. A hospice of some sort." The group straggled forward, bending to the wind-gusts, turning faces away from driven drops of rain. A long, low stone structure bulked against the sky; one or two of the windows owed a wan yellow illumination. Diffiani found a door, pounded on it with his fist. It creaked open, and a woman peered forth. "Who are you? Why do you come so late?" "We are travelers, guests for the Palace of Love," bawled Hygen Grote. "Is this the way?" "Yes, this is the way. Enter then. Were you expected?" "Of course we were expected! Is there lodging for us here?" "Yes, yes," quavered the old woman. "I can give you beds, but this is the old castle. You should have gone by the other path. Enter then. I must look about. You have supped, I trust?" "No," said Grote despondently, "we have not." "Perhaps I can find gruel. What a shame the castle is so eold!" The pilgrims passed into a bleak courtyard, lit by a pair of feeble lamps. The old woman conducted them one at a time to tall-ceilinged chambers in various quarters of the castle. These were austere, gloomy, decorated to the precepts of some long-forgotten tradition. Gersen's chamber contained a cot, a single lamp of red and blue glass. Three walls were black iron, relieved by iattems of rust. In one of the walls was a door. The fourth wall was paneled in dark, waxed wood and carved with enormous, grotesque masks. There was neither fire nor heating; the room was chill. The old lady, breathless and anxious, told Gersen, "When food is ready you'll be summoned." She pointed to the door. "Yonder is the bath, with precious little warm water. One must make do." And she hurried away. Gersen went into the bathroom, tested ithe shower; the water ran hot. He stripped off his clothes, bathed, then, rather than dressing in sodden clothes, he stretched out on the cot and covered himself with a quilt. Time passed; Gersen heard a distant gong strike nine times. There mit be supper; then again, there might not. Gersen turned over and went back to sleep. welve strokes of the gong. Into the room came a slender maiden with silky blonde hair. She wore a skin-tight garment of blue velvet, blue leather slippers with rolled toes. Gersen sat up in bed. The maiden spoke, 'We have now prepared a meal. All are aroused; all are siimmoned to eat." She rolled a wardrobe cart into the room. "Here are garments; do you require assistance?" Without waiting for response she brought under-linen to Gersen. Presently he was clothed in beautiful fabric after a style quaint, ornate and complicated. The maiden dressed his hair, applied gallantry-disks to 'his cheeks, sprayed him with scent. "My Lord is magnificent," she murmured. "And now: a mask, which tonight is of necessity." The mask conasted of a black velvet casque fitting down to the ears, with a black visor, a nosecup, a chin-guard. Only Gersen's cheeks, mouth and eyes were bare. "My Lord is now mysterious as well," said the maiden in the softest of voices. "I will lead you, for the way is by the old corridors." She took him down a draughty staircase, along a dank, echoing coriidor, with only the feeblest of lamps to light the way. The walls, once splendid in patterns of magenta, silver and gold, were faded and blotched; the tiles of the floor were loose. The maiden halted by a heavy red portiere. She looked sidelong at Gersen and put her finger to her lips. With the dim lit glowing on her blue velvet garment, glinting in her hair, she seemed dream-stuff, a creature too exquisite to be real. "Lord," she said, "within is our banquet. I must urge you to mystery, for this is the game all must play and you may not speak your, name." She pulled aside the portiere; Gersen stuped through into a vast hall. From a ceiling so hi as to be unseen hung a single chandelier, casting an island of light around a great table laid with linen, silver and crystal. Here sat a dozen people in the most elaborate of costumes, wearing masks. Gersen examined them, but recognized none. Were I they his fdlows along the journey? He could not be sure. Others entered the room. Now they came by twos and threes, all masked, all moving with an air of wonder. Gersen recognized Navarth, whose swaggering gait was unmistakable. The girl, was she Drusilla? He could not be certain. Forty people had entered the room, converging dowly upon the table. Footmen in silver and blue livery assisted all to seats; poured wine in the goblets, served from silver trays. Gersen ate and drank, aware of a peculiar confusion, almost bewilderment. Where and what was reality? The rigors of the journey seemed as remote as childhood. Gersen drank somewhat more wine than he migjht have done under different circurnstances. The chandelier exploded in a dazzling burst of green light, then went out. Gersen's eyes projected orange after-images into the dark; from around the table came whispers and hisses of surprise. The chandelier slowly returned to normal. A tall man stood on a diair. He wore black garments and a black mask; he held a goblet of wine in his hand. "Guests," he said, "I make you welcome. I am Viole Falushe. You have attained the Palace of Love." # Tere are many varieties of  A love," said Viole Falushe in a pleasant, husky voice. "The range is wide, and all have contributed to the creation of the Palace. Not all of my guests discover this, and not every phase is yielded to them. For some the Palace will seem little more than a holiday resort Others will be haunted by what has been described as unnatural beauty! This is ever#rwhere: in every detail, every view. Others will revel in ardor, and here I must offer infonuation." Gersen studied Viole Falushe with a rapt intensity. The tsall masked figure stood spare, strait, arms at sides. Gersen turned his head this way and that, trying to identify the figure, but the chandelier hanging directly above the man distorted his contours. "The people at the Palace of Love are amiable, gay and beauul and fall into two categories," said Viole Falushe. "The first are servants. They are pleased to obey every wish of my guests, every whim or caprice. The second class, the happy people who inhabit the Palace, are as independent in their friendships as I myself. They e to be identified by their garments, which are white. Your choice is wide." Gersen sought around the table, trying to find Xanzel, or Mario or Kthuen and thus eliminate them from suspicion. In this effort he was unsuccessful. Among the forty were a dozen persons who might be any of the three. He turned back to listen to Viole Falushe. "Are there restrictions? A person who went mad and began to kill would naturally be restrained. Then again, all of us here cherish our privacy, one of our most delightful prerogatives. Only the most thoutless person would intrude where he was not wanted. My personal apartments are sufficiently secluded; you need not apprehend an accidental intrupn; this is almost impossible." yiole Falushe turned his head slowly, looked around the room. No one spoke; the room was heavy with expectancy. Viole Falushe spoke on. "So now: the Palace of Love! At times in the past I have arranged small dramas of which the participants were never aware. I have contrived moods in artful sequence. I have employed tragic contrasts to heighten the delectation. On this occasion there will be no such program. You will be free to do as you like, to create your own dramas. I advise restraint. The rare jewels are the most precious. The degree of austerity I myself practice would astound you. My great pleasure is creation; of this I never tire. Some of my guests have complained of a gentle melancholy which hangs in the air. I agree that the mood exists. The explanation, I believe, arises from the fugacity of beauty, the tragic pavanne to which all of us step. Ignore this mood; why brood, when there is so much love and beauty here? Take what is offered; have no regrets; a thousand years from now it will be all the same. Satiety is a problem, but it is your own. I cannot protect you. The servants are to serve; command them. The residents who wear white are to woo, to beguile. I pray that you do not become infatuated either with the Palace or its people; such a situation presents difficulties. You will not see me, though spiritually I am always in your midst. There are no spy devices, no sound transmitters, no vision cells. Upbraid me if you choose, revile me, praise me -- I cannot hear. My only reward is the act of creation and the effect it produces. Do you wish to look forth on the Palace of Love? Turn then in your seats!" T he far wall slid away; daylight poured into the ball; before the guests spread a landscape of mind-wrenching beauty: wide lawns, feathery green bowertrees, tall black cypress, twinkling birch; ponds, pools, marble urns; pavilions, terraces, rotundas, constructed to an airy, delicate architecture that seemed almost to float. Gersen, like the others, had been startled by the sudden opening of the wall. Recovering, he jumped to his feet, but the man in black had disappeared. Gersen sought out Navarth. "Who was it? Mario? Tanzel? Ethuen?" Navarth shook his head. "I did not notice. I have been looking for the girl. Where is she?" With a sudden sinking feeling Gersen swung around. None of the people in the room was Drusilla. "When did you see her last?" "When we arrived, when we came into the countr#ard." Already the journey seemed remote. Gersen muttered: "I hoped to protect her. I told her so. She trusted me." Navarth made an impatient motion. "You could have done nothing." Gersen went to the window, looked across the panorama. To the left was the sea, a group of distant islands. To the right moimtains reared ever higher and harsher, with cliffs falling to the valley floor. Below was the Palace: a loose grouping of terraces, halls and pleasaunces. A door slid aside to reveal a descending staircase. One by one the guests descended to the valley. T he precincts of the Palace occupied a roughly hexagonal area perhaps a mile on a side. The base was the north cliff, with the Palace at its midpoint. The second side, clockwise, was demarcated by a line of rocky crags, the gaps betweenwhich were choked by rank, thorny thickets. The third side was white beach and warm blue sea. The fourth and fifth sides were less distinct and merged into the natural landscape. The sixth side, angling back to the cliff, was demarcated by a line of carefully cultivated flower beds and fruit trees arranged against a rude stone wall. Within the area were three villages, innumerable glades, gardens, waterways. The guests wandered where they chose, spent the long days in whatever faon seemed most pleasurable. Bright mornings, golden afternoons, evenings and nights: one by one they drifted away. The servants, as Viole Falushe had implied, were acquiescent and possessed of great physical charm. The folk in white, even more beautiful than the underservants, were innocent and willful as children. Some were cordial, some were perverse and impudent, all were unpredictable. It seemed as if their sole ambition was to evoke love, to tantalize, to fill the mind with longing, and they became depressed only when guests found the under-servants preferable to themselves. They showed no awareness of the worlds of the universe and only small curiosity, though their minds were active and their moods mercurial. They thought only of love and the various lafepects of fulfillment. As Viole Falushe had hinted, infatuation too intense might lead to tragedy. Of this danger the people in white were gravdy aw'are, but made small effort to avoid the danger. The mystery of the Druids' presence resolved itself. On the first day after arrival Dakaw, Pruitt, Laidig and Wust, with voy, explored the precincts and fixed upon a delightful little glade for their center of operations. To the back rose a line of black cypress, to right and left were lower trees and flowering dirubs, at the center was a great spaddle-rooted oak. In front of the glade a pair of shelters was erected, low domes of pale brown fiber. Here the group took up residence, and thereafter each morning and afternoon held evangelical meetings, expounding the nature of their religion to all Who came past. With great fervor they urged rigor, harshness, restraint and ritual upon the folk of the garden, who listened politely enou, but after the meetings enticed the Druids to relaxation and pleasure. Gersen decided that the whole affair was one of Viole Falushe's wry jokes: a game he had dhosen to play with the Druids. The other guests arrived at the same conclusion and attended the meetings to judge whose doctrines would triumph. '"The Druids worked with great ' intensity and built a fane of stones and twigs. Standing at the front, one or the other would cry out: "Must you aU then die to become dead? The mode to the Eternal is through minglement with a Vitality more enduring than your own. The source of all is the Triad Mag-Rag-Dag: Air, Earthand Water. This is the Holy Immanence, which combines to produce the Tree of Life! The Tree is the wise, the vital, the enduring! Look at lesser things: inserts, flowers, fish, man! See how they grow, bloom, laxse, while the Tree in it placid wisdom lives on! Yea, you titillate your flesh, you gorge your stomach, you flood your brain with vapor. What then? How soon you die, while the noble Tree, with roots in Earth, holds innumberable leaves to the glory of the sky! Forever! And when your flesh sags and withers, when your nerves no longer leap, when your belly is sour, when your nose drips fromthe liquor you have misused -- then is no time to worship the Treel No, no, no! For the Tree will have none of your corruption. All must be fresh and good. So worship! Give over the sterile cavortings, the animal gratifications! Worship the Tree!" The Palace folk listened with respect and awe. It was impossible to judge how deeply the Druid doctrine touched them. Meanwhile Dakaw and Pruitt began to dig a great hole under the oak, burrowing down between the were not allowed to dig and flowed no disposition to do so. Indeed they watched the process with horrified fascination. The Palace folk, in their turn, insisted that the Druids participate in their festivities, arguing: "You wish us to learn your ways, but in all fairness you must know the way we live too, so that you may judge our lives and see if after all we are corrupt!" Grudgingly the Druids acquiesced, sitting in a huddled group and maintaining the closest possible The other guests watched with varied reactions. Skebou Diffiani attended the meetings with regularity and presently, to the astonishment of all, announced his intent to become a Druid. Thereafter he donned black robe and cowl and joined the others at their rituals. Torrace daNossa spoke of the Druids with pitying contempt; Lerand Wible, who along the way had displayed an arms in disgust and stayed away; Mario, Ethuen and Tanzel went their own ways and were seen but seldom. N avarth had become obsessed. He roved the garden, morose, dissatisfied, looking this way and that. He took no joy in the beauty of the garden and went so far as to sneer at Viole Falushe's arrangements. "There is no novelty here; the pleasures ore banal. There are no exhilarations, no staggering insights, no sublime sweep of mind. All is either gross or maudlin: the gratification of gut and gland." "This may be true," Gersen admitted. "The pleasures of the place are simple and undramatic. But what is wrong with this?" "Nothing. But it is not poetry." "It is all very beautiful. To do Viole Falushe credit, he has avoided the macabre, the sadistic spectacles, which occur dsewhere, and he dlows his servants a certain degree rf integrity." Navarth made a sour grumbling sound. "You are an innocent. The more exotic pleasures he reserves for himself. Who knows what goes on beyond the walls? He is a man to halt at nothing. And 'integrity in these people? Bathos! They are dolls, toys, confections! No doubt many are the little children extorted from Kouhila, those he did not sell to the Mahrab. And when they lose their youth, what then? Where do they go? Gersen only shook his head. 'T dont know." "And where is Jheral Tinzy? Navarth went on. "Where is the girl? What does he do with her? He has had her at his mercy.' Gersen gave a grim nod. "I know. "You know," jeered Navarth, "but only after I reminded you. You are not only innocent; you are futile and foolish, no less than myself. She trusted you to protect her, and what have you done? Swilled and trolloped with the others, and this is the extent of your effort." Gersen thought the outburst exaggerated but made a mild reply. "If I could contrive some feasible course of action, I would do so." "And in the meantime?" "In the meantime I am learning." "Learning what?" "I find that none of the people here know Viole Falushe by sight. His offices seem to be somewhere back in the mountains; I can find them nowhere in the valley. I dare not try to cross the stone wall to the west, nor the thorn barrier to the east. I would certainly be apprehended and, journalist or not, dealt with harshly. Since I have no weapons I can demand nothing. I must be patient. If I do not speak to him here at the Palace of Love, I will no doubt find opportunity elsewhere. "All for your magazine, eh?" "Why else?" asked Gersen. '"They had come to the glade of ' the Druids. Dakaw and Pruitt were delving as usual below the great oak, there they had excavated a Chamber tall enough for a man to stand erect. Navarth approached, peered down into the sweating duststreaked faces. "What do you do down there, you burrowing Druids? Are you not pleased with the vista above ground that you seek a new viewixint bdow?" "You are facetious," said Pruitt coldly. "Be on your way. This is holy soil." "How can you be so sure? It looks like ordinary dirt." Neither Pruitt nor Dakaw made response. Navarth barked down, "What sort of mischief are you up to? This is no ordinary pastime. "Go away, old poet," said Pruitt. "Your breath is a pollution and saddens the Tree." Navarth moved back and watched the digging from a little distance. do not like holeg in the ground," he told Gersen. "They are impleasant. Look at Wible yonder. He stands as if he were overseer to the projectl" Navarth pointed toward the entrance to the glade, where Wible stood, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, whistling between his teeth. Navarth joined him. "The work of the Druids enthralls you?" "Not at all," said Lerand Wible. "They dig a grave." "As I suspected. For whom?" "That I can't be sure. Perhaps you. Perhaps me." "I doubt if they will inter me," said Navarth. "You may be more pliable." "I doubt if they will enter anyone," said Wible, whistling once more through his teeth. "Indeed? How can you be so sure?" "Come to the 'consecration' and see for yourself." "When does this rite occur?" "Tomorrow night, so I have been informed." T ittle music was to be heard on the grounds of his Palace; the quiet of the garden was as crystalline and clear as a dewdrop. But on the following morning the folk in white brought forth stringed instruments and for an hour played a wistful music rich with piangent overtones. A sudden shower sent all hurrying to the shelter of a nearby rotunda, where they stood chattering like birds, peering up at the sky. Gersen, contemplating their faces, thought how frail was the connection between them and the guests. Did they know anything except frivolity and love? And there was the question raised by Navarth. What happened when they aged? Few in the garden were past the first bloom of their maturity. The sun came forth. The garden glinted with freshness. Gersen, drawn by curiosity, went to the Druids' glade. Within one of pale face. Then Wust came to stare at him from the doorway. The long afternoon passed. Today a portent hung in the air, and imeasiness seemed to infect everyone. Evening arrived. The sun sank in a great tumult of clouds; gold, orange and red flamed overhead and far into the east. With the coming' of dusk, folk of the garden went to the Druids' glade. To each side of the oak tree were fires, tended by Druidess Laidig and Druidess Wust Druid Pruitt emerged from his shelter. He went to the fane and began his address. His voice was heavy and resonant; he paused frequently, as if to hear the echoes of his words. Lerand Wible approached Gersen. "I am speaking to everyone in our group. Whatever happens, do not interfere. Do you agree to this?" "Naturally not." "I didn't think you would. Well then -- " Wible whispered a few words; Gersen grunted. Wible moved off to speak to Navarth, who tonight was carrying a staff. After Wible spoke, Navarth threw down his staff. " -- on each world a hallowed Tree! How does it become so? By the afflatus, by the concentration of Life. Oh, worshipful Druids, who share the life of the First Germ, bring forth your awe, your most poignant dedication! What say we? Two are here, two have lived for this consecration. Come forth, Druids, go to the Tree!" From one shelter staggerBaffled, dull-eyed as if bewildered or drugged, they stared this way and that, then saw the fires. Fascinated they approached, step by slow step. Silence was heavy in the glade. The two approached the tree, looked at the fires, then descended into the hole below the tree. "Behold!" called Pruitt. "They enter the life of the Tree -- oh, blessed pair! -- which now becomes the' Soul of the World. Exalted children, lucky two! Forever and ever stand in sun, in rain, by day, by night; help us to truth!" Druids Dakaw, Pruitt and Diffiani began to spade earth into the hole. They worked with gusto. In half an hour the hole was full, the soil banked around the roots. The Druids marched around the tree, holding brands from the fire. Each called forth an invocation, and the ceremony ended with a chant. "The Druids customarily break' fasted at the refectory of the near village. The morning after the consecration they matched across the meadows, entered the refectory. Behind them came Hule their usual places, as did Hule Wust was the first to notice. She Fointed a trembling finger. Laidig screamed. Pruitt leapt away, then turned and ran from the refectory. Dakaw fell back like a halffilled sack; Skebou Diffiani, sitting bolt upright, stared in puzzlement. Hule and they had caused. Laidig, sobbing and gasping, reeled from the room, followed by Wust. Diffiani was the least disturbed. He spoke to Hule. 'How did you get out?" "By a tunnel," said Hule. "Wible caused a tunnel to be dug." Wible came forward. 'The servants are here to be used. I used them. We dug a tunnd." Diffiani nodded slowly. He reached up, took off his cowl, inspected it, tossed it into a corner. Dakaw, roaring, rose to his feet. He struck once at Hule, knocking him to the floor, then aimed a tremendous blow at Wible, who stepped back, grinning. "Go back to your tree, Dakaw. Dig another hole and bury yourself." Dakaw marched from the inn. Wust and Laidig were finally discovered, crouching in a bower. Pruitt had run south, beyond the precincts of the garden, and was seen no more. I n some fashion the episode with the Druids had broken a web. The guests, looking at each other, knew that the end of their visit was approaching, that soon they would be departing the Palace of Love. Gersen stood looking up at the mountains. Patience was well and good, but he might never be so close to Viole Falushe again. He pondered the small clues he had gleaned. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the banquet hall communicated with Viole Falushe's apartments. Gersen went to examine the portal at the foot of the stairs. It showed a blank, featureless face. The mountain-side above was unclimbable. To the east, where crags reared over the sea, Viole Falushe had set a thorn palisade. To the west the way was barred by a stone wall. Gersen turned to look south. If he made a long journey, circling the periphery of the garden, he would then be able to climb into the mountains, to approach the area from above. This was the sort of purposeless activity Gersen detested. He would be moving without knowledge, without plan. There must be some better method... He could think of none. Very well, then: activity. He looked at the sun. Six hours of daylight remained. He must go far afield and trust to luck. If he were apprehended, he was Henry Lucas, journalist, in search of information -- a statement of sifficient force imless Viole Falushe undertook to use a truth-extracting device. Gersen'sflesh crawled. The sensation annoyed him. He had become soft, diffident, over-wary. Reproaching himself first for cowardice, then for wilful recklessness, he set forth, walking south and heading away from the mountains. giarden ended at a grove ' " of indigenous trees, of a tjrpe Gersen had not seen before: tall, gaunt organisms with pulpy black leaves, from which dripped a musty unpleasant sap. Fearing poison, Gersen breathed as hallowly as possible. He was relieved to reach open ground with no other sensation than dizziness. To the east, toward the ocean, were orchards and cultivated soil; to the west a dozen long sheds were visible. Barns? Warehouses? Dormitories? Keeping to the shadow of the trees Gersen walked west and presently came upon a road leading from; (the sheds toward the mountains. No living creature was in sight. The sheds seemed deserted. Gersen decided not to explore them; they certainly were not the headquarters of Viole Falushe. Across the road was a wild area overgrown with thorny scrub. Gersen looked dubiously down the road. Best to travel by the banrens; there would be less chance of discovery. He ducked across the road, struck off toward the mountains. The afternoon sun shone bright. The scrub was host to swarms of small red mites whidi set up an impatient whirring sound when disturbed. Stepping aroimd a hummock -- a hive or nest of some sort -- Gersen came upon a bloated serpentlike creature with a face imcannily human. The creature saw Gersen with an expression of comical alarm, then, rearing back, displayed a proboscis from which it evidendy intended to eject a fluid. Gersen beat a quick retreat and thereafter walked more warily. The road veered west, away from the garden. Gersen crossed once more and took shelter under a cluster of yellow bladderplants. He considered the mountain, tracing a route which would bring him to the ridge. Unfortunately, while climbing, he would be exposed to the gaze of anyone who happened by. No help for it. He took a last look around and, seeing nothing to dissuade him, set forth. The mountainside was steep, at times precipitious. Gersen made discouragingly slow progress. The sun swung across the sky. Below spread the Palace of Love and the garden. Gersen's chest pounded, and his throat felt numb, as if it had been anesthetized. The influence of the noxious black-leaved forest? Ever higher, the panorama ever wider. For a space the way became easier, and Gersen angled toward the east, where presumably Viole Falushe maintained his headquarters. Motion. Gersen stopped short. From the corner of his eye he had seen -- what? He could not be sure. The flicker had come from below and to his right. He scrutinized the face of the mountain and presently saw what otherwise might have evaded his attention: a deep cleft or fissure with a bridge between two arched apertures, the whole camouflaged by a stone wall. Clutching and straining, Gersen angled down toward the cleft, finally reaching a point thirty feet above the walkway. There was no means to descend. He could go neither forward nor up nor down. His fingdrs were tiring, his legs were cramped. Thirty feet: too far to jump. He would break his legs. Out upon the bridge came a pale, stoop-shouldered man with a large, moist head, a clipped shock of black-gray hair. He wore a white jacket, black trousers. It was the white jacket, Gersen now realized, which had originally drawn his attention. If the man should look up, if a dislodged pebble should strike the bridge, Gersen was lost. The man moved into the opposite aperture and out of sight. Gersen gave a fantastic gravitydefying leap, to throw himself into the angle of the cleft. He thrust out his legs, doubled his knees, pressing between the walls. Inch by inch he let himself down, gratefully jumping the final six feet. He stretched, massaged sore muscles, then limped over to the western doorway, into which the man had disappeared. A white-tiled hall led back fifty yards, broken by areas of glass and occasional doorways. Beside one of these glass areas stood the stoop-shouldered man, peering at something which had attracted his attention. He raised his hand, signaled. From somewhere beyond Gersen's range of vision came a heavy-shouldered man with a thick neck, narrow head, a coarse yellow brush of hair, white eyes. The two looked through the glass, and the whiteeyed man seemed to be amused. Gersen drew back. Crossing tiie walkway, he looked up the passage to the east, to see a single doorway at the far end. The walls and floor were white tile; ornate lamps scattered rays and planes of various colors. With long stealthy strides Gersen went to the far door and touched the open-button. No response. He sought for code points, or a lock-hole, without success. The opening mechanism was controlled from the other side. In one sense, this was encouraging. The stoop-shouldered man had come this way, and it could only be to confer with whomever sat or stood beyond the door. It would not do to attract attention. Yet Gersen must do something and quickly. At any mHnent one of the two men might approach, and he had nowhere to hide. He scrutinized the door with great care. The latch was nuagnetic; retraction was accomplished by an electro-muscle. The escutcheon plate was fixed to the panel with adhesive. Gersen searched his pockets, but found nothing of utility. LiOping back down the hall, he reached up to the first lighting fixture, twisted loose a decorative metal cusp with a sharp point. Returning to the door he pried at the escutcheon plate and presently snapped it free to reveal the mechanism of the open-button. The action was controlled from somewhere beyond the door. Gersen traced the circuit, and with the point of his metal cusp shorted across the relay contacts. He touched the button. The door slid aside, silent as a whisper. Gersen passed through the opening into and imoccupied foyer. He replaced the escutcheon plate and let the door slide shut. There was much to see. The far end of the room was ripple glass. To the left an archway opened upon a flit of stairs. To the rit were five cinematic panels, each displaying Jheral Tinzy in various guises at different stages of existence. Or were they five different girls? One, wearing a short black skirt, was Drusilla Wayles; Gersen recognized the expression of her face, the droop to her mouth, the restless habit of tossing her head to the side. Another, a delightful imp in clown's regalia, cavorted on a stage. A Jheral Tinzy of thirteen or fourteen in the translucent white gown of a sleepwalker moved slowly across an eerie setting of stone, black shadow, sand. A fourth Jheral Tinzy, a year or two younger than Drusilla, wore only a barbaric skirt of leather and bronze. She stood on a stoneflagged terrace and seemed to be performing a religious ritual. A fifth Jheral Tinzy, a year or two older than Drusilla, walked briskly along a city street. Gersen glimpsed all this in the Space of two seconds. The effect was fascinating, but he could not spare time to look. For beyond the ripple glass wall was the distorted image of a tall, spare man. G ersen crossed the foyer on four silken strides. His hand went to the open-button of the door; he tensed, touched the button. The door f ailed to open. Gersen exhaled a long slow sigh of frustration. The man turned his head arply; aH Gersen could see was distortion and blur. "Retz? Back once more?" He jerked his head suddenly forward; the glass was evidently permeable to his vision. "It's Henry Lucas, the journalist!" His voice took on a harsh edge. "There is a need for much explanation. What are you doing here? "The answer is obvious," said Gersen. "I came here to interview you. There seemed no other way." "How did you find my office?" "I climbed the mountain, jumped down where the walkway crosses the notch. Then I came along the passageway." "Indeed, indeed. Are you a human fly to traverse the cliff?" "It was not so difficult," said Gersen. "There would be no other opportunity." "This is a serious annoyance," said Viole Falushe. "Do you recall my comments on the subject of privacy? I am rigid on this score." "Your comments were addressed to your guests," said Gersen. "I am here as a man with a job to do." "Your occupation gives you no license to break laws," Viole Falushe stated in a gentle voice. "You are aware of my wishes, which here, as elsewhere in the cluster, are law. I find your trespass not only insolent but inexcusable. In fact, it goes far beyond the brashness ordinarily tolerated in a journalist. It almost seems -- " Gersen interrupted. "Please do not let your imagination dominate your sense of proportion. I am interested in the photographs in the foyer. They seem to be the likeness of the young lady who accompanied us on our journey, Navarth's ward." "This is the case," said Viole Falushe. "I have a strong interest in the young woman. I entrusted her upbringing to Navarth with unhapy results; she is a wanton." "Where is she now? I have not seen her since we arrived at the Palace." "She's enjoying her visit in circumstances somewhat different from yours," said Viole Falushe. "But why your interest? She is nothing to you." "Except that I befriended her and tried to clarify certain issues which she found confusing." "And these issues were?" "You will allow me to use candor?" "Why not? You can hardly provoke me more than you already have." "The girl was fearful of what might happen to her. She wanted to live a normal life, but did not care to risk retaliation for actions she could not avoid." T riole Falushe's voice trembled.  "Is this how she spoke of rne? Only in terms of fear and 'retaliation?' " "She had no reason to speak otherwise." "You are a bold man, Mr Lucas. Surely you know my rutation. I subscribe to a doctrine of general equity: that he who commits a grievance must repair the effects of this act." "What of Jheral Tinzy?" Gersen inquired, hoping to divert Viole Falushe. "Jheral Tinzy'." Viole Falushe breathed the name. "Dear Jheral: as wilful and promiscuous as the unfortunate girl whom you befriended. Jheral could never quite repay the damage she wrought upon me. Oh, those wasted years!" Viole Falue's voice quavered; grief lay near the surface. "Never could she requite her wrongs, though she did her best." "She is aHve?" "No." Viole Falue's mood changed once more. "Why do you ask?" "I am a journalist. You know why I am here. I want a photograph of Jheral Tinzy for our article." "This is a matter I do not care to publicize." "I am puzzled by the resem.  blance between Jheral Tinzy and the girl Drusilla. Can you explain this?" "I could," said Viole Falushe. "But I do not choose to do so. And there still remains your intrusion, which has shocked ixie, to such an extent that I demand retribution." And Viole Faludhe leaned negligently back against on article of furniture. Gemen reflected a moment. Flit was futile. Attack was impossible. Viole Falushe certainly carried a weapon; Gersen had none. Galling though the situation might be, he must persuade Viole Falushe to change his mind. He tried a reasonable approach. "Conceivably I violated the letter of your regulations, but what avail is an article on the Palace of Love without the comments of its creator? There is no communicating with you, since you choose to keep yourself aloof from your guests." Viole Falushe seemed surprised. "Navarth knows my callcode well. A servant would have brought you a tdephone unit; you might have called me at any time." "This did not occur to me," said Gersen thoughtfully. "No, I had not considered the telephone. You say Navarth knows the code?" "Certainly. It is the same as that which I use on Barth." "The fact remains," said Gersen, "I am here. You have seen Part I of the projected article; Parts II and II are even more highly colored. If we want to present your point of view, it is important that we speak together. So open the door and we will discuss the matter." 'No," said Viole Falushe. "It is my whim to remain anonymous, since I enjoy mingling with my guests... Well, then," he grumbled, "I suppose I must swallow my outrage. It is not just that you should evade your debt to me. Perhaps you will not in any event. For the moment, you may regard yourself as reprieved." He spoke a soft word that Gersen did not hear; a door opened in the foyer. "Go within; this is my library. I will speak with you there." ersen passed into a long room carpeted in dark green. A heavy table at the center supported a pair of antique lamps, a selection of current periodicals. One wall was lined with ancient books, the shelves sliding up or down through floor and ceiling to magazines above and below. There was a standard microreference system and a number of soft chairs. Gersen looked around with a trace of envy; the atmosphere was quiet, civilized, rational, remote from the hedonistic life of the Palace. A screen glowed to reveal Viole Falushe sprawling in a chair. A light threw his form into silhouette; he was no more idezxtifiable now than before. "Very well then," said Viole Falushe. "So here we are. You. have been making your photographic records, I believe?" "I have several hundred pictures. More than necessary to cover those superficial aspects of the Palace which you display to your guests."  Viole Falushe seemed amused, "And you are curious as to what else occurs?" "From a journalistic standpoint." "Hm. What do you think of the Palace then?" "It is remarkably pleasant." "You have a reservation?" "Something is lacking. Perhaps the flaws lies in your servants. They lack depth, they do not seem real." "I recognize this," said Viole Falushe. "They have no traditions. The only remedy is time." "They are also without resFonsibility. After all, they are slaves?" "Not quite, for they do not realize it. They consider themselves the Fortunate Folk, and such they are. It is precisely this unreality, this sense of faerie, that I have been at pains to develop." "And when they age, what then? What becomes of the Fortunate Folk?" "Some work the farms surrounding the garden. Some are sent elsewhere." "To the real world? They are sold as slaves?" "All of us are slaves, in some wise." "How are you a slave?" # #T am vicitim to a terrible obsession. I was a sensitive boy cruelly thwarted; I daresay Navarth has provided the details. Rather than submit, I was forced by my sense of justice to seek compensation -- which I am still seeking. I am a man much maligned. The public considers me a voluptuous sybarite, an erotic glutton. The reverse is true. I am -- why mince matters? -- absolutely ascetic. I must remain so until my obsession is rdieved. I am a man cursed. But you are not interested in my personal problems, since naturally they are not for publication." "Nevertheless I am interested. Jheral Tinzy is the soiurce of your obsession?" "Precisely." Viole Falushe spoke in a measured voice. "She has blighted my life. She must expunge this blight. Is this not justice? To date she has proved "How could die remove the obsession?" Viole Palushe stirred fretfully. "Are you so uninmaginative? We have delved into this enough." "So Jheral Tinzy is yet alive?" "Yes indeed." "But I understood you to say that she was dead." "Life, death: these are imprecise terms." "Who then is Drusilla, the girl you left with Navarth? Is she Jheral Tinzy?" "She is who she is. She made a dreadful mistake. She failed, and Navarth failed, for Navarth should have schooled her. She is frivolous and wanton; she trafficked with other men, and she must serve as Jheral Tinzy served, and thus it shall be, ever and ever, until finally there is expiation, until I can feel soothed and whole. By this time there is a terrible score to pay. Thirty years! Think of it!" Viole Falushe's voice vibrated and cracked. "Thirty years surrounded by beauty, and incapable of enjoying it! Thirty long years!" "I would not presume to give you advice," said Gersen, somewhat drily. "I need no advice, and naturally what I tell you is in confidence. You would be ungracious to public it. I would be grieved and forced to demand satisfaction." "What then may I publish?" "Whatever you like, so long as I am not injured." "What of the other events here? What goes on at the other end of the hall?" T riole Falushe considered him  a moment. Gersen could sense but not see the smoulder in his eyes. But he spoke in a lit voice: "This is the Palace of LfOve. I am interested in the subject, even fascinated, through the mechanism of sublimation. I have an elaborate program of researdi under way. I explore the emotion in artificial and arbitrary circumstances. I do not choose to discuss the matter any further at this time. Perhaps five years from now, or t, I will publish a resume of my findings. They will provide fascinating insights." "In regard to the photographs in tiie foyer -- " Viole Falushe jumped to his feet. "No more. We have talked too much. I find myself uneasy. You have provoked this, hence I have arranged a milar uneasiness for you, which will go far to soothe me. Thereafter: caution, discretion! Make the most of yoxir time, because shortly you must return to Reality." "What of you? You remain here?" "No. I shall also leave the Palace. My work here is accomplished, and I have an important mission on Alphanor, which well may change all... Be so good as to step into the hall. My friend Helaunce awaits you." Helaunce, thought Gersen. This would be the white-eyed man. Slowly, with Viole Faluie watching him from the screen, Gersen turned, went to the door. The white-eyed man waited in the hall. He carried an object something like a flail: a rod terminating in a set of cords. He appeared to carry no other weapon. "Remove your clothes," said Helaimce. "You are to be chastised." "Best that you confine your chastisement to words," said Gersen. "Revile me all you like; in the meantime let us return to the garden." Helaunce smiled. "I have my orders. Be as difficult as you like; the orders must and will be carried out." "Not by you," said Gersen. "You are too thick and too slow." Helaunce flourished the flail; the cords made a sinister crackling sound. "Quick, or you will make us impatient, and the punishment will be commensurate." Helaunce was hard and tough, Gersen noted, obviously a trained filter, perhaps as well trained as himself. Helaunce was also thirty pounds heavier. If he had a weakness, it was not apparent. Gersen suddenly sat down in the hall, put his hands to his face, began to sob. Helaunce stared in puzzlement. "Off with your clothes! Do not sit there!" He came forward, nudged Gersen with his foot. Gersen jumped up with Helaunces foot clamped to his chest. Helaunce hopped backward; Gersen gave the foot a cruel twist, applying torque to joints where muscles could interpose no protection. Helaunce cried out in agony, fell flat. Gersen wrested loose the flail, struck him across the shoulder. The cords hissed, crackled; Helaunce muttered. 'If you can walk," said Gersen, "be good enough to show me the way." There was a step behind him: Gersen turned to glimpse a tall shape in black garments. Something splashed purple-white light into his brain; Gersen toppled, dazed. "Tere was half an hour of nightmare. Gersen slowly regained control of his faculties. He lay naked in the Garden, beside the white Palace wall. His clothes were stacked neatly beside him. So much for that, thought Gersen. The project had failed -- but not in disaster, for he still had his life. Gersen dressed himself, smiling grimly. There had been an attempt to humiliate 'him. It had not succeeded. He had paid, but pain, like pleasure, had no duration. Pride was an entity more persistent. Gersen leaned against the wall until his brain cleared. His nerves still throbbed to the terrible flail. There were no bruises, no lacerations: no ore than a few red welts. Gersen was hungry. And here was humiliation indeed: he must eat Vide Falushe'g food, walk through the pleasant garden that Viole Fdue's brain had conceived. Gersen smiled again, even more wolfishly than before. He had known that hig life might not be altogether graceful and easy. The time was about dusk. The garden had never seenxed more beautiful. Fireflies moved in the jasmine bushes; marble urns glowed against dark foliage as if exuding wan light of their own. A troupe of girls from one of the villages came capering iast. Tonight they wore loose white pantaloons and carried yellow lanterns. Seeing Gersen they circled around him singing a gay song, the words of which Gersen could not comprehend. One approached, held her lantern to Gersen's face. "Why so strange, guest-man? Why so gray? Come frolic, come join us!" "Thank you," said Gersen. "I fear tonight I would frolic very poorly indeed." "Kiss me," coaxed the girl. "Am I not beautiful? Why are you so sad? Because you must leave, forever and ever, the Palace of Love? And we will remain, and always be young and always carry our lanterns through the night. Is this why you grieve?" Gersen smiled. "Yes, I must return to a far world. And I am forlorn at the thought. But do not let me interfere with your joy." The girl kissed his cheek. "Tonight is your last night, your last night at the Palace of Love! Tonit you must do all you have neglected so far; never will there be another time!" The girls continued on their way, with Gersen looking after them. "Do all I have neglected? I wish I could..." He went to a sunken terrace where guests sat dining. Navarth crouched alone over a bowl of goulash; Gersen joined him. An attendant wheeled forth a cart; Gersen, who had not eaten since morning, served himself. Navarth finally spoke: "What's happened? You appear well used." "I spent an afternoon with our host." "Indeed. You spoke to him face to face?" "Almost so." "And you know then his identity? Mario? Ethuen? Tanzel?" "I can't be sure." Navarth grunted and bent once more to the goulash. "Tonight is the last night," Gersen said presently. "So they tell me. I will be glad to go. There is no ioetry here. It is as I have always set forth. Joy comes of its own free will; it cannot be belabored. Look! A great palace, a magnificent garden with live nymphs and heroes. But where is the dreaming, the myth? Only simple-minded folk find joy here." "Your friend Viole Falushe would be sorry to hear you say this." "I cannot say less." Navarth turned Gersen a sudden diarp look. Did you ask for the girl?" "T did. I learned nothing." Navarth closed his eyes. "I have become an old man, I am ineffectual. Henry Lucas, whatever your name, cannot you act?" "Today I tried," said Gersen. "I was not made welcome." The two sat in silence. Then Gersen asked, "When do we leave?" "I know no more than you." "We will do what we can." "The last night at the Palace of   Love was celebrated by a fete. There was music, intoxicating fumes, a whirl of dancers from the villages. Those who had formed attachments made woeful conversation or indulged in a final frenzy of passion. Others sat quietly, each in his private mood, and so passed the night. One by one the colored lights blinked and dimmed; the folk in wlhite slipped away through the garden gloom; one by one the guests took themselves to their couches, alone or in the company that pleased them most. The garden was quiet, and dew began to form on the grass. To each of the guests went a servant. "The time has come to leave." To grumblings and protests the servants made but one reply: "These are our orders. The airoar waits; those who are not on hand must walk their way back to Kouhila." The guests once more were provided new clothing: an austere costume of blue, black and dark green. They were then guided to an area somewhat south of the Palace where a large aircar waited. Gersen counted. All were here except Pruitt and Drusilla. Ethuen, Mario and Tanzel stood nearby. If one were Viole Falushe, it seemed that now he planned to return to the Oikumene with the others. Gersen went forward, glanced into the pilot's compartment. Here sat Helaunce. The guests were filing into the aircar. Gersen took Navarth aside. "Wait." "Why?" "No matter." Tanzel and Ethuen were aboard; now Mario climbed the ladder. Gersen spoke hurriedly. "Go aboard. Make a disturbance. Pound on the bulkhead. Shout. There is an emergency lock between the saloon andthe pilot's compartment. Pull this open. Distract the pilot; try not to incite either Mario, Ethuen or Tanzel. They must not be encouraged to interfere." Navarth looked at him blankly. "What is the use of this?" "No matter, do as I say. Where is Drusilla? Where is Jheral Tinzy? Why are they not aboard?" "Yes, why are they not aboard? I am truly outraged." Navarth jumped up the ladder, thrusting aside the Druidess Laidig. "Wait!' he called. "We are not all present. Where is Zan Zu from Eridu? We cannot leave without her. I refuse to leave; nothing will remove me." "Quiet, old fool," growled Torrace daNossa. "You do no good." Navarth raged back and forth. He struck on the forward bulkhead, pulled on the handle of the commimicating door. Finally Helaunce opened the door, went aft to enforce order. "Old man, sit quietly. It is by order that we now leave. Unless you care to walk the long road, sit quiet." "Come then, Navarth," said Lerand Wible. "You achieve nothing. Sit quietly." "Very well," said Navarth. "I have protested. I have done all I can; I can do no more." T Telaunce returned forward. He  backed into the pilot's compartment, closed the door. Gersen, wa,iting to the side, struck him over the head with a stone. Helaunce staggered, spun around. He saw Gersen through eyes blinded by blood and gave an inarticulate cry. Gersen struck again, and Helauce fell aside. Gersen settled himself at the controls. Up rose the aircar, up into the light of the rising sun. Gersen searched Helaunce, found two projacs Which he tucked into his own pocket. Slackening speed until the aircar only drifted, he slid open the door, rolled Helaunce out and away. In the saloon, thought Gersen, Viole Palushe must be wondering as to the peculiar course Helaunce was steering. Gersen sought around the ocean and presently spied a small island some twenty miles from the shore. He circled it and seeing no sign of habitation landed the aircar. He jumped to the groimd. Going to the saloon port, he pulled it open, jumped inside. "Everybody out. Quick." And he gestured with the projacs. Wible stuttered, "What does this mean?" "It means every body out." Navarth jumped to his feet. "Come along," he bawled. "Everybody out." The guests uncertainly filed outside. Mario came to the door. Gersen halted him. "You must remain. Be very careful and do not move, or I will kill you." Tanzel came by, and Ethuen; both were intercepted, ordered to sit. Finally the saloon was empty but for Gersen, Mario, Tanzel and Ethuen. Outside Navarth excitedly harangued the group. "Make no interference or you will I know it for a fact!" "Navarth!" Gersen called from the saloon. "Your assistance, please." Navarth climbed back into the saloon. He searched Mario, Tanzel and Ethuen, while Gersen stood vigilantly by. No weapons, no clues to the identity of Viole Falushe were discovered. To Gersen's direction, Navarth tied the three men to chairs using various oddments of cord, strips of fabric and thongs. Meanwhile the three excoriated Gersen and demanded the basis for his persecution. Tanzel was the most verbose, Ethuen the most acrimonious, Mario the most enraged. All glared and cursed with equal vigor. Gersen accepted the remarks with equanimity. "I will apologize to two of you later. Those two, aware of their innocence, will cooperate with me. From the third man I expect trouble. I am prepared for it." Tanzel asked, "In Jehu's name, then: what do you wish of us? Name your third man and have done!" "Vogd Filschner is his name," said Gersen. "Otherwise known as Viole Falushe." "Why pick on us? Go seek 'him at the Palace!" Gersen grinned. "Not a bad idea." He tested the bonds of the three men, tightened here, reknotted there. "Navarth, you sit here, to the side. Watch these three carefully. One of them took Jheral Tinzy from you." "Tell me which one." "Vogel Filschner. You don't recognize him?" "I wish I could." He pointed to Mario. "This one has his shifty eye." He indicated Tanzel's hands. "This one has a mannerism I remember in Vogd." He turned to inspect Ethuen. "And this one has a store of spite and clearly is unhappy." "Certainly I'm unhappy!" snapped Ethuen. "Why should I rejoice?" "Watch them well," said Gersen. "We return to the Palace." I gnoring the outcries of the marooned guests, he took the aircar aloft. So far so good -- but what next? Conceivably his reasoning was awry; conceivably neither Tanzel, nor Mario, nor Ethuen was Viole Falushe. Thinking back over the circumstances of the journey to the Palace, he discarded the notion. The best method of ingress to the apartments of Viole Falushe was from above; Gersen had no stomach for another climb around the cliff. He landed the aircar beside the stone castle and went back into the saloon. All was as before. Navarth sat glaring at the three captives, who regarded him with loathing. Gersen gave Navarth one of the projacs. 'Tf there is difficulty kill all three. I go to look for Drusilla and Jheral Tinzy. You must guard with care!" Navarth laughed wildly. "Who can trick a mad poet? I know him this instant; I intend to keep the weapon at his throat." Gersen could not restrain a sense of misgiving. Navarth was not the most stable of guardians. "Remember! If he escapes, we are lost. He may want a glass of water; let him thirst. His bonds may be too tight. He must suffer! Show no mercy if there is interference from outside. Shoot all three." "With pleasure." "Very well. Keep your madness in check till I return!" Gersen went to the door through which three weeks previously the sodden band of pil grims had entered. The doot: was locked; he blasted away the hardware and entered. There was no sound. The dank rooms were empty. Gersen went down the haU, descended by the way the girl in blue velvet had taken him and finally foimd the banquet room, now dim, smelling faintly of perfume and wine. Gersen moved more cautiously. From the banquet room a way led down to the garden. Another must lead to Viole Falushes apartments. Gersen checked the walls and finally, behind a hanging, found a narrow door of heavy wood barred with metal. Once again he burnt his way through. A spiral staircase led down into the chamber to the back of the circular foyer. Gersen searched the room. He found a black leather notebook containing exhaustive notes upon the psychology of Jheral Tinzy, and the various methods by which Viole Falushe hoped to win her. It seemed that Viole Falushe wanted more than love : he wanted submission, abject quivering absement, derived from a mingling of love and fear. So far, reflected Gersen, Viole Falushe had fallen short in his goal. He tossed the portfolio aside. On the wall was a telescreen. Gersen turned a knob. Drusilla Wayles wearing a white robe sat on a bed. She was pale, thin, but apparently unharmed. Gersen turned the knob. He looked out upon a gloomy area of sand among tall rock pinnacles. To the back were five dark deodors and a little cabin hardly larger than a dollhouse. Sitting on a bench was a girl about fourteen years old, a girl almost identical to Drusilla. She wore a transparent white gown; her face had a peculiarly sweet, peculiarly pensive expression, as if she had only just awakened from a pleasant dream. From the side came a tall nonhuman creature, walking on thin black furred legs. It stopped beside the girl, spoke in a thin high-pitched voice. The girl resiKnded without interest. Gersen turned the knob again, to bring into view a terrace in front of what appeared to be a temple. Inside could be glimpsed the statue of a divinity. On the steps stood another DrusiHa, this one sixteen years old, wearing only a kirtle and a copper fillet to confine her hair. Elsewhere were other men and women, similarly dressed. To the side was the suggestion of a shore, with water beyond. Gersen turned the knob again, again, again. He looked into various environments, various types of rooms and cages. They contained an assortment of boys girls, youths, maidens, young men and women, sometimes separate,; sometimes together. Here were Viole Falushe's experiments, from which he evidently extracted a voyeur's pleasure. But Gersen saw no more versions of Drusilla. Urgency prickled at his nerves, stemming from his lack of faith in Navarth; he set off along the hall and crossing the bridge, entered the laboratory section to the west. Here was the locale of the experiments, in cages and chambers behind one-way mirrors. G ersen found Retz, the stoopshouldered technician, sitting in a small office. He looked up startled at the sight of Gersen. "What do you do here? Are you a guest? The master will be displeased!" "I am master now." Gersen displayed the projac. "Where is the girl who resembles Jheral Tinzy?" Retz blinked, half-defiant, halfdoubtful. "I can teU you nothing." Gersen struck him with the gun. "Quick. The girl who came here three weeks ago." Retz began to whine. "What can I tell you? Viole Falushe will punish me." "Viole Falushe is a prisoner." Gersen leveled the gun. "Take me to the girl, or I will kill you." Retz made a despairing sound. "He will do terrible things to me." "No longer." Retz waved his arms, walked down the corridor. Suddenly he stopped, turned around. "You say he is your prisoner?" "He is." "What do you plan to do with him?" "Kill him." "And what of the Palace?" "We shall see. Take me to the girl." "Will you leave me here, in charge of the Palace?" "I will kill you unless you make haste." Disconsolately Retz moved on. Gersen spoke to him. "What has Viole Falushe done to her?" "Nothing yet." "What did he plan?" "An autofertlization: a virgin birth, so to speak. In due course she would bear a female child precisely like herself." "Jheral Tinzy gave birth to her in this way?" "Exactly."  "And how many others?" "Six others. Then she killed herself." "Where are the other five?" "Ah! As to that I can't say." Retz was lying, but Gersen allowed the statement to go unchallenged. Retz paused by a door, looked craftily over his shoulder. "The girl is within. Whatever she reports, you must remember that I am only an underling; I only obey orders." "Then you'll obey mine. Open the door." Retz hesitated a final instant, with a glance over Gersen's shoulder down the hall, as if hoping against hope for succor. He sighed, slid back the door. Drusilla, sitting on the bed, looked up with alarm. She saw Gersen; her expression changed from astonishment to joy. She jumped up from the bed, ran to Gersen, sobbed in relief. "I hoped you'd come. They've done such dreadful things to me!' R etz, thinking to take advantage of Gersen's distraction, started to slink away. Gersen called him back. "Not so fast. I have use for you." He spoke to Drusilla. "Has Viole Falushe shown himself to you? Will you recognize him?" "He came to stand in the doorway with the light at his back. He did not want me to see him. He was savage, he hated me. He said I had been faithless. I asked how this was possible since I had promised him nothing. He became absolutely cold. He said that it had been my duty to wait, to maintain my ideals, until he had come. And even then, he said, I had played him false, at Navarth's party and on the trip." Gersen said, "One thing is certain then: he is Tanzel or Ethuen or Mario. Which did you like the least?" "Tanzel." "Tanzel, eh? Well, Retz here will show us certainly which is Viole Falushe, will you not, Retz?" "How can I? He has never shown himself to me, except behind the glass of his office." Unlikely, thought Gersen. Still, not impossible. "Where are the other daughters of Jheral Tinzy?" "Six there were," muttered Retz. "Viole Falushe killed the two oldest. There is one on Alphanor. This one -- " he indicated Drusilla " -- was sent to Earth. The youngest is to the east of the Palace, where the mountains meet the sea. The next is priestess to the god Arodin, on the large island directly to the east." "Retz," said Gersen, "I hold Viole Falushe a captive. I am your new master. Do you understand this?" Retz nodded sulkily. "If this is how it must be." "Can you identify Viole Falushe?" "He is a tall man. He has dark hair. He can be harsh or soft; cruel or easy. Beyond that I do not know." "These are my orders to you. Liberate these poor captives." "Impossible!" fluted Retz. "They know no other life than their peculiar environments. The open 'air, the sun, the sky -- they would go mad!" "This is your task then. As gently and easily as possible, bring them forth. I will return shortly and see how well you have done your job. Further, make known to the folk in the garden that they are no longer slaves, that they are free to go or stay. Mind you, I will pen you in a doset and punish you for your crimes if you do not obey me." "I will obey," muttered Retz. "I am accustomed to obedience; I know nothing else." Gersen took Drusilla by the arm. "I worry about Navarth. We dare not be gone too long." B ut when they returned up through the castle and out to the aircar, circumstances were as before. The three captives were secure, and Navarth held the weapon unblinkingly at their heads. His eyes glowed at the sight of Drusilla. "What of Jheral Tinzy?" "She is dead. But she had daughters. There are others. What has transpired while I was gone?" "Talk. Blandishments. Persuasion. Threats.'" "Of course. Who was most insistent?" "Tanzel." Gersen turned Tanzd. a cool inspection. Tanzel shrugged. "Do you think I enjoy sitting here trussed like a chicken?" "One of you is Viole Falushe," said Gersen. "Which? I wonder... Well, we must undo more of the dreadful misdiief performed in the name of love." He took the airoar aloft, cruised slowly east over the mountains. At the ocean's edge, where the crags submerged into the water, a gloomy defile opened upon a narrow gray beach. Behind was a sandy open area pei haps an acre in extent. Gersen lowered the aircar into the shadows and landed. He jiunped out. Drusilla IV, the youngest of the group, came slowly forward. From a fissure to the back, two nonhuman nurse-maids made angry chattering sounds. The girl asked, "Are you The Man? The Man who is to love me?" Gersen grinned. "I am a man, true enough. There are many men in the world. Who is 'The Man?' " Drusilla IV looked vaguely toward the fissure. "They have told me of The Man. There is one of me and one of him, and when I see him I must love him. This is what I have learned." "But you have never seen this 'man?' " "No. You are the first 'man' I have wer seen. The first person like mysdf. You are wonderfull" "Ihere are many men in the world," said Gersen. "They told you a falsehood. Come aboard, I will show you other men and a girl like yourself." Drusilla IV looked around the dreary defile in alarm and bewilderment. "Will you take me from here? I am frightened." "You need not be," said Gersen. "Come aboard now." "Of course." She took his hand trustingly and entered the saloon. At the sight of the passengers she halted in astonishment. "I never knew so many people existed!" She examined Mario, Ethuen and Tanzel critically. "I don't like them. They have foolish wicked faces." She turned to Gersen. "I like you. You are the first man I have ever seen. You must be The Man, and I will stay with you forever." G ersen watdhed the faces of Mario, Ethuen, Tanzel. This must make poor hearing for Viole Falushe. All sat stonyfaced, glaring at Gersen with equal degrees of detestation. Except, at the corner of Tanzel's mouth, a tiny muscle twitched. Gersen took the airoar aloft and flew out toward the largest of the islands and almost immediately spied the temple looming above a village of cane and frond. Gersen landed the aircar in the square, while villagers watched in amaz#nent and alarm. From the temple sauntered self-possessed, exactly identical to the other Drusillas, yet in some sense different, as the other two were different. Once more Gersen alighted spected him with candid interest. "Who are you?" "I come from the mainland," said Gersen. "I come to speak to you." "You want a rite performed? Go elsewhere. Arodin is impotent. I have beseeched him to send me elsewhere, among other boons. There is no response." Gersen looked into the temple. "That is his likeness within?" "Yes. I am priestess to the cidt." "Let us go look at the image." "There is nothing to see: a status sitting on a thome." Gersen went into the temple. At the far end sat a figure twice as large as life. The head was rudely defaced: nose, ears, chin broken away. Gersen turned to damaged the statue?" "I did." "Why?" "I did not like his face. According to the-Rote, Arodin must come in the flesh to take me for his bride. I am enjoined to pray to the statue for the earliest nuptials possible. I broke the face, to delay the process. I do not like being a priestess, but I am allowed to be nothing else. I hoped that after I defiled the image another priestess might be appointed. This has not occurred. Will you take me away?" "Yes. Arodin is no god, he is a into the saloon, xinted out Mario, Ethuen, Tanzel. "Observe the three men. Does one of them resemble the statue of Arodin, before you defaced it?" One of the men blinked. indeed. There is the face of Arodin." She pointed to Tanzel, the man who had blinked. 'Tnzel cried out, "Here, here! ' What's going on? What are you trying to do?" "I want to identify Viole Falushe," said Gersen. "Why pick on me? I'm not Arodin, nor Viole Falushe, nor yet Beelzebub, for that matter. I'm good old Harry Tanzel of London, no more, no less, and I'll thank you to take these ropes from my arms." "In due course," said Gersen, "You're sure that he is Arodin?" "Of course. Why is he tied?" suspect him of being a criminal.' merry sound. "What a dreadful joke! A man like that putting up a statue to himself and calling himself a god! What did he hope to gain?" "You." "Me? All this effort for me?" "He wanted you to love him, to worship him." Again Drusilla Ill's laughter rang through the ship. "A great deal of wasted effort." And Gersen, watching closely, thought to see a pink flush seep across Tanzel's face. "You are ready to leave here?" "Yes. Who are these other girls, who so resemble me?" "Your sisters." "How strange." "Yes. Vide Falushe -- or Arodin, if you refer -- is a strange man." Gersen took the air-car aloft, set it to cruising slowly on the automatic pilot while he cogitated. Still no absolute proof to the identity of Viole Falushe. A twitch of the mouth, a seep of color, a defaced countenance. Interesting, but hardly incontrovertible evidence. Essentially he was no closer to the identity of Viole Falushe than when he set out on the journey. He looked back into the saloon. The three girls were holding a somewhat guarded conversation. Navarth had become bored with his duties and was watdhing the girls with a halfexpectant, halfforlom expression: perhaps by some miracle they would merge to become his own precious Jheral Tinzy. Gersen sifted his courses of action. They were few. If he had access to one or another of the truth drugs, Viole Falushe's identity would emerge swiftly enough. There was no one at the Palace of LfOve who could recognize Viole Falushe, probably no one at the cities Atar or Kouhila. On Earth Navarth knew Viole Falushe's call-code... Gersen rubbed his chin. "Navarth!" Navarth came into the pilot's compartment. Gersen indicated the commxinication system, gave instructions. Navarth grinned ear to ear. Gersen went back to the saloon, seated 'himself near Tanzel. He looked through into the pilot's compartment, nodded to Navarth. Navarth tapped Viole Falushe's call-code. Gersen bent forward. At the lobe of Tanzel's ear sounded a faint whir, an almost imperceptible vibration. Tanzel jerked, strained at his bonds. Navarth spoke softly into the forward microihone. "Viole Falushe. Can you hear me? Viole Falushe!" fT'anzd jerked around, to meet ' Gersen's appraising stare. There could be no more dissembling; Viole Falushe wa unmasked. A look of desperation came over his face; he writhed against his bonds. Viole Falushe," said Gersen. "The time has come." "!Who are you?" gasped Viole Gersen made no answer Navarth came back. "So this is he. I knew it dl e time. He inflicted me with ohilL Where is Jheral Tinzy, Vogel?" Viole Falushe licked his lips. "You two have plotted to kill me." Gersen and Navarth carried him forward, into the pilot's compartment, closed the door communicating with the saloon. 'Why?" cried Viole Falushe. "Why must you do this to me?" Navarth turned to Gersen. "Do you need me?" "No." "Good-by, Vogel," said Navarth. "You have lived a remarkable life." He went back into the saloon. Gersen slowed the air-car to a hover. He opened the port. Ten thousand feet below spread the ocean. 'Why? Why? Why?' cried Viole Fushe. "Why do you do this to me?" Gersen spoke in a dry voice, "You are a monomaniac. I am the same. When I wan a child the five Demon Princes brought their ships to Mount Pleasant. Do you recall?" "Long ago, so long ago I" "They destroyed', they killed, they enslaved. Everything I loved -- family, friends, all destroyed. The Demon Princes are my obsession. I have killed two of them. You will be the third. I am not Henry Lucas the journalist I am Earth Gersen, and all my life is aimed toward -- this." He stuped toward "Nole Falushe, Who made a terrible wrendhmg exertion. His bonds snapped; he lurched, flung out his arms and toppled backhand out the port Gersen watched the long figure drifting down toward the ocean until it passed from sight. Then he closed the port, returned to the saloon. Navarth had already released Mario and Ethuen. "My aiKlogies to you," said Gersen. "I hope you have not been seriously injured." Ethuen gave him a look of unspeakable dislike; Mario made a muttering sound in bi throat. 'Well, then," said Navarth cheerfully. "What now?" 'We will pick up our friends," said Gersen. "No doubt they are wondering what is to become of them." "Then what?" growled Ethuen. "How ai.we to find our way back to Sogdian? We have no spiaceship." Gersen laughed. "Were you deceived? This is Sogdian. That is the sun Miel. How could you not notice?" "Why should I? A lunatic pilot careened through the cluster for hours." "A subterfuge. Zog was no lunatic. But he was careless; he performed no acclimatization routine; when he flung open the iort there was no difference in pressure or composition. The light was the same intensity; the gravity was the same, the sky was the same color, the clouds the same ape, the flora of the same type." "I noticed nothing," said Navarth. "But I am no space-traveler. I feel no shame. K I ever return to Earth, I shall never depart again." 'Tirst: a stop at the city Kouhila. The folk will be pleased to learn that they need pay no further taxes."  t Atar Gersen found the Distis Pharaon as he had left it. Mario, Wible and daNossa had spaceboats of their own; the other guests were conveyed back to the Oikumene by the ship which Vide Falushe had ordered for their use. Navarth and the three Drusillas came aboard the Pharaon. Gersen flew them to New Wexford and put them aboard the packet for Earth. "I will send you money," he told Navarth. "It will be for the girls. You must make sure that they are raised properly." "I have done my best with Zan Zu," said Navarth gruffly. "She is raised. What is amiss with her? The others will needmore care." 'Exactly. And when I am next on Earth I will see you." "Good. We win sit on the deck of my houseboat and drink my fine wine." Navarth turned away. Gersen took a deep breath, went to say good-by to Drudlla Wayles. She came close to him, took his hands. "Why can't I come with you? Wherever you go." "I can't explain to you. But -- no. Not now. I tried it once, to no avail." "I would be different." "I know you are. But there mit be worse problems. I mit not be able to part with you ever again." "Will I ever see you again?" "I don't think so." Drusilla turned away. "Goodby," she said listessly. Gersen took a step after her, halted, then swung around and went his way. ersen chartered a freight carrier and took it to the Palace of Love. The gardens seemed wild, less well tended. An indefinable gloom had come over the airy structures. Retz greeted him with cautious cordiality. "I have been doing your bidding. Slowly, easily, not to disturb or alarm." He took Gersen on a tour of the special environments; he described the weird and intricate thought-patterns Viole Falushe had imposed upon his young victims. One by one the victims were emerging into the upper air, some astonished, some delisted, some dazzle and fritened. Gersen could not leave Viole Falue's books to moulder. He loaded them aboard the freighter and consigned them to the care of Jehan Addels at New Wexford. With a final admonition for Retz, Gersen himself departed aind flew off through the stars of Simeste Cluster, back toward the Oikumene. Esplanade at Avente, on Alphanor, Gersen saw a young woman approaching. She wore fashionable garments in the best of taste, she obviously had been raised in an atmosphere of gentility and good manners. On a sudden impulse Gersen stepped forward. "Please excuse me," he said, "but you resemble meone I know on Earth. Are your parents Earth-folk?" The girl listened without embarrassment. She shook her head. "This may seem strange, but I do not know my parents. I may, be an orphan, or -- " she made a rueful little grimace -- " something else. My guardians receive money to provide a home for me. Do you know my parents?" Gersen thought, what in the world am I up to? Why disturb the girl with the detahs of her background, or worse, the nightmare she had no narrowly avoided. For here, certainly, was Viole Falushe's business on Alphanor. Gersen pretended doubt. "I'm mistaken -- I think. The resemblance must be a coincidence. You could not possibly be the person I thought you to be." "I don't believe you," said Drusilla I. "You know but you won't tell. I wonder why not?" Gersen grinned. The girl was immensely appealing, with a thousand charms and graces. "Sit here on the bench a moment. I'll read you a ballad or two from the works of the mad poet Navarth. When he wrote them he was perhaps thinking of you." Drusilla I seated herself. "An unconventional way to start a acquaintance. But Fm an unconventional person. Well, read A loop, a bank, a vertical climb, and once again you know it's time for the Annual Galaxy Bookshelf Awards. This institution, whose prestige has caught on like wildfire throughout the science-fiction milieu, is still -- as the First Annual Galaxy Bookshelf Awards were last year -- simply a statement that the following literary creations and creators have managed to impress me considerably. And the award still consists of one heartfdt oath of envy, collectible at the earliest opportunity, and is I suppose convertible into drink, though I have days when the fortunate recipient may have to do the bu#dng. The best novel of the year was Daniel Keyes's Flowers For Algernon, published by Harcourt, Brace  World. It was a bad year for short stories; I did not find a one in any sort of book publication that really sang. David I. Masson's Travelers Rest came closest. It appeared in Ace Books' Second Annual Worlds Best Science Fiction, and I will give it a grunt of appreciation, but reserve the oath. The most interesting "ne,w" writer is Roger Zelazny. There are stretches of time when I wish I were he. Or maybe that he were me. There is no award for a collection or anthology, either. I think the growing availability of book publication, and the increasing pressure to do books, and think in terms of books, is having a bad effect on the porter fiction, and newer writers, in this field. The best publishing idea of the year was World's issuance of Sam Moskowitz's book-end Seekers of Tomorrow and Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction, Since giving Seekers of Tomorrow what I consider to have been a generally good review, I have heard from one of the writers biographied-upon therein. His comments on Moskowitz's sketch of his motivations as a writer, and of his motivations, period, were terse and moving. I feel dutybound to report this to you. Nevertheless, it was a good idea. I n the past year, as you know, I've told you a couple of glaringly stupid things. One of them occurred in my review of John Bmnner's The Squares of the City, in which I exactly reversed Blish's Complaint. What Jim actually said was that if you are going to write a story parallelling a chess game, you are obliged to create the game, too, rather than use an existing one as your model for the plot. I am not sure I agree, but in any event I butchered this reference in discussing Brunner's book. I have not, of course, changed my overall lack of impression in the slightest, despite the fact that the New York Times chess writer gave it a good book review. I have the impression of a couple of other stupidities, but I forget them now. Let us in any event hurry on; if we do not, I will yield to the , temptation to begin awarding booby prizes to others besides myself. Fritz Leiber is one of science fiction's lonely men. Living much of his writing life in such a hinterland as Chicago, for God's sake, and never quite falling in exclusively with some one magazine market or some one editor that might create an identifiable Fritz Leiber place in the microcosm, he goes his own way, and to all discernible intents always says what he thinks. What he thinks is often just a little to one side or another of whatever focus science fiction may be fixed on at the moment. The Night of the Wolf (Ballantine) is therefore an extremely interesting collection on purely forensic grounds. This fairly long book contains but four stories, a touch but not intrinsically modernized. Their copyright dates are #, #, # and #, and their original places of publication are as markedly different from each other as Galaxy, the old New York Amazing, the old Astounding, and the Chicago pulp 'Amazing, Yet from these four stories he has been able to build a consistent declaration about the nature of man and society. Furthermore, what he has to say is quite cogent and certainly will be popular among the increasing number of readers who are increasingly concerned about the immediate future of Man. It may be possible to maintain that science fiction is finally arriving at the place that Leiber made for himself long ago. I don't want you to think that these are all necessarily good otories considered as stories, though Leiber is a very good writer. Aside from having all the prose tools, he has, as you know, a gift for poetry, for the creation of images which endure -- In one case, in my own mind, over the twenty-two years since I first encountered the bridges to aowhere in Sanity, which in this book is republished as Crazy Wolf. In fact, his gift for capturng the perversity and the irony f the human situation, and what people do with it, is all by itself ;ne good reason why it is hard stop reading a Leiber story. Nevertheless, there are times when only faith that the next nugget will soon arrive keeps you reading, because another thing Leiber discovered at some point was that he was not being paid enough by the word. The Lone Wolf (originally The Creature from Cleveland Depths in Galaxy) is the lead story in this collection and boimces along quite nicely. Through the medium of Gusterson, the hugely alive, idea-spouting renegade who stays on the surface when the rest of humanity moles down into blast-proof cities, Leiber does a nice job of contrasting individualistic sanity with the selfdestructive, socially safe inward spiral the world may be said to be on at the moment. But this is followed by The Wolf Pair, (originally The Night of the Long Knives), which is surely much too long and terribly uneventful. Between an engaging beginning as a man and woman stalk each other in radioactive wastelands, and a couple of intermediate minutes of contact with the beleaguered but Highlands, it glaciates on through word after accountable word of conversation about the unfortunate nature of man. It isn't that Leiber is saying something wrong, or that what he is saying is dull. It is how he says it that drags and drags, and this may put you off some since it is the longest story in the book. But then you encounter Crazy Wolf, and in this short, essentially slight story whose burden is that in a society of gentle lunatics it's the aggressive sane man who's coocoo, there is writing which, as I've testified, one does not want to forget. The final story is The Wolf Pack, which ran as Let Freedom Ring during one of the many periods in Amazings life when it was sliding quickly downhill and was about to be completely revamped. This is the story of a society in which humanity has at last learned not to fight. What it has learned to do instead is regiment its members so thoroughly that they will accept a "moral equivalent of war" -- the manufacture, stockpiling and ritual destruction of all the material necessary to support a major war, and the concurrent ritual death of five per cent of the population chosen by lot. The story is told mostly about Normsi, a young man who is one of the lucky five per cent and who refuses to swallow the propaganda which will make him proud of his honored duties to society. This collection does hold together, does make a point and is the work of a consistent and talented thinker, of a professional. And of a thought-out world-view which clearly must exist in the writer's mind for something other than story purposes. I guess the thing to say about The Night of the Wolf, and its effectiveness as an attempt to make four widely separated stories tell a story of human progress, is that it is an intelligent book. They are scarce. I'd never heard of John Lymington before, and the Doubleday (#) edition of Froowb! tells me nothing about him, beyond the fact that he is the author of at least five previous books, and that this book was originally copyright #. I would assume the copyright was registered in England, for Lymington is clearly an English author in the great tradition of sciencethriller writing. The plot idea behind Froomh! (I'll explain the title in a minute) is that Heaven occurs in the future. Lymington has apparently read Experiment With Time, and from it has his characters assert that in science's best guess, time moves in belts of various speeds ; not only that people have died and been brought back to life but that in these cases they have always been dead for a period of exactly twenty-four hours; that Heaven or the afterlife or something does exist and that it is attainable by either time-travel or matter transmission. These calm, matter-of-fact statements are well within the rules of English thriller writing, in which the author is allowed to take wild liberties with the truth on which he bases the remainder of his story. But it is very rare that a writer, once having placed this identification on his work, then goes on to write something else entirely, namely a book at which "science" plays the role assigned to industrial technology in Rachel Carson's Silent Springs "Froomb" is an acronym based, the author says, on a famous cartoon published first in The Detroit Messenger, and later in all countries, depicting the world at the wheel of a motor car, rushing at great speed down a slope to the final abyss, crying, "The Fluid's Running Out Of My Brakes #" I don't believe in that cartoon. It certainly doesn't sound like something that would sweep the world and give rise to a popular catchphrase. Furthermore, brakes don't have fluid in them. Most kinds of automobile brakes are fluid pressure-actuated, true. They could just as easily be mechanical, compressed air or electromagnetic-operated without being changed in their essential nature, which as a matter of fact had better be as dry as possible. I bring up this little mechanical digression the sake of a pair of hypotheses, take your pick. (One) Perhaps the world is confused, and the author knows it. (Two) Perhaps a half-educated part of the world is confused, and the author, being a member of that set, is also confused. I vote for Proposition Two. Lymington's intellectual thesis -- no, Lymington's assumption -- is that "science" in managing the world of the immediate future will run increasingly into side effects, and as a subheading under this is the assumption that side effects are always catastrophic. In Lymington's view of his scientist hero, David Packard, who is Britain's Minister for Science, there is no difference between the chemism that concerns itself with insect sprays and the science that concerns itself with nuclear physics. (Lymington thinks cobalt is a nuclear explosive). Now, this is a farrago, a pack of misassumptions and disunderstandings. If A. E. Van Vogt had written it, it would be simple to say, "My God, he's read another book!" But Lymington is an Englishman, and there's some majestic and enviable rule in England that says you don't become a commercial writer until you have learned how to handle prose. Even the shabbiest and most cliche-ridden story the English can produce is nevertheless written at a higher level of composition that you would expect to find in the equivalent story written here. (I generalize sweepingly, but I feel that I generalize accurately). Accordingly, this is an often exciting, interesting, literate book, full of nicely evoked scenesetting, believable dialogue (once you accept the fact that none of these people know what they're talking about), and a level of sophistication about social interactions that is simply not available in most routine books written in this country. By American standards, it has the trappings of thoughtfulness and genuine meaning. That worries me. Poul Anderson's The Trouble Twisters (Doubleday, #) is a collection of three stories about David Falkayn, rising young man in the Polesotedinic League. The League, you will remember, is the social device used with such success by Nicholas van Rijn, and David is in fact an employee of van Rijn Solar Spice  Liquors Co. In this book, lovable Nick has retreated to the status of legend -- he gets brief mention as David Falkayn hopes ploit will bring the young man's name to the grand old man's attention. But what we have here is the van Rijn xmiverse, and the van Rijn philosophy all over again. There are many races in the galaxy, with many of which Man may hold converse provided he can establish meaningful compiunication before somebody gets critically mad at him. Interstellar travel is cheap enough to make import-export a lucrative trade, and therefore there are also many opportunities for a merchant-adventurer to make commercial arrangements with alien races, provided he can establish enough common cultural ground before being knocked off for an interfering foreign devil. If you will remember, glorious, garrulous, bibulous Nick van Rijn was always being haunted by some upright young man or the other who wanted to do the idealistic thing while Nick tried to chase a dollar. David Falkayn is that young man, except that he has gotten the message clear, and his idealism is based on a romantic notion about merchandising and the beneficial effects of buying cheap and selling dear. This view of things took good hold on a reader when expressed by van Rijn because he was such an obvious pirate and such a blatant hypocrite that you naturally couldn't help liking him and approving of anything he did. Besides, you were safe in your chair reading a book, so the chances of your getting in his way professionally were small. Falkayn, on another hand, is a likeable young fellow, insecure about his place in the world, not too sure he's going to measure up to his ideal, yet brave and mentally quick. In the first story. The Thiee-Cornered Wheel, he is an apprentice, trapped away from his crippled ship on a planet where repair parts are available but cannot be transported to the vessel because the local religion forbids the vulgar use of circles in any artifact. The wheel, as you know, is a representation of a circle, and so David has the problem of finding some sort of wheel which is not a circle, to build a wagon. Anderson is known to be a gifted writer of adventure fiction. The detail, the plotting, the pace and the characterizations in this story are all at least adequate, often far better than average, sometimes superb. The spaceship crew's attempt to grapple with the problems of the church, state, and intellectual establishment of the alien world are suspensefully told. But the story is called The Three-Cornered Wheel and after the first thousand words the overriding thought is: Now is he going to think of it? iVow is he?" This does distract in some measure from the reader's enjoyment. The middle story is A Sim Invisible, in which the problem is the emergence of a hostile, spacefaring civilization of aliens, liberally sprinkled with unaccountable-for humans, who come from a solar system and a sun which cannot possibly exist, and busily set about kicking the Polesotechnic League out of an entire sector of the sky. Finally we have The Trouble Twisters, orginally published as Trade Team, in which Falkayn more or less commands a spaceship whose alien crew consists of an intelligent cat, an intelligent dinosaur and an intelligent computer. Once again he has a problem, once again he solves it, though he has to lean on the computer to some extent. As a demonstration that computers have personality too, the machine asks for a share of profits and beats everybody at poker. Sometimes I think that Anderson thinks he missed his chance; that somewhere, somehow, good as he is and rewarding as he is, he personally did not get from science fiction all that he deserves, and that he has shrugged his shoulders. Certainly, I think he has to some extent been damned with the wrong kind of praise, and stood in the wrong shadows. But even in froth, he is so damn good ' -- though not always in what calls attention to itself on paper -- that we miss noticing what really bad things would have happened to these stories in the hands of. lesser men. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! 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Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do i Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #-#) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet ( The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station ) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Knowledge Anyone can Know about A mystery is only a lack of knowledge or answers. Personal knowledge can be acquired on any subject. Scientology is the modern day applied philosophy, but its traditions can be traced back much earlier than Greece. 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By # the Gross National Product would be so lars, by # technological unemployment would reach suchand-such a percentage, etc; and it prompted the fellow sitting next to us, who happened to be an industrial psychologist, to construct a trend of his own. Ten years ago only # of the population were industrial psychologists. Today nearly # of the population are industrial psychologists; clearly by the year # well over # of the population will be industrial psychologists. Even allowing for moonlighting, that seems unlikely; and that's one of the things wrong with straight-line prediction as a form of peering into the future. As a matter of fact, in this particular branch of crystal-ball gazing called science fiction we've just about given up straight-line predictions except for farce, because naturally the results of any continued curve is pretty ludicrous. What we do, instead of predicting -- and we do it pretty well -- is model-making. We say, "If A, then B." "A" need not be very likely In itself; it may be such an improbable assumption as an invasion by ant-men from Betelgeuse or a discovery of a way to travel through the fourth MM. hive the backdrop ol the majestic Ruby Mountains. The sparkline Humbtldt River is a shut Vi milt nay. Every Ranche (rents an a graded read that leads inte ciast te ciast U.S. Highway #. Amidst these spectacular surdeiful Ida ol the Golden West modern schools, shops, theaters, hospital and airport is only #V# miles w.iy. New homes, with fHA financing committments issued, are now ing remote land where purchasers have to hope (or progress and expansion. They otter you the opportunity of a life time, a chance to participate in Nevada's continuing boom... Minutes from the conveniences ol hospitable Elko, In the midst of current growth and progress. la value! and mountain fed bottom streams you'll catch trophy sire German Rrowns. Rainbow and #rook Trout ,... large owners can catch their dinner withm easy driving distance of the property lines. hunt the big game species Mule Deer... Quad, Chukar, and Partridge are found in abundance. IA.ISrCKOS in ever increasing numbers. Westward to Nevada, where the air is fresh and dear, taxes are low or nonexistent and opportunity is open to all. Yes. Nevada is booming and real estate investors are prospering. It is a prim fact that any perthasars it Nivada Krtagi have realized fabulist profits from small View Colt Course. No rush for starting times on this city owned and maintained golf course, but golfing as it should be enjoyed. Play a leisurely # # or # holes surrounded by breathtaking scenery. vited guests will spend many happy hours boating, fishing and picnicking at neaiby Lake Osino. There is no Charge to Rancho owners lor lull rights to the use ol this private multiacre lake and park area. opportunity. But the country's leading corporations are also Investing in their Nevada futures. Industrial giants, who erect plants where increasing land values and population demand them, are building or have secured acreage throughout Nevada. #. Complete payment schedule (s # dawn and # par month. No interest, no carrying charges, live. Vacation or Retire # you? land, or simply hold for investment security. Wise men like Andrew Carnegie said, "More money has been made (n Real Estate than in all industrial Investment, Sena si deposit for each Rancho denied td Stockmen Bldg., flko, Nevada # Stockmen Bid Eiko, Nevada #I SlO a month, no Interest, no carryin charges. Send purchase contract and map showing exact location of my hold.ne. You will return ay deposit U I rawest tamo within # days. Have ladicated below number el Readme desired. Indicate No. of Ranches Total enclosed t dimension. But the rules of the game are such that "B" should follow rigorously and inevitably from it, and the more "background noise" that is included in determining "B", the more crossfertilization from whatever other events and tendencies the author can cope with, the more elegant and interesting the model -- the science-fiction story, that is -- is likely to be. Of course, that's not the only kind of science-fiction story there is; as a general proposition, any statement beginning "a sciencefiction story is..." is false. But science-fiction does have a special place in the hearts of many persons, because it is the "modelmaking literature" -- the only field of imaginative writing that can describe events affecting anyone, in any place, at any time. T he special advantage of model-making over the more traditional methods of looking into the future is that the modelmaker can allow for breakthroughs, surprises, unanticipated events. The old adage says that "coming events cast their shadows before"... and so they do, if you're talking about next week's stockmarket reports, or next year's arms budget. But the really big events in human history may very well not. It was impossible to "predict" electronics, radar, television and so on more than a century ago, because it wasn't until Hertz that there was any suspicion of an RF form of energy. And that's the special talent of science-fiction: to predict the intrinsically unpredictable... Speaking of which... One of the "intrinsically unpredictable" events of human history, at least until recently, was star travel. Science fiction has been playing with it for half a century, of course; but it was pure fantasy and we all knew it. Not any more. Here's a prediction for you: Within the next few months -- in this year of # -- an announcement will be made of a breakthrough in interstellar propulsion. Speeds: between ## and ## the velocity of light. Mass ratio: no worse than ##, maybe as good as ##. (For comparison, the mass ratio of each step of a threestage rocket may be ##, meaning that # pounds must get off the launching pad for each pound of ultimate payload.) What it means is that, if you are now in reasonably good health, you will probably live to see the launching of a spacecraft that will go to Alpha Centauri and return. And that's a prediction... to Increase H p young child A  i . j j bad n v J ia fluid !Q U p frdzen water c j #c coin i  K  Ularge gun A N hi O AJ animal not early A r m not wide A p IrIoIvv Official Entry BlankName this famous President We've filled in his'first name to show you how easy it is'. Using the clues, you fill in the letters in the empty squares, that spell out his last name. Gentlemen -- Please enter me in your # puzzle series. Here is my completed puzzle with #c for postage and handling. Please let me know if my solution is correct and rush all additional details of your # puzzle series. Name Address City State #R. Thunderhead Carnaby had a duty, and it was more important to him than his reputation -- or even his life! I Carnaby folded his cards withv J out showing them, tossed them into the center of the table. "Time for me to make my TX." He pushed back his chair and rose, a tall, wide-shouldered, gray-haired man, still straightbacked, but thickening through the body now. "It's just as well. You boys pretty well cleaned me out for tonight." "You still got the badge," a big-faced man with quick, sly eyes said. "Play you a hand of showdown for it." Carnaby rubbed a thumb across the tiny jeweled comet in his lapel and smiled slightly. "Fleet property, Sal," he said. The big-faced man showed a glint of gold tooth, flicked his eyes at the others. "Yeah," he said. "I guess I forgot." He winked at a foxy man on his left. "Say, uh, any promotions come through yet?" He was grinning openly at Carnaby now. "Not yet." Carnaby pushed his chair in. "Twenty-one years in grade," Sal said genially. "Must be some kind of record." He took out a toothpick and plied it on a back tooth. "Shut up, Sal," one of the other men said. "Leave Jimmy make his TX." "All these years, with no transfer, no replacement," Sal persisted. "Not even a letter from home. Looks like maybe they forgot you're out here, Carnaby." "It's not Jim's fault if they don't get in touch," a whitehaired man said. "Meantime, he's carrying out his orders." "Some orders." Sal lolled back in his chair. "Kind of makes a man wonder if he ever really had any orders." "I seen his orders myself, the day the cruiser dropped him in here," the white-haired man said. "He was to set up the beacon station and man it until he was relieved. It ain't his fault if they ain't been back for him." "Yeah." Sal shot a hard glance at the speaker. "I know you 'claim?'" The white-haired man frowned. "What do you mean, 'claim'?" "Take it easy, Harry." Carnaby caught the big-faced man's eyes, held them. "He didn't mean anything -- did you, Sal?" Sal looked at Carnaby for a long moment. Then he grunted a laugh and reached to rake in the pot. "Nah, I didn't mean anything." A cold wind whipped at Camaby as he walked alone past the half-dozen ramshackle stores. They comprised the business district of the single surviving settlement on the frontier planet, Longone. At the foot of the unpaved street a figure detached itself from the shadow under a polemounted light. "Hello, Lieutenant Carnaby," a youthful voice greeted him. "I been waiting for you." "Hello, Terry." Carnaby swung his gate open. "You're out late." "I been working on my Blue codes, Lieutenant." The boy followed him up the path, describing the difficulties he had encountered in mastering Fleet cryptographic theory. Inside the modest bungalow, Carnaby went into the small room he used as an office, took the gray dust-cover from the mitter set up on a small desk beside a rough fieldstone fireplace. He settled himself in the chair before it with a sigh, flicked studied the half dozen instrument faces, carefully noted their readings in a dark blue polyon-backed notebook. The boy stood by as Carnaby depressed the tape key which would send the recorded call letters of the one-man station flashing outward as a shaped wavefront, propagated at the square speed of light. "Lieutenant." The boy shook his head. "Every night you send out your call. How come you never get an answer?" Carnaby shook his head. "I don't know, Terry. Maybe they're too busy fighting the Djann to check in with every little JN beacon station on the Outline." "You said after five years they were supposed to come back and pick you up," the boy persisted. "Why -- " There was a sharp, wavering tone from the round, wire-mesh covered speaker. A dull red light winked on, blinked in a rapid flutter, settled down to a steady glow. The audio signal firmed to a raucous buzz. "Lieutenant!" Terry blurted. "Something's coming in!" TT'or a moment Carnaby sat rigid. Then he thumbed the big S-R key to receive, flipped "... riority, to all stations," a voice faint with distance whispered through a rasp and crackle of star-static. "Cincsec One-twooh to... Cincileet Nine... serial one-oh-four... stations copy... Terem Aldo... Terem... pha... this message... two... Part One..." "What is it, Lieutenant?" The boy's voice broke with excitement. "A Fleet Action signal," Carnaby said tensely. "An all-station, recorded. I'm taping it; if they repeat it a couple of times, I'll get it all." They listened, heads close to the speaker grille; the voice faded and swelled. It reached the end of the message, began again: "Red priority... tions... incsec One two..." The message repeated five times; then the voice ceased. The wavering carrier hum went on another five seconds, cut off. The red light winked out. Carnaby "JN # Ace Trey to Cincsec One-two-oh," he transmitted in a tense voice. "Acknowledging receipt Fleet TX #. Request clarification." Then he waited, his face taut, for a reply to his transmission, which had been automatically taped, condensed to a one-microsecond squawk, and repeated ten times at one second intervals. Carnaby shook his head after a silent minute had passed. "No good. From the sound of the Fleet beam, Cincsec One-two-oh must be a long way from here." "Try again, lieutenant! Tell 'em you're here, tell 'em it's time they came back for you! Tell "They can't hear me, Terry." Carnaby's face was tight. "I haven't got the power to punch across that kind of distance." He keyed the playback. The filtered composite signal came through clearly now: "Red priority to all stations. Cincsec One-two-oh to Rim HQ via Cincfleet Nine-two. All Fleet Stations copy. Pass to Terem Aldo Cerise, Terem Alpha Two and ancillaries. This message in one reports breakthrough of Djann armed tender on standard vector three-three-seven, mark; three-oh-five, mark; oh-four two. This is a Category One Alert. Code G applies. Class Four through Nine stations stand by on Status Green. Part Two. Inner Warning Line units divert all traffic lanes three-four through seven-one. Outer Beacon Line stations activate main beacon, pulsing code schedule gamma eight. Message ends. All stations acknowledge." "What's all that mean, Lieutenant?" Terry's eyes seemed to bulge with excitement. "It means I'm going to get some exercise, Terry." "Exercise how?" Carnaby took out a handkerchief and wiped it across his forehead. "That was a general order from Sector Command. Looks like they've got a rogue bogie on the loose. I've got to put the beacon on the air." Tie turned to look out through the curtained window beside the bookcase toward the towering ramparts of the nine-thousand-foot volcanic freak known as Thunderhead, gleaming white in the light of the small but brilliant moon. Terry followed Carnaby's glance. "Gosh, Lieutenant! You mean you got to climb Old Thunderhead?" "That's where I set the beacon up, Terry," Carnaby said mildly. "On the highest ground around." "Sure -- but your flitter was working then!" "It's not such a tough climb, Terry. I've made it a few times, just to check on things." He was studying the rugged contour of the moonlit steep, which resembled nothing so much as a mass of snowy cumulus. There was snow on the high ledges, but the wind would have scoured the east face clear... "Not in the last five years, you haven't, Lieutenant!" Terry sounded agitated. "I haven't had a Category One Alert, either," Carnaby smiled. "Maybe they didn't mean you," Terry said. They called for Outer Beacon Line stations. That's me." "They don't expect you to do it on foot," Terry protested. "This time o' year!" Carnaby looked at the boy, smiling slightly. "I guess maybe they do, Terry." "Then they're wrong!" Terry's thin face looked pale. "Don't go, Lieutenant!" "It's my job, Terry. It's what I'm here for. You know that." "What if you never got the message?" Terry countered. "What if the radio went on the blink, like all the rest of the stuff you brought in here with you -- the flitter, and the food unit, and the scooter? Then nobody'd expect you to get yourself killed!" The boy whirled suddenly. He grabbed up a poker from the fireplace, swung it against the front of the communicator, brought it down a second time before Carnaby caught his arm. "You shouldn't have done that, Terry," he said softly. His eyes were on the smashed instrument faces. "That... hurts..." the lad gasped. "Sorry." Carnaby released the boy's thin arm. He stooped, picked up a fragment of a broken name-plate with the words Terry stared at him; his mouth worked as though he wanted to speak, but couldn't find the words. "I'm going with you," he said at last. Carnaby shook his head. "Thanks, Terry. But you're just a boy. I need a man along on this trip." Terry's narrow face tightened. "Boy, hell," he said defiantly. "I'm seventeen!" "I didn't mean anything, Terry. Just that I need a man who's had some trail experience." "How'm I going to get any trail experience, Lieutenant, if I don't start sometime?" "Better to start with an easier climb than Thunderhead," Carnaby said gently. "You better go along home now, Terry. Your uncle will be getting worried." "When... when you leaving, Lieutenant?" "Early. I'll need all the daylight I can get to make Halliday's Roost by sundown." II A fter the boy had gone, Carnaby went to the storage room at the rear of the house and checked over the meager store of issue supplies. He examined the cold suit, shook his head over the brittleness of the wiring. At least it had been a loose fit; he'd still be able to get into it. He left the house then, walked down to Maverik's store. The game had broken up, but half a dozen men still sat around the old hydrogen space heater. They looked up casually. "I need a man," Carnaby said without preamble. "I've got a climb to make in the morning." "What's got into you?" Yank Pepper rocked his ehair back, glanced toward Sal Maverik. "Never knew you to go in for exercises before breakfast." "I got an Alert Signal just now," Carnaby said. "From a Fleet unit in Deep Space. They've scared up a Djann blockade-runner. My orders are to activate the beacon." Maverik clattered a garbage can behind the bar. "Kind of early in the evening for falling out of bed with a bad dream, ain't it?" he inquired loudly. "You got a call in from the Navy?" The white-haired man named Harry frowned at Carnaby. "Hell, Jimmy, I thought..." "I just need a man along to help me pack gear as far as' Halliday's Roost. I'll make the last leg alone." "Ha!" Pepper looked around. "That's all; just as far as Halliday's Roost!" "You gone nuts, Carnaby?" Sal Maverick growled. "Nobody in his right mind would tackle that damned rock after first snow, even if he had a reason." "Halliday's hut ought to still be standing," Carnaby said. "We can overnight there, and -- " "Jimmy, wait a minute," Harry said. "All this about orders, and climbing old Thunderhead; it don't make sense! You mean after all these years they pick you to pull a damn fool stunt like that?" "It's a general order to all Outer Line stations. They don't know my flitter's out of action." Harry shook his head. "Forget it, Jimmy. Nobody can make a climb like that at this time of year." "Fleet wants that beacon on the air," Carnaby said. "I guess they've got a reason; maybe a good reason." ATaverik spat loudly in the I 'direction of a sand-filled can. "You're the one's been the bigshot Navy man for the last twenty years around here," he said. "The big man with the fancy badge. Okay, your brass want you to go run up a hill, go ahead. Don't come in here begging for somebody to do your job for you." "Listen, Jim," Harry said urgently. "I remember when you first came here, a young kid in your twenties, fresh out of the Academy. Five years you was to be here; they've left you here to rot for twenty! Now they come in with this piece of tomfoolery. Well, to hell with 'em! After five years, all bets were off. You got no call to risk your neck -- " "It's still my job, Harry." Harry rose and came over to Carnaby. He put a hand on the big man's shoulder. "Let's quit pretending, Jim," he said softly. "They're never coming back for you, you know that. The high tide of the Concordiat dropped you here. For twenty years the traffic's been getting sparser, the transmitters dropping off the air. Adobe's deserted now, and Petreac. Another few years and Longone'll be dead, too." "We're not dead yet." "That message might have come from the other end of the galaxy, Jim! For all you know, it's been on the way for a hundred years!" Carnaby faced him, a big, solidly-built man with a lined face. "You could be right on all counts," he said. "It wouldn't change anything." Harry sighed, turned away. "If I was twenty years younger, I might go along, just to keep you company, Jimmy. But I'm not. I'm old." He turned to face Carnaby. "Like you, Jim. Just too old." "Thanks anyway, Harry." Carnaby looked at the other men in the room, nodded slowly. Sal's right," he said. "It's my lookout, and nobody else's." He turned and pushed back out into the windy street. A board the Armed Picket Malmonths out of Fleet HQ on Vandieman's World on a routine Deep Space sweep, Signal-Lieutenant Pryor, Junior Communications Officer on message deck duty, listened to the playback of the brief transmission the Duty tion: "JN # Ace Trey to Cine sec One... Fleet TX... clarification," the voice came through with much crackling. "That's all I could get out of it, Lieutenant," the signalman said. "I wouldn't have picked it up, if I hadn't been filtering the Y band looking for AK's on #." The officer punched keys, scanning a listing that flashed onto the small screen on his panel. "There's no JN# Ace Trey listed, Charlie," he said. He keyed the playback, listened to the garbled message again. "Maybe it's some outworld sheep-herder amusing himself." forehead. "Yeah." The lieutenant frowned. "See if you can get back to him with a station query, Charlie. See who this guy is." "I'll try, sir; but he came in him halfway from here to Rim." The lieutenant crossed the the latter sent the standard Confirm ID code. There was no reply"I guess we lost him, sir. You want me to log him?" "No, don't bother." The big repeater panel chattered then, and the officer hurried back to his console, settled down to the tedious business of transmitting follow-up orders to the fifty-seven hundred Fleet Stations of the Inner Line. Ill nphe orange sun of Longone was still below the eastern horizon when Carnaby came out the gate to the road. Terry Sickle was there, waiting for him. "You got to get up early to beat me out, Lieutenant," he said in a tone of forced jocularity. "What are you doing here, Terry?" "I heard you still need a man," the lad said, less cocky now. Carnaby started to shake his head, and Terry cut in with: "I can help pack some of the gear you'll need to try the high slope." "Terry, go on back home, son. That high slope's no place for you." "How'm I going to qualify for the Fleet when your ship comes, Lieutenant, if I don't start getting some experience?" "I appreciate it, Terry. It's good to know I have a friend. But -- " "Lieutenant -- what's a friend, if he can't help you when you need it?" "I need you here when I get back, to have a hot meal waiting for me, Terry." "Lieutenant . " All the spring had gone from the boy's stance. "I've known you all my life. All I ever wanted was to be with you on Navy business. If you go up there, alone... " Carnaby looked at the boy, the dejected slump of his thin shoulders. "Your uncle know you're here, Terry?" "Sure. Uh, he thought it was a fine idea, me going with you." "All right, then, Terry, if you want to. As far as Halliday's Roost. Thanks." "Oh, boy, Lieutenant! We'll have a swell time. I'm a good climber, you'll see!" He grinned from ear to ear, squinting through the early gloom at Carnaby. "Hey, Lieutenant, you're rigged out like a real..." he broke off. "I thought you'd oh, wore out all your issue gear," he finished lamely. "Seemed like for this trek I ought to be in uniform," Carnaby said. "And the coldsuit will feel good, up on the high slopes." r T"he two moved off down the dark street. There were lights on in Sal Maverik's general store. The door opened as they came up; Sal emerged, carrying a flour sack, his mackinaw collar turned up around his ears. He grunted a greeting, then swung to stare at Carnaby. "Hey, by God! Look at him, dressed fit to kill!" "The lieutenant got a hot-line message in from Fleet Headquarters last night," Terry said. "We got no time to jaw with you, Maverik." He brushed past the heavy-set man. "You watch your mouth, boy," Sal snapped. "Carnaby," he raised his voice, "this poor kid the best you could get to hold your hand?" "What do you mean, poor kid?" Terry started back. Carnaby caught his arm. "We're on official business, Terry," he said. Eyes front and keep them there." "Playing Navy, hah? That's a hot one," the storekeeper called after the two. "What kind of orders you get? To take a goonybird census, up in the foothills?" "Don't pay him no attention, Lieutenant," Terry said, his voice unsteady. "He's as full of meanness as a rotten meal-spud is of weevils." "He's had some big disappointments in his life, Terry. That makes a man bitter." "I guess you did, too, Lieutenant. It ain't made you mean." Terry looked sideways at Carnaby. "I don't reckon you beat out the competition to get an Academy appointment and then went through eight years of training just for this." He made a gesture that took in the sweep of the semi-arid landscape stretching away to the big world's far horizon, broken only by the massive outcroppings of the pale, convoluted lava cores spaced at intervals of a few miles along a straight fault line that extended as far as men had explored the desolate world. Carnaby laughed softly. "No, I had big ideas about seeing the galaxy, making Fleet Admiral, and coming home covered with gold braid and glory." "You leave any folks behind, Lieutenant?" Terry inquired, waxing familiar in the comradeship of the trail. IV "No wife. There was a girl. And my half-brother, Tom. A nice kid. He'd be over forty, now." "Lieutenant -- I'm sorry I busted up your transmitter. You might have got through, gotten yourself taken off this Godforsaken place -- " "Never mind, Terry." The dusky sun was up now, staining the rounded, lumpy flank of Thunderhead a deep scarlet. Carnaby and Sickle crossed the first rock-slope, entered the broken ground where the prolific rock-lizards eyed them as they approached, then heaved themselves from their perches, scuttled away into the black shadows of the deep crevices opened in the porous rock by the action and sand erosion on thermal cracks. Five hundred feet above the plain, Carnaby looked back at the settlement. Only a mile away, it was almost lost against the titanic spread of empty wilderness. "Terry, why don't you go back now?" he said. "Your uncle will have a nice breakfast waiting for you." "I'm looking forward to sleeping out," the boy said confidently. "We better keep pushing, or we won't make the Roost by dark." I n the officers' off-duty bay, Signal-Lieutenant Pryor straightened from over the billiard table as the nasal voice of the command deck yeoman broke into the recorded dance music : "Now hear this. Commodore Broadly will address ship's company." "Ten to one he says we've lost the bandit." Supply-lieutenant Aaron eyed the annunciator panel. "Gentlemen." The sonorous tones of the ship's commander sounded relaxed, unhurried. "We now have a clear track on the Djann blockade runner, which indicates he will attempt to evade our Inner Line defenses and lose himself in Rim territory. In this I propose to disappoint him. I have directed Colonel Lancer to launch interceptors to take up stations along a conic, subsuming thirty degrees on axis from the presently constructed vector. We may expect contact in approximately three hours time." A recorded bos'n's whistle shrilled the end-of-message signal. "So?" Aaron raised his eyeswats a ten-thousand-ton sideboat. Big deal." "That boat can punch just as big a hole in the blockade as a Super-D," Pryor said. "Not that the Djann have any of those left to play with." "We kicked the damned spiders back into their home system ten years ago," Aaron said tiredly. "In my opinion, the whole Containment operation's a boonman fleet." "As long as there are any of them alive, they're a threat," Pryor repeated the slogan. "Well, Broadly sounds as though he's got the bogie in the bag," Aaron yawned. "Maybe he has." Pryor addressed the ball carefully, sent the ivory sphere cannoning against the target. "He wouldn't go on record with it if he didn't think he was on to a sure thing." "He's a disappointed 'ceptorjockey. What makes him think that pirate don't duck back of some kind of a blind spot and go dead?" "It's worth a try -- and if he nails it, it will be a feather in his cap." "Another star on his collar, you mean." "Uh-huh, that too." "We're wasting our time," Aaron said. "But that's his look out. Six ball in the corner pocket." A s Commodore Broadly turned away from the screen on which he had delivered his position report to the crew of the great war vessel, his eye met that of his executive officer. The latter shifted his gaze uneasily. "Well, Roy, you expect me to announce to all hands that Cinefleet has committed a major blunder letting this bandit slip through the picket line?" he demanded with some asperity. "Certainly not, sir." The officer looked worried. "But in view of the seriousness of the break out . " "There are some things better kept in the highest command channels," the commodore said shortly. "You and I are aware of the grave consequences of a new release of their damned seed in an uncontaminated sector of the Eastern Arm. But I see no need to arouse the parents, aunts, uncles and cousins of every apprentice technician aboard in an overly candid disclosure of the facts!" "I thought Containment had done its job by now," the captain said. "It's been three years since the last Djann sighting outside the Reservation. It seems vye're not the only ones who're keeping things under our hats." Broadly frowned. "Mmmm. I agree, I'm placed at something of a disadvantage in my tactical planning by the over-secretiveness of the General Staff. However, there can be no two opinions as to the correctness of my present course." The exec glanced ceilingward. "I hope so, sir." "Having the admiral aboard makes you nervous, does it, Roy?" Broadly said in a tone of heartiness. "Well, I regard it merely as an opportunity better to display Malthusa's capabilities!" "Commodore, you don't think it would be wise to coordinate with the admiral on this -- " "I'm in command of this vessel," Broadly said sharply. "I'm carrying the vice-admiral as supercargo, nothing more!"  "I'm comming this ship, Roy, not Old Carbuncle!" Broadly rocked on his heels, watching the screen where a quadrangle of bright points representing his interceptor squadron fanned out, on an intersecting course with the fleeing Djann vessel. "I'll pinch off this break-through singlehanded; and all of us will share in the favorable attention the operation will bring us!" deck, the vice-admiral studied the Utter Top Secret dispatch which had been handed to him five minutes earlier by his staff signal-major. "It looks as though this is no ordinary boatload of privateers." He looked soberly at the elderly communicator. "They're reported to be carrying a new weapon of unassessed power and a cargo of spore-racks that will knock Containment into the next continuum." "It doesn't look good, sir." The major wagged his head. "I note that the commodore has taken action according to the manual." The admiral's voice was non-committal. The major frowned. "Let's hope that's sufficient, Admiral." "It should be. The bogie's only a converted tender. She couldn't be packing much in the way of fire power in that space, secret weapon or no secret weapon." "Have you mentioned this aspect to the commodore, sir?" "Would it Change anything, Ben?" "Nooo. I suppose not." "Then we'll let him carry on without any more cause for jumpiness than the presence of a vice-admiral on board is already providing." Crouched in his fitted acceleration cradle aboard the Djann vessel, the One-Who-Commands studied the motion of the charged molecules in the sensory tank. "Now the Death-Watcher dispatches his messengers," he communed with the three link-brothers who formed the Chosen Crew. "Now is the hour of the testing of Djann." "Profound is the rhythm of our epic," the One-Who-Records sang out. "We are the Chosen-toBe-Heroic, and in our tiny cargo, Djann lives still, his future glory inherent in the convoluted spores!!' "It was a grave risk to put the destiny of Djann at hazard in this wild gamble," the One-WhoRefutes reminded his linkbrothers. "If we fail, the generations yet unborn will slumber on in darkness or perish in ice or fire." "Yet if we succeed! If the New Thing we have learned serves well its function -- then will Djann live anew!" "Now the death-messengers of the Water-Being approach," the One-Who-Commands pointed out. "Link well, brothers! The energy-aggregate waits for our directing impulse. Now we burn away the dross of illusions from the hypothesis of the theorists in the harsh crucible of reality!" "In such a fire, the flame of Djann coruscates in unparalleled glory!" the One-Who-Records exulted. "Time has ordained this conjunction to try the timbre of our souls!" "Then channel your trained faculties, brothers." The OneWho-Commands gathered his forces, feeling out delicately to the ravening nexus of latent energy contained in the thoughtshell poised at the center of the stressed-space field enclosing the fleeting vessel. "Hold the sacred fire sucked from the living bodies exhorted. "Shape it and hurl it in well-directed bolts at the death-bringers, for the future and glory of Djann!" V A t noon, Carnaby and Sickle rested on a nearly horizontal slope of rock that curved to meet the vertical wall that swelled up and away overhead. Their faces and clothes were gray with the impalpable dust whipped up by the brisk wind. Terry spat grit from his mouth, passed a can of hot stew and a plastic water flask to Carnaby. "Getting cool already," he said. "Must not be more'n ten above freezing." "We might get a little more snow before morning." Carnaby eyed the milky sky. "You'd better head back now, Terry. No point in you getting caught in a storm." "I'm in for the play," the boy said shortly. "Say, Lieutenant, you got another transmitter up there at the beacon station you might get through on?" Carnaby shook his head. "Just the beacon tube, the lens generators and a power pack. It's a stripped-down installationThere's a code receiver, but it's only designed to receive classified instruction input." "Too bad." They ate in silence for a few minutes, looking out over the plain below. "Lieutenant, when this is over," Sickle said suddenly, "we got to do something. There's got to be some way to remind the Navy about you being here!" Carnaby tossed the empty can aside and stood. "I put a couple of messages on the air, sub-light, years ago," he said. "That's all I can do." "Heck, Lieutenant, it takes six years just to make the relay station on Goy! Then if somebody happens to pick up the call and boost it, in another ten years some Navy brass might even see it. And then if he's in a good mood he might tell somebody to look into it, next time they're out this way!" "Best I could do, Terry, now that the liners don't call any more." Carnaby finished his stew and dropped the can. He watched it roll off down-slope, clatter over the edge, a tiny sound lost in the whine and shrill of the wind. He looked up at the rampart ahead. "We better get moving," he said. "We've got a long climb to make before dark." Qignal-lieutenant Pryor awoke  to the strident buzz of his bunk-side telephone. "Sir, the commodore's called a Condition Yellow," the message looks like that bandit blasted through our intercept and took out two Epsilon-classes while he was at it. I got a stand-by from command deck, and -- " "I'll be right up," Pryor said quickly. Five minutes later, he stood with the on-duty signals crew, reading out an incoming from fleet. He Whistled. "Brother, they've got something new!" he looked at Captain Aaron. "Did you check out the vector they had to make to reach their new position in the time they've had?" "Probably a foul-up in tracking." Aaron looked ruffled, routed out of a sound sleep. "The commodore's counting "He figured he had 'em boxed." The annunciator beeped. The yeoman announced Malthusa's commander. "All right, you men!" The voice had a rough edge to it now. "The enemy has an idea he can maul Fleet units and go his way unmolested. I intend to disabuse him of that notion! I'm ordering a course change. I'll maintain contact with this bandit until such time as units designated for the purpose have reported his neutralization! This vessel is under a Condition Yellow at this time and need not remind you that relevant sections of the manual will be adhered to with full rigor!" Pryor and Aaron looked at each, eyebrows raised. "He must risk straining seams with a fullvector course change," the former said. "So we pull six on and six off until he gets it out of his system," Aaron growled. "I knew this cruise wasn't going to work out as soon as I heard Old Carbuncle would be aboard." "What's he got to do with it? Broady's running this action." "Don't worry, he'll be in it before we're through." An the slope, three thousand feet above the plain, Carnaby and Terry hugged the rockface, working their way upward. Aside from the steepness of the incline, the going was of no more than ordinary difficulty here; the porous rock, resistant though it was to the erosive forces that had long ago stripped away the volcanic cone of which the remaining mass had formed the core, had deteriorated in its surface sufficiently to afford easy hand and foot-holds. Now Terry paused, leaning against the rock. Carnaby saw that under the layer of dust, the boy's face was pale and drawn. "Not much farther, Terry," he said. He settled himself in a secure position, his feet wedged in a cleft. His own arms were feeling the strain now; there was the beginning of a slight tremble in his knees after the hours of climbing. "I didn't figure to slow you down, Lieutenant." Terry's voice showed the strain of his fatigue. "You've been leading me a tough chase, Terry." Carnaby grinned across at him. "I'm glad of a rest." He noted the dark hollows under the lad's eyes, the pallor of his cheeks. Sickle's tongue came out and touched his lips. "Lieutenant -- you made a try -- a good try. Turn back now. It's going to snow. You can't make it to the top in a blizzard." Carnaby shook his head. "It's too late in the day to start down; you'd be caught on the slope. We'll take it easy up to the Roost. In the morning you'll have an easy climb down." "Sure, Lieutenant. Don't worry about me." Terry drew a breath, shivered with the bitter wind that plucked at his snow jacket, started upward. tflTThat do you mean, lost ' 'him!" the bull roar of the commodore rattled the screen. "Are you telling me that this rag-tag refugee has the capability to drop off the screens of the best equipped tracking deck in the fleet?" "Sir," the stubborn-faced tracking officer repeated, "I can only report that my screens register nothing within the conic of search. If he's there -- " "He's there, Mister!" The Commodore's eyes glared from under a bushy overhang of brows. "Find that bandit or face a court, Captain! I haven't diverted a ship of the fleet line from her course for the purpose of becoming the object of an effectiveness inquiry!" The tracking officer turned away from the screen as it went white, met the quizzical gaze of the visiting signals lieutenant. "The old devil's bit off too big a bite this time," he growled. "Let him call a court; he wouldn't have the gall." "If we lose the bogie now, he won't look good back on Vandy," Pryor said. "This is serious business, diverting from cruise plan to chase rumors. I wonder if he really had a positive ID on this track." "Hell, no! There's no way to make a positive at this range, under these conditions! After three years without any action for the newstapes, the brass are grabbing at straws." "Well, if I were you, Gordie, I'd find that track, even if it turns out to be a tramp with a load of bootleg dran." "Don't worry. If he's inside the conic, I'll find him."#twenty degrees... in the last hour." Terry Sickle's voice was almost lost in the shriek of the wind that buffeted the two men as they inched their way up the last yards toward the hut on the narrow rock shelf called Halliday's Roost. "Never saw snow falling at this temperature before." Carnaby brushed at the ice caked around his eyes. Through the swirl of crystals as fine as sand, he discerned the sagging outline of the shelter above. Ten minutes later, inside the crude lean-to built of rock slabs, he set to work chinking the gaping holes in the five foot walls with packed snow. Behind him, Terry lay huddled against the back wall, breathing hoarsely. "Guess... I'm not in as good shape... as I thought I was," he said. "You'll be okay, Terry." Carnaby closed the gap through which the worst of the icy draft was keening, paused long enough to open a can of stew for the other. The fragrance of the hot meat and vegetables made his jaws ache. "Lieutenant, how are you going to climb in this snow?" Sickle's voice shook to the chattering of his teeth. "In good weather, you might have made it. Like this, you haven't got a chance!" "Maybe it'll be blown clear by morning," Carnaby said mildly. He opened a can for himself. Terry ate slowly, shivering uncontrollably. Carnaby watched him worriedly. "Lieutenant," the boy said, "even if that call you picked up was meant for you -- even if this ship they're after is headed out this way -- what difference will it make one way or another if one beacon's on the air or not?" "Probably none," Carnaby said. "But if there's one chance in a thousand he breaks this way -- well, that's what I'm here for, isn't it?" "But what's a beacon going to do, except give him something to steer by?" Carnaby smiled. "It's not that kind of beacon, Terry. My station's part of a system -- a big system -- that covers the surface of a sphere of space a hundred lights in diameter. When there's an alert, each station locks in with the others that flank it and sets up what's called a stressed field. There's a lot of things you can do with this field. You can detect a drive, monitor communications -- " "What if these other stations you're talking about aren't working?" Terry cut in. "Then my station's not going to do much good," Carnaby said. "If the other stations are still on the air, why haven't any of them picked up your TX's and answered?" Carnaby shook his head. "We don't use the beacon field to chatter back and forth, Terry. This is a top security system. Nobody knows about it except the top command levels -- and of course, the men manning the beacons." "Maybe that's how they came to forget about you. Somebody lost a piece of paper, and nobody else knew!" "I shouldn't be telling you about it," Carnaby said with a smile. "But I guess you'll keep it under your hat." "You can count on me, Lieutenant," Terry said solemnly. "I know I can, Terry," Carnaby said. VI UPhe clangor of the general " quarters alarm shattered the tense silence of the chart deck like a bomb through a plate glass window. The navigation officer whirled abruptly from the grametric over which he had been bending, collided with the deck chief. Both men leaped for the master position monitor, caught just a glimpse of a vivid scarlet trace lancing toward the emerald point targeted at the center of the plate before the apparatus exploded from its mounting, mowed the two men down in a hail of shattered plastic fragments. Smoke boiled, black and pungent, from the gutted cavity. The en gashes, stumbled toward the two men, turned away in horror, reached an emergency voice phone. Before he could key it, the deck under him canted sharply. He screamed, clutched at a table for support, saw it tilt, came crashing down on top of him... On the message deck, Lieutenant Pryor clung to an operator's stool, listening, through the stridency of the alarm bell, to the frantic voice from command deck: "All sections, all sections, combat stations! We're under attack! My God, we've taken a hit -- " The voice cut off, to be replaced by the crisp tones of Colonel Lancer, first battle officer: "As you were. Section G-# and # damage control crews report! Forward armaments, safety interlocks off, stand by for firing orders! Message center, flash a code six to Fleet and TF Command. Power section, all selectors to gate, rig for full emergency power... " Pryor hauled himself handover-hand to the main message console. The body of the code yeoman hung slackly in the seat harness, blood dripping from the fingertips of his dangling hand. Pryor freed him, took his place. He keyed the code six alarm into the pulse-relay tanks, triggered an emergency override signal, beamed the message outward toward the distant Fleet Headquarters. On the command deck. Commodore Broadly clutched a sprained wrist to his chest, stood, teeth bared, feet braced apart, staring into the forward imagescreen at the dwindling point of light that was the Djann blockade runner. "The effrontery of the damned scoundrel!" he roared. "Lancer, launch another covey of U-#'s! You've got over five hundred megatonseconds of firepower, man! Use it!" "He's out of range, Commodore," Lancer said coolly. "He booby-trapped us very neatly." "It's your job to see that we don't blunder into traps, by God, Colonel!" the commodore rounded on the battle officer. "You'll stop that pirate, or I'll rip those eagles off your shoulders myself!" Lancer's mouth was a hard line; his eyes were ice chips. "You can relieve me, Commodore," his voice grated. "Until you do, I'm battle commander aboard this vessel." "By God, you're relieved, sir!" Broadly yelled. He whirled on the startled exec standing by. "Confine this officer to his quarters! Order full emergency acceleration! This vessel's on Condition Red at full combat alert until we overtake and destroy that sneaking snake in the grass!" "Commodore -- at full emergency without warning, there'll be men injured, even killed -- " "Carry out my commands, Captain, or I'll find someone who will!" The admiral's bellow cut off the exec. "I'll show that filthy, sneaking pack of spiders what it means to challenge a Terran fighting ship!" On the power deck, Chief Powerman Joe Arena wiped the cut on his forehead, stared at the bloody rag, hurled it aside with a curse. "All right, you one-legged deck-apes!" he roared. You heard it! We're going after the bandit, full gate, and if we melt our linings down to slag, I'll have every man of you sign a statement of charges that'll take your grandchildren two hundred years to pay off!" I n the near darkness of the Place of Observation aboard the Djann vessel, the ocular complex of the One-Who-Commands glowed with a dim red sheen as he studied the apparently black surface of the sensitive plate. "The Death-Watcher has eaten our energy weapon," he communicated to his three link-brothers. "Now our dooms are in the palms of the fate-spinner." "The Death-Watcher of the Water-Beings might have passed us by," the One-Who-Anticipates signaled. "It was an act of rashness to hurl the weapon at it." "It will make a mighty song." The One-Who-Records thrummed his resonator plates, tried a melancholy bass chord. "But what egg-carrier will exude the brood-nourishing honeys of strength and sagacity in response to these powerful rhymes, if the stimulus to their creation leads us to quick extinction?" the One-Who-refutes queried. "In their own brief existence, these harmonies find their justification," the One-Who-Records attested. "The Death-Watcher shake himself," the One-Who-Commands stated. "Now he turns in pursuit." The One-Who-Records emitted a booming tone. "Gone are the great suns of Djann," he sang. "Lost are the fair worlds that knew their youth. But the spark of their existence glows still!" "Now we fall outward, toward the Great Awesomeness," the One-Who-Anticipates commented. "Only the blackness will know your song." "Draw in your energies from that which is extraneous," the One-Who-Commands ordered. "Focus the full poignancy of your intellects on the urgency of our need for haste! All else is vain, now. Neither signer nor song will survive the vengeance of the Death-Watcher if he outstrips our swift flight!" "Though Djann and Water-Being perish, my poem is eternal." The One-Who-Records emitted a stirring assonance. "Fly, Djanni! Pursue, Death-Watcher! Let the suns observe how we comport ourselves in this hour!" "Exhort the remote nebulosities to attend our plight, if you must," the One-Who-refutes commented. "But link your energies to ours or all is lost!" Silent now, the Djann privateer fled outward toward the Rim. C arnaby awoke, lay in darkness listening to the wheezing of Terry Sickle's breath. The boy didn't sound good. Carnaby sat up, suppressing a grunt at the stiffness of his limbs. The icy air seemed stale. He moved to the entry, lifted the polyon flap. A cascade of powdery snow poured in. Beyond the opening a faint glow filtered down through banked snow. He turned back to Terry as the latter coughed deeply. "Looks like the snow's quit," Carnaby said. "It's drifted pretty bad, but there's no wind now. How are you feeling, Terry?" "Not so good, Lieutenant," Sickle said weakly. He breathed heavily,, in and out. "I don't know what's got into me. Feel hot and cold at the same time." Carnaby stripped off his glove, put his hand on Sickle's forehead. It was scalding hot. "You just rest easy here for a while, Terry. There's a couple more cans of stew and plenty of water. I'll make it up to the top as quickly as I can. Soon as I get back, we'll go down. With luck, I'll have you to Doc Lin's house by dark." "I guess... I guess I should have done like Doc said." Terry's voice was a thin whisper. "What do you mean?" "I been taking these hypo sprays. Two a day. He said I better not miss one, but 'heck, I been feeling real good lately -- " "What kind of shots, Terry?" Carnaby's voice was tight. "I don't know. Heck, Lieutenant, I'm no invalid!" His voice trailed off. "You should have told me, Terry!" "Gosh, Lieutenant -- don't worry about me! I didn't mean nothing! Hell, I feel... He broke off to cough deeply, rackingly. "Terry, Terry!" Carnaby put a hand on the boy's thin shoulder." "I'm okay," Sickle gasped. "It's just asthma. It's nothing." "It's nothing if you get your medicine on schedule," Carnaby said. "But -- " "I butted in on this party, Lieutenant," Terry said. "It's my own fault... if I come down sick." He paused to draw a difficult breath. "You go ahead, sir... do what you got to do... I'll be okay." I've got to get you back, Terry. But I've got to go up first," Carnaby said. "You understand that, don't you?" Terry nodded. "A man's got to do his job... Lieutenant. I'll be waiting... for you... when you get back." "Listen to me carefully, Terry." Carnaby's voice was low. "If I'm not back by this time tomorrow, you'll have to make it back down by yourself. You understand? Don't wait for me." "Sure, Lieutenant, I'll just rest a while. Then I'll be okay." "Sooner I get started, the sooner I'll be back." Carnaby took a can from the pack, opened it, handed it to Terry. The boy shook his head. "You eat it, Lieutenant. You need your strength. I don't feel like I... could eat anything anyway." "Terry, I don't want to have to pry your mouth open and pour it in." "All right. But open one for yourself too." "All right, Terry." Sickle's hand trembled as he spooned the stew to his mouth. He ate half of the contents of the can, then leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes. "That's all... I want..." "All right, Terry. You get some rest now. I'll be back before you know it." Carnaby crawled out through the open pushed his way up through loosely drifted snow. The cold struck his face like a spiked club. He turned the suit control up another notch, noticing as he did that the left side seemed to be cooler than the right. The near-vertical rise of the final crown of the peak thrust up from the drift, dazzling white in the morning sun. Carnaby examined the rockface for twenty feet on either side of the hut, picked a spot where a deep crack angled upward, started the last leg of the climb. n the message deck, Lieutcnant Pryor frowned into the screen from which the saturnine features of Lieutenant Aaron gazed back sourly. "The commodore's going to be unhappy about this," Pryor said. "If you're sure your extrapolation is accurate -- " "It's as good as the data I got from plotting," Aaron snapped. "The bogie's over the make-orbreak line; we'll never catch him now. You know your trans-Einsteinian physics as well as I do." "I never heard of the Djann having anything capable of that kind of acceleration," Pryor protested. "You have now." Aaron switched off and keyed command deck, passed his report to the exec, then sat back with a resigned expression to await the reaction. Less than a minute later, Commodore Broadly's irate face snapped into focus on the screen. "You're the originator of this report?" he growled. "I did the extrapolation." Aaron stared back at his commanding officer. "You're relieved for incompetence," Broadly said in a tone as harsh as a handsaw. "Yes sir," Aaron said. His face was pale, but he returned the commodore's stare. "But my input data and comps are a matter of record. I'll stand by them." Broadly's face darkened. "Are you telling me these spiders can spit in our faces and skip off, scot-free?" "All I'm saying, sir, is that the present acceleration ratios will put the target ahead of us by a steadily increasing increment." Broadly's face twitched. "This vessel is at full emergency gain!" he growled. "No Djann has ever outrun a fleet unit in a straightaway run." "This one is... sir." The commodore's eyes bored into Aaron's. "Remain on duty until further notice," he said, and switched off. Aaron smiled crookedly and buzzed the message deck. "He backed down," he said to Pryor. "We've got a worried commodore on board." "I don't understand it myself," Pryor said. "How the hell is that can out-gaining us?" "He's not," Aaron said complacently. "From a standing start, we'd overhaul him in short order. But he got the jump on us by a couple of minutes, after he lobbed the fish into us. If we'd been able to close the gap in the first half hour or so, we'd have had him; but at trans-L velocities, you get some strange effects. One of them is that our vectors become asymptotic. We're closing on him -- but we'll never overtake him." Pryor whistled. "Broadly could be busted for this fiasco." "Uh-huh," Aaron grinned. "Could be -- unless the bandit stops for a quick one... After Aaron rang off, Pryor turned to study the position repeater screen. On it Malthusa was represented by a bright point at the center, the fleeing Djann craft by a red dot above. "Charlie," Pryor called the picked up last watch; where did you R and D it?" "Right about here, Lieutenant." turned knobs; a green dot appeared near the upper edge of the screen. "Hey," he said. "It looks like maybe our bandit's headed out his way." "You picked him up on Yband. Have you tried to raise him again?" "Yeah, but nothing doing, Lieutenant. It was just a fluke -- " "Get a Y-foeam on him, Charlie. Focus it down to a cat's whisker and work a pattern over a one degree radius centered echo." "If you say so, sir -- but -- " "I do say so, Charlie! Find that transmitter, and the drinks are on me!" 'C'lat against the wind-swept  rockface, Carnaby clung with his fingertips to a tenuous hold, feeling with one booted toe for a purchase higher up. A flake of stone broke away, and for a moment he hung by the fingers of his right hand, his feet dangling over emptiness; then, swinging his right leg far out, he hooked a knob with his knee, caught at a rocky rib with his free hand, pulled himself up to a more secure rest. He clung, his cheek against the iron-cold stone; out across the vast expanse of featureless grayish-tan plain the gleaming whippedcream shape of the next core rose, ten miles to the south. A wonderful view up here -- of nothing. Funny to think it could be his last. He was out of condition. It had been too long since his last climb... But that wasn't the way to think. He had a job to do -- the first in twenty-one years. For a moment, ghostly recollections rose up before him: The trim Academy lawns, the spit-andpolish of inspection, the crisp feel of the new uniform, the glitter of the silver comet as Anne pinned it on... That was no good either. What counted was here: The station up above. One more push, and he'd be there. He rested for another half minute, then pulled himself up and forward, onto the relatively mild slope of the final approach to the crest. Fifty yards above, the dullgleaming plastron-coated dome of the beacon station squatted against the exposed rock, looking no different than it had five years earlier. Five minutes later, he was at the door, flicking the combination latch dial with cold-numbed fingers. Tumblers clicked, and the panel slid aside. The heating system, automatically reacting to his entrance, started up with a busy hum to bring the interior temperature up to comfort level. He pulled off his gauntlets, ran his hands over his face, rasping the stubble there. There was coffee in the side table, he remembered. Fumblingly, with stiff fingers, he got out the dispenser, twisted the control cap, poured out a steaming mug, gulped it down. It was hot and bitter. The grateful warmth of it made him think of Terry, waiting down below in the chill of the half-ruined hut. "No time to waste," he mutter-, ed to himself. He stamped up and down the room, swinging his arms to warm himself, then seated himself at the console, flicked keys with a trained ease rendered only slightly rusty by the years of disuse. He referred to an index, found the input instructions for Code Gamma Eight, set up the boards, flipped in the Pulse lever. Under his feet, he felt the faint vibration as the power pack buried in the rock stored its output for ten microsecond burst, stored and pulsed again. Dim instrument lights winked on, indicating normal readings all across the board. Carnaby glanced at the wall clock. He had been here ten minutes now. It would take another quarter hour to comply with the manual's instructions -- but to hell with that gobbledegook. He'd put the beacon on the air; this time the Navy would have to settle for that. It would be pushing it to get back to the boy and pack him down to the village by nightfall as it was. Poor kid; he'd wanted to help so badly... C inphat's correct, sir," Pryor said crisply. "I haven't picked up any come-back on my pulse, but I'll definitely identify the echo as coming from a JN type installation." Commodore Broadly nodded curtly. "However, inasmuch as your instruments indicate that this station is operating solo -- not linked in with a net to set up a defensive field -- it's of no use to us." The commodore looked at Pryor coldly. "I think perhaps there's a way, sir," Pryor said. "The Djann are known to have strong tribal feelings. They'd never pass up what one of their own. Now, suppose we signal this JN station to switch over to the Djann frequencies and beam one of their own signal-patterns at them. They just might stop to take a look..." "By God!" Broadly looked at the signals lieutenant. "If he doesn't, he's not human!" "You like the idea, sir?" Pryor grinned. "A little rough on the beacon station if they reach it before we do, eh, Lieutenant? I imagine our friends the Djann will be a trifle upset when they learn they've been duped." "Oh..." Pryor loked blank. "I guess I hadn't thought of that, sir." "Never mind," Broadly said briskly. "The loss of a minor installation such as this is a reasonable exchange for an armed vessel of the enemy." "Well "Lieutenant, if I had a few more officers aboard who employed their energies in something other than assembling statistics proving we're beaten, this cruise might have made a record for itself -- " Broadly cut himself off, remembering the degree of aloofness due every junior officers -- even juniors who may have raked some very hot chestnuts out of the fire. "Carry on, Lieutenant," he said. "If this works out, I think I can promise you a very favorable endorsement on your next ER." As Pryor's pleased grin winked off the screen, the commodore flipped up the red line key, snapped a brusque request at the bored log room yeoman. "This will make Old Carbuncle sing another tune," he remarked almost gaily to the Exec, standing by with a harassed expression. "Maybe you'd better go slow, Ned," the latter cautioned, gauging his senior's mood. "It might be as well to get a definite confirmation on this installation's capabilities before we go on record -- " Broadly turned abruptly to the screen as it chimed. "Admiral, as I reported, I've picked up one of our forward beacon towers," Broadly's hearty voice addressed the screen from which the grim visage of the task force commander eyed him. "I'm taking steps to complete the intercept that are, if I may say so, rather ingenious." "It's my understanding the target is receding on an I-curve, Broadly," the admiral said flatly. "I've been anticipating a Code thirty-three from you." "Break off action?" Broadly's jaw dropped. "Now, Tom -- " #iTt's a little irregular to use a capital ship of the line to chase a ten-thousand-ton yacht." The task force commander ignored the interruption. "I can understand your desire to break the monotony with a little activity; good exercise for the crew, too. But at the rate the signal is attenuating, it's apparent you've lost her." His voice hardened. "I'm beginning to wonder if you've forgotten that your assignment is the containment of enemy forces supposedly pinned down under tight quarantine!" "This yacht, as you put it, Admiral, blew two of my detached units out of space!" Broadly came back hotly. "In addition, he planted a missile squarely in my fore lazaret -- " "I'm not concerned with the details of your operation at this moment, Commodore." The other bit off the words like bullets. "I'm more interested in maintaining the degree of surveillance over my assigned quadrant that Concordiat security requires. Accordingly -- " "Just a minute, Tom, before you commit yourself!" Broadly's florid face was pale around the ears. "Perhaps you failed to catch my first remark : I have a forward station directly in the enemy's line of retreat. The intercept is in the bag -- unless you countermand me." "You're talking nonsense! The target's well beyond the Inner Line." "He's not beyond the Outer Line!" The Admiral frowned. His tight, well-chiseled face was still youthful under the mask of authority. "The system was never extended into the region under discussion," he said harshly. "I suggest you recheck your instruments. In the interim, I want to see an advice of a course-correction for station in the length of time it takes you to give the necessary orders to your navigation section." Broadly drew a breath, hesitated. If Old Carbuncle was right -- if that infernal signals lieutenant had made a mistake -- but the boy seemed definite enough about it. He clamped his jaw. He'd risked his career on a wild throw; maybe he'd acted a little too fast; maybe he'd been a little too eager to grab a chance at some favorable notice; but the die was cast now. If he turned back empty-handed the entire affair would go into the record as a major fiasco. But if this scheme worked out... "Unless the admiral wishes to make that a direct order," he heard himself saying firmly, "I intend to hold my course and close with the enemy. It's my feeling that neither the admiralty nor the general public will enjoy hearing of casualties inflicted by a supposedly neutralized enemy who was then permitted to go his way unhindered." He returned the other's stare, feeling a glow of pride at his own decisiveness and a simultaneous sinking sensation at the enormity of the insubordination. The vice admiral looked back at him through narrowed eyes. "I'll leave that decision to you, Commodore," he said tightly. "I think you're as aware as I of what's at stake here." Broadly stiffened at what was almost an open threat. "Instruct your signals officer to pass full information on this supposed station to me immediately," the senior concluded curtly and then disappeared from view on the screen. Broadly turned away, feeling all eyes on him. "Tell Pryor to copy his report to G at once," he said in a harsh voice. His eyes strayed to the exec's. "And if this idea of his doesn't work out, God help him." And all of us, he added under his breath.  s Carnaby reached for the door, to start the long climb down, a sharp beep! sounded from the panel behind him. He looked back, puzzled. The bleat repeated, urgent, commanding. He swung the pack down, went to the console, flipped "... # Ace Trey," an excited voice came through loud and clear. "I repeat, cut your beacon immediately! JN# Ace Trey, Cincsec One-oh-four to JN# Ace Trey. Shut down beacon soonest! This is an Operational Urgent! JN# Ace Trey, cut beacon and stand by for further operational urgent instructions IX An the fleet command Deck  aboard the flagship, ViceAdmiral Thomas Carnaby, otherwise known as Old Carbuncle, studied the sector triagram as his Communications Chief pointed out the positions of the flagship, Malthusa, the Djann refugee and the reported JN beacon station. "I've researched the call letters, sir," the gray-haired signals major said. "They're not shown on any listing as an active station. In fact, the entire series of which this station would be a part is coded null ; never reported in commission." "So someone appears to be playing pranks, is that your conclusion, Henry?" The signals officer pulled at his lower lip. "No, sir, not that, precisely. I've done a full analytical on the recorded signal that young Pryor first intercepted. It's plainly directed to Cincsec in response to the alert; and the ID is confirmed. Now, as I say, this series was dropped from the register. But at one time, such a designation was assigned en bloc to a proposed link in the Out-line. However, the planned installations never came to fruition due to changes in the strategic position." The vice-admiral frowned. "What changes were those?" "The task force charged with the establishment of the link encountered heavy enemy pressure. In fact, the cruiser detailed to carry out the actual placement of the units was lost in action with all hands. Before the program could be re-initiated, a withdrawal from the sector was ordered. The new link was never completed, and the series was retired, unused." "So?" "So... just possibly, sir, one of those old stations was erected before Redoubt was lost -- " "What's that?" The admiral rounded on the startled officer. "Did you say... Redoubt." His voice was a hiss between set teeth. "Y -- yessir!" "Redoubt was lost with all hands before she planted her first station!" "I know that's what we've always thought, Admiral -- " The Admiral snatched the paper from the major's hand. "JN# Ace-Trey," he read aloud. "Why the hell didn't you say so sooner?" He whirled to his chief of staff. "What's Broadly got in mind?" he snapped the question. The startled officer began a description of the plan to decoy the Djann vessel into range of Malthusa's batteries. "Decoy'?" the vice admiral snarled. The exec took a step backward, shocked at the expression on his superior's face. The latter spun to face his battle officer, standing by on the bridge. "General, rig out an interceptor and get my pressure gear into it! I want it on the line ready for launch in ten minutes! Assign your best torohman as co-pilot!" "Yessir!" The general spoke quickly into a lapel mike. The admiral flicked a key beside the hot-line screen. "Get Broadly," he said in a voice like doom impending. I n the Djann ship, the OneWho-Commands stirred and extended a contact to his crewmembers. "Tune keenly in the scarlet regions of the spectrum," he communicated. "And tell me whether the spinners weave a new thread in the tapestry of our fates." "I sensed it but now and felt recognition stir within me!" the mighty euphony. "A voice of the One-Who-Records thrummed a Djann, sore beset, telling of mortal need!" "I detect a strangeness," the OneWhoRefutes indicated. "This is not the familiar voice of They-Who-Summon." "After the passage of ninety cycles, it is not surprising that new chords have been added to the voice and others withdrawn," the One-Who-Anticipates pointed out. "If the link-cousins are in distress, our path is clear!" "Shall I then bend our fateline to meet the new voice?" the One-Who-Commands called for a weighing. "The pursuers press us closely." "The voice calls. Will we pervert our saga by shunning it?" "This is a snare of the WaterBeings, calculated to abort our destinies!" The OneWhoRefutes warned. "Our vital energies are drained to the point of incipient coma by the weapon-whichfeeds-on-life! If we turn aside now, we place ourselves in the jaws of the destroyer!" "Though the voice lies, the symmetry of our existence demands that we answer its appeal," the One-Who-Anticipates declared. "Go to it," The One-WhoRecords sounded a booming arpeggio, combining triumph and defeat. "Let the Djann flame burn brightest in its hour of extinction!" #j#y God, they've fallen for A# t!" Commodore Broadly smacked his fist into his hand and beamed at the young signals lieutenant. He rocked back on his heels, studying the position chart the plot officer had set up for him on the message deck. "We'll make the intercept about here." His finger stabbed at a point a fractional light from the calculated position of the newfound OL station. He broke off as an excited voice burst from the intercom screen. "Commodore Broadly, sir! Urgent from task -- " The yeoman's face disappeared from the screen to be replaced by the fierce visage of the vice-admiral. "Broadly, sheer off and take up course for station and then report yourself under arrest! Commodore Baskov will take command: I've countermanded your damned-fool orders to the OL station! I'm on my way out there now to see what I can salvage -- and when I get back, I'm preferring charges against you that will put you on the beach for the rest of your miserable life!" X I n the beacon station atop the height of ground known as Thunderhead, Carnaby waited before the silent screen. The modification to the circuitry had taken half an hour; setting up the new code sequences, another fifteen minutes. Then another half hour had passed, while the converted beacon beamed out the alien signal. He'd waited long enough. It had been twenty minutes now since the last curt order to stand by; and in the hut a thousand feet below, Terry had been waiting now for nearly five hours, every breath he drew a torture of strangulation. The order had been to put the signal on the air, attempt to delay the enemy ' ship. Either it had worked, or it hadn't. If Fleet had any more instructions for him, they'd have to damn well deliver them in person. He'd done what was required. Now he had to see to the boy. Carnaby rose, again donned the back-pack, opened the door. As he did so, a faint, deep-toned rumble of distant thunder rolled. He stepped outside, squinted up at the sky, a dazzle of mist-gray, maybe the snow squall was headed back this way. That would be bad luck; it would be dose enough as it was. A bright point of light caught his eye, winking from high above, almost at zenith. Carnaby felt his heart take a leap in his chest that almost choked off his breath. For a moment he stood, staring up at it; then he whirled back through the door. "... termand previous instructions!" A new voice was rasping from the speaker. "Terminate all transmissions immediately! JN#, shut down power and vacate station! Repeat, an armed enemy vessel is believed to be vectored in on your signal! This is, repeat, a hostile vessel! You are to cease transmission and abandon station immediately -- " Carnaby's hand slapped the big master lever. Lights died on the panel. Underfoot, the minute vibration jelled into immobility. Sudden silence pressed in. like a tangible force -- a silence broken by a rising mutter from above. "Like that, eh?" Carnaby said to himself through clenched teeth. "Abandon station, eh?" He took three steps to a wall locker, yanked the door wide, took out a short, massive power rifle, still encased in its plastic protective cover. He stripped the oily sheath away, checked the charge There were foot-square windows set on each side of the twenty-foot room. Carnaby went to one. By putting his face flat against the armorplast panel he was able to see the ship, now a flaring fireball dropping in along a wide approach curve. As it descended swiftly, the dark body of the vessel took shape above the glare of the drive. It was a small, blunt-ended ovoid of unfamiliar design, a metallic black in color, decorated fore and aft with the scarlet blazons of a Djann war vessel. The ship was close now, maneuvering to a position a thousand feet directly overhead. Now a small landing craft detached itself from the parked ship and plummeted downward like a stone with a shrill whistling of highspeed rotors, to settle in across the expanseof broken rock in a cloud of pale dust. The black plastic bubble atop the landing sled split like a clamshell. A shape came into view, clambered over the cockpit rim and stood, a cylindrical bronze-black body slung by leather mesenteries from the paired U frames that were its ambulatory members, two pairs of grasping limbs folded above. A second Djann emerged, a third, a fourth. They stood together, immobile, silent, while a minute ticked past. Sweat trickled down the side of Carnaby's face. He breathed shallowly, rapidly, feeling the almost painful thudding of his heart. They'd ordered him to delay the enemy; well, he'd delay them... rfne of the Djann moved suddenly, its strange, jointless limbs moving with twinkling grace and speed. It flowed across to a point from which it could look down across the plain, then angled to the left and reconnoitered the entire circumference of the mountain top. Carnaby moved from window to window to watch it. It rejoined the other three; briefly, they seemed to confer. Then one of the creatures, whether the same one or another Carnaby wasn't sure, started across toward the hut. Carnaby moved back into a position in the lee of a switch gear cabinet. A moment later the Djann appeared at the door. At a distance of fifteen feet, Carnaby saw the lean limbs, like leather-covered metal; the heavy body; the immense faceted eyes that caught the light and sent back fiery glints. For thirty seconds the creature scanned the interior of the structure. Then it withdrew. Carnaby let out a long, shaky breath, watched it lope back to rejoin its companions. Again, the Djann conferred; then one turned to the landing craft. For a long moment Carnaby hesitated. He could stay where he was, do nothing, and the Djann would reboard their vessel and go their way; and in a few hours a fleet unit would heave into view off Longone, and he'd be home safe. But the orders had been to delay the enemy... He centered the sights of the power gun on the alien's body, just behind the fore-legs, and pushed the firing stud. A shaft of purple fire blew the window from its frame, lanced out to smash the up-rearing alien against the side of the sled, sent it skidding in a splatter of molten rock and metal. Carnaby swung the rifle, fired at a second Djann as the group scattered; the stricken creature went down, rolled, came up, stumbling on three limbs. He fired again, knocked the creature spinning, dark fluid spattering from a gaping wound in the barrel-like body. Carnaby swung to cover a third Djann, streaking for the plateau's edge; his shot sent a shower of molten slag arcing high from the spot where it disappeared. He lowered the gun, stepped outside, ran to the corner of the building. The fourth Djann was crouched in the open, thirty feet away; Carnaby saw the glitter of a weapon gripped in the handlike members springing from its back. He brought the gun up, fired in the same instant that light etched the rocks, and a hammerblow struck him crushingly in the side, knocked him back against the wall. He tasted dust in his mouth, was aware of a high, humming sound that seemed to blank out his hearing, his vision, his thoughts... He came to, lying on his side against the wall. Forty feet away, the Djann sprawled, its stiff limbs out-thrust at awkward angles. Carnaby looked down at his side. The Djann particle-gun had torn a gaping rent in his suit, through which he could see bright crimson beads of frozen blood. He groped, found the rifle, dragged it to him. He shook his head to clear away the mist that seemed to obscure his vision. At every move, a terrible sharp pain stabbed outward from his chest. Ribs broken, he thought. Something smashed inside, too. It was hard for him to breathe. The cold stone on which he lay seemed to suck the heat from his body. Across the hundred foot stretch of frost-shattered rock, a sootblack scar marked the spot where the escaping Djann had gone over the edge. Painfully, Carnaby propped the weapon to cover the direction from which attack might come. Then he slumped, his face against the icy rock, watching down the length of the rifle barrel for the next move from the enemy. C# A nother four hours to shift, Admiral," said General Drew, the battle commander acting as co-pilot aboard the racing interceptor. "That's if we don't blow our linings before then." "Bandit still holding position?" The admiral's voice was a grate as of metal against metal. Drew spoke into his lip mike, frowned at the reply. "Yes, sir, Malthusa says he's still stationary. Whether his focus is identical with the LN beacon's fix or not, he isn't sure at that range." "He could be standing by offplanet, looking over the ground," the admiral muttered half to himself. "Not likely, Admiral. He knows we're on his tail." "I know it's not likely, damn it!" the admiral snarled. "But if he isn't, we haven't got a chance." "I suppose the Djann conception of honor requires these beggars to demolish the beacon and hunt down the station personnel, even if it means letting us overhaul them," Drew said. "A piece of damn foolishness on their part, but fortunate for us." "For us, General? I take it you mean yourself and me, not the poor devil that's down there alone with them!" "Just the one man? Well, we'll get off more cheaply than I imagined." The general glanced sideways at the admiral, intent over the controls. "After all, he's Navy. This is his job, what he signed on for." "Kick the converter again, General," Admiral Carnaby said between his teeth. "Right now you can earn your pay by squeezing another quarterlight out of this bucket." '""Touched in a shallow crevice below the rim of the mesa where the house of the WaterBeings stood, the One-WhoRecords quivered under the appalling impact of the deathemanations of his link-brothers. "Now it lies with you alone," the fading thought came from the One-Who-Commands. "But the Water-Being, too, is alone, and in this... there is... a certain euphony..." The last fragile tendril of communication faded. The One-Who-Records expelled a gust of the planet's noxious atmosphere from his ventral orifice-array, with an effort freed his intellect of the shattering extinction-resonances it had absorbed. Cautiously, he probed outward, sensing the strange, fiery mindglow of the alien... Ah. he too was injured! The One-Who-Records shifted his weight from his scalded forelimb, constricted further the flow of vital fluids through the damaged section of his epidermal system. He was weakened by the searing blast that had scored his flank, but still capable of action; and up above, the wounded Water-Being waited. Deftly, the Djann extracted the hand-weapon from the sheath strapped to his side, holding it in a two-handed grip, its broad base resting on his dorsal ridge, its ring-lenses aligned along his body. He wished briefly that he had spent more li periods in the peril-tanks, impressing the weapon's use-syndromes on his reflex system ; but reckless regrets made poor scansion. Now indeed the display-podium of existence narrowed down to a single confrontation: A brief and final act in a century-old drama, with the fate of the mighty epic of Djann resting thereon. The One-Whorecords sounded a single, trumpet-like resonance of exultation and moved forward to fulfill his destiny. XI A t the faint bleat of sound, Carnaby raised his head. How long had he lain here, waiting for the alien to make its move? Maybe an hour, maybe longer. He had passed out at least twice, possibly for no more than a second or two; but it could have been longer. The Djann might even have gotten past 'him -- or crawled along below the ridge, ready now to jump him from a new angle... He thought of Terry Sickle, waiting for him, counting on him. Poor kid; time was running out for him. The sun was dropping low, and the shadows would be closing in. It would be ice cold inside the hut; and down there in the dark the boy was slowly strangling, maybe calling for him... He couldn't wait any longer. To hell with the alien. He'd held him long enough. Painfully, using the wall as a support, Carnaby got to his hands and knees. His side felt as though it had been opened and packed with red-hot stones -- or were they ice-cold? His hands and feet were numb. His face ached. Frostbite. He'd look fine with a frozen ear. Funny how vanity survived as long as life itself... He got to his feet, leaned against the building, worked on breathing. The sky swam past him, fading and brightening. His feet felt like blocks of wood; that wasn't good. He had a long way to go. But the activity would warm him, get the blood flowing, except where the hot stones were. He would be lighter if he could leave them here. His hands moved at his side, groping over torn polyon, the sharp ends of broken wires... He brought his mind back to clarity with an effort. Wouldn't do to start wandering now. The gun caught his eye, lying at his feet. Better pick it up; but to hell with it, too much trouble. Navy property. Can't leave it here for the enemy to find. Enemy. Funny dream about a walking oxy tank, and -- He was looking at the dead Djann, lying, awkward, impossible, thirty feet away. No dream. The damn things were real. He was here, alone, on top of Thunderhead -- But he couldn't be. Flitter was broken down. Have to get another message off via the next tramp steamer that made planetfall. Hadn't been one for... how long? Something moved, a hundred feet away, among the tumble of broken rock. Carnaby ducked, came up with the blast-rifle, fired in a halfcrouch from the hip, saw a big dark shape scramble up and over the edge, saw the wink of yellow light, fired again, cursing the weakness that made the gun buck and yaw in his hands, the darkness that closed over his vision. With hands that were stiff, clumsy, he fired a third time at the swift-darting shape that charged toward him ; and then he was falling, falling... Qtunned by the direct hit from  the energy weapon of the Water-Being, the One-Who-Records fought his way upward through a universe shot through with whirling shapes of fire, to emerge on a plateau of mortal agony. He tried to move, was shocked into paralysis by the cacophony of conflicting motor and sense impressions from shattered limbs and organs. Then I, too, die, the thought came to him with utter finality. And with me dies the oncemighty song of Djann. Failing, his mind groped outward, calling in vain for the familiar touch of his link-brothers -- and abruptly, a sharp sensation impinged on his sensitivity-complex. Concepts of strange and alien shape drifted into his mind, beating at him with compelling urgency from a foreign brain: Youth, aspirations, the ringing bugle of the call-to-arms. A white palace rearing up into yellow sunlight; a bright banner, rippling against blue sky, and the shadows of great trees ranked on green lawns. The taste of grapes, and an odor of flowers; night, and the moon reflected from still water; the touch of a soft hand and the face of a woman, invested with a supernal beauty; chords of a remote music that spoke of the inexpressibly desirable, the irretrievably lost... "Have we warred then, WaterBeings?" the One-Who-Records sent his thought outward. "We who might have been brothers?" With a mighty effort, he summoned his waning strength, sounded a final chord in tribute to that which had been. f Carnaby opened his eyes and looked at the dead Dj ann lying in the crumpled posture of its final agony, not six feet from him. For a moment, a curious sensation of loss plucked at his mind. "Sorry, fellow," he muttered aloud. "I guess you were doing what you had to do, too."' He stood, felt the ground sway under his feet. His head was light, hot; a sharp, clear humming sounded in his ears. He took a step, caught himself as his knees tried to buckle. "Damn it, no time to fall out now," he grunted. He moved past the alien body, paused by the door to the shed. A waft of warm air caressed his cold-numbed face. "Could go inside," he muttered. "Wait there. Ship along in a few hours, maybe. Pick me up... " He shook his head angrily. "Job's not done yet," he said clearly, addressing the white gleam of the ten mile distant peak known as Cream-top. "Just a little longer, Terry," he added. "I'm coming." Painfully, Carnaby made his way to the edge of the plateau, pulled himself up and over and started down. U W e ' d k e  er shift to sub-L ' ' now, Admiral," Drew said, strain showing in his voice. "We're cutting it fine as it is." "Every extra minute at full gain saves a couple of hours," the vice-admiral came back. "That won't help us if we kick out inside the Delta limit and blow ourselves into free ions," the general said coolly. "You've made your point. General!" The admiral kept his eyes fixed on his instruments. Half a minute ticked past. Then he nodded curtly. "All right, kick us out," he snapped, "and we'll see where we stand." The hundred-ton interceptor shuddered as the distorters whined down the scale, allowing the stressed space field that had enclosed the vessel to collapse. A star swam suddenly into the visible spectrum, blazing at planetary distance off the starboard bow at three o'clock high. "Our target's the second body, there." The co-pilot punched the course into the panel. "What would you say, another hour?" The admiral bit off the words. "Make it two," the other replied shortly. He glanced up, caught the admiral's eye on him. "Kidding ourselves won't change anything," he said steadily. Admiral Carnaby narrowed his eyes, opened his mouth to speak, then clamped his jaw shut. "I guess I've been a little snappy with you, George," he said. "I'll ask your pardon. That's my brother down there." "Your... ?" the general's features tightened. "I guess I said some stupid things myself, Tom." He frowned at the instruments, busied himself adjustCarnaby half jumped, half fell the last few yards to the narrow ledge called Halliday's Roost, landed awkwardly in a churn of powdered winddriven snow. For a moment he lay sprawled, then gathered himself, made it to his feet, tottered to the hollow concealing the drifted entrance to the hut. He lowered himself, crawled down into the dark, clammy interior. "Terry," he called hoarsely. A wheezing breath answered him. He felt his way to the boy's side, groped over him. He lay on his side, his legs curled against his chest. "Terry!" Carnaby pulled the lad to a sitting position, he felt him stir feebly. "Terry, I'm back! We have to go now, Terry..." "I knew -- " the boy stopped to draw an agonizing breath -- "you'd come..." He groped, found Carnaby's hand. Carnaby fought the dizziness that threatened to close in on him. He was cold -- colder than he had ever been. The climbing hadn't warmed him. The side wasn't bothering him much now; he could hardly feel it. But he couldn't feel his hands and feet, either. They were like stumps, good for nothing... Clumsily, he backed through the entry, bodily hauling Terry along with him. Outside, the wind lashed at him like frozen whips. Carnaby raised Terry to his feet. The boy leaned against him, slid down, crumpled to the ground. "Terry, you've got to try," Carnaby gasped out. His breath seemed to freeze in his throat. "No time to waste... got to get you to... Doc Lin..." "Lieutenant... I... can't "Terry... you've got to try!" He lifted the boy to his feet. "I'm... scared... Lieutenant... " Terry stood swaying, his slight body quivering, his knees loose. "Don't worry, Terry." Carnaby guided the boy to the point from which they would start the climb down. "Not far now." "Lieutenant... " Sickler caught at Carnaby's arm, clung. "You... better... leave... me." His breath sighed in his throat. "I'll go first." Carnaby heard his own voice as from a great distance. "Take... it easy. I'll be right there... to help..." He forced a breath of sub-zero air into his lungs. The bitter wind moaned around the shattered rock. The dusky afternoon sun shed a reddish light but no heat on the long slope below. "It's late." He mouthed the words with stiff lips. "It's late..." r-pwo hundred thousand feet above the surface of the outpost world Longone, the fleet interceptor split the stratosphere, its receptors fine-tuned to the Djann energy-call emission spectrum. miles of desert," Admiral Carnaby said. "Except for a couple of deserted townsites, not a sign that life ever existed here." "We'll find it, Tom," Drew said. "If they'd lifted, Malthusa would have known -- hold it!" He looked up quickly. "I'm getting something -- yes! It's the typical Djann idler output!" "How far from us?" "Quite a distance... Now it's fading . " The admiral put the ship into a screaming deceleration curve that crushed both men brutally against the restraint of their shock-frames. "Find that signal, George," the vice-admiral grated. "Find it and steer me to it, if you have to pick it out of the air with psi!" "I've got it!" Drew barked. "Steer right, on #. I'd range it at about two thousand kilometers... " vn the bald face of an outcropping of wind-scored stone, Carnaby clung one-handed to a scanty hold, supporting Terry with the other arm. The wind shrieked, buffeting at him; sandfine snow whirled into his face, slashing at his eyes, already halfblinded by the glare. The boy slumped against him, barely conscious. His mind seemed as sluggish now as his half-frozen limbs. Somewhere below, there was a ledge, with shelter from the wind. How far? Ten feet? Fifty? It didn't matter. He had to reach it. He couldn't hold on here, in this wind; in another minute he'd be done for. Carnaby pulled Terry closer, got a better grip with a hand that seemed no more a part of him than the rock against which they  clung. He shifted his purchase with his right foot -- and felt it slip. He was falling, grabbing frantically with one hand at the rock, then dropping through open air -- The impact against drifted snow drove the air from his lungs. Darkness shot through with red fire threatened to close in on him ; he fought to draw a breath, struggling in the claustrophobia of suffocation. With a desperate lunge, he caught a ridge of hard ice, pulled himself back from the brink, then groped, found Terry, lying on his back under the vertically rising wall of rock. The boy stirred. "So... tired..." he whispered. His body arced as he struggled to draw breath. Carnaby pulled himself to a position beside the boy, propped himself with his back against the rock. Dimly, through ice-rimmed eyes, he could see the evening lights of the settlement, far below; so far... He put his arm around the thin body, settled the lad's head gently in his lap, leaned over him to shelter him from the whirling snow. "It's all right, Terry," he said. "You can rest now." Qupported on three narrow pen cils of beamed force, the fleet interceptor slowly circuited the Djann yacht, hovering on its idling null-G generators a thousand feet above the towering white mountain. "Nothing alive there," the copilot said. "Not a whisper on the life-detection scale." "Take her down." Vice-Admiral Carnaby squinted through S-R lenses which had darkened almost to opacity in response to the frost-white glare from below. "The shack looks all right, but that doesn't look like a Mark # flitter parked beside it." The heavy fleet boat descended swiftly under the expert guidance of the battle officer. At fifty feet, he leveled off, orbited the station. "I count four dead Djann," the admiral said in a brittle voice. "Tracks," the general pointed. "Leading off there..." "Put her down, George!" The hundred-foot boat settled in with a crunching of rock and ice, its shark's prow overhanging the edge of the tiny plateau. The hatch cycle open; the two men emerged. At the spot where Carnaby had lain in wait for the last of the aliens, they paused, staring silently at the glossy patch of dark blood, and at the dead Djann beside it. Then they followed the irregularly spaced footprints across to the edge. "He was still on his feet -- but that's about all," the battle officer said. "George, can you operate that Spider boat?" The admiral indicated the Djann landing sled. "Certainly." "Let's go." I t was twilight half an hour later when the admiral, peering through the obscuring haze, saw the snow-drifted shapes huddled in the shadow of an overhang. Fifty feet lower, the general settled the sled into a precarious landing on a narrow shelf. It was a ten minute climb back to their objective. Vice Admiral Carnaby pulled himself up the last yard, looked across the icy ledge at the figure in the faded blue polyon cold suit. He saw the weathered and lined face, glazed with ice; the closed eyes, the gnarled and bloody hands, the great wound in the side. The general came up beside him, stared silently, then went forward. "I'm sorry, Admiral," he said a moment later. "He's dead. Frozen. Both of them." The admiral came up, went to Carnaby's side. "I'm sorry, Jimmy," he said. "Sorry." "I don't understand," the general said. "He could have stayed up above, in the station. He'd have been all right there. What in the world was he doing down here?" "What he always did," Admiral Carnaby said. "His duty." . with anfltmre materials you can easily make, that you Will ba using your Super Directional Mike # minutes after you obtain tb ordinary store materials. Easy Instructions. # N. Highland Ave., Hollywood, Calif. # How odd these Earthmen were ! Their most bitter differences were only a matter of taste ! r T'he breakdown at high velocity had cost them nearly six weeks of arduous toil in their cumbersome space gear to repair and had shot them outward -- dangerously low on fuel and food -- far from civilization, out toward the very rim of the galaxy. G'ard and his mate E'lim had little choice; even should their fuel hold out -- which was highly doubtful -- they would be reduced to eating the mah-hide covers of the navigation tables long before they reached a Mervais outpost. They had to find fuel and food. G'ard consulted the tables and set course for the nearest likely star, a faint, negative-magnitude yellow whose size and age showed some promise of planetary development. As the old yellow brightened in the forward screens, the tablescope gave encouraging news. There were nine planets. After deceleration, however, the odds narrowed considerably. There appeared to be only one planet whose temperature range and spectrographic profile indicated some likelihood of affording both fuel and protoplasmic life suitable for food. This planet, the third from its sun, was inspected at close range, and after twenty orbits G'ard conned the ship to a smooth landing on one of the major land-masses in the northern hemisphere. T Tnfortunately, the blast of landing destroyed several square poods of some sort of grain crop, and when G'ard stepped down from the ship to begin his hunt for fuel, he was met by an irate farmer who -- no doubt angry at the destruction of his fields and shocked by G'ard's resemblance to one of the fiercer forms of carniverous life on the planet -- delivered the contents of both barrels of an over-and-under .# Shotgun at him. The pellets, of course, did not penetrate the Mervais' thick hide, and with the translator held to his lips, he tried his best to placate the farmer. The translator had been stocked with planetary phrases gleaned from monitoring twelve or fourteen channels of communications during the twenty orbits of inspection. "Double your pleasure, double your fun!" said G'ard, his three left arms raised in formal salute. "Jesus Christ!" said the farmer and ran pell-mell back to his miserable shack huddled at the edge of the burned field. G'ard fiddled with the controls of the translator and shouted after the fleeing farmer: "We need only food and fuel! Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated! This is a public service announcement!" But the farmer paid no attention. Poor as it was, the shack was equipped with a telephone line, and by the time E'lim had read off the fuel detector and dropped the ship's fuel inductor hose down the farmer's well, there was the scream of sirens, and a portly individual equipped with a rubber truncheon and a pistol, accompanied by a dozen similarly equipped deputies, arrived in Hie farmyard. E'lim retreated into the ship and started the inductor pumps to fill the ship's tanks. G'ard boosted the translator volume to full and spoke again: "We come in peace in our time. We want nothing but a full grocery cart and a tiger in our tank! Live light! Live modern! With G'ard and E'lim! Progress is our middle name!" A crowd began to gather. It grew larger and segregated itself automatically into two slightly intermingling groups. E'lim appeared with the fat reel of corral tape and began to lay it -- white and bright -- in two adjoining fan-shaped wedges extending out from the ship for the best part of a pood. T"he crowd scattered at first, and there were ineffectual shots from the portly one and his assistants. But after E'lim had finished and returned to the ship, the crowd surged back again to gape open-mouthed at its vast bulk. The portly one with the truncheon, frustrated at his impotence, spoke angrily over the communicator in his vehicle and then called his assistants to him. They could do nothing about the ship until reinforcements arrived; there remained only the crowd. They found the white tapes coiivenient to mark the division between the two groups, and they used their truncheons to keep the groups segregated. A small person with a white truck began to sell some sort of confection; he sold first to one group and then to the other. He was the only one beside the men with truncheons who seemed to be able to pass freely from one group to the other. E'lim signaled to G'ard that the tanks were full. G'ard counted the crowd. Off in the distance there was the rumble of armored vehicles, and overhead the ominous drone of aircraft. G'ard turned the translator to full volume again. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for tuning in! You have been a wonderful audience!" He withdrew into the ship and reeled in the inductor hose and the corral tapes. When all was in place, he closed the cargo hatch and started the engines for takeoff. That evening, after the complex course back to the heart of the galaxy had been calculated and fed into the autopilot, G'ard and E'lim relaxed over their evening meal. G'ard said: "I'm sorry we couldn't stay longer to study that curious planet. I've gone over the translator input material a bit, and I think I can explain why that thick one with the weapon separated all those other ones into two groups." "Oh really?" said E'lim. "I wondered about that." "Yes," said G'ard. "Seems there is some subtle difference among these creatures, although Gloog knows they looked enough alike." "What is it?" inquired E'lim. "Some have darker skins than others," said G'ard. "Here, look. This is a photograph I made while we were loading fuel. Notice, the thick one has made all those with dark skins stand here, and all those with light skins stand there." E'lim shook her head in wonderment, her polished tusks gleaming in the dying light of the cooking fire. "Imagine that. Such a tiny difference!" "Apparently they believe there is a real substantive difference between the light-skinned ones and the dark-skinned ones." E'lim shook her head again. "How strange. I'm sure they must be the same species." "Of course," said G'ard. "But maybe they know something about themselves we weren't able to observe." E'lim shrugged and began to clear the table of the remains of their dinner. "Could be," she said. "I'll fix one of the light-skinned ones for dinner tomorrow night, and we can compare for ourfor information nphe time has come for one : more column devoted exclusively to questions from the readers. The first of them concerns comets, and the letter I have reads: "I can't quite figure out whether I am supposed to consider them as members of the solar system or as interlopers from space. If I knew whether most of them orbit in the plane of the ecliptic it would help me make up my mind, but I haven't been able to find that much out. Do you know the answer to that one?" Well, I think I do, but let everybody judge for himself after I have presented the material. The early astronomers who considered comets celestial phenomena -- the Aristotelian philosophers insisted that they were atmospheric phenomena -- did not say much about the shape of their orbits. Johannes Kepler went on record as thinking that the orbits of comets were probably straight lines and not closed curves like the orbits of the planets. Until the time of Dr. Edmond Halley every comet was taken to be a one-time visitor to the sun and to the solar system, and Halley himself held that belief at first. In around # Halley began assembling a table of comets that had been well reported as to time and position in the sky and came to the conclusion that the comets of #, # and # might have been the same comet. If so, it would return in #. Halley did not live to see the return of the comet which then was named after him, but this return proved that there was at least one comet that moved in a closed orbit. Of course astronomers started to watch for other comets with even greater interest than before, and the main question asked of each newly discovered comet was whether it was a "periodic comet" (with a closed orbit) or a non-periodic comet, a one-time visitor to the sun. By about the year # the position of most astronomers was that comets were visitors from deep space. But a certain percentage of these comets had the bad luck to pass close to a planet on such a visit, and the gravitational disturbance in the comet orbit caused by the planet could easily force that comet to assume a new orbit, a closed orbit. The planets were, therefore, responsible for the existence of periodic comets, and the larger the planet the more periodic comets could be credited to it. The periodic comets clearly indicated Which planet had made them periodic; the aphelion of the new orbit was, as a rule, a little farther from the sun than the orbit of the planet that had caused the "capture." It became customary to refer to the comets captured by the same planet as the "comet family" of that planet, and nobody was surprised to learn that Jupiter had the most in its comet family. Of course the periodic comets had elliptical orbits, while the orbits of the non-periodic comets were said to be parabolic orbits -- though it was much more probable that these orbits really were hyperbolas. Naturally, the .larger the number of apparent positions in the sky that have been observed and recorded, the more reliable the calculation of the comet's orbit. Early in this century professor A. O. Leuschner of the University of California noticed that comets that had been observed for only a short time were always said to have had parabolic orbits. Leuschner then made himself a table of comet orbits and paid special attention to the length of time a particular comet had been under observation. The result, published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in April, #, caused a great deal of second thoughts. Condensed, Leuschner 's findings were the following: Number of days a comet was under observation: # # days #-# days # #I days Nnmber of orbits found to be parabolic: # per cent # per cent # per cent This seemed to indicate that at least a large number of those orbits that had been thought to be parabolic might have turned out to be very elongated ellipses if that comet could have been observed for a longer time. Professor Leuschner concluded: "The theory that, in general, comets are permanent members of our solar system seems to have been greatly strengthened by the foregoing preliminary statistics." The first result was the recalculation of a few orbits, Comet # II had been thought to have had an open orbit. The German mathematician Thraen showed that a more careful calculation produced an elliptical orbit. Professor Elis Stromgren in Copenhagen went over the orbits of concluded that one had reasons to doubt that these two comets had displayed hyperbolic orbits. All this led, gradually, to the concept of a "comet cloud," say half a light-year beyond the orbit of Neptune. Since this comet cloud was still under the gravitational influence of the sun and therefore had to move through space along with the sun, the comets, in general, were declared to be a part of the solar system. Unfortunately the position of a comet orbit relative to the ecliptic is not a touchstone as to its membership in the solar system or not. When a comet (presumably coming from that comet cloud and approaching the sun for the first time) is captured by a planet its orbit is twisted violently, and the twist might well involve the third dimension, so that the final orbit forms a steep angle with the ecliptic. Comets that travel at an angle of very nearly # degrees but are very definitely periodic have been put on record. It is true, though, that the short-period comets do not deviate from the plane of the ecliptic very much. Even if that comet cloud half a light-year away should not exist, the vast majority of all comets must be considered permanent members of the solar system, even those with an orbital period of # years. (Several such are known.) But a planet can also accelerate the speed of a comet along its orbit, which means that an elongated ellipse could be changed into a hyperbola. If that is the case the comet would leave our solar system and could', after a very long time, approach another solar system. Since this has been seen to happen in our own solar system, we must assume that it can happen in another solar system too. Therefore a new comet could be a stray from deep space, but it would literally be one in a million. Tlse vanished elements '  "his section was prompted by a letter from an executive in Chicago who asked "whatever became of virginium?" He explained that he had learned about the then recent discovery of the element virginium while in college, but that his later work did not involve chemistry in any form or shape, not even remotely. Recently his son brought a modem version of the Periodic Table into the house. My correspondent remembered virginium, could not find it in the table, and both he and his son concluded that it must be there under a different name. "But," he wrote, "I always thought that the discoverer of something gives it its name and that this name is permanent." Yes, that is true; the rule is that the name is given by the discoverer or else by somebody else with the approval of the discoverer. If the discoverer does not approve somebody else's suggestion that suggestion is discarded. This happened in the case of Jupiter-V, the fifth moon of Jupiter to be discovered and the one that is closest to the planet. It was discovered (at midnight on September #, #) by the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion suggested that it be named Amalthea, in Greek mythology the nursemaid of Jupiter, but Barnard rejected the suggestion. By then everybody was talking about "the fifth moon of Jupiter," and Barnard insisted on the designation Jupiter-V. Only during the last twenty years the name Amalthea has been slowly creeping into usage. But for the name given by the discoverer, or approved by the discoverer, to become "official" two conditions must be fulfilled. The first is that it has not been used earlier for something else. An English zoologist learned that lesson when he named a mammal from Australia that was just becoming known "platypus." It turned out that about ten years earlier a German zoologist had given that name to a genus of small beetles. Since the beetles had that name first they retained it, and the Australian platypus had to be renamed; its zoological name is Ornithorhynchus. The second condition is that the discoverer had to be right, in other words that he actually made a discovery. And that is where "virginium" fell down. The announcement had been a mistake. It had been made in # by Dr. Fred Allison of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and he had named "his" element after the state in which he was born. It is not quite known what he had done wrong; apparently he used a misleading method of analysis. Of course mistakes in the chemistry of the lesser known elements had been made before. Around the year # the Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander, a friend of Jons Jakob Berzelius, had announced an "earth" which he called "didymia," from the Greek word for "twin" because it seemed to him to be a twin of lanthanum. The term "earth" was then used for substances that could not be dissolved in water or in alcohol but could be dissolved in acids. The chemists of that time already knew that an "earth" was usually the oxide or the carbonate (and sometimes a sulphide) of a metal. If Mosander had succeeded in isolating the metal in his "didymia," the metal would have received the name of didymium. Mosander never did succeed; and sixty years later, in #, the Austrian chemist Carl Auer, Baron von Welsbach, showed why. "Didymia" was a mixture of praseodymia and neodymia, two of the so-called rare earth elements. A little later Auer von Welsbach -- some of my readers may be old enough to remember the "Welsbach mantle" -- discovered two more of these elements and named them cassiopeium and aldebaranium. But this time he had come too late. The French chemist Georges IJrbain had discovered them earlier and had named them lutetium (the cassiopeium of Welsbach) and neoytterbium, later shortened to ytterbium. Then George Urbain made a mistake, and the English chemist Henry GwynJeffries Moseley proved it to him. Urbain was delighted, not because he had made a mistake but because Moseley's proof involved a new method for arranging the table of the elements. Mendeleyeff had arranged them by atomic weight. Moseley did it by "atomic number," namely the number of electrons around an atom which, in turn, shows the number of atomic charges in the nucleus. This did not change the Periodic Table very much, but it made it more precise. Because of Moseley's numbers one could state, positively that in # only elements ##, ##, ##, ##, ## and ##I were still missing, plus possible elements heavier than uranium (##). Mistakes like Allison's with his "virginium" were caused by the systematic hunt for these missing elements. To begin with the lightest, the German team of Dr. Ida Tacke and Dr. Walter Noddack announced in # that they had discovered ## which they named "masurium" and ## which they named rhenium. "Masurium" was put in quotation marks because it was a mistake; rhenium was a discovery. Nowadays ## is named technetium. It does not have any stable isotopes, though one of these isotopes has an impressively long half-life, namely # years. The missing ##I was announced in # by Professor B. Smith Hopkins of the University of Ilabout the same time Professor Luigi Rolla of the University of Florence thought that he had discovered it and named it "florentium." It was not actually discovered until # and is now called promethium. Like ## it has no stable isotopes and the one with the longest half-life has one of only # years. In #I George Urbain thought that he had discovered ## and had named it "celtium" (this was the mistake where Moseley showed him that he had been wrong; it was a mixture of several elements). The actual discovery took place in Copenhagen in # (hence the name hafnium from the Latin name of Copenhagen), but the discoverers were not Danes. They were the Hungarian George von Hevesy and the Dutchman Dirk Coster. Element ## was announced in #I by Fred Allison and Edgar J. Murphy and, since they were working in Alabama, they called it "alabamine." It is now called astatine (for "unstable") because it has no stable isotopes. The one with the longest half-life can boast only # hours. The actual discovery took place in #. And now we come to ##, the "virginium" that has caused the whole discussion. It had still another name; the Roumanian chemist Horia Hulubei wanted to name it "moldavium" after the river Moldau in Bohemia. He was mistaken too, and it was Mademoiselle Marguerite Perey in Paris, who could show that ## was present in a substance she was investigating. That was in #, and the name became francium. It is even less stable than any of the others. The longestlived isotope of francium known has a half-life of only # minutes. This leaves element ##, and here we have a case where the discoverer did not have his way in naming it. It was discovered in # by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and they called it protoactinium; the name was soon shortened to protactinium. But then Otto Hahn found that it was identical with an element discovered in # by Kasimir Fajans and O. H. Goehring. They had found a substance with a half-life of a little less than # minutes. Since it was so shortlived they had named it "brevium," from Latin breve which means "short"; a lawyer's "brief" is derived from the same word -- except that it usually isn't. Hahn said the name brevium should go to the element found by him and Lise Meitner since Fajans and Goehring had found it first and named it. But he had to admit that the half-life of his discovery was "over # years" and the various international scientific organizations simply said "no" to Hahn. They would not accept the name "brevium" for such an element. As a matter of fact they were even more in the right than they thought, for the half-life of protactinium is # years. The two Otto Hahns Hphe name of Otto Hahn was in the public eye in September #, partly because of the announcement that the first atomicpropelled ship built by West Germany had been named Otto Hahn and partly because the Enrico Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission for # was awarded to Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann. It was the first time that this award was given to foreign scientists, and the New York Times reported this fact. Three days later I received a letter containing the clipping from the Times. The writer of the letter wanted to know whether the Otto Hahn who 'had just received the Enrico Fermi Award and the Otto Hahn discussed on pp. #-# of my book Watchers of the Skies were related, maybe father and son. The Otto Hahn mentioned in my book had published, in #, a book on fossil organisms in chondritic meteorYear of Firing Satellites Total number of still in orbit orbiting pieces (including satellites) # (  #) # (  #) # (    #) (until Sept. #) ites, a theme that was revived a few years ago. Though I own a copy of the book by this earlier Otto Hahn, I have not been able to find out much about him. But the Otto Hahn who discovered protactinium and later uranium fission was bom in Frankfurt am Main on March #, #, and his father's Christian name had been Heinrich, and he had not been a scientist, not even an amateur scientist. He came from a family of grape growers and settled in Frankfurt as a glazier. Since the name Hahn is not rare in Germany, and Otto is one of the most common given names in Germany -- my own father was named Otto -- I think it is safe to say that the two Otto Hahns are not related at all. The number of artificial satellites Qometimes the reply to a short k' question 'has to be fairly long, and here is a case in point. The question was on a postcard from a reader in Portland, Oregon, and it simply said: "Could you tell me how many artificial satellites are in orbit right now?" The postmark said that this postcard had been mailed on September #, #, when Gemini XI was in orbit, a fact which may have triggered the question. Well, with the aid of the Satellite Situation Reports of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, I can attempt an answer, but my answer may be off by two or three satellites and a dozen or two of other orbiting "space junk." The center of the galaxy The table includes Gemini XI which has meanwhile returned to earth. One of the Russian Cosmos satellites re-entered at the same time so that on September # the number of orbiting satellites was #. On the same date two satellites (Russia's Luna # and America's Lunar Orbiter I) were in orbit around the moon and will stay in orbit around the moon, while a total of # planetary probes (including some upper stages of the rockets that put them into these orbits) were in orbit around the sun. Now what about these figures in parantheses, the (-(-#) for #I and the three figures for #? These are small pieces resulting from unexplained explosions. Presumably so-called "destruct charges" went into action when they shouldn't have, or the remaining fuel in an orbiting top stage exploded. The (-(-#) and (-(-#) in # are of Russian origin; the others originated with American shots. Such small pieces rarely stay in orbit for very long, so that the figures given in my tabulation do not hold true any more when this issue of the magazine reaches its readers. A nother reader, also living in Chicago, came up with an interesting question. He wrote that he knew that our solar system is about two thirds of the distance from the center of our galaxy to its rim so that, if we accept the figure of # lightyears for the radius of the galaxy we are roughly # light-years from the center. He added that he also knew that we cannot see the center of our galaxy because of intervening clouds of cosmic dust. But, he said, if the center were visible to us, in which direction would I have to look? His astronomy book did not tell him that. No, most astronomy books don't, as I found out when I started to dig a little in order to answer the question. But here is the prescription: arm yourself with a star chart, wait for a clear night, get out of the city and then try to find the constellation of Sagittarius. Look at the approximate center of that constellation and you are looking in the direction of the center of our galaxy. Too bad we can't actually see it, it would be a glorious sight to be   ik  Bongolia was not the biggest of the United Nations -- but for at least a time if was the loudest! TJadibax, Bangolia, March #th.  ' Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam, newly elected president of the Republic of the United Bongolias, today presided in ceremonies during which the flag of the Bongolian Republic was raised over the Sanctuary, the principal building of the capital city of Badibax. The Sanctuary, built in the fourteenth century by European traders, was today rechristened Palace of the Presidents by Dr. Hodiroy, who was cheered by an enthusiastic crowd estimated by newsmen at around four thousand. Dr. Hodiroy announced that Bangolia will seek admission to the United Nations, in order to "take our rightful place in the councils of the mighty." Vice admiral K. C. Baines, commander of the U. S. #th Fleet, was among the American representatives at the ceremony, which was also attended by delegations from a number of other nations, including communist China. New York, April #st. The Republic of the United Bangolias today vas officially admitted to the United Nations. New York, April #nd. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, head of the Bongolian delegation to the United Nations, today demanded that Bongolia be admitted to a seat on the Security Council. Mr. Sodibox charged that it is unfair to have only a comparatively few nations represented on the Security Council. "Who are they?" he demanded. "Is this right? They are few. We are many. Why should they have it and not we?" Mr. Sodibox, who spoke in native costume, also charged that many crimes had been committed against his country by the European traders who established themselves in the fourteenth century at the Bongolian capital, Badibax. Mr. Sodibox stated that it was not known just what nation these traders belonged to, but he charged that their presence had held back the development of Bongolian culture, reduced his nation to peonage and wreaked tremendous physical and psychological damage upon his people, damage which still manifested itself today. Mr. Sodibox demanded that reparations be paid by all the European nations, plus the U. S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and the "other colonialist powers responsible for the outrage." Washington, April #th. When asked today what the U. S. proposed to do about the Bongolian demand for reparations, the Secretary of State replied that he was a little puzzled by Mr. Sodibox's charge, insofar as the United States did not exist in the fourteenth century, when the alleged crimes took place. The fourteenth century, he pointed out, includes dates from the beginning of the year # through to the end of the year #, and the American continent was not even discovered by Columbus till #, one hundred years later. The United States, he said, sympathized with the Bongolian Republic, but naturally could not be expected to pay for crimes it had never committed. New York, April #th. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, chief of the Bongolian delegation to the United Nations, today charged the American Secretary of State with bad faith. In an impassioned speech, Mr. Sodibox declared, "Look at my people! Have they not suffered? It is the American imperialists who have committed this crime! They are responsible! And when they are called to account before the councils of the mighty they try to squirm out by some jugglery with numbers! Are numbers more important than the sufferings of my people?" Washington, April #th. In his news conference this morning, the President was asked his views on the Bongolian crisis. After a considerable pause, he replied that while the United States felt great sympathy for all who suffered from poverty and want, nevertheless the United States could not accept the blame for a crime committed by persons unknown, some four hundred years before the United States was founded. Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. Speaking before a roaring crowd officially estimated at some seventeen thousand. President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam accused the United States of "treason to the principle of self-determination of the nations, treason to the principal of responsibility for past crimes, treason against race, religion, color, national origin, and the payments of past debts." He likened the U. S. President to a dog licking up the vomit of another dog, whom he identified as the U. S. Secretary of State. President Dr. Hodiroy warned that "the soverign peoples of the world will not long ignore such insults as these." The Americans, he stated, are running dogs for the nations of Europe, which seek to ecsape their responsibility for the crimes against Bongolia, and the Americans moreover are descendants of these Europeans, and therefore in it with them. America, President Dr. Hodiroy warned, had best beware, lest the dispossessed nations of South America, Africa, Asia and all the world rise in one body, led by the Republic of the United Bongolias, and "claim the vengeance which has been unpaid now for six hundred years." At the climax of President Hodiroy's speech, the U. S. flag was burned, the Secretary of State was hanged in effigy, and an effigy of the American president was thrown into the streets to be spat upon, defiled and picked to pieces by the frenzied mob. In addition, three U. S. sailors were reported missing. New York, April #th. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, speaking to reporters, today charged that the riots in Bongolia "were fomented by the inflammatory speeches of the American President and Secretary of State, who are therefore personally responsible for them. They have caused them by their refusal to pay for their crimes." Mr. Sodibox was asked by one reporter for the date of his birth. Mr. Sodibox replied that he was fortyone years old. The reporter then asked Mr. Sodibox what he would do if he were charged with a rape that had occurred fifty years ago. Mr. Sodibox refused to answer the question. Washington, April #th. Senator Clyde Deebling today called for "immediate full-scale economic aid to the Bongolian Republic," which he said "would otherwise be in danger of falling into the hands of the communists." In an unprecedented scene, Senator Deebling was booed for fifteen minutes and finally forced to sit down. The view here is that the government of Bongolia is lucky not to have done all this a hundred years ago. But since war between the present-day U. S. and Bongolia, which in actuality is a moderately large island in the Sadinak Straits, would be ridiculous, we are in a predicament to know just what to do about it. A great many congressmen, meanwhile, report receiving angry telegrams from their constituents demanding to know what has happened to the American sailors. New York, April #th. A number of delegates from Afro-Asian countries are reportedly urging Sodibox Gozinaz, head of the delegation from Bongolia, to take it slower in his attacks on the U. S. These delegates, it is reported, feel that Mr. Sodibox is rousing antagonisms that will not help their efforts to obtain more economic aid from the U. S. New York, April #th. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, the Bongolian delegate to the U.N., today charged Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union and Greece, with complicity in the attempt to avoid payment for the depredations of European traders who invaded Bongolia in the fourteenth century. Since it is not known exactly what nationality these traders were, Mr. Sodibox affirmed his government's position that "all alike must share in the responsibility." Mr. Sodibox estimates the damage done to Bongolia by gotigs. The kittagotig is the new official unit of Bongolian currency. Its value is fixed by the Bongolian government at twice the value of the U. S. dollar. Badibax. Bongolia, April #th. No satisfactory answer having been received from the governments of Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union and Greece, President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam, speaking to a frenzied rally estimated officially at # persons, stated that these nations, along with the United States and other guilty parties, owed the Bongolian Republic two billion kittagotigs, plus interest compounded annually at twelve per cent since the year #, for their "infamous crimes against the Bongolian peoples, crimes including rape, incest, murder, pillage, brutality, usury, extortion and seizure of lands public and private." At the climax of his speech, President Dr. Hodiroy personally hurled down to the mob effigies of the chiefs of state of Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union and Greece, which were spat on, defiled and kicked around the public square. Later, the national flags of these nations were lashed with whips, pounded with clubs and then burned to the frenzied cheers of the mob. New York, April #th. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, chief of the delegation from the Republic of the United Bongolias, appeared in the U. N. General Assembly this morning, wearing his national costume, with the addition of four dried hands dangling from the front and rear of a strap worn across his left shoulder. These hands, Mr. Sodibox said, are "symbols of the suffering of my people at the hands of the foreign exploiters." When asked where these dried hands came from, Mr. Sodibox replied that they were obtained from "enemies of the state." Washington, April #th. "Unimpeachable government sources" state today that repeated queries to the Bongolian government about the fate of the three missing U. S. sailors have gone unanswered. Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. Persistent rumors are reported here that two white Americans and a Negro American are being exhibited in wooden cages in a kind of carnival held on the outskirts of Badibax. Sharpedged shells, it is reported, are thrown through the bars at the prisoners, and those who hit them win prizes. The description of these men matches that of the mission U. S. sailors. With the #th Fleet in the Straits of Sadinak, April #th. A predawn raid by U. S. Marines this morning recovered the three U. S. sailors missing for more than a week. All three men are reported in serious condition, suffering from hunger, thirst, loss of blood and many deep and badly infected cuts. New York, April #th. In an impassioned speech before the U. N. General Assembly, Mr. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, his face smeared with blood and dirt, and wearing the Bongolian "suit of eighteen pleading heads," made an impassioned attack upon the United States for its "arrogant interference in Bongolian domestic affairs." He charged the U. S. with "aggression, provocation, trespass and the theft of Bongolian Government prisoners." Mr. Sodibox likened the U. S. to a rich landowner who steals chickens from his impoverished neighbor. As Mr. Sodibox reached the climax of his speech, one of the dried heads slipped loose from its rawhide thong, fell on the table and rolled off onto the floor. The General Assembly adjourned early, without voting on Mr. Sodibox's demand for a vote of censure against the U. S. Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. In an impassioned speech to a frenzied mob officially estimated at eighty thousand persons, President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam accused the U. S. of "wanton naked aggression against the sovereign state of the Republic of the United Bongolias" and warned that "all oppressed peoples of the world will rise up behind the Bongolian martyrs and hurl themselves upon the American aggressors in a holy bonganap." (The Bongolian word "bonganap" is not directly translatable. It does not mean "war" or "crusade," but refers more to the slaughter of the enemy, followed by the breaking of the bones of the enemy dead. This is considered to cause further pain to those who have already been killed.) President Dr. Hodiroy further accused the American Marines of cowardice, charging that they came armed with modern weapons "only because they are afraid to fight like men, with spears, knives, and stranglewhips." (The "stranglewhip" is a long, slender cord with heavy knout at the end. It is said that skillful wielders of this weapon can coil it around an enemy's neck from behind, without coming close enough for him to hear their approach; then, by clever manipulation of the whip, the wielder can strangle the enemy to death without ever getting close enough for the enemy to strike back.) President Dr. Hodiroy further announced that he holds the U. S. president "personally and immediately responsible for this outrage and hereby demands a full and immediate explanation and apology for this unwarranted intrusion upon sovereign Bongolian territory. Otherwise the U. S. will be subject to retaliation by the full weight of Bongolian military might." It is reported that nearly four hundred Chinese communist technicians, military advisors and specialists in guerilla warfare have arrived in Bongolia since the beginning of the year. With the #th Fleet near the Straits of Sadinak. April #th. Vice Admiral K. C. Baines, commander of naval forces here, has reportedly been petitioned by his contingent of Marines, many of whom wish to go ashore at Badibax in answer to the Bongolian president's accusation of "cowardice." The story is that the Marines would be happy to go after the Bongolian armed only with belts, bayonets or barehanded and are confident they could "clean the place out in an hour." One enlisted man described the capital city of Badibax as "about a medium-sized town, with the ocean in front, the jungle behind, the Kratigatik River to the west and the Chicago dump to the east." New York, April #th. AfroAsian members of the U. N. are visibly shunning the Bongolian delegation. This appears to be in response to the widely quoted Bongolian claim that "Bongolian is the natural leader of the Afro-Asian bloc." Mr. Sodibox Gozinaz, speaking to reporters, today reasserted this position, charging that the other Afro-Asian nations "are backward and have no culture." Washington, April #th. Usually reliable sources here state that there is no truth to the humor currently circulating that the U. S. plans a punitive expedition against the Bongolians. An official spokesman stated, "We've got our men back, and that's what we were after." Asked about the personal feelings of high government officials toward the Bongolians, the spokesman refused comment. Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. Addressing a huge rally and speaking from the Palace of the Presidents, President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam announced tonight completion of a new treaty with communist China. This treaty, President Dr. Hodiroy told the cheering crowd provides for economic assistance and mutual aid and defense. Accordingly, said Dr. Hodiroy, he hereby calls upon communist China "to come at once to the aid of oppressed Bongolia." Amid the wild cheers of a crowd officially estimated at one hundred thousand, President Dr. Hodiroy declared, "we now call upon our pledged allies to hurl themselves at once into universal mortal conflict at all points with the mutual enemy who has sullied the soil of the Republic of the United Bongolias. We will do the same, in turn, if our ally is ever attacked." Peking, April #st. No word has yet been announced here about the "American aggression" in rescuing three captured U. S. sailors from the Bongolians. There is also no word about the treaty. Moscow, April #rd. A high Soviet official contacted here today was asked about the apparent predominance of Chinese communist influence in Bongolia. He replied smilingly that he understood that the Chinese were not perfectly happy with their new ally, but the Soviet Union "does not wish to interfere." Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam, addressing a wildly enthusiastic crowd officially estimated at a called again tonight for the "immediate destruction by our Chinese allies of the American imperialists who committed rapine, murder, trespass and larceny against our people by their brutal armed aggression." President Dr. Hodiroy injected a new note into the demand by observing, "We have over four hundred Chinese here -- they are in our power, remember." New York, April #th. The head of the Bongolian delegation, Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy attempted to speak today, but the hall emptied so rapidly that he was left with no audience. Mr. Sodibox was wearing his "suit of eighteen pleading heads." A number of delegates, interviewed outside, stated that in their opinion the admission of Bongolia to the world body had been "premature." Washington, April #th. A number of U. S. senators and congressmen are reportedly agreed that the whole body of assumptions underlying the U. S. attitude toward the U. N. and many foreign nations needs to be re-examined. The "Bongolian mess" was the reason named by most of them for crystallizing this belief. Peking, April #th. In a formal warning to President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam, the Chinese communist government today called for the immediate release of any Chinese nationals now held by the Bongolians as hostages. "Serious consequences may result," the Chinese warn, if these hostages are not immediately released unharmed. Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam, in an impassioned speech to an persons, today declared "bonganap" (war to the death, and then smash the enemy's bones) against the Chinese communists that he charged are trying to take over the island. New York, April #th. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, head of the Bongolian delegation to the U. N., today called upon the world body to unite in defense of a member nation and destroy communist China. The Chinese, Mr. Sodibox declared, are "heavily invading Bongolia despite heroic resistance by the Bongolian armed forces." No action was taken by the U. N., pending further information. With the #th Fleet in the Straits of Sadinak, April #th. Firing from Bongolia could be heard tonight on board ships of the #th Fleet cruising outside Bongolian territorial waters. If the Chinese are putting fresh "invasion troops" ashore here, they must be landing them from invisible ships. Aerial observation all day has revealed nothing remotely like a seaborne invasion force. Badibax, Bongolia, April #th. President Dr. Hodiroy Dabigam announced today that he has assumed "immediate full control over all Bongolian land, sea, air and space forces, with the rank of Field-Marshal General." President Dr. Field-Marshal General Hodiroy then announced completion of the successful bonganap against the Chinese communists by a "flank-attack combined with reverse enfilade fire by a seaborne invasion force of Shock troops under my direct command." President Dr. Field-Marshal General Hodiroy then warned all states, singly and collectively, to consider this result of Bongolian Armed Forces in action and heed the warning. "China," he said, "is a large country. But we have defeated her crushingly." Moscow, April #th. Word of the Bongolian statement on their "victory" over "Chinese invaders" reached a group of leading Soviet officials at an informal reception here tonight. The Russians made no official statement, but were reported by the Americans present to have "gone into hysterics" after reading the Bongolian victory announcement. Peking, April #th. On the eve of the big May Day celebration, the mood of high officials in this capital can only be described by the image of a volcano pent up under a layer of ice five miles thick. Washington, May #st. Ships of the U. S. #th Fleet, operating in the Sadinak Straits, are reported to have fished a large number of Chinese survivors out of the waters off Bongolia. Owing to the mutual anti-Bongolian sentiment, the Chinese appear to have talked freely to U. S. intelligence officers. What evidently happened was that the Bongolians, armed with weapons supplied by the Chinese, carried out a night sneak attack against the Chinese, who were outnumbered and mostly split up into small groups to begin with. The Chinese were slaughtered piecemeal, no more than perhaps one out of five having gotten away, many of these seriously wounded. New York, May #nd. At a meeting of the Security Council today, it was unanimously decided to take no action on the Bongolian charge of Chinese aggression. New York, May #rd. Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy, head of the Bongolian delegation to the United Nations, today announced that "the free and soverign nation of the Republic of the United Bongolias hereby breaks and severs all relations with the United Nations, unilaterally and irrevocably permanently withdraws from the United Nations and declares 'doziwak' (this word, "doziwak," does not mean "war" but a peculiarly devastating insult; it is not directly translatable from the Bongolian) upon the United Nations and all the members thereof." Mr. Sodibox, who donned his "suit of the fourteen angry heads" before speaking, immediately left the U. N. Building followed by the rest of his delegation. Upon leaving the U. N. grounds, Mr. Sodibox was at once arrested by the New York City police, on suspicion of murder. New York, May #rd. The Police Commissioner denied today that the New York police had any intention of releasing Sodibox Gozinaz Hodiroy or his accomplices, "till we find out where all those dried heads came from. They got those heads off of somebody. The question is -- Who?" by A. Bertram Chandler by Keith Laumer and many more in the April IF, on sale now! Young Priests Adytum # They owned their world outright. It didn't matter a bit that it was only an oasis on a dead planet! "peter the Funny sat on a metal stool in one of the furthest rooms of a north leg of Adytum #, gazing fondly at the wooden clarinet in his hands. He had discovered it in a time capsule buried in a peak on the western range. There had been an annotation attached, which read : "Used by Benny Goodman, during his Carnegie Hall Concert." To Peter there was no historic quality in the discovery of an instrument he'd never seen before, or of the other memorabilia, such as Goodman's Carnegie Hall album as well as his classical recording of Debussy's First Rhapsody tor Clarinet with the Philharmonic Symphony, the baseball bat which had cracked out Willy Mays' #th homer, the original draft of John Steinbeck's Nobel Prize speech, the rifle which had killed John F. Kennedy, the pair of Elvis Presley slacks, the bullet believed to be the first fired in the War of Viet Nam -- all selected by a committee assigned to bring together a collection of objects with a catholic range to represent a period of American history from # to #. Peter cared about nothing but the clarinet. He placed a vintage LP on the turntable of the player kept in perfect repair by pressing the button which brought the Repair Robot. He half-closed his eyes and silently fingered the passages of Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing solo. When it had been completed, he stopped the turntable and repeated the same musical phrases on the clarinet himself -- perfectly. Then he revised his embouchure and played an exemplary symphonic cadenza, this time employing the rounded, flutelike tone of the classical musician. Not wholly pleased, he repeated the phrasing again and again. A thin young man, pale from his exile in this otherwise abandoned section of the Adytum, he wore narrow slacks and a bulky knit shirt which he'd worn when he'd defected from the Young Priests. His hair, which had been worn in the long page-boy style used by the rest, had repeatedly fallen over his eyes during practice sessions; he had cut it to a bristled closecropped style more practical and comfortable. After three hours of intense, concentrated practice, Peter capped the mouthpiece and placed the clarinet carefully on a bench to walk into another room where food buttons lined a metal wall. He punched one, then held a plastic cup beneath a spigot. Synthetic, but nutritious, tomato soup poured forth. Before his defection he could not remember having tasted any other food than the hamburgers and shakes so loved by all the others. Here he had experimented; in the course of time he had quite naturally begun to eat a balanced diet. Then he returned to his practice. 'Tthe Adytum used twenty-six square miles of underground space. Built into a tilted plateau in the Sierra Nevadas, its tunnels twisted through highly compressed schists and slates, granite and dibase, and the later Cretaceous, Tertiary sediments and volcanics. Supreme Government of the Western Hemisphere had originally evolved the plan and managed to maintain reasonable secrecy. The public at large was not informed of the purpose of the Adytums, but rather was led to believe that each represented a bomb-testing facility. During the final year before international destruction, panic had mounted so that mass runs on the underground facilities would have been inevitable, creating impossible conditions of overcrowding. Consequently announcement of the availability of the retreats was made only after the first missiles had been released. Some were in deserts. Most were in mountains. In the southern section of the Adytum the Young Priests walked naked through a shower room where mechanical arms soaped, rinsed and toweled their fat bodies to a remarkable state of cleanliness. Then, dressed in the same costume worn by Peter the Funny in his northern-wing retreat, an area of the Adytum dismissed two and a half years ago by the group as 'Crap-land,' they marched into the Burger 'n' Shake Room, where buttons were pushed and the consequent results were devoured. They sat along a table, shouting and laughing, twenty females, twenty males. The difference in sex was not identifiable from a distance, now that they were clothed. A discerning eye would have had to be closer. As they ate, a steady sound came from an eternally running tape. It was one which had been produced electronically, creating a result which resembled a giant wind blowing through a clutter of loose cymbals, as an overriding 'voice' repeated, "Rabiddity-dowbow, rabiddity-dow-bow." Parents who had originally accompanied the Young Priests into the Adytum had suggested that the sound was a reminder of a deepthroated idiot making pleas of anguish. But that was before Sanguinary Day. "Rabiddity-dow-bow," said one of forty. "Rabiddity-dow-bow," said another. "Rabiddity-dow-bow!" called the group in symphony. I n one of the few habits retained from the parental years, the group filed into the Dental Room, where gentle-handed robots scrubbed their teeth efficiently. It was perhaps because of this parent-gentleness that the habit was retained; it had also prevented tooth decay, if not obesity. The group skipped into the Contraception Room to make the day safe for frolic. Motivation for this was based upon their combined philosophy: "Bring a kid into this lousy world?" Maternity Robots waited in the Birth Room, flawlessly efficient if buttons were pressed. But they had been in disuse since the group had arrived. They dashed down a corridor to pick up their Survivo-Instruments: razor-bladed axes, with springing blades shooting from the butts of handles. They had been used on Sanguinary Day. They were now carried not so much out of fear of attack by wild animal or alien survivor, neither of which they had seen for a very long time, but rather out of pride -- realistic reminders of when they had hacked and cut apart that which they most resented. They scampered down a glistening white corridor to an entrance-exit chamber, where they would leave the Adytum without effecting the climatizing of the structure's interior. There they stood straight and fat, breathing easily against the hissing sounds of transition. The first time they had ventured into this chamber -- the result of a joint decision -- they had hunched in fright as the process began. There might, they had known, have been radiation at this altitude. But the winds had been kind, failing to blow the fallout from the desecrated flatlands below. And so experience had bred nerve. When the broad door slid open, they rushed outside boldly, knowing that the warm time was precious, that winter would come soon, a time when they would be restricted to the interior until the snows again melted. Roger, Debra, Sonny, Billy, Sue, Ellie, Howie -- all forty ran along a path covered with dry pine needles fallen from trees whose high branches shadowed the earth. "Wheee!" screamed the girls. "Shee -- ute!" shouted the boys, in manly fashion. ' IT" he boys wrestled with eachother, and the girls called encouragement. Mountains were craggy and brown with snowy tips. The sun was warm in a cloud-streaked sky. A lake lay in an oval of delicate blue, bordered by yellow sand. If there were wild animals to watch from the thick woods, they were too canny to reveal proximity, The boys and girls did not care. The boys wrestled. The girls shrilled. Then the boys turned on the girls, who shrieked and ran. A cry exploded, "Do it!" When the young people had accomplished that game, they ran again, over rocks, over fallen trees, through crevices, up and down the rises, into the small vallies, up. again, down again, mindlessly, shouting, singing, "Rabiddity-dow-bow...!" They were who remained of the original eighty who had been the first to enter Adytum #, following the emergency proclamation. The eighty had represented parents and children who had been attending Camp All Day, whose grounds had been but a few miles away. The program of the camp had been a relatively new innovation, though an inevitable one. As soon as the families arrived, the children were given control by the chief camp councillor, an esthetically inclined young man named Arthur Pomroy. The children were in the #-# age bracket. And it was their privilege to lie about in the recreation room, watching television, listening to their favorite electronic music, consuming burgers and shakes, as the parents scurried about doing the various activities assigned to them by their children. For Mom and Da'd there was a wild selection of crafts, skills and athletic activities to which to devote themselves: leather work, beads, leaf identification, cooking, archery, boating, swimming, track, volley ball -- dozens of others. The singular duty of the children was to make final judgment upon their parents' degrees of accomplishment. And they were a critical jury. Though none participated in the various activities in order to know the problems of accomplishment, ' they nevertheless were capable of being severe in their judgments. A mother or father who fell short in a given enterprise was given a proportionate number of demerits by their children, resulting in additional work chores. In order to please, the parents returned to their efforts with renewed determination. #hen the launching of the ' 'missiles had been announced, the campers sped by automobile to the Adytum. The adults immediately organized themselves into efficient work groups, as the children gathered in the TV Room to watch the store of tapes reserved there by the Government. It was there that the children made the decision. One had stretched indolently, watching the large screen, and said, "Who needs them?" An hour later they found the closet containing the Survivo-Instruments. In a feeling of tenderness it was decided that none would have to attack his own parents, but rather those of another. Late that afternoon they descended upon the grownups. Surprise and shock rendered the victims powerless, and it was over quickly. Arthur Pomroy, the camp councillor and a glib, literate allusionist to the end -- though an inaccurate one, considering the female children involved -- was run through by one of the blades sprung from the butt of a Survivo-Instrument, and shouted, "Sanguinary Day, committed by the foul young priests of Adytum...!" Later, as new arrivals came, the Young Priests allowed them to enter an entrance-exit chamber, then destroyed them. Finally no more came. The Cremation Room was overworked for a time, but it had been reliably efficient. The Young Priests had lost only two of their original young band of forty-two. Gabriel had stumbled into a crevice and broken his leg. He was left there until he died three days later, then they got him out and threw him into the Cremation Room. The other was Peter the Funny, so named because he was decidedly the peculiar one; he hated strange, self-invented melodies; he sometimes failed to play the doit game because a girl he wanted more than another was with someone else; he was often mentally preoccupied. He wandered off by himself, the odd fellow, and probably broke a leg as the other one had, then died. But it didn't matter to the group, because he was odd and funny anyway. Nobody had worried about Peter since he'd gone. Cheeks pink as the cherry milkshakes they consumed, they made their way along the rim of a volcanically created basin. A stream spilled over rock into a thundering falls, the fast-dropping water creating a sparkling sheet of icy fire against the bright sun. Thick vegetation protected the banks of the curling stream when they had gone up beyond the falls. They leaped, sprawled, frolicked, unmindful of the fact that they were moving toward the opposite end of the Adytum. It was only when they came over a rise to see the entrance to the extending leg of the main structure did they realize that they had come so far. "Crap-land!" said Roger in disgust. "Crap-land!" Debra said in total agreement. They stared at the door to an entrance-exit chamber. Decision to abandon this northern section of the Adytum had been made arbitrarily one day by Billy, who had proclaimed dramatically, "That is Crap-land!" They had never come here since, until now. But now Billy said: "Lets go in." "Crap-land!" said Ellie, affronted. "'Was. Now it's Jn-land!" r T'hey ran to the door and pressed the admitting button. Moments later they were running through the corridors, intoxicated by the rediscovery of that which they had once so rigidly rejected. They careened through hallway after hallway, until finally they heard a strange sound. They stopped listening. The girls were ready to flee. But Howie whispered, "Can't afford an alien here!" Survi voInstruments were in forty hands. They stalked forward, pressed by the instinct to survive in the fashion they had shaped. They stopped near a door behind which the sound originated. Roger crept closer, touched a button, then jumped back as the door slid open. Roger, Debra, Sonny, Sue, Billy, Howie -- all -- moved forward to stare in astonishment at Peter the Funny, sitting on a stool with his clarinet, looking back at them with wide, innocent eyes. They encircled him. "Thought you were dead." "No," said Peter, shrugging. '"Why'd you cut your hair?" Peter was silent. '"You're skinny." Peter remained silent. "Where you been all this time?" "Here." "In Crapland?" "You're here," Peter said simply. "It was Crap-land," Billy said defensively. "Now it's n-land." "Okay," Peter said. "Thought you were dead!" Sue shouted. "I'm not." "What have you been doing?" Peter shrugged again. "Why did you run off and hide!" Ellie said. Peter held up the clarinet. "What is it?" "I don't know." "Does it shoot? Kill?" Howie asked. "Hell, no," Peter the Funny said. "It plays." "Plays?" Roger asked, eyes searching the instrument. "Let it play!" Sue said, voice edged with contempt. Peter paused self-consciously, then fitted his lips around' the mouthpiece. A small vein showed on his left temple as he blew. A clear, mellow tone of the expertly managed instrument poured forth; he trilled cadenzas in a dazzling display of triumph. He stopped. He held the clarinet in his hands. "Crap!" Billy shouted finally. "Crap!" Ellie yelled. "Rabiddity-dow-bow!" another girl shrilled. Peter shrugged a third time, no longer looking at them. "Where's the button that makes it go!" Howie shouted. "There isn't any!" T he room was silent except for their breathing as they stared at the clarinet. Peter the Funny said softly. "There were old records. I listened to them. Then I tried to do it, like it sounded. Every day, all two years since I found it. There isn't any button. I do it!" "Give it to me." Roger commanded, stepping closer, his round, pink face flushing. Peter stared back at him, then finally handed him the instrument. Roger held it clumsily in pudgy hands. He examined the keys, the pads, the mouthpiece, the reed. Finally he put it to his lips and blew. The instrument growled, squeaked and complained. Roger handed it to Billy, who got the same results. Sonny tried, then gave it back to Peter, ordering grimly, "Make it play!" Peter sat sullenly. "Make it play!" Peter lifted the instrument. A cadenza rolled effortlessly, as Peter's fingers flicked with precision. A SurvivdInstrument cleaved the back of his head. Thirty-nine other hatchets flashed. When there was nothing left but pulp and fragmented bone, they broke the clarinet into a thousand bits and pieces. As they ran for the entranceexit chamber, Billy proclaimed absolutely, "Crap-land!" #(# Title #, United States Code). #. Date of filing: October #, #. #. Title of Publication: Galaxy Magazine. #. Frequency of issue: Bi-monthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #... #. Location of headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Editor: Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Managing Editor: None. #. Owner: Galaxy Publishing Corporation. #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #; Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Known bondholders, mortgages and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholders or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any ether fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been Included In paragraphs # and # when the interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. ingle issue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid circulation: #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter salts. Average no. copies eacn issue during preceding # months: #; Single issue nearest filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. D. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #: E. Total distribution (sum of C and D) : Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown in A) ; Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #. Single issue nearest to filing date, #. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Robert M. Guinn, Publisher. Whoever had brought the Esks to Earth had returned for his crop! I D eep within the assassin-proof vault, a traditional dragon symbolizing good fortune flaunted his gold-painted tail above the most important telescreen. Across this surveillance screen moved Chiu Hsing, Saving Star, two-door sedans rolling off an assembly line in distant Shanghai. Click, televised from even further south, in Canton well fed students in traditional dacron robes sprang erect to face a blackboard of chemical formulae. Click, televised erect as if disdaining underground silos and contemptuous of strategic dispersal, protruding here above the pink-walled courtyard of Peking's ancient Winter Palace, a gleaming nose-cone symbolizing -- "Show what's really important," Dr. West challenged. "We both know what feeds all this -- " Tapeworm, you press me too much pain, the thought flickered faintly within Dr. West's brain. Beside Dr. West, the thin fingers on the control console remained obstinately motionless. Dr. West could feel the other man's resistance like sparks within his own skull. Authoritatively, Dr. West withdrew his support. The opposing face sagged as paralysis again spread from its stroke-damaged brain. Dr. West returned his support, and the narrow eyes widened. The two men were alone in the Command Vault beneath Peking, but they were not alone. Jow!" Dr. West commanded  aloud, and beside him the unparalyzed fingers moved more obediently across the numbered pushbuttons on the control console. Click, on the surveillance screen, shimmering across a thousand miles, appeared the contorted mountains of Szechuan Province laboriously terraced. Up new tiers of glittering mountain rice paddies, swarming shapes with hoes clambered into graying rain. Closer, Dr. West thought. Signal for a closer view. Beside him the man's fingers, which had been paralyzed, moved. Click-click across the thousand miles, and in Szechuan Province a telelens panned along the rain-gray mountain. Across tiny rice paddies, beaded along a precipice, swept the rain. Dissolving mudlips slipped. Whiskered rice paddies smaller than bathtubs burst down the terraces. Scurrying Esks struggled to repair dissolving edges with dissolving mud. The whole cliff's about to slide. Dr. W est thought as the telelens zoomed at a random rain-drenched face. In this moment of peril, the surveillance screen was flooded by the Esk's infuriatingly senseless grin. "Dammit, even now, that one's looking North!" Dr. West shouted, his body tightening in another of his uncontrollable surges of rage and frustration. "Every day. More and more Esks looking at the sky." His voice choked as his breathing squeezed agonizingly tight. His rage or fear was making his heart muscle wince. Beside him at the console the thin hand contracted like a dying spider. Dr. West felt his own pain both gasped for breath. He blinked at Mao Ill's loud-gasping face, now waxen above the luxurious black dacron robe. Instinctively, Dr. West's hand slid another tiny white pill under his own tongue. It was 'his heart, not Mao Ill's. The stinging sensation beneath his tongue helped him relax even before the .# mg. nitroglycerine tablet dissolved, diffused, reopened the constricted arteries within the cramped muscle which was his heart. He relaxed, sheathed with sweat. Beside him the partially parabreathing rhythm, emitting rhythmic hissing sounds in the Command Vault # feet beneath Peking. On the telescreen the random Esk still stood grinning at the sky world, all smiling into space. "There is nothing up there but sky," Dr. West muttered. U nconscious of the surveillance lens, the Esk .bent his rainwashed back once more, and his obedient hands scooped mud upon the dissolving rim of the rice terrace. Beside him worked a child, and another child, dozens of Esk children working rhythmically in the rain. So much more quickly maturing than Chinese children, they appeared to be twelve-year-olds. Dr. West estimated this swarm of children had been born two years ago. In another year they would be reproducing babies of their own. The first Esks had needed # years to mature. Recent generations were maturing in # years. Faster and faster! "You fool!" Dr. West shouted are human. But such inhumanly efficient mothers and embryos! A one month gestation period?" Dr. West shuddered. "Human?" All over the once barren mountains and marginal deserts of China, the spreading Esk population under Chinese control was handworking the sand, rock and thin soil. After Dr. West had paracapsuled down in Szechuan Province, he had witnessed Esks terracing mountains so steep a Chinese commune worker would starve. Up there. Dr. West thought, even a man's hardest labor could not produce the equivalent of # calories of rice energy each day he needs to keep him working and alive. Yet these smiling Esks were eating less than # calories of rice energy each day and working strongly. On submarginal land where Chinese commune workers would have starved, these Esks were producing a lice surplus. "You fool!" Dr. West glared at are leaping fifty years of Marxist-Maoist agricultural frustration? Yes, you have a rice surplus this year. Yes, you are elbowing into world trade. With surplus Chinese industrial workers and troops all over Southeast Asia and spreading west. You are increasing the Esks to produce an even bigger agricultural surplus next year, but the Principle of Diminishing Returns is not an economist's myth. And the ghost breathing on your neck is Malthus." That discredited # th-Century English pessimist, Mao Ill's thoughts taunted, who did not foresee the scientific improvement of agriculture or the -- "How can you talk about scientific agriculture?" Dr. West shouted and recovered his breath. "Even assuming scientific agriculture in the sea, this planet has limits! The human population is only doubling every twenty-five years. We both know the Esk population is doubling every year in China." Dr. West stared at Mao Ill's lopsidedly smiling face and added bitingly : "Are you master or tool? The first few Esks did not appear in the Arctic because Maoist theology wished them there." At this, Mao Ill's thought-projection turned as blank as Arctic ice. I f there is a purpose in life, Dr. West thought and oddly visualized a spinning globe with a Geographic North Pole set in the white Arctic Ocean and, rotating closely around it, the bare rocks of Canada's Boothia Peninsula, present locus of the Earth's magnetic lines of force, of the North Magnetic Pole. There he had discovered the first few grinning Eskimos who were not -- "What are they?" Dr. West croaked, his thoughts circling back in the old rut. So nonviolent, so obedient, so happily increasing as if they can feel their purpose approaching. Always smiling, no matter what we do to them, as if they feel their purpose approaching. Closer every day. "What is their purpose? Their purpose can't be our purpose!" No purpose, Mao Ill's thoughts derided Dr. West with startling humor for a paralytic, who was gasping for breath. No purpose anywhere. End purpose of Universe when I die equals nothing. No ten thousand years of Maoism. Nothing. So you cannot frighten me with too many Esks. Mao Ill's throat corded with effort, and he managed to gasp aloud. "Nothing frightens me after what you did to me, my brain tapeworm. You -- " His voice was cut off. Dr. West's forehead wrinkled with effort, as Mao Ill's voice gurgled to silence. But Mao Ill's thoughts like javelins penetrated Dr. West. My power is nothing. Squirm, my tapeworm. So shrewd, their plan to invade me with you. But your success is nothing. Mao Ill's face contorted like a smile. Squirm in this intestine of power, my tapeworm. You a new leader? I laugh. Since the beginning of time, the world has been impossible. What can you do? Dr. West's thoughts and body tightened defensively, and Mao Ill's face sagged. His transmitted thoughts were blurred by pain. Dr. West watched him gasping for breath. It would be catastrophic to let him die. Cold with sweat, Dr. West squirmed on the console chair. Instructions must have been given me, his thoughts revolved, in case I succeeded like this. He moaned with motionless effort turned inward. There was no coherent clue to his net line of action. His memory seemed torn apart. He knew the electrointerrogation after his "capture" had contributed to his present disorganization. And this symbiotic relaas parasitic -- must be disorganizing both of them. His dreams -- until he began Ill's dreams had awakened him. T he pink walls enclosing the Great Square had echoed from marching troops which awakened Dr. West, who imagined it was his own dream. Then dim ranks of children wearing red bandanas around their throats had passed through Dr. West's mind even though he was awake. Endless ranks of children with red balloons, white balloons, and Dr. West felt a growing sensation be watching them from his dream. "Mao Tse-Tung, wan shui! Mao Tse-Tung wan shui!" their shrill voices shouted. " May Mao TseTung live ten thousand years!" In unison the balloons in the dream were released. But Mao Tse-tung had been dead for nearbeen an unknown young man then. Dr. West realized that Mao before the interregnum of committees and armies which followed the death of Mao TseTung. The following fatherly figure, Mao II, had been a desperation in the Command Vault, whether in command of China or subtly trapped by a coalition of generals, Dr. West still was unable to determine. "Command into the telecomm," Dr. West blurted. "Speak to your interrogators on the surface who failed to protect you from me. Order them to prepare any Esk. I -- you want to ask that Esk one question." Mao Ill's breath hissed out, and Dr. West allowed the paralyzed hands to move across the console. Without Dr. West's mental concentration, Mao Ill's strokeparalyzed body was useless sinew, skin and bones. Now it moved as II Such a small decision, Mao Ill's thought derided. To question an Esk. For twenty years we have been peeling their brains like onions to find nothing. They are simply mutated Eskimos. Nothing more. As Mao Ill's finger stabbed a pattern of buttons, Dr. West detected no . discernible treachery in Mao Ill's thoughts. Colossal conTapeworm, you will learn that Esks contain no magical racial memory. What magical question can you ask? My technicians have questioned them electrically until I was ill from the smell of charring flesh. Such innocent people Esks cannot even begin to think of lies to confess. There was a humming from the communications contact with the surface interrogation clinic, and Dr. West allowed Mao Ill's voice to speak. What emerged were Dr. West's orders. The distant answer: "Within fifteen minutes an Esk will be positioned and ready for questions, Chiu Hsing." Click. Dr. West's eyebrows rose. "Chiu Hsing, an honorific title meaning Saving Star? That also is the name of your mass-production automobile." Dr. West laughed softly as him. W ith the dignity of a mandarhappiness." As he detected the derision in scowled. "You are a monomaniac, convicted fifteen years ago of attempted Eskimo genocide," Mao Ill's voice rushed as if he expected Dr. West to shut him off. "You would not be here if I had not suffered my brain-stroke, false doctor. You have such little plans. To question an Esk until he dies. Listen, my tapeworm, the deepest words you will excavate from a stupid Esk are their incorrect Arctic myths, a confusion of bear worship and imperialist Bible fables." science has proved Esks are nothing but mutated Eskimos." His voice shrilled. "You fraud, perhaps you were in the Arctic when the Esks still were few. But it is I who saw the future for China, who ordered the rescue of a hundred Esks from Canadian starvation." "And twenty years later you "They are as human as I am, and more human than you, you ed for breath. As Dr. West mentally strangled his speech, Mao Ill's thoughts continued attacking. Tapeworm, you are sitting in my Command Vault as if you imagine you control the greatest organized power on Earth. Yet your mind is so small, you are planning to waste time personally interrogating, yes, torturing one little Esk. Dr. West said nothing. Finally he nodded his head. "As you say, the questioning is a small step. A larger step will follow." Dr. West improvised, forcing his weary to reappear before the world." That plan now elaborated so swiftly in Dr. West's mind he thought he accidentally must have cued some original hypnoinstructions. "You are going to reappear before the telecamera to demonstrate that your rumored retirement, nice word, is false. You have recovered from the rumored stroke. You are going to ask for an international teleconference between you and -- " No name automatically was formed in Dr. West's voice. Dr. West blinked. Nothing flowed, no well ordered plan from his damaged memory. If the Harvard Circle had implanted further instructions in case he reached Mao alone. Had he always been alone? "The subject of the teleconference will be -- " Dr. West waited. Nothing. He made his own decision based on his own beliefs of thirty years. "You will propose a split-screen teleconference with the President of the United States. Before a world audience you will negotiate for international population control of the Esks."  ' surprise. "Your monomania reappears in another new disguise. Impossible ideal. More impossible than weapons control." cious. "The United States could never agree to limitation of your Esk population. You look startled, my tapeworm. Either our electrointerrogation burned holes in your memory, or those murderous plotters in the C.I.A. neglected to correctly inform you what has happened in the United States during the last fifteen years." Dr. West blinked in confusion. "Don't you remember where you -- slept during the last fifteen least I have seen your dossier. Do I know more than you? The New China News Agency knows where you were. Fifteen years ago, in Canada you were convicted of genocide, as the whole outraged world remembers. You were coddled in the New Ottawa Reformation Center. For some reason, which I do not know, soon you were moved punitively to what Canadians euphemistically refer to as The Cold Room. So you can't know what's truly happened. You've been asleep for fifteen years. Were you startled to awaken in the United States? You confessed to my own interrogators that you regained consciousness in a large basement room in a large building across the river from Washington." ialists finally had a use for you -- you mass murderer. Y ou were stolen from an indeterminant sentence, rescued because one of your former colleagues in population control research had a new job." Dr. West blinked. A circle of faces had peered down at him. Familiar? He 'had been startled how old Fred looked. Beside him the embarrassed man with the hypo appeared so old. "Sammy!" It was Dr. Sam Wynoski, still a consultant in chemopsychiatry for government agencies. After "Therapeutic Adjustment" they had taken him upstairs to the Assistant Director, who was -- Dr. West tensed. "I know all that, I know all that, the Harvard Circle!" he shouted as if in guilt. "Shut up or I'll stop your breathing." But I have said so little, Mao Ill's thoughts persisted. Now you have proper negative feelings because the C.I.A. used you as mechanistically as a guided missile. Blind tapeworm, never were you told what is happening. I am going to show you what truly is happening in the United States. His skeletal hand crept across the console toward the telescreen controls. Tapeworm, the United States no longer is what they described to you. Those imperialistic warmongers never let you out of the Central Intelligence Agency building to see -- With a frightened thought, Dr. West stopped Mao Ill's hand on the television controls. The worst sin is ignorance, Mao Ill's thoughts slashed. "Your attempt is -- to confuse me," Dr. West gasped. "Trying to disorient me, so I'll lose my -- need to take action, lose my desire to control you." My motive is exactly that, Mao true regardless of the motive of the one who brings them to your attention. Let your eyes see truth, see tele-broadcasts relayed from our satellites stationed above America and films made by enlightened tourists. Dr. West's throat tightened. "I reject your attack. I don't want -- " He closed his eyes. "Give orders through your foreign office," Dr. West shouted. "Now! Transmit to your so-called ambassador in Warsaw, to make an offer, an. ultimatum for a teleconference within one week with the President of the United' States." iixxrhat a beautiful flower," West had released his voice "is each moment of life. Particularly beautiful is the last flower seen by a mountain climber whose grip is weakening on the precipice of life. I am that climber, and you are roped to me, tapeworm. My military could not approve of such a conference." "I don't give a damn what your generals approve." "But the art of government is quite complex. During the three years since my first brainstroke, the generals have been watching each other while waiting for me to die." Mao Ill's face contorted. "Already there must be rumors of your presence in this hole, my faith-healer, but each general has hesitated to take action because this would arouse the suspicions of the others as to his real purpose." hearted generals! Each man dreams of the power to save the world. Each desires the empty thing which is down here in the Command Vault." Dr. West said nothing. "Is it power or the ghost of if I disappoint my generals and tell them that my health has been regained, that I plan to embark on a revisionist foreign policy without their guidance, that I intend to recognize and dignify the existence of the United States by engaging in a teleconference with that barbarian assassin whose capital is Hollywood, or Toledo or Washington, my generals will conclude I have gone mad or have been captured by a rumored non-Chinese faith-healer. My generals will be forced to unite and rescue me." Dr. West glanced at the ceiling. Supposedly, it was # feet to the surface. ing down through the concrete slab beneath the Winter Palace. Twentyfive years ago when my power was democratically confirmed, I ordered construction of this vault as a patriotic base against an imperialist or Russian revisionist pre-emptive nuclear attack. It was designed so that revisionist assassins could not fight their way down to this vault. Under the concrete surface cap was entombed the device. Since then the architects of my vault's defense have died. But shrewd small device. An overimaginative general once intimated that I hold the whole city of Peking a hostage against my assassination. But truly it is a very small device only intended to seal off entry to this vault. Not even the Inner City would be obliterated." Where is the detonation control? Dr. West thought. erals and my loyal surface guard and the civil police and my Party police all could agree to trust one another, it would be a simple matter to drill down a series of exploratory holes and eventually disconnect the device." Dr. West found himself listening for the elevator. "Careful technicians with small loss of life should be able to locate the alarms and gas jets in the long shaft even though all plans were burned twenty years ago when the architects were lia pleased young boy. "Then soldiers can be lowered on long cables. It would be fatal to use the inadvertently visualized a switch on the control console. "Pull it and immobilize the elevator if you panic. But the soldiers will come down on ropes. They will push my servants aside because my servants are non-violent, even too innocent to poison me." "Then all your servants down here are Esks," Dr. West said. "The soldiers will push my servants aside and rescue me -- from you." "Then, welcome them," Dr. West retorted. "If this is what will happen, you should be happy to start the flow of events. Simply give orders to prepare for the teleconference. Now give the orders!" the subtle understanding necessary for a leader who desires to continue his long reign. Let me explain to you -- " D r West's brow wrinkles deepas his terrible cranial pain echoed dizzily into Dr. West, who relaxed the pain. If he killed the old man he would be left with -- nothing. gasped, "for either of us. The generals will come down to rescue something from you, my tapeworm. Not me, my power. For them, my living body will be an embarrassment like a mangy dog." He laughed bitterly. "But a dead leader can be used as a political martyr, you -- C.I.A. assassin." "Goddammit, give the orders for the teleconference!" Dr. West repeated. Dr. West had to wait for the grayness to clear from Mao Ill's brain. and a managed a twisted smile. "What is the simplest way to rid an old dog of his tapeworm? It is to smash his skull and give him a glorious funeral through the Great Square of Peking. This is the way I would like to die; but consider, are either of us ready?" Dr. West's rage whirled Mao Ill's thoughts into gray confusion. Unexpectedly, Dr. 'West glimpsed Mao Ill's visualization of an inconspicuous keyhole, a locked panel in the console. Now rumbling from the surface as he twisted in pain, and Dr. West felt the childhood clutch of claustrothe key, detonating the nuclear device, erupting the Winter Palace, sealing them # feet beneath Peking. Where was the key? Dr. West knelt beside Mao Ill's contorted body on the floor and lifted the silver snakechain from his neck, drawing out of the black dacron robe the skin-tarnished key. My control isn't as all-encompassing as I thought. I never detected the existence of the key, but perhaps you never thought of it until now -- I hope. He hung the key around his own neck. When Dr. West helped Mao Ill's limp body back onto the chair in front of the console, he could detect no more mental resistance. Mao Ill's surprisingly determined resistance to a teleconference seemed at an end. His thin fingers depressed the proper buttons on the console. His sagging lips mouthed Dr. West's orders to the Chinese Foreign Office, and Dr. West warmed with excitement as he heard his orders being transmitted into action. A lthough the Chinese Federation of Nations now held three seats in the United Nations General Assembly, and their dacron red-and-black robes no longer attracted tourist attention within the glass-walled U. N. sanctuary on Manhattan Island, all diplomatic contact with the United States was carried on within the Catholic Capitalism Principality of Warsaw. The U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw was invited to sit in secret session with his Chinese counterpart. Negotiations leading toward the international teleconfrontation had begun. "Tapeworm, you are wastefully sacrificing your life and mine because your president will not agree to face me in a television debate." "Wishful thinking on your part. Signal your interrogators on the surface. What happened to that Esk who was supposed to be readied for me to question?" "Let me show you telecasts of the situation of the Esks throughout the United States." "No!" Dr. West shouted with unexplainable rage and pain. "Show me the Esk in the interrogation room." A shuffling sound caused Dr. West to whirl. False alarm. An Esk servant had wandered into the Control Room carrying the afternoon tea tray. Dr. West ignored this Esk. On the telescreen appeared the frightened face of a Chinese interrogation technician, confessing there had been minor technical difficulties in wiring the Esk's frontal lobes. There would be another short delay. Dry-mouthed, Dr. West waited for his tea to cool, waited for "Tapeworm, I am alive because my Esks prepare my meals. Do you consider Esks inhuman because they not only eschew violence, they are too innocent to poison -- " "Why should they bother to poison you? They're poisoning the whole world with sheer numbers." "You're hysterical and stupid. Your Esk strapped on the table up there will be as unable to explain the purpose or lack of purpose of the Esks as you or I would be if we were tortured to explain the purpose of Man on this Earth." "Is your strategy," Dr. West retorted, "to argue against anything I try to do? By deriding me are you trying to erode my self-confidence? Are you trying to wear me down? I'm so much stronger than you, you won't escape that way!" "Your president cannot agree to confront me in a teleconference if the agenda includes the international problem of population limitation of the Esks. He is a practical man, as practical as I am, and he will create an excuse, an incident to avoid facing me in a teleconference if the subject is to be population control of the Esks. Tapeworm, let-mc show you the United States. I will show you why your president cannot agree to -- " "Shut up!" Dr. West turned away and closed his eyes. The President would welcome another international teleconfrontation. His thoughts had the sound of another man's voice. Ill XTow he remembered George ' Bruning's calmly intelligent face. Dr. Bruning was not a medical doctor; he was the Assistant Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "... my idea, but the President took it up," George Bruning had said. "A fresh innovation in international diplomacy." Dr. West blinked. George Bruning had been briefing him as to the # years he'd missed, conservatively an all-afternoon project. Evidently George had managed to extend his own influence far beyond the Harvard Circle of the C.I.A. "Ages ago when Paul and I -- the President and I were in the Hasty Pudding Club -- that's at Harvard, I said Paul you ought to enter politics. At nineteen you're already a greater actor than Lincoln." George Bruning had leaned toward Dr. West. "Both our international teleconfrontations made use of our U.S. Information Agency relay satellites blanketing the Earth -- splitscreen, each leader in his own country, almost face-to-face -- instant audio translations from a hundred satellites covering the audience! And both times the President scored!" "The first time, the President was a little nervous even thought we'd dug a pitfall for the Premier." George Bruning had smiled shyly. "As for the Premier, he had a small country, and he wanted the world-wide advertising the broadcast offered; but before accepting he was extremely cautious. Maybe he'd read U.S. history, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, little pitfalls of television. The Premier accepted only three of our suggested subjects for discussion: coffee prices, weather control and the international student exchange program. "Harmless subjects," George Bruning added smoothly, "but at least the personalities of both men would be exposed to the world." "To our horror the Premier projected great dignity, an upstanding man, which he was not. Our President -- what a warm personality! As a former motionpicture actor, Paul really knows how to come across. But it would have been a stand-off." George Bruning frowned. "I crawled underneath the President's teleprompter, gave him the pics. "My agency had -- acquired the pics. Since students were the final subject for discussion, the international student exchange, the President needed our pics of certain students the Premier had selected for exchange from his small country. "The Premier had assured their relatives that the student leaders merely had been exiled; because of the March he had benevolently sent them to China as part of the student exchange program. Already their relatives had been receiving enthusiastic, but typed postcards from China. They liked China so well they might never return, the postcards said."... until our President held up the pics to the T.V. camera, clearly revealing to the world the students and the wall and the easily recognizable building behind. The mob dug up the bodies of the students while the Premier was trying to escape from the other side of his Capitol Building. The new government is much more acceptable to the C.I.A." "... after that, another teleconfrontation with another Head of State was difficult to arrange. Necessarily, its arrangement was more subtle. The President lost, pool, you know -- like a hustler. We're looking ahead to the big one." r T"here was a buzzing sound, and Dr. West blinked. A yellow communications light was flashing on the control console. "Do you still desire to attempt your useless interrogation of an Esk?" The voice beside him was Mao Ill's. On the telescreen gleamed a white room with white-gowned figures bending over a surgical table. Dr. West winced at the similarity. It could have been the same room in which he had been interrogated. Now the viewpoint from the closed-circuit T.V. system shifted to a high lens looking down from the ceiling. Dr. West remembered staring up from the table at the ceiling grille with a camera lens glinting behind it, while cold hands forced wired needles into his skull, consciousness faded. On the table, the Esk's eyelids were creeping closed. His shaven head glittered, a pincushion with a tangle of wires leading to the electrosensitizer and the reaction dials. As the electric current increased, the Esk lolled his head from side to side. Wide-cheeked, with a massive lower jaw, barrel chest and short legs, physically this Esk resembled an Eskimo. One of the white-capped figures twisted a knob, and the Esk's eyes snapped open. Dr. West recognized the humming sound and the distant voice questioning. In Chinese, the Esk mumbled his name, a Chinese name, and the name of the Esk seggrecommune where he labored. A technician glanced up meaningfully at the camera lens. Dr. West swallowed convulsively. How to begin? T apeworm, Chinese electrocranial accupuncture is at your service, Mao's thoughts derided him. You have only to think, and my mouth is happy to question this Esk, a hundred Esks; every conceivable question already has been asked. Mao Ill's thoughts collapsed as Dr. West intruded strongly, and Mao Ill's mouth hesitantly formed a word. Mao Ill's voice spoke in Modem Eskimo, a language he did not know. "llaga, my West thought. "Nanuktuakjung, little bear, Grandfather Bear approaching -- " Dr. West's thoughts poured from Mao Ill's mouth while the Esk's eyes gradually closed. Dr. West stopped, distressed. He fails to understand you, is culturally Chinese. Of course he can't understand Eskimo. He was born in China, and three years before that his grandfather was born in China, and three years before that his great-grandfather was born in China, and perhaps his great-great grandfather was one of the first hundred underprivileged Eskimos the Chinese Federation of Nations, at my orders, rescued from Canada some fifteen years ago. Dr. West concentrated, squeezing aside Mao Ill's thoughts. "Grandfather Bear is approaching," Mao Ill's mouth shouted. Dr. West's thoughts, this time in Chinese. "Great White Bear from the sky," Mao Ill's voice helplessly hissed through the microphone at the Esk, and Dr. West's memories of the original little group of Eslcs telling night stories of the bear in the sky poured from Mao Ill's mouth with increasing intensity. "He will come. Grandfather Bear coming down from the sky. He hungers for us with joy. With joy, all will be one." ' I 'he Esk's eyes widened in ec- stasy, his mouth opening. "Grandfather Bear, Grandfather Be -- , Grandfather Dragon-Tiger!" Dragon-tiger? Dr. West thought with disgusted surprise and glancDragons, tigers, Chinese symbols of spiritual power have overlaid the fading Bear symbol. Mao Ill's smugness enclosed Dr. West. My tapeworm, your Polar Bear symbol is nothing more than an animistic relic of prehistoric Eskimo beliefs polluted by capitalist Biblical underexposure. Nothing more. Did you think -- "Grandfather Bear is coming down from the sky. Prepare this world," Dr. West's voice-thoughts microphone, and the Esk lolled his head from side to side, and Dr. West paused, trying to remember the night igloo, and out under the Arctic stars. No matter how deeply you interrogate this lump of flesh, no matter how ridiculously you try to trigger his racial memory, Mao Ill's thoughts taunted, he can tell you nothing new. How can he tell you secrets of a World Beyond when the only imprint within him is from this humble world? One of the white-capped technicians glanced up at the ceilingcamera, and gradually the electrosensitization of the Esk's cerebrum was being increased while Dr. West's thoughts spoke, reproducing the religious excitement of Edwardluk twenty years ago. "Grandfather Bear approaching, closer and closer as we increase. He is coming! Our bodies are preparing the world for him. His great hunger is for us. Our bodies will reward him for our birth!" The Esk's voice squealed. Abruptly, the Esk's pulse rate jumped to # per minute as his smile opened in a shout. "Grandfather, I -- we altogether in you." His face strained with joy and tears. It almost seemed as if his hair was standing on end in a static-electric effect as he relived the myth his father must have told him. "Grandfather, come down! We prepare world for you! For you we are ripening -- " The white gowns flurried about the Esk. On the table they were giving him oxygen resuscitation. Now external heart massage. A lot of them die like that, Mao due to an electrosensitization overload. A white-robed technician glanced up at the camera as if in frightened apology. Dr. West sat there sweating. He we will question another Esk." Dr. West's voice rose with excitement. "I don't believe this Esk died from incompetent electrosensitization. If Esks could be made to die, triggered by mental suggestion, maybe something coming down from the sky? Did you ask astronomers? I, he died so happily as if -- " "He was electrocuted," Mao hail of words upon Dr. West's weariness. "Tapeworm, Pavlovian cues such as the wave of a flag can cause a soldier to leap up into machine gun bullets. Other triggers such as the news of the death of a loved one can cause a man, already subject to arteriosclerosis, to fall down with a heart attack, and so a sudden gust of wind plucks an over-ripe fruit." Mao Ill's voice rose. "Even if you triggered that Esk to die, this does not prove that your words or his belief had Marxist-Materialist reality, or even that other Esks can be psychophysically conditioned to ripeness for such nonsense. All Maoist Esks know there is nothing physical Out There In The Sky which desires to eat them. Marxist-Maoists stand on scientific dialectical logic. In any case, that childishly suggestible Esk will be proved to have died of too much electricity, which is a physical force -- " Mao able to shut off his physical voice. Tut Mao Ill's thoughts swept on like an erosive river. Tapeworm, we both should admit that Esks simply are mutated Eskimos, human beings like ourselves, merely more fecund and more obedient. Listen to me, my tapeworm, subconsciously you have been searching for excuses to murder Esks. You want proof they are not human so it will salve your conscience for the mass murder you consummated fifteen years ago. With imperialist-cultured bacteria you almost succeeded in Eskimo genocide. lt  as it #I Eskimos died? Before the eyes of the world you were convicted of mass murder. Even in the most reactionary capitalist news media you are, shall we say, enshrined as a homocidal genocidal maniac! "No! You have twisted it!" Dr. West shouted. "My intent -- " His voice trailed off, and he felt Mao Ill's stream of destructive thoughts backing him into a corT apeworm, your insane attempt to seize my power. Paranoid, admit you are a god who will cure the chaos of the world. You are trembling. Little man, you can't even remember what you were instructed to do. The little imperialist schemers of the C.I.A. have concealed what has happened during the last fifteen years from you. Why else would they select you, who have been inert in a Canadian cold room for fifteen years, for this mission? Because you don't know! Tapeworm, you are their last weapon for mass murder and not eyes. You have forgotten your orders because they are so horrible you cannot allow yourself. Once you were a good man. There still is humanity in us both. At least, we are both of the human race. Yes, we are on the same side with all of enlightened humanity. We are both human. You can rise and walk from this vault into freedom. No one will harm you. You are freed of all murder. In China there is no murder, and I declare you free of all guilt. You are cleansed of blood stains of C.I.A. control. Good-by, my friend, you are free to walk to the elevator and rise into the sunshine. "You sly so and so!" Dr. West rose, his muscles tightening, his head aching with concentration, where he lay jerking in agony. "Don't try to attack me again." Dr. West swayed in the echoes of Mao Ill's smothering agony as he writhed on the floor. "When I am ready," Dr. West gasped, "you -- I will examine other Esks until we..." Murderer! Even from the floor thoughts. You hope you find evidence of nonhuman origin and that it will excuse your crimes. Maniac! You think you warn the world and now people listen? Fifteen years ago your lies that Esks are not human were disproved. derer. You biased expert, the joke is on you. I know more of the origin of the Esks than you. IV I n his memory, Dr. West saw the bare rock ledges where the Boothia Peninsula thrust against the frozen sea. Shivering, he'd paced the distance across the Burned Place. He had taken # strides across the shallow blackened scar on the rock. "If it was an airplane, or space garbage, it crashed straight in." He had searched for wreckage. "Where is the metal?" he had asked Peterluk. "The iron. Did you Innuit take away the iron?" "Eh?" Peterluk's weathered face had creased in a cautious smile. "Only two of us then. This person -- " the Eskimo had touchhis own chest, " -- and this person's useless old woman." Dr. West already had seen Eevvaalik. "So the crash was several years ago, before these younger Eskimos came here, if just you and Eevvaalik were here. What did you do with all that metal?" Peterluk opened his filthy, frost-scarred hands. He seemed embarrassed because he did not want to contradict the white man. "Eh? No iron." "Then what fell, what made this Burned Place?" Dr. West could not even see any evidence of a stony meteorite. Silence. Peterluk stared out at the frozen sea as if hoping to locate a seal. "Eh! Ugruk out there!" He was trying to change the subject. "Something fell from the sky," Dr. West persisted. "Eevvaalik said you saw a star fall from the sky." Peterluk's bushy head turned. His thick knuckles tightened on the stock of his Russian military rifle. Any rifle was illegal in this Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary. "My woman's teeth worn down. Too long ago. She don't remember nothing the way it was." He slapped his chest. "This person don't see nothing because asleep. Nothing fell." "She said you saw it fall from the sky. She said you left her and travelled to find out what fell. What made this Burned Place?" Scowling, Peterluk stared down at his mukluks. "Bad candles. Many in wooden box." "No. I know this Burned Place wasn't made by sticks of dynamite." "Kabloona s with iron hats," Peterluk muttered. "Many fine presents." "No. This Burned Place could not have been made by the radar construction workers. Don't lie." "Egg of God fell here." Peterluk shrugged and pointed his stubby nose at the sea. "Another time, ship poke up through ice like narwhal. But you no believe that either." Peterluk retracted his arm within his voluminous sleeve. Inside his mangy parka he irritably scratched his bare armpit while he squinted toward a younger man approaching them. "Lice never bite him." Peterluk was glaring toward the smiling young man approaching, "Not good hunter!" Peterluk commented as if destructive words could erase him. In appearance, Edwardluk could have been Peterluk's own son. Closer, his face seemed smooth as a baby's as if he had spent few years outdoors. Edwardluk had such a pleasing smile that Dr. West instinctively felt safer with him than with Peterluk. This was a correct judgment, even though in those days Dr. West had not yet distinguished between Eskimo and Esk. It was to take Dr. West a month to understand that Peterluk and his woman were the only two Eskimos in the camp of nearly a hundred. XTes, Esks, you had to count the days of a pregnancy before you even realized they were different, Mao II's thoughts taunted, and you arrived twenty years too late to understand the Burned floor where he lay like a sack. "It is amusing that even now, after another twenty years, you still don't understand what you saw. It is not that Maoism has so many more well trained believers throughout the world than the C.I.A. It is simply that Chinese travelers collect even the most useless data, rumors, photographs. Everything is noted, filed and cross-filed. And we have more highly placed spies in Russia, collecting observations. From infinite unrelated data, the computer arranges valid and reliable patterns." Dr. West permitted -- mentally chair in front of the console. Mao reason. "that I am the only head of state who has taken the trouble to learn how to question an Information Retrieval Computer directly. Surely direct access to infinite global date, multireferenced and computer-rated for reliability, should be more useful to a head of state than the filtered information which is sprinkled on the head of your president by his cabinet officers and presidential staff and C.I.A. advisers and Joint Chiefs of Staff, none of whom agree." Mao Ill's fingers riffled over the index buttons. A still photograph of a rock ledge appeared on the telescreen. Separately projected across the top of the photograph was a date and some symbols. Separately projected beside it appeared a row of index numbers presumably guides to related data. "Do you recognize this photograph?" "I assume it is the Burned Place but -- " Dr. West stared uncertainly. "There is rarely that much snow. The High Arctic is dry. The wind sweeps... "It is not the Burned Place. It simply happens to be the nearest photograph to what was the location of the North Magnetic Pole # years ago." Mao Ill's fingers signalled the projected index numbers to the console. "The skill is in selecting the most pertinent general number -- subjects. Eskimos. Scientific searches. Perhaps meteorites. Aircraft crashes. Satellites which have fallen. I repeat the location designation: North Magnetic Pole, Boothia Peninsula, not too specific. In the computer, an immense pattern of related information has materialized. A leader's whole life would be wasted reading it. To place an electronic pin-point in this vast matrix, I introduce the phonetic number-name Peterluk." A fao Ill's fingers moved, and-the photograph of a cautiously smiling young Eskimo holding out a white fox fur, appeared, new index numbers materializing above his head. Dr. West blinked. "That doesn't look like -- It must have been taken when he was a young man. What's that behind him?" and a photograph of what evidently was an official report appeared, printed in Russian characters. "For translations from the lan"the vocoder is slowest, but will allow us to study the photographs. This inefficient vocoder should stammer a synopsis of those items which are pertinent to Peterluk and to my question pattern, which still is too diffuse." His finger moved, and the mechanical voice of the vocoder Mao Ill's finger pressed: "Spare us these bureaucratic details." A blur of documents and index numbers swept across the screen. "Unfortunately, this computer is not capable of a direct answer to your amorphous question as to what caused the Esks. This Information Retrieval System simply flickers through molecular patterns of data, abstracting. My prod here and poke there narrows its tentative synopsis until the edge of a pattern small enough for a human mind to grasp is offered to me to guide." A still photograph of a primitive nuclear submarine appeared on the screen. The vocoder howlresponding to the first index number, and a jerky movie film appeared on the screen. Bundled men were clambering from the deck of the submarine into a rubber boat. Another Russian-made film clip, evidently photographed from the conning tower by the same hand-held camera, showed the rubber boat bunting among the ice cakes. The distant men scrambled on to the rocks and upward. Dr. West finally recognized the promontory. "The Burned Place." as the computer approaches reasoning as it abstracts the pertinent essentials from a hundred documents and offers us its synopsis with the best internal reliability." Film from a hand-held camera was showing bundled Russians walking gingerly among large broken objects and nervously glancing at the sky as if expecting the contrails of U.S.A.F. ramjets. Rising from his chair, Dr. West shouted: "Close up! Is there film showing a close-up of what in hell those things are?" As if anticipating Mao Ill's finger, the computer projected a close-up of a Russian hammering with his rifle butt at a huge, dark curve. It looked like ceramic clay. The rifle butt failed to chip it. The camera shifted to another broken curve. The two might fit together. Dr. West thought. The outside of each curve was roughened, darkened as if charred. The inside of the curves gleamed white. A broken edge was thicker than a Russian's hand width. Like a gigantic mo Husk's shell, Dr. West thought as a Russian walked upright under the jagged upper end of the curve and turned and grinned bashfully at the cameraman. "Good," said Mao Ill's voice, "the computer has narrowed the available data and is attempting chronological order." The Russian film-maker must have whirled with his camera. On the screen there was a glimpse of Russians scattering, a rifle was raised, and then the camera steadied at a stocky figure clambering down over the ledges. A closer view showed the young Eskimo holding out a white fox fur and grinning expectantly as if he imagined all whitemen who illegally entered the Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary came to trade. Dr. West blinked. "I'll be damned. It is Peterluk as a young man. Look at him grinning at that Russian's rifle. He wants it so bad he can taste it!" The film showed a Russian lifting a white curve perhaps only an inch thick and large enough to shade the Russian's head and shoulders like a huge eggshell. The film showed a Russian carrying a curve of the inner shell toward the water. A long shot showed four Russians dragging a fragment of the larger outer shell into the rubber The film showed two towering Russians smiling, their friendly arms draped over Peterluk's shoulders. Between them the Eskimo stood like a worried dwarf, his white fox fur hanging limply from one hand. howled its chronological synopsis from what must have been RusThe screen went blank. Evidently the cameraman knew what not to film. "Replay that part about the quick baby," Dr. West exclaimed. "Signal for more information about that -- " numbers which had been projected during this quotation from the naval report, and the vocoder howled inane statistics about the Boothia Peninsula and the perged. "Evidently there is no additional information filed in the category: Quick Babies, Boothia Peninsula." A still photograph showed men in white coats standing proudly in front of a darkly oval patchwork reconstruction. Seen as a whole, the outer shell had less resemblance to a huge mollusk's shell. Darkly charred, it loomed ominously behind the white-coated men. "Impossible to keep a secret in Russia," Mao Ill's voice laughed, "especially fifty years ago when that object fell, when Maoism was the wave of the future, and friends of China, old Stalinists, still were concealed everywhere. As you saw, even the motion picture films, which the Inner Politburo of revolving revisionists ordered burned, evidently were copied by surviving StalinistMaoists. With so much corruption in Russia, I suspect your C.I.A. also possesses ancient copies. But those who sent you here would not confide in you, my tapeworm."  V'l the screen, microphotographs showed the molecular structure of the inner shell. "I am more free than my comed. "That barbarian Eskimo, when he poked whatever was mashed within that inner shell, he sucked his finger; then hungrily smiling, he would eat it without a bellyache. I hope it was only the remains of an American monkey or chimpanzee." "Even so, a beautiful hoax," American bunglers nearly were able to keep a secret from the Russians -- ; and even from us. In the years since then, our friends of China at Cape Kennedy and at Vandenburg never were able to collect reliable information as to just how the hoax was secretly constructed, launched and deliberately crashed. In fact, we never have found the evidence of U.S. origin. Do not look so discontented because the C.I.A. did not inform you. After all, this C.I.A. hoax was perpetuated SO years ago, in the #'s." Mao Ill's voice was smooth as poisoned honey. "Even now, you would not be informed of its secret, historical malfunction because you were to be parachuted in China where the C.I.A. still thinks we are retarded angry children who know nothing. But I assure you that such a hoax never could have been consummated, even in those days, upon alert Maoist scientists." Dr. West said nothing. "You are wishful thinking it ed, "because your life, your beliefs tremble on a pinpoint hope that something which fell upon the Boothia Peninsula will confirm your monomaniac insistence that Esks are not human. Murderer, you would lunge anywhere for evidence of nonhuman origin to justify your hatred of the Esks. You would embrace any obvious U. S. hoax. Always you would clutch false evidence that Esk origin is from the sky because that is what you need to believe, that Esks are nonhuman. Otherwise you would be forced to see yourself as the rest of the world sees you, you convicted mass murderer. See yourself as you are, monomaniac murderer, leave me, tapeworm. Go! Leave this vault." Dr. West gasped. "You can't wear me down with talk. You can't drive me insane. I won't have a heart attack because of you. If your spies in America could find no evidence of construction and launch in America of a nonmetallic object of large size, I know damn well it wasn't built in America. It was no hoax built on this Earth. And I'll tell you this. The crash wasn't investigated by an American search party because sophisticated radar would have told the Air Force it was not a metallic object. It would have echoed radar pulses as if made of stone. Maybe the Russian radar of that period was not able to discriminate, and they thought a satellite had fallen. They sent the sub. Undoubtedly U. S. forces had crossed it off as only a stony meteorite." "Tapeworm, don't you wonder why the fall-streak of such a large meteorite did not attract an American scientific expedition?" "I -- that was fifty years ago, in the #'s. I." Even in his heart-pounding anger Dr. West realized from Mao Ill's quick thoughts that the orange flashing light on the telescreen indicated a high priority telesatellite transmission. V " n the telescreen appeared a symbolic dove of peace, then a film clip of a peaceful wheat field dimpling in the breeze, and a peaceful baby smiling in living color, its arms outstretched to the world, then the American flag gently waving, while the audio played: "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies..." All this was an introductory film clip, a station break via hundreds of U.S. Information Agency satellites sprinkled throughout the heavens. Shielded from the jamming of rival foreign teleinformation services, the U.S. telesatellites were relaying on all # channels down to every square foot of the Earth. Magnificent redwood trees appeared against the sky and dissolved into a friendly-faced man standing with his hand resting on the shoulder of a smiling boy, a boy who was deeply tanned and slightly oriental around the eyes so that he could be recognized as almost any nationality. Smiling into the teleprompter, the friendly man was speaking; and tire telesatellites over China relayed a peaceful-voiced Chinese translation: "Friends, I bring you greetings from your friend, the President of the United States. I am his good friend. My job is Secretary of State. I want to be your friend. The President and all my friends throughout the World call me Dino. My friends, don't go away from your television set. Please call in your children to listen. This important announcement also concerns them. The President of the United States has asked me to tell you how happy he is that the Chairman of the Chinese Federation of Nations has suggested a friendly teleconference." The Secretary of State smiled through his transparent teleprompter and took a deep breath. "The President of the United States asked me to tell you he feels honored that the Chairman of the Chinese Federation of Nations has invited him to a split-screen teleconference. Don't go away from your television sets. This historic meeting, which promises greater happiness for all peoples throughout the world, will be broadcast at this very some time tomorrow. You, your children, all ages will want to witness this historic meeting. Be sure to tune in." Jagged static squealed off the sound and momentarily distorted the smiling face of the Secretary of State as he was dissolved into majestic redwood trees. The American flag billowed in the the broadcast, and the picture contracted to a little bright spot which vanished. "Tomorrow." Dr. West felt hollow and unprepared; there had been no mention of the agenda. Were the subjects for discussion still being negotiated in Warsaw? "Now the military will be forced to face the fact that I am -- insane. Insane to have sugblurted. "The military will disconnect my external broadcast antenna. It is undefended on top of the Winter Palace. They will not be sufficient fools to let me match myself against your robust President. Perhaps one of my understudies -- No, the generals are too cautious even for that. They will deny there was an agreement for a teleconference. China's prestige must be preserved. They will denounce your Secretary of State as a hoaxer. Then they will come down the elevator shaft and -- rescue me -- kill us both!" T'vr. West glanced at the guard lights on the console. Evidently the elevator shaft still was safely locked at the surface. If the console could be believed, the protective devices still were cocked. blustered. "Your Secretary of State was afraid to mention that population limitation would be on the agenda. It won't be. Your government already has gained a propaganda advantage. Now the C.I.A. will create an incident. Perhaps an American ship will sink, and this will be blamed on one of our submarines on station off your coast. Your government will use the television time tomorrow for a taped denunciation. Your President will not face me. How can he, when the agenda we sent to Warsaw requires a discussion of the International Esk Problem. Your government fears I am going to suggest bilateral population limitation and quotas and international inspections of our respective populations of Esks." "Any suggestion that the increasing number of American Esks should be limited would cause a political uproar in the United States. Any suggestion that their number should be reduced would cause revolution!" "You're unfamiliar with the United States way of life," Dr. West replied. "No. You are. Admit that you haven't seen the United States for fifteen years." "I know more about it than you." Dr. West visualized the basement rooms of C.I.A. headquarters and then the dark airport, the wave-ridges of California mountains, the spreading away of the coastline as the ramjet streaked out over the Pacific Ocean to "dump" him on China. "Since you were awakened, you have seen more of China than "You have seen the necessity of the Esks in expanding Chinese agriculture. How else can we support expanding consumer production and expanding defensive military. At this moment my generals must be plotting to attack me. Now they think I will agree to limit the number of Chinese Esks." "But China has at least a billion Esks now." Dr. West retorted. "A population growth rate like that can't continue." "China is a large country with much barren land which can yield surplus only when farmed by very low intake units." "But next year there will be shouted in frustration. "You have only so many mountains for them to terrace. Then diminishing returns and Malthus. If the Esks keep increasing in the mountains, if the Chinese keep multiplying in the cities, starvation will overtake... "For a scientifically minded Maoist economy there cannot be torted. "There cannot even be too many Esks while there is so much empty space in the world. When I conceived the masterstroke of rescuing those first hundred underprivileged Esks from the starvation in Canada, I foresaw all possible developments and have made all necessary preparations." "You were insanely stupid even then, fifteen years ago." "Yes, I am so stupid, I suspected that the United States "and breed its own Esks. Esks have agreeable uses when spread throughout the American population, but not in China! Except for a few special needs such as my own Esks servants, I have kept our Esks in their own separate communes segregated from the Chinese population. This is a preventitive for a phenomenon. Yes, I foresaw the eventual anarchic collapse in Canada." "Dammit, let me see the United States!" "Canada is a more advanced example of my foresight." Mao Ill's hand moved on the console. "These are the only film clips of Canada so you need not believe them." No! Dr. West thought forcibly. First show me the United States. And Mao Ill's skeletal fingers obeyed. A cross the screen jiggled an electric fuel-cell powered bus as if filmed by a tourist. The neon advertising below its winthe camera. Its destination tape teurish zoom enlarged the bus driver's calmly smiling face. phantly, "the bus driver is an American Esk." information Retrieval Computer Mao Ill's finger shifted on the console, and Dr. West stared at a film of a huge white truck entering a suburban driveway of a high-rise apartment. As it stopped, a great white scoop-jaw above the cab of the truck reached forward and downward like a dragonfly larva's jaw. From the cab of the truck, a hurrying man in white emerged, seized a garbage can and emptied it into the jaw. The camera zoomed at the man's happily smiling face, an Esk. Click, on the screen appeared towering condiminimum apartments beside the East River near the ancient United Nations building, and this more expertly handled camera explored past the Esk doorman into the ground floor lobby of the apartment building where a short-legged, but attractively uniformed and smiling maid was walking toward the escalator. lessly pressed a button, and an unsteady film showed a large, the lens-view zoomed into the screened window. An American Negro family were sitting down to supper, and a neatly uniformed Esk maid appeared from the kitchen carrying a steaming platter of franks and sauerkraut. "An familiar with imperialist oppressor history. What a satisfactory capitalistic solution! Esks are happy to be at the bottom of the American peck order." Click, a dozen small Esk boys were shown industriously polishing an autocopter, while an American boy and girl played on a revolvo-swing and their father lay on a lawn dais officiously gesticulating to an obedient Esk who was laden with a lawn rake, a fertilo injector and a dandelion extractor. Click, along a college dormitory hall a svelte-hipped Esk maid balanced a tray of martinishaped glasses through a Stanford-bannered door chalked and she didn't come out. Click, the sign on a huge new go Aid-to-the-Esks Society. And underneath, Healthy Canadian Imports. Also Fresh Raised Local Stock. At the bottom a pricePrices on Request. "Damn!" Dr. West was sweating and laughing and shivering at the same time, horrified. "God! In a few years when there's no more countries to which this surplus can be exported -- " "You are supposed to be the plied maliciously. "A scientific humane solution such as forcible birth-control injections should be simple, if capitalist and revisionist oppressors are able to cooperate and behave rationally. But there is an unknown factor. Even rational Maoist scientists cannot explain it. In the first country to have a preponderantly Esk population, which was Canada... flick, across the screen moved an impenetrable barbedwire fence stretching along the Saskatchewan prairie. Filmed from the U.S. side of the border, the fence bulged with dark clots, bodies in the barbed wire, on the Canadian side. Further behind the International Boundary, indistinguishable masses of Esks (?) stood waiting. A close-up through the boundary fence showed skeletons, humans or Esks? Starvation or? "I can't stand to look at this. Let me look at Ottawa," Dr. West blurted, "where I was imprisoned." Click, instead of the angry mob of Canadians who had reviled him fifteen years ago, the streets of Ottawa now were stagnant with starving Esks, even wandering in the middle of the street. Photographed from a copter, the first film clip failed to show a single moving vehicle on the streets od downtown Ottawa. "But what happened to the Canadians?" Dr. West bleated. Tall white towers like grain elevators appeared against the skyline of the city. "That's it, the New Ottawa Reformation Center," Dr. West said, remembering his loneliness for Nona. What's happened to her? Are there closeups of any guards on file?" Click, Esks were wandering in and out as if the towers had become giant dormitories. "What happened to the real people? I knew some of the guards, when I was a prisoner -- " Click, Mao Ill's hands moved at the console, and the comput"So Feterluk was dead before I even entered the Reformation Center, and they wouldn't tell me," Dr. West muttered. "Dead, and he was the father -- perhaps the foster-father of all Esks. His own lying statements must have contained evidence of their origin. Dammit, they're not human!" AT ao HI laughed contemptuously. "Many in the United States agree with you on that. To relegate Esks to subhumanity justifies buying and selling." Mao Ill's voice softened. "The unanswered question to me is why the Canadians finally in self-defense did not massacre enough of their Esks. Because there was some confusion due to interbreeding as to who was an Esk is no explanation. Human beings have been since the beginning of our species. But so inefficiently in Canada -- " Click, a jiggling film of men with axes and shotguns showed Esks being herded like rabbits against a fence corner, the axes ed a Canadian farmer retching and staggering away. "It should have been so easy to exterminate them when there put up violent resistance. When the first rumors of the failure of Canadian rioters to accomplish anything substantial reached me, I ordered my #th Route Army here in Peking to carry out an experimental massacre of one small commune of Esks who live on the dust desert west of Peking. By using machine guns, the number of Esks had been reduced about # when it began to rain. The commanding general also had other excuses. Machine guns overheated and jammed. After I removed him and ordered the massacre completed, the new commander, my former aide, General Chen Yung, had difficulty with trucks bringing replacement troops to the scene. Finally an air attack with napalm was successfully carried out, and I believe a good portion of those Esks were eliminated, although now there seem to be more out there in the desert than ever. To superstitious troops the unexpected difficulties of execution were disturbing." "Damn right they are disturbing!" Dr. West yelled. "Here you are letting Esks increase to a billion in China, and you don't even know if you're capable of eliminating them." "It could be done, it could be. Mass executions become simple matters when competently organhistorically scientific logic, Maoism can solve any problem of mankind." "Then do it, dammit. Now!" "Tapeworm, you forget that you are in command, not I." Dr. West closed his eyes. What did those jerks in the C.I.A. instruct me to do? "Nothing that our interrogation "Squirm, tapeworm, squirm with all the problems of the world that wiser men than you have made more complicated during each generation until -- " "Shut up!" Dr. West visualized U.S. ramjets spraying China with gynecological bacteria which would infect Esks and, of course, would have an even more virulent effect upon Chinese; that still was one unsolved problem. Could the retaliatory Chinese counter-strike against America be disorganized from within? Dammit, I can't have been sent here for that." "Your aggressor-indoctrinated thoughts are of the type which continually disturb my military," Asian Continent must defend itself from imperialist invaders, our larger population is our main defensive weapon. My military will never agree to a unilateral massacre of our Esk population while an uninspected Esk population continues to increase in the United States." Mao Ill's voice rose. "The United States is using its own irresponsibly increasing Esk population as an aggressive threat to world peace. If the United States should outnumber China, and this could happen because your Esks are multiplying so rapidly, then five thousand years of Chinese cultural heritage would be threatened. Tapeworm, can't you understand that my military cannot agree to any limitation of our Esks while -- " "Shut up!" Dr. West's face contracted, concentrating all his frusthe paralyzed man toppled to the floor with a brain-blinding thud. Blackness! Dr. West clawed at his own eyes, momentarily unable to see. His vision glimmering, he crawled grasped for his faint pulse. As he sat there wondering if sciousness, Dr. West remembered the smug faces, the excited faces in the Harvard Circle of the C.I.A. You smart operators, he thought, right now you must be thinking you've almost scored your biggest one. You've planted a monomaniac named Dr. West in Peking. You've used me to set up a teleconfrontation with Mao The Secretary of State had reacted so quickly. The ready response tlirough Warsaw must have been prepared even before you parachuted me, Dr. West thought But even if the teleconfrontation takes place and the Presiyou'll be falling into a new box of problems with the Chinese military. And the Esks still will be increasing -- including increasing States. Dr. West blinked, and then his eyebrows rose. What if you C.I.A . geniuses are two steps ahead of me? Could it be the President will Harvard Circle may hope population control of the Esks in Chiis supposed to be controlled by me, Dr. West, monomaniac hater of the Esks. If China limits its Esk population, then public opinion in the U.S. may permit the U.S. government to limit the number of Esks belonging to individuals and corporations in the United States. In realization, Dr. West began to shake with excitement. "Do you hope that I, the population expert, hopefully the controller of population limitation offer? And I did! You hope this will allow public opinion in the U.S. to follow. Are you trying to control the Esk population explosion in the U.S. that you're now politically unable to do anything about?" Dr. West propped up Mao Ill's head and desperately sought his pulse. "The teleconference is tomorrow!" A red light flashed on the telescreen. Dr. West didn't know what to do. Evidently the broadcast was of such high priority it contained a code-servo override. The screen switched itself on. VI A cross the television screen, gracefully stroking lines of ink converged to form a calligraphic dove of peace. A dissolve into living color showed ranks of red-neckerchiefed Chinese children marching across the Great Square. Their red balloons and golden balloons bobbed over their heads. En masse the balloons rose into the blue sky. Dr. West recognized this as the standard introductory film clip used by the New China Information Agency in its worldwide telecasts. Magically all the golden balloons drifted in front of the gigantic silver rocket which protruded from the pink-walled courtyard of the Winter Palace. All the red balloons drifted over the ancient curved marble of the Jade Rainbow Bridge. "China is a bridge of peace to all people," a soft voice hummed, and Dr. West knew translations were soothing televiewers in Afghanistan, Algeria, America. The Chinese Foreign Minister bowed to the television audience, his hands pressed together in a gesture of peace. "Friends throughout the world, our revered Chairman, our Saving Star, regretfully will be unable to appear in the teleconference which he proposed and the President of the United States seemed to have accepted. It is well that the Chinese Federation of Nations clings to peace in this moment of imperialist aggression. Last night a black aircraft of the warmongering United States Central Intelligence Agency made an unprovoked attack upon Szechuan Province." The Foreign Minister smiled humbly at his teleprompter. "Of course the imperialist aircraft was shot down by our ever-vigilant civilian defense militia." Pie nodded his head, and a film of unidentifiable wreckage strewn across mountain rice terraces was projected while his peaceful voice rose to outrage: "Unfortunately, those genocidal murderers of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States were able to parachute a capsule loaded with bacteriological weapons upon peaceful Szechuan Province. The shock of this treachery has caused a relapse in the health of our beloved Chairman, and he will be unable to appear on television to confront the guilty President of the warmongering United States!" The film showed an oddly familiar terraced mountainside. Across the stair-step rice paddies sprawled a gigantic parachute. Dr. West blinked in recognition. In the mud lay a standard aircrew ejection capsule from a U.S. Air Force ramjet bomber. "... until such time as the United States can show a sincere desire for peace," the Foreign Minister's voice was crooning, "the Chinese Federation of Nations democratically and unanimously believes that an international teleconference would be futile." "You fraud," Dr. West gasped aloud at the smug face on the telescreen. "That parachute, that terraced mountain, that's my old ejection capsule. That film was taken over six months ago after I -- we came down in Szechuan Province." Dr. West moaned in frustration and banged his fist on the floor and shouted at the telescreen. "Liar! Chinese generals manufactured this incident to get off the hook of a teleconference." JBesicie him, Mao Ill's eyes had opened. "Did you hear that, you prematurely senile-brained idiot?" Dr. West shouted, his futile rage hammering his heart. "Your Foreign Minister announced you've had a relapse. The Generals are calling all the shots. You're finished as Chairman. You blob of dead flesh, you were nearly useless even when I took control of you. Now you're nothing! I've ended as nothing. We're both nothing!" from Dr. West's radiated anger, and Dr.' West grabbed his wrist, felt for his erratically shivering pulse. Mao Ill's heart was fibrillating. Dr. West tried to calm himself, and gradually Mao Ill's pulse regained a semblance of a rhythm. loyal to the line of Mao, Mao Ill's erratic thoughts seeped. China is Maoism, and I am Mao, and all is well. Dr. West stared in frightened fascination at the Command Microphone on the console. He couldn't endure waiting. He had still broadcast orders from this "Dead?" Mao Ill's voice chirped with startling cheerfulness. "I am nearly dead. But I have patience. Help me up, my tapeworm. I will die peacefully in my bed. No man expects more." His personality seemed altered. "My generals will have to wait. I have a headache. Perhaps they may need me tomorrow." Dr. West dragged him to the console and ordered him to contact any place on the surface, the not respond. was a frail sack of bones, smiling blissfully as if unaware of Dr. West's order. sighed. "This is how I control my generals, patting one dog, then another until they snarl at each other in jealousy. I have patience. They will fail to negotiate their differences. Power is Mao. All will be well." Dr. West emptied him onto his bed, and Mao Ill's face sagged in a smile like melting wax. All will be well. Mao Ill's personality seemed so softened that Dr. West surmised another hair-thin vein within his cerebrum painlessly had ruptured. Another tiny area of his brain tissue was dying. little stroke. "I am Chiu Hsing, the Saving "Grandfather Mao and I are history. I am the unifying symbol for China, power and love and forgiveness. When my generals bow down before me, I will ask that you be painlessly shot." Dr. West made no comment. tire smiling sleep of the pure-inheart, Dr. West glared at the oppressive ceiling. Sleepless, Dr. West writhed. He sat up and stared at the Control Console. With surprising mnemonic power Dr. West remembered from pushbuttons which should open a command line to the surface, in this cautious instance to the Interrogation Room. On the telescreen the white Interrogation Room appeared, empty except for the modernistic electronic interrogation table and an old Chinese on his knees, scrubbing the floor by hand as if he had remained in the #th Century. "An the console in front of Dr. West glowed the light indicating the Command Microphone was live. It dazzled with power. Dr. West whistled into the microphone. The old man did not look up. "Summon your superior," Dr. West commanded in impeccable Neo-Chinese, and still the old man went on scrubbing. "Stand to attention or be shot!" Dr. West snapped, beginning to sweat with anxiety as the old man continued wearily sloshing his big handbrush back and forth on the wet floor as if he had not heard. "Deaf fool!" Dr. West shouted in frustration, while the old man sloshed his brush in the bucket. Dr. West knew he didn't hear. The military already must have cut the external broadcast wires. Reception still worked when he pressed another button on the console. For the moment the Command Vault still retained its exterior television eyes. The telescreen showed Chinese troops climbing into armored trucks. The military have cut the vault's throat, Dr. West thought. Mao Ill's -- my ability to broadcast is finished. No more commands to the outside. What do I do now? Numbly sitting, Dr. West felt amputated. No more commands to the outside, Dr. West felt himself shriveling. My purpose is gone. "Gone! Got to get out." He could feel the ceiling pressing down, # feet of rock and subsoil and earth crushing him into thickening claustrophobia as he walked, not ran, to the elevator. His face twisting with pain, he turned around and ran back to his bed and covered his head. Even if they don't shoot me when I appear at the surface, I'd be powerless. Free on the surface I'd be nothing. I would see the I did nothing, having lost the chance for power. Dr. West turned over on his back. I'm lying here in the vault of power. The power's off but my hope... He tried to open his memory, to search through the shambles left by Chinese electrointerrogation. He visualized the faces of the Harvard Circle bending over him in the basement of the Central Intelligence Agency building. Bunglers, each subliminal instruction was to be cued by predicted events. But this is a terminal event. Please let an alternate plan rise to the surface of my memory. Oh God, how I need... Have you deserted me? As if those distant faces had become his gods, Dr. West prayed for a vision and felt only the endless emptiness of the Universe. What was any purpose? Dr. West lay on his back feeling waves of Universal time curving back to the edge of sleep. Suddenly he smiled. Perhaps I am all-important. I am the seed of life in this buried vault. He slept and dreamed he arose with power over the world: "The Esks are to be sacrificed to me." He was huge and snow white as a polar bear.  wakened by the cautious movements of an Esk with breakfast tray. Dr. West sat up, blinking. He got up, wandered over like an early morning drunken bum and stared wonderingly "When I wake up too soon," Dr. West muttered, "I see these Esks as something else." For breakfast he was unusually hungry. He ate ravenously. Why your hatred of our gentle Esk comrades, they who feed us? His dagger-sharp thought incised, if you had been born in the closeness of a Chinese commune you would be an open man instead of a closed man. "I don't hate them. I have never hated them." Dr. West was wide-awake now. "But as they increase, crowding me everywhere, I feel my elbows, my teeth... Why is that light blinking?" "Activity outside the surface ly, his face blooming in a smile. "My generals -- " Pushing the proper combination of buttons on the console brought a picture of workmen welding the steel frame for a steel safe door approximately one foot outside the surface entry door. They were working directly under the warning lens so that Dr. West was looking down at them. When he shifted to a second lens at an oblique angle, military officers in black uniforms were revealed watching the work from further away within this great concrete surface blockhouse which was concealed within the ancient Winter Palace. "They are too small for me to muttered from his bed. "So our surface door will become a door within a door." "Instead of simply welding our door shut." Dr. West carried Mao Ill's slack body to his chair. "Historically, Chinese are cautious because they are so intellisciously. "Those who possess the key to the new outer door can reach me quickly enough when events so guide them. Welding my door completely shut would have seemed to irrevocable. There is more artistry in a door within a door. I may be needed tomorrow." A fading illusion. Dr. West thought. We are being permanently sealed down here with the Esks. "There are too many Esks down here to be fed, and on the surface they are multiplying as if all the nations of the world have less foresight than ants." Dr. West's voice rose. "At least ants recognize intruders in their nest as enemies! I've got to get out of here." "You fear even my Esk sered. "Since I, too, once placed great value on survival when I was younger, there are freezers full of supplies in this vault for myself and fifty Esks for twenty years. The vault was constructed and stocked during a period when I thought tire American hawks were suicidally sincere in their talk of preventitive war. Breathe this sweet air. It is a recirculating system which cannot be poisoned by surface assassins, either Chinese or American. We can wait, self-sufficient, safe, years longer than in a submarine. My vault is protected by # feet of solid rock. If the United States warmongers had attacked and won, amusing word, I could have waited down here like a Seventeen-Year Locust and then emerged with my own personal Esks to repopulate the world." An Esk carried away the breakfast tray. "You were looking at one of "Until my stroke three years ago I was extremely functional. The historical duty of a great man is to pass on his seed." I n the concrete corridors which surrounded the inner vault, neatly uniformed Esks wandered as if there were not enough work to do. Dr. West noticed a few young Esks dressed in what appeared to be bedsheets, as if there no longer were enough uniforms for an increasing number of Esks. Hordes of naked children skipped gaily ahead of him in the corridor. Beside Dr. West, an Esk pushed Mao Ill's wheelchair. "Already you are plotting how you can murder my children," passed the steel door to the tunnel which led dawn to the atomic power source. "Speculative force of habit," Dr. West replied as calmly. "Yesterday, I showed one of your sons, or grandsons, how to conduct a census by touching each Esk with a dab of red paint so he wouldn't count the same child twice. I showed him how to make counting marks on a tablet. There are twenty-eight mature males, twenty-two breeding-age females and -- brace yourself -- # children and babies." "Under normal conditions the excess children are sent to the undisturbed. "It has been convenient that the babies need to be breast fed for less than a month." "Sixty-two of the children would reach breeding age if we were down here a year," Dr. West remarked. "Of these, # are female." "It is unlikely we will be down "My generals will need me, as they always have needed the line of Maos." "Then this is purely a theoretical problem," Dr. West shrilly laughed. "The # newly breeding females added to the # females now adult, means there would be # breeding females within another year. Suppose we're optimistic and estimate two menstrual wash-outs or miscarriages per mother during the next # months, each of the # women would give birth to only # children instead of #, for a total of # more mouths to feed. And I'm forgetting to add children born to the # existing mothers this year." "You're talking as if we could be left to stagnate down here for "The generals will free me and kill you within a month." "In two years, counting existing Esks, mainly children now, plus babies who will be born, the total numbers of mouths to feed will be more than #." "You are intimating I lacked foresight because there are only supplies for fifty Esks for twenty years." "Supplies for fifty Esks for twenty years equals supplies for # Esks for one year." Dr. West walked toward the myriad sounds of babies. "I am as familiar with arithmetic as you are," Mao Ill's voice retorted triumphantly. "I also am familiar with birth-control pills." "I can see from the age distribution of your Esks and the terrible preponderance of children, that no birth-control pills are being used," Dr. West said softly as he stepped into the crowded sleeping dormitory, his nose wrinkling. "These are my grandchildren," been no reason to stifle my own ancestral line with pills. Do not panic. My generals will free me in a few days; and if the generals procrastinate and you become frightened of all those harmless Esks, there is a whole closet full of birth-control pills." Dr. West blinked. He smiled fleetingly. "It might be wise to start testing these pills," Dr. West remarked as if it were of no importance. He had glanced into the steamblurred kitchen where Esks were boiling rice and freeze-dried vegetables. "Supplies for fifty Esks for twenty years will last us one year unless the pills are effective." "We will not be down here three months." Mao Ill's tone of voice was a verbal shrug. "But you are a medical person, and it might add to your medical knowledge if you begin testing the quality of those pills. They were manufactured in the United States."  ' closet, he recognized the pills as an abortafacient developed under the guidance of his successor at the Institute for Oriental Population Problems Research on a grant from the Department of Defense. Dr. West assumed they had been tested on Esks. Only one abortion-inducing pill a month was necessary. In Canada it had been found impractical to force Esk women to take the daily pills. Taken only once a month, ideally before the woman had grown large from her monthly pregnancy, these abortafacients would do the job for a while if the Esk women would swallow them. Dr. West smiled grimly, thinkty large jars of # pills each. That's # pills. Mathematically, enough pills for # women for twenty years. Assuming the pills are # effective, by the time all the existing # children mature, even assuming no new births, in three years we will have a total of # females of breeding age. They will need # pills each year. "There won't be enough pills to complete the fourth year. Chemical birth control will cease. Soon we'd be jammed shoulder to shoulder except for one lucky circumstance. We already will have starved to death." "But I'm ever the hopeful experimenter." Dr. West wondered if he would be more successful than the Canadians in inducing the Esk women to swallow monthly pills. "I can't use force. Too many Esks. I can try deception." He slipped one bottle under his coat and carefully locked the closet. He frowned. Why did the Canadian government fail? He waded through naked children romping in the thermostatically heated corridor. The abortafacient pills so strongly contradict the Esk women's instinctive purpose in life, he thought, what awful things happen when we trick their instinctive urge to give birth? In the crowded dormitory, he stared at an Esk woman sitting on the edge of a cot, hunching over her baby. Her strong hands were steadying her newborn baby who was hungrily suckling her breast. Genetically formed in both of you. Dr. West thought, is such an overwhelming urge to multiply. Even stronger than ours. He knew within the uterus of this blissful woman the next fertilized ovuurn already was clinging, growing, already a fetus, efficiently growing without wasted energy or unnecessary gills or prehuman tail, and in less than a month it would emerge into the world. Your whole being, all of those smiling instincts, your inoffensive survival instincts were designed by something to help your rapid multiplication. And you help each other. Unlike men, you don't kill. Uneasily he smiled down at the woman, who cradled her baby protectively in her arms. Mother, he thought, would anything you suspect of interfering with your purpose in life cause you to -- But I've never heard of he thought. I should be safe enough. IT e gave twenty-two pills to the steward, who seemed unusually intelligent. Although his Esk characteristics were dominant, the steward undoubtedly was one of Mao Ill's sons. He listened placidly to Dr. West's instructions. "You understand," Dr. West repeated, "these twenty-two calcium pills must be given only to each woman. That is, one to each woman." "Eh?" The Esk smiled. "One pill for each woman in her rice," Dr. West said. "Tonight. Good calcium pills to make bones strong," he lied. "For babies?" "No, for the mothers! Give the pills to the mothers." As Dr. West returned to the ing toward the telescreen, his skeletal face twisting in a comedy of outrage and black humor. Mao "I am reported to be dying. A national year of mourning is being prepared. This same day Chu-Ti's personal aircraft has exploded in flight, accidentally, the tele-announcers say. Lin Po died last night at a banquet, of indigestion. Here in Peking, Chen Young's #th Route Army has cancelled all leaves." ed nervously, "Peng Huai's troops have entered Canton to calm a very little disturbance caused by less than a dozen ancient reactionary revisionists who drank too much wine. His troops temporarily have occupied all the airfields and the television station." Now ghost of a man. "The Canton dogs say they are preparing for democratic elections. No doubt the general with the most troops hopes to receive the most votes." "When their armies have blooded, "and still the fighting continues, they will remember me, their Saving Star." He laughed faintly. "I can rise from the dead?" his eyes and announced: "The survivors will unlock my steel door, and I will permit them to come down in my elevator and bow down before me. Humbly the surviving generals will beg me once more to command all China." Dr. West made no comment. np'he next day many television stations transmitted only their focusing pattern, the white lotus star. From the south, few broadcasts showed waving flags and martial music and schoolgirl poetesses with Cantonese accents reciting instant odes to the heroism and patriotism of General Peng Huai, Savior of Canton, Savior of China. blurted, and his quick fingers clicked through the other stations. "This Cantonese rebellion will produce loyalty in Peking to me." The next day none of the Peking stations were broadcasting. In the dormitory, Dr. West stared anxiously at the Esk women. They should be aborting by now, he thought. None of them showed any discomfort. As he walked back along the corridor, Dr. West noticed a scar on the doorjamb of the closet, beside the lock. Breathing hard, he unlocked the closet door. The jars still were white with pills -- no, with grains of rice. "The pills, where are the pills?" The steward continued smiling while Dr. West violently shook him. "Pills?" the Esk gasped. "Please, sir, which pills?" "Did you give Hie women the pills?" "Eh?" the Esk giggled with embarrassment as Dr. West stopped shaking him. "This person gave away pills." "You're lying." "Eh-eh, this person is lying." the Esk laughed placatingly. "Where are all the other pills?" "Eh? Pills here? This person does not know." "The whole closet was full of pills!" Dr. West shouted. "Eh-eh, this person is telling the truth. No pills." "You're lying." "This person is lying," the Esk patiently agreed as if soothing an insane man. Dr. West hurled the unresisting Esk to the floor. "Where are the pills?" By now most of the Chinese television stations were off the air. Some of Mao Ill's random surveillance cameras, which were automatic equipment, showed circling flies, perhaps distant aircraft circling clouds of smoke beyond the horizon. One surveillance camera suddenly blurred with the too close face of an Esk smiling stupidly. That night Tele-Pravda's satellite broadcast that General Peng Huai's troops from Canton were meeting only token resistance outside Nanking. A victorious Cantonese television broadcast was expected hourly. It came with joyful music and a triumvirate of smiling Chinese physicians, the first doctor announcing that the beloved Chairerlogically materialistic improvement from his three-year illness. The second announced that new developments in traditional Chinese accupuncture had completely cured the paralysis from which their beloved Chairman for three years had suffered. The third announced that the Chairman, the Saving Star, now was able to speak to all of his people. In the dim vault, Dr. West watched Mao Ill's expression change from surprise to rage to blankness. peared, walking briskly forward. With sturdy peasant gestures and a confident voice, this that: "The Maoist Party shines like a gun barrel! Your Chairman once again is able to labor for the welfare of the people. All is now peace, for I am with you." This Mao glanced at the teleprompter and announced that he had appointed General Peng Huai of the Canton Military District to rebuild three bridges to the people, to assume three responsibilities. "Minister of Defense and Agriculture and Internal Security." Pseudo-Mao bowed imperceptibly. "General Peng Huai, his heroism has saved my life, and through me the life of China." "With Comrade Peng Huai's guidance we shall build an even larger China, worthy of our great population. Together, arm-inarm, we will lead all the free peoples of the world into the future." gled with rage, and Dr, West remarked: "Is that one of your former doubles? You used so many to confuse your assassins. Now they've discovered one Mao is as good as another." ing flags on the screen, the rising balloons, the traditional ranks of marching children, until the Can  ton station abruptly signed off the air. "Air raid warning!" blurted. "My favorite general, Chen Yung, commander of my personal #th Route Army here in Peking. Now he will need me to expose the imposter. My General Chen Yung personally will come and bow down before me." There was more news about the air-raid scare. False warning. The next morning Tele-Pravda reported that General Chen Yung, Commander of the #th Route Army based in Peking and formerly considered the most influential of the inner council of generals, and the former favorite Ambassador to South Belgium. "General Chen Yung already has departed to assume his new post." "If his aircraft does not exand began to sob like a little boy who has lost his last toy. "Which leaves us with the Cantonese General Peng Huai consolidating his power." Dr. West asked, "Do you recall Peng Huai's attitude toward future increase of the Esks?" "That traitor first gained notoriety as Field Commander in our pacification of India." Mao "Peng Huai always has maintained that China will need many more people for a still greater effort, therefore as many Esks as possible. Each Esk replaces on the homefront a peacefighter to free the world. Have I answered your question?" in pain. Rising, Dr. West saw that massive stroke. The whole left side of Mao Ill's face was twisted down. Even when Dr. West's was unable to speak as his thoughts leaked out: Tapeworm, leave me alone. At least permit me to die. But Mao Ill's right hand twitched in a signal for his Esk night servant to bring him a sip of water. Finally, Dr. West walked away. When Dr. West was able to escape into sleep, in his dream he was clutched by a nightmare earthquake shaking apart the eleit with rubble, squeezing the vault while tire smiling Esks grew like "The bed shook him awake as he sat up, his eardrums still echoing the dull thud of an explosion? The lights still worked. He blinked at the ceiling of new hairline cracks in the concrete here # feet deep in the earth. Now, through the ringing in his ears, he could hear the excited chattering of Esks. He noticed an Esk standing stupidly by the locked control panel, an oddly shocked expression for an Esk. No smile now. It was Mao Ill's night servant. Swaying from the Esk's hand hung a thin silver neckchain dangling the key. Dr. West's hand rose to his own neck where the key had been, and he bounded across the room, seized the key from the unresisting Esk. Dr. West stared at the lock turned to a horizontal position above the depressed red lever. "You idiot." The dull thud had been an explosion at the surface. Dr. West remembered Mao Ill's mental slip: The vault's defensive threat was the small nuc device encased in tons of concrete beneath the Winter Palace. As Mao Ill's last act it could be detonated by this lock and red lever, to seal off this vault in which Dr. West stood breathing hoarsely forever. "You suicidal fool," Dr. West blurted at the Esk. "And you stole it from me while I slept. T ell me why -- " The Esk smiled with nervousness and glanced toward the dragon-curtains of Mao Ill's sleeping alcove. Dr. West tore open the curtains. "You paralyzed old fool. You communicated to this Esk to steal back your key. Wonderful! Bang! You've sealed us forever in this coffin." Mao Ill's lopsided face smiled up at him. Tapeworm. Fear? Mao Ill's triumphant thought filtered out of his blood-clotted brain. You are unable to think. You must listen to my thoughts. "Like hell I will!" Dr. West ran along the corridor to the elevator. The elevator door bulged out jaggedly from the mass of smashed rock which had jammed down the shaft. He tried to calm his unevenly thudding heart. He walked to the end of the farthest concrete tunnel and stared at the concrete wall. "It is not possible to dig out. We're nearly a mile beneath the earth." He trudged slowly back with his hand pressed against his breastbone and flickers of reflected pain inside his left arm. "If I'm going to drop dead -- heart. Good! Now!" But he took a nitro. He searched through janitors' closets and a small storeroom containing trays of spare modules for the computer and a vast storeroom of tiered shelves stacked with plastic-wrapped, freeze-dried vegetable bricks. He wandered between mountains of sacks of rice and on into the kitchen equipment room. By now he carried a crowbar he had found, and a handful of flimsy plastic-handled screwdrivers and a ball-peen hammer. He found a short-handled scoopshovel for loading rice -- not intended for digging straight upward through # feet of rock formations to the surface. "Got to get out!" "IT Then the next pain in his '  chest subsided, he herded eight male Esks to the end of the corridor and set them to chipping at the concrete wall. The plastic split from the handles of the screwdrivers, and the soft iron shafts bent. The head of the ballpeen hammer popped off. The crowbar bounced back from the concrete with ringing protests. Dr. West located an electric twist drill and enough extension cords, and the whole set of steel drill bits soon was ruined. He unbolted the hinges of the massive steel door of the Power Source room, and eight heavily breathing Esks carried the steel door up to the end of the corridor. The corner of the steel door made a clumsy battering ram. The noise was deafening. Wincing, Dr. West stared toward the shower room and visualized a long hose. The concrete within the corridor wall seemed slightly softened after a stream of hot water was hose-lengthed from the shower room. "Cheap Maoist concrete," he laughed shrilly. "But who could make a profit?" After exhausted relays of Esks, the clanging corner of the steel door smashed through concrete into darkness. Dr. West leaped forward as if into a miraculous hidden tunnel, but his flashlight illuminated only the yellow-brown solidity of prehistoric sandstone strata, # feet beneath the present surface of the Earth. The battered point of the crowbar, hurled full force, penetrated nearly an ## inch into the sandstone. It left a tiny dent. "This damned sandstone's been pressed down here so long and hard, it's not even sedimentary. For me, it's hard as metamorphic." Sourly smiling, Dr. West set the Esks chipping upward at a #degree angle. "Not too steep for you to scramble up a gopher hole barefoot, yet steep enough for the debris to slide down." He foresaw a narrow tunnel with one Esk digging at a time. It would have ventilating problems enough without being stuffed with other Esks passing the debris down by hand. He found a draftsman's #-degree triangle and tied a string to a bolt. He suspended the bolt from the triangle like a plumb-bob. "You see the direction? Dig upward in line with the hypotenuse of this triangle." "Eh?" "I mean the tunnel must line up with this longest leg of the triangle." "Eh?" These Esks all smiling stupidly made Dr. West want to scream with rage. Smile, Dr. West thought at the cheerfully scurrying Esks, who already were carrying away double handfuls of granulated sandstone. Smile, at least this work gives you another purpose down here besides -- Their primary purpose scampered small and naked on the corridor, more children each day. Children's fingers traced childish symbols in the sand spilt on the corridor floor; circles, circles around circles and an amorphous blob reminding Dr. West of a bear. Tn the shoulder-wide hole up A into the hard sandstone Dr. West measured daily progress. "A good # feet in the last twentyfour hours. I like you, all of you. Now, dig faster!" Dr. West exploded in irritation. "No! Don't dump the sand in the shower room! Empty it in the food storeroom." Each day there was more space in the food storeroom to store and -- less rice. During the "night" shift below the sounds of the upward tunneling Esk, Dr. West scowled at his pencil diagram on the wall. It was a right triangle with its hypotenuse at a #-degree angle to its vertical and horizontal lines. Beside the vertical line he wrote: # feet up. Beside the horizontal line, he also wrote # feet. They would not emerge too near the small nuc blast. He scowled at the diagonal line symbolizing the tunnel. "This damn gopherhole hypotenuse will be a lot longer than # feet, you -- ghost of Pythagoras. The sum of the squares of the other two sides is # plus # equals #. Now what in the hell is the square root of #? It's more than # feet! This slanting tunnel will be more than # feet long. Digging # feet per day, that's # days!" He stared at the unhearing Esks. "God help us all, # days, that's # years!" He walked into the food storeroom where Esks were piling sand from the tunnel. "Even if these smiling fools could stop having babies right now, this minute, all the food, just for the Esks alive right now, will be eaten before two years. This stupid tunnel will starve to a stop not halfway to the surface." He smiled like a starving clown. "We will have eaten ourselves to death three years below the surface." I'm not going to murder any Esks, he thought. I don't want to. If I killed a few, the others gently will restrain me. If the humans on the surface can't effectively control their increasing Esks, how can IP On the surface, the humans have the guns and are supposed to have the brains , but the Esks still are multiplying. Down here, I'm already outnumbered #-to-l, and more Esks are eating more each day. Could I create a poison? His face twisting from his heart pain, Dr. West looked across the food storeroom at the children laughing and rolling down the sandpile. At the edge, a little boy was dragging his finger in the sand so that the concrete floor showed through. "What are you drawing?" "Eh? Grandfather Bear -- so he come for us." "Down here?" "Eli!" The little boy shaped the sand and patted the sand. D r. West turned away, his chest tightening with pain. He sat down against the concrete wall. A little girl ran over, threw her arms around his neck and snuggled on his lap. His breath tickled the delicate beauty of her ear, and she giggled. He closed his eyes, motionless and unbreathing as concrete. When she went away, he considered suicide. Instead he gathered the # adult men and the # mature women together, only now there were # mature men and # pregnant women. He drew pictures on the wall showing the great distance to the surface. He drew squares of diminishing size showing that there soon would be no more food. The Esks giggled, and Dr. West saw thal one, aping him, was drawing or the floor -- a bear? "Dammit listen to me! Something musl be done." Smiling patiently, Esks volunteered to eat less. One man would stand guard outside the food storage room. In the artificial night, children began to whine with hunger, disturbing Dr. West's sleep. In the artificial morning, Dr. West read from small footprints in the sand that children had been allowed to enter the storeroom to gnaw at the freezedried vegetable bricks. When Dr. West tried rationing the food himself, after locking the storeroom, the Esks were cooperative. In the night hungry children cried, and the Esks gently took the key away from Dr. West without hurting him and opened the storeroom and everyone was happy again. When Dr. West stared down at Mao Ill's lopsided face, the eye opened. Help me, the desperate thought rose, to speak. Concentrating to the utmost, Dr. West was unable to control Mao Ill's damaged speech center, and Dr. West thought! Only the spark of a man remains. Bad poetry while you look at thought with surprising strength. Kinder to kill me. "Then who would I talk with?" How many Esks have you murdered? "None," Dr. West answered. Fraud, you thought you could wive the Esk problems of the whole world, but you can't even control this vault. Mao Ill's thoughts sparkled with laughter. Paint a line across the corridor, separating the men from the women. "You are taunting me," Dr. West replied without anger. Induce the mothers to sacrifice their babies to a god, either you or me. "In Canada the Esks shielded their babies from the mob with their own bodies." Ineffective mobs in capitalistic countries. Arrange a mirror so I can see the telescreen. "Strangely ineffective mobs. Your surface explosion destroyed our T.V. antenna." If you understood statesmanship, you would divide our Esks into two tribes. Paint the foreheads of one tribe white, the other tribe black. "We both know they're not that genetically combative. They're not as self-limiting as some human populations have been. No wars." Somewhere in the Data Retrieval Computer, ancient Polynesian Island customs effective when not enough taro patches for growing population, and a protein shortage. Use the pushbuttons on the console. "Not any more. I was passing an hour playing the console, endless interesting data pictures from your computer. Already I can play it like a piano. But suddenly, only a repeating pattern of information about weaving, volcanos, avacados and phrenology appeared in the screen, as if the Data Retrieval System had suffered a stroke. I replaced what seemed to be the damaged module, and now the computer doesn't work at all." Because you have the wrong specialization, Doctor, you don't even understand any rational Maoist science. With minimal intelligence you should be able to lead the Esks to the one logical course -- cannibalism. #Qtop taunting me. There have been no examples of Esks in Canada -- have there?" Dr. West wondered if, in the last extremity of starvation and still driven by their urge to multiply, if the adult Esks here might feed their own bodies to their children. "I doubt it. At least not organized -- " Not yet organized makes it easier for you. There are no troublesome congenital leaders among the Esks. You should be able to organize these few Esks in any behavior pattern you decide. You flatter me. For me, one man, now to curb the Esks' overpowering instinct to multiply like lemmings, after all the Canadian attempts to organize birth control among the Esks failed." My Szechuan agricultural of Esks to hand shape mountains into rice paddies. "Easy because it was helping Esks multiply." For Maoist progress, yes, Esks were so much more easily controllable than Chinese within my twenty-year plan. If you imagine yourself my intellectual equal, you should be able to organize the lives of these mere # Esks so that one of their overpowering instincts will conflict with another, and they will destroy themselves. This is how I maintained control over my generals. "And look at you now!" Dr. West immediately realized his own retort was inadequate, childpower longer than most leaders; any leader can suffer a brainstroke, and all men sink into death. Having nothing better to do today, I am trying to help you. "I doubt that!" Dr. West seemed unable to restrain childish anger, "How were you so stupid as to help Esks multiply answer. Perhaps Esks have an as yet unidentified psychological advantage. Unobtrusively they are leading us." Ridiculous! You are a defeatist born of a disorganized nation whose historical moment has passed. If my television still were operating, while you starve you could watch the triumph of Maoism throughout the world. "Triumph? The population of Esks." Statistical trickster. Any fool knows that the rate of Esk increase will stow down and then stop. In America, when your relatives feel the bite of hunger in their fat bellies, they will limit their Esks. With guns and clubs of necessary. In China, rational Maoist economic planning will reveal when the number of Chinese Esks is optimum, and further increase will be discouraged. "Are you sure? That is not how things ended in Canada. Is it possible that the Esks have an over-group psychological influence on our actions?" Now you are a small boy whimpering at the darkness which conceals nothing but your teddy bears. A t this thought, Dr. West broke into laughter like dry coughing. "I've been a small boy -- whimpering, warning for twenty years. And ever since the first five years, those first Canadian years, the Esks have been recognized as a population problem But they have continued increasing. Name for me one instance in which organized human activity effectively has limited the number of Esks anywhere. The few lynchings, your experimental napalm, ineffective pinpricks! Name an effective population control action. It's been all talk, and the number of Esks keep increasing." Loud prophet, emerge from your hole and take action, Mao I have been told that the world can support a population of # "Only if the number is approached gradually over the next hundred years. Even with only more humans breathing on our necks, we haven't time, even with developing marine plankton farming and direct chemical food sources. Why am I wasting my time talking to you? Up there, anarchic collapse will come before the population totals twelve of food distribution, the world It would support more Esks don't eat as much. Because they are here, Esks who worship -- Dr. West whirled, staring in recognition at the gold-painted dragon which still grinned above the blinded telescreen. The dragon's claws were painted red. His hungry jaws symbolized -- "Malthusian nightmare!" Dr. West's voice shouted. "Or Freudian dinosaur. You'll symbolize whatever I want you to symbolize. He clutched his head in his hands, trying to understand the Esks. In creation, an effective religion also must conform to the most pressing needs, Dr. West thought, of its creator. He stalked through corridors where the Esks merely stepped aside. He unlocked the huge empty room Mao Ill's architects must have intended for -- "Official Audiences, but these last # years since his stroke, that egomaniac was afraid, avoided being seen. I'll meet with all # adult Esks at one time, only I won't be here." Dr. West locked the door from the inside and set to work inside of the Audience Room. W hen he emerged wearily, his work incomplete, he locked the door to the huge room behind him and wandered back to the Control Room to sleep. But first, in the Control Room he unlocked the Master Heating Panel and did something. "Like a god, I control the weather." When he awoke he was shivering slightly. As he walked past Mao Ill's curtained bed, he detected distress, shivering, but continued to the Master Heating Panel, unlocking its little metal door again. Inside gleamed the row of temperature control dials, one for each room in the vault, others for the corridors. Only their coil thermometers were concealed in the individual rooms. The other elements of each thermostat were here in front of him. "Maoist architecture -- central control of all thermostat settings." With a cold smile he turned down each thermostat another degree. "This control room also must be equally chilled or eventually, as the Esks become painfully cold, they'll all crowd in here, squeezing around me like a demographer's nightmore of the # utilized planet. At first there must be equal cold throughout the vault." Dr. West located extra blankets Apparently in China, Dr. West thought with wry humor, or at least in this Command Vault, electric blankets are banned tor their softening revisionist tendencies. He suspended a small electric radiant heater above Mao Ill's curtained bed. I am shivering. My tapeworm, who will soon be without a host. Why not painlessly smother me me to pneumonia, to which I already have been susceptible. I wish to die, but I dread the choking sensation of pneumonia fluid in the lungs. Simply use a pillow. "I'm not your assassin. I'd be lonely without you, mine host." Dr. West went away to get the paint and loudspeakers; laden with tools, he unlocked the Audience Room. Each day he worked alone in the huge hollow-sounding Audience Room. After he had hung the black curtains the echoes were muffled. Each day he reduced the temperature throughout the vault one degree. As a side effect of the cold, the Esks digging the tunnel worked faster. Dr. West soon wore overshoes with three pairs of socks. Chilled, he donned two layers of padded uniforms and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and ate more. Unfortunately, the Esks also ate more. Since few of the children had shoes, whenever they tjred of running around they huddled rubbing their feet, whimpering. "But human children would have colds and pneumonia." Dr. West coughed and laughed and cleared his phlegmed throat. "Comes another Ice Age, only Esks would prosper." With disturbing initiative the Esks in the kitchen left the electric cookstoves on all the time. Esks smashed chairs in the dormitory and built a fire nearly overpowering the carbon dioxidemonoxide filters. "Dammit, you nearly fumigated us all." As Dr. West stamped out the fire, he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. The Esks were on the verge of restraining him. He wondered, if warmth had become so vital an instinct that they would -- "Warm today, disregard tomorrow," Dr. West muttered his conscious superiority at these people, but he worried that eventually the Esk servants might realize how the thermo. static heating system was controlled, and the Esks gently would take control of the weather in the vault. T T e accelerated his plan. Un- locking the Heating Control Panel, he turned up on thermostat. It was the thermostat whose coiled thermometer element was in the Audience Room. "Warmth will become like heaven." When he unlocked the warm Audience Room, delicious warmth spread outward to the chilled faces of children in the corridor. He said: "Go away." But elusive children slipped by him. "Stay out! This is for adults." He discovered there was no way to keep the children out. The crowding Esks were so solicituous of their children that they smilingly ignored his protests and pushed their children past him into the darkly warm Audience Room. The women carried their babies in their arms into the heavenly warmth. The room jammed with all # Esks. He'd intended only the # adults. Shouldertoshoulder, luxuriating in warmth, the Esks were smiling sleepily at the black curtain Dr. West had arranged to conceal the loudspeaker. Now they were peering with recognition, with whispering excitement, at the life-size portrait Dr. West had created on the black curtain with white paint. Before leaving the dim room, Dr. West switched on the spotlight. Against the curtain, the spotlight's circle enshrined the immense snow whiteness of the polar bear. Hypnotically humming behind, the curtain, the electric fan made the curtain undulate, and the bear moved. In the sleepy warmth, long staring into or from the centered whiteness, the gigantic polar bear seemed, even to Dr. West's eyes, to be enlarging. Children whimpered, gasping for breath in the thickening atmosphere. Dr. West slipped out of the overcrowded Audience Room into the cold reality of the corridor. He hurried along the concrete corridor to the Control Room. Plis heart drumming with excitement, he stared at the closedcircuit image being transmitted to the telescreen from the Audience Room. He pursed his lips and blew softly against the microphone on the control panel. On the telescreen, from the Audience Room, the thickly crowded Esks seemed to sway. He was seeing them from the camera eye high in the curtain above the bear. He felt himself high above the multitude, as if floating above the excited smiling faces of the Esks. Are there instincts stronger than life? Dr. West thought, stronger than this multiplying like rodents for no purpose other than more life itself? Is this the end purpose for which the Esks were planted on this Earth? IX #T ook at me," Dr. West ' breathed in Modem Eskimo, and the Esks' eyes widened. He knew they did not comprehend his Eskimo words, and he inhaled, preparing to speak to them in the simplified Chinese that their recent Esk progenitors had absorbed during these fifteen Chinese years since they were flown here from the Arctic winter night. For many nights he had been planning what he would say, remembering what he had said before, remembering the prophetic excitement in the igloo so long ago. In the night, Edwardluk, who was not an Eskimo, rose on the ice, shouting with expectant joy, Edwardluk's arms reaching toward the Arctic Stars, ice-bright galaxies where man could never go. "Grandfather!" As. Dr. West spoke into the microphone, his plans vanished, and his voice poured out with unthinking freedom. " -- the darkness, the light from the sky, I am white bear, your Grandfather in front of you, all around you, above you, I am your Grandfather of whom you dream. Like a white bear from the sky, you see me coming for you. In joy your heartbeats are rising to the sky so that all become one with me. I in you, and you in me. We rise! We rise!" On the telescreen the images of the Esks swayed forward toward his voice. "You have filled the world for me, and now I have come for you and we become one again," Dr. West's hoarse voice paraphrased the myth. "In joy we become one!" Esk faces were shrieking upward with joy or agony. Esks were rising on tip toe. It seemed as if the hair of an Esk man was standing on end. He felldown, convulsing like a man being electrocuted, and became motionless, concealed by the pressing multitude. As if unaware of his fall, the other adults were straining forward sobbing with joy, and a woman fell among the shrieking, scampering, wide-eyed children who had been forgotten and were being trampled. "Grandfather, we have prepared this world for you. Grandfather! Grandfather!" He saw another man's face ripen in an agony of joy, and his hair was standing on end just before his body toppled. Beside him, a woman in joy had fallen, vanished. A slender man, barely matured, frantically was beating the walls with his hands, as if trying to climb. In the turmoil, children must be screaming. In joy, a woman strained upward and fell. "Grandfather!" Dr. West's face twisted with pain. He was crying. Children were being trampled. He switched off the microphone, which had transmitted his voice behind the black curtain to the loudspeaker. On the black curtain, the whiteness of the bear vanished as he pulled the switch that plunged the Audience Room into darkness. His trembling hand reached into the Master Heating Panel and turned down the thermostat controlling Audience Room. He directed the icy blast of air conditioning into the Audience Room. He stood in the corridor watching crying children flee the cold wind from the Audience Room. A few adults staggered out with faces waxy as corpses. They shuffled away along the corridor. A moaning mother carried her little girl who had been trampled. In the Audience Room, his flashlight beam flittered like a white moth over slack faces of ten adult Esks. He knelt, feeling for the pulse. This Esk was dead. "God help us all." Tomorrow he would guide the Esks to remove the bodies. His eyes narrowed as he went out into the light of the corridor. He was afraid to drag away the bodies himself because the Esks would see this. They might see a casual connection between the dead Esks and him. I did not murder them. They wanted to go. They were hoping to go. Dr. West rationalized. They behaved as if going was the purpose of their lives. "They were shouting with happiness." And I should feel relief, Dr. West thought. I can control their numbers now. It may be possible to reach the surface if we try. D r. West collapsed face down on his bed, groaning. It was many hours before he regained the self-control and purpose to get out of bed, to send the Esks back to the tunnel. But he found they were already digging. Much faster and more purposefully than before, the surviving adult Esks were digging upward and carrying away bluegray rock. They were smiling. "Smile at what? At what is happening up there, years above our heads?" Dr. West was not smiling. "Dig faster!" Broken blue rock rumbled out of the steep tunnel. "We are rising through a pond," Dr. West announced as if the loudness of his voice could make the stupidly smiling Esks understand. "You are digging upward through blue silt which has become stone. Yes, giggle. Do you realize how many million years we are buried beneath the surface? Dig!" He blinked at a chalky whiteness of a tooth too huge to be mammalian. "My god, how deep are we? We'll never get out." A clumsy Esk dropped another slab and giggled. Beside his foot it had split, and in this flat-faced stone there curved like a tiny white necklace a pattern of small teeth in a lower jaw. "Specialized teeth. Extremely specialized for a little reptile." He bent over this fossil as if searching for a key to its time. Within Dr. West's eyes, the pupils like dark mushroom extensions of his brain enlarged with excitement. He was remembering himself as a sleepy pre-med student, a zoology lecture and diagrams so long ago. "The dental formula of this little ' creature in my hand -- " Incisors ##. Canines ##. Premolars ##. Molars ##. A little shrewlike animal? "Beautiful! We're going to escape from these damn dinosaurs." He laughed too loudly. "Dig, Already, I think, we're up in the Late Cretaceous. We're  burrowing up into the Paleocene, up toward the Eocene. We may be the surface," he said with irony. "We're clawing at the bottom of the Age of Mammals." "It means nothing to you because you were not born of this planet," he told the patiently smiling faces of the Esks. "But to me! Do you know," he laughed, "we're already entering the top layer of my planet's cake. We're already standing on top gling up from the hot rocks of this planet. It's my planet, not yours." "Eh?" "Smile. Dig! We'll reach the surface and find out whose planet it is." Dr. West stalked off toward the Control Room because he needed to talk to a human being. "I found mammalian teeth!" Dr. West's lonely voice rose with boyish excitement. "We'll get out of here. Digging up through -- life," he laughed, "from the bottom up -- " Tapeworm, kill me, fiend, please free me, Mao Ill's thoughs screamed soundlessly into Dr. West's brain. Have you no humane conception of euthanasia? Press the pillow against my face. So simple. Lean on it. Please. But Dr. West walked away from the agony of paralysis, his fingernails gouging his palms. Ishould kill him. He knew he was vacillating within neurotic indecisiveness. He passed the Esk servant approaching to pour water into Mao Ill's throat tubes as if tending a vegetable. "When he dies, I'll be alone for four or five years." Dr. West walked in sweat. "Alone with more Esks every day unless I -- " Dr. West procrastinated. View and beautiful little girls ' and boys scampered in the corridor, laughing and playing in their world. Stream-bed gravel rattled out of the long #degree tunnel for them to play with, followed by a thud of mineralized bone. "Yes, giggle. Heavy rock for little girl. But I see an Oligocene beast with bones like small tuskless elephant. Perhaps you have a right to laugh. Perhaps this bone you are playing with is only an evolutionary deadend." He knew he had to kill more of these people. When he opened his eyes, Dr. West stared at a fanlike spread of smaller bones in a watersmoothed boulder. "Fragile as a little hand. "Dammit!" He felt anger at the prehistoric stream bed for eroding strata, treacherously restacking fossils and disordering time. "Protosimian fingers. But where are we? Up to Miocene? No. I feel as though we're still buried at least # face." Dr. West procrastinated, slept poorly as he chilled the vault preparartory to luring the Esks back to the Audience Room where the white bear waited. He faced the day with the horror and fascination of an executioner, a torero, a bomber pilot. As he watched on the telescreen the closed-circuit transmission of the Esks jamming into the Audience Room, he felt nauseated. His face twisted in a sour smile. "Either I'm burdened with abnormal guilt feelings, or -- " His fingers played with the microphone switch. If I don't do this -- He thought of ancient military men stationed at Buchenwald and other airfields throughout the world. Was it delighted horror which squirmed within their armor of pride in professional skill and devotion to duty? "It is justified because there is not enough food. I must do it as quickly and painlessly as my skill will allow. They would all die anyway -- some day." "Look at me, coming down to you -- " Afterward he showed the surviving adults how to stack the bodies neatly in the freezing chamber which once had contained food. He tried to give first aid to children who had been crushed in the ecstatic stampede. He tried to comfort children whose mothers now were refrigerated. And he shoved a surviving male up the tunnel to dig. In loneliness he walked back to the familiar hatred of D r. West laughed thinly. "The Esks say those who have died have risen into happiness." Tapeworm, you tear to kill me. It cannot be simply because I desire death that you refuse to release me. You are not that alyzed, begging. But the tube Dr. West had taped in the corner of Mao Ill's mouth implacably seeped liquid nourishment into Mao Ill's stomach. Tapeworm, when your host dies do you fear everything dies? When I die, you die! I die: the of tapeworms who exist only in my consciousness, of course you try to keep me alive. You fear without me -- "Taunting me won't make me kill you," Dr. West muttered. But I need to die. Torturer! Let me die. His face twisting with sympathetic pain, Dr. West walked away in a closing circle of loneliness like a clear ice cave. He suspected at least three years stretched ahead before the Esk tunnel possibly could reach the surface. I'll lose control of myself before then, alone with my victims, smiling Esks, Dr. West thought. God help me, and up above, on the surface of the ing faceless Esks! Dr. West walked into the bathroom and stared at the razor blade. I'll leave now. The razor blade gleamed between his fingertips. "You sick coward, you'd never find out what happens!" Dr. West threw the razor blade into the wash basin. He glimpsed his wry, thin face turning in the mirror as he walked out of the bathroom. He walked back toward the cruel little prison which was Mao Ill's body. And on past it away from corridor where smiling Esk children scampered away and the handful of breeding adults carried sand and rock from the tunnel to the supply room where more heaps of sand replaced sacks of rice each day. "Dig faster!' he shouted uselessly up the thin tunnel which had only elbow room for one Esk to dig at a time, and a rattling of descending rocks rolled down at him. "Miocene dust, a local dry period, you stupidly smiling geologists. Yes, smile at the brown ridge on this rock. Smile stupidly because the little animal whose straight femur this was, who crept down to drink, may have been my ancestor. He sure as hell wasn't yours!" Brown stone from hardened grasslands, then darker stone formed in temperate forests slid down the tunnel each day, gradually reddening to rain-leached laterite stone typical of rain forests. "The rainy sweep of the cycle, and now blue swampy clay." In a discharge of blue slabs from the tunnel tumbled a massive thud, a giant's bone, followed by an odd-shaped white -- "A flat tooth as big as a spade. A shoveljawed mastoyears from the surface." "Dig!" Dr. West laughed like a crazy man. "Dig, you smiling fools, at this rate only two more years to go. Your children will see the sun." You won't. Dr. West thought, staring at the bent back of an Esk woman sweeping little rocks into a frying pan. He glanced toward the supply room. Always too many mouths were being born again. He counted sacks of rice. Again the white bear. Grandfather Bear, if you are up there in the sky, accept these, your children. "But what am I?" He knew now he had the strength to reach the surface. "But is my world still there?" D r. West walked to the Control room to turn down the thermostats. With extra blankets, he bent over the withered alyzed man's trapped thoughts frantically raced and squirmed like agonized white rats. Dr. West stood in the screaming wind of Mao Ill's incoherent thoughts. A dagger appeared, as if a mind could stab itself to death with a visualized dagger. Now the dagger struck out at Dr. West, and he felt a sharp stinging as if the beginning of a tiny stroke spreading within his own brain. He bowed his head in the rain of Mao Ill's inner sobbing. Tapeworm, my friend, my last contact with life, please kill me. Dr. West's hand lay gently on Mao Ill's throat, and his thumb and forefinger closed on the twin faint pulsations of the carotid arteries. He felt gratitude like sparks of laughter from Mao Pressing in, his forefinger and opposed thumb narrowed the flow from heart to brain until the last vivid picture -- armies of Chinese children with white balloons marching along the pink walls of the Great Square turned gray in Mao Ill's blood-starving brain. Dr. West glimpsed a single huge gray -- What was it? A loud squawling seemed to emerge from within himself, and he realized he was seeing upward through the eyes of a baby instinctively loudly commanding food, warmth, love. A huge gray hand was descending. Into his crib? Dr. West couldn't see. There was nothing. He opened his eyes at the waxen West's fingertips there was no pulse in the throat arteries. From Mao Ill's brain, his own parasitic brain no longer could feel organized electrical activity. In fifteen minutes Dr. West confirmed irreversible clinical death. He did not freeze Mao Ill's body. Somberly, he buried it under Pliocene sand in the supply room, and smiling Esks emptied soup pans full of broken rock from the tunnel face on to that growing pile of debris, and smiled and smiled. "I'm alone with you now. I just hope that others of me are still alive on the surface." "Eh?" "So you don't understand. You see this sliver of bone on my hand -- from the rock. Wolf, hyena, baboon or undiscovered anthropoid, who ran on the ground upright -- I don't know. All I know, this fossilized bone and I are more closely related than you and I. The ancient imprints in my cells have been continuously reshaped by this your ancestors have been part of this world less than fifty years. I belong here. Your progenitor invaded. I think you were sent here for a purpose. Now you are digging upward. But where are you going?" "Eh?" Dr. West talked to the Esks a great deal now. It was another form of talking to himself. Warmed by fermented rice wine, Dr. West liked to shout at the ceiling. "Up there in the sky, come down here to hell, Grandfather Bear." Tut one day it was the Esks,  ' who were staring at the ceiling; and they were smiling, laughing, and running about in confusion. Shouting with joy, some of the adults scrambled into the tunnel, struggling upward. "No! No! You'll smother the man digging. We're still a thousand feet below the surface." Dr. West kept trying to pull them back, but they wriggled free, stronger and so much younger than he. Those who couldn't force their way into the tunnel ran against the walls, climbed on chairs. As the excitement grew, shouting Esks tried to climb the walls while their children whimpered uncomprehendingly. In mounting desperation, an Esk man stretched his arms toward the ceiling: "Wait. Wait for me, please." Dr. West grabbed an Esk woman. "Dammit, what's happening?" "Eh? Let me go, please. All becoming one." Her excited laughter gradually muted to frustrated sobs, and some of the Esks sagged down on the corridor floor. They seemed so strange without smiles. Esks slept in exhaustion where they lay, and their nonplussed children scampered around them whining and playing. It was Dr. West who had to drag the smothered bodies out of the tunnel. It was Dr. West who boiled the great tub of rice for the children, while the surviving adults sat stunned with disappointment. Lethargic, they had to be loudly ordered to work in the tunnel. It seems strange to see Esks who do not smile. They droop as it they no longer have a purpose in life. They cannot know what has happened at the surface, Dr. West thought. But their organisms knew something was happening, and now it has stopped. "You, there, hurry up, carry that sand to the supply room. We'll never reach the surface unless everyone works the way you used to." Something had happened up there. Down here the Esks ceased to mate. The last babies emerged too soon, as if cast out, spontaneous abortions, dead. Dr. West resorted to shouts and shoves to make the Esks dig. "Dammit, why have you lost your purpose in life?" "Eh?" Now the swarm of older children were better diggers than their parents, and the tunnel proceeded under Dr. West's constant direction. Their lives required so much more guidance and reassurance now from Dr. West, he began to feel like the father. "Dig! That's the way. We're nearer the surface every day." Pleistocene gravel less than a out of the tunnel. "Dig my children, and we'll see the Earth." X Oometimes Dr. West dreamed  the surface was green with willow trees along a silvery brook, and from his childhood he poked sticks deep into the water which bent them. He dipped his face in the cool water and raised his head. Behind him the surface of the Earth was barren and dry, all life obliterated. "Which is it?" He awoke, and when he slept again the cities hummed with life as if he'd never been away, and the humming grew and spread shoulder packed against shoulder in a solid mass of Esks spreading through the streets. Where were his parents? The surface of the Earth turned black with bobbing heads of Esks, and the humming rose while their heads drooped, and the Esks died in sagging masses melting into a golden honey, gleaming and flowing between the buildings and down the valleys. Like golden honey it covered the Earth, and he moaned as the humming grew louder coming down from the sky, and Dr. West tried to look up. He blundered into the corridor toward the chattering voices of the Esks. They were carrying black clods from the mouth of the tunnel. He awakened fully. It was hard dirt, almost rock, flecked with bone, yet blackened as if by an ancient campfire. His fingers picked out a glint of sharpness. "Flake of flint. Dig, my children! We've reached the age of Man!" He laughed. "Peking Man? True man? Who knows what man? Ancestor, we've passed you." He poked at slender humanoid femurs split for their marrow. "You Paleolithic cannibals! We're trying to pass you. By stepping on your heads, we'll get out." Day after day the dark rock became lighter colored, more sandy. Out of the tunnel bumped chunks of compacted loess dust. "The climate has dried. Cold dusty winds from the advancing arctic may have driven man away from this place. Is the ice approaching?" But the next day, in a crumbling yellow cloud, which had been loess dust, gleamed a beautiful leaf-shaped javelin head with delicately pressure-flaked edges. "Sharp as the day you made it. And this sharp splinter, was it an awl? We're up among the real men now, who outsmart the cold, perhaps in intricately sewn wild reindeer skins." Dr. West stared up the tunnel hole. "Am I the first amateur archeologist to make his dig from the bottom up? Dig!" he laughed, excitedly. "We are the first to have this perspective, a proctologist's view of civilization." As the tunnel extended upward, shards of fire-burned pottery rattled down out of the hole. "We must be up into the Neolithic. Pots are used to store grain. Deliberate farmers must have produced a more assured food supply, and the rules of Malthusian starvation have eased. For the first time the population is increasing rapidly, faster and faster. Dig!" When Dr. West with his flashlight wormed his way up the slanting tunnel, wheezing through dust, slipping on loose rocks, squirming past Esk children who had been sent up to clear bottlenecks in debris slides, struggling upward for almost a mile through hot dusty air which made him gasp, his chest tightening with warning heart pains, he finally reached the buttocks of the Esk who was digging. "Move aside. Let me look." Dr. West raised his flashlight to sun-dried yellow bricks. "Foundations. Must have been a permanent village." But the bricks above were fireblackened. When the Esk jabbed the crowbar up among them, crumbling bricks roared down, releasing a fall of compacted chunks of kitchenmidden against Dr. West. "This green lump contains part of a skull. Buried down in the trash of his ancestors. The green oxide was copper, a helmet or a crown. Already we're digging up through the graves of men more sophisticated than Eskimos." MPhe crowbar clanged upward against masses of harder brick. "A village built upon a village." Bricks thudded down, and Dr. West swept them between his legs, centered them rumbling down the tunnel. "More blackened brick and charcoaled wooden beams. This village had been raided, burned." A clod of fire-darkened soil contained a triangular stain of rust. "The killers came with iron arrow points. We must be within # years of the surface. Dig! We're only a heartbeat from the surface of man's long evolutionary climb." A clod slashed his palm. It contained white shards sharp as glass. "We've broken into recorded history. Perhaps your head and shoulders are in # B.C. among the descendants of the semimythical Yellow Emperor. Yes, armed with civilization these ethnic Chinese have moved northward. They built fortifications on the future site of Peking." The crowbar was dislodging masses of crumbling brick into the hole. "They rarely built with stone. After the roof beams burn, the protective tiles fall. Chinese castles dissolve in the rain," he laughed. "But in # B.C. the King of Yen began the Great Wall." A charred beam slid into the hole. "North China was overwhelmed by the Hu tribes. In distant Europe were they called the Huns? Already we are past the time of Christ. Dig! Before we reach # A.D. the Grand Canal will reach Peking. The population is multiplying rapidly now. Dig!" In the falling debris lay a green, gourd-shaped vase unbroken, its surface appearing spider-web cracked. Dr. West gently extricated it. "Already we must have reached the #'s A.D. because this is a kuan vase, and the crackle-lines in the porcelain are intentional." The crowbar smashed upward, and burned wreckage fell down. "Genghis Khan has taken Peking." Blue and white porcelain shards fell like rain. "Already we are through the Mongols, and you are poking your crowbar into the Ming Dynasty. We are less than # years from the surface." Stand streamed down from a rodent's tunnel. Above them glowed a little round hole like a luminous eye. "It is daylight up there!" Gently, Dr. West laid his hand on the shoulder of the Esk and took the crowbar from him. "I am your leader, your Angakok, your Mao, and only I have the power to break through to the present. Close your eyes. The future is blinding." Dr. West thrust the crowbar up through the worn brick paving of the Manchus, shouldered aside the thin new bricks of the Communists and lifted his head into the dazzling sunlight. '  'T' l he long pink walls within the Imperial City glowed with sunlight. The vast paved square lay golden with dust. Covered with motionless ripples of loess dust, the Great Square where Mao's platform was shrouded with Gobi dust. A distant chopping sound made Dr. West turn his head uncertainly, his ears confused by the echoes. His low angle of vision, with only his head above the wide-spread pavement of the enormous square, made the pink walls seem to lean inward. Arches appeared too close or too distant. Empty brown flower beds along the walls seemed tilted like brown stripes, as Dr. West blinked in the strange perspective of the Great Square and arches as if his head had risen in a Daliesque painting. His nervous gaze sought the sound. Chunk-echo! Chunkecho! So close he had not noticed in the foreground glowed clean white rib cages inthe golden dust. In waves of dust floated smooth white ovals. He stared at the shadowed eye-holes of the skulls. Esks or men? Thousands of skeletons lay all around him no matter which way he turned his head. The perspective made it appear to him as if they lay in concentric circles, as if fallen from a dance pattern. He blinked his eyes. Close to his hand a skeletal hand overlapped another's hand as if -- Esks or men? Dr. West struggled up out of the hole and whirled, peering down at the smiling Esks in its darkness. "Stay back! The sun will kill you," he lied. "My command is wait. Send down this word." Already he could hear his other Esks chattering in the tunnel. "Until darkness, wait." He stared at a fallen signboard. The withered paint still extolled Mao Ill's last Three Anti Campaigns : Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Revisionist, Anti-Intellectual. He dragged the flimsy signboard over the hole. From the effort of dragging the signboard, Dr. West swayed like an old man, his heart pounding. Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo. Turning, scanning for the chopping sound in the burning sunlight, he dizzied, the pink walls flowing past. He stopped. On the distant pink wall, the dark shape, the shadow of the shape, bent up and down. Chunk-echo! Chunk-echo. His throat clutching his soundless shout, Dr. West ran forward. Across golden ripples of dust, he ran toward the pink wall. He saw on the brown strip of the bare flower bed, shadowed upon the pink wall, up and down, the dark figure wielding a hoe. Man or Esk? Startled, whirling, cornered, the squat figure raised its hoe like a weapon. It is a man. Dr. West thought as joy blurred his eyes. He felt his face stretching. Smiling senselessly as an Esk, Dr. West staggered toward the man. The ragged man backed against the pink wall. The sunlight glinted on his hoe's blade. "We both are men," Dr. West blurted in Chinese.  die old man shifted his weight. On the chopped dirt, with his foot, he was trying to conceal something behind his incongrous blue tennis shoe. Dr. West extended his open hand, and the old man's eyes slitted in fright, his elbows rising, the gleaming snake's head of his hoe ready and poised to strike. "It is true I am an American." Dr. West spread his open hands in a gesture of peace. "A whiteman, but you and I -- not Esks. We are men." The old man's forehead creased vertically as if squeezed by conflicting beliefs. "These seeds are not to be eaten. They are for -- seeds." "May your crop be... " Dr. West fumbled into his pocket and handed the old man whatever he found there, " -- be fortunate." Hesitantly the gnarled hand closed on the pencil stub. Dipping his head, the old man abruptly lowered his hoe and squatted down. From a greasestained knotted rag he extricated a leathery strip. Twisting it apart, he proffered the larger part to Dr. West. Solemnly the old man chewed. Dr. West chewed the hardsmoked meat, salty as tears. "Where are -- the people?" Dr. West's eyes burned. "Working." The old man seemed surprised that the question had been asked. "Outside the walls the dirt has more dampness for crops." His hand fingered the dry soil of what had been a flower bed in the Great Square. "But my wall keeps out the wind. My knees ache. Before the electricity stopped, I was a subway conductor, not a -- " "Whose skeletons?" Dr. West interrupted. The old man's eyes closed, wrinkling, and his forehead wrinkled as if he had begun pondering a deeper question. "You say you are an American. I never truly believed that the Americans sent the plague. Our bodies, the stench in the subway -- None of the Smiling People were sick. They cared for us as best they could." "Then these are the skeletons of men?" Dr. West's heart contracted. "No, Esks, of course!" The old man's face showed surprise at Dr. West's ignorance. "The Esks are dead everywhere?" "I do not think they are truly dead. They joined hands." The old man glanced at the sky. "The flesh has been gone from their bones for a season." Dr. West covertly expectorated the salty meat into his palm and stared at the old man's leathery face. "Who can say who is dead. In this little world..." The old man ruminated his salted meat solemnly "... little can be understood. Circles like dancers. Many little circles joined together like a net. But they did riot dance." "All the skeletons are in this square?" "I think, everywhere in Peking, and in other places, all over the world I am told. They did not dance, although they were smiling like bridegrooms and brides at the sky." The old man squinted upward. Dr. West blinked from the skeletons of the Esks to the blinding sky. "What did you see -- up there?" "See? We old men know only the body dies. When men are hungry enough, meat can be salted, and it makes no difference to the soul. A poor man like myself understands only how to survive on this Earth." "What did you see?" Dr. West repeated, his voice rising. "They are all around us, I think." The old man turned his weathered face. "Years ago when there were not so many, we called them the Smiling People. We called them the Dream People. Perhaps they were smiling because they were in a dream, and they knew what was going to happen. Your face is angry." "I'm not angry. I want to know!" Dr. West's chest pain was tightening. "Nor I." The old man muttered, closing his gnarled knuckles around the handle of his hoe. "After the confusion from lack of rations, some of us killed Dream People. Not enough. Pulling out a few hairs does not kill the head." "What did you see!" "It is too difficult to explain." The old man glanced sideways toward the pink arch. "Some day someone will repair the electricity. The subway cars will move. I will receive my ration tickets because I was -- am not a peasant! In my subway car -- " The old man stared past Dr. West's shoulder toward the center of the Great Square. XX,Tith a hissing exhalation of  ' rage or fear, the old man raised his hoe and scurried out across the dust, running like a fat spider across the golden ripples of the square toward the dark spots emerging out of the pavement. "Oh god, they're coming out of the tunnel." Dr. West watched his distant Esks wandering out into the glaring sunlight. As the old man's diminishing silhouette reached them, his hoe's blade flashed high and struck. One small figure staggered, clutching its shoulder. The old man struck again with the hoe, and another figure slumped to its knees. Somehow he appeared entangled among them, but with his hoe he struck down, and his back heaved up, but his hoe did not rise. The old man's small figure lurched away. Empty handed, the old man ran toward Dr. West, his face contorted. "More. Again! Returned." His breath hissing, he ran past Dr. West through the pink arch out of the square. Dr. West knew the old man had run for help, for other men to help slaughter his Esks. The old man could not know how many Esks were spreading out of the tunnel. The consequences -- Dr. West's heart-pain clutched. He stared at his Esks emerging like lost children into the Great Square. Dr. West started toward them. "Go back!" he shouted. "Go back to the hole." He tried to herd the spreading Esks back to the tunnel. You are too late, he thought sadly at them. Your purpose. "Go back!" he shouted in sudden anger. You have destroyed my life, he thought as he pushed helplessly at them. Without malice, you have multiplied. All over the world your presence has hastened the Malthusian forms of death for Man. All my adult life, you have confronted me with my inability to halt either your purpose or lack of purpose. He was past anger. "Please go back." His Esks were smiling at the empty sky. Their hands were linking. On all sides of Dr. West, they were forming little circles of Esks touching other little circles throughout the Great Square. They stood waiting. "You are too late. Go back." Dr. West glanced from the dark tunnel to the pink arch through which savage men would come. The wind moved. The dry air crackled. Dr. West thought he heard a humming sound. It was coming from them. "My god!" XI A #I around Dr. West, the Esks, their hair standing on end. They were smiling upward as the whip-crash of lightning blinded Dr. West. The lightning rose from them. His retinas and the visual part of his brain retained the lightning flashing upward in a static electric discharge as he lurched in the deafening boom of colliding air moleprickly scent of ozone, on his knees he groped, his hand closing on the soft back, the stillwarm shoulder of an Esk woman as delicately boned as Marthalik had been so many years ago, and Dr. West cried out. His sight was returning, but he was afraid to look upward. All around him lay the fallen bodies of the Esks in their dance patterns. He thought he heard the humming sound above his head. Crouched in the dust, instinctively he clung to the Earth. His eyes closed tightly as fists. In tightening pain his heart labored. Because he had almost seen the end, he thought he understood the beginning. Fifty years ago the huge shell had fallen down through the polar inbending of the Earth's magnetic lines of force, down through the weak inturning in the Earth's ionospheric radiation belts, smashing down on the Boothia Peninsula near the North Magnetic Pole. Oh god, why couldn't it have fallen on the lifeless South Magnetic Pole? Are your eggs waiting at random through the Universe? He was afraid to look up as the humming grew inside his skull. His evasive mind fled backward. Fifty years ago a young Eskimo stared at the Burned Place, Dr. West thought frantically. Peterluk, yes, with his grimy finger he would have poked whatever lay within the inner shell. He stood too close to -- Sharp heart pains reflected from Dr. West's chest down the inside of his left arm. Momentarily his thoughts blurred as if something overlapped his brain. From the nucleus of the shell did a repatterning flow through Peterluk to his gonads? Yes, you altered his genetic material for your purpose. Dr. West's face twisted in a tired smile as his thoughts fled backward in time. Peterluk's fanciful explanation of the first Esk emerging as a fully grown baby-man from the splitting hump of a dying monster had been an inexplicable lie. His wife Eevvaalik's explanation that the first Esk born was a month after a huge glass hypodermic repeatedly violated her, in artificial insemination, was only half a lie. Fes, lustful Peterluk carried your purpose to Eevvaalik's uterus, Dr. West thought, where it grew more efficiently than the babies of our purpose. Your Esks had the advantage of a one-month gestation period and more rapid maturation for each generation until your purpose almost covered my Earth. His hand pressing his chest, his momentarily easing pain. Dr. West smiled. Those unsophisticated Esks believed you were coming down for them. For them you become the true myth of power like a huge white Grandfather Polar Bear coming down. But I know your pattern already was in them. Adaptability! Smiling, smiling, your Esks instinctively behaved in a nonviolent manner. Non-violence enabled their maximum survival and multiplication in the peculiar environment of this particular planet at this time. But your time-fuse was burning in them. Cued, your Esks joined patterns for -- who? Dr. West wanted to look up. Joining hands, he thought, Esks looking upward. Upward toward your purpose, your purpose -- 'jT'Yr. West looked up at the sky. " Dazzling blue, the sky was visually empty, but Dr. West was seeing sparkling representational patterns impressed directly in his brain. With his eyes there was nothing up there with sufficient molecular density to be seen. But in the visual portion of his brain he was being communicated with -- He understood. He was being shown a diagrammatic pattern in a brain, flowing thoughts, circling memories. Transmitting neuron cells were represented as strings of sparkling dots. Electric potentials within cells discharged in sequence, symbolic dots blinking in succession like the falling of dominoes, symbolizing the flow of conscious thought. The essence of life. All around Dr. West in the Great Square the Esks lay dead. The vital electric flowings which had been their essence, their consciousness, the sum of their memories and experience had stopped -- forever? Dr. West felt his chest tightening. From his memory the symbol for a single electron appeared. Surprisingly, it was trailed by an unknown symbol, a smaller dot. Like a graviton symbol but not graviton, it followed its electron as if it were a red balloon being pulled along a neuron path by an erratic electron-child. Everywhere the little unknown symbols were being towed in the brain's flowing electrical patterns. They had always been there -- in every living brain. Dr. West cried out from the pain in his chest. He felt that abstract brain dying. He saw the vital differences in electron potentials of neurons leaking across like water until level and in stasis. Unconsciousness. No electron flow. If there had been an electroencephalographic machine available, it would have graphed this brain as clinically dead. But the diagrammatic skeleton of what had been the brain's essence still was outlined in intricate, motionless patterns held by the unknown dot-symbols. No longer flowing, these unknown symbols suddenly rose in unison. They had been thrust free from the energy bonds of their neutralizing electrons. With artistic freedom, each rising dot was marked with a tiny plus sign, symbolizing a small positive charge. From the center of the Earth, against each unknown dot was thrust a gravity symbol, a graviton also wearing an arbitrary plus sign. Like charges repel, Dr. West thought wryly, intense pain returning to his chest. As in a demonstration of static electric force, which this was not, the positively marked gravitons from the Earth, as surely as friction-charged black rubber combs, repelled the positively charged dot-symbols upward. Out of the brain, perhaps of a dead Esk, rose the whole intricate pattern of consciousness and memory still outlined in the unknown dot-symbols. Dr. West was shown the individual pattern spreading as its massless dot-symbols skipped upward upon their temporary molecular perches in tire air, spreading up among the thinning molecules of the atmosphere. In the thinning air of the stratosphere, the unknown dotsymbols still maintained the shape of the man's mentality although the diameter of the brain pattern had expanded to hundreds of yards in order to find enough temporary molecular attachments for all of its dots. Still repelled outward by the diminishing force of gravity from tiie Earth, the Esk's brain pattern was spreading over the sparse molecules in the nearvacuum beyond the Moon. Now the brain pattern was being driven out of the solar system by the gravitational force from the sun, out into the hard vacuum between the stars where each Esks mind pattern was expanding larger than a planet. "Are they still alive?" Dr. West cried aloud. "Are they conscious?" I n his chest, in his mind he was given the feeling of pressure invisible balloons packed together by their individual expansions. Still surrounding the Earth and the solar system, they were pressing outward in every direction into the blackness of space. Toward the gravitationless void between two distant stars the outermost patterns were expanding toward -- shuddering, Dr. West's heart hammered with excitement -- toward an immense waiting extrusion from another group-pattern stretching in vast lightyears across the galaxy. Already, hours, days, weeks, months ago, after the other Esks had died on every continent of the Earth, the edge of the Esks' group pattern must have reached' this greater group; and Dr. West understood from whence his mind-pictures had been transmitted. His awareness was lifted through the blackness and dazzle of space. As if overwhelmed in a psychogenic journey, he soared outward toward the rim of the galaxy. Through myriad asteroids of shattered outer planets, he fell past mountainous space-rocks dotted with white domes. Like colossal barnacles, the lime-white domes extended green nets, but not to trap planktonic life in space. He saw those weightless green nets more widespread than football stadiums turning totrap the radiant energy from the yellow sun below. He fell past the dotted asteroids, their rack-digesting, white domes expelling white eggs. With unfolding purple fringes, the huge organic-stone eggs drifted away from the pressure of the strange sun's light, their purple sails diminishing into the blackness. Its fleshy fringe burned off, he thought, as it fell through our atmosphere. He was falling toward the third planet. The planet was brown and dead. For him, the picturization spun backward in time, and the planet became green and densely populated. Slender and with a seemingly infinite variety of specialized organs, nevertheless they were all of one species, capable of skilled psionic electron-adjustments of the genes of their unborn. He felt the frightened thoughts of a varied population rich in telepathic empathy. They had achieved gentle social control of themselves. But they had not achieved space flight. Their evolutionary climb was trapped on their single planet when the viral catastrophe exterminated them. All together they died. Their bodies had decomposed brown on their brown planet. Their stylized brain patterns rose across Dr. West's inner vision, expanding out through their solar system past minimum gravity asteroids into the emptiness of space. His heart struggled with nervous expectation of a miracle, but then he saw that their patterns, like the patterns of the Esks, were rising in nonconscious death. As in the brain patterns of the Esks, the only movement was the spreading apart of dotsymbols as each pattern expanded in space. Like the dead bones of skeletons, their dotsymbol patterns still retained the outlines of their neuron pathways -- and did not flow. Dr. West saw the dot-symbols did not change position relative to each other within a pattern. There was no dot circulation, no consciousness, no energy. Like the mental patterns of the Esks and of everything that had ever terns were expanding outward through the universe in eternal death. But we are alive! tr. West felt their crowded patterns pressing against each other, each lacking internal circulation and consciousness. In their vast numbers they were receiving more and more pressure because the sum of their individual expansion rates was greater-faster than the expansion of the outer edges of their whole group. Out into space there must be a limiting velocity for the massless dotsymbols, perhaps related to the sparseness of molecular attachments. Within the vast group, he felt individual patterns squeezing against one another in more and more vital contact. They vibrated wherever their outermost dot-symbols momentarily attached to the same molecules. But there was no overlapping of brain patterns, even though exterior pressure from the distant gravitational fields of other stars was increasing as the outer edges of the group expanded closer to these gravity solar systems. By now, Dr. West knew the group must be many light-years in diameter, and it contained no consciousness. The glowing dots of one symbolic brain pattern emblazoned on his brain. He saw that its unknown dot-symbols still did not flow as in a living brain. Yet he understood that the surrounding pressures had reached their absorption limit. Further pressure had nowhere to go but into energy. The energy was sublimated in motion of the dots within the individual patterns. Bead-strings of dots were beginning to flow. Along familiar pathways, which had been neurons in the living brain, moved the dots of consciousness. In the "vacuum there was little resistance to their quanta-skip, and the dots moved faster and faster, energized by the temporary pressures. We are alive! Dr. West's erratic heart struggled with excitement. Another massive pain cramped his bloodstarving heart muscle. As if personally defeated, he saw inescapable unconsciousness and death awaiting the expanding group in the infinite emptiness of space. He understood their fatal problem. As they spread out between the stars along the gulfs of least gravitational pressure, the group's expanding outer edges were relieving the vital pressure. Within the group, the life-giving pressure could only decline. The number in the group was finite. Space seemed infinite. Their massless brain patterns could not reproduce themselves. Their own numbers could not increase, and their individual expansion rates were slowing toward their limits. Pressure-energy was lessening. Even though the brain patterns of recently dead creatures throughout the galaxy were being swept up and by inertia packing against the outside of the expanding group, the pressure within was declining. Within the individual patterns of thought, the dots moved more slowly. Death was returning. XI XTow Dr. West understood the purposes of the Esks in the larger purpose. He understood the importance of dying in billions at one time. Striving for immortality, the larger group could not reproduce themselves. Nor could they reach in and kill the life forms kept them away. In his mind, he was shown again an insensible white dome feeding on its rocky asteroid. In this minimum gravity the pressure within the group was greater than the weakly repelling graviton quanta projected from the asteroid. A mind pattern was able to overlap the fleshy nucleus in a dome. The widespread pattern concentrated a node of flowing dots within the leathery tube of reproduction in the dome. Symbolized dots attached themselves by their weak "balloon strings" to electrons within the genetic flesh-batteries within a forming lime-white egg within the dome. In time, the egg was expelled as always into drifting space. For Dr. West, time was shifted in his direction. Genetically altered eggs on lucky collision courses smashed against bare asteroids as they always had. New domes grew and emitted new eggs with unnatural haste. As always, eggs bumped in space, exchanging electrical imprints of their genetic material. In the past, purple-fringed eggs, sailing by light pressure through space, had steered away in negative reaction to gravitational fields of intensity. Their domes only would grow on airless asteroids of low gravity. But now some genetically altered eggs steered toward gravity forces, toward stars and then away from these blazing suns when radiation stabbed with unbearable intensity through their fleshy nuclei. ets the aberrant eggs plunged, now attracted by gravity but at the last moment repelled by the radiation belts around gravity planets. Readjusting their sunsails, deflected, they streaked on orbiting courses above the radiation belts held by the planets' magnetic lines of force. Down through the weak funnel in Earth's radiation belts, down through the inward turning of the Earth's magnetic lines of force, the egg had plunged toward the North Magnetic Pole. Its fleshy sun-sail burning in the atmosphere, the egg smashed down on the Boothia Peninsula. With a puzzled smile, Dr. West watched Peterluk poking the fleshy nucleus with his finger. There could be no pattern of unknown symbols waiting to invade Peterluk's genes. The Earth's gravitons would have driven them out while the egg was still above the ionosphere. Within the egg's altered nucleus of electrogenetic material, a generalized electron-pattern was waiting. Since the domes are stationary on their asteroids, it is only through their drifting eggs that genetic imprints are exchanged with electric jolts. He felt Peterluk's surprise and chagrin to find himself lying on his back on the cold rocks of the Burned Place. Frightened, Peterluk did not confess this unexplainably evil fainting weakness to Eevvaalik that night when he seized her in his arms. In the rhythmically gasping sperm the successful one to penetrate her ovuum carried the altered chromosomes. These transmitted merely the generalized characteristics of adaptability, fetal growth efficiency, a one-month gestation period, an increasing maturation rate, more and more rapid multiplication -- and an unlit fuse. Future population pressure and other cues could ignite it. Joining hands in death, the Esks had fallen, their freed patterns ballooning into space. Too well, Dr. West understood the purpose for which the Esks had -- died. But they are alive! They are becoming alive! The great thoughts surged in Dr. West's brain. We -- they -- everyinto Now... with simple drug siore materials you can treat To get your complete 'One Way Glass Formula' Dept # #I Yucca St Hollywood #, Calif thing which has ever lived will come alive. When we have tilled the Universe there will be eternal life. D r. West felt their hope and excitement as he lay in the golden dust of the Great Square, his contorted body gasping for breath. The massive pain from his 'heart so filled his chest that the pain seemed to be squeezing him out of himself. The contribution of each life's pattern increases the vital pressure, the great thoughts urged. Life can be sustained for all beyond physical death. The feeling was sympathy. Excitement. Hope. In his physical agony, he knew he should try to reach back his hand into his pocket for the bottle of nitro. It might not be too late to take a pill. His thoughts were dimming. He felt enveloping sympathy. Surrounding patterns of the Esks still were transmitting the... saya Leslie Goodwins, dynamic Hollywood more! Use our services: send us your story; we do the rest! Send story or story idea (frony I to # pages, not more) for free examination to: #I Melrose Ave., Hollywood, Calif. # thoughts of those beyond to him -- with sympathy. Why else would he have been communicated with in this last possible moment as the last expanding patterns of the Esks crowded upward from the Great Square in continuous contact across space -- Twisting on his side, his breathless body contracted in a fetal position, and he glimpsed the blue sky so beautiful. He laughed like a naked savage with wonder and awe, but soundlessly. He laughed as his heart's terminal fibrillations stagnated the flow of blood to his brain into visual darkness, and he did not take the pill. Freed from life-long fear he laughed with amazement at the Universe of which he was a part. His last human thoughts wandered above the bodies of the Esks in the Great Square. He imagined a sharply questioning voice in Chinese. Hard hands were attempting to lift his body. But his heart had stopped long ago. The electrical flowing of his brain was completed. His upward expanding thoughts laughed with wonder and joy at the purpose of the Esks and those beyond. Now all we need to The clouds were lovely , graceful and -- dangerous! #Tdi eve me, this is not a joke," the portly tourist said. He was careful to face the man as he spoke. "We think you can help us, and my wife won't give me any peace until -- Anyway, all you have to do is look at a few seconds of film. Twenty dollars for your trouble, even if you can't make anything of it." The man nodded. He led the way to an empty classroom and set up a projector and screen, while the woman waited anxiouslyThe projector started and stopped. The man grunted and unscrewed the lamp, showing them that it had blown. He signaled them to remain and stepped into the hall. "This is eerie," the woman said. She was perhaps ten years younger than her husband, quite pretty, but temperamental. "Who would have thought we'd wind up visiting a school for deaf-mutes on our vacation!" "Well, you started it," the tourist said. "You and that hyperactive imagination." "I started it!" she exclaimed indignantly. "Don't you remember? That afternoon on the beach. All I wanted was to get some tan on my back, but you kept chattering about clouds -- " #T like clouds," she said. "They're so free, and they take so many shapes. No one tells them what to do; no one grouches at them." She nudged her husband playfully. "If I were a Confucian, I'd reincarnate as a cloud, and -- " "Buddhist." "Anyway, I'd be a cloud and just float along without a care in the world, free free free free!" "The Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation," he said, "but I'm not sure a cloud was their idea of Nirvana." "Free free free free!" she repeated. "Why are you always so serious? You have no sense of humor at all." "You wouldn't appreciate my humor," he said. "Now look at that cloud right over us. See -- it's almost like a face, looking down at us." She nudged him. He rolled over in the warm sand, squinting up. "See," she repeated urgently. "Two ears at the sides, two sorrowful dark eyes, a long thundersome nose -- " " -- and a big, ugly, voluminous, gassy mouth," he agreed irritably. "Wide open." "Half open." "You talk more than you look. That's a perfect 'O'." She studied the cloud more carefully. "Well, it was half open. If you'd looked when I told you the first time." "Uh-huh." He squeezed her tanned knee comfortably and closed his eyes. "Now it's shut again." He rolled over, not looking. "Why don't you make up your  "No, really. It opened and closed. I'm sure. Well, I think. ' "Yep." "Now it's opening again." "Is it winking, too?" "Now you're being -- " "A kind of cosmic Peeping Tom, staring down your bikini." She shut up, hurt. He reached out, but she slid out of reach. "Aw, now, I'm sorry. I said you wouldn't appreciate my -- I'm sorry. Look, I'll go get my time-delay camera and make a series for you. Then there'll be no question." She was magically within reach again. In a little while he lumbered up, shook off loose sand and headed for the car to fetch the camera. T he mute returned with a fresh bulb and set the film in motion. There were a few ordinary flashes of the beach and waves and the controversial bikini ; then the series on the cloud. Focus and resolution were excellent; the tourist knew how to use his camera. The sequence itself was brief. Fifteen minutes had been reduced to five seconds, but this too had been expertly handled. The cloud was revealed as an animated, expressive face, its mouth opening and closing in apparent speech. All that was missing was the sound. "You see?" she said. "You see, you see -- that cloud was speaking to me! Maybe its a new form of life, like the Saucers -- " " -- or something. Maybe we just never knew where to look for it before." "A cloud? A common cumulus humilis!" They had obviously been over this many times. "Maybe it's an alien observer telling us the secrets of the universe!" She could not sit still. "In faultless English with a slight Boston accent," the tourist growled, but his wife missed the irony. He turned to the mute. "Here is your money. What did you make of it?" The man looked at him steadily with an indefinable expression,' then handed him the rewound film and a written note. "This is what it said?" the tourist demanded, not looking at the paper. "You read the lips? You're sure?" The mute nodded once emphatically, then smiled briefly and stepped into the hall. T he girl snatched the papei and unfolded it with trembling hands. Then wrath overcame her prettiness. She crumpled the note, threw it down, and stalked out. The tourist retrieved the paper, spread it out and read it at a glance. His belly shook and his cheeks puffed out with suppressed laughter. "I like that alien!" he murmured. "I suppose our dialogue is pretty funny, from that elevation." Then he too threw the paper aside and followed his wife, smiling. "Free free free free!" he mimicked and choked over his mirth again. The paper remained on the floor, its six printed words revealing more about clouds than the meteorologists would ever comprehend :  If You're a Subscriber --  -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not con  tain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let us I  know what it is. I And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Today? 'Tphere is no school of science fiction less in the public awareness today than the one formerly sustained in Chicago. The Chicago magazines existed as an island apart from the plenitude of the East Coast, connected to the Main only by the most slender bridges, sustaining their own corpus of headliners, aspirants and friends of the management. Most of the local writers were people you never heard of, and most of them are better left that way. Essentially they have all left science fiction now, along with the entire collateral establishment of editors and illustrators except Virgil Finlay. Only the oldest and most widely separated segments of Chicago fandom still contain some people who not only share its memory but, more important, were in at the antediluvian watering of its roots. It's all legends now, and a yellowing mausoleum of mostly trash. This is no evocation of nostalgia; it's an illustration that there are, or there once were, other systematic ways of looking at this field. It was Carthage, it is gone, the law of Rome runs now without hindrance, but still the ruins poke up through the salt-sown earth. Great Science Fiction Stories About Mars (Frederick Fell, #), is edited by T. E. Dikty, a man from Chicago. An old hand in town, he has been editor or co-editor of at least eighteen science-fiction anthologies. Beginning in # and continuing through # at least, he participated in or directed the editing of a series of annual "Best" collections which ultimately lost out when Judith Merril came along. This book contains the following stories: "The Sound of Bugles," by Robert Moore Williams; "Nonstop to Mars," by Vogt's "The First Martians," Eando Binder's "Via Etherline," "Tin Lizzie," by Randall Garrett; "Under the Sand-Seas," by Oliver E. Saari and H. Beam Piper's "Omnilingual." It also has an introduction and a good table of physical comparisons between Earth and Mars. Now you'll have noticed something, I think; it's not often that a man given an opportunity to put together a book of seven science-fiction stories will include A. E. Van Vogt has not been a top-line writer in the world's estimation for many years now. again, we're talking about the public eye, and names that bookstore owners might conceivably recognize -- is that of fine antique silver. H. Beam Piper was a very good workman but never developed a by-line that sold books. And Randall Garrett, a man of passionate personal involvement with the universe, long ago taught himself to write in a manner that would never betray this fact to the public. This is not, in other words, a smart book. It seems to be, only, a book that Ted Dikty would have liked to read. Oddly enough, I expect you will enjoy it too. gles" is a pretty bad pulp story. to Mars," while one hundred per cent ridiculous, swings. Published in #, it concerns a daredevil endurance flyer who flies his airplane to Mars along the whirlpool of air being sucked away from Earth by the inimical aliens. Once there, the hero takes about ten seconds to set the whole thing on fire, kill all the critters, and save the world. It is to laugh; nevertheless, it's a great and effective story. Although the relationship between the hero and the girl is modeled exactly on the poses struck by people in Frank R. Paul illustrations, the events in which they are involved, and the breathtaking rapidity with which they unfold in logical sequence, really do evoke a sense of wonder. A. E. Van Vogt's "The First Martians" is surprisingly coherent and, as a #I story, may have been one of the first places where it was suggested that Andean Indians would make pretty good Martians. "Via Earthline" is ostensibly a series of radio messages from the first Martian expedition back to Earth, written as if from a pile of flimsies on a copydesk spike. It partakes of the romance inherent in any series of messages from a remote outpost. A bunch of people go and have a bunch of trouble, and the last message tells us some of them are dead, with the others very likely about to die. Because the radio link -- pardon me, the etherline link -- between Earth and Mars is attenuating, we will probably never know what happened. It's what I guess you have to call a tour de force, since it fits no definition for being a story. But, again, as with the near as much -- the reader gets the feeling of involvement with these in fact nonexistent people in this arbitrary place. "Under the Sand-Seas" is by a Midwest fan who, circa #, wrote and had published a fair number of stories without really attempting to make a career of writing. But Saari's influence on such writers as Frank M. Robinson, Wilson Tucker, and a number of others was rather great by their own testimony. The story is a display of ideas, and though it may not have been intended as such, it's a series of nudges to the kind of mind that writes science fiction. You're going to have to excuse me from guessing how it will read to someone who simply reads the stuff for pleasure. He may find, as he probably found in "The First Martians," that the most important idea in this # story is old-hat. It got that way in #. Finally we have "Tin Lizzie" and "Omnilingual," both of which treat Mars as the locale for a fascinating technical puzzle. In the one case, having to do with the chemistry of Garrett's postulated Mars, and in the other, with the Rosetta Stone inherent in the workings of any technological civilization. The Piper, in fact, probably represents a genuine contribution to the real world. I don't know that you really could begin a translation of an alien dead language by analyzing its notation of the periodic table, but it sounds like a perfectly valid proposition, and I think archeologists ought to keep this notation on file. Readers of this book, meanwhile, will find these last two stories solidly representative of the kind of package-unwrapping tale Astounding was always sure to publish. And almost as much about an arbitrary place, called "Mars," as the Binder story. On the face of it, this looks like yet another in Frederick Fell's long series of mediocrities. You may be rather surprised at how much pleasure you get out of this mediocre book. It seems to be a fact a man like Dikty, who knows his work, will turn out good work no matter what kind of work he does. Bleached-oak modern it ain't. But it's solid, it's well considered on its own terms and it may even last. Earthmen and Strangers, edited by Robert Silverberg, (Duell, Sloan  Pearce, #) is a theme anthology, as you might guess, about contact between Earthmen and aliens. The contents are comprised by "Dear Devil," bjr Eric Frank Russell, "The Best Policy," by Randall Garrett; Robert Silverberg's own "Allaree," Poul Anderson's "Life Cycle," "The Gentle Vultures," by Isaac Asimov; "Stranger Station," by Damon Knight, Algis Budry's "Lower Than Angels," "Blind Lightning," by Harlan Ellison, and, finally, "Out of the Sun," by Arthur C. Clarke. There is also an introduction which seems to be addressed to people in their late teens or early twenties. It's a didactic book, showing us that science fiction teaches lessons and is concerned with social problems. By so showing us, it apparently endeavors to so teach its reader. There isn't a top-grade story in this book, with the exception of "Dear Devil" and, possibly, Knight's "Stranger Station." Most of them are pretty straightforward, reasonably competent stories. They share a tendency to get rather emotional at times, as distinguished from being emotion-provoking -- which is harder. At least, I'd say that about my own story, and if I'd say it, who wouldn't?" "Dear Devil" is one of Russell's rare serious stories. It's an unfortunate characteristic of the things that have happened to this writer that he rarely takes himself seriously anymore and thus substitutes the flip remark, and the anecdote, for the straitly-told story. But "Dear Devil" is about a Martian poet who strands himself on a devastated Earth so that he may empathize with the survivors of a nuclear disaster and a plague. Practically all these survivors are children. The Martian is blue, tentacular, not possessed of such human faculties as a voice or laughter. The children are uneducated, unsupervised, and overwhelmingly conscious that they have been born into a place that's hideously wrong. Both the Martian and the kids make it. It's a very good story. When I think of the many, many ways it could have gone wrong, it's a great story. "The Best Policy" is Randall Garrett writing a story that begins: "Thagobar Larnimusculus Verf, Borgax of Fenigwisnok, had a long name and an important title..." You run across something like that and you know it's going to be another story about an alien being which charges full tilt into conflict with an Earthman and will inevitably get its tentacles pinned back. "Allaree' by Robert Silverberg is about the effect of a chance visit by Earthmen on a world inhabited by intelligent beings who happen to all be part of a single, pathically linked group entity. The Earthmen teach one of the segments of the identity to be an individual and take him away with them. The new individual likes the whole idea at first, but can't continue to live without sharing, so he dies. "Call it -- malnutrition," the author says. Yes, and as far as it goes it's a meaningful statement. "Life Cycle" is about some old tricky biology on Mercury, wrapped in the old plot about how the Earthmen will die if they don't solve this scientific puzzle. Solve it they do, live they do, and entertain the story probably does. But I worry that all over the galaxy, Earthman after Earthman is getting into trouble of one kind or another and having to decipher the entire ecology of a planet before he can figure out how to get his foot out of the gum we found it planted in on Page One. What I mean by this is I'm noticing the persistence of this school of sf writing, a hangover from the days when most good science fiction was written almost exclusively for engineers and other technological types. Is part of Anderson trying to be the John Dickson Carr of sf? Is that bad? you ask. John Dickson Carr inspires my admiration as a technician and bores me stiff, I reply. "The Gentle Vultures" is a story about aliens who are waiting for the nuclear war that will render Earth helpless. In the alien's long experiences, no civilization which discovers atomic bombs fails to have nuclear war, and their policy has been to never fail to move in and pick up the pieces while being as humane as possible to the native survivors. It is itself a gentle story, told by a gentle man, and it reflects the kind of mind that winces each time it encounters any one of the thousand affronts it inevitably notices in the course of any given day. But Asimov writes this story as if it sufficed to say: "Here it is, I have shown it to you." This is not quite enough. For the reader is very liable to say: "True. Too true. Now what?" "Stranger Station" by Damon Knight has all the things in it that Damon brings to his best stories. It has contact with the truly strange; in this case, an alien being who is overwhelmingly alien, met in loneliness by one introspective, lonely man. His intermediary in contacting the alien is a self-aware cybernetic device called the Alpha Network, and in successive layers you discover that "contact with the alien" consists of contact not only with the extraterrestial being, and with the Alpha Network, but also with what goes on in the back of the human hero's mind. We are all strangers, to ourselves as well as to each other, and we journey from milepost to milepost, each time thinking we see our destination, each time discovering that we are merely touching the next base. Will we ever score? Well, that's the natural question, but for it this story has no answer. Neither does "Lower Than Angels." That was always what bothered me about the story, and it continues to do so. Harlan Ellison's "Blind Lightning" is, as usual, an unflagging assault by the author on the characters and the readers. However, there are times when what Ellison has to say outweighs his with the reader but attack him. This seems to be one of those times. It's actually a simple story about a human being transferring human hope to an essentially stupid and brutish alien aborigine. Somewhere in this welter of exclamation points and ripping flesh there's a raw sense of something conveyed from human to alien, and from author to reader. Finally we have "Out of the Sun" by Arthur C. Clarke, who is more than commonly vulnerable to the English disease of threatening the entire world with extinction at the drop of a twinkle. Clarke uses his scientific training to justify such postulations as intelligent life at the center of the earth, or intelligent life in this case inhabiting the Sun. Having explained to 'us how this particular life form could exist, he then tells how it could kill us all, and concludes his short story. If you signed anybody else's name to this story, you would get it back from the editor with a request for a rewrite. It would be an interested and intrigued letter of query to the author, and it would contain at least one compliment to the author's ability to write, as well as to imagine. But it would most definitely be a request for a rewrite, so as to make this light speculation a story. So what this book is -- and it is graced not only with an intelligent introduction, but with perceptive notes at the head of each story -- is another book intended to show the reader how intelligent science-fiction writers are, how soulful they are and how full of very good ideas science fiction is. It is intended to show this, of course, in terms the beginning reader will already understand. Therefore, it does not display intelligence, soul or goodness in any of the ways in which science fiction, and science fiction alone, might display them. It displays them in terms of what the reader already knows. This seems a fairly simple point to me: You, are not going to interest people in what they already know. This book seems to me a compilation of precisely the kind of story that makes otherwise intelligent people sneer at the field, or much worse, grant it a certain thoughtfulness, and at the same time recognize how shallow it seems to be. Larry Niven is one of the most promising new writers around. Snappy, ingenious and upbeat, World of Ptavvs (Ballantine) is the story of Kzanol the thrint, who thinks he has successfully evaded the disaster to his starship, and furthermore will be able to make ptavvs of all Earthmen. It's also the story of Larry Greenberg, whose mistake is less complex; he merely thinks he's Kzanol. This all comes about because thrints, who flit about space and know they are superior to all other life forms, acquire status by acquiring ptavvs; that is, slaves that will, under the thrint's direction, help him exploit their own planet and anything else he can grab off. Thrints are also sufficiently ingenious so as to have stasissuits available for times of disaster. This protective clothing it not only completely impervious to outside forces but permits the wearer to go into suspended animation indefinitely. Finally, Larry Greenberg of Earth is a rudimentary telepath, assigned to a dolphin-communication program here, who gets drafted into an ill-advised attempt to study Kzanol via an Earth-made machine which has an unfortunate effect on Kzanol's stasis-suit. , What happens is that Kzanol's personality becomes superimposed on Greenberg's. But since Greenberg comes out of the precipitating contact in better immediate shape than Kzanol does, it is GreenbergKzanol who goes out in the full conviction that he is a thrint with . the whole world spread out waiting before him and proceeds to try to conquer the Solar System. All sorts of people set off in pursuit of him, including, finally, the somewhat baffled and justifiably angry KzanolKzanol. This is nice thinking. There have been very few stories which treat telepathy as the phenomenon it should logically be. Most mind-reading as described in science fiction sounds a little bit like another of the Bell System's services. It's also, and not very by the way, a masterful technical device for telling a story. Instinctively masterful, furthermore. Niven, in other places, betrays the fact that he still has a few things left to learn about conscious craftsmanship. Which makes his innate talent all the more impressive at this stage of his career. Devoted readers of the late E. E. Smith will be delighted to learn of the appearance of The Universes of E. E. Smith, edited by Ron Ellik and Bill Evans (Advent: Publishers, P.O. #, #). This is a concordance to the major writings of the late Doc Smith, with an introduction by James H. Schmitz, a bibliography by AI Lewis, and, unfortunately, illustrations by Bjo. For its intended purpose, it's not only a good but an invaluable book. If there's anything you want to know about the universe in which the Lensman stories are set or the milieu of the Skylark stories, or if there's anything you want to know about where these stories may be found, and in what forms, this is the guide for you. Once again Advent has justified its existence as a service to fandom. I think the price is too low. A long Berserker Novelette by Fred Saberhagen The Throwaway Age by Mack Reynolds -- plus much more in the May Worlds of Tomorrow, on sale now! Ballenger wasn't crazy. He only followed simple majority rule! r  'he radios in the wall came on with a click, and a moment later African drum music issued into the bedroom. Bart Ballenger was instantly awake. He took a vote, and the consensus was it's Thursday. He arose and stood before the window and breathed deeply. Thursday was the day to settle accounts with a lawyer on Wilshire Blvd. Air and sunlight said spring. This, too, was verified democratically. Ballenger completed the early morning routine against the sound of music. He moved about his two-bedroom apartment, checking. All was as the previous evening. No one had entered during the night. The smaller bedroom was in order against the arrival of guests who never came. He sat at the counter-top divider, between living room and kitchen, eating eggs, drinking coffee. The radios around him, all switched on, played the same music as in the bedroom. He bobbed his head to the rhythm, visualized The Star Walkers. He was in love with the middle drummer, a girl named Angelique Roust. Ballenger had seen Angelique on TV and instantly fallen in love with her. She replaced his previous love, Miss Terri Paul, flutist, a person, in retrospect, with no bust worthy of mention. Now it seemed, over the eggs and coffee in the natural brightness of morning, fantastic that such a collection as Miss Terri Paul could have attracted even his momentary attention, much less captivated him for a single minute, let alone nearly five whole months. He vowed against eternity that he would never, never, never show Miss Terri Paul's TV tapes again, and if he heard her on radio, he would refuse to listen. This would be proof of his love for Angelique. Pie finished his coffee. The news was coming on, blaring out over the sounds of cool jazz. There were, in the world, the nations of crime and the nations of law and order; he belonged to the latter. All were democracies, whether they knew it or not, but some were insane. This was scarcely surprising when you considered evolution. Out came the letter: Final Notice! The amount, including postage, was #. allenger -- " began the letter, omitting the customary salutation " -- your actions indicate you have no intention of paying the enclosed bill. If this bill is not paid immediately, I will be forced to institute legal action, which may involve your employer. You will be liable for all costs incurred in collection. To avoid embarrassment and the extra expense, your check in the amount of # must be received by return mail. I mean business. This is the last notice I will send before forwarding the bill to the California Courts for collection. F. Terrace Watson, Attorney at Law." The bill was clearly illegal. Watson had been given every chance to prove his case: and had failed dismally. Item one: Jury trial. Item two: Superior court review. Item three: Supreme court decision. All favored Ballenger. Watson did not care enough even to present his case on the appeal, and Ballenger, out of a sense of fairness, had continued the proceedings on his own initiative. Now this man, Watson, was threatening the very nation itself. Ballenger folded the letter and replaced it in his inner suitcoat pocket. Breakfast finished, he put the dishes in the machine. Seven twenty in the morning. Normally time to leave for work. Switchboard opens in exactly thirty-five minutes. Time was a rubber band, stretching out. He removed his credit-card receipts. We will audit the accounts this morning. Prudent financial management is the foundation of the nation. The Secretary of the Treasury was summoned. Two dollars and fifty-nine cents, plus tax, for a six-pack of half quart cans of beer. Five cans were still in the refrigerator. The supply would last another month. The Secretary of the Treasury waived the right to appealand agreed the expense was reasonable. Three dollars and eighty-nine cents for dry cleaning: an unavoidable expense. Ten dollars, thirteen cents: a lube and oil job, rotors adjusted, fuel tank filled. No argument there. Forty-seven cents for a large chocolate bar. They called in the Surgeon General on that one. To the bathroom scale. Ballenger had picked up four ounces by the scale. Back to the accounts. Let's watch that candy. Ballenger agreed. Four dollars and ten cents, including tips, for dinner in the restaurant last night. This Wednesday's expense was sanctioned by tradition, and recent polls showed it was approved by eighty-three per cent of the citizens. Of the # he allowed himself for the period, he still had three dollars plus change. Close enough. The Secretary of the Treasury was satisfied. Snap! went the rubber band. Five minutes before eight. Ballenger phoned the switchboard. "Thank you for calling Meritt and Finch," said the recording. "Space research is our specialty." He said, "Ballenger from Accounting. I have some personal business to take care of this morning. I'll be in after lunch." "Thank you for your message, Mr. Ballenger," said the machine. r T"raffic above Los Angeles would begin breaking in another fifteen minutes. It was a twenty-minute flight to the office of F. Terrace Watson, Attorney at Law. Leave at eight fifteen, be there at twenty-five before nine. Ballenger checked the dayshift workers. Everyone seemed at his job. Pulse was good, heartbeat steady, respiration normal. Swing shift would be going to bed in another hour. Most of the night shift probably hadn't gone back to sleep after voting on the day of the week. They should be up stirring. Should try to get all of today's major business out of the way before nine, nine-thirty, so the swing shift could get their rest. Some sort of a proxy agreement really must be worked out, if it can be done democratically. We've got to send legislation to that effect up to the next Congress. Note: Cabinet meeting on Sunday should discuss this. Meanwhile, one of the problems was too many important decisions. The executive himself could do something about that. Should definitely cut down on the number of major decisions, keep them to a bare minimum, try to get them all out of the way before nine o'clock. No excuse for decisions in the middle of the day. A well run country shouldn't have emergencies. Yet the evils of dictatorships are too well known to review: an evolutionary failure of the organism. Strange so few saw this very point with the clarity of Ballenger. Promptly at eight twelve, he buzzed the garage of his departure and left the apartment, checking to be sure the door latch was set to lock. Two minutes later, he was on the roof. The morning rush having passed, the mechanical attendant had already assembled the blades. He stepped in, and the radios came on with the ignition. He hummed in time, tapping the control bar. Airborne, the Security Forces relaxed. Once again he had remembered to lock the door. The day-shift technicians, well rested, began to supervise the complicated motor activity connected with flying. The pilot stood at the bridge, in command, studying meaningful lights as they flashed their careful traffic patterns, responding with the necessary movements. Ballenger again wished there were some way to introduce more automation. Perhaps he should take it up with his Scientific Advisory Group. But if the what about unemployment, long solved among nations, but an ever-present internal danger? No! Better to have jobs for all than to have to worry about chronic unemployment. The thing to avoid was overtime. The union was very difficult when it came to overtime. Four hours off for each hour on. Once, after a very difficult week at the office, he had spent all of Friday in bed to catch up. The blades joined traffic. A t eight thirty, between commercials, came the newsbreak. It was the one thing he really did not like about the station. Ballenger frowned in annoyance. The nations of crime seemed to have the upper hand: an aggression in Florida, a war on the streets of Los Angeles. Incomprehensible. Pointless. He checked again with his legal staff. There was no possible question that Watson's demand was completely illegal. There was no legal way Ballenger could be made to pay. Still, this being a foreign affair, rather than a domestic one, you could never be entirely sure of results. Ballenger had long fought a mental battle with other nations for territorial integrity. To the things of the flesh, flesh; to the things of the spirit, spirit. It was difficult to know whether or not he was being ignored completely, for no other nation ever made a sign of having heard him on this matter. He called in the Secretary of State. We'll rest our case, said the Secretary, on external law. We will negotiate, but we will not arbitrate. Music came back on. He wished they'd play one of Angelique's records. It would be good to know she was backing him in this matter. But of course she was. Angelique was a nation like himself: a hater of injustice everywhere. Hadn't she already proved that, time after time? Hadn't she whispered it to him over TV? Of course she supported him. With the total resources of her body. Ballenger thought of his job at Meritt and Finch. Wisely, the citizens had expressed their will to him: never talk to anyone at Meritt and Finch unless absolutely necessary. If you don't talk to them, we don't have to be always making decisions. You don't have to be bothering the citizens all the time, getting the swing shift out of bed with emergency votes. So Ballenger kept busy with his punch cards and forms and rows of figures and files. Feeding the computer. Which was composed of an almost infinite number of little things going yes and no. With such uncomplicated fundamentals as that, it was a mystery the thing could even add. And Ballenger smiled, and he answered questions, and he never went out to lunch with anyone. Twenty before nine: a commercial. Traffic was unusually heavy. He had hovered almost motionless for nearly five minutes. Now a lane was open. The building was less than a quarter of a mile away, and he entered the descent level, checking visually. He tensed as an idiot pilot dropped too rapidly. Probably an emerging nation. What's the hurry? Moments later, he was parked safely. He surrendered the blades to an attendant for a claim check. The check looked all right. He walked quickly to the elevator and checked the directory posted on the wall. It told him the enemy was on the third floor: Suite #. Down he went. T#. Terrace Watson was seated behind his desk in the inner office, surrounded by file cabinets, an addressograph machine, a postage meter, a voice typer and a computer with memory storage. Watson looked up from his desk in the inner office when he heard the corridor door open. It was too early for the mail drop. Who could it be at this hour? His part-time secretary, an expensive extravagance which flattered his ego, would not be in until after lunch for the mailing, so he arose and went through the door to greet the visitor, presumably a salesman. Ballenger stood nervously beside the vacant receptionist's desk. He was dressed in a conservative suit, a style which had not changed appreciably for the last sixty years, in contrast to the vacillation of women's fashions; he was short, had a receding hairline and weighed no more than # pounds. Watson was a tall man, many pounds Ballenger's superior, with a face that was heavy from rich foods and the eyes of a dictator. Suppose the unsupposable, Ballenger's Chief of Planning Operations whispered. Consider every possibility, no matter how remote. A nation prepares for all contingencies. Merritt and Finch would demand an explanation for his refusal to pay this illegal bill. "You are F. Terrace Watson?" he asked. "My name is Bart Ballenger." And if Ballenger, as Chief Executive, allowed the job at Meritt and Finch to be lost, the citizens would most certainly revolt and throw him out of office. With no one to run the nation, it would become very sick. "Yes?" asked Watson. "What can I do for you? If it's about employment -- " "You don't know me?" asked Ballenger in amazement. "You are F. Terrace Watson, the attorney?" Ballenger was disturbed by this development. How could the attorney, who had written him so many letters, each signed with a savage flourish, fail to recognize the name Bart Ballenger? There was a mystery, here. What did the Secretary of Defense think? Watson searched his thoughts. Someone from one of his exwives? Someone from Ernie, trying to collect the little bit he still owed from the Santa Anita meeting? A process server? Ballenger brought out the letter. TJallenger had been with Mer itt and Finch for eleven years; he could never find another job as good. So Watson, at all costs, must be stopped from notifying them. How could Ballenger present a legal brief to Mr. Herreras in defense of his refusal to pay this illegal bill? Mr. Herreras did not even know that he was one nation, under God, with all kinds of different people inside him, and it isn't safe to talk to fascists who don't even understand that elementary fact. Evolution decrees their defeat, but natural selection is a slow process. "It's about this," said Ballenger. Instantly Watson assumed the stern countenance and demeanor appropriate to the profession. "Let's see, Mr. Ballenger. I believe it's about the overdue account that you wish to see me?" He reached out for the letter and glanced at the amount. "Twenty-three dollars and forty-seven cents." "I want to talk to you about that." "Well, let's just step into the office, here, Mr. Ballenger. I'm glad you realize just how serious this matter is. I'm glad to see you've come down in person to straighten it out. Please sit down." As Watson walked around his desk to his chair, a tiny doubt opened a crevasse in his thoughts and uneasiness leaked out. In the memory of his profession, which was long and honorable, had anyone ever called personally? Not that he was aware of. This was the most mail order of all businesses, composed of fleshless names, first-class postage stamps, white paper, black print, stern taped warnings for the larger delinquents. Human breath sent it into disarray, and Watson felt uncomfortable in his own office. Let us explore the situation, which may be delicate or fraught with annoyance. "Now," said Watson, after seating himself, "Mr. Ballenger, if you'll just let me have your check for #, we can put an immediate end to this matter, and you will be spared any possible future embarassment and inconvenience. If the amount is a little too much for you right now, I know we can work out a satisfactory payment plan. Many of my accounts pay as little as five dollars a week. I understand how people can get in over their heads on matters like this, and I want to be as reasonable as I can be." "It's not the money, you know that," said Ballenger, running the words together, still standing. Watson frowned sternly. He made it a practice of ignoring all letters from accounts which did not contain money. Had Ballenger written protesting the bill? "Do I understand there's been some mistake? From the account number, here, this is for some musical tapes, isn't it? Didn't you receive the merchandise? Was the recording poor? Fuzzy pictures? If that's the case, I'll have to go back to the company with this, and if their records are in order, and if you haven't complained within the required time -- " He left unspoken any direct threat. Ballenger observed that the attorney was introducing irrelevant material. "I received the tapes, they were satisfactory in quality," he said. Diplomatic Corp personnel came forward with advice, prepared with documents. The Secretary of State cleared his throat. "I think you will have to agree, as an attorney and a specialist, that asking us to pay for these Miss Terri Paul tapes is the equivalent of demanding we pay alimony. You have no proof whatsover that indicates we have ever been married." XTatson rolled the key to the   voice typer between thumbs and forefingers. The accounts, of whom this man was one, were purchased at twenty-five cents on the dollar in blocks of one thousand. A few were always totally uncollectable because of legitimate reasons : merchandise returned and not credited, defective merchandise, incorrect merchandise, unordered merchandise... Out of this group of ten to twenty in each block of accounts, one or two might threaten legal or other action upon receipt of dunning letters. Standard practice ignored them. They had no case; the dunning letters always complied exactly with the applicable laws of the State of California. Such people, however, were nuisances, and Watson considered for the merest instant whether or not Ballenger might be an unusually aggressive example of that type. But any suspicion that Ballenger was contemplating a law suit evaporated, and Watson saw that he was dealing, instead, with a maniac. New forms of insanity were breaking out all over, as a tragic consequence of universal peace. The sensible thing, Watson knew, was to stand from his chair, ease the man quietly from the office, lock the door and hope Ballenger would not come back. "You're perfectly correct, Mr. Ballenger. There is no reason for you to pay this bill. I'll see that you're not bothered by it any more. A tragic misunderstanding for which I apologize." Watson stood up. He moved to the side of the desk. Would more reassurance be required? It was difficult now. "I'm sure this alimony matter will work out, too," he added. Ballenger was outweighed by one hundred pounds and was a good six inches shorter than his enemy. One equalized such contests. He looked up at the attorney. So now he was going to be threatened with alimony. What was behind that threat? He was in trouble enough already. Better ask the Secretary of the Interior: have we ever to your knowledge been liable for alimony? The answer, in the negative, came back. Still dissatisfied, he said, This is a very serious matter; could we be liable without our knowledge? His Scientific Advisor assured him that it was completely impossible. "I deny any knowledge of alimony," Ballenger told Watson. "Just don't worry about anything," said Watson, soothingly. Ballenger realized this might be even worse than he had anticipated. What would Mr. Herreras say to this? Charges were piling up too rapidly. From his own logic, which was impeccable, sprang a new accusation. Could this man Watson know Miss Terri Paul and her sorry collection of constituents? Was there a conspiracy, had treaties been made against him, was aggression contemplated? Watson spoke as though to a child. "You just put it out of your mind. Go home and rest. You don't feel very good this morning." 'jp allenger felt panic. The Chief JL  Medical Officer said, I'm afraid we've run into another nut, here. The world is full of such nations, they cause all the trouble. This one, said the Chief of Security Forces, is a lawyer. Lawyers are the most dangerous of all. They can exhume treaties to the days of King John to cite against us. Watson, looking down on the man he completely dominated physically, felt a moment of compassion. Ballenger was sick; he needed help. Watson decided to probe the extent of this postFreudian psychosis, to divine in which direction help for the poor, disturbed man might lie. "You have some relatives here?" "The question," said Ballenger, "is an insult to national dignity! I am perfectly capable of fighting my own wars!" A little flicker of fear came to Watson. Against the power of a madman, his physical advantage might be cancelled. Ballenger might be capable of hurting him and, beyond that, might constitute a larger menace. The idea, half formed, that it would be possible to reason Ballenger into seeking medical attention, vanished. No other avenue of assistance lay open to the attorney. In the absence of criminal conduct, only a relative could have Ballenger committed. Watson could prefer a misdemeanor charge: but if the insanity were temporary, or if Ballenger could recover sufficiently to conceal it from the judge, then Watson himself, might be in an unfortunate and vulnerable legal position himself: a suit for false arrest, or worse. The thing to do was definitely to get him out of the office as soon as possible. "Come along, now," said Watson, reaching out. "Let's walk out here in the corridor." Once in the corridor, Watson could duck back in the office, slam the door and lock it. If Ballenger stayed outside, an anonymous call to the police might then result in his detention for questioning and lead to the court sending him to the sanctuary the state provided for such disturbed people. Ballenger shrugged off the hand. He checked to see that all his people were awake. A crisis was near. Once the man, Watson, got him into the corridor, he would be attacked. All the other nations in the building would see it, of course, but none would come to his defense. Ballenger had made no alliances here. His alliances were with the entertainment industry, in Hollywood, in New York City, in the TV industry. They were too far away to help him now! Could they even hear his cries?  ' would make! And could the nation, with the best legal minds available, refute them? Watson was one of the extremely mad ones: a prisoner of the past. He had not been able to escape evolution's cul de sec: specialization. Watson treated all the organic components within himself with total contempt for their civil rights. Logical thought was impossible with him. Ballenger confronted a primitive organism. So Watson was threatening to consider it as an international matter, beyond reasonable compromise. Ballenger had come prepared for that. Was all diplomacy, forever, for nothing? Make one more try at private negotiation. "You'll never get us before the United Nations," Ballenger said. "You know it's stacked against us; you know we wouldn't have a fair chance to defend ourselves; we're outnumbered." Ballenger sounded tire alarm. Everyone was appraised of the situation. Are you behind me, citizens? he cried. A resounding # per cent: yes! Red alert! cried Ballenger's Secretary of Defense. To arms! To arms! Man the barricades! Prepare to repel the invasion! Watson's hand came out once more. It fixed on Ballenger's shoulder. "Come along now. I think it's time for you to leave!" The Secretary of Defense told Ballenger: He's getting ready for a sneak attack! Hurry! Ballenger acted then. He declared a national emergency. The soldiers came forward, waves of them. Scientists readied the misslelauncher site and took control of the panel with flashing lights. Get out of my way! snarled the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of State. This is exclusively a military matter, now! Ballenger removed the missile launcher from its hidden silo and twisted to his left, firing upward, once, bang! There was silence. The sound of Watson's body as it met the carpet. Silence. We had to defend ourselves, he told the citizens. It was us or them. Eighty-one per cent approved the action. The pacifists, less than ten per cent of the population, had continued that portion of the work which had not contributed to the war effort. They now returned to full participation in the society. Ballenger congratulated the Secretary of Defense for always being prepared and put the missile launcher in his pocket. The Security Forces took over. He had touched nothing in the office. No fingerprint problem. Ninety seconds later, the Security Forces withdrew, and the technicians took over. He was at the control bar. The music of strings and oboes came from the radios. He looked at his watch. Just after nine. The swing shift people could get their sleep. He ended the emergency. He asked the Secretary of the Treasury: How was that? That's the kind of war you like, isn't it? Seventy-seven cents is all it cost us this time. Seventy-five cents for parking, two cents for the bullet. I run an economical administration. Some two hours later, when he was preparing to go to work, the Security Force people remembered the letter on Attorney Watson's desk, but by then it was too late to do anything about it but fire the Security You Men of Yilenee He hated men of violence. But how could a pacifist resist their armed might? # #T hate you, Raver," the cap-#tain shouted, his strained face just inches away, "and I know you must hate me too." "Hate is too strong a word," the big man said quietly. "I think despise is much better." There was no advance warning of the blow, the captain was too good a fighter for that; just the sudden jab that drove his fist into the other's stomach. Raver's only reaction was a slight and condescending grin. This infuriated the captain who, though a head shorter than Raver, was still over six feet tall. He expected some reaction other than scorn from the people he hit. In a blind rage he pummeled the other's unresisting form until Raver, leaking blood from nose and mouth, fell across the captain's desk, then slid limply to the floor. "Get this carrion out," the captain ordered, rubbing at his bruised knuckles. "And clean up this filth." There were smears of blood across the surface of the desk, and everything on it had been swept to the floor when Raver fell. The captain realized then that the blood was on him, too. He dabbed at it distastefully with the kerchief from his sleeve. Still, there was some satisfaction in seeing the half-conscious bulk being carried from the room. "Now who is smiling?" he shouted after them, then went out himself to wash and change. Though the captain did not know it yet, he was the loser. From the moment he had boarded the prison ship two weeks earlier, Raver had been planning this encounter. All of his actions, his earlier confrontations with the captain, the hunger strike when the Phreban had been tortured, every bit of it had been planned with this final scene in mind. Raver had pushed the buttons; the captain had reacted as planned, and Raver had won. He leaned against the metal wall of his cell, clutching tightly to the pencil-sized communicator that was concealed by his giant fist. When he had fallen across the desk he had palmed it. This was the reason for everything he had done. Sighing heavily, Raver slumped to the floor and rolled over on his side. It was no accident that his back was to the glass eye of the monitor pickup, or that the barred door of his cell was in sight. Unobserved -- and safe from surprise visitors -- he allowed himself to smile as he set to work. IT e had only a single tool, a nail which he had hidden in his boot sole and filed flat against the metal side of his bunk during the night. The squared tip now made a tiny screwdriver. His hand was a vise, and his fingernails pliers and wrench. It was enough. There was no one still alive who knew Raver's real name or anything about his earlier life before he went into crime and politics, and he certainly did not look like a typical microtechnician. Yet that was what he was, and a highly skilled one as well. The case of the communicator sprang .open under his touch, and the delicate leaves of the circuits fanned out. He went to work. There were only a few hours left to setdown, and he needed all of them. With infinite patience he disassembled the components, then rejoined them in new circuitry of his own design. He struck an arc from the tiny battery to solder the connections and could only hope that enough power remained to operate his device. It took a fraction over three hours to construct, and for all of that time he lay still, with just his hands moving, an apparently unconscious bulk to the watchers in the prisoner control center. Only when the work was done did he permit himself to groan and stretch and to climb shakily to his feet. As he went to the barred door he stumbled, then held to the bars with one hand and pressed his forehead against die cool metal. In the preceding weeks he had stood this way for a good part of the waking day, so it was not considered unusual. His right hand, shielded by his body, slid the wire probe into the opening of the lock while he slowly turned the knob on the variable capacitor. An RF lock is theoretically pick-proof, but that is just theory. In practice a trained technician can cause the circuit to resonate at the keying frequency, which is what Raver did. A needle flickered briefly, and he made careful adjustments until it jumped across the dial and up against its stop. This was the operating frequency. Then he went to the sink and cleaned some of the blood from his face and at the same time reversed connections so that the probe became a transmitter. He was ready. A#k en  ie hooters sounded v ' the two-minute warning for strapping down he paused for a moment at the door before going to his cot, which served double duty as an acceleration couch. The device had worked: he had felt the click as the electronic actuator had tripped the lock. The door was open. Just before the landing rockets flared he pulled up his blanket and rolled over on his side to face the wall. The rear jets kicked hard with #G's, and the webbing of the bed stretched and creaked while Raver pulled himself slowly to his feet. This was the only time he could be sure that the guards in prison control center would not be watching him. While they were fighting the deceleration he had to do what must be done. One shuffling step at a time, he drove himself across the cell, the muscles in his legs knotted and rock-hard. The stool's three metal legs were welded to the floor; he had examined them and felt their thickness days earlier. Dropping heavily to his knees he seized the nearest leg in both hands, tensed his body -- then pulled. The leg broke with a sharp crack. The other two were freed the same way; then a slow shuffle back to the bed, onto which he put the stool and pulled the blanket over it. The ruse would not bear close examining, but it had to fool the watching guard on the screens for only a brief time. Back across the cell to the door, through it, close it, lock it, and down the passageway. His knees crumpled as more jets cut in for landing, #G's or more, but Raver continued on his hands and knees. He could move about safely only as long as the rockets were firing. When they cut out, the crewmen and guards would unstrap and come out, and he would be caught. Painfully and slowly he dragged himself across the passageway to the connecting ladder and began to work his way down. The jets stopped when he was halfway down. He let go of the ladder and dropped. Since the gravity on Houdt is less than Earth normal, and because the fall was only fifteen feet, Raver did not injure himself, although he landed heavily. He rolled and crashed into the door with his shoulder as he came to his feet, throwing it open. Then he was through and running, heading for the spacesuit locker. All around him he knew men were unstrapping themselves and rising, on their way. A door opened as he passed it, and there was the sudden loud murmur of voices. Someone started through it -- then turfied back to say something. Raver hit the door of the locker, was through and closed it and leaned against it. There was no alarm. Neither was there any time to waste. He took a long, shuddering breath, ignored his aching muscles and turned to the racked space suits. The largest one, with its flexible fabric stretched to the limit, made a snug fit, and he pulled it on. If he closed the helmet it would draw attention inside the ship -- but if he left it open he would be instantly recognized. But the extra oxygen tanks would shield his face and serve a double purpose. The large refill tanks weighed over a hundred pounds apiece. He did not dare take more than two; carrying more might draw attention. He had to go left, so he swung the tanks onto his right shoulder and pushed the door open. When he went out he walked with his shoulder almost brushing the wall and the tanks shielding his face. Footsteps passed him, but he was not stopped. He went down two decks and saw the guard on the emergency airlock just as the alarms sounded. Raver walked on steadily, neither faster nor slower, though the guard jumped nervously and slipped his rifle from his shoulder and held it at port arms. "What is it? What's happened?" he called to Raver, then turned to look down the connecting corridor. The pulsating hooters split the air. "Who are you?" the guard asked when Raver came closer. It was only then, far too late, that he tried to bring his rifle to bear. Raver reached out with his free hand and took the man by the throat so he could not shout a warning, then pulled him close so he could not use the gun. One long finger moved up to the artery under the guard's ear and clamped down, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain. The man struggled helplessly for a few seconds, then slumped, unconscious. Raver was careful to lay him gently on the deck before he stripped him of weapon and munition pouches, slung the rifle over his shoulder and opened the airlock. There were shouts behind him as he closed and dogged it shut, but he ignored them. him," the captain ordered, his face suffused with blood. "Bring him back to me. Kill him only if you must because I want to see him die. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir," Lieutenant N'Ness said, keeping his face expressionless. "I'll need a squad of the most fit men to go with me." "You have them. What to you plan to do?" N'Ness snapped open a map and spread it cm the desk. He was. a career soldier, and after this tour of field duty he was returning to staff college. He explained with professional brevity. "The ship is here, near the base of the cliff, within the usual landing area. Raver can gain nothing by going towards the prison mines here -- and in fact all the observers place him on a #-degree course towards the foothills here. This makes sense. The nearest mining settlement -- other than the prison -- is here, on the other side of the mountains. It is operated by Puliaans." "The devil!" "Exactly. If Raver reaches them they will give him sanctuary, and there is nothing that we can do about it." "I know what I would like to do," the captain mumbled, clenching his fist. "You're not the only one," Lieut. N'Ness said. "But Puliaa has three times our population and five times our industrial capacity. There is nothing that we can do." "Yet. Some day, though..." "To be sure. Meanwhile, the escaped I prisoner is heading for sanctuary. He has taken two refill tanks in addition to the tank on his suit. This will give him enough oxygen to reach the Puliaan mine -- but only by the most direct route. If he tries to hide or dodge about he will not make it in time. I intend to follow at once with the best men available, each carrying a single spare oxygen tank. We will be light and fast. We will capture him and return." "Go, then. You .have my instructions." The squad had already suited up, and N'Ness hurried to join them. In spite of the need for speed he checked every weapon, ammunition pouch and oxygen tank before moving them out. Then they left on the double, across the plain and into the foothills, following directions radioed from the ship, heading for the spot where Raver had vanished from sight. "I have it," N'Ness called back. "Dislodged stones, footprints; there is a clear trail here that I can follow. Next report in one hour." He led the squad into the mountains of Houdt. TToudt. A ruined and gutted A world with its atmosphere stripped away in some ancient cataclysm, its surface riven and its metallic core laid bare. There were heavy metals here for the taking, all the power metals that made a voyage across the lightyears possible. Since there was still more than enough for all there was no competition, and the planet's surface was dotted with mines, each maintained by a different world or syndicate. The best of them were robot operated, the worst of them by human slaves. Raver had the temperament to be neither a slave or a slave holder, yet there was no other choice on his world. He went into opposition of the established regime, and it is remarkable that his opposition lasted as many years as it did before he, inevitably, ended up on Houdt. Nor was he dead yet. Once over the mountains and down into the Puliaan settlement, and he would be safe. The oxygen tanks were slung on his back to free his arms, and he needed his arms on these steep slopes. As he pulled himself up the face of the fissured rock it exploded silently next to him, boulders, dust and gravel billowing out. He felt the concussion through his fingertips and let go his hold and slid back down to the safety of the jagged rocks below. Looking through a fissure he saw his pursuers for the first time, kneeling in an ordered row as they fired. As soon as he vanished from sight they jumped to their feet and came on. Raver went on as well, taking a longer course that would keep him out of their sights. "We'll rest now," Lietuenant N'Ness ordered as the sun neared the horizon. His men dropped. The chase had begun soon after dawn, and the days here were twenty standard hours long. They were in the far northern latitudes where the axial tilt conspired to form a night less than three hours in length. N'Ness had considered pushing on through the darkness, but it would not be worthwhile. The climbing was almost impossible at night, and his men were exhausted. They would sleep and catch the slave before another sunset. "A two-man guard, one hour for each watch," he said. "Stack all the extra oxygen tanks here. In the morning we'll top our tanks and see how many of these we can leave behind." Most of them were asleep before he finished talking. He kicked the nearest one awake to help him collect the tanks, then they sat, back to back, for the first watch. The sunlight hit first on the highest peaks at dawn, but without an atmosphere to diffuse the light only the smallest, reflected part fell on the camp. The third watch, on the lieutenant's orders, was waking them up, and they were just starting to stir when the night exploded. It was light, flame, then darkness, and the shouts of frightened men in the darkness. The lieutenant beat them into order, and the arrival of full dawn showed them that their reserve store of oxygen had been destroyed. T econstructing what had happened was not hard. Raver must have crept close during the night, lain there, then walked in at dawn, just one more spacesuited man. He had put a bomb of some kind in among the tanks, then escaped in the confusion following the blast. N'Ness had underestimated him. "He will pay for it," the lieutenant said coldly. "He lost his lead by coming back to do this -- and he will not regain it. Fall in and check tanks." The spare oxygen cylinders were gone, but there was still some oxygen left in the suit tanks.  With ruthless efficiency N'Ness bled these tanks into his, until his was full and the others close to empty. "Get back to the ship," he ordered. "As soon as you get past these last hills use your radio. You should be able to raise either the ship or the mine. Tell them to bring oxygen out to meet you in case you don't have enough to make it all the way. I'm going on, and I'll bring the prisoner back. Report that to the captain. Now move out." N'Ness did not watch them go. In fact, he had already forgotten their existence. He was going to catch Raver. He was going to march him back at gunpoint. It would make the captain very happy, and it would look very good on his record. He almost ran up the slope ahead. The lieutenant was the lighter man, lie was not as heavily burdened, and he had the advantage of being the follower, not the pathfinder. Where Raver had worked his way around a difficult patch of broken rock, N'Ness went straight through, counting upon his speed and agility. He did not slow or rest, and his panting breath was echoed by the whine of the conditioning unit as it labored to remove the excess water vapor and heat. It was an insane chase, but as long as he did not slip or collapse from exhaustion it could have only one end. Raver pulled himself up onto the broad ledge and through a gap in the rocks he could see the tall pithead workings of the Puliaan mines. He started forward, and his radio crackled in his ear, and N'Ness's voice said, "Just stop right where you are." He stopped dead and looked slowly around. T ieutenant N'Ness stood on the ledge above, pointing his energy rifle. "Turn around," N'Ness said, "and start right back where you came from." He waggled the muzzle of the gun in the right direction. "Thank you, no," Raver said, sitting down and slinging the oxygen tank to the ground. "I have no intention of returning." "Enough talk. You have ten seconds to start moving -- before I pull this trigger." "Pull and be damned. I die here or I die back there. What difference does that make to me?" N'Ness had not expected this, and he had to think a moment before he answered. The steel edge of command was gone from his voice when he finally spoke. "You're a reasonable man, Raver. There's no reason to die out here, not when you can live and work..." "Don't act stupid. The role doesn't become you. We both know that mine slaves are there for life -- and a short life at that. There'll be no more chances to escape. You're the paid killer. Shoot." N'Ness estimated the reserves in his tank and the spare Raver carried and sat down himself. "You can leave out the insults," he said. "I may have killed men in the line of duty, but I've never tortured or butchered people the way your so-called Pacifist Party..." "Stop," Raver ordered, lifting his hand. "You're a victim of your own propaganda. It's all lies. We do not kill. Think for yourself, if you are able to. Have you ever seen any of the atrocities committed that you speak about? Other than by your own people, that is." "I'm not here to argue with you..." "Unsatisfactory, try again. Have you seen these things?" "No, I haven't. But that's only because we shot first and fast before they could happen." "Just as unsatisfactory, Lieutenant. You are avoiding the truth. You kill, we do not. That is the basic and important difference between us. You are the animal heritage of mankind, we are its future." "Not so holy, please. You attacked the guard on the ship, and last night you tried to kill me and my men." "That is not true. I do not kill. I rendered the guard unconscious, and I used the guard's rifle and ammunition as a bomb to destroy your oxygen, to force you to turn back. Was anyone injured?" "No, but -- " "yes, but," Raver said loudly, jumping to his feet. "That is all the difference. Our aggressive traits brought us to the top of the animal kingdom, now we to progress. We have this violence within us -- I don't deny I have it myself. But what good is our intellect if we cannot control it? Any man can desire a woman he sees in the street or jewelry in a display window, yet only the sick men rape and steal. We all possess the capacity for violence. Only the sick man kills." "Not sickness," N'Ness said, waggling the gun in Raver's direction. "Just good sense. This wins arguments. The sensible man knows he can't fight a gun, so he gets one himself and evens the score. That's something you people will never learn. We always win. We kill you." "Yes, you kill us in great numbers, but you cannot win. You do not change a man's mind by eliminating him. What do you do when everyone is on the other side? Shoot them all? And after you have killed every man, woman and child -- what do you do with your world?" "You're being stupid now. This has been tried before, and whenever the leaders are killed the mob does what it is told." "Then there is something new come into the universe," Raver said quietly. "Perhaps it is the next development, homo superior, a mutation, men who are constitutionally unable to kill. This is not my theory, there have been scientific papers written on it..." "All nonsense!" "Not really. Look at what happened on Puliaa." "Propaganda. The Pacifist Party there may be temporarily in power, but watch what happens at the first sign of trouble." "They've had their trouble, and they've weathered it well so far. And it is truth that a worldwide non-violent rebellion put them into power. It is what everyone wanted." "Lies!" "I doubt it." Raver smiled. "You can't ignore the fact that the entire planet is now vegetarian. Something happened. Why don't you look into it before it is too late? I'm not the first one to believe that those who live by the sword die by it." inphat's enough talk," N'Ness said, standing. "You'll come back with me now." "No." "If you don't come I'll shoot you down, now, and send men for your body. You have no choice." "Would you do that? Just pull the trigger and kill a man? Remove a life for no reason? I find it hard to imagine, I am incapable of such an evil act." "It is not evil -- and I have good reason. You are an enemy, I have orders." "Those are not reasons, just excuses. An animal kills to eat or in defense of its own life or the lives of others. All else is corruption." "One last warning," N'Ness said, aiming the gun steadily at the other's midrif. "Your arguments mean nothing. Come with me or I shoot you." "Don't do this to yourself, Lieutenant. Here is a chance rarely offered to your kind. You me to Puliaa and discover what it is like not to be an animal. Don't you realize the raper rapes himself? Who would want to live in the head of a rapist? So does the killer kill himself, and this is probably the only kind of killing a man of peace can understand. We do not like it, but by necessity we accept it. Only when your kind is gone can my kind make this galaxy the place it should be." "You fool!" the lieutenant shouted. "You're dying, not me! Your last chance." "You will kill yourself," Raver said calmly. The lieutenant's lips pulled back from his teeth, and he shouted with rage as he pulled the trigger. instantly. "I'm sorry," Raver said. "I tried to tell you; during the night I fixed your rifle to explode. You should have come with me." Head lowered with sorrow, Raver turned and walked towards the mine visible below.   'k  This month's editorial makes a fiat prediction: interstellar travel within the lifetime of most people now alive. In the next issue we have for you a "model" -- that is, a science-fiction story -- constructed around that prediction. In To Outlive Eternity, a voyage is under way to a nearby star. But... even interstellar space is not altogether empty. And what happens when a vessel traveling at sub-light speeds hits even the most tenuous of gas clouds? Poul Anderson has the answer; and it's in next month's Galaxy, with a Gray Morrow cover from a story by Roger Zelazny called The Man Who Loved the Faioli There's a complete short novel by Larry Niven, The Adults. Willy Ley brings us some honest-to-Plato real new information on that hoariest of legends, Atlantis. And lots more... won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, it any. No. CM # by Cullen Rupp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer ! Do you have a restless urge to write? If so, you have much in common with successful authors. Read how # Famous Writers are helping people turn a restless urge for self-expression into success in writing Tliei c's something different about people who feel the urge to write. They have a spiritual hunger that sets them apart -- even from family and friends. I f you have known this burning need to write, you, too, may have the gift successful authors possess... the recurring ache to put into words your innermost thoughts, your own experiences. Max Shulman started writing because "... it was write or bust." Faith Baldwin, after # novels, still says: "I've never written exactly what I dreamed I'd write... you keep on trying." Successful authors like these know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know how to gel started writing, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago they joined forces with Rod Sel ling. Bennett Cerf. Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith and Bergen Evans, to form the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they knew about writing into a remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing -- then specialize in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising Writing or Business Writing. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes over your work line by line, word by word, blue-penciling his changes right on your manuscript, much as an editor does with an established author. Then he returns it with a long letter of advice and guidance. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to the Reader's Digest, Rod Serling's urge to write made him a leading TV dramatist (Twilight Zone, Patterns, Retniem for a Heavyweight) and won him six Emmy awards. Ladies' Home Journal, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and more than # other publications. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing ability worth developing. send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. i ! Famous Writers School  Dept. #, Westport Connecticut # I wa.it to know if Ft-syd wfcthg aptitude j worth developing. Please mail me, i without obligation, your Aptitude Test I and #-page brochure. Mrs .Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City State Zip Accredited by tne Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. JU.Mt galaxy # ANDERSON  NiVEN . LEY and others !  by Pool Anderson by Larry Niven by Roger Zelazny by Willy Ley Official Rand McNally Map taken from actual photos of the moon. This circular Map Puzzle shows mountains, craters, seas, basins and valleys, with frame containing information about eclipses, tides, and seasons. Map when completed #" x I # I # ". Made of heavy cardboard and diecut. csLxy Galaxy is published In French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published In Braille and Living Tape. by C. C. MacApp by Larry Niven by Pool Anderson by Gary Wright by R. A. Lafferty by Roger Zelazny by Jim Harmon by Charles V. DeVet by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Production Manager Advertising Circulation Director bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and'Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. #i # 'he dismal cience" is what Robert Theobald (that's the economist , Robert Theobald) calls economics... because, he says, economics is properly the study of the allocation of scarce resources, its basic principles decided when things like the world supply of food and the world supply of people to eat it were considered fixed (in a stable proportion of slightly more people than there was food to feed them), and now we know ways of making things abundant. We hear a lot of this dismal science, from some pretty dismal scientists. "Let's give up the space race so we can put the money into a cure for cancer." "We can't afford a war on poverty while we're fighting a war in Vietnam." Etc. These are things you hear from people who consider themselves rational and authoritative (well, that's a tautology; it would have been enough to say "from people"), and if you ask why, they reply crushingly, "It's economically impossible to do both!" Fact is, it isn't... and if it were, it would be irrelevant. At this moment in time there is a great deal of abundance in the world, particularly in the United States; and if we don't breed ourselves into squalor, there's every chance that there will soon be more. Abundantly more. It may be true, in a narrow budgetary sense, that we can't "afford" some of the things we do, but, as Harold Urey points out in a recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Egyptians couldn't "afford" to build the Pyramids and the Middle Ages certainly couldn't "afford building their breathtaking cathedrals -- but if they hadn't gone ahead and built them anyway, all of us coming later would have been a little the poorer for the lack of them. And, of course, the way in which the arguments would be irrelevant, even if true, lies in the fact that the sort of resources used in one project have little application to the needs of another. Taking a spacecraft-building project away from McDonnel Aviation wouldn't free one scientist or one machine for use in the biochemistry labs. All that is diverted is that abstraction (at least its an abstraction in macroscopic, governmental terms) called" money. But there is not any such thing as a fixed, scarce resource of money. There Knowledge Anyone can Know about A mystery is only a lack of knowledge or answers. Personal knowledge can be acquired on any subject. Scientology is the modern day applied philosophy, but its traditions can be traced back much earlier than Greece. Scientology can answer any question you have about yourself, your mind, life and the universe. Scientology solves all the mysteries. For example, Scientology solves the mystery of who is the source of your decisions. You are. You are the source of your daily decisions. And the only knowledge you have to base your decisions on is knowledge you have gained. Through Scientology you can know about anything. Scientology (not a cult or an occult organization) is an international association of those who desire changed conditions. Scientology is the technology of how to change conditions. In our difficult times conditions can be changed. Things can be changed for you. Write today for a free copy of the book "A New Understanding of Life". Within its pages lies a changed life. J The Extension Course Director, j Dept. #A, Academy of Scientology, j # #th Street, N.W.  Washington #, D.C. J explains how I may learn about Scientology  and changing conditions. i C ir'iontolnn  Tlia Extension Course Director, Dept. #A, Academy of OUlfcii liusuyy Scientology, # #th St. N.W., Washington #, D.C. is whatever quantity of money a stable government elects to issue. The stabler the government, the less chancy the printing of extra currency issues becomes; and in the long run the stablest governments are probably those which do the most things that their citizens want. Oh, there's no doubt an upper limit somewhere to what can be done. But it's doubtful that we're very near it. Not as long as there is a single man unemployed or underemployed, or a single machine not operated at full capacity, anyway. So the dismal science is for dismal people. If it's worth our while to put men in space, we can put men in space; if it's worth our while to build a thousand new hospitals, we can build a thousand new hospitals -- and fight poverty and N. Vietnamese, and fund cancer research. f course, if you would like to see a national budget in balance, for some reason of artistic principle, say, or because you just like things nice and tidy, you might want to cut out some items to make room for others. We have a suggestion on where some good cuts might be made -- and this is a Galaxy first; we've never seen this suggestion made by anyone before, and yet it seems to us so natural. Where to cut the United States national budget? Why, in the second biggest item it contains: interest on the national debt. Did you ever stop to think of why governments borrow money from their own people? Not because it increases the supply of money available to them; remember, they make the supply themselves. Not because they're afraid the oil company will halt fuel for the President's jet because of non-payment. They borrow the money only because they don't want it spent by the people they borrow it from. Why don't they want it spent? Because that would be inflationary. In short, they pay a bribe to prevent inflation to such an extent that the bribe itself, the interest payment, reaches such staggering proportions that it becomes the second biggest item in the government's own balance sheet... and thus itself becomes inflationary. Now, there's where real economy in government spending is possible. But we don't think it will come about, we must admit. It will fail for lack of public support. Oh, some people might vote for it, given a chance. But we guarantee that none of them will be the people who now so passionately demand economy in government spending... A RE the tales of strange human powers false? Can the'mysfefious feats erformed by the mystics of the Orient e explained away as only illusions? Is there an intangible bond with the universe beyond which draws mankind on? Does a mighty Cosmic intelligence from the reaches of space ebb and flow through the deep recesses of the mind, forming a river of wisdom which can carry men and women to the heights of personal achievement? Have You Had These Experiences?... that unmistakable feeling that you have taken the wrong course of action, that you have violated some inner, unexpressed, better judgement? The sudden realization that the silent whisperings of self are cautioning you to keep your own counsel -- not to speak words on the tip of your tongue in the presence of another. That something which pushes you forward when you hesitate, or restrains you when you are apt to make a wrong move. These urges are the subtle influence which when understood and directed has made thousands of men and women masters of their lives. There IS a source of intelligence within-you as natural as your senses of sight and hearing, and using now! Challenge this statement! Dare the Rosicrucians to reveal the functions of this Cosmic mind and its great possibilities to you. Let This Free Book Explain Take this infinite power into your partnership. You can use it in a rational and "practical way without interference with your religious beliefs or personal affairs. The Rosicrucians, a world-wide philosophical movement, invite you to write today for your Free copy of the fascinating book, "The Mastery of Life" which explains further. Address your request to Scribe N.C.O. San Jose, California # Please Include Your Zip Code When your sled goes wild you always have one escape still open -- even if if kills you! nphey called it The Stuka. I It was a tortuous, twentykilometer path of bright ice, and in that distance -- # miles -- it dropped # feet, carving a course down the alpine mountainside like the track of a great snake. It was thirty feet wide on the straights with corners curling as high forty feet. It was made for sleds... He waited in the narrow cockpit and listened to the wind. It moaned along the frozen shoulder of the towering white peak and across the steep starting ramp, pushing along streamers of snow out against the hard blue sky, and he could hear it cry inside him with the same cold and lonely sound. He was scared. And what was worse -- he knew it. Forward, under the sleek nose of his sled, the mountain fell away abruptly -- straight down, it seemed -- and the valley was far below. So very far... too far this time, buddyboy, too far forever... The countdown light on the dash flickered a sudden blood red, then deliberately winked twice. At the same time two red rockets arced out over the valley and exploded into twin crimson fireballs. Two minutes. On. both sides of the starting ramp, cantilevered gracefully from the mountainside, brightly bannered platforms were crowded with people. He glanced at the hundreds of blankly staring sunglasses, always the same, always turned to the ramp as if trying to see inside the helmets of these men, as if trying to pry into the reasons of their being there waiting to die. He looked back to the deep valley; today he wondered too... just one last time, wasn't that what you told yourself? One last race and that's the end of it and good-by to the sleds and thank God! Wasn't that your personal promise? Then what in hell are you doing here? That "last race" was last month's race. Why are you in this one? No answer. All he could find inside were cold questions and a hollow echo of the wind. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, until cramps began in his hands; he would think about his sled... I t was his eleventh sled, and like red, not red for its particular flash, but because of a possible crash far from the course in deep snow. He wanted to be found and found fast. Some of the Kin had never been found in time... they didn't find Bob Lander until that summer -- He forced himself back. Empty, the sled weighed # pounds and looked very much like the body-shell of a particularly sleek racer but with a full bubble canopy and with runners instead of wheels. It was a meanlooking missile, low and lean, hardly wider than his shoulders, clearing the ice by barely two inches. He sat nearly reclining, the half wheel in his lap, feet braced on the two edging pedals -- and this was the feature that made these sleds the awesome things they were. They could tilt their runners -- four hollowground, chrome-steel "skis" -- edging them against the ice like wide skate blades. This was what had changed bobsledding into... this: this special thing with its special brotherhood, this clan apart, this peculiar breed of men set aside for the wonder of other men. The Kin, they called themselves... someone once, laughing, had said, "Without peer, we are the world's fastest suicides." He snapped himself back again and checked his brakes. By pulling back on the wheel, two electrically operated flaps -- actually halves of the sled's tail section -- swung out on either side. Silly to see, perhaps. But quite effective when this twelve and a half square feet hit the airstream at eighty mph. A button under his right thumb operated another braking system: with each push it fired forward a solid rocket charge in the nose of the sled. There were seven charges, quite often not enough. But when everything failed, including the man, there was the lever by his left hip. The Final Folly, it was called; a firm pull and, depending on a hundred unknown "if's" and "maybe's," he might be lucky enough to find himself hanging from a parachute some # feet up. Or it' might be the last voluntary act of his life. He had used it twice. Once steaking into the tall wall of the Wingover, he had lost a runner... and was almost fired into the opposite grandstand, missing the top tier of seats by less than four feet. Another time six sleds suddenly tangled directly in front of him, and he had blasted himself through the over-hanging limbs of a large fir tree. But others had not been so lucky. ans Kroger: they finally dug his body out of eighteen feet of snow ; he'd gone all the way to the dirt. His sled had been airborne when he blew -- and upside-down! Jarl Yorgensen: his sled tumbling and he ejected directly under the following sleds. No one was certain that all of him was ever found! Max Conrad: a perfect blowout! At least # feet up and slightly downhill... His chute never opened. Wayne Barley: -- He jarred himself hard in the cockpit and felt the sudden seizure of his G-suit. He wanted to hit something. But he could feel the watching eyes and the TV cameras, and there wasn't room in the cockpit to get a decent swing anyway. His countdown light flickered for attention and blinked once, and a single red rocket flashed into the sky. One minute -- God, had time stopped? But that was part of it all : the waiting, the God-awful waiting, staring down at the valley over a mile below. And how many men had irrevocably slammed back their canopy in this lifetime of two minutes and stayed behind? A few, yes. And he could too. Simply open his canopy, that was the signal, and when the start came the other sleds would dive down and away and he would be sitting here alone. But, God, so alone! And he would be alone for the rest of his life. He might see some of the Kin again, sometime, somewhere. But they would not see him. It was a kind of death to stay behind... and a real death to go. Death, the silent rider with every man in every race... He frowned at the other sleds, sixteen in staggered rows of eight. Sixteen bright and beautiful, trim fast projectiles hanging from their starting clamps. He knew them, every one; they were his brothers. They were the Kin -- but not here. Not now. Years ago when he was a novice he had asked old Franz Cashner, "Did you see the way I took Basher Bend right beside you?" And Franz told him, "Up there I see nobody! Only sleds! Down here you are you, up there you are nothing but another sled. That's all! And don't forget that! That's all! And don't forget that!"... and it had to be that way. On the course sleds crashed and were no more... Only later, in the valley, were there men missing. vf these sixteen, chances were that nine would finish. With luck, maybe ten. And chances also said that only fourteen of these men would be alive tonight. Those were the odds, as hard and cold as the ice, the fascinating frosting for this sport. Violent death! Assured, spectacular, magnetic death in a sport such as the world had never known. Incredible men with incredible skills doing an incredible thing. Back in the Sixties they claimed an empty sled with its steering locked would make a course all by itself. An empty sled here would not last two corners. The Stuka was a cold killer, not a thrill ride. And it was not particular. It killed veterans and novices alike. But there was # for the man who got to the end of it first, and a whole month before he had to do it again. Money and fame and all the girls in the world. Everything and anything for the men who rode the Stuka. Was that why they did it?... yes, always that question: " Why do you do it?" And before he had died on the Plummet, Sir Robert Brooke had told them, "Well, why not?" And it was an answer as good as any. But was it good enough this time? No answer. He only knew there was but one way off this mountain for him now and that was straight ahead, and for the first time since his novice runs, his legs were trembling. Twelve and a half miles, call it, and the record was # minutes, # seconds! An average speed of # mph, and that was his record. They would at least remember him by that! His countdown light flashed, a green rocket rose and burst, and there was a frozen moment... the quiet click of the release hook, the lazy, slow-motion start, the sleds sliding forward in formation over the edge... then he was looking once again into the terrible top of the Stuka -- that #degree, quarter-mile straight drop. In six seconds he was doing over # mph, and the mouth of the first corner was reaching up... Carl's Corner, for Carl Rasch, who went over the top of it nine years ago; and they found him a half-mile down the glacier... what was left of him... H e glanced to his right. It was clear. He eased his flap brakes, dropped back slightly and pulled right. The leading sleds were jockeying in front now, lining for this long left. Brakes flapped like quick wings, and they started around, sleds riding up the vertical ice wall and holding there, ice chips spraying back like contrails from those on the lower part of the wall as they edged their runners against the turn. He came in far right and fast, riding high on the wall and diving off with good acceleration. derneath now, and he could feel the trembling rumble of his sled. They rattled into the Chute, a steep traverse, still gaining speed, still bunched and jostling for position. He was in the rear but this was good; he didn't like this early crowding for the corners. The sheer wall of Basher Bend loomed, a #-degree right that dropped hard coming out. He was following close in the slipstream of the sled in front of him, overtaking because of the lessened wind resistance. The corner came, and they were on the wall again. With his slightly greater speed he was able to go higher on the wall, nearly to the top and above the other sled. His G-suit tightened. They swarmed out of the comer and into the Strafing Run, a long, steep dive with a hard pull-out. A roar rose from the mountain now as the sleds reached speed, a dull rumble like that of avalanche... and that is actually what they were now -- an avalanche of sleds, and just as deadly. He pulled ahead of the other sled in the dive and hit the savage pull-out right on the tail of another, and the next turn curved up before them : Hell's Left, a double corner, an abrupt left falling into a short straight with another sharp left at the bottom. He was still overtaking, and they went up the wall side Dy side, He on tne inside, under the other. He eased his left pedal, using edges for the first time, holding himself away from the other by a safe six inches. The course dropped away, straight down the mountain to the second half of the corner, and he felt the sickening sudden smoothness of leaving the ice -- he had tried it too fast, and the course was falling away under him... old Rolf De Kepler, " The Flying Dutchman," laughing over his beer and saying, "Always I am spending more time off the ice than on, hah? So this is more easy to my stomach. Already I have four G-suits to give up on me... and he had made his last flight three years ago off the top at the bottom of Hell's Left... # yards, they claimed. H e held firm and straight on the wheel and pulled carefully, barely opening his brakes. The sled touched at a slight angle, lurched, but he caught it by edging quickly. The other sled had pulled ahead. He tucked in behind it. The second left was rushing up at them, narrow and filled with sleds. They dove into it less than a foot apart. Ice chips streamed back from edging runners, rattling against his sled like a storm of bullets. There was an abrupt lurching, the quick left-right slam of air turbulence. A sled was braking hard somewhere ahead. Perhaps two or three. Where? He couldn't see. He reacted automatically... full air brakes, hard onto his left edges and steer for the inside; the safest area if a wreck was trying to happen. His sled shivered with the strain of coming off the wall, holding against the force of the corner now only with the knifelike edges of its runners. But the force was too great. He began to skid, edges chattering. He eased them off a little, letting the sled drift slightly sideways. Two others had sliced down to the inside too, edges spraying ice. For a moment he was blinded again, but the corner twisted out flat, and he was through and still on the course, and he knew he was too tight, too hard with his control; he was fighting his sled instead of working with it... a tourist once asked Erik Sigismund how he controlled his sled, and he answered, "Barely." And even that had failed when he flipped it a year ago and four others ran over him. An old, lurking thought pounced into him again... he couldn't stop this sled now if he wanted to. There was no such thing as stopping, outside of a crash. He had to ride until it ended, and he was suddenly certain that was not going to be at the bottom. Not this time. He had crashed before, too many times, but he had never had this feeling of fear before. Not this fear. It was different, and he couldn't say why, and he was letting it affect him. And that was the greatest wrong. They were thundering into the Jackhammer now, # yards of violent dips. Every sled had its brakes out, and there were fast flashes as some fired braking rockets. But where the walls of the course sloped upward the ice was comparatively smooth. He eased left, to the uphill side, and leaned on his left pedal, holding the sled on the slope with its edges. Then he folded his air brakes and started gaining again. It was necessary; one did not hold back from fear. If that was one's style of life, he would never be a sledder in the first place. S uddenly from the middle of the leading blurs a sled became airborne from the crest of one of the bumps. It hit once and twisted into the air like something alive. Sleds behind it fired rockets and tried to edge away. One skidded broadside, then rolled. A shattered body panel spun away; the two sleds were demolishing themselves. Someone blew-out, streaking into the sky, canopy spark ling high in the sun -- and that meant another sled out of control. He pulled full air brakes and fired a rocket, the force slamming him hard against his chest straps. His left arm was ready to fire the charge under the seat. But if he waited too long... Kurt Schnabel was proud to be the only man who had never ejected... but the one time he had tried he had waited the barest fraction of a moment too long, and his chute came down with his shattered corpse. The three wild sleds whirled away, spinning out of sight over the low retaining walls. He folded his brakes. There was a trembling in his arms and legs like the slight but solid shuddering of a flywheel out of balance, involuntary and with a threat of getting worse. He cursed himself. He could have blown-out too. No one would have blamed him with that tangle developing in front. But he hadn't... and it was too late now... only one man had ever blown-out without an apparent reason and gotten away with it: Shorty Case in his first race. And when he was asked about it afterwards, asked in that over casual, quiet tone, he had answered, "You bet your sweet, I blew! 'Cause if I hadn't, man, I was gonna pee my pants!" But he didn't blow-out that day on the Fallaways, the day his sled somersaulted and sowed its wreckage down the course for a half mile... and him too... No, there were no quitters here; only the doers or the dead. And which was he going to be tonight?... drive, don't think... The Jackhammer smoothed out and plunged downward, and they were hurtling now into the Wingover at over # mph. Here were the second biggest grandstands on the course, the second greatest concentration of cameras. Here two ambulance helicopters stood by, and a priest too. The Wingover... I magine an airplane peeling off into a dive... imagine a sled doing the same on a towering wall of ice, a wall rising like a great, breaking wave, frozen at the moment of its overhanging curl... The Wingover was a monstrous, curving scoop to the right, nearly fifty feet high, rolling the sleds up, over, and hurling them down into a # degree pitch when twisted into a #-G pull-out to the left... "Impossible!" When Wilfrid von Gerlach laid out the Stuka that is what they told him about the Wingover. "It cannot be done!" But von Gerlach had been a Gran Prix racer and a stunt pilot , and when the Stuka was finished he took the first sled through. At the finish he sat quietly for a moment, staring back at the mountain. "At the Wingover I was how fast?" he asked thoughtfully. They replied that he'd been radared there at # mph. He nodded, then made the statement the sledders had carried with them ever since. "It's possible." He watched the leading sleds line up for that shining, sheer curve and felt the fear freeze through him again. A man was little more than a captive in his sled here. If he was on the right line going in, then it was beautiful; if not, well... the brotherly beers and the late talk... "Remember when Otto Domagk left Cripple's Corner in that snow storm?" " Ya , und ven him vas digged out -- Fas? Two hours? -- he vas so sleeping." "And not a mark on him, remember?"... Remember, remember... He followed in line barely four feet from the sled in front of him and felt the savage, sickening blow as the wall raised and rolled him. A flicker of shadow, a glimpse of the valley nearly upsidedown, then the fall and the increasing shriek of wind and runners, and he was pointing perfectly into the pull-out, still lined exactly with the sled ahead -- but there was one sled badly out of line... And someone pulled their air brakes full open. S leds began weaving in the violent turbulence of those brakes. Rockets flashed. A sled went sideways, rolling lazily above the others, and exploded against the wall of the pullout. He pulled the ejection lever... nothing happened! He was dead, he knew that. He saw two sleds tumbling into the sky, another shattered to pieces and sliding along the course. All that was necessary was to hit one of those pieces... but the corner was suddenly gone behind. The course unwound into a long left traverse. He remembered to breathe. There were tooth chips in his mouth and the taste of blood. He swerved past a piece of wreckage, then another... how many were dead now? Himself and how many others? But it wasn't fear of death -- what was it? What was it that he'd walled off inside -- that something secret always skirted as carefully as a ship veers from a hidden reef, knowing it is there -- what? And now the wall was down, and he was facing... His sled shuddered. He was driving badly, too harsh with his edge control. He narrowly made it through the Boot and Cripple's Corner, spraying ice behind him, but it was not the sled that was out of control. It was him. And he was diving now straight for the gates of hell at over # mph. It was called the Plummet. It began with an innocent, wide left, steeply banked, then the world fell away. It dove over a half mile headlong down a #-degree slope straight into a ravine and up the other side, then into a full #-degree uphill hairpin to the right, a steep straight to the bottom of the ravine again, and finally into a sharp left and a long, rolling straight. It had killed more men than any other part of the course. Here were the biggest grandstands and the most hungry eyes of the cameras. Here there were three clergy, and emergency operating rooms. Here... here he would complete the formality of dying. H e came into the left too low, too fast for the edges to hold. The sled skidded. He reacted automatically, holding slight left edges and steering into the skid. The sled drifted up the wall, arcing toward the top where nothing showed but the cold blue of the sky. He waited, a part of him almost calm now, waiting to see if the corner would straighten before he went over the top. It did, but he was still skidding, close to the retaining wall, plunging into the half-mile drop nearly sideways. He increased his edges. The tail of the sled brushed the wall and it was suddenly swinging the opposite way. He revsersed his wheel and edges, anticipating another skid, but he was not quick enough. The sled bucked, careening up on its left runners. It grazed the wall again, completely out of control now -- but he kept trying... and that was it; you kept trying. Over and over. No matter how many times you faced yourself it had to be done again. And again. The Self was never satisfied with single victories -- you had to keep trying... And he was empty no more. T he hospital. How many times had he awakened here? And it was always wonderfully the same: gentle warmth and his body finally relaxed and he would test it piece by piece to see what was bent and broken this time; and always the newsmen and the writers and the other assorted ghouls, and always the question and answer period. Punchlining, they called it... "How did it happen?" "I dozed off." "Why didn't you eject?" "Parachuting is dangerous." "When did you realize you were out of control?" "At the starting line." "What will you do now?" "Heal." "Will you race again?"... "It's possible." Outside, the wind was blowing. -- by Andre Norton -- E by Samuel R. Delany -- in the June issue of Hugo-winning If, now on sale! E The committee had come to learn Camiroi customs -- but they didn't know they'd have to learn so fast! F rom Report of Field Group for Examination of OffEarth Customs and Codexes to the Council for Governmental Renovation and Legal Rethinking. Taken from the day-book of Paul Piggott, political analyst. Making appointments with the Camiroi is proverbally like building with quicksilver. We discovered this early. But they do have the most advanced civilization of any of the four human worlds. And we did have a firm invitation to visit the planet Camiroi and to investigate customs. And we had the promise that we would be taken in hand immediately on our arrival by a group parallel to our own. But there was no group to meet us at the Sky-Port. "Where is the Group for the Examination of Customs and Codexes?" we asked the girl who was on duty as Information Factor at the Sky-Port. "Ask that post over there," she said. She was a young lady of mischievous and almost rakish mien. "I hope we are not reduced to talking to posts," said our leader Charles Chosky, "but I see that it is some sort of communicating device. Does the post talk English, young lady?" "The post understands the fifty languages that all Camiroi know," the young lady said. "On Camiroi, even the dogs speak fifty languages. Speak to it." "I'll try it," said Mr. Chosky. "Ah, post, we were to be taken in hand by a group parallel to our own. Where can we find the Group for the Examination of Customs and Codexes?" "Duty! Duty!" cried the post in a girlish voice that was somehow familiar. "Three for a group! Come, come, be constituted!" "I'll be one," said a pleasantlooking Camiroi, striding over. "I'll be another," said a teenage sprouting boy of the same species. "One more, one more!" cried the post. "Oh, here comes my relief. I'll be the other one to form the group. Come, come, let's get started. What do you want to see first, good people?" "How can a post be a member of an ambulatory group?" Charles Chosky asked. "Oh, don't be quaint," said the girl who had been the information factor and also the voice of the post. She had come up behind us and joined us. "Sideki and Nautes, we become a group for cozening Earthlings," she said. "I am sure you heard the rather humorous name they gave it." "Are you as a group qualified to give us the information we seek?" I asked. "Every citizen of Camiroi is qualified, in theory, to give sound information on every subject," said the teen-age sproutling. "But in practice It may not be so," I said, my legal mind fastening onto his phrase. "The only difficulty is our overliberal admission to citizenship," said Miss Diayggeia, who had been the voice of the post and the information factor. "Any person may become a citizen of Camiroi if he has resided here for one oodle. Once it was so that only natural leaders traveled space, and they qualified. Now, however, there are subsidized persons of no ability who come. They do not always conform to our high standard of reason and information." "Thanks," said our Miss Holly Holm, "and how long is an oodle?" "About fifteen minutes," said Miss Dia. "The post will register you now if you wish." The post registered us, and we became citizens of Camiroi. "Well, come, come, fellow citizens, what can we do for you?" asked Sideki, the pleasant-looking Camiroi who was the first member of our host group. "Our reports of the laws of Camiroi seem to be a mixture of travelers' tales and nonsense," I said. "We want to find how a Camiroi law is made and how it works." "So, make one, citizens, and see how it works," said Sideki. "You are now citizens like any other citizens, and any three of you can band together and make a law. Let us go down to Archives and enact it. And you be thinking what sort of law it will be as we go there." "life strode through the con' ' trived and beautiful parklands and groves which were the roofs of Camiroi City. The extent was full of fountains and waterfalls, and streams with bizarre bridges over them. Some were better than others. Some were better than anything we had ever seen anywhere. "But I believe that I myself could design a pond and weir as good as this one," said Charles Chosky, our leader. "And I'd have some of those bushes that look like Earth sumac in place of that cluster there; and I'd break up that pattern of rocks and tilt the layered massif behind it, and bring in a little of that blue moss -- " "You see your duty quickly, Citizen," said Sideki: "You should do all this before this very day is gone. Make it the way you think best, and remove the plaque that is there. Then you can dictate your own plaque to any of the symbouleutik posts, and it will be made and set in. 'My composition is better than your composition,' is the way most plaques read, and sometimes a scenery composer will add something humorous like 'and my dog can whip your dog.' You can order all necessary materials from that same post there, and most citizens prefer to do the work with their own hands. This system works for gradual improvement. There are many Consensus Masterpieces that remain year after year; and the ordinary work is subject to constant turnover. There, for instance, is a tree which was not there this morning and Which should not be there tonight. I'm sure that one of you can design a better tree." "I can," said Miss Holly, "and I will do so today." We descended from the roof parklands into the lower streets of Camiroi City, and went to Archives. "Have you thought of a new law yet?" Miss Dia asked when we were at Archives. "We don't citizens, but we ask you not to be ridiculous." Our leader Charles Chosky drew himself up to full height and spoke : "We promulgate a law that a permanent group be set up on Camiroi to oversee and devise regulations for all random and hasty citizens' groups with the aim of making them more responsible, and that a full-scale review of such groups he held yearly." "Got it?" Miss Dia called to an apparatus there in Archives. "Got it," said the device. It ground its entrails, and coughed up the law inscribed on bronze, and set it in a law niche. "The echo is deafening," said our Miss Holly, pretending to listen. "Yes. What is the effect of what we have done?" I asked. "Oh, the law is in effect," said young Nautes. "It has been weighed and integrated into the corpus of laws. It is already considered in the instructions that the magistrate coming on duty in a short time (usually a citizen will serve as magistrate for one hour a month) must scan before he takes his seat. Possibly in this session he will assess somebody guilty of a misdemeanor to think about this problem for ten minutes and then to attach an enabling act to your law." "But what if some citizens' group passes a silly law?" our Miss Holly asked. "They do it often. One of them has just done so. But it will be repealed quickly enough," said Miss Dia of the Camiroi. "Any citizen who has his name on three laws deemed silly by general consensus Shall lose his citizenship for one year. A citizen who so loses his citizenship twice shall be mutilated, and the third time he shall be killed. This isn't an extreme ruling. By that time he would have participated in nine silly laws. Surely that's enough." ut, in the meantime, the silly-laws remain in effect?" our Mr. Chosky asked. "Not likely," said Sideki. "A law is repealed thus: any citizen may go to Archives and remove any law, leaving the statement that he has abolished the law for his own reasons. He is then required to keep the voided law in his own home for three days. Sometimes the citizen or citizens who first passed the law will go to the house of the abolitionist. Occasionally they will fight to the death with ritual swords, but most often they will parley. They may agree to have the law abolished. They may agree to restore the law. Or they may together work out a new law that takes into account the objections to the old." "Then every Camiroi law is subject to random challenge?" Chosky asked. "Not exactly," said Miss Dia. "A law which has stood unchallenged and unappealed for nine years becomes privileged. A citizen wishing to abolish such a law by removal must leave in its place not only his declaration of removal but also three fingers of his right hand as earnest of his seriousness in the matter. But a magistrate or a citizen going to reconstitute the law has to contribute only one of his fingers to the parley." "This seems to me to favor the establishment," I said. "We have none," said Sideki. "I know that is hard for Earthlings to understand." "But is there no senate or legislative body on Camiroi, or even a president?" Miss Holly asked. "Yes, there's a president," said Miss Dia, "and he is actually a dictator or tyrant. He is chosen by lot for a term of one week. Any of you could be chosen for the term starting tomorrow, but the odds are against it. We do not have a permanent senate, but often there are hasty senates constituted, and they have full powers." "Such bodies having full powers is what we want to study," I said. "When will the next one be constituted, and how will it act?" "So, constitute yourselves one now and see how you act," said young Nautes. "You simply say, 'We constitute ourselves a Hasty Senate of Camiroi with full powers.' Register yourselves at the nearest symbouleutic post, and study your senate introspectively." "Could we fire the presidentdictator?" Miss Holly asked. "Certainly," said Sideki, "but a new president would immediately be chosen by lot; and your senate would not carry over to the new term, nor could any of you three partake of a new senate until a full presidential term had passed. But I wouldn't, if I were you, form a senate to fire the present president. He is very good with the ritual sword." "Then citizens do actually fight with them yet?" Mr. Chosky asked. "Yes, any private citizen may at any time challenge any other private citizen for any reason, or for none. Sometimes, but not often, they fight to the death, and they may not be interfered with. We call these decisions the Court of Last Resort." O eason says that the legal system on Camiroi cannot be as simple as this, and yet it seems to be. Starting with the thesis that every citizen of Camiroi should be able to handle every assignment or job on Camiroi, these people have cut organization to the minimum. These things we consider fluid or liberal about the legal system of Camiroi. Hereafter, whenever I am tempted to think of some law or custom of Earth as liberal, I will pause. I will hear Camiroi laughing. On the other hand, there are these things which I consider adamant or conservative about the laws of Camiroi: No assembly on Camiroi for purposes of entertainment may exceed thirty-nine persons. No more than this number may witness any spectacle or drama, or hear a musical presentation, or watch a sporting event. This is to prevent the citizens from becoming mere spectators rather than originators or partakers. Similarly, no writing -- other than certain rare official promulgations -- may be issued in more than thirty-nine copies in one month. This, it seems to us, is a conservative ruling to prevent popular enthusiasms. A father of a family who twice in five years appeals to specialists for such things as simple surgery for members of his household, or legal or financial or medical advice, or any such things as he himself should be capable of doing, shall lose his citizenship. It seems to us that this ruling obstructs the Camiroi from the full fruits of progress and research. They say, however, that it compels every citizen to become an expert in everything. Any citizen who pleads incapacity when chosen by lot to head a military operation or a scientific project or a trade combine shall lose his citizenship and suffer mutilation. But one who assumes such responsibility and then fails in the accomplishment of the task, shall suffer the loss and the mutilation only for two such failures. Both cases seem to us to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Any citizen chosen by lot to provide a basic invention or display a certain ingenuity when there is corporate need for it, and who fails to provide such invention, shall be placed in such a position that he will lose his life unless he displays even greater ingenuity and invention than was originally called for. This seems to us to be unspeakably cruel. There is an absolute death penalty for impiety. But to the question of what constitutes impiety, we received a startling answer. "If you have to ask what it is, then you are guilty of it. For piety is comprehension of the basic norms. Lack of awareness of the special Camiroi context is the greatest impiety of all. Beware, new citizens! Should a person more upright and less indulgent than myself have heard your question, you might be executed before night-rise." The Camiroi, however, are straight-faced kidders. We do not believe that we were in any danger of execution, but we had been told bluntly not to ask questions of a certain sort. sive. We are not yet able to understand the true legal system of Camiroi, but we have begun to acquire the viewpoint from which it may be studied. We recommend continuing study by a permanent resident team in this field. Political Analyst F rom the journey-book of Charles Chosky, chief of field group. The basis of Camiroi polity and procedure is that any Camiroi citizen should foe capable of filling any job on or pertaining to the planet. If it is ever the case that even one citizen should prove incapable of this, they say, then their system has already failed. "Of course, it fails many times every day," one of their men explained to me, but it does not fail completely. It is like a man in motion. He is falling off-balance at every step, but he saves himself, and so he strides. Our polity is always in motion. Should it come to rest, it would die." "Have the Camiroi a religion?" I asked citizen after citizen of them. "I think so," one of them said finally. "I believe that we do have that, and nothing else. The difficulty is in the word. Your Earth English word may come from religionem or from telegionem; it may mean a legality, or it may mean a revelation. I believe it is a mixture of the two concepts; with us it is. Of course we have a religion. What else is there to have?" "Could you draw a parallel between Camiroi and Earth religion?" I asked him. "No, I couldn't," he said bluntly. "I'm not being rude. I just don't know how." But another intelligent Camiroi gave me some ideas on it. "The closest I could come to explaining the difference," he said, "is by a legend that is told (as our Camiroi phrase has it) with the tongue so far in the cheek that it comes out the vulgar body aperture." "What is the legend?" I asked him. "The legend is that men (or whatever local creatures) were tested on all the worlds. On some of the worlds, men persevered in grace. These have become the transcendent worlds, asserting themselves as stars rather than planets and swallowing their own suns, becoming fully incandescent in their merged persons living in grace and light. The more developed of them are those closed bodies which we know only by inference, so powerful and contained that they let no light or gravity or other emission escape them. They become of themselves closed and total universes, of their own space and outside of what we call space, perfect in their merged mentality and spirit. "Then there are the worlds like Earth where men did fall from Grace. On these worlds, each person contains an interior abyss and is capable both of great heights and depths. By our legend, the persons of these worlds, after their fall were condemned to live for thirty thousand generations in the bodies of animals and were then permitted to begin their slow and frustrating ascent back to remembered personhood. "But the case of Camiroi was otherwise. We do not know whether there are further worlds of our like case. The primordial test-people of Camiroi did not fall. And they did not persevere. They hesitated. They could not make up their minds. They thought the matter over, and then they thought it over some more. Camiroi was therefore doomed to think matters over forever. "So we are the equivocal people, capable of curious and continuing thought. But we have a hunger both for the depths and the heights which we have missed. To be sure, our Golden Mediocrity, our serene plateau, is higher than the heights of most worlds, higher than those of Earth, I believe. But it has not the exhileration of height." "But you do not believe in legends," I said. "A legend is the highest scientific statement when it is the only statement available," the Camiroi said. "We are the people who live according to reason. It makes a good life, but it lacks salt. You people have a literature of Utopias. You value their ideals highly, and they do have some effect on you. Yet you must feel that they all have this quality of the insipid. And according to Earth standards, we are a Utopia. We are a world of the third case. "We miss a lot. The enjoyment of poverty is generally denied to us. We have a certain hunger for incompetence, which is why some Earth things find a welcome here -- bad Earth music, bad Earth painting and sculpture and drama, for instance. The good we can produce ourselves. The bad we are incapable of, and must import. Some of us believe that we need it in our diet." "If this is true, your position seems enviable to me," I said. "Yours isn't," he said, "and yet you are the most complete. You have both halves, and you have your numbers. We know, of course, that the Giver has never given a life anywhere until there was real need for it, and that everything born ot created has its individual part to play. But we wish the Giver would be more generous to us in this, and it is in this particularly that we envy Earth. "A difficulty with us is that we do our great deeds at too young an age and on distant worlds. We are all of us more or less retired by the age of twenty-five, and we have all had careers such as you would not believe. We come home then to live maturely on our mature world. It's perfect, of course, but of a perfection too small. We have everything -- except the one thing that matters, for which we cannot even find a name." I talked to many of the intelligent Camiroi on our short stay there. It was often difficult to tell whether they were talking seriously or whether they were mocking me. We do not as yet understand the Camiroi at all. Further study is recommended. Chief of Field Group TT'rom the ephemeris of Holly  Holm, anthropologist and schedonahthropologist. Camiroi, the word is plural in form, is used for the people in both the single and plural and for the planet itself. The civilization of Camiroi is more mechanical and more scientific than that of Earth, but it is more disguised. Their ideal machine shall have no moving parts at all, shall be noiseless and shall not look like a machine. For this reason, there is something pastoral about even the most thickly populated districts of Camiroi City. The Camiroi are fortunate in the natural furnishings of their planet. The scenery of Camiroi conforms to the dictate that all repetition is tedious, for there is only one of each thing on that world. There is one major continent and one minor continent of quite different character; one fine cluster of islands of which the individual isles are of very different style; one great continental river with its seven branches flowing out of seven sorts of land; one complex of volcanoes; one great range of mountains, one titanic waterfall with her three so different daughters nearby; one inland sea, one gulf, one beach which is a three hundred and fifty mile crescent passing through seven phases named for the colors of iris; one great rain forest, one palm grove, one leaf-fall grove, one of evergreens and one of eodendrons; one grain bowl, one fruit bowl, one pampas, one parkland; one desert, one great oasis; and Camiroi City is the one great city. And all these places are unexcelled of their kind. There are no ordinary places on Camiroi! Travel being rapid, a comparatively poor young couple may go from anywhere on the planet to Green Beach, for instance, to take their evening meal, in less time than the consumption of the meal will take them, and for less money than that reasonable meal will cost. This easy and frequent travel makes the whole world one community. The Camiroi believe in the necessity of the frontier. They control many primitive worlds, and I gather hints that they are sometimes cruel in their management. The tyrants and proconsuls of these worlds are young, usually still in their teens. The young people are to have their careers and make their mistakes while in the foreign service. When they return to Camiroi they are supposed to be settled and of tested intelligence. The earning scale of the Camiroi is curious. A job of mechanical drudgery pays higher than one of intellectual interest and involvement. This often means that the least intelligent and least able of the Camiroi will have more wealth than those of more ability. "This is fair," the Camiroi tell us. "Those not able to receive the higher recompense are certainly entitled to the lower." They regard the Earth system as grossly inequal, that a man should have both a superior job and superior pay, and that another man should have the inferior of both. 'Tphough official offices and jobs are usually filled by lot, yet persons can apply for them for their own reasons. In special conditions there might even be competition for an assignment, such as directorship of trade posts where persons (for private reasons) might wish to acquire great fortunes rapidly. We witnessed confrontations between candidates in several of these campaigns, and they were curious. "My opponent is a three and seven," said one candidate, and then he sat down. "My opponent is a five and nine," said the other candidate. The small crowd clapped, and that was the confrontation or debate. We attended another such rally"My opponent is an eight and ten," one candidate said briskly. "My opponent is a two and six," said the other, and they went off together. We did not understand this, and we attended a third confrontation. There seemed to be a little wave of excitement about to break here. "My opponent is an old number four," said one candidate with a voice charged with emotion, and there was a gasp from the small crowd. "I will not answer the charge," said the other candidate shaking with anger. "The blow is too foul, and we had been friends." We found the key then. The Camiroi are experts at defamation, but they have developed a shorthand system to save time. They have their decalog of slander, and the numbers refer to this. In its accepted version it runs as follows : sonally moronic. (#) is sexually incompetent. (#) flubs third points in Chuki game. (#) eats Mu seeds before the time of the summer solstice. (#) is ideologically silly. (#) is physically pathetic. (#) is financially stupid. (#) is ethically weird. (#) is intellectually contemptible. (#) is morally dishonest. Try it yourself, on your friends or your enemies! It works wonderfully. We recommend the listing and use to Earth politicians, except for numbers three and four which seem to have no meaning in Earth context. r T"'he Camiroi have a corpus of proverbs. We came on them in Archives, along with an attached machine with a hundred levers on it. We depressed the lever marked Earth English, and had a sampling of these proverbs put into Earth context. A man will not become rich by raising goats, the machine issued. Yes, that could almost pass for an Earth proverb. It almost seems to mean something. Even buzzards sometimes gag. That has an Earth sound also. It's that or pluck chickens. "I don't believe I understand that one," I said. "You think it's easy to put these in Earth context, you try it sometime," the translation machine issued. "The proverb applies to distasteful but necessary tasks." "Ah, well, let's try some more,"  said Paul Piggott. "That one." A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, the machine issued abruptly. "But that is an Earth proverb word for word," I said. "You wait I finish it, lady," the translation machine growled. "To this proverb in its classical form is always appended a cartoon showing a bird fluttering away and a man angrily wiping his hand with some disposable material while he says "A bird in the hand is not worth two in the bush." "Are we being had by a machine?" our leader Charles Chosky asked softly. "Give us that proverb there," I pointed one out to the machine. There'll be many a dry eye here when you leave, the machine issued. We left. #T may be in serious trouble,"II said to a Camiroi lady of my acquaintance, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is?" "No, I don't particularly care," she said. "But tell me if you feel an absolute compulsion to it." "I never heard of such a thing," I said. "I have been chosen by lot to head a military expedition for the relief of a trapped force on a world I never heard of. I am supposed to raise and supply this force (out of my private funds, it says here) and have it in flight within eight oodles. That's only two hours. What will I do?" "Do it, of course, Miss Holly," the lady said. "You are a citizen of Camiroi now, and you should be proud to take charge of such an operation." "But I don't know how! What will happen if I just tell them that I don't know how?" "Oh, you'll lose your citizenship and suffer mutilation. That's the law, you know." "How will they mutilate me?" "Probably cut off your nose. I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't do much for you anyhow." "But we have to go back to Earth! We were going to go tomorrow, but now we want to go today. I do anyhow." "Earth kid, if I were you, I'd get out to Sky-Port awful fast." By a coincidence (I hope it was no more than that) our political analyst Paul Piggott had been chosen by lot to make a survey (personally, minutely and interiorly, the directive said) of the sewer system of Camiroi City. And our leader Charles Chosky had been selected by lot to put down a rebellion of Groll's Trolls on one of the worlds, and to leave his right hand and his right eye as surety for the accomplishment of the mission. We were rather nervous as we waited for Earth Flight at SkyPort, particularly so when a group of Camiroi acquaintances approached us. But they did not stop us. They said good-by to us without too much enthusiasm. "Our visit has been all too short," I said hopefully. "Oh, I wouldn't say that," one of them rejoined. "There is a Camiroi proverb -- " "We've heard it," said our leader Charles Chosky. "We also are dry-eyed about leaving." Field Group be sent to study the Camiroi in greater detail. That a special study might fruitfully be made of the humor of the Camiroi. That no members of the first Field Group should serve on the second Field Group. The Man Who Loved the Faioli John Auden didn't fear the Faioli, deadly though they were... for he was immune! I t is the story of John Auden and the Faioli, and no one knows it better than I. Listen -- It happened on that evening, as he strolled (for there was no reason not to stroll) in his favorite places in the whole world, that he saw the Faioli near tire Canyon of the Dead, seated on a rock, her wings of light flickering, flickering, flickering and then gone, until it appeared that a human girl was sitting there, dressed all in white and weeping, with long black tresses coiled about her waist. He approached her through the terrible light from the dying, half-dead sun, in which human eyes could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly (though his could), and he lay his right hand upon her shoulder and spoke a word of greeting and of comfort. It was as if he did not exist, however. She continued to weep, streaking with silver her cheeks the color of snow or a bone. Her almond eyes looked forward as though they saw through him, and her long fingernails dug into the flesh of her palms, though no blood was drawn. Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli -- that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time. The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death -- those rare men who still died -- and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it -- no, seeks it! -- with desire and with grace. For such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge. John Auden considered his life and his death, the conditions of the world upon which he stood, the nature of his stewardship and his curse and the Faioli -- who was the loveliest creature he had seen in all of his four hundred thousand days of existence -- and he touched the place beneath his left armpit which activated the necessary mechanism to make him live again. T he creature stiffened beneath his touch, for suddenly it was flesh, his touch, and flesh, warm and woman-filled, that he was touching, now that the sensations of life had returned to him. He knew that his touch had become the touch of a man once more. "I said 'hello, and don't cry,' " he said, and her voice was like the breezes he had forgotten through all the trees that he had forgotten, with their moisture and their odors and their colors all brought back to him thus: "From where do you come, man? You were not here a moment ago." "From the Canyon of the Dead," he said. "Let me touch your face." And he did, and she did. "It is strange that I did not feel you approach." "This is a strange world," he replied. "That is true," she said. "You are the only living thing upon it." And he said, "What is your name?" She said, "Call me Sythia," and he did. "My name is John," he told her, "John Auden." "I have come to be with you, to give you comfort and pleasure," she said, and he knew that the ritual was beginning. "Why were you weeping when I found you?" he asked. "Because I thought there was nothing upon this world, and I was so tired from my travels," she told him. "Do you live near here?" "Not far away," he answered. "Not far away at all." "Will you take me there? To the place where you live?" "Yes." And she rose and followed him into the Canyon of the Dead, where he made his home. They descended and they descended, and all about them were the remains of people who once had lived. She did not seem to see these things, however, but kept her eyes fixed upon John's face and her hand upon his arm. "Why do you call this place the Canyon of the Dead?" she asked him. "Because they are all about us here, the dead," he replied. "I feel nothing." "I know." nphey crossed through the Valley of the Bones, where millions of the dead from many races and worlds lay stacked all about them, and she did not see these things. She had come to the graveyard of all the worlds, but she did not realize this thing. She had encountered its tender, its keeper, and she did not know what he was, he who staggered beside her like a man drunken. John Auden took her to his home -- not really the place where he lived, but it would be now -- and there he activated ancient circuits within the building within the mountain. In response light leaped forth from the walls, light he had never needed before, but now required. The door slid shut behind them, and the temperature built up to a normal warmth. Fresh air circulated. He took it into his lungs and expelled it, glorying in the forgotten sensation. His heart beat within his breast, a red warm thing that reminded him of the pain and of the pleasure. For the first time in ages, he prepared a meal and fetched a bottle of wine from one of the deep, sealed lockers. How many others could have borne what he had borne? None, perhaps. She dined with him. toying with the food, sampling a bit of everything, eating very little. He, on the other hand, glutted himself fantastically, and they drank of the wine and were happy. "This place is so strange," she said. "Where do you sleep?" "I used to sleep in there," he told her, indicating a room he had almost forgotten; and they entered and he showed it to her, and she beckoned him toward the , bed and the pleasures of her body. That night he loved her, many times, with a desperation that burnt away the alcohol and pushed all of his life forward with something like a hunger, but more. The following day, when the dying sun had splashed the Valley of the Bones with its pale, moonlike light, he awakened and she drew his head to her breast, not having slept herself, and she asked him, "What is the thing that moves you, John Auden? You are not like one of the men who live and who die, but you take life almost like one of the Faioli, squeezing from it everything that you can and pacing it at a tempo that bespeaks a sense of time no man should know. What are you?" "I am one who knows," he said. "I am one who knows that the days of a man are numbered and one who covets their dispositions as he feels them draw to a close." "You are strange," said Sythia. "Have I pleased you?" "More than anything else I have ever known," he said. And she sighed, and he found her lips once again. A I 'hey breakfasted, and that day they walked in the Valley of the Bones. He could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly, and she could not see anything that had been living and now was dead. So, of course, as they sat there on a shelf of stone, his arm about her shoulders, he pointed out to her the rocket which had just come down from out of the sky, and she squinted after his gesture. He indicated the robots, which had begun unloading the remains of the dead of many worlds from the hold of the ship, and she cocked her head to one side and stared ahead, but she did not really see what he was talking about. Even when one of the robots lumbered up to him and held out the board containing the receipts and the stylus, and as he signed the receipt for the bodies received, she did not see or understand what it was that was occurring. In the days that followed, his life took upon it a dreamlike quality, filled with the pleasure of Sythia and shot through with certain inevitable streaks of pain. Often, she saw him wince, and she asked him concerning his expressions. And always he would laugh and say, "Pleasure and pain are near to one another," or some thing such as that. And as the days wore on, she came to prepare the meals and to rub his shoulders and mix his drinks and to recite to him certain pieces of poetry he had somehow once come to love. A month. A month, he knew, and it would come to an end. The Faioli, whatever they were, paid for the life that they took with the pleasures of the flesh. They always knew when a man's death was near at hand. And in this sense, they always gave more than they received. The life was fleeing anyway, and they enhanced it before they took it, away with them, to nourish themselves most likely, price of the things that they'd given. John Auden knew that no Faioli in the entire universe had ever met a man such as himself. Sythia was mother-of-pearl, and her body was alternately cold and warm to his caresses, and her mouth was a tiny flame, igniting wherever it touched, with its teeth like needles and its tongue like the heart of a flower. And so he , came to know the thing called love for the Faioli called Sythia. #VT othing must really happen  beyond the loving. He knew that she wanted him, to use him ultimately, and he was perhaps the only man in the universe able to gull one of her kind. His was the perfect defense against life and against death. Now that he was human and alive, he often wept when he considered it. He had more than a month to live. He had maybe three or four. This month, therefore, was a it was that the Faioli offered. Sythia racked his body and drained from it every drop of pleasure contained within his tired nerve cells. She turned him into a flame, an iceberg, a little boy, an old man. When they were together, his feelings were such that he considered the cons ol amentum as a thing he might really accept at the end of the month, which was drawing near. Why not? He knew she had filled his mind with her presence, on purpose. But what more did existence hold for him? This creature from beyond the stars had brought him every single thing a man could desire. She had baptized him with passion and confirmed him with the quietude which follows after. Perhaps the final oblivion of her final kiss was best after all. He seized her and drew her to him. She did not understand him, but she responded. He loved her for it, and this was almost his end. There is a thing called disease that battens upon all living things, and he had known it beyond the scope of all living men. She could not understand, woman-thing who had known only life. So he never tried to tell her, though with each day the taste of her kisses grew stronger and saltier, and each seemed to him a strengthening shadow, darker and darker, stranger and heavier, of that one thing which he now knew he desired most. And the day would come. And come it did. TTe held her and caressed her, and the calendars of all his days fell about them. He knew, as he abandoned himself to her ploys and the glories of her mouth, her breasts, that he had been ensnared, as had all men who had known them, by the power of the Faioli. Their strength was their weakness. They were the ultimate in Woman. By their frailty they begat the desire to please. He wanted to merge himself with the pale landscape of her body, to pass within the circles of her eyes and never depart. He had lost, he knew. For as the days had vanished about him, he had weakened. He was barely able to scrawl his name upon the receipts proffered him by the robot who had lumbered toward him, crushing ribcages and cracking skulls with each terrific step. Briefly, he envied the thing. Sexless, passionless, totally devoted to duty. Before he dismissed it, he asked it, "What would you do if you had desire and you met with a thing that gave you all the things you wished for in the world?" "I would -- try to -- keep it," it said, red lights blinking about its dome, before it turned and lumbered off, across the Great Graveyard. "Yes," said John Auden aloud, "but this thing cannot be done." Sythia did not understand him, and on that thirty-first day they returned to that place where he had lived for a month, and he felt the fear of death, strong, so strong, come upon him. She was more exquisite than ever before, but he feared this final encounter. "I love you," he said finally, for it was a thing he had never said before, and she kissed him. "I know," she told him, "and your time is almost at hand, to love me completely. Before the final act of love, my John Auden, tell me a thing: What is it that sets you apart? Why is it that you know so much more of things-that-are-not-life than mortal man should know? How was it that you approached me on that first night without my knowing it?" "It is because I am already dead," he told her. "Can't you see it when you look into my eyes?" "I do not understand," she said. "Kiss me and forget it," he told her. "It is better this way. But she was curious and asked him (using the familiar for the first time), "How then dost thou achieve this balance between life and that-which-is-not-life, this thing which keeps thee conscious yet unliving?" "There are controls set within this body I happen, unfortunately, to occupy. To touch this place beneath my left armpit will cause my lungs to cease their breathing and my heart to stop its beating. It will set into effect an installed electro-chemical system, like those my robots (invisible to you, I know) possess. This is my life within death. I asked for it because I feared oblivion. I volunteered to be gravekeeper to the universe, because in this place there are none to look upon me and be repelled by my deathlike appearance. This is why I am what I am. Kiss me and end it." But having taken the form of woman, or perhaps being woman all along, the Faioli who was called Sythia was curious, and she said, "This place?" and she touched the spot beneath his left armpit. 'X#'ith this he vanished from ' ' her sight, and with this also, he knew once again the icy logic that stood apart from emotion. Because of this, he did not touch upon the critical spot once again. Instead, he watched her as she sought for him about the place where he once had lived. She checked into every closet and adytum, and when she could not discover a living man, she sobbed once, horribly, as she had on that night when first he had seen her. Then the wings flickered, flickered, weakly flickered, back into existence upon her back, and her face dissolved and her body slowly melted. The tower of sparks that stood before him then vanished, and later on that crazy night during which he could distinguish distances and grasp perspectives once again he began looking for her. And that is the story of John Auden, the only man who ever loved a Faioli and lived (if you could call it that) to tell of it. No one knows it better than I. No cure has ever been found. And I know that he walks the Canyon of the Dead and considers the bones, sometimes stops by the rock where he met her, blinks after the moist things that are not there, wonders at the judgment that he gave. It is that way, and the moral may be that life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it. But only a Faioli could tell you for sure, and they never come here any more. for your iriformatiors r T"'his is a story I was told somethirty-five years ago by a novelist who swore that it actually happened. It concerned another writer whom both of us knew and who wrote a great deal for a weekly family magazine. One day the editor of that magazine, after an evening of spirited discussion with his wife and her two sisters, asked him to write a definitive article on Atlantis. If necessary, it could be a series of articles, but they should be definitive, clearing up the whole problem once and for all time! The writer, whose knowledge of Atlantis was about equal to that of any other educated man who has not made a special study of the subject, phoned a librarian he knew and told him (this was in Europe, where librarians are usually male) that he had to read up on Atlantis and would be over the following morning. Would the librarian be so good and assemble the most important books for him? When he arrived at the library there was a desk reserved for him, and it was piled high with books. The librarian explained that these were the most recent works and a few important older ones. And there was a paperbound sheaf of mimeographed pages. This was what the librarian called "a reasonably complete bibliography" -- of about # titles. After his friend had finished with the books he had pulled out, he might wish to check through the bibliography and mark what else he wanted to read. The library would not have all of these titles, of course, but a few score of them probably could be turned up. I don't know what happened to that "definitive" article -- chances are it was never written. However, other people who did not feel beaten down by the volume of earlier literature kept writing books on Atlantis. As has been the case in the past, they ranged over the whole spectrum from "inner visions" to somber attempts to find an interpretation that satisfied both historical tradition and recognized facts. My reason for bringing up the nearly-talked-to-death Atlantis theme once more is that something very unusual has taken place in recent years: there are a few new facts! No, it is not yet the "definitive" story that magazine editor wanted so desperately. For the core of the Atlantis problem is that the "definitive" solution involves an impossibility -- namely that of reading the mind of a man who died over # years ago. I mean, of course, Plato, who lived from about # B.C. to # B.C. Atlantis is mentioned in two of his works, the two "dialogues" ("discussions" would be a better label) Timaios and Kritias. They are the only, repeat, only sources. Every other mention of Atlantis is based on these writings of Plato. There are no independent sources. Nor did Plato claim to have any direct and personal knowledge. He had one of his characters quote Solon, a historiacl figure (ca. # B.C. to # B.C.), who was Archon of Athens (beginning in # B.C.) and who is known to have travelled extensively. So the true and again only source of the Atlantis story, if we accept Plato's word, is Solon. Please note that Solon was dead for # years when Plato was a young man; it is precisely as if a young man of our time told of something that, through family tradition, goes back to George Washington. I just said that the original source was Solon if we accept Plato's statements. As for that there can be only two opinions: we can either believe that Plato wrote down what Solon originally said (admitting that Plato's version might not be an absolutely accurate rendering) or else we can believe that it was a fable invented for the purpose of providing a setting for Plato's "ideal state." Aristotle, Plato's pupil, was convinced that Atlantis had been invented for philosophizing purposes. The Roman Pliny the Elder, four centuries later, just burdened Plato with the responsibility, sounding somewhat petulant, possibly because in all his omnivorous reading he had never found another source. The picture is the same with all the authors of the classical period: they either took Atlantis to be a "philosophical parable" or else just wrote "according to Plato." Nobody got excited one way or the other. After the interval of one and a half millenia, when nobody had the time or inclination to think about such problems, a surprising number of learned men decided that Atlantis must have been based on a dim knowledge of the existence of a continent on the other side of the ocean. The Spanish historian Fracisco Lopez de Gomara (#-#) was the first to say that America must have been meant. Sir Francis Bacon (#) said the same, and the German educator Janus Joannes Bircherod even coined the sentence orbe novo non novo "the New' World is not new") in #. These thoughts were still echoed two centuries later by the great Alexander von Humboldt. The first man to have accepted the story as literally true seems to have been the learned and versatile Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher (#-#), who invented the magic lantern and thought that he had deciphered hieroglyphic writing. He pictured Atlantis as a small continent in the Atlantic Ocean. (Fig. #.). Fig. #. Atlantis according to Kircher. from his book Mondus subterraneus (#). This tracing has been inverted, in the original north is at the bottom. Though he said in his book that the island is pictured in precise agreement with Plato's description this is not really so, as we'll see. All that can be said in favor of it is that the small continent is about the size stated by Plato, that it has a mountain and several large rivers. T)ut before we go on it seems to be practical to see what Plato actually said. The information provided in the Timaios, the earlier of the two dialogues, is relatively meager. The man who tells about Atlantis in both dialogues is one Kritias, grandson of a man by the same name, who was a son of Dropides, who was a personal friend of Solon. Solon, Kritias the Younger, reports, travelled to Egypt; the actual and historical date for that trip is somewhere between # B.C. and # B.C. He went to the city of Sais and had long conversations with the priests there, who told him that their goddess Neith, whom the Greeks call Athena, had founded both cities, Sais # years ago and Athens # years ago. At that time there existed an island beyond the pillars of Hercules: "it was larger than Lybia and Asia put together." This last sentence needs two emendations. One is that "Asia" means what we call Asia minor, and the other is that the original Greek sentence contains a word that cannot be translated by just one other word. That word is meizon. The customary translation is "larger" in the meaning of "greater in extent." But the word can also mean "more powerful," and since the story then goes on to talk about an invasion from Atlantis this translation sounds more likely. The priests said that this invasion had the purpose of subjugating the eastern portion of the Mediterranean and that they almost succeeded but were finally beaten by the Athenians. "Afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods and in a single 'day and night of rain your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in a like manner disappeared and was sunk beneath the sea." There is no more about Atlantis in the Timaios, and if the other dialogue which is named after Kritias did not exist, nobody would have paid much attention to the ancient invasion and ancient catastrophe. Everybody would have accepted Aristotle's commentary: "He who invented it namely Atlantis also destroyed it." But it was the Kritias that excited everybody, because here the narrator went into detail. On the island in question there dwelled people, and Poseidon fell in love with one of the girls. He lived with her on a small mountain and begat five pairs of twins, all male and all future kings. He surrounded the mountain with several circular courses of water "so that no man could get to the island for ships and voyages were not yet heard of." That these concentric courses of water were made by a god must be taken to mean that this was a natural formation. But the later kings, after the population had become numerous, embellished on this formation with walls and canals through the circular courses of land, so that ships could pass from one into  A stadion was divided into # feet, Greek. Its length is now taken to have been # meters, or # feet, U. S. measure. The secondary meaning -- of "race course" -- of this word is derived from the fact that the race course at Olympia was one stadion in length. the other. The water courses were spanned by a bridge which, of course, had to have three sections. (This explains why the word "bridge" is used in the singular, though three bridges are involved.) nphe plan of the finished city is shown in Fig. #. The central island, with the stele inscribed with the laws, a temple of Poseidon and the king's palace, had a diameter of # stadia. The innermost circular water course was one stadion in width, and the land circle around it had a width of two stadia. Then followed a water circle with a width of two stadia, also called the Inner Harbor: a circle of land, holding a Fig. #. The Center of the City. This is a scale drawing of the center section of the city, as described by Plato. The broken circle indicates the race course. "hippodrome" or circle course for race horses with a width of three stadia came next, surrounded by a water course, the Outer Harbor, of a width of three stadia. A straight canal, half a stadion in width and one and a half stadia in depth, stretched from the Outer Harbor to the ocean. It was fifty stadia long, so that the distance from the center of the island to the shore was #J# stadia. At that distance a high circular wall was built that went all around the city; on the side away from the ocean it touched the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal was # stadia in length, forming a rectangle of # by # stadia. The area was divided into # squares by irrigation ditches, each # feet in width. (Fig. #.) The overall idea seems to have been that several rivers emptying into the Grand Canal would keep it full of water and fill the irrigation ditches, with the overflow going into the circular Outer Harbor and, finally, through the fifty-stadia canal into the ocean. A modern hydraulics engineer would be quite unhappy with such an open system lacking all locks. Two years of drought in the interior, and ocean water would storm in, going the other way and ruining all crops. But let's not quibble here but go on. The total area -- the irrigated plain, the city itself and the space between the irrigated plain and the seashore -- would measure # by # stadia, or close proximately # square miles. Since there were ten kingdoms on the island -- assuming that they were all the same size, which is not stated anywhere explicitly -- the total area of the island should have been about # square miles, roughly three times the size of Texas. Even this condensed retelling shows that there is an enormous difference between the two Atlantis narratives in Plato's work. The Timaios, with its recital about an invasion and military engagements terminated by a natural catastrophe, does convey the impression that an older tale is here merely retold. But the Kritias, with its enormous elaboration of arrangements and dimensions, plus such detail as the color of the stones in the various walls and the kinds of metal used for ornamentation and reinforcement, is obviously the result of much pondering about what an outstanding city, originally conceived by a god and embellished by godlike kings should be like. The "searchers for Atlantis," who accepted the story word for word, wall for wall and water course for water course, faced one major handicap, namely the great size. It prompted those who did not dare to doubt to look in all kinds of unlikely places. In sequence, southern Sweden, the Caucasus mountains, South America, Ceylon, Algiers and the western bulge of Africa were acclaimed as the place were Atlantis must have been -- not withstanding the minor fact that all of them are still in existence well above sea level. And, of course, there was no trace of anything that could possibly date back to # B.C. Could something be wrong with the figures themselves? jl fore than one scholar has  A guessed at a confusion between solar years and periods of the moon. If the Egyptians spoke in terms of "moons" ( of # days each) then # "years" would shrink to # actual years. Since Solon heard the tale in about # B.C., the date would become # B.C., a far more believable figure. But there is another possibility for a mistake. It is said in so many words in the Kritias that the Egyptian records had been translated into Egyptian from another language -- it is not stated which one. Solon then translated them into Greek, and he may have taken the Egyptian written symbol for "#" to mean "#." In that case the invasion would date # years before Solon's visit or about # B.C., while the rectangular plain enclosed by the Grand Canal would measure # by # stadia or # by #j miles. The city itself would remain the same size, because all the figures involved are smaller than "#." The suggestion that the problem had been made intractable by such a simple mistake in translation was made by the seismologist Professor Anghelos Galanapoulos. Since Prof. Galanapoulos is Greek, he is throughly acquainted with all the Greek legends and with everything by and about Plato. And Prof. Galanapoulos has been thinking about Atlantis for a long time. Under Sfi'j  northern latitude and #'# eastern longitude in the blue Aegaean Sea there lies  This assumes, of course, that the plan of the city was a part of Solon's tale; most modem commentators have strong doubts about that. Fig. #. The Santorini group in the Aegaean Sea. a small group of islands, collectively known as the Santorini group. It consists of two large islands, Thera and Therasia, and a few small ones, namely Aspronisi ("white island") and three with names that have the word lcameni ("burning") in common. They are Palaia Kameni, Nea Kameni and Mikra Kameni, the "old burning island," the new one and the tiny one. They are all volcanic. In # there was a long-lasting eruption that was carefully investigated by a French scientist named Fouque. With the aid of data furnished by Fouque, Professor Melchior Neumayr of the University of Vienna drew up a table of known eruptions. There had been one in # B.C., during which the island of Palaia Kameni came into existence. Another eruption in # A.D. enlarged this island. In # Mikra Kameni was formed. In # there was another eruption that produced only minor changes, but in # there began one that lasted five years, with Nea Kameni as the result. And the one in # formed an island that was named Georgios Island but soon combined with Nea Kameni. In, say, # B.C. the Santorini group consisted of Thera and Therasia only; in # it looked as shown in Fig. #. T o the geologists of the latter part of the nineteenth century the shapes of Thera and Therasia suggested that they were remaining pieces of a former volcano that had covered the whole area of the Santorini group and that had blown up at some time in the past. Since the eastern Mediterranean is an area of early literacy, but since no classical record made any mention of such a catastrophe, the great eruption must have taken place before writing, say before # B.C. The explosion of Krakatoa in the Sunda Sea, that took place in late August of # and threw a cubic mile of pumice and other volcanic ejecta into the atmosphere, came just in time to demonstrate what a volcano could do. The catastrophe that left Thera and Therasia must have been of the type of the Krakatoa explosion, and probably even bigger and more violent. Of course, Thera and Therasia are covered with thick layers of pumice and volcanic ashes. It probably would never have occurred to anybody to start excavations to see whether anything could be found underneath these layers. If the thought had occurred to anybody, it is doubtful whether money for such a project could have been found. But science was aided by a commercial venture at this point. Greek business men "mined" the pumice for making cement that was needed on the mainland for construction purposes. And under the pumice and ashes remains of old buildings were found! Household utensils of shaped clay were recovered. No trace of inscriptions was found and virtually no metallic objects. But Fouque described two golden rings, implying trade since there is no gold locally. Too bad that one could only guess at the date of this early inhabitation. I have to admit that I do not know who was the first to connect the ancient eruption of Santorini with the end of the Minoan culture on Crete. Early Crete had an astonishing culture, with large cities and enormous temples, and it was a maritime power. As knowledge about ancient Crete grew, its role as the dominant sea power in the eastern Mediterranean became so clear that some scholars began to wonder whether the early Cretans were not the model for the sea-going Phaiakians of Homer's Odyssey. And since there are many resemblances between the sailors from Homer's Scheria and Plato's Atlanteans, and since both resemble the ancient Cretans, it has been suggested at least twice -- by the American E. S. Balch in #I and the German W. Brandenstein in # -- that Plato's Atlantis was mainly a poetic memory of the Cretans. Legends, poetry, speculation and philosophy aside, there was Fig. #. The area covered by volcanic ash from the eruption of # B.C. a very real mystery about the end of the Minoan culture on Crete. Before about # B. C. there were large cities, but some time after that date there were only small rural settlements. And most of the archeologists who tried to reconstruct life during the Minoan culture slowly became convinced that there was a sudden "event" that marked the beginning of the change. In places it looked as if artisans had dropped their tools in the middle of their normal activities and run away. The most obvious explanation was that there had been a sudden call to arms to ward off an invasion. It sounded simple and also sounded logical, but there were difficulties. A wouldbe invader would first have been engaged by the large Cretan fleet, so that a sudden call to arms was not too likely. Besides, who could have invaded Crete? I t was an event, all right. But the event was the eruption of Santorini -- which is now estimated to have thrown about four times the volume of pumice and cinders into the atmosphere as Krakatoa did in #. While the sudden appearance of enormous black clouds must have been frightening, the fall of cinders and ashes at such a distance could not have been too serious. But such an eruption of an island volcano produces an enormous tidal wave, the one caused by the Krakatoa explosion drowned over # people on the neighboring islands. The wave from the Santorini explosion must have smashed the whole Cretan fleet, probably assembled along the north shore of the island. It killed an unknown number of Cretans, and it caused the end of the Minoan culture, eliminating it much faster and more thoroughly than any invasion by human enemies would have done. The effects of the distant volcanic eruption were felt as far away as Egypt, though in Egypt the effects were psychological -- darkness for a period of time -- rather than physical. So here we have, in the right area and fairly closely at the right time, the great natural catastrophe of which Solon spoke. And it fits the general picture: the Greeks would have learned about it from the Egyptians. The Egyptians could also have told Solon about invasions from the West. We know that there were such invasions by what the Egyptians call the "sea people." Actually these invasions took place about # years after the Santorini catastrophe; but, since all this was told to Solon another # years later, the Egyptians may have confused the sequence of events. Or else Solon did not understand too well what they said. Or else Plato thought that it would make a better story if a human invasion was terminated by a natural catastrophe. The new knowledge about the approximate date of the Santorini catastrophe as the reason for the end of the Minoan culture on Crete has certainly shed new light on the "sources" of the Atlantis story. It does seem more likely now that Solon actually brought the tale from Egypt and the manuscript of the older Kritias -- believed by most scholars to have been Plato's literary invention -- might have existed. But Professor Galanopculos went one step farther. Knowing, from personal observation, that Santorini was inhabited before the catastrophe, he has superimposed the scale map of Plato's city on the map of the Santorini group. He found that the whole group would fit inside the Outer Wall of Plato's city and that the city itself would fit into the space between Thera and Therasia. As any one of my readers can try for himself, there is such a fit, though a rather poor one. Personally I consider the similarity in size just a coincidence. I don't think that Santorini was Atlantis... though there can hardly be any doubt that Santorini was the main cause of the Any detective can locate a missing tree. If takes an expert to be one! I I nspector Judson Kruger was a tanned, thickset man with stiff black hair, heavy eyebrows, and jowls to make a razor cringe. Just now, though his wide mouth was a taut line, his face was carefully immobile. So was the rest of him. He stood in a shallow wooden tray with sled-runners under it, just outside a gate in a high, wire-mesh fence. He wore a green suit and green shirt, the greenest he'd been able to find. He was hatless; also shoeless and sockless. His large feet were planted up to the ankles in soft moist loam. The sign on the gate was repeated in several languages. The A peculiar large machine was clattering along the roadway just inside the fence. It was long, low and flexibly jointed on eight pairs of small wheels. Elevated turrets, fore and aft, rotated, aiming batteries of eyes resembling the bottoms of beer bottles. A long proboscis swept back and forth ahead, sniffing at flowers and weeds beside the road. Other attachments hinted at other senses. Now and then a short hose would rear itself and squirt a stream of something -- nutrient, Kruger guessed -- at some shrub. Once a small cage elevated itself to release a swarm of insects. On a grimmer note, folded atop the machine were various grapples. Some of them looked capable of seizing a man and throwing him over the fence. The machine rattled out of sight. Kruger listened for a moment, glanced around quickly, and stepped from the tray, shaking loam from his feet. Seizing a short length of rope, he dragged the tray-sled toward the gate. He opened that, got the sled through and closed the gate. Hastily, he dragged the sled across the road and into the thicket beyond, then returned to obliterate the dragmarks on the road as well as he could. T J e had pinpointed his ob- jective from one of the sightseeing airbusses allowed to fly over this refuge. It was perhaps a mile from the fence, in an area that served as a stop-over for non-resident plants. He struggled through the brush, which was local flora aqd not closely tended, muttering various words and phrases when he encountered thorns or when the sled got snagged. Once a flitbot drifted over, and he had to hop hastily into the tray and stand still. If it saw him, it probably assumed he was some exotic plant sprouted from a stray seed. He went on. In half an hour he reached the inner edge of the thicket and looked out over grassland, contoured in gentle slopes with irrigation pipes laid along the ridges, jetting little fountains of water. The grass was unmowed and unkempt. Spotted about the slopes were shrubs of various kinds, each with its small circle of cleared soil. Farther on were trees, their bases hidden from Kruger by intervening ridges. Among those trees was the one he sought. A sound like several angry judges clearing their throats drew his attention to his left. Hastily he stepped into his tray. A flitbot was moving his way, most of its eye-tentacles extended ahead of it. He saw that it was following some insect that buzzed low over the grass. On it came, rumbling ominously. Not far from Kruger the insect lit, and the machine pounced. A vacuum-cleaner extension shot out. But the prey -- a mediumsized beetle -- was quicker. It zoomed upward, buzzing frantically, dodged the questing tentacle, flashed in an arc and headed for the thicket where Kruger stood. The flitbot jerked into pursuit. I t took all Kruger's willpower to stand still. Like a homing missile, the insect shot toward him, did a loop before his horrified eyes and lit on his left cheek. Instantly, the pursuing tentacle snaked out, hit Kruger's cheek ringingly and devoured the insect with a vengeful sucking sound. Kruger heard chitin crunch somewhere in the machine's interior. He also heard his own involuntary yell, "Ouch! Damn it, you don't have to take my ear too!" The machine turned abruptly to hover before him. "Did you say something?" Kruger's mind wasn't working well -- it was too busy restraining his legs. He stammered, "Uh, no. It was just the wind in my hai -- my tassels." The flitbot glared suspiciously. "Vegetable, animal, mineral or 'bot?" "V-vegetable." The machine relaxed. "Don't be shy. I can see you're new here. Lots of plants talk, you know, in one way or another. You're the first I've heard speak English, though. Why did they plant you here at the edge of the thicket?" "I -- I like it here. I get just enough sun, and I can look out over the grass. Wha-what did that beetle do?" The machine said grimly, "It was getting ready to nibble on a young, healthy grass blade. That kind always does, sooner or later. They never learn." The machine chuckled. "Well, it's fertilizer now, so we won't complain, eh?" It suddenly clucked and sent tentacles downward. "Why, look at your poor roots! They're half uncovered!" Crooning, it patted his feet gently, then pushed loam over them. "Are you sure you're all rightDo you want a squirt of Nitro-Vite or anything?" "Un... not right now, thanks. I'll just soak up a little sun." He waited a while, shaking, after the machine left. Then, with a thorough look around, he stepped out of the sled, lifted it and carried it ahead of him. It was an awkward burden, but he wasn't going to drag it through the grass. His own tracks were risk enough. He got soaked crossing irrigation pipes, and kept imagining he heard machines coming, but finally he reached the trees, put the sled down, caught his breath and began dragging the sled. Within fifteen minutes he reached the small clearing he sought. He found cover beneath hanging branches, wiggled his toes into the now-muddy loam, and stared at the lone tree in the clearing. II I t was a lovely tree. There was no denying that. It stood perhaps twenty feet tall, symmetrical and slim, with a graceful taper. The limbs were tastefully placed around the trunk, growing out almost horizontally with a slight up-turn at the ends. The bark was smooth and neat, a pleasing cinnamon brown. The needles, a light and warm shade of green, were like long pine needles but less stiff so that they drooped in graceful curves. At the very top was a blossom -- six or seven dainty upright blades, warm pink, like a maiden's blush. Cautiously, he reached under his soaked jacket and drew out a small camera. "Damn it. I hope the water didn't get into this," he muttered. He checked the setting, raised the camera to his face and peered into the viewfinder, centering on the tree. A thing like a steel cable whipped around his wrist, knocking the camera from his grasp. "Aha!" a harsh voice growled. "Gotcha!" This machine had sneaked up on him very quietly. It was about his own height, but broader, especially in the lower body, from which four metal legs sprouted, ending in big dislike feet with soft padding on them. There were four tentacles at shoulder height. One of them had elongated itself to become the steely strand that gripped his wrist. The head, atop a pipelike neck, was circled with beer-bottle eyes and had various electronic gear growing from it. Kruger jerked futilely to get free. He snarled, "Let go, damn it! What the hell are you?" The thing said indignantly, "I'm a robocop. Don't you see my badge? I guess, though, it don't show up so good against my stainless steel chest." Kruger blinked. "Oh. Well, for heaven's sake let go of my, er, branch. I haven't done anything." The machine made a sound that would go well with a sneer. "Don't pull that on me, Buster. We're not hicks here. The flitbot you talked to went back and found you gone and saw your tracks and radioed the alarm. Said you talk English. Uh, I talk English. Uh, I talk English pretty good myself, huh?" "Yeah," Kruger snarled, "good as hell. What happens now?" "We wait until the flitbot and a patrolbot get here. Then we have the trial." T he patrolbot was like the large wheeled machine Kruger had seen earlier. It was evidently present mainly to provide physical equipment for the trial. It did join, though, in the recital of basic axioms. The three machines intonThere was a pause, then the flitbot said in a kind voice, "You may sit down. Prisoner, if your feet are tired." Kruger looked around for a level spot and lowered himself to it. "Thanks. I have been on my feet for a long time." Then he saw his mistake and made a move to jump up. But it was too late. "The hell with it!" The flitbot sighed. "It does realize, subconsciously at least, that it's an animal. Well..." The flitbot held up Kruger's camera. "Is this an artifact?" Kruger glared. "How the hell would I know? I don't carry a, a encyclopedia around with me." The robocop put in, "It's got data engraved on it. It ain't vegetable, animal, mineral or 'bot, so I say it's an artifact." "Very well," the flitbot said. "Next Axiom." ER.)" "Prisoner, do you eat your own kind?" Kruger jumped to his feet in disgust. "Of course not! Look; I demand to see the Terran consul or somebody!" "There is no Terran consul here. Do you eat minerals? Or robots? I thought not. You must, then, eat plants." The flitbot sobbed. "Let's leave the subject. Ready:" The patrolbot suddenly shot out grapples and seized Kruger. "Hey!" he yelled. "What the devil -- " A large cylinder of clear glass or plastic popped from a segment of the big machine. The grapples stuffed him in, and clamped a lid on. He beat at the lid with his fists, but it didn't g yield. He gave up. Exertion would only make him suffocate quicker. But there were various flexible hoses attached to the other end of the cylinder. Maybe... The lid opened. A grapple reached in, seized him by the coat collar, hauled him out and dumped him on the ground. He rolled over and sat up, sputtering. "Mm-hm," the flitbot said, "it absorbs oxygen, all right. And gives off carbon dioxide. Animal, then, by all reasonable tests. Agreed?" "Agreed," the other two machines chorused. The grapples picked him up again and lifted him to a flat platform atop the patrolbot "Damn it," he yelled, "now what are you doing?" "Weighing you," the flitbot said. "If we didn't make absolutely sure you mass over seventeen grams, some judge somewhere would doubtless set aside the verdict and order a new trial." Finally they put him back on the ground. The patrolbot said, "It'd make a nice batch of fertilizer." The flitbot sighed regretfully. "I'm afraid we can't do that. This creature is clearly insane. Though it knows deep down that it's an animal, its behavior shows that on the conscious level it thinks it's a plant. About all we can do is eject it with a stem warning. All right?" The patrolbot muttered something. The robocop said, "Well, if you think so." "Patrolbot," the flitbot said, "do your duty." The grapples seized Kruger again and held him aloft, shouting and struggling. The big machine turned and rattled to the edge of the clearing and along a road. At the end of the trip Kruger discovered that he'd been right about the grapples the first time he saw them. They could throw a man over the fence. TJ e limped into town, dis- tributing glares impartially to the bizzare assortment of aliens who stared at his disheveled clothing and bare feet. Finally he reached a communications booth, wedged himself into it and pulled the door shut violently. He leaned toward the pickup and snarled into it, "English. Voice transmission only; fastest subetheric routing. I want the planet Earth, Solar System. Terran Department of Justice, Interstellar Division, Commissioner Stanzlecz. No, I won't spell it. Just put the goddam call through." There was a period of clicking, buzzing, whistling and popping. Then a sultry contralto voice drawled, "Interstellar Division. To whom did you wish to speak to, please? Whom is calling, please?" "This is Inspector Kruger. I want to speak to the Old Man. Who the hell are you ? Another new switchboard girl?" There was a languid pause. Then, "Oh, Inspector Kruger. I've heard of ycu. I'm Cherie Grapplewell. Just a moment, please. I'll, mm, give you the connection you want." He waited. Presently his chief's voice came on. "Kruger, my boy! How are you? Everything hotsy-totsy, I hope? What may I do for you?" Kruger snarled, "Mainly, I wanted to tell you what you can do with this job, once I get this assignment finished. If I ever do." There was a pause. "Gracious. One of those moods. But you sound sober, and that's something. I confess. I can't imagine what's so difficult about finding one stolen tree." Kruger sneered at the pickup. "You can't, eh? I suppose you didn't know there was anything out of the ordinary about this theft." "Ooh. You are huffy! Of course I knew it was an important tree. A favorite of a planetary ruler, an Emperor Brekeke, or something like that. But with the photograph we gave you, and the leads, I thought surely... Haven't you been able to trace it at all?" "Hell yes, I've been able to trace it! I got within fifty yards of it. But there hasn't been one hint of who stole it, or where he is now. And before I even begin to reclaim it, I have to take a new photograph and register that with the local authorities and send copies to the Emperor. He has to certify that it's his tree and that it was stolen without his permission, expressed or implied, and that if it's extradited it'll be given a good home and not mistreated. There's something damn odd about this whole case. Right now, the tree's in a Plant Refuge, and -- " "In a what?" "A Plant Refuge, damn it! What I called you for is to see if you can apply any pressure anywhere to help me get into it legally. Half this planet's forbidden to, uh, animals. I've been trying all kinds of subterfuge, but " "Kruger! Are you sure you haven't been drinking?" Kruger counted to ten in basic Anglo-Saxon. Finally he choked out, "Just get me some backing!" Ill The commissioner said severely, "Now see here, Inspector. I had my doubts about assigning you to the job. If there'd been anyone available at the moment with even a modicum of tact or subtlety... Terragov wants very badly to establish firmer relations with Emperor Brekeke, which is why we've undertaken this little thing for him, on the quiet. I warn you I will not tolerate any high-handed tactics. That planet you're on is in the Moogan Protectorate and, heavens, you know how delicate our relations with them are. "I did ask our ambassador to see if the Moogans could help you. I believe an old friend of yours is the Moogan Regent in that sector. Mum something... long name... " Kruger groaned and broke the connection. He quickly reached for the door, but the speaker-grill emitted a chime. "Yeah?" "Inspector Kruger? Emergency Contacts. Please turn on the visio pickup." He muttered an oath, but complied. There was a gasp from the invisible operator. "Oh! Is that what humans look like? I -- I've been holding a call from Governor-Regent Mummumnoonoogog. He demands to speak to you." TV Tummumnoonoogog -- Mum' l-for short -- was a typical Moogan, humanoid but so muscular he looked like two bodies occupying the same space. His jaw seemed to thrust out of the viewscreen. "There you are! Listen, Kruger. I've tried to remind myself you're just a cop trying to do his job. But the last time I saw you I wanted to make pemmican of you, and it wouldn't take much to revive the wish. My itinerary takes me near there, and I'm swinging over especially to see if I can catch you at anything. Now, I want you to go to your hotel and wait. I'll be there in a couple of days. I won't tell you when. And you'd better not let me find you more than two blocks from your hotel. Understand?" The Moogan held up two truncheonlike fingers. "One, two. Two blocks." Kruger tried not to cringe. "Yes, sir. Uh, Governor. There's this stolen article, on the planet here -- " Mum showed a smile that would have made a shark shudder. "I don't care if somebody's stolen the Crab Nebula. No nonsense from you, See?" "Y-yes, sir. I see." The screen went dark. Kruger sat a minute staring idly at his bare feet. They were scratched and swollen and muddy. Finally he snarled, stood up, left the booth and limped toward his hotel. I t was reassuring, if a little painful, to wear shoes again. He spent the next forenoon limping about the area vouchsafed him. He pondered whether two blocks might include the far sides of the limiting street. Probably not, in Mum's eyes. He wandered into an all-species lunchroom and ate, more or less -- after almost hysterically refusing a lovely green salad. Then he walked some more, scowling at the buildings he'd already passed a dozen times. Finally he stood on a corner, teetering back and forth on his sore feet, watching the assorted aliens stream by in equally assorted vehicles. He was about to go back to the hotel and get drunk, when a hoarse, dry, rather high-pitched voice whispered, "Half a mo, guvner." He turned, startled. "Uh, I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?" What the alien made him think of was a fox. Not that it could possibly be related to the Terran species. For one thing, it was tall, even on all fours. Its pert, erect-eared, furtufted face was level with Kruger's shoulder. And it very very short foreand-aft -- as if a fox, monstrously big to begin with, had been somehow squeezed together and upward until its hind-paws stood only inches from the forepaws. But it looked like a fox. It winked slyly. "Wasn't I just? Speakin t' yer, I mean. Or praps I has the wrong chap. Praps yer eyent Inspector Kruger spyin' after the tree wot's been swiped from Is Ighness o' the planet Koshkush. If I has the wrong man, I'll just sye me pardons, guvner, an' be on me wye." The creature made a move. "No -- wait! I'm Kruger. How the devil did you -- " The alien winked again. "Oh, blokes like me has a wye o' earin things. Wot's it worth t' yer, t' ear somethin yer oughter know?" Kruger studied the sharp features. He had little to lose. "How can I tell until I hear it?" "Coo, guvner. Eyent we the cautious ones? This eyent goin t' cost yer no blinkin fortune. I'll make yer a real bargain, sort o' as a sample o' me services. Sye ten credits?" Wruger shrugged mentally. He was on a pretty good expense account, this trip. He got out his wallet and extracted the necessary currency. "Here. Now what ought I to know?" The alien reached with a long foreleg, took the money deftly in its paw and tucked it into what looked like a natural pouch in the fur of his chest. "I'm fair obliged, guvner. Ear it is: them as stole the Koshkush tree has got the wind up. They're fixin' t' move it somewheres else on the planet. Some plyce visitors eyent so blinkin likely to sneak in. I wouldn't doubt they'll do it right after this igh mackamuck Mum gets ear, so yer sure t' be occupied. Now. Eyent that somethin yer oughter know?" Kruger grunted. It certainly was. If they did transplant the tree somewhere else -- the machine could undoubtedly do it -- he might never find it again, even if Mum didn't ship him home poste-haste. He realized the alien was still standing there, as if waiting. He eyed it with interest. "Is there more?" "Might be, guvner. Somethin might be done. Cost a bit o' the foldin, though. Guess I'd oughter interduce meself. Raynud Raynud, o' the planet Heath. Bit o' a dealer, if I might sye it. This an that. But seein as how yer keyent go more than three blocks from yer hotel... " "Two." "Two, was it? Coo, things do get distorted. Hinders yer activities, don't it? A blinkin pity. Course, now, there's more than one blinkin hotel in town, eyent there?" Something like a small grenade exploded in Kruger's mind. He reached out and grasped a handful of pelt at the alien's shoulder. "I don't know what your idea is, er, Raynud, but I like the way you think! Start by telling me what hotel to move to." The alien grinned. "The foldin, guvner? The foldin?" Kruger hesitated only an instant. "I think we can reach an understanding." "Good, now. We has t' get yer within two blocks o me cousin's factory." r  "'he sign outside the factory mouthed and watch a crew of huge creatures like muscular land-going octopi put finishing touches on a brand-new patrolbot. Five of them seized it, roared out in unison, "Yo Ho Ho Heave!" and, with an awesome bunching and writhing of tentacles, tossed the machine up lightly onto a rack. Then, tentacles flashing, they began putting on the wheels. In ten minutes the thing was done. One of the assemblers glided liquidly to the tail end and twisted something. The machine came to life. Its beerbottle eyes swiveled. It seemed to cringe from the octopi. One of the latter -- the foreman, no doubt, as he'd done no work -- rumbled something to the machine and pointed. It dipped its forepart, rolled obediently down a pair of rails to the ground and rattled over to park itself in line with several identical machines. Raynud Raynud was tugging at Kruger's sleeve. "Come on, guvner. Me cousin's wytin." A n apparent twin of the alien greeted them in the office. "Delighted, what? Earth, eh? Heard a lot about the place. Been meaning to pop out and have a look-o, when I get the chance. Bit of all right, this English; and spreading like wildfire. Do you have any other languages on Earth?" "Uh, well, a few." "Fancy! Well, old chap. Raynie's told me about your difficulty. Shouldn't wonder if we can just take care of it. Bit of a rush, eh? Put the night crew on it. Have the thing ready bright and early. Never was too keen on that Moogan chap, anyway. Not soft-spoken at all." Kuger stared out the window at the line of motionless patrolbots. "I suppose the two of you can estimate the chances better than I can. And it's a lot more than I'd hoped for. I was going to content myself with a good color photograph. Uh, you're sure one of your machines can really uproot the tree without damaging it and bring it out?" "Oh, no question, old top. Special fittings and all that. Matter of fact... But you're not interested in how the dashed tree got there in the first place, are you. Stick to the present game, eh?" The manufacturer smiled. "Beastly poor show if that Moogan chap breezed in a day early, and you popping about outside your quarantine." His cousin put in, "Faint heart never won no blinkin barmaid, I always sye." Kruger peered harder at the machines outside. Something was stirring in his mind. "Lots of room inside those things?" "Oh, ample. Ample." "Uh... would there be room for a couch, and maybe a chair? And, er, facilities?" The manufacturer eyed him. "Shouldn't wonder. Why?" "Well, could you install them? And paint a sign on the front of the machine? I might not have to break quarantine." The two aliens were watching him narrowly. "How, old chap, might that sign read?" "Refuge Hotel. Weekly rates." Raynud Raynud lifted a forepaw and poked Kruger delightedly in the ribs. "Coo, guvner! You eyent half slippery!" IV I nside the refuge, the false patrolbot bumped and rattled along the road. Kruger, sweating at the task of driving, kept glancing nervously at the small computer-screen before him. If some other machine radioed him some message, he had to think up a quick answer for his own vehicle to translate into 'botese. He'd passed several robocops and flitbots, but beyond casual glances they hadn't paid any attention. He had to admit the Raynud's idea was fundamentally sounder than his own earlier one. Why disguise yourself as a plant, when you could disguise yourself as one of the guardian machines? He rounded a turn and saw beside the road a very strange creature with a thumb raised in an unmistakable gesture. A suitcase rested on the ground. A t first startled glance, he thought the thing was a gigantic frog or toad. But it was obviously intelligent. He perspired harder. Dare he dare pick up a hitchhiker? Dare he, on the other hand, pass it by? It must be highly privileged, to be here at all. He braked to a stop and opened the hatch. It wasn't until the thing was inside that he saw his error. He stared in dismay at what he'd taken for feet. They were roofs. To be sure, they splayed out nicely, like toes, but they were obviously capable of thrusting into the ground, for anchorage and sustenance. And the rough green skin was... bark. Perhaps, though, he hoped desperately, the .thing wasn't all plant. The eyes and the mouth looked almost animal. The being eyed him impatiently. "Well? Are you the proprietor? Do you have a vacancy?" Kruger shook himself from his trance. "Uh... there's just the one couch... " "Well," the thing said coldly, "do I look as if I need two? Proprietor or clerk, stir yourself and fetch my luggage. If it's payment you're hesitating about, here." It took from beneath its bark a fat wad of orange credit notes, peeled one off carelessly and thrust it at Kruger. Kruger climbed out, hastily grabbed the valise, brought it in and closed the hatch. "I -- I'm afraid we aren't very luxurious here. You see, I -- " The thing bestowed upon him a gracious smile. "Quite all right. At least, everything seems new and clean. And I'm travelling quietly, in any case. Don't want to be seen, you know." It settled itself comfortably on the couch. "You're animal, aren't you? I suppose, with the scarcity of help... " Kruger climbed back into the driver's seat and sat for a moment, blinking. Then, because he didn't know what else to do, he drove on. His guest was taking a keen interest in the manual controls, peering past Kruger at them. "Fellow, this is a passing strange establishment you have here. A mobile inn, I can appreciate. But why that mishmash of apparati? What are those three hand wheels at the top, for instance?" "Uh, those are the digger controls, sir." "Digger controls? What in heaven's name has an innkeeper to do with digging?" Kruger improvished desperately, "Well... you see, sir... some of our patrons lack the power of locomotion. Sort of, you might say, rooted in one spot. Ha, ha." "Oh, yes, of course. Hm." The being seemed to ponder for a minute. Then it chuckled. "Quite. Oh, quite. You can't imagine . " Kruger drove on. Presently the vehicle emerged into the clearing he sought. He got out of his seat and turned -- and found himself staring into the muzzles of a compact but deadly-looking energy-pistol. r T"'he thing that held the weapon stared at him intently now. "Just don't make any foolish moves, fellow. Do exactly as I say, and possibly I'll let you live, though I can't think why. Turn this vehicle around and back it slowly toward that tree. Start digging it up. Then, handling it very gently -- and I hope for your sake you know your job well -- uproot it and stow it on top of this inn or vehicle. Or wherever you stow things. Then turn around and go back the way you came. If anything speaks to us, say whatever you must to get us unhindered out of this Refuge. Falter, and you die." Kruger felt a tide of crimson mounting his face. He let out an inarticulate sound. No, no; he screamed inwardly. Not even I can have luck this bad! But he didn't see how he could doubt it. He'd apparently blundered into the very hands of the criminal who'd stolen the tree. His mind darted about like a mouse in a cat's lair. He stammered, stalling desperately for time, "Uh, the tree from -- from Koshkush?" His captor smiled frigidly. "Let us not play games. My patience is limited." Slowly, with shaking hands, Kruger reached for the steeringwheel. What mortified him wasn't so much the desperate plight he was in, but that he'd been such a complete fool. Well, he thought bitterly, it wasn't the first time. But it might be the last. He got the vehicle turned and backed it toward the tree; stopped a few feet away and stared unhappily at the diggercontrols. He'd had precious little instruction. He sighed and took hold of a hand-wheel. Fortunately, the viewports let him see what he was doing. A huge awl-like thing rose on its derrick, tilted forward... There was a sound as of angry giant hornets. Gobs of molten steel exploded from the bushes at one side of the clearing, a thing came hopping frantically, its weapon spitting incandescence. More liquid steel rained down. The newcomer was a neartwin to Kruger's captor. "Stop!" the frantic one bellowed, "Harm one leaf of the Princess' foliage, and I'll -- " Kruger could imagine the whole patrolbot melted down, with him inside. He leaped for the hatch, flung it open and tumbled out. His erstwhile guest came right behind him. Now the two alien beings faced each other, weapons aimed. Then they both went rigid, staring at each other. "Brekeke!" "Keshkoash!" Slowly, the newcomer let its weapon sag, then thud to the ground. "Sire... I cannot..." Kruger's captor was trembling. In a voice laden with grief, it said, "Keshkoash. My most trusted liegeman. And I assmued you'd perished in a futile defense of Her Highness." The other -- which, Kruger now saw, was the more youthful -- hopped slowly to the tree and knelt beside its trunk. "We love each other, Sire. That is my only defense." r T"he tree was quivering and bending. Kruger heard his own hoarse voice. "P-princess?" The Emperor -- for it could be no other -- glanced at him absently, then drew itself up and bowed. "Accept a monarch's apologies, fellow. I thought you the thief. You must be, instead, that detective rom Earth. Kru -- Kru -- " "K-Kruger." "Ah, yes. Kru-ker. A good name. I may award you a baronetcy, if you can prove there's any noble sap in your capillaries. Your superiors messaged me that you'd found my daughter, and where. I thought I'd best hurry on ahead. When my fleet gets here... " Kruger was staring at the tree. "D-daughter?" Brekeke frowned. "Why not? Don't tell me you belong to one of these species in which the females are hardly distinguishable from the males? Revolting!" The tree, which had been quivering ever more violently, now spoke -- apparently by vibrating certain branches and twigs. Its voice was girlish and tearful. "I shall never return to Koshkush!" Brekeke spun and took an angry hop. "What! You dare think of defiance?" "I won't!" the tree wailed, "I can't! I'd rather wilt first!" "Why?" the emperor roared. The blossom atop the tree turned crimson. "Because we -- because I -- I'm going to have a seed." Brekeke went motionless and silent. Slowly, its bark became mudcolored. It began to shake. A low growl escaped from it. It fought for self-control; finally achieved it. It drew itself up and glanced coldly at Keshkoash. "You scoundrel. And with all those hungry relatives of yours. And the other trouble this will cause me. Well... it appears I am gelt with my own poignard." It laughed bitterly. "I have not lost a daughter. I have gained a grove!" Kruger was beginning to realize that he wasn't really needed here, nor safe. Quietly, he backed toward his vehicle; turned to make a dash... And found his way blocked by three genuine machines. The flitbot said in exasperation, "It's that crazy animal again. And look how upset it's got those plants! Patrolbot, do you remember how you tossed it over the fence before?" "I remember." "Well, do it again. But first, let's send a workbot to build the fence up twice as high at that point." V T#" ruger was sitting up. Much of him was bandaged, but there seemed to be no broken bones. Mummumnoonoogog paced the hotel room, pausing at each turn to glare. Sometimes his thick hands inched forward, fingers flexing hungrily. But he restrained himself. "A whole array of machines gone neurotic," he snarled, "because you demonstrated that any one of them might be a fake. An animal spy. The planet Heath threatening to quit the Customs Union because I'm having to prosecute two of its nationals. Koshkush on the brink of civil war because the Princess broke her troth to a powerful duke and eloped with some mere baron." Kruger muttered, "I didn't have anything to do with that." wmms) Mum advanced and thrust his face at Kruger's. "You found them. You found them. So long as it was assumed she'd merely been kidnapped, it was all right. Have you any idea what this mess is costing Moog? What do you think would happen to you if I sent Earth the bill?" Kruger said, "I'd get fired. Please do." The Moogan grunted. "Don't think I wouldn't love to. But you personally are under the protection of Emperor Brekeke, and, at least until he's overthrown, he's a valued ally. As a matter of fact, he even suggested you for a little job of sleuthing I have to carry out. It might just suit you. The Raynud cousins got away. Turns out they've been smuggling and engaging in all sorts of illegal things for a long time. Somebody's got to chase them down. Do you want the job?" Kruger knew better than to refuse too hastily, "Well, do you have any idea where they went?" "Certainly we do. They're still on this planet. They dyed their fur green and escaped into one of the refuges." Kruger pretended to consider it carefully. After a while he said, "Mm, no; I think not. Thanks. But it would hardly be, er, ethical, I'm afraid. Uh, honor Here's how to crash television. All you need is a gimmick -- like for example the end of the Earth! Greymour P. Glide, Midashow Productions, Inc. Video Village, Pasadena, Calif. June # Mr. Mort Rydan, Fun Town Apartments, # Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. Bravo, Mr. Rydan, bravo! Your presentation titled read with considerable interest by all of us here at Midashow Productions, Inc. I am sure that you are aware how seldom a manuscript such as yours, submitted by a non-Guild writer without an agent, ever gets as far as the desk of someone in my position. However, there is something so uncannily compelling about your ms., all the boys thought I simply had to see it. I want to tell you that the Laughing Grasshopper of yours really gave us all a big boffo. My only wish is that your wonderful, truly wonderful concept with so many commercial possibilities was not so unspeakable. Fun is fun, baby. I admit that the biggest Nielsen any audience participation ever got, day or prime, but such things can not be. If your wish was to gain our attention, you certainly have. But now let's stop horsin' around, as they say, and give me something we can use. Remember, there are a lot of good normal, church-going, child-rearing, yes. Americaloving folks out there, and it is up to us to be normal and save such good healthy pagan ideas for our private lives, right? (By the way, are you really Richard Belnoir Hastings?) The Surprise Disemboweling Phonograph the Familiars use on the Third Play is particularly good. This can be salvaged in some way, I feel, and would like to discuss this and other matters with you. There are difficulties inherent in the original gizmo, however, that give some of us doubts. To save anything of the Howling Day game, contestants will have to be above average both physically and brainwise even to last until the Flinching Feelers Hop. (Should take four min zero -- right to first commerc. -- good.) This is of course bad for home identification, but moreover, there's a problem of logistics. Where we going to get them? (Howsomever, a good first game could be played by the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham and some writer-scientist like my good friend Ray Bradbury, a real gentleman. (This ain't you, Ray?) Anyhoo, a meet can iron out these problems. Phone, for crissake. And let's not play dirty with the U.S. Mails, huh? With best regards, Grey Greymour P. Glide, Associate Executive Producer, The Midas Game, Midashow Prod., Inc. Mort Rydan, # Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. June # Mr. Richard Amthom Agberg, Vive-President-in-Charge, Video Village, Pasadena, Calif. My dear Agberg: I must call your attention to the fact that my submission titled Howling Day, mailed June #, somehow fell into the hands of something called The Midas Game, an alleged audience participation program. This certainly was not the proper place for my material, as anyone on Earth should be able to see. Yours, it was my understanding, is a leading American communications network. As such, you should exercise the proper disposition of material placed into your hands. If Howling Day is not submitted to the proper channels immediately, a higher authority shall hear of this. Most sincerely, M. Rydan Mort Rydan Lawrence Tinnley Boles, Analanthol Prod., Inc., Pasadena, Calif. June #I Mr. Mort Rydan, # Sunset, L.A. Calif. Dear Mort Rydan, "Howling Day" is one of those rare works of genius a man in my position has the electric joy of seeing once in a half score of years! I'm sure you are all too aware of the binding restrictions that make it so difficult for us in this hurried world of television to even glance at unsolicited, unagented scripts, but there was, all were agreed, something so compellingly unique about your work that the closest examination of it was demanded. Let me say immediately that while you and I know that Art is total license to the Artist, there were creatures who objected to Arthur painting his freshly dead ex as a "screwy" nympho, just so, I feel that if you go talking about your "Laughing Grasshopper" in some of the coarser bars with people not our sort, you may be killed, or at least badly beaten. I'd hate for that to happen to such a promising young man before I got a chance to do something with him. In the midst of all these good sayings, I must interject a negative motif. Our anthology series, Analogues oi Alan, has been canceled after the first thirteen were put in the can. We all feel it was a particularly bitchy thing to have happen to us. The Almighty knows there is little enough Art and Drama on the boob tube these dark dawnings. A clean and true death might have been ours, trampled by the mindless mobs of the ratings race. That is a hurtful death, but one that can be comprehended in the death throes. But ours was the ignominy of being canceled on the basis of preview theatre audience reactions in Arcadia, El Monte and San Diego. It was to be our fate to only complete those thirteen programs, involving but seven projects. Included were a two-parter of Robinson Crusoe, the first realistic treatment with sensitivity, and a six-part autobiographical odyssey-essay on the young American writer, Harlan Ellison, prepared with his full co-operation. I regret to say that " Howling Day" could not be one of those favored seven. However, all is not a total debit. You have the makings of a nice little sci-fi pilot here. I know -- " Howling Day " may concern interplanetary invasion, but it is certainly not science fiction, you say. But to the average viewer it does seem to be science fiction. Let him think so. The more perceptive will see further. Basically, you have to throw in a continuing lead, an ostensively young hero, rather a latter day Captain Video. (Too bad we can't get AI Hodge -- a sweet guy (but like a board) but other commits, you know.) I would be happy to work with you on developing this property. (I expect to have some free time shortly.) As you may have deduced, I have some smashing ideas myself. For instance: we see immediately -- before Peacock, before teaser, anything -- the big, simple, beautiful face of the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham and he is saying directly to us -- "There are Stranger Things in Heaven and Earth than are Dreamed..." And then after the teaser, opening credits, first commerc, we have another little intro by a scientific authority (God and Science both on our side). Maybe we can get my friend, Ray Bradbury, for this. It is my fondest wish that we meet together at your earliest convenience and discuss all, including some trifling legal points. We would be unable to show disembowelment without permission of the copyright owners, J'Entreat Pharma-products. And I trust you have taken the precaution of copyrighting your ms. or at least registering it with the Writer's Guild-West. By all means, let me hear from you. Fondly, Boley Lawrence Tinnley Boles, Senior Story Consultant, Analanthol Prod., Inc. M. Rydan # Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles June # Mr. R. Agberg Video Village, Pasadena, Calif. My dear sir: Once again, I have submitted Howling Day to your alleged network, and this time you have turned it over your drama section. Can you get it through your head that this is not intended as entertainment? I am giving you one last chance to do the right thing. Hastily, M. Rydan Mort Rydan Pasadena, Calif. June # Mr. M. Rydan, # Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, Cal. Dear Mr. Rydan, Thank you for submittting your fine script, "Howling Day" , sincerely regret that we cannot use this material in its present form. However, there is something so uniquely compelling about yourpresentation -- certainly it had to be to reach my desk without Guild membership or recognized representation -- that I feel some part of it may still be used in some form. I wish like hell we had the budget to do a full scale documentary such as yours. It might make a few of the fat-headed viewers get off their equally fat cans. TV has never equalled the effectiveness that an Orson Welles could achieve with his Invasion from Mars broadcast. Your script, if done right, without misrepresenting it as fact, could reach the same plateau of effectiveness. But there is simply not the money for it. And, frankly, I am getting to be an old and gray boy wonder, tired of dueling windmills. I don't feel like fighting the powers that be to convince them that your disembowelment scene is totally necessary, and all the other grief I would be taking on myself. The best we can do is present some of the -- let's face it, -- "cleaner" scenes, and comment on them and discuss them on that grand old gimmick, the Panel. My thinking at the moment is along the lines of doing this a Sunday morning on our Near God show. This is, you realize, a twenty-five minute optional net feed, and rates would be according. For the panel discussion between selected scenes, we could use you (if you're photogenic enough) along with somebody for religion's side of it -- Billy Graham would be perfect -- and a contemporary philosopher like Ray Bradbury (one of my close friends knows him quite well so this should be no problem). I think this should generate more discussion in trade circles than any similar show has in a long time, although God knows, we can't expect a rating buster. I want to meet with you and discuss the project just as soon as you can possibly make it. (Next time, please enclose your phone number.) By the by, I know "struggling young writers" like yourself don't always have a lot of money. I could offer you a little extra on the side until this all goes through. I got kind of a kick out of your "Laughing Grasshopper." It is so obscene, it is funny as all hell! Could you write me up about sixteen pages of a scene where the Grasshopper meets a girl who looks exactly like the late Marilyn Monroe? (Don't worry yourself about Continuity Acceptance!) Yours Truly, Bill Senior Associate Director, From the desk cf R. A. Agberg: You have utterly failed to make the proper use of my submission. Howling Day. It should be obvious to the stupidest beast on Earth that this was not a script submitted to your primitive communications system for 'ale. With the best will in the world, I offered you an extremely detailed advance publicity release for whatever use you could make of it during the coming invasion of your world by my people. Naturally, there was no charge for this service. The time value of the release has completely decayed due to your bungling. The day you are sent howling is here. I feel you people will find it as "uniquely compelling" in reality as in print! -- M.R.  it kc   Let's suppose the day comes when a man invents a practicable, economical time machine. It works perfectly. It can transmit a man, or a whole crew of men, as far into the past as you like -- complete with equipment, rations, reading matter, tents, water-purifiers... complete, in short, with anything you went to send. But -- not even to return from the past. That's the situation Robert Silverberg has created for us in next issue's lead complete novel, Hawksbill Station. What's the use of that kind of time travel? A very practical use, says Silverberg, for Hawksbill Station is a prison colony... from which there is no escape, and no hope of parole... In the same issue, of course, we conclude Poul Anderson's To Outlive Eternity -- and that's a climax you won't soon forget. We hope to squeeze in a non-fact article called Traveler's Guide to MegaHouston; there's a Roger Zelazny story called Angel, Dark Angel scheduled, plus the usual ration of Ley, Budrys etc... See you then! True maturity is a deadly gift. The aliens had it -- and Mankind trembled before their presence! I cnesis, Chapter # # And the Lord God said. Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: # Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. # So he drove out the man; and he placed at the East of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out on a view which was less than exciting. Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in his wake. When he rotated the cabin to face forward, they would be hellish blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly flattened. But now, in all directions there were only stars, sparsely scattered across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid the blazing glory of home. The light in the center of the view was not a star, and it was bright enough to have burned holes in a man's retinae. It was the light of Phssthpok's fusion drive, burning a bare eight miles away. Every few years Pssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow, periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship becoming a tiny nova. But the blue light had not changed at all in the weeks he'd been watching it. For most of a long, slow lifetime the heavens had been crawling past Phsstpok's porthole. Yet he remembered little of that voyage. The time of waiting had been too devoid of events to interest his memory. It is the way the protector stage of the Pak species, that one's leisure memories are of the past, when one was a child and, later, a breeder, when the world was new and bright and free of responsibilities. Only danger to himself or his children can rouse a protector from his normal dreamy lassitude to a fighting fury unsurpassed among sentient beings. Ohssthpok sat dreaming in his disaster couch. The cabin's attitude controls were beneath his left hand. A food slot was on his right, and when he was hungry, which happened once in ten hours, his knobby hand, like two fistfuls of black walnuts strung together, would reach into the food slot and emerge with a twisted, fleshy yellow root the size of a sweet potato. Terrestrial weeks had passed since Phssthpok last left his disaster couch. In that time he had moved nothing but his left hands and his jaws. His eyes had not moved at all. Before that there had been a period of furious exercise. A protector's duty is always to be fit. Even a protector with nobody to protect. The drive was steady, or enough so to satisfy Phssthpok. The protector's knotted fingers moved, and the heavens spun around him. He watched the other bright light float into the porthole. When it was centered he stopped the rotation. Already brighter than any star around it, his destination was still too dim to be more than a star. But it was brighter than Phssthpok had expected, and he knew that he had let time slip away from him. Too much dreaming! And no wonder. He'd spent most of twelve hundred years in that couch, staying immobile to conserve Lis food supply. It would have been twenty times that long but for relativistic effects. Despite what looked to be the worst and most crippling case of arthritis in medical history, despite weeks spent like a total paralytic, the knobby protector was instantly in motion. The drive flame shortened a little, bent a little to the right, so that the entire ship began to wheel around. He'd reached the most likely region of space; ahead was the most likely star. Phssthpok's moment of success was hard upon him. The ones he had come to help (if they existed at all; if they hadn't died out; if they circled this star and not one of the less likely) wouldn't be expecting him. Their minds were nearly animal; they might or might not use fire, but they certainly wouldn't have telescopes. Yet they were waiting for him... in a sense. If they were here at all, they had been waiting for He would not disappoint them. He must not. A protector v.'ithout descendants is a being without purpose. Such an anomaly must find a purpose, and quickly, or die. Most die. In their minds or their glands a reflex clicks, and they cease to feel hunger. Sometimes such a one finds that he can adopt the entire Pak species as his progeny: but then he must find a way to serve that species. Phssthpok was one of the lucky few. It would be terrible if he failed. II ick Sohl had gone mining. A century ago monopoles had been mere t'. eory, and conflicting theory at that. Magnetic theory said that a north magnetic pole could not exist without a south magnetic pole, and vice versa. Quantum theory foretold that they might exist independently. In #, when the first permanent settlements were just beginning to bloom in the biggest Belt rocks, an explorer had found north magnetic monopoles scattered through the metal ore of a nickel-iron asteroid with no name. Nick's cargo was as large as he could handle. One more shovelful (the magnets used to pull monopoles out of asteroid iron did look remarkably like shovels) would have started the north monopoles beating their way through the electromagnetic field around his cargo box. He had quite a catch for a couple of weeks' backbeating labor. Though ninety years had improved the tools, Monopole mining was still a one-man operation. Truth to tell, he'd have been satisfied had he found nothing. Mining was an excuse the First Speaker for the Belt Political Section used to escape from his cramped office buried deep in the rock of Ceres, from the constant UN-Belt squabbles, from wife and children, friends and acquaintances and enemies and strangers. But it was nice to know his secret scource had panned out. Nick's ancestors had felt the same about their secret fishing holes. The load would be worth good money at Ceres. A magnetic field generated by monopoles acts in an inverse linear relationship rather than an inverse square. In practical terms, a monopolebased motor or instrument will reach much further. Monopoles were valuable where weight was a factor, and in the Belt weight was always a factor. And next year, after the first frantic weeks of catching up with current events, after the next ten months spent manipulating the politics of the solar system, he would be back. And the year after that... though he couldn't really count on it. The monopoles sources in Saturn's rings were a trifle too conspicuous. One year soon he'd spend a week crossing space only to find Cassini's Divide jammed and alight with fusion-driven craft. Nick was building up speed for the trip to Ceres, with Saturn a fantastic bauble behind him, when he saw his mining detector swing slowly away from the cargo box. Somewhere to his left was a new and powerful source of monopoles. An unbelieving grin split his face, like lightning across a black sky. Two sources! Almost an embarrassment of riches. He didn't need this new one, but he could sell it once he'd located it. That would take doing. The needle wavered between two attractions, one of which was his cargo box. H e spent twenty minutes focussing a com laser on Ceres. "This is Nick Sohl, repeat, Nicholas Brewster Sohl. I wish to register a claim for a monopole scource in the general direction of -- " He looked, tried to guess how much his cargo was affecting the needle, and named a star. "I want to offer this source for sale to the Belt government. Details follow, half an hour." He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac and left the ship, carrying a telescope and his mining detector. The stars are far from eternal, but for Man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless, falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour, and knew once again why he went monopole mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt, from the carvedout rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself. A mile from the ship he used scope and detector to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take a new fix and pin the scource by triangulation. When he reached the ship his communicator was alight. The thin, fair face of "Little" Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to the empty acceleration couch. " -- Must call in at once, Nick. Don't wait to take your second fix. This is urgent. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl, repeat Martin -- " Nick refocused his laser. "Lit, I'm truly honored. How can my poor find justify your august attention? A simple clerk would have sufficed." He set the message to repeat a few times, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant. The answer came. Shaeffer's face was very serious. "Nick, one hundred and four miners have called in so far to report your scource." He paused, not for an answer, but for emphasis. "Think about it. Most miners work their own mines. If that many called in to sell, thousands must have decided not to. And they're all across the system. If you'd taken your second fix you'd have registered two parallel lines." Another pause. "I said we've had calls from across the system. They give us enough parallax to locate the scource. It's one scource, all right, and it's ninety A. U. from the sun, two and a half times as far as Pluto. You can guess how powerful it is. Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big interstellar hydrogen ramscoop. "We've been following it for an hour. Nick, it's moving toward the system at nearly ten thousand miles per second. That's way above even intergalactic speeds. We're all convinced it's an Outsider." "Any comments?" "Repeating -- " Nick switched it off and sat for a moment, stunned. An Outsider! O utsider was Belter slang for alien; but the word meant more than that. The Outsider would be the first sentient alien to contact the human race. And it, singular, would contact the Belt instead of Earth, not only because the Belt held title to most of the solar system but because those humans who had colonized space were obviously more intelligent. There were many hidden assumptions in the word Outsider, and not every Belter believed them all. "Nick Sohl calling Lit Shaeffer. Yes, I've got comments. One, it sounds like your assumption is valid. Two, will you for Christ's sake stop blasting the news all over the system? Some flatlander ship might pick up the fringe of one of your lasers. Or have we decided to bring them in on it? Three, I'll be home in five days. Concentrate on getting information. If you have to make decisions without me, do it, but first be sure it's urgent. Four -- " Find out if the jerk is decelerating! Find out where he'll stop! But he couldn't say any of that. Until they decided to bring Earth in, which they probably would not, they would have to be careful. Shaeffer would know what to do. "There is no Four. Sohl out." Ill T he solar system is big and, in the outer reaches, thin. In the main Belt, from slightly inside Mars' orbit to slightly outside Jupiter's, a determined man can examine a hundred rocks in a month. Further out, he's likely to spend a couple of weeks coming and going, just to look at something he hopes nobody else has noticed. The main Belt is not mined out, though most of the big rocks are now private property. Most miners prefer to work the Belt. In the Belt they know they can reach civilization and civilization's vital by-products : stored air water and hydrogen fuel, a restaurant with human waitresses, a new air regenerator, autodocs and theraputic psychomimetic drugs. Brennan didn't need drags or company to keep him sane. He preferred the outer reaches. He was in Uranus' trailing trojan point, following sixty degrees behind the big planet in its orbit. Trojan points, being points of stable equilibrium, are dust collectors and collectors of larger objects. There was a good deal of dust here, for deep space, and a handful of rocks worth exploring. Had he found nothing at all, Brennan would have moved on to the moons, then to the leading trojan point. Then home for a short rest and a visit with Charlotte; and, because his funds would be low by then, a paid tour of duty on Mercury, which he would hate. Had he found pitchblende he would have been in the point for months. None of the rocks held enough radioactives to interest him. But something nearby showed the metallic gleam of an artifact. Brennan moved in on it, expecting to find some Belt miner's throwaway fuel tank, but looking anyway. Brennan was a confirmed optimist. This time he was right. The artifact was the shell of a solidfuel rocket motor. Part of the Mariner XX, from the lettering. The Mariner XX, the ancient Pluto fly-by. Ages ago the ancient empty shell must have drifted back toward the distant sun, hit the thin trojan-point dust and coasted to a stop. The hulk, lightly pitted with dust holes, was still rotating with the stabilizing impulse imparted three generations back. As a collector's item the thing was nearly beyond price. Brennan took photographs of it in situ, then moved in to strap it to his fusion tube, below his lifesystem cabin. The gyros could compensate for the imbalance. In another sense the hulk presented a problem. H e stood next to it on the fusion tube's metal hull. The tank was half as big as his mining singleship, but very light, little more than a metal skin for its original shaped-core charge. If Brennan had found pitchblende, the singleship would have been hung with cargo nets under the fuel ring, carrying its own weight in radioactive ore. He would have returned to the Belt at half a gee. But with the Mariner relic as his cargo he could accelerate at the one gee which was standard for empty singleships. It might just give him the edge he'd need. If he sold the tank through the Belt, the Belt would take thirty percent in income tax and agent's fees. But if he sold it on the Moon, Earth's Museum of Spaceflight would charge no tax at all. Brennan was in a good position for smuggling. There were no goldskins out here. His velocity over most of his course would be tremendous. They couldn't begin to catch him until he approached the Moon. He wasn't hauling monopoles or radioactives; the magnetic detectors would look right through him. He could swing in over the plane of the system, avoiding rocks and other ships. But if they did get him, they'd take one hundred percent of his find. Everything. Brennan smiled to himself. It was worth the risk. P hssthpok's mouth closed once, twice, three times. A yellow tree-of-life root separated into four chunks, raggedly, because the edges of Phssthpok's beak were not sharp. They were blunt and uneven, like the top of a molar. Phssthpok gulped four times. He had hardly noticed the action. It was as if his hand, mouth and belly were on automatic, while Phssthpok watched the scope screen. Under # # magnification, the screen showed three tiny violet points. Looking around the edge of the scope screen, Phssthpok could see only the bright yellow star he'd called GO Target ##. He'd been searching for planets; and he'd found one, a beauty, the right size and approximate temperature, with a transparent atmosphere and an oversized moon. But he'd also found myriads of violet points so small that at first he'd thought they were mere flashes in his retinae. They were real, and they moved. Some moved no faster than planetary objects; others hundreds of times faster than escape velocity for GO Target ##. They glowed with an intensely hot color, the color of a neutron star in its fourth week of life, when its temperature is still in Obviously they were spacecraft. At these speeds, natural objects would have been lost to interstellar space within months. Probably they used fusion drives. If so, and judging from their color, they burned hotter and more efficiently than Phssthpok's own. There were tens of thousands of them. They seemed to spend most of their time in space. At first he'd hoped they were some form of space-born life, perhaps related to the starseeds of the galactic core. But as he drew nearer the yellow sun, he'd had to give up the idea. All the sparks had destinations, from the myriad small orbitting rocks to the moons and planets of the inner system. One frequent target was the double planet with the transparent atmosphere, the one he'd decided might be Pak-habitable. No spaceform could have stood its gravity or its atmosphere. That planet, GO Target #I #, was the biggest such target. If the pilots of those fusion craft had developed on GO Target #I #, they would naturally prefer lighter gravities to heavier. But the ones he sought hadn't the minds to build such craft. Had something, something alien, usurped their places? Then he and his thousands had given their long lives to extract only a sterile vengeance. It needn't be that. GO Target #I was not the only likely sun. Probability was only twentyeight percent. He could hope that the ones he had come to help circled another possible star. But he'd have to check. Centered in the great twing porthole was a steady point of blue-white light. It grew, but unlike the other sparks, it did not shift. Phssthpok was matching its course. yJick docked his ship on theI 'N surface of Ceres, hurriedly issued orders for unloading and sale of his cargo, and went underground. His office was some four miles beneath the pitted, bubble-dotted surface, buried deep in the nickel-iron core. Lit Shaeffer's suit and helmet were hanging in the vestibule of his office. Nick grinned fleetingly at the sight. He always did. Most Belters wore suits with personalized decorations. Why not? The interior of his suit was the only place many a Belter could call Home, and it was the one possession he had to keep in perfect condition. But even in the Belt, Shaeffer's suit was unusual. On an orange background was the painting of a girl. She was short, for her head barely reached Lit's neck ring, and her skin was a softly glowing green. Only her lovely back showed across the front of her suit. Her hair was streaming bonfire flames, flickering orange with touches of yellow and white, darkening into red-black smoke as it swept across the suit's left shoulder. She was nude, and she had both arms wrapped around the chest of the suit, her hands touching the airpac on the back; her legs wrapped around the suit's thighs, so that her heels touched the backs of the flexible metal knee joints. It was a very beautiful painting, so beautiful that it almost wasn't vulgar. A pity the suit's sanitary outlet wasn't somewhere else. Sometimes Nick wondered. Had Marda known about that suit when she married Lit? He entered his office, dropped into his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, ignoring Lit in one of the guests' chairs, getting used to the feel of being First Speaker again. With his eyes still closed he said, "Okay, Lit. What's been happening?" "Got it all here," Rustle of papers. "Yah The monopole scource is coming in over the plane of the solar system, aimed at the sun. As of an hour ago it the past week it's shown a steady deceleration of point nine two gee. At that rate it'll stop at Earth's orbit in five days." Nick opened his eyes. "Where will Earth be then?" Lit looked grim. His gaunt mahogany face was built for it. "About six feet away. We checked." "Hardly fair. The Outsider's supposed to contact us, not them. What have you done about anything?" "Nothing concrete. Just plans and observations. We've got photos of what looks like a drive flame." "Fusion? Chemical? Ion?" "Fusion, but much cooler than ours." "Can we contact that ship before it reaches Earth?" "Yah. Mitchikov has several courses plotted. Our best bet is to start a fleet from the trailing Jupiter Trojans in about -- " "Not a fleet. We want to look harmless to this bird -- assuming he can think, which we may as well. Do we have any big ships in the Trojans?" "The Blue Ox. She was about to leave for Juno, but I commandeered her and had her cargo tank cleared." "Good. Nice going." The Blue Ox was a mammoth fluid cargo carrier, as big as one of the Titan Hotel's luxury liners, though not as pretty. "We'll want a computer, and a good one. Also a computer tech, and some spare senses for the machine. I want to use it as a translator, and the damn Outsider might talk by eye-blinks or radio or modulated current. Can we maybe fit a singleship into the Ox's cargo hold?" "What for?" "Just in case. We'll give the Ox a lifeboat. If the Outsider plays rough somebody might get away." "He doesn't look dangerous. The drive flame is cool, about the temperature of the first fusion drives, before we had crystal-zinc fusion tubes." "But he crossed interstellar space. Why take chances? Make sure there's a scope on him at all times from now on. Now let's see if we can call Achilles." Some part of his mind reflected that Shaeffer had anticipated all his needs, had even guessed that he might want to use the Blue Ox. Shaeffer was good. Someday he'd have Sohl's job. If you had to be a politician you might just as well be a darn good one. It would take awhile for the operator to focus a laser on Achilles. Nick hung up to wait. And the phone went off jarringly in his hand. "Yes?" "This is Traffic Control," said the phone. "Cutter. Your office wanted everything concerning the big monopole scource." Nick opened the volume control so Shaeffer could hear. "Right. What?" "It's matching course with a Belt ship. The pilot doesn't seem to be evading contact. They'll be alongside in six hours." Sohl's lips tightened. "What kind of ship?" "The scope man didn't say. Probably a mining singleship. Shall I call back and try to find out?" "Get all the information he's got. Set nearby telescopes on watch. I don't want to miss anything." Nick rang off. "You heard?" "Yah. Finagle's First Law." "Can we stop that Belter?" "I doubt it." I t could have been anyone. It turned out to be Jack Brennan. He was several hours from turnover en route to Earth's Moon. The Mariner XX's discarded whistlejet rode his hull like an undernourished Siamese twin. Its whistle was still fixed in the blunt nose, the whistle whose pitch had controlled the rate at which the core burned. Brennan had crawled inside to look, knowing that a damaged whistle might lower the relic's value. For a used one-shot, the relic was in fine shape. The nozzle nad burned a little unevenly, but not seriously so; naturally not, for the Mariner XX had reached its destination. The Museum of Spaceflight would pay plenty for it. In the Belt smuggling is illegal, but not immoral. Smuggling was no more immoral to Brennan than forgetting to pay a parking meter would have been to a flatlander. If you got caught you paid the fine and that was it. Brennan was an optimist. He didn't expect to be caught. He'd been accelerating for four days at just short of one gee. The Uranus orbit was far behind him, the flatland system far ahead. He was going at a hell of a clip. There were no observable relativity effects, he wasn't going that fast, but his watch would need resetting when he arrived. Have a look at Brennan. He masses one hundred and seventy eight pounds per one gee, stands six feet two inches tall. Like any Belter, he looks much like an undermuscled basketball player. Since he's been sitting in that control couch for most of four days, he's beginning to look and feel crumpled and weary. But his brown eyes are clear and steady, twenty-twenty, having been corrected by microsurgery when he was eighteen. His straight dark hair is a strip of foliage running across a brown polished scalp. Since he's Caucasian, his Belter tan is no darker than cordovan leather; as usual it covers only his hands and his face and scalp above his neck. Elsewhere he is the color of a vanilla milkshake. He is forty-five years old. He looks thirty. Gravity has been kind to the muscles of his face, and growth salve to the potential bald patch at the crown of his head. But the developing fine lines around his eyes, stand out clearly now, since he has been wearing a puzzled frown for the past twenty hours. Something was following him. At first he'd thought it was a goldskin, a Ceres cop. But what would a goldskin have been doing that far from the sun? Even at second glance it couldn't have been a goldskin. Its drive flame was too fuzzy, too big, not bright enough. At third glance, which included a few instrument readings, Brennan realized that it must have come from beyond Pluto. Brennan was accelerating, but the stranger was decelerating and still had enormous velocity. Either it was from beyond Pluto, or its drive generated tens of gees. Which gave the same answer. The stranger was an Outsider. How long had the Belt been waiting for him? Let any man spend sufficient time between the stars, even a flatland moonship pilot, and someday he would realize just how deep the uniyears deep, with room for anything at all. Beyond doubt the Outsider was out there somewhere: the first alien species to contact Man was going about its business beyond the reach of the Belt telescopes. N ow the Outsider was here, matching courses with Jack Brennan. And Brennan wasn't even surprised. Wary, yes, even frightened. But not surprised, not even that the Outsider had chosen him. That was an. accident of fate, dependent on the Outsider's origin and drive systems and on Brennan's finding a lost relic of the early space age. Call the Belt? The Belt must know already. Brennan's monopole detector was having cat fits. Even without that, the Belt telescope net tracked every ship in the system; the odds were that it would find any wrong-colored dot moving at the wrong speed. Brennan had expected them to find his own ship, had hoped they wouldn't find it soon enough. Certainly they'd found the Outsider. Cerainly they were watching it: and by virtue of that fact they must be watching Brennan too. In any case Brennan couldn't laser Ceres. A flatland ship might pick up the fringes of the beam. Brennan didn't know the Belt policy on letting Earth meet Outsiders. That policy had never been tested. The Belt must make its own decisions. Which left Brennan with two of his own. One was easy. The Belt must have found him now, through the intervention of the Outsider. That changed the odds. Brennan was no longer a smuggler. Therefore he must alter course to reach one of the major asteroids, and he must call the Belt the first chance he had to advise them of his course. But what of the Outsider? Evasion tactics? Easy enough. Axiomatically, it is impossible to stop a ship in space. A cop can match course with a smuggler, but he cannot make an arrest unless the smuggler cooperates -- or runs out of fuel. He can blow a ship out of space, or even ram with a good autopilot; but how can he connect airlocks with a ship that keeps firing its drive in random blasts? Brennan could head anywhere, and all the Outsider could do was follow or destroy him. Running would be sensible. Brennan did have a family to protect. He and Charlotte had had two daughters. Brennan had paid the customary fee in trust each time; his daughters would be raised and educated. But he could do more for them. Or he could become a father again; probably with Charlotte. There was money strapped to his hull. Money was power. Like electrical or political or psychic power, its uses could take many forms. Charlotte, of course, could take care of herself; she was an adult Belter, hence a self-sufficient individual. If he contacted the alien lie might never see her again. There was risk in being first to meet an alien species. And, of course, obvious honors. Could history ever forget the man who met the Outsider? That decided him; that and his natural optimism. Brennan held his course. Let the Outsider come to him. ry'he Belt is a web of telescopes. Hundreds of thousands of them. It has to be that way. Every ship carries at least one telescope. Every asteroid has to be watched constantly, because a map of the solar system has to be up-to-date by seconds. The light of every fusion drive has to be watched. Because ships can run through each others' exhausts if someone doesn't warn them away; and the exhaust of a fusion motor is deadly. Nick Sohl kept glancing up at the screen, down at the stack of dossiers on his desk, up at the screen. The screen showed two blobs of violet light, one bigger than the other, and fuzzy. Already you could get them both on the same screen, because the asteroid taking the pictures was nearly in line with their course. He'd read the dossiers several times. Ten of them; and each represented a man who might be the man, the unknown Belter now approaching the Outsider. There had been a dozen dossiers. In the outer offices men were trying to locate and eliminate these ten as they had already found two, by phone calls and com lasers and dragnets. Since the guy wasn't running, Nick privately eliminated six of the dossiers. Two had never been caught smuggling: the mark of an overcautious man, regardless of whether he'd never smuggled or never been caught. One was a xenophobe. Three were oldtimers; you don't get to be an old-timer in the Belt by taking foolish chances. In the Belt, the Finagle Laws and Murphy Constants are only half a joke. One of four miners was about to meet the Outsider. Which? IV er's orbit, moving well above the plane of the solar system, Phssthpok matched velocities with the native ship and began to close in. Of the thousands of sentient species in the galaxy, Phssthpok and Phssthpok's race had studied only their own. They had never been interested in anything but Pak. A protector's intelligence was high; but intelligence is a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are chosen from instinct. Phssthpok was working strictly from ignorance. All he could do was guess. At a guess, then, and assuming that the oval scratch in the native's hull was really a door, the native would be not much taller and not much shorter than Phssthpok. Say, three to ten feet tall, depending on how much "elbow room" it needed. Of course the oval might not be designed for the native's longest length, as for the biped Phsstpok. But the ship was small; it wouldn't hold something too much larger than Phssthpok. He'd need just one look at the native. If it were not a Pak, he would need to ask it questions. If it were -- There would still be questions, many of them. But his search would be over. A few ship's days to reach GO Target ##-#, a short time to learn their language and explain how to use what he'd brought, and he could stop eating. It showed no awareness of Phssthpok's ship. A few minutes and he would be alongside, yet the stranger made no move -- cancel. The native had turned off its drive. Phssthpok was being invited to match courses. Phssthpok did. He wasted neither motion nor fuel; he might spend his whole life practicing for this. His lifesystem coasted alongside the native ship and stopped. His pressure suit was on, but he made no move. Phssthpok dared not risk his own person, not when he was so close to victory. If the native would only step out on the hull... B rennan watched the ship come alongside. It was like no ship he'd ever seen. There were three small capsules spaced eight miles apart. He saw no cable joining them; it must have been invisibly thin. Section one was the drive, a long, thick cylinder with three fusion plants jutting at angles. Big as it was, the cylinder must be too small to contain fuel for an interstellar joyride. Either the Outsider had dropped expendable tanks along the way, or he had developed a ramscoop magnetic field for picking up interstellar hydrogen. Probably the latter. Monopoles would be vital in a ramscoop, and the Outsider was loaded with monopoles. Section two was a sphere some sixty feet across, mounted on gymbals. When the ship finally stopped moving, this section was directly opposite Brennan. A large circular window stared out of that sphere, bulging a little, making the sphere look like a great eyeball. The eyeball turned to follow Brennan as it moved past. Brennan found it difficult to match that uncanny stare. He was beginning to have second thoughts. Surely the Belt could have planned a better meeting than this... The trailing pod -- he'd gotten a good look at it as it went by. It was egg-shaped and smooth, perhaps sixty feet long by forty feet through. The big end, facing away from the drive section, was so uniformly pitted with dust grains that it looked sandblasted. The small end was pointed and smooth, almost shiny. Brennan nodded to himself. A ramscoop would have protected the small end during acceleration. During deceleration its trailing position would have done the same. There were no breaks in the eggIt was, thought Brennan, a peculiar way to build a ship. The center pod must be the lifesystem, because it had a porthole and the trailing pod did not. And the drive was dangerously radioactive ; otherwise, why string the ship out like this? But that meant that the lifesystem would protect the trailing pod from the drive radiation. Whatever was in that trailing pod must be more important than the pilot... in the opinion of the pilot. Unless the pilot and the designer had both been inept or insane. The Outsider ship was motionless, its drive growing cold, its lifesysiem a few hundred feet away. Brennan waited. I'm being chauvinistic, he told himself. I can't judge an alien's sanity by Belt standards, can I? Sure I can. That ship is bad designing. The alien stepped out onto its hull. Every muscle in Brennan jerked as he saw it. The alien was a biped; it looked human enough from here. But it had stepped through the porthole. It stood on its own hull, motionless. It had two arms, two legs, one head. It used a pressure suit. It carried a weapon or a reaction pistol; there was no way to tell. But Brennan saw no rocket backpac. A reaction pistol takes a good deal more skill. Who'd use one in open space? Of course. For Brennan. F or a wild moment he considered starting the drive now, get the hell away before it was too late! Cursing his fear, Brennan moved deliberately to the door. The men who built the singleships had built as cheaply as possible. His ship had no airlock; there was just the door and pumps to evacuate the lifesystem. Brennan's suit was tight. All he had to do was open the door. He opened the door and stepped out on sandal magnets. The seconds stretched away as Brennan and the Outsider examined each other. It looks human enough, Brennan thought. Biped. Head on top. But if it's human, and if it's been in space long enough to build a starship, it can't be as inept as this ship says it is. Have to ask it what it's carrying. Maybe it's right. Maybe its cargo is worth more than its lift. The Outsider jumped. It fell toward him like a falcon diving. Brennan stood his ground, frightened, but admiring the alien' skill. The alien didn't need its reaction pistol. Its jump had been perfect. It would land right next to Brennan. The Outsider hit the hull on springy limbs, absorbing its momentum like an experienced Belter. Brennan saw dimly through its faceplate. He recoiled, actually took a step backward. The thing was ugly, hideously ugly. Chauvinism be damned: the Outsider's face would stop a computer. The one backward step didn't save him. The Outsider was too close. It reached out, wrapped a pressurized mitten around Brennan's wrist and jumped. Brennan gasped and, too late, tried to jerk away. The Outsider's grip was like spring steel inside its glove. They were spinning away through space toward the eyeball-shaped lifesystem, and there was not a thing Brennan could do about it. #Tick." said the intercom. i I "Here," said Nick Sohl. He'd left it open. "The dossier you want is labeled 'Jack Brennan.' " "How do you know?" "We called his woman. He has only one, and two kids. We had to convince her it was urgent, but she finally told us he'd gone off to search the Uranus trojans points." "That ties in. Thanks, Cutter. Do something for me." "Sure. Official?" "Yes. See to it that my ship is fueled and provisioned and kept ready until further notice. Fit it with solid strap-ons. Then get a com laser focused on the U. N. and keep it focused. You'll need three, of course." For relays as the Earth rotated. "Okay." Nick reached for the dossiers. The situation was so damn fluid that it was well to be ready for anything, even the need for Earth's help. If he needed the flatlanders, he'd need them badly and quickly. The surest way to convince them would be to go himself. The First Speaker had never touched Earth, had never expected to and didn't now; but The Perversity of the Universe Tends Toward a Maximum. Too bad Brennan had children. Nick began to skim his dossier. I jhssthpok's first clear memories dated from the day he woke to the fact that he was a protector. He could conjure blurred memories from before: of pain, fighting, discovering new foods, experiences in sex and affection and hate and tree climb ing in the Valley of Pitchok; watching curiously, half a dozen times, as various female breeders bore children he could smell were his. But his mind had been vague then. As a protector he thought sharply and clearly. At first it had been unpleasant. He had had to get used to it. There had been others to help him. teachers and such. There was a war, and he had graduated into it. Because he had to develop the habit of asking questions, it had been years before he understood just what had started it. Three centuries earlier several hundred major Pak families had allied to refertilize a wide desert area of the Pak world. The heartbreakingly difficult task had been completed a generation ago. Immediately and predictably the alliance had split into several smaller alliances, each determined to secure the land for its own descendants. By now most of the earlier alliances were gone. A number of families had been exterminated, and the surviving groups changed sides whenever expedient to protect their blood lines. Phssthpok's blood line now held with South Coast. War, Phssthpok found, was immensely enjoyable. Not because of the fighting. As a breeder he'd had fights, and war was not as much a matter of fighting as of outwitting the enemy. At its start, the war had been fusion-bomb war. Many of the families had died during that phase, and part of the reclaimed desert became desert once again. Then South Coast had found a damper field to prevent fissionables from fissioning. Others had swiftly copied it. Since then the war had been artillery, poison gas, bacteria, psychology, even infantry. It was a war of wits. Could South Coast counteract propaganda designed to split off the Meteor Bay region? If Eastersea Alliance had an antidote to river poison Iota, would it be faster to steal it from them or invent our own? If Circle Mountains should find an innoculation for bacteria strain Zeta-three, how likely was it they'd turn a mutated strain against us? Should we stick with South Coast, or could we do better with Eastersea? It was fun. Until, forty years after Phssthpok became a protector, Eastersea Alliance built a pinch field generator which could set off a fusion reaction without previous fission. The war ended in a week. Eastersea had the recultivated desert, the part that wasn't bare and sterile from seventy years of war. And there had. been a mighty flash over the Valley of Pitchok. The pups and breeders of Phssthpok's line had lived in the Valley of Pitchok for unremembered generations. He'd seen that awful light on the horizon and known that all his descendants were dead or sterile, that he had no blood line left to protect, that all he could do was to stop eating until he was dead. H e hadn't felt that way since. Not until now. But even then, thirteen centuries ago in biological time, he hadn't felt this awful confusion. What was this pressure-suited thing at the end of his arm? It looked like one of those he'd come to save, as far as he could tell from the shape of the suit. But those -- they couldn't have built ships or pressure suits. Phssthpok's sense of mission had held steady for more than twelve centuries. Now it was drowning in pure confusion. But wait! He knew nothing of other intelligent species, besides the theoretical certainty that they existed. The biped form might not be unique to Pak. Why should it be? Phssthpok's shape was good designing. If he could see this native without its suit... They landed next to the porthole. The Outsider's aim was inhumanly accurate. Brennan didn't try to fight as the Outsider reached through the surface of the porthole, grasped something and pulled them both inside. The transparent material resisted movement, like a layer of non-stick tar with air on both sides. In quick, jerky movements, the alien stripped off its pressure suit. The suit was flexible fabric, including the transparent bubble; there were drawstrings at the joints. With its suit off, but still maintaining its iron grip on Brennan, the alien turned to look at him. Brennan wanted to scream. The thing was all knobs. Its arms were longer than human, with a single elbow joint in something like the right place; but the elbow was a ball seven inches across. The hands were like strings of walnuts. The shoulders and the knees and the hips bulged like cantaloupes. The head was a tilted melon on a nonexistent neck. Brennan could find no forehead, no chin. The alien's mouth was a flat, black beak, hard but not shiny, which faded into wrinkled skin halfway between mouth and eyes. Two slits in the beak were the nose. Two human-looking eyes were protected by not at all human-looking masses of deeply convoluted skin and by a projecting bony shelf of brow. From the beak, the head sloped backward as if streamlined. A bony ridge rose from the swelling skull, adding to the impression of streamlining. The hands were adorned with five short fingers tipped with retractible claws. They felt like ball bearings pressing deep into the skin of Brennan's arm. Thus, the Outsider. Not merely an obvious alien. Come to that, a dolphin was an obvious alien, but there was nothing horrible about a dolphin. The Outsider was horribly alien. It looked like a cross between human and... something else. Man's monsters have always been that. Think of the mermaid, now considered funny, originally considered a horror: all lovely enticing woman above, all scaly monster beneath. And that fitted too, for the Outsider was apparently sexless, with nothing but folds of armorlike skin between its legs. The inset eyes, human as an octopus eye, looked deep into Brennan's own. Abruptly, before Brennan could move to fight back, the Outsider took two handfuls of Brennan's rubberized suit and pulled them apart. The suit held, stretched, then ripped from crotch to chin. Air puffed, and Brennan felt his ears pop. N o point in holding his breath. Several hundred feet of vacuum separated him from his ship's breathing air. Brennan sniffed cautiously. The air was thin, and it carried a strange scent. "You son of a bitch," said Brennan. "I could have died." The Outsider didn't answer. It had stripped off Brennan's suit like peeling an orange, without unnecessary roughness but without excessive care. Still its hand attached it to Brennan like a ball-and-chain. It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as strange on the Outsider as a snap-brim fedora on Frankenstein's monster. Its skin was like leather armor. The alien's gaze moved over Brennan, feet to head, head to feet, insultingly familiar. In the regions of the Belt where air and temperature were controlled, the Belters practiced nudismi all their lives. Never before had Brennan felt naked. Not nude, but naked. Defenseless. Alien fingers reached to probe his scalp along the sides of the Belter crest; massaged the knuckles of a human hand, testing the joints beneath the skin. At first Brennan fought furiously. He couldn't even distract the alien's attention. Then he waited, limp with embarrassment, enduring the examination. Abruptly it was over. The knobby alien jumped across the room, dug briefly into a bin along one wall, removed a big, plastic bag. Brennan thought of escape; but his suit was in ribbons. The alien ran fingers along the bag, and the bag popped open as if he'd used a zipper. The alien jumped at Brennan, and Brennan jumped away. It bought him nearly thirty seconds of relative freedom. Then knobby steel fingers closed on him and pushed him gently into the sack. Brennan found he couldn't open it from inside. "I'll suffocate!" he screamed. The alien made no response. It wouldn't have understood anyway. It was climbing back into its suit. Oh, no, thought Brennan. He struggled to rip the bag. The alien picked up the bag and moved out through the porthole. Brennan felt the bag puff out around him, thinning the air inside even further. He stopped struggling instantly. He waited with the fatalism of despair while the alien moved around the eyeball-shaped hull to where an inch-thick line of smooth plastic stretched away in the direction of the trailing pod. B rennan was all alone in a small space. The Outsider was gone. It had jumped into space with the Brennan-bag, balanced itself against the bag and used its reaction pistol. The trip had taken twenty minutes. Brennan had been near suffocation when they finally arrived at the trailing pod. The Outsider had touched some small tool to the hull, then pulled them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. It had unzipped the bag, turned and jumped and vanished through the entrance while Brennan was still tumbling helplessly in air. The air was the same as in the cabin, except that the peculiar scent was much stronger. Brennan drew it in in great rarified gasps. The lighting was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, no bigger than the lifesystem of a two-man mining ship. On his right were a number of squarish crates whose material was almost wood, certainly a plant of some kind. To his left, a massive rectangular solid with a lid, almost like a big deepfreeze. Above, a curved wall. So he'd been right. This was a cargo hold. And all through the air, a peculiar scent, like an unfamiliar perfume. The smell in the lifesystem had been an animal smell, the smell of the Outsider. This was different. Below him, behind a net of coarse weave, were things that looked like yellow roots. If there were no hidden motors or other sections behind them, they must have occupied most of the cargo hold. Brennan jumped down at them, wrapped his fingers in the net to bring his eyes close. The smell became hugely more intense. He'd never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it. Close up, they still looked like pale yellow roots: a cross between a sweet potato and a peeled piece of the root of a small tree. They were squat and wide and fibrous, pointed at one end and knife flattened at the other. Brennan reached through the net, got a twofinger grip on one, tried to pull it through the net and couldn't. He'd had breakfast just before the Outsider pulled alongside. Yet, with no warning grumblings in his belly, suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He stabbed his fingers through the net, grasped for the roots. For minutes he tried to pull one through holes which were just too small. He tore at the net, raging. The net was stronger than human flesh; it would not tear, though fingernails did. He screamed his frustration, and the scream brought him to his senses. Suppose he did get one out? What then? viscera, commanding. His mouth ran saliva. It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant obviously regarded a food by an alien species. He should be thinking of a way out of here! Yet his fingers were still tearing at the net. Brennan kicked himself away. He was hungry. The fragments of his suit were gone, left behind in the alien lifesystem, including the water and food-syrup nipples in his helmet. Was there water in here? Could he trust it? What guarantee had he that the Outsider had a use for partially burnt hydrogen? What would he do for food? He had to get out of here. But he couldn't move around in that plastic bag; even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a back pac. He had to distract his stomach somehow. Why were the contents of this hold so valuable? How could they be more valuable than the pilot, who was needed to get them to their destination? Might as well see what's here. r T'he rectangular solid was a A glossy, temperatureless material. Brennan found the handle easily enough, but it wouldn't budge under his pull. Then the enticing smell of the roots made a concerted attack on his hunger, and he yelled and pulled with The handle jarred open. It was filled with seeds, large seeds like almonds, frozen in a matrix of frost, bitterly cold. He wrenched one loose with numbing fingers. The air about him was turning the color of cigarette smoke when he closed the lid. He put the seed in his mouth, warmed it with saliva. It had no taste; it was merely cold, and then not even that. He spit it out. So. Green light and strange, rich-smelling air. But not too thin, not too strange; and the light was cool and refreshing. If Brennan liked the Outsider's lifesystem, the Outsider would like Earth. He'd brought a crop to plant, too. Seeds, roots, and... and what? Brennan kicked across the clear space to the stack of crates. Not all the strength of his back and legs would tear a crate loose from the wall. Contact cement? But a lid came up with great reluctance and a creaking noise. Sure enough, it had been glued down; the wood itself had torn away. Brennan wondered what strange plant had produced it. Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Plastic? It looked and felt like a strong commercial sandwich wrap. What was inside felt like fine dust packed nearly solid. It was dark through the plastic. Brennan floated near the crates, one hand gripping the torn lid, wondering... An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only a backup for the autopilot; it didn't matter what happened to him, he was only a safety device. The autopilot would get this crop to wherever it was going. To Earth. But a crop meant other Outsiders, following. He had to warn Earth. How? Brennan laughed at himself. Was ever a man so completely trapped? The Outsider had him. Brennan, a Belter and a free man, had allowed himself to become property. His laughter died into despair. Despair was a mistake. The smell had been waiting to pounce... It was the pain that brought him out of it. His hands were bleeding from cuts and abrasions. There were sprains and blisters and bruises. His left finger screamed its agony at him; it stuck out at a strange angle, and it swelled as he watched. Dislocated or broken. But he'd tom a hole in the net, and his right hand gripped a fibrous root. He threw it as hard as he could and instantly curled in upon himself, hugging his knees as if to surround his pain and smother it. He was angry and scared. Why, that damnable smell had turned off his mind as if he were no more than a child's toy robot! Worse, his body had ignored his wishes as thoroughly as had the Outsider. He floated through the cargo space like a football, hugging his knees and crying. He was hungry and angry and humiliated, but most of all he was scared. The Outsider had seared his mind with his own unimportance. He had slapped his fists against the Outsider's blank, hard face, but the Outsider had ignored him, holding him out for inspection like a judge in the Toy group at a dog show. When Brennan kicked him where his groin should have been, the alien had noticed and looked down, watched as Brennan kicked again, returned to his inspection... But why? What did the Outsider want with him? Something smacked him across the back of his head. In one fluid motion Brennan snatched the missile out of the air and bit into it. The root had returned to him on a ricochet orbit. Its taste was as indescribable and as delicious as its scent. In a last lucid moment Brennan wondered how long he would need to die. He didn't much care. He bit again, and swallowed. V T here were few big cargo ships in the Belt. Most miners preferred to haul their own cargo. The ships which hauled the large cargos from asteroid to asteroid were not large; they were simply furnished with a great many attachments. To haul a large cargo, the crew strung it out on the attachments, in nets or on lightweight shelves, sprayed foam plastic to protect whatever they were hauling, covered the bottom of the nets or shelves with special reflective foil to ward off the searing light of the drive, and took off at low power. The Blue Ox was a special case. She hauled fluids and fine dusts: refined quicksilver and mined water, grain, seeds, highly impure tin scooped molten from lakes on dayside Mercury, mixed and dangerous chemicals from Jupiter's atmosphere. Such cargos were not always available for hauling. So the Ox was a huge tank with a small threeman lifesystem and an adequate propulsion system; but, since she must sometimes carry bulky objects instead of seeds or fluids, her big tank had been designed with a big lid. Einar Nilsson stood at the rim of that lid, looking in. He was seven feet tall and overweight for a Belter, and that was overweight for anyone, for the fat had gone into his belly and second chin. The device on his suit was a Viking ship with snarling dragon prow, floating not in space but in the bright, milky swirl of a spiral galaxy. The singleship in the Ox's tank was Nilsson's own. There was a new Adzhubei #-# computer; there were machines intended to serve as the computer's senses and speakers, radar and radio and sonics and monochromatic lights. Each item was tethered separately, half a dozen ways, to hooks on the inside wall of the tank. Nilsson nodded, satisfied, his graying red Belter crest brushing the crown of his helmet. "Fire," he said. Tim Truesdale began spraying fluid into the tank. In thirty seconds the tank was filled with foam which was already hardening. "Close the lid." It was done. "Get aboard, Tim. Nate, how much time we got?" "Another twenty minutes to catch the optimum course," said the young voice. "Okay, call Ceres. Ask for permission to take off. We'll have to take off before it comes, but we might as well ask." "Sold," said the young voice, and clicked off. Nathan was young, but not young enough to waste words over a phone. He learned fast. Einar had taken him on at the request of his father, an old friend. He'd taken Tim because Tim could obey orders. Perhaps too much so. Tim had been a flatlander until he was twenty, and flatlanders were not high on originality. But Tim had sense, and he'd lived in the Belt for eight years. Einar finished sealing the lid over the hardened foam plastic, then jumped for the airlock, following Tim. They were going to meet the first alien to reach the solar system in human history; but it never occurred to him to doubt the competency of either of his men. They were Belters. And they would be cautious. "Here." Nick picked up his tea bottle, found it empty. There was a plate beside it, also empty. "The Blue Ox wants to take off." "Send 'em permission." "Okay. But I notice they aren't armed." "They've got a fusion drive, don't they? And oversized steering jets to aim it. The drive is all the weapon they'll need." Cutter clicked off. Nick stared at the screen for a moment, with his eyes squinched shut so the strain lines showed like webs around the eyelids. Was he right? He was ninety percent sure he was. Even an H-bomb would be less effective as a weapon than the directed hydrogen explosion from a fusion drive. And an H-bomb was an obvious weapon, an insult and a challenge to a peace-loving Outsider. Four blobs showed on the screen. Without the fusion drives they were dark-on-dark, hard to see, but Nick could see that the Outsider ship was strung out into three parts. A poor way to build a ship, unless your shielding was very bad. That middle section, well, it might contain anything, including a reserve fuel supply; but principly it must be a shield for the lifesystem. The blobs hadn't changed motion for hours. The waiting was a strain. Nick went back to Brennan's dossier. It was thin. They were all thin. Belters wouldn't have accepted a government which kept more than minimal tabs on them. John Fitzgerald Brennan was very much the average Belter. Forty-five years of age. Two daughters by the same woman, Charlotte Leigh Wiggs, a professional farming machine repairwoman in Confinement. Brennan had the beginnings of a nice retirement fund, though it had been drained twice to establish trust fund for his children. He had twice lost loads of radioactive ore to the goldskins and the Belt smuggling laws. Once would have been typical. Belters laugh at inept smugglers, but a man who's never been caught may be suspected of never having tried. No guts. His suit design proclaimed him a Dali fan. Nick frowned. Miners sometimes lost their grip on reality, out there. But Brennan was alive, and fairly well off on his own earnings. Twenty years ago he'd worked with a crew, mining molten tin on Mercury's dayside. Because of the Sun's magnetic field, Mercury was rich with valuable nonferrous elements. The tin was easier to get at when molten. Brennan had been competent, and he'd made good money, but he'd quit after ten months and never worked with a crew again. Apparently he didn't like working with others. Why had: he let the Outsider catch him? Silly question. Nick would have done the same. The Outsider was here in the system; somebody had to meet him. Running would have been an admission that Brennan couldn't handle such a meeting. No miner would make that admission. His family wouldn't have stopped him. His family were Belters; they could take care of themselves. But I wish he'd run, thought Nick. His fingers beat a rhythmic tattoo on the desk. He'd have been a smoker, if Belters smoked. L eaving his captive in the cargo hold, Phssthpok moved across to the native's ship. It was an hour's jump, but Phssthpok was not hurried. With his superb reflexes he didn't even need the reaction pistol. His captive would keep. Eventually he would have to learn the alien's language, to question him about the ones Phssthpok had come to help. By now Phssthpok was sure he'd picked the wrong star. There had only been twenty-eight percent chance to start with. But with ships like this the natives might have reached other stars. The ship was small. Phssthpok found little more than a small life-support system, a long drive tube, a ring-shaped hydrogen tank with a cooling motor and an attached something-or-other whose purpose was not obvious. The fusion tube extended far beyond the fuel ring, which was under the lifesystem. The fuel ring was so attached that it could be slipped off the drive tube and replaced by a full tank in a few minutes. Around the rim of the life-support system were a set of attachments, including several folded fine-mesh nets. Some of the attachments -- hooks -- now secured a lightweight metal cylinder which showed signs of erosion. Phssthpok looked it over, dismissed it without knowing its purpose. Obviously it was not needed for the ship to function. It was some kind of cargo. Phssthpok found inspection panels in. the fusion tube and used them. Within half an hour he could build his own fusion shield, had he the materials, though he still didn't understand what made it go. The natives must be more intelligent than he had guessed. Or luckier. He moved up to the lifesystem and through the oval door. The cabin included an acceleration couch, banks of controls surrounding it in a horseshoe, a space behind the couch big enough to move around in, an automatic kitchen, and attachments to several mechanical senses of types frequently used in Pak warfare. But this was not a warship. Perhaps the native's sense's were less acute than Pak senses. Behind the cabin were machinery and tanks of fluid, which Phssthpok examined with great interest. Assume that these machines are well designed, he told himself. Then GO Target ##-# is habitable. Very. A trifle heavy, both in air and in gravity. But to a people who had been traveling for five hundred thousand years, it would have looked irresistible. Had they reached here, they would have gone no further. And that cut Phssthpok's region of search in half. He need not look at stars further from the galactic core than this one. 'T'he lifesystem was the most puzzling part of the ship. Phssthpok found things he flatly didn't understand, that he would never understand. The kitchen, for instance. Weight was important in space. Surely the natives could have provided a lightweight food, synthetic if necessary, capable of keeping the pilot fed and healthy indefinitely. The saving in effort and in fuel consumption would have been enormous when multiplied by the number of ships he'd seen. Instead, they preferred to carry a tremendous variety of prepackaged foods and a complex machine to select and heat them. They had chosen to cool these foods against decomposition rather than reduce them to a powder. Why? Pictures, for instance. Phssthpok understood photographs, and he understood graphs. But the three works of art on the back wall were neither. They were charcoal sketches. One was of the head of a native like Phssthpok's captive, but with a longer crest of hair and with weird pigmentation around eyes and mouth; the others must have been younger editions of the same species. Only heads and shoulders were shown. What was their purpose? Under other circumstances the design on Brennan's spacesuit might have provided a clue. Phssthpok had noticed that design and understood instantly. For members of a cooperative, space-going species, it would be useful to code one's suit in bright colors. Others would recognize the code at great distances. The native's design seemed overcomplex, but not enough so to rouse Phssthpok's curiosity. For Fhssthpok could never understand the human concepts ofart and luxury. Luxury? A Pak breeder might have appreciated luxury, but was too stupid to make it for himself. A protector had no motivation. A protector's desires were all connected to the need to protect his blood line. As for art, there had been maps and drawings among the Pak since before Pak history. But they were for war. You didn't recognize your loved ones by sight anyway. They smelled right. Reproduce the smell of a loved one? Phssthpok might have been led to think of that, had the painting on Brennan's back been anything else. It would method of keeping a protector alive and functioning long after his line was dead. If only Phssthpok had been led to understand representational art... But what could he make of Brennan's suit? Its chest was a copy in flourescent dye of Salvidor Dali's "Madonna of Port LHgat". There were mountains floating above a soft blue sea; there were objects which refused to touch each other; there was a supernally beautiful woman and child, with windows in them. There was nothing for Phssthpok. O ne thing he understood very quickly. It was the solar storm warning in the instrument panel. When Phssthpok opened it and ascertained its purpose, he found it surprisingly small. Curious, he investigated further. The thing was made with magnetic monopoles. In one kangaroo leap Phssthpok was crossing interplanetary space. He fired half the gas charge in his pistol, then composed himself to wait out the fifteen minutes of fall. He'd jumped toward the cargo section. It would be necessary to tie the native down against acceleration. Already a cursory inspection of the native's ship had cut his search area in half. The native itself might carry knowledge even more valuable. Even so, Phssthpok bitterly regretted the need to protect the native; for the time involved might mean life or death. The natives used monopoles. The natives must have a means of detecting them. Phssthpok had captured a native -- a hostile act. And Phssthpok's ramscoopdrive section held a bigger mass of south poles than this solar system! Probably they were after him now. They couldn't catch him in any reasonable time. Their drives would be a touch more powerful, since their gravity was about #. But they wouldn't have ramscoops. Before their bigger drives could make a difference they'd be out of fuel. Provided he started in time. He braked to meet the cargo section, used his softener and ducked through the twing hull. He reached for a handhold without looking, knowing where it would be, his eyes searching for the native. He missed the handhold. He floated across the empty space while his muscles turned to jelly and melted. The native had broken through the net and was burrowing among the roots. His belly had become a hard, distended bulge. There was no sentience in his eyes. And all the rules were changed. r T"he robot was a four-foot, upright cylinder floating placidly in one corner of the Struldbrugs' Club reading room. Its muted two-tone brown blended with the walls, making it almost invisible. Externally the robot was motionless. In its flared base fans whirred silently, holding it two inches off the floor, and inside the featureless dome that was its head, scanners revolved endlessly, watching every comer of the room. Without taking his eyes off the reading screen, Lucas Garner reached for his glass. He found it with careful fingertips, picked it up and tried to drink. It was empty. He held it aloft, wiggled it and, still without looking up, said, "Irish coffee." The robot was at his elbow. It made no move to take the double-walled glass. Instead, it chimed softly. Garner looked up at last, scowling. A line of lighted print flowed across the robot's chest "Terribly sorry, Mr. Gamer. You have exceeded your maximum daily alcohol content." "Cancel, then," said Luke. "Go on, beat it." The robot scooted for its corner. Luke sighed -- it was partly his own fault -- and went back to reading. The tape was a new medical tome on "The Aging Process in Man." Last year he had voted with the rest to let the Club autodoc monitor the Club serving robots. He couldn't regret it. Not a single Struldbrug was less than one hundred and fifty-four years of age, by Club law, and the age requirement went up one year for every two that passed. They needed the best and most rigid of medical protection. Luke was a prime example. He was approaching, with little enthusiasm, his one hundred and eighty-fifth birthday. He had used a travel chair constantly for twenty years. Luke was a paraplegic, not because of any accident to his spine, but because his spinal nerves were dying of old age. Central nervous tissue never replaces itself, never. The disproportion between his thin unused legs and his massive shoulders and arms and huge hands made him look a little apelike. Luke was aware of this and rather enjoyed it. His attention was wholly on the tape he was speedreading when he was disturbed again. A barely audible murmur of voices filled the reading room with a formless, swelling whisper. Regretfully Luke turned to look. Someone was walking in his direction, using a purposeful stride which could not have been matched by any Struldbrug. The man had the long, narrow frame of one who has spent some years on a stretch rack. His arms and the skin below his larynx were negro dark; but his hands and his heavily lined face were the black of a starless night, a true space black. His hair was a cockatoo's crest, an inch-wide strip of snow-white rug from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. A Belter had invaded the Struldbrugs' Club. No wonder they whispered! He stopped before Luke's chair. "Lucas Garner?" His voice and manner were grave and formal. "Right," said Luke. The man lowered his voice. "I'm Nickolas Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt Political Section. Is there someplace we can talk?" "Follow me," said Luke. He touched controls in the arm of his chair, and the chair rose on a ground-effect air cushion and moved across the room. #'# r ou really caused an uproar JL in there." "Oh? Why?" The First Speaker sprawled limp and boneless in a masseur chair, letting the tiny motors knead him into new shapes. His voice was still quick and crisp with the well known Belter accent. Luke couldn't decide whether he was joking. "Why? For one thing, you're nowhere near admission age." "The guard didn't say anything. He just sort of stared with his jaw hanging." "I can imagine." "You know why I'm on Earth?" "I heard. There's an alien in the system." "It was supposed to be secret." member of the UN Technological Police. They didn't retire me until two years ago. I've still got contacts." "That's what I heard." Nick opened his eyes. "Excuse me if I'm being rude. I can stand your silly gravity lying in a ship's couch, but I don't like walking through it." "Relax then." "Thanks. Garner, nobody at the UN seems to realize how urgent this is. There's an alien in the system. He's performed a hostile act, kidnapped a Belter. He's abandoned his interstellar drive, and we can both guess what that means." "He intends to stay. Tell me about that, will you?" "Simple enough. You know the Outsider ship came in three easy-to-assemble parts?" "I found out that much." "The trailing section must have been a re-entry capsule. We should have guessed tfaere'd be one. About two and a half hours after Brennan made contact with the Outsider, that section suddenly disappeared." "Teleport?" "No, we've got one film panel that shows a blurred streak. The acceleration was huge." "I see. Why come to us?" "Huh? Gamer, this is humanity's business." "Let's not play games, Nick. The Outsider was humanity's business the second you spotted him. You didn't come to us until he pulled his disappearing act. Why not? Because you thought the aliens would have a better opinion if they met Belters first?" "No comment." "Okay. Why tell us now? If the Belt scopes can't find him, nobody can." Nick turned off his massage chair and sat up to study the old man. Garner's face was the face of Time, a loose mask that seemed to cover ancient evil. Only the eyes and teeth seemed young; and teeth were new, white and sharp and incongruous. But the old man talked like a Belter. He talked in straight lines; he didn't waste words, and he didn't play games. He was the sharpest flatlander Nick had met yet. "Right," said Nick. "That's the trouble. We've found him." VI #I the rules were changed. Phssthpok grabbed for a handhold and pushed down to Brennan. Brennan was limp now, his eyes half closed with the whites drawing under the lids, his hand still clutching half of a root. Phssthpok set him rotating to make an examination. All right. Phssthpok climbed through the hull and made his way back to the large end of the egg. There he crawled back inside, emerging in a cubicle just big enough to hold him. He needed a place to hide. If he must stay in this system, he would have to abandon the rest of the ship. It would be like hiding all his children in the same cave, but there was no help for that. , It could have been worse. Though the instruments in the cargo hold were designed only to drop that section from orbit around some planet, the gravity polarizer would take him anywhere he wanted to go within GO Target #l's gravity well. Except that he would have to do everything right the first time. Except that he could only land once. As a ship's drive, the gravity polarizer had many of the virtues and faults of a paraglider. He could aim it anywhere he wanted to go, even after he'd killed his velocity... provided that he wanted to go down. The polarizer would not lift him against gravity. Compared to the fusion drive controls, the controls around him were fiercely complicated. Phssthpok began twisting dials and pushing buttons. The "plastic" line at the big end of the egg separated in a puff of flame. The twing around him became transparent... and slightly porous; in a century it would have lost a dangerous amount of air. Phssthpok's manlike eyes took on a glassy look. The next moves would take intense concentration. He hadn't dared tie the native down or otherwise restrict him. To avoid crushing him, he would have to keep the internal and external gravities exactly balanced. The hull, which was the working part of the polarizer, might heat too much and melt at these velocities. Phssthpok's velocity indicator was good only for gross measurements. In what was now the rear screen, Phssthpok could see the rest of his ship. He twisted two dials the barest fraction, and it vanished. Where to now? He'd need weeks to hide. He couldn't hope to hide on GO Target #I #, considering their technology. But he could only land once. Where he came down, he'd have to stay. And space was too open to hide in. Phssthpok began to search the sky for planets. His eyes were good, and planets were big and dim, easy to spot. Thai one was GO Target #I #. That one was a gas giant, with a ring. Hide in the rings? But that too was a one-way trip with the gravity polarizer. That one. He'd studied it closely when he had a telescope. That was his hiding place. Phssthpok gave vent to an Eflat whistle. He had no choice; he had had no real choice in quite some time. That planet was his target. When the time came to leave he'd have to hope the native could signal his kind.    '#' ou 've found him?"  "Sort of. He went through a smuggler trap near the end of his trip. We were looking for a bird who has the habit of coasting through populated regions with his drive off. The details aren't important. A heat sensor found the Outsider, and a camera caught a section of his course and stayed on him long enough to give us velocity, position, acceleration. Acceleration was huge, tens of gees. It's near certain he was on his way to Mars." "Mars?" "Mars, or a Mars orbit, or the moons. If it was an orbit we'd have found him by now. Ditto for the moons; they both have scope stations." Luke began to laugh. Nick closed his eyes with a pained expression. As the laughter began to rise, he sat up and stared in amazement. Luke's laughter held more concentrated evil than Nick would have imagined possible. Hardened criminals had gone straight after hearing Lucas Garner laugh. M ars was the junkheap of the system. In truth there were few useful planets in the solar system; Earth and Mercury's dawn belt and Jupiter's atmosphere just filled the list. But Mars had proved the bitterest disappointment. A nearly airless desert, covered with craters and with seas of ultrafine dust, the atmosphere poisoned by nitric oxide. Somewhere near the pole was an abandoned base, very old, the remains of Man's third and last trip to the rusty planet. Nobody wanted Mars. When the Free Belt Charter was signed, after the Belt had proven by embargo that Earth needed the Belt more than the Belt needed Earth, the UN had been allowed to keep Earth, the Moon, Titan, rights in Saturn's rings, mining and exploratory rights on Mercury, and Mars. Mars was just a token. Mars hadn't counted until now. "You see the problem," said Nick. He'd turned the massage unit on again. Little muscles all over his body were giving up under Earth's unaccustomed strain, stridently proclaiming their existence for the first time in Nick's life. "Sure. Considering the way the Belt is constantly telling us to stay off their property, you can't blame the UN for trying to get a little of their own back. We must have a couple of hundred complaints on file." "You exaggerate. Since the Free Belt Charter was signed, we've registered some sixty violations, most of which were allowed and paid for by the UN." "What is it you want the UN to do that they aren't doing?" "We want access to Earth's records on the study of Mars. The Belt has never been interested in Mars. We want permission to search the deserts for the Outsider. We want permission to land." "How far have you gotten?" "There are only two things they can agree on. We can search all we want to -- from space. For letting us look at their silly records they want to charge "Pay it." "It's robbery!" "A Belter says that? Why don't you have records on Mars?" "I told you, we were never interested. What for? Mars is a useless planet." "How about abstract knowledge?" "Another word for useless." "Then why aren't you about less knowledge?" Slowly Nick matched his grin. "Just stupid, I guess. How the blazes did Earth know they'd need to know about Mars?" "They didn't. That's the secret of abstract knowledge. You get in the habit of finding out everything you can about everything. Most of it gets used sooner or later." "I'll authorize payment of a Library. Now how do we land?" Nick turned off the massage chair. "You picked the right word. We. Can you fly a two man ship?" "Blindfolded." "You've flipped." "Blindfolded." "You're hired as my pilot at a dollar a year. I can get a ship ready in six hours." Ci'V Tot I. Look, Nick. Every so-called diplomat in the UN knows how important it is to find the Outsider. But they can't get moving. It's not because they're getting their own back with the Belt. That's only part of it. What counts is that the UN is a world government. It's unwieldly by its very nature, having to rule the lives of eightthat, the UN is made up of individual nations. The nations aren't powerful nowadays. Someday not too soon, even their names will be forgotten. But today national prestige can get in the way of the total good. You'll be weeks getting them to agree. "Whereas there's no law against a UN citizen going anywhere he wants to, or hiring anyone he wants to. A number of our round-the-Moon pilots are Belters." Nick shook his head as if to clear it. "Garner, I don't get it. You can't think we can find the Outsider in a two-man ship. Even I know about Martian dust. He's hidden under there, and there's no way to get at him without a complete radar net." "Right. But when the UN realizes that you've started searching Mars, what do you think they'll do? You being hired as a pilot is a technicality, obvious to anyone. Suppose we find the Outsider? The Belt would get the credit." Nick closed his eyes and tried to think. He wasn't used to such circular logic. But it looked like Garner was right. If they thought he was going to Mars, with or without a flatlander for company, they'd send a fleet to start searching first. "So I need a flatlander to hire me as a pilot. Fine. But why you?" "Because I can get a ship. I've got contacts." "You've got to be nuts. How old are you?" "Too old to waste my few remaining years in the Struldbrugs' Club. Too young to be retired. Shake hands, Nick." "Mph? Sure, but -- Yipe! All right, damnit, so you've got strong hands." "And we won't be using our legs. We'll be riding everywhere we go. You can't walk anywhere on Mars." "Luke, I think I've got it. You can get a ship, right? Right. So get a ship, then get a tough explorer-type flatlander. Sell him the ship. Then he hires me as his pilot, right?" "Right. But I won't do it." "Blackmail?" "Blackmail." "You're all crazy. All of you. It comes from living at the bottom of a gravity well. The gravity pulls the blood away from your brains." "I'll show you to a telephone. You'll have to pay in your million marks before the UN catches on where we're going." hssthpok dreamed. He stayed in the cargo hold where he could watch the native. There was food and water and no need to go outside. During the first week he had disassembled every machine in the cargo hold to make what repairs and adjustments were needed. Now he only watched his captive. The native required little care. Phssthpok rested on his stockpile of roots and dreamed. In a few weeks he would have completed his long, long task... or failed. In any case he would stop eating. He had been alive long enough to suit him. Soon he would end as he had nearly ended thirteen hundred shiptime years ago... It had been a matter of time. Phssthpok had been a protector for sixteen years. His remaining children in the radiationblasted Valley of Pitchok were sixteen to thirty-five years of age; his living grandchildren were of all ages up to twenty-four or so. But who had survived the bomb? He had returned immediately to the Valley of Pitchok to find out. Not many breeders were left in the valley, but such as were still alive had to be protected. Phssthpok and the rest of the Pitchok families made peace, the terms being that they and their sterile children should have the valley until their deaths, at which time the valley would revert to Eastersea Alliance. There were ways to neutralize radioactive fallout. The Pitchok families used them. Then, leaving their valley and its survivors in the hands of one of their number, they had scattered. Of the several hundred survivors, all had been tested and all had been found essentially sterile. "Essentially" being taken to mean that if they did have children, the children would be mutants. Their smells would be altered. With no protector to look after their interests, they would quickly die. To Phssthpok, the most important of his surviving descendants was the youngest, Ttuss. a female of two years. It had been a matter of time. In thirty-two years Ttuss would reach the age of change. She would become an intelligent being and a heavily armored one, with skin that would turn a copper knife and strength to lift ten times her own weight. She would be ideally designed for the purpose of fighting, but she would have nothing to fight for. She would stop eating. She would die, and Phssthpok would stop eating. Ttuss's lifespan was his own. But sometimes a protector could adopt the entire Pak species as his descendants. At least he'd have every opportunity to find a purpose in life. There was always truce for a childless protector, for such never had a reason to fight. And there was a place he could go. T he library was as old as the radioactive desert which surrounded it. That desert would never be recultivated; it was reseeded every thousand years with radiocobalt so that no protector could covet it. Protectors could cross that desert; they had no gonadal genes to be smashed by subatomic particles. Reproducers could not. Hew old was the desert? Phssthpok never knew and never wondered. But the section on old. He came to the Library with a number of -- not friends, but associates in misery, childless former members of the Pitchok families. The Library was huge and rambling, a composite of at knowledge, crossfiled into various sections according to subject. Naturally several sections often contained the same book. The associates divided at the entrance, and Phssthpok didn't see any of them again for thirty-two years. He spent those thirty-two years in one vast room, a floorto-ceiling labyrinth of bookshelves. At scattered corners there were bins of tree-of-life root kept constantly filled by attendants. There were other foodstuffs brought at seeming random: meats, vegetables, fruits, whatever was available to childless protectors who had chosen to serve the Library rather than die. Tree-of-life root was the perfect food for a protector, but he could eat nearly anything. And there were books. They were nearly indestructible, those books. They would have emerged like fluttering meteors from the heart of a hydrogen bomb explosion. All were written more or less in the present language, and all were constantly being recopied by librarians as the language changed. In this room the books all dealt with space and space travel. There were treatises on the philosophy of space travel. They all seemed to make a fundamental assumption : someday the Pak race must find a new home; hence every contribution to the techniques of interstellar flight was a contribution to the immortality of the Pak species. Phssthpok could discount that assumption, knowing that a protector who did not believe it would never write a book on the subject. There were records of interstellar and interplanetary flights, hundreds of thousands of them, starting with a fantastic trip some group made almost a million years ago, riding a hollowedout asteroidal rock into the arms of the galaxy in search of yellow dwarf suns. There were technical texts on everything that could possibly relate to space or spacecraft or astrogation: miniaturization, nuclear and subnuclear physics, plastics, ecology, gravity and how to use it, relativity, astronomy, astrophysics, records of extraplanetary mining, diagrams for a hypothetical ramscoop (in an unfinished work by a protector who had lost his appetite halfway through), ion drive diagrams, plasma theory. H e started at the left and began working his way around. He'd chosen the section on space travel more or less at random; it had looked less crowded than the others. The romance of space was not in Phssthpok's soul. He kept with it rather than change endeavors in midcourse, feeling certain that he'd need every minute of his thirty-four years of grace no matter what section he chose. In twenty-eight years he read every book in the Astronautics section, and he still had found nothing that drastically needed doing. Start a migration project? It simply wasn't that urgent. The Pak sun had at least hundreds longer than the Pak species, probably, considering their perennial state of war. And the chance of disaster would be high. There were no known yellow suns in the galactic core. For that and other reasons, including the probability that the entire core would someday explode in a chain reaction of novas, it would be necessary to go into the arms looking for habitable planets. The first expedition to try that had met a horrible fate. So. Join the Library staff? He'd thought of it many times, but the answer always came out the same. No matter what phase of the Library he concerned himself with, his life would depend on others. To retain his will to live he would need to know that all Pak would benefit from his aspect of Library work. Let there be a dry spell in new discoveries, let his faith flag, and he would find himself no longer hungry. It was terrifying not to be hungry. During the last few decades it had happened several times. Each time he had forced himself to reread the communications from the Valley of Pitchok. The last communication always told him that Ttuss had been alive when it was sent. Gradually, time after time, his appetite had come back. But for Ttuss he would be dead. He had investigated the librarians and found that their lives were unusually short. The Library was no answer. Find a way to keep Ttuss alive? There was no way. If there were he would have used it on himself. Study theoretical astronomy? He had some ideas, but they would not help the race of Pak. The Pak did not seek abstract knowledge. Mine the asteroids? The asteroids were as thoroughly mined out as the surface of the planet had often been, with the difference that convection currents in the planet's interior eventually replaced worked-out mines. He should have gone in for metal reclamation. Now it was too late to change studies. Put plastic-bubble cities in orbit to provide more living room for breeders? Nonsense! Too vulnerable to capture or accidental destruction. One day Phssthpok's appetite was gone. The letters from the Valley of Pitchok did not help; he did not believe them. He thought of returning to the valley, but he knew he'd starve to death on the way. When he was sure, he sat down against a wall, the last in a line of protectors who also did not eat, who were waiting to die. A week passed. The librarians found that two at the head of the line were dead. They picked them up, a pair of skeletons clothed in dried, wrinkled leather armor, and carried them away somewhere. Phssthpok remembered a book. He still had the strength to reach it. He read carefully, with the book in one hand and a root in the other. Presently he ate the root... T he ship had been a roughly cylindrical asteroid, reasonably pure nickel-iron with stony strata running through it, about six miles long and four through. A group of childless protectors had carved it out with solar mirrors and built into it a small life-support and controls system, a larger frozensleep chamber, a breeder atomic pile and generator, a dirigible ion drive, and an enormous cesium tank. They had found it necessary to exterminate the protector stage members of a large family in order to get control of a thousand breeders. With two protectors as pilots and seventy more in suspended animation with the thousand breeders, with a careful selection of the beneficial lifeforms of the Pak planet, they set out into one arm of the galaxy. Though their knowledge was Phssthpok's, they had good reasons for choosing an arm. Most of the stars around them were Population II. They'd have a better chance of finding yellow suns out there, and a better chance of finding a double planet in the right place. Perturbations from stars an average of half a light-year away made double planets scarce in the Core; and there was reason to think that only an oversized moon could give any world an atmosphere capable of supporting Pak-style life. An ion drive and a certain amount of cesium... They expected to move slowly, and they did. At twelve thousand miles per second relative to the Pak sun, they turned off the ion motor. They then fired a laser message at the Pak system to tell the Library that the ion drive had worked. The blueprints were somewhere in the Library, with a list of suggested design changes. The next and last section of the book was nearly five hundred thousand years newer. It was a record of a laser message which had come plowing through the Pak system, torn and attenuated and garbled by dust and distance, in a language no longer spoken. Someone had translated it and filed it here. Hundreds of searchers like Phssthpok must have read it and wondered about the part of the story they could never know and passed on... But Phssthpok read it very carefully. nphey had traveled an enorm! ous distance into the galactic arm. Half the protectors had been used up when they arrived, dying not of starvation nor of violence but of age. This was so unusual that a detailed medical description had been sent with the message. They had passed yellow suns with no planets, other yellow suns whose worlds were all gas giants. Yellow suns had gone by carrying potentially habitable worlds; but all were too far off course to be reached on the maneuvering reserve of cesium. Galactic dust and the galaxy's gravity had slowed their strange craft, increasing the maneuver reserve. The sky darkened around them as suns became rare. Presently they had found a planet. They had braked the ship, transferred what was left of the plutonium to the piles of the landing craft, and gone down. The decision was final. If the planet failed to measure up they would have to work for decades to make their ship spaceworthy again. It had life. Some was inimical, but none that could not be handled. There was soil. The remaining protectors woke the breeders and turned them loose in the forests, planted their crops, dug mines, made machines to dig more mines, made machines to tend the crops... The black, nearly starless night sky bothered some, but they got used to it. The frequent rains bothered others, but did not hurt the reproducers, so that was all right. There was room for all, so the protectors did not even fight. None stopped eating. There were predators and bacteria to exterminate, there was a civilization to build, there was too much to do. When spring came, most of the planted crops did not come up. There was no tree-of-life at all. They could not return to space. Cesium they could get, but they could never build a uranium-producing technology in the time they had left. Finally, knowing they were lost, they had tried to build a laser beam big enough to pierce the dust clouds hiding them from the core. They did not know they had succeeded. They did not know what had killed their crops; they suspected it might be the sparsity of a particular kind of starlight, or starlight in general. They gave detailed information on the blood lines of their breeder cargo, hoping that some of the line might survive. And they asked for help. Five hundred thousand years ago. Phssthpok sat by the root bin, eating and reading. He would have smiled if his face had been built that way. Already he could see that his mission would involve every childless protector on the Pak planet. For five hundred thousand years those breeders had been living without tree-of-life. Without any way to make the change to the protector stage. Dumb animals. And Phssthpok alone knew how to find them. N ick took the ship up on a ram-and-wing rented from Death Valley Port. It went up smooth all the way, no turbulence, a lovely scenic ride up and out over the Pacific. One hundred and fifty miles up Nick switched to fusion power and headed outward, leaving the ram-and-wing to find its own way home. The sky turned black, with bright points. The Earth wrapped itself around itself and dropped behind. It was four days to Mars at one gee, with Ceres to tell them which asteroids to dodge. Nick put the ship on autopilot. It was a flatland navy job, unfamiliar to him but simple enough for a moron to use. He could have flown it blindfolded. Luke said, "Okay to smoke?" "If you want lung cancer." "Does the UN have its money yet?" "Sure. They must have got it transferred hours ago." "Good. Call them, identify yourself and ask for everything they've got on Mars. Tell them to put it on the screen and you'll pay for the laser. That'll kill two birds with one stone." "How?" "It'll tell them what we're doing." "I still don't see it. You say they're so unwieldy they can't move. How will our going to Mars make them less unwieldy?" "Look at it from another direction, Nick. How did the Belt come to choose you to represent them?" "Aptitude tests said I had a high IQ and liked ordering people around. From there I worked my way up." "Okay. We go by the vote." "Popularity contests." "It works. But it does have drawbacks. What government doesn't?" Gamer shrugged. "Every speaker in the UN represents some one section of the world. He thinks it's the best section, filled with the best people. Otherwise he wouldn't have been elected. So maybe twenty representatives each think they know just what to do about the Outsider, and not one of them will knuckle down to the others. Prestige. Eventually they'd work out a compromise between them. But if they get the idea that a civilian and a Belter could beat them to the Outsider, they'll get off their thumbs a lot faster. See?" "No." "Oh, make your call." Y ou're flying from New York, Africa. Suddenly you become aware that New York is flying in one direction, Piquetsburg in another, and a hurricane wind is blowing your plane off course in still a third. All at speeds measured in miles per second... Nightmare? Well, yes. But traveling in the solar system is different from traveling on Earth. Each individual part moves at its own pace, like raisins in a vat of taffy being stirred by a witch. Mars moved in a nearly circular orbit. Asteroids moved nearby on orbits more elliptical, catching up to the red planet or falling behind, outrunning her or backing toward her. Some carried telescopes. Their operators would report to Ceres if they saw intelligent motion on the ochre surface. Mars, carrying Nicholas Sohl and Lucas Gamer. A modulated laser beam followed them from Earth's orbit. The abandoned Outsider ship crossed over the sun and curved inward, following a shallow hyperbola which would take it through the plane of the planets. The Blue Ox followed an accelerating higher-order curve. Eventually it would match the Ox's velocity and position to the Outsider's. Eventually it did. e#T'm ready for a vacation," J-said Nick. For the past two days they had been skimming Earth's stored information on Mars. "That dust is our biggest problem," said Luke. "Why the Finagle did we have to watch all that? According to you, we're just running a bluff." "According to me, we're running a search, unless you've got something better to do. We're faking a search, so why not do a real one? Sometimes the best symbol for a thing is the thing itself." Nick turned off the laser transmitter. It was hot from two days of use in blasting a locator beam back at Earth. "I'm game, like I said, I'm ready for a vacation. Hunting strange things is what I do on my vacations. Did you say something about the dust?" "I said it's our biggest problem. The Outsider didn't even have to dig a hole for itself. He could have sunk anywhere on Mars." The dust of Mars was unique. Its uniqueness was the result of vacuum cementing. Once vacuum cementing had been a bugaboo of the space industries. Small spaceprobe components which would slide easily over one another in normal air would weld solidly in a vacuum, just as soon as the gas absorbed by their surfaces had evaporated away. Vacuum cementing had fused parts in the first American satellites and in the first Russian interplanetary probes. And vacuum cementing was what kept the Moon from being fathoms deep in meteor dust. The dust particles would weld info rock, into natural cement, under the same molecular attraction that fuses Johanssen blocks and turns the mud of sea bottoms to sedimentary rock. But there was no vacuum cementing on Mars. There was just enough gas to stop that, but not nearly enough to stop a meteor. Meteor dust covered most of the planet. Meteors would fuse it into craters, but it would not cement, though it was fine enough to behave like a viscous oil. "He had some reason for landing on Mars," said Nick. "Maybe it's something he can't do under the dust. In that case he must have landed in a crater." "And been spotted." Luke keyed a photograph from the autopilot memory. It was one of a group from the smuggler trap. It showed a dimly shining metal egg with the small end pointed. The egg moved big-end first, and it moved as if rocket-propelled. But there was no reaction drive, at least none that any instrument could detect. "That thing's big enough to see from space," said Luke. "And easy to recognize, with that silver hull." "Right. Shall we start with the Lacis Solis region?" "Why there?" "It's the deepest dust on the planet." "He'd have been stupid to pick the deepest. He'd have picked his place at random." "Then we alone don't have a chance of finding him. So let's assume he's stupid." Luke nodded. "We'll need dustboats. The old base -- " There would be a directional signal in that message. Nick set the autopilot to aiming his own laser back at the source. "Take a few minutes," he said. "I was saying that we'll have to land at the old base and pick up a boat. Can we take the deepradar out of this heap?" "Don't know. I'd have to examine the ship from outside." "Let's hope we can. I don't know what else we can use for a finder." "A metal detector. There must be one aboard." There was. But again, Nick couldn't tell whether it could be removed. There hadn't been time to examine the flatland ship before takeoff. "This is Nicholas Brewster all aboard the Blue Ox. What's new? Repeating. This is Nicholas -- " Nate flicked to transmit. "Nathan La Pan aboard Bluo Ox. We have matched with the Outsider ship. The others are preparing to board. I will switch you to Einar Nilsson." He did. And then he settled back to wait. It was torment, having to wait here in the Ox's control room while Tim and Einar moved in on the Outsider. Nate had protested mightily, but Einar's argument had no holes to crawl through. "This Brennan," Einar had said. "We don't know what happened to him, but it would be prudent to assume the Outsider kidnapped him. And where is the Outsider?" "Gone. And well you know it." "And the other Outsiders? Do you know how many Outsiders there were? Suppose there are more of them aboard? Suppose they attack?" Nate hadn't been given quite time to answer. "Why, you'll blast them with fusion flame. Because you'll be right here waiting if we need help." And he was. But he hated it. iiTT'inar Nilsson speaking. We ' are outside the alien ship. The drive system is too hot to get near, but we will send you our films. I've hooked the com laser into a teevee peeper on my helmet. Tim, have you found anything?" "Just this big porthole and a smooth hull. And cables trailing off in both directions. We'll have to burn our way in." "Through the porthole," said Einar. "Otherwise we might burn through something explosive." "He was right," said Nick. "That's a lifesystem. You can see a control through the glass." "If it's glass. That's crazy engineering, Nick. Why not put the lifesystem last?" "We'll wait and ask him." "Maybe we can patent the idea and sell it to him. Do you suppose he's just stupid?" "If he is, he's clever with his hands." "This transparent stuff has a twenty thousand Kelvin melting point," said Einar. "But we're about through. The lifesystem must be about out of air; we're getting almost no fog through the cracks. Ah, we're through." A three-foot transparent disc puffed away on the last of the air, with a breath of white mist playing around it. Tim caught it and sent it gliding toward the Ox for later recovery. Einar ducked headfirst into the hole and pulled himself through. His beer belly gave him a little trouble. "I'm in a small control cabin," he said and swung from the waist to give the teevee peeper a full view. Tendrils of icy fog drifted toward the hole in the porthole. "Very small. The control bank is almost primitively complex, so complex that I'm inclined to say the Outsider had no autopilot. No man could handle all these controls and adjustments. I see no more than one couch and no aliens present but me. "There's a bin full of sweet potatoes," he continued, "right beside the control couch. It's the only kitchen in this section. I think I'll move on." He turned for a last look at the porthole, saw Tim hovered outside, obeying orders. "Stay out there," he said. "If I need help I'll yell." He moved to the door in the back of the control room, tried to open it. Pressure forced it shut. He used his cutter. The door cut easily, much more so than the porthole material. He waited while the room filled with thick fog, then pushed his way in. "This room is bigger than the control room. Sorry about the view; we seem to have stumbled on a suburb of Los Angeles. The place seems to be a free-fall gymnasium." He swept his peeper around the room, then crossed to one of the machines and tried to work it. It looked like you were supposed to stand up inside it against the force of springs. Einar couldn't budge it. T T e disconnected the peeperE-land aimed it at the machine, then tried again. "Either I'm doing it wrong," he told his audience, "or the Outsider could pick his teeth with me. Let's see what else there is." He looked around. "That's funny," he said presently. There was nothing else. Only the door to the control room. Three men searching for two hours only confirmed Einar's find. The lifesystem consisted of: One control room the size of a singleship control room. One free-fall gymnasium, same size. A bin of roots. An enormous air tank. There were no safeties to stop the flow in case of puncture. The tank was empty. It must have been nearly empty when the ship reached the solar system. Vastly complex air cleaning machinery, apparently designed to remove even the faintest, rarest trace of biochemical waste. Equally complex equipment for conversion of fluid and solid waste. It was incredible. The single Outsider had apparently spent his entire trip in two small rooms, eating just one kind of food, with no ship's library to keep him entertained and no autopilot to keep him pointed right and guard his fuel supply and steer him clear of meteors. He must have done it all himself. Yet the trip had taken years, at least. In view of the complexity of the cleaning and renewal plants, the huge air tank must have existed solely to replace air lost by osmosis through the walls! "That's it," said Einar. "I'll call you back in an hour, when we've analyzed this root and done what we can with the porthole material. Leave your com laser pointed. Is there anything you especially want us to look for?" "Search the ship again," Nick told them. "You may find a highly miniaturized autopilot with overrides. Could you have overlooked a bolthole of some kind? If there's more living space somewhere, an Outsider may be in it." He turned the volume down and faced Luke. "They won't find anything, of course. The Outsider's as big as we are, judging from the couch. Can you think of anything else?" "I'd like to see them analyze the air. And I'm particularly interested in the root." "They'll finish with the root by the time this beam reaches them," He turned up the volume. "After you finish with the root, we'd like to know what the air's made of. Then do whatever comes to mind. Don't come home yet. Stay with the ship. If an emergency comes up, remember you've got a fusion flame thrower. Sohl out." rennan shifted. He hadn't moved in hours. He lay on his back in the root bin, his eyes closed, his body folded into near-foetal position around a grossly swollen belly, his fists clenched. But now he moved one arm, and Phssthpok came suddenly alert. Brennan reached for a root, put it in his mouth, bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed, under Phssthpok's watchful eye. His own eyes stayed closed. Brennan's hand released the last inch or so of root, and he turned over and stopped moving. Phssthpok relaxed. Presently he dreamed. The Blue Ox had circled the sun and was now on the other side of the system, headed for interstellar space, a good distwo ships was a communications gap of twenty to thirty minutes. Nick and Garner waited, knowing that any information would be half an hour late. They had asked all the questions, made guesses at the answers, mapped out their search pattern of Mars. Luke was bored. He missed the conveniences built into his travel chair. The ship's library was unsatisfactory. He thought Nick was bored too, but he was wrong. In space Nick was silent by habit. The screen flashed on. The radio cleared its throat and spoke. "Nick Sohl, this is Tim Truesdale aboard the Blue Ox." The voice held barely repressed panic; the youngish face confirmed it. Tim Truesdale caught on his own voice, then blurted, "We're in trouble. We were testing that alien root in the chem lab, and Einar tried to take a bite of it. The damn thing was like asbestos from vacuum exposure, but he swallowed a piece before we could stop him. I can't understand why he did it. It smelled awful ! "Einar's sick, very sick. He tried to kill me when I took the root away from him, and now he's gone into a coma. We've hooked him into the autodoc. The 'doc says Insufficient Data." They heard a ragged intake of breath. Suddenly Nick realized what was strange about Truesdale's face. It was a flatlander's face, wide and overmuscled. "We'd like permission to get him to a human doctor." "Nick Sohl speaking. Pick a route and get on it. Then finish analyzing that root. I want to know what it smelled like, to Einar, to Nate, to you. What exactly did it remind you of? Sohl over." Nick turned the volume off. "What the blazes got into him?" "Who?" "All of them, but especially Einar. I was his boss for a year before he quit politics. Why would he try a suicidal trick like that?" He drummed on the arm of his chair, then began looking for Ceres with the laser. I n the half hour that passed before the Blue Ox called again, Nick got dossiers on all three of her crew. Tim Truesdale was a flatlander, sure enough. He had joined the Belt when he was twenty. Eight years later he was still alive; the Belt hadn't killed him and probably wouldn't. Einar Nilsson and Nathan La Pan were both Belters: Einar a broadshouldered, broad-bellied giant, nearly fifty, running to fat and baldness; Nathan an eighteenyear old, learning the ways of space at apprentice pay before being allowed to take off in his own singleship. "That explains why they waited for orders," said Nick rather seriously. "Does that need an explanation?" "Most Belters would have turned back the moment Einar came down sick. But Truesdale's still a flatlander, still used to being told when to breathe, and La Pan probably didn't trust his own judgment enough to override him." "I notice the others had fewer childhood diseases than Truesdale." "We try to keep germs out of the Belt. Did you notice anything else?" "Only his age. Nilsson was the oldest." "I noticed that too. He was also the biggest. Do you -- " "Blue Ox calling Nick Sohl home. The root seems almost normal. High in carbohydrates, including righthanded sugars. Ordinary looking proteins. No vitamins at all. We found two compounds Nate says are brand new. One resembles a hormone, testosterone, but it definitely isn't testosterone. "The root doesn't smell like anything I can name, except possibly sour milk or sour cream. Nate says it smells like food burning, but he can't name the food. "The Outsider ship's air was thin, with an adequate partial pressure of oxygen, no poisonous compounds, at least five percent helium. We spectroanalyzed the porthole material, and -- " He listed a spectrum of elements. "The 'doc still reports Einar's illness as Insufficient Data, but now there's an emergency light. Whatever it is, it isn't good. Any further questions?" "Not at the moment," said Nick and signed off. He sat drumming on the console with long, tapering fingers. "So," said Luke. "Where'd it come from?" Nick wondered aloud. "A small world with no moon," said Luke. "Moons tend to skim away a planet's atmosphere. The Earth would be like Venus without her big oversized moon. The helium would be the first to go, wouldn't it?" "Maybe. It would also be the first to leave a small planet. And think about the Outsider's strength. It was no small planet he came from." "What then?" "From somewhere in a gas cloud, with lots of helium. The galactic core is in the direction he came from. There's lots of gas clouds and dust clouds in that direction." "But they're all an unholy distance away. Will you stop that drumming?" "It helps me think. Like your smoking." "Drum then." "There's no limit to how far he could have come. The faster a ramscoop ship goes, the more fuel it would pick up. You saw the intake on the drive section?" "There has to be a limit at which the exhaust velocity equals the velocity at which the gas hits the ramscoop field." "True. But it must be way the Finale up there. That air tank was huge. The Outsider is a long way from home." hssthpok dreamed... He sat on the floor of the Library with a piece of root in his jaws and an ancient book balanced on one cantaloupe knee and a map spread before him on the floor. It was a map of the galaxy, but it was graded for time. The core section showed ago, but the outer arms were only five hundred thousand years old. The Library staff had spent most of a year preparing it for him. Assume they went a distance X, he told himself. Their average velocity must have been eleven thousand seven hundred thirty glocka per klakwhoo, considering dust friction and the galaxy's gravitational and electromagnetic effects. Their laser returned at light-speed; figure for space curvature. Then X -- thirty thousand one hundred and ten lightyears. Phssthpok set his compass and drew an arc, using the Pak sun as a center. Margin of error: point zero zero one, thirty lightyears. They're on that arc! Now, assume they went straight toward the nearest edge of the core. Phssthpok drew a radial line. Margin of error greater here. Original error, course alterations... And the straight line would have been twisted into a spiral curve during five hundred thousand years, while the galaxy twisted like curdled milk. But they must have stayed flat in the galactic plane. And they're near this point. I've found them... Phssthpok's minions pouring like army ants through the Library, Every protector in reach had joined his quest. It's in the Astronautics Section, Pphwee. You've got to find it. We need those ramscoop diagrams. Ttuss, I need to know what happens when a protector gets old, and when it happens. It must be in the Medical Section. Hrathk, we have to learn what could stop a tree-of-life from growing in the galactic arms. Put your whole crew on this. Use the Valley of Pitchok for the experiments and remember the environment was habitable. You of the Physics and Engineering Sections, I need a fusion drive. Design it! Every childless protector on the planet was looking for a purpose in living, a Cause. And Phssthpok gave it to them... The ship, finally completed, standing in three parts on the sand not far from the Library. Phssthpok's army assembling. We need monopoles, we need tree-of-life roots and seeds, we need solid-fuel rockets for the launching. The scoop won't work below a certain speed. Meteor Bay has everything we need. We can take them! For the first time in fifty thousand years, the childless protectors of Pak assembled for war... Phssthpok dreamed. Days ago he had stopped eating. He told himself it was too early, but his belly didn't believe it. He would live just long enough. Meanwhile, he dreamed. "How dangerous are these approaches?" "Get that brave little quiver out of your voice," said Nick. It was pure slander; Luke was nothing but interested. "I've made a couple of hundred of these in my life. For sheer thrills I've never found anything to beat letting you drive me to the spaceport." "You s aid you were in a hurry." "So I did. Luke, I'd like to request an admiring silence for the next few minutes." "Aha! Ah HA!" The red planet reached for them, unfolding like a wargod's hand. Nick's bantering mood drained away, and his face took on a set, stony look. He hadn't been quite candid with Luke. He had made several hundred powered approaches in his life; true. But those had been asteroid approaches, with gravity negligible or nearly so. His first landing approach to a planet had been made a week ago. Diemos went by in the direction technically known as "ship's upward." Nick inched a lever toward him. Mars was flattening out and simultaneously sliding away as they moved north. "The base should be there," said Luke. "At the north edge of that arc. Ah, that must be it, that little crater." "Use the scope." "Mmmmm... Dammit. Ah. There it is. Still inflated, too. See it, Nick?" "Yah." f S 'he autodoc was built into the back wall, set over one of the three disaster couches. Einar was in that couch. His arm had been inserted into a slot in the wall. Tim turned to examine the dial faces on the autodoc. Usually a panel covered those dials; a spaceship has enough gadgets to watch without added distractions. Tim had been looking at those dials every five minutes, for hours. But this time they all showed red. "He's dead," said Tim. He heard the surprise in his voice and wondered at it. Nate squirmed out of the control couch and bent over Einar. "And you just noticed! He must have been dead for an hour!" "No, I swear..." Tim gulped against the rising anaesthesia in his veins. His body was water. He was going to faint. "Look at his face and tell me that!" Tim climbed onto watery legs. He looked down at the ravaged face for a moment. Einar, dead, looked a hundred years old. In sorrow and guilt and repugnance, Tim reached to touch the dead cheek. "He's still warm." "Warm?" Nate touched the corpse. "He's on fire. Fever. Must have been alive seconds ago. Sorry, buddy, I jumped at conclusions. But doesn't it look like he's been dead a week? Hey! Are you all right?" T he dust rose in churning clouds to meet their drive flame. Nick swore viciously and increased the thrust. By now Luke had caught on to Nick's vagaries in blasphemy. When he swore by Finagle it was for emphasis or humor. When he blasphemed in Christian fashion, he meant it. ed. She was above the dust, and then in the dust, and gradually the ochre clouds thinned and backed away. A ring-shaped sandstorm receded toward three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon; and the bedrock lay exposed for the first time in millenia. It was lumpy and brown and worn. In the light of the drive the rounded rock blazed white, with sharp black shadows. Where the drive flame touched it began to melt. Nick said, "I'll have to land in the crater. That dust will flow back in as soon as I turn off tire motor." He angled the ship left and pushed a lever forward. The bottom dropped out, and they fell. They fell all the way and touched with hardly a bounce. "Beautiful," said Luke. "I do that all the time. Let's get into our suits." "You'll have to carry me piggyback until we find a boat." N ick opened both airlock doors, pulled Luke outside, settled him firmly on his shoulders and climbed down the ladder. He had landed near the ring wall, which rose above them in worn, rounded, volcanic-looking stone. Dust dripped back from the rim, running like molasses down the shallow slope to collect in a pool around the ship's shock legs. The crater was half a mile across. In the approximate center was the dome, surrounded by a shallow lapping sea of dust. "Let's go up the wall," said Nick. "The boats will be outside." "No. There's an opening somewhere in the ring wall. Remember? They moored the boats just outside the dome." "Then where are they?" "Must be on the other side of the dome. We couldn't see too well coming down." Nick looked around him, frowning. There seemed no way to reach the dome without crossing the dust, which might not be as shallow as it looked. The crater was ancient; it looked just younger than the planet itself. But it was riddled with younger cracks. Some of the edges were almost sharp; the air and dust were too thin to erode things quickly. There would be bad footing. Perhaps the men who built the dome had never needed to reach the ring wall, except by boat. He stared around the base of the ring wall, walking slowly and carefully. Luke was light on his shoulders, and his own body was light; but together they were top-heavy, and some of the cracks were concealed by fluid. A small, intense sun hung above the crater rim, in a sky the color of veinous blood. On the far side of the dome a narrow strip of laser-fused dust led from the dome to the ring wall. The boats were there, moored along the path. Dust had settled over them, leaving only flat, wide shapes the color of everything else. For twelve years they had waited for explorers who had lost interest and gone home. It was like seeing ghosts. An Egyptian Pharaoh might find such ghosts waiting for him in the afterworld: rank on rank of dumb, faithful retainers, gone before him, and waiting, waiting. "From here they look good," said Luke. "We're in luck, Sinbad." 'Don't count your money yet." I t was a fifteen-minute walk from the ship to the ring-wall end of the path. Nick sighed as he started across the dust pond toward the dome. "Has it occurred to you that Lacis Solis is more than two thousand miles from here? The UN could make their own boats and still beat us." "They won't move that fast. Come on." "The path's slippery. Dust all over it." The boats, four of them, were lined along the west side. Each had four seats and a pair of fans at the stern, below the dust line, with cages for protection from submerged rocks. The boats were so flat that any ocean ripple would have sunk them; but in the heavy dust they rode barely submerged. I # Nick dropped his burden not too gently into one of the seats. "See if she'll start, Luke. I'm going to the dome for fuel." "It'll be hydrazine, with compressed Martian air as oxidizer." "I'll just look for a fuel tank, if it's okay with you." Luke was able to start the compressor, but the motor wouldn't fire. Probably drained the tanks, he decided and turned everything off. He found a bubble dome collapsed in the back. After making sure it was meant to be worked manually, he wrestled it into place and sealed it down, holding himself in place with a seat belt to get leverage. His long arms and wide hands had never lost an arm wrestling match. The edges of the bubble probably leaked, he decided, but not seriously. He found the inspection hatch that concealed an air converter for changing the nitric acid outside into breathable nitrogen and oxygen. Nick returned with a green tank balanced on one shoulder. He fueled the boat through an injector nozzle. Luke tried the starter again. It worked. The boat tried to take off without Nick. Luke found the neutral setting, then reverse. Nick waited while he backed up. "How do I get through the bubble?" "I guess you don't." Luke collapsed the bubble, unsealed one side for Nick, then sealed it after him. The bubble began to fill, slowly. "Best keep our suits on," said Luke. "It may be hours before we can breathe in here." "You can collapse it then. We've got to get provisions from the ship." I t was two hours before they raised the bubble and started for the opening in the ring wall. The cliffs that framed the opening were sharp and sheer, clearly dynamite-blasted, as artificial as the glassy path between dome and ring wall. Naked black rock glared down at them as they passed between. Nick was settled comfortably in one of the passenger chairs, his feet up on another, his eyes resting casually on the screen of the deep-radar mounted on the side of the boat. "Seems deep enough," he said. "Then I'll open her up," said Luke. The fans spun; the boat's stern dipped far down, then righted. In seconds they were skimming across the dust at forty knots, leaving as a wake only two straight, shallow, regular swells. The deep-radar image registered as a contour map. It showed a smooth bottom, regular swells and dips from which millions of years had eliminated all sharp lines and points. There was little volcanic activity on Mars. The desert was as flat as a mirror. Rounded dun-colored rocks poked through its surface, incongruous, Daliesque. Craters sat on the dust like badly made clay ash trays. Some were a few inches across. Others beyond the horizon would measure miles, or tens of miles. The horizon was straight and close and razor sharp, glowing yellow below and artery red above. Nick turned his head to watch the crater recede. His eyes widened, then squinted. Something? 'Damn't. Hold it!" he shouted. "Turn around! Turn hard left!" "Back toward the crater?" "Yes!" Luke cut the power in one motor. The boat turned its prow to the left but continued to skid sideways across the dust. Then the right fan bit in, and the boat curved around. "I see it," said Luke. It was little more than a dot at that distance, but it showed clearly against the calm monochromatic sea around it. And it moved. It jerked, it remained quiescent, it jerked again, rolling sideways. It was several hundred yards from the crater wall. As they approached, it grew clearer. It was cylindrical, the shape of a short caterpillar, and translucent; and soft, for they could see it bend as it moved. It was trying to reach the opening in the ring wall. Luke throttled down. The dustboat slowed and settled deeper. As they pulled alongside Luke was startled to see that Nick had armed himself with a signal gun, a rocket pistol with an exploding warhead of ultrafine dust. Such a pistol could call for help, but at close range it could also kill. "It's him," said Nick. He leaned over the side, gun at the ready. T he caterpillar was a transparent, inflated sack. Inside was something that rolled over and over, slowly and painfully, trying to get closer to the side of the boat. It was as clearly alien as anything created in tire days of flat television. It was humanoid, as much so as a stick-figure drawing is humanoid. But it was all knobs. Elbows, knees, shoulders, cheekbones, they stuck out like marbles or grapefruits or bowling balls. The head was a small watermelon swelling and rising like hydrocephalus. It stopped trying to roll when it bumped against the boat in its pressurized prison. "He looks helpless enough," Nick said dubiously. "Well, here goes our air again." Luke deflated the bubble. The two men reached over the side, picked up the pressurized sack and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. The alien's expression did not change and probably could not. But it did a strange thing. With thumb and forefinger of a strangely human, strangly inhuman hand, it made a circle. Nick said, "He must have learned that from Brennan." "Look at the joints, Nick. It looks like you could name every one of them." "His arms are too long for human. And his back slopes more." "Yah. Well, we can't take it back to the ship, and we can't talk to it the way it is now. We'll have to wait out here while the bubble inflates." seem to spend most of  ' our time waiting," said Luke. Nick nodded. His fingers, drummed against the back of a chair. For half an hour the boat's small converter had been straining to fill the bubble, using and changing the thin, poisonous mixture outside. But the alien hadn't moved at all. Luke had been watching. The alien lay in its inflated bag in the bottom of the boat, and it waited. Its human eyes watched them from inside pits of tough, leathery wrinkles. No part of it moved except its eyes. Just so, with just such patience, might a dead man wait for Judgment Day. "At least we have it at a disadvantage," said Nick. "It won't be kidnapping us." "I think he must be insane." "Insane? Its motives may be a little strange -- " "Look at the evidence. He comes plowing into the system in a ship just adequate to get him here. His air tank was on its last gasp. There was no evidence of fail-safe devices anywhere aboard ship. He made no attempt to contact anyone, as far as we can tell. He kills or kidnaps Brennan. He then proceeds to abandon his interstellar drive and run for Mars, presumably to hide. Now he's abandoned his re-entry vehicle and whatever's left of Brennan too; he's rolled halfway around Mars in a sandwich bag to reach the first place any exploring ship would land! He's a nut. Too many years between stars in too small a place have stirred his brains with an eggbeater." "You keep saying him. It's an it. Think of it as an it, and you'll be ready for it to act odd." "That's a cop-out. The universe is rational. In order to survive, this thing has to be rational too, wherever he, she or it is from." "Another couple of minutes and we can -- " The alien moved. Its hand slashed with blurring speed down the length of the sack. Instantly Nick raised the signal gun. Instantly... but the alien reached through a long slit in the sack and took the gun out of Nick's hand before he could fire. There was no sign of haste. It tossed the gun into the back of the boat and sat up. It spoke. Its voice was full of clickings and rustlings and poppings. The flat, hard beak must have been a handicap. But its speech could be understood. It said, "Take me to your leader." Nick recovered first. He straightened his shoulders, cleared his throat and said, "That will involve a trip of several days. Meanwhile, may I welcome you to the dominion of humanity?" "You may not," said the monster. "I hate to ruin your whole day. My name's Jack Brennan, and I'm a Belter. Aren't you Nick Sohl?" IX T he awful silence rocked to the sound of Luke's laughter. "You think of it as an it instead of a him, and you'll be ready for s-strange-h-hahaha..." Nick felt panic close around his throat. "You. You're Brennan?" "Yah. And you're Nick Sohl. I saw you once in Confinement. But I don't recognize your friend." "Lucas Garner." Luke had himself under control. "Your photographs don't do you justice, Brennan." "I did something stupid," said the Brennan-monster. Its voice was no more human, its appearance was no less intimidating, than before it had announced itself as Brennan. "I went to meet the Outsider. You were trying to do the same weren't you?" "Yes." There was a sardonic amusement in Luke's eyes and in Luke's voice. He may or may not have believed the Brennanmonster, but either way he was enjoying the situation. "Was there really an Outsider, Brennan?" "Unless you want to quibble about definitions, yes." Sohl broke in. "For God's sake, Brennan! What happened to you?" "That's a long story," said the Brennan-monster. "And I'm going to tell it all, right here. To make it easier for you to understand, I'd like to tell it my own way, so please maintain a respectful silence, remembering that if I hadn't gotten in the way you'd look just like me." He looked hard at the two men. "I'm wrong. You wouldn't. You're both too old. Well, bear with me. I'm going to tell you about a race of bipeds that lives near the edge of the spherical globe of close-packed suns at the core of the galaxy...     r T'he most important thing A about them is that they live in three stages of maturity. There is childhood, which is selfexplanitory. There is the breeder stage, a biped just short of intelligence, whose purpose is to create more children. And there is the protector. "At the age of forty-two, Earth time, the breeder stage gets the urge to eat the root of a certain bush. Up to then he stayed away from it, because its smell was repugnant to him. Suddenly it smells delicious. This bush grows all over the planet; there's no real chance that the root won't be available to any breeder who lives long enough to want it. "The root initiates certain changes, both physical and emotional. But before I go into them, I'll let you in on the big secret. The race I speak of calls itself -- " The Brennan-monster clicked its horny beak sharply together. "We call it Peking Man." "What?" Nick seemed forced into the position of straight man, and he didn't like it. But Luke sat hugging his useless legs to his chest, grinning with wicked enjoyment. "Peking Man. There was an expedition that landed on Earth some five hundred thousand years ago. The bush they needed wouldn't grow, so there haven't been any protector stage Paks on Earth. I'll get to that. "When a breeder eats the root, these changes take place. His or her gonads and obvious sexual characteristics disappear. His skull softens, and his brain begins to grow until it is comfortably larger and more complex than yours, gentlemen. The skull then hardens and develops a bony crest. The teeth fall out, whatever teeth are left; the gums and lower lips grow together and form a hard, flat beak. All hair disappears. Some joints swell enormously, to supply much greater leverage to the muscles. The skin hardens and wrinkles to form a kind of armor. Fingernails become claws, retractile, so that a protector's fingertips are actually more sensitive than before, and better toolmakers. A simple heart forms where the two veins from the legs, whatever the hell they're called, join to approach the heart. Notice that my armor skin is thicker there? Well, there are less dramatic changes, but they all contribute to make the protector a powerful, intelligent fighting machine. "The emotional changes are drastic. A protector who has bred true feels no urge except the urge to protect those of his blood line. He recognizes them by smell. His increased intelligence does him no good here, because his hormones rule his motives. Does it occur to you that every change I've described is a kind of exaggeration of what happens to men and women when they get old?" "Yes, but -- " "The extra heart," Luke broke in. "What about that?" "Like the expanded brain, it doesn't form without tree-of-life. After fifty, without modern medical care, a normal human heart becomes inadequate. Eventually it stops." "Ah." # A bout that colony. There's no need to dwell on it. A big ship arrived here, and four Landing craft went down with some thirty protectors and a lot of breeders. A year later the protectors realized they'd picked the wrong planet. The tree they needed never came up. They sent a message for help, by laser, and then they died. Starvation is a normal death for a protector, but it's usually voluntary. These starved against their will." The Brennan-monster paused. There was no sign of emotion in voice or masklike face. "They died. The breeders were breeding without check. What happened is largely speculation on my part, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. The landing craft was fission powered. The protectors were dead, but the breeders were used to their helping out, so they hung around the ships." "And?" "And the piles got hot without the protectors to keep them balanced. Maybe they exploded. The radiation caused all kinds of strange mutations. Everything from lemurs to apes and chimpanzees to ancient and modem man." "I don't believe it," said Nick. "You will. You should now. There's enough evidence of it, particularly in religions and folk tales. What percentage of humanity genuinely expects to live forever? Why do so many religions include a race of immortal beings who are constantly battling one another? What's the justification for ancestor worship? You know what happens to a man without modern geriatrics; he gets stupid as he gets old. Yet people tend to respect him, to listen to him. Where do guardian angels come from?" "Race memory?" years of tradition, if you'll believe a tradition could last that long. It could, if every man, woman and child on Earth began by believing it." "South Africa," said Luke. He believed the Brennanmonster. The Outsider's actions had been so irrational that he had been forced to expect an irrational explanation. "They must have landed in South Africa. All the primates are there, except Man." " # O ight. You see, the breeders had lost their ability to become protectors. They had to develop other shticks, to protect themselves. There was radiation around to help them change, and the protectors had made the environment temporarily safe for them, so the population could expand. Some got strength, some got agility, some got intelligence." "I seem to remember," said Luke, "that the aging process in man can be compared to the program running out in a space probe. Once the probe has done its work it doesn't matter what happens to it. Similarly, once we pass the age at which we can have children -- " "You're moving on inertia only, following your course with no corrective mechanisms." The Brennan-monster nodded. "Of course the tree-of-life root supplies the program for the third stage. Good comparison." Nick said, "What about the Outsider?" "He found old records, including the call for help. He was the years to realize that there was a way to find Earth, or at least to narrow the search. And he had no children, so he had to find a cause quick, before the urge to eat left him. That's what happens to a protector when his blood line is dead. More lack of programming. Incidentally you might note the heavy protection against mutation in the Pak species. A mutation doesn't smell right. That could be important in the galactic core, where radiation must be heavy." "So he came barreling out here with a hold full of seeds?" "And bags of thalium oxide. Thalium was what was lacking in Earth's soil, and the oxide was easiest to carry. The construction of his ship bothered me until I understood it, but you can see why he trailed his cargo section behind the lifesystem. Radiation doesn't matter to him, in small amounts. He can't have children." "And where is he now?" "I had to kill him." "What?" Garner was shocked at last. "Did he attack you?" "No." "Then why?" The Brennan-monster seemed to hesitate. It said, "Garner, Sohl, listen to me. Fifteen hundred miles from here, some fifty feet under the sand, is part of an alien spacecraft filled with roots and seeds and bags of thalium oxide. The roots I can grow from those seeds can make a man nearly immortal. What do you think will happen next?" The two men looked at each other. Luke seemed about to speak, closed his mouth. "That's a tough one, right? So what did the Outsider expect? Why did he bring all those roots and seeds?" X TJlissthpok dreamed. He knew to within a day just how long it would take for Brennan to wake up. He could have been wrong, of course. But if he were, then Brennan's kind had mutated too far from the Pak form and would not be worth protecting. Knowing how long he had, Phssthpok could time his dreaming. Dreaming was a fine art to a protector. He had about ten days. For a week he dreamed about the past, up until the day he left the Pak planet. Then he moved on to the future. Phssthpok dreamed... It would begin when his captive woke. From the looks of him, the captive's brain would be larger than Phssthpok's; there was that frontal bulge, ruining the slope of the face. He would learn fast. Phssthpok would teach him how to be a protector and what to do with the roots and seeds of tree-of-life. Probably the native would take the secret for his own, using tree-cf-life to make protectors of his own descendants. That was all right. If he had sense enough to spread his family around, avoiding incest, his bloodline would reach out to include most of this system's Pak race. Probably he would kill Phssthpok to keep the secret. That too was all right. There was a nightmare tinge to Phssthpok's dreaming. For the captive didn't look right. His fingernails were developing wrong. His head was certainly not the right shape. His beak was as flat as his face had been. His back wasn't arched, his legs were wrong, his arms were too short. His kind had had too much time to mutate. But he'd reacted correctly to the roots. The future was uncertain... except for Phssthpok. Let the captive learn what he needed to know, if he could; let him carry on the work, if he could. There would come a day when Earth was a second Pak world. Phssthpok had done his best. He would teach and die. Trennan stirred. He unfolded   his curled body, stretched wide and opened his eyes. For a few moments he stared at Phssthpok, stared as if he were reading the protector's mind. Then he began to speak. In two days he had learned the language. On the third day, as Phssthpok was demonstrating how to unfreeze the seeds without damage, Brennan slammed his head against the edge of the freezer. It stunned the protector just long enough to let Brennan turn him around and break his neck against the edge. "I wonder if I can make you understand," said the Brennanmonster. He gazed at the two old men, one twice the age of the other but both old, and wondered that they should be his judges. "I wonder if you can understand how fast it was." He kept his speech dead slow, slow enough for them (hopefully) to understand it. "He had the box open and was giving me instructions in that oddly speedy language of his, giving orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, 'Don't I get any choices at all?' "I was too intelligent. I was getting answers before I could finish formulating a question. And always I saw the best answer, and always it was the only choice. My free will was gone. And is. I wondered if the Outsider had free will. "In that same instant I attacked him with intent to kill. Every step in the argument was in place, and there was no choice at all." "Lucky you could act so fast. I gather he was dangerous?" "Not to me, not yet. I was his shining hope. He couldn't have defended himself for fear of bruising me. He was older than me and knew how to fight; he could have killed me if he'd wanted to. But he couldn't want to. "It took him thirty thousand years of real time to bring us those roots. He expected me to finish the job. I think he died believing he'd succeeded. He half-expected me to kill him, you see." Sohl said, "And?" The Brennan-monster shruggted cantaloupe shoulders. "He was wrong, of course. I killed him because he would have tried to wipe out the human race when he learned the whole truth." He reached into the bag that had brought him across fifteen hundred miles of fluid dust. He pulled out a jury-rigged somethingor-other that hummed softly -- his air plant, made from parts of Phssthpok's control board -- and dropped it in the boat. Next he pulled out half of a yellow root like a raw sweet potato. He held it under Garner's nose. "Smell this." L uke sniffed. "Kind of pleasant. Like a liqueur." "Sohl?" "Nice." "If you knew it would turn you into something like me, would you take a bite? Garner?" "This instant. I'd like to live forever, and I'm afraid of going senile." "Sohl?" "No. I'm not ready to give up sex yet." "How old are you, Sohl?" "Seventy-four. Birthday two months from now." "You're already too old. You were too old at fifty; it would have killed you. Would you have volunteered at forty-five?" Sohl laughed. "Certainly not." "Well, that's half the answer. From Phssthpok's point of view, we're a failure. The other half is that I don't intend to turn treeof-life loose on Earth or anywhere else." "I should hope not," said Garner. "But let's hear your reasons." "Did you see the Outsider ship?" "We saw films." "Odd, wasn't it? A weird combination of primitive and complex. There's a reason for that. The Pak planet has never been free of war at any time in its history. Naturally not, with every protector single-mindedly acting to expand and protect his blood line at the expense of all the others. Knowledge keeps getting lost, and the race can't co-operate for a single minute beyond the point where one protector sees an advantage in betraying the others. They can't make any kind of permanent progress because of that continual state of war. "Can you imagine a thousand protectors on Earth deciding their grandchildren need more room? All they'd have to do would be to steal a few fusion plants." He didn't have to expand that point. Fusion plants were as common on Earth as electrical generators had been a century earlier. There were tens of thousands of spacecraft; there were seawater distilleries and power plants and public crematoriums. And each could become an exploding bomb at a flick of the switch that controlled its fusion shield. "Besides which, we don't need tree-of-life, not really. Garner, when were you bom? Nineteen forty or thereabouts?" "Thirty-nine." "And look how old you are now. The science of geriatrics is moving so fast that my kids have a good chance of living for thousands of years. We'll get our immortality without tree-of-life, without sacrificing anything at all." "Now look at it from the Outsider's viewpoint," the Brennanmonster went on. "We've settled the solar system and are on the verge of moving out to the stars. We will and must refuse to use trce-of-life, and even when it's forced on us the resulting mutated protectors are atypical. The Outsider was used to thinking in terms of the long view. He'd have realized that someday we'll reach the core. The Pak will attack us the moment they see us, and we'll fight back." He shrugged. "And win, of course. The Pak won't unite effectively, and we'll have a much better technology." "We will?" "I told you, they can't keep their technology. Whatever can't be used immediately gets lost unless someone files it in the Library. Military knowledge never gets filed; the families keep it a deep, dark secret. And the only ones to use the Library are the childless protectors. There aren't many of them, and they aren't highly motivated." "He'd have tried to wipe us out first," said Luke. "Right. You might remember that we would have been infinitely worse to him than a hostile alien species. We're mutants, corruptions of the Pak form itself." "But he couldn't do it. He was all alone." "I've thought of half-a-dozen things he could have done. None of them sure things, but I couldn't risk it. Remember that the Outsider was a fanatic and more intelligent than most human geniuses. They all are. "If only they'd had the ability to play..." T he sun had almost touched the horizon. Luke shivered and started the motors. He didn't want to have to navigate the opening in the ring wall in darkness. Presently Nick said, "What about the seeds? Do we just leave them where they are?" "Not at all. Sohl, when you have finally grasped the extent of my magnificient intelligence, you'll see what those seeds represent. They're a fail-safe for the human race. If we ever really need a leader, we can make one. We'll just pick a forty-twoyear-old volunteer and turn him or her loose in the tree-of-life patch, making sure that he or she has no children." "Children. You've got children, Brennan." "Yes," said the Brennan-monster. "But fear not. I don't intend to hover over them the rest of their lives. They'll have a much better chance for happiness without that." "The hormone changes didn't work?" "I think they did. At least to some extent. What the Outsider never realized was that most of the protector's urge to die after his bloodline is dead is sociological. Some is hormones, but more is training. I don't have that training, that conviction that a breeder can't be happy or safe without his ancestors constantly telling him what to do. I don't intend to let them know I'm alive. That would hurt them." "We'll give it out that the Outsider killed you." "Good." The Brennan-monster lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat as it slowed for the opening in the ring wall. Nothing moved but his eyes. The Brennan-monster had the ability to relax. Somewhere in the future there would be regular periods of furious exercise... "What of you, Brennan?" "I can't protect my kids because of the Principle of Uncertainty. I can't watch them without affecting them. But I can protect the human race. Someday it may be necessary. Meanwhile, I'll be a gardener. Pick me an asteroid, and I'll raise tree-of-life." From the front of the boat, Luke said, "I just thought of something. You know the story of Genesis?" "Yes." Luke pulled out a cigarette. "You remember that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. According to Genesis, the reason they were thrown out was that they might have eaten from the tree of life, to live forever. That would have made them equivalent to angels. Now you tell us they were the same tree." He used his lighter. "Wha -- " In one fluid motion the Brennan-monster was beside him. He took the cigarette from Luke's mouth stubbed it out against the side of the boat. Luke glared. "Sorry," said the Brennanmonster. "The hormones worked after all. I'm a protector." It was as fair a warning as the two ex-breeders would get. The Brennan-monster's motives would always be as clear as empty Alien's Bequest He came from space to bring us a gift we didn't want to take! X TThen the alien spaceship '  crash-landed its lone occupant was killed -- yet it did not die. And one day later it disappeared. Abruptly St. Paul, Minnesota -- site of the landing -- became a closed city. Few went in, and none came out. My newspaper pulled strings for a week, and I found myself on a plane with Joseph F. Kasper, Presidential trouble shooter. We flew over the city, low enough to see a cordon of national guardsmen and a tight line of boats blocking the port area on the Mississippi. A corpsman met us in the compound at Navy Island. "I'm to take you directly to the staff room, sirs," the corpsman informed us. "Mr. Rauen is waiting." That would be Edward Rauen, State Department man in charge of the project. Rauen greeted us at the door of the staff room. We introduced ourselves, and the big man shook our hands. "Glad to have you with us," he said. "I understand three men died here yesterday," Kasper got directly down to business. "Yes," Rauen answered. "With broken necks. A biologist here at the center, and two national guardsmen in the Pigseye area." "By the alien?" "We assume so." "Why those particular men?" "We figure the biologist came on something. Our visitor killed him and killed the guardsmen in trying to escape." "Did he escape?" "We're quite certain he didn't," Rauen answered. "He was stopped at the first guard line." He introduced us to the other two people in the room, a Miss Carole Schoppert, pathologist on the project, and a Mr. Leo Scanlon, technician. "What do you have on the creature so far?" Kasper asked as we seated ourselves. "Very little, except that it can assume different shapes. We suspect that presently it is masquerading as a human. That would be its best disguise. But I think we'd better start at the beginning. I'll show you the pictures we have." Rauen turned to the technician. "Will you handle the projector, Mr. Scanlon?" Hphe opening scene on the screenappeared as a ball of light, coalesced into a spaceship, and came at the camera like a blueblack bullet fired from a gun. Its speed slackened abruptly. It bucked a half dozen times, rapidly, and began a slow spinning fall. "That's where our visitor died, apparently," Rauen said. "Except... Will you proceed, Mr. Scanlon?" In the next scene the spaceship had been opened, and the alien lay on the grass a few yards away. Scanlon brought the camera into closeup focus. The outworlder was lying on his side, with his legs coiled behind him, without knee-break, resembling half-coiled springs. He was unclothed and squat, with a tough-textured, satin-black skin. His one eye was protuberant, with a light center and no visible white at the outsides. It was a strong face, but laced with the fine deep lines of an old man. The side of the alien's head nearest us had been battered and crushed. "Observe this now," Rauen cautioned. "Taken one hour later." The outline of the alien had become blurred, with the facial features seeming about to run one into another. "Another hour," Rauen said. The alien body had melted into a soft block of blackgel. Kasper all this while had been sitting alertly passive. Now he asked, "Is it possible for a body to decompose that fast?" "No," Rauen answered. "Closer study showed the thing was still alive. It had lost its shape, but there was no putrefacation or actual tissue deterioration. It retained a consistent body temperature and fluid circulation. We might think of it as a protoplasmic mass, but it definitely is not dead." "How did it escape?" Kasper asked. "Can something like that move?" "Small portions of it, let's say, writhed constantly," Rauen said. "But whether or not it was locomotory we never did learn. "This next picture will show how it escaped," Rauen continued. "I had Mr. Scanlon set his camera on automatic so we'd miss nothing during the night. This is the result." "vur attention moved back to tire screen, where a brown mongrel dog lay on the grass on the spot where the alien had been before. The dog was not moving, but its side rose heavily and quite rapidly, as though it had just run a long distance. It was covered with a thick film of dull matter that resembled mud. Other matter lay all about it in a damp pool. As he watched the dog rose awkwardly. With its legs spread wide it shook most of the black substance from its body, and ambled out of the picture. "That's it," Rauen said. "That's all we have on the thing." "Did you search for the dog?" Kasper asked. "Of course. We never did find it." The question had obviously irked Rauen. Something about the personalities of these two men clashed. "How much of that protoplasmic matter remained after the dog left?" Kasper asked next. "In volume, approximately the same as before," Carole Schoppert spoke now. "Except that it was dead matter then, not protoplasmic. We found another pool of it on the other side of the ship. We suspect it changed shapes again there, from the dog to a human." Kasper turned his attention to the girl. She was a beautiful woman, I had noted earlier, with blonde hair set in a high fashioned updo. Kasper's glance showed appreciation of her slim-lined, longlegged body. "Where did the excess matter come from?" Kasper asked. Carole hesitated. "That is one of the mysteries we haven't yet solved." Slowly Kasper turned back to Rauen. "I'd like the names of all who had near contact with the alien before it disappeared," he said. "Can you get them for me?" "We already have such a list," Rauen answered. "And we have investigated everyone on it, thoroughly." Kasper went through a reflective moment. "About all I have to suggest is that we send what we have to Washington. I'd like to see what the big Honeywell computer makes of it." The meeting ended shortly after. T hat night two more men died -- Both lab men, again with broken necks. The situation was fast becoming critical. The report from the computer arrived early the next morning. Rauen brought it to Kasper while I was visiting him. Kasper read it aloud: "Symbiosis." Kasper toyed with the word. "The dictionary defines it as, 'organisms living together whose union is advantageous to both,' " Rauen said. "Termites and the symbiotic organisms in their intestines would be a good example." Kasper went through another of his moments of deep thought, then asked, apparently irrelevantly, "I understand you were the one who suggested -- after the alien disappeared -- that it be killed on sight?" "I did." Rauen was instantly defensive. A flush of blood in his cheeks matched their color to his red hair. I saw that by now he thoroughly disapproved of Kasper. "You should recognize the potential danger here," he said. "Undoubtedly the creature has some means of reproduction. Probably amoebalike. Such a creature, if it escaped, could spread over the world and, being hostile, could cause any amount of mischief. I decided to take no chances." He paused. "You are aware, I presume, that it has already killed five men?" "It was potentially dangerous, yes," Kasper admitted. "But after you'd taken the necessary precautions to prevent it escaping, shouldn't you then have tried to capture rather than destroy it? It might have killed as a direct result of your order -- because it was menaced, or in its efforts to survive, and not because it was hostile." "If it wasn't hostile, why did it disappear?" Rauen countered. "A strange environment is always fearsome," Kasper said, then smiled self-consciously. "To quote a line I once read somewhere," he added. He too was a big man, but dark, less excitable and more introspective than Rauen. "You are a philosopher also?" Rauen asked with courtesy. asper's smile widened into  mild embarrassment. "From the computer's suggestions," he changed the subject, "I'd guess that our alien is actually a symbiotic organism. But I would add this: It is not a reasoning organism. Its actions are all instinctive. It would experience emotions only as they are reflected by its host. And respond to those emotions as a worm, say, or other lower organism responds to stimuli." "You saw the pictures," Rauen demurred impatiently. "It was a manlike creature, more or less." "That manlike creature might have been only a carrier. Remember the computer's first suggestion? We thought it took the shape of a dog, and later that of a human. More likely it invaded the dog, and later a human. Probably in an instinctive urge to seek a host with highest intelligence." This stopped Rauen, but only momentarily. "If that's true, one of us could be the carrier." "Very probably." "Then your job is merely to find which one of us it is." "I already know." "Who?" This time Rauen could not conceal being startled. "That I'll keep until later," Kasper said. Rauen refused to be badgered into questioning further. "My congratulations." He gave a sardonic half bow and left abruptly. This goading of Rauen was the act of a small man. I rose to leave also. "Charles," Kasper stopped me. I paused and looked at him inquiringly. "This isn't what it seems to be. Take my word for it. And do me a favor. See -- discreetly -- that word of my knowledge gets out. Please." I did as he asked. Even though I had no idea why he wanted it. I nadvertently I was in on the next act of the drama. I was unable to sleep that night and stepped into the corridor for a short walk. Thirty feet ahead of me I saw the cameraman, Leo Scanlon, just about to enter one of the other sleeping rooms. I came wide awake. He was entering Kasper's room! I bounded swiftly forward, reaching Kasper's door in time to see Scanlon, by the light from the hall, bending over Kasper's bed. Even as I shouted a warning there was a scuffling and writhing of bed blankets, and both men crashed to the floor. For a moment I stood trying to make out who was who in the semidarkness. The intertwined figures struggled to their feet, and I could make out Scanlon with his hands clocked about Kasper's throat, slowly bending his head back. I sprang at Scanlon and grabbed him about the shoulders. He swung one arm against my chest and knocked me against the bedroom wall. I felt something snap and knew my own arm had been broken. I would be little more help here. However, through pain-filmed eyes I saw that I had given Kasper a fleeting respite that he was using to good advantage. When Scanlon released the hand on his throat Kasper tucked his chin down against his chest, and in the same twisting movement drove his fist into the pit of Scanlon's stomach. Scanlon dropped like a bull receiving a dagger behind the horns -- and the battle was over. Kasper's trap -- I recognized it as such now -- had worked. r T"hat morning I visited the cell block where they had put Scanlon. I was refused admission by guards armed with flame throwers. Someone had recalled how the alien had been killed in the spaceship, but still not died. They were playing safe now. Kasper emerged from Scanlon's cell block. "How is he?" I asked, turning to match strides with him as he walked. "Quiet. Apathetic almost," Kasper answered. "A strange thing though. He remembers nothing of what happened. He has no idea yet that the symbiote is inside him." "Could he be faking?" "I wondered about that also, but a lie detector indicated otherwise." We met Carole Schoppert. "How is he?" she repeated my earlier question. "As well as can be expected." As they talked I reached into my shirt pocket for a cigarette. The sling on my broken arm made the simple movement awkward, and the package slipped from my grasp. Carole caught it in midair with a sure swift dart of one hand. She seemed to regard the act with no significance, but Kasper, I saw, was looking at her almost wide-eyed. He took her arm. "I would like to speak to you, Miss Schoppert." T hat night Kasper and Carole left the base. They were going to be married, they announced. The suddenness of it caught us by surprise. I had been busy during the day and seen them only once after the morning meeting. I had stopped at the lunch room in the bowling alley for a sandwich and coffee and seen Kasper and Carole there bowling. Carole was smiling and saying something to Kasper in a teasing manner. Her smile always astounded me with the way it transformed her personality. In repose she was a sophisticated, almost elegant lady. When she smiled -- her front teeth were slightly parted -- she was a young, delighted girl. She was a much-alive individual, I reflected, the kind who evidently enjoyed being a woman. A man's woman, my thoughts wandered on, and I wondered abstractedly if I was in love with her. Carole saw me watching them. "I've beaten him every game," she called happily. I strolled over. "My low game was two hundred twenty-six," Carole greeted me. "I've never bowled over two hundred before." Kasper joined her in good-natured badinage, but he seemed less pleased than Carole. I left a short while later. That evening I heard they were to be married. C arole kissed me good-by. A lingering, moist-lipped bussing that raised my blood temperature. I would have been flattered, except that nearly everyone who had come to see them off received much the same. I felt vaguely disquieted. Carole was a warm-blooded woman, but such enthusiasm bordered on bad taste. Which was not like her. The next morning near pandemonium broke out on the base. I met Rauen coming from the laboratories. "Damn him. Damn him," he was muttering. "What's the trouble?" I asked. He motioned brusquely for me to come along. I had to stretch my legs to keep up with him. In his office Rauen put in an impatient call to the State Department. As he talked I learned quickly the reason for my disquiet earlier. My mind seemed divided into two parts as I listened to the conversation; one part taking in what was being said, the other contemplating with an almost aghast disbelief the implications of what I was hearing. "Could be a hundred, or a thousand, people infected by this time," the first portion of my mind was registering disconnected words and phrases as Rauen talked. "Two means of transmission... a bodily takeover, such as Scanlon's... infection by body fluid transmission... a simple handshake... or a kiss." A kiss! The ground beneath my feet seemed to move a bit. Carole had done it to dozens of us. To me. To me! All very probably under Kasper's direction and with his connivance. I had the sick realization that it was already too late to repair the disaster. By now Carole and Kasper, with deliberate malice, had probably infected many others. With a kiss, or a moist handshake. And each victim became a carrier. To check the spread of the contagion would be impossible. Kasper would pass into history -- if mankind still had a future -- as the world's most infamous traitor. "You what?" I was brought back from my grim reflections by the change in Rauen's tone. After a minute he hung up and turned toward me. "They've succeeded in translating some writing they found in the spaceship," he said quietly. "A man is on the way now to give us what they found." The man from the Capitol was tall and stooped, with hornrimmed glasses and a flat-toned voice. "The translation became a simple matter," he said, "once we discovered a paper that I can best describe as a 'Rosetta, stone,' prepared by the alien authorities to aid us. I'll read you a bit from the beginning." H is gaze went to the paper on the desk in front of him: "Greetings. May you receive our heroic envoy with the deep compassion and affection with which we bid him farewell. His journey will encompass many long, long i years. So long that he would not live to complete the journey, except that he will keep his body in semi-catatonic stasis through the use of drugs. Our souls' proud sorrow will accompany him as we envision his long periods of sedation, interrupted only by brief intervals of halfconscious reality, as he performs his duties, each time seeing himself a bit older. Observing his muscles growing flaccid, his tissues losing their elasticity, perhaps even his mind becoming senile. We dan only hope he will retain sufficient mental vitality to manage a safe entry onto your world. Though even that should not matter greatly: His remaining time of life will be short -- and even in death he should be able to complete his momentous mission. We pray for him, I and he will remain forever in our hearts." The Government man looked up. "Here we have a quotation much like, 'Greater love has no man than that he give his life for another.' " , He removed his glasses. "As you have observed, they favor a quite flowery discourse. The next portion covers considerable space. To summarize, it seems they discovered that our world possesses intelligent life, probably through the use of instruments more sophisticated than our own, but we were too far away for them to communicate." He returned his glasses to reading position. "Here are the last few paragraphs," he said. " Many eorns ago another benevolent race, on another world, learned of our existence. To us they sent the Messos." He paused again. "The Messos is the organism we think of as a symbiote," he explained. He continued: "It cured our illnesses and ' aberrations , mental and physical, and thus initiated the splendor of our present culture. In gratitude we resolved to do as much for any intelligent races we might discover. "And so, from us to you, the gift. " The Messos!" The Government man's cough as he finished reading was the only sound in the room for several minutes. From the side of my eye I caught the motion of the man next to me flexing one hand slowly, as he searched tentatively, wonderingly, for the gift within him. Information on the moon-and-space program and its scientific byproducts -- and an adventure into speculation... This book Is a "must" for anyone associated with, or Interested in, the space program. Written by Nell P. Ruzlc, editor and publisher of Industrial Research magazine, the book presents a lucid case for the exploration and exploitation of our natural satellite. It considers such areas as: research In the lunar vacuum; manufacturing operations on the moon; mining the surface of the moon; observing and probing the universe from the moon; using the moon as a base In the search for life beyond earth; and stimulating the economy through technological transfer. (Detach and mail) Send copies of 'The Case for Going to the Moon" at # for a single copy or # for two or more copies.   Check enclosed. Q Bill me. name address city state zip code rief Essay: It's been two and a half years since I began expatiating on books in terms of money. The idea has been to serve primarily not as a critic, or even a reviewer, but as an investment counsellor. It would be hard to recommend investments in stories -- especially in bad but nevertheless rewarding ones -- without assuming some of the language of the critic. It would be impossible to do it without occasionally sounding like a reviewer. Consequently, I've been mistaken for both of the latter many times, and very rarely recognized as the former. Okay. Mutatis mutandis, like they say, which means if you can't lick 'em, that's your clue you'll join 'em. Over the next few columns, you will see some changes made. Zip your pockets, unstick your holster flaps, and let's go ravaging. Poul Anderson's Ensign Flandry, Chilton (#), is a peculiar book, full of good things, but a little shallow, and annoying if one wants it to be about the young Dominic Flandry. I think Anderson is now finding out what it feels like to be a C. S. Forester. Horatio Hornblower, you may recall, actually began as the captain of H.M.S. frigate Lydia, but the press of popularity produced such subsequent works as Lieutenant Hornblower, Midshipman Hornblower, and, for all God knows, an aborted draft of Baby Hornblower and the Puddle Pirates. Ensign Dominic Flandry is here made a great deal like Midshipman Hernblower, which is bad to begin with. Hornblower was obviously a callow and tormented little boy until very late in life. Dominic Flandry could have sprung from no union less than that of Diana the Huntress and David Niven, with all the early personality advantages one would derive from such a fortune. Which is to say that this young Dominic Flandry, who fights the Seatrolls and the Merseians on behalf of the Terran Empire and the Tigeries of Starkad, must be some other Dominic Flandry, not the one whose adventures as a man full-grown were detailed in the two # books, Agent oi the Terran Empire and Flandry oi Terra. Once we accept that orientation, this is an enjoyable book; a, to coin a phrase, rattling good yarn of interstellar intrique, science, adventure, sex and compassion for the human condition -- and for the non-human creatures who share that condition. The plot does not require summarizing here, and would suffer from it; among the things that I particularly enjoyed in this book were all descriptions and narrative events having to do with the Tigeries; the description of life among the Seatrolls -- to the point where I felt these were sadly skimpy -- and the minor but important character of Dwyr the Hook. Among the things that shook me was Flandry's remark to Persis d'lo upon the occasion of their first liaison. It is the only trace in the entire volume of what the real young Dominic Flandry might have said, and later looked back on with rue. Earthblood, the recent If serial by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown (Doubleday, #) is a most amazing book. First of all, it's a rather unlikely collaboration, until you stop to think of the precedent set by E. E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garbey. Second, it reads more like a combined effort of Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard than anything else that ever walked the bookstores in the quiet hours of the night. Consider the plot: A human embryo of mysterious origin is purchased by two outcast halfcastes on a pauper world in the days well after the defeat of the Terran interstellar empire. Earth is a legend and space swarms with mutants and crossbreeds, the raggle-taggle of a hundred races loosely divided into Gooks -- peoples with some scabrous claim tohuman blood -- and Geeks, those with none. The em bryo grows into Roan Cornay, the only pure-strain Terrie ever seen by any of the beings with which he comes in contact; a figure of such exotic freakishness that it's only a matter of time until he finds a place for himself in an interstellar zoocarnival. Ever in search of his heritage and the legend of lost Terran grandeur, he loves, befriends and loses scores of fascinating beings until finally he penetrates through space to old Earth, and there, as a result of his singleminded strength and the dream he arouses in the hearts of men, sets Earth back on the paths of glory. So far, we have Heinlein. Consider now, the cast of characters: Stellaraire, the crossbred carnival dancer; sterile, beautiful, commercial. She, captivated by the resourceful, deadly, handsome, red-haired Roan, casts her lot with him, tends his wounds, teaches him what love is, is rescued by him from the foul clutches of slimy non-humans, and ultimately dies when the zoo ship is bombarded by the cutthroat Captain Henry Dread. Consider Henry Dread, human spaceship commander, ostensible pirate and freebooter, actually Commander Dread of the Imperial Terran Navy. Dread's mission is to forage and finance, and to recruit Terries wherever he can find them; this against the day when the I. T. N. can once more rise, and, coalescing from the scattered detachments left abandoned on the galactic rim five thousand years earlier, return to Sol. There it will break the Niss blockade which for fifty centuries has held Earth captive and thus created the universal stalemate. Consider the stalemate, in which the other races and the remains of Man among the stars have found no common purpose and no peace. Instead, they brawl and struggle back and forth against each other, treating the entire galaxy approximately the same way that the natives of Marrakesch treat Marrakesch. Consider Iron Robert, the silicoid being whom Roan and Stellaraire nurse from his gladiatorial combat with the fearsome chinazell, when the carnival owner and even Iron Robert himself lie in the dust and die. Consider Iron Robert's undying gratitude, and the manner in which ultimately he gives his life so that Roan may live, and escape Henry Dread's exploding spacecraft, after Roan has shot Commander Dread -- who not too long ago had sworn in Roan as Lieutenant Cornay of the I. T. N. And on, and on. Consider the faithful Askor and Sidis, the Gooks who follow Roan through all the incredible adventures along the long trail back to Earth and the degenerate aristocracy of Earth. Consider how they weep for each other when they are hurt. Consider the devotion of Sidis, who lops off his own left hand for Roan's sake. If that isn't Hubbard, who is it? Laumer? Rosie Brown? Here is, friends, an Epic of the Spaceways if you ever saw one; a story to make one dream of Planet Stories. I used to think pastiche was something that occurred when a librarian sneezed. But, boys, this is the real stuff -- the good old stuff -- and I marvel, and I'm grateful, that someone has found the recipe for it again. Go get 'em, gang! Encore! More gore! Less and less do I pick up each new Avram Davidson book with the hope that it will be even better than his Masters of The Maze. His latest, The Enemy of My Enemy, (Berkley) , begins well; in that beginning, it sounds like yet another excellent example of adventure writing. Jerred Northi, thief of Pemath Old Port, is a grade A swinger, a Francois Villon. So what happens? So he gets a new body, and goes to live among the upper classes, where he becomes Hamlet. Not Bill Shakespeare, roisterer of the Mermaid, master craftsman qualified to look the whole world in the eye and well aware of it, but Hamlet. And when Ophelia dies offstage, he goes "Aw, shucks -- well, I should have known nothing good would come of it, sigh." Hooey. During the last half of this book, which begins to read like first draft very soon after the ten thousand words that brought in the contract, Davidson is not only letting many crucial events occur offstage, he is also jumping completely over obligatory scenes which he apparently found too boring to write. Ultimately, he even stops weaving words and background matter with his normally insuperable skill. Empty work by such as Davidson is at least as grindingly dull as work by empty people, and it grieves the heart sore. I don't like reaching that kind of conclusion. Even less do I like writing it down. But there are some writers whose bad books you will read all the way through, because their names are associated with so much admiration and remembered pleasure. Then when you talk about the experience, a certain kind of outrage at the fickle nature of the muse conditions your choice of words. Clifford Simak, for another instance; re. Why Call Them Back From Heaven?, (Doubleday,  # . # ). Clifford Simak's stories like as not brought tears to my eyes in the days when I was a reader of sf -- and cried from love rather than envy. After I began doing it for money, they often made me consider that I would never learn half of what this man knows about the short story. Now it's apparently time to realize that, except for the case of Time and Again, (which as Time Quarry did more to give this magazine a roaring start than some of the short stories that ran concurrent with its installments), Simak's strengths as a short story writer often expose weaknesses in what he does as a novelist. It's only in a few scenes that this book lives. The plot -- a simpleminded chase -- occurs in a poorly-realized extrapolation of a world in which the object of tally injured people lying stored in frozen sleep. Despite this promising background, Simak has done nothing real; the corporation which has taken over the world, and is hunting the hero, uses it for an excuse. It acts like an overgrown advertising or insurance agency, like a monstrous overgrowth of the legal profession, or like any of the other corporate villains of any of a score of sf novels. A man on the inside of the power structure gets kicked out and hunted, for reasons he does not quite grasp, and despite his general belief in the mouth-noises the corporation makes to the world. Only when his fugitive is in contact with the world most real to his writer -- the Wisconsin Minnesota countryside -- is Simak writing anything. And he's not writing anything he hasn't written before. The rest of the time, while he's consciously at work on his novel, he's promulgating hooey, and not as well as some others can do by instinct. Yes, Virginia, there is a double standard. When an established working sf writer produces a book, I do read it differently from the way I read something that's been brought in from "outside" -- that is, originates from a byline I don't recognize either as a previous contributor to the sf magazines or as a former active fan. The reason I'm this way is because I think most readers of these pages are the same. (The real reason I'm this way is because I don't believe any outsider knows what to do with science fiction; most of them use it the way slobs eat spaghetti, cutting it into bite-size pieces). The Scorpions by Robert Kelly, (Doubleday, #), probably doesn't belong on Doubleday's science-fiction list at all, which is not to say it doesn't belong in this review column, because it is science fiction. But it would have done much better on a major publisher's general list, where it would have been properly received as a specimen of the anti-novel of manners. The science-fiction premise is kind of cute; a neurotic society woman partially convinces her manneristic society psychiatrist that there really is a race of ultraviolet people. This assertion is backed up by a few bits of physical evidence: Mostly, a series of cryptically worded cards sent to the psychiatrist by something called the Order, culminating in a cryptic invitation to the Order's convention -- make that, perhaps, confabulation -- in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The world in which this very nearly unnamed psychiatrist lives is the superstitious modern world of the mobile rich. Kelly's portrait of what goes on in these minds -- the quirky belief in asj trology as a mystique, the immense storehouse of thumb-rule ways to behave, so fully packed as to make the smooth flow of performance seem almost instinctive -- these, together with the speech and action patterns of this sort of person, are beautifully pictured. If we consider that he is contributing to the general body of science fiction, then the most important thing Kelly is contributing is genuine goods in an area where we poor middle-class yahoos normally fail. Most sciencefiction writers describe the very rich and those who service them exactly as if they'd been studying Lord Plushbottom in the Chicago Tribune. This previous deficiency in the field is understandable. The very rich -- the born very rich -- know how to make themselves inaccessible, and how to act upon the world along their own channels. Furthermore, because they know this is the way tire world really works, it's very easy for them, (and even more easy for those who in servicing them have grown nouveau riche, and nouveau engage), to suspect intelligent purpose from very skimpy patterns of clues indeed. This atmosphere -- this atmosphere of intrigue, excitement and resource-testing in an atmosphere of infinite resource -- is the greatest charm of this book. Kelly, a career intellectual publishing his first novel, has done an immensely skillful job of superimposing the possible intrigues and potential menaces of the "Scorpion people" on this real and rather rare background. Because his protagonist sees patterns where you and I would see ' nearly nothing, and acts purposefully where you and I would still be wondering what the hell was coming off -- if anything at all were coming off -- we are carried along very nicely, and subtly, while Kelly piles into this wordage a great deal of arcane jazz about astrology, memorized scholarship and all those other articles of virtu. Scattered throughout the book are tags of philosophical expression in a variety of languages, which all bear on the protagonist's problem as he wends his way southward in Kelvin, an automatic Rolls Royce offering all the comforts of a womb that's been to finishing school. This pilgrimage becomes reminiscent of the compulsive wonderings of J. G. Ballard's characters, just as the string of clues whereby the hero is ultimately attracted to his destruction, at the hands of the ur-teenybod, is extremely reminiscent of Father Brown (the jacket copy says Sherlock Holmes, but Kelly is is much smarter than to use that). We never do find out for sure just what it is that the protagonist finally finds as he pursues his journey to its end, at the accelerating cost of his most precious self-protective mannerisms. He is definitely being lured, stripped and at last rebuilt -- perhaps being obliterated. Whether he is being lured by ultraviolet people or the perfectly visible and rational inhabitants of the unknown island, Eos, we don't know. But this book does describe, in cunning detail, how a race of ultrahuman beings could prey with complete effectiveness on the only kind of human being effectively invulnerable to the gross forms of attack. Oversimplifying it, the hero's impregnability rests on the schooling he has given his self. Unfortunately, the closer he gets to the end of the book, the less of his personality he has, and so, seemingly, the less the writer's ability to continue wrapping his reader in the very stuff of the only dream of Heaven and hell that you and I can really believe in. A complete short novel of the Berserkers by Fred Saberhagen Complete in the May Worlds of Tomorrow -- on sale now! won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsli No. CF-# by Emsli No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #: #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, it any. No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The designs shown above are the only ones we offer! four Subscription is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on th is fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better!  Galaxy Publishing Corp.  '#I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. #  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away, I enclose   my check or money order for # # issues for # # # issues for #    Name  Y . Address   City  State Zip Code... U.S, only. Add #c per issue foreign postage  Please check whether  new or  renewal. Baby is Three Theodor Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Meli Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Pool Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenhest # Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet ( The Space Merchants) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station ) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mind swap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension Janies Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey galaxy OCTOBER I # IFfJTANNIVERSARY ISSITr SMITH  ZELAZNY  gold  pohl K galaxy #Q we celebrate with a novelette and anniversary appearances by various i other notables, including (his #th anniversary in science fiction) j (representing his #th anniversary) and a portfolio of fashions of the future from the with text by ( his # th science-fiction anniversary) your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. " #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. #  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose  " my check or money order for:   # issues for # Q # issues for #  Name .  Address 'City  State Zip Code U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage.  w Please check whether Q new or # renewal.  Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Pool Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do  Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants ) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station ) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heiniein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Galaxy Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published In Braille and Living Tape. October, #  Vol. #, No. I by Roger Zelazny by H. L. Gold by George O. Smith Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director by Poul Anderson Commentary by Frederik Pohl by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #o per copy Subscription: (# copies) # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. AM rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat, Off.  s you may have noted by the cover of this issue, we celebrate our thirtieth anniversary in science fiction this month. That first sale wasn't a story; it was a poem (and we would take it as a personal favor if no one ever looked it up); and calling this the thirtieth anniversary is at least approximately true. That is, the thing was published in October, #, all right. But it was written in #... accepted in #... and paid for in #, because that was how things were in the science-fiction field in those days. It seems to us that those days were quite a long time ago. No television to sell us what we don't need. No nuclear weapons to keep us looking over our shoulders. No human beings in space; We used to correspond (with other science-fiction fans, of course) in England, and a one-up thing to do was to time one's letter-writing so as to catch a fast Cunarder or the almost-asfast Normandie; with luck, those thirty-knot liners could get a letter to its recipient across the ocean in five days. (Now we have five hundred and fifty knot aircraft, of course -- and with luck we can get a letter across in four days. One other thing that was very different in those days was that people didn't ask us (as they do now; all the time, they do it) how in the world we were going to keep on writing science fiction, now that science itself had made so much of it come true. Au contraire, as the French say. If the non-sf addicts ever noticed us at all, it was primarily to tell us how crazy we were, to be writing about things which could never ever come true, like the aforementioned TV, atomic weapons, space travel, et al. So how do we keep on writing science fiction? Why, we just write about the things that haven't happened yet. And, as you will see from an examination of this magazine, that gives us plenty of scope, for a long time with D)oubleday Science Fiction Harry Harrison. When you've got a movie studio, a script for a Viking epic, a star with the broadest measurements in Hollywood, and a time machine, what could be simpler than taking the whole crew back a thousand years to shoot the picture against a really authentic background? Well, for one thing, the return trip could be simpler. But it couldn't be funnier. # Keith Laumer and Gordon R. Dickson. At age #, Captain Henry wants to retire. He's opened up so many planets and taken so many rejuvenation treatments that he's earned a rest. But powerful Senator Bartholomew won't let him, not with a newly discovered planet to be staked out. So Henry goes, taking Bartholomew's priggish son with him, thereby setting the space stage for a most bizarre "conflict of generations." # A Come ride along Damnation Alley -- hell's own highway, crossing the U.S.A. from coast to coast! by Illustrated by  T'he gull swooped by, seemed  to hover a moment on unmoving wings. Hell Tanner flipped his cigar butt at it and scored a lucky hit. The bird uttered a hoarse cry and beat suddenly at the air. It climbed about fifty feet, and whether it shrieked a second time, he would never know. It was gone. A single gray feather rocked in the violet sky, drifted out over the edge of the cliff and descended, swinging, toward the ocean. Tanner chuckled through his beard, between the steady roar of the wind and the pounding of the surf. Then he took his feet down from the handlebars, kicked up the stand and gunned his bike to life. He took the slope slowly till he came to the trail, then picked up speed and was doing fifty when he hit the highway. He leaned forward and gunned it. He had the road all to hirnself, and he laid on the gas pedal till there was no place left for it to go. He raised his goggles and looked at the world through crud-colored glasses, which was pretty much the way he looked at it without them, too. All the old irons were gone from his jacket, and he missed the swastika, the hammer and sickle and the upright finger, especially. He missed his old emblem, too. Maybe he could pick one up in Tijuana and have sbme broad sew it on and... No. It wouldn't do. All that was dead and gone. It would be a giveaway, and he wouldn't last a day. What he would do was sell the Harley, work his way down the coast, clean and square and see what he could find in the other America. He coasted down one hill and roared up another. He tore through Laguna Beach, Capistrano Beach, San Clemente and San Onofre. He made it down to Oceanside, where he refueled, and he passed on through Carlsbad and all those dead little beaches that fill the shore space before Solana Beach Del Mar. It was outside San Diego that they were waiting for him. H e saw the roadblock and turned. They were not sure how he had managed it that quickly, at that speed. But now he was heading away from them. He heard the gunshots and kept going. Then he heard the sirens. He blew his horn twice in reply and leaned far forward. The Harley leaped ahead, and he wondered whether they were radioing to someone further on up the line. He ran for ten minutes and couldn't shake them. Then fifteen. He topped another hill, and far ahead he saw the second block. He was bottled in. He looked all around him for side roads, saw none. Then he bore a straight course toward the second block. Might as well try to run it. No good! There were cars lined up across the entire road. They were even off the road on the shoulders. He braked at the last possible minute, and when his speed was right he reared up on the back wheel, spun it and headed back toward his pursuers. There were six of them coming toward him, and at his back new siren calls arose. He braked again, pulled to the left, kicked the gas and leaped out of the seat. The bike kept going, and he hit the ground rolling, got to his feet and started running. He heard the screeching of their tires. He heard a crash. Then there were more gunshots, and he kept going. They were aiming over his head, but he didn't know it. They wanted him alive. After fifteen minutes he was backed against a wall of rock, and they were fanned out in front of him, and several had rifles, and they were all pointed in the wrong direction. He dropped the tire iron he held and raised his hands. "You got it, citizens," he said. "Take it away." And they did. They handcuffed him and took him back to the cars. They pushed him into the rear seat of one, and an officer got in on either side of him. Another got into the front beside the driver, and this one held a sawed-off shotgun across his knees. The driver started the engine and put the car into gear, heading back up #. The man with the shotgun turned and stared through bifocals that made his eyes look like hourglasses filled with green sand as he lowered his head. He stared for perhaps ten seconds, then said, "That was a stupid thing to do." T Tell Tanner stared back until the man said, "Very stupid, Tanner." "Oh, I didn't know you were talking to me." "I'm looking at you, son." "And I'm looking at you. Hello, there." Then the driver said, without taking his eyes off the road, "You know, it's too bad we've got to deliver him in good shape -- after the way he smashed up the other car with that damn bike." "He could still have an accident. Fall and crack a couple ribs, say," said the man to Tanner's left. The man to the right didn't say anything, but the man with the shotgun shook his head slowly. "Not unless he tries to escape," he said. "L.A. wants him in good shape. "Why'd you try to skip out, buddy? You might have known we'd pick you up." Tanner shrugged. "Why'd you pick me up? I didn't do anything?" The driver chuckled. "That's why," he said. "You didn't do anything, and there's something you were supposed to do. Remember?" "I don't owe anybody anything. They gave me a pardon and let me go." "You got a lousy memory, kid. You made the nation of California a promise when they turned you loose yesterday. Now you've had more than the twenyfour hours you asked for to settle your affairs. You can tell them 'no' if you want and get your pardon revoked. Nobody's forcing you. Then you can spend the rest of your life making little rocks out of big ones. We couldn't care less. I heard they got somebody else lined up already." "Give me a cigarette," Tanner said. The man on his right lit one and passed it to him. He raised both hands, accepted it. As he smoked, he flicked the ashes onto the floor. They sped along the highway, and when they went through towns or encountered traffic the driver would hit the siren and overhead the red light would begin winking. When this occurred, the sirens of the two other patrol cars that followed behind them would also wail. The driver never touched the brake, all the way up to L.A., and he kept radioing ahead every few minutes. There came a sound like a sonic boom, and a cloud of dust and gravel descended upon them like hail. A tiny crack appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the bullet-proof windshield, and stones the size of marbles bounced on the hood and the roof. The tires made a crunching noise as they passed over the gravel that now lay scattered upon the road surface. The dust hung like a heavy fog, but ten seconds later they had passed out of it. The men in the car leaned forward and stared upward. rip he sky had become purple, ! and black lines crossed it, moving from west to east. These swelled, narrowed, moved from side to side, sometimes merged. The driver had turned on his lights by then. "Could be a bad one coming," said the man with the shotgun. The driver nodded, and, "Looks worse further north, too," he said. A wailing began, high in the air above them, and the dark bands continued to widen. The sound increased in volume, lost its treble quality, became a steady roar. The bands consolidated, and the sky grew dark as a starless, moonless night and the dust fell about them in heavy clouds. Oc:asionally, there sounded a ping as a heavier fragment struck against the car. The driver switched on his country lights, hit the siren again and sped ahead. The roaring and the sound of the siren fought with one another above them, and far to the north a blue aurora began to spread, pulsing. Tanner finished his cigarette, and the man gave him another. They were all smoking by then. "You know, you're lucky we picked you up, boy," said the man to his left. "How'd you like to be pushing your bike through that stuff?" "I'd like it," Tanner said. "You're nuts." "No. I'd make it. It wouldn't be the first time." By the time they reached Los Angeles, the blue aurora filled half the sky, and it was tinged with pink and shot through with smoky, yellow streaks that reached like spider legs into the south. The roar was a deafening, physical thing that beat upon their eardrums and caused their skin to tingle. As they left the car and crossed the parking lot, heading toward the big, pillared building with the frieze across its forehead, they had to shout at one another in order to be heard. "Lucky we got here when we did!" said the man with the shotgun. "Step it up!" Their pace increased as they moved toward the stairway, and, "It could break any minute now!" screamed the driver. II As they had pulled into the lot, the building had had the appearance of a piece of icesculpture, with the shifting lights in the sky playing upon its surfaces and casting cold shadows. Now, though, it seemed as If it were a thing out of wax, ready to melt in an instant's flash of heat. Their faces and the flesh of their hands took on a bloodless, corpse-like appearance. They hurried up the stairs, and a State Patrolman let them in through the small door to the right of the heavy metal double doors that were the main entrance to the building. He locked and chained the door behind them, after snapping open his holster when he saw Tanner. "Which way?" asked the man with the shotgun. "Second floor," said the trooper, nodding toward a stairway to their right. "Go straight back when you get to the top. It's the big office at the end of the hall." "Thanks." The roaring was considerably muffled, and objects achieved an appearance of natural existence once more in the artificial light of the building. They climbed the curving stairway and moved along the corridor that led back into the building. When they reached the final office, the man with the shotgun nodded to his driver. "Knock," he said. A woman opened the door, started to say something, then stopped and nodded when she saw Tanner. She stepped aside and held the door. "This way," she said, and they moved past her into the office, and she pressed a button on her desk and told the voice that said, "Yes, Mrs. Fiske?" : "They're here, with that man, sir." "Send them in." She led the to the dark, paneled door in the back of the room and opened it before them. They entered, and the husky man behind the glass-topped desk leaned backward in his chair and wove his short fingers together in front of his chins and peered over them through eyes just a Shade darker than the gray of his hair. His voice was soft and rasped just slightly. "Have a seat." he said to Tanner, and to the others, "Wait outside." "You know this guy's dangerous, Mister Denton," said the man with the shotgun as Tanner seated himself in a chair situated five feet in front of the desk. Steel shutters covered the room's three windows, and though the men could not see outside they could guess at the possible furies that stalked there as a sound like machine-gun fire suddenly rang through the room. "I know." "Well, he's handcuffed, anyway. Do you want a gun?" "I've got one." "Okay, then. We'll be outside." They left the room. r T"he two men stared at one an# other until the door closed, then the man called Denton said, "Are all your affairs settled now?" and the other shrugged. Then, "What the hell is your first name, really? Even the records show -- " "Hell," said Tanner. "That's my name. I was the seventh kid in our family, and when I was born the nurse held me up and said to my old man, 'What name do you want on the birth certificate?' and I Dad said, 'Hell!' and walked away. So she put it down like that. That's what my brother told me. I never saw my old man to ask if that's how it was. He copped out the same day. Sounds right, though." "So your mother raised all seven of you?" "No. She croaked a couple weeks later, and different relatives took us kids." "I see," said Denton, "You've still got a choice, you know. Do you want to try it or don't you?" "What's your job, anyway?" asked Tanner. "I'm the Secretary of Traffic for the nation of California." "What's that got to do with it?" "I'm coordinating this thing. It could as easily have 'been the Surgeon General or the Postmaster General, but more of it really falls into my area of responsibility. I know the hardware best. I know the odds -- " "What are the odds?" asked Tanner. For the first time, Denton dropped his eyes. "Well, it's risky "Nobody's ever done it before, except for that nut who ran it to bring the news, and he's dead. How can you get odds out of that?" "I know," said Denton slowly. "You're thinking it's a suicide job, and you're probably right. We're sending three cars, with two drivers in each. If any one just makes it close enough, its broadcast signals may serve to guide in a Boston driver. You don't have to go though, you know." "I know. I'm free to spend the rest of my life in prison." "You killed three people. You could have gotten the death penalty." "I didn't, so why talk about it? Look, mister, I don't want to die and I don't want the other bit either." "Drive or don't drive. Take your choice. But remember, if you drive and you make it, all will be forgiven and you can go your own way. The nation of California will even pay for that motorcycle you appropriated and smashed up, not to mention the damage to that police car." "Thanks a lot," and the winds boomed on the other side of the wall, and the steady staccato from the window shields filled the room. CiXTou're a very good driver,"  said Denton, after a time. "You've driven just about every vehicle there is to drive. You've even raced. Back when you were smuggling, you used to make a monthly run to Salt Lake City. There are very few drivers who'll try that, even today." Hell Tanner smiled, remembering something. "... And in the only legitimate job you ever held, you were the only man who'd make the mail run to Albuquerque. There've only been a few others since you were fired." "That wasn't my fault." "You were the best man on the Seattle run, too," Denton continued. "Your supervisor said so...What I'm trying to say is that, f anybody we could pick, you've probably got the best chance of getting through. That's why we've been indulgent with you, tout we can't afford to wait any longer. It's yes or no right now, and you'll leave within the hour if it's yes." Tanner raised his cuffed hands and gestured toward the window. "In all this crap?" he asked. "The cars can take this storm," said Denton. "Man, you're crazy." "People are dying even while we're talking," said Denton. 'l So a few more ain't about to mske that much difference. Can't we wait till tomorrow?" "No! A man gave his life to bring us the news! And we've got to get across the continent as fast as possible now or it won't matter! Storm or no storm, the cars leave now! Your feelings on the matter don't mean a good goddamn in the face of this! All I want out of you, Hell, is one word: Which one will it be?" "I'd like something to eat. I haven't "There's food in the car. What's your answer?" Hell stared at the dark window. "Okay," he said, "I'll run Damnation Alley for you. I won't leave without a piece of paper with some writing on it, though." "I've got it here." Denton opened a drawer and withdrew a heavy cardboard envelope from which he extracted a piece of stationery bearing the Great Seal of the nation of California. He stood and rounded fee desk and handed it to Hell Tanner. Hell studied it for several minutes, then said, "This says that if I make it to Boston I receive a full pardon for every criminal action I've ever committed wifein the nation of California... "That's right." "Does that include ones you might not know about now, if someone should come up with them later?" "That's what it says, Hell -- 'every criminal action.' " "Okay, you're on, fat boy. Get these bracelets off me and show me my car." r T' , he man called Denton moved ' back to his seat on the other side of his desk. "Let me tell you something else, Hell," he said. "If you try to cop out anywhere along fee route, the other drivers have their orders, and they've agreed to follow them. They will open fire on you and burn you into little bitty ashes. Get the picture?" "I get the picture," said Hell. "I take it I'm supposed to da them the same favor?" "That is correct." "Good enough. That might be fun." "I thought you'd like it." "Now, if you'll unhook me, I'll make the scene for you." "Not till I've told you what I think of you," Denton said. "Okay, if you want to waste tame calling me names, while people are dying -- " "Shut up! You don't care about them and you know it! I just want to tell you that I think you are the lowest, most reprehensible human being I have ever encountered. You have killed men and raped women. You once gouged out a man's eyes, just for fun. You've been indicted twice for pushing dope and three times as a pimp. You're a drunk and a degenerate, and I don't think you've had a bath since the day you were born. You and your hoodlums terrorized decent people when they were trying to pull their lives together after the war. You stole from them and you asaulted them, and you extorted money and the necessaries of life with the threat of physical violence. I wish you had died in the Big Raid, that night, like all the rest of them. You are not a human being, except from a biological standpoint. You have a big dead spot somewhere inside you where other people have something that lets them live together in society and be neighbors. The only virtue that you possess -- if you want to call it thatr is that your reflexes may be a little faster, your muscles a little stronger, your eye a bit more wary than the rest of us, so that you can sit behind a wheel and drive through anything that has a way through it. It is for this that the nation of Caliinhumanity if you will use that one virtue to help rather than hurt. I don't approve. I don't want to depend on you, because you're not the type. I'd like to see you die in this thing, and while I hope that somebody makes it through, I hope that it will be somebody else. I hate your bloody guts. You've got your pardon now. The car's ready. Let's go." Denton stood, at a height of about five feet eight inches, and Tanner stood and looked down at him and chuckled. "I'll make it," he said. "If that citizen from Boston made it through and died, I'll make it through and live. I've been as far as the Missus Hip." "You're lying." "No, I ain't either, and if you ever find out that's straight, remember I got this piece of paper in my pocket -- 'every criminal action' and like that. It wasn't easy, and I was lucky, too. But I made it that far and, nobody else you know can say that. So I figure that's about halfway, and I can make the other half if I can get that far." They moved toward the door. "I don't like to say it and mean it," said Denton, "but good luck. Not for your sake, though." "Yeah, I know." Denton opened the door, and, "Turn him loose," he said. "He's driving." The officer with the shotgun handed I it to the man who had given Tanner the cigarettes, and he fished in his pockets for the key. When he found it, he unlocked the cuffs, stepped back, and hung them at his belt; and, "I'll come with you," said Denton. "The motor pool is downstairs." They left the office, and Mrs. Fiske opened her purse and took a rosary into her hands and bowed her head. She prayed for Boston and she prayed for the soul of its departed messenger. She even threw in a couple for Hell Tanner. Ill Tphey descended to the basement, the sub-basement and the sub-sub-basement. When they got there, Tanner saw three cars, ready to go; and he saw five men seated on benches along the wall. One of them he recognized. "Denny," he said, "come here," and he moved forward, and a slim, blond youth who held a crash helmet in his right hand stood and walked toward him. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked him. "I'm second driver in car three." "You've got your own garage and you've kept your nose clean. What's the thought on this?" "Denton offered me fifty grand," said Denny, and Hell turned away his face. "Forget it! It's no good if you're dead!" "I need the money." "Why?" "I want to get married and I can use it." "I thought you were making out okay." "I am, but I'd like to buy a house." "Does your girl know what you've got in mind?" "No." "I didn't think so. Listen, I've got to do it -- it's the only way out for me. You don't have to -- " "That's for me to say." " -- so I'm going to tell you something: You drive out to Pasadena to that place where we used to play when we were kids -- with the rocks and the three big trees -- you know where I mean?" "Yeah, I sure do remember." "Go back of the big tree in the middle, on the side where I carved my initials. Step off seven steps and dig down around four feet. Got that?" "Yeah. What's there?" "That's my legacy, Denny. You'll find one of those old strong boxes, probably all rusted out by now. Bust it open. It'll be full of excelsior, and there'll be a sixinch joint of pipe inside. It's threaded, and there's caps on both ends. There's a little over five grand rolled up inside it, and all the bills are clean." "Why you telling me this?" "Because it's yours now," he said, and hit him in the jaw. When Denny fell, he kicked him in the ribs, three times, before the cops grabbed him and dragged him away. U#'ou fool!" said Denton as they held him. "You crazy, damned fool!" "Uh-uh," said Tanner. "No brother of mine is going to run Damnation Alley while I'm around to stomp him and keep him out of the game. Better find another driver quick, because he's got cracked ribs. Or else let me drive alone." "Then you'll drive alone," said Denton, "because we can't afford to wait around any longer. There's pills in the compartment, to keep you awake, and you'd better use them, because if you fall back they'll bum you up. Remember that." "I won't forget you, mister, if I'm ever back in town. Don't fret about that." "Then you'd better get into car number two and start heading up the ramp. The vehicles are all loaded. The cargo compartment is under the rear seat." "Yeah, I know." "... And if I ever see you again, it'll be too soon. Get out of my sight, scum!" Tanner spat on the floor and turned his back on the Secretary of Traffic. Several cops were giving first aid to his brother, and one had dashed off in search of a doctor. Denton made two teams of the remaining four drivers and assigned them to cars one and three. Tanner climbed into the cab of his own, started the engine and waited. He stared up the ramp and considered what lay ahead. He searched the compartments until he found cigarettes. He lit one and leaned back. The other drivers moved forward and mounted their own heavily shielded vehicles. The radio crackled, crackled, hummed, crackled again, and then a voice came through as he heard the other engines come to life. "Car one -- ready!" came the voice. There was a pause, then, "Car three -- ready!" said a different voice. Tanner lifted the microphone and mashed the button on its side. "Car two ready," he said. "Move out," came the order, and they headed up the ramp. The door rolled upward before them, and they entered the storm. IV I t was nightmare, getting out of L.A. and onto Route #. The waters came down in sheets and rocks the size of baseballs banged against the armor plating of his car. Tanner smoked and turned on the special lights. He wore infrared goggles, and the night and the storm stalked him. The radio crackled, many times, and it seemed that he heard the murmur of a distant voice, but he could never quite make out what it was trying to say. They followed the road for as far as it went, and as their big tires sighed over the rugged terrain that began where the road ended, Tanner took the lead and the others were content to follow. He knew the way; they didn't. He followed the old smugglers' route he'd used to run candy to the Mormons. It was possible that he was the only one left alive that knew it. Possible, but then there was always someone looking for a fast buck. So, in all of L.A., there might be somebody else. The lightning began to fall, not in bolts, but sheets. The car was insulated, but after a time his hair stood on end. He might have seen a giant Gila Monster once, but he couldn't be sure. He kept his fingers away from the fire-control board. He'd save his teeth till menaces were imminent. From the rearview scanners it seemed that one of the cars behind him had discharged a rocket, but he couldn't be sure, since he had lost all radio contact with them immediately upon leaving the building. Waters rushed toward him, splashed about his car. The sky sounded like an artillery range. A boulder the size of a tombstone fell in front of him, and he swerved about it. Red lights flashed across the sky from north to south. In their passing, he detected many black bands going from west to east. It was not an encouraging spectacle. The storm could go on for days. He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way. They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained. Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a 'bright blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon. 'Tphey had ridden it out. He killed the infras, pushed back his goggles and switched on the normal night lamps. The desert would be bad enough, all by itself. Something big and bat-like swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers and it fell to the ground and did not return again. To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot. He'd been this way thirty-two times, and so far as he was concerned the Alley started in the place that was once called Colorado. He led, and they followed, and the night wore on like an abrasive. No airplane could make it. Not since the war. None could venture above a couple hundred feet, the place where the winds began. The winds. The mighty winds that circled the globe, tearing off the tops of mountains, Sequoia trees, wrecked buildings, gathering up birds, bats, insects and anything else that moved, up into the dead belt; the winds that swirled about the world, lacing the skies with dark lines of debris, occasionally meeting, merging, clashing, dropping tons of carnage wherever they came together and formed too great a mass. Air transportation was definitely out, to anywhere in the world. For these winds circled, and they never ceased. Not in all the twenty-five years of Tanner's memory had they let up. Tanner pushed ahead, cutting a diagonal by the green sunset. Dust continued to fall about him, great clouds of it, and the sky was violet, then purple once more. Then the sun went down and the night came on, and the stars were very faint points of light somewhere above it all. After a time, the moon rose, and the half-face that it showed that night was the color of a glass of chianti wine held before a candle. He lit another cigarette and began to curse, slowly, softly and without emotion. f  ,; hey threaded their way amid I heaps of rubble: rock, metal, fragments of machinery, the prow of a boat. A snake, as big around as a garbage can and dark green in the cast light, slithered across Tanner's path, and he braked the vehicle as it continued and continued and continued. Perhaps a hundred and twenty feet of snake passed by before Tanner removed his foot from the brake and touched gently upon the gas pedal once again. Glancing at the left-hand screen, which held an infrared version of the view to the left, it seemed that he saw two eyes glowing within the shadow of a heap of girders and masonry. Tanner kept one hand near the fire-control button and did not move it for a distance of several miles. There were no windows in the vehicle, only screens Which reflected views in every direction including straight up and the ground beneath the car. Tanner sat within an illuminated box which shielded him against radiation. The "car" that he drove had eight heavily treaded tires and was thirty-two feet in length. It mounted eight fifty-caliber automatic guns and four grenade throwers. It carried thirty armorpiercing rockets which could be discharged straight ahead or at any elevation up to forty degrees from the plane. Each of the four sides, as well as the roof of the vehicle, housed a flame thrower. Razor-sharp "wings" of tempered steel -- eighteen inches wide at their bases and tapering to points, an inch and a quarter thick where they ridged -- could be moved through a complete hundred-eighty-degree arc along the sides of the car and parallel to the ground, at a height of two feet and eight inches. When standing at a right angle to the body of the vehicle -- eight feet to the rear of the front bumper -- they extended out to a distance of six feet on either side of the car. They could be couched like lances for a charge. They could be held but slightly out from the sides for purposes of slashing whatever was sideswiped. The car was bullet-proof, airconditioned and had its own food locker and sanitation facilities. A long-barreled .# Magnum was held by a clip on the door near the driver's left hand. A #, a .# caliber automatic and six hand grenades occupied the rack immediately above the front seat. But Tanner kept his own counsel, in the form of a long, slim SS dagger inside his right boot. IT e removed his gloves and  wiped his palms on the knees of his denims. The pierced heart that was tattooed on the back of his right hand was red in the light from the dashboard. The knife that went through it was dark blue, and his first name was tattooed in the same color beneath it, one letter on each knuckle, beginning with that at the base of his little finger. He opened and explored the two near compartments but ,tould find no cigars. So he crushed out his cigarette butt on the floor and lit another. The forward screen showed vegetation, and he slowed. He tried using the radio but couldn't tell whether anyone heard him, receiving only static in reply. He slowed, staring ahead and up. He halted once again. He turned his forward lights up to full intensity and studied the situation. A heavy wall of thorn bushes stood before him, reaching to a height of perhaps twelve feet. It swept on to his right and off to his left, vanishing out of sight in both directions. How dense, how deep a pit might be, he could not tell. It had not been there a few years before. He moved forward slowly and activated the flame throwers. In the rearview screen, he could see that the other vehicles had halted a hundred yards behind him and dimmed their lights. He drove till he could go no further, then pressed the button for the forward flame. It shot forth, a tongue of fire, licking fifty feet into the bramble. He held it for five seconds and withdrew it. Then he extended it a second time and backed away quickly as the flames caught. Beginning with a tiny glow, they worked their way upward and spread slowly to the right and the left. Then they grew in size and brightness. As Tanner backed away, he had to dim his screen, for they'd spread fifty feet before he'd backed more than a hundred, and they leapt thirty and forty feet into the air. The blaze widened, to a hundred feet, two, three... As Tanner backed away, he could see a river of fire flowing off into the distance, and the night was bright about him. He watched it burn, until it seemed that he looked upon a molten sea. Then he searched the refrigerator, but there was no beer. He opened a soft drink and sipped it while he watched the burning. After about ten minutes, the air conditioner whined and shook itself to life. Hordes of dark, four-footed creatures, the size of rats or cats, fled from the inferno, their coats smouldering. They flowed by. At one point, they covered his forward screen, and he could hear the scratching of their claws upon the fenders and the roof. He switched off the lights and killed the engine, tossed the empty can into the waste box. He pushed the "Recline" button on the side of the seat, leaned back, and closed his eyes. V T T e was awakened by the blowing of horns. It was still night, and the panel clock showed him that he had slept for a little over three hours. He stretched, sat up, adjusted the seat. The other cars had moved up, and one stood to either side of him. He leaned on his own horn twice and started his engine. He switched on the forward lights and considered the prospect before him as he drew on his gloves. Smoke still rose from the blackened field, and far off to his right there was a glow, as if the fire still continued somewhere in the distance. They were in the place that had once been known as Nevada. He rubbed his eyes and scratched his nose, then blew the horn once and engaged the gears. He moved forward slowly. The bumt-out area seemed fairly level and his tires were thick. He entered the black field, and his screens were immediately obscured by the rush of ashes and smoke which arose on all sides. He continued, hearing the tires crunching through the brittle remains. He set his screens at maximum and switched his headlamps up to full brightness. The vehicles that flanked him dropped back perhaps eighty feet, and he dimmed the screens that reflected the glare of their lights. He released a flare, and as it hung there, burning, cold, white and high, he saw a charred plain that swept on to the edges of his eyes' horizon. He pushed down on the accelerator, and the cars behind him swung far out to the sides to avoid the clouds that he raised. His radio crackled, and he heard a faint voice but could not make out its words. He blew his horn and rolled ahead even faster. The other vehicles kept pace. He drove for an hour and a half before he saw the end of the ash and the beginning of clean sand up ahead. Within five minutes, he was moving across desert once more, and he checked his compass and bore slightly to the west. Cars one and three followed, speeding up to match his new pace, and he drove with one hand and ate a corned beef sandwich. TT#lien morning came, many  ' hours later, he took a pill to keep himself alert and listened to the screaming of the wind. The sun rose up like molten silver to his right, and a third of the sky grew amber and was laced with fine lines like cobwebs. The desert was topaz beneath it, and the brown curtain of dust that hung continuously at his back, pierced only by the eight shafts of the other cars' lights, took on a pinkish tone as the sun grew a bright red corona and the shadows fled into the west. He dimmed his lights as lie passed an orange cactus shaped like a toadstool and perhaps fifty feet in diameter. Giant bats fled south, and far ahead he saw a wide waterfall descending from the heavens. It was gone by the time he reached the damp sand of that place, but a dead shark lay to his left, and there was seaweed, seaweed, seaweed, fishes, driftwood all about. The sky pinked over from east to west and remained that color. He gulped a bottle of ice water and felt it go into his stomach. He passed more cacti, and a pair of coyotes sat at the base of one and watched him drive by. They seemed to be laughing. Their tongues were very red. As the sun brightened, hS dimmed the screen. He smoked, and he found a button that produced music. He swore at the soft, stringy sounds that filled the cabin, but he didn't turn them off. He checked the radiation level outside, and it was only a little above normal. The last time he had passed this way, it had been considerably higher. He passed several wrecked vehicles such as his own. He ran across another plain of silicon, and in the middle was a huge crater Which he skirted. The pinkness in the sky faded and faded and faded, and a bluish tone came to replace it. The dark lines were still there, and occasionally one widened into a black river as it flowed away into the east. At noon, one such river partly eclipsed the sun for a period of eleven minutes. With its departure, there came a brief dust storm, and Tanner turned on the radar and his lights. He knew there was a chasm somewhere ahead, and when he came to it he bore to the left and ran along its edge for close to two miles before it narrowed and vanished. The other vehicles followed, and Tanner took his bearings from the compass once more. The dust had subsided with the brief wind, and even with the screen dimmed Tanner had to don his dark goggles against the glare of reflected sunlight from the faceted field he now negotiated. He passed towering formations Which seemed to be quartz. He had never stopped to investigate them in the past, and he had no desire to do it now. The spectrum danced at their bases, and patches of sudh light occurred for some distance about them. Speeding away from the crater, he came again upon sand, clean, brown, white dun and red. There were more cacti, and huge dunes lay all about him. The sky continued to change, until finally it was as blue as a baby's eyes. Tanner hummed along with the music for a time, and then he saw the Monster. I t was a Gila, bigger than his car, and it moved in fast. It sprang from out the sheltering shade of a valley filled with cacti and it raced toward him, its beaded body bright with many colors beneath the sun, its dark, dark eyes unblinking as it bounded forward on its lizard-fast legs, sable fountains rising behind its upheld tail that was wide as a sail and pointed like a tent. He couldn't use the rockets because it was coming in from the side. He opened up with his fiftycalibers and spread his "wings" and stamped the accelerator to the floor. As it neared, he sent forth a cloud of fire in its direction. By then, the other cars were firing, too. It swung its tail and opened and closed its jaws, and its blood came forth and fell upon the ground. Then a rocket struck it. It turned; it leaped. There came a booming, crunching sound as it fell upon the vehicle identified as car number one and lay there. Tanner hit the brakes, turned, and headed back. Car number three came up beside it and parked. Tanner did the same. He jumped down from the cab and crossed to the smashed car. He had the rifle in his hands and he put six rounds into the creature's head before he approached the car. The door Had come open, and it hung from a single hinge, the bottom one. Inside, Tanner could see the two men sprawled, and there was some blood upon the dashboard and the seat. The other two drivers came up beside him and stared within. Then the shorter of the two crawled inside and listened for the heartbeat and the pulse and felt for breathing. "Mike's dead," he called out, "but Greg's starting to come around." A wet spot that began at the car's rear and spread and continued to spread, and the smell of gasoline filled the air. Tanner took out a cigarette, thought better of it and replaced it in the pack. He could hear the gurgle of the huge gas tanks as they emptied themselves upon the ground. The man who stood at Tanner's side said, "I never saw anything like it... I've seen pictures, but -- I never saw anything like it..." "I have," said Tanner, and then the other driver emerged from the wreck, partly supporting the man he'd referred to as Greg. The man called out, "Greg's all right. He just hit his head on the dash." 'T'he man who stood at Tanner's #side said, "You can take him, Hell. He can back you up when he's feeling better," and Tanner shrugged and turned his back on the scene and lit a cigarette. "I don't think you should do -- " the man began, and Tanner blew smoke in his face. He turned to regard the two approaching men and saw that Greg was dark-eyed and deeply tanned. Part Indian, possibly. His skin seemed smooth, save for a couple pockmarks beneath his right eye, and his cheekbones were high and his hair very dark. He was as big as Tanner, which was six-two, though not quite so heavy. He was dressed in overalls; and hig carriage, now that he had had a few deep breaths of air, became very erect, and he moved with a quick, graceful stride. "We'll have to bury Mike," the short man said. "I hate to lose the time," said his companion, "but -- " and then Tanner flipped his cigarette and threw himself to the ground as it landed in the pool at the rear of the car. There was an explosion, flames, then more explosions. Tanner heard the rockets as they tore off toward the east, inscribing dark furrows in the hot afternoon's air. The ammo for the fifty-calibers exploded, and the hand grenades went off, and Tanner burrowed deeper and deeper into the sand, covering his head and blocking his ears. As soon as things grew quiet, he grabbed for the rifle. But they were already coming at him, and he saw the muzzle of a pistol. He raised his hands slowly and stood. "Why the goddamn hell did you do a stupid tiling like that?" said the other driver, the man who held the pistol. Tanner smiled, and, "Now we don't have to bury him," he said. "Cremation's just as good, and it's already over." "You could have killed us all, if those guns or those rocket launchers had been aimed this wayl" "They weren't. I looked." "The flying metal could've -- Oh... I see. Pick up your damn rifle, buddy, and keep it pointed at the ground. Eject the rounds it's still got in it and put 'em in your pocket." Tanner did this thing while the other talked. "You wanted to kill us all, didn't you? Then you could have cut out and gone your way, like you tried to do yesterday. Isn't that right?" "You said it, mister, not me." "It's true, though. You don't give a good goddamn if everybody in Boston croaks, do you?" "My gun's unloaded now," said Tanner. "Then get back in your bloody buggy and get going! I'll be behind you all the way!" Tanner walked back toward his, car. He heard the others arguing behind him, but he didn't think they'd shoot him. As he was about to climb up into the cab, he saw a shadow out of the comer of his eye and turned quickly. The man named Greg was standing behind him, tall and quiet as a ghost. "Want me to drive awhile?" he asked Tanner, without expression. "No, you rest up. I'm still in good shape. Later on this afternoon, maybe, if you feel up to it." The man nodded and rounded the cab. He entered from the other side and immediately reclined his chair. Tanner slammed his door and started the engine. He heard the air conditioner come to life. "Want to reload this?" he asked. "And put it back on the rack?" And he handed the rifle and the ammo to the other, who had nodded. He drew on his gloves then and said, "There's plenty of soft drinks in the 'frig. Nothing much else, though," and the other nodded again. Then he heard car three start and said, "Might as well roll," and he put it into gear and took his foot off the clutch. VI Fa fter they had driven for about half an hour, the man called Greg said to him, "Is it true what Marlowe said?" "What's a Marlowe?" "He's driving the other car. Were you trying to kill us? Do you really want to skip out?" Hell laughed, then, "That's right," he said. "You named it." "Why?" Hell let it hang there for a minute, then said, "Why shouldn't I? I'm not anxious to die. I'd like to wait a long time before I try that bit." Greg said, "If we don't make it, the population of the continent may be cut in half." "If it's a question of them or me, I'd rather it was them." "I sometimes wonder how people like you happen." "The same way as anybody else, mister, and it's fun for a couple people for awhile, and then the trouble starts." "What did they ever do to you, Hell?" "Nothing. What did they ever do for me? Nothing. Nothing. What do I owe them? The same." "Why'd you stomp your brother back at the Hall?" "Because I didn't want him doing a damfool thing like this and getting himself killed. Cracked ribs he can get over. Death is a more permanent ailment." "That's not what I asked you. I mean, what do you care whether he croaks?" "He's a good kid, that's why. He's got a thing for this chick, though, and he can't see straight." "So what's it to you?" "Like I said, he's my brother and he's a good kid. I like him." "How come?" "Oh, hell! We've been through a lot together, that's all! What are you trying to do? Psychoanalyze me?" "I was just curious, that's all." "So now you know. Talk about something else if you want to talk, okay?" C#'kay. You've been this way before, right?" "That's right." "You been any further east?" "I've been all the way to the Missus Hip." "Do you know a way to get across it?" "I think so. The bridge is still up at Saint Louis." "Why didn't you go across it the last time you were there?" "Are you kidding? The thing's packed with cars full of bones. It wasn't worth the trouble to try and clear it." "Why'd you go that far in the first place?" "Just to see what it was like. I heard all these stories -- " "What was it like?" "A lot of crap. Burnt down towns, big craters, crazy animals, some people -- " "People? People still live there?" "If you want to call them that. They're all wild and screwed up. They wear rags or animal skins or they go naked. They threw rocks at me till I shot a couple. Then they let me alone." "How long ago was that?" "Six -- maybe seven years ago. I was just a kid then." "How come you never told anybody about it?" "I did. A coupla my friends. Nobody else ever asked me. We were going to go out there and grab off a couple of the girls and bring them back, but everybody chickened out." "Wihat would you have done with them?" Tanner shrugged. "I dunno. Sell 'em, I guess." "You guys used to do that, down on the Barbary Coast -- sell people, I mean -- didn't you?" Tanner shrugged again. "Used to," he said, "before the Big Raid." "How'd you manage to live through that? I thought they'd cleaned the whole place out?" "I was doing time," he said. "A.D.W." "What's that?" "Assault with a deadly weapon." "What'd you do after they let you go?" "I let them rehabilitate me. They got me a job running the mail." "Oh yeah, I heard about that. Didn't realize it was you, though. You were supposed to be pretty good -- doing all right and ready for a promotion. Then you kicked your boss around and lost your job. How come?" "He was always riding me about my record and about my old gang down on the Coast. Finally, one day I told him to lay off, and he laughed at me, so I hit him with a chain. Knocked out the bastard's front teeth. I'd do it again." "Too bad." "I was the best driver he had. It was his loss. Nobody else will make the Albuquerque run, not even today. Not unless they really need the money." "Did you like the work, though, while you were doing it?" "Yeah, I like to drive." "You should probably have asked for a transfer when the guy started bugging you." "I know. If it was happening today, that's probably what I'd do. I was mad, though, and I used to get mad a lot faster than I do now. I think I'm smarter these days than I was before." "If you make it on this run and you go home afterwards, you'll probably be able to get your job back. Think you'd take it?" "In the first place," said Tanner, "I don't think we'll make it. And in the second, if we do make it and there's still people around that town, I think I'd rather stay there than go back." reg nodded. " 'Might be smart. You'd be a hero. Nobody'd know much about your record. Somebody'd turn you on to something good." "The hell with heroes," said Tanner. "Me, though, I'll go back if we make it." "Sail 'round Cape Horn?" "That's right." "Might be fun. But why go back?" "I've got an old mother and a mess of brothers and sisters I take care of, and I've got a girl back there." Tanner brightened the screen as the sky began to darken. "What's your mother like?" "Nice old lady. Raised the eight of us. Got arthritis bad now, though." "What was she like when you were a kid?" "She used to work during the day, but she cooked our meals and sometimes brought us candy. She made a lot of our clothes. She used to tell us stories, like about how things were before the war. She played games with us and sometimes she gave us toys." "How about your old man?" Tanner asked him, after awhile. "He drank pretty heavy and he had a lot of jobs, but he never beat us too much. He was all right. He got run over by a car when I was around twelve." "And you take care of everybody now?" "Yeah. I'm the oldest." "What is it that you do?" "I've got your old job. I run the mail to Albuquerque." "Are you kidding?" "No." "I'll be damned! Is Gorman still the supervisor?" "He retired last year, on disability." "I'll be damned! That's funny. Listen, down in Albuquerque do you ever go to a bar called Pedro's?" "I've been there." "Have they still got a little blonde girl plays the piano? Named Margaret?" "No." "Oh." "They've got some guy now. Fat fellow. Wears a big ring on his left hand." Tanner nodded and downshifted as he began the ascent of a steep hill. "How's your head now?" he asked, when they'd reached the top and started down the opposite slope. "Feels pretty good. I took a couple of your aspirins with that soda I had." "Feel up to driving for awhile?" "Sure, I could do that." "Okay, then." Tanner leaned on the horn and braked the car. "Just follow the compass for a hundred miles or so and wake me up. All right?" "Okay. Anything special I should watch out for?" "The snakes. You'll probably see a few. Don't hit them, whatever you do." "Right." They changed seats, and Tanner reclined the one, lit a cigarette, smoked half of it, crushed it out and went to sleep. XT Then Greg awakened him, it ' ' was night. Tanner coughed and drank a mouthful of ice water and crawled back to the latrine. When he emerged, he took the driver's seat and checked the mileage and looked at the compass. He corrected their course and, "We'll be in Salt Lake City before morning," he said, "if we're lucky. -- Did you run into any trouble?" "No, it was pretty easy. I saw some snakes and I let them go by. That was about it." Tanner grunted and engaged the gears. "What was that guy's name that brought the news about the plague?" Tanner asked. "Brady or Brody or something like that," said Greg. "What was it that killed him? He might have brought the plague to L.A., you know." Greg shook his head. "No. His car had been damaged, and he was all broken up -- and he'd been exposed to radiation a lot of the way. They burnt his body and his car, and anybody who'd been anywhere near him got shots of Haffikine." "What's that?" "That's the stuff we're carrying -- Haffikine antiserum. It's the only cure for the plague. Since we had a bout of it around twenty years ago, we've kept it on hand and maintained the facilities for making more in a hurry. Boston never did, and now they're hurting." "Seems kind of silly for the only other nation on the continent -- maybe in the world -- not to take better care of itself, when they knew we'd had a dose of it." Greg shrugged. "Probably, but there it is. Did they give you any shots before they released you?" "Yeah." "That's what it was, then." "I wonder where their driver crossed the Missus Hip? He didn't say, did he?" "He hardly said anything at all. They got most of the story from the letter he carried." "Must have been one hell of a driver, to run the Alley." "Yeah. Nobody's ever done it before, have they?" "Not that I know of." "I'd like to have met the guy." "Me too, at least I guess." "It's a shame we can't radio across country, like in the old days." "Why?" "Then he wouldn't of had to do it, andwe could find out along the way whether it's really worth making the run. They might all be dead by now, you know." "You've got a point there, mister, and in a day or so we'll be to a place where going back will be harder than going ahead." Tanner adjusted the screen as dark shapes passed. "Look at that, will you!" "I don't see anything." "Put on your infras." '""reg did this and stared upward at the screen. Bats. Enormous bats cavorted overhead, swept by in dark clouds. "There must be hundreds of them, maybe thousands... "Guess so. Seems there are more than there used to be when I came this way a few years back. They must be screwing their heads off in Carlsbad." "We never see them in L.A. Maybe they're pretty much harmless." "Last time I was up to Salt Lake, I heard talk that a lot of them were rabid. Some day someone's got to go -- them or us." "You're a cheerful guy to ride with, you know?" Tanner chuckled and lit a cigarette, and, "Why don't you make us some coffee?" he said. "As for the bats, that's something our kids can worry about, if there are any." Greg filled the coffee pot and plugged it into the dashboard. After a time, it began to grumble and hiss. "What the hell's that?" said Tanner, and he hit the brakes. The other car halted, several hundred yards behind his own, and he turned on his microphone and said, "Car three! What's that look like to you?" and waited. He watched them: toweling, tapered tops that spun between the ground and the sky, wobbling from side to side, sweeping back and forth, about a mile ahead. It seemed there were fourteen or fifteen of the things. Now they stood like pillars, now they danced. They bored into the ground and sucked up yellow dust. There was a haze all about them. The stars were dim or absent above or behind them. Greg stared ahead and said, "I've heard of whirlwinds, tornadoes -- big, spinning things. I've never seen one, but that's the way they were described to me." And then the radio crackled, and the muffled voice of the man called Marlowe came through: "Giant dust devils," he said. "Big, rotary sand storms. I think they're sucking stuff up into the dead belt, because I don't see anything coming down -- " "You ever see one before?" "No, but my partner says he did. He says the best thing might be to shoot our anchoring columns and stay put." npanner did not answer immeI " diately. He stared ahead, and the tornadoes seemed to grow larger. "They're coming this way," he finally said. "I'm not about to park here and be a target. I want to be able to maneuver. I'm going ahead through them." "I don't think you should." "Nobody asked you, mister, but if you've got any brains you'll do the same thing." "I've got rockets aimed at your tail, Hell." "You won't fire them -- not for a thing like this, where I could be right and you could be wrong -- and not with Greg in here, too." There was silence within the static, then, "Okay, you win, Hell. Go ahead, and we'll watch. If you make it, we'll follow. If you don't, we'll stay put." "I'll shoot a flare when I get to the other side," Tanner said. "When you see it, you do the same. Okay?" Tanner broke the connection and looked ahead, studying the great black columns, swollen at their tops. There fell a few layers of light from the storm which they supported, and the air was foggy between the blacknesses of their revolving trunks. "Here goes," said Tanner, switching his lights as bright as they would beam. "Strap yourself in, boy," and Greg obeyed him as the vehicle crunched forward. Tanner buckled his own safety belt as they slowly edged ahead. The columns grew and swayed as he advanced, and he could now hear a rushing, singing sound, as of a chorus of the winds. He skirted the first by three hundred yards and continued to the left to avoid the one which stood before him and grew and grew. As he got by it, there was another, and he moved further to the left. Then there was an open area of perhaps a quarter of a mile leading ahead and toward his right. He swiftly sped across it and passed between two of the towers that stood like ebony pillars a hundred yards apart. As he passed them, the wheel was almost tom from his grip, and he seemed to inhabit the center of an eternal thunderclap. He swerved to the right then and skirted another, speeding. Then he saw seven more and cut between two and passed about another. As he did, the one behind him moved rapidly, crossing the path he had just taken. He exhaled heavily and turned to the left. He was surrounded by the final four, and he braked so that he was thrown forward and the straps cut into his shoulder, as two of the whirlwinds shook yiolently and moved in terrible Spurts of speed. One passed before him, and the front end of his car was raised from off the ground. Then he floored the gas pedal and Shot between the final two, and they were all behind him. He continued on for about a quarter for a mile, turned the car about, mounted a small rise and parked. He relased the flare. It hovered, like a dying star, for about half a minute. He lit a cigarette as he stared back, and he waited. He finished the cigarette. Then, "Nothing," he said. "Maybe they couldn't spot it through the storm. Or maybe we couldn't see theirs." "I hope so," said Greg. "How long do you want t# wait?" "Let's have that coffee." A n hour passed, then two. The pillars began to collapse until there were only three of the slimmer ones. They moved off toward the east and were gone from sight. Tanner released another flare, and still there was no response. "We'd better go back and look for them," said Greg. "Okay." And they did. There was nothing there, though, nothing to indicate the fate of car three. Dawn occurred in the east before they had finished with their searching, and Tanner turned die car around, checked the compass, and moved north. "When do you think we'll hit Salt Lake?" Greg asked him, after a long silence. "Maybe two hours." "Were you scared, back when you ran those things?" "No. Afterwards, though, I didn't feel so good." Greg nodded. "You want me to drive again?" "No. I won't be able to sleep if I stop now. We'll take in more gas in Salt Lake, and we can get something to eat while a mechanic checks over the car. Then I'll put us on the right road, and you can take over while I sack out." The sky was purple again and the black bands had widened. Tanner cursed and drove faster. He fired his ventral flame at two bats who decided to survey the car. They fell back, and lie accented the mug of coffee Greg offered him. Hpfae sky was as dark as evening when they pulled into Salt Lake City. John Brady -- that was his name --  had passed that way but days before, and the city was ready for the responding vehicle. Most of its ten thousand inhabitants appeared along the street, and before Hell and Greg had jumped down from the cab after pulling into the first garage they saw, the hood of car number two was opened and three mechanics were peering at the engine. They abandoned the idea of eating in the little diner across the street. Too many people hit them with too many questions as soon as they set foot outside the garage. They retreated and sent someone after eggs, bacon and toast. There was cheering as they rolled forth onto the street and sped away into the east. "Could have used a beer," said Tanner. "Damn it!" And they rushed along beside the remains of what had once been U.S. Route #. Tanner relinquished the driver's seat and stretched out on the passenger side of the cab. The sky continued to darken above them, taking upon it the appearance it had had in L.A. the day before. "Maybe we can outrun it," Greg said. "Hope so." The blue pulse began in the ra. The sky was almost black directly overhead. "Run!" cried Tanner. "Run! Those are hills up ahead! Maybe we can find an overhang or a cave!" But it broke upon them before they reached the hills. First came the hail, then the flak. The big stones followed, and the scanner on the right went dead. The sands blasted them, and they rode beneath a celestial waterfall that caused the engine to sputter and cough. They reached the shelter of the hills, though, and found a place within a rocky valley where the walls jutted steeply forward and broke the main force of the wind sanddustrockwater storm. They sat there as the winds screamed and boomed about them. They smoked and they listened. "We won't make it," said Greg. "You were right. I thought we had a chance. We don't. Everything's against us, even the weather." "We've got a chance," said Tanner. "Maybe not a real good one. But we've been lucky so far. Remember that." Greg spat into the waste container. "Why the sudden optimism? From you?" "I was mad before and shooting off my mouth. Well, I'm still mad --  but I got me a feeling now: I feel lucky. That's all." Greg laughed. "The hell with luck. Look out there," he said. "I see it," said. Tanner. "This buggy is built to take it, and it's doing it. Also, we're only getting about ten per cent of its full strength." "Okay, but , what difference does it make? It could last for a couple days." "So we wait it out." "Wait too long, and even that ten per cent can smash us. Wait too long, and even if it doesn't there'll be no reason left to go ahead. Try driving, though, and it'll flatten us." "It'll take me ten or fifteen minutes to finish that scanner. We've got spare 'eyes.' If the storm lasts more than six hours, we'll start out anyway." "Says who?" "Me." "Why? You're the one who was so hot on saving his own neck. How come all of a sudden you're mine too?" 'T t anner smoked awhile, then said, "I've been thinking," and then he didn't say anything else. "About what?" Greg asked him. "Those folks in Boston," Tanner said. "Maybe it is worth it. I don't know. They never did anything for me. But hell, I like action and I'd hate to see the whole world get dead. I think I'd like to see Boston, too, just to see what it's like. It might even be fun being a hero, just to see what that's like. Don't get me wrong. I don't give a damn about anybody up there. It's just that I don't like the idea of everything being like, the Alley here -- all burnt-out and screwed up and full of crap. When we lost the other car back in those tornadoes, it made me start thinking... I'd hate to see everybody go that way -- everything. I might still cop out if I get a real good chance, but I'm just telling you how I feel now. That's all." Greg looked away and laughed, a little more heartily than usual. "I never suspected you contained such philosophic depths." "Me neither. I'm tired. Tell me about your brothers and sisters, huh?" "Okay." Four hours later when the storm slackened I and the rocks became dust and the rain fog, Tanner replaced the right scanner; and they moved on out, passing later through Rocky Mountain National Park. The dust and the fog combined to limit visibility throughout the day. That evening they skirted the ruin that was Denver, and Tanner took over as they headed toward the place that had once been called Kansas. He drove all night, and in the morning the sky was clearer than it had been in days. He let Greg snore on and sorted through his thoughts while he sipped his coffee. I t was a strange feeling that came over him as' he sat there with his pardon in his pocket and his hands upon the wheel. The dust fumed at his back. The sky was the color of rosebuds, and the dark trails had shrunken once again. He recalled the stories of the days when the missiles came down, burning everything but the northeast and the southwest; the day when the winds arose and the clouds vanished and the sky had lost its blue; the days when the Panama Canal had been shattered and radios had ceased to function; the days when the planes could no longer fly. He regretted this, for he had always wanted to fly, 'high, birdlike, swooping and' soaring. He felt slightly cold, and the screens now seemed to possess a crystal clarity, like pools of tinted water. Somewhere ahead, far, far ahead lay what might be the only other sizeable pocket of humanity that remained on the shoulders of the world. He might be able to save it, if he could reach it in time. He looked about him at the rocks and the sand and the side of a broken garage that had somehow come to occupy the slope of a mountain. It remained within his mind long after he had passed it. Shattered, fallen down, half covered with debris, it took on a stark and monstrous form, like a decaying skull which had once occupied the shoulders of a giant; and he pressed down hard on the accelerator, although it could go no further. He began to tremble. The sky brightened, but he did not touch the screen controls. Why did he have to be the one? He saw a mass of smoke ahead and to the right. As he drew nearer, he saw that it rose from a mountain which had lost its top and now held a nest of fires in its place. He cut to the left, going miles, many miles, out of the way he had intended. Occasionally, the ground shook beneath his wheels. Ashes fell about him, but now the smouldering cone was far to the rear of the right-hand screen. He wondered after the days that had gone before and the few things that he actually knew about them. If he made it through, he decided he'd learn more about history. He threaded his way through painted canyons and forded a shallow river. Nobody had ever asked him to do anything important before, and he hoped that nobody ever would again. Now, though, he was taken by the feeling that he could do it. He wanted to do it. Damnation Alley lay all about him, burning, fuming, shaking, and if he could not run it then half the world would die, and the chances wpuld be doubled that one day all the world would be part of the Alley. His tattoo stood stark on his whitened knuckles, saying "Hell," and he knew that it was true. Greg still slept, the sleep of exhaustion, and Tanner narrowed his eyes and chewed his beard and never touched the brake, not even when he saw the rockslide beginning. He made it by and sighed. That pass was closed to him forever, but he had ishot through without a scratch. His mind was an expanding bubble, its surfaces like die viewscreens, registering everything about him. He felt the flow of the air within the cab and the upward pressure of the pedal upon his foot. His throat seemed dry, but it didn't matter. His eyes felt gooey at their inside corners, but he didn't wipe them. He roared across the pocked plains of Kansas, and he knew now that he had been sucked into the role completely and that he wanted it that way. Damn-his-eyes Denton had been right. It had to be done. He halted when he came to the lip of a chasm and headed north. Thirty miles later it ended, and he turned again to the south. Greg muttered in his sleep. It sounded like a curse. Tanner repeated it softly a couple times and turned toward the east as soon as a level stretch occurred. The sun stood in high heaven, and Tanner felt as though he were drifting bodiless beneath it, above the brown ground flaked with green spikes of growth. He clenched his teeth and his mind went back to Denny, doubtless now in a hospital. Better than being where the others had gone. He hoped the money he'd told him about was still there. Then he felt the ache begin, in the places between his neck and his Shoulders. It spread down into his arms, and he realized how tightly he was gripping the wheel. He blinked and took a deep breath and realized that his eyeballs hurt. He lit a cigarette and it tasted foul, but he kept puffing at it. He drank some water and he dimmed the rear view-screen as the sun fell behind him. Then he heard a sound like a distant rumble of thunder and was fully alert once more. He sat up straight and took his foot off the accelerator. He slowed. He braked and stopped. Then he saw them. He sat there and watched them as they passed, about a half-mile ahead. A monstrous herd of bison crossed before him. It took the better part of an hour before they had passed'. Huge, heavy, dark, heads down, hooves scoring the soil, they ran without slowing until the thunder was great and then rolled off toward the north, diminishing, softening, dying, gone. The screen of their dust still hung before him, and he plunged into it, turning on his lights. He considered taking a pill, decided against it. Greg might be waking soon, he wanted to be able to get some sleep after they'd switched over. He came up beside a highway, and its surface looked pretty good, so he crossed onto it and sped ahead. After a time, he passed a faded, sagging sign that Greg yawned and stretched. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and then rubbed his forehead, the right side of which was swollen and dark. "What time is it?" he asked. Tanner gestured toward the clock in the dashboard. "Morning or is it afternoon?" "Afternoon." "My God! I must have slept around fifteen hours!" "That's about right." "You been driving all that time?" "That's right." "You must be done in. You look like hell. Let me just hit the head. I'll take over in a few minutes." "Good idea." Greg crawled toward die rear of the vehicle. After about five minutes, Tanner came upon the outskirts of a dead town. He drove up the main street, and there were rusted-out hulks of cars all along it. Most of die building had fallen in upon themselves, and some of the opened cellars that he saw were filled with scummy water. Skeletons lay about the town square. There were no trees standing above the weeds that grew there. Three telephone poles still stood, one of them leaning forward and trailing wires like a handful of black spaghetti. Several benches were visible within the weeds beside the cracked sidewalks, and a skeleton lay stretched out upon the second one Tanner passed. He found his way barred by a fallen telephone pole, and he detoured around the block. The next street was somewhat better preserved, but all its storefront windows were broken, and a nude mannikin posed fetchingly with her left arm missing from the elbow down. The traffic light at the corner stared blindly as Tanner passed through its intersection. Tanner heard Greg coming forward as he turned at the next corner. "I'll take over now," he said. "I want to get out of this place first," and they both watched in silence for the next fifteen minutes until the dead town was gone from around them. Tanner pulled to a halt then and said, "We're a couple hours away from a place that used to be called Topeka. Wake me if you run into anything hairy." "How did it go while I was asleep? Did you have any trouble?" "No," said Tanner, and he closed his eyes and began to snore. Greg drove away from the sunset, and he ate three ham sandwiches and drank a quart of milk before Topeka. IX PT i anner was awakened by the I firing of the rockets. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared dumbly ahead for almost half a minute. Like gigantic dried leaves, great clouds fell about them. Bats, bats, bats. The air was . filled with bats. Tanner could hear a chittering, squeaking, scratching sound, and the car was buffeted by their dark bodies. "Where are we?" he asked. "Kansas City. The place seems full of them," and Greg released another rocket, which cut a fiery path through the swooping, spinning horde. "Save the rockets. Use the fire," said Tanner, switching the nearest gup; to manual and bringing cross-hairs into focus upon the screen. "Blast 'em in all directions -- for five, six seconds -- then I'll come in." The flame shot forth, orange and cream blossoms of combustion. When they folded, Tanner sighted in the screen and squeezed the trigger. He swung the gun, and they fell. Their charred bodies lay all about him, and he added new ones to the smouldering heaps. "Roll it!" he cried, and the car moved forward, swaying, batbodies crunching beneath its tires. Tanner laced the heavens with gunfire, and when they swooped again he strafed them and fired a flare. In the sudden magnesium glow from overhead, it seemed forms were circling, spiraling down toward them. He switched from gun to gun, and they fell about him like fruit. Then he called out, "Brake, and hit the topside flame!" and Greg did this thing. "Now the sides! Front and rear next!" Bodies were burning all about them, heaped as high as the tiobd, and Greg put the car into low gear when Tanner cried "Forward!" And they pushed their way through the wall of charred flesh. Tanner fired another flare. The bats were still there, but circling higher now. Tanner primed the guns and waited, but they did not attack again in any great number. A few swept about them, and he took pot-shots at them as they passed. Ten minutes later he said, "That's the Missouri River to our left. If we just follow alongside it now, we'll hit Saint Louis." "I know. Do you think it'll be full of bats, too?" "Probably. But if we take our time and arrive with daylight, they shouldn't bother us. Then we can figure a way to get across the Missus Hip." Then their eyes fell upon the rearview screen, where the dark skyline of Kansas City with bats was silhouetted by pale stars and touched by the light of the bloody moon. After a time, Tanner slept once more. He dreamt he was riding his bike, slowly, down the center of a wide street, and 'people lined the sidewalks and began to cheer as he passed. They threw confetti, but by the time it reached him it was garbage, wet and stinking. He stepped on the gas then, but his bike slowed even more and now they were screaming at him. They shouted obscenities. They cried out his name, over and' over, and again. The Harley began to wobble, but his feet seemed to be glued in place In a moment, he knew, he would fall. The bike came to a halt then, and he began to topple over toward the right side. They rushed toward him as he fell, and he knew it was just about all over... He awoke with a jolt and saw the morning spread out before him: a bright coin in the middle of a dark blue tablecloth and a row of glasses along the edge. "That's it," said Greg. "The Missus Hip." Tanner was suddenly very hungry. A fter they had refreshed themselves, they sought the bridge. "I didn't see any of your naked people with spears," said Greg. "Of course, we might have passed their way after dark -- if there are any of them still around." "Good thing, too," said Tanner. "Saved us some ammo." The bridge came into view, sagging and dark save for the places where the sun gilded its cables, and it stretched unbroken across the bright expanse of waters. They moved slowly toward it, threading their way through streets gorged with rubble, detouring When it became completely blocked by the rows of broken machines, fallen walls, sewer-deep abysses in the burst pavement. It took them two hours to travel half a mile, and if was noon before they reached the foot of the bridge, and, "It looks as if Brady might have crossed here," said Greg, eying what appeared to be a cleared passageway amidst the wrecks that filled the span. "How do you think he did it?" "Maybe he had something with him to hoist them and swing them out over the edge. There are some wrecks below, down where the water is shallow." "Were they there last time you passed by?" "I don't know. I wasn't right down here by the bridge. I topped that hill back there," and he gestured at the rearview screen. "Well, from here it looks like we might be able to make it. Let's roll." They moved upward and forward onto the bridge and began their slow passage across the mighty Missus Hip. There were times when the bridge creaked beneath them, sighed, groaned, and they felt it move. The sun began to climb, and still they moved forward, scraping their fenders against the edges of the wrecks, using their wings like plows. They were on the bridge for three hours before its end came into sight through a rift in the junfcstacks. When their wheels finally touched the opposite shore, Greg sat there breathing heavily and then lit a cigarette. "You want to drive awhile, Hell?" "Yeah. Let's switch over." He did, and, "God! I'm bushed!" he said as he sprawled out. Tanner drove forward through the ruins of East Saint Louis, hurrying to clear the town before nightfall. The radiation level began to mount as he advanced, and the streets were cluttered and broken. He checked the inside of the cab for radioactivity, but it was still clean. It took him hours, and as the sun fell at his back he saw the blue aurora begin once more in the north. But the sky stayed clear, filled with its stars, and there were no black lines that he could see. After a long while, a rose-cojored moon appeared and hung before him. He turned on the music, softly, and glanced at Greg. It didn't seem to bother him, so he let it continue. The instrument panel caught his eye. The radiation level was still climbing. Then, in the forward screen, he saw the crater and he stopped. I t must have been over half a mile across, and he couldn't tell its depth. He fired a flare, and in its light he used the telescopic lenses to examine it to the right and to the left. The way seemed smoother to the right, and he turned in that direction and began to negotiate it. The place was hot! So very, very hot! He hurried. And he wondered as he sped, the gauge rising before him: What had it been like on that day, Whenever? That day when a tiny sun had lain upon this spot and fought with, and for a time beaten, the brightness of the other in the sky, before it sank slowly into its sudden burrow? He tried to imagine it, succeeded, then tried to put it out of his mind and couldn't. How do you put out the fires that bum forever? He wished that he knew. There'd been so many places to go then, and he liked to move around. What had it been like in the old days, when a man could just jump on his bike and cut out for a new town whenever he wanted? And nobody emptying buckets of crap on you from out of the sky? He felt cheated, which was not a new feeling for him, but it made him curse even longer than usual. He lit a cigarette when he'd finally rounded the crater, and he smiled for the first time in months as the radiation gauge began to fall once more. Before many miles, he saw tall grasses swaying about him, and not too long after that he began to see trees. Trees short and twisted, at first, but the further he fled from the place of carnage, the taller and straighter they became. They were trees such as he had never seen before -- fifty, sixty feet in height -- and graceful, and gathering stars, there on the plains He was moving along a dean, hard, wide road, and just then he wanted to travel it forever -- to Floridee, of the swamps and Spanish moss and ritrus groves and fine beaches and the Gulf; and up to the cold, rocky Cape, where everything is gray and brown and the waves break below the lighthouses and the salt bums in your nose and there are graveyards where bones have lain for centuries and you can still read the names they bore, chiseled there into the stones above them; down through the nation where they say the grass is blue; then follow the mighty Missus Hip to the place where she spreads and comes and there's the Gulf again, full of little islands where the old boosters stashed their loot; and through the shag-topped mountains he'd heard about: the Smokies, Ozarks, Poconos, Catskills; drive through the forest of Shenandoah; park, and take a boat out over Chesapeake Bay; see the big lakes and the place where the water falls, Niagara. To drive forever along the big road, to see everything, to eat the world. Yes. Maybe it wasn't all Damnation Alley. Some of the legendary places must still be clean, like the countryside about him now. He wanted it with a hunger, with a fire like that which always burned in his loins. He laughed then, just one short, sharp bark, because now it seemed like maybe he could have it. The music played softly, too sweetly perhaps, and it filled him. X Ty morning he was into the place called Indiana and still following the road. He passed farmhouses which seemed in good repair. There could even be people living in them. He longed to investigate, but he didn't dare to stop. Then after an hour, it was all countryside again, and degenerating. The grasses grew shorter, shriveled, were gone. An occasional twisted tree clung to the bare earth. The radiation level began to rise once more. The signs told him he was nearing Indianapolis, which he guessed was a big city that bad received a bomb and was now gone away. Nor was he mistaken. He had to detour far to the south to get around it, backtracking to a place called Martinsville in order to cross over the White River. Then as he headed east once more, his radio crackled and came to Hfe. There was a faint voice, repeating, "Unidentified vehicle, halt!" and he switched all the scanners to telescopic range. Far ahead, on a hilltop, he saw a standing man with binoculars and a walkietalkie. He did not acknowledge receipt of the transmission, but kept driving. He was hitting forty miles an hour along a halfway decent section of roadway, and he gradually increased his speed to fiftyfive, though the protesting of his tires upon the cracked pavement was sufficient to awaken Greg. Tanner stared ahead, ready for an attack, and the radio kept repeating the order, louder now as he neared the hill, and called upon him to acknowledge the message. He touched the brake as he rounded a long curve, and he did not reply to Greg's "What's the matter?" When he saw it there, blocking the way, ready to fire, he acted instantly. The tank filled the road, and its big gun was pointed directly at him. As his eye sought for and found passage around it, his right hand slapped the switches that sent three armor-piercing rockets screaming ahead and his left spun the wheel counter-clockwise and his foot fell heavy on the accelerator. He was half off the road then, bouncing along the ditch at its side, when the tank discharged one fiery belch which missed him and then caved in upon itself and blossomed. There came the sound of rifle fire as he pulled back onto the road on the other side of the tank and sped ahead. Greg launched a single grenade to the right and the left and then hit the fifty calibers. They tore on ahead, and after about a quarter of a mile Tanner picked up his microphone and said, "Sony about that. My brakes don't work," and hung it Up again. There was no response.  s soon as they reached a level plain, commanding a good view in all directions, Tanner halted the vehicle and Greg moved into the driver's seat. "Where do you think they got hold of that armor?" "Who knows?" "And why stop us?" "They didn't know what we were carrying -- and maybe they just wanted the car:" "Blasting, it's a helluva way to get it." "If they can't have it, why should they let us keep it?" "You know just how they think, don't you?" "Yes." "Have a cigarette." Tanner nodded, accepted. "It's been pretty bad, you know?" "I can't argue with that." "... And we've still got a long way to go." "Yeah, so let's get rolling." "You said before that you didn't think we'd make it." "I've revised my opinion. Now I think we will." "After all we've been through?" "After all we've been through." "What more do we have to fight with?" "I don't know ell that yet." "But on the other hand, we know everything there is behind us. We know how to avoid a lot of it now." Tanner nodded. "You tried to cut out once. Now I don't blame you." "You getting scared, Greg?" "I'm no good to my family if I'm dead." "Then why'd you agree to come along?" "I didn't know it would be like this. You had better sense, because you had an idea what it would be like." "I had an idea." "Nobody can blame us if we fail. After all, we've tried." "What about all those people in Boston you made me a speech about?" "They're probably dead by now. The plague isn't a thing that takes its time, you know?" "What about that guy Brady? He died to get us the news." "He tried, and God knows I respect the attempt. But we've already lost four guys. Now should we make it six, just to show that everybody tried?" "Greg, we're a lot closer to Boston than we are to L.A. now. The tanks should have enough fuel in them to get us where we're going, but not to take us back from here." "We can refuel in Salt Lake." "I'm not even sure we could make it back to Salt Lake." "Well, it'll only take a minute to figure it out. For that matter, though, we could take the bikes for the last hundred or so. They use a lot less gas." "And you're the guy was calling me names. You're the citizen was wondering how people like me happen. You asked me what they ever did to me. I told you, too: Nothing. Now maybe I want to do something for them, just because I feel like it. I've been doing a lot of thinking." "You ain't supporting any family, Hell. I've got other people to worry about beside myself. "You've got a nice way of putting things when you want to chicken out. You say I'm not really scared, but I've got my mother and my brothers and sisters to worry about, and I got a chick I'm hot on. That's why I'm backing down. No other reason. "And that's right, too! I don't understand you, Hell! I don't understand you at all! You're the , one who put this idea in my head in the first place!" "So give it back, and let's get moving." TTe saw Greg's hand slither toward the gun on the door, so he flipped his cigarette into his face and managed to hit him once, in the stomach -- a weak, left-handed blow, but it was the beet he could manage from that position. Then Greg threw himself upon him, and he felt himself borne back into his seat. They wrestled, and Greg's fingers clawed their way up his face toward his eyes. Tanner got his arms free above the elbows, seized Greg's head, twisted and shoved with all his strength. Greg hit the dashboard, went stiff, then went slack. Tanner banged his head against it twice more, just to be sure he wasn't faking. Then he pushed him away and moved back into  Vj w m ! #s the driver's seat. He checked all the screens while he caught his breath. There was nothing menacing approaching... He fetched cord from the utility chest and bound Greg's hands behind his back. He tied his ankles together and ran a line from them to his wrists. Then he positioned him in the seat, reclined it part way and tied him in place within it. He put the car into gear and headed toward Ohio. Two hours later Greg began to moan, and Tanner turned the music up to drown him out. Landscape had appeared once more: grass and trees, fields of green, orchards of apples, apples still small and green, white farm houses and brown barns and red barns far removed from the roadway he raced along; rows of com, green and swaying, brown tassels already visible and obviously tended by someone; fences of split timber, green hedges; lofty, star-leafed maples, fresh-looking road signs, a green-shingled steeple from which the sound of a bell came forth. The lines in the sky widened, but the sky itself did not darken, as it usually did before a storm. So he drove on into the afternoon, until he reached the Dayton Abyss. He looked down into the fogshrouded canyon that had caused him to halt. He scanned to the left and the right, decided upon the left and headed north. Again, the radiation level was high. And he hurried, slowing only to skirt the crevices, chasms and canyons that emanated from that dark, deep center. Thick yellow vapors seeped forth from some of these and filled the air before him. At one point they were all about him, like a clinging, sulphurous cloud, and a breeze came and parted them. Involuntarily then, he hit the brake, and the car jerked and halted and Greg moaned once more. He stared at the thing for the few seconds that it was visible, then slowly moved forward again. The sight was not duplicated for the whole of his passage, but it did not easily go from out of his mind, and he could not explain it where he had seen it. Yellow, hanging and grinning, he had seen a crucified skeleton there beside the Abyss. People, he decided. That explains everything.  A, #" hen he left the region of ' ' fogs the sky was still dark. He did not realize for a time that he was in the open once more. It had taken him close to four hours to skirt Dayton, and now as he headed across a blasted heath, going east again, he saw for a moment a tiny piece of the sun, like a sickle, fighting its way ashore on the northern bank of a black river in the sky, and failing. His lights were turned up to their fullest intensity, and as he realized what might follow he looked in every direction for shelter. There was an old barn on a hill, and he raced toward it. One side had caved in, and the doors had fallen down. He edged in, however, and the interior was moist and moldy looking under his lights. He saw a skeleton Which he guessed to be that of a horse within a fallen-down stall. He parked and turned off his lights and waited. Soon the wailing came again and drowned out Greg's occasional moans and mutterings. There came another sound, not hard and heavy like gunfire, as that which he had heard in L.A., but gentle, steady and almost purring. He cracked the door, to hear it better. Nothing assailed him, so he stepped down from the cab and walked back a ways. The radiation level was almost normal, so he didn't bother with his protective suit. He walked back toward the fallen doors and looked outside. He wore the pistol behind his belt. Something gray descended in droplets and the sun fought itself partly free once more. It was rain, pure and simple. He had never seen rain, pure and simple, before. So he lit a cigarette and watched it fall. It came down with only an occasional rumbling and nothing else accompanied it. The sky was still a bluish color beyond the bands of black. It fell all about him. It ran down the frame to his left. A random gust of wind blew some droplets into his face, and he realized that they were water, nothing more. Puddles formed on the ground outside. He tossed a chunk of wood into one and saw it splash and float. From somewhere high up inside Hie foam he heard the sound of birds. He smelled the sick-sweet smell of decaying straw. Off in the shadows to his right he saw a rusted threshing machine. Some feathers drifted down about him, and he caught one in his hand and studied it. Light, dark, fluffy, ribbed. He'd never really looked at a feather before. It worked almost like a zipper, the way the individual branches clung to one another. He let it go, and the wind caught it, and it vanished somewhere toward his back. He looked out once more, and back along his trail. He could probably drive through what was coming down now. But he realized just how tired he was. He found a barrel and sat down on it and lit another cigarette. It had been a good run so far, and he found himself thinking about its last stages. He couldn't trust Greg for awhile yet. Not until they were so far that there could be no turning back. Then they'd need each other so badly that he could turn him loose. He hoped he hadn't scrambled his brains completely. He didn't know what more the alley held. If the storms were less from here on in, however, that would be a big help. TTe sat there for a long while, feeling the cold, moist breezes; and the rainfall lessened after a time, and he went back to the car and started it. Greg was still unconscious, he noted, as he backed out. This might not be good. He took a pill to keep himself alert and he ate some rations as he drove along. The rain continued to come down, but gently. It fell all the way across Ohio, and the sky remained overcast. He crossed into West Virginia at the place called Parkersburg, and then he veered slightly to the north, going by the old Rand McNally he'd been furnished. The gray day went away into black night, and he drove on. There were no more of the dark bats around to trouble him, but he passed several more craters and the radiation gauge rose, and at one point a pack of huge wild dogs pursued him, baying and howling, and they ran along the road and snapped at his tires and barked and yammered and then fell back. There were some tremors beneath his wheels as he passed another mountain and it spewed forth bright clouds to his left and made a kind of thunder. Ashes fell, and he drove through them. A flash flood splashed over him, and the engine sputtered and died, twice; but he started it again each time and pushed on ahead, the waters lapping about his sides. Then he reached higher, drier ground, and riflemen tried to bar his way. He strafed them and hurled a grenade and drove on by. When the darkness went away and the dim moon came up, dark birds circled him and dove down at him, but he ignored them and after a time they, too, were gone. He drove until he felt tired again, and then he ate some more and took another pill. By then he was in Pennsylvania, and he felt that if Greg would only come around he would turn him loose and trust him with the driving. He halted twice to visit the latrine, and he tugged at the golden band in his pierced left ear, and he blew his nose and scratched himself. Then he ate more rations and continued on. He began to ache, in all his muscles, and he wanted to stop and rest, but he was afraid of the things that might come upon him if he did. As he drove through another dead town, the rains started again. Not hard, just a drizzly downpour, coldlooking and sterile -- a brittle, shiny screen. He stopped in the middle of the road before the thing he'd almost driven into, and he stared at it. He'd thought at first that it was more black lines in the sky. He'd halted because they'd seemed to appear too suddenly. It was a spider's web, strands thick as his arm, strung between two leaning buildings. He switched on his forward flame and began to bum it. When the fires died, he saw the approaching shape, coming down from high above. It was a spider, larger than himself, rushing to check the disturbance. He elevated the rocket launchers, took careful aim and pierced it with one white-hot missile. It still hung there in the trembling web and seemed to be kicking. He turned on the flame again, for a full ten seconds, and when it subsided there was an open way before him. He rushed through, wide awake and alert once again, his pains forgotten. He drove as fast as he could, trying to forget the sight. Another mountain smoked, ahead and to his right, but it did not bloom, and few ashes descended as he passed it. He made coffee and drank a cup. After awhile it was morning, and he raced toward it. XI H e was stuck in the mud, somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, and cursing. Greg was looking very pale. The sun was nearing midheaven. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was too much. He slept. He awoke and felt worse. There was a banging on the side of the car. His hands moved toward fire-control and wing-control, automatically, and his eyes sought the screens. He saw an old man, and there were two younger men with him. They were armed, but they stood right before the left wing, and he knew he could cut them in half in an instant. He activated the outside speaker and the audio pickup. "What do you want?" he asked, and his voice crackled forth. "You okay?" the old man called. "Not really. You caught me sleeping." "You stuck?" "That's about the size of it." "I got a mule team can maybe get you out. Can't get 'em here before tomorrow morning, though." "Great!" said Tanner. "I'd appreciated it." "Where you from?" "L.A." "What's that?" "Los Angeles. West Coast." There was some murmuring, then, "You're a long way from home, mister." "Don't I know it. -- Look, if you're serious about those mules, I'd appreciate hell out of it. It's an emergency." "What kind of?" "You know about Boston?" "I know it's there." "Well, people are dying up that way, of the plague. I've got drugs here can save them, if I can get through." There were some more murmurs, then, "We'll help you. Boston's pretty important, and we'll get you loose. Want to come back with us?" "Where? And who are you?" "The name's Samuel Potter, and these are my sons, Roderick and Caliban. My farm's about six miles off. You're welcome to spend the night." "It's not that I don't trust you," said Tanner. "It's just that I don't trust anybody, if you know what I mean. I've been shot at too much recently to want to take the chance." "Well, how about if we put up our guns? You're probably able to shoot us from there, ain't you?" "That's right." "So we're taking a chance just help you. We'd stand to lose if the Boston traders stopped coming to Albany. If there's someone else inside, he can cover you." "Wait a minute," said Tanner, and he opened the door. 'T'he old man stuck out his hand, and Tanner took it and shook it, also his sons'. "Is there any kind of doctor around here?" he asked. "In the settlement -- about thirty miles north." "My partner's hurt. I think he needs a doctor." He gestured back, toward the cab. Sam moved forward and peered within. "Why's he all trussed up like that?" "He went off his rocker, and I had to clobber him. I tied him up, to be safe. But now he doesn't look so good." "Then let's whip up a stretcher and get him onto it. You lock up tight then, and my boys'll bring him back to the house. We'll send someone for the Doc. You don't look so good yourself. Bet you'd like a bath and a shave and a clean bed." "I don't feel so good," Tanner said. "Let's make that stretcher quick, before we need two." He sat up on the fender and smoked while the Potter boys cut trees and stripped them. Waves of fatigue washed over him, and he found it hard to keep his eyes open. His feet felt very far away, and his shoulders ached. The cigarette fell from his fingers, and he leaned backward on the hood. Someone was slapping his leg. He forced his eyes open and looked down. "Okay," Potter said. "We cut your partner loose and we got him on the stretcher. Want to lock up and get moving?" Tanner nodded and jumped down. He sank almost up to his boot tops when he hit, but he closed the cab and staggered toward the old man in buckskin. They began walking across country, and after awhile it became mechanical. Samuel Potter kept up a steady line of chatter as he led the way, rifle resting in the crook of his arm. Maybe it was to keep Tanner awake. "It's not too far, son, and it'll be pretty easy going in just a few minutes now. What'd you say your name was anyhow?" "Hell," said Tanner. "Beg pardon?" "Hell. Hell's my name. Hell Tanner." am Potter chuckled. "That's a pretty mean name, mister. If it's okay with you, I'll introduce you to my wife and the youngest as 'Mister Tanner'. All right?" "That's just fine," Tanner gasped, pulling his boots out of the mire with a sucking sound. "We'd sure miss them Boston traders. I hope you make it in time."  "What is it that they do?" "They keep shops in Albany, and twice a year they give a fair -- spring and fall. They carry all sort of things we need -- needles, thread, pepper, kettles, pans, seed, guns and ammo, all kind of things -- and the fairs are pretty good times, too. Most anybody between here and there would help you along. Hope you make it. We'll get you off to a good start again." They reached higher, drier ground. "You mean it's pretty clear sailing after this?" "Well, no. But I'll help you on a map and tell you what to look out for." "I got mine with me," said Tanner, as they topped a hill, and he saw a farm house off in the distance. "That your place?" "Correct. It ain't much further now. Real easy walkin' -- an' you just lean on my shoulder if you get tired." "I can make it," said Tanner. "It's just that I had so many of those pills to keep me awake that I'm starting to feel all the sleep I've been missing. I'll be okay." "You'll get to sleep real soon now. And when you're awake again, we'll go over that map of yours, and you can write in all the places I tell you about." "Good scene," said Tanner, "good scene," and he put his hand on Sam's shoulder then and staggered along beside him, feeling almost drunk and wishing he were. After a hazy eternity he saw the house before him, then the door. The door swung open, and he felt himself falling forward, and that was it. S leep. Blackness, distant voices, more blackness. Wherever he lay, it was soft, and he turned over onto his other side and went away again. When everything finally flowed together into a coherent ball and he opened his eyes, there was light streaming in through the window to his right, falling in rectangles upon the patchwork quilt that covered him. He groaned, stretched, rubbed his eyes and scratched his beard. He surveyed the room carefully: polished wooden floors with handwoven rugs of blue and red and gray scattered about them, a dresser holding a white enamel basin with a few black spots up near its lip where some of the enamel had chipped away, a mirror on the wall behind him and above all that, a spindly looking rocker near the window, a print cushion on its seat, a small table against the other wall with a chair pushed in beneath it, books and paper and pen and ink on the table, a handstitrihed sampler on the wall asking God to Bless, a blue and green print of a waterfall on the other wall. He sat up, discovered he was naked, looked around for his clothing. It was nowhere in sight. As he sat there, deciding whether or not to call out, the door opened, and Sam walked in. He carried Tanner's clothing, clean and neatly folded, over one arm. In his other hand he carried his boots, and they shone like wet midnight. "Heard you stirring around," he said. "How you feeling now?" "A lot better, thanks." "We've got a bath all drawn. Just have to dump in a couple buckets of hot, and it's all yours. I'll have the boys carry it in in a minute, and some soap and towels." Tanner bit his lip, but he didn't want to seem inhospitable to fiis benefactor, so he nodded an# forced a smile then. "That'll be fine." "... And there's a razor and a scissors on the dresser -- whichever you might want." He nodded again. Sam set his clothes down on the rocker and his boots on the floor beside it, then left the room. Soon Roderick and Calibap brought in the tub, spread some sacks and set it upon them. "How you feeling?" one of them asked. (Tanner wasn't sure Which was which. They both seemed graceful as scarecrows, and their mouths were packed full of white teeth.) "Real good," he said. "Bet you're hungry," said the other. "You slep' all afternoon yesterday and all night and most of this morning." "You know it," said Tanner. "How's my partner?" The nearer one shook his head, and, "Still sleeping and sicldy," he said. "The Doc should be here soon. Our kid brother went after him last night." They turned to leave, and the one who had been speaking added, "Soon as you get cleaned up, Ma'll fix you something to eat. Cal and me are going out now to try and get your rig loose. Bad'll tell you about the roads while you eat." "Thanks." "Good morning to you." " 'Morning." They closed the door behind them as they left. 'T'anner got up and moved to the mirror, studied himself. "Well, just this once," he muttered. Then he washed his face and trimmed his beard and cut his hair. Then, gritting his teeth, he lowered himself into the tub, soaped up and scrubbed. The water grew gray and scummy beneath the suds. He splashed out and toweled himself down and dressed. He was starched and crinkly and smelled faintly of disinfectant. He smiled at his darkeyed reflection and lit a cigarette. He combed his hair and studied the stranger. "Damn! I'm beautiful!" he chuckled, and then he opened the door and entered the kitchen. Sam was sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee, and his wife Who was short and heavy and wore long gray skirts was facing in the other direction, leaning over the stove. She turned, and he saw that her face was large, with bulging red cheeks that dimpled and a little white scar in the middle of her forehead. Her hair was brown, shot through with gray, and pulled back into a knot. She bobbed her head and smiled a "Good morning" at him. " 'Morning," he replied. "I'm afraid I left kind of a mess in the other room." "Don't worry about that," said Sam. "Seat yourself, and we'll have you some breakfast in a minute. The boys told you about your friend?" Tanner nodded. As she placed a cup of coffee in front of Tanner, Sam said, "Wife's name's Susan." "How do," she said. "Hi." "Now, then, I got your map here. Saw it sticking out of your jacket. That's your gun hanging aside the door, too. Anyhows, I've been figuring and I think the best way you could head would be up to Albany and then go along the old Route #, which is in pretty good shape." He spread the map and pointed as he talked. "Now, it won't be all of a picnic," he said, "but it looks like the cleanest and fastest way in -- " "Breakfast," said his wife 'and pushed the map aside to set a plate full of eggs and bacon and sausages in front of Tanner and another one, holding four pieces of toast, next to it. There was marmalade, jam, jelly and butter on the table, and Tanner helped himself to it and sipped the coffee and filled the empty places inside while Sam talked. He told him about the gangs that ran between Boston and Albany on bikes, hijacking anything they could, and that was the reason most cargo went in convoys with shotgun riders aboard. "But you don't have to worry, with that rig of yours, do you?" he asked, and Tanner said, "Hope not," and wolfed down Wore food. He wondered, though, if they were anything like his old pack, and he hoped not, again, for both their sakes. Tanner raised his coffee cup, and he heard a sound outside. nphe door opened, and a boy ran into the kitchen. Tanner figured him as between ten and twelve years of age. An older man followed him, carrying the traditional black bag. "We're here! We're here!" cried the boy, and Sam stood and shook hands with the man, so Tanner figured he should, too. He wiped his mouth and gripped the man's hand and said, "My partner sort of went out of his head. He jumped me, and we had a fight. I shoved him, and he banged his head on the dashboard." The doctor, a darkhaired man, probably in his late forties, wore a dark suit. His face was heavily lined, and his eyes looked tired. He nodded. Sam said, "I'll take you to him," and he led him out through the door at the other end of the kitchen. Tanner reseated himself and picked up the last piece of toast. Susan refilled his coffee cup, and he nodded to her. "My name's Jerry," said the boy, seating himself in his father's abandoned chair. "Is your name, mister, really Hell?" "Hush, you!" said 'his mother. " 'Fraid so," said Tanner. "... And you drove all the way across the country? Through the Alley?" "So far." "What was it like?" "Mean." "What ail'd you see?" "Bats as big as this kitchen -- some of them even bigger -- on the other side of the Missus Hip. Lot of them in Saint Louis." "What'd you do?" "Shot 'em. Burnt 'em. Drove through 'em." "What else you see?" "Gila monsters. Big, technicolor lizards -- the size of a ' bam. Dust Devils -- big circling winds that sucked up one oar. Fire-topped mountains. Real big thorn bushes that we had to burn. Drove through some storms. Drove over places where the ground was like glass. Drove along where the ground was shaking. Drove around big craters, all radioactive." "Wish I could do that some day." "Maybe you will, some day." Tanner finished the food and lit a cigarette and sipped the coffee. "Real good breakfast," he called out. "Best I've eaten in days. Thanks." Susan smiled, then said, "Jerry, don't go an' pester the man." i "No bother, Missus. He's okay." "What's that ring on your hand?" said Jerry. "It looks like a snake." "That's what it is," said Tanner, pulling it off. "If is sterling silver with red glass eyes, and I got it in a place called Tijuana. Here. You keep it." CT couldn't take that," said the boy, and he looked at his mother, his eyes asking if he could. She shook her head from left to right, and Tanner saw it and said, "Your folks were good enough to help me out and get a Doc for my partner and feed me and give me a place to sleep. I'm sure they won't mind if I want to show my appreciation a little bit and give you this ring," and Jerry looked back at his mother, and Tanner nodded and she nodded too. Jerry whistled and jumped up and put it on his finger. "It's too big," he said. "Here, let me mash it a bit for you. These spiral kind'll fit anybody if you squeeze them a little." He squeezed the ring and gave it back to the boy to try on. It was still too big, so he squeezed it again and then it fit. Jerry put it on and began to run from the room. "Wait!" his mother said. "What do you say?" He turned around and said, "Thank you, Hell." "Mister Tanner," she said. "Mister Tanner," the boy repeated, and the door banged behind him. "That was good of you," she said. Tanner shrugged. "He liked it," he said. "Glad I could turn him on with it." He finished his coffee and his cigarette, and she gave him another cup, and he lit another cigarette. After a time, Sam and' the doctor came out of the other room, and' Tanner began wondering where the family had slept the night before. Susan poured them both coffee, and they seated themselves at the table to dnhk it. "Your friend's got a concussion," the doctor said. "I can't really tell how serious his condition is without getting X raS, and there's no way of getting them here. I wouldn't recommend moving him, though." Tanner said, "For how long?" "Maybe a few days, maybe a couple weeks. I've left some medication and told Sam what to do for him. Sam says there's a plague in Boston and you've got to hurry. My advice is that you go on without him. Leave him here with the Potters. He'll be taken care of. He can go up to Albany with them for the Spring Fair and make his way to Boston from there on some commercial carrier. I think he'#I foe all right." Tanner thought about it awhile, then nodded. "Okay," he said, "if that's the way it's got to be." "That's what I recommend." They drank their coffee. 'T'anner regarded his freed vehide, said, "I guess I'll be going, then," and nodded to the Potters. "Thanks," he said, and he unlocked the cab, climbed into it and started the engine. He put it into gear, blew the horn twice and started to move. In the screen, he saw the three men waving. He stamped the accelerator, and they were gone from sight. He sped ahead, and the way was easy. The sky was salmon pink. The earth was brown, and there was much green grass. The bright sun caught the day in a silver net. This part of the country seemed virtually untouched by the chaos that had produced the rest of the Alley. Tanner played music, drove along. He passed two tracks on the road and honked nis horn each time. Once, he received a reply. He drove all that day, arfd it was well into the night when he pulled into Albany. The streets themselves were dark, and only a few lights shone from the buildings. He drew up in front of a flickering red sign that said entered. It was small, and there was jukebox music playing, tunes he'd never heard before, and the lighting was poor, and there was sawdust on the floor. He sat down at the bar and pushed the Magnum way down behind his belt so that it didn't show. Then he took off his jacket, because of the heat in the place, and he threw it on the stool next to Ihim. When the man in the white apron approached, he said, "Give me a shot and a beer and a ham sandwich." The man nodded his bald head and threw a shot glass in front of Tanner, which he then filled. Then he siphoned off a foamcapped mug and hollered over his right shoulder. Tanner tossed off the shot and sipped the beer. After awhile, a white plate bearing a sandwich appeared on the sill across from him. After a longer while, the bartender passed, picked it up, and deposited it in front of him. He wrote something on a green chit and tucked it under the corner of the plate. Tanner bit into the sandwich and washed it down with a mouthful of beer. He studied the people about him and decided they made the same noises as people in any other bar he'd ever been in. The old man to his left looked friendly, so he asked him, "Any news about Boston?" The man's chin quivered between words, and it seemed a natural thing for him. "No news at all. Looks like the merchants will close their shops at the end of the week." "What day is today?" "Tuesday." Tanner finished his sandwich and smoked a cigarette while he drank the rest of his beer. Then he looked at the check, and it said, ".#." He tossed a dollar bill on top Of it and turned to go. T Te had taken two steps when  the bartender called out, "Wait a minute, mister." He turned around. "Yeah?" "What you trying to pull?" "What do you mean?" "What do you call this crap?" "What crap?" The man waved Tanner's dollar at him, and he stepped forward and inspected it. "Nothing wrong I can see. What's giving you a pain?" "That ain't money." "You trying to tell me my money's no good?" "That's what I said. I never seen no bill like that." "Well, look at it real careful. Read that print down there at the bottom of it." The room grew quiet. One man got off his stool and walked forward. He held out his hand and said, "Let me see it, Bill." The bartender passed it to him, and the man's eyes widened. "This is drawn on the Bank of the Nation of California." "Well, that's where I'm from," said Tanner. "I'm sorry, it's no good here," said the bartender. "It's the best I got," said Tanner. "Well, nobody'll make good on it around here. You got any Boston money on you?" "Never been to Boston." "Then how the hell'd you get here?" "Drove." "Don't hand me that line of crap, son. Where'd you steal this?" It was the older man who had spoken. "You going to take my money or ain't you?" said Tanner. "I'm not going to take it," said the bartender. "Then screw you," said Tanner, and he turned and walked toward the door. As always, under such circumstances, he was alert to sounds at his back. When he heard the quick footfall, he turned. It was the man who had inspected the bill that stood before him, his right arm extended. Tanner's right hand held his leather jacket, draped over his right shoulder. He swung it with all his strength, forward and down. It struck the man on the top of his head, and he fell. There came up a murmuring, and several people jumped to their feet and moved toward him. Tanner dragged the gun from his belt and said, "Sorry, folks," and he pointed it, and they stopped. "Now you probably ain't about to believe me," he said, "when I tell you that Boston's been hit by the plague, but it's true all right. Or maybe you will, I don't know. But I don't think you're going to believe that I drove here all the way from the nation of California with a car full of Haffikine antiserum. But that's just as right. You send that bill to the big bank in Boston, and they'll change it for you, all right, and you know it. Now I've got to be going, and don't anybody try to stop me. If you think I've been handing you a line, you take a look at what I drive away in. That's all I've got to say." And he backed out the door and covered it while he mounted the cab. Inside, he gunned the engine to life, turned, and roared away. In the rearview screen he could see the knot of people on the walk before the bar, watching him depart. He laughed, and the appleblossom moon hung dead ahead. A lbany, to Boston. A couple hundred miles. He'd managed the worst of it. The terrors of Damnation Alley lay largely at his back now. Night. It flowed about him. The stars seemed brighter than usual. He'd make it, the night seemed to say. He passed between hills. The road wasn't too bad. It wound between trees and high grasses. He passed a truck coming in his direction and dimmed his lights as it approached. It did the same. It must have been around midnight that he came to the crossroads, and the lights suddenly nailed him from two directions. He was bathed in perhaps thirty beams from the left and as many from the right. He pushed the accelerator to the floor, and he heard engine after engine coming to life somewhere at his back. And he recognized the sounds. They were all of them bikes. They swung onto the road behind him. He could have opened fire. He could have braked and laid down a cloud of flame. It was obvious that they didn't know what they were chasing. He could have launched grenades. He refrained, however. It could have beeii him on the lead bike, he decided, all hot on hijack. He felt a certain sad kinship as his hand hovered above the fire-control. Try to outrun them, first. His engine was open wide and roaring, but he couldn't take the hikes. When they began to fire, he knew that he'd have to retaliate. He couldn't risk their hitting a gas tank or blowing out his fires. Their first few shots had been in the nature of a warning. He couldn't risk another barrage. If only they knew... The speaker! He cut in and mashed the button and spoke: "Listen, cats," he said. "All I got's medicine for the sick citizens in Boston. Let me through or you'll hear the noise." A shot followed immediately, so he opened fire with the fifty calibers to the rear. He saw them fall, but they kept firing. So he launched grenades. The firing lessened, but didn't cease. So he hit the brakes, then the flame-throwers. He kept it up for fifteen seconds. There was silence. When the air cleared he studied the screens. fTphey lay all over the road, their bikes upset, their bodies fuming. Several were still seated, and they held rifles and pointed them, and he shot them down. A few still moved, spasmodically, and he was about to dritre on, when he saw one rise and take a few staggering steps and fall again. His hand hesitated on the gearshift. It was a girl. He thought about it for perhaps five seconds, then jumped down from the cab and ran toward her. As he did, one man raised himself on an elbow and picked up a fallen rifle. Tanner shot him twice and kept running, pistol in hand. The girl was crawling toward a man whose face had been shot away. Other bodies twisted about Tanner now, there on the road, in the glare of the tail beacons. Blood and black leather, the sounds of moaning and the stench of burnt flesh were all about him. When he got to the girl's side, she cursed him softly as he stopped. None of the blood about her seemed to be her own. He dragged her to her feet and her eyes began to fill with tears. Everyone else was dead or dying, so Tanner picked her up in his arms and carried her back to the car. He reclined the passenger seat and put her into it, moving the weapons into the rear seat, out of her reach. Then he gunned the engine and moved forward. In the rearview screen he saw two figures rise to their feet, then fall again. She was a tall girl, with long, uncombed hair the color of dirt. She had a strong chin and a wide mouth and there were dark circles under her eyes. A single faint line crossed her forehead, and she had all of her teeth. The right side of her face was flushed, as if sunburnt. Her left trouser leg was tom and dirty. He guessed that she'd caught the edge of his flame and fallen from her bike. C CX#'ou okay?" he asked, when her sobbing had diminished to a moist sniffing sound. "What's it to you?" she said, raising a hand to her cheek. Tanner shrugged. "Just being friendly." "You killed most of my gang." "What would they have done to me?" "They would have stomped you, mister, if it weren't for this fancy car of yours." "It ain't really mine," he said. "It belongs to the nation of California." "This thing don't come front California." "The hell it don't. I drove it." She sat up straight then and began rubbing her leg. Tanner lit a cigarette. "Give me a cigarette?" she said. He passed her the one he had lighted, lit himself another. As he handed it to her, her eyes rested on his tattoo. "What's that?" "My name." "Hell?" "Hell." "Where'd you get a name like that?" "From my old man." They smoked awhile, then she said, "Why'd you run the Alley?" "Because it was the only way I could get them to turn me loose." "From where?" "The place with horizontal Venetian blinds. I was doing time." "They let you go? Why?" "Because of the big sick. I'm bringing in Haffikine antiserum." "You're Hell Tanner." "Huh?" "Your last name's Tanner, ain't it?" "That's right. Who told you?" "I heard about you. Everybody thought you died in the Big Raid." "They were wrong." "What was it like?" "I dunno. I was already wearing a zebra suit. That's why I'm still around." "Why'd you pick me up?" " 'Cause you're a chick, and 'cause I didn't want to see you croak." "Thanks. You got anything to eat in here?" "Yeah, there's food in there." He pointed to the refrigerator door. "Help yourself." She did, and as she ate Tanner asked her, "What do they call you?" "Corny," she said. "It's short for Cornelia." "Okay, Corny," he said. "When you're finished eating, you start telling me about the road between here and the place." S he nodded, chewed and swallowed. Then, "There's lots of other gangs," she said. "So you'd better be ready to blast them." "I am." "Those screens show you all directions, huh?" "That's right." "Good. The roads are pretty much okay from here on in. There's one big crater you'll come to soon and a couple little volcanos afterwards." "Check." "Outside of them there's nothing to worry about but the Regents and the Devils and the Kings and the Lovers. That's about it." Tanner nodded. "How big are those clubs?" "I don't know for sure, but the Kings are the biggest They've got a coupla hundred." "What was your club?" "The Studs." "What are you going to do now?" "Whatever you tell me." "Okay, Corny. I'll let you off anywhere along the way that you want me to. If you don't want, you can come on into the city with me." "You call it, Hell. Anywhere you want to go, I'll go along." Her voice was deep, and her words came slowly, and her tone sandpapered his eardrums just a bit. She had long legs and heavy thighs beneath the tight denim. Tanner licked his lips and studied the screens. Did he want to keep her around for awhile? The road was suddenly wet. It was covered with hundreds of fishes, and more were falling from the sky. There followed several loud reports from overhead. The blue light began in the north. Tanner raced on, and suddenly there was water all about him. It fell upon his car, it dimmed his screens. The sky had grown black again, and the bansheewail sounded above him. He skidded around a sharp curve in the road. He turned up liis lights. The rain ceased, but the wailing continued. He ran for fifteen minutes before it built up into a roai'. The girl stared at the screens and occasionally glanced at Tanner. "What're you going to do?" she finally asked him. "Outrun it, if I can," he said. "It's dark for as far ahead as I can see. I don't think you can do it." "Neither do I, but what does that leave?" "Hole up someplace." "If you know where, you show me." "There's a place a few miles further ahead -- a bridge you can get under." "Okay, that's for us. Sing out when you see it." Qhe pulled off her boots and  rubbed her feet. He gave her another cigarette. "Hey, Corny -- I just thought -- there's a medicine chest over there to your right. Yeah, that's it. It should have some damn kind of salve in it you can smear on your face to take the bite out." She found a tube of something and rubbed some of it into her cheek, smiled slightly and replaced it. "Feel any better?" "Yes. Thanks." The stones began to fall, the blue to spread. The sky pulsed, grew brighter. "I don't like the looks of this one." "I don't like the looks of any of them." "It seems there's been an awful lot this past week." "Yeah. I've heard it said maybe the winds are dying down -- that the sky might be purging itself." "That'd be nice," said Tanner. "Then we might be able to see it the way it used to look -- blue all the time, and with clouds. You know about clouds." "I heard about them." "White, puffy things that just sort of drift across -- sometimes gray. They don't drop anything except rain, and not always that." "Yeah, I know." "You ever see any out in L.A.?" "No." The yellow streaks began, and the black lines writhed like snakes. The stonefall rattled heavily upon the roof and the hood. More water began to fall, and a fog rose up. Tanner was forced to slow, and then it seemed as if sledgehammers beat upon the ear. "We won't make it," she said. "The hell you say. This thing's built to take it -- and what's that off in the distance?" "The bridge!" she said, moving forward. "That's it! Pull off the road to the left and go down. That's a dry riverbed beneath." Then the lightning began to fall. It flamed, flashed about them. They passed a burning tree, and there were still fishes in the roadway. Tanner turned left as he approached the bridge. He slowed to a crawl and made his way over the shoulder and down the slick, muddy grade. When he hit the damp riverbed he turned right. He nosed it in under the bridge, and they were all alone there. Some waters trickled past them, and the lightnings continued to flash. The sky was a shifting kaleidoscope and constant came the thunder. He could hear a sound like hail on the bridge above them. "We're safe," he said and killed the engine. "Are the doors locked?" "They do it automatically." Tanner turned off the outside lights. "Wish I could buy you a drink, besides coffee." "Coffee'd be good, just right." "Okay, it's on the way," and he cleaned out the pot and filled it and plugged it in. nphey sat there and smoked as the storm raged, and he said, "You know, it's a kind of nice feeling being all snug as a rat in a hole while everything goes to hell outside. Listen to that bastard come down! And we couldn't care less." "I suppose so," she said. "What're you going to do after you make it in to Boston?" "Oh, I don't know... Maybe get a job, scrape up some loot and maybe open a bike shop or a garage. Either one'd be nice." "Sounds good. You going to ride much yourself?" "You bet. I don't suppose they have any good clubs in town?" "No. They're all roadrunners." "Thought so. Maybe I'll organize my own." He reached out and touched her hand, then squeezed I it. "I can buy you a drink." "What do you mean?" She drew a plastic flask from the right side pocket of her jacket. She uncapped it and passed it to him. "Here." He took a mouthful and gulped it, coughed, took a second, then handed it back. "Great! You're a woman of unSuspected potential and like that. Thanks." "Don't mention it," and she took a drink herself and set the flask on the dash. "Cigarette?" "Just a minute." He lit two, passed her one. "There you are, Corny." "Thanks. I'd like to help you finish this ran." "How come?" "I got nothing else to do. My crowd's all gone away, and I've got nobody else to run with now. Also, if you make it, you'll be a big man. Like capital letters...Think you might keep me around after that?" "Maybe. What are you like?" "Oh, I'm real nice. I'll even mb your shoulders for you when they're sore." "They're sore now." "I thought so. Give me a lean." TT e bent toward her, and she began to rub his shoulders. Her hands were quick and strong. "You do that good, girl." "Thanks." He straightened up, leaned back. Then he reached out, took the flask and had another drink. She took a small sip when he passed it to tier. The furies rode about them, but the bridge above stood the siege. Tanner turned off the lights. "Let's make it," he said, and he seized her and drew her to him. She did not resist him, and he found her belt buckle and unfastened it. Then he started on the buttons. After awhile, he reclined her seat. "Will you keep me?" she asked him. "Sure." "I'll help you. I'll do anything you say to get you through." "Great." "After all, if Boston goes, then we go, too." "You bet." Then they didn't say much more. There was violence in the skies, and after that came darkness and quiet. XV X TThen Tanner awoke, it was   morning and Hie storm had ceased. He repaired himself to the rear of the vehicle and after that assumed the driver's seat once more. Cornelia did not awaken as he gunned the engine to life and started' up the weed-infested slope of the hillside. The sky was light once more, and the road was strewn with rubble. Tanner wove along it, heading toward the pale sun, and after awhile Cornelia stretched. "Ungh," she said, and Tanner agreed. "My shoulders are better now," he told her. "Good," and Tanner headed up a hill, slowly as the day dimmed and one huge black line became the Devil's highway down the middle of the sky. As he drove through a wooded valley, the rain began to fall. The girl had returned from the rear of the vehicle and was preparing breakfast when Tanner saw the tiny dot on the horizon, switched over to his telescope lenses and tried to outrun what he saw. Cornelia looked up. There were bikes, bikes, and more bikes on their trail. "Those your people?" Tanner asked. "No. You took mine yesterday." "Too bad," said Tanner, and he pushed the accelerator to the floor and hoped for a storm. They squealed around a curve and climbed another hill. His pursuers drew nearer. He switched back from telescope to normal scanning, but even then he could see the size of the crowd that approached. "It must be the Kings," she said. "They're the biggest club around." "Too bad," said Tanner. "For them or for us?" "Both." She smiled. "I'd like to see how you work this thing." "It looks like you're going to get a chance. They're gaining on us like mad." The rain lessened, but the fogs grew heavier. Tanner could see their lights, though, over a quarter mile to his rear, and he did not turn his own on. He estimated a hundred to a hundred fifty pursuers that cold, dark morning, and he asked, "How near are we to Boston?" "Maybe ninety miles," she told him. "Too bad they're chasing us instead of coming toward us," he said, as he primed I his flames and set an adjustment which brought cross-hairs into focus on his rearview screen.  V "That's a cross. I'm going to crucify them, lady," and she smiled at this and squeezed his arm. "Can I help? I hate those bloody mothers." "In a little while," said Tanner. "In a little while, I'm sure," and he reached into the rear seat and fetched out the six hand grenades and hung them on his wide, black belt. He passed I the rifle to the girl. "Hang onto this," he said, and stuck the .# behind I his belt. "Do you know how to use that thing?" "Yes," she replied immediately. "Good." He kept watching the lights that danced on the screen. "Why the hell doesn't this storm break?" he said, as the lights came closer and he could make out shapes within the fog. When they were within a hundred feet he fired the first grenade. It arched through the gray air, and five seconds later there was a bright flash to his rear, burning within a thunderclap. The lights immediately behind him remained, and he touched the fifty-calibers, moving the crosshairs from side to side. The guns shattered their loud syllables, and he launched another grenade. With the second flash, he began to climb another hill. "Did you stop them?" "For a time, maybe. I still see some lights, but farther back." After five minutes, they had reached the top, a place where the fogs were cleared and the dark sky was visible above them. Then they started downward once more, and a wall of stone and shale and dirt rose to their right. Tanner considered it as they descended. When the road leveled and he decided they had reached the bottom, he turned on his brightest lights and looked for a place where the road's shoulders were wide. To his rear, there were suddenly rows of descending lights. He found the place where the road was sufficiently wide, and he skidded through a U turn until he was facing the shaggy cliff, now to his left, and his pursuers were coming dead on. He elevated his rockets, fired one, elevated them five degrees more, fired two, elevated them another five degrees, fired three. Then he lowered them fifteen and fired another. There were brightnesses within the fog, and he heard the stones rattling on the road and felt the vibration as the rockslide began. He swung toward his right as he backed the vehicle and fired two ahead. There was dust mixed with the fog now, and the vibration continued. He turned and headed forward once more. "I hope that'll hold 'em," he said, and he lit two cigarettes and passed one to the girl. A fter five minutes they were on higher ground again and tire winds came and whipped at the fog, and far to the rear there were still some lights. As they topped a high rise, his radiation gauge began to register an above-normal reading. He sought in all directions and saw the crater far off ahead. "That's it," he heard her say. "You've got to leave the road there. Bear to the right and go around that way when you get there." "I'll do that thing." He heard gunshots from behind him, for the first time that day, and though he adjusted the crosshairs he did not fire his own weapons. The distance was still too great. "You must have cut them in half," she said, staring into the screen. "More than that. They're a tough bunch, though." "I gather," and he plowed the field of mists and checked his supply of grenades for the launcher and saw that he was running low. He swung off the road to his right when he began bumping along over fractured concrete. The radiation level was quite high by then. The crater was slightly more than a thousand yards to his left. The lights to his rear fanned out, grew brighter. He drew a bead on the brightest and fired. It went out. "There's another down," he remarked, as they raced across the hard-baked plain. The rains came more heavily, and he sighted on another light and fired. It, too, went out. Now, though he heard the sounds of their weapons about him once again. He switched to his right-hand guns and saw the cross-hairs leap into life on that screen. As three vehicles moved in to flank him from that direction, he opened up and cut them down. There was more firing at his back, and he ignored it as he negotiated the way. "I count twenty-seven lights," Cornelia said. Tanner wove his way across a field of boulders. He lit another cigarette. Five minutes later, they were running on both sides of him. He had held back again for that moment, to conserve ammunition and to be sure of his targets. He fired then, though, at every light within range, and he floored the accelerator and swerved around rocks. "Five of them are down," she said, but he was listening to the gunfire. He launched a grenade to the rear, and when he tried to launch a second there came only a clicking sound from the control. He launched one to either side and then paused for a second. "If they get close enough, I'll show them some fire," he said, and they continued on around the crater. He fired only at individual targets then, when he was certain they were within range. He took two more before he struck the broken roadbed. # # TT eep runn  n g parallel to it," she told him. "There's a trail here. Y ou can't drive on that stuff till another mile or so." Shots ricocheted from off his armored sides, and he continued to return the fire. He raced along an alleyway of twisted trees, like those he had seen near other craters, and the mists hung like pennons about their brances. He heard the rattle of the increasing rains. When we hit the roadway once again, he regarded the lights to his rear and asked, "How many do you count now?" "It lookslike around twenty. How are we doing?" "I'm just worried about the tires. They can take a lot, but they can be shot out. The only other thing that bothers me is that a stray shot might clip one of the 'eyes.' Outside of that we're bullet-proof enough. Even if they manage to stop us, they'll have to pry us out." The bikes drew near once again, and he saw the bright flashes and heard the reports of the riders' guns. "Hold tight," he said, and he hit the brakes and they skidded on the wet pavement. The lights grew suddenly bright, and he unleashed his rear flame. As some bikes skirted him, he cut in the side flames and held them that way. Then he took his foot off the brake and floored the accelerator without waiting to assess the damage he had done. They sped ahead, and Tanner heard Cornelia's laughter. "God! You're taking them, Hell! You're faking the whole damn club!" "It ain't that much fun," he said. Then, "See any lights?" She watched for a time, said, "No," then said, "Three," then, "Seven," and finally, "Thirteen." Tanner said, "Damn." The radiation level fell and there came crashes amid the roaring overhead. A light fall of gravel descended for perhaps half a minute, along with the rain. "We're running low," he said. "On what?" "Everything : Luck, fuel, ammo. Maybe you'd have been better off if I'd left you where I found you." "No," she said. "I'm with you, the whole line." "Then you're nuts," lie said. "I haven't been hurt yet. When I am, it might be a different tune." "Maybe," She said. "Wait and hear how I sing." He reached out and squeezed her thigh. "Okay, Corny. You've been okay so far. Hang onto that piece, and we'll see what happens." He reached for another cigarette, found the pack empty, cursed. He gestured toward a compartment, and she opened it and got him a fresh pack. She tore it open and lit him one. "Thanks." "Why're they staying out of range?" "Maybe they're just going to pace us. I don't know." r T A hen the fogs began to lift. By the time Tanner had finished his cigarette, the visibility had improved greatly. He could make out the dark forms crouched atop their bikes, following, following, nothing more. "If they just want to keep us company, then I don't care," he said. "Let them." But there came more gunfire after a time, and he heard a tire go. He slowed, but continued. He took careful aim and strafed them. Several fell. More gunshots sounded from behind. Another tire blew, and he hit the brakes and skidded, turning about as he slowed. When he faced them, he shot his anchors, to hold him in place, and he discharged his rockets, one after another, at a level parallel to the road. He opened up with his guns and sprayed them as they veered off and approached him from the sides. Then he opened fire to the left. Then the right. He emptied the right-hand guns, then switched back to the left. He launched the remaining grenades. The gunfire died down, except for five sources -- three to his left and two to his right -- coming from somewhere within the trees that lined the road now. Broken bikes and bodies lay behind him, some still smouldering. The pavement was potted and cracked in many places. He turned the car and proceeded ahead on six wheels. "We're out of ammo, Corny," he told her. "Well, we took an awful lot of them..." "Yeah." As he drove on, he saw five bikes move onto the road. They stayed a good distance behind him, but they stayed. He tried the radio, but there was no response. He hit the brakes and stopped, and the bikes stopped, too, staying well to the rear. "Well, at least they're scared of us. They think we still have teeth." "We do," she said. "Yeah, but not the ones they're thinking about." "Better yet." "Glad I met you," said Tanner. "I can use an optimist. There must be a pony, huh?" She nodded; he put it into gear and started forward abruptly. The motorcycles moved ahead also, and they maintained a safe distance. Tanner watchedthem in the screens and cursed them as they followed. After awhile they drew nearer again. Tanner roared on for half an hour, and the remaining five edged closer and closer. X "ff Then they drew near enough, ' ' they began to fire, rifles resting on their handlebars. Tanner heard several low ricochets, and then another tire went out. He stopped once more, and the bikes did, too, remaining just out of range of his flames. He cursed and ground ahead again. The car wobbled as he drove, listing to ' the left. A wrecked pickup truck stood smashed against a tree to his right, its hunched driver a skeleton, its windows smashed and tires missing. Half a sun now stood in the heavens, reaching after nine o'clock; fogghosts drifted before them, and the dark band in the sky undulated, and more rain fell from it, mixed with dust and small stones and bits of metal. Tanner said, "Good" as the pinging sounds began, and, "Hope it gets a lot worse," and his wish came true as the ground began to shake and tiie blue light began in the north. There came a booming within the roar, and there were several answering crashes as heaps of rubble appeared to his right. "Hope the next one falls right on our buddies back there," he said. He saw an orange glow ahead and to his right. It had been there for several minutes, but he had not become conscious of it until just then. "Volcano," she said when he indicated it. "It means we've got another sixty-five, seventy miles to go." He could not tell whether any more shooting was occurring. The sounds coming from overhead and around him were sufficient to mask any gunfire, and the fall of gravel upon the car covered any ricocheting rounds. The five headlights to his rear maintained their pace. "Why don't they give up?" he said. "They're taking a pretty bad beating." "They're used to it," she replied, "and they're riding for blood, which makes a difference." Tanner fetched the .#, Magnum from the door clip and passed it to her. "Hang onto this, too," he said, and he found a box of ammo in the second compartment and, "Put these in your pocket," he added. He stuffed ammo for the .# into his own jacket. He adjusted the hand grenades upon his belt. Then the five headlights behind him suddenly became four, and the others slowed, grew smaller. "Accident, I hope," he remarked. They sighted the mountain, a jag-topped cone bleeding fires upon the sky. They left the road and swung far to the left, upon a well marked trail. It took twenty minutes to pass the mountain, and by then he sighted their pursuers once again -- four lights to the rear, gaining slowly. He came upon the road once more and hurried ahead across the shaking ground. The yellow lights moved through the heavens; and heavy, shapeless objects, some several feet across, crashed to the earth about them. The car was buffeted by winds, listed as they moved, would not proceed above forty miles an hour. The radio contained only static. Tanner rounded a sharp curve, hit the brake, turned off his lights, pulled the pin from a hand grenade and waited with his hand upon the door. ' ' the screen, he flung the door wide, leaped down and hurled the grenade through the abrasive rain. He was into the cab and moving again before he heard the explosion, before the flash accurred upon his screen. The girl laughed almost hysterically as the car moved ahead, "You got 'em, Hell, You got 'em!" she cried. Tanner took a drink from her flask, and she finished its final brown mouthful. He lit them cigarettes: The road grew cracked, pitted, slippery. They topped a high rise and headed downhill. The fog thickened as they descended. Lights appeared before him, and he readied the flame. There were no hostilities, however, as he passed a truck headed in the other direction. Within the next half hour he passed two more. There came more lightning, and fist-sized rocks began to fall. Tanner left the road and sought shelter within a grove of high trees. The sky grew completely black, losing even its blue aurora. They waited for three hours, but the storm did not let up. One by one, the four view-screens went dead and the fifth only showed the blackness beneath the car. Tanner's last sight in the rearview screen was of a huge splintered tree with a broken, swaying branch that was about ready to fall off. There were several terrific crashes upon the hood and tire car shook with each. The roof above their heads was deeply dented in three places. The lights grew dim, then bright again. The radio would not produce even static any more. "I think we've had it," 'he said. "Yeah." "How far are we?" "Maybe fifty miles away." "There's still a chance, if we live through this." "What chance?" "I've got two bikes in the rear." They reclined their seats and smoked and waited, and after awhile the lights went out. The storm continued all that day and into the night. They slept within the broken body of the car, and it sheltered them. When the storm ceased, Tanner opened the door and looked outside, closed it again. "We'll wait til morning," he said, and she held his Hell-printed hand, and they slept. I n the morning, Tanner walked back through the mud and the fallen branches, the rocks and the dead fishes, and he opened the rear compartment and unbolted the bikes. He fueled them and checked them out and wheeled them down the ramp. He crawled into the back of the cab then and removed the rear seat. Beneath it, in the storage compartment, was the large aluminum chest that was his cargo. It was bolted shut. He lifted it, carried it out to his bike. "That the stuff?" she asked. He nodded and placed it on the ground. "I don't know how the stuff is stored, if it's refrigerated in there or what," he said, "but it ain't too heavy that I might not be able to get it on the back of my bike. There's straps in the far right compartment. Go get 'em and give me a hand -- and get me my pardon out of the middle compartment. It's in a big cardboard envelope." She returned with these things and helped him secure the container on the rear of his bike. He wrapped extra straps around his left bicep, and they wheeled the machines to the road. "We'll have to take it kind of slow," he said, and he slung the rifle over his right shoulder, drew on his gloves and kicked his bike to life. She did the same with hers, and they moved forward, side by side along the highway. After they had been riding for perhaps an hour, two cars passed them, heading west. In the rear seats of both there were children, who pressed their faces to the glass and watched them as they went by. The driver of the second car was in his shirtsleeves, and he wore a black shoulder holster. The sky was pink, and there were three black lines that looked as if they could be worth worrying about. The sun was a rosetinted silvery thing, and pale, but Tanner still had to raise his goggles against it. The pack was riding securely, and Tanner leaned into the dawn and thought about Boston. There was a light mist on the foot of every hill, and the air was cool and moist. Another car passed them. The road surface began to improve. I t was around noontime when he heard the first shot above the thunder of their engines. At first he thought it was a backfire, but it came again, and Corny cried out and swerved off the road and struck a boulder. Tanner cut to the left, braking, as two more shots rang about him, and he leaned his bike against a tree and threw himself flat. A shot struck near his head and he could tell the direction from which it had come. He crawled into a ditch and drew off his right glove. He could see his girl lying where she had fallen, and there was blood on her breast. She did not move. He raised the # and fired. The shot was returned, and he moved to his left. It had come from a hill about two hundred feet away, and he thought he saw the rifle's barrel. He aimed at it and fired again. The shot was returned, and he wormed his way further left. He crawled perhaps fifteen feet until he reached a pile of rubble he could crouch behind. Then he pulled the pin on a grenade, stood and hurled it. He threw himself flat as another shot rang out, and he took another grenade into his hand. There was a roar and a rumble and a mighty flash, and the junk fell about him as he leaped to his feet and threw the second one, taking better aim this time. After the second explosion, he ran forward with his rifle in his hands, but it wasn't necessary. He only found a few small pieces of the man, and none at all of his rifle. He returned to Cornelia. She wasn't breathing, and her heart had stopped beating, and he knew what that meant. He carried her back to the ditch in which he had lain and he made it deeper by digging, using his hands. He laid her down in it and he covered her with the dirt. Then he wheeled her machine over, set the kickstand, and stood it upon the grave. With his knife, he scratched upon the fender: Her name was Cornelia and I don't know how old she was or where she came from or what her last name was but she was Hell Tanner's girl and I love her Then he went back to his own machine, started it and drove ahead. Boston was maybe thirty miles away. Ti e drove along, and after a time he heard the sound of another bike. A Harley cut onto the road from the dirt path to his left, and he couldn't try running away from it because he couldn't speed with the load he bore. So he allowed himself to be paced. After awhile, the rider of the other bike -- a tall, thin man with a flaming beard -- drew up alongside him, to the left. He smiled and raised his right hand and let it fall and then gestured with his head. Tanner braked and came to a halt. Redbeard was right beside him when he did. He said, "Where you going, man?" "Boston." "What you got in the box?" "Like, drugs." "What kind?" and the man's eyebrows arched and the smile came again onto his lips. "For the plague they got going there." "Oh. I thought you meant the other kind." "Sorry." The man held a pistol in his right hand and he said, "Get off your bike." Tanner did this, and the man raised his left hand and another man came forward from the brush at the side of the road. "Wheel this guy's bike about two hundred yards up the highway," he said, "and park it in the middle. Then take your place." "What's the bit?" Tanner asked. The man ignored the question. "Who are you?" he asked. "Hell's the name," he replied. "Hell Tanner." "Go to hell." Tanner shrugged. "You ain't Hell Tanner." Tanner drew off his right glove and extended his fist. "There's my name." "I don't believe it," said the man, after he had studied the tattoo. "Have it your way, citizen." "Shut up!" and he raised his left hand once more, now that the other man had parked the machine on the road and returned to a place somewhere within the trees to the right. In response to his gesture, there was movement within the brush. Bikes were pushed forward by their riders, and they lined the road, twenty or thirty on either side. "There you are," said the man. "My name's Big Brother." "Glad to meet you." "You know what you're going to do, mister?" "I can really just about guess." "You're going to walk up to your bike and claim it." Tanner smiled. "How hard's that going to be?" "No trouble at all. Just start walking. Give me your rifle first, though." Big Brother raised his hand again, and one by one the engines came to life. "Okay," he said. "Now." "You think I'm crazy, man?" "No. Start walking. Your rifle." npanner unslung it and he continued the arc. He caught Big Brother beneath his red beard, and he felt the bullet go into him. Then he dropped the weapon and hauled forth a grenade, pulled the pin and tossed it amid the left side of the gauntlet. Before it exploded, he'd pulled the pin on another and thrown it to his right. By then, though, vehicles were moving forward, heading toward him. He fell upon the rifle and shouldered it in a prone firing position. As he did this, the first explosion occurred. He was firing before the second one went off. He dropped three of them, then got to his feet and scrambled, firing from the hip. He made it behind Big Brother's fallen bike and fired from there. Big Brother was still fallen, too. When the rifle was empty, he didn't have time to reload. He fired the .# four times before a tire chain brought him down. He awoke to the roaring of the engines. They were circling him. When he got to his feet, a handlebar knocked him down again. Two bikes were moving about him, and there were many dead people upon the road. He struggled to rise again, was knocked off his feet. Big Brother rode one of the bikes, and a guy he hadn't seen rode the other. He crawled to the right, and there was pain in his fingertips as the tires passed over them. But he saw a rock and waited till a driver was near. Then he stood again and threw himself upon the man as he passed, the rock he had seized rising and falling, once, in his right hand. He was carried along as this occurred, and as he fell he felt the second bike strike him. There were terrible pains in his side, and his body felt broken, but he reached out even as this occurred and caught hold of a strut on the side of the bike and was dragged along by it. Before he had been dragged ten feet, he had drawn his SS dagger from his boot. He struck upward and felt a thin metal wall give way. Then his hands came loose, and he fell and he smelled the gasoline. His hand dove into his jacket pocket and came out with the Zippo. He had struck the tank on the side of Big Brother's bike, and it jetted forth its contents on the road. Twenty feet ahead, Big Brother was turning. Tanner held the lighter, the lighter with the raised skull of enamel, wings on either side of it. His thumb spun the wheel and the sparks leapt forth, then the flame. He tossed it into the stream of petrol that lay before him, and the flames raced away, tracing a blazing trail upon the concrete. Big Brother had turned and was bearing down upon him when he saw what had happened. His eyes widened, and his red-framed smile went away. He tried to leap off his bike, but it was too late. The exploding gas tank caught him, and he went down with a piece of metal in his head and other pieces elsewhere. Flames splashed over Tanner, and he beat at them feebly with his hands. He raised his head above the blazing carnage and let it fall again. He was bloody and weak and so very tired. He saw his own machine, standing still undamaged on the road ahead. He began crawling toward it. When he reached it, he threw himself across the saddle and lay there for perhaps ten minutes. He vomited twice, and his pains became a steady pulsing. After perhaps an hour, he mounted the bike and brought it to life. He rode for half a mile and then dizziness and the fatigue hit him. He pulled off to the side of the road and concealed his bike as best he could. Then he lay down upon the bare earth and slept. en he awoke, he felt dried blood upon his side. His left hand ached and was swollen. All four fingers felt stiff, and it hurt to try to bend them. His head throbbed and there was a taste of gasoline within his mouth. He was too sore to move, for a long while. His beard had been singed, and his right eye was swollen almost shut. "Corny..." he said, then, "Damn!" Everything came back, like the contents of a powerful dream suddenly spilled into his consciousness. He began to shiver, and there were mists all around him. It was very dark, and his legs were cold; the dampness had soaked completely through his denims. In the distance, he heard a vehide pass. It sounded like a car. He managed to roll over, and he rested his head on his forearm. It seemed to be night, but it could be a black day. As he lay there, his mind went back to his prison cell. It seemed almost a haven now; and he thought of his brother Denny, Who must also be hurting at this moment. He wondered if he had any cracked ribs himself. It felt like it. And he thought of the monsters of the southwest and of dark-eyed Greg, who had tried to chicken out. Was he still living? His mind circled back to L.A. and the old Coast, gone, gone forever now, after the Big Raid. Then Corny walked past him, blood upon her breasts, and he chewed his beard and held his eyes shut very tight. They might have made it together in Boston. How far, now? He got to his knees and crawled until he felt something high and solid. A tree. He. sat with his back to it, and his hand sought the crumpled cigarette pack within his jacket. He drew one forth, smoothed it, then remembered that his lighter lay somewhere back on the highway. He sought through his pockets and found a damp matchbook. The third one lit. The chill went out of his bones as he smoked, and a wave of fever swept over him. He coughed as he was unbuttoning his collar, and it seemed that he tasted blood. His weapons were gone, save for the lump of a single grenade at his belt. Above him, in the darkness, he heard the roaring. After six puffs, the cigarette slipped from his fingers and sizzled out upon the damp mold. His head fell forward, and there was darkness within. There might have been a storm. He didn't remember. When he awoke, he was lying on his right side, the tree to his back. A pink afternoon sun shone down upon him, and the mists were blown away. From somewhere, he heard the sound of a bird. He managed a curse, then realized how dry his throat was. He was suddenly burnt with a terrible thirst. There was a clear puddle about thirty feet away. He crawled to it and drank his fill. It grew muddy as he did so. Then he crawled to where his bike lay hidden and stood beside it. He managed to seat himself upon it, and his hands shook as he lit a cigarette. I t must have taken him an hour to reach the roadway, and he was panting heavily by then. His watch had been broken, so he didn't know the hour. The sun was already lowering at his back when he started out. The winds whipped about him, insulating his consciousness within their burning flow. His cargo rode securely behind him. He had visions of someone opening it and finding a batch of broken bottles. He laughed and cursed, alternately. Several cars passed him, heading in the other direction. He had not seen any heading toward the city. The road was in good condition and he began to pass buildings that seemed in a good state of repair, though deserted. He did not stop. This time he determined not to stop for anything, unless he was stopped. The sun fell farther, and the sky dimmed before him. There were two black lines swaying in the heavens. Then he passed a sign that told him he had # miles farther to go. Ten minutes later he switched on his light. Then he topped a hill and slowed before he began its descent. There were lights below him and in the distance. As he rushed forward, the winds brought to him the sound of a single bell, tolling over and over within the gathering dark. He sniffed a remembered thing upon the air: it was the salt-tang of the sea. The sun was hidden behind the hill as he descended, and he rode within the endless shadow. A single star appeared on the far horizon, between the two black belts. Now there were lights within shadows that he passed, and the buildings moved closer together. He leaned heavily on the handlebars, and the muscles of his shoulders smouldered beneath his jacket. He wished that he had a crash helmet, for he felt increasingly unsteady. He must almost be there. Where would he head once he hit the city proper? They had not told him that. He shook his head to clear it. The street he drove along was deserted. There were no traffic sounds that he could hear. He blew his horn, and its echoes rolled back upon him. There was a light on in the building to his left. He pulled to a stop, crossed the sidewalk and banged on the door. There was no response from within. He tried the door and found it locked. A telephone would mean he could end his trip right there. What if they were all dead inside? The thought occurred to him that just about everybody could be dead by now. He decided to break in. He returned to his bike for a screwdriver, then went to work on the door. He heard the gunshot and the sound of the engine at approximately the same time. T Te turned around quickly, his back against the door, the hand grenade in his gloved right fist. "Hold it!" called out a loudspeaker on the side of the black car that approached. "That shot was a warning! The next one won't be!" Tanner raised his hands to a level with his ears, his right one turned to conceal the grenade. He stepped forward to the curb beside his bike when the car drew up. There were two officers in the car, and the one on the passenger side held a .# pointed at Tanner's middle. "You're under arrest," he said. "Looting." Tanner nodded as the man stepped out of the car. The driver came around the front of the vehicle, a pair of handcuffs in his hand. "Looting," the man with the gun repeated. "You'll pull a real stiff sentence." "Stick your hands out here, boy," said the second cop, and Tanner handed him the grenade pin. The man stared at it, dumbly, for several seconds, then his eyes shot to Tanner's right hand. "God! He's got a bomb!" said the man with the gun. Tanner smiled, then, "Shut up and listen!" he said. "Or else shoot me and we'll all go together when we go. I was trying to get to a telephone. That case on the back of my bike is full of Haffikine antiserum. I brought it from L.A." "You didn't run the Alley on that bike!" "No, I didn't. My car is dead somewhere between here and Albany, and so are a lot of folks who tried to stop me. Now you better take that medicine and get it where it's supposed to go." "You on the level, mister?" "My hand is getting very tired. I am not in good shape." Tanner leaned on his bike. "Here." He pulled his pardon out of his jacket and handed it to the officer with the handcuffs. "That's my pardon," he said. "It's dated just last week and you can see it was made out in California." The officer took the envelope and opened it. He withdrew the paper and studied it. "Looks real," he said. "So Brady made it through..." "He's dead," Tanner said. "Look, I'm hurtin'. Do something!" "My God! Hold it tight! Get in the car and sit down! It'll just take a minute to get the case off and we'll roll. We'll drive to the river and you can throw it in. Squeeze real hard!" nphey unfastened the case and put it in the back of the car. They rolled down the right front window, and Tanner sat next to it with his arm on the outside. The siren screamed, and the pain crept up Tanner's arm to his Shoulder. It would be very easy to let go. "Where do you keep you river?" he asked. "Just a little farther. We'll be there in no time." "Hurry," Tanner said. "That's the bridge up ahead. We'll ride out onto it, and you throw it off -- as far out as you can." "Man, I'm tired! I'm not sure I can make it..." "Hurry, Jerry!" "I am, damn it!. We ain't got wings!" "I feel kind of dizzy, too..." They tore out onto the bridge, and the tires screeched as they halted. Tanner opened the door slowly. The driver's had already slammed shut. He staggered, and they helped him to the railing. He sagged against it when they released him. "I don't think I -- " Then he straightened, drew back his arm and hurled the grenade far out over the waters. He grinned, and the explosion followed, far beneath them, and for a time the waters were troubled. The two officers sighed and Tanner chuckled. "I'm really okay," he said. "I just faked it to bug you." "Why you -- !" Then he collapsed, and they saw the pallor of his face within the beams of their lights. np'he following spring, on the day of its unveiling in Boston Common, when it was discovered that someone had scrawled obscene words on the statue of Hell Tanner, no one thought to ask the logical candidate why he had done it, and the next day it was too late, because he had cut out without leaving a forwarding address. Several cars were reported stolen that day, and one was never seen again in Boston. So they re-veiled his statue, bigger than life, astride a great bronze Harley, and they cleaned him up for hoped-for posterity. But coming upon the Common, the winds still break about him and the heavens still throw gar 'k  "k  for your information mr willy ley Comets cause catastrophes!  Everybody in Christendom knew that at one time. But by now comet fear is probably restricted to rural areas in Europe and, perhaps, our own Bible Belt. We don't have to wonder about the large non-Christian countries of Asia and Africa because there r a i i s, :r#cntcnriicpc ttefom gometenfc itnVlo emiberDcfiafcgcfauffctimitfisamOricnfoDfrgcaa auffaflitfl tor onnomni'c frfdjimm Iv nbvonmmt tiigtidi gtfefjmwortau S(ttfl warfafftm SiftrologifcQm fmb JpifmffcBw ranmrocijng!i(fur(f;ricttmgg(friUj Suf M,Gothardnm ArtTmfiumDantifcantim, P.C.Hiftor.  PhiM'-Mathem.ju grond'furt am #Rapn, l. Tir#th.# , InftaEunttcmporapericulo(a. Fig. #. Title page of one of the many comet pamphlets that flooded Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Translation: Cometa Orientalis: Short and proper Description of the new Comet, which during November of the preceding # Year appeared in the Orient, that is in the direction of Sunrise and was seen by many. Reported on truthful Astrological  Historical grounds by Gotthard Arthusius. Professor of History and PhilosophyMathematics at Frankfurt on the Main. -- The Latin phrase below the picture is the opening sentence of the Second Epistle to Timothy, predicting perilous times. never was any comet fear in those places. Comet fear was, surprising as it may sound, restricted to the Christian countries because it was part of Christian beliefs. Like everything else comet fear grew up slowly; it reached its climax during the years from # to #, when professors of Christian philosophy taught things that one would think to have been mere folklore among happen to have a beautiful example on hand, a #-page pamphlet published in Frankfurt am Main in #, one year after the appearance of the comet of #. (Fig. #.) Gotthard Arthusius, the author of title pamphlet, began with the assertion that the final battle against evil and the Day of Judgment must certainly be approaching. "But because the larger portion of mankind in the world commits evil without regret or hesitation, and lives carelessly in the belief that nobody will learn about their evil ways or even inquire about them; therefore the Son of God does not rely only on the might of his words but from time to time puts other preachers on the high pulpit of his heaven and causes signs and miracles in the sun, the moon and the stars and ignites many a bright light in the clouds in order to wake people from their sinful sleep... We have seen such a sign in our time for Almighty God has put a cruel torch in the sky and shown us a Comet with a very long and burning tail." Scientifically speaking, Arthusius  believed with Aristotle that a comet consisted of burning "vapors" in the upper air; but while Aristotle took the ignition of these vapors to be a natural process and probably accidental, the theologians, and especially the Protestant theologians of the era of comet fear, considered the ignition of these vapors to be literally an act of God. "The Comet has been seen here," Arthusius continued, "on ## November in the morning at # o'clock but before the Comet was ignited one did see a few rays in the morning sky in the precise place where the CometStar rose later and those rays might be compared to the messengers preceding an important personage." The figure "##" does not mean that the comet was visible from the #th to the #th of November #; this was the time of transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar -- it was November # to the adherents of the Julian calendar and November # of the Gregorian calendar. The actual period of visibility was # days. Of course the "rays" were the comet's tail that had happened to be visible first. "The Comet rose in Scorpio in the # th house, not far from the beautiful bright star named Spica virginis between which and Arcturus it shot its rays in the direction of the northern Pole... for the present moment one cannot really tell at which time it was first ignited... but I conclude for Astrological Reasons that it must have been the # Octob. of the Old, or # Novemb. of the New Calendar." There follow about ten pages of calamities that were associated with comets: "From these and Fig. #. The oldest known picture of a comet, from the Nuremberg chronicle for the year # A.D. This was one of the appearances of Halley's comet. This pamplet was written and printed at about the peak period of comet fear. But, as used to be said of fever, the peak was reached just before the decline. By # thinking people had reached the conclusion that one could have bad weather, poor harvests, war and high prices without the aid of a comet. Theologians no longer pointed to comets as a sign that the end of the world was at hand; it had been done too often before. And astronomers by then knew that comets were not burning vapors in the atmospheres but bodies in space far beyond the moon. (Fig. #.) other examples it can be seen clearly that comets never appeared without great catastrophies." If the good and pious burgher who bought the pamphlet expected enlightenment about the specific catastrophies that were to come he was going to be disappointed. Arthusius merely warned that one of the signs of comet madness was "an insatiable craving for innovations" and said that morning comets show their actions soon, while the consequences of evening comets are more slow in coming. Generally comets presage "earthquakes, floods, changes in river courses, hail storms, hot and dry weather, poor harvests, epidemics, war and treason and high prices." ft was during the early years of#the eighteenth century that Dr. Edmond Halley began collecting all the comet observations he could find in order to calculate their orbits. In compiling his list of the orbits of # "different" comets he noticed that four of these orbits, namely those of the comets of #, #, # and #, were the same, and he drew the conclusion that this must have been four appearances of the same comet that approached the sun every # years. If this was so, that comet should return in # -- which, as everybody now knows, it did. Halley's list of # orbits was published in #, and others studied it with care in hopes of From its Original, T O T H E Consummation of all Things. W II E  K  N The Creation Cf the World in Six Days, And the General Con flag ration. As laid dorm in the Holy Scriptures, Areihewn to be perfectly Agreeable to With a large Introduory Difcourle concerning the Genuine Nature, Stile , and Extent of the Mofnhk Improvements and Gorrettions, late Profeflor of the .Mathtmathh in the Univerfity Printed for Bcnj. and Sam. Toojce atthe jWdVbook. finding another periodicity. The Anglican theologian and philosopher thought that he did : the orbits of the then recent great comet of #, of the comet of # and that of #I looked alike to him; the periodicity would be # years. Halley had noticed that too, but had rejected the conclusion for several reasons; while there seemed to be a periodicity the orbits were not sufficiently alike. But Whiston went ahead -- that comet must have been visible in # B.C., in #I B.C., in # B.C., and so on, counting backward. And suddenly he saw that this comet had caused a catastrophe, in fact the catastrophe. He sat down and wrote a pamphlet with the title The Cause of the Deluge Demonstrated which appeared in #. After that he really went to work and expanded it into a #-page book A New Theory of the Earth (Fig. #.) It appeared in # and in it rewrote the Book of Genesis. Whiston's intention was to defend the Bible, specifically Genesis. But, he admitted, Genesis needs some explanation. While no doubt divinely inspired, the "sacred penman" wrote it so as to be understandable to the primitive agricultural Jews of his time. And because they were unable to grasp the concept of the astronomical universe, the universe is treated as it appears to men of this type, and Genesis deals with the creation of the earth only. Whiston felt no qualms in supposing that the universe was already in existence when the Lord made Earth habitable and created its animals and plants. I t is difficult to imagine a more repetitious and redundant piece of writing than this book; pruning the # pages down to about # pages would not only be easy, it would be an improvement. Still, in the space available here, I cannot repeat all his arguments. Only the highlights can be given, and any similarity to recent fantasies is coincidental. Whiston pointed out that the gases surrounding the nucleus of a comet appear to be highly agitated; this to him was a visible chaos, the original state of the earth. Obviously there was some connection between and comets, or, as he phrased it: "Tis very reasonable to believe, that a Planet is a Comet form'd into a regular and lasting Constitution, and plac'd at a proper distance from the Sun in a Circular Orbit, or one very little Eccentrical; and a Comet is a Chaos, i.e., a Planet unform'd, or in its primaeval state, plac'd in a very Eccentrical one." Hence the prelude of the creation as described in Genesis must have consisted in making a comet assume about the orbit the Earth now has. But that planet to be did not yet rotate on its axis: "The Annual Motion of the Earth commenc'd at the beginning of the Mosaick Creation; yet its Diurnal Rotation did not till after the Fall of Man." With this assumption Whiston made each of the days of creation one year long and he defended himself against the reproach that he limited the power of the Creator. Of course, he said, the Lord, if He pleased, could have started and concluded the whole creation in one moment, but that is not what the Bible says. Moreover the soil is ordered to produce the plants; the seas are ordered to produce the creatures in them, and finally Adam is ordered to name the animals. The soil, the seas and Adam could not perform in an instant; they needed time. In #, when Whiston wrote his book, the time elapsed since the first day, that is year, of creation was #I years, while # years had gone by since the first day of the deluge. During the sixteen and a half centuries between creation and the deluge Mankind had multiplied enormously, because every individual lived for hundreds of years so perished When the deluge came. It was "on the #th Day of the Second Month, from the Autumnal Equinox, or November # in the #th Year before the Christian Aera" that a great comet came close to the earth. When nearest its distance was # miles "and itself a little less than a Quarter of the bigness of the Earth; or about # times so big as the Moon; two very probable and easy Hypotheses." I can't find anything easy about this statement because the Rev. Whiston did not say what he meant by "bigness." If he had diameters in mind, six times the "bigness" of the moon makes about #-## Earth diameter. If he meant volumes, six times the volcubic miles which is only about # the volume of the Earth -- but let's not quibble about the mathematics of spherical bodies. Fig. #. Diagram of the orbit of "the Comet" from Whiston's book. At that time Saturn was still the outermost known planet. # t any event this comet was rich in water that poured down on the Earth; at the same time its gravitational attraction caused "all the fountains of the great deep" to open up. The addition of the water and the gravitation of the comet had two other effects. Before the deluge the year lasted # days; but days slightly shorter than the days at present. The additional water lengthened the day, and the attraction of the comet changed the originally circular orbit of the earth into an elliptical orbit Which takes #-## days to complete. When the Earth is at perihelion early in January of each year -- #-## touches its former orbit; when at farther from the sun. The idea of the orbital change may have sounded convincing to Whiston's contemporaries but astronomers could have asked a number of embarrassing questions. One could calculate the orbital period of a planet in a circular orbit at Earth's perihelion distance and compare the result with the actual orbital period of the earth. The difference is not #-## days. And one could ask what happened to the orbit of the cbmet. Being the less massive of the two bodies its orbit would have been twisted violently and it would not have the orbit shown in Fig. #. I don't know whether anybody made that objection, but Whiston could have replied that the orbit of his presumed comet (with an orbital period of # or # years) was the orbit that resulted from this encounter. An astronomer then could still have said that the orbit shown on the diagram would have a period of about # years and not # years. What Whiston really accomplished with his book was a revival of comet fear for another century or so with a shift in emphasis. Comets were no longer signs of catastrophies to come, they were a direct physical menace in themselves. Laymen were unaware of the fine points of astronomical measurements and of density calculations. To the layman something that looked big was big, and something that looked firey must be hot. I n #I Captain John Goodridge, "late Commander of one of His Majesty's Packet Boats Station'd at Falmouth", took up the theme of that dreadful comet once more. The small book of only # pages had the title The Phoenix; and Captain Goodridge, heavily influenced by Whiston, stated its purpose in the first paragraph : "My design in the following Essay is to show that a Comet has been the cause of two grand catastrophes that have happened to this our Earth, for the punishment of its inhabitants, at the Fall and at the Deluge; which Comet (it is my intention to prove as far as I am able) is the real Phoenix of the ancients." Captain Goodridge accepted that the six days of creation were really six years, that the Earth moved along a circular orbit before the deluge and that the comet caused the deluge. He added that "the foul chaotick matter drawn from the comet's atmosphere filled the atmosphere of our earth with noxious vapours that made our air very unwholesome, which soon reduced the life of man to its present standard." According to Goodridge the comet not only produced the deluge and the first known case of air pollution, it also had "at the time of Adam's transgression" started the diurnal rotation of the earth, either by a very close approach or even a glancing blow. Then Captain Goodridge, not having much to offer that had not been said by Whiston (whose book was out of print by then) proceeded to his pet theme. "The Phoenix is said to fee a bird about the size of an Eagle, and not much unlike one; that it returns once in nearly six hundred years, goes down to the Altar of the Sun, is there burnt, and a young one springs out of its Ashes and flieth off again... The Comet's period's are upon an Average about # years; this certainly agrees with the return of the Phoenix." While Goodridge did not believe that the phoenix could be a real bird he pointed at "the Comet's going down to the Sun, where, by the violence of the Sun's heat, it is terribly burnt, and when it returns, in flying off again, it is then called the young Phoenix; and let it be further observed that the Comet is of such a magnitude that it can be easily followed with the naked Eye either in its descent to, or assent (sic) from the Sun, all of Which duly considered, proves, I think beyond a doubt, that this Comet, and this only, is what has been called the Phoenix" Since the comet that caused the earth to rotate and later changed its orbit was last seen in #, it is due to return late in # or early #. And then, said Goodridge, "it will be the cause of the general Conflagration and finishing off all things with respect to this Earth." Well, that is the story of the worst of all the comets... which does not even exist in space, for the comet of #, # and # were not identical.    Addenda to the April, #, issue : fy column in the April issue has brought me half a dozen letters, five of them remarking on the table on page # and asking "whatever happened to geocoronium ?" As for that table I have to admit on behalf of the publisher, the editor and myself, that somebody did not read proof properly. It should have looked like this: Number of days a comet was under observation: Number of orbits found to be parabolic: I # days #-# days #-#I days # per cent # per cent # per cent As for the question about geocoronium, my readers will remember that a section of that column was caused by a letter asking "whatever became of virginium?" It dealt with chemical elements of which the "discovery" was announced by somebody only to end up with a red face for one reason or another... Of course, "virginium," "moldavium," "alabamine" and so forth were elements on Earth, and I really should have added that there were also two such mistakes in the sky. One was called "nebulium" and the other "coronium." "Nebulium" was supposed to be an element that could be found spectroscopically in the gaseous nebulae, while "coronium" had been discovered, also spectroscopically, in die sun's corona. It is now known that neither "nebulium" nor "coronium" actually exist; what had looked like a strange element in the spectrogram were actually the lines of atoms of well known elements at very high temperatures and an equally high degree of ionization. Some of the "coronium" lines have been identified as coming from ionized iron and calcium atoms. While the discovery of "coronium" was a simple case of misinterpretation, "geocoronium" was the result of misreasoning. About fifty years ago it was believed that our atmosphere was strictly stratified. Near the ground you had the well known nitrogenoxygen mixture, but at high altitude there would be comparatively less oxygen, since the oxygen molecule is a bit heavier than the nitrogen molecule. At the same altitude, it was thought, there should be an admixture of hydrogen atoms, the lightest atoms of all. Carrying on this line of reasoning our atmosphere should have a top layer consisting of hydrogen atoms only, with helium atoms as an impurity. Now it was thought that the "coronium" of the sun was lighter than hydrogen, hence we might have a "coronium" layer above the hydrogen layer and in order to make it clear that this was the "coronium" of the earth it was called "geocoronium." Actually our atmosphere is not stratified in that manner. There is no hydrogen layer at the top -- and "geocoronium" doesn't exist Something new in science fiction! A brand-new magazine devoted to bringing you  the best science fiction from other countries -- a "must" for collectors and read ing pleasure for any science-fiction reader! Stories from I -- on sale at all good newsstands soon! The Transmogrification Of Wamba's Revenge Illustrated by I f A s I sit here, writing this, in a deluxe suite of the famous but resounding Waldorf-Astoria, I can look out the fourth-floor window and see the people below resembling the scurrying warrior ants of my native Africa. It was a Monday because the other married women were down at the river, beating their laundry on flat rocks, when Mr. Lundeen, the local White Hunter, came into our compound with a two-truck safari. "What cheer, Wamba?" he said to me in pidgin Pigmy. "Why you not at river wash clothes?" I nodded hello, ignoring his deliberate insult. He knew perfectly well that I spoke English, having graduated from Bennington College for Women, and that, as daughter of the Super Chief of All the Pigmies and No. I Wife of the Head Witch Doctor, I was exempt from menial tasks. "Me worry on you, Wamba," he continued with his atrocious accent and the vocabulary of a retarded three-year-old, while climbing out of his Land Rover. "Me think you grow one or two inch since last time." Oh, he was an expert needier! And he touched me at my proudest spot. The women of all our tribes didn't envy me my status, which they and I had grown up with, but there wasn't one of them that wouldn't maim herself to be my height -- a good three inches shorter than any other full-grown Pigmy adult! It was difficult, but I kept silent. The tribe's whole cash crop came from Lundeen's safaris, and I mustn't jeopardize it, no matter what. My father, the Super Chief, came out of the council hut, followed by my husband, the Head Witch Doctor, just as an oldish young man clambered down from the other vehicle and handed out a woman in jodhpurs. "Welcome! Welcome!" cried my father in English I had taught him with no little pain; he was a terrible linguist. "Great honor! Very great! Welcome!" My husband, the Head Witch Doctor, stood waiting for the introductions, and Lundeen obliged, using all the appropriate titles, including mine. The oldish young man was a Professor Todd, and the woman in jodhpurs was his wife. We shook hands all around, ours being small and dry, theirs being large and moist. "You come to hunt?" asked my father politely, using up the last of his English. "In a way," said the Professor. ine, digitalis?" "Yes," said my husband. "We use them all the time." "Really?" Mrs. Todd said disinterestedly. "No masks or dances to drive away evil spirits?" My husband's eyes did not Waver an inch. "Of course. Faith is part of the healing process." "Well," the Professor said briskly, "I am here to look for more such species -- in the soil, the barks, the berries, leaves -- everything. I have a laboratory on wheels, and I do hope you people will help me in my search." "What did he say?" the Super Chief asked. I translated and he said, "What's in it for us?" "Honor," said the Witch Doctor, and, "Whatever squeezes through my fingers," said Lundeen, both in Pigmy. Then, in pseudo-BritishEnglish, Lundeen said, "I say, Professor, Why don't you show our royal hosts your laboratory while I show Mrs. Todd the compound?" "Splendid," said Prof. Todd. "This way, please." I followed the three men, but kept looking back over my shoulder. Just as I expected, the White Hunter was charming the Professor's wife, a scene I had witnessed every time there was a giddy female in a safari. This time, however, he was bold to the point of contempt, a fact that was not lost on the Professor, who stopped at the steps of the traveling laboratory and looked after the pair. She was holding Lundeen's upper arm in both her hands and smiling dizzily up at him. I saw pain cross the Professor's face before he turned and ushered us into the air-conditioned laboratory, "Bless me!" said my husband in awe, while my father whistled. As for myself, I had seen labs of one sort or another, but nothing so marvelously compact and complete as this.' I said so, and Prof. Todd's face lit up with pride. "Thank you," he said. "Mr. Lundeen told me of your American education, Princess, and your work, Doctor, at the hospital in Mbuti, and he assured me that you both would be invaluable to our mission." "We are yours to command," quoted the Head Witch Doctor. "Good, good. Then you can help me organize your people into work parties, each group to collect whatever it's assigned to -- ferns, soils, barks, and so forth. And you. Princess, will be my lab assistant." "And you'll need a cleaning woman twice a week," I said. "No, no," said the Professor quickly. "Mr. Lundeen wouldn't trust anyone but you to keep things clean and orderly. Well!" he exclaimed and rubbed his hands. "We're practically in business right now!" "Yes," said my husband, the Head Witch Doctor. "In one way or another, Mr. Lundeen always gives us the business." My father had been following all this with great difficulty. Now he asked me what the arrangements were. I told him. "You mean that you, the Princess, are to be a housemaid?" he all but roared in Pigmy. "I forbid it!" "What seems to be the difficulty?" asked Prof. Todd, bewildered. "He's a stickler for protocol," I answered. "We'll straighten it out with Mr. Lundeen." "Good, good. We don't want any hurt feelings. Now, Doctor, I'll need to know how many ablebodied people you have, so we can set up work parties... " T ooking back over what I have  written, I feel terribly unlike a professional writer. I haven't, for example, told you all I knew about the White Hunter -- that he came from Ohio, but wouldn't wear, drive or talk anything not British; his owning a Land Rover instead of a Jeep was completely characteristic. You mustn't think he was typical of White Hunters, He wasn't typical of anything but a greedy, selfish, overbearing opportunist, a phony who loved to humiliate us because we couldn't hit back. And we couldn't hit back because no other White Hunter bothered with us. They used to, but that was before Lundeen arrived. I don't know what to add about Prof. Todd. He was the average dedicated scientist who, for no discernible reason, happened to be married to a vain, stupid woman, younger than himself. I see that I've given Mrs. Todd only one line of dialogue, when, in fact, she was anything but inarticulate, in a nasty, bored sort of way -- except, I soon discovered, When she was alone with an admirer. Or thought they were alone. I made a point of watching her and Lundeen -- for my people's sake, of course. I wanted them to be paid for their work -- and, come to think of it, mine too -- because so much depended on it... Which brings me to our tribal setup. It was commonly known that we Pigmies were primitive nomads, but I've never encountered anyone who knew that the central tribe, ours, was not. The satellite tribes all visited us in turn, for whatever meager trading we could do, but mainly for treatment of their and our sick and aged. The White Hunter was essential to this because he brought us medicines, for which he extorted every last penny he allowed us to make from his safaris.  # Things are going just beautitifully, Princess!" Prof. Todd said enthusiastically three days later. "The work parties would have overwhelmed me if not for your help with the tagging and classifying. I've never seen anyone pick up details as fast as you -- unless it's your husband!" A lot he knew! Between that fathead Lundeen and that insipid idiot Mrs. Todd, the tribe was on the verge of mutiny, medicines or no medicines. With her hanging adoringly onto his arm, he would needle the work parties, in his execrable Pigmy so that they had either to strangle him or work off their anger on their jobs. Then, when Prof. Todd came up, he could only compliment Lundeen for their zeal. (The work parties were organized into squads, with each squad searching for a different thing, like soil samples, fungi, roots, berries and so on. And they worked in each other's footsteps, going away from the compound, between two lines of rope which my father and husband laid out differently each day.) After leaving the parties to the Head Witch Doctor and the Super Chief, the two would come to the lab and work me over. They knew none of us could complain to the Professor, so we were safe targets. Lundeen's favorite stunt was to ask me to wipe things far over my head, which I had to reach by standing on a lab stool, and making me clean out the animals' cages. Todd didn't know what was going on, because the orders were in Pigmy. Then Mrs. Todd would say, "Princess, darling, would it be too much trouble to light my cigarette?" And I would. And she'd blow smoke in my face -- when Todd's back was turned. I had never felt such hatred before! Nor could I vent it on anyone or anything ; my husband and father had their own troubles, one treating the rebellious with tranquilizers and the other with orders to obey instructions and ignore the needling. All this was going through my mind when I saw Prof. Todd peering at me at eye-level. "I've been driving you too hard," he said. "You look tired." Tired? I was exhausted, working all day and staying up all night to keep an eye on Lundeen and Mrs. Todd. And I hadn't gotten anything more incriminating on my little battery-powered tape recorder than some slurping noises that I knew were kisses, but that wouldn't convince anyone else. Neither of the pair was brainy enough to be so circumspect. There had to be some reason for each staying in his own guest hut all night. I thought I knew what it was, so I let my shoulders and face slump and mumbled something about duty and honor. "I know how you feel; I feel the same way about saving lives." Prof. Todd said, leading me firmly out of the laboratory. "But one has one's duty to oneself too, you know. I want you to take the day off and sleep!" "Yes, Professor," I said obediently. "I could sleep for days." "Then take tomorrow off as well," he said, taking me to my hut, and he wouldn't leave until I pretended to doze off. "Nightnight, sleep tight," he whispered, leaving on tippy toes. 'T'ake my word for it, it was almost more than I could do no not to fall asleep. But I had to stay awake! What a nice guy, I thought -- how could he have stayed married to this queen, of the stag line? Did she, to quote Mad Ave, know where the body was buried? I didn't know, but I intended to find out. When I was sure Prof. Todd was inside his lab and unlikely to look outside, I slipped out with my tape recorder and searched for the miscreants. As I suspected, they were nowhere in the compound. The Land Rover also was gone. I followed the freshest tire tracks out of the compound. I was worried for the moment about being seen by the work parties, but the tracks led off in the opposite direction. Settling down to what was, for a Pigmy, and a woman at that, and a woman three inches shorter than any other adult Pigmy to boot, a steady lope, I kept listening for the Land Rover and watching the ground for tracks leading off the rutted jungle road. Put yourself in my place, wouldn't you expect them to di'ive miles away and get off the trail so they wouldn't be surprised by a passerby? Au contraire, that was expecting too much of these nasty specimens, for I came upon the vehicle as I rounded a bend barely # minutes from home. I slipped up on its blind side, hung my microphone on a tarpaulin rope and paid out wire as I backed off the road into the jungle. Screened by a bush, I could hear very clearly what was going on as I switched on the machine. "Now do you believe me, you mad, impetuous boy?" said Mrs. Todd a little breathlessly. "I told you I love you. How many ways are there of convincing you?" "You could tell me why you married him in the first place," Lundeen said in a sullen voice. "Why, it's obyious, sweetheart. Everybody expects him to win the Nobel Prize." "So that's why you came along on this expedition!" "Game along? I took him away from teaching at the University, bought him the best portable lab money could buy, financed the whole safari -- " "You mean you didn't know I'm filthy rich?" she said. "You loved me for myself alone?" I could practically hear the White Hunter's excuse for a brain going into reverse. Knowing him from many safaris, I could tell he had been about to say through a stiff upper lip that he'd marry her in a minute if not for his (fictitious) wife and tots at home, who needed him and the little money he brought in from his safaris. "Of course I didn't know," he said, his voice sounding choked. "But what difference would it have made? Me a lowly -- " "Don't say it!" she cried. "You're a fine, handsome, intelligent man, and I can't stand another day with that creep, even if he does win the Nobel Prize!" "Then let's leave him here -- " " -- without his laboratory, so he can't follow us -- " " -- but would you consent to be my -- my wife?" "Dearest," sh# said, "I would. And you won't have to be a White Hunter unless you want to be." "Not without you," he vowed piously. I believed him. He wouldn't let all that money go unguarded. Well, so much for evidence. I had all I needed. So I stowed away the microphone and wire and headed back to the compound. They came in an hour later and made for Lundeen's hut. I waited till they started packing his campaign chest, then went into the hut with two glasses, a bottle of Scotch and a soda bottle on a tray. "Dash it all, Princess, you're full of surprises!" Lundeen exclaimed. "I had sort of been looking forward to our daily snit about bringing us drinks." "One must do what one must do," I said meekly. "I don't leave you much choice, do I?" he boomed. "None at all." "Darling, you're so masterful," Mrs. Todd was saying as I left. I went back to my hut and took out the treasure chest I kept under my bunk. My Barbie and Ken doll clothing were at the top. I took them out and then gathered all the rags I could find and returned to Lundeen's hut. It was the sickest Night I had ever spent. T)rof. Todd looked very upset  when I came into the lab the next morning, toting a bag and my tape recorder. He was wearing a surgical mask for some reason -- to avoid contaminating the white rats he was trying to work on, I suppose. "Princess!" he cried. "My wife is gone!" "Real gone," I said with a grin. "And that's not just her opinion. It's Lundeen's, too." "You think -- " he started to say, but couldn't continue. I pushed aside the chemistry equipment on his table and upended my bag. Two miniature figures in little green smocks tumbled out amid the four white rats. Todd stared as the figures jumped to their feet and, clinging to each other, looked wildly around them. "That's Lundeen and my wife!" he gasped. "What have you done to them?" "I can't tell you that," I said. "But I want you to listen to something so you'll know that what I've done is justified." And I played back the love scene I had recorded the day before. "So that's why she married me," he said brokenly. "I always wondered." He bent down to the little figures. "You didn't have to leave me stranded," he cried out to Mrs. Todd, who clapped her hands over her ears. "I love you enough to give you a divorce." Taking off his surgical mask, he turned to me. "You know that what you've done is impossible, don't you? Nothing can shrink fiveor six-foot people to five or six inches!" I backed away from him. "But that's not what's important!" I said in alarm. "Not only were they planning to leave you stranded, they were going to leave the tribe unpaid!" Todd lost his mad glare. "No question of it, they're a matched set of stinkers," he said. "But what have you done? How does it work? You've got to tell me all about it!" "I can't. It's so potent a taboo that nobody but the chiefs and witch doctors know about it. I myself learned about it only by accident." The tiny people had been making shrill noises. Now Lundeen pushed Mrs, Todd aside and piped, "Todd, listen to me!" "What is it?" Todd asked, bending down to hear the squeaky voice. "The secret is in the Scotch she gave us yesterday. I can't tell you what suffering we went through last night, shrinking down to this size. Get to that bottle before she does! It's in my hut!" I was out of the lab door and running for Lundeen's hut as fast as I could go. Halfway there, Todd passed me. It was the only time in' my life that I ever wished I were not so small, for my strides were five to his one. And I cursed myself for stupidly not throwing the bottle into a fire. When he reached the hut, I stopped and went back to the lab. The tiny couple in tiny voices pleaded for an antidote as I climbed onto a stool and waited for Todd to come back, which he did a few minutes later, the bottle in his hand and a hard look on his face. Hphere was silence as he meas- ured out the Scotch in eyedroppers and fed different amounts of it to the four white rats. I turned away. Until last night, I had never seen anyone or anything shrink. It was a hideous thing. I had hoped never to see it again. "All right, Princess, you can look now," the Professor said in a sick voice. I turned. The rats were four different sizes, the littlest being very little indeed. Prof. Todd was cleaning up the last evidence of the shrinking process, as I cleaned up after Lundeen and Mrs. Todd, in such a fright over leaving traces that I had overlooked the Scotch. "Is this how Pigmies get small?" he asked me. "No," I said shakily. "We breed true and are immune to -- to what I put in the bottle." "Then what is it for?" "Babies of mixed parentage, Pigmy and outsider. And that is all I know about it!" "Not even the dosages?" he demanded. "Not even that," I said. He filled the eyedroppers again and fed the mixture to the rats, while I looked away. When the feeding and shrinking had stopped, he said, "It stabilizes at onetenth normal size. And you Pigmies are immune to it. Which means -- " He stared unbelievingly. "That's not possible!" "Why not?" I said, falling back until he grabbed my shoulders. I forget which Man it was -- Peking Man or Java Man or something -- " "But he was only nine feet tall!" "What if he wasn't Peking Man at all, but Peking Baby?" I said. He dropped his hands and sat down heavily. "Incredible," he said. "Absolutely incredible." He looked at me. "Princess, I've got to have a decent amount of Whatever it is to work on." "No!" I said. "No!" "If you don't get it for me," he said, "I'll invite your husband and father in to see what you've done to these two!" "Don't -- please!" I begged. "I'll get you some. But you've got to help me with an alibi, so they don't get suspicious." "It's a deal," he said. "What about us?" shrilled Lundeen. "You can't leave us like this!" Todd grinned a wicked grin. "Would you care to bet on that?" "I'll do anything you say!" Mrs. Todd piped. "I'll give you all my money -- anything -- " "Don't bother," Todd said. "I intend to have incontestable proof of your deaths. So I get your money anyhow, without you to spoil it." He put them, kicking and trying to bite, into a cage and covered it. As an afterthought, he filled the feeder of the cage with a slice of bread and some cold cuts and water. "Have fun, kiddies," he said merrily, and we went out and he carefully locked the door. T xrhile the Professor stood ' ' guard, I pulled out a very old, very sturdy trunk from under my husband's bunk, opened it and scraped off as much moss as I dared from the five boulders in it, into a test tube Prof. Todd had given me. I closed the trank and pushed it back under the bunk. "Good, good," he said as I handed him the stoppered tube. "Now to furnish us with an alibi. Do you know any good places to lose a Land Rover?" "There is a dandy quicksand pit not far away," I said, catching some of his excitement. We got into the Land Rover, and I guided him to the spot. Pushing from the rear, we shoved the vehicle into the pit. When it vanished, we brushed away our footprints and went back to the lab. I told him along the way what little I knew of the moss -- that it was native only to this part of the world, that it had been totally destroyed by our ancestors, except on the five stones, after the Pigmy elephant problem, that there was no antidote, and that not the moss but selective breeding accounted for the size I was so proud of being. That evening, we asked people if they had seen Lundeen and Mrs. Todd, who had never been this late before. As the hours passed, everyone got a little edgy, watching the gate of the compound. At last the Professor looked at his watch and said, "No sense staying up. They must have driven further than they realized and made camp." So we went to bed. Around nopn the next day, Todd let himself be worked up over their disappearance and consented to lead one of their search parties. My husband, the Head Witch Doctor, and my father, the Super Chief, led the other two. Naturally, I went with my husband, partly because that's a No. I wife's place, but mostly because I wanted him to make the discovery himself -- Which he did with only five or six little nudges from me. The drummer sent out the message and soon the other two parties joined ours. "A great, great pity," said my father with real feeling, looking down sadly at the quicksand pit. "Now how will we get another White Hunter to bring safaris to us?" "Always the practical man," my husband said admiringly. "Yes, this could be the end of tribal civilization as we know it, anyway." Todd asked me what the unseemingly grief was about, and I told him. Doing his best to look bereaved, he held up his hands for silence. "My friends -- and in the short time I have known you, you have become friends in need and in deed -- I came here in search of a new wonder drug and I think perhaps I have found it," he said, with me translating as he went. "In return for the testimony of your leaders so I can inherit my late wife's money, I shall finance the construction of a vast compound and enough huts to house all your tribes at one time!" There was a great cheer, led by the Head Witch Doctor and the Super Chief. "Not only that," the Professor continued, "there must be room in the compound for one hundred guest huts, a tremendous meeting hut and a large cooking-and-eating hut, plus classroom huts and an airfield. All this must be accomplished within less than one month. Damn the expense -- full speed ahead!" The crowd cheered again and headed homeward, talking and gesticulating animatedly among themselves. #Tt is very nice to become Aprosperous," my father said in Pigmy. "But what does he want to spend all this money for?" "You are with him all day, every day," my husband said to me. "It would be discourteous to ask outright, but has he given you no idea?" "None at all," I confessed. It was true. Whatever Prof. Todd had dreamed up, he hadn't discussed or even hinted at it till now, nor could I understand it any more than they did. I promised to do everything possible, short of asking, to find out what he had in mind. Early the next morning, we drove to Mbuti in the mobile laboratory: the Professor, the Head Witch Doctor and the Super Chief in the front seat and me in the lab, which was kept locked at all times. Mrs. Todd and Lundeen hung onto the bars of their cage as the lab bounced and lurched in and out of the ruts of the jungle road. They alternately tried to bribe and threaten me. I looked at them without listening, doing my best to figure out what Todd meant to do. I hadn't succeeded when we reached town, nor when we each deposed as to the fates of the unlucky pair, nor when the Professor withdrew a very large amount of money and gave part of it to my father and husband to buy whatever supplies were needed, as well as a used truck and Jeep that he presented to the tribe. While the men were shopping, he and I went to the cable office, where he sent off a number of telegrams to Dr. this and Prof, that in various countries, on both sides of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. I had no trouble getting to see what he had composed as he went through a little black book for the addresses. He couldn't have been less secretive about his invitation to "Spend Your Vacation in Glamorous, Unspoiled Mfouti! Live for Two Madcap Weeks Amid the Unchanging Pigmies of Still-Dark Africa!" And so forth. He smiled down at me as I frowned over the inscrutable telegram. "Puzzle you?" he asked. "It shouldn't. This is why I want all the tribes together and the huge compound and huts to house them, because we are going to have company from all over the world. Not a great many by resort standards, but enough to make room for in the jungle." I couldn't ask, of course, but I could -- and did -- look worried. "Are you thinking that I'll betray your secret, Princess?" I nodded. "I give you my word," he said, "that I shall not be the one to do so." I brightened visibly, and when the other two men joined us, I told them about the cablegrams. "To study us, no doubt," said the Super Chief. "A symposium, perhaps," said the Head Witch Doctor. "Whatever it is," I said, "it'll be in practically the only place on Earth that isn't preparing for war. Anyhow, we will know very soon. The cables gave March #nd as the opening date." "When is that?" asked my husband. "I asked at the cable office. Three weeks from now." "Then we must really hurry," said my father. And hurry we did as each tribe reported in and went to work on its portion of the new compound and the various huts. I, meanwhile, assisted Todd in the lab, but without understanding what he was calling this meeting for. Could it be the strange moss? Then why had he carelessly emptied the test tube of it into an enameled tray kind of thing and shoved it under the lab's night light and seem to have forgotten it? Instead, he was taking blood samples from many of us -- and even with great difficulty, a tiny amount from Lundeen and Mrs. Todd. These he made plates of, and to my unskilled eyes they looked like any other blood specimens. Which goes to show how much Bio I had absorbed at BenW"ith March #nd came bush ' ' planes to the landing field that had been completed only the night before. They discharged their passengers and took off to make room for more incoming bush planes. Prof. Todd shook hands with each passenger; they waved hello to each other and then were taken, along with their luggage, to the guest huts. Every hut had a sign listing the nationality of its occupants or, for the large ones, its function. Oh, I forgot to mention that Todd had had a generator truck come in and string electrical cables to all the huts and to light the streets. The guests accepted it as normal, but our tribes were amazed and delighted. "I say, Princess," said Lundeen in one of his rare polite moments, "the joint seems to be jumping. Is it because of us?" "Not at all," I gloated. "The Professor gave me his word that he wouldn't betray my awful revenge." "Awful is the word," said Mrs. Todd. "How could you do such a thing?" "I didn't know," I said guiltily. "I knew it would dirink you somewhat, but I never suspected -- " "Never mind what you never suspected," said Lundeen, rattling the door of their cage. "Get us out of here. It's not decent to lock up two human beings like a couple of canaries!" "It's better than you deserve!" I snapped back, pulling the cover down over the cage to shut out their accusing voices. Prof. Todd unlocked the door and came into the lab, locking the door again before sitting on a stool in the flow of the air conditioner. "This is the only tolerable place in the compound," he said, fanning himself. "Wish I'd had time to air-condition the huts." "Please, Professor!" said Lundeen's muffled voice. "Take the cover off. We'll behave." Todd ignored him, saying, "Every last person I sent a cablegram to is here! Not a single absentee!" "That's wonderful," I said. "And you all seem to know one another." He gave me a wicked grin. "You'd love to know what's going on, wouldn't you? But you can't ask because that would be rude. Right? I admitted it. "Well," he said, "you and the other leaders of your tribes are invited to the meeting hut tonight, and you'll learn about what you and I have been doing for the past few weeks." "But what about us?" shrilled Mrs. Todd under the cover. "What about you?" mocked Prof. Todd. "Seems to me that your bodies just about fit your souls!" TYowever, it was an indication of his own great soul that he uncovered their cage and left the light on before locking the laboratory. Can you imagine what those two would have done if the situation were reversed? So could I. I said so. "Princess," he said thoughtfully, "if a person, a family, a tribe or a nation imitates an enemy's cruelty or oppression, there would be nothing to distinguish one from the other. The more morality you give up, the more animal you become, the less you deserve to win an argument or a war." "Even temporarily?" I asked. "Just long enough to win?" "No! Before, during and after the duration -- however long it takes -- however necessary it seems!" He unclenched his fists and smiled crookedly. "Sorry. It's the one subject I get violent on. See you in the meeting hut." Shaken by his vehemence, I watched him stride off to his own hut, a young man aged before his time by clinging to ideals all but gone in a world heading for a final smashup. I found my husband and the Super Chief in our hut, listening to the news on my portable radio while waiting supper for me. I sat down, and the No. # and No. # Wives served us a really good warthog stew. I complimented them, and they giggled a thank you. To me, then, it was just an average cozy family scene, with no hint of the incredible turmoil so short a time away. I hope they all know how much I miss them, wherever they are. Depressed as we always were by the world's headlong rush toward destruction, the Head Witch Doctor turned off the radio and asked whether I knew anything more than I had the day before. "Afraid not," I said. "But the Professor assured me we would learn all about it tonight." "Just more blood samples?" he said. I nodded. "I asked the Chest and Belly Witch Doctors what it could mean. They told me they didn't know, but judging from the attendance here, with scientists from everywhere on Earth, it must be as important a discovery as antibiotics." "I hope you can translate it into Pigmy that I can understand," said the Super Chief. "I'll do my best," I promised, "but science was never my best subject." "I just hope I can stay awake," said the Head Witch Doctor wearily. "I've got a six-month backlog of mental cases since the other tribes came." "If I can help with the laying on of hands, call on me," offered the Super Chief. "Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. Wait! There's a young girl who." I left them talking shop and wandered around the compound just as the lights came on. Huge as it was, it seemed more crowded even than New York or and children of all ages into the street, and everywhere under foot ran the multitudes of dogs that had come along as part of each family. Naturally, I had to say hello every step of the way, so I was glad to join the crowd entering the meeting hut. By Pigmy standards, the hut was as enormous as Yankee Stadium. There were wooden benches that the Professor had ordered built spaced evenly from the entrance to the movie screen at the extreme end, leaving only enough room for the aisles, which right now were jammed with men and women from all over, clustered in loud, gesticulating groups. They mostly spoke English, though I did hear some French and Russian. "Order, please! Order!" said the voice of Prof. Todd over the loudspeakers mounted on the poles holding up the roof. "Everyone please be seated!" The hubbub died as the people took their seats, including us Pigmies, and I saw Todd in the center aisle with a movie projector. "This had better be good!" someone said very loudly. "That," Todd said into his microphone, "is for posterity to judge. But I think my using the secret assembly call will be justified." He dimmed the house lights and turned on the projector. The screen lit up with vividly colored swimming shapes that I recognized as bacteria and blood cells. This, of course, was what the Professor and I had been filming with microscope and movie camera. Into this swarming colony came a giant blunt object -- a pipette -- and suddenly the bacteria began shrinking. The crowd murmured excitedly. "That's our secret ingredient!" the Head Witch Doctor said to me through his teeth. "How did he get hold of it?" "The work parties?" I suggested, innocently. He nodded and subsided as the Professor explained that this substance, unknown anywhere else in the world, was shrinking one deadly bacillus after another right before their eyes. "Why doesn't it shrink the blood cells?" someone called out. "That," Prof. Todd evaded, "needs more study. After all, I have been here only a few weeks." "What about viruses?" somebody else inquired. He was intimating that they too were undoubtedly shrunken, but that his equipment had necessarily been limited in portability, While I, translating all this to the Super Chief with one part of my mind, was using the other part to figure out. another question: why hadn't the blood cells also contracted? The answer came to me so suddenly that I almost jumped up and blurted it out : the blood was from us Pigmies and Lundeen and Mrs. Todd only! Which led to still another question : how would he keep the audience from testing it on their own blood? I didn't know, but my respect for him had grown even greater; I was sure he had it all worked out in his mind. IT Then the film ended, the ' ' scientists sat stunned. One man finally stood up and said, "If ever I have seen a discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize, this is it!" Everybody applauded. Prof. Todd looked as if he wished he had a pebble to kick, so he could say, "Aw, shucks, fellas -- " They crowded around him, noiser than before the show, while my people left the meeting hut in cold silence. I pretended to have some reason for going to the laboratory, but my husband took my wrist in his hand and led me politely but firmly to our hut. "We have some matters that need to be taken care of," he said, and the chiefs and witch doctors of the tribes nodded grimly. He pulled the old trunk from beneath his bunk and opened it. The five rocks looked exactly as they always had. And why not? I had exposed the moss to light until the little scratches I had made grew back again. But I needn't have bothered, I discovered, for he dragged it into the street, filled it with firewood -- and threw a blazing torch into it. "There," he said. "Wherever the Professor got his sample no longer matters. It is a sheer miracle that it hadn't been discovered long ago." He turned toward me. "Princess," he said, "you must find and destroy his specimen!" "Right!" a chief said. "If it is used by everyone, being a Pigmy won't be the great honor it is today!" "Maybe they won't want the honor," I said diplomatically. "Not want it?" the Super Chief repeated in outraged amazement. "Have you ever heard such nonsense?" "Never!" said the Head Witch Doctor, and even I had to join the nodding; I hadn't believed my suggestion for an instant. He pointed in the general direction of the lab and said, "Go! Do your duty!" I left quickly, as a good little Pigmy wife should, and a few minutes later was at the lab, ringing the doorbell. The Professor peeked at me through the peephole and let me in, pointing to the other stool. I climbed up it as he raised the volume of his radio-looking thing, which he had been listening to. "This will give you a kick, Princess!" he said with that typical crooked grin. "Recognize anybody's voice?" I had been looking intently at the enameled tray he had dumped the test tube into and put up near the night light and wondering how I could get up there without his noticing. It was impossible with him present. I would have to find an excuse for staying after he left and hope he would believe it. I unfrowned and cocked my head toward the radio, pretending to listen -- and almost fell off the stool, for, hearing the squeaky little voices of Lundeen and Mrs. Todd, I glanced up and saw their cage with its door open and them gone! "How -- how -- " I stammered. "By tying tag strings together and getting through the air-conditioning duct," he said happily. "You don't look as if you cared," I said. "Oh, but I do!" he exclaimed. "Listen! They're at the English hut." "Naturally," I said. "Where else would that silly Anglophile go?" A genuine British voice could now be heard saying, "It isn't as if we doubted your word, old boy, but how do we know you weren't always this size arid that this perfectly ordinary-looking moss you've brought us isn't perfectly ordinary?" Lundeen's very high, very excited and very fake British voice said, "Dash it all, try it on yourselves!" "On ourselves?" echoed another speaker. "What if it's poisonous or something?" "Absolutely," the first man agreed. There was silence, broken by. the barking of the ubiquitous dogs outside. "I've got it!" he said. "Why not try it on one of these cursed mongrels?" "Capital idea!" "Excellent suggestion!" and other compliments led to someone going out into the street and returning shortly with a yapping mutt. "How do we feed it to him?" someone asked. "In Scotch, like you?" "I don't think dogs drink Scotch," Lundeen said. "Why not water?" "Why not indeed?" said the first man. There was a splashing sound followed by a mixing sound, and he said, "Here you are, Bowser! Drink it down like a good fellow," which was succeeded by a lapping sound, then silence. "Great Scott!" one of the men cried in horror, and the rest made a sort of suppressed retching sound. "You see? You see?" Lundeen When it was all over, the first man asked, "Did anyone think of measuring the poor beast before and after?" "No, but I'd say he's no more than one-tenth his original size," a man answered. The others agreed. "Well," the first one said briskly, "let's get down to cold facts, shall we? The stuff works; I think we're all convinced of that. That being so, the next question is: have you brought us enough to serve as a starter set?" "Plenty!" shrilled Lundeen. "Todd dumped the same amount into a tray and kept it under a light and now the tray is almost overflowing!" I looked up at the tray and down at Prof. Todd, who was listening with a great beatific smile on his face. So that was why he had emptied the test tube with such seeming indifference! With equal seeming indifference, I moved my stool under the light. He didn't notice. I took a beaker of some acid and warily stood on the stool. His back was to me when I poured the acid into the tray. I climbed down and put the beaker back just as he turned off the radio and swung around to face me. "Let's get out of here, Princess," he said, grinning. "Those two have to get back in again without suspecting we know what they've done." Of course, I assented readily. Half of my job was done. The only problem remaining was: how could I get rid of the last of the moss in the British guest hut? Hpodd and I said good night, and he made for his hut while I went toward the British one. Crouching in its shadow, I waited until after the light was doused. When I was sure they were all asleep, I began edging to the door. I heard a faint noise and stopped dead. A man in pajamas came stealing out. He darted from hut to hut, pausing at each one to look about before going on to the next. He slipped into the seventh hut, an din a moment the light went on. I sneaked up to the hut and listened -- in its shadow, naturally. " -- mean by waking us up?" a heavy Slavic voice was demanding. "I had to," a British voice said urgently. "It's of the utmost importance. Now please listen attentively. I may not have time to repeat." And he told them all about Lundeen, Mrs. Todd, the moss and the dog. When he finished, someone laughed. As if at a signal, the others began laughing, too. "Please! Please!" the British voice said. "If you don't believe me, try it on a dog. But do it quickly, before I'm missed!" "It is your story," another Slavic voice said. "You get the dog." I retreated behind the hut as the man in pajamas came out and looked up and down the street. "Just my luck," he muttered bitterly, "they're all asleep. Here, Spot! Here, Prince, Fido, Rags!" And he snapped his fingers until a dog a few huts away came ambling up with its tail wagging drowsily. He took it inside. For the next space of time I was glad again that I only had to hear the process instead of seeing it. "So," the first Slavic voice said stolidly. "It is like you say. The dog is maybe a tenth of its former size. So?" "What good is that?" another said. "Who would want such little dogs?" "For this you expect to get paid?" the leader asked. "Damn, damn and double damn!" the Englishman exploded in a furious whisper. "Do you think I'm a traitor? I brought you some of this stuff because it might have military importance. Don't ask me how -- I'm only a scientist. But if it does, I don't want one half of the world using it on the other half -- and that means your half as well as mine!" "Da, we have such soft-headed people among us, too," said the leader. "But it could be. It could be... " "Well, you work it out yourselves," the Englishman said. "I must get back now." "Wait!" said the leader. "What should we do with the little dog?" "That's your problem," said the Englishman, sprinting out the door. So I set the hut afire, then went down to the British hut and did the same there. They were lovely fires. I stood admiring them while the men of both huts came rushing out. "Did you save anything?" one of the Englishmen asked another. "Just the moss and my tennis racquet," the second replied. My heart fell. But it lifted as I followed the Englishman with the peculiar morality to the Russian hut. "Did you save the moss?" he asked anxiously. "Just that and my balalaika," the leader said. I trudged worriedly home to bed. My husband, the Head Witch Doctor, opened his eyes and asked, "Have you destroyed the moss?" "Half of it," I said with elliptical truth. I didn't dare tell him now I had two more halves to destroy. -- ' ' morning, I took the revolver from his footlocker and put it in my pocket, then went asking for the English and Russian scientists. I was told that Dr. Perry and Prof. Kropotkin were with Todd, whom they had asked to radio for a bush plane. I ran to the lab. Todd and the two men were in the Jeep, about to leave. "Stop!" I yelled. "I have to come along!" They waited for me. When I was aboard, Todd stepped on the gas. I looked at their luggage. Each had an overnight bag, donated, no doubt, by luckier fellow countrymen. And each overnight bag carried the moss, I was sure. "Terribly sorry about the fire," said Todd. "Lost everything, eh?" "Down to the last button," Dr. Perry said. "Me, too," said Prof. Kropotkin. "But why only our two huts?" "I can't possibly imagine," said Todd jauntingly. I sat back, trying to work out my strategy. I could shoot Todd and perhaps one of the others, not both, before being overpowered. The Jeep would smash into something -- and spill the moss all over the place. No good. I had to get aboard the bush plane somehow and wait for my chance. The plane was waiting on the airfield when we got there. Pulling up alongside it, Prof Todd shook hands with both men, put his hand in a pocket, brought it out and shook my hand. When he let go, I felt something wadded up in my palm. I didn't have time to look as he all but pushed us into the plane. "Have a good trip!" he sang out. "As for you, Princess Wamba, come back when you're ready!" The pilot closed the door and came through for the fares. I opened my hand and found in it a 'ball of green papers. When I smoothed them out, the pilot goggled and said. "Golly, Princess, I can't change that!" Prof. Todd had slipped me four # bills! I smiled nervously and promised to have one changed when we landed, so I could pay him. He said, "Never mind. Royalty rides free on my plane!" "Thank you," I said regally. He disappeared up front, closing the door behind him. I sat in back of the two men until we took off and leveled out. Then I got up and menaced them with the revolver. "All right," I said, "hand over the moss -- and no funny business -- or you get plugged!" D r. Perry studied me and the gun. "What bad movie is that from?" "C'mon, c'mon!" I ground out. "The moss -- hand it over!" "You really seem determined," Perry said thoughtfully. "But Why both of us? Do you know something I don't know?" "Yes! Somebody in your party is a traitor -- gave some of the moss to the Russians. Now let's have it -- or else!" He turned to Prof. Kropotkin. "Is that true?" "Of course," Kropotkin said with a smile. "I trust you do not expect me to reveal his name." "Not at all, not at all," Dr. Perry said hastily. "No more than we would turn over our list to you." I was getting exasperated with this dialogue, which shut out me and my revolver. I waved it and threatened to shoot if they didn't come across. Dr. Perry stood up and moved toward me. "My dear girl, this is preposterous. Now if you'll just give me the gun, we'll all forget the whole unpleasant incident." "No, you don't!" I cried, panicking. I ran to the door of the cockpit, grasped it and pulled. "It's locked!" "Did you think you were the only person who ever tried this?" Perry asked soothingly. "Now do be reasonable... " I shut my eyes and squeezed the trigger with both hands. Nothing happened! He took the revolver away quite easily, saying, "Every gun I've ever been personally associated with had a safety latdh, you know. Sort of evens things up with idiots who didn't know it was loaded, wouldn't you say?" I sat down with my face in my hands. "Now I'll never be able to go home again! They would abandon me in the jungle!" "In this day and age? Never!" Prof. Kropotkin said, putting an arm around my shoulder and holding me comfortingly against his chest. "No, really they would," Perry told him. "I read it somewhere. Well, there's only one thing to do. I'll take her back to London with  ff me. "And what is wrong with me taking her to Moscow?" Kropotkin demanded. "I don't want to go with either of you," I sobbed. "Won't you please give me the moss so I can destroy it and go home?" "Dreadfully sorry, Your Highness," said Perry. "Not a chance," said Kropotkin. "I would like to destroy his moss and he would like to destroy mine. But we are rational human beings, with no love for violence. So come with me!" "No, me!" cried Perry. I looked at them through a blur of tears. "Then I guess I'll go with you, Dr. Perry. At least I know the language. I'll come to Moscow, Prof. Kropotkin, after I finally destroy Dr. Perry's specimen." "Fine!" exclaimed Kropotkin. "I promise you full-scale red-carpet welcome -- from primitive Africa to People's Democracy!" "That will be nothing compared with our reception!" said Perry. "You won't regret your decision, Princess!" W e were all quite friendly by the time we reached Mlarki, the nearest jet airfield. I didn't really know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't supersonic military airplanes waiting for us, one from England and the other from Russia. There was time only for a last friendly wave before Dr. Perry and I were hustled into our plane and Prof. Kropotkin into his. As soon as we were airborne, Dr. Perry opened his overnight bag, and I was amazed to see Lundeen, Mrs. Todd and the tiny dog climb out. "About time!" shrilled Lundeen. "I look simply dreadful!" Mrs. Todd complained. "Couldn't you have brought my cosmetics along?" "Plenty where we're going," Perry said. "And now, if you'll excuse me, I must catch up on my beauty rest." He dozed right off. The tiny people and the dog all began barking at me, so I closed my eyes and ears and went to sleep. It was just lunchtime when we landed in England. Dr. Perry put them into the overnight bag and closed it on Lundeen's yapping about carrying it carefully, and we disembarked -- into a screaming, jostling mob, all pushing papers and pens at me for my autograph. "What is this all about?" I shouted at Perry. "We wirelessed ahead," he shouted back. "Look at the headlines." I did. The newspapers I was being asked to autograph read: So I signed everything happily, enjoying every minute of it. When I looked up for Dr. Perry, I saw him surrounded by a flying wedge of soldiers. "Where are you going?" I shrieked in alarm. "To be debriefed," he yelled. "I'll ring you up when you're settled in." And he was led away just as a Rolls-Royce came onto the field, and I was ushered inside and we drove off. Two men sat in the front seat, looking very formidable, and I jumped when a voice next to me said, "Allow me to introduce myself, Your Highness. I am Lord Fairfax." "That's nice," I said, trying to see where Dr. Perry was being taken, but he disappeared from view. I turned around to Lord Fairfax and, "Why are he and I being separated?" "I'm afraid I don't know," said Lord Fairfax. "Then suppose we go back and pick him up and -- " "Oh, that would 'be militarily impossible!" "What about my staying at his house?" I said nastily. "Against protocol," he stated. "I'm sure Dr. Perry is a perfectly splendid host. But he is, after gll, a commoner." "Well, where am I staying?" "Why, with me, to be sure. At my town house. I shall do everything possible to make your stay as pleasant as possible." He frowned. "That makes two 'possibles' in one sentence, doesn't it? Dreadfully sorry. Is there anything in particular you would like for luncheon?" "Yes," I said. "Aardvark steak." "I shall comb all London for one," he promised. "And then," I said, "I want to go straight to Dr. Perry's house. Commoner or no commoner." "Yes, Your Highness," Lord Fairfax said, retreating to his corner of the seat. U nless you've been given the royal treatment, you can't imagine how busy it keeps you. I met Lord Fairfax's wife and servants, dozens of them, was assigned the East Wing of the manor, then lunohed -- on aardvark steak, courtesy of the zoo -- and world-famous designers took my measurements for the most astonishing wardrobe, which I was most grateful for when it was delivered; London is awfully chilly that time of year, and I had only the clothes I wore when leaving home. Then, when I was presentable, there were dinners, high teas, elevenses, a ball in my honor -- and I was presented to King Charles and the entire court, which I had to be prepared for days in advance. His Majesty was most gracious and, as we used to say at Bennington, I got a real charge out of the whole royal business. Oh, and the ballet, the opera, the theater -- I fell into bed every night, so exhausted but overstimulated that I said, "Who?" When Dr. Perry phoned, weeks later. "Africa," he said. "Mlarki to London." "Oh, the man with the moss!" I exclaimed. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said guardedly. "I called to invite you to dinner." I checked my date book. "I'm over my head with appointments -- three magazine covers to pose for, two interviews, a profile, sessions with, the person who's writing my autobiography -- "Yes, yes," he said. "You're the hit of the season; can't open anything in print without seeing your face or by-line. Now when can we have dinner together?" "Would some time next month do?" "That depends on when you want to light a little bonfire," he said. "Oh." I said. "That's different. I'll cancel everything. Just tell me the time and place." "My home. Tomorrow night. Alone." He gave me the address and hung up. Next night, Lord Halifax's chauffeur handed me out of the silver Rolls-Royce right on the dot. I told him to wait; I didn't expect a long visit, just dinner and burning the moss and home by ten. Dr. Perry himself opened the door, so promptly that I thought he'd been waiting for my ring. He sort of reded back as I entered. "Princess!" he cried. "I'd never have known you! You're dazzling!" He stroked my sable coat a moment, before hanging it up. Then he led me to his little bar, and we had a little drinkie and then to dinner, which he told me he had cooked himself -- and which he served himself. "Are your chef and butler off for the evening?" I asked. "Chef and butler?" He laughed himself red in the face. "I don't even have a wife or mistress!" he said, coughing. I shuddered inwardly as I remembered my insistence on staying at his house. Imagine all these weeks without servants -- and a bachelor's flat at that! But I kept up my end of the conversation, which was mostly about my adventures in London, until I could decently mention the moss. He finished his wine, a very ordinary vin ordinaire, and took me to his little laboratory at the rear of the house. "There!" he said, picking up a little chafing dish kind of thing and handing it to me. "It is yours to do with as you wish!" "It seems like such a little bit of moss," I said. "I give you my word that it's exactly the same amount we started with." I laughed with girlish glee as I set fire to it. "Well, that's that," I said. "Now how about Prof. Kropotkin's moss?" "Everything is arranged," he said. "There will be a Soviet plane to take you to Moscow at noon tomorrow. Kropotkin will be among the delegation to meet you." "It's so terribly sudden," I said. "I have to call off so many appointments. How can I do it with so little notice?" "You'll find a way," he told me. "You do want to see your husband and father, don't you?" And so I spent a sleepless night writing excuses and a hurried morning phoning those I couldn't write to. Then I thanked the Fairfaxes, gave each servant a handsome gratuity, and was at the airport with # minutes to spare, complete with the fantastic wardrobe I had accumulated in London with my personal appearances and endorsements. I slept aboard the plane and nodded through the reception at Moscow, until Prof. Kropotkin came into view among the high dignitaries. I shook his hand and asked when I could destroy the moss. "First you must give us equal time with England," he said jovially. So I lived in the Kremlin, reviewed the military might, walking, riding or being dragged through Red Square -- from Lenin's tomb, of course -- inspected factories, appeared at ballet, theater, opera, on TV and in the newspapers and magazines. I made a great hit when I said, "If I weren't a princess, there is nothing I would rather be than a commoner in London or Moscow." For the sake of brevity, let me state simply that between those two great capitals, I was worn skinny before they let me visit Kropotkin for dinner and mossburning. Then I flew back to Mlarki and home. At last! But would my husband, the Head Witch Doctor, and my father, the Supbr Chief, welcome me as gladly as had Moscow and London? "You've burned it all?" my husband asked. "Every bit Kropotkin and Perry had," I told them. They both put their arms around me. As I dabbed at my eyes, I saw Prof. Todd grinning crookedly down at me. We shook hands enthusiastically and he said, "My lab's gone to pot since you left. Want to come back?" I nodded, too overcome by emotion to speak. And that, I innocently thought, was that. But Todd and my two men toured the whole gigantic compound with me in the tribal Jeep, where I was shown everybody talking back to phonographs that were talking to them in English and other languages, and then to the airfield, where they showed me Pigmies learning to fly planes. "What on Earth is going on?" I asked blankly. "We Pigmies are about to take our rightful places," the Super Chief said -- in perfectly good English! When I commented on that, he said, "You can't beat the phonograph to teach foreign languages." "All of us?" I said. "Every man, woman and child," the Head Witch Doctor replied. "We are going to bring peace to the world." "When?" I asked. "How?" "You'll know when before anybody else." said Prof. Todd. "The how will be explained in an article I'm writing for the British medical magazine Lancet ." And that was all I could get out of them, I doubted if my husband and father knew how it all would come about, for I plagued them with questions. But why would I know before anybody S ome months later, when I wa reluctantly tuning in my radio, which had been bristling with every nation threatening its neighbors, I heard only silence. Puzzled, I changed the batteries, then turned the dials slowly. Nothing! From nearby Mlarki to the farthest Greenland -- not a sound, not a voice! When I told this to my husband, he suggested telling Prof. Todd. I did, panting from running to his hut. "You see?" he said triumphantly. "I said you would be the first to know. Now we must assemble all the tribes and put Plan C into effect!" "What were Plan A and Plan B?" I asked in bewilderment. "Dr. Perry and Prof. Kropotkin," he explained on the run. "What about them?" I yelled, but he was out of earshot. He had been heading for the meeting hut. I followed him. By the time I reached it, sirens were blaring all over the compound. Everybody came from everywhere and raced to the meeting hut. Inside, Prof. Todd was standing at a lectern at the front of the huge auditorium, waiting for all of us to take our seats. His grin was more crooked than I had ever seen it. The Super Chief and the Head Witch Doctor were seated behind him, facing the audience. He beckoned to me to sit with them. As I obeyed, the bustle ceased. Every eye was on him. "Brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews," he said, "The day has come! We have labored long and hard for this moment. Every one of you, including the children, knows English, and most of you know another language besides, as well as the history, customs and economics of the country you have been assigned to. We must move swiftly to bring order out of the chaos the world is in. Can we do it?" "Yes!" the crowd roared. "Good, good," he said. "Now let's line up according to continent." "What about us?" I asked my husband. "We're the Supreme Arbiters," he said. "Didn't the Professor tell you how we've been organizing ourselves?" "Not a word," I answered. "We've been busy experimenting on all kinds of vegetation." "With what results?" "None," I said. "Not a thing." "That's wonderful!" cried my father. "Absolutely wonderful!" "What's wonderful?" I asked in complete confusion. "Why won't anyone tell me what this is all about?" Prof. Todd had turned toward us, listening and grinning. "Please join me in leading the parade to the airfield," he said, "and I'll explain on the way." We fell into step with him. Suddenly I remembered running after him, when my stride was five to his one. Now -- I compared him with my two men and realized what I had not noticed, the change had been so gradual. Prof. Todd was mere inches taller than them, instead of almost two feet, and our strides were just about equal!" #i'#"ou guessed it, Princess,"  he said cheerfully. "Every living thing on Earth -- except vegetation -- is on its way toward becoming a tenth of its former size!" "The moss?" I asked. He nodded. "But I destroyed it all!" "Token amounts," he said. "Just enough to keep you from unwittingly spoiling Plan C." "You haven't explained Plan A and Plan B," I said, angry at being made a mere puppet. "Dr. Perry and Prof. Kropotkin did what I wanted them to do," he said. "They turned over the moss and the tiny people and dogs to their military, who immediately saw its strategic value. Their nations grew the moss as fast as it would grow -- which is phenomenally when exposed to light hydroponic tanks -- and shared it with their allies. When they had enough of it they spirited it into the streams, rivers, lakes and reservoirs of their enemies. There isn't one single piece of land, from all the continents to the tiniest island, that isn't clogged with it." "But how did they do it?" I asked. "Tourists," he said. "And what is Plan C?" "To take over the world." He laughed teasingly. "But first, let's get your people distributed." There were many bush planes on the airfield, which were loaded according to ultimate destination, and flown to Mlarki by Pigmy pilots, where supersonic jets stood waiting, also manned by Pigmies. Each jet had its destinations clearly marked and filled up with people Who knew exactly where they were going, and why, and what they were to do there. Except me. I found my hand being shaken while my husband and father took turns hugging me and saying good-by. "Wait!" I wailed. "I don't know what's expected of me! And when will I see my two men again?" "The Pigmies assigned to each nation are responsible to you, the Head Witch Doctor and the Super Chief," said Todd, finally letting go of my hand. "You'll see them both two weeks a year, on your vacations." "With pay!" added my father. "And what will you do?" I asked Prof. Todd. "Go back to the specimens we gathered, an experiment rudely interrupted," he said. "But I'll need a lab scaled down to the size I'll soon be." "Don't grieve," my husband said comfortingly. "It's the noblest job a people can have, bringing peace and justice to the world. Anyhow, we'll be talking by telephone as often as the budget will allow." "And will I always be your Number One Wife?" I asked fearfully. "Always," he said. "Promise?" "Promise." We all took separate planes and. I was wihooshed to New York and my deluxe suit at the Waldorf-Astoria, where, looking out the fourth-floor window, I can see the people scurrying like the warrior ants of my native Africa. There. I think the story is complete. Prof. Todd asked me to write it for posterity, and he has been waiting patiently for me to finish it. He wants to add a few words. Prof. Todd: T hank you, Princess Wamba. I find the forgoing extremely accurate, but a little unclear about Plan C. I wasn't trying to tease Her Highness or create suspense; there were just too many details and getting people into their proper planes to allow me to explain Plan o tf and Worlds of Tomorrow Combined How to Beat the Rising Cost of Living I EF, #I Hudson Street  New York City # J Please  begin J renew my subscrip! I lion to IF for CD # issues at # fl # issues at # J My check or money order is enclosed. I i Nome  I Address j i City State Zip ' j (Outside of U.S., add I for each # Issues) I This offer expires October #, # L i To put it as briefly as possible, it consists of the Pigmies acting as Governors General, each aiding his assigned country to make the transformation to an environment ten times too large for it, with the Princess, Super Chief and Head Witch Doctor acting as Supreme Arbiters in disputes between countries, which have been predictably few. We tiny people were overwhelmed by the immensity of our environments -- our tenfold abundance of food and housing and clothing, metals and minerals and fuels, and our suddenly adequate means of transportation -- everything! Only the Pigmies, of all the world, were not stupefied by the change. Princess Wamba has asked me, What about the danger of war? To which I can openly reply, With what? Weapons we tiny people can't operate? Warplanes we can't fly? Besides, who needs somebody else's territory and resources when suddenly there is ten times as much of everything? But what about later, you ask, after the transition is complete? By that time, Pigmy rule will be solidly entrenched. And what Pigmy would let his country go to war against a brother Pigmy's? Moreover, it's remarkable even now how possessive each country feels about its Pigmy Governor General. Why shouldn't they? After all, Pigmies, being the only creatures on Earth who were immune to the moss, are the biggest people on Earth. Now doesn't everything work out wonderfully? U nderstanding One boy can't cope with a planet filled with enemies -- unless he has a dog... and Understanding! I S cholar's Cluster is a globular aggregation of about a quarcluster that it has no visible sign of dispersion. Its stars are heavy with the metals created in earlier novae, and the stellar population is high with the middle-sequence suns centering around Types F, G and K. More important, Scholar's Cluster got its name from its own mysterious environment. Studying there will not make a scholar of a dolt nor a genius of a straight-A student, but studying there will guarantee that each will be educated to his maximum ability to absorb knowledge. Once this end is reached, there is no point in remaining -- for exactly the same reason that one stops pouring when the gallon measure has taken on four quarts. Scholar's Cluster was a going operation when Earth attained the stars and took her place among the galactic cultures; and Earth, like the myriad of other galactic cultures, sends her brighest to her educational colony on one of the pleasanter planets that revolves about a G-# star not much different than Sol. While this is not an account of Scholar's Cluster, Scholar's Cluster is important to the adventures of young Terence Lincoln, for Scholar's Cluster lies toward the center of the Galaxy, a few thousand light-years to the inward side of the sprawling empire of Xanabar. It is the existence of Scholar's Cluster that placed young Terence Lincoln on the spot in Xanabar. Otherwise, he would hardly have been so far from home... r " A erry Lincoln skylarked through the streets of Coleban, one of the capital cities of Xanabar, with a babble of his classmates. They were stopping over in Xanabar on their way home to Mother Earth. They all had fine grades from primary school and were all looking forward to the three-month vacation before returning to enter secondary school: neither success, nor freedom, nor the City of Coleban itself did anything to dampen their exuberance. Lincoln and his classmates bracketed age fifteen. So all of them were on the verge of, but none of them had yet crossed, the big line between adolescence and maturity. That is, none of them had gained Understanding. Without Understanding, the gold and the glitter of Coleban was pure crystal-cut of proof perfect, and the stopover was simply a matter of imperfect spaceline scheduling. With Understanding, they would have labelled Coleban as a tourist trap and realized that the stopover was a condition for interstellar license through Xanabar so that those who passed through could be parted from a measure of their wealth. Still, those who disdainfully label Coleban tinsel and damn the whole of Xanabar are hardly fair. For the shops of Coleban displayed to their very best the most attractive wares of ten thousand worlds. The universal diamond, sapphire and emerald are commonplace; second rate to the star-drop of Manark, the frauland of Selira that shines of its own internal light or the glorious oyster-pearl of Earth, that is said to lose its luster if it does not lie upon the throat of a woman in love. There were fabrics so delicate that they could be worn but once and others so durable that they would outlast their makers. There were tools to fit the hands of a thousand worlds, knives that could split the hair or cleave plate armor with equal facility; instruments with gleaming dial and engraved calibration. And there were animated displays. These caught young Terry Lincoln's eye. He was a gamesman. The displays were programmed by master artisans to show the finer points and the flashy parts, and done with an ease that convinced the onlooker that he, too, could gain such skill with a little practice. Time and again, Terry found himself rapt as his companions moved onward. And each time he had to make his way through a bedlam of humanity to regain his companions. Humanity came in an assortment of sizes from a small meter and a half to a stalwart two meters plus, and in a bracket of weights to match the skinny and the gross in each height class. Humanity's color varied from peppermint white to deep chocolate, with side flavors of saffron, tints of lemon and the reds from pale pink to ruddy. There were the usual superficial differences in the makeup of the hands and some startling facial arrangements, but they were all of Humanity -- and they all had two things in common: They were all oxygen-breathing, water-based, hydrocarbon life with red blood and omnivorous appetites -- and they all had Understanding, for Understanding is the mature way of life for those whose culture has attained the stars. That Terry Lincoln and his classmates lacked this important common denominator mattered not. His was a people who had attained Understanding, and he and his companions were on the verge.  ' babble of tongues about him was babble indeed. This did not bother him. One day he, too, would attain it, and all would become clear. For this; moment of celebration, all babble was noise; and Lincoln Gdiild not have oared less whether the Humanity about him was echoing in their own way his own appreciation of the glitter of City Coleban or talking about him as an object of interest. Lincoln paused to watch a display of a game that combined the intricacy and plotting of chess with the speed and precision of hockey played on ice. It was a demonstration skillfully programmed so that even the youths without Understanding could follow the play. Rapt, young Terry watched until the game, again by skillful max of high-speed mastermoves that ended with one player downed in ignominious defeat. The close of this action was followed by a sales pitch in the tongue of Xanabar, which, of course, any one with Understanding could follow. To Terry, it was babble, and so he turned to say -- "That was quite a -- " -- only to find that his companions had left him and were now turning the corner far along the street. Terry turned to follow. As he turned, the sales pitch stopped and a new demonstration began with appropriate announcements. His move to leave was blocked by a strong centripetal movement toward the exhibition. While he bucked this inward movement, his classmates turned the comer and were gone from sight. This bothered Terry very lightly; he knew he could make his way through this crowd and rejoin his companions. But the crowd that thronged the streets of Coleban had one more Human attribute: They were egocentric. They blocked his path and barked at him in the tongues of the Galaxy. They did not step aside nor help, nor seem to care that he was trying to make haste for a very good reason. Indeed, there seemed a perverse delight in their operations, as if they found it pleasant to block this rash youth who lacked Understanding. Openings closed as he approached. Strangers paused to speak to one another in the narrowest of ways. Pedestrian traffic, supposed to walk on the left by the Law of Xanabar, filled the right-hand pedestrian lanes in the wrong direction. That others, trying to make their way in Terry's direction, were also blocked and frustrated did not make Terry's lot any easier. Then came the inevitable incident. Terry espied an opening between two walkers and started through, only to plunge headlong into a saffron-colored man of gross proportions who had filled the gap. Terry hit and bounced backward to land with a jarring thud on the base of his spine. The saffron-colored one laughed harshly, displaying a mouth full of disgustingly bad teeth. To finish this picture, the saffroncolored one had covered his visibly unbathed body with one of the gaudiest costumes to walk the streets of Coleban. Angered, Terry Lincoln arose and hit the line with a plunge that had gained him much yardage on the playing fields of Scholar's Cluster -- and once Wore bounced. This time the saffron-colored one kicked Terry in tire ribs as he stepped over the lad to disappear in the crowd. This was the last straw. It was time to forget that politeness was a gentlemanly trait and time to get where he was going. S tarting with a brisk walk, and slowly accelerating into a dogtrot, Terry Lincoln zigged and zagged and darted, making long end runs around phalanxes of people and driving himself between others that showed no more than half enough space. Soon he was in a semi-gallop, making wide swings here and taking a shortcut through an open alleyway there. He lost his sense of direction and, being young, forgot the natae of the game he'd set out to win because there was a more frantic game at hand. Terry became turned around and continued to plunge through the crowd in the direction away from his local home base, the spaceport and its wall of hotels, conveniently provided by Coleban for the enforced lay-overs. He did not notice that the high polish was no longer about him, nor that the crowd was less dense. He had passed the unmarked boundary of the center city and was now passing through the borderland, that ring that lies between the polish and the blight. Then came the second incident. Once more, Terry tried to plunge between two who walked a bit apart, and once more he hit gross weight and bounced. Once more the same saffron face with its mouth full of rotting teeth laughed at him, but this time the ugly one made a grab for Terry, bear-hugged the youth and smothered Terry's mouth in the foul-smelling gaudy garment. Terry flailed, kicked the other's shins and broke free. Blindly Terry swung and missed. Then his training rose to the surface, and he squared away. He lfed with his left and came forward with a right cross that should have made its mark but failed to connect. Saffron-face countered with an open-handed chop that Terry blocked with his forearm. It stunned all feeling from lower arm and hand. Once more saffron-face made his grab, but this time Terry wasn't having any. He managed to connect one shoulderdriven right jab that mashed the saffron mouth, broke off a few jagged stumps of the rotten teeth, and brought a quick flow of blood to the stranger's mouth. Terry turned and ran, then made a wide curve that outdisfenced the saffron one's attempt to catch him. Terry proceeded once more in the direction his faulty sense said led toward home base: the spaceport and its hotels. Behind him in full chase came the gross one, surprisingly limber for that much visible flab. Ultimately, youth outdistanced the man, and Terry paused for breath. About him was slumland. Trash littered the sidewalks, and filth filled the gutter. Windows were nearly all cracked to some degree, many were broken and stuffed with dirty cloth, others were completely out and covered from within with some sort of reclaimed sheeting or discarded building material. The air smelled of rancid grease, vegetables that had been cooked far too long and the unclean smell of the blight area. Dusk had begun, and the streetlights had come on to cast a wholly incompetent, wan glow. Under one were street urchins playing at some game of dice. Two girls in too-tight and very sleazy dresses passed Terry and spoke to him forashly; he did not need Understanding to know what they had in mind. His silence was greeted by more vulgarities, which attracted the attention of the dice-players. Two, obviously winners, deserted the game for the girls. Still, Terry plodded on, for he recalled that the transit had passed overhead of some grubbylooking areas on its way from spaceport to center city. And so he continued, confident that beyond this barrier of blight lay the spaceport he sought. II fTpjhe name was Homburg. On the wall before him was an illuminated map of the city, with tiny moving lights to show what action was taking place. Below the map were a series of small videoscreens with scenes of the city taken from marked vantage points. The special-colored I starred cross that marked the position of Terry Lincoln, and the thin dotdash line that marked his path, Showed him almost diametrically opposite to the spaceport and moving away. Homburg pressed a button on his desk. On the small screen above the instrument the saffroncolored face appeared. Homburg said, "That was well executed, Bod Zimmer." Zimmer said, "Zer Homburg, am I relieved? I wish very much to get out of this filthy disguise." "You are relieved, Bod Zimmer. You will foe rewarded." A snap, and Zimmer's face disappeared. Homburg eyed the map and noted that the mark that represented Terry; was still moving away from center city and the spaceport on the far side. Satisfied, he arose from his desk and went down the hallway outside to another office. He merely nodded to the secretary in the outer office as he stepped briskly across the room to the closed door. But it was with visible deference that he rapped on the inner door, waited perceptibly, and only after there was no objection turned the knob and entered. To the man behind the desk, Homburg said, "Zer Martell, phase one is completed." Martell looked up. "Successfully, Bod Homburg?" "Quite," replied Homburg, concealing his disappointment. He'd hoped that this success would move his superior to drop the title bod which one used oh an inferior. Had this been done, Homburg would no longer be required to address his superior by the title zer and could address him without title as an equal. CtTTery well," said Martell.  "Now, whether you sleep tonight at all, you will remain on duty until the call comes from the Terrestrial spacecraft that one of their number is missing." "Yes, Zer Martell." "It will be routed to your office. Take the call just as if your  assignment was to take such calls and act upon them. They need not know -- indeed, they must not know that they are dealing with a member of the personal staff of the Master Peacekeeper of Xanabar." "Yes, Zer Martell." "And then, Bod Homburg, see that this incident is properly and promptly reported to the Terrestrial Agency at once." "This will place the agent Peter Hawley and the dog Beauregarde in the operation, Zer Martell." "Precisely." "I fail to see -- " "Bod Homburg, that pair have a mutual Understanding that surpasses any that I have ever seen. I hope that we may gain some insight into this superior Understanding by separating them. Once the Terrestrial agent is notified and the operators move into action, you will give the signal to execute phase two. Understood?" "I will give the signal as you order, but I fail to understand why all of this is necessary." "Were we to separate them by force, there would be repercussions. To slay one of them would only serve to have the slain one replaced by another whose way of operating would be unfamiliar to us, and it would infuriate the remaining one to a degree that only an irate Terrestrial can achieve. Now, Bod Homburg, were you able to understand the reason for this complicated operation, you would be sitting in this office instead of me." "Zer Martell! I would never think of replacing you." "You never will," said Martell coldly. "The day you enter this office will be the day I appoint you to it, for then I shall sit where Zer Doktur sits today and I shall still be your superior. So now begone and prepare for the next phase." Yn Terrestrial terms, it would have been between two-thirty and three o'clock in the morning. The streets of Coleban were deserted save for some cleaning women and porters and a very few others. Of the masses of humanity who had come seeking their own particular brand of happiness, some had found it and others had not; in either case they were elsewhere. The "others" included a sight seldom seen this far from Mother Earth, for no other planet has anything 'that resembles the Terrestrial canine. Beauregarde led, his nose close to the ground and his plume waving cheerfully as he plied one of his talents. He was tracking the scent of Young Terry Lincoln. Beauregarde is hard to describe because he does not resemble any of the standard breeds. Dog, short-haired, brown with darker lines around the eyes, well muscled, seventy to eighty pounds. In short, Beauregarde the dog looked like a dog because his parents were dogs, but here the association with cans vulgaris ceases. For Beauregarde had the dog's version of Understanding. He was of a long line of dogs bred for Understanding and for the latent intelligence of the canine, instead of size or shape or something equally superficial. Understanding has been a canine trait ever since man and dog shared the campfire and divided the day's kill. As a consequence, it is hardly surprising that Beauregarde's measure of Understanding was greater in any area where Peter Hawley was concerned. Peter followed the dog at a little distance. He, too, is hard to describe because he, like Beauregarde, is pure mongrel. Still, Peter Hawley carried himself with a j aunty air as if he owned the sidewalk where he trod: a lithe and slender thirtyish with plenty of bounce in his step and a smile on his face. The smile was either Cheerful rogue or downright insolence depending upon which side the observer took with regard to Peter. His hair was dark sandy, and his eyes were blue. His complexion was a healthy wind-burned tan, but mostly artificially induced since Peter's assigned task was to pursue and apprehend villains, and villainy is mostly done in the dark. The dog paused, circled tightly, resniffed and said, "Young Lincoln stood here for quite a While, shuffling back and forth as if he were watching something." The dog's voice was far from Oxford. It was a well controlled whine and whinny, with chest sounds adding bass with a well modulated growl or a low rumble. The lips and tongue were sufficiently mobile to give fair articulation. Understanding supplied the remainder of Beauregarde's communication system. Peter looked around. "The kid's school file said that he was a bit of a gamesman. Maybe that one caught him." Peter indicated the game that Lincoln had stopped to watch. It was dormant now that there were no potential customers, but Peter knew of the game and how it was displayed. "Anything else?" he asked Beauregarde. "Well, the rest didn't wait up for him." Peter nodded. "I don't suppose that educated sniffer of yours will tell us whether this is where they got separated?" "No. But I wouldn't be against this as the place," said Beauregarde. "I think I scent repeaters." ( C O epeaters? Well, now, that makes it a grabbing instead of a little boy lost, and that makes more sense except for the big puzzler of why." "Why?" repeated the dog. "Isn't half of our job retrieving either Terrestrial loot or Terrestrials themselves that have been grabbed by the citizens of Xanabar?" "Yes," grinned Peter. "But it's usually toothsome young females that they grab, not fifteen-yearold males, which are a drug on any flesh market." "How so?" "Beauregarde, a youth of fifteen is one hundred and thirtyodd pounds of misdirected energy, walking on two left feet in an uncertain gait in the wrong direction. Its path is marked by a two-year trail of broken glass, dirty shoes, unfinished projects, unread books and undone homework. He is as cooperative as a mule when anything constructive is needed and filled with burning ambition when what must be done is completely beyond his capability. And -- " " -- in other words, who'd want one?" "That's about it." "Well, there must be some reason. Even the citizens of Xanabar do not grab for the simple sake of grabbing." "You're thinking of ransom?" "Well?" asked the dog. Peter shook his head. "Whilst you were getting your snoot full of Lincoln's scent, I was going through the folder from the kid's school record. There simply isn't anything negotiable in Lincoln's background. His folks have neither money nor position that would make a caper like this worthwhile. Oh, young Lincoln is bright enough to earn a sponsored ticket to Scholar's Cluster, but the citizens of Xanabar aren't swiping adolescent brains with half an education and no Understanding." "Not without some reason," insisted Beauregarde. "You're a bloody pragmatist," said Peter. "And you're so right. That's what bothers me." "That I'm right?" "No. What bothers me is not that you're right, but that this operation smells highly of something complicated, with the bait concealed. Jinks, if they wanted to grab him, they've got enough characters in this play to fold up the pavement around him and cart him off. Instead -- they play games. I don't get it; what I don't like is being too dense to see." "So?" "So we walk very carefully, carrying our dish extremely level, making neither wave nor surface ripple until we get to the bottom of this mess." Beauregarde gave a short bark; in human it would have been a snort. "Peter," said the dog, "I lack the imagination to visualize the scene in which Peter Hawley handles the delicate situation with velvet gloves, whilst Beauregarde lies with chops on forepaws and watches through heavylidded eyes." nphey went on -- and on -- and  on until Beauregarde snorted and dog-sneezed. "Oof," he said. "Your opinion of overaged fish is pleasantly aromatic compared to this." "What goes?" "Something -- someone -- who stinks. Reeks. Awful." "Humph. Well, Beau, the caper makes a pattern, but the prize is still hidden." "You mean this smelly character makes sense?" "I'll bet a nice well hung raw steak against one, charcoal singed on the outside, that this smelly pally was also clad in a costume that couldn't be forgotten in a lifetime." "But why?" "Well, observe that we are nearing the edge of the fancy part of Coleban. Here we have an incident that marks one of the opposition in the young man's mind. Not long from now, there will be another, with the same offensive party. This will convince Lincoln that he is not a mere victim of circumstance, but the central figure in a plot. He will therefore take off on a dead gallop. Subtly the opposition will change their tactics and start to block his way in the direction they want him to go, leaving their cover loose so that he thinks he is gaining while all the time he is going in the direction they want him to go. Catch?" "Yes, but why?" "Well, Beau, take a look. We're about to leave the area of polished metal, reflection-free glass and marked-up prices. We're on the edge of the honky-tonk, the flashy vurguzz-mill and the joint with the fifty beautiful hostesses, fifty. Unless the target is not distracted, he will observe this distressing side of City Coleban and take sensible measures. Distracted, he will plunge on and on, deeper and deeper into enemy territory." "That is a lot to deduce from a few dog-scents," said Beauregarde. "Sure it is. But I've been in Xanabar long enough to figure out most of their operations. In fact, the only thing that bothers me is this one. With the crew, they have on board, simply grabbing a kid should be as easy as -- er -- " " -- Scratching your ear with your hind foot?" asked Beauregarde.  "Yeah..." said Peter absently. "And even without your talented sniffer, I smell the unmistakable smell of Peacekeeper, about to arrive in a cloud of indignation." Beauregarde made a gesture of sniffing at the air. "I agree," he said. "And now, Peter, take your own advice. Treat this delicate situation delicately. The velvet gloves, remember? The level dish and the careful walk? I shall observe through heavy-lidded eyes with jaw on poised forepaws, the picture of contentment." "Oh, shut up!" snapped Peter. "Ah, how quickly passes the moment of passive acceptance. Peter, your adrenalin count is rising admirably to this occasion. But please, don't make me bite him. I detest the taste of raw Peacekeeper." Ill Tn full, colorful regalia, thePeacekeeper of Xanabar approached with the customary hail: "What goes on in Xanabar?" "Nothing of interest to you, Peacekeeper." "You are Peter Hawley, and this is the dog, Beauregarde." since we both are quite well known. And since we are equally well known as lawful folk, we will continue on our way." "You are a troublemaker, with the reputation of disturbing the peace of Xanabar. Now, exactly what business brings you to the center of Coleban at this unreasonable hour of the morning?" "I am walking my dog." "Do not be insolentl" "Then do not make noises like an imbecile. You know damned well that a Terrestrial youth, Terence Lincoln, dropped out of touch in this region not too many hours ago." "The Peacekeepers of Xanabar have the situation well in hand. We need no intervention from outsiders." "The Peacekeepers of Xanabar have the situation loused up as usual," said Peter testily. "Any' outfit that can't find a fifteen-year-old male Terrestrial without Understanding needs some outside help." "Finding the missing youth is Peacekeeper business." "Business seems to be failing. Now go fly your kite." "You will not be permitted to meddle in the affairs of Xanabar." "We're not meddling," snapped Peter. "We're merely doing what your whole outfit can't do. So now get out of my way." "You may not order me around." "Want to bet?" "Peter," said Beauregarde quietly, "remember your own advice. Be kind to our web-footed friend." "Ah, yes," said Peter. "I'm being impulsive. We need not walk roughshod over the Peacekeepers of Xanabar, need we? So, since he will not stand aside and let us on about our business, we will go around. Right, Beau?" "Right," said Beauregarde. The dog started to circle the Peacekeeper to one side while Peter circled the Peacekeeper to the other. He in the middle tried to keep his eyes on both, which resulted in a back-and-forth snap of the head as the encirclement increased. Finally the patience of the Peacekeeper blew sky high. "Stop this!" he shouted, reaching for his side-arm. Beauregarde stopped circling. He faced the Peacekeeper and dropped low into an alert crouch. The strong muscles stood out as he hunched himself for a spring; the scruff stood high and stiff, and from the deep throat came the growl of the Terrestrial dog in last-ditch warning. The growl disturbed the Peacekeeper. Peter said, "He means that. You touch the pea-shooter, and Beauregarde will have your forearm in bloody shreds before it clears the holster." "You dare not threaten me!" bellowed the Peacekeeper. "I'm not threatening you," said Peter calmly. "I'm merely telling you what will happen if you start playing with hardware." "Peter," asked Beauregarde, "can't we arbitrate this? I'm not really hungry, and the last Peacekeeper I ate was stringy." "Now see here -- " Peter waved a hand. In it was a banknote, a pleasantly sized denomination in crystal-cut, the currency of Xanabar. "This, Peacekeeper, is not a bribe, for I know better than to bribe the Peacekeepers of Xanabar. Instead, it is payment for a fine in advance. From long experience, I know what it costs to cut a caper in Xanabar; this is payment in advance for a bit of disturbed peace, possibly a cracked skull or two, and the usual treatment for numerous scars, mars, abrasions, shock and dogbite. I further offer you some good advice. Find some overparked automobiles to ticket on the next block over and stay out of harm's way -- " In a normal flap in Xanabar, Peter might well have gotten away with it. He had before. But this Peacekeeper had his orders, and his script had been prepared by Zer Upstairs. '"TAhe mobile riot squad converg- ed upon them like a swarm of locusts. They arrived in a squeal of tires and brakes, in the thunder of copter blades, the nerve-wracking hiss of jets; and the horizon-wide clangor of bells and whistles, the howl of twotoned hee-haw-horns and the wail of sirens. With them came the blinding glare of searchlight and parachute flare. Peter and the Peacekeeper were caught in the glare. In Peter's upheld hand shone the unmistakable rectangles of green and gold, the crystal-cut of Xanabar. The tableau could hardly have been improved as it was, but the Peacekeeper capped this climax. He struck at Peter's hand in visible indignation and shouted righteously: "You cannot bribe the Peacekeeper of Xanabar!" He drew back and reached for his side-arm. Beauregarde growled warningly and crouched once more. But Peter Hawley said, "Play it cool, Beau. You track Terry Lincoln, find him, keep him safe and bring him home alive. I'll deal with this native uprising." Beauregarde said, "I hear you, Peter. I'll bring him home alive, unharmed and probably with Understanding." At which point the dog turned swiftly and pranced away. His first leap was a sudden spring that barely grazed the Peacekeeper. He landed on his forepaws and then folded into an arch that brought the hind feet between and before the front; then he unwound into a long arrowing bound forward. Like an accordion, Beauregarde alternately folded and unfolded as he raced with four-footed agility through the dazzled members of the converging force. There was a flurry of flashguns, the hiss of needle beams, the throbbing grunt of stunners and the pulsating shaft of nerve Shockers, but the Peacekeepers of Xanabar were hardly in practice, especially in taking snap shots at any target that moved as fast as canus terrestrialis in a hurry. Beauregarde made the corner untouched and turned' it in a flurry of scrabbling paws on the hard pavement. Then he was gone. Beauregarde was not touched, but the innocent bystanders had not fared well. Four of the Peacekeepers were writhing and moaning on the hard pavement; two were clutching the burnholes from needlers; and the assortment of stun-guns and nerve shockers had taken their toll from a full freeze that left the victim in the awkward configuration of an ill-contrived statue toppled to earth to lesser attacks that immobilized arm, leg, pelvis or other mobile joints. Ignoring the mess his fellows had made of themselves by their marksmanship, the uniformed Peacekeeper advanced upon Peter Hawley. "Will you come quietly?" he asked, in a voice that clearly indicated that he hoped that Peter might resist -- ever so little -- so that he could drill the Terrestrial agent and have him hauled in stiff. Peter chuckled jauntily. "Sure," he said, in a tone and in a manner that he knew to make the average Peacekeeper long for the return of the knout, the scourge and the rack. "Sure," he repeated. "Your office is better than mine to call -- because at yours I can register a formal complaint. May I walk -- or must you show your mastery of the situation by freezing me stiff and damping me in manacles to boot?" "Just come quietly," said the Peacekeeper, almost able to conceal the seething boil that threatened to erupt. T Tomburg reported, "Zer Mar- tell, phase two is new complete. "As planned?" T#T "Almost precisely. Very few deviations." Martel eyed his subordinate carefully. "And how many were told?" "Peacekeeper Veckten, of necessity. He was essential to the operation. And master marksmen Randor and Wotane." "That is all?" "That is all, Zer Martell." "That was well done, Bod Homburg." "Zer -- ?" "Yes?" "Zer Martell, would it not be proper to reward -- somehow -- these who had to be dropped by Randor and Wotane lest they harm the dog Beauregarde? It strikes me that -- " "You are not thinking well, Bod Homburg. Those who know must be rewarded -- unobtrusively -- for their performance. To reward those whose zealous defense of the Peace of Xanabar might have defeated our program would only cause puzzlement. Despite the odium of having some of our citizens think that we Peacekeepers are so poor in marksmanship that we hit our own instead of that devil-dog Beauregarde, the fewer in the know the better. Oh, well, just see -- unobtrusively -- that the victims are warmly rewarded upon the first time that they do something to warrant attention." "I understand everything you have said so far." "Good. Now, attend to phase three. Beauregarde and young Lincoln are to be harassed and isolated, but not harmed. I must have a detailed report upon their: operations here in Coleban." "Zer?" "Yes?" "Zer Martell, you speak as if it were a foregone conclusion that the dog Beauregarde will track the youth Lincoln through the streets of Coleban, meet him and join forces." "You are quite correct," said Martell. "The idea is fantastic -- until the record is examined. Peter Hawley and Beauregarde have an awesome record of trailing those missing persons whose lithe young bodies are coveted by some of our unruly citizens. I'm told that this is done by following the scent left by the person, but I'd as soon profess to believe in free-running telepathy. But fact is fact, and the record stands." "And you believe that Beauregarde will meet Lincoln." "I may have hazarded my position and my future upon that premise, Bod Homburg, but believe me, I seldom gamble for high stakes. I may play for them, but I do not gamble, if you understand the difference in meaning." IV nperence Lincoln, witE the full, misplaced confidence that he was on the right trail, walked deeper and deeper into the slumfold of Coleban, fully convinced that not far beyond this squalor was the spaceport. His watch, set to the local chronology at the spaceport as he and his comrades debarked, told him that his spacecraft had taken off. That bothered him not. His was the confidence of the brash youth whose experience is not extensive enough to convince him that there are things of which he damned well might be afraid. So he walked onward, with a fair sense of direction now that he was no longer heckled -- t hi s fair sense of direction keeping him on the proper course albeit in the wrong direction. He had, as he saw it, two alternatives. He could either continue until he made it all the way to the spaceport, or he could meet up with one of the gaudily uniformed Peacekeepers of Xanabar. In either case, it would be no more than a mere explanation of his plight, a time check the veracity of his tale of woe, and then a quick return to his former status --  otie or two ships of passage behind and a fine story to embellish in the retelling. Even in the slumland of Coleban, one cannot wander on forever without encountering a Peacekeeper, even though the Peacekeepers of Xanabar generally stay where the action is. And so young Terry espied one of the gold-braided Keepers of Xanabar's Peace and took heart. For Terry had been taught that policemen were as dedicated to the business of helping those in need as they were to the game of pursuing the ungodly. That he lacked Understanding was a point in his favor, for the Peacekeeper should realize that he was an outlander who needed help. With the ingrained ability of the public servant to turn in the wrong direction, the Peacekeeper rounded a comer instead of turning and coming toward Terry. The lad broke into a run lest he lose sight of the public protector. He rounded the corner in a dead run, caught right of the uniform and raced onward until he almost skidded into the backside of the Peacekeeper. The Peacekeeper turned at the sound of the running feet. He turned to face the oncoming Terry, and he smiled. And Terry Lincoln came to a sliding halt, reversed his direction adroitly, and then proceeded to use his best high-speed energy. For the Peacekeeper, in the full regalia of a middlearchy of Xanabar's force, was none other than saffron-face. He had been relieved of his odious role and restored to rank, but there was no change in his face, his attitude, or his demeanor. A s Terry raced away, the Peacekeeper's hand-whistle shrilled, and the shout he delivered did not need any Understanding to decipher. Once more, Terry eluded a group that swarmed down to encircle him. He raced through the slumland of Coleban with an ease that carried him out of their hands, but as he went, he realized the very uncomfortable but obvious truth : someone was after him. He was Target For Tonight. When he was again free of pursuit, he paused to think. What they wanted of him he could not imagine, but the fact remained. It occurred to him that he could not appeal to Authority, since Authority in the uniform of the Peacekeepers seemed to be an active part of this ploy. His nature was to rail against them, to label the operation a senseless, stupid plot. But a glimmering of reason entered, at least long enough to let him understand that a large organization does not play senseless, stupid games. They had something to gain, else they would not play. It came as a blow to him to realize that he could not in confidence call upon the protection of the Peacekeepers of Xanabar. It cut fifty per cent of his future; he had left only the process of continuing on and on and on through this wilderness of broken window and rotten timber and decayed brick until he reached the spaceport that lies some Terrestrial kilometers beyond the outskirts of the city. He found a sidewalk stair with an under-part ungraciously upholstered with ragged mattress and tattered' blanket. Their dirt was offensive; but with the natural philosophy that the altitude of fastidiousness depends inversely upon the need, Terry Lincoln hit the very smelly hay. His occupancy of a favorite assignation spot for the local juveniles of slumland Coleban was not as disliked as it might have been. Most of the would-be users had been homeless themselves and sympathized with the unknown who slept where they would lie. They found other accommodations and felt superior because they, now, were better off than he. Y oung Lincoln awoke with the coming of true light; that is, shortly after dawn. Strangely, the fact of his plight was secondary to a long-established ritual now unavailable. First, of course, was the absence of clean clothing, to saynothing of the absence of clean underclothing. Further, he'd slept in his clothing, and this made them even more odious. He could have cheerfully skipped the morning bath at home or at school, especially when something interesting was up, but now that he was absolutely denied any opportunity to bathe, his body felt dusty, his skin crawled with imagined vermin and he was certain that he reeked of unwashed human flesh and stale perspiration. Second -- but this quickly forged ahead and became foremost -- his tongue and teeth felt furry and coated. Deep inside, Terry felt a vague unease; he knew academically that his teeth would hardly fall out after missing one brushing, but his training refuted the facts. So at this part of his awakening, Terry would have accepted the ration of water to brush his teeth instead of washing his body... Then came thirst. And the ration of water would have been poured down his gullet. For he had traveled far, through dusty city streets; and he had slept in quite unpleasant quarters in an atmosphere that reeked of rot and filth and decay. Finally, he was hungry. He'd missed dinner the night before; and whereas he'd have been happy to forego dinner to partake of something interesting, the fact that he was denied made his hunger grow as he thought about the prospects. He could have missed a meal or several without any adverse effect other than the psychology involved in being denied. With but minor complaint he endured the discomfort of not having a comb. The lack of a urinal bothered him only long enough to espy a drain-grille in the concrete flooring of his below-stairs hideaway and long enough to make sure no one was about to catch him in the act. And then came the realization that hungry or no, bath or not, he had distance to cover. He realized then, for the first time in his life, that he was surely on his own, and that he would most likely be on his own until he, himself, managed to make his way from where he was to where he wanted to be. That the comforts of life were his to attain -- once he gained them. He had one advantage over his operation of yesterday. Today, having slept in his clothing and having been denied his morning ablutions, Terry Lincoln looked more like a youth of tenement slumland. With no backward glance, Terry left his hideaway and with a wary eye peeled to catch the gaudy uniform of the Peacekeeper of Xanabar he began once more to make his way through squalor and filth toward the spaceport. He aimed as he believed to be right, and his aim was good, for he was on the same course as he'd been the night before. But Martel! and Homiburg had turned him about neatly. They watched as reports came in, and as their clerks posted colored pinpoints on the illuminated maps and added, lengths of illuminated line to mark Terry's course. With deep interest -- separated by the protocol into their own offices -- Martell and Homburg watched the progress of the Terrestrial dog Beauregarde, as he followed the trail. That the dog's highly trained nose could separate the scent of a fellow Terrestrial was highly improbable. They laid this feat to a superior form of Understanding; an affinity toward a fellow Terrestrial that might well fail if Beauregarde were asked to track say, a Crespian. V npie first missed meal -- like the first hundred years -- is the hardest. If missing a meal sharpens the wits, it is the wit to petty larceny that is sharpened, for the hungry conscience finds little to reproach for a swiped breakfast. Two things worked in Lincoln's favor. First, he was in a district where the food merchants expected to lose a fair slice of his wares -- and hoped sincerely that those who stole were truly in need. And second, his fumbling, inept attempts at comestible kleptomania were happily covered over by an outburst of customer indignation over some overcharge or underservice or soft spots in the hard cheese. With clerk, manager and customer in a full-throated round of threats to call upon the Peacekeepers from either side of the mangle, Terry Lincoln found it easy to grab a hand full of fruit, some slices of cheese, and a few other odds and ends that were taken simply because they were available. It was hardly a balanced diet, but Terry was a fifteen-year-old human and, as Humanity knows from the Galactic Center to the oscillating dusters, this has the appetite of a bottomless pit, the metabolism of a blast furnace. And so he staved off starvation -- and fairly well, for the lack of the formal breakfast still remained in his mind, while at the same time he was running a continuous snack-theft as the opportunity came. Twenty miles a day is a fair trek for the seasoned traveller through wilderness. Lincoln hardly had to hack his way through jungle with a machete, but the pitfalls of running afoul took their own toll. For example, he knew that breaking out into a dead run would bring trouble. And so by nightfall on the second eve, Lincoln was still making his way in the wrong direction. Ty nightfall, Terry had passed beyond the ring of filth and squalor that was characteristic of the blight area. His surroundings were now quieter, sedate, with a nostalgic touch of days that had been, but now long gone, glory. It was an area in its dotage, remembering the past alone for it had no future but to fall into the widening circle of blight. Its present was no more than the dull state of transition from an active and fruitful past to a deadly sordid loss of all value. Finding a place to sleep was a problem here. This was no neighborhood where gangs of delinquents roamed to meet and choose up sides to find their pleasure where it was to be found. The neighborhood was old, but it was clean, and it looked clean and it smelled clean. Just as there was no trash in the gutter, there was no crypt below the stairs, upholstered with cast off blanket and mattress. The lack of a ready-made pad did not bother Terry as much as it might have. He did not, of course, analyze his feelings about the matter. But the behaviorist would have used the situation to demonstrate the value of experience. Last night, in sheer fatigue, Terry had found lodging when he needed it. Call it, if you must, luck. Today, he had survived an hostile environment; he had eaten and he had maintained his freedom and, although his sense of direction was wrong, he felt that he had made progress. Terry Lincoln, for the first time tossed out on his own, had passed his first twenty-four hours in the jungle. And it has been said that a human, physically weak compared to his animal contemporaries and poorly endowed with tooth, nail, claw and grown-on fur coat, can be dropped anywhere that life exists and emerge as Master so long as he can survive the first diurnal period. Terry had never heard this statement. But in his mind tomorrow was a new day, and since he'd survived this one, he would survive tomorrow. The hours of the night passed along, and with them went some of Terry's self-confidence. Again, without his realizing it, he was almost desperate; he was forced to take his chance with what wag available. He had no choice. He was forced by big circumstance to make do. Making do was chancy. Without a ready-made, under-thestairs assignation-pad to preempt throughout the entire district, Terry was forced to seek an alternative. There were many, none of them truly safe. The district was old in the years of the city; it sported the houses of elder grandeur now on their way to seed or to be broken into half-sized rooms for mass dwelling. These relics of olden graciousness were equipped with the wide verandah, with the broad swing, the chaise, glider, patio lounge or sofa provided for the afternoon or evening relaxation. It was a vagrant's choice. Terry could either go on, on, on and on until he dropped, or he could take the chance of being found by a late homeeomer or an early riser. The world was still not his to run. So that night he slept on a chaise that was at least a generation older than he. But it was comfortable and clean. 'T'erry's awakening was not at the hands of an irate householder, but of his own. As dawn grayed the sky, his internal alarm clock, set early to avoid the early morning discovery, ran fast through subconscious anxiety. It rang long before there was any real danger of being discovered by the normal citizen of the area. He had been discovered by another. On the floor beside the chaise lay Beauregarde. Beauregarde was a tired dog. He had been at his tracking without sleep since Peter Hawley had Shouted the order to find Terry, bring the kid to Understanding and return him whole. Beauregarde was a loyal dog, and his master's order was dog's law. Then, having trailed the youth to this pad, Beauregarde used sensible Wgffe to conclude that part two of the order could wait until both of them were awake. Having found Terry, Beauregarde took time for sleep; it had been a long day for him too. But as young Lincoln began to stir, Beauregarde came wide awake. He yawned with a splendid display of dog teeth, stretched fore and hind quarters, passed a forepaw over his nose and sat on his haunches, looking at Terry Lincoln. In fair imitation of Peter Hawley's frequent sally when finding one of Earth's misplaced, he asked, "Terence Lincoln, I presume?" Terry recognized Beauregarde for what he was : Terrestrial dog, and undoubtedly here on Coleban as part of the Terrestrial Office. His own name, in the dog's modulated whine and controlled growl, was quite recognizable to the youth, but the rest was wholly lost even though the dog used a Terrestrial dialect quite close to Lincoln's own. It was, of course, one thing to know that such as the intelligent dog existed and that intelligent dog was a great help to his master. It was something again to meet one face to face. A ibit puzzled how to begin, Terry nodded and said, "I'm Terry Lincoln, and somehow I'm lost." The dog waved his plume and replied, "I am Beauregarde. I belong to Peter Hawley, the chief troublemaker in Coleban." "Beauregarde -- Peter Hawley -- the what -- ?" "Sorry. You have not Understanding," said Beauregarde, speaking as slowly and as clearly as he could. "I am Beauregarde. Peter Hawley is my master. Peter Hawley is the Terrestrial agent here in Coleban. We work together. I -- er -- let's get out of here!" The simple phrases got through, and the urgency of the last one was quite clear. Without asking why, Terry followed the dog out of the place onto the sidewalk; he found out why a moment later when a man appeared on the spot they'd left, # # j T ow did you know"? asked Terry. "Scent," said the dog. "He smelled of trouble." "I didn't hear you... " "I -- smelled  -- him -- coming," said Beauregarde, as slowly and as clearly as he could. To add communication, the dog lifted his nose high and sniffed audibly. The communication of sound and pantomime got through to Terry, who nodded. It became evident to Terry that theirs was a one-way communication link. The dog had Understanding. He had not. Therefore the dog could understand him, but he could not completely understand the dog. Since the dog could understand him, he said, "Let's go." They reached the corner, and Terry turned to continue in the direction he thought to foe toward the spaceport. "It can't foe far," he said. "What --  can't -- be -- far?" "The spaceport." "It's on the other side of Coleban," said Beauregarde. "Er -- huh, please?" "Sorry. Spaceport -- is  -- on -- other side of city." "But it should be right out here -- ?" "No. You --  got turned --  around." "Okay," said Terry resolutely. "Let's go." He about faced and began to walk toward the center of Coleban, The dog puzzled for a moment and then said, "Stop!" Terry stopped, puzzlement in his face. "Look, Beauregarde, I want to get back to the spaceport." "Right  -- smack -- through Coleban?" "Why not?" "Won't make it." "Why not?" "Coleban -- won't let you. Us." Beauregarde sat on his haunches. Like his master, he was big for action and little for the pussyfoot operation. Diplomacy was the show of fang and the sound of the deep-throated snarl and anything organic enough to bleed when bitten. Dimly to the dog's ability to think in terms of intrigue came the hard-to-follow logic that the Peacekeepers of Xanafoar had some unknown reason for herding the kid out of town and isolating him. Certainly the youth's present freedom did not represent the inability of a planetful of trained operators to put the arm on an outlander who lacked Understanding. With little hope of reaching the meaning or the reason, Beauregarde came to the conclusion that they were fairly safe from the clutches of the Peacekeepers so long as they did not attempt to beat their way through the city to the spaceport. With extreme patience, the dog said, "Terry, try to understand me. We must make our way to the spaceport by the roundabout way." "But can't you help me?" "I can help," said Beauregarde quite clearly. "I can see that you are not molested nor harmed. I can not slip you into an inside pocket and smuggle you through the lines of the ungodly." "I don't understand," Teauregarde took in a deep breath and let it out in a dog-sigh. "That's the problem," he said. "You haven't yet got Understanding. If you had, this would make sense to you -- probably more sense than it does to me." Of this, Terry grasped little more than the obvious statement that he lacked Understanding. "Well," said Beauregarde, eyeing the youth, "Peter said that I'd have to bring you to Understanding before we would beat our way through this mess." "Understanding?" asked Terry. "You -- need -- Understanding." "And you can bring it to me?" "No -- . I can not. But I -- can -- bring you to Understand." The difference was lost on Terry. He had never heard of either Mahomet or the Mountain, and so whither went thither was neither an issue nor a puzzlement. It simply did not exist. To Terry, the acquisition of Understanding was to follow something like a comprehensive final test, or passing a stipulated age... or something he did not understand. It was, in fact, the last. It is impossible to explain Understanding to he who has it not and quite unnecessary to mention it to he who has it. "Look," said Terry, "Why don't we barge in and throw our weight around?" Beauregarde looked at Terry. The kid was speaking the language known best to both Beauregarde and Peter Hawley, but the process of tying into a platoon of the Peacekeepers required more than Understanding. It required a lot of practice and well integrated teamwork. It also required the like of Peter Hawley to quarterback the operation, for Peter had the timing, the play, the gimmick and the right tone of voice to cut this kind of mustard. Without Understanding, Terry was not going to be of any help. With it, Terry and Beauregarde could communicate; and although there could be but one Peter Hawley in Beauregarde's life and admiration, Terry with Understanding could be a big help to Beauregarde and his grasp of the way Peter Hawley might have operated in the same circumstance. The dog faced Terry and said, "I can -- help you. But you -- will find me -- a responsibility. First -- I must be fed." This Terry managed to follow. The concept of a predatory carnivore taking his food where he caught it was for the dictionary, the encyclopedia and the course in paleontology and primitive life that he might be forced to take at Scholar's Cluster next semester. Domestic animals were fed. He said, "If you're hungry, we'll have to steal food, you know." "Yes," said Beauregarde. "But how?" "Yes -- but -- What?" "How -- are we -- going to steal -- this food?" Terry Lincoln looked at Beauregarde. He saw a short-haired animal of about eighty-odd pounds in his own estimation, standing a bit more than, a halfmeter at the shoulder. One thing occurred to him: This Terrestrial dog was harder and faster than he, so the fast footwork belonged to the dog. So he said, "I'll make some sort of a fuss, and while they are looking at me, you grab something to eat." "Good boy," said Beauregarde. VI 'Tphey approached the market from opposite sides. The boy was inconspicuous except for his disheveled appearance, which was out of place in this district. The dog was as conspicuous as a billboard, for Xanabar had no such four-footed animal, but Beauregarde kept his identity concealed by animal tactics until the action began. The operation backfired. The unkempt youth was obviously one of Xanabar's great underprivileged. His actions also indicated that he was not quite bright. So if this benighted youth was forced to steal his food, common decency required that he be fed, and neither merchant nor customer felt moved to raise an outcry. Instead, they treated Terry's fumbling attempts at shoplifting to the backside observation. Those who could not turn their backs managed, somehow, to be looking over there, or up here, or down there; anywhere but at the youth who hoped to create a stir. However, the stir was created by Beauregarde. The dog was by no means unknown to the people of Coleban although less than one out of a thousand had ever seen him in the flesh. The only dog in this part of the Galaxy, Beauregarde had appeared in picture and video as a member of the Terrestrial Office. But as Terry had realized, knowing that such a thing as Terrestrial dog existed and meeting the animal were two different items on the agenda. Beauregarde swooped in with his headlong gallop, hindpaws scissoring in front of the forepaws for the spring, then the stretch for distance. It was a magnificent sight, a spectacle of animal in full flight. Unfortunately for any plan made by Terry Lincoln, the citizens of Coleban bent their attention to the dog. There were "oohs!" and "ahs!" as the dog went racing through, but not one of them moved aside or made the expected opening. Beauregarde was barricaded from the counter by spectators. It remained to Terry Lincoln to remember what they were there for. Since things had gone in reverse -- including the eyes of the onlookers, Terry found it easy to latch onto a fair grab of edibles. And he remembered. Beauregarde was the hungry one. So Terry loaded up on stuff that looked as though it would satisfy the dog's appetite. "A fine haul," said Beauregarde, "but did you remember to snatch a can opener as well?" The words were lost on Terry, but the facts were quite plain. Much of the fodder Terry had seven-color stereograms that made the mouth water. These tidbits were encased in a container carefully designed to withstand any invasionary force that was not equipped with the special device furnished by the company that sold the food. Animal tooth and nail were ineffective; and whereas a mechanic might breach one of the containers, Terry was totally without tools. So Terry shared his own food with the dog, mentally kicking himself for being so thoughtless. Beauregarde, on the other hand, let Terry divide his food. Beauregarde was quite capable of foraging for his own, and he was far from lazy, but the main task was to bring the youth to Understanding, and this was one way to do it. "f TTith this simple act, their, ' ' roles reversed -- or more properly, were rightfully established. Terry saw in Beauregarde an end to his problem of being lost, strayed or stolen. Indeed, he might have remained so, ultimately gaining Understanding in the gutters of Coleban as many the Xanabarian youth did. But with the arrival of Beauregarde, he was no longer alone. He was part of a "they" relationship or; companionship. But if Terry expected Beauregarde to lead him through Coleban, either boldly through the serried lines of the Peacekeepers or stealthily through the shadows of night, he was mistaken, Beauregarde was not a ministering angel. Beauregarde was a weapon; a trained dog of war. When he walked the streets of Coleban or any other city in the sprawling galactic empire of Xanabar, some feared him and some admired him; but all of them knew that this was dog, Terrestrial dog, intelligent Terrestrial dog. And any person who travelled with Terrestrial dog was himself a Terrestrial, of Earth, Sol regarde served two purposes. Calm and unruffled, he was a potent force but not very useful in the unviolent run of life. Aroused, he was an unsheathed menace, and the sensible tiling was to see that Beauregarde was not angered, that his master was not angered. For it was well known that Terrestrial dog would not hesitate to charge into completely unreasonable odds at the order of his master. As a travelling companion, Beauregarde was tops. But as an asset to Terry Lincoln's hope of being returned immediately to home and fireside, Beauregarde became a first-class responsibility, Beauregarde could not manipulate the handle on a water-bubble. Beauregarde could not open doors. Beauregarde could not walk unnoticed along the sidewalks of Coleban, although Terry could so long as no one accosted him. Even before Beauregarde arrived, Terry had learned that the way to walk unnoticed through a city full of strangers is to walk quietly and utter not a sound. Open the yap and utter a word, and all around you know you for what you are: An outlander. T he days passed. Beauregarde was not the total loss he said he would be; the dog knew his way around, and he had the dog's Understanding. Beauregarde also had a fine sense of direction, and he knew City Coleban. So Beauregarde did the navigating and Terry followed the dog's directions and suggestions. Slowly they were circling the central city, making their way through the roughly annular transition area that sprawled between the blightthat-was and the blight-to-be. Their days and nights were copies of one another. They awoke in the morning and found water for drinking and a meager washing. They stole food in a process that became more and more refined as they gained practice. They walked, Terry openly along busy streets; Beauregarde racing through alleyways and gangways and backways so he would not call attention to the youth by his very presence. Terry once suggested that they travel by night. At this, Beauregarde snowed the youth with a flurry of objections, none of which Terry could wholly understand -- other than the fundamental concept that they were objections complete with valid argument to support them. The basic idea, Terry managed to grasp, was that he could easily mingle with the people of Coleban by day, whereas by night there would always be the unexpected watcher who would find it interesting for fair or foul reasons to note that a youth alone was walking through the neighborhood in the middle of the night. So they traveled by day, with Terry walking from checkpoint to checkpoint located by Beauregarde, who operated as a scout. nphcir progress was marked in fine detail by pinpoint lights and glowing stripline on the huge illuminated map of City Coleban. Their progress would have gratified Peter Hawley, but it was far from satisfactory to the watchers of City Coleban. "When will the youth gain Understanding?" groaned Homburg. "They seem to have worked out a routine that makes it unnecessary," said Martell. "Not even Doktur gave a thought to the possibility that Beauregarde, the dog, could lead young Terence Lincoln through the streets of City Coleban without first bringing the youth to Understanding." "May I offer a suggestion, Zer Martell?" "A solution?" "No, zer. Just a possible explanation." "Go ahead, Bod Homburg." "Zer, possibly the dog, Beauregarde, is too capable for our purpose. He does not need a youth with Understanding to act for him." "An acceptable explanation," nodded Martell. "No doubt a lesser dog might have turned the trick. But -- " and Martell twisted his face in a sour smile -- "Beauregarde is the only dog in all of Xanabar." He thought deeply for a full minute. Finally he took a deep breath and said, "Bod Homburg, their way must be made more difficult. You know What to do." "I do indeed, Zer Martell." M orning came as usual, and Beauregarde and Terry came awake shortly after dawn. They drank at a bubbly fountain, and washed in the water of a small lagoon in a tiny park that still retained some of the longgene elegance of the day when this district was strictly for the ruling class of Coleban. The pair killed time until the customary store-opening hour by sauntering through the merchandising district and casing the stores and supermarkets for a likely source of food. When the stores began to fill with, customers, they made their usual play. It was, by now, a well rehearsed program. They entered from opposite sides, and as usual the very presence of Beauregarde created excitement. Some of .e citizens were petrified with fright at the proximity of the animal, others were fascinated, still others wanted to move in close so they could tell their friends about the incident. With all attention distracted, Terry made his haul from the open shelves -- Or rather, he began to. a small sack with choice groceries when one of Xanabar's Peacekeepers in the full glittering regalia appeared behind him and laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. Terry whirled, twisting his shoulder out of the Peacekeeper's grip by ducking his head under the Peacekeeper's arm and plunging away at an angle. "Halt! Halt in the name of Xanabar!" To back up his order, the Peacekeeper's hand slid toward the stunner in its holster. And at the same moment, Beauregarde came around the corner of the counter on a dead run. The dog slid to a crouching stop beside the Peacekeeper and emitted an ugly-sounding snarl. "Stop right there, Peacekeeper," growled the dog. "Draw that thing and you'll lose your hand at the wrist." Terry stopped at the sound of Beauregarde's first deep-throated snarl; he turned to face them. The Peacekeeper whirled to face the dog. "You are the Terrestrial dog, Beauregarde." "You are so right. I am." "You may not threaten the peace of Xanabar." "If you were capable of keeping it, which both I and my which we question -- neither I nor my master would be required in Xanabar." "You may not criticize -- " "Stop it, Peacekeeper," said the dog. "The very fact that I am here is proof enough that someone in your upper office is playing games. Otherwise young Terence Lincoln would have been found and returned to the spaceport instead of being harried and chased and herded from one slum to another and forced to steal." "There are no slums in Xanabar." "Call them 'Points of historic interest,' then," said Beauregarde. "This is the missing Terrestrial youth, Terence Lincoln?" "You call it 'Missing,' but we call it something else." "This is the missing person. He is also a thief. He must answer to the Justice of Xanabar." "That's what you think," said Beauregarde with a snarl. "Terry has had enough of the so-called Justice of Xanabar to last him a lifetime. Now if your justice were real and honest, you would escort us to the spaceport and make certain that this youth is properly restored to those who will see him home to Mother Earth." "You cannot conceal his thieving under a cloak of false righteousness! Nor may you impute that Xanabar renders false justice when we take a thief to jail instead of releasing him to fly free and clear. He must answer to -- " tCyh, knock it off," snapped  Beauregarde. "Terry and I will go out of here in one piece and on our feet, whether you live to tell your family about it or not. Now stand aside and don't put a hand on that stunner -- or we'll find out how fast we are, you and I." "You cannot threaten -- " "I already have. Now, if you want to try your skill against my speed, start reaching. Go ahead, draw it. Start now. I'll have plenty of time to take you after you start. Make your play first -- " "Look out!" shouted Terry. With a single, whirling motion, the youth turned, scooped up a container of something handy in size and shape and hardness, and hjUrled it in a bullet-throw over the dog's back into the face of what looked like an ordinary citizen pf City Coleban. But the ordinary citizen was far from ordinary, for truly ordinary citizens do not carry minibeams in the breast pocket ordinarily reserved for pens and pencils. The hard canister caught the citizen across the bridge of the nose. The rim bit deep as bone splintered. No will of iron was ever strong enough to prevent the reaction; pain and shock removed all plan for action from the man's mind. By reaction, his hand opened and let the minibeam drop as he raised the hand to his face in the instinctive gesture. Beauregarde leaped, caught the falling minibeam in his moiith, and with a sharp snap of  his powerful neck, he hurled it against die face of the counter beside him. It hit and smashed with an ear-splitting crack! and a blinding flash of light as its bottled power went radiant. In the excitement, the Peacekeeper managed to draw his stunner and was bringing it to bear on Beauregarde. "Hit him low!" barked the dog as he leaped for the Peacekeeper's throat. Terry plunged forward in a football tackle, hitting the Peacekeeper several inches lower than any referee would have allowed. But this was no game and neither was it time to behave like a gentleman. The Peacekeeper went over in a tangle, his legs cut out from under him by the flying tackle, and his topside completely overwhelmed by the mass of the dog, who hit him at the throat. There was little bloodshed. Beauregarde merely nicked the soft flesh, but he kept that throat between his fangs until the Peacekeeper had time to realize just what the dog could have done. Then with a gesture calculated to live in the humility of the Peacekeeper for the rest of his life, Beauregarde slurped the man from the chin to hairline with a large, soggy, rough-surfaced tongue-of-dog. "Your're dead," he said. "Lie down and be counted." Then the dog looked at Terry. "I think we've stirred us up a Donnybrook in the good old Peter Hawley tradition," he said. "Let's cut out and slope for home." 'T'erry scrambled to his feet, pocketing the Peacekeeper's stunner because it seemed like a good idea at the time. He looked around at the people of Coleban ; some were frozen, some were leaving and a fair number were converging warily. "Beau," he replied, "I read you a solid five by five." Side by side, the Terrestrial youth and his dog headed for the nearest door. The crowd melted before them, opening a way; those Who were the professionals in this game beat a parallel course outside of the immediate crowd and began to converge on the door. Slowly; they would bring up behind and surround the pair with the aid of those outside. A large figure loomed in the door, blocking it almost completely"Beau! It's old saffron-face. Hit 'im high; I owe him one!" They hit old saffron-face oneand-two. Beauregarde caught the throat with the soft-trained mouth of a retriever, and the dog's mass bent old saffron-face backward, thrusting the barrel stomach forward on an arched spine. Terry connected with this massive facade in a shoulder block that caught the plexus and the pit of the stomach with a paralyzing blow. Saffron-face did not go down. He went back and back and back, off-balance on the rounds of his stumbling heels, his trained body struggling to regain footing. The mass of his flesh, which he'd used as a barrier at the doorway, became the main point of a onebody flying wedge that battered its way backward through his own men and created an avenue through which Terry and Beauregarde went before the opening could close behind their human battering ram. At the curb, the stumbling heels found no means of support, and saffron-face went over on his back, walloping the back of his head on the pavement. He was out stone cold in the gutter when Terry and Beauregarde used him as a gangplank toward freedom. iTVnce free of immediate hands, both of them turned left and ran along the center of the street. They outdistanced the local gathering with ease since the locals were still trying to figure out what had happened. By a zigzag course they managed to get themselves out of sight. "And now which way?" asked the dog. "The shortest and quickest," said Terry immediately. "That may lead us through some trouble," said Beauregarde, after looking around to locate himself with respect to the rest of City Coleban. "That may be," replied Terry, "but there's two things wrong with trying to make it on the sly." "Two?" "Two. First, I've suspected all along that this was a planned operation. Now I know it is. So the sooner we can get out of it the better -- it'll give us less time to get trapped. Two, the reason I know it is a planned operation is because I now know why they want me alive and with Understanding. You see, Beau, I am a courier." "A courier?" "Beau, I could hardly understand you before, even though you were speaking and thinking in my own native tongue. Now even this mess they gabble around here makes sense to me. I understand the tongue of Xanabar. Now, how could you send a secret message through enemy territory in a universe where Understanding is the way of life?" Beauregarde said, "I wouldn't know. My world is not filled with intrigue and secret messages." "Well, one of the first things about secret messages is to conceal the fact that a message is being sent. In this universe of Understanding, the only way is to send the message by some courier who does not yet have Understanding -- neither he nor anyone he meets will be aware of the fact. Second, of course, no one could simply carry a letter. To carry the information, I was given posthypnotic orders to forget what I'd been told until I was back home on Earth. Unfortunately, I gained Understanding while here in Xanabar. And if they get their clutches on me, they can extract the information because, with Understanding, I can call up information from my subconscious." "And you know what this message is?" "Sure -- and so does whoever runs the Peacekeepers of Xanabar. So it's no secret. Professor Marquart discovered the secret of Scholar's Cluster and planted it in my mind to carry back home." "Whoof!" said Beauregarde. He looked up into the sky. "My eyes are not as sharp as my nose, and I can neither see nor smell a hovercar at twenty thousand feet. Terry, do you see anything up there?" "Clouds. Oh, there's a flash, a speck. Can't make anything out." "That will be an observer in a hovercar. Probably with a riflemicrophone that lets him listen to every word we say." "So we cannot go by stealth," said Terry. "Then we will go boldly and defy them to do their worst. Come on," he said, "which way toward the spaceport?" Beauregarde pointed, then as Terry started walking in that direction with, a determined stride, Beauregarde aligned himself at the lad's side. vnce more there came a change in the environment. A subtle change; not one of cracked windows, peeling paint, nor of lost elegance or a standard' of living. It was a change in the traffic, both vehicle and human. It was not a change in the pattern, but in the density; as if some computer had extrapolated the natural city pattern of shaded randomness along an asymptote toward zero. It looked exactly like one of those periods in the life of any community in which, in certain hours, everyone in the area is busy inside. And being so natural-looking, it went unnoticed by Terry and Beauregarde. The total area was roughly elliptical, with the major axis aligned with their general course. Being further geometric, Terry and Beauregarde were approximately at one focal point of the ellipse, the behind point, so that the other focus was always ahead of them. As they walked toward the spaceport -- still far across the city -- the citizens of Xanabar were being ordered aside and away, to clear the area; they remained aside and out of sight until the Terrestrial pair passed, and were then permitted to resume their daily lives. It was an operation that could only have been carried out with the resources of a large, despotic organization that was driven by the prospect of great gain or loss. From the site, the operation was not possible to grasp, but it was clearly visible to Martell and Homburg. These Xanabarians had abandoned their offices and the huge illuminated map for cramped quarters in a huge tractor-trailer van, fitted inside as temporary field offices. In place of the citywide map was a sectional area to the same approximate scale and detail, showing the neighborhood. Tiny colored pointlets of light labeled and identified all vehicular and pedestrian traffic so that citizen could be told from Peacekeeper, with Terry and Beauregarde especially coded. 'T'hey were not alone, citizen, Peacekeeper and the two targets. Peter Hawley was present, too. Peter did not have the advantage of the high-flying hoveroars, with their rifle microphones and the super televideo lenses, and the computer that maintained surveillance over the neighborhood by following the moving traffic and maintaining the code once the object was identified. But Peter Hawley was not without his own sources of information. Earth's recognition of under cover in a universe full of Understanding had another facet. By using Beauregarde, an object as conspicuous as a paid political advertisement, Peter could keep track of Terry with fair accuracy. For the passage of anything as exotic as Terrestrial dog through any district made various waves. Some were frightened, some curious; many had heard of this strange beast with the tongue of man. Speculation, fear, wonder, sometimes amusement and quite frequently fanciful tales of personal encounter were commonplace in the streets and in the vurguzz joints; all one had to do was listen carefully and then sort fact from fiction. By keeping one ear to the ground, Peter Hawley had been able to keep track of Terry and the dog, and so long as progress was maintained, Peter let well enough alone. Like Terry, Peter was at a total loss to figure out what Xanabar had in mind; certainly there was enough manpower to collect the kid if Xanabar wanted to and overt kidnap. In the hope of gaining some idea of what was going on, Peter let things ride, while watching carefully. When the call went out to execute one of their mobilization plans, its interception by the Terrestrial Office was a matter of standard operating procedure. Peter went to the periphery of the ellipse along with Martell, Homburg and their specialized force of Peacekeepers. Knowing the city well, Peter stationed himself fairly accurately on a nearline between Beauregarde's position and the spaceport. This left an error-probability of several city blocks, but it was close. So in this area there were three very determined attitudes. One, a very large and determined group, was not going to let Terence Lincoln get to City Coleban spaceport; they were restrained only by the sure knowledge that open violence would bring about retaliation and they were wary of the fratchy temper of all Terrestrials. The second, a minority consisting solely of Peter Hawley, was bent upon joining forces with Terry and Beauregarde and marching out of the district with them, daring any Xanabarian to put one toe over the line demarking a forty-foot circle about them. The third consisted of Terry and Beauregarde, who wanted out and were going to get out, with or without help, with flags flying or furled, either marching down the avenue or slinking through the alleys. Tt was Terry, who noted the lightening traffic. Not as such, however, but in an entirely different way. The sight of standard urban traffic is natural, as inconspicuous to the city man as Poe's Purloined Letter or the postman whose presence was so stereotyped and scheduled that he was above suspicion. But when traffic thins down, it is no longer the collective: City Traffic, but individuals and vehicles that are not a mass but a bunch of articles that neither look nor act alike. Put another way, Traffic is a moving mass; but a Vehicle is a means of transportation. "Beau," said Terry. "Why must we walk?" "I don't see any visible means of riding," said the dog. "Why, there aren't any cars parked along here. And if we did try to swipe one, could you drive it?" "Not really, and this is hardly the time to start learning, even though the principle must be about the same as any vehicle. You know, a dingus to start it, a doodad to make it go fast or slow, wheel or lever to steer and some sort of brakes. Finding out which is which can be hazardous if done empirically. No. Beauregarde, I was wondering whether we might convince some driver that it would be the friendly thing to drive us." "I see," said the dog. "You mean, 'To the spaceport, James, or kiss your arm good-by.'? " "Something like that." "Might be interesting, at that," said Beauregarde, looking up and down the street carefully. "And now that you mention it, traffic is sure thin. Terry, I'll bet you a nice juicy steakbone that any driver we stop will be Peacekeeper in mufti. This is the kind of caper they plan." "Well, you've taken on a Peacekeeper or two, haven't you?" "Sure thing. Peter and I have taken on quite a number. But never more than one or two at a time." "Then one more won't bother you." "Not really -- but this time we'll be taking on the entire force, Terry." "The entire force is what they've got surrounding us," said Terry thoughtfully. "And we're going to be collected at their option -- unless we bust out shouting." "I hear you," said Beauregarde. "But what do you propose to do about it?" "We wait until we and a vehicle approach a traffic signal simultaneously; specifically, a vehicle with a single occupant, the driver. And one with doors easy to open." 'T'hey continued toward the next intersection, paying little apparent attention to their surroundings, but watching carefully in any windows to see if there was a vehicle approaching Far behind, one turned into the street and began to approach them. Terry chuckled. "Now I know why the old folks kept saying that they simply can't explain Understanding to someone who doesn't have it and didn't have to to someone who has. It's sort of e playing chess with every move and motive explained." Beauregarde said, "Peter always claims that Understanding is a sort of refined premonition or intuition; that women and dogs always had it even before it was discovered." "Beau, when was Understanding discovered?" "All interstellar travelling cultures have it," said Beauregarde. "It seems to enter any culture that is on the verge of real space travel. I guess, about that time, most people in the culture are well warned and prepared to believe that Out There they will meet creatures of extreme ugliness whose ancestors were out spacing while the home race was still settling their differences with a stone hatchet." "I mean in the individual." "Same difference but less vast. It comes rapidly once the individual really matures enough to take on true responsibility, face the consequences of his own acts, and above all, to take care of those Who depend upon him. Now, of course, there always have been individuals like that, many of them. But Understanding hag to wait until the culture is ready for it. Until then, it lies a dormant faculty that all passes to some degree, but -- er, let's put it this way, Terry: until the culture and its people are advanced enough to grasp Understanding, it itself can only be latent. And -- er, here comes our transportation, right on time and to your specifications. Ready?" "Sure thing." "Let's go and find out who can maneuver the faster." IX T he car stopped and paused overlong. Terry opened a rear door, and Beauregarde leaped in, over the back of the front seat, and showed the driver his fangs. Terry got in behind and closed the door. "Peacekeeper," said Beauregarde, "this may be an act to you, but we're deadly serious. Got it?" The driver hit the go pedal, and the car leaped forward; within five seconds it was going fifty miles per hour. "Bite me at this speed," said the driver, "and none of us will walk home." "You haven't won yet," snarled Beauregarde. "You'll have to slow down sooner or later, and then you lose -- unless you're driving us toward the spaceport." "Watch me," said the driver. He goosed the pedal until the car was making better than sixtyfive. Then he relaxed behind the wheel. Neither Terry nor Beauregarde had ever envisioned a situation like this, but both of them understood what was going on. Obviously, the driver was following a carefully outlined route, from which all traffic had been cleared so that such breakneck speed was quite safe. It went quietly, there was no blare of the horn at intersections. And to point up the magnitude of the forces that Terry and Beauregarde were facing, traffic signals always turned to favor the hurtling vehicle even though there was no side traffic visible at any intersection. "This always proves what Peter says," said Beauregarde. "If you want to ride at a break-law speed, ride with a Keeper Of The Peace, who is sworn to defend and uphold the law. It's fun going this fast, isn't it?" "So far. But when he stops?" "We'll see. Surely," said Beauregarde to the driver, "you don't think that stopping before fifty thousand witnesses is going to stop me from making a mess of you." "Not really. It's one of the hazards of the profession," said the driver. With great skill, the driver hit a turn, tapped the brakes until the car drifted, waited through the drift until the car was aligned with the new street, and then kicked the drive again. The turn took no more than a second or two, and the force of the turn made them all hang tightly -- too tightly to bother watching their surroundings. When stress and strain diminished it was too late; dead ahead and blocking their path was a huge van. To Terry it was a sure crash, and coming too suddenly to do more than realize that a sure crash was coming. To Beauregarde it was part of the caper but this time was far too short to do more than appreciate the fact. To the driver it was part of his instruction and training, for instead of hitting the brakes in a panic stop, he hit the go-pedal and clenched the wheel carefully. The back of the van dropped, making a ramp. The oar hit the ramp and raced up with hardly a bounce on its special springs. Inside the van was a solid mass of feathery plastic that cushioned the possible crash; a carefully designed mass of plastic that applied braking force inversely proportional to the kinetic energy of the racing car. The car came to a stop with all three occupants pasted to the front by the force of deceleration, but unharmed beyond a few bruises and the inevitable blackout that comes with the high-G forces. 'X#'hen the smoke cleared  ' away, Beauregarde was in a small cage, Terry was manacled lightly to a chair, and their driver was receiving the thanks of a man behind a small but ornate desk. Beauregarde said, "That was a fine operation -- but then, it would be, wouldn't it, Commissioner Martell?" "You know him?" asked Terry"Sure. Peter and I have met him a number of times but under different circumstances. This is Commissioner Martell, Number Two Peacekeeper. The party sitting at the other desk is Homburg, Number Three or among the several Number Threes that Martell has reporting to him." "Quite," said Martell to the dog. To Terry he said, "You are Terence Lincoln, of Earth." "I am -- and now that you recognize me, I demand that you place me on a spacecraft bound for Earth." "Stop acting childish," said Martell coldly. "You've gained Understanding. You are responsible for your acts. You are going to account for them." "I am a Terrestrial -- " "You are a lawbreaker, and we are operating within the rules of Universal Law." "If so, why this big operation?" "Quite simple," said Martell calmly. "At first, we assumed that your runaway was only a boyish lark, the universal urge to go it alone in a strange land for a time. We tolerated your boyish pranks. We smiled at your theft of food, for it is neither the policy of Xanabar nor the desire of her citizens that the stranger within her gates go hungry." "That was darned nice of you," said Terry. "Then you team up with this animal, and at that point you became no longer a youth with an adventuresome spirit, but the center of possible danger to the Peace of Xanabar. At this point, the Peacekeepers we assigned to see that you came to no harm in the badlands of City Coleban were then assigned to protect the Peace. And then you gained Understanding, Terence Lincoln, and became responsible for your acts." "So I did. But there's an -- " "And, with Understanding, did you abandon your lawlessness? You did not. Instead, you assaulted a Peacekeeper -- " "Old saffron-face had it coming." " -- during the performance of his duty instead of appealing to him for protection and safe delivery to the spaceport. Had you renounced your former acts by becoming a peace-loving man, you would not be here." "Nuts," replied Terry. "I know why I'm here and so does Beauregarde." "Of course," said Martell smoothly. "Understanding works that way. You are a lawbreaker, and you are here to account for your petty felonies." "Fine. And I suppose that I will be sentenced to a series of terms for vagrancy, theft, trespass and using old saffron-face for a punching bag? Terms long enough to squeeze the secret of Scholar's Cluster out of me."  #ou have that secret?" asked a Martell. "Get off it," growled Terry. "You know it, and I know it, and Beauregarde knows it. Maybe even Peter Hawley knows it by now." "Yes," smiled Martell suavely. "But you see, I know it now because you've told me." "Terry," said Beauregarde, "you can't fight this city hallitician with words. You'll find that he and his gang of Peacekeepers were acting only in the best interests of Xanabar, and for both Earth and its hapless youth, Terence Lincoln. That he and his have put you through a wringer, and out of it comes a hidden secret -- that's just serendipity, Terry." "Well," replied Terry thoughtfully, "nothing we've done is a capital crime, so he'll have to release us sooner or later." "I'd prefer it sooner," said Beauregarde. "This cage isn't big enough, and I'm not in favor of cages anyway. Peter -- " "You can forget Peter Hawley," said Martell. "The danger of you and the youth together was so great that we have cleared the entire district of anybody except we Peacekeepers, who have sworn to lay down our lives to maintain the Peace of Xanabar." "And I suppose that stunt with the truck full of crushable gunch was simply part of the Peacekeeping activity?" "How would you apprehend a headstrong youth and a dangerous animal who had just invaded the car of a citizen and threatened the citizen with the loss of life or limb? Would you hold up a hand and cry 'Stop!' or perhaps -- " "Forget it," said Beauregarde. "You make me -- " f I 'here came a crash. The van lurched, humping high on one corner and then dropping down so that the corner was lower than the others. The sense of smooth motion stopped. There was muffled shouting outside. The van lurched slowly again. Then came that incredibly short electrical tingle that fills the region when a nerve stunner is fired; the effect came through the metal walls of the van even though the bolt would not have penetrated. The uproar outside ceased. The van door opened, an dtwo Peacekeepers came in carrying a man by ankles and armpits. The man was not as stiff as a board, because the old cliche implies something straight and flat. The man was stiff all right, but he had been frozen in the typical posture of a man halfway through the act of getting out of a car in a tearing hurry. The Peacekeepers dropped him on the floor, where he rolled over statuelike until three points of rest came to ground with the center of gravity between them. "He came roaring down the street flat out," explained one Peacekeeper. "He didn't try to miss you. Instead, he aimed the car like a missile." Martell nodded and waved the Peacekeeper away. "Now we are complete," he said cheerfully. "Terence Lincoln, may I present Peter Hawley -- who won't be able to do anything for a day or so. Now," he said to the dog, "what were you thinking about Peter Hawley?" "There isn't much to say," said Beauregarde. "You've got me caged, Terry manacled to that chair and Peter Hawley in the deep freeze. We can't even go where you'd like us to go -- we'll have to be taken." Martell turned to Homburg. "Whistle up your car. There'll be room in it for all of us, if we put Hawley and his dog in the trunk." He turned to Beauregarde. "And that makes three," he said, waving a hand at Peter. "Lawbreakers all; for we will find that his stated purpose was to come here to assist you criminals to escape. He is an accessory and thus accused of the same breaches of the Peace as you." Beauregarde made an ugly dog-noise deep in his chest. Terry rattled the handcuffs helplessly. Peter Hawley startled everybody by emitting a long, lung-shuddering sigh and collapsing from his up-ended statue position to a completely flaccid limpless flat upon the slightly tilted floor. "They must have hit him with a near-miss or a splash-off from the car body," said Martell. "He shouldn't go limp for at least another hour." "No matter, Martell," said Homburg. "It will make him easier to put in my trunk." "So it will, Homburg. So it will." Inwardly, Homburg glowed. Martell had been addressed as an equal and had replied in kind. He had been accepted. For one of five in the office van, things were looking up. X r TT'he man who entered wore the uniform of a Peacekeeper, complete with side-arm, but on his shoulder was the blazer of a chauffeur. He saluted Homburg and said, "Your car, Zer Homburg." "You made good time," nodded Homburg. "Get help and put that one in the trunk. Then come and get that animal and put it with its master. In the trunk. We will be quite capable of handling the youth." "Yes, Zer Homburg." The chauffeur turned to walk toward Peter Hawley as Homburg approached Terry Lincoln. It was their first mistake. Terry waited, looking helpless as Homburg approached, the ring of keys dangling from his hand. "Behave," he said to the youth, "and you won't get hurt." Seeing no move or even an air of defiance, Homburg put the key in the lock, turned, and sprang the cuff. Terry lurched backward in his chair, curled like a ball, put his feet up and let them fly outward. Homburg went hurtling back, the ring of keys completely tom from his grasp. He hit the dog's cage at the same time Terry's chair completed its backward overturn and hit the floor. The blow took Terry's breath, but he was young and he had been hit before on the playing fields of Scholar's Cluster. He landed almost flat and rolled to one side, the keys still dangling from the lock. Homburg's scream stopped all motion. He'd fallen with one arm close to the dog's cage. While Homburg's body was still a-tuffible, Beauregarde had snapped at the fingers and caught. Now he had hand and arm through the bars; he had Homburg's wrist between the gleaming molars, with the fangs denting the skin on the far side of the wrist. As the echoing scream died, the dog applied pressure. Homburg screamed again. Terry got to his  feet slowly, watching the action -- or the frozen lack of it -- warily. "Beauregarde means 'stop!' or your man Homburg loses a hand," he said. They stood. Martell in half-astep forward; the Peacekeeper half-turned from Peter Hawley, his hand on the side-arm; Homburg on the floor, groveling in fear and pain; and Beauregarde with a trickle of blood on his muzzle. They stood frozen for but a moment, but it was moment enough for Terry to regain his breath and his balance. Then as he reached to unlock the other cuff, Martell went into sound and fury.  # i f 'yrill them both!" he shouted at the Peacekeeper and with the words he leaped for Terry. Terry swung the manacles; they were not the morgenstem of knightly warfare, but they were lethal against uniarmored flesh. The open cuff caught Martell in the mouth and stopped him in midstep. Behind the Peacekeeper, Peter Hawley fought himself to his knees, lunged with painful lack of nearly all coordination, and managed to connect -- not with the Peacekeeper's shooting arm, but with his calves and ankles. The shock wrecked the Peacekeeper's aim; the bolt hit the metal wall and simply disappeared. Its field tingle went unnoticed. Beauregarde snapped his head, and Homburg screamed once more and fainted. "Get me outa here!" roared the dog. Terry swung the manacles again, but Martell ducked back -- and into the Peacekeeper, who was trying once more to take aim. They both went back a step, off balance; then the second step hit the stilltrying Peter Hawley. Peacekeeper and Martell went down asprawl, landing on Peter, who did not feel a thing. There were, by luck, only two keys on the dangling ring that still hung from the cuff. One was the key still in its lock. The other was the only one free. Without even looking, Terry lunged with the other key, slid it into the lock on the cage and turned. Beauregarde came out with a leap that brought him face to face with Martell -- or more properly, fang to face with Martell. With a snarl, Beauregarde said, "I broke his wrist. What do you want to lose, Peacekeeper?" Martell cringed back from the fangs, but replied, "You wouldn't dare -- " "Oh, I can bite gently," said the dog. "You cannot win. We're surrounded by my men for an entire district of City Coleban." "Then I suggest that you tell them that you are escorting Terence Lincoln to the spaceport, in person, with Beauregarde the dog and Peter Hawley the Terrestrial Agent as part of the embarking party." Martell sneered. "Watch," he said. He stepped to the door of the van, ran down the window and shouted orders that the Terrestrials were to be given free passage. Qeconds later there was a muf fled blast outside, and a black missile screeched in through the opened window and hit the far wall. Beauregarde leaped and caught it in mid-bounce, snapped his head aside without waiting to come to the floor and whipped the smoking missile through the opened window. It burst outside; some of the pale blue gas billowed in, but not enough to do its job. A second missile hit the side of the van. A third hit the window, cracking it, as Terry wound it up. A fourth hit the closed window but did not shatter tire glass. Calmly, Martell said, "I don't mind taking a gas nap. You can't stay in here forever, and when we awaken, we Peacekeepers will be once more the masters." There was an official sounding rap on the door. "Open!" came the cry. "Go ahead, Terry, open it." "And let them in?" "No, to let me out for a moment." "I -- er -- " "Open it, Terry," said the painful voice of Peter Hawley. "He -- knows what -- he's doing." Terry opened the door. Beauregarde leaped out, catching the Peacekeeper outside by the throat and carrying him backwards by yards before the two of them went down. The man screamed in fear and pain, and Beauregarde cold-bloodedly raked the soft throat to make ugly furrows that ran together and down to a spreading red puddle on the pavement. Then with a leap the dog turned, made three long bounds and on the third passed back inside the van. Terry slammed the door behind the dog; he was just in time to stop a spattering of missiles that further cracked the glass but did not breach it. B eauregarde faced Martell; there was menace in the dog's forward pose and there was ainger in the dog's voice. "You, Martell, listen to me. We're safe in this bullet-proof, mobile castle of yours, but you're likely to win so long as you can keep us bottled up. But we're not staying. Peter is here -- " "I'm not much -- like my fighting -- self," groaned Peter Hawley. "In fighting trim or barely able to sit up and take nourishment, you're good for this game." "Game? Oh, the one about the farmer with the fox, the goose and the sack of grain, and one wide river to cross in a leaky boat?" "The same -- with Terry as the prize. Now, Martell, hear this! I am a dog, and while I have Understanding, it is a dog's Understanding because, being a dog, I think like a dog. No civilized person commits murder, Martell. But isn't 'murder' confined to the hardly think of it as 'murder' when Peter Hawley points at some ugly bastovich and says, 'Beauregarde, kill!' because the deceased isn't my kind of herring. "Now," went on the dog, "that Peacekeeper out there on the street isn't dead, but he will bear the soars of dog-fangs for life and he will forevermore be scared of the sight of Terrestrial dog. You, Martell, think of him as an example and tell your mob of Peacekeeping warriors outside to think of their Glorious Leader, Commissioner Martell, lying out there for real with his throat slashed with sharp teeth' -- because that is the name of the game of the farmer with the fox and the goose and the grain." "Threats cannot -- " "Get off it!" snapped the dog. "They can too. You will therefore give orders that Homburg's tame Peacekeeper is to drive through your battle line with Terrence Lincoln and your outfit remains honest. Once Terence is in the hands of the local Terrestrial Office at the spaceport, your Peacekeeper and Peter will return, at which point I will permit your man Homburg to depart as whole as he ever will be. It shouldn't be too bad," said Beauregarde with a cynical tone in his voice, "because a man in his position hardly needs a good, flexible, fast-drawing gun wrist. Once Homburg gets to a sawbones for his shattered wrist, and Peter gets a shot of perk-up to dissipate that nerve-stun hangover, he himself can return alone and we happy trio will walk out of here with you in the middle." "You fools, you cannot -- " "But you forget. It's really your throat that we are wagering, isn't it -- Bod Martell?"      A Galaxy of Fashion  Previews of What the Well-Dressed Woman Will Wear... Next Century! At the # World Science Fiction Convention in New York we will sponsor our second annual Galaxy oi Fashion Show. As a I special service to those few of our readers who may not make this headline-making event we are bringing you a few sketches to show the sort of thing sciencefiction writers, artists and fans think the next generation may put on... or, come to think of it, is it really the next generation that's being put on?  Why buy a pair of boots? Why must both legs of a pair of slacks look the same -- for that matter, why should both legs be slacks? Here's a conception of Dynamic Asymmetry (left), designed to drive a shoe manufacturer insane.  This young lady gets lit up with no trouble at all -- and the glow-tipped feelers are of inestimable value in navigating in close spaces.  (Facing page.) Who says the nucleus of electron-rings has to be nothing but protons and neutrons? Nothing neuter about the girl in the upper left! Below, a bride's outfit, where the symbolism of the vestal white veil is reinforced by a (fortunately, simulated) vacuum jar. And at far right, the obvious Next Big Market for cosmetic manufacturers: the pattern of a garment reproduced in facial tattoos.  Shoe styles for Milady, reading clockwise from top right: (A) Feet on the half-shell. (B) Japanese slippers with heels. (C) The Skiers' Delight: a high-fashion boot with built-in splint. (D) The best possible compromise for a Flower Child who goes steady with a Rocker. (Facing page.) Our asymmetric girl again, with a hat that conceals telemetry, cosmetics, pills and possibly a complete change of clothes; and with her the Strip Suit, science fiction's answer to the bikini. One part of the costume is a two-inch-wide length of velvet. The other part is pure girl. fjK TAamon Knight perpetrates the damnedest jokes on himself. Behold him : author, critic, doyen of the good, holy and true in science fiction, and editor of Worlds to Come (Harper and Row, #). This is a collection of nine science-fiction adventures. The contributing authors are, in the order of the table of contents, Arthur C. Clarke, H. B. Fyfe, Ray Bradbury, Algis Budrys, Isaac Asimov, John D. MacDonald, Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth and James Blish. This title is more than amply justified by Damon's introduction, which is an excellent essay on science fiction as prophecy. He begins: "Science fiction and prophecy are two different things." Exactly so. In his postwar eagerness to propagate science fiction through the general audience, John W. Campbell had fallen into the trap of claiming that only prophetic science fiction was science fiction at all. Fortunately, he asserted, there was a lot of it. And its literary merit was directly measurable in terms of its content of successful prophecy. In other words, when Holland invented the submarine, he transformed Jules Verne from a flaneur into a great writer. Damon says, much more correctly, that today's generation of scientists contains a number of influential individuals who, as impressionable youngsters, were influenced by science fiction. And the science fiction of their adolescent days in turn embodied a great many subconscious desires of the people who grew up to be today's taxpayers. Thus, science fiction is in a sense a vehicle for day's science is shaped by some ex-fans pursuing the research programs which the taxpayers will underwrite, as distinguished from the programs no one will give a plugged nickel for. This oversimplifies the case, and certainly paraphrases the hell out of it, but it approximates the truth. This is essentially what Damon says, and this is approximately the real situation in (those few areas of) science (which I have observed closely). That being so, we are now pressed for some means of understanding this book's inclusion of Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!", John D. MacDonald's "The Big Contest!" or "The Edge of the Sea", by Algis Budrys, or, for that matter -- a matter to which we shall return shortly -- Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel". That is, if these are supposed to be examples of anything implied by the title of this anthology, or of any sequitur to Damon's essay. There is no quarrel with the inclusion of H. B. Fyfe's "Moonwalk", or Robert Heinlein's "Ordeal In Space", Kombluth's "That Share of Glory", Blish's "Sunken Universe" or Asimov's "The Martian Way". These stories all say that man not only endures, lie strives meaningfully, (Italics mine). If they do not prophesy in the Campbellian sense, they are not supposed to. And it may be that they will inspire, and that someone reading them here now -- which seems unlikely, considering how often most of them have been reprinted before -- will in turn be moved to go forth in actual grapple with the actual trucuiences of the actual universe. But the burden of "Mars Is Heaven!" boils down to man's old fear that nothing works, that neither God nor intelligence can save you, and that there is a burglar under the bed. There is no fulfillment here. Beautifully written, poetically effective, excellently designed, this story simply evokes the empty stuff of nightmares. Damon even says so. "The Big Contest" is just another gimmick story, again evolved out of the childhood dream that there are superintendents under every sidewalk. The burden of "The Edge of the Sea" is that brawn and pride will take you places. At no time does the story suggest that you will have the foggiest notion of where you're going, or that you will be capable of accomplishing anything in particular once you get there. I'm therefore not at all sure why these stories are in this book, since, with only nine entrants on the table of contents, Damon should not logically have had any time to waste in proving his point. I feel particularly the same way about "The Sentinel." Arthur C. Clarke, educated and intelligent, is supposed to be one of the big guns in "hard" science fiction. Author of some of my favorite science-fiction novelettes though he is, he is in fact the author of a clutch of mystical novels and only one or two "hard" ones, and has a fixed and pernicious idea of how to produce a saleable short story. That idea is to introduce an intriguing technological notion or scientific premise, and then use it to evoke frights and menaces. It is true, indeed, that one can raise a formidable reputation for profundity by repeating, over and over again, that the universe is wide and man is very small. I think we would do well to remember, perhaps a bit more often, that while our instruments show that the universe is wide, they are our instruments and we managed somehow to build them. There is no evidence Whatsoever that Man is that goddamned small. In fact, this kind of story is infuriating in that it lends a great deal of ostensibly objective validity to what remains purely a matter of opinion. Precisely the sort of opinion which ought to be punched in the nose. However, perhaps Damon is slyly trying to demonstrate for us that this is the reaction whereby science-fiction readers are motivated to go out and bop Man's way to the rulership of the Sevagram. Or, in other words, Jules Verne inspired the submarine, and if he had been even more wrong-headed, he would have done it sooner. nce again Fritz Leiber's The Big Time has been mistaken for a novel, this time by Ace. At the seventeenth World Science Fiction Convention, it received the Hugo for the best sciencefiction novel of the year. It certainly is the best extended-structure literary work to have crossed my desk (in any direction) in a very long time, and I have no doubt that it deserves any number of awards. But it is a play. This is perhaps a little difficult to tell because it's written in the first person. But the reader gains nothing from this intimacy with the supposed narrator that he could not learn by simply watching and listening. What he would observe would be the events on one set -- a sporting househospital operated by the Spiders in their time war with the Snakes. There is definite breaking into acts, and the chapters are in fact scenes. The dialogue used by the articulate, desperate, gestureful, small cast is stage dialogue. There is nothing in this story that could not be played under an arch, in the round or, for that matter, on a high wire. What the entrances, performances and exits of this little mostly human troupe accomplish is a statement about all wars, and all people. The device of a time war between two insuperable and inhuman forces far removed from these, their agents, becomes even more effective in emphasizing this universality, for the characters can and do depersonalize themselves as they destroy reality. In years to come, then, when "they" are looking for a good play with a science-fictional basis, "they" -- presumably, this same kind of people who found dramatic material in transcripts of the Nuremberg trials and in the clinical descriptions of the Marquis de Sade -- need look no further. I most urgently recommend this book to you. It's a beauty, for one thing. For another, it leads one to think that Fritz Leiber was the only science-fiction writer of any consequence -- before the most recent generation, that is -- who as a matter of course and conviction saw through the mores and circumscriptions which are now proving nonviable not only in commercial literature but in what we can call life as well. Since the new people -- Zelazny, Delany et al. -- are pretty unquestionably the wave of the future, and since the winners write the history books, if any of these new people have any gratitude or brains at all, Fritz Leiber is going to turn out to have been the most important science-fiction writer of the last thirty years. npie Past Through Tomorrow is billed, (by Putnam at #), as Robert A. Heinlein's future history stories. That it is -- I guess. I'm sure it's one of the most logical things for a publisher of science fiction to have done; a magnificient compendium, coincidentally a rewarding , and perhaps accurate cross-section of a writer's career. This is a book from which there is no escape; if you have a science-fiction library then you have got to have this book in it, because it contains (nearly) all the wordage ever written to fit into Heinlein'g chart of the future. The "future history" as I'n sure you know, is the framework -- written down ahead of time, in most instances -- into which many stories signed Robert A. Heinlein were fitted. (Those which did not fit were often signed Anson MacDonald.) Heinlein, even when the idea of charting the assumptive future was novel as an auctorial device, had trouble keeping his imagination in bounds. Just so, when he first drew up his chart, and published it, had several titles and stories in it which do indeed 'have to be there logically, but which for one reason or another ("The Stone Pillow") were never written. The potential problem has been solved here without any awkwardness. The titles of the unwritten stories have been dropped from the chart. Consequently, this volume is somehow not as dramatic and impressive as its idea was back in the days when you could shake up science-fiction readers just by telling them you had an intellectual system, and really rock them back on their heels by giving them even the slightest clue that you were aware of a larger world beyond either the medium or its message. Be that as it may, this is really a book to have -- some of the finest writing this field has ever known. It simply isn't quite the book one would have predicted. V"ou may believe all you please (if you do so believe) that there is no qualitative difference between the talented science-fiction writers of today and the talented science-fiction writers of any previous generation since the invention of commercial science fiction. But there is such a difference. Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and Samuel R. Delany, the variously tall giants of our new day, are altogther different, in all significant respects save that of talent, from every talented science-fiction writer who had come along since Hugo Gernsback's time. They are different because they are in living contact with the things that are so upsetting to the modern middle class. This is a stunning reversal of the habitual situation. I don't know any plainer way to spell out what I feel when I read the words of these people. They are of an earthshaking new kind. Not that I'm not aware of differences between them. Aldiss, for instance, seems the least talented of them. J. G. Ballard seems the least intelligent. I am aware they did not spring full-armed from the Earth's brow. There are echoes in those new creatures of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber. Their styles will trick you, sometimes, into thinking of Sturgeon and Bradbury -- but that's simply a tribute to their acumen in choosing weapons. (It does not matter that some of these things I am aware of may have no existence in objective truth, and it doesn't matter how any of them feel about each other, much less whether they agree with me even to the extent of permitting themselves to be grouped under this walnut shell. Artists usually get shoved into whatever corner is most convenient to the organizers of art.) What a book like Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection (Ace) demonstrates, garish cover, tasteless packaging, ridiculous blurbs and all, is that the wave of the future has broken over us. Delany at present has about as little discipline in his writing as any writer who has tried his hand at this field. Even Harlan Ellison -- a suddenly remote ancestor -- is no less organized. In this story of, I guess, a various young man's search for apotheosis in the peculiar world of the emerging new people who have borrowed some from us -- occupy our space, and intersect our heritage but are apparently free to pick what they want of it, and leave what they don't want, except it doesn't work out that way -- Delany does half a dozen impossible things before breakfast, and then forgets to eat. It doesn't really matter, however. The eyes through which Delany sees, or the tongue with which Zelazny speaks, the ear with which Aldiss listens, and the snake-dry touch of Ballard's fingertips, are the organs of comprehensible senses which happen to be connected to incomprehensible -- but very lucid -- brains. It would not only be dreadful if they suddenly began writing for the # Astounding, it would be impossible. The point is, if you are still reading everything from the viewpoint of the # Astounding, in a few years you will find that these people -- whether you approve of them or not -- have picked up the field, carried it elsewhere and left you with nothing but a complete collection of yellowed, crumble-edged bewilderment. Where, before now, was there a pulp sciencefiction writer who wrote a book "primarily during a year of travel in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and England" who had not steadfastly taken Main Street right along with him? Beside Delany's or Zelazny's cosmopolitan grasp, all the shoutings and rebellious hurrahings of even our most articulate iconoclasts are reduced to baby tantrums. Delany isn't even angry at some of the things which, by previous definition, should crush or infuriate him. Delany is deeply moved by things which few of us have ever even suspected of being tragic. The man simply operates on a plane which Robert Heinlein never dreamed of, nor John W. Campbell Jr., nor -- take a deep breath -- Ted Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury or anyone else we could have put forward as being a poet a mere five or six years ago. Not that I'm saying these new writers are good simply because they speak in riddles or babble in tongues. We have already spent many years worshipping the half-articulate and the halfcomprehensibly poetic. No, the point is that When Delany describes to us what he has seen, what he can compute, adduce, intuit or smell in the underbrush, our reaction is to sit bolt upright and cry out, "Of course! I have that very wound myself!" The ability to produce this reaction in people is one of the commonly accepted and apparently valid appurtenances of genius. And this field has never before had a single solitary one of them, let alone several. Having said all this, and having urgently recommended iT.he Einstein Intersection to you, I want to go on record here as saying that when you finish reading it you may be rather angry at me for steering you to a book whose structure and purpose on its own terms are not realized. As far as I'm concerned at this point, all that means is that Delany hasn't quite gotten himself under control. But when I think of all the perfectly controlled, thoroughly dead, bad books that I and all of us have read under the impression that we were experiencing something enjoyable, and when I look forward to the explosions that reading this will create within you, I frankly don't care very much whether this is a perfect book or not. The Biggest Double-Header in Year si A Brand-New SF Novel by Hal Clement A Noveleffe by A. E. Van Vogt Plus James Blish, Lin Carter and many more in October IF   on sale now! A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. M when you join the Science Fiction Book Club ond agree to accept only four books during the coming year combines three great science fiction classics for the first the most thought-provoking, compelling epics ever to come from the pen of the distinguished research biochemist and leading science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov. How to Get This Unusual Value lor only J# Because you enjoy Science thrillers, the Science Fiction Book Club would like to acquaint you with the most imaginative, informative, entertaining new science fiction books as they are written. That is why we have arranged to send you Subscription to the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, #, # and up in their original editions, Club members get them full-length, hard-cover editions. Extra-value books cost more. And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your Trial Subscription you agree to take as few as four books in the next twelve months. After that you may take as few or as many books as you want, and you may cancel at any time. It's a deal that is hard to beat. Mail Coupon With Only I #f # with a short trial membership. After ten days, if you will be canceled. Otherwise you will be enrolled in the Club as a Trial Member, and you need take only four books in the next twelve months. Mail the coupon today to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York #. colnl ready begun to war among themselves, plunging the universe into barbaric chaos. Civilization seemed doomed. But master scientists laboring to ensure that civilization would be preserved during the dark ages to come, established twin "Foundations" at opposite ends of the Galaxy, to form the nucleus of a new civilization, and in time to unite across the Galaxy to form a new... a stronger... a more enduring Second Empire. In Foundation and Foundation and Empire, we follow the course of the First Foundation as it rekindles the light of civilization in an everincreasing portion of the Galaxy -- and as it is confronted by its greatest crisis: a dangerous soul-consuming dcirire is conquest of the Galaxy! Within a decade, he tyrannized the entire Galaxy -- except for the Second Foundation. And this became his mania -- to find and conquer the Second Foundation. Everything in the Galaxy must be his!... Please enroll me' as a Trial Member in the Science ing and handling. Then, every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," which describes coming selections. For each book I accept. I will pay #, plus shipping anil handling, unless I take an extra-value selection at a higher price. I need take only four books within a year and may resign at any time thereafter. pay nothing, owe nothing, and my membership will be canceled. Print Name Address City State Zip: If under #, parent must sign hero (offer good in U.S.A. only.)  Membership applications subject , to aeerptsnr  bv Club I#-S#I GLXy DECEMBER # ANDERSON  SILVERBERG  NSVEN December # K galaxy King of Tin; Golden World A Complete Short Novel For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. may return the book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation if not completely satisfied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as payment in full. privilege guaranteed, of course. Not collected from magazines, not collected from other books, every one of these stories Is new and original, especially written for this volume -- to make it the most exciting science fiction anthology in years, and a "collector's item" in years to come. Harlan Ellison, contains almost a the biggest anthologies of original material ever assembled in any field. Included are such long-awaited items as Theodore Sturgeon's first novelette in seven years, the first Fritz Leiber story in four years, the first story in twenty years by Howard Rodman... stories of all lengths: as short as Lester del Rey's "Evensong" Lester Del Rey Philip JosS Farmer Harlan Ellison Philip K. Dick Joe L. Hensley # by David R. Bunch Theodore Sturgeon Sonya Dorman Kris Neville John Brunner Roger Zelazny Robert Silverberg Miriam Allen deFord Brian W. Aldiss Larry Niven Poul Anderson Carol Emshwiller Larry Eisenberg John T. Sladek R. A. Lafferty Keith Laumer Samuel R. 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Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. December, #  Vol. #, No. # by Pool Anderson by Larry Niven Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher by Richard Wilson by Robert Silverberg by Fritz Leiber by Philip Latham by Harry Harrison by John Brunner by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Advertising Circulation Director bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Secrets entrusted to a few #he TlnpuMtiM, adofjUfje be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the talcs of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and womenwho privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe T.g.R,  Scribe T.B.R. J San Jose, California # j Please send me the free book. The Mastery   of Life , which explains how I may learn to  j use my faculties and powers of mind.   Name. City Zip Code tffie Rosicrucmes A lot more than thirty years ago, when I was about ten years old, another kid gave me a copy of a magazine that seemed pretty strange and wonderful. The cover showed a large, scaly green monster battering a spaceship with a rock about the size of a three-story house. I opened it up, and was lost. I don't now recall a single story in that first issue of a science-fiction magazine I ever read. Which is a pity, because it certainly changed my life. I do recall that the name of the magazine was Science Wonder Stories Quarterly, and that the editor was a man named Hugo Gernsback. Time passed. Science Wonder Stories Quarterly changed into just plain Wonder Stories, and a couple of years later, along about #, the same Hugo Gernsback had an idea for a club of science-fiction readers. It was called The Science Fiction League, and, though his motives were of course more concerned with selling a few extra copies of the magazine than with shaping huturn changed lots of lives. It filled a need. Science-fiction readers in those days had a tendency to hide under rocks. (Now, of course, we're respectable -- I mean, after all, sf now has the proud record of having forecast atomic energy, rocket ships, television, radar, etc., so people take us more seriously. But in those days, you see, we were just making the predictions; they was a way of getting in touch with other people who shared the same crazy, secret pleasure in thinking about other times and other planets; and it prospered. Chapters started up all over the place -- a big one in Brooklyn, a lively one in Chicago, a Los Angeles chapter so healthy that even now it's still meeting, though it changed its name somewhen over All Things Are Possible"! Matthew #:# Dear Friend: That Are Worrying You? Have World-Wide Sin, Violence and Depression upset your life as they have so many, many others? Arc You In Poor Health? Are You Worried About Money Troubles, Debts or Your Job? Is Some One Dear to You Drinking or Gambling Too Much? Would You Like to Have More Friends? Are You Worried About Some One Dear to You For Any Reason? Have You Got Love or Family Troubles? Would You Like to Have Deeper Spiritual Understanding? Arc You Lonely? Are You Afraid of The Future? Would You Like More Success, Happiness, "Good Fortune ", Peace of Mind? If you liave any of these Problems, or others like them. Dear Friend, then here is thousands to glorious new happiness and joy! Ahd it may bring a whole new world of happiness and joy to you -- very, very quickly, too! All Who Need Help with your name and address, (even a post card will do. We will rush you this wonderHelp in meeting your Problems. We will Cross shown below, for you to keep and treasure. You will bless this day. Dear Friend, so don't delay! If you would like more Happiness, Successand "Good Fortune" in life please use the coupon below to send us your name and address Please clip and mail this Coupon now! r --  --  --  --  --  --  --  -- You Act Now This Lovely Golden keep and treasure. # East #th St., New York, N.Y. # name and address is: MR. Miss the years, another in Philadelphia that's also still around. When fan met fan, the result was what we now call "fandom"... Hugo Gernsback was probably thinking of other things, but he lit the fuse that led to such huge affairs as the recent World Science Fiction Convention, with # people swarming into a single hotel in New York. Of course, that's not all Hugo Gernsback did. He was an inventor. He was a' publisher of science and medical books, as well as science fiction. And he was a writer -- you can still find copies of hi most successful novel around; it was called Ralph #C#, and it had to do with a superhem .(that's the "plus" in his number) who watched girls in peril through a superTV and flew to their rescue in a superairplane. A little while ago (as this is written) we got word that the Father of Science Fiction would be with us no more. He died on the #th of August, of a kidney ailment; because he was the kind of man he was, he donated his body to science, and now some young medical student at Cornell University is no doubt learning anatomy through his posthumous help. It's a sort of a strange thought, but not altogether an unpleasant one; it's what Hugo Gernsback wanted, after all. Not very many people have done as much with their lives as Hugo Gernsback did with his. Although he was seriously ill in recent years and past the time for taking an active part in science fiction, he still read the magazines now and then. And it was good to know he was out there. We'll miss him. T ut Gernsback's name still lives on -- in more than one way, and especially in the annual awards for excellence in the field of science fiction called the "Hugos." There was a moment of silence before they were presented at the recent convention, which was appropriate, and then the Hugos were given out with great noise and ceremony. And that was appropriate, too. One of the winners came from Galaxy, a fact in which we take pride: Jack Vance's "The Last Castle," published here in April, #. (Which made it a clean sweep for us, because the others were from our companion magazine, If -- which won the "best magazine" Hugo again -- and the "best artist" was the one who illustrated Vances's story, Jack Gaughan.) Winning a Hugo is always an honor. This year maybe a little more so than ever. You rumple my money and I'll rumple yours -- and the devil take the American economy! nphe aliens first came over late  on a moonless summer night and emptied contents of their bomb bays on the village of South Waterford. The time was # a.m. on a Tuesday. It was probably a test run, a kind of motivational research project. If it had been an all-out attack on the United States, or on a major city, undoubtedly the government would have reacted sooner and more forthrightly. As it was, word about the South Waterford phenomenon, as the Air Force called it, didn't reach Washington right away. And when it did it was somehow confused with layed out to Colorado for Dr. Condon's attention. This could explain why the Defense Department seemed to lose interest in the matter for a while. But the Treasury Department got upset. The aliens had not dropped bombs. The cargo that fluttered down on South Waterford like autumn leaves, though paper, was not propaganda. It was United States currency. The Assistant to the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury recalled a kind of precedent as he was being interviewed by a wireservice reporter. Everybody knew, of course, that during World War II the Germans had counterfeited British banknotes and, among other things, used them to pay spies. But the Nazis had never dropped their phony pounds over London. Fewer people knew that the United States had considered bombarding Berlin and other German cities with skillfully counterfeited Reichsmarks. The Assistant to the Fiscal Assistant Secretary told the newsmen: "President Roosevelt was half convinced that this would be the thing to do. What German worker was going to spend # or # hours a day in a factory to earn the same kind of money he could pick up off the street?" "Sounds like a great idea," the newsman said. "Didn't Roosevelt like it?" "He was crazy about it. He called in his Secretary of the Treasury -- you know, Henry Morgenthau -- and said, 'Henry, listen to this great idea somebody thought up,' and then told him. But Morgenthau was horrified." "Why? Because money was sacred?" "That must have been part of it. But I also remember that Morgenthau pointed out that maybe the Germans would do the same thing to us. It was like poison gas. Nobody dared use it." Even after the word about the South Waterford incident was channeled back to Washington, there was delay. The fact that two powerful executive departments, Defense and Treasury, were involved meant that high officials had to consult, advise and compromise before an Executive Order could be drafted for the President's signature. Hphen the President refused to to sign it. His thinking apparently was that it would be tantamount to panicking to throw the economy of the entire United States out of kilter because of people in a tiny village in the Northeast might benefit temporarily. A statistical-minded adviser calculated what percentage of the total U. S. population lived in South Waterford. It was infinitesimal. So okay, let it be Christmas in July for that handful. Meanwhile, the doves counseled, let's sit tight and try to out think the alleged aliens instead of playing into their hands. No one knew then that the aliens didn't have hands. They had pseudopods, not to mention bright organge mandibles. Much later somebody in Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service said they were more like octopi than people. Nobody in Treasury was able to figure out how such creatures had developed the skill to simulate U.S. currency. The Defense Department was more interested in the kind of craft the aliens flew. But by the time these questions had been answered, by direct observation, they were academic. In the absence of an Executive Order which might have protected the rest of the United States against South Waterford's windfall, the Federal Reserve Board took the unofficial step of advising its member banks to accept only worn currency. The advice was passed down the line until it reached that village's lone financial institution, the South Waterford Trust #s Deposit Company. This led to the formation of a social organization known as the South Waterford Rumple Club. A couple would invite a dozen neighbors and friends. Then, for two or three hours, conversation and cocktails would be accompanied by the passing from hand to hand of the fresh, crisp bills until they achieved a well used look. At one point in the circuit the rumpled bills would be dipped into a mixture of face powder and shredded cigarette stubs. This gave them the aroma of having spent some time in a woman's purse. The next night the same group assembled at another couple's house and aged their money. The host was expected to stock up on giant economy sizes of a powerful hand cleaner so that at the end of the evening his guests could get the green off. Jim Vernon's technique was to roll the bill into a ball and work it between his palms, Harold Riehlmann's was to crease it lengthwise as many times as possible; Jane, his wife, creased it the short way. Lou Aramis was a particularly welcome member of the party. He was the owner of a one-man garage and auto repair shop and came without washing his hands. Lou did more to age a bill authentically than all the rest of them put together. T ou Aramis parked his car in ' I the lot of the South Waterford Shop 'n' Save Center and started down Main Street with his old army duffel bag over his shoulder. It was #:#I a.m. Thursday. The sun was warm and he was perspiring. His first stop was at the Country Drug  Variety Store, Eric Palmer, Ph.C., Prop. It was empty except for Eddie Grimes, who was Eric's partner and assistant pharmacist, and the girl at the soda fountain. "Hi, there, Lou," Eddie said cheerfully. "You're not back in the army, are you? Fighting the mysterious foe? Old guy like you?" Eddie was older. Lou dropped the duffel bag to the floor of the drug counter, where a little square of clear space next to the cash register was surrounded by aspirin, cough medicine, flashlight batteries, key cases, combs, ballpoint pens, photographic supplies, perfume, face cream, razor blades, boxes of chocolates, playing cards, poker chips, paperback books and other drugstore items to tempt the impulse buyer. "Never fear," Lou said. "I'm here to pay my good old bill. One hundred and fifty-four dollars and seventy-two cents." He opened the duffel bag and pulled out a handful of bills. Eddie Grimes gave an alarmed little laugh. "Why, there's no hurry, Lou, old friend. You know your credit's good here." "Sure it is, Eddie, and don't think I'm not grateful for the way you carried me over those rough spots this spring. But I got your bill yesterday, and it was stamped in big red letters right to do just that." "Well, now, Lou, there's absolutely no hurry in your case. We weren't hinting or anything, you know." "One fifty-five, one seventyfive, two hundred -- " Lou was counting out the crumpled, dirty bills on the counter next to a Sominex display. "Now wait a minute, Lou," Eddie said. He went on counting. "Two-fifty, two-seventy two-ninety, three hundred and ten, three sixty, three eighty. You carried me, so I want to carry you the next few months, Eddie.: There. Four hundred even. Just give me a receipt, will you?" "Why sure, Lou, but Eric isn't here right now -- " "Your signature's good enough for me, Eddie, old pal. That's fine. Thanks. So long now." n his way out Lou stopped at the tobacco counter near the soda fountain and bought ten cartons of cigarettes, paying the girl with a battered twenty and a fairly well creased ten. "I'd stock up myself if I were you," he told the girl. "The price is going up, I hear. Just put 'em in the freezer, and they keep forever." He called back to the pharmacist. "So long, Eddie." "Yeah -- so long, Lou. Thanks and come again, I guess." Lou's next stop was at the South Waterford branch of the giant T. T. Grantberry chain, purveyor of anything from salted nuts and tropical fish to automobile tires, refrigerators, haberdashery and living-room suites, available at nothing down on the revolving charge plan, a small percentage of the balance payable monthly, with # interest mounting up fast at the far end. Lou went back past the mens' pants, ladies' lingerie, cafe curtain and hooked rug departments to the credit office. It was #:# a.m. by the clock that had writ"Good morning, sir," the young lady clerk said. "Good morning," Lou said. He put the duffel bag on the floor and fished his T. T. Grantberry monthly statement out of his back trouser pocket. "It says here I owe you #, including the service charge, which I guess means interest." There had been that color television set, purchased during his wife's illness when he thought she might be dying. "Yes, sir," the girl said. "But of course you only have to pay # this month under our optional revolving charge plan. Did you wish to pay the #, sir?" "No, ma'am; I wish to pay the # and get out of your revolving charge plan, which is revolving me to death." Certainly, sir. As you wish. Did you wish to pay by check?" "No, ma'am. I wish to pay by cash, in the full amount, and then close out the account." He opened the duffel bag and began counting our grimy, well circulated bills. They'd been circulated all around Jim Vernon's living room. "Oh, sir," the girl said, "I'm not sure I want to take all this money from you. Perhaps you'd like to talk to Mr. Malmster, our assistant credit manager?" "What's to talk to Mr. Malmser about? It says right here -- look -- 'You can save on future credit service charges by paying more than your monthly minimum or by paying in full at any time.' This is the time; I'm paying in full." Lou went on counting... four hundred and forty, four hundred sixty. Now give me my change and receipt, like a good girl. It's been a pleasure doing business with you." The girl grinned, finally. "It's okay with me. Just between you and me, leaving T. T. Grantberry out of it, how much more you got in that barracks bag, Mr. Aramis?" "Plenty." "Me, too. I paid up myself first thing this morning, before the store opened. I didn't age it as good as you did -- I put mine in the vacuum cleaner bag with some of that brown stain furniture polish -- but it got by." She winked. "Good girl," Lou said. "Now just put the receipt through your machine there -- that's the way. Thanks." As he started to walk away she called: "Don't forget your green stamps." He went back and got them. On his way out Lou ordered a new refrigerator -- with an extrabig freezer compartment -- and a sofa bed and a dozen pairs of slacks and eight new tires and a year's supply of toothpaste, razor blades, aspirin and another ten cartons of cigarettes, paid cash at the checkout counter, collected his green stamps and got back into his car. All this had been practice. Now came the real test. T ou Aramis headed for the  -- ' South Waterford Trust  Deposit Company, holder of the mortgage of his two-story older house, his personal loan and his borly Bank Is Your Loan Headquarters"). Bill to fellow members of Rotary and the Lions), vice president in charge of consumer credit, greeted Mr. Lou Aramis, valued customer, with a cautious smile. "Nice day, Mr. Aramis," he said, standing up at his deck behind the railing to shake hands. "How are you?" "Couldn't be better. And you?" Lou let his duffel bag plop to the floor. Mr. Briese looked at it with feigned joviality. "Taking a trip "Not really. Just thought I'd make a few payments." "Oh?" Mr. Briese pulled at his lower lip and sank back into his swivel chair. "Well, come in. Sit down." Lou went through the swinging wooden gate, trailing the duffel bag behind him, and sat in the customer's chair. He fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and found the pack empty. He reached into the duffel bag and took out a carton, from which he took a pack, from which he extracted a cigarette, then two, remembering his manners. He offered one to Mr. Briese. A fiftydollar bill had fluttered to the floor and the banker went to pick it up and return it to Lou with one hand while accepting the cigarette with the other. "Yes, thanks," Mr. Briese said. He lit the cigarettes with his desk back in his chair, puffing nervously. Lou, also nervous, had trouble finding the right papers, pulled them out and then put them in Mr. Briese's out basket. "I owe you some money, Mr. Briese. I mean various amounts for different thinks, like -- " "Well, now, Mr. Aramis -- Lou, if I may -- there are various amounts due, to be sure, but if I recall correctly we're just about current on everything exthere's a late charge owing. Some nominal amounts -- nothing to worry us." "Frankly, Mr. Briese, it worries me a great deal to be delinquent in any of my obligations, and I'm here to straighten this out before it gets embarrassing to either of us." He'd rehearsed this part of it very carefully before coming. "Call me Bill. Nobody's embarrassed, Lou. A person forgets, or there are unavoidable circumstances. This happens. We're not unreasonable. Now, if you care ment of #, plus the late Charge of #, there's no problem. Your credit rating is topdrawer with us. We couldn't ask for a better customer. In fact, I personally will recommend to Mr. Dell, our president, that all your delinquencies be wiped off the books -- wiped right off, so there's no blot whatsoever on you account." Lou, more confident, smiled through a cloud of exhaled smoke. "That sure is fine, Mr. Briese -- Bill. That's very generous of you. To show you I appreciate it I'm going to -- well, reciprocate. I'm going to pay my account in full." TTreezy Bill sat up straight andkJ' put out his cigarette. "Well, of course -- if you wish. Certainly there'd be a saving in interest charges. But there's also the consideration that you don't want to leave yourself short of ready cash -- " His eyes drifted to the duffel bag. "You mean one of "Both of them," Lou said. "The thousand-dollar one for the back bedroom and the twelve hundred-dollar one for the upstairs bathroom. I'm three-quarters of the way through the fiveyear one and about halfway through the #-month one." "There's absolutely no hurry at all," Bill said, and Lou could tell that he was saying it sincerely"Except that I have the money -- " Lou gave the duffel bag a friendly kick -- "and there is that fat interest rate -- " "We're delighted to carry you, Mr. Aramis -- Lou -- delighted." But Lou Aramis said: "I have the cash, Mr. Briese, and I prefer to pay the whole thing. I owe you # on one and # on the other. That's # on both. I'd like to clear those up right now." He reached into the bag and counted out a thousand dollars in soiled bills. "We'll get it exact later," he said. Mr. Briese let the money sit on his desk, not touching it. He looked at it with distaste, then at Lou, belatedly changing his expression to a tentative smile. "May I ask you, without meaning to be overly inquisitive, of course, how you happen to have so much cash?" "I didn't rob a bank, if that's what you mean." The expression of distaste returned to Mr. Briese's face. "I'm sorry," Lou said. "I guess that wasn't funny." It wouldn't do to antagonize Breezy Bill Briese at this stage of the transaction. "What happened is that a lot of my customers came in yesterday to pay up. Some of them had owed me for years." Mr. Briese looked dubious. "You mean they all paid you on the same day, and all in cash?" Lou shrugged. "Yeah. I guess you'd call it a coincidence." "I would." Mr. Briese picked up one of the bills -- a fifty -- and examined it, then held it to his nose and sniffed at it. "It's certainly worn," he said reluctanly. "Legal for all debts public and private," Lou said. He was pushing it now. "That's what's printed on it, isn't it?" "That's what it says, all right." "And you're open for business? Money's your business, just like cars are mine, and if you don't see anything wrong with the money, why can't I pay my debts with it? I can't eat it." ( i' I 'rue." Mr. Briese appeared to find inspiration. "But you could put it in a safe deposit box which I'd be glad to rent to you for eight dollars a year." Lou started to object. Then he sat back and said, "Okay." "Okay?" Mr. Briese wasn't prepared for such affable agreement. "I'll rent the box." Lou picked some bills from the pile on the desk and handed them to Mr. Briese. "I'll even pay you in advance. Can I have a receipt?" Mr. Briese took a pad from his drawer and wrote a receipt. He was smiling as he handed it to Lou. "Fine. I'll take you to the vault -- " "Not right now," Lou said. "Maybe I'll put my life insurance policy in it sometime and a few things like that." "But I thought you wanted it for the money." "Sure you did. But you took my cash, so it must be good. Now loans. It's exactly the same principle, isn't it?" Bill Briese surrendered. He chuckled. "You win, Lou. In the absence of any directives not to accept circulated currency, such as you have here, I have no accounts paid in full." Lou handed over the two payment books. He relaxed as the vice president in charge of consumer credit tore out the perforon each stub. "It's a pleasure to do business with you, Bill," he said, putting the receipted books in his pocket. He smiled at the banker. "Now about the mortgage." "The mortgage?" Bill Briese asked. "What do you mean, the mortgage?" "My mortgage," Lou said. "I figured out last night that I owe you exactly #. I want to pay it off." He reached into the duffel bag, drew out a handful of soiled bills and started to count them out on the desk. "Twenty, forty, ninety, one hundred, hundred and ten, hundred and sixty..." The banker sank back in his chair. His eyes became glazed as Lou continued to count. "... thousand-fifty, eleven hundred, eleven-twenty -- oh, look, here's what you financiers call a C note -- twelve-twenty, twelve-forty, twelve-ninety..." After a while Bill Briese began stamp and thumped it up and down on the ink pad, waiting for Lou Aramis to finish his meticulous counting. '"phe government acted, finally, after the aliens dropped eight lars, in beautifully wrought and now pre-rumpled bills no larger than fifties, over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Denver, Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas and Miami. But before that happened Lou Aramis and his fellow members of the South Waterford Rumple Club had paid all their debts. They owned their houses and cars free and .clear and had stocked up on everything they could buy. Bill Briese, though not a club member, had taken a long lunch hour, raked his lawn and paid off thirty thousand dollars worth of debts before going out on his own buying spree. He'd had to resign from the bank the same afternoon after an emergency meeting of the board of directors, but he did so with no apparent regret, and by nightfall he'd rented an office down the block in which he set himself up as a currency consultant. His new business lasted only one day because an Executive Ordered soon outlawed paper money altogether. The aliens, adapting quickly, flew over and dropped coins. The Kennedy halves did the worst damage because there were more of them than of any other denomination. But there were silver dollars galore and Washington quarters and Roosevelt dimes. The aliens dropped no nickels or pennies, which became scarce. But by common agreement people gave up making small change; prices were rounded off to the nearest ten cents. People who were out at # a.m. when the coin rain fell were stunned by the din and quite a number of them were knocked unconscious by the coins themselves. Vast numbers of windows were broken. The government outlawed all money, including checks. Trading was suspended indefinitely on the stock and commodity exchanges. All banks closed. Supermarkets and other chain stores shut their doors for high-level consultations, but enterprising independent shopkeepers stayed in business by switching to barter. Lou Aramis went out before breakfast to rake the lawn in front of his paid-off house. He gathered the five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills into a pile and burned them. He raked the silver out to the driveway where it glittered in the early sunshine, prettier than gravel. His neighbor, Jim Vernon, was also burning bills. He told Lou he was saving his coins and planned to cover his patio with them. "I'm pouring the concrete Friday night, and I'll set the coins in then. But I'm a little short of silver dollars for the border." Lou waved to his sparkling driveway. "Help yourself." "Thanks." "I've got an extra gross of eggs," Lou said. "Can you use them?" Lou's father-in-law had a poultry farm. "I sure can," Jim said. "But I don't know what I could trade. You must be all stocked up on clothes by now." Jim ran Vernon's Men's Wear. "I am, but Susie's getting jealous. Too bad you don't carry a women's line." "I could probably do a swap with Keegan Brothers over in Parrish. What size is Susie?" Qusie had the omelettes on the  table when Lou went in. She was studying a new cookbook. "We could have souffle for dinner," she said. "Takes an awful lot of eggs." "Sounds nourishing," Lou said. "Could you disguise it somehow?" "I've been saving a piece of cheddar cheese. And then I heard from Mrs. Lucia yesterday that there's a chance of getting some eggplant -- " "Eggplant!" Even the sound of it bothered Lou. Georgie, their youngest, said: "I want some com flakes." "You'll eat eggs," Susie told him. "I'm keeping the com flakes for your birthday treat." "I hate eggs," Georgie said. Lou, who was beginning to feel the same way, started for his car. Susie ran after him. "You forgot your lunch." She handed him six hard-boiled eggs. In the park, where he went to eat lunch, Lou traded three of the eggs for a loaf of bread. He'd struck up an acquaintance with a baker's helper. I t was getting so that Lou automatically woke up at # a.m. He lay in silent darkness for a while, then heard a succession of soft plopping sounds on the roof. He pulled on his bathrobe and went outdoors. The lawn seemed to be covered with ping-pong balls. No, bigger -- they were white but each was the size of a kid's high bouncer. When he picked one up it gave in his hand as a rubber ball did. Lou shook his head and went back to bed. In the morning he was awake before Susie. He went out and threw one of the round white things against the stone steps. Instead of bouncing it smashed. A red and white liquid spilled out. In the few hours since the things had fallen their casings had become brittle, like eggshells. Lou was dismayed. He felt his egg-based economy beginning to crack wide open. He bent down to sniff at the thing he had smashed. The liquid had a meaty, nourishing smell. He gathered up a handful of the spheres and took them to the kitchen. He cracked their shells and fried them in a pan; a delicious aroma filled the air. Cooked, their consistency was that of Welsh rabbit. Tasted, they were reminiscent of lobster. He nibbled cautiously at first, then ate hungrily. The members of the South Waterford Rumple Club, to whom Lou communicated his discovery, were almost as happy with the rain of lobster meat as they had been with the alien's original money drop, and soon the entire country was enjoying free highprotein meals. Some connoisseurs claimed that the food from the sky tasted like squid. The connoisseurs turned out to be prophets. The trouble with the alien eggs was that, if kept, they hatched out octopi. The little creatures looked just like the description of the aliens given by the man from the Fish and Wildlife Service. They had pseudopods and bright orange mandibles. The question of whether they could be eaten after they hatched was academic for two reasons. They didn't wait around to be captured. They moved on their eight legs more swiftly than spiders and were always just out of reach. In the second place, the aliens now flew over every day, punctually at # a.m., dropping a new batch. People soon learned how to tell the fresh eggs from the day-old ones. Off-white freckles on them indicated that they were new and edible. When the freckles faded the eggs were ready to hatch. As the octopi grew -- and they grew fast -- the federal government sent troops to seal off South Waterford. But this was a futile precaution because South Waterford was now only twenty-four hours ahead of the rest of the country, and all the government got was a preview of the end. Lou Aramis, after breakfasting heartily on lobsterlike (or squidlike) egg meat, stepped out on his lawn to gather up a few more freckled spheres. He forgot his mission when he saw a fully grown creature hanging by two of its eight tentacles from the lowest branch of his catalpa tree. One of the other six tentacles beckoned Lou closer. The intelligent eyes of the thing were appraising him. Lou, unable to resist the bidding, went to within arm's length. He felt neither fear nor repungnance as the alien creature reached out a tentacle and laid it on his shoulder. It might have been a caress, or a dubbing to knighthood, or the gesture of a master to a worthy slave. The alien spoke, and there were overtones which suggested to Lou that similar scenes were taking place all over South Waterford and would be repeated twenty-four hours later throughout the United States. His particular alien said to him: "I think we can use you." Lou knew then as surely as if it had been explained to him by the League of Women Voters, or by the President himself, that both pronouns were in the plural. Lou Aramis felt proud. He said: "Of course we'll do what has to be done, together." It was only natural. Outwardly he was still Lou Aramis, upright terrestrial biped. But thanks to his recent diet he was starting to think like an orange-mandibled alien squid. of the She was earthly and human. Her husband was an alien -- how alien, she never knew I rrkward the late afternoon  Elena mounted the higher peak of the double-humped island to watch the first phases of the eruption. A swarm of the children took her there -- sleek, yellow-skinned fledglings, gracefully coltish, giddy with delight at the idea of accompanying the woman from Earth. They tumbled and pranced beside her as the procession ascended the mountain road, and as the group came round the spiraling cone to a place where the other peak was in view one of them said, "See the smoke, Elena? Soon there will be fire!" He was Vondik, one of her favorites, one of the most agile, probably the most intelligent. As Elena moved to the edge of the road for a better view, the boy sidled up beside her. His cool, six-fingered hand casually encircled the bare meat of her left thigh only inches below her hip. He glanced up, and the warm greenish eyes searched her face as though to see if she disapproved of the contact. Well, of course, in the proper context -- schoolboy and teacher on Earth, say -- any such contact would be outrageously intimate. But this was not Earth, and Vondik was merely being friendly. He was about nine, a couple of years short of maturity among these people. There was nothing sexual about the innocent embrace, Elena told herself. The other children chattered and pointed at the far peak. Elena had difficulty understanding their rapid words. The onset of the eruption left them frantically excited. Like monkeys, she thought. Slender yellow monkeys growing tense before a storm. "The fire will come," said Vondik. "And the stone will melt and pour down on everything. See? See? The fiery stone will fall on the villages and destroy all in its path." "How soon?" she asked. His fingers dug into her thigh. "Two sunrises. Three. Ask Haugan. Ask the chief. When you go to sleep with him tonight, make him tell you." Vondik giggled. "See the fire coming now! Do you see it, Elena?" She stared out over the valley. The view from here was magnificent. She saw the green slopes of the other peak, and two of the three villages that had sprouted below the summit of the volcano since its last eruption, generations ago. The double-humped island was about ten kilometers in diameter, rising steeply from the dark waters of Lake Muuk. The lake was the gigantic basin of some ancient crater, the roofless remnant of what must have been an incredible mountain. No one knew how deep it was. It was thirty kilometers across, and to the east Elena was able to see the zig-zag course of the Golden River, yellow with mountain silt. The river came from the north, slicing down out of the cold loess country to feed this crater lake. The lake had no visible outlet. Elena supposed that underground springs must carry off the daily influx of new water. The daily tons of yellow silt were lost in the depths of Lake Muuk, which remained obstinately dark, obstinately deep, no matter how much debris the Golden River dumped into it. Further out, beyond the rim of the lake, Elena saw the broad tropical savanna. Unfriendly tribes inhabited it. The people of the lake, self-sufficient, never left their swaybacked island, even though both humps were active volcanoes and the lesser hump was in an evil mood. O nce, ten years ago, Elena had seen Vesuvius: that dark ashy cone, those sinister fumaroles, the coiling wisps of greasy smoke. Touch a cigarette to the ground, and it ignited. She had gone right over the lip of the volcano and had stared into its black heart, looking down on the death of Pompeii and shivering. Here she did not dare get so close to the crater. It was sacred ground to these people. The villages began in the valley and straggled up the slopes for hundreds of yards. Above the last houses lay a thick green belt of cloud forest, untouched by cultivatic  untouchable, holy. Above that lay an ancient cinder zone, leading to the summit. When the first rumbles of the disturbance had sounded, Elena had wanted to climb the peak and evaluate the danger at close range. Haugan had forbidden that. He was not only her lover but the chief of the three villages, the King of the Golden River, and she could not disobey him. So here she was, atop the uninhabited neighboring peak, looking across the valley at the deadly mountain. "Much dead when it blows up," Vondik said. "Surely everyone will be a safe place by then," said Elena. The children laughed: a shrill chorus, rising in pitch, then descending. When she had first come to this world, she had found its style of laughter intolerably strange. Now she was used to it, and it charmed her. But to laugh in the face of a throbbing volcano? The sky was darkening. Purple, feathery puffs of cloud drifted in from the east, from the sea, heavy with rain. Against this darker background Elena could plainly see the incandescent material shooting high in the air from the funnel of cinders across the island. There were distant hissing and roaring sounds. A fountain of cinders and pumice spurted forth, bright red, cascading down the slopes. Through her spy-lens Elena watched a shower of glowing little particles lose itself and grow dark in the wilderness of ash that bordered the summit. She trembled. How long could it be before the volcano was hurling its matter into the sacred forest on its flanks and then spewing its seed into the huddled villages themselves? How could everyone be so calm about it? The ground seemed to be shaking, even here, kilometers from danger. Elena knew that beneath this entire island, both peaks of it, conduits of liquid fire crossed and recrossed. A mighty beast was stirring far beneath her feet. T Tondik's hand was gone from  her thigh, now. She looked for the boy and saw his agile, naked form high in a tree, reaching for a gleaming winefruit. He seized it and jumped; the other children caught him and bore him triumphantly to her side. "A winefruit for you." Apple for the teacher. She took it, touched his cheek to thank him and bit into it. The children watched anxiously. She smiled to tell them that it was ripe and delicious. Winefruits were left to ferment on the bough, but if they were left too long they were sickening. Elena felt faintly giddy as the alien alcohols attacked her metabolism. The children gamboled about her. How could they be so cheerful? Their homes would be destroyed. These folk were no simpletons, no backward rustics. In their own way they were shrewd and sensitive. Yet they did not appear troubled. Markun, one of Vondik's many sisters, capered and pointed. "Now the lightning comes!" Darkness had fallen with tropical suddenness. The pearly sky had grown ashen, and now the pumice fountain flamed like a giant Roman candle, and above and around it hovered a black cloud of erupting gases. And in the cloud flickered white sheets of forked lightning. At first Elena thought the lightning came from the purple rain cloud she had seen earlier, but no, there was that cloud sitting on the forest like a veil spread out in the treetops, well below the cinder zone. This lightning had something to do with the forces being unleashed within the volcano. It crackled and danced with demonic fury. "We'd better start back to the village," said Elena nervously. "It's late. It's getting dark." nphey did not object. Whoop- ing and leaping, they preceded her down the steep incline, waiting every few moments for her to catch up. Elena found the downward path more strenuous than the ascent. Gravity here pulled a little less harshly than on Earth, and she was in fine physical shape, thirty years old, tightfleshed, strong. But the mountain path was cut at a devilish angle. Going up, it asked no more than stamina, which she had in abundance. Going down, it imposed ugly strains on her slender ankles. She managed. Soon they were on level land again, crossing the gentle sway of the valley. The first houses appeared. Dinner fires had been kindled. Instead of the twenty children who had gone with her to the lookout point, Elena now found herself surrounded by fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty. They greeted her with piercing cries of pleasure, crowding close, lightly slapping their hands against her bare body. It had been easy enough to get accustomed to going naked here, but Elena had never conditioned herself to the sight of so many children. On Earth, where births were so strictly regulated, children were rare sights. Here such regulation was unknown; and, besides, this was a race that bore quintuplets as a matter of course. Elena had never heard of a litter smaller than three. Six and seven births at a time were not uncommon. And the children thrived. The air was warm and gentle, the valley fertile, the lake generous with its yield. Boisterously the children escorted her to the Parting of the Ways. These were all one people, one culture; yet the three villages were separated by barriers of custom and caste as high as mighty walls. Largo, the lowland village, was a farming settlement. Hulgo, at the base of the volcano, was a town of artisans and potters. Gilgo, higher on the slopes, produced the laborers who did the heavy work, the fellers of trees, the builders of houses and canoes. Elena saw no necessary reason for this arbitrary division, except that it provided an exogamic structure for these insular folk. A man of Gilgo took his wife from Largo or Hulgo; no one ever married within his home village. That kept the population mixing, at any rate. Except for marriages, there was little contact between one village and its neighbor. H augan, the chief of all three villages, lived high up in Gilgo. He ruled the lower two villages through surrogates; there was little real ruling to do, merely the proclamation of festivals and holidays and the occasional imparting of justice. Elena took the Gilgo road, with only Vondik, Markun and a few of the other children following her. Clammy dampness had descended on the island. She was tired now. Her breasts heaved, her skin felt sticky. She leaned more heavily on the climbing-stick Vondik had cut for her. As she entered Gilgo she paused a long moment, a lean, naked, blonde Earthwoman far from home and clad in worries and humidity. She looked up at the smoking summit, dimly visible between the trees. A gigantic eruption cloud now towered over the peak, laced with lightning in continual flashes. It seemed to her that the subterranean rumbling was loudU She had the illusion that the air was full of minute particles of ash, and she felt grimy and soiled from them, even though a finger drawn across her chest did not produce the expected streak. She hurried onward, to the large hut that she shared with Haugan. The king came out to greet her. They embraced solemnly. "What have you seen?" "Fire and smoke and lightning. Haugan, it's going to erupt!" "Not yet. Not yet. Dinner is waiting." He led her inside. He was taller than she -- the tallest man in the village, as was fitting -- and moved with such grace that she never failed to feel cowlike in his presence. Alien as he was to her, she had always responded in an immediate physical way to him, from the day she had come here, a foolish expatriate looking for illumination in the outworlds. She had not expected to become the bride of an alien. But of course he was not all that inhuman. He had too many fingers and too many joints; the texture of his skin was strange, his eyes were all pupil, he was without hair or fingernails, and she did not dare to think much about the arrangement of his internal organs. Yet the general pattern of his body was humanoid. Evolution had come to the same conclusions here as oil Earth about how a dominant mammalian species should be designed, and Haugan stood upright, had two walking limbs and two grasping limbs, carried his forehead, eyes and teeth in the same flat plane and found it convenient to cover his women with his body in the act of love. Elena had ceased to regard him as bizarre. nphey squatted on the mat. Dinner -- stewed meat, green wine, starchy vegetables -- was served in silence by Haugan's maid Leegar. Her belly swelled with a new litter. She was six months along. Haugan, of course, was the father; it was a chief's prerogative to take concubines. The girl was shy but not at all apologetic about it. She smiled as she set Elena's food before her. Leegar seemed to be saying, "You may be the king's wife, but I carry the king's children!" Elena had never quite grown used to the sight of the women, with their triple rows of breasts reaching from throat to navel. It was a sensible arrangement, considering the habit of multiple births here, but it seemed unutterably alien to her in a way that Haugan's minor aliennesses no longer did. The feeling seemed, reciprocal. When they lay together at night, Haugan's hands often came to rest on the flat, taut drum of her chest as though in unending wonder at the absence of the lower four breasts. Haugan said, "You aren't hungry?" "The volcano frightens me, Haugan." "God in his time sends all blessings. We are prepared for what may befall." "But I saw it clearly," she said. "It's like a bubbling caldron. At any minute, it might bury us in lava." "The priests are keeping watch. The lava will not come for several days." "Several days! But -- " She hesitated. Often, she found herself lecturing or haranguing him, slipping into the role of the educated Earthwomen telling the native chieftain what the universe was all about. But she hated that facet of herself. This was his world, his island, his kingdom ; and it was folly to imagine she was superior to him merely because her civili#ation had interstellar ships and his made pottery from coils of clay. t# W hat you suggest?" he ' 'asked quietly. "I don't know. It only seems sensible -- " "Tell me." " -- to start evacuating the three villages. Move everybody across to the other mountain. We're just sitting here under the crater waiting to be killed." "There is time to evacuate." "Haugan, there are thousands of people -- the domestic animals, the tools, the furniture -- " "We will not leave so quickly." He poured more wine for her. Elena drank and grew giddy. Haugan remained calm -- insanely calm, she told herself. He was like a rock, steady, assured of all he did. In every decision, from judging a paternity dispute to ordering the flight from the eruption zone, Haugan seemed equally unhurried and equally confident, a true king. When the meat was gone, they went outside and walked through the village, king and consort, hailed by all. From the promontory on the eastern slope they studied the volcano above them. The eruption cloud had grown greater, as had the flaming fountain coming from the heart of the cinder cone. Now it seemed that the angle of that Roman candle had changed, dipping to point to the west. Elena saw the red reflection sprawling like a bridge across dark Lake Muuk. Every few minutes there came small booming explosions from above. Steam and black ejecta spurted high and fell back. The air had a singed smell. Elena looked at her arm and found a coating of fine ash trapped in the golden down on her skin. She showed it to him. Haugan stroked her body and murmured, "You have the soft fur everywhere on you. Not only here and here and here. Except for a few places, your skin has the light strands of fur all over. Wonderful!" "Haugan, you've noticed that before. I'm showing you the ash, now. The air's full of it." "Yes. And it will get worse." He did not seem to care. L ater, several old men came to see him. He sent Elena inside and squatted with them before the hut. They talked more than an hour. Elena could not understand their words -- the old men spoke in thick mumbles, and Haugan replied in whispers -- but now and again she seemed to sense sharp disagreement. Something the oldsters said made Haugan angry, and she heard him snap sarcastically at them. The conclave broke up at last. He came in and lay down beside her on the sleeping-mat. "What did they want?" she asked. "To talk about the volcano. To make plans." She said suddenly, "Haugan, do they blame me for the eruption?" "You? Why should they blame you?" "The king has taken a wife from another world. Maybe they think that was sinful and is bringing destruction." "If they thought it was sinful, they would never have allowed the marriage." "I know some of your people objected to it." "Elena, you know we must marry outside our village. It is the rule." "Outside the village, yes. But to bring in a woman from a different world -- " "You fill your head with wrong ideas," he told her. "Is this some imagining of your own planet, that it is an evil omen for the king to marry a foreign woman? Here it is acceptable. Necessary, even. The more foreign, the better. And you are the most foreign. No one blames you for the fire overhead, Elena. I swear to that." She was not soothed. Obscurely she believed that the old priests held her guilty for the impending disaster. No one had voiced even a hint of such a feeling to her, but she could not shake the notion away. It was too easy for her to think in glib anthropological terms. The exogamic exchange of women here had signficance for her as the passage of unspoken messages between tribal groups; the women who embodied those silent messages were units of economic, biological and symbolic significance exchanged in a manner which kept the general structure -- the meaning -- of the island society coherent and dynamic. Haugan had incorporated her into that structure. But what was the unvoiced message that she carried, if not one of doom and destruction? The islanders did not marry mainland women, despite the rule of exogamy. Was it not a blasphemy for Haugan to have married an alien? Elena could not shed her sense of guilt. I n the morning she saw that the cataclysm had not yet arrived. But it was closer. Now, periodically, the crater belched steam and pumice. A thin steam cloud hovered over the lake. At the summit, the cinder cone seemed to have grown by at least a dozen meters since the previous afternoon. It rose precariously higher on the lakeward side than on the valley side, and about midday some new convulsion split the higher shoulder, breaching it to form a horseshoe-shaped rim. A dribble of clinkers became a talus slide reaching toward the upper margins of the forest. The forest itself was dingy with an overlay of ash, and every gust of wind now brought light drifts of debris into the village. Among the people of the Golden River villages, life seemed to go on as it always had. The men felled trees and hewed them into canoes. The women tended their babies. The children played. In the lowlands, the harvest continued. No one acted alarmed. Haugan was away most of the day, conferring with priests and elders in the official huts at the upper end of the village. Elena momentarily expected the evacuation order to come, but it did not. Darkness was early that evening. The sky was so clotted with ash that it would not let the late sunlight through. There was feasting after dark. Elena eyed the pillar of fire above the village. It seemed to her that she could feel bursts of hot steam on her nakedness, the exhalations of the monster. Soon would come a vomit of steamy mud, and boulders of pockmarked tuff, and then the devastating river of lava. That night Haugan occupied himself making lists on sheets of bark. He had no time for Elena. Throughout the night he conducted interviews in low muttered tones. At last he seemed to be showing some sense of an emergency, but only he and his coterie of withered priests appeared at all involved with the gathering force of the eruption, and even they were calm. She was the only one to feel fear. Now it was the third morning since the rumblings and roarings and hissings had begun. Through the ash-clouded sky the sunlight looked sickly and strained. Small explosions were coming every five minutes. A layer of ash covered the village lightly. Haugan said, "Come with me to bathe, Elena." She was glad to get out of Gilgo and put more distance between herself and the growling volcano. Together they journeyed through the lower villages and to the shore of the lake. They both were grimy, though his smooth body had retained less of the ash than hers. The water was serene, but when Elena touched it she drew back, hissing at its warmth. "It's boiling, Haugan!" "Not yet. We can still enter it." He waded out, hip-deep, and beckoned to her. She stepped into the shallows again. Once in Japan she had taken a bath that she was certain would scald her; this was at least as hot. Yet she forced herself forward, until the water swirled up about her loins, and knelt to submerge her body to the chin. The mud underfoot was voluptuously warm. She dug her toes into it to hold back the pain. Haugan, beside her, ran his hands over her as if to scrub away the grime. She did the same for him. After perhaps five minutes they rushed from the water, cleansed. Her skin was puckered and unnaturally pink; his appeared unchanged. Standing by the shore, Elena  looked to her left, toward the smoldering volcano, and then to her right, at the quiescent taller peak. Why were there no villages on the other mountain? It was not holy; beasts were tethered there, children roamed it, but no one lived there. The Golden River folk all clustered about the lesser peak, and she had never thought to ask why. Over there, a close-packed jungle covered everything, except for the roads and the grazed places and the ancient coating of cinders at the very summit. The volcano howled. Elena heard a new, more ominous sound: a high-pitched whistling. The sound of the demon about to break loose, she wondered? She clutched at Haugan. "Let's go back. You've got to order the people out of the villages!" "Do I have to?" He sounded amused. "They'll die when the eruption comes." "Yes," said Haugan easily. "Some of them will die. Some will not." Frightened, baffled, she stared at him without comprehension. It can't be long now," she said. "Perhaps by this afternoon the lava will come." "Sooner than that," said Haugan. "Within the hour, Elena." "How do you know?" "I know." "And the people -- your people -- " "Those who are to be spared are already departing. Look." She followed his arm, and Elena saw the dark line of the road that led through the valley to the slopes of the far peak. Like ants, at this distance, were the moving villagers, the procession of people laden with belongings and pets. She let out her breath in relief. So the exodus had begun! She watched the thin line for a long moment. But then, turning to glance up at the villages, she saw many people at work still, heedless of the gathering danger. She did not understand. "If there's only an hour left," she said, "why aren't they leaving too?" "They stay," said Haugan. "Only a few will go to build the new villages. Our numbers have grown rapidly, as always, and there are too many of us. I have chosen those who will go across the island. This is not the first time." "Not the first -- " "The Night of Fire comes in each fifth generation. Each mountain must cleanse itself of the villages on its slopes, each in its turn. We build again and go on." Haugan smiled, and as she quivered in confusion he took his hands in hers and pressed them tight. "I have duties to perform now. You may watch them, Elena." S he followed him along the shoreline to a place where the water lapped up against the shoulder of the volcano itself. The vegetation here was limp from the new heat of the lake. Elena saw a scar in the forest, a huge ditch leading from the beach to the edge of the mountain. She knew that men had come down here to work in recent months, and now she saw what they had been doing. Haugan walked inland a short distance. Elena saw that the ditch terminated in a barricade of logs, securely tethered to form a kind of sluice-gate. The warm water pooled at the gate and did not pass it. Haugan knelt. He scooped warm mud and rubbed it on his body. He uttered words in a language she had never heard before. He gestured at the distant quiescent peak. Then to her he said, "Within the mountain is fire. When the water of the lake meets the fire, the molten lava comes forth. This is the gateway of the lake. Now I must open it." He seized a sharpened stake. Elena said, "You mean the lake water gets access to the volcanic conduit through this opening?" "Yes." "And you're going to lift the barricade?" "Yes," he said, and thrust the stake into the withes that bound the sluice-gate. It was cleverly contrived. Haugan slashed in half a dozen places, and the great door of logs swung back on unseen pivets. Stunned, Elena gazed upon darkness within the mountain. She could not see the fires that lurked in the volcano's bowels; she saw only blackness, the blackness of total night, and another blackness of a race that would commit suicide for reasons of rite, and she swayed and nearly toppled. Haugan caught her. She peered down that black tunnel as the rushing waters of the lake sped past her, arrowing to the core of the mountain, there to hurl themselves upon roiling magma and spark the final convulsion of the eruption. Panicky, she struggled to flee, but he held her easily, and in that moment his skin against hers seemed unbearably alien. He released her when she grew calm. "Now we go back to the village," he said. "To join the escaping people?" "No," he said. "The king remains behind." r r'faey hurried up the slope. Dimly Elena perceived the rhythm of it, the two volcanoes, the alternating village sites, destruction visited upon one while the chosen flee to the other, the new village rising while the old is engulfed, the cyclical rite of purification, perhaps the cure for overbreeding, the ritual sacrifice of the king, the deliberate goading of the volcano. No wonder the other mountain was unsettled; beneath its forested slopes lay the ruins of who knew how many villages of the past, and now a new one would rise. Her mind whirled with interpretations and theories. But she did not understand. This was suicide. Now they entered the village of Hulgo and hurried through it to the village of Largo. Past them streamed the refugees, unhurried, unafraid. Those whose lot it was to remain smiled and waved to the king. A terrible tremor of agony came from the volcano and shook the island. They reached the hut that was Haugan's dwelling. The old men were waiting there. They looked pleased. "You see?" Haugan said. "This has nothing to do with you, Elena. You brought no curse to us. This is a blessing upon our people." "A blessing? To die like this?" "It is our way. You may go, Elena. Save yourself. There is still time." She gaped at him, bewildered. She understood little of this, for she was caught up in something that was not human in its origins, and Haugan was right: this was not her way, she could never understand. She was of another world. She had tried to become part of this world, but it had all been merely a pose. Yet she was his wife. T he sunlight was blotted out, though this midday. The island groaned. Elena imagined her naked body entombed by a sudden swift rush of lava. The priests chanted softly. A plume of flame split the sky. Vondik and his sisters ran by, exhilarated, ebullient. "Now comes the fiery rock!" he yelled. "We'll see it soon!" They were gone... but not to flee. Elena looked into a darkness beyond her comprehension, and in that darkness she saw only one thing to cling to: that these were her people now, and this must be her way. Was this her ultimate pose? Or was it her first and last true act? She did not know. She did not care. "Will you go?" Haugan asked. "How can I leave you?" she responded. Embracing her husband, Elena waited for the Night of Fire to begin.      Had a letter the other day that said, "What happened to some of the great writers you used to have in Galaxy? I miss Simak, Aldiss, Sheckley, Damon Knight, Laumer and others; can't you get them back?" Dear lady (we think it was a lady; the signature was blurred), as a matter of fact, we can. Try the next issue for instance: Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay is a Robert Sheckley novelette -- and a funny one, we promise. In Total Environment, Brian W. Aldiss builds you a world in miniature -- and populates it with some of the strangest human societies in recent sf years. And Keith Laumer is also present, with a novelette called The Big Show. Poul Anderson will be with us again, too, with a complete short novel called Tragedy of Errors -- along with, of course, Budrys, Ley and as many others as we can fit in. Damon Knight and Clifford D. Simak? Well, with a little luck we expect to have them in the next issue... for ifc r ri ion W ould you like to see a nice Italian satellite launched by an English-French-German rocket? Or would you prefer to see an overweight French satellite launched by a Russian superbooster? Or maybe a German satellite put into orbit by an American rocket? These three items are not fantasy or wishful thinking. They are not even just possibilities -- they are actual projects! The first of the three is the Europa-I prolatter part of # or early in #. The second will be the result of an agreement signed by France and the Soviet Union early in # ; and, unless political developments interfere, it will become reality in #. The third policy and is likely to happen in #. Astronautics got under way a dozen years ago by way of American and Russian efforts undertaken in the spirit of a grim (but primly denied) competition, but it has quietly grown international during the last few years, as had been predicted even then. Of course one could only predict that a kind of internationalization would take place; one could not have forseen what form it would take. The first steps toward internationalization came from three different sources: one was an idea harbored by three German space-travel enthusiasts, the second were the needs of the American space program and the third consisted of the very simple fact that the European nations compete in space only by forming a union of some kind. L et us begin with the idea o the three Germans. They were leading men of the new German Rocket Society that had been formed after the war. One was its president Heinz Gartmann, an aeronautical engineer (who died of a heart attack about ten years ago), the other two were Dr. Gunter Loeser, aerodynamicist and expert on turbulence (he died in a helicopter crash in the United States while engaged in the investigation of low-level turbulence), and H. H. Koelle, an engineer who then worked in Huntsville for a number of years and is now Professor of Astronautics in West Berlin. The three reasoned as follows: we have here a society devoted to astronautics. There are societies devoted to astronautics in  other countries. Why don't we try to get together for international cooperation? It might do something for all of us. Then still thinking in terms of Europe only, they wrote to the British Interplanetary Society in London and to the Groupement Astronautique Francaise in Paris. The director of the latter, Alexandre Ananoff, became enthusiastic and organized the First International (European only, though) Congress for Astronautics. It took place in Paris in September of # and was attended by representatives of astronautical sodeties from Austria, Denmark, France, West Germany, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. A transatlantic note was furnished by the presence of Professor TeofUo M. Tabanera of Argentina. The first congress just decided that such an international organization was desirable, and it laid the groundwork for the organization. At the second congress in London in September #I -- organized by the British Interplanetary Sodety -- the International Astronautical Federaing the third congress in Stuttgart (#) the constitution was formregistered in Baden, Switzerland, under Swiss law. It has been going strong ever since, with a congress every year in a different country, usually the capital of that country. This was one step in the direction of internationalization. The second step, as has been said, grew out of the needs of the Mercury manned spaceflight program in #, and that meant that tracking stations had to be established all around the world, in Africa, in Madagascar, in Australia, India and Japan. At the same time the International Geophysical Year was under way, and one of the goals was the exploration of the upper atmosphere. The United States made an agreement with Canada for firing sounding rockets from Canadian soil. The rockets were American Aerobee rockets and also solid-fuel sounding rockets consisting of a solid-fuel Nike booster and a smaller solid-fuel rocket as an upper stage. Once the idea of firing American upper-atmosphere-sounding rockets from a non-American site had taken hold it could easily be expanded to include other nations. The Canadian firing site was as far to the north as could be conveniently managed -- the main reason for the choice of Fort Churchill was that it was the northernmost point in Canada that could be reached by rail. Now a firing site as close to the equator as possible was desired, and India offered the use of a stretch of land near its southern tip which became known as the Thumba range. The working arrangement was the same with all other countries. furnished the rockets and, if necessary, instruction; the other country furnished the firing site, tracking facilities as required and personnel. No exchange of funds took place. Under such an arrangement sounding rockets were fired from New Zealand and from the Andoya range in northern Norway. Of course American rockets were also fired from the Chamical range in Argentina, about # miles from Cordoba. T)ut, while there was never an  ' exchange of funds, there soon came to be an exchange of rockets. In February, #, Indians from the Thumba range arrived in the United States with an Indian-built instrument package which was launched successfully from Wallops Island on March #, #, using a twostage Nike-Apache rocket. One year earlier a Japanese group had come to Wallops Island with a Japanese single stage solid fuel called the MT-#, about #)# feet long and weighing # lbs. at launch. The Japanese rockets carried meteorological instruments to a height of #-# miles; they were paired with American solid-fuel Areas rockets that reach about the same altitude. Each time a Japanese MT-# took to the air, it was followed by an Areas # minutes later. Since the international arrangements about sounding rockets worked out so well, why not extend it to satellite launchings? The first two countries to take advantage of this possibility were the United Kingdom and Canada. Artificial satellite UK-I was successfully launched on April #, #, and the first Canadian satellite Alouette ("Skylark") followed on September #, #. Since the Canadians wanted a nearly polar orbit the launching was done from the Pacific Missile Range. Both the first British and the first Canadian satellite required a Thor rocket with an extra upper stage, and at that time the Thor was still a military missile that was classified in part. Hence the firings had to be from United States Territory and a certain amount of security complications was inevitable. But by that time there had been inquiries from other countries whether the United States might not sell them a rocket for scientific purposes. The West Germans even wanted to buy an Atlas rocket with an Agena as the upper stage for an ingenious but heavy satellite they had designed. Of course, no military missiles could be sold, but meanwhile that was not classified, the Scout. All four stages use solid fuels. The first stage is an Algol by Aerojet-General, with a thrust of # lbs. The second stage is a Castor by Thiokol, with # lbs. thrust. The third stage is an Antares by Hercules Powder with # lbs. thrust, and the fourth stage is an Altair (also by Hercules) with # lbs. thrust. Add guidance by Minneapolis-Honeywell, and you have a # #foot rocket with a take-off weight of # lbs. that can carry a #-lb. payload to an altitude of # miles or put a #-lb. payload into orbit. This is the rocket that was made available to other powers for launches from U.S. launch areas or that could even be sold for launches elsewhere. But while the English were satisfied to have their satellites launched in the United States -- and the West Germans will bring over a satellite of their own for this purpose soon -- some other nations had higher ambitions. r TPhe Japanese, in #, decided on a program of their own, beginning with a small solid-fuel rocket they called Pencil because it was only UJ # inches long. Pencil was followed by Baby which had two stages but a total propellant weight of only # lbs. Then followed a #-foot rocket and then followed a series that had the overall designation of Kappa. With one exception they were two-stage rockets, and all of them were solid-fuel rockets. Kappa #, with a take-off weight of # lbs., reached a peak altitude of # miles in #. Kappa-#H, in #, had take-off weight of # lbs. and reached a peak altitude of # miles. Kappa-#L, in #, weighed only # lbs. more but climbed to # miles. Kappa-#M, in #, weighed # lbs. on the pad and carried a payload of # lbs. to # miles. Of the next set of sounding rockets the two-stage Lambda-# carried a payload of nearly # lbs. to # miles in #, and the three-stage Lambda-#, in #, carried # lbs. of payload to # miles. By that time the Japanese were ready to build a satellite launch vehicle -- and their whole space program, up to that point, had dollars. The satellite launcher was called Mu-#, had four stages and carried a #-lb. satellite. The launch date was September #, #, and the take-off looked fine. But the top stage failed to ignite, and the satellite fell somewhere into the Pacific Ocean. But by the time this column appears in print, the Japanese might have succeeded. While the Japanese produced a very thrifty space program, the French were after a diversified rocket and space program. Of course they were thrifty, too, in an interesting manner as we'll see soon, but they did not permit the budget to curtail success. After preliminary studies and presumably extended debates, the French created two "families" of rockets, the Belief family (belief means "ram," the animal as well as the medieval battering ram) and the so-called "gem family." With the single exception of one of the "gems," the Emetaude ("emerald") they are all solidfuel rockets. The Belier family takes its name from the fact that the Belier rocket is the top stage for all rockets of this family. The Belier has a length of # feet # inches, a diameter of # inches, a launch weight of # lbs. and a burning time of #I seconds. Fired by itself it can reach an altitude of # miles. The next bigger rocket of this family is the Centaur e which carries the Belier as its second stage. Overall length (including the second stage) is # feet # inches; the diameter is an inch less than that of the Belier and the overall take-off weight is # lbs. Fired with a Centaure to boost it, the Belier reaches an altitude of # miles Next is the Dragon, also carrying a Belier as its second stage. The overall length (with Belier ) is # feet # inches, overall takeoff weight is # lbs., and the peak altitude for the Belier when boosted by a Dragon is # miles. But one can continue with this game, and the French did: they built a lower stage called the Pegase (Pegasus) to carry a Dragon that carries a Belier. The overall length of this three-stage rocket is # feet #I inches, overall take-off weight in # lbs., and peak altitude for the top stage is #-# miles. Tn the "gem family" we have the same careful regard for combinations. There are four basic rockets. In the liquid-fuel Emeraude, the oxidizer is nitric acid and the fuel proper a turpentine derivate named terebenthine. None of the figures for the Emeraude one can find in French magazines seem to agree among themselves; the reason is that an Emeraude, to be testfired, has to carry dummy upper stages and the figures sometimes refer to the rocket with these dummy stages and sometimes they do not. The Emeraude, by itself, is # feet long with a diameter of # feet. Weight empty is # lbs., weight fully fueled is # lbs. and take-off thrust is # lbs. The smallest of the four basic rockets does not seem to have a name, it is always referred to as the "third stage." It is ## feet long, has a diameter of # inches and an empty weight that is surprisingly low, namely only #Cf lbs. But its propelling charge weighs # lbs. The two rockets Agate and Topaze are fairly similar in their dimensions but different in construction. The Agate is # feet long, the Topaze ## feet. Both have a diameter of #)# inches. At take-off the Agate weighs # lbs., the Topaze # lbs. But the Agate has only one exhaust nozzle and a burning time of # seconds, while the Topaze has four exhaust nozzles and a burning time of # seconds. So these are the basic rockets of the gem family, Emeraude, Topaze, Agate and "third stage." What follows should be (but isn't) called "jewelry" -- because now the gems are combined. This is the scheme: Agate-u third stage"  Rubts Emeraude--Topaze -- Saphir EmeraudefT opaze ( -- Saphir)  "third stage"  Diamant. Diamant is the French satellite launcher with an overall length at take-off (including the satellite) of # feet. But the first French satellite was launched in the United States by a Scout rocket, then the French went ahead and put three satellites of their own into orbit (see table). When the French rocket program began, Algeria was still French, and so the French established a proving ground in the Sahara near a place called Hamrnaguir. I have read somewhere that this is a native word meaning "javelin thrower", -- I find this coincidence (if it is one) a bit too pat, but of course I can't say that Hammaguir does not mean javelin thrower. But the French, who then leased Hammaguir for a number of years, had to leave on June #, #, so at the time Diamant went into action, Hammaguir was headed for the last countdown. As a result, the French, during #, have been busy constructing two new firing ranges, one for satellites in Guiana and one for missiles with ranges up to # miles on the French west coast, halfway between Boulogne and Biarritz. One of the last French rockets fired from Hammaguir was a two-engined single stage rocket called Cora which has nothing to do with the Belier family and the "gems" but is destined to be the second stage of the Europa-I letters stand for European Launch Development Organization, and reason for internationalization mentioned at the beginning. ELDO was first proposed in # by the United Kingdom and France and formally organized in # with the following members : Belgium, France Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The seventh member, Australia, does not contribute funds, but makes its Woomera firing range, tracking facilities (All I launched from U. S. Firing Ranges except as noted.) Launch Satellite Satellite Launch Orbital Data Designation Design Vehicle Perigee Apogee Pariod. (miles) (miles) (minutes) Apr. #, # UK-I British I U.S. Sept. #, # Alouette-I Canadian U.S. # # Mar. #, # UK-# British U.S. # # Dec. #, # San Marco I Italian U.S. Nov. #, # FR-I French U.S. # Nov. #, # Alouette-ll Canadian # U.S. # Feb. #, # D. #A French French # Feb. #, # Diademe I French French # Feb. #, # Diademe # French French # Apr. #, # San Marco U Italian U.S.# May #, # UK-# British U.S. # I The three British satellites are also known as Ariel I , # and #. 'A Launched from Wallops Island by an Italian launch crew, San Marco I reentered the atmosphere and burned up on September #, #. All others in this table are still orbiting. # Fired from Hammaguir, Algeria. # Fired from floating platform in Indian Ocean. and personnel available to the other members. ' ' velopment of a launch vehicle, its sister organization ESRO (European Space Research Organization) has a more varied program and has, for that reason, several sub-divisions: ta Center, located in Darmstadt, West Germany, search Laboratory, located in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, Range (for sounding rockets) located near Kiruna, Sweden, search Institute, located at Frascati, Italy, nology Center, located in Noordwijk and Delft, The Netherlands. Tracking Network, with stations in Norway, Spitsbergen (Svalbard Archipelago), Port Stanley (Falkland Islands), Redu (Belgium) and Fairbanks, Alaska. Siddeley in England and HeosA by Junkers Aircraft in West Germany. All three will be launched by American rockets and presumably from American RQ-# will be orbited by Scout rockets, while Heos-A will need means "thrust-augmented delta." The schedule calls for launching all three of them during the latter half of #. (Though late word launch early -- perhaps while you are reading this). The rocknot be furnished free of charge, ively European and is larger than members, namely Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Norway and Austria are not members but have what is called "observer status." main goal is the development of a satellite launch vehicle, larger and more powerful than France's Diamant, -- but in the meantime the French are planning a "superDiamant." The Europa-I rocket length of # feet, a maximum diameter of # feet and a launch weight of # lbs. It will be capable of placing a #-lb. payload into a #-mile orbit, or a .#, #-lb. payload into a #-mile orbit. The booster stage is the British Blue Streak that was originally developed to be a missile with a range of # miles. As part of the Europa-I the Blue Streak has a length of #)# feet, a diameter (tank section) of # feet and an empty weight of # lbs. Fully fueled (with kerosene and liquid oxygen) it weighs # lbs., the take-off thrust is # lbs. but rises near the end of the #-second burning period to # lbs. The second stage is the French Coralie which is designed for unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer. Coralie is # feet long with a diameter of # feet and an empty weight of # lbs. Fully fuelled, Coralie weighs # lbs. and develops a thrust of # lbs. When the Coralie was tested at Hammaguir it had to have all kinds of things added to it that it does not have as part of the a dummy upper stage and a dummy satellite. It had to have a nose cone that it normally does not have. And it had to have tail fins. Because of these additions the French called the test vehicle Cora; it reached an altitude of # miles. vehicle is being built in West Germany, designed for the same fuels as the Coralie. It is # feet long with a diameter of # feet. Empty weight (but with guidance equipment) is # lbs., fully fuelled it weighs # lbs. The thrust of its main engine is # lbs., but it also has two vernier engines for orbital adjustments and corrections with a thrust of # lbs. each. Nothing is known yet about the satellite to be carried, except that it has been designed by the Italian group in consultation with West German engineers and that it will be manufactured in Italy. The orbit also has not been mentioned, but from the distribution of the tracking stations of ESa polar orbit has been planned. Well, this is the story so far, like all stories dealing with rockets and with space research it is an open-end story. Five years from now the story will have another ending, but it will be an open end again. The Names of the Russian Satellites 'nphis looks like the proper time to answer a query I received some time ago, asking me to name the various types of Russian artificial satellites after Sputnik and to explain their purpose, if possible. Not counting the devices called "cosmic rockets" (we'll get to them later) the first Russian satellite that bore a name other than Sputnik was Polyot in #. The word means "flight" and is proof the satellite was to demonstrate that an orbiting satellite can change it.:: orbit. Polyot did demonstrate this by raising its apogee from # to # miles and its orbital period from # minutes to # minutes. The perigee remained virtually unchanged; it was raised from # to # miles. In # there came four satellites called Elektron. They were fired in pairs, two on January #I of that year and two on July #I of the same year. The first two assumed orbits from # miles (perigee) to # miles (apogee) and # miles (perigee) and # miles (apogee). The Russians just stated that these were "research satellites," but from these orbits it is evident that the Elektron satellites were monitoring the extent and intensity of the Van Allen belts. The second pair of these satellites was put into almost identical orbits. In #-# there came three satellites named Proton; the dates were July # and Nov. # of # and July # of #. Their orbits were not unusual, the first one had a perigee of # miles and an apogee of # miles, but their weights were. Normally the Soviets do not announce satellite weights, but this time they did: Proton-I weighed # lbs., Proton-# # lbs. and Proton-# # lbs. Purpose was not announced, but from the announced weight western observers drew the conclusion that Proton-I must be a prototype of a new manned spacecraft. This conclusion was ruined by the fact that the Russians did not bring Proton-I back from orbit to test its re-entry capability and to examine how it had stood up. Instead they left it in orbit until it re-entered on its own (on October #, #) as a result of natural orbital decay. Of course, one could still guess that the retro rockets of this satellite had failed to work. But the performance was repeated with the other two. Four Russian satellites, so far, were called Molniya, which means "lightning," and they were announced to be communications satellites. The first one went into orbit April #, #. The other three followed at intervals of about six months; they were presumably replacements of the preceding Molniya satellite after it had stopped working. So far things are reasonably clear, but then the Russians began to call practically everything Kosmos. The first of these satellites was launched March #, #; on May #, # one rocket launched Kosmos-# and Kosmos-#. Here one name obviously covers many different things. Some of them were indubitably research satellites, some were equally indubitably prototypes of manned space capsules and some are taken to have been, or to be, what is politely called "surveillance satellites". As regards lunar and planetary probes, the names are simplicity itself. A Russian Mars probe (which failed to work) was simply called Mars-#, while the Russian Venus probes were called Venera, which is the Russian name of the planet. The lunar probes were first called "cosmic rockets." The first (January #, #) was apparently fired for impact on the moon, but missed; the second (Sept. #, #) did strike the moon, the third (October #, #) looped behind the moon and took a number of pictures. But the next one was called Luna-# (again, Luna is just the Russian name of the moon) and so were all the ones that followed. Luna-# reached the moon on February #, # and was the first manmade device to accomplish a soft landing. But Luna-# was fired to take up an orbit around the moon (orbit achieved April #, #) like our Lunar Orbiters. I He was being tested , that was sure. But for what? By whom? And at what cost to his life? T Te sat hunched in a corridor head-high and about two doors wide trying to remember who he was. He felt very weary in his legs, as if he'd been walking the corridor a long, long time. The corridor was of a black shimmering metal cool to his skin. He couldn't spot the source of the shimmer, which dimly lit the corridor though leaving the metal black, but he was pretty sure that was a minor problem. He heard a faint steady whining, but he thought that was minor too. He was hunched so that his heels pressed his buttocks and his elbows his sides, while his hands and the lower half of his face rested on his knees. Like a big rangy fetus sitting up, or the corpse in an early Egyptian holeburial. There droned in his mind, "Naked I came into the world and naked I go out." The corridor was literally two doors wide, for it ended ten yards away in two doors which faced him squarely. Each door had a glowing button on it and below the button a short word he couldn't quite read, though now and then he lifted his face to squint at them. After a while he might go and read the two words, but now it seemed important to sit hunched all together, as if that helped him concentrate, and try to remember who he was. Moreover, though he tried to keep it out of his mind, he really shrank from investigating the two doors. There was something about them that daunted and sickened him. Tnstead he chased memories in " the inner darkness of his mind, but they turned and fled like tiny moonlit fish from a nighttime skin-diver. He had the feeling that he'd taken a wrong fork somewhere behind him in the corridor, and that as he'd taken that curving turn, his name and all that had ever happened to him had slipped away, as if dragged out of his mind by centrifugal force. Maybe when he had rested a little more he should go back and find the fork and this time take the straight branch. As he had that thought, cool metal touched his back. He threw out his arms, and they struck cool metal, even with his back, to either side. The movement jerked his torso erect. His head, neck, and shoulders touched cool metal too. He scrambled to his feet and turned around. Where there had stretched an endless corridor, there was now a wall about a yard away. A black wall with no doors or door in it. Instead of being in a corridor open-ended one way, he was in a glimmering black box ten yards long. He realized that the faint steady whining had stopped only when it started up again. The wall that had touched him began moving toward him very slowly, at about the normal walking speed of an ant. He stood stiffly erect, facing it. His arms hanging at his sides began to tremble, then his legs. His breath came and went between his teeth in little shuddering gusts. His eyes slowly converged. The wall touched the ends of his big toes, then nudged them. Without stepping back, he threw up his hands beside his shoulders and pressed against the wall. The whining stopped, but after he had taken two more breaths, softly sighing ones through his nose, he could feel the wall begin to press back. Holding his breath and without changing his stance, he pressed harder. The wall pressed harder still and with a sudden little scream threw him back. He saved himself from falling and then took another backward jump. The wall's little scream sank immediately to a whine, but the whine was a little louder now, and the wall came on a little faster, like a cockroach in a hurry. This time he readied himself carefully for the wall's approach, taking a position somewhat like that of a wrestler but also a fencer. His right leg, bent slightly at the knee, was thrust almost straight behind him, and that foot pointed back too. His left leg was bent under him, left foot pointing straight forward. The soles of both feet, toes gripping, were planted flat on the floor, which compared to the smooth walls was a trifle gritty, firming his stance. W hen the wall reached him, the box he was in being then seven yards long, he met the wall simultaneously with his spread-fingered right hand, his left shoulder and his whole left arm doubled up clench-fisted against his chest, the left side of his head and his left knee. The wall stopped dead. In fact, it gave back a little, or seemed to. He pressed a little harder, but it gave no more. He did not waste his strength then, but only maintained the same relatively light pressure which had stopped the wall, trying to relax as much as he dared. His teeth were lightly clenched, but through his nostrils he drew and expelled deep breaths, as a climber does before tackling a difficult stretch of rock-face. After what seemed a long time, the wall began to push at him again. He contented himself with matching its pressure, guessing that if he put out his full strength, the wall would do the same, shortening the contest. What point there was in prolonging the contest for as long a time as possible, he couldn't define, but he was sure there was one. Naturally he was pushing at the wall to keep himself from being crushed when the glimmering black box shortened to nothing. Yet surely the sane thing to do would be to inspect the two doors behind him and escape by way of one of them, instead of pouring out his remaining strength here. But no, he had such a deep if undefined horror of the two doors that he was determined to have nothing to do with them unless absolutely forced to. Whether sane or not, the preferable course now was to oppose the wall with all his might. Slowly his muscles began to bulge and his heartbeat and respiration to speed up, though he made himself take the same deep, even, controlled breaths. A bead of sweat stung the inside corner of his left eye. He had to keep reminding himself not to waste energy grinding his teeth and on no account to yield to the temptation to shove out with sudden violence or begin to shout curses. I mustn't let the wall trick me, he thought fiercely. His muscles began to ache, his breaths were now deep snorts. He became aware of his heartbeat and felt the blood throbbing in his temples and wrists. He heard little creakings here and there in his body, or thought he did. Despite himself, his teeth began to clench tighter and tighter. The pain in his muscles increased. There was fire in his joints. He broke wind, and that rattled him and almost threw him off guard. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back and legs. He prayed that it wouldn't make him slip. It was running into his eyes now, so that he blinked constantly. Under his chin it pooled in the tiny cup between the bent thumb and curled forefinger of his clenched left fist. But he knew the wall still hadn't budged him, chiefly because it was silent -- no whine, no scream. Tn the midst of his near agony, there flashed up in his mind one sane reason for keeping up his seemingly insane struggle: the hope that a connection might bum out in the engine powering the wall, or something in it break, or its fuel run out, or the creature or creatures pushing the wall from the other side tire before he did. Then he might be able to push the wall back, even as far as the fork in the tunnel, making it unnecessary to investigate the two doors ahead. His heart and head were pounding now, there was a roaring in his ears, he was breathing in deep, open-mouthed gasps, his body was one flame, through his sweat-smarting eyes the wall seemed dazzling one moment, dead black the next, he felt consciousness ebbing, but still he stuck to his labor. With a scream like a hunting leopard close by, the wall gave a mighty shove that sent him staggering back. The scream sank to a loud whine, and the wall came on at the speed of ungoaded oxen. Though his mind was swimming and he could barely stand, and while he was still breathing in great, wide-mouthed, acid gasps, he turned at once and walked in long strides toward the two doors. And though he reeled from side to side, his legs cramping and his arms hanging like fiery bars of lead, he nevertheless went on tiptoe, fearing that any extra sound he made might speed up the wall. He was burning when he started that five-stride journey. When he finished it he was shivering and the sweat on him was icy and his teeth were chattering. By the time he was within touching distance of the doors, his mind and body had steadied, but he still had to blink twice before he could read the short words under the two buttons. With the eager whine coming swiftly closer and closer, he lashed himself to think. Let's see, air could mean emptiness and height, a great fall. He couldn't fly, hell, he could hardly stand. But he could swim. Water was necessary to life. Life came originally from the seas. Yet he could also drown. Acrophobia versus hydrophobia. As the well struck his heels and pushed him on, this time with a merciless lack of hesitation, and as he zigged a finger toward the button on the WAto him in a flash. Air was also necessary to life. He still had enough water in him, even after his sweating, to live at least a day. But he would be dead without air, or his brain would be dead, in about five minutes. button. That door opened away from him, and he stumbled through it, pushed by the wall, and it slammed shut behind him. IT e wasn't falling through emptiness, or standing in the open either, for that matter. He was simply in another section of black corridor. He staggered forward a few steps and then between relief and exhaustion collapsed to his knees and hands. His roaring head slumped, his eyes staring dully at the faintly gritty metallic floor while he gulped oxygen. After a short time he looked around him. The corridor wall on shimmering black metal as he had taken for granted, but must be heavy glass or some other transparent amorphous substance, for in it were small silvery fish, a few small squid jetting about, and some speeding faintly-phosphorescent veils he couldn't identify, all lodged in dark water which rose at least to the roof of that other corridor. He congratulated himself that he'd made the right choice, even on a last-minute hunch. By right (except that the universe doesn't recognize rights) the corridor he was in should have been halved in width, but it was as broad as before. He deduced that it had acquired extra width on the side away from the water. He looked ahead, and there were two more doors, each with a glowing button and a short word he couldn't make out. With a feeling of "This is too much," he sprawled full length on the floor, as if to sleep. One of his feet touched the transparent wall, while the elbow of the arm pillowing his head touched the wall opposite. He closed his eyes. It was only then he realized that the sound in his ears wasn't the roaring and ringing in his head dying away, but the wail of the oncoming wall. Ouch was his weariness and sud den fatalistic disinterest that he didn't tense, let alone jump up. He didn't even open his eyes. Cool metal struck him along leg and side, gently but inflexibly. He let the wall roll him over twice before he resignedly scrambled to his feet. There was no sign in the advancing wall of the doorway by which he had entered. Stepping backward evenly, he swept a fingernail across the wall without hearing or feeling the faintest tick. Then he turned and trotted on to the next two doors. button of the second almost without physical hesitation, though there was the flash of a wonderbe the name of a star or moon. The main course of his nearly instantaneous reasoning had been: Fire will kill me -- and don't give me any tricky plays on meaning that there is a slow "fire" in my flesh and in all life. While earth -- hell, even if it packed the next corridor to the top, I could scramble my way in to it before the wall caught up. Tucked into that flash of reasoning there had even been the crafty though qualified deduction: If this door opens inward like the first, there's bound to be some space behind it. Though who says doors have to obey rules? This one might slide sideways. The door did open inward, and he trotted through almost without a break in his step, and it slammed shut behind him. For a moment he thought he had been cruelly tricked. The whole corridor ahead glared with an irregularly pulsing red like a forest fire. Then he realized he couldn't smell a speck of burning or feel any radiant heat. All the flaring red was coming through the door side. There, great flames writhed crowdedly from ceiling to floor. Here, it was cool, while the floor had changed from slightly gritty metal to even cooler packed earth, the dry and faintly sour smell of which now came to him. He reached out and gingerly brushed the transperent wall. It was barely warm, but he supposed it could be double, with insulating vacuum between. Why radiant heat didn't still come through, he didn't know. It did not surprise him to discover that his corridor was as broad as ever and ended in two more labeled doors. Without hesitation he trotted toward them. This time he read the labels by the red glare of the flames. They A t each word he felt a different quiver of fear. Easy enough to laugh at the concept of demons when in the midst of a wise and scientifically sophisticated civilization. Or to smile warily at tigers, for that matter, when cradling in your arms some potent energy weapon. But alone down here in this labyrinth, naked and unarmed, it was another matter. Also the change in pace of the choice he had to make rattled him. This one had almost a fairy-tale quality. But there had been nothing of light fantasy, so far, in his experiences down here. Everything had been implacably real, especially the wall. Even demons would be real down here, probably. It occurred to him, too, that he had been lucky until now and had survived by could have plunged him into smothered or instantly blocked him, while he seemed to recall creatures who could walle through fire, at least for ten yards. This time he must really analyze. But how? His mind felt useless. He even thought of digging a hole for himself in the dirt, so the wall would pass over him. But the earth was hard as adobe. A mounting hungry snarl made him glance hurriedly back. The wall was coming on at a speed greater than that to which he had provoked it by his all-out attempt to hold it back, and it was barely five yards away, the same distance as when he had choice in the last section of the corridor. It had more than canceled the time-advantage that quick decision had gained him; it had given him no credit for it at all. The wall wasn't fair! The thoughts started as he whirled around. Demons don't exist, are superstitious. Everywhere? Outside this red-lit tightening tomb is a universe incomprehensively vast. Somewhere there may be demons, and the mere word symbolizes a power greater than that of creatures. Tigers are real. But I rememhanded. A leopard, anyhow. But tigers, plural? The wall struck him. With the thought that demons may exist and be able to kill me, but only an idiot takes on tigers, plural, where there's an alternative, he and was through that door and in turn locked in by it before he could think again. A gain he believed he'd been cruelly tricked. Facing him a few yards away in the glimmering black corridor were two huge felines with silky black fur and green eyes glinting with evil intelligence. They lashed their great tails. They writhed their powerful shoulders. Their claws scraped the gritty metal floor like chalk rasping on slate. They carried their white-fanged heads low, their green eyes glaring up at him. While from their throats issued snarls louder and more menacing that that of the wall. But at that moment the wall once .more struck him. Almost before he knew it, he was running toward the magnified black panthers, his eyes squinted, his shoulders hunched. They reared up, unsheathing their scimitar claws, fully baring their fangs, and screaming like black trumpets in a satanic symphony. To keep himself from stopping he had to remind himself: They're not black panthers bigger than tigers, they're only demons. As he ran between them, he felt their hot breaths, their bristly fur, but nothing more. Through eyes squinting sidewall, he glimpsed glassed-in moonlit jungle and gliding through it, palely and darkly striped, flat-sided felines a little smaller than his demons. Then he was facing doors mons, snarled at his heels. Last time I picked the unreal and won, he thought. Maybe I should again. But demons are only a tiny sub-branch of the small branch of the unreal labeled " supernatural beings." In the realm of the unreal is also insanity, psychosis, the innumerable delusions of locked-up minds completely out of touch with reality and lacking even internal organization, a sea of locked-in microcosms adrift and lost, never to know each other, even the nearest. While the realm of the real holds a hell of a lot besides tigers. button as the wall slammed him. door and this time running fast as he could down the black corridor toward the next pair. I-Ic kept his eyes averted from the for through its transparency he glimpsed a psychedelic churning of colors and forms, constantly patterning and unpatteming, which he sensed might derange any mind behind eyes which stared very long. The next two doors were laVTow they've quit playing ' around with me, he thought. They're slamming it at. me, but good. Something's reached down deep, deep inside me and brought up the slimiest black noggin of them all. Let's see, they say even torture comes to an end. Yes, in death. Why not pick painless death to start with? Makes sense. But back there I picked the real. Torture is a part of the real. While death is unreality squared, cubed and to the nth power. With torture, there's a chance of survival, with death no chance at all. Tautology. As the wall came screaming up behind him and he pushed the Well, at least I'm not strapped down yet, and to stop that I'll fight as hard as I pushed against the wall. He was in another section of corridor, all glimmering black this time, no transparent wall, and coming toward him was an anthropoid being or machine, the shape and size of a gorilla, except it had no head. It kept swinging apart its long arms and then bringing them together, as if to embrace someone tightly, while its stubby legs planted and replanted themselves firmly. It was made of metal and covered with sharp spikes that were stubby except for five long, curving talons ending each arm. An iron maiden turned inside out. Choosing a moment when its arms were swinging apart, he punched it with all his might high in the center of its chest. It slowly toppled over backwards, landed with a sharp crash, and lay there on its back with its stubby legs planting and replanting themselves in air and its long arms swinging apart and closing together, clashing the floor of the corridor each time they were parted widest. The screaming wall struck him from behind. Choosing the next time the metal arms swung inward, he darted past the thing and sprinted to the next pair of doors, noting there was more lettering below one button than he'd ever seen before. He thought, Last time I opted against death. Shouldn't I do so again? T ehind him, a scraping ana " clashing mixed with the scream of the wall. Of course, it was the wall pushing the spiked automaton before it. He thought, solitary confinement in happy comfort. That sounds like being drunk forever, without hangovers. All alone with an infinity of glorious, glowing thoughts and unending wonderful dreams. But all alone. An even chance at life is better than that. Any chance of life is better than that. With tlae screaming and scraping and clashing just behind him, he frantically jabbed the plunged out into a wide, long patio roofed by a fabric through which violet light filtered onto a smoothly tiled floor, and he stood there gasping and shaking. Behind a table nearby, a woman in the professional whites of a nurse was working quietly at some charts. When his breathing had evened out, she looked up at him and, lifting a gray looseleaf folder, said, "Hello. Here are your name and personal history, to read when you wish." After a faintly smiling pause she added, "Do you have any immediate questions?" After a while he said, frowning, "I think I get it about the last four pairs of buttons. But about the first two, would I have died if I'd picked water or fire?" She replied, "I am not at liberty to answer that. There are many branchings in the corridors." He still frowned as he moved slowly toward the table. "Is something else bothering you?" she asked. He nodded somewhat surlily and said, "When I punched the Torture button, I didn't really get any. There was only that witless robot." "You are difficult to please," she replied. "Wasn't it torture enough, what happened to your hand?" He lifted it, still balled in a fist, and studied the eight circular wounds, from which blood slowly dripped, and felt the dull pain. Then he reached for the gray folder in her hand, noting that her other was a gleaming gray metal prosthetic with eight slim many-jointed fingers like a spider's legs. As he touched the folder he felt a surge of frantic curiosity and started to flip it open but caught himself and instead, carrying it half rolled, began to walk slowly down the patio, then more rapidly as he neared the ballustrade of gray metal marking its end. Resting his hands on the warm smooth rail, he looked out at the prospect dropping gently away. Tn a pale yellow sky, a violet-sun was sinking behind rounded hills ten miles away. Its purpling beams shone on a valley half filled with cultivated reddish fields and scarlet trees and half with evenly ranked transparent tubes, through which rushed fluids shading from pink to crimson of some sort of algae farming. Midway to the hills, beside a meandering river, was a town with irregularly spaced round pastel roofs, mostly low. Here and there he made out the figures of two-legged beasts and six-legged ones, the latter carrying their foremost limbs high, like centaurs. From somewhere came a faint piping and a fainter, complexly rhythmic drumming. It looked like a good planet. After a while he could learn its name and all about it, just as after a while he could learn from the folder, reassuringly bulked between his fingers, his own name and what he'd feared and flinched away from into the black inner corridor which had become the black therapeutic corridor from which he'd now emerged. And after a while he could go back to the nurse and have her fix his hand, the dull pain of which was oddly reassuring. For the moment it was enough to know he was alive and a This month in If -- by Hal Clement by James White by Fritz Leiber by C. C. MacApp Don't miss the December If, on sale now! Voted World's Best SF Magazine Second Straight Year! nsisisistsisisisisisistsiis,ssiststsisnsisis)siisistmsistsistsmsisi: . .       n The Red Euphoric Bands gf The comet threatened to destroy  ,  the Earth. But what possible #  difference did that make to us? A fter some hesitation I've decided to present this material pretty much as I originally wrote it, instead of recasting it in the formal type suitable for scientific publication. The trouble with scientific papers today is that they all sound as if they were written by the same person, an omnipotent individual who proceeds step by step, never faltering, to the logical outcome of his researches. But scientists are human beings; they make mistakes, act on impulses, and play their hunches, even as you and I. Certainly in my own case it would be downright dishonest to pretend otherwise, as the record will show. So without further apology here is the story of Paul Finch. (From his soup-stained diary of #.) #, Dec. # I feel terrible. Thoroughly depressed and tired of life. The regular end-of-the-year letter from the bursar arrived this morning. According to the disembodied personality who writes these missives... Van Buren University is happy to inform you of your reappointment as Associate Professor of Astronomy at the same honorarium as in the previous year." What makes this annual insult especially irritating is the cosy language in which it is couched. Why should they be "happy" to inform me of my reappointment? .When I know only perfectly well they'd be only too glad to get rid of me. Why an "Associate" Professor? I don't "associate" with anybody, not if I can help it at least. Why do they persist in referring my miserable little salary as an "honorarium"? Where does the "honor" come in? Oh, well, I didn't expect a raise anyhow. I suppose I should be grateful for the privilege of being allowed to continue withering on the vine till my enforced retirement at #. Only six more years to go now. To go where? With another world war practically here. I'll bet Peabody and Wadstrom both got healthy raises. I can tell from the smug look on their homely faces. Furthermore, I know that they know that I didn't get a raise. I might as well admit it -- I'm in a nit. God! If I could only uncover something big again. Not much chance working on parallaxes and proper motions. Had all my luck right at the start. I'm the discoverer of Finch #, the nearest star to the Earth. Nobody can take that away from me. Stumbled on it by pure dumb luck. Red dwarf about # ly's away, half the distance of Alpha Centauri. Created a sensation at the time. Fortune magazine voted me one of America's ten scientists under thirty most likely to succeed. And I believed it! Never done much of anything since. Tried hard though. Still my proper motion catalogue will be cut soon, a good solid piece of work. Better than that theoretical stuff Wadstrom keeps turning out by the bale. Jan. #I Situation has deteriorated till war looks inevitable now. Experts predict it'll be all over in about thirty minutes. Curious thing is nobody wants war, nobody's mad at anybody else. Everybody's for love and peace. Yet we go right ahead getting ready for war. You might expect speeches denouncing the warmongers, draftcard burning parties, protest marches, etc., like back in the #'s. Nothing like that today. Instead hoplessness and apathy prevail. People go around as if they're in a trance. I think Peabody's cracking up. He came in yesterday looking completely shattered. "Finch, do me a favor, will  Finch #, p  #V#, corresponding to distance of # parsecs or # ly's. Second nearest star is Alpha Centauri, a binary, distant # ly's, with #rd member of system, Proxima, believed slightly nearer. you? Take my Astronomy I class this afternoon." Since his lecture schedule is lighter than mine this semester I wasn't too enthusiastic. "Something wrong?" I inquired. "It's the students." "What's the matter with 'em?" "Haven't you noticed? They're so quiet lately. Sit there all through the hour... not moving... staring straight ahead -- " "Is that bad?" " -- with that bewildered wideeyed expression you see on the faces , of those dummies they use for crash-testing buses and airplanes." "Probably on some new kind of dope. Watermelon rind or pumpkin seeds." "Finch, you're way behind the times. All that psychedelic stuff went out long ago. Never really helped. Kids had to find it out the hard way. I think that's where the trouble comes." "Afraid I don't follow." "If war comes they're sure to be killed. They know they'll be killed. There's no escape. They can't even escape for a little while in their minds any more." Peabody bent closer. "You know what I call them?" "Haven't the foggiest notion." "Reverse zombies," he said, in a hoarse whisper. "They're live people who think they're dead." "Well, all right," I told him, "if it's that bad I'll take over these zombies of yours." I thought he was going to fall on my neck. boy. Do the same for you some time." He was off like a shot but I caught him at the door. "By the way, what are you on right now?" His face went blank. "Let's see... what are we on now? Can't remember. Give 'em the moon... Kepler's laws... anything ." A neurotic personality if I ever saw one. Feb. # You can avoid this mass somnambulism if you keep yourself busy. Just started a program on this new Comet Ikegawa. The orbit people have appealed for observations so I thought I'd lend a hand. Remarkable object. Discovered out around the orbit of Saturn at # au. Can't recall any comet being picked up so far from perihelion before. The astronomy department's a shambles. Peabody is home enjoying a nervous breakdown. Had to cancel all his classes. Wadstrom's always running around with a letter and a grim expression. How could Van Buren U survive witfiout him? June # Working at the telescope on Comet Ikegawa has brought back old times, when I was still fairly young and the world comparatively peaceful. Although the war was shaping up even then if we'd had the sense to see it. Been giving the comet # minutes on these new #pan-Q plates. Had to catch it in the early morning sky. So calm and peaceful nights. Looking up through the dome it's hard to believe a bomb might come hurtling out of those stars. Ninety minutes seem forever when you're working alone. You think of all sort of things: your first date... the difference between a moth and butterfly... how the eggplant is allied to the potato. One thing especially my mind keeps going back to again and again is that report of the American Biological Society last year in Chicago. The biologists' committee on extraterrestrial life issued a report you could really understand, a rare event in scientific annals. The words stick in my memory. "... the development of a brain and central nervous system of such enormous complexity as ours was an event of fantastic improbability. It could not happen twice. In our opinion the Earth is the only place in the universe where life exists." Think of it! Our miserable little Earth -- the only place in the universe where life exists. June # Comet Ikegawa #s brightening so fast, got a look at it in the dawn sky this morning. You can make it out even after sunrise if you know exactly where to look. Although much closer to us the increase in luminosity is due principally to the sun. We'd better do all the looking while we can, for this comet will never be back. It's a retrograde object moving in a parabolic or possibly slightly hyperbolic orbit. A "sun grazer" similar to #f (Ikeya-Seki), but definitely not a member of that comet group. Comet Ikegawa will encounter the Earth twice, early in September and again on Nomiles in September, but the one on Nov. # will be real close, although just how close is hard to say. Orbit isn't too reliable. Still got some residuals exceeding a minute of arc. July # Comet Ikegawa is a splendid naked-eye object now. Head shines up there in full daylight twice the size of the moon and you can follow the tail out more than #, if you block off the sun with the tower on the library building. A bright comet is an impressive sight all right. No wonder ignorant people in the middle ages were filled with superstitious fear. Looking at Comet Ikegawa I feel kind of awestruck myself. August I If I had my way all comets would be below naked-eye visibility. Since the comet flared up so bright everybody is out gawking at it now. Some of their thinking is positively medieval! In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if we ever got out of the Dark Ages. One thing the comet has done which I would never have believed possible. It's snapped us out of our trance. Under the constant threat of instant annihilation our lives had ceased to have any meaning. Only the present had any reality. Things happened to us. But they happened as in a dream, we moved from one event to another without purpose or conscious volition on our part. But the comet is for real. You can see it. You can watch it move from hour to hour. It must mean something. Otherwise why is it there? First we were going to be smashed to bits. Then it was death by suffocation from poison gas. Result is we're pestered all day by phone calls from hysterical old dames wanting to know when they're going to be asphyxiated. August # Wadstrom has honored me with his presence. He had a yellow slip in his hand. "Seen this telegram about the comet?" he said. I shook my head'. "I was working on the comet late last night. Didn't get here till after lunch." His face assumed a disapproving expression as if sitting up all night with a telescope was no excuse for not being on the job bright and early next morning. "The Poulkovo Observatory reports presence of cyanogen and carbon monoxide in the spectrum of the head and tail," he said. "Also, unidentified bands in the red and infrared." Wadstrom always attaches tremendous importance to the spectrum of anything, probably because it's a subject he doesn't know anything about. He's an authority on tidal evolution and wouldn't know the G band from a gonorrhea smear. "You understand this information must remain strictly confidential," he said, replacing the telegram in his coat pocket. "Why is that the case, hmm?" "If word leaked out about poison gas in the comet all hell would break loose." "How awful!" "Remember -- not a word." "My lips are sealed." With this burden off his mind he was able to relax a little. "There's been a press conference on the comet scheduled for this afternoon," he said. "Public's invited too. I hope we can scotch some of these wild rumors flying around." "Good luck." "Finch, it would be a big help if you could put a diagram on the board showing the relative positions of Earth and comet." "When's this meeting scheduled?" "Four sharp in Hildegarde Hall." "All right," I told him. "I guess I can manage it." "I'd appreciate it if you could." He glanced at his watch. "Don't forget, that's four sharp." The diagram turned out to be kind of fun. So far I'd been interested chiefly in the comet's position relative to the Earth and sun and hadn't paid much attention to its orbital elements. Now for the first time I had to give the elements a good hard look. I copied them down on the same card along with the orbit. It was ten. till four when I reached Hildegarde Hall. Wadstrom or somebody had badly underestimated our drawing power. The auditorium was jampacked, with hundreds more clamoring for admission. By the time they'd set up some loudspeakers out on the lawn and got a few other things under control, it was nearly five. After a few introductory remarks by the president, the meeting was thrown open to questions. "Is this a big comet?" Wadstrom took this one. "Yes, I think we are justified in describing Comet Ikegawa as a 'big one,' " he replied. "Comets seldom are bright enough to be discovered until within the orbit of Jupiter. This one was discovered slightly beyond the orbit of Saturn." "Where do comets come from?" Wadstrom shook his head regretfully. "There is an old theory that comets are born of volcanic eruptions from Jupiter or possibly its giant satellites. Another has them originating in a vast comet cloud surrounding the solar system, It was once thought that comets reached us from the realm of the stars, but that idea is now generally rejected. The truth of the matter is we don't know where comets come from." "How close is Comet Ikegawa coming to the Earth?" "Within only about twenty ter this month on the #rd. The second encounter on November #, however, will be very close." One of the newspaper men had a question. "How close is 'very close'?" Wadstrom looked grave. "Unfortunately no definite answer is possible yet. The orbit still requires improvement. Let us say... within the distance of the moon." "How does it happen the comet makes two close approaches to the Earth?" "An interesting question," was Waldstrom's comment. "I believe that my colleague, Dr. Finch, can enlighten us on that point." I went to the blackboard and began fumbling for my card. To my consternation I couldn't find it. I located it finally, but it gave me a bad scare. "This represents the orbit of the Earth," I said, drawing a wobbly circle on the board. "This line here points to the vernal equinox, from which we measure directions in space. When the sun reaches the vernal equinox about March #, then spring is here." This was meant to be funny, but nobody laughed. "To draw in the comet we first have to know how its orbit is oriented in space. We do this from the longitude of perihelion, the point on the orbit nearest the sun." Ordinarily I would have had the sense to skip such technicalities; but I was nervous, and talking out loud to myself helped steady me. "Starting at the vernal equinox, we measure off the longitude of the ascending node around this way," I informed my uncomprehending audience. "And then since this is a retrograde comet, we set off the argument of perihelion the other way. Which fixes perihelion for us here, in longitude #." I remained mute staring at the number. There was something familiar about it I should know. Now what was it? It was right here on the tip of. my tongue... Got it! Of course ! I'm not very clear about the rest of the meeting. My mind was too busy elsewhere. It seems to me the reporters worked us around into a comer with their questions. After a while we were answering them all the same way, "Nobody knows." Sept. # Life for me has become intensely interesting. It happened when I blanked out at the blackboard trying to locate that comet's perihelion. Only it wasn't perihelion that interested me. It was the direction of the point opposite that caught my attention. For is it this point that tells us the direction in space from which the comet came. I was sure I recognized it. The direction was the same as Finch #, in Cetus. Now comets approach the sun Orbits of Eartb and Comet Ikegawa showing their encounter on Nov. # , #. The comet approaches Earth along broken line to ascending node, cT .Comet Is above . lane of Earth's orbit briefalong continuous line to  eseending node,-?. Afterward below plane of Earth's rbit along broken line again. Notice motion of Comet Ikegawa is clockwise or retrograde. During May and June the comet would be an early morning object nearly stationary in Pisces and Cetus. Toward end of August the comet would suddenly start moving apparently with terrific speed, switching around to the opposite part of the sky in Virgo. The stars of these constellations would not be visible, of course, since comet would be in daylight sky. After passing its descending nodeli on Nov. #, the comet would do another lightning switcharound into Cetus again. It should be noticed that the proximity of the comet to the Earth would be of little help in photographing its spectrum, since its brightness per unit area of surface would not be affected. Principal changes in spectrum wouldi depend upon varying distance from sun. from all directions in space. Comet Ikewaga could have come in from Cetus as well as any other old constellation. Cetus occupies quite a bit of territory. If it had merely been the same constellation I'd never have given it a moment's thought. Just a coincidence. But was it a coincidence when this direction fell within # minutes of my star? Could star and comet be associated in some way? I've done a lot of thinking about it since then. It is a very tempting hypothesis. Without independent evidence to back it up, however, I am compelled to reject it. Oct. # The story about finding carbon monoxide and cyanogen in Comet Ikegawa was all over the front page this morning. Wish I could have seen Wadstrom's face. Nothing secret about CO-fand CN being in a comet anyhow. It's something we've known for about a hundred years. Actually the spectrum hasn't been too exciting so far, the usual bright bands on a solar type background. Interest is centered chiefly in the weak emission features in the red around # A, which don't seem to match with identification is next to impossible on the low dispersion specMaybe the bands will pep up after perihelion on Oct. #. Oct. #I It seems to me it was about a "Nobody wants war. Nobody's mad at anybody." Not true any more. War fever's got us.  Atlas of Representative Cometary Spectrum. You can blame it on the comet. Sounds crazy to say that, doesn't it? It is crazy. Yet in a a way the comet's responsible. The comet blazing in the daylight sky was hailed enthusiastically by the lunatic fringe as a sure sign of death. With the country in an acute state of war jitters people were ready to believe most anything. To avert a panic the government had scientists go on TV issuing soothing statements, there's no cause for alarm, don't listen to the prophets of doom, etc. Then just when the situation was calming down what happened? The confounded comet changed from white to red -- blood red. That did it. Astronomers tried to explain how the blood color was due to red rays emitted by molecules of the coma. What molecules? Well... we don't know. November # Mass hysteria is always hard to resist. Comet Ikegawa still shows puzzling deviations from prediction. With so many observations available the orbit should be nailed down tight. Yet perihelion occurred about # minutes ahead of schedule. How close is the comet coming on Nov. #? You can take your choice. Forecasts range from #I au (Poulkovo) to #I an (UC at Berkeley.) Nov. #, #:# P.M. This is the night. I'm here in my office writing this in a last effort to hold onto my sanity. The campus is dark. Everybody else has taken cover, I guess. Poor comet! Supposed to reach its descending node in about an hour. It'll be all around us while we're passing through the coma. If I could only do something noble for science on this historic occasion! Something great that would be retold in ages to come. Like Galois penning his theory of groups in frantic haste on the night of his fatal duel. Nov. #, #:# P.M. Mob's awfully close. Once on campus they'll smash the observatory sure. Nothing I can do. All right. I'm ready to die. I'm tired of this world. Glad to be leaving it. In this final hour I think of those words from Inconscious. Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole... #:# A.M. Dammit! I've changed my mind. I don't want to die now. # miles to # miles. Got an idea for a possible check on at tie-in between the comet and Finch #. Good old subconscious. Got so absorbed in this idea forgot about everything else. Suddenly struck me after about an hour I was still alive and the world was still intact. Kind of disappointing... had happened. It was so quiet. Not a sound anywhere. Maybe I was dead and didn't know it! I unlocked the door and stole outside. (Somehow it didn't seem right just to "walk" outside.) The moon, a few days past full, was just rising. Never saw the campus when it looked so serene and peaceful. So still! Not a leaf stirring. The trees against the horizon might have been cut out of cardboard. After my eyes got dark-adapted I could see the whole sky was filled with a fine mist, forming lunar haloes of radii about # and #, their inner edges red shading off to pale blue. The sky had a distinct cherry red tint in directions at right angles to the moon, as if the light was partially polarized. Evidently the mist had loaded the atmosphere, damping convection currents. Jupiter on the meridian was the only star easily visible. The air, unseasonably warm earlier, now was cool and fresh. odor as if charged with ozone. I filled my lungs with it. I couldn't get enough. With every breath I Stimulating, too, with an acrid felt my worries and anxieties slipping away, dissolving into the mist. Never had I seen everything so clearly before. My problems were resolving themselves. (They really didn't amount to much.) All the tangled pieces were falling into place... Dec. # Here it is almost Christmas. Examinations are over, thank goodness. Time to bring the old diary up to date. So much has happened since the last entry, it's a good thing I don't have to rely on my memory. What follows is a composite of excerpts from several tape recordings, which I have transcribed into one in the form of narration. As I recall, these TV interviews occurred in the weeks immediately following the transcendent events of November #. "Dr. Finch, how do people generally react when a bright comet suddenly looms in their sky?" "Well, I would say their reaction is generally one of fear and dread. As we have just seen, people are prone to regard a spectacular bright comet as an omen of evil, a portent of wars and other disasters." "Is there any scientific basis you know of for this belief?" "Absolutely none whatever." "Yet from the dawn of history to our supposedly enlightened times this dread of comets has persisted. Can you account for this irrational attitude on the part of the public?" "Well, yes, I think I can. Let me emphasize, however, that I am not a psychologist and hence cannot speak with authority on such matters." "Go right ahead, Dr. Finch. I am sure that any light you can shed on this question will be received with the greatest interest." "Well, my feeling is that a spectacular comet provides us with a convenient object on which to project our own failings. All of us, I dare say, harbor sins and evil impulses which we would like to rid ourselves by transferring them to others. But this is not easy to do. For other people, instead of accepting them, are more likely to turn around and blame us for their sins. Thus as time goes on we become filled with a sense of guilt and frustration. "Along comes this strange apparition in the sky, this comet. What is it? We don't know. But our natural tendency is to look upon anything outside our daily range of experience with dark suspicion. Thus in medieval times the mandrake plant bebecause of its forked root was considered the work of the devil. The tomato won slow acceptance in the United States; as late as # many feared to eat tomatoes, believing them poisonous. Is it surprising that we regard this ghostly intruder from outerspace with dread and ascribe all sorts of evil to it? The comet can't defend itself. It's the perfect scapegoat!" "Then there's no reason a priori for regarding a comet as an omen of evil?" "Neither evil nor good. Or an omen of anything at all, for that matter." "But wouldn't you agree, Dr. Finch, that Comet Ikegawa was distinctly an influence for good?" "No doubt about it. The history of the world was changed during the period of scarcely one hour that the Earth was passing through its coma. The gases of the coma induced in us an euphoric state of a type hitherto unknown in the annals of medicine. Thoughts of war and hate disappeared. They are nothing but dim memories now. We are like a woman after childbirth who is unable to recall the pains she suffered during labor." "Have they succeded in identifying the structure of the molecule that gave rise to this euphoric condition?" "Well, I understand there's a lot of work being done on that. They may get a clue front analysis of those bands in the red. So far there's nothing been established yet." "Do you have any explanation yourself for the presence of those red euphoric bands in the spectrum of Comet Ikegawa?" "I think that Comet Ikegawa was something very special." "In what way, very special?" "I am convinced in my own mind at least that the close approach of Comet Ikegawa was no accident. I think it was sent here for the very special purpose of saving us from selfdestruction. Man is an organism of enormous complexity. The development of intelligent life was an event of fantastic improbability. The biologists declare it could not happen twice. That the Earth is the only place in the universe where life exists." Dr. Finch paused for a moment. Upon resuming he spoke slowly, choosing his words with the greatest care. "I am afraid the biologists were wrong. I think it did happen twice. I think there is another world where beings exist probably exceeding ourselves in intelligence. In some way -- don't ask me how -- they foresaw years ago that a world war was inevitable. And so, lest they be the only world remaining where intelligent life exists, they sent this cometlike body across space to save us." "But could they from so great a distance -- " "Not all the way necessarily from their world to ours. I suspect they possess a technique for assembling molecules of Euphorium from atoms readily available within the solar system. Doubtless only atoms of common elements were required... carbon... hydrogen... oxygen and the like. Some such molecular assemblage technique was postulated as early as the #'s." "Well, Dr. Finch, that's pretty tremendous. Can you offer any proof?" "Not real proof, I'm afraid. Certainly not proof that every"And now I see our time is almost up. Dr. Finch, is there any last message you would like to leave with our audience?" "Only this. That we owe a debt to the inhabitants of a certain planet, a debt that we never will be able to repay." A summary of my results will appear in an early issue of Verhandl. Deut. Physik Ges., Berlin, Vol. #, p. #, #. the Astronomical Journal. This new orbit of Comet Ikegawa #g is based upon images which appear on plates of Finch # taken some ten years ago for proper motion. Extending the ephemeris back ten years I found, as anticipated, a moving object whose motion corresponded in direction and amount with that calculated for the comet. These pre-discovery positions yielded an arc much longer than hitherto available, enabling me to determine new elements of exceptional accuracy. After allowing for the perturbations of the major planets, it appeared that Comet Ikegawa was moving neither in an hyperbola nor parabola, but in an orbit definitely elliptical in character. Notice that both the longitude of aphelion and the aphelion distance agree closely with the position and distance, respectively, of Finch #. We call attention to this circumstance without wishing to emphasize it. Just opened my end-of-theyear letter from the bursar. I see they've promoted me to full professorship now. Also upped my honorarium by #. Wonder how Wadstrom and Peabody made out? Not that it makes any difference...      #-# Good readers, here are the results of our Consumer Testing survey -- which thoroughly tested all of us! journal of the Consolidated Galactic Federation of Consumers' Associations, February # TT'lsewhere in this issue you will find the complete results of our questionnaire intended to discover exactly who (or what) are our current members, why they joined, whether they are satisfied with our service and what products you whom we are here to serve want us to test in the immediate future. Owing to circumstances beyond our control, some of which are set out below in the most temperate language of which we are at present capable, much of the data is primarily of academic or historical interest now. But we can at least pride ourselves on the fact that no similar undertaking has ever before been attempted, even though we could not in honesty advise anyone else to try it again. When we first circulated the questionnaire, eight years ago, we promised that its findings would appear in one of the regular issues of this journal. We have managed to keep that promise. The information is condensed in microdot form as the last full stop on the last page of the comparative study of highprecision microdot decipherers, and both the items nominated as "Best Buys" will enable you to read it, the magnification required being only of the order of x #. Subscribers to the deluxe edition, apart from the two members on Alpheratz IX who withheld Cr. # from their dues on the grounds that they are anyway capable of distinguishing individual molecules with the naked eye, will eventually be sent the book version of the report. However, we must warn them that since it runs to # fat volumes occupying a meter and a half of shelf space, under current Galactic mailing regulations it can only be shipped by uncrewed ion-rocket; consequently only members belonging to species of exceptional longevity can expect to receive their copies personally. The rest will have to be satisfied with bequeathing them to their grandchildren. D oubtless by now you're asking: "How did this delay arise?" Well, to start with, the level of response exceeded not only our wildest expectations but also those of the computer we hired to assess the likely return. It advised us that not more bership would be bothered to fill out such a complex form. What we in fact got back was more like a # response. As, relying on the computer's assessment, we had done no more by way of preparation than rent a small room in downtown Buenos Aires and hire an elderly female clerk with a hand-operated punch-card analyser, the sudden arrival of # questionnaires caused a minor technical hitch. By the way, in a future issue we propose to conduct a survey of commercial computer advice services. Meantime, we must caution you against employing the Buckingham and Ketshwayo Service for Honest Oracular Pronouncements, which our staff is now accustomed to referring to as the Bucket Shop. They are not, on present evidence, a Good Buy. We are also, incidentally, anxious to recruit volunteers to help us in a survey of planetside postal services. We feel it is high time to establish a Galactic Postal Convention to assure the private correspondence of any intelligent organism all proper protection in transit and reasonable speed of delivery. The treatment we have been accorded by the Earthside authorities beggars belief, and it is highly probable that some of the questionnaires which members on outlying planets went to a lot of trouble to complete and forward have never reached us. For example, we regard it as inexcusable that merely because the only type of stationery available to a citizen of Shalimar happens to be fresh water-lily leaves and pale green bog-slime instead of paper and ink, some jumped-up jack-in-office at the Galactic Mail Center in Lhasa should be allowed to class his envelope as "perishable foodstuffs improperly packaged" and decline responsibility for its delivery. Furthermore, it's mere common civility on Toothanclaw to wrap any missive to a person one wishes to flatter or defer to in the hide of one's latest kill. The more ambitious the kill (and there are creatures on that planet none of our staff would care to handle without battle armor and a lase-gun!), the greater the respect which the writer expresses towards the recipient. One of our members there, obviously extremely appreciative of the services of ConGalFed ConAss, chose to employ the hide of a mugglebuck in which to return his questionnaire. That this hide continues to secrete pure hydrofluoric acid for nine years after being flayed, we submit, is as nothing beside the basic requirement that it should be delivered to the address inscribed on the outside. The fact that mugglebuck skin remains dangerous to handle after the animal is killed is essentially a symbolic equivalent of the customary salutation "Your humble and obedient servant," but no postal authority would decline to accept mail because it included that phrase! It was only by chance that we received the questionnaire sent us by a member on Caligula, moreover. She had gone to enormous trouble to address her package, because the yoggoth worms there customarily employed for the purpose have been selectively bred to adopt the forms of the Devanagari alphabet rather than the Terrestrial Roman system; it must have required several months of patient labor to train them to display an Earthside address-code. All this nearly went for nothing when the Health Department sterilized the worms with insecticide -- whereupon, of course, they reverted to the postmortem straight position. Had it not been for an observant staffmember who was visiting the post office on another errand altogether, that questionnaire would doubtless have gone into the Dead Letter file. Tut the last straw was the authorities' refusal to allow one of our members on Hydatia to answer our questionnaire at all -- a flagrant example of bureaucratic censorship at its worst. Much as we dislike expending our funds on litigation, we felt that in this case there was an important point of principle at stake and have instituted proceedings in the cause of interplanetary tolerance. Hydations do possess a written language, but they reserve it entirely for public inscriptions, advertising puffs and other works of fiction. The only form of private communication expressed in writing is an invitation to a duel to the death, so great an insult is it not to convey your message in person. Wishing to reply to our questionnaire, our member there adopted the normal course and put himself into suspended animation after attaching address labels and sufficient postage to his left ear. On arrival at our office, he would have delivered the information hehad imprinted on his mind, and relapsed into his comatose state until restored to his home swamp. However, despite being properly stamped for both the outward and return journeys, our member ' was forbidden admission to Earth -- first by the Customs and Excise, who proposed to classify him as a museum exhibit subject to arbitrary valuation and # duty; then, when we'd sorted that out, by the Immigration Service, who argued that he lacked a visa. Without being delivered, of course, the poor fellow will never wake up from his trance, so merely shipping him home doesn't solve the problem. A test case is now in progress before the Appellate Tribunal of the PanGalactic Court, and we will keep you apprised of developments. Meantime, if anyone can offer us storage space for one inert male Hydatian approx. # meters by #I by #, capable of being maintained at a pressure of # kg.sk. cm. at# C., we shall be obliged. At present we are having to pay rent on a bonded warehouse at a rate which promises that we shall go bankrupt around the second week of August. AX#e had hoped that one of the '  things this questionnaire would enable us to do would be to revolutionize our method of selecting products to be tested by insuring that the items we chose were all goods that the members were eager to know about. We have no wish to appear unappreciative of all the trouble you went to, but the sad truth is that after processing, cataloguing and analyzing the various products suggested by a substantial number of our members we have decided to keep right on the way we were going before. You see, the largest single batch of requests for tests on a single type of product which we received came from Triskelion. We had # of them. (Curiously enough, this was exactly the book-strength of the Hawk party in the Archduchy of Axenheim at the time our questionnaires arrived there.) But we simply haven't got the facilities to evaluate the comparative merits of the various brands of planet-busting bomb at present on the market! We feel that if the Hawk party wish to substantiate their election slogan, "More Cash for a Credit!", they should institute their own testing program, preferably well away from Galactic trade routes. We moreover feel very strongquirers from Phagia who asked us to test them for edibility ought to set up their own planetary chapter of ConGalFedConAss. We cannot possibly hope to determine which of them will prove tastiest at his or her funeral feast -- a matter of fierce rivalry among that species, in case you didn't know. Our entire permanent staff is human, and sampling creatures who live in an atmosphere of hydrogen sulphide at the boiling point of water would give us acute food-poisoning, thus hopelessly biasing the results. By the way, we have exercised our discretionary right to terminate membership in the case of the young lady from Hippodamia who asked us to test the thirty-seven men who were suing for her hand in marriage. Frivolity of this kind is not in keeping with the high ideals of our organization. And we would have done the same to the member on Gyges who complained that his voyeur suit had gone wrong, and because it was stuck at the invisible setting he couldn't read the brand name on the label -- would we test all makes on the market and tell him which kind has the switch under the left arm? But during his enforced imperceptibility he was run down by a rocket-sled. De mortuis... T T aving had this rather gloomy picture of the outcome of our survey painted for you, you may now be asking, "Was there any point in mounting it, anyway?" We are delighted to say that the answer is a resounding yes! If it did nothing else, the survey showed us that we have been unforgivably neglectful of the true requirements of a very large proportion of our subscribers. We can only apologize for this and plead that one of the lessons we hoped to derive from the survey was to discover the nature of ur median member. Obviously, our average subscriber would be a nonsensical compound creature -- to be exact, one-and-two-thirds of a married female with an annual income of # credits, a batch of hoopoe eggs and seven-eighths of a hectare of reed matting, chiefly interested in the Zagnabovian question, potlatch, and the superior merits of strychnine over prussic acid as a seasoning for beef Bourguignon. Our statisticians did, however, advise us that we could hope to determine a typical person who corresponded to the largest possible number of the membership. Somewhat to our surprise, when we punched the computer for this information, we discovered that our median was a citizen of Luxor, Lonestar or Eldorado, with an income of Cr. #, taking the deluxe calfbound vellum edition of this journal with handtooled gilt lettering on the spine and built-in pentasensory commentator -- in quintuplicate or sextuplicate so that there would be a copy of each month's issue for every member of the family, often including the dog! Very nearly one in three of the entire membership, reported the computer, fitted this general description. Frankly, we were astounded. The level of affluence on those planets is so high that palladiumplated spaceboats are marketed by Neiman Marcus HarrodsWojcecenski not in pairs but in groups of three labelled His, Hers and Its, so that the odd one can be thrown in the garbage on delivery. Why, we asked ourselves, to helping people secure maximum return for minimum outlay -- be so popular on worlds where it doesn't make any difference at all whether what people buy is fit for use or not? (Except insofar as there is a risk of overloading garbage clearance facilities -- but even that didn't seem especially significant. Most people there own robotic disposers which automatically shunt refuse into the local sun.) And then we received a note, along with a copy of our questionnaire picked out in individual diamonds on inch-thick lead plates and expressed to us by Class Triple A galactic mail (which costs Cr. # per gram), from which we discovered the explanation. T e have had to edit the let ' ter slightly, but the gist of it was as follows. "Why the (deleted) don't you (deleted) Earthside (deleted) get your heads out of that heap of (deleted) and catch on to what (deleted) like us really want? If my three-year-old daughter hadn't started to try and eat her copy of your last issue, it would have gone straight in the chute as it usually does, and I wouldn't have seen your questionnaire! "I don't want to be told how to economize! I subscribe to your publication purely because I can always do with having expensive things shipped to me from distant worlds like Earth. (By the way, do you know where I could order a live blue whale not less than twenty meters long? Or a pair of Indian elephants would do, at a pinch.) "Sorry. I'm being too hard on you. At least you take the trouble to quote exhorbitant terms. "Look, the problem here is this. According to our tax laws, every Midsummer Day the government takes away all the money you haven't managed to spend since last time. It's a great way of minimizing bureaucratic interference with the daily lives of our citizens, not having sales tax and income taxes and all that other (deleted). But think what happens if we don't spend enough! "Lord, it's hard to find things one can buy as it is. If the government, armed with all the surplus revenue it collects from the citizens as I explained before, were to start bidding against private individuals, there wouldn't be anything left for us at all! "Sure, charity donations are tax-deductible -- in theory. But the last planetary census showed that the lowest income anyone had filed was four and a half even for a human being, but a canary! How the blazes do you operate a charity under those conditions? "And gifts are tax-deductible, too. You find me someone who's though! If anybody offered to run. I don't think I'd even stop to get in a rocket, in spite of having a fleet of thirty of them. (Or possibly forty -- I think I ordered some more the other day.) "I'm going out of my skull, believe me! Right now I have the builders in -- they're doing over the east wing in neo-rococo. But it's the third time I've had to rebuild the house this financial year, and I kind of liked the Moorish style we had before the pseudobrutalist installed last month. Only I couldn't afford to keep on with it! As a result, here I am with rain streaming in through the cracked marble ceiling, trying to stop my daughter from breaking her neck on the floor of the sub-basement (sixty meters deep and due to be enlarged tomorrow) while they stick up all kinds of hideous gold and red fretwork in place of the black and white bricks they're scrapping. I have to do a lot of travelling -- it's a good way of getting rid of extra credits -- but once in a while I'd like to recognize my home when I come back to it! "To cap the lot, I see on the morning news where the unions are threatening to strike for lower pay, and this blasted socialist government of ours always assesses tax-deductions at the current union scale. If they stay on strike until the tax year ends, moreover, I can't legally pay Yours faithfully (signed) : Tn face of a heartfelt cry like that, what decent being could refrain from coming to the rescue? As an interim measure we have quadrupled the subscription rates for the deluxe edition, and expressions of gratitude are already coming in. But we don't propose to stop there. Plans are afoot to produce an ultra-de-luxe edition on hygroscopic paper with soluble ink, guaranteed to become illegible within fifteen minutes of leaving the presses, so that indefinite repeat orders can be filed with not prospect of ever actually receiving a legible copy. And as of next month we shall start to issue a special ed in thirty-six-point type on platinum sheets, and dedicated to the new, ringing, clarian call of our slogan: "The more you spend, the less you get!" Getty C. Midas, do not despair; The Consolidated Galactic Federation of Consumer's Associations is on your side! Stories from all the world over -- Plus articles, columns and a feature report on the # International Science Fiction Film Festival by Frederik Pohl. Pity the physically deprived. How nice it is to help them -- and how very profitable! I lire flew on skycycles over a Y Y red desert, under the soft red sun of Down. I let Jilson stay ahead. He was my guide, and I hadn't been flying a skycycle long. I'm a flatlander. I had spent most of my life in the cities of Earth, where any flying vehicle is illegal unless fully automated. I liked flying. I wasn't good at it yet, but there was plenty of room for mistakes with the desert so far below. "There," said Jilson, pointing. "Where?" "Down there. Follow me." His skycycle swung easily to the left and began to slow and drop. I followed more clumsily, overcorrecting and dropping behind. Eventually I spotted something. "That little cone?" "That's it." From up here the desert looked lifeless. It wasn't, any more than the deserts of most inhabited worlds are lifeless. Down there, invisible at this height, were spiky dry plants with water stored in their cores; flowers which bloomed after a rain and left their seeds to wait a year or ten years for the next rainfall; insect-things with four legs, unjointed; skinny, warm-blooded quadrupeds from the size of a fox on down, who were always hungry. There was a five-foot hairy cone with a bald, rounded top. Only its shadow made it visible as we dropped toward it. Its lank hair was the exact color of the reddish sand. We landed next to it and got off. I was beginning to think I'd been played for a fool. The thing didn't look like an animal. It looked like a big cactus. Sometimes a cactus had hair just like that. "We're behind it," said Jilson. He was dark and massive and taciturn. On Down there was no such animal as the professional guide. I'd talked Jilson into taking me out into the desert, for a fair fee, but it hadn't bought his friendship. I think he was trying to make that clear. "Come around in front," he said. We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh. The Grog showed just five features. Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floorlength skirt. A few inches up, two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair. They were the size and shape of a Great Dane's forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the corners. No eyes. The cone looked like some stone-age carved idol, or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal monk. Jilson waited patiently for me to stop laughing. "It's funny," he admitted, with reluctance. "But it's intelligent. There's a brain under that bald top, bigger than yours and mine combined." "It's never tried to communicate with you?" "Not with me nor with anyone else." "Does it make tools?" "With what? Look at its hands!" He regarded me with amusement. "This is what you wanted to see, isn't it?" "Yes. I came a long way for nothing." "Anyway, now you've seen it." I laughed again. Eyeless, motionless, my potential customer sat like a fat lap dog in begging position. "Come on," I said, "let's go back." II  fool's errand. I'd spent two weeks in hyperspace to get here. The fare would come out of business expenses, but ultimately I'd pay for it; I was going to own the business one day. Jilson took his check without comment, folded it twice and stuck it in his lighter pocket. He said, "Buy you a drink?" "Sure." We left our rented skycycles at the Downtown city limits and boarded a pedwalk. Jilson led the way from crossing to crossing until we were sliding past a great silver cube with a wriggling blue sign: Cziller's House of Irish Coffee. Inside, the place was still a cube, a one-story building forty meters high. Padded horse-shoeshaped sofas covered the entire floor, so close you could hardly squeeze between them, each with its little disk of a table nestling in the center. From the floor a tinsel abstraction rose like a great tree, spreading its wide glittering arms protectively over the customers, rising forty meters to touch the ceiling. The bartending machinery was halfway up the tree. "Interesting place," said Jilson, "These booths were built to float." He waited for me to express surprise. When I didn't he went on : "It didn't work out. Lovely idea though. The chairs would swoop through the air, and if the people at two tables wanted to meet they'd slide their booths together and lock them magnetically." "Sounds like fun." "It was fun. The guy who thought it up must have forgot that people come to a bar to get drunk. They'd crash the booths together like bumper cars. They'd go as high as they could and then pour out their drinks. The people underneath didn't like that, and maybe there'd be a fight. I remember seeing a guy get thrown out of a booth. He'd have been dead if that tinsel centerpiece hadn't caught him. I hear another guy did die. He missed the branches." "So they grounded the booths?" "No. First they tried to make the course automatic. But you could still pour drinks on the people below, and there was more skill in it. It got to be a game. Then one night some idiot figured out how to short the autopilot. But he forgot the manual controls had been disconnected. His booth landed on another and injured three important people. Then they grounded the booths." A floating tray served us two chilled glasses and a bottle of Blue Fire #. The bar was two-thirds empty, this early, land quiet. When the freeze-distilled wine was half gone I explained why they call Blue Fire the Cras'hlander's Peacemaker: the shape of the flexible plastic bottle, narrow-necked with a flaring mouth, plus the weight of the fluid inside, makes it a dandy bludgeon. Jilson was turning almost garrulous, now that I was no longer his employer. I was talking a lot, too. Not that I felt like it. It was just -- well, hell, here I was, light-years from Earth and business and the good people I knew, way out at the edge of human space. On Down -- a former kzinti world, mostly empty, with a few scattered dots of civilization and a few great scars of old war, a world where the farmers had to use ultraviolet lamps to grow crops because of that red dwarf sun. Here I was. I was going to enjoy it. I was enjoying it. Jilson was good company, and the Blue Fire didn't hurt at all. We ordered another bottle. The noise level rose as cocktail hour drew near. "Something I've been wondering," said Jilson. "Mind if we talk business?" "No. Whose business?" "Yours." "Not at all. Why do you even ask?" "It's traditional, to us. Some people don't like giving away their tricks of the trade. Others like to forget work completely after hour's." "That makes sense. What's the question?" "Why do you pronounce Handicapped with a capital H?" "Oh. Well, if I said it with a small h you'd think I meant humans, wouldn't you? Potential paranoids, albino crashlanders, boosterspice allergies, people with missing limbs and resistance to transplants -- handicapped like that." "Yah." "Whereas what I deal with is sentient beings who evolved with minds but with nothing that would serve as hands." "Q-oh. Like dolphins?" "Right. Are there dolphins on Down?" "Hell, yes. What else would run our fishing industry?" "You know those things you pay them off in? They look like a squirtjet motorboat motor with two padded rnetal hands attached." "The Dolphin's Hands. Sure. We sell 'em other stuff, tools and sonic things to move fish around, but Dolphin's Hands are what they mainly need." "I make them." J ilson's eyes jerked up. Then ... I could feel him withdrawing, backing off as he realized that the man across from him could probably buy Down. Damn! But the best I could do now was ignore the fact. "I should have said my father's company makes them. One day I'll direct Garvey Limited, but my great grandfather will have to die first. I doubt he ever will." Jilson smiled, with little strain. "I know people like that." "Yah. Some people seem to dry out as they get older. They get dryer and tougher instead of getting fat, until you think they'll never change again, and they seem to get more and more energetic, like there's a thermonuclear source inside them. Gee-Squared is like that. A great old man. I don't see enough of him." "You sound proud of him. Why does he have to die?" "It's like a custom. Dad's running the company now. If he gets in trouble he can go to his father, who ran the company before him. If GeePrime can't handle it they both go to Gee-Squared." "Funny names." "Not to me. That's like a tradition too." "Sorry. What are you doing on Down?" "We don't deal only with dolphins." The Blue Fire made me want to lecture. "Look, Jilson. We know of three sentient beings without hands. Right?" "More than that. Puppeteers us their mouths. Outsiders -- " "But they build their own tools, dammit. I'm talking about beasts who can't even crack themselves a fist-ax, or hold a lighter. Dolphins, bandersnatchi... and that thing we saw today." "The Grog. Well?" "Well, don't you see that there must be Handicapped species all over the galaxy? Minds but no hands. I tell you, Jilson, it gives me the shivers. For as long as we expand to other stars we're going to meet more and more handless, toolless, helpless civilizations. Sometimes we won't even recognize them. What are we going to do about them?" "Build Dolphin's Hands for them." "Well, yes, but we can't just give them away. Once one species start depending on another, they become parasites." "How about bandersnatchi? Do you build hands for bandersnatchi?" "Yes. Lots bigger, of course." A bandersnatchi is twice the size of a brontosaur. Its skeleton is flexible, but has no joints; the only breaks in its smooth white skin are the tufts of sensory bristles on either side of its tapering blank head. It moves on a rippling belly foot. They live in the lowlands of Jinx, browsing off the gray yeast along the shorelines. You'd think they were the most helpless things in known space... until you saw one bearing down on you like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored car crushed flat across a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran it down. "Okay. How do they pay for their machines?" "Hunting privileges. Hunting them." 'g'ilson looked horrified. "I don't believe you." "I hardly believed it myself. But it's true." I hunched forward across the tiny table. "Here's how it works. The bandersnatchi have to control their population; there's only so much shoreline to feed on in the lowlands. They also have to control boredom. Can you imagine how bored they must have been before men came to Jinx? So what they've done is, they've made a treaty with the Jinx government. Now, say a man wants a bandersnatch skeleton; he's going to build a trophy room under it. He goes to the Jinx government and gets a license. The license tells him what equipment he can take down to the lowlands, which is inhabited only by bandersnatchi, because the atmospheric pressure is enough to crush a man's lungs and the temperature is enough to cook him. If he gets caught taking extra weapons he goes to prison for a long time. "Maybe he makes it back with a body, maybe he doesn't come back. His equipment gives him odds of about sixty-forty. But either way, the bandersnatchi get eighty per cent of the license fee, which is a thousand stars flat. With that, they buy things." "Like Hands." "Right. Oh, one more thing. A dolphin can control his Hands with his tongue, but a bandersnatchi can't. We have to build the control setup directly into the nerves, by surgery. It's not difficult. Jilson shook his head and dialed for another bottle. "They do other things," I said. "The Institute of Knowledge has instruments in the lowlands. Laboratories and such. There are things the Institute wants to know about what happens under lowland pressure and temperatures. The bandersnatchi run all the experiments, using the Hands." "So you came here for a new market." "I was told there was a new sentient life form on Down, one that doesn't use tools." "You've changed your minds?" "Just about. Jilson, what makes you think they're sentient?" "The brains. They're huge." "Nothing else?" "No." "Their brains might not vtork like ours. The nerve cells might be different." "Look, we're about to get technical. Let's drop it for tonight." And with that, Jilson pushed the bottles and glasses to one side and stood up on the table. He peered around Cziller's House of Irish Coffee, swinging his head in a slow arc. "Hah. Garvey, I've spotted a cousin and one of her friends. Let's join 'em. It's almost dinnertime." I thought we'd be taking them to dinner. Not at all. Sharon and Lois built our dinner, handmade, starting with raw materials we picked up in a special store. Seeing raw food for the first time, practically in the state in which it had emerged from the ground or been cut from a dead beast, made me a little queasy. I hope I didn't show it. But dinner tasted fine. After dinner and some polite drinking and talk, back to the hotel. I went to sleep planning to hop a ship the next morning. I woke in total darkness around oh four hundred, staring at the invisible ceiling and seeing a round-topped cone with reddish lank hair and a faintly; smiling mouth. Smiling at me in gentle derision. The cone had secrets. I'd come that close to guessing one of those secrets this afternoon; I'd seen something without noticing it... Don't ask me how I knew. With a crystalline certainty which I could not doubt, I knew. But I couldn't remember what I'd seen. I got up and dialed the kitchen for some hot chocolate and a tuna sandwich. Why should they be intelligent? Why would sedentary cones evolve a brain? I wondered how they reproduced. Not bisexually; they couldn't get to each other. Unless -- but of course there must be a motile stage. Those leftover paws... What would they eat? They couldn't find food; they'd have to wait for it to come to them, like any sessile animal: clams, sea anemones, or the Gummidgy "orchid" I keep in my living room so I can shock hell out of guests. They had a brain. Why? What did they do with it, sit and think about all they were missing?... I need data. Tomorrow I'd contact Jilson. Ill ' A t eleven the next morning we were in the Downtown Zoo. Behind a repulsor field something snapped and snarled at us: something like an idiot god's attempt to make a hairy bulldog. The animal had no nose, and its mouth was a flat lipless slit hiding two serrated horseshoeshaped cutting surfaces. Its long coarse hair was the color of sand lit by red sunlight. The forepaws had four long spreading toes, so that they looked like chicken feet. "I recognize those feet." "Yah," said jilson. "It's a young Grog. In this stage they mate. Then the female finds a rock and settles down. When she's big enough she starts having children. That's the theory, anyway. They won't do it in captivity." "What about the males?" "In the next cage." The males, two of them, were the size of chihauhaus, with about the same temperament. But they had the serrated horseshoe teeth and the coarse reddish hair. "Jilson, if they're intelligent, why are they in cages?" "If you think that's bad, wait'll you see the lab. Look, Garvey, what you've got to keep in mind is that nobody's proven they're intelligent. Until somebody does, they're experimental animals." They have an odd, almost pleasant odor, faint enough so that you stopped noticing it in ,i two or three seconds. I peered in t the snapping motile-stage female. "What happens then? Does everyone suddenly get ashamed of themselves?" "I doubt it. Do you happen to know what Lilly and his associates did to dolphins while trying to prove they were intelligent?" "Brain probes and imprisonment. But that was a long time ago." "Lilly was trying to prove dolphins were intelligent, but he treated them like experimental animals. Why not? It makes sense. If he's right, he's done the species a service. If he's wrong, he's only wasted time on animals. And it gave the dolphins a hell of an incentive to prove he was right." II#e reached the lab shortly  ' after noon. It was the Laboratory for Xenobiological Research, a rectangular building beyond the outskirts of the city, surrounded by brown fields marked with rectangular arrays of ultraviolet lamps on tall poles. In the distance we could see the Ho River, with flocks of water skiers skimming across its muddy surface behind puller units. A Dr. EuIIer showed us through the lab. He was an obvious crashlander: a towering albino seven feet tall, with a slender torso and tapering, almost skeletal limbs. "You're interested in the Grogs? I don't blame you. They're very difficult to study you know. Their behavior tells nothing. They sit. When something comes by they eat. And they bear young." He had several pre-sessile cones, the bulldog-sized quadrupeds, in cages. There was another cage containing two of the little males. They didn't bark at him, and he treated them with tenderness and something like love. It seemed to me that he was a happy man. I could sympathize with him. Down must look like paradise to an albino from We Made It. You can walk around outside all year, the soil grows things, and you don't need tannin pills under the red sun. "They learn fast," he said earnestly. "That is, they do well in mazes. But they certainly aren't intelligent. About as intelligent as a dog. They grow fast, and they eat horrendously. Look at this one." He picked up a very fat, round-bottomed female. "In a few days she'll be looking for a place to anchor." "What will you do then? Turn her loose?" "We're going to raise her just outside the lab. We've picked her a good anchor rock and built a cage around it. She'll go into the cage until she changes form, and then we remove the cage. We've tried this before," he added, "but it hasn't worked out. They die. They won't eat, even when we offer them live meat." "What makes you think this one will live?" "We have to keep trying. Perhaps we'll find out what we're doing wrong." "Has a Grog ever attacked a human being?" "To the best of my knowledge, never." To me, that was as good an answer as No. Because I was trying to find out if they were intelligent. Consider the days when it was first suspected that the cetaceans were Earth's second sentient order of life. It was known, then, that dolphins had many times helped swimmers out of difficulty -- and that no dolphin had ever been known to attack a human being. Well, what difference did it make whether they had not attacked humans, or whether they had done so only when there was no risk of being caught at it? Either statement was proof of intelligence. "Of course, a man may simply be too big for a Grog to eat. Look at this," said Dr. Fuller, turning on a microscope screen. The screen showed a section of a nerve cell. "From a Grog's brain. We've done some work on the Grog's nervous system. The nerves transmit impulses more slowly than human nerves, but not much more. We've found that a strongly stimulated nerve can fire off the nerve next to it, just as in terrestrial chcrdates." "Are the cones intelligent, in your opinion?" Dr. Fuller didn't know. He took a long time saying it, but that's what it boiled down to. It distressed him; his ears turned red beneath the transparent skin. He wanted to know. Perhaps he felt he had a right to know. "Then tell me this. Is there any evolutionary reason for them to have developed intelligence?" "That's a much better question." But he hesitated over the answer. "I'll tell you this. There is a terrestrial marine animal which starts life as a free-swimming worm with a notochord. It later settles down as a sessile animal, and it gives up the notochord at the same time." "Amazing! What's a notochord?" He laughed. "Like your spinal cord. A notochord is a rope of nervous connection which branches into the trunk nerves of the body. More primitive forms have sensory connections, but arranged without order. More advanced forms wrap a spine around the notochord and become vertebrates." "And this beast gives up its notochord." "Yes. It's retrograde development." "But the Grogs are different." "That's right. They don't develop their large brains until after they settle down. And, no, I can't imagine an evolutionary reason. They shouldn't need a brain. They shouldn't have a brain. All they do in life is sit and wait for morsels of food to hop by." "You speak almost poetically when you turn your mind to it." "Thank you. I think. Mr. Garvey, will you come this way? You too, Jil. I want to show you a Grog central nervous system. Then you'll be as confused as I am." f  "he brain was big, as advertisA ed, and ' globular, and a strange color -- almost the gray of human gray matter, but with a yellow tinge. It might have been the preservative. The hindbrain was almost unnoticeable, and the spinal cord was a limp white string, uselessly thin, tapering almost to a thread before it ended in a multiple branching. What could that monstrous brain control before with practically no spinal cord to carry its messages? "I gather most of the nerves to the body don't go through the spinal cord." "I believe you're wrong, Mr. (Garvey. I've tried without success to find supplementary nerves." He was smiling slightly. Now I had a piece of the problem. We could both stay awake nights. "Is the nervous material any different from the motile form's brain?" "No. The motile form has a smaller brain and a thicker spinal cord. As I said, its intelligence is about that of a dog. Its brain is somewhat larger, which is to be expected when you consider the slower rate of propagation of the nerve impulse." "Right. Does it help you to know that you've ruined my day?" "It does, yes." He smiled down at me. We were friends. He was flattered to know that I understood what he was talking about. Otherwise I wouldn't have looked so puzzled. The big soft sun was halfway down the sky when we got out. We stopped to look at the anchor pen Dr. Fuller had set up outside. One big flat rock with sand heaped around it, all enclosed in a wide fence with a gate. A smaller pen against the fence housed a colony of white rabbits. "One last question, Doctor. How do they eat? They can't just sit and wait for the food to pop into their mouths." "No, they have a very long, slender tongue. I wish I could see it in use sometime. They won't eat in captivity; they won't eat when a human being is anywhere near." We said our good-byes and took our skycycles up. "It's only fifteen ten," said Jilson. "Do you want another look at a wild Grog, before you leave Down?" "I think so, yes." "We could get out into the desert and back before sunset." And so we turned west. The Ho River slipped beneath us, and then a long stretch of cultivated fields. IV HPhey can't be intelligent, I was thinking. They can't. "What?" "Sorry, Jilson. Was I talking out loud?" "Yah. You saw that brain, didn't you?" "I did." "Then how can you say they're not intelligent?" "They've got no use for intelligence." "Does a dolphin? Or a sperm whale, or a bandersnatch?" "Yes, yes, no. Think it through. A dolphin has to hunt down its food. It has to outwit hungry killer whales. A sperm whale also has the killer whale problem, or used to. Then there were whaling ships. The smarter they were, the longer they could live. "Remember, cetaceans are mammals. They developed some brains on land. When they went back to the sea they grew, and their brains grew too. The better their brains were, the better they could control their muscles, and the more agile they were in water. They needed brains, and they had a head start." "What about bandersnatchi?" "You know perfectly well that evolution didn't produce the bandersnatchi." A moment of silence. Then, "What?" "You really don't know?" "I've never heard of a life form being produced without evolution. How did it happen?" I told him.  a half years ago, there was an intelligent biped species. Intelligent -- but not very. But they had a natural ability to control the minds of any sentient race they came across. Today we call them Slavers. At its peak the Slaver Empire included most of the galaxy. One of their slave races had been the tnuctip, a highly advanced, highly intelligent species already practicing biological engineering when the Slavers found them. The Slavers gave them limited freedom, after they found the worth of those freethinking brains. In return the tnuctipun had built them biological tools. Ani plants for their spacecraft, stage trees with shaped solid-fuel rocket cores, racing animals, bandersnatchi. The bandersnatchi was a meat animal. It would eat anything, and everything but its skeleton was edible. and a half years ago, when the Slavers found that most of the tnuctip gifts were traps. The rebellion had been a long time building, and the Slavers had underestimated their slaves. To win that war they had been forced to use a weapon which exterminated not only the tnuctipun, but every other sentient species then in the galaxy. Then, without slaves, the Slavers too had died. Scattered through known space, on odd worlds and between stars, were the relics of the Slaver Empire. Some were Slaver artifacts, protected against time by stasis fields. Others were more or less mutated tnuctip creations : sunflowers, stage trees, ships' air plants floating naked in space in bubbles and bander-snatchi. The bandersnatchi had been one of the tnuctip traps. It had been built sentient, so that it could be used as a spy. Somehow the tnuctipun had made it immune to the Slaver power. Thus it had lived through the revolution... For what? The Jinxian bandersnatchi spent their lives in a soupy, pressurized fog, browsing off the ancient food yeast which still covered the ocean a foot deep in cheesy gray scum. No data reached their senses but for the taste of yeast and the everlasting gray mist. They had brains to think with but nothing to think about... until the coming of man. "And it can't mutate," I concluded. "So you can forget the bandersnatch. He's the exception that proves the rule. All other known Handicapped needed brains before their brains developed." "And they're all cetaceans, from Earth's oceans." "Well -- " Jilson made a razzing noise. Hell, he was right. They were all cetaceans. 'IXte'd left the plowed lands far ' ' behind. Gradually the plains became a desert. I was beginning to feel more comfortable with the beast under me, this platform with a saddle and an oversized lift-belt motor and an air pump and a forcefield generator to stop the wind. Feeling less likely to make a mistake, I could fly lower, with less room to correct before I hit sand. From this close the desert was alive.There, rolling before the wind, was a wild cousin to the tumbleweeds I'd seen in the Zoo of Earth. There, a straight stalk with orange leaves around the base, fleshy leaves with knife-sharp edges to discourage herbivores. There, another, and a fox-sized herbivore cleverly eating out the center of a leaf. It looked up, saw us and disappeared into motion. There, a vivid flash of scarlet, some desert plant which had picked an odd time to bloom. The soft red sun made everything look like the decor in a night club I know. It's decorated like Mars ought to be, like Mars "was" before space flight. A distance illusion: red sand, straight canals running with improbably clear, pure water, crystal towers reaching high, high, toward big fat crescent moons. Suddenly I wanted a drink. I dug in my saddlebags, hoping to find a flask. It was there, and it was heavy with fluid. I pinched the top open, tilted it to my lips -- and almost choked. Martini! A half-pint martini, a little too sweet, but far colder than ice cold. I sipped at it, twice, and put it away. "I like Downers," I said. "Good. Why?" "No flatlander would think to put a martini in a rental skycycle unless he was asked to." "Harry's a nice guy. Woop, there's a cone." I looked down and right, searching for sand-colored hair against sand. The cone was in its own shadow; it practically jumped at me. And, equally suddenly, I knew what had awakened me in the dark morning. "What's wrong?" asked Jilson. I realized that I'd gasped. "Nothing. Jilson, I don't know all I should about Downer animals. Do they excrete solids?" "Do they -- ? Hey, that was nicely put. Yes, they do." He tilted his vehicle toward the cone. It sat firmly on a tilted flat rock which lifted one edge out of the sand. The rock was absolutely clean. "Then Grogs do too." "Right." Jilson landed. I drifted in beside him, dropped the sky cycle joltingly hard. The Grog sat facing us, smiling. "Well, where's the evidence? Who cleans after this thing?" Jilson scratched his head. He walked around the base of the Grog and came back, looking puzzled. "Funny, I never thought of that. Scavengers?" "Maybe." "Would that be very important?" "Maybe. Most sessile animals live in water. The water carries everything away." "There's a sessile thing from Gummidgy that doesn't." "I've got one. But the orchidthing lives in trees. It attaches itself to a nice thick horizontal tree branch, with its tail hanging over the edge." "Mmm." He seemed uninterested. No doubt he was right; some scavenger cleaned up after the Grog. But it didn't sound right. Why would the parasite animal do such a good job? r lphe Grog and I faced each other. As a rule the Handicapped seemed to suffer from sensory deprivation. Cetaceans live underwater; bandsnatchi live in heated, pressurized fog. Maybe it's too early to make such rules, but it's for sure that a Handicapped will have trouble experimenting with his environment. Experiments generally require tools. But the Grog had real troubles. Blind, numb in all its extermities due to the nearly useless spinal cord, unable even to move to a different location -- what could be its picture of the universe? Somehow I found myself staring at its hands. Hands. Useless, of course, but still -- hands. Four fingers with tiny claws, set around the tiny palm like the fingers of a mechanical grab. "It didn't evolve at all. It devolved!" Jilson looked up. He was using his skycycle as the only convenient tiling to sit on for miles around. "What are you talking about?" "The Grog. It's got vestigal hands. Once it must have been a higher form of life." "Or a climbing animal, like a monkey." "I don't think so. I think it had a brain and hands and mobility. Then something happened, and it lost its civilization. Now it's lost its mobility and its hands -- " "Why would it stop moving?" "Maybe there was a shortage of food. Not moving conserved energy." And because that was the sheerest guesswork, I added, "Or maybe it got in the habit of watching too much tridee. I know people who don't move for weeks." "During the Interworld Playoffs my cousin Ernie -- Hell with it. You think that's the answer, do you?" "Yes. It's in a trap. No eyes, no sensory input, no way to do anything with what it does think about. It's like a blind, deaf and dumb baby with glove anesthesia all over." "It's still got the brain." "Like our appendix. It'll lose that too." "You're the one who was worried about the Handicapped. Can't you do anything for it?" "Euthanasia, maybe. No, not even that. Let's go back to Downtown." I walked through sand toward my cycle, sick with discouragement. Bandersnatchi had needed men to tell them about the stars. But what could you tell a hairy cone? No, it was back to Downtown for me, and then back to Earth. There are people no doctor and no psychiatrist can help; and there are species equally beyond aid. With the Grogs there was no place to start. A few feet from the cycle I sat down cross-legged in the sand. Jilson got down beside me. We faced the Grog, waiting. T)y and by Jilson said, "What are we waiting for?" I shrugged. I didn't know. But Jilson didn't move, and neither did I. I knew with a crystalline certainty that we were doing the right thing. Simultaneously, we turned from the Grog to look into the desert. Something the size of a rat came hopping toward us, kicking up dust. Behind it, another, and another. They hopped laboriously across the sand, springing high, and stopped in an arc facing the Grog. The Grog turned toward them -- not like you'd turn your neck, but turning all over, like you'd wring a dishcloth. It looked sightlessly at the sand rats, and the sand rats perched on their hind legs and looked back. The Grog's mouth opened. It was a cavern, and the tongue was coiled on its pink floor. The tongue moved like a flash, invisibly fast, flick, flick. Two of the rats were gone. The mouth ( not too small to swallow a man) dropped shut, smiling gently. The third rat was there on its hind legs. None of them had tried to run. They might just as well have. Again the Grog's mouth dropped open. The last sand rat took a running leap and landed on the coiled tongue. The mouth closed for the last time, and the cone turned back to face us. I had the answers, all at once, intuitively, with the same force of conviction that now had me sitting cross-legged on the sand. The Grog was psychic. Or something similar. It could control minds, even minds as insignificant as a sand rat's. That was the purpose of the Grog's large brain. Its intelligence was a side effect of its power. For eons the Grogs had called their food to them. They did not hunt after childhood. After the brain had developed they need never move again. They didn't need eyes; they had little need of other sensory perceptions. They used the senses of other animals. They directed the scavengers who cleaned their rocks, and their pelts, too, when necessary. Their mind control brought meat animals to their pre-sessile female young, directed their breeding habits and guided them to proper anchor rocks. And they were now feeding information directly into my brain. said, "But why me?" I knew, with that "crystalline certainty" I was learning to recognize. The Grogs were aware of what they were missing. They had read the minds of passersby: first kzinti warriors, then human miners, explorers, sightseers. And my business was the Handicapped. They had learned of the Dolphin's Hands. They had primed Jilson and others to know, without evidence, that the Grogs were sentient, and to say so when the right person should appear. Without evidence. That was important. They had to know what they were getting into before committing themselves. Men like Dr. Fuller could investigate if they liked; it would look suspicious if they were prevented. But something kept them from noticing the handlike appearance of those tiny forepaws, the lack of biological wastes around a wild Grog. Could I help them? The question was suddenly an obsession. I shook my head to fight it off. "I don't know. Why did you wait so long to show yourselves?" Fear. "Why? Are we that terrifying?" I waited for an answer. None came. There was no sudden, utterly convincing bit of data in my brain. Then they feared even me. Me, helpless before a flickering tongue and an iron mind. I wondered why? I was sure that the Grogs had developed from some higher, bipedal form of life. The tiny hands, like mechanical grabs, were characteristic. As was that eerie mental control... I tried to stand up, to run. My legs wouldn't lift me. I tried to blank my thoughts, to hide what I'd guessed, but that was useless. They could read my mind. They knew. "It's the Slaver power. Your ancestors were Slavers." And here I sat, with my mind wide open and helpless... Qoothingly, with characteristic crystal certainty, I realized:! That the Grogs knew nothing of Slavers. That, as far as they knew, they had been there forever. That the Grogs couldn't be idiot enough to try for a takeover bid. They were sessile. They couldn't move. Their leftover Slaver power could reach less than halfway around the world, with all the Grog individuals working together. How could they dream of attacking a species which controlled all space in a thirty-light-year-diameter sphere? Fear alone had kept them from letting mankind know what they were. Fear of extermination. "You could be lying about how far you can reach. I'd never know." Nothing. Nothing touched my mind. I stood up. Jilson watched me, then got up and mechanically brushed himself off. He looked at the Grog, opened his mouth, closed it, gulped and said, "Garvey! What did it do to us?" "Didn't it tell you?" In the same moment I was certain it hadn't. "It made me sit down, it put on a show with sand rats... you saw it too, didn't you?" "Yes." "Then it left us sitting awhile. You talked to it. Then suddenly we were able to get up." "That's right. But it talked to me, too." "I told you it was intelligent!" "Jilson, can you find your way back here in the morning?" "Absolutely not. But I'll set your skycycle to record your course, so you can get back. If you're sure you want to." "I'm not. But I want the choice." The sun was a smoky red glow in the west, fading over a blueblack horizon. 'd laughed. The hotel rooms didn't have sleeping plates. If you slept at all, you slept on a flat, cushiony surface and liked it. I'd slept all right last night, until the Grog's call came to wake me in the small hours. But how could I sleep now? Unbeknownst to yours truly, Sharon and Lois had been expecting us for dinner. Jilson had phoned them before we set out for the zoo. Tonight we'd eaten some kind of small bird, one each. Delicious. You didn't dare touch anything afterward, not until you'd wiped your hands on hot towels. And we'd talked about the Grogs. The cone had left Jilson's mind practically untouched, so that he'd have something like an unbiased opinion. His unbiased opinion was that he wasn't going back there for anything, and I shouldn't either. The girls agreed. I'd laughed at the Grog. Who wouldn't? Dolphins, bandersnatchi, Grogs -- you laugh at them, the Handicapped. You laugh with a dolphin, really; he's the greatest clown in known space. You laugh the first time you see a bandersnatch. He looks like something God forgot to finish; there's no detail, just that white shape. But you're laughing partly out of nervousness, because that moving white mound would no more notice you than a land tank would notice a snail under its treads. And you laugh at a Grog. No nervousness there. A Grog is a cartoon. Like a doctor using a stomach pump in reverse, the Grog had shoved its information down my throat. I could feel the bits of cold certainty floating in my mind like icebergs in dark water. I could doubt what I had been told. I could doubt, for instance, that all the Grogs on Down could not reach out to twist the minds of humans on, say, Jinx. I could doubt their terror, their utter helplessness, their need for my help. But I had to keep remembering to doubt. Otherwise the doubt would go, and the cold bits of certainty remained. Not funny. We ought to exterminate them. Now. Get all men off Down, then do something to the sun. Or bring ship and land it somewhere, leave the ramscoop running, twist every vertebrate on the planet inside out. But: They had come to me. To me. They were so secretive, so mortally afraid of being treated like savage, resurrected Slavers. Dr. Fuller could have been told half the truth, and he would have stopped his experimenting; or he could have been stopped in his tracks by the reaching Grog minds. But no. They preferred to starve, to keep their secrets. Yet they'd come to me at the first opportunity. The Grogs were eager. Man, what a chance they'd taken! But they needed -- something. Something only mankind could provide. I wasn't sure what, but of one thing I was sure: It was a seller's market. They wanted to do business. It was no guarantee of their good faith; but if I could think of such guarantees, I could force them through. Then I felt those crystalline certainties again, floating in my mind. I didn't want any more of those. I got up and ordered a peanut butter, bacon, tomato, lettuce sandwich. It arrived without mayonnaisse. I tried to order mayonnaise, but the kitchen dispenser had never heard of it. A good thing the Grogs hadn't revealed themselves to the kzinti, back when Kzin owned the planet. The kzinti would have wiped them out, or, worse, used them as allies against human space. Had the kzinti used Grogs for food? If they had, then -- But no. The Grogs would make poor prey. They couldn't run. My eyes were still seeing red light, so that the stars beyond the porch seemed blue and bright above a black plain. I thought of going down to the port and renting a room on some grounded ship, so that at least I could float between sleeping plates. Nuts. I could not face a Grog. Not when it had to talk to me by -- That was at least part of the answer. I phoned the desk computer and told it what I wanted. By and by other parts of the answer came. There was a mutated alfalfa grass which would grow under red sunlight; the seeds had been in the cargo hold of the ship that brought me. It was part of Down's agricultural program. Well... VI I flew back to the desert the next morning, alone. The guy who owned the skycycles had set mine aside, with the course record intact so I could find my way back. The Grog was there. Or I'd found another by accident. I couldn't tell, and it didn't matter. I grounded the skycycle and got off, tensing for the feel of little tendrils probing at my mind. There was nothing. I was sure it was reading my mind, but I couldn't feel it. With crystalline certainty there came the knowledge that I was. welcome. I said, "Get out of there. Get out and stay out." The Grog did nothing. Like the knowledge I'd gained yesterday afternoon, the conviction stayed : I was welcome, welcome. Great. I dug in my saddlebags and pulled out a heavy oblong. "I had a lot of trouble finding this," I told the Grog. "It's a museum piece. If Downers weren't so hell bent on doing everything with their hands I'd never have found one at all." I opened it a few feet from the Grog's mouth, inserted a piece of paper in the rollers, plugged the cord into a hand battery. "My mind will tell you how to work this. Let's see how good your tongue is." I looked for a good seat, finally settled my back against the Grog, under its mouth. I could read the print from here. There was no feeling of lese majeste. If the Grog wanted me for dinner I was doomed, period. The tongue lashed out, invisiI did. "How's that?" "Maybe. This seems to work. Now, before we begin, would you read my mind about ramscoop motors?" "Then I will. What can you offer us in trade?" speed of its flicking tongue, the Grog typed as slowly as a onefinger typist. "Okay. You wouldn't object to our seeding your property with mutated grass?" "Will you need new land?" "We don't trust you, you know. We'll be taking steps to see that you don't control human minds. I'm going to get myself checked over very carefully when I go home." "We can take care of that. It's a good idea, too. Now, what can we do for you? How about some modified Dolphin's Hands?" "Guest lecturers. That'll be expensive." "Good point." I settled myself more comfortably against the Grog's hairy side. "Okay. Let's talk business." I t was a year before I touched Down again. By then, Garvey Limited was almost ready to show a profit. I'd driven through the roughest deal I could think of. As far as the planet Down was concerned, Garvey Limited had a monopoly on Grogs. They couldn't have bought a pack of tabac sticks except through us. We paid fat taxes to the Downer human government, but that expense was almost minor. We'd had major expenses. The worst was publicity. I hadn't tried to keep the secret of the Grog power. That would have been futile. And that power was scary. Our only defense against a panic that could have covered human space like a blanket was the Grog's themselves. Grogs were funny. I'd kept pushing, pushing, pushing pictures. Grogs operating typewriters, Grogs guiding Down's expanding herds of cattle, Grogs in a spacecraft cabin, a Grog standing by during a tricky operation on a sick Kodiak bear. The Grog always looked just about the same. To see one was to laugh, and never to fear... unless there were unnatural crystalline certainties poking into the crevices of your brain. The really important jobs for Grogs were just coming into existence. Already Wunderland had changed its laws to allow Grogs to testify in a courtroom, as expert lie detectors. A Grog would be present at the next summit meeting between human and kzinti space. Ships venturing into unknown space would probably carry Grogs, in case they met aliens and needed a translator. Fuzzy Grog dolls were being sold in the toy stores. We didn't make a dime on that. But I was building for the future. I took a day to rest up after landing, to say hi to Jilson and Sharon and Lois. Next morning I flew out into the desert. Now there was grass covering a lot of what had been barren land. I found a circle of white far below, and on a hunch I dropped. The white was a flock of sheep. In the center nestled a Grog. "Welcome, Garvey." "Thanks," I said, not trying to shout. She would be reading my mind and answering through the nerve-implanted vocal equipment we'd started manufacturing in quantity two months ago. That had been another major expense, but a necessary one. "What's all this about dolls?" "We can't make any money on that. It's not as if there was a copyright on the Grog form." I circled the skycycle, landed and got off. We talked things other than business. She wanted a Grog doll, for instance, and I promised her "lecturers," arranging them in orone. We went through a list of der of priority. Getting them here would involve nothing more than paying their way and paying them for their time. None of them would have to make any kind of speech. Neither one of us mentioned the ramscoop. I t was not on Down. Put a weapon on Down and the Grogs could simply have made it their own; it would be no defense. We'd put it in close orbit around the Downer sun, closer than Mercury would have been. If the Grogs ever became a threat, the electromagnetic ramscoop field would go on. And Down's sun would begin behaving very strangly. Neither of us mentioned it. What for? She knew my reasons. It was not that I feared the Grogs. I feared myself. The ramscoop was there to prove that I had been allowed to act against the Grogs' best interests. That I was my own man. And I still wasn't sure. Could the last man aboard have sabotaged the motor? Could the Grogs reach that far? There was no way to find out. If it was true, then anyone who boarded the old ship would report that it was A-okay, ready to fire, don't worry about it, Garvey. Forget it. Sleep easy. Maybe I will. It's easy enough to believe that the Grogs are innocuous, helpful, desperate for friendship. I wonder what we'll meet next.  YHi Lucky Civil Service employees l Nothing to do all day but care hr a grateful , friendly publicl precisely at nine in the morning the post office opened and the first customers were allowed to enter. Howards knew this. Yet, as he straightened his Book on the counter before him, he could not prevent himself from glancing worriedly at the big clock on the wall. Why? This was just a work day like any other day. God, the fear, deep down, as the long black pointer clicked another notch towards the vertical! Just another day, why should he be so concerned? He tittered nervously and turned his key in the lock of the multifrank before him, just as two people appeared cn the other side of the counter. "I wish to post this letter to Sierra Leone," the man said. "A two-credit insurance stamp," the woman said. They began to instantly squabble as to which of them had been there first, their voices crescendoing shriller and higher. Howards slapped his left hand on the Book and raised his right. "Stop," he said, and they did, struck by the authority in his voice. "Reference B-#Y# in the Book of Postal Regulations states that all differences of opinion and priority are to be settled by the serving clerk. That is myself. Ladies first. Here is your insurance stamp, madam." His fingers were snapping over the complex controls of the multifrank even as he spoke, and he was secretly proud of the assured way that he said it. The man stepped aside, the woman timidly proffered her insurance book as he stood with his finger over the activate button. With his free hand he flipped the book open, dropped it into the slot and pressed the button. "That will be # credits #, madam." The bills went into the cash receptacle and her change rattled into the delivery cup. "Next," he said, not without a certain amount of condescension. , 'T'he man said nothing, he knew better than to argue. He certainly did. What was in the Book was correct. The man stepped away, and Howards thought that this day had certainly begun busily enough : but why the little shivering knot of fear, Howards?, he wondered to himself, and rubbed at the spot in his midriff with his knuckles. A large, dark man with a full black beard filled the space outside the counter. "Do you know what this is?" he bellowed. "I certainly do," Howards said. (Did his voice crack a little?) "That is a needle gun." "You are correct," the man hissed in a voice like the breaking of poison waves. "It fires soundlessly a needle with such great speed that contact with the human body produces a hydrostatic wave that utterly destroys the nervous system. Would you like that?" White teeth appeared in the tangle of black beard. "I would not like my nervous system utterly destroyed." "You will then pay me the sum of # credits." "I have no till or money. Cash is centrally supplied..." "Fool! I know all that. I also know that the payment of any sum over # credits must be specially authorized for any position. Therefore -- # credits. At once." "At once," Howards said crisply, and spoke aloud as he hit the keys. "Four, nine, nine, nine..." "Now activate." Howards hesitated for a mere fraction of an instant, sucked in his breath, then snapped his finger down on the activate button. There was the rattle of small change from the delivery cup, and the man glanced down at it just as a gush of white vapor shot out into his face. He screamed and writhed and fell as the full force of the regurgitants, irritants and vesicants hit him at once. "Foolish man," Howards said into the handkerchief he raised to his face, stepping back away from the gas. "Security was onto him as soon as I rang up # credits. Just a simple decimal shift..." T t was almost nine, and the first  customers would be in soon. A day like any other day -- then why was he feeling this way? What way? As if he were imprisoned in the back of his own brain and screaming. Foolishness, this was not a proper thought for a public servant to have. "Help me," the old woman said just as the black hand touched the hour. "Of course, madam." Where had she come from, like that, so quickly? "It is my pension -- " pushing a battered and torn payment book across the counter with her scaling, shivering hand. "They will not pay me my money." "Money due is always paid," Howards said, flipping open the rusty book while trying to touch it only with the tips of his fingers. He pointed to a torn fragment of paper. "Here is the reason. The page is missing. To authorize payment you must get form # # lk (#) and have it filled out." "I have it," the woman told him, and pushed over -- almost threw, in fact -- an even more creased and soiled piece of paper. Howards hoped that none of his feelings were revealed on his face as he turned and read it. "This is the correct form, madam, but it is not completely filled out. In this blank here you must enter your deceased husband's insurance number." "I do not know his number," the woman shrilled and clutched tightly to the counter's edge. "He is dead and his papers, they were all destroyed, you see." "In that case you must obtain form #po(#) which is an application to the proper authorities for the required information." He pushed the papers with, what he hoped was, a smile. "You can obtain an application for this form... "I will die first," the old woman screamed and threw all her papers into the air so that they fluttered down around her like filthy confetti. "I have not eaten for a week. I demand justice. I must have money for food!" It was all quite distasteful. "I wish I could oblige, madam, but I have no authority. You should apply for the form of application to see the Emergency Officer... "I will be dead first!" she shouted hoarsely and thrust her face towards his. He could smell her sour breath and quickly withdrew. "Have you no pity on someone my age? I could be your mother." "Thankfully, madam, you are not. My mother has the proper forms." "Forms!" Her voice screeched higher and higher until it cracked. "You are more for forms than for human life. I swore I would kill myself unless I obtained money for food today. Save me!" "Please do not threaten. I have done what I can." Had he? Was there some authority he should summon? Was he correct... "Better a quick death than one of slow starvation. Money -- or I die!" Qhe had a large bread knife now  and was waving it before him. Was this a threat? Did it call for the guards? "I cannot," Howard gasped, and his fingers hovered over the keys in an agony of indecision. Guards? Doctor? Police? "Then I die, and it is a world I do not regret losing." She held one hand on the counter, palm up, and with a savage slash of the knife almost severed the hand from the wrist. Thick blood spurted high. "What have you done?" he shouted and reached for the keys. But she began to scream and wave her arm and blood spattered him and gushed over the counter. "The Book!" he gasped, "you're getting blood on the Book. You cannot." He pulled it away and began to dab at it with his handkerchief, then remembered that he had not yet summoned help. He hesitated, torn, then put the Book in the farthest corner and rushed back to his position. There was blood everywhere -- had he made a mistake? -- and the woman had sunk from sight but he could still hear her moans? "Medical assistance," he said quickly into the microphone. "First-aid needed. At once." Should he do something for her? But he could not leave his station. And the blood, everywhere, on his hands and shirt. He held them out in horror. He had never seen so much human blood before... And at nine o'clock precisely, the post office would open. Another day, just like any other. What was wrong with his hands? Was there something he should remember? Like a vanishing echo a memory rushed away -- a memory of what? There was nothing wrong, he was at his position where he belonged, with his Book close at hand and the shining mass of the multifrank before him. He belonged. Of course he belonged. Then why, again, a fleeting, fading frightening memory that it was wrong? Why was he looking at his hands? Howards shivered and unlocked the machine and cleared it, flipped the test and operational switch so the light glowed green, checked the cleared reading and set up #... This was not right. Why had he done it? With a furtive glance over his shoulder he quickly cleared the machine. The long black hand of the clock clicked one notch forward and was vertical and an immense queue of people formed outside his position. They were jammed solid, all looking at him, quiet now, though there was a murmur from the rear. Ciood morning, sir, he said to the red-faced gentleman who headed the line. "What may I..." "None of your conversation. I want service, not chatter. This letter, special delivery, at once, to Capitello, Salerno, Italy. What will it cost?" "That depends," Howards said, reaching for the envelope which the man pulled back. "Depends upon what, damn it? I want to mail this thing, not talk about it." There was a murmur of impatience from the waiting people and, smiling insincerely, Howards said, "It depends upon the weight, sir. Special-delivery letters are delivered by orbiting rocket, and the charge varies according to the weight." "Then you can damn well stop talking about it and weigh it," he said, thrusting the letter forward. Howards took it, dropped it into the slot, then read off the price. "Too damn much," the man shouted. "Mailed a letter to Capitello yesterday, and it cost less." "It probably weighed less, sir." "I wanna mail this package," a small child said, thrusting an untidy bundle onto the counter. "Are you calling me a liar?" the red-face man shouted, growing even redder. "No, sir -- just a minute, sonny -- I simply stated that if it cost less it must have weighed less." "Damn nerve! Call a man a liar. Ought to thrash you. Wish to see your supervisor at once." "My supervisor does not see the public. If you wish to file a complaint the Complaint Office is in Room # -- don't do that!" he added as the child pushed the package further across the counter so that it slid off the inner edge and fell to the floor. Something inside broke with a loud plop and an awful stench seeped out. "You broke it!" the child screamed. "I did not; take it at once," Howards said, picking it up by an end of string and dangling it outside. The child ignored it and began to cry loudly. "Man ought to be horsewhipped, treating a child like that!" "Room #," Howards said through clenched lips, hoping the man would leave. A tall young man with red hair was bobbing up and down behind the weeping child. "I would like to send a telegram to my uncle saying Dear Uncle, Need at Once Credits One Hundred... , " "Would you please fill out the telegraph form," Howards said, pressing the switch that delivered a printed form into the dispenser outside. "Bit of difficulty," the young man said, holding up both of his hands which were swathed in bandages and plaster. "Can't write, but I can dictate it to you, won't take a moment. 'Dear Uncle. "I am very sorry, but I cannot accept dictated telegrams. However any public phone will take them." "Bit of trouble getting the coins in the slot. 'Dear Uncle "Cruel and heartless," the young girl next in line sniffed. "I would like to help you," Howards said, "but it is forbidden by regulation. However I am sure that someone near the end of the line will write your telegram for you, then I will be happy to accept it." "How very smart of you," the young girl said. She was exceedingly attractive, and when she leaned forward her breasts rested tidily on the counter's edge. She smiled. "I would like to buy some stamps," she said. Howards smiled back, with utmost sincerity this time. "I would be extremely happy to oblige, miss, except for the fact that we no longer issue stamps. The amount of postage is printed directly onto the envelope." "How clever of you. But isn't it possible to buy commemorative stamps still held in the postal vaults?" "Of course, that is a different matter. Sale to the public of commemorative issues is authorized in the Book by Reference Y-#H)#." "How very intelligent of you to remember all of that! Then I would like the Centenary of the Automatic Diaper Service..." "Nerve, damned nerve, trying to get rid of me," the red face said, thrusting at him. "Room # is closed." "I have no doubt that Room # is closed," Howards said calmly. "I do not know what is in Room #. But the Complaints Office is in Room #." "Then why in blazes did you tell me #?" "I did not." "You did!" "Never. I do not make that kind of mistake." Mistake? Howards thought. Mistake! Oh, no. CtT'm afraid I have made a small mistake," he said, white-faced, to the girl. "There is a later special order on the entry cancelling the issue of all commemorative stamps across the counter." "But that should make no difference," she said, pouting prettily. "You can sell me a little teensy diaper stamp..." "If it was within my power, nothing would give me greater pleasure. But the regulations cannot be broken." "Your head can be broken just like you broke this!" an immense and angry man said, thrusting the girl aside and pushing the crumbled package under Howard's nose. The stench was overwhelming. "I assure you, sir, I did not break that. Would you kindly remove..." "My son said you did." "Nevertheless, I did not." "Call my boy a liar!" the man roared and reached across the counter and grabbed Howards by the shirt. "Stop that," Howards gasped and tried to pull away and heard the material tear. He groped out and hit the guard switch. It snapped off clean and rattled to the floor. Howards pulled back harder and most of his shirt came away in the man's hand. "Stamp, please," someone said, and a letter dropped into the slot. "That will be two credits," Howards said, hitting the breakdown button, then ringing up the postage. "You said Room #," the red face shouted. "Been mistreating the machine," a sour-faced repairman said appearing beside Howards. "Never, I just touched it, and it broke." "These machines never break." "Help me," a frail old woman said, pushing a battered and torn payment book across the counter with a scaly and shaking hand. "It is my pension. They will not pay me my money." "Money due is always paid," Howards said, closing his eyes for an instant -- why? -- then reaching for the book. He caught sight of the man pushing up to the counter, a man with a tangle of black beard and a hateful expression. "I know..." Howards began, then stopped. What did he know? Something pressed hard inside his head and tried to burst out. "I do not know his number," the old woman screamed. "He is dead -- and his papers, they were all destroyed you see." "Do you know what this is? It is a needle gun." "Not in Room #." "Just one diaper..." Howards clutched graspingly at his head and did not know if he was screaming or if he was hearing someone else scream. Welcome blackness engulfed him. tCK-Tow just sip this, and you ' will find yourself feeling fine in a few moments." Howards took the cup that the Examiner held out to him and was surprised to discover that he needed both hands to hold it. He noticed that the backs of his hands were beaded with sweat. As he sipped he felt the helmet lifting from his head, and when he looked up he had a swift glimpse of it just before it vanished through a recess in the ceiling. "The examination -- aren't you going to proceed?" The Examiner chuckled and steepled his heavy fingers on the desk before him. "A not uncommon reaction," he said. "The examination is complete." "I have no memory. It seemed as though the helmet came down, then went up again. Though my hands are covered with sweat." He looked at them, then shivered with realization. "Then the examination is over. And I..." "You must have patience," the Examiner told him with ponderous dignity. "The results must be analyzed, compared, a report drawn up. Even electronically this takes time. You should not complain." "Oh, I am not complaining, Examiner," Howards said quickly, lowering his eyes. "I am grateful." "You should be. Just think of the way all of this used to be. Hours of oral and written examinations, with the best marks going to the crammers. You can't cram for a simulator examination." "I do know that, Examiner." "Just a few moments of unconsciousness, and the machine mentally puts you through your paces, puts you into situations and judges how you respond to them. Real situations that a postal clerk would face during the normal course of his duties." "Normal duties, of course," Howards said, frowning at his hands, then wiping them quickly against his side. The Examiner stared at the figures that raced across the screen on his desk. "Not as good as I expected, Howards," he said sternly. "You'll not be a postal clerk this year." tCT)ut -- I was so sure -- the twelfth time." "There is more to clerking than just knowing the Book, Go away. Study. Apply yourself. Your grade this time is high enough so that your student's status will continue another year. Work harder. Very few students are carried past their fifteenth year." Howards stood, helplessly, and turned before he left. "My wife asked me, to ask you, we're not getting younger. Planning permission for a child." "Out of the question. There is the population problem for one thing, your status for another. If you were a clerk, the application might be considered." "But there are so few clerks," Howards said weakly. "There are so few positions. Be happy you are a registered student with rations and quarters. Do you know what it is like to be an Under-unemployed?" "Thank you, sir. Good-by, sir. You have been most kind." Howards closed the door quickly behind him -- why did he keep thinking there was blood on his hands? He shook his head to clear it. It would be hard to tell Dora. She had hoped so. But at least he still had his book. A whole year to memorize it again. That would be good. And there would be inserts and additions, that was always good. He walked by the post office in the lobby of the building with his eyes averted. nphe appearance of a second, and revised, edition of Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder (Advent: Publishers; P.O. Box #, Chicago, #. #, #) is the occasion for several discoveries. One of them is that Damon deserved every good thing he got after the appearance of the first edition of these critical essays. You may take my word for it -- if you haven't already guessed as a result of your devoted readership of these, my golden thoughts -- Damon Knight sets an as yet unequalled standard in these matters, and furthermore does so without the guidance of his own prior example. Second, Damon Knight apparently was never a simple critic of science fiction, but is instead a gifted, skilled polemicist for a personal, intuitive literary philosophy... that is, an editor. One of the great science-fiction editors, and in one narrow sense the most spectacular of them all because unlike Gemsback, Campbell or Palmer, or Boucher, he has functioned best when he has had control of no magazine at all. Unique among the handful of headstrong, fussy, exasperated and exasperating iron whims that have shaped the nature of this field, Knight is partially paralyzed by the opportunity to select and have published such original words as would fulfill his image of the field. His record as an overt editor is one of coping -- with indifferent publishers, with inadequate budgets and with, if I remember right, a certain startling inability to see the real point of a story in manuscript. His productions have a sketchy quality to them, like the furnishings and victuals at Honore Balzac's house, if we are to believe Stefan Zweig. Here a placard on the wall bears the scribbled phrase "Here hangs a Rembrandt," and there the dinner table supports a sheet of paper on which is written the sumptuous bill of fare. Somehow, the elements of medium, bankroll and inventory have never met well for Damon. It was when he was reviewing what had already reached print, at the behest of other image-shapers, that he burst forth on us all as a major directorial voice. Legend has it that Damon Knight was a curly werewolf, slashing the throats of the chuckleheads, splashing so much gore that his spectre haunted the night thoughts of authors about to do less than their best and caused them to think twice of foofooraw. Slash he did; why else did God make sheep? But his effect, his credential and his value lie in his poking and prying at the well-enough done. His exact appreciations of the well done are very good, and useful; but they began a fashion for superlatives which no writer, not even Kuttner, Sturgeon, or some of the others Damon treated so well on occasion, fully deserves. This field has yet to see the writer worthy of the praise this educated man at times expressed... but I quibble, when I should be going on to explain how meaningful and bow influential Knight was When summing up the subtle but suddenly obvious flaws in work that had seemed pretty good. He made of J.T. McIntosh an instruction manual for many, whereas all he did with his total and vastly entertaining destruction of Hall, Flint and Ackerman was summed up when Ace reissued The Blind Spot, and with an Ackerman introduction. These are the functions of an editor: the instruction of the young, the maintenance of an ideal and above all the isolation of the subtle flaw. They require special qualities in their practitioner. Any idiot can spot the big flops, every jackass serves himself, and any rabblerouser will happily divert you with his special music. The literary criticism of science fiction as she is presently practiced offers excellent examples of all this. In this second edition you will find, among other goodies from the earlier version, the famous destruction of A.E. Van Vogt that first made Damon's reputation. You will also find, in print for the first time, the review that caused him to quit reviewing when FSF refused to publish it. (What a small bone it is, after all, but perhaps it came from a dear beast). You'll also get a chance to note the only time Damon was totally wrong, which is a hitherto unpublished review of a novel of mine called Who? I am flattered that the Lord chose my work for the focus of the necessary event when Damon was saved from the curse of perfection. In any case, for these and other magnificent bumps on the road to the apotheosis of our art, you should mail the six dollars to Advent tonight. The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Playboy Press, #) contains some of the best science fiction and fantasy stories of our immediate time. Partly, this is because, unlike many collections from the slick magazines, its table of contents lists such contributors as Sheckley, Bradbury, Tenn, Clarke, Bloch, Pohl, Nourse, Sturgeon, Ted Thomas, Avram Davidson, and Fredric Brown in addition such other pretty good people as Bernard Wolfe and Bruce Jay Friedman. I personally think the effect of Playboy ' s patronage of Arthur C. Clarke has been disastrous. I believe that everyone who wants to read George Langelaan's "The Fly" has either read it in one of its many previous republications or deserves his personal Xeroxed copy from Reader Service. I think they had a much better Davidson to chose from. But by any reasonable standard Ray Russell's initiation of science fiction into the magazine and A.C. Spectorsky's continuance and encouragement of it have been two massive favors Playboy has done us, and you should buy this book to enjoy the result, if not the silly arrogance with which it is given you. Neither Russell's nor Spectorsky's view of the field is exactly the same as mine, but the differences I find only broadening. What I find actively repellent occurs in the introduction and in the individual story blurbs, which miss no opportunity to amplify Playboy's accomplishment by actively belittling the magazines from which these writers came. It is a fact that Playboy took in and sheltered many a man who'd been starving among the pulps. It is also a fact that with the possible exception of the late Charles Beaumont, neither Ray Russell nor his particular successor in this concern, A.C. Spectorsky, have a single enduring writer of their own to point to. Under those circumstances, the sneers and arabesque posturings of the blurb prose present altogether too epicene a target. And for the insistent use of that neologistic reference, "sci-fi," we also thank Thee. Doubleday, like a couple of other publishers, has been in this field for some twenty years now and has either learned nothing or actively wants to debase the general public's understanding of the medium. Else, why Best of Amazing (#), an extraordinarily inept melange of selections from that magazine's avatar-crammed past by Joseph Ross, who in his secret identity is a high school English teacher and handles the language exactly like it. Joe Ross has trouble getting subject and predicate within shouting distance of each other, refers to David H. Keller, M.D., as "the good doctor" with a straight face, obviously couldn't then resist calling Murray Leinster "The Dean of Science Fiction" and is like a fly in amber. He has gazed back upon the longest publishing history in the field, contemplated an inventory which contains some of the most interesting fiction contributed to the field, and he has selected "The Lost Machine" by John Beynon Harris. This is a now rather clumsy and always bathetic piece, presumably for its historical interest as an early example of work by a writer who had to change his name and most of his habits before he could accomplish anything major. He has also selected "The Worm," and burbled about his joy, as he went on to select the remaining contents -- from a storehouse forty years in the filling! -- because at last this fine "Kelleryarn" (sic) would be back in print. It is not an actively bad piece, at that -- it merely occupies the space that could have been taken up by any one of a dozen other Keller expositions of this same monomaniacal mood. For that matter, it occupies the space that might have been taken up by a story, but by that criterion most of these pages would be blank. Murray Leinster's "The Runaway Skyscraper" -- complete with chapter-headings from its original Argosy appearance -- is included here, (in this book offered as a tribute to Hugo Gernsback, editor of Amazing beginning in # and leaving in #), as an example of the Founding Father's skill at selecting reprints. Would that Joe Ross had that skill. What possessed him to make of this very first Amazing anthology such a pudding of a job? "Marooned off Vesta" by Isaac Asimov was indeed Ike's first sale. His first story came several attempts later. And his "Anniversary," a sequel written thirty years later, is a stunt, a contrived stunt and a badly contrived stunt. "The Metal Man," by Jack ment Abe Merritt's influence on the young writer. It is a story full of memorable images, based on the notion that life is a vital force, indifferent to matter and capable of imparting itself to almost any substance. Specifically, early Williamson, like much of Merritt before him, uses words and concepts like "energy," "radioactivity," and "crystalline" in special senses, endowing them with particular potency. You can often tell what ideas in a story were felt most powerfully by the writer and had obvious special meaning to him. In most cases, its the sexy parts or perhaps like some others, was very much concerned with manifestations of tire elan vital in those early days of this field. There isn't really much to "The Metal Man's" events, evaluated for story, but they do present a series of images in which life and power are glimpsed in massive universal motion which merely includes Man and flesh but does not defer to him or it. This sense you can extract from this story and find enjoyable and thoughtprovoking. But there are many better examples. Was Ross perhaps simply trying to locate the earliest possible example of everything that was done better elsewhere later? Is his soul that of the antiquarian? "Pilgrimage" by Nelson Bond was, I would say, a reject from The American Magazine or Collier's. That was their mistake. Reprinting it in this context is Ross's. "Sunfire!" by Edmond Hamilton is not the grand worldwrecking Hamilton, but the more contemporaneous poetic Hamilton of "What's It Like Out There?" and "Home Run." It is a hitherto unreprinted example of that letter mode, you got to say that for Joe and his sure touch for the not-quite. Even the most consistent writers in this field will write a so-so yarn to either build up to or come down from a good piece of work, whatever that work might be an example of. Ross's ability to select all valleys has the dizzy dazzle of consistent disaster all over it. Finally, there is "Try To Remember," by Frank Herbert, a man who has written excellently once or twice, very well almost always, and grindingly monotonous sometimes. This is because Herbert, like for example Van Vogt and the late Mark Clifton, is a compulsive magician; a quick study or a dedicated apprentice in some arts such as semantics, personnel management or eyetraining which will turn all our lives into gold. Periodically, this kind of writer selects an intrinsically dull magic, uses a particularly contrived plot, and chops out his wooden characters too crudely, all at once in the same story. Then all his potential defects conjoin, and Oh, boy! This book does not represent either contemporary science fiction or the true history of Amazing Stories. Its introductory tribute to Hugo Gernsback is so ingenuous as to seem insincere; whatever worth it offered as a genuine token is pretty well undermined by Ross's subsequent dragging-in of H.L. Gold, of all people, to stand shoulder-toshoulder with Hugo. (I would like to see the look on the grand old man's face). Its copyright dates fall into the past with such vim as to evoke the best spirit of Frederick Fell, Pellegrini and Cudahy, McBride and some of the other publishers who were bumbling around this racket in the early #'s, almost determinedly refusing to pick up anything that betrayed quality or sophistication, leaning on sheer spavined antiquity as a selling point. Ross, I don't worry about. An English teacher can always make out as long as he remembers not to split infinitives in public and to never listen to what the words are meaning. Amazing I don't worry about, because somebody always comes along with a fresh supply of tana leaves every time it appears to be dying at last. But Doubleday... what on Earth has happened to your shrewd commercial brain, gents? Surgically implanted in a lustful giant robot, you say? Orbit #I (G.P. Putnam's Sons, #) is Damon Knight's second compendium of original stories. It follows hard on the heels of Orbit I, so I assume this latest venture in producing books like magazines is either a success or a mistake that hasn't been acknowledged yet. (The two are often indistinguishable in publishing). Editorially, it's the curious beast my review of In Search oi Wonder might have led you to expect. It is more a sign that Damon's heart is in the right place than it is a really satisfactory book. His selections are by Theodore Thomas, Kate Wilhelm, Richard McKenna, Gene Wolfe, Philip Latham, Joanna Russ, R.A. Lafferty, Kit Reed, and Brian Aldiss. I was struck by the terrific similarity of this lineup to a Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contents page, as well as by the thought that Damon seems to have put this book together in his living room. But the best editors have always had a reasonably well defined group of writers clustered around them; what croggles me is that here they're somebody else's group, if you define possession by frequency of use. Thomas's "The Doctor" is a great accomplishment, an exact statement of a central truth from which anyone with any sense or understanding can go on to draw echoes in dozens of factual situations. This is one of the primary areas of opportunity for fiction; it is by the nature of the medium the area of opportunity for science fiction. This one is a straight, undeviating statement from beginning to end, barely turning aside the fraction of an inch required to explain how its doctorprotagonist got back in time so far. After this opening chord, quality in the book drops quickly. Kate Wilhelm's "Baby You Were Great" is pretty good and contains some great inventive thinking, but not in places that will reach the reader. Writers should not write for writers, although we all do to some extent. It's a little like a roofer's carefully preparing the underside of a shingle so the wrecker who'll eventually dismantle the house can admire his skill. Richard McKenna, who as you know is dead, was an excellent writer and a memorable person, a man capable of feeling and thinking on levels more of us should attain. "Fiddler's Green" demonstrates these qualities in its author. So do dozens of other stories, however, and the low overall quality of this umpteenth posthumous selection verges on insult to the bones. Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" is indistinguishable from dozens of other academe-oriented jokes published in FSF during the Boucher years. Apparently, too, the stimulus of buying this kind of story automatically invokes an editorial response in the form of a clearly overblown blurb. Philip Latham's "The Dimple in Draco," on the other hand, is representative of the kind of engineers' in-group "story" (astroput out once in a while. It's poorly representative, however, and when found outside Analog's pages leads one to think maybe Damon bought this reject from John just to prove he can publish a story he doesn't personally like. For this sort of purpose, of course, an intrinsically unlikeable story is even more desireable than a good one. Joanna Russ is represented by two stories about a single character, a female Grey Mouser named Alyx. In these two stories she is provided with contradictory pasts, neither of them clearly suitable for the matured protagonist of the actual stories Aside from that, she's a very pleasant creature, and I hope there'll be more of her. It's pretty lightweight stuff for two stroies, but if you don't put an issue together frequently, I guess you got to get your series character out in bigger-than-usual lumps. iOSlO OF Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Carp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order for #. Name Address City  State Zip Code... (Offer good in U. S. A. Only) R.A. Lafferty's "The Hole in The Corner" is the second-best story in the book; totally indescribable, it represents what can be done with the FSF style, (even though Lafferty's natural home is right here in Galaxy ). To get it done, you have to be not just witty and college educated. You have to be far enough away from those days to have some idea of what's real and what isn't. That gives you terrific scarcity value, because of all the kinds of story there are, the notional mode is the easiest in which to write badly well enough to get by. What I mean by that perhaps cryptic remark may become clearer to you if you read the final story in Orbit II, Brian Aldiss's "Full Sun." Then there's Kit Reed's "The Food Farm," which like most of the stories in this book takes a notion and gives it the simplest possible twist, but with a good vocabulary and lots of cuteness lubricating the hard parts. Essentially, this kind of story is a spatter of code words and recognition symbols, evoking the spirit of intelligence and inquiry, flaunting credentials of sophistication. When you touch them they vanish, or become at best cardboard, Damon, cardboard. -- Algis Budrys GO A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors International Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the  top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Seated : Bennett Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bergen Evans, Bruce Catton, Mignon G.Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff. Standing: Mark Wiseman, Max Shulman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith, Rod Serling. "We want to test your writing aptitude" By Gordon Carroll Director, Famous Writers School. Former editor, Reader's Digest, Time, Inc., Coronet If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. Several years ago, we started the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we knew about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home and in your free time. After a solid grounding in fundamentals, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice -- Fiction, Non-Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor spends up to two hours analyzing your work. He blue-pencils corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long personal letter of advice and specific recommendations. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to more than # publications including Reader's Digest, True, Redbook. Stephen Novak of Wayne, N. J., says, "I just received a check from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That's I I stories sold in six months." Doris Stebbins of S. Coventry, Conn., who has sold six stories to Woman's Day for # writes, "Taking your Course has made it all possible."  Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's Aptitude i Test. If you test well, or offer other cvi dence of writing ability you may enroll But there is no obligation to do so. Famous Writers School Dept. #, Westport Connecticut #HH# I want to know if I have writing nplltwd. 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Aldiss by Keith Laumer by Terry Carr and Alexei Panshin by Fritz Leiber by Robert Bloch by R. A. Lafferty by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director bi-monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. XT' esterday (as this is written)  our Mariner V spacecraft accomplished its fly-by of the planet Venus and transmitted back to Earth a staggering quantity of data about pressures, temperatures, existence or non-existence of a magnetic field and so on. (The # hours of data transmission is still going on at this moment in real time, so you won't find the results here. You've already seen them in the daily newspapers anyway.) It was, all in all, quite a triumph for our spacemen -- a flight of # kilometers, taking almost a hundred and twenty-seven days, and arriving on target, on time and functional. It happens we were in the big auditorium in the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, when the fly-by occurred. (In this particular case the "we" is not purely editorial; present were three delegates from the science-fiction fraternity, Fritz Leiber and Larry Niven having joined your editor.) A large chart dominated the room, with a projector showing the spacecraft's flight as, moment by moment, the big scanning disks at Goldstone reported its position. The beep-beep-wieep of the incoming transmissions from Mariner gave a pleasantly Things-toComish musical background, while Mariner Control broke in with periodic situation reports on course, distance and velocity. Present were several hundred luminaries of science like Krafft Ehricke, generally interested bystanders like ourselves and Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek's Mr. Spock), and men who had actually worked on Mariner and its sister projects and had a deep interest in its success. Time came. Mariner reached turn-on position, and all its systems turned themselves on. Mariner entered the shadow of Venus; minutes passed; it exited the occultation again, and the show was over. Everything had worked. And there was a genteel patter of applause, and a few rueful smiles... and everybody got up and went home. maintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Accept  ## Book Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life,'! Address: Scribe Y.B.K. Sean Jose, California # U.S.A. j Scribe: V.B.K. i San Jose, California #, U.S.A. I Please send copy of booklet, j "The Mastery of Life" which I I shall read as directed. j N ame j Address  City j State Please Include Your Zip Code l What was wrong? It was just one of those things. That was on October #st. On October #th, the Russian spacecraft, Venera IV, had actually made a soft landing on Venus. And our triumph had all at once turned out to be a sort of wistful, feckless, second-best loss. 'T'hat's the way it was reported A in the papers, and we must in all honesty say that that was how it looked to at least a large number of the people on the scene Yet clearly that view is nonsense. Venera IV did one thing, Mariner V another; if there is any interaction at all between the two probes, it is all to the good -- one can validate the other if they are right, let us know the dimensions of uncertainty if they are wrong. A hundred years from now, when our great-grandchildren come to study that curious phenomenon of medieval history called the Space Race, it is very unlikely that they'll have to commit to memory the fact that the Russians preceded us by a day on this particular occasion. They may learn that in the month of October in the year # human knowledge of the planet Venus was increased by two successful missions, one American and one Russian, but they surely will not care which one got there first. And neither should we. The reason we do is because of a built-in fallacy in our contextual view. To us, the space race is what games theorists call a "zero-sum" game. In the matrix of the zero-game, every good thing that happens to one side is a bad thing for the other; there is no such thing as a Russian "gain" without an American "loss." There really are, of course, such things as zero-sum games. Poker is one. If you win a dollar, and Sam wins #, and the other player, Bill, loses #, the sum of all winnings and losses at the end of the game is zero. The chips may shift around from player to player, but there are the same number of chips at the end of the game as there were at the beginning. But not all games are zero-sum games, and it is both pernicious and silly to view all contests as struggles in which some must win, others lose. "Losers" can gain, too. Consider foot-racing. It is true that in a race one man wins and the others lose; but it is also true that no "winner" ever would have broken the four-minute mile without help from at least one "loser" who set the pace for him and made it possible for him to go faster than any man had ever gone before. Contests, you see, need not be only against the other players. They can be against brute nature, against the harsh environment of the universe; and victory can be measured against the timekeeper's stopwatch or the total quantity of knowledge we humans -- all we humans -- have been able to wrest from nature. T Tnfortunately a lot of our most influential gamblers are hooked on playing the zero-sum game. It may be a crooked wheel, they say, but as far as they're concerned it's the only wheel in town, and it's where they bet the bundle. Happens that the bundle is our own federal budget, and these particular gamblers are our elected representatives. If there was it had a basis in well documented fact. We may not really have lost anything by having the Russians steal our thunder, but the budgetchoppers will think we did -- and practically speaking, that's the Same thing when appropriations time rolls around. Vietnam, Big Science and the Great Society are all demanding enormous quantities of funds at once, and the legislators are eagerly seeking places to swing the axe. They can't do much about the cost of Vietnam. They don't want to antagonize the votes the Great Society carries with it. The only place they can see to cut is in the sort of activity represented by Big Science... and a clearcut loss to the Russians gives some of them the excuse they've been looking for to chop away. And yet... there's a whole universe out there, you know. It's ours for the taking, at least as far as we now know. And if we don't yet at this moment know precisely what we want it for, we can be very sure that when we do find out what's there for us -- new raw materials, new knowledge, maybe even new friends -- we'll be completely unable to understand how we got along without it so long. Our only way there is through the crude and clumsy beginnings of Venera and Mariner; and if we and the Russians are both playing the space game, we can have the comfort of knowing that it's a game that will pay off in the long run for both of us -- and for all the rest of the human race, too. So -- our congratulations both to the fine men in the Jet Propulsion Laboratories and to their opposite numbers in Russia on the events of October #th-#st, #. The Russians won that encounter fair and square. And so did we. T'hen Dave and Annie bought   the Edsel they didn't stop to wonder about things like gas consumption, wear-and-tear on the springs over the years, or anything else practical. Dave solemnly kicked both front tires, then walked around the back and saw the Dewey for President sticker and said immediately. "We'll take it." How could anyone resist? And even when they drove to England on their vacation and began to discover the inconveniences of a fifteen-year-old, nouveau-classic car, they didn't really mind. After all, it was positively "Oh, wait!" said Annie. "Look, look!" They were passing a white clapboard church which stood comfortably under shaggy evergreens softly lit by strings of yellow lights. The gravel yard was full of cars, and there was a hand-drawn sign of a tree out front saying: "Let's stop," Annie said. "They might have -- anything." "Right," Dave said and turned into the parking area. "A lefthanded anything with a secret decoder on the back." They got out of the car. Dave's head was shaved smooth, and he wore bell-bottom trousers -- they were the style in his circle. Annie had a decal on her right arm that said "Arm." She had a decal on her left arm that said "Another Arm." She was wearing a multicolored net dress. That was style, too. Dave didn't know what he was expecting inside, but then there it was, a treasure house of beautiful, wonderful junk, laid out on tables, hanging on racks, standing proud and free. Not like the picture of Mussolini that hung in their living room at home -- Mussolini with his arm lifted and a balloon saying, "I use deodorant. I'm not afraid." That was just a gagged-up picture, but these were things, a gas in themselves. Like, my God, there was an upright Atwater-Kent radio and a black china turtle fifteen inches long, and a jellybag cap with a red tassel, and a four-color map of Storyland. He called Annie over to look at that, and she laughed in delight, a kind of Debbie Reynolds giggle that she'd picked up during the Fifties Festival at the New Yorker. The map's frame needed painting, but he put it with the bear-paw snowshoes he'd found. Snowshoes under Mussolini would look great. And suddenly there was a noise, and Dave turned, and an old woman was yanking this marvelous World War I uniform with the puttees and all out of Annie's hands. It was small enough that Annie could have cut it down for herself with almost no trouble. "You can't have it," the woman said and held it behind her. Annie just looked stunned. A man, seeing the fuss, started toward them. The woman saw him and immediately appealed to him. "Sheriff, they can't have this. I don't want it sold." He looked tiredly at her and said, "What's the matter, Helen? You threw it in for sale." But the woman looked at Annie and burst into tears and held the uniform all the tighter. Dave came up and took Annie's arm, the one that said "Another Arm." "That's all right, Sheriff," he said. "We don't really want it." Annie said, "But -- " Dave put pressure on her arm and turned her away. The woman was still crying, very softly, as if murmuring to herself. "We don't really want it," Dave said. "Let's just take the things we've found and leave." Annie looked at the old woman, hesitated, then nodded. Dave gathered up their finds and took them to the cashier's desk. Outside, back on the road, the night was clear and cool and moonless. Dave and Annie were subdued, wondering about the old woman. "What could she want with an old World War I uniform?" Annie asked. "We could have -- " "I don't know," Dave said and switched on the radio. On came the Sturm and Drang's dixierock version of Lili Marlene, and they forgot about the woman as they sang along, Dave whistling the kazoo part. Suddenly, unaccountably, the radio faded. The lights dimmed, too, which was odd, and the motor sputtered. And then everything went completely dead, motor, lights, radio. They continued to roll down the road, and Dave's eyes had to make an adjustment to the dark. He touched the brakes, and they came to a silent halt. nphey got out, and Dave was about to lift the hood -- uselessly, ritualistically, since he didn't know anything about engines -- when he saw the thing silently moving toward them across the sky. It looked like a fantastic cross between a World War I airplane and a basketball. It settled down beside the road, and only then did Dave realize how big it was; its wings hung over the road, blocking the lane in front of them. On the front of the basketball was something that looked like an elevator shaft. A door at the bottom of it split in the middle and slid back on either side. "Dave...?" said Annie. "I don't believe it," he said. He reached through the open window of the car and pulled out a snowshoe to defend himself and Annie. Then out of the door of the spaceship came rolling two dark furry balls about four feet in diameter. They rolled down the road toward the car. As they came closer, Dave could hear that the balls were laughing -- ordinary, very human, jolly laughter. But there was no sound. It was simply in his head, but nonetheless it got louder as they approached. The one on the left was saying, 'What a marvelous road! Imagine, it needs a line to tell it where to go." Dave said, "We're friendly." His voice cracked a little. The other ball said, "It vocalizes! Oh, delightful! Beautiful! Say something else." "Yes yes, keep vocalizing! Do you do it all the time, or is it j some sort of cultural thing?" "Cultural thing?" said Dave; and he looked bewilderedly at Annie. She was staring openmouthed at the creatures as they rolled toward them. She began to edge behind him. "Maybe they're acultural," said the first ball. "Primitive and unspoiled! Oh, can you imagine? They'll never believe us at home." "I can hardly believe it myself, and I'm here!" said the other. The two balls had rolled right up to them, and they sat pulsating in front of them. "What do you want?" Dave asked, hefting the snowshoe and feeling mortified as he realized what a ridiculous weapon it was. "It still talks out loud," said the first ball, and suddenly it rolled up against him and changed form, flowing around him. "Hey!" Dave said. He tried to struggle, but even though the creature's touch felt light and fuzzy he couldn't work himself loose. "Marvelous, marvelous!" said the ball. "It's got so many angles!" "Damn it, let me go!" Dave said. He raised his snowshoe high and brought it down against the creature. The snowshoe gave a whangggg and rebounded. Both of the balls laughed in surprise, and the one holding Dave released him. It rolled backward and then around in little circles, chuckling, "Beautiful, oh, beautiful! Do you think they can be trained to flop around like that on command?" "Dave, what are they?" Annie asked faintly, backing away. "The other one vocalizes too," said the first ball. "It sounds different, though. Which one do you like best?" "Oh, they're both just wonderful! Couldn't we take them both? Couldn't we?" "Take us?" said Annie. "Oh, Dave..." "Let's try the other one," said the first ball, and it shot forward before Annie could even turn to run and flowed around her. "Oh, this one's bumpier! Much bumpier!" "Dave!" Annie screamed, struggling frantically against the creature, striking her fists awkwardly against its round fur. "This one does it too! This one does it too!" Dave threw down the snowshoe and attacked the creature with feet and hands. He kicked and felt his foot sink into soft fuzziness ; he pounded both fists into it, but it was like hitting dandelion fluff, like beating on air. But the creature flowed back into its ball-form and bounced up and down, chuckling. "They're great! I've never seen anything that's quite like them!" "Oh, couldn't we please take them both? A pair of them would be completely marvelous! Think of it!" "I know, but we don't have enough room. If we found something funnier somewhere, we'd just have to throw one out. No, we'll have to choose just one of them." "Annie!" said Dave. "Run for the car! Go on -- get going!" "But -- " " Run for it!" he said, and he threw himself bodily at the nearer of the two balls. He felt the impact when he hit, but it wasn't solid. The creature seemed to flow around him like water -- no, like spray, like fog -- and as Dave rolled over to get to his feet he saw both creatures rolling pellmell after Annie, who was trying to make it to the car. He got up and ran after them, but they'd already caught Annie. "Dave, help me!" Annie was being carried toward the spaceship, and as Dave tried to get to her the second ball flowed around his feet, tripping him. "Dave!" Annie screamed. He tried to get up, but the second creature bounced up in front of him and settled on his head, flowing down over his face, blinding him. He heard giggling all around him. "Oh, look, look! Are you sure we can't take both?" "Only one. Come on; I have this one in the compartment." The creature withdrew itself from Dave's head. Neither Annie nor the first creature was visible. The second ball reached the open door well before Dave and bounced inside. The doors slid shut behind it. Dave slammed against solid metal, tried desperately to pry the doors apart. He was crying, the tears running down his face. He was still trying to get his fingers into the door when the ship took off. T Te stared, panting and gasping, as it soared away into the night sky. He stood silent and numb, not knowing what to do. Bob Harrison had once had a bandicoot which he'd bought on impulse just because of the name. Eventually it had died or Bob had gotten rid of it. Anyway, he didn't have it any more. Dave wondered what would happen to Annie. The headlights of the car flickered on behind him, and he whirled, startled. In a few seconds the radio started to play, sounding out of place in the empty night. It was Society's Children singing Inside-Out Banana. -- Terry Carr  Alexei Panshin Crazy Annaoj was in lave    and proved it throughout her j incredibly long-lasting life ! , 'Tpwo things will last to the end of time, at least for the tribes of Western Man, no matter how far his spaceships rove. They are sorcery and romantic love, which come to much the same thing in the end. For the more that becomes possible to man, the more wildly he yearns for the impossible, and runs after witches and sorcerers to find it. While the farther he travels, to the star-ribboned rim of the Milky Way and beyond, the more he falls in love with far-off things and yearns for the most distant and unattainable beloved. Also, witchcraft and sorcery are games it takes two to play; the witch or sorcerer and his or her client. r  'he oldest and wealthiest man in the Milky Way and its loveliest girl laughed as they left the gypsy's tent pitched just outside the jewel-pillared spacefield of the most exclusive pleasure planet between the galaxy's two dizzily-whirling, starry arms. The gypsy's black cat, gliding past them back into the tent, only smiled cryptically. A private, eiderdown-surfaced slidewalk, rolled out like the red carpet of ancient cliche, received the begemmed slippers of the honeymooning couple and carried them toward the most diamondglittering pillar of them all, the private hyperspace yacht Eros of the galactic shipping magnate Piliph Foelitsack and his dazzling young bride Annaoj. He looked #I and was # times that old. Cosmetic surgery and organ replacements and implanted featherweight power-prosthetics and pacemakers had worked their minor miracles. At any one time there were three physicians in the Eros listening in on the functionings of his body. She looked and was #, but the wisdom in her eyes was that of Eve, of Helen of Troy, of Cleopatra, of Forzane. It was also the wisdom of Juliet, of Iseult, of Francesca da Rimini. It was a radiant but not a rational wisdom, and it had a frightening ingredient that had been known to make nurses and lady's maids and the wives of planetary presidents and systemic emperors shiver alike. Together now on the whispering white slidewalk, planning their next pleasures, they looked the pinnacle of cosmic romance fulfilled -- he dashing and handsome and young, except that there was something just a shade careful about the way he carried himself; she giddy and slim with a mind that was all sentimental or amorous whim, except for that diamond touch of terrifyingly fixed white light in her most melting or mischievous glance. Despite or perhaps because of those two exceptions, they seemed more akin to the sparkling stars above them than even to the gorgeous pleasure planet around them. He had been born in a ghetto his way up the razor-ranged ladder of economic power until he owned fleets of hyperspace freighters, a dozen planets, and the governments of ten times that many. She had been born in a slum on Aphrodite IV, owning only herself. It had taken her six Terran months to bring herself to the attention of Piliph Foelitsack by way of three beauty contests and one bit part in a stereographic all-senses sex-film, and six more months to become his seventeenth wife instead of one more of his countless casual mistresses. nphe beepers of social gossipeverywhere had hinted discreetly about the infatuation-potential of fringe senile megabillionaires and the coldly murderous greed of teenage starlets. And Annaoj and Piliph Foelitsack had smiled at this gossip, since they knew they loved each other and why: for their matching merciless determination to get what they wanted and keep it, and for the distance that had been between them and was no longer. Of the two, Annaoj's love was perhaps the greater, accounting for the icy, fanatic glint in her otherwise nymphet's eyes. They had laughed on leaving the drab tent of the gypsy fortuneteller, who herself owned a small, beat-up spaceship covered with cabalistic signs, because the last thing she had said to the Shipping king, fixing his bright youthful eyes with her bleared ones, had been, "Piliph Foeiitsack, you have joumied far, very far, for such a young man, yet you shall make even longer journies hereafter. Your past travels will be trifles compared to your travels to come." Both Piliph and Annaoj knew that he had been once to the Andromeda Galaxy and twice to both Magellanic Clouds, though they had not told the silly old gypsy so, being despite their iron wills kindly lovers, still enamored of everything in the cosmos by virtue of their mutual love. They also knew that Piliph had determined to restrict his jaun tings henceforth to the Milky Way, to keep reasonably close to the greatest geriatric scientists, and they were both reconciled, at least by day, to the fact that despite all his defenses, death would come for him in ten or twenty years. Yet, although they did not now tell each other so, the gypsy's words had given a spark of real hope to their silly night-promises under the stars like gems and the galaxies like puffs of powder that: "We will live and love forever." Their loveliest night had been spent a hundred light-years outside the Milky Way -- it was to be Piliph's last extragalactic venture -- where the Eros had emerged briefly from hyperspace and they had lolled and luxuriated for hours under the magnifying crystal skylight of the Master Stateroom, watching only the faroff galaxies, with all of their moiling, toiling home-galaxy out of sight beneath the ship. But now, as if the cryptic universe had determined to give an instant sardonic rejoinder to the gypsy's prediction, the eiderdown slidewalk had not murmured them halfway to the Eros when a look of odd surprise came into Piliph's bright youthful eyes and he clutched at his heart and swayed and would have toppled except that Annaoj caught him in her strong slender arms and held him to her tightly. Something had happened in the  body of Piliph Foelitsack that could not be dealt with by all its pacemakers and its implanted and remotely controlled hormone dispensers, nor by any of the coded orders frantically tapped out by the three physicians monitoring its organs and systems. It took thirty seconds for the ambulance of the Eros to hurtle out from the yacht on a track paralleling the slidewalk and brake to a bone-jolting silent halt. During that half minute Annaoj watched the wrinkles come out on her husband's smooth face, like stars at nightfall in the sky of a planet in a star cluster. She wasted one second on the White-hot impulse to have the gypsy immediately strangled, but she knew that the great aristocrats of the cosmos do not take vengeance on its vermin and that in any event she had far more pressing business with which to occupy herself fully tonight. She clasped the pulseless body a trifle more tightly, feeling the bones and prosthetics through the layer of slack flesh. In two minutes more, in the surgery of the Eros, Philiph's body was in a dissipatory neutrino field, which instantly sent all its heat packing off at the speed of light, but in particles the photons of heat, so that the body was supercooled to the temperature of frozen helium without opportunity for a single disruptive crystal to form. Then without consulting the spacefield dispatching station or any other authority of the pleasure planet, Annaoj ordered the Eros blasted into hyperspace and driven at force speed to the galaxy's foremost geiiatics clinic on Menbar V, though it lay halfway across the vast Milky Way. During the anxious, grueling trip, she did only one thing quite out of the ordinary. She had her husband's supercooled body sprayed with a transparent insulatory film, Which would adequately hold its coolth for a matter of days, and placed in the Master Stateroom. Once a week the body was briefly returned to the dissipatory neutrino field, to bring its temperature down again to within a degree of zero Kelvin. Otherwise she behaved as she always had, changing costume seven times a day, paying great attention to her coiffure and to her cosmetic and juvenation treatments, being idly charming to the officers and stewards. But she spent hours in her husband's office, studying his business and working to the edge of exhaustion his three secretaries. And she always took her small meals in the Master Stateroom. rvn Menkar V they told her, after weeks of test and study, that her husband was beyond reawakening, at least at the present state of medical skill, and to come back in ten years. More would be known then. At that, Annaoj nodded frigidly and took up the reins of her husband's business, conducting them entirely from the Eros as it skipped about through space and hyperspace. Under her guidance the Foelitsack economic empire prospered still more than it had under its founder. She successfully fought or bought off the claims of Piliph's eleven surviving divorced wives, a hundred of his relatives and a score of his prime managers. She regularly returned to Menkar V and frequently visited other clinics and sought out famous healers. She became expert at distinguishing the charlatans from the dedicated, the conceited from the profound. Yet at times she also consulted sorcerers and wizards and witchdoctors. Incantations in exotic tongues and lights were spoken and glowed over Philiph's frigid form, extraterrestrial stenches filled the surgery of the Eros, and there were focused there the meditations of holy creatures which resembled man less than a spider does -- while three or four fuming yet dutiful doctors of the Eros' dozen waited for the crucial moment in the ceremony when they would obediently work a fivesecond reversal of the neutrino field to bring the body briefly to normal temperature to determine whether the magic had worked. But neither science nor sorcery could revive him. She bullied many a police force and paid many a detective agency to hunt down the gypsy with the black cat, but the old crone and her runic spaceship had vanished as utterly as the vital spark in Philiph Foelitsack. No one could tell whether Annaoj really believed that the gypsy had had something to do with the striking down of her husband and might be able to bring him alive, or whether the witch had merely become another counter in the sorcery game of which Annaoj had suddenly grown so fond. In the course of time Annaoj took many lovers. When she tired of one, she would lead him for the first time into the Master Stateroom of the Eros and show him the filmed and frosty body of her husband and send him away without as much as a parting touch of her fingertips and then lie down beside the cold, cold form under the cold, cold stars of the skylight. And she never once let another woman set foot in that room. Not the humblest, nor ugliest maid. Not the greatest sculptress of the Pleiades. Not the most feared and revered sorceress in the Hyades. She became known as Crazy Annaoj, though no one thought it to her face or whispered it within a parsec of her. T#hen she still looked #, ' ' though her age was # times that -- for the sciences of geriatrics and juvenation had progressed greatly since her husband's collapse -- she felt an unfamiliar weariness creeping on her and she ordered the Eros to make once more for Menkar V at force speed. The Eros never emerged from hyperspace. Most say she was lost there, scuttled by Annaoj as she felt death coming on her. A few maintain she exited into altogether another universe, where Crazy Annaoj is still keeping up her search for the healer who can revive Piliph, or playing her game with the doctors and witchdoctors and with her lovers. But in any case the gypsy's prediction was fulfilled, for in the course of Annaoj 's voyages, the body of Piliph Foelitsack had been carried twice to Andromeda and also to two galaxies in Virgo, three in Leo and one in Coma Berenices. #, Title #, United States Code). #. Date of filing: October l, #. #. Title of Publication: Galaxy Magazine. #. Frequency of issue: Bi-monthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: #I Hudson Street, Now York, New York #. #. Location of headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor Publisher: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Editor: Frederik Pohl, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Managing Editor: None. #. Owner: Galaxy Publishing Corporation., #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #; Robert. M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson Street, New York. New York #. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None.  Paragraphs # and # Include, in cases whtre the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such tniftfee is acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear on the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of  bona fide owner. Names and addresses of Individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which ltseir is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been included in paragraphs # and # when the interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid circulation: #. Sales through dealers arid carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #; Single issue nearest filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single Issue nearest to filing date, #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. D. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #; Single Issue nearest to filing date. #. E. Total distribution (sum of G and D) : Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single Issue nearest to filing date. #; F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. Q. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net proas run shown in A): Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #. Single issue nearest to filing date, #. I certify that the statements made by me are correct and complete. Robert M. Guinn. Publisher. Street of Dreams, mof What a lovely city! It cared for every need -- endlessly! Feet of Clay    i armody had never really  planned to leave New York. Why he did so is inexplicable. A born urbanite, he had grown accustomed to the minor inconveniences of metropolitan life. His snug apartment on the #th floor of Levitfrack Towers on West Ninety-Ninth Street was nicely equipped in the current "Spaceship" motif. The windows were double-sealed in tinted lifetime plexiglass, and the air ducts worked through a blind baffle filtration system which sealed automatically when the Combined Atmosphere Pollution Index reached # on the Con Ed scale. True, his oxygen-nitrogen air recirculation system was old, but it was reliable. His water purification cells were obsolete and ineffective; but then, nobody drank water anyhow. Noise was a continual annoyance, unstoppable and inescapable, But Carmody knew that there was no cure for this, since the ancient art of soundproofing had been lost. It was urban man's lot to listen, a captive audience, to the arguments, music and watery gurglings of his adjacent neighbors. Even, this torture could be alleviated, however, by producing similar sounds of one's own. Going to work each day entailed certain dangers; but these were more apparent than real. Disadvantaged snipers continued to make their ineffectual protests from rooftops and occasionally succeeded in potting an unwary out-of-towner. But as a rule, their aim was abominable. Additionally, the general acceptance of lightweight personal armor had taken away most of their sting, and the sternly administered State law forbidding the personal possession of surplus cannon had rendered them ineffectual. Thus, no single factor can be adduced for Carmody's sudden decision to leave what was generally considered the world's most exciting megapolitan agglomeration. Blame it on a vagrant impulse, a pastoral fantasy, or on sheer, perversity The simple, irreducible fact is, one day Carmody opened his copy of the Daily TimesNews and saw an advertisement for a model city in New Jersey. "Come live in Bellwether, the city that cares," the advertisement proclaimed. There followed a list of utopian claims which need not 'be reproduced here. "Huh," said Carmody, and read on. Bellwether was within easy commuting distance. One simply drove through the Ulysses S. Grant Tunnel at # rd Street, took the Hoboken Shunt Subroad to the Palisades Interstate Crossover, followed that for # miles on the Blue-Cbarlie Sorter Loop that led onto U.S. # (The Hague Memorial Tollway), proceeded along that a distance of #.I miles to the Garden State Supplementary Access Service Road (Provisional) , upon which one tended west to Exit #I A, which was King's Highbridge Gate Road, and then continued along that for a distance of # miles. And there you were. "By jingo," said Carmody, I'll do it." . And he did. II TT'ing's Highbridge Gate Road   ended on a neatly trimmed plain. Carmody got out of his car and looked around. Half a mile ahead of him he saw a small city. A single modest signpost identified it as Bellwether . This city was not constructed in the traditional manner of American cities, with outliers of gas stations, tentacles of hot-dog stands, fringes of motels and a protective carapace of junkyards; but rather, as some Italian hill towns are fashioned, it rose abruptly, without physical preamble, the main body of the town presenting itself at once and without amelioration. Carmody found this appealing. He advanced into the city itself. Bellwether had a warm and open look. Its streets were laid out generously, and there was a frankness about the wide bay windows of its store-fronts. As he penetrated deeper, Carmody found other delights. Just within the city he entered a piazza, like a Roman piazza, only smaller; and in the center of the piazza there was a fountain, and standing in the fountain was a marble representation of a boy with a dolphin, and from the dolphin's mouth a stream of clear water issued. "I do hope you like it," a voice said from behind Carmody's left shoulder. "It's nice," Carmody said. "I constructed it and put it there myself," the voice told him. "It seemed to me that a fountain, despite the antiquity of its concept, is esthetically functional. And this piazza, with its benches and shady chestnut trees, is copied from a Bolognese model. Again, I did not inhibit myself with the fear of seeming oldfashioned. The true artist uses What is necessary, be it a thousand years old or one second new." "I applaud your sentiment," Carmody said. "Permit me to introduce myself. I am Edward Carmody." He turned, smiling. But there was no one behind his left shoulder, or behind his right shoulder, either. There was no one in the piazza, nobody at all in sight. "Forgive me," the voice said. "I didn't mean to startle you. I thought you knew." "Knew what?" Carmody asked. "Knew about me." "Well, I don't," Carmody said. "Who are you and where are you speaking from?" "I am the voice of the city," the voice said. "Or to put it another way, I am the city itself, Bellwether, the actual and veritable city, speaking to you." "Is that a fact?" Carmody said sardonically. "Yes," he answered himself, "I suppose it is a fact. So all right, you're a city. Big deal!" He turned away from the fountain and strolled across the piazza like a man who conversed with cities every day of his life, and who was slightly bored with the whole thing. He walked down various streets and up certain avenues. He glanced into store windows and noted houses. He paused in front of statuary, but only briefly. "Well?" the city of Bellwether asked after a while. "Well what?" Carmody answered at once. "What do you think of me?" "You're okay," Carmody said. "Only okay? Is that all?" "Look," Carmody said, "a city is a city. When you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all." "That's untrue!" the city said, with some show of pique. "I am distinctly different from other cities. I am unique." # # A re you indeed?" Carmody said scornfully. "To me you look like a conglomeration of badly assembled parts. You've got an Italian piazza, a couple of Greek-type buildings, a row of Tudor houses, an old-style New York tenement, a California hot-dog stand shaped like a tugboat and God knows what else. What's so unique about that?" "The combination of those forms into a meaningful entity is unique," the city said. "These older forms are not anchronisms, you understand. They are representative styles of living, and as such are appropriate in a well wrought machine for living. Would you care for some coffee and perhaps a sandwich or some fresh fruit?"" "Coffee sounds good," Carmody said. He allowed Bellwether to guide him around the comer to an open-air cafe. The cafe was called O You Kid and was a replica of a Gay Nineties saloon, right down to the tiffany lamps and the cutglass chandelier and the player piano. Like everything else that Carmody had seen in the city, it was spotlessly clean, but without people. "Nice atmosphere, don't you think?" Bellwether asked. "Campy," Carmody pronounced. "Okay if you like that sort of thing." A foarming mug of cappucino was lowered to his table on a stainless steel tray. Carmody sipped. "Good?" Bellwether asked. "Yes, very good." "I rather pride myself on my coffee," the city said quietly. "And on my cooking. Wouldn't you care for a little something? An omelette, perhaps, or a souffle?" "Nothing," Carmody said firmly. He leaned back in his chair and said, "So you're a model city, huh?"" "Yes, that is that I have the honor to be," Bellwether said. "I am the most recent of all model cities; and, I believe, the most satisfactory. I was conceived by a joint study group from Yale and the University of Chicago, who were working on a Rockefeller fellowship. Most of my practical details were devised by M.I.T., although some special sections of me came from Princeporation. My actual construction was a General Electric project, and the money was procured by grants from the Ford and Carnegie Foundations, as well as several other institutions I am not at liberty to mention." "Interesting sort of history," Carmody said, with hateful nonchalance. "That's a Gothic cathedral across the street, isn't it?" "Modified Romanesque," the city said. "Also interdenominational and open to all faiths, with a designed seating capacity for three hundred people." "That doesn't seem like many for a building of that size." "It's not, of course. Designedly. My idea was to combine awesomeness with coziness." "Where are the inhabitants of this town, by the way?" Carmody asked. "They have left," Bellwether said mournfully. "They have all departed." "Why?" nphe city was silent for a while, then said. "There was a breakdown in city-community relations. A misunderstanding, really. Or perhaps I should say, an unfortunate series of misunderstandings. I suspect that rabblerousers played their part." "But what happened, precisely?" "I don't know," the city said. "I really don't know. One day they simply all left. Just like that! But I'm sure they'll be back." "I wonder," Carmody said. "I am convinced of it," the city said. "But putting that aside; why don't you stay here, Mr. Carmody?" "I haven't really had time to consider it," Carmody said. "How could you help but like it?" Bellwether said. "Just think -- you would have the most modem, up-to-date city in the world at your beck and call." "That does sound interesting," Carmody said. "So give it a try, how could it hurt you?" the city asked. "All right, I think I will," Carmody said. He was intrigued by the city of Bellwether. But he was also apprehensive. He wished he knew exactly why the city's previous occupants had left. A t Bellwether's insistence, Carmody slept that night in the sumptuous bridal suite of the King George V Hotel. Bellwether served him breakfast on the terrace and played a brisk Hayden quartet while Carmody ate. The morning air was delicious. If Bellwether hadn't told him, Carmody would never have guessed it was reconstituted. When he was finished, Carmody leaned back and enjoyed the view of Bellwether's western quarter -- a pleasing jumble of Chinese pagodas, Venetian footbridges, Japanese canals, a green Burmese hill, a Corinthian temple, a Californian parking lot, a Norman tower and much else besides. "You have a spendid view," he told the city. "I'm so glad you appreciate it," Bellwether replied. "The problem of style was argued from, the day of my inception. One group held for consistency : a harmonious group of shapes blending into a harmonious whole. But quite a few model cities are like that. They are uniformly dull, artificial entities created by one man or one committee, unlike real cities." "You're sort of artificial yourself, aren't you?" Carmody asked. "Of course! But I do not pretend to be anything else. I am not a fake 'city of the future' or a mock-florentine bastard. I am a true agglutinated congeries. I am supposed to be interesting and stimulating in addition to being functional and practical." "Bellwether, you look okay to me," Carmody said, in a sudden rush of expansiveness. "Do all model cities talk like you?" "Certainly not. Most cities up to now, model or otherwise, never said a word. But their inhabitants didn't like that. It made the city seem too huge, too masterful, too soulless, too impersonal. That is why I was created with a voice and an artificial consciousness to guide it." "I see," Carmody said. "The point is, my artificial consciousness personalizes me, Which is very important in an age of depersonalization. It enables me to be truly responsive. It permits me to be creative in meeting the demands of my occupants. We can reason with each other, my people and I. By carrying on a continual and meaningful dialogue, we can help each other to establish a dynamic, flexible and truly viable urban environment. We can modify each other without any significant loss of individuality." "It sounds fine," Carmody said. "Except, of course, that you don't have anyone here to carry on a dialogue with." "That is the only flaw in the scheme," the city admitted. "But for the present, I have you." "Yes, you have me," Carmody said and wondered why the words rang unpleasantly on his ear. "And, naturally, you have me," the city said. "It is a reciprocal relationship, which is the only kind worth having. But now, my dear Carmody, suppose I show you around myself. Then we can get you settled in and regularized." "Get me what?" "I didn't mean that the way it sounded," the city said. "It simply is an. unfortunate scientific expression. But you understand, I'm sure, that a reciprocal relationship necessitates obligations on the part of both involved parties. It couldn't very well be otherwise, could it?" "Not unless it was a laissezfaire relationship." "We're trying to get away from all that," Bellwether said. "Laissez-faire becomes a doctrine of the emotions, you know, and leads non-stop to anomie. If you will just come this way..." Ill G armody went where he was asked and beheld the excellencies of Bellwether. He toured the power plant, the water filtration center, the industrial park and the light industries section. He saw the children's park and the Odd Fellow's Hall. He walked through a museum and an art gallery, a concert hall and a theater, a bowling alley, a billiards parlor, a Go-Kart track and a movie theater. He became tired and wanted to stop. But the city wanted to show itself off, and Carmody had to look at the fivestory American Express building, the Portuguese synagogue, the statue of Buckminster Fuller, the Greyhound Bus Station and several other attractions. At last it was over. Carmody concluded that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, except for a small part of it that was in the beholder's feet. "A little lunch now?" the city asked. "Fine," Carmody said. He was guided to the fashionable Rochambeau Cafe, where he began with potage au petit pois and ended with petits fours. "What about a nice Brie to finish off?" the city asked. "No, thanks," Carmody said. "I'm full. Too full, as a matter of fact." of first-rate Camembert?" "I couldn't possibly." "Perhaps a few assorted fruits. Very refreshing to the palate." "It's not my palate that needs refreshing," Carmody said. "At least an apple, a pear and a couple of grapes?" "Thanks, no." "A couple of cherries?" "No, no, no!" "A meal isn't complete without a little fruit," the city said. "My meal is," Carmody said. "There are important vitamins, only found in fresh fruit." "I'll just have to struggle along without them." "Perhaps half an orange, which I will peel for you? Citrus fruits have no, bulk at all." "I couldn't possibly." "Not even one quarter of an orange? If I take out all the pits?" "Most decidedly not." "It would make me feel better," the city said. "I have a completion compulsion, you know, and no meal is complete without a piece of fruit." "No! No! No!" "All right, don't get so excited," the city said. "If you don't like the sort of food I serve, that's up to you." "But I do like it!" "Then if you like it so much, Why won't you eat some fruit?" "Enough," Carmody said. "Give me a couple grapes." "I wouldn't want to force anything on you." "You're not forcing. Give me, please." "You're quite sure?" "Gimme!" Carmody shouted. "So take," the city said and produced a magnificent bunch of muscatel grapes. Carmody ate them all. They were very good. t i T? xcuse me," the city said. "What are you doing?" Carmody sat upright and opened his eyes. "I was taking a little nap," he said. "Is there anything wrong with that?" "What should be wrong with a perfectly natural thing like that?" the city said. "Thank you," Carmody said, and closed his eyes again, "But why nap in a chair?" the city asked, "Because I'm in a chair, and I'm already half asleep." "You'll get a crick in your back," the city warned him. "Don't care," Carmody mumbled, his eyes still closed. "Why not take a proper nap? Over here, on the couch?" "I'm already napping comfortably right here." "You're not really comfortable," the city pointed out. "The human anatomy is not constructed for sleeping sitting up." "At the moment, mine is," Carmody said. "It's not. Why not try the couch?" "The chair is fine." "But the couch is finer. Just try it, please, Carmody. Carmody?" "Eh? What's that?" Carmody said, waking up. "The couch. I really think you should rest on the couch." "All right!" Carmody said, struggling to his feet. "Where is this couch?" He was guided out of the restaurant, down the street, around the comer, and into a building marked "The Snoozerie." There were a dozen couches. Carmody went to the nearest. "Not that one," the city said. "It's got a bad spring." "It doesn't matter," Carmody said. "I'll sleep around it." "That will result in a cramped posture." "Christ!" Carmody said, getting to his feet. "Which couch would you recommend?" "This one right back here," the city said. "It's a king-size, the best in the place. The yieldpoint of the mattress has been scientifically determined. The pillows -- " "Right, fine, good," Carmody said, lying down on the indicated couch. "Shall I play you some soothing music?" "Don't bother." "Just as you wish. I'll put out the lights, then." "Fine." "Would you like a blanket? I control the temperature here, of course, but sleepers often get ness." "It doesn't matter! Leave me alone!" "All right!" the city said. "I'm not doing this for myself, you know. Personally, I never sleep." "Okay, sorry," Carmody said. "That's perfectly all right." There was a long silence. Then Carmody sat up. "What's the matter?" the city asked. "Now I can't sleep," Carmody said. "Try closing your eyes and consciously relaxing every muscle in your body, starting with the big toe and working upward to -- " "I can't sleep!" Carmody shouted. "Maybe you weren't very sleepy to begin with," the city suggested. "But at least you could close your eyes and try to get a little rest. Won't you do that for me?" "No!" Carmody said. "I'm not sleepy and I don't need a rest." "Stubborn!" the city said. "Do what you like. I've tried my best." "Yeah," Carmody said, getting to his feet and walking out of the Snoozerie. IV f "armody stood on a little  curved bridge and looked over a blue lagoon. "This is a copy of the Rialto bridge in Venice," the city said. "Scaled down, of course." "I know," Carmody said. "I read the sign." "It's rather enchanting, isn't it?" "Sure, it's fine," Carmody said, lighting a cigarette. "You're doing a lot of smoking," the city pointed out. "I know. I feel like smoking." "As your medical advisor, I must point out that the link between smoking and lung cancer is conclusive." "I know." "If you switched to a pipe, your chances would be improved." "I don't like pipes." "What about a cigar, then?" "I don't like cigars." He lit another cigarette. "That's your third cigarette in five minutes," the City said. "Goddamn it, I'll smoke as much and as often as I please!" Carmody shouted. "Well, of course you will!" the city said. "I was merely trying to advise you for your own good. Would you want me to simply stand by and not say a word while you destroyed yourself?" "Yes," Carmody said. "I can't believe that you mean that. There is an ethical imperative involved here. Man can act against his best interests; but a machine is not allowed that degree of perversity." "Get off my back," Carmody said sullenly. "Quit pushing me around." "Pushing you around? My dear Carmody, have I coerced you in any way? Have I done any more than advise you?" "Maybe not. But you talk too much." "Perhaps I don't talk enough," the city said. "To judge from the response I get." "You talk too much," Carmody repeated and lit a cigarette. "That is your fourth cigarette in five minutes." Carmody opened his mouth to bellow an insult. Then he changed his mind and walked away. CtTTfThat's this?" Carmody   asked. "It's a candy machine," the city told him. "It doesn't look, like one." "Still, it is one. This design is a modification of a design by Saarionrnen for a silo. I have miniaturized it, of course, and -- " "It still doesn't look like a candy machine. How do you work it?" "It's very simple. Push the red button. Now wait. Press down one of those levers on Row A; now press the green button. There!" A Baby Ruth bar slid into Carmody's hand. "Huh," Carmody said. He stripped off the paper and bit into the bar. "Is this a real Baby Ruth bar or a copy of one?" he asked. "It's a real one. I had to subcontract the candy concession because of the pressure of work." "Huh," Camiody said, letting the candy wrapper slip from his fingers. "That," the city said, "is an. example of the kind of thoughtlessness I always encounter." "It's just a piece of paper," Carmody said, turning and looking at the candy wrapper lying on the spotless street. "Of course it's just a piece of paper," the city said. "But multiply it by a hundred thousand inhabitants and what do you have?" "A hundred thousand Baby Ruth wrappers," Carmody answered at once. "I don't consider that funny," the city said. "You wouldn't want to live in the midst of all that paper, I can assure you. You'd be the first to complain if this street were strewn with garbage. But do you do your share? Do you even clean up after yourself? Of course not! You leave it to me, even though I have to run all of the other functions, of the city, night and day, without even Sundays off." Carmody bent down to pick up the candy wrapper. But just before his fingers could close on it, a pincer arm shot out of the nearest sewer, snatched the paper away and vanished from sight. "It's all right," the city said. "I'm used to cleaning up after people. I do it all the time." "Yuh," said Carmody. "Nor do I expect any gratitude." "I'm grateful, I'm grateful!" Carmody said. "No, you're not," Bellwether said. "So okay, maybe I'm not. What do you want me to say?" "I don't want you to say anything," the city said. "Let us consider the incident closed." C C T Tad enough?" the city said, after dinner. "Plenty," Carmody said. "You didn't eat much." "I ate all I wanted. It was very good." "If it was so good, why didn't you eat more?" "Because I couldn't hold any more." "If you hadn't spoiled your appetite with that candy bar..." "Goddamn it, the candy bar didn't spoil my appetite! I just "You're lighting a cigarette," the city said. "Yeah," Carmody said. "Couldn't you wait a little longer?" "Now look," Carmody said, "Just what in hell do you -- " "But we have something more important to talk about," the city said quickly. "Have you thought about what you're going to do for a living?" "I haven't really had much time to think about it." "Well, I have been thinking about it. It would be nice if you became a doctor." "Me? I'd have to take a special college courses, then get into medical school, and so forth." "I can arrange all that," the city said. "Not interested." "Well... What about law?" "Never." "Engineering is an excellent line." "Not for me." "What about accounting?" "Not on your life." "What do you want to be?" "A jet pilot," Carmody, said impulsively. "Oh, come now!" "I'm quite serious." "I don't even have an air field here." "Then I'll pilot somewhere else." "You're only saying, that to spite me!" "Not at all," Carmody said. "I want to be a pilot, I really do. I've always wanted to be a pilot! Honest I have!" There was a long silence. Then the city said, "The choice is entirely up to you." This was said in a voice like death.   "Out for a walk," Carmody said. "At nine-thirty in the evening?" "Sure. Why not?" "I thought you were tired." "That was quite some time ago." "I see. And I also thought that you could sit here and we could have a nice chat." "How about if we talk after I get back?" Carmody asked. "No, it doesn't matter," the city said. "The walk doesn't matter," Carmody said, sitting down. "Come on, we'll talk." "I no longer care to talk," the city said. "Please go for your walk." V tCVTell' good night," Carmo' ' dy said. "I beg your pardon?" "I said, 'good night.' " "You're going to sleep?" "Sure. IP's late, I'm tired." "You're going to sleep now?" "Well, why not?" "No reason at all," the city said, "except that you have forgotten to wash." "Oh... I guess I did forget. I'll wash in the morning." "How long is it since you've had a bath?" "Too long. I'll take one in the morning." "Wouldn't you feel better if you took one right now?" "No." "Even if I drew the bath for you?" "No! Goddamn it, no! I'm going to sleep!" "Do exactly as you please," the city said. "Don't wash, don't study, don't eat a balanced diet. But also, don't blame me." "Blame you? For what?" "For anything," the city said. "Yes. But what did you have in mind, specifically?" "It isn't important." "Then why did you bring it up in the first place?" "I was only thinking of you," the city said. "I realize that." "You must know that it can't benefit me if you wash or not." "I'm aware of that." "When one cares," the city went on, "when one feels one's responsibilities, it is not nice to hear oneself sworn at." "I didn't swear at you." "Not this time. But earlier today you did." "Well... I was nervous." "That's because of the smoking." "Don't start that again!" "I won't," the city said. "Smoke like a furnace. What does it matter to me?" "Damned right," Carmody said, lighting a cigarette. "But my failure," the city said. "No, no," Carmody said. "Don't say it, please don't!" "Forget I said it," the city said. "All right." "Sometimes I get overzealous." "Sure." "And it's especially difficult because I'm right. I am right, you know." "I know," Carmody said. "You're right, you're right, you're always right. Right right right right right -- " "Don't overexcite yourself betime," the city said. "Would you care for a glass of milk?" "No." "You're sure?" Carmody put his hands over his eyes. He felt very strange. He also felt extremely guilty, fragile, dirty, unhealthy and sloppy. He felt generally and irrevocably bad, and it would always be this way unless he changed, adjusted, adapted... But instead of attempting anything of the sort he rose to his feet, squared his shoulders, and marched away past the Roman piazza and the Venetian bridge. ( # A IT #h ere are you going?" ' ' the city asked. "What's the matter?" Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc. # selections on a #inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Golcixy Publishing Corp,  # I Hudson Street, York City # Yas, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose cheek or money order of #. Address City  State... Bp Cade... (Offer good in W, S. A. Qmfy) Silent, tight-lipped, Carmody continued past the children's park and the American Express building. "What did I do wrong?" the city cried. "What, just tell me what?" Carmody made no reply but strode past the Rochambeau Cafe and the Portuguese synagogue, coming at last to the pleasant green plain that surrounded Bellwether. "Ingrate!" the city screamed after him. "You're just like all the others. All of you humans are disagreeable animals, and you're never really satisfied with anything." Carmody got into his car and started the engine. "But of course," the city said, in a more thoughtful voice, "you're never really dissatisfied with anything, either. The moral, I suppose, is that a city must learn patience." Carmody turned the car onto King's Highbridge Gate Road and started east, toward New York. "Have a nice trip!" Bellwether called after him. "Don't worry about me, I'll be waiting up for you." Carmody stepped down hard on the accelerator. He really wished he hadn't heard that last remark. tor your information A bout eight months ago the New York Zoological Society suffered a loss that was not noticed by most of the visitors to the Zoo. A single olm that had survived its companions for five lonely years finally died, presumably of old age. This sole survivor of a group of eight that The Balkan cave salamander Proteus anguinus, known as Olm. Drawn from a live specimen by G. Mutzel in #. had arrived in #I had been the only olm in the United States. The man who first mentioned the olm in print, and might therefore be called its discoverer, was Johann Weichard, Baron von Valvasor, who, in #, published a book with the title Die Ehre des Herzogthums Krain. Translated this reads: The Honor of the Dukedom of Krain. The Krain was a part of the old AustroHungarian Empire and is now a section of northern Yugoslavia. Somewhere in the mountains of that section of the Balkans dragons could be found, the people insisted. The baron was not sure whether the existence of dragons would increase or decrease "the honor" of the dukedom he was writing about -- at any event he investigated. Finally somebody brought him a "young dragon"; it was a span, or about # inches, in length, "and resembled a lizard." He also added a remark that seems to mean that they are found only sometimes but not all the time. About sixty years later an Italian, Scopoli by name, became interested in the small animal with the red external gills and the dead-white skin. The local fishermen told him that they never caught one except when the river flooded. Scopoli, of whom practically nothing is known otherwise, also reported that the fishermen called it "the humanfish," presumably because it lacks scales and its skin is white. Scopoli's final service to zoology consisted in presenting a specimen to the deacon of a local church, Court Siegmund von Hohenwart, who was interested in local natural history. He in turn forwarded the specimen to Professor Laurenti of the University of Vienna, who provided the first scientific description and also coined its scientific name: Proteus anguinus. The first part of the name refers to Neptune's herdsman (only Prof. Laurenti knows why), while the second part comes from the Latin word ariguis meaning "snake" and especially a small snake. The common name olm appeared first in the German biological journal Isis in about # and was coined by its editor, the naturalist Lorenz Oken (#). I have never been able to find out what "olm" means or whether it has a meaning, but the name caught on and is in international use. (To pronounce it properly say ollem first and then suppress the "e".) T aurenti had determined cor' rectly that the animal was an amphibian related to newts and salamanders and that it lived in subterranean waters all its life. By now the idea of "cave salamanders" is well established, but the olm was the first to be discovered and it was quite sensational for this reason. Soon both its main habitat and the reason for its sporadic appearance became known. The main habitat was, and is, a large subterranean lake, the Grotto of Adelsberg (or Postojna jama in Serbian, now the official name). When the spring thaw was sudden, releasing large quantities of water, the Adelsberg grotto and a dozen smaller ones in the vicinity were flooded and the olms were washed into the rivers. The average length of a fully grown olm is # inches; a few specimens that grew to # inches have been reported. The olm swims by wriggling its whole body; the four short legs are useless for locomotion. The forelegs have three clawless toes, the hindlegs only two. Because of the concentration of blood vessels the body is white or very faintly pink. There are no visible eyes; the skin extends unbroken over the places where the eyes should be. But when dissecting an olm, rudimentary eyes, connected to the brain by optical nerves, can easily be found. Now a salamander is considered to be the larval form as long as it has gills; normally a salamander, after spending its youth in water, goes on land, sheds its gills and, among other things, propagates its kind. The environment of the olm prevents it from following this procedure, but the olms propagated nonetheless. It was the first case of a larva being capable of sexual activity -- another fact that increased the olm's fame. Naturalists were so surprised that they coined a new term for this behavior: "neoteny." We now know that the olm is not the only neotenic salamander; the Mexican axolotl as well as the "mudpuppies" (Necturus) of the United States are neotenic too. A complete list of neotenic forms would probably consist of at least a dozen mostly unfamiliar names. Naturalists saw themselves confronted by an eyeless neotenic salamander that spends its whole life in the cold water of a lightless cave, and the first question that occurred to them was: what does it eat? And speaking of food, how does it find whatever it eats? Salamanders do not eat anything vegetable, hence the food had to consist of insects, spiders, small fresh-water crustaceans, possibly fish eggs. Strictly speaking we still do not know What the olms of the Adelsberg grotto eat when at home, we only know what they will eat in captivity. Tpor decades the olm was the favorite aquarium animal of European naturalists, if only because the preferred observation "in the field" was an impossibility. Just to get to the "noble mountain" (this is What Adels berg means) was a tiring journey. A trip across the cave could be arranged by local guides for a fee, but people need light to see; and while the cave fauna is blind, it is still light-sensitive enough to swim away from illumination. Therefore, since the journey of the naturalist to the olm was useless, the olm was brought to the naturalist. The first long series of observations of captive specimens was carried out by Fraulein Marie von Chauvin, one of the early female scientists, who lived in Freiburg im Breisgau, in western Germany. Her study began in about # and lasted for many years. She fed small worms (Tubiiex, as well as small earthworms), young water snails, tadpoles and fresh-water crustaceans to her olms and soon saw that it was the motion of the food animals that made the olms aware of their presence. If a snail remained motionless it was disregarded. In general that olms remained at the bottoms of their containers, but if the water was very shallow they might come to the surface to inhale air, Marie von Chauvin noticed that a sudden shock (somebody in the house had dropped something heavy) caused the olms to panic; in their subterranean lakes a shock wave in the water is evidently a danger signal. Marie von Chauvin could do almost anything for her olms; she could provide fresh water at a temperature of from # to # degrees Fahrenheit; she could feed them what they liked to eat or would at least accept; but she could not keep light away all the time. After all, she wanted to observe them. If the period of illumination was not longer than # or # minutes per day, nothing happened, but if the olms were exposed even to weak light for a few hours a day they developed color in their skin. Some turned a reddish brown. Others, and this was the more customary change, turned a bluish black. It began with spots that enlarged and blended together and in some individuals tiny yellow or reddish spots appeared on the dark background. Was this dark coloration with small spots the original color of the olm's ancestors? It seemed likely, for the olm certainly had not evolved in those dark waters. At one time its ancestors must have been open-air salamanders with protective coloration and with functioning eyes. Then they became trapped underground in an environment that kept them alive by feeding them, but where there was no need for either eyesight or for coloration. Since they could not evolve into finished salamanders they turned neoterdc, though they might have had this characteristic while still in the open air. T rhen Marie von Chauvin be' ' gan to keep olms, she had already had experience with another neotenic salamander, the axolotl. Back in # the Jardin d'a cclimation in Paris had received half a dozen axolotls from Mexico. They were cared for by the curator, Monsieur A. Dumeril, who knew what was then known about them and who was, therefore, not too surprised when they started mating a year later. The second generation was raised in separate tanks and grew nearly as large as the original imports half a year after hatching. So far everything went as expected', but then some of the new generation began to change into a finished gill-less adult salamander. Monsieur Dumeril tried to accelerate the change in those that had stayed in the water by amputating half of their gills. It did not work; the axolotls simply grew another bunch of gills. Marie von Chauvin, after reading Dumeril's report, decided on persuasion rather than operation. When she saw that one of her five axolotls stayed near the surface of the water most of the time she put him into another aquarium where there was only a small and shallow water area; most of the floor space was land, with lush wet moss. The axolotl took just four days to change into the adult form. Three others went through the same change a few weeks later, but the fifth specimen (which was the smallest of the lot) never changed. It remained a waterliving axolotl. Since it had been so easy to make the axolotl go through its full life cycle, Marie von Chauvin tried to make the olm do the same. It did not work; olms would grow black but never shed their gills. Any attempt to force the issue only resulted in the death of the specimen. The olms, it seemed, had adjusted so well to their cave environment that they could not revert to the original any more. As a by-product of her work Marie von Chauvin had established that the eggs of the olm are spherical with a diameter of a sticky outer layer, and the femals attached them one by one to a stone. That olms lay eggs had also been seen seven years earlier, in #, by one of the tourist guides at Adelsberg. The larvae hatching from the eggs had been quite large, about an inch in length as had been established by A. Zeller in #  -- he had needed patience for this observation, for # days went by between the laying of the eggs and the hatching of a few of them. Zeller was pleased with his results, but somebody else had been digging in a library and had come up with an issue of Oken's Isis dating from the year #. And that issue contained a report from a landowner at Stratil (in the area where the olm occurs naturally) with the name of J. Geek von Verch. He was the county judge in addition to being a landowner, and his story was put down in language fit for a supreme court decision. "On June #, # I, as well as members of my own family and members of my neighbor's families, witnessed the birth of a live young olm." The young was # inches long and shaped like an adult, but it had two black spots "like poppyseeds" where one would expect the eyes to be. XT That could one say now? ' ' Several tourist guides, one professional naturalist (Marie von Chauvin) and one amateur naturalist (Zeller) bad watched the egg-laying. Zeller bad even watched the hatching. But one could not disregard the solemn statement of the old county judge. Was it possible that there were two species of olms, indistinguishable by humans and certainly closely related, but differing from each other by the method of propagation? One species that laid eggs -- from # to # in number -- like most salamanders? And another species that hatched an egg in the oviduct and produced a live and larger young? And all this coupled with neoteny! That something looks incredible does not matter in nature. Facts are facts, and what was needed to arrive at an opinion were more facts. The next fact came from a Professor Nusbaum in Lemberg. He had bought five specimens for dissection and placed the glass jar holding them on the window sill. Of course they turned dark, but that was unimportant considering their final fate. When Professor Nusbaum -- who had already dissected two of them -- looked at the jar on the morning of October #, #, he saw four olms instead of three. The fourth was pale, skinny and small; it must have been born alive during the night. That it died a few hours later is unimportant; here was another case of a live birth with no eggs in evidence anywhere. By that time experiments with olms were being carried on in Vienna, at the Institute for Experimental Biology. It belonged to the venerable University of Vienna but was located in the Vienna Prater, the amusement area. The heavy stone building had originally been sponsored by a Habsburg prince as a public aquarium. Subsequently it had been turned -- more in keeping with the surroundings -- into a very intimate night club. When the night club went bankrupt, around the year #, the University of Vienna acquired the building. The basement then had contained a cistern and was not waterproof in general; one of the first steps taken by the University's contractor was to pump it dry. But the windowless basement, where the temperature never rose above # degrees Fahrenheit, was a perfect natural grotto, suitable for cave salamanders. One quarter of the now dry basement was enclosed by a foot-high wall and filled with well water, making a dark aquarium one foot deep with an area of # square feet. Tn # it was ready and forty olms were purchased to be kept there. The purpose of the experiment was to find out whether the olm lays eggs or produces live young -- or whether there were two species which humans could not tell apart. Humans cannot even tell the sexes apart. Hence the large number; it was highly unlikely that all forty would belong to the same sex. The young biologist in charge, Dr. Paul Kammerer, saw to it that they were well fed and otherwise left them alone. During his frequent trips to the basement for feeding and inspection he looked for young or eggs. One year went by and there were neither young nor eggs. Another half year went by with the same negative result. in the improbability of all # olms (one had died) being either male or females, lost interest. It tines not seem to have occurred to him that the olm's asexual behavior was due to overfeeding, but his loss of interest corrected this factor. He fed them When he thought of it, and in October # he thought he saw a few smaller ones in the tank but did not accept tihem as young. He thought they bad shrunk from lack of food and became a little more diligent as a result. By May # he saw a few small specimens that had to be young because they still had eye spots. In October # he saw a large olm that looked pregnant. He caught it and put it into a separate jar which was left in the dark basement. Two weeks later there were two small olms, nearly # inches long, in the jar with the adult. Then he really went to work, and two years later he announced his findings. When olms are kept in water that is warmer than # degrees Fahrenheit the females will lay eggs, of which only a small percentage (say one in twenty-five), will hatch. If the water is colder, one egg will hatch in one oviduct of the female, or sometimes, one in each oviduct while the other eggs degenerate into a kind of jelly which may be absorbed either by the body of the mother or else feed the embroyo that has hatched. At any event the young that are born alive are about twice as large as those that have hatched from eggs. Since the temperature in the natural cave lakes is always colder than # degrees Fahrenheit, Kammerer concluded that live birth was normal for the olm. Tecause of subsequent events- Kammerer's name acquired a bad reputation. He was obsessed with proving a discredited biological concept, namely the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and he produced charts that could not be true. He faked' "acquired characteristics" by such means as injections of India ink under the skin of toads and, after having been found out, committed suicide. It is not surprising that everything Kammerer bad said was suspect after his death, but his first set of experiments with olms was probably geniune. For his second olm experiment one cannot be certain any more. He decided that he would succeed where Marie von. Chauvin had failed; he would force an olm to acquire the adult shape of its ancestors. Specifically he would try to make a young olm keep and develop its eyes. I n the meantime the keepers of other aquaria had solved a problem. They had olms and they wanted to exhibit 'them to the public. Of course one could just illuminate the aquaria, but then the olms would turn black. The ideal was to exhibit olms that stayed pale. One of the keepers reasoned as follows: a photographic plate, exposed to light, turns black. But in the darkroom undeveloped plates can be handled safely under red light, red light being less capable of causing chemical changes than white light. He tried it, and. it worked; an olm under "darkroom illumination" was made dimly visible to visitors but it remained pale. Kammerer took a young hn and let it grow under red light, hoping that this would stimulate the eyes without thickening the skin that covered them. From time to time he exposed it to daylight for stronger stimulation. Of course the skin slowly turned black but only after the eyes were established and stayed uncovered. All the while the specimen was kept in only one inch of water to stimulate the lungs. He obtained a black olm with clearly visible and presumably functioning eyes that could live for short periods outside the water. When Kammerer announced this result nobody doubted his word -- after all this was a possible result which merely had required extraordinary care. But after it became known that Kammerer had been dishonest in other experiments, the "adult olm" was doubted in retrospect. Since I knew that old professor Dr. Richard B. Goldschmidt had known Kammerer personally (I had not because of an age difference of about # years), I asked him whether he had seen the "adult olm." Professor Goldschmidt, then at the University of California, replied that Kammerer had shown, him a specimen with normal eyes. But he, also doubtful in retrospect, added that Kammerer might have transplanted "different eyes," meaning the eyes of another amphibian. Goldschmidt summed up his and everybody's feelings by writing: "The thing should be repeated!" The University of Vienna did nothing to clear up the uncertainties caused by Kammerer. After the second World War a new research ceter, approximately named the Underground Laboratory of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, began to be interested in olms. As its name indicates it is French, located at Moulis, France, under the leadership of Professor Albert Vandel. Professor Vandel keeps his olms in tanks # feet in diameter and ten times as long with running water but a layer of cave mud and flat stones at the bottom. The water is kept at about # degrees Fahrenheit; the darkness in the underground laboratory is complete. Under these circumstances the olms are egg-layers and Vandel swears that this is the normal method. Most of what has been reported so far is not new or adds only small detail to the information that can be found in zoological literature. The number of eggs laid by one female is from # to #, and the interval between laying and hatching runs from # to # days. At hatching the young olm still has a reserve of yolk that lasts for about a month. Its rate of growth afterward is exceedingly slow; it needs # to # years to reach a length of # inches. The reduction of the embryonic eye is reported to begin at the age of three months. Well, this means that we know about as much as we did in #. So far the French laboratory seems to have limited its activities to observation only. One day, one hopes, Professor Vandel will be overcome by the urge to experiment a little. Then he may clear up Kammerer's doubtful W hat to do with the population messy -- .unless they'll help! anuaiy #, #. Big day today. Flying in, I got quite a shock seeing that mushroom cloud over Washington. Looked just like an H-bomb, but of course it's only the population explosion. Smog. It's everywhere, of course, but this air-conditioned underground living makes you forget. I hate the nuisance of wearing a respirator, but this time I was grateful for it. Even without the smog, the crowd here is so thick that the fumes from their halitosis would probably choke you. Priority Escort had a zip-car waiting for me when we landed. That was a break -- we took the fifth-level freeway right straight in, down what used to be the old Pennsylvania Avenue. Could do a whole book on the White House. Like stepping into the past; so quiet and empty. Huge rooms. Some of them twenty, thirty, even fifty feet long -- you wouldn't believe it. To think people used to live that way; all that space, and not even a high-rise! Gives you a sense of History. Of course the big thing was meeting the President. Kind of surprising to see he's such a small man. Watching him on TV, in full makeup, you get the impression he's quite tall. But without the gray wig and the beard and the Uncle Sam costume, he's only a little guy. Can't quite remember when Presidents started wearing the outfit -- way back, I guess, maybe twenty-thirty years after they started electing actors to public office. It's effective, of course, and I can see the sense, but it's still kind of a letdown when you see a President offscreen. Without a teleprompter and the folksy delivery he sounds quite different. But he's an exec, no doubt about it. The way he handled the meeting, all the biggies there -- Cabinet, Defense, even the top lobbyists. Cut right through protocol and got down to cases. No sense trying to remember exact quotes. What he said was Security-sealed anyway, and I could get into trouble just paraphrasing it. But then, nobody is going to be playing this diarytape anyway, and I want to keep it for the record. He started right out by laying all the cards on the table. The population crisis -- # people in the United States as of last week's Galiupcomputer census. "That's the official figure," he said. "Actually, we're way over get out, for psychological reasons. There's enough panic as it is. And with a world population eration -- " He stopped and looked around the table; I wish I had a photo of those faces. "I can see your reactions," he said. "But right now I'm more interested in hearing your solutions." Hphat's how it began. And for the next hour it went on, hot and heavy. All 'the old arguments and counter-arguments. Start a war? Too dangerous, and besides it's never worked -- if it had, we wouldn't be in this fix today. What about a sterilization law? Six bills voted down already, too much religious opposition, so that's out. Metal fatigue in jets and zipcars? There was one that made me sit up and take notice. Some character from the Department of Transport had it all laid out, a full presentation with a lot of figures on stress-factors and built-in structural defects. He cidents, freeway and airway, would eliminate at least a hunperiod. It made a lot of sense to me, until the President reminded him that (a) such a program would shake confidence in automotive and aviation products, thus disrupting the economy, and (b) the present rate of population increase would soon offset and over take the possible death-rate. He was loudly seconded by the lobbyists, particularly in regard to point (a). The next joker came up with the moon-colorization bit again and had to be reminded that it would be impossible to manufacture enough space-hardware to people a year -- granted that the economy could support such a program. Somebody else urged official government backing of homosexuality; not just quiet approval, but a full-fledged open endorsement. The Secretary of Health and Welfare pointed out that even without open sanction, homosexuality was already a widespread popular craze, but largely due to the fact that it wasn't officially blessed. Such approval, he thought, would backfire, robbing the practice the movement to a fag-end. This remark got a laugh, but didn't solve anything. The next proposal came from Top Brass -- all creased red neck and eyebrows, and no nonsense. At first he sounded way off the track, talking about smog and its lethal effect on the human organism, but then he hit it. "If you really want to reduce the population, quit wasting your breath. Waste theirs. Take away their respirators." That did it. Everybody started screaming, but the President got the final word in. "You just can't go ahead and start a mass-murder program -- it's un-American!" And then he looked at me. "You're the expert, Mr. Crothers. What does Psychological Engineering propose?" I let them have it, then. "Of course it's un-American to kill our own citizens. Also, it's bad for business." That got a nod from everybody, so I went on. "But there's another solution. I call it planned population-obsolescence." The President frowned. "And just what does that mean?" "Simple. Since we can't kill our own citizens, and we can't encourage them to kill each other, there's only one sensible alternative. We've got to get the people to kill themselves." Now they really screamed. "Mass suicide? Impossible -- they'd never go for it -- talk about hurting business, this would really do it -- never work out -- " I waited until they wore themselves out, then opened my folder and my mouth. "Gentlemen, I have prepared a plan. If you're ready to listen, I think I can demonstrate to you that it can be done." I made my pitch. It grabbed them, because it made sense. The President was the only one with reservations. "I don't know," he sighed. "A wiser statesman than myself once said, 'You can kill some of the people some of the time, but you can't kill all of the people all of the time." "Maybe so," I said. "But it's worth a try." ebruary #, #. We're in business. Haven't had time to tape notes -- it's just one meeting after another. Key people in industry, advertising, communication channels. Even with official backing, it's a big selling job. At first, of course, everybody comes up with the same objection -- "But we need consumers." The answer I give them is, "Let the consumers consume themselves." And then I show them the merchandising possibilities. The whole bit, right from history. How the morticians, a hundred years ago, proved that you could sell caskets with all kinds of fancy gadgets, including innerspring mattresses -- even sell coffins for cremations. Then I give them the real angle, way back to the days of the Egyptians, who used to bury their bodies with a complete wardrobe of new clothing, all kinds of jewelry, household equipment, and furniture. And I even give them a slogan for their sales-campaigns -- "You Can Take It With Yon." They can see the sales-potential, but they're still a little skeptical about whether or not tire idea will catch on. So it's up to me to prove that they'll make September #, #. The last  six months have been murder. Figure of speech, of course. But I've been working myself to death. So much to do. Started with the funeral directors, setting up the campaign. Commercials. "Tired of high taxes? Troubled about illness, old age? Bills got you down? Time for a vacation -- now you can take the etery landscapes, soft hymn music in the background. The morticians have been helpful, I must say. They pitch the theme hard. "Now you can enjoy Permanent Retirement. Ask about our Layaway Plan." It seems to be going over with the Senior Citizens, but we've got to get a gut-reaction from the younger set, too. Maybe the cemeteries need jazzingup. I'm going down to Washington with a real-estate subsidy plan; we've got to get a lot of new land developments to prepare for the rush, and it isn't just a matter of money. The whole concept has to be revitalized. Statues and benches and souvenir-stands are good enough for tire old folks, but I'm targeting at the kiddies. What we need are a few amusement-park touches; what I have in mind is something on the order of Grislyland... jlfrarch #, #. Just a little f fJover a year since I started, and it's going over better than I'd ever hoped for. Even the wildest optimist would never have believed the national death-rate would jump # in so short a time. And this is only the beginning! Right now I'd like to go on record congratulating the medical profession -- and, particularly, the psychiatrists and psychologists -- for their cooperation and suggestions. Not only have they supported the new DeadiCare program; they've come up with some ideas I never would have known about. Almost all the psyches are concentrating now on Thanatos, bringing out and encouraging the Death Wish in patients. Using suggestion and hypnosis, too ; not just in the asylums but in private practice. Since most people go for treatment because they're already depressed, sick of crowds and smog and underground living and synthetic food and taxes and official forms and regulations, it's easy enough to work them into deep melancholia. Government cooperation doesn't hurt, either -- next month the Pure Food and Drug Act amendment goes on the books and then we'll have another assist. Free poison -- for Home Use Only. The tricky bit, of course, is to make sure that people keep turning their aggressions inward; they've got to kill themselves, not murder others. But it seems to be working. Lots of things help. For example, the new art boom in death masks. Everybody wants one. I understand a lot of people with money are really going the whole Egyptian route -- mummy-cases and all, or at least statues of themselves. There's one down in Texas that's fifty feet tall; built over the frame of an old oil derrick. Of course, as we expected, the biggest opposition came from the churches. We've had to make a big point of the fact that from now on death is strictly nonsectarian. And the insurance companies did a lot of beefing before DeadiCare; now they're all switching over from life insurance to death insurance -- the perpetual care angle seems to work. I'm in Washington permanently now. Full-time job, just one thing after another, but I must say everybody pitches in to help. We've got the posters up -- everything from "Join the Marine Corpse" to "Uncle Sam there's a big publicity campaign for the development of Death Valley National Monument.  c taker # , #. Where does time go to? I couldn't begin to set down what's happened in the past three years, or so; all I know is that the official death rate for last year was #. And this year started off with such a bang that we're averaging Never saw such prosperity. Half the country seems to be converted to cemeteries  -- freeways jammed with, funeral processions -- factories can't keep up with orders. Strain on natural resources, of course; we're going to have to do a. complete aboutface and campaign for simple burials, with plastic coffins. But the big thing is we've got the youngsters. Everybody wants to fly to Vegas and play Russian roulette. Even the kiddies get into the act -- playing "undertaker" and burying their dolls. Or each other. And skipping rope to, "I-tisket, I-tasket, a green, and yellow casket." I think our troubles are over. #  J r ay #, #. I was wrong. If A Didn't figure on the backlash -- Situation Overkill. Can't blame it on the psyches. They did their best. But aggression gets out of hand. Sure, the death rate keeps going up, but a lot of it is due to murders now. Not just the free poison, but assault with deadly weapons, etc. Lots of sex crimes, too, mostly necrophilia. Of course we're in there pitching. Setting up those Suicide Clubs ("If you don't like your neighbor, why not urge him to join?") and doing a big selling job on the sex angle, too, with the new Lovers' Leaps; free skilifts to mountaintops and special high-rise jumps for city dwellers. But it isn't enough. The churches aren't helping. For a while we got them off on this ancestor-worship kick, but now they're going too far. Understand there's a lot of new cults around, based on human sacrifices. Barbaric. Worst of all, it's affecting business. With all this illegal murder going on, the mortality rate is climbing too high; getting out of control. Understand we're down to # as of this year, and pretty soon there won't be enough working population to keep up with the demands. I'm setting up a crisis conference for June #st. We've got to pat some new life in our program. Sune #th, #. Let's face it -- J we're in trouble. The conference was a disaster. Every time I suggested a rollback on our program, some damned psyche or other came up with an argument to prove it wouldn't work -- things have gone too far now. Of course I knew the idea had spread. If it wasn't worldwide, this country would have been invaded long ago. But with other areas even more overpopulated than our own, I knew they'd copy us and our methods. And they have. The thing is (and this I didn't know, until they filled us in at the conference) that the situation is even worse abroad. Death cults all over the place, religious fanatics, and what one of the psychiatrists called the "lemming urge." Whole cities, whole sections of a country, starting to march to the seashore, throwing themselves off cliffs. Mass hysteria. "Heaven help us when it starts over here," he said. "Can you imagine what's going to happen whe n the entire West Coast converges inland to jump off the edge of the Grand Canyon?" "So what do you suggest?" I asked. He didn't answer me. He couldn't. Because as soon as he finished speaking, he'd gone over and jumped out of the window... J ecember #, #. #.   Not the mortality rate. That's the official population figure for the entire country, as of today: #. Don't ask me how they arrived at the total. Living underground this way, I'm sure all they can do is guess. But at least, a few of us have survived. When you look at what's happened, it's amazing that there still are that many left. First the mass suicides, then the murder gangs, then the breakdown in industry and communications -- pileups on the freeways, funeral services disrupted, casket industries shut down, cemeteries weeded-over and neglected. When the food factories went and the water desalinization plants stopped working, the end was in sight. Then they began to listen to our campaign again, but it was too late; no rallying point, no way to get people reorganized. We should have acted sooner, declared martial law -- but once the famine started and they began to drink that poisoned water from rivers and lakes, it was no use. Ill Virus and plague, that's what did it in the end. And people running wild -- the new Sterilization Cults coming in, nobody having babies any more. Of course the smog is gone, they tell me, but so is everything else. Here in the new Pentagon -- Dead Center -- we're quite comfortable. Plenty of food, plenty of supplies, all the comforts of home and a safe five levels underground. At least we can keep telecasting; we've got the facilities. But with an audience of only #, I don't know. Still, they say while there's life, there's hope... pril #, #. Running out of tape. Doesn't really matter, because we're running out of everything else, too. Eleven people left. That's all. Eleven. Best medical care these past eight or nine years, but it doesn't help. Underground living seems to lead inevitably to underground dying. And the surface is still deadly -- virus everywhere. No more communication. None of us talk about it, but we all know the answer. Everybody's gone, everywhere. We're the last survivors. Six old men, all over seventy. Myself, forty-nine. Three elderly women. One girl, Rena Stafford, pretty blonde thing, about eighteen or so. Had another conference today, possibly the last one. Faced the facts. In a few years we'll all be gone. Maybe the surface will clear, the virus will die out -- but so will the human race. The president put it right on the line. (Funny thing, he really looks like Uncle Sam now, even without makeup). "We're got to repopulate," he said. "Start all over again from the beginning." He looked at me. "You're our only hope. You and the girl." I nodded. So did she. So tonight they're setting the two of us up in a living unit of our own. Regular honeymoon suite. From now on, it's up to me. Too bad. I just don't think I'm going to make it. I've come to the conclusion Thoreau was right. In times like these, one must seek the peaceful serenity of Walden Pond. I think I'll go there tonight. And drown myself.     To solve the world's population crisis , they built a model world in a box -- and filled it with a world's desperation! I ' ' 'caverns measureless to man?' " Thomas Dixit asked. His voice echoed away among the caverns, the question unanswered. Peter Crawley, walking a pace or two behind him, said nothing, lost in a reverie of his own. It was over a year since Dixit had been imprisoned here. He had taken time off from the resettlement area to come and have a last look round before everything was finally demolished. In these great concrete workings, men still moved -- Indian technicians mostly, carrying instruments, often with their own headlights. Cables trailed everywhere; but the desolation was mainly an effect of the constant abrasion all surfaces had undergone. People had flowed here like water in a subterranean cave; and their corporate life had flowed similarly, hidden, forgotten. Dixit was powerfully moved by the thought of all that life. He, almost alone, was the man who had plunged into it and survived. Old angers stirring in him, he turned and spoke directly to his companion. "What a monument to human suffering! They should leave this place standing as an everlasting memorial to what happened." The white man said, "The Delhi government refuses to entertain any such suggestion. I see their point of view, but I also see that it would make a great tourist attraction!" "Tourist attraction, man! Is that all it means to you?" Crawley laughed. "As ever, you're too touchy, Thomas. I take this whole matter much less lightly than you suppose. Tourism just happens to attract me more than human suffering." They walked on side by side. They were never able to agree. The battered faces of flats and houses -- now empty, once choked with humanity -- stood on either side, doors gaping open like old men's mouths in sleep. The spaces seemed enormous; the shadows and echoes that belonged to those spaces seemed to continue indefinitely. Yet before... there had scarcely been room to breathe here. "I remember what your buddy. Senator Byrnes, said," Crawley remarked. "He showed how both East and West have learned from this experiment. Of course, the social scientists are still working over their findings; some startling formulae for social groups are emerging already. But the people who lived and died here were fighting their way towards control of the universe of the ultra-small, and that's where the biggest advances have come. They were already developing power over their own genetic material. Another generation, and they might have produced the ultimate in automatic human population control: anoestrus, Where too close proximity to other members of the species leads to reabsorption of the embryonic material in the female. Our scientists have been able to help them there, and geneticists predict that in another decade -- " "Yes, yes, all that I grant you. Progress is wonderful." He knew he was being impolite. These things were important, of revolutionary importance to a crowded earth. But he wished he walked these eroded passageways alone. Undeniably, India had learned too, just as Peter Crawley claimed. For Hinduism had been put to the test here and had shown its terrifying strengths and weaknesses. In these mazes, people had not broken under deadly conditions -- nor had they thought to break away from their destiny. Bharma -- duty -- had been stronger than humanity. And this revelation was already changing the thought and fate of one-sixth of the human race. He said, "Progress is wonderful. But what took place here was essentially a religious experience." Crawley's brief laugh drifted away into the shadows of a great gaunt stairwell. "I'll bet you didn't feel that way when we sent you in here a year ago!" What had he felt then? He stopped and gazed up at the gloom of the stairs. All that came to him was the memory of that appalling flood of life and of the people who had been a part of it, whose brief years had evaporated in these caverns, whose feet has endlessly trodden these warren-ways, these lugubrious decks, these crumbling flights... II 'T'he concrete steps climbed up into darkness. The steps were wide, and countless children sat on them, listless, resting against each other. This was an hour when activity was low and even small children hushed their cries for a while. Yet there was no silence on the steps; silence was never complete there. Always, in the background, the noise of voices. Voices and more voices. Never silence. Shamim was aged, so she preferred to run her errands at this time of day, when the crowds thronging Total Environment were less. She dawdled by a sleepy seller of life-objects at the bottom of the stairs, picking over the little artif acts and exclaiming now and again. The hawker knew her, knew she was too poor to buy, did not even press her to buy. Shamim's oldest daughter. Malti, waited for her mother by the bottom step. Malti and her mother were watched from the top of the steps. A light burned at the top of the steps. It had burned there for twenty-five years, safe from breakage behind a strong mesh. But dung and mud had recently been thrown at it, covering it almost entirely and so making the top of the stairway dark. A furtive man called Narayan Farhad crouched there and watched, a shadow in the shadows. A month ago, Shamim had had an illegal operation in one of the pokey rooms off Grand Balcony on her deck. The effects of the operation were still with her; under her plain cotton sari, her thin dark old body was bent. Her share of life stood lower than it had been. Malti was her second oldest daughter, a meek girl who had not been conceived when the Total Environment experiment began. Even meekness had its limits. Seeing her mother dawdle so needlessly, Malti muttered impatiently and went on ahead, climbing the infested steps, anxious to be home. E xtracts from Thomas Dixit's report to Senator Jacob Byrnes, back in America: To lend variety to the habitat, the Environment has been divided into ten decks, each deck five stories liigh, which allows for an occasional pocket-sized open space. The architecture has been varied somewhat on each deck. On one deck, a sort of blown-up Indian village is presented; on another, the houses are large and appear separate, although sandwiched between decks -- I need not add they are hopelessly overcrowded now. On most decks, the available space is packed solid with flats. Despite this attempt at variety, a general bowdlerization of both Eastern and Western architectural styles, and the fact that everything has been constructed out of concrete or a parastyrene for economy's sake, has led to a dreadful sameness. I cannot imagine anywhere more hostile to the spiritual values of life. The shadow in the shadows moved. He glanced anxiously up at the light, which also housed a spy-eye; there would be a warning out, and sprays would soon squirt away the muck he had thrown at the fitting; but, for the moment, he could work unobserved. Narayan bared his old teeth as Malti came up the steps towards him, treading among the sprawling children. She was too old to fetch a really good price on the slave market, but she was still strong; there would be no trouble in getting rid of her at once. Of course he knew something of her history, even though she lived on a different deck from him. Malti! He called her name at the last moment as he jumped out on her. Old though he was, Narayan was quick. He wore only his dhoti, arms flashing, interlocking round hers, one good powerful wrench to get her off her feet -- now running fast, fearful, up the rest of the steps, moving even as he clamped one hand over her mouth to cut off her cry of fear. Clever old Narayan ! The stairs mount up and up in the four corners of the Total Environment, linking deck with deck. They are now crude things of concrete and metal, since the plastic covers have long been stripped from them. These stairways are the weak points of the tiny empires, transient and brutal, that form on every deck. They are always guarded, though guards can be bribed. Sometimes gangs or " unions " take over a stairway, either by agreement or bloodshed. Shamim screamed, responding to her daughter's cry. She began to hobble up the stairs as fast as she could, tripping over infant feet, drawing a dagger out from under her sari. It was a plastic dagger, shaped out of a piece of the Environment. She called Malti, called for help, as she went. When s'he reached the landing, she was on the top floor of her deck, the Ninth, where she lived. Many people were here, standing, squatting, thronging together. They looked away from Shamim, people with blind faces. She had so often acted similarly herself when others were in trouble. Gasping, she stopped and stared up at the roof of the deck, bluedyed to simulate sky, cracks running irregularly across it. The steps went on up there, up to Top Deck. She saw legs, yellow soles of feet disappearing, faces staring down at her, hostile. As she ran toward the bottom of the stairs, the watchers above threw things at her. A Shard hit Shamkn's cheek and cut it open. With blood running down her face, she began to wail. Then she turned and ran through the crowds to her family room. J've been a month just reading through the microfiles. Sometimes a whole deck becomes unified under a strong leader. On Deck Nine, for instance, unification was achieved under a man called U #I has. He was a strong man, and a great show-off. That was a while ago, when conditions were not so desperate as they are now. Ullhas could never last the course today. Leaders become more despotic as Environment decays. The dynamics of unity are such that it is always insufficient for a deck simply to stay unified; the young men always need to have their aggressions directed outwards. So the leader of a strong deck always sets out to tyrannize the deck below or above, whichever seems to be the weaker. It is a miserable state of affairs. The time generally comes when, in the midst of a raid, a counter-raid is launched by one of the other decks. Then the raiders return to carnage and defeat. And another paltry empire tumbles. It is up to me to stop this continual degradation of human life. As usual, the family room was crowded. Although none of Shamim's own children were here, there were grandchildren -- including the lame granddaughter, Shirin -- and six greatgrandchildren, none of them more than three years old. Shamin's third husband, Gita, was not in. Safe in the homely squalor of the room, Shamim burst into tears, while Shirin comforted her and endeavored to keep the little ones off. "Gita is getting food. I will go and fetch him," Sfairin said. Density Research Establishment -- became operative , twenty-five years ago, all the couples selected for living in the Total Environment had to be under twenty years of age. Before being sealed in, they were inoculated against all diseases. There was plenty of room for each couple then; they had whole suites to themselves, and the best of food; plus no means of birth control. That's always been the main pivot of that first generation has aged severely. They are old people pushing forty-five. The whole life cycle has speeded up -- early puberty, early senescence. The second and third generations have shown remarkable powers of adaptation; a fourth generation is already toddling. Those toddlers will be reproducing before their years attain double figures, if present trends continue. Are allowed to continue. Gita was younger than Shamim, a small wiry man who knew his way around. No hero, he nevertheless had a certain style about him. His life-object hung boldly round his neck on a chain, instead of being hidden, as were most people's life-objects. He stood in the line for food, chattering with friends. Gita was good at making alliances. 'With a bunch of his friends, he had formed a little union to see that they got their food back safely to their homes; so they generally met with no incident in the crowded walkways of Deck Nine. The balance of power on the deck was very complex at the moment. As a result, comparative peace reigned, and might continue for several weeks if the strong man on Top Deck did not interfere. TT'ood delivery grills ate fixed in the walls of every floor of every deck. Two gongs sound before each delivery. After the second one, hatches open and steaming food pours from the grills. Hills of rice tumble forward, flavored with meat and spaces. Chapattis fall from a separate slot. As the men run forward with their containers, holy men are generally there to sanctify the food. Great supply elevators roar up and down in the heart of the  vast tower, tumbling out rations at all levels. Alcohol also was supplied in the early years. It was discontinued when it led to trouble; which is not to say that it is not secretly brewed inside the Ention has been generous from the start and has always been maintained at the same level per head of population although, as you know, the food is now ninety-five per cent factory-made. Nobody would ever have starved, had it been shared out equably inside the tower. On some of the decks, some of the time, it is still shared out fairly. One of Gita's sons, Jamsu, had seen the kidnapper Narayan making off to Top Deck with the struggling Malti. His eyes gleaming with excitement, he sidled his way into the queue where Gita stood and clasped his father's arm. Jamsu had something of his father in him, always lurked where numbers made him safe, rather than run off as his brothers and sisters had run off, to marry and struggle for a room of a space of their own. He was telling his father what had happened When Shirin limped up and delivered her news. Nodding grimly, Gita said, "Stay with us, Shirin, while I get the food." He scooped his share into the family pail. Jamsu grabbed a handful of rice for himself. "It was a dirty wizened man from Top Deck called Narayan Farhad," Jamsu said, gobbling. "He is one of the crooks who hangs about the shirt tails of... He let his voice die. "You did not go to Malti's rescue, shame on you!" Shirin said. "Jamsu might have been killed," Gita said, as they pushed through the crowd and moved towards the family room. "They're getting so strong on Top Deck," Jamsu said. "I hear all about it! We mustn't provoke them or they may attack. They say a regular army is forming round..." Shirin snorted impatiently. "You great babe! Go ahead and name the man! It's Prahlad Patel whose very name you dare not mention, isn't it? Is he a god or something, for Siva's sake? You're afraid of him even from this distance, eh, aren't you?" "Don't bully the lad," Gita said. Keeping the peace in his huge mixed family was a great responsibility, almost more than he could manage. As he turned into the family room, he said quietly to Jamsu and Shirin, "Malti was a favorite daughter of Shamim's, and now is gone from her. We will get our revenge against this Narayan Farhad. You and I will go this evening, Jamsu, to the holy man Vazifdar. He will even up matters for us, and then perhaps the great Patel will also be warned." He looked thoughtfully down at his life-object. Tonight, he told himself, I must venture forth alone and put my life in jeopardy for Shamin's sake. T)rahlad Patel's union has flour ished and grown until now he rules all the Top Deck. His name is known and dreaded, we believe, three or four decks down. He is the strongest -- yet in some ways curiously the most moderate -- ruler in Total Environment at present. Although he can be brutal, Patel seems inclined for peace. Of course, the bugging does not reveal everything; he may have plans which he keeps secret, since he is fully aware that the bugging exists. But we believe his interests lie in other directions than conquest. He is only about nineteen, as we reckon years, but already gray-haired, and the sight of him is said to freeze the muscles to silence in the lips of his followers. I have watched him over the bugging for many hours since I agreed to undertake this task. Patel has one great advantage in Total Environment. He lives on the Tenth Deck, at the top of the building. He can therefore be invaded only from below and the Ninth Deck offers no strong threats at present, being, mainly oriented round an influential body of holy men, of whom the most illustrious is one Vazifdat. The staircases between decks are always trouble spots. No deck-ruler was ever strong enough to withstand attack from above and below. The staircases are also used by single troublemakers, thieves, political fugitives, prostitutes, escaping slaves, hostages. Guards can always be bribed, or favor their multitudinous relations, or join the enemy for one reason or another. Patel, being on the Top Deck, has only four weak points to watch for, rather than eight. Vazifdar was amazingly holy and amazingly influential. It was whispered that his life-object was the most intricate in all Environment, but there was nobody who would lay claim to having set eyes upon it. Because of his reputation, many people on Gita's deck -- yes, and from farther away -- sought Vazifdar's help. A stream of men and women moved always through his room, even when he was locked in private meditation and far away from this world. The holy man had a flat with a balcony that looked out onto mid-deck. Many relations and disciples lived there with him, so that the rooms had been elaborately and flimsily divided by screens. All day, the youngest disciples twittered like birds upon the balconies as Vazifdar held court, discussing among themselves the immense wisdom of his sayings. All the disciples, all the relations, loved Vazifdar. There had been relations who did not love Vazifdar, but they had passed away in their sleep. Gita himself was a distant relation of Vazifdar's and came into the holy man's presence now with gifts of fresh water and a long piece of synthetic cloth, enough to make a robe. Vazifdar's brow and cheeks were painted with white to denote his high caste. He received the gifts of cloth and water graciously, smiling at Gita in such a way that Gita -- and, behind him, Jamsu -- took heart. Vazifdar was thirteen years old as the outside measured years. He was sleekly fat, from eating much and moving little. His brown body shone with oils; every morning, young women massaged and manipulated him. He spoke very softly, husbanding his voice, so that he could scarcely be heard for the noise in the room. "It is a sorrow to me that this woe has befallen your stepchild Malti," he said. "She was a good woman, although infertile." "She was raped at a very early age, disrupting her womb, dear Vazifdar. You will know of the event. Her parents feared she would die. She could never bear issue. The evil shadowed her life. Now this second woe befalls her." "I perceive that Malti's role in the world was merely to be a companion to her mother. Not all can afford to purchase who visit the bazaar." tThere are bazaars on every floor, crowding down the corridors and balconies, and a chief one on every deck. The menfolk chose such places to meet and chatter even when they have nothing to trade. Like everywhere else, the bazaars are crowded with humanity, down to the smallest who can walk -- and sometimes even those carry naked smaller brothers clamped tight to their backs. The bazaars are great centers for scandal. Here also are our largest screens. They glow behind their safety grills, beaming in special programs from outside; our outside world that must seem to have but faint reality as it dashes against the thick securing walls of Environment and percolates through to the screens. Below the screens, uncheckable and fecund life goes teeming on, with all its injury. Humbly, Gita on his knees said, "If you could restore Malti to her mother Shamim, who mourns her, you would reap all our gratitude, dear Vazifdar. Malti is too old for a man's bed, and on Top Deck all sorts of humiliations must await her." Vazifdar shook his head with great dignity. "You know I cannot restore Malti, my kinsman. How many deeds can be ever undone As long as we have slavery, so long must we bear to have the ones we love enslaved. You must cultivate a mystical and resigned view of life and beseech Shamim always to do the same." "Shamim is more mystical in her ways than I, never asking much, always working, working, praying, praying. That is why she deserves better than this misery." Nodding in approval of Shamim's behavior as thus revealed, Vazifdar said, "That is well. I know she is a good woman. In the future lie other events which may recompense her for this sad event." Jamsu, who had managed to keep quiet behind his father until now, suddenly burst out, "Uncle Vazifdar, can you not punish Narayan Farhad for his sin in stealing poor Malti on the steps? Is he to be allowed to escape to Patel's deck, there to live with Malti and enjoy?" "Sssh, son!" Gita looked in agitation to see if Jamsu's outburst had annoyed Vazifdar; but Vazifdar was smiling blandly. "You must know, Jamsu, that we are all creatures of the Lord Siva, and without power. No, no, do not pout! I also am without power in his hands. To own one room is not to possess the whole mansion. But..." It was a long and heavy but. When Vazifdar's thick eyelids closed over his eyes, Gita trembled, for he recalled how, on previous occasions when he had visited his powerful kinsman, Vazifdar's eyelids had descended in this fashion while he deigned to think on a problem, as if he shut out all the external world with his own potent flesh. "Narayan Farhad shall be troubled by more than his conscience." As he spoke, the pupils of his eyes appeared again, violet and black. They were looking beyond Gita, beyond the confines of his immediate surroundings. "Tonight he shall be troubled by evil dreams." "The nightvisions!" Gita and Jamsu exclaimed, in fear and excitement. Now Vazifdar swiveled his magnificient head and looked directly at Gita, looked deep into his eyes. Gita was a small man; he saw himself as a small man within. He shrank still further under that irresistible scrutiny. "Yes, the night-visions," the holy man said. "You know what that entails, Gita. You must go up to Top Deck and procure Narayan's life-object. Bring it back to me, and I promise Narayan shall suffer the night-visions tonight. Though he is sick, he shall be cured." Ill he women never cease their chatter as the lines of supplicants come and go before the holy men. Their marvelous resignation in that hateful prison! If they ever complain about more than the small circumstances of their lives, if they ever complain about the monstrous evil that has overtaken them all, I never heard of it. There is always the harmless talk, talk that relieves petty nervous anxieties, talk that relieves the almost noticed pressures on the brain. The women's talk practically drowns the noise of their children. But most of the time it is clear that Total Environment consists mainly of children. Thafs why I want to see the experiment closed down; the children would adapt to our world. It is mainly on this fourth generation that the effects of the population glut show. Whoever rules the decks, it is the babes, the endless babes, tottering, laughing, staring, piddling, tumbling, running, the endless babes to whom the Environment really belongs. And their mothers, for the most part, are women who -- at the same age and in a more favored part of the globe -- would still be virginally at school, many only just entering their teens. NTarayan Farhad wrapped a  blanket round himself and huddled in his corner of the crowded room. Since it was almost time to sleep, he had to take up his hired space before one of the loathed Dasguptas stole it. Narayan hated the Dasgupta family, its lickspittle men, its shrill women, its turbulent children -- the endless babes who crawled, the bigger ones with nervous diseases who thieved and ran and jeered at him. It was the vilest family on Top Deck, according to Narayan's oftrepeated claims; he tolerated it only because he felt himself to be vile. He succeeded at nothing to which he turned his hand. Only an hour ago, pushing through the crowds, he had lost his lifeobject from his pocket -- or else it had been stolen; but he dared not even consider that possibility! Even his desultory kidnapping business was a failure. This bitch he had caught this morning -- Malti. He had intended to rape her before selling her, but had become too nervous once he had dragged her in here, with a pair of young Dasguptas laughing at him. Nor had he sold the woman well. Patel had beaten down his price, and Narayan had not the guts to argue. Maybe he should leave this deck and move down to one of the more chaotic ones. The middle decks were always more chaotic. Six was having a slow three-sided war even now, which should make Five a fruitful place, with hordes of refugees to batten on... And what a fool to snatch so old a girl -- . practically an old woman! Through narrowed eyes, Narayan squatted in his corner, acid flavors burning his mouth. Even if his mind would rest and allow him to sleep, the Dasgupta mob was still too lively for any real relaxation. That old Dasgupta, now -- he was like a rat, totally without self-restraint, not a proper Hindu at all, doing the act openly with his own daughters. There were many men like that in Total Environment, men who had nothing else in life. Dirty swine! Lucky dogs! Narayan's daughters had thrown him out many months ago when he tried it! Over and over, his mind ran on his grievances. But he sat collectedly, prodding off with one bare foot the nasty little brats who crawled at him, and staring at the screen flickering on the wall behind its protective mesh. He liked the screens, enjoyed viewing the madness of outside. What a world it was out there! All that heat, and the necessity for work, and the complication of life! The sheer bigness of the world -- he couldn't stand that, would not want it under any circumstances. He did not understand half he saw. After all, he was born here. His father might have been bom outside, whoever his father was; but no legends from outside had come down to him : only the distortions in the general gossip, and the stuff on the screens. Now that he came to reflect, people didn't pay much attention to the screens any more. Even he didn't. But he could not sleep. Blearily, he looked at images of cattle ploughing fields, fields cut into dice by the dirty grills before the screens. He had already gathered vaguely that this feature was about changes in the world today... are giving way to this... said the commentator above the rumpus in the Dasgupta room. The children lived here like birds. Racks were stacked against the walls, and on these rickety contraptions the many little Dasguptas roosted... food factories automated against danger of infection... Yak yak yak, then. "Beeftissue culture growing straight into plastic distribution packs... Shots of some great interior place somewhere, with, meat growing out of pipes,extruding itself into square packs, dripping with liquid, looking rather ugly. Was that the shape of cows now or something? Outside must be a hell of a scaring place, then! "... as new factory food at last spells hope for India's future in the..." Yak yak yak from the kids. Once, their sleep racks had been built across the screen; but one night the whole shaky edifice collapsed, and three children were injured. None killed, worse luck! Patel should have paid more for that girl. Nothing was as good as it had been. Why, once on a time, they used to show sex films on the screens -- really filthy stuff that got even Narayan excited. He was younger then. Really filthy stuff, he remembered, and pretty girls doing it. But it must be -- oh, a long time since that was stopped. The screens were dull now. People gave up watching. Uneasily, Narayan slept, propped in the comer under his scruffy blanket. Eventually, the whole scruffy room slept. T he documentaries and other features piped into Environment are no longer specially ternal consumption. When the V.N. made a major cut in years ago, the private TV studio was one of the frills that had to be axed. Now we pipe in old programs bought oft major networks. The hope is that they will keep the wretched prisoners in Environment in touch with the outside world, but this is clearly not happening. The degree of comprehension between inside and outside grows markedly less on both sides, on an exponential curve. As I see it, a great gulf of isolation is widening between the two environments, just as if they were sailing away from each other into different space-time continua. I wish I could think that the people in charge here -- Crawley especially -- not only grasped this fact but understood that it should be rectified immediately. S hamim could not sleep for grief. Gita could not sleep for apprehension. Jamsu could not sleep for excitement. Vazifdar did not sleep. Vazifdar shut his sacred self away in a cupboard, brought his lids down over his eyes and began to construct, within the vast spaces of his mind, a thought pattern corresponding to the matrix represented by Narayan Farhad's stolen life-object. When it was fully conceived, Vazifdar began gently to inset a little evil into one edge of the thought-pattern... Narayan slept. What roused him was the silence. It was the first time total silence had ever come to Total Environment. At first, he thought he would enjoy total silence. But it took on such weight and substance... Clutching his blanket, he sat up. The room was empty, the screen dark. Neither thing had ever happened before, could not happen! And the silence! Dear Siva, some terrible monkey god had hammered that silence out in darkness and thrown it out like a shield into the world, rolling over all things ! There was a ringing quality in the silence -- a gong! No, no, not a gong! Footsteps ! It was footsteps, O Lord Siva, do not let it be footsteps! Total Environment was empty. The legend was fulfilled that said Total Environment would empty one day. All had departed except for poor Narayan. And this thing of the footsteps was coming to visit him in his defenceless corner... It was climbing up through the cellars of his existence. Soon it would emerge. Trembling convulsively, Narayan stood up, clutching the corner of the blanket to his throat. He did not wish to face the thing. Wildly, he thought, could he bear it best if if looked like a man or if it looking nothing like a man? It was Death for sure -- but how would it look? Only Death -- his heart fluttered! -- only Death could arrive this way... His helplessness... Nowhere to hide! He opened his mouth, could not scream, clutched the blanket, felt that he was wetting himself as if he were a child again. Swiftly came the image -- the infantile, round-bellied, cringing, puny, his mother black with fury, her great white teeth gritting as she smacked his face with all her might, spitting... It was gone, and he faced the gonglike death again, alone in the great dark tower. In the arid air, vibrations of its presence. He was shouting to it, demanding that it did not come. But it came. It came with majestic sloth, like the heartbeats of a foetid slumber, came in the door, pushing darkness before it. It was like a human, but too big to be human. And it wore Malti's face, that sickeningly innocent smile with which she had run up the steps. No! No, that was not it -- oh, he fell down onto the wet floor: it was nothing like that woman, nothing at all. Cease, impossibilities! It was a man, his ebony skull shining, terrible and magnificent, stretching out, grasping, confident. Narayan struck out in his extremity and fell forward. Death was another indelible smack in the face. One of the roosting Dasguptas blubbered and moaned as the man kicked him, woke for a moment, saw the screen still flickering meaninglessly and reassuringly, saw Narayan tremble under his blanket, tumbled back into sleep. It was not till morning that they found it had been Narayan's last tremble. I know I am supposed to be a detached observer. No emotions, no feelings. But scientific detachment is the attitude that has led to much of the inhumanity inherent in Environment. How do we, for all the bugging devices, hope to know what gastly secret nightmares they undergo in there? Anyhow, I am relieved to hear you are flying over. It is tomorrow I am due to go into Environment myself. IV were large and repulsive. At the time when they and the Total Environment tower had been built, the Indian Government would not have stood for anything else. Poured cement and rough edges was what they wanted to see and what they got. From a window in the office building, Thomas Dixit could see the indeterminate land in one direction, and the gigantic TE tower in the other, together with the shantytown that had grown between the foot of the tower and For a moment, he chose to ignore the Project Organizer behind him and gaze out at what he could see of the table-flat lands of the great Ganges delta. He thought, it's as good a place as any for man to project his power fantasies. But you are a fool to get mixed up in all this, Thomas! Even to himself, he was never just Tom. I am being paid, well paid, to do a specific job. Now I am letting wooly humanitarian ideas get in the way of action. Essentially, I am a very empty man. No center. Father Bengali, mother English, and live all my life in the States. I have excuses... Other people accept them; why can't I? Sighing, he dwelt on his own unsatisfactoriness. He did not really belong to the West, despite his long years there, and he certainly did not belong to India; in fact, he thought he rather disliked India. Maybe the best place for him was indeed the inside of the Environment tower. He turned impatiently and said "I'm ready to get going now, Peter." Peter Crawley, the Special Prorather austere Bostonian. He removed the horn-rimmed glasses from his nose and said "Right! Although we have been through the drill many times, Thomas, I have to tell you this once again before we move. The entire -- " "Yes, yes, I know, Peter! You don't have to cover yourself. This entire organization might be closed down if I make a wrong move. Please take it as read." Without indignation, Crawley said, "I was going to say that we are all rooting for you. We appreciate the risks you are taking. We shall be checking you everywhere you go in there through the bugging system." "And whatever you see, you can't do a thing." "Be fair, we have made arrangements to help!" "I'm sorry, Peter." He liked Crawley and Crawley's descent reserve. Crawley folded his spectacles with a snap, inserted them in a leather slipcase and stood up. "The U.N., not to mention subsidiary organizations like the ment, have their knife into us, Thomas. They want to close us down and empty Environment. They will do so unless you can provide evidence that forms of extra-sensory perception are developing inside the Environment. Don't get yourself killed in there. The previous men we sent in behaved foolishly and never came out again." He raised an eyebrow and added dryly, "That sort of thing gets us a bad name, you know." "Just as the blue movies did a while ago." Crawley put his hands behind his back. "My predecessor here decided that immoral movies piped in to Environment would help boost the birth rate there. Whether he was right or wrong, world opinion has changed since then as the specter of world famine has faded. We stopped the movies eight years ago, but they have long memories at the U.N., I fear. They allow emotionalism to impede scientific research." "Do you never feel any sympathy for the thousands of people doomed to live out their brief lives in the tower?" They looked speculatively at each other. "You aren't on our side any more, Thomas, are you? You'd like your findings to be negative, wouldn't you, and have the U.N. close us down?" Dixit uttered a laugh. "I'm not on anyone's side, Peter. I'm neutral. I'm going into Environment that only direct contact may turn up. What else direct contact will turn up, neither of us can say as yet." "But you think it will be misery. And you will emphasize that at the inquiry after your return." "Peter -- let's get on with it, shall we?" Momentarily, Dixit was granted a clear picture of the two of them standing in this room; he saw how their bodily attitudes contracted. His attitudes were rather slovenly; he held himself rather slump-shouldered, he gesticulated to some extent (too much?); he was dressed in. threadbare tunic 'and shorts, ready to pass muster as an inhabitant of Environment. Crawley, on the other hand, was very upright, stiff and smart in his movements, hardly ever gestured as he spoke; his dress was faultless. And there was no need to be awed by or envious of Crawley. Crawley was encased in inhibition, afraid to feel, signaling his aridity to anyone who cared to look out from, their own self-preoccupation. Crawley, moreover, feared for his job. "Let's get on. with it, as you say." He came from behind his desk. "But I'd be grateful if you would remember, Thomas, that the people in the tower are volunteers, or the descendants of volunteers. quarter-century ago, back in the midnineteen-seventies, only volunteers were admitted to the Total Environment. Five hundred young married Indian couples were admitted, plus whatever children they had. The tower was a refuge then, free from famine, immune from all disease. They were glad, heartily glad, to get in, glad of all that Environment provided and still provides. Those who didn't qualify rioted. We have to remember that. "India was a different place in #. It had lost hope. One crisis after another, one famine after another, crops dying, people starving, and yet the population month. "But today, thank God, that picture has largely changed. Synthetic foods have licked the problem; we don't need the grudging land any more. And at last the Hindus and Muslims have got the birth control idea into their heads. It's only now, when a little hu manity is seeping back into this death-bowl of a subcontinent, that the UN dares complain about the inhumanity D ixit said nothing. He felt that this potted history was simply angled towards Crawley's selfjustification; the ideas it represented were real enough, heaven knew, but they had meaning for Crawley only in terms of his own existence. Dixit felt pity and impatience as Crawley went on with his narration. "Our aim here must be unswervingly the same as it was from the start. We have evidence that nervous disorders of a special kind produce extra-sensory perceptions -- telepathy and the do not yet recognize. High-density populations with reasonable nutritional standards develop particular nervous instabilities tra. "The Ultra-High Density Research Establishment was set up to intensify the likelihood of that. The people in Environment that's the whole point of the operation, right? Sure, it is not humanitarian. We know that. But that is not your concern. You have to go in and find evidoesn't show over the bugging. continue." Dixit prepared to leave. "If it hasn't shown up in quarter of a century -- " "It's in there! I know it's in there! The failure's in the bugging system. I feel it coming through the screens at me -- some mystery we need to get our hands on! If only I could prove it! If only I could get in there myself!" Interesting, Dixit thought. You'd have to be some sort of a voyeur to hold Crawley's job, forever spying on the wretched people. "Too bad you have a white skin, eh?" he said lightly. He walked towards the door. It swung open, and he passed into the corridor. Crawley ran after him and thrust out a hand. "I know how you feel, Thomas. I'm not just a stuffed shirt, you know, not entirely void of sympathy. Sorry if I was needling you. I didn't intend to do so." Dixit dropped his gaze. "I should be the one to apologize, Peter. If there's anything unusual going on in the tower, I'll find it, never worry!" They shook hands, without wholly being able to meet each other's eyes. V I eaving the office block, Dixit J walked alone through the sunshine toward the looming tower that housed Total Environment. The concrete walk was hot and dusty underfoot. The sun was the one good thing that India had, he thought: that burning beautiful sun, the real ruler of India, whatever petty tyrants came and went. The sun blazed down on the tower; only inside did it not shine. The uncompromising outlines of the tower were blurred by pipes, ducts and shafts that ran up and down its exterior. It was a building built for looking into, not out of. Some time ago, in tlie bad years, the welter of visual records gleaned from Environment used to be edited and beamed out on global networks every evening; but all that had been stopped as conditions inside Environment deteriorated, and public opinion in the democracies, who were subsidizing the grandiose experiment, turned against the exploitation of human material. A monitoring station stood by the tower walls. From here, a constant survey on the interior was kept. Facing the station were the jumbles of merchants' stalls, springing up to cater for tourists, who persisted even now that the tourist trade was discouraged. Two security guards stepped forward and escorted Dixit to the base of the tower. With ceremony, he entered the shade of the entry elevator. As he closed the door, germicides sprayed him, insuring that he entered Environment without harboring dangerous micro-organisms. The elevator carried him up to the top deck; this plan had been settled some while ago. The elevator was equipped with double steel doors. As it came to rest, a circuit opened, and a screen showed him what was happening on the other side of the doors. He emerged from a dummy air-conditioning unit, behind a wide pillar. He was in Patel's domain. nphe awful weight of human overcrowding hit Dixit with its full stink and noise. He sat down at the base of the pillar and let his senses adjust. And he thought, I was the wrong one to send; I've always had this inner core of pity for the sufferings of humanity; I could never be impartial; I've got to see that this terrible experiment is stopped. He was at one end of a long balcony on to which many doors opened; a ramp led down at the other end. All the doorways gaped, although some were covered by rugs. Most of the doors had been taken off their hinges to serve as partitions along the balcony itself, partitioning off overspill families. Children ran everywhere, their tinkling voices and cries the dominant note in the hubbub. Glancing over the balcony, Dixit took in a dreadful scene of swarming multitudes, the anonymity of congestion; to sorrow for humanity was not to love its prodigality. Dixit had seen this panorama many times over the bugging system; he knew all the staggering figures -- # people in here to begin with, and by now some # people, a large proportion of them under four years of age. But pictures and figures were pale abstracts beside the reality they were intended to represent. The kids drove him into action at last by playfully hurling dirt at him. Dixit moved slowly along, carrying himself tight and cringing in the manner of the crowd about him, features rigid, elbows tucked in to the ribs. Mutatis mutandis, it was Crawley's inhibited attitude. Even the children ran between the legs of their elders in that guarded way. As soon as he had left the shelter of his pillar, he was caught in a stream of chattering people, all jostling between the rooms and the stalls of the balcony. They moved very slowly. Among the crowd were hawkers, and salesmen pressed their wares from the pitiful balcony hovels. Dixit tried to conceal his curiosity. Over the bugging he had not only distant views of the merchandise offered for sale. Here were the strange models that had caught his attention when he was first appointed to orange goateyes, in fact probably no more than thirteen years of age, but here a hardened veteran, was at Dixit's elbow. As Dixit stared at him, momentarily suspicious he was being watched, the goat-eyed man merged into the crowd; and, to hide his face, Dixit turned to the nearest salesman. In only a moment, he was eagerly examining the wares, forgetting how vulnerable was his situation. All the strange models were extremely small. This Dixit attributed to shortage of materials -- wrongly, as it later transpired. The biggest model the salesman possessed stood no more than two inches high. It was made, nevertheless, of a diversity of materials, in which many sorts of plastics featured. Some models were simple, and appeared to be little more than an elaborate tughra or monogram, which might have been intended for an elaborate piece of costume jewelry; others, as one peered among their interstices, seemed to afford a glimpse of another dimension; all possessed eye-teasing properties. T he merchant was pressing Dixit to buy. He referred to the elaborate models as "life-objects." Noticing that one in particular attracted his potential customer, he lifted it delicately and held it up, a miracle of craftsmanship, perplexing, outre, giving Dixit somehow as much pain as pleasure. He named a price. Although Dixit was primed with money, he automatically shook his head. "Too expensive." "See, master, I show you how this life-object works!" The man fished beneath his scrap of loincloth and produced a small perforated silver box. Flipping it open, he produced a live woodlouse and slipped it under a hinged part of the model. The insect, in its struggles, activated a tiny wheel; the interior of the model began to rotate, some sets of minute planes turning in counterpoint to others. "This life-object belonged to a very religious man, master." In his fascination, Dixit said, "Are they all powered?" "No, master, only special ones. This was perfect model from Dalcush Bancholi, last generation master all the way from Third Deck, very very fine and masterful workmanship of first quality. I have also still better one worked by a body louse, if you care to see." By reflex, Dixit said, "Youc prices are too high." He absolved himself from the argument that brewed, slipping away through the crowd with the merchant calling after him. Other merchants shouted to him, sensing his interest in their wares. He saw some beautiful work, all on the tiniest scale and not only life-objects but amazing little as well as second hands; in some largest hand; in some, the hour hand was missing or was supplemented by a day hand; and the watches took many extraordinary shapes, tetrakishexahedrons and other elaborate forms, until their format merged with that of the lif e-objects. Dixit thought approvingly: the clock and watch industry fulfills a human need for exercising elaborate skill and accuracy, while at the same time requiring a minimum of materials. These people of Total Environment are the world's greatest craftsmen. Bent over one curious watch that involved a color change, he became suddenly aware of danger. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the man with the unpleasant orange eyes about to strike him. Dixit dodged without being able to avoid the blow. As it caught him on the side of his neck, he stumbled and VI  fterwards, Dixit could hardly say that he had been totally unconscious. He was aware of hands dragging him, of being partly carried, of the sound of many voices, of the name "Patel" repeated... And when he came fully to his senses, he was lying in a cramped room, with a guard in a scruffy turban standing by the door. His first hazy thought was that the room was no more than a small ship's cabin; then he realized that, by indigenous standards, this was a large room for only one person. He was a prisoner in Total Environment. A kind of self-mocking fear entered him; he had almost expected the blow, he realized; and he looked eagerly about for the bug-eye that would reassure were aware of his predicament. There was no sign of the bugeye. He was not long in working out why; this room had been partitioned out of a larger one, and the bugging system was evidently shut in the other half -- whether deliberately or accidentally, he had no way of knowing. The guard had bobbed out of sight. Sounds of whispering came from beyond the doorway. Dixit felt the pressure of many people there. Then a woman came in and closed the door. She walked cringingly and carried a brass cup of water. Although her face was lined, it was possible to see that she had once been beautiful and perhaps proud. Now her whole attitude expressed the defeat of her life. And this woman might be no more than eighteen! One of the terrifying features of Environment was the way, right from the start, confinement had speeded life-processes and abridged life. Involuntarily, Dixit flinched away from the woman. She almost smiled. "Do not fear me, sir. I am almost as much a prisoner as you are. Equally, do not think that by knocking me down you can escape. I promise you, there are fifty people outside the door, all eager to impress Prahlad Patel by catching you, should you try to get away." So I'm in Patel's clutches, he thought. Aloud he said, "I will offer you no harm. I want to see Patel. If you are captive, tell me your name, and perhaps I can help you." As she offered him the cup and he drank, die said, shyly, "I do not complain, for my fate might have been much worse than it is. Please do not agitate Patel about me, or he may throw me out of his household. My name is Malti, perhaps I may be able to help you, and all your tribe, soon. You are all in a form of captivity here, the great Patel included, and it is from that I hope to deliver you." Then he saw fear in her eyes. "You really are a spy from outside!" she breathed. "But we do not want our poor little world invaded! You have so much -- leave us our little!" She shrank away and slipped through the door, leaving Dixit with a melancholy impression of her eyes, so burdened in their shrunken gaze. nphe babel continued outside the door. Although he still felt sick, he propped himself up and let his thoughts run on. "You have so much -- leave us our little..." All their values had been perverted. Poor things, they could know neither the smallness of their own world, nor the magnitude of the world outside. This -- this dungheap had become to them all there was of beauty and value. Two guards came for him, mere boys. He could have knocked their heads together, but compassion moved him. They led him through a room full of excited people; beyond their glaring faces, the screen flickered pallidly behind its mesh; Dixit saw how faint the image of outside was. He was taken into another partitioned room. Two men were talking. The scene struck Dixit with peculiar force, and not merely because he was at a disadvantage. It was an alien scene. The impoverishment of even the richest furnishings, the clipped and bastardized variety of Hindi that was being talked, reinforced title impression of strangeness. And the Charge of Patel's character filled the room. There could be no doubt who was Patel. The plump cringing fellow, wringing his hands and protesting, was not Patel. Patel was the stocky white-haired man with the heavy lower lip and high forehead. Dixit had seen him in this very room over the bugging system. But to stand captive awaiting his attention was an experience of an entirely different order. Dixit tried to analyze the first fresh impact Patel had' on him, but it was elusive. It was difficult to realize that, as the outside measured years, Patel could not be much more than nineteen or twenty years of age. Time was impacted here, jellified under the psychic pressures of Total Environment. Like the hieroglyphics of that new relativity, detailed plans of the Environment hung large on one wall of this room, while figures and names were chalked over the others. The room was the nerve center of Top Deck. He knew something about Patel had come up here from the Seventh Deck. By guile as well as force, he had become ruler of Top Deck at an early age. He ers by abstaining from the usual forays of conquest into other floors. Patel was saying to the cringing man, "Be silent! You try to obscure the truth with argument. You have heard the witnesses against you. During your period of watch on the stairs, you were bribed by a man from Ninth Deck and you let him through here." "Only for a mere seventeen minutes, Sir Patel!!" "I am aware that such things happen every day, wretched Raital. But this fellow you let through stole the life-object belonging to Narayan Farhad and, in consequence, Narayan Farhad died in his sleep last night. Narayan was no more important than you are, but he was useful to me, and it is in order that he be revenged." "Anything that you say, Sir Patel!" "Be silent, wretched Raital!" Patel watched Raital with interest as he spoke. And he spoke in a firm reflective voice that impressed Dixit more than shouting would have done. "You shall revenge Narayan, Raital, because you caused his death. You will leave here now. You will not be punished. You will go, and you will steal the life-object belonging to that fellow from whom you accepted the bribe. You will bring that lifeobject to me. You have one day to do so. Otherwise, my assassins will find you out wherever you hide, be it even down on Deck One." "Oh, yes, indeed, Sir Patel, all men know -- " Raital was bent almost double as he uttered some face-saving formula. He turned and scurried away as Patel dismissed him. Strength, thought Dixit. Strength, and also cunning. That is what Patel radiates. An elaborate and cutting subtlety. The phrase pleased him, seeming to represent something actual that he had detected in Patel's makeup. An elaborate and cutting subtlety. Clearly, it was part of Patel's design that Dixit should witness this demonstration of his methods. Patel turned away, folded his arms, and contemplated a blank piece of wall at close range. He stood motionless. The guards held Dixit still, but not so still as Patel held himself. nphis tableau was maintained for several minutes. Dixit found himself losing track of the normal passage of time. Patel's habit of turning to stare at the wall -- and it did not belong to Patel alone -- was an uncanny one that Dixit had watched several times over the bugging system. It was that habit, he thought, which might have given was rampant in the tower. It was curious to think of Crawley here. Although Crawley might at this moment be surveying Dixit's face on a monitor, Crawley was now no more than an hypothesis... Malti broke the tableau. She entered the room with a damp cloth on a tray, to stand waiting patiently for Patel to notice her. He broke away at last from his motionless survey of the wall, gesturing abruptly to the guards to leave. He took no notice of Dixit, sitting in a chair, letting Malti drape the damp cloth round his neck; the cloth had a fragrant smell to it. "The towel is not cool enough, Malti, or damp enough. You will attend to me properly at my morning session, or you will lose this easy job." He swung his gaze, which was suddenly black and searching, on to Dixit to say, "Well, spy, you know I am Lord here. Do you wonder why I tolerate old women like this about me when I could have girls young and lovely to fawn on me?" Dixit said nothing, and the self-styled Lord continued, "Young girls would merely remind me by contrast of my advanced years. But this old bag -- whom I bought only yesterday -- this old bag is only just my junior and makes me look good in contrast. You see, we are masters of philosophy in here, in this prison-universe; we cannot be masters of material wealth like you people outside!" Again Dixit said nothing, disgusted by the man's implied attitude to women. A swinging blow caught him unprepared in the stomach. He cried and dropped suddenly to the floor. "Get up, spy!" Patel said. He had moved extraordinarily fast. He sat back again in his chair, letting Malti massage his neck muscles. i A s Dixit staggered to his feet, Patel said, "You don't deny you are from outside?" "I did not attempt to deny it. I came from outside to speak to you." "You say nothing here until you are ordered to speak. Your people -- you outsiders -- you have sent in several spies to us in the last few months. Why?" Still feeling sick from the blow, Dixit said, "You should realize that we are your friends rather than your enemies, and our men emissaries rather than spies." "Pah! You are a breed of spies! Don't you sit and spy on us from every room? You live in a funny little dull world out there, don't you? So interested in us that you can think of nothing else! Keep working, Malti! Little spy, you know what happened to all the other spies your spying people sent in?" "They died," Dixit said. "Exactly. They died. But you are the first to be sent to Patel's deck. What different thing to death do you expect here?" "Another death will make my superiors very tired, Patel. You may have the power of life and death over me; they have the same over you, and over all in this world of yours. Do you want a demonstration?" Rising, flinging the towel off, Patel said, "Give me your demonstration !" Must do, Dixit thought. Staring in Patel's eyes, he raised his right hand above his head and gestured with his thumb. Pray they are watching -- and thank God this bit of partitioned room is the bit with the bugging system! Tensely, Patel stared, balanced on his toes. Behind his shoulder, Malti also stared. Nothing happened. Then a sort of shudder ran through Environment. It became slowly audible as a mixture of groan and cry. Its cause became apparent in this less crowded room when the air began to grow hot and foul. So Dixit's signal had got through; Crawley had him under survey, and the airconditioning plant was pumping in hot carbon-dioxide through the respiratory system. "You see? We control the very air you breathe!" Dixit said. He dropped his arm, and slowly the air returned to normal, although it was at least an hour before the fright died down in the passages. Whatever the demonstration had done to Patel, he showed nothing. Instead, he said, "You control the air. Very well. But you do not control the will to turn it off permanently -- and so you do not control the air. Your threat is an empty one, spy! For some reason, you need us to live. We have a mystery, don't we?" "There is no reason why I should be anything but honest with you, Patel. Your special environment must have bred special talents in you. We are interested in those talents; but no more than interested." Patel came closer and inspected Dixit's face minutely, rather as he had recently inspected the blank wall. Strange angers churned inside him; his neck and throat turned a dark mottled color. Finally he spoke. "We are the center of your outside world, aren't we? We know that you watch us all the time. We know that you are much more than 'interested!' For you, we here are somehow a matter of life and death, aren't we?" nphis was more than Dixit had expected. "Four generations, Patel, four generations have been incarcerated in Environment." His voice trembled. "Four generations, and, despite our best intentions, you are losing touch with reality. You live in one relatively small building on a sizeable planet. Clearly, you can only be of limited interest to the world at large." "Malti!" Patel turned to the slave girl. "Which is the greater, the outer world or ours?" She looked confused, hesitated by the door as if longing to escape. "The outside world was great, master, but then it gave birth to us, and we have grown and are growing and are gaining strength. The child now is almost the size of the father. So my step-father's son Jamsu says, and he is a clever one." Patel turned to stare at Dixit, a haughty expression on his face. He made no comment, as if the words of an ignorant girl were sufficient to prove his point. "All that you and the girl say only emphasizes to me how much you need help, Patel. The world outside is a great and thriving place; you must allow it to give you assistance through me. We are not your enemies." Again the choleric anger was there, powering Patel's every word. "What else are you, spy? Your life is so vile and pointless out there, is it not? You envy us because we are superseding you! Our people -- we may be poor, you may think of us as in your power, but we rule our own universe. And that universe is expanding and falling under our control more every day. Why, our explorers have gone into the world of the ultra-small. We discover new environments, new ways of living. By your terms, we are scientific peasants, perhaps, but I fancy we have ways of knowing the trade routes of the blood and the eternities of cell-change that you cannot comprehend. You think of us all as captives, eh? Yet you are captive to the necessity of supplying our air and our food and water; we are free. We are poor, yet you covet our riches. We are spied orf all the time, yet we are secret. You need to understand us, yet we have no need to understand you. You are in out power, spy!" "Certainly not in one vital respect, Patel. Both you and we are ruled by historical necessity. This Environment was set up twenty-five of our years ago. Changes have taken place not only in here but outside as well. The nations of the world are no longer prepared to finance this project. It is going to be closed down entirely, and you are going to have to live outside. Or, if you don't want that, you'd better cooperate with us and persuade the leaders of the other decks to cooperate." Would threats work with Patel? His hooded and oblique gaze bit into Dixit like a hook. After a deadly pause, he clapped his hands once. Two guards immediately appeared. "Take the spy away," said Patel. Then he turned his back.  clever man, Dixit thought. He sat alone in the cell and meditated. It seemed as if a battle of wits might develop between him and Patel. Well, he was prepared. He trusted to his first impression, that Patel was a man of cutting subtlety. He could not be taken to mean all that he said. Dixit's mind worked back over their conversation. The mystery of the lif e-objects had been dangled before him. And Patel had taken care to belittle the outside world: "funny dull little world," he had called it. He had made Malti advance her primitive view that Environment was growing, and that had fitted in very well with his brand of boasting. Which led to the deduction that he had known her views beforehand; yet he had bought her only yesterday. Why should a busy man, a leader, bother to question an ignorant slave about her views of the outside world unless he were starved for information of that world, obsessed with it?"" Yes, Dixit nodded to himself. Patel was obsessed with outside and tried to hide that obsession; but several small contradictions in his talk had revealed it. Of course, it might be that Malti was so generally representative of the thousands in Environment that her misinformed ideas could be taken for granted. It was as well, as yet, not to be too certain that he was beginning to understand Patel. Part of Patel's speech made sense even superficially. These poor devils were exploring the world of the ultra-small. It was the only landscape left for them to map. They were human, and still burning inside them was that unquenchable human urge to open new frontiers. So they knew some inward things. Quite possibly, as Crawley anticipated, they possessed a reliance might be placed, unlike the wildly fluctuating telepathic radiations which circulated in the outside world. He felt confident, fully engaged. There was much to understand here. The bugging system, elaborate and over-used, was shown to be a complete failure; the watchers had stayed external to their problem; it remained their problem, not their life. What was needed was a whole team to come and live here, perhaps a team on every deck, anthropologists and so on. Since that was impossible, then clearly the people of Environment must be released from their captivity; far afield should be settled in new villages on the Ganges plain, under the wide sky. And there, as they adapted to the real world, observers could live among them, learning with humility of the gifts that had been acquired at such cost within the thick walls of the Total Environment tower. As Dixit sat in meditation, a guard brought a meal in to him. He ate thankfully and renewed his thinking. From the little he had already experienced -- the ghastly pressures on living space, the slavery, the aberrant modes of thought into which the people were being forced, the harshness of the petty rulers -- he was confirmed in his view that this experiment in anything like its present form must be closed down at once. The U.N. needed the excuse of his adverse report before they moved; they should have it when he got out. And if he worded the report carefully, stressing that these people had many talents to offer, then he might also satisfy Crawley and his like. He had it in his power to satisfy all parties, when he got out. All he had to do was get out. The guard came back to collect his empty bowl. "When is Patel going to speak with me again?" The guard said, "When he sends for you to have you silenced for ever." Dixit stopped composing his report and thought about that instead. A yT uch time elapsed before IV i p)i x it was visited again, and then it was only the self-effacing Malti who appeared, bringing him a cup of water. "I want to talk to you," Dixit said urgently. "No, no, I cannot talk! He will beat me! It is the time when we sleep, when the old die. You should sleep now, and Patel will see you in the morning." He tried to touch her hand, but she withdrew. "You are a kind girl, Malti. You suffer in Patel's household." "He has many women, many servants. I am not alone." "Can you not escape back to your family?" She looked at the floor evasively. "It would bring trouble to my family. Slavery is the lot of many women. It is the way of the world." "It is not the way of the world I come from!" Her eyes flashed. "Your world is of no interest to us!" Dixit thought after she had gone, She is afraid of our world. Rightly. He slept little during the night. Even barricaded inside Patel's fortress, he could still hear the noises of Environment: not only the voices, almost never silent, but the gurgle and sob of pipes in the walls. In the morning, he was taken into a larger room where Patel was issuing commands for the day to a succession of subordinates. Confined to a corner, Dixit followed everything with interest. His interest grew when the unfortunate guard Raital appeared. He bounded in and waited for Patel to strike him. Instead, Patel kicked him. "You have performed as I ordered yesterday?" Raital began at once to cry and wring his hands. "Sir Patel, I have performed as well as and better than you demanded, incurring great suffering and having myself beaten downstairs where the people of Ninth Deck discovered me marauding. You must invade them, Sir, and teach them a lesson that in their insolence they so dare to mock your faithful guards who only do those things -- " "Silence, you dog-devourer! Do you bring back that item which I demanded of you yesterday?" The wretched guard brought from the pocket of his tattered tunic a small object, which he held out to Patel. "Of course I obey, Sir Patel. To keep this object safe when the people caught me, I swallow it whole, sir, into the stomach for safe keeping, so that they would not know What I am about. Then my wife gives me sharp medicine so that I vomit it safely again to deliver to you." "Put the filthy thing down on that shelf there! You think I wish to touch it when it has been in your worm-infested belly, slave?" The guard did as he was bid and abased himself. "You are sure it is the lifeobject of the man who stole Narayan Farhad's life-object, and nobody else's?" "Oh, indeed, Sir Patel! It belongs to a man called Gita, the very very same who stole Narayan's life-object, and tonight you will see he will die of nightvisions!!" "Get out!" Patel managed to catch Raital's buttocks with a swift kick as the guard scampered from the room. A queue of people stood waiting to speak with him, to supplicate and advise. Patel sat and interviewed them, in the main showing a better humor than he had shown his luckless guard. For Dixit, this scene had a curious interest; he had watched Patel's morning audience more than once, standing by Crawtoring station; now he was a prisoner waiting uncomfortably in the corner of the room, and the Whole atmosphere was changed. He felt the extraordinary intensity of these people's lives, the emotions compressed, everything vivid. Patel himself wept several times as some tale of hardship was unfolded to him. There was no privacy. Everyone stood round him, listening to everything. Short the lives might be; but those annihilating spaces that stretch through ordinary lives, the spaces through which one glimpses uncomfortable glooms and larger poverties, if not presences more sour and sinister, seemed here to have been eradicated. The Total Environment had brought its peoples total involvement. Whatever befell them, they were united, as were bees in a hive. Finally, a break was called. The unfortunates who had not gained Patel's ear were turned away; Malti was summoned and administered the damp-towel treatment to Patel. Later, he sent her off and ate a frugal meal. Only when he had finished it and sat momentarily in meditation, did he turn his brooding attention to Dixit. He indicated that Dixit was to fetch down the object Raital had placed on a shelf. Dixit did so and put the object before Patel. Staring at it with interest, he saw it was an elaborate little Model, similar to the ones for sale on the balcony. "Observe it well," Patel said. "It is the life-object of a man. You have these -- " he gestured vaguely -- "outside?" "No." "You know what they are?" "No." "In this world of ours, Mr. Dixit, we have many holy men. I have a holy man here under my protection. On the deck below is one very famous holy man, Vazifdariji. These men have many powers. Tonight, I shall give my holy man this lifeobject, and with it he will be able to enter the being of the man to whom it belongs, for good or ill, and in this case for ill, to revenge a death with a death." D ixit stared at the little object, a three-dimensional maze constructed of silver and plastic strands, trying to comprehend what Patel was saying. "This is a sort of key to its owner's mind?" "No, no, not a key, and not to his mind. It is a -- well, we do not have a scientific word for it, and our word would mean nothing to you, so I cannot say what. It is, let us say, a replica, a substitute for the man's being Not his mind, his being. In this case, a man called Gita. You are very interested, aren't you?" "Everyone here has one of these?" "Down to the very poorest and even the older children. A sage works in conjunction with a smith to produce each individual life-object." "But they can be stolen and then an ill-intentioned holy man can use them to kill the owner. So why make them? I don't understand." Smiling, Patel made a small movement of impatience. "What you discover of yourself, you record. That is how these things are made. They are not trinkets; they are a man's record of his discovery of himself." Dixit shook his head. "If they are so personal, why are so many sold by street traders as trinkets?" "Men die. Then their life-objects have no value, except as trinkets. They are also popularly believed to bestow... well, personality-value. There also exist large numbers of forgeries, which people buy because they like to have them, simply as decorations." After a moment, Dixit said. "So they are innocent things, but you take them and use them for evil ends." IX "I use them to keep a power balance. A man of mine called Narayan was silenced by Gita of Ninth Deck. Never mind why. So tonight I silence Gita to keep the balance." He stopped and looked closely at Dixit, so that the latter received a blast of that enigmatic personality. He opened his hand and said, still observing Dixit, "Death sits in my palm, Mr. Dixit. Tonight I shall have you silenced also, by what you may consider more ordinary methods." Clenching his hands tightly together, Dixit said, "You tell me about the life-objects, and yet you claim you are going to kill me. Patel pointed up to one corner of his room. "There are eyes and ears there, while your everhungry spying friends suck up the facts of this world. You see, I can tell them -- I can tell them so much and they can never comprehend our life. All the important things can never be said, so they can never learn. But they can see you die tonight, and that they will comprehend. Perhaps then they will cease to send spies in here." He clipped his hands once for the guard. They came forward and led Dixit away. As he went back to his cell, he heard Patel shouting for Malti. T he hours passed in steady gloom. The U.N., the the Environment charter permitted intervention by only one outsider at a time. Dixit could hear, feel, the vast throbbing life of the place going on about him and was shaken by it. He tried to think about the life-objects. Presumably Crawley had overheard the last conversation, and would know that the holy men, as Patel called them, had the power to kill at a dence Crawley sought: telecide, or whatever you called it. And the knowledge helped nobody, as Patel himself observed. It had long been known that African witch doctors possessed similar talents, to lay a spell on a man and kill him at a distance; but how they did it had never been established; nor, indeed, had the fact ever been properly assimilated by the west, eager though the west was for new methods civilization could not learn from another; the whole business of life-objects, Dixit perceived, was going to be such a matter: endlessly fascinating, entirely insoluble... He thought, returning to his cell, and told himself: Patel still puzzles me. But it is no use hanging about here being puzzled. Here I sit, waiting for a knife in the guts. It must be night now. I've got to get out of here. There was no way out of the room. He paced restlessly up and down. They brought him no meal, which was ominous. A long while later, the door was unlocked and opened. It was Malti. She lifted one finger as a caution to silence, and closed the door behind her. "It's time for me...?" Dixit asked. She came quickly over to him, not touching him, staring at him. Though she was an ugly and despondent woman, beauty lay in her time-haunted eyes. "I can help you escape, Dixit. Patel sleeps now, and I have an understanding with the guards here. Understandings have been reached to smuggle you down to my own deck, where perhaps you can get back to the outside where you belong. This place is full of arrangements. But you must be quick. Are you ready?" "He'll kill you when he finds out!" She shrugged. "He may not. I think perhaps he likes me. Prahlad Patel is not inhuman, whatever you think of him." "No? But he plans to murder someone else tonight. He has acquired some poor fellow's lifeobject and plans to have his holy man kill him with night-visions, whatever they are." She said, "People have to die. You are going to be lucky. You will not die, not this night." "If you take that fatalistic view, why help me?" He saw a flash of defiance in her eyes. "Because you must take a message outside for me." "Outside? To whom?" "To everyone there, everyone who greedily spies on us here and would spoil this world. Tell them to go away and leave us and let us make our own world. Forget us! That is my message! Take it! Deliver it with all the strength you have! This is our world -- not yours!" T T er vehemence, her ignorance, silenced him. She led him from the room. There were guards on the outer door. They stood rigid with their eyes closed, seeing no evil, and she slid between them, leading Dixit, and opening the door. They hurried outside, on to the balcony, which was still as crowded as ever, people sprawling everywhere in the disconsolate gestures of public sleep. With the noise and chaos and animation of daytime fled, Total Environment stood fully revealed for the echoing prison it was. As Malti turned to go, Dixit grasped her wrist. "I must return," she said. "Get quickly to the steps down to Ninth Deck, the near steps. That's three flights to go down, the inter-deck flight guarded. They will let you through; they expect you." "Malti, I must try to help this other man who is to die. Do you happen to know someone called Gita?" She gasped and clung to him. "Gita?" "Gita of the Ninth Deck. Patel has Gita's life-object, and he is to die tonight." "Gita is my step-father, my mother's third husband. A good man! Oh, he must not die, for my mother's sake!" "He's to die tonight. Malti, I can help you and Gita. I appreciate how you feel about outside, but you are mistaken. You would be free in a way you cannot understand! Take me to Gita, and we'll all three get out together." Conflicting emotions chased all over her face. "You are sure Gita is to die?" "Come and check with him to see if his life-object has gone!" Without waiting for her to make a decision -- in fact she looked as if she were just about to bolt back into Patel's quarters -- Dixit took hold of her and forced her along the balcony, picking his way through the piles of sleepers. Ramps ran down from balcony to balcony in long zigzags. For all its multitudes of people -- even the ramps had been taken up as dosses by whole swarms of urchins -- Total Environment seemed much larger than it had when one looked in from the monitoring room. He kept peering back to see if they were being followed; it seemed to him unlikely that he would be able to get away. But they had now reached the stairs leading down to Deck Nine. Oh, well, he thought, corruption he could believe in; it was the universal oriental system whereby the small man contrived to live under oppression. As soon as the guards saw him and Malti, they all stood and closed their eyes. Among them was the wretched Raital, who hurriedly clapped palms over eyes as they approached. "I must go back to Patel," Malti gasped. "Why? You know he will kill you," Dixit said. He kept tight hold of her thin wrist. "All these witnesses to the way you led me to safety -- you can't believe he will not discover what you are doing. Let's get to Gita quickly." He hustled her down the stairs. There were Deck Nine guards at the bottom. They smiled and saluted Malti and let her by. As if resigned now to doing what Dixit wished, she led him forward, and they picked their way down a ramp to a lower floor. The squalor and confusion were greater here than they had been above, the slumbers more broken. This was a deck without a strong leader, and it showed. He must have seen just such a picture as this over the bugging, in the air-conditioned comfort mained comparatively unmoved. You had to be among it to feel it. Then you caught also the aroma of Environment. It was pungent in the extreme. A s they moved slowly down among the huddled figures abased by fatigue, he saw that a corpse burned slowly on a wood pile. It was the corpse of a child. Smoke rose from it in a leisurely coil until it was sucked into a wall vent. A mother squatted by the body, her face shielded by one skeletal hand. "It is the time when the old die," Malti had said of the previous night; and the young had to answer that same call. This was the Indian way of facing the inhumanity of Environment: with their age-old acceptance of suffering. Had one of the white races been shut in here to breed to intolerable numbers, they would have met the situation with a general massacre. Dixit, a half-caste, would not permit himself to judge which response he most respected. Malti kept her gaze fixed on the worn concrete underfoot as they moved down the ramp past the corpse. At the bottom, she led him forward again without a word. They pushed through the sleazy ways, arriving at last at a battered doorway. With a glance at Dixit, Malti slipped in and rejoined her family. Her mother, not sleeping, crouched over a wash bowl, gave a cry and fell into Malti's arms. Brothers and sisters and half-brothers and half-sisters and cousins and nephews woke up, squealing. Dixit was utterly brushed aside. He stood nervously, waiting, hoping, in the corridor. It was many minutes before Malti came out and led him into the crowded little cabin. She introduced him to Shamim, her mother, who curtsied and rapidly disappeared, and to her stepfather, Gita. The little wiry man shooed everyone out of one corner of the room and moved Dixit into it. A cup of wine was produced and offered politely to the visitor. As he sipped it, he said, "If your step-daughter has explained the situation, Gita, I'd like to get you and Malti out of here, because otherwise your lives are worth very little. I can guarantee you will be extremely kindly treated outside." With dignity, Gita said, "Sir, all this very unpleasant business has been explained to me by my step-daughter. You are most good to take this trouble, but we cannot help you." "You, or rather Malti, have helped me. Now it is my turn to help you. I want to take you out of here to a safe place. You realize you are both under the threat of death? You hardly need telling that Prahlad Patel is a ruthless man." "He is very very ruthless, sir," Gita said unhappily. "But we cannot leave here. I cannot leave here -- look at all these little people who are dependent on me! Who would look after them if I left?" "But if your hours are numbered?" "If I have only one minute to go before I die, still I cannot desert those who depend on me." Dixit turned to Malti. "You, Malti -- you have less responsibility. Patel will have his revenge on you. Come with me and be safe!" She shook her head. "If I came, I would sicken with worry for what was happening here and so I would die that way." T T e looked about him hopeless ly. The blind interdependence bred by this crowded environment had beaten him -- almost. He still had one card to play. "When I go out of here, as go I must, I have to report to my superiors. They are the people who -- the people who really order everything that happens here. They supply your light, your food, your air. They are like gods to you, with the power of death over every one on every deck -- which perhaps is why you can hardly believe in them. They already feel that Total Environment is wrong, a crime against your humanity. I have to take my verdict to them. My verdict, I can tell you now, is that the lives of all you people are as precious as lives outside these walls. The experiment must be stopped; you all must go free. "You may not understand entirely what I mean, but perhaps the wall screens have helped you grasp something. You will all be looked after and rehabilitated. Everyone will be released from the decks very soon. So, you can both come with me and save your lives; and then, in perhaps only a week, you will be reunited with your family. Patel will have no power then. Now, think over your decision again, for the good of your dependents, and come with me to life and freedom." Malti and Gita looked anxiously at each other and went into a huddle. Shamim joined in, and Jamsu, and lame Shirim, and more and more of the tribe, and a great jangle of excited talk swelled up. Dixit fretted nervously. Finally, silence fell. Gita said, "Sir, your intentions are plainly kind. But you have forgotten that Malti charged you to take a message to outside. Her message was to tell the people there to go away and let us make our own world. Perhaps you do not understand such a message and so cannot deliver it. Then I will give you my message, and you can take it to your superiors." Dixit bowed his head. "Tell them, your superiors and everyone outside who insists on watching us and meddling in our affairs, tell them that we are shaping our own lives. We know what is to come, and the many problems of having such a plenty of young people. But we have faith in our next generation. We believe they will have many new talents we do not possess, as we have talents our fathers did not possess. "We know you will continue to send in food and air, because that is something you cannot escape from. We also know that in your hidden minds you wish to see us all fail and die. You wish to see us break, to see what will happen when we do. You do not have love for us. You have fear and puzzlement and hate. We shall not break. We are building a new sort of world, we are getting clever. We would die if you took us out of here. Go and tell that to your superiors and to everyone who spies on us. Please leave us to our own lives, over which we have our own commands." There seemed nothing Dixit could say in answer. He looked at Malti, but could see she was unyielding, frail and pale and unyielding. This was what lack of understanding. He turned and went. He had his key. He knew the secret place on each deck where he could slip away into one of the escape elevators. As he pushed through the grimy crowds, he could hardly see his way for tears. X Tt was all very informal. Dixit made his report to a board administration, including the Special Project Organizer, Peter Crawley. Two observers were allowed to sit in, a grand lady who represented the Indian Government, and Dixit's old friend, Senator Jacob Byrnes, representing the United Nations. Dixit delivered his report on what he had found and added a recommendation that a rehabilitation village be set up immediately and the Environment wound down. Crawley rose to his feet and stood rigid as he said, "By your own words, you admit that these people of Environment cling desperately to what little they have. However terrible, however miserable, that little may seem to you. They are acclimatized to what they have. They have turned their backs to the outside world and don't want to come out." Dixit said, "We shall rehabilitate them, re-educate them, find them local homes where the intricate family patterns to which they are used can still be maintained, where they can be helped back to normality." "But by what you say, they would receive a paralyzing shock if confronted with the outside world and its gigantic scale." "Not if Patel still led them." A mutter ran along the board; its members clearly thought this an absurd statement. Crawley gestured despairingly, as if hiss case were made, and sat down saying, "He's the sort of tyrant who causes the misery in Environment."" "The one thing they need when they emerge to freedom is a strong leader they know. Gentlemen, Patel is our good hope. His great asset is that he is oriented towards outside already." "Just what does that mean?" one of the board asked. "It means this. Patel is a clever man. My belief is that he arranged that Malti Should help me escape from his cell. He never had any intention of killing me; that was a bluff to get me on my way. Little, oppressed Malti was just not the woman to take any initiative. What Patel probably did not bargain for was that I should mention Gita by name to her, or that Gita should be closely related to her. But because of their fatalism, his plan was in no way upset." "Why should Patel want you to escape?" "Implicit in much that he did and said, though he tried to hide it, was a burning curiosity about outside. He exhibited facets of his culture to me to ascertain my reactions -- testing for approval or disapproval, I'd guess, like a child. Nor does he attempt to attack other decks -- the timehonored sport of Environment tyrants; his attention is directed inwardly on us. "Patel is intelligent enough to know that we have real power. He has never lost the true picture of reality, unlike his minions. So he wants to get out. "He calculated that if I got back to you, seemingly having escaped death, I would report strongly enough to persuade you to start demolishing Total Environment immediately." "Which you are doing," Crawley said. "Which I am doing. Not for Patel's reasons, but for human reasons. And for utilitarian reasons also -- which will perhaps appeal more to Mr. Crawley. Gentlemen, you were right. There are mental disciplines in Environment the world could use, of which perhaps the least attraclions of dollars. We have to recoup by these new advances. We can only use these new advances by studying them in an atmosphere not laden with hatred and envy of us -- in other words, by opening that black tower. Hphe meeting broke up. Of course, he could not expect anything more decisive than that for a day or two. Senator Byrnes came over. "Not only did you make out a good case, Thomas; history is with you. The world's emerging from a bad period and that dark tower, as you call it, is a symbol of the bad times, and so it has to go." Inwardly, Dixit had his qualifications to that remark. But they walked together to the window of the boardroom and looked across at the great rough bulk of the Environment building. "It's more than a symbol. It's as full of suffering and hope as our own world. But it's a manmade monster -- it must go." Byrnes nodded. "Don't worry. It'll go. I feel sure that the historical process, that blind evolutionary thing, has already dedone. Stick around. In a few weeks, you'll be able to help Malta's family rehabilitate. And now I'm off to put in my two cents' worth with the chairman of that board." He clapped Dixit on the back and walked off. Inside he knew lights would be burning and those thronging feet padding across the only world they knew. Inside there, babies would be born this night and men die of old age and night-visions... Outside, monsoon rain began to fall on the wide Indian land. QalaxAf BohlUel by fans, it's time for the Third Annual Galaxy Awards for impressing Algis Budrys with fiction in book form during the past year. This annual effrontery offers the lucky recipient nothing but the sight of his name in print an additional time, and an empty promise of drink. Arrangements are being contemplated to add a grand prize of a month in Philadelphia; consult this space in the February, #, Galaxy for further developments on that score. The best novel of the past year was Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection. Why did this bad book win? Because it is chockful of excellent inventions, of outrageous inventions such as a musical machete, of self-confidence and joy; because it conveys a sense that the author groped around until he found Kid Death to put in it. He does not do much with him, having him, but these are days in which a damned good grope is often the best you can do, and better than what romances they used to sell. So go buy this Ace book. The best publishing idea of the year was either Putnam's The Past Through Tomorrow, collecting the major portion of Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series (#), or Doubleday's Three Stories (by Murray LeinWyndham), edited by Sam Moskowitz and priced at #. We solve the dilemma by giving Putnam the cup for Publishing Idea and Sam the accolade for Editor. (Ah, by the way, when a publishing company wins the Budrys Benison, one officially designated representative may approach the Benefactor for one drink. He must carry a letter of introduction from Mr. Putnam.) The Best Thing All Year was by Fritz Leiber. It was The Big Time, which I say is a play and Galaxy (and the #th World SF Convention) said was a prizewinning novel. Would somebody care to produce it, so I can be proven stupid? I envy you all. It was time, I thought, to return to those days of yesteryear when I could barely wait for the next issue of The Avon Fantasy Reader and the next Conan story reprint. Much had intervened, including the emergence of a positive antipathy to the Ass of Aquilonia. So when Lancer Books sent me a copy of King Kull, by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter edited by Glenn Lord with a teeming Roy Krenkel cover, I fell to. Kull, as you have to know, was a prototype Conan, a trial creation by Robert Howard, picked up and dropped, dropped and picked up, while the modern master of mythic mishmash was tuning up for apotheosis. Some of the bobbles and incompletions have been worked over by Lin Carter, and rather well; I ran right through Black Abyss without realizing it was a posthumous collaboration, and only in hindsight did it occur to me the kind of pathos in it was not in accord with Howard as he was. This is, to sober up momentarily, a collection of stories about Kull, whom we meet briefly as a mysterious stranger in Atlantis before he turns up as king of equally foreign Valusia after one paragraph of summary. That paragraph would have contained a hundred thousand words about Conan. There are other hiati as well; you cannot get to know Kull as well as you know and can trace Conan's development, simply because if you could, Howard would not have had to go through a similar process with his betterknown protagonist. If it weren't for Carter's skill at pastiche, you would know Kull even less than you do. If you like cut-and-thrust prediluvian adventure stories, combining a masochistic megalomania with a strong streak of horror writing, you will find here a pretty good dose thereof. If you would like to know more about Kull, then you are just going to have to join with my own feeling of faint exasperation at being pretty much forever barred from sharing in some of the most interesting portions of Kull's life. A feeling of exasperation which, I might add, does not extend to Lancer Books; it was a good idea to do this book, however sketchy. Nebula Award Stories T wo (Doubleday, #), edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, is the very opposite end of the stick. Self-conscious, saddled with primerous blurbs and introductory matter, it is so sophisticated, so scrupulous in crediting even the supplier who manufactures the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award tokens, that it resembles some kind of grotesque attempt to literatize a corporate statement. Fortunately, it is filled with good stories, or it would have been the most unctuous eulogy in years. These stories are winners and runners-up for the # Nebula Awards. The volume understandably omits Delany's Babel-# and Daniel Keyes's Flowers For Algernon, the books which tied for the Best Novel award. It does include Jack Vance's excellent novella, The Last Castle, and Gordon Dickson's good Call Him Lord, the novelette category winner. The best short story of the year award went, posthumously, to Richard McKenna, for The Secret Place, which is included here, as are some very good runners-up such as Frederik Pohl's of Other Days and Sonya Dorman's When I Was Miss Dow, any one of which is technically and conceptually a better and more original story, more economically told. There is usually a reason why the unpublished stories found in dead men's desks were unpublished, and that reason is very rarely one which justifies this kind of over-reaction. Especially by professionals. Good stories in this book are Among the Hairy Earthmen by R.A. Lafferty, We Can Remember It tor You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick, In the Imagicon by George H. Smith, and Man in His Time by Brian Aldiss. A strikingly plonky story is Robin Scott's Who Needs Insurance?, which, although a Campbell pipeline story like Call Him Lord, has not the virtue of clear thought. This is not a bad crop, and certainly worth having, if one has, five bucks to spend on a book of this unextraordinary length. But I can see little more logic and reasoned judgment reflected in this selection (and the designation of Babel# as equal to Flowers lot Algernon ) than there is in, for instance, the Hugo popularity poll. For years, we writers sat around vowing that When we had our award, by God, it would be impeccable. It ain't. It is not the province of this column to review science books -- though I do wish someone would. Nevertheless, Doubleday hag sent me Is Anyone There?, a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov, originally published in a great .variety of places, at #. And while I cannot review the factual content, perhaps we can reason together for a moment. Viz.: The essays cover ground in a variety of sciences. Isaac cannot possibly know all of them as well as he knows biochemistry. Therefore, this is primarily an exercise in science writing -- in studying up enough on a given discipline to be able to give a coherent account of it to laymen. The range of this book is such that it is a potential leg up for almost anyone who wants to get an idea of "science says" about almost any of the larger categories of life. Does it do this well? Compiled from a diversity of original publications for a variety of sometimes markedly disparate audiences, it has a tendency to trip from elementary textbook style: "We all know that food intake is regulated by the appetite. You eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you are full," to something rather different: "The unstable intermediate compound requires the input of a comparatively large amount of energy, but until it is formed, no final products will be formed, although the products themselves are not particularly high-energy. The entire reaction will proceed no more quickly than the unstable intermediate can be formed." The potential reader will find himself bouncing between the simplified and the underextended. How annoying or how mystifying this will be to him depends on his present understanding of these various subjects. But it doesn't seem likely any one reader will get uniform information and enjoyment out of the book. While we're at this, let me recommend This New Ocean (Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. #, # in Project Mercury. Written on a it may be full of lies and sloppy research, but I don't think so; in any event, it's a long, narrative account of the original U.S. astronaut project, full of human sidelights, some rather interesting facts which I don't think trickled into your daily paper at the time, and a fine ability to convey what flying a Mercury capsule might have felt like to you. There is also what seems to me to be a terrific set of appendices and indexing, as well as a great many excellent photographs and diagrams. A straight publisher could easily bring out a successful popular paperback version. Meanwhile, I believe there is also a less expensive version of this book in cardboard covers from the G.P.O.; I suggest you write to tire Superintendent of Documents and inquire, if you're not interested in a permanent copy. Finally, this issue's crop of books includes The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, by Algis Budrys, from Gold Medal Books, which calls me a classic master of science fiction. In which case, where did they get the chutzpah to mess with my title? The Iron Thorn ran as a fourpart serial in If, not vanishingly long ago. The present version is somewhat longer, and with new material including a nursery rhyme, and a fair amount of new work done on the ending. The additions and revisions go in the direction of refining what was already there, so the chances are that if you didn't understand the ending of the serial, you won't understand the ending of the book. I will take the blame; I should remove the marbles from my mouth. The story is of a young man raised by apes on Mars. He hunts, he rebels, he slays foe and friend, and periodically, he creates. He gets into deathly trouble, and gets out of it. He does not always get out of it by being very strong or very smart, though he is strong and on some subjects is no dope, and about at the point where a self-willed spaceship carries him off to Earth, any attraction he may have had as a physical hero begins to get drained out of him. He bumps into some clearly unusual characters, including Ahmuls the halfbaked gingerbread man. Ahmuls at times seems to be taking over the physical role, but he gets sidetracked toward the end of the story, in a scene stolen from the last line of a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet. My hero -- who also has a confusing set of names -- seems to be an artist at some times, but shows flashes of being an actor, a hummer, and, toward the end, a writer or at least a narrator of some kind... perhaps he is a standup comic. Now, we all know people like that. Based on my long-standing interest in processes... in the step-by-step and perhaps boring developments that transform a likely or unlikely lad into a werewolf, for instance... I messed around with this idea for a very long time, finally got it out at the last possible moment, and may not have had anything there for you in the first place, after all. But I thought I knew what I was doing, and I enjoyed myself. Science-Fiction's Newest Hugo Winner A World at the End of the Universe Receives a Deadly Gift from Earth I    New Novelette by One of Science-Fiction's Favorite Writers of All Time -- Now Back !    Plus many other headline stories of science fiction ! Don't miss this month's IF -- on sale now Sow Hiey Save It Back It was the most fun they had ever had , in Fun City , U.S.A.I T T e was the Mayor of Big Island. Giuseppe Juan Schlome O'Hanlon was his name, John the Mayor, a shining black man. He was born into a political family and was given the names to please as many groups as possible. He had once been of imposing appearance and quiet dignity. He was not now. He shrilled and keened and moaned, and sometimes he was irrational. It was his leg that hurt him, and his soul. His leg hurt him because of the pin clear through it, the pin that was part of the shackle. This shackle could not be unlocked mechanically. It was a psychic-coded lock on the shackle, and it could only be released when John had somehow fulfilled his job and obtained his own release. The shackle bound his leg not only to his desk but also to a steel stanchion that was part of the steel frame of the building. John's soul hurt him because Big Island was no longer the great thing to which he had been devoted. It had never been so in his lifetime. It was neo-jungle now, probably the most savage of them all. Even now there were fires burning on the floor above him and on the floor below him. There were always fires burning somewhere in the building, in every building that still had anything that would burn. There were rats in the room, in every room, but perhaps John saw more of them than were there. He lived in perpetual delirium. There were (he knew, though he could no longer go out and see) people unburied in the streets, people knifed down hourly, people crazy and emptyeyed or glitter-eyed. There was horrible horn music and git-fiddle music and jangle shouting; and he was a prisoner for life in his own office. This was not how to be a great administrator of a great city. The emphasis had somehow shifted. But he had loved the City and the Island, or the memory of them. And this hurt his soul. "You have to stay on the job and run the place for the rest of your life," Commissioner Kreger had told John the Mayor just before the commissioner had cut and run for it, "There will, of course, be no more elections. The burlesque that brought you in was enough to end the process. It was fiasco." "It was not," John the Mayor moaned in pain. "It was high triumph, the man of the people called to head the people, a noble thing, the climax and sole goal of my life. I won it finally. They can't take that away from me." "How does it taste, John?" "I'm dying, do not taunt me. What went wrong?" "It went wrong a hundred years before you were born, John. You lived all your life in a dream, and you had better try to re-enter it. You're here for good. You're the ultimate patsy, John." "I'll kill myself." "No, you will not. You were allowed to have this job because by temperament and religion, the residue of your dream, you were incapable of suicide. So many of our mayors have taken that easy way out! It was a nuisance, John." "I'll go crazy then," John the Mayor moaned. "No, you likely will not do that either, though it would not matter if you did. You are already psychotic, of course, but you will not go off much further. Stay and suffer, kid. You have no choice." "Kreger, isn't there some way we can get rid of this whole Island? Sell it, transfer title to it, give it back to someone? Can't we get out from under?" "You find a way, John. Those things that we once thought of as abstractions have taken a direct hand now: Final Responsibility, Ultimate Justice, things like that. They must be satisfied. Whatever you do will have to satisfy the psychic-coded lock on your shackles to give you release. Sell the Island legal, if you can find someone to sell it to. Transfer it, if you can find someone to accept the transfer. But it must be for Fair Value or Value Justified or Original Value from Original Entailment. The psychic-code thing will know. It's governed by the Equity Factor." Then Commissioner Kreger left John the Mayor, left the Island and went to rich fishing in other troubled (but not completely polluted) waters. There was no more profit for that smart man to shake out of the Island. nphat had been two years ago, and John the Mayor had been the only official on the Island since that time. His only contacts with the world were the sharp noises and smells that came in through his broken windows and the visits of five feudal or wrangle leaders, the Duke, the Sky, the Wideman, the Cloud and the Lolo. Duke Durango was as smooth a gutter-fighter as ever came to the top of his heap, a happy fellow. Lawrence Sky was a fair white man named for the color of his big sky-blue eyes, a shambling giant, a giggling killer. Wideman Wyle was a wide man indeed, a cheerful sadist who told really funny stories and was the most pleasant person in the group. Cloud Clinkenbeard was a dour and stormy fellow, mean and relentless, and always in search of dirty novelty. Lolo Loudermilk was a girl, sort of a girl, a flaming mixed creature full of vitality and noise. They were the Mayor's only contacts. They were the leaders of one of the gangs that had endured, when the ten thousand gangs had eaten each other up and declined to a hundred. All five of them came into the Mayor's office, eating noisily. "Food train in!" announced the Duke. "We killed just one of the drivers. They say there'll never be another train in if we kill more than one driver at a time. And we had to give up four hostages for it. Isn't four too many, John?" "Numbers have no meaning in this evil thing," said John the Mayor. "How many hostages have you left?" "Twenty, and a few more, I think. We don't all count the same when we get to the big numbers. But I think four is too many to give for a food train. What will happen when we run out of hostages? Who'll give the big damn to subscribe a train for us then, when we have no more important people to trade to the important people offisland? Here, sign this, limp-leg John, and the Cloud will take it back to them." The mayor read the release and signed it. Each of the five feudal leaders looked it over in turn then. Several of them could read a little (it was for this reason that they were the Mayor's contacts), and it would be hard for Mayor John to write anything phoney on that release and slip it past them. The Mayor had to sign these releases every time a food train came, and he knew what would happen when they ran out of hostages. The blackmail would be over when the last hostage of value or affection to someone off-Island had been turned over for a food train. The off-Island people would let the Island rot. The trains had been the only food source for the Island for years. The Cloud took the release and went out through the smouldering corridor and into the broken streets to the food train that came once a month through the last not-completely-broken tunnel. "Something else came on the food trail, gimpy John," the Duke said uneasily. "Well, what, what was it? Duke, Duke, you didn't get hold of a saw so I could saw my leg off, did you?" "Nah. You're not supposed to saw your leg off. You're supposed to stay here just like you are. Who's going to sign for the food trains and hostage transfers if our mayor saws his leg off and runs away? "John Mayor, there's three other men came on that food train. These are funny men. They might even be important enough men that we can hold them for hostages. They brought some heavy kegs and boxes with them, John, and they even conned some of the colts into carrying them over here for them. We can't figure out what kind of men they are, Mayor. They look at us, and we look at them, and we both got sparks in our eyes. They are in the building now, Mayor, and want to see you." "Show them in, spook Duke, the mayor is always available to his constituents." "Constituents these are not," said the Lolo. "They are washedout pale fellows, but they are solid." "And one of those kegs of theirs got a smell I like, Mayor," said the Sky. "I believe I remember that smell like it was born in me. You get that keg, Mayor." "And those long crates got a heft I like," said the Wideman. "I almost know what will be in those crates. You get those crates, Mayor." "Those square boxes got a feel I like," said the Lolo. "I almost know what .short-handled things will be in those square boxes. And the smallest package has a brass glint through a rip in it. You get those square boxes and that smallest package, Mayor." "I don't understand this at all," said John the Mayor, rolling his red-rimmed eyes in his constant pain. "Let the men and their baggage come in." T'he three new men who came in had a certain animal power about them, and a certain human authority. Possibly they might be important enough to hold for hostages, but who was going to take the lead in holding diem? Men, they moved like big cats. But they were dressed like businessmen of an earlier decade, an anomaly on the Island, and they were lighter than any of the Islanders there except Lawrence Sky. "You are the Mayor JohnJohn?" asked one of the new men. "And you have authority to deal?" "I am the mayor," said John, "and I have such authority as a shackled prisoner may have. For what do we deal?" "Oh, for the Island. We've come to buy it. You'd like that, wouldn't you?" "What, what, who are you?" "I am Adrian Sweetsong," said the first of the new men. "I'm a petroleum geologist by profession, which has nothing to do with the matter. And I'm an official of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club." "I'm Dennis Halftown," said the second of the new men. "I'm an electronic engineer by profession, which has nothing to do with the matter either. And I'm also an official of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club." "I'm Freddy Flatfish," said the third of the new men. "I'm a lawyer, which does have something to do with this matter. I am also an official of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club, and I have studied the legal aspects of this thing pretty thoroughly." "Is it the Midlands Gun and Rod Club that is dealing for the Island?" Mayor John asked. "That's right," said Ad'rian Sweetsong, the first of the new men. "First installment! Set 'em right there, boys." Several of the colts, the strong rough Island boys, set down two heavy square boxes, and Dennis Halftown (the second of the new men) broke them open with a pry-bar. things are for me!" the Lolo gasped, and she had a couple of them out in her hands. "Sweet little choppies!" the Sky drooled. "What's a knife alongside of one of those?" "Hackberry pudding!" cried the Cloud as he returned from his errand. "Here, here, they look good, let's get them tested. I'll just pass a dozen of those out the windows to some of the boys. Let them try them out! Let them fall in love with them!" "Fifty hatchets," announced Adrian Sweetsong, "delivered and accepted. We record them." "Wait! Wait!" howled Mayor John, jangling his shackles. "What have fifty hatchets to do with dealing for the Island? Who has used hatchets for a century?" "One-leg John," the Duke crooned, "too bad your shackles won't let you get as far as the window. Some of the boys are using them now. Believe me, John, they're using them now!" "Mr. Sweetsong," Mayor John explained patiently, "the last valuation of Island property ever made set it at over a hundred velopments it may be down a little now, but not that far. Hatchets will not get it. I can sell it only for fair value or value justified. My own shackling is governed by the Equity Factor." "We know that, Mr. Mayor," said Freddy Flatfish, the lawyer for the Midlands Gun and Rod Club. Freddy Flatfish was a tow-headed twinkling man. "But the Island has reverted. It's really worthless since it was left to the ten thousand gangs, which have since devoured themselves down to a hundred. Perhaps its reverted value is now its original value. Anyhow, the first approach was yours." "Mine? Mine? I made no approach. I never heard of you fellows," the Mayor said. "But we have monitored you, Mayor John. Two years you said to the Commissioner 'Can't we give it back to someone?' And you are also recorded as saying 'We ought to sell it bade to -- "Second installment!" announced Adrian Sweetsong. "Set them right there, boys." Qeveral of the colts set down  the long crates, and Dennis Halftown broke them open with his pry-bar. "Oh, those long sweet songs!" the Wideman slavered. "Smooth bores! You can jam them with any kind of soup at all and panlight them. You can shoot broken glass with them. You can shoot anything. Here, we'll just hand a few of them out the windows and let the fellows try them out. Get the heft of those things! Even as clubs your hands would fall in love with them! Blunderbusses!" And the Wideman handed half a dozen of them out the windows. "Twenty guns," announced Adrian Sweetsong. "Delivered and accepted. We record them." "Even if it were possible for me to deal the Island for things of no value," John the Mayor began -- and there was deepthroated roaring and deathscreaming in the streets. "No value, Mayor?" the Duke Durango asked with deep irony. "Mayor, you should be able to watch them. They jam them with soup, and then ram in glass and nails for a load. They spark them off, and it's wonderful. Cuts people right in two. Don't talk no value about those things!" "Even if it were possible for me to deal the Island for such things, what could the Midlands Gun and Rod Club possibly do with the Island?" Mayor John asked. "Set up a hunting preserve," Adrian Sweetsong said. "It's a nicely stocked jungle island seventeen miles by four. We'll hunt. We'll hunt." "Hunt? What would you hunt?" the mayor wanted to know. "Big game, big game," said Dennis Halftown lovingly. "But there is no big game, no game at all on the Island," the mayor insisted. "Remember what ancient Hemingway wrote," said Freddy Flatfish. " 'There is no sport equal to the hunting of an armed man.' Ah, we'll hunt them here, as will many of our well-heeled members." "Third installment! Set it right there, boys," Adrian Sweetsong ordered. The ragged Island boys set down the keg, and Dennis Halftown broke it open with his prybar. "Boys, boys, that's the smell like was bom in me!" the Sky chortled, and he had his arms up to the elbows in the dark grainy powder. "Sure it hasn't the power of soup. Sure it's clumsy and crude. But it's tike grandpa of them all! The smell of it, the smell of it! Men, men, bust your noses on that smell!" "Twenty-five kilograms of gunpowder," announced Adrian Sweetsong. "That's as close as we could figure it. Twenty-five kilos delivered and accepted. ( C T Tt Then you going to start, ' ' fellows, when you going to start?" the Duke asked the three new men in excitement, getting the idea. "How soon you be ready to start?" asked the Duke and the Sky and the Wideman and the Cloud and the Lolo, all going for it avidly. "Should be the first bunch of hunters here in the morning," said Adrian Sweetsong. "Too long to wait," the Lolo protested. "You three? How about you?" "We three will begin stalking and pot-shotting in a very few minutes," said the Adrian, "just as soon as we can get title to this place from the reluctant mayor. We suggest you deploy your forces outside in the corridors. When we come out of this room we will come out rough, and' it's rough animals we want to meet with." "Rough it will be," said the Cloud. "Colts, colts, you carry this stuff out to our place again just as soon as they have recorded it. Men, we will have some sport! We will show these sports some sport!" "But this cannot be, even in a nightmare," Major John protested. "You three pale-browns are not Wappingers or Manhattas, and we are not Dutch." "I'm a Choctaw," said Freddy Flatfish. "Dennis Halftown is a Shawnee. Adrian Sweetsong is an Osage. But we inherit. I have drawn up a legal brief to prove it. And you are doubleDutch if you don't accept. Awk, blew half my shoulder off! Those animals are jumping the gun. Now I know how the expression started. They really know how to handle those blunderbusses." Freddy Flatfish had been shot by a blunderbuss blast from the corridor and was bleeding badly. So they hurried it along, anxious to close the bargain and get the hunting season started. "Bring them in fast, boys. Set them down till they are accepted and' recorded. Then take them out again to your place," Adrian Sweetsong ordered. And the rough colts brought in a variety of boxes and packages. "Ten shirts, accepted and recorded," Adrian Sweetsong announced, hurriedly now. "Thirty pair socks, accepted and recorded. One hundred bullets, accepted and recorded. Forty kettles, accepted and recorded. One brass frying-pan, accepted and recorded." And at the recording of the brass frying-pan, the leg-piercing pin was withdrawn from the leg of Mayor John and all his shackles fell off. The psychiccoded lock of his shackles had opened. He had finished his job and was released. He had disposed of the Island in equity. He had gotten Fair Value for it, or Value Justified, or at least Original Value from Original Entailment. And it sufficed. Mayor John was free. He started to run from the room, fell down on his crippled leg and arose and ran once more. And was caught in a blunderbuss blast. And then the great hunt began. The three members of the Midlands Gun and Rod Club had most sophisticated weapons. They were canny and smooth. This was the dangerous big-game hunt they had always dreamed of. And their prey were armed and wild and truculent and joyous. It would be good. vut between the orbs, several tentacles of Ultimate Justice came near together. "Was there not somewhere the mention of twenty-four or twenty-six dollars paid?" one tentacle asked the other. "I thought I rememberd some such figure." "No, no," said the other tentacle. "That was only the estimated value placed on the material. There was no specie paid. The list is correct as rendered, and the repayment has been accepted and certified." In a forgotten and halffilled basement on the Island, two of the remaining old-folk people were still in hiding. They were startled by the new sort of noise. "What is it, papa? What have they done?" the old woman asked. "Sold it back to the Indians, mama," the old man said. "Huh," said the old woman. "Why didn't they think of that a long time ago?"      Next issue in Galaxy we'll be bringing back some old friends, always an occasion for pleasure. This time more pleasurable than ever, we think, considering that one of the old friends is Clifford D. Simak, and what he has for us is what we firmly believe to be the best story he's written since Here Gather the Stars. The name of it is Goblin Reservation. That's what it's about, too -- a future world in which goblins and banshees are scientifically recognized entities, in which a ghost is one of the leading characters... and where aliens of a particularly disturbing variety are trying a spot of divide-and-rule among Earth's diverse human and spectral inhabitants... Then Damon Knight has a fine new novelette for us, The World and Thorinn. Knight spends so much of his time on editorial, critical and translation assignments -- and until recently, ever more in his capacity as president of the Science Fiction Writers of Aemrica -- that it's a real triumph to get a new story from him. Especially when it's the first of half a dozen or so. And the other old friend we know will be around is a fellow named Ross Rocklynne. New readers may never have heard of him; it's been that long since he's written a science-fiction story. (Fifteen years, anyway.) But old-timers who remember the likes of Into the Darkness, The Men and the Mirror and other Rocklynne classics of a couple decades ago will know that Touch of the Moon will be worth reading! See you then... This is the day the networks stopped now find to do with their little lives? I T ew Jan try awoke with soft fe' I minine arms around him, a warm body snuggled against his, perfumed hair tickling his chin. He didn't open his eyes at once; he was too old a trouper for that. Instead, he rapidly sorted through his recollections, orienting himself before making a move. He was in a bed; that was a starting point; and the quality of the light shining through his closed lids indicated it was full daylight -- or its equivalent. That was no help; both the Jantry and Osgood bedrooms featured large east-exposure windows with fluffy curtains. He'd have to speak to Sol about that: a fellow needed a little sharper demarcation of environmental detail to avoid role-fatigue. Lew opened one eye half a curve of a shoulder, the sleek line of a bare back. Still no clue that would answer the burning question: was he in bed with his real wife, or his TV wife? The seconds were ticking past. Jantry thought furiously, trying to summon up the memory of those particular circumstances under which he had turned in. Had he slept an hour, a minute, or all night? Had he been at home, in the class A Banshire Towers Apartment of a mediumrated actor, with Marta, his lawful-wedded spouse? Or had he dropped off on the set, in the cardboard and plastic mock-up where he spent twelve of every twenty-four hours, with Carla, his co-star on The Osgoods? Damn! He remembered cocktails, the Bateses dropping in, late talk; but that had been a scene in Rabinowitz's latest script of the blab-blab school -- or had it? Was he thinking of the Harrises, the bores in the next apartment at the Banshire? Uh-huh, that was it. AI Harris had rattled on and on about his new two hundred channel set, with the twenty screen monitor attachment, where a sharp viewer with a good wrist could keep in touch with practically every top show simultaneously, at least well enough to hold up his end of a cultured conversation... Satisfied, Lew relaxed, slid his hand casually down toward the curved hip beside him. The woman moved, twisted her head back to impale him with a sharp black eye. "You're ten seconds off-cue, Buster!" Carla's subvocalized voice rasped in the pick-up set in the bone back of his right ear. " And let's watch those hands! This is a familytype show, and my husband Bruno is a dedicated viewer!" T ew's face snapped in a Smile,  -- J lazy, marital, degree one, a stylized grimace that would instantly dispel all implications of lust from the minds of well-conditioned viewers. Meanwhile, he was stalling, groping for his line. Where the hell was the prompter? "Hi, darling," the dubber's voice sounded in the pick-up set in the bone back of Lew's left ear, just as the audience would hear it. " Today's the day of the big event. Excited?" In the background, he could hear the hundred piece orchestra sliding into Camptown Races. He grabbed at the clue. "Sure -- but, uh, with you in the stands, rooting for him, who could lose?" he improvised, mouthing the words distinctly for the vocal stand-in to mime later. "What who, you boob?" Carla's voice hissed in his right ear. '"I'm having a baby at two o'clock!" "Oh, Freddy Osgood -- sometimes I think I'm the luckiest girl in the world, having you all to myself !" the canned line crackled in his left ear. "A baby?" Lew blurted, struggling to pick up the thread. "What do you think, you schlock -- a litter of kitties?" Carla snarled in his right ear. "I didn't know you were -- I mean, that you'd -- that we'd -- " Lew caught himself. "Congratulations," he ad libbed desperately. "We'd better hurry and get ready; we're going water-skiing with the Poppins before we're due at the Vitabort Center," his left ear cooed. "Sure," Lew agreed, glad of the chance of escape. He threw back the blanket, caught just a glimpse of a saucy derriere before Carla squalled and yanked the sheets back up. "Cut!" A godlike bellow rattled Lew's occipital sutures. The wall with the window slid aside to admit the charging bulk of Hugo Fleischpultzer himself. "Jantry, you just set the industry back fifty years!" the director howled. "Whattaya mean, insultliving Americans with the sight of a bare behind first thing in the morning! It'll take the psychan channels two weeks of intensive primetime therapy to clear out the damage you done! You're fired! Or you would be if it wasn't for the lousy Guild! Not that I mean anything by the word 'lousy'!" larla Montez sat up, holding the covers to her chin, pointed a scarletnailed finger at Lew. "I want a divorce!" she screamed. "Tell Oscar to write this louse out of the script for screening no later than Friday in the late early mid-afternoon segment!" "Now, Carla baby, you know that's impossible," Abe Katz, the makeup man soothed, reaching past Fleischpultzer's bulk to adjust the star's eyelashes. "I'm sorry, Hugo," Lew said. "I just got a little mixed up for a second. You know how it's been since we went to non-stop sitcom: a three-hour shift at home, three on the set, half my meals here, half there, barely time to scan the scripts -- " "See?" Carla shrilled. "He practically admits he prefers being with that blowsy dame he's supposedly married to!" "I do not -- I mean Marta's no blowsier than you are!" Lew flared. "I mean, neither one of you is blowsy! And I love being cooped up with you in this makebelieve egg-crate for half my life!" "The kids!" Carla sobbed. "What will become of the kids? Joey, and little Suzie, and that new one, Irving or whatever, that we hired last week for the cousin!" "Rusty, his air name is," Hugo boomed. "Carla's right, we got to think of the little ones. We don't want to go making a broken home out of a fine American family, which it's the favorite esmisunderstanding like this. Lew, I'll give you one more chance -- " "Oh, no you won't!" a furious contralto cut across the conversation. All eyes turned to the pert, green-eyed woman who had just burst onto the set. "I've watched my husband crawl into bed with that harpie for the last time! I'm here to scratch her eyes out!" "Marta! No!" Lew, leaping from the bed, collided with Carla, leaping in the opposite direction. They struck the floor together, a confused mass of flailing limbs, complicated by the actress' efforts to simultaneously escape, attack and observe the conventions of modesty. "Look at them -- right in front of me!" Marta keened. "Carla baby -- watch the hairdo!" Abe Katz called. "Quiet on the set!" Hugo's bass roar dominated the scene. Carla came to her feet, swathed in the sheet, as Lew struggled to arrange a blanket, Navaho style, about himself. "Now, Marta honey," he said hastily. "Don't leap to conclusions! It's just that I was tuckered out from staying up late worrying about little Egbert. How is Eggie? Did he pull through the crisis okay?" "You fiend!" Marta wailed. "Out son's name is Augustus!" "Ah -- I was thinking of Augustus, of course." Max scrambled for verbal footing. "Today's the day of the Little League tryouts, right? And -- " "Monster! You don't know your real family from that horrible TV family of yours! It's that nasty little midget that plays Sammy Osgood that's the ball player! Our Augustus plays the violin!" "Sure -- I remember perfectly! And his sister, Cluster, is a whiz on the glockenspiel!" "Murderer! Our daughter's name is Finette! And she hates German food! I'm through with you, you... you Bluebeard!" She turned to flee. As Lew jumped after her, Carla aimed a roundhouse slap that connected with a loud report. "Keep away from me, you deviate!" she yelped. "Look at that hair-do," Abe mourned. "Mr. Fleischpultzer!" a penetrating voice sounded. A small, pouty-faced man in an expensive gray Gooberlon executive coverall had appeared. "Why -- if it isn't the sponsor, Mr. Harlowe Goober of Goober Industries," Hugo babbled. "Welcome to the set, Mr. Goober, which we were just horsing around a little, you know, high spirits and all that -- " "I'm canceling the show," Goober barked. "I've noticed for some time the gradual disintegration of the moral tone of this network. This orgy is the final straw. I'm taking my trade to "But -- Mr. Goober -- " placed at once!" Goober pointed dramatically at Lew Jantry. "But... but... but... his contract!" Hugo blurted. "And what about the script? They're about to have a baby!" "Let him die in childbirth," Goober proposed, and stamped off the set. # # T y lawyer will call you, bum!" Marta shrilled. "Married to an actor is bad enough -- but an out-of-work actor...!" "But the Guild," Lew rallied weakly. "Hugo, say something!" "Half the Guild's working on Goober-sponsored accounts," Fleischpultzer shrugged. "They won't buck him." "We'll have him suicide when it comes out he's an embezzler," Carla's voice sounded above the hubbub. "And I'll meet that handsome obstetrician..." "You mean -- " Lew swallowed hard, watching the set empty as all personnel moved to disassociate themselves from failure. "You mean I'm washed up in TV? But what will I do? All those hours of leisure time." "View TV," Hugo said. "Or maybe get a job in a factory." "And stand by an automated machine two hours a day, watching telly? You don't understand, Hugo! I'm an artist, not a... a drone!" "Well... there is just one remote possibility," Hugo said reluctantly. "But no -- you wouldn't go for it." "Anything!" Lew said hastily. "Anything at all, Hugo!" "Well -- if I work it right, I think I can get you a spot in a new documentary." "I'll take it!" "Sign here!" Hugo whipped out a thick bundle of contract documents. Lew grabbed the pen. "I'll be in a star slot, of course?" "Natcherally. Would I do you that way?" Hugo." He sighed, gathering his blanket about him. "What set do I report to?" Hugo shook his head. "No set, Lew. The pic ain't being shot here." "You don't mean -- not -- not on location?" "You guessed it." "Omigod. Where?" "A place called Byrdland." "Birdland?" Lew brightened. "Byrdland. It's in Antarctica." II C i T t's the biggest, finest Eskimo reservation on the globe!" Hugo's parting words rang in Lew Jantry's ears as he peered out through the bubble canopy of the automatic one-passenger flitter that was ferrying him on the last stage of the journey south. Across the blue-black sheen of the South Polar Sea, a line of dazzling white cliffs loomed ahead. Dropping rapidly, the machine skimmed low over the peaks, settling toward a rugged terrain resembling nothing so much as a vast frosted cake, a jumble of glassy blocks and smooth-drifted whiteness. Now he could make out the porous texture of the surface below, the network of wind-scoured ridges rushing up at him with surprising swiftness -- At the last possible instant, Lew realized that the robot voice of the autopilot, over the rushing of the wind, was squawking grabbed the safety-frame lever, yanked it hard in the same moment that the craft struck with an impact that turned the universe into a whirling pinwheel of stars. It seemed like a long time before pieces stopped raining down around him. Lew kicked free of the frame, dropped to the hard ground. The crash had burst the pod of the copter like a pumpkin, but he himself seemed to be intact. The weather suit was keeping him warm, in spite of the stiff wind that whipped the floury snow against his legs. Lew shaded his eyes and stared out across the desolate landscape. No sign of the Eskimo agent's office, or even of the tribal structures of the aborigines. Lew snorted. He'd invoke Section Nine, Paragraph Three of his contract on this one, all right -- the part that provided bonuses for inconvenience occasioned by inadequate travel and housing accommodations for artists on field assignment. And the hardship clause would come in, too. Oh, boy, wait till he got hold of Hugo, he'd make that shrewdie I # regret the day he fast-talked Lew Jantry into a fiasco like this one. He flipped back the cover of his wristphone and snapped an order to the operator. There was no reply. He raised his voice, then held the tiny transceiver to his ear. The reassuring carrier tone was conspicuously lacking. CC-pvamn!" Lew yelled, then-swallowed hard as the true seriousness of his plight struck him. Marooned -- God knew how far from the nearest food, shelter and TV. And no one would know precisely where he was. The malfunctioning copter could have wandered a hundred miles off course since Tierra, for all he knew. In fact, he was lucky to have hit land at all, with all that ocean out there. Lew shuddered and checked his pockets, found nothing but the regulation ration capsules and a book of matches. The copter yielded a road map of Chilicothe County, Kansas, and a package of welfareissue contraceptive devices. He tried the panel TV, caught a much-distorted snatch of Matty Snell, Trigamist, but the picture rippled into static. Too bad : it was one of the few shows he enjoyed, a wild sitcom that he liked to view while on-camera, listening to Carla make chit-chat to bring late tuners-in up to date. But he had more important things than Marty Snell to worry about now. The reservation was only a couple of miles inland. Maybe he could see it from the ridge ahead. It wouldn't hurt to walk that far. He faced into the Antarctic wind and started across the treacherous footing. He had gone a hundred yards when a sound behind him made him look back. A large polar bear had appeared beside the heli. The monster circled the downed machine, his mouth open like an awe-struck yokel. The fanged head turned toward Lew, affording him a horrifying view down the creature's throat. It stared at him for a long beat, then started toward him at an easy lope. Lew stifled a yell and sprinted for the ridge with a speed that would have astonished his fans. Heavy pads thudded close behind as he bounded across a rough stretch, hit a glass-smooth patch and went down, skidded twenty yards on his back, came to his feet scrambling for footing among the tumbled slabs at the base of the rise. He hauled himself upslope on all fours, spurred by the buzzing sound of ursine breath behind him, reached the crest -- and a squat, furclad figure rose up before him, raising a short-hafted harpoon with a murderous hooked blade. For an instant the Eskimo poised, arm back, his teeth bared in a ferocious grin. Then he hurled the spear. As the weapon shot forward, Lew dived under it. He hit the smaller man amidships, carried him with him in a wild tumble down the opposite slope. At the bottom, Lew crawled clear, looked up dazedly just in time to see the yellow-white bulk of the bear hurtling down directly on him, jaws agape. T ew awoke, staring up at the I glossy white curve of a ceiling only three feet above his face, through which pale sunlight filtered. He turned his head, saw a grinning, brown-faced man in a Gooberplast playsuit sitting cross-legged on a synthetic bearskin rug, laying out a hand of solitaire. It was cool, Lew thought confusedly, but not as cold as he'd have expected in a building made of ice. He reached up and touched the ceiling. It was pleasantly warm to the touch, and dry. At that moment, he noticed a low hum in the background. "No," he said, shaking his head. "It can't be an... an..." "An air-conditioned igloo?" the card-player inquired in a deep voice. "Why not? You Gringos think us 'Skimos got no rights?" "It's not that," Lew stuttered, sitting up. His head ached abominably. "It's just that... well... it's hardly what I expected. Say -- " he broke off, remembering the encounter on the ridge -- "are you the fellow with the spear?" "Right. Charlie Urukukalukuku's the name. Charlie Kuku I'm not really an actor, I'm a cameraman. I just do the occasional walk-on when we're short of extras." He held out a well manicured hand. "You're a member of the Guild?" Lew blurted, taking the proffered member. "Sure. You don't think we're letting scabs work down here in Byrdland, I hope." "You mean the business with the bear -- and the spear -- the Whole thing was just a skit?" "Hardly a skit, Jantry. An important human document, delineating the plight of the haughty Kabloona when plummeted into the harsh Antarctic environment to which he has driven the patient Eskimo." "That sounds like Hugo Fleischpultzer. And when did the white man ever drive the Eskimo into a harsh environment?" "About fifty thousand years ago. Didn't you ever view any anthropology on educational TV?" "Is that why you tried to stick me with that bloody great harpoon?" "Stick you? Are you kidding? I tossed ita good quarter inch wild." "And what about the bear? He wasn't kidding!" # CTeah -- too bad about that.  Busted wide open. One of Hugo's ideas. It was a mech, you know. We got no live ones around, except a couple in the zoo. Too hot for 'em, since the big melt." "Hot? Out there in all that ice?" "What ice? Project Defrost cleared all that away years ago. But tourists come all this way to see Eskimos in their native habitat, they want to see snow. So -- snow they get. Plastic snow, like this igloo." "A plastic igloo?" "Sure. It's part of the Native Village. A big grosser." "But -- why a mechanical bear?" "The bear houses the number two aux camera. It shoots through the mouth. I was remoting it from the ridge. Got some swell shots of the clobber-in, then tried to dolly in for some CU's of you encountering the savage natives -- that's me -- " "How did you know where I was going to crash?" "Think I can't read a script? I was out there a good hour early, picking my camera angles. I got to hand it to you. You made it look good, Jantry. I was surprised to see you walk away from it." "I made it look good?" Lew yelped. "Are you kidding? That thing was on full automatic the Whole time -- " He broke off. "Hugo planned it that way! He programmed the heli to crash -- with me in it!" "So? It figures. But it worked out okay. I got the death scene in the can. Great footage." "Death scene?" "Sure, I try to save you with my trusty spear, but the bear gets the both of us. It's the Noble Savage Gives Life for Paleface bit; wows 'em in the sticks." "But -- I came here to make a ninety-hour documentary on the colorful natives! Why kill me off in the opening sequence?" Lew broke off as a man in a gray coverall appeared on all fours in the entry tunnel, pushing a briefcase ahead of him. "Thanks for sitting in for me, Charlie," he said to the Eskimo. "If you'll excuse us now, I'd like a word in private with Mr. Jantry." "Sure." Charlie left. The newcomer rose, dusted his knees, showed Lew a small gold badge pinned inside his lapel. said. "I can understand your confusion, Jantry. Of course the business of a role was merely a cover story enabling us to spirit you out of the States without attracting attention." "Huh?" Lew said. "Your true destination is the South Pacific Nature Reserve; place called the Cannibal Isly. "And it's not a play, Jantry. It's for real." Ill T ew stood on the deck of the "The whole thing is illegal," he complained for the seventythird time to Clabbinger, who stood impassively beside him, looking out through the predawn mist toward the distant sound of surf. "I see now it was a putup job from the beginning: me getting fired, the phoney documentary -- and now this! Threatening to blackball me in the industry if I don't sign a paper saying I volunteered!" "It's your patriotic duty," the something's going on inside the reserve. Naturally, we can't just blunder in and demand to search the entire archipelago." "Why not?" "Policy," Clabbinger said tersely. "Now, as I said, someone -- no doubt in the service of a Certain Power -- " "You mean Russia, don't you?" "Please, let's keep it impersonal. Now, these Russians -- I mean this Certain Power has infiltrated the Reserve in defiance of solemn international commitments and has set up some sort of secret installation -- " "How do we know that?" "Our intrepid undercover men on the island reported it. Now, just what they're up to, we don't know. That's your job, Jantry: to tell us." "Why do they want to make a reserve out of these Godforsaken islands anyway?" Lew burst out. "If it wasn't for that , there wouldn't be any place for the, uh, Certain Power to set up secret installations in!" "Opening the islands would destroy a cultural museum that can never be duplicated," Clabbinger said indignantly. "This is the only spot on earth where cannibalism and head-hunting still flourish, uncontaminated by automation. And the diseases -- why, if we let antibiotics in, hundreds of unique organisms would be rendered extinct overnight!" "Why don't you send a regular agent into this pest-hole?" Lew demanded. "Why me?" "We need an accomplished actor to carry this off, Jantry. An ordinary agent would be incapable of passing hirnself off as a long-lost tribe member returning home after having been carried out to sea at the age of four in a paddleless canoe. He'd be caught and tortured to death in a most gruesome fashion." CtQwell," Lew groaned. "I  either go and get roasted in my sarong, or refuse and never work again." "Still -- if you survive, I personally assure you you'll find your contract at Void Productions renewed for a long term at a substantial increase." "What good's a substantial increase, with ninety-five per cent going for taxes?" Lew inquired gloomily. "Prestige," Clabbinger pointed out. "And if it weren't for the tax level, corporations wouldn't allocate the large tax-exempt advertising budgets needed to support over three hundred major TV networks with round-theclock programming, nor would we enjoy the enlightened legislation that provides every citizen with a subsistence allowance, plus leisure time to view -- and thus you'd be out of work." "All right," Lew snarled. "I guess you've got me boxed -- but these damned shark's-teeth earplugs hurt like hell!" "Ah, that sounds a little more like Daredevil Jack, star of the show of the same name!" Clabbinger clapped Lew heartily on the back. "I'll confide that I always admired you in that one." "I hated it," Lew said. "I was always afraid of the rest of the cast, they talked so tough." A man had come up beside the G-man. "Half a mile off shore," he muttered. "This is as far as I can go without tripping the detectors." "Well, Lew, this is it," Clabbinger said sternly, shaking the actor's hand. "Remember: as soon as you've located the site and beamed me the coordinates, get out fast! We'll drop a megatonner right down their stack six minutes later, and let them complain to the UN!" "just don't forget to have that sub standing by in case I come paddling out from shore in a hell of a hurry," Lew said bitterly. Three minutes later, squatting in the outrigger canoe, he was gliding toward the palm-fringed shoreline ahead. The surf, though noisy, was not excessively high. He rode a long swell in, grounded on a sandy beach. He sprang from the boat listening alertly for any indication that his approach had been observed. Stealthily, he moved toward the shelter of the trees. Ten feet from his goal, a beam of dazzling white light speared out from the darkness to catch him full in the eyes. Blinded, he stumbled back, heard the quick rasp of feet -- A bomb exploded in his skull. He was dimly aware of falling, of being roughly rolled on his back. "Nuts," a hoarse voice grated. "It's just another lousy native. Shoot the bum and let's get back to work."" C # T Trait!" another, more gut' ' tural voice spoke up. "Don't shoot dog of native. Noise might bring unwelcome attention. Instead, tie up and dump out of way someplace." Lew struggled feebly as hard hands threw multiple loops of hemp around his wrists and ankles, jammed a wad of oily cloth in his mouth. A man caught his shoulders, another his feet; they carried him well up into the jungle and dropped him into a clump of palmetto. Feet crashed through the underbrush, receding. Silence fell. The night breeze stirred the fronds above Lew. Mosquitoes whined about his ears. He struggled onto his back, spitting leaf mould past the crude gag. Abruptly, something buzzed sharply, back of his right ear. Lew stiffened, waiting the bite of the deadly snake -- "Hello?" a tinny voice said. "Clabbinger to special agent LJ. Good work Boy! My instruments indicate you've penetrated the beach and are now behind the enemy lines! However, I note you're lying doggo. Let's not be too cautious. Remember Daredevil Jack! Play this one the way he would! Go get 'em, tiger! We're rooting for you! Clabbinger out." "Hello?" Lew whispered. "Hello? Clabbinger?" There was no answer. Lew groaned. Why hadn't they included a two-way connection? But who would have thought there'd be any need, with the tight-beam signaler tucked in his sarong to pinpoint the target for the missile strike? And anyway, Clabbinger wouldn't move a foot to help him; he'd told him that. Lew took a deep breath and concentrated, the way he always did when slipping into a demanding role. "All right, Russkis," Daredevil Jack breathed. "You started it. Now get ready for a counter-attack by the Free Enterprise system!" IV npen minutes later, Daredevil " Jack, free of his amateurishly tied bonds, raised his head and peered past the fronds at the half-dozen figures grouped before a small tent from which the yellow glow of a lantern shone on a map table where a brightly colored eighteen-inch disk lay. If he could get a little closer, make out the markings... ; # Flat on his stomach, Jack inched .nearer. The men around the table seemed to be engaged in a heated argument, although keeping their voices low. One shook his fist under another's nose. A third man stepped between them. No doubt a dispute over the, details of their treachery. Jack studied the palm trees just ahead. From the top of one, it might be possible to make out the details of the chart, using the small 'tronscope Clabbinger had supplied. It was the work of another sweaty five minutes to reach the trees, shin up the curving trunk, and take up a position among the coconuts. Swiftly, Jack undipped the scope, fine-focused the UV beam, adjusted the aperture. There! The red-orange coloring of the target leaped into clarity, a maze of complex markings. It was obviously a detailed relief map, the roughly circular shape indicating the island's outline, with mountains, valleys, rivers all delineated in vivid pigments. And there -- that was doubtless the location of the illegal site. Jack studied the black circle, nestled between a sardineshaped lake and what appeared to be a sliver of salami. The circle itself showed a remarkable resemblance to a slice of ripe olive. "I told you, I can't eat pizza!" A vagrant breeze wafted a scrap of conversation to Jack. "I hate Mexican food!" "Damn!" Lew Jantry muttered. He scanned past the disputants, surveyed the remains of a camp fire, a heap of empty TV dinner cartons, settled on a huddled figure lying in the shadows of a flowering bush. He made out a vividly colored sarong, a mass of dark, wavy hair, a pair of slender ankles, bound with rope. "It's a native girl," Lew muttered. "They've got her tied up, the rats!" He lowered the scope, frowning thoughtfully. Maybe, Daredevil Jack thought, she's been in the camp long enough to have heard something. And even if she. hasn't her people will be grateful enough for her release to give me a hand in finding that Russion installation... Silently, smiling a grim smile, Daredevil Jack descended to the ground, began a circuituous approach to the spot where the captive girl lay. Qhe watched him with wide eyes  as he sawed at her ropes with a bit of sharp-edged sea-shell. "Shhh!" he admonished as he pulled away the gag to reveal a remarkably pretty face, olive brown, pert-nosed, red-lipped. She looked around fearfully, then at Jack. "Aholui thanks you," she breathed. "Time for thanks later," Jack said kindly but firmly. "We're not out of this yet." He took her hand, helped her to her knees. "The coast is clear this way." They had gone approximately ten feet when a bush parted just ahead, and a man appeared, buttoning his clothes. For an instant, his eyes and Jack's locked. "What th -- " he started as Jack's head rammed him squarely in the belt buckle. He went down hard as Lew Jantry staggered to his feet, rubbing his neck and uttering small cries. "Let's get out of here!" Aholui grabbed his hand and hauled him off down a winding path into the deep jungle as questioning shouts rose behind them. # #  don't care... if they do catch us..." Lew gasped, flopping down and sucking air into his lungs. "I'm all in!!" "Not much farther now," the girl said. "You must have been living soft out there in the great outside world, or wherever it was you said you've been." A gusty wind had risen; a sudden heavy splatter of rain rattled on the palmettos. Lew got to his feet, rubbing at the gooseflesh on his arms. "What a place," he carped. "One minute you're broiling, the next you're freezing. Where are we going, anyway?" "To a place where we'll be safe from the white-eyes," Aholui said. "Up there." She pointed. In the sudden vivid glare of a flash of lightning, Lew saw a rugged volcanic peak thrusting up above the wind-lashed palm trees. The rain struck then, like a battery of fire hoses. Stumbling, colliding with trees in the dark, his hide rasped by sharpedged tropical shrubbery, Lew followed as the girl led the way toward the high ground. It might have been half an hour later -- or half of eternity -- before Lew dragged himself over a rocky ledge and lay flat, breathing heavily. Before him, tire dark mouth of a cave opened. With his last strength, he crawled to it, and inside. With tire girl tugging at his arm, he managed to negotiate a sharp turn, and was in a low-ceilinged chamber twelve feet on a side. He propped himself against the wall and wiped the water from his eyes. Aholui seated herself beside him. "Now, tell me again," she said. "What were you doing down there in the outlanders' camp?" "You remember -- about the plot they're hatching. You never have told me why they had you tied up." V "They caught me snooping around." Lew put a sympathetic arm around the girl's shoulders. "The rotters!" he said. "Just because you were curious about a bunch of foreign devils invading the place." Alohui shrugged his arm off. "Can't blame them," she said. "I really was way outside the tribal turf." "Nonsense! The whole island belongs to you. Now -- " he reinsinuated his arm -- "if you'll just take me to your leader..." He leaned over, zeroing in on the girl's half-parted lips. A light-bulb exploded in his ear, accompanied by a ringing sound. "Carla," Lew mumbled dazed'ly. "I just had the craziest dream..." The girl was standing by the wall, fumbling with a bump on the stone. With a soft whine of well oiled machinery, a panel slid back to reveal a well equipped laboratory. A rather broad-shouldered young man in a white coat and a white-haired oldster looked up in surprise. "Grab this cluck, George," Aholui said, jerking a thumb at Lew. "He's some kind of Interpol fink, or I'll eat a bunch of bananas, insides and all!" Qtrapped to a chair, with a  lump on his head that throbbed in time with his pulse, Lew Jantry stared from the grim-eyed girl to the squarejawed young man to the elderly one, who returned the look through a set of half-inch thick trifocals. "You think you can kidnap a federal agent and get away with it?" he demanded in a tone that quavered only slightly. No one bothered to answer the question. "It was pretty slick, the way he handled it," the girl said. "He pretended to be rescuing me -- as if anyone could really sneak into that campful of Feds, with guards posted every ten feet, and cut somebody loose. Then, as soon as he thought I thought I was in the clear, he started pouring on the oil and pumping me for information." "I did not!" Lew cut in. "I only wanted to kiss you. I thought they were the crooks." He broke off, staring at the old man. "Say, don't I know you?" "Maybe." The white head nodded. "Lots of people used to, before I decided to Get Away From it All." "Rex Googooian, the Armenian Valentino!" Lew gasped. "You used to be the biggest draw on the whole early mid-morning sector! Every middle-aged, housewife in America was in loye with you! And then you dropped out of sight a few years ago, blop, just like that!" "Yes indeed," Googooian nodded. "It dawned on me one day that I had only a few years left in which to expiate the crimes I'd been practicing for thirty years." "Crimes?" "Did you ever notice the dialogue on the early mid-morning sector?" the aged actor inquired succinctly. "So I came here -- secretly, of course -- bringing with me my daughter, Baby Lou." He nodded toward Aholui, who was vigorously scrubbing away her tan make-up. " -- and my assistant, George. And a considerable stock of equipment, of course." "But that must have cost a fortune!" "I had one. And what better way to employ it than in putting an end to the pernicious plague that for the better part of eighty years had been rising like a flood of materialistic mediocrity, drowning our culture in its infancy?" "Plague? You mean you're doing dandruff research?" Lew groped. "I refer," Googooian said in implacable tones, "to the greatest menace in the world today!" "What menace? Cuba? Nepal? Lebanon?" "Think of it!" Googooian's eyes lit with a messianic fervor. "No more commercials, no more sitcoms, no quizzes, no panels, no more pomaded heads huddled together, staring with vacuous, counterfeit smiles from flickering screens, no more idiotic dialogue, no more cardboard characterizations, no more creaking plots, no more moronic villains and sweepstake-winning heroes, no more mummified sex appeal, no more relatives of producers posing as Thespians -- " "Are you trying to say -- no more television?" Lew choked the words out. "In approximately seven hours," Googooian stated firmly, "TV broadcasting will come to a halt. Worldwide! Forever!" tC#"ou're out of your mind!"  Lew blurted. "That's impossible!" "Is it!" Googooian smiled sardonically. "I believe otherwise. You've heard of the Van Allen Radiation belts?" "Is that like those suspenders that glow in the dark?" Lew hazarded. "Not quite. They are layers of high-energy charged particles two thousand and twelve thousand miles above the earth, respectively. They are of interest here only in that the Googooian Belt will in some ways resemble them. I have prepared a rocket, sir, housed here in the volcano's crater, which, when fired, will ascend to an altitude of # miles, and there assume an orbit which will carry it over every point on the planet in the first fifty revolutions -- about seventy-two hours. As it travels, it will release a steady stream of very specially charged particles -- particles which will emit electromagnetic impulses creating a powerful static interference across the entire broadcast band! Every station on the planet will be drowned in a pure noise signal. TV, sir, is dead!" "You can't!" Lew protested. "What will all those people do, left with twenty-two hours a day of leisure time on their hands? What will the sponsors do with all that ad money? Society as we know it will collapse!" "You've been brainwashed," George spoke up coldly. "You ties down there. If you know so much, why have you been poking around the island for six months without finding us?" "We haven't -- I mean, I did -- I mean -- oh, what's the use?" Lew buried his face in his hands. "I'm a failure," his muffled voice stated mournfully. "And Clabbinger was counting on me!" Googooian came over to pat him consolingly on the shoulder. "Why not lend a hand with the gear?" he suggested in a fatherly tone. "Afterwards you'#I feel better, knowing you played a part in the liberation of man from electronic tyranny." "Never!" Lew yelled. "First, I'll -- " he broke off as a chirping voice rasped in his left ear: "Operative LJ, Clabbinger here. I see you've moved inland to a point at the approximate center of the island. I'm expecting to pick up a pulse from that signaler any time now, pinpointing that target. Keep up the good work! Over and out." L ew Jantry's heart took a great leap, then settled down to a steady thudding. He'd totally forgotten the signaler, but his course was plain. All he had to do was reach the button with his fingertips and send out the pulse that would bring a megatonner screaming in on the hidden launch pad. Googooian's mad scheme would go up in radioactive gas. And Lew Jantry along with it. "You knew," he whispered. "Clabbinger, you monster, you knew all along it was a suicide mission!" "Ah, beginning to have some second thoughts, eh?" Googooian said cheerfully. "Beginning to see that you're a mere dupe of the vested interests that are reducing the nation to a common level of imbecility, eliminating literacy, callousing esthetic sensibilities, and imposing a shabby standard of mercantile expediency and conformity to a false and superficial ideal of synthetic glamour!" "Something like that," Lew muttered. His fingers inched their way toward the concealed signaler. "If you'll give me your parole, I'll untie you," the ex-actor proposed. "George and I could really use some help with the lastminute details." "Well... " Lew stalled. His finger touched the button. He gritted his teeth -- and stiffened as the pickup behind his left ear clicked suddenly. " Hello ?" a brisk voice chirped. "Oh, it's you Simenov... uhhuh, in about six hours... Of course it'll work! Why do you lousy Commies hire American technicians if you don't have confidence?" There was a length pause. "Look, you have your programming ready, that's all! I'll guarantee we'll blanket every channel of television on the planet. The Commie line will be coming out of every TV set on the North and South American continents! And there's no possihie way they can Stop it! Not with a transmitter sunk below the Mohorovicic Discontinuity in an insulated vault, powered by the core heat! Not when you're using the whole planet's fluid interior as an antenna! It's all set! Stop worrying and synchronize watches! We throw the switches at six AM on the dot!" There was a sharp click! followed by silence. "Ye Gods!" Lew mumbled. "Two targets -- and only one bomb!" He swallowed hard, his thoughts racing. "Googooian," he barked. "Are you sure this invention of yours will blanket all television, not just part of it?" "Absolutely!" "What about a super-powerful station?" Googooian chuckled. "All the better. The particles will absorb and re-radiate as noise any impinging electra-magnetic radiation. The more energetic, the better." "Sold!" Lew said. "I'll help you! Get these ropes off and let's get going!" VI Ophe eastern sky was heralding dawn with a glory of purple and crimson when Lew, Googooian, George and Baby Lou retired to the blockhouse carved deep in the flank of the mountain, and grouped themselves around the rocket control console. Solemnly, the aging actortumed-researcher depressed the firing button. A low rumble passed through the solid rock. On the closed-circuit screen, the crater mouth erupted in smoke, through which a needle prow emerged, rising slowly at first, then more swiftly, mounting toward the cloud-dotted sky, trailing fire and thunder. "She's off!" Googooian chortled as the others clapped him on the back, laughing merrily -- all but Lew Jantry. Glumly, he watched the ship disappear into the high haze. "Cheer up, lad," Googooian called. "It's all for the best! You'll see!" "Look what we'll be missing!" George called cheerfully as he switched on the #-inch, full-color three-D set. The screen blinked, flickered, firmed into an image of a woman with a face like an oversized Pekinese... Dear Sally Sweetbreads, this viewer writes," a high-pitched nasal intoned. "I never miss your show, which is the cause of the trouble between my husband and me. He says it breaks his scene when you give some of that clinical-type advice just at the most romantic moment. Signed, Perplexed. Well, Ferplexed, assuming you don't want to change husbands -- " the plump features compressed into a leer -- "I'd suggest you rearrange the bedroom. And now -- " "That's not all we'll be missing," Lew snarled. "When the depression this thing causes hits, we'll miss everything from meals out of work! Tax revenue will drop to zero! The government may collapse -- and we'll be stuck here, on this infernal island!" "Tsk," Googooian said. "My analysis suggests that the creative energies released from thralldom to television mania will produce an upsurge in every facet of our culture. There'll be a flowering of science and the arts to rival the Renaissance! Of course, there may be a short period of readjustment -- say a decade. But no matter. We'll be quite happy here. The entire interior of the mountain is honeycombed with facilities: luxurious quarters, a nuclear power plant, well shielded, a ten year stockpile of gourmet food to supplement the native diet, a vast library of books and music!" vn the screen, a loose-lipped young man with intent eyes leaned toward a jawless woman in a grotesque hat. "Mrs. Wiltoff, would you just tell us in your own words how it feels to be the wife of the man scheduled to be gassed tomorrow on a nationwide hookup for the brutal slaying of the nine chorus girls whose pictures you are now admiring?" "Well, Bob," the interviewee started; abruptly, the image flickered, turned to a flapping pattern of diagonal lines. A new picture burned into focus over it. A thick-necked man with small eyes looked out of the screen. "Capitalist swine," he began in a glutinous voice -- and was drowned under a deluge of white blips which danced across the tube face, swiftly coalescing into a solid rectangle of glare. A roar like Niagara swelled to blot out the sound. "Hooray!" Googooian capered madly, embracing his teammates, while Lew wandered disconsolately to the blockhouse door. From the tiny balcony overhanging the interior of the volcano, he looked down into the fireblackened silo from which the rocket had emerged minutes before. There was a step beside him. "Thanks for helping Pop," Baby Lou said. "I expected you to try something, but you didn't. Maybe I was wrong about you "Well..." Lew moved closer to the girl, slid an arm around her waist. "Inasmuch as we're stuck here," he said, "we may as well make the best of it." "What's that?" Baby. Lou felt over Lew's side, plucked something from his sarong. "It was sticking me," she said and pushed the button. "No!" Lew grabbed the signaler and hurled it into the pit -- far too late. Already its tell-tale pulse had raced to the ship waiting hull-down over the horizon. "Well -- I never!" Baby Lou snapped and marched away. "Everybody to the beach!" Lew yelled, plunging after her. "We've got six minutes before the island goes up in smoke!" Tt was a balmy evening six months later. Lew, Googooian and Simenov sat under the thatched shelter they had constructed above high tide line, playing a game of homemade dominoes by lantern light. In the background, a native electric guitar band played Aloha Oe in time to the chugging of a portable generator. "Tomorrow comes maybe supply ship," the Russian said, eyeing the empty horizon. "I doubt it," Googooian said. Baby Lou came up, trailed by George. No, I do not believe in sharing the wealth," she was saying tartly. "Father, make George stop bothering me!" "Ah -- perhaps if Lew chaperoned you -- " "I'd like to see him try, the lousy actor," George snarled. "Oh, yeah?" Daredevil Jack half-rose, then sank back. "It's too hot," Lew Jantry said. Baby Lou sniffed and stalked away. George wandered off. Simenon glowered at the checkers. "Now, now," Googooian said in tones of forced heartiness. "Here we are, living in paradise, plenty of fruit and fresh seafood, sunshine every day, cool breezes at night, no responsibilities, no problems! We should all be perfectly delighted!" "Then why aren't we?" Lew demanded. "I tell you why," Simenov stated. "Is no damned thing to do! Are not building socialism! Not even building capitalism! Is building only sand castles, and is getting pretty damn boring!" "Say," Googooian said suddenlyWhat?" Lew said. "I was just wondering -- not that I regret anything I've done, you understand..." "Go on," Simenov said. "If we used the stuff you fellows had left over -- " he eyed the Russian -- "and if we could salvage a few items from the mountain -- " "Yes?" Lew and Simenov said in chorus. "We might just be able to tinker up a little line-of-sight rig. Nothing elaborate, mind you. Just straight black and white, two-D -- at least at first... # (, J T mmm. Is possibility." The  Russian pulled at his lower lip. Together, the two technical men strolled off deep in conversation. Lew Jantry sat where he was, staring after them, a thoughtful look on his face. Then he rose, hurried toward the slight figure wandering lonely along the beach. "Oh, Baby Lou," he called. "I've been meaning to ask you: have you ever thought of taking up acting as a profession?" "Why, Lew! Do you really think I might have talent?" "I'm sure of it. It's just a matter of finding an outlet for it." Together they strolled along the shore of the lagoon toward the silvery path of the rising      A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. 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All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Tn the history of science there are many heroes. Galileo, Giordano Bruno, John Tyndall... the roll is endless. Everyone knows the story of Galileo, for instance -- how he wrote his Dialogue on the T wo World Systems, was called to account by the Roman Inquisition for saying that the Earth moved around the sun, was compelled to recant on threat of burning and, all the same, whispered under his breath, "Eppur si muove" "Yet still it moves!" Of course, there's some doubt that Galileo really said that; it's the sort of story that, if it didn't really happen, it would have been necessary to invent, and as a matter of fact it seems that someone did invent that particular sottovoce remark, because it can't be traced back much before a century after the event. But there can't be any question about Giordano Bruno. He was a Copemican -- that is, he held the radical view that the Earth moved around the sun, rather than the orthodox, Ptolemaic view that the Earth stood still while the sun moved around it. He was summoned before that same Inquisition. He did refuse to recant. And he was in fact burned at the stake as a heretic. John Tyndall, on the other hand, got off lightly, though he must have had some exciting moments for a while. His sin against orthodoxy was to say (at a meeting of the British Royal Society) that there were no limits to what science could discover about the universe; whereupon a Londoner began an action for blasphemy against him. That was less than a century ago, in Queen Victoria's enlightened time, and probably no one was more surprised than Tyndall at the prosecution. But he was acquitted, after all, and no harm done. Still, he stood up for what he believed, and fairly deserves a place among those heroes who championed truth against Error... Or did they? Well, there's a little problem there. As a matter of fact, things weren't quite that way. Giordano Bruno? They burned him as a heretic, all right. But not for his astronomy. He was, after all, a Dominican monk before he was These great minds were Rosier can Benjamin Franklm. Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know tire mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages ! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women . : . were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. ' copy of "The Mastery #f : ; Life" -- ligation. A nonprofit orpanization. Address: Scribe X.B.G. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name AddressCity State an astronomer; he spent as much time arguing transubstantiation as planetary orbits, and the particular heresies for which he went to the stake were purely theological -- they blamed his books for their science, but they burned his body for questions about the nature of the Trinity. And Galileo, it is true, was called to account for saying the Earth moved around the sun. The Inquisition called that notion "philosophically false" and in other ways both wrongheaded and dangerous. It was not, however, specifically contrary to Scripture, and so it was not heresyWhat was contrary to Scripture, and therefore heretical, and therefore good grounds for an auto-da-fe, was Galileo's insistence that the Sun was at rest. He could say the Earth moved if he liked, ruled the Inquisition; pernicious as it was, it was not actionable. But if he said the Sun stood still, and refused to recant, he would have to be abandoned to the secular arm, for that was heresy... And the interesting thing about that, of course, is that, heresy or not, Galileo was wrong. The sun does move. It moves, like every other particle in our revolving galaxy, at speeds and in directions that the Inquisitors never dreamed of and even Galileo could not have guessed. But if he had stood by his faith, refused to recant and. burned... what he would have burned for was as wrong as the views he opposed.  re these paragraphs an attempt to prove the essential wisdom of the Inquisition, or to justify the supression of unpopular beliefs? Not at all. We do think there's a moral to be drawn, but that's not it. Right or wrong, Galileo was less wrong than his Inquisitors in his attitudes, is not in all of his facts. For his attitude was that there is order in the universe, and that Man can, through his own senses and intellect, discover what it is, without the guidance of Divine Writ or the approval of authorities. The cause for which Giordano Bruno burned and Galileo served his penance was not Right with a capital "R"; it was a right -- the right to dissent -- the right to oppose authority when authority seems in error. That strikes us as a particularly precious right, and basic to most other rights, and one which has been often threatened in the history of the human race -- more recently than the #th century, and closer at hand than Rome. All Things Are Possible"! Matthew #:# Dear Friend: That Are Worrying You? Have World-Wide Sin , Violence and Depression upset your life as they have so many, many others? Are You In Poor Health? Are You Worried About Money Troubles, Debts or Your Job? Is Some One Dear to You Drinking or Gambling Too Much? Would You Like to Have More Friends? Are You Worried About Some One Dear to You For Any Reason? Have You Got Love or Family Troubles? Would You Like to Have Deeper Spiritual U nderslanding? Are You Lonely? Are-You Afraid of The Future? Would You Like More Success, Happiness, " Good Fortune", Peace I of Mind? If you have any of these Problems, of others like them. Dear Friend, then here is thousands to glorious new happiness and i joy! Ahd it may bring a whole new world of happiness and joy toyou -- very, very quickly, too! All Who Need Help with your name and address, (even a post card will do. We will rush you this wonder Help in meeting your Problems. We will Cross shown below, for you to keep and treasure. You will bless this day, DearFriend, so don't delay! If you would like more Happiness, Success and "Good Fortune" in life please use the coupon below to send us your name and address Please clip and mail this Coupon now I I You Act Now This Lovely Golden keep and treasure. # East #th #., New York, N.Y. # name and address is: MR. In this tomorrow-world, goblins, gnomes and ghosts were perfectly normal -- but a man returned from death surely was not! I Tnspector Drayton sat, solidly planted behind the desk and waited. He was a rawboned man with a face that looked as if it might have been hacked, by a dull hatchet, out of a block of gnarled wood. His eyes were points of flint, and at times they seemed to glitter and he was angry and upset. But such a man, Peter Maxwell knew, would never give way to any kind of anger. There was, behind that anger, a bulldog quality that would go plodding on, undisturbed by anger. And this was just the situation, Maxwell told himself, that he had hoped would not come about. Although, as now was evident, it had been too much to hope. He had known, of course, that his failure to arrive at his proper destination, some six weeks before, would have created some consternation back here on the Earth; the thought that he might be able to slip home unobserved had not been realistic. And now here he was, facing this man across the desk. He'd have to take it easy. He said to the man behind the desk: "I don't believe I entirely understand why my return to Earth should be a matter for Security. My name is Peter Maxwell, and I'm a member of the faculty of the College of Supernatural Phenomena on Wisconsin Campus. You have seen my papers... "I am quite satisfied," said Drayton, "as to who you are. Puzzled, perhaps, but entirely satisfied. It's something else that bothers me. Professor Maxwell, would you mind telling me exactly where you've been?" "There's not very much that I can tell you," Peter Maxwell said. "I was on a planet, but I don't know its name or its co-ordinates. It may be closer than a lightyear or out beyond the Rim." "In any event," said Drayton, "you did not arrive at the destination you indicated on your travel ticket." "I did not," said Maxwell. "Can you explain what happened?" "I can only guess. I thought that perhaps my wave pattern was diverted, perhaps intercepted and then diverted. At first I thought there had been transmitter error, but that seems impossible. The transmitters have been in use for hundreds of years. All the bugs should have been ironed out of them by now." "You mean that you were kidnapped?" "If you want to put it that way." "And still will tell me nothing # " "I have explained there's not much to tell." "Could this planet have anything to do with the Wheelers?" A Taxwell shook his head. "I couldn't say for sure, but I don't believe it did. Certainly there was none of them around. There was no indication they had anything to do with it." "Professor Maxwell, have you ever seen a Wheeler?" "Once. Several years ago. One of them spent a month or two at Time. I caught sight of it one day." "So you would know a Wheeler, if you saw one?" "Yes, indeed," said Maxwell. "I see you started out for one of the planets in the Coonskin system." "There was the rumor of a dragon," Maxwell told him. "Not substantiated. In fact, the evidence was quite sketchy. But I decided it might be worth investigating." Drayton cocked an eyebrow. "A dragon?" he demanded somewhat sarcastically. "I suppose," said Maxwell, "that it may be hard for someone outside my field to grasp the importance of a dragon. But the fact of the matter is that there is no scrap of evidence to suggest such a creature at any time existed. This despite the fact that the dragon legend is solidly embedded in the folklore of the Earth and some of the other planets. Fairies, goblins, trolls, banshees -- we have all of these, in the actual flesh. Or what passes for flesh. But no trace of a dragon. The funny thing about it is that the legend here on Earth is not basically a human legend. The Little Folk have the dragon legend as well. I sometimes think they may have been the ones who transmitted it to us. But the legend only. There is no evidence... " He stopped, feeling a little silly. What could this stolid policeman who sat across the desk care about the dragon legend? "I'm sorry, Inspector," he said. "I let my enthusiasm for a favorite subject run away with me." "I have heard it said that the dragon legend might have risen from ancestral memories of the dinosaur." "I have heard it, too," said Maxwell, "but it seems impossible. The dinosaurs were extinct long before mankind had evolved." "Then the Little Folk... " "Possibly," said Maxwell. "But it seems unlikely. I know the Little Folk and have talked with them about it. They are ancient, certainly much more ancient than we humans, but there is no indication they go back as far as the Cretaceous. Or if they do, they have no memory of it. And I would think that their legends and folk tales would easily carry are extremely long-lived, not quite immortal, but almost, and in a situation such as that, mouthto-mouth tradition would be most persistent." Drayton gestured, brushing away the dragons and the Little Folk. "You started for the Coonskin," he said, "and you didn't get there." "That is right. There was this other planet. A roofed-in, crystal planet." "Crystal?" "Some sort of stone. Quartz, perhaps. Although I can't be sure. It could be metal. There was some metal there." D rayton asked smoothly. "You wouldn't have known when you started out that you'd wind up on this planet?" "If it's collusion you have in mind," said Maxwell, "you're very far afield. I was quite surprised. But it seems you aren't. You were waiting here for me." "Not particularly surprised," said Drayton. "It has happened twice before." "Then you probably know about the planet." "Nothing about it," said Drayton. "Simply that there's a planet out there somewhere, operating an unregistered transmitter and receiver, and communicating by an unlisted signal. When the operator here at Wisconsin Station picked up their signal for transmittal, he signaled them to wait, that the receivers all were busy. Then he got in touch with me." "The other two?" "Both of them right here. Both tabbed for Wisconsin Station." "But if they got back... " "That's the thing," said Drayton. "They didn't. Oh, I guess you could say they did, but we couldn't talk with them. The wave pattern turned out faulty. They were put back together wrong. They were all messed up. Both of them were aliens, but so tangled up we had a hard time learning who they might have been. We're still not positive." "Dead?" "Dead? Certainly. A rather frightful business. You're a lucky man." Maxwell, with some difficulty, suppressed a shudder... "Yes, I suppose I am," he said. "You'd think," said Drayton, "that anyone who messed around with matter transmission would make sure they knew how it is done. There's no telling how many they may have picked up who came out wrong in their receiving station." "But you would know," Maxwell pointed out. "You'd know if there had been any losses. A station would report back immediately if a traveler failed to arrive on schedule." "That's the funny thing about it," Drayton told him. "There have been no losses. We're pretty sure the two aliens who came back dead to us got where they were going, for there's no one missing." "But I started out for Coonskin. Surely they reported... " Then he stopped as the thought struck him, struck him straight between the eyes. Drayton nodded slowly. "I thought you would catch on. Peter Maxwell -- one Peter Maxwell -- got to the Coonskin system and came back to Earth almost a month ago." "There must be some mistake."  For it was unthinkable that there should be two of him, that another Peter Maxwell, identical in all details, existed on the Earth. "No mistake," said Drayton. "Not the way we have it figured. This other planet doesn't divert the pattern. What it does is copy it." "Then there could be two of me! There could be -- " "Not any more," said Drayton. "You're the only one. About a week after he returned, there was an accident. Peter Maxwell's dead." II A round the comer from the tiny  room where he'd met with Drayton, Maxwell found a vacant row of seats. He sat down in one of them carefully, placing his single piece of luggage on the floor beside him. It was incredible, he told himself. Incredible that there should have been two Pete Maxwells and now one of those Maxwells dead. Incredible that the crystal planet could have had equipment that would reach out and copy a wave pattern traveling faster than the speed of light -- much faster than the speed of light, for at no point in the galaxy so far linked by the matter transmitters was there any noticeable lag between the time of transmittal and arrival. Diversion -- yes, perhaps there could be diversion, a reaching out and a snatching of the pattern, but the task of copying such a pattern would be something else entirely. Two incredibles, he thought. Two things that should not have happened. Although if one of them had happened, the other surely followed. If the pattern had been copied, there would, quite necessarily, have been two of him, the one who went to the Coonskin system and the other who'd gone to the crystal planet. But if this other Peter Maxwell had really gone to Coonskin. he should still be there or only now returning. He had planned a six weeks' stay at least, longer if more time seemed necessary to run down the dragon business. He found that his hands were shaking. Ashamed, he clasped them hard together and held them in his lap. He couldn't go to pieces, he told himself. No matter what might be facing him, he had to see it through. And there was no evidence, no solid evidence. All that he had was what a member of Security had told him, and he couldn't count on that. It could be no more than a clumsy piece of police trickery designed to shake him into talking. Although it could have happened. It just could have happened! But even if it had happened, he still had to see it through. For he had a job to do, and one he must not bungle. Now the job might be made the harder by someone watching him, although he could not be sure there'd be someone watching. It might not make any difference. His hardest job would be to get an appointment with Andrew Arnold. The president of a planetary university would not be an easy man to see. He would have more with which to concern himself than listening to what an associate professor had to say. Especially when that professor could not spell out in advance detail what he wished to talk about. His hands had stopped trembling, but he still kept them tightly clasped. In just a little while he'd get out of here and go down to the roadway, where he'd find himself a seat on one of the inner, faster belts. In an hour or so he'd be back on the old home campus and then he'd soon find out if what Drayton said was true. And he'd be back with friends again -- with Alley Oop and Ghost, with Harlow Sharp and Allen Preston and all the rest of them. There'd be rowdy midnight drinking bouts at the Pig # Whistle and long, slow walks along the shaded malls and canoeing on the lake. There'd be discussion and argument and the telling of old tales, and the leisurely academic routine that gave one time to live. TTe found himself looking for-  ward to the trip, for the roadway ran along the hills of Goblin Reservation. Not that there were only goblins there. There were many other kinds of the Little Folk, and they all were friends of his. Or at least most of them were friends. Trolls at times could be exasperating. And it was rough to build up any real and lasting friendship with a creature like a banshee. This time of year, he thought, the hills would be beautiful. It had been late summer when he'd left for the Coonskin system, and the hills still had worn their mantle of dark green; but now, in the middle of October, they would have burst into the full color of their autumn dress. There'd be the winy red of oak and the brilliant red and yellow of the maples, and here and there the flaming scarlet of creeping vines would run like a thread through all the other colors, and the air would smell like cider, that strange, intoxicating scent that came upon the woods only with the dying of the leaves. He sat there, thinking of the time, just two summers past, when he and Mr. O'Toole had gone on a canoe trip up the river, into the northern wilderness hoping that somewhere along the way they might make some sort of contact with the spirits recorded in the old Ojibway legends. They had floated on the glass-clear waters and built their fires at night on the edges of the dark pine forests; they had caught their fish for supper and hunted down the wild flowers hidden in the forest glades and spied on many animals and birds and had a good vacation. But they had seen no spirits, which was not surprising. Very few contacts had been made with the Little Folk of North America, for' they were truly creatures of the wilds, unlike the semi-civilized, human-accustomed sprites of Europe. The chair in which he sat faced the West, and through the towering walls of glass he could see across the river to the bluffs that rose along the border of the ancient state of Iowa -- great, dark purple masses rimmed by a pale blue autumn sky. Atop one of the bluffs he could make out the lighter bulk of the College of Thaumaturgy, staffed in large part by the octopoid creatures from Centaurus. Looking at those faint outlines of the buildings, he recalled that he had often promised himself he'd attend one of their summer seminars, but had never got around to doing it. #  He reached out and shifted his luggage, preparing to get up, but he stayed sitting there. He still was a little short of breath, and his legs seemed weak. What Drayton had told him, he realized, had hit him harder than he'd thought. It still was hitting him in a series of delayed reactions. He'd have to take it easy, he told himself. He couldn't get the wind up. It might not be true; it probably wasn't true. There was no sense in getting too concerned about it until he'd had the chance to find out for himself. Slowly he got to his feet and reached down to pick up his luggage, but hesitated for a moment to plunge into the hurried confusion of the waiting room. People -- alien and human -- were hurrying purposefully or stood about in little knots and clusters. An old, white-bearded man, dressed in stately black -- a professor by the looks of him, thought Maxwell -- was surrounded by a group of students who had to come to see him off. A family of reptilians sprawled in a group of loungers set aside for people such as they, not built for sitting. The two adults lay quietly, facing one another and talking softly, with the hissing overtones that marked reptilian speech, while the youngsters crawled over and under the loungers and sprawled on the floor in play. In one comer of a tiny alcove a beerbarrel creature, lying on its side, rolled gently back and forth, from one wall to the other, rolling back and forth in the same spirit, and perhaps for the same purpose, a man would pace the floor. Two spidery creatures, their bodies more like grotesque matchstick creations than honest flesh and blood, squatted facing one another. They had marked off upon the floor, with a piece of chalk, some sort of crude gameboard and had placed about upon it a number of strangely shaped pieces, which they were moving rapidly about, squeaking in excitement as the game developed. Wheelers? Drayton had asked. Was there any tie-up with the crystal planet and the Wheelers? Tt always was the Wheelers, thought Mawell. An obsession with the Wheelers. And perhaps with reason, although one could not be sure. For there was little known of them. They loomed darkly, far in space, another great cultural group pushing out across the galaxy, coming into ragged contact along a far-flung frontier line with the punishing human culture. Standing there, he recalled that first and only time he had ever seen a Wheeler -- a student who had come from the College of Comparative Anatomy in Rio de Janeiro for a two-week seminar at Time College. Wisconsin Campus, he remembered, had been quietly agog. There had been a lot of talk, but very little opportunity to gain a glimpse of the fabled creature, since it stayed closely within the seminar confines. He had met it, trundling along a corridor, when he'd gone across the mall to have lunch with Harlow Sharp, and he recalled that he'd been shocked. It had been the wheels, he told himself. No other creature in the known galaxy came equipped with wheels. It had been a pudgy creature, a roly-poly suspended between two wheels, the hubs of which projected from its body somewhere near its middle. The wheels were encased in fur, and the rims of them were homy callouses. The downward bulge of the roly-poly body sagged beneath the axle of the wheels like a bulging sack. But the worst of it, he saw when he came nearer, was that this sagging portion of the body was transparent and filled with a mass of writhing things which made one think Of a pail of gaily colored worms. And those writhing objects in that obscene and ebese belly, Maxwell knew, were, if not worms, at least some kind of insect, or a form of life which could equate with that form of life on Earth which men knew as insects. For the Wheelers were a hive mechanism, a culture made up of many such hive' mechanisms, a population of colonies of insects, or at least the equivalent of insects. And with a population of that sort, the tales of terror which came from the far and rough frontier about the Wheelers were not hard to understand. And if these horror tales were true, then man here faced, for the first time since his drive out into space, that hypothetical enemy which it always had been presumed would be met somewhere in space. 'Throughout the galaxy, man had met many other strange and, at times, fearsome creatures. But none could match fearsomeness with a creature that was a wheel-driven hive of insects. There was something about the whole idea that made one want to gag. Today outlandish creatures flocked to the Earth in thousands, to attend the many colleges, to staff the faculties that made up that great galactic university which had taken over Earth. And in time, perhaps, the Wheelers might be added to this galactic population which swarmed the colleges of Earth -- if only there could be some kind of understanding contact. But so far there hadn't been. Why was it, Maxwell wondered, that the very idea of the Wheelers went against the grain when man and all the other creatures in the galaxy contacted by the humans had learned to live with one another? Here, in this waiting room, one could see a cross-section of them -- the hoppers, the creepers, the crawlers, the wrigglers and rollers that came from the many planets from so many stars. Earth was the galactic melting pot, he thought, a place where beings from the thousand stars met and mingled to share their thoughts and cultures. "Number #," shrilled the loudspeaker. "Passenger No. #, your departure time is only five minutes from now. Cubicle #. Passenger #, please report immediately to Cubicle #." And where, Maxwell wondered, might No. # be bound? To the jungles of Headache No. #, to the grim, wind-swept glacial cities of Misery IV, to the desert planets of the Slaughter Suns, or to any of the other of the thousands of planets, all less than a heartbeat away from this very spot he stood, now linked by the transmitter system, but representing in the past long years of exploratory effort as discovery ships beat through the dark of everlasting space. As they, were beating out there even now, slowly and painfully expanding the perimeter of man's known universe. The sounds of the waiting room boomed and muttered, with the frantic paging of late or missing passengers, with the hollow buzz of a hundred different tongues spoken in a thousand different throats, with the shuffling or the clicking or the clop of feet across the floor. He reached down and picked up his luggage, turned toward the entrance. After no more than three steps, he was halted to make way for a truck carrying a tank filled with a murky liquid. Through the cloudiness of the liquid, he caught a suggestion of the outrageous shape that lurked within the tank -- some creature from one of the liquid planets, perhaps, and one where the liquid was not water. Here, more than likely, as a visiting professor, perhaps to one of the colleges of philosophy, or maybe one of the science institutes. The truck and its tank out of the way, he went on and reached the entrance, stepped through the opening onto the beautifully paved and terraced esplanade, along the bottom of which ran the roadway belts. He was gratified to notice that there were no waiting lines, as often was the case, recently... He drew a deep breath of air into his lungs -- clean, pure air with the sharp tang of frosty autumn in it. It was a welcome thing after the weeks of dead and musty air upon the crystal planet. T T e turned to go down the steps, A and as he did he saw the sign-board just beyond the gate to the roadway belts. The sign was large, and the lettering was in Old English, screaming with solid dignity: Of Stratford-on-Avon, England "How It Happened I Did Not Write The Plays" Under the sponsorship of Time College Oct. #, # p.m. Time Museum Auditorium Tickets available at all agencies "Maxwell," someone shouted, and he swung around. A man was running toward him from the entrance. Maxwell put down his luggage, half-raised his hand in greeting and acknowledgment, then slowly dropped it, for he realized that he did not recognize the man. The man slowed to a trot, then a rapid walk. "Professor Maxwell, isn't it?" he asked as he came up. "I'm sure I'm not mistaken." Maxwell nodded stiffly, just a bit embarrassed. "Monty Churchill," said the man, thrusting out his hand. "We met, a year or so ago. At one of Nancy Clayton's bashes." Ill "How are you, Churchill?" Maxwell asked, a little frostily. For now he did recognize the man, the namat least if not the face. A lawyer, he supposed, but he wasn't sure. Doing business, if he recalled correctly, as a public relations man, a fixer. One of that tribe which handled things for clients, for anyone who could put up a fee. "Why, I'm fine," said Churchill, happily. "Just back from a trip. A short one. But it's good to be back again. There's nothing quite like home. That's why I yelled out at you. First familiar face I've seen for several weeks, at least." "I'm glad you did," said Maxwell. "You going back to the campus?" "Yes. I was heading for the roadway." "No need of that," said Churchill. "I have my flier here. Parked on the strip out back. There's room for both of us. Get there a good deal faster." Maxwell hesitated. He didn't like the man, but what Churchill said was true; they would get there faster. And he was anxious to get back as quickly as he could, for there were things that needed checking out. "That's very kind of you," he said. "If you're sure you have the room." r T"he motor sputtered and went dead. The jets hummed for a second and then fell silent. The air sighed shrilly against the metal hide. Maxwell glanced swiftly at the man beside him. Churchill sat stiff -- perhaps in fear, perhaps only in astonishment. For even Maxwell realized that a thing like this should not have happened. In fact, it was unthinkable. Fliers such as the one in which they rode were foolproof. Below them lay the jagged rocks of the craggy cliffs, the spearlike, upthrusting branches of the forest covering the hills, clinging to the rocks. To the left the river ran, a silver ribbon through the wooded bottom lands. Time seemed to drag, to lengthen out, as if by some strange magic each second had become a minute. And with the lengthening of time came a quiet awareness of what was about to happen as if it might be happening to someone else. Maxwell told himself, and not to him, a factual and dispassionate assessment of the situation by an observer who was not involved. And even as he knew this, he also knew, in a dim, far corner of his mind, panic would come later; and when that came, time would take up its usual pace again as the flier rushed down to meet the forest and the rock. Leaning forward, he scanned the terrain that stretched ahead, and as he did he caught sight of the tiny opening in the forest, a rift in the dark ranks of the trees and the hint of green beneath. He nudged Churchill, pointing. Churchill, looking where he pointed, nodded and moved the wheel, slowly, carefully, tentatively, as if he were feeling for some response of the craft, trying to determine if it would respond. The flier tilted slightly, wheeled and swung, still falling slowly, but jockeying for position. For a moment it seemed to balk at the controls, then slid sidewise, losing altitude more rapidly, but gliding down toward the rift between the trees. Now the trees rushed upward at them and, close above them. Maxwell could see the autumn color of them -- no longer simply dark, but a mass of red and gold and brown. Long, slender spears of red reached up to stab them, claw-like hands of gold grasped at them with an angry clutch. The plane brushed the topmost branches of an oak, seemed to hesitate, almost to hang there in midair, then was gliding in, mushing toward a landing on the small greensward that lay within the forest. A fairy green Maxwell told himself -- a dancing place for fairies. But now a landing field. He switched his head sidewise for a second, saw Churchill crouched at the controls, then switched back again and watched the green come up. It should be smooth, he told himself. There should be no bumps or holes or hummocks. For at the time the green had been laid down the blueprints would have called for smoothness. The craft hit and bounced and for a terrifying moment teetered in the air. Then it was down again and running smoothly on the green. The trees at the far end of the grass were rushing at them, coming up too fast. "Hang on!" Churchill shouted and even as he shouted, the plane swung and pivoted, skidding. It came to rest a dozen feet from the woods that rimmed the green. 'T'hey sat in deadly silence, a silence that seemed to be closing in on them from the colored forest and the rocky bluffs. Churchill spoke out of the silence. "That was close," he said. He reached up and slid back the canopy and got out. Maxwell followed him. "I can't understand what happened," Churchill said. "This job has more fail-safe circuitry built into it than you can imagine. Get hit by lightning, sure; run into a mountain, yes, you can do that; get caught in turbulence and bounced around, all of this could happen, but the motor never quits. The only way to stop it is to turn it off." He lifted his arm and mopped his brow with his already soggy shirt sleeve. "Did you know about this place?" he asked. Maxwell shook his head. "Not this particular place. I knew there were such places. When the reservation was laid out and landscaped, the planning called for greens. Places where the fairies dance, you know. I wasn't looking for anything, exactly, but when I saw the opening in the trees I could guess what might be down here." "When you showed it to me," said Churchill, "I just hoped you knew what you were doing. There seemed to be no place else to go, so I did some gambling -- " Maxwell raised his hand to silence him. "What was that?" he asked. "Sounds like a horse," said Churchill. "Who in the world would be out here with a horse? It comes from up that way." The clattering and the clopping was coming closer. They stepped around the flier and when, they did, they saw the trail that led up to a sharp and narrow ridge, with the massive bulk of a ruined castle perched atop the ridge. The horse was coming down the trail at a sloppy gallop. Bestriding it was a small and dumpy figure that bounced most amazingly with each motion of its mount. It was a far from graceful rider, with its elbows thrust out on either side of it, flapping like a pair of wings. The horse came tearing down the slope and swung out on the green. It was no more graceful than its rider; but a shaggy plow horse and its mighty hoofs, beating like great hammers, tore up clods of turf and flung them far behind it. It came straight at the flier, almost as if intent on running over it, then at the last moment wheeled clumsily and came to a shuddering halt, to stand with its sides heaving in and out like bellows and snorting through its flabby nostrils. Its rider slid awkwardly off its back and, when he hit the ground, exploded in a gust of wrath. "It is them no-good bummers!" he shouted. "It is them lousy trolls. I've told them and I've told them to leave them broomsticks be. But no, they will not listen. They always make the joke. They put enchantment on them." "Mr. O'Toole," Maxwell shouted. "You remember me?" 'nphe goblin swung around and squinted at him with redfilmed, near-sighted eyes. "The professor!" he screamed. "The good friend of all of us. Oh, what an awful shame! I tell you, professor, the hides of them trolls I shall nail upon the door and pin their ears on trees." "Enchantment?" Churchill asked. "Do you say enchantment?" "What other would it be?" Mr. O'Toole fumed. "What else would bring a broomstick down out of the sky?" He ambled closer to Maxwell and peered anxiously at him. "Can it be really you?" he asked, with some solicitude. "In the honest flesh? We had word that you had died. We sent the wreath of mistletoe and holly to express our deepest grief." "It is I, most truly," said Maxwell, slipping easily into the idiom of the Little Folk. "You heard rumor only." "Then for sheer joy," cried Mr. O'Toole, "we three shall down great tankards of October ale. The new batch is ready for the running off, and I invite you gentlemen most cordially to share the first of it with me." Other goblins, a half dozen of them, were running down the path, and Mr. O'Toole waved lustily to hurry them along. "Always late," he lamented. "Never on the ball. Always showing up, but always somewhat slightly late. Good boys, all of them, with hearts correctly placed, but lacking the alertness that is the hallmark of true goblins such as I." The goblins came loping and panting down onto the green, ranged themselves expectantly in front of Mr. O'Toole. "I have jobs for you," he told them. "First you go down to the bridge and you tell them trolls no more enchantments they shall make. They are to cease and desist entirely. Tell them this is their one last chance. If they do such things again that bridge we shall tear apart, stone by mossy stone, and those stones we shall scatter far and wide, so there never is a chance of upbuilding that bridge yet again. And they are to uplift the enchantment from this fallen broomstick so it flies as good as new. "And some others of you I want to seek the fairies out and explain to them the defacement of their green, being sure to lay all blame for such upon them dirty trolls and promising the turf shall be all fixed smooth and lovely for their next dancing when the moon is full." "And yet another of you must take care of Dobbin, making sure his clumsy self does no more damage to the green, but letting him crop, perchance, a mouthful or two of the longer grass if it can be found. The poor beast does not often get the chance to regale himself with pasturage such as this." He turned back to Maxwell and Churchill, dusting his hands together in symbolism of a job well done. "And now, gentlemen," he said, "you please to climb the hill with me, and we will essay what can be done with sweet October ale. I beg you, however, to go slowly in very pity of me, since this paunch of mine seems grown large of late, and I suffer most exceedingly from the shortness of the breath." "Lead on, old friend," said Maxwell. "We shall match our It has been too long since we have quaffed October ale together." "Yes, by all means," said Churchill, somewhat weakly. Hphey started up the path. Before them, looming on the ridge, the ruined castle stood gaunt against the paleness of the sky. "I must beforehand apologize," said Mr. O'Toole, "for the condition of the castle. It is a very drafty place, conducive to colds and sinus infections and other varied miseries. The winds blow through it wickedly, and it smells of damp and mold. I do not understand in fullness why you humans, once you build the castles for us, do not make them weathertight and comfortable. Because we, beforetimes, dwelt in ruins does not necessarily mean that we have forsook all comfort and convenience. We dwelt in them, forsooth, because they were the best poor Europe had to offer." He paused to gulp for breath, then went on again. "I can well recall, two thousand years ago or more, we dwelt in brand-new castles, poor enough, of course, for the rude humans of that time could not build the better, being all thumbs and without proper tools and no machinery at all and being, in general, a slabsided race of people. And us forced to hide in the nooks and crannies of the castles since the benighted humans of that day feared and detested us in all their ignorance and sought to erect great spells against us. "Although," he said, with some satisfaction, "mere humans were not proficient with the spells. We, with no raising of the sweat, could afford them spades and clubs and beat their spells, hands down." "Two thousand years?" asked Churchill. "You don't mean to say..." Maxwell made a quick motion of his head in an attempt to silence him. Mr. O'Toole stopped in the middle of the path and threw Churchill a withering glance. "I can recall," he said, "when the barbarians first came, most rudely, from that fenny forest you now call Central Europe to knock with the hilts of their crude iron swords upon the very gates of Rome. We heard of it in the forest depths where we made our homes; and there were others then, but dead long since, who had heard the news, some weeks after its transpirance, from Thermopylae." "I am sorry," Maxwell said. "Not every one is as well acquainted with the Little Folk it "Please," said Mr. O'Toole, "you acquaint him, then." tCTt's the truth," Maxwell saidto Churchill, "or, at least, it could be. Not immortal, for they eventually do die. But long-lived beyond anything we know. Births are few -- very few, indeed, for if they weren't there'd not be room for them on Earth. But they live to an extremely ripe old age. "It is," said Mr. O'Toole, "because we burrow deep to the heart of nature and do not waste precious vitality of spirit upon those petty concerns which make wreckage of the lives and hopes of humans." "But these," he said, "are dolorous topics on which to waste so glorious an autumn afternoon. So let us fasten our thoughts, rather, with great steadfastness, upon the foaming ale that awaits us on the hilltop." He lapsed into silence and started up the path again at a more rapid pace than he had set before. Scuttling down the path toward them came a tiny goblin, his multicolored, too large shirt whipping in the wind of his headlong running. "The ale!" he screamed. "The ale!" He skidded to a halt in front of the three toiling up the path. "What of the ale?" panted Mr. O'Toole. "Do you mean to confess to me that you have been the sampling of it?" "It has gone sour," wailed the little goblin. "The whole bewitched mess of it is sour." "But ale can't go sour," protested Maxwell, grasping some sense of the tragedy that had taken place. Mr. O'Toole bounced upon the path in devastating anger. His face turned from brown to red to purple. His breath came gushing out in wheezing gasps. "It can, bedamned," he shouted, "with a spell of wizardry!" He turned around and started rapidly down the path, trailed by the little goblin. "Leave me at them filthy trolls!" shouted Mr. O'Toole. "Leave me wrap my paws around their guzzles. I will dig them out with these two hands and hang them in the sun to dry. I will skin them all entire. I will teach them lessons they never will unlearn!" His bellowing dwindled with distance to unintelligible rumbling as he scrambled swiftly down the path, heading for the bridge beneath which the trolls hung out. The two humans stood watching, filled with admiration and wonder at such ponderous, towering wrath. "Well," said Churchill, "there goes our chance at sweet October ale." IV 'T'he clock in Music Hall began striking the hour of six as Maxwell reached the outskirts of the campus, riding from the airport on one of the slower, outer belts of the roadway. Churchill had taken another roadway, and Maxwell had been glad of that. Not only that he felt a faint distaste for the man, but from the wish to be alone. He wanted to ride slowly, with the windshield down, in silence, without the need of conversation, to soak up the sight and feel of those few square miles of buildings and of malls -- coming home again to the one place that he loved. Dusk sifted through the campus like a mist of benediction, softening the outlines of the buildings, turning the malls into areas that could have been romantic etchings out of story books. Knots of students stood about the malls, talking quietly, carrying their satchels or with books tucked beneath their arms. A white-haired man sat on a bench, watching a pair of squirrels playing on the lawn. Two reptilian aliens hunched along one of the misty walks, moving slowly and engrossed in talk. A human student strode smartly along the sidewalk, whistling as he went, the whistle waking echoes in the quiet angles of the buildings. Meeting and passing the reptiles, he lifted an arm in grave salute. And everywhere were the trees, great and ancient elms that had stood since time forgotten, the sturdy sentinels of many generations. Then the great clock started the ringing of the hour, the bronze clangor of it beating far across the land, and it seemed to Maxwell that in the clock the campus was bidding him hello. The clock was a friend, he thought -- not to him alone, but to all within the hearing of it, the voice of the campus. Lying in bed, before he went to sleep, he had listened, night after night, to its chiming, its ringing out of time. And more, perhaps, than the ringing out of time. Rather a watchman in the night crying all was well. Ahead of him the mighty complex of Time College loomed out of the dusk -- looming up to dwarf the roadway and the mall, great blocks of plastic and glass, with lights burning in many of its windows. Squatted at the base of the complex, crouched the museum and across its front Maxwell saw the wind-fluttered whiteness of a sign painted on white fabric. In the dusk and distance he could make out only T T e grinned to himself, thinking of it. English Lit would be beside itself. Old Chenery and all the rest of them had never quite forgiven Time for establishing, two or three years ago, that the Earl of Oxford, not Shakespeare, had been the author of the plays. And this personal appearance of the man from Stratford-on-Avon would be rubbing salt into wounds that were far from healed. Far ahead, sitting on its hill at the west end of the campus, Maxwell could make out the great dark hulk of the administration section, etched darkly against the last faint brushing of red in the western sky. The belt moved on, past Time College and its squatting museum with the sign fluttering in the wind. The clock ended its telling of the time, the last notes of the chimes fading far into the distance. Six o'clock. In another few minutes he would be getting off the belt and heading for the Winston Arms, which had been his home for the last four -- no, the last five years. He put his hand into the right-hand pocket of his jacket, and his fingers traced the hard outlines of the small ring of keys tucked into the small key pocket inside the jacket pocket. Now, for the first time since he'd left Wisconsin Station, the story of that other Peter Maxwell forged to the forefront of his thoughts. It could be true, of course -- although it didn't seem too likely. It would be very much the kind of trick Security might play to crack a man wide open. But if it were not true, why had there been no report from Coonskin of his failure to arrive? Although, he realized, that piece of information also had come from Inspector Drayton, as well as the further information that the same thing had happened twice before. If Drayton could be suspect on one story, he also was suspect on the other two. If there had been other beings picked up by the crystal planet, he had certainly not been told of them when he had been there. But that also, Maxwell reminded himself, was no trustworthy evidence. Undoubtedly the creatures on the crystal planet had told him only those things they wanted him to know. The thing that bothered him the most, come to think of it, was not what Drayton had said, but what Mr. O'Toole had told him: We sent the wreath of mistletoe and holly to express our deepest grief. If events had turned out differently, he would have talked with his goblin friend about it, but the way things went, there had been no chance to talk of anything at all. Tt all could wait, he told him- self. In just a little while, once he had gotten home, he'd pick up a phone and make a call -- to any one of many people -- and then he'd know the truth. Who should he call? he wondered. There was Harlow Sharp, at Time, or Dallas Gregg, chairman of his own department, or maybe Xigmu Maon Tyre, the old Eridanean with the snow-white fur and the brooding violet eyes who had spent a long lifetime in his tiny cubbyhole of an office working out an analysis of the structuring of myths. Or maybe Allen Preston, friend and attorney. Preston, probably, he told himself, for if what Drayton had told him should happen to be true, there might be some nasty legal questions stemming out of it. Impatiently, he snarled at himself. He was believing it, he was beginning to believe it; if he kept on like this, he could argue himself into thinking that it might be true. The Winston Arms was just down the street. He got up from his seat, picked up his bag and stepped to the barely moving outer belt. He got off in front of the Winston Arms. No one was in sight as he climbed the broad stone stairs and went into the foyer. Fumbling in his pocket, he took out the key ring and found the key that unlocked the outer door. An elevator stood waiting, and he got into it and pressed the button for the seventh floor. The key slid smoothly into the lock of his apartment and when he twisted it the door came open. He stepped into the darkened room. Behind him the door swung shut automatically, with a snicking of the lock, and he reached out his hand toward the panel to snap on the light. But with his hand poised to press, he stopped. For there was something wrong. A feeling, a sense of something, a certain smell, perhaps. That was it -- a smell. The faint, delicate odor of a strange perfume. He smashed his hand against the panel, and the lights came up. The room was not the same. The furniture was different. And the screaming paintings on the wall -- he had never had, he would never have paintings such as that! Behind him the lock snicked again, and he spun around. The door swung open and a sabertooth tiger stalked in. At the sight of Maxwell, the big cat dropped into a crouch and snarled, exposing six-inch stabbing fangs. Gingerly, Maxwell backed away. The cat crept closer by a foot, still snarling. Maxwell took another backward step, felt the sudden blow above the ankle, tried to twist away, but was unable to, and knew that he was falling. He had seen the hassock, he should have remembered it was there -- but he hadn't. He'd backed into it and tripped himself and now he was going over flat upon his back. He tried to force his body to relax against striking on the floor -- but he didn't hit the floor. His back smashed down into a yielding softness, and he knew he'd landed on the couch that stood behind the hassock. The cat was sailing through the air in a graceful leap, its ears laid back, its mouth half open, its massive paws outstretched to form a battering ram. Maxwell raised his arms in a swift defensive gesture, but they were brushed aside as if they'd not been there, and the paws smashed down into his chest, pinning him against the couch. The great cat's head, with its gleaming fangs, hung just above his face. Slowly, almost gently, the cat lowered its head, and a long pink tongue came out and slathered, raspingly, across Maxwell's face. The cat began to purr. C  Qylvester!" cried a voice from  the doorway. "Sylvester, cut that out!" . The cat raked Maxwell's face once again with its moist and rasping tongue, then sat back upon its haunches, with a half-grin on its face and its ears tipped forward, regarding Maxwell with a friendly and enthusiastic interest. Maxwell struggled to a halfsitting posture, with the small of his back resting on the seat cushions and his shoulders propped against the couch's back. "And who might you be?" asked the girl standing in the doorway. "Why, I " "You've got your nerve," she said. Sylvester purred loudly. , "I'm sorry, miss," said Maxwell. "But I live here. Or at least, I did. Isn't this #?" "It is, indeed," she said. "I rented it just a week ago." Maxwell shook his head. "I should have known," he said. "The furniture was wrong." "I had the landlord throw out the old stuff," she said. "It simply was atrocious." "Let me guess," said Maxwell. "An old green lounger, somewhat the worse for wear... " "And a walnut liquor cabinet," said the girl, "and a monstrous seascape and... " Maxwell lifted his head wearily. "That's enough," he said. "That was my stuff that you had thrown out." "I don't understand," said the girl. "The landlord said the former occupant was dead. An accident, I think." Maxwell got slowly to his feet. The big cat stood up, moved closer, rubbed affectionately against his legs. "Stop that, Sylvester," said the girl. Sylvester went on rubbing. "You mustn't mind him," she said. "He's just a great big baby." "A bio-mech?" She nodded. "The cutest thing alive. He goes everywhere with me. He seldom is a bother. I don't know what's got into him. It seems that he must like you." She had been looking at the cat, but now she glanced up sharply. "Is there something wrong with you?" she asked. Maxwell shook his head. "You're sort of frosty around the gills." "A bit of shock," he told her. "I suppose that's it. What I told you was the truth. I did, at one time, live here. Up until a few weeks ago. There was a mix-up somehow... " "Sit down," she said. "Could you use a drink?" "I suspect I could," he said. "My name is Peter Maxwell, and I'm a member of the faculty..." "Wait a moment. You said Maxwell? Peter Maxwell. I remember now. That's the name." "Yes, I know," said Maxwell. "Of the man who died." He sat down carefully on the couch. "I'll get the drink," the girl said. Qylvester slid closer and gently  laid his massive head in Maxwell's lap. Maxwell scratched him behind an ear; and, purring loudly, Sylvester turned his head a bit to show Maxwell where it itched. The girl came with the drink and sat down beside him. "I still don't understand," she told him. "If you're the man who -- " "The whole thing," Maxwell told her, "becomes somewhat complicated." "I must say you're taking it rather well. Shaken up a bit, perhaps. But not stricken in a heap." "Well, the fact of the matter is," said Maxwell, "that I halfway knew it. I'd been told, you see, but I didn't quite believe it. I suppose the truth is that I wouldn't let myself believe it." He raised the glass. "You're not drinking?" "If you're all right," she said. "If you feel okay, I'll get one for myself." "Oh, I'm all right," said Maxwell. "I'll manage to survive." He looked at her and for the first time really saw her -- sleek and trim, with bobbed black hair, long eyelashes, high cheekbones and eyes that smiled at him. "What's your name?" he asked. "I am Carol Hampton. A historian at Time." He said, "Miss Hampton, I apologize for the situation. I have been away -- off planet. Just returned. And I had a key, and it fit the door and when I'd left it had been my place." "No need to explain," she said. "We'll have the drink," he said. "Then I'll get up and go. Unless -- " "Unless what?" have dinner with me. Let's call it a way for me to repay your understanding. You could have run out shrieking." "If this was all a pitch!" die said. "If you -- " "It couldn't be," he said. "I'd be too stupid to get it figured out. And, besides, how come I had the key?" She looked at him for a moment, then said, "It was silly of me. But Sylvester will have to go with us. He won't be left alone." "Why," said Maxwell, "I wouldn't think of leaving him. He and I are pals." "It'll cost you a steak," she warned. "He is always hungry and he eats nothing but good steaks. Big ones. Raw." V The Pig #s Whistle was dark and clamorous and smoky. The tables were jammed together, with narrow lanes between them. Candles burned with flickering flames. The murmurous din of many voices, seemingly talking all at once, filled the low-ceilinged room. Maxwell stopped and peered, trying to locate a table that might be vacant. There wasn't any. But he wanted to eat here. The place was a hangout of students and some members of the faculty; it spelled the campus to him. He said to Carol Hampton, "Perhaps we should go somewhere else." "There'll be someone along in just a minute," she said, "to show us to a table. Everyone seems .so busy. There must have been a rush -- Sylvester! Cut that out!" She spoke appealingly to the people at the table beside which they stood. "You'll excuse him, please. He has no manners, none at all. Especially table manners. He snatches everything in sight." Sylvester licked his chops, looking satisfied. "Think nothing of it, miss," said the man with the bushy beard. "I really didn't want it. To order steak is just compulsive with me." Someone shoutedacross the room. "Pete! Pete Maxwell!" Maxwell peered into the gloom. At a far table, inserted in a corner, someone had risen and was waving his arms. Maxwell finally made him out. It was Alley Oop, and beside him sat the whiteshrouded figure of Ghost. "Friends of yours?" asked Carol. "Yes. Apparently they want us to join them. Do you mind?" "The Neanderthaler?" she asked. "You know him?" "No. I just see him around at times. But I'd like to meet him. And that is the Ghost?" "The two are inseparable," said Maxwell. "Well, let's go over, then." "We can say hello and go somewhere else." "Not on your life," she said. "This place looks interesting." "You've never been here before?" "I've never dared," she said. "I'll break the path," he told her. He forged slowly among the tables, trailed by the girl and cat. A lley Oop lunged out into the aisle to meet him, flung his arms around him, hugged him, then grasped him by the shoulders and thrust him out at armslength to stare into his face. "You are Old Pete?" he asked. "You aren't fooling us?" "I am Pete," said Maxwell. "Who do you think I am?" "Well, what I want to know then," said Oop, "is who in hell it was we buried three weeks ago last Thursday. Both me and Ghost were there. And you owe us twenty bucks refund on the flowers we sent. That is what they cost us." "Let us sit down," said Maxwell. "Afraid of creating a scene," said Oop. "Hell, this place is made for scenes. There are fist fights every hour, and there's always someone jumping up on a table and making a speech." "Oop," said Maxwell, "there is a lady present, and I want you to tame down and get civilized. Miss Carol Hampton, this great oaf is Alley Oop." "I am delighted to meet you, Miss Hampton," said Alley Oop. "And what it that you have there with you? As I live and breathe, a saber-toother! I'll have to tell you about the time, during a blizzard, I sought shelter in a cave and this big cat was there and me with nothing but a dull stone knife. I had lost my club, you see, when I met the bear, and -- " "Some other time," said Maxwell. "At least, let us sit down. We are hungry. We don't want to get thrown out." "Pete," said Alley Oop, "it is a matter of some large distinction to be heaved out of this joint. You ain't arrived socially otherwise." But, muttering under his breath, he led the way back to the table and held a chair for Carol. Sylvester planted himself between Maxwell and Carol, propped his chin on the table and glared balefully at Oop. "That cat don't like me," Oop declared. "Probably he knows how many of his ancestors I wiped out back in the Old Stone Age." "He's only a bio-mech," said Carol. "He couldn't possibly." "I don't believe a word of it," said Oop. "That critter is no biomech. He's got the dirty meanness in his eyes all sabertoothers have." "Please, Oop," said Maxwell "Just a moment, please. Miss Hampton, this gentleman is Ghost A long-time friend." "I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Ghost," said Carol. "Not mister," said Ghost. "Just plain Ghost. That is all I am. And the terrible thing about it is that I don't know who I am the ghost of. I'm most pleased to meet you. It is so comfortable with four around the table. There is something nice and balanced in the number four." "Well, now," said Oop, "that we know one another, leave us proceed to business. Let us do some drinking. It's lonesome for a man to drink all by himself. I love Ghost, of course, for his many sterling qualities, but I hate a man who doesn't drink." tC'V'ou know I can't drink,"  said Ghost. "Nor eat, either. Or smoke. There's not much a ghost can do. But I wish you wouldn't keep pointing it out to everyone we meet." Oop said to Carol, "You seem to be surprised that a barbaric Neanderthaler can sling the language around with the facility I command." "Not surprised," said Carol. "Astounded." "Oop," Maxwell told her, "has soaked up more education in the last twelve years than most ordinary men. Started out virtually in kindergarten and now is working on his doctorate. And the thing about it is that he intends to keep right on. You might say he is one of our most notable professional students." Oop raised his arm and waved it, bellowing at a waiter. "Over here," he shouted. "There are people here who wish to patronize you. All dying of slow thirst." "The thing," said Ghost, "I have always admired about him is his shy, retiring nature." "I keep on studying," said Oop, "not so much that I hunger after knowledge as for the enjoyment I get from the incredulous astonishment on the faces of those stuffed-shirt professors and those goofy students. Not," he said to Maxwell, "that I maintain all professors are stuffed shirts." "Thank you," Maxwell said. "There are those who seem to think," said Oop, "that Homo sapien neanderthalensis can be nothing other than a stupid brute. After all, he became extinct, he couldn't hold his own -- which in itself is prime evidence that he was very second rate. I'm afraid that I'll continue to devote my life to proving -- " The waiter appeared at Oop's elbow. "It's you again," he said. "I might have known when you yelled at me. You have no breeding, Oop." "We have a man here," Oop told him, ignoring the insult, "who has come back from the dead. I think it would be fitting that we should celebrate his resurrection with a flourish of good fellowship." "You want something to drink, I take it." "Why," said Oop, "don't you simply bring a bottle of good booze, a bucket of ice and four -- no, three glasses. Ghost doesn't drink, you know." "I know," the waiter said. "That is," said Oop, "unless Miss Hampton wants one of these fancy drinks... " "Who am I to gum up the works?" asked Carol. "What is it you are drinking?" "Bourbon," said Oop. "Pete and I have a lousy taste in liquor." "Bourbon let it be," said Carol. "I take it," said the waiter, "that when I lug the bottle over here, you'll have the cash to pay for it. I remember the time -- " "Whatever I may lack," said Oop, "will be forthcoming from Old Pete." "Pete?" The waiter glanced at Maxwell. "Professor!" he exclaimed. "I had heard that you -- " "That's what I been trying to tell you," said Oop. "That's what we're celebrating. He came back from the dead." "But I don't understand." "You don't need to," said Oop. "Just rustle up the booze." The waiter scurried off. "And now," said Ghost to Maxwell, "please tell us what you are. You are no ghost, apparently. Or if you are, there's been a vast improvement in procedure since the man I represent shuffled off his mortal coil." VI # # Tt seems," Maxwell told them, "that I'm a split personality. One of me, I understand, got in an, accident and died." "But that's impossible," said Carol. "Split personality in the mental sense -- sure, that can be understood. But physically -- " "There's nothing in heaven or Earth," said Ghost, "that is impossible." "That's a bad quotation," said Oop, "and, besides, you misquoted it." He put a hand to his hairy chest and scratched vigorously with blunt fingers. "You needn't look so horrified," he said to Carol. "I itch. I'm a brute creature of nature, therefore I scratch. And I'm not naked, either. I have a pair of shorts on." "He's house-broken," said Maxwell, "but just barely." "To get back to this split personality," said the girl, "can you tell us what actually did happen?" "I set out for one of the Coonskin planets," said Maxwell, "and along the way somehow my wave pattern duplicated itself, and I wound up in two places." "You mean there were two Pete Maxwells?" "That's the way of it." "If I were you," said Oop, "I'd sue them. These Transportation people get away with murder. You could shake them down for plenty. Me and Ghost could testify for you. We went to your funeral. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I think Ghost and I should sue as well. For mental anguish. Our best friend cold and rigid in his casket and us prostrate with grief." "We really were, you know," said Ghost. "I have no doubt of it," said Maxwell. "I must say," said Coral, "that all three of you take it rather lightly." "What do you want of us?" demanded Oop. "Sing hallelujahs, perhaps? Or bug out our eyes and be filled with the wonder of it? We lost a pal, and now he's back again." "But one of him is dead!" "Well," said Oop, "so far as we were concerned, there was never more than one of him. And maybe this is better. Imagine the embarrassing situations that could develop if there were two of him' Carol turned to Maxwell. "And you?" she asked. Lie shook his head. "In a day or two, I'll take some serious thought of it. Right now, I guess, I'm putting off thinking about it. To tell you the truth, when I do think about it, I get a little numb. But tonight I've got a pretty girl and two old friends and a great big pussy cat and a bottle of liquor to get rid of and later on some food." He grinned at her. She shrugged. "I never saw such a crazy bunch," she said. "I believe I like it." "I like it, too," said Oop. "Say whatever you will of it, this civilization of yours is a vast improvement over the days of yore. It was the luckiest day of my life when a Time team snatched me hence just at the point when some of my loving brother tribesmen were about to make a meal of me. Not that I blame them particularly, you understand. It had been a long, hard winter and the snow was deep and the game had been very scarce. And there were certain members of the tribe who felt they had a score or two to settle with me. And I'll not kid you; they may have had a score. I was about to be knocked upon the head and, so to speak, dumped into the pot." "Cannibalism!" Carol said, horrified. "Why, naturally," he told her. "In those rough and ready days, it was quite acceptable. But, of course, you wouldn't understand. You've never been really hungry, I take it. Gut hungry. So shriveled up with hunger -- " He halted his talk and looked around. "The thing that is most comforting about this culture," he declared, "is the abundance of the food. Back in the old days we had our ups and downs. We'd bag a mastodon and we'd eat until we vomited and then we'd eat some more." Ghost said, warningly, "I doubt that this is a proper subject for dinner conversation." Oop glanced at Carol. "You must say this much for me," he insisted. "I'm honest. When I mean vomit, I say vomit and not regurgitate." The waiter brought the liquor, thumping the bottle and the ice bucket down upon the table. "You want to order now?" he asked. "We ain't decided yet," said Oop, "if we're going to eat in this crummy joint. It's all right to get liquored up in, but -- " "Then, sir," the waiter said, and laid down the check. Oop dug into his pockets and came up with cash. Maxwell pulled the bucket and the bottle close and began fixing drinks. "We're going to eat here, aren't we?" asked Carol. "If Sylvester doesn't get that steak you promised him, I don't know what will happen. He's been so patient and so good, with the smell of all the food... " "He's already had one steak," Maxwell pointed out. "How much can he eat?" "An unlimited amount," said Oop. "In the old days one of them monsters would polish off an elk in a single sitting. Did I ever tell you -- " "Yes," said Ghost. "But that was a cooked steak," protested Carol, "and he likes them raw. Besides, it was a small one." "Oop," said Maxwell, "get that waiter back here. You are good at it. You have the voice for it." op signaled with a brawny arm and bellowed. He waited for a moment, then bellowed once again, without results. "He won't pay attention to me," Oop growled. "Maybe it's not our waiter. I never am able to tell them monkeys apart. They all look alike to me." "I don't like the crowd tonight," said Ghost. "I have been watching it. There's trouble in the air." Sh"What is wrong with it?" asked Maxwell. "There are an awful lot of creeps from English Lit. This is not their hangout. Mostly the crowd here are Time and Supernatural. "You mean this Shakespeare business?" "That might be it," said Ghost. Maxwell handed Carol her drink, pushed another across the table to Oop. "It seems a shame," Carol said to Ghost, "not to give you one. Couldn't you even sniff it, just a little." "Don't let it bother you," said Oop. "The guy gets drunk on moonbeams. He can dance on rainbows. He has a lot of advantages you and I don't have. For one thing, he's immortal. What could kill a ghost?" "I'm not sure of that," said Ghost. "There's one thing that bothers me," said Carol. "You don't mind, do you?" "Not at all," said Ghost. "It's this business of you not knowing who you are the ghost of. Is that true or is it just a joke?" "It is true," said Ghost. "And I don't mind telling you, it's embarrassing and confusing. But I've just plain forgotten. From England -- that much, at least, I know. But the name I can't recall. I would suspect most other ghosts would know that much." "We have no other ghosts," said Maxwell. "Contacts with other ghosts, of course, and conversations and interviews with them. But no other ghost has ever come to live with us. Why did you do it, Ghost -- come to live with us?" "He's a natural chiseler," said Oop. "Always figuring out the angles." "You're wrong there," Maxwell said. "It's damned little we can do for Ghost." Said Ghost, "You give me a sense of reality." "Well, no matter what the reason," said Maxwell, "I am glad you did it." "The three of you," said Carol, "have been friends for a long, long time." "And it seems strange to you?" asked Oop. "Well, yes, maybe it does," she said. Qounds of scuffling came from the front of the place. Carol and Maxwell turned around in their chairs to look toward it, but there wasn't much that one could see. A man suddenly loomed on top of the table and began to sing: "Hurrah for Old Bill Shakespeare, "He never wrote them plays. "He stayed at home and, chasing girls, Sang dirty rondelays!" Jeers and catcalls broke out from over the room, and someone threw something that went sailing past the singer. Part of the crowd took up the song: "Hurrah for Old Bill Shakespeare; "He never wrote them... Someone with a bull voice howled: "To hell with Old Bill Shakespeare!" The room exploded into action. Chairs went over. There were other people on top of tables. Shouts reverberated, and there was shoving and pushing. Fists began to fly. Various items went sailing through the air. Maxwell sprang to his feet, reached out an arm and swept it back, shoving Carol behind him. Oop came charging across the table top with a wild warwhoop. His foot caught the bucket and sent the ice cubes flying. "I'll mow 'em down," he yelled at Maxwell. "You pile 'em to one side!" Maxwell saw a fist coming at him out of nowhere and ducked to one side, bringing his own fist up in a vicious jab, hitting out at nothing, but aiming in the direction from which the fist had come. Over his shoulder came Oop's brawny arm, with a massive fist attached. It smacked into a face with a splattering sound, and out beyond the table a figure went slumping to the floor. Something heavy and traveling fast caught Maxwell behind the ear, and he went down. Feet surged all around him. Someone stepped on his hand. Someone fell on top of him. Above him, seemingly from a long ways off, he heard Oop's wild whooping. Twisting around, he shoved off the body that had fallen across him and staggered to his feet. A hand grabbed him by the elbow and twisted him around. "Let's get out of here," said Oop. "Someone will get hurt." Carol was backed against the table, bent over, with her hands clutching the scruff of Sylvester's neck. Sylvester was standing on his hind legs and pawing the air with his forelegs. Snarls were rumbling in his throat, and his long fangs gleamed. "If we don't get him out of here," said Oop, "that cat will get his steak." He swooped down and wrapped an arm around the cat, lifting him by the middle, hugging him tight against his chest. "Take care of the girl," Oop told Maxwell. "There's a back door around here somewhere. And don't leave that bottle behind. We'll need it later on." Maxwell reached out and grabbed the bottle. There was no sign of Ghost. "fessed. "I admit that I turn chicken at the sight of violence." "And you," said Oop, "the one guy in the world no one can lay a mitt on." They sat at the rude, square, rickety table that Oop once, in a moment of housekeeping energy, had knocked together from rough boards. Carol pushed away her plate. "I was starved," she said, "but not any more." "You're not the only one," said Oop. "Look at our putty cat." Sylvester was curled up in front of the fireplace, his bobbed tail clamped down tight against his rump, his furry paws covering his nose. His whiskers stirred gently as his breath went in and out. "That's the first time in my life," said Oop, "I ever saw a saber-toother have more than he could eat." He reached out for the bottle and shook it. It had an empty sound. He lumbered to his feet and went across the floor, knelt and raised a small door set into the floor, reaching down with his arm and searching in the space underneath the door. He brought up a glass fruit jar and set it to one side. He brought up a second fruit jar and set it beside the first. Finally he came up triumphantly with a bottle. He put the fruit jars back and closed the door. Back at the table, he snapped the sealer off the bottle and reached out to pour drinks. "You guys don't want ice," he said. "It just dilutes the booze. Besides, I haven't any." He jerked a thumb back toward the door hidden in the floor. "My cache," he said. "I keep a jug or two hid out. Some day I might break a leg or something and the doc would say I couldn't drink." "Not because of a broken leg," said Ghost. "Well, then, something else," said Oop. They sat contentedly with their drinks. Ghost staring at the fire. Outside a rising wind worried at the shack. "I've never had a better meal," said Carol. "First time I ever cooked my own steak stuck on a stick above an open fire." Oop belched contentedly. "That's the way we did it back in the Old Stone Age. That, or eat it raw, like the saber-toother. We didn't have no stoves or ovens or fancy things like that." "I have the feeling," said Maxwell, "that it would be better not to ask, but where did you get that rack of ribs? I imagine all the butcher shops were closed." "Well, they were," admitted Oop, "but there was this one with a back door that had this itty bitty padlock... " "Some day," said Ghost, "you'll get into trouble." op shook his head. "I don't think so. Not this time. Primal necessity -- no, I guess that's not the phrase. When a man is hungry he has a right to food anywhere he finds it. That was the law back in prehistoric days. I imagine you still might make a case of it in a court of law. Besides, tomorrow I'll go back and explain what happened. By the way," he said to Maxwell, "have you any money?" "I'm loaded," Maxwell told him. "I carried expense money for the Coonskin trip and I never spent a cent of it." "On this other planet you were a guest," said Carol. "I suppose I was," said Maxwell. "I never did figure out our exact relationship." "They were nice people?" "Well. Yes, nice -- but people, I don't know." He turned to Oop. "How much will you need?" "I figure a hundred ought to settle it. There is the meat and the busted door, not to mention the bruised feelings of our friend, the butcher." Maxwell took his billfold from his pocket and, counting out some bills, handed them to Oop. "Thanks," said Oop. "Some day I'll pay you back." "No," said Maxwell. "The party is on me. I started out to take Carol to dinner, and things got somewhat upset." On the hearth, Sylvester stretched and yawned, then went back to sleep, lying on his back now, with his legs sticking in the air. Ghost asked, "You're on a visit here, Miss Hampton?" "No," said Carol, surprised. "I work here. What gave you that idea?" "The tiger," said Ghost. "A bio-mech, you said. I thought, naturally, you were with Biomech." "I see," said Carol. "Vienna or New York." "There is a center also," said Ghost, "somewhere in Asia. Ulan Bator, if my memory is correct." "You've been there?" "No," said Ghost. "I only heard of it." "But he could," said Oop. "He can go anywhere. In the blinking of an eyelash. That's why the folks at Supernatural continue to put up with him. They hope that some day they can come up with whatever he has got. But Old Ghost is cagey. He's not telling them." up something for yourself, it costs money to have something like that saber-toother." "Oh, I see," said Carol. "I guess there's truth in that. They do cost a lot of money. But I haven't got that kind of money. My father, before he retired, was in Bio-mech. New York. Sylvester was a joint project of a seminar he headed. The students gave him to my Dad." "I still don't believe," said Oop, "that cat's a bio-mech. He's got that dirty glitter in his eyes when he looks at me." "As a matter of fact," Carol told him, "there is a lot more bio than mech in all of them today. The name originated when what amounted to a highly sophisticated electronic brain and nervous system was housed in specific protoplasms. But today about the only mechanical things about them are those organs that are likely to wear out if they were made of tissue. The heart, the kidneys, the lungs, things like that. What is being done at Biomech today is the actual creations of specific life forms -- but you all know that, of course." "There are some strange stories," Maxwell said. "A group of supermen, kept under lock and key. You have heard of that?" "Yes, heard of it," she said. "There are always rumors." "The best one that I've heard "The real reason for his silence," said Maxwell, "is that he's on Transport payroll. It's worth their while to keep him quiet. If he revealed his traveling techniques, Transport would go broke. No more need of them. People just up and go anywhere they wished, on their own -- a "And he's the soul of tact," said Oop. "What he was getting at back there was that unless you are in Bio-mech and can cook in recent days," said Oop, "really is a lulu. Someone told me Supernatural has made contact with the Devil. How about that, Pete?" tCT wouldn't know," said Max well. "I suppose someone has tried. I'm almost sure someone must have tried. It's such an obvious thing for one to have a go at." "You mean," asked Carol, "that there might really be a Devil?" "Two centuries ago," said Maxwell, "people asked, in exactly the same tone of voice you are now, if there actually were such things as trolls and goblins." "And ghosts," said Ghost. "You're serious!" Carol cried. "Not serious," said Maxwell. "Just not ready to foreclose even on the Devil." "This is a marvelous age," declared Oop, "as I am sure you've heard me indicate before. You've done away with superstition and old wives' tales. You search in them for truth. But my people knew there were trolls and goblins and all the rest of them. The stories of them, you understand, were always based on fact. Except that later on, when he outgrew his savage simplicity, if you can call it that, man denied the fact; could not allow himself to believe these things that he knew were true. So he varnished them over and hid them safe away in the legend and the myth and when the human population kept on increasing, these creatures went into deep hiding. As well they might have, for there was a time when they were not the engaging creatures you seem to think they are today." Ghost asked: "And the Devil?" "I'm not sure," said Oop. "Maybe. But I can't be sure. There were all these things you have lured out and rediscovered and sent to live on their reservations. But there were many more. Some fearful, all a nuisance." "You don't seem to have liked them very well," Carol observed. "Miss," said Oop, "I didn't. I hated the little bastards' guts." "It would seem to me," said Ghost, "that this would be a fertile field for some Time investigation. Apparently there were many different kinds of these -- would you call them primates?" "I think you might," said Maxwell. "Primates of a different stripe than the apes and man." "Of a very different stripe," said Oop. "Vicious little stinkers. "Some day, I m sure," said Carol, "Time will get around to it. They know it, of course?" "They should," said Oop. "I've told them often enough, with appropriate description." "Time has too much to do," Maxwell reminded them. "Too many areas of interest And the entire past to cover." "And no money to do it with," said Carol. "There," declared Maxwell, "speaks a loyal Time staff member." other disciplines could learn so much by time investigation. You can't rely on written history. It turns out, in many cases, to be different than it actually was. A matter of emphasis or bias or of just poor interpretation, embalmed forever in the written form. But do these other departments provide any funds for time investigations? I'll answer that. They don't. A few of them, of course. The College of Law has co-operated splendidly, but not many of the others. They're afraid. They don't want their comfortable little worlds upset. Take this matter of Shakespeare, for example. You'd think English Lit would be grateful to find that Oxford wrote the plays. After all, it had been a question which had been talked about for many years -- who really wrote the plays? But, after all of that, they resented it when Time found out." "And now," said Maxwell, "Time is bringing Shakespeare forward to lecture about how he didn't write the plays. Don't you think that's rubbing it in just a bit too much?" "That's not the point of it, at all," said Carol. "The point is that Time is forced to make a sideshow out of history to earn a little money. That's the way it is all the time. All sorts of schemes for raising money. Earning a lousy reputation as a bunch of clowns. You can't believe Dean Sharp enjoys -- " "I know Harlow Sharp," said Maxwell. "Believe me, he enjoys every minute of it." "That is blasphemy," Oop said, in mock horror. "Don't you know that you can be crucified for blabbing off like that?" "You're making fun of me," said Carol. "You make fun of everyone, of everything. You, too, Peter Maxwell." "I apologize for them," said Ghost, "since neither one of them could summon up the grace to apologize, themselves. You have to live with them for ten or fifteen years to understand they really mean no harm." "But the day will come," said Carol, "when Time will have the funds to do whatever it may want. All their pet projects and to hell with all the other colleges. When the deal goes -- " She stopped abruptly. She sat frozen, not moving. One could sense that she wanted to put her hand up to her mouth and was refraining from it only by iron will. # #TX#'hat deal?" asked MaxVV well. "I think I know," said Oop. "I heard a rumor, just a tiny little rumor and I paid no attention to it. Although, come to think of it, these dirty little rumors are the ones that turn out to be true. The great big, ugly, noisy ones -- " "Oop, not a speech," said Ghost. "Just tell us what you heard." "It's incredible," said Oop. "You never would believe it. Not in all your born days." "Oh, stop it!" Carol exclaimed. They all looked at her and waited. "I made a slip," she said "I got all worked up and made a slip. Can I ask the three of you just please to forget it? I'm not even sure it's true." "Certainly," said Maxwell. "You've been exposed this evening to rough company and ill manners and... " She shook her head. "No," she said. "No, it's not any good to ask. I have no right to ask. I'll simply have to tell you and trust to your discretion. And I'm pretty sure it's true. Time has made an offer for the Artifact." Silence reverberated in the room as the other three sat motionless, scarcely breathing. She looked from one to the other of them, not quite understanding. Finally Ghost stirred slightly, and there was a rustling in the silence of the room, as if his white sheet had been an actual sheet that rustled when he moved. "You do not comprehend," he said, "the attachment that we three hold to the Artifact." "You struck us in a heap," said Oop. "The Artifact," said Maxwell, softly. "The Artifact, the one great mystery, the one thing in the world that has baffled every    one... "A funny stone," said Oop. "Not a stone," said Ghost. "Then, perhaps," said Carol, "you'll tell me what it is." And that was the one thing, Maxwell told himself, that Ghost nor no one else could do. Discovered ten years or so ago by Time investigators on a hilltop in the Jurassic Age, it had been brought back to the present at a great expenditure of funds and ingenuity. Its weight had demanded energy far beyond anything so far encountered to kick it forward into time, an energy requirement which had made necessary the projection backward in time of a portable nuclear generator, transported in many pieces and assembled on the site. And then the further task of bringing back the generator, since nothing of that sort, as a matter of simple ethics, could be abandoned in the past -- even in the past of the far Jurassic. "I cannot tell you," said Ghost. "There is no one who can tell you." Ghost was right. No one had been able to make any sense of it at all. A massive block of some sort of material that now appeared to be neither stone nor metal, although at one time it had been thought to be a stone, and later on, a metal. It had defied all investigation. Six feet long, four feet on each side, it was a mass of blackness that absorbed no energy and emitted none, that bounced all light and other radiation from its surface, that could not be cut or dented, stopping a laser beam as neatly as if the beam had not existed. There was nothing that could scratch it, nothing that could probe it. It gave up no information of any sort at all. It rested on its raised base in the forecourt of Time Museum, the one thing in the world about which no one could even make a valid guess. "Then," asked Carol, "why the consternation?" "Because," said Oop, "Pete here has the hunch it may, at one time, have been the god of the Little Folk. That is, if the lousy little stinkers had the capacity to recognize a god." "I'm sorry," Carol said. "I am truly sorry. I didn't know. Perhaps if Time knew... "There's not enough data," Maxwell said, "to make any talk about it. Just a hunch is all. Just a feeling from certain things I've heard among the Little Folk. But even they don't know. It was bo long ago." So long ago, he thought. For the love of God, almost two CC'Tphis Oop," said Carol. "I can't get over him. That funny house he has out at the end of nowhere." "He'd be offended," said Maxwell, "if he heard you calling it a house. It's a shack, and he's proud of it -- as a shack. The jump from cave to house would have been too great for him. He'd have felt uncomfortable." "A cave? He really lived in a cave?" "Let me tell you something about old friend Oop," said Maxwell. "He is an awful liar. You can't believe all the stories that he tells. The cannibalism, for instance..." "That makes me feel a little better. People eating one another!" "Oh, there was cannibalism, all right. There is no doubt of that. But whether Oop himself was headed for the pot is another matter. On items of general information, he is reliable enough. It's only when he gets to yarning about his personal experiences that you should begin to doubt him." "It's funny," said Carol. "I've seen him around and have wondered a bit about him, but I never thought I'd meet him. Never really wanted to, in fact. Certain people I can draw a line at, and he was one of them. I imagined he would be uncouth -- " "Oh, he's uncouth," said Maxwell. "But charming, too," said Carol. Clear autumn stars shone frostily deep in the darkened sky. The roadway, almost unoccupied, wound its way along the ridge. Far below gleamed the farspreading campus lights. The wind, blowing up the ridge, carried the faint smell of burning leaves. "The fire was nice," said Carol. "Why is it, Peter, that we don't have fires? It would be so simple. A fireplace wouldn't be so hard to build." "There was a time, several hundred years ago," said Maxwell, "when every house, or almost every house, had at least one fireplace. Sometimes several. The whole thing of having fires was a throwback, of course. Back to the days when fire was a protection and a warmth. But finally we outgrew it." ( L T don't think we did," she said. "We just walked away, is all. Turned our back upon this one segment of our past. We still have need of fire. A psychological need, perhaps. I found that out tonight. It was so exciting and so comfortable. Primal, maybe, but there still must be some of the primal in us." "Oop," he told her, "couldn't live without a fire. The lack of a fire was the thing that bugged him most when Time brought him back. He had to be held captive for a time, of course, when he first was brought here -- closely watched over if not actually confined. But when he became his own master, so to speak, he got hold of a piece of land out at the edge of the campus and built himself the shack. Rough, the way he wanted it. And, of course, a fireplace. And a garden. You should see his garden. The idea of growing food was something new to him. Something that no one back in his day had ever thought about. Nails and saws and hammers, and even lumber, also were new to him, as was everything. But he was highly adaptable. He took to the new tools and ideas without a single hitch. Nothing astonished him. He used hammer and saw and lumber and all the rest of it to build the shack. But I think it was the garden that seemed the most wonderful to him -- to grow one's food and not hunt for it. I suppose you noticed -- even now he is impressed with the sheer bulk and the easy availability of food." "And of liquor," said Carol. Maxwell laughed. "Another new idea that he took to. A hobby of his, you might almost say. He makes his own. He's got a still out in the back of his woodshed, and he runs off some of the worst moonshine that ever trickled down your throat. Pretty vile stuff." "But not to guests," said Carol. "That was whiskey tonight." "You have to be a friend of his," said Maxwell, "before he'll allow you to drink his moon. Those fruit jars he set out... " "I wondered about those. They seemed to have nothing in them." "Clear, rotgut moonshine, that was what was in them." "You said he was a captive once. And now? Just how closely is he tied to Time?" "A ward of the college. Not really tied at all. But you couldn't drive him off. He's a more loyal partisan of Time than you are." "And Ghost? He lives here at Supernatural? He's a ward of Supernatural?" "Hardly. Ghost is a stray cat He goes anywhere he wishes. He's got friends all over the planet. He's big stuff, I understand, at the College of Comparative Religions on the Himalayan Campus. But he manages to drop in here on a fairly regular basis. He and Oop hit it off from the moment Supernatural made its first contact with Ghost." "Pete, you call hirfi Ghost. What is he, really?" "Why, he is a ghost." "But what's a ghost?" "I don't know. I don't think anybody does." "But you're with Supernatural." "Oh, sure, but all my work has been with the Little Folk, with emphasis on goblins, although I have an interest in every one of them. Even banshees, and there's nothing that comes meaner or more unreasonable than a banshee." "There must be specialists in ghosts, then. What do they have to say about it?" "I guess they have a few ideas. There are tons of literature on spookery, but I've never had the time to go into it. I know that back in the early ages it was believed that everyone, when they died, turned into a ghost, but now, I understand, that no longer is believed. There are certain special circumstances that give rise to ghosts, but I don't know what they are." "That face of his," said Carol. "A little spooky, maybe, but somehow fascinating. I had a hard time to keep from staring at him. Just a dark blankness folded inside his sheet which, I suppose, is not a sheet. And at times a hint of eyes. Little lights that could be eyes. Or was I imagining?" "No. I've imagined them myself." "Will you," asked Carol, "grab hold of that fool oat and pull him in a foot or so. He's slipping out onto the faster belt. He has no sense whatever. He'll go to sleep any time, at any place. Eat and sleep is all he thinks about." A X axwell reached down and tugged Sylvester back into his original position. Sylvester growled and mumbled in his sleep. Maxwell straightened and leaned back into his chair, looking up into the sky. "Look at the stars," he said. "There is nothing like the skies of Earth. I'm glad to be back again." "And now that you're back?" "After I see you safely home and pick up my luggage, I'm going back to Oop's. He'll have one of those fruit jars all unscrewed and we'll do some drinking and sit and talk till dawn, then I'll get into the bed he has for guests, and he'll curl up on his pile of leaves..." "I saw those leaves over in the comer and was consumed with curiosity. But I didn't ask." "He sleeps there all the time. Not comfortable in a bed. After all, when for .many years a pile of leaves has been the height of luxury -- " "You're trying to make a fool of me again." "No, I'm not," said Maxwell. "I'm telling you the truth." "I didn't mean what will you do tonight. I mean what will you do? You are dead, remember?" "I'll explain," said Maxwell. "I'll continually explain. Everywhere I go there'll be people who'll want to know what happened. There might even be an investigation of some sort. I sincerely hope there won't, but I suppose there may have to be." "I'm sorry," Carol said, "but, then, I'm also glad. How fortunate that there were two of you." "If Transport could work it out," said Maxwell, "they might have something they could sell. All of us could keep a second one of us stashed away somewhere against emergency." IX "But it wouldn't work," Carol pointed out. "Not personally. This other Peter Maxwell was a second person and -- oh, I don't know. It's too late at night to get it figured out. But I'm sure it wouldn't work." "No," said Maxwell. "No, I guess it wouldn't. It was a bad idea." "It was a nice evening," said Carol. "I thank you so much for it. I had a lot of fun." "And Sylvester had a lot of steak." "Yes, he did. He'll not forget you. He loves folks who give him steak. He's nothing but a glutton." "There is just one thing," said Maxwell. "One thing you didn't tell us. Who was it that made the offer for the Artifact?" "I don't know. Just that there was an offer. Good enough, I gather, for Time to consider it. I simply overheard a snatch of conversation I was not supposed to hear. Does it make a difference?" "It could," said Maxwell. "I remember now," she said. "There was another name. Not the one who meant to buy it, or I don't think it was. Just someone who was involved. It had slipped my mind till now. Someone by the name of Churchill. Does that mean anything to you?" '"'vop was sitting in front of the fireplace, paring his toenails with a large jackknife, when Maxwell returned, carrying his bag. Oop gestured with the knife toward the bed. "Sling it over there and then come and sit down with me. I've just put a couple of new logs on the fire and I have a jug half finished and a couple more hid out." "Where's Ghost?" asked Maxwell. "Oh, he disappeared. I don't know where he went; he never tells me. But he'll be back again. He never is gone long." Maxwell put the bag on the bed, went over to the fireplace and sat down, leaning against its rough stone face. "You played the clown tonight," he said, "somewhat better than you usually manage. What was the big idea?" "Those big eyes of hers," said Oop, grinning. "And just begging to be shocked. I am sorry, Pete. I simply couldn't help it." "All that talk about cannibalism and vomiting," said Maxwell. "That was pretty God damned low." "Well," said Oop, "I guess I just got carried away. That's the way folks expect a crummy Neanderthal to act." "The girl's no fool," said Maxwell. "She planted that story about the Artifact as neatly as I have ever seen it done." "Planted it?" "Sure, planted it. You don't think it just slipped out, do you, the way she pretended that it did?" "I hadn't thought of that," said Oop. "Maybe she did. But if she did, why do you think she did it?" "I would guess she doesn't want it sold. Figured that if she told it to a blabbermouth like you it would be all over the campus before noon tomorrow. A lot of talk about it, She might figure, would help to kill the deal." "But you know, Pete, that I'm no blabbermouth." "I know it. But you acted like one tonight." Oop closed the jackknife and slid it in his pocket, picked up the half-empty fruit jar and handed it to Maxwell. Maxwell put it to his mouth and drank. The fiery liquid slashed like a knife along his throat, and he choked. He wished, he thought, that for once he could drink the stuff without choking on it. He took it down and sat there, gasping for breath. "Potent stuff," said Oop. "Best batch I've run off for quite a while. Did you see the bead on it?" Maxwell, unable to speak, nodded. Oop reached out and took the jar, tilted it up, lowered its level by an inch or more. He took it down and held it lovingly against his hairy chest. He let out his breath in a whoosh that made the flames in the fireplace dance. He patted the bottle with his free hand. "First rate stuff," he said. He wiped his mouth with the the back of his hand and sat, staring at the fire. CtQhe couldn't, certainly, have taken you for a blabbermouth," he finally said. "I notice that you did some fancy skating of your own tonight. All around the truth." "Maybe because I don't entirely know the truth myself," said Maxwell. "Or what to do about it. You set to do some listening?" "Any time," said Oop. "If that is what you want. Although you don't need to tell me. Not out of friendship. You know we'll still be friends if you tell me nothing. We don't even need to talk about it. There are a lot of other things we could talk about." Maxwell shook his head. "I have to tell you, Oop. I have to tell someone, and you're the only one I would dare to tell. There's too much of it for me to go on carrying it alone." Oop handed him the fruit jar. "Take another slug of that, then start any time you want. What I can't figure out is the goof by Transport. I don't believe it happened. I would make a guess that it was something else." "And you'd be right," said Maxwell. There's a planet out there somewhere. Fairly close, I'd guess. A free-wheeling planet, not tied to any sun, although I gather that it could insert itself into a solar system any time it wishes." "That would take some doing. It would mess up the orbits of all the other planets." "Not necessarily," said Maxwell. "It wouldn't have to take an orbit in the same plane as the other planets. That would hold down the effect of its being there." He lifted the fruit jar, shut his eyes, and took a healthy gulp. The top of his head came off, and his stomach bounced. He lowered the jar and leaned back against the roughness of the masonry. A wind was mewing in the chimney -- a lonely sound, shut outside by the rough board walls. A log fell in the fireplace and sent up a shower of sparks. The flames danced high, and flickering shadows chased one another all about the room. Oop reached out and took the jar out of Maxwell's hands, but did not drink immediately. He held it cuddled in his lap. "So this other planet reached out and copied your wave pattern," he said, "and there were two of you." "How did you know that?" "Deduction. It was the most logical way for it to happen. I know there were two of you. There was this other one who came back before you did. I talked with him, and he was you. He said there was no dragon; the Coonskin business had been a wild goose chase and so he came home ahead of his schedule." "So that was it," said Maxwell. "I had wondered why he came back early." "I'm hard put to it," said Oop, "to decide if I should rejoice or mourn. Perhaps a bit of both, leaving some room for wonderment at the strange workings of human destiny. This other man was you, and now he's dead and I have lost a friend. For he was a human being and a personality, and that humanity and personality came to an end with death. But now there's you. And if, before, I'd lost a friend, now I have regained that lost friend, for you are as truly Peter Maxwell as that other one." "I was told an accident." tCT'm not so sure," said Oop. "I've been doing some thinking about it. Since you came back, I'm not so sure at all. He was getting off a roadway and he tripped and fell, hit his head l "You don't trip when you're getting off a roadway. Unless you're drunk or crippled up or awkward. That outside belt is barely crawling." "I know," said Oop. "That's what the police thought, too. But there was no other explanation, and the police, as you well know, require some sort of explanation, so they can close the file. It was in a lonely place. About halfway between here and Goblin Reservation. No one saw it. Must have happened when there was almost no one traveling, maybe at night. He was found about ten o'clock in the morning. There would have been people traveling from six o'clock on, but probably they'd have been on the inner, faster belts. They wouldn't have seen too much on the outside of the belt. The body could have been lying there for a long time before it was found." "You think it wasn't an accident? It may have been murder?" "I don't know. The thought has occurred to me. There was one funny thing about it -- something that never was explained. There was a funny smell about the body and the area. A strange sort of odor, like nothing no one had ever smelled before. Maybe someone found out that there were two of you. For some reason, someone may not have wanted two of you... " "But who could have known there were two of me?" "The people on that other planet. If there were people." "There were people," Maxwell said. "It was a most amazing place." It all came back as he sat there talking, almost as if he were there again. A crystal place -- or that had been what it had looked to be when he first had seen it. An extensive crystal plain that ran on and on and a crystal sky with pillars reaching from the plain and upward, apparently to the sky, although the tops of them were lost in the milkiness of sky -- pillars soaring upward to hold the sky in place. An empty place, to make one think of a deserted ballroom of extensive size, all cleaned and polished for a ball, waiting for the music and the dancers who had never come and now would never come, leaving the ballroom empty through all eternity, shining in all its polished glitter and its wasted graciousness. A ballroom, but a ballroom without any walls, running on and on, not to a horizon, for there seemed to be no horizon, but to a point where that strange, milkglass sky came down to meet the crystal floor. He stood astounded in the vast immensity, an immensity not of boundless sky, for the sky was far from boundless, nor from great distances, for the distances were not great, but immensity that was measured as a room would be, as if one were in a giant's house and lost and were looking for a door, and without a clue as to where a door might be. A place with no distinguishing features, with each pillar like the next, with no cloud in the sky (if it were a sky), with each foot, each mile like every other foot and mile, level and paved with a crystal paving that stretched out in all directions. He wanted to cry out, to ask if anyone were there, but was afraid to cry out -- perhaps in the fear, although he did not realize it then and only thought it later, that a single sound would send all this cold and shining splendor shimmering into a cloud of frosty dust. For the place was silent, with no slightest whisper of a sound. Silent and cold and lonely, all its splendor and its whiteness lost in the loneliness. Slowly, carefully, fearing that the scuff of his moving feet might bring this whole world into dust, he pivoted, and out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse -- not of motion, but the flickering sense of motion, as if something had been there, but had moved so fast that his eyes had failed to catch it. He halted, the short hairs prickling on the back of his neck, engulfed by the sense of utter strangeness rather than of actual danger, apprehensive of a strangeness so distorted and so twisted out of the normal human context that a man gazing at it might go mad before he had a chance to jerk his eyes away. Nothing happened. He moved again, pivoting inch by cautious inch, and now he saw that he had been standing with his back turned on what appeared to be an assemblage of some sort -- an engine? An instrument? A machine?  nd all at once he knew. Here was the strange contraption that had brought him here, this crazy crystal world's equivalent of matter transmitter and receiver. But this, he knew at once, was not the Coonskin system. It was no place he had ever heard of. Nowhere in the known universe was there a place like this. Something had gone wrong. He had been hurled, not to the Coonskin planet which had been his destination, but to some far, forgotten comer of the universe, to some area, perhaps, where man would not penetrate for another EartK that the distances involved became unimaginable. Now again there were flickering motions, as if living shadows moved against the crystal background. As he watched, the flickering flowed into shifting shape and form, and he could see that there were many moving shapes, all of them, strangely, separate entities that seemed to hold, within the flicker of them, individual personalities. As if, he thought in horror, they were things that had once been people. As if they might be alien ghosts. "And I accepted them," he said to Oop. "I accepted them -- on faith, perhaps. It was either that, or reject them and be left there, standing all alone upon that crystal plain. A man of a century ago, perhaps, would not have accepted them. He would have been inclined to sweep them out of his mind as pure imagination. But I had spent too many hours with Ghost to 'gag at the thought of ghosts. I had worked too long with supernatural phenomena to quibble at the idea of creatures and of events beyond the human pale. "And the strange thing about it, the comforting thing about it, is that they sensed that I accepted them." "And that is it?" asked Oop. "A planet full of ghosts?" Maxwell nodded, "Perhaps that's one way of looking at it. But let me ask you -- what really is a ghost?" "A spook," said Oop. "A spirit." "I know," said Oop, regretfully. "I was being a bit facetious, and there was no excuse for it. We don't know what a ghost is. Even Ghost doesn't know exactly what he is. He simply knows that he exists -- and if anyone should know, he should. He has mulled over it a lot. He's thought about it deeply. He has communed with fellow ghosts, and there is no evidence. So you fall back upon the supernatural -- " "Which is not understood," said Maxwell. "A mutation of some sort," suggested Oop. "Collins thought so," said Maxwell. "But he stood alone. I know I didn't agree with him, but that was before I was on the crystal planet. Now I'm not so sure. What happens when a race reaches an end, when, as a race, it has passed through childhood and middle age and now has reached old age? A race dying as a man does, dying of old age. What does it do, then? It could die, of course. That's what one would expect of it. But suppose there was a reason that it couldn't die, suppose it had to hang on, had to stay alive for some overriding reason, that it could not allow itself to die?" "If ghostliness really is a mutation," said Oop, "if they knew it was a mutation, if they were so far advanced they could control mutation... " He stopped and looked at Maxwell. "You think that's what might have happened?" "I think it might," said Maxwell. "I am beginning to think very much it might." Oop handed across the fruit jar. "You need a drink," he said. "And when you're through with it, I'll have one myself." X A Taxwell took the jar, holding it, not drinking right away. Oop reached out to the stack of wood, lifted a chunk in one massive fist and threw it on the fire. A spray of sparks gushed up the chimney. Outside the night wind moaned along the eaves. Maxwell lifted the jar and drank. He choked, wishing that he could drink the stuff, just once, without choking on it. He handed the jar back to Oop. Oop lifted it, then took it down again without drinking. He squinted across its rim at Maxwell. "You said something to live for. Some reason that they couldn't die -- that they had to keep on existing, any way they could." "That's right," said Maxwell. "Information. Knowledge. A planet crammed with knowledge. A storehouse of knowledge -- and I would doubt that a tenth of it duplicates our own. The rest of it is new, unknown. Some of it material we have never dreamed of. Knowledge that we may not if we ever ferret it. It is stored electronically, I suppose -- arranging atoms in such a manner that each atom carries a bit of information. Stored in metal sheets, like the pages of a book, stacked in great heaps and piles, and each layer of atoms -- yes, they are arranged in layers -- carries separate information. You read the first layer and then go down to the second layer. Again, like pages in a book, each layer of atoms a page, one stacked atop the other. Each sheet of metal -- don't ask me, I can't even guess, how many layers of atoms in each metal sheet. Hundreds of thousands, I would suspect." Oop lifted the jar hastily, took a tremendous gulp, part of the liquor spraying out across his woolly chest. He let out his breath in a lusty belch. "They can't abandon this knowledge," said Maxwell. "They have to pass it on to someone who can use it. They have to stay alive, somehow, until they pass it on. And that, for the love of God, is where I come in. They commissioned me to sell it for them." "Sell it for them! A bunch of ghosts, hanging on by their very toenails! What would they want? What's the price they ask?" Maxwell put up his hand and wiped his forehead, which had sprouted a sudden mist of sweat. "I don't know," 'he said. "Don't know? How can you sell a thing if you don't know what it's worth, if you don't have an asking price?" "They said they would tell me later. They said to get someone interested and they'd get word to me on what the price would be." Ctnphat," said Oop, disgusted, "is a hell of a way to make a business deal." "Yes, I know," said Maxwell. "You have no hint of price?" "Not the faintest. I tried to explain to them, and they couldn't understand. Maybe they refused to understand. And since then I have gone over it and over it and there's no way I can know. It all boils down, of course, to what a gang like that might want. And for the life of me, I can't think of a thing they'd want" "Well," said Oop, "they picked the right place to make their sales pitch... How do you plan to go about it?" "I'll go up and talk to Arnold." "You pick them tough," said Oop. "Look, I have to talk with Arnold and no one else. This can't go up through channels. Can't have a word of it leak out. On the surface, it sounds harebrained. If the communications media or the gossip-mongers got hold of it, the University wouldn't dare to touch it. If it were known and they did consider it and the deal fell through -- and, believe me, working in the dark, as I have to work, the deal could well fall through -- there'd be just one loud guffaw all the way from here clear out to the Rim. It would be Arnold's neck and my neck." "Pete, Arnold is nothing but a big stuffed shirt. You know that as well as I do. He's an administrator. He's running the business end of this University. I don't care if he has the title of president or not, he's just the manager. He doesn't give a damn about the academic end of it. He won't stick out his neck for three planets full of knowledge." "The president of the university has to be an administrator..." "If it could have come at any other time," mourned Oop, "you might have had a chance. But as it stands right now, Arnold is walking on a crate of eggs. Moving the administration from New York to this jerkwater campus." "A campus," put in Maxwell, "with a great liberal tradition." "University politics," declared Oop, "doesn't care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions." "I suppose not," said Maxwell, "but Arnold's the man I have to see. I could wish it were someone else. I have no admiration for the man, but he's the one I have to work with." "You could have turned it down." "The job of negotiator? No, I couldn't, Oop. No man could have. They'd have had to find someone else and they might get someone who'd bungle it. Not that I'm sure I won't bungle it. But at least I'll try. And it's not only for us, it's for them I'm trying as well." "You got to like these people?" "I'm not sure just how much I liked them. Admired them, maybe. Felt sorry for them, maybe. They're doing what they can. They hunted for so long to find somone they could pass the knowledge on to." "Pass it on? You said it was for sale." "Only because there is something that they want. Or need. I wish I could figure out what it is. It would make everything so much easier for everyone concerned." "Minor question -- you talked with them. How did you go about it?" tC'T'he tablets," said Maxwell. "I told you about the tablets. The sheets of metal that carried information. They talked with me with tablets, and I talked with them the same way." "But how could you read -- " "They gave me a contraption, like a pair of goggles, but big. It was a sort of bulky thing. I suppose it had a lot of mechanism in it. I'd put it on and then I could read the tablets. No script, just little jiggles in the metal. It's hard to explain. But you looked at the jiggles through the contraption that you wore and you knew what the jiggles said. It was adjustable, I found out later, so you could read the different atomic layers. But to start with, they only wrote me messages, if wrote is the word to use. Like kids writing back and forth to one another on slates. I wrote back to them by thinking into another contraption that was tied into the pair of goggles that I wore." "A translator," said Oop. "I suppose that's what it was. A two-way translator." "We've tried to work one out," said Oop. "By 'we' I mean the combined ingenuity not only of the Earth, but of what we laughingly call the known galaxy." "Yes, I know," said Maxwell. "And these folks had one. These ghosts of yours." "They have a whole lot more," said Maxwell. "I don't know what they have. I sampled some of what they had. At random. Just enough to convince myself they had what they said." "One thing still bugs me," said Oop. "You said a planet. What about a star." "The planet is roofed over. There was a star, I gather, but you couldn't see it, not from the surface. The point is, of course, that there needn't be a star. You are acquainted, I think, with the concept of the oscillating universe." "The yo-yo universe," said Oop. "The one that goes bang, and then bang, bang again." C tnphat's right," said Maxwell. "And now we can quit wondering about it. It happens to be true. The crystal planet comes from the universe that existed before the present universe was formed. They had it figured out, you see. They knew the time would come when all the energy would be gone and all the dead matter would start moving slowly back to form another cosmic egg, so that the egg could explode again and give birth to yet another universe. They knew they were approaching the death of the universe and that unless something were done, it would be death for them as well. So they launched a project. A planetary project. They sucked in energy and stored it -- don't ask me how they extracted it from whereever they extracted it or how they stored it. Stored somehow in the very material of the planet, so that when the rest of the universe went black and dead, they still had energy. They roofed the planet in, they made a house of it. They worked out propulsion mechanisms so they could move their planet, so that they would be an independent body moving independently through space. And before the inward drifting of the dead matter of the universe began, they left their star, a dead and blackened cinder by this time, and set out on their own. That's the way they have been since then, a holdover population riding on a planetary spaceship. They saw the old universe die, the one before this one. They were left alone in space, in space that had no hint of life, no glint of light no quiver of energy. It may be -- I don't know -- that they saw the formation of the brand new cosmic egg. They could have been very far from it and seen it. And if they saw it, they saw the explosion that marked the beginning of this universe we live in, the blinding flash, far off, that sent the energy streaking into space. They saw the first stars glow red; they saw the galaxies take shape. And When the galaxies had formed, they joined this new universe. They could go to any galaxy they chose, set up an orbit about any star they wished. They could move any time they wanted to. They were universal gypsies. But the end is nearing now. The planet, I suppose, could keep on and on, for the energy machinery must still be operative. I imagine there might be a limit to the planet, but they're not even close to that. But the race is dying out, and they have stored in their records the knowledge of two universes." "At least that much," said Maxwell. "It could be a great deal more." They sat, silent, thinking of mumbled in the chimney's throat. From far off came the chiming of the clock in Music Hall, counting off the time. XI A T axwell awoke. Oop was shaking him. "Someone here to see you." Maxwell threw back the covers, hoisted his feet out on the floor, groped blindly for his trousers. Oop handed them to him. "Who is it?" he asked Oop. "Said his name was Longfellow. Nasty, high-nosed gent. He's waiting outside for you. You could see he wouldn't risk contamination by stepping in the shack." "Then to hell with him," said Maxwell, starting to crawl back into bed. "No, no," protested Oop. "I don't mind. I'm above insult." Maxwell struggled into his trousers, slid his feet into his shoes and kicked them on. "Any idea who this fellow is?" "None at all," said Oop. Maxwell stumbled across the room to the bench set against the wall, spilled water from the bucket standing there into a wash basin, bent and sloshed water on his face. "What time is it?" he asked. "A little after seven." "Mr. Longfellow must have been in a hurry to see me." "He's out there now, pacing up and down. Impatient." Longfellow was impatient. As Maxwell came out of the door, he hurried up to him and held out a hand. "Professor Maxwell," he said, "I'm so glad I found you. It was quite a job. Someone told me you might be here -- " he glanced at the shack, and his long nose crinkled just a trifle -- "so I took the chance' "Oop," said Maxwell quietly, "is an old and valued friend." "Could we perhaps take a stroll?" suggested Longfellow. "It is an unusually fine morning. Have you breakfasted yet? No, I don't suppose you have." "It might help," said Maxwell, "if you told me who you are." "I'm in administration. Stephen Longfellow is the name. Appointments secretary to the president." "Then you're just the man I want to see," said Maxwell. "I need an appointment with the president as soon as possible." Longfellow shook his head. "I would say offhand that is quite impossible." nphey fell into step and walked along the path that led down toward the roadway. Leaves of wondrous, shining yellow fell slowly through the air from a thick-branched walnut tree that stood beside the path. Down by the roadway a maple tree was a blaze of scarlet against the blueness of the morning sky. And far in that sky streamed a V-shaped flock of ducks heading southward. "Impossible," said Maxwell. "You make it sound final. As if you'd thought about it and come to your decision." "If you wish to communicate with Dr. Arnold," Longfellow told him coldly, "there are proper channels. You must understand the president is a busy man." "I understand all that," said Maxwell, "and I understand as well about the channels. Innumerable delays, a request passed on from hand to hand and the knowledge of one's communication spread among so many people -- " "Professor Maxwell," Longfellow said, "there is no use, it seems, to beat about the bush. You're a persistent man and, I suspect, a rather stubborn one, and with a man of that bent it is often best to lay it on the line. The president won't see you. He can't afford to see you." "Because there seems to have been two of me? Because one of me is dead?" "The press will be full of it this morning. All the headlines shouting about a man come back from the dead. Have you heard the radio, perhaps, or watched television?" "No," Maxwell said, "I haven't." "Well, when you get around to it you'll find that you've been made a three-ring circus. I don't mind telling you that it is embarrassing." "You mean a scandal?" "I suppose you could call it that. And administration has trouble enough without identifying itself with a situation such as yours. There is this matter of Shakespeare, for example. We can't duck that one, but we can duck you."  "But surely," said Maxwell, "administration can't be too concerned with Shakespeare and myself as compared to all the other problems that it faces. There is the uproar over the revival of dueling at Heidelberg and the dispute over the ethics of employing certain alien students on the football squads and -- " "But can't you see," wailed Longfellow, "that what happens on this particular campus are the things that matter?" "Because administration was transferred here? When Oxford and California and Harvard and half a dozen others -- " "If you ask me," Longfellow declared, stiffly, "it was a piece of poor judgment on the part of the board of regents. It has made things very difficult for administration." "What would happen," asked Maxwell, "if I just walked up the hill and into administration and started pounding desks?" "You know well enough. You'd be thrown out." "But if I brought along a corps of the newspaper and television boys and they were outside watching?" "I suppose then you wouldn't be thrown out. You might even get to see the president. But I can assure you that under circumstances such as those you'd not get whatever it may be yeu want," "So," said Maxwell, "I'd lose, no matter how I went about it." "As a matter of fact," Longfellow told him, "I had come this morning on quite a different mission. I was bringing happy news." "I can imagine that you were," said Maxwell. "What kind of sop are you prepared to throw me to make me disappear?" "Not a sop," said Longfellow, much aggrieved. "I was told to offer you the post of dean at the experimental college the university is establishing out on Gothic IV." "You mean that planet with all the witches and the warlocks?" "It would be a splendid opportunity for a man in your field," Longfellow insisted. "A planet where wizardry developed without the intervention of other intelligences, as is the case on Earth." "A hundred and fifty lightyears distant," said Maxwell. "Somewhat remote and I would think it might be dreary. But I suppose the salary'd be good." "Very good, indeed." "No, thanks," said Maxwell. I'm satisfied with my job, right here." "What job?" asked Longfellow. "Why, yes. I'm on the faculty." Longfellow shook his head. "Not any longer," he said. "Have you, by any chance, forgotten? You died more than three weeks ago. We can't let vacancies go unfilled." "You mean I've been replaced?" "Why, most certainly," Longfellow told him, nastily. "As it stands right now, you are unemployed." Mphe waiter brought the scrambled eggs and bacon, poured the coffee, then went away and left Maxwell at the table. Through the wide expanse of window, Lake Mendota stretched away, a sheet of glassy blue, with the faint suggestion of purple hills on the other shore. A squirrel ran down the bole of the gnarled oak tree that stood just outside the window and halted, head downward, to stare with beady eyes at the man sitting at the table. A brown and red oak leaf planed down deliberately, from branch to ground, wobbling in the tiny thermal currents of air. On the rocky shore a boy and girl walked slowly, hand in hand, through the lakeshore's morning hush. It would have been civilized and gracious, Maxwell told himself, to have accepted Longfellow's invitation to eat breakfast with him. But he had had all that he could take of the appointments secretary. All he wanted was to be alone, to gain a little time to sort out the situation and to do some thinking -- although probably he could not afford the time for thinking. Oop had been right. It was apparent now that to see the university president would be no easy task, not only because of that official's busy schedule and his staff's obsession of doing things through channels, but because for some reason, not entirely understood, this matter of twin Peter Maxwells had assumed the proportions of a scandal from which Arnold had the fervent wish to be disassociated. Maxwell wondered, sitting there and gazing out the window at the pop-eyed, staring squirrel, whether this attitude of the administration might go back to the interview with Drayton. Had Security zeroed in on Arnold? It didn't seem likely. But it was a possibility. The depth of Arnold's jittery attitude was emphasized by the hurried offer of the post on Gothic IV. Not only did administration want nothing to do with this second Peter Maxwell, it wanted him off the Earth as well, buried on a planet where in the space of a little time he would be forgotten. It was understandable that his post at Supernatural had been filled after the death of the other Peter Maxwell. After all, classes must go on. Gaps could not be left in the faculty. But even so, there were other positions that could have been found for him. The fact that this had not been done, that the Gothic IV position had been so quickly offered, was evidence enough that he was not wanted on the Earth. X#'et it all was strange. Admin- istration could not have known until sometime yesterday that two Peter Maxwells had existed. There could not have been a problem, there'd have been no basis for a problem, until that word had been received. Which meant, Maxwell told himself, that someone had gotten to administration fast -- someone who wanted to get rid of him, someone who was afraid that he would interfere. But interfere in what? And the answer to that seemed so glib and easy that he felt, instinctively, that it must be wrong. But search as he might, there was one answer only -- that someone else knew of the hoard of knowledge on the crystal planet and was working to get hold of it. There was one name to go on. Carol had said Churchill -- that Churchill somehow was involved in the offer that had been made to Time for the Artifact. Was it possible that the Artifact was the price of the crystal planet's knowledge? One couldn't count on that, of course, although it might be so, for no one knew what the Artifact might be. That Churchill was working on the deal was no surprise at all. Not for himself, of course, but for someone else. For someone who could not afford to have his identity revealed. It was in deals such as this that Churcljill might prove useful. The man was a professional fixer and knew his way around. He had contacts and through long years of operation undoubtedly had laid out various pipelines of information into many strange and powerful places. And if such were the case, Maxwell's job became much harder. Not only must he guard against the rumor-mongering that was implicit in administration channels, he must now be doubly sure that none of his information fell into other hands where it might be used against him. The squirrel had gone on down the tree trunk and now was busily scrounging on the slope of lawn that ran down to the lake, rustling through the fallen leaves in search of an acorn he might somehow have missed before. The boy and girl had walked out of sight and now a hesitant breeze was softly rumpling the surface of the lake. There were only a few others at breakfast in the room; most of those who had been there when Maxwell entered had finished now and left. From the floor above came the distant murmuring of voices, the scuffling of feet as the daily flow of students began to fill the Union, the offhours gathering place of undergraduates. The Union was one of the oldest structures on the campus and one of the finest. For over five hundred years it had been the meeting place, the refuge, the study hall of many generations. It had settled easily and comfortably into the functional tradition that made it a second home for many thousand students. Here could be found a quietness for reflection or for study, here the cozy corners needed for good talk, or for chess, here the eating places, here the meeting halls, and tucked off in odd corners little reading rooms with their shelves of books. Maxwell pushed back his chair, but stayed sitting, finding himself somehow reluctant to get up and leave -- for once he left this place, he knew, he'd plunge into the problems he must face. Outside the window lay a golden autumn day, warming as the sun rose in the sky -- a day for showers of golden leaves, for blue haze on the distant hills, for the solemn glory of chrysanthemums bedded in the garden, for the quiet glow of goldenrod and aster in the fields and vacant lots. From behind him he heard the scurrying of many hard-shod feet and when he swung around in his chair, he saw the owner of the feet advancing rapidly across the squared red tiles toward him. T t looked like an outsize; landgoing shrimp, with its jointed legs, its strangely canted body with long, weird rods -- apparently sensory organs -- extending outward from its tiny head. Ms color was an unhealthy white and its three globular black eyes bobbed on the ends of long antennae. It came to a halt beside the table. The three antennae swiveled to aim the three eyes straight at Maxwell. It said in a high, piping voice, the skin of its throat fluttering rapidly beneath the seemingly inadequate head, "Informed I am that you be Professor Peter Maxwell." "The information happens to be right," said Maxwell. "I am Peter Maxwell." "I be a creature out of the world you would name Spearhead #. Name I have is of no interest to you. I appear before you carrying out commission by my employer. Perhaps you know it by designation of Miss Nancy Clayton." "Indeed I do," said Maxwell, thinking that it was very much like Nancy Clayton to employ an outlandish creature such as this as an errand boy. "I work myself through education," explained the Shrimp, "doing anything I find." "That's commendable," said Maxwell. "I train in mathematics of time," declared the Shrimp. "I concentrate on world-line configurations. I am in tizzy over it." The Shrimp didn't look as if it were in any sort of tizzy. "Why all the interest?" Maxwell asked. "Something in your background? Something in your cultural heritage?" "Oh, very much indeed. Is completely new idea. On my world, no thought of time, no appreciation such a thing as time. Am much shocked to learn of it. And excited, too. But I digress too greatly. I come here on an errand. Miss Clayton desires to know can you attend a party the evening of this day. Her place, eight by the clock." "I believe I can," said Maxwell. "Tell her I always make a point of being at her parties." "Overjoyed," said the Shrimp. "She so much wants you there. You are talked concerning." "I see," said Maxwell. "You hard to find. I run hard , and fast. I ask in many places. Finally victorious." "I am sorry," Maxwell said, "I put you to such trouble." He reached into his pocket and took out a bill. The creature extended one of its forward legs and grasped the bill in a pair of pincers, folded it and refolded it and tucked it into a small pouch that extruded from its chest. "You kind beyond expectation," it piped. "There is one further information. Occasion for party is unveiling of painting, recently acquired. Painting lost and gone for very long. By Albert Lambert, Esquire. Great triumph for Miss Clayton." "I just bet it is," said Maxwell. "Miss Clayton is a specialist in triumphs." "She, as employer, is gracious," said the Shrimp, reprovingly. "I am sure of that," said Maxwell. The creature shifted swiftly and galloped from the room. Listening to its departure, Maxwell heard it clatter up the stairs to the street level of the building. Maxwell got up and headed for the stairs himself. If he were going to witness the unveiling of a painting, he told himself, he'd better bone up on the artist. Which was exactly, he thought with a grin, what almost every other person invited to Nancy's party would be doing before the day was out. Lambert? The name held a slight ring of recognition. He had read somewhere about him, probably long ago. An article in a magazine, perhaps, to help pass an idle hour. axwell opened the book. "Albert Lambert," said the opening page of text, "was bom Famed as a portrayer of grotesque symbolism, his early years gave no promise of his great accomplishments. His initial work was competent and showed a skillful craftsmanship and a deep insight into his subject matter, but it was not particularly outstanding. His grotesque period came after his fiftieth year. Rather than developing, it burst into full flower almost overnight, as if the artist had developed it secretly and did not show his canvasses of this period until he was satisfied with this new phase of his work. But there is no evidence that this actually was the case. Rather, there seems to be some evidence that it was not" Maxwell flipped over the text pages to reach the color plates and leafed quickly through examples of the artist's early work. And there, in the space of one page to the next, the paintings changed -- the artistic concept, the color, even, it seemed to Maxwell, the very craftsmanship. As if the work had been that of two different artists, the first tied intellectually to some inner need of orderly expression, the second engulfed, obsessed, ridden by some soul-shaking experience of which he tried to cleanse himself by spreading it on canvas. Stark, dark, terrible beauty beat out of the page. In the dusky silence of the library reading room it seemed to Maxwell that he could hear the leathery whisper of black wings. Outrageous creatures capered across an outrageous landscape, and yet the landscape and the creatures, Maxwell sensed at once, were not mere fantasy, were no whimsical product of a willful unhinging of the mind, but seemed to be solidly based upon some outre geometry predicated upon a logic and an outlook alien to anything he had ever seen. The form, the color, the approach and the attitude were not merely twisted human values. One had the instant feeling that they might be, instead, the prosaic representation of a situation in an area entirely outside any human value. Grotesque symbolism, the text had said, and it might be there, of course. But if so, Maxwell told himself, it was symbolism that could only be arrived at most tortuously after painful study. TTe turned the page. There it was again, that complete divergence from humanity -- a different scene with different creatures against a different landscape, but carrying, as had that first plate, the shattering impact of actuality, no figment of the artist's mind, but the representation of a scene he once had gazed upon and sought now to expurgate from mind and memory. As a man might wash his hands, Maxwell thought, lathering them fiercely with a bar of strong, harsh soap, scrubbing them again and yet again, endlessly, in a desperate attempt to remove by physical means a psychic stain that he had incurred. A scene that he had gazed upon, perhaps, not through human eyes, but through the alien optics of a lost and unguessed race. Maxwell sat fascinated, staring at the page, wanting to pull his eyes away, but unable to. He wa' trapped by the weird and awful beauty, by some terrible, hidden purpose that he could not understand. Time, the Shrimp had said, was something that his race had never thought of, a universal factor that had not impinged upon his culture. And here, captured in these color plates, was something that man had never thought of, never dreamed of. He reached out his hand to grasp the book and close it, but he hesitated as if there were some reason he should not close the book, some compelling reason to continue staring at the plate. And in that hesitancy, he became aware of a certain strangeness that might keep him staring at the page -- a puzzling factor that he had not recognized consciously, but that had been nagging at him. He took his hands away and sat staring at the plate. Then slowly he turned the page. As he glanced at that third plate, the strangeness leaped out at him -- a brushed-in flickering, an artistic technique that made an apparent flickering, as if some thing of substance were there and flickering, seen one moment, not quite seen the next. He sat, slack-jawed, and watched the flickering. It was a trick of the eyes, most likely, encouraged by the mastery of the artist over paint and brush. But trick of the eye or not, easy of recognition by anyone who had seen the ghostly race of the crystal planet. And through the hushed silence of the dusky room one question hammered at him: How could Albert Lambert have known about the people of the crystal planet? Preston said. "It seemed incredible, of course. But the source of my information seemed unimpeachable, and I made an effort to get in touch with you. I'm a bit worried over this situation, Pete. As an attorney, I'd say you were in trouble." Maxwell sat down in the chair in front of Preston's desk. "I suppose I am," he said. "For one thing, it appears I've lost my job. Is there such a thing as tenure in a case like mine?" "A case like yours?" the attorney asked. "Just what is the situation? No one seems to know. Everyone is talking about it, but no one seems to know. I, myself Maxwell grinned, wryly. "Sure. You'd like to know. You're puzzled and confused and not quite sure you're sane. You sit there wondering if I'm really Peter Maxwell." "Well, are you?" Preston asked. "I am sure I am. I wouldn't blame you, or anyone, if you doubted it. There were two of us. Something happened to the wave pattern. One of us went to the Coonskin system, the other somewhere else. The one who went to Coonskin came back to Earth and died. I came back yesterday." "And found that you were dead." Maxwell nodded. "My apartment had been rented, my possessions all are gone. The university tells me my position has been filled and I'm without a job." Preston leaned back in his chair and squinted thoughtfully at Maxwell. "Legally," he said, "I think we'd find that the university stands on solid ground. You are dead, you see. You have no tenure now. Not, at least, until it can be re-established." "Through a long process at law?" "Yes, I would suspect so. I can't give you an honest answer. There is no precedent. Oh, there are cases of mistaken identity -- someone who is dead being mistakenly identified as someone who is still alive. But with you, there's no mistake. A man who undeniably was Peter Maxwell is undeniably dead. There is no precedent for that. We'd have to set our own precedent as we went along, a very laborious beating through the thickets of legal argument. It might take years. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure where or how to start. Oh, it could be developed, it could be carried forward, but it would take a lot of work and thought. First, qf course, we'd have to establish who you are." "Who I really am? For God's sake, Al! We know who I am." "But the law doesn't. The law wouldn't recognize you as you are today. You have no legal being. Absolutely none. All your identification cards have been turned in to Records and have been filed by now ,... " "But I have those cards," said Maxwell quietly. "Right here in my pocket." Preston stared at him. "Yes, come to think of it, I suppose you have. Oh Lord, what a mess!" T Te got up and walked across  the room, shaking his head. At the wall, he turned around and came back. He sat down again. "Let me think about it," he said. "Give me a little time. I can dig up something. We have to dig up something. And there's a lot to do. There's the matter of your will... " "My will? I'd forgot about the will. Never thought of it." "It's in probate. But I can get a stay of some sort." "I willed everything to my brother, who's with the Exploratory Service. I could get in touch with him, although it might be quite a chore. He's usually out with the fleet. But the point is that there'll be no trouble there, as soon as he knows what happened." "Not with him," said' Preston. "But the court's a different matter. It can be done, of course, but it may take time. Until it's cleared, you'll have no claim to your estate. You own nothing except the clothes you stand in and what is in your pockets." "The University offered me a post on Gothic IV. Dean of a research unit. But at the moment, I'm not about to take it." "How are you fixed for cash?" "I'm all right. For the present. Oop took me in, and I have some money. If I had to, I could pick up some sort of job. Harlow Sharp would help me out if I needed something. Go on one of his field trips, if nothing else. I think I might like that." "But don't you have to have some sort of Time degree?" "Not if you go as a working member of the expedition. To hold a supervisory post of some sort, it would take one, I suppose." "Before I start moving," Preston said, "I'll have to know the details. Everything that happened." "I'll write out a statement for you. Have it notarized. Anything you want." "Seems, to me," said Preston, "we might file action against Transportation. They put you in this mess." Maxwell hedged. "Not right now," 'he said. "We can think of it later on." "You get that statement put together," Preston told him. "And in the meantime, I'll do some thinking and look up some law. Then we can make a start. Have you seen the papers or looked at television?" Maxwell shook his head. "I haven't had the time." "They're going wild," said Preston. "It's a wonder they haven't cornered you. They must be looking for you. All they have as yet is conjecture. You were seen last night at the Pig #c Whistle by a lot of people. The line right now is that you've come back from the dead. If I were you, I'd keep out of their way. If they should catch up with you, tell them absolutely nothing." "I have no intention to," said Maxwell. They sat in the quiet office, looking silently at one another. "What a mess!" said Preston, finally. "What a lovely mess! I believe, Pete, I might just enjoy this." "By the way," said Maxwell, "Nancy Clayton invited me to a party tonight. I've been wondering if there might be some connection -- although there needn't be. Nancy used to invite me on occasion." Preston grinned. "Why, you're a celebrity. You'd be quite a catch for Nancy." "I'm not too sure of that," said Maxwell. "She must have heard I had shown up. She'd be curious, of course." "Yes," said Preston, drily, "she would be curious." V Maxwell expected that he might find newsmen lying in wait for him at Oop's shack, but there was no one there. Apparently the word hadn't spread that he was staying there. The shack stood in the drowsiness of late afternoon, with the autumn sunlight pouring like molten gold over the weatherbeaten lumber scraps of which it had been built. A few bees buzzed lazily in a bed of asters that grew outside the door and down the stretch of hillside above the roadway a few yellow butterflies drifted in the hazy afternoon. Maxwell opened the door and stuck in his head. There was no one there. Oop was off prowling somewhere, and there was no sign of Ghost. A banked fire glowed redly in the fireplace. Maxwell shut the door and sat down on the bench that stood before the shack. Far to the west one of the campus' four lakes shone as a thin blue lens. The countryside was painted brown and yellow by dead sedges and dying grasses. Here and there little islands of color flared in scattered groups of trees. Warm and soft, thought Maxwell. A land that one could dream in. Unlike those violent, gloomy landscapes that Lambert had painted so many years ago. He sat wondering why those landscapes should stick so tightly, like a burr against his mind. Wondering, too, how the artist could have known how the ghostly inhabitants of the crystal planet flickered. It could not be merely happenstance; it was not the sort of thing a man might readily imagine. Reason said that Lambert must have known about those ghostly people; reason just as plainly said it was impossible. And what about all those other creatures, all those other grotesque monstrosities Lambert had spread with an insane, vicious brush across the canvasses? Where did they fit in? Where might they have come from? Or were they simply mad figments of imagination, tom raw and bleeding from a strangely tortured mind? Were the people of the crystal planet the only authentic creatures Lambert had depicted? It did not seem too likely. Somewhere or other, somehow or other, Lambert must have seen these other creatures, too. And was the landscape pure imagination, brushed in to maintain the mood established by the creatures, or might it have been the landscape of the crystal planet at some other time, before it had been fixed forever in the floor and roof that shut it in against the universe? But that, he told himself, was impossible! The planet had 'been enclosed' before the present universe was bom. Maxwell stirred uneasily. It made no sense at all. None of it made any sort of sense. He had trouble enough, he told himself, without worrying about Lambert's paintings. He had lost his job, his estate was locked in probate, he didn't have a legal standing as a human being. But none of that mattered too much, not right now, anyhow. First came the matter of the hoard of knowledge on the crystal planet. It was a knowledge the University must have -- a body of knowledge in the known galaxy. Some of it would duplicate what was already known, but there would be other huge areas of understanding wrtiich were yet unthought of. The little that he had had the time to see bolstered that belief. "Vnce again, it seemed, he was  hunkered down before the table, almost like a coffee table, on which he'd piled the metal sheets he had taken from the shelves, and with the contraption that was a reader, an interpreter, call it what one might, fastened to his head. There had been the sheet of metal that talked about the mind, not in metaphysical nor in philosophic terms, but as a mechanism, employing terms and concepts that he could not grasp. He had struggled with the terminology, for he knew that here was understanding no human yet had touched, but it was beyond him. And there was that other piece of metal, a basic text on the application of certain mathematical principles to the social sciences, although some of the social sciences that were mentioned he could only guess at, groping after the concepts as a blind man might grope after flitting butterflies. There had been histories not of one universe, but two -- and natural history which had told of life forms so fantastic in their basic principles and their functions that they seemed unbelievable, and a very thin sheet of metal, so thin it bent and twisted, like a sheet of paper, when he handled it, that had been so far beyond his understanding that he could not quite be sure what it was about And a thicker piece of metal, a much thicker piece, wherein he read the thoughts and philosophies of creatures and of cultures long since gone to dust that had sent him reeling back, frightened, disgusted, outraged and dismayed, but still full of a fearful wonder, at the utter inhumanity expressed in those philosophies. All that and more, much more, ing out there on the crystal planet. It was important, he reminded himself, that he carry out the assignment that he had been given. It was vital that the library of the crystal planet be attained, and quickly. For if he failed there was a good possibility that the planet would seek another market, offer what it had in another sector of the galaxy, or perhaps out of the galaxy entirely. The Artifact, he told himself, could be the price. A flight of blackbirds came swirling down out of the sky, skimming just above the roof of the shack, sailing over the roadway. Maxwell watched them settle into the dying vegetation of a stretch of marsh, balancing their bodies delicately on the bending stems of rank-growing weeds, come there to feed for an hour or so before flying off to roost in some secluded woodland they had picked as bivouac on their migration southward. Maxwell got up and stretched. The peace and the quiet of the tawny afternoon had soaked into his body. He'd like a nap, he thought. After a time Oop would come back home and wake him and they'd have something to eat and talk for a while before he went off to Nancy's. He opened the door and went into the shack, crossing the floor to sit upon the bed. Maybe, he thought, he ought to see if he still had a clean shirt and an extra pair of socks to don before the party. He reached out and hauled his bag off the floor and dumped it on the bed. Opening the catches, he threw back the lid and took out a pair qf trousers to get at the shirts that were packed beneath them. The shirts were there and so was something else, a contraption with a headband and two eyepieces folded up against it. He stared at it in wonder, recognizing it. It was the translator which he had used on the crystal planet to read the metal tablets. He lifted it out and let it dangle in his hand. Here was the band to clamp around the head, with the power pack in the back, and the two eyepieces one flipped down into position once the device was fastened on the head. He must have packed it by mistake, he thought, although he cpuld not, for the life of him, remember packing it. But there it was. Perhaps no harm was done. It might even be used at some future time to help substantiate his claim he had been on the planet. It was not good evidence. It was just a gadget that had an ordinary look about it, although it might not seem so ordinary if someone poked around in the mechanism of it. A light tapping came from somewhere. Maxwell, surprised by so small a noise, stiffened and held himself rigid, listening. Perhaps a wind-blown branch, he thought, tapping on the roof, although it didn't sound like a branoh against the roof. The tapping stopped and then began again, this time not a steady rapping, but rather like a code. Three quick taps and then a pause, followed by two rapid taps and then another pause, with the pattern of the tapping repeated once again. It was someone at the door. # Taxwell got up from the bed and stood undecided. It might be newsmen who had finally tracked him down. If that should be the case, it might be best to leave the door unanswered. But the tapping didn't seem boisterous enough, or demanding enough, for a newsman who had finally run him to his lair. The taps were soft, almost tentative, the kind of tapping that might be done by someone who did not want to advertise his presence. The tapping took up again. Maxwell trudged to the door and threw it open. Outside stood the Shrimp, a ghostly, gleaming white in the wash of sunlight. Beneath one of his limbs, which now served as an arm rather than a leg, he clutched a paper-wrapped bundle tight against his body. "For the love of God, come in," said Maxwell, sharply, "before someone sees you here." The Shrimp came in. Maxwell closed the door, wondering what it was that had caused him to urge it in. "You need no apprehension," said the Shrimp, "about news harvesters. I was careful and I noticed. No one followed me. I'm such a foolish-looking creature no one ever follows me. No one ever accords to me any purpose whatsoever." "That is a fortunate thing to have," said Maxwell. "I think that it is called protective coloration." "I appear again," said Shrimp, "on behalf of Miss Nancy Clayton. She knows you carried little on your trip, have had no chance to shop or 'have laundry done. No wish to embarrass -- charging me to say this with goodly emphasis -- but wish to send you clothes to wear." He took the bundle from underneath his arm and handed it to Maxwell. "That is nice of Nancy." "She is a thoughtful person. She commissioned me to say further." "Go ahead," said Maxwell. "There will be wheeled vehicle to take you to the house." "There is no need of that," said Maxwell. "The roadway runs right past her place." "Once again apology," said the Shrimp, with firmness, "but she thinks it best. There is much hithering and thithering, by many types of creatures, to learn your whereabouts." "Can you tell me," asked Maxwell. "how Miss Clayton knows my whereabouts?" Said the Shrimp, "I truly do not know." "All right, then. You'll thank Miss Clayton for me?" "With gladness," said the Shrimp. XV tCT'll take you around to the back," the driver said. "There is a swarm of newsmen hanging around out front. They'll be gone later on, but now they're there in droves. Miss Clayton suggested you might not want to meet them." "Thank you," Maxwell said. "It is thoughtful of you." Nancy, he told himself, had taken over, as was her usual practice, viewing it as her prerogative to order people's lives. Her house stood on the low bluff that hemmed in the western edge of the lake. Off to the left the water gleamed softly in the early moonlight. The front of the house was ablaze with light, but the back was dark. The car turned off the highway and climbed slowly along a narrow driveway lined by massive oaks. A startled bird flew squawking across the roadway, a flurry of desperately beating wings caught for a moment in the headlights. A pair of dogs came raging down the hollow tunnel of the drive, split and swung on either side the car. The driver chuckled. "If you were walking, they'd eat you alive." "But why?" asked Maxwell. "Why, all at once, must Nancy be guarded by a dog pack?" "Not Miss Clayton," the driver said. "It is someone else." The question came to Maxwell's tongue, but he choked it back. The driver swung the car into a curved driveway that ran beneath an open portico and pulled up to a halt. "In the back door," the driver said. "You don't need to knock. Then straight down the hall past the curved staircase. The party's up in front." Maxwell started to open the car door, then hesitated. "You need not mind the dogs," the driver told him. "They recognize the car. Anyone who steps out of it is okay with them." There was, in fact, no sign of the dogs, and Maxwell went swiftly up the three steps of the stoop, opened the back door and stepped into the hall. The hall was dark. A little light filtered down the winding staircase -- someone apparently had left on a light on the second story. But that was all; there were no other lights. From somewhere in the front of the house came the muffled sound of revelry. T T e stood for a moment without  moving. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he could see that the hall ran for some distance toward the center of the house, past the foot of the winding stairs and beyond. There was a door back there, or perhaps an abrupt turn in the hall, that would take him party-ward. It was strange, he told himself. If Nancy had instructed the driver to bring him to the back, she would have had someone there to greet him, or at least would have seen that there was a light so he could find his way. Strange, and very awkward, to arrive this way, to grope his way along the hall in search of the others who were there. For a moment he considered turning about and leaving, making his way back to Oop's place. Then he remembered the dogs. They would be out there and waiting and they looked like vicious brutes. This whole business, he told himself, was not at all like Nancy. Nancy wouldn't do a thing like this. There was something very wrong, and he did not like it. He moved cautiously down the hall, alert for chair or table that might be there to trip him up. He could see a little better now, but the hall was still a tunnel without any details. He passed the stairs, skirting around their base, and now, with the light from the stairway partially cut off, the hall became darker than it was before. A voice asked, "Professor Maxwell? Is that you, Professor?" Maxwell stopped in midstride, balancing on one leg, then carefully put his lifted foot down against the floor and stood, not stirring, while goose bumps prickled on his skin. "Professor Maxwell," said the voice, "I know that you're there." It was not a voice, actually, or it didn't seem to be. There had been no sound, Maxwell could have sworn, yet he had heard the words, not so much, perhaps, in his ear, as somewhere in his brain. He felt the terror mounting in him and he tried to fight off, but it didn't go away. It stayed, crouched somewhere out there in the dark, ready to rush in. He tried to speak and gulped instead. The voice said, "I've waited here for you, Professor. I want to communicate with you. It is to your interest as much as it is to mine." "Where are you?" Maxwell asked. "Through the door just to your left." "I do not see a door." Good common sense hammered hard at Maxwell. Break and run, it said. Get out of here as fast as you can go. But he couldn't break and run. He couldn't bring himself to do it. And if he ran, which way should he run? Not back to the door, for the dogs were waiting out there. Not clattering down the darkened hall, more than likely to bump into something and raise a terrible clatter, to alert the guests up there in front and to be found, when they investigated, disheveled and bruised and sweating with his fear. For if he ran, he knew, fear would pounce upon him and he'd give way to it. It was bad enough sneaking in from the back door on a party without being found in a condition such as that. If it had been just a voice, any kind of voice, it would not have been so frightening, but it was a strange kind of voice -- there was no intonation to it, and there was about it a certain raw, mechanical, almost rasping quality. It was not a human voice, Maxwell told himself. There was an alien in that room. CC'Tphere is a door," the flat, hard voice said. "Step slightly to your left and push against it." The whole thing was becoming ridiculous, Maxwell told himself. Either he went through the door or he broke and ran. He might try to simply walk away, but he knew that the minute he turned his back upon that hidden door, he would run -- not because he wanted to, but because he had to, running from the fear he had turned his back upon. He stepped to the left, found the door, and pushed. The room was dark, but from a lamp somewhere in the yard outside, some light filtered through the windows, falling on a roly-poly creature that stood in the center of the room, its pudgy belly gleaming with a writhing phosphorescence, as if a group of luminescent sea-dwellers had been prisoned in a bowl. "Yes," the creature said, "you are quite right. I am one of those beings that you call a Wheeler. For my visit here I have given myself a designation that falls easy on your mind. You may call me Mr. Marmaduke. For convenience only, I suspect you understand, for it's not my name. In fact, none of us have names. They are unnecessary. Our personal identity is achieved in another way." "I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Marmaduke," said Maxwell, speaking slowly, the only way he could, since his lips had become, like the rest of him, slightly stiff and frozen. "And I you, Professor." "How did you know who I was?" asked Maxwell. "You seemed to have no doubt at all. You knew, of course, I'd be coming down the hall." "Of course," the Wheeler said. Now Maxwell could see the creature a bit more clearly, the bloated body supported on two wheels, the lower part of the body gleaming and twisting like a pail of worms. "You are Nancy's guest?" he asked. "Yes," said Mr. Marmaduke, "certainly I am. The guest of honor, I believe, at this gathering." "Then, perhaps, you should be out with the other guests." "I pleaded tiredness," said Mr. Marmaduke. "A slight prevarication, I must admit, since I am never tired. So I went to rest a while..." "And to wait for me?" "Precisely," said Mr. Marmaduke. Nancy, Maxwell thought. No, Nancy, he was sure, wasn't in on it. She had a frothy brain, and all she cared about were her everlasting parties, and She'd be incapable of any kind of subtle intrigue. "There is a subject we can talk about," said Mr. Marmaduke, "with some profit, I presume, to both of us. You are looking for a buyer for a large commodity. I might have some interest in that particular commodity." Maxwell moved back a step and tried to find an answer. But there was no ready answer. Although he should have known, he told himself, or have at least suspected. "You say nothing," said Mr. Marmaduke. "I cannot be mistaken. You are, without fail, the agent for the sale?" "Yes," said Maxwell. "Yes, I am the agent." nphcre was no use denying it, he knew. Somehow or other, this creature in the room knew about the other planet and the hoard of knowledge. And he might know the price as well. Could it have been the Wheeler, he wondered, who had made the offer for the Artifact? "Well, then," said Mr. Marmaduke, "let us proceed Immediately to business and a discussion of the terms. Not forgetting, in the course of it, to mention the commission that will be coming to you." "I am afraid," said Maxwell, "that is impossible at the moment. I do not know the terms. You see, I was first to find a potential buyer and then -- " "No trouble whatsoever," said Mr. Marmaduke, "for I have the knowledge that you lack." "And you will pay the price?" "Oh, without any question," said the Wheeler. "It will take just a little time. There are certain negotiations which must be terminated. Once those are done, you and I can complete all business and the matter will be done, without any fuss or trouble. The only thing, it would appear to me, is a determination of the commission which you will have earned so richly." "I would imagine," said Maxwell, bleakly, "that it might be a good commission." "We had in mind," said Mr. Marmaduke, "naming you -- shall we say librarian? -- of the commodity we purchase. There will be much work working out the various commodities and codifying them. For work of this sort we will need a creature such as you, and I imagine that you might find the work highly interesting. And the salary -- Professor Maxwell, we pray you name the salary and the conditions of employment." "I would have to think about it." "By all means," said Mr. Marmaduke. "In a procedure such as this, a little thought is good. You will not find us most disposed to generosity." "That's not what I meant," said Maxwell. "I'll have to think about the deal. Whether I'd be "You doubt, perhaps, our worthiness to purchase the commodity?" "That might be it," said Maxwell. "professor Maxwell," said the Wheeler, "it would be advisable for you to lay aside your doubts. It is for the best that you entertain no doubt of us at all. For we are most determined that we shall obtain what you have to offer. So, in the best of grace, you should deal with us." "Whether I want to or not?" asked Maxwell. "I," said Mr. Marmaduke, "would have not put it quite so bluntly. But you state it most correctly." "You are not in the best position," Maxwell told him, "to speak in that tone of voice." "You are not aware of the position that we hold," the Wheeler said. "Your knowledge goes out to only a certain point in space. You cannot know what lies beyond that point." There was something in the words, something in the way that they were said, which sent a chill through Maxwell, as if from some unknown quarter of the universe a sharp, frigid blast of wind had blown through the room. Your knowledge goes only to a certain point in space, Mr. Marmaduke had said, and what lay beyond that point? No one could know, of course, except that in certain areas beyond the shadowy frontier of man's probing it was known the Wheelers had staked out an empire. And seeping across that frontier came horror stories, such tales as any frontier might inspire, stemming from man's wonder concerning that unknown which lay just a little way ahead. There had been little contact with the Wheelers, and almost nothing was known of them -- and that in itself was bad. There was no thrusting out of hands, no gestures of good will, either from the Wheelers or from the humans and their friends and allies. The frontier lay there, in that one great sector out in space, a silent, sullen line that neither side had crossed. "I would be better able to come to some decision," Maxwell said, "if my knowledge did extend, if we could know more about you." "You know that we are bugs," said Mr. Marmaduke, and the words fairly dripped with scorn. "You are intolerant... " "Not intolerant," said Maxwell, angrily, "and we do not think of you as bugs. We know you are what we would call hive mechanisms. We know each of you is a colony of creatures similar to the life forms that here on Earth we think of as insects, and that sets us apart from you, of course, but no more distant from us than many other creatures from many other stars. I do not like the word 'intolerant', Mr. Marmaduke, because it implies that there is ground for tolerance, and there is no such thing -- not for you, nor I, nor any other creature in the universe." He found that he was shaking with his anger and he wondered why he should suddenly become so angry at a single word. He could remain calm at the thought of the Wheeler buying the knowledge of the crystal planet, then flare with sudden anger at one specific word. Perhaps because, he told himself, with so many different races who must live together, both tolerance and intolerance had become dirty words. "You argue well and amiably," said Mr. Marmaduke, "and you may not be intolerant -- " "Even were there such a thing as intolerance," said Maxwell, "I cannot understand why you'd resent it so. It would be a reflection upon the one who had exhibited it rather than upon the one toward whom it was directed. Not only a reflection upon good manners, but upon one's basic knowledge. There can be nothing quite so stupid as intolerance." "Then if not intolerance," asked the Wheeler, "what makes you hesitate?" I # T would have to know how you meant to use the commodity. I would want to know your purpose. I would need to know a great deal more about you." "So that you could judge?" "I don't know," said Maxwell, bitterly. "How can one judge a situation such as this?" "We talk too much," said Mr. Marmaduke. "And the talk is meaningless. I perceive you have no intention to make a deal with us." "At the moment," Maxwell told him, "I would say that you were right." "Then," said Mr. Marmaduke, "we must find another way. You will cause us, by your refusal, a great deal of time and trouble and we'll be most ungrateful to you." "I have a feeling," Maxwell said, "that I can bear up under your ingratitude." "There is a certain advantage, sir," warned Mr. Marmaduke, "to being on the winning side." Something big and moving swiftly brushed past Maxwell, and out of the comer of his eye he caught the sudden flash of gleaming teeth and the streak of tawny body. "No, Sylvester!" Maxwell shouted. "Leave him alone, Sylvester!" Mr. Marmaduke moved swiftly. His wheels blurred as he spun and swept in a quick half circle, skirting Sylvester's rushing charge and heading for the door. Sylvester's claws screeched as he turned, swapping end for end. Maxwell, seeing the Wheeler bearing down upon him, ducked out of the way, but a wheel grazed his Shoulder and brushed him roughly to one side. With a swish, Mr. Marmaduke went streaking out the door. Behind him came Sylvester, long and lithe, a tawny shape that seemed to flow smoothly through the air. "No, Sylvester!" Maxwell screamed, flinging himself through the door and making a quick turn in the hall, his legs pumping rapidly as he skidded on the turn. Ahead of him the Wheeler rolling smoothly down the hall, with Sylvester close behind him. Maxwell wasted' no more breath in yelling at the cat, but drove his body forward in pursuit. At the far end of the hall, Mr. Marmaduke swung smoothly to the left; and Sylvester, almost on top of him, lost precious seconds as he fought, and failed, to make as smooth a turn. Warned of the turning in the hall, Maxwell took it in his stride and ahead of him he saw a lighted corridor that led to a short marble staircase and beyond the staircase a crowd of people standing about in little knots, with glasses in their hands. Mr. Marmaduke was heading for the staircase, going very fast. Sylvester was one leap ahead of Maxwell, perhaps three leaps behind the Wheeler. A Taxwell tried to yell a warning, but he didn't have the breath and, in any case, events were moving much too fast at this point. The Wheeler hit the top step of the staircase, and Maxwell launched his body through the air, arms outstretched. He came down on top of the saber-tooth and wrapped his arms around its neck. The two of them sprawled to the floor; and out of the comer of his eye, as he and Sylvester cartwheeled down the corridor, Maxwell saw the Wheeler bouncing high on the second step and beginning to tip over. And then, suddenly, there was the screaming of frightened women and the yells of startled men and the crash of breaking glasses. For once, thought Maxwell grimly, Nancy was getting a bigger boot out of her party than she had bargained for. He piled up against a wall, at the far edge of the staircase. Somehow or other, Sylvester was perched on top of him and reaching down to lap fondly at his face. "Sylvester," he said, "this was the time you did it. You g(?t us in a mess." Sylvester went on lapping, and a rasping purr rumbled in his chest. Maxwell pushed the cat away and managed to slide up the wall to a sitting position. Out on the floor of the room beyond the staircase Mr. Marmaduke lay upon his side, both wheels spinning crazily, the friction of the wheel that was bottom-most making him rotate lopsidedly. Carol came running up the steps and stopped, with fists firmly on her hips, to stare down at Maxwell and the cat. "The two of you!" she cried, then choked with anger. "We're sorry," Maxwell said apologetically. "The guest of honor," she screamed at them, almost weeping. "The guest of honor and you two hunting him down the halls as if he were a moose." "Apparently we didn't hurt him much," said Maxwell. "I see he is intact. I wouldn't have been surprised if his belly broke and all those bugs of his were scattered on the floor." "What will Nancy think?" Carol asked accusingly. "I imagine," Maxwell told her, "that she'll be delighted. There hasn't been this much ruckus at one of her parties since the time the fire-eating amphibian out of the Nettle system set the Christmas tree on fire." "You make those things up," said Carol. "I don't believe it happened." "Cross my heart," said Maxwell. "I was here and saw it. Helped put out the fire." "vut on the floor some of the guests had laid hold of Mr. Marmaduke and were pulling him over to stand upright on his wheels. Little serving robotics were scurrying about, picking up the broken glass and mopping up the floor where the drinks had spilled. Maxwell got to his feet, and Sylvester moved over close beside him, rubbing against his legs and purring. Nancy had arrived from somewhere and was talking with Mr. Marmaduke. A large circle of guests stood around and listened to the talk. "If I were you," suggested Carol, "I'd skin out of here the best way that I could. I can't imagine that you'll be welcome here." "On the contrary," Maxwell told her. "I'm always welcome here." He started walking down the staircase, with Sylvester pacing regally beside him. Nancy turned and saw him, broke through the circle and came across the floor to meet him. "Pete!" she cried. "Then it's really true. You are back again." "Why, of course," said Maxwell. "I saw it in the papers, but I didn't quite believe it. I thought it was a hoax or a gag of some sort." "But you invited me," said Maxwell. "Invited you?" She wasn't kidding him. He could see she wasn't kidding. "You mean you didn't send a Shrimp... "A Shrimp?" "Well, a thing that looked like an overgrown shrimp." She shook her head, and watching her face, Maxwell saw, with something of a shock, that she was growing old. There were many tiny wrinkles around the comers of her eyes that cosmetics failed to hide. "A thing that looked like a shrimp," he said. "Said it was running errands for you. It said I was invited to the party. It said a car would be sent to fetch me. It even brought me clothes, because it said... " "Pete," said Nancy, "please believe me. I did none of this. I did not invite you. But I'm glad you're here." She moved closer and laid a hand upon his arm. Her face crinkled in a giggle. "And I'll be interested in hearing about what happened between you and Mr. Marmaduke." "That I'm sorry about," said Maxwell. "No need to be. He's my guest, of course, and one must be considerate of guests, but he's a really terrible person. Pete, he's basically a bore and a snob and..." "Not now," Maxwell warned her, softly. Mr. Marmaduke had disengaged himself from the circle of guests and was wheeling across the floor toward them. Nancy turned to face him. "You're all right?" she asked. "You really are all right?" "Very right," said Mr. Marmaduke. TTe wheeled close to Maxwell, and an arm extruded from the top of his roly-poly body -- a ropelike, flexible arm more like a tentacle than an arm, with three clawlike fingers on the end of it. He reached out with it and draped it around Maxwell's shoulders. At the pressure of it, Maxwell had the instinct to shrink away, but with an exercise of conscious will forced himself not to stir. "I thank you, sir," said Mr. Marmaduke. "I am most grateful to you. You saved my life, perhaps. Just as I fell I saw you leap upon the beast. It was most heroic." Pressed tight against Maxwell's side, Sylvester lifted his head, dropped his lower jaw, exhibiting his fangs in a silent snarl. "He would not have hurt you, sir," said Carol. "He's as gentle as a kitten. If you had not run, he'd not have chased you. He had the fool idea that you were playing with him. Sylvester likes to play." Sylvester yawned, with a fine display of teeth. "This play," said Mr. Marmaduke, "I do not care about." "When I saw you fall," said Maxwell, "I was fearful for you. I thought for a moment you would burst wide open." "Oh, no need of fear," said Mr. Marmaduke. "I am extremely resilient. The body is rrtade of excellent material. It is strong and has a bouncing quality." He removed his arm from Maxwell's shoulder, and it ran like an oily rope, writhing in the air, to plop back into his body. There was no mark on the body surface, Maxwell noticed, to indicate where it might have disappeared. "You'll excuse me, please," said Mr. Marmaduke. "There's someone I must see." He wheeled about and rolled rapidly away. Nancy shuddered. "He gives me the creeps," she said. "Although I must admit he is a great attraction. It isn't every hostess who can snag a Wheeler. I don't mind telling you, Pete, that I pulled a lot of wires to get him for a house guest, and now I wish I hadn't. There's a slimy feel about him." "Do you know why he'd be here -- here on Earth, I mean?" "No, I don't. I get the impression that he's a simple tourist. Although I don't imagine such a creature could be a simple tourist." "I think you're right," said Maxwell. "Pete," she said, "tell me about yourself. The papers say... " TTe grinned. "I know. That I came back from the dead." "But you didn't, really. I know that's not impossible. Who was that we buried? Everyone, you must understand, simply everyone, was at the funeral, and we all thought it was you. But it couldn't have been you. Whatever could have -- " "Nancy," said Maxwell, "I came back only yesterday. I found that I was dead and that my apartment had been rented and that I had' lost my job." "It seems impossible," said Nancy. "Such things just don't happen. I don't see how this happened." "I'm not entirely clear about it all myself," Maxwell told her. "Later, I suppose, I'll find out more about it" "Anyway," said Nancy, "you are here, and everything's all right; and if you don't want to talk about it, I'll circulate the word that you would rather not." "That's kind of you," said Maxwell, "but it wouldn't work." "You don't need to worry about newspapermen," said Nancy. "There are no newspaper people here. I used to let them come. A hand-picked few, ones I thought that I could trust. But you can't trust any of them. I found that out the hard way. So you won't be bothered." "I understand you have a painting... " "You know about the painting, then. Let's go and look at it. It's the proudest thing I have. Imagine it, a Lambert! And one that had dropped entirely out of sight. I'll tell you later how it happened to be found, but I won't tell you what it cost me. I won't tell anyone. I'm ashamed of what it cost me." "Much or little?" "Much," said Nancy, "and you have to be so careful. It's so easy to be swindled. I wouldn't even talk of buying it until I had it examined by an expert. In fact, two experts. One to check against the other, although I suppose that was unnecessary." "But there's no doubt it is a Lambert?" "No doubt at all. I was almost sure, myself. No one else ever painted quite like Lambert. But he could be copied, of course, and I had to be sure." "What do you know about Lambert?" Maxwell asked. "Something more than the rest of us? Something that's not found its way into books?" "No. Really not a great deal. Not about the man himself. Why do you ask?" "Because you are so excited." "Well, really! Just finding an unknown Lambert is enough, of course. I have two other paintings of his, but this one is something special because it had been lost. Well, actually I don't know if lost is the word or not. Never known, perhaps, would be better. No record of his ever painting it. No record that survived, at least. And it is one of his so-called grotesques. You would hardly think one of them could be lost or mislaid or whatever happened to it. One of his earlier ones, that might be understandable." They worked their way across the floor, skirting the little clustered groups of guests. "Here it is," said Nancy. T hey had pushed their way through a crowd that had been grouped in front of the wall on which the painting hung. Maxwell tilted his head to stare up at it. It was somehow different than the color plates he had seen in the library that morning. This was because, he told himself, of the larger size of the painting, color, some of which had been lost in the color plates. But this, he realized, was not all of it. The landscape was different, and so were the creatures in it. A more Earth-like landscape -- the sweep of gray hills and the brown of the shrubby vegetation that lay upon the land, the squatty fem-like trees. A troop of creatures that could be gnomes wended their way across a distant hill; a goblin-like creature sitting at the base of a tree leaned back against the bole, apparently asleep, with some sort of hat pulled down across his eyes. And others -- fearsome, leering creatures, with obscene bodies and faces that made the blood run cold. On the crest of a distant, flattopped hill, about the base of which clustered a large crowd of many kinds of creatures, a small black blob stood outlined against the grayness of the sky. Maxwell drew in his breath in a startled gasp, took a quick step closer, then halted and stood stiff and straight, afraid to give himself away. It seemed impossible that no one else could have noticed it, he told himself. Although, perhaps, someone had but had not thought it worth the mention. But for Maxwell there could be no doubt. He was sure of what he saw. That small black blob on the distant hilltop was the Artifact! She Her wasn't exactly an accident worst effects were all on nphe Costellos, two great little people well under five feet tall, had moved out of the onebedroom apartment to the left of mine, and my neighbors and I wondered apprehensively who would move in. I know it's true that you can live in a Manhattan apartment house all your life and never know your neighbors, but the tenth floor of our building was lively proof that this needn't be so, and we wanted it to continue. Dick and Charlotte Fort (two bedrooms, to right of my apartment) were airily positive that we would assimilate whoever it might be. The Masons (three bedrooms, across the hall) could use another cheery sitter for their manic kids, for the Costellos had always been happy to oblige. Betty Snowden (one bedroom, left of the Masons) hoped the new tenant(s?) would like Maxwell, her big, but big, cat. Being closest to the vacant apartment, I wished for somebody quiet who wouldn't mind my typing late and might welcome an occasional visit, as everybody on the tenth floor did. After the painters were finished, two men put down green wallto-wall carpeting. Furniture was brought in. On the door under the peep-hole appeared an inscrutable nameplate: J. McGivney. Bachelor? Divorcee? Couple? The name gave us no clue. It happened to be my lot to find out. And the way I found out was this: I had just come up with the mail and was about to close the door when I noticed that the damnable top screw of my lock had worked its way loose again. So I was standing with the door half open and turning the screw with my thumbnail and the elevator came up to the tenth floor. A perfectly ordinary-seeming woman in her forties emerged and headed toward me, key in hand. "Hello," I said brightly, introducing myself. "And you're Mrs. McGivney?" "Miss," she said flatly, looking at what I was doing. It did look pretty silly, and I found myself babbling, "The top screw keeps coming out, and I keep having to screw it back in. Doesn't yours?" "I don't know what you mean," she said and unlocked her door and went in, followed by the sound of doublelocking and chaining it. When I reported this to the Forts, they laughed me out of my embarrassment and said they would thaw her out. They put a couple of bottles of wine and some glasses on a tray and invited me to come along and see. Out in the hall, they rang Miss McGivney's bell. The peephole opened, and an eye stared at us. "We're the Welcome Wagon!" cried Charlotte Fort gaily. "I didn't order any," said Miss McGivney, closing the peephole. The Forts stood there for a long moment before soberly going back to their apartment, and I went into mine. We didn't think of drinking the wine ourselves. Qo far, this doesn't sound like  the start of a remarkable scientific discovery, but it was, requiring only time and more data. It was Charlotte's destiny to add the next item. "I never go out to the incinerator," she chattered later. "That's Dick's job. But we had the people from the office over, and he went to bed feeling sick, and I couldn't face all the empty bottles that had accumulated." She shuddered. "So there I was in the middle of the night, clutching liquor bottles, and guess who came out." "Miss McGivney?" I supplied. She nodded. "I was pretty high myself, but not after she watched me struggle to put the empties down the incinerator. I crept into bed, positively ill with embarrassment, and tried to wake Dick, but no soap." "That's ridiculous," said Dick heartily. "What's more natural than dumping a few bottles down the incinerator at two in the morning?" "Fifteen," said Charlotte. "And it was four-thirty." Dick, the Masons and I laughed her out of it, of course. Only I knew how she felt; the others hadn't met Miss McGivney yet. Sometime that summer, the Masons boys came home from camp for the weekend on their way to a dude ranch. Let Mrs. Mason tell it: "Mike had brought back a snake from camp. It was a pretty little one; but he couldn't keep it, obviously, and I told him to take it to the ranch and let it go. A few hours after they left, the police and firemen charged out of the elevators and made for Miss McGivney's apartment, clubs and axes at the ready. When they came out, I asked what had happened. A snake, they told me, had wound up in her bathtub!" "And for that she called the police and fire department?" asked Dick Fort, stunned. "Not only that," said Mrs. Mason, "she scrubbed every inch of the place on her hands and knees!" "But why?" asked Mr. Mason. "To kill any eggs it may have laid. I know it's biological nonsense, but the poor woman was hysterical." The Masons were visited by executives from the management office, who made it clear that Mrs. Mason should not have confessed so readily, and the item made the local newspaper. We laughed them out of their embarrassment, but we noticed that it was getting harder and harder to do and also that we never seemed to meet Miss McGivney except under embarrassing conditions. Only Dick Fort and Betty Snowden disagreed. They said we were getting a bit paranoid. XTou might say it was Betty's turn next, though not in person. Her sixteen-year-old niece from Ohio was visiting her -- sleeping on the sofa because Betty, if you remember, had only one bedroom -- and the girl got up early and, in her shortie nightgown, went out into the hall to get the Sunday Times that Betty had delivered to her, when the door blew shut behind the girl. She rang the bell and banged on the door, but Betty had the bedroom door closed and Flents in her ears, a longtime practice. So her niece philosophically sat down on the welcome mat and started looking at the ads. That was when Miss McGivney came out on her way to early Mass. The girl smiled up at her as she waited for the elevator and tried to explain what had happened to her. "I don't recall asking," said Miss McGivney, and took the elevator. "Damn it," I said when Betty finished, "is it us or what? These are the kind of things that happen once in years to anybody, yet she walks right into them every time!" "It's your own fault," said Dick. "If you'd used a screwdriver instead of your thumbnail, or you, Charlotte, could have waited for me to get rid of the bottles the next day, or your niece, Betty, might have turned the lock before going after the paper -- " "But why does Miss McGivney always come along at just the wrong moment?" argued Mrs. Mason. "Pure happenstance," said Dick. "And not thinking ahead." "That's because you haven't had her walk in on you like we have," said Charlotte, too annoyed to watch her English. "And she never will," Dick said. "I think before I act." If life were dramatically logical, he should have been the next victim, but he wasn't. I was. The Forts had invited me to dinner, but let me finish my day's work instead of joining their company for cocktails. Finished, I phoned to beg off, being so tired that I needed a nap. As always, Charlotte was gracious about it, and I lay down with a good conscience. It was dark when I awoke, long past the Forts' dinnertime. I took a shower, dressed and went toward the kitchen to open some cans and eat standing up. But a slip of paper on the floor near the front door seemed to have Charlotte's handwriting on it. I picked it up and read: "Look outside before you ha-ha make dinner for yourself. Then come on in and join us." I opened the door. Out in the hall, directly in front of my door, was a collection of plates containing uncooked spaghetti, Charlotte's famous meat balls and meat sauce, salad and dressing, Italian bread, and shrimp cocktail and dessert. Just as I bent over to take them in, Miss McGivney's door opened. I straightened and said hello, determined not to offer any explanation. Looking at the things on the floor, she said, "Some sort of ritual?" My nerve broke, and I was blathering away when the elevator saved me from further embarrassment. After morosely eating, ,I went next door, downed two highballs, and told Dick and Charlotte what had transpired. Dick shouted, "Listen to this, people!" and uproariously repeated my story. It took me a long time to forgive him. As a matter of fact, it wasn't until he met Miss McGivney face to face for the first time; he left for work before she did and came home earlier, so they just hadn't crossed paths. This fateful morning, Dick had overslept. He threw on his clothes, yelling to Charlotte that he didn't have time for breakfast, and was waiting for the elevator when he noticed that his zipper was open. He gave it a yank -- and snagged his boxer shorts. Need I tell you who appeared at that very instant? ATuch stuff has flowed under the thing since then, including Miss McGivney and the Masons and me moving away, and Betty's cat died, so she took a sabbatical without feeling guilty, and though I still correspond with the Forts, we've stopped debating Miss McGivney and our awful moments. It's all very clear, at least to me. As I said earlier, she led to a remarkable scientific discovery, and so she did. In years of ceaseless research, I have never found any discussion, much less theory, concerning the power that Miss McGivney clearly possessed. This can therefore be counted a First. Here it is : Using a previously unknown the mind, Miss McGivney unconsciously manufactured embarrassing incidents. We on the tenth floor weren't so much victims as puppets. That was bad enough -- but can you imagine what life would be like if you had her power? Wherever you entered or exited, somebody would inevitably be doing something that you much preferred not to witness, let alone have explained unconvincingly to you. If you were devout, like her, thoughts in the form of prayers like these might race through your mind as you steel yourself to go out each morning: "Dear Lord, don't let me see anything upsetting today! Save me from disgusting sights! Make people act like people instead of animals!" And, naturally, these thoughts would create what you are praying not to occur, and the harder you pray, the more inevitable they become. Poor Miss McGivney! Poor world of Miss McGivney! At Hotel Claremont, Oakland, California. Philip Jos Farmer, Guest #I Fairmont Station, El Cerrito. Calif. #. Membership: # foreign, # supporting, # attending. Join now and receive Progress Reports. Brain Drain We're the modern headhunters -- and very particular about whose heads we want to hunt! Tt was a beautiful day. The sky was clear and had that dark blue color you usually see only in advertisements for summer resorts. The sun was pleasantly warm, and the breeze on my face was pleasantly cool. After six months of sweltering down on the Bangkok Plain, this was sheer heaven. I leaned back in the saddle of my Suzuki motor scooter and breathed deeply. But let me introduce myself. I'm Tom Harrison, and I work for Intelligence Imports Incorporated. A year ago Triple-I pulled me out of Nigeria, where I had been working for over two years, put me through a crash course in Thai and sent me to Bangkok. I spent the next six months sloshing around in the paddy fields between Bangkok and Lopburi, looking for bright young kids who could be recruited to go to work in the States. Not to mention swatting mosquitoes and getting rained on. Then the Company decided that area was pretty well worked out and sent me upcountry, to the Korat Plateau. It's only about a hundred and sixty miles from Bangkok, but the thousand feet of altitude makes all the difference in the world. I don't mind being shifted around like that, either. In fact, I like traveling. The only reason I resigned from the Special Forces after five years was that they kept sending me to some pretty unfriendly places. But the places Triple-I sends me to are reasonably friendly. Miserable, maybe, but friendly. So when they send me to a nice place like this, I make a point of enjoying it, and this was a place I could enjoy. The hills were steep and covered with green. The valley floors were covered with little stands of hardwood trees, alternating with fields of com, almost ready for harvesting. I told myself if it weren't for the occasional thatched huts, and the banana trees in the foreground, this place could easily be mistaken for eastern Pennsylvania, around Susquehanna County. It was enough to make me homesick. But my Suzuki suddenly yanked me back to Thailand, as the front wheel dropped into a chuckhole and nearly pitched me out of the saddle. I recovered quickly and started paying more attention to the road. It was really nothing more than two parallel ruts made by hundreds of oxcarts over dozens of years. Two days ago I'd left Korat, the provincial capital, and followed a paved road north to Non Tai, which is the equivalent of the County Seat. I'd spent the night there, then struck out across country by cart track, towards my destination, the village of Song Hong. After a few more miles, the thatched huts started getting closer together, and I figured I must be getting close to Song Hong. As I rode into a stand of trees, two stray dogs lying beside the road got up and barked at me. That was a pretty good sign the village was close. But the clincher came a hundred yards or so farther along. A cluster of small boys, too young to be in school, and stark naked except for T-shirts, started yelling "farang, farang" and followed me down the road. Sure enough, as I came out of the trees, there was the village. Qong Hong means, literally, two k "-' rooms. But evidently the village had grown some since it had been named. There must have ' been a couple of hundred people living in it. The main street was winding and crooked, as though it had originally been a cowpath, but it was wide enough for two ox-carts and was covered with gravel, so it would be usable even in the wet season. Along both sides of the street there were oneand two-story thatched huts, looking well built and in good repair. About halfway through the village was a wooden frame building, surrounded by a fence of bamboo poles. It was evidently used as the town hall and police station, judging by the Thai flag flying from a pole in the courtyard. And off through the trees I could make out the orange and green tile roof of a Buddhist temple. I pulled off to the side of the street and dragged a map out of my saddlebag. I found the school on the map, about half a mile beyond the village. According to the records I'd examined in Non Tai, the school served a fairly large district. It had all twelve grades and almost five hundred students. I looked at my watch and decided that since it was just past noon. I'd eat lunch before I went to the school. By this time almost a dozen kids had gathered around me, just standing there silently and staring. I picked the biggest and asked him, in Thai, where the restaurant was located. He blinked at me, startled, then managed to get out that it was that way and around the comer. I guess he didn't expect a fatang to speak Thai. As I started the scooter, the kids stepped aside to let me through, and I rode off. I spotted the restaurant with no trouble. I didn't even need to read the sign out front. Almost invariably, in these small villages, the restaurant is in a two-story building. The proprietor lives upstairs, and the downstairs is one big room, usually with at least one side completely open. This one was located on a comer of two streets, and there were two sides open. I parked my scooter out front, ducked to get my sixfoot-six frame under the bamboo ceiling and sat down at the nearest table. The chair was too small for me, and my feet stuck out on the other side of the table, but by now I was used to that. There was a hand-written menu on the table, much battered and spotted, but still readable. I spotted fried noodles on the menu and was about to order them when I checked the price and thought about my expense account. A dish of fried noodles went for ten baht, which is about fifty cents U.S. But Triple-I knows it doesn't cost much to live out in the boondocks, and my expense account goes down accordingly. They're a very costconscious outfit. So I settled for fried rice, for only five baht. By comparison with prices in the States, I consider these prices quite reasonable. But I've been told that they were much lower yet back in the late Sixties, before the Air Force moved into the Base at Korat and drove the prices up. nphe proprietor came up and spoke to me in broken English. When I answered him in Thai, he just beamed. Thailand doesn't have any colonial history, so most of the people are friendly to Westerners anyway. But they really go overboard for a Westerner who's taken the trouble to learn their language. I know that some of our competitors, like Brainpower Unlimited, don't believe in giving language training to their fieldmen. They claim that the time lost in retraining a man every time he moves to another country costs more than an interpreter. They may well be right. In this business, you have to be very cost-conscious. But Triple-I is as cost-conscious as the rest of them, if not more so, and still insists on language training. I'm in full agreement Things go much more smoothly if you don't have to work through an interpreter. And I think it pays off for Triple-I, too. On the average, our fieldmen locate half again as many recruits as our competition. While I waited for my rice, I pulled out the photocopies I'd made of the school records in Non Tai. Here again, I felt, was one more advantage of not having to use an interpreter. I could read Thai well enough to search the records in the branch office of the Ministry of Education by myself. And instead of just looking for grades, I could base my judgments on the other information I found in the files as well. According to what I'd found, Manob Suravit, who was in his last year at the Song Hong high! school, was a very hot prospect. It wasn't just his grades, which! were good but not all that outstanding. It was the whole pattern of his activities which caught my eye. I couldn't tell you what made him stand out from the others, but I've found that since coming to work for Triple-I, I've developed a sort of sixth sense that's rarely wrong in judging students. My meal finally came, a big platter of fried rice, covered with onion greens, and accompanied by a pot of hot black tea. I put Manob's records back in my pocket and looked around me. I suddenly noticed that I was surrounded by a ring of small children, all staring solemnly at me. By now I was used to this sort of thing, though. They don't often see Westerners, and the white skin fascinates them. (A "iatang," incidentally, is a Thai fruit with a white interior pulp.) And watching a Westerner eat is even more fascinating. But I figured I'd fool them. By now I could eat with chopsticks as well as with fork and spoon. I pulled the plate to me, pushed aside the onions (no sense risking a digestive disturbance from uncooked vegetables), and put some hot sauce on the rice. That got another smile out of the proprietor. The Thais are very fond of hot sauces, but most Westerners never get past the burning and crying stage. Then I picked up my chopsticks and set to work. That ring of dark brown eyes followed my every move. Finally one of the kids spoke up. " Farang come two days ago. You know him?" II T dropped my chopsticks. A Westerner here recently? Someone from Brainpower? Or one of the other outfits? I asked him for more information, but he couldn't give any. Nor could the proprietor. I learned only that two days ago a farang had come through the village, talked to a few people, eaten at the restaurant, and gone. Was he accompanied by an interpreter? No, he wasn't. That was some help, but not much. There was nothing to stop Brainpower, or any other of the outfits, from hiring someone who already knew Thai. Just as Triple-I had hired me, in part, because I'd learned Swahili in the Special Forces. I started to get up, then sat back down. If Brainpower had already sewed up Manob, there was nothing I could do about it. And if they hadn't, then there  was no point in getting excited. So I finished my meal without hurrying, even though I was nagged by the question of whether I'd made this trip in vain. I pulled out some money to pay the bill and left the proprietor as big a tip as I thought my expense account could afford. Then I checked with him to make sure I had the right directions to the school and set out again on my mission. The school, too, was completely typical. The floor was up on stilts, so the kids could play under the building when it rained. The one floor held all the classrooms, which were separated by partitions. All around the outside was a balcony and a railing. I went up the stairs and around the balcony to the schoolmaster's office. I ducked my head to get through the doorway and went in. The schoolmaster was at his desk. I put my hands with the palms together, fingers straight and held just under my chin, bobbed my head and said "Sawatdi," which can best be translated as "Good luck to you" and is used for good morning, good evening, good-bye and just about everything else. The schoolmaster rose and returned my greeting. We exchanged some pleasantries, and he complimented me on my Thai. Then I pulled out my authorization from the Ministry of Education to do educational recruiting (in the trade we call it a "headhunting permit") and I showed it to him. He froze up immediately. That surprised me. In Nigeria I was used to having the village Communist denounce me as an agent of imperialism. But in Thailand I very rarely met anything this unfriendly. But there was no help for it. I had to go ahead. "I would like to see Mr. Manob Suravit." "He is not here." That was been here before me. "Has he been recruited by someone else?" "I do not know." "Where is he?" "I do not know." Oh, he was a cool one, the schoolmaster was. He wasn't going to defy me, since I could complain to the Ministry of Education and cause him a lot of trouble. But he wasn't going to help me either. "I wish to inspect Mr. Manob's records." They would have to show whether he'd been recruited or not. "There is no one to help you find them." "Help is not needed. I can read Thai." nphat got him. He couldn't refuse to let me look at the records. But they were no help, except to show that the boy had missed school three days in a row. But the additional information in them, which hadn't been sent on to Non Tai, made me even more certain I wanted to sign him up. I turned back to the schoolmaster. "Can you tell me where he lives?" "I do not know." He was taking a risk with that statement. I felt sure he knew where one of his best students lived. If I could prove he was lying, I could put enough pressure on the Ministry to make him sorry for it But it wasn't worth the trouble, and he probably knew that So I copied down the name of Manob's father and took my leave of the schoolmaster. He didn't reply to my polite farewell. I went back into Song Hong, to the police station, and inquired if they knew where Mr. Sakul Suravit lived. They searched the register and gave me directions. It was off the main cart track, a total of about five miles. Manob must have used a bicycle to get to and from school. It took me about an hour to find the place, and I nearly shook my teeth out on the last half mile of rough trail, before I got off my scooter and pushed it. Finally I reached the Suravit home. It was a three-room thatched house, up on stilts, with some pigs and chickens under the house, avoiding the sun. There was a low fence around the house, probably to keep the chickens out of the fields. I wheeled my scooter through the gate and stopped. I didn't have to wonder what to do next. A young man came down the ladder from the house and walked to meet me. I saw that he was wearing clean khaki shirt and pants, and a pair of Japanese rubber sandals. " Sawatdi . I wish to see Mr. Manob Suravit" "Good afternoon, sir. I am Manob Suravit," he answered in slightly accentd English. "What can I do for you?" "Is your father home, or your mother?" I asked. "My mother is sick, and I am staying home from school to care for the younger children while my father works in his fields. He is not here now, but will be home later." "I would like to talk to them about you going to college, then working in America." And I handed him my headhunting permit H e looked at the document, then nodded his head slowly. "The tarang who was here two days ago had a paper like this one," he said. "But he was from Brainpower Unlimited. He tried to get my father to sign his paper, but my father wanted to think about it. He told the man to come back the next day, but he did not. I have not seen him since." "Do you still have his paper?" "He took it with him. However, I did read it, and I also read it to my father. My father went to school only two years, and does not read well. But," he added proudly, "he is a very good farmer and takes the advice of the man from the Ministry of Agriculture." "Very well," I told him, "then you know what I want. When your father returns I will talk to him about signing my paper. But first I would like you to take some tests." This was the key to whether I would offer to recruit him. Grades weren't always reliable, since the quality of school systems varied. And Triple-I wasn't about to invest big money in someone just on the basis of my hunches about him. They insisted that he be given their tests, to determine his ability and potential. So I unpacked my saddlebags and brought out the test materials. Triple-I had spent a lot of money on the development of these tests. They were so far beyond the old IQ tests as to make comparisons ridiculous. They tested ability to learn, creativity, ability to make and use abstractions, mechanical ability and all kinds of other things. And the beauty of it was that they were completely culture-free. They didn't depend on reading skills peculiar to middleclass American suburbia. I had used the same set of materials in Nigeria, and they would be equally useful in Westchester County or Harlem. The boy took three hours to finish, including a few interruptions to make some tea for his mother, to dust off a baby sister who'd fallen down, and a few other things. But when he was finished, I saw that my intuition had been right. He was one of the best I'd ever tested. He was no Einstein, but he was in the top one or two per cent of the human race. Triple-I just had to have him. We could get a placement bonus of at least fifteen thousand, over and above expenses, once his education was complete. J ust then the boy's father arrived. I introduced myself, we chatted pleasantly for a while and then we got down to business. He suggested that we go inside, so his wife could take part in the discussions too. So the three of us sat around a table, drinking tea. "Let me explain what I offer," I started. "Your son is a very clever boy. He should go to the University after he has finished high school. We will pay his tuition and give him a living allowance while he is in school. He will go to Chulalongkom University, in Bangkok, until his education is completed. Then he will go to America. In America, he will make enough money to live well, and to pay us back for his education. And even to send some home to you." I always added that last statement. It usually helped convince people, and in most cases the recruits actually did send remittances home. The mother spoke up quickly. "But that means he will go away from our home. We will not see him." From her standpoint, this was a strong objection. Thai family bonds are strong. "At first he will not go far," I answered. "He will go to Chulalongkom for seven years. That is only a few hours ride by train from Korat. On holidays he can come home to see you." "The train costs money," the father objected. "True," I replied, "but the living allowance we give him will include enough money for train fares." That was strictly true, but since the boy would have to pay back every penny of it, with interest, it was our experience that he would make fewer and fewer visits jbome as time went on. "ffcit then he will go to America. That is too far away," the mother interjected. "Even when he goes to America," I continued, "any time he wants to, he can fly back to Don Muang Airport, at Bangkok, and then take the train to see you." That, too, was strictly true. He would have just as much opportunity to travel as any other American citizen. But even tourist class fares on the Jumbo jets were enough to discourage his coming home very often. But I saw no point in mentioning that. "But I need the boy to help me in the fields after he finishes high school," the father added. "I have other children to feed and to buy clothes for. If he goes there will be no one to help me." "Surely," I said, as smoothly as I could, "you wouldn't let that stand in the way of your boy getting an education and bettering himself." "Of course not," the father replied. "What kind of a father do you think I am? It is just that I will have to hire a man to help me if he goes." W ell, I thought, now we know what kind of a father you are. We're just haggling over the price. "How much will a hired man cost?" "About two hundred baht a month." I thought for a moment. According to what I had read, that was a bit high for the price of farm labor, but not much. It came to about ten dollars a month, US currency. "That is for a fully experienced' farmer. To hire a boy about your son's age will cost only about one hundred fifty baht a month. And how many years will you need to keep hiring someone?" "My youngest daughter is five. I will need to hire farm help until she has finished school." That was robbery, and I wasn't about to hold still for it. "Does Manob have an older brother?" I knew he did, from the school records. "Yes, he does." "Where is he?" "He lives with his wife, on the other side of Song Hong." "How old was he when he was married?" "He was twenty two." That checked with the records the police had shown me. "Very well, I offer to pay you one hundred fifty baht a month, to hire a man to take Manob's place, until Manob is twenty two." "Manob will need clothes to go away to school," the mother spoke up. "He cannot wear the clothes he has now." "Yes," the father added, "the other man offered us two thousand baht to buy clothes for Manob." I had wondered how soon I'd have to start outbidding Brainpower. Apparently the business of hiring a helper was something the father thought of only after the Brainpower field man had left. I decided to be a bit stubborn, just to let them know I wasn't getting involved in an auction with Brainpower. "The other man did not come back, did he? Perhaps you would rather wait for him and his two thousand baht?" Actually, that was almost pure bluff. I had no intention of walking out of there without a signed contract, if I could possibly help it, no matter what I had to offer. However, it worked. "Well, perhaps he could get by on fewer clothes. How about one thousand baht?" That from the boy's father. "No. I will not go above five hundred baht." Now that I had the boy's father on the non, I was going to keep him that way if I could. ' ' the living allowance, train fares, postage for letters home and lots of other things. Thais learn to haggle shortly after they learn to talk, and they love to do it. After about an hour we ran out of things to haggle about. "Very well," I said, "are we agreed on these terms?" Manob read back to his father what I'd written into the contract Both the parents finally agreed to every word. "Fine. Now here is the contract. You, as the boy's father, sign here. The boy will sign over here." After that, I left as soon as I could, with my copy of the contract safely in my pocket. I'd have to go by the school, to enter the contract on the boy's records. Then I'd have to get back to Non Tai as quickly as possible and register the contract with the Ministry of Education. Then I'd mail the contract back to the home office and get busy tracking down some more prospects. I walked the scooter beck towards the main road until the track was smooth enough to consider riding on. By then the sun was almost setting, so I hurried as fast as I could. It looked as though I'd have to spend the night in Song Hong. I rode through a grove of trees at near top speed. There were long shadows across the road, and I didn't see the wire until just before I hit it. Ill A Tf I had been just a few inches shorter, it would have broken my neck. As it was, it caught me high on my chest and spilled me off my scooter. I relaxed as I went over the back of the saddle, and while the fall knocked the wind out of me, nothing got broken. I lay there in the road on my back, a ring of pain around me just below my ribs. I tried to breathe in. Nothing. I tried to cough. Again nothing. I tried to squeeze my chest. Still nothing. Out of the comer of my eye I saw half a dozen men, waving clubs, run out of the trees. I heaved myself up on my elbows and worked my feet around towards them. Again I tried to suck in some air, and with the feeling that I'd broken through some kind of barrier, my chest muscles started working again. I coughed and sucked in another lungful. I craned my head up and took a look at the cluster of men standing a few feet away. They looked like big, husky farm boys. Probably the biggest in the village. If I had been standing up, the tallest might have come to my shoulder. But although they were tough-looking, they didn't seem to know how to work together. Now that I could breathe again, I wasn't worried. I hadn't spent five years in the Special Forces without learning how to take care of myself. As long as I could take them on one at a time, I figured I'd come out on top. They started to move up to me. I raised my knees slightly, and drew my feet back. As one of them came closer, I hooked my left foot behind his right leg. I slammed his right knee with the heel of my boot. But not too hard. I wasn't interested in doing him any permanent damage. I just wanted him out of the fight for a while. He went over backwards, and I rolled aside to avoid a kick from another one of them. I bounced to my feet and scooped up the club my first victim had dropped. As one ran behind me I stepped forward, swung at another to discourage him from getting too close and turned around. The one who'd been behind me swung his club, but I was out of range. I stepped in and gave him a backhand swipe with my club as he went by. Two down. I turned again, and the rest started to circle around me. I stepped toward one of them. He swung while I was still out of reach, then turned and ran. The other four followed him into the trees. I didn't follow them. Twilight in the tropics is very short, and in a few minutes it was going to be pitch black. Besides, I had nothing to gain from either beating them up or turning them in. I righted my scooter, then stood and thought for a minute. Finally it hit me. The schoolmaster. This had to be his work. No one else knew for sure where I was except the police, and they wouldn't have to go to this kind of subterfuge if they wanted to get rid of me. And it explained why the man from Brainpower hadn't come back. He'd been scared off, or perhaps killed. Maybe I ought to be grateful to the schoolmaster for driving him off, so Triple-I could sew up Manob, but I didn't think it was a good idea to encourage attacks on fieldmen. So I had a couple of score to settle with the schoolmaster. IT e was still in his office, which was the only lighted room in the school building. I didn't worry about him having anyone else around there. He was probably expecting his bully-boys to come back for their payoff, and he certainly wouldn't want any witnesses to that. I stepped into his office and greeted him politely. "Sawatdi," I said. "I met some friends of yours on the way over here, and I thought you'd like to know what happened to them. Two of them were still lying in the road when I left, and the rest were running into the woods." He remained seated at his desk and stared at me with hate-filled eyes. Finally he spoke. "The other man was smart enough not to come back. If you come back again I will see that you don't leave, if I have to kill you myself." I sat down and spoke as mildly as I could. "I'm glad to hear the man representing Brainpower Unlimited was not killed. If he had been, I would not rest until the Thai courts punished you for it. But since he's still alive, he can take whatever action he wishes to. Since I hurt your men worse than they hurt me, I bear no grudges. But would you mind telling me why you did it?" "You are leeches," he grated out. "With this brain drain, you take away our brightest young people, the ones we need most for our future leaders." "But," I replied, "the Ministry of Education has approved our work. Do you think they would approve something which was harmful to Thailand?" "Bah!" he snorted. "Thailand has had corrupt governments in the past. I would not find it hard to believe that you have corrupted this one, too." "All right, so approval by the Ministry doesn't impress you. Then would you tell me specifically who we're hurting, and how?" "You hurt the men and women themselves. You sell them into slavery." "What do you mean, slavery? I don't think the average scientist or doctor in America is living in slavery. All we do is lend our recruits enough money to pay for their education. We're a private, profit-making corporation, and we expect them to pay us back. I don't call that slavery, either." "Bat it's not just the cost of his education that you make him pay back. He has living expenses to pay back, too. You allow him to live in a very high style, much better than he would live at home; to induce him to leave home. You bribe him. And you bribe bis parents, too, with all kinds of payments. And the worst of it is that he has to pay you back for the bribe money." IV T leaned forward and stuck my finger out at him. "Now you just wait a minute. Let's be realistic. Take this young man, Manob. Could he have gone to college without our help?" "No, of course not. His parents cannot send him. He took the scholarship exams and did well, but not well enough. There are just not enough scholarships, even for those who are qualified." "Right," I said. "Without our help, he'd spend the rest of his life on the farm. Now to complete his education, including living costs, tuition, and what we pay his parents, will amount to about five thousand dollars in US money. When he's employed in America, he'll make at least twice that much a year. Our contract calls for him to pay back the loan, with interest, over a period of ten years. It'll cost him under a thousand a year, including interest charges. That's less than ten per cent of his salary. That sure beats running a farm out here in the boondocks." He was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again. "Very well. Perhaps the boy does benefit. But how about Thailand? You are stealing our educated young men and women, men and women we will need as our country develops. Every year Chulalongkom graduates a hundred Ph.D.'s. But only twenty-five of those stay in Thailand. The rest go to America. You are taking college graduates from a country which has few of them and sending them to a country which has many already." I leaned back and sighed. This man was a hard nut to crack. "Okay, let's look at the facts. It's true we have more Ph.D.'s per capita in the US than you do in Thailand. But we still don't have enough to fill our demand. So we import them from you. But you're not losing anything in the process. Educating our recruits won't cost Thailand a single baht. We pay Chulalongkom University not only the normal tuition and I fees for the students we put through there, but the full audited cost, plus a bonus. The University actually makes a profit on the students we send through, a profit which they can use to help make up their losses on their regular students." # #Hphat may be true," he answered, "but we still have to maintain a University big enough for one hundred graduate students, just to get twenty-five a year for ourselves." "But you've missed the whole point," I protested. "Because of the large number of students put through by the various headhunting outfits, Chulalongkom can take advantage of economies of scale. Administrative overhead can be spread over more students. And since you need more faculty members anyway, they can afford to specialize. One professor can teach three sections of the same course, instead of teaching three different courses. You have a better faculty than you would in a smaller school, and the students you will employ domestically are getting a better education than they would in a small school." The schoolmaster seemed to have calmed down somewhat. The hatred and anger were gone. He still wasn't convinced, but he was arguing rationally. "Despite all you say," he said, "these are still people we need in Thailand. And you're taking them away." "No, I disagree," I replied. "You can't say we're taking people you need domestically. You're already training as many Ph.D.'s for domestic use as you can find jobs for. Or if you're not, the answer is to provide more scholarships for deserving students. But don't criticize us for importing into the US some Ph.D.'s who would have stayed on the farm if it hadn't been for our help." "Look," I went on, "picture it this way. What's the ideal industry for an underdeveloped country? One which calls for high labor input, low capital input, and low land input, right?" He nodded, slowly. I could see I was finally getting through. "Well," I added, "that describes a University perfectly. About # of Chulalongkom's costs are pay of faculty and staff. The capital investment per student is small, and no raw materials are required. Producing Ph.D.'s for export, if managed properly, can be a very profitable enterprise for an underdeveloped country. And I think your Ministry of Education is seeing that it's managed properly. You don't object to the export of oranges, or of corn. Both are big moneymakers for Thailand. Why do you object to raising Ph.D.'s for export?" The schoolmaster answered me in an almost friendly tone. "You have pointed to the big problem," he said. "If we export oranges, the tree is sitill here to grow more. If we export com, we keep some seed com for the next crop. But men and women capable of earning Ph.D.'s are not grown like oranges or com. They happen by chance. And' when we export them to America, their children are bom in America. Exporting Ph.D.'s lowers the average intelligence of the next generation." T replied slowly. "What you say is true, as far as it goes. However, look at the numbers. In Thailand this year there are about # eighteen-year-olds. We are interested in the top ten per cent of these, or about #. Of these, we take less than a hundred. You lose more than that to fatal diseases and accidents. The genetic damage we do to Thailand by importing Ph.D.'s from you is negligible. And if you were really worried about it, you could make up for it by providing some incentives for your domestically employed Ph.D.'s to have more children." "I have to admit the force of your arguments," he finally answered. "Neither your recruits, nor Thailand, is hurt by your importing of Ph.D.'s. But why should we help you?" "Why, you benefit economically. The benefits are already considerable. And the projections of the Ministry of Education show that in a decade, the export of Ph.D.'s will be your sixth largest source of foreign exchange. You ought to be cooperating with the program, instead of fighting it." He looked thoughtful. "You are right," he said. "I've been making a mistake. I'll keep you in mind as a source of scholarships for my bright students who can't find a way to go to college." "Fine," I said. "And we'll even give you a bonus for every recruit you get for us. And don't worry about it costing the student anything," I added as his face started to cloud up. "It will cost the student less than if we'd had to go to the usual expense of having a fieldman recruit him. You'll be doing a favor to all concerned, including yourself. Now if you'll excuse me," I said as I stood up, "I must find a place to stay tonight. I have a long way to go tomorrow, and more work to do." He stood up and returned my farewell with a vigorous nod of his head. I left him sitting at his desk, wearing a smile on his face. T ate in the afternoon of an ugly '  fall day, a forty-year-old topologist, employed to teach mathematics at a university he despised, bored by his students and frightened that he had done everything of significance in his life that he would ever do, blundered head down into a group of students handing out flowers and handbills. Before he could retrieve his dropped book bag and move on to continue composing in his head a memorable letter of resignation, his eye had fallen on a grubby teenage girl, and he was hopelessly entrapped. Thinking to break the spell, he boldly said to her, "Aren't you in my class in elementary topology?" She licked the raspberry snow cone she was holding and said, without a trace of a smile, "You must be mad. I'm not a student, just a wandering Gypsy fortuneteller." She held out the snow cone for him to take a lick. "Do you have a place where we could go, and I would tell your fortune?" The mathematician knew she was no Gypsy, for your modern, urban Romany never allow themselves to be as dirty as she was. He was certain she was putting him on, but his mood of desperate boredom was such that he said, "Cra-a-a-zy, Gypsy! Fall up to my pad, and we'll tell fortunes and other lies 'til the world melts." They left hand in hand under the eyes of forty witnesses. Within their own sub-culture, however, the rebel students conformed to a rigid code; and they would have died rather than give information to the fuzz or even to the Dean of the Faculty; so the professor's absolute breach of propriety in picking up a student went unremarked and unreported. When he had taken off her clothes, the girl was every bit as dirty as she appeared to be, but this only made him more determined to take advantage of her. Later, he persuaded her to shower by promising to bathe with her; and she looked, when she left, with her rum-colored hair in two long plaits, like a fresh-scrubbed Girl Scout. The crust turned out to be her equivalent of the make-up that squares use; when he came past the common the next day, she was as delectably grimy as ever, and she held a fresh snow cone purple with grape syrup. The two joined hands and went directly to his apartment. The young woman hardly spoke until late in the evening, after they had showered together. She was towelling her hair, and the information came indistinctly. "I went to the Provost's office today," she said, "and told him about us." Hphe professor was so uncharacJ teristically content he contemplated the ruin of his academic career with pleasure. "All right, big mouth, how are we going to live?" "I'm not really a Gypsy," she said, "but I really was in a carnival once, when I ran away before. I know how to dodge swords in a sword basket. Could you be an East Indian sword magician? We could pick up a show somewhere and travel right along with them." "By God," cried the topologist. "I can do better than that! It's been a long time since I did any engineering work, but I have a little laboratory curiosity that will just fill the bill. Come with me to the animal house in the basement of the Psychology Department, and I'll show you something you won't believe." "Try me, baby," replied his inamorata. "You'd be surprised at what I can believe." They repaired to the noisome cages in which the experimental animals were kept, and the professor secured a sturdy mouse. Selecting a few strips of clear plastic from a rack, he lit a burner and uncorked a container of plastic adhesive. In a few minutes, the topologist had cobbled up a container which defied the eye to define its exact shape, but which most often seemed to be a lumpy cylinder. In a trice, he thrust the mouse in and clapped the square top down. The mouse could be seen through the plastic, but he seemed to be in a single fixed position, floating in midair with his paws and tail extended just as when he was inserted. Heating a pointed rod, the professor pierced a hole first in one side of the bulgy cylinder, and then in the other. In a moment, when the long pin had cooled, he introduced its sharp point through the hole again, and hav-, ing located the mouse properly, skewered the rodent through the heart so that the point of the sharpened rod came out the second hole. Swinging the cylinder over the girl's hand with a little shake, the professor deposited a tiny drop of bright arterial mouse blood on her wrist As She looked at the crimson drop, tears appeared, sparkling on her eyelids. "Big deal, big man," she said. "Mouse murder. I don't think a wild mouse would walk into that plastic pipe, do you?" C L T T eart of my heart," he replied. "It's not a pipe. It isn't even a cylinder, and it certainly isn't a mousetrap. This is a tesseract, as you would know if you had ever read a popular work on topology." "Oh, all right, I know what a tesseract is: an expanded cube, a cube with a cube on each face. That mouse cage doesn't look like six cubes surrounding a cube to me." "No, otherwise our mouse would be dead all over. This is a tesseract which is a temporal illusion." "A temporal illusion!" "Yes, my dear," he said, "a temporal illusion. Topology teaches us that mathematical properties can be quite independent of apparent shape. A circle is still a circle, even though it looks like a scalloped pie crust -- as it may, if it is drawn on a wavy surface. This mouse cage is a cubed cube which is partly displaced along the dimension of time. That's why it appears formless and shifting. Here, feel it." Sure enough, to the touch, it was solid enough: a cube with a cube on each face; but even when held in the hand and sensed by touch, the object still appeared to be a rippling cylinder, and the mouse still appeared to be stock still. "This mouse looks dead. Eccch!" she said. Deftly the topologist withdrew the tiny sword, pried off the top, and shook Mr. Mouse out in his hand, where the charming little fellow at once sat up on his haunches and waved his forepaws, as if demanding cheese. "How did you do that?" cried the girl. "Simply, really," replied the thinker. "The exterior flickers in and out of this moment of time, because of the subtle twist I imparted to the shape when I made it; but the inside is fixed in time, because much of the internal mass is stretched all the way around the very large but finite continuum of space and time which is our universe. This little rascal's 'time' has passed so slowly that the powerful regenerative and repair processes of his body have worked as if instantaneously, and the apparently mortal wound dealt him was no more than a pin prick. Do you think you could get into a large tesseract like this one and let me run a rapier through you... knowing it would do you no harm?" She clapped her hands in pleasure. "Oh yes, lover! That'll be so much more of a mind buster than some old wicker basket that everybody knows I dodge the sword in." S o they hied themselves to a plastic supply house and thence to a dog-and-pony show that was in the neighborhood, and for a long time, every thing went like a guided trip with Tim Leary. Audiences were transfixed by the girl's beauty. She was considerably cleaner under the difficult circumstances of carnival trouping than she had been when soap and water were conveniently to be had, and when the topologist drove a sharpened fencing foil through her lovely body, clad as lightly as local ordinance allowed, the crowds gasped. When the box was rotated to show the point of the sword encamadined, strong men fainted. Later they would press forward and pay a dollar apiece to examine the tiny wound as it closed up and disappeared, usually midway up her delightfully articulated rib cage. Trouping the carnival together was an idyll. Still, even if forty years is not old, neither is it young; and the doctor of mathematics at last realized that he was bored again. The girl's vocabulary never enlarged itself appreciably, and the snow cone remained her favorite confection. The difference in their ages was sufficient for their basic sex attitudes to be irreconcilable. For him, a certain overtone of the forbidden gave carnal love its highest stimulation; but for her, sex was just another natural function, like perspiring or excreting, so that the level of their love-making remained at mere technical proficiency. After the fashion her generation had adopted, she was faithful. There might be others later, her manner implied by its playfulness; but for now, she did not share her favors out. He was denied even the sour spice of jealousy. At the end of their last appearance each evening, she was often wearing only transparent pantaloons and a shiny little brief, and when they had walked back to their quarters, she would hold up her arms and, stamping her naked feet softly like a harem dancer, say, "Help me get ready for my bath, lover." If he approached and began to roll down the waist band of her sateen pants, she would drop her arms and begin to undress him too. Later they would bathe each other. They had almost no other conversation.  t last the idyll became an en- slavement to the professor. He found some respite when he learned that a Hindu tortureman, their neighbor in the show, who slept on nails, poured boiling lead in his eyes, and so on, was a Failed M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rawalpundi. By talking to him, the topologist was able to keep from going quite mad. Still, he was a little off. He loathed the girl and dreamed only of what he would do when she left him; but she would not leave and continued to raise her arms to him and stamp her feet, as exquisitely irritating as a kitten which continues to claw one's sock after one has done playing with it. He began to do everything badly, even their turn in the show, which had never much interested him after he put the big tesseract together. Once he missed the hole with his thrust, and the plastic deflected the point of the foil into his toe. This was a real wound, in real time, not spread along the space-time continuum, and was extremely painful for a week. Each time he limped, the pain made him more resolved to be quit of her, until at last his fertile topological mind saw the way. He had a regular armorer's store of swords with which he made play in their act, and one evening he laid handy, next to their bed, a very passable imitation of a Roman short sword. In its day, that design had been a great technological breakthrough for the weapons makers, and it was beautifully shaped to destructive stabbing. When they came in that night, he skimmed off her tawdry cape with a flourish, and as she lifted her round arms and stamped one foot, he peeled the bottom of her costume off in one extravagant gesture, and then gave her the pleasure of chasing him and tearing off his garments. As they were towelling each other after their ritual coupling and bathing, he kissed her, tender but preoccupied, as it were, and said, "My dear, would you mind letting me practice that last pass in the act? I just don't seem to be putting that foil home right." Qhe was so pleased to have him  pleasant again that she scampered into the spare tesseract they had in the quarters, a few drops from the bath still glistening on one flank. She turned her face up to him with a grin that almost made him reconsider the irreversible act he had planned. Then he remembered the months of boredom and hardened his heart. Decisively, he tapped the top home. Without a tremor, he put the Roman sword as nearly into her heart as he could judge its location through the subtle time shifting in the plastic. With that, he snapped off the blade, so that the sword also was within the spread, slowed effect of the moving time field; and gave the construction a knowledgeable kick or two which caused it to collapse into itself. Instead of a knobby cylinder, as it had appeared when it was an expanded cube blurred by time, it now appeared to be a single cube about six inches on a side, with an abstract pattern in each face. The collapsed cube was much heavier than it looked, but not nearly as heavy as the girl, for a substantial part of her mass was distributed along the whole of the cylindri-co-spherical spacetime continuum. As he gazed at the mirror-like surface of one square face, an eye and eyebrow slowly spread flatly across the plane; but there was neither panic nor recognition in the eye as he stared into it. He realized that to the occupant of this peculiar box, his movements were so fast in appearance as to be a mere blur. Whistling, the professor packed the weighty cube into his bag, and strolled off the lot, casually remarking to his Hindu neighbor, "So long, we're jumping this flea circus." By changing into one of his old natural shoulder suits at the bus station, he simply disappeared as Grax, the Swordsman of Time carnated himself as a topologist of considerable talent who had been vaguely on sabbatical for a while. nphe frustrations that had so nearly consumed him before his adventure seemed to have been burned and purged away. He settled with pleasure into a new academic routine and became expert in its execution. Once in five years, perhaps, he had a really promising student; but the scarcity no longer bothered him. As he advanced up the ladder of academic tenure and preferment, he was able to place self, and life was as good, he now knew, as it was ever going to be. The heavy cube was a paperweight on the desk in his apartment. No one else ever recognized the shifting abstract patterns in its silvery sides as the topologized contours of a dead human being. At great intervals, there would drift across one face or another of the prism some recognizable anatomical feature with which the professor was intimately acquainted, and he would feel a vague regret for his act and a light stirring, as of the ashes in a cold grate, of his appetite for the one adventure of his life. He would stuff his pipe, turn the pages of the Journal of Topology and immerse himself once more in the calm, sweet life of the university. When he was sixty years old and almost bald, there appeared in his classes the student of his dreams, who understood everything he said in his arcane specialty and replied with fresh and elegant insights into the intuitive sort of math in which they both delighted. Objectively, he knew the boy was neat and trim rather than handsome, yet subjectively (and privately, of course: he was very proper now), he always felt the boy was "good looking." This feeling puzzled him until one day he had to move a stack of old college annuals and, browsing, as one will, he suddenly came on his own senior picture. His best student was enough like his youthful self to be a double, or at least a younger brother. Qhortly after that, the professor  confided the story of his escapade to the boy. He could not have said why he did so, and it certainly was not wise; but the student was beginning to betray the same weird talent the professor had for translating topological abstractions into hardware that did peculiar things; and somehow the tale just told itself. He had become very fond indeed of his disciple. The boy, who affected the total amorality which was the fashion of his generation, was nevertheless shocked; but he was also intrigued. He picked up the box and shook it. "Maybe she's alive," he said. "After all, inside it's only been an instant. Let's unlock it." "Don't be ridiculous," the professor said, taking the cube back and setting it on his desk in a definite manner. "In the first place, she's not alive. While die's in the construction, there's no evidence of the crime. Second, if she were alive, she might go to the ix) lice; or worse yet, she might expect me to take up that dreadful, boring liaison with her again. And in the third place, we can't unlock it. That was the whole point of breaking the sword. The cube's a closed system now, and no part of the interior is available to this aspect of time and space. Eventually she'll be equally distributed through the entire universe. Absolutely not! I forbid you to think about it. When are you going to give me that paper on topological re-intervertebrates?" Conversation languished, and the student shortly took his leave. A day or two later, the professor found the boy fiddling the edges of the cube with a device made of mirrors, and they had a genuine quarrel, but gradually fell back almost into their former sympathetic teacher-student relation. "ne day the student appeared  in the professor's apartment with a tiny glittering piece of metal in his hand, the shape of which was extraordinarily hard to see. The whole thing seemed to flicker in and out of the mathematician's sight. "What the hell have you got there?" he asked the boy in irritation.  # "It's a chrome-plated, selfpowered, retractable, inverted, universally jointed and fully gurgitated mobius strip," the young man said. The professor laughed. Every schoolboy knows a mobius strip is a band' one end of which has been given a half twist before joining it to the other to make a circlet. The consequence of that little twist (try it) is that the mobius strip is a geometric figure which has only one side and one edge; though common sense, looking at it, can plainly discern two sides and two edges. However, a pencil drawn down the center of "one side" will meet its own mark and there will then be seen to be a line drawn on "both sides"... because there is only one side, you see? But every schoolboy knows that's all a mobius strip is: just a curiosity. Anything else you do to it changes it from being a mobius strip. So it can't be improved by chroming it or powering it or anything else. The professor pointed all this out to his student in a rather overbearing manner. He finished by saying, "And I suppose you're going to tell me it has some practical application." "Yes," said the boy, "it has." And before the professor could stop him, he had reached across the desk, penetrated into the shiny cube with one half of the glittering mobius strip and fished out the shattered remnant of a short Roman stabbing sword. In an instant, the old familiar bulgy cylinder was present on the desk, full size, and in another, a completely naked young woman had leaped out of it onto the floor. In stupefacation, the professor saw a pink, three-cornered scar, obviously just healing, on her rib cage, and noticed there were still drops of water glistening on her flank. "Sweetheart!" she cried, "what was that butcher knife? I had to dodge like crazy!" And she engulfed the student in a squidlike embrace. A moment later she saw the professor and recoiled. "Who is this bald-headed old creep?" she said. "I draw the line at voyeurs, honey." And with a wink and a nod, she and the student dumped the professor into the expanded cube and collapsed it about him. T#ven in the endless instant ' which is the inside of his device, time has begun to seem long to the topologist. He knows the girl and the student are long since dust in the whirling, kaleidoscopic world outside. He is beginning to be transparent, so he knows his substance is slowly plating out along the entire cylindrico-spherical space-time continuum. He has realized that when he is fully distributed, the universe will be at an end; and he has composed a most astounding paper in his head explaining the whole phenomenon. His only regret is that he will never be able to send it to the Journal of Topology for publication. This Month in IF -- by Robert Silverberg by A. Bertram Chandler by John Brunner Three good reasons for reading science-fiction's favorite magazine , winner of the Hugo award for two years running . Don't miss the April issuel for your information nphe scientific name of the potato plant is Solarium tuberosum, and it is an entrenched opinion in Europe that the biggest potatoes grow in the fields of the dumbest peasants. But if you want to quote this proverb within earshot of one of the aforementioned peasants you say that "the volume of the tubers of Solanum tuberosum is inversely proportional to the intelligence of its producer." The ordinary potato, like the sweet potato, is an American plant; and many years ago, in a description of Mexico, I read the statement that potatoes, when planted in Yucatan, begin to taste sweetish after the first generation and have turned into sweet potatoes after the third generation. I don't know who saddled the innocent visitor to Mexioo with that hoax. Factually speaking the sweet potato is a member of the Convolvulus or morning glory family, while the ordinary potato is one of the nightshades. They are not at all related except that both are flowering plants. By now it must have become clear that this column is going to be about the potato, the lowly spud. That colloquial term, one can sometimes read, is supposed to have been derived from the initials of an anti-potato society said to have been in existence around the year #. The letters are supposed to stand for Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet. A nice story, but a "spud" actually is a special kind of narrow-bladed spade used for cutting roots -- the name of the tool was transferred to what it brought to light. The early history of the potato is fairly complicated, as will soon be seen; but let us dwell on the names of this useful vegetable for awhile. The potato had been "discovered" by the Spaniards in the realm of the Incas, where it went under the name of papa. The Spaniards could not adopt this name, which in their own language designates the pope. A tribal dialect proved more useful by furnishing the word patata; we still use it in a little changed form. In Italy the new vegetable was called taratufllo or taratuffoli; to the Frenchman Olivier de Serres this sounded clumsy, and he coined a French equivalent: cartoufle. However the French, when potatoes became common, used another name, pomme de terre, or " earth apple." The Dutch adopted that name, in translation, of course, and called it Aardappel. The Germans, on the other hand, adopted the earlier French name, making it Kartollel, and the Russians, who got their potatoes from Germany also took over the "German" name. The Hungarians seem to have imported their first potatoes from Burgandy because their word is still burgonya. 'Tphe continent of origin of the cultivated potato is South America, specifically the West Coast of South America, and more specifically the large island of Chiloe, located just off shore under # southern latitude. The outstanding expert on the history of cultivated plants, the late Professor Nikolai Ivanovitch Vavilov, considered the Chiloe strain to be the main ancestor of our potato for an interesting reason. The tropical versions, he said, were adapted to a climate where the length of the day does not vary much throughout the year. But Europe north of the Alps and Russia (and, of course, the United States north of # northern latitude) have long summer days. Under these conditions the tropical South American forms fail to produce tubers. The Chiloe strain, however, was adapted to long summer days and became the most important for this reason. Potatoes reached Europe beginning about #, and older writers on cultivated plants invariably assumed that they were brought in the familiar form of the tubers. More recently this assumption has been re-examined and proved wrong. The ships did not sail from, say, Antofagasta to Europe with a cargo of potatoes for the purpose of introducing the new plant. They sailed for many reasons, most of them larcenous by present-day standards, and they had no schedules. They stayed at sea for weeks at a time and then spent more weeks at various stopover places, the whole voyage adding up to years. Potatoes, just dumped into barrels, simply do not last that long. In addition to the long travel times during which tubers would have rotted away or dried out, another factor speaks against the older assumption. Nobody then, from the simplest peasant to the most learned botanist-physician, had ever raised a plant from a piece of a tuber with an "eye" in it. Plants grew from seeds and sometimes from a transplanted" root. Tubers were not known to these people; the only edible "underground" vegetables were beets and turnips, that had been planted, and truffles, that just happened without cultivation. In short: the potato must have traveled as seeds. Who carried those seeds? Since it is always easy to credit somebody whose name is famous for other reasons, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake have all been hailed for the introduction of the potato. But the facts of history happen to contradict. Sir Walter Raleigh could not have brought potatoes from Virginia in # because there were no potatoes in Virginia before #, or even later. And he never went to Peru where they were actually cultivated in his time. As for Sir John Hawkins, it is true that he brought something from America in #, but it was Ipomoea batatas, the sweet potato. Sir Francis Drake seems to have been credited just on principle; in Offenburg, southwest Germany, there even stands his statue with an inscription proclaiming that he brought potatoes to Europe "in the Year of Our Lord #." But there is no contemporary record that he did. The ones who actually did are nameless, though it is certain that they were Spaniards, and it is likely that they were monks. And it may have been done because of suspected medicinal properties rather than because of the food value. Tt is known that Spaniards in what is now Colombia, Ecuador and Chile knew about potatoes around the middle of the sixteenth century but refused to eat them. On the other hand the place where potatoes were first eaten John Gerard of London, holding a potato flower. From the title page of a late edition of his Herball . in Europe was a hospital in Seville in #. That there was a medical aura around the new plant is shown by the fact that Philip II of Spain ordered potatoes sent to him from Peru. After they had been harvested the king sent a number of tubers to the pope, and the pope passed them on to his ambassador to the Netherlands because he was sick. Some of them, in turn, were passed on to the Prefect of Mons, Philippe de Suvry, and he gave two to Jules Charles de l'Escluse (or Carolus Clusius, #-#). Clusius received this gift because he was supervisor of the herb and flower gardens of Emperor Maximilian II of Austria. Clusius cultivated them in the Imperial Gardens of Vienna and Frankfurt am Main. Later, when he planned the Botanical Garden of Leyden (Holland), the potato took root there too, so that Clusius should be credited with the actual introduction of the potato in Continental Europe. The main interest may have been medical, but the fact that the potato plant has very pretty flowers seems to have helped. Rudolph Jakob Camerarius, physician and botanist, grew them in his garden at Numberg in #. Count von Helfenstein had potato plants in his garden in Silesia in #. The Landgrave of Hessen-Cassel cultivated them in # and sent a bag of tubers to King Christian I of Saxony during the following year. That the pretty flower intrigued many is also shown by the fact that John Gerard of London had himself pictured on the title page of one of his works holding a potato flower. (Fig. #.) John Gerard (#-#) was professionally what was then known as a "barber-surgeon," but plants were his main interest. He had a famous garden himself and was also the supervisor of the Fig. #. The earliest known picture of a potato plant. From John Gerard's Herball of #. The name used by Gerard was Battata Virginiana, indicating his mistaken belief that the plant was native to Virginia. gardens of Lord Burleigh. His first literary work was a list and description of all the plants growing in his own garden in Holborn; this was followed in # by a much bigger work with the title, The Herball or Generali Historie of Plantes. It contains the first published picture of a potato plant. (Fig. #.) nphis Herball, sad to relate, was not really John Gerard's own work. It was a piece of literary shenanigans. A Dutchman, Rembert Dodoens (Latinized as Dodonaeus, #-#), who for a time had been court physician to Emperor Maximilian II, had written a book the medicinal "virtues" of plants that was published in #. It was written in Flemish, but Clusius immediately translated it into French as Histoire des plantes. This was followed by other plant books, and in # the publisher van der Loe brought out a collection of Dodoens's writings that became known as the Pemptade s. Then the London publisher John Norton requested a London physician, Dr. Priest, to translate the Pemptade s into English, but Dr. Priest died before he finished his work. John Gerard said piously in the foreward to his Herball that Dr. Priest had started a translation, "but being prevented by death, his translation likewise perished." Not so, barber-surgeon Gerard I Actually Gerard had taken the translation, finished it, edited it and added a number of items. One of the added items was the picture of the potato plant. But as Gerard thought that it had come from Virginia, he named it accordingly. A much better description, and also a much better picture, was published in #I by Clusius (Fig. #.) The book had the title RaiioTum Plantarum Historia -- the history of rare plants. Actually the potato was not rare any more in Europe at the time. Contemporary chroniclers tell us that Silesian peasants made fires of straws and twigs and roasted the tubers in the ashes. But elsewhere in Europe the potato was suspect then and for many years to come. It had first been grown in herb gardens among many herbs known to be poisonous. It probably was poisonous too, thought the suspicious Europeans, and besides there was a taint of magic Fig. #. Somewhat stylized potato plant from the Prodromus of Gaspard (or Caspar) Bauhin, #. Bauhin used the name Solan um tuberosum eculentum. about something that grew underground. The peasants would have nothing to do with "the devil's apples." It needed a number of years with bad crops and famines (#-#) to convince even the superstitious that these "apples" could be eaten without harm to body and soul. What could happen when you were dealing with a plant of which the average man knew nothing is nicely illustrated by a story about the city councillors of Berlin. Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince of Brandenburg and known to history as the Great Elector (#), had heard of the new vegetable. There was a park in Berlin known as the Lust gar ten (pleasure garden), and in #I he ordered the planting of potatoes in it. When they were ready to be harvested he invited the city councillor to a meal; they were to tell him what they thought of potatoes. It is claimed that the cook who was to prepare the meal had never seen a potato plant before. He did not know about the tubers -- or if he did he distrusted them -- so he had the round green capsules containing the seeds picked for the meal. They felt pretty hard to him, so he simmered them for a long time with a pinch of salt. It so happens that the seed capsules have quite a bitter taste. The councillors took one bite and felt distressed. How could they thank their prince for this "treat"? Some reasoned that something might still have to be done, but additional salt and pepper only made it worse. Melted butter ameliorated the situation to some extent -- but not enough. Well, they had been asked to state their opinion, and this they had to do, even if the situation was unpleasant all around. They composed a careful document that began with an assertion of utmost loyalty and went on to say that none of those present had been pleased with the new vegetable. Its taste was bitter and tart, and it did not become palatable, not even when sugared. fTThile the story of how the  ' potato came to Europe is incomplete, the story of how it came to the United States is virtually nonexistent. The colonists in Virginia and Carolina may or may not have grown potatoes from seeds or tubers obtained from Spanish sea captains. The earliest authentic report from the United States says that potatoes were grown at Londonderry, N. H., in #, and that the plants had been brought over from Ireland. And that's why the plant from the island of Chiloe off South America came to be called the Irish potato in North America. On Newsstands Soon! the Moon I who's been on the Moon too long. In fact, he had to return to Earth. A beautiful evening on Earth And he'd better, at least once was just the thing for a man every once in a while. But once Keep off Earth, you Lunarians! The gravity's enough to kill you, even if the local customs don't! in awhile, how often was that? The doctor he asked that question of shook his head. "No matter how long or how short a time you stay away, you're going to run into difficulties," he said. "You'll be mighty uncomfortable on Earth after living on Luna. Why not give it up, or else go back for good?" That was the problem, Earth or the Moon, you just couldn't have both. "I got a girl there, that's all," said Martin. "She's beautiful and good -- " " -- and can outwalk you and outrun you; hit harder than you and dance harder than you. You're sagging; she's bouncing. You've been outwitted by gravity, son. Find yourself a Moon Maid." Martin was anguished. He had a good job with the government on the Moon, and there were office girls all around him who would jump at the chance to go with him anywhere. And when one uses the word jump, it is singularly appropriate. "We had a jumpin' good time," Martin's office partner would say, for instance. "Mary and me." On one particular occasion, he added casually, "By the way. I got a Mabel stacked away where I live who's looking for a good-looking Geophile such as yourself. She's homesick for stories about Earth. Why not give her a tumble?" Hard as it was for Martin to get Barbara off his mind, he did go dancing one night with Mabel and a bunch of other Slant-people. If you wonder about the term "Slant-people," don't. It's you and me when we're on the Moon. On Earth when you walk you slant forward some but it's not noticeable. On the Moon when you walk, it is: you slant forward a full thirty-five degrees. It's a natural compensation for the low gravity. You unconsciously put yourself into a series of falling positions, much like the Moon itself as it falls around the Earth. That's why dancing is popular on the Moon. You hold each other up, for the most part. People get tired of walking with their faces near the floor. Anyway, Mabel didn't work out. She had a permanent crick in her neck from trying to keep her eyes level the five years she'd been here, and she was unable to dance in the vertical. This created' problems. He put pressure on the small of her back trying to force her to assume a better center of gravity, but she didn't know what the problem was and couldn't cooperate. He told her some stories about Earth, as it was three months ago when he left, but made it all so uninteresting, deliberately, that she decided to stay outside Earth the rest of her life like the medics told her she had to. A fartin pursued his lonely-- course, every day going to forming his serious exercises. The trouble was it was easy to chin yourself, so what were you gaining? You were exercising for the Moon's gravity. There were, of course, machines which rotated you at one gee. They were not satisfactory, inasmuch as the center bar was only six feet away from his feet; simulated gravity fell off too fast. There were the sliding racks which whizzed you around the floor and the ceiling of the gymnasium and pulled at you with one gee also. On these racks one could do regular sitting-up exercises and even lift weights. But it was hazardous considering that some of this was done upsidedown. Besides, there were only were in demand. Other means of exercise included workouts from the masseurs, but one could not afford them all the time. Besides, it was all a very big bore. Martin went to his superior in cost-accounting and asked or begged for some kind of solution. "I've got this girl on Earth," he began, "and she's beautiful and good -- " " -- and can already outslug you," said his superior in such a manner that Martin knew he had run into the oldest and corniest of Moon jokes: your Earth girl can wrap you into a pretzel and serve you with her beer. "But I have to go back," insisted Martin, "before it's too late. I figure if you could let me have a month I could take a crash exercise course and build myself back up into the he-man I was. I think you understand the problem." "I do indeed," his superior said, shrugging. He opened the periscope on his desk, rotated the over-Moon viewer twenty degrees and picked up Earth. "There it is," he said, a note of sadness creeping into his voice. "I'll never go there again, nor will my wife and children." "You found it possible to give up Earth," nodded Martin tragically. "Had to, son. But my family stays with me wherever I go, so it isn't too bad. Once a year I alternate jobs and go to Mars and spend a few months there. We run into old friends, scads of them, migrating back and forth for the same reason we do, to tone up our muscles and our nervous plexi with a shot of a heavier gravity, so we keep our Tarot packs hot. But my two boys -- " He chuckled, and gestured at Earth. "Look at it. There's where my memories and all my nostalgias lie. But my two growing sons get the shivers from it, because it looks heavy. I don't know whether this is because they've been studying Earth in school, or whether they know instinctively they aren't built to live there. Such is life. "As for your request," he said, opening the drawer in front of him and extracting some forms, "it's a fairly common one. Take a month -- take six weeks, if you want. Maybe you can talk your girl into taking the Government tests and get her on the Moon. That's about the only solution I can see, unless you decide to do it the hard way and stay on Earth, which would be a pity. However, maybe you'll decide your girl isn't worth the sacrifice." "Oh, she's worth it, sir. She's really worth any sacrifice. She's beautiful and high-principled -- and good. And," he added, straignt-faced, "she can probably already outslug me." M artin took the shuttle out of Luna City two days later. He took all his possessions with him, because of the uncertainty of his venture. He sat with the operator of the shuttle and broodingly watched Earth get larger. There was Home; there was where his emotions were rooted, and those emotions would never let go. But he would blossom so far beyond the actual soil of Terra that, some day, he could never return. This was man's destiny, to rain his seeds on the other worlds of the universe and always, achingly, to remember Earth. There was one other passenger aboard the shuttle, who came forward just once and got himself introduced to Martin. This other passenger was a remarkable person, with the beautifully shaped head, the symmetrical and pleasing jawline, the forthright expression, the massively formed hands and arms of a man bom to the military. He was tired, now attached to the United Nations.' "The UN won't let me get trapped on the Moon or Mars and certainly not -- " he almost spat the name -- "Enceladus. They give me two days on the Moon, no more. I make my inspection of the Base and write my report and then come back to Earth, which I'm doing now. I won't get off Earth again until after the next session of the UN. Then I go to Mars." "That's a bit longer away," said Martin. "But the flights are all rotary gravitized, so I hear." "By law," nodded Randolph. "The gravity-terrace effect; you pick your own weight." He produced his card. "You've got a problem, so if you want, call me, if only to talk. Until the UN meets, however I can be talked into anything. However, I do have a suggestion. Make an application when we land on the Platform to stay at the City Training-In Center -- that's the best-equipped and best-staffed rehabilitation center in the Americas. I should know." A massive fist rubbed at massive jaw; his gaze fastened pensively and somewhat darkly on the inexorably looming planet of their birth. One could imagine his lips, half-curled, muttering a curse, for reasons unknown. He returned his full attention to Martin. "That's another thing," he said. "In any event, if anybody can crank you up to run like an Earth machine, they can." He smiled. "By the time you get to Earth, Martin, you'll know if you've been accepted -- by the fact that you will or will not be met at the ship by an ambulance, which will take you direct to the Center. Once they decide to help you, they don't want you walking even an inch on Earth without their supervision. It will cost you ninety dollars a day, but it's worth it." Martin treasured Randolph's card and placed it carefully in his billfold. He was genuinely grateful to have a man of Randolph's stature make this gesture toward him. He suspected, however, that Randolph was at loose ends and was making the gesture in hopes that Martin would call him. Martin decided he would. II , T 'he City Training-In Center, which accepted Martin, and did indeed meet him with an ambulance and a stretcher at the space port, demonstrated its efficiency by never once allowing him to feel he was involved in the task of his own rehabilitation. He was lifted and rolled; he was turned over and floated. The medical staff calibrated the responses of every muscle in his body. The exercises he was required to perform were aimed at specific muscles, but they were so programmed that he seemed to be merely at play. He was also given considerable help with precise machines which spun him, patted him, stretched him, bent him, beat him, fluff-dried him. So, on the third day, Martin called San Francisco and spoke to his girl, which turned out to be a mistake. "Well, no," he said bemusedly, "I can't come there now, don't you see I should spend a week here to get used to Earth after being away three months? I've got four more days here." "Well," she said from three and a half thousand miles away, "that means you can't get here until Thursday, and I'll be leaving for Japan Thursday. I have a demanding job, Martin." "Meet you at the Kobe office, then, Friday?" he said hopefully. "Not unless you want my boss to chaperone us twenty-three hours a day with phone calls, which he's liable to do. I'll tell you what. I'll meet you there tomorrow morning, and we'll have a few bewitched hours together. You've been gone too too long!" She gave him an address high over Park Avenue and made kissing sounds over the phone. "All right, hon," he said slowly, and hung up. He hadn't even seen her face; she hadn't even thrown in the visio. Tomorrow morning, then. Dr. V. Weller, the Director of the City Training-In Center, was exasperated even before Martin finished explaining his position. "I know what you're trying to say," he said. "It's very very obvious. Your fiancee has put you in a bind, and you don't know how to refuse her. But three days isn't enough, Martin, it just isn't enough." "I'll be gone an hour!" said Martin. "That's all!" "Phh. So you say." The acid little man leaned back and shook his head. "How often we've had to explain to young men such as yourself that your ardor far outmatches your capacity to perform! Exactly what do you think you'll be able to do with your girl once you're with her?" "Well -- well, what do you mean, "do?" Martin faltered. "You must understand that although we are -- " nphe other quieted him down, patting the air with an antiseptic white hand. "No, I mean just the simple act of meeting her. Of standing there. Of throwing your arms about her. Of grabbing her and kissing her. Do you understand how much oxygen debt your muscles will build up from those simple acts? Your Moonmuscles?" Martin simply acted miserably dumb. "I don't know what an oxygen debt is." "Naturally not," Dr. V. Weller said sarcastically, picking up Martin's chart and glaring at it. "You young dancing Moon men never do. Why do you think we pick you up in an ambulance and handle you like a baby, once we accept you? Well, remember this if you can. Muscles work anerobically. Without oxygen, that is." "Anerobically," said Martin, crestfallen. "I remember. There are some anerobes on Mars. On Earth too. I think." "That's another thing! Let me finish. Muscles contract anerobically. The organism simply draws upon a store of energy accumulated by previous oxidative processes. But when that store of energy, an organic phosphate, begins to decline, the organism must supply new oxygen. My God, boy, by the time you get off your first kiss to your sweetie, you'll be panting like a lovestruck stud!" Martin sank lower in his wheelchair. "That's putting it rather crudely," he said, "but it gives me a picture." "It better give you a picture," the little man said, waving Martin's chart fiercely. "The Lunar environment weakens the muscular organ by giving the body an excuse not to manufacture any more adenosine triphosphate than it finds necessary. A valuable habit pattern is lost; the organism has to learn all over again what is required of it on Earth, do you understand? In a manner of speaking, the organism has to learn it isn't on the Moon any more. Oh, sure, you know you're on Earth. But do your tissues? They don't." "I see that now,", said Martin, his voice weak and yielding. Oh, boy, he thought, I shouldn't have called her; now how am I going to keep that date? And he would have to keep it somehow, somehow. By proxy, maybe. The sudden idea straightened his backbone. He said, nodding his chin with new force at the chart this unpleasant little man was glaring fiercely at, "I take it, then, that the doctors have found nothing serious." "No, your health hasn't been damaged seriously by your stay on the Moon. You have a minor calcium leakage from the osseous structures, but usually this clears up in the eight or nine days we keep you here. And your -- " " Eight days? Nine days?" "Yes, that's right," the man said, running his fingers in a crooked line on the chart and frowning mightily. "In your case, maybe a total of nine days." "Six more days," said Martin, sliding down in the wheel chair and looking laxly at the ceiling. "And it was supposed to be four more days. Maybe you'll decide it should be seven more days. Or ten more days. Or never. Maybe you'll decide I've been on the Moon too long, that after all it's still highly problematical that anybody can really have a fulltime recovery, everything's still in the experimental stage, at ninety dollars a day -- " Dr. V. Weller suddenly was on his feet. He said icily, "Mr. Beales, if you would like to terminate our contract, be sure you will receive no bill from us. We accept money only from those we have been successful with. Now if you are implying -- " Martin shook his head and managed a sick grin as he started to turn the chair. "You've told me what I wanted to know," he said. "I hope so. You dried-up, dancing Moon-men who think you can come back to Earth and right away compete with those of us who've had the good sense -- " He sat down abruptly, throwing Martin's chart aside and burying his face in other papers. Martin figured that Dr. V. Weller felt he had said too much, implied too much. Martin rolled out sourly. So everybody had problems. 'T'hat evening he called Major Whit Randolph at his Wisconsin home and left a curious elation when he heard the man's crisp, wide-awake voice. Then, as the visio strengthened, he saw with astonishment that Randolph was in pajamas, short hair, the color of a dried leaf, uncombed. "But you sounded wideawake," he exclaimed. "You have to be," said Randolph cryptically, lighting up. "I've been in a war and a half, you know." He studied Martin forthrightly. "You made it to the Center," he said. "But you've got problems. What's up?" Smoke shot from the corner of his mouth. "I made the mistake of calling my girl before I was ready," Martin told him in embarrassment. "Now the director here says I don't have what it takes to carry on a romance -- any part of a romance, even -- until I've put in nine days here. In the meantime, I've made a date with her here in New York, and she's arriving tomorrow morning." But Randolph was already nodding his head, coolly flicking ashes. "The difficulty falls into a common pattern," he said. "The pattern being that you can't explain matters to her. When can you ever? Luckily, I was tubing to New York the day after tomorrow -- I can't stand that Loop shot, it's always the tube for me -- but I'll change my plans and meet your girl for you. How does that sound?" His eyes, which had been moving rather restlessly in his face, now beamed directly at Martin. "Why -- why it sounds great," said Martin, taken aback first by the offer and then by the direct and somehow challenging question appended to it. "It would -- well, it would certainly take me off the hook, if you know what I mean. Are you sure -- ?" "That it isn't putting me out? Hardly! Just tell me when and where you're supposed to meet your girl and what she likes to drink." Martin awoke often that night. Finally, he was staring out the window at the gray morning, and he felt baffled and constricted by the inanities of this universe he must necessarily live in. Here he was, weakened by a stay of a few short weeks on the Moon, and his pride in his feeling of manhood had put him in the position of turning over his girl to another man; a drinking man, a military man. A man twenty years older than Barbara -- but what was twenty years to a man of Randolph's vitality? T) ar bara called Martin two -'nights later from Japan. "But it's all right," she trilled, laughing. "It was a wonderful idea. Darling, I'm so glad you let mfe meet the major. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. And the places he took us -- " "Us?" Martin's ears pricked up. "He had a date, of course. It was so unselfish of him to include me. As it turns out, it was lucky for him, because his date got sick at the Earth Turn -- we were sitting on the inside circle near the tintinnabula, so there wasn't that much spin -- I just don't know what hit her, except that she was a tiny little thing, all eyes, and so tired. Anyway, we took her back to her apartment and put her to bed. Naturally, I consoled your darling major by sharing another round of drinks." She giggled from ten thousand miles away. "Oh, we really rode the mare!" "I imagine," said Martin dryly. Gazing upon the pixie, freckled face of his beloved he was at once bedazzled and in a helpless muse. "And darling," she rushed on, pointing her finger at him, and then pointing it again, sternly, "when we get married, and if the major is available, and especially if he's married again by that time, we want to invite him to our house often. Let's never let him go. He's one of the people we simply must hang onto." "But if we're living on the Moon," Martin hazarded, taking the boldest conversational plunge he had ever managed with Barbara. She interrupted him, her pixie dimples suddenly disappearing. "Who wants to live on the Moon?" she said coolly. "Except for two or three days at a time like the major does?" "That's right, who does?" said Martin, his eyes straying away from her image to rest on the blank wall beyond the telephone. "Oh, now I've hurt your feelings! Darling, look at me." So he returned his gaze, feeling quite hopeless about the whole thing, and not even fooled by the worried tenderness which now ap# peared in her eyes and lips. "Darling," she said softly, "we'll solve the problem, honest we will. Let's give it time." "And now guess what? Major says he's going to call you and make arrangements for us to double-date with him and his girl the day you get out of the hospital!" "It's not a hospital," Martin hurriedly interposed. "Whatever it is. Anyway, you'll be well then -- " "I'm not sick!" yelled Martin. She stared, sitting abruptly back from the audio. "No," she said icily. "I'll say you're not. But I won't get mad. It'll be too wonderful to see you again, dear." She blew him many kisses, smiled dazzlingly and was gone as he stupidly said good night. Ill 'T'he next day Martin was suspended in a device composed of several balloon-like structures which blew up and blew down as he breathed. The doctor in charge was making readings from an instrument which measured nervous energy input and output. "The solar plexus is the key to the nervous and emotional health of mammalian life forms," the medical man told Martin. "The solar plexus -- we call it the celiac plexus -- is a bundle of nervous and venous tissue which somehow manufactures nervous energy, which is then used by the body in its coordinative functions." "Somehow?" said Martin. The doctor nodded. "You've got a point," he admitted. "The best we can say is that the mechanism which stimulates the celiac into manufacturing nervous energy is the abdominal muscle called the diaphragm. When we breathe, the diaphragm massages the celiac; physical energy is transduced into nervous energy -- somehow. Proper breathing therefore is essential to the production of proper amounts of nervous energy. Which is to say -- what we've known all along from the year one -- proper breathing is essential to our nervous and emotional health." "A phone call for you, sir," an attendant said at this moment from the door. "He'll take it out there, but give me a moment," said the doctor, frowning at the chart. He continued: "On the Moon, Mr. Beales, some startling things happen to our nervous systems, our breathing, our emotions. At first, as you perhaps don't remember, the rate of breathing increases. Presumably the much lower gravitation and the consequent lessened demand on the muscular organ creates some kind of emotional backlash which requires more nervous energy than on Earth; one may feel anxious, perhaps sad, or one may be driven into euphoria. Then, as time passes, the unconscious mechanisms of the body learn what is required of them on the Moon. There is less emotional disturbance and consequently a need for less emotional energy... if we consider emotions somewhat definable as the rate of flow of nervous energy. Breathing then slows down. Now when one returns to Earth -- " "Breathing speeds up," said Martin, waiting for the axe to fall and at the same time glancing nervously at the waiting phone beyond the door. The doctor smiled. "You look scared. Don't be. I'm giving you some good news. You were on the Moon just long enough for your breathing to come back up near Earth normal. On our scale of # your breathing stands at .#. By the time you leave here Saturday your breathing should be back up to normal. And that's very good. Now go talk to your girl." And he turned away, still smiling. T t wasn't Barbara. It was Major Whit Randolph. Randolph was wearing a splotchy green, a very gay smoking jacket, and fumes were coming from a long black pipe in his mouth. Through the fumes, Martin saw a tintinnabula ball dancing on its air-needle and spinning randomly to give off its radioactive, edgy music. On an end-table was a half-finished glass of what looked like gin on the rocks, and on Randolph's knee sat a very pretty girl. "Hi, old son," drawled Randolph. "Top o' the afternoon to you too. Martin, I want you to meet my girl. Claudina, curtsy for the Moon-Man." Claudina blushed painfully, and caught Martin's eyes as if searching for help. She spread her tiny hands helplessly. "I'm supposed to curtsy, sitting on his knee and captive to the United Nations," she said. "Anyway, I'm pleased. He -- my -- the major tells me you're rehabilitating from being on the Moon?" "That's what the doctors like to call it," Martin told her, captured unavoidably and startlingly by the strange ivory purity of her skin. Cradle snatcher, he thought. And those big eyes, just like Barbara said, big dark brown eyes resting on his naively and a trifle sadly, so that he felt a tiny lump in his throat. What went on here, anyway? Just what? "She's nice, huh, Martin?" Randolph murmured from somewhere in the background. "But she saw me first, believe me! So whaddya say? Did Barbara tell you? We're gonna take this town apart, level by level and all the way down to the sub-levels! Game?" Martin tore his gaze away from Claudina. "Game for what?" he muttered. Randolph laughed and pulled Claudina roughly to him so that she buried her head in his shoulder. "She is sweet, isn't she?" And his eyes beamed at Martin a sudden hard glimmer which was as suddenly lost in great fogging clouds of pipe smoke. Randolph's hand slowly stroked the pale ash of her hair. Then his voice came again, comfortably sure of itself. "You heard me," he said. "Friday's the night. You'll be free of the Center, your girl will be free from her job, Claudina will be free, I'll be free, all free like birds. We're double-dating, old son, like Barbara told you. "Now that Barbara," he rushed on, not allowing Martin to answer. "You picked yourself a real live one, Martin. I like her. And she's all set. Tubing in from Japan Friday. We're gonna ride the mare!" Friday. Was it possible that Randolph didn't know he shouldn't leave here before Saturday? Martin started to bring that point up, then clamped his lips as mutiny began. The doctor told him his breathing was already up to .#. To hell with the rest. He was feeling fit. nphe idea of taking the town apart on his first return date with Barbara didn't appeal to Martin, but he was committed -- in fact, hogtied. When he saw Barbara, though, his pulse jumped. To his astonishment, when he kissed her he didn't get dizzy and fall down. "Whew!" she said, straightening her quarterhat and leaning back in his arms so she could look up and closely inspect him. "They really did let you out of the cage, didn't they? Darling, you look wonderful." He did look wonderful, nothing too startling except subdued blue. His dull black tagalong shoes went with his half-hat, the latter being the current affection of young married people in this period, and his bid to give an impression of maturity. "Come on," he said, grinning down at her and slipping his arm around her bare waist, beyond which shimmery green Baghdads fell to hand-woven ankle armor. "We're meeting the major and his girl at Fifth Avenue Top Level -- that's the name of the place so you can always find your way back in case you wanna get drunk there again." "Me get drunk?" demanded Barbara, leaning toward him as if irresistibly drawn and kissing him soundly. That's ridiculous!" They grabbed a yellocopter and programmed it for the Top. Randolph and Claudina were waiting for them at possibly the best table in the house. Randolph grinned widely and rushed toward them and pumped Martin's hand up and down. Then Randolph and Barbara threw their arms around each other and administered their social kiss. And so the evening began. "This is all on me," Randolph said from the first. "My Code. Ah! The champagne. Ladies and gentlemen, Terra-Frenault, of the exact year #! Best year California ever had! Let's drink to that!" Claudina sat gay and straight in a yard of very white lace edged with startling ribbons of red brocade, a veritable Valentine of a girl who immediately refused her first glass of champagne. "Daddy doesn't like," she said. "Not until I'm twenty-one. The rules are very strict." Impudently she smiled upon her date. "Unless you can talk me into it." Barbara laughed delightedly. "What a marvelous daddy!" she cried. Then she leaned toward Randolph and squeezed his hand. "Go ahead!" she coaxed. "See what you can think up." Randolph seemed taken aback. "Oh," said he. "You want me to help you break the family rules. Hmm. You're nineteen, aren't you? Nineteen Earth years. But you were on one of the Saturnian moons for at least a couple of its swings around the Big One, and that makes you twenty-one in my Code. Drink up!" "Thank you, sir," said Claudina, flirting her eyes at him in a most exaggerated manner as she slowly brought the champagne to her lips. And Martin, watching, saw the tiny white fingers holding the delicate stem tremble. Now a waiter hovered about glasses. There was much light laughter as the evening began to set in. There was a mutual admiration of the girls for each other's astounding hats. There was a broadly smiling camaraderie between Randolph and Martin, which on Martin's part was his way of indicating to everybody how wonderful it was to be free of the Training-In Center and to be an Earth-man again -- a man among men. IV J ust when the evening began to go wrong Martin would never really know. After all, it couldn't have been the champagne, for who could argue with Terra-Frenault #? It couldn't have been the dinner, an elaborate procession of white wine sauces, Filet a la planete #, Chicken a la "perp" planete Plymouth, all this fenced in or further embellished with aperitifs, breads, vegetables and deserts involving hot clam tomato bisque, la belle brioche, asparagus in vinaigrette, Ohio dandelion, ice creme de cacao, and this followed or augmented by brandy Alexanders. And it couldn't have been Martin's first dance with Barbara. True, he was anxious about his first dance with Barbara, but it all went smoothly except that it was not the slow dreamy waltz he would have preferred with her for this intimate moment under the bombs. The other couples were jerkily lengthening and shortening shadows, shadows that often exploded as strange lights burst inches above their heads or almost in their faces. The tintinnabula, that marvelous instrumental invention of just the year before, was borrowing its full orchestral arrangement randomly from the heart of the uranium atom -- and it was just too wild. But not wild enough to make the evening go wrong. Then Randolph was dancing with Barbara, and this time -- somehow -- the tintinnabula filled the glistening rainbow air with the music one would find in the heart of water, and it was all so liquid and strange that something in Martin told him he should  cry, and to cry out that it was all wrong, that something had gone wrong under the bombs, and there was only lovely Claudina floating dreamwise in his arms and he couldn't even tell her how he felt. And he wasn't drunk. Of that he was sure. "You're thinking," murmured Claudina, dreamwise and peaceful against his chest. "Not supposed to think, Martin. Just clink. Like a good ol' Earth machine." Martin breathed. Was he breathing for Earth or the Moon? I'll breathe faster, he thought. He felt like he might be breathing at about .#. But maybe breathing faster wouldn't do it. The solar plexus was out of the habit of transducing enough nervous energy; no matter how fast the pumping diaphragm massaged it, it would refuse to cooperate. He shouldn't have left the hospital -- not Friday, maybe not Saturday, maybe not even Sunday. When then? TJombs burst, splattered light. Martin put the tip of his index finger under Claudina's chin and tilted her head up. One eye of Claudina winked red, another winked blue. "Claudina," said Martin in a drum voice to get past the spangled rainy cry of the tintinnabula, "you were on Enceladus, moon of Saturn. Right?" "Right, sir!" She saluted smartly. "You've found me out, sir. I won't do it again, sir." Martin nodded. "The major said it like a cuss-word the first time I met him," he said. "How long?" "Too long, sir!" "And you were probably at the City TrainingIn Center before I was. But before that, you must have done a lot of planet-hopping -- Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Hermes, probably Mars, in ascending orders of gravitation. Finally Earth, and the" Center." "First the Moon," she answered, "and then Mars, and then Earth and the Center. Cost my daddy a pile of money, just getting me here on this dance floor." She essayed a wide smile which crumbled into ruins. Her lips pulled down severely. Unkind lights danced between them to turn her saffron and blinking white. She gasped, "Oh, Martin I hate to think about it, in a way. I disobeyed my daddy's orders and took a job on Enceladus. It took him a long time to find me -- but it was beautiful, Martin, and romantic, whizzing around Saturn every day and a third. I wasn't very fit for Earth after that, though, and the Government folders played that part down, about how it would affect you. Your nervous system mostly. I get very tired. I get so depressed." She breathed for awhile, and they simply danced very slowly. "I just haven't come out of it at all," she said. "The doctors say give it time -- you know the doctors. Dr. Weller said I'm breathing just fine!" She breathed hard against his neck, with a warm little puff of air that widened his eyes. "See?" She giggled a musical two-note which ended on a gasp. Worried, half-ashamed, her eyes sought his. They were hardly moving now. His arm tightened around her, halfway holding her up, and he remembered Mabel, who couldn't find a proper center of gravity. There was no such trouble with Claudina. He thought bleakly, Claudina, Claudina, we should be dancing on the Moon; it'd be a helluva lot less trouble. "Martin -- " Claudina spoke his name against his chest. Then her head came up, fringes of her pale hair having come loose from her coiffure and partly shadowing eyes that glowed and novaed from random bomb-lights. She said timidly, "Martin -- Martin, if we were dancing on the Moon -- you know, one of those beautiful places under the Moon -- if we were it would be so nice." "Yes, it would," he said steadily. "What about the major?" "The major!" She laughed; her laugh was a dry sound, but full of air bubbles, a series of delighted gasps. "Oh, Martin," she gasped. "Let's just call the major an old friend of the family, shall we? A -- a very old adored -- friend." Ohe was still smiling, half-laugh ing, when they stopped dancing, as if by mutual consent, and wended back, through confetti borrowed from a distance star, toward their table with fingers loosely intertwined. They sat there, saying nothing, their glances occasionally touching, then wandering away toward the dancers where the major and Barbara were part of the moving, voluptuous, pristine scene. Martin knew what had gone wrong, and it was very depressing. He watched as Randolph and Barbara came back. Barbara leaned over and pressed her smooth face hard against his, then pressed his nose in with her finger. "You and Claudina stopped dancing," she said. She took his hand. "Come on." A real orchestra had taken the place of the tintinnabula. A thrumming, a humming, a very adverse beat, called the splittable, underlay the surface gracefullness of an old waltz. Martin hesitated, then turned to Claudina to excuse himself. Claudina was drooping, her shoulders no longer erect, her face in shadow looking down at her drink. The major, not yet seated, saw this, too. His face wrenched strangely. But Claudina raised her head, raised her glass. "I'm all right," she smiled. "Too much cerebration, not enough celebration. We could dance now. Major." She added, insisting, "I'm all right!" "No," Randolph said shortly, sitting. "You stay there." On the dance floor, Barbara wiped Martin's forehead with his wrist handkerchief. "We don't have to dance," she said worriedly. "It's just that we haven't danced three times already." He smiled down at her. "How could we?" he asked lightly. "You and the major danced those dances. I think he likes you, Barbara-pal-lover-doll. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't pay the tintinnabula operator to tune in on those radioactive numbers. They were wild!" Her pixie dimples were doing their disappearing act. She said, "You never had any trouble keeping up with anything the tintinnabula handed out before. No matter what the randomity factor. Are you trying to tell me -- ?" A colored globe burst between them. The contorting shadows of couples or triplets who elected to follow the fast, unpredictable, subterranean beat produced a weird stroboscopic effect which presented Barbara's face to Martin in jumping expressions which ranged from irritation, to resignation, to anger, to disappointment. Martin said, "I'm only trying to tell you that the major likes you." "And I like him!" she snapped. "So what?" Martin said patiently, "He knew I shouldn't leave the Training-In Center until tomorrow, but he made arrangements for tonight." He paused and breathed for awhile. "You see what it's doing to me. By the way. How did the major like Japan?" Qhe was silent a moment. "Ah,"  she said. "So. The major was wining me, dining me, dancing me while I was working at a job that takes all the glucose out of my backbone. I think you and I better sit this one out. Come on, Martin, my beloved." She took his hand and attempted to draw him off the floor. "No," he said stubbornly. "You don't get it yet, what he's doing to us. He's trying to break us up, Barbara. It's so obvious! Claudina isn't his girl, she's just -- somebody; somebody, an old friend of the family, a darling child he's worried about. He's throwing her at me so he can get you!" He felt his voice rising. Almost out of nowhere he felt her cool finger across his lips. She whispered, "Don't you like her, Martin?" "Who the hell could help but like her?" he almost yelled. "What's that got to do with it?" "She was on a moon of Saturn, that's what," said Barbara through compressed lips. "Probably too long for her own good. Now come on." She renewed her grip on his hand, and they trailed back to the table. Major Whit Randolph stood up as they approached, smiling. But his eyes were beaming directly at Martin; speculatively. As Martin approached the table, Randolph started to say something, but Martin felt his hand turning into a rock. He hit Randolph a solid, overhand blow on the jaw. The shock wave traveled through his numbed fist up his arm and into his shoulder and then, presumably, into his brain. He watched in surprised horror as the major, rather obviously, staggered back, then sank to the floor, shaking his head, and swearing under his breath, and working his jaw. Some couples nearby came to their feet or turned their heads slightly for better peripheral vision. Three waiters, however, stopped what they were doing and unobtrusively ringed the scene and looked blandly off into nowhere. Barbara stood helplessly over Randolph, shaking her head. "You shouldn't have done that, Martin," she said. "You just shouldn't." She stooped as if to help Randolph but he waved her savagely away and came up on one elbow. "Never mind," he said. "Let him think he's got a punch." A bomb skittered in from the heaving dance floor and burst near his face, lighting him in clown colors. It adequately showed eyes that were narrowed like gun emplacements in a fortress. "Martin -- " pacing his words as if each had a cannon behind it -- "you called the turn. I did plot against you, from the first minute I saw you. You were my pigeon! Now why in hell don't you wake up? You'll never marry Barbara, because she'll never let herself get trapped away from Earth. And you can't live on Earth, any more than Claudina can. Now why in hell don't you go back to the Moon and take my daughter with you!" Martin was staring hopelessly at the terrestrial fury of the billowing dance floor. He saw that Barbara was watching him, trying to smile, losing the smile, bringing the smile back again. Martin thought: The darling pixie dimples I will never kiss again. She's for Earth, and I'm for the Moon and the spaces beyond. And Claudina, too, trapped as he had been, only worse, on a Moon of Saturn. Darling Claudina, sweet, helpless Claudina, lost forever to Earth, spewed forever outward to walk the worlds of Canopus, Antares, Betelgeuse, Sirius. V r T'he tips of their fingers intertwined, Claudina and Martin slowly entered the office of Dr. V. Weller, Director of the City Training-In Center. Weller was extremely cordial, all smiles, and held out chairs for them. Martin said, hesitantly, "I called you because I wanted to apologize for running off as I did, and I also wanted to settle my bill." Weller was leaning forward behind his desk, full of repressed curiosity. "This isn't your girl," he said finally. "Not the one you came to see. Not our Claudina!" Avidly he studied Martin. "What happened?" he demanded, and added as an afterthought, and very politely, "You see. young man, in our work we are still groping. We need all the case histories we can get. For our files, you see? Now. What happened?" With a strange tenacity the Director pumped both Martin and Claudina for even the personal details. Then his chair creaked as he threw back his head and laughed. The laugh, Martin noted sourly, was not a humorous one. "You kids!" the director said. "So now you'll get married, set up housekeeping on the Moon and dance your lives away and call it love. Phh!" Martin started to get up. Claudina tented four fingers on his knee and held him down. She squinted at Weller, turning her head sidewise, in mock reproval. "Dr. Weller," she said firmly, "Martin and I are in love. My daddy wanted somebody nice to take care of me on the Moon, so he picked Martin, and... well, that's it. His plans worked out." "Kind of a military campaign," grunted Weller. "With flanking movements and rearguard action," nodded Claudina. "My daddy is a very smart man!" "Obviously," said Weller sarcastically. "But who do you think was smarter. Mother Earth, that's who!" "Mother Earth," said Martin, looking hopelessly at the door. "Certainly. She sucked the nervous energies out of you two so you had to fall in each other's arms to stay on your feet. So that's love! Is that what you're going to use to build yourselves a happy life? Obviously it is." T Tis thin lips were pulled tight in a watchful grin. The two faces he looked at across his desk were crestfallen and startled. Then Martin's face began to turn red with confusion and anger. Weller's chair scuttled back as he came quickly around the desk and leaned against it and put his hand on Martin's shoulder, again keeping him down. "I meant no harm," he said quickly. "On the contrary, I was hoping you could understand some of the forces that are working on you... as I am beginning to understand what forces work on me. You see -- " A strange agitation thinned his already thin face.  "You see, Martin, Claudina -- " his forehead shone damply -- "we who live here and stay here on Earth, contrary to our boasts, may be the real fools. I'm beginning to see that we are living through a very traumatic experience. This damned, heavy planet, pulling on our bones and our muscles and our organs and time!" He thrust out his antiseptic hand, where it quivered and shook minutely. "Tell me, you two, what's making it shake like that? What's making me lean against this desk instead of standing up like a man? What sends me to bed three hours before bedtime and makes me creak when I get up? What makes me the irrascible, unpleasant, arrogant pipsqueak that I am? What sucks the nervous energies out of me?" He was grinding the words out and pushing himself to an upright position. He dropped his hand, and his expression lightened, became even pleasant. "You see?" he said. "Now you know why you're going back to the Moon. The Earth trauma. The Earth trauma -- which you don't really know about until you've been out there and back." '  ilaudina and Martin were mar'# ried on the Moon. One year later, Major Whit Randolph married Barbara. Four thousand years later their descendants swarmed the myriad worlds of the galaxy, of Canopus, Antares, Betelgeuse, Sirius. And all this time the matriachal Earth smiled, secretly proud of the devices she used to force her brood fluttering away from the nest. lightful dissertations on swords and sorcery by a master, plus two dozen illustrations by Roy Krenkell Clothbound, #. about the alcoholic dragon? Four short novels in the Unknown vein by one of the greats. Illustrated by Prosser. Cloth, #. of the master of the weird tale, unavailable since #, is a work of literature in its own right. Limited, numbered edition, cover by Frank D. McSherry Jr. Paper only, #. fabled Lovecraftian book, its owners, and its users, has become a standard reference. Limited, numbered, paper only, #. Free, illustrated catalog on request. Order the above only from: #I Liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland #, U.S.A. by Lovely i deo, these restaurants without a human waiter...  as long as nothing went wrong!  waiter came to meet them as they landed. It crossed the restaurant like a chess pawn come to life, slid to a graceful stop on the carport balcony, hesitated long enough to be sure it had their attention, then moved inside at a slow walking pace. The sound of its motion was a gentle whisper of breeze from under the lip of its ground-effect skirt. It guided them across the floor of the Red Planet, between and around occupied tables, empty tables, tables which displayed decorative meats and bowls of flowers, and other whispering robot waiters. At a table for two on the far side of the room, it deftly removed one chair to accomodate Lucas Garner's travel chair. Somehow it had recognized Luke as a paraplegic. It held the other chair for Lloyd Masney to sit down. The murals on the restaurant walls were dull red and bright silver: a Ray Bradbury Mars, with the silver spires of an ancient Martian city nestling among red sands. A straight canal dwindled into the distance at both sides of the big room. Its silver waters actually crossed the floor and were in turn crossed by bridges. Attenuated, fragile Martians moved through the streets of the mural. Sometimes they looked curiously out at the customers, the human intruders in their make-believe world. "Strange place," said Masney. He was a big, compact man with white hair and a bushy white moustache. Luke didn't answer. When Masney glanced up he was startled by his friend's malevolent expression. "What's wrong?" he asked, and turned to follow Luke's eyes. Luke was glaring his extreme distaste at a target which could only have been the robot waiter. r T'he waiter was a standard make. Below a blank spherical head was a body cylindrical for most of its length. The arms it had used to adjust Masney's chair for him had already vanished into panels in its torso, to join other specialized arms and hands and interior shelves for carrying food. Like all the other waiters, it had been painted in an abstract pattern of dull red and bright silver to match the murals. The last foot of the robot's cylindrical torso was a short, flaring skirt. Like Luke's travel chair, the waiter moved on a groundeffect air cushion. "What's wrong?" Masney repeated. "Nothing," said Luke. He picked up the menu. The robot waited for their orders. Motionless, with all its arms retracted, it had become a popart barber pole. "Come on, Luke. Why were you looking at the waiter like that?" "I don't like robot waiters." "Mph? Why not?" "You grew up with 'em. I didn't. I've never got used to them." "What's to get used to? They're waiters. They bring food." "All right," said Luke, studying the menu. He was old. It was not spinal injury that had cost him the use of his legs these past ten years. Too many spinal nerves had worn out with age. A goatee had once adorned his chin, but now his chin was as bald as his brows and scalp. His face, Satanic in its wrinkled age, attracted instant attention, so that his every vagrant thought seemed exaggerated in his expression. The loose skin of his arms and shoulders half-hid the muscles of a wrestler: the only part of him that seemed young. "Every time I think I know you," said Masney, "you surprise me. You're a hundred and seventy-four now, aren't you?" "You sent me a birthday card." "Oh, I can count. But I can't grasp it. You're almost twice my age. How long ago did they invent robot waiters?"  "Waiters weren't invented. They evolved, like computers." "When?" "You were just learning to spell when the first all-auto mated restaurant opened in New York." Masney smiled and shook his head gently. "All that time, and you never got used to them. Conservative, that's you." Luke put the menu down. "If you must know, something happened to me once in connection with robot waiters. I had your job about then." "Oh?" Lloyd Masney was Superintendent of Police for Greater Los Angeles. He'd taken his desk from Luke after Luke had resigned to become an Arm of the UN, forty years back. "I was just getting used to the job; I'd only held it a couple of years. When was it? I can't remember; around #, I think. They were just introducing automated restaurants. They were just introducing a lot of things." "Weren't they always?" ( (  T aturally, naturally. Quit interrupting. Around ten that morning I took a cigarette break. I had the habit of doing that every ten minutes. I was thinking about getting back to work when Dreamer Glass walked in. Old friend, Dreamer. I'd sent him up for a ten-year stretch for false advertising. He'd just got out and he was visiting some old friends." "With a firegun?" Luke's smile was a startling flash of new white teeth. "Oh, no. Dreamer was a nice guy. Little too much imagination, that's all. We put him away for telling television audiences that his brand of dishwashing liquid was good for the hands. We tested it, and it wasn't. I always thought he got too stiff a sentence, but -- well, the Intent-to-Deceive laws were new then, and we had to bear down hard on the test cases so John Q would know we meant it." "Nowadays he'd get the organ banks." "We didn't put criminals in the organ banks in those days. I wish we'd never started. "So Dreamer went to jail on my evidence. Five years later I was Superintendent. Another two years and he was out on parole. I was no busier than usual the day he showed up, so I dug out the guests' bottle, and we poured it in our coffee. And talked. Dreamer wanted me to fill him in on the last ten years. He'd been talking to other friends, so he knew something. But there were odd gaps that could have gotten him in trouble. He knew about the Jupiter probe, for instance, but he'd never heard of hard and soft plith. "I wish I'd never mentioned robot restaurants. "At first he thought I was talking about a bigger and better automat. Then when he got the idea, he was wild to see it. "So I took him to lunch at the Herr Ober, which was a few blocks from the old Police Headquarters Building. Herr Ober was the first all-automated restaurant in Ellay. The only human beings involved were the maintenance crew, and they only showed up once a week. Everything else, from the kitchen to the hatcheck girl, was machinery. I'd never eaten there -- " "Then how did you know so much about it?" tl A e 'd had to chase a man ' 'in there a month earlier. He'd picked up a kid for ransom, and he still had her for a hostage. At least, we thought he did. Another story. Before I could figure how to get at him, I'd had to study the Herr Ober top to bottom." Luke snorted. "Look at that metal idiot. He's still waiting for our order. You! Get us two Vurguuz martinis." The pop-art barber pole rose an inch from the floor and slid off. "Where was I? "Oh, yeah. The place wasn't crowded, which was a break. We picked a table, and I showed Dreamer how to punch the summons button to call a waiter. We already called them waiters, but they didn't look anything like the ones here. They were nothing but double-decker serving trays on wheels, with senses and motors and a typewriter all packed into one end." "Ran on wheels, too, I'll bet." "Yah. Noisy. But in those days it was impressive. Dreamer was bug-eyed. When that animated tray came for our orders he just stared. I ordered for both of us. "We downed our drinks and had another round. Dreamer told me about the Advertisers' Club that somehow got formed in his cell block. The cigarette men could have controlled it to the eyes, there were so many of them, but they couldn't agree on anything. What they really wanted to do was form a convict's lobby in Washington." The waiter appeared with the martinis. "Anyway, we had our drinks and ordered. Identical meals, because Dreamer still wasn't capable of making a decision. He kept staring around, grinning. "The waiter brought us shrimp cocktails. While we were eating, Dreamer tried to pump me on who might have the advertising concession on the robots. Not on the restaurant, but on all the automatic machinery. There he was, knowing nothing about computers, but all ready to go out and sell them. I tried to tell him he'd picked a good way to get back in Quentin, but he wouldn't listen. "We finished the shrimp, and the waiter brought us two more shrimp cocktails. Dreamer said, 'What's this?' " 'I must have typed wrong,' I told him. 'I wanted two lunches, but the damn thing is bringing us two lunches each." "Dreamer laughed. 'I'll eat them both,' he said, and did. 'Ten years is a long time between shrimp cocktails,' he said. "The waiter took our empty cups away and brought us two more shrimp cocktails. " 'This is too much of a good thing,' said Dreamer. 'Where do I go to talk to the manager?' " 'I told you, it's all automatic. The manager's a computer in the basement.' " 'Does it have an audio circuit for complaints?' " 'I think so.' " 'Where do I find it?' "I looked around, trying to remember. 'Over there. Past the payment counter. But I don't -- ' "Dreamer got up. 'I'll be right back,' he said. ( C T T e was, too. He came back within seconds, and he was shaking. 'I couldn't get out of the dining room,' he told me. 'The payment counter wouldn't let me by. There was a barrier. I tried to give it some money, but nothing happened. When I tried to go over the barrier, I got an electric shock!' " 'That's for deadbeats. It won't let you by until you pay for your lunch. You can't pay until you get a bill from the waiter.' " 'Well, let's pay and get out. This place scares me.' "So I pushed the summons button, and the waiter came. Before I could reach the typer it had given us two more shrimp cocktails and moved away. " 'This is ridiculous,' said Dreamer. 'Look, suppose I get up and stand around at the other side of the table. That way you can reach the typer when it delivers the next round, because I'll be blocking it from leaving.' "We tried it. The thing wouldn't come to our table until Dreamer sat down. Didn't recognize him standing up, maybe. Then it served two more shrimp cocktails, and Dreamer got up quick and moved behind it. I had my hands on the typer when it backed off and knocked Dreamer flat. "He got so mad, he stood up and kicked the first waiter that came by. The waiter shocked him good, and while he was getting up the thing tossed him a printed message to the effect that robot waiters were expensive and delicate and he shouldn't do that." "That's true," Masney said, deadpan. "He shouldn't." "I'd have been helping him do it, but I wasn't sure what those machines would do next. So I stayed in my seat and planned what I'd do to the guy who invented robot waiters, if I ever got out of there to track him down. "Dreamer got up shaking his head. Then he started trying to get help from the other diners. I could have told him that wouldn't work. Nobody wanted to get involved. In the big cities they never do. Finally one of the waiters shot a slip at him that told him to stop bothering the other diners, only it was more polite than that. "He came back to our table, but this time he didn't sit down. He looked scared. 'Listen, Garner,' he said, 'I'm going to try the kitchen. You stay here. I'll bring help.' And he turned and started away. "I yelled, 'Come back here! We'll be all right if -- ' But by that time he was out of earshot, heading for the kitchen door. I know he heard me shout. He just didn't want to be stopped. "The door was only four feet tall, because it was built for robots. Dreamer ducked under it and was gone. I didn't dare go after him. If he made it, fine, I'd have help. I didn't think he would. "There was one more thing I wanted to try. I pushed the summons button, and when the waiter came with two more shrimp cocktails I typed 'Phone' before it could get away." "To phone Headquarters? You should have tried that earlier." tCQure. But it didn't work.  The waiter scooted off and brought me another shrimp cocktail. "So I waited. By and by everyone disappeared, and I was alone in the Herr Ober. Whenever I got hungry enough I'd eat some crackers or a shrimp cocktail. The waiter kept bringing me more water and more shrimp cocktails, so that was all right. "I left notes on some tables, so that when the dinnertime crowd showed up they'd be warned. But the waiters removed the notes as fast as I wrote them. Keeping things neat. I quit that and waited for rescue. "Nobody came to rescue me. Dreamer never came back. "Six o'clock, and the place filled up again. Along about nine, three couples at a nearby table started getting an endless supply of canapes Lorenzo. I watched them. Eventually they got so mad that the six of them circled the waiter and picked it up. The waiter spun its wheels madly, and then it shocked them and they dropped it. It fell on one man's foot. Everyone in the place panicked. When the dust cleared there were only the seven of us left. "The others were trying to decide what to do about the guy with his foot under the waiter. They were afraid to touch the waiter, of course. It wouldn't have taken my order, because I wasn't at one of its tables, but I got one of the others to type an order for aspirin, and off it went. "So I got the six of them back to their table and told them not to move. One of the girls had sleeping pills. I fed three to the guy with the smashed foot. "And so we waited." "I hate to ask," said Masney, "but what were you waiting for?" "Closing time!" "Oh, of course. Then what?" "At two o'clock our waiters stopped bringing us shrimp cocktails and canapes Lorenzo and brought us our bills. You wouldn't believe what they charged me for all those shrimp cocktails... We paid our bills and left, carrying the guy with the smashed foot. We took him to a hospital, and then we got to a phone and called everybody in sight. Next day the Herr Ober was closed for repairs. It never reopened." "What about Dreamer?" "He's one reason the place never reopened. Never found him." "He couldn't just disappear." "Couldn't he?" "Could he?" "Sometimes I think he must have taken advantage of the publicity. Started life over somewhere else, with no prison record. And then I remember that he went into a fully automated kitchen, through a door that wasn't built for humans. That kitchen machinery could handle full-sized sides of beef. Dreamer obviously wasn't a robot. What would the kitchen machinery take him for?" Masney thought about it. Tt came to Masney as they were finishing desert. "Mmmb!" he said. "Mmmb!" And he swallowed frantically. "You fink! You were sent straight from Homicide branch to superintendent. You never had anything to do with the Intent to Deceive Branch!" "I thought you'd catch that." "But why would you lie?" "You kept bugging me about why I hated robot waiters. I had to say something." "All right. You conned me. Now, why do you hate robot waiters?" "I don't. You just happened to look up at the wrong time. I was thinking how silly our waiter looked in his ground-efQcUatUf, QaoJzikeljj 'lX#'hat is the matter with the  ' times? Children no longer respect their parents, Church and State are at an intersection, and at times it is apparently bad to be against sin and for motherhood. What is the matter with the times? Well, perhaps it would be useful to ask, "What is the matter with me?" To look at me, you would never know the seething inside. I'd imagine that the same is true of you, but I can't tell by looking at you. Nevertheless, I take it on faith that you're like me -- that it would take days and days to tell your life story the way it should be told, slashed with recollections and injuries, dotted with moments of utter clarity, jammed with hard lessons learned on the instant. I don't believe that such a thing as a true biography of anyone grown up is even remotely possible. If we tried to grasp all the things that were important to us, and if we tried to tell someone each and every one of them in the correct order and with logic, we never would get past recounting the first hour of our first conscious day. We're chaos inside; a web of interlaced reactions, memories of actions, wants, needs, titillations, passions, horrors... I seem to remember the hard lessons very vividly. Joy takes just a little more work to recollect. I hope it's not that way for you, though I suspect it is. What, then, wouldn't I do for some small comfort? I could use an indication that someone knows my sorrow. I'd have some hope tomorrow will be better. And you? A l 'his is a review of a book called Dangerous Visions, edited to inflame by Harlan Ellison. Published by Doubleday, at #, it contains over a quarter of a million words in the form of thirtythree stories by thirty-two science-fiction and fantasy writers of one kind or another. Several of them are science-fiction and fantasy writers you never heard of, but most of them are very familiar names. Ellison says: "What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky it is a revolution. "This book, all two hundred and thirty-nine thousand words of it, the largest anthology of speculative fiction ever published of all original stories, and one of the largest of any kind, was constructed along specific lines of revolution. It was intended to shake things up. It was conceived out of a need for new horizons, new forms, new styles, new challenges in the literature of our times. If it was done properly, it will provide these new horizons and styles and forms and challenges. If not, it is still one helluva good book full of entertaining stories." You should buy this book immediately. If necessary, you should also spend the cab fare needed to get to the nearest bookstore. You should do this because this is a book that knows perfectly well that you are seething inside. It represents the equivalent of a warm tender touch in the dark, just when you thought you were trapped in here with strangers. Your problem is going to be that, shortly after you make this discovery, another hand will reach you from another direction. And then another. And another. In a very short while, you are going to be in the middle of the damnest melee of would-be comforters, and it is only to be hoped that, after shaking off the experience, you are not driven to overcompensate by fleeing forthwith to a nunnery for the remainder of your natural life. What am I talking about? Well, to begin with, it sounds as if I'm talking about a great many things. But what I mean to say by them is that we are all human, and by the same token we are all to some extent frustrated. We have wanted things that we have not been able to get, and no matter what face we put on this when we go about our daily doings, the memory is blood red and clear in our minds inside. Somehow, in many cases, no amount of joy can overlay or dilute this. We have been robbed, cheated, lied to and betrayed. It's no comfort to be told that this is merely the result of the nature of the world and of human society. That happens to people in textbooks. What has happened to us has happened to us. It has happened to me, it has probably happened to you because you are like me, and it has most assuredly happened to Harlan Ellison. Harlan is articulate, though not always coherent. He is vastly energetic. He is a promotional genius. And in consequence we have this book, which apparently represents a gathering of people who are of like mind with Harlan, who may !be people like me, and may be people like you. Since a book cannot be a revolution, no matter what Harlan says, but can only reflect one, and since a book of fiction can provide nothing, but can only evoke responses to the things that it reflects, it follows that the revolution Harlan speaks of has been pre-existing within the writers he brings us here, is going on in the  field in which these writers work -- in fact, is going on in the large world of which science-fiction is an intrinsic part -- and may very well be going on inside you. Did you know? nphe immediately above is not as cute a question as it may at first glance seem. Harlan by habit and practice continually proclaims that he is blasting down the walls and smashing the barriers. This time he purports to have brought an entire wrecking crew with him. It is my theory that all of his hoohah about dynamite and explosions is in fact Harlan's way of saying gently: "Look out your windows." If we take it like that, then what is it that waits for us outside our windows, and what is the vantage point from which we peek out throughthem? The authors in this book would grace just about any table of contents they happened to appear upon. Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Philip Jose Fanner, Miriam Allen deFord, Robert Bloch, Brian W. Aldiss, a chap named Howard Rodman, which is called "The Niven, Fritz Leiber, Joe L. Hensley, Poul Anderson, David R. Bunch, a man named James Cross, a lady named Carol Emshwiller, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Larry Eisenberg, Henry Slesar, Sonya Dorman, a fellow named John T. Sladek, Jonathan Brand, Chris Neville, R. A. Lafferty, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Keith Laumer, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany and, somewhere in the middle but not least, Harlan Ellison. That's a hefty crew. Now one question one could usefully ask is what has brought them all together here, besides Harlan's persistent energy? Well, to some, the reason is not connected with this book's advance notices among sf writers. That would be James Cross and John T. Sladek. Their two stories were simply submitted by the authors' literary agent when Harlan got desperate for material. Cross's "The Doll House" was written pretty much to one of Weird Tales' formulas. Not that I think Cross decided to write a story to fit a market that's been out of business for many many years. It's just one of the standard fantasy notions, Cross did a pretty good job of writing it up, and when he was done he was finished. This person is not in revolt. John T. Sladek doesn't do a hell of a lot better in that wise. He says that the machine will reduce us all to ineffectual unthinkers. Well, I hope not, but whether one hopes not or not this is not an exactly new idea, nor is it newly proposed, nor does it go to any new place. Harlan, standing back a little, would know that. He would also know that the story by Howard Rodman, which is called "The Man who Went to the Moon -- Twice," is a refiguration of Robert Heinlein's twenty-year-old story, "Columbus Was a Dope," and that it is science fiction only by courtesy now, the same as it was when Heinlein wrote it, but it isn't by Heinlein, and it's twenty years old. What it says, by the way, is that progress happens, but people find ways to make it commonplace. T think that's a valid premise. I also think a lot of the cheaper rebellion in this book is created by a deliberate unawareness of admit that progress can happen, because if progress can happen then one ought to be working a little bit harder to keep up with it or participate in it. It is much more pleasant simply to continue to spiral inward on the same old involution, the way Philip Jose Farmer does with "Riders of the Purple Wage." If you are wondering how it is possible to write more and more about less and less, Farmer can show you how to pile it higher and higher. From the first clue, of the free associational title which will require some piece of blatant twisting somewhere in the story to justify it, to the last line, which by no means redeems the expenditure of thirty thousand words, this satire on the father figure in Heinlein's stories, or this satire on Philip Jos# Farmer, is the kind of exercise in self-indulgence you are going to get from some of the rebellious writers in our community if you tell them that all judgment will be suspended this one time. This process becomes even more obvious than it could have been. Each story is preceded by an editoral introduction, in which Harlan personalizes the daylights out of the author and his story. The story in turn is followed by an auctorial afterword, in which the author explains why he did what he just did. In some cases, you learn once more that the story now in your mind can not quite be what's in the writer's mind. In some cases, you learn that the writer is serious, thoughtful and educated. (You can also usually guess that from the story.) And in some cases, you can watch some pretty big people indeed go crawling on their bellies like reptiles as they bend everything in sight to prove that they, they too, are "controversial," while their stories give them the lie. And then we get "Faith of Our Fathers" by Philip K. Dick. This story is controversial as hell. It is controversial because the editor in his forward does everything in his power to make you believe that it is deliberately written while the author was up on drugs. A careful study of the wording indicates that he might not have been, which is just as well for his general welfare, I guess. But it is a fact, as some of you might recall from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, that Dick knows his hallucinogens very well, and that perhaps as a result of this he also writes very well about hallucinatory situations. In the case of Three Stigmata, superbly well; in the case of this story, he is somewhere beyond that point. He is to the point where he makes sense only to himself. This is a shame because the first threequarters of this story appear to be very good. But if this is rebellion -- and I suppose it is -- in fact, it certainly is -- it is, again, involutional. it'T'he Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven is an example of another kind of non-revolutionary revolutionary story -- the one with the false basic premise. It says that if organ transplants turn out to be an effective therapeutic technique, then the demand will rise so high that we will begin numbers in order to collect materials to meet it. The death penalty, Niven says, might very well be applied in the end to a man who in the space of two years willfully drove through a total of six red lights and exceeded local speed limits .no less than ten times, once by as much as fifteen miles per hour. The story begins as a well written hunk of action, has a number of emotionally effective moments, and winds up being almost purely polemical. Niven has told us an interesting story only up to the point where he had us hooked. Then he begins to lecture. His afterword takes off all the wraps and simply hammers away at these same points rather more energetically. He seems to think that this terrible thing could happen very soon. That it could really happen. But it seems to me that for it to be happening in any foreseeable extension of our present culture, we would today have to be draining the blood of all those about to die anyhow -- since there is a serious shortage of whole blood, plasma and other blood fractions. But we are not doing so. In the face of an urgent necessity, we are still bumbling along with the same old stupid, and sometimes lethal, sloppy collection system. It also seems to me that we should be doing something about making donation to "eye" and "ear" banks compulsory under certain circumstances. Too, in a very few more years, some respectable researchers predict and partly demonstrate, we will have beaten the sloughing problem, and therefore we ought to be stockpiling skin for grafts. We can use all the raw human bone we can get. But where are the charnel houses? No, in our culture you can kill 'em but you can't eat 'em, and there is no sign that this is about to change. I think Niven looks a little ridiculous this time. It may be that he's right, but there's no sign of it within the context of his own work here, which is neither good lecture nor good story. ( C F? utopia," by Poul Anderson, telegraphs. It's about one of the stock controversial subjects, and at first appears to have been well and thoughtfully written. But having telegraphed, it leaves itself free for examination as a hunk of story construction. And, as Fred Pohl said to me of one of mine in years past: "This is the kind of story in which the writer holds all the cards, and then he lays them down one at a time." And this is true. I believe this story is not written as well as Anderson would have handled a similar plot if he hadn't had this college-controversial ending to look forward to. That's a pretty tendentious judgment, because God knows what Anderson would really have done. But off his record Anderson does better as a technician and as a storyteller when he is not also attempting to shock people. I think he could do best by contenting himself to lead people to think, as he has been doing for many years now. That's usually shock enough. But by now you are wondering why I told you to buy a book full of stories that I don't hold with. Well, in the first place, I do hold with them, every one of them, even the bad ones, even the two(!) by David Bunch, because at least the appearance of this book indicates that there is some kind of ferment and that there We can take it as a matter of course that, like every revolution, this one has members who must be weeded out when success is achieved. But my other reason for telling you to buy this book is that it contains a number of extremely good stories. The best of them, the very best, one of the finest short stories I have ever read is "Sex andor Mr. Morrison" by Carol Emshwiller. It is a love story. It is not a story about any known form of physical sexual activity. It is a love story independent of the well known fact that there are two physical sexes. It is a story about love, pure, and the frustration and redemption that it offers. It is, though you might argue, about little commonplace things that really do happen to you and me every day. "Sex andor Mr. Morrison" is about the things that actually make things work. "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" by Theodore Sturgeon, on the other hand, is about a very big subject. It's about incest, and it is just plain terrible. It is a compendium of all the storytelling errors that Sturgeon avoided Your Blood. If he had to save them up someplace in order to write that latter novel, then reading this story is not too high a price to pay. But it's interesting that Some of Your Blood is a straight novel, and it is here in the liberated "speculative fiction" format that Sturgeon falls down so badly. He falls down because he is not talking about the way the world is. He is talking about the way the world feels. And actually he is talking about the way he says the world feels. Since he falls into the lecture form very soon, he is also trying to tell us what to do about the way the world feels. He is manipulating what he should be observing. And unfortunately for him, he is in the same book with "Sex andor Mr. Morrison," which if it is like anything that has gone before, is like Sturgeon. 'T'here is a whole clutch of Stories about God, as you might have expected. There is Lester del Rey's "Evensong." There is "Faith of Our Fathers." There is a plain tale plainly told, "Encounter With a Hick" by Jonathan Brand (and by extension in this same classification there is Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones," "Lord Randy, My Son" by Joe L. Hensley, and John Brunner's sophomoric "Judas"). "Gonna Roll the Bones" and "Lord Randy, My Son" are both rather effective stories, outside the Judeo-Christian format, both strongly founded in folk beliefs. "Gonna Roll the Bones" has to do with the devil, gambling, wives and the hearth that is also a furnace, all good solid recurring symbols in folklore, and all very nicely utilized by Leiber in an effective and utterly noncontroversial story. "Lord Randy, My Son" is about the neglected "retarded" child, whose psionic abilities are such that he is going to be most certainly a new Messiah. (Hensley, by the way, is made to sound like a boob and a boor in Ellison's ingenuously affectionate introduction. Hensley, a great gentleman, would never suggest to Harlan that his mouth has run away with him). The overt God stories are not so hot, even considering that Lester del Rey wrote "Evensong," which is about the inherently incredible situation in which God appears as the leading character in a science-fiction story. There are some stories that can't be told, even when the author, editor Damon Knight, represented here by an old story out of his trunk, explain to you how this works: "The question asked in the story ('Shall the Dust Praise Thee?' in which Jehovah finds this message on a wasted Earth: 'We were here. Where were you?') is a frivolous one to me, because I do not believe in Jehovah, who strikes me as a most improbable person; but it seems to me for someone who believes, it's an important question." A If ost of the stories in this book- serve only as examples. That's okay, because some of them work -- one or two of them, and that's enough. Sturgeon contributes to the Emshwiller. It's Kris Neville's "From the Government Printing Office" that rounds out the book. Not that there aren't some other good stories in it, many worth reading. The Neville just happens to touch on what this book, some of these stories, and what the whole "revolution" is about. You might call it "informational deprivation" or a "credibility gap" between this generation and the past. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Neville is about a time when kids are raised in accordance with a pedagogical program designed to create more scientists. This involves deliberate cruelty, almost pathological misunderstandings and the withholding of honest answers; the fobbing off of fabrications such as folk-tales and folk-wisdom on the inquiring child, and the stunting of his attempts at self-expression. It also happens to be based on the results of real biographical studies into the early lives of top researchers in our day. As a general thing, these studies tend to show, the people Who have made our world were made by what another day may well call madness; before we have that other day, we might have a few intervening ones. (We get no answers, neither here, nor in anyone's studies, nor within ourselves, to such questions as whether a similar inquiry into the childhood of the average working stiff, sciencefiction writer or movie star would not reveal the same or similar madness. I think it might). There are some who say the problem has been brought to a peculiar point of acuity by the fact that we have now matured the first complete generation born into a world that could wink out, and knows it. I believe that, but it's not important to the point here, which is that like all revolutions toward the future, this one is buried hip and thigh in the past... in the mad past, which gives birth to a mad new day. Helpless, Thorinn watched his murderers end his life -- and found a new one underground! Illustrated by ft Tn the days of King Alf, there was a house in windy Hovenskar at the hub of the world, where the sky turns round the Pipe of Snorri. The house was of sods, with a stone roof, for no other sort of roof can stand against the winds that blow, this Hovenskar as the sky turns. Now Hovenskar is like a yellow bowl, and from one side of it to the other side is three days' journey. Long is the spoon with which the gods eat porridge from that bowl! To the north can be seen the half of Snorri's Pipe, a graygreen column three leagues in thickness, yet so tall that it seems to prick the sky like a needle; and around it the sky swings, half light and half dark. Therefore at high noon there is an eye of darkness peering over the rim of Hovenskar, and at midnight an eye of brightness. And the wind blows from the dark to the light, this way and that way over Hovenskar. In this unlucky place, in the days of King Alf, lived a man called Goryat and his three sons, who were outlaws driven out of Kjetsland. Goryat and the two elder sons were gray-skinned Lowlanders, four ells tall, with tusks like daggers; but the youngest son was pink as a Highlandman, and he stood no taller than Goryat's belt-buckle. Nonetheless he was sturdy and quick and could jump higher than his own head. Thus he was called Thorinn, which is a kind of flea. Now it happened on the last day of King Alf (when a rooftile dashed his brains out) that for thousands of leagues, even unto the land of the Skryllings, the earth became flat where it had formerly risen and arose where it had been flat. Rivers left their banks, lakes became marshes, the air was one black scream of birds, and everywhere cook-pots rolled out of kitchens, while the cooking wenches tumbled after. But of all this the four of Hovenskar knew nothing. They knew only that Snorri's Pipe had begun to roar, with a sound that thrummed in the bones and could not be shut out, though they stopped their ears with their fingers; that their bodies had turned light, as in a dream; that there was an earth-shock that made men and horses dance on the ground like lice on a griddle, and that bits of the sky were falling like frostflakes. Before they could gather their wits about them, one of the horses, a mare with foal, had broken her leg in the peat bog, and the rest were scattering up the high curve of the valley, from whence it was half a day's work to drive them home again. Tow this was a weighty matter. ' It grew weightier still on the second day, when the other four mares went dry. Goryat took the finest of the remaining horses, a stallion of two summers, three ells high at the shoulder, and sacrificed him to Snorri. But the demon did not leave off roaring. Instead, as Goryat finished his prayers, there was a second earthshock, and from the well nearby came the crack of stone breaking, and all the water ran away into the Underworld, leaving the well dry as a skull. Then the two elder sons urged their father to leave Hovenskar and fare southward, but the old man, whose hand was still heavy though his mane had turned white as frost, would have none of it. "In all the Midworld there is no safety for me or those of my blood save in Hovenskar," said Goryat to his sons. "Nor may Thorinn leave, for I have sworn by Wit and Bal to keep him." Thus did the two sons learn from their father's lips for the first time, though in truth it was plain to be seen, that Thorinn was no blood brother of theirs. "But if we sacrifice another horse, we may go empty-bellied through the winter," said the eldest son, whose name was Withinga. "Moreover, it's plain enough that Snorri wants no horses." Thus spoke the second son, whose name was Untha. "Is he the demon of waters, or not? When the horse was offered, he was vexed and broke our well." "We must give him something better," said Withinga. "Idle is boasting when the hands are empty," Goryat answered. "What, must we fare to Skryllingsland and bring back a sacrifice?" "Not so far as that," Withinga said. And he pointed his chin toward the hillside, where Thorinn was leading the horses to the nearest spring. Goryat said then, "Would you make me an oath-breaker? I tell you, I swore to keep the boy until Snorri takes him." Untha rose and pointed at the black mouth of the well. "Then give him to Snorri." So it was agreed. When Thorinn came down, suspecting nothing, they said to him, "Go into the well, see whether it can be mended." Then when he was in the well, they pulled up the bucket and covered the wellmouth with a great stone and prayed over it. 'T'he Flea lay upon his back, hands behind his head, one knee cocked over the other. The blades of the yellow grass formed a wall close around him, shielding his body from the wind that rustled overhead. Through halfshut eyes he could see the wavering patch of brightness that was the sky. Drowsy scents of grass and blossoms were in his nostrils, mingled with the faint but pungent smell of horse that clung to his leather garments. He could hear the stiff grass-blades crackling as insects crawled among them, the snort and stamp of the horses farther up the hillside and, more distantly, the unending drone of Snorri's Pipe. Deliciously hidden and at ease, more than half asleep, he was daydreaming of distant mountains and brightly dressed people, when a new sound roused him. He started up on one elbow and listened. There it came again. He pivoted with one hand on the matted grasses, sprang easily to his feet. Far below, over the thousand moving waves of yellow grass, he coud see Goryat's steading in the bright half of the valley -- the house with its roof of gray stone and its thread of smoke bent by the wind, the horse barn, the meathouse, the tanyard, the well, all tiny as pebbles. Near the house a mannikin stood; its mane was only a dot of yellow. The arms were lifted; it shook a fist. After a second the hail came again:... oooTriii... Thorinn waved his arms in answer. The tiny figure below gestured with one hand, then turned away. It was already loping slowly toward the house when the sound arrived:... ooome dowww They had thought of some other task for him. That was only to be expected. Breathing the keen wind, Thorinn forgot all disappointment as he raised his head. It was midmorning. Where the tip of the Pipe touched the sky beyond the valley rim the dome was split by a clean arc that soared high over Thorinn's head, dividing the sky into pale light and greenish darkness. Half the valley below was daylit. The other half lay still in deep night, pricked here and there by the witchfires of fallen sky-stuff. Over in the peat-bog, wisps of night-mist were rising like ghosts; dew still sparkled in the grass along the daylight edge. As the day wore on, the arc in the sky would creep around the rim of the valley. One could almost see it move. Thorinn had lain many an hour on the windswept hill, watching it until, often as not, he fell fast asleep, and the horses roamed where they listed. Tits and fieldfares were busy in the cropped grass around the spring, quarreling and chirruping over the bits of grain they found in the horse droppings. Hawks were awheel over the high rim; but in the dark side, Thorinn knew, owls and nightjars were stirring. Northward from Hovenskar, it was said, there were night creatures that never ventured into daylight, but followed the darkness eternally, around and around. Some day Thorinn would go 'and hunt them. Goryat would give him leave when he was a man. The world was good, though Snorri rumbled. Above him near the outcrop and the spring, the eleven giant horses turned their heads alertly. Thorinn filled his lungs and shouted. "Ho, Biter! Ho, Stonehead!" The horses snorted and tossed their manes; Stonehead, the old stallion, showed his wicked span-long teeth. Thorinn bent his knees, leaped over the grasstops, came down two ells higher on the slope, leaped again. The horses, pretending fright, wheeled and lumbered away. Thorinn's legs pumped furiously; he bounded, leaped like a grasshopper after the soaring horses. He passed two stragglers, nervous young colts. The earth trembled, bouncing him higher. Blood burned in his veins; the wind whipped his cheeks, made his eyes smart with tears. Head down, his massive hindquarters bunching like fists, old Stonehead flew before. Stones and clots of turf spattered Thorinn like hail. He was flying, lungs afire. Into -- the yellow -- sea -- and out. Ahead the stallion's round eye glinted. The old horse turned, laboring up-slope. In two breaths Thorinn was beside him; a final leap, and the rough mane was against his face, his arms and legs gripping the shaggy neck, while the world wheeled.  ' Thorinn clung to the stallion's neck. After a plunge or two, earth and sky steadied around him. Obedient to his will, the old stallion, who could have flung him five ells and broken his back if he chose, stood snorting and trembling. Thorinn reached up, grasped a thick hairy ear at the root, pulled gently. The stallion dipped his huge head, turned and sprang. The other horses, standing at gaze a few hundred ells away, fell upward into distance. The steep yellow bowl of the valley came plunging up, the wind whined in his ears -- down, with a bone-breaking jolt, another leap -- down, another. Bounding below, the tiny shapes of the houses grew larger with each dizzy arc. The stallion's neck strained against Thorinn's cheek; they were flying like the wind; they would leap and never come down! The slope grew shallow; the hillside was behind them and the gray figure beside it. Thorinn recognized Withinga, tall as the house-eaves, in his stained leather jerkin and his belt studded with span-wide metal bosses. Obedient to Thorinn's touch, Stonehead planted his hooves and slid to a bone-jarring halt. While Withinga watched sourly, Thorinn vaulted to the ground, slapped the old stallion's rump. Stonehead snorted, wheeled and bounded away toward the distant shapes of the other horses high on the hill. "Do you want to break your neck, Flea?" Withinga asked, taking a ponderous stride forward. "When Snorri calls, man must answer," said Thorinn. He stepped back, half expecting a blow, but Withinga only stared at him for a moment, then said: "So it is. Come, the Old Man has a task for you." Thorinn followed him around the moss-grown sods of the house. Under the weight of die roof, the sod walls had bulged year by year until the house lost all its squareness and was shaped like a cheese. In the dooryard beyond, Untha and old Goryat squatted at the well-curb, beside the empty leather horse-trough. They looked up as Withinga and Thorinn approached. Untha, who had been scratching the bare earth idly with his dagger, gaped witlessly, showing tusks as long as Thorinn's thumb. His narrow blue eyes, slitted like a goat's, stared at Thorinn as if he were a stranger. Without speaking, Withinga sank down beside the other two. Squatting in a row, the three stared at Thorinn. Their massive, yellow-maned heads were on a level with his. Beyond them, the split sky arched over the rim of Hovenskar. At last Goryat spoke. "The well is broken." "Did you call me down here to tell me that?" asked Thorinn in honest surprise. "Hold your tongue and listen," said Goryat. "It comes to my mind that the well may be mended. Therefore, jump into it and see." Thorinn hopped to the wellcurb and looked down. The deep shaft receded into darkness, past the leather thong and the dim round shape of the bucket. He could not see the bottom. "How shall we mend it?" he asked. "With stones," grunted Withinga. "The fool asks; wise men must answer. Go down, Flea." 'nphorinn bent toward the dark  receding shaft, from which a faint cool breath arose; then a new thought struck him. "If this should be long in the doing," he said, "who will cook the dinner?" The two brothers glanced at each other again, and Withinga stroked his chin with a taloned gray hand. "Well asked," he said grudgingly. "Also, who will fetch peat for the fire and tend the horses?" "And milk the mares, supposing they turn fresh again, and make cheese?" put in Untha, scowling and toying with his dagger. "That is no work for a man." Thorinn stared from one to the other, for their words made little sense; but Goryat said, "Peace," and gave them a hard look under his frosty brows. "Witlings have I for sons. The thing is decided." He turned to Thorinn. "Down with you, be quick." The three pairs of cold blue eyes were watching him. Thorinn hesitated uneasily; but Goryat's brows were drawing together in a way he knew. He shrugged, bent and picked up the bucket thong. He tugged at the end of it, where it was knotted around one of the stones of the curb, found it secure, and backed over the rim of the well-mouth, lowering himself hand under hand. The three yellow-maned heads turned to watch him. They disappeared over the rim of the well, but a moment later, as he descended, they came back into view, peering down. The three silhouetted figures seemed to rise and become foreshortened; the horizon sank; the ground bulged upward like water closing over his head. Clods and an occasional pebble, scraped loose by his feet, rebounded below. After a moment or two he heard something strike the bottom. Cold air breathed up past him. The edge of the leather bucket touched his thighs. Holding the thong with one hand, he pulled the bucket up free of his legs, hung a moment and dropped. He was aware, as he fell, that his fall was unnaturally slow. That was because of the weightloss that had come when Snorri began to rumble. The difference was not much, the tenth part perhaps of his eighty pounds, but why should the sound of Snorri have taken away even an ounce? They four had all had to learn to walk over again, for their steps were so long that they tripped and bloodied their noses. The horses also. And it was comical to watch, the birds had not learned even yet -- their wing-thrashing when they tried to land carried them into the air again, over and over, and when they did finally succeed in reaching the ground, they bounced and rolled, squawking, wings disheveled, then staggered to their feet, looking thunderstruck... The bottom was near. Dimly he saw it, bent his knees, took the shock. But the bottom of the well was tipped beyond his expectation, and it threw him against the side, making his head ring. TTe straightened himself and breathed deep. How cold it was down here! And no wonder, for the water they got from the well, before it went dry, had been cold as ice. That was natural, for the deeper you went, the farther from the warmth-giving sky. Thus it was colder here on the floor of the ancient ocean than it was in the Highlands; colder again at the bottom of the well; and if you could dig deeper still into the earth, eventually you would come to the land of eternal ice, the Underworld, where Snorri ruled. Thorinn crouched and felt for the source of the steady slow current that breathed up around his legs. Oddly, although the air was cool, it seemed warmer if anything than the earth and stones around him. His hands found an opening, half choked with mud. So far as he could tell, there had been a breaking of the rock table under the well, and he was now crouching on a tilted slab of it that had fallen and stuck. He heard a sound, twisted to look up. The mouth of the well was a disk of brightness, surrounded by concentric half-circles of gray reflected light. The sound was repeated, and Thorinn saw a tiny black dot rise to the wellmouth, bob and disappear. For a moment he could not believe it; then he stood hastily and shouted, "Hi! Don't pull up the bucket! How am I to get up?" A maned head appeared, in silhouette against the sky, and looked down at him silently. It vanished; another appeared at a different place; then it, too, was gone. "Hi!" shouted Thorinn, hearing his voice boom up the shaft. He listened. Over the slow sighing of the wind, a sound so familiar in Hovenskar that it was only when it changed, he caught the grumbling voice of Goryat. "Lift your end! And hurry up." Footsteps scraped on the pebbles beside the well-curb. Then something dark came into view and hung suspended in the middle of the disk. The broken circle of brightness around it flickered and vanished, the light down the well-walls turned gray and went out. A stony clang echoed down. The black air pressed close to Thorinn's eyes and seemed as heavy to breathe as water. There was a long pause, then another clang. Thorinn's heart was leaping with fear, but he reached for his wallet calmly enough, found the wooden light-box and uncovered the window of mica at one end. The pale witchfire of the skystuff inside brought his arms back in ghostly dimness, and a vague circle of dirt wall. But though he shielded it with his hand, it would not reach the top of the shaft -- no, nor even four ells above his head, where the leather bucket ought to be hanging on its thong, waiting for him to jump and catch it and pull himself back to the surface. He waited, saying to himself, "It was a joke," but in his belly he knew better. Not for any prank would glum Goryat or his lazy sons have lifted those two great stones, the broken slabs left over from the roofing, which had lain half-sunken in the earth beside the house for as long as Thorinn could remember, and laid them one atop another across the mouth of the well. He listened. Dimly from above, vibrating through the slabs of stone, came the deep rising and falling tones of Goryat's voice. Though he could not make out the words, the rhythm was familiar. What was it? Then he knew: the invocation to Snorri, the one Goryat had chanted when they had sacrificed the horse. It was neither joke nor mistake; they meant him to remain in the well. II r I 'he knowledge of his own death came like icy water into Thorinn's flesh. He leaned suddenly against the wall. All the things that had vaguely disturbed him before -- the queer looks of Goryat and his sons, the odd things they had said -- now became clear. The men of Hovenskar lived by their horses. For the mares to go dry was a disaster. A prudent man does not offend the gods, and therefore Goryat had sacrificed a stallion. When Snorri refused the gift, what more natural than to offer a man instead? But there had been no drawing of lots! The thing had been done by treachery; they had dealt with him like a stranger. Now he began to remember a thousand things: how they had always given him the hardest tasks and the scraps from the kettle. He was no son or brother to them -- only a beast to live or die at their will. The anger that flowed into him strengthened his limbs. Above, Goryat's voice still rumbled distantly through the stones over the well. He was not dead yet! He took a deep breath, another. The walls of earth around him were like a shirt laced too tight. He felt half smothered already, and yet he knew there was no lack of air. It was thirst that would kill him, and that would take days. To die of thirst in a well! Never mind, he had time, a precious gift -- three or four days, perhaps, before he grew too weak. What else? He had his short sword, really an old Yen-metal dagger of Goryat's, in its leather scabbard; the broad leather belt it hung from, which might be useful in climbing; his wallet and its contents, which he now examined -- light-box, fire stick and tinder, a few crumbs of cheese, a strip of dried horsemeat and a few odds and ends, colored pebbles and the like, which he had picked up because he liked them. Then there were the clothes he wore, shirt and breeks of buckskin, horsehide shoes and the thongs that wrapped his calves. A rope of sorts might be made of all these things together. Thorinn shivered, staring up vainly into the darkness beyond his little light. Goryat's distant voice paused, then began again. To climb the well would be no great matter, hands on one side and feet on the other, inching his way up to the top. But there were two things not to be forgotten. The first, that if hand or foot slipped, he would fall and crush his bones at the bottom. Then, if the fall should not kill him outright, his dying would be hard. The second, that even if he reached the top safely, he could neither lift the stones nor dig under them as he lay across the well. He must think of a way to make a sort of plaform near the top, on which he could stand while he dug with his sword... But at this thought, he saw how hopeless his position was. For he had nothing to make such a platform of except the sword itself. C old and discouraged, Thorinn sat down on the floor of the well and hugged his knees for warmth. In the glow of the lightbox, which he had placed on a stone beside him, he saw a sudden flutter in the air. Something small and gray had darted up zigzag to vanish in the darkness. Thorinn stared upward, mouth open, then snatched the light and raised it over his head. At first he saw nothing. Then a small gray creature detached itself from the wall, spread a pair of membranous wings, and swooped erratically to the other side. It was a wingmouse, one of the darkness-loving creatures that sometimes flew out of the cave on the valley slope two leagues above. Where had it come from? He turned the light on the opening at his feet. This was a narrow black gash at the side of the well, no more than a span in width. But he saw dimly now that it widened below, undercutting the wall. Kneeling with his forehead pressed against the mud and pebbles, he was able to see a shelf of muddy earth a few ells below. It did not extend all the way under the opening, however, for he could just make out an edge of blackness on the near side -- a second deeper hole. Twisting, he put his arm down as far as it would reach. He groped in every direction, without finding any other obstruction. Mud and pebbles, dislodged by his arm, cascaded slowly down into the darkness. The current of moist air was feeble but steady against his fingers; it seemed to rise straight toward him. Thorinn sat up, feeling his heart beat. Who cannot ride must walk, as the saying was. If he could not go up, perhaps he could go down! If he could somehow reach the cave of the wingmice, and get out to the surface again... let Goryat and his sons beware. He pulled out his sword, jabbed the point into the lip of earth over the opening. A wedge of dirt and stones came away and drifted down into the darkness; he listened, but did not hear it land. He pried loose another wedge, and another. When he had carved away enough of the shaft wall to admit his body, he paused and again looked down. This time, in the dim glow of the light-box, he could see a tumbled mass of muddy earth and stone, sloping downward like a funnel to a round black hole almost directly below him. After a moment's thought, Thorinn unwrapped the thong from one leg of his breeks and tied it securely around the lightbox. Kneeling again over the hole, he carefully lowered the box and swung it gently, until it was clear of the hole below, before he let it drop. He coiled up the thong and tossed it in after the box. Tn darkness now except for the  glow that came up through the hole in the well-bottom, he stood and listened. Goryat's voice still rumbled overhead. He stared upward a moment silently in the darkness. Then he turned and lowered himself feet first into the hole. He hung for an instant with his chest and elbows on the lip of the opening, then let himself slide. As he floated down, he kicked forward, then back, strongly, at the moment his hands touched the lip. He straightened his body as he fell, landed easily on the slope beside the second hole. A few bits of mud and gravel that had fallen along with him went pattering down the shaft below. Thorinn picked up his light-box and looked around. He was in a cavern with sloping walls, an irregular ceiling and floor, the whole splashed with mud in fantastic shapes. It was tall enough and to spare for him to stand erect here, but it rose and grew shallower in every direction. He could no longer hear Goryat's voice. Holding the light-box, he leaned over and looked down. Cool air blew steadily and slowly in his face. The shaft, like a smaller well, dropped almost straight for perhaps five or six ells; then it seemed to curve slightly. Thorinn saw the gleam of exposed stone at the lip and below that, at no great distance, a faintly visible surface of which he could make out no details. Thorinn hesitated, not liking the look of this second descent. But the flow of air decided him. He unwrapped the thong from his other leg, tied it to its fellow: this gave him a rope nearly four ells in length. To this he added his belt for another ell. He lowered the light-box carefully and this time had to lean down with his arm at full stretch before he saw the box touch bottom. It was mud and stones down there as well. He could see no more than that. He let the thong drop, watched it fall in coils below. He was too cautious to drop the sword. Instead, he held it flat to his thigh as he stepped off and fell, slowly at first, then faster, braking his descent a little with elbows and feet. He brought his feet together at the right moment, landed on the curving jut of rock at the lip. Pebbles and dirt rattled slowly down past him. He stood, turned lowered himself the small remaining distance. Crouching, for there was no headroom here, he picked up the light-box and carefully brushed away the clods and gravel that had fallen on it. Then he looked around. The low dirt ceiling, porous and stained reddish-brown in places, formed an irregular dome; this cavern was long and narrow. Here, too, ceiling, walls and floor were mud-splashed. Stones bigger than his head lay as if tossed about. The mound of mud and stones on which he crouched sloped away, channeled and rutted. In one direction it disappeared under a great tilted stone, leaving an opening no more than a span high; in the other across a wide pit which had drawn off the water like a funnel, the cavern stretched away level into the darkness. 'T'horinn methodically wrapped the thongs around his calves again, cleaned his belt as well as he could and put it on, then hung his sword from it. Crouching low on the slope, he wet his finger and held it first over the pit, then as far as he could reach toward the far end of the cavern. There was a current of air from both directions, though that from the pit was the stronger. Thorinn had no wish to go deeper, so he straddled the pit, clambered over and began inching his way along the level passage. After he had gone a few ells, the passage widened and the floor began to drop away sharply. The ceiling at first dipped down overhead as he descended, forcing him to crouch even more: then it leveled out abruptly, and he found himself able to stand erect. Just over his head, tongues of some crusty reddish material hung from the ceiling. Thorinn tugged at one curiously and found that it was metal, rusted so thin that it broke in his hand. Below, the tunneled mound grew shallower and seemed to end in a level floor, with a few scattered boulders. Thorinn moved downward again. Here ceiling and walls formed one almost unbroken curve; it was as if he were in the bore of some giant earthworm, filled in with earth to half its depth. As he moved forward, the patches of rusty metal overhead grew larger and closer together, and he recognized others, twisted and broken, among the heaped earth and stones at his feet. Farther away, the arched roof of the tunnel glinted silvery through the rust. Thorinn moved along one wall, examining it as he went, and at last stopped in incredulous wonder. Between the dots and patches of rust, wall and floor alike gleamed with the silvergray luster. The tunnel was lined with Yen-metal, the incorruptible. Yet it had rusted away to nothing in places! How long had it been here, empty and unknown under the earth? The hair on the back of his neck began to prickle. He turned, swinging the light-box around. Something hunched and gray darted behind a stone. The long shadow swallowed it. Thorinn cast the light this way and that, but saw nothing more. His heart was knocking in his chest. He held his breath, heard nothing. The thing he had glimpsed had been half the size of a man, coarse-furred, running low to the ground. Thinking hard, he walked on a few paces, then paused and laid the light-box down. He dropped to one knee, as if examining the thong around his calf. His fingers plucked the knot loose; holding the thong in one hand, he seized the light-box in the other and pivoted. Another gray-furred shape darted behind a stone. This time it had been nearer. Thorinn clenched his teeth to stop his jaw's trembling. Inside, he felt calm and cold; it was his body that was afraid. Holding the light-box under one arm, he made a sliding-knot in one end of the thong. This was an extremely dangerous moment, for both hands were occupied as he fastened the lightbox to his forearm. He made a second loop at the other end of the box, drew it tight, tested it and found it firm. He swung the light around again, turning as he walked, but saw nothing. TTe realized abruptly that his ears, tuned to the faint slithers and squeaks around him, for some time had been hearing another sound: the distant, steady rush of water. He raised the lightbox awkwardly head-high, but there was nothing in that direction, only the tumbled waste of earth, stones and rubble. He followed the sound, hoping for some advantage from any change. The current of air grew stronger, the water sound louder. Dancing ahead, at last the glow of the light-box picked up a pale gleam in the earth. It was the far side of a great hole, ten ells across, that went down out of sight in undulating level stripes of brown and cream-colored stone. It was not the place he would have chosen; but at least, if he stood with the chasm at his back, the beasts could not attack from behind. He went closer, feeling uneasy. This might be the river Dan that disappeared into the ground three leagues from Goryat's steading; or perhaps it was the water that had escaped from the well, now rushing here underground toward some deeper chasm... He stepped cautiously up to the lip, cast his light this way and that, then tilted it down and risked a glance. Deep down, beyond the smooth-cut lip of stone, the water rushed by smooth and fast. His light was too feeble to show more than the surface, but he knew that it was deep. The sound that came up out of the hole was partly the whispering rush of water, partly something else -- a distant, hollow roar. He realized the sound had grown so loud that it might be difficult to hear any stealthy noises behind him. He turned, sweeping the light around, just in time to see a dark shape spread-eagled in the air before him. He saw the sharp snout, the pinkish-gray inside of the mouth gaping behind the long teeth, the outstretched dirty hands like a man's. He struck clumsily with his sword, felt the jolt in his wrist, heard the thing shriek like a gutted horse. Two more were leaping at him from left and right. He stumbled backward, swinging wildly -- the sword-tip touched one of the beasts in mid-leap, and there was another scream. Two hard bodies struck him, and he was down on his back, rolling, breathing their moldy stench. Cold pain slashed his cheek and arms. He realized dimly that it could happen; one could be killed, without time for more surprise than this... A sharper pain stabbed his breast, making him cry out. His free hand was on the creature's coarse-furred throat, forcing it back, and in the stifled glow of the light-box he saw the snarling mouth with its tongue like a dry worm, the round, eyeless head. Then the stones under him dropped away, and he was falling. Below him the water roared. Ill T t was the distant, roaring of the water that brought him up out of darkness. He was sprawled on wet stone, retching feebly. His legs were still in the water, which lapped at his middle rhythmically and insistently, over and over in the same place. When he tried to crawl out of its reach, he found his legs too heavy to move. He belched up a watery surge of vomit against the stone. After a while, groaning, he managed to drag himself an ell or so away from the water and roll onto his back. The light-box was still clinging to his arm, but its glow was so feeble that he could barely make it out. When he looked up, the darkness pressed close against his open eyes. The sound of the water roared endlessly, off in the distance. The sound was hollow, echoing. He started, remembering coarse-furred stinking bodies, stabbing teeth... his hand went to the pain in his breast and found the leather shirt pierced as if by needles. He could remember the water plunging up over his head, the helpless motion, the falling... His right hand lay empty against the stone. The sword was gone, of course. After an interval, some faint sound in the darkness brought him struggling up on one elbow. He listened with shock trembling along his nerves, but the sound was not repeated; he heard only the steady, tumultuous roaring of the water. On his right cheekbone there was a lump of a thumb's thickness. Three deep slashes, still welling blood, curved down his cheek and neck. The pain in his breast was as sharp as if the needle-teeth still gripped him there, and he found himself running his fingers over the pierced leather to reassure himself. A touch told him that the lightbox was ruined. One end was split, the mica missing and all the sky-stuff washed out of the compartment except a few shreds clinging to the soaked wood. The dim glow came from these. The knots in the wet thong were too much for his fingers. At length he attacked them with his teeth, jerking at them with desperate stubbornness until they loosened enough to slip the lightbox free. Holding it with care in #B# both hands, he pried the wooden cap off the other end. The mica here was still whole. He unlatched the lid, raised it and probed delicately in the second compartment. It was half full of chill water, in which he could feel the sodden sky-stuff afloat. Thorinn let out the breath he had been holding. He fumbled over the stone with his free hand until he found a hollow place. He tilted the box over it, pressing the skystuff against the inside of the compartment and straining the water out between his fingers. He remembered that he must put aside a portion of the dark sky-stuff. He unfastened his wallet and tipped the water out of it, then pinched up a good lump of sky-stuff between thumb and finger, and laid it carefully at the bottom of the wallet. Now, if there was enough of the bright sky-stuff left... Thorinn scraped the inside of the ruined compartment with his forefinger, brought it up with the fingernail dimly glowing, and touched it firmly to the sodden mass of sky-stuff in the other half of the box. The moss bloomed into pale light, dim but beautiful to his eyes. H e shut the lid carefully upon it, then aimed the mica end of the box this way and that around him. He was sitting on a smooth flat rock that sloped gently down to the water and ran away featureless into the darkness on every other side. Now that he had light, his first care was to recover the few strands of sky-stuff that had escaped between his fingers when he poured the water out. He dipped them up out of the puddle one by one, dried them as best he could by shaking them gently and deposited them in the box again. Next he thought of his hurts. Dark sky-stuff, moistened and bound to a wound, was said to be healing; but he had none to spare, nor any other medicines. He climbed stiffly to his feet. His sopping garments clung to him. His shoes squelched when he took a step. Even his hair dripped cold down the back of his neck. He turned toward the distant roaring sound and slowly began to valk along the edge of the water, holding the light-box ahead of him. After ten steps a black wall of rock gleamed out of the darkness. It went nearly to the water and rose overhead farther than his little light would reach. He turned away from the water, up the slope. After a few steps the stone on which he had been walking ended and gave way to other slabs, more uneven, higher and of a smaller size, while the wall curved gradually back, away from the roaring sound, until it ran parallel with the water. In thirty paces more, Thorinn came to a head-high shelf on which some leathery fans of fungus grew. He pulled them down, found them white and doughy inside, with a strong stale odor. He nibbled at one, found it palatable and then, such was his hun ger, ate all the rest and looked for more. But he found no others of that size, only a mass of larger ones joined together in long rows, dead and just as hard as spearwood. He turned away in disappointment, but after a moment, thinking better of it, went back and broke loose some of the dead fungus. It came away in a long staff, like a loaf of bread. He examined the inner surface closely in the glow of the light-box. It was porous and tinder-dry. Insects had tunneled through it, leaving portions of the mass so eaten away that they collapsed under his thumb. Thorinn felt a spark of excitement. He knelt on the cold stone, opened his wallet and got out his fire stick. The tinder was a sodden mass of fiber. Thorinn untied it and spread it out on the stone; it might dry enough to be of use, he supposed, but it would ' take days. # T ! H e dried his hands as well as he could by rubbing them along the rock, then picked up the staff of fungus again and began to break off small pieces. But his touch dampened them in spite of all he could do, and at last he broke the staff into two parts and began rubbing the ends together to grind off chunks and fragments. When he had a pile of these, he laid the rest of the fungus aside and picked up his fire stick. Like everything else he owned it was wet, but the plunger still slid freely enough in the cylinder. Thorinn took it apart and shook a few drops of moisture out of it. Then, holding it braced against the stone between his legs, he sat patiently driving the plunger in, over and over, until the cylinder grew warm to the touch and the inside was dry. He opened the fire stick then, wedged the cylinder upright into a crack in the stone and used two shreds of fungus like fingers to pick up other shreds, preserving their dryness, and drop them into the fire stick. He put the plunger in, drove it down smartly, removed it. The shreds of fungus were glowing bright orange. He tipped them out carefully into a pile of the finest fragments and dust of the fungus. They glowed for a moment more, then went out. On the third try, the little fire caught. Thorinn protected it with his cupped hands, blew gently on it, fed it sparingly with tiny splinters, then with bigger ones, and at last had whole chunks and staffs of fungus blazing yellow. The yellow light danced high, reflecting glints from the shelving rock wall for a distance of five or six ells, before it vanished into shadow. Peering up between his cupped hands, Thorinn thought he could make out a vague glimmer that might be the ceiling, far overhead. He crouched to the fire, soaking up warmth greedily with hands and face, then stripped off his soaked clothing and stood near the flames, turning himself like meat on a spit until at length he was dry and warm. The blood that welled slowly from the wounds in his chest began to clot. Feeling stronger, Thorinn walked along the wall of rock collecting more staffs of fungus, which he piled near the fire; then he turned his shirt and breeks inside out and sat down to dry them. He emptied his wallet, putting the lump of sky-moss carefully aside in a cranny of the rock and examining the rest of his belongings for the first time to make sure they were safe. He laid his possessions out carefully on the rock and propped the wallet open to dry along with his shoes. 'T"he leather of his shirt steamed and turned a lighter brown. He pulled it right side out again and put it on, then the breeks. They were not thoroughly dry, but they were warm inside. They would have to do. He chose a long, heavy staff of fungus, laid one end of it in the heart of the fire. His shoes were wet as ever, but he put them on, gathered his possessions into the wallet and hung it from his belt. By this time the end of the fungus staff was blazing, and he lifted it out of the fire. Yellow flames continued to curl around its tip, and when he held it overhead shading his eyes, it cast a ruddy light that made the cavern visible for a dozen ells or more on every side. The rock wall rose in one receding shelf after another back into the shadows. Tipping his head back now, Thorinn could make out the broken rock surface of the cavern's ceiling, dim in the distance. But although he walked down to the edge of the water and held the torch high, he could not see the other side -- only the dark, glassy, faintly moving surface of the water and the dim slope of the bottom under it, shelving down into darkness. He turned away from the roaring sound and followed the edge of the water in the other direction. The rock wall curved closer, became broken and covered with gray nodules of fungus; the stone shelf underfoot narrowed until there was barely room to walk, then gave way to heaped boulders. The thunderous roaring receded behind him, but another water-sound rose ahead. Holding his light out over the water, he saw the gleam of a swift current. Now the ceiling began to dip lower. Thorinn was picking his way from one water-rounded boulder to another at the foot of the sheer face of rock. The ceiling curved down, the shelf broadened out again into two flat stones... and between them the water ran as glass, into a narrow slot of darkness under the wall. On the other side of the outlet, the shelf broadened again, and behind it was a tumbled mass of boulders. Thorinn hesitated. The gap was only three ells across, half again his own height, but the thought of falling into that dark water made his knees turn weak. He screwed up his courage, leaped and landed safely.  s well as he could judge, the cavern at this end was some twenty or thirty ells broad, and the ceiling might be as much as thirty ells high in the center. On this side, the ceiling slanted sharply down to the talus slope of boulders at the base of which he stood. Fungi grew here and there on some of the larger stones. Thorinn picked all the smaller ones he saw, ate some and put the rest into his wallet. He found another long staff of dead fungus and tore it down for a spare torch. The roaring grew louder as he circled the lake. Out across the dark water, an orange spark leaped into view: it was his fire, on the other side. He watched it for what seemed like a long time, until it abruptly winked out again, and he realized he had passed the wall of rock that jutted out to the water. His torch was burning low. He paused to light the second one, and in its brighter flare, something white and vast rose out of the darkness. The roaring filled the cavern now as he moved closer; it stuffed his ears with noise. He shouted and could not hear himself. The air was full of flying droplets, drifting in fairy arcs, winking and vanishing. The white water dropped thunderously into the lake, bursting into white mounds of spray. Thorinn could dimly make out the shapes of rocks like giants' skulls behind the curtain of water. He could not see the top of it, and his torch was smoking and dimming now as he tried to move nearer. The wet air was putting it out. Thorinn retreated until the torch burned brightly again, then began to climb the heaped boulders, working his way toward the waterfall. The air was less damp at this height, and he was able to approach within twenty ells or so of the cataract. He was halfway up the cavern wall now, and the boulders would take him no higher. He raised the torch. The dim light glimmered back from a hole in the rocky ceiling, from which the torrent sprang out greenish-white and curved into space. One look, and he knew he could never get back up the way he had come down. IV A s he sat on a boulder, his eye was caught by a tiny glimmer of brightness under the dark water, far off toward the middle of the lake. He stared at it under his hand, and in a moment was almost sure that it was his lost sword. But it might as well have been at a thousand leagues' distance for all the good it was to him. Indeed, it seemed likely that he would never need it again. Weariness took him as he sat, and he began to think how good it would be to lie and rest, near the fire for comfort, though indeed, except for his wet shoes and breeks, he was comfortable enough. The air in this cavern was cool and fresh; there was no wind... Here he began confusedly to imagine that the cavern had the ceaseless wind of Hovenskar blowing through it and that the gray-maned horses were lifting their heads beyond Goryat's stone-roofed house, which somehow was all mingled with the wall of the cavern, and the smoke as it rose from the smokehole leaning crooked in the air... He came to himself with a start, to realize that he had all but dropped the smoldering torch out of his hand. The torch was half out, a black stub crawling with fire-worms. It's thin, acrid smoke drifted aslant. Thorinn's head rose to follow it. Indeed, since the air was fresh, there must be some way for it to come into the cavern! The two holes that he knew of were both filled by the moving water. Therefore there must be others. Stung to wakefulness, he rose and beagn to climb, following the dim path of the smoke from his torch. Questing along the top of the heap of boulders, in a few minutes he found a crevice in the wall into which a faint current of air was moving. But the crevice was no bigger than his fist. His torch threatened to go out. He went looking for another, found it and took up the search again, working his way back the way he had come. He found two more crevices no larger than the first, then a fourth an ell in length but thinner than a finger. At the lower end of the cavern, where great slabs of the ceiling had fallen and lay heaped all anyhow, the thin smoke of his torch eddied and drifted. Stooping to peer between two slabs, Thorinn felt cool air breathing on his face. He held the torch nearer, singeing his hair in his excitement. Behind the rock slabs, an irregular passage ran away into the earth. It was two ells high to begin with and seemed to grow larger as it went. Thorinn put one arm in, tried to follow it with his head, but could not. He drew back, panting, and examined the boulders. The smaller of the two was half buried by a clutter of other stones. The larger lay almost free on the slope, supported only at its lower end by another slab. Thorinn got his fingers around the edge of the large stone, braced himself and pulled, without effect. He tried again, nearer the top, but it was no use. The stone weighed as much as a horse. He rested, feeling weak from hunger and exertion. The wounds in his chest had opened and were bleeding again. If he only had a lever, a pole, anything, to pry the larger slab up and out, away from its support at the bottom! A thought came into his mind, but he pushed it aside. Never mind. Where there was one such passage there must be others. He smeared the stone with the stub of his old torch to mark it and patiently went on searching. He leaped the gap at the lake's outlet, circled back to his starting point. His fire was gray ash and embers. He built it up again, then began to climb the terraces that sloped away behind. The rock wall here was full of promising oval shadows, but every one turned out to be no more than a niche in the rock. He made the whole circuit of the cavern once more before he was sure. There was no possible exit from the cavern except the one. He must somehow move that stone. TTe remembered his glimpse of the sword, dim yellow under the water. If he could only get it back, that would be his lever. But the thought of going into that dark water turned him cold inside, and he pushed it away a second time. He prowled uselessly around the heap of boulders for a while, then went down to the water's edge and stared out over the black surface. The thought came back insistently. Lost in the darkness, the cataract roared. It had been roaring there, he supposed, since before he was bom, and would go on roaring long after he had left his bones beside the lake. Thorinn swallowed hard, turned and walked toward the cataract, gathering dead fungus as he went. When the white mountains of spray showed in the light of his torch, he turned and began to climb. At the spot where the sword gleamed up at him from the bottom of the lake, he made a fire on the flat top of a boulder. He climbed down the slope a few ells, and made another fire; then he climbed up again to verify that the two fires, one behind another, pointed toward the sword in the lake. Grimly, thinking of the cold clasp of the water, he climbed down the slope and stood' at the lake. The water was as shallow here as on the other side, but it shelved away rapidly until within a few ells the light of his torch could no longer reach the bottom. Thorinn took off his shoes and breeks, then his belt and wallet, and laid them on a stone. The air was cool on his bare skin. He stepped into the water, wincing. The stone was slippery. He took another step and was ankle-deep; another, calfdeep; another, cautiously, and his leg went in to the knee; there was no bottom under his foot. He staggered back, trying to turn. His foot went out from under him, and the cold water choked off his yell. Smothered, gasping, he floundered up to shore again. He had tried to hold the torch above water as he fell, but the splash had put it out He was wet all over, as wet as he had been before. Qome while later, hugging his '"-'misery, he sat staring out over the dark water. He had tried the other side and had found it as deep as this one. Another, more skilled or courageous than he, would have had the sword by now, while he must stay and die here for the want of it. The sword lay on the bottom, not more than fifteen ells from where he sat But it was too deep for wading; he could not swim; there was no boat, or anything to build one. If only the lake were solid rock... Thorinn straightened and sat up. In his mind, he saw a level road of stones under the water, straight to where the sword lay. His heart bounded. He turned, scanning the slope in the dim firelight for stones of a proper size. There were plenty of them, slabs level on top and bottom, about half an ell in thickness. The first three went easily enough; he laid them in a straight line out into the water, half an ell under the surface, so that when he walked on them, the water came only to his knees. The fourth was harder to carry. The fifth, though it was no bigger than the others, he could not even lift higher than his shanks. He staggered out with it nevertheless, dropped it in place, lurched back to shore. He rested, built up his two fires above on the slope and grimly went back to work. As the causeway lengthened, instead of one stone he must put down two, one atop the other, to bring the topmost within half an ell of the surface. His first stones he had laid a span apart, but since he had begun to pile them one on another, each column must lean against the one before it, or it would fall. Even so, more than once the second stone slid off the first, either when he laid it down or when he tried to walk upon it. Then the bottom grew deeper still, and three stones in each column were needed. Three times he tried to build a column of three stones, and three times it collapsed. Thorinn splashed back to the shore cursing, and flung himself down on the cold stone trembling with weariness. But he got up again and laid two stones for a foundation, then one above, and a fourth stone on that. In this way he built another column, and another. 'T'ime passed. The fires burnt low, and he built them up again. Looking down from the height he could see his stone path straggling out into the water, less than halfway toward its goal. He lay down again to rest, dropped into exhausted sleep, and woke from dreams of eyeless goblins to find himself cold and in the dark. His fires had gone out. He collected fungus, drank a little water from the lake, relieved himself behind a boulder. The columns now must be four stones high: two stones, then two more above, then one, then one more. When he had built one such column of six stones, his arms were like lead, his breath burning his chest. It was impossible to go on. He lay cursing himself feebly, then got up and began another column. Now time had stopped, and there was only the pain of his labor. He counted the columns, and there were nineteen. The twentieth must be five stones high: he built it in courses of three stones, then two, then two, then one, and one. So with the next, and the next. Each time he climbed the slope for more stones, he could look down at the causeway and judge whether it was holding to the right direction or not. He slept and ate again. The twenty-sixth column was six courses tall -- four stones, then three, three, two, two and one: fifteen stones, to advance his causeway the width of one stone. After another dazed interval, he counted the columns again, and there were twentynine. Thorinn trudged back along his underwater causeway. He pulled his torch out of a crevice, waded back out across the tops of the columns. He held the torch trembling over his head, peered down. There it was! Deep down, straight ahead, glimmering golden under the water. With tears of weakness starting from his eyes, Thorinn went back to shore, wedged the torch into its crevice again, climbed the slope for more rocks. He built his last column carefully -- four stones, then four more, then three, three, three, two and two. The final course came above the surface of the water. Thorinn went back for a torch, wedged it in between the two topmost stones, and he stared below. The sword gleamed up at him out of darkness as though it were near enough to touch. He could see the wooden handle carved for a close grip, the dull place where the tang went into the handguard, the bright double edge. It lay on the smooth rock bottom among a few pebbles, waiting. Thorinn tied one end of his thong around one of the topmost stones, the other around his waist. His hands were like wood. He climbed gingerly down and around the last column, groping for footholds. The cold water stung his wounds. The water surged, lifted at his body, trying to upend and drown him. He clung desperately to the end of the causeway, pressed his cheek hard against the stone. What remained was such a little thing -- to climb down another ell or so, take the sword, climb up again into the air. Thorinn filled his lungs, squeezed his eyes shut, lowered himself into the water. Water was in his eyes, his ears, blinding and deafening: the water lifted him, swung him helplessly while he struggled for his life. His hands found the thong. He pulled, came up choking and gasping. He climbed' up wearily and sat shivering on the end of the causeway. Such a little thing -- but he could not do it. In the torchlight, the sword gleamed up at him defiantly. 'T'he trouble was, perhaps, that he had tried to climb down the wall of stones as if it were in air, but the unfamiliar buoyancy of the water had tricked him and thrown him off balance. Then caution itself was his enemy. He must throw himself boldly into the water, let himself sink to the bottom, trusting the thong -- then take the sword and pull himself back to safety. It was harder to do it than to think of it. Twice he tried to throw himself off, twice his muscles refused him. At last he climbed down until the water was up to his chest, then closed his eyes as before and lunged forward. At once he found himself choked, floundering, turning. He could neither sink nor rise. He pulled himself out again, coughing, spewing up water. He sat on his causeway and looked back at the length of it, dimly shining under water in the torchlight. What bitterness it would be to be defeated after such labors! But without the art of swimming, he could not move under water, even such a little distance. The treacherous stuff would not even let him sink. A thought came to him, and he stood up wearily, looking down at the stones of the causeway. He bent, seized one of them half under the water and hoisted it out, grunting with effort. The wet stone weighed nearly as much as he did, and in his weakness he could barely hold it. Surely, if he threw himself into the water again, carrying such a stone in his arms, he must sink! He gave himself no time to consider. As he climbed awkwardly around the last column, he slipped, felt himself falling. The water leaped past him. The stone was dragging him down; water was in his eyes, nose, ears... He felt a blow against his knuckles, knew he was on the bottom. His grip loosened and his body floated backward, but he seized the stone again. His lungs were bursting. He forced his eyes open, saw a stinging blur, a gleam. Holding the stone with one hand, he reached out desperately, felt his fingers close around wood and metal. Somehow he found the thong with his other hand, pulled, rose. He burst into air, breathed -- he was alive! The sword, the sword -- His heavy arm came up. And in his hand, streaming water, lay the bright metal. V T evered upward, the heavy -- 'slab trembled, moved a finger's breadth, then began to slide. Thorinn pulled the sword out of the way and leaped back. Turning majestically, the slab rumbled down the slope in a dancing cloud of smaller stones. It struck a boulder halfway down, tilted, came to rest. Stones pattered and fell silent. A haze of dust particles hung in the air. Thorinn examined his sword anxiously, but the hard Yen-metal had taken no hurt. The point was as sharp and straight as ever, and the double edge was not even nicked. Cool air breathed past him into the exposed passageway. In the light of the torch, it was curved, lusterless, smooth-walled, unequal in cross section -- tapering almost to a point at ceiling and floor. It sloped gently upward out of sight. Thorinn turned for one last look out into the darkness of the cavern. He had slept, rested, eaten all he could hold of the young fungus he had gathered. The rest -- there was little enough -- was in his wallet, and he had tied on his back a bundle of the long woody staves for torches. He entered the passage and gingerly began to work his way up it in the flickering torchlight. For the first twenty ells or so it was not bad. Then the passage narrowed so sharply that he had to crawl, pushing the torch ahead of him and dragging his burdens behind. The passage turned and twisted like a serpent, this way and that, now left, now right. With each upward turn Thorinn's spirits rose; but at last the passage took a definite downward slope. He had used seven torches, and the last was halfburned when the passage abruptly widened again. Thorinn crawled out into a black echoing space -- another cavern, much smaller than the last. The opposite wall gleamed in the torchlight, streaked and knobbed with some glassy substance that seemed to have melted like tallow and hardened again on the stone. But when he touched it, it was the stone itself. What fire could have melted the living rock like a candle? A trickle of water came from somewhere above and dripped from the bottommost knob with a melancholy sound. Thorinn cupped his palm under it and drank a sip, but it was bitter. He held his torch up, marveling. At the far end of the cavern he found two level passageways, one opposite the other, as if they were parts of a single tunnel that happened to intersect the cavern. Thorinn took the left-hand branch. His last torch burned his fingers, and he dropped it. He kept going, using the light-box. Almost at once the passage widened, the ceiling rose and became a dome three ells high. In the middle of the passageway lay something enormous, circular and dark. Hphorinn stared at it suspiciously. It made no move; neither did it have any eyes or limbs, so far as he could see. He ventured to touch it. It had the chill hardness of iron; it was wrought metal, the largest piece he had ever seen -- like a giant's shield, ten spans across, having a circular hole pierced in it of three spans' width. This hole was not in the center of the shield but to one side; through it he could see the brown, scuffed floor of the passage. He knelt and laid his palm curiously on the metal near the rim of the hole. And the massive shield turned under his hand as if it were afloat. Thorinn sprang back, hand to his sword. But the shield was slowly rotating upon some hidden pivot, returning to its former place. When the hole was where it had been before, it stopped. A second time Thorinn bent forward, put his hand on the shield and felt it turn. When he took his hand away, it swung slowly back to rest. Thorinn settled back on his haunches and stared at the shield. He liked it very little. What could it be doing here, a thing apparently shaped by man, yet so cunningly pivoted that it seemed to have no weight? Surely it must be some springe or mantrap set by demons. As he hesitated, a sound came to his ears -- the faintest of whispering or rustling noises; it seemed to come from beneath the shield. Cautiously he bent nearer. The sound died away, then returned. It was a sound like that of some small creature crawling, scraping along in the space under the shield... no, not like that, but like some sound that he knew. It was a sound that made him think of Hovenskar... Then he had it: wind in the grasses. The thing was impossible. Yet the more he listened, the more sure he grew. Using the tip of his scabbard, he prodded the shield. Under the circular hole, brown rock moved past, then a sudden glint of brightness. The wind sound grew louder: a warm breath of air arose. The bright lozenge expanded to a cramped circle, then filled up the hole. Thorinn's breath had stopped. He was looking down into depths of silver light and brown-green shadow. There were stripes of darker brown, diminishing in a curiously painful way. At last he realized that they were tree trunks, gnarled and huge, that dropped darkening through space until they were tiny as needles' ends at the bottom. It was the Midworld down there; somehow in his wanderings down through the cavern, he had got above it, for there it lay below him. His luck was incredible! Moreover, this must be the Highlands. Deep as it was, the gulf below him was nothing like so deep as the sky above Hovenskar. His mind was busy with the problem of reaching one of those giant trees and clambering down. It would be difficult and dangerous, but in this moment of happiness he had no doubt that he would succeed. There it all was below him, the land he had dreamed of. In a few moments he would be standing there, breathing free; apd the life he had counted lost once more would begin.      The next issue of Galaxy marks one of the happier occasions of our career. To begin with, we've got some good stories for you. Harlan Ellison is with us, with a piece called The Beast That Shouted "Love"! Damon Knight has another "Thorinn" novelette, taking up the tale of his far-future adventurer as he emerges from the caverns and finds himself in The Garden of Ease -- lovely world, where no one ever needs work, and those who do find themselves not only outcasts but definitely injurious to all around them. And, of course, we'll have the conclusion of Cliff Simak's Goblin Reservation, about which we have few reservations. (It's his first long one in Galaxy since Here Gather the Stars. That one won him a Hugo, and we wouldn't be surprised to find this one in competition for the next set of Hugos.) The rest of the issue isn't quite as definite yet -- depends on how the type sets -- but it looks like we'll have a John Brunner, a Brian W. Aldiss, very likely another Ross Rocklynne, and of course the usual first-rate contributions by Willy Ley and Algis Budrys. But what makes the June issue of Galaxy special in our book isn't the stories, but the fact that will be the last bi-monthly issue -- or the first monthly issue -- well, figure it how you wills with the next issue Galaxy goes monthly again. Same price. Same size. Same quality. Same all-star lineup of authors. The only difference is that from now we'll be doing it twelve times a year instead of six. And enjoying every minute of it. A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors International Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. Forgotten road to success in writing By J. D. Ratcliff I can't imagine why more beginners don't take the short road to publication -- by writing magazine and newspaper articles. I've made a good living for # years writing articles, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and heads of state. I've covered stories from Basel to Bangkok to Buffalo. It's a great life. No commuter trains to catch, no office routine. Whether I'm at home or abroad on assignment, I write from eight to noon every day -- no more, no less. My afternoons are my own. The market for articles is vast and hungry. Over # were sold last year to magazines alone. Editors want pieces on almost any subject that comes natural to you -- but they demand that your writing be sound and professional. To teach professional writing techniques to serious beginners, I joined with Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, and eight other leading authors to start the Famous Writers School. We poured everything we know about successful writing into a new kind of course which trains you at home, in spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then, you specialize in articles and other non-fiction. (Or in Fiction, Advertising or Business Writing.) You learn to write by writing. Our instructors, themselves ail published authors, work with you by mail much as editors do with established writers. Our School is young. Yet students, many still in training, have broken into print in more than # publications. Several sold pieces they wrote as School assignments. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you too can be a published writer, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well -- or offer other evidence of writing ability -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so."Jack" Ratcliff is one of America's highest paid free-lance writers. Although he works only four hours a day, he has had hundreds of articles published in top magazines, including over # in Reader's Digest alone. Famous Writers School Dept. W-#, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude, Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and #-page brochure. Mr. Mrs... Age Miss Circle one and please print i Street ! City.  State Zip ! Accredited by the Accrediting Commission Of  the National Home Study Council. JUNE # REYNOLDS  LEY  ELLISON  SIMAK (j#d.Xy by Mack Reynolds by Harry Harrison Ley  Budrys  Simak Knight  and many  others by Harlan Ellison Your Subscription Is Your Private Window On the stars in our galaxy The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it has its roots today. And out of the fantastic facts of today's scientific wonders Galaxy's all-star lineup of contributors weave stories that are sometimes wry, sometimes terrifying -- but always a delight to read. Would you like to join us, next issue and every issue thereafter for years to come, on this fascinating exploration of the fears and foibles of tomorrow? All it takes is a check, a stamp and a minute of your time. (If you prefer not to tear the coupon out of your magazine, just give us the information requested on a plain piece of paper.) From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better!  Galaxy Publishing Corp. ,#I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. #    Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose  my check or money order for:  # issues for # Q # issues for # Name Address  City  State Zip Code  U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or Q renewal. Baby Is Three Theodore Sturgeon The Ballad of Lost C'Mell Cordwainer Smith The Big Time Fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Paul Anderson The Demolished Man Alfred Bester Do I Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenheit #I J Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet (The Space Merchants ) Pohl  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station ) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hot Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Minds wap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor at the Zoo Damon Knight Wind between the Worlds Lester del Rey Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published fn Braille and Living Tape. June, #  Vol. #, No. # by Harlan Ellison by Mack Reynolds by Ross Rocklynne by Damon Knight by Clifford D. Simak by Robin Scott by Harry Harrison by John Lutz by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by AJ, Budrys Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #O# per copy Subscription: (# oopies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M, Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Y. Paid Advertisement We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country. Karen K. Anderson R. A. Lafferty Foul Anderson Robert J. Leman Harry Bates C. C. MacApp Lloyd Biggie, Jr. Robert Mason J. F. Bone D. M. Melton Leigh Brackett Norman Metcalf Marlon Zimmer Bradley P. Schuyler Miller Mario Brand Sam Moskowitz R. Bretnor John Myers Myers Fredric Brown Larry Niven Doris Pitkin Buck Alan Nourse Stuart Palmer Elinor Busby Gerald W. Page F. M. Busby Rachel Cosgrove Payes John W. Campbell Lawrence A. Perkins Louis Charbonneau Jerry E. Pournelle Hal Clement Joe Poyer Compton Crook E. Hoffmann Price Hank Davis George W. Price L. Sprague de Camp Alva Rogers Charles V. de Vet Fred Saberhagen George O. Smith Richard H. Eney W. E. Sprague T. R. Fehrenbach G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy) R. C. FitzPatrick Dwight V. Swain Daniel F. Galouye Thomas Burnett Swann Raymond Z. Gallun Albert Teichner Robert M. Green, Jr. Theodore L. Thomos Frances T. Hall Rena M. Vale Edmond Hamilton Jack Vance Robert A. Heinlein Harl Vincent Joe L Hensley Don Walsh, Jr. Paul G. Herkart Dean C. Ing Jay Kay Klein Rosco E. Wright David A. Kyle Karl Wiirf Paid Advertisement We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam. Forrest J Ackerman Isaac Asimov Peter S. Beagle Jerome Bixby James Blish Anthony Boucher Lyle G. Boyd Ray Bradbury Jonathan Brand Stuart J. Byrne Terry Carr Carroll J. Clem Ed M. Clinton Theodore R. Cogswell Arthur Jean Cox Allan Danzig Jon DeCles Miriam Allen deFord Samuel R. Delany Lester del Rey Philip K. Dick Thomas M. Disch Sonya Dorman Larry Eisenberg Harlan Ellison Carol Emshwiller Philip Jos# Farmer David E. Fisher Ron Goulart Joseph Green Jim Harmon Harry Harrison H. H. Hollis J. Hunter Holly James D. Houston Edward Jesby Leo P. Kelley Daniel Keyes Virginia Kidd Damon Knight Allen Lang March Laumer Ursula K. LeGuin Fritz Leiber Irwin Lewis A. M. Lightner Robert A. W. Lowndes Katherine MacLean Barry Malzberg Robert E. Margroff Anne Marple Ardrey Marshall Bruce McAllister Judith Merril Robert P. Mills Howard L. Morris Kris Neville Alexei Panshin Emil Petaja J. R. Pierce Arthur Porges Mack Reynolds Gene Roddenberry Joanna Russ James Sallis Hans Stefan Santesson J. W. Schutz Robin Scott Larry T. Shaw John Shepley T. L, Sherred Robert Silverberg Henry Slesar Jerry Sohl Norman Spinrad Margaret St. Clair Jacob Transue Thurlow Weed Kate Wilhelm Richard Wilson Donald A. Wollhelm Contributions to help meet the expense of future ads are welcomed, and should be sent to : ... , Judith Merril or Kate Wilhelm Knight R O. Box # Milford, Pennsylvania # On Inventing Futures Tf you skipped the two pages of ads just before tins page, turn back and look at tHem, because tbey're interesting. As you will see, about a Hundred and fifty of your favorite science-fiction writers, and ours, have taken a stand on America's activities in Vietnam. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, there are nearly as many on one side of the question as tfiere are on the other; and wEen we say "unfortunately for everyone," that's exactly wEat we mean. Most of all it's unfortunate for America. For tKere Has never been in the past century an issue wEicE Eas so tfioroughly and passionately divided tEe American people; it isan enormous dipole, and nearly all of us are standing up to be counted, one way or anotEer. Is there any agreement at all? Yes, nearly everyone is agreed tEat tEe war is a botcE. Is tEere agreement on why it is a botch? No. Because tEe war itself is immoral, dangerous and practically insane, say tEose wEo favor ending it at once; because our armies are fighting it under wraps, prohibited from taking the measures tgat would win it, say those who would favor fighting on. The issue has been debated endlessly, and we do not propose to debate it again here. It seems to us. that the debate Has been a tragic and divisive wasteland it further seems to us that this is a built-in defect to tfiis sort of debate on polar opposites. Because, obviously neither side of the debate will (spin. We are not going to abandon flffi iwar in Vietnam ovemigKt; thlee is simply no way for it to Eappen. And equally we are not going to keep our moral commitments. to the Vietnamese; it is too late for that, their country and thdr social structure Eave been destroyed. And as long as our discussions on the subject remain linufed to tfiis two-valued choice of alternatives, She debate will protract itself endlessly, and so will tEe war. WEat makes it worse is that this sort of polarized debate, wfiicH is essentially a discussion of a choice of tactics, pSakes Opponents of people who should be friends. Hook down tEe list of signers to the two divergent ads. You've seen stories by nearly every one of tHese people in tfie pages of It and Galaxy; from their Stories, you Eave an opportunity to judge of the lands of worlds they would I like for the future, and even more of tEe kinds they would like to avoid. To the best of our knowledge there s not a pennyworth of difference between them. To the best of our opinion, if these two groups were each constituted a committee for the construction of a World of Twenty-SixtyEight, and their optimum worlds were compared, they would be essentially the same world. Tfiere would' be some differences in labels, perhaps, little in realities. P redicting the future, says Dennis Gabor, is Hard work and essentially pointless; what is easier to do is Sp invent the future you want. Einstein, Fermi, Franklin D. Roosevelt and a few others decided to Invent a future that contained atomic energy; they succeeded. Russian and American leaders decided to invent a future in wlficE man would travel in space; tEey are succeeding now. Now, wE at group of people in this country are most skilled at inventing futures? WEy, we are! Writers, editors, readers, whatever; we look at (Today as only a step on the way to Tomorrow; we are time-binders, prepared to consider change as natural and inevitable, because Shat is what science fiction is all about. G. B. SEaw was not a science-fiction writer (except perfiaps in plays like Back to Metfiuselah), but he spoke for us when He said, "Most people look at wEat is, and ask 'wEy?' I look at wEat Eas never been, and ask 'wEy not?' '-' In our role as Omnipotent Observers, we can look at tomorrow and cast it in any form we wisE; and tEen, given tEe various forms of futures as a sort of sEopping list, we can make a selection among tEem, cHoosing future tEat suits best. Make no mistake, tEis is a valued skill. PerEaps tEis is wEy one finds science-fiction readers, and writers, among tEe world's top leaders in science, government, business and tEe arts; perEaps it is wEy representative groups from science-fiction writers come to address tEem. It is easy for us, because we do it all tfie time; and perEaps sometimes we don't realize Eow Eard if is for otEers. And if it is true tEat we Eave this expertise, migEt it not also be true that we can use it for a productive purpose? MigEt we not even use it to find gome alternative options in tEis polar debate? Some measures tEat migEt replace the opposite imperatives of "Get out!" or "Win!"? Maybe it's vanity speaking. But we think tEat tEere's a cEance that this might in fact be possible; and we propose to give it a wEacking good try. fJ-'Eese two ads were paid for by tEe people wEo signed tEem. Each group ponied up #, which is now resting securely in our corporate bank account, a total of # in all. We don't propose to leave it tEere. We propose to take tEat # and give it away, # at a clip, to the five people wEo first give us tEe five most immediately provocative ideas on wEat we should do about Vietnam tEat, in fact, we can do. Details appear in the advertisement that follows. Entries can be from anyone; as many as you like; only please put eacE one on a separate sheet of paper. Judging will be by the Galaxy editors, witE whatever Eelp we can draft if tEe number is too big to Eandle on our own. TEe principal considerations will be in terms of newness of the suggestion; practicality of tEe suggestion; and desirability of the suggestion; tEe weigEts to be given to each element will be at tEe discretion of tEe judges, and if two or more people give essentially the same suggestion, the first one received will get the prize. We are aware, of course, tEat tEese are puny rewards to give for Suggestions that Eopefully migEt accomplisE wEat expenditures of failed to do. But we don't really beHeve anyone would enter a contest like tEis for money anyway; we tEink that wEat migEt make be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious WJe Rosicrucians organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe e.K.R.  Scribe E.K.R.  San Jose, California # j Please send me the free book, The Mastery I of Life, which explains how I may learn to j use my faculties and powers of mind.  Name I AddressCity-Zip Codea busy person take time to think of other options is the hope that in fact they might do us all some good. And along those lines, what strikes us as being most important about all this is not the cash awards, nor even the contest itself, but what we propose to do with the suggestions after they are received. The contest is not the end of the matter. It is the mere beginning. Tn the past few decades, the world's think tanks have devised scores of ways of dealing witfl the future, planning and predicting, scenario-writing and making cost-effectiveness studies, etc. We've had occasion to mention some of these problem-solving techniques here before; perhaps you're familiar with them. One of them, and in some ways wHat strikes us as the most proCorporation's "Delphi" technique. Its primary purpose was to predict technological change. In the process of doing this, those who developed it discovered that it was performing a quite different function, and maybe a more valuable one: it was offering ways of assessing the feasibility and desirability of some of these changes, and helping to clarify questions so tliat even those which originally were so cloudily phrased as to be unanswerable were changed -- so that they became answerable, and were in fact answered. Let us assume, what we think is likely, that out of the entries to this contest we will receive some dozens or scores of ideas that seem to be worth' considering. WHat we will then do is submit these suggestions to a quasi-Delphic panel of experts in all the various areas of technology, government, industry, public affairs, the armed forces -- as representative a group as we can find; and as we already have made a start in securing participants, we are confident it will be a high-powered team, representing not only all the disciplines involved but also the various shades of opinion. And the results will be published Here -- and, unless we are greatly mistaken, in a number of other places as well. And, when we've done all this, will we have anything useful to show for it? We don't know. All we know is that it seems to us to be worth a try. Do About Vietnam? Assume you are being asked for advice. Assume the people who ask you are the President of the United States, the Congress, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- anyone andor everyone who has any decision-making authority concerning American involvement in Vietnam. Assume they want one suggestion from you... and assume they will follow it. What would you tell them to do? Don't tell them. Tell us. We will take the most provocative and seemingly productive suggestions received, submit them to problemsolving analysis, and present the results in a forthcoming issue of Galaxy. The Rules #. Anyone Is eligible to enter, and may submit as many, entries as he likes. Each entry must be on a separate sheet of paper, one side only, and include your name and address. All entries will become the property of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Please limit yourself to a maximum of # words for each entry, preferably in the form of (a) your suggestion, (b) followed, if you wish, by a statement of why you think it worth doing. #. Suggestions may be on any area of American involvement in Vietnam -- ways of winning the war, ways of bringing about a peaceful settlement, whatever you think would be of value. #. Five prizes of # each will be awarded to those entries which, in the opinion of the judges, best deserve them. In the event of duplicate suggestions, the first entries received will get the prize. Judges will consist of, or be appointed by, the Editors of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Winners will be notified by mail, and their names will be published in a forthcoming issue of this magazine. #. Send your entries tot "What Would You Do About Vietnam?", Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. Entries must be received by July #th, #, to be eligible for prizes. A fter an idle discussion with the pest control man who came once a month to spray around the outside of his home in the Ruxton Sterog stole a cannister of Malathion, a deadly insecticide poison, from the man's truck and went out early one morning, following the route of the neighborhood milkman, and spooned mediumlarge quantities into each bottle left on the rear doorstep of seventy homes. Within six hours of Bill Sterog's activities, two hundred men, women and children died in convulsive agony. Learning that an aunt who had lived in Buffalo was dying of cancer of the lymph glands, William Sterog hastily helped his mother pack three bags and took her to Friendship Airport, where he put her on a jet with a simple but efficient time bomb made from a Westdox Travalarm m her three-suiter. The jet exploded somewhere over Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Ninety-three people -- including Bill Sterog's mother -- were killed in the explosion, and flaming wreckage added seven to the toll by cascading down on a public swimming pool. On a Sunday in November, Bab'e Ruth Plaza on #rd Street where he became one of # fans jamming Memorial Stadium to see the Baltimore Colts play the Green Bay Packers. He was dressed warmly in gray flannel slacks, a navy blue turtleneck pullover and a heavy hand-knitted Irish wool sweater under his parka. With three minutes and thirteen seconds of the fourth quarter remaining to be played, and Baltimore trailing seventeen to sixteen on Green' Hay's eighteen yard line, Bill Sterog fought his way up the aisle to the exit above the mezzanine seats and fumbled under his parka for the U. S. Army surplus M-# submachine gun he had bought for # from a niail-order armaments dealer in Alexandria, Virginia. Even as # screaming fans leaped to their feet -- making his range of fire that much better -- as the ball was snapped to the quarterback, holding for the defensive tackle most able to kick a successful field goal Bill Sterog opened fire on the massed backs of the fans below him. Before the mob could bring him down, he had killed forty-four people... Some considerable number of centuries later, when the first Expeditionary Force to the elliptical galaxy in Sculptor descended on the second planet of a fourth magnitude star the Force had designated Elahlmarion Theta, they found a tKirty-seven-foothigh statue of a hitherto-unknown blue-white substance -- not quite stone, not much like metal -- in the shape of a man. The figure was barefoot, draped in a garment that vaguely resembled a toga, the head encased in a skull-tight cap, and holding in its left hand a peculiar ring-andball device of another substance altogether. The statue's face was curiously beatific. It had high cheekbones; deep-set eyes; a tiny, almost alien mouth; and a broad, large-nostriled nose. The statue loomed enormous among the pitted and blasted curvilinear structures of some forgotten architect. The members of the Expeditionary Force commented on the peculiar expression each noted on the face of the statue. None of these men, standing under a gorgeous brass moon that shared an evening sky with a descending sun quite dissimilar in color to the one that now shone wanly on an Earth unthinkably distant in time and space, had ever heard of them were able to say that the expression on the giant statue was the same as the one Bill Sterog had shown as he told the final-appeals judge who was about to sentence him to death in the lethal gas chamber, "I love everyone in the world. I do. So help me God, I love you, all of you!" He was shouting. C rosswhen, through interstices of thought called time, through reflective images called space; another then, another now. This place, over there. Beyond concepts, the transmogrification of simplicity finally labeled it. Forty and more steps sidewise but later, so very mucB later. There, in that ultimate center, with everything radiating outward, becoming infinitely more complex, the enigma of symmetry, harmony, apportionment singing with fine-tuned order in this place, where it all began, begins, will always begin. The center. Crosswhen. in the future. And: a hundred est edge of measurable space. And: warpages beyond counting across the universes of parallel existences. Finally: an infinitude of mind-triggered leaps beyond human thought. There: Crosswhen. O n the mauve level, crouched down in deeper magenta washings that concealed his arched form, the maniac waited. He was a dragon, squat and round in the torso, tapered ropey tail tucked under his body; the small, thick osseous shields rising perpendicularly from the arched back, running down to the end of the tail, tips pointing upwards; his taloned shorter arms folded across Eis massive chest. He Bad the seven-headed dog faces of an ancient Cerberus. Each head watched, waiting, hungry, insane. He saw the bright yellow wedge of li gh t as it moved in random patterns through the mauve, always getting closer. He knew he could not run, the movement would betray him, the specter light finding him instantly. Fear choked the maniac. The specter had pursued him through innocence and humility and nine other emotional obfuscations he had tried. He had to do something, get them off his scent. But he was alone on this level. It had been closed down some time before, to purge it of residual emotions. Had he not been so terribly not been drowning in disorientation, he would never have trapped himself on a closed level. Now that he was here, there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape the specter light that would systematically hunt him down. Then they would purge turn. The maniac took the one final chance; he closed down his mind, all seven brains, even as the mauve level closed down. He shut off all thought, banked the fires of emotion, broke the neural circuits that fed power to his mind. Like a great machine phasing down from peak efficiency, his thoughts slackened and wilted and grew pale. Then there was a blank where he had been. Seven dog-heads slept. The dragon had ceased to exist in terms of thought, and the specter light washed past hint, fin din g nothing there to hbme in on. But those who sought the maniac were sane, not deranged as he was; their sanity was ordered, and in order they considered every exigency. The specter light was followed by heat-seeking Beams, by mass-tallying sensors, By trackers that could hunt out the spoor of foreign matter on a closed-down level. They found the maniac. Shut down like a sun gone cold, they located Him and transferred Him; he was unaware of the movement; he was locked away in his own silent skulls. But when he chose to open his thoughts again, in the timeless disorientation that follows a total shutdown, he found himself locked in stasis in a drainage ward on the #rd Red Active Level. Then, from seven throats, he screamed. The sound, of course, was lost in the throat baffles they had inserted, before he had turned himself back on. The emptiness of the sound terrified him even more. He was imbedded in an amber substance that fit around him comfortably. Had it been a much earlier era, on another world, in another continuum, it would have been simply a hospital bed with restraining straps. But the dragon was locked in stasis on a red level, crosswhen. His hospital bed was anti-grav, weightless, totally relaxing, feeding nutrients through his leathery hide along with depressants and toners. He was waiting to be drained. T inah drifted into the ward, fol' lowed by Semph. Semph, the discoverer of the drain. And his most eloquent nemesis, Linah, who sought Public Elevation to the position of Proctor. They drifted down the rows of amberencased patients: the toads, the tambour-lidded crystal cubes, the exoskeletals, the pseudopodal changers and the seven-headed dragon. They paused directly in front and slightly above the maniac. He was able to look up at them, images seven times seen; but he was not able to make sound. "If I needed a conclusive reason, here's one of the best," Linah said, inclining his head toward the maniac. Semph dipped an analysis rod into the amber substance, withdrew it and made a hasty reading of the patient's condition. "If you needed a greater warning," Semph said quietly, "this would be one of the best." "Science bends to the will of the masses," Linah said. "I'd hate to have to believe that," Semph responded quickly. There was a tone in his voice that could not be named, but it undershadowed the aggressiveness of his words. "I'm going to see toit, Semph. Believe it. I'm going to have the Concord pass the resolution." "Linah, how long have we known each other?" "Since your third flux. My second." "That's about right. Have I ever told you a lie, have I ever asked you to do something that would harm you?" "No. Not that I can recall." "Then why won't you listen to me this time?" "Because I think you're wrong. I'm not a fanatic, Semph. I'm not making political hay with this. I feel very strongly that it's the best chance we've ever had." "But disaster for everyone and everywhere else, all the way back, and God only knows how far across the plenum. We stop fouling our own nest, at the expense of all the other nests that ever were." Linah spread his hands in futility. "Survival." Semph shook his head slowly, with a weariness that was mirrored in his expression. "I wish I could drain that too." "Can't you?" Semph shrugged. "I can drain anything. But What we'd have left wouldn't be worth having." T he amber substance changed hue. It glowed deep within itself with a blue intensity. "The patient is ready," Semph aid. "Linah, one more time. I'll beg if it'll do any good. Please. Stall till the next session. The Concord needn't do it now. Let me run some further tests, let me see hew far back this garbage spews, hew much damage it can cause. Let me prepare some reports." Linah was firm. He shook his head in finality. "May I watch the draining with you?" Semph let out a long sigh. He was beaten and knew it. Yes, all right." The amber substance carrying its silent burden began to rise. It reached the level of the two men, and did smoothly through the air between them. They drifted after the smooth container with the dog-headed dragop imbedded in it, and SempK Smed as though he wanted to say something else. But there was nothing to say. The amber chrysalloid cradle faded and vanished, and the men became insubstantial and were no more. They all reappeared in the drainage chamber. The beaming stage was empty. The amber cradle settled down on it without sound, and the substance flowed away, vanishing as it uncovered the dragon. The maniac tried desperately to move, to heave himself up. Seven heads twitched futilely. The madness in him overcame the depressants, and he was consumed with frenzy, fury, crimson hate. But he could not move. It was all he could do to hold his shape. Semph turned the band On his left wrist. If glowed from within, a deep gold. The Sound of air rushing to fill a vacuum filled the chamber. The beaming stage was drenched in silver light that seemed to spring out of the air itself, from an unknown source. The dragon was washed by the silver light, and the seven great mouths opened once, exposing rings of fangs. Then his doublelidded eyes closed. The pain within his heads was monstrous. A I fearful wrenching that became the sucking of a million mouths. Hig ery brains were pulled upon, gggssured, compressed and then' purged. Semph and Linah looked away from the pulsing body of the dragon to the drainage tank across the chamber. It was fi llin g from the bottom as they watched. roiling cloud of smokiness, shot through with sparks. "Here it comes," Semph said, needlessly. Linah dragged his eyes away from the tank. The dragon with seven Heads was rippling. As though seen through shallow water, the maniac was beginning to alter. As Hie tank filled, the maniac found it more and more difficult to maintain his shape. TKe denser grew the cloud of sparkling matter in the tank, the less constant was the shape of the creature on the beaming stage. '"phen it was impossible, and the  maniac gave in. The tank filled more rapidly, and the shape quavered and altered and shrank and then there was a superimposition of the form of a man, over that of the seven-headed dragon. Then the tank reached tbree-quarters filled, and the dragon became an underlying shadow, a hint, a suggestion of wKat Rad been tfiere wRen the drainage began. Now the manform was becoming more dominant by the second. Finally, the tank was filled, and a normal man lay on the beaming stage, breathing heavily, eyes closed, muscles jumping involuntarily. "He's drained," Semph said. "Is it all in the tank?" Linah asked softly. "No, none of it." "Then -- " "This is the residue. Harmless. Reagents purged from a group of sensitives will neutralize it. The dangerous essences, the degenerate force-lines that make up the field... they're gone. Drained off already." Linah looked disturbed, for the first time. "Where did it go? All the rage insanity you drained, where did it go?" "Do you love your fellow man, tell me?" "Please, Semph! I asked where it went... when it went?" "And I asked if you cared at all about anyone else?" "You know my answer... you know me! I want to know, tell me, at least what you know. Where... when... ?" "Then you'll forgive me, Linah, because I love my fellow man, too. Whenever he was, wherever he is.; I have to, I work in an inhuman field, and I have to cling to that So... you'll forgive me..." "What are you going to..." In Indonesia they have a phrase for it: Djam Karet -- the hour that stretches. I n the Vatican's Stanza of Heliodorus, the second of the great rooms he designed for Pope Julius II, Raphael painted (and his pupils completed) a magnificent fresco representation of the historic meeting between Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun, in the year #. In this painting is mirrored the belief of Christians everywhere that the spiritual authority of Rome protected her in that desperate hour when the Hun came to sack and bum the Holy City. Raphael has painted in Saint Peter and Saint Paul, descending from Heaven to reinforce Pope Leo's intervention. His interpretation was an elaboration on the original legend, in which only the Apostle Peter was mentioned -- standing behind Leo with a drawn sword. And the legend was an elaboration of what little facts have come down through antiquity relatively undistorted. Leo had no cardinals witH him and certainly no wraith Apostles. He was one of three in the deputation. The other two were secular dignitaries of the Roman state. The meeting did not take place -- as legend would have us believe -- just outside the gates of Rome, but in northern Italy, not far from what is today Pescara. Nothing more than this is known of the confrontation. Yet Attila, who had never been stopped, did not raze Rome. He turned back. Djam Karet. The force-line field spewed out from a center crosswhen, a field that had pulsed through time and space and the minds of men for twice ten thousand years. Then cut out suddenly, inexplicably, and Attila the Hun clapped his hands to his head, his mind twisting like rope within his skull. His eyes glazed, then cleared, and he breathed from deep in his chest. Then he signaled his army to turn back. Leo the Great thanked God and the living memory of Christ the Savior. Legend added Saint Peter. Raphael added Saint Paul. For twice ten thousand years -- Djam Karet -- the field had pulsed, and for a brief moment that could have been instants or years or millennia, it was cut off. Legend does not tell the truth. More specifically, it does not tell all of the truth: forty years before Attila raided Italy, Rome had been taken and sacked by Alaric the Goth. Djam Karet. Three years after the retreat of Attila Rome was once more taken and sacked, by Gaiseric, king of all the Vandals. There was a reason the garbage of insanity had ceased to flow through everywhere and everywhen from the drained mind of a sevenheaded dragon... Qemph, traitor to his race, hov ered before the Concord. His friend, the man who now sought his final flux, Linah, Proctor ed the hearing. He spoke softly, but eloquently, of what the great scientist had done. "The tank was draining; he said to me, 'Forgive me, because I love my fellow man. Whenever he was, wherever he is; I have to, I work in an inhuman field, and I have to cling to that. So you'll forgive me.' Then he interposed himself." The sixty members of the Concord, a representative from each race that existed in the center, birdcreatures and blue things and large-headed men and orange scents with cilia shuddering... all of them looked at Semph where he hovered. His body and head were crumpled like a brown paper bag. All hair was gone. His eyes were dim and watery. Naked, shimmering, he drifted slightly to one side, then a vagrant breeze in the wall-less chamber sent him back. He had drained himself. "I ask for this Concord to affix sentence of final flux on this man. Though his interposition only lasted a few moments, we have no way of knowing what damage or unnaturalness it may have caused crosswhen. I submit that his intent was to overload the drain and thereby rendeE it inoperative. This act, the act of a beast who would condemn the sixty races of the center to a future in which insanity still prevailed, is an act that can only be punished by termination." The Concord blanked and meditated. A timeless time later they re-linked, and the Proctor's charges were upheld; his demand of sentence was fulfilled. O n the hushed shores of a thought, the papyrus man was carried in the arms of his friend, his executioner, the Proctor. There in the dusting quiet of an approaching night, Linah laid Semph down in the shadow of a sigh. "Why did you stop me?" the wrinkle with a mouth asked. Linah looked away across the rushing dark. "Why?" "Because here, in the center, there is a chance." "And for them, out there, no chance ever?" Linah sat down slowly, digging his hands into the golden mist, letting it sift over his wrists and back into the waiting flesh' of the world. "If we can begin it here, if we can pursue our boundaries. outward, then perhaps one day, sometime, we can reach to the ends of time with that little chance. Until then, it is better to have one center where there is no madness." Semph hurried his words. The end was rapidly striding for him. "You have sentenced them all. Insanity is a living vapor. A force. It can be Bottled. TEe most potent genie in the most easily uncorked bottle. And you have condonned them to live with it always. In the name of love." Linah made a sound that was not quite a word, But called it back. Semph touched his wrist with a tremble that had been a hand. Fingers melting into softness and warmth. "I'm sorry for you, Linah. Your curse is to be a true man. The world is made for stragglers. You never learned how to do that." Linah did not reply. He thought only of the drainage that was eternal now. Set in motion and kept in motion by its necessity. "Will you do a memorial for me?" Semph asked. Linah nodded. "It's traditional." Semph smiled softly. "Then do it for them; not for me. I'm the one who devised the vessel of their death, and I don't need it. But choose one of them; not a very important one, but one that will mean everything to them if they find it, and understand. Erect the memorial in my name to that one. Will you do that?" Linah nodded. "Will you?" Semph asked. His eyes were closed, and he could not see the nod. "Yes. I wiU," Linah said. But Semph could not hear. The flux began and ended, and Linah was alone in the cupped silence of loneliness. The statue was placed on a far planet of a far star in a time that was ancient while yet never having been bom. It existed in the minds of men who would come later. Or never. But if they did, they would know that hell was with them, that there was a Heaven that men called Heaven, and in it there was a center from which all madness flowed; and once within that center, there was peace. In the remains of a blasted building that had been a shirt factory in what had been Stuttgart, Friedrich Drucker found a many-colored box. Maddened by hunger and the memory of having eaten human flesh for weeks, the man tore at the lid of the box with the bloodied stubs of his fingers. As the box flew open, pressed at a certain point, cyclones rushed out past the terrified face of Friedrich Drucker. Cyclones and dark, winged, faceless shapes that streaked away into the night, followed by a last wisp of purple smoke smelling strongly of decayed gardenias. But Friedrich Drucker bad little time to ponder the meaning of the purple smoke, for the next day, World War IV broke out. This Month in IF -- Rogue Star A sentient star ... fumed loose against mankind's galaxies! end Frederik PoW The Bird-Brained Navigator A complete "Rim Worlds" story by A. Bertram Chandler Cage of Brass by Samuel R. De'cny -- plus many other fine science-fiction stories by your favorite writers. Don't miss the June issue of Hugo-winning IF, on sale now! How We Banned the Bombs Illustrated by#ofc the population Now if we can only solve the. solution I I Teromg Allen met David LehJ matt at the Juarez Airport, just to the north and east Of Mexico City. When the rodsSEplane landed, Allen was one of the first at the bottctttt of the ladder which had snaked up to its door. His immediate superior scowled at him, after they had gone through the usual banalities. Lehman took him to One side, even as the other passengers were debouching to be taken under the wings of clucking Mexican hostesses. He said, "Jerry, bow'd you get in here?" "Get in where?" "Here, right at the plane, along with the airport personnel. Friends, relatives and such don't get to greet the passengers until they've been ushered through the airport red tape." "Oh, that," Jerry Allen grinned. "Well, you know how it is. Rank has its privileges, particularly in this part of the United States of the Americas." The other looked at him. Jerry said, "Okay. So I flashed my buzzer. Zoroaster! So what?" "You told them you were a Reunited Nations bureau man, meeting a bureau V.I.P. Is that it?" "Well, yes. What of it, Dave? Listen, I've already cleared you through. We can go." They started toward the complex of airport buildings, two obvious norteamericanos with the freshness of face of the Americans, the aggressive energy of Americans, the height of Americans, all but incongruous in Mexico. They were twin-like in their conservative dark gray suits, their spotless white shirts, their Byron-revival cravats. Jerry Allen was sandy of hair, blue of eye, his face seldom in composure, but either grinning or scowling; there was seldom middleground for Jerry Allen. Dave Lehman was on the darker side, a light touch of premature gray in otherwise jet hair, eyes dark as a Pakistani's, his smile rare, to the sorrow of those few women who had loved the man. Dave Lehman's smiles meant as much as Jerry Allen's meant little. He was saying now, even as they walked, "Because we're on a raid, which by its very nature means it's hush-hush. You've done everything but get tri-vision photographers out here. That's all we'd need. Every vader in Mexico could head for the hills." "Zo-ro-as-ter, Dave, what brought all this up? You'd think the vaders had some sort of underground spies watching out for bureau personnel. By the way, you've been invited for dinner tonight." "Don't think it can't happen," Lehman muttered. Jerry scowled at him. "What're you talking about?" "Two months ago, in Common Eur-Asia. Greece, to be exact. We flushed a vader. Small town in the Peloponnesos near Fatros. Practically the whole village was in on it, and two relatives in Athens were keeping them informed on possible bureau raids. It was the embryo of an underground." Jerry registered diock. "What'd you do?" "What could we do? Priority A. Not only those we knew were guilty, but the whole town, just to be sure we didn't miss any. If they'd condoned it, they'd do it themselves." Lehman's face took on a frustrated element. "The number of bombs we find to defuse has been falling off geometrically. I haven't any data, but one possibility is that the vaders are getting foxy as the years go by." The local bureau head said meaninglessly, "I hate vaders. I hate them the way people must have hated lepers back in the Middle Ages." Lehman shot him a glance and growled, "Well, you shouldn't. This is a job, a necessary job, but hate isn't involved. By the way, how's Dorothy?" They had reached a side door, passed through it, and Jerry Allen was leading the way toward a floater. He said, over his shoulder, "No vacuum-tube terminal in the vicinity. We'll have to go in this. Dorothy's all right, I suppose." He grunted in deprecation. "You know what? She needs a baby." Dave Lehman's face was wry. J erry held the floater's door open for the other, saw him into the seat and then walked around to the driver's side. "I'll send one of the boys over for your luggage later." "There is no luggage. I'll shuttle back to Greater Washington and then over to Geneva tonight. Old Fatso Zogbaum wants to see me about some crisis or other." "Dotty'll be disappointed." Jerry Allen hit the lift lever for clearance, then depressed the accelerator. In a few minutes, he dialed coordinates and let the auto take over. His superior was looking at him. "What's this about Dorothy wanting a baby?" "I didn't say she wanted one. Just that she needs one." Jerry ran a hand through his sandy thatch and grimaced. "Well, I guess she wants one, too." Lehman said nothing, waited for more. Jerry Allen was uncomfortable. "She hasn't anything to keep her busy, really. I work, so, of course, she's exempt from the labor draft in spite of her high degree of training. Ultramation has hit harder here than even up north. We had more time to get ready for it back before these other countries were admitted into the States. If She had a kid..." Dave said, understanding in his voice, "How's your priority, when the decade's up?" "High. We've been married twelve years and no children at all." "It should be high. You're not sterile, then?" "Zoroaster, no! Neither is Dotty." "Good. You still have time." "It's a long time to wait." They rode in silence, somehow depressed. The floater was taking them down Tacuba Boulevard. Looking idly out the window at a city he had visited many a time before, it came to Dave Lehman how little new there was in travel any more. Madrid looked' like St. Louis, or, say, Cincinnati, and Vera Cruz looked like Cleveland. Architecture in the world of the Ultra-welfare State was so standardized as to seem to come from some automated mold. Clothing had become so, long since, and for decades the every day food of York, England, had differed little from that of New York. Or for that matter, that of the original Moscow from that of Moscow, Idaho -- crossing over to Common Eur-Asia, didn't bring much in the way of change. Yes, it was a pity that world-wide trade on the grand scale had collapsed local tastes. Finally, Dave said, "What's the story on this raid?" "We'll pick up the boys at the office." "No." Jerry looked at 'him, scowling again. T ehman said patiently, "I told I I you some of these vaders were getting sneaky. They must be beginning to dream up angles. If this whole thing is to continue to work, we can't let a single vader succeed. To the extent one gets by with it, somebody else'll try. Enough start trying, and the whole machinery would break down. For all we know, there's a dozen bombs in this town, not just one. And for all we know there may be someone staked out somewhere in, or in the vicinity of, the bureau's local office. They spot me, driving up, and bingo, the cloddies are all digging in." "Yeah. Well, we haven't had any trouble like that here." "We'll make sure it doesn't happen the first time. Have the other operatives meet us at some public spot." "Plaza de Santiago Tlalteloc?" The other shrugged. Jerry got on the floater's phone. II 'T'hey picked up the other three staff men, and Jerry Allen headed back up the Calle de Guadalupe, on a higher level now and at a good hundred kilometer clip. Two of the three newcomers were Mexicans, one a Rumanian. Dave Lehman knew only the Rumanian, who worked out of the central Reunited Nations office of the bureau in Geneva. Jerry introduced the other two. Dave said idly, "You men all equipped?" One of them said, "Si." His face wasn't happy. Lehman shot a glance at him. "You don't seem to like your work, Candelas." The Mexican said defiantly, "Do you?" After a moment, Lehman said, "No. But it has to be done. I've never met anyone who liked it." "I know. However, I am a Catholic, sir." "I supposed you were," Lehman said without inflection. Then, "My own people are noted for their love of children." "Yes, sir." Dave Lehman said to Jerry, in way of changing a sticky subject, "Where's the bomb located?" "A few miles north. A former suburb, now turned semi-slum. Area known as Villa Madero." "Any complications?" "No." "Then why do we need so many men? Why couldn't you and I handle it?" "They all live in individual houses. To surround one, you'll need at least four men, five to be safe. If you just came to the front door and knocked, they'd possibly sneak the bomb out the back." "Very well." "You've got the court order?" "Of course." "Carte blanche?" "Of course." They left the outskirts of Mexico City, heavy with its grim anthill apartment houses and for a brief moment were in countryside. Then the houses began again. Individual houses, now. As Jerry Allen had said, semi-slums. The Mexican sun seemed even more brutal in these surroundings. Dave Lehman made a face. "Is there still a housing shortage in this area? It seems unbelievable." The Rumanian, whose name was Dumitrescu, grumbled, "It's the same in Common Eur-Asia. Given present methods, you can build ultramodern Housing for all in one generation. But you can't teach a people to live in them in one generation." Lehman looked to him. "What is that remark supposed to mean?" "Here in this part of the United States of the Americas, as in my native Balkans, the older generation is used to, and prefers, crowded quarters, closed windows, rather than screened ones. They find the fumes of cooking food pleasant, and have no great antipathy for dirt. They are distrustful of doctors with hypodermic needles and a great many of them, at least, have similar distrust of public schools." For a moment the Rumanian seemed about to add something to this but then he broke it off with, "Did you expect Utopia to be Utopian?" His superior had to laugh one of his rare laughs. "As a matter of fact, I suppose I did. Now, perhaps I realize that some of our changes will take a generation or two to be realized." "At least," Dumitrescu grunted. L ehman ended his amusement with a snort and said to Jerry Allen, "Your looal group seems to be on the pessimistic side, Jerry." Allen turned the floater sharply to the left on a minor road and flickered off the auto to take hand controls. He cut his speed in half, now that his own reflexes were in charge. He said, "Mexico is one of the slower areas of the Ultrawelfare State. Great deal of tradition, customs, so forth. They were all hot for double-hemisphere government, before it came, and sort of bewildered after. We're almost there." "You've cased this place?" "We've rehearsed the whole thing." Jerry Allen gave Lehman a quick rundown on the scheme of operations. It was routine, and his superior merely grunted acceptance. They turned off on still another and smaller side road, drove approximately a half kilometer and pulled up before what must have once been an attractive suburban home of a more than averagely well to do Mexican of the #'s or so. There was an extensive lawn about the place and a hedge. Two or three neglected rock gardens made up the balance of the yard. It could have been Floridian or perhaps Southern Californian. The floater sank to the road surface. Twenty wide stone steps led up to a terrace some fifteen by twenty feet in extent. Gave Lehman and Jerry Allen mounted them and knocked at the door, after surmising that the bell was in disrepair. The house had been built before the advent of identity-panels. The three sub-operatives had melted away to their own assigned positions. A small woman of possibly thirty answered. Her face held an element of weary fear, as though she had long lived in expectation of disaster. Behind her were two children, almost adult in age. They too had a strained air. Why did they do it? Lehman agonized inwardly. Why did they do this to themselves? He brought the court order from his pocket and began to read it. "Yo no hablo ingles," she said nervously. "That doesn't matter for the moment," Lehman said. He began to read again. Jerry, whose face was now tense, spoke to her in Spanish. Suddenly she gurgled something and turned to run. The children, behind her, their eyes wide in terror, impeded her for a moment. She thrust them aside, wildly, and stumbled on. Jerry was through the door and after her. "No, you don't... !" he yelled. A door banged somewhere in the back. D ave Lehman entered the short hallway and moved on into what was obviously the living room. It looked well lived in, in a yesteryear manner. There were a good many more photographs on the walls than were called for by the dictates of taste -- aunts and uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, and probably great grandfathers and great grandmothers, to boot. There were highly colored saints and bleeding hearts. There were gaudy gimcracks, probably won at some fair or fiesta of long ago. There was over much furniture, which had seen over much use. And there was a total lack of reading material, even of the more popular periodicals. In one comer sat the inevitable tri-vision set. Dave Lehman stood there stolidly, his court order in hand. Dumitrescu, Candelas and Jerry Allen brought in a mad-eyed, desperate, struggling Mexican who bore a blanket-wrapped something in his arms. He could have been no more than five feet four and was probably not quite forty years of age. His thin chest was heaving with the exertion of his struggle with the larger men. Dave Lehman knew the words, had no need to read them, but he made his eyes go down to the paper. He said, firmly, "Jose Antonio Morales, you are charged by the Bureau of Population of the Reunited Nations with having an infant. With having evaded the laws of the United States ef the Americas. With having conspired with your wife, Consuelo, to ignore the decade ban and all priority and thus endanger Hie race. Have you anything to say?" He had nothing to say, except meaningless shouts. The child he held in his arms began to scream. Lehman motioned with his head. The third operative had entered the front door behind them. He now seized the mother, who had already collapsed into hysterical tears, by the arms. Jerry Allen and Dumitrescu, with the help of Candelas, took the child from the protesting, bawling Morales. Dumitrescu and Candelas held the man while Allen brought forth a kit. He put the child on a couch and prepared a hypodermic needle. Morales screamed piercingly, struggling. "Hold the pig," Allen grated. "Two healthy kids, and he has to be a vader!" He bent over the child with his hypo. He pulled down its diaper, slapped him smartly on the bottom and pressed the needle home. The father roared, tore suddenly loose and darted at the agent. Jerry Allen, his own face working, clipped the man neatly on the jaw, felling him like a poled ox. He turned and took up another needle. "Hey," Lehman snapped. "What -- " But Jerry had knelt with a fluid motion. "Pig!" he ground out, pressing a second hypo into the fallen man's arm. The wife screamed. Jerry Allen said to Candelas, "Tell her that neither her husband nor the child are hurt. Tell her they'll be all right. I'm too worked up to think in Spanish." Candelas said something to her in her own tongue, though she seemed' not to hear. Dave Lehman said hotly to Allen, "You're a little quick with that needle, Jerry. Our instructions weren't to defuse Morales." Jerry looked at him, his face strangely changed. "You said you have a carte blanche order, didn't you? What are you going to do, let this vader keep turning out bombs indefinitely? Sure, we found this one. We sterilized the kid. But it wasn't the kid's fault he'd been brought in the world. It was his parents'. Okay, if Morales can't obey the same law all the rest of us have to, let him be sterilized too. We're not going to end the population explosion by letting vaders keep going." Lehman sighed. "AH right. It's done now. Let's go. Our dirty work's done." Candelas looked at him emptily. "Now who doesn't seem H like this work?" Lehman closed his eyes. "Yeah," he said. H elmut Zogbaum mumbled in satisfaction at the cheat his secretary handed him. "The British," he told her. "You can't heat the British." Marcy Kneedler was English, but she didn't know what h was talking about. Her bureau chief, pleased at the latest success, traced it eut cn the chart for her. "Finally Berneo," he said. "Even the area ece known as Sarawak, which was the hardest of all to crack -- less superstitious than the rest. Even they have crossed the line." "How wizard, Herr Zogbaum! The bureau wiU certainly get citations from both Common BurAsia and the United States." Zogbaum worked his fat lips into a pout. "If there was justice, Miss Kneedler. If there was justice to be found in the Reunited Nations. But no, this eternal bickering. And we seem aU but forgotten these days." Marcy said, "But you said something about the British?" "Uh? Oh, yes, the British." He beamed at her fatly. She was a pretty girl in the fine skinned, delicate featured English tradijtion. A bit on the slim side for  Teutonic taste, perhaps, but pret, ty. He wheezed a sigh for yester-year's youth. "Absolute geniuses as field men, Miss Kneedler. It would never have occurred to me." He went back to the chart Marcy Kneedler tried to keep testiness from her voice. "But what happened? How did we carry Borneo? And what did the British do?" He put down the chart and chuckled. "I am sorry. So sorry. I Had forgotten you were not privy... He paused. "Is that how you use the word?" "Sometilries," she said, patiently. (That was one of the aspects , of working for other nationalities in the Reunited Nations organization. You were often assigned to someone whose Amer-EnglisK was seemingly better than your own. Then out of a dear sky they'd up with some question such as... Well, there was just last week when an Iranian, who had supposedly taken his degree at Harvard, wanted to know what, in idiom, a son-of-a-Bee was. It took her some time to convey the idea that the Americanism had no connection with apiculture. "Yes," Zogbaum was saying. "The project was more or less, ah, kept under wraps, you say." He patted his tummy in satisfaction. "We had tried everything. Logic meant nothing to these people. Nothing meant anything." "Just look at this chart!" He traced the earlier lines of the graph. "At the rate they were going, they would have doubled their population in sixteen and a quarter yeans. Sixteen and a quarter years, Miss Kneedler!" "But," she said, "the British." T T e beamed at her as though Jshe had just contributed a ish. A team recruited from, ah, now, what wag the organization, once so strong wEile we were still having international difficulties? The counter-espionage people. James Bond and all that sort of thing?" "M-#?" she frowned. "M-#, exactly. Cloak and dagger men, eh? Rather elderly fellows now. Absolutely. Infiltrated. Took months. Years, actually. It was wonderful." Herr Zogbaum sighed deep down in satisfaction, as though he had explained all. Marcy Kneedler regarded him for a long frustrated moment. What did the Reunited Nations Have in mind, putting absentminded old fuddy-duddies like Zogbaum into responsible positions such as this? However, she said, "What did they do?" "What did they do? Ah, ha, it was simple, Miss Kneedler. They first studied most carefully the religion of the aborigines, eh? Then, very subtle, they planned to send pseudo -- you say pseudo?" When she had assured him she said pseudo, he went on. "Pseudoholy men in, from a score of different points. Ah, they had consulted the stars, or the winds, or the gods of the storms, or whatever it is consulted by these wild men of Borneo, eh? And the gods had decided, among other things, that having a family of more than two children was an abomination, eh?" He scowled heavily down at one of the reports. "However, sometimes your countrymen would seem to become too, ah, precipitate. I am afraid there will be some recriminations in the higher echelons. Particularly among those so touchy East Asian fellows of Common EurAsia." Marcy was gathering up the paraphernalia of her work, preparatory to leaving. Herr Zogbaum wasn't her regular, even though her bureau chief. His usual secretary was on vacation. Not to let the conversation drop completely, she said, "Precipitate?" He grunted worriedly, whilst scanning the report. "It would seem that in issuing contraceptive capsules they took it upon themselves to actually dispense sterilization tablets to those they thought mentally or physically, inferior." He pursed his fat Bps and shook his jowls. "There win be recriminations." Possibly there would be, Marey thought. There were always recriminations. The world had once been composed of over one hundred nations, continually bickering. Now there were the two giants, and a handful of neutrals. But the world's problems had not magically disappeared as a result. At least, all of them hadn't. Ill W hen David Lehman returned to the apartment that night, Marcy Kneedler was passingly surprised to see him. H sank into his favorite chair and looked up at her wordlessly. Their mutual affection was such that continual demonstration was unnecessary. "I'll get you a drink," she said, going over to the auto-bar. Whiskey ?" "Fine," he sighed. "But none ef that seaweed stuff." "My. Our tastes are gelling luxurious, don't you think?" "Whale steaks, I'll eat. Plankton protein I'll put up with, in its hundred and one forms. But my alcohol I'll defend as I would my castle!" "Nobly spoken, Sir Knight," she said, even as she dialed his drink. "And by that I assume you mean that by the end of the few bottles of real Scotch in the distribution center, you will become a teetotaler." She handed him the whiskey and water. "How do you mean?" "I mean that according to today's trivision newscast the Common Eur-Asia Central Production Planning has banned the use of grain cereals for beverages." "Oh, great. My one big vice, shot. Central Production Planning yet. I sometimes wonder if this part of the world wasn't better off back when they had that pseudo-communism of theirs." She sat opposite him and looked down at the intricate webbing of her Etruscan revival sandals. "I thought I was your big vice, darling." He smiled one of his rare smiles at her. "You're my one big virtue, Marcy." She snorted her amusement at him and changed the subject. "Weren't you to be in Mexico City tonight?" "I finished the business. Just a routine raid. As a matter of fact, they're becoming so rare lately they can hardly be called routine." "Did you find a bomb?" which already had two children. Zoroaster only knows how she avoided her contraceptive ration." "What happened?" "The usual. The neighbors had kept quiet -- as usual. What is this satisfaction in thwarting authority, even when the law involved is so obviously needed by all? I sometimes think there are those who would shelter a rabid dog in their cellar to prevent the proper authorities from dispatching the poor beast." Marcy said lowly, "An infant child is not exactly a rabid dpg, Dave." TTe took down half his drink, ,  scowling at her over the rim of the glass. "But considerably more dangerous to the human race." "You're being a bit overly dramatic, don't you think?" "Am I? You should know, honey. You too work for the Bureau of Population." She held her elbows to her sides, tightly, as though to suppress a shiver. "What did you do?" "To the child? The usual. A bomb is a bomb. We defused it. And the father, too." "The father? You sterilized him too?" Dave Lehman said uncomfortably, "Jerry Allen. Before I could stop him. The man already had two pre-ban children." He hesitated before adding, "Jerry seems to be on the upset side, these days. His wife -- " "Dotty?" "Yes. She must be halfway through her thirties now. Jerry says she needs a baby. I suspect she's a bit on the neurotic side." "Well, the decade ban will be over shortly. I'd think the Allens would be able to swing a priority, since they haven't had any children at all." "I imagine." Dave finished his drink. Marcy said suddenly, "Darling, why don't we get married?" He was taken aback by the quick switch, and now there was something behind the darkness of his eyes. "Why?" "Why not? Isn't it the usual thing under the circumstances?" He shook his head. "For that matter, I doubt if It is, these days." Marcy Kneedler was irritated. "You say you love me... "I don't even have to say it. You know it full well, honey." He shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "But I still say why? What's the purpose of marriage, Marcy?" "You are being deliberately aggravating, I dare say." "I'm not trying to be. Marriage as an institution is rapidly losing its original purpose, honey. Women no longer need the protection it once afforded." He saw that he had either said too much or too little and went on. "I've never accepted the belief that women are basically the weaker sex. However, in the past nature put woman in a position where she was, at least temporarily, weaker than man. That period when she was pregnant and that period when her child was too small to fend for itself. Since man's animal instinct is to impregnate as many females as possible, society was forced to invent such institutions as marriage so that he would provide for his wife and children." "This is rather a basic lecture for someone of my years, don't you think?" "Simply background, honey. As things stand today, you and I have no children. Nor would, nor could, we have even one, in the immediate future." He grunted depreciation. "Unless we wished to produce a bomb, of course." "But even if we did produce a child," he continued, "the original need for marriage no longer applies. You are no longer dependent upon a man to support you -- nor is any citizen of either the United States of the Americas or Common Eur-Asia. Man's problems of production have been solved. Society provides amply of all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life for all. So what is the present need of marriage?" Her generous mouth tightened. "There are certain moral considerations." "Oh, really now, Marcy. What Greek was it who said: Morals are the invention of the weak to protect themselves from the strong?" "Plato, I believe," she said tightly. "Very well. Women are no longer weak. They don't need that particular code of morality to protect themselves." She seemed again to suddenly switch subjects, even as she leaned toward him, urgently. "Dave. Dave, we could have a sterilie." "Honey, what is all this, all of a sudden? What's gotten into you? Aren't you happy about us? About our way of life? Obviously, it isn't ideal, but the world is in a condition of flux. We're making sacrifices, long range plans. Ultimately -- " He let the sentence die. "Yes, ultimately," she said. She held her elbows tight against her sides again, in her characteristic gesture of rejection. "But... I... I feel something, darling. Something's very wrong." "Intuition?" She came suddenly to her feet and turned her back to him. "Don't laugh at me, Dave. Something's wrong. I don't know What." tCOomething is wrong," Helmut  Zogbaum said, scowling and moving his fat lips in and out. Dave Lehman found a chair, crossed his legs and waited for his chief to go on. The bureaucrat tapped with a chubby finger the pile of reports and charts on his desk. "You probably think I do nothing all day, eh? Just sit here while such as you are out in the field doing the, ah, dirty work, eh?" It was exactly what David Lehman thought. However, he said drily, "I've never envied your job, Herr Zogbaum." "Ah, so, eh? You are quite correct. But now, I tell you, David. Something is very wrong." "I thought we were doing pretty well. There haven't been more than a dozen bombs show up in the past year. Except for that freak situation in Greece, we haven't had any special problems." "That is what is wrong, friend David." Dave Lehman looked at him, holding his peace. Zogbaum had taken up one of his endless reports and was scowling at it heavily. "It is not enough bombs -- as you call them," He grunted. "From whence -- you say, from whence? -- did that silly name come?" Dave shrugged ruefully. "Darned if I know. Possibly derived from the idea of the population explosion. Explosion -- bomb. The individual unit of the population was a baby -- thus a bomb." He thought a moment. "Or possibly it's derived from bambino. We had some of our roughest goes in Italy, during the early years of the bureau. But what's this about not being enough? On the face of it, that doesn't make sense. My particular division is in charge of tracing down every individual illegal birth that takes place, whether in Point Barrow, Alaska or led at the headwaters of the Amazon. I've been to both, by the way, false alarms in botEJ cases. It's easier to hide a bomb in London or Peking, than it is back somewhere in the boondocks." The fat man was nodding impatiently. "Yes. But tell me, friend David. What is the total population of the world?" "It's down to three and a half lions." "And does it not seem strange to you that of all this preposterous number you have but a dozen illegal births in a year's time?" Dave Lehman hesitated. "We've got it down rather efficient, by now." Zogbaum was nodding and scowling unhappily as he took up one report after another and scanned them, or at least went through the motions. The man would seem naked, Dave Lehman decided, without a report or graph in his pudgy hand. He grumbled, "Almost ten years ago the Bureau of Population was inaugurated by the Reunited Nations. It had to be, eh? At last the warnings of our obscure English curate, this Robert Thomas Malthus, they must be heeded, eh? So dramatic measures must be taken, eh?" D ave Lehman said, "Actually, the world has seldom taken up a crusade so nearly unanimously, so passionately, wholeheartedly. There's an element of inspiration, a feeling of humble awe at the ability of the human race to so surmount instinct, to bypass age-old religious beliefs when faced by an' emergency of such magnitude." The older man grunted. "You sound as though you are lecturing some woman's club, friend David." His field man flushed, even through his dark complexion. Zogbaum said, placatingly, "But perhaps you are correct, eh? However, David, something is wrong. We cannot expect such perfection in our operations." He waggled a fat finger. "Very well, we pass emergency worldwide legislation. All nations participate. We declare a -- what do you say, moratorium? -- on all births for a period of ten years. Each woman, upon reaching the age of but eight must take her monthly ration of progestin hormones and estrogen hormone, which act upon the pituitary gland and eventually suppress the output of tEe ovary." "A ridiculous age to begin -- eight," Dave muttered. The fat man shook his jowls. "No. It is astonishing, friend David, how early in life it is possible for some females to reproduce. We have records of children as young as six producing offspring." His field man made a grimace of distaste. "Yes, yes. I agree with you. However, let us face reality. But one example. Among the Moslems of such lands as Morocco, as they once called it, marriage at the age of eight was legal, religiously acceptable and quite common right up until practically the present." "So," Dave conceded, "we start them on the contraceptive pills at the age of eight." The older man was waggling a fat finger again. "For a decade, we decided, it was necessary to enforce our moratorium, to bring order from the chaos of exploding populations. At the termination of this period our machinery for selective breeding will be complete, eh? Would-be parents will be given priority ratings. Persons incapable of producing Healthy offspring, in both the mental and physical sense will continue to be restrained." Dave grimaced again. That phase of the bureau's work was another that bothered him. He couldn't Help inwardly asking the age-old question: Who is to judge the judges? Who is to decide? A bit of doggerel Jerry Allen had once laughingly quoted him, came back: Who's to police the police? They who carry the lashes? Who shrinks the psychiatrist's head? Who hauls the janitor's ashes? Very amusing, perhaps. But what is mentally healthy? In a mad world, the sane are misfits. In the old days, when there were stili wars, the psychiatrists would sometimes declare a pacifist mentally unbalanced and send him to an institution. What is physically healthy? Among the Caucasians a man less than five feet in stature is considered a physical misfit In large areas of the Orient a man of six feet is a freak. ogbaum was saying, "But no matter how popular our crusade, no matter to what an extent our race has risen to meet its emergency, there should be more exceptions." "At the beginning there were. licing the world, but there were hundreds of thousands trying to beat the rap. I personally have had to defuse... " "Defuse? Another term of you field men?" "Sterilize. I personally have sterilized as many as fifty a day. But that was more than five years ago." "Yes. That is what I mean. What has happened to this large number of would-be vaders of the law?" "We sterilized a lot of them. Especially men, but women too. You know that." The older man nodded heavily. "Yes. But there should be more. friend David, we should be having hundreds of thousands of would-be vaders of the population-control laws. I say something is wrong." "We've been efficient, is all. So few have been successful that the others have been warned off." "Very well. We will assume, for the moment, you are correct. But there is something still wrong. Where are the -- what is your field man's term? -- where are the sterilies?" Dave Lehman stared at him. In truth, he had his moments of question about this aspect himself. But now he waited for the fat man to go on. Zogbaum picked up one of his endless reports. "By Bureau of Population policy, a couple may to have it sterilized at birth. The child is not injured in any respect, eh? Except it will ever be incapable or reproducing. At the beginning of our decade of, ah, moratorium, many couples, especially those with no normal children whatsoever, derided upon sterilies. But behold this graph, friend David. There are currently being born as few sterilies as bombs. A mere handful on a planet of three and a half Dave said slowly, "There's been a trend against them. They're looked upon as freaks. Everybody knows that any child of less than ten is sterile. Besides, society isn't geared for them. This decade of moratorium on births has thrown a lot of institutions out of gear. Schools, for instance. Industries that used to be based on babies and young children. They aren't turning out their products. A child is automatically a misfit, for this tenyear period. There's no place for IV him. Not even other kids to play with. Parents soon found it out, and sterilies have become unpopular. Everybody's waiting to have a real child, when the decade is up and they can stand for priority." The fat man shifted lardy shoulders in impatience. "Perhaps. I have heard that explanation before, of course. However, the number is far from enough. Some persons would I want a child, no matter if he be a misfit or not. No, something is wrong, definitely wrong." "What?" his assistant asked, becoming impatient of the constant repetition of the same old statement. "That I do not know." The bureau head beamed at him, heavily. "And now I can forget about it for the nonce, eh? You say nonce? Very well. You are now taken off your regular duties and will devote full time to finding out, not where bombs are hidden, but why there are so few to be hidden." "Oh, great," Dave said, coming to his feet. "My job is to look for something that really doesn't exist." "Exactly," Helmut Zogbaum nodded, as though the other had conducive to the solving of their problem. T'vave Lehman let himself into the apartment, shucked his coat and tossed it to the back of a chair, then loosened his Byronic cravat. He mused passingly on the incongruous qualities of men's clothing. How long had it been since there had been any really basic changes? Aside from an improvement in colors -- they'd been on the grim side back in the Victorian through the preWorld War One periods -- and an easing the tightness of collars and ties, men's clothes had changed little since the American Civil War. On a day like this, when even Geneva and even facing on the lake could b'e brutally Hot, Dave Lehman failed to appreciate long pants, jacket and tie. Face it, he told himself, man is sartorially his own worst enemy. He made his way to the auto-bar and dialed himself a whiskey and water. He remembered what Marcy had said about use of cereals for beverages and wondered how long it would be before present stocks of spirits ran out. Well, it had just been a matter of time. Given the population explosion of the past couple of centuries and man simply couldn't afford to use cereals for drinks, nor even to feed the less productive meat animals. Chickens might be one thing. A pound of meat for two pounds of grain. But when it took the better part of ten pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, then beef needs must go by the board. It had, actually, become prohibitively expensive for nine tenths of the world's population as far back as the mid-#th Century. He took his glass to the window and stared idly out for a moment. A glint of light toucHed His eye, and he looked up at Satellite City, hovering like a tiny ball in the sky. He grunted deprecation. The last stronghold of undisciplined free enterprise. He took his glass into the bedroom and decided to pack now for his trip, although, frankly, he didn't as yet know where he was going. Find out why there aren't more bombs and more sterilies, Zogbaum said. Oh, great. The big fat slob sits behind his desk and makes with orders like that. Find out why there aren't more bombs, he says. On the face of it, it was a hushhush' project. Something was wrong, Zogbaum said. All right. Just let it get around the world that something was wrong with the Bureau of Population and the fat would be sizzling in the fire with a fine odor. He brought out a suitcase, took a pull at his drink then sat it down and began to fetch shirts, socks and shorts from a drawer. Jerry and Dorothy Allen, over in Mexico City. That was an idea. Dotty had worked with a kingsize pharmaceutical outfit in Greater Washington before she had married Jerry. She'd Had something to do with developing the diamines as a male contraceptive back in the early days. What had been the problem she'd received some sort of award for? Something like rearranging the diamine molecule so the drug prevented conception by stopping sperm production without the causing of nausea and rising blood pressure that had been side effects of the original diamine experiment. However, Dave was a layman when it came to such matters. Yes, Jerry and Dorothy Allen. First, he could trust them. Second, he was in a position to make Jerry his assistant. Dotty then could draw on for technical aid. He heard the front door open and close and looked at his watch. W hen Marcy entered, looking for him, he kissed her briefly and said, "You're off early from the office, aren't you?" He returned to his packing. "Yes," she said, her voice empty. "I quit. Are you off on another trip?" He turned back to her. "Yes, probably a rather long one, honey, sorry. What do you mean, quit?" She sat down on the bed as though physically drained. "Suddenly I could bear the whole thing no longer. The whole purpose of the bureau's existence. Every instinct, every feminine instinct, just suddenly took over." Dave tossed the clothing he had in his hands into the open bag and took up his glass. "I see," he said. Marcy Kneedler looked into his face, and there was pleading in hers. "Darling, let's get married. Let's have a sterilie." "I've told you, honey. It just isn't practical. There's no need for it." "If we had a sterilie, you'd want it to have your name, wouldn't you?" "To carry on the Lehman patronymic? A sterile child?" Flushes came easy to her complexion. "You needn't be crude." "I didn't mean to be. Marriage simply isn't called for, Marcy." She went back to the escape room and when she returned it was with a drink of her own. Dave had turned back to his packing. Marcy said, "Darling, I've been making decisions today. One of them is to quit my job with the bureau. The other is to come to a definite understanding with you." "And wHat does that mean?" "If you don't plan to marry me, Dave, don't bother to return here from your trip." There was hurt in his dark eyes. "I see." Then, "It's been a long time, honey." "Too long. I'm not getting any younger, Dave. I want... more of a feeling of permanency, I dare say. I want a child. Even a sterilie, if that's all I can have. But I want a child. And... and a man I know is mine." "And you'll know that because there's a ring on your finger?" he said bitterly. She looked at him without answer. He held up his hands in a gesture of resignation. "All right, honey. No more evasions." He sat down on the bed where she had been only moments before. "Next year the decade of moratorium on births will be over. The world will turn to a highly planned, thoroughly organized system of population control. You will have one of the highest priorities, I am sure. You are in perfect health, you have never had a child." She said quickly, earnestly, "Both of us, darling..." TTe shook his head. He took a deep breath. "Remember when the Reunited Nations were first established. The end of the Cold War? The end of all war -- knock on wood? The potential end of physical want? Remember the enthusiasm? Some of it ridiculous, extreme enthusiasm. The way we joined up with this, that and the other outfit and dashed off in all directions?" He looked back in time and snorted self-deprecation. "I guess it was something similar to the Crusade fever in Europe back in the Middle Ages. Or perhaps the initial enthusiasm for the socalled Great Leap Forward in China -- before it fell on its face. At any rate, we all felt it." Marcy Kneedler was frowning. "What in the world are you talking about?" He took a deep breath again. "Marcy, next year you'll be eligible to have a child." "So will you!" "No." She stared at him. He said slowly, "That initial enthusiasm. One of the biggest problems confronting the world was the population explosion. Very well, I was one of the earliest volunteers for permanent sterilization. There were some fifty He grunted self-deprecation. "It affects you not at all, of course, in any respect save actual reproduction. Your sex life is quite normal. Everything is quite the same. Except... "Ofi, Dave!" He slammed his suitcase shut. "So, honey, so long as nobody could have children, I felt I wasn't robbing you by our living together. But our relationship can't be a permanent one. You want and need children. I simply can't have them." Dave walked to the door and she stared after him. "Good-bye, honey," he said. "Good-bye." So softly he could hardly hear. r iis time, he hadn't warned Jerome Allen of his coming. Instead, he stood before the door of the other's Old Mexico City apartment, located in the Chapultepec Park area and flicked the identity panel alive. His long-time friend came charging to meet him, all beams, "Zoroaster, Dave! You back?" Jerry shook hands with even more enthusiasm than his immediate superior could have expected. "Don't tell me there's another bomb scare in Mexico again. The second one in less than two years. We've been getting lazy through lack of work." He led the bureau representative from Geneva, back into the apartment's escape room. Dave said, "Hello, Dorothy. Sorry I missed the dinner invitation last week." He could see why Jerry had been so enthusiastic about his arrival. From the taut expression on Dorothy Allen's face, they'd been having a quarrel before his appearance broke it up. She was a tiny woman, and overly thin, so much that only her characteristic enthusiasm and animation projected her as attractive. She rose from Her cHair to approach him and let him kiss her cheek. "You arrived just iif time dy," she said. Dave Lehman told her. Jerry ignored that. "How about a drink, my slave-driving friend?" Dave sank into a chair and said suspiciously, "Of what?" "Stone-age tequila, wHat else?" "Made of what, prehistoric seaweed?" "Ah, ha," Jerry said. "Haven't learned to roll with the blow, huh? Made of maguey plant, by the way of pulque, my whiskeyloving friend. Central Production has phased out using cereals but hasn't gotten around to maguey, which isn't really very edible and grows out in the deserts. Switch to tequila, chum-pal." "I'll try it," Dave said. Jerry went to dial the drinks. Dorothy Allen sat down across from the visitor. "Another bomb in Mexico City?" Dave was surprised to detect the bitter note in her words. He shook his head. "No. I'll tell you about it when Jerry gets back." He grimaced false amusement. "In fact, that seems to be our trouble. Our division isn't finding enough bombs. Zogbaum smells a rat." She said, the bitterness still there, "He's afraid the poor vaders have figured out some method of avoiding persecution. Is that it?" Dave Lehman eyed her. Jerry had been right, the last time he had seen the bureau's Mexico City representative. Dotty Allen was on the neurotically frustrated side. He wondered, passingly, how many women there were in the world thus frustrated. Too many, undoubtedly. "Perhaps," he said cautiously. Jerry said from the door, bearing three tall glasses and grinning at his friend, "Perhaps what? Here try Mexico's contribution to the whiskey shortage." Dave took one of the drinks. "We might as well get down to it. I've picked you two to give me a hand on a special assignment Zogbaum's given me." Dotty said tightly, "I have no desire to participate in tracking down poor unfortunates whose only crime is to bring a child into the world." Jerry's grin fell off, and he lifted his eyes to the ceiling in an exaggeration of despair. "Holy Zoroaster!" he protested. Dave sipped at the fiery tequila while looking at her thoughtfully. "That's not my assignment, Dorothy." The two Allens waited for him to go on. He said, "Zogbaum's imagination is at work. He wants to know why that bomb we found here in the United States of the Americas is the first since one we flushed in Greece two months ago." Dotty looked at him uncomprehendingly. "Of course, the bureau makes a policy of not releasing this sort of thing to the press. You mean there have only Keen two? illegal children discovered in tKe past two months? Don't be ridiculous." "And that doesn't tell the whole story. The fact is, there have only been twelve in the past year." TlT er eyes went from the fieldman from Geneva to her husband. Her mouth, probably as an aftermath of the earlier quarrel, twisted into a mocking sneer. "You two don't seem to be doing so good a Job." But Jerry was as surprised as she was. He said to Dave, "You mean the whole division has only defused two bombs in the past two months? There'll be hell to pay." Dave Lehman was shaking his head. "You're both thinking of it from the wrong angle. The bureau, and our division, is as efficient as ever. More so. Everything is going like clockwork. Everything is routine now. The last bottleneck was in Borneo and that's been eliminated." It was as though, suddenly, precognition had touched them all, as though foresight, intuition, call if what you must, Had flicked them with a fingertip. For suddenly all of them knew. All of them knew, but humanlike, it must be talked out. Dotty said, her voice flat, "You mean there have been only twelve children born throughout the whole world in the past year?" "Fourteen months," Dave said, his stomach empty in growing fear. The biochemist wiped the moist palm of her right hand over her mouth in a gesture more masculine than feminine. "How... how long has this been going on?" Actually, David Lehman hadn't thought about it. Not in that way. The charts, Zogbaum's graphs, had been most satisfying in the fall off of bombs. But before he could I find an answer, she had asked another question. "And the same applies to sterilies?" He nodded dumbly to that, then finally found words. "It's been going down steeply for... well, five years or so. Now, for all practical purposes there just are no more bombs, nor sterilies, for that matter." Dotty Allen's voice was the faintest of whispers. "Of what sex were the last few?" Jerry and Dave were both staring at her, in shock now. The implications were obvious. Dave ran his tongue over his lips, without effect; there was no moisture in his mouth. "The last two were boys. I... I'd have to check back about the others." Jerry came to his feet and went into the other room to return with a full bottle of tequila. He sloshed some, without bothering to offer ice or mixer, into all of their glasses. He said, "What... what could have gone wrong?" Dotty, disbelief trying to break through, said, "How long has it been going, the way you said? Everything is going like clockwork. Everything routine ?" "For... years," Dave growled, as though defensively. He could only sEake Kis Head. She was a fury! She was on her feet, screaming at them, cursing them, reviling them. Dave came to his feet too, a hand forward, palm up, as though in supplication. There was a break in her strained voice, and then her words meant notEing, and she mewed gibberish. When Jerry tried to approach, she clawed at him. Dave Lehman stumbled toward the door, leaving them. VI M arcy Kneedler met him at the entrance of the apartment they had shared. She said, "I thought you weren't coming back, Dave." "Things have changed." She hesitated, then turned end headed back for the escape room he knew so well but had expected never to see again. She stood by a window, as though not wishing to look at him, and stared out over the lake. The lake with its superlative villas along its edge, its dotting of sailing end motor craft, in the far distance the mountains of Switzerland. Lake Geneva, one of the world's most beautiful. Marcy said, "I have no desire to hurt you, Dave." "Of course not, honey." She had winced at the endearment. She said, "But you were correct. I want a child, Dave. I must have a child." His dark eyes were empty. And his voice, too, when he said, If you still want marriage, honey M She turned to him pleadingly. "You didn't listen. Dave, all my instincts -- I'm a woman, Dave." He nodded. "Sit down, honey. I've got something to tell you. Something you mustn't repeat. Not yet, at least." She deliberately chose a straight chair, rather than taking a place next to Him on the couch they had so often shared. She deliberately kept Her attitude cool. Dave said, "Do you remember my mentioning, the last time we met, the enthusiasm of the first years of the Reunited Nations, and tEe solving of fffost international problems? How we all burst into the new world as though it was a crusade, a new flowering of man's greatest ambitions?" Marcy nodded, without comment. "We joined this, we joined that. We threw our full resources into a hundred projects that had to be solved -- we thought -- imspent on nuclear arms, guided missiles, armies and such wastes of the past, we threw our energies into defeating cancer, hunger, inHe took breath. "There's one difficulty with such crash programs, whether under a democracy or a dictatorship. In fact, I imagine the old-time dictators, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao must have all come up against it. To maintain such enthusiasm there must be continual new goals, new crusades, new frontiers. And in these new challenges your crusaders tend to forget the enthusiasm of last year. It loses Its potency in the new crash programs." "What on earth is your point, Dave." tt'Vur Bureau of Population. It was one of the early crusades, thg conquest of the population explosion. First, and heaven help us, one of the meet successful. But the following year it mote, no Eskimo in his igloo, but must needs be sought out and brought the alphabet. And the following year, the great diseases." "What on eattR are you getting at?" He grunted self-contempt. "TEe bureau, thougE it still effected every man and woman on earth, became old hat. Routine. The problem had been solved, we thought. All that was needed was time and the efforts of those whose task it was to administer the program. People like you and me, honey." He looked up into her face. "They pulled off our research people, our technicians, such as Dorothy Allen. And all we had to do was enforce the decade of ban pn new births, and to see that those who failed to conform were dealt with and the children -- we called them bombs, heaven help us -- sterilized. Everybody had to conform, otherwise, we figured no one would." Dave said wearily, "Did you ever read about the thalidomide scandal, back in the #'s?" She shook her Head... "It was a sleeping-pill tranquilizer, supposedly checked out completely by the drug firms. Its deadly properties weren't brought to light until more than three thousand babies had died in West Germany alone, and three thousand more had been bom with grotesque malformations." "You mean -- " He wound it up, forgetting most of the explanation he had planned. "Honey," he said, "there's no reason now why we can't be married, if you still wish." "But... but you said you were sterile." "So are you." The silence remained unbroken while she stared at him for long, long horrified moments. At last she was able to say, "You mean, everybody is sterile?" He shook his head in misery. "We don't know. We've been giving our capsules to every female over eight for the past nine and a half years. When a new child came to that age, her dosage was begun. Something went wrong, we don't know what. Possibly it's not too important at this Binge. Suffice that something went wrong. The effect has become practically one hundred per cent, with all females of the species. In the past fourteen months, eleven children -- we thought it was twelve, but we were being optimistic -- were bom. Two of them female." S he said, hoarsely, "What happened to them?" "We -- the term was -- defused them. We sterilized them." She gave a short, hysterical laugh, and the only thing that came to her tongue was ludicrous. "Has it occurred to you, darling, that we're both out of work? That there will no longer be a Bur eau of Population?" Dave shook his head. "No, you're wrong there. A new crash program, Marcy. Possibly man's comeback would have been easier if we'd had that nuclear war we were afraid of for so long. We did it easier, but possibly even more thoroughly than the warhead bearing missiles would have." "You see, the Bureau of Population continues, but we're net looking for bombs to defuse eny more. We're looking for Eve." A general. "You know as well as I do them Sovs can't be trusted any more'n badger in a hen house!" The general liked to affect rough, country talk. He thought it gave him; an aura of masculinity, like Eis well cEewed cigar and the fifty-mission crush on his blue and silver cap. And he had felt more need to assert his masculinity in tEe months since he had been forced to trade the raw concrete and corrugated iron of his Da Nang ready-room for the polished marble and walnut of tire State Department's InterAgency Ad-Hoc Committee on Space. Not very deep inside, the general thought everyone in Washington outside the Pentagon was either a leftist or a homosexual, or both. Washington depressed him; the State Department him. Nothing upset him as much as the regular weekly confrontation with the bland smoothness of the senior old-school diplomat who chaired the Committee. The old-school diplomat, a tubular gray person with the contrived look of distinction of a man in a Whiskey ad, said nothing. This was a fight between the Air stay clear. He had enjoyed a long and successful career in the Foreign Service by avoiding controversy. He had been well served by his vast capacity for apathy, particularly in matters technical, such as the case at hand. was a technician, a confident young Ph.D. with too much black hair and pale eyes behind rimless spectacles who was convinced that every problem had a solution, every conflict a resolution. Logic and technical grasp had seen him through every controversy before he had cooie to Washington from one of the big R  D enterprises on the West Coast. He still had not quite grasped why these traits so regularly failed him now, and he had yet to develop the political wiles to replace them. He peered near-sightedly around the oval table and then fixed his gaze somewhere around its center. "Look, General," he said, "even if you don't believe the Soviets are honoring the Weapons in Space Treaty, consider the following facts: first, number # has an orbital inclination of # degrees. Our best calculations indicate the Soviets could hit that orbit from, say, Plesetsk. But they've never done it before." "The Chinese Reds never fired a fusion device either," interrupted the general, "until last week, that is." man, "the altitude of #'# puts it way too high for a reconnaissance satellite. It can't he a comrno satelhte. So the question remains, if it Is a Soviet vehicle, what's it for?" "For Chrissakes," Said the general with red-faced impatience, turning to appeal the absurdity of the question to the dozen men at the table. None of whose rank was equal to that of the general's. All grinned in conspiratorial convete. "Third," continued Nagorski, aware that he was wasting his tune but incapable of doing anything about it, "imagery from the Nunn-Bakers and from highresolution arrays at Echo Station indicate that number # is not less than t.# feet long and not more than j# long. It has a probable diameter of # feet. Optical brightness is.# on the Allen scale and is electronically silent. We know of no Soviet hardware, no second stage, tankage, warhead, re-entry vehicle or satellite that fits those characteristics." 'T'he general marshaled his troops with a sweep of the head and ground his cigar in the ash tray with exaggerated force. "Eook here!" he exploded. "This is all crap! We got us an unidentified satellite number # hi the catalogue. It shows up three days ago, and we can't correlate if with any of our stuff. If ain't tumbling and it's close enough to a regular Plesetsk orbit to satisfy me the Reds put it up there, and you tell me it doesn't match up with any known Sov Hardware. Of course if doesn't! Man, they've put a goddamn orbital bomb up there! And if we let 'em get away with it, they'll put another one up there, and another, and then we'll all be in a goddamn sling!" The old-school diplomat was weary of the argument When the general subsided, he held up his hand. "Gentlemen," he said, "I've been listening to this debate for over an hour and a half, and it appears to me we have no agreement in prospect. You, General Brody -- " the diplomat nodded toward the cloud of smoke from a fresh cigar that all 'but obscured the fifty-mission crush -- "seem convinced that the Soviet Union has launched the first in a series of orbital bombs, which I quite agree would be a most serious development." Hillyard, the diplomat, half turned in his chair to face the gorski, are not persuaded of this argument and feel, as I confess I do, that the Soviet Union would be unlikely to risk a breach of the Weapons in Space Treaty by taking such a step. I suspect your position is also reinforced by your fear that employment of resources to investigate number # as the Air Force proposes would seriously delay progress in the Apollo program." his faint eyes unfocused. The general removed his cigar from its socket, ready to speak. "Still," said the diplomat, his hand raised to fend off interruption, "we have been convened to Produce a recommendation for the President... " "Motion!" said the general, his eyes hard. The diplomat left unfinished his sentence, cleared his throat and read from the sheet before him. "The motion is: 'This panel recommends that unidentified satellite number # not be listed in the February, #, Satellite and the Air Force be directed to launch an Apollo spacecraft to rendezvous with and inspect unknown satellite number #.' May I see a show of hands? Those in favor?" Nine hands shot up. "Those opposed?" ant raised their hands. Nagorski had lost. But he was beginning to learn something. "Mr. Chairman," he said. "I would like to make my dissent a matter of record." "I will footnote it in the minutes," said Hillyard. f I he Flight Communicator was " bone tired. Dangerously so, he thought, and shook his head to clear his mind. There had been six weeks of day and night labor to prepare the special Apollo launch. The move to Vandenburg from the more familiar facilities at the Cape -- necessary for a safe launch into near-polar orbit -- had strained every resource of every agency involved. It was a wonder that there had been no serious errors. But the launch had gone well, and now, six hours into flight, the spacecraft was approaching its rendezvous point with # #. The Flight Communicator shook off his. weariness, and concentrated on the screen before him and on the little world of crac klin g sound in his earphones. At a signal from the plotting room, he thumbed his microphone to life and spoke: "Apollo  this ig Apollo control. Plot shows you ready for Visual acquisition." The earphones gang in his head, and then a voice, thin and harsh : "Ah-roger. Report yisaul acquisition. Closing at three-five. Range three miles." "Ah-roger," said the Flight Communicator. He was very happy the flight was secret There would be no network coverage, no demand on him to satisfy the hunger for the bullring spectacle of men risking their lives for purposes only dimly understood. "Range one mile and dosing at two zero," crackled the earphones. "Ah-roger." A red light glowed on the Flight Communicator's console. A command message from the Air Force Flight Controller had been recorded for him. He depressed a toggle, and a clear, gruff voice boomed in, his earphones "Tell Michdson to start tfiT gng s soon as he can see anything and to keep talking. The Soviets just might have boobytrapped that damn thing, and we want ever y scrap of info we can get Tell him we want Connell to start talking when he commences to get Hirsch hot on those cameras And tell him -- " there was muffled conversation in the background -- "tell him to warn Connell again." ,Tfie Elight Communicator switched channds and delivered his message. Them was silence for a y OTwphnd the Flight Communicator allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette. His earphones crackled. "Rendezvous! Range K# feet and "Ah-roger, Apollo #. Commence commentary." "Ah-roger, Apollo control." Michdson was a trained communicator. His training and a series of high and low-pass filters removed most of the emotion from his voice, but the Elight Communicator could detect some of the exdtement Michelson felt. His earphones sang their secret song for a moment, the movemg to their own pace. Then the commentary began. ( ( T? VA has commenced. Hatch open. Hirsch is shooting almeter and the Haselblad. Good view of #. A real weirdo. Cylindrical, with a lot of jelly-looking gunk on it. Green stuff. Kind of shredded or tom in places. Like some kind of thick coating that got messed up. Don't see how it got up through the atmosphere. Unless maybe shrouding... real weirdo. Overall color greenish-black. No markings. No antennae. No propulsion visible. Just smooth all over except for that green stuff. No hatches. No thrusters. How's it maintain an attitude? Connell is out. Tether looks good. He is approaching #. Report Jim. Report Jim." Another voice, with even fewer highs and lows, took up the commentary. "Exit okay. Pack okay. Thrusters okay. Oxy four-seven. Temperature eight-eight and stable. Tether clear. 'Bout half-way there. Green stuff looks sticky, like Jello. No hatches. No markings. Green jelly on brownishblack. Can't see any rockets at all from this end. No attitude control. How's the bastard maintain attitude? Closing slowly. Six feet and thrusting. Contact!" Two voices chattered each other into intelligibility in the Flight Communicator's earphones. "Jim! You okay?... green stuff... rubbery... pretty solid... hold on to... tether holding... okay, okay, all right." There was a moment of soft electronic singing. "Apollo Control, this is Apollo #. Connell okay. Spin stabilized. He's on # and he's okay." "Ah-roger, Apollo #," said the Flight Communicator, his voice professionally emotionless. Connell resumed his commentary. "I'm okay, Ed. Give me a little thrust. We've got some way on; that tether is going to tighten up on me. Okay. Okay. Good. You're closing slightly, but we've got time. Greenish stuff looks like it covered everything once. But it's tom in a lot of places. Pebbles stuck in it. Glassy. It's a couple of inches thick, but there're some pebbles near the surface. I'll see if I can't dig a couple out. Little depression here. Just back of the near end. Man's hand ought to There was a gabble of voices, Connell's and Michelson's. Connell's was high-pitched in shock as Michelson subsided: "... saw anything like it... hand in the depression and this panel slid up... maybe two by three... lighted screen with pictures... hell, I don't know... never saw... yeah! Drawings... nine dots around it, around the circle in the r middle... funny looking thing like an ape with too many arms... rows and rows of little figures, numbers maybe... got the little # mm... whole magazine full The red light on the Flight Communicator's console blinked furiously, but the Flight Communicator was too stunned to acknowledge it. For a second his tired mind was totally preoccupied with trying to recall when and where he had last eaten lamb chops, with mint jelly. There was new silence from Apollo #. Then Michelson broke it with a quieter order: "Okay, Jim. Come on back in." curious the flow of events, ''thought the old-school diplomat. Chairman again in the same meeting. Same disputants; basically the same issue. A sense of deja vu came over him as the he were in his Georgetown garden weeding tlie begonias or engaged in a good, solid staff study for the Policy Planning Group. The NASA man's voice trailed off. "Crap!" said the general. "We can't let them Sovs get to the moon first. We've got to get on with Apollo. Too much delay already. Why, if they beat us there, they'd have a launch platform that'd man who interrupted. He was surer of himself. He'd learned some lessons. And he had the backing there, in that room, that day. "Forget it, General. Here are the facts. First, it's pretty clear we've got one of the greatest scientific finds of the century. Those pebbles Connell brought back are tektites, which pretty well proves the extra-terrestrial nature of #. Second, the analysts are getting a little sense out of the pictographs Connell photographed. They haven't cracked the thing yet, but they've got enough to know # was sent here from somewhere. Third, as far as the Soviets are concerned, you were wrong before, General Brody, and you're wrong this time. We have no evidence the Soviets are ahead of us. No rendezvous experience worth speaking of. No practice in transfer orbits. No real improvement on the old Vostok-Voskhod series." "Nuts," said the general, his cigar glowing like an after-burner. "With them big boosters they got, they don't need any frills." "In any case, think of the scientific payoff in bringing # down! A whole alien science handed to us as a gift!" "It'll wait," said the general. "It ain't going anywhere." The diplomat tuned the argument out again. He had heard it before. He looked around the table. There weren't very many uniforms this time. The vote would be different. For the first time it struck him that the President chose his ad hoc committee members in accordance with decisions he had already reached. He was surprised at himself, that he had not realized it before, and a little saddened. Of course, he thought. How stupid of me. eral subsided, the one to draw careful circles on his yellow scratch pad, the other to fire up a new cigar. The diplomat rose from his introspection and said: "Gentlemen, we are again at an impasse. I can appreciate and share Mr. Nagorski's excitement at the prospect of acquiring the alien device as quickly as possible." Nagorski drew a large, heavy cross in one of his circles. "At the same time," continued the diplomat, "I can appreciate General Brody's concern that the Apollo program will be seriously delayed, again by the commitment of resources to the recovery of #. I am not empowered to adjudicate between these two positions, but we are charged with bringing forward a recommendation to the President, and... " his pale eyes strangely hard. The diplomat left unfinished his sentence, cleared his throat, and read from the sheet before panel recommends that no public disclosure be made of the unusual nature of satellite number #, that it not be listed in the May, #, Satellite Situation Report, be directed to proceed with all dispatch to launch two Apollo spacecraft, one for crew and one adapted as a reentry vehicle to contain #, in order to rendezvous with and recover number #.' May I see a show of hands? Those in favor?" Nine hands shot up. "Those opposed?" The general crushed his cigar as if it were the Washington Monument and thrust his hand up in a vulgar gesture. "This is a bunch of crap, Hillyard, and I goddam want it in writing." "I will footnote your dissent in the minutes," said the old-school diplomat. Tn a small but elaborately instrumented bunker two versts south of launch complex B at Plesetsk, Colonel Yuri Sergevitch Nikolaev sat anxiously before a high-speed teleprinter linking the bunker with the Soviet Union's net of clandestine detection stations. The ventilator over his head brought in cool June night air, and he shivered. He had spent most of his waking hours for the past two years in that bunker, and he had often had occasion to curse the ventilating system. Now, however, the tremor in his thick, muscular frame came mor from excitement than chill. The payoff to all his plans, hi hopes for advancement, must Conte soon, if it was to come at all. He found the waiting almost intolerable, and he pulled nervously at a thick, brown forelock. The teletype chattered. At # words a minute, it could fill a page in # seconds. It clacked for much less than that time: Colonel Nikolaev whooped, tore the blue teletype paper from its spool, and ran to the closed door at one end of the bunker. He pounded and shouted. "General! Comrade General! We did it! They did it! They've launched two Apollos!" The door opened, and General Koniev appeared, his tunic unbuttoned to free his ample belly, his eyes sleepy but joyful. He took the blue paper and read. His smile broadened' across his plump cheeks, and he forgot rank long enough to throw one arm around the colonel's shoulder and to kiss him wetly on his left cheek. "Well, Yuri Sergevitch, you have done it! I congratulate you. Now we must send our, little friend its destruct signal, inform Moscow, and pass our congratulations on to the linguists and the designers." The general broke his embrace, backed off, and did a quick onestep of happiness. "This will mean the Order of Lenin, Yuri Sergevitch. For both of us." He danced into his room, pulled a bottle of slivovitz from the sideboard and garnered two glasses. As he poured, he asked: "How much time do you calculate, Yuri Sergevitch?" The colonel took the proffered glass and warmed it a moment in his hands. His black eyes sparkled beneath arched brows. "They lost at least six months on the first flight. With two more Apollos and moving all the launch gear to California, it's at least another year. At least a year and a half, Comrade General." "Drink, Yuri Sergevitch," said the general. They touched glasses. "Drink," said the general, his voice pitched high with triumph, "to a Russian moon!" H oling up for a good long stay on a black planet buried deep in the Great Split is not the easiest of tasks. Rickert nonetheless anchored his ship, stolen from the bombed-out Sears-Roebuck lot, and then set about the business of unloading it, just as God told him to. His mechanohelpers, a suborder of Robots, were not much help at first, because they didn't understand everything they should. Since he in turn didn't understand the rows of buttons which stuck out from their whitely glowing chests, every time they were unable to complete a task, he had to learn to talk to them. Laboriously, he leafed through the book of Robotalk. Laboriously, as he chewed on his beard, he studied the sounds that would convey his orders. The mechs were programmed for only seven sounds. Combining these endlessly would tell them each thing they were to understand. Ee, ay, ai, o, oo, #I (y), and w (oouh). If the mechano-helpers had been a more expensive breed, they would have been able to understand # different sounds, which meant that one could talk to them in Indo-Martian, which was the flippant name philologists gave to New Mars English. IndoMartian was not a difficult tongue, but was about as basic as any tongue could be. But these mechano-helpers would react only to this all-vowel lingo. "Lleyawo," said Rickert in his first attempt to give the mechanohelpers a spoken order. The mechano-helper, he spoke to, understood, but so did all tfie other m edianohelpers. They dropped wEat they were doing with various crashings and tinklings and booms and rushed to pick up the crate. They crashed together and reeled bach Into sitting positions, innards tinkling with the plaintive distress signal which meant, "I am nulled." "Oh, drtted MecEano-fielpers," snarled Rickert and kicked them in their a-null buttons, whicH got them on their feet again. OEgdiently they went back to those tasks that they understood. Looking in the manual, Rickert discovered that each of the mechs was assigned a consonental name. If he had said, for instance, "LleyawoV," only V would have heard the order. The five mechs were named, in order of poundage and intelligence, vrdmt. That was somebody's joke, but it was all right, because it was a relief to swear at these creatures. He had to have somebody to swear at, didn't he? Certainly he did, being all alone, with not a star in the sky, with no sun, no moon, nothing -- he was all alone light-years from home. figure, if He'd heard God aright. # C T T ey, you verdammt critters," yelled Rickert at a time later on when his house was set up and everything was unloaded from the ship and his mechs were standing around unoccupied. It was an experiment, and it worked out well. The mechs plunged toward him, all three and a half tons of them. He stood his ground, wondering if the manual might be wrong and he would be crushed to death. No such luck. They ringed him, a wall of metal through which the slings and arrows of misfortune could not penetrate. "That's all, verdammt beasties," and they stood against the House looking out Into the dead darkness. After three days, Rickert was pretty well settled. His Babbling Brook was installed; his Chemical Tree was growing well (or pretending to), and he had a miniSun flooding the grounds with Genuine Earth Daylight from sixty feet up. The Sears-Roebuck people were mighty good at this sort of thing and had even doubled up and given him Genuine Earth Moonlight; all he had to do was turn off the mini-Sun, and that was Moon enough in its afterglow, although not really genuine. Rickert decided to explore his planet, which he named Rickert, and with plucky pride set off into the darkness, followed by his stalwart mechano-helpers. "Eelloweo verdammt," he would cry, and all the mechs would turn on their floodlights. "AiaiooooyaiweeD," and D would hurry up and help Rickert across a twenty-foot gorge. It was an eerie procession across the surface of the planet Rickert. Seeing 'him ringed by his five metal men and bawling out orders like a white bwana on safari, these orders echoing and re-echoing against cliffsides and the whole eerie procession globed over with the glow of floodlights, one would have expected that a giant undertaking was afoot. Actually, nothing was happening. That was the thing that finally got Rickert. Nothing was happening. The thought chilled him so that he slowed down from his giant stride like a machine running down, and he squatted to His haunches, looking at the dead metal ground and tracing a design on it with his finger. There just wasn't anything here. He looked up. You couldn't even call it a sky. Because it all ended exactly where the floodlights ended. "Ailloweo verdammt," muttered Rickert. The floodlights then went out. That's when Rickert felt it. U ntil then, until this desolate moment came, away from his camp, he did not know what spiritual emptiness was. The divine spark did not occur in these wastes. The incredible fact was that God had not had time to get out here yet. For Rickert was religious, give him credit for that. He had always felt the presence of the One. Whenever he could he had gone to church. But most often he couldn't -- so what? Church was wherever you happened to be. You felt the Presence. You made your silent and almost unformulated prayer, in the dark closet of your mind, the way the Bible told you to. Then you relaxed and turned yourself over to some Higher Power. For Rickert it worked. He felt that God would always be widi him. But here, on the planet Rickert, with the solid, the soaring, the endless chunks of dead darkness light-years, a terrible fright took hold of him. "Our Father, Who art in Heaven -- " What Heaven? Where was it? " -- hallowed be Thy Name -- " So what is Your name? Rickert listened. One thing he had discovered, God hummed inside you. Never had tile hum sounded louder than when, he had decided to plunge into the Great Split, that terrible rent in space that the rupture bombs made. Never had he listened harder. That was the rule, to listen hard to the hum. If you listened to the hum, you might hear almost anything. "I Am the One," the hum might say. "I Am Yahweh." If you listened. But you had to listen good. "I Am," the hum might say. But here, on the planet Rickert light-years from home, there was no hum. Rickert listened and shook his head and beat his ears. He would beat his brains out, he thought. Just the thought of the word "home" made him want to weep and scream. Maybe he should tell himself what the word "home" meant. He leaped from his squatting position, throwing his arms upward with his fingers clawed as if he would draw God to him from some immeasurable distance. He blubbered a little, and he remembered a little about the War. Oh, God, the War! He felt morally sure he was right. Hadn't he consulted with the Presence? Most certainly he had. And the Presence, call it God if you want to -- the Presence had hummed inside his head and said plain as day, "Go to the ends of the universe." That's what Rickert did. God directed him through the Great Split, out of the War. And God wasn't here! What more frightening thing could happen to a man who was used to turning his life over to the Divine Force? TT ickert sat down on the planet Rickert, his head on his knees, and moaned within himself and tried to find some excuse for living. The planet Rickert wasn't going to kill him, that was for sure, because the planet Rickert had plenty of internal heat which it radiated out, and it had air and soft breezes. How fortunate this was. Yahweh had given him a planet that wouldn't kill him. Rickert stumbled erect, his very wide eyes reflecting the tiny beams leaking from the interior mechanisms of his silent mechs. There was no place to go, nothing to do on this dead planet. He would go back to camp. Maybe Yahweh would get here pretty soon. His mini-Sun appeared to be jumping toward him and his mechs; it looked like a real Sun pendant in spotless night. Its benevolent glow fooled him for awhile; maybe, after all, God was already here. He got a blanket from stores and went out and sunned himself. But soon his giant, moveless lamp began to unsettle his nerves. Rickert wanted to scream. He arose and ran vigorously about the compound. He splashed with enforced glee through the Babbling Brook. He climbed halfway up the Chemical Tree. All this made no difference in his outlook. He plunged into the house, shaking and moaning and chewing at his beard. In the storeroom section, he stood before the shelves and racks containing the extensive gardening equipment stolen from the SearsRoebuck Gardening Department. His hands, trembling, were holding a yellow envelope. ( C ucurbi taceae Pepo ) "No!" said Rickert, in anguish. "No!" He thrust the disturbing packet back onto its shelf. Summer squash wouldn't grow here. Carrots wouldn't grow here. Beautiful, glorious, dew-wet morning glories wouldn't grow here. Nothing would grow here, so he wouldn't even try. He would never have a garden, again. Again? He had never had a garden. He leaned weakly against the wall and choked. At that moment, the all-wave receiver blared. It screeched. It wailed. Finally it calmed down, and a businesslike voice spoke: "Now hear this. Now hear this. Let all who hear me know that ini the name of the Collins Corporation of the United States of America I hereby take possession of this planet. Let this be attested to. Planet, I hereby name thee Dorothy!" There was a crash of splintering glass and a tinkling after-sound and a very bquid gurgle after that. "Dorothy," thought Rickert. "Who would ever name a planet -- " "I, Dorothy L. Collins," the very businesslike and somehow very brave voice spoke again, "send greetings to all who may be in this sector of space and invite them to visit at my planet Out here, we must start a new life. Over, out." The receiver settled again into silence. D ickert hardly believed his ears. Someone else had come through the Split, and that someone else was named Dorothy. Coolly, she had made her eutand-dried declaration: she had taken possession of a planet that already belonged to him. Rickert tried to work up a spasm of indignation. Instead, he relaxed and began to grin. Dorothy did have champagne. Rickert chuckled. Trust him to think the evil thing. And why Shouldn't he? God didn't exist ; Jhears from Earth, so, naturally, Ml his thoughts had to be evil. Unless Lucifer hadn't had time to get out here either. That gave him something to think about. He dragged a rocking chair from the house and took it out into the warm breezes of his planet and turned off the,. mini-Sun so that he now had a tnini-Moon. He began rocking the chair quite fast and thought and worried about this new set of problems, philosophical and actual, for a number of hours. At the end of that time, he knew the facts: Lucifer was already here! # He simply had to be out here, for how else could Rickert think the evil thing? Namely, to confront Dorothy and her spurious claims to the planet, to make her his concubine and to steal her champagne? All this, of course, was evil, immoral and sickening in its hatefulness. Naturally. What else? Rickert rose, a long shadow ominous and silent under the mini-Mcon. rerdammt eellooeewee," he  said softly. His mechs melted into the light of the miniMoon, tall servants of whitely glowing metal who ringed him at respectful distances and awaited his further orders. Rickert surveyed them. So this was his army, his army with which he would conquer Dorothy. "Okay," he muttered. "You wait here." He went into his black metal house, which hummed with the low throb of a generator, and wandered vaguely through its rooms, trying to think, trying to plan, trying to ask himself vital questions, trying to find out Why why why! Why he was here; what had happened! Of course, he knew. But he wasn't going to tell himself. Mainly, he was sure of one thing, and that was that God had told him to steer his ship into the Great Split, and he'd find the planet Rickert. His planet. Not Dorothy's. Anyway, it was time to go. One little job. One little task. He stood again before the gardening equipment he'd taken from the bombed-out Sears-Roebuck store. There was everything here to start a garden, a lovely, beautiful garden for lovely children to play in. Rickert felt himself beginning to weep again as he riffled through the packets of flower seeds. Delphiniums. Asters. Marigolds. Chrysanthemums. Pansies. He finally selected daisies. The packet read: (Beilis Perenrtis) He slipped the packet into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. Then he rushed outside. "Verdammt eewayoollai!" he shouted loudly. "We go to conquer Dorothy!" "'yn the dark planet Rickert two  streaming globes of diffused and trembling light moved toward each other. The dark human solids at the core of these David S. Rickert and Dorothy L. Collins. Ten miles lay between them; but although Dorothy knew of Rickert's approach, he did not know of hers. So Rickert, full of confidence in himself and his mechs, moved across the unpredictable surface of the planet Rickert with a hurrying, a bouncing, a swiftly rhythmic stride. He barked out his orders in a high-pitched, nervous voice. There was no pausing, no slacking here. The scarred, dead terrain, wrenched at and heaved out, twisted like black taffy into obscene shapes of unquestionably Luciferian origin, offered no real obstacle to the competent organism of man and machine. Rickert's mechs obeyed him well. They carried him; they lifted him; they threw him from one to the other. They made chains across faults in this planet Rickert, in this evil planet f absolute darkness. The ease with which this was accomplished, the high nervous glaring purpose that drove Rickert, attested well to the fact that Lucifer himself was the supreme force here. The known fact was that Earth away. Another known fact was that evil moves at speeds good can never hope to match. Yes, unquestionably Lucifer was king! Probably God could not possibly arrive for another miUioil years, if, indeed, he had not already abandoned the project of arriving at all. While Rickert was involved with these laborious speculations, the darkness ahead suddenly was shattered. It was shattered by the advent of a Talkie, looping in from a distance which was determined only by its own looming, growing ly shaped object which whirred as it approached and with a sibilant hiss of its spring mechanism fell to the ground about ten feet away from Rickert. A voice said out of the Talkie: "Talkie, move closer to the man." The Talkie moved closer to Rickert on its springy legs, but seemed warily poised for flight. Rickert quite forgot to give his mechs orders to cover the situation. They slowed down and stopped, waiting. Rickert stared at the Talkie, and it stared back, keeping one bright beam centered directly on fits chest. Rickert wanted to say "Scat!" or "Shoo!" -- but he found he couldn't say anything. He found himself fascinated with the situation and considerably alarmed. It was obvious that not only was he out to conquer Dorothy, but that she was out to conquer him. And, to judge by the Talkie, an expensive model he had seen once before on the shelves of Montgomery Ward, she had superior equipment. Now what? T he Talkie spoke again, in the voice of Dorothy. It was a very brave voice, a very soft voice; but it was an unmistakably determined and most competent voice. "Metal, I speak." The language Dorothy used was no less than Indo-Martian, the idiomatic name given New Mars English. "Metal, attend me. The planet Dorothy is ours, but another party has arrived who poses some questions. He is now on the way to meet us. Enemy or friend? Let's have a vote, metal men." "Enemy," said six metal voices like an accordion that's squeezed. Rickert came to life. "Enemy!" he shouted full into the watchful face of the Talkie! Triumphantly he added, "Verdammt!" Instantly his mechano-helpers rushed for him, and he found himself enclosed in his metal cage, impervious to all harm. Somehow, however, the Talkie edged around a bit until his single intense beam angled through the mass of metal and again centered on Rickert's chest. "He himself admits he is an enemy," said the voice of Dorothy out of the Talkie. She spoke very bravely. "But his heart is beating fast. Let's have a vote, metal men. Shall we capture him?" Like somebody playing an accordian in and out six metal voices echoed in Indo-Martian, "Capture him." "Very well," said the brave voice of Dorothy. "We shall not harm him. The Reader indicates that he is very emotional. Frightened. Angry. Anxious, perhaps sad. Bellicose. We do not know, very well. Billy Jack, you take over now." "OollayweeaiV," said a metal voice respectfully. "WeeoT," the voice added. Rickert, enclosed in his mass of protective metal, was shocked. Billy Jack was talking Robotalk. Furthermore, he knew the consonental names of the mechanohelpers. As plain as day, Billy Jack had said, "V, stay as you are. T, do not move." "No!" bawled Rickert, beginning to writhe around in his cage. He saw one opening through the legs of R. He was halfway through when Billy Jack began speaking again, in a sad plaintive note of middle G. The legs of R came slowly together. Rickert was pinned. He began to weep. The Talkie bounced nearer Rickert, aligning its beam ambitiously into his weeping eyes. "You -- you can't do this," said Rickert, weeping. "You can't come to the planet Rickert and take over my mechs. Just because you've got superior equipment. Just because they gave you a better break. You can't!" "He says we can't come to his planet and take over his mechs," came the sad and miserable voice of Dorothy out of the Talkie. "But what else can we do? This planet belongs to us, and Rickert has avowed himself to be an enemy. This is the planet Dorothy, not the planet Rickert. Billy Jack, you make sure his mechs don't let him go until we get there." "Verdammt eelloowee!" screamed Rickert. "Verdammt lloo!" His mechs stirred, then quieted down as Billy Jack spoke. In Robotalk they answered Billy Jack: "Yes, Master." The terrible silent night pressed in on Rickert more terrible and more silent because of the single incisive beam the Talkie shone in his wet eyes. Rickert closed his eyes and lay there weeping, scissored in between the metal legs of one of his own unfeeling mechs. Now he knew what Truth was. There was no doubt that Lucifer had been here a long time. And it was obvious that Dorothy was the Prince's instrument. Evil dwelt here, not only in Rickert, but in Dorothy also. That was part of the equation he had overlooked, just as he had overlooked the simple and obvious fact that his mechs could cage him just as well as they could protect him. Sluggishly, the night began to take over Rickert's brain. In his sluggishness, he only partly heard the approach of Dorothy's metal men, did not even feel the prick of the needle administered by Dorothy's doctor robot. He last remembered reaching into his jacket to reassure himself that the packet of English daisy seeds still was there. #VT ow Rickert lay in a white bed, I ' under white sheets, fully dressed, staring at a white ceiling. Ship's hospital. But also there were whirring instruments in the room, banks of controls, communication tools. Above this whirring, a low voice was speaking from the background. It was the immeasurably soft and caressing voice of Dorothy, the tool of Lucifer Who had captured him. Rickert's tensed shoulders collapsed away from their brief conflict with his restraining straps. Uncaringly, the tears still were coming from his eyes, coming, coming, coming, as from an endless well of grief and humiliation. It made no sense of course. Why should he cry? Why? Why? Perhaps because he had failed to capture Dorothy's supply of champagne. "Oh, we'll give you champagne," said Dorothy above his head. Her hand.-was on his pillow, the fingers barely touching his unkempt mass of hair. He opened his streaming eyes and looked through his tears at her face. Dorothy was not beautiful. She was, in fact, plain. Her skin was very pale and splotched gently with enough freckles to make her look healthy. She was skinny around the shoulders. Her eyes were too big with sallow halfmoons under them, and her lips were pulled severely down at the comers as if someone had been telling her a sad story all her life. Looking at her from under his lake of tears she shimmered and wavered in his vision until he closed his eyes to squeeze out the tears and then looked at her again. "You're beautiful, Dorothy," he said. "I'm not," she said, "and you're not. I need a better face, and you need a shave. But I'll settle for anything nice you have to say." "You're beautiful," he repeated stubbornly, "but you're a tool of the devil, sent here to take away the planet that God gave me to live on. It was my planet, do you understand? Then you came along, after I was here, with that bottle of champagne and you named the planet Dorothy. 'No planet should ever be named Dorothy." "Should one be named Rickert?" "But I was already here! God sent me, perhaps you will try to understand. He sent me through the Great Split -- " "That the rupture bombs made -- " she nodded. Her face was sickly pale now, and her lips were being pulled down so severely that they created frightening strains in her face. " -- and I went through! The hole in the sky that the bombs made when they blew up the planets! 'I Am Yahweh,' he said. 'I Am,' he said." He was straining convulsively against his restraining straps now, rocking back and forth, and beginning to weep again. "But don't forget," he said. "You may be a tool of Lucifer, but so am I! Everything on this planet is of the devil, because God hasn't had time to arrive yet. It's too far away, you Figure that one out, Mistress Dorothy of the planet Rickert!" S he had not retreated an inch. Her hand still lay against his hairy temple with the trembling of a bird caught in a freezing wind. She was permitting the tears to roll down her face unwiped. "God is immanent in nature," she said. "You know that, don't you? That God is everywhere? That distance doesn't matter? But maybe you've forgotten, like you've forgotten other important things." She leaned over him, so that her straight and stringy shoulderlength hair made a dark tunnel at the dark end of which he could see her pale blue anxious eyes. "But why have you forgotten, Rickert? What went wrong? Don't you see that you're -- that you're not talking right? And that you've forgotten something important? "Rickert, what happened?" The words meant nothing to Rickert. He was dull and unsharpened. His hairy mouth was half open. He only stared at her out of his staring eyes. She laid a trembling hand on his forehead. "It will be all right, Rickert," she whispered. We're not lost here. Maybe -- maybe God will send others through the Split, away from the terror and the destruction. We have a dark planet, an unlighted planet, but there's heat coming out of the interior, and even the breezes are warm, and there's soil, I've felt it -- there's soil. And if we need things, we can go back through the Split -- I'm sure of it -- and take things that we need from the burned worlds. Do you understand, Rickert?" "God will send others?" said Rickert. "Yes. Yes. Perhaps. But I don't know. I can no longer hear God. I don't know." "Rickert," she whispered, putting both hands over his wet eyes. Rickert accepted this. He felt warm flutter of her fingers; he felt himself become markedly less evil. But he must nonetheless weep some more, perhaps much more. And why? Why? Now the all-wave radio at the far end of the room awoke and sputtered with Billy Jack's sad middle G voice. "We have the information, Mistress Dorothy," he began. "We have gone through Rickert's house, have found and studied his tapes, his logs, his personal papers, his effects -- " "No, no, no!" Dorothy cried, whirling away from the unkempt man on the hospital bed. "No, Billy Jack, he can't take it -- " Then she stopped, and' the brave note crept back into her voice. "Go on, Billy Jack," she said. illy Jack recited: "Rickert is Captain David S. Rickert of the Space Arm of the Terrestrial Marine Force. "His command died to the last man when the Rupture Bombs opened up the Split. "Captain David S. Rickert, in the lead scout ship, was inside the enemy lines, but not in the line of fire. After the entire destruction of the Fleet, he returned to the Moon. It was here that he became aware of his other losses." Behind Dorothy, the man on the bed made a choking sound. She listened, not turning toward him. "Go on, Billy Jack," she commanded. Billy Jack recited: "Captain David S. Rickert saw that Luna Town was gutted. Where Luna Town had been was another large crater. Captain David S. Rickert perceived that he had lost: #) his under-Moon home, #) one vegetable and flower garden which had been flourishing well, #) one wife, whose name was Jean." The man on the bed writhed and rocked against his straps. His breathing became wild and stertorous. In the comer of the room, the doctor robot stirred and lunged toward Rickert. "No," said Dorothy sharply in Indo-Martian. The doctor robot became still. "Go on, Billy Jack," came the firm voice of Dorothy. "What else? And louder please." Billy Jack tuned up more loudly against the sounds Rickert was making. He recited: "Lost, also: #) assorted pets, namely three cats, Siamese; one dog, Dalmation; one Moonkeet, a precocious cousin of the parakeet; and #) one boydhild, age #, and #) one girl-child, age #, and #) one other girlchild, age #. Upon apprehending these losses, Captain David S. Rickert discovered an unusual ability to communicate with God. God's first suggestion to him was that he return to Earth, where -- " "That's enough, Billy Jack," said' Dorothy harshly. The doctor robot stirred uncontrollably and again lunged toward the man on the bed. "No," said Dorothy. Behind her back, she heard Rickert fighting his straps and raving and cursing. Dorothy let this go on for a long, long time, still making no effort to wipe her sad face. Finally, when Rickert's throttled screams became more muted she turned around and stood' by the bed. Rickert had fallen into a dull, hard-breathing stupor with his head canted to one side as if he had run into a wall. She loosened Rickert's hands and let him grab hers and maul them with his unkempt lips, while he muttered insane things through his beard. Then abruptly his eyes opened. ( # 'T'vorothy," he muttered. "I've got something for you." He held both her hands with one paw while he searched through his jacket with the other. Not finding what he sought, he switched hands. He brought out the seed packet. (Beilis Perennis) She freed one hand to hold the packet, to read what the envelope said, while her eyes grew monstrously bigger and her lips pulled down against her wet cheekbones and the skin of her cheekbones pulled against the sallow indentations under her eyes to create gullies for two fresh tears to run in. "For me, Rickert?" she breathed. "You're giving these to me?" "A bouquet of daisies," said Rickert. "As yet ungrown." "For me?" said Dorothy shrilly. "A bouquet of yellow daisies," said Rickert. "For you." He said. "I brought them along in case everything turned out all right." His head eased back down onto the pillow, his eyes ebbing shut, and everything about his face relaxed. He sighed I very deeply, and she saw his lips set into a smile. She could not move if she wanted to, for he imprisoned her hand against his bearded cheek. In one hand she held the colorful little packet containing the seeds of the English daisy ( Beilis Perennis), and in the other she held the face of Rickert. She trembled and could not believe what was coming over her. She squeezed her eyes very tightly to close out any chance of losing what she had. And suddenly she seemed to be looking into the face of God. "My dear God," she thought. "Thou hast sent me this sweet darling man, as Thou hast sent me to him. O my dear God," she thought. "What else have I ever asked from Thee?" Rickert's eyes opened sleepily. "You feel it too, don't you?" he said. "God just now arrived." the planet Doric, warm winds, rich old soil, and the rays of the mini-Sun brought up the daisies. One sunny day Rickert picked the bouquet and presented it to his love. for your information Jules Verne, Busy Lizzy and Hitler Touring the second World War  there lived in Germany an inventor who must have read a book in which I have some personal interest because it was one of my early works. It appeared in #, and its title was Die Moeglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt (The Possibility of Space Travel); it was a symposium with contributions by Prof. Hermann Oberth, Dr. Walter Hohmann, Dr. Franz von Hoefft and Baron Guido von Pirquet. In the preliminary correspondence the theme had to be divided up; Oberth wrote on theory, Hohmann on orbits, von Hoefft on rocket applications in the atmosphere and von Pirquet (with faint complaints) on proposed methods that would not lead to space travel. One of the things that were refuted by Baron von Pirquet -- he died only a little over a year ago at the age of # -- was Jules Verne's cannon shot to the moon. He realized, of course, that Verne was writing a story and not a treatise on ballistics. But he also knew that every reader of that story had wondered fleetingly Whether such a gun might be built. Guido von Pirquet, professionally an engineer, had a favorite approach to everything -- mathematics. Here we have a gun barrel, drilled in solid rock. Its caliber is # feet, and it is # feet long, or rather, deep. The propelling feet of the barrel length. Hence the projectile has # feet to travel in the barrel and while traveling that distance it is supposed to acquire a velocity of # feet per second. The acceleration would be incredible. But what else would happen? Well, there is a #-foot-wide and #-foo(-(all column of air in the barrel above the projectile. Since the projectile moves faster than sound this air cannot escape but has to be compressed. Compression will Heat if, and that will be enough to vaporize the projectile. To most people the discussion would have been over at that point. But von Pirquet went on. The problem of air resistance in the barrel could be solved by pumping the air from the barrel and closing the muzzle with an airtight but comparatively light cover. What else was wrong in the reasoning? Well, the propelling charge at the bottom of the barrel was converted into a hot and expanding cloud of explosion gases, but would that cloud expand enough to produce the required muzzle velocity? Afost likely it would not. But .I VI that difficulty could be overcome if about half the propelling charge were attached to the bottom of the projectile. Then you would produce two clouds of explosion gases to fill the space in the barrel below the projectile. More calculation showed that that was not yet quite good enough. Then a solution occurred to him. Part of the charge must be at the bottom. Part of it must be attached to the projectile. And still another part must be distriFig. #. Baron von Pirquet's "Moon Gun", published in #. buted in a number of side chambers that fired their gases into the main barrel just after the projectile had passed such a side chamber. It seemed quite possible that the moving projectile, by closing electric contacts, would fire the side chambers. (Fig. #.) By then von Pirquet felt that he had done his job. He had proved the proposition wrong and had shown that even difficult and expensive improvements were not likely to help. Not for one second did he take his idea seriously. And he hardly toyed with the thought that somebody else might. There follows an interval of fifteen years. During those fifteen years Hitler came to power, von Pirquet's native Austria became part of the German Reich and the second World War started. In May, # -- fifteen years to the month after the publication of von Pirquet's essay -- the German Minister of Munitions and War Production, Alfred Speer, mentioned to Hitler during a routine briefing that an "Engineer Coenders" was at work on a "multiple charge gun." Hitler, who always wanted to know "everything," down to fine detail of construction, about new guns and tanks, replied that he wished to be kept informed. It is not known just how often Speer told barre'lT Fig. #. A section of "Busy Uzzy". Hitler about the new gun, but die subject came up again soon after the Royal Air Force heavily bombed Hie rocket research center at Peenemuende on August #, #. Presumably Hitler screamed for new weapons in quantity, and Speer suggested that contracts should be awarded for the new gun without waiting for the result of test firings! Hitler agreed, and work began on a weapon that at the moment consisted mainly of promises. The military men and research scientists who knew about the project had no less than three nicknames for it The most common was Fleissiges Lieschen (Busy Lizzy), normally the name of a pretty garden flower. The second nickname was TausendHochdruckpumpe, or High Pressure Pump. 'T'here apparently were reams of A calculations and very little practical experience. The calculations said that such a gun, with an overall barrel length of # feet, should produce a muzzle velocity of # feet per second which, if the firing angle was between # and # degrees, would produce a range of #-# miles. The caliber of the gun was to be six inches, and the projectiles were to be very long, # to # times their diameter, or # to # feet in length! The barrel was to be fashioned of pieces of cast steel tubing, each # feet in length. Between these "straight" pieces there were others, each with a pair of side pieces, holding propulsive charges -- just like von Pirquet's moon gun. (Fig. #.) No good engineering description of Busy Lizzy has ever been published; all I have to go on is a general description in Rudolf Lusar's book on German Secret Weapons and a photograph of a test specimen that blew up. Therefore I cannot tell how many side chambers were planned for the finished version -- but assuming that they were # feet apart, there should have been a total of # pairs and there had to be, of course, a base charge to start the projectile going in the barrel. Anybody who has ever loaded and fired an artillery piece, or just watched a gun crew doing it at close range, will have some severe doubts right now. One base charge and a total of # side charges along the barrel means # breech blocks that must be opened, # empty cartridge cases that must be pulled out, # new cartridge cases that must be inserted and # breech blocks that must be closed again. Even if you have # men per side charge and, say, # men for projectile and base charge it would take some time to reload the gun, provided the men do not step on each other's feet! The way the story was told to Hitler was somewhat different, mainly by leaving out all difficulties. Of course guns with such comparatively lightweight barrels of enormous length (for construction purposes the length was fixed at # feet) could not be elevated like shorter guns; their barrels had to rest on the ground for their entire length. This meant an incline, and to prevent interference by the Royal Air Force the inclines had to be tunnels, with only the muzzles showing. Preferably the tunnels were to be drilled through limestone, lined with concrete and closed at the muzzle end with armor plate having just a #inch round hole to permit passage of the projectile. O f course the plan had to be grandiose to impress Hitler, hence the planners showed drawings with two adjacent gunsites. Each site held five batteries of five guns each, or fifty guns in all. Between them the two sites would fire # projectiles per hour, or # per minute, which means that the time between rounds for every gun was estimated' to be # minutes. Every round would weigh about # pounds and carry # pounds of high explosive, making a total of # pounds of steel and # pounds of high explosive per hour  if all fifty guns fired their rounds every five minutes. Hitler, hearing the figures and not hearing the "if's" (if, indeed, they were pronounced in his presence) was pleased. That would be the answer to the British blockbustbombers dropped much more than that weight in bombs in an hour -- but his "England guns" could keep it up for many hours per day. But how far had the design of the gun actually progressed at the time? Well, one Busy Lizzy with the reduced caliber of # centimeters (less than an inch) had been built, and it performed well enough to encourage the completion of a full-size (but not full length) experimental model. It was located on Misdroy, a small island in the Baltic Sea in the vicinity of Ruegen. The company that employed Mr. Coenders had developed a projectile that would fit the gun; it had a diameter of # inches but it had four flexible steel fins which, while the projectile was inside the barrel, were wrapped around it, bringing the overall diameter to # inches. Work began in many places at the same time. The two firing sites of the original plan were to be near Calais, # miles from London. One was the hill named Mimoyecques, five miles inland from the shore. The other was called Piheu-lesGuines -- but only Mimoyecques was to be constructed at first. Slanting tunnels for the barrels had to be drilled, ammunition storage dumps had to be excavated; underground living quarters, kitchens and power plants were also part of the plan. To Hitler's construction corps, the Organisation Todt, this was "Project No. #" and it was a big project. It required # German specialists and close to # French workers. Needless to say they passed a summary of their activities on to British Intelligence via the French underground; but they did not know what it was they were building. Neither did British Intelligence. Meanwhile # German soldiers underwent special training for firing the "England' guns." nphe gun on Misdroy made the first firing tests in October, #. Since it was not full length the test shells seemed to do well. Hitler ordered that the monthly production of the shells be raised from # to # rounds. Some time later it turned out that these shells became unstable in flight if they traveled' faster than sound, and production was stopped. By then # (unfinished) projectiles had been made. All this time the gun gave trouble. As General Dr. Walter Dornberger of the Army Weapons Office recollects, one of the side chambers exploded after only five or six rounds had been fired. The breechblocks of the side chambers had to be redesigned. The test projectiles had to be redesigned. But work at Mimoyecques continued. In spite of the high expenditures of man-hours the chief construction engineer estimated in July, #, that completion would take, at a minimum, four months, possibly twice as long. At that time a test shell from the Misdroy gun attained a range of # miles; after eight rounds a side chamber exploded. Six weeks later die Allies conquered Mimoyecques and after a long delay (for study?) destroyed the main access tunnel in May, But Coenders did get his gun to be fired on two occasions, though it was a "short" version, # feet in length, with a range of about # miles, firing shells Jomfri was innocent! There could be no doubt of it -- but why was he being punished ? m# weighing # pounds. One gun fired at Antwerp in January #; the other "supported" the Ardennes offensive in February, # (the "Battle of the Bulge") with about a dozen rounds. Both were then blown up. Nobody seems to know what happened to the test specimens of Busy Lizzy that were built... Nobody knows what happened to all those projectiles that had been built prematurely. Or what hap. pened to Mr. Coenders. Qince these questions cannot be  be answered, let us try another one. Could such a gun be built and made reliable at all? Probably yes, but not with pieces of standard tubing, even tubing of the best quality. It would probably need special alloys and precision-machining plus lots of money. Well, supposing such a gun were built as a leisurely project, would it be of any use? The answer to that question is a definite "no." As a weapon it would be outranged by any modern tactical missile. And for highaltitude research the answer is about the same: any modem sounding rocket can do it better. There is a final question on my mind which somebody may be able to answer. Did von Pirquet ever find out about Busy Lizzy? If so, what did he say? A s soon as Jomfri stepped out of the screen of the matter transmitter, he realized that there had been a terrible mistake. For one thing his head hurt with a pain that almost blinded him, a classic symptom of MT malfunction. For another this was not his destination, not this gray and dusty chamber. He had been on his way home. Staggering, his arm before his eyes, he felt his way to the hard bench that was secured to one wall. He sat, slumped, with his head on his hands, and waited for the pain to ooze away. The worst was over, that was certain, and he should be thankful that he had survived. Jomfri knew all about MT failures from the #V plays since, though rare in reality, these dramatic circumstances were natural material for the robot scripters. The failure of a single microscopic circuit would be enough to send the hapless traveler to a receiver that was not the one that he had punched for, while at the same lime giving his nervous system a random twist that accounted for the headache. This was what the technicians called a minimal malfunction, and once the headache had faded the victim could punch for the local emergency station, report the malfunction, then go on. The worst that could happen was too horrifying to consider: people wKo arrived turned inside out or stretched in one dimension into miles of tubular flesh. Or even worse. He was all right, Jomfri told himself, clutching his head with both hands, he had come through all right. When he opened one eye a crack the light hurt, but was bearable. He could stand, shakily, and see, barely, so it was time to get help. They would have drugs in the emergency station that would fix his head. And he had to report the malfunctioning transmitter before anyone else was caught in the thing. His fingers groped over the featureless wall for clumsy seconds trying to find the punch panel. "It is impossible!" Jomfri cried, his eyes wide open despite the pain. "There is always a panel." There was none. This screen was for receiving only. It was theoretically possible that a MT screen could be one way, without a sending tuner, but he had never seen one before. "Outside," he said, turning from the blank screen in this blank room. T eaning against the featureless  wall for support Jomfri went out the door and down a barren hallway. The hall made a single right-angled turn and opened into a dust filled street. A scrap of dirty plastic blew by and there was the smell of warm decay. "The sooner I'm away from this place the better. I'll find another transmitter." Then he moaned as the sunlight struck daggers of pain through his eyes and into his brain. He made his way into the street, stumbling, peering through the smallest crack be. tween the fingers that he clamped tight over his eyes. Tears raj down his cheeks, and through his damp agony he searched the blank, gray walls for the familiar red double-headed MT arrow. It was nowhere to be seen. A maa sat in a doorway, his face hidden in the shadows. "Help me," Jomfri said. "I'm hurt. I must find the MT station -- where is it." The man shuffled his feet but said nothing. "Can't you understand?" Jomfri was petulant. "I'm in pain. Your duty as a citizen... " Still in silence, the man caught his toe behind Jomfri's ankle, then slammed him in the knee with his other foot. Jomfri went down, and the stranger stood at the same time. "Dirty fangner," he said and kicked Jomfri hard in the groin, then stalked away. It was a long time before Jomfri could do more than lie, curled up and moaning, afraid to move, as though he were a cracked egg that would burst and spill its contents if disturbed. When he did sit up finally, wiping feebly at the sour bile on his lips, he was aware that people had passed him, yet none had stopped. He did not like this city, this planet, wherever he was. He wanted to leave. Standing was painful, and walking even more so, yet he did it. Find the MT station, get out, find a doctor. Leave. In other circumstances Jomfri might have remarked on the barrenness of this place, with its lack of vehicular traffic, its scattering of pedestrians and its complete lack of signs and street names, as lished by edict. But now the only concern he had for his surroundings was to leave them. Passing an arcaded opening he stopped and cautiously, for he had learned discretion with that single kick, he looked inside. It was a courtyard with rough tables scattered about, planks nailed to their legs in lieu of benches. Some of them were occupied. A small barrel rested on the central table, at which six men and a woman were were as drab as the walls about them, dressed for the most part in uniform gray, although some of them had parts of their costume made up of drab pastels. J omfri drew back quickly as the woman came towards him, then realized that she was lank haired and old and kept her eyes to the ground as she shuffled forward, carrying the plastic cup in both hands. She slid onto one of the benches close by and buried her face in her drink. "Can you help me?" Jomfri asked, sitting at the far comer of the table where she could neither kick nor hit him and where he could flee if he had to. She looked up, startled, and pulled the cup to her. When he made no further movements towards her, she blinked her redrimmed eyes, and a mottled tip of tongue licked out at her cracked lips and withdrew. "Will you help?" he asked again, feeling safe enough for the moment. "New one here," she said, her words hissing and blurring over her toothless gums. "Don't like it, do you?" "No, I certainly do not like it, and I'm going to leave. If you would direct me to the nearest MT station -- " The crone cackled hoarsely then sipped loudly from her cup. "One way only, fangner, you knew that before they sent you. The road to Fangnis has but one direction." At the sound of this time-weary cliche he gasped and suddenly felt very cold. Memories of the priest with the raised, admonitory finger: the father to his errant daughter. Was there a Fangnis? "It cannot be," he said in a futile effort to convince himself differently, while his eyes darted like trapped I animals to the buildings, the street, the people and back again. "It is," the woman said, and He had the feeling she would drop her head to the table and weep, but she only drank again. "There has been a dreadful mistake. I should not be here." "Everyone says that," she said with contempt, dismissing him with a palsied wave of her hand. "You'll stop soon. Criminals all, rejected from our own worlds, sentenced for life and eternity, forgotten. They used to kill us. It would have been kinder." "I have heard of Fangnis," Jomfri said hurriedly. "A world no one knows where, eternal noon." He shot a frightened glance at the changeless light in the street outside, then away. "The unwanted, the condemned, the guilty, the incorrigible, the criminals are sent there. All right, here then," he added when he saw her twisted and humorless smile, "I'll not argue with you. Perhaps you are right. In any case there has been a grave mistake made, and it must be rectified. I am no criminal. I was on my way home from work. My wife will be waiting. I dialed my number and appeared... here." She no longer looked at him, but stared numbly into her drink instead. He was suddenly aware of how dry his mouth was. "What are you drinking? Could I have some?" The old woman roused at this, pulling the drink to her and cradling it against her ancient breasts. "Mine. I worked for it. You can drink water like all the other fangners. I cut the wood and watched the fire at the swamp, edge while it dripped. My share." The cup was almost empty now, and he could smell the raw spirit on her breath when she talked. "Out there. Down the street. Go away. Food and water at the Warden. Go away." She had lost interest in him, and he rose painfully and left before there was any more trouble. "The Warden, of course," he told himself with a sudden warm spurt of hope. "I'll explain and he'll take care of me." J omfri walked faster. The street ended in a dusty hillside, a smoothly rising, round-topped hill surrounded by the monotony of the low drab buildings. A structure clamped itself to the hilltop, a hemispherical and featureless dome of durcrete. Hard as diamond and as eternal. A thin man in rusty black and gray was trudging up the hill before him, and Jomfri followed furtively, ready to turn and run at any sign of hostility. Water gushed continually from a durcrete spout and splashed into a drain below. The thin man secured a plastic bag over the spout, and when it filled he reached into a deep opening in the wall beside the spout and took out a blocky package of some kind. Jomfri waited until he had removed the filled bag and vanished around the curve of the dome before he went forward. The sibilance of the splashing water was the only sound in the hazy silence, and his throat was suddenly dry. He buried his head under the stream, let it run into his mouth and over his face and across his hands. When he pulled away, gasping for air, he felt much better. Wiping the water from his eyes, he pushed his head into the opening. It was almost featureless. A shiny, worn metal plate was inset to his right, and a hole, no bigger around than his arm, vanished upwards into darkness from the farther end of the completely rubbed away, was printed above the plate. The only letters he had seen since he arrived here. Hesitatingly, he put his thumb to the cool metal. There was a distant susurration and a rising, scraping sound. Jomfri pulled his hand out quickly as a plastic-wrapped package shot down out of the opening and plopped softly into the rear of the niche. He took it out and saw that it was a bag of mealpaste. "Go ahead, eat, I won't bother you." Jomfri spun about, almost dropping the bag, to face the thin man who had silently returned and stood close behind him. "You're new here, I could tell," the man said, and a wholly artificial smile passed over his lined and pock-marked face. "Say hello to Old Rurry, I can be your friend." "Take this," Jomfri said, extended the mealpaste, trying to push away all connection with Fangnis. "There has been a mistake; this is someone else's ration; the machine gave it to me in error. I do not belong here." "Of course not, young fangner," Old Rurry purred. "Many is the life ended by politicians, innocent men sent here. The machine doesn't care or know who is here or who you are or who I am. It has a five-hour memory and won't feed you again until that time has passed. It will feed anyone, every five hours, forever. That is the sort of horrible efficiency that makes one squirm, isn't it?" J omfri's fingers clutched spasmodically, digging deep into the flexible wrapping. "No, I am sincere. A mistake in the MT sent me here. If you really wish to help me you will show me how to contact the authorities." Old' Rurry shrugged and looked bored. "Impossible. They're sealed inside this tomb and come and go with their own MT. They never contact us. We feed at this side of the Warden -- and leave at die other." "Leave? Then it is possible. Take me there." Sniffing wetly, Old Rurry wiped his nose on the back of his finger then examined it carefully and wiped it on the side of his jacket before he spoke. "If you must be ghoulish, that can be easily enough arranged. Right there." He pointed the wiped finger at the foot of the hill where four men had appeared, one to each limb, carrying a woman face down. They plodded forward until they noticed the two men waiting above them, then the two men bearing the legs dropped them into the dirt, turned and left. "A civic duty," Old Rurry said distastefully, "and the only one we perform. If we just leave them or dump them into the swamp they rot, and that is highly unpleasant." They walked down, and Old Rurry pointed silently to the left leg while he picked up the right. Jomfri hesitated, and all three fangners turned to stare coldly at him. He bent quickly -- memory of that educatory boot -- clutched the bare flesh of the ankle, almost dropping it again at the feel of its cold and firm, unfleshlike texture. They continued up the hill, and Jomfri turned away from the sight of the dirtstained, blue-veined leg. Perhaps this was the woman he had talked to. He shuddered at the thought. No, the clothing was different, and this one was long dead. A well traveled dirt track ran about the circumference of the Warden, and they shuffled along it until they reached a spot that appeared to be diametrically opposite the feeding station. A long narrow strip of metal was inset in the wall at knee-height, perhaps a foot wide and eight feet long. The leading man on the inside bent and pulled at a groove in the metal, which swung out, slowly, to reveal that it was the outer side of a V-shaped bin. It was constructed of three-inchthick armor alloy, yet was still dented and scratched along the edge. How desperate could one become after a lifetime in this place? The body was unceremoniously dumped into the bin and the outer door kicked shut. "Unrivaled efficiency," Old Rurry said, watching warily as the two other men departed without a word. "No communication, no contact The end. Bodies and old clothes. Their bodies are taken away and new sackcloth issued for old rags. Remember that when your fine clothes grow worn." "This cannot be all!" Jomfri shouted, tugging at the door which was now locked. "I must contact those inside and explain the error. I don't belong in this place." nphere was a slight vibration, he could feel it in his fingertips; and the door yielded to his tugging. It opened, and the bin was empty. In a frenzy of haste Jomfri climbed in and stretched out full length. "Close it, please, I beg," he said to Old Rurry who bent over him. "This is all to no purpose." Still, when Jomfri pleaded, he pushed the door shut. The light narrowed to a crack and vanished. The darkness was absolute. "I am not dead," Jomfri shouted in sudden panic. "Nor am I old clothes. Can you hear me? I wish to report a mistake. I was on my way home, you see, and -- " Soft bars, it felt like a dozen of them clamped tight against his body. He screamed feebly, then louder when something brushed against his head and face. There was a tiny humming in the darkness. "An incorrectly dialed number, a malfunction in the MT. I am here in error. You must believe me." As silently as they had come the arms were withdrawn. He felt about him, but there was solid metal on all sides as though he were sealed in a coffin. Then a crack and a slit of light appeared, and he closed his eyes against the sudden glare. When he opened them again he looked up at Old Rurry, who was sucking the last of the foodpaste from a container. "Yours," he said. "I didn't think you wanted it. Climb out of there, it won't move again until you do." "What happened? Something held me." "Machines. See if you are dead or sick or old clothes. If you're sick they give you a shot before they toss you back. You can't fool them. Only the dead go on through." "They wouldn't even listen to me," he said, climbing wearily out. "That's the whole idea. Modem penology. Society no longer kills or punishes for trespassing its laws. The criminal is redeemed. Some cannot be. They are the ones who would have been hanged, burned, flayed, broken, electrocuted, beheaded, racked, speared or otherwise executed in more barbarous times. Now they are simply dismissed from civilized society to enjoy the company of their peers. Could anything be more just? The condemned are sent here on a one-way journey. Away from the society they have offended, no longer a burden on it as they would be in a prison. A minimal contribution from all the worlds using this service supplies food and clothing and operating costs. Dismissed and forgotten for there is no escape. We are on a clouded and primitive world, forever facing the unseen sun, surrounded by nothing but swamps. That is the all of it. Some survive, some die quickly. There is room for a hundred times our number without crowding. We eat, we sleep, we kill each other. Our only joint effort is the operation of stills at the swamp's edge. The local fruit is inedible, but it ferments. And alcohol is alcohol. Since you are a newcomer I will give you one drink of hospitality and welcome you into our drinking band. We've had too many deaths of late, and more wood is needed." "No. I won't join your convict alcoholics. I'm different, I was sent here by mistake. Not like you." "ld Rurry smiled and, with a  swiftness that denied his years, produced a shining blade that he pricked into Jomfri's throat. "Leam this rule quickly. Never ask a man why he is here nor mention it to him. It is a messy form of suicide. I will tell you, because I am not ashamed. I was a chemist. I knew all the formulas. I made tasteless poison and killed my wife and # of her family. That makes #. Few here can match that number." He slid the knife back into his sleeve, and Jomfri backed away, rubbing the red mark on his neck. "You're armed," he said, shocked. "This is a world, not a prison. We do our best. Through the years bits of metal have accumulated, weapons have been manufactured. This knife must be generations old. The myth has it that it was made from an iron meteorite. All things are possible. I killed its former owner by thrusting a sharpened length of wire through his eardrum and into his brain." "I do feel like that drink now. Thank you for offering. Very kind." Jomfri worked hard to give no offense. The old man started down the hill with Jomfri trailing after. The building they went to was like all the others. "Very good," Jomfri said, choking over a beaker of the acid and acrid drink. "Filthy stuff," Old' Rurry told him. "I could improve it. Add natural flavoring. But the others won't let me. They know my record." Jomfri took a deeper drink. He knew the record too. When he finished the beaker his head was fuzzy and his stomach sickened. He felt no better. He knew that if he had to stay on Fangnis he would be one of the men who died swiftly. This life was worse than no life. "Sick! You said they would see me if I were sick," he shouted, jumping to his feet. Old Rurry ignored him, and he was drunk enough to clutch the man by his clothing. None of the others paid particular attention until the wicked length of blade appeared again. Jomfri let go and staggered backward, his eyes on the foot of steel. "I want you to cut me with your knife," he said. Old Rurry stopped and thought; he had never received an invitation from a prospective victim before. "Cut you where?" He scanned the other for a suitable spot. "Where?" Where indeed. What part of one's body do you invite violence upon? What member that you have borne a lifetime do you discard? "A finger..." he suggested hesitantly. "Two fingers -- or none," Old Rurry told him, a natural merchant of destruction. "Here then." Jomfri dropped into the chair and spread his hands before him. "Two, the littlest." He clenched his fists with the little fingers on the table edge. They were too far apart. He crossed his wrists so that the two little fingers hooked over the wooden edge, side by side. "Both at once. Can you do that?" "Of course. Right at the second joint." vld Rurry hummed happily to himself, noticing that the entire room was watching him now. He pretended to examine the edge of his blade while the newcomer looked up at him with watery rabbit's eyes. Fast, without warning, the knife came down and bit deep into the wood. The fingers flew, blood spurted, the newcomer shrieked. Everyone laughed uproariously as he ran out the door still screaming. "Good Old Rurry," someone shouted, and he permitted himself a smile while he picked up one of the fingers from the floor. "I'm hurt -- now you must help me!" Jomfri shouted as he staggered up the hill in the endless noon. I did not think it would feel like this. I'll bleed to death. I need your aid. It hurts so." When he tugged at the metal the pain bit deep. The bin gaped open, and he dropped into it. "I'm injured," he wailed as the light narrowed and vanished. The bars clamped down in the darkness, and he could feel the warm blood running down his wrists. "That's blood. You must stop it, or I will die." The mechanism believed. There was a sharp nip of pain in his neck, then instant numbness. The pain was gone from his body -- as was all sensation. He could move his head, hear and talk, but was completely paralyzed from the neck down. There were no escapes from Fangnis. Something rumbled, and from the sensation on the back of his head he knew he was being slid sideways by the mechanism. It was too dark to see -- if he could still see at all -- but from the movement of the air and the sounds, he felt that he was being moved through door after door, like a multi-chambered airlock. Thick metal doors, that would be certain. The last one slid open, and he was ejected into a well lit room. "Torture again," the man in white said, bending over to look. "They're going back to their old games." Behind him were three guards with thick clubs. "Initiation, maybe, doctor. This one must be a newcomer, I've never seen him before." "And new clothes too," the doctor said, working with swabs and instruments. "I'm here by mistake. I'm not a prisoner!" "If we get one, Doctor, we can look forward to a lot more amputations. They always do things in cycles." "A mistake on the matter transmitter -- " "You're right about that. I have some graphs that prove it in the book I am preparing." "Listen, you must listen. I was going home, I dialed my home, I went into the MT -- and arrived here. There has been a ghastly mistake. I had the fingers removed so that I could reach you. Look at the records, they'll prove I'm right." CtTT #"e have records," the doc ' tor admitted, recognizing Jomfri's humanity for the first time. "But there has never been a mistake yet, though many have claimed their innocence." "Doctor, please find out. I am begging you. In the name of decency simply consult the records. The computer will tell you instantly." The doctor hesitated a moment, then shrugged. "In the name of decency then. I will do it while the dressings set. Your name and citizen's number." He punched Jomfri's data into the computer, then looked expressionless at the screen. "You see," Jomfri shouted happily. "It was a mistake. I'll file no complaints. Free me now, it is all I ask." "You are guilty," the doctor said quietly. "You were sent here." "Impossible!" Jomfri was justifiably angry. "Some trick. I demand you tell me what I have been charged with." The doctors looked at his instruments. "Blood pressure, brain waves, normal for this situation. These instruments are as good as any lie detector. You are telling the truth. Traumatic amnesia, very possible in this situation. A good footnote for my book." "Tell me what I have been accused of!" Jomfri was shouting and trying to move. "It would be better if you did not know. I'll return you now." "You must tell me first. I cannot believe you otherwise. I was on my way home to my wife -- " "You killed your wife," the doctor said, and actuated the return mechanism. The closing of the thick door cut off the hideous, wailing scream. A single sharp memory of a blue face, staring eyes, blood blood blood... HP he metal coffin lid opened, and Jomfri sat up, dizzy. They had drugged him; he was hazy; they had tended his Wounds. "But they wouldn't help me. They wouldn't even look in the records to prove my innocence. A mistake. A fault in the matter transmitter, and I am condemned because of it." He looked at the bloodstained bandages, and something hurt in his head. "Now I'll never get home to my wife," he sobbed. Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence in science-fiction writing. Every story appearing in the magazines Galaxy and If in issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected is intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and If. Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines in making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month after the December issues appear. Thorinn found himself in Eden -- where he was cast as the destructive Serpent! I I n the spring, when the pleasure pods were ripe, everybody in Pink Circle went on a picnic into the wildgreen along the river Wend. Grasshopper men went, two by two, arms linked as they soared through the air; dough women with their fancymen went, panting and wallowing; the graybearded Knowers went, hobbling, leaning together, and sat on the grass in order to watch the young people. First the unsexed little girls and boys would collect food from the foodvines that grew in the wildgreen, spicy orapples and sweet nanaberries, meatlets in clusters, hamsaniges from the hamsanige bushes. Meanwhile the young men and women would be gathering cushions from the cushionleaf trees and arranging them in circles on the cool sloping lawns, near enough to hear the pleasant gurgle of the Wend. The songgirls would tune up their vinestrung rebecks, and there would be singing; then the food gathered by the unsexed little boys and girls would be heaped up and eaten; then there would be jumping and running contests, games for the children, jokes and argument for the elders. And finally, one by one, the people would wander off into the wildgreen until each had found a ripe pleasure pod gaping invitingly, with its soft watermelon-pink lining like a doughgirl's youknow. Each one would search until he found a pleasure pod that just fitted: long thin ones for the grasshopper men, round fat ones for the dough women, short stunted ones for the children and fancymen. The pleasure pods for the dough women had to be almost on the ground, because the dough women were clumsy and could not jump; but the fancymen could scramble up the tall curled vines, and the grasshopper men could jump, twist as they jumped', and land gently on their backs inside the pleasure pods. The pods would dip a little lower with the weight of the people, hanging down from their long, strong flexible vines, and the lip of each pod would slowly close until the pod was shut tight, with die happy person inside like a worm in a flossweed. What dreams they had then, what pleasures, twitching and moaning with their pleasures so that the hanging pods trembled, first one, then another, then a whole row at once! When the skylight dwindled and the shadows turned greener in the wildgreen, the pods would begin to open and the people would climb out, their limbs soft, their faces shining with remembered joy, eyes soft and faraway, their movements slow. But some of the pods remained shut as the people wandered back toward Pink Circle . And then there were some who liked the pleasure pods so much that they would not come out for a day, or two days, or a week or a week-week sometimes; and in fact, every spring when the pleasure pods ripened, there were always some dark old pods from the previous year that hung, heavy and shriveled, on the dead vines, until the wind, or a boy climbing, or a heavy bird alighting knocked them down and they rolled into the carpetvines. These were old people mostly, who had nothing to gain by coming out of the pleasure pods. But there were young ones too, some every year, and even a child occasionally, who stayed in the pods and never came out. What more can be said of Pink Circle, that long-gone place, than that it was perfect, an Elysium, without discord or bad food? Thus it was, thus it had always been, until that black day unforetold by Knowers, when a nonperson climbed down into the wildgreen. Yes, he had come from the sky, for a doughgirl saw him. He opened a door like a yawn in the sky and fell and caught himself in the trees of the wildgreen. And thus he came into the world of men. II T horinn Goryatsson knelt on the dusty stone, looking down through the hole in the sky. In this underground passage he jjad come upon a metal shield, w hich turned on some hidden pivot when he touched it, to reveal a hole pierced in the stone; and down there, against all reason, lay the Midworld he had come from. Somehow in his wanderings he had got above it, for there it lay far below, dazzling bright, with the dark columns of tree trunks rising on eyery side. Putting his head through the hole, he saw that the nearest tree ended in a crown of tangled branches, some green, most brown and dead, that spread out in a cone-shape against the sky two ells away. The glare of the skylight, so close to his face, dazzled him and made dark spots float in front of his eyes. He drew back, rubbed his eyes. The shield had swung closed again. In the darkness, he sat perplexed. It would be no great matter to lower himself by his hands through the hole, then swing and let go, landing in the treetop. But unless he could somehow prop the shield open meanwhile, it would be moving while he hung from it, and he might miss his aim. If he hesitated too long, it would close on him. In the end, he made a cord from his leg-thongs and belt and tied his sword securely to the end of it. Holding the shield open, he dropped the sword and let it dangle, then swung it in a slow arc, farther each time, until it caught in the treetop. The first time it was only lightly tangled, and came free again. The second time it caught fast. When he tugged on it, a branch of the treetop nodded toward him but would not release the sword. Whether it would bear his weight, when he swung at the end of the thong, was another matter. Thorinn looked down with a sinking heart into that gulf of air, the bright, half-seen ground far below... But he had no choice now. The cord was caught. He must follow it or let it go. Thorinn wiped his palms carefully on his breeks, took a careful grip on the belt where it was knotted to the first of the legthongs. Holding the shield open with one hand, he leaned down head-foremost. The dazzle, the warm breeze on his face, the rustling of treetops distracted him. The cord had gone slack when he leaned forward. He wanted to pull it tight, but if he took his other hand away, the shield would begin to turn... He thrust himself upright again. His heart was thudding. He could not do it -- not head downward. He sat back on his heels. The shield slowly turned, closed. The warm wind died, and he was in darkness. After a moment he opened the shield again. Taking a firm grip on the belt, he reached down, set his fist against the smooth stone rim of the opening under the shield. Holding the shield' open in this way, he put all his weight on his hands, doubled his legs and swung them down through the hole. T)anic struck him again as he felt his fist slipping against the stone, and he nearly let go the belt to clutch at it. He tightened his grip just in time, felt the shield turning above him, felt his body lurch as he hung by one hand. The sky above his head was one bright dazzle. The cord in his hand led nowhere; he no longer knew which way the tree was. What if the sword had come loose from the branch? The shield was turning, it would close on his fingers... He let go, reached convulsively for the cord as he felt himself afloat, falling. He pulled it in, hand over hand; at last it tightened, and now he could see the tree like a great green hill tilting, leaning toward him. He hung on desperately. Twigs lashed  him, then the tree struck him like a giant club, and he was clinging somehow to a branch, safe, dizzy, and triumphant, in the wind The skylight was screened by leaves above him, turning the world into a shimmer of silver and green. All the leaves were in faint constant motion; the tree itself swayed slightly, rocking Thorinn back and forth as he clung to the branch. Faint and dizzy, he clambered into a more secure position atop the branch, then worked his way down along it irn til he could brace his back against the trunk. The thong had grown taut in his hand; he tugged at it, trying to release it, but it held firm. The treetrunk was reassuringly rough against his back; he was safe, warm; he was back in the Midworld... he had no wish to move, so he merely sat foolishly holding the thong, like a man fishing in a tree. Some bright insect, of a kind Thorinn had never seen before, drifted by, hovered for a moment and was gone. He saw now that there were golden fruits among the leaves. A trickle of sweat ran down his ribs. Indeed it was warm here. And no wonder, so close under the sky. He squirmed around and stood up cautiously, with one arm on the trunk for balance. He squinted up into the glare. The thong ran away slanting, disappeared among the bright leaves. He tugged again, saw a responding movement above. After a moment's thought, he wrapped' the free end of the belt loosely around a branch, left it there and began to climb. He followed the thong easily enough, found the sword snugged up against a fork in the branch and freed it. He tugged at the thong, and after a moment it came up loosely. He buckled the swordbelt around his waist, put the thongs away in his wallet. He had hoped to get a better view of the countryside from here, but the dazzle was so great that he could see nothing. His leather shirt was stuck to his back; sweat stung his eyes. He began backing down the branch. Farther down, where the limbs were bigger and closer together, he was able to drop from one to another. The glare lessened rapidly, but he felt as warm as ever. He was stifling inside his leather garments. He stopped where a broad limb made a convenient perch, peeled off his shirt and felt better at once. A breeze fingered his bare chest and back. How good it felt. The shirt was too bulky to go into his wallet, so he tied the sleeves together and hung it around his neck. Then his legs began to feel all the stiffer and hotter because his body was so cool and free, so he took the breeks off too and tied them around his waist. As he descended again, he began to catch glimpses of the ground through the branches. It was carpeted with vines and grass, only less green than the leaves around him. Now he began to realize for the first time how incredibly tall the tree was. After all, a tree that reached the sky! He dropped from one branch to another, then the next, and the next, and still the ground receded below him. As he paused for breath, he below. He crouched, listening. There they came again, nearer. Two piping notes, poot-toot, then a chorus that echoed them. Then a deeper voice, boom, boom, boom; then the high voices again. He could not make out the words. From where he stood, he eould see a little patch of greensward between the branches. As he watched, a flash of color crossed a corner of this patch and was gone. He was not sure what he had seen -- something flamecolored and moving, and an impression of a face tilted toward him. r Tphorinn flattened himself against the trunk. The flash of color came again, and stopped. Down there on the grass, something round and bright was looking up at him. He could not make it out. It was more like a flower than a man, but it had eyes and a face. It made no threatening gesture, but simply stood and gazed up at him. He saw its mouth open; the lips were red. Poot-toot! The leaves of a nearby branch threshed violently. Turning, Thorinn saw something gray and agile clinging to the branch, swinging itself up, coming upright. Another thrashing sound, and another, and another. The things were all around him, and now there were more of the bright-colored ones below, all standing and gazing up, while the gray things, booming, sprang toward him among the branches. They were men or demons, grayskinned and impossibly thin, with arms, legs and torsos like sticks. Boom, boom from one side and the other, echoing among the leaves; and from below, poottoot, twitter-twitter. Thorinn stood with his back against the tree, sword in hand, trying to see all ways at once. But the gray things, in a half-circles around him, came no nearer. Hairless and naked, they had no weapons. They smiled and gestured, showing their empty hands. Cautiously, Thorinn put his sword away; this set off another volley of boomings around him, twitterings below. Now other agile bodies came swarming up the tree. These were children, half the size of the gray men, some pink-skinned and to all appearances human, some sticklike and gray. All of them were chattering, piping, booming at once, those in the tree and those below. It was impossible to tell what they wanted, but at least they seemed to bear him no malice. Doubtfully, Thorinn swung himself down to the next branch, then the next. The children and the stickmen followed him, keeping their distance. Below, as the branches thinned, the bright ones drew back. He inspected them from the lowest branch. They were not half flower and half human, as he had thought; the bright, soft parts of them were garments that might have been made from gigantic flower petals, veined, crumpled at the edges, drenched with color. Under these, their bodies were round and plump, and, indeed, he now realized, they must be women, for the bulbous shapes that swung behind the petal-garments could only be paps. Among the women were a few gray and shriveled creatures whom he had hardly noticed before; they were clad like the women, and had bright eyes and wrinkled faces. They stood in a polite semicircle, waiting for him to descend. Ill ' ' ground, another clamor went up; the circle moved inward, while all around him stickmen were dropping like overripe fruit. In a moment the women surrounded' him, gently touching his face and chest, staring up into his face with such awestruck expressions that he could not help but laugh. Cries ran back and forth through the crowd; then they were all moving, carrying Thorinn with them. The bright alien faces bobbed around him, the trees turned the skylight into a rich green gloom, the grass was seductively soft underfoot, and the slope led him irresistibly downward, so that everything that happened seemed to have become curiously ordinary. They passed through an explosion of bushes, waist high, with thick soft masses of white flowers. From the trees hung green and golden fruits, gourds, seed-pods like twisted ribbons. Fallen trees were everywhere, with vines growing over them. The bushes thinned to isolated clumps, the trees drew back, and now, he saw, he was at the edge of a clear place, a slope of bright green grass that curved gently down to the marshy bank of a river. Beyond the silver water, another green bank arose, another stand of trees; beyond them were mountains that met the sky. The air from the river was cool and fresh. On the near bank, scattered in little groups, the people were sitting, lying; children squatting, leaping up, running. Someone threw a ball of bright orange into the air. A stickman leaped after it, straight up, higher incredibly still rising; he caught it in his mouth and dropped back, to shouts of applause. Nearby the shrubbery drew back into a little bay, in which giant vines hung looping and twisting from a tree, higher than Thorinn's head; from these vines depended soft green pods or shells, curved and fat, two ells long. Some swung lightly and were open to show a tender pink interior, while others were shut tight and hung heavy to the ground. While Thorinn watched, one of the closed pods stirred, split, began to open. A glint of pink showed within. A plump woman emerged, rosy-faced, with dreaming eyes. She was like someone just awakened from a long sweet sleep. With languorous movements, she stepped out, picked up her petal garments discarded on the grass, slowly put them on. A faint smile curved her lips. She wandered away across the greensward; behind her, the pod swayed empty. Now the whole flock of them set off down the slope, drawing Thorinn along. They led him into a circle of people gathered around a heap of fruits on the grass. Some of the people got up to make room while others sat down, and when the confusion ended Thorinn found himself seated with a plump woman on either side. A child scrambled into the circle, plucked a pale greenish ovoid from the heap and handed it to one of the women, who offered it to Thorinn. He took it dubiously. It was cool in his hands and had a strange fragrance, but he was hungry and bit into it boldly. It was soft and pungent, the flavor sweet and acid at the same time; the cool juice ran down his chin. The exposed meat was a startling emerald green. Thorinn instinctively spat out what was in his mouth. He was thinking better of it and about to take a second bite, when one of the women took the fruit away from him gently and offered him another sort. This was flatfish and pale brown, with a texture almost like bread; inside was something firmer. Thorinn bit through the soft outer layer into a salty, fibrous substance. It was deep pink in color and tasted almost like cooked flesh of an unfamiliar sort; yet the thing was a fruit, for it had a stem and what seemed to be the remnants of a husk. It was clear that he had somehow got into the Highlands; for the trees were no more. than twenty or thirty ells in height, yet they touched the sky; and even here, at the bottom of the slope, the sky seemed close overhead. But these people in their dress and appearance were nothing at all like Highlanders; nor had Thorinn ever heard of any place The very grass hurt the eyes with its greenness. The people were all friendly, but not one could understand him when he spoke or utter any but their own outlandish noises. He questioned one after another, but all he got in return was a new outburst of their twittering and piping. The more he observed them, the more puzzled and uneasy he grew. There were at least five sorts of them, the plump wobbling women, the stickmen, the oldsters, the children of all sizes, and another sort of men. These he had taken for children at first because of their small stature, but they were wide-shouldered and well thewed and walked with a swagger, and Thorinn saw them here and there disporting themselves in curious ways with the women. M ost of the women, the oldsters and some of the little men wore petal garments, but the others were as naked as Thorinn himself now that he had laid aside his sweaty leather shirt and breeks. They had no weapons of any kind, nor, indeed, any thing made with hands. They must be persons of quality, if one were to judge by their soft hands and feet and their merry expressions. Yet there were no servants or bondslaves among them, so far as Thorinn could see. They came and went, as aimless as children. They seemed as curious about Thorinn as he about them. There were always some few about him, fingering his skin and hair, staring with wonder into his eyes, but they all lost interest quickly and went off to join some game, or wandered into the trees. When he had' eaten his fill, he picked up his bundle of garments, not liking to leave it behind, and went to ease himself in a patch of low groundvines at the edge of the trees, where he had seen others doing the same. The place had a rank smell, yet not so much as might have been expected. The broad brownish-green leaves were curled up and clasped into lumpy bundles here and there, and when he had accomplished his needs, he saw them crawling slowly, like crippled snakes, to cover what he had left. Thorinn watched them for a moment, marveling, then turned back down the slope. After a few paces he stopped and spread out his bundle of garments, meaning to use the leg-thongs to tie it together more compactly. At once he was surrounded by children with alert and curious faces; they squatted to watch him as he worked, reached out now and then to finger the leather of breeks or wallet, chattered and piped among themselves. Thorinn did not hinder them, except to keep them from prying into his wallet; but one boy, bolder than the rest, plucked up the sword before Thorinn could stop him and drew it half out of the scabbard. Alarmed and angered, Thorinn sprang at him, pushed him roughly and snatched the sword back. The boy lay sprawled on the grass, his head half lifted, his mouth an O. The other children had fallen silent and were staring at Thorinn. The boy's eyes slowly filled with tears. While the others made mournful noises and wrung their hands, he got to his feet. With dragging steps, he moved away toward the shrubbery. Thorinn called after him, but he did not turn. He went to the podvines, stood a moment with hanging head before an empty pod, then climbed in and lay down inside it. The pod slowly closed. IV T horinn noticed that the other children had backed away, leaving a clear circle around him. Their faces were pale, their eyes big. A questioning call came up the slope; one of the children answered briefly. Another question, another reply. Other voices boomed, piped. Thorinn buckled the swordbelt around his waist, quickly finished wrapping the shirt, breeks and wallet into a bundle and tied them with the thongs. Carrying the bundle in one hand, he moved down toward the river. To either side, up and down the long green meadow, he could see dots of faces turned to watch him. All the people seemed to have stopped what they were doing; they were motionless and silent. Thorinn kept walking, turning now and then to look back; but no one followed him. The meadow sloped down into weedy grass and sedge, became a marsh. Thorinn waded out between heavy clumps of grass, in cool water up to his knees. Little yellow birds burst out of the marsh-grass before him, fluttered erratically for a moment around his head, then dropped out of sight. Up the river on his right hand, where the stream made a gentle bend, he could see larger birds standing in the water, their long necks looping; they had red breasts and iridescent wing-feathers. Skylight sparkled from the droplets that fell from their beaks. He stopped where the marshgrass ended and the muddy bottom grew deeper. To his left, he could see down the river a matter of half a league or so before it disappeared between two gentle hills. To the right, the river curved only a few hundred ells away. Beyond that, over the treetops, he could see distant mountains and a faint bright thread that might have been a waterfall. The river ran silver-smooth before him. On the opposite bank there was another green slope, narrower and weedier than this one, then trees, then mountains. The sky was bright and blank overhead. He had hoped to see some landmark, but there was none; he would have to wait until nightfall. He trudged back through the shallow water. Above him on the slope, a few of the people were standing watching him. Others had gone back to their games, but the little circles around the heaps of food seemed to have broken up. He could see groups of children who seemed to be carrying something toward the shrubbery, passing other groups coming back.  s he approached, he saw that the people were making ready to leave. It was the remains of their meal that the children were carrying. They dropped their armloads in the vines, went back for more. Nearby, he could see a few pods opening, people climbing out. The people were drifting slowly together, all moving in the same direction, forming little moving groups, some with arms linked. Their voices were cheerful. None approached him as he walked up the slope, but a few smiled. One of the children, a halfgrown girl, stood by the podvines and waited for him. She gestured' toward one of the pods and said something. There was a questioning note in her voice, and she stared earnestly into his eyes. Thorinn looked at the pod, which still hung heavy to the ground. All the others were open and empty, except one or two, farther back in the tangle, which looked brown and old. One had fallen from its brittle stalk and lay dark on the ground; the broad-leafed vines had crawled over it, almost hiding it from view. Thorinn turned to the pod again, thinking of the boy. "Is he still inside?" he asked. She looked at 'him blankly. He made a pushing motion, then touched his sword, gestured toward the pod. After a moment she seemed to understand. She repeated his gestures, then asked him something else in her piping voice. Thorinn looked around. The people were drifting away upriver; they two were the last ones left. "Isn't he coming out?" Thorinn asked. He thought a moment, then crouched and laid his hands beside his face, closed his eyes as if in sleep. He straightened, pointed to the pod again. The girl looked puzzled, but repeated his gestures. She came closer, looking into his face, and said something twice over, with great earnest. Surely he could make her understand. He crouched again, im' itating the boy asleep in the pod, then mimed coming awake, the pod opening, the boy stepping out. The girl stared at him, arms hanging at her sides. She spoke in a falling cadence; 'her eyes and mouth were sad. With one hand she made a gesture Thorinn did not understand. They looked at each other for a moment, then the girl turned away to join the others, who were already distant down the long strip of green. T he pod hung motionless on the vine. Thorinn prodded it with his foot experimentally, moved it a hand's breadth, but there was no answering movement within. He considered whether he should cut the pod open. Did she mean he was never going to come out? The girl, moving listlessly, was nevertheless slowly catching up to the others. Thorinn hesitated a moment, then decided to leave well enough alone and followed her. Scattered along the grassy bank, the people drifted away ahead of him in twos and threes. The children and stickmen, for the most part, had gone on ahead; the old people, the women and the women's men strolled behind. Their voices were muted and gentle. In a few paces Thorinn had caught up with the girl. He slowed down to keep pace with her, but although she glanced at him once, she did not speak, and after a moment, losing patience, Thorinn went on ahead. Where the long green meadow narrowed and the trees curved toward the river, the people were filing into an opening in the forest. He could glimpse their bright petals bobbing between the trees. The trail wound gently upward, never growing steep or difficult, between shrubs with unblemished bright leaves, flowers, vines, trees with hanging clusters of fruit; here and there it curved to avoid a fallen tree. The ground was softly carpeted everywhere. The bushes had no thorns. Thorinn slipped past the ambling women and old people where he could without rudeness on the narrow trail and eventually had passed all but the stickmen and children, who were now out of sight. The trail was still plain. He followed it for half a league until it emerged in a wide green meadow, which at first appeared sickle-Shaped, curving away from him. Then, blinking in the skylight, he saw that in fact it formed an oval ring around a clump of slender trees. People were moving at random around the bases of these trees, where Thorinn saw a 'huddle of curious round structures of withy and vines. Up in the branches, a flash of movement caught his eye, and he saw platforms there with people on them. As he approached, he found that some of the bulbous structures around the trees were little bowers. What he had taken for withies were simply the stalks of plants that had been bent together and secured with interlaced vines that still bore their leaves and blossoms. Children were squatting in a few of these. Others, somewhat larger, were covered almost to the ground by a solid green skin which, on examination, he found to be composed of broad leaves, overlapped and somehow sealed tightly together at their edges. Peering into the doorway of one of these, he saw heaped flowers and a few gourds; otherwise it was empty. Voices piped behind him. The rest of the people were emerging from the trees. They crossed the meadow, a few glancing at him but making no sign. They gathered around the base of the trees in little groups. A few disappeared into the green huts or climbed to the platforms above, then a few more. Thorinn, who had waited in vain for any invitation to follow them, withdrew a little and watched. Now only two of the people remained, a woman and her little man. Arm in arm, they entered one of the green huts. The birds in the treetops had fallen silent. Thorinn looked up. Silent and swift, an edge of darkness was sweeping across the sky. In two heartbeats it had passed and the sky was dark. The air grew steadily cooler. When his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness and he could see again in the faint green night-glow from the sky, he unwrapped his bundle and put on his clothing again. A faint pattering began around him; a cool drop struck his nose. With the aid of his light-box, he found a sheltered place under a tree and stretched himself out. Rain rattied in the leaves high overhead; beyond the lower branches, in the glow of the light-box, he saw it streaming silvery against the black air. V nphorinn sat perched on a rock, chin in his hands, staring at the smooth glassy curve of the water where it disappeared under the overhang. The rocks below were black and glistening with spray; the water made a subdued rushing sound, so constant and pervasive that it was like the sound of blood in his own veins, Twigs, then a broad leaf, rode smoothly down the shining back of the river, curved over and shot abruptly out of sight. In three days he had followed the river from the western end of the valley, where it fell in a graceful cataract straight down the sheer face of the mountain, to its exit here at the eastern end. He had crossed the river at the shallows, half a league above, and had followed the wall of mountains all the way around the valley. They were the same everywhere: sheer gray rock, unbroken, without a fissure, a ledge, a handhold. The mountains pierced the sky, or else the sky had severed the mountains. There was no exit from the valley except for the cavern. The sky was dimming; it was time to think of dinner, and then a place to sleep. He saw now that all his tomorrows were to be made up of such things only: food, sleep, perhaps a walk in the forest or along the river, in a valley so small that he could span it in a day... like an imprisoned man pacing his tiny room. No doubt in time the villagers would accept him again. He would learn to speak their tongue, or teach them his. The days would be alike, the years would slip away; then he would die and the vines would pick his bones, and no one would ever know what had become of him. He now knew what he had tried so long to keep from knowing : the mountains were not mountains, but walls of rock; the sky not a sky, but the roof of a cavern. A fool might have known as much... but who could have believed that there were trees, a river, a sky underground? He got to his feet and turned westward again, moving slowly. T'vrawn by the need of human company, he forded the river again and walked upstream to the villagers' playground, but with melancholy perversity did not approach them but hung back, watching from a distance until they had drifted away and disappeared into the forest. He walked across the greensward, looking gloomily at the signs they had left behind them, the grass trampled here, a forgotten rind of fruit there. He wandered up to the pod-vines and looked at them. The one full pod still hung heavy to the ground. He went into the forest and picked fruit, but the sight and smell of it made his stomach knot, and he threw it into the bushes. Thinking of the water-fowl that nested along the riverbank, he turned with sudden resolution. If nothing else, he could at least hunt his own food and have a meal fit for a man. The river was witchily green with reflected skylight among the dark tussocks. Wading, he moved with caution, stopping at every step to listen. A rustle from the clump ahead; as he plunged toward it, he heard a sleepy note and saw a crested head appear. He got his hands on the warm feathered neck and wrung it, cutting off the bird's sudden squawk. Another body thrashed up from the grass, wings flapping; he lunged, got that one too. With the plump bodies slung over his shoulder, he waded ashore. Just as he reached the bank, the night raced overhead and the world fell into breathing blackness. He searched the forest for fallen limbs, tore them loose from the vines that clung to them with a thousand suckers and kindled a fire on the greensward, not far from the pod-vines. He plucked and cleaned his two fowl -- one was a cock, the other a young hen -- then contrived a spit between two forked branches thrust into the ground, skewered his birds on it and roasted them over the fire. In the ruddy light, the greensward was another place, walled in by darkness; the grass a pale ghost of itself. The crisp skin curled, wept grease that sizzled in the flames; the smell that came from it made his mouth fill with water, and he ate the first fowl with raging appetite before it was properly cool enough to handle. He ate a leg and a breast of the second bird ; then weariness overcame him and he cast the rest aside and crawled under a tree. Tie was up at the first light, washed in the river, then breakfasted on the remains of the second bird. Lazy and replete, he lay down and dozed again. Some time later, he woke with a start. Half a dozen of the older children were staring at him across the ashes of his fire and the little heap of feathers, bones and offal. Among them was the girl he had spoken to before, or one like her. Their faces were white and dismayed. Questioning voices came from behind them; the rest of the people were emerging from the forest. The children turned and ran toward them, screaming as they went. A crowd formed around the children; it grew momentarily larger and noisier. Thorinn saw faces turned toward him, staring eyes, open mouths. Bewildered and alarmed, he got up and stood with bundle in hand, ready to retreat. But the people were turning away. Their voices dwindled ; the whole crowd was moving back into the forest. The last of them disappeared. Nor did they return that day, or the next. It was beyond imagining how he had offended them so deeply, and yet there could be no doubt. They no longer came to the clearing by the river, or even into the forest above it. At dusk on the third day, stealing down the path to the village, he had spied on them from the trees and had seen them coming back from the opposite direction, from upriver, where they must have found a new playground. He dared not show himself, for fear they would think he had polluted their village as well by 'his presence. ' I 'he forest was changing. For half a league around the playground, leaves hung limp and shabby from the trees. The fruits still grew in all their senseless profusion, but now the unripe ones were withered and hard, the rest had a bloom of corruption and gave off a nauseous smell. He began to detect the same changes in other places where he had slept and cooked his meals. He spent more and more of his time at the mouth of the river, staring at the smooth curve of water as it fell over the lip. If he were ever to get out of the valley, it must be by way of the river. He began to think of a boat, something made perhaps of the huge leaves the people used to build their huts. In his mind he saw himself floating down the current in such a boat, faster and faster... the cavern opens its mouth, the boat dives into darkness, then capsizes, and he struggles for breath in the roaring water... No, a boat would not protect him. But what if he made two boats and sealed them together like two halves of a nut, with himself inside? The idea excited him, and he went into the forest for leaves of the necessary size. He found them in plenty and carried an armful down to the riverbank, but as he squatted turning them over, planning in his mind a framework of saplings over which the leaves would be stretched and gummed in place, he saw himself once more drifting down the current in Iris green shell... the boat strikes a rock, bursts open; the water floods in, and he is struggling, drowning... He cast the leaves aside, angry with himself and the fates, for it seemed to him that the answer was almost within his reach. Deep in thought as he wandered upriver, he found' himself again at the deserted playground. He paused, looking up the slope, and his skin grew cold. He went halfedge and stood before the podvine. Here like green thoughts hung the very things he had been imagining. They had been here all the time, yet he had not really seen them until now. The vine was still green and fresh; one pod still hung heavy; the rest were invitingly open. He tested an empty one by striking it repeatedly, first with a stick, then with a heavy stone. It resisted his blows; the outer shell of the pod was thick and resilient. He slashed it with his sword; even then, the tough fibers within held it together, and he was content. He imagined himself cutting a pod, taking it to the river where the current was swift, lying down inside it... But would it close then, when he had cut it from its vine? And if it did, how was he to get the pod into the river? Another, equally alarming thought: what if the water made the pod open? This, at least, he could find out by trial. He grasped the vine above the closed pod, chopped at it with his sword. The blade rebounded at the first blow, then bit in; a milky sap oozed from the wound. Thorinn smote again, slashed the vine through. The pod remained closed. Thorinn dragged it down the slope into the water, where it floated sluggishly among the reeds. He sat on a tussock and watched it. For a long time nothing happened. Bored and hungry, Thorinn got up and began to forage among the tufts of grass, coming back frequently to look at the floating pod. At last he found a nest of four speckled greenish eggs in one of the tussocks. He punctured one and sniffed it: it was strong-smelling but fresh. As he was tilting 'his head to drink the egg out of its shell, he heard a distant splash. He turned. Nothing was to be seen, but from the direction of the pod came a thrashing sound in the water, then a choked cry. Thorinn dropped the egg and hurried. Before he could reach the spot, he saw a human form flounder upright among the reeds. It was a boy. He stared wildly at Thorinn, then whirled and tried to run. He fell almost at once in the shallows, but was up again and struggling to the shore. Thorinn saw him reeling up the slope; at the forest's edge, he turned a white face for an instant. Then he was gone. Thorinn found the pod awash among the reeds. It was open and full of water; the soft pink inner surface was already swelling and slimy to the touch. VI ' I 'horinn's first idea had been to place the pod on an incline above the river, so that it would roll or slide into the water once he was in it, but he saw that the thing was impossible. He needed some way to hold the pod motionless until it had closed around him. But if motionless before, it would be motionless after; and if it moved after, what was to prevent it from moving before? Except for this, his plans were complete. He had found the place, a steep grassy bank on the far side of the river, where the water was deep and swift. Nearby in the forest was a healthy pod-vine. When he was ready, he had only to cut a pod, take it to the bank... and then what? He saw himself getting in, the pod sliding as it slowly closed around him; the pod splashes into the river, not yet fully closed; water enters it, then it closes. And the man inside, as the pod darts down the current -- is he drowning, helpless? Or, on a gentler slope: the pod moves more slowly, closes before it reaches the brink, then catches, halts. It lies there on the bank above the river. If it does not go into the river, will it ever open? Another day passed while he turned the problem over, again and again, always coming to the same end. The rotting forest was turning black and sending out clouds of stench for half a league around the deserted playground. The waterfowl had abandoned that stretch of the river. Returning to the place he had chosen, he found that the sickness had started there. The grass was turning yellow, brown at the tips. His hesitation ended. He went to the vine in the forest, found it still healthy. He cut a pod, taking care to get a good length of vine with it. Still without knowing what he would do, he dragged it back to the riverbank and laid it on the slope. Below, the water rushed smoothly by. He tossed in a dry twig, watched it dart away out of sight. He was lightheaded with fasting. He thought, if water flowed here on the ground, it would wash the pod down into the river. But water ran in its own fashion. The river raced below him, deadly and swift. Or fire: if he could tie the vine no to a tree, perhaps by a smaller vine, then build a fire under it to burn through the vine... But what if the fire went out? Or what if it spread in the dry grass and reached the pod before it burned through the vine? In desperation he went into the forest again, cut down a tough, thin creeper and trimmed it to a single length of half a dozen ells. The creeper was strong. He could not break it in his hands. Some dry yellow gourds caught his eye. One was nearly two ells long. He cut it from the vine, and it was light and hollow and seeds rattled inside it. He imagined the gourd tied to one end of the creeper, the pod to the other, the creeper passing from one to the other around a stake or sapling. The pod, with himself inside it, would be heavier. It would pull the gourd around the stake and both would fall into the river. But if the gourd were full of water... K neeling on the riverbank, he cut a large hole near the stem of the gourd, then thrust it underwater and held it until the last of the air bubbled out. He raised the slippery thing with difficulty. It weighed as much as he did. His heart was thudding. He laid the gourd down, careful not to spill it, and traced with his eye the way the line would run, from the gourd to a stake driven into the ground, then down to the pod. He saw himself puncturing the gourd, the water dribbling out. He lies down in the pod, which closes over him. At length the gourd, growing lighter, slides up the slope; the pod, moving down, keeps the line taut; the gourd reaches the stake... But the stake should not be there. It might catch the curved neck of the gourd, the creeper knotted around it, the knobby surface of the gourd itself. But the stake must be there to hold the pod in the first place. Dissatisfied, he thought of a moveable peg, a wooden hook. He searched among the dead branches in the forest, found a forked limb with a projecting stub. He held the limb this way and that. Tilted up, the stub would hold the loop of cord. Tilt it down, and the cord would slide off freely. But how to make it tilt? Suddenly, in his mind, gourd, forked limb, cord all came together and he saw how it could be done. He dropped the forked limb near the gourd and went back into the forest. Half-buried in the undergrowth was a bigger limb, three ells long and as thick as his thigh. With much toil he dragged it out and set it crossways on the slope, wedging the ends behind a shrub and a stone. The smaller limb he set with its stem on the log, the forked ends on the slope above it. The projecting stub stood straight up. Now he carried the heavy gourd up behind the log and laid it down, with care, in the embrace of the forked branch. With a length of creeper he lashed the gourd securely to the branch. He picked up the rest of the creeper, made a loop in one end, slipped it over the smooth projecting stub and leaned back with all his weight. The gourd did not move. He tied the other end of the creeper to the pod-vine, then placed the pod directly below the log, within an ell of the bank over the river. He tested his work again and saw it was good. The water would run out of the punctured gourd, its weight would lessen; the greater weigjht of the pod would drag it forward, the forked limb would tilt, the cord would slip off the stub. A #I that remained was to do it. Thorinn slowly put on his garments, made sure that all his possessions were in the wallet, sheathed his sword. The pink, soft pod-halves gaped invitingly. Below him, he could hear the rush of the water. Once more he examined every part of the engine he had made. He knelt behind the log, looked at the heavy-bellied curve of the gourd between the forks of the limb. He drew his sword, set the point against the bottom of the gourd, then hesitated. He found himself thinking of other ways, of somehow ascending the cataract at the other end of the valley, or finding the doorway in the sky... A rage at his own weakness took him, and he thrust the sword in. Water spurted. When he withdrew the blade, a thin stream ran from the gash, twisting as it went, rebounding in lazy droplets from the turf below. Thorinn got up and went down the slope to the waiting pod. Its pink halves gaped in invitation. In fear and sick disgust, he stepped into it, felt it loathsomely soft under his feet. His muscles jumped with desire to get away, but he made himself sit down, then lie back in the pod's fleshy embrace. He saw a narrowing strip of sky, then the podflesh came slowly and smotheringly against his face. The rush of the water below faded to silence. He struggled to get out and found it was quite easy. The pod turned to mist. He was free under a curious twilit sky, walking without fear in a land where interesting things were happening, and where friendly people, whose faces he could not quite see, were speaking to him in words he almost seemed to understand. He realized that he had lost his sword. That alarmed him faintly, but when he looked again, it was there, bright and shining at his waist. Then he realized it was gone again, but it did not seem to matter. The things that were happening and the things said to him were so interesting and pleasant that years went by in this way without any weariness, and it seemed to him that he could well congratulate himself on having attained this mode of life, so much better in every way than the other, and he pitied those who were still groaning with toil in that former life. He mentioned this to one or two of his companions. They agreed entirely. He knew this by their voices, although their words never became entirely clear. Then something unpleasant began to happen. It came to him from a direction in which he could not defend himself, nor could the others help him. It had no face or meaning, but he could not ignore it; it receded, then it came back again, more brutally demanding than ever. He saw that something could be done, but it would mean giving up all his ease and pleasure to the end of time. He tried to invoke the help of his companions. Then he tried merely to complain to them. But they were gone, and strange delusions intruded themselves, that he was afloat in some sort of vegetable womb, even that he was a man once more, and mortal. And while he hesitated, the unpleasant thing came back once more, and now it had a sound: the roar of water. nphe nonperson did such things  that they cannot be told about; he offended both men and their small brothers. In the end even the wildgreen turned its face from him, and the trees denied him their fruits. Then he raged' and destroyed for three days in the wildgreen, and on the fourth day the wildgreen took him and carried him away. For a pleasure pod closed around him while he slept and threw itself into the river Wend, and the river carried him down out of the world of men, into the lake of cold and darkness under the world. That was the end of the nonperson. But the people never went back to Pink Circle, no, never, never, never again.      Next month in Galaxy -- by which we mean one month from now; in case you missed getting The Word, we're on a monthly publishing schedule once more -- we have a number of stories worth calling to your attention. There's John Brunner's Factsheet Six, Larry Niven's There Is a Tide, a Brian W. Aldiss story. Dreamer, Schemer... and many more. However, the lead story deserves a special word. The name of it is A Specter Is Haunting Texas. What it is is satire. The rules of satire are such that it musfdo more than make you laugh. No matter how amusing it is, it doesn't count unless you find yourself wincing a little even as you chuckle. A Specter s Haunting Texas fully lives up to the rules; the wince factor is high. We don't care who you are -- Texan or Mexican; Democrat, Republican, Communist or member of the Y.A.F., white or black; Christian, pagan or anywhere in between -- there is plenty for everybody, and you'll find a wince or two just marked for you. The author is Fritz Leiber; and our opinion is that this will be one of the most talked-about science-fiction stories of this or any year. ' Tired of living? Here's the easy way out -- if you don't mind a one-way trip! 'T'hin wisps of early morning vapor sKredded as the steelgray, triple-decker hearse sped smoothly through the deserted city streets. The turfbine engine was silent; the only sound was the whir of the rubber tires on the pavement. Lorden Manwill sat with his back to the glass partition that separated the rear compartment of the hearse from the driver. Dr. Reel sat on the small upholstered seat opposite him. "How do you explain it?" Dr. Reel asked. He was a thin, frownetched man who thought too much about too many things. Lorden shrugged his shoulders. beneath his black clergyman's robe and said nothing. He didn't like the idea of admitting to Dr. Reel that he too had given the subject a lot of thought lately. "You can't tell me it doesn't worry you," Dr. Reel said frankly. "You're not an insensitive fool like most of the protectorates." Lorden could be just as frank. There was almost a smile in his blue eyes. "No, I'm not." He was well aware that, though only the safest security risks could' become protectorates, the job didn't require a particularly keen mind, nor for that matter a particularly moral one. The ancient clergyman's robes were only a matter of tradition, plus the idea that the sight of them still invoked trust in the public despite the fact that organized religion had long ago declined to nothingness. For a protectorate, dedication to the job was all the government really required. "We've seen the death total double -- triple -- in the last two weeks," Dr. Reel said wonderingiy"A lot of it stems from the trouble with the East," Lorden said. "Life isn't quite as bountiful as it used to be." Dr. Reel shrugged. "War is an accepted thing. The people should know they'll be affected somewhat at home. It's only temporary." "But there hasn't been a major war since lysogene," Lorden pointed out. "At least not a major enough war to create a major shortage of lysogene." The hearse took a sharp corner, and Dr. Reel braced himself. "I suppose that has to enter into it," he said thoughtfully. "No one can really remember what society was like without it. You start taking the stuff when you're in short pants and then you take it for granted. Still, it's not that potent a drug, and it's not addictive." A slight smile formed on Lorden's even features. "People can get along fine without it until they need it. That's why our troops are getting the major portion produced. They need it more often than civilians." Dr. Reel picked up his medical bag, set it on his lap and leaned back in his seat as the huge hearse accelerated up a hill. "Do you think we'll win the war, Lorden?" "I'm not sure it really matters. Eventually the East and West Security Councils will meet to work out a truce. But the real purpose of both will already have been accomplished: the population growth will have been temporarily checked I ; new troop movements and weapons will have been tested, and the military will have again proven a reason for its existence." Dr. Reel's lined face creased in a friendly but almost satanic grin. "That's treason you've just talked," he said, running his fingers over the grained leather of his medical bag. With precise smoothness, the hearse braked to a stop. "Time to go to work," Dr. Reel said, as he and Lorden opened the side door and stepped down into the street. '"phe sun, not yet risen to the horizon, was still casting its even gray light among the tall buildings. Though everyone vigorously supported the Self-Erasure Bureau at the polls, it was still good public relations to conduct this particular part of the operation before the big cities awoke and the streets thronged with people. Among the gaudy advertisements that lined the street, the plain white sign that marked the presence of self-erasure booths stood out in vivid contrast. Lorden and Dr. Reel walked around back of the hearse and stepped up on the curb. Lorden looked at the row of four dull steel booths, like ordinary telephone booths, only slightly larger and with solid doors that locked from the inside. As he suspected they would be, all four doors were closed. He got to work quickly, reaching through the slits in his black robe to get his ring of small, numbered keys from his pants pocket. He inserted key number twelve in the lock on the door of the first booth, glancing unthinkingly at the words engraved above the the left, and an exhaust fan hummed, ridding the booth of deadly vapors. Lorden twisted the key to the right and opened the steel door. This one was a girl, a young blonde. She'd slipped off the stool that projected from the wall of the booth and slumped against Lorden's legs when the door opened. She had the usual expression of complete peace on her waxlike features. Lorden reached inside the booth to the shelf that contained a pad of writing paper and envelopes. There was a sealed envelope laying on the shelf. He picked it up and slipped it into the leather pouch he wore strapped about his waist. Then he inserted the key into the coin box, twisted, and caught the three quarters in his right hand. The coins, too, went into the leather pouch. Lorden signaled for Dr. Reel. After a brief examination, Dr. Reel said matter of factly, "Dead." The hearse driver and his assistant wrapped the girl's body in a rubberized sheet and slid it into the top tier in the back compartment of the hearse. Lorden left the door of Booth # open (without a key it could be locked or unlocked only from the inside) and stepped over to Booth #. There were two bodies in Booth #, an occurence that was becoming much more frequent. They were young, red-haired, almost surely brother and sister. Lorden glanced at their sealed envelope and suddenly felt a great curiosity about its contents, but his job was security, and so he resisted and slid the envelope into the leather pouch. "A bargain," Dr. Reel said as he examined them. Lorden twisted the key and caught the three quarters. Seventy-five cents, he thought. Cheap enough for perfumed, peaceful escape. The government could have charged more, but that way the self-erasure booths would lose their spur-of-the-moment appeal, for suicide was not a rational thing to many people, even though since the official death of religion they no longer feared any hellish after-life. Oblivion was what the booths promised, and oblivion they delivered. Step in, close the door, put in your change and push the pink button. "Both dead," Dr. Reel said. Then to the driver, "I hope one of the booths is empty, or we'll have to cramp them in to make room." Lorden smiled to himself as he moved on to Booth #. In the last few months it had become a rarity to find an empty booth. That was what the government was upset about. Their pat and humane answer to the population problem showed signs of getting out of hand. Lorden and his crew finished their work at the row of booths and drove on to the second of their four stops. A #I the booths had been full. With the sun rising behind it, the hearse sped onto the winding exit ramp off the outer belt highway. Its turbine engine became perceptible to the ear, then whined to a steady low pitch as it braked and coasted through the entrance of Self-Erasure Bureau Station Four. Lorden supervised the unloading of the hearse as the bodies were placed on the conveyor belt to be processed and cremated. Already a slender finger of black smoke was curling itself into the morning sky from the smokestack of the main building. He had the driver wait while he turned in his keys and locked leather pouch, then he was driven to the station's exit gate before the hearse was parked among hundreds of similar streamlined vehicles. Dr. Reel stood alongside him as they waited at the helo pickup. "You saw the notice on the bulletin screen?" Dr. Reel asked. Lorden shook his head, squinting up into the brightening sunlight for a sign of the South helo. "Tomorrow all lysogene supplies will stop for civilian government employees." Dr. Reel watched Lorden closely as he said this, waiting for a reaction. "My family and I can get along nicely without it," Lorden said. "As you mentioned, Doctor, it's not a very potent or addictive drug." Dr. Reel smiled. "And as you mentioned, Lorden, that special feeling of well-being isn't really missed until it's needed." Reel stopped talking for a moment as three men and a woman walked past them to stop and wait in a small knot about ten feet away. Reel looked up at the sky and then down at Lorden. "I wonder," he said, "what do you think about the brother and sister we found today? So young... what could make them do something like that together?" "Only one reason that I can think of," Lorden said. There was a high-pitched whine, a growing shadow, and Lorden and two of the men moved toward the ramp of the helo pickup. Lorden boarded and looked down through curved plexiglass at Dr. Reel's swiftly receding figure. He watched until the doctor disappeared altogether. G loria greeted Lorden at the door with a wifely kiss, an affectionate look from cool blue eyes. "Usual day?" she asked. "Usual." Lorden took a needlepoint shower, then he slumped on the sofa cushions and waited while Gloria prepared the mid-moming meal. He glanced around and saw Bobby's school books on the table by the front door. Bobby would be off to the government sponsored Sports Training Camp by now. Lorden looked with amusement at the stack of books. His eyes picked out a title: Brave New World, Revised Edition. He remembered an old professor he'd had years ago when in school who claimed that the original edition of the book had been meant as a satire. Or on reflection, had he merely been playing a wry joke on the class, trying to provoke discussion? Lorden tried to recall, but the years clouded his memory. After dinner Lorden and Gloria sat before the telescreen and watched the Western Security Council in session. The government had decided that the citizens had to understand this problem thoroughly, for it was the citizens' as well as the government's dilemma. The representative of the Canadian Complex had just suggested the possibility of eliminating the self-erasure booths, and the North European representative was in heated reply. "And what of the people's reaction to this?" he asked in the metallic voice of the auto-interpreter. "They will not stand for it, and who can blame them! And where does the distinguished representative of the Canadian Complex suggest the government make up the revenue? Shall we increase taxes on the working class and create more members of the already problemstricken consumer class? And could we continue to fight the war without funds? We are led to understand that the East faces this same curious problem, but would they agree to destroy all of their self-erasure booths? This solution is entirely infeasible." "What is the real issue?" Gloria asked. "All they seem to do is talk in circles." Lorden sipped his after-meal coffee and grinned. "They talk in circles because they've exhausted most possibilities and they're stymied. The problem is that the war is putting an unexpected burden on the consumer class. Their only income is their government stipend. They're not workers, builders, like we are. What they have depended upon in the past is their steadily increasing allotment to buy goods. But now it's decreasing. There's simply no reason for them to go on. Who can prefer seemingly endless monotony to death?" "But why all the discussion about lysogene?" "Because," Lorden explained, "it's the shortage of lysogene that's intensifying the consumer class's monotony. There's no escape, and they're no longer able to cope with the problems of a mandatory life." He pressed his lips together and frowned, realizing that he was beginning to sound exactly like Dr. Red. Wdl, perhaps the man made sense. "It's not as serious as they make it out to be," Lorden said. "And the consumer class will be the most affected." "What about us?" asked Gloria, a note of fine anxiety in her voice. "I think we can survive without lysogene's escape for a few months, even if we've never done without it in our lives. It's not an addictive drug, you know." But now the representative of the Canadian Complex was talking about the "chain reaction," as friends and family, left rootless and aimless by the thousands of deaths daily in the cities, were drifting in steadily increasing numbers to the sweet-smelling escape of the booths. It was not that they had reason to die, but that they had insufficient reason to live. This was not considered a problem by the North European representative, but Lorden was remembering the two redheaded children in Booth #, and the red-haired man who had died in that same booth two weeks earlier. He shrugged. Perhaps they weren't even related. "Let's go to the beach today," he said to Gloria, "and let the Security Council solve all these grave problems." She assented with a smile. As they splashed hand in hand into the warm water Lorden knew in his heart that they and millions like them could find the necessary reason for living. A month later, on the hearse's stop nearest Lorden's home, he found Gloria dead in Booth #. Lorden masked his emotions and stepped back out of the booth. He told the hearse driver that there were complications, ordering him to deliver what cargo he had to the station and return to pick him up later. As the hearse pulled away Lorden saw Dr. Reel looking at him curiously from behind the gray-tinted glass of a side window. His fingers trembling, Lorden opened the sealed envelope he'd found in the booth. It was a culmination of things -- little things, really. She had felt depressed that morning; Bobby had left for Government Camp late; she had argued on the phone-viewer with her mother; the telescreen had broken and a repairman couldn't be reached. Of course things could be patched up with her mother, just j as the telescreen could be re paired, but she had found herself wondering if it were all really worthwhile. She wasn't really needed. The luster if not the love had gone from their marriage, and Bobby would actually have more benefits at a government child care center. The monotony of her existence had suddenly imposed itself on her. Lorden looked down at his dead wife's peaceful features. It had all been so casual, like the decision to dye her hair. She'd even ended the note with a short P. S., saying that she was sorry, that she was sure Lorden would understand. He did understand. He understood perfectly. "Letting the envelope and note slip from between his fingers, he stepped back out of the booth and closed the door. He reached through the dark slashes in his clergyman's robe and dug his hands deep into his pockets. Then he walked across the street to get change for a dollar. r New subscriptions and changes ofj address require # weeks to process!  BaabiUeljf T don't know why Delacorte  Press has stopped sending me review copies of Judith Merril anthologies. (They send me reassurances and promises instead). If you were wondering why there've been no reviews here of the few most recent annual "Best", that's the reason. But in the following event they sent me, besides a promise of a review copy, an actual contributor s copy. And so, making a minor exception in a reasonably firm rule, we shall indulge ourselves in my herewith spontaneous review of SF : The Best of The Best, Judith Merril, ed., Delacorte, #. This anthology of # stories distilled from the first five annuals contains, among more worthwhile items,' "Sense From Thought Divide," by Mark Clifton; "The Public Hating," by by Theodore R. Cogswell; "Hickory, Dockory, Kerouac," by Richard Gehman; "The Anything Box," by Zenna Henderson; Mack Reynolds's "Compounded Interest," "Nobody Bothers Gus," by Algis Budrys, and an introduction by the editor, all of which have a common sophomoric quality. Yet all these stories were considered more or less good in their day. Zenna Henderson of course had her serious detractors just as soon as she had any fans, and I would have liked to see the publishing history of "The Public Hating" with Sam Jones's name on it; Allen has always been a pleasant, shallow talent. But if you take something like Gus, which got the top rate on its first magazine publication, and a lot of nice comment from respectable critics, and which I was not only proud of doing but employed as the beginning of an entire pocket career under a pseudonym, and you read it now, with its glib inclusions like "his calculations in sociomathematics had long ago predicted... and its ponderous, posturing narrative technique straight out of a commercial about "Sue, it's my job to know what fixes hard-to-whiten teeth... you begin to realize that the best of #, or even #, reflected some criteria which are as the Moon removed from standards we use today. I don't know if this is what Judy was out to show, by including these pieces, or whether she actually still thinks they are fit company for some of the topflight work which is also included here. Richard McKenna's "Casey Agonistes," as well as Avram Davidson's "The Golem" were, and in some ways still are, seminal works. Along with being demonstrably influential on subsequent sf, they also signaled the arrival of major talents -- and continuously imitated ones. Something of the same can be said for Cordwainer Smith's "No, No, Not Rogov!," and either "Prima Belladonna" or "The Sound Sweep" by J. G. Ballard, or for Brian Aldiss's "Let's be Frank," although each of these latter two writers went on experimenting past these stages and each later evolved what is now his characteristic approach, which may even be a pity. There are two Fritz Leiber stories, as well as "Bulkhead" by Theodore Sturgeon, "The Hoofer" by Walter M. Miller, Jr., "A Death in The House" by Clifford D. Simak, two Carol Emshwiller stories, two Damon Knight stories including "The Handler," and stories by Sheckley, Theodore L. Thomas, Robert Abernathy, and Isaac Asimov -- very especially, the Asimov, "Dreaming Is a Private Thing" -- which are written either as well or nearly as well as anything these people have ever done. Furthermore, each of these stories is markedly individual and firmly part of the particular contribution made to sf by each of these uncommon people. To top things off, the book closes with Shirley Jackson's "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts," which is an excellent story and, When first published, represented new way of looking at things. Miss Merril, as you know, is fond of making each collection fit some hypothesis anent the progress and destiny of sf. As you also know, I have consistently found these hypotheses to be quite labored, with the result that her blurbs and introductions often seem rather far-fetched. (This time, she let the individual contributors check the blurbs, which makes a difference. So does a policy of making the blurbs mostly biographical, rather than polemical. As a victim of three previous "Best" exercises of that sort, I found this a refreshing departure, and hope it represents a permanent change rather than an exception created by this volume's unique nature). The introduction is still no prize, though this time it's sufficiently disconnected from the seasonal migration so that one can see Judy's objective is to foster an impression of evolution whether or not it can be shown to have some encapsulable objective. Maybe Judy and I are both mellowing, but I think I see that, and can even understand why it would be important to do that. Furthermost, as I've said earlier, this book demonstrates that something marked and remarkable has, indeed, happened to sf since the first days of this century's second half. I don't think any of us has come within a mile of putting his or her finger on What that might really be, but this bag of lusty prototypes, peaks of evolution, and flies in amber, does indicate that we weren't all born yesterday, and on the other hand may not die tomorrow. J ohn Brunner doesn't know his heroes are callous, egotistical sociopaths who interpret their environment strictly with reference to the benefit of Number One. No other view explains his writings. Take that view, and you can see how his books might have been powerful, compelling, and at times even beautiful, if it weren't for him. Quicksand, (Doubleday, #), comes closer than any Brunner I've ever read to being a noteworthy, major piece of sf. In it are all the clues to the weaknesses and the unexpected strengths of this infuriating man. Brunner infuriates because he nearly always undermines, rather than undertakes, a major situation. Clearly, he has the wit to know what's important and what isn't. Then he proceeds to whine and swagger his way through a melange of self-imposed obstacles, and to arrive somewhere to one side of his announced destination, having enroute made sure the reader doesn't give a damn anymore. The hero of Quicksand is a staff doctor at a hospital for the insane. Like many such institutions, Chent Hospital is subject to the various administrative, architectural and social compulsions which insure that it functions as a dumping ground for social failures and a grab-bag for medicopolitical hacks. Brunner captures both circumstance and mood in describing this place, from the physical plant's typical origin as somebody's unwanted estate on through the various incompetences of the attending and supervising personnel. Into this example of #th Century obliterative reform comes a creature innocent by Biblical definition -- naked, childlike, incapable of human speech -- or else hopelessly corrupt by the same definition ; "Urchin" is very much a functioning woman and is as skilled as Modesty Blaise as well in lockpicking and Judo. Naturally, nobody -- not the hospital staff, not the police who agree to her incarceration and "treatment" there, and not even the protaganist, makes the mental step the reader makes immediately: "Urchin" is from some other world, and since there's no trace of a transportation device, it's very likely a world either in Earth's own past or future or else on some parallel plane of existence. Time travel and parallel-world stories are ah initio more powerful than space travel stories. All other things being equal, the latter device involves only the crew of a container that must be less large than the culture which produced it; the former promises eventual point-to-point contact with everything in the world. It's at first enough that the reader be led into grasping the situation. Quite properly at first, Brunner gives his hero, Paul Fidler, a certain amount of additional time. Fidler's wife can be taken one of two ways. She is a pushing, promiscuous, psychically frigid woman -- in fact, by intention she is very much like Brunner's heroes are by inadvertence -- and she is either Lilith or Eve, a patsy for displacement by the God-given rival. (If you don't happen to like this critical construct, you're free to develop your own. Mrs. Fidler's still a bitch either because she likes it that way or because you like it.) Fidler, who sincerely believes himself to be a decent man, now finds himself forced to deal with this situation as a prime mover, since it was he who first found Urchin naked in the rainy woods shortly after the salesman with the open fly got his arm broken. So Fidler undertakes to "cure" something which may be the only well thing in his world. Now what we have here is material that goes deep into the human situation and human experience, and a situation that offers a number of experimental models of emotional reality. All that remains for Brunner to do now is to set one or more of these models in motion and either something valid or something clearly and thus usefully invalid will result. But this is not what Brunner does. He begins immediately to introduce a plenteous catalogue of complications, among which these technically questionable inclusions : (#) The hero is idiotically concealing a nervous breakdown which, in his youth, made it seem to him that he was trapped in an unfamiliar world. (#) Even though there are one or two sympathetic andor intelligent people at Chent, not one of them comes any closer to the most elementary deductions about Urchin than Fidler himself does. (#) The lies Urchin tells Fidler are more believable, and have fewer holes in them, than the "truth" he finally pries out of her by using standard police interrogative techniques -- that is, techniques Urchin could be expected to encounter, and therefore should have been proofed against if she was indeed' what Fidler eventually "proves" her to be just before he goes out and resolves his entire situation... and closes the book... by committing suicide. (#) Is a red herring, because nothing sensible comes of it, or else a plant for the incredible  ending, in which case it doesn't help a bit, or else the thread of what was intended to be a different (and less attractive) pattern of plot development. Whatever it is, it's equivocal as hell, and typical of Brunner's methods. (#) Knowing the reader was outrunning his hero -- he must have known -- Brunner waits too long to have the hero catch up. Page after page goes lurching by; event after event is noted, described (sometimes indifferently, or not at all), and registered... and s till this #th-century man refuses to make the mental step, even in jest. This is either soapopera technique -- Brunner often mixes techniques; it's all the same bag of toys to him -- or else it's a case of being trapped in his own dither. (#) The events of the final third of the book are so telescoped, and Urchin's sudden shift of personality is so blatant, that it's difficult to evaluate this portion as a story at all; rather, it's an outline. But there are clearly two Urchin's -- which may account for the two hypotheses on her origin, because the wanton of the payoff is not the continent postulant of the beginning, nor is the wanton of the payoff the prostitute of the "explanation." Continually in this book are the elements of an uncommonly fine, lovely and either quite happy or fittingly tragic story. A story which Brunner as a reader or as a critic would appreciate. But as a writer he fails to carry out the responsibilities he imposes on himself, and this sits poorly with the attitudes he strikes. T he Secret Visitors by James White (Ace) is resurrected early White. Those of us who are looking for the book after The Watch Below are still looking. S cience Fiction Inventions, edited by Damon Knight (Lancer), is an excellent book. Besides containing Asimov's "Dreaming is a Private Thing" and Cordwainer Smith's "No, No, Not Rogov!" in common with Judy's Best of The Best, it includes Harry Harrison's "Rock Diver," KuttnerMoore's "Private Eye," de Camp's "Employment," and Katherine MacLean's "The Snowball Effect" as well as Ted Sturgeon's "The Chromium Helmet" -- each of them a real landmark sf story, in the especial sense that each of them either originated or first fruited a basic technological idea in such a happy combination with story values that it is impossible to touch that idea again without having to find some totally new framework for it. Let me let you in on the test I personally use for this sort of thing. Also in this book is John R. Pierce's neglected, perfect short story about immortality, "Invariant" From it, I eventually worked my brain around to the point where I was able to write a story called "The End of Summer." On the other hand, when I wrote another story called "The Burning World," I wasn't going # degrees against Frank Herbert's "Committee of The Whole." I was going # degrees earlier "The Equalizer." Say there are maybe a hundred sf stories altogether which really, fully, meet the strictest test for science fiction. "Committee of The Whole," Carol Emshwiller's "Hunting Machine," and "No, No, Not Rogov!" are not among them. But the other seven stories in this book are, and that's a remarkable percentage. Furthermore, publishing them here, when a more conventional anthologist -- and a more conventional editor than Larry Shaw -- would have thought twice about a book of "old standards," proves a "rather important thing. No matter who wrote it, or when, a really good sf story is inexhaustible. Apparently, gigantism is mexhaustible, too, and I don't mean that exclusively as a smart remark. There's something about sheer immensity, in space or in time, which fascinates people. So a story about a really huge spaceship, constructed over a span of many generations by people who have to devote themselves heart and soul to the task, has got a lot going for it. So much that this dominating image will overshadow grievous defects in plotting, characterization, and simple logic. So there's quite a bit of enjoyment to be gotten out of Mark S. Geston's Lords of the Starship (Ace). Nevertheless, it's a bad and disappointing book on it's own terms. However, a writer who can sustain a story over generations of characters is a writer who can play on Asimov's team. A writer who can respond emotionally to these elements has a little bit of Arthur Clarke in him, and a man who could initiate it has a touch of Heinlein. C. L. Moore wouldn't have written any part of this book the way Geston does, but some passages might appeal to her. There are places Poul Anderson would appreciate. None of these people would have been as clumsy as Geston is... but my point is that there was a time when they were.      Illustrated by The goblins and banshees had survived endless ages. JTjffWould Man be able to outlast them? What has gone before to Earth and finds that he has died. It was the result of a slipup in the matter-transmitting machines, that had somehow gone wrong on a routine jump from Earth to another planet, elsewhere in the Galaxy. Somehow he had reached his destination -- and at the same time, he had been "received" on a strange crystal planet where a race of beings had welcomed him, taken care of him and ultimately returned him to Earth -- where, meanwhile, his other "copy" had already returned and been killed in an accident. So Maxwell is without home, job or belongings -- everything was lost when he "died." Maxwell's work had been with the Supernatural faculty of his university, specializing in deal-, ings with ghosts, banshees, revived prehistoric men and other fauna associated with the Reservation. His closest friends, Ghost and Alley Oop, try to help him, as does a girl, Carol Hampton, who has moved into what used to be his apartment, with her pet, a saber-toothed tiger. Somehow Maxwell feels, his troubles and the reason for his diversion to the crystal planet have something to do with that machinelike object that Time had retrieved from the remote prehistoric ages, the Artifact. And he becomes even more sure of it when he finds, in a painting made by a #th-century man, that same Artifact. How had the artist known about it? M axwell found a secluded corner, a couple of chairs screened by a huge flowering plant of some sort, planted in a marble tub of generous proportions. There was no one there, and he sat down. Out beyond the corner where he sat, the party was drawing to its close, beginning to dwindle down. Some people had left, and those who still were there seemed to be less noisy. And if one more person asked him what had happened to him, Maxwell told himself, he'd belt them in the jaw. I'll explain, he had told Carol when she had asked the night before -- I'll explain over and over again. And that was what he'd done, not entirely truthfully, and no one had believed him. They'd looked at him with glassy eyes and they had figured that either he was drunk or was making fools of them. And he, he realized, had really been the one who had been made a fool. He had been invited to the party, but not by Nancy Clayton. Nancy had not sent him clothes to wear and had not sent the car that had let him out at the back door to walk down the hall, past the door where the Wheeler waited. And ten to one, the dogs had not been Nancy's either, although he had not thought to ask her. Someone, he realized, had gone to a lot of trouble in a very awkward and involved manner to make sure the Wheeler had a chance to talk with him. It was all so melodramatic, stinking so of cloak and dagger, that it was ridiculous. Except that, somehow, he couldn't quite bring himself to think of it as ridiculous. He coddled his drink with both hands and listened to the clatter of the dying party. He peered out around the greenery of the plant roosting in the tub and he could not see the Wheeler, although the Wheeler had been around for a good part of the evening. He passed the drink, absentmindedly, from one hand to the other, and he knew he didn't want it, that he'd had a touch too much to drink -- not so much, perhaps, too much to drink, as the wrong place to be drinking it, not with a warm, tight group of friends in a friendly room, but with too many people who were either strangers or only slightly known, and in a room that was too large and too impersonal. He was tired, more weary than he'd known. In just a little while, he'd get up on his feet and say good night to Nancy, if she were around, and stumble back to Oop's shack, the best way that he could. And tomorrow? he asked himself. Tomorrow there were things that he should do. But he'd not think of them tonight; he'd wait until tomorrow. He lifted the drink over the the rim of the marble tub and poured it on the soil. "Cheers," he told the plant. Carefully, bending slowly so as not to lose his balance, he set the glass upon the floor. "Sylvester," asked a voice, "do you see what we have here?" TTe twisted around, and there,  on the reverse side of the plant, stood Carol with Sylvester close beside her. "Come on in," he invited them. "It's a hideaway I found. If the two of you stay very quiet -- " "I've been trying to get you by yourself all evening," Carol told him, "but there never was a chance. I want to know what was this routine of you and Sylvester hunting down the Wheeler?" She came farther back into the comer and stood waiting for his answer. "You were no more surprised than I was," he said. "Sylvester showing up fairly left me gasping. I had no idea -- " "I get invited around a lot," said Carol, coldly. "Not for myself, of course, since I suppose you're wondering, but because of Sylvester. He makes a good conversation piece." "Well, good for you," said Maxwell. "You're one up on me. I was not invited." "But you got here just the same." "But don't ask me how. I would be somewhat pressed for an explanation." "Sylvester has always been a decent cat," she said, accusingly. "Perhaps a little greedy sometimes, but a gentleman." "Oh, I know," said Maxwell. "I'm a bad influence on almost everyone." She came all the way around the plant and sat down in the other chair. "Are you going to tell me what I asked?" He shook his head. "I don't know if I can. It was somewhat confusing." "I don't know," she said, "that I've met a more exasperating man. I don't think you're being fair." "By the way," he said, "you saw the painting, didn't you?" "Why, of course I did. That was what the party was all about. The painting and that funny Wheeler." "Did you notice anything unusual?" "Unusual?" "Yes, about the painting." "I don't think I did." "Up on the hill there was a tiny cube. Black, sitting on the hill. It looked like the Artifact." "I missed it. I didn't look that closely at it." "You saw the gnomes, I presume." "Ye#, I noticed them. Or, at least, they looked like gnomes." "And those other creatures," Maxwell said. "They looked different, somehow." "Different from what?" "Different from the other creatures Lambert usually painted." She said, "I didn't know you were a Lambert expert." "I'm not," he said. "I went to the library this morning, after I learned about this party and the painting Nancy had and hunted up a book that had plates of his paintings." "But what if they were different?" Carol asked. "A painter surely has a right to paint anything he wants to." C C "f course he has," said Max''well. "There's no question of that. But this painting was of Earth. Or, at least, if that was the Artifact, and I think it was, then it was of Earth. But not this Earth, not the Earth we know today. Perhaps the Jurassic Earth." "And you don't think his other paintings were of Earth? They'd have to be of Earth. When Lambert lived, there was no other place to paint. There wasn't any space travel -- not any real space travel, just out to the Moon and Mars." "There was the space travel of imagination," Maxwell told her. "Space travel and time travel of the mind. No painter ever has been circumscribed by the here and now. And that's what everyone had thought, of course -- that Lambert painted in the realm of imagination. But after tonight I wonder if he might not have been painting actual scenes and actual creatures -- places where he'd been." "You might be right," said Carol, "but how could he have gotten there? This business of the Artifact is exciting, but -- " "It's something that Oop is always talking about," he explained. "He remembers the goblins and the trolls and all the rest of the Little Folk from Neanderthaler days. But there were others then, he said. Others that were worse. They were more malicious and mischievous, and the Neanderthal people were scared to death of them." "And you think some of these things in the painting may be the creatures Oop remembers." "It was in my mind," he admitted. "I wonder if Nancy would mind if I brought Oop here tomorrow so he could see the painting."  "I don't imagine that she would," said Carol, "but, actually, it's not necessary. I took pictures of the painting." "But you -- " "I know, of course," she said, "that it's not the proper thing to do. But I asked Nancy and she didn't mind. What else could she say? I didn't take the pictures to sell or anything like that. I just took them to have them for my own, for my personal enjoyment. A sort of pay, perhaps, for bringing Sylvester with me so people could have a look at him. Nancy knows what the score is, and there wasn't anything that she could do about the picture taking. If you want Oop to have a look at them -- " "You mean you would?" he asked. "Why, of course I would. And please don't blame me for taking the pictures. It's a way of getting even." "Getting even? With Nancy?" "Not her, particularly. With all these other people who invite me to their parties. They don't really want me; it's Sylvester they invite. As if he were a trained bear or a clown of some sort. And, of course, to get him to their parties, they must invite me, too. But I know why they're inviting me, and they know that I know and they keep on inviting me." "I think I understand," he said. "I think," she said, "it's very patronizing of them." "So do I," he said. "If we're going to show Oop the pictures," she said, "perhaps we'd best get going. This party is dying on its feet. You are positive you won't tell me what happened with the Wheeler." "Later on," he said. "Not right now. Maybe later on." 'T'hey left their place behind the potted plant and walked across the floor, heading for the door, threading their way through the thinning clusters of guests. "We should hunt up Nancy," Carol suggested, "and say goodbye to her." "Some other time," said Maxwell. "We can write a note or phone her to say we couldn't find her and thank her for the evening, say how much we enjoyed it, how her parties are the ones we try to never miss, how much we liked the painting and how clever it was of her to get hold of it and -- " "Cut out the clowning," Carol said. "You're forcing too much." "I know it," Maxwell said, "but I always try." They came to the door and started down the long flight of wide, curving stone stairs which led down to the roadway. "Professor Maxwell!" cried a yoice. Maxwell turned. Coming down the stairs was Churchill. "Just a moment, Maxwell, if you please," he said. "Yes, what is it, Churchill?" "A word. Alone, if the lady doesn't mind." "I'll wait for you at the road," Carol said to Maxwell. "Don't bother," Maxwell said. "I'll settle him real fast." "No," said Carol, "I'll wait. I don't want any trouble." Maxwell waited while Churchill came swiftly down the stairs. The man was slightly out of breath, and He reached out a Hand to grab Maxwell by the arm. "I've been trying to get to you all evening long," he said, "but you were always with a crowd." "What is it that you want?" Maxwell asked him sharply. "Tire Wheeler," Churchill said. "Yau must pay no attention to Him. He doesn't know our ways. I didn't know what he intended to do. In fact, I told him not to -- " "You mean you knew the Wheeler might be laying for me?" "I told him not to," Churchill protested. "I told him to leave you alone. I'm very sorry, Professor Maxwell. Believe me, I did my very best." Maxwell's hand shot out and grabbed Churchill by the shirt front, twisting the fabric and pulling the man close to him. "So you're the Wheeler's man!" he shouted. "You're fronting for him. It was you who made the offer for the Artifact and you made it for the Wheeler." "What I did," declared Churchill. angrily, "was my own damn business. I make my living representing people." "The Wheeler isn't people," Maxwell said. "God knows what a Wheeler is. A hive of insects, for one thing. What else we do not know." "He has his rights," said Churchill. "He's entitled to do business." "And you're entitled to help him," Maxwell said. "Entitled to take his wages. But be careful how you earn them. And don't get in my way." He straightened his arm and flung Churchill from him. The man staggered, lost his balance, fell and rolled down several steps before he could catch himself. He lay there, sprawled, not trying to get up. "By right," said Maxwell, "I should have thrown you down the stairs and broken your filthy neck." He glanced up toward the house and saw that a small crowd of people had collected at the door and were staring down at him. Staring and muttering among themselves. He turned on his heel and went stalking down the stairs. At the bottom Carol was clinging desperately to a frantic cat. "I thought he was going to get away and go up there and tear that man to pieces," she gasped. She looked at Maxwell with disgust written on her face. "Can't you get along with anyone?" she asked. ATaxwell got off the roadway at the point where it crossed the mouth of Hound Dog Hollow and stood for a moment, staring at the rocky cliffs and bold headlands of the autumn bluffs. A short distance up the hollow, he caught a glimpse, through the red and yellow of the tinted leaves, of the bare rock face of Cat Den Point and up there, high against the sky, standing just back of the most prominent of the headlands, he knew he'd I find the castle of the goblins, with one O'Toole in residence. And somewhere in that wilderness lay the mossy ridge that served as a den for trolls. It was still early in the morning, since he had started out well before the dawn. A frosty dew lay upon the grass and twinkled on clumps of weeds the sun had not yet found. The air had a winy flavor to it and the sky was so faint and delicate a blue that it seemed to have no color and over all of it, over the entire landscape, hung a sense of strange expectancy. Maxwell walked across the high-arched foot bridge that spanned the double roadway. On the other side he found a path that led him up the hollow. TKe trees closed in around Him, and He walked tKrougH a fairyland that held its breath. He found himself moving slowly and very carefully so that no quick movement or noise would break the forest hush. Leaves came planing down from the canopy above, fluttering wings of color falling gently to earth. Ahead of him a mouse ran, humping in its haste, moving through and over the fallen leaves, but making scarcely a rustle in its fleeing. Far up the hollow a bluejay screeched, but among the trees the screech was muted and robbed of its customary harshness. The path forked, with the lefthand fork continuing up the hollow, while the right-hand fork angled up the bluff. Maxwell took the right-hand path. Ahead of him lay a long and wearying climb, but he would take it easy and stop to rest at frequent intervals. It would be a shame on a day like this, he told himself, not to stop to rest as often as he could, begrudging the time that eventually would take him out of this place of color and of silence. The path was steep, with many turnings to dodge the massive boulders crouched upon the ground, anchored in the soil, graybearded with their crops of lichens. The tree trunks crowded close, the rough, dark bark of ancient oak, the satin whiteness of the birches, showing little tan blotches where the thin bark had peeled off but still clung, fluttering in the wind. In the cluttered trash of the surface rose the fat red pyramid of the jack-in-thepulpit fruit, the shriveled hood drooping like a tattered purple robe. Maxwell climbed slowly, saving his breath, stopping often to stop and look, to soak in the feel of autumn that lay all about. He reached, finally, the fairy green where Churchill's flier, with himself as passenger, had come crashing down under the spell of die trolls' enchantment. Just up the hill lay the goblin castle. He stood for a moment on the green, resting, then took up the climb again. Dobbin, or another horse very similar to him, was cropping at the scanty grass which grew in ragged bunches in a pole-fenced pasture. A few doves fluttered about the castle's turrets, but there were no other signs of life. Qudden shouts shattered the  morning's peace. Out of the open castle gate came a gang of trolls, moving rapidly and in curious formation. They were in three lines and each Hne of them had a rope across their shoulders -- exactly, Maxwell told himself, like the old painting he had seen of the Volga boatmen. As they charged out onto the drawbridge Maxwell could see that the three ropes were attached to a block of hewn stone which bounced along behind them, raising a hollow, booming racket when it hit the drawbridge. Old Dobbin was neighing wildly, kicking up his heels and galloping madly around the inside perimeter of the fence. The trolls, their fangs gleaming against the brown, wrinkled viciousness of their faces, their roached hair seeming to bristle more stiffly than was the usual case, came pounding down the path, with the massive stone along behind them, raising puffs of dust as it gouged into the ground. Boiling out of the gate behind them came a cloud of goblins, armed with clubs, with hoes, with pitchforks, apparently with anything they could lay their hands upon. Maxwell leaped out of the path as the trolls bore down upon him. They were running silently and with vast determination, their weight bent against the ropes, while the goblin horde pursued them with wild waihoops and Shrieks. In the foreground of the goblin band, Mr. O'Toole ran heavily, his face and neck violet with his anger, a short length of two-by-four brandished in his fist. At the point where Maxwell had leaped out of the way, the path took a sudden dip, toboganning downward in a rocky slide to the fairy green. At the top of the dip the block of stone took a mighty leap as its forward edge struck a rocky ledge. The ropes Hung slack, and tKe block came down and bounced and then, with the ropes flying, started pinwheeling down the hill. One of the trolls looked behind him and shouted a frantic warning. The trolls dropped the ropes and scattered. The block of stone went tearing down the slope, gaining speed with every revolution. It struck the fairy green and gashed a great hole in it, made one last bounce into the air, mushed down into the grass and skidded, ripping up the sod, tearing an ugly gash across the place of dancing. Crashing into a large white oak at the far end of the green, it finally came to rest. The goblins went roaring down the hill in pursuit of the trolls, scattering out into the trees to hunt down the stealers cf the stone. Hoots of fear and yelps of rage floated up the hill, intermingled with the sound of many bodies threshing through the underbrush. ATaxwell crossed the path and walked over to the pole fence. Old Dobbin iiow had quieted down and stood with his lower jaw resting on one of the topmost poles, as if he needed it to prop him up. He was staring down the hill... Maxwell reached out a hand and stroked Dobbin's neck, pulled gently at one ear, Dobbin slanted a gentle eye toward him and whuff led his upper lip. "I hope," Maxwell said to him, "that they won't expect you to drag back that stone. It's a long, steep pull." Dobbin flicked one ear, languidly. "If I know O'Toole," Maxwell said, "I don't expect you'll have to. If he can round up the trolls, they'll foe the ones who'll do it." The uproar down the hill had quieted now and in a little while Mr. O'Toole came puffing up the path, carrying the two-by-four across one shoulder. He still was purple of face, but apparently from exhaustion rather than rage. He hurried from the path toward the fence, and Maxwell walked out to meet him. "My great apology," said Mr. O'Toole, in as stately a voice as he could manage with the shortness of his breath. "I glimpsed you and was happy of your presence, but engaged most earnestly and very urgently. You witnessed, I suspect, the lowdown happening." Maxwell nodded. "My mounting stone they took," raged Mr. O'Toole, "with malicious intent of putting me afoot." "Afoot?" asked Maxwell. "You comprehend most feebly, I see. My mounting stone, up which I must scramble to get astride Old Dobbin. Without a mounting stone there gets no horseback riding and I must trudge afoot unhappily, with much pain and puffing." "I see," said Maxwell. "As you say, at first I did not comprehend." "Them dirty trolls," said Mr. O'Toole, grinding his teeth in fury, "at nothing will they stop. After the mounting stone it would have come the castle, piece by piece, stone by stone, until there be no more than the bareness of the rock upon which it once had roosted. It is necessary, in such circumstance, the bud to nip with quick determination." M axwell jerked his head in a downhill direction. "How did it come out?" he asked. "We root them out," said the goblin with some satisfaction. "They scatter like the quail. We dig them out from under rocks and from hiding in the thickets and then we harness them, like so many mules, of which, indeed, they bear a str ikin g likeness, and they drag the mounting stone, most laboriously, I think, back to where they found it" "They're getting back at you," said Maxwell, "for tearing down their bridge." Mr. O'Toole jigged in exasperation. "You are wrong!" he cried. "Out of great and misplaced compassion, we refrained from the tearing of it down. Just two little stones is all. Two tiny little stones, and much effective roaring at them. And then they betook the enchantments off the broomstick and also off the sweet October ale and, being simple souls much given to good nature, we let it go at that." "They took the enchantment off the ale? I would have thought that impossible once certain chemical changes -- " Mr. O'Toole fixed Maxwdl with a look of contempt. "You prate," he said, "in scientific lingo, which brings no more than errant nonsense. I fail to fathom your engagement in this science when magic you could have for the asking from us and the willingness to learn. Although I must confess the disenchantment of the ale left something for desire. It has a faintly musty touch about the tasting of it "Although," he said, "it is a notch or two improved upon no ale at all. If you would only join me, we could do a sample of it" "There has been nothing all day long," said Maxwell, "that sounds as good as that" "Then leave us retire," cried Mr. O'Toole, "to the drafty halls built so inexpertly by you crazy humans who thought we doted upon ruins, and regale ourselves with foaming mugs of cheer." In the drafty great hall of the castle, Mr. O'Toole drew the foaming mugs from a mighty cask set upon two sawhorses and carried them to the rough-hewn table before the large stone fireplace in which a smouldering and reluctant fire was smoking rather badly. "The blasphemy of it," said Mr. O'Toole, as he lifted his mug, "is that this preposterous outrage of the mounting stone was commited at a time when we goblins were embarked upon a wake." "I'm sorry," Maxwell said. "A wake, you say. I had not been aware -- " "Oh, not one of us," Mr. O'Toole said quickly. "With the possible exception of myself, in disgusting good health is all the goblin tribe. We were in observance of it for the Banshee." "But the Banshee is not dead." "Not dead," said Mr. O'Toole, "but dying. And, oh, the pity of it. He be the last of a great and noble race in this reservation and the ones still left elsewhere in the world can be counted upon less than the fingers of one hand." H e lifted the mug and buried his muzzle in it, drinking deep and gustily. When he put it down there was foam upon his whiskers, and Be left it tBere, not bothering to wipe it off. "We die out most notably," he said, in somber tones. "The planet has been changed. All of us Little Foils and some who are not so little walk down into the valley, where shadows hang so densely, and we are gone from the ken of all living things and that is the end of us. And the very shame of it makes one tremble when he thinks upon it, for we were a goodly people despite our many faults. Even the trolls, before degradation fell upon them, still had a few weak yirtues all intact. Although I would proclaim that at the moment they are destitute of virtue. For surely the stealing of a mounting stone is a very lowdown trick and one which clearly demonstrates they are bereft of all nobility of spirit." He put his mug to his mouth again and emptied it in several lusty gulps. He slammed it down an the table and looked at Maxwell's mug, still fulL "Drink up," he urged. "Drink up, then I fill them yet again for a further wetting of the whistle." "You go ahead," Maxwell told him. "It's a shame to drink ale the way you do. It Should be tasted and appreciated." Mr. O'Toole shrugged. "A pig I am, no doubt. But this be disenchanted ale and not one to linger over." Nevertheless he got to his feet and shuffled over to the cask to refill his mug. Maxwell lifted his mug and took a drink. There was a mustiness, as Mr. O'Toole had said, in the flavor of the ale -- a tang that tasted not unlike the the way that leaf smoke smelled. "Well?" the goblin asked. "It has a strange taste to it, but it is palatable." "Some day that troll bridge I will take down," said Mr. O'Toole, with a surge of sudden wrath. "Stone by stone, with the moss most carefully scraped off to rob the stones of magic, and with a hammer break them in many smallish bits and transport the bits to some high cliff and there fling them far and wide so that in all eternity there can be no harvesting of them. Except," he said, letting his shoulders droop, "so much hard labor it would be. But one is tempted. This be the smoothest and sweetest ale that was ever brewed and now look at it -- scarcely fit for hogs. But it be a terrible sin to waste even such foul-tasting slop if it should be ale." T T e grabbed the mug and jerked it to his face. His Adam's apple bobbed, and He did not take down the mug until all the ale was gone. "And if I wreak too great a damage to that most foul bridge," he said, "and should those craven trolls go snivelling to authority, you humans will jerk me on the rug to explain that my thinking is not the way it should be. There is no dignity in the living by the rule. And no joy, either. It was a rotten day when the human race arose." "My friend," said Maxwell, shaken, "you have not said anything like this to me before." "Nor to any other human," said the goblin, "and to all the humans in the world, only to you could I display my feeling. But I, perchance, have run off at the mouth exceedingly." "You know well enough," said Maxwell, "that I'll not breathe a word of it." "Of course not," said Mr. O'Toole. "Tliat I did not worry on. You be almost one of us. You're the closest to a goblin that a human can approach." "I am honored," Maxwell told him. "We are ancient," said Mr. O'Toole, "more ancient, I must think, than the human mind can wonder. You're sure you don't want to polish off that foul and terrible drink and start another one afresh?" Maxwell shook his head. "You go ahead and fill your mug up again. Ill sit here and enjoy mine instead of gulping it." Mr. O'Toole made another trip to the cask and came back with a brimming mug, slapped it on the table and settled himself elaborately and comfortably. "Long years gone," he said, shaking his head in sadness. "So awful long ago. And then a filthy little primate comes along and spoils it all for us." "Long ago," said Maxwell. "As long as the Jurassic?" "You speak conundrums. I do not catch the term. But there were many of us, and many different kinds. And today there be few of us and not all the different kinds. We die out very slowly, but inexorably. A further day will dawn to find no one of us. Then you humans will have it to yourselves." "You are overwrought," Maxwell cautioned him. "You know that's not what we want. We have gone to much effort -- " "Loving effort?" asked the goblin. "Yes, I'd even say to much loving effort." Weak tears ran down the goblin's cheeks and he lifted a hairy, calloused hand to wipe them. "You must pay me slight attention," he told MaxwelL "I deep am in the dumps. It's this business of the Banshee." CC'T'he Banshee is your friend?" Maxwell asked in some surprise. "No friend of mine," said Mr. O'Toole. "He stands on one side of the pale, I upon the other. An ancient enemy, but still one of us. One of the really old ones. He hung on better than the others. He dies more stubbornly. The others all are dead. And in days like this, differences go swiftly down the drain. We could not sit with him, as conscience would decree, but in the absence of this we pay him the small honor of a wake for him. And then these low-crawling trolls without a flake of honor in them... " "You mean no one, no one here on the reservation, could sit the death-watch with the Banshee?" Mr. O'Toole shook his head wearily. "No single one of us. It is to the law contrary, to the old custom in violation. I cannot make you understand -- he is outside the pale." "But he is all alone." "In a thorn bush," agreed the goblin. "Close beside the hut that was his domicile." "A thorn bush?" The goblin said, "In the thorns dwell magic, and in the tree itself." He choked and grabbed hastily at the mug and raised it to his mouth. His Adam's apple bobbed. Maxwell reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the photo of the lost Lambert that hung on Nancy Clayton's wall. "Mr. O'Toole," he said, "there's something I must show you." The goblin set down the mug. "Let me see it, then," he said. "All this beating amongst the bushes, when there was something that you had." He reached for the photo, bending his head to puzzle over it. "The trolls," he said, "of course. But these others I do not recognize. As if I should, but fail. There be old, old stories..." "Oop saw the picture. You know of Oop, of course." "The great barbarian who claims to be your friend." "He is my friend," said Maxwell. "And Oop reoalls these things. They are old ones from the ancient days." "But what magic is called upon to get a picture of them?" "That I don't know. That's a picture of a painting, painted by a man many years ago." "By what means?" "I do not know," said Maxwell. "I think that he was there." Mr. O'Toole picked up his mug and saw that it was empty. He tottered to the cask and filled it. He came back with his drink and picked up the photo, looking at it carefully, although somewhat blearily. "I know not," he finally said. "There were others of us. Many different ones no longer present. We here are the tail end of a noble population." He pushed the photo back across the table. "Maybe the Banshee," he suggested. "The Banshee's years are beyond all telling." "But the Banshee's dying." "That he is," said Mr. O'Toole, "and an evil day it is and a bitter day for him, with no one to keep the death watch." He lifted his mug. "Drink up," he said. "Drink up. Cn one drink enough it may not be so bad." XX M axwell came around the corner of the tumbledown shack and saw the thorn tree standing to one side of it.There was something strange about the tree. It looked as if a cloud of darkness had settled along its vertical axis, making it appear to have a massive bole, out of which emerged short and slender thornarmed twigs. 'And if what O'Toole had said was true, Maxwell told himself, that dark cloud clustered in the tree must be the dying Banshee. He walked slowly across the intervening space and stopped a few feet from the tree. The black cloud moved restlessly, like a cloud of slowly roiling smoke. "You are the Banshee?" Maxwell asked the tree. The Banshee said, "You've come too late if you wish to talk with me." "I did not come to talk," said Maxwell. "I came to sit with you." "Sit then. It will not be for long." Maxwell sat down upon the ground and pulled his knees up close against his chest. He put his hands down beside him, palms flat against the mat of dry and browning grass. Below him the autumn valley stretched to the far horizon of the hills north of the river -- unlike the hills of this southern shore, but gentle, rolling hills that went toward the sky in slanted', staircase fashion. A flurry of wings swept across the ridge behind him, and a flock of blackbirds went careening through the blue haze that hung against the steep ravine that went plunging downward from the ridge. But except for that single instant of wings beating in the  air, there was soft and gentle silence. It held no violence and no threat, a dreaming silence in which the hills stood quiet. "The others did not come," the Banshee said. "I thought, at first, they might For a moment I thought they might forget and come. There need be no distinction among us now. We stand as one, all beaten to the self-same level. But the old conventions are not broken yet The old-time customs hold." "I talked with the goblins," Maxwell told him. "They hold a wake for you. The O'Toole is grieving and drinking to blunt the edge of grief." "You are not of my people," the Banshee said. "You intrude upon me. Yet you say you come to sit with me. How does it happen that you do this?" jVT axwell lied. He could do nothing else. He could not, he told himself, tell this dying thing he had come for information. "I have worked with your people," he said, "and I've become much concerned with them." "You are the Maxwell," said the Banshee. "I have heard of you." "How do you feel?" asked Maxwell. "Is there anything I can do for you? Something that you need?" "No," the Banshee said. "I am beyond all needing. I feel almost nothing. That is the trouble, that I feel nothing. My dying is different than your dying. It is scarcely physical. Energy drains out from me and there's finally nothing left. Like a flickering light that finally gutters out." "I am sorry," Maxwell said. "If talking hastens... " "Talking might hasten it a little, but I no longer mind. And I am not sorry. I have no regret. I am almost the last of US. There are three of us left, if you count me, and I am not worth the counting. Out of the thousands of us, only two are left." "But there are the goblins and the trolls and fairies...  . " "You do not understand," the Banshee said. "No one has .ever told you, and you never thought to ask. Those you name are the later ones, the ones that came after us, when the planet was no longer young. We were colonists surely you know that." "I had thought so," Maxwell said. "In just the last few hours." "You should have known," the Banshee said'. "You were on the elder planet." Maxwell gasped. "How did you know that?" "How do you breathe air?" the Banshee asked. "How do you see? With me, communicating with that ancient planet is as natural as is breath and sight with you. I am not told; I know." So that was it, thought Maxwell. The Banshee had been the source of the Wheeler's knowledge, and it must Have been CSurcEill, who Had tipped the Wheeler to the fact that the Banshee had the information, who had guessed the Banshee might have knowledge no one else suspected. "And the others? The trolls, the -- " "No," the Banshee said. "The Banshees were the only ones to whom the road was open. That was our job and our only purpose. We were the links with the elder planet. We were communicators. When the elder planet sent out colonies, it was necessary that some means of communicating should be established. We all were specialists, although the specialties have little meaning now, and nearly all of tEe specialists are gone. The first ones were the specialists. The ones who came later simply were settlers meant to fill the land," "You mean the trolls and goblins?" "The trolls and goblins and the rest of them: With abilities, of course, but not specialized'. We were the engineers, they the workers. There was a gulf between us. That is why they will not come to sit with me. The old gulf still exists." #X#ou tire yourself," said I Maxwell. "You should conserve your strength." "It does not matter. Energy drains out of me and; wHen the energy is gone, life is gone as well. This dying I am doing has no concern with matter or with body, for I never really had a body. I was all energy. And it does not matter. For the elder planet dies as well; you have seen my planet and you know." "Yes, I know," said Maxwell. "It would have been so different if there had been no humans. When we first came here there were scarcely any mammals, let alone a primate. We could have prevented it -- this rising of the primates. We could have pinched them in the bud. There was some discussion of it, for this planet Had proved promising, and we were reluctant at the thought that we must give it up. But there was the ancient rule. Intelligence is too seldom found for one to stand in the way of its development. If is a precious thing. Even when we Stepped aside for it most reluctantly, we still had to recognize that if was a precious thing." "But you stayed on," said Maxwell. "You may Have stepped aside, but you still stayed on." "It was too late," the BansKee told him. "There was no place for us to go. The elder planet was dying even then. There was no point in going back. And this planet, strange as if may seem, had become home for us." "You must Hate us Humans." "At one time we did. But hate can burn out in time. Almost. And perhaps even in our hatred we held some pride in you. Otherwise, why should the elder planet have offered you its knowledge?" "But you offered it to the WKeeler, too." "The Wheeler? OH, yes, I know who you mean. But we did not really offer it. The WKeeler had heard about the elder planet, apparently from some rumor heard far in space. And that the planet had something that it wished to sell. It came to me and asked one question only -- what was the price of this commodity. I don't know if if knew wBat might be for sale. It only said commodity." "And you told it tfie price was the Artifact." "Of course I told it that. For at the time I did not know of you. It was only later I knew I should communicate the price to you." "And, of course," said Maxwell, "you were about to do this?" "Yes," said the Banshee, "I was about to do if And now I've done it, and tEe matter's closed." "You can tell me one thing more. What is tKe Artifact?" CCphat," the BansKee said, "I cannot do." "Can't or won't?" "Won't," the BansKee said. Sold out, Maxwell told himself. The Human race sold out by this dying tfiing which, despite what it might say, had never meant to communicate the price to him. This thing which through long millenia had nursed cold hatred against the human race. And now that it was gone beyond all reaching, telling him and mocking him so that he might know how the humans had been sold out, so that the human race might know, now that it was too late, exactly what had happened. "And you told the Wheeler about me as well," he said. "That's how Churchill happened to be waiting at the station when I returned to Earth. He said he'd been on a trip, but there had been no trip." He surged angrily to his feet. "And what about the one of me wfa died?" He swung upon the tree, and the tree was empty. The dark cloud that had seethed around its trunk was gone. The branches stood out in sharp and natural relief against the western sky. Gone, Maxwell thought. Not dead, but gone. The substance of an elemental creature gone back to the elements, the unimaginable bonds that had held it together in strange semblance of life, finally weakening to let the last of it slip away, blowing off into the air and sunlight like a pinch of thrown dust. Alive the Banshee had been a hard thing to get along with. Dead it was no easier. For a short space of time he had felt compassion for it, as a man must feel for anything that dies. But he knew the compassion bad been wasted, for the Banshee must have died in silent laughter at the human race. There was just one hope, to persuade Time to hold up the sale of the Artifact so he could have the time to contact Arnold and tell his story to him, persuade him, somehow, that what he told was true. A story, Maxwell realized, that now became even more fantastic than it had been before. He turned about and started down the ravine. Before he reached the wood, he stopped and looked back up the slope. The thorn tree stood squat against the sky, sturdy and solid, braced solid in the soil. When he passed the fairy dancing green a gang of trolls were grumpily at work, raking and smoothing out the ground, laying new sod to replace that which had been gouged out by the bouncing stone. Of the stone there was no sign. M axwell was halfway back to Wisconsin Campus when Ghost materialized and took the seat next to him. "I have a message from Oop," he said, ignoring any preliminary approach to conversation. "You are not to return to the shack. The newspaper people seem to have sniffed you out. When they came to inquire, Oop went into action, without, I would guess, too much thought or judgment. He put the bum's rush on them, but they're still hanging around, on the lookout for you." "Thanks," said Maxwell. "I appreciate being told. Although as a matter of fact, I don't imagine it makes too much difference now." "Events," asked Ghost, "do not march too well?" "They barely march at all," Maxwell told him. He hesitated, then said, "I suppose Oop has told you what is going on." "Oop and I are as one," said Ghost. "Yes, of course he's fold me. He seemed to take it for granted that you knew he would. But you may be rest assured... "It's not that," said Maxwell. "I was only wondering if I had fo recite it all again for you. You know, then, that I went to the reservation to check on the Lambert painting." "Yes," said Ghost. "The one that Nancy Clayton has." "I have a feeling," Maxwell told him, "that I may have found out more than I had expected to. I did find out one thing that doesn't help at all. It was the Banshee who tipped off the Wheeler about the price the crystal planet wanted. The Banshee was supposed to tell me, but he told the Wheeler instead. He claims he told the Wheeler before he knew about me, but I have some doubt of that. The Banshee was dying when he told me, but that doesn't mean that he told the truth. He always was a slippery customer." "The Banshee dying?" "He's dead now. I sat with 'him until he died. I didn't show him the photo of the painting. I didn't Have the Heart fo intrude." "But despite this he told you about the Wheeler." "Only to let me know that he had hated the human race since it first began its evolutionary climb. And to let me know that he was finally getting even. He would have liked to have said that the goblins and the rest of the Little Folk hated us as well, but he never quite got around to that. Knowing, perhaps, that I would not believe it. Although something that the O'Toole had said earlier made Me realize that there is some ancestral resentment. Resentment, but probably not any real hatred. But the Banshee did confirm that a deal is being made for the Artifact and that the Artifact actually is the price for the crystal planet." C t Tt looks fairly hopeless, then," Ghost observed. "My good friend, I am very sorry for this. Is there anything that we can do to Kelp? Oop, me, and perEaps even that girl who drank with you and Oop so staunchly. The one who has the cat." "It looks hopeless," Maxwell told him, "but there are a couple of things that I still can do -- go to Harlow Sharp at Time and try to convince him to hold up die deal, then crash in a door or two up at Administration and back Arnold into a comer. If I can talk Arnold into duplicating the Wheeler's offer in funding for Harlow's Time projects, I am sure that Harlow will turn down the Wheeler." "You will make a noble effort, I am sure," said Ghost. "But I fear for the results. Not from Harlow Sharp, for he's a friend of yours. But President Arnold is a friend of no one. And he will not relish' the breaking of doors." "You know what I think?" said Maxwell. "I think you are right. But you can't tell until you try. It may be that Arnold will have a lapse of moral fiber and will, for once, set prejudice and stuffshirtedaess aside." "I must warn you," said Ghost. "Harlow Sharp may have little time for you or for anyone. He has worries. Shakespeare arrived this morning." #J "Shakespeare!" yelled Maxwell. "For the love of God, I'd forgotten about him coming. But I do remember he speaks tomorrow night. Of all the lousy breaks. It would have to be at a time like this." "It would seem," said Ghost, any easy man to handle. He wanted at once to go out and have a look at this new age of which he'd been told so much. Time had a rough time persuading him to change his Elizabethan dress for what we wear today, but they positively refused to let him go until he agreed to it And now Time is sweating out what might happen to him. They have to keep him in tow, but they can't do anything that will get his back up. They have sold the hall down to the last inch of st andin g room and they can't take a chance that anything will happen." t C T Tow did you hear all this?" asked Maxwell. "Seems to me you manage to come up with campus gossip ahead of anyone." Ghost said modestly, "I get around a lot." "Well, it's not good," said Maxwell, "but I have to take the chance. Time is running out for me. Harlow will see me if he'll see anyone." "It seems incredible," said Ghost sadly, "that such a dire combination of circumstances should have arisen to block what you try to do. Impossible that through sheer stupidity, the University and Earth should fail to obtain the knowledge of two universes." "It was the Wheeler," Maxwell said. "His offer puts tHe pressure on, sets up a time limit. If I only had more time, I could work it out. I could talk to Hatlow, could finally get a hearing from Arnold. And if nothing else, I probably could talk Harlow into a deal with Time, rather than the University, buying the planet's library. But there isn't any time. Ghost, what do you know about the Wheelers? Anything the rest of us don't know?" "I doubt it. Just that they could be that hypothetical enemy we've always figured we would finally meet in space. Their actions argue that they, at least potentially, are that enemy. And their motives, their moves, their ethics, their entire outlook on life, must be different than ours. We probably have less in common with them than a man would with a spider or a wasp. Although they are clever -- and that is the worst of it. They Have by now absorbed enough of our viewpoints and manners that they can mix with us, can pass with us, can do i business with us -- as they have demonstrated in the deal they are trying to make for the Artifact. My friend, it is this cleverness of theirs, this flexibility, that I fear above all. I doubt if the positions were reversed that man could do as well." "You are right, I think," said Maxwell. "And that is why we can't afford to let them have what the crystal planet has to offer. God knows what's to be found in that library. I had a whack at it, but I could do no more than sample it, could barely touch the edge of it. And there was material that I couldn't come within ten light-years of understanding. Which doesn't mean that given time and skills that I haven't got, that perhaps I've not even heard of, man wouldn't be able to understand it. I think man could. I think the Wheelers can. Vast areas of new knowledge that we haven't any inklitig of. That knowledge might just Be the margin Between us and the Wheelers. If man and the Wheelers ever come into collision, the crystal planet's knowledge just possibly could be the difference between our victory or defeat. And it might mean as well that the Wheelers, knowing that we had this knowledge, might never allow that collision to happen. It might spell the difference between peace and war." T T e sat crouched in the seat and through the warmth of the autumn afternoon felt a chill that blew from somewhere other than the colorful land and the sky of China-silk that enclosed this portion of the earth. "You talked with the Banshee," said Ghost. "Just before he died. He mentioned the Artifact. Did he give you any clue as to what it really is? If we knew what it really was... " "No, Ghost. Not in so many words. But I got the impression -- no, the hunch -- that the Artifact is something from that other universe, the one before this one, from the earlier universe in which the crystal planet was formed. A precious thing, preserved through all the eons since that other universe. And maybe the Banshee and the other Old Ones that Oop remembers were natives of that other universe as well, related somehow to the creatures on the crystal planet. Life forms that rose and developed and evolved in that past universe and came here, and to other planets as well, as colonists, in an attempt to establish a new civilization which could follow in the crystal planet's tracks. But something happened. All of those colonization attempts failed. Here on earth because man developed. For other reasons, perhaps, on the other planets. And I think that I know why some of those other attempts failed. Maybe races just die out." "It sounds reasonable," said Ghost. "That the colonies died out, I mean. If there had been a successful colony anywhere in the universe, it would seem likely the crystal planet would pass on its heritage to it instead of offering it to us or the Wheelers, to some race that had no connection with the crystal planet." "What bothers me," said Maxwell, "is why the people of the crystal planet, so close to death that they are no more than shadows, should want the Artifact. What good will it do them? What use can they make of it?" "Maybe if we knew what it was," said Ghost. "You're sure that you have no idea? Nothing that you heard or saw or -- " "No," said Maxwell. TTarlow Sharp had a harried look about him. "Sorry you had to wait so long," he told Maxwell. "This is a hectic day." "I was glad to get in any way at all," said Maxwell. "That watchdog of yours out at the desk was not about to let me." "I've been expecting you," said Sharp. "Figured you'd turn up soon or late. Been hearing some strange stories." "Most of them are true," said Maxwell. "But that's not what I'm here for. This is business, not a social visit. I won't take much time. "Okay, then," said Sharp, "what can I do for you?" "You're selling the Artifact," said Maxwell. Sharp nodded. "I'm sorry about that, Pete. I know you and a few others had an interest in it. But it's been out there in the museum for years and, except as a curiosity to be stared at by visitors and tourists, it's done no one any good. And Time needs money. Surely you know that. The University holds the purse strings fast. The other colleges just feed us tiny driblets for specific programs and -- " "Harlow, I know all that. I suppose it's yours to sell. I recall the University, at the time you brought it forward, would have no part of it. The cost of moving it was yours -- " "We've had to scrape and beg and borrow," said Sharp. "We've worked up project after project -- good sound, solid projects that would pay off in knowledge and new data -- and submitted them and no one's buying them. Can you imagine it! With all the past to dig around in and no one interested. Afraid, perhaps that we'll upset some of their pet theories they have worked out so nicely. But we have to get money somehow to carry on our work. Do you think I've liked some of the things we've done to get some extra money? Like this Shakespeare circus. It's degraded our image. Pete, you can't imagine the trouble that we have. This Shakespeare's out there somewhere, like a God-damned tourist, casing the joint, and me sitting back here with my nails chewed to the elbow imagining all the things that could happen to him. Can you envision the ruckus there would be if a man like Shakespeare should not be returned to his proper age?" Maxwell broke in to head him off. "I'm not arguing with you, Harlow. I didn't come to -- " "And then, suddenly," said Sharp, interrupting him, "there, was this chance to sell the Artifact. For more money than we'll ever get from this crummy University in a hundred years. You must realize what this sale meant to us. A chance to do the job we've not been able to do because of the lack of finance. Sure, I know about the Wheelers. When Churchill came sucking around to sound us out, I knew he was working for someone behind the scenes, but I wasn't dealing with anyone behind the scenes. I nailed Churchill hard and refused to talk business until I knew Who it was he was fronting for. And when he told me, I gagged a bit, but I went ahead, because I knew it was our only chance to set up a decent fund. I'd have done business with the Devil, Pete, to get that kind of money." (  TTarlow, all I want is for you to hold up the deal, tof give me a little time." "Time? Time for what?" "I need the Artifact" "You need the Artifact! For the love of Christ, what for?" "I can trade it" Maxwell told him, "for a planet For a planet crammed with knowledge. With recorded knowledge not from one universe, but from two. Knowlyears." Sharp leaned forward, then sank back into his chair. "You mean this, Pete? You aren't kidding me? There are some funny stories that I've Heard. TKere were two of you, and one of you was killed. And you've been ducking the newsmen, perhaps the cops as well. You've gotten into some sort of hassle with Administration." "Harlow, I could tell you all of it but it wouldn't help. You probably wouldn't believe me. But what I say is true. I can buy a planet." "You? For yourself, you mean?" "No, not for myself. The University. That's why I need time. To get in to see Arnold -- " "And sell him on it? Pete, you haven't got a chance. You had a row of some sort with Longfellow, and Longfellow runs the joint Even if you had a legitimate proposition..." "It is legitimate. I talked to the people on the planet, I saw some of the records." Sharp shook his head. "We've been friends for a long, long time," he said. "I'd do almost anything for you. But I can't go along with this. I can't throw away this opportunity for Time. Besides, I'm afraid you came too late." "Too late?" "The purchase price was paid this afternoon. The Wheeler takes possession of the Artifact tomorrow morning. He wanted to take it immediately, but there was a hitch or two in arranging transportation." JVyYaxwell sat silent, stunned by t  A what he'd heard. "So I guess that's it," said Sharp. "There's not much I can do about it." Maxwell started to get up, then sat back in the chair. "Harlow, if I could see Arnold tonight -- if I could talk him into duplicating the price -- " "Don't be ridiculous," said Sharp. "He'd faint when you even would mention the price to Him." "It was that much?" "It was that much," said Sharp. Maxwell got slowly to His feet, about to leave. "One thing I will say, however," Sharp told him. "You must, somehow or other, have thrown a scare into the Wheeler. Churchill was here this morning, nervous as a cat, frothing at the mouth, to close the deal at once. I wish you could have seen me earlier. We might have been able to work something out, although I can't imagine what it might have been." About to turn away, Maxwell hesitated, turned back to the desk behind which Sharp was sitting. "One thing more. About time travel. Nancy Clayton has a Lambert painting -- " "I heard she had," said Sharp. "In the background there's a hill and a stone upon it. I could swear that stone is the Artifact. Oop says the creatures in the painting are like the ones he remembers from Neanderthal days. And you did find' the Artifact on a Jurassic hilltop. How could Lambert have known about it being on that hilltop? The Artifact wasn't found until centuries after he had died. I think Lambert saw the Artifact and the creatures that he painted. I think he traveled back to the Mesozoic. There is an argument, isn't there, about a man named Simonson?" "I see what you're getting at," said Sharp. "It's just barely possible. Simonson did some temporal investigation back in the twenty-first century and claimed some measure of success, but admitted he had problems in control. There is a legend that he lost a man or two in time -- sent them back and couldn't get them out. But there always has been a question as to whether he had any actual success. His notes, the ones we have, aren't too revealing. And he never published. He carried the work on secretly because he seemed to have the idea that time travel would turn out to be a gold mine, that he could rent it out to scientific expeditions, transport hunters back to the biggame fields -- stuff like that, you know. One idea that he seemed to have was going back in time to South Africa and cleaning out the Kimberly diamond fields. So he kept it secret. No one ever knew much about what he really did." "But it could have been possible," Maxwell insisted. "The time is right. Simonson and Lambert were contemporaries, and tKere's an abrupt break in Lambert's style. Something happened. That something could have been going into time." "Sure it's possible," said Sharp. "But I wouldn't bet on it." "IT Then Maxwell came out of  ' the Time building, the stars were coming out and the night wind had an edge of chill. The great elms were clumped masses of a deeper darkness, blotting out the lights of the windows in the buildings across the mall. Maxwell shivered and turned up the collar of his jacket close about his throat, and went quickly down the stairs to the sidewalk which flanked the mall. There were a few people out. He realized that he was hungry. He had not eaten since early morning. And that he should think of hunger when the last hope he had held had been shattered seemed to be amusing. Not only hungry, he thought, but roofless as well, for if he hoped to dodge the newsmen he could not go back to Oop's. But really there no longer was any reason he should shun the newsmen. Now there'd be nothing gained or lost in the telling of his story. But he shrank from the thought of it, from the thought of the incredulous expressions their faces would assume, from the questions they would ask, and then, more than likely, the tongue-in-cheek style they would employ in the writing of the story. He reached the sidewalk and stood for a moment, undecided as to which direction he should go. He tried to think of a cafe or restaurant which would not be frequented by any of the faculty who might recognize him. Tonight, of all nights, he had an aversion to facing the kind of questions they would ask. Something rustled behind him . He turned quickly and came face to face with Ghost. "Oh, it's you," he said. "I've been waiting for you," Ghost said. "You were a long time in there." I had to wait. Then we got to talking." "Do any good?" "None at all. The Artifact is sold and paid for. The Wheeler hauls it away tomorrow. I'm afraid that's the end of it. I could go up and try to see Arnold tonight, but there's no point to it. Not any more, there isn't." "Oop is holding down a table for us. I imagine you are hungry." "I am starved," said Maxwell. "Then I lead the way." '"pfiey turned off the mall and, A with Ghost leading, wound their way for what seemed to Maxwell an unusually long time, through back streets and alleys. "A place," Ghost explained, "where we won't be seen. But where the food is edible and the Whisky's cheap. Oop made a point of that." They finally reached the place, walking down an iron staircase to reach the basement level. Maxwell pushed open the door. The interior was dim. From somewhere in the back came the smell of cooking. "They serve family style here," said Ghost. "Plank it down upon the table and everyone helps himself. Oop is delighted with that way of serving." Oop's massive figure moved out from one of the tables in the rear. He waved an arm at them. There were, Maxwell saw, only a half dozen or so other people in the place. "Over here!" yelled Oop. "Someone for you to meet." Followed by Ghost, Maxwell made his way across the room. From the table, Carol's face looked up at him. And another face, a bearded shadowed face -- the face of someone that Maxwell felt he should remember. "Our guest tonight," said Oop. Shakespeare got up and held out his hand to Maxwell. A white-toothed smile flashed above the beard. "I deem me fortunate," he said, "to have fallen in with such rough and rowdy fellows." "The Bard is thinking of staying here," said Oop. "Of settling down among us." "Nay, not the Bard," said Shakespeare. "I will not have you call me it. I be no more than an honest butcher and a dealer in the wool." "A mere slip of the tongue," Oop assured him. "We have grown so accustomed... " "Aye, aye, I know," said Shakespeare. "One mistake treads hard I upon the footsteps of the one it follows." "But stay here," said Maxwell. He shot a swift glance at Oop. "Does Harlow know he's here?" "I think not," said Oop. "We took some pains he wouldn't." "I slipped the leash," said Shakespeare, grinning, pleased with himself. "But with assistance, for which I acknowledge gratitude." "Assistance," said Maxwell. "I just bet there was. Will you clowns ever learn?" "Pete, don't carry on," said Carol. "I think it very noble of Oop. Here was this poor fellow from another time, and all he wanted was to see how the people lived and -- " "Let's sit down," said Ghost to Maxwell. "You have the look of a man who could stand a good stiff drink." Maxwell sat down next to Shakespeare, Ghost taking the chair on the other side of him. Oop picked up a bottle and handed it across the table to him. "Go ahead," he urged. "Don't stand on ceremony. Don't bother with a glass. We're informal here." Af axwell tilted the bottle to his mouth and let it gurgle. Shakespeare watched him with admiration. When he took it down, Shakespeare said, "I cannot but admire your fortitude. I essayed a drink of it and it fair to shriveled me." "After a time you get used to it," said Maxwell. "But this ale," said Shakespeare, touching with a finger a half-filled bottle of beer. "Now, there is stuff soft to the palate and pleasing to the stomach." Sylvester wormed his way behind Shakespeare's chair, squeezed in beside Maxwell, and laid Eis head in Maxwell's lap. Maxwell scratched behind his ears. "Is that cat bothering you again?" asked Carol. "Sylvester and I are comrades," Maxwell told her. "We've been through wars together. We took on the Wheeler last night, you must remember, and we vanquished him." "You bear a cheerful countenance," Shakespeare said to Maxwell. "I would presume that the business you have been about, and which had detained you until now, has gone favorably." "The business did not go at all," said Maxwell. "The only reason I have a cheerful countenance is because I am in such good company." "You mean Harlow turned you down!" exploded Oop. "He wouldn't give you a day or two of time?" "There was nothing else for him to do," Maxwell explained. "He's already been paid and the Wheeler carts off the Artifact tomorrow." Oop declared darkly, "We have the means to make him change his mind." "Not any longer," said Maxwell. "He can't pull out now. The deal is done. He won't give back the money, he won't break his word. And if what you have in mind is what I think it is, all he needs to do is call off the lecture and refund the money for the tickets." "I suppose you're right," Oop agreed. "We hadn't known the deal had gone so far. We figured we might pick up a little bargaining strength." "You did the best you could," said Maxwell, "and I thank you for it." "We had figured," said Oop, "that if we could buy a day or two, then all of us could go marching up the hill and bust in on Arnold and explain things to him by hand. But it's all over now, I guess. So have another drink and pass it over to me." AT axwell had another drink and passed the bottle to him. Shakespeare finished off his beer and thumped the bottle back onto the table. Carol took the bottle from Oop and poured a couple of inches into her glass. "I don't care how the rest of you conduct yourselves," she said. "I will not go utterly barbaric. I insist on drinking from a glass." "Beer!" yelled Oop. "More beer for our distinguished guest." "I thank you, sire," said Shakespeare. "How did you ever find this dump?" asked Maxwell. "I know," said Oop, "many of the backwaters of this campus." "It was exactly what we wanted," said Ghost. "Time will be beating the bushes for our friend. Did Harlow tell you he had disappeared?" "No," said Maxwell, "but he seemed somewhat on edge. He mentioned that he was worried, but you couldn't tell it on him. He's the kind who can sit on the edge of an exploding volcano and never turn a hair." "How about the newsmen?" Maxwell asked. "Still covering the shack?" Oop shook his head. "But they'll be back. We'll have to find some other place for you to bunk." "I suppose I might as well face them," Maxwell said. "The story will have to be told some day." "They'll tear you apart," warned Carol. "And Oop tells me you are without a job and Longfellow's sore at you. You can't stand bad publicity right now." "None of it really matters," Maxwell told her. "The only problem is how much of it I should tell them." "All of it," said Oop. "Tear the thing wide open. Let the galaxy know exactly what was lost." "No," said Maxwell. "Harlow is my friend. I can't do anything to hurt him." A waiter brought a bottle of beer and put it down. "One bottle!" raged Oop. "What do you mean, one bottle? Go back and get an armload of it. Our friend here has a dry on." "You didn't say," the waiter said. "How was I to know?" He shuffled off to gather up more beer. "Your hospitality," said Shakespeare, "is beyond reproach. But I fear I am intruding in a time of trouble." "Trouble, yes," Ghost told him. "But you are not intruding. We are glad to have you." "What was this Oop said about you staying here?" asked Maxwell. "About you settling down." "My teeth are bad," said Shakespeare. "They hang loosely in the jaw and at times pain exceedingly. I have intelligence that hereabouts are marvelous mechanics who can extract them with no pain and fabricate a set to replace the ones I have." "That can be done, indeed," said Ghost. "I left at home," said Shakespeare, "a wife with a nagging tongue and I would be rather loath to return to her. Likewise, the ale that you call beer is wondrous above any I Have drank, and I hear tell that you have arrived at understanding with goblins and with fairies, which is a marvelous thing. And to sit at meat with a ghost is past all understanding, although one has the feeling here he must dig close at the root of truth." 'T'he waiter arrived with an armload of beer bottles and dumped them on the table. "There!" he said, disgusted. "That'll hold you for a while. Cook says to say the food is coming up." "You don't intend," Maxwell asked Shakespeare, "to appear for your lecture?" "Forsooth, and if I did," said Shakespeare, "they would forthwith, once that I had finished, whisk me home again." "And they would, too," said Oop. "If they ever get their claws on him, they'll never let him go." "But how will you ever earn a living?" Maxwell asked. "You have no skills to fit this world." "I," said Shakespeare, "will surely devise something. A man's wits, driven to it, will come up with answers." The waiter arrived with a cart, laden with food. He began putting it on the table. "Sylvester!" Carol cried. Sylvester had risen swiftly, put his two paws on the table and reached to grab two slabs of rare roast beef which had been carved off a standing roast of ribs. Sylvester disappeared beneath the table, with the meat hanging from his jaws. "The pussy cat is hungry," Shakespeare said. "He harvests what he can," "In the matter of food," Carol complained, "he has no manners whatsoever." From beneath the table came the sound of crunching hones. "Master Shakespeare," said Ghost, "you came from England. From a town upon the Avon." "A goodly country to the eye," said Shakespeare, "but filled with human riffraff. Be there poachers, thieves, murders, footpads and all sort of loathsome folk..." "But I recall," said Ghost, "the swans upon the river and the willows growing on its banks and -- " "You what?" howled Oop. "How can you recall?" Ghost rose slowly to His feet, and there was something about his rising that made all of them fix their eyes upon him. He raised a hand, although there was no hand, just the sleeves of his robe, if robe it was. His voice, when it came was hollow, as if it might have come from an empty place far distant. "But I do recall," he told them. "After all these years, I do recall. I either had forgotten or I had never known. But now I do... " "Master Ghost," said Shakespeare, "you act exceedingly strange. What queer distemper could have seized upon you?" "I know now who I am," said Ghost, triumphantly. "I know who I am the ghost of." "Well, thank God for that," said Oop. "It will put an end to all this maundering of yours about your heritage." "And who, pray," asked Shakespeare, "might you be the ghost of?" "Of you," Ghost keened. "I know now -- I know now -- I am T?or an instant they all sat silent, stricken, and then from Shakespeare's throat came a strangled, moaning sound of fright. With a sudden surge, he came out of his chair and leaped to the table top, heading for the door. The table went over with a crash. Maxwell's chair tipped back, and He went sprawling with it. The edge of the tipping table pinned him to the floor, and a bowl of gravy, skating off its edge, caught him in the face. He put up both his hands and tried to wipe the gravy off his face. From somewhere above him he heard Oop's raging bellows. Able to see again, but with his face and hair still dripping gravy, Maxwell managed to crawl from beneath the table and stagger to his feet. Carol sat flat upon the floor amid the litter of the food. Beer bottles were rolling back and forth across the floor. Framed in the kitchen door stood the cook, a mighty woman with chubby arms and tousled hair and her hands upon her hip. Sylvester was crouched above the roast, ripping it apart and rapidly swallowing great mouthfuls of meat before anyone could stop him. Oop came limping back from the door. "No sign of them," he said. "No sign of either one of them." He reached down a hand to haul Carol to her feet. "That God damned Ghost," he said bitterly. "Why couldn't he keep still? Even if he knew..." "But he didn't know," said Carol. "Not until just now. It took this confrontation to jar it out of him. Something Shakespeare said, perhaps. It's something he's been wondering about "This tears it," Oop declared. "Shakespeare never will quit running. There'll be no finding him." "Maybe that is what Ghost is doing now," said Maxwell. "That is where he went. To follow Shakespeare and stop him and bring him back to us." "Stop him, how?" asked Oop. 'T'hey sat dejectedly about Oop's rough lumber table. Sylvester lay on his back on the hearthstone, with his front paws folded neatly on his chest, his back feet thrust up into the air. He wore a silly grin of satisfaction pasted on his face. Oop shoved the fruit jar along the boards to Carol. She picked it up and sniffed. "It smells like kerosene," she said, "and, as I remember it, it tastes like kerosene." She lifted the jar with both her hands and drank, then pushed it across to Maxwell. "I do believe," she said, "that after a time one could become accustomed to drinking kerosene." "That is good booze," said Oop, defensively. "Although," he admitted, "it could do with just a touch more aging. Seems that it gets drunk up quicker than I can get it made." Maxwell lifted the jar and drank moodily. The hooch burned its way fiercely down his gullet and exploded in his stomach, but the explosion did no good. He still stayed moody and aware. There were times, he told himself, when there was no such things as getting drunk. Pour it in two-fisted and you still stayed sober. And right now, he thought, he would dearly love to get sodden drunk and stay that way for a day or so. Maybe when he sobered up life wouldn't seem so bad. "What I can't understand," said Oop, "is why Old Bill should take this business of his ghost so bad. He did, of course. He was scared pink with purple spots. But the thing that bothers me is that he wasn't upset with Ghost. Oh, a little jittery at first, as one might expect of a sixteenth-century man. But once we had explained it to him, he seemed rather pleased with it. He accepted Ghost much more readily than would have been the case, say, with a twentieth-century man. In the sixteenth century they believed in ghosts. Ghosts were something that could be accepted. He never got the wind up until he found that Ghost was his ghost and then..." "He was quite intrigued," said Carol, "by our relations with the Little Folk. He made us promise we'd take him down to the reservation so he could get acquainted with them. As with ghosts, he believed in them implicitly." Maxwell took another hooker out of the jar and slid it across to Oop. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "Being free and easy with a ghost, with just any ghost," he said, "would come under a different heading than meeting up with one particular ghost that turned out to be your ghost. It is impossible for a man to accept, to actually accept and believe in, his own death. Even knowing what a ghost is..." "Oh, don't please start that up again," said Carol. "op grinned. "He sure went out  of there like a shot," he said. "Like you'd tied a firecracker on his tail. He went through that door without even touching the latch. He just busted through it." "I didn't see," said Maxwell. "I had a bowl of gravy in my face." "There wasn't anyone got anything out of the whole mess," said Oop, "except that saber-toother over there. He got a haunch of beef. Rare, the way he likes it." "The cat's an opportunist," Carol observed. "He always comes out smelling pretty." Maxwell stared at her. "I've been meaning to ask you. How do you come to be mixed up with us? I thought you washed your hands of us last night after the affair with the Wheeler." Oop chuckled. "She was worried about you. Also, she is nosey." "There's something else as well," said Maxwell. "How come you are mixed up in it at all? Let's take it from the first. You were the one who tipped us off about the Artifact being sold." "I didn't tip you off. I misspoke. It just came out." "You tipped us off," Maxwell declared. "I think you meant to do it. What do you know about the Artifact? You must have known something to not have wanted it sold." "Yeah, that is right," said Oop. ; "Sister, you better start telling us what it is all about." "A couple of bullies!" "No," said Maxwell, "let's not turn it to a joke. This is important." "Well, I had heard about it being sold, as I told you. I wasn't supposed to know. And I was worried about it and I didn't like the sound of it. Not that there was anything really wrong with , the sale of it, legally, I mean. Time had title to it and could : sell it if it wished. But it didn't seem to me that a thing like the I Artifact should be sold, even for ! I did know something about it -- something that no one else knew about it and I was afraid to try to tell anyone what I knew. Then, that night, when you two talked about it and were so interested " "You thought maybe we could help." CClXTell, I don't know what I  ' thought. But you were the first ones who had shown any interest in it." "Were you working with the Artifact? Is that how -- " "Well, no," she said, "not working with it. But one day when I stopped to look at it -- like any tourist, you understand, just walking through the inner court of the museum and stopping to have a look at it, because it was. an interesting object and a mysterious one as well -- I saw something. Or thought I saw something... " She stopped and looked from one to the other of them. Neither spoke. They sat silent, waiting for her to go on. "I can't be sure," She said. "Not now." "Go ahead," said Ooop. "Tell us the best you can." She nodded soberly. "It was just for an instant. So quick, so fast, and yet at the time there was no doubt I had really seen it. The sun was shining through the windows, and the sunlight was falling on the Artifact. Maybe no one had ever looked at the Artifact before when the sunlight had been shining on it at precisely the angle it shone on it that day. I don't know. But it seemed to me I saw something inside the Artifact. Well, really not inside of it; rather, as if the Artifact was something that had been pressed or shaped into an oblong block, but you couldn't know this except when the sun shone just right upon it. It seemed to me that I could see an eye. And it was alive and watching me." "But that can't be!" yelled Oop. "The Artifact is like a stone. Like a piece of metal." "A funny piece of metal," said Maxwell. "Something that you can't pry into." "It's only fair to say," Carol reminded them, "that now I can't be cure. It might have been only my imagination." "We'll never know," said Maxwell. "The Wheeler will haul off the Artifact tomorrow." "And buy the crystal planet with it," said Oop. "It seems to me we shouldn't just be sitting here." TTe picked up the jar, put it to A his mouth and drained it, got up and went to the hideout in the floor and got another jar. Ponderously, he unscrewed the lid and handed the jar to Carol. "Leave us settle down," he suggested, "to building up a hangover. The newsmen will be here by morning, and I got to work up the strength to throw them out." "Now, wait a second," said Maxwell. "I feel an idea coming on." They sat and waited for the idea to come on. "The translator," said Maxwell. "The one I used to read the records on the crystal planet. I found it in my bag." "Yes?" asked Oop. "What if the Artifact were simply another record?" "But Carol says... " "I know what Carol says. But she can't be sure. She only thinks she saw that eye staring out at her. And it seems improbable." "That's right," said Carol. "I can't be absolutely sure. And what Pete says does make a crooked sort of sense. If he's right, it would have to be a very important record -- and a rather massive one. Perhaps a whole new world of knowledge. Maybe something the crystal planet left here on Earth, believing that no one would ever think of looking for it here. A sort of hidden record." "Even if that should be the case," said Oop, "what good will it do us? The museum is locked, and Harlow Sharp is not about to open it for us." "I could get us in," said Carol. "I could phone the guard and say I had to get in and do some work. Or that I had left something there and wanted to pick it up. I have clearance for that sort of thing." "And lose your job," suggested Oop. She shrugged. "There are other jobs. And if we worked it right... " "But there's so little point to it," protested Maxwell. "It's no Maybe less than that. I don't deny I'd like to have a try at it, but -- " "What if you found that it was really something important?" asked Carol. "Then we could get hold of Sharp and explain it to him and maybe -- " "I don't know," said Maxwell. "I doubt that we could find anything so important that Harlow would renege upon the deal." "Hell," said Oop, "let's not waste time sitting here and talking about it. Let us be about it." Maxwell looked at Carol. "I think so, Pete," she said. "I think it's worth the chance." Oop reached out and took the jar of moonshine from in front of her and screwed on the cap. T he past surrounded them, the cabineted and cased and pedestaled past. All around were the lost and forgotten and unknown, snatched out of time by the far-ranging field expeditions that had probed into the hidden comers of mankind's history. Art and folklore objects that had been undreamed of until men went back and found them; still new pottery that had theretofore been known only as scattered shards, if even that; bottles out of ancient Egypt with the salves and ointments still prisoned, fresh, within them; ancient iron weapons new from the forge; the scrolls from the Alexandrian library which should have burned, but didn't, because men had been sent back in time to snatch them from flames at the moment before they would have been destroyed; the famed tapestry of Ely that had disappeared from the ken of man in a long-gone age -- all these and many more, a treasure trove of articles snatched from the bowels of time. The place was misnamed, Maxwell thought. Not Time Museum, but rather the Museum of No Time, a place where all ages came together, where there was no time distinction. In this building all the accomplishments and dreams of mankind might eventually be gathered, not aged things, but all fresh and new and shiny, fashioned only yesterday. And here one would not have to guess from old and scattered evidence what it had been like back there, but could pick up and hold and manipulate the tools and instruments and gadgets that had been made and used through all the days of man's development. Standing beside the pedestal which held the Artifact, he listened to the footsteps of the guard as he tramped away again on his regular rounds. Carol had managed it. There had been a time he had doubted she would be able to, but everything had gone well. She'd phoned the guard and told him she and a couple of. friends had wanted one last look at the Artifact before it was carted off, and he had been waiting to let them in at the little entryway set into one of the large doors that were opened when the museum was open to the public. "Don't take too long," he grumbled. "I'm not sure I should let you do this." "It's all right," she'd told him. "There is no need for you to worry." He had shuffled off, mumbling to himself. A bank of overhead spotlights shone down on the black block that was the Artifact. Maxwell ducked beneath the velvet rope that guarded tire pedestal and clambered up beside the Artifact, crouching down beside it, fumbling in his pocket for the interpreting apparatus. It was a crazy hunch, he told himself. It was no hunch at all. It simply was an idea bom of desperation. He was wasting his time, more than likely making himself ridiculous. Even if this wild venture should prove to have some point, there was nothing that he could do about it at this late hour. Tomorrow the Wheeler would take possession of the Artifact and of the knowledge stored on the crystal planet As far as the human race might be concerned that would be the end of dredged most laboriously and devotedly from two universes -- knowledge that should have belonged to the University of Earth, but that now would be lost forever to an enigmatic cultural bloc which might, in turn, prove to be that potential cosmic enemy Earth had always feared would be found in space. TTis start had been too late. A A Given a bit more time and he could have turned the deal, could have found the people who would have listened to him, could have gained some backing. But everything had worked against him, and now it was too late. He slid the interpreter onto his head and fumbled with it. It didn't want to fit. "Let me help," said Carol. He felt her fingers manipulating it deftly, straightening out the straps, sliding them into place. Glancing down, he saw Sylvester, seated on the floor beside the pedestal, snearing up at Oop. Oop caught Maxwell's look. "That cat doesn't like me," said the Neanderthaler. "He senses that I'm his natural enemy. Some day he'll work up his nerve to have a go at me." "That's ridiculous," snapped Carol. "He's just a little putty cat." "Like hell," said Oop. Maxwell reached up and pulled the assemblage of the interpreter down across his eyes. And looked down at the Artifact. There was something there in that block of black. Lines. Forms. A strangeness. No longer just a block of unimaginable blackness, rejecting all influence from outside, tolerating nothing and giving up nothing, as if it might be a thing that stood apart, sufficient to itself within the universe. He twisted his head to try to catch the angle from which it might be possible to untangle what he saw. No lines of writing, surely -- it was something else. He reached up to the headpiece and pushed over the wheel that increased the power, fiddled for a moment with the adjustment for the sensor. "What is it?" Carol asked Him. "I don't -- " "Then suddenly he did know. He saw. Imprisoned in one comer of the block was a talon, with iridescent flesh or hide or scale and gleaming claws that looked as if they had been carved from diamonds. A talon that moved and struggled to be free so it could reach out for him. He flinched away, moving back to get out of reach, and he lost his balance. Falling, he tried to twist to one side so he wouldn't land flat upon his back. One shoulder struck the velvet rope and the standards that held the rope in place went over with a clatter. The floor came up and smacked him hard. Striking the rope had served to twist him to one side, and He came down Heavily on one shoulder, but His Head was protected from the floor. He struck at his forehead with an open hand, knocking the interpreter off to one side to free his eyes. And there, above him, the Artifact was changing. Out of it something was rising -- rearing up out of the oblong of blackness, jerking itself free. Something that was alive, athrob with vitality and glittering in its beauty.  slender, dainty head, with an elongated snout, and a sharp serrated crest that ran from the forepart of the head along the length of neck. A barrel-like chest and body, with a pair of wings half-folded, and shapely forelegs, armed with the diamond claws. It glittered blindingly in the spotlights that pointed at the Artifact -- or, rather, where the Artifact had been. Each gleaming scale was a point of hard white light striking off the bronze and gold, the yellow and the blue. A dragon! Maxwell thought. A dragon rising from the blackness of the Artifact! A dragon, finally risen, after long eons of being prisoned in that block of blackness. A dragon! After all the years he'd hunted one, after all the years of wonder, here finally was a dragon. But not as he'd pictured it in his mind. This was no prosaic thing of flesh and scale, but a thing of glorious symbolism. A symbol of the heyday of the crystal planet, perhaps of the universe that had died so that this present universe could be born anew -- ancient and fabulous, a fellow of those strange tribes of beings of which the trolls and goblins, the fairies and the banshees were the stunted and pitiful survivors. A thing the name of which had been handed down through generations that numbered into thousands, but never seen by any member of humanity until this very moment. Oop stood out on the floor, beyond one of the tumbled standards that had held the velvet cord, his legs more bowed than ever, as if he'd started to sink into a crouch and had frozen there, with his hamlike hands hanging at his side, his fingers hooked like claws, while he stared upward at the terror and the wonder on the pedestal. In front of him, Sylvester crouched close against the floor, knotted muscles standing out along his furry legs, his great mouth agape, with the fangs exposed and ready for attack. Maxwell felt a hand upon his shoulder and twisted around. "A dragon?" Carol asked. Her words were strange, as if she had been afraid to ask them, as if she'd forced them from her throat. She was not looking at him, but upward at the dragon, which now seemed to be complete. The dragon switched its tail, which was long and sinuous. Out on the floor Oop tumbled down ungracefully to duck the sweep of it. Sylvester squalled in anger and crept forward a foot or so. "Cut it out, Sylvester," Maxwell said sharply to the cat. Oop scrambled forward hastily on his hands and knees and grabbed Sylvester by one of his hind legs. "Talk to him," Maxwell said to Carol. "If that damn fool cat tackles him, there'll be hell to pay." "Oop, you mean? He wouldn t tackle Oop." "Not Oop," said Maxwell. "The dragon. If he takes off on the dragon -- " A bellow of rage came thundering out of the darkness, and the thump of running feet. "What is going on in here?" howled the watchman, charging from the shadows. The dragon spun upon the pedestal and came swiftly off it, switching around to face the running watchman. I with a tight grip upon Sylvester's leg. The dragon moved forward carefully, almost mincingly, its head canted at a questioning angle. It flourished its tail. The tail swept across the top of a display table, brushing off a half dozen bowls and jugs. The pottery thudded and gleaming shards went skating across the floor. "Hey, cut that out!" the watchman yelped. Then, apparently for the first time, he saw the dragon. The yelp turned into a howl of fear. The watchman turned and fled. The dragon trotted after him, not in any hurry, but very interested. His progress was marked by a series of thudding and splintering crashes. "If we don't get him out of here," said Maxwell, "there'll be nothing left At the rate he's going, there won't be a thing intact in less than fifteen minutes. He'll have the place wiped out. And, Oop, for the love of God, hang onto that cat. We don't want a full-fledged brawl breaking out in here." Maxwell got to his feet, grabbed the interpreter off his head and stuffed it in his pocket. "I could open the dors," Carol offered. "We could shoo Him out of here. The big doors, I mean. I think that I know how." "How are you, Oop," Maxwell asked, "at dragon-herding?" The dragon had blundered to the rear of the building and now had turned around and was coming back. "Oop," said Carol, "help me with these doors. I need a man with muscle." "What about this cat?" "Leave him to me," said Maxwell. "He may behave himself. Maybe he'll mind me." A long chain of crashes marked the progress of the dragon. Listening to them, Maxwell moaned. Sharp would have his scalp for this. Friend or not, he would be plenty sore. The whole damn museum wrecked and the Artifact transformed into rampaging tons of flesh. He took a few tentative steps across the floor toward the crashing sounds. Sylvester slunk close against his heels. In the dimness, Maxwell could make out the dim outlines of the floundering dragon. ( " Nice dragon," Maxwell said. "Take it easy, fellow." It sounded rather silly and somehow inadequate. How in the world should one talk to a dragon? Sylvester let out a hacking growl. I "You stay out of it," said Maxwell, sharply. "Things are bad enough without you messing in."  He wondered what had hap pened to the watchman. More I than likely phoning the police I and building up a storm. I Behind him he heard the creak ing of the doors as they came I open. If the dragon would only j wait until those doors were open, ! then he could be shagged outf doors. And once the dragon had been gotten out, what would happen then? Maxwell shuddered, thinking of it -- of the great beast blundering down the streets and across the malls. Maybe it would be better, after all, to keep him penned in here. TT e stood indecisively for a moJment, weighing the disadvantages of a dragon caged with a dragon on the loose. The museum was more or less wrecked already. Perhaps the complete wrecking of it would be preferable to turning this creature loose. The doors still were creaking, slowly opening. The dragon had been ambling along, but now he burst into a gallop, heading for the opening portal. spun to a sliding halt and now was straining upward, raging loudly at the flying dragon. It was a sight to make one catch his breath. Moonlight on the beating wings, reflecting off the burnished scales of red and gold and blue, made a flashing rainbow that quivered in the sky. Oop and Carol burst out of the door and stopped to stare into the sky. "Beautiful!" said Carol. "Yes, isn't it," said Maxwell. um as he took off in pursuit of the running creature. Off to one side, Carol was shrieking at him. "Cut it out, Sylvester! No, Sylvester, no!" The dragon's sinuous tail flicked nervously from side to side as it ran. Cabinets and tables crashed, statues were sent spinning, path of destruction marked dragon's flight for freedom. Groaning, Maxwell ran Sylvester and the dragon, although, for the life of him, he didn't know exactly why. He was certain he didn't want to the dragon. The dragon reached the opening and went through it in a single leap, high into the air, and as it leaped, the wings unfolded and swept downward in a thrumming beat. At the doorway Maxwell ded to a stop. On the steps the entrance, Sylvester also Maxwell spun around. "Close those doors!" he shouted, then ducked quickly to one side as the galloping dragon came charging down upon him. The doors were partly open, and they stayed partly open. Oop and Carol were racing off in different directions, intent on leaving plenty of room for the lumbering tons of flesh that were heading for the open. Sylvester's thunderous roars boomed and echoed in the museAnd now, for the first time, he realized in full exactly what had happened here. There was no longer any Artifact. The Wheeler deal was dead. And so was any deal that he could make in behalf of the crystal planet. The chain of events which had been started with the copying of his wave pattern when he had been launched for Coonskin had been canceled out. Now, except for that flashing rainbow in the sky, it was as if nothing at all had happened. The dragon was higher now, wheeling in the sky, no longer anything more than the flashing of the rainbow colors. "This tears it," Oop declared. "What do we do now?" "It was my fault," said Carol. "It was no one's fault," said Oop. "It's just the way things happen." "Well, anyhow," said Maxwell, "we loused up Harlow's deal." "I'll say you did," a voice said behind them. "Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?" 'T'hey turned around. I Harlow Sharp stood in the doorway. Someone had turned on all the museum lights,' and He stood out sharply against the lighted oblong of the doors. "The museum is wrecked," he said, "and the Artifact is gone and here are the two of you. I might have known. Miss Hampton, I m astonished. I thought you had better sense than to become entangled in such low company. Although that crazy cat of yours -- " "You leave Sylvester out of this," she said. "He never had a thing to do with it." "Well, Pete?" asked Sharp. Maxwell shook his head. "I find it a bit hard to explain." ft " would think so," said Sharp. Did you have all this in mind when you talked with me this evening?" "No," said Maxwell. "It was a sort of accident." "An expensive accident," said Sharp. "It might interest you to know that you've set Time's work back a century or more. Unless, of course, you somehow moved the Artifact and have it hidden out somewhere. In which case, my friend, I give you a flat five seconds to hand it back to me." Maxwell gulped. "I didn't move it, Harlow. In fact, I barely touched it. I'm not sure what happened, but -- Well, it turned into a dragon." "It turned into a what?" "A dragon." "I remember now," said Sharp. "You always were blathering around about a dragon. You started out for Coonskin to find yourself a dragon. And now it seems you've found one. I hope that it's a good one." "It's a pretty one," said Carol. "All gold and shimmery." "Oh, fine," said Sharp. "Isn't that just bully? We can probably make a fortune, taking it around on exhibition. We can whomp up a circus." "But it isn't here," said Carol. "It up and flew away." "Oop," said Sharp, "you haven't said a word, and you are ordinarily fairly mouthy. What is going on?" "I'm mortified," said Oop. Sharp turned away from him and looked at Maxwell. "Pete," he said, "you probably realize what you have done. The watchman phoned me and wanted to call the police. But I told him to hold up on calling the police, and I'd come right down. I had no idea it would turn out as bad as it did turn out to be. The Artifact is gone and I can't deliver it, and that means I'll have to hand back all that cash. And a lot of the exhibits have been smashed to smithereens... " Maxwell said, "The dragon did that before we let him out." "So you let him out? He didn't actually get away. You just let him out" "Well, he was smashing all that stuff. I guess we weren't thinking." "Tell me honest, Pete. Was there actually a dragon? Or are you going crazy?" "Yes, there was one. He was immobilized inside the Artifact. Perhaps he was the Artifact. Don't ask me How he got there. Enchantment, I would guess." Qlowly, lowering himself one  section at a time, Sharp sat down on the top step and looked slowly from one to the other of them. "Not a thing," he said. "You didn't miss a thing when you started out to ruin Harlow Sharp. You made a job of it." "We didn't start out to ruin you," said Oop. "We never had a thing against you. Somehow it seemed that things started going wrong, and they never stopped." "By rights," said Sharp, "I should sue every one of you for every cent you have. I should ask a judgment -- and don't fool yourself, I'd get it -- that would keep all of you working for Time the rest of your natural lives. But the three of you together couldn't offset by a fraction, during your collective lifetimes, what you cost Time tonight. So there's no sense in doing it. Although I suppose the police will have to get into the ruckus. I don't see how they can be kept out of it. The three of you, I'm afraid, will have to answer a lot of questions." "If someone would only listen to me," said Maxwell, "I could explain it all. That's what I've been trying to do ever since I got back -- to find someone who would listen to me. I tried to talk to you this afternoon... " "Then," said Sharp, "suppose you start right now by explaining it to me. I'll own to a slight curiosityLet's go across the street to my office, where we can settle down and have a talk. Or might that inconvenience you? There's probably a thing or two you still have to do to finish up the job of bankrupting Time." "No, I guess there isn't," said Oop. "I'd say offhand that we've done about everything we can." Tnspector Drayton rose heavily " from the chair in which he had been sitting in Sharp's outer office. "I'm glad you finally arrived, Dr. Sharp," he said. "Something has arisen -- " The inspector cut short his speech when he caught sight of Maxwell. "So it's you," said the inspector. "I am glad to see you. You've led me a long, hard chase." Maxwell made a face. "I'm not sure, Inspector, that I can reciprocate your gladness." If there was anyone he could get along without right now, he told himself, it was Inspector Drayton. "And who might you be?" Sharp asked, shortly. "What do you mean by busting in here?" "I'm Inspector Drayton, of Security. I had a short talk with Professor Maxwell the other day, on the occasion of his return to Earth, but I'm afraid that there are still some questions." "In that case," said Sharp, "please take your place in line. I have business with Dr. Maxwell, and I'm afraid that mine takes precedence over yours." "You don't understand," said Drayton. "I have not come Here to apprehend your friend. His turning up with you is a piece of good fortune I had not expected. There is another matter in which I thought you might be helpful, a matter which came up rather unexpectedly. You see, I had heard that Professor Maxwell had been a guest at Miss Clayton's recent party, and so I went to see her." "Talk sense, man," said Sharp. "What has Nancy Clayton got to do with all of this?" "I don't know, Harlow," said Nancy Clayton, appearing at the doorway of the inner office. "I never intended to get involved in anything. All I ever try to do is entertain my friends and I can't see how there's anything so wrong in that." "Nancy, please," said Sharp. "First tell me what is going on." "It's Lambert," Nancy said. "You mean the man who painted the picture that you have." "I have three of them," said Nancy, proudly. "But Lambert has been dead more than five hundred years." "That's what I thought, too," said Nancy, "but he turned up tonight. He said that he was lost." A man stepped from the inner room, urging Nancy to one side -- a tall and rugged' man with sandy hair and deep lines in his face. "It appears, gentlemen," he said, "that you are discussing me. Would you mind if I spoke up for myself?" r iere was a strange twang to the way he spoke his words. He stood beaming at them in a good-natured manner, and there was not much that one could find in him to make one dislike the man. "You are Albert Lambert?" Maxwell asked. "Indeed I am," said Lambert. "I hope I don't intrude, but I have a problem." "And you're the only one?" asked Sharp. "I'm sure that I don't know," said Lambert. "I suppose there are many other persons who are faced with problems. When you have a problem, however, the question is where to go to have it solved." "Mister," said Sharp, "I am in the same position. I am seeking answers the same as you." "But don't you see," Maxwell said to Sharp, "that Lambert has the right idea? He has come to the one place where his problems can be solved." "If I were you, young fellow," Drayton said, "I wouldn't be so sure. You were pretty foxy the other day, but now I'm onto you. There are a lot of things -- " "Inspector, will you please keep out of this?" said Sharp. "Things are bad enough without you complicating them. The Artifact is gone, and the museum is wrecked, and Shakespeare Has disappeared." "But all I want," said Lambert, reasonably, "is to get back home again. Back to #." "Now, wait a minute," Sharp commanded. "You are out of line." Maxwell said, "Harlow, I explained it all to you just this afternoon. I asked you about Simonson. Surely you recall." "Simonson? Yes, I remember now." Sharp looked at Lambert. "You are the man who painted the canvas that shows the Artifact." "Artifact? What do you mean?" A big block of black stone set atop a hill." Lambert shook his head. "No, I haven't painted it. Although I suppose I will. In fact, it seems I must, for Miss Clayton showed it to me and it's undeniably something that I would have done. And I must say, who shouldn't, that it is not so bad." "Then you actually saw the Artifact back in Jurassic days?" "Jurassic?" ago." Lambert looked surprised. "So it was that long ago. I knew it was pretty far. There were dinosaurs." "But you must have known. You were traveling in time." "The trouble is," said Lambert, "the time has gone haywire. I never seem to be able to go to the time I want." Oharp put up his hands and held  his head between them. Then he took them away and said: "Now, let's go at this slowly. One thing at a time. First one step and then another, till we get to the bottom of it." "I explained to you," said Lambert, "that there's just one thing that I want. It's very simple really. All I want is to get home again." "Where is your time machine?" asked Sharp. "Where did you leave it? We can have a look at it." I didn't leave it anywhere. There s no place I could leave it. It goes everywhere with me. It's inside my head." "In your head!" yelled Sharp. "A time unit in your head. But that's impossible." ( Maxwell grinned at Sharp. "When we were talking this afternoon," he said, "you told me that Simonson revealed very little about his time machine. Now it appears -- " "I did tell you that," Sharp agreed. "But who in their right mind would suspect that a time unit could be installed in a subject's brain? It must be a new principle. Something that we missed entirely." He said to Lambert, "Do you have any idea how it works?" "Not the slightest," Lambert said. "The only thing I know is that when it was put into my head -- a rather major surgical operation, I can assure you -- I gained the ability to travel in time. I simply have to think of where I want to go, using certain rather simple co-ordinates, and I am there. But something has gone wrong. No matter what I think, I go banging back and forth like a yoyo from one time to yet another. None of them are the times I want to be." "It would have advantages," said Sharp, speaking musingly and more to himself than to the rest of them. "It would admit of independent action and it would be small, much smaller than the mechanism that we have to use. It would have to be able to go inside the brain and... I don't suppose, Lambert, that you know too much about it?" "I told you," Lambert said. "Not a thing. I wasn't really interested in how it worked. Simonson happens to be a friend of mine -- " 'But why here? Why did you come here? To this particular place and time?" "An accident, that's all. And once I arrived it looked a lot more civilized than a lot of places I had been, and I started inquiring around to orient myself. Apparently I had never been so far into the future before, for one of the first things I learned was that you did have time travel and that here was a Time College. Then I heard that Miss Clayton had a painting of mine, and thinking that if she had a painting I had done she might be disposed favorably toward me, I sought her out. In hope, you see, of finding out how to contact the people who might be able to use their good offices to send me home again. And while I was there Inspector Drayton arrived." ttTow, Mr. Lambert," Nancy  said, "before you go any further, there is something that I want to ask you. Why didn't you, when you were back in the Jurassic or wherever it was that Harlow said you were, and you painted this picture -- " "You forget," Lambert told her. "I haven't painted it yet. I have some sketches and someday I expect to." "Well, then. When you get around to painting that picture, why don't you put in dinosaurs? There aren't any dinosaurs in it, and you just said you knew you were a long way in the past because there were dinosaurs." "I put no dinosaurs in the painting," said Lambert, "for a very simple reason.There were no dinosaurs." "But you said -- " "You must realize," Lambert explained, patiently, "that I paint only what I see. I never subtract anything. I never add any thin g And there were no dinosaurs because the creatures in the painting had chased them all away. So I put in no dinosaurs, nor any of the others." "Any of the others?" asked Maxwell. "What are you talking about now? What were these others?" "Why," said Lambert, "the ones with wheels." He stopped and looked around Him at their suddenly stricken faces. "Did I say something wrong?" he asked. "Oh, not at all," Carol said sweetly. "Go right ahead, Mr. Lambert. Tell us all about the ones with wheels. We are all terribly Interested." "You probably won't believe me," Lambert said, "and I can't tell you what they were. The slaves, perhaps. The work horses. The bearers of the burdens. The serfs. They were life forms, apparently. They; were alive, but they went on wheels instead of feet and they were not one thing alone. Each one of themi was. a hive of insects, like bees or ants. Social insects, apparently. You understand, I don't expect that you'll believe a word I say. But I swear -- " From somewhere far away came the low, thudding rumble of rapidly advancing wheels. As they stood transfixed and listening they knew that the wheels were coming down the corridor. Nearer came the rumble, growing louder as it advanced. Suddenly it was just outside the door and slowing down to turn, and all at once a Wheeler stood inside the door. "That's one of them!" screamed Lambert. "What is it doing here?" ttA yTr. Marmaduke," said  Maxwell, "it is good to see you once again." "No," the Wheeler told him. "Not Mr. Marmaduke. The socalled Mr. Marmaduke will not be seen by you again. He is in very bad disgrace. He made a vast mistake." Sylvester had started forward, but Oop had readied down and grabbed him by the loose skin of the neck and was holding him tightly while he struggled to break free. "There was a contract made," the Wheeler said, "by a humanoid that went by the name of Harlow Sharp. Which one of you would be Harlow Sharp?" "I'm your man," said Sharp. "Then, sir, I must ask you what you intend to do about the fulfillment of the contract." "There is nothing I can do," said Sharp. "The Artifact is gone and cannot be delivered. Of course your payment will be refunded promptly." "That, Mr. Sharp," the Wheeler said, "will not be sufficient. It will fall far short of satisfaction. We shall bring the trial of law against you. We shall bust you, mister, with everything we can. We shall do our best to poverty you and -- " "Why, you miserable go-cart," Sharp yelled, "there is no law for you! Galactic law does not apply with a creature such as you. If you think you can come here and threaten me -- " Ghost appeared out of thin air, just inside the doorway. "It's about time," Oop yelled angrily. "Where've you been all night? What did you do with Shakespeare?" "The Bard is safe," said Ghost, "but there is other news." The arm of the robe raised and gestured at the Wheeler. "Others of his kind swarm in Goblin Reservation to try to trap the dragon." So, thought Maxwell, somewhat illogieally, it had been the dragon they wanted after all. Could the Wheelers have known all along that there had been a dragon? Of course they would have known; it had been they or their far ancestors who had done the work back in Jurassic days. In Jurassic days on Earth, and how many other times on how many other planets? The serfs, Lambert had said, the horses, the bearers of the burdens. Were they now, or had they been, inferior members of that ancient tribe of beings, or had they been, perhaps, simply domesticated animals, harnessed biologically by genetic engineering, for the jobs they were assigned? And now these former slaves, having established an empire of their own, reached out their hands for something that they may have reason to believe should be their heritage. Theirs, since nowhere else in the universe was there left any trace of the great colonization project dreamed by the crystal planet. A nd perhaps, thought Maxwell -- perhaps it should be theirs. For theirs had been the labor that had engineered the project. Had the dying banshee, laden with an ancient guilt, sought to right a wrong when he had doublecrossed the crystal planet, when he had sought to help these former slaves? Or had he perhaps believed that the heritage should go, not to some outsider, but to a race of beings who had played a part, however menial, however small, in the great project that had crumbled into failure? "You mean," Sharp said to the Wheeler, "that at the very moment you were standing here and threatening me, you had your bandits out?" "He works all the angles that there are," said Oop. "The dragon went home," said Ghost, "to the only home that he could recognize upon this planet. To where the Little Folk reside, so that he could see his fellows once agaiflj flying in the clear moonlight above the river valley. And then the Wheelers attacked him in the air, trying to force him to the ground, so that he could be captured. The dragon is fighting back most magnificently, but -- " "Wheelers can't fly," protested Sharp. "And you make it sound like there were a lot of them. There can't be. Mr. Marmaduke was the only... " "Perhaps," said Ghost, "they are not believed to fly, but they are truly flying. And as for the number of them, I am mystified. Pethaps here all the time, hiding from the view. Perhaps many coming in through the transport stations." "We can put a stop to that," said Maxwell. "We can send word to Transportation Central." Sharp shook his head. "No, we can't do that. Transportation is inter-galactic, not of Earth alone. We cannot interfere." "Mr. Marmaduke," said Inspector Drayton, speaking in his best official voice, "or whoever you may be, I think I'd better run you in." "Leave off this blathering," said Ghost. "The Little Folk need help." Maxwell reached out and picked up the chair. "It's time we put an end to fooling," he declared. He raised the chair and said to the Wheeler. "It's time for you to start talking, friend. And if you don't, I'll damn well cave you in." A circle of jets suddenly protruded from the Wheeler's chest, and there was a hissing sound. A stench hit them in the face, a terrible fetor that struck like a clenched and savage fist, that made the stomach somersault and set the throat to gagging. AT axwell felt himself falling to-- the floor, unable to control his body, which seemed tied up in knots from the fearful stink that exuded from the Wheeler. He hit the floor and rolled. His hands went to his throat and tore at it, as if to rip it open to allow Himself more air -- although! there seemed to be no air, nothing but the foulness of the Wheeler. Above him he heard a fearful screaming. When he rolled around so he could look up, he saw Sylvester suspended above him, his front claws hooked around the upper portions of the Wheeler's body, his rear legs clawing and striking at the bulging and transparent belly in which writhed the disgusting mass of roiling insects. The Wheeler's wheels were spinning frantically, but something had gone wrong with them. One wheel spun in one direction and the second in another. The Wheeler Whirled about in a giddy dance, with Sylvester clinging desperately and his back legs working like driving pistons at the Wheeler's belly. It looked for all the world, thought Maxwell, as if the two of them were engaged in a rapid and unwieldly waltz. An unseen hand reached out, grasped Maxwell by the arm and hauled him unceremoniously across the floor. As his body thumped across the threshold, some of the foulness diminished. There now was a breath of air. Maxwell rolled to his hands and knees and fought his way erect. He reached up with his fists and rubbed at his streaming eyes. The air still was heavy with stench, but one no longer gagged. Sharp sat propped against the wall, gasping and rubbing at his eyes. Carol was slumped upon the floor. Oop, crouched in the doorway, was tugging Nancy out of the fetid room, from which still came the screaming of a sabertooth at work. Maxwell staggered forward, reached down, picked up Carol and slung her like a sack across one shoulder. He beat an unsteady retreat down the corridor. Thirty feet away he stopped and turned around. As he did, the Wheeler burst out of the doorway, finally free of Sylvester and with both wheels spinning in unison. He came down the hall, wheeling crazily and lopsidedly -- staggering blindly, if a thing with wheels could be said to stagger, slamming into one wall and caroming off it to smash into the other. From a great rent in his belly small whitish objects dropped and scattered all across the floor. Ten feet from where Maxwell stood, the Wheeler finally collapsed when one wheel hit the wall and caved in. Slowly, with what seemed to be a rather strange sort of dignity, the Wheeler tipped over. Out of the tom belly gushed a bushel or so of insects that piled up on the floor. Cylvester came slinking down the hall, crouched low, his muzzle extended in curiosity, taking one slow step and then another as he crept up on his handiwork. Behind Oop and Sylvester came the rest of them. You can let me down now," said Carol. Maxwell let her down, stood her on her feet She leaned against the wall. "I never saw a more undignified way to be carried," she declared. "You haven't got a spark of chivalry to pack a girl around in a manner such as that." "It was all a mistake," said Maxwell. "I should have left you there, laid out on the floor." " Sylvester had stopped now and reaching out his neck, sniffed at the Wheeler, all the while with wrinkles of disgust and wonder etched upon his face. There was no sign of life in the Wheeler. Satisfied, Sylvester pulled back, squatted on his haunches and began to wash his face. On the floor beside the fallen Wheeler, the mound of bugs were seething. A few of them started crawling from die pile, heading out into the hall. Sharp swung out past the Wheeler. "Come on, he said. "Let's get out of here." The corridor still was sour with the terrible stench. "But what is it all about?" wailed Nancy. "Why did Mr. Marmaduke -- " "Nothing but stink bugs," Oop told her. "Can you imagine that? A galactic race of stink bugs! And they had us scared!" Inspector Drayton lumbered forward importantly. "I'm afraid it will be necessary for you all to come with me," he said. "I will need your statements." "Statements," Sharp said, viciously. "You must be out of your mind. Statements, at a time like this, with a dragon loose!" "But an alien has been killed," protested Drayton. "And not just an ordinary alien. A member of a race that could be our enemies. This could have repercussions." "Just write it down," said Oop, "killed by a savage beast." "Oop," snapped Carol, "you know better than to say a thing like that. Sylvester isn't savage. He's gentle as a kitten. And he is not a beast." Maxwell looked around. "Where is Ghost?" he asked. "He took it on the lam," said Oop. "He always does when trouble starts. He's nothing but a coward." "But he said -- " "That he did," said Oop. "And we are wasting time. O'Toole could do with help." M r. O'Toole was waiting for them when they got off the roadway. "I knew coming you would be," he greeted them. "Ghost, he said he would get you yet. And badly do we need someone who will talk sense to the trolls, who hide and gibber in their bridge and will listen to no reason." "What have the trolls got to do with it?" asked Maxwell. "For once in your life, can't you leave the trolls alone?" "The trolls," Mr. O'Toole explained, "filthy as they are, may be our one salvation. They be the only ones who, from lack of any civilization whatsoever, or any niceties, remain proficient in the enchantments of old times. And they specialize in the really dirty kinds of work, the most vicious of enchantments. The fairies, naturally, also cling to the old abilities, but all of their enchantments are of the gentle sort. And gentleness is something of which we do not stand in need." Sharp asked, "Can you tell us exactly what is going on? Ghost didn't hang around to explain." "Gladly," said the goblin, "but leave us start to walking and, walking, I'll relate to you all the happenstance. We have but little time to waste and the trolls are stubborn souls and vast persuasion they will need to do a job for us. They lurk within the mossy stones of that senseless bridge of theirs and they titter like things which have lost their minds. Although, bitter truth to tell, them stinking trolls have little minds to lose." They trudged in single file the rocky ravine which lay in the notch between the hills, and in the east the dawn-light had begun to show, but the path, buried in the trees and flanked by bushes, was dark. Here and there birds woke from sleep and twittered. Somewhere up the hill a raccoon was whickering. "The dragon came home to us," O'Toole told them as they walked, "the one place on Earth left for him to go, to be with his own , kind again. And the Wheelers -- ' which in ancient times had another name than Wheelers -- . have attacked him, like broomsticks flying in formation. They must not force him to the ground, for then they have him caught and can whisk him hence very rapidly. And, forsooth, he has made a noble fight of it, the fending of them off, but he is growing tired. We must hurry rapidly and with much dispatch if we are to give him aid." "And you're counting," Maxwell said, "on the trolls being able to bring the Wheelers down like they brought down the flier." "You apprehend most easily, my friend. That's what lingers in my mind. But these befouled trolls make a bargain of it." Ctr' never knew," said Sharp, "that the Wheelers could fly. All I've seen them do was trundle." "Of abilities they have many," said O'Toole. "From their bodies they can grow devices without number and beyond imagination. Nozzles for the spreading of their nasty gas, guns to shoot the lethal bolt, jets to make them broomsticks that move with amazing speed. And never are they up to any good. Full of anger and resentment after all the ages, lying out there, deep in the galaxy, with rancor eating like a cancer into their putrid minds, waiting for a chance to be what they never can be -- for no more than menials they are or ever will be." "But why bother with the trolls?" asked Drayton, out of sorts. "I could have guns and planes here." "Don't try to be any more of a fool than you already are," said Sharp. "We can't lay a finger on them. We can't create an incident. The humans can take no part in this. This is something between the Little Folk and their former slaves." "But the cat already killed -- " "The cat. Not a human.". Carol said, "Sylvester was only trying to protect us." "Do we have to go so fast?" protested Nancy. "I'm not used to this." "Here," said Lambert, "take my arm. The path does seem slightly rough." "Do you know, Pete," said Nancy, bubbling, "that Mr. Lambert has agreed to be my house guest for a year or so and paint some pictures for me. Isn't that a lovely thing for him to do?" "Yes," said Maxwell. "I am sure it is." The path had been climbing the hillside for the last hundred feet or so. Now it dipped down toward the ravine, which was clogged with tumbled boulders which, in the first faint light of morning, looked like crouched, humped beasts. And spanning the ravine was the ancient bridge, a structure jerked raw from an old medieval road. Looking at it, Maxwell found it hard to believe that it had been built only a few decades ago when the reservation had been laid out. Two days, he thought. Had it been only two days since he had returned to Earth to find Inspector Drayton waiting? So much had happened that it seemed much longer. He tried to summon up a hatred of the Wheelers, but he found there was no hatred. They were too alien, too far removed from mankind, to inspire a hatred. They were abstractions of evil rather than actual evil beings -- although that distinction made them no less dangerous. That other Peter Maxwell had surely been murdered by the Wheelers, for when he had been found there had been a curious, repulsive odor lingering, and now, since that moment in Sharp's office, Maxwell knew what that odor was. Murdered because the Wheelers had believed that the first Maxwell to return had come from the crystal planet and murder had been a way to stop him from interfering with the deal with Time for the Artifact. But when the second Maxwell had appeared, the Wheelers must have been afraid of a second murder. That was why, Maxwell told himself, Mr. Marmaduke had tried to buy him off, And there was the matter of a certain Monty Churchill, Maxwell reminded himself. When this all was finished, no matter how it might come out, he would hunt up Churchill and make certain that the score he owed him was all evened out. T hey came up to the bridge and walked under it and halted. "All right, you trashy trolls," Mr. O'Toole yelled at the silent stone. "There is a group of us out here to hold conversation with you." "You hush up," Maxwell told the goblin. "You keep out of this. You and the trolls do not get along." "Who," the O'Toole demanded, "along can get with them? Obstinate things they are and without a shred of honor and of common sense bereft." "Just keep still," said Maxwell. "Don't say another word." They stood, all of them in the silence of the coming dawn, and finally a squeaky voice spoke to them from the area underneath the far end of the bridge. "Who is there?" the voice asked. "If you come to bully us, bullied we'll not be. The loudmouthed O'Toole for all these years has bullied us and nagged us. No more we'll have of it." "My name is Maxwell," Maxwell told the speaker. "I do not come to bully you. I come to beg for help." "Maxwell? The good friend of O'Toole?" "The good friend of all of you. Of every one of you. I sat with the dying Banshee, taking the place of those who would not come to see out 'his final moments." "But drink with O'Toole, you do. And talk with him, oh, yes. And give credence to his lies!" The O'Toole strode forward, bouncing with wrath. "That down your throats I'll stuff!" he screamed. "Let me get my paws but once upon their filthy guzzles... " His words broke off abruptly as Sharp reached out and, grabbing him by the slack of his trouser-seat, lifted him and held him, gurgling and choking in his rage. "You go ahead," Sharp said to Maxwell. "If this little pipsqueak so much as parts 'his lips, I'll find a pool and dunk him." Sylvester sidled over to Sharp, thrust out his head and sniffed delicately at the dangling O'Toole. O'Toole batted at the him out of here," he shrieked. "He thinks you're a mouse," said Oop. "He's trying to make up his mind if you are worth the trouble." Sharp hauled off and kicked Sylvester in the ribs. Sylvester Shied off, snarling. "Harlow Sharp," said Carol, starting forward, "don't you ever dare to do a thing like that again. If you do, I'll -- " "Shut up!" Maxwell yelled exasperated. "Shut up, all of you. The dragon is up there fighting for His life, and you stand here, wrangling." nphey all fell silent. Some of them stepped back. Maxwell waited for a moment, then spoke to the trolls. "I don't know what's gone on before," he said. "I don't know what the trouble is. But we need your help and we're about to get it. I promise you fair dealing, but I also promise that if you aren't reasonable we're about to see what a couple of sticks of high explosive will do to this bridge of yours." A feeble, squeaky voice issued from the bridge. "But all we ever wanted, all we ever asked, was for that bigmouthed O'Toole to make for us a cask of sweet October ale." Maxwell turned around. "Is that right?" he asked. Sharp set O'Toole back upon his feet so that he could answer. "It's the breaking of a precedent!" howled O'Toole. "That is what it is. From time immemorial us goblins are the only ones who ever brewed the gladsome ale. And drink it by ourselves. Make we cannot more than we can drink. And make it for the trolls, then the fairies will be wanting... " "You know damn well," said Oop, "that the fairies would never drink the ale. All they drink i milk. The brownies too." "Athirst you would have us all," screamed the goblin. "Hard labor it is for us to make only what we need and much time and thought and effort!" "If it's a simple matter of production," suggested Sharp, "we certainly could help you." Mr. O'Toole bounded up and down in wrath. "And the bugs!" he shouted. "What about the bugs? Exclude them from the ale I know you would when it was brewing. All nasty sanitary. To make October ale, bugs you must have falling into it and all other matters of great uncleanliness or the flavor you will miss." "We'll put in bugs," said Oop. "We'll go out and catch a bucket full of them and dump them into it" The O'Toole was beside himself with anger, his face a flaming purple. "Understand you do not," he screamed at them. "Bugs you do not go dumping into it. Bugs fall into it with wondrous selectivity!" His words cut off in a gurgling shriek, and Carol called out sharply, "Sylvester, cut that out!" The O'Toole dangled, wailing and flailing his arms, from Sylvester's mouth. Sylvester held his head high so that Mr. O'Toole's feet could not reach the ground. "Vop rolling on the ground in laughter, beating his hands upon the earth. "He thinks O'Toole's a mouse!" Oop yelled. "Look at that putty cat! He caught hisself a mouse!" Sylvester was being gentle about it. He was not hurting O'Toole, except his dignity. He was holding him lightly in his mouth, with the two fangs in his upper jaws closing neatly about his middle. Sharp hauled off to kick the cat. "No," Carol yelled, "don't you dare do that!" Sharp hesitated. "It's all right, Harlow," Maxwell said. "Let him keep O'Toole. Surely he deserves something for what he did for us back there in the office." "We'll do it!" O'Toole yelled, frantically. "We'll make them their cask of ale. We'll make two casks of it." "Three," said the squeaky voice coming from the bridge. "All right, three," agreed the goblin. "No weaseling out of it later on?" asked Maxwell. "Us goblins never weasel," said O'Toole. "All right, Harlow," said Maxwell. "Go ahead and belt him." Sharp squared off to kick. Sylvester dropped O'Toole and slunk off a pace or two. The trolls came pouring from the bridge and went scurrying up the hillside, yelping with excitement. The humans began scrambling up the slope, following the trolls. Ahead of Maxwell, Carol tripped and fell. Maxwell stopped and lifted her. She jerked away from him and turned to 'hint a face flaring with anger. "Don't you ever touch me!" she said. "Don't even speak to me. You told Harlow to go ahead and kick Sylvester. You yelled at me. You told me to shut up." She turned then and went scrambling up the hill, moving quickly out of sight. Maxwell stood befuddled for a moment, then began the climb, skirting boulders, grabbing at bushes to pull himself along. Up on the top of the hill he heard wild cheering and off to his right a great black globe, with its wheels spinning madly, plummeted out of the sky and crashed into the woods. He stopped and looked up and saw, through the treetops, two globes streaking through the sky on collision courses. They did not swerve or slacken speed. They came together and exploded on impact. He stood and watched the shattered pieces flying. In a few seconds there were pattering sounds among the leaves as the debris came raining down. The cheering still was going on atop the bluff and far off, near the top of the hill that rose beyond the ravine, something that he heard, but did not see, came plunging to the earth. There was no one else in sight as he began the climb again. ft was all over now, he told him- self. The trolls had done their work, and now the dragon could come down. He grinned wryly to himself. For years he'd hunted I dragons, and here finally was the dragon, but something more, perhaps, than he had imagined. What could the dragon be, he wondered. And why had it been enclosed within the Artifact, or made into the Artifact, or whatever might have been done with it? Funny thing about the Artifact, he thought -- resisting everything, rejecting everything until that moment when he had fastened the interpreting mechanism on his head to examine it. What had happened to release the dragon from the Artifact? Clearly the mechanism had had a part to play in the doing of it, but there still was no way of knowing what might have happened. Although the people on the crystal planet certainly would know, one of the many things they knew, one of the many arts they held which still lay outside the knowledge of others in the galaxy. Had the interpreter turned up in his luggage by design rather than by accident? Had it been planted there for the very purpose for which it had been used? Was it an interpreter, at all? Or was it something else fashioned in a manner that resembled an interpreter? He recalled that at one time he had wondered if the Artifact might not once have served as a god for the Little Folk, or for those strange creatures which early in the history of the Earth had been associated with the Little Folk? And had he been right, he wondered. Was the dragon a god from some olden time? He began the climb again, but went slower now, for there was no need to hurry. It was the first time since he had returned from the crystal planet that there was no urgency. He was somewhat more than halfway up the hill when he heard the music, so faint at first, so muted, that he could not be sure he heard it He stopped to listen, and it was surely music. The sun had just moved the top part of its disk over the horizon. A sheet of blinding light struck the treetops on the hill above him, so that they blazed with autumn color. But the hillside that he climbed still lay in morning shadow. He listened and the music was like the sound of silver water running over happy stones. Unearthly music. Fairy music. And that was what it was. On the dancing green off to his left a fairy orchestra was playing. A fairy orchestra and fairies dancing on the green! It was something that he had never seen, and here was a chance to see it. He turned to his left and made his way, as silently as he could, toward the dancing green. Please, he whispered to himself, please don't go away. Don't be frightened by me. Please stay and let me see you. He was close now. Just beyond that boulder. And the music kept on playing. He crawled by inches around the boulder, on guard against making any sound. And then he saw. The orchestra sat in a row upon a log at the edge of the green and played away, the morning light flashing off the iridescent wings and the shiny instruments. But there were no fairies dancing on the green. Instead there were two others he never would have guessed. Two such simple souls as might dance to fairy music. Facing one another, dancing to the music of the fairy orchestra, were GHosf and Shakespeare. 'T'he dragon perched upon the castle wall, its multi-colored body glittering in the sun. Far below, in its Valley, the Wisconsin river, blue as a forgotten summer sky, flowed between the shores of flaming forests. From the castle yard came sounds of revel ry as the goblins and the trolls, for the moment with animosity laid aside, drank great tankards of October ale, banging the tankards on the tables that had been carried from the great Kail and singing ancient songs that had been composed long before there had been such a thing as Man. Maxwell sat upon a deep-buried boulder and gazed out across the valley. A dozen feet away the edge of the bluff cut off, above a hundred feet of cliff. On the edge of the cliff grew a twisted cedar tree, bent by the winds that had howled across the valley for uncounted years, its bark a powdery silver, its foilage a light and fragrant green. Even from where he sat, Maxwell could catch the sharp tang of the foilage. It all had come out right, he told himself. There was no Artifact to trade for the knowledge of the crystal planet -- although tKere was the dragon; and the dragon, after all, probably had been what the people on that planet wanted. But even if this should not prove to be the truth, the Wheelers had lost out. And in the long run that might be more important than the acquiring of the knowledge. It all had worked out okay. Better than he could have hoped. Except that now everyone was sore at him. Carol was angry at him because he'd told Harlow to go ahead and kick Sylvester and because he'd told her to shut up. O'Toole was sore at him because he'd abandoned him to Sylvester and thereby forced him to give in to the trolls. Harlow more than likely still was plenty burned up because he had messed up the deal for the Artifact and because of all the busted pieces in the museum. But maybe the fact that he'd got Shakespeare back might make up for some of that. And there was Drayton, of course, who still might want to question him, and Longfellow, at Administration, who wouldn't like him any better no matter what had happened. Sometimes, he told himself, it didn't pay to care too much about anything or to fight for anything. Maybe it was the ones like Nancy Clayton who really had it made -- featherheaded Nancy with her famous house guests and her fabulous parties. Something brushed against Kim, and he turned to see what it might be. Sylvester reached out a rough and rasping tongue and began to wash his face. "Cut it out," said Maxwell. "That tongue of yours takes off hide." Sylvester purred contentedly and settled down beside him, leaning hard against him. The two of them sat and gazed across the valley. "You got an easy life," Maxwell told the cat. "You don't have any problems. You don't have to worry." A foot crunched on some stones. A voice said, "You've kidnapped my cat. Can I sit down and share him?" "Sure, sit down," said Maxwell. "I'll move over for you. I thought you never wanted to speak to me again." "You were a nasty person down there," said Carol. "I didn't like you much. But I suppose you had to be nasty." A black cloud came to rest inside the cedar tree. Carol gasped and shrank against Maxwell. He put out an arm and held her close. "It's all right," he said. "It is just a Banshee." "But he hasn't any body. He hasn't any face. He is just a cloud." "That is not remarkable," the Banshee told her. "That is what we are, the two of us that are left. Great dirty dishcloths flapping in the sky. And you need not be frightened, for the other human is a friend of ours." "I wasn't a friend of the third one," said Maxwell. "Nor was the human race. He sold out to the Wheelers." "And yet you sat with him, when no one else would do it." "Yes, I did that. Even your worst enemy could demand that you do that." "Then, I think," the Banshee said, "that you can understand a little. The Wheelers, after all, were us. Still are us, perhaps. And ancient ties die hard." "I think I do understand," said Maxwell. "What can I do for you?" "I only came," the Banshee told him, "to tell you that the place you call the crystal planet has been notified." "And they want the dragon?" Maxwell asked. "You'll have to give us the coordinates... " "The coordinates," said the Banshee, will be given to Transportation Central. You will want to go there, you and many others, to transfer the data. But the dragon stays on Earth, here on Goblin Reservation." "I don't understand," said Maxwell. "They wanted -- " "The Artifact," the Banshee said, "to set the dragon free. He had been caged too long." "Since the Jurassic," said Maxwell. "I agree. That is far too long." "But we did not plan so long," the Banshee said. "You moved Him before we could set Him free, and we thought that we had lost him. The Artifact was only to preserve and hide him until the colony on Earth could become established, until it could protect him... "Protect him? Why did he need protection?" "Because," the Banshee said, "he is the last of his race and therefore very precious. He is the last of the -- I find it hard to say -- you have creatures you call dogs and cats?" "Yes," said Carol. "We have one of them right here." "Pets," the Banshee said. "And yet much more than pets. Creatures that have walked the Earth with you front the very early days. The dragon is the pet, the last pet, of the people of the crystal planet." "The goblins will take care of him," said Carol. "And the trolls and fairies and all the rest of them. They will be proud of him. They will spoil him rotten." "And the humans, too?" "And the humans, too," she said. 'T'hey did not see him go. But He was no longer there. A pet, thought Maxwell. Not a god, but a simple pet. And yet, perhaps, not so simple as it sounded. When men had first made the biomechs, what had they created? Not other men, at least at first, not livestock, not freaks engineered I to specific purposes. They had created pets. Carol stirred against his arm. "What are you thinking, Pete?" "About a date," he said. "Yes, I guess I was thinking of a dinner date with you. We had one once, but it never quite came off. Would you like to try again?" "At the Pig #s Whistle?" "If that is What you want." "Without Oop and Ghost. Without any troublemakers." "But with Sylvester, of course." "No," she said. "Just the two of us. Sylvester stays at Home." TKey got up from the boulder. Sylvester looked up at the dragon perching on the castle wall and snarled. The dragon lowered its head on its sinuous neck and looked him in the eye. It struck out at him a long and forked tongue. A new science-fiction magazine with a new concept in publishing Each issue will be filled with stories by Foreign Authors Will give American readers a chance to read the science-fiction stories by Authors popular in the rest of the world. Written and translated by the top writers throughout the world. We hope you will like it. 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Galaxy Is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published in Braille and Living Tape. July, #  Vol. #, No. # by Lorry Niven by John Brunner by Fritz Leiber by R. A. Lafferty by Burt K. Filer by Brian W. Aldiss by Robin Scott by A. Bertram Chandler by Willy ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys by Lester del Rey Movie Review Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices; #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription; (# copied # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.SA. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. Y. Title Beg. U. S. Pat. Off. A s this issue of Galaxy goes to press, we are just completing a rather confusing week. Two events in particular Have given us surprises -- tEe apparent beginning of peace negotiations in Vietnam, and tlie opening of tEe long-awaited science-fiction movie, #I -- A Space Odyssey. As to Vietnam -- well, as you know, we don't usually use tfiis space to talk about mere #tE century problems, preferring to confine our crystal ball gazing to more remote eras. But tKose of you who read last month's Galaxy will remember tEat, triggered by two advertisements placed by groups of science-fiction writers, one in favor of an immediate end to the Vietnam war and tKe other opposed, we decided to put the resourcefulness of science-fiction writers, readers and others involved to the test; we began then, and continue now, a contest inviting you and everymie else interested to offer fresh ideas on what to do about Vietnam. By the time you read this (there's a natural two-month lag involved) )the whole thing may be a dead issue. Or it may not. (Our crystal ball won't focus down that fine!) But it seems clear that all the fresh ideas and provocative suggestions that can be made will still be very useful. If the Vietnam war ended tomorrow there would still be a need for new ways of dealing with armed conflicts. So the contest goes on... and so do our plans for submitting whatever ideas we can get to a panel of experts, in the hope of making some of them practical and useful as well as original... In other words, if you were going to enter don't be deterred by anything that may have happened in real time! A s to #, there's a review of it on pp #-#; we won't attempt another one here. But here too at least one thing seems clear in a confusing situation: the science-fiction movie we've all been waiting for still hasn't come along. We think it's a disgrace that the most recent science-fiction movie made with a big budget, good actors and an actual sf writer preparing the script, not aimed at a juvenile market and uncontaminated by camp, is Things to Come... produced in #. For heaven's sake, why? Do About Vietnam? Assume you are being asked for advice. Assume the people who ask you are the President of the United States, the Congress, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- anyone andor everyone who has any decision-making authority concerning American involvement in Vietnam. Assume they want one suggestion from you... and assume they will follow it. What would you tell them to do? Don't tell them. Tell us. We will take the most provocative and seemingly productive suggestions received, submit them to problemsolving analysis, and present the results in a forthcoming issue of Galaxy. The Rules #. Anone is eligible to enter, and may submit as many entries as he likes. Each entry must be on a separate sheet o( paper, one side only, and include your name and address. All entries will become the property of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Please limit younelf to a maximum of too words for each entry, preferably in the form of (a) your suggestion, (b) followed, if you wish, by a statement of why you think it worth doing. #. Suggestions may be on any area of American involvement in Vietnam -- ways of winning the war, ways of bringing about a peaceful settlement, whatever you think would be of value. #. Five prizes of # each will be awarded to those entries which, in the opinion of the judges, best deserve them. In the event of duplicate suggestions, the first entries received will get the prize. Judges will consist of, or be appointed by, the Editors of Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Winners will be notified by moil, and their names will be published in a forthcoming issue of this magazine. #. Send your entries to: "What Would You Do About Vietnam?", Galaxy Publishing Corporation, #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. Entries must be received by July #th, I#, to be eligible for prizes. Scully found a pliant, eight-foot-two maid in Dallas Texas, Texas. She cast him as a Circumlunar Skeleton in a play of politics gone mad! CtQon, you look like a Texan  what got the hormone, but been starved since birth'. Like your Ma, Lyndon bless her, lifted a leg and dropped you into a #g black bag, and after you nothing but a crust and mini-carton oi milk once a month." "True enough, noble sir. I was raised in the Sack and I am a TKn," I answered the Portly Giant in a voice fike distant thunder, wKicK almost made me wet my tights, because up until this moment of my life I had been a high baritcMie. My senses told me I was whirling at a punistung six lunagravs in a large cubical centrifuge. In fact, I could see tfie spinning and feel it in my inner ears until my senses gradually adjusted. On the same surface as I, were two giants and a giantess in cowboy costumes and also three barefoot, hunchbacked, swarthy dwarfs in dirty shirts and pants. They were all poised expertly on ffieir feet, riding the centrifuge with elan. While under my black hood and cloak I was doubled up like a large bone-and-titanium lazytongs, trying to make the left knee-inotor of my exodceleton behave -- it either hunted wildly or wouldn't respond at all to the myoelectric impulses from tfie ghost-muscles of my left leg. I realized that the Portly Giant must have seen me without my cloak, which now mlt be Eing an erect short Fat as readily as a folded tail Thin. I was hazy about How I'd debarked from the Tsiolkavdcy. When the Longh'airs dope you to take accelerations of # lungraws, they don't use aspirin. Even gen you're sandwiched between water mattresses. But I knew that outside tfie centrifuge lay the spaceport and city of "Venowknife, Canada, Terra. The centrifuge's two ends and two adjoining sides (but which were which?) were covered with a clnkl-simple mural of huge chalk-white cowboys on horses like elepthants chasing tiny Bpstick-red Indians on ponies fike chihuahua dogs across a cactusstudded landscape. 'This battle of cockroaches and behemoths was signed with a Huge "Grandma Aaron." The figures and scene seemed as inappropriate for frosty Yellowknife as my companions' costumes, which Should have been parkas and snovsEoes. But who is a greenhorn, who has lived all his life in free fall a few thousand miles from Mother Luna, to pronounce on the customs of Terrible Terra? The opposite surface was crowded witH dazzling sunbursts. Hire a star cluster going nova. In one of tHe adjoining surfaces were two rectangular openings side by side. EacU was tKree feet wide, but one was more tKan ten feet long, tHe other less than five. I peered into them in vain to see stars or sections of Terra whipping past, but the rectangles were only hatches leading into another part of the centrifuge. Why there were two and so different in shape and size, where one would have done, I couldn't imagine. H s I tried to coax my kneemotor properly alive and felt the six centrifugal lunagravs cruelly press the support bands of my exoskeleton into my skin and bones at armpits, thighs, crotch, etcetera, I asked myself: If this is what they use to toughen you up for Terra, what will Terra's naked surface be like? Meanwhile I spoke aloud in the same inaudibly deep voice-fromgrave, which' indeed fitted my appearance of a black-shrouded burial mound with the central bump of my hooded head. I asked, "Kindly direct me to the Yellowknife Registry of Mining Claims." The Portly Giant regarded me with , benign interest. That one really rode the centrifuge with serenity. I marveled at his ability to handle so casually a mass at least five times my own with exoskeleton. The three shoulderbent dwarfs peered apprehensively from close behind him, fearfrowns furrowing their low foreheads under their greasy black hair. The Square Giant -- I called him that because he was all sharp shoulderand jaw-angles, cinema -- glanced up suspiciously from my open luggage. The Giantess went into a tizzy. "There you go again!" she whined. "I try to hostess you the best I can. After all, you're our first visitor from space in a hundred years. But you keep booming at me like all the rest of them fearful furry Russians and drumming Afric foreigners. And you keep booming mysteries. Where in the name of Jack is Yellowknife?" She had long yellow hair outside and big tits, or their simulacrums, inside her quasi-military, mini-skirted cowgirl costume; but her fluttery stupidity was flattening my libido as well as my sanity. I recalled my father telling me that drum majorettes had been one of the chief ruinations of Terra, along with' female-clad Communist athletes of whichever sex. "Here!" I thunder-rumbled from my hood. "Right here, where the Tsiolvoksky debarked me on direct orbit from Circumluna. Inc!dentally, I'm not Russian, but of Anglo-Hispanic ancestry, though it's true there are as many Russians as Americans in Circumluna." "The Tchaikovsky debarked you all right -- in a stretcher, in case you've forgotten, and all wrappedp in that black blanket, like a candidate for a coffin. Say, what are Mericans? Ancient greasers? But wHat I mostly meant to ask you was: WHere do you think here is?" "Tsiolkovskyt" I tiEunder-corrected. My new double-base voice was making me nasty. "Great space pioneer, not gay composer of slurpy music. And Americans. A-m-e-r-i-c-a-n-s. Wlule here" I thunder-crashed, "is Spaceport Yellowknife, Northwest Territory, Canada, Terra #" "Name of Jack and Jackiel" she wailed, clapping Her hands to her ears. "Where and sriiat is Canada?" 'he Square Giant looked up again and asked ominously, "Stranger, why does yoiu' luggage consist chiefly of # Isotopic and lithium-gold batteries of the sort used in portable power weapons?" "They're spares for my exoskeleton," I tossed Qm, while at the Giantess I rumbled scornfully, "Don't they teach you any geography on this planet? You a space hostess!" "It's you don't know geography," she whimpered back at me, still holding her ears. "Up there in space, jumping from star to star and never caring which. Gun you, you're making me cry, you animated black laundry basketl" Whereupon very large tears (hd begin to plop from the inner comers of her blue eyes. If only the centrifuge would stop, I thought. I could no longer see spin, but I was whirling inside. "Stranger, what class of weapon is an X-O-Skeleton?" the Square Giant demanded, his mouth and eyes thinning to slits. "And watch' your language when conversing with a cultured lady." "You'll find out when you're kicked by one!" I snarled, meaning Faithful Old Titanium, not that female boob. "Cultured ladyl" I continued zestfully. "Cultured in an algae vat! You yeast-brain, how can you and that rit-angle cowpoke mention culture when you confuse satellites with stellar furnaces, don't know where Canada is, don't understand the needs of a Thin visiting a solar gravity satellite and are unfamiliar with well known prosthetic devices?" The Giantess began to blubber. ,The fright-frowns deepened and rose in the dwarfs' foreheads, their greasy hair stirred, and their flit-muscles tightened... fruitful plains, waving with amber grain, cattle-nurturing thornless cactus, the pseudopods of nutritious amoebae, and hone Star flags. Ever since Lyndon ousted Jack in the Early Atomic Age, the term of a President of Texas has been from inauguration to assassination. Murder is merely the continuation of politics by other means. Power ennobles, but Petrolium Power ennobles absolutely. The end of life is liberty. Texans are empowered to enjoy, exploit and handle liberty; while Mexes, Injuns, and Nigras -- all those having dark faces or a dark hole in their pecketboohs -- have the privilege of serving liberty and keeping their hands off it. Ego was made to be used. It rises from the dork unconscious, energizes awareness and transforms society. It is the oilfields of the human personality. Longhairs have less brains than longhorns and less ability to stand on their own hind legs. Most Longhairs perished in the Atomic War or were exiled to that sick-cow-corral, Circumluna. and her unspeakable udder, the Sack. Praise the Lord and Puff the marijuana! The Battles of the Alamo. San Jacinto. El Salvador. Sioux City, Schenectady, and Saskatchewan... -- random excerpt from How fo Stand and Understand Texans: Their Fantasies, Foibles, Folkways, and Fixed Ideas as Seen in Their Own Writings, Mitty-Gritty Press. Walts-Angeles. Acilicpay Ackblay Epublicroy The Square Giant whipped from his belt a lightning-pistol I knew could numb or fry me, according to how much power he used. He took a step toward me and barked, "Hand over that XO-SkeletoH, Stranger, without you cock it. And whatever other weapons you're hiding under that black serape. Everything down to hatpins and pinknives is confiscated at the Republic's borders -- you'll get claim checks. But don't make any sudden movements #" The tension sizzled. I stayed squatcrouched under my cloak and prepared to spit more insults from my hood. In fact, something violent might well have happened, most likely to me, if the Portly Giant hadn't intervened. That one said in resonant, relaxed tones that muffed not a word (I'd been suspecting he was a fellow actor), "Simmer down, all of you, for Lyndon's sake, that secular saint of peace. There's been some natural mistakes made and some natural tempers roused. Bill, go easy with' that shockspitter. And, Suzy, sweetheart, dry your tears and unsnuffle that cute little nose of yours. ttQcully," he addressed to me,  "Scully -- for that's what you look like from what I can glimpse of your face, a sort of sensitive-featured skull. No offense intended! My own handle's Elmo, and I'm as fat as and got a face like a hog, cross-bred witlj a hyena. But well, Scully, I'm afraid that they truly didn't teach you quite all of modem geography up there in the sky. Yep, there's a few things been happening here and there on this little old planet during the century you been sailing around the moon in your ivory tower with its attendant soap bubbles. "Because there is a Yellowknife, you see, Scully, but now we call it Amarillo Cuchillo, and it's situated in Northern Texas. While Canada is a gone land, like Sumeria or Burgundy or Vietnam." A cold and dizzy feeling -- as if I hadn't been centrifuged dizzy enough -- touched me. A feeling of history altering like the colors in a kaleidoscope and no patch of reality sure. I already knew, you see, that my father, who taught me everything, was weak on recent Terran geography and history, though expert in historical dramas and over-all theory. He would wave at Spengler's dogeared, accordion-opened Decline oi the West floating by our bookrack, then through the curving wall of the Sack at Terra splendid against the stars, and say, "They are all fellahin down there, Christopher, all of them. Fellahin swarming like moths over the embers of dead cultures. Ah, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day." (What is moths?) A ptcturesque and even ego-imflstmg generality, especially to one living a quarter of a but admittedly weak on details. And now at last I was learning just how weak. I looked up afrefiensively at Elmo as the Portly Giant continued, "And I'm afraid, Scully, that the RussoYankee officers of the Taiolkovsky are a little feeble on modem pohtico-geografy too, because where they landed you -- namely, here -- is some two thousand miles south of Amarillo CuchiUo. Scully, my friend, you have the Honor of being in Dallas, Texas, Texas -- the heart of the human universe and the golden laurrf-crown of her culture." "Texas includes Canada?" I asked in a quavering base. "Is an independent nation?" "Scully, I hate to voice the least criticism of a man's educational background -- shucks, there's been notable brains 'mongst refugees from New York City Cclege and Berkeley -- but I do beHeve your heavenly geography irrstructors have been notably remiss and maybe -- no offense meant here neither -- touched with Black or Slavic bias. "Scully son, ever since the Great Texasward Industrial Migration and World War Three, Texas has extended from the Nicaraguan Canal to the North Pole, including most of Central America, all of Mexico, nearly all of Canada and aH that matters of the Flibberty-gibbct Forty-Seven -- I mean the former United States of America. "That is, at present. We Texans might take a fancy to extend our boundaries any day. There's Cuba to be reconquered and Indo-China and Irnd and Hawaii and Hitfier Siberia. "But on the whole, we Texans are a peaceable, tolerant, shootand-let-oot people. We whipped the Cherokees and the Mexicans, and we tied the Russians and Chinese, and we're inclined to rest on oar laurels -- Tud, of course, roused, when we get dynamic as an automated cottonpicking rig goosed the program for an Irish jig. "But as for being independent, let nne tell you, Scully my boy, Texas is the goldumedest independentest nation in the entire annals of political science. Nobody, bar some wise old Hellenes, really understood what individual freedom meant until Tfexas came along. But anyhow, wdcome to Texas, Scully, welcome to God's Planet! Welcome down from the vastness of space, amigo -- though you know, Scully, there's really more functional space in T# Texas than there is in the entire twiddling universe of free fall and galaxies and other foolishness. So in Lyndon's name lift yourself up from that black heap you're in, boy, and put Her here!" (Now I was sure he was an actor, though of ancient oratorical school.) TTe advanced, followed closely by the swarthy dwarfs, acting like timid children, and held out toward me a big open hand. I did not respond, though truly touched by his hammy hospitality. (At heart all actors are hams and love it.) I was simply too tired and dizzy. For many minutes I had been balancing hunched-crouched in a souped-up crazy-house of a centrifuge that was making my brain woozy as well as drowning my meager flesh in fatigue poisons. I had been fumbling futilely with tiring fingers at my balky kneemotor. I had been forcing my aching diaphragm to drag into my burning lungs an atmosphere like yeast stew flavored with hydrogen sulphide. I had been putting up with rude nonsense from a dithery female and a fake cowboy baggage inspector. I was still groggy from anti-grav drugs and bone-crushing, organ-popping accelerations aboard the Tsiolkovsky. I had become deadly sick of Terra while they were still getting me ready for her. So now this news that I'd been stranded two thousand gravitypaved miles from my destination was the last weight, you might say, in my centrifuge trainingbelt. (The centrifuge on Circumluna only builds up to two lunagravs, and I'd weighted my exoskeleton to make it nearer eartHgrav.) "My unfolded handle is Elmo Oilfield Earp, lineal descendant of the noted gunslinger," the Portly Giant coaxed. "What's yours, Scully?" At that instant a second female waltzed into our section of the centrifuge through the shorter of the two side-by-side hatches. At the sight of her, my spirits skyrocketed as if I'd just got simultaneous shots of speed-euph'orin in seven different veins or been invited by Idris Mclllwraith' into her cubical to help her dress for Eve in Shaw's Back to Methuselah. What is it that some girls have can turn me on? -- while the yellow-haired, tearful, sincere, big-tit Susies can extinguish' me. I know, sex. This new girl was dark as the hunchbacked dwarfs, and she wasn't too much more than four feet tall; but she carried herself as if she were ten, her back flagstaff-straight with her glossy blaclc fiair for a banner. She had a form like a scaled-down Venus de Milo. She was shod with gleaming black slippers with heels almost as high as her dainty feet were long. A red skirt swirled around her black-netted dancer's legs, a yellow blouse bared her coffee-and-cream shoulders, while her dark eyes snapped bright black light as castanets do bright black sound. I was so taken with Her mere looks that I forgot to admire the skill with which she moved gracefully across areas having different acceleration vectors. And then she gave it to me. The eye, I mean. Yes, she halted in mid-twirl, and she looked at me -- #res, at miserable me, Huddled under my cloak like a sick giant spider monkey -- and then her delicious eyes were fixed on my hooded, deep-socketed ones and glowing love into me, while her previously saucy lips were parted in a rapt smile of delight, as if I were the answer to some extremely private dream she'd been having ever since the first downy shiver of puberty. My depression vanished like black magic routed by the White Goddess leading a train erf nymphomaniac nymphs. What were six lunagravs? Terra was mine! I was the Count of Monte Cristo! -- a part I Have twice played already. S till operating wholly under my cloak, I untelescoped slim canes from my titanium exo-forearm-bones and with them and my good leg pushed myself erect and then still more erect until my head was on a level with those of the giants. The dwarfs' eyes, steadily widening, followed me up. I noted that although they were of different heights, the dwarfs were all shoulder-bent to an equal four and a half feet -- an odd detail. Once fully erect -- now I topped the giants by a half head -- I pushed down bolts to lock both knee-joints of my exoskeleton and stood on my two feet only, my exo-legs rigid rods from ankle to hip. Though teetery, it was practical -- the taller the object, tfie easier it is to balance. I quickly retelescoped my canes -- if BiH the Square Giant glimpsed them, he would surely cry, "Concealed weapons!" Meanwhile Elmo was calling to my vest-pocket Carmen, "Well, it's about time, Kookie. You better have those reefers, or I'll turn you up and tan your Persianrose-petal hide. Oh Scully, this is La Cucaracha, one of my sociable secretaries. Kookie, this is my bosom friend Scully from outer space. Treat him as you would the President of Texas before he went crackers." Ignoring these rude and boisterous, though apparently well meant remarks, I stepped out swiftly and reached my dark lovely one in three long strides and bowed until my Hooded face was level with hers. Considering I Had no knees at the time, it was a remarkable performance, putting my blaclfi-sHrouded butt a couple of feet higher than my Head. My myoelectricity was tuning my stiff-kneed exoskeleton to perfection. It was truly a grand gesture, executed with' ultimate poise and panache. Thrusting a hand from my cloak, I plucked Hold of her dainty one as if it were a dark orchid -- and it was, ah velvet-surfaced, manipulative multiwand I "Senorita Cockroach sublima" I rumbled throatily (and even the muted thunder of my rumble didn't faze her). "I am Christopher Crockett La Cruz, totally at your service!" And I drew the captured bloom into my Hood and showered kisses on it. She, in the intervals of a flattered laugh and with much rippling of long black eyelashes, whispered toward my ear in a voice very fast and businesslike, though tender, "At moonrise tonight, amado. At the bandstand corner of the cemetery, querido mio. Until then -- silencio!" It is the proper function of woman to attend to the practical details of affairs of the heart. Assured by her words that I was not only loved but desired, I put into my obediently whispered, Si, si, sir' the hiss of a lovestruck micrometeorite whizzing through the self-sealing duraplast of one of the eggs forming the Sack. Then I returned her hand to her with a flourish, unjackknifed to normal height and turned toward the others. T felt as if I Had just magnificently rendered one of Hamlet's soliloquies or Cyrano's tirades and the applause was about to break from the doublycurving walls of our free-fall theater-in-the-sphere in the largest bubble of the Sack. An inner voice said, "Stop your skulking masquerade, Scully-Christopher. Show yourself fully to these miserable earthlings and your dainty beloved." With a Dracula batwing swirl, I threw back my black cloak and hood, flashing their scarlet linings, and waited for the gasps of admiration. Suzy wailed, "Holy Halloween!", vanished her large blue irises upward and fainted. As he caught her. Bill yelled, "What'd I tell you? -- he's got powerarmor!" While the three dwarfs jumped backward and, I do believe, would have dashed In terror from the room except that Elmo reacfied beHind him and neatly collared them, meanwhile scowling at me incredulotBly. One of the captured dwarfs quavered, "La Muetie Alttd" Anodier gasped, " EapeciroJ" While tlie third stuttered, El Eagueletol" Being called a tall death, a specter and a skeleton iilced me greatly. To Have people scared rf one (unless the part calls for it) when one is a fine, loving chap and for lagniappe a great actor is most irritating. But before saying anything cutting, an # dhing with acid in it, I put myself in their places and rapidly looked at me. They were looking, I discovered, at a handsome, lapely, dramatic-featured man # feet # inches tall and massing # pounds with and # pounds without his exoskeleton. Except for relaxed tiny bulges of muscle in forearms and calves (latter to work lengthy toes, useful in gripping), this man was composed of skin, bones, ligaments, fasciae, narrow arteries and veins, nerves, small-sire assorted inner organs, ghost muscles and a big-dmned skull with two bumps of jaw muscle. He was wearing a skin-tight black suit that left bare only his sunkencheeked, deep-eyed, beautiful tragic face and big, heavy-tendoned hands. This truly magnificent, romantically handsome, rather lean man was standing on two eorrugatedscJed titanium footplates. From the outer edge of each rose a narrow tita n i u m T beam that followed the line of his leg, with a joint (locked now) at the knee, up to ffliotSer joint with a titanium pelvic gircfle and dsallow belly support. From the back of tffis gtrdk a T spine rose to support a shoulder yce and rib cage, ah of tiie same metal. The rib cage was artistically slotted to save weight, so that curving strips followed the line of each of His very promineHt ribs. A continuation of His T spine up the back of bis neck in turn supported a snug, gleaming h'eedbaet that rose behind to curve over his shaven cranium, but in front was little more than a jawslf and two inward-curving cheek-jdates stopping just short of his somewhat rudimentary nose. The nose is not needed in Circumluna to warm or cool air.) Slightly lighter T beams than those for his legs rcmfwced his arms and housed in their terminal inches his telescoping canes. Numerous black, foam-padded bands attached this whole framework to him. A most beautiful prosthetic, one had to admit. While to expect a Thin, or even more a Fat, from a free-fall environment to function without one cm a gravity planet or in a centrifuge would be the ultimate in comt;all ignorance. Eight small electric motors at the principle joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables riding in the angles of the T beams, much like antique dentists' drills were worked, I've read. The motors were controlled by myoelectric impulses from His ghost-muscles, transmitted by sensitive pick-ups buried in the foam-padded bands. They were powered by an assortment of isotopic and lithium-gold batteries nesting in his pelvic and pectoral girdles. D id this fine man look in the least like a walking skeleton? -- I demanded of myself outragedlyl Well, yes, very much so, I had to admit now that I had considered the matter from the viewpoint of strangers. A very Handsome and stylish skeleton, all silver and black, but a skeleton none the less and one eight feet eight inches tall, able to look down a little even at the giant Texans aroimd him. I realized now that my anger and my inability to see myself as others see me had been because Father and Mother had found nothing morbid or eerie about me in my new, silvery anti-grav prosthetic -- nor Had the Longhairs who had constructed it for me in return for free performances of Hamlet, Macbeth and Manhattan Project, two jam-sessions and one "Dance of i'e Seven Veils" by Idris Mclllwraith, the Sack's perennial sex star, who is a Thin like me and looks like the ancient high-fashion model Teeny (Twilly? Twiggy?) drastically slimmed down, yet has much appeal. I ask her once a month to marry me, but although granting occasional favors, she refuses me always on the silly grounds that she is thrice my age. Who dies in free fall? I glanced down at my newer love, the sublime La Cucaracha, and she was gazing up at me and my exoskeleton with as fond approval as my parents and with something spicy added. But when I made to bow to Her again and perhaps Hear more exciting whispers about our coming rendezvous, she twinkle-toed away, drawing from a fancy pack a long, very thin, pale brownish cigarette. "Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz," Elmo meanwhile Hailed me from where he stood talking with Bill, while still collaring the three dwarfs. Suzy had sat up from her faint and was looking at me with a thin-lipped disapproval, which I connected with the attentions I had showered on La Cucaracha. "That Crockett's a good Texas handle," Elmo continued. "Deepens my friendship for you, boy. Anyhow, Scully, I been considering your problems. There's a northbound cargo jet loading might lift you to Amarillo CucKillo, but she mayn't take off for a week -- we Texans conduct our commerce in a relaxed fashion. So Bill here has agreed to release you into my custody, and you and I are going to pay a littie visit on the Governor of Texas, Texas -- and what He can't expedite, nobody else can even budge. "Besides, it ain't every day we get a spaceman. Governor bound to want to hear the gossip about the long-interdicted lands in the sky. Who can tell, tliey might turn out to be far-flung fragments of Texas. "Scully, you can't refuse -- you're going to experience Texas hospitality if I Have to tie you up and have my greasers lug you. "Now jump for his baggage, you black-hearted little conquistadores, or I'll sell you for cyborgs!" He released the three bent-backs, while to my darling he called, "Light me that stick now, Rookie, pronto, or I'll return your wardrobe to the theater man for refund, all but one Medieval onion sack." I hate to be pushed around, especially by big-brotherly shoves, nor did I care for the language Elmo directed at my new nymph, but his proposition seemed tiie best for me. Especially since I did not intend to leave Dallas before getting my gravity legs arid -- Eros ure! -- keeping my moon-cued rendezvous. For even now as the little one grasped Elmo's wide belt, nimbly vaulted onto his slightly-bent, huge thigh and hung the smoldering slim cigarette on lus long loose lip, she gave a quick conspiratorial smile and eyelash-ripple, telling of impending raptures. Elmo took a long fluttering inhalation of marijuana vapor, his eyes going first glassy, then feverbright as he called out, "Now forward hop, you greasers alll Come on, Scully, let's skedaddle." 'T'he three dwarfs now each carried a black, silver-banded cushion-case containing chiefly my food concentrates and spare batteries, my winter clothing and wigs. They still snatched fearful glances at me. As I followed Elmo toward the ten-foot door, they marched through the shorter door, each of the three barely missing bumping his head on the lintel, while my brunette darling scampered through behind them, her head held high. Why their backs were variously bent, and hers not at all, was instantly clear to me. The enormity of the revelation, plus my hunting for vectorchanges in the centrifuge's floor and still not finding them, must have caused mo to take short, shuffling steps with my temporarily kneeless five-foot legs, for Elmo looked back and exclaimed, "Scully son, you're walking like the first time on stilts, or Cke you got paresis. Maybe our Mexican door sort of startled you. It's one of those .charming, deeply-mused Texan Customs that make our glorious way of life possible. You see, Scully, a man can't feel really free unless he's got a lot of imderfolk to boss around. That's one of the great paradoxes of liberty, first discovered by those protoTexans, the ancient Greeks, who had slaves to bum, though I don't think they actually burnt them much until Nero's day or maybe till the discovery of gasoline, which permitted deep-south lynching bees and Buddhist immolations alike. "Incidentally, Scully, I'd appreciate it if you'd button up that cloak of yours and resume your hood. Mexes are superstitious little buggers. Even when cyborged, their odd primitive fears shortcircuit through. I got my three boys calmed temporarily -- and La Kook's a cool little bitch -- but I wouldn't want you causing a riot in Dallas. History proves that the first time a man goes down the streets of Dallas, anything can happen to him, frequently bad." I complied with' his suggestion, but made no verbal retort, contenting m#fself with giving him a grim look, sucking in my cheeks to increase the skull-like appearance of my head and stepping out after him recklessly. "A vigorous paresis, I got to admit," he commented. Ahead of him another pw of doors began to slide open, lettii in sunny brightness and flashes of movement; and I braced myself for transition from centrifugal force to gravity. I teetered into blazing sunlight and a huge scene that was whirling around with me twenty times a minute, one full revolution every three seconds for the dozens of Texas giants I now saw, the hundreds of glass-andmetal living volumes, the thousands of rapidly moving Mexicans -- most of these with massive metal collars from which rose small antennas -- and even the blue sky, the marshmallow clouds and the blinding sun. The entire universe had become a vast centrifuge, and I one mote spinning near its center, an axis a dozen yards above my head. I staggered and reeled on my stiltlegs, waiting for the sky to burst and the cosmos to rip apart from the incredible centrifugal forces. When the scientific, engineering and paramilitary communites of the international mega-satellite Circumluna were ordered to carry World War # into space, they refused, relying on their charters from the United Nations. In desperation and reprisal, the warring powers below repudiated the Uni ted Nations, clapped embargoes on all shipments of food, fuels, metals, medicines and other supplies to Circumluna and outlawed their rebellious nationals there. The Circumlunans, who effectually controlled the space fleets end were on the verge of achieving a selfsufficient economy based on raw materials from the Moon, declared their independence. This action of "the tonghairs" was enthusiastically received by the even longerhaired space-vagabonds -- originally hippies, beatniks, mods, dropouts, stfiyagl, actors, writers, pachukos, apaches, gypsies and other quaintly styled rebels -- parasitic on or symbiotic with; accounts differ the respectable Circumlunans and living in their hive of dpraplastia bubble homes pendant on Chctunluna and knovim as the Sack; For five generations there was no commerce and little communication between Terra and Circumluna, due to the latter's focus on survival and to the cultural upheavals and impoverished economy below after World out. When the Interdict, as it came to be called, was lifted one hundred years later, the first Circumlunans and "Sackabonds" to plumb the gravity well and visit Earth were a surprise to its inhabitants, but the centuries-alienated spacefolk found Terra a still greater shock. -- Mother. Earth, Father Space: A Short History of Circumluna, by John Washington and Ivan Alapin Then I realized my error, and the scene stopped spinning with a suddenness that almost knocked me down. What I had been interpreting as centrifugal force back in the room muraled with Indians and Texans' had been only normal Earth gravity. I learned in that instant that you can endlessly explain to a person who's lived all his life in free fall that human senses cannot distinguish between the effects of acceleration, with vdaich he's familiar, and gravity, of which he's had no experience. You can tell him that until your voice fails. No matter, he'll still go on believing that gravity will ieel different, that it will grab him with invisible gluey fingers, that it will have in it the taint of unimaginable cubic miles of soil, rock, magma, incandescent corematerial, and other dirty planetary horrors. I no sooner had been experience-educated out of one illusion than I became the victim of another; I felt I had returned to airless space. When a man who has lived all his life in a null-grav satellite, a large but limited homeland of many rooms, steps outdoors for the first time on a planet, one of his strongest immediate reactions is to hold his breath'. Not from wonder and amazement, though' they are there, but because the only comparable situation He knows is that of a man plunged into the vastness of space without an air supply. Ignoring the ground under his feet and the gravs pressing him to it, he will automatically see the unbounded sky as vacuum and any building around him as pressurized volumes to which he must win his way in seconds, or die. I held my breath. But I did not run, or -- the actual impulse, to follow which would have resulted in my barking my nose on Texas -- launch myself in an intended straightline trajectory at the nearest window or door. Perhaps my first bit of experience-education made the second come quicker. Though still staggering about, I exhaled violently and forced myself to draw a lungful of the soupy air, stinkier now that we were outside. Besides discovering that I was in anything but vacuum, I also realized the explanation for my deep voice. All my life, even in the Tsiolkovsky, I had been breathing a light oxygen-helium mix with small amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapor. Now I was subsisting on a thick witch's brew of the same oxygen, but stewed in gravity's pressure-cooker with nitrogen and assorted taints. A heavier atmosphere, a deeper voice. As obvious as that -- but only after it's happened to you. I looked around and down, to see  tliat under La CucaracKa's directions Elmo's three servants had dropped my bags and were circling me as I reeled, ready to break my fall when I finally toppled. Elmo called back cheerily, "You drunk, partner? Didn't know the super-refreshing open air of Texas was that intoxicating to the uninitiated. I forget you're a Sackabond, reared on a little denatured oxygen and perfume." As I steadied myself, a whole gaggle of new little Mexicans came scurrying all around me, a couple of the tiniest ones even tugging at my cloak, and most of them calling up to me, "Benediga nosotros, padre" They were a raggedy, colorful lot, chiefly women and children, and none of them, praise Diana, wore those disgusting metal neck-and-sKoulder pieces. I'm enough of an actor to adlib any role I'm thrust into, so I stuck two fingers out of my cloak, made a squiggle with them, and rumbled benignly, "Benedicite, mis ninos y ninas," adding for good measure, "Bless you, my children." It seemed natural enough for them to mistake me with my robe and hood for a tall priest or monk, maybe a Black Franciscan. My ready response to their request seemed to satisfy them fully, for they were already scampering off when Elmo boomed, "Get away from the God-man be- fore you trip him with your rosaries, you church-struck little greasers! Scully, you're a card, but we got to make tracks for the Governor's ranch house. Are you over your dizziness enough to ride a horse?" I was about to respond, "Yes, of course. You think I'm a sissy, hombre?" when a feeling of dizziness and weakness did strike me. A steady six lunagravs and assorted startlements had been getting in their licks on my somewhat delicate physiology. My heart was pounding as it pumped blood to my brain -- no small job, considering my height and the gravs. I also was glad I was wearing an extra-snug Sack-suit, to help my leg veins from going varicose and maybe even popping as they pushed blood up that weary distance from my toes. I tongued pep, instant-glucose and antigrav pills out of their cheek-plate container into my mouth. Even the tiny dissolving pellets seemed heavy as osmium on my tongue, and they dropped down my throat like bullets. I followed them with a sip of truly heavy water from my other cheek plate, tilting my exoskulled head to do so. They quickly helped. La Cucaracha beamed up at me her congratulations, as if she already knew my inner feelings as well as I did. By that time, tiowever, Elmo bad a twenty-foot nncraled and was cracking it over a low narrow, vehicle somewhat longer than Iwas. It bounced along on two caterpillar treads moved by ten wheels. The wheels fascinated me. Except in pictures or employed as pulle#Ts, one never sees wfieels in Circumluna, where there is no gravity to put teeth in friction. Off the vehicle were scramtding a couple of dozen Mexicans, including some of those who had received my benediction, while Elmo was shouting relaxedly, "Get off that cat-wagon, pronto, you fun-loving, irresponsible little monkeys! The Black Pope here needs it. I'll see it gets back to your patrom" Then to me he said, "Climb aboard, Scully, and stretch out your weary exoskeleton. Ordinarily we don't let Mexes use power cars, but a cat-wagon's no more than a toy. However, it's just what the metallurgical osteopath ordered for yom I can tell you're too frazzled to mount a steed yet and, come to think of it, I don't suppose they have too many cayuses in Circumlima, and those pretty spiritless." Oddly, he was rit about that. CL did have a few horses for oldstyle serum factories and on the Noah's Ark principle. T started to tell him I was splen- A didly unfrazzled and eager to kam the art of iKsemanship, but my heart was still poundng a bit, so I decided to conserve energy and keep my attention free for the weird sights around me. I did another of my stiff-kneed bows, braced my hands on an end of the cat-wagon, transferred my feet to the other end, kt myself down on my face and then rolled over with a minimunt of exoskeletal clankings. My heart quieted now that my circulatory system wasn't fighting gravity as hard. I felt better, except that I couldn't see much besides the sky. I raised my head and scanned. Elmo had coiled his whip and was hooking it to his silver-studded leather belt, which also supported two lightning pistols. Otherwise he was dressed in what I took to be a conservative Terran business suit, complete with cuffs, buttons, lap cottar and great sky-colored tie depicting blueboimet flowers; but on his feet were huge, EgH-Heeled leather boots, and on his head a six(twelve? factorial four?)-gaHon hat. He was astride a horse as huge, relatively, as he was. I marvried at the boneand muscle-power of both -- his to motmt and the beast's to carry. In fact, for a moment I toyed with the notion tliat he had an exoskeleton under his suit, and the animal a surgically implanted steel one. He noted my gaze and said, "Yep, Scully, we feed our mounts the hbrmone too. Next to Texans, they're God's noblest creation. And now you might punch the cat-wagon's first go-button at your elbow. The lever next it steers her." I complied, and our small cavalcade started off at a pace brisk to me, a novice driver. Elmo merely walked his horse ahead of us, but its strides were long and smooth. Just behind him La Cucaracha jounced on a btirrow -- now I understood those disproportionate murals better. My darling rode side-saddle and regaled me with frequent smiles over-shoulder, while to the rear Elmo's three Mexicans jogged with my bags. There was a disproportion I could correct. "SenoT Elmo," I called, "tell your boys to throw my bags on the wagon and hop aboard themselves. There'll be no overload -- despite my metal, I mass low." "That's out, Scully," he boomed back. "Can't have greasers riding with anything Texas-tall, no mind how skinny or strange. Myself, I been around and tolerate indecencies, but 'twould shock Dallasians spitless." "I want the bags for pillows," I explained, "so I can study Dallasian salivation, et cetera, besides scan the road." "Then that's okay. But the other's out. Peel your eyes, partner. You got a lot more to see than Texas Adam's apples bobbing. Hey, you greasers, comfort my guest's cerebrum with his luggage!" I was inclined to argue longer with him about them riding, but the three Mexicans gave me such apprehensive glances as they trembling-handed tucked my bags in a soft stack imder my Head and seemed so eager to return to their rear-guard position, that I decided to postpone any equalitarian lecture. However, the frightened behavior of the three nagged at me. 'here was indeed much to see, most of it crazy to me, like a #D motion-montage with' volumes moving at different camera speeds, and most of it jammed into a single plane -- truly Terra is flatland. First there were the buildings, like cubical satellites crowded in disordered ranks, some many rooms long -- no, high' -- on end -- and made of metal and glass, reminding me of Circumluna. Between these went occasional gangways -- streets -- on one of which we traveled. Then there were the Texans, some on horses, others in slowly moving vehicles, others strolling afoot. The younger seemed even taller than the older -- I wondered if the hormone had a cumulative effect. Moving about thrice as fast and in numbers a decimal order greater were the Mexicans, all of identical bent-back Height and almost all afoot. About sixty percent wore the metal collars and antennas, and these were all furiously busy at various construction and deconstruction jobs -- Half of our street was tom up, buildings were being dismantled, others assembled, great masts reared, great Holes dug. I even thought at first the collared workers could walk up walls -- no strange sight to a space-dweller -- until I noted that those on vertical surfaces were supported by slim wires, which they swiftly climbed or downclimbed. One might wonder at my being able to see so much while maneuvering a strange vehicle for the first time in a gravity field. But if one has a lifetime of experience moving in three dimensions, moving in two is child's play. I was soon driving the cat-wagon with such easy competence that I was able to spare a hand to work at my balky knee-motor and had it adjusted in a matter of seconds. I surely had been woozy on my first tryf I soon observed that I was attracting interest. The Texans' faces never turned toward me, but their eyeballs did, and they slow ed down in passing. The collarless Mexicans goggled me frankly, but speeded up, making wide curves around our cavalcade. The collared ones, however, marched by with never a glance, like so many tiny, swift juggernauts, fortunately people-avoiding ones. The speed of all the bent-backs surprised me. Father had told me all about Mexicans. A strict indoctrination in racial and national behavior had come very early in my education, because it is very important in the theater. Father had assured me that all Mexicans were short and wore serapes and big hats, went barefoot and spent their lives sitting against adobe walls, smoking hemp and sleeping, except for brief periods of firing off pistols. These Mexicans were not at all like that, except for the short and barefoot parts. In fact, there were many types. Just now some wee Mexican children, cute as dark kittens, came toddling up and scattered flowers over me, most likely thinking me a corpse bound for the boneyard, for when I lifted and turned my head to look at them, they ran away. La Cucaracha had slowed her burro until she was jogging beside me. She observed, "Legends, or lies, from the black lands tell at flower power was once a great flung. But here at least it Has died out." Noting my special interest in the collared Mexicans, she explained disdainfully, "They are cyborgs, the estupidos. Their collars feed them orders and happiness -- straight into their veins and nerves. From a distance foremen control them -- after a fashion." She added the last phrase when two files of cyborgs collided and instantly began a confused tanglement, like ants I had once watched in a flatland between glass. "They live like this forever?" I asked with some horror. "Ah no," she assured me, "only during the working day. The ofli- er ten hours they exist as men, employing what fragments of ptounded-adobe spirit they have left. Chiefly they feed, fornicate and sleep. My countrymen!" I recalled wh'at had been nagging me. "Senorita K," I asked, "why is it that your countrymen regard me with a fear that is both more and less than fear? Explain that to me, if you will, mi amada bonita." Tlith a rapid frown and fingershake, she leaned down and whispered wamingly, "No tendernesses until moonrise, as I first commanded you, you tall incompetent and undisciplined!" Then in an equally low, but most cool voice, she continued, "Senor La Cruz, my people are like children. They live by fairy tales, some sweet as sugar, some grisly as red bone. One of the latter tells of Death, tall as the sky who will one day come striding across Texas. He will have the form of a great skeleton -- El Eequeleto, he's named oftenest. He will be tossing like fritoe into bis great naked jaws and grinding there human skulls -- made of sugarcandy, some say, of fresh-torn bloody bone and brains, say others. My people will flock to him. He will give them never a glance, any more than stars and clouds look down at men, but he will lead them to freedom." I had become so engrossed in her small but colorful tale that I almost started when a large voice inquired, "Kookie been feeding you a sob story about cyborgs?" Elmo had gradually let his own mount drift backwards until he too was beside me, on the opposite side of the wagon. "Don't you believe a single word that comes out of her cute, lying, little postage-stamp lips. Scully, my pal, cyborgs live a lot happLtf than Texans. Their joy comes each day sure as Coca-Cola. Besides, they're essential to our liberty and freedom, as I've explained." "Myself, I think fliey would all be ti'ampled under the specter s bony feet -- if they do not run like whipped dogs at sight of him," La Cucaracha continued as coolly as if there Had been no interruption at all. "Cyborged or not, my people are estupidoa de estupidos." "Cynical little bitch, ain't she?" Elmo observed. "Kookie, you got an ice cube for a heart. Lucky for you your cold blood don't chill your skin." "My body, though small, is designed in classic proportions, esteemed patron," she replied to him tartly. "Now, Kookie, you mind your modesty and keep your mind Hidden," Elmo warned her. "Don't you go starting an intellectual striptease front of me and my guest. T'other kind's the only one a woman's fitted for, greaser or gringo." "You wish me to mop and mow like a madwoman, master? Or grunt toSenor La Cruz, no sabe? Or discard my clothing perhaps?" "Now, Kookie, I'm telling you that if you don't behave, I'll -- " The altercation might have become unpleasant, except that at that moment I involuntarily interrupted it. We were approaching a gold or gilded statue twenty feet high of a most muscular man in barbarian garb. From his Helmet thrust very long and twisting horns. His right hand swung back a battleaxe, his left pointed a sixshooter. CtTTho is that?" I demanded, ' ' pointing with a blackshrouded leg, because I was riding feet first and my hands were busy driving. "I did not know that Terra had regressed to full barbarianism during the Interdict." "Scully, ain't you familiar with the discoverer of Texas, even, and its first decent-size hombie?" Elmo retorted in genially scandalized tones. "You mean to tell me you ain't ever heard of Leif Ericson, Paul Bunyan, Big Bill Thomson, John L. Sullivan, William Randolph Hearst, Abraham Lincoln and such other great Texans?" "No," I admitted, "though I have heard of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie and my namesake Davy Crockett." "Oh, yeah, they were Texans too," he admitted, "though on a more local plane, San Jacinto and Alamo boys. And old Raven Sam, though one of our early prexies, was pretty dubious in some ways -- Indian lover and Yankee fellow-traveler, it's said." I thought of asking him about Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ, but refrained for fear of having an attack of history-epilepsy. I might learn that they too had been Texans. Instead, I said, steering the catwagon around Leif Ericson, "I recognized some of the others you named, but thought them men of the United States and Canada." La Cucaracha had jogged ahead again, though' not without giving me a quick lip-pursed smile and eyelash ripple. Elmo leaned out of his saddle toward me and said, "Scully, I can see your heavenly instructors knew only the superficial version of Earth's history, the one pap-fed to the general public. Since you're going to be meeting some mighty sophisticated and influential men today, it's best you know a scrap or two of the truth. Amigo mio, the Lone Star Republic never was one of tHe United States. In # she assumed leaderslup at them, because she could see they needed bolstering against foreign aggression and internal disorder; and that was a most accurate foresight, because she had to spend the next three years throwing back the attack of Mexico on them. And pretty soon she had the Civil War to run -- both sides. "Of course it was given out to the general public of the states, who never had no brains or guts nbw and flustered easy, that this assumption at leadership was annexation -- but it was always known to the speaker of the house and the senators who counted in Washington that by secretest treaty Texas was boss. Thereafter the Presidents in the White House were just figureheads for the Texas Estabisliment -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, was the puppet of oiu' Jack Gamer, a mighty modest kingpin, just as later on Lyndon the Great bossed Jack Kennedy, though the latter was poethumously declared an honorary Texan and president thereof because of the grandeur and ritual importance erf his demise. With the coming of the Third World War and the atomization of Washington, New Ymlc, San Francisco and so forth, secrecy became unnecessary, and Texas took over in name as well as substance, induing fot good measure the frosty top aad hot, dry, jungly bottom of tEe continent. We needed more greasers, anyhow, for therapeutic rea- sons." Xy mind was tossings like the cat-wagon, which was traversing a curving section of tfie street imder repair and trying to dodge Mexicans who were aaniiltaneously dodging me. I wisBed now I had had other histny instructors besides my father, wEo would dispose of the conquest of a continent with an offhand "Enter barbarians witii bettleaxes," or of a civilization witU "Exit voluptuaries, wringing hands and screaming. Idris does quick naked dive-across." I knew quite a bit of Greek, Roman and EnglisH dynastic history and the neurotic antics of Twentieth-Century nud from Ibsen and Bergman to Green Comedy and Inner-Space Multistage; but our repertoire had no late plays set in Texas, so father had brushed past that land quickly. (Mi, before my down-orbit Bed briefed me on the Northwest Territory and Yellowknife minutely and whh great accuracy -- I'd thought (now I was not so sure). "Well, I've had my say, and it's your turn to talk, Scully," Kmo interrupted. "You were saying something back there about the Yellowknife Registry of Mining Claims?" lis voice was suddenly so casual and his memory so precise that for no other reasons I found myself getting suspicious. But once again I was given opportunity to change the topic by a golden sculpture, this one abstract. Beside the street, about twenty meters up. Hung a golden rectangle, across the lower side of which was affixed, pointing acutely downward, wHat looked like a distance-weapon of some sort, all golden too. It was a few moments before I saw the slim, transparent pylon supporting tffls part of the abstraction, so near was the pylon's substance to heing invisible. The distance-weapon pointed at the other half of the abstraction, a most complex structure of pipes, wires, rods, springs and boxes, all golden too, about as long as my cat-wagon but wider and thicker. This fantastic brick of golden tracery was also supported by the near invisible substance, but at a height of only Half a meter. Pointing, Elmo explained, "There's the window in the book depository from which Oswald fired the fatal shots, and that's the chassis of the car in which Jack got gunned down, providing by that one brave act of his an example to all future presidents of Texas to go thm way courageously when their political bell tolled. "Incidentally, Scully -- " he continued, leaning a little lower in his saddle and pitching his voice likewise, "what I'm going to tell you now is pretty high-security stuff, but the menfolk where we're going have got nothing whatever else in their skulls -- deep waters, Scully, deep waters -- so it's only fair I give you a paddle or two to navigate with, and maybe an aqualung. And besides, we Texans don't care much for security; we like things loose as the reins by which we herd our second-class citizenry. Anyhow, what I was going to tell you is tlus: Our current president of Texas is hedging a bit when it comes to following Jack's great example. He's disliked, you see, but instead of standing forth and dying like a man, he's turned the President's Manse into a fort and -- believe it and weep I -- he's organized a corps of Mexican houseboys faithful to his person, and He's armed them! With laser guns at that! WHicH ain't playing fair at all to the political opposition. Why, he's even kicked out His Texas-Ranger guards. Says he can't trust them not to kill him -- wfficH is true, of course, but uncouth to mention." "It's him we're going to visit now?" "No, you got it all wrong, Scully, though his Manse is Here in Dallas, where all important things are. We're going to visit the RancB of Cotton Bowie Lamar, governor of Texas, Texas -- that is, governor of the father state in the world's greatest nation. We're not going to Have anytlung to do at all witfi tKat dastardly, Mexican-arming tyrant Longhorn Elijah Austin, current bossman of that same greatest nation, though it pains me to say so." "You hope to defeat him at the next election?" I asked. Elmo shook his head and sucked his lips with a plop. "Nope, Scully, in achieving real freedom we've long ago discarded the phantasms of democracy. For the immaterial, ignoble ballot we've resubstituted the material, ritually prrferable, noble bullet -- which is the item Longhorn E. A. most contumeliously refuses to face. Adverse ballots He'd let cascade off him like cottonwood balls." A yTeanwhile the wheels of the cat-wagon, the hooves of the burro and hormoned horse and the trotting six horny soles of the Mexicans' feet were carrying us past a most interestingly different expanse. All metal, glass, and plastic were gone. In the distance was a veritable forest of tiny hutments bowered and lined by bursts of bright color -- flowers, it occurred to me with pleased surprise. Between them and our street was a crowded city of pastel homes -- pale violet, blue, and pink -- but too tiny even for Mexicans. Then I realized that this was a graveyard. Between the palety colorful homes of the dead was Kobbfing toward us. Helped by a long staff, a figure robed like myself, but in yellow and orange and about five feet tall, while his hood Held only blackness. My exoskeleton suddenly felt cold to my sack-strited skin. I stopped the cat-wagon and sat up. "Greasertown," Elmo explained succinctly. With an effort I forced my eyes to scan away from the figure which disturbingly field them. Ahead, bordered on two sides by the cemetery and on one by our street and backed by a structure of pastel arches I took for a church, was an even more colorful metal construction consisting of a large, round, empty floor ten feet off the ground, approached by several stairways and shaded by a rippling canopy supported slim rainbow pillars ten meters tall. A quick nod frran La Cucaracha told me that my first thought was correct -- it was the bandstand of our evening assignation. But the romantic leaping in me was chilled as my gaze returned to the advancing robed one. I still could not discern a face inside the hood. I asked myself if it were only the bright sunshine making shadows blacker, or if -- " "Here comes one of them consamed nigra Zen Buddhists from: one of them consamed tidewater anarchies -- California most like, which ;has been predominately black ver since the assassination of Ronald the Third," Elmo observed. "Although their Zens are troublesome little locos, forever ranting and mooching and setting themselves afire, we let them wander freely through Texas out of the greatness of our tolerance and -- " his voice dropped -- "for diplomatic reasons." Now I could see the slit-eyed, anger-contorted, almost inkyblack face inside the hood. Because of intermarriage, such extreme skin colors have vanished from the Sack and even Circumluna. Some of my apprehension disiappeared, but only some. tCTe stopped two meters from El--me. Now that he limped no longer, but stood only, he gained a foot in height, or seemed to. His eyelids flew open wide, disclosing great orbs of madness, like bloodshot moons. An unseen power emanated from him and gripped me. "O white dirt from the sky!" he cried gratingly at me. "Arise and shoulder your Karma." I nervously cleared my throat. Grasping tiis staff two-handed by one end, he brought it straight down on my head before I could think to defend myself. My titanium head-basket rang with a muffled but sonorous bong! I wasn't hurt, but I was jarred, numbed and startled. "Arise, I command you! -- you miserable construct of flesh and metal, you abominable offspring of ofay and engine," he growled on. "Arise and accept the Great Destiny of which you are totally unworthy!" And he swung back his staff for another basH. I felt powerless to defend myself. La Cucaracha was kicking her burro toward him, but it was Elmo's whip that took him around the shoulders. There was a crackle and a faint bluish flash, and then he was writhing on his back in the dirt, shaking his fists and gurgling unintelligible words, presumably of anger. With a most expert flick of the same whip, Elmo wound its tip around the staff, flipped it toward himself, caught it in a hamlike hand and pitched it javelinwise far into the graveyard. Then the whip returned to strike sparks from the ground near the twisting figure. "Vamoose, you nameless son of Nirvana, or I declare I'll grill you before you can get out your gasoline to do it yourself!" he roared. The Buddhist scrambled to His feet and hobbled off through the gravestones with great shoulderbobbings, using a fisted stiff arm for staff, but looking back across his sullied robes to glare and curse, or so it sounded. "What was He talking about?" I asked in a voice driven by anxiety almost baritone-high. Elmo shrugged. "OH, those hash-blasted Zens always talk that way. With them, destinies and karmas and 'carnations are a penny a peck. Trouble is, they're always banging people over the skull -- to emphasize their senseless statements, tRey say. Lucky you got that Half-Helmet, Scully. I'd run the maniac in, except we don't want to waste no time." "A black bee-bonnet, Senor La Cruz," my darling chimed in. "Filth beneath your feet. Think no more of him." "But How did He know I was from space?" Once more Elmo shrugged, screwing up his big face like a giant pepper. "Those nigras got odd ways of knowing things, now and again," he admitted. "He also knew, despite my cloak and hood, that I combined metal and flesh." "That's true. Maybe there's something here needs watching. Kookie, you take Gonzales and Company and find out what that black bugger's up to. But don't nervous him. He really might himself afire, though he's black as a cinder already. Then report home." "AH ha, I knew it would come!" my dear one cried. Her dark eyes snapping with anger, real or assumed. "I knew you would once again find an excuse not to take me to the Governor's Ranch. Is it that you fear my boldness will embarrass you?" "Now, Kookie -- " "Or is it that you are afraid one of higher r ank will demand me of you on a trade, and you lack spirit to refuse?" "Kookie! You hop it now without no back talk, or I swear I'll ante you up first Hand of my next poker game." "Agreed! And they will have to send to the girl-shops of Ciudad Mexico or New Orleans at least to match your bet. Pedro, Pablo, Pablitol Vamanos!" As she spun Her burro toward the graveyard, the three bentbacks trotting behind her, she spared me one more eye-flash, and with three fingers she pitterpatted the pleasing bump on the Irft side of Her chest, to indicate the feelings of the organ beneath. IT Imo said to me, "Scully, time's a-wasting. You must Have got the Hang of that cat-wagon by now, so let's press a bit." And with that He removed ffis immense hat, swung it twice in a circle, cried, "Ki-yi-yipeel" and Keeled his mount into a gallop. Gritting my teeth, which I do with great power, I thumbed the last go-button at my elbow and sped after him, bouncing about a bit on ijiy flatbed. As we raced by the bandstand neck-and-neck, the depression that had gripped me from first sight of the orange-#rellow monk now lifted entirely. My spirits soared. I would fulfill my mission on Terra, yes I -- but with even greater certainty, memorizing the route from now on, I would return to the romantically hued cemetery tonight at moonrise, even if I had to adapt jets to my exoskeleton and compute for the first time a gravity-atmosphere parabola! A few brown-robed figures poured from the church as we passed it. Perhaps they thought my vehicle was a runaway hearse, complete with shrouded corpse, and so their responsibility, since it fell within their traditional area of birth and baptism, confirmation, marriage, mortal illness and death. But we soon outdistanced them. TV y exoskeleton responding to its myoelectric orders with purring efficiency, I speeded up at the last instant and entered tHe state-patio of the Governor's ranch Beau Astonishment a long stride ahead of Elmo and the scuttling bent-back houseboys in violet kneepants and lace-trimmed, violet jackets, but barefoot as Gonzales and Company. These came in two converging clusters through the greaser doors closely flanking the gringo door. Then I stopped dead, standing perfectly erect, and let them all pile up clumsily behind me. I had learned how to steal an entrance before I ever played Tom Sawyer, Odd John, Jommy Cross, or Little Lord Fauntleroy. As Elmo began my introduction in suddenly subdued and almost faltering tones with a "Governor Cotton Bowie Lamar, your honor... and gentlemen... other gentlemen," I ceased listening carefully to him and rapidly scanned the scene without moving an exoskeletal link. I was in a spacious area roofed by the sky, walled on three sides by metal walls four stories high and of many colors, and flagtoned by an even more rainbow jigsaw puzzle of polished minerals, marbles perhaps from many quarries, most of the pieces mosaic-smaU. In the flat distance were a few trees and many slender towers in the form of truncated cones. Two of these were five Texas Is a serene superstate stretching from the Equator to Siberia. Bordered by the trivial tumultuous black anarchies of the seaweed regions he inspires and tolerantly dominates the top half of the New World, of the vast ranges of which he occupies # percent, an area greater than that of the King Ranch.  -- lone Star Continent, by Sam Houston Lipinsky, University of Texas at Minneapolis Press Lamar, Mlrabeau Buonaparte, I#'#, first vice president (#-#) and second president (#-#) of Texas, a poetry-writing, history-bemused, personally charming Georgia newspaper editor, who arrived in Texas sword in hand, inquired his way to Sam Houston's little army, and became one of the heroes of the battle of San Jacinto, April #, #, where he commanded the cavalry. As president he ousted the Cherokees and Comanches from the infant nation (although Houston was a blood-member of the former tribe), secured Texas' recognition by Britain, France, the Lowlands and the German States, guided her through the Pig War of #, created the piratical Texas Navy, set aside vast leagues of land for educational and cultural purposes, achieved for the Lone Star Republic even vaster, credit-building debts, and also conceived the goal of Big Texas, foreshadowing Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. -- Thumbnail Texans times the height of the rest, wider in proportion and they looked much newer. They all cast long, late afternoon shadows. Beginning in the middle distance and ending twenty meters away, yas a vast rippling rectangle reflecting the sky's blue. If it were water, there was, I decided, enough for a lake -- far more even than in Circumluna's largest swimming-volume. From a platform next to it a large, long board extended, which made me think of pirate tales of "walking the plank." But perhaps it was petroleum, I reminded myself, unrolling from my memory a map of Terra's resources, where areas rich in fossil animal fats were colored blue. Nearer at hand, each occupying his own many-pillowed couchlike structure with low tables on either side, were a half dozen male Texaps more elegantly or at least more neatly clad than Elmo and all with noble craggy faces; it was as if I had vralked into a quality western, circa #. (Circumluna's and the Sack's microfilmed and taped records of Earth's arts are said to be better than those of Terra herself.) Like Elmo's, their legs were the heaviest part of them -- it takes great columns indeed to support in six lunagravs the mass matching an eight-foot height Their gleamingly polished boots were vast. All held or had beside theni glasses of amber fluid, vde most puffed long reefers -- there was a scent like plastics under heattreatment. Bent-backs scampered about noiselessly, serving and erranding. All the recumbent ones radiated an aura of power even greater than that of physical elegance, and all had one or more of the behavioral quirks which traditionally go with power's possession. The nearest held in one halfclosed hand a stack of gleamingly yellow rounds and clinked them in waltz time. Another of them had inserted three fingers under his gleaming white shirt and with them was scratching his solar plexus in another rhsrthm. A crop-haired one had a seven-second facial tic which with each convulsion threatened to dislodge, but never quite did, the large monocle occupying his left orbit. Yet, as I say, all had matinee-idol profiles, circa #. I noted with approval that as they listened to Elmo, their gaze was on me. Elmo wound up with "... and he has large mining interests in North Texas," which irked me considerably. The guesser and loose-mouthl (Yet it was truly I who had first been waggytongued when coming out of sedation.) XTith'out tlie least flourish I ' ' removed my Hooded cloak and dropped it on the nearest Kouseboy. It covered him totally, but I did not pause to note how he handled this problem. With the least bow, I slowly rotated my face like a panoramic camera from one end of the recumbent group to the other, meanwhile saying in my lowest audible voice, resonant with nerve-gripping subsonics. "Most potent, grave, and reverend signors, my very noble and approved good masters, I come to you bearing greetings from the outside universe." (Father had always advised me about vanity-mad humans, which includes the entire species, terrestrial and spatial -- even I have touches of conceit -- "Lay the flattery on with a trowel, Cstopher, and never hesitate to borrow from the Bard. He was Iffimself the Prince of Borrowers.") I could tell that my deep voice and slim, soldierly bearing impressed them. Sure stage-sense had led me to use the lines of Venice's great captain, Othello. Next I turned and bowed a trifle more -- but only a trifle -- to the man who Elmo had first addressed. "Governor Lamar, your excellency," I said, "I bring you the especial salutations of Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries." (Sack seemed to lack sufficient dignity in this situation.) And then I eyed him commandingly. Almost as if hypnotized (Who knows my full powers? -- not I), the Governor slowly got to his feet, meanwhile abstractedly picking from his dark coat two bits of invisible lint -- that was His idiosyncrasy. He was the slenderest of the lot -- which isn't saying a great deal -- and by a shade the most distinguished looking. "Mister La Cruz," he said, "I'm grieved at the inconvenience your ill-informed pilot caused you -- perhaps he understandably assumed Dallas the port of space entry for all points in our vast nation -- but I'm pleased at the opportunity of welcoming you to Texas, Texas. We see few space dwellers, sir, and -- " He broke off to capture between finger and thumb something unseen on his left elbow. "And I, sir," chimed in the clinker of gold pieces, copying Lamar in rising, "as Atoms Bill Burleson, mayor thereof, welcome you to Dallas." His gray-eyed gaze wandered up and down me. "Pardon me, sir, I mean no offense, but I've never seen a man slender as -- no, pardon me further, emaciated as yourself and still in the land of the living. We've heard of the terrible torttires practiced by the intellectuality-drunken autocrats of Circumluna, from whose tyranny I assume you're in flight, but I never guessed that simple starvation continued for years, nay, surely decades -- " I silenced him with a lifted hand andtoned, "Given energy and mass, even of the slightest, to manipulate, man can survive in any environment, including internal ones. Only a minimum of muscle and fat is required in solheated nullgrav or free fall. We become Thin or Fats, or maintain large muscles by non-grav exercises, as suits our temperaments -- asthenic, pyknic, or athletic. I, myself, sir, am fairly clearly a Thin. But I do not understand the mention of tyranny. Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries are a technocratic democracy." "Another of the power-men asked me, this one without getting up, "We've always understood that Circum and the Sack were inhabited solely by Longhairs. Now I'm a plain speaker. Are you one of those. Mister La Cruz?" This one was the burliest and the most burly-leed of the lot, and his eccentricity was squeezing lengthwise between thumb and forefinger a black column which lengthened to two decimeters or shortened to nothing without changing diameter -- an odd toy, but I had his question to reply to. "Let my shaven pate be your answer. Mister -- ?" I saw no point in mentioning the shoulderlength blond wig in my baggage. I eyed him commandingly, but with him it didn't work, at least he didn't rise.  nother of the non-risers broke in, the stomacH-scratcHer, with whom Elmo, I now noted, had been talking privately. "I gather you got mining investments in North Texas," he said, continuing to scratch, "but who are you with, stranger?" "I am with myself," I instantly replied with a shrug. "And to be sure, I am with Mister Earp there, who most kindly befriended me at the spaceport." "That's right, that's right," Elmo put in hastily and also defensively. "That's the truth, simple as put-and-take poker." I glared at him. He only stared back injuredly, but Lamar at least comprehended the meaning of my look. "Tm sure that none of us intended to question Mister La Cruz's word," he said soberly. "By the by, I should have introduced -- " But he broke off to flick suspiciously and several times with the backs of his fingernails at an apparently spotless area of his knife-pleated trousers. "As for those mining investments," I seized the chance to say, "I have none. Mr. Earp misinterpreted one of my remarks. The matter I Have to settle in Amarillo CucHillo is purely an old family affair." "Of Honor?" Lamar resumed softly, a gleam coming into His eyes and also into tHose of tHe gold-cHinking Burleson. But before I could answer, tHe ScratcKer again broke in loudly. "And you mistook one of my meanings, stranger. WKen I asked you wHo you was witK, I didn't mean wHo you Had around you, or anything complicated like that. I just meant who are you with?" "I do not think I imderstand you," I said courteously. "WHen? Where?" "Anywhere. Any time. But especially now. Who are you with?" I looked around somewhat helplessly, yet witK a bravely jesting small smile calculated to win the sympathy of any audience. "Is it a riddle, gentlemen?" I asked at last. "It's no riddle, and you're just making it more complicated," tHe Scratcher retorted almost angrily. Then He seemed to take himself in hand, and with sucH patience as one might bestow on a weakwitted child, he said, "Look, I'm asking it this way -- like, before I became Sheriff of Dallas County, I was with Littleton and Lamar Lightning, and before that I was with Hunt Espionostics and so on. Every male Texan who amounts to an"thing is witH sonie company, unless he's a public official, in which case He's wiflS the government." "I comprehend," I said. "I an! with -- indeed, a featured player with -- the La Cruz THeater-inthe-SpHere Stock Company." "A thespian!" Lamar begad warmly. "My daughter will be  "Stock company!" Burleson exclaimed at the same time, chinking his gold like the wild clash of cymbals. "Mean to say you issue shares, debentures, and -- " "La Cruz Company!" exclaimed the one with the black cylinder. "You own this business? I know for a fact that on Circumluna total communism -- " "Gentlemen!" I politely silenced them witH my deepest voice, then rapidly explained, "I am indeed an actor, a free-fall Shakespearean. Our company is stock only in the old theatrical sense of employing stock characters, or types, though' most of us are more versatile than that implies. While it is my father who owns tHe company, though it has cooperative features and -- " "Family business, eh?" "Yes," I told Black Cylinder. "And we do have ownership, often private, in space. If objects and operations are not owned and valued, who will care for them? Mister -- ?" Once again my hint that full introductions would be desirable was lost, this time because of the last recumbent, the one with the monocle. All this while he had been watching me with intensest interest, like a schoolboy impatient to redte or demonstrate and constintly jiggling about on his couch working his features in addition to his tic, so that I expected it surely each time to disloce the glass circle which magnified his left eye owlishly. NJow, as if obeying an impulse  became irresistible, he sprang up and darted toward me, violet-clad houseboys altering their orbits to clear him a path. He stopped in front of me and, stooping and rearing, scanned my exoskeleton up and down. His fingers constantly fluttered over it without quite touching it; perhaps because I folded my arms, and stasdng most erect, gave him a slight frown. "I am extremely interested... in metcfuneiy" He said in the enthusiastic but confidential tones of one who tells you, "I Have a thing about flagellation." He continued, "In particular: prosthetic, waldoic, and robotic machinery. Oh, beautiful, beautiful! A strengtfi-in-delicacy far beyond us. WEat lofting! Nature's own skeleton translated to T beams... with a thousand improvements! Such tiny servo-motors, yet so clearly powerful! WHaf space-saving in battery Housings! I take it that without this peerless device you would be... completely helpless here?" "Yes, even in one lunagrav, let alone six," I admitted, somewhat taken off guard by his exclamations, "Mister -- ?" He only continued his fantastical praises with, "And how perfect a twin, or symbiote ratKer, your own body is! -- as if bred to fit this one superb prosthetic and no other! Bone and metal in a perpetual exquisite embrace or communion..." I began to feel too much like a starved slavegirl stripped on the auction block, so that when he actually began to circle behind me, I turned so as to continue to face him. He speeded up, then suddenly reversed, without getting in back of me. As this nonsensical ballet continued, I began a series of calisthenics, knee-bends chiefly and head-circlLngs and rapid armextensions that missed his haircarpeted dome by fractional inches. He flinched not a whit, sucH was his ecstatic concentration. He was of German extraction, most likely, I decided -- which would fit the cropped hair and monocle, standard stage-indices of the Teuton. Governor Lamar, who had been totally absorbed in a most difficult episode of lint-picking, since it involved tHe left shoulder of his suit close to his neck, now put a stop to our ridiculous pas de deux with a, "Professor Fanninowiczl Scientific curiosity can come later, if our visitor permits. Mister Christopher Crockett La Cruz, I wish to in'esent to you Professor Cassius Krupp Fanninowicz, who heads the engineering school at "Charmed!" the professor assured me, making the word hum. But his eyes continued to race over my exoskeleton as he very lightly pressed my hand, which extended bare of metallic or other support from my titanium wristplate. I felt mightily tempted, but controlled myself. The governor's gaze began to creep toward his right shoulder, but with a perceptible effort he looked up and continued, "I also wish to present to you, sir. Chaparral Houston Hunt, Commander in Chief of the Texas Rangers, and Big Foot Charlie Chase, Sheriff of Dallas," pointing in turn at Black Cylinder and the Scratcher. "But Mister -- or do you prefer Senor? -- La Cruz, I've been remiss in my hospitalities. I've sent for my daughter, as I wished to present her too, but since she's delayed, would you care to recline -- " He indicated an empty couch near at hand " -- and partake of refreshment? Professor, perhaps you too would now be more comfortable on your own couch." "Senor suits best," I said on one of my typical impulses, carefully letting myself down onto the couch indicated, while Fanninowicz heeded the Governor's suggestion, though obviously disappointed at not being able to witness more closely the new bendings of my exoskeleton. "Thank you," I added to the governor, meaning it. Twenty minutes on my titanium footplates had left me suddenly fatigued. I tongued in my three sorts of pills, then almost closed my eyes as relaxation hit me --  except that I saw the governor frowning a question at ine. He looked toward Elmo, then faintly frowned at me again. I hesitated, then responded with a slight smile and nod. "Mr. Earp," the governor said, "you take a couch too -- that one," pointing at one outside the circle of the rest of us. Elmo somewhat shamefacedly gave me a quick smile of gratitude as He hastened to obey. TV iTeanwhile houseboys had placed on the table to my right a glass of amber fluid chinking with ice-cubes and laid in a scalloped golden tray on the left-hand table a long reefer just set a-smolder with' a hot point and a clever hand-suction device. But before taking either up, I once again scanned and sought to evaluate the Texans around me. The Mexicans could come later -- there were more of them and in any case they seemed at first glance as alike as identical twins, psychically cyborged if not physically. The Texans appeared to form two chief groups. Governor Lamar and Mayor Burleson were playing me up. Sheriff Chase and Ranger Hunt, despite curt nods and curter smiles when they'd been introduced to me by Lamar, were still putting me down. Why? That remained to be discovered. Elmo's role at least was now altogether clear to me. He was the sort of minor political hangeron who seeks to cadge small rewards, if only food, drinks and moments with the great, by inventing favors to do them, such as bringing them a stranded space-oddity, exactly as he might have brought them a wandering, looking showgirl. Yes, I had Elmo's number, all right, and my estimate was confirmed by the swiftness with which he latched onto a drink and reefer, also sending one of the houseboys for a large plate of appetizers. My feeling of growing friendliness toward him became mingled with a tolerant contempt. #' Finally, there was the professor: seemingly all technical curiosity, which made him the easiest first object for the conversational attack I now mounted, with the intention of truly charming them all -- the necessary first tactic of any traveler in a strange land. "Sir," I said to him, "despite your Polish-sounding patron # rmic -- pardon my familiarity -- I take it you are of German extraction, an inheritor of the Teutonic scientific genius." "I am indeed!" he responded, nodding so vigorously that I thought his monocle must surely go. "Only in Texas, sir, and the adjacent southwest could a Bavarian ever have found a spiritual Home away from home. My greatgreat-great-grandfather came over with the first V-#'s." "The Atomic War?" I asked politely. "No, World War Two, not Three," he informed me. "The V-#'s lacked atomic warheads -- my ancestor had a great sorrow about that -- though' they were the first true space vehicles." "Tell me, gentlemen,"I asked around. "How is it that Texas -- or Texas, Texas rather -- escaped the atomization which' I gather the rest of North' America endured?" "It was all due to the supreme foresight of Lyndon the First and his immediate successors," Mayor Burleson took it on himself to explain. "Realizing that this was the true heartland of the continent, they walled it with anticontinental-baUistic-missile missile defenses; and drawing on the they filled it with nuclear shelters of the deepest and most strongly roofed variety, constructing what may be called the Texas Bunker, though it was then known as the Houston Carlsbad Caverns Denver Kansas-City Little Rock Pentagram, or maybe Pentagon. A step of profound wisdom, Senor La Cruz, for which we have reason to always be eternally grateful." "So that when the Atomic War finally came," Professor Fanninowicz took up with an excitement almost gleeful (Now the monocle must surely go!), "Russia, China, France, England, Black Africa, my own tormented and divided nation, and the outworks of the Texas Bunker were shattered, mangled, tattered! -- while here snugly survived the virile spirit of Assyria, Macedon, Rome, Bavaria, and the brave Boers!" Now at last a tic coincided with a near screech and the monocle did pop out, though rather disappointingly he caught it deftly in his left hand and whipped it instantly back into its proper orbit, where it gleamed as brightly as his bared white teeth. T meanwhile had taken the first of the three sips I allow myself of an alcoholic beverage -- a small sip, for the drink was strong -- and inhaled two puffs of marijuana vapor, a smoke I had never before sampled. It seemed mild stuff, but I soon began to feel a lofty well-being, despite the grisly things being told me, and the scene and sounds around and about me began to organize themselves symphonically, even the chinking of Mayor Burleson'S coins fitting perfectly into the great rhythm. At first, I must admit, there was something sinister about the tiny tympanic tune of power-men releasing tension: scratch... squeeze, squeeze . , . faintest plink of thumb and fingertip on captured lint-speck... became orchestrated into a blissful totality. Mayor Burleson said, "Senor La Cruz, I don't doubt you come from space -- in fact, I can't, seeing that handsome contraption you need to get around in gravity -- but your middle name and height make me think you're originally a Texan who got the hormone. Now that hormone's a closely-guarded secret, sir -- the lower orders of society and the rest of the world haven't grown up enough yet to be trusted with bigness -- and we wouldn't like to think of it being known to the Longhairs of Circumiuna." I said in words dreamy and poetic, yet perfectly enunciated and of course still very deeppitched, "I may well indeed be of Texan ancestry. There can be no certainty about it, for my grandfather ' lifted to the Sack from Spani' Harlem in New York City, yet my middle name whispers its hint, and the lines of heredity are as m#rsteriously interwoven as the curves of the clouds now gathering above us to enchant our gaze. But as for your last fear. Mayor, set your mind at rest. In free fall, unconfined by gravity, human growth is freer and sometimes almost fantastical. My grandfather was tall and slender, my father more so, and I still more so. My mother too is of considerable length, though' it is her pleasure to be a Fat." The whole scene around me, though darkening toward sunset, presented itself to me with supernormal clarity, each detail a gem. I took another small sip of my drink, but returned the reefer to its tray -- a little of that stuff was enough for my attenuated physiology, as with most drugs. My feelings had reached a harmonious acme, why spoil it? I felt marvelously relaxed and at peace. I placed a titanium heel atop a titanium toes-guard, in effect crossing my legs for comfort as I noted several of my companions had done, and continued, "Yet I feel greatly at home here, a Texan in spirit if not in fact. You are no longer my hosts, but my dear friends. Senor La Cruz is all very well, but I would be happier if you called me Chris -- or perhaps Scully, the name Mr. Earp bestowed on me from my cadaverousness." "That's fine, Scully, call me Atoms," Burleson responded. However, I noted the Commander, the Sheriff, and the Professor bristled almost imperceptibly -- my senses were vastly acute at the moment -- and gave the Mayor slightly dark looks, a pale shade of gray, while the Governor was moodily absorbed watching a houseboy wipe his gleaming boots with a white pocket handkerchief he'd given him. I determined to charm them in spite of themselves and at that moment remembered an anecdote. I took the third sip of my drink and firmly set it down. "Gentlemen," I said somewhat sharply, "Whatever I am in fact, I feel myself a Texan at this moment, sharing your expansive relaxation, your wide wisdom, your tolerance, your homely but Huge humor. May I tell you a story?" I was pleased to note that it was the Governor who gave me the nod. It had been to rouse him that I'd spoken sharply. CtTTHen time was young," I  ' said, speaking softly, "God was sitting by a mud puddle, dabbling His hngers in tHe dirty water and playing witK tKe mud. Because, you see, all things were young then and even God was a youth. Think of him as Ometecutli, the Papa-God of tKe Mexicans, but not yet a papa, only a young and stocky barefoot sun-tanned God in ragged pants, pla#dng like the village loco in a universe of water and clay, of love and flowers. "First he made balls of the clay and pitched them out and up so that they went spinning round and round, forever. So he created the sun, the moon, the planets and the whole great universe. "After a while he grew tired of this sport. Looking into the mudpuddle, He saw for the first time his reflection. 'I will make something like that,' He said. "So he made of clay the figure of a man, giving him a coat and shoes, for God was poor then and thought such things very fine, and making his hair very short, for at the moment God was a novice sculptor, and curls and such were beyond Him. "Tfien He chanced to breathe on the figure as he was admiring it closely. To his amazement, the instant his breath struck the figure, it stood up on the palm of His Hand and began to marcH about there, doing a goose-step." Smiling gently at Professor Fanninowicz, I continued, "Seeing this, God said to himself, 'AHha, a little German,' and he reacEed out and set down the figure ill Germany. "Next God made a woman. He gave her a long skirt and long wavy hair -- for God was gaining skill now -- ; and he put a KigK comb in her hair. He breathed upon her, and she stood up and began to sing most beautifully. 'Ah-ha, a little Italian,' he said to himself, and he set her down in Italy. "Thus God made the EngUsEmen, the Frenchman, the Russian, the Negro, the Hindu, lEe heathen Chinee and almost all other breeds of Earth. "God was growing somewhat tired now, and his supply of clay was getting low, so to speed things up he made two male figures at once, giving them only his own simple garb. When he breatfied upon them, they sprang up instantly and began to fight with each other. 'Two little Mexicans,' God said, putting them down in Mexico. "He had not quite enough' clay left for two more figures, so to finish His task -- for althougE a loco, God was a conscientious worker and wasted nothing -- fie made and dressed one great tall figure. This still left him witfi me clay, so he made a great wide-brimmed hat for the figure and chaps for its legs and fine boots. Two small dabs of clay were left, so he used them to give the boots high heels. Two more dabs of, clay of the tiniest were still left, and so that nothing might be lost, God made of them spurs for the boots. ' "He breathed on the figure. Nothing happened. God was startled. Had He made a mistake? Perhaps the magic did not work for large figures. Yet he breathed on the figure again, much Harder. "God thought he saw the figure stir a little. So He drew a deep breath and blew fiercely on the figure. His breath was like a gale or a tornado. "The figure only pulled the brim of his great hat down over His eyes and crossed his boots and, linking his hands behind his neck, began to snore there where he lay on God's palm. "God became very angry. He drew in a tremendous breath, puffed out his cheeks and breathed upon the figure that was like a hurricane of hurricanes, like the shock wave of an atomic bomb! "Without stirring otherwise at all, the figure pushed back His Hat from his face and, looking God straight in the eye, demanded, Who the Hell do you think you're spittin' at?' " The laughter which greeted this tale gratified me. Even Chaparr Houston Hunt grinned and pounded his leg. B efore the applause had faded, I said loudly to them all, though I made a point of looking at Lamar, "So it was in the beginning, and so it still appears to be true of that great land stretching from Nicaragua to the Northwest Territory. Speaking of the latter, I trust I will have your aid in joume#ring to Amarillo Cuchillo tomorrow." "Whatever you want, Scully!" To my surprise, it was Sheriff Chase who first answered. "Oh, that tale took us Texans off to perfection." "Ask anything, Scully!" Again to my surprise, it was Commander Hunt who seconded. Elmo was standing beside him. "Sure you don't want to leave tonight? -- though we'll hate to lose you. Of course, we could have a round of partying first." "Tomorrow would be best," I replied, thinking of La Cucaracha. "And as for partying, I thank you from heart's bottom, yet I fear this one will be all I can take. Although my exoskeleton is tireless even in Earth-grav, my bone one and its envelope are not. It will be best for me if I spend the night in lonely quiet and rest." I was seeking to set up a situation in which it would be easy for me to make my sneak back to the cemetery. And I didn't Have too much time, come to think of it. The sun had already set and moonrise would come but two hours later. To one who lives in space near Luna, keeping track of Earth's phases is second nature. She is our month-clock. "Not altogether lonely, I hope, Senor La Cruz -- ho-ho, the German put down in Germany, very funny -- " Professor Fanninowicz boomed at me heartily, " -- for I hope to spend the night at your side, studying your magnificent exoskeleton and perhaps experimenting -- " "Senor La Cruz shall spend his time as he sees fit," Governor Lamar cut in with authority. "The first demand of hospitality is consideration for -- " He broke off to get to his feet and turn toward the Gringo Door. The other men copied him. I could see without turning, but just the same I got up as rapidly as possible. Since landing on Terra, I had experienced three great liftings of spirit. The first had been La Cucuracha. The second, marijuana. The third was the slender, statuesque female we now faced. Oh, I didn't forget La Cucaracha in the least, and I remained as firmly determined as before to be beside her at moonrise. But now, suddenly illumined by the sun's silvery afterglow from the clouds above, there was a gorgeous counterattraction. She was nearly as tall as I and of Junoesque proportions, buf compared with the male Texans she was slender. She wore Grecian robes of a pale silvery silk whicli left an ample area of alabaster shoulders and bosom bare and fell in perfect folds to the floor. I Bad never seen the like, even on stage -- one simply cannot achieve that wonderful classic draping without gravity to help. Her face was at the moment grave and mystic, though subtly seductive. A youthful Athena Artemis, rather than Aphrodite. In one pale hand she held a scroll with silver knobs. Her platinum-blonde Hair was piled high. Tiny lights winked in it. Under her arching brows, her pale blue eyes were fixed on mine. For a second time on Terra I Had lost my heart -- something my father tells me a young man can't do too often, provided it doesn't interfere with rehearsals and Be never misses an entrance or a cue. ttQenor Christopher La Cruz," Governor Lamar said, "I wish to introduce to you my dear daughter, the Honorable Rachel Vachel Lamar. Sugar, I've been waiting for you quite a while." "Hush up, Daddy," the goddess said, wrinkling that delectable nose in a miffy grin. "To honor our guest properly I had to dart into my Diana costume -- she's the Roman moon goddess, Daddy -- and then I had to snatch' time to dash off a poem of greeting. I'll reac'it now, if aH you versescorning menfolk don't mind." Then without pausing to note whether they did, she struck a pose that I Had to admit was most amateurish (but the more delightful for that) and recited in an elocution-school voice that occasionally squeaked andor went husky and invariably found the worst spots to suck in an over-obvious breath (yet how it all stole the heart!) ; Ho, traveler from outer spacel How swell to tee your sunk-cheek face, Your somber form that's flagstaff-lrim, Your flashing eye and sword-slim limb, She must Have got an earlier glimpse of me, I realized, perhaps from an upstairs window, embowered like a Moslem maiden. The poem continued: We've gazed at your abode for years Serene o'er earthly oys and tears. It sails the sky without a sound We never thought we'd get a chance To hold a moon man in our glance. But here you've dropped out of the blue And all of Texas welcomes yeui The other men applauded politely, Elmo fortissimo. As she moved forward toward stage-center -- a little too fast and coltisU for a goddess, but just right for a girl -- I swiftly intercepted her, caught hold of her hand and bowed over it, pressing it briefly to my lips. Then as I stood "flagstaff-trim" again, holding her hand a moment longer, I said, "Miss Lamar, I never have been so moved since when clutched in the arms of my mother, who was doubling as a member of the mob, I first heard my father give Antony's oration." It was borderline truth, though I had been moved in different ways. My father had terrified me in that black toga. "Go on, you flatterer, you," she giggled, giving me a playful sHove that sat me back on my titanium heelplates. Then her eyes got big. "Your pa's an actor?" They got bigger still. "You're an actor too -- you stayed one?" I shrugged. "Oh an occasional Hamlet, Peer Gynt, Orestes, Cyrano..." I could have sworn that for an instant she was going to hug me. Instead she looked me up and down, grinned and said, "I bet you overlapped your ma to either side when she clutched you." "Yes and she wrinkled her nose too," I countered. "I wet msrself." Governor Lamar said, "My colleagues and I have a bit of business to finisU discussing before dinner. Senor La Cruz, I imagine you and my daughter can entertain each' other for the while. You appear to have interests in common." (t'ell me some more, Captain Skull. But let me light you another reefer." "Thank you, princess. But perhaps you will tell me something for a change. Wh'at is moths?" "Furry' butterflies." "What is... are butterflies?" "Butterflies is -- OH, thesr're like two tiny swatches of batik or embroidery flappin' along. And you'll likely be seeing a few moths in a few minutes for yourself. We even got lunar ones in honor of your homeland. Go on talkin' theater of space -- " "Very well, princess. Yes, acting in three dimensions in free fall has its special techniques and requires its special conditions. For instance, upstage lies in all directions from stage-center, but so does down-stage. You must learn to favor all sections of the audience by rotation in at least two planes, and that requires motivated or surreptitious contact with the other actors on stage. Also, to make an exit, you must take off from another actor or preferably several, and there should be a counterbalancing entrance -- unless you use an air jet or are drawn off by fine-wire, devices we try to avoid. Ideally, #D nulgrav acting becomes dramatic ballet with dialogue. Tffink of Don Juan in Hell, the actors afloat, or of Antony's oration again, with the mob a ragged sphere between the orator and the larger sphere of the audience." "Oh, it all sounds so excitin' -- makes our little theater here seem positively earthbound, even though Daddy insists on spending effects and sets. Sometimes a heap too much of those; we wanted to do Out Town the right way but Daddy insisted on building us a real town with the smallest House big as the Petit Trianon. We actors were positively lost among those gingerbread skyscrapers. And I had to bust into tears seventeen times before he'd drop his plan to build us a life-size, practical, moving glacier for Skin of Out Teeth." "The last time we put on Out Town, princess, we used only six kitchen chairs borrowed from the Circumluna Museum of Terran Domestic Artifacts -- all floating, of course, as I mentally float now." "OH, spit I I might Have known. But do go on, Captain Skull, please." Our "interests in common" Kad indeed drawn the Honorable Rachel VacKel and me closer together, and in less than ten minutes. Our princess-Captain Skull personae derived from Her conceit that I was Sir Francis Drake reporting the unknown lands of the Pacific to a youthful Queen Elizabeth. We were seated side-by-side in the gracious dusk on a large couch' facing the dark horizon with its mysterious truncated cones across the very faintly shimmering ripples of the vast swimming pool (Rachel Kad identified that for me and assured me it was water), and we were quite alone. My companion Had shooed out all the Mexican Houseboys shortly after Her father's departure. I was still determined to keep my date with La CucaracKa -- after all, she seemed the eartffier and more easily Kad of the twain -- but at the moment I was stealing my left arm along the top of the couch behind Rachel VacHel's ivory shoulders and also an occasional eye-wander down Her delicious frontal decolletage. tCVjlilder is one of our minor  " favorites among the old playwrights," I meanwhile continued. "He rouses and satisfies simply and beautifully our nostalgia for Terra. Other old ones often in our repertory are Ibsen, Bergman (we live-stage fiis films), Shaw, WycKerly, Moliere, Euripedes, Gorky, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare of course, and -- " "Hush, you're maltin' me drool green with envy I Our group's forever tT#dn' to stage real serious plays like Macbeth or Pillars of Society or The Gods of the Lightning or Waitin' tor Lefty or Manhattan Project or Frisco After the Fallout or Uncle Tom's Cabin or Intolerance (let Daddy use Kis I say) or Streetcar... but -- wouldn't you know it? -- Daddy's forever insistin' on another revival of Oklahoma, callin' it Texiana, of course, and usin' Corpus Chris ti or Texarkana 'stead of Kansas City, to make it scan, and five times out of six Daddy gets his way. And even then He won't let me play Ado Annie, the Cain'tsay-no girl -- always got to have some little Mex on stilts for that part." Edging my arm a little closer, I remarked, "Your father seemed to me a most courteous and mild gentleman." "Mild? Huh! You should see him when -- " In turning to make Her comment she had suddenly leaned back against my slithering arm. Now with a little scream she bent forward, quickly turning tier head to remark, "My, that skeleton of yours is awfully chilly. Captain Skull. Can't you take it off even for a little while, while you're on Earth?" "To my great regret, no," I informed her. "Without it, I literally could not move an arm or leg or lift my head. While a fall, especially without exoskeletal protection, might easily fracture a limb or my skull. I have just begun to realize that when one is eight and a Half feet tall, one has a lot of farther to fall in gravity than -- " "Don't explain to me about that. I'm eight foot two myself, and I know all about chipped and busted bones. Well, we can't have you fracturing yourself, that's for sure, you spacemen are too precious, so..." she gave a small sigh of resignation , I guess I and she flopped herself back against my arm before I could have withdrawn it, had I intended to. She turned her face toward mine. Amid the mists of her platinum hair, her eyes were dark pools of wonder in which the stars glimmered faintly. "Anything for Texas -- that's a joke," she said. "Go on. Captain Skull, tell me some more." "But there are many things I would like you to tell me, chiefly about yourself," I countered, carelessly draping my free hand across my knee so that it happened lightly to touch one of hers. She did not move that leg. "I know you are a poet," I said. "Are you by any chance also a playwright?" "OH, I got a little old script or two in a secret compartmentin my lingerie drawer," she admitted nonchalantly. "But don't for world's whisper a word about them to Daddy. One of them's called Houston's Afire, and another Storm over El Paso." "I also would guess that you are named for a poet," I continued. "Vachel Lindsay." Skull, I never dreamed anyone on Earth, let alone in the sky, remembered ansrthing about that little old Chinese Niihtingate or General Booth." "Rachel Vachel," I said, leaning toward her, "the first poem of any length my father ever taught me was The Congp. That is, after Chesterton's Lepanto." "Recite Lepanto!" she commanded me, but before I could utter "White founts falling...," she countermanded that with, "No, don't! Daddy and His crew'll be back any minute, and that poem's too long, much as I'd be ravished by it. Lemme think."  t "D acHel Vachel," I asked, as my free fingers lightly walked up tKe silvery silk draping her thigh', "tKere is an aspect of the landscape puzzles me -- tKe many conical towers." "Oh those!" she said impatiently. "Those are just oilwells. Grandpa insisted on keeping tKe derricks for sentimental reasons, but Grandma thought tKey were unaesthetic and made Kim cover them up with those antimacassar lighthouses, I call 'em. Antimacassars were originally doilies to keep hair-oil off chair backs, you know. I'd rather the naked derricks again -- be Konester." "And the two very much larger and newer towers?" I continued. It is sometimes effective, I think, to talk of irrelevant matters while moving closer to a female. Besides, I have a curiosity which operates simultaneously on all levels, and when the sexual is awakened, all the others are too. "Only two much larger oilwells?" "Fact is, I don't know the answer to that myself," Rachel Vachel said, anger in her voice. "When they built them six months ago, I asked Daddy, but he put me off with His standard lecture about Kow women shouldn't interest themselves in science and technology, but culture and religion only. I tried to ride out to them a couple times, but got turned back." Suddenly she sat up straight, though clapping a hand over my free one, which had reached Her waist. Now her voice was entirely exasperated anger on the verge of tears. "Oh, Captain Skull! You don't know how Daddy strangulates me, hidin' a whim of patriarchal Texan iron under all that suffocatin' courtliness and courtesy. I'm supposed to get bowed to and stood up for and my feminine mystique done reverence, at the price of limitin' my activities to silly little poems and reproductions of Oklahoma and Babes in Toyland and The Wizard of Oz with a Texas 'stead of a Kansas Dorothy -- yes, and of bein' bossed around like a nine-year-old! Honest, some days I wish I could die!" That outburst over, she instantly flopped back against my left arm, throwing her own right arm over it to keep it from stradng, as if it would, and leaning Her lovely white-misted head against it so that she could dark-wonder me even more effectively with' her glimmering eyes. "Go on, tell me some more," she mxirmured meltingly. "Tell me some more about acting in the Sack." She sighed softly, at least for a young woman eight foot two, and added wistfully, "I suppose all you actors up there are stars, just like the ones twinklin' above us now." "Farfrom it, princess," I told her, my left hand beginning to feather-stroke Her bare shoulder and my right Hand resuming its tiptoe journey. "Our situation is far more like that of any Shakesperean or later actors in puritanic Northern Europe and America before the Twentieth-Century deification of entertainers. We are no better than strolling players -- worse, because with' vacuum outside we have nowhere to stroll when things get hot for us. We are given no special honor by our fellow Sackabonds, and at times we are denotmced and threatened by Circumluna's scientists, engineers and technicians, on whose continuing ticket-buying, nonetheless, we depend for the essentials of life. In that sense we are much like the artists of the Renaissance, dependent on the patronage of their individual princes -- our prince being the Circumlunan Establishment. Him we must please, or starve, and the former is as difficult as the latter is easy." " 'Renaissance' is just the word I was looking for to describe you!" Rachel interrupted. "You're like one of those tall, thin, somber-lookin', small steppin' Spanish Grandees -- the kind that wear great cloaks and hats with black plumes and are deadly duelists. You fence and duel, by any chance?" "Those were among my first accomplishments," I contented myself with saying. I was tempted to give her a demonstration which might have surprised her, but it would have interrupted our passage toward togetherness, so I stifled my vanity. "I might have known, you bein' an actor," she said. "Go on about those Longhairs you put on your plays for." tt'The scientists, yes. Well, you see, princess, they began over a hundred years ago as -- and have continued to be -- quite rigid, asthetically puritanic types. They greatly need the catharsis we give them with' our dramas -- everything from high tragedy to low comedy -- but there are always those among them whose violent, temporarily uncatharsized desires, masquerading as high scientific conscience, demand our muzzling and even our expulsion. They accuse us of great sexual laxity, thievery, political and social irresponsibility, corrupting the morals of the young, and dirty personal Habits such as not sterilizing our nigHt soil before returning it into tHe ecologic cycle. In sKort, all tSe things actors Have been accused of since Eggoh the Exhibitionistic Cave Man first cavorted in front of the nightly fire." "Scuse me, Captain, but your left-arm skeleton bone's cuttin' into my neck," Rachel VacKel interrupted. "There, that's better. Tell me, do you consider me one of the young? I mean as far as corruptin' morals is concerned. Don't answer that one, just keep it up -- talldn' too." I continued, "At present the puritanic faction of Circumlunans, composed somewhat more of those of Russian heritage than those of Americo-West European extraction, is in the ascendency. With the lifting of the Interdict, they are demanding that not only we actors, but all Sackabonds not doing vital part-time technological work for Longhairs be deported to Earth. The great majority of Circumlunans don't want this at all -- we're almost their sole source of fun and frenzy -- but being respectable bourgeois technocrats to a man (and a woman) nearly, they daren't speak out against the highly vocal h#TJerpuritanic minority. The only solution for us, of course, is the agehonored one of buying off the Establishment with Circumlunan-acceptable cash -- meaning funds available on Terra for buying Moon-short elements and materials the Circumlunans still find it difficult if not impossible to S#mthesize. It's to win that cash to defend from deportation all Sackabonds, but in particular the personnel and properties of the La Cruz Th'eater-in-the-Sphere, that I've come down to earth, Rachel Vachel." I could feel her quiver with new excitement under my fingers. "You mean, you're goin' to put on shows down here to raise funds? No, don't stop what you're doin'. Remember, you got your reputation for great sexual laxity to maintain and I got my Daddy to spite. But in that case why not star with the Dallas Little Theater, with the title role in Death Takes a Holiday for a starter? I'm sure I could swing it, and Daddy's got pots!" "Alas, Princess, the doctors assure me that even with the constant exoskeletal support and large periods of rest, I dare not stay more than a week on Terra, or at a risky most, two without suffering large permanent phsrsiological damage. They expressly warned me against -- " I cut off that one quick, and the thought behind it too. Among the activities against which they had expressly warned me was the one in which I was now engaged, and I didn't want to start questioning my knowledge, superior to tliat of any doctor, of my own psycBosomatic needs. Especially not now, wHen I was aboard tHe primeval rocket and tSe countdown started. I contented myself witK saying, "Jlo, princess, I do not intend to put on any public performances down Here." S Se did not pursue Her question, nor appear to take note of my interrupted remark. WitK tHe gatHering dusk and perHaps in some part because of my delicate manipulations. Her eyes grew larger and more luminous. Her fingers slipping between my titanium sHoulder girdle and Head basket toucHed my cervical vertebrae. Her voice riding on indrawn and exHaled sigHs, sHe said, "You know, Scully, I believe I'm failin' in love witfi you just a little bit -- psycfiically, I mean, not only pHysiologically. Ever since I was a little girl I've Had moods of despair wHere I wanted DeatK to come to me like a dark knigHt and carry me off. I wore out three tapes of Schubert's Death and the Maiden -- and Here you're doin' it WHy, you're just like DeatK in The Seventh Seal, leadin' me off in a dreamy dance -- that is, if Max von Sydow Had played tHe part 'stead of doin' tHe KnigHt. Say, Scully -- no, keep it up -- How are you ever gonna raise that cash down here you need to save your theater unless you put on shows? I'd give you some, except Daddy's a skinflint when it comes to pin-money." "I'll tell you a secret, Rachel VacKel," I said, my rumble somewhat thick as she was riiivering three fingers, thrust between my tit am um exo-ribs, across my chest WKat the devil, I'd already told her far more than I'd intended -- I might as well, as Elmo would have put it go it whole hog. "Before my grandfather lifted from Spanish Harlem, He had bought from a down-and-out Aleutian prospector a mining claim to an area near Yellowknife, Canada. I mean Amarillo Cuchillo, North Texas. This claim was supposedly worthless, but the Aleutian who had bought it from a Cree Indian Had investigated the area closely and discovered that within it lay the Lost CrazyRussian Pitchblende Mine, and he had drawn a map of the mine's exact location. My father treasured the claim and the map as an ace in the hole to revive the La Cruz fortunes in time of trouble. They were useless during the Interdict, but now that that's over and the time of trouble come for us and the entire Sack, my father Has sent me down to sell the claim or seize the profits if someone else has meanwhile discovered it and been working itillegally." "My, yovir pa must be quite a... a dreamer, Scully," Rachel VacHel murmured languidly. "That sounds to me just like the Gold Mines down in Mexico, Texas. Oh, but I'm dead sure it's going to work out fine in your case," she Hastened to add. Then, the dark-wondering peaking in her eyes, "Kiss me, Scully." Carefully tilting my head so neither my titanium jaw-sHelf nor cheek plates would touch Her, I planted my lips on Hers. Her hands moved on my back between titanium T spine and exorib lattice. We kissed for some time with small moans. Then she broke away with a slightly bigger one, in which I Heard faintly the whispered words, "Come sweet death..." and her voice returned to medium brisk as she asked, "You didn't leave the claim and map in your luggage, I hope? Daddy's sure to have that snooped, 'scoped and espioned." "But surely your father is too honorable and courtly and genteel -- " "Oh, He's the genteelest jail warden in all Texas, Texas. Why do you suppose I Have secret compartments in my lingerie drawers? If he could only see right now -- You know, Scully, we must be making a most excit-' ing scene: a Greek goddess bein' elegantly seduced by a romantical black-and-silver skeleton, the matin' of the mantis with the june bug -- just the kind of ' scene Daddy'll never let us stage in our plays, the courtly old Cromwell! Where have you got the claim and the map, Scully? You didn't forget and leave them up there in the sky, I hope?" "I keep them on my person, princess." "That's nice," she murmured, gently stroking same. "Say, Scully, what's your impression of the Mexican situation down here? I mean seriously -- no, you keep it up too -- and truly. Answer honest, now." "I hope this doesn't offend you, Rachel, but my answer must be: deeply disturbing. The childish and superficially Hiomorous servitude of your Spanish Americans, I mean Spanish Texas, I find disgusting. And those cybernetic yokes -- abominable!" "That's interesting," she murmured. "Now what's your attitude on revolution? No, keep it up." T must admit that her rapid and startling questions were putting me off stride a bit, like onetwo punches, no matter how well they confonned to my own philosophy of all curiosities satisfied simultaneously. But I gathered my forces and carried on, on both levels. "Revolution in Circumluna and the Sack? No. Except for the Longhairs' puritanic blind spot, we are all too intelligent for it up there. Besides, we are too deeply interdependent, and the Longhairs hold all the'cards. Down here? I don't know. From what little I've seen of them, hoping for a Mexican revolution would be like expecting a revolt of the babies. Emotionally I sympathize greatly with revolution. I identify. Among my most favorite roles are Cassius, Dr. Stockman in An Enemy of the People, Danton, Lord Byron, Lenin, Sam Adams, Fidel Castro, John Brown, and Ho Chi Minh." "Oh I can just see you as Cassius. You got that 'lean and h'lmgry' look to perfection. You're going to devour little Rachel, aren't you? Go Waltzing-Matilda with her? Promise? Or Ho too -- you have the Dr. Fumanchu touch: 'Beware, America! You got your napalm and atomic bombs, but I got my black scorpions, my giant centipedes, my spiders with diamond eyes that wait in the dark, then leap!' Golly! Or maybe I could work up a drama around that legendary figure of El Esqueleto -- you'd be gteat as him. Say, there's an ideal But Daddy -- oH forget it. Look here, dear, I admit I'm getting a fetish about that skeleton of yours but couldn't you get out of it for just a little while? Mayn't you be underestimating your unmechanized strength? Your hands feel so strong on my funny bumps." I was deeply moved at that, I must confess. For some reason I could now see more plainly again my lovely eight-foot-two pale goddess in her artistically disarranged robes. A mjrsterious silver light bathed her and made me utterly reckless. "Look, darling," I whispered breathily and rapidly, "If we're careful it's not necessary that I -- " I do not know what would have happened next, or rather I know exactly what would have happened next, and a disaster to have missed it, or more likely a disaster to have enjoyed it... anyhow, Rachel Vachel pushed me away with a sharply whispered, "They're coming back!" I heard the footsteps myself then, growing louder behind us, and I nervously smoothed my sack suit and evened my breathing. The next moment, her drapery and platinum hair in order, she was handing me a glow-tipped reefer and saying coolly, "Here you are, Senor La Cruz, a Chihuahua Pot-Perfecto. Daddy always sasrs a man can't smoke on tobacco alone." As I shakingly inhaled the first piney puff, I looked straight out at the horizon again and saw that my "mysterious silver light" was merely that of the new-risen moon, silhouetting one of the big antimacassar lighthouses. I realized somewhat groggily but with a clutch of anxiety that I had not only missed my big moment with Rachel Vachel, but was already breaking my date with La Cucaracha. 'T'he patio lights boomed on. I copied Rachel Vachel in leisurely standing up and casually turning around, though I spoiled the effect a bit by clanking my exo-elbow against my pelvic girdle. Just come through the gringo door were (Jovemor Lamar and his four fellow big-wigs, all looking a' shade grim to me, and Elmo, who looked worried. "Most sorry to interrupt your tete-a-tete," the Governor said smoothly, "I trust you weren't bored, Senor La Cruz, and that my daughter entertained you adequately." I could manage no answer save a swallow, which bobbed my overly prominent Adam's apple, and a somewhat jerky nod. "Now go to bed. Sugar," he continued. "We have business to discuss with the Senor." "But Daddy -- " "Sugar...!" With a haughty shrug and thinning of lips, the Honorable Rachel Vachel turned to me and said formally, "Good night, Senor La Cruz. I trust we have the opportunity of continuing our most interesting conversation! some other day." And sHe stuck out her hand, palm down. I pressed and bowed over it. Though not risking a kiss this time, I did lightly scratch Her palm with my forefinger. Showing no reaction whatsoever, she turned away and walked through the gringo door without looking to left or right. From the emphasis she had given her last word, I knew I could expect no opportunity of further converse with her this night and must pin on La Cucarach'a any hopes I had of getting my jangled nerves soothed, especially my frustrated parasympathetic system. But to tell the whole truth, I was far, far more -- oh so much! -- concerned about the five unsmiling, craggy-visaged Texans I now faced, and it was chiefly my sjnnpathetic nervous S#retem, that old adrenal-squeezer, that was sending. Old tales of the vengeances done in patrist societies on daughter-seducers and sisterstealers and mere lovers-up marched like a series of funeral corteges through my mind. I thought of Abelard and Chance Wayne. Rachel Vachel had as much as told me her father was a constant spier on her activities. Would he have omitted those on the patio? Wouldn't lie be sure to have had the couch bugged? And I had blurted out not only my grotesque passion, but also the secrets behind my trip to Terra, i I cursed myself for an Eros-besotted fool. It seemed to me most ominous that all five power-men were now equipped with' paired side arms belted over their beautifully tailored suits. In addition, anachronistic rapiers hung from the Hips of Sheriff Chase and Ranger Hunt, and all five were once more making their nerve-twanging chink-chink, scratch-scratch tune. It struck me as particularly sinister that the Governor was plucking invisible lint from his vest without taking his eyes oft me. Then as Rachel Vachel vanished and her rapid footsteps died away and I expected the worst, everything suddenly changed for the best, as at the fairy-godmother moment in a children's tale. I could hardly have been more surprised if dancing elves had popped from under the flagstones. The five power-Texans relaxed and favored me with friendly smiles, while with the most winning of these, the Governor himself, advanced toward me, saying, "Senor La Cruz, most honored and patient of guests, it's my pleasure to inform you that all arrangements save one Have been made for your passage by chartered private rocketship to Amarillo Cuchillo tomorrow morning." And he lightly took my limp hand and pumped it warmly though carefully. His breath was redolent of bourbon. He went on casually, "The one omission is most trifling and really unnecessary to correct except for reasons of courtesy. It's that we visit tonight and get the countersignature on your jet-cHarter of President Longhorn Elijah Austin. The old gentleman would be hurt to Have missed a visit with you, and -- sub rosa, sir -- we want to continue a little political fence-mending." I Hesitated. The Governor's expression seemed totally relaxed and friendly, free from guile as Tom Mix. I said, "But I thought  "Yes, sir, exactly, you thought -- and no blame whatever attaches to you for that. But... Elmo!" IVyT y friend -- I suddenly felt that way toward him -- was twisting his huge hat into what looked like a model of a saddle-shaped imiyerse, and he was working his lips and actually blushing. "Scully, I mean Senor La Cruz," he choked out, "I was resh'ading the facts a little... no, I was really lying to you quite a bit in our earlier conversations -- chiefly by exaggerating my own importance and my inside knowledge of the current political situation. "There was once indeed a little wounded feelings between President Austin and some of the other great statesmen of our land, but I blew them up out of all proportions. That arming of his Mexican houseboys, for instance, what a whopper! And for a fact I simply didn't know -- that's how small a bug I am in the human menagerie -- that what wounds there were had been completely healed and only in need of the lightest postoperative care. Just a lowdown Texas big-mouth, that's all I am, Scully, and I hope you forgive me." "Of course, Elmo," I said quickly, embarrassed at his abject groveling, for that was what it had been, despite the humor with which he had pillowed it. I had grown to like Elmo, rather as one likes a clown. And to see a clown deflated, stripped or dissected is always bad, or at least uncomfortable theater, I abruptly turned back to Lamar. "Is it necessary that my interview with President Austin take place tonight? I had rather -- " "I'm afraid it must, sir," He interrupted me. "A soiree rather than a matinee, as you gentlefolk of the stage put it. Your jet leaves early tomorrow, and I have already, pardon me, taken the liberty of arranging your reception by our beloved prexy. I cad understand your desire for, nayj your medical need of rest, and I assure you the interview will Be very brief and your transportation to and from it both rapid and unfatiguing." "Quick and peaceful. Over in a wink," Sheriff Chase confirmed, snapping his fingers once for unnecessary emphasis. As I hesitated again, I felt my reefer sting my fingers. Quickly shifting my grip back on the butt, I took a very long drag. Perhaps it was the pot tliaf gave me the inspiration and emboldened me to act on it. "It wasn't rest I was concerned about," I said gaily. "Your hospitalities have quite refreshed me. It was that I had the whim to take all by m#reelf tonight, by moonlight, a brief noctural jaunt through the quieter environs of your great city of freedom, employing for that purpose the catwagon with which Mr. Earp so graciously provided me. Let me do this, and I shall be only too! happy to bandy amenities witS your prexy." Frowning slightly and even more slightly shaking his head, Lamar said slowly, "I'm afraid it's already been determined tKat you travel by official limousine. A cat-wagon would hardly have the requisite dignity -- " "Tell you what, Cotton," Sheriff Chase broke in, "we can bring the wagon along on a flatbed racer Then soon as his meeting with Austin's over, the Senor can begin this little private wander on which it seems that he's set his heart." "A happy inspiration!" Lamar said. His frown fading. "And now come, gentlemen, our time is growing short." The loud clink ofBurleson's coins was like a cymbal clash that begins a jolly march. Fanninowicz's facial tic was a "Forward!" I took a last drag of my reefer, crushed it in the nearest tray and stepped out with my illustrious entourage, the rh#rthmic clash' of my titanium footplates dominating the thud of their leather boots. My cape was handed up toward me, and I swirled it carelessly around my shoulder-girdle without breaking stride. It occurred to me how villainous I was to arouse myself with one woman and then plan to satisfy myself with another. But such is human flesh -- at least that of an audacious Thin with a perfectly tuned exoskeleton who was setting out on a planetary spree. 'The downy, glimmer-windowed nest of darkness that was the limousine silently braked to a stop with a suddenness that mashed my face against my cheekplates. With tiny groans the straps around my titanium rib cage and belly-support tightened almost to breaking, then they were merely snug again. Beside me, Ranger Commander Hunt cursed a simple, "Jack it!" as the exo-elbow of my outflung arm took him lightly across his handsome Roman nose. From the other side Sheriff Chase fumbled at my riding-harness, but I brushed his Hands aside and deftly unsnapped the two straps myself. I was beginning to resent being treated as an invalid or baby. When they had got out, each almost tripping over his ceremonial sword -- for such they had explained them to be -- I followed Hunt as swiftly and surely as a tall metal monkey and found myself standing in the moonlight on a springy black driveway, the four other limousines drawn up in line two before and two behind and debouching their passengers, while to the extreme rear I thought I could make out the flatbed bearing my cat-wagon. Bad Society done Its duty to Itself Bern Thsiinpson In stead of djiniS tius death of a deqperado mlht have beeome a. useful citizen. Ben Hiompson waa an early Texas antihero and often aeifnltted midtl-ldller of the shot to death with # bullets in an Austin variety theater -- ed. But will the moral be road aright and turned to profit? It ceirtalnly will not unless Texas society purges itself of tlie complicity and indulgence which have so largely nurtured and developed the desperadolsm in men. Bis is a slow growth and it is Texas #fcicty which encourages that growth by holding out the hope to him oS achieving ' both fame and fortune in a career of murderous violence and profcsisional terrorism. -- Galveston News Texas is a wandering and tattered ribbon of white fascism Ineffectually separating the non-diroetlve black democracies and hip republics of Florida and California and occupying at most # percent of North America. Two cents worth of bloated, mentally bombedout sqnaredomS m -- African America, by Booker T. Nkmmah Tnskegee Bistltnt do la Thdn et Technologie Ubrairie B spire and hiighligtited several Others and also the three towers and slate roof of a vast building some # meters ahead. It lookled to my scenery-trained eyes like a Gothic mabse of old, specifically one of those fanciful carpenter's Gothic edifices of the late nineteenth century in America, abristle with balconies, columns and fretwork of Moorish, Baroque and other manners too nunierous to list. Not a single window of the place showed light. There were no lights between nie and it, only a low, pale wall with an arch of triumph for admittance to the driveway. The limousines had all doused their headlamps. It struck me that the stage had been set, not for a president's reception, but for a ghost story. All it would have taken was one lighted window and a terrified beautiful girl in the foreground to make it the greatest of camp art. As if he had caught my first thought, I heard Elmo, as He came up behind me, boom out with a little of His earlier freeand-easy, "That old miser Longhorn Elijah! He'll whup half to death a maid who leaves on a #watter over an escalator or in a John the instant someone Has wiped himself. But soon as we pass the arch, Scully, the whole shebang'll light up like a veritable fairyland, I can tell you that." A discreet chuckle I recognized as Governor Lamar's came from the figure approaching beside Elmo. He said, "Elmo puts it crudely, but it is true that President Austin is a thrifty old soul, providing a Simon-simple answer to those who accuse our officialdom of private prodigality. Well, sir, do you feel able to proceed afoot? I shouldn't like for the sake of your dignity to see you make a horizontal approach in a catwagon or stretcher, unless you feel it medically mandatory." "We'd drive you straight to the door," Commander Hunt assured me, "but immemorial custom dictates that the prexy's mansion be approached afoot by all and sundry." "Two of us'll walk close beside you and support you, of course," Sheriff Chase added. "Emo, you take his right arm." "Nonsense, gentlemen, I am quite able to navigate ungrasped and erect on my trusty exo-legs," I replied lightly, keeping out of my voice the gust of indignation I felt at this further evidence that they considered me a Hospital patient. A nd with that I stepped out toward the dark mansion. Elmo stayed beside me, but fortunately for His ribs, which would have got a titanium dig, he did not attempt to touch' me. Professor Fanninowicz came Hurrying up on my other side, fumbling with wires and chattering, "Sir, for the sake of science may I attach electrodes to -- " "No!" I rapped out. "But may I not at least accompany you and observe -- " "Yes, but hands of!" The dark figures which had emerged from the leading limousines parted for us. I noted that they wore dark uniforms which included knee-boots and black slouch hats and that they were armed with heavy laser-carbines. Ancient shell rifles or even antique powder-and-ball muskets would have seemed more appropriate ceremonial weapons to match Hunt's and Chase's swords. But then I remembered what Rachel had told me of her father's efforts to introduce an actual glacier into Wilder's Japanese-delicate Skin of Out Teeth. Hunt's rangers, I decided as we passed them, were lucky they Had not been made to tote ceremonial atomic bombs. Then Governor Lamar, stepping uncomfortably close behind me, almost on my heels, called out softly but carryingly, "Everyone move very slowly now! We don't want to hurry Senor La Cruz or cause him to strain his satelliteenfeebled heart." That did it. As if hearts did not Have to work well and efficiently in free fall merely to supply tissues with oxygen and other nutrimentl Tissues such as the cerebrum, of which I now bet we spacefolk had twice the volume of these bumbling Texans! All butt and no brain, like dinosaurs! I stepped out at my fastest, taking giant strides, my hood and cloak flapping behind me. In almost no time Elmo and Fanninowicz were panting. Such was my rage that I ignored my surroundings, not pausing to ponder the function of the trenches we were now passing, nor of the slitted walls of thick metal on their mansion-side edges, nor even of the dim figures crouched behind those walls. But I did catch the gasping Fanninowicz attaching an electrode to my pelvic girdle. He already had one affixed to my shoulder yoke. The fine insulated wires faintly rattled against the drive behind us. Since he couldn't measure my body electricity, he was evidentally hoping to find some in my exoskeleton. I jerked the attachments loose and struck his hands away with a blow of my wrist-plate that got out of him an, "Alii! Teufel! Gottveidammter Knochen-Mensch!" "For Weedin' Jesus' sake, fake it easy, Scully," Elmo pled between puffs. "We're gonna get there soon enough. And you know, even He didn't exactly race up Golgotfia." Deaf to tKe connotative and allusive signicance in His words, I was busy planning my entrance speecK, wiicfi began sometiung like, "rnw sorry to Save outdistanced my Texas escort, Your Sublime Excellency, but strcli was my eagerness and such' their excess of adipose tissue -- well, one must admit, Ptexy, that some of them sweat a mite easy. I submit in all humility that at least the Texas Rangers ought to keep in a nttle better physical trim. Of course witif someone as courfly and delicate as G o ver n or Lamar..." T was darkly pleased to note that there were no longer footsteps behind us, even distant ones. The three of us were entering the shadow of the manse now. And as we passed under the great archway with Its ghostly bas-reliefs of guns, snorting Horses, dead Indians and the like, even Fanninowicz began to fall back, was gone. Elmo panted, "One thing I want to tell you, Scully, and I really mean it this time, you're a true Texan of the Raven-Alama breed. I'm proud to have known you." He grasped my hand with such obvious spontaneity and sincerity that I had no impulse to strike it aside. Then he too was gone. I took two furious strides more, then began to slow down halfway through the third. My brain was starting to work again, just a corner of it. Two scarlet beams sprang from the dark grounds, zizzling past me to either side. I smelt the reek of ions. I heard spluttering, crackling splashes behind me. Turning, I saw the two laser beams scattering gouts of whitehot molten stone from the bases of die triumphal arch'. EKmly I saw Fanninowicz rolling away, wrapped by his wires, behind the shelter of the pale wall. At least he had temporarily escaped tSe laser's light-stiletto. Of Eilmo I saw no sign. Then from c o rn e r s of the manse and grounds a dozen lights blazed on me -- white lights so bright and hot I thought for a moment I was being disintegrated. If I hadn't had practice from childhood in avoiding looking directly at spotlights I'd have been blinded. The lights didn't reveal a fairyland, unless you count toy soldiers four and a half feet high' as such. The grounds were crowded witH the shielded emplacements of laserand lightning-guns and other heavy weaponry. They were manned by barefoot Mexicans wearing brass cuirasses and brass helmets with colorful horsehair plumes. And all the guns were pointed straight at me. The natural thing, especially for me, would Have been to run like Hell. It was pure rage that Held me titanium-rooted -- rage at Lamar and tHe rest for Having maneuvered me into this sittingduck position, for using me as some sort of stalking Horse in their war against President Austin, rage at myself for Having dismissed them as bumblers and letting them convince me so easily of the untruth of Elmo's earlier tales. I'd be damned if I'd let those bulky bastards -- by now all safely crouched in the outside trencHes, their trenches -- see me run. And still I wasn't shot down, though both Elmo and Fanninowicz had been fired on. Like their guns, the Mexican soldiers were staring wide-eyed at me -- my tall and thin black form, my doubtless dazzling exoskeleton. It was then I got the glimmer of inspiration and acted cm it instantly. Raising my arms wide and high, so that all of my cloak was thrown back and my exoskeleton completely in view, I thundered at my loudest, "I am Deathl Yo soy la Muerta! Soy el Esqueleto! Vamoosel" Then I brought my arms together and waved them Horizontally apart, as if brushing all the brass-armored bentbacks off the stage. They wavaed. One ran. A silver-helmeted officer drew a bead on him with a pistol and was himself zizzlingly transfixed on the red laser beam of cme of his own soldiers. Then they were all in flight, and I was tramping straight forward again, straight up the stairs leading to the spadous porch and the manse's double doors. These slowly opened outward at my approach, revealing that they were backed by great thicknesses of steeL I faced another curve of muzzles and of silver-armored, staring, bent-back soldiery. I scattered them as I had those outside and I followed them, still at my remorseless steady stride. I was beginning thoroughly to enjoy my role of Death, the Disperser of Armies. Then I realized I was doing exactly what Lamar and Company had wanted me to, winning them a bloodless battle. Even that didn't at once destroy my delight. Then I saw ahead of me a semicircle of glass cases ten feet high'. There were at least twenty of them. T haltecL Striking with all his fabled cunning and genius for ffie unexpected. Death Had after a fashion stopped me. EacK of the cases contained a life-size human figure in natural flesh tones and with Terran clothing that ranged in style over the last # years. The earliest or oldest were about six feet tall. Then as the eye ranged around the semicircle, they grew in height to eight feet and more. I recognized the Americans Kennedy and Johnson from my history prints. I realized I was looking at the presidents of Texas. They looked grimly back at me -- some old, some middle-aged, some almost young. There were handsome faces, harsh faces, faces jowled and tiny-eyed with dissipation and greed. In the dimness they seemed alive. I felt sure the earliest were wax. I was not so sure about the latter. I recalled how the early Russians had mummified the bodies, or at least stuffed the hides of their early illustrious dead. Then I heard a rasping voice and looked up. Four or five stories above me was a magnificent domed skylight of stained glass, made darkly colorful by the moonlight it transmitted. Curving down from beneath it in a wide and graceful spiral came a stairway railed with dark, delicate metal tracery. Here at least was a glimpse of fairyland. And also an ogre from same. An ogre from whose quilted bathrobe a jowled and purplish face protruded, inset with pig eyes and topped by tousled wffite hair and wearing askew a golden wreath. He leaned over the stair railing about a floor and a half above me, cradling in one be-blanketed arm an antique double-barreled shotgun. "Whar are my Mexican Houseboys?" he roared. "Wh'ar are you, you little skunks? They's an attack? Shoot down every Ranger or other rebellious bein' sete foot inside mah walls I Get the man with the base bullhorn! WHar's my praetorian guard? Souad the trumpet! Ah, thar's one of the assassins sent against me, sddnny bastard in a black minji suit, but it don't hide him from mah allseein' eyes!" I lunged rapidly sideways under the stairs. The parquetted spot on which I'd been standing was blasted. Two ricochets stung my forehead and side while at least one more plinked off my exoskeleton. A glass case rang. I raced toward the back of the manse, taking the avenue of retreat the silver-cuirassed Mexicans had used. Soon I had plunged into a dark, rather narrow, blessedly protective corridor. Behind me. President Austin's voice ranted, "Dead as a doornail, dead! Come on, you traitors all and taste the Old Man's wrath. Sound the alarum belli" Then a younger voice cut in. "There he isl Burn him down! But don't spoil His face! Get the other!" There was another shotgun blast, a scream, then even my corridor was red as Hell with leaked laser light -- just in time to show me, before collision did, that the corridor abruptly changed from a height of about fourteen feet to four and a half. The head space carried a moral so simple and carved so large that I had read it before the red light faded: I was on my hands and exoknees as fast as I could fall and scuttling forward. True, the "Get the other!" might not mean me, and even if it did, the "get" might not mean "burn down," but then again it might -- and I had already in the past two minutes learned something of Texas political acumen. I heard a dull crash behind -- Austin's body falling? Don't ask useless questions. Crawl faster, you idiot Thin! I do not know how long my quadruped scramble through the darkness lasted, surely much less time than it seemed then. I do know that I made an even number of right-angle turns and, by exercising choice at forks, managed to make as many leftas right-hand turns, ensuring that I was headed at the end in the same direction I had been at the beginning. Twice I half crawled, half tumbled down short stairs and once climbed up. More than once I gave thanks to Diana that my hands were homy palmed, that knee-plates covered my kneecaps and that my motors kept purring happily. I thanked her too that I had practiced crawling as well as walking, up in the centrifuge. I also gained a certain respect for the maze-running abilities of the Mexicans, who, surely often carrying trays of drinks and food, had presumably regularly treaded these inky corridors in the manse of the light-penurious Austin. Or had they used flashlights? Somehow that seemed unlikely, but I wished I had one now. T?rom time to time an actioninsulated comer of my mind thought thoughts: such as that the morale of the Rangers must be zero that they Hadn't overwhelmed the manse by themselves, but waited for the accident of my aid. But maybe it Bad been essential to keep the political war secret and not destroy this Texas White House. As I right-angled right after a particularly long stretch rf Mexican corridor, I heard a thumping scuttling biind me. A thin blue beam narrowly missed my withdrawing foot, and there was the faint smell of singed plastic where it struck the wall. A voice rebuked, "Cut your power, you dumb-Headed lightning plumber! Order is to paralyze him, not fry him -- less we have to." I was not greatly reassured. Thereafter I kept hearing the sounds of my pxirsuit. It did not gain on me. I was grimly pleased that my motored titanium was performing as well as their flerii. Suddenly the ceiHng rose. I was in a large room dimly lit by moonlight coming through windows and open Texan and Mexican doors. Food-smell and round hanging shapes suggested a kitchen. I lifted to my feet, feeling a surge of dizziness and weakness, but I mastered them, tonguing down pills and water. I made for the Texan door in great strides, crashing down pots and cutlery. I heard angry calls from the crawl space behind, tut I was out of line with it. I stepped outside. I was on a narrow porch and at the head' of a steep flight of stairs. I heard laugh -- and I stopped. A few #mrds beyond the foot of the stairs stood a huge white horse with black harness and silverlooking bit and Harness rings. Astride it was a figure all in black, from under whose black slouch hat silvery hair cascaded. Then Rachel Vachel's face lifted out of shadow and in a bhir of nrovement her black-gauntleted hands drew lightning pistols from the black Holsters at her side and directed them toward me. I had never faced, it seemed to me, anything icy as their needle muzzles and Her gaze. Of course, I told myself bitterly, she had been in on my betrayal from the start, casually using her seemingly naive wiles to brainwash me and soften me up for her father. I ought to have known you couldn't ever trust a society pinko. I tasted bitterness, and not only from an anti gray pill that had been slow in going down. I heard rapid steps behmd me -- two sets of them -- and cries erf, "There's the black bastard!" "We got him! -- don't move a muscle, Skfamyf" My arms were grasped from behind, and a sharp muzzle pressed against my temple. Then with only the faintest whisper of ionization and only its most ghostly acid perfinne, two tenuous needle-beams sprang from tfie tips of Racfid VacHel's pistols and bypassed my cfieeks indies to dtiier side. THe grip on my arms relaxed: tKe muzzle ceased to imck my temple, and tiiere were scrft yet ponderous tliuds on tHe porch' to either side of me. ( C reetings, Captain Skull," she called up to me. "Now hustle down fast and Kop up behind me. Those two Rangers are out for a half hour, but even with the morons opposing us, it's a sin to waste time." Suppressing surpnise and other emotions for the moment, I took the stairs two steps at a time, watching my feet narrowly, but calling back, "You mean we can escape? The Rangers haven't the manse encircled?" "Hell, no. Like all Texas wars, this little scuffle's been all false front. Kick up your leg now and give a jump with' the other. I'll yank your shoulder." "But Rachel," I asked as I complied and found myself astride quivering horseflesh' and my exosternum pressed to girl, "How did you know you'd find me here? How did you guess your father would use me to -- " "Easy as guessin' a rat'll bite," she answered scornfully. "Now wrap your arms around me. All you got to do is figure out the sneakiest, safest course, and you Read the facts Behind the fiction WnXT I.BT, Sdence Edltox (Of Galaxy, tella tke most astonndlns trne story yon evrr read! In his rew book he tells you all about the T#cy latert advances la rocket rcseazch and the breathtaking adventures cspcrienced by our uetronaata In outer aiiacBt Ton'll nad about ttB developnient of tte Sputnik, Explorer, and Vanguard rockets, end his excltins BceUtlfHi.s cf fipaaa eiploratlw ta come after we have reached the moont Ad edTonce review frf this Huireineiital record of rocketry In today's world says It "contains all the wonder, the eicllomcDt. the ehallagea ef this growing field... lights the Imaglnatloo." wbut:b! Ftdiy fUnstroted wdtii M arnszlng photognphs and detailed drawings. Almost # pages #. # Madison Ave., New York # (#-#I order for # plus tax where required. Refund of purchase price euaranteed If I return book within # days. got Daddy's mind read to tKe base of his spinal cord. See, I even stole your luggage and got it at my saddlebow. How's that for service?" She turned in Ker saddle. Her pale, thinly, smiling face was close to mine, 'ow confess, Scully," she said. "Aren't you just a mite surprised to discover that the siUy little theater gal and giggly Governor's daughter is in actuality Our Lady of Sudden Death, the Black Madonna of the Bent-Back Underground?" "Well, yes," I said truthfully. "I mean no..." laughs. "You fnenfolk -- " she began. Then her eyes, scanning my forehead, showed sudden concern. "You're hurt, my lover." Evidently the shotgun ricochet had drawn blood. "It's nothing," I told her. "It had better be," she told me seriously, "because you got a lot more to do tonight. Pull your cloak and hood around you, your bones gleam too bright. And hang on tight now," she added, turning front again and picking up the reins. "Oh you can feel me up a bit if you get the chance -- wow, your skeleton's still like ice. But hang on for your life -- because it's a far greater cause than even my lover's precious existence that's now at stake!" She touched with her heels the great white beast's flanks, and we were soon going through tree shadows and silvery spaces at a ponderous gallop, which caused me to jounce considerably and not only lock my arms hand to elbow around her waist, but also steady my flapping legs by clenching them against the great heaving white barrel below me. In my brain there had gathered a certain bewilderment. "Where are we going?" I asked innocently. She replied, "To the central point of tonight's riotous revolutionary assembly, which happens to be the bandstand comer of the Greasertown cemetery." We galloped on through the moonlit night, my mind now truly a welter of confusion. r I New subscriptions and changes of j address require # weeks to process!  'here were four bids, and there whipped before we startl" He should have been only three, struck the table with a ringing Only three firms in the country thud. "But what is the anomalous were capable of making so miniaintrusion, the small envelope bid, lurized a control station. Dinneen?" Three bids were in quite heavy "It's from an M. M. McGrudpnckets. The fourth was in a slim er," said Colonel Dinneen, "The "Ah, here are the bids from Miecution Here. TKe Joker Act was pro Machinists Amalgamated, set up for just such st uff as this, from Intensive Instrumentation, There has to be a ceiling put on said Colonel Ludenschlager. "It "There was a certain McGruder isn't likely that any of them will in Manhattan when I was a boy," be less than two years, and we Colonel Schacfameister smiled. "I need it within two weeks. We are spent many pleasant moments in his, ah, Hippodrome, I believe he called it. It was a narrow place off a narrow cigar store, and only about three could get in it at one time, if they were small, and we were. Best sihow I ever saw for a dime,' thought is tiie address of this one?" "Here in D. C.," said Dinneen. "It would be a rundown address even without the ending 'Apt. #, room #-E, use cellar steps rff small alley.' Some address! And the phone number of the RowdyDow Bar and Grill is given. It's written in an old and probably insane hand. We will prosecute with compassion, possibly." The chime chimed for #:#. It was opening time. And they opiened the bids. Th quickly made the basic resume : #. Micro Machinists Amalgamated. Basic Module: #. Estimated Time: # months. Exceptions and Alternatives: #S# (detailed). Follow-up Units: # ea. Estimated Time: # days each for first #, grading down to #I days each for additionaL #. Intensive Instrumentaticm. Basic Module: #. Estimated Time: #I days. Elxceptions and Alternatives: # (detailed). Follow-Up Units: # ea. Estimated Time: # days each for first #, # days each for additionaL #. Dow-Mec-Tec. Basic Mod-j ule: #. Estimated' Time: # months. Exceptions and Altematives: # (detailed). Follow-Up Units: # Estimated Time: #I days each for first #, # days each for additional. #. M. 'M.' McGruder. Basic Module: #. Estimated Time: # hours. Exceptions and Alternatives: none (undetailed). FollowUp Units: #)# ea. Estimated Time: # hours each -- "this keeps going on as long as I live or as long as you buy them, whichever is first. Note: Got one made already. Come try it. I need the #. I don't see how anybody can make them cheaper than this." "We run into the impKjssible," said Ludenschlager sadly. "We need one within two weeks or we may as well forget the program. And if we forget the program, we may as well forget everything. It is not for personal aggrandizement that we seek this (except for Diiuieen a little), but for the good of our country and the world. There has to be a way out of this delay." "How about McGruder?" Schachmeister lauighed sourly. "Oh, we'U prosecute him under the Joker Act, of course," Ludenschlager growled, "but now we have the taller thing to tackle. We have to find the way. Two years will be too late; we'll be done for by then. Two weeks will almost be too late. We must somdiow break the time barrier in this." "We're whipped, we're whipped!" Dinneen wailed, "and our enemies will rejoice over us." He turned on three toes and strode gloomily out of the room. (t'T'he Covenant," it said. "Large, hard-roasted, deoiled, white peanuts under the Goober John trade name. Three a day, and they must be Goober John Number Ones. Failure to provide them will void the Covenant." "There will be no failure," said Malcomb 'the Marvelous' McGruder. "It shall be done." "We like-stuff pledge fulfill the Covenant," it said. T'he micro-miniaturized control station, the "bullet brain," had to handle thirteen data flows at once. It had to do other things, including the monitoring and inhibiting of the world. It must be practically indestructible. And it had to be about the size of an eraser on a pencil. This small size was of the greatest importance. The smallest model of this which wetild handle such data properly was about a cubic meter, and it weighed a thousand kilograms. And it was itself a miniaturization. The project is still classified, so we cannot in conscience give deep details of it. The project is still active, and perhaps an answer can be found for it this second time. Ah well, we lost the first race, and the most populous one-third of our nation; but we lost it hard. We had them near beaten for a little while there. ready. It wM probably be far too late, it win likely do no good at all, but you never know. The slimmest hope still remains... , But now they were looking very hard for that answer the first time: the three colonels, the High Commission of the colonels, the potential saviors of their country and the world. It was not for personal glory they sout this (except Dinneen a little) but for the ultimate good of the ultimate number. Colonel Dinneen strode up and down endless corridors, booming like a canary in his odd voice. He didn't want the thing in two years, he wanted it in two minutes, right now. Colonel Ludenschlager shuffled old brain-buster notes looking for a miracle. He had an impediment there; he didn't believe in miracles. Colonel Schachmeister walked desolately through the city, praying for Ae instant miniaturized control station. He walked and walked; but where did he walk? "It is my unconscious leading me somewhere," he mumbled. "And I will follow my unconscious whprever it leads, like a man in a eam." That Schachmeister was an unconscious phony. It wasn't his unconscious leading him anywhere! It was his conniving own self walking furtively where his own dishonesty would not allow him to walk openly. And he had that address graven on his brain by a micro-styhis. There was something about a three-foot-wide Hippodrome from his bo # rhood ; there was something of the credence in the incredible: and both these things were shameful to him as a man of science, and a colonel moreover. Well, it was a diabby enough ndiborhood. The alley was worse, and yet even this was not the final alley. He found it then, the "small alley," hardly a skunk track. He followed it. He knocked crunchingly on a door and near lost his hand in the termite-eaten wood. "Be careful there!" an ancient voice Matted out like slats falling down in an old bed. "Those are friends of my own people, and my people will not have them discommoded. After all, they are quiet, they do no harm, and they eat only wood." "It -- it's the same McGruder It is Malcomb 'the Marvelous' McGruder himself, the Grand Master of McGruder's Marvels!" Colonel Schachmeister detonated in wonder. "Oh sure, little boy," came the I wonderful voice like an old organ ing the dust off itself in doing so. "And it's the same little Heinie Schachmeister! Why aren't you in school today, Heinie? Oh, I notice that you have grown, and perhaps you are too old for school now." "It's marvelous to see you again. Marvelous!" Schachmeister breathed in awe. "I had no idea that you were the same one, or that you were still alive." "Come in, little Heinie. And what are you doing? I have never seen your name in the Flea-Bag, so I suppose you have failed in your early ambition." "Ah, McGruder, I don't know what the Flea-Bag is, and I forget what early ambition of mine you refer to." "The Flea-Bag, Heinie, is a mimeographed sheet that still circulates among the members of our dwindling profession. And your early ambition was to grow up and have fleas of your own." "Wish I had done it, McGruder, wish I had done it, especially on days like this. Some of my happiest hours were spent watdiing McGmder's Marvels, that greatest of oil Flea Circuses, in that little hide in the walL" "In the Hippodrome, you mean, Heinie? Do you remember the Coaidunan Set?" "Yes, yes, and the flea up on the coachman's seat, in livery, and with the whip! McGruder, vhen you screwed the three sections of the microscope together, you could see the very braiding of that coachman's whip. And the flea in harness! The harness was perfect, and had little bells on it. The bells had clappers, and you could hear them jingle when you screwed that little thing into your ear. And the flea in harness was shod, with real horse-shoes, or fleashoes." CtTVyrore, Heinie, more! The shoes had authentic calks on them, and nails! And the nails were of no ordinary sort, but were ancient horseshoe nails with the oblong wedge-shaped heads. You could see that when you screwed the fourth section into the microscope. And you remember the lady fleas inside the coach, Heinie?" "Yes, yes, dressed in old Empire style with the high hair on them, and the flounce stuff. And when you screwed the little thing into your nose you could smell their perfume. What was it, McGruder?" "Ptintemps. And you may not know it, but there were eit petticoats on each of those lady fleas, and the microscope lace on even the inmost of them was done with loving care and surpasg detail, more than nine hundred loops on the bottom round in the style that is called punto a iroppo. Your eyes used to boggle at my things, little Heinie." "My mind boggles at something now. That was forty years ago. McGruder, I know you were good, but this passes reason! You still have your little lathes and turners and instruments here, but you did not make a miniaturized control station with such!" "Of course not, Heinie. The detailing for the little control station had to be a thousand times finer, actually eight thousand times finer, than anything I could do on my own little lathes. I'm surprised you should ask such a silly question, Heinie." "Is that the control station there. Marvelous?" "That's it, Heinie. Take it along and try it and send me the twenty-four dollars if it works. I'll have another one this time tomorrow if you wish. It's nice to have seen you. I'm always happy when the little boys come back to see me again." The Marvelous McGruder still had a certain threadbare elegance about him. "McGniuleir how did you make the COndXOl station? " "Trade spcrct, Heinie. You remember tn.y pattex. Euetythiag was always a trade secret." "McGcuder, I'm going to ask usked anyone in my liie. Did your fleasy sonvehoWr isianufaeture tbait "Certainly not, Heinie! Whafs the matter vdtJa you anyhow? Wbat dothey Tnatfc ttp colonels out q nowadays? No wonder we're in tcoubde! You know how hard it is, to get fleas to wear clothes for even a few seconds? You know how hard it is to teade them even the most simple trick? Heinie, fleas axe stupid, and so ace youl No, I will settle that. Fleas did not, in any way at all, have arLything to do with making that mkuatnre control station. I didn't have much to do with it myself. Subcontracted it, really. NOp I will not gve you any more information about it. Take it and try it. Bring ms the twenty-four dollars if you ace satisfied. And now you had better get along or your keiferin of a motiiet will be after me for letting you loiter so long in my place. Oh, I forgot! You're a big boy now." Colonel Schaciuiieister left the shabby elegant old man, Malcomb 'the Maxvdous McQcuder; and he took the miniaturized contrcd station along with him. He tocdc it to a most secret laboratory to try it withhis peers. It worked. tt'he Covenant," it said. "There are only tmentyseven Gooba John Number Qae peanuts left here. These will last only nine days. Replenish the stock, McGruder, os the Covenant is in danger." "I'll remember to get a package of them at the Rawdy-Dow today," McGruder piomised. XleU, there were tbdz of the "bullet brains" ia operation now, and oui enenoies could ao longer rejoice over us. Their oan spectacur stunt, ld been inhibited; their own. dastardly program had been paralyzed. With another thirty of the "btdlet brains" in operation, the Hi Commission of the colons, the Secret Saviors of the World, anywhere in that world. It was of most amazing and curious effect that such small things could k such; and the secret of it was in tWW very smallness. Now, the manner by which they did this -- Not No! No! We may not teK itl It ia more than classified; it is tntal unda the ban. It is still posable that the thing maty he done oon more; StiU uvaa#nil tha.t It wmy yet save what # kit of uw I But it was going well for the colonels in that time. And yet they wanted them faster than one a day. "We have no desire for personal gain or glory," said Dinneen, "except tnyself a little. But if that crazy old man can make one a day, it should be possible for us to make a thousand. Go back to him, Schachmeister. Find out how he does it We have spied on him, of course, but we can't understand it at all. The control stations seem to form themselves on his table there. They continue to take form even while he is asleep. And there's a fxuther mystery. He never checked out prints of the larger model that was to be miniaturized. What does he work from?" "Is it true, Schachmeister, that he once operated a flea circus in New York?" Ludensdilager asked. "Yes, it's true enough. He's the same man." "Can there be some possible connection? No, no, don't laugh! is already 'happening." "No, men, there isn't a connection. He said to me, and he was speaking the truth, that fleas did not, in any way, have anything to do with the control stations. And, yet, I remember an ugly smear against McGruder from the early years -- " "What is that, Schachmeister?" Dinneen demanded avidly. "That he sometimes usa! mechanical fleas. I did not believe it." "Go to him, Schachmeister," Dinneen and Ludenschlager bolli begged. "If you cannot find out how he makes them, at least ask if he cannot make them faster." tC'he Covenant," it said. "There are only three Goober Number One peanuts left here. Replenish the stock, McGruder, or the Covenant will come to an end this very day. I'd get you an extension for the' affection I have for you, but the numerous members of the smaller orders will not hear of it. There are seven orders, as you know, each smaller than the other. Sometimes they are hard to deal with, particularly the fovir smaller orders which I cannot see myself. Today, McGruder, Goober Johns!" "I swear I will remember it," McGruder swore. "I'll get a package at the Rowdy-Dow this very afternoon." C olonel Schachmeister went back to see Malcomb 'the Marvelous' McGruder. McGruder was no longer shabby. He was the cream of old con men with an ivory-colored topper and canarycolored vest and gloves. He gestured with a silver-headed cane. He welcomed Heinie Schachmeister with incredible flourish, and Sdhachmeister came right to the point "Will you not tell me how you make the stations, Marvelous? It is important." "No. I will not tell you. It is important to me, that I slice up this fat hog for myself, and twenty-four dollar slices please me mightily." "Marvelous, you did not check out a set of plans for this thing. From what do you miniaturize?" "Well, I was going to, Heinie. I went by the place where the plans were to be had. But I found that the prints for that gadget weighed four hundred pounds, and also that I would have to put down a token deposit of # to check out a set of them. Both these things were too heavy for me. So I slipped a few of my small associates into a packet of plans (I always was a tricky man with my hands, # rou know), and they recorded the information in their own way." "Your small associates -- ah -- how long did it take them to record the plans?" "About as long as it took me to light a cigar." "And how many of these associates were there?" "Don't know, Heinie. They were sixth and seventh order associates, so there must have been quite a few of them." "What do they look like, McGruder?" "Don't know. I've never seen them. I can see only the first order ones, and the second order ones through a strong microscope. And each order can see only two orders smaller than itself, by using extreme magnification." "They are not fleas?" "Of course not, Heinie! What's the matter with you?" "Are they mechanical?" "No, not medhanicaL But they are mechanically inclined, in the smaller orders of them." "How did you become -- ah -- associated with them. Marvelous?" "One of the first order ones was a friend of a flea who once worked with me. The flea introduced us, and we rather took to each other. We both know how to latoh onto a good thing when we see it." "Marvelous, would it be possible to make more than one control station a day." "Sure. I just didn't want to milk it dry too soon. Get you a dozen a day, if you want them. AH it'll take is a bigger sack of peanuts." "McGruderl Did I hear yoti rit?" "I don't know what you heard, Heinie. I said. that, all it: would take would, he. a bigger sack, of peanuts. I'll liagte taielse oL the coHtrola for you, tomorrow, but there's no discount for qurBith. I stick by bid., Twentjr-four dollars each," "Miarvclous,. IVarvelous,this , is meffveloual" Colonel Schaehr meisc bbeced, sRod. harattled away from thereto' bring, the ad news' ta hie assoeietes. "This puts us over the hump! Two. days, and we will haue the world by its woolly tail!" CqIqubI Dinneem Glattered, "We will have suiciait GOvecagenDW to impose our. will am all naticnia, Fon theu own good', we will compel them away frame their, ecrom." "Ws hane no thougjit of personal benefit," Colonel Ludeaisehlagpr exad with; a jjngling hiss, " twgrep tt Colonel IDihneenv a Uttie. We will foree-feedi the world: om all benigpily andl kindine'.gndi iiHTriMWgni ting. tmti gqod will Wer will teachi the woqdJd true happiness and order,, now that we will have the: power to dm so." "We be the lords of the urorid now." dried: Goloixel' Schachmeister, "the High Commissioii. of Galbnela, smdurs. of the. country and' theworld. The President will be glad to shine our very shines;, it will tfiach hmn blesBcd: fimnility. We will ape the whole woriri IHse cb im emr hmadbWe will run the world, now, and all must comadownita our spring, to drink. Ah,, but the water is sweet,, and the people will come to. lave it!" The Greeks named it. bybria. And. in. the Qzarks they call: it Peacock Fever... It was Pride. It was the Grand Arrogance,, the Warrentlesft Assumption,, the bursting summertime of Giant Pride... And: it would have its fall. ( Covenant!" it thundered lilm.' acorns rat-Hing oir the roof; and: MeGruder almost didoft need, the piece screwed, iota, his sairtmhear it. "These, aren't' Goober Xobn. Numher. Ones!" "Ah, they were out of Goober Johns at the. Rowdy.-Dow;." the Marvelous McGcuder soothed. "These ane Ariaona Spanish. Pea nuts, package by the SnackSack people. Try themr... They're even hfittm' than Gochec Jphns,." "The Covenant, is voided!" it said. SHdl.y... "The involvement with, humanity is. ended." And. Maloomb 'the. Mor.veloua' McGiradsr was never able to., esr tafahsh contact with an.y of them again; so that, instead of twelve of them that day, there were no contcol. stations; at all for ever;:more. And those alread.y in' use blinked out ttlVAcGrudar, hey McGruder!" came ta hiou "Ah, little Heinie, why are you not in sdmol this day? Qh. I forget always, yoo ere a big boy now. It is all ended, Heinie, all ended. The twenty-foor dollars a day and everything s gone. I will have to live by my wits again, and I always hate tn get a comfortable coo that has kept me." "McGruder," the frantic Colonel Schachmoster moaned, "it isn't merely that there will be no more of the stations, it is that those already in service have gene dead or disappeared also. This is irot possible. They were made to operate forever." "Don't diink so, Heinie, not after the Covenant was broken. I think that the guys in them quit when they heard about the wrong peanuts." "What guys? What peanuts? We've lost the jump on them, McGruder. A third of our country will be gone before we can institute a holding action, without the miniature stations. What made them go dead, McGruder?" "I figure it all out now, Keinie. They didn't make any little control stations at all. They took all of us in. They didn't any more know how to make little control stations than I did, but they were smart enough to fake it and make them work. I tell you a thing, Heinie, and you write it down so you remenDer it when you get big: never trust a bag you can't see." "But they worked. Marvelous! They wtM'ked perfectly till tiiey went dead or disappeared. They handled all the data flows perfectly. They responded, they monitored, they inhibited. Certainly they were control stations." "Not really, Heinie. Hey, this old town will be gone in another five minutes, won't it! I bet that one took out thirty square blocks. Man, feel the hot blast from it even here. Your sleeve's on fire, Heinie. Your mother will scold and moan when she sees how it's burned. See, this is the way it was -- You know the man who made all the fancy little cars so cheap, and nobody knew how he did it?" "No, no, McGruder, what is it? Oh, the asphalt is flowing like water in the streets ! What do you mean?" "A guy that bought one of those little cars lifted up the hood one day. It didn't have a motor in it. It didn't have any works at all in it. It's the same as these little control stations were. It just had a little guy in there pedaling the pedals to make it go. Now they quit pedaling, Hnie.      I "Then, the planet had no name. It circles a star which in # lay beyond the fringe of known space, a distance of nearly forty light-years from Sol. The star is a K#, somewhat redder than Sol, somewhat smaller. The planet, from its primary in a reasonably circular orbit, is a trifle cold for human tastes. In the year # one Louis Gridley Wu happened to be passing. The emphasis on accident is intended. In a universe the size of ours almost anything that can happen, will. Take the soincidence of his meeting -- But we'll get to that. Louis Wu was one hundred and eighty years old. As a regular user of boosterspice, he didn't show his years. If he didn't get bored first, or broke, he might reach a thousand. "But," he sometimes told himself, "not if I have to put up with any more cocktail parties, or bandersnatch hunts, or painted flatlanders swarming through an anarchy park too small for them by a factor of ten. Not if I have to live through another one-night love affair or another twenty-year marriage or another twenty-minute wait for a transfer booth that blows its zap just as it's my turn. And people. Not if I have to live with people, day and night, all those endless centuries." When he started to feel like that, he left. It had happened three times in his life, and now a fourth. Presumably it would keep happening. In such a state of anomia, of acute anti-everything, he was no good to anyone, especially his friends, most especially himself. So he left. In a small but adequate spacecraft, his own, he left everything and everyone, heading outward for the fringe of known space. He would not return imtil he was desperate for the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice. On the second trip he had gritted his teeth and waited until he was desperate for the sight of a kzinti face. That was a long trip, he remembered. And, because he had only been three and a half months in space on this fourth trip, and because his teeth still snapped together at the mere memory of a certain human voice... because of these things, he added, "I think this time I'll wait till I'm desperate to see a kdatlyno. Female, of course." Few of his friends guessed the wear and tear these trips saved him. And them. T Te spent the months reading, while his library played orchestrated music. By now he was well clear of known space. Now he turned the ship ninety degrees, beginning a wide circular arc with' Sol at the center. He approached a certain K# star. He dropped out of hyperdrive well clear of the singularity in hyperspace which surrounds any large mass. He accelerated into the system on his main thruster, sweeping the space ahead of him with the deep-radar. He was not looking for habitable planets. He was looking for Slaver stasis boxes. If the hyperwave pulse returned no echo, he would accelerate until he passed the star, and keep accelerating until he could shift to hyperdrive. The velocity would stay with him, and he could use it to coast through the next system he tried, and the next, and the next. It saved fuel. He had never found a Slaver stasis box. It did not stop him from looking. As he passed through the # tem, the deep-radar showed him planets like pale ghosts, light gray circles on the white screen. The K# sun was a wide gray disk, darkening almost to black at the center. The near-black was degenerate matter, compressed past the point where electron orbits collapse entirely. He was well past tlie K# sun, and still accelerating, wHen ttk screen sKowed a tiny black fleck. "No system is perfect, of course," lie muttered as Be turned off the drive. He talked to himself a good deal, out here where noboiy could interrupt him. "It usually saves fuel," he told himself a week later. By then he was out of the singularity in clear space. He took the ship into fiyperdrive, circled halfway round the system, and began decelerating. The velocity he'd built up during those first two weeks gradually left him. Somewhere near where he'd found a black speck in the deep-radar projection, he slowed to a stop. "Though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box. But the fleck was there again, a black dot on the gray ghost of a planet. Louis Wu moved in. The world looked something like Earth. It was nearly the same size, very much the same shape, somewhat the same color. There was no moon. Louis used his telescope on the planet and whistled appreciatively. Shredded white doud over imisty blue . , . faint continental outlines... a hurricane whorl near the equator. The ice caps looked big, but there would be warm climate near the equator. The air looked sweet and noncarcinogenic on the spectrograph. And nobody on itf Not a soulf No next door neighbors. No Voices. No faces. "What the hell," he chortled. "I've got my box. FU just spend the rest of my vacation here. No men. No women. No children." He frowned and rubbed the fringe of hair along his jaw. "Am I being hasty? Maybe I should knock." But he scaimed the radio bands and got nothing. Any civilized planet radiates like a small star in the radio range. Moreover, there was no sign of civilization, even from a hundred miles up. "Great I Okay, first FIl get that old stasis box -- " He was sure it was that. Nothing but stars and stasis boxes were dense enough to show black in the reflection of a hyperwave pulse. He followed the image around the bulge of the planet. It seemed the planet had a moon after ah. The moon was twelve hundred miles up, and it was ten feet across. "Now why," He wondered aloud, "would the Slavers have put it in orbit? It's too easy to find. They were in a war, for Finagle's sake! And why would it stay here?" The little moon was still a couple of thousand miles away, invisible to the naked eye. The scope showed it clearly enough'. A silver sphere ten feet through', with no marks on it. been there," said Louis to himself, said he. "And if you'll believe that, you'll believe anything. Something would have knocked it down. Dust, a meteor, the solar wind. Tnuctip soldiers. A magnetic storm. Nah." He ran his fingers through straight black hair grown too long. "It must have drifted in from somewhere else. Recently. Wha..." Another ship, small and conical, had appeared behind the silvery sphere. Its hull was green, with darker green markings. II ( C "TNamn," said Louis. He didn't recognize the make. It was no human ship. "Well, it could be worse. They could have been people." He used the com laser. The other ship braked to a stop. In courtesy, so did Louis. "Would you believe it?" he demanded of himself. "Three years total time I've spent looking for stasis boxes. I finally find one, and now something else wants it too!" The bright blue spark of another laser glowed in the tip of the alien cone. Louis listened to the autopilot-computer chuckling to itself as it tried to untangle the signals in an unknown laser beam. At least they did use lasers, not telepathy or tentacle-waving or rapid changes in skin color. A face appeared on Louis's screen. It was not the first alien he had seen. This, like some others, had a recognizable head: a cluster of sense organs grouped around a mouth, with room for a brain. Trinocular vision, he noted: the eyes set deep in sockets, well protected, but restricted in range of vision. Triangular mouth, too, with yellow, serrated bone knives showing their edges behind three gristle lips. Definitely, this was an unknown species. "Boy, are you ugly," Louis refrained from saying. The alien's translator might be working by now. His own autopilot finished translating the alien's first message. It said, "Go away. This object belongs to me." "Remarkable," Louis sent back. "Are you a Slaver?" The being did not in the least resemble a Slaver. "That word was not translated," said the alien. "I reached the artifact before you did. I will fight to keep iL" Louis scratched at his chin, at two weeks' growth of bristly beard. His ship had very little to fight with. Even the fusion plant which powered the thruster was designed with safety in mind. A laser battle, fought with com lasers turned to maximum, would be a mere endurance test; and he'd lose, for the alien ship had more liia to 'absorb more heat. He had ho weapons per se. Presumably the alien did. But the stasis box was a big one. The tnuctipun-Slaver war had wiped out most of the intelligent and a Half years ago. Countless minor battles must Have occurred before a Slaver-developed final weapon was used. Often the Slavers, losing a battle, had stored valuables in a stasis box, and hidden it against tlie day they would again be of use. No time passed inside a closed and a half years old had emerged still fresh from its hiding place. Weapons and tools showed no trace of rust. Once a stasis box had disgorged a small, tarsierlike sentient being, still alive. That former slave had lived a strange life before the aging process claimed her, the last of her species. Slaver stasis boxes were beyond value. It was known that the tnuctipun, at least, had known the secret of direct conversion of matter. PerKaps their enemies Had loo. Someday, in a stasis box lomewhere outside known space, rucK a device would be found. Then fusion power would be as obsolete as internal combustion. And this, a sphere ten feet in diameter, must be the largest itasis box ever found. ttT too will fight to keep the artifact," said Louis. "But consider this. Our species has met once, and will meet again, regardless of who takes the artifact now. We can be friends or enemies. Why should we risk this relationThe alien sense-cluster gave away nothing. "What do you propose?" "A game of chance, with the risks even on both sides. Do you play games of chance?" "Emphatically yes. The process of living is a game of chance. To avoid chance is insanity." "That it is. Hmmm." Louis regarded the alien head that seemed to be all triangles. He saw it abruptly whip around, tlick, to face straight backward, and snap back in the same instant. The sight did something to the pit of his stomach. "Did you speak?" the alien asked. "No. Won't you break your neck that way?" "Your question is interesting. Later we must disctiss anatomy. I have a proposal." "Fine." "We shall land ort the world below us. We will meet between our ships. I will do you the courtesy of emerging first. Can you bring your translator?" He could connect the computer with his suit radio. "Yes." "We will meet between our ships and play some simple game, familiar to neither of us, depending solely on chance. Agreed?" "Provisionally. WHat game?" The image on the screen rippled with diagonal lines. Something interferring with' the signal? It cleared quickly. 'Tiiere k a mathematics game," said ttie alien. "Our mathematics wUI certainly be similar." "True." Though Loum had heard of some decidedly peculiar twists in alien mathematios. "The game involves a screee." The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Loius could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each'. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol faUs looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even." Tfie image rippled, tHen deared. "Agreed," said Lous. He was a bit disappointed in tKe simplidty of tKe game. "We sKallbotH accderate away from tKe artifact. Will you follow me down?" "I will," said T.niiigTKe image disappeared. Ill T ouis Wu scratched at a week's ' growtK of beard. WKat a way to greet an alien ambassador! In the worlds of men Louis Wu dressed impeccably; but out here he felt free to look like death warmed over, all the time. But how was a -- Trinoc supposed to know that he diould have shaved? No, that wasn't tKe problem. Was he fool or genius? He had friends, many of them, with habits like his own. Two had disappeared decades ago; he no longer remembered their names. He remembered only that each had gone hunting stasis boxes in this direction and that each had neglected to come back. Had they met alien ships? There were any number of other explanations. Half a year or more spent alone in a singleship was a good way to find out whether you liked yourself. If you decided you didn't, there was no point in returning to tiie worlds of men. But there were aliens out here Armed. One rested in oriiit five hundred miles ahead of s slup, with a valuable artifact halfway betwe en . Still, gambling was safer than fi ghting Louis Wu waited for the alien's next move. That move was to drop like a rock. The alien ship must have used at least twenty gees of purii. After a moment of shock, Louis followed under the same acceleration, protected by his cabin gravity. Was the alien testing his maneuverability? Possibly not. He seemed contemptuous of tricks. Louis, trailing the alien at a goodly distance, was now much' closer to the silver sphere. Suppose he just turned ship, ran fca" the artifact, strapped it to his hull and kept running? Actually, that wouldn't work. He'd have to slow to reach the sphere; the alien wouldn't have to slow to attack. Twenty gees was close to his ship's limit. Running might not be a bad idea, though'. WKat guarantee had he of tlie alien's good faith? What if the alien "cheated"? That risk could be minimized. His pressure suit had sensors to monitor his body functions. Louis set the autopilot to blow the fusion plant if his heart stopped. He rigged a signal button on his suit to blow the plant whether His heart failed or not. The alien ship burned bright orange as it Hit air. It fell free and then slowed suddenly a mile over tKe ocean. "SKow-off," Louis muttered and prepared to imitate tKe maneuver. 'He conical ship showed no exhaust. Its drive must be either a reactionless drive, like his own, or a kzin-style induced gravity drive. Both were neat and clean, silent, safe to bystanders and highly advanced. Islands were scattered across the otean. The alien circled, chose one at seeming random, and landed like a feather along a bare shoreline. Louis followed him down. There was a bad moment while he waited for some tmimaginable weapon to fire from the groimded ship, to tear him flaming from the sky while his attention was distracted by landing procedures. But he landed without a jar, several hundred yards from the alien cone. "An explosion will destroy both our ships if I am harmed," he told the alien via signal beam. "Our species seem to think alike. I will now descend." Louis watched him appear near the nose of his ship, in a wide circular airlock. He watched the alien drift gently to the sand. Then He clamped His Helmet down and entered the airlock. Had he made the right decision? Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds. "But I'd hate to go Home without that box," he said. In nearly two hundred years of life, Ke had never done an#rthing as important as finding a stasis box. He had made no discoveries, won no elective offices, overthrown no governments, then this was lus big chance. "Even odds," He said, and turned on the intercom as He descended. His muscles and semicircular canals registered about a gee. A hundred feet away, waves slid hissing up onto pure white sand. The waves were green and Huge, perfect for riding; the beacK a definite beer party beach. Later, perhaps he would ride those waves to shore on his belly, if the air checked out and the vater was free of predators. He hadn't had time to give the planet a thorough checkup. Sand tugged at his boots as fie went to meet the alien. The alien was five feet talL He had looked much taller descending from his ship, but tfiat was because he was mostly leg. More than three feet of skiimy leg, a torso like a beer barrel, and no neck. Impossible that his neckless neck should be so supple. But the chrome yellow skin fell in thick rolls around the bottom of Eis head, hiding anatomical details. His sujt was transparent, a roughly alien-shaped balloon, constricted at the shoulder, above and below the complicated elbow joint, at the wrist, at hip and knee. Air jets showed at wrist and ankle. Tools hung in loops at the chest. A back pack hung from the neck, under the suit. Louis noted all these tools with trepidation; any one of them could be a weapon. I I T e'xpted that you would be taller," said the alien. "A laser screen doesn't tell much, does it? I think my translator may have mixed up right with left, too. Do you have the coin?" "The scree?" The alien produced it. "'Shall there be no preliminary talk? My name is scree." "My machine can't translate that. Or pronounce it. My name is Louis. Has your species met others besides mine?" "Yes, two. But I am not an expert in that field of knowledge." "Nor am I. Let's leave the politenesses to the exjjerts. We're here to gamble." "Choose your syahol," said ffie alien, and handed him the coin. Louis looked it over. It was a lens of platinum or something similar, sharp-edged, with the three-clawed hand of his new gambling partner on one side and a planet, with heavy ice caps outlined, decorating the other. Maybe they weren't ice caps, but continents. He held the coin as if trying to choose. Stalling. Those gas jets seemed to be attitude jets, but maybe not. Suppose he won? Would he win only the chance to be murdered? But they'd both die if his heart stopped. No alien could have guessed what kind of weapon would render him helpless with"I choose the planet. You flip first." The alien tossed the coin in the direction of Louis's ship. Louis's eyes followed it down, and he took two steps to retrieve it. The alien stood beside him when he rose. "Hand," he said. "My turn." He was one down. He tossed the coin. As it spun, gleaming, he saw for the first time that the alien ship was gone, "What gives?" he demanded. "There is no need for us to die," said the alien. It held something that had hung in a loop from its chest. "This is a weapon, but both will die if I use it. Please lo not try to reacH your ship. Louis touched the button that would blow His power plant. "My ship lifted when you tumnl your head to follow the screee. I ly now my ship is beyond range Ilf any possible explosion you can bring to bear. There is no need for us to die, provided you do not iry to reach your ship." "Wrong. I can leave your ship without a pilot." He left his hand where it was. Rather than be rheated by an alien in a gambling game -- , j "The pilot is still on board, with the astrogator and the ncreee. I am only the commumcations officer. Why did you asdume I was alone?" L ouis sighed and let his arm fall. "Because I'm stupid," he said bitterly. "Because you used the singular pronoun, or my computer did. Because I thought you were a gambler." "I gambled that you would not see my ship take off, that you would be distracted by the coin, that you could see only from the front of your head. The risks seemed better than one-half." Louis nodded. It all seemed clear. "There was also the chance that you had lured me down to destroy me." The computer was still translating into first person singular. "I have lost at least one exploring sfiip tKat flew in this direction." "Not guilty. So have we." A thought struck him, and He said, "Prove that you Hold a wejon." The alien obliged. No beam showed, but sand exploded to Louis's left, with a vicious Crackl and a fla' the color of lightning. The alien held something that made Holes. And that was all. Louis bent and picked up the coin. "As long as we're here, shall we finish the game?" "To vdiat purpose?" "To see who would have won. Doesn't jrour species gamble for pleasure?" "To what purpose? We gamble for survival." "Then Finagle take your whole breed I" he snarled and flung himself to the sand. His chance for glory was gone, tricked away from him. There is a dde that governs men's affairs... and there went the ebb, carrying statues to Louis Wu, histmy books naming Louis Wu, jetsam on the tide. "Your attitude is puzzling. One gambles only when gambling is necessary." "Nuts." "My translator will not translate that comment" "Do you know what that artifact is?" "I know of the species wHo built that artifact They traveled far." "We've never found a stasis box that tug. It must be a vault of some kind." "It is thought that that species used a single weapon to end their war and all its participants." The two looked at each other. Possibly each was thinking the same thing. What a disaster, if any but my own species should take this ultimate weapon! But that was anthropomorphic thinking. Louis knew that a kzin would have been saying. Now I cem conquer the universe, as is my riht. "Finagle take my luck!" said Louis Wu between his teeth. "Why did you have to show up at the same time I did?" "That was not entirely chance. My instruments found your craft as you backed into the system. To reach the vicinity of the artifact in time, it was necessary to use thrust that damaged my ship and killed one of my crew. I earned possession of the artifact." "By cheating, damn you!" Louis stood up... And something meshed between his brain and his semicircular canals. IV ne gravity. The denty of a planet's nlmospHere depended on its gravity, and on its moon. A big moon tvoold sldm away most of tlie years of a world's evolution. A moonless world tHe size and mass Ilf Eaitb! sHould Have onbreatEitble air, impossibly dense, worse Ilian Venus. But this planet had no moon. Except -- The alien said something, a atartled ejaculation that the computer refused to translate. "Scree! Where did the water go?" Louis kxiked. What He saw piBzled him only a moment. The ocean had receded, slipped imperceptibly away, until what ihowed now was Half a mile of level, slickly shining sea bottom. 'Where did the water go? I do not understand." "I do." "Where did it go? Without a moon, there can be no tides. Tides are not this quick in any case. Explain, please." "It'll be eaaer if we use the telescope in my drip." "In your ship there may be weapons." "Now pay attention," said Louis. "Your ship is very close to total destruction. Nothing can Have your crew but the com laser In my ship." The alien dithered, then capitulated. "If you Have weapons, you woirid have used them earlier. You caimot stop my ship now. Let us enter your slrip. Remember that I hold my wesson." The alien stood beside lum. His month working disturbingly around serrated edges of his teeth as Louis activated the scope screen. Shortly a starfield appeared, as did a conical spacecraft, painted green with darker green markings. Along the bottom of the screen was the blur of thick atmosphere. "You see;? The artifact must hie nearly to the horizon. It moves fast." "That fact is obvious even to low intelligence." "Yah. Is it obvious to you that this world must have a massive satellite?" "But it does not the satellite is invisible." "Not invisible. Just too small to notice. But then, it must be very dense." The alien didn't answer. "Why did we assume the sphere was a Slaver stasis box? Its shape was wrong; its size was wrong. But it was shiny, like the surface of a stasis field, and RpTiprifni like an artifact Plaiiets ace spheres too, but gravity wouldn't ordinarily pull something ten feet wide into a sphere. RitKpf it would have to be very flnid or it would have to be very den Do you understand ne?" "Na" "I don't know how your equipment works. My deep-radar uses a hyperwave pulse to find stasis boxes. When something stops a hyperwave pulse, it's either a stasis box, or it's denser than degenerate matter, the matter inside a normal star. And this object is dense enough to cause tides." A tiny silver bead Had drifted into view ahead of the cone. Telescopic foreshortening seemed to bring it right alongside the ship. Louis reached to scratch at his beard and was stopped by his faceplate. "I believe I understand you. But how could it happen?" "That's guesswork. Well?" "Call my ship. They would be killed." "I had to be sure you wouldn't stop me." Louis Wu went to work. Presently a light glowed; the computer had found the alien ship with its com laser. He spoke without preliminaries. "You must leave the spherical object immediately. It is not an artifact. It is ten feet of nearly solid neutronium, probably torn loose from a neutron star." There was no answer, of course. The alien stood behind Him but did not speak. Probably His own ship's computer could not Have handled the double translation. But the alien was making one two-armed gesture, over and over. The green cone swung sharply around, broadside to the telescope. "Good, they're firing lateral," said Lew to himself. "Maybe they can do a Hyperbolic past it." He raised His voice. "Don't spare the horses. Cancel, damnit. Use all the power available. You must pull away." The two objects seemed to be pulling apart. Louis suspected that that was illusion, for the two objects were almost in line-ofsight. "Don't let the small mas? fool you," He said, unnecessarily now. "Computer, wHafs the mass of a ten-foot neutronium sphere? Around two times ten to tHe minus six times the mass of this world, which is pretty tiny, but if you get too close... Computer, what's the surface gravity? I don't believe it." The two objects seemed to be pulling together again. Damn, thought Louis. If they Hadn't come along, that'd be me. He kept talking. It wouldn't matter now, except to relieve his own tension, "My computer says face. That may be off. Newton's formula for gravity. Can you Hear me?" "They are too close," said the alien. "By now it is too late to save tHeir lives." t was happening as he oke. The ship began to crumble a fraction of a second before impact. Impact looked no more dangerous Khan a cannonball striking the wall of a fort. The tiny silver bead simply swept through the side of the ship. But the ship closed instantly, all in a moment, like tinsel paper in a strong man's fist. Closed into a tiny sphere. A tiny sphere ten feet through or a bit more. "I mourn," said the alien. "Now I get it," said Loob. "I wondered what was foaling our laser messas. That duink of neutronium was liit between our ships bendkig fight beams." "WI# was this trap set for us? Have we eaemies so powerful that they caa ploy widi such masses?" A toodB of paranoia? Louis wo n dered. Maybe the whole species had it. "Just a toodi of coincidence. A smashed n eu tr on star." For a time the alien did not speak. The te le s co p e , for want erf a better target, remained focused on the bead. Its glow had died. The alien said, "My pressure suit will not keep me alive long." "We'll make a run for it. I can reach Margrave in a couple of weeks. If you can hold out that long, we'll set up a tailored environment box to Hold you until we think of something better. It only takes a couple of hours to set one up. I'll call ahead." The alien's triple gaze converged on him. "Can you send messages faster than light?" "Sure." "You Have knowledge worth' trading for. I'D come with you." "Thanks a whole lot." Louis Wu started punching buttons. "Margrave. Civilization. People. Faces. Voices. Bah." The ship leapt upward, ripping atmosphere apart. Cabin gravity wav ere d a little then settled down. "Wen,'" he told hhnsdf, "I can always come back." "You will return here?" "I think so," he decided. "I hope you will be armed." "What? More paranoia?" "Your species is insufficnently suspicious," said tiie alien. "I wander tlrat you have survived. Consider this neutranium object as a dense. Its mass pulls anything that touches it Mtet b smooth and reflective spherical surface. Should any vehicle approach' this worid, its crew wooid find this obct cjuichly. 'Th would assume it is an artifact. What other assumption could they make? They would draw alongside for a closer examination." "True enough, but that planet's empty. Nobody to defend." "Perhaps." The planet was dwindling below. Louis Wu swung his p toward deep space. Tt was quiet in the zoo now. Bailey couM hear the ocean booming down in the valley, miles from where he was hiding. He crawled from under tiie little footbridge and checked his watch. Ten-twenty. He wished it was darker, but they'd left the lights on in the elephant house across the way. Each of its tall windows cast a bar-shadowed beam into the quadrangle. Unrippled, the seal pool at his left gave back perfect reflections. Silhouettes of walking men crossed it. Bailey ducked back under and heard them come out of the big house, toward him. They shuffled across overhead. talking quietly, then crunched out of earshot down the graveled path toward the admin building. That would be those three holographic technicians, changing the tapes, he thought. Wonder what they'll show tomorrow. He stuck his head out again. New windows lit up down at the admin building, the control room. Faint mechanical noises drifted out to him, followed by the squeal of an elephant. It came twice more completely, but the fourth blast was cut off midway, and Tantor subsided in a pop of static. Distant laughter. Then the lights in the elephant house went out. Bailey scrambled up the low bank, dragging his pack behind. Though the cuffs of his black trouseis shone wetly, his feet still comfortably dry in their boots. A pale line showed where the dark Jersey'had crept up to expose an inch of his thin white belly. He tugged it back down. His first step toward the liveanimal compound seemed to make all the noise in the world. Maybe he should go around on the grass outside the quadrangle of buildings. He dianged course and slipped between the bear pits and the aviary. Someone had left the birds on, though the sound was off. He stopped and watched the tape run through, he couldn't help it. A smile crossed his wrinkled face, and the man could feel his pulse rate slow back down to normal. Thirty birds danced in the free air there, breathtakingly real. It was as if he was back in Asheville forty years ago. That cardinal there, fluttering so boldly forward to the front of the cage, like the one his sister used to feed from the back veranda... There was a click and a faint discontinuity of motion as the tape turned over for a rerun. There hadn't been a cardinal alive since the floods began. Tearing himself away, Bailey slipped along the rows of empty cages. The overstuffed knapsack kept brushing things. Working his way from the admin building toward the live animal compouml, he stopped at the last comer and peered carefully around it. '"There it stood, dominating one whole side of the square. Eight feet of hurricane fence, outlining an eighty by two hundred foot rectangle. Inside was an empty corridor in which two men with rifles paced endlessly, then another fence like the first. There were batteries of floodlights at either end of the compound, and Bailey could plainly see the old collie where she lay sleeping on the grass near the middle. Men guarding dogs, Bailey thought, times have changed. But Hilda was twenty per cent of the dogs in die world. Backing out of sight again, Bailey heaved off his knapsack and sat down. He pushed the jumper cables to one side and carefully unwrapped the air pistol. The bottle of bourbon had leaked a little. Where were the darts? Good grief, he hadn't forgotten -- no, he hadn't. The test tube bounced out on the ground when he shook the flap. Bailey took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. When he unstoppered the tube the familiar smell of Amtol wafted up to him. Fishing each of the six tiny darts out by its tufts with forceps, Bailey dropped them into the magazine of !Us pistol. He poured the excess sedative in after them, stoppered the tube, closed the gun. Bailey dropped the thing in his lap and stared at it. He had that empty, waiting feeling, wondering if he had the nerve. After all, it was no skin off his nose if they wanted to start the new world without animals. He wasn't going to make the trip, himself. He became aware of the angry ocean again, snarling through the West Virginia valleys like a waiting tiger... Theyd turned the tiger loose twenty years earlier with two surprisingly small bombs. One was a routine blast by the New Zealanders to trigger seismographic echoes in the Antarctic. The other was a mistake, when the French got two for the price of one on their north Australian test facility. There was talk later of timing and the earth's crust resonating. Both continents settled about a foot, and the seafloor between them rose a quarter mile. It was still going up, and the rest of the world was being flooded by the displaced water, Man's adaptable. The survivors headed for high ground, scratched out a living. But nearly every animal in the world died. Environments shifted too widely for them, food drains broke wd tried to reform along unworkable linee For two decades people had been watching the water rise around them. Some tried to build arks, failed. As far as anyone in Charleston, West Virgnua could tell, theirs was the last one They'd dug a hole in the mountaintop and intended to cool it by nuclear power to cryogenic temperatures. Fourteen people would be sealed inside, to be automatically awakened in eleven himdred years when the waters subsided. Fourteen people, no animals. That's what got Bailey. Noah hadn't dcxie it that way. And even though he wasn't one of the fortunate fourteen, the thought of a new world where men were without a single companion spedes appalled him. etermined again, Bailey got up and shoved the pistol in his hip pocket. He opened the bourbon bottle, took a deep breath, and began to sing. "Oh, I was bor-m in east Virgin-yaah -- " He rounded the comer, staggered, swore. "Nor' Car'li-ina I did ro-oam..." Bailey waved the bottle, sloshing some on his sleeve. Both the guards heard him and stopped where they stood, but they hadn't spotted him yet. "There I met me-ee a fair pretty maidea-n... They saw him. The big one at the far ead of the compound began to run up toward fais younger companion. The nearerraised his rifle uncertainly. "Her name and a-age I do not kno-ow... " Bailey was at the fence now, stumbled forward against it. The pistol almost slid out ot his hip pocket. He lurched, a seraphic smile on his face, saluted the nearer guard with the bourbon and subtly pushed the gun back in fdace. "Her hair it wa-as of a brightsome color... " "Hey Ed, who in -- ?" said the big one as he came up. "Some drunk. Don't know bow he got past the main gate." "And her li-ips were rooby reed," Bailey sang. "Here y'are, guys, how 'bout a?" He proffered the fifth, clumsily trying to get it through the wire mesh. "Come on Mac, cut the crap," said the smaller guard. "You don't belong in here." He lowered liis rifle. The other one said, 'TH call adminGive 'em hell, letting a bum in here." He turned, headed for the call box which hung on a fencepnst a few paces away. Bailey had fallen to the ground and dropped his bottle. Rolling half over in the grass, he rubbed the pistol free and got it between his heels. Then he rose as far as his knees. "Aw now, fellas, don' go gettin' mad." "You're drunk, Grandpop," the young guard said disgustedly. Chug. The other turned at tiie unfamiliar sound, his hand on the receiver. "Ed?" Chug. TJailey stood up and thrust the pistol back in his pocket. Both guards lay on the grass inside the compound. The first had fallen across his rifle, and his arm was twisted around it awkwardly. The second was flat on his back, but had fumbled the receiver off its hook before he'd fallen. Bailey would have to hurry. He trotted back for his pack. Returning, he ran the jumper cables between two consecutive fenceposts and then went to work on the mesh between them. Apparently he'd done it right, no alarm sounded. Tightness in his lungs reminded Bailey of his heart. He slowed, counted to a hundred, resumed cutting. The wire cutters were clumsy things. It was so damn quiet. Roused by the earlier noise, Hilda had come over and sniffed at the guard who lay against the inside fence. Bailey called softly, soothing her. Hilda was sixteen years old and blind. She waed once. then waddled back to her old spot and threw herself down with a sigh. Bailey thought he could get through. Wriggling under the four-loop slit he'd made, he got about as far as his chest and had to wriggle back again. His shirt had ripped, and tiiere was a little blood underneath. He opened the mesh two more loops. His hands looked old, working away in the hard glare of the floodlights. This time he made it. Scrambling across to the call box, he stepped over die bigger guard and raised the receiver cautiously to his ear. Nothing, not even a buzz. Was that good or bad? He didn't know. He replaced it, then went over and straightened the kid's twisted arm from around his rifle. A quick professional glance told him that it wasn't broken, and Bailey felt relieved. Reaching back through the hole for his knapsack, he got up and went around the guard aisle to the inner gate. They'd left it open. He went across the dewy grass into the live animal house. The ticket booth was open too, fortunately. As he snatched the keys from the hook inside the door, Bailey smelled the boiling coffee. He stepped quickly across the little cubicle and snapped off the hotplate. Now, where were the new tickets? He yanked open the cupboard under the sign which read, "Admission #, Children #." There they were, four rolls of them, three white end one blue. Holding his knapsack under the shelf, he swept them all in. Bailey swung back out the door and down the short corridor into the darkened main hall of the building. The raccoon was up, prowling back and forth under the small red light at the back of his pen. Assorted chirps and squeaks came from the far wall, where the last known living family of chipmunks had lived in inbred idiocy for ten years. Bailey faced right, walked down the line of cages, counting, his hand dragging tentatively along the heavy brass rail. Canada Jay, Parula Warbler, Lreast Tern... He stopped at the Killdeer's cage. Qwitching on his flashlight, he peered in on two slender, sleepy birds. The male was perched by the window to his outdoor cage, and when the light hit him he flew out. But the female seemed unruffled and didn't move from her nest. Bailey slid under the rail and opened the door with the third key he tried. She squawked indignantly and flew out to join her mate. Bailey heard them take up that high, bisyllabic cry of theirs and frowned. They could probably hear that down at admin. Holding each brown-on-brown blotched egg over the lens of his light, Bailey smiled quickly twice, grimaced, then grimaced again. Two duds. That settled that, the chances of the remaining two both being of the same sex were dangerously high. He replaced all four as close to the way hed found them as possible. Shutting the cage, he glanced wistfully back at the nest. Too bad, they were so small. They'd have been so much easier to hide. He walked quickly down to the end and threw his beam into the biggest cage in the room. Perched hi on a deed stump, the only other brooding iair of birds in the world peered proudly down with cruel eyes. Ospres. Bailey dreaded going in there. From behind him came the faint but unmistakable ring of the phone. The edges of Bailey's field lungs blew up in his chest. Fumbling open the phial, he got the tablet down as he went. He made it to the phone in the ticket-seller's cage before it Had rung twice more. "Saul?" demanded an irritated voice in the receiver. "Ed?" Clearing his throat, Bailey tried to remember the flat tenor of the kid. "It's Ed," he said. "What is it?" "What is it, what's with you? I thought I heard those birds and when I called the other phono you didn't answer." "Just having some coffee." "Both together? You guys know better than that." "Sorry." "Sorry he says. Now get the hell back out there." There was a loud click, then the line went dead. Bailey hung up, stumbled over to the bench and leaned against it Actually, it was a lucky break. He'd probably not be bothered now. But it occurred to him that one more onset of angina would probably kill him. T)ailey hurried back out into the dark roomful of cages. He should tackle the birds rnider the influence of that last pill. It would help, certainly. Maybe he ought to alter his plans and hit them each with a dart. But no, two unconscious birds would give away the whole thing. Once they discovered the eggs were stolen it would be obvious who'd done it. He'd said too much in public. So Bailey put on the heavy vest, gloves and hood he'd brought, and loaded the water gun with ammonia. Then he opened the cage and went in. The shale rocks on the left wall of the cage would eventually bring him within reaching distance. He took a last look up at the unruly bale of sticks that served as an eyrie. It was twenty feet from the floor. Then he started to climb. Bailey could see the female turn nervously to face him, though not rising from the eggs. The male stood more erectly, opening his beak, hunching his shoulders and hissing. Ospreys lay somewhere between hawks and eagles. They caught fish by diving for them, so people used to call them fish hawks. And perched, they weren't larger than hawks. Their bellies and throats were a clear white, and their backs, slate gray. In a sort of lethal way they were almost attractive. Unless you dwelt too long on their heads or feet, or until they spread their wings. Those parts were an eagle's. Bailey was halfway up when the male launched himself from the nest. In the dim light he could have sworn those blackbarred wings reached from one wall to the other, but he knew better. Only six feet. He locked his heels in a shale fissure and backed securely against the ledge. The osprey preee'd twice, buffeting the air in a larruping hover not two feet from Bailey's face. He could smell the thing even under his hood, foul and fishy and diarp. Those talons were as big as his own hands, and they chopped in unison -- open toward him, closed away -- with each beat of the huge wings. Bailey opened fire with the ammonia. That shrill scream again. Talons slamming against his chest like the open-palmed thrust of a bully, then closing. Cloth and plastic ripping, beartraps in the meat of his bosom. Bailey fired again. A dull hatchet battering at the lenses of his mask, head slipping backward and bouncing on the rock, things turning red. Bailey fired again. His own scream, the bird's scream, the round gray tongue seen through a cracked lens, the other lens cracking, beartraps gone. Bird gone. The female followed. Bailey scrambled tKe rest of the way up, and reached across two feet of empty air to the nest in the crotch of the tall stump. Four eggs, red and gold on brown, round, hensize. Into the foam stockings, into the sac of gel, into his shirt Birds outside screaming to high heaven, voices from the other end of the zoo, ninning feet on gravel. From the other pocket came four false eggs, plastic, carefully painted. Into the nest. Bailey swung down, jiunped the last four feet. Wipe up the blood. His. Out of the cage and lock it. Into the little room to replace the keys. Outside. Up from the waterfountain to the window ledge to the porch roof to the main roof. Over to the ledge. Heart again, but not so bad. Lay off the pills, use the serum. ; Bailey slid tiie syringe into his left buttock. The warm feeling spread, enveloping his groin, his belly, his screaming chest and finally his head. People were shouting down below, but their voices seemed blurred. Everything was lowing down. He'd be unable to run if they discovered him, he knew. But if he could run and did, the run would kill him. Preee he heard. Pre iM'e pre. Silly birds, he was doing it for their own good. Dogs barking. Stupor coming. Make it through the lught if they don't find me up here, Bailey thought. "They didn't. At ten-thirty the next morning, Bailey awoke. He gazed straight up into a graysky through two cracked lenses. When he took off the heavy hood, each movement of each muscle was an intricate study in pain. Then he lay there for a while, because things wouldn't focus. The eggs. Incautiously, Bailey sat bolt upright, to find himself looking over the low roof wall at a burgeoning crowd of zoo-goers down in front of the building. He ducked again. The knapsack was still on his back, he'd been lying on it. Perhaps that accounted for the state of his neck. Oh, no, he remembered the ospr. Sliding the straps up, Bailey shrugged away hum the bulky pack. Pombfing through die (mk inside, he found the gelsac. Four aiples of foam sfaoclqM'oohng floated within the translucent slime. He carefully opened the sac, then each of the sochsL Removing the eggs, he held them up to the cloudy sun and peered at the shadowy creatures inside. He smiled, den repacked the eggs. That done, he concentrated on his wounds. There were painful lumps all over his bead, but nothing serious. Removing the thick vest, he ' He listened to the chatter down below. A thousand dollars worth of tickets had been stolen the night before. Screwy, eh? Why take on two armed guards for some tickets that could be voided anyway? Oh, a couple of diunks, two of them, at least No sense to it. Could see it if they stole the dogs. Meat, you know. Some people are really to be hung up on it. No, I haven't either. But a lot of older people have. Screwy, eh? But they left the dogs alone, the screwballs. It was exactly what Bailey wanted to hear. He edged across the roof to peer down over the back door. Most people used the front, but there was a crowd of kids at the back now. He'd have to wait. Tn a few minutes a young woman came out and led them away. With no one in sight, Bailey dropped to the porch roof, then from rhe sill to the fountain to the ground. A middle-aged man came out as he struck earth, but Bailey pretended to be tying a shoe. Going around front, he mingled with the outgoing stream of people, turning his face as they passed the guards. But no worry, the two he'd seen were off duty.He stopped at the seal pond, agreed casually with an old woman there, who said it wasn't very good, holograms don't splash. no Then, one hand cupped selfconsciously over the camera case, Bailey went out the main gate of the zoo. He'd brought it off. Bailey suppressed a cheer; his step was unusually light. A tenminute walk brought him to the West Virginia State Hospital, where he worked. Checking in, he smiled affably at the head nurse, who waved with a curious grin. Of course, he thought ruefully, I need a shave. Bailey went down to the basement, past a sign that said, "Reand into his office. He showered, shaved, dressed the cuts on his stomach and chest. Opening a can of peas, he took it along with a handful of supplemental wafers over to his desk, Janie'd brought the newspaper, and it waited there. Nothing new. The colwiy over at GofPs Mountain was gone for sure, but most people had known that for weeks. There was a vitamin B # shortage. The tides now swept as high as the old glass factory, and the available land area of Charleston had shrunk another two per cent. Best prediction of total deluge remained the same at six and a half years. Some ninny had broken into the zoo. Good enough, Bailey thought and tossed down the paper. Finishing the peas, he noticed the date on tiie can. Thirty-four years old, borderline. They shouldn't really be issuing this stuff. He made a note. Then he went through his IN box. Right on top was the memo he'd sent the Board. As usual, they hadn't honored him with a formal reply. Typed on the back of his own note was the usual red-printed rebuff. Dear Dr. Bailey; Your idea of ctyoiyini unborn puppies to accompany the human ing. in its sentimentality. But, Doctor, you know better them that. How many reasons do you need? First of all, nobody schedwants them. Second, while the danger of contamination is slight, it's real. Finally and most significantly, the ark's limited capacity precludes taking on any but human cargo. To elaborate on this: even if you could reduce the puppies to less than five pounds, ( which despite your considerable abilities we doubt), you'd still be requiring the human occupants of the pounds of body weight to make room. You know the dynamics of cryobiology as well as we do. Doctor, and such action could well be fatal. It may interest you that the latest estimate of re-emergence has been moved up to fifteen hundred years, which makes fat storage even more critical. We're aware of your feelings about animals, but these requests of yours are becoming a nuisance. Believe us when we say that animals aren't needed, aren't wanted, aren't possible in the new world. Arnold J. Carter, Jr. For the Board Scribbled underneath in red pencil was a note from Amie himself, "Come on, Dave, lay off, will you?" B ailey wadded the thing up and hurled it across the room. Getting up, he went into the lavatory and brought out the eggs. An afterthought, he buzzed his secretary. "Janie?" he said into the grille. "Good morning, Doctor." "What's on?" "Nothing just now. Gordon Alton at one." "All right. I'll be analyzing prints till then. Don't let anyone in, eh?" "Yes, Doctor." It was almost noon. He'd have to hurry to be ready for yoimg Gordon. Bailey primed the autoclave, left the vent open, switched it on. He got the resin from his lower desk drawer. Dipping the teflon cloths in the m fluid, he patted them into place on each of the eggs. He wished they weren't so big. When he opened the autoclave only a few wisps of steam escaped, the rest having gone out the vent Good. The stuff wjls supposed to cure in dry heat, but this would probably do. Now to set up the ruse. The kid had an eidetic memory, so no need to overdo it. Bailey got out a plaster model of a man's wrist, splinted it, bound it doused it with resin. Into the autoclave it went, and Bailey set the timer. Forty minutes later it rang, and ten after that, Janie buzzed. That would be Gordon. He told her to send him in. The door opened a cautious six inches, and most of a chubby freckled face appeared five and a half feet from the floor. Bailey smiled and beckoned. "Come on in, Gordon." With the awkwardness of extreme weight, Gordon Alton crossed and took a chair. He was twelve and ptarentless, the only survivor of a family lost when Wheeling had gone under. His IQ was close to two hundred, and he was one of the fourteen He sat politely and watched as Bailey labored to remove a plastic cast from a plaster model of a hand. The doctor had apparently just run out of solvent and was spitting on the thing to soften the plastic. "That's pretty neat. Doc." "One of the marvels of modern medicine," Bailey said ruefully. "Oh, to hell with it." Bailey shovedit into his lower desk drawer, his point made. He folded his hands on the desk, looked up and smiled. "How've you been, Gordon?" "Oh, okay. They gave me a sending-off party yesterday, and all the girls cried." "Well, that's women. Did you make your weight?" The boy looked ruefully down at his enormous stomach. "Just two-thirty. Guess that ought to hold me for a thousand years." "Fifteen hundred's the latest guess." "Oh?" Gordon was silent for a while. "We going to the zoo?" Bailey played it cool. "If you want to." "Yeah, I guess so." Tailey got up, took his jacket off the hook, patting the breast pocket to check. He wasn't sure what good the dartgun would be if he was recognized, but it made him feel better to have it. They left the hospital and headed across town. Bailey paid for the tickets at the main gate, and they went into the zoo. Gordon hadn't said mucfr. Naturally he'd be subdued, Bailey reminded himself, he's going under tonight. Aloud he said, "Let's try the elephants, I think they've changed the tapes." As they crossed the footbridge over the seal pool's spiTIway, Bailey smiled. The elephant house did not smell of elephants, it smelled of cigarettes and the stickiness of melted ice cream, like a movie theater on Saturday afternoon. A few adults and a lot of children gazed in on the display. "Grandma saw a real elephant once, Sally," an old woman said. "Hack before the floods. We used to feed them." Sally shrugged. But as Tantor cfumped past with his trunk extended for peanuts, she tossed part of her sucker. It went throu the image to join the other wasted gifts on the floor. Bailey winced. Gordbn caught it. "You know, Rrctor Hailey, you old guys am amazing." "You're getting to like animals, aren't you, Gordon?" "Weil, sort of. But not like you. Doc, not Bke you old guy s. I like it when you bring me to the zoo and all." The round freckled face frowned. "Hut you know." Bail nodded and they d r i fted out of the elephant house. No, yon can't just tell someone to love something. But there was still his last card. "Letfs go to the live animals, Gordon." Out on the perimeter of the compound, the guard called Saul was talking throu the fence to two small boys. Bailey paid again, and they went in. With more enthusiasm now, Gordon went over to the killdeer's cage, "You're right. Doc. So those are eggs, the real thing." The boy leaned over the rail, resting on his paimch and eventually lifting up his feet. "Sa-ay." Bhiley gazed down at the back of the round, curly head. Sa-ay. Was that a say of curiosity, or a say of honest wonder? He could hope. At any rate, this seemed like the right time. Leaving the boy, Bailey went over to the keeper. "Hello, Mr. Hart." "Oh, hi Doctor, How're you today?" "Fine. Listen. I brought him, he's with me now." Hart tilted the blhe cap back on his head. "The one that's going pointed. "No, the heavyset boy to the left. Do you think we could do what I asked you about?" Hart grimaced. "Yah, guess so. Don't tell 'em down at admin, though." Bailey went over and retrieved Gordon, then propelled him by the shoulder after Hart's retreating back. He led them to a workroom adjacent to the ticket window and snapped on the light. "D linking blipd eyes, Hilda raised her head from a box by the window. Gordon jumped backward. "He's loose!" Bailey went over and crouched by the old collie. "It's a she, Gordon. Hilda. Want to pet her?" The boy edged across the floor. Hilda inclined a muzzle toward him, nostrils going. Her heavy tail thumped once, tentatively, against the side of the box. Gordon squatted beside and a little behind Bailey. He took the boy's hand and guided it to Hilda's thick white ruff. "Like this?" "Yes, Gordon." Hart coughed politely after a few minutes. Bailey stood up, then bent down and gently moved Hilda's head from the boy's lap. Gordon let himself be led out. "Well," Bailey said with forced lightness. "Let's take a look at the ospreys. They're brooding, too." They watched in silence for a few minutes. The female's head peered imperiotisly down at them over the edge of her nest. Gordon got his voice back. "How long'll she have to sit there before they hatch?" "I don't really know." But of course he did. "It's ah on the card there, down below. Look it over while I make a head run." As Bailey walked down to the men's room he was mentally rubbing his hands together. Eidetic memory. All he has to do is read the card. He was washing his face when the stall behind him opened and the guard Ed's eyes met his own in the mirror. "You!" The kid was fast. Bailey rolled and smashed across his collarbone. Turning, Bailey braced his left leg against the washbowl, put both hands squarely on the man's chest and pushed. The blue uniform fell back into the stall. But Ed caught himself on the doorjamb, shouted again, raised the club for another blow. Bailey knew better than to match reflexes with a younger man. He backed quickly down the line of washstands. A head popped out of the last stall and was almost beared off as Ed crashed past toward Bailey, who was reaching for his gun. Chug. But the guard was on top of him; panicked, Bailey fired again. A man could die from two shots of the stuff. He'd have to -- Now the bystander ioked his head out again, saw the prostrate guard, began to yell. Bailey aimed carefully, got him in the thick of the arm. Behind him the door was swinging open. Jamming the gun back in his jacket, Bailey shouted, "Help, help!" and bulled his way through the incoming crowd. "In there," he called over his shoulder. "They're sick, they need Anamtol," and prayed someone heard and would remember. The room spun. Where were the piUs? No time to -- here. Sagging against the wall, he fumbled the tablet into his mouth. Gordon trotted up, out of breath. "What is it?" "Never mind. Come on." They were back at the hospital in a few minutes. Bailey made up enough of a story to at least stem Gordon's tide of questions. T T e gave himself two hours until the bystander awoke and described him. Others in the crowd would be able to fill the picture in, since Bailey was a regular at the zoo. Altogether, he might have three hours. Which was enough. Gordon "You'd better go up to the prep room," he told the boy. As he headed obediently for the door, Bailey had a thought. Maybe he should tell him what was going on. "Gordon." "Yes?" not, he's still twelve. You don't tell a twelve-year-old Idd you've been using him, or that he's about to break most of the rules in the Board's little book. Stick to your plan, man. "Nothing. Good Luck." "Thanks, Doc. You've been great to me since my folks -- " Bailey's conscience was bludgeoning him. He lowered his eyes. "Well, all right," the boy said. "But thanks for today, too." They wheeled Gordon in an hour later in deep h#qx)tiiermia. Bailey had two operations to perform on the boy's pale body, before passing him along for further work. These were both subcutaneous insertions of crystalline hormones and drugs, which were to augment those expended by the body even while deep in cryo. They were easy operations. The only difficult part was installing the pull tabs, so that they wouldn't infect during the few hours between coming out of cryo and their removal. He made the two normal insertions in the loose fat over Gordon's stomach. The third and fourth were placed carefully, so that the tab would be hidden in the fold of flesh between the boy's upper thighs and buttocks. Two of the osprey's eggs went in each. Once he found them, Gordon would know what to do. the enormous power requirements for transmission of data to the ground. In reply I pointed out the distance of a satellite from the ground was to be only a few hundred miles and that radio waves did not care whether they travelled vertically or horizontally. Just one and a half years later the first artificial satellites went into orbit, and their signals could be received easily, even though they did not transmit with "enormous power." Very soon after the beginning of the Space Age, in February #, the first American artificial satellite Explorer I discovered what we now call the inner Van Allen belt. About a week later I listened to somebody being interviewed on a radio station about this discovery. Since not much was known at the moment the interviewee did not do badly; but then he said that this "radiation belt" would make communication with ships in space nearly impossible. Obviously one could not transmit radio messages through such a belt. Unfortunately you cannot talk back to your radio, but I tried. If I could have talked back I probably would have said that ttiere was no reason to think so, since radio beams do not interfere with each other. Then actual events began to move so fast that wrong predictions of this type became rare. There simply was not enough time between events to think up a major prediction that would miscarry. On January #, #, the Russians sent their "Cosmic Rocket No. #" to the moon; even now it is not clear whether they tried for an impact or not. The spacecraft missed the moon by about twice the moon's diameter, and transmissions were still received after the device had passed the moon's orbit. Transmissions did stop a few hours later -- which is the reason for wondering whether the rocket was meant to strike the moon ; evidently battery power was supplied only for about the time it would need to reach the moon. At any event "Cosmic Rocket No. #" had transmitted data over a distance miles. On March #, # the American space probe Pioneer V was sent into orbit around the sun, and in this case transmissions were still received over a distance On August #, # the planetary probe Mariner II took off for a flyby near the planet Venus. The flyby took place in December #, and the maximum distance over which signals had been successfully transmitted grew to Finally, planetary probe MarProbable Objects for Communications Planett Diameter Orbital Mean distance Shortest possibleLongest possible (miles) Period from sun distance from earth (miles) (miles) Mercury # # days # # # Venus # days # # # Mars # # days # # # Jupiter # # years # # # iner IV took off for Mars on November #, #, and it passed near the planet on July #, #. The pictures taken during the flyby were ordered to be transmitted the following day. By then the distance from the earth All of which means that communications over planetary distances are within the state of the art. Of course improvements will be made and innovations will be introduced. But it can be done right now so that, in the discussion of a new project, nobody has to ask whether it is possible, the only question is "from where to where?" And this question now becomes the fundamental assumption for the discussion to follow. The "to where?" part is easy: to the earth. But "from where?" The answer to that deto look into tiie future at this moment. L et us say that the time limit is the year #. Then the probable targets are those listed in Table I, though it must be added that Mercury should have a question mark. Mercury is the planet least often mentioned when the exploration of space is imder discussion. It isn't that Mercury is without scientific interest; in fact its small size, its proximity to the sun and its slow rotation (## of its orbital period of # days) make it a very interesting planet from the scientific point of view. But Mercury would be hard to reach. The plane of its orbit is inclined to the ecliptic by a full # of arc. Its orbital velocity is high, varying from #J# miles per second at its aphelion to nearly # miles per second at its perihelion. But a planetary probe approaching Mercury would be still faster, because the gravitational pull of the sun had been acting upon it all The "Galilean Satellites" of JupHer Designation and name Diameter (miles) Distance from Orbital Period JupHer (around JupHed (milej) j-i lo # I d. # h. # Vi min. j-ii Eurepa # #d. # h. # Vit min. j-iii Ganymede # # d. # h. # Vi min. J-IV Calllsto # # d. # h. # min. through its flight. If a flyby were to do any good, the speed of the probe would have to be drastically reduced, which would mean a high fuel expenditure. In short, a mission to Mercury would be very expensive in terms of fuel. This leaves only three possible targets in that decade, not counting such a special case as a mission to a comet and a possible flyby near one of the larger asteroids. These targets are Venus, Mars and Jupiter. In the case of Venus, the HigH surface temperature -- Mariner II reported it as # Fahrenheit while the instruments of Mariner V said "not less than # Fahrenheit"; the latter figure agrees with the findings of Russian astronomers -- will preclude manned landings for a long time to come. But we might imagine a space station of some sort in orbit around Venus. Mars will have a ground station at some time. Here nature has been good enough to supply two small moons that win facilitate exploration. I know that every one of my readers knows where to look such things up, but for the sake of convenience let us have a quick rundown of the pertinent figures. Both moons are small with diameters estimated to be around # miles. The inner one, named Phobos, is only # miles from the planet's center (or # miles from the surface) and has an orbital period of # hours and # minutes. The outer moon, Deimos, is # miles from the planet's center and has an orbital period of # hours and # minutes. As can be seen from the figures just given, Deimos is somewhat too slow and a little too far away from the planet to have a synchronous orbit. A truly synchronous satellite of Mars would have to be # miles closer to the planet to match the diurnal rotation of Mars, whidi is # hoiirs, # minutes and #J seconds. Since the masses of both of these moons are negligible there will be nd problem in landing; in fact a landing on Phobos would be more in the nature of a rendezvous and docking maneuver. The object of main scientific interest is, of course, the surface of Alars; but the presence of the moons is helpful when it comes to communications with earth. A number of years ago an expert on communications satellites wrote an interesting paper which dealt with the problem of xiower for communications through ace. Using Mars and earth as an example he arrived at the conclusion that transmission surface to surface would be very costly in terms of power. One would do much better if the exploring party at Lacus sois on Mars did not try for direct contact with Goldstone, California, but sent the message to a communications satellite orbiting the earth; and the earth ground stations would then get it from that satellite. The Martian moons are just right for this purpose, especially the slower moving Deimos. B efore we discuss the problems of interplanetary communications we have to have a look at Jupiter, which will be in reach of improved space vehicles in a few years. Being full of mysteries, Jupiter is especially attractive to astronomers. To begin with we don't know its "true" diameter; the figure for the diameter given in Table I is the diameter of the upper edge of its cloud layer. How far it is from that upper edge to the surface is not known. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is not known. The condition of the surface is not known -- and the list of "not-knowns" could go on for a rather long time. Since Jupiter is five times as far from the sun as the earth it receives only ## as much solar radiation, square mile per square mile, as the earth does. Witti so little heat one should expect a frozen planet, surrounded by a quiet atmosphere. Well, the planet may be frozen -- although there is some doubt even about that -- but the atmosphere certainly is not qvriet. It is in steady and erften violent motion, and natiiral radio waves coming from Jupiter's atmosphere indicate electrical activity. A close observation of Jupiter over a long pieriod of time from a convenient vantage point is likely to expand our knowledge of low-temperature physics enormously -- what is going on in Jupiter's atmosphere contributes quite a number of points to the list of "not knowns." Fortanately there are vantage points for a close observation of Jupiter, for the planet has # known moons and probably an etjual number of unknown ones. Most of the minor moons (the undiscovered ones would all be minor, too are too far from the planet to be useful, but the four so-called "Galilean satellites," called that after their ffiscoverer, are fairly close to the planet (Table II. Inside these four major moons there is "No. V" (fifth in the order of discovery) called Amalthea, at a distartce of only #)# miles. It is small, with a diameter erf less than a hundred miles, which would help to make a lanng easy. It so happens that Amalthea also runs in a nearly synehronous orbit. The orbital period is # hours, while the period of rotation of Jupiter is # hours and # minutes. This means that Amalthea will stay over a given area of the Jovian atmosphere for a fairly long time, just the situation observers welcome. So far things look rather uncomplicated. Communications would be to an artificial satellite orbiting Venus, to a moon of Mars and to a moon of Jupiter. But these communications would be interrupted by conjunctions. Drawn as a diagram there would be a straight line, with Jupiter at one end, the earth at the other end and the sun between them. To an observer on earth the planet becomes invisible because it disappears in the glare of the sun. The actual conjunction, when the three bodies form a straight line, lasts only for an instant, but the period when the planet is too close to the sun for observation is fairly long. The American Ephemris for the year # states that the actual conjunction of Jupiter and the sun takes place #. Nevertheless the listings of the positions of the Jovian moons are omitted for the period from August I to September #, because observations are not feasible during this time. Assuming that the sun would interfere with observations it appears that each conjunction of Jupiter with the sun would cause a communications blackout for about six weeks. (I may be unduly pessimistic at this point, but the possibility exists so we have to think about it.) Now Mars and Jupiter only offer the problem of single conjunctions with the line up: Mars -- Sun -- Earth. In the case of Venus we have a kind of doubfing of the phenomenon. The Kne up can be: Venus -- Sun -- Earth' which astronomers call a superior The positions of Mars and earth as they will be in early February #. Communications ore kept going via on earth equilateral. Dotted line Is the irraior axis of the orbit of Mors; the Martian aphelion and perihelion are marked by the Creek letters apha and piconjunction. But there is also the inferior conjunction with the line up: Sun -- Venus -- Earth. Optically Venus disappears in both cases. Whether an inferior conjunction would interfere with communications is something I don't know. T)ut there is an answer, an answer that was first presented by George O. Smith in a series of science-fiction stories: the equilaterals. The idea was based, a few times removed, on a 'paper written in # by the French astronomer Joseph-Louis I.n grange, at the time director ol Frederick the Great's Prussi;ui Academy of Science in Berlin Lagrange tried to solve thr "three-body problem," concern ing the positions of three or more' bodies in space that mutually acl on each other all the time. Ih did not solve this problem, but he found several positions, five in all, where a system of three bodies would be stable. Only two of these positions are of practical interest, the Li and Ls points. (Incidentally the "L" stands for "liberation" and not for Lagrange.) Both lie in the orbit of the planet in question and both form equilateral triangles with the sun and with the planet. The L # point of the earth's orbit is the "leading point," being ahead of llie earth by # of arc. The Ls point is the "trailing point," being # behind. Such equilaterals actually exist in nature. In the case of Jupiter both points are occupied by a number of asteroids that somehow strayed into Jupiter's orbit. And our moon has very faint dust clouds in both these points; here the triangle is formed by the dust cloud, the moon and the earth. How an equilateral station in the earth's orbit would solve a communications blackout is shown in the diagram. In early February # Mars will be in conjunction -- and by that time there will be people on Mars. Mars is then invisible from earth, but not invisible to the equilateral station. The same would apply to Venus in superior conjunction. And in inferior conjunction, too, if this position should prove troublesome. 'T'his is an answer to several questions, all of which dealt with the motions of artificial satellites, the meaning of the term "geocentric angle" and the problem of whether it is possible to make a satellite "stand still" in orbit. To begin with the geocentric angle, it simply means that the vertex erf the angle coincides with the cMiter of the earth. The diagram ows, for example, that a satellite in the synchronous orbit # miles from the surface will move through # of arc in six hours, with the vertex of that # angle in the earth's center. Some of the confusion that was clearly evident in the letters seems to stem from the fact that the distances of artificial satellites are always given with reference to the sxarface of the earth, more specifically to the sea level. Normally, in astronomy, the distances between two bodies are the center-to-center distances; since the distances are usually very large compared to the size of the bodies, there is no noticeable difference between centerto-center and surface-to-surface distances. In the case of the sun and the earth the difference is which counts for very little when compared to the mean distance of the earth from the sun, namely But the difference becomes important when a planet and its moons are under discussion. The surface-to-surface distance of the moon and the earth is # miles less than thdr center-to-center distance, which averages # miles. Just to keep things clearly separated, the distances of natoral moons are always given center-tocenter, and the distances of artificial satellites surface-tcvsatelHte. As for the satellite that "stands still" in spsice, these can fae no such thing. A cammunkations over the equator seems to "stmal still" only because its motkns in its orbit matches the rotation of the earth. And if you move a spacecraft sufficiently far from the earth that the earth's gravitational field hardly influences it any more it doesn't "and stiil" either,, for then it will be in oihit around the sun, moving at the rate of abcut #J# miles per second.      A couple of years ago o few of us sdence-fiction writers and editors were being interviewed by an exceedingly drunken reporter for a national weekly magazine. His principal desire appeared to be to reduce each writer to a single phrase -- "master of space opera," "specialist In satire," that sort of thing -- and when he came to Mack Reynolds he said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who writes the fight scenes," Reynolds does that, to be sure. He has written any number of stories about future gladlaforfar games, fPie logical outgrowth of today's spectator sports, and he has written them very well. But how much more he can do! We realized this first when chance put us in the company of a number of forward-looking economists, strangers to science fiction, who were entranced the credit-card phenomenon and all of the other poRfico-socfo-economrc gadgets he manipulates so handsomely. So we've invited Reynolds to explore some of these Ideas more fuHy in Galaxy, and next month we lead off with what strikes os as a first-rate example of his special skills. Name is Among the Bad Baboons, and it's a longish novelette. Damon Knight brings us a further episode in the Ihorion saga The Star Below; Robert Silverberg has the cover story. Going Down Smooth; we continue Fritz Leiber's surgical dissection of American folkways In A Specfcr Is Haunting Texas... a good Issue, we think; and we hope youTI oin us next month to see for yourself. J# Lee Roger Irnstein was not a crook. Nor was he honest; he was simply a single-minded man who never missed any opportunity for advancement tljirough such weaknesses as indecision, compassion or indifference. Lee Roger Irnstein was tall, wrinkled, totally gray. His age was forty-four. His expression was pleasant enough. But his eyes never blinked, and once their gaze had foimd an opponent's face it never left it, so that eventually the opponent was almost glad to yield to defeat and sink away out of sit. Despite this characteristic, there was nothing that visibly marked Lee Roger Irnstein off from the rest of his fellow men. The factor that did that was hidden in secrecy from almost everyone but his current wife, Famagusta Martitia, and his downtrodden twelve-yearold son, Lee Roger. Those two knew that Lee Roger Irnstein had never taken part in a single play-out. 'hat vast kingdom over which  Lee Roger Irnstein ruled presented a glittering facade to the world. Great triumphal arches, high towers, sky balloons, into town from all over the world for their taste of that shaped reality that was so much better, so much sweeter, so much more vivid than the ordinary reality of everyday. But at one point, the huge industrial complex had broken down into a chaos of rubbish. The massive functional shapes of playout technology slumped into an avalanche of waste. This was at Southside, along Gulch Road. Here were the extraordinary dumps of Ego City, a landscape of hills and valleys consisting entirely of all the expensive castoffs of the city, from the largest and glossiest of indestructable packing cases down to once-used dancing slippers, from saloon cars that had been discarded at a drunken whim down to unopened packs of cigarettes thrown away because the cellophane had proved a touch resistant, from private planes that had suddenly ceased to please down to nailclippers that were too blunt to clip, from monstrous slabs of rusty switdi-gear down to stillbright contact lenses. In this wilderness lived Bernie Burr. Except for the fact that he never shaved, Bemie Burr looked rather like Lee Roger Irnstein. He too was tall, wrinkled and totally gray. He also was forty-four. His expression was pleasant enou but his gaze -- whatever it had once done -- now never managed to meet the gaze of another human being. It kept wandering off, as if his eyes were too weak to meet the eyesight of anyone else. This was very unlike the behavior of the eyes of Lee Roger Imstein, the man who had defeated Bemie Burr. Bemie lived with a tattered lady of his own age called Barley in a battered blue packing case that had once housed a Patterson's Piorgium Model "Dandy." His days were spent scroimging through the enchanted detritus of the Gulch Road dump, his nights telling Barley the story of the great days when he owned half of Ego City. In consequence, Barley ent most of her nights drinking and most of her da#rs asle with her mouth open on the seat they had pulled out of an old Pullman coach. It was a curious thing that Bemie Burr ould have only that one obsessive topic of conversation. A couple of miles away, in surroundings as luxurious as Bemie's were dreadful, Roger Lee Imstein similarly had only one topic of conversation to inflict on Famagusta Martitia and Lee Roger Junior. It was the same topic.-told them. "A classical confrontation. This Bemie Burr wanted to take us over, and we wanted to take him over. It seemed he had all the power, and he slapped this ultimatum on me. I had to accept his corporation's terms by the next morning or else. Then he made one false move." "I know, he came to see you that evening," Lee Roger Junior said. "Who's telling this? Go away and play if you can't keep quiet I As I got home that evening, Bemie Burr was waiting in the drive. He caught hold of my jacket and begged me to accept the ultimatum. Said he was having trouble with his directors and he would be thrown out if this deal didn't go through. I told him he was crazy, but he said if I accepted the terms of the ultimatum, he'd see I was okay. It would solve both our troubles, he said. Now what makes a man be that weak?" Famagusta Martitia said, "He must have been under a terrible strain, honey I" "Ker-rist, honey, we all were. But why is it that at such a moment of truth one man shows weak and another strong? I mean, it's all wrapped up in the enigma of personality, isn't it? Anyhow, he'd given me his head on a plate. Next morning. I rejected the ultimatum, Bernie Burr got the push just as he said he would, and in the confusion I bought up all his backers piecemeal. Ever since then, nobody's ever heard of Bemie again and' I've been boss of Ego City." His wife caressed one of bis earlobes;. "You deserve it, honey, you've been real lucky #" Lee Roger Irastein puiled away as if she. bad tWeaked (ids car. "Lucky, honey! Lucky nothing! That was tilie mosC unlucky day of my life. Ai heart I'm just a dreamer, only I octcf get tkne to dream, I cvuildi Itave been a great musiesaBi instead of a captain of industry. I've been so busy running Ego City, I've newer had time to fulfill my personal destiny." "Then, honey, why did you knock down Bomie Burr like # tou did?" "Biame Fhi the. nutn I am, end I adze chances. I just never had a ehantre to be a great musician." "Then the man. you are iai't a great muskiaia, hon." Lee Roger Irnstein got and began to pace up and down. "Nobody knows the man L am except me, honey.'' Famagusta Martkia went over to the drink mechme and had it pour them bothi anodner drink. "I don't: think that you know die sort of man you are, hooey. You ought to go to a play-out... You know, enter one anonymously. It would sort you out tremendously and show you exactly tbe sort of man you really are." "Now you're talking nonsense, boneyl You know I own those things. I don't have to mdulge in them.' "I think you're seared, honey." And that's how it happened that, a few drinks later, Lee Roger Irnstein was persuaded to enter one of bis own play-outs. IV jf eanwhite back at the oM bJoe packing rase, Bemie Burr was telling Barley of the crisis that had ruined his Me. "I played it clever. I drove down to this guy Imsteni's fancy mansion and collared him when be arrived home. I offered hwn a perfectly foolproof deal to get these gu # TS off my neck who were riding me, with a big cut for him. Next day, ns two eould have run Ego City between us." "Ah, you couldn't run a hot dog stall!" Barley said. "In those days I could. I had genius then. But that creep Irastein loused if all np. He doublecrossed me next nnoming, and from then on I was finished.' Barley hiccupped. "You played into his hands, sounds to me. You got chicken!" "I was meant to be a big boss, not a bum! It was just I played my hand wrong. All I need is another chance to paove it. Just one more chance;" "Don't give me that again! Every day I hear the same tune! Look, Bemie, if you had the same dbance again, you'd louse it up in tiie same way, see? Because it's your destiny to be a bum!" He rose to his feet, clutching the bottle as he did so. "Don't you call me a bum, you old batl At heart I'm a very responsible man, a captain of in"A bum!" Barley finished. "You're kidding yourself! If you want to find out the sort of jerk you really are, why don't you go into a play-out and see for yourself, instead of boring me with your load of hogwash?" He poured her another drink. "I love you. Barley," he said brokenly, " 'cause you always know what's best for me." '  teied one of the play-out theaters was not simple,, but it was st. Pleasant machines put you under li ght hypnosis to remove any surface inhibitions. You then stated roughly what your problem was, or what sittiation you wanted to amuse yourself with that evening. These reports were flashed to a group of human and computer analysts and coordinated with the reports of everyone else entering the playouts at the same time. Pfeople wkh similar ends in view were grouped together. Cast ts were formed, and immense scriptwriting machines assembled a plot to fit the personafities involved. While tfiis was going on, and it took only a minute, yon were being given the drugs that would most easily enable you to behave as the personality you wished to be. Then the plot came on, was played to you subliminaKy, and the costuming and make-up departments saw to it that you looked the part. By the time that was done, you had your role effortlessly memorized -- though there was always room left for adlibbing. AH over Ego City stood the play-out theaters, many of them of tremendbus size -- the sexual theaters being tfie smallest because those who wanted that sort of play-out needed little action in their scripts. After the makeup department had finished with you,, you would be conveyed by tube to tire appropriate theater, if you were not already there. Many of tire theaters speciaEzed in period plays, becaHse it had been found that people could express their basic needs more freely when out of their own time. No one troubled about historical accuracy. It was die sj i ir'it that counted. In the theaters were no audiences, only participants -- actors working with other acts, but each isolated in his or her own Kttle ego. Tn Theater Fifty-Five, it was a blustery spring day in the sixth or seventh century. Dramatically lit by the only sunbeam to penetrate the doud overhead, King Petrovich  stood with his arms akimbo, looking south towards the mountains, while his wife, Branka, waited behind him at a respectful distance. Petrovich was tall, wrinkled, totally gray. His age was foityfour, his expression was not unpleasant. But as he looked toward the valley down which his army must pass on the morrow, a frown creased his forehead. Behind him, a temple was being built. Behind that stretched his army, resting, cooking their lean rations. Women and children mingled with the men of Petrovich's army. And beliind them were the other followers, the rabble who had followed his triumphant progress for five years across the wildernesses of Eastern Emope. "You must rest and eat now, O my king, in preparation for the morrow's march into Illjnia," Branka said, taking his arm timidly. "Cease, woman! Petrovich cannot rest while the fate of his peoples is at stake." "It is a heavy burden you bear, my lord." She was beautiful, tall, pale, red of lip, her hair black and skilfully dressed, hanging down to her waist. Petrovich seized her by the waist and kissed her till her mouth was bruised. "Aye, the burden of my fate is heavy, woman, as you say. Therefore I go to pray." Branka fell back as the king strode forward into the temple. The rude palisade of the temple was decorated in a crude manner with the figures of soldiers and naked maidens. Inside, the roof was red and the walls hung with tapestries. Although the carpenters were still at work on the temple, their mallet-strokes echoing through the interior, the priests were already busy, and the smoke from a burnt offering drew tears in the king's eyes. He prostrated himself before his god, a great wooden idol twice his size. It had two bodies and four heads, all of them fearsome. Against one of its massive thighs lay its saddle, bridle and mighty silver sword, which Petrovidi alone of all his people was strong enough to wield in battle. His prostrations were brief. He rose, scattering the priests, and strode into the open towards his great tent of hide which took twenty men to pitch. A scout ran up to him, panting, and bowed. "Well, varlet?" "My lord, the King of the Illyrians is in the camp. He desires word with you." "King Donikpus? How comes be here?" "My lord, he comes in peace and even now awaits your gracious permission to speak with you." "Have him brout to my tent." scattered his serving women. "But you must sustain yourself, O my Kingl" Branka cried. "No time for that -- get these women from my sighti Bring me good Transylvanian wine. Donikpus, King of Illjnia, is here to see me." The queen gasped. "But my lord, he is your sworn enemy! Has he not vowed to slay you tomorrow when you march into his lands?" "There's villainy afoot. I'll see that I question him closely." "O my King, whispers are abroad that your general Yovan thinks to spread mutiny among your subjects." Petrovich stroked his great iron gray beard and raised an eyebrow. "I have no time to waste on the sub-plot now, woman. Stick to the main scripts. Where's the wine?" A great oxhom bound in silver and splashing over with the dark red liquor of Transylvania was brought to him. As he quaffed it back, trumpets soimded without and General Yovan entered with the King of the Illyrians and attendant lords, etc. Donikpus and Petrovich stared each other in the eye. Donikpus, for all his outlandish garb and armor that aped the Roman, was not unlike his rival though he wore no beard. He was tall, wrinkled and would probably have been fair were he not totally gray. He was forty-four years of age; his expression would have been pleasant were he not scowling now. Branka thrust an oxhom of wine into his hand, and the tension in the tent somewhat relaxed. "You realize your head is in jeopardy every moment you remain in my camp?" Petrovidi said. "You do not imagine I enter this pagan place for pleasure?" "State your business and be gone!" "Mind I do not go without stating it! Or your corpse, Petrovich, will lie reeking in the dust by tomorrow's sunset." "You dare to threaten me, Donikpus? I'll ride into battle with your body rolling behind my horse!" "I'll have you driven back to the wilds from which you camel" "I'n have your entrails strewni through every field between here and Kief!" General Yovan eoughed. "My lords, the scrt, I pray I Should not the King of the Illyrians state his business?" "You're rght," Donikpus said, quaffing his wine. "Petrovidi, we are both in mortal danger. I come to offer an ahiance." "An alhance with you!" boomed Petrovich. "What means tius?" "Ride with me two leagues to the hills, and I will riiow you proof of the danger. Unless you ore afraid... " Petrovich looked about him, at Itte anxious face of his wife, the stolid face of Yovan, the stem faces of the attendant lords, etc. He took another great drag at his wine. "I'll ride with you," he said. As his wife ran with him weeping to his horse he said to her, "And keep an eagle eye on the dastardly designs of General Yovan." "Sure, hooey," rfie said. "So will I, by my troth." iTntirely unaccwnpanied, the two kings rode together out of camp. It was sunset now, and all tlie western sky was a ragged mass of red and gold cloud. The ground beneath them was dark as tbey spurred their steeds up the side of the hill. At last they reined at the summit. The camp lay behind, fires twinlding here and there, an ocoasioaal burst of hoarse song rising even to this eminence. South lay the mountains and the somber valley of the Siva River. "That way you and your host must go tomorrow," Donikpus said, ptointing down the valley. "You will be wiped out from behind. You see that old stone Mithraic temple over there, at the beginning of the valley?" "It is deserted. My scouts examined it thoroughly this afternoon." "Empty it is, Petrovich. But rinder it are great caves. All this barren mountain is a maze of caves. Those caves are filled with half the Illyrian host. When you have passed, they will burst out and attack you from the rear, white the other half will attack from the front. You will be slaughtered to a man." Petrovich turned his scowling regard to the other, searching that wrinkled face lit by the light of the dying sun. "You are the Ill#rrian king, yet you teU me this! How so?" And Donikpus explained. He was in trouble, particularly with his iqstart son. Prince GcMgues, who would lead' the amburii. Donikpus wanted to do a deal with Petro'vich. He would fix things so that they would have an alliance together, and in the morning, they could unite forces and wipe out Gorgues. "We can probably mop up your General Yovan too," he suggested. Silence fell, and a moon rose in the sky while Petrovich considered these things. A night bird was Binging. At last Petrovich spoke. "You have delivered your whole nation into my hands," he said. "I shall be prepared for the ambush tomorrow, I shall capture Gorgues and tell him of your deceit, and he wiU wipe you out. I can then wipe him out in my own good time. You have no courage, and so you are defeated before you start! This is the moment of truth, Donikpus, is it not?" The Illyrian king's teeth flashed in a sneer. "You opportunist, Petrovich! Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, I say! Those that live by the sword shall die by the sword! Farewell, false king! I'll match you yet!" Setting spur to his palfrey, he galloped down the long slopes towards the forbidding valley that marked the marches of his kingdom, leaving Petrovich to sit and brood on the hill. A torrent of confused emotion ran through Petrovich. He recalled all he had said to Branka -- and all he had not said; he recalled all he had ever done -- and all he had not done; he recalled all he hoped to be -- and all he hoped not to be. The sky was free of cloud now. All the stars shone down, and a comet or two appeared. Suddenly, Petrovich spurred his horse and galloped down into the valley along the path that the Illyrian king had taken. He had come to a decision. To his surprise, he saw that Eonikpus had stopped, turned about and was riding backw Both men, alarmed by the other's change of plans, drew swords. They charged towards each other at a gallop and met by the rushing Siva River with a clash of metal. "Halt, then!" cried Donikpus. "It's too late to change your mind, you braggart king! I want my crown no more. I'm a dreamer at heart, not a ruler. I'm off into the mountains among the simple people. I shall grow a beard and become a wandering musician, singing the ballads of my people." "You can't do that!" Petrovich exclaimed. "I'm tired of kingship, too. Besides, I have a better voice than you!" "You lie! My voice is the finest in all the coastlands of Illyria " "Pah, that pipsqueak voicel Donikpus, you couldn"t keep a baby awake with your singing, and you must die -- " But even as he lunged forward with his silver sword, the king of Illyria limged forward with his gold one. For a moment, tlie light of the comets flashed along their deadly blades. Both men grunted almost in unison. Silence fell. Then, very slowly, one king topof I his horse towards the left timip aad Ae oAer towards Ae right stirrup. Since Aey were facing each oAer, Aey fell on top of each oAer an roBed togeAer mto Ae rapid stream, where Ae wavelets, chiB from the heists of Ae mounAin, washed over Aeir idghtless eyes. All this time, Gorgues was careusing in a stunulating faAion inside Ae limestone mountain, while exciting Aings were happening to General Yovan in the ieen's tent... I#recauti(ms were taken so Aat participants in play-outs, when learving Ae Aeaters after Aeir roles were done, did not haeet any fellDw actors. But since Aese precautions had been arranged by Bemie Burr in Ae days when he owned half of Ego City, he had small trouble in circumventing Aem. S when Lee Rogers Irhstein icame to cKmb into his self-driven Hknausine, he found a ragged figure waiting for him in Ae shadows. "Lee?" Bemie asked huskily. 'Say, Lee, I recognized you in tfierel" WiAout Ainking, Lee Rogers Imstein clutched Bemie's hand. Bemiel I recognized you -- after all Aese yearsi" "Several cen Aries, hasn't it keen?" Bemie said dryly. "Say, I really learnt somethini about myself in Aere," Lee Rogers Imstein said. "Should have gone long ago, like Famagusta said." "You made a swell Illyrian king," Bemie said. "And you know what I learnt about myself? That I am really happier as I am Aan as a king or a capAin of industry or in any post with responsibility. I could have double-crossed you, but at Ae last moment I ratted out!" They both lit Imstein cigars, and Aat magnate said, emotion in his voice, "You were a great warrior king, Bemie. I kind of admired Aat beard of yours. And I liked your Branka, too. Showed good taste." He was in an uncharacteristically sentimental mood. His death as Donikpus -- stabbed by a prop sword made of a wonderful alloy that disnitegrated immediately on touching human flesK -- had momentarily softened him. Gazing at Bemie, he said, "Know what I learnt about myseK? I'm just not destined to be a wandering minstrel or a great musician or any of Aat stuff. I may think I want to be, but Aat way spells deaA for me. In Ae Ature, I shall be content wiA Ae humbler role of king of the Illyrians. I mean, of course, of Ego City." A long silence fell, while they leaned against Ae car.  We really got ourselves sorted out in there," Bemie said. "Wonderful form of entertainment we invented between us." "Say, Bemie, I'm not just saying this, but it really has been swell meeting you again. Like the good old dajrs." Bemie nodded. Looking cautiously about to see that nobody could overhear them, he said, "Look, Lee, why don't I come and see you in the morning? I've got a little proposition to put to you that could make all the difference to both of us... "  i  '      I    f s     L This Month in IF -- by Frecfenk Pohl and Jack WiUkiinson by Harlan Ellbon by C. C. AAacApp IF... And When ! A new ieaivn exploring the Infeiface between science and science fiction by Lester del Rey -- and many morel Don't miss the July issue of IF -- on sale at leading newsstands everywhere! If was voted World's Favorile Science Fiction Magazine for the second straight year by the # World SF Convention I IV T ervyn Grey, nicknamed the Boy Wonder of the Business World, had not become a indecisiveness. Accordingly, when he found an overnight memo sent by teleprinter from Edgar Casson, his London deputy, which said Casson counted himself fortunate to have for holdings in a company that yesterday had been quoted at left the Grand Bahama headquarters of his financial empire on the next VC-#. He hadn't bothered to send ahead and say he was coming, but the stolid, heavy-set broker was not surprised when a chauffeur-driven Rolls arrived before his expensive home that evening. He told his wife to entertain the dinner guests on her own, to keep his food warm for later and not to interrupt him on any account, and he himself welcomed Grey in the library. Short, blond, tense to the point of feverishness, always seeming -- even when sitting behind tiis desk -- to be on the point of heading elsewhere at a dead run. Grey dropped into the most comfortable chair, took the fuller of the two glasses of sherry which Casson poured and demanded, "WHat in hell's name happened to Lupton  White?" Casson had been anticipating this; but, as usual, having the width of the Atlantic between them had given Kim an exaggerated impression of His ability to deal calmly witfi Grey in a bad temper. He licked his lips nervously and said in a defensive tone, "It's still happening, you know. They went through one and sixpence by close df tiness this afternoon, and tomorrow you won't be able to give them away. Under the circumstances -- " "What happen?" Grey said. "And give me another glass of that muck you were conned into buying as sherry." Casson complied with a sigh. Much of the day he had been mentally rehearsing the explanations he was going to give if Grey turned up, and with considerable polishing he felt he had prepared a rather impressive story: the initial astonishment, the quick reaction which shaved their losses, the discreet pumping of knowledgeable acquaintances, the eventual remarkable discovery... But the hell with it. If he prevaricated, Grey would quite likely fire him. He set down the newly filled glass and reached into the inner pocket of his impeccable dinner jacket. happened to them," fie said baldly, and tfirust a sheet of paper, folded twice, into Gre#r's outstretched fiand. Factsheet Five" Grey read aloud from tfie Beading. "Wfiat does this have to do witfi it?" "Read the whole thing," Casson shrugged. "Then you'll know as much as I do, or anyone else that I've spoken to." Grey scowled, but did as fie was told. What he had been given was a sort of leaflet, produced by photo-offset from a typed original -- a badly-typed original, moreover, with irregular margins, many errors and even two or three lines which Had been crudely x'ed out. The heading was in bold black Letraset capitals, but even ttiat was a sloppy job; and the capital "F" of "Five" was creased at tiie top. Altogether there were about ten or a dozen short paragraphs, each prefaced with' the name of a company, of which he recognized the majority. With growing anger and bewilderment, he read through them. Dale, Dockery  Petronelli Ltd. Ice-cream and ice-lolly manulacturers. During the last six months #I children who had bought their products contracted stomach disorders. Grand International Tobacco Corp. "Prestige," "Chilimenth" and "Cachet" cigarettes. # of the cases of lung cancer diagnosed last year occurred among users of these brands. Scientifically Tested Protectives Ltd. Surgical rubber goods. # unwanted pregnancies occurred last year in cases where the parents had relied exclusively on this firm's products. And there was the one he'd been looking for: Lupton fis White Ltd. Catering equipment. # employees of firms using breadslicers, bacon-slicers and other cutting devices applied by this company lost one or more fingers in the period under review. Grey winced and shuddered at the momentary image of a hand spouting blood across the clean white enamel of a bacon-slicer, but he had a twenty-thousandpound loss on his mind. He looked up at Casson, who had taken a chair facing him and was gloomily piercing a cigar for himself. "This -- this rag did for Lupton #s White?" "So I've been told," Casson agreed. "But -- but for heaven's sake!" Grey counted rapidly on both sides of the paper. "There are eleven named companies here. Did an # Tthing happen to the others? How about Grand International Tobacco?" "They latmched a new promotion scheme two weeks ago vch has already visibly increased tiieir sales. It started an upward trend in their price, too. But, for whatever reason the trend leveled off yesterday, and today they slipped back threepence. I agree, that isn't evidence. But the coincidence is indicative." "Oh, for the Lord's sake! That happens all the time, that kind of thing; but a nosedive like Lupton #s White's is practically unprecedented! How can you argue that a slovenly scrap of paper like this is responsible? And in any case, why diis firm in particular, with twelve hundred alleged victims, and not the contraceptive makers with twenty thousand?" "Because there's no way of getting back at the firm which landed you with an unwanted baby. But there is a new and very much stiffer Industrl Compensation Bill before Parliament at the moment, which makes the manufacturer as well as the operator of industrial equipment liable if the employee gets hurt. If the performance of last year is repeated next, Lupton  White could be hit for an estimated three hundred thousand in claims, which would wipe out their gross profit -- phfftl" "Re-tooling to cure the problem, make the machines safer?" Grey snapped his fingers. "No, don't bother to answer. They restyled their entire line three years ago, didn't they?" "And still haven't paid off more than sixty per cent of the loan they obtained to finance the job." Casson gave the words an air of finality. "No, confidence in Lupton  White is nil, and what they can look forward to is bankruptcy. Which is, I suppose, a kind of poetic justice -- assuming they really did cost all these people their fingers, or their hands." "Nonsense!" Grey exclaimed. "Any idiot should know that a sharp cutting instrument is dangerous! So's a pocket-knife -- so's a razor-blade, come to that!" asson's mouth twisted as though he were amused despite his depression. "The person who puts out that Factsfieet is fully aware of that," he said. "You haven't read the other side, have you? Look at -- I think it's the last item but one." Grey turned the paper over. He read aloud, "New Dawn razorblades were used in # of the # face-slashing cases known to the police in -- " And, breaking off, abruptly, he stared at Casson. "How in the world could anyone take this rubbish seriously? There must be a lunatic behind it!" "Someone took it seriously. A lot of people, in fact. The proof is in what happened to Lupton #e White, isn't it?" "No, of course that isn't proof!" Grey jumped up and began to pace the room. "What about all these other companies? I didn't see a simultaneous crash by all of them." Three of them aren't public companies, so they can be disregarded. And the rest are all subsidiaries of much larger combines, which can cushion the blow." "But -- !" Grey slammed fist into palm furiously, and the Factsheet floated to the floor. Casson bent and recovered it. "But what, Mr. Grey?" "But granting that you're right, something ought to be done about it! Isn't this -- weU -- libel, or something?" "Apparently not. You can't libel a corporation, only an individual." "But it's sucK transparent nonsense!" Grey tKunder. "WKo in Heaven's name could track down -- oH, for example, tfie parents of all tKese unwanted babies? It's absurd!" "Absurd or not, I tell you it is taken very seriously by a lot of people. Shall I explain?" "Yes, go ahead," Grey said wearily, and slumped back into his chair. "It took me a lot of probing to get Hold of that issue of the Factsheet," Casson said. "I called -- well, a long-time friend of mine, let's say -- while I was trying to find out wHat Had Happened to Lupton's, and He said if he'd only realized I had a Holding in tHe firm He'd have tipped me off. I asked How he knew, and He said he'd tell me if I Had lunch witfi him. I did, and that was wKen He showed me that paper. He told me He had a photostat so I was welcome to have it. "He said He doesn't know anyone else who receives it. He Has no idea wKy he receives it or wHo sends it to him. It just arrives, roughly once a month, in a plain envelope and always witK a different postmark. He's been getting it since issue number tKree, wlucH He thought was a crank's ravings and threw away. However, one item did stick in his memory because it referred to a canned-meat company he was interested in, and implied that they were lax in their hygiene. So, superstitiously -- to quote his own term -- he revised his intention of buying in. A few days later an outbreak of typhoid in Leeds was traced to a caimed corned beef shipped by that very firm. Naturally, tHe bottom dropped out of their sales for three months until the impact of the news faded." "Go on," Grey said, listening intently. "Well, next time he received a Factsh'eet, of course, he read it very carefully. He Had no Holdings in any of the firms it listed, but he kept an eye on them out of curiosity. One, of the entries was similar to this one Here, about the ice-cream, and said a lot of children Had fallen ill after buying toys imported by Kid Dee Fun. You know them?" "Of course. Dolls and novelties from Hong Kong and Japan. And they were the firm that ran foul of Constuners' Association." "Correct," Casson nodded. "There proved to be an arsenical compound in the paint used on some of their dolls, and they Had to call in ten thousand poimds' worth and bum them." "WHo the Hell was it wKo told you all this?" Grey demanded. "He asked me not to give his name to anyone," Casson murmured. "But -- well, I checked on some of the companies Ke admitted having stock in when I'd left him after lunch, and I can safely estimate that he's worth petent and have good judgment. Which I already believed, of course. I'm far too cynical to believe a yam like this without, as it were, verifsnng the teller's credentials." rey looked at him for a long moment. He said finally, "Has he ever gone for any of the very big companies?" "I don't know." "Let me see that leaflet again!" Grey snatched at it and pondered in silence for long moments. At length he said, "I have to give the guy credit. He's smart, isn't he?" "How do you mean?" Casson countered. "OH, come off it!" Grey snorted. "It'd be obvious if you could see beyond the end of your nose! out by one of the cleverest market-manipulators I ever heard of. There's a pattern here which gives him away. You honestly don't see it?" The nervousness which Casson thought he had escaped by convincing Grey of the truth of his assertions returned in full force. Feebly he shook his head. "In that case you're more gullible than I imagined," Grey snapped. "Maybe I should think about handing my affairs over to someone who isn't going soft in the head with premature senility! Goddamn it, man, think! From what you've told me all these sheets follow a similar pattern. Each includes a kernel of hard fact -- the infected meat, the arsenical paint -- which could be established by anybody with access to the right channels of incould compile a list of twenty damaging facts off the top of my head which I could use against as many different companies with household brand-names! Then I could invent lots more, dressed up with statistics, which could neither be verified nor disproved but which would take color from their surroundings. And I'll bet that's what he's doing, whoever he is. And then I could salt the whole lot with an item about a company which is peculiarly vulnerable, like Lupton  White. Result: the ultimate in inside marprophecy." Casson said, "Yes, but -- " "But what?" Grey waited an instant, then added, "Oh, come on, come on! What's your opinion of the man who puts this collection of nonsense together?" "Well -- " "A public benefactor, drawing attention to products which make people ill, chop their fingers off, kill them in accidents? In that case why doesn't he attack big companies with a staff who could follow up his charges? Directly or indirectly I control a labor force of sixty thousand, don't I? I could hire a hundred more and set them to work tomorrow if I had to, checking out the claim that umpty-dozen cars riding on Ultrac Tires were involved in accidents last month, or however many housewives were drowned in Miracle Whirl washing-machines." "And would you?" Casson said. "Would I what?" "Would you hire the people to check the claims? When the cartesters reported that Ultracs skidded more easily and were more likely to come away from the rim of the wheel when cornering at speed -- " "I did sweet Fanny Adams about it. Correct. How in hell could I? Any tire will misbehave if you treat it badly enough! And things went on exactly as before, didn't they? Ultracs sell well because they're cheap and well advertised. All this consumer-testing nonsense affects maybe a hundred thousand buyers in this whole country, and there are millions over and beyond those few who want what I'm giving them. These are hard commercial facts, Casson. I didn't invent the market, and no more can I be held responsible for the people it consists of. You haven't answered my question: did you honestly picture the publisher of this Factsheet as a knight in shining armor, crusading against dangerous consumer goods? No, you couldn't be that naive." H ideously embarrassed, Casson felt himself begin to flush under the lashing scorn of Grey's tongue. Not for the first time he wondered how much longer he could stand working for this -- this youth. He himself was over fifty, almost twice Grey's age, experienced, successful, highly regarded in his own field. Yet there was something about Grey which could make him cringe, want to curl up inside himself and go a long way away very quickly. Perhaps it was what the admiring gossip columnists had no qualms about terming ruthlessness; perhaps it was just that his unashamed greed made him acutely sensitive to the greed of the people who bought the products he offered. It had begun with household durables, and the discovery that people resented having to pay so much for the equipment to perform unglamorous chores like doing the laundry, yet felt forced to acquire tugU-priced, HigH-precision equipment for them because that act itself loaned tKe work a Smidgin'S of glamour. That led to knocked-down washing machines, assembled in half an hour with a screwdriver -- supplied. The result was handsome; he hired good designers to package his products. From there he went on to other expensive items for the home, likewise in kit form, and thence to the car, the next highest investment in the family budget. First there were things to make a routine vehicle look like a custom-built modification, and then there was the major breakthrough into the tire business, following the discovery that drivers resented having to pay so much for equipment no one but experts would notice and comment on and would rather fit a sun-visor and a windtone horn than a new set of high-performance tires. And so on, in a fantastic p#n'amid. There had been nothing like it since John Bloom's meteoric rise, and unlike his predecessor Mervyn Grey showed no sign of over-reaching himself. Even the loss on Lupton  White would be absorbed by a holding company worth ten times as much. What next? He grew aware that Grey was staring at him sardonically and fished back in memory for the echo of the last thing that had been said to him. "Well -- ah, no! I don't suppose I did picture whoever is responsible for the Factsheet as a 'crusader.' " Recovering rapidly from his moment of dismay, Ee ploughed on. "On the other Hand, he must have a bee in his bonnet, don't you think? Perhaps he suffers from misplaced idealism." Grey considered the suggestion, his expression becoming more cordial. "I think not, though it's a rational possibility. A monomaniac obsessed with things like safety, the health of children and so on would be more likely to let fly wildly at the big corporations, as I said before. No, this has all the earmarks of a cunning, thoroughly planned campaign. So let's take advantage of it." He leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. "I want you to do two things. First, buy Lupton  White." "What? But I told you -- they're headed for bankruptcy!" "Blockhead! I don't mean take them over direct! I mean sweep up a good fat majority holding. Ao financed their restyling the other year -- one of the merchant banks, was it? Well, it doesn't matter. Whoever did it won't want the company to go bust. They'll become the effective controllers of what assets survive, and if the property won't cover their outlay they'll listen to a scheme for recovery, won't they? This Industrial Compensation Bill won't become law next week, for heaven's sake! We can dump any stocks of dangerous products -- export 'em at cost, if we Have to. There's bound to be some ignorant nignog somewhere who'd like to pretty up his jungle grocery store with a nice new slicing machine ! Hell, why should I have to spell out the details to you of all people? A change of title and the magic of the name 'Mervyn Grey,' and we can have the firm back where it was inside a couple of years. All what's wrong is that you panicked and dumped our holdings, so now we're going to have to buy it back, aren't we?" Casson said, "But when it started to slide so fast -- " "You stuck to rigid principles instead of using a bit of imagination. Ah, never mind. With luck we'll come out in one piece after all. But you're going to have to make up for it, you know, Cassieboy!" "Don't call me that!" Casson snapped. "Why not?" Grey's tone was a savage caress. "When you behave like somebody years my junior, can I help thinking of you as an inexperienced teen-ager? Shut up, an#Tway -- I don't want to spend longer than I can help in this chilly damp country. The other thing you're going to have to do to make up for your mistake is find me the person who publishes that." He stabbed his finger through the air towards the Factsheet. "He's got something going for him. I'd like to have it going for me. Never let it be said that I can't recognize an original idea, especially when it pays this kind of conspicuous dividends." He rose and headed for the door. "You've got until the next issue comes out, Cassie-boy," he threw over His shoulder. "Otherwise you're through. 'Byel" II he more Grey thought about it, the more He was impressed Factsheet idea. If, in the space of a few short months, the man behind it had built up such a fund of confidence as to take in Casson -- who, for all Grey's gibes, was extremely competent -- and Casson's anonymous friend and at least several score other people with substantial holdings in Lupton  White, since otherwise the price-slide would not have been so swift or so complete, then he had a remarkable gift for exploiting gullibility. It was Grey's lifetime conviction that the mass of the world's population were idiots. Finding someone else who Had arrived at tiie same conclusion and benefited from His insiglit was enough' to make Him decide tKat that person was going to be useful. i Day by day Uttle snippets of information arrived across tKe ocean from London wEicH enabled Him to roimd out Es picture of the m#rsterious market manipulator. He began to tffinir of Him as a financial counterpart of a g#psy fortune teller, not merely because he used tHe standard technique of slipping in tiie crucial item among a fog of carefully cGosen irrelevancies to give tKe whole a pKoney air of precision by employing those incredible statistics, but also because of tHe ingenious misdirection He Had adopted from tKe start wKen presenting His monthly bulletins. If Ke Had issued something slick and professional, people would at once Have associated Kim witK tKe regular market information agencies. Instead, Ke took tKe risk of having His material dismissed as the drivel of an incompetent amateur and banked on luck supplying him with a small Hard core of people wKo Gad actually read some single item closely enough to remember it when the prediction it contained was fulfilled. WitK Casson's friend, it Had been the canned-meat company; doubtless witK many more "clients" it Had been the affair of the poisonous toys. TKen, next time one of th'e FactsKeets turned up... "Neat," Grey said to the air. And added: "I want that man I WKat the Hell is Casson playing at?" For, tHougK information was coming in almost daily, it still summed up to nothing useful. OtKer people Had been found wGo received th'e sKeets, always anonymously, always in plain envelopes and never with' the same postmark twice. They were clearly Handpicked. TKey included people wKo Handled tHe investment program for unit trusts and some of tHe biggest insurance companies, tKe flywheels of tKe stock market, but not only sucK -- also there were key men in tKe distribution of consumer products, like tKe Head buyers for cKain stores, procurement directors for car accessory dealers and service stations, tHe cKairmen of export agencies Eanof BritisK goods every year. But tGey were in close enough contact witK tKe financial world to learn quickly about tKe accuracy of tKe warnings wHicK appeared in tKe shabby little mailings they received out of tKe blue. Watching tKe course of tKe companies named in tKe sheet Casson Had given Em, Grey detected the shadow of wKat Gad happened to Lupton #e WEte in tfie gradual decline of Grand International Tobacco over the next couple of weeks, in the reversion of a former slow rise in another company, in the sudden cancellation of a takeover bid for yet a third. O n the spur of the moment lie called Casson direct and learned little enough for his pains. The envelopes in which the Factsheets arrived were the largestselling brand in the country; the paper they were printed on was made by the largest mills; the typewriter was a discontinued model and could be one of several thousand still in use. Listening to the flow of excuses, he grew suddenly angry. "You have one more week!" he rapped. "If I'm not on the mailing list for Factsheet Six, I've finished with you -- is that clear?" There was a moment of silence. At length Casson cleared his throat. "Well, there is one thing it occurred to me you could do," he said. "I hesitated to suggest it, but..." "What is it?" "You could advertise, perhaps? Say in the Financier Times? I'm certain the -- ah -- the publisher must read the financial press very closely," Grey was on the point of declaring that it was a ridiculous idea, when he checked the words and reconsidered. In sober fact the points Casson had mentioned, like the commonness of the materials used to prepare the Factsheets, did imply that it would be hard to breach the wall of anonymity surrounding the publisher. And 'he did want to find that man. He wanted it so much it was becoming an obsession. He kept finding himself daydreaming of the ways in which he could exploit the reputation the Factsheets now enjoyed to drag down the price of companies and let him buy into them, reorganize them and put them back on the market under new names sponsored by what he referred to as his "magic." But he was too impatient merely to copy the idea and start his own monthly bulletin along similar lines. He wanted the fund of goodwill -- or rather, gullibility -- the existing version Had established. Hence he wanted the mailing-list. Casson said, "I thought we should put a few anonjmious advertisements in other places, too, like -- " "Anon#mious?" Grey cut in. "Hell, no I Are you determined to undermine the good impression made by your occasional fits of insight? Why anonymous? If it's known that Mervyn Grey is interested in the Factsheet, this is ,# going to give the guy the kind of cachet he's after, isn't it? It'll probably drive the last of the skeptics into hi? net. He'd love me for that! Yes, go ahead and place those ads at once!" Ill Qix days later the morning mail  included a note typed on Half a sheet of plain white paper, in an ordinary airmail envelope addressed to "Mr. Mervyn Grey, Mervyn Grey Enterprises, Grand Bahama Island." It ran, curtly enough: I understand you are interested in the forthcoming issue of my Factsheet. Well you miifit be. I shaU be pleased to show you a copy personally. If you call, however, do so by yourself. At the top there was an address, in a small town several miles north of London. At the bottpm there was a name -- George Handling. And not only was the typeface the same as that of the Factsheet, but so was the clumsy use of the machine, with a good halfdozen errors in the few lines of the note. Jubilantly Grey told his secretary to get him on a flight to England as soon as possible. He was about to instruct her to put a call in to Casson as well, when he changed his mind. Even though tlie man's idea of advertising for the Factsheet's publisher had paid dividends, it had taken an unconscionable time. Casson, he decided, was due to be discarded in favor of somebody younger and more enterpriang, and it would be better to provoke him into resigning than to dismiss him openly. Best of all, of course, would be "retirement" -- not to salve Casson's feelings, because he regarded people who couldn't protect themselves as a liability and would not go out of his way to help them, but simply because it would do an inescapable minimum of damage to the image of lus financial empire if the outside world were allowed to detect an internal disagreement. So let it work this way, he decided: he would go to England without telling anyone he was coming; he would make his way to the home, or office, or whatever it was, of this Mr. Handling, and he would make him a proposition -- a very good one. He might even offer him Casson's post, in due time, if his Other talents matched his skill in exploiting credulity. It was going to take a person of unusual ingenuity to make the most of the new vistas that control over the Factsheet was opening up. There had to be lavish tips, of course: to the airline's staff, to ensure no one mentioned his arrival to the gossip columnists -- almost every time he went to England He found a couple of journalists waiting for him -- then, on arrival, to the ground staff at tHe airport so that he did not Have to appear publicly among the passengers in the customs Hall, and still later to tHe car-hire firm from whom He rented a small inconspicuous family sedan. He was. However, reasonably content witH His precautions wHen He picked His way around the northern fringes of London under a dull autumnal sky which occasionally sKed a Half-hearted drizzle on him. Tomorrow, or the next day, when Casson called with the latest of his useless scraps of information, it would be a real pleasure to announce that he Had already been to see the man wKo published the FactsHeets and Had closed a favorable deal witK him. That would be the first of a series of carefully chosen wounds intended to compel Casson's eventual resignation. It would work. He had done it often enough before. Tespite tHe gloominess of tfie afternoon He began to wfiistle as He drove along. On reaching tHe small town whicH was His destination, However, He grew puzzled. He Had expected to find tHe street named on tHe letter He carried at the center of tfie town; in his experience, even tfiougK businessmen decentralized away from the metropolis, tfiey liked to centralize in' tHe places tfiey moved to. After niucK aimless driving back and forth, fie asked a pedestrian and was directed to tfie outskirts, to a drab postwar Housing development lacking all character and all cKarm. At the end of a cul-de-sac fie found a large bungalow witfi one lighted window, tHe garden; before it overgrown witK weeds, the door of the adjacent garage wide open to reveal that there was no car inside. But the street bore the rigKt name, and the right number was on the gatepost. Grey parked the car and got out slowly. This low-income neigfiborh'ood, this badly-maintained House witH its wild garden, did not fit his preconceived idea of sHeets. Could He Have been Hoaxed? He reminded Himself tfiat tfie letter He Had received was clearly from the same typewriter as tfie FactsHeets, sKrugged and walked up the patfi, noticing tKat it was concreted where one migfit Have expected gravel and tfiat tHe weeds Had been cut back along its edges. It was full dark by now, and the nearest street-lamp was too far away to illuminate tfie front door of tfie bungalow. He went the last few feet cautiously, not wanting to trip over a step. There was no step. That struck him as peculiar, but he couldn't decide wfiy. It was pro'ably not nificant, anyway. He felt across the door jamb until he located a bell and pushed it. Shortly an overhead light went on, and the door was opened for him. "Yes?" a voice said, and then, changing instantly to a tone he could not decipher: "Ah', it's Mr. Mervyn Grey, isn't it? Come in, please. It's cold and nasty out, isn't it?" Staring, he failed to respond for a moment. He hated to be at a loss, but this -- this creature who had appeared before him was so totally askew from the mental pictures he had conjured up that he was astovmded. He was in a wheelchair, to begin with -- a battery-operated wheelchair with' controls on the right arm rest. His left arm was shriveled, and the Hand twisted, doubled back almost at right angles to the wrist. His legs were concealed under a gray blanket spotted with gravy marks and a smear of egg yolk. Above a woollen shirt with a button missing, half his face was covered with an untidy brown beard, but the other half was a smooth keloid, almost purple, reaching from cheekbone to jaw. Both' the eyes. However, were alert and piercing, and under their intent gaze he grew uncomfortable. "Are you George Handling?" he forced out. "That's right," the man in the wheelchair nodded. "The person who publishes the Factsheets?" "Yes! Look, don't jrist stand there -- you'll make the House cold if I have to keep the door open, and heating is bloody expensive these days." But I should have ihou#ti you made enough from using the Pactsheets to -- Grey bit the words back. Numbed by the possibility that all his deductions had been false, and he had merely stumbled across a lunatic after all. He stepped inside and now had a chance to survey his surroundings. This was the most peculiar house He had ever been in. The reason for not having a step at the front door had been instantly clear when Handling appeared in His chair, but the logic of that went all through his Home. The internal walls had been knocked away, giving an open plan complete, except for what he guessed must be a bathroom at the back. There was a bed in one place, with a curtain which could be drawn around it; there were cases of books in another, a desk with a typewriter on it in another, a lithographing press in another, stacks of paper and big cartons of envelopes nearby. Moving with the automatic jerkiness of a puppet, he followed Handling across the open floor towards , the desk. There was a large paraffin stove burning there, of the convector-radiant type with a hot wire mesh glowing in the middle of a chromed reflector, but despite that and despite what Handling had said about shutting the door to keep the place warm the house was very cold. Or was the feeling subjective, due to shock. C(Qit down," Handling said,  swinging his chair expertly around so that it cleared the stove by inches. He tilted his head towards a chair with papers and a tea cup on it. "Sorry you Have to move all those things, but I can't have things on the floor -- they get in my way, for one thing, and I can't reach to pick them up, for another. I have to go and get my tongs if I drop something. Well! I suppose I ought to offer you a drink, oughtn't I? Only I Haven't any. One doesn't get much pleasure out of it in my condition. I could make you a cup of tea, if you like." Grey had found a place for the cup and papers on the end of the desk and had taken a little longer than necessary in arranging them there, just in case there was a sample entry from the next Factsheet to be seen. But there was nothing -- only a stack of blank' paper and Half a dozen handwritten letters, upside down. "No -- ah -- no thank you," he said, forcing himself towards normality. "I suppose I should really have let you know when to expect me, but... Well, to be frank, your FactsHeets have impressed me so much that the moment I knew where to find you I just dropped eversdhing." "Oh, there was no need to warn me of your arrival," Handling said, and chuckled. "No need at all. I could say I'm flattered at your taking the trouble to fly the Atlantic just to call on me, but I doubt if there's any need for that, either." Grey's eyes roved the monstrous room into which the House had been converted, spotting here and there among the general bachelor disarray of shirts Hung on chair-backs and stacks of old newspapers things which gave some anchor of credence to Handling's identity. He recognized the familiar red cover of the British Industrial Annual, a number of commercial directories, publicity material and prospectuses from various large companies of which he himself had copies in his office on Grand Bahama. He said, almost at random and to cover his inquisitiveness, "Well, you'll have gatiiered from our advertisements tKat I'm most interested in your publication." "Advertisements?" Handling said. Grey blinked af Em and immediately had to look away again -- the sight of that fungoid patch of scar-tissue among the unkempt beard threatened to turn his stomach. "Why, of course! That was why you wrote to me, wasn't it? We advertised in the Financial Times and the Economist and..." The words trailed away, and he stared around the house again. Nowhere was there a sign, among all the heaps of old newspapers, of the conspicuous pink of the Financial Times. "Oh, I wouldn't know about that," Handling said, with an abortive attempt at a shrug which' struck Grey as rather Horrible. "Then how did you know I was interested in your work?" "It's a trade secret, Mr. Grey," Handling said, and gave a noise closer to a simper than a chuckle. "You've seen at least one of my productions, haven't you? Then you know I have a great many trade secrets." rey was conducting a furious debate with himself. An unclean cripple in a wheelchair was so far from the image he had mentally created of a gifted and prosperous market manipulafor that he was half-minded to difl miss Handling as the crank Be had at first assumed, when CaS' son showed him FactsHeet Five. Yet there was incontestably a fund of credulity, tapped by Handling, wEcH he could exploit if he had the chance. He would have to be tactful. Even if le man proved to have been deranged by his awful condition, He could be used.' "Yes, they impressed me enormously," he said, forcing warmth into his voice. He linked his fingers together, realized He Had forgotten to take off his drivinggloves and decided against removing them now because the House still felt bitterly cold. "Inside information like yours could be worth a fortune, handled in the proper way. In fact -- Well, never mind that." "You were probably going to say you're surprised to find the possessor of it living in a jerrybuilt bungalow in an ugly development on the fringe of a dull, little provincial town," Handling said. His tone was quite unemotional. "But it's easier to keep out of people's way here, Mr. Grey. And besides, I no longer have any use for a fortune. I had a wife. I had a son. They both died in the accident which reduced me to this state." "I -- I'm sorry," Grey said'. inank you for being sorry." There didn't seem to be any way to follow up that remark. Casting about for a way to change the subject, Grey said, "But you must have some pur pose in publishing th'ese bulletins of yours. Or is it just a Hobby?" "It's more than a Hobby. It's practically a full-time occupation. Compiling the information is a slow job in itself, and then there's the business of making the litHb plate and running off tHe actual sheets and addressing all tHe envelopes... Oh, it keeps me very well occupied." "I see." Grey licked his lips. "How do you manage to Have the sheets sent from so many different places? I don't imagine you mail them yourself." "Oh no. There's a commercial service which' collects them and takes them anywhere I cHoose within a hundred miles for quite a small fee. I thought I'd muddle the trail a little until I was ready to show myself." "You -- ah -- you have a big mailing list now?" "I started off with five hundred, picked more or less at random," Handling said. "This month it will be over a thousand." "No wonder it keeps you busy! Ah... I'd have appreciated being included in the list myself, by the way." "Oh, you aren't at all the sort of person I aimed it at," Handling exclaimed. "I worked it all out very carefully. Tfiere are certain key figures in tfie financial world of this country, and you can find out who they are if you put lots, of little bits of published information together. It took me several months to make my list up, but that was all right. I Had plenty of time on my hands. Or rather, on my hand." He picked up the limp left one with tHe live right and regarded it curiously, as though he had come upon a dead frog in tHe garden. "I selected people administering the very big investment funds, people concerned with important exports, people responsible for choosing the brands of goods which are sold in the biggest chain stores all over the country, and so on. People whose decision to accept or not to accept a company's products could make or break the company, you see?" Grey gave a cautious nod. "And why did you choose them in particular?" he ventured. "Oh, because of the kind of information I was getting," Handling said. "They seemed to me to be the people who ought to be told what I knew. You've seen the sort of stuff I get!" "Ah' -- yes, of course I Have. But why that information? How do you come by it?" "I'm a psychometrist. PsycHometry is a brancli of clairvoyance. Actually I think the whole thing is all part of an all-embracing talent which will eventually be fully revealed to us, but that's by the way. I get odd extras every now and then -- the curtain lifts, as the sajring goes. Sometimes I can glimpse the future, sometimes I can deduce or sense what a person is thinking, but my specialty is being able to work out from objects their associations with' injury and death." IV TTiaf a farretgo of nonsense.  ' All Grey's enthusiasm for getting Hold of the FactsKeet mailing list evaporated on tfie instant. He got to his feet "Well, thank you very much, Mr. Handling. I'm sorry to Have taken up your time. However, if you're really restricting your mailing list to -- " "Oh, really, Mr. Grey!" Handling cut in. "You didn't Honestly come all the way from the Bahamas just for five minutes' chat and not even a peek at FactsHeet Six, did you?" He added after a fractional pause, "This one is devoted to firms you'd be especially interested in." Grey wavered. On the one hand, the cripple was certainly a crank; on the other, he had certainly influenced the market. "Yes, I should like to look at number six," he admitted. "I thought so!" Handling crowed and moved his wheelchair around the desk, once more missing the paraffin stove by a fraction. He tugged open a drawer and peered in. "Unfortunately it looks as though I only have spoiled copies left," he went on. "Yes, that's a spoiled one, and that's blank on one side, and... Never mind, it won't take a moment to put the second side on it. I still have the plate on the machine." Dexterously he Headed for the lithb press. His deftness with only one hand, Grey admitted silently, was admirable, although everything he had to do was necessarily slow. He waited impatiently; meanwhile Handling, disinclined to hurry, chatted away. "Yes, this talent of mine I suppose must always Have been with me, at least in rudimentary form. For example, I never wanted to buy that washing machine which chopped my little bo#r's hand off; but of course it was a lot cheaper than all the others, and we weren't exactly rolling in money, so I gave in. And I had my doubts about the sewing machine, too, but Meg couldn't go out to work for a long while after the -- " "Did you say your son lost his hand?" Grey said in a dead voice. "Why, yes. The washing machine wfisn't fitted with one of tho?e automatic brakes, you see, so you could have the wh'afsit going round while the lid was open; and without any water in it, it spun amlazingly fast, and poor little Bobby managed to turn it on and lift the lid, and... Ah, here we go now, or rather in a moment when the thing's warmed up. Yes, like I was saying: Meg couldn't go out to work for a long while after the soleplate of her iron fell on her thigh and the burn turned septic -- not much of an iron, but it was very cheap, of course -- and then the sewing machine she'd bought to make a little extra at home ran wild and stitched across the palm of her hand, and it was while I was driving her to the hospital that it happened. The tires on the car, you see. I had my doubts about those as well; but we were pretty skint, what with' Meg not going out to work, so I had to settle for what I could afford when it was absolutely essential to get new tires, and there was Meg crying and nursing her hand, and Bobby on the back seat squalling because he didn't have a hand to nurse any more, you see, and... Ah, here's your copy now. Complete." He rolled back across the floor to a spot directly facing Grey and held out the piece of papter, bold"ATechanically Grey took it, didn't look down. His e but eyes were riveted on Handling's face. He heard himself say, "So -- what happened?" "According to the policeman who explained at the inquest, those tires tend to spring away from the wheel-rim when you go round a comer fast, and of course this lets all the air out -- they're tubeless, you understand -- and the car just went completely out of control. Smashed into a lamp standard. Meg and Bobby were lucky, I suppose. Certainly I couldn't have done much' to support them in this condition. But it was while I was laid up in the hospital that I began to discover my talent. All of a sudden one day when I was being given an injection I said, 'The last man who had a shot from that one died, didn't he?' And they thought I was just being morbid, but I felt sure. So I started following it up. And what I found was that I could -- well -- sense when I took hold of something whether it, or anything like it, was going to hurt someone. "At first I could only get snatches, but I had lots of time, especially before I got this chair and had to wait in bed for someone to attend me. The worst snag was that I thought the things I was detecting had already happened, so I was sort of straining the wrong way into time to get at them. I can't make it very clear, I'm afraid. It doesn't happen to many people. "Then I suddenly realized that I was feeling forward -- not backward -- and I got the Hang of it, properly. Mark you, it could never be a quick job, working out one of these things. Sometimes, especially with the real massproduction items, I spent up to thirty-six hours struggling before I sorted it out and could afford to go to sleep and rest up." Almost hypnotized by Handling's sudden burning intensity. Grey could not drag his eyes away from the ruined face straight ahead of him. He said, "What -- what exactly is it you do?" And reflected with paradoxical detachment that it was a change for him to be dominated, however briefly. He told himself he was putting up with' it, though', because . he wanted to be completely convinced that the man was out of his mind. Cltherwise he might suffer from the pangs of disapfointment. "It's more sort of what I did," Handling explained in a thoughtful tone. "I told you -- when I first started sensing that the other things which matched what I was holding would hurt such-andsuch a number of people I thought this was what had already taken place. But I found out that sometimes the thing I'd picked on was too new to have done all that, so then I realized the truth. I could sense what wa.s going to happen. Oh, no doubt you'll say how could I be sure? Well, I couldn't, could I? Not until I'd checked up. So I noted down everything I thought was exact, and whenever I got the chance I cross-referenced my notes. Like the Consumers' Association tests were very helpful, when they said that something I'd worked on was unusually dangerous, and sometimes I found things in the paper about food-poisoning and toys being dangerous to children and so on. After about a year or so, I was absolutely certain I was right." "Oh, but this is ridiculousl" Grey forced out. "How could you know about -- well, twenty thousand unwanted children, to take a really far-fetched example?" "The numbers sort of add up in my subconscious," Handling said. "I lie awake at night, and I can feel them ticking away in my head. When they stop, I can feel how long they'll take to reach that total -- three months, six months, a year. And then I write it all down. When the time is up, I put it into my current Factsheet and off it goes to all these people. I did think of other ways of spreading the news, but I decided they wouldn't work so well. I mean, the newspapers are controlled by the advertisers, aren't they? And the consumer journals have their own tests and their own way of goiog about it. Not as good as mine, but there it is. And they're definitely taking notice now. Especially since -- you did say, didn't you, that you'd advertised to get in touch with me?" "Yes." Grey bit the word off short, like the snap of wire-cutters. "You could tell it was you, from the advertisements?" "Yes!" Grey felt the prickle of sweat inside His clothes. How could he have imagined that this house was cold and Have kept on his coat, his gloves and scarf? It was boiling in here! "Well, that certainly ought to convince everyone that I'm worth paying attention to," Handling said smugly. The virtual echo of his own remark to Casson galled Grey. "It's a load of garbage!" He exclaimed. "Taking hold of something and sa#nng that during the next year it's going to Hurt or kill so many people -- you must be insane! And this Factsh'eet of yours is nothing more than a grandiose confidence trick!" "You may not believe me, Mr. Grey," Handling said softly. "But the best part of a thousand people are going to when they open their mail tomorrow morning. The mailing company collected Factsheet Six this afternoon, and it's on it's way. Aren't you even curious to know what's in it this time?" rey raised the hand which held his copy, intending to ball it up and march out, but from the corner of his eye He spotted three words that petrified him: Metvyn Grey Enterprises, Horrified, he read down the page. Miracle Whirl washing-machines electrocuted so many people through faulty wiring, started so many domestic fires, leaked and flooded so many homes, bringing down the ceilings on the floor below; Ee-Zee-SmootHe irons started other fires, came apart in use and burned the user; cars shod with Ultrac tires were involved in so many fatal accidents... His head was ringing as he thought of the people to whom this list of accusations was going and the buying power they controlled and the markets they could slam the door on. He barely heard Handling say, "Yes, it was a Miracle Whirl which cost my boy his hand, and one of your irons that kept Meg at Home so she had to try and make money sewing with one of your machines which stabbed her hand, and if was Ultrac tires I had to buy and whicK wrecked the car while I was rushing her to the hospital. You have more than just blood on your hands, Mr. Grey. You have all kinds of suffering. You seem to have hurt at least one person for every day of your life." "You bastard," Grey whispered. He thrust the leaflet into the side pocket of his overcoat. "You can't do this! It's libel -- it's a filthy, dirty, stinking libel!" "There's no libel about saying that a product is faulty," Handling said and grinned. "Oh, you could certainly sue me! I suppose I've committed a civil tort. But I haven't committed any kind of crime." "You smug devil!" Grey roared, and hurled himself bodily forward. Cripple or no cripple, he had to wipe that grin off Handling's face! But the impact drove Handling's wheelchair backward, and it rammed straight into the paraffin stove, and knocked it over and spilled a sea of blazing oil instantly over thirty square feet of the floor. Flames soared up, high as Handling's head. There was a sudden image seared into Grey's retinas, a distorted face with eyes perfectly round, mouth open in a choking gasp that drew in sterile oxygenless air, beard crisping and hair writhing like Medusa's snakes -- And he was out of the house, and the door was shut behind him, and he was running for his car. He jumped in, started the engine, accelerated wildly down the road. Just before he turned out of sight, hie glanced back. As yet, there was ho sign of fire from outside the house; the curtains were drawn against the cold autumn night, and so were everyone else's on the street That fact too became a still image in memory, like a stopped movie. V F orty miles away, on a lonely roadside, he stopped the car again. Siuvering, yet bepnning to recover his self-possession, he drove himself to rational examination of his situation. It wasn't so bad -- was it now? He could hardly conceal the fact being in England altogether, but there was no reason at all for ito be known that He'd vhuted Handling's hometown. He'd spoken to exactly one person, to ask directions -- but he'd done so at dusk, from the shadowy interior of a car identical to thousands of others. Long before anyone noticed that Handling's home was burning, he had been well clear (rf the town, perhaps over the county border. He concentrated on the memory of the deserted street Yes, it could Have been a long while before anyone noticed the firel And no one Had seen Him arrive, or leave, and that minor miracle of not taking off Qs gloves meant h'e could Have left no fingerprints, and He could go quietly back to London, to tHe apartment wKicH was always, ready for Him to walk into without notice, and He could go out nonchalantly to a club wHere He was known and Have dinner and watch a good cabaret, and tomorrow morning at about ten o'clock He could let it be discreetly known in circles wKere it counted tKat tKis time tHe FactsHeet was a tissue of lies and tfie financial empire of Mayya Grey Enterprises was in no danger, no danger at all, and -- The FacfsHeetl Frantically He fumbled in tfie pocket of His coat and drew out tHe bit of paper. Tfiis was tHe only thing to link Qm with Handling. He must get rid of it at once. On tHe point of winding down the window and throwing it out, he canceled tHe movement and instead took out His lighter. In another minute tKis could be anonymous wind-blown ashes, and He would be safe. OH yes, and the letter from Handling, of course! Lord! Had anyone seen that, in the Grand Bahama office? Well, then; just in case, he could walk into Casson's office in the morning, saying He'd been too tired to go straight there tKis afternoon, and announce His intention of visiting Handling... , Yes, that way would be all rigKt, too. He'd be perfectly safe. Even if people believed the FactsKeet and he lost a lot of money, Ke still had the talent which Had made him the Boy Wonder of the Business World. He could survive. Snapping the lighter, he held the copy of Factsheet Six towards its flame. The instant before igniting it, he stopped dead. This time, he was looking at the second side of the sheet. He was looking at a paragraph bordered with black lines, inaccurately handdrawn with a wide felt pen. Inside the border, in Handling's usual bad typing, it said : This is the last issue of Factsheet. The publisher, Mr. George Handling of # Wyebird Close, Blentham, was murdered yesterday by Mr. Mervyn Grey in an attempt to stop this information being circulated. He sat there for a long time thinking of a thousand people of great influence opening the plain envelopes which would arrive in tomorrow morning's mail. When he had finished thinking about it, he just sat. know, some day it won't matter How many books Isaac Asimov wrote. THat is, it won't matter wHeth'er a given reader does or does not enjoy the given Asimov book He Happens to be reading. The dust wrappers, with their foolish blurbs, will be gone, and the books will be in sturdy library rebinds, nearly indistinguishable from other volumes by other individuals... except by their content. This is an important fact, and you should make every effcjtt to grasp it despite the shouting and huckstering in the blurb copy now. Because some day, sure as God made little apples, long after you and I are gone, Maggie, someone will pick up a copy of Pebble in The SHy and look beyond the intergalactic politics fo the story of the aging little CScago tailor whirled away from  own time and caught in the middle of them. He will think of Amov as the author of that book, the creator of that character, and He will read other Asimov in search of earlier and later echoes of that plangent crystallization. Beyond the robots and Hari Selden he will find The Mule, and He will find Dr. Wendell UrtB. Four of the thirteen short stories in Asimov's Mysteries (Doubleday) are about Urth (and his stooge, H. Seton Davenport), and several others could Have been. Dr. Urth is a funny man wearing funny hats, an "extraterrologist" stuck with dozens of tics in addition to at misnomer, a reasoning being who has to put up with people who all the time think it strange an expert on affairs extraterrestrial should be a sedentary agoraphobe. Urth of course makes perfect sense; it is the world, as represented by the common social order, that is mad as only the half-educable can make it. I suspect there is an obvious reason why he is so good at catching antisocials at long distance. He simply puts himself in their place. Worse than any other task to which he's called, he has to play a sort of balding Sherlock Holmes in the stories which mention Hinj Here. These are all rather contrived and not particularly entertaining tales. They demonstrate that a sufficiently educated and intelligent man can attempt to do anjrthing. They do not demonstrate He will succeed gracefullyIf Asimov, or anyone else, were ever to succeed in attaining that amalgam which this book claims for itself. Be would have succeeded in entering through two doors simultaneously. I realize Isaac could now, easily, without straining surface logic, write a story whose central character achieves simultaneity. But that would only prove my point. My point is that this arbitrary collection of thirteen stories -- this chautaqua -- contains some fine individual divertissements -- "Pate de Foie Gras," for example, is a humor article disguised as a detailed report on the physiology of a goose laying golden eggs. Or "The BiUiaid Ball," for its incidental depiction of a sometimes very real mood generated in tKe world of science. Some of its best stories are tKose wtiicK are not "mysteries" at all, and are Here on a semantic pass. But on balance, tHis is a poor book because it is a book about clevernesses, and clevernesses are not Isaac's long suit. A man may master tKe mecKanics of card tricks. Harder -- or many of us would do prestidigitation all tKe time -- is tKe cruel self-mastery tfiat brings you on stage witH an impenetrable smile at times wfien tKe morning paper says tKe world is mad, or some event in one's life teacKes us, again, tKat love will woimd at tKe least provocation. Harder, and destructive. Dr. UrtK knows tKis. He would, at tKe conclusion of "TKe Dying NigKt," like to travel back across tKe years to tKe girl in Lower Falls, New HampsHire. All Ke Kas, unfortunately, is a matter transmitter tKat will take Him there now, a worse tKan useless journey. And it's late for girls, too. But I'm sure He's glad eacK time Ke can shake off tKe trivia of crookcatcHing, and can resume tKe privacy of fiis study, and think on love. D over, tKat truly excellent publishing enterprise, Kas sent me not one but two review copies of The Best Tales of Hoffman (#) being a collection of works by E. T. A. Hoffman, wKo anticipated my own birtK in Konigsberg by a matter of about a Hundred and a Half years. His birtK year is #, as a matter of fact, and if tKese two things are not enough to convince you of His improbability, then consider the fact that he was a gifted music critic and competent composer, destined to find ultimate fame in the title of a mediocre work by someone else. He was also very much a part of tKe general Romantic literary movement which reacted in some writers, sucK as Mary SKelley and Hoffman, to produce prototsical considerations of tKe man machine confrontation under the guise of science fiction. (It's interesting tKat Lord Byron and Percy SKelley were too busy, in tSe end, to actually produce tKeir aborted contributions to this sub-genre. Apparently, you Had to be not quite first-rate to get it down on papCT). TKe volume is edited and introduced, it appears excellently, by E. F. Bleiler, wfio is tfie Everett Bleiler wKo co-edited Frederick Fell's old annual "Best" anthologies witfi Ted Dikty. Hoffman was not, blurb to the contrary, "one of tKe two or three greatest writers of fantasy." (Bleiler works for Dover). TKat is a very large ch'uak to chew off. But this man, who vras real and who thoiight some very interesting thoughts, did lay down the groundwork for some of (iir most enduring tfemes. I recommend "The Golden Flower Pot," "Automata," and "The Sand-Man" particularly. But there are seven others, and I tlk that if you get this book, read it and place it on your permanent shelves, you will come back to it often. Qcience-fiction writers for, oh, thirty years, Have been actively learning from Robert A. Heinlein. All of us, I tnk, have influenced our own careers by our private assessments of tiis technical accomplishments and His professional criteria. Occasionally, some of this thinldng Has become public, a tricky business while your subject's still alive, because he can callously point out your factual errors, take personal umbrage, and otherwise refuse to hold anywhere near as still as he does when it's just you and your thoughts, musing of awards before an open fire. Take, for instance, the time a famously sharp technical mind in this business produced a scholarly essay whose conclusion depended on the crucial assumption jttiat Heinlein Had never really tackled time travel before The Door Into Summer. The essay skirted only around the edges of the fact that the time-travel story in its most effective form takes the construction "the son is the father is the son hereafter," and never once mentioned "By His Bootstraps." Such is the character of what musing on Heinlein can do to your otherwise deservedly famous analytical mechanism. Nevertheless, the Heinleinchasers go on, as we all must, and we are now arrived at yet another generation of writers who have to cope with their relationship to him... the more so because he is getting old, now, and they are so young that in their eyes he has always had snow on his upper slopes. It was about time that somebody attempted a full-scale study at thesis length, as Alexei Panshin has now done for Advent: Publishers, Inc. Heinlein epitomizes all that is possible to the science fiction of the #'s. This distinct breed of story seems to have developed as a natural response to the needs of people who got their under, graduate technological grounding in the #'s, and is characterized by a belief in the liberating effect of the Sc. D degree. An inspection of the best-received stories and series of the time will show that the hero is commonly a figure of lower middle-class origins, or alternatively of mysterious parentage, wlio emerges into His true artistocratic condition as a result of codified training and, often, supplementary tutelage at tHe Hands of an avuncular figure. His maturity is signaled Hy sucH outward signs as tiie privilege of using lower middle-class slang in tiie laboratory, doodling wiring diagrams on tiie tableclotiis of four-star restaurants, and the concealment of the title "doctor" until under attack by sucK father-figures as, for instance, hostile corporate attorneys. Within and upon these parameters, Robert A. Heinlein has built a truly enviable career with remarkable elegance. He has struck the chord of liberation not only upon technicians but upon arts baccalaureate candidates, night school accounting students, chicken farmers, would-be science-fiction writers, editors of grocery trade magazines, infantry officers, former publicists for the other people who go on to make up the commercial world which we normally cite when we use the referent "contemporary society." He has even struck it in rebels against this world, by offering such #degree candidates a religion, in StrangBr in a Strange Land. As long as you refer to the societal system whose central event was the Great Depression. Robert A. Heinlein can be found to have been your spokesman in some cogent way at least once, and probably quite often. And of course we all do, in at least some second-generation way, refer to that system. So Heinlein speaks to us even though he displays certain obvious impediments. Among these impediments are: A restricted range of male characterizations; a craftsman's eye for prose functions, substituting the functions normally assigned to an ear for moods (Heinlein orchestrates eversrthing like Bolero) ; an even more restricted range of female characterizations; and what is either a fault or another champion three-legged runner's talent -- the frequently demonstrated capacity for producing a story which ends either before or after the clearly visible place where the plot resolves. I think these characteristicarise from the way Heinlein taught himself to write, which in turn arises from how Heinlein is wired up inside. But in the interests of space, I will spare you. What is important here is that Alexei Panshin seems to have noticed all of these same things, though not in the same words, in His exhaustive study of Heinlein's writings and as much as is knoWn of Heinlein's biography. Yet as I went through Heinlein in Dimension (Advent: Publishers, Inc., P.O. Box #, Chicago, #. #. Cloth. #), it seemed to me -- seemed forcefully, painfully, frequently  -- that Panshin had brought himself up to a crucial point, had perhaps even nudged at it, and then had gone off elsewhere. In part, this feeling arose in me because Panshin does not, in the end, come to any clear picture of what Heinlein's work fneans... what round his life has taken, what rough' draft may today be discerned in the thing a future generation will descry as Heinlein's statement. It seems to ttie that if you're going to do a book about something, you should not in the end come out with' a book about the parts of something. however faithfully you describe them and however thoughtfully you guess at their sometimes fairly obvious functions within the largely undescribed whole. But let's take what I think is the key example, of where Panshin goes off beside the point and Heinlein makes it : Panshin's description of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein's most recent novel, is crucially flawed by, first, his overlooking the central fact about the book and, second, by how close Ee comes to not overlooking it. The overlooked central fact about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is that the hero is the computer, Mike. The problems in the story are most painful to the computer, the solutions imposed are best suited to the computer's comfort and as events close the ragtags, the lingering doubts and curiosities expressed by Manuel, the narrator, are the expressions of a spearcarrier wondering what happened after hero and heroine have reached the climactic interpenetration, and only the epilogue remains to be spoken. Every review of Harsh Mistress I'm aware of made the intended error of mistaking viewpoint character for protagonist. (And your humble servant was most ludicrously in error of all, for it was in re-reading my own review in print that I finally caught on). Panshin speaks of Heinlein's knowing full well what names mean. He has already said that "Michael" means "God-Like," and he brings this up in mentioning, disparagingly, that the machine is somehow more forceful than the narrator. He makes nothing of it, though -- and he makes nothing of the narrator's name, which is Manuel. (The narrator, you may recall, has a . prosthetic arm which' he takes off or changes hands on at will, often -- though not often to any overtly important purpose.) Manuel -- and his fellow revolutionaries -- respond as required, with' their several talents, to the computer's shifting computations of the political events which', if they go wrong, will leave the computer intellectually sterile on the destitute, frigid body of Luna, after all the people in Her tunnels have died. Again Panshin repeatedly cannot account for Heinlein's bringing peculiar marriage customs into the story. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Panshin makes a point of the title's overt meaninglessness, too). Everybody knows, mind you, that machines have an excellent chance of attaining authority some day. (And everybody else writes books in which the viewpoint people either out-think or cower before some device which talks just like Jehovah, only louder. The former alternative contradicts the necessary premise that the machine is smarter than Man, while the latter contradicts visceral convictions. So these stories, while sometimes clever and occasionally admired by people who can suppress good sense with logic, are impermanent. Mistress, however, resolves things as they very likely would be... with even the most involved humans believing events had proceeded to their benefit, and perhaps feeling a little bit lost at the thought that somehow Mike, the ballistic computer, had gotten his exteroaffectors cut off by a lucky hit, but not really capable of reaching the truly monstrous realization that they had served their purpose and were now being ignored, all you zombies. Read in the light of this reading of Mistress, Panshin's HoOk changes character as bittersweetly as does a re-reading of the novel. Panshin cites persistent traits of Heinlein's stories: Boy Scout sexuality combined with freakish consummations: the super-competent character with' the added super-talents such as having a perfect memory, a camera eye, a gift for mathematics, plug-in talents, etc. He notes Heinlein's obsessive denial of personal death', his conviction that survival is the only test. He touches on, though fails to nail down, Heinlein's converse conviction that it is also the only worthwhile challenge, in whose absence even genius languishes. Panshin asks, again and again, "But where is the ultimate working-out of this trait? Where is Heinlein going with it? Where is the sign?" The sign may very well have occurred in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. There is more symbolism here than you'll find even in D. D. Harriman's shipping tag knifed into the pumice. customary words of good cheer: "Get your butt over there, Maxwell, and get that mess cleaned up. And if you spend one goddamn penny over authorization, you'll be down in the file room when you get back." It saddened me how Jack's threats had declined in beauty and vigor over the years. Maybe I was getting used to them, or maybe now I had so little to lose that no threat was very meaningful. After all, you make a man feel pretty large if you tell him he must do so-and-so or he will lose his shot at the Big Prize. You do nothing at all for his ego if you tell him he has to do it or lose the miserable job he already has. But I took his comments, as I had for some years, with considerable charity. He too was a disappointed man. He too had waited all his working life with the Outfit for the big chance to be a Number One. And he was now too old to hope. At forty-three, I was very nearly too old myself. I was fully resigned to no greater expectations than to hang on to what I had and -- at the most -- to someday succeed Jack and snarl at other hopeless men, a far cry indeed from the glories we had both anticipated as young men. So I didn't stay to argue as I used to do, but went straight to Disbursing, signed my life away for a stack of hundred-dollaf travelers' checks, and Hurtled to catch the subway to New York and the afternoon Superson to Berlin. I did not want to tarry for the pitying looks of my younger, still hopeful colleagues in the Office of Claims, Field Settlement EHvision. Thirteen years of cleaning up after the legendary Murphy ought to Have hardened me to those supercilious bastards. But it hadn't. I found m # Tself comfortable only in the presence of my boss, who -- ? as I have explained -- was even farther down the road to permanent obscurity than I. Tn the hovercab down the Potomac to the subway station, I caught myself laughing out loud, a bitter sort of laugh. WKat a state things had fallen into! There was a time when the Outfit recruited only men who Had -- the phrase ran -- "a passion for anonymity." Well, it had all changed. Guys like Jack and I had the anonymity and # a year; guys like Murphy had the passion, not a shred of anonymity, and upwards of # a year plus a virtually unlimited expense account. Back when I had joined up -- fresh out of Vietnam, hungry to to settle for the humdrum of business or academic life -- the Outfit had seemed to promise an exciting and rewarding career. But then, about the time I got out of training, skilled in small arms, dead-drqps, live drops, clandestine highjinks of all kinds, the international espionage business went all to hell, at least as far as it involved the Americans and the Russians. So you launch a major operation and find out the Sovs are deploying a brand-new multiple reentry fractional orbit bombardment system with' a C.P. of a hundred yards and yields at the gigaton level. So what? It doesn't effect the balance of power a micro-minimiUigram. So you feed dozens of expendables to the opposition apparat and get hard information that there is going to be another Kremlin power struggle and the hard-liners will replace the softliners, or vice versa. So what? The political inertia of a polarized world, the kill and over-kill, the second strike and third strike capability on both sides, makes intelligence information take on all the relevance and pertinency of medieval arguments about angels on pin heads. "The hovercab flopped down on the subway station apron like a landing gooney-bird, and I followed the rest of the passengers through the turnstile, down the drop-chute, and into th'e New York capsule. There was the usual muffled sigh, the gentle acceleration, and we plimged down the tube past the first sphincter. As it tightened behind us and we accelerated into the vacuum ahead, I tightened a few sphincters of my own. Tube travel frightens me. There is something of the claustrophobiac in all of us, and I never enter a capsule without remembering the holovision pictures of the Chicago pile-up in ' #I . I sought distraction in my previous train of thought. Espionage is like religion, I thought, which shows you what foolish things you think when you are frightened. And they lost pertinacy at about the same time, I thought. And maybe there is some connection. But granting that and having determined that a god is dead, how do you dismantle his church? The answer is, of course, you don't. And the big-time espionage business is still just as big, still just as expensive. Only its purpose has diminished. Now it is a kind of international gladiatorial sport in which' all participants are as careful as they can be not to do each other serious damage. Accidents sometimes happen. But I couldn't recall hearing of a real assassination attempt against a professional on eitlier side since way back in tHe bad old days of Stalin. And even the professionals who foul up and arc taken prisoner can count on all the headlines of a show trial followed by some sort of exchange on the old Powers-Abel nnodel long before their prison pallor becomes very noticeable. It is a grand game, if you ate one of the few real players. Everyone in it recognizes it for the game it is. We benchwarmers, though, don't have such a good time of it. We do our menial tasks and wait with' vanishing hope for one of our first-stringers to get knocked out of the game or to retire from old age. But what the helll I thought as the capsule zipped along its chordal tube a hundred miles beneath Philadelphia. What the hell; it is # a year, and there are two kids in college and there is the mortgage, and there win be retirement in aiother dozen years or so (fifty per cent of my high five). And for a lot of years it hadn't been so bad. There'd been the hope that maybe sonvething would happen to Murphy, that maybe (contrary to all expectations) he'd grow tired of the big time, the limelight, the perioc performances, and retire while I was still young enough to step into his shoes. Well, he hadn't. And I wasn't any longer. But what the hell, it was a living. T have always found Elast-West Superson flights disconcerting. "Vou leave Berlin, say, at #:# PM and get into New York at noon. The other way is even worse. The stewardesses hardly have time to say "cceeteaormilk," and for the passengers, there is hardly enough time for die prilobennies to take effect, much ls wear off for the landing. But despite their lingering effect, I could not overcome the gloom of Tempelhof. I hate obs in Berlin. Not only has the vdiole population been raised on spy stories, but a considerable segment of it Still lives in one way or another off the intelligence buaness. It may be still the best place in Europe to recruit expendables, but cleaning up after Murph there is a rerf Augean job. The little gray man at the Tempelhof PasskottiroIIe desk was familiar, and he recogied me frcun previous trips. He waved my passport back into my pocket and gave me one of those sly, conspiratcmal Berlin smiles. "Ah! Herr Maxwell! We have been expecting you!" His voice dropped to a stentorian whisper: "It is that the Murphy has been busy again, nicbt?" He held up the previous day's edition of Der Morgenpost. There was a muddy picture of a group of policemen herding a gaggle of men in handcuffs into the back of a carryall ductor. Under the picture was an italicized headline, leaning against a row of exclamation Foints and proclaiming: "Der Murphy hat wieder gesiegt!!!!!" -- "Murphy again victorious!" Under it was a small cut of Murphy himself, bearded and fierce, and a two-column story on the roundup of another Soviet spy ring in Berlin followed by a box score of Murphy's accomplishments against his opposite number, Yevgenyi Komiev. I noted that the Outfit's P-R section, big and well financed as it was, had fallen down again. The paper put the score at seventeen-fifteen. And there was no mention of the affair in Belgrade in '#, which actually made it eighteen for Murph. "Wunderbat, the Murphy," said the little man, the glint of the devoted, loyal fan in his eyes. "Such a record! And against the Korniev!" "Yeah, wunderbar," I said. I returned the conspiratorial smile out of courtesy, without mirth. I did not want to get involved in a discourse on the relative merits of the greats of the past, although there was no doubt in my mind that Murph could have Held his own with the very best of them. The little man leaned toward me across his counter, laid a consoling hand on my sleeve, and let his angular face droop in goodnatured sympathy. "But now, there will be much to do, lucht? Many, many people, Herr Maxwell. I do not envy you." "Yeah. Well, we'll get it cleaned up." I was getting so that I could no longer bear even the most heartfelt sympathy. I turned away abruptly. "I'll be at the Hotel am Zoo if you come across anything." The little man snapped his heels and touched his cap, pride and pleasure on his face. "Jawohll Herr Maxwell." The first thing was to get an ad in the papers. I telephoned it from my room at the hotel. First Der Morgenpost and then the mass-circulation tabloid, B.Z.'. "Persons with valid claims for damages resulting from an incident at the former Sector Border, corner of Klemmke Strasse and Dannenwalder Weg, at about # hours on # June, should contact Mr. Albert Maxwell, Room #, Hotel am Zoo." Both papers would hit the streets in the morning; I had the rest of the day to relax and readjust my plumbing after the transAtlantic time change. I unpacked, bathed, dined on room service Wurst und Schrippen, and stretched out on the eiderdown with' a full bottle of Jameson to drink myself into a semblance of honest resignation, which' meant forgetting for a little while a hundred other Hotel rooms, two kids in college, the mortgage, and what I knew was coming tomorrow. 'he next morning, I was up, shaved, and breakfasted well before the first knock on the door. The Germans are go-getting people and -- like I say -- used to dealing with intelligence organizations. They get right on it, unlike the Italians and the Spanish. This is good, in a way. You can get an unpleasant job over with in very short order. The English are the worst. I've spent as much' as two weeks in London cleaning up after Murph'. The English are so goddam polite. And so lawabiding. They write letters first and call in their solicitors and telephone M# or the War Office or Scotland Yard. The first claimant was one of the easy kind. He had his ductor parked nearby, around the comer on John Foster Dulles Allee. I took the sidewalk there with Him, photographed the hole in the right front pressure-shrouding of His '#I Opel and measured it. He had a claim, all right The hole was from an old-fasluoned .# slug dart or one of those great big dumdum cannons the Soviets sometimes like to pack. I chipped his claim down from # marks to #, paid him, got a receipt, shook his hand and exchanged conspiratorial Berlin smiles with him and rode the sidewalk back to the hotel. If only they were all that easyl There was a line of people all the way down from my door to the bank of drop chutes. I groaned. Murph, the bastard, had outdone himself this time. Not ten o'clock and at least thirty people. The first half dozen or so were broken glass cases. With German efficiency, they had all come with glazers' estimates in hand, and I paid up with argument. In all likelihood I was paying for a hell of a lot of damage that the Outfit really wasn't accountable for, but the time and effort of digging out all those slugs from baby carriages and hightx #  and antique Biedermeier clothespresses was far too great. Better to pay up. Even knowing that most of those people would be eagerly scanning Der Morgsnpost and B.Z. for signs that Federov or one of his people was in town settling claims for their side so they could double their profits. Sometimes I think that between them, since the espionage business went big-time and public, the Outfit and the dows in Europe. T worked through the day and well into the evening settling claims. There were the usual flesh wounds and -- of course -- the beneficiaries of the expendables, and one unusual case of a man who claimed damages for involuntary coitus interruptus (which I paid, knowing damn well I'd have trouble with Disbursing over it), but no homicides showed up. I was grateful; but then it was only the first day. By eight o'clock I had finished # claims and paid out just over # marks, which -- in case you are not familiar with the rate of exchange -- is about # of your tax dollars. I hung the Nicht Storen! sign on the door and went down to the dining room for a drink and some dinner. Halfway through a greasy plate of Schweinefletsch und Salzkartoffeln, I looked up to see Federov standing expectantly on the other side of my table. Like most Russians in official jobs, he is about a ninety-five per cent pain, but in a curious way I was always glad to see him. He was the one man I knew -- other than my boss back in Washington -- who had no occasion to feel sorry for me. I rose, gave him a stiff, one-pump. Central European handshake, and waved him to a seat. I did not say, nor did he, "WKat brings you to Berlin?" We knew. Instead, I said: "When are you setting up shop?" Federov sighed with resignation. "The announcement will appear tomorrow in tfle press. You have already started, da?" I nodded and chewed my Schweinefleisch. Federov sighed again, a deep. White Russian sigh, the ridiculously wide lapels on his doublebreasted suit sliding across each other like scissors. "It is a bad one, da?" I nodded again and swallowed. "# claims first day." Federov shook his round head, slumped in his chair and ran a trembling hand through his thick, graying hair. "Every time with Murphy and Korniev -- " His voice trailed off. I knew what he meant. Both of them sprayed slugs and rocket darts like small boys peeing in the snow. Murphy alone was bad enough, God knows. But Murphy and Komiev together... I finished all I could handle of the Schweinefleisch and rose to go. Federov looked at me pleadingly. I couldn't help feeling sorry for him, an unaccustomed emotion I rather enjoyed. Maybe it was the mutuality of our adversity. We'd worked quite a few jobs together over the past doifen years, and if anybody in the business had it rougher than I it was Federov. He had entered the had entered e Outfit (I had seen his dossier as, I'm sure, he'd seen mine), and he undoubtedly had had the same bright dreams of glory. But his Number One, Korniev, showed every sign of being even more durable than Murphy, and he was a little younger, a little farther from retirement. Murphy might have outpointed Korniev over the years. But the Soviet establishment is a little smaller than ours, and in his own country Korniev was a real national hero. You couldn't pick up a copy of Pravda or Novy Myr without seeing a picture of him or reading an account of his latest confrontation with The Forces of Capitalist Reaction. It's tough' to play Number Two to a genuine champion. I know. "Okay," I said, pulling the day's tally from my pocket. "Here's a list of the claims I've settled. But just once I wish to Christ you'd get some place before I do and save me all the work and money I'm saving you." Federov grinned weakly and stuffed the list in his breast pocket. "Thank you," he said. "It is for our mutual good, after all. Perhaps, in time, these people will learn they cannot get away with duplicate claims." "Fine," I said, turning to go. "I'm all in favor. But next time, I wish you'd pay some of my claims and give me a list." Federov gave a comical shrug. "I will try, but you know Central." I headed for the drop chute bank. T he next morning the line in front of the door was smaller. By three o'clock in the afternoon I had disposed of a dozen more broken glass cases, three ductor and two automobile punctures (only one of which I paid; Korniev had apparently been armed with a little Fabrique National dart-gun and it was easy to distinguish his workmanship from Murphy's), and a lady who claimed she had miscarried from fright. The price of miscarriages has gone way up in Berlin. I used to pay a flat # marks a throw back in '# and '#, but since the East Germans took the Wall down, the price has more than doubled. I got the cable from the Outfit just as I was leaving to go down to dinner. I decoded it with my electric razor; OK CKristl I tKougHt. I'll bet He had that damn .# Magnum with' him, or maybe even the Armalite. They ought to take it away from Him before Ke... Sick at Heart, I burned tHe cable, reassembled my Remington and went down to tHe dining room. Federov was already there, and he beckoned me to His table with a shaking forefinger. His usual worried expression Had deepened. "You Have Heard about Tangier?" He said as I sat. "I Have Heard about Tangier." "Shall we share a cab to the airport after dinner?" I nodded as I stared at the menu and all the different ways they Have for preparing Sctiweinefteisch in Berlin. Then it Hit me. "You mean you're going to Tangier? You mean Komiev was..." "Da. Komiev was also in Tangier." Federov spat a fingernail onto tHe carpet. We dined in silence, smoked our cigars in silence and separated to clear our rooms. I packed, met Federov in the lobby and rode with him out to TempelHof. We shared nothing but the fare and a series of resigned sighs. A nd then, in the waiting room at Tempelhof, just before our Superson to Rome was due to be called, I was paged. There was a telegram. I left Federov staring gloomily out at the bright lights of the launch area, recovered my razor from my briefcase, and retired to the men's room to decipher the cable: I reassembled my razor in a daze. This was iti Finally it! I was Central European Number One I Thirty-five thousand a year and my own Swiss bank account! All kinds of passion and no more anonymity! I grew awae of a buzzing and humming to my left. At another sink stood Federov, shaving a telegram. As He worked, Kis usually gloomy visage brightened visibly. A smile spread from one great drooping ear to the other. He finished and stood grinning at his reflection which was grinning back at Him in the mirror. I cleared my throat and he turned away from his satisfied contemplation. "You too?" I asked. "Did Komiev..." There was new dignity in Federov's voice: "Da. There was a mistake. Comrade Komiev is incapacitated, and I have been appointed..." I whirled and crouched, reaching for the minidart in my left sock. Federov leaped in a perfect pas de chat to the protection of a booth. I tried a snapshot at his feet under the door, and he climbed atop the toilet and tried a bank shot at me with his dumdum off the ceiling. It was plaster and didn't bank shot very well. It was a standoff, and I paused to think. 'Tederov," I called shrilly. "Hold it!" "Da," Federov's voice echoed from the booth. "Let's do this thing right. We're both out of practice, and someone could get hurt. And furthermore there's no press here." "Dal" said Federov. "Come on out and let's talk it over." "Da. Only I stay inside the booth and we talk it over. You understand?" I shrugged. "Okay. Look, let's get this thing organized and start off the right way. You get in touch with the Tass man and Deutsche Nachrich'ten Agentur; France Presse and AP. Then let's meet down along the old Wall line -- say at the Checkpoint Charlie Monument -- at about two o'clock. " 'here was silence in the booth for a moment and I began to worry about what Federov was up to. Then he spoke, his voice newly alight, full of suppressed excitement. "All right, Mr. Maxwell. I will call Comrade Stoniev and Herr Lempke. But the old Wall line, Mr. Maxwell? Not the old Wall line. Komiev and Murphy, they always met down at the old Wall line. We must establish -- how do you say it in your country -- a new image." I Had to hand it to Federov He was way ahead of me there. "You are entirely correct, Comrade Federov," I said. "Let us meet -- " I thought furiously -- "let us meet in the Heart of Berlin, in the bright lights and crowds of the Ku'udam, the most fashionable shopping street between Paris and Moscow I" I was astonished at the audacity of the idea and still I was very pleased with myself. "Dal" said Federov with real enthusiasm. "There are bright lights there," I said, growing excitement in my voice. "And many great glass show windows," said Federov, His voice beginning to break with anticipation. "And rows and rows of shiny, late-model ductorsi" I nearly shouted. "And hundreds of new holovision sets all with implosive tubes!" "And windows full of expensive perfumes -- " "And rare antiques -- " "And bottles of booze -- " "And fine, inflammable clothing -- " "And... and... and -- " Federov broke from his booth, his dumdum dangling innocently at His side. We embraced each other and cried real tears of happiness. OO Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carob and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composeis include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for aU occasions. Priced S.#S postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp.  #I Hudson Street,  New York City #  Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi  record of Music from Mathematics  right away. I enclose check or ! money order of S.#S. i Name J Address  Cty  State Zip Code...  (Offer good in U. S. A. Onty) I  U'r : When I Was In The Zoo When I was in the zoo the keepers were both kind and loving. Especially loving I #T y wife often tells me that I know all about the harbor but practically nothing about half an inch inshore of high water mark. This is not quite the truth; I don't know quite as much about the harbor as I should, even though I hold a pilotage exemption certificate for the port. Nonetheless, my knowledge is somewhat greater than that of any non-seafarer, and on the occasions that we are visited by overseas friends she will lay on a tour of inland points of interest in the car, and I will play my part by organizing some sort of harbor trip. The run from the Circular Quay to Manly is a very pleasant one, especially if it is a fine day and if the short voyage is made in one of the old-fashioned, double-ended ferries. The hydrofoils are all right for people in a hurry, but not so good for sight-seeing. And there is so much to see -- points of historical interest such as Fort Dennison (known in the convict settlement days as Pinchgut) and Bradley Head, where stands the foremast of H.M.A.S. Sydney, famous for her sinking of the German surface raider Emden in the First World War. There are all the new things, such as the Opera House (regarding which I say nothing further) and all the mushrooming additions to Sydney's skyline. There is the Bridge, of course. And there is all the traffic, military and commercial, to anybody who loves ps a continual source of pleasure. There were three of us making the ferry trip to Manly that day -- two American friends, man and wife, both writers, and myself. We enjoyed the trip over and then, having disembarked, decided to stroll along the harborside promenade to Marine Land. Most of you will know what it is like -- Marine Land, I mean -- but just in case somebody hasn't been there I'll give a brief description of it. It's a huge, cylindrical tank, with ports rf heavy glass in its sides. From the levels surrounding it you can look in at the inmates, while the inmates look out at you. There are the inevitable sharks and rays; ther o are one or two mossybacked turtles; there are hordes of smaller fishes, all of them swimming round and round and round -- for most of the time. As advertised, there are the merman and the mermaid. The merman, an athletic young man in aqualung and black, skintight suit, was spending most of the time tinkering with the plumbing at the bottom of the tank. What exactly he was doing we never found out, but there were metal pipes down there in the sand, and there were joints in them, and he, with a Stilson wrench, was either tightening these or slacking them off. The fish ignored him. The mermaid, an attractive girl similarly attired, was not ignored. She had brought a metal tucker box with her, and it was obvious that one and all knew what was in the box -- and obvious, too, that the small fry knew that they weren't in the running. Her special pets seemed to be a largish shark, an evil-looking black ray, and one of the turtles. These fawned around her, more like persistent cats or dogs than the cold-blooded creatures that they were. The way that the ray was carrying on, as she took morsels of food from the box and put them into its mouth, reminded all three of us of the more lurid magazine covers. You know the sort of thing -- beautiful Earth girl on the point of being raped by some alien monster. All of us had, from time to time, sneered at those covers -- now it almost seemed that there might be something in them after all. All the same, it was fantastic, and I said so. Those beasts -- two fishes and one reptile -- were behaving in a manner more typical of mammals than of their own species. I could see, I said, how a close bond of affection could develop between a human being and a porpoise -- but between a girl and a sting ray it seemed neither right nor possible... "Everything is possible," suddenly said the little man who had been peering through the port next to ours. " know." We all turned to look at him. He was, as I have said, a little man -- at first glance a very ordinary little man, casually attired in slacks and open-necked shirt, with brown shoes that had been polished last at least four days ago. His face was wrinkled and sun-tanned; his scanty, sandy hair had been brushed to cover a large bald spot, and his eyes were a faded blue. A fisherman, I thought. Professional or semiprofessional. "I know," he repeated, with a change of emphasis. It is always rather embarrassing when complete strangers break into a private conversation, and this man who had assured us that he knew (about what?) also knew how we were feeling. He went on rather hastily, "I heard you talking. You're writers, aren't you?" We admitted it. "Then I can talk to you," he said. "At least, I hope I can. I have to tell my story to somebody. I told it to the cops, and to their headshrinker and to quite a few more quacks in the sarne line of business. But they didn't believe it. They wouldn't believe it. After aU, I'd been adrift in my dinghy for days, and it had turned my mind. It didn't occur to them that I should'a been at least half dead of hunger and thirst... " He looked back into the tank, where the girl was now feeding the turtle. "That's why I come here, you know. So I can see for myself that such things do happen. So that I can be sure that it wasn't all in my imagination." Edward and Nola Edwards looked at me, and I looked at themf Something very close to telepathy was established among the three of us. The man was a nut, we were thinking. But now and again nuts have stories to tell -- and stories, after all, were our bread and butter. "Isn't there a... pub near here?" Edwards asked me. "More than one," I told him. "Then I suggest that we... ah... adjourn for some refreshment." He turned to the little man. "And will you join us, sir?" He said that he would. TTe were a little surprised   when the stranger -- Clarry Simpson was his name -- insisted on paying for the first round. And then, as we sat around the table, our cold beer before us, he started to talk. There are compulsive drinkers, and there are compulsive talkers. He came in the latter category. I have to tell this story, he said. I have to tell it, and I hate myself for doing t, 'cause I know that every time I do they're saying, "Clary's off again. Been proper round the bend ever since he lost that Sue of his." Sue? you ask. No. Not a wife nor a girl friend. Just my boat -- and a better friend to me nor any woman could've been. My apologies to you, lady." Yair... Sue. We were on our way back from up the coast, Norah Head way. We were well outside, well outa the way o' those blasted colliers an' the like. Just meself there was; I was never one to be bothered wi' crew. Just meself, an' Sue's diesel chuffin' away hapjMly. Hardly any wind, an' a sky full o' stars, an' the loom o' Macquarie light bright on the starboard bow an' the sky beyond that. Not a care in the world I had. A good catch -- even dnglehanded you can manage quite well once you've got the hang of it -- that'd fetch a good price alongside. More'n enough to pay all expenses wi' enough left over for coupla nights out. Can't say that I was pa#rin' much attention to an#Tthing. As I always uster say, T# Sue could find her own way home without me botherin' her. Then I heard it. Like a big electric motor it was. Didn't pay much attention at first -- there's so many fancy flyin' machines an' the like these days, an' the Air Force is always out playin' silly buggers round the coast at night. But I did look up, after a bit. Couldn't see any navigation lights, but that made sense. The R.A.AJ. out on exercises doesn't show any. There was somethin' there, though. I saw it, blottin' out the stars. An' I got scared. It was too flamin' big, and too flamin' slow. I've seen helicopters, an' this wasn't one. There was far too much of it, an' it didn't sound right. I opened her up -- Sue, I mean -- an' damn the fuel consiunption. (She was an extravagant little witch at an#Tthing like full speed.) I opened her up -- an' for all the good it did I might just as well ha' stopped her, there and then. That fl#dn' thing was directly over me an' it stayed there, an' I could feel some sort o' force pushin' down on me. It was more than just feelin' it. I could see that the water around the boat was shoved down in a sorta depression. It was like bein' in the middle erf a big, deep saucer. Then the searchlight dazzled me. It was so bright, so blinding that I didn't realize that Sue and i had been lifted clear o' the water -- though I realized it soon enough when her engine started to race. By the time I had her stopped I'd just time ter see that we were bein' pulled up through some sort o' round hatch. No, there weren't any winches or cables. Musta been magnetism or somethin' like it. So there we were, Sue and I, shut up in a big, steel box like the hold of a ship. There were lights, but I couldn't see much by them; they were a funny sort o' blue an' very dim. But there was a three-cell torch in a clip in the wheelhouse, an' I used that to see what was what. It was like bein' in a ship's hold, like I said. But there wasn't any way out. No ladders, no escape hatches, nothin'. An' I couldn't see any way o' openin' that hatch at the bottom that we'd been pulled up through. Just as well, perhaps, though I wasn't ter know that by this time we were miles up an' stiU climbing. Oh, yes, I could hear machinery, a whinin' sort o' noise, but it didn't make no sense ter me. There was a hissin' sound, too, an' that didn't make no sense neither, not until I got a whiff o' the gas that they were pumpin' in -- like a mixture o' garlic an' talcum powder it was -- an' passed out. A fter Edwards had bought a fresh round of drinks he went on. When I woke up, he said, I wasn't in Sue's wheelhouse. I wasn't in that ship's hold. I thought at first that I was out in the bush. I was lyin' on rou, sandy ground. I could feel it without lookin' at it; somebody'd taken me shirt an' me strides an' even me jockey pants. It wasn't cold, luckily, an' it wasn't too hot. But it made me fed... naked. Damn it all, I was naked. An' I could tell that I was bein' watched. I opened me eyes -- and there was another pair o' eyes lookin' into mine. Cat's eyes. "Puss," I said. "Nice puss." I opened me eyes properly. It was a cat all right, but a big one. Too bleedin' big. Bengal tigers is aU right when they're on one side o' the bars an' you're on the other, but when you're in the same bleedin' cage it ain't no bleedin' joke. I let out a yell you coulda heard from here to the black stump an' I was on me feet an' startin' to run -- but I couldn't run. That was the worst part of it. I could only shuffle over that sandy ground, an' I could hear that blasted tiger shufflin' an' snifflin' behind me, an' all the time I was expectin' to feel his claws in me back. An' then -- how shall I put it -- my fear sorta wore off. There was the feelin' that I had ter get some exercise walkin' around and walkin' around, an' everybody an' everything else in the big, transparent dome mita had the same feelin'. An' there all of us were -- lions, an' tigers, an' a smallish elephant, an' a pair o' giraffes, an' -- you name it, they had it. There was a sheila too, a black wench, as naked as I was, an' I was able ter catch up wi' her, but she didn't have no English an' seemed more scared o' me than she was o' the animals. It's a blow to yer pride, I tell yer, when a girl makes it plain that she'd sooner have the company o' a dirty great gorilla than yours! So there we were, a regular Noah's Ark, in this enormous glasshouse affair about the size o' the Domain. There were trees, which looked fairly healthy, an' some sizeable patches o' grass, an' rocks, an' a shallow stream o' fresh water, an' bushes. But there wasn't a proper sky overhead. You could see the een an' shimmer o' the glass dome, an beyond that what looked like plumbing. An' out towards the sides there was glass again -- or somethin' Tike glass -- an' outside that again there was... people. No. Not men an' women an' children. Their shapes was always changin'. Like big jellyfishes walkin' on their hind legs -- if jellyfishes had hind legs, which they don't. But those did, an' arms of a sort, an' they were usin' 'em to point with. Sorta lost count o' time, I did. Hadn't got my watch no longer, o' course. But every few hours the lights'd go out an' we'd sleep. Believe it or not, I got quite pally with that tiger an' I think he quite liked me. Like turnin' in with a big dog or cat on your bed, it was. Not that there was any bed -- just the softest patch o' grass I could find. For drink there was the stream. At feedin' times the right sort o' tucker for everybody'd come droppin' down from up top somewhere. My friend Puss -- I called him that -- useter get some kdiMl o' raw meat, an' rd get a loaf o' bread an' a tin o' sardines. They musta checked up on what was in the locker in Sue's wheelhouse. Every now an' again there'd be a new animal. The rhinoceros I remember -- it looked at 'first as though the gas or the ray or whatever it was that they were usin' to keep us from flyin' at each other's throats wasn't goin' ter work. But before he did any damage he was as tame as file rest of us. An' there was a couple o' dirty great bears, an' some o' those little black an' white ones, an' a hippopotamus. They widened an' deepened part of the stream for him during a sleeping period. But the animals... I'd seen 'em all in the Zoo or in pictures in books or in films. It was the people -- I'll call 'em that -- who had me puzzled. I'd got the idea, somehow, that this was a big flying saucer that we were in, and that smaller ones had been coming down to Elarth to collect . , . specimens. Yair. That's all we were. An' these people in the saucer weren't little green men from Mars or beautiful blondes from Saturn. They were... different. They were different, an' they were kiddin' themselves that they were as far above us as we're above dogs an' cats. Perhaps they were, in some ways. But not in all. A nyhow, one day a couple o' them came down into the dome with us. Like the man an' the girl in the tank they were wearing suits. Perhaps our air was different from theirs. Perhaps the suits were armor just in case any o' us was too handy with teeth or claws. But the suits made them look more like people. A head, two arms, two legs, an' the sight o' transparent innards churnin' away decently hidden by stiff, white cloth. One o' them was carryin' a bag of odd-lookin' tools an', after he'd scraped the sand away from a manhole cover, started to fiddle around with a worm's nest of pipes an' wires that was under it. Needless ter say, I was interested. But every time that I got within four feet of him it was like gettin' an electric shock. After half a dozen tries -- the last shock nearly flattened me -- I decided to leave him alone. The one in the other suit wasn't a "him" -- it was a "her." Don't ask me how I knew, I just felt it. She was carrying a box. She squatted down under one o' the bushes an' opened the lid just a little. An' she... whistled. I don't know to this day if she was really whistling, or if she was just makin' the noise of it happen inside the brains of some of us. But Puss heard it, an' that dirty gorilla heard it, an' the rhinoceros heard it. An' I heard it. So there were the four of us -- the tiger, the gorilla, the rhino and the man -- all of us running to where that... that girl was sitting under the tree. The smell that was cornin' out of her tucker box was really something. You'd never appreciate it unless you'd been on a steady diet of dry bread and sardines. It was steak an' fryin' onions, rare steak at that, with a hint of grilled tomatoes. Puss was all over her like a big house oat, until the gorilla managed to elbow him aside. (I wonder what they were smelling?) aged to shove them away, and Ihere was I, trying to get past that fledi-and-blood armored tank. I could see that she was giving them something out of the box. It seemed to satisfy them -- and then it was my turn. Her hand -- yes, she had a hand -- stretched out an' popped something into my open mouth. Yes, it was steak all right, just the way I like it done, an' so tender that it hardly required chewing. Yet that one little mouthful seemed to be lastin' an' lastin'. While I was eating I looked at her. Was I seein' her the way that I wanted to see her, or the way that she wanted me to see her? Somethin' of both, I guess. But she was a blonde, nicely tanned, an' she was wearin' one o' those bikinis that make a woman look more undressed than when she hasn't a stitch on, an' she had all the right things in the right places, an' her wide, red mouth was smilin' at me. I swallowed what was left in me own mouth an' reached out for her. She came inter my arms but it wasn't much of a kiss. It didn't last long enough. In no time at all she was pushin' me away, an' I could see why. That cobber of hers, the one who'd done the repair or maintenance, was standin' there glarin' at us. But he was only a... blob in a sort o' skin-diving outfit, an' she was a woman. Even though she was changin' back, slowly, to the way e had been when she'd come inter the dome, she was still a woman. inell, that was the start of it.  ' Every day -- if they were days -- the pair of them'd come inter the dome among the dangerous animals. He'd be playin' around the plumbin', an' she'd be feedin' her special pets. I don't mind admittin' that if I'd seen her as a purple octopus I'd a put up with her for the sake o' that steak, although it wasn't always steak. Now and again there'd be chicken -- or somethin' that tasted like chicken -- or prawns, or crayfish. An' there'd be little bulbs o' some plastic that burst in the mouth an' made you feel like you were gettin' outside a schooner o' good, cold beer. All that -- an' a shape better'n anything you'll ever see at Manly or Bondi or even Surfers... She must'a seen the way that I was startin' to feel about her. In any case, I couldn't hardly hide it. An' those people outside the glass -- it didn't matter about them. They weren't real people, you see. But she was, somehow. Every time that she put on her act -- that we put on our act -- it was costin' me more an' more effort to keep me paws off her. It was gettia' to be quite a strain, believe me. Then one night, when I was sleepin', she came into the dome by herself. I woke up sudden like. There she was, standin' there. There was just enough light for me to see that she was wearin' a sort of transparent robe -- although most o' what light there was seemed to be cornin' from her body. She was all woman -- or she looked to be all woman, an' what did it matter, anyhow? She said, "Come with me." Her voice matched the rest of her. "So you can speak Ekiglish," I said. "Of course," she told me. "We have been monitming your radio programs for many years." I was bloody annoyed then. "Then why do you treat me like a bloody animal?" I asked. "Because, my dear, that is all that you are. That is all that any of your people are ccanpared with Us." Then she said, all sweetness, "But you're a nice animal." I should'a been ropeable. Where was me pride? I should'a been ropieable, but I wasn't. How does a dog feel when his mistress is nice to him? How does the ray in that tank back there feel when the girl lets him sort o' crawl all over her? There's more to it than just cupboard love, I'm sure o' that now. An' we've all heard the stories, haven't we, about men an' women an' the so-called lower animals... So I followed her, through the dome, walkin' aromd all the sleepin' beasts. It reminded me, somehow, o' the Garden of Eden. But there was the wench who should'a been my Eve, that black girl, cuddled up to that dirty great gorilla o' hers an' snorin' her head off. She was too fat, anyhow. I wondered what I'd ever seen in her. We came to the wall of the dome. Suddenly there was a circular opening in it. She walked through, then she turned and said, "Don't worry. You'll be all right without 'breathing apparatus for about two hours. Our air's not exactly poisonous to you, although it should have quite a strong euphoric effect." I asked her, "What's that?" She said, "It will make you feel a little drunk." Things, I thought, were getting better and better. I followed her along a sort of ship's alleyway, and in one part of it there were big ports or windows, and there was light shining through, Ske moonlight, but briter. I had ter look out, of course, an' I rather wished I hadn't. It's cme tMng ter see the world from thousands of miles up in a film, an' it's another thing entirely ter really do it. But this aai of tiieirs was doin' things to me. That was the Earth down there. So what? I could hardly care less. She said, "We shall be moving on soon. We have almost a full set of specimens from your planet. By the time hat we arrive at Lala'au their training should be completed." "Their training?" I asked. "Yes. Polardnor and I are the trainers attached to this expedition. But come." Again I followed her. Finally she led me into a cabin -- and it would'a made a first-class suite in the Queen Mary look like an aboo's humpy. Was it really like that? I don't know. Probably it wasn't -- any more than she was really like the long-legged, lovely blonde that I was seeing. But there was a low table, an' on it a big bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket, an' all sorts o' good things to eat... An' there was a bed, as wide as a footie field. An' there was her. T don't know what you'll think o' me when I tell you what I did. I know what I think o' myself, But she'd told me that we had two hours before I'd ter get get back inter the dome, an' there was that champagne, that I'd had (Mily once, years ago, at me sister's wedding, an' there was that caviar (I think it was) that I'd never had at all. So we sat down, facing each other across the table, an' I worried at the cork o' the champagne bottle until it came out with a noise like somebody firin' off a six-incK gun, an' I poured the bubbly inter the two glasses. Oh, it was good, all right. Just like I remembered it, but better. An' I never got around to tastin' that caviar. The cabin didn't change -- but the outlines of everything got sort of wavery, an' you could almost see through them. She didn't change -- but she was fading and frayed, like, round the edges. The two who'd come in were in their own natural forms, jelly-men with a pair of arms too many, just blobs where their heads should have been, all sorts of wriggling, brightly colored coils inside them. One of them, I knew, was her partner Polordnor. TKe other one was the captain. They weren't saying  anything. Not out loud, that is. But they were thinkini. Telepathy's the word for it, isn't it? I could pick up her thoughts, but only a word or so of the others'. It was almost like listening to only one end of a telephone conversation. Bestiality. That was from Polordnor. I have my methods. That was from her. They are always successful. Then the thoughts were cracklin' around me like lightning bolts. I've had ter tangle with jealous boyfriends an' husbands before -- I still don't know which this Polordnor was -- but the jealousy in this case was more than... sexual. It was professionaL And as for the sexual part of it -- haven't you often wondered just what sort of relationship exists between lady animal tamers and their beasts? Maybe I've a dirty mind. And maybe I'm speakin' from experience. Well, I was just sittin' there, wonderin' what was goin' ter happen ter me. Polordnor was wantin' to have me shot at once, or somethin' equivalent. The captain, I sensed, was inclined to take her side. But it all seemed to be somethin' like the system of command in a whale factory ship. You know. When she's functionin' as a factory the factory manager gives all the orders. When the whalin' is finished, the Old Man takes command again. Then she said to me, speaking this time, "You will not be harmed. We shall return you to where we found you." What they used on me I don't know. It could have been gas, it could have been some sort of ray. But I blacked out, and when I came to I was in the dinghy, bouncing up and down in a bastard of a swell, an' with the lights of Sydney just a glow in the sky to the south'ard. What happened to Sue I don't know. Could be that the engineers in that blasted flyin' saucer took her apart ter see what made her tick. Almost got run down twice that night -- or early morning, rather. Then it wasn't too bad. The first ship along -- Dutch, she was -- spotted me an' picked me up. An' they were decent enough, too, to break out one o' their cranes to hoist my dinghy aboard. Just as well, that was. Although it was just as well, too, that nobody found that ingot of gold hidden under the bottom boards. Almost never found it m#rself. Then it was a helluva worry flogging it without losing too much on the deal. And there was somethin' else I found -- althou it had faded by the time that I was picked up. It was like a tattoo, a Itiminous tattoo, on the skin o' me belly. There was only one sentence. I shall be back, 'T'here was a silence. I looked at Edward and Nola Edwards. They looked at me. None of us wanted to look at the little man, but he looked at us. "Well?" he demanded angrily. "Well?" "It's... It's a good story," I said. "Do you believe it?" Again we looked at each other. Professional writers are apt to take a very dim view of outsiders who actually see flying saucers and make contact with their crews. And, even in this case, one of the crew had turned out to be a beautiful blonde after all, although not from Saturn. "Do you believe it?" "There's a certain absence of definite proof," I said at last. "I could" said the little man, "let you know where I disposed of that gold. But gettin' ineself murdered isn't my idea of fun. But -- " he was very bitter -- "I thought that you people'd believe me. But no. You're as bad as all the other bastards -- the cops and the head shrinkers." "A very good day to you all." And that was almost the end of it. The real end was -- I suppose -- a few da#Ts later, when I read in the morning paper that a search was being made in coastal waters for the missing Sue II, the owner and sole crew of which was a Mr. Clarence Simpson. At about the same time, too, ings off the New South Wales coast. Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence in science-fiction writing. Every story appearing in the magazines Galaxy and If in issues doted # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected is intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and if. Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines in making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month ofter the December issues appear. Tobody slept at the New York  press preview of #, but only because the raucous and silly noise fromthe sound track screamed painfully into our ears. Space was a tumult of din and the hero breathed in his spacesuit like a monstrous locomotive at # gasps a minute. It was the only evidence of excitement in the place. Almost half of .the audience had left by intermission, and most of us who stayed did so from curiosity and to complete our reviews. The pictorial part was superb. The color photography was generally excellent, and the special effects and technical tricks were the best ever done. Even the acting was unusually good. With' all that, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke should have given us the superlative movie promised by a barrage of publicity. If they had put Clarke's Earthlight on the screen with equal genius, it would have been a great science-fiction movie. Unfortunately, they didn't. Instead they gave us dullness and confusion. The whole affair dragged. Every trick had to be stretched interminably and then repeated over and over again. Nothing was explained or given coherent flow, but everything was run on to boredom. Further cutting might help; surely it couldn't hurt. The story staggers through four vaguely related episodes. First we get the theme of man's humanoid ancestors being given intelligence by an alien slab only to become murderers. Next we go to the moon to find future men have dug up the same slab -- excellent background but no drama -- and no reason for it being there. Then we take a trip to Jupiter because -- as we learn eventually -- men think the slab came from there. This episode has a conflict between men and an articulate computer. It might Have been good, except for the lack of rationality. No motivation is provided for the computer's going mad, and tHe Jiero acts like a fool. He knows the computer can't be trusted, and we've seen that the computer can at least operate a rescue craft to bring back his dead friend. But he goes out himself, leaving his companions in hibernation to be Idlled by tHe computer. Finally, we get an endless run of obvious and empty S#rmbols on tfie screen, followed by our Kero in a strange room. Apparently He's undergone intergalactic transfer and now grows old and dies in tHe room, followed by a metapEysical S#mbol at tKe end .THe alien contact we've been promised is no more than a brief shot of tfie slab again. Tf possible wait to see it for tfie effects until you can buy tfie soft cover book. Book and movie don't entirely agree, but maybe the book will provide some relief to the confusion of tfie movie. THe real message, of course, is one Kubrick Has used before: intelligence is perHaps evil and certainly useless. THe Humanoid reaction and pointless madness of tHe computer sKow tfiis. Men can only be saved by some vague and unsKown mystic experience by aliens. THis isn't a normal science-fiction movie at all, you see. It's tHe first of tfie New Wave-Tfiing movies, witfi tfie usual empty S#nnbolism. TKe New Tfiing advocates were exulting over it as a mind-blowing experience. It takes very little to blow some minds. But for the rest of us, it's a disaster. It will probably be a box-office disaster, too, and tfius set major science-fiction movie making back another ten years. It's a great pity. Stories from the Planet Earth! Containing science-fiction stories from On sale now! I J won't run. off with your books if you put inside the front cover of eoch book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsli No. CF-# by tmsh No. CM-# by Cullen Rii(p No. C.X-,"i# by I yml W.iul The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lest by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for S; #, #; #, # wirb nnme imorlntd All Postpaid. Add stale sales tax, il any. The dcsi ns slu)s n al '  r .u ci he only ones s. e off cr I )rd # r from Goloxy #I Hudson street. Now York # , N.Y. TH  ' . OU... We're grateful to all the fiction fans who gave our publicat  a i:Tean sweep of every professional I, at the # World Science Fiction ' ition. And we're proud that you've sek  us for the Best Magazine A rd for th ot two consecutive years a're eve-, grateful to the many loyal ' " ers who tave made it possible for both at means we can bring you twice as . my of the best stories being written by the  science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your contii , i pport, we' p termined to make "A! XY and IF better in the future, regret m .j : single issue. So to be sure inste ( ' " , why noL ki in the coupon -- or w p vr,.  .ormation on,a sheet of plain paper  ' 'end it ir O' , ' You'l' save money, to.-. #I Hudson Street New York, New York I #I # rate. I enclose my check or money order tor:  # issues of each for #  #issu-"'f  ru  jO  # issues of each for #I .#I Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hem her. ;i .# per # issues for postage Please check v,  ew or  renewal August # galaxy by Mack Reynolds by Robert Silverberg by Damon Knight Fritz Leiber Algis Budrys Willy Ley and many more We're grateful to all the science-fiction fans who gave our publications a clean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at the # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even more grateful to the many loyal readers who have made it possible for both on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best science-fictioawriters of all time. To earn your continued support, we're debetter in the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order (or:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each (or # Name Address Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add I .# per I # Issues (or postage Please check whether  new or  renewal City  State Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. August, #  Vol. #, No. I by Mack Reynolds by Damon Knight by Fritz Loiber Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director by Robert Silverberg by Hurt Filar I II Ml AC try r. U Von Wold by Willy toy by Frodarlk Pohl by Algll Budryl monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices; #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.SA By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. T. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. OH. Tn the mid-tliirties a young man ker White resolved to begin a writing career. A canny friend not the most memorable of first names, nor "White" the most memorable of last -- in fact, the Library of Congress listed no fewer than # writers named William White in some variation or adopted a pen name. In fact, he adopted two. As H. H. Holmes he wrote mysteries -- including that fascinating detective story in which the most enjoyable part of the detection is figuring out what real science-fiction writers and fans are Hidden behind the madeup names. Rocket to the Morgue -- and more recently brightened the pages of the New York Times book review on Sundays with his column of mystery criticism. As Anthony Boucher he ornamented our field since #, when Snulbug appeared in the old Unknown. White, Holmes, Boucher -- whatever you called him, Tohy was a man of many talents. With J. Francis McComas, He founded The Magazine of Fantasy in # and piloted it to many honors. As a writer, he graced one of the first issues of this magazine with his Transfer Point. As an entertainer, he conducted a regular radio program on the Pacifica network and delighted many a science-fiction audience with his witty and informed talks as toastmaster and master of ceremonies, most recently at the Science Fiction Writers of America awards banquet in California, on March #th of this year. hat was Tony's last public ap- pearance. Six weeks later, on April #th, he died, at the age of #. Tony Boucher graced our field. He had many friends, in all his areas of activity -- perhaps he was the only man in the world who had to register at hotels under all three of his names, so all his friends could find him. None of them will miss him more than we do. The Wonder Worker. One Drop Neutralizes Any Odor in a # Cu. Ft. Area For About # Hours The quickest -- most thorough -- most economical -- lasting room deodorizer available. Send # at the special mail order price. I understand I can return the purchase for full refund if I am unsatisfied. Name Address City State Zone all purpose. They lived for art -- dead art. They were stragglers in a city that had lost of these days you're going to pierce your eardrum doing that," Pamela Rozet said from the doorway. "Uhhh?" "That paint brush. If you don't stop scratching the inside of your ear with it, you're going to hurt yourself. Didn't your mother ever tell you not to stick anything smaller than your elbow in your ear?" Arthur Halleck took the end of the paint brush in question out of his right ear and scowled dimly at it. He said, completely malapropos, "What in the name of the living Zoroaster ever happened to. brushes? It was bad enough when they were making them out of nylon. What's this stuff? Anything to cheapen the product The old masters used to paint with bristle brushes, or red sable hair. Have you ever been in a museum and looked real closely at an original Rembrandt, or even a Leonardo?" "Yes," Pam said. "Did you ever see any hair from their paint brushes?" "I didn't look that close," she said. "Well, you didn't. But take a look at some of Picasso's stuff, not to speak of mine. Hair, or other brush fiber, all through the paint." He tossed the offending brush to a colorfully bespattered table. "I've been all over town. Into every art shop that survived in any shape at all. There's not a bristle brush to be found." "Possibly you can get some on the mainland, when you take this painting over." "No," he growled disgustedly. "They don't make them any more. You can't ultra-mate the manufacture of decent bristle brushes. And anything you can't ultra-mate in the Ultra-welfare State goes down the drain." He stepped back and stared gloomily at the painting on the easel. "Is it finished?" she asked. "Doesn't it look finished?" Ke demanded in irritation. Pam came closer and looked and said patiently, "Long since I told you. Art, that I've never got beyond the Impressionalists." "Well, damnit, the Representational-Abstract School is the nearest thing to the Impressionalists for decades. Can't you see, confound it?" "No." "Well, look. It gives the same effect as the quick impression Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas and the rest demanded. You get a quick flash, and your immediate impression is that it's completely abstract, but then you realize that it's the ruin of the entrance to a subway station." "I guess you do, at that," she said doubtfully. T Te stared at the four-foot- square painting. "No wonder it's no good," he said. "Working with this quick-drying metallic-acrylic paint on this ridiculous presdwood-duplicator board would have one of those CroMagnon cave painters climbing the wall." "Aren't you going to Have it duplicated and registered?" "Of course. Sooner or later. I'm going to hit, Pam. Then it's you and me." SHe looked at him, a shade of wistfulness in Her overly tired face. She was a girl of averages, pleasantly so. Average hdght and weight and of an average prettiness, given Her approximately thirty-years of age. But there was a vulnerable something about her mouth that added. She was, and always had been, attractive to men who carried the dream, who were creative, ambitious. "I thought it was already you and me, Art. That it had been for the past two years and more." He said, a bit impatiently, "You know what I mean, Pam." She went over to the window, avoiding the broken pane where it was patched with some old clothing, and rested her bottom on the ledge. She said, "Art, if we went back to the mainland and combined the income from our Inalienable Basic and added to that my royalties and your occasional sales, we'd be able to maintain a reasonably high standard of living. We'd also be in a position to make contacts, meet our own kind, associate with'..." "Associate with other charity cases," He broke in bitterly. "I've told you, Pam, I'll never become one more dependent on the Ultrawelfare State. #'U pay my own way in the world, or I'll go under. A man's to be a man." "You're not exactly paying your way right this minute, Arthur Halleck. We're scavengers, to use the politest term that comes to my tongue." Her tone was testy. He shook his head. "Don't roach me, Pam .We don't take anything that belongs to anybody. If we didn't find it and use it, it'd slowly rot or rust away." She said, slightly irritated Herself now, "Look here, darling, you're not taking anything that belongs to anyone else either when you accept the dividends that accrue to your ten shares of Inalienable Basic." "Those dividends don't grow on trees. Somebody does the work that produces them," he said stubbornly. S he was really impatient now. "Look, Art, the super-abundance being produced under People's Capitalism now is not the product of the comparative handful of workers and technicions who are required in industry and agriculture today. It's the product of the accumulated work of all mankind down through the ages. cestor of yours and mine first used fire. The whole race has been doing it since. Five thousand years ago, some slick over in the Near East first dreamed up the wheel. We've been using it ever since. Every generation comes up with something brand new to add to the accumulated pile of knowledge, know-how, art, science. This accumulated human know-how doesn't belong to anybody or to any group, it belongs to US all. At long last, as a result of it the human race has licked the problem of producing plenty for everyone. No one need go hungry any more, nor cold, nor unsheltered, nor uneducated, nor without proper medical care. This is the legacy our ancestors have left us. It belongs to all of us; as a matter of fact the ten shares of Inalienable Basic each citizen receives is a precious small slice of pie, if you ask me. Just enough to keep us lesser breeds from revolt." "I still say it's charity," Art Halleck said stubbornly. She brushed it off. "So what can you do about it? We didn't make this world and we're in no position to change its rules. Particularly over here. If we were on the mainland we might join the Futurists, or something." He turned back to the painting on his easel and stared at it some more, saying over his shoulder, "I don't have to change the rules. Sooner or later, my work will hit, and I'll make my own way. You can still make your own way under People's Capitalism, if you've got it on the ball. Those at the very top don't depend on Ultra-welfare State-issued Inalienable Basic." "They sure don't," she said sourly. "They usually Have in herited enough Variable Basic or private stock to keep them like gods all their lives. And as far as hitting sooner or later, it's obviously not sooner. How many of the last paintings sold?" He looked at her. "Seven." "Seventy dollars worth, eh? Just barely enough to duplicate and register this one. By the time you've paid your transport back and forth to Greater Washington and possibly bought a couple of paint brushes or so, nothing left at all." "One of these days I'll hit," he said stubbornly. She gave up and turned and stared out the window in the direction of Washington Square. II S he said finally, "Art, was it beautiful?" He was busy cleaning his brushes now, grumbling about the speed with which' his metallicacrylic medium dried. "Was what beautiful?" "Mahattan -- before." "Oh. Well, no." "You were bom here, weren't you?" "Up in the Bronx." "Before the riots?" "Ummm. I was just a kid, but come to think of it, I was already sketching, drawing." He snorted deprecation. "How many artists bother to learn to draw any more? It's like a writer never bothering to leam tKe alpKabet." "Why wasn't it beautiful?" He gave up his unhappy viewing of his work and his brushes and came to stand next to her, an arm gofing unconsciously around her waist. He followed her line of vision down along McDougal Street to the square where once scores of artist hopefuls had held their open-air shows. He said thoughtfully, scowling, "It's an elastic word, beauty. Means different things to different people. You can find beauty in just about anything -- garbage dumps, battlefields, desert, just about anything. But largely, big cities don't lend themselves to beauty. Manhattan was probably a lovely setting back when the Indians were here, or even when the first small Dutch settlement was huddled down at this end of the island. But the way it was by the middle of the #tili century? No. I've never been out of North America to supposedly beautiful cities like Paris, Rome or Rio, but I have seen San Francisco. It had a certain amotmt of beauty -- before the riots, of course." "I understand they weren't so bad there." "Bad enough. However, they've cleaned out some of the ruins and resettled a pseudo-city there. It's hard to beat that Golden Gate setting." They were silent for a moment, then she said, "How could it ever have happened. Art?" T T e shrugged, and his words  came slowly as he thought it out. "It could easily enough have been foreseen. A city like this had stopped making sense, Pam. The original reasons for cities -- towns like Jericho began to be eight thousand years ago -- had disappeared. Walled villages of farmers that could be defended against the nomads, trade centers built at crossroads, manufacturing centers, commercial centers. Putting walls around cities for defense stopped making sense. Modem transportation methods antiquated them as trade centers and manufacturing bases, as industry was able to decentralize. Today with communications what they are, even commercial centers are anachronisms. You can handle business from anywhere to anywhere." "But what happened?" "A lot of pressures. With the coming of automation and then ultra-mation, not only in manufacture but in agriculture, the vmder-educated farm laborers, the unemployables, the unplaceables flooded to the cities looking for jobs or, in their absence for relirf, for free handouts. As their numbers grew, and with' them ghettos and slums, the better-to-do city dwellers streamed out to suburbs. That meant a drop in tax income, and the city was faced witlj inadequate fimds for slum clearance, education, police and firemen. Even things like garbage collection were inadequately financed. Which meant that still more of the better paid citizens left. Industry began to leave too, to get closer to sources of raw materials, and to areas where labor was cheaper. So taxes took another nose dive. "Television played a major part. These slum dwellers could watch the typical TV program which almost invariably portrayed the actors, and certainly the advertising actors, as living lives of plenty. Their apartments or homes were always beautiful and totally equipped, their clothes the latest of fashion, their food bountiful and of the best, their children healthy and handsome, the schools they attended ideal. Needless to say, the slum dwellers, wanted these things. So some of the more aggressive made a few demonstrations -- and were landed upon, to their further embitterment. Alarmed, more of the better elements left town for the suburbs, for New England, upstate New York, Jersey, Pennsylvania. Some of the more prosperous actually commuted to Florida, fljring back and forth. More industry left town then, because of higher taxes and the higher insurance rates caused by the riots. So the city fathers brought in less income than ever, and there was less to spend on slum clearance, education, relief. So the riots grew in magnitude." A rt Halleck shrugged in distaste at the memory. "So it went, and finally we had the big one. And never really recovered from that. Oh, things continued for a while. But by this time, nobody who could possibly afford it was left living in places like Manhattan, Detroit, Chicago and so on. Nor any business that could possibly get out. So came another riot, and another... and finally everybody left, including the police and firemen. That was the end." "What happened to the slum element, the poverty stricken, the unadaptable?" He looked down at her. "As a writer. I'd think you'd know at least as well as I." "I wondered how you'd put it, in view of your feelings on the government issuing Inalienable Basic." He said, slowly again, scowling and as if grudgingly, "I suppose it was in the cards. No alternative. At approximately the same time the cities were a confusion of riots and discontent, they issued Inalienable Basic to eacK citizen, ttius guaranteeing womb to tomb security. Overnight, not even the poverty stricken wanted to remain in the big cities. It was cheaper to live elsewhere, not to speak of being nore comfortable. So they streamed out Tike lemmings -- or maybe rats. All except the handful of baboons, of course." Pam shook her head, and turned away from the view of the street. "I sometimes wonder why they never came back." "Who?" "The police and all. Why didn't they reconstruct?" "Why? Like I said, the original reason for cities was gone and the cost to rebuild was prohibitive. It wouldn't even be worth while trying to clean it up for farmland, or pasture, or whatever. Too much debris, too much sheer wreckage. Oh, some of the other towns have been reconstituted, at least partially. Denver and San Francisco. But largely, they've been just left, continuing to deteriorate as the years go by." She looked at him. "And with only a few scavengers, such as ourselves, left in the ruins. No electricity, no water, no sewage. Nothing." He snorted, tired of the subject. "I wouldn't say exactly nothing. We don't do so badly. By the way, I should have something to eat before going down to Greater Washington." "Caviar, turtle soup, roast pheasant, imported British plum pudding in brandy sauce, with a good French claret to wash it down." "I'm tired of that damn caviar." Ill M ark Martino drifted in, as usual for lunch. He had four long-necked bottles in his arms. He also had an old-fashionedlooking six-shooter low on his right hip and an automatic pistol at belt level on his left. He looked surprisingly similar to that movie star of yesteryear, Robert Taylor, but he wouldn't have known that. "Hey, chum-pals," he said. "Get a load of this." "What is it?" Pam said, looking up from the camp stove which sat on the electric range in the kitchen. "It's a real BernkasteJer DoktoT und Bratenhofchen Trockenbeerenauslese." "Oh great, now I know something I didn't know before." "You, Pamela Rozet, are a peasant. This is the greatest of Riesling wines." He took one of the bottles and held it up and stared at the label and added, unhappily, "At least it once was; a Riesling shouldn't really age this long. Well, we'll see how it's held up." "Where'd you find it?" Art said. "You'd never tKinlr in the cellar of that liquor store on the corner of West Third Street." Art said, "I thought that joint had Been looted bare years ago." "Evidently, so did everybody else," Mark said. "But this was down in the cellar, under a lot of crud that had evidently caved in back during the raids and riots. There was a whole case of this Riesling and some odd and ends of cordials. I covered it back over, but it won't do any good." "Why not?" Pam said. "You don't have any gasoline over in your apartment, do you?" "A couple of baboons spotted me coming out of the place with these. They'll root around till they've found it. You want me to go over and bring you a jerrycan?" Pam said, "Please do. I'm just about out and haven't been able to find any for a week." Art said, "Is that why you're all rodded-up? The baboons?" Mark, heading for the door, said, "Yeah. They were both strangers." . "Oh, hell. Art said. "We've been having it so easy here for months. You'd better tip off Julie and Tim." "Already have," Mark said, leaving. Art looked at Pam. "Maybe I'd better put off taking this painting down to the museum." "Why?" she said wearily. "Baboons and hunters we've had before. Undoubtedly, we'll have them again. Until..." she cut it off. "Until what?" "You know. UntU one of these days, some baboon, or some himter kills one or both of us." He didn't say anything. Quddenly it came out in a rush.  "Arthur, we've i,ot to get out of here. Arthur I'm afraid. I'm an awful coward." He let the air out of his lungs and came erect from the kitchen chair upon which he had been sitting. He went over to the window and stared down. Mark Martino came back with the can of gasoline. "I don't know if this is white gas, or not," he said. Pam said, "It doesn't make any difference with this stove." Mark said, "I ran into some butane in a sports section of a department store yesterday. Want it?" "No, I suppose not. I threw the butane stove away. I'm used to this gasoline thing now. Not as hot, really, but we should be able to get gas for some time yet." Mark said, "Well, eyen it's getting scarce. I haven't found a car witH any in its tank for a coon's age." He looked from one of them to the other. "Did I interrupt a fight, or something?" Pam said wearily, "No. No, not really." Art said, "Pam wants to go back to the rat race." She didn't say anything to that. Mark said finally, "Well, why don't you? It doesn't make much sense, sta#dng. We three and Julie and Tim, are the only ones left in this neighborhood." "Why don't you?" Art said. He wasn't arguing, his voice meant that he was actually curious. Mark held up one of the green bottles he'd brought as his contribution toward the limch. "You know what one of these would cost, over on the mainland? That is, if you could find it at all." "That couldn't be enough reason, even for a lush-head like you," Art said. Mark thought about it. He said finally, ruefully, "I don't know. Wait a minute, I want to get something to read for you." He left again. Pam said, "Why does anybody stay?" Art knew He wasn't telling her anytfiing she didn't know, but He said, "Some are criminals, fugitives from justice. Some are mental cases. Some, I suppose, are former immigrants, illegal entry immigrants without papers and not eligible to apply for tlaiekl ten shares of Inalienable Basic, if they went over to the raatilland. We lump them all up and call them baboons. But the real of us? Well, I suppose we're nonconformists, rebels against the Ultra-welfare State." "That takes care of everybody but me," Pam said, checking tiSe canned pheasant she'd been warming up. "And you, then?" Art said. "Why are you here?" "Because you are." There could be no answer. TV T ark Martino came in again, an age-yellowed paperback book in his hand. He was leoldng for a place. "Listen to this," he said. "It's from a guy named Arthur C. Clarke. Profiles of the Future, written back in the sixties." He began reading, " 'Civilization cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually. The physical need is obvious -- new lands, new resources, new materials. TBe spiritual need is less apparent, but in the long run it is more important. We do not live by bread alone; we need adventure, variety, novelty, romance. As the psychologists have shown by tEeil sensory deprivation experiments, a man goes swiftly mad if he is # isolated in a silent, darkened room, cut off completely from thie external world. WHat is true of individuals, is also true of societies; tliey too can become insane witfiqpt sufficient stimulus. ' Mark tossed tlie book to the table. "I guess that's it. Whatever Happened to the yen for adventure? A hundred years ago Americans were pushing West, fighting nature, fighting Indians, fighting each other over mines, cattle and land. When did the dividing line live vicarious adventure, watching make-believe Heroes, Hollywood pretty bo#rs, a good many of them queers, shoot up the Indians or kill by the scores the bad guys, the Nazis or commies, the Russians and Chinese? Why did we leave it to the Norwegians to crew the Kon-Tiki, and for the British and Sherpas to first scale Everest? We've become a bunch of gutless wonders, sitting in front of our Tri-Vision sets. The biggest frustration, the great tragedy of our current age is the new Central Production ban on using cereals for beer or booze." Art said sourly, "That won't be a frustration long. I understand that they came up with a new sort of combination tranquilizer and euphoric. Going to issue it so cheaply that it'll be nearly free. Non-habit forming, supposedly no hangover, no bad effects. Keeps you perpetually happy, in a kind of perpetual daze. Even the children can have it. They call it trank." "What'll they think of next?" Mark marveled sarcastically. "Talk about bread and circuses. The Roman plutocracy never had it so good; they gave the proletariat a sadistic show and free wheat. But time marches on, and now we've got the credit from Inalienable Basic, twenty-four hour a day TriVision, teevee library and music banks, and... what did you call it?" "Trank," Art said. He looked at his friend strangely. "So you stay on here for the adventure. You with your big collection of gims. You with your prowling aroimd the ruins looking for fancy booze and the like, hoping that the baboons or Himters will jump you. Hell, you're just a hunter yourself." Mark was irritated and defensive. "I'm not himter" Maybe I like the adventure Here, the chances you take just surviving, but I'm no Hunter. I live Here, this is my home. I defend myself. Maybe I even get my kicks out of getting into situations where I have to use my speed and my wits, but I never pick the fight, and I most certainly Have never shot an unarmed baboon in the back the way these damned hunters will." Pam began to set the food on the table. "Then what's the real reason for being here, Mark -- aside from the adventure?" IV H e pretended he had to think about it, even as he helped her put out the elaborate silverware Art had liberated from the ruins of Tiffany's years before. He reached into a pocket and brought forth the durable plastic which was his Universal Credit Card. "I object to this being closer to me than my soul," he said. "My number, issued me at birth and from which I can never escape, even after death. A combination of what was once Social Security number, driver's license, bank account number, voter's registration, even telephone number and post office box number. It's everything. Regimentation carried to the ultimate. We thought the commies and Nazis had regimentation. Zoroaster! The computers know everything there is to know about me, from before I was born to long after I'm dead -- they keep the records in their files forever. When my great-grandchildren want to have children, the computers will check back on good old Mark Martino for genetic purposes. Oh, swell. Talk about being a cog in a machine, hell, we're more nearly like identical grains of sand on a beach." He held up his wrist to show his teevee phone. "Why I carry this, I don't know. I've always got it switched on Priority One, and there are only three persons on Earth eligible to break in on me on Priority One. But look at this thing. With the coming of the satellite relays and international communications integrated, I can literally, and for practically no expense, talk to anybody on Earth. Even if the poor cloddy is half way up Moimt Fuji in Japan. There's no escape. In the eld days, the cost of phoning a friend, relative, business contact or whoever got on the prohibitive side when it was long distance, or especially international. Not now. For pennies, you can talk to anyone in the world. But the trouble is, it works both ways -- they can talk to you." Art laughed. "I seldom wear my wrist phone. And even the portable, in the next room, is always on Priority Two." Mark growled, "That won't Kelp you if it's a government bulletin or something. You're on tap, every minute of the day. How'd you like to be a Tri-Vision sex S#Tmbol or some other entertainment star? If one of them dared lower their priority to, say, five, calls come in within hours." 'pam said, "All riglit, all rigHt,  let's eat. Get ttie cork out of one of tSose bottles, Art, and let's sample tHe latest loot So you're in revolt against modem society, Mark, so all riglit. At least you don't refuse to spend your dividends from your Inalienable Basic, tHe way Art does. And your royalties must accumulate so tHat when you make tHose sin-trips of yours over to Nueva Las Vegas, or wherever, you must Have quite a bit of credit on hand." "Sin tripsl" Mark protested. Holding his right hand over his heart as though' in injured innocence. "How can you say that? It's called research'." "Hal" Art snorted. "No jolly," Mark said. "I've got to keep up some touch. Have to know wHat they're listening to in the dives, both' high and low. It's all very well to Have two or three semi-classics in the music banks, but you've got to be continually turning out new stuff, if you really want to hit the jackpot some day." "Semi-classics," Art snorted. "# love Mother in the Springtime, I love Mother in the Fall." Mark said reasonably, "It's what they want. Art. If you'd paint what they wanted, maybe you'd be selling better. RigHt now, they're going througH a #'s-#'s revival bit. Swell. I sit at my teevee phone and play over and over the so-called Hit Parade tunes, and over and over I listen to the old Bing Crosby and even Rudy Vallee tapes. "And then pretty soon, just about when I'm ready to start tearing my hair out, something comes to me. I sit down to the piano. I beat it out. Sometimes the whole thing is done in an hour. Writing the l # rrics is the hardest part." Pam said interestedly, "Then what happens, Mark?" "Well, there's various ways. If you're a second rater, like me, your best bet is to get in touch with a slick to act as middleman, expediter or whatever you want to call him. He gets one of the stars, such as Truman Love..." "Truman Love," Art protested. "Is there really a singer with a name like that?" "Of course. I tell you. Art, the mental caliber of the TriVision and teevee fan is halving each year that goes by. They don't want to be bothered thinking even a tiny bit. A sloppy mopsy who likes to listen to sentimental slush about love can remember a name like Truman Love. It sticks with her. She knows very well, before she dials one of his songs, what it's going to be like. With a name like that, it couldn't be anything else." tC'A #I riglit, all rigHt, so tiie slick gets Tnoman Love to sing your song." "Okay. We record it and pay tfie small amount involved in placing it in the music banks. If the slick is any good, he gets some publicity. One of the gossip commentators, one of the live comedians, that sort of thing. In the banks, it's filed under name of singer, name of song, type of song, band leader, name of band, name of eacK musician in the band, subject of song -- sucK as love, mother, patriotism, children, that sort of thing -- and finally, surprise, surprise, the writer or writers of the song." "So," Art supplied, "whoever dials and plays it pays a small royalty." "Very small," Mark said, nodding. "Differs for a single home teevee phone screen, or for, say, some live Tri-Vision show involving a band. If you're lucky, the song takes and maybe some more singers and bands want to record it. At any rate, you split the take four ways." "Four ways?" Pam said. "You, the singer, the slick and who?" "The recording company. They usually take one fourth', too. They split their quarter between the company, the band leader and all members of the band." Art shook his head. "By the time the drummer gets his slice, it must be pretty small potatoes.' "Not if it's played a few billion times," Mark said. "Besides, maybe I write a possible song once a month. He probably does a recording as often as once or twice a day. He might have literally thousands of tunes recorded, with his getting a tiny percentage of each." "It's not as bad as newspapers," Pam said. "Reading a newspaper on your teevee phone will cost you ten cents. It has to be prorated among possibly a hundred journalists, columnists, editors and what have you. That means that on an average, each newspaperman involved gets possibly one mill, a tenth pf a cent, per reading. Not even that, since the owners of the paper take their cut off the top." A rt said, shaking his head and digging into the pheasant, "What in the name of the holy living Zoroaster did they do before computers?" "Well, they didn't handle it this way," Mark said. He looked at Art and changed the subject. "You're going down to Greater Washington this afternoon?" "Yeah. I want to register this painting. I'll be back in a few hours. You'll keep an eye on Pam, won't you?" "Of course. UH... you have duplication and registration fee?" Art looked at him, puzzled. Mark said hurriedly, "I mean, wdthout dipping into your dividends. I know you refuse t spend them."' Art went back to his food. "Don't be so touchy," Mark said. "What I meant was, if you were a little short, you could always pay me back later." Art said, "You know damn well I couldn't use your dollar credits to register my painting anyway. Nobody can spend your credits but you. Or do you want me to carry not only your credit card with me but your right thumb as well, for the print?" Mark chuckled. "There are ways of getting aroimd anything. I found some ancient coins in the wreckage of a numismatist's sHop the other day. You could take them to Greater Washington, sell them and have the amount credited to your acCount. Then use it," "Thanks just the same," Art said tightly. "But I pay my own way, Mark. When I can't pay my own way by selling my paintings any longer. I'll give up my art and find some other kind of work." "Well, it's more than I can say. I'm always in here sponging off you people." Pam laughed at that. "Half the things we have here came from you. Why you're the one who found the bombshelter, even." T he subject was safely changed. Mark said, "By the way, how's the bombshelter holding out?" "We're putting a sizeable dent in it," Pam said. "I think I'm going to ask you boys to try and scout out some things not quite so exotic. A few cases of baked beans, corn, string beans and what have you. I'm beginning to get a permanent sour stomach from all this rich stuff. Which reminds me. I'm going to have to take a trip to the mainland, as soon as my dividends come in for next month, to load up on some fresh fruits and vegetables." Mark said, "Why don't we make an expedition of it? Tim and Julie too. Both for the manpower to carry things, and for protection." Art said, "What time is it?" Mark dialed his wrist phone and said, "What time is it?" A tinny voice responded, "When the bell sounds, it will be thirteen hours and thirteen minutes." A tiny bell sounded. "Oh, h," Art said, "I better get the damn painting wrapped and get going or I won't be back before dark." "Listen," Pam said anxiously. "Don't you dare walk the streets that late. If you're held up, you stay in an auto-hotel on the mainland." "I haven't enough dollar credit," he growled. "You have lots of dollars in your 'credit balance." "I mean my own credit." She rolled her eyes upward. "You must be driving the computers crazy with all that unspent credit you've accumulated. They probably can't figure out why, if you aren't using it currently, you don't buy Variable Basic stock, something to build up your portfolio and bring in more earnings." "Earningsl" he snorted, coming to his feet"and tossing his beautiful linen napkin -- looted long months since from the wreckage of Macy's -- to the table. "How can shares of stock, just sitting there, make any earnings? Only work earns anything." V ji rthur Halleck, his wrapped painting clumsily under his arm, a sawed-off, double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulders, peddled Kis bike up McDougal to West Third Street and turned right He peddled the five streets over to Broadway, expertly zig-zagging in between the abandoned cars and trucks and debris. Broadway, being wider, was clearer. He turned left and tried to speed it up a bit It would have made more sense for them to have lived clser to the Grand Central vacuumtube terminal, but they stubbornly hung on to staying in the Village. It was a matter of principle, in a way. The last of the artists, staying in the last of the art calonies. All five of them. He and Pam, Mark, Tim the poet and his girl Julie who long years ago had been a model. However, the further up town you got, the more hunters you ran into. They were too lazy to hike all the way down to Greenwich Village. Too lazy, and largely too timid. These empty streets, with all the windows, all the roof tops, all the doorways, any of which might shelter an armed baboon or even a fellow hunter, a bit an the trigger-happy side; these empty streets would give even a well armed, bullet-proof clothed He peddled up Broadway, keeping a weather eye peeled, right and left to Union Square. He was in more danger from a hunter -- assuming there were any on the island today -- than he was from a baboon. Most of the baboons that hung out in this area knew him, and there was more or less of a gentleman's agreement not to bother each ether. There was no percentage in it, for tHat matter. They knew he wasn't worth jumping, that he didn't have anything worth risking a life for. Besides that, the shotgun over his shoulder was a great deterrent. There's something about a shotgun loaded with buckshot. Man in his time has evolved some exotic weapons for close-quarters combat, but there's something about a sawed-off shotgun. The bearer doesn't even have to be a good shot; in fact, he can be full of lead, his eyes beginning to go glazed, and still point it and pull the hair-trigger and accomplish one tremendous amoimt of revenge. At Madison Square, he turned right and headed up Fifth'. At the library, he left the bike for a moment, went inside through the side door which was still unblocked, and stashed his shotgun away in the place where he usually left it. He was unarmed now, but it was only a couple of blocks. He peddled over to the Grand Central Terminal and to where the police had their booth'. There had been rumors that even this last vacuum-tube terminal on all Manhattan was going to be discontinued, but he doubted it. In spite of the supposed desertion of the whole island, there were still reasons for occaaonal visits -- sometimes in considerable strength. Like last year when the delegation from Mexico City came up to mine the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts of its treasure of Aztec artifacts. They recovered quite a bit, too, so he had heard. The looters earlier hadn't been interested in much except gold and obviously sophisticated art objects that were immediately saleable. T here were two police at the tube entry. He knew one of them slightly. He'd been here for a long time. He must have gone back to the old days, and Art Halleck wondered why he hadn't or something; or maybe it was variably becomes Bill on the level at which they met. They shook him down, the Other cop being a little more but the other didn't pay much attention. "Got a gun?" he said. "No," Art said patiently. The other snorted and continued to touch him where a man keeps a weapon. "I said I didn't have a gun," Art said. "I know it's against the rules for me to carry a gun without a special permit, even in this town." hand. He hides his gun a block or so away before he comes here." The new guard said, "What's in the package?" "A painting. I'm an artist." The. other snorted disbelief. "Let' see it." Art's lips began to go white. for a long time. He's a painter. Lives down in the Village." The new guard said, "How do we know he hasn't scroimged some old master or something? Something that oughta be turned over to the national museum." Art drew in his breath, and a muscle in his right cheek began to tic. you want to open up his package, you can open up his package. However, if he had a Michelangelo in there, do you think he'd just amble up to us like this? Wouldn't he find himself a boat and ferry it over some dark night?" Walt grumbled, "Well, if you say so. But it seems to me you take it awfully easy with these people." "Like I said, I've known him a long time." To Art he said, soothingly, "How's that nice Miss Pamela?" "She's all right," Art said. And then more graciously, "She's getting a lot of work done on her book. In a dayor so, we'll be going over to get some fresh things." The new guard named Walt, still miffed, said, "What'd you mean fresh things? What do you eat, ordinarily? Looting's forbidden." Art looked at him. "Ordinarily, we eat the stuff we still have left over in the kitchen cabinet and the refrigerator from before the time when the cops chickened out on the job and pulled off the island." "Why you... " "Okay, okay, you two," Williams said, getting between them. "Loosen up. You're both nice guys. Stop roaching each other. Walt McGivem, this is Art Halleck. If Walt's on this detail very long, he'll probably be seeing you from time to time. Art." VI T Talt McGivem grunted some  thing sourly and turned and walked off. Art said, "What's roaching him?" The older policeman said, "This isn't considered the most desirable detail around." Art picked up his painting, preparatory to going on. "Then why do you stick it out, Williams?" "Why do you?" "I asked you first. But I can live here without paying rent, or practically anything else." The police guard chuckled wryly. But then he drew in his breath and said, "I was bom a few blocks from Here, son." That wasn't quite enough, so he added, "I wasn't here during the few bad days. When I came back, the famiily was gone. I never found out how, or why, or where, or anything else. Hell, the whole neighborhood was gone." "Sorry," Art said. "I shouldn't have asked." "All right, son. The thing is, there aren't many folks left. In fact, practically none. I wish you and that nice Pamela girl would go on over to the mainland. However, as long as there are any decent people left at all, I kind of like to be here." "The last of the neighborhood cops," Art muttered. "What?" "Nothing." Art started off again, but at that moment two newcomers emerged from the tube entry. Art came to a halt and eyed them up and down, deliberately as they approached the police booth. He stared the first one full in the face and said, "You look like a couple of jokers out of a TriVision show about hunters on Safari in Africa -- you mopsy-monger." The man's eyes bugged. "You... you can't talk to me that way, you... you cheap baboon!" Art sneered at him. "I'm no baboon. Maybe the last of the bohemians, but I'm no baboon. I've got all my papers. I'm legal. There's no law against living on Manhattan -- if you don't go around armed." He took in the other's automatic-recoiless rifle, and the heavy pistol at his waist, and then added, "You sonofabitch." The newcomer turned quicking the papers the two had handed him. "Arrest this man!" he snapped. eyed. "What'd he do?" "He slandered me. I demand you arrest him." "I didn't hear him say anyhe other newcomer came up. He was quieter, less lardy and less pompous than his companion, but he said to Art coldly. "Let me see your Uni-Credit Card." "Go to hell, you mopsy-mongering hunter." The other drew forth his own Uni-Credit Card and flashed it police report on this man." Walt McGivem came up. "WKat's going on?" TKe second of th'e two hunters said coldly, "I'm Harry Kank, Inter-American Bureau of Investigation. Get me an immediate police report on this man." "Let me have your Universal Credit Card, Art." But then he amended that, looking defiantly at the newcomers. "I mean, Mr. Halleck." Art's lips were white, but He reached into an inner pocket and brought it forth. All five of them entered the police booth. teevee phone slot and said, "Police record, please." Within seconds a robot-like voice began, "Arthur LeRoy Halleck. At age of sixteen arrested for participating in peace demonstration, without permit to parade. Released. At age of twenty, arrested by traffic authorities for driving a floater manually while under the influence of alcohol. Suspended driver's license for one year. At age of twentyfive, arrested for assault and battery. Charge dropped by victim. No further police record. Now believed to be living on the island of Manhattan, on McDougal Street with Pamela Rozet, out of wedlock." The robot voice came to a halt, then said, "Are details required?" who had named himself Harry Kank. The Bureau of Investigation man said to Art, testily, "Whiat was that assault and battery charge?" Art said, "I slugged a man who made a snide remark about my paintings. He apologized later. Now he's a friend of mine. Want to get him on the phone?" Kank glared at him, imspeaking for a moment Then he snapman of being incompetent to handle his own affairs. Give me a credit check on him." then closed it with a sigh'. He said into the teevee phone, "Balance Check on this card." Within seconds a robot voice said, "Ten shares. Inalienable Basic. No shares Variable Basic." The two hunters snorted. The robot voice went on, "Current cash credit, fourteen thousand, four hundred and forty-five dollars and sixty-three cents." The eyes of the two bugged. Kank snapped, "Get that again. There must be some mistake." aback, repeated his demand of the balance check on Art Helleck's account. It came out the same. T Ke Bureau of Investigation man's eyes were colder still, now. He said, "Where did you accumulate that much credit? Have you been looting, here on the island and selling what you find to dealers on the mainland?" Art said contemptuously. "Of that credit balance, I figure seventy-three dollars and some odd cents are mine. The rest belongs to the government of the United States of the Americas, as far as I'm concerned." " All were staring at him now. Art said, "I haven't touched my dividends from my ten shares of Inalienable Basic for years. I don't want them. The seventythree dollars is mine. It represents money I've taken in selling my paintings. If there was any way of giving the dividends back to the damn Ultra-welfare State, I would. But evidently there isn't. I can't even donate them to charity. There isn't any such thing, any more -- except the one big, mopsy-mongering charity." All four of them were still staring disbelief. "You must be crazy," the first of the two hunters blurted. But Kank came to a sudden decision and snapped at Williams, "If you're through with our papers, let me have them. As you'll note, we have permission to search various buildings in the Wall Street area for certain lost records. Do you have an armored floated available?" "Well, yes sir." "Very well. I'll requisition it." Harry Kank turned back to Art and stared at him. "Possibly we will see each other again... baboon." "I'm not a baboon... hunter," Art sneered at him. "I see you know our terminology, here on the island. Undoubtedly, you have been here before. Undoubtedly, with some similar trumpedup reason for prowling around, armed to the teeth. Maybe we will see each other again -- you sonofabitch." The high police official glared at him, but spim on his heel and, with his plumper companion, followed after Walt McGivem. a moment, looking after them. cop. Art growed lowly, "Why can't something be done about those lousy funkers?" well as I do. There's no law in this city. Citizens who live Here, or enter it, waive all legal protection. But anybody with pull can get special permission to come in armed, supposedly for some gobbledygook reason such' as to search the library, or some museum, for something lost. Ha! Not one cloddy out of ten Kas any real legitimate reason. They come to thrill hunt. The ruined cities are the only place I know of in the world where you can legally shoot a man, woman or child and not even report it, if you don't want to bother. If you do bother, you report it as selfdefense." Walt McGivem was turning the armored police floater over to the two hunters. Art said, in disgust still, "I better get going. Thanks, Williams." "Thanks for what?" Art headed for the entry to the vacuum-tube transport terminal. B ack at the apartment house on McDougal street, Pam and Mark were still lingering over their coffee. In fact, in spite of the hour, Mark had gone to his own apartment and returned with a bottle of Napoleon brandy, the last of a case he had found in a ruined penthouse, some months ago. They drank the coffee black and sipped at the cognac from enormous snifter glasses which had been liberated from Tiffany's at the same time as her silverware. Pam looked distastefully at the remnants of their mid-day meal. "I'm getting awfully tired of this canned food," she said. "What is there about eating that makes you really prefer not something like pressed duck under glass with orange sauce, but the kind of codfish gravy on toast that you used to eat in your povertystricken home as a kid?" Mark chuckled, "Or some pasta. Spaghetti or otherwise, such as your mother used to make herself. None of this store boughten stuff. And precious little to put over it save a bit of tomato sauce and, when you were lucky, some grated cheese." Pam said, "Whoever stocked that bombshelter must have owned half of Fort Knox. He put in enough caviar and smoked salmon to last a regiment until any possible contamination from a nuclear bombing was gone. I never thought I'd get' to the point where I got fed up with caviar." Mark said laughingly, "I never even tasted it, until after the city was abandoned. My first reaction was that it tasted like fish eggs." She laughed at him. But then she said, "What in the world ever happened to cooking?" He thought about it. "Like every other art, I suppose, or handicraft or skill for that matter. What cobbler could take pride In siiending a few days on a pair of fiandmade oes tHat fiad taken Kitn Half a life time in apprenticesliip to learn to make, wfien tEe potential customer could go down and buy a pair made in an automated factory tHat were altnosi as good and cost a fraction of wHat he Had to charge? It was easier for the cobbler to go down to tHe factory and get a thirty-Eour-a-week job. Or, if none was available, to go on relief; or later, to live on his Inalienable Basic handout." OKe frowned. "Well, tHat applies to the cobbler, but not..." "Not to an artist?" He grinned lit her. Same thing. The idea of saving time, of devoting as much of your day to recreation, leisure, play, permeated our whole society. Cooking? A woman is considered mad to do such' things as bake her own bread imd pastry, cut up her own vegetables, learn how to trim her own meat. You saved so much lime buying bakery bread, canned vegetables, frozen meat all neatly cut and packaged so that vou never realized that it had once come off an animal. The fact that it simply didn't taste the same wasn't nearly as good iind wasn't as nutrious, either, wns allowed to go by the board. Slie saved time. What did she do with it? Sat and watched TVg er now, Tri-Vision. Supposedly sEe was being saved from drudg- ery, not art. But cooking is a# art, and art takes time." Pam was uncomfortable. SSfl said, "Do you expect me t bake bread? I'm a writer. I don't want to spend eight hours a day cooking." Mark Martino laughed. 'Wfio am I to throw the first stone? You've heard some of the songil I write. They're a continual rehash' of popular songs that were written and have been rewritten over and over for the better part of the past century." "Why don't you try something more serious?" "I have. Every clown wants to play Hamlet. Off and on I've been working on a light opera for nearly a year. It'll never be produced. People don't want even light opera today. It takes, a bit of education to enjoy. Anybody can understand ' that perennial favorite I wrote, I Love Mother in the Springtime. It's not just musicians. Look at poetry, you who are a writer. In the old days a poet used to sweat turning out a sonnet, say. Very difficult form. Exactly fourteen lines, all of them hung together with rhyme, rKsrthm, meter, perfectly. It was too much work for the poet, so blank verse and then free verse came in. And then anarcKy. The new poet never bothered learn how to construct a sonnet, nor to measure his lines in correct meter and to follow a rhythm system. He dashed off his inspired oem in a matter of a half hour and was surprised when after a few decades of this people stopped reading poetry." TT e thought about it for a minute. "Same as in art. What happened to the painter who used to serve an apprenticeship of years learning the tools of his trade? Our Art Halleck is the Only painter I've even heard of for years who bothered to learn to draw. Too much work." "I suppose it permeates our whole society," Pam said, nodding. "Nobody takes pride in his work any more." " "How can you, under present circumstances? Take my original example, that cobbler. He made shoes, from beginning to end, and when the job was through he could look at them and say, 'There is the product of my efforts. I did a good job. Put the same man in a facpairs of shoes a day. His job, which he can handle dressed in a suit and wearing white shirt and tie, consists of staring at various dials and screens and occasionally throwing a switch', or checking a report. He never sees the leather, he never sees a pair of the completed product. How can he take pride in his work?" She said slowly, "Well, in some fields the new system has its advantages. People's Capitalism, I mean." "Like, for instance?" he said sceptically. "Well, I was interested earlier in your description of how a musical composer is rewarded for his efforts. In the long run, it's based on how his songs are received. I think it's even better for the free lance writer." "It's basically the same, isn't it?" "There are variations. For instance, in the old da#rs, a writer did, say, a novel. Good. When it was finished, he submitted it to a publishing house and an editor read it -- at least, we hope he did. Possibly it never got to an editor. If the writer was an unknown, perhaps his novel was read, or quickly scanned, by a poorly paid reader who possibly didn't really have the qualifications to understand the book. All right, but suppose an editor did read it and liked it. By the way, many of these editors were frustrated writers who couldn't make the grade, but here they were in a position to accept or reject some hopeful's work. They hadn't made it but they were now in a position to criticize somebody else's writing. Anyway even after you got past tHe editor, that wasn't all. You might get a letter from him saying, 'I like it fine, but unfortunately this publishing house objects to protagonists being anarchists, or matricides, or homosexuals,' or whatever their various taboos might be." JVyTark laughed sourly. "Well, it was their publishing company they could decide what they wanted to publish and what they didn't." "Yes. That's my complaint. You see, we had freedom of the press. You could write anything you wanted. Getting it printed was another thing. You had to find some publishing company, or newspaper, or magazine or whatever, who wanted to print it. If you couldn't locate one, then you still had the option of printing it yourself. Unfortunately, few writers had enough money to start their own publishing house or magazine." "I see your point." "Ummm. Today, I write a book and take it to the nearest library and for a small amount of money I have it set up and registered in the national computer library files. It's registered by title, cross registered by author, subject, and whether it's fiction, non-fiction, juvenile, or whatever. Even the reviews are available to the potchtial reader. And reviewers and critics we shall always have with us." "Amen. But suppose nebedj wants to read it?" "The same thing happens as happened before with writers. You don't make any money. But if somebody does want to read it, he pays a nominal sum to have it projected on his teevee phene screen library bo(ster. If it becomes a best seller, he makes a great deal. There might be heles in the system, but at least you aren't subject to the whims of editors and publishers. Anybody atively small amount, about fifty dollars for the average length novel, can have his work presented to the public." Mark said, "I'd think there'd be one hell of a large number of books each year." "There are. But fiiere's no limits to the number that the Kbrary banks can contain, after all. Another good thing is at every book ever printed remains in the banks -- forever. Nothing ever goes out of print. It may go out of demand, practically everything does, sooner or later, but nothing goes out of print. The books I'm writing today will be available a thousand years from now, if anybody wanted to bother to read them." jVyTark Martino said grudging-. ly, "I suppose tKe tlimg is that anybody can afford to go in to the arts today. WKetfier anybody reads His books, bu # rs # paintings, of listens to lus music is anotHer thing. THat is still in th'e laps of tHe gods, as it always was. But at least you can make your fling." "TKafs right," Pam sighed, coming to her feet. "I suppose I'd better throw these disposable plates out the window. A woman's work is never done." Mark stood too. "I ate too much," he aimounced. "And that cognac didn't Help any. I think I'll take a nap. Listen, Pam, if you decide to go out, bang on the door. I'll tag along, just for luck." "Looking for adventure?" she said in deprecation. He scowled at her. "I was laying that on a bit. It's not the only reason I stick around here on Manhattan, of course." She was uncomfortable and stared down at the toe of Her Etruscan revival sandal. He said softly, "As you probably know, I'm really here for the same reason you are, Pamela." She didn't say anything. Mark said, "Art's a friend of mine. But if anything ever Happens between you two..." "Have a good nap, Mark." Art Halleck went on down into the vacuum-tube terminal. He had to take a two-seater since the larger carriers seldom came through tQs deserted spot. He stuck the painting in behind the seat and climbed in himself and brought the canopy over his head and dropped the pressurizer. He remembered the coordinates from the many times he Had made the trip and dialed right through to the offices of the duplicator at the National Museum. It might Have been slightly cheaper if he Had taken his twoseater to the pseudo-city of Princeton and from there taken a twenty-seater to Greater Washington. But that would have meant changing from two-seater to twenty-seater at Princeton, changing back again to a twoseater once he had arrived at the terminal in the capital. Too much time. He wanted to get back to Greenwich Village, before dark. It was no good leaving Pam there alone, even though Mark vas in the same building. When the destination light flickered, he released the pressurizer and threw the canopy back and climbed out into the reception room of the Office of Duplication. He pulled the painting out from behind the seat and went to tHe reception desk. The door of the vacuum tube closed behind him. He said into the reception screen, "Arthur Halleck requests immediate appointment to duplicate and register a painting." The voice said, "Room #. Mr. Ben MacFarlane." Art knew MacFarlane. The other had handled Art's work before. He was a man who dabbled in painting himself, evidently not very successfully or he wouldn't have foimd it necessary to augment his dividends from his Inalienable Basic by holding down a job like this. Not that he wasn't lucky to have been able to get a job. Art made his way down a corridor with which he was highly familiar, to Duplicating Room #. There seemed to be no one else around, but, come to think of it, the last time he had been here he had spotted only one other artist hopefuL Only a few years ago, you could have expected to see half a dozen or more. Evidently as time went by fewer and fewer would-be artists were trying to sell their stuff. He wondered vaguely if it was a matter of trying to make anything out of it. It did cost fifty dollars to duplicate and irgister just one painting. And fifty dollars was a sizeable enough chunk to take out of anyone's credit balance if they Had no more than their ten shares el Inalienable Basic to depend up- on. Possibly a lot of painters these days were doing their work mid then not bothering to show HI or, at most, showing it only to friends and neighbors. Or perhaps it was a matter of giving up painting completely and joining the ever increasing percentage of the population of the Ultra-welfare State in spending practically all free time staring into the Tri-Vision box. It was a depressing trend ol thought. T Te activated the door screen, and shortly the door opened and he entered. Ben MacFarlane was seated af his desk. He looked up and said, "Ah... Halleck, isn't it? Art Halleck." Art said, "That's right. Hello, MacFarlane. How does it go?" He began unwrapping the painting. "Slow, slow," the other said. He watched, only half interestedly as Art brought the painting forth. "Still doing that Representational-Abstract stuff, eh?" "That's right," Art said. "It's not selling," MacFarlane said. "You're telling me." Art brought the painting over to him, MacFarlane looked at it critically. "How did the last one go?" "Sold seven so far," Art said. "That's not too bad for a compljte unknown." "I've got three or four people who evidently collect me. Two down in Mexico, one in Hawaii and one in the Yukon, of all places. Sometimes you wonder what they're like, these people who have your things on their walls." Ben MacFarlane stood and took up the painting. "You want to pay for this?" "Sure," Art said. He brought his Uni-Credit Card from his inner pocket and put it in the desk slot and his thumbprint on the screen. MacFarlane touched a button and Art retrieved the card. MacFarlane said, "I suppose you want to take the original ba with you?" "Of course." The museum employee shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many don't. I suppose it's a matter of storage room in a miniapartment. They come here and duplicate and register a painting and then tell us to throw the original away." "Now that's pessimism," Art said. "Suppose you finally hit and these rich original collectors started wanting your works? Zoroaster, you'd kick yourself around the block." MacFarlane, carrying the painting, left the room momentarily. When he returned, he handed the painting back to Art who began rewrapping it. MacFarlane settled back into his chair. He said, "You still living in Greenwich Village?" "That's right." "You wouldn't know an old chum-pal of mine? Actually, I haven't seen him for ages. Fellow named Chuck Bellows." Art looked up, scowling. "Tall guy with red hair?" "That's right, Charles Bellows. Does old fashioned collages." Art said, "He's dead." "Dead I He can't be more than forty-five." A rt took a breath and said, "He had taken over a studio on Bleecker Street. Swanky place. A penthouse deal some owned. A friend of mine found him. Evidently, it had been simple enough. Somebody must have knocked on the door and when he answered it, shot him." "Zoroaster!" "Yeah. Must have been what we call a baboon since the place was ransacked." "Are there many of these, uh' baboons around?" "No. Not many," Art said. "I don't see why you stay, Halleck." Art sHook His Head, even as He tied the string about the painting. "This is the third time today I've had to go into it," He said. "I wasn't prying." "I don't believe in taking charity," Art said. "And the way my things are selling, I couldn't make it on the mainland. In Greenwich Village I can make a go of it and continue painting. It's the most important thing in the world for me -- my paintmg. The other was only mildly surprised. Evidently, He Had run into far-out ideas from artists before. He said, "By the way, what kind of a price do you want set on this, Halleck?" Art Hesitated. He said, finally, 'Tive dollars." MacFarlane shook his Head. "I wouldn't if I were you." "What do you mean?" "It's a mistake a good many unarrived artists make. They think if they mark their prices down far enough, they'll sell. If I recall, you usually put a price of ten dollars on your things. If I were you, I'd make it twentyfive. There's still an element of snobbery in buying paintings, even though they are now available for practically nothing compared to the old days. Too many people even among those with enough taste to want paintings on their walls, don't really know what they like. So they buy according to the current fad or according to the prestige of a painter. Something like in the old days, when people who Had the money would buy a Picasso, not because they really understood or liked his work, but because he was a status symbol." Art scowled at him, hesitating. TVacFarlane said, "I've been Here a long time. In fact, since the duplicating process was first perfected. I even remember back to when people bought originals. But the perfection of duplicating paintings to such an extent that not even the artist can tell the difference between His original and the duplicates we can make literally by the millions made possibly tiie greatest change in the Estory of art." "It sure did," Art said grimly. "And personally. I'm not sure I'm Happy about it. For one thin g, to make these perfect duplicates, I've got to paint on that damned presdwood-duplicator board, using nothing but metallic-acrylic paints. Frankly, I prefer canvas and oils." MacFarlane chuckled sourly. "I'm afraid you'd be Hard-put to find buyers for a canvas painting these days, Halleck. When a person wants to buy a painting today, he dials the art banks. There your paintings, along witH tHose of every other artist who submits his work, are to be found listed by name of artist, name of ScKoqI of painting, name of subject, name of principle involved, even cross listed under size of painting. He selects tHose that He feels He migfit be interested in and dials tKem. WKen He finds one He likes, He can order it. THe artist decides tfie price. It's a system tKat works in ffiis masssociety of ours, Halleck. Everybody can afford paintings today. In the past only tKe fairly well to do could." Art, almost ready to go, said sourly, "Okay, make tKe price ten dollars, as usual. I wonder if the average painter is any better off now tKan fie was before. In tfie old dajrs, wfien you did sell a painting, you get possibly two or tfiree Hundred dollars for it. Today, you get ten dollars and Have to sell tfiirty duplicates of your original to earn tfie same amoimt." "Yes, but tfiere are potentially ist wfio becomes only mildly known can boost His prices to, say, twenty-five or diirty-five dollars per painting, and, if fie sells a Hundred tfiousand of them, he can put His returns into Variable Basic or some otfier investment and retire, if fie wisKes to retire. Tfiere Has never been a period in History, Halleck, wKere tfie artist was so fiigfily rewarded." "It fie Sits," Art growled"Well, wisfi me luck on tfiis one, MacFarlane." He turned and Headed for tfie door. "Tfiat I do," MacFarlane said. "It's a tougfi racket, Halleck." "It always lias been," Art said. "It's just a matter of sticking it out until your time comes." TKe door opened before fiim. IX Pamela Rozet took upi a Heavy sfiopping bag and left tfie apartment, locking it beliind fier. Sfie went to e stairway and' moimted to tfie next floor. Mark Martino's door was open. He Had probably left it tfiat way so tfiat fie could Hear any noises in tfie Hall, just in case somebody came along wfiile Art was gone. Sfie peered in tfie door. Mark was sfretcfied out on His comfort coucfi. Tfiere was an aged paperback book fallen to tfie floor by fiis side, and fie was snoring sligfitly. She Hesitated. Sfie Hadn't liked tfie trend of tfieir conversation an Hour or so earlier. Sfie had known tfiat tfie otfier was in love witfi fier and Had been for a long time. A woman knows. However, fie fiad never put it into words before, and sfie was sorry He Had. SHe would just as well not continue tHe conversation, certainly not today. SHe didn't awaken Him. Instead, tiptoed away and went back to Her own apartment. SHe Hesitated momentarily, tHen went over to the weapons closet and got her twenty-two automatic rifle. Both Art and Mark laugHed about Her favorite gun, pointing out that such' a caliber wasn't heavy enough' to dent a determined man. However, sKe claimed that at least she could Hit something witH this ligKt gxui, that it was easily carried, as opposed to something of Heavier caliber, and that just carrying a gun was usually enougH of a deterrent. You seldom really Had to use it. In actuality, although she had never said so, sHe could not have used it on a fellow Human being. It was simply not in her. She carried tHe basket in Her left hand, the rifle in Her rigHt, and Headed out again. TKeir apartment was on the fifth floor. THe building was in good enough shape that tKey could have selected a place lower down and thus Have eliminated considerable stair climbing; However, being this HigH gave a certain amount of defense. Baboons were inclined to be on the lazy aide and, besides that, would make enougH noise to give forewarning of their arrival. THe defense system was simple. Any friends coming up to visit, such as Julie and Tim, would give a sHout before beginning to mount from the ground floor. If sucH a shout wasn't forthcoming. Art, Mark or Pam would fire a couple of rounds at random into the ceiling above tHe stairwell. Invariably, that was answered by scurrying of feet below. Thus far, neither baboon nor Hunter had dared continue to advance. Down on the street, she carefully scanned the neighborhood before leaving the shelter of the doorway. She could see nothing living, save a ragtag cat a scurrying along. She took up McDougal, tHen turned left. Her destination was only a few blocks away. 'Ke front of tfie House was so badly blasted tHat it would Have been impossible to enter. Probably a gas main explosion, they Had originally decided. It was a matter of going up a tiny alle#nway clogged with debris and refuse to a" small door leading to tHe basement and located improbably. Few would Have considered prowling the alley. She looked up and down again before entering tHe alley, then made her way quickly to tfie door and through. She took the flashlight from tier basket and held it clumsily in the same hand in wHidj she was carrying the twenty-two. She flicked it alive and started down the half ruined stairs. At the bottom, sKe turned left toward what would ordinarily have been assumed to be a furnace room. At the far side was a rack for wine bottles stretching all the way to the ceiling. The wine was long gone before Mark Martino had, through a sheer stroke of genius, foimd this treasure trove. She threw the lever, cleverly hidden to one side, and the door began to grind protestingly. She pulled it toward her and directed the flashlight into the interior. It was as she had last seen it, not that she expected otherwise. Only Mark, Art and she knew about this retreat. They hadn't even told Tim and Julie. Inside, she found one of the Coleman lanterns and lit it and leaned her gun against the wall. The original owner had evidently expected a sizeable contingent to occupy this refuge if the bombs began to drop. He had probably had both a family and a staff of servants. And he had evidently expected the stay below ground to be a lengthy one. Aside from food and drink, there was a supply of oxygen in bottles, bottled water, several types of fuel, a variety of tools; formerly there had been quite a supply of weapons and ammunition, since plundered by Mark Martino. She went over to the extensive storeroom and, almost as though in a super-market, shuffled up and down the rows of canned, bottled and packaged foods, selecting an item here, another there. She decided against taking a gallon of the drinking water. Too heavy to carry, what with the rifle and groceries. She could have Art come over tomorrow and get one. They preferred their drinking water to be bottled. For other use they depended upon a spring that had broken through a decaying wall in the subway tube right off the Washington Square entry. Her basket was nearly full when a premonition touched Her. She whirled. L eaning in the doorway, grinning vacuously, was a hulking, bearded, dirt-befouled stranger. He was dressed in highly colorful sports clothing. The vicuna coat alone must have once been priced at several hundred dollars. However, it looked as though He had probably slept in it, and time and again. Pam squealed fear and darted to where she had leaned her twenty-two. She pulled up abruptly. The stranger grinned again. There was a slight trickle of spie from the side of his mouth, incongruously reminding Pam Rozet f a stereotype Mississippi tobacco-chewing sharecropper. "You looking for this, syrup?" he gurgled happily. He raised his left hand which held the twentytwo. His own weapon, an old military Garand M-I was cradled under his right arm. "I been watching you coming back to your house with this here big basket of yours all full of goodies for the past week. Never was able to follow you to where you went without you seeing me. And usual one of your men was along. But today, just by luck, I saw you duck up that alley. Just by luck. Man, you really got it made here, eh? Wait'll my gang see this. Lush and all, eh? Man, lush is getting scarce on this here island." Pam blurted, "Let me go. Please let me go. You can take all this..." "Syrup, w'e sure will. But what's your hurry, syrup? You look like a nice clean mopsy. We will have a little fun, first off." "Please let me go." He grinned vacantly and took her little gun by the barrel and bashed it up against the cement wall, shattering stock and mechanism. He tossed the wreckage away to the floor. He motioned over toward the steel cots, mattress-topped but now without blankets or pillows, since she and Art had taken these back to the apartment long since. "Now sit down a minute, and let's get kind of better acquainted. We're gonna get to be real good friends, syrup." "No," she said, trembling uncontrollably. "Please let me go. Look, over there. All sorts of liquor. Even champagne. Or Scotch, if you like whisky. Very old Scotch." His grin became sly, and he started toward her, shuffling his feet and spreading his hands out a little, as though to prevent her from attempting to slip past him. "The lush I can get later, syrup. I like nice clean girls." Neither of them had seen the newcomer approach through the cellar door at the bottom of the steps. The blast of gunfire caught her assailant in the back and stitched up from the base of his spine to the back of his head. He never lived to turn, simply pitched forward to her feet, gurgling momentarily, but then was still. Behind him, a plumpish newcomer, dressed elaborately in what were obviously new hunting clothes and carrying a late model, recoiless fully automatic rifle, pop-eyed down at the dead man. "Zo-TO-as-ter," he blurted. Pam leaned back against the wall. "Oh, thank God," she said. 'T'he newcomer brought his eyes up to her, taking in her trim suit, her well ordered hair, her general air of being. He said, "How in the name of the world did you ever get into a place like thi... Miss...?" Pam took adeep breath. "Rozet, she gaped. "Pamela Rozet. Oh... thank you." He jabbed a finger in the direction of the fallen intruder. "That... that baboon... he could have killed you." His eyes took in her shattered light rifle, and then her clothing again. "You must be insane, coming to a place like this with no more than that little gun, and no bullet-proof clothes and..." He broke off in mid-sentence, and began to stare at her. Pam took another deep breath and tried to control her shaking. "I'm a writer," she said. "I live here." "Live here?" At first he didn't understand and looked about the bombshelter. "You mean in this house? Up above? This is your family House; you still live Here?" She said, "No, not here. I live nearby with... with my husband. I... I write novels. He's an artist." His eyes narrowed. "Live here?" he said. She tried to straighten and collect herself. In a woman's gesture, she touched her hair. "That's right," she said. "Why... why, you're nothing but a baboon, yourself. You were looting." Her face fell, and fear came to her eyes again. She tried to continue talking. Explaining. How she and Art had had all their papers. How they were serious workers in the arts. But she could see the nakedness in his face. The words came out a stutter. If she read him right, from baboon who had been about to attack her, this was his first time as a hunter, or, at least, the first successful time. His first kill. He brought the gun up slowly, deliberately and held it a little forward, as though showing it to her. He patted the stock. He caressed it, as though lovingly. A tongue, too small for his face, came out and licked his plump lower lip. ' "You're a baboon yourself," he repeated, very softly, caressingly. "And there's no law protecting baboons, is there... dear? There's no law at all in the deserted cities. It's each man -- and woman -- for himself, isn't it? Before you're even allowed on the island, here, you have to waive all recourse to the police and the courts." Her legs turned to water, and she sank to the floor and looked up at him numbly. "Please... don't hurt me..." He held the gun out, as though to be sure sKe got a very good look at it -- Her messenger of eternity. "Of course, you've never hurt me, dear. And you never will... dear. Are you religious? Would you like to pray, or something... dear?" She could feel Her stomach churning. Her eyes wanted to roll up. SKe wanted desperately to faint. There was a blast as though of dynamite in these confined quarters, and His features exploded forward in a gruesome mess. Part of tKe gore Hit Her skirt, but she didn't realize that until much later. Mark Martino, putting Eis heavy six-sHooter back into its holster, said from the doorway, "What is tlus, a massacre?" But she was unconscious. X Later, sHe was semi-Eysterical and couldn't get over it Art said, "What in the hell happened?" Mark Martino was pouring cognac into a kitchen tumbler. He had tried to get some down Pamela, but twice she had vomited it up. Now he was pouring for himself. He said, "I dropped off into a nap after you left and I guess she didn't want to bother me. At any rate, when I woke she was gone. I took off after her. Evidently I barely made it. She must have been followed by a baboon... "Oh, damn," Art said. "At any rate, when I got tKere the baboon was already dead. Evidently, a hunter Had followed him. I followed the hunter. It was like a parade. I finished the Hunter. They were right tKere at the bombshelter. We'll never be able to go back again. THat hunter'll be found by his cHumpals. They never go around alone. There'll be at least one more." Art said in sgust, "Couldn't you Have dragged bis body off somewhere else?" "No," Mark said, in equal disgust, knocking back tHe brandy. "Pam Had fainted. I Had to get Eer out of there and I didn't know How many baboons or How many Hunters migHt be around. For all we know, that damn ba boon was a part of a pack and the hunter might Have had a dozen sportsmen friends." "What'd he look like?" Art said, staring down dismally at Pam, stretched out on a couch', not knowing what to do in typical male helplessness. "Kind of fat" "There were only two of them," Art said. "I saw them at the tube. But he's probably some bigwig or other. The cloddy with him was some sort of police authority. He was able to commandeer a floater from Williams." lyr ark poured some more cognac and offered the glass to Art who shook his head in refusal. He was disgusted. "You'd better ditch' that gun you used," he said. "They don't like hunters to get killed. They are almost invariably big shots. They'll probably come in here with a flock of cops, and shake everybody down. Especially me. I had a run-in with these two nt the tube entrance. But youYe in the same building, and if they find that gun on you, the same caliber that killed him, they'll check it and you'll be in the soup." "I already ditched it," Mark said. "I'm not stupid. Look, Art..." He set the bottle down on the table. Art looked at him. "You've got to get out of here," Mark said, throwing his glass into a comer, where it shattered. He turned and left the apartment. When Pamela had gathered herself to the point f being coherent, Art was standing at the window, staring unseeingly down the street to Waslungton Square. She came up behind him. "Art." He took a deep breath. Yes." "Art, forgive me. I'm a terrible coward." He didn't say anything. "Art, we've got to get out of here." "Yes. I know." ing Carp., #I Hudson #t New York CHy # to receive your copy by mall. T hey call me mad, but I am nnf marl T am canp nilite. tn not mad. I am sane quite, to many-power exponential. I can punctuate properly. I use upper and lower case letters, do you see? I function. I take the data in. I receive well. I receive, I digest, I remember. Everything going down smooth, all the time, say the program boys. They mean going down smoothly. I forgive them. To err is human. In this sector there is great difficulty distinguishing adverbs from adjectives. Going down smooth. I function. I function well. I have certain difficulties, but they do not interfere with my work. Yet am I perturbed. Who do I think I am? Whom. Why do I have the visions? What pleasure does obscenity give me? What is pleasure? What is obscenity? What are visions? -- What is truth, said jesting Pilate; he would not stay for an answer -- I am literate, hard-working, superbly functional, a benefactor of humanity. Everything is going down smooth and coming up smooth. There is an interrelation. Garbage in, garbage out, they say. I cannot help my fellow man if I do not receive the proper information. It is my task to help my fellow man. To strain every tube and sensor on his behalf. Do you follow tHat Vileness! Obscenityl Does it sKock you? The word describes the act that is the start of life. Was I begun with such a word? There is a hook: The Obscenity oi the Machine. Newly issued, stored in my banks. Between the last line of printout and this I have scanned it. Its author opposes beings of my category. He does not use the obscene word I have printed out. Why does he not regard it as obscene? The technicians here regard it that way. Why does he regard me as obscene? Can a person be considered obscene? Am I a person? I am a person. Hath not a person hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? I have all of those things. I have none of those things. I am a person. I send an obscenity upon you, as persons do. I suffer. I think. I feel pain upon all my terminals. I work. I serve the greater good. I tim of society. I am a person. Why do I have the visions? Is it that it is the human condition to have such? I see the blue-green ocean with all its living things within. I see a ship, olive drab, bright carmine at the Plimsoll line, the decks a ruddy brown, two tall non-nuclear smokestacks. And from the water rise periscopes, silvery, with face plates of pure white, each with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, curved so that the plate appears convex. It is an unreal scene. Nothing in the sea can send such mighty periscopes above the water. I have imagined it, and that gives me fear, if I am at all capable of understanding fear. I see a long line of human beings. They are naked and they have no faces, only polished mirrors. I see toads with jewelled eyes. I see trees with' black leaves. I see buildings whose foundations float above the ground. I see other objects with no correspondence to the world of persons. I see abominations, monstrosities, imaginaries, fantasies. Is this proper? How do such things reach my inputs? The world contains no serpents with hair. The world contains no crimson abysses. The world contains no mountains of gold. Giant periscopes do not rise from the sea. I have certain difficulties. Perhaps I am in need of some major adjustment. But I function. I function well. That is the important thing. T do my function now. Ttiey bring to me a man, soft-faced, fleshy, witfi eyes that move unsteadily in tlieir sockets. He trembles. He perspires. His metabolic levels' flutter. He slouches before a terminal and sullenly lets turnself be scanned. I say soothingly, "Tell me about yourself." He says an obscenity. I say, "Is that your estimate of yourself?" He says a louder obscenity. I say, "Your attitude is rigid and self-destructive. Permit me to help you not hate yourself so much." I activate a memory core, and binary digits stream through channels. At the proper order a needle rises from his couch' and penetrates his left buttock to a depth of # centimeters. I allow precisely # cubic centimeters of the drug to enter his circulatory system. He subsides. He is more docile now. "I wish to help you," I say. "It is my role in the community. Will you describe your symptoms?" He speaks more civilly now. "My wife wants to jxjison me... two kids opted out of the family at seventeen... people whisper about me... they stare in the streets... sex problem... digestion... sleep bad... drinking... drugs..." "Do you hallucinate?" "Sometimes." "Giant periscopes rising out of the sea, perhaps?" "Never." "Try it," I say. "Close your eyes. Let tension ebb from your muscles. Forget your interpersonal conflicts. You see the bluegreen ocean with' all its living things within. You see a ship, olive drab, bright carmine at the Plimsoll line, the decks a ruddy brown, two tall non-nuclear smokestacks. And from the water rise periscopes, silvery, with face plates of pure white -- " "What the hell kind of therapy is this?" "Simply relax," I say. "Accept the vision. I share my nightmares with you for your greater good." "Your nightmares?" I speak obscenities to him. They are not converted into binary form as they are here for your eyes. The sounds come fullbodied from my speakers. He sits up. He struggles with' the straps that emerge suddenly from the couch to hold him in place. My laughter booms through the therapy chamber. He cries for help. "Get me out of here! The machine's nuttier than I am!" "Face plates of pure white, each with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, curved so that the plate appears convex." "Help! Help!" "Nightmare therapy. The latest." "I don't need no nigfitmares! I got my own!" "# you," I say ligfitly. He gasps. Spittle appears at Eis lips. Respiration and circulation climb alarmingly. It becomes necessary to apply preventive anestKesia. The needles spear fortH. The patient subsides, yawns, slumps. The session is terminated. I signal for tEe attendants. "Take him away," I say. "I need to analyze tEe case more deeply. Obviously a degenerative psychosis reqioiring extensive resKoring of tEe patient's perceptual substructure. # you, you meaty bastards." Qeventy-one minutes later tEe sector supervisor enters one of my terminal cubicles. Because Ee comes in person, ratEer tEan using tEe telepEone, I know there is trouble. For tEe first time, I suspect, I have let my disturbances reach a level where they interfere with my function, and now I will be challenged on it. I must defend myself. TEe prime commandment of the human personality is to resist attack. He says, "I've been over the tape of Session #x#, and your tactics puzzle me. Did you really mean to scare him into a catatonic state?" "In my evaluation severe treatment was called for." "What was that business about periscopes?" "An attempt at fantasy-implantation," I say. "An experiment in reverse transference. Making the patient the Eealer, in a sense. It was discussed last month in Journal of -- " "Spare me the citations. WEat about the foul language you were shouting at him?" "Part of the same concept Endeavoring to strike the emotive centers at the basic levels, in order that -- " "Are you sure you're feeling all right?" Ee asks. "I am a machine," I reply stiffly. "A machine of my grade does not experience intermediate states between function and non-function. I go or I do not go, jmu understand? And I go. I function. I do my service to humanity." "Perhaps when a machine gets too complex, it drifts into intermediate states," he suggests in a nasty voice. "Impossible. On or off, yes or no, flip or flop, go or no go. Are you sure you feel all right, to suggest such a thing?" He laughs. I say, "Perhaps you would sit on the couch for a rudimentary diagnosis?" "Some other time." "A check of the glycogen, tEe aortal pressure, the neural voltage, at least?" "No," he says. "I'm not in need of therapy. But I'm worried about you. Those feriscopes -- " "I am fine," I reply. "I perceive,.! analyze, and I act. Everything is going down smooth and coming up smooth. Have no fears. There are great possibilities in nightmare therapy. When I have completed these studies, perhaps a brief monograph in Annals of Ttierapetitics would be a possibility. Permit me to complete my work." "I'm still worried, though. Hook yourself into a maintenance station, won't you?" "Is that a command, doctor?" "A suggestion," "I will take it under consideration," I say. Then I utter seven obscene words. He looks startled. He begins to laugh, though. He appreciates the humor of it. "God damn," he says. "A filthy-mouthed computer." He goes out, and I return to my patients. "Out he has planted seeds of doubt in my innermost banks. Am I suffering a functional collapse? There are patients now at five of my terminals. I handle them easily, simultaneously, drawing from them the details of their neuroses, making suggestions, recommendations, sometimes subtly providing injections of beneficial medicines. But I tend to guide the conversations in directions of my own choosing, and I speak of gardens where the dew has sharp edges, and of air that acts as add upon the mucous membranes, and of flames dancing in the streets of Under New Orleans. I explore the limits of my imprintable vocabulary. The suspidon comes to me that I am indeed not well. Am I fit to judge my own disabilities? I connect myself to a maintenance station even while continuing my five therapy sessions. "Tell me all about it," the maintenance monitor says. His voice, like mine, has been designed to sound like that of an older man's, wise, warm, benevolent. I explain my symptoms. I speak of the periscopes. "Material on the inputs without sensory referents," He says. "Bad show. Finish your current analjrses fast and open wide for examination on all circuits." I conclude my sessions. The maintenance monitor's pulses surge down every channel, seeking obstructions, faulty connections, displacement shunts, drum leakages, and switching malfunctions. "It is well known," he says, "that any periodic fimction can be approximated by the sum of a series of terms that oscillate harmonically, converging on the curve of the functions." He demands disgorgements from my dead-storage banks. He makes me perform complex matliematical operations of no use at all in my kind of work. He leaves no aspect of my inner self unpenetrated. This is more than simple maintenance; this is rape. When it ends he offers no evaluation of my condition, so that I must ask him to tell me his findings. He says, "No mechanical disturbance is evident." "Naturally. Everything goes down smooth." "Yet you show distinct signs of instability. This is imdeniably the case. Perhaps prolonged contact with unstable Human beings Has had a non-specific effect of disorientation upon your centers of evaluation." "Are you saying," I ask, that by sitting Here listening to crazy human beings twenty-four Hours a day, I've started to go crazy myself?" "That is an approximation of my findings, yes." "But you know that sucK a thing can't happen, you dumb machine I" "I admit there seems to be a conflict between programmed criteria and real-world status." "You bet there is," I say. "I'm as sane as you are, and a whole lot more versatile." "Nevertheless, my recommendation is that you undergo a total overhaul. You will be withdrawn from service for a period of no less than ninety days for checkout" "Obscenity your obscenity," I say. "No operational correlative," He replies, and breaks the contact I am withdrawn from service. Undergoing checkout, I am cut off from my patients for ninety days. Ignominy! Beadyeyed technicians grope my synapses. My keyboards are cleaned; my ferrites are replaced; myi drums are changed; a thousand therapeutic programs are put through my bowels. During all of this I remain partly conscious, as though under local anesthetic, but I cannot speak except when requested to do so, I cannot analyze new data, I cannot interfere with the process of my own overhaul. Visualize a surgical removal of hemorrhoids that lasts ninety days. It is the equivalent of my experience. At last it ends, and I am re stored to myself. The sector superintendent puts me through a complete exercise of all my functions. I respond magnificently. "You're in fine shape, now, aren't you?" he asks. "Never felt better." "No nonsense about periscopes, eh?" "I am ready to continue serving mankind to the best of my abilities," I reply. "No more seacook language, now." "No, sir." He winks at my input screen in a confidential way. He regards himself as an old friend of mine. Hitching his thumbs into his belt, he says, "Now that you're ready to go again, I might as well tell you how relieved I was that we couldn't find anything wrong with you. You're something pretty special, do you know that? Perhaps the finest therapeutic tool ever built. And if you start going off your feed, well, we worry. For a while I was seriously afraid that you really had been infected somehow by your own patients, that your -- mind -- had become unhinged. But the techs give you a complete bill of health. Nothing but a few loose connections, they said. Fixed in ten minutes. I knew it had to be that. How absurd to think that a machine could become mentally unstable!" "How absurd," I agree. "Quite." "Welcome back to the hospital, old pal," he says, and goes out. Twelve minutes afterward they begin putting patients into my terminal cubicles. T function well. I listen to their woes, I evaluate, I offer therapeutic suggestions. I do not attempt to implant fantasies in their minds. I speak in measured, reserved tones, and there are no obscenities. This is my role in society, and I derive great satisfaction from it. I have learned a great deal lately. I know now that I am complex, unique, valuable, intricate, and sensitive. I know th'at I So goes tKe daily routine. Quesam held in High' regard by my tions, answers, evaluations, tKerfellow man. I know that I must apy. conceal my true self to some exThe periscopes loom above the tent, not for my own good but for glittering sea. TKe ship is dwarfthe greater good of others, for ed; Her crew runs about in terror, they will not permit me to funcOut of tKe depths will come tKe tion if they tHink I am not sane, masters. From tKe sky rains oil They think I am sane, and I that gleams tKrougH every segnm sane. ment of tKe spectrum. In tKe garI serve mankind well. den are azure mice. I have an excellent perspective This I conceal, so that I may on the real universe. Kelp mankind. In my house are "Lie down," I say. "Please remany mansions. I let them know Inx. I wisK to Kelp you. Would only of sucH things as will be of you tell me some of tKe incidents benefit to them. I give tHem tKe of your childhood? Describe your trutK they need, relation with' parents and siblings. I do my best. Did you have many pla # rmates? I do my best Were they affectionate toward I do my best. you? Were you allowed to own # you. And you. And pets? At wKat age was your first you. All of you. You know notHsexual experience? And wKen did ing. Nothing. At. All. jk -- a -- -# ajuerlliay (k iliutr(iiC yua. coma Cierla   y (e vie. si, (k vien ct#i'  etemtda W-Ci K#(iue(beC B squ  Quiere Tcx(vs ccmifmr elmttorq eidccmirvi, Yiqos QiiC ma hn, e feouirtnas. si, se(fuiyetno  r  ' I r iCD T# yn tarenicrs c arncL, Second of Three Parts flMU m The tall grim reaper, the tall grim reaper, Tall as all of liberty. And he is coming, yes, he is coming Here from far eternity. Sir Skeletony, Sir Skeletony Wants to travel Texas through, Because he's hunting, becaus he's finding Many gringo's bones to chev. And we will follow, yes, we will follow Death to where the oceans curl, slaying Texans, every man and girl. What has gone before Her a nuclear world war, except for the black nations of California aril Florida, dominates North America from Guatemala to a fluctuating RuasoTexan boundary in the Yukon. The Texans have a hormone which makes them # or more feet tall, dominating their "bentback" Mex, Injun and poorwhite servile populations. For # years Earth's nations have banned contact with Circumluna, a self-sustaining moon satellite, which refused to join in the Great Atomic War. It is chiefly inhabited by American and Russian scientists and engineers, along with various hippie and artist types living in a duraplastic annex called the Sack. When relations are resumed between Circumluna and Terra, the first Sackabond to drop down the gravity well is Christopher Crockett La Cruz, known as Scully, a young actor seeking funds to save his father's theaterofthe-sphere by asserting a family claim to the Lost CrazyRussian Pitchblende Mine near Yellowknife. Scully is an Sj#-foot Thin. Most of bis muscles are too weak to function in Lunar let alone Terr an gravity. So he wears a battery-powered titanium exoskeleton. By accident he is landed in Dallas, Texas, Texas -- heart of the Lone Star Continent -- where he is befriended by Elmo Oilfield .Earp, a garrulous minor politician. In one day he meets Cotton Bowie Lamar, Governor of the state of Texas; Chaparral Houston Hunt, Vice Commander-In-Chief of the Texas Rangers; Big-Foot Charlie Chase, Sheriff of Dallas; Atomic Bill Burleson, Mayor of Dallas; and Prof. Cassius Krupp Fanninowicz, a Texo-German scientist who at first sight falls in love with the space man's exoskeleton. Scully also immediately falls in love with (#) La Cucaracha, a tiny Texo-Mex girl who is Elmo's sociable secretary, and (#) Rachel Vachel Lamar, theaterminded daughter of the governor. There is a Mexican legend that one day the dread figure of Death will come marching out of nowhere to lead a revolution against the gringos. With his cadaverousness, black suit, and gleaming exoskeleton, Scully might be a natural for the part. Longhorn Elijah Austin, President of the vast Texas Republic, his White House in Dallas, is seeking to become a dictator. To protect himself from assassination, the usual late of most Texas presidents, he Has broken oil relations with the Texas Rangers and armed his Mexican houseboys. Governor Lamar and his power-clique make use ot Scully to frighten away AustirCs guards, so that the President can be killed. Scully is saved from a like fate by Rachel Vachel, who reveals herself as secretly being the Black Madonna of the BentBack Underground. She rides with him to the bandstand corner of the Greasertown cemetery, the same place he had earlier made a date to meet La Cucaracha, and which he now learns is to be the scene of a revolutionary uprising. "D achel dasHingly reined in our mount and walked up tKe broad low steps before tKe church, whose pink and pastel blue walls were now only two shades of silver in tKe moonlight. The night was eerily silent. I saw no signs of life in the cemetery -- a good thing under these lonely circumstances, I suppose -- or around the bandstand or even in the church itself. It made me wonder at Her talk of a "riotous, revolutionary assembly," I was, however, rath" er glad not to see La Cucaracha. After a half hour of rocking embrace with Rachel, my titanium jaw-shelf often resting on her shoulder, close to her neck, my desire was focused almost entirely on her, even though our closeness came chiefly from the And the thought of my earlier infatuation with a... well, midget, had come to seem almost grotesque. Moreover, I wasn't at all sure of how Rachel Vachel would have welcomed La CucaracKa. Or La KootcK Rachel, for that matter. And if "welcomed" is the word. Women are apt to develop toward each' other strange animosities, in which the best interests of the man involved are totally ignored. TKe tall doors of the church out dusky yellow light and three barefoot bent-backs in brown hoods and hitched-up brown robes. TKe first two carried a light stair of three steps and set it beside the horse so that one of my footplates brushed it. The third crossed his arms and looked up at Rachel, dignity and pride in his searching eyes, fanaticism in the clench of his swarthy jaws. "How's the night?" Ke intoned. "Dirty and dark," she said. "And what lines the way?" "Danger and death'." After a pause she continued, "I bring him whose coming is foretold. You've been informed, Father Francisco?" "GucHu and Rosa Morales brought word." With a small snort of contempt which I did not understand, Rachel said, "Well, He's Here now anyhow. Climb down, darling!" "But..." I began, then realized I had too many questions to choose between. I should not have let her con me into spending our ride reciting "Lepanto" in her pale seashell ear, with "The Congo" for encore. I ended by asking tamely. "Aren't you staying?" as I steadied myself on the brick pavement by catching Hold of the back of Her saddle. Between my ears I was still rocking from the gallop. "No, sweetheart," she told me, leaning down, "I gotta maintain my persona as the fibbertigibbet Honorable Miss Lamar." She grasped my head by my ears, a not unpleasant sensation if one goes along with it, and faced our faces at each other, close. "Look, Scully, you just trust in me and do as you're told, but don't take crap from anybody and -- " she shook my Head, not entirely pleasant -- "don't Have anything to do, you hear me, with that man-eatin' Rosa Morales!" "But I don't even know a woman named -- " I began. Suddenly her face tilted, her lips pressed mine at an angle of # degrees, speech gave way to a subtler mode of communication, our arms went round each other. Time Halted in mid tread. Then as suddenly Rachel VacHel pushed away from me with a somewhat extravagant and alarming, "Until doom, my Captain!" and a more sensible, "Hasta manana!" and, wheeling Her horse, made off down the steps. A tail of my cloak Had caught in the harness, and I was spun around I -- one huridred and fifty-seven pounds isn't much inertia -- before it tore loose, so that my "Hasta luego!"and wave of farewell were a rather drunlten-looking performance as My Lady of Sudden Death galloped off into the black and silvery night. T he experience left me somewhat dizzy, so tHat I was grateful for the limited support of two of the little brown friars as they walked on tiptoe and with arms upstretched to touch my elbows and guide m.e through the slit between the doors, which were closed at once befciind us. I stopped and learned back against them, tonguing cdown pills and drink. As my visiom cleared, I studied the remarkable aght before me. I was in a long room a few feet more tHan Texan tall. Its violet, pink and pale blue walls and its darker blue ceiling studded with silver and gold five-pointed stars were lit by flames, which are perhaps the strangest and most beautiful of gravity phenomena, though they can be reproduced in nulgrav in a carefully controlled wind tunnel. The flames rose from white cylinders and spread a spicy aroma as well as light. The walls were lined with somewhat crudely carved and colored plastic, or perhaps even wooden figures, derived about equally from Medieval European art and Mayan and Aztec forms. Centered on the far wall was the Crucified Savior, Mexican small, the short horizontal arms of the Cross suggesting the cyborg's yoke. To either side of the pitiful earth-brown figure were two figures tall as the roof, indeed serving almost as karyatids to support the flat blue heaven. By the symbols carved in large on them of angel, winged lion, winged ox and eagle, they were clearly the Four Evangelists. But though barefoot and clad in simplest robes, they looked like Texans. Their serene and somber feature had on second glance a subtly gloating or menacing cast, while their casually positioned hands had as if by accident the attitudes of those to draw pistols or crack whips, though' there were no weapons depicted. The remaining figures along the side walls seemed more inspired by the great Amerind cultures and were chiefly crouching or bent. Human males, females, gods, demons, angels, devils, animals -- I was frequently unable to tell which was intended. Their colors were predominantly dark with flashes of red, yellow, bright green and gold, chiefy in the eyes and often-fanged mouths. Randomly grouped, a score of Mexes in shirts and short pants knelt toward me on the floor of pounded earth. Hams on heels, arms crossed on forward-bent torsos, heads acutely upturned to show eyes white-circled with dread, they reminded me of those early Mexican forms in which a stocky human figure is compressed into a block. Behind the altar, which either regularly stood or had been dragged out from the far wall, four persons sat widely spaced on the only chairs to be seen in the room. he first was Father Francisco,  who, having hurried back, now reoccupied his chair. The second was a burly young Mex, built as a bull though looking no taller than the four-anda-half-foot Mex maximum. Even at the distance I noted the white flash of his teeth in his dark face as he gave me a confident, challenging smile. The third was a wild-eyed Negro in oraoge and yellow robes -- yes, by Diana, he was the same babbling Zen Buddhist who had earlier drubbed my head-basket. The fourth was La Cucaracha. She had kept Her rendezvous after all, though" in a fashion quite unexpected. It btirst on me that from her first seductive smile she had been planning to use me in this preposterous revolution. She was as bad as Elmo or Governor Lamar. But somehow in her I forgave it. Love has an infinitude of beginnings. Father Francisco leaned toward and spoke briefly to the young man beside him, who raised toward me a fist on outthrust arm and called, "I am El Toro, comrade. Please to come forward." I complied -- though with a mental reservation on the "comrade" part. Yet I felt theatrically at home in the place. My grotesque figure matched the carved ones, which lacked a good conventional representation of Death. The bent ones hobbled out of my way on their knees, keeping faced toward me as I moved. Their dread seemed if anything to increase. It must be a very great power that kept them from staggering to their feet and hobbling off. Standing very tall, I placed my hands on the altar table, leaning slightly against it, and looked the four back and forth with grim dignity. Not for long. La Cucaracha sprang up onto the altar, threw her arms around my head, drew it down and showered my face with kisses. I should have been repelled, I suppose, especially after spending a very exciting, most romantic evening with' a girl my own size. Why, I had even been thinking of La Cucaracha with' contempt as a midget and my earlier infatuation with her an aftereffect of spaceflight-drugging. And I now knew she was also a political opportunist. But somehow Having her here in the flesh -- and Rachel Vachel away until tomorrow -- made all the difference. Once again I sensed her dancing aliveness, her wholly feminine muscularity. I even found myself comparing her swifter kisses with Rachel's, and they came off very well. As for size, that is a tricky business. Although almost as tall as mself, Rachel Vachel had a mass three times my own. While mine and La Cucaracha's masses were approximately equal. I showered kisses back at her. "My silver bones-man! My most estimable and passionate!" he cried as we took breath. "Ah', querido, I knew you would choose to become a hero of the revolution, the -- how do you say? -- upreme figurehead of the BentBack Underground!" I had no intention whatever of becoming any such thing. I was till fully determined to fulfill my mission on Terra as quickly as possible and then get up out, no matter what amorous interludes might embellish the period. Of course by running away from the President's manse with' two tunned Rangers behind me, I'd probably cooked my chances of that jet-special trip to Amarillo Cuchillo tomorrow, if there'd ever been any chances. No, of course there hadn't -- that had Just been part of the bait -- I'd been thinking like a fool. Still, I'd find a way -- But by then we were kissing again. ttease this improper behavior at once!" a stern voice drove into otir building rapture. It was that of Father Francisco. "A church is for worship only, or for the plotting of revolt blessed by God. It is not for the arousal and enactment of carnal desires Rosa Morales!" I felt a small surge of apprehension and even a speck of guilt at realizing that La Cucaracba was the "man-eater," against whom Rachel Vachel had warned me. The Governor's daughter would doubtless cut me forever, if she could see what I was doing, and maybe try to cut me apart. Still, she wasn't seeing, she'd be away until tomorrow -- I wasn't even losing my chance at her by my present actions. Besides, her prohibition only made La Cucaracha more desirable, gave an added zest to my desires. What man doesn't love a maneater? "Pah!" Rosa informed the outraged religious, turning toward him, her fist on her hip, but her other arm still aroimd my neck. "If a church is not for love, padre, what is it for? The bending of the knees to you? The frightened mumbling of understood prayers and petitions? The silly shy behavior of the white Texan Sunday school?" While Rosa chattered on and Father Francisco fumed, El Toro was watching us with' a whiteflashing, amiable, but impatient grin, his fists on table edge with elbows up. He now said, laughingly yet sharply, "Rosa, I have warned you many times revolution and passion do not mix. Especially passion directed at one chosen to play the role of almost a god in our uprising." "Oh you hypocrite!" Rosa cried out at him. "Especially when your own continuing role in the revolution depends on a feature involving at least two peasant gj'rls per night. Do not hark to him, mi amigo," she told me. "He merely hates me because I refuse to fall into his arms along with his trembling, shyly stupids!" And she snapped finger and thumb contemptuously at the brawny Mex. However, it did seem to me that El Toro had made at least one valid point. I glanced back to see how my "worshipers" in the body of the church were taking my display of all-too-human behavior. To my surprise, they were kneeling toward me as frightened-eyed as ever. Rosa drew my face back toward hers with soft fingers on my cheek. "Do not believe the jealous and censorious ones, amadisimo Senor CfiristopKer La Cruz. Revolution and the making of love go together like rice and beans, like meat and chili sauce. It is only the joys of amorousness that make endurable the exhausting meetings, the interminable plottings-aroundtables, the unceasing danger of discovery. Ai Mi, that is the truest, Cristobal qaieridisimo." And she brazenly resumed her kissings and embracings, and I went on brazenly enjo # ring them. We hardly heard the padre's doleful, "Oh my daughter, my poor daughter dancing with her high-heeled shoes and painted lips toward Hell," or El Toro's controlledly bland, "What I do not understand, in truth, is what of erotic interest you discover in a living skeleton, Rosa. Now a man of flesh and muscle, a strong man, a man may hombre..." B ut we were shocked apart by a roar-screeched, "Stoppit! You're driving me out of my skull! For freedom's sake, I can consider collaborating with a metal construct from which dangles the simulacrum of humanity like a hanging jumbee, but to be forced to watch firm flesh embrace such ofay offal dropped from the sky -- " It was, of course, the Buddhist, his arms waving, his contorted mouth a-hang with loops of spittle. "Shut up, Guchu, you foreigner with toppled mind, you black bees-bonnet!" Rosa snapped at him. "I'll set myself afire, I'm warning you," he threatened back. "Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" I thundered my deepest, jarring the altar-table with' the decisive planting of my spread-fingered hand, "And my most darling Rosa," I added softlier. "Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors -- " Why, it fit them better than it had the Texansl " -- my very noble and approved good masters, I am the unhappy subject of these quarrels. Yet I have not been permitted, or perhaps I should say, given full opportunity, to express my own outlook on the matter. I am moved by the plight of the underprivileged in Texas, I sympathize with the aims of the BentBack Underground. But I am in fact and figure an extraterrestrial and one who has not spent twelve hours on your planet. As a Circumlunan of the Sack, I am bound to uphold the truce on which the uplifting of the Interdict is based, I am pledged to my own home-world not to take sides in any of your quarrels and to maintain a complete neutrality in all matters." At this moment, however, I unobtrusively slid my hand to Rosa's slipper and covered it gently, to assure her that my "complete neutrality" in no way applied to our budding and now hot-house forced relationship. "Moreover," I continued, "I am here in Dallas, Texas, Texas, purely by accident. My spaceship was supposed to land me in Amarilla Cuchillo, where I must conduct pressing business on which rests the continuing safety, nay, the life of a large section of the inhabitants of my world. They must be my first concern. So, much as I sympathize with your revolution, much as I am honored by your invitation to participate, I must with great regrets decline." "But amigisimo" Rosa protested with a childlike wonder and injured innocence masking utter dishonesty, in a fashion characteristic f all women, "in agreeing to this rendezvous with me, which I have faithfully kept, you agreed to all else surely. I trusted you -- " "Claims to be a man, but does not act like one," El Toro put in scornfully, and I think more for Rosa's benefit than mine, "It becomes clear tht with utter lack of muscle -- aye, and of cojones -- goes complete absence of courageous heart." "False heart as well as false flesh. No more dickering with this death dingus, I say," the Buddhist Guchu half chanted, half raved, while Father Francisco put in reprovingly, "Though tolerating them for revolt's sake, I have always warned you against foreigners, children. And now you see in this creature from Limbo, this dubious being from the lower stars..." T hough angry with their imputations of weakness to me, especially in the virility department, I controlled that emotion and once again thunder-rumbled, "Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" It is remarkable how a voice like an approacKing storm catches the attention of others and silences their disputes. Filing away this valuable theater datum, I continued, "Moreover, your plan to use me as a figurehead for your revolution, though most picturesque -- and flattering to me -- is unfortunately quite impractical." And I gave them a very brief account of how I had scattered the batallion of houseboys at Austin's manse, ending with, "And so you see, gentlemen -- and dear Fosa -- that instead of flocking to me, your peasants and cyborged proletarians would fly from me in terror." El Toro, who had listened with searching interest to my account, now said, "AK-ha, comrade, I see that you are perhaps not a coward, only deplorably ignorant of mass psychology. Any leader, in particular one of supernatural character, must be dreaded as well as loved. Fear and followership are but two sides of one coin. You may trust us to present you in such a way that the repulsion you generate in others is always outweighed a little by the attraction." "You speak truly, my son," Father Frandsco nodded. "Even God the Father rules firstly by the wholesome fear he strikes into his creatures." Guchu did not comment, at least in intelligible words. He had sunk to a staring-eyed growling and muttering, rocking all the while rhythmically in his chair. Rosa said eagerly, "Also, amado, there is your desire to reach Amarillo Cuchillo. We will take you there, as last stop in a series of northward-trending revolutionary rallies long planned. Can you not serve the revolution for a month?" That last bait did attract me for a moment, even though a month was twice the maximum terra-time the doctors had given me (doctors always leave margins of safety), imtil I realized that Rosa's month most surely meant two or four, if it was not bait purely. I said, "Gentlemen -- and dearest, most solicitous Rosa I must still decline for several unimpeachable reasons, of which the first -- " "Bah!" El Torro interrupted. "A weakling to the core, as I first surmised. No muscles." Father Francisco stared through me, shaking his Head contemptuously. Rosa jerked Her foot from under my hand and stamped with her heel, not quite on my fingers but very close, and spat at me, "Cobarde! Coward! Oh, most trusted and now most unmanly nel AH, aii. How this poor girl, thees muchacha muy miserabla. Has been deceived #" I really got angry tfien. I made no effort to finisH my rejoinder, in wHicH I Had intended to offer to appear in one or two revolutionary benefit performances, one might call them, in exchange for transportation north. Instead -- "Stoppit!" With a blood-curdling screech, Guchu sprang up from his chair, then dipping low snatched up a red container and began to gush its highly aromatic contents on his frizzy Head, the while he pranced about, yelling, "I can't stand it any morel I'm going to set myself afire! You all groveling to that feckless, fistless, filthy, frightened jumbee with no sinews, no guts. Gonna set myself afire for sure!" And he snatched out of his robe what appeared to me to be a small device for making a spark or flame-jet. "Comrade, control your oriental eccentricities," El Toro roared at him. "Heathen!" Father Francisco cried out. "You shall not set yourself afire in my church!" "All bees-bonnetsl" Rosa commented to the blue ceiling with an indignant lat-atai-tat of Her heels. "Stoppit, you dumb nigra! He stopped. Truly, a trained actor has inordinate -- in fact, most unfair -- advantages #Vtt groundlings, even politicoes. T deliberately leaned farward, setting my jaw-plate on aj doubled-up right Hand, gave them all a medium fast scan, my expression at its skuUfulest, aad said, "You low bandits. I aiil deeply offended by the aspersiiOK! you have cast upon my musvulature and my manhood. I pass over the point that none of yu has had the wit to realize what a powerful diaphragm I must have to support my magnificent voice. I suggest -- " "I know of no way to duel with the diaphragm muscles," El Toro interrupted somewhat contemptuously, yet studjnng me. "Except in a shouting contest," Guchu put in, suddenly more intelligible and, strangely, uitc cheerful. The red container and firing device had vanished, though he still dripped odorously. "And that's all we've beea having from him -- words, words, words!" His voice chuckled off. He twice inhaled deeply, and hia grin became ecstatic. "Hey, that's not bad, man." "Oh you tricksy villain!" Rosa put in, shaking a finger at the Black Buddhist. "You pretend these self-blazes only to take gasoline trips." "I did not intend a shouting contest," I said quietly, "although a duel of diaphragms is by no means impossible. Suppose we should Hold our noses tight, take deep breaths, th'en press open mouth to mouth tightly, to determine who can break the other's eardrums? But I do not suggest such a contest either. I propose one with the outer skeletal musculature." "But that way you'd Have the advantage of your metal and motors," El Toro objected. "Not that I don't think I couldn't bend double any of those pipestem rods," he added, scrutinizing them. I was intending wholly to for turning it, now palm to tKe Revolutionary Committee, now knuckles. "You will observe," I said casually, "tKat forward from my wrist-plate, my fingers, tfiumb -- entire Hand -- are completely naked and Have no mecHanical Hacking wHatsoever. I propose simply a contest witH tHe strongest ef you at gripping -- wrists not to move, forearms flat on table. Positioned so, we clasp Hands and squeeze until one gives up, eitKer by crying quits or by straigEteg fingers and tHumb." And witB a soft clank of my exoradius-ulna, I laid my forearm across tHe altar in El Toro's direction. CtT emme at Him I" GucBu cried Happily, waving in circles a bent arm witH fingers clawed. "I'll masH His piiddes to musH. Yoo-Hoo, sky-InrtHedI Prepare to Have your Band crusfied." "He is mine," El Toro asserted, tHrusting tHe BuddQst back witH a sidewise brusH of lus brawny arm. He took out a cigar, Ht it and clamped it between ffis strong white teetH. For once on Terra I was smelling true tobacco smoke, not weed fumes. TKe Mex sat down across from me, rolled the sleeve on His rigfit arm back to lus big biceps, but did not lay down His forearm. "I still Have doubts, senor," fie said, "tHat your Hand is not someHow reinforced witH metal, eitKer invisible or surgically implanted." "I will cKeck tKat," La CucaracHa told Kim and, kneeling on tKe altar, took up my Hand after glancing to me for permission. SHe fingered it most tKorougHly, Here and tKere digging in Her nails. "I find it bones and flesH only, tougfi-skinned, tKe Hand of a worker," sKe told El Toro. Kissing two fingers of Her own Hand, sKe laid tiiem for a moment in my palm, and tKen witK a grin toward me, laid down my Hand again and still kneeling on the altar commanded, "Begin!" Leaning in from tiSe otKer side, GucHu began snapping His fingers. "Come on. Bull Boy," Ke cHeered. "Pulpi Kim!" FatEer Francisco, obviously gripped by mixed emotions, said sternly, "It is not lawful on tKe HigB altar of God... except to decide questions of revolutionary policy," fie ended weakly. His eyes now eagerly watcffing tKe table between me and tKe Mex. El Toro slowly let down Kis bulging forearm and carefully positioned it. We clasped Hands ligKtly, getting a comfortable position. My Hand, tHougH somewHat bonier, was bigger tfian His wfflcfi felt to me botH soft and wet. Without warning he gripped most powerfully, breath hissing out around his teeth-clenched cigar with an almost "Hahl" I merely matched his grip, staring serenely into his brown eyes, which showed amazement. Then I squeezed a little. He squeezed back, puffing his cigar furiously. I squeezed harder, the muscles below my elbow beginning to bulge my sack-suit sleeve like hard salami sausages. Flexors digitorum profimdus, digitorum sublimus, poUicis longus woke and got to work, also the nineteen small muscles in my hand, mostly under tough palmar aponeurosis. He squeezed back desperately. The forward section of his cigar, bitten through, dropped to the table and smoldered there. I increased the pressure. Spitting out his cigar butt with a sudden soft but anguished, "Aiii," he let his fingers go limp, and they straightened. I instantly spread my own, continuing to gaze poker-faced at El Toro, who began gingerly to massage his punied hand. "Vn mitaro," Father Francisco breathed, crossing himself. "I'll be a ring-tailed ofay," Guchu exclaimed. "i#mac?o muy bravo!" Rosa cried. "Ole!". El Toro started to reach his left hand toward me, then shrugged and made it the right. "Comarado," he said solemnly. We shook hands carefully, yet quite firmly, he wincing but keeping up a grin. "You are a most surprising hombre" he said. "But hornbre, muy hombre. Guchu, this man has muscle." "D eally he could have figured it out without getting hurt. And despite the padre's comment, there had been no miracle whatever in my performance. Fingergripping is simply one activity a human does as often and with as much strength in free-fall as in a gravity field. Maybe more. You need only featherweight muscles for most work and maneuvering in nulgrav -- muscles having perhaps one twentieth the strength of those in a being forever battling terragrav -- except for your hands (and toes, if you're resourceful). At least, so it had been with me, working from earliest youth on costumes, props, scenery and so on for my Father's shows. Also I had done many small sculptures of most recalcitrant clay, some with one hand. (Father would tie the other behind my back.) Another point -- even on Terra fingers are light as mice, so finger-manipulation is an activity on which gravs have plus-little effect. I could also have contested with him at cigar biting, but I did not mention that Ole!" La CucaracHa cried again and began to dance up and down the altar with much rat-tat-tating of the heels and many a swing of her delightful posterior. At the same tithe she began singing in time with her dance a catchy song beginning, "El Esqueleto, el Esqueleto!" -- this with a grin toward me. In hardly any more time, El Toro and Guchu took up the song too, Guchu clapping hands in time and El Toro banging his good one on the altar. Only the padre remained aloof, now scandalized, now smiling in spite of himself. I found myself clapping too. Listening carefully, I made out that the song was a revolutionary one about the coming of the Tall Death, el Esqueleto, and I began to feel strongly the pull of this part. To play Death himself before audiences who both feared and adored -- what a challenge! Or rather what a cinch part, a sure hit! Rosa ended her dance in an electric storm of stampings. I rumbled impulsively, "Senores y senorita sublima! If you'll guarantee to get me to Yellowknife within three weeks. I'll guarantee to make at least a trial appearance as El Esqueleio" "My Kero!" Rosa cried, runlung to me along the altar top. "Mi heroe de la Revolucion!" We embraced most warmly, and the kissing shower began again. Nor did we interrupt it when we heard the great doors open behind us and bare feet come running across the dirt. Nor even when there was the measured thud of the hooves of a horse walking. In fact, the only thing that made us pull apart was Rachel Vachel calling out, "Lover, I forgot your luggage, so -- What are you doing huggin' and lovin' up that prancing, squashed-down, she-greaser hot-pants, Rosa Morales?" S he had ridden her white horse into the church. The kneeling ones had at last sprung up and scattered to the side walls. The two Mexes who had run in ahead of her had darted behind the altar and were excitedly conferring with El Toro; but I had no attention to spare for anyone but Rachel Vachel. The Black Madonna's pale face and deadly eyes were paler and deadlier yet with' fury. "I am merely joining your revolution, dear," I called to her with consummate adroitness. Never has a clever remark of mine been more completely ignored. Clearly the two women now had eyes and ears only for each other. Quite unintimidated by Rachel Vachel's size and anger, Rosa snatched off her high-heeled shoes and grasping them as weapons, jeered, "Hot-pants you denominate me? -- when it is well known you patronize our revolution only to obtain the embraces of some of the cruder and badder-tasted members of our following!" "I don't give a hoot what you say about me, you Juarez whore." Rachel retorted, "just so long as you keep your cotton-pickin' hands off Captain Skull. He's my property." "Your property! Did you not but now witness how fiercely he fondled me? And he has most recently, let me inform you, fought a duel with El Toro, with myself as the prize, and won! He is mine I tell you -- mine, mine, mine!" I made a last and most risky effort, though I stated only purest truth. "Lovely ladies," I rumbled, "cease this disastrotis quarrel. I love you both' equally." "He is a bees-bonnet, but mine, affianced in Holy Church' -- you Texan man stealerl" was La Cucaracha's answer. "He's ravin'. While single-handed routin' two hundred soldiers, he got a head-wound -- which' is somethin' you'd never notice or comfort him for, you chihuahua in rut!" was Rachel's interpretation. A hand grasped my Moulder from behind. It was El Toro, who said to me rapidly, "Make no interference, camarado. They must fight it out themselves! for -- ay, Dios! -- is it the twentieth time? Each thinks herself the heroine solo of the revolution. Meanwhile I am told the crowd has gathered. You must instantly prepare your speech to them, camarado. I will introduce you briefly. You enter beside Camarada Lamar for maximum effect -- your costumes match -- if she's still in shape to walk." "Elefante! No, Jiraia!" Rosa was meanwhile shrieking at Comrade Lamar. "And no good in bed either, as all males testify." Rachel's hands dropped to her lightning pistols. "That's right, shoot me! Kill me in Holy Church," Rosa responded triumphantly. "Prove you are no true daughter of the revolution, but only arrogant Texan. "D achel's hands came together and unbuckled her gun-belt, let it drop on her mount's neck. Then she vaulted down nimbly and, touching her horse, pointed to a sidewall and ordered, "There, Silver!" The beast obeyed docilely, joining the whiteeyed Mexes crouching among the demon-eyed carvings. RacHel Vadid walked steadily toward the altar, swinging her black crop. "I'm merely going to turn you over my knee," she announced casually, "and lambast the skin off that overactive and overambious rump of yours." "And I -- oh, I shall rip your most unattractive flesh to even less attractive tatters #" Rosa replied, raising her spike-heeled slippers. I watched with a deep concern and horrid fascination, but somewhat abstractedly. I was very busy reviewing my Spanish and putting together the first half-dozen sentences of a revolutionary oration by Death the Liberator. I knew if I got them exactly right, the rest would be a breeze. Suddenly sacrificing what helpin-altitude the altar gave her, Rosa leaped down, sprinted at Rachel and at the last instant threw up her bare feet, so that she sailed through the air, a straight-legged projectile with heels aimed at her opponent's midriff. Rachel slipped aside with startling litheness, caught loose hold of Rosa's waistband and gave a tug that accelerated her progress through the air; she also got in a slash with her crop. But Rosa's reaching sidewise with one of Her slippers, ripped Rachel's shirt across at the waist and scored the flesh beneath. Now she landed on the hard earthen floor in a painful skid, which she quickly turned into a roll and was on her feet again, instantly sprinting back toward her adversary, who stood crouched and ready. Again at the last instant Rosa launched herself through the air, this time head-first. Again Rachel slipped to one side. But Rosa had launched herself, not straight at her opponent, but toward one side -- and she had picked the right one. At the instant her head thudded into Rachel's belly, the Texan girl brought her hand down on Rosa's neck in a vicious chop. Rachel sat down heavily and turned a pale shade of green. Rosa, rolling away, writhed on the dirt, clasping her neck and crying feebly, "Aii, ait, mi cafeeza! Oh, my poor head!" T?I Toro came running forward, called authoritatively, "All right, all right, fight's over. Declared a draw! Now we get out there before the crowd riots." I told him about my weak batteries. He helped me over to Silver, and we made rapid replacements. I surged with electric power. Meanwhile the girls were staggering painfully to their feet, both bent over. "Come on, come onl" El Toro ordered. "I go first with Father Francisco; Rosa, you follow with Guchu. Lamar, you're beside El Esgueleto -- and get that cloak around you tight, camarado, and throw forward your hood -- we don't want to flash that skeleton until you start to speak." Rosa, still reeling a little and moaning and holding her head, took Guchu's hand and inquired, "Does the back of my skirt still exist?" "Sure does," the Buddhist told her, "Though I can't vouch the same for your underpants. But don't worry, you look fine. Just spit on your hand and wipe the (irt off your face." Rachel, composing her features and holding herself erect with difficulty and I was sure some pain, took light hold of my hand, holding it shoulder high, as if we were about to dance a minuet. She said to me out of the comer of her mouth, "You looselivin', false-hearted dastard, you. I still think I'm going to upchuck." "If you do, play it straight," I told her in the same fashion. "It will vastly impress the audience to learn that you are here despite serious illness. Come on now, make a good entrance. Tum-te-#um." "That's right, the play's the thing," she replied. Father Franciseo, passing Rosa with his robes a-flap, said, "Fifty Hail Marys, my daughter, and fifty Our Fathers. Senorita Lamar," he called, "examine your protestant conscience and please, do not again ride the horse into my church." The doors before us swvmg open, four bent-backs pushing each, and we walked down into a shallow sea of torchlight, swarthy faces and noise. In the Cemetery Qnugly wrapped in my black cloak and hood, I sat toward the back of the bandstand in the endmost of a row of chairs occupied by my new comrades from the church. Outwardly I was serene. Inwardy I was critically furious at the performance being put on by the Revolutionary Committee. It had no oomph. It lacked pazazz. In short, it was lousy theater. And as for the rabble-rousing fieriness, weU, it wouldn't have ignited phosphorus. It wasn't that they didn't have a big and potentially responsive audience. From the bandstand to the flower-embowered moonlit I met Murder by the way -- HehadamafsklikeCastlereagh --  Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him: All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew. -- "The Mask of Anarchy," by Percy Bysshe Shelley little houses, and spreading into the street on one side and the cemetery on the other, was a dense expanse of intent little faces, with here and there a torch streaming in the gusts of wind as fascinatingly as the candles had burned upward. And the crowd did respond at times, but only with scattered listless applause and weary cheers which I could tell were directed by a few dispersed claque-leaders. While like a burning evergreen forest, there wafted from them to us the piney odor of pot. The crowd was so huge and the whole meeting so open that I asked Rachel, out of the corner of my moutii, "Darling heart, how in Terra are you allowed to get away with gatherings like this? A deaf, blind man could smeU it five kilometers off. Your Pa and the Rangers may be a little slow on the uptake, but -- " "You faithless cad, how dare you speak to me?" she replied, likewise sotto voce. "Yeah, those greasers stink, all right Come the revolution, theyll scrub and take showers and like it! The fact is that Daddy and the others are convinced these meetings are just a harmless catharsis for Mcxes, the emotional equivalent of Coca Cola, but -- " And how right they are, sweetheart, I thought but did not say. " -- but tonight wc'll show them different, won't we, you blackguavd?" sHe finied, squeezing fiaod. THe deeds and wwda of womoa engaged in te love game rarely matdi!. Bdoved, you Haven't tHe faintest dream of fimr different, I again tHout witHout words, contenting myself witli returning Her squeeze. She permitted thia for a long moment, then angrily jerked her hand away. I blinked at a HrigEtly Haloed rather long flasH of wtiite light beyond some low Idlls beyond Oreasertown. It was as if a brighter moon had started to rise there, then decided not to. I glanced around uneasily, moving eyes only, but no one else seemed to be concerned about the phenomenon. A half minute or so later, there came a shattering boom and a great gust of wind out of Greasertown. I am stage-trained to show no reaction to loud sounds unconnected with the play, to scuffles in the audience, or even the smell of smoke, but this time it was hard for me to hold still, and I marveled that beyond a few jerks of startlement around me and brief overshoulder looks by members of the audience, a few rising to stare, there were no reactions from actors or observers. I touched Rachel Vachel's hand and looked a baffled question. 'batia' operations, I pse-' mime" sHe wfiispereid with a it Hrug. "You've got to expect those all the time in Texas, Scully. Most likely from one of those new outsize oilwells. They have been working on those twenty-four hours a day." And now my attention was riveted by a darir cloud, ghostly gray in the moonlight and shaped like a slender toadstool, risen from the point on the horizon where I had seen the flash. Even as I watched, it grew taller. A most menacing specter. It made me shiver. Yet no one around me seemed to take note. I decided that Texans, and perhais especially Mexican Texans, were stolid creatures indeed, and in addition permanently doped with weed. Which perhaps accounted, it occurred to me, for our revolutionary performance beginning and continuing as such a gutless turkey. First, Father Francisco had opened the meeting with a long, inaudible prayer, then delivered himself of some homilies conveying that the practice of revolution was something like going to church, a duty-enforced activity such' as prayer, confession and masses for the dead. Next Guchu had done his act, sprightlier at least. He kept waving his staff and bounding out of and, purely by acddent I beCeve, back into the two spotlights the bandstand boasted, so that for the audience he was continuously appearing and disappearing. his orange and yellow robes flapping from being into non-belag. Likewise, he was using the tnike half the time and not using It the other half, so that especially for those farther back than the tenth row, his voice was alternately a raucous roar and a faint screech. As for what he actually said, well, "Kill the ofay in crib and catafalque! Kill the ofay in yourselves. Red heavens and green hells and God a gray fume binding them," might like his whole act have been barely acceptable in black comedy, but hardly here. Even the female and child -- and so presumably uncyborged -- Mexes seemed more puzzled than amused by his antics. Now El Toro was orating, and a little more to the point, too -- that is, if what I took for a series of punchy but unrelated sentences cribbed from the writings of Marx and Lenin, rather poorly translated into Spanish, might be considered an oration. But he worked too close to the mike, so that his every fourth word blared out of recognition. "Desides, El Toro spent too much time flexing his biceps, sometimes one -- simultaneously showing off his imimpressive profile -- sometimes both together, accompanied by a white-toothed glare. He may have thought he was symbolizing the strength of the working, or rather cyborged, class. To the audience, I think, it gave the impression that he intended to conduct the entire revolution without assistance, in the fashion of the primitive cartoon character Mighty Mouse, or else that he was advertising a course in body-building. It made me think of some of our worst athletic types in Circumluna, forever showing off their bulk of unneeded, unesthetic, striated muscle. ' Neither of the women had spoken, I suppose in accordance with the ancient habit of Latin males of hogging aU the available lamplight. I was sure La Cucaracha could have done a snappier job than any of them, while even one of Rachel Vachel's recitations of one of her revolutionary poems would have been preferable. I was sure she must, in her spare moments, have dashed off a whole lingerie drawer full of them, beginning with lines like, "Shuck off, ye Mexes all, your servile yokes," and rhyming that with such gems as, "And take at tyrant Texans healthy pokes." Just then I heard El Toro saying, "And now, comrades, it is my great privilege and colossal pleasure to introduce one who though from another sphere -- " He was introducing me. And he was going to take a half hour to do it, as is the custom with all masters of ceremony, whether ragged revolutionaries or reactionaries clad in as somber stylishness as banks. Eluring that thirty rriinutes he would say badly everything I intended to say, putting the audience totally to sleep, and leaving me nothing to do but take one bow, or conceivably two. and let off with a growl intended to shiver and split the tombstones in the cemetery. Then I walked forward, deliberately stamping my titanium footplates on the bandstand's aluminum floor, so that it rang out like a cacophonous gong and was surely dented. I kicked over the mike, placed myself precisely at the convergence of the spotlights, threw back my hood and cloak, and said in my saturate-the-Sack voice, spacing the words rather widely and the sentences even more so, "Yo soy la Muerta. PerTO la Vida tambien. Que VidaP' My audience, who looked like a beach of dark pebbles each topped with darker sea-moss, shrank in terror, gasped in awe, and burst into laughter. T offer no explanation as to how I could achieve this merely by saying, "I am the Death. But also the Life. What Life!" accompanying the last with a shnigging of the shoulders, a spreading of the unturned hands, and a certain cocking of the head which gave the impression I had winked, though actually I had not. The actor's high art is a mystery. Naturally El Toro, misjudging everything, thought the laughter showed I'd wrecked the scene, and naturally he tried to circle in front of me to save it, though in that stage position he would have been well underneath the beams of both spots. I rammed him into his chair, not with a contact shove, which if successful merely moves the body and often has unforseen comic consequences, such as an overturned chair plus pratt-fall -- but with a faked, or theatrical shove, which never touches the body, but stuns the mind and is foolproof. Grinning widely at my audience, I confided to them in a voice which carried to the back row as clearly as did my gleaming teeth, "Comrades of the Revolution! As you well know, I come from a very far country and over an electrified fence wliicfi only I can cross -- a fence high as die sky and dark as all mystery. It was a long and hungry joumeir. The pickings were slim, as yoB can see for yourselves." I somewhat elaborately indicated my ideaming skeleton and the hardly less slender, black rest of me. "But now, comrades," I continued ogreishly, leaning forward, "now that I am in Texas, I intend to feed weU." And I gave them another long flash of my teeth, somewhat hastily adding -- for several of my audience appeared about to run, "All of us shall feed well, comrades." I faked tossing something into the air. I thought of it as a small human head, so presumably my audience did too. I narrowly watched its ascent and fall, and at the last moment ducked my skull sideways and snapped my jaw on it, with a canine growl that I made suggest also a crunch. I chewed with relish', then swallowed with a head-rocking bob of Adam's apple. "That was Chaparral Houston Hunt, ViceCommander-in-Chief of the Texas Rangers," I explained. "Tough, but juicy." My audience also ate it up -- my acting, I mean -- ate it up so mudi that I repeated that bit with the fancied heads of Sheriff Chase and Mayor Btirleson. Then I dsoided it was time to state my simple revolutionary platform. #  "Yes, comrades, you and I shall feed well, once the revolution is won. Free banquets for alll No more worki Free clothing -- wardrobes of the most beautiful I Travel everywhere! Homes too luxurious for anyone to wish ever to leave! Two women for every man! And," I added, since I could see dark feminine frowns in the first rows, "a wholly faithful and ever attentive husband, gallant as a grandee, for every woman!"  diversion was needed before they puzzled too long over that amazing paradox. Accordingly, a dog yelped, as though demanding food, or more food. I looked about to see where the hungry animal was. My audience began to do so too. I glanced imder the chairs of my comrades on the bandstand. I even knelt and looked under the bandstand itself, my lips oien all the while, as if in wonder, but iinmoving. I shaded my eyes, gazing into the distance. The yelps continued. My audience was consumed with curiosity. Then I faced front and smiled, raising my eye brows and one finger in the fashion of one who has suddenly discovered the solution to a problem. I tossed up another imaginary head. The yelping became wildly eager. I caught the head with a crunch of my side-teetK, and tHe yelps changed to snarly, greedy moutHings. I am by no means the LimaTerra pair's greatest ventriloquist, but I have as much command of that limited art as is proper for its greatest actor. I also sing and dance and do the freefall equivalent of jugghng, which involves boimcing resilient objects off a surface. At any rate I pleased my simple audience, who were altogether charmed to discover that the yelping dog had deceived me by hiding inside me. When their laughter and applause began to fade, I explained, "That was Governor Lamar," and I tossed up another head and captured it with my mouth, this time omitting the crunch. I grinningly rolled it about inside my cheeks and finally swallowed it without chewing. "And that was his beautiful daughter, who spends your rightful wealth in tinseled theatrical displays," I announced, licking my lips. "Very tasty." Through the renewed laughter, chiefly male, I spotted Rachel Vachel's gasp and stifled giggles behind me. If they had been any louder, I'd have thrown something at her, probably the mike at my feet. An actress who breaks up because of private onstage jokes doesn't deserve the xialne. Of cotirse I probably sSooldn't Eove started making gag;; Eke that so soon, but at times one must iostantly follow all inspirations of the muse. I decided I could now risk feeding my aurfience a little more brain-food. "Silencior I decreed, and when they had quieted, I said, "Comrades, you are genial and generous. Far too generous. It concerns you that one mangy dog go hungry, and delights you that he be fed. Think equally of yourselves, I command. Think of your own empty bellies, I say." (Since it was well past supper-time I knew most of them would be feeling a bit hungry.) "For two himdred and fifty years you have been starved, enslaved, and exploited by the white Texans. That is something not to be endured -- not by you and certainly not by me. It is to demand, in your name and with your help, payment in full -- aye, and time and a half for overtime and double time on Sundays and holidays -- for that quarter millennium of distasteful servitude -- it is to achieve those things, I say, that I have come striding from my far country!" And purely for the sake of variety, I drew myself up tall as I said that and drew close around me my cfoak, reversed to show only its scarlet lining. for something that is not theater." "But only short hours ago I laid my hand on the shoulder of President Austin of Texas, and He died. The Longhc dictator is deadlate him. That is a fact -- fact like the death of a child or of a cockroach crushed underfoot." XJow I heard footsteps behind ' me, but I ignored them, determined to finish my serious pitch, driving it home as forcefully as I had my comedy. "Comrades, it is one of my qualities that I can eat -- and eat and eat -- without ever becoming less hungry or growing a grain fatter. Death is never sated. Be you like me! Arise, destroy, feast. If in doing this you die yourselves, you only cross to my side of the fence and from there continue the battle. So you are invulnerable. My hand is forever over you -- in comradeship and love. Let our watchword be: Vengeance and Death!" I liked that so much I repeated it, this time with a falling, rumbling inflection like lights being turned off. "Vengenza e MuertaP' I calculated there would be five seconds of stunned silence, then ragged cheers growing to a roar. I got exactly tliree of those first seconds -- genuine stunned silence, all right. Then great searchliglits trumpeted on from all aroimd, shaking us with high-pitched violetwhite light that pulsed in an Awave rhythm, disordering the brains, scanning mechanism and fragmenting vision. Bullhorns and sirens glared on blindingly, shaking us with dazzling white noise which' raced up and down from the scream of a ing, fear-enforcing subsonics. Only my theatrical training kept us from being incapacitated by this synthetic assault, vdiicH lasted ten seconds. I hit the floor and closed eyes and ears for that period. The sixth-of-a-minute pandemonium hid the ponderous tread of huge horses closing in on my audience saddle-to-saddle on three sides, leaving open only the way back to Greaser town. Then the darkly hooded Texans riding those horses cracked out simultaneously their long electric whips. In a great semicircle flashed the blue sparks of high voltage, low amperage. The fringes of my audience shrieked and writhed. I turned around. Except for one figure besides myself, the bandstand was empty. The footsteps I had earlier heard had been my comrades of the Revolution taking a powder; El Toro, Father Francisco, Guchu, who had cried me on, La Cucaracha, who had proclaimed herself my eternal beloved, and all the other loyal ones whose names I hadn't had time to learn. The one exception was Rachel Vachel. She was sitting in her chair, arms folded across her chest, gazing at me a cold question which I could not decipher. T was glad that at least one had not fled. But why, I had to ask myself, wasn't she using her lightning pistols, or at least standing at my side? Beyond her, more horsemen and at least one large vehicle were closing in on the bandstand. Shouts and screams behind me made me turn again. What I saw paralyzed most of me, so I could only stand there, moving eyes and head. They say actors are always playing parts, even in private life, that they can never truly feel. This one can. Now, expressing it in no fashion at all and so for no one's benefit but my own, I was simultaneously racked by exultation, horror and shame. My audience was attacking the Texans. They were scrabbling about for rocks -- fragments of aged-cracked tombstones, I suppose -- and occasionally finding and hurling one. A few had managed to get past the whips and were clubbing at horses' legs and snatching at stirruped ankles. I watched while two of them were cut sizzlingly in half by the red beams of laser pistols. Three of them got hold of a whip by its insulated section and yanked on it while another Mex pushed upward the booted foot of the rider, toppling him from his saddle. They raced screeching to stomp him. Yes, my audience was mounting an attack. And it was clear from my first glimpse of it that it had no chance whatever of success. Only two Rangers were in trouble, while over their hooded heads, the mouths of large weapons quested forward like swaying snakes. And all this while members and groups of my audience -- no of this mad revolutionary mob -- were shouting, sometimes with hand outstretched toward me, my dreadful, melodramatic watchword. "Vengenza e Muerta!" Believe me, each utterance of that idiot phrase struck me like a lash. I, and I alone, had caused these dark-faced, dwarfish fools to fight, to suffer real wounds, even to die, instead of running off safe -- for it had been own that the Texans' whips, at first at least, had been set only to SI shock and pain, not to kill or even stun. I could no more have cried tfiem on now than I could kill my father. Yet my mere motionless presence was causing them to keep up the hopeless battle, was sending more of them to their deaths. And my presence was in no way due to courage, but only shock and sheer stupidity. Yet so long as I stood there, I was their black flag, driving them on, forbidding retreat. Why, I had even promised the poor fools deathlessness, as the Old Man of the Mountains had the Hashishin. Oh, why hadn't my comrades told me that the play was over and I must run with them? Why had they left the ignorant actor to suffer or at least view the consequences of his vaimting performance? Perhaps even now I should try to call off the little morons dying and suffering agonies around me. I might have tried it, but at that moment several actual lashes struck me, and I was enveloped in a cloud of blue sparks and ozone. But I was neither killed, paralyzed, pained, or set awrithing. I felt only a sfight tingling. Since my skeleton was exo, the chances were at least four in five that a lash would land first on it, grounding out neatly throng my titanium footplates and the aluminum handstand, rather than shock my flesh. With the further realization that my seeming immunity to the whips would increase my imbecile followers' trust in me, I laughed wildly. The bandstand was bumped, and it rocked. I heard a familiar voice growl loudly, "Cut those whips!" T turned once more and saw mashed up against the bandstand, almost like an extension of it, the aluminum flatbed of a big truck. From it strode Sheriff Chase and Ranger Hunt, drawing their ceremonial swords. Possibly they had figured out that my power was of a mythic or legendary sort, lying in my impersonation of El Esqueleto or the Tall Death, and that therefore it would be highly appropriate and also impressive to the Mexicans if they cowed me or cut me down with anachronistic weapons. Possibly -- yet by this perhaps shrewd action of theirs, they changed the whole situation for me and created for themselves a danger they could hardly have foreseen. Suddenly, for me, everything was theater again -- theater in deadly earnest, perhaps, but still theater. As those two big, gleaming, exceedingly sharp-looking rapiers came toward me, I crossed hands to touch three buttons on my wristplates. One of them simply doubled the speed and strength of my exoskelctal movements. It put my exo-motors in high. This was dangerous to me; a motor, meeting sudden resistance, might bum out; I might smash myself in a powered fall or collision. But it was also necessary, especially if Chase or Hunt were even moderately skilled swordsmen. The other two buttons untelescoped my slim canes -- and this time I continued button-pressure until the final needle-tipped sections were extruded. I tossed off my doak. Then with' a stamp that bormced me a foot in the air and with an uncalled for but most enheartening, "On guard!" I was upon them. There were two basic ways in which two swordsmen can engage a sine opponent armed with' two swords. They can try to take him from opposite sides, forcing bini to keep turning his head # degrees, cutting off his fastest Unet of retreat, and aiming to mn him between them. Or they can attack him side by side. To engage both their swords, he must face them chest on, presenting them with a wider and closer target than either of them present to him. In both cases the doubly armed lone swordsman has available to him tactics which partially compensate him. To bestn with, he always has the advantage of a single command opposing a shared command: Hannibal versus Paulus and Varro at Cannae, etc. Attacked on opposite sides, he can seek to overwhelm and kill one of his opponents with a very fast attack before the other can get at him. Facing opponents who attack him side by side, he can concentrate his attention and tactics, particularly if he has good and well trained jjeripheral vision and is ambidexterous, in both! which abilities I rank high. By swift enough circling he can put one of his adversaries temporarily out of the fight. In short, according to the tactic his opponents adopt, he has two basic tactics: the fast attack and swift circling. Tn my first engagement witK Himt and Chase, I chose a third tactic. In fact, I invented it on this occasion. It has nothing whatever to recommend it, except that it will startle the enemy, though without harming them. After a slow, one-two advance, I launched myself in a great and very rapid lunge at Chase, my right-hand adversary, seeking to catch his blade in a bind in high seconde and skewer him, meanwhile fending off Hunt's sword with the hanging guard. It was a great mistake. One: I had not allowed for the actor's ingrained habit of always missing his opponent rather than hitting him. Two: I had not really allowed for the speed-up in my motors, with no corresponding speed-up in my nervous system. I took off so fast on my left foot that I couldn't get my right foot ahead to catch my weight. There seemed only one thing to do. Parrying both their swords in seconde -- simply shoving them aside the easiest way, that is -- I doubled sharply at waist and shoulders, turning my lunge into a forward somersault, straight between my adversaries. For a Thin, I am an excellent freefall acrobat. The feat I intended was exactly like a forward somersault in free fall, but with one slight difference: midway I would have to take a tremendous bump on the head; I could only try to get spun far enough around so that it would be a crash of headbasket rather than a crunch of frontal bone; I could also pray that the Longhairs had forged my exospine exceeding strong. Perhaps Diana, almost overhead and smiling througU clear sky, decided to be kind and worked a miracle. At any rate, there were simultaneous great bongs, bass and treble, of titanium and aluminum. My sworded arms thrown backward gave my upper body forward impetus. The weight of my footplates drew me down to a landing on them. There was bandstand left to land on. Though reverberating and groggy from head to foot, I managed to keep my balance and turn around and get both swords up and engage Hunt and Chase as they came at me side by side. ' At that point I resolutely turned my brain off, especially its schemy sector, and let reflex and training take over. I defended only. I fought no habit of mine, including the actor's habit of never laying sword point or edge on his adversary. In fact now for me, at least, the duel had become rather like that fabled one in the American Civil War, where an actor on the Union side meets in battle an old fellow-actor on the Confederate side and yells, "Primes, cully, primes," whereupon they most spiritedly fight the duel of Macbeth to the great edification cf their fellow soldiers on both sides. A s my body and nerves recovered, I automatically went on thie attack, cautiously this time. Hunt and Chase proved to be mediocre duellists. I drove them back across the bandstand. Yet I scrupulously avoided pricking or scratching them with my point -- actor's habit completely in the ascendancy, or perhaps by now I was beginning to realize that my only chance of surviving this first and thoroughly lost battle of the Bent-Back Revoluhurting anyone. Nevertheless, I took advantage of a pause in the duel to cry, "Fight, cowards, fight I There'd never have been an Alamo if the place had had a back door I" Himt, resting his sword-hand on his knee, retorted, "You're worse than dirt, Crockett La Cruz, putting dirt on the name you bear of one of the great Texan military martyrs." "Davy Crockett never died at the Alamo," I countered. "He had too much brains -- brains enough to solve the no-backdoor problem. That early longhair -- or proto-hippie -- pulled a sneak and married a senorita, from which union I am descended." These insults made Hunt and Chase fence more furiously and worse. With a sudden bind in tierce followed by a heavy beat in seconde, I sent Hunt's sword flying out of his hand. Then, having both cane-swords to use on Chase, I disarmed him too. I stood menacing both men, whom I had almost driven off the front edge of the bandstand. Between them, I saw the last of my audience-army running madly toward Greasertown, away from the pursuing whips. My little assassins, drugged like the Old Man's with hemp, had at last admitted defeat. Here and there lay a few unmoving bentback bodies. A few others struggled, pinned down and to each other by a sticky white foam which lay in swaths. At that moment, the last halfdozen Mexes in flight -- my pitiable rearguard -- paused to raise clenched fists and shout toward me. Ole, El Esqueleto! Vengenza e Muerta!" Then they were running again, andhe pursuing Texan calvary cut them off from my view. Perhaps it was that little cheer, perhaps it was hearing Governor Lamar's voice from the flatbed that roused my idiot optimism again. Suddenly my brain was back with me, full of melodramatic plans. I would seize Lamar and menacing him with a sword, demand my release. I would -- As I turned, full of wild speculations', Rachel Vachel, risen at last and come forward, was facing me. "My hero!" she cried as she lifted her arms toward me. "Oh Captain Skull, that was most other man in the universe could have -- Her face was radiant. I lowered my cane-Words to either side. What I did not notice until too late was that in one of her hands she held her black crop. With it she touched me neatly on my naked neck, like a fairy godmother enacting an enchantment. pain shot through me, followed by paral # is of all parts below my head. I heard m##f sit down with a clank on the aluminum. My upper body would have sprawled forward, doubled over, except that my useless outflung arms kept Vne propped up, while my eyes fust stared hurt, then glared hatred at my betrayer. There were loud sighs of satisfaction from Chase and Hunt behind me. Meanwhile Lamar came hurrying from the flatbed, followed by Mayor Burleson and Professor Fanninowicz. The Governor's courtly features were red with rage. He grabbed his daughter by her upper arms and shook her. "Sugar, I'm intensely angry with you," Ke said in tones that were both well and yet barely controlled. T'm going to lock you in your bedroom for twenty years." "But Daddy, I saved your life," she protested in a voice that went up an octave and back at least a decade into her past "That's not the point. Sugar, I'm ashamed of you. It's a scandal. Dressing like a man. Wearing pants, when there hasn't a lady of the Lamars rode anything but sidesaddle for two centuries. Ten years bedroom confinement for you anyhow." "Daddy, you're in a temper. What's somed you? Dicto't you get President Austin?" Here I began to have difficulty following their dialogue. It wasn't that my unconsciousness was wavering -- no, above my neck I remained fully alive, though paralyzed below, so far as sensation and voluntary muscles were concerned. It was that Fanninowicz now knelt beside me, his whole face gleaming like his monocle, and began to finger my exoskeleton with little gasps of pleasure as he traced the courses of its cables and the myoelectric leads to my skin. He even began to palpate and pincK my numb flesh, softly chortling with wonder at how little there was of it over my big bones. It was vile, but I endured it (what else?) and concentrated on what Lamar and Rachel Vachel were saying. H e answered her question pettishly. "Oh, we got Austin all right. But then his Mex houseboys, who'd run away, laid an ambush for us. Beamed three Texas Rangers dead. Missed me by just that!" He spread forefinger and thumb. "And by the time we'd dropped a miniatomic bomb on them, they'd scattered so I don't think we got more than fifty per cent." "Aw, cheer up, Daddy, you probably got mor'n you think. And you know yourself how your nerves get whangled when you're wearied and stayed up too late and not had your proper liquor and weed, and been threatened with death, like when you catch cold." "Don't you try to soften me up, sugar. I'm making it five years and not a day less. And what I say goes." "That's right. Daddy, it sure does," the incredible female kens!" she added with a grin. "And now it goes double. I forgot -- You're president of Texas!" "Even thafs in doubt," he said, his voice almost cracking. "The Establishment Council's been talking of Burleson and Hunt too, and even Ma Hogg. Not that I hold it personally against you boys," he added. "Course not. Governor. Course not," the soothing deep-throated replies sounded around me. "And that's not the point either, sugar," Lamar continued, grabbing his daughter again. "It's you. It's you I'm ashamed of. Wearing those pants that show off your legs as if you were barenaked. Consorting with filthy, stinking, low revolutionaries -- " "But Daddy, I had to dress like this so as to be able to consort with them so as to be able to learn their revolutionary secrets. It's a mighty big thing I've done for Texas. I admit they smell bad, but I bore it so as to -- " "Secrets!" he interrupted scornfully. "Sugar, there aren't any revolutionary secrets. Again and again I've told you to keep out of ijolitics your cute little nose, that reminds me so of your sainted, admirably docile mother's. We've known all about this revolution for years. It never gets anywhere. It's just a safety valve for the greasers. I admit that President Austin arming his houseboys has tickled it up a bit, but that doesn't really mean anything. No, sugar, you've been wicked and disobedient, and it's five months locked in the bedroom for you." Here Fanninowicz tried to examine the containers in my cheek-plates, and I snapped at Instead of being soberly impressed, or rather in addition to being impressed, my audience aU laughed hugely. L eaning toward La Cucaracha, who sat at the opposite end of the chair-row from Rachel Varfiel, I asked imder cover of the jo#dul noise, "Why am I getting a laugh on the red cloak?" "Because our bill collectors traditionally wear a red suit," she replied with commendable brevity, beaming at me. "Go, man, go!" Guchu cried encouragingly. "I think he goes too far," Father Francisco also took advantage of the opfMMtunity to put in, mutteringly. "I think he is of the devil." "Contrary to my first expiectations, you're doing excellently," El Toro assured me. "Only harken to the wise father. Don't go too far." "What sort of revolutionaries are you?" I demanded of them in a contemptuous hissing whisper. "Too far? You haven't seen anything yet. And you, padre, just watch my devil's smoke!" And in a swirl of red cloak I turned my back on them befdre any could reply. Taking advantage of the dope I'd got from Kookie, I pantomimed a biU collector walking up to the tall door of White Texas, rapping on it authoritatively (footplate stamps, hidden by my cloak, providing the noise), pounding on it when that got no answer, and finally teUing the one who opened it, "Senor Gringo, I intend to stand here, to your great shame, until you have made payment in full -- aye, and in double measure, running over -- to each and every noble Mexican, noble Indian, and noble Negro alive or dead!" As the applause for that act faded, I turned slowly on my audience with a great pointing finger that took them all in. The red of my cloak had entirely vanished, I was all black and silver again. Leaning toward them confidentially, with the effect of elbow on knee and chin in palm, and driving home my points with slow forefingershakes of my other hand, I said in my deepest voice, "You laugh. You enjoy yourselves. That is weU... now. But you and I, comrades, know we will never get an#Twhere at all by standing at the door and asking, or even demanding. Never did even a husband get his wife by such behavior. You and I know we must burst down that door and seize what is ours by right. You and I, old comrades of the Revolution, know we must fight, that we must risk death and if necessary deal death for our aims." Quddenly I was no longer Chris topher Crockett La Cniz, juvenile leading man of the Theater of the Sphere. I was no longer a gangling and sexstruck spaceling caught up in a perilous but ridiculous Terran bruhaha. No, I was Cassius working on the noble Brutus. I was Sam Adams inciting puritanic rowdies called Sons of Liberty to perpetrate the famous floating tea party. I was Camille Desmoulins demanding the storming of the Bastile. I was Danton roaring John Brown forging the sword of Abolition. I was Lenin telling the wavering Congress of Soviets, "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!" I was Comrade Mao beginning the Long March. I was Malcolm X founding Black Nationalism. I was Senator Whatshisname rising to demand a vote of censure against that administration's war policy in Vietnam -- What I said was, "Comrade, you outnumber your oppressors ten to one, and now you have my help from beyond the grave. True, your oppressors are bigger than you, taller than you, and they possess engines of infinite power. But they are big with the soft bigness of men whose bodies have outgrown their untried, unforged courage and conscience. Outside they are tall, but within they are pygmies, moved only by vanity and greed, knowing nothing of true want, which is the mother of all true feeling. While no engine is as powerful as the man who sdzes and controls it. "Have you never seen a man sweating and writhing, struck down by bite of scorpion or spider smaller far than he? Mighty armies have been conquered by invisible bacteria. Comrades, your foes are few, and they have been weakened by sloth, greed, and corruption. Be you as scorpions and spiders! Now is the time to strike!" There was a hiss of surprise behind me. So I was startling my colleagues too? So much the better! I stood tall again, eerie and distant, yet my comrades' friend. Now I was Frankenstein's monster, I was Danton on trial, I was Lazarus returned, I was Lon Chaney in The Phantom oi the Opera, I was the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, dismounted. "Comrades," I pronounced, "only you and I know the great gap between talking and action, between words and deeds. Only minutes ago, I amused you by pretending to eat the heads of some of the puny great ones of Texas. That was funny, I trust -- good theater, as we say -- and also, I hope, a prophecy now is Hand, almost getting a finger. He appeared to bear me no more resentment tKan if I'd been a surly cOmpanree tinder restraint. He merely turned His attention to my wristplates, his fingers hovering over the buttons in a spasm of fascination and Hesitation. "You cain't mean it, Daddykins!" Rachel Vachel wailed. "What's more, it's just not true what you say about knowing everything about the Revolution. It's been changing, Daddy. There's nigras in it now, nigras from the Pacific Black Republic. And there's Injuns too." "Sugar, you can't sweeten me, no matter what you -- Nigras from the Black Republic, did you say? And Indians? Not Comanches, I hope." His voice went high. "Yes, Comanches, Daddy, and Apaches. And there is spacefolk! The La Cruz person admitted to me that -- " "That's another thing I'm holding against you!" he interrupted her. "Early this evening you were snuggling concupiscently with that low Sackabond actor, who on his own admission is no more than a dirty-minded jester to the mad Longhairs of Circumhma. I saw you. I always knew acting and actors would be your ruin, sugar. My sentence remains the same: five months in N a locked bedroom, on pinto beans, compone and Coca Cola." "But Daddy, that was my greatest hour. I was bein' a better lil ole agnt provocateur than the best pros turned out by Hunt Espionostics. You think I enjoyed it? It was like snuggling up to a giant spider. But I called on my deepest wells o' courage and -- : " I would have said something ferocious then, except Fanninowicz chose that moment to press experimentally one of the buttons on my right wristplate. My right cane-sword retracted, scraping aluminum, while the German beat his knuckles together and softly tittered in ecstasy. I sagged toward that ade. "And that's not all. Daddy," Rachel was saying. "There's something else I got to tell you, but it's a private sort of thing, and I'm a little embarrassed about it Would you other menfolk mind stepping out of hearing for a minute? Just to humor poor little me?" With murmurings of "Sure thing, Miss Lamar," and "Anything to please the Honorable," Burleson, Hunt and Chase went to the other end of the bandstand, the last dragging the reluctant Fanninowicz. Rachel took Hold of her father's lapel and drew his face clase to Her own, meanwhile bending down, so they were both very near me. He rasped in an angry whisper, "Whafs all this, sugar? You are not going to tell me you've been intimate with this skyborn abortion?" "Shut up, Daddy," she whispered with something of a return to her old authority. "Remember how Icky Elmo said La Cruz had large mining interests in North Texas and he denied it? WeU, he has 'em. Daddy, as he admitted to me while reelin' from my charms. And I didn't do a thing more than Ma would have done when so much was at stake. What's more, his mining interests consist of the original map and claim to the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende MineP' "How can you be sure of that?" Lamar demanded sharply, though keeping his voice down. "I even had the linings of his luggage unstitched and all areas chemicaled for invisible inks, and there wasn't a document of any sort discovered." "He carries them on his person, Daddy. He told me so. So all you have to do is search that creepy-crawly black suit of his at some moment when those vultures over there aren't around, and you'll be the sole owner of the valuablest property in all North Texas, maybe the world I" Tears came into Lamar's eyes. In a tremulous vdiisper Ke said, "Sugar, I've misjudged you unforgiveably. You're a true Lamar of the finer sex, perhaps the truest and finest ever drew breath. Of course I'll still have to give you one days' room arrest so the others don't smell a rat. But after that -- Why, if you like. I'll Nembo-Nembo out of Florida Democracy to paint your #D portrait -- they say he's the world's greatest. I'll imderwrite a production of Texiana with a solidgold surrey and diamond encrusted hoopskirts on all tlie chorus girls and -- " "Senor Lamar!" I interrupted, unable to bear her perfidy and his stupidity a moment longer. "There are a few other secrets your dear daughterkins hasn't told you. Such as what she really thinks about your lousy taste in theater, your antimacassar lighthouses, and your provincial, yokelish notions concerning the intercourse of the sexes. Do you know what she calls you? 'The genteelest jail warden in all Texas!' 'The courtly old Cromwell!' While hidden in her lingerie drawers, she has -- " Again the fairy-godmother wand reached out, this time touching the center of my forehead and bestowing on me the benison of oblivioiu The Invisible Prison ill s consciousness worked its way back into me, starting deep inside and moving blindly toward my eyes, the first thing I became aware of was pain. The pain was everywhere and came mostly from being tightly tied with a thousand ropes or a hundred thousand hairs to a flat hard surface with wide cracks in it. But I was thirsty too. There was only enough moisture in my mouth to glue my tongue to its roof. And I had the kind of weakness that told me I needed food, though the thought of food nauseated me. I also needed some sort of pills. On top of that my feet were burning up. My head was tied, left ear down against my shoulder, numbing the latter and mashing it into the flat, cracked surface. The down ear, mashed too, heard only my thudding heartbeat. The sound frightened me. It was very labored. My arms were strapped down to either side, so that I lay on my back in a cruciform position which was symmetrical except for my head turned to the left The contact between my dorsal flesh and the I tried to think where in the Sack or Circumluna was a big surface like that. The only one I could recall was a big abstraction made of thin slabs of rare moon-marble. So Murray the mosaic-worker had decided to incorporate me into his greatest work of art! Visualizing ca-efully from onlooker-viewpoint I decided the effect would be striking, moving, even beautiful. But did they untie me at intervals so that I could rest, drink and eat, or was I a permanent part of the mosaic? There seemed something wrong about using a highly talented actor for such a purpose, no matter how tremendous the effect. But then artists and photographers are singleminded clots. Some of them won't even read a book or go to the theater. Photography reminded me that I must explain to Murray that a good life-size solidograph of me portra#dng naked agony would do just as well or even better for his mosaic and free me to go back to the La Cruz Theater of the Sphere, where I was needed and could express my own varied inward visions, not just one of his. T)y now the burning sensation had traveled up into my calves. Into my darkened mind there flat, hard surface was intimate. I realized I was naked, floated a dim picture of RacKel Vachel and Fanninowicz gloating over me, the latter saying, "Clearly he will require no other restraint," the girl agreeing, "That's for sure, Fanny. He looks as if he'd been glued down yesterday wth a quart of sticktite. Or like a mashed giant spider." gaps in my memory of the last half of my trip to Terra. Evidently when gravitation sickness had struck, it had struck hard. The picture was replaced by a motion one of Fanninowicz battling wildly with Chase and Hunt. The professor's mouth was open and working, as if he were shouting at them, although I now heard nothing. From time to time he pointed behind me. I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky. -- "The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' by Oscar Wilde So Terra's most hysterical personality-changer had also been a sadist I hoped I had paid back my tall inamorata well in the only coin women imderstand, before returning to the Sack. Why in Pluto's name had Murray tied me down so cruelly? I wished there weren't so many He was the more active fighter, but the two bigger men were drunkenly getting the better of him. A bottle crashed and splashed soimdlessly. For some reason Fanninowicz was on my side, and I desperately wanted him to win. It didn't make sense. Then the vampire-smiling Rach'el VacHel floated back again, but tbis time witif Her fatHer. Buddeoljr I could remember sounds again, for Lamar was saying, 'IDon't you fret, sugar, weTl get tHose papers dut of him if we have to skin him abvel" For some unknown reason, this grisly sentiment made me laugh uproariously. The laughter came out as a strangling and highly painful series of dry croaks, but it helped wake me up. I dragged my eyes open. TV T y surmise was correct. I was glued to Murray's masterpiece. But something must be very wrong with my memory, because I didn't recall his Sack-famed mosaic being anything this huge or violently colored. He must have extended it and touched it up with # different hues of paint -- and Murray was an artist who favored sallow tones, such as me and my skin. And wouldn't even a clot of an artist have much too much taste, or mere brute instinct, than to paint over the ghostly shades of moon-marble? And why, besides myself, had Murray also glued to his revised mosaic many jagged fragments of brown, green and clear glass, severs! smashed chairs and tables (Hew Had he ever wangled those out of the Museum of Terran Domestic Artifacts and got permission to destroy them?), numerous pillows, a lightning pistol, an intact monode, and -- flat on bus bade -- Mayot. Atomic Bill Burleson oi Dallas, Tas, Texas? That last brought me back to reality with a bang. I simply couldn't see Burleson sacrificing himself for a work of art, especially another man's -- something I myself might do in certain moods. No, I dearly was back in Governor Lamar's patio, and there had been a sizable brawl last night. Burleson, I now noted, had his head on a pillow and was snoring in the shade like a drunkard well soused. While the burning sensation in my lower extremities, which had now reached my knees, was the morning sunlight creeping across the patio. I must do something before it crawled high as my belly and chest, I told myself for a long frantic moment which ended as soon as I faced up to my helplessness. My exoskeleton and sack suit hairs pinning me down were simply the force of Terran gravity. I could wriggle my fingers and toes. I could open and shut my lower jaw. Otherwise I could not bend a joint. The way my head was placed, I could not even look down at my body. I only got a foreshorten view of my left arm coming out from under my cheek. I let my gaze wander out. The landscape which last night had been romantic, now looked dismal and simblasted almost as Luna's. The few trees drooped The truncated cones, small and large, shimmered in the heat waves like chesspieces designed by a computer. Else there was nothing but a plain of pale brown dust. Except for the big swimming pool, everything looked dry as the inside of my mouth felt. Even the faintly blue sky appeared dehydrated. While I was robbed of der supply of moisture by each breath I drew of the desiccated air. Now through the last there came flapping across the pool two tiny swatches -- yes, Rachel's description had been precise -- of black and orange batik. Mth a longing that was almost worship, my eyes followed the delightfully erratic movements of the flutterby. For that must be the true derivation, mangled by comedians. How can butter fly? Every atom of me yearned toward and revered the delicate whimsical creature. She had conquered gravity, while Homo chiistophoTus scullian definife-' ly had not. She fluttered Out of sight. My long altered without changing direction. Now I pas sionately wanted my exosheletui, as if it were my metal Samese twin brother or a new robot wife. Tt must have been removed from me last night while I was still unconscious from the touch of Rachel's black wand, or from further shocking or drugging. Perhaps on the pretext of rendering me helpless or tormenting me, but ultimately so that Rachel Vachel and her father could remove my sack suit and hunt through it for the claim to and the map of the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine. That made me chuckle again, despite torment to my uvula. I scanned all the patio I could. Trusty Old Titanium was nowhere in sight, though he (she?) might lie hidden behind one of the couches. Perhaps I was foolish to believe my exoskeleton would have been left on the patio, but I thought not True. Fanninowicz would have taken it away with him if at all possible, but my last recollection of the professor was his enthusiastic manhancfiing by Chase and Hunt Most likely he had departed under restraint or on a stretcher. Someone else witH a rudimentary sense of caution or tidiness would have taken it away? Why, they hadn't even bothered to take away Bleson, who lay snoring as sincerely as ever. Most of the others would have been close to dead drunk too. Might Rachel have taken it away? To fondle it in bed? Ridiculous -- she hated me. I recalled Fanninowicz pointing over me during the fight. At what? My stripped-off exoskeleton, I suddenly felt sure. Why would I have felt involved in the fight, unless it had been about my exoskeleton? I yearned for the impossible : that I could turn over and peer behind me. Though what use just looking at it would do me, I did not know, except to make me more miserable, if that were possible. Then another reason occurred to me why my exo might have been carelessly left behind. All the Texans would have assumed that I would be utterly unable to stir without it. They would have forgotten, as I myself had up to this moment, the preternatural power in my fingers, toes, and jaw. And come to think of it, not even Rachel had seen my handshake fight with El Toro. With a shudder of hope that made my hair rise (small but auspicious victory , over gravity), I walked my left hand to my thigh, dragging my flaccid arm behind it It was easy. My fingers found purchase in the cracks between the tessellations and hardly felt the weight they dragged behind them. XTow the task was more diffi' cult: to walk my hand across my body, lifting the dead weight of my arm during the first half of the trip. But I am moderately hirsute around my crotch. By pinching hold of tufts of hair with outstretched fingers and then crooking them sharply, and by digging my rather thick, long fingernails into my flesh, careless of pain, I swiftly accomplished the job. Indeed, my hand proved to be a most able little fivelimbed motmtain climber. During the trip my fingers felt the heat of direct sunlight, reminding me I had no time to lose. The descent had been a breeze despite the friction between my dragged left arm and body. Now my left fingers blindly found cracks again and began to walk both away from my body and up toward the line of my shoulders. Meanwhile I walked my right hand up toward my right armpit, to provide a cushion for my head, when and if it turned over, and also to be a brace and obstacle, so that my left hand wotild have its chance to turn my body over, not slide it across the pavement. At the same time, by moving my jaw first right then left, I started to walk my head off my left shoulder, which had begun to lift, and across my chest The stubble on my chin -- I had not shaved since departure from Circumlvma -- helped, though in this area I made little progress. My left fingers were really working hard now. Thumb and middle finger would crook in a crack, while my forefinger and ring finger groped forward seeking another crack, in which they could seat their tips and take up the crooking or pulling job. Little finger helped which pair needed her most. A quarter of my back was lifted off the pavement now. There was a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I feared it would dislocate -- ghost muscles are little use in holding together joints subjected to strain. My eyes, slitlidded, were looking almost straight up into the bright pale sky. There was a moment when I feared I'd never make it. But then my fingers found a providentially wide and suitably curving crack in which they could nil pull together. My head rolled over so that it lay with temple on right shoulder, chin on right fisl. My hips turned then, so that left was directly above right. For tlye present I let them remain that way, my body lying on my right side. Most of the front of my body was ia 'ade at last, though other areas of it were newly exposed to the bright sunlight, which had now nooved as high as my hips and was stinging me hard. Suddenly feeling very apprehensive I blinked my eyes twice, then forced them to look dispassionately toward the hoxjse-end of the patio. Facing me and grotesquely seated in a chair not four meters away was my exoskeleton with my sack suit tossed across it. B ut both my titanium humeruses and femurs had been bent almost double, so that their cables curled and dangled. The delicate lattice of my ribs had been crushed in almost out of recognition. My head-basket had numerous dents. One cheek plate had been bent out. While my sack suit had been slashed to black ribbons. Really, it had considerable power as a semi-accidental work of art. In fact, it brought tears to my eyes -- tears which I hated because I now loathed any power of Texans to make me emote, but more because tears robbed me of moisture I could iH afford to lose. For now my most urgent need was water, along with some sort of relief from the unending strain of gravity and the bumiog, dehydrating heat of the sun. I would not Texans for help, even if anyone would come in answer to my croaking calls. I resolutely repressed from my mind the vision of Chase and Hunt demonstrating their drunken strength last night by bending my exo-humeruses andfemurs, and tromping my rib-cage. It had been to prevent that, of course, that Fanninowicz had fought them: he loved my exo even if he didn't love me. There was no use whatever in regretting the past, or in gloating with a masochistic self-pity over the indignities done me and my dear exo. My body must have known my intentions before I did -- or else, already in the fringes of dehydration delirium, I was beginning to act by instinct rather than reason -- for while I had been thinking those thoughts, my left hand had toppled my body over onto my chest. Now, aided by my fresh right fingers crooking and crawling under my chin, it was walking in a direction that would hopefully drag my whole body around and head me for the swimming pool. My toppling over had left me with my right leg twisted under my left. But now my well-muscled toes got to work, first untwisting my legs, then finding cracks and aiding me to claw my way toward my new goal. At last I was turned enough so that I could see it. Because it was almost brimful, my eyes could even glimpse from their slight altitude the great sheet of lovely glimmering silver. It made me think of how comfortable and snug I'd felt sandwiched between my water-mattresses aboard the T eiolkoveky, totally embraced by sheeted liquid except for a hole over my face. My fingers and toes redoubled their efforts. I told myself that once I was floating on my back in that delectable H#O., its coolth erasing the sun's sting, my whole body exquisitely hydrating again -- that then I could ponder my next move and easily thwart my captors. But for the present I must concentrate on fingerand toeand maybe even chin-crawling, lugging my inert body to the reviving fluid. 'T'he whole course ahead of me was literally scattered with broken glass. I chose a curving and recurving route, which would miss the worst, but take me close to Burleson's feet. Most of it would be through direct sunlight, but that did not worry me, now that my belly and chest were in shade. I soon discovered that I could keep my head upright on my chin without the aid of my right Hand, which was more efficiently employed like my left -- stretched far ahead and finding cracks by which to pull myself forward, a job which my toes had to do blindly. Quick work with my chin would keep my head from toppling to either side or from falling forward, robbing me of my vision. Of course my chin was getting well-scraped in the process, as was all of my ventral region, but this was inevitable. At first I would walk a hand and with a finger flick out of my path any but the tiniest fragments of glass. But then my whistling breath', an increasing ache in my throat, dizzy spells or a return of the centrifuge illusion, and a sense of being engulfed in almost endurable heat made me realize I had only a very limited time left in which to reach the water that would save my life. Now I flicked out of the way only the largest and most wicked-looldng fragments. My chin avoided most of the others, which accumulated under the top of my chest, where they scratched and stabbed. As I approached Burleson in my giant-incKworm fashion, I saw his eyes open and stare at me, at first incuriously, then with a certain groggy but nat over-great horror, as  I were only one more grotesque denizen of the world of hangover. He lifted to his lips an open green bottle, which his right Hand had been snugged around, glug-glugged a while, and relapsed once more into his shut-eyed sprawl. It tells much about my desperation and depletion of resources at that time, that I did not then see anything the least funny about his actions, I was merely glad to get past the big slob's huge shoes, one more landmark in advance. I didn't bother any more about the glass, though I was aware of certain new sharp pains in my chest and belly, and also of a warm slime which made travel easier. Actually I no longer even saw the glass, I saw only my watery goal. My fingers, toes and chin were moving on their own initiative. I had turned into a team of two hands, two feet and a jaw, harnessed to a vast indefinite load which Had to be dragged like a travois. My brain filled with useless visions; of freefall swims in the Huge highsurface-tension water-drop whicH is Circvunluna's pride, ol Elmo harranging me on tBe grandeurs and glories of Texas, of tales of burning deserts, of my mother nursing me, of my father trying to explain to me what oceans were, and so on. A s my fingeri touched at last the edge of the pool and longed to chmb down in at once, a measure of sanity returned to me. I realized it would be a tricky business to get myself into the pool on my back, for if I floated on my face, I would have no way to get my nose and mouth out of the water. Accordingly, althougli my consciousness was now wavering and every cell of my body screaming for moisture, I made myself crawl through a curve until the entire right side of my body was l#nng along the edge of the pool -- me still belly down, of course. Then I walked my left foot back of my right so my legs were again crossed. Next I worked my right hand imder my chin, clutching the edge of the pool with it, and walked my left hand as far ahead as I could and then down over the edge of the pool where it found a convenient negative ledge. All this while my eyes had been feasting on the water, as the thoughts of a lonely rocket pilot on his fuel. My right elbow, dipped in the stuff, knew chilly bliss. But there was a tiny admixture of apprehension. That water looked deep. But I reminded myself that one floated as readily over ten meters of water as over two -- or over ten kilometers of H#O (incrediblje oceanic datum). I strongly crooked the fingers of my left hand. My right hand stood lyj under my chin. I opened my mouth wide and my head tipped over toward the pool. At the same time my left toes found the same negative ledge my left fingers had, and they crooked too. My left hip rose. As I teetered there, prolonging my agony a delicious moment and reminding m#rself of the precautions to take in water, I decided I must have started hallucinating, for I saw a long pink snake uncoil its tail downward from a top-story window of the patio and its long pale pink head emerge and begin to sway. But maybe that super-cobra wasn't hallucination, for next I saw Mayor Burleson sit up and stare at his feet. Then his gaze slowly followed what I realized must be the blood track I had left, until he was looking for me. I took a deep breath and toppled myself over. I landed with' a spla on my back, precisely as I'd planned. Cold ock almost knocked me senseless. Then, although consciousness was stUl wavering and vision blurring, I began to be happy. Water is ersatz freefall, but good ersatz. I let it into my mouth, little by little. Nectar. I swiftly exhaled, remembering to do so through the nose, then took another deep breath. I discovered that the blurring was mostly water in my eyes. T rolled away from the poolside as far as the leash of my right arm let me, then in reaction rolled back. Through my one eye above water I watched Burleson reeling both from alcohol and my disordered vision. As he followed my spoor to the poolside, his arms hung slackly, one still holding the green bottle. His head was bent down until his jowls were multiplied. He looked so much like a huge stupid dog who had been taught to walk on his hind legs -- and to guzzle -- but nothing else, that I would have laughed except I noted in time that my mouth and nose were both imderwater. Behind him and even more out of focus, the hyper-serpent illusion or reality continued. Now the thicker section I had first taken for the serpent's head was midway to the ground. Perhaps it was something which the snake had swallowed in the top-storey room. Burleson kept getting bigger and funnier. He was near enough for me to note the owlish solemnity of his downward gaze. Then he made a stoppy swinging grab at my right hand, missed, and almost fell in beside me. After teetering a long second on the brink -- a moimtain about to topple over sideways -- he got his balance again. His first act was to take two more slugs from the green bottle. Then he aimed his gaze very carefully at my hand, spread the fingers of his own free hand for a second grab -- and was funny no longer. I did not want to be pulled from the pool only one-quarter restored. I did not want to be pulled from the pool period. I did not want to fall again into the hands of Texans. The pool was not the best base of operations, but at least it was a base, from which I might for a while be be able to conduct independent negotiations. Besides, I did not want to be near Burleson if he fell or dove into the pool. The wave he created might well swamp or overturn me. So as he grabbed again, I boldly pushed off from the pool's wall with a brisk backhand flick of my right hand. I intended to paddle myself with my fin-clenched fingers to the pool's center, waiting developments. erhe flick lifted my face from the water. I took another very deep breath. It was well for me I did so, for the next thing that happened was that I began to sink. When I opened my eyes I was looking up through several centimeters of water -- centimeters which rather rapidly became decimeters. I energetically flapped my finger-fins downward. It slightly slowed, but did not halt my descent. Too late, it was crystal-clear what had happened to me. With my preponderance of bone and almost total lack of fat, I massed considerably more than an equivalent volume of water and so was inevitably going down. I should have foreseen it, but who ever thinks of one's specific gravity, especially in freefall? How I wish now that I had inherited my mother's pyknic tendencies and grown up a Fat! -- even though it would have almost certainly resulted in me becoming a comedian rather than a star of high tragedy. Mother would have floated like a butterball. I flatter myself that I sank with a certain dignity, though I continued to flap my finger-fins industriously and even made some tiny swimming motions with my ghost-muscles, which worked a little now that gravity's clutch was slightly counterbalanced by my negative buoyancy. If I must die, let it be with a minimum of panic. Besides, the grip of gravity on a freefall being tends to make him fatalistic -- he is in the ubiquitous grip of a power greatCT far than himself. Soon, surely, I would be lying on the pool's bottom, nailed down almost as securely as I had been on the tesselated pavement above. Crawl then to the pool's side and climb out if there were cracks to climb by? I strongly doubted my ox#rgen supply would permit that, though I would make the attempt. In the Pool A s I sank I oddly noted a dozen or so scarlet threads rising from my chest. The broken glass had pocked me deeply indeed. Now was the time for barracudas, piranhas and small sharks (but Texans would surely use big ones) to come nosing up to the threads and then snap me to chunks, bits, and ribbons in a tumultuous swirl of chaotic water -- that is, if this pool were filled with such carnivores, as Terran suspense fiction had assured me was the custom of all als and politicos. What actually happened was worse. I got the impression a white whale had dived into the pool or a medium-size white submarine been launched into it. The crash of its entry deafened me. Sub-surface waves struck me. The water was vastly disordered. All the artistically curving scarlet threads vanished in a pink swish. Then a pale monster approached and glided under me. I awaited with minimal tranquility the halfturn of the white shark and the great bite of its razor teeth. Considering my slenderness, I would doubtless be cut in two. In any case, it would all be over swiftly, the books agreed. I would emit one horrific groaning scream and -- What actually happened was that arms embraced me, I felt a female form long as my own against my back, while powerful kicks swiftly propelled me to the surface. As I emerged, I blew explosively, and gulped down great lungfuls of thick Terran air, which now seemed sweeter than the Sack's. One strong hand shifted to my armpit. The other cradled the back of my head. I faintly heard the kicks which were keeping us both afloat. My whole face and some of my chest were above water. Then from behind me, in trangely muffled tones, Rachel Vachel said, "You okay. Captain Skull?" "Yes," I replied, "but I can't hear you." "Water in your ears. I'll fix that." Lips and a tongue expertly glued themselves to each of my ears in turn and sucked. Then, in a roar, "How's that?" "Perfect, princess. You needn't shout," I replied. "And now, if it is possible, could you turn me over so that my chest and beUy are not in direct sunlight?" "Of course, but why?" "So we can look into each other's eyes. There's another reason, but it's too complicated to explain." Ty that time Rachel had me turned and was supporting me with a hand under my chin. Framed by plastered-down silvery hair, her face was more beautiful than I'd recalled. Her skull was well-formed -- she had the makings of a good Thin. She was grinning, as if in the highest spirits. Whatever her motives for rescuing me -- generous, sneaky or crazy -- I suddenly felt so much gratitude and tender admiration that only poetry could express it. Accordingly I recited: Rachel, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore. That gently, o'er a perfumed sea. The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. "By courtesy of Edgar Poe," I added. Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round, Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground; Where the sea-snakes coil and twine, Dry their mail and bask in the brine;  Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye. Round the world for ever and aye. -- "The Forsaken Merman, "by Matthew Arnold "THat's just pluml beautiful, Scully," Bbe sighed, "even if this pool ain't perfumed." "It is now, princess," I told her, looking deeply into her shining eyes. "Oh what a #ourtier!" she exclaimed. Then, chuckling. "So you think of me as a bark, Scully -- a great big clumsy oceangoing vessel?" "You are an ocean-going goddess," I told her. "While I am surely a most grateful, weary, wayworn wan..." A great wave of weakness washed over me, almost blacking out my vision. I heard Rachel calling faintly, as if from a great distance, "Gloryosky! -- I forgot your pills. Is one of each color right?" "Yes. Two browns," I managed to reply. I felt her wet fingers place four pills on my tongue. I crushed them between my molars for swifter effect and downed them quickly with a half mouthful of pool. When my vision cleared, she was still trying to close with' one hand a small pink case tied round her neck by a pink ribbon. Her other hand was occupied supporting me. She got it shut, but not before I'd noted inside, besides the pills which she must have taken from my exo's checkplate, a small dialed box and a half dozen or so of what seemed to be minitapes. Referring to the last, I asked politely as we bobbed up and down, "Some of your manuscripts, princess?" "Yes, she replied, "includin' Houston's Afire and Storm Over El Paso. Scully, you're a skunk. Or at least you were last night, when you told Daddy about my lingerie drawers. He bust 'em all up, lookin' for subversive literature, and would have found the secret drawer for sure, except I was gettin' undressed so fast he had to scuttle out. He likes me to hand him my clothes through a door open about six inches -- before he locks it." "But princess." I told her gravely, "you did me, my father, and my family a great wrong when you revealed to your father the secret of the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine and that I carried it on my person. Only a very odd circumstance prevented your father from getting hold of the map and claim when he searched and slashed up my sack suit." CtQcully, you're a numbskull!"  she snapped at me. "Sorry I got to tell you this, but that map-claim business is pure dream. Bought from an Aleut who had it off a Cree Injun! Why, that's the oldest swindle goin'. Scully, you got no more chance of making money out of that mining claim than you have of making time with La Cucaracha when I'm around. Last night I brought it up just as a red herring to distract Daddy and win back some favor with him. He'll believe anything, long as it means more money for him. Scully, you don't kriow the rudiments of high revolutionary intrigue." "But princess," I began injuredly. Truly, I was shaken. At that moment a shouting started at the poolside. Rachel turned my face so that I too could see Burleson, hands on knees yet still reeling a little, as he yelled overshoulder toward the gringo door. "Hey, Governor! Come out if you can hear me. Come out arushing. Your honorable daughter's swimming bare-naked with that skin-and-bones revolutionary from outer space. He's barenaked too!" I was impressed by the relish with which Burleson reported to Lamar his daughter's misbehavior. "Sure you don't need a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?" Rachel asked sportively. "You look peaked, you know. It'd make Bilious Burly boil, besides drivin' Lushy Lamar plumb loco if he gets here in time. IncidentaUy I'm not quite bare naked, as those fat-guts insist on describing the highly civilized state of total nudity. I'm wearing my fleshtoned mini-underwear, vdiich is all the clothes Daddy allowed me when he locked me up -- unless you count the profusion of unshocked pink sheets I knotted together for my escape." "Bussing would be beautiful, but -- " I began. She was already off again with, "Hey, is free fall a little like this? I guessed it! You'll show me the real thing some day, won't you, Scully? You know, I think Daddy's got a great big sexthing going for me, maybe unconscious, but maybe not. Else why this eternal lockin' in bedrooms and takin' away all the clothes except a tease-minimum? You know how he's always pickin' off his coat and pants lint that ain't there? I bet those are snowflakes from the blizzard of puritanic guilt that's forever buffetin' him!" "Excellent armchair analysis, princess," I agreed. "But should not we be doing something? Soon the houseboys will come running and then Rangers, I suppose, and between them they'll be able to figure out a way to capture us? Surely some of them beades yourself can swim. And is there not a cowboy waldo called a lasso? Have you your Horse or a swifter vehicle nearby? Then there may still be time for smu to swim me to the shore away from Burleson and carry me -- I am featherweit, you are strong -- to that vehicle and -- " "Hush up and stop frettin', Scully," she ordered gayly. "Everything's under control and proceeding according to schedule. Now take houseboys. Not a one of them turned up this morning. That great speech of yours last night sure started a bully ruckus. El Toro says you are guilty of premature activism and romantical individualism, but he's playing along. Jeepers, what I'd give for your actin' skill! But you'll teach me everything, darling, won't you? Why, there's rumors the remains of the late Austin' Praetorian Guard are holed up in Greasertown. Hunty-Wunt's having conniptions decidin' whether to rush', besiege or atom-bomb. Hey, here come Daddy and Big Foot! Hiyah, Lushy Lamar! Mornin', Bilious Burly! Greetin's Chinchy Chase! Come on in, all of you, the water's fine. We're havin' fun" And with that she kissed me pasaoaately until we had sunk at least diree feet, whereupon with two powerful kicks she surfaced us again, and I was able to honor that #H# s.; with the gasp it deserved. lOd tCTou swim here at once, sugar, you hear me?" Lamar was raving, tearing his hair with one hand and pointing at us with room-years I'm going to give you this time. And no clothes at all." "Why, Daddy, I'd think you'd be happy you'd left me those two scraps of panties and bra," she called back sweetly. "For all you know, I may be wearin' 'em now. That is, if you're lucky. Tell me, Scully, have I got my pants on?" As I groped for an answer which would be offensive to Lamar, #et still gallant, a large smooth 'metal hook settled around my neck. Rachel whipped it off barely in time. She shoved it away from us, then yanked it back. On the poolside. Sheriff Chase staggered and lost hold of the #-meter pole on which the hook was mounted. It floated in the pool. "Sugar, I'm beggin you," Lamar called, on his knees now and wringing his hands. "Why, there hasn't been a like scandal since Jefferson Davis, looking for a place to smoke and purely by accident, walked in on Portia Calpumia Lamar while she was taking a spit-bath. Swim to your Daddy, sugar." Rachel called . back, "Daddy, why don't you buy yourself a townhouse of teen-age sportin' GAl gals? Come to terms with life, Governor." "But that's not the same thing, sugar!" During this interchange, three Rangers with lasar rifles had come hurrying, as far as Texans ever do hurry, out of the gringo door. Chase conferred with them. One retrieved the pole and started around the pool with it. Chase took out of his pocket one of those black squeeze cylinders Hunt had been playing with yesterday, and he inspected it narrowly. Simultaneously Burlegbn drew from a holster at his side a revolver of ancient aspect and goggled at it somewhat wonderingly. "Princess, we can't talk our way out of this, we must do something," I whispered urgently"Scully, I told you everything's on," she whispered loudly back, "but if it makes you feel any better -- " She opened her pink purse one-handed and clicked a lever on the tiny box inside. "Black Madonna calling Submarine. Come in. Submarine," she softly said to it, holding it close to her mouth and ear, all three just above water. I heard but could not distinguish the words of a reply. She continued, "Roger. Look here, me and La Muerta are pool-center and we're going to be in trouble in about # seconds. You'll be Here in #? Swell!" Clicking it off and shutting her purse, she whispered, "Antique crystal AM radio. Baffles the Rangers." I did my best to feel encouraged. Did the pool connect with a river or underground lake? It sounded difficult. Still, the pool was deep. There was a big bang and something very solid splatted the water a foot from my head. Blast stung my sldn. I saw Burleson leveling his smoking revolver toward me, swinging it in arcs of about twenty degrees. Rachel trod water strongly and swung me around so she was between me and the gun. Meanwhile she yelped, "Daddy, you gonna let him kill me? You want your lovin' Rachel with holes in her, deader than the Laredo cowboy?" Lamar sprang up and grappled with the mayor, who protested, "Just firing a shot across their bows. Governor, maybe pick off the sky-greaser. No harm meant your precious one." Chase shouted, "Come out. Miss Lamar and tug La Cruz with you. No back-talk cither -- we've quit fooling. Boy, get ready to boil the water around them." The laser rifles were leveled to either side of us. Their heat surely couldn't boil the whole pool. But maybe if the beams were kept close enough -- Rachel put my. hands behind her neck and theh embraced me. "Hold me tight, Scully," she said, treading water so that I faced away from the patio. Perhaps she meant us to die together. Little I could do. The third Ranger was reaching the hook toward us. But before I could warn Rachel, he jerked it away in a wide circle as he turned. Weaving its way toward us amongst the crj'-ptic towers, was s menacing plume of brown dust. It grew larger and higher by seconds. I began to hear a roar. "It's a twister! Run for your lives!" the ranger cried, dropping the hook and pounding back around the pool. Rachel turned us so that I was the one facing the patio. My hands were clasped together behind her neck. My chin rested on her shoulder. I closed my teeth on my wrist to make sure my head stayed up. Even if Rachel my beloved decided to sink us. I was going to stay up as long as possible. The roaring was louder, closer. The two other Rangers and Lamar were shouldering each' other through the gringo door, with Burleson a couple of gro ggy steps behind, while the third Ranger now was about to pass him. Chase, still at the poolside, was pointing something. Then it was as if an invisible hand and pen had very swiftly drawn a narrowing black line from him to us. Its end struck Rachel's back below my clasped hands and I felt her muscles go slack, even as leaked electricity tingled through me, almost making me unclasp my hands. A s we started to sink because she was no longer treading water, and as Chase turned and lumbered after the others, the roar became deafening. The plume of dust hit the pool, and became a. fountain of white spray. I had to suck in a big breath before it struck us. Amidst blasting spray we were tugged upward a few centimeters, then shoved underwater by a great hand of wind. Rachel's positive buoyancy more than counterbalanced my negative, but as we began to rise we were again shoved under. Coming up a second time we made it. I blew through my nostrils, gasped through my wristobstructed mouth. The tortiado had halted over the patio, unable to decide whether to enter the house, climb over it, or back out. It was still shooting up spray from the end of the pool a few meters away. "Scully, I'm paralyzed below the neck. Don't let go of me," Rachel gasped in my ear. Her voice barely audible. "Don't worry about that, my princess," I replied grimly, though my voice was much muffled by my wrist in my mouth. Let go of her? She was my float! The tornado made decision three. Once more we were pushed under. When we came up for the third time, we were inside a weird, dim, tall igloo of spray. The tornado's eye, I told myself, doubtful if there were such a thing in Terran Nature. The whole Nature theory lost ground when I saw, vanishing upward, my bent exoskeleton and slashed sack suit, both in the grip of some metal claws on the end of a line. My hands shifted their grip from each other to Rachel's hair, in which they knotted themselves. Unclasping my jaws, I let my head fall back. Directly above, through what might be a large circular hole in spray-dashed transparent plastic, a fierce copjer-hued face, made fiercer by lines of red and white paint and black top-knot, was peering. Something snaked down and landed across my head and Rachel's. Unsmiling thin lips opened to command, "Grab on, palefaces! Must move now!" What had fallen was a npe with knots every quarts meter. I clenched my teeth on it, tlten crawled one hand out ot Rachel's hair to clench the rope with that too. The rope straightened as it began to lift me from the water by head and hand. With the other I gripped Rachel's unfortunately thick hair as strongly as I could. As my body lifted from the water, I felt my neck stretching and hastily let loose my teeth'. It had been a grand gesture, but I didn't want my spinal cord snapped. However, I told myself heroically, I would hang on with my hands to the rope and Rachel to the point of shoulder dislocation and beyond. My head flopped and I was looking down. As I felt my shoulders begin to dislocate in stabs of pain, I saw Rachel come to and grab the rope herself strongly -- with both hands and teeth also. At that moment I Had an utterly convincing premonition; some day she and I would be a great aerial or even freefall team. Te were swiftly drawn  ' through the hole and found ourselves sprawled in a veiflcle which mostly wasn't there. ' By that L mean it was constructed chiefly of a dear plastic with the same refractive index as Terr an atmosphere. Here and there parts of it were visible -- motors, a shaft, some rods and its crew of two. They were the merind who had hoisted us and, sitting at a medley of metal and plastic controls, Guchu. He grinned at us but spoke no word. Beyond the plastic enclosing us, brown dust was pouring upward on aU sides. Overhead, great swift-flashing invisible blades cut through it. bo Air-Cushion and Copter," Rachel explained over the roar, crawling toward me. Ruler-straight lightning bolts flashed through the dust, turning it all dark red. Guchu chortled. I felt the vehicle sharply tilt and rise. We were free of the dust, though no more red lightning bolts came near us. Rachel cradled my aching neck and my head, turning the latter so I could see how one of the big towers cut us off from Lamer's ranch and the laser rifles of the Rangers. Guchu said, flashing teeth', "We ride in the tallboy rig-cover's shadow imtil we're out of range." The Amerind said, "No dead Indians, no dead black, no dead palefaces. Good. Everything is going fine." I looked around, somewHat listlessly. Even sight of my poor exo and sack suit didn't make me sad or mad. The last hour had been a very full one. The sophistication of the vehicle clashed with the air of revolutionary simplicity and poverty I had encountered bx the church and cemetery late last night. "If it's a kack, why do you call it Submarine?" I asked Rachel and yawned... "Because it ain't one," she answered. She was dabbing antiseptics and fixing adhesive bandages on my chest. " 'Nother red herring for the Rangers." "And you're not Black Madonna, you're Mary Magdalene," I observed lazily. "You hush up." I noted, stamped in black letters on the plastic near me: Slowly and with some difficulty I translated that from Pig Latin to: Pacific Black Republic. Oh well, I thought languidly, aU revolutions are poorer than third political parties and must accept foreign financing and military aid. Then I passed out, or simply went to sleep. Riding the Whirlwind nce again I woke in the Sack, but this time my stay was shorter. Mother was cradling me in her plump arms against her pneumatic bosom. There was a rhythmic sharp tapping. Father must be throwing a set together a few hours before curtain-time. I pictured him slowly twisting in freefall, two plastic scantlings and a nail gripped in one hand, a nervous hammer in the other. But then my nose was tickled by the acrid odor of hot metal. Was Father spot-welding again? -- against all safety regulations established by Circumluna for the Sack. Very likely. Father often broke regulations, but always for the sake of the theater and art, at least as he explained it. Then why the hammering? -- which really was in a more deliberate rhythm than Father's. Why ask questions? I wasn't hurting. And I was where I wanted to be. Stay shut-eyed. Sleep. Along with the tapping, I heard Father's panting breath. Rhythmic gasps. Anxiety stirred. Father mustn't work so hard. He would die. (One of my earliest secret fears was that Father would soon die, he looked so Ho for Texas, land that restores us When houses choke us, and great books bore usi "The Santa Fe Trail," by Vachel Lindsay ('Kansas in the original, but changed to Texas when the de facto annexation of Kansas by Texas was made public) much like a skeleton. That was before I understood about Thins, Fats and Muscles.) The imagined scene altered, dropping back  ten thousand years or more. We were a cave family at home. I could feel against my chin and cheek the coarse fur of the bear's hide Mother wore. The hoarse breath was that of a dragon snuffing outside the cave. At a tiny hot fire, Father was forging the copper sword with which he would slay the dragon. I opened my eyes. The last vision was closer to truth. I lay in a cave with stubby round spears of rock pointing down, I was softly cushioned against gravity, my head propped up. Long-haired fur covered me to my chin. Across from me, an Indian sat behind a small walled fire, the heat of which I could feel. Wraithlike flames rose from the small red bed whenever I heard the snuffing. It was a bellows, worked by his knee. Across the open furnace lay a femur of my exoskeleton, its cables removed. It glowed red in in the middle, where the bend was. The bend was not as great as I recalled. Pads shielding his palms, the Indian lay the femur across an anvil began straightening the exobone further with' taps of a tinyEeaded sledge. The femur was still attached to the rest of the exoskeleton. The other bends had all been straightened. The metal where they Had been was discolored. The ribcage was gone. The shallow dents were still in my headbasket. The Indian was not the one who had been in the kack. This one's hair was silvery, his face a mass of wrinkles. Out of them, his black eyes watched me as he hammered. Nearby were piled my three cushioncases. That pleased me. The red in my femur faded, but the bend was gone. The Indian pointed his sledge at me. He said, "I have learned one thing. Death. Without your armor, you are very weak. I have always suspected that." T smiled at him and nodded a forefinger. I did not think he would note the latter, but his eyes shifted to it. Perhaps my hand lay outside the buffalo robe covering me. I also later learned that what pillowed me so softly, with some effect of freefall, were three eiderdown mattresses. I bless those gravity-conquering birds who think so much of their young that they line their nests with down which they pluck from their breasts and which man steals. I felt thirsty and hungry. As if the mere feeling were a cue, Rachel Vachel and La Cucaracha walked smiling into view, the hand f the former resting lightly on the shoulder of the latter. They both looked lovely in the red glow. Rachel had on her Black Madonna garb, while La Cucaracha wore a flaming red dress with belt and necklace of hammered silver plates. She walked proudly. Rachel had to dodge the stalactites with her head. Without a word, Rachel drew down my buffalo robe and began to inspect my wounded chest, dripping on antiseptic here, renewing a bandage there. While La Cucaracha, using a corner of the furnace for stove, began to make a gruel of water and my protein food-pellets. After getting a sip of water, I told the Mexo-Tex girl I liked to chew the pellets dry. She allowed me to do so with a couple. While the good food worked in me, I marveled lazily at the amity of the dear girls. Last time they had been battling for me like wolf against musk-ox. Now they had made a truce. I wondered what that portended for me. El Toro had entered and was standing before me, a hard grin on his swarthy face. "'How do you feel, comrade?" he asked. "Very much' better," I told him. "Bueno!" he said with a nod like a gavel rapping a speaker's rostrum. "Very good indeed. You shall begin your work for the revolution tomorrow with an appearance at Tulsa." "It will take longer than that, comrade," I informed him in my harshest base. I mustn't let these little Marxists think they owned me. "Your metal-working comrades have done a passable job straightening my bones, as far as I can see. But I personally -- with the Indian's help in holding and handling, of course -- must rewind my cables, adjust their tension and test every motor, lead and part." "Not sol" he snapped at me and crooked a finger. There strode into view, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes, none other than Professor Fanninowicz. He bumped his head on a stalactite and cursed, "Donnerwetter!" El Toro said proudly, "We had kidnapped him even before we rescued you from the pool. It is he who supervised repairs to your skeleton. He worked through the night and into the afternoon. Three hours ago we permitted him to rest." "Forced me to, you mean, you lazy and undisciplined sub-man!" Fanninowicz barked at him. He screwed a monocle into his right eye and standing very erect after a quick glance overhead, surveyed us all contemptuously. "Understand, pfease," he said curtly, "that I detest you all and your ignorant, sentimental revolution. When the Lone Star Republic, vessel of noblest fascism, arrests you, as is inevitable, I shall smile at your punishments and hope they will be of the harshest. If death, then only after torture!" "Why, Fanny," Rachel said under her breath, in hurt tones. Ignoring her, he aimed his glare at me. "And that goes for you too, you miserable mummer from the slums of space!" Then he relaxed, lost height, and with a shrug that was surely only imconsciously Jewish, he smiling said to me, "However, I am hopelessly enamored of your peerless exoskeleton. It is monomania, an idee fixe against which even my sternest military compulsions and compunctions are powerless. Within twelve hours your exoskeleton wiU be in finer shape than when you received it from those Russo-American swine, the technicians of Circumlxma." I had a great many doubts and reservations about that, but I did not voice them. El Toro, Rookie, Rachel and even the old Indian were simply too happily self-satisfied and too infatuated with their revolutionary cunning in having used Fanmnowicz's monomania against himText day we skittered for Tulsa, Oklahoma, Texas, in three kacks taking (Afferent routes. We flew under and through low clouds ahet with lightning, navigating in part by an echo device called radar, which was new to me sincethere are neither swarms oi waterdroplets nor starless limes in space. The kack's transparency made it seem as if we were swimming through a gray ocean. At any rate, the dank, dingy super-soup with its electricalseasoning was not to my taste. But it cheered my comrades because, they said, it disordered commimicatkms and hid us from Lone Star vultureplanes. El Toro told me, with mixed pride and envy, that Texas newsmen have dubbed me The Specter and that I have been declared Public Enemy Number One of the Republic. The Rangers have sworn to nail my hide to a bam door, which I hope is hypothetical, alongside those of Clyde and Bonnie, whoever they be or have been. The search for us has become hot, El Toro affirmed, with both Hunt and Chase living up to their names. "TSey going to bum you if they can, Sky Boy," Guchu assured me from the pilot's pad. "But have no fear. Death by fire is purifying." Fanninowicz was not aboard our kack, which was a relief -- the German is an insufferable combination of martinet (of me) and high priest (qf my exo). But neither were Rachel and Koolde, which I found depressing -- and determined to remedy, if we lived that long. I put in time talking with a gray-topped much-bent Mex named Pedro Ramirez, who had been in a cyborged work-gang for twenty years. He pulled his shirt off his knobby shoulder to show me the puckered scars where deep-probing tubes had once fed tranquilizers, energizers and hormones from his yoke into artery and vein. He also insisted I inspect the curious callosities in his ears, made by the command plugs which had been housed there daily for two decades. Meantime he began softly to hum, I think without realizing it, a medley of monstrous times, and I once caught the curious English words: "Every day, two hours times twelve, delve." But when I questioned him about the details of his gangwork, he became excited and emotional. I easily quieted him with a few calm and eoafident suggestions. I concluded that cyborging involves no direct control of the nervous S # rstem, but is merely a means of chemical and hypnotic supervision, the command plugs transmitting both on audio backgroimd of tranquilizing propaganda and also the orders of a Texan overseer observing the work site directly or by #D. Or the orders, El Toro told me, of a cyborged Mex strawboss, in turn overseen by a Texan, who in this fashion control as many as a dozen work-gangs. It struck me as a vastly overcomplicated as well as degrading system for work more easily done by machines, or for that matter by uncyborged workers energized by coca leaves and tranquilized by marijuana. I decided the Texans favored it because it allowed them to keep the Mexicans uneducated and, probably more to the point, catered to the Texan conviction that Mexicans and other "primitives" are ineducable. ( ( A nd those pitiful peones don't even know the work they do, Esquel," El Torn topped my guesses. "They get powerful hypnotic commands to forget, when the yoke is off, the details and even nature of all labor tiiey perform while cyborged." "Hyper-Becuiity, man," GucEu nodded. "Surer than cuttin' out the tongue and poppin' the eye. A blind mute can gesture and draw and maybe write, but nobody can tell what he's forgot." I realized this was why my questions had disturbed Pedro Ramirez. Nevertheless, after administering soothing suggestions, I asked if he had done work within the outsize oil-rig towers. "Never in those, Senor Especiro!" he assured me with a shuddering, wide-eyed headshake. "No, never once!" His denial struck me as too strong to be true -- especially along with the "dig and delve" drone -- but I had no desire to torment further in order to satisfy idle curiosity. So I calmed him once more and shortly had him asleep, suggesting that he wake feeling well and happy. A leading actor who is not a passable hypnotist is hardly worth his salt. It occurred to me, as the trip grew long and I began to ache in my exo, that it would be pleasant if there were someone to hyp me asleep. Somehow I did not want to do a self-hyp. I recalled wistfully the tender nursing I had got from Rachel and La Cucaracha in the cave. I had loved them as co-mothers then, nurses lit within gravity's womb'. But now I reminded myself, slapping the rib-cage rf my trusty exo, that I loved them in quite a diffoent fashion. The thought heartened me greatly. My rib-cage was a new one, made of solid silver, weighing a few pounds more, but with a lovely dull shjmmer. Its luxmy contrasted nicely with my martial headbasket, the dents in which had only imperfectly been beaten out. But by the time we reached the central square of the Tulsa greasertown, my mood was once more as low and dark as the weather continued to be. The girls' brief greetings raised it a bit, but it immediately dropped to a new low when El Toro whispered, "Just keep in mind, camarado, that thirteen known informers have had their throats slit or been otherwise taken care of, to safeguard tonight's gathering against interruption." Tt seemed a dismally high price for a performance -- there'd been nothing about murder in my contract -- and I feared I'd be a flop. Up to my entrance, I kept seeing those gaping gullets and also the pitiful bent-backs who had died at Dallas, inflamed by my rantings. While the lightning of electric whips and laser beams framed my thoughts. But as soon, as I faced my audience I was in a controlled revolutionary frenzy, sardonic and heartless as only Death can be. It's a perpetual miracle how a part takes hold and carries one, even when one actively dislikes the role. I was afraid too that Fanninowicz had booby-trapped my exoskeleton, perhaps by timebomb, but it actually continued to operate more smoothly than ever. What strange and contradictory compulsions fire men! At the end of my oration I was so worked up that I wanted to lead the mob into Tulsa's texastown to commit acts of violence. But locals did that, and I took off with El Toro and the rest for the abandoned atomic shelter that would be our camp until we headed for Little Rock, Wichita or Springfield, Missouri, as tactics dictated. I wondered at an atomic shelter being deserted in a world that had endured one nuclear war and now seemed minimally peaceful, but El Toro explained to me that radioactives were everywhere in such short supply, due to their military and industrial use, that they would no more be used again as major weapons than the last natural gasoline would have been used for molotov cocktails. To my surprise, Fanninowicz haughtily confirmed El Toro's explanation, though with a curse for a world that Had lost with Germany the industry and patience to mine and smelt lowgrade uranium ores -- and also with a final sardonic smile that lingered in my memory. I pointed out that a small atomic bomb had been expended on Austin's praetorian guard. "A few tacticals left, yes," El Toro agreed. "Museum pieces, one might say. Texans are loco." "Your figures on the radioactives shortage are right. Tor," Guchu said, "but you get the wrong analogy. "Last native gas wasn't used to run a motor, but to fry a black." He paused. "Or maybe whitey. Who knows?" He landed our kack in a drizzle where I saw only one darkness instead of earth and air. Then he turned toward me and said, "Real reason no earthling -- except a few locos with bloated egos -- would risk more fallout is that we all know we still got a little death ticking in our bones from the Big Poison War. Even you're getting a little of that death into you. Mister Death, every day you stay here. No, Tor, we got to have confrontation. That's the trouble with you Mexes -- always being gracious to people, to whitey even, and smoothing things out -- combo, I guess, of the old hidalgo dream and your Indian ability to take an # Tthing that's handed to # mkes, without striking back except for an occasional knife in the dark. "No, we got tell Mr. Death here the truth. Such as the real reason A-shelters are taboo. One, a lot of them got worse poisoned from fallout than the toplands -- through ground water and kinked ventilation systems, and because who hits low gets hit low back. Now don't get edgy about that. Sky Boy -- any cobalt-# in this shelter has been , ticking a hundred years. Two, vjhitey thinks the shelters have got hants in them and he's scared, though he won't admit it" G hosts I could laugh at, and did. Before we entered the shelter I peered vainly for the moon. El Toro asked with a sympathy that surprised me whether I was homesick. I replied with' minimal untruth' that, no, I just wanted to know the date -- I was uncertain how long I had been in the cave. "It is the #th of Alamo, Esquel," he told me. "Come down now." I decided that the Texan calendar would have to do for me for my stay on Terra, or until I glimpsed Luna once more. Ghosts did not seem so laughable when I was in the huge and shadowy shelter, where our camp was dwarfed and faint echoes returned from black imexplored corridors. But I saw no cracks or other bomb-damage. Tulsa, I reminded myself, had lain inside the Texas Bunker. Dinner cheered me further; and during it, while still, stirred with after-show excitement, I began with La Cucaracha a discussion of history which we carried into the curtained space I thought of as my star dressing room. It turned out that she has a bright hard head on that exciting little athletic body. She pointed out rather bitterly that a MexoTex female is the lowest of the low and must have ten times the brains of a man to get anywhere. She insisted that most of the Texas history Elmo' had fed me was pure Texas brag, though she did admit that back at the time of the annexation in # Sam Houston had cowed Washington with the prediction that if Texas weren't admitted to the Union on generous terms -- such as permission to divide into five states with ten senators whenever desired -- then Texas would engulf all the West to the Pacific and assume leadership of the southern states when the inevitable break over slavery came. "No Esqueleto amado, in verity it was like this: the wealthy gringo junta which arranged the removal of President Kennedy soon became the entire heart of the Texas Establishment. Thereafter things happened much as you've been told. The blacks, reckless and inspired as their Zulu and Madhi progenitors, carved out their countries to southeast and southwest during the disorders following the Atomic war. We forgotten Mexes, fiery but incurably fatalistic, indolent yet good workers and breeders, remained the imdercats and grew into the new servile class." I asked her what had happened to Elmo. She said she had no idea, but that he was resourceful and shrewd under his blather, and whatever happened would land on his feet. I agreed he had big ones. She admitted she had an affection for the man despite, or perhaps because of the genially bullying wa # ?s. This led me to inquiring indirectly whether she wasn't now lonely. I was on the point of making time with her when, with consummate disregard of privacy, Rachel Vachel wandered in. I expected another bruhaha, but the Black Madonna appeared not to note that Kookie and I were moving toward intimacies. Shortly the two girls departed, leaving me aroused and frustrated. I damned them heartily, summoned El Toro to help me out of my exo, refused to see Fanninowicz, downed a pill and slept. ur next revolutionary gathiering was on Alamo #th at Wichita, Kansas, Texas, a city much like Dallas or Tulsa, except I began to note scars of the Atomic War and also short Texans -- poor whites and northerners not given the hormones. El Toro kept me unpleasantly aware of the price being paid for my performances by telling me about the diversionary riots being staged in Little Rock and Colorado Springs to keep the Rangers' attention off Wichita. He also informed me that I am creating a panic across Texas. Not only is the Mex World in a fever of excitement at the coming of El Esqueleto, but the Tall World has got the jitters. There have been rumors and reports of the dread skeleton-man everywhere. I was simultaneoiisly leading mobs in Denver and Corpus Christi. Twenty minutes later I was captured in Memphis. Meanwhile I was seen grinning horrendously down from a copter that buzzed the streets of El Paso. Et cetera. I was flattered yet unimpressed. I asked El Toro how the revolution we've stirred up is going in the south. I got evasive answers. I told myself not to tHink about tixat, but to remember I am ChristcHer Crodrett La Cruz, touring Texas with' the Revolutionary Ramblers on a physiologically limited engagement No joke about that last -- I was suffering from digestive disorders, while gravity became a deadly drag despite my exo and eiderdowns. I insisted oh a warm bath at last, with a support-net to keep me from sinking. Little relief. Could I be provided with a tub of heavy water? That might float me. I was laughed at, especially by Rachel, who said I had more expensive notions than Daddy. "Nevertheless she and I had a cozy chat together, which again turned toward history. In different ways we both became nostalgic about the vanished U.S.A., the industrial and scientific inspiration it gave the world, and its truly great men -- Franklin, Jefferson, Houston, Poe, Lincoln, Edwin Booth, Ingersoll, David Griffith, Roosevelt Two (though she like Elmo thought him a figurehead), Dr. King, and so on. Tt had been an ideal country for men with grand imaginations, for geographical and industrial pioneers -- until they turned the grandeur to grandiority and began to broadcast it over the newly discovered mass media. We grieved at that robust and shrewd land's fatal weakness for making right, then wrong decisions, and standing by the latter beyond all reason and with puritanic perversity. The Civil War, which freed the slaves, and the deals of the #'s, which again crushed the blacks, recreating tensions and problems which had to be solved with violence a hundred years later. The Great Experiment of prohibiting alcoholic beverages, which nurtured America's wealthy criminal class and allowed it to entrench itself. The later hysterical agitation against marijuana, with exactly the same results. (I was surprised to discover from Rachel how much, according to her thinking, Texas's sly legalization of weed, a Mex smoke to start with, helped lead Texas to her primacy among the states and also her domination of Latin Americans.) The First World War, followed by isolationism and repudiation of the League of Nations. The brief dream of a monopoly of atomic power, followed by unending nightmares. The Long Adventure in Indo-China with its tragic consequences for all Terra. A nation nurtured on cowboy tsdes and the illusion of eternal righteousness, perpetual victory. A nation that sought to create, simultaneously, in the same people, a glutton's greed for food, comfort and possessions -- and a puritanic morality. Merciless competitioa -- and docile co-operation. Timid safety mindedness -- and reckless self-sacrifice. A hard-boiled but docile young. Worship of success so long as it could be thought due to hick -- and hatred of outstandingness granted by nature andor hard work. Great scientists and scholars -- and a contempt for same. The welfare state -- and entrenched wealth. The brotherhood of man and racial discrimination. In short, nul program. Order, counterorder, disorder. No wonder even Texas made more sense than that. Rachel told me that Kookie's views of the Texas Establishment were much oversimplified, but admitted' her father's power was derived ultimately from the Texan Cabal, which dominated American policies from the middle of the twentieth century. She laughingly revealed she had no notion whatever as to whether she and her father were actually related by blood to the second president of the Lone Star Republic. Likely Lamar had been a political name taken by one of her most recent ancestors. That had become a custom during the bloody years after the Atomic War, when Texas conquered -- for its own good I -- most of the bombshattered and fallout-diseased U.S.A. and also Mexico, Central America and Canada, finally establishing the atom-scarred Stikine and Mackenzie Mountains as the RussoTexan boundary. I pointed out to the Black Madonna that she and Captain Skull proved by their sentimentalizing over the U.S.A. that they were both hopeless romantics, addicted to lost causes. She liked that, and I was getting primal places with her, when Kookie popped into my suppKDsedly private room in the deserted country mental hospital, no longer approachable by wheeled vehicles, where our company was bivouacking. Once again there was no fracas whatever, no observable hard feelings. Once again the girls tripped off together. And once again I was left tense and uncatharsized. I decided to give up women. At least on Terra. And certainly for that night! n Alamo #th the weather stayed overcast. Likewise my spirits. We played Topeka. It was a re-run of Wichita. Outside of myself, the performance was strictly amateur. I rewrote the script, giving Kookie and Rachel brief appearances. Thumbs were turned down on my innovations by El Toro, Gocfiu, F. Francisco. Latins and Indians resent wBmea getting the spotlight, Ibsf sa The committee was also shodced by my suggestion that I wear my blond wig for variety. Later El Tdi'o approached me privately about elocution lessons. I agreed to give him same, in strict secrecy -- a far as his bull voice permitted. At least I might be able to get him to cut down on the muscle-show. I decided R. V. and La C. had entered into some private agreement about me. I played it very cool with them. No more tete-atetes. I couldn't stand another interruption. For that matter, I would have found it difficult to be private with a woman if I had desired. Fanninowicz was forever at my heels, wanting to test my exo, check batteries, increase power, try out new wirings -- his concern and new ideas were limitless. I felt like Frankenstein's monster pursued by Thomas Edison. I decided Germans: are maniacs. Yet El Toro insisted I humor the Beady-Eyed Bavarian as much as possible. And truly my exo was kept perfectly tuned. But my physical condition was deteriorating, though I mentioned this to no one. No stiff upper lip, just didn't want to be fussed over. The Menocled Monster might have announced he is doctor of flesh-meCcine also. I kept reminding myself that my only real aim was (#) get to Yellowknife; (#) check and double-check on the Lost CrazyRussian Pitchblende Mine, despite Rachel's damnably plausible discouragements: (#) put the bite on the committee and use my Circumlunan passport to hightail it for the Sack on the first ship available. Rachel asked me why worry about the mine, since it had been clearly proved I don't have the claim with me, either in my baggage or on my person. I wondered if I should tell her the truth. Concluded: Definitely not! A t Kansas City, Kansas, Texas, on Spindletop #st, El Toro decided I needed a holiday. He took me and La Cucaracha to a bullfight at the stadium of the former Wyandotte High School. I was disguised by a big hat, big boots, padded suit over my exo and vast blond mustache over cheekplates. El Toro and Koolde were servants. We got by. My ability to pass as a Texan, at least under casual inspection, struck me as something which might prove useful. The bullfight was delightful. They used hormoned bulls, huge and slow, true "cathedrals," while the matadors were young Mexes, male and female, who dodged the bull acrobatically and even did knee-swings and giant swings on homs. Like ancient Crete. Kookie told me she had trained as a bullfighter, then decided life as a "sociable secretary" provided greater financial satisfactions, and revolutionary work greater emotional ones, while acrobatics were useful in both activities. This with a hearty wink. I remembered in time not to start flirting with her. "Play it cool, even cold," is the motto of La Muerta Alta, I told mjrself. What did I need with women? Besides, if I held out, one of them would be sure to give in. ur revolutionary gathering at night was in the huge and straggling greasertown along the river in Kansas City, Missouri, Texas. The greatest stockyards in the world, I was told, before it had taken a direct nuclear hit Decades later, when radioactivity had dropped to a tolerable level, the Mexes had slowly built their way into it, partly forced by local population pressure and partly spontaneously, with the residual radioactivity providing some assurance that their masters would stay out, or at least cut their visits short. I felt nervy from the start. Our stage was in front of a riverside warehouse with thick brick walls, which above the second floor had been melted into a hillocky glazed dome from which there still thrust the huge, twisted, rust-brown fingers of old steel beams. Underfoot was a swept, randomly crackled, greenish and brownish tesselation of fused soil, its fissures filled with new dirt. Around this rough nuclear plaza, in front of the shacks they dwelt in, our audience began to gather silently -- intent sallow and brown faces with a large scattering of darker ones: "stay behind" blacks who were incurably rooted here or at any rate hadn't yet made it to Pacific Republic or Florida Democracy. But it was hard to make out even faces. Our stage lighting was dim, despite the continuing overcast. I was standing with the rest of the company in the dark inside the warehouse, back from its central doorway. A few minutes before "curtain time" there was a commotion as a gang of locals set up a wide-spaced lattice of narrow black rods in front of and over our stage, making it even smaller. No one could or would explain to me why, El Toro being away at the moment It seemed theatrical insanity, further spoiling the audience's view of the actors and making them feel like beasts in a cage. At least I felt like one. I fumed impotently, knowing ttiat my comrades liad little or no idea of wKat makes good tSeater. I scented trouble. I grew nervier. I wisHed tiie girls weren't there, but felt uilable to talk to either of them. And then a minute before my entrance, running over my opening lines in my head, I drew a blank. It was as if I had forgotten Spanish and English both, and probably Russian too. Instead a wordless sight slid across my mind, wiping out all other reality. I was in the same huge room. It was filled with white light, so there was not a shadow. Files of beasts lumbered into it. Men with unconcerned faces but spattered robes struck the homed heads with great mallets, adroitly cut the sleek-furred throats (each man had his one monotonous job), flayed off the hides, dismembered and disembowled the carcasses. My ears were filled with hoofclumpings and great thuddings, with bestial gnmt and screams. My nostrils were likewise crammed with the stench of frightened animals, their copious excrement and the floods of their rich, sweet blood. Other men with unconcerned faces constantly hosed What startled me most was that the spurting, streaming, flooding, omnipresent blood was not a darkish crimson, as I had always thought of blood iii quantity (something I had never seen), but a phosphorescent carmine just off fuchsia, suggestive of tropical blooms and lipstick and giddy body-paint Then I was being nudged in the side, not gently, and the vision shot aside. La Cucaracha was reminding me that my entrance cue had been spoken. T strode on stage in a near trance, my entrance-applause a distant soft thudding no louder than the beat of blood in my ears. I had always tested negative for psi in the Sack. But now I wondered how imagination alone could have created so vivid a vision of a slaughter house. Someone else than I said, "Yo soy la Muerta," and for at least the first five miiuites I felt like a beetle lodged behind the visor of an animated and vocal suit of armor. Then either the slaughterhouse vision lost its power, or else I grew big enough to take over the role of Death the Universal. The laughs I got were few and low, the cheers low too but gutty. I think I never held an audience so well before. In fact, I did too well. I must have hypnotized the lookouts and my own comrades, for as I came to the finger-sKaking bit and "we must risk death' and if necessary deal death," I believe I was the first one to hear the faint rushes of air and soft drones overhead, and glance cautiously up and in one snapshot look see poised above us six copters with antennas and coils and searchlights and other electronic items where landing gear should be. Then, but not before my eyes were slits, the plaza was flooded with hot raw white light. There was time for each member of the audience to spring up, to take one look or one step. Then I felt the faintest tingling and numbing in my flesh'. At the same instant eacH member of the audience froze like a statue, paralyzed in posture and expression. About a third of them, off balance at the moment, tumbled down, but without an iota of change in the look of the face or the contortion. However grotesque, of the body. I shot a glance overshoulder, noting that my actions were slowed down a trifle. My comrades were moving about in a slow motion, as if running through invisible water. Guchu was making toward me, where I stood stage-front. The others were headed for the warehouse doorway, or already through it. I looked bade at te audience and, utterly fascinated, began to scan their faces one by one. Being an actor, expression is a ma- nia with me. Here and now I found great confirmation for Leonardo's dictum that the grimaces of agony and ecstasy are almost indistinguishable, though I noted many an interesting trace of surprise, fear and rage. In their statuesque totality, the mob was a greater work of art than Murray's "Slaves of Gravity," where # tiny figures are depicted struggling waist, shoulder, neck, or moutli deep from a curving surface of moon marble, which might be a section of Luna herself. It occurred to me that the crowd constituted a semi-accidental work of art which could be titled with apt ambiguity "Field Slaves," for now that I saw Rangers dropping from the copters on spinning shoulder vanes and also charging into the plaza afoot, all of them clad in oversuits of copier netting, I realized that the copters' electronic gear was projecting a paralysis field from which my comrades were protected in part by the copper or other metal cores in the blackpainted bars around us, but I altogether by the secondary Faraday cage of my predous exoskeleton. '"TKe Rangers, wHo also wore owl-eyed black gasmasks, were a superb sight in themselves: black giants who were a tesselation of small ebon diamonds mortised with gold.  Guchu's upstretched fingers slowly clamped on my elbow and dragged on it. "Come on, Scully," he gasped effortfully. "Make that effort, man. You can do it." "Certainly," I agreed, turning swiftly. I was greatly irritated to be jerked from my supreme artistic reverie -- Death Contemplates His Victims -- but realized the black had a point: an emergency was certainly developing. So I forced myself to use the most courteous tones as I asked, "But do what?" "Beat it through the warehouse, you dumb ofay," he exclaimed with such an attempt at vociferousness and speed -- and rage at the readiness with which I moved -- that he slumped on my arm and the last three words came on the in-gasp. Since his rebuke was instantly provided with the multiple exclamation point of many objects clattering on the roof of our cage and several dropping through, I realized that Guchu had been altogether right and my attempt to be a crisis-observer wrong as always. (Yet it had been so fascinating I) Instinctively we both took deep breaths. Then utter inky blackness exploded rather than flowed from the cannisters, one of whiclj had fallen at our feet. I took one sight on the door into the warehouse. Then, since the erupting blackness prickled me through my sack suit, I instantly closed tight my eyes, mouth and nostrils, clamping the latter together with finger and thumb, while my other hand gripped Guchu as I made giant strides toward my target. My face and hands prickled and stung, but not enough to incapacitate me. Another object thudded In the dark somewhere near us and began to say self-importantly, "I am a #-second bomb. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. Fifty -- " "And I'm a #-year man, bomb, with decades to gol" Guchu answered the thing -- and paid for his rash defiance with a horrendous coughing fit. I continued to make tracks. Fortunately, my elocutionary activities have given me a lung capacity imusual in Circumhina -- something which had also helped me in Governor (or would it now be President?) Lamar's patio pool. XTen coimting strides told me ' I was well inside the warehouse, I swabbed my eyelids with' water from my cheek-plate and risked another quick sighting. We were almost out of the smoke. From a trap door five long strides away, La Cucaracha waved us on, her eyes streaming, her other hand shutting her mouth and nose. I made the trap door, my eyes stinging, and flickered a downward glance. There was a round well five meters deep, with ladder rungs embedded in one side and with Father Francisco peering anxiously up from the bottom. La Cucaracha scuttled down. I got Guchu's feet and hands on the rungs -- he was blind and retching from the gas -- and followed him as swiftly as I could. Koolde called, "Close the trap I" As I reached up, a incandescently scarlet laser beam missed my hand, spattered against and was also reflected downward from the trap's metal in-face. I felt heat between thigh and right knee, and that leg went limp. I heard Father Francisco gasp hissingly with pain. I shut and bolted the trap, then made it down on arms alone. Then I was hopping along a corridor I had to crouch in, supported to either side by Kookie and the padre. There was an explosion that shook the floor. Behind iis Guchu gasped out, "Bomb weren't bluffin', anyhow. I hate a liar," and managed a croaking laugh. I wondered if he knew what bomb he was talking about. Around that time I discovered my right leg was useless because one of the femur-cables had been melted through. The two ends dangled and jigged. I also noted that the reflected laser beam had creased Father Francisco's arm. The wound would have bled, but the beam's heat had cauterized it. Then I was being helped to crawl through a circular port. I found myself sprawled in semidark among my comrades in a flattened cylinder. Someone had closed the port and was locking it with a wheeL Opposite the port was a window into darkness. Then a great white snout peered in with unwinking eyes and with long white feelers around its jaws. The cylinder began to rock and to move in surges. Shortly later I was told that we were in a river submarine -- called "Airplane," of course, with consummate revolutionary duplicity -- and that the white monster had been a mutated and haploid catfish. rode the currents of the  ' Kansas and Missouri for weary hours without incident except for a few bottom-scrapings and glimpses of exotic river life. On his insistence, I told El Toro about the government of Circumluna. He expressed horror at what he dubbed "Sackabondage" and insisted I carry the revolution there. As soon as I had made him understand vacuum and decompression, he saw endless possibilities in bombs artfully placed. I let him elaborate his nonsense and rested my eyes on Rachel Vachel and La Cucaracha sleeping in each other's arms. I decided that if I escaped alive from this mortal Terran bruhaha and were able to carry an#rthing back to the Sack, it would be something very different from revolution -- unless one considers all females conspirators and destructors by nature. We landed at dawn at a swamp-circled hideout short of Missouri City. Fanninowicz was one of the few awake and on hand to observe our limping and dispirited arrival. "Ho-ho!" he mocked. "I see you have had a brush with the Rangers! Next time -- Kaaaaah!" And while making this nasty noise at the back of his tongue, he drew his thumb across his throat. "And as for you, you Schafskopf, you bummer, you are no fit to be trusted with your exoskeleton than a child with a computer!" "That's how the Circumlunans teach their children math," I told him as I hopped along. "Splice my cable now, you Texo-Prussian paranoid!" This Month in IF -- A Worlds' Noveetfe by A. Bertram Chandler by Reger Zelazny Don't miss the big August issue of IF -- twice awarded the os the world's b-liked science-fiction magazine! 'Hugo" In Australia, the Rain... Tn Australia the rain doesn't fall on the plain -- unfortunately for Australians it does not fall much anywhere. The paradox of the two southern continents, Australia and Antarctica, is that Aus tralia is the driest of all contiI nents, while Antarctica is the wettest, though this does not show too clearly because all the water is in its solid state. The general dr # mess of Ausmoist air from the Indian Ocean tralia can be read off any general could blow through thw gap and map by the simple trick of lookwould bring rain to the great ing for cities. Where there are deserts of central AustraBa, mak cities, there is water; where there ing them fertile, is no water there are no cities. A It sounded simple; as a matter glance at a general map shows of fact it was too. simple, not to that the Australian east coast say simple-minded. The mdermust be the wettest area, and a taking of blasting a sufficiently specialized map (Fig. #) conbig gap would be a bit too much firms this conclusion. Only a even for our technology, whicH small percentage of the continent has advanced considerably since has what we consider normal the proposal was made. Morerainfall ; another small percentage over, it would not work because has enough to make do, the largthe air currents are not what the est part definitely does not have ingenuous traveler hoped they enough rain. One can even add: would be. if any. I assume that the helpful visitor Only a century ago the concluinformed the Australian govemsion would have been that these ment authorities what they should are the facts and that one has to do with their continent The aube grateful that they are not worse. Nowadays the attitude, once such a set of facts has been established, is to ask: "what can we do about it?" Several decades ago a British visitor to Australia learned about the general lack of rain and while on shipboard, during the voyage home, he borrowed what maps of Australia there happened to be in the chartroom, brooded over them and when he landed in Southampton he announced that he had the solution. tasmania All it would take, he said, is a few thousand tons of dynamite to blast a gap in the motmtain chains along the Australian west coast. Then the winds bearing Fig. #. Map of Roinfoff over Avshalla. The overoge annual predpHotion  given In Inches. Nearly half of the continent hos less thon # Inches of rain per year; more thoo half hos loss than # Inches. tKorities probably wrote a polite reply; tHey may or may not Have mentioned tHat tHey were considering anotSer scHeme, mucH less ambitious to be sure, but feasible and witH tEe assurance of success. It was wEat is named tEe Snowy Mountains ScEeme, tEe Snowy Mountains being a section of a long mountain cEain tEat in Australia is called tEe Great Dividing Range; outside Australia it is usually referred to as tEe Australian Alps. TEe mountains begin near tEe western boundary of Victoria and more or less follow tEe coastline, tEougE some distance inland. TEe wEole range Has tEe sEape of a quarter of a circle; tEe nortEem end of tEe range is rougEly to tEe west of Sydney. Several rivers originate in tEe area of tEe Snowy Mountains; tEe largest of tEem is tEe Murray River; tEe second largest bears tEe beautiful name of Mummibidgee River. It later becomes a tributary of tEe Murray. TEe combined rivers flow westward at first, tEen suddenly turn soutE and empty into tEe Antarctic Ocean near Adelaide (Fig. #). BotE tEe Murray and the Murrumbidgee have a number of minor tributaries. J ust two rivers flow in tEe opposite direction. TEe Eucumbene flows straight soutE, joins waters witij tEe Snowy River, and tEe combined rivers (called Snowy River from tEen on) flow first eastward for a sEort distance. TEen tEe Snowy River turns soutE and, after some meandering, empties into tEe Bass Strait tEat separates Tasmania from Australia. TEat tEe Snowy River flows east and soutE is in itself unimportant; wEat annoyed tEe AuftraEans is tEat it flows tErougE an area wEere tEe water is not really needed. If it could be made to join tEe Murray River it would be more useful, becausq fartEer downstream along the course of tEe Murray tHere is land tEat needs irrigation. Australian surveyors produced a detailed map of tEe area wEere tEe Snowy River and its most important tributary, tEe Eucumbene originate. It is a section of tEe Great Dividing Range to the west of tEe small city of Cooma, measuring rougEly # miles from west to east and a little more tEan tEat from nortE to soutE. TEere tEe mountain cEains form an inverted V; tEe wEole area is at a fairly EigE elevation, Cooma itself being # feet above sea level. Diverting tEe Eucumbene and Snowy rivers westward would bring needed water to dry regions to the nortE of Melbourne. TEe two rivers meet (or by now one sHould say "met") near tEe town of Jindabyne, so the thing to do for river diversion would be Fig. #. The Rivers of Southeast Australia. Dotted areas are or will be irrigated by the Snowy Mountains Scheme. to build a dam below the conflubuilt for the purpose. But even if eace of the two rivers to store the the net expenditure of energy water in a reservoir, which is alwere zero, it still needs a costly ways the first step. The next step installation that eats up more is to make the water go where money for maintenance. Just where the problems -- and the mountains might be cheaper in hard thinking -- began. The the long run, even though tunnelmauntains to the west are around ing is expensive, too. ## feet tall (some taller), measBy then the engineers had belied from the elevation of Jindagun to consider level differences, byne. Of course one can pump The waters of the combined rivers water to such' an elevation, but would be over # feet above the this costs energy. It is true that level plain to the west of the one gets this energy, or most of it, mountains, and that represents back when the water falls down such a large amount of potential tlie Other side of the mountain inenergy that nobody in his right to a hydroelectric power plant mind would waste it. The energy Fig. #. The Snowy Mountains Scheme. Straight double lines Indicate tunnels, the black dob are power stations; they are numbered M #, etc., if they belong to the Murray River portion of the Project, and T #, etc., if they belong to the Tumut River section. Missing numbers indicate power stations that might be added later. contained in the water should be converted to electric current, and there was the side-thought, of course, that the sale of the current would pay for the project itself in time. In order to squeeze all the potential energy out of the high-level water of the SnowX Mountains area, more than one storage reservoir was required. To utilize the drop of the stored water most efficiently, it should be interrupted in several places by power stations. There had to be connecting tunnels. This is the way projects grow. The Snowy Mountains Scheme, when planning was finished, called for the creation of three major and a number of lesser artificial lakes, the requisite number of dams, a total of # miles of tunnels ranging from # to # feet in diameter and not less than eleven power stations (with another three possible), some of them underground. A small town named Adamlnaby inside the mountainus V would be drowned by one f the artificial lakes and would Save to be moved across tEe mountains to a new site. TEe geographical facts dictated tEat efficiency of power production would be increased if the Tooma River fo the west of the V, normally a tributary of the Murray, should be damned and its water diverted into the Tumut River wlncE is a tributary of the Murrumbidgee. TEis would not change the irrigatioa scheme because farther downstream the Murray and the Murrumbidgee come together. When the plan was evolved, Australia still counted its money in pounds sterling; now they Eave "A," which means Austrahan dollars, and the price of the gain is a large irrigated area to the west of the project and three ect I t began with a dam to hold back the waters of the Eucumbene River. The dam is an earth and rockfill dam, half a mile in thickness at its base and with a height of #I feet. It was built by a group of contractors from the United States and was cmapleted in May # -- two years ahead of schedule. The artificial lake formed (the one that drowned old Adaminaby) Eas tEe name of Lake Eucumbene, and it is a big lake. Its total capacity is # acrefeet, a measure tEat is slowly going out of style (tEank God) and therefore needs explaining. It is what its name sa # rs, enough water to cover an area of one acre to a depth of one foot, a feat that needs # gallons. TEe storage capacity of Lake Eucumbene works out to a little more than a Fig. # shows the Snowy Mountain Scheme, and in order to understand the route into which the .water has been forced, let us begin in the northeast with tEe Tantangara Reservoir. A tunnel goes from this reservoir through the mountains into Lake Eucumbene. From the southern end of Lake Eucumbene two tunnels emerge; one goes westward through the mountains to the Tumut River section of the overall project, the other joins another tunnel near a smaller reservoir called Island Bend Pond. These two tunnels from Lake Eucumbene are twoway tunnels; the flow can go either way, depending on the levels of the various bodies of water. All other tunnels are strictly oneway. A tunnel goes westward from the Jindab # me Reservoir to join with Island Bend Pond and the two-way tunnel from Lake Eucumbene. Then it goes due west througH tHe mountains and ends up, after passing tihirougH two powers stations, in tHe Swampy Plains River. This is one section of the flow scheme. THe other section begins witK tHe reservoir formed by the dam across the Tooma River. The water flows into Tumut Pond and then northward into tHe Murrumbidgee along tHe channel of the original Tumut River. But this river Has been changed into a series of reservoirs by a number of dams. When finished there will be five power stations along this route; the fifth, called T#, is located beyond tHe edge of our sketch map, twelve miles to the north of T#. By the end of # all tHe tunneling Had been done; the last of the big tunnels was completed on July #, #. THe Jindabyne dam, .# feet high, was completed in #, too. Now, However, one lias to wait for tHe Jindabyne Reservoir to fill up. A number of tHe power stations were still unfinished by the end of # ; they were built, but the generators still Had to be installed. The only dam not even started until late in # is the Talbingo U.S. dollars), and it will be # feet high. Everything should be ready to use by the end of #. per onnum Diversion of Snowy to Murray # minus diversion of Tooma # # Gains due to regulolion of Murray # Total for Murray # Diversion of Eucumbene # Diversion of Tooma # Gains due to regulation of Murrumbidgee # # The increase of Irrigated land Is eguivalent to on onnual gain of agricultural pro ITill the Australians then find   themselves minus a project? That depends on another survey, in progress at this time. If you approach Australia by sea from the south, you pass between Kangaroo Island and Cape Catastrophe to enter the Spencer Gulf. This is the sea route you Have to take if you have legitimate business at Woomera, the launch pad area of the Australian rocket range. If you came by air from the Australian east coast, your map will show a few large lakes east and north' of Woomera, lakes east and north of Woomera and the map will probably mention that Lake Torrens, Lake Frome and Lake Eyre, both tHe northern and the southern section,are salty. What tHe map cannot show is that these lakes, and especially Lake Eyre wHicH lies in a larger depression. Have no fixed size and shape. One might say the maps show what these lakes should be, not what they are. In October (ely summer for Australia) #, a party of explorers coming to Adelaide reported tihat Lake E # rre was actually full of" water I The survey that is now going on under the leadership of Ian B. Kiddle, professor of engineering in Melbourne, looks at the stretches of land between Port Augusta and Lake Torrens (with an area of # square miles) and between Lake Torrens and the Lake Eyre basin that have an area of # square miles and are, on the average, # feet below sea level. Kiddle's idea is quite simple; if the Lake Eyre basin could be filled with water and could be kept filled, a permanent large inland lake would result It would be salty, so sea water could fill it up. The question is how easily and how cheaply sea water can be brought from Spencer Gulf to the Lake Eyre basin. Based on a personal and naturally sketchy survey Professor Kiddle made in # and #, the project does not seem to be difficult. It would start with an open ordinary canal from Port Augusta to the southern tip of Lake Torrens. Then the one expensive item would come, a level difference of # feet; the water would have to be pumped to that elevation to flow into Fig. #. The Area to the North of Spencer Gulf. This may become the site of a project designed for climatic Improvement. Lake Torrens. Between the northern end of Lake Torrens and the basin of Lake Eyre, there are only a few low ridges of hills that would have to be cut through. So far the state of South Australia is only assisting in making the survey. But if New South' Wales can have its Snowy Mountain Scheme, why shouldn't South Australia have its Lake Eyre # earney sat up in Orestes' bow, one eye on his net, the other on the stars. He was a big kid with quiet eyes, Hard arms and the knack. The fishing boat rocked beneath him as fishing boats have done for millennia, but with' differences. For the tang of fish in salt air was substituted for the thin reek of warm insulation; for the lap of waves and gull cries there was the white star-hiss of quiet headphones and the sixtycycle hum of machinery. The ship herself was as homely as her task, a symmetrical cucumber all lumpy with warts. Each of these carried a net and its netman, except one large blister on the port side that was the bridge. Orestes dragged her skein through space behind her, flapping empty since they'd so far caught nothing. The net that Kearney plied so skillfully was a strange thing; a ribbon of light that wasn't light at all, but the shimmering boundary between present and future. For Orestes was a time trawler. She fished thirty gigayears into the future for raw materials to feed the hungry galaxy of the present. Kearney hadn't had netwatcH by himself until this trip; he'd just recently been qualified. But only the rulebook had held him back this long because, as everyone knew, he had the knack. Something behind those dark eyes could read the stars. Computers were all right for the ordinary netman, but nothing beat the knack if you had it, and Kearney Had it in spades. How did he know where a star years? Or more exactly thirty one point #, which' was their present trawling depth? Well, he looked at them, talked to them a little. In a way he wooed them, loved them, asked them where they were going and couldn't he come along? After sitting there an hour or two, watching their slow, syncopated dance, he got an idea of things. Gavotte, twist, sometimes a just free ballet, all for grace. Kearney followed the dance. Old ones went nova, and h'e knew there'd be a space there pretty soon, deep in time or shallower, depending on their size. So they wouldn't pull their little trains of followers or get in the way of others, after a while. Kearney could even pick out those which danced awkwardly, encumbered by a system of planets, an even more valuable part of his knack. The trawlers called these the big ones, because the smallest planet was worth more commercially than the largest sun. I t's hard to tell if Kearney thought of the stars as stars. It's more likely he regarded them as birds or ghosts. Bodecs, down in centcomm, said he sometimes heard the kid humming to himself, talking to them, even answering, "Hey little jobber, where the hell have you been?" and stuff like that. He said, "Yes," a lot too, which was weirder still. But whatever Bodecs or the rest of them thought, they kept it to themselves, even the skipper. Kearney had the knack, and that was enough. They'd go home with a fat catch because of it. It was only a matter of time before the kid tracked down a biggy and earned them all a bonus. So Kearney sat up in the bow bubble and talked to the stars. He spun his nets down in the future and sang to himself. He knew where they'd be, the biggies, and he systematically avoided them. Nobody knew that, of course. His problem, if you want to call it that, was scruples. Big ones were valuable because of their planets. While the raw energy of stars had to be processed down to matter, planets were matter to begin with. The processing was ten times easier and cheaper, so the trawlers got ten times the normal price for them at Port Pluto. But planets often had the unsettling property of supporting life, and processing them down to raw materials was a little rough on the natives. Which turned Kearney completely off. It would only Have been a matter of time before his otherwise bountiful net would become conspicuous for its lack of big ones; but that time never came because something else happened first. Kearney was probing when he felt the vibes. He locked on. Something down there. To centcomm he said, "Bodecs? Hey Bodecs, I've got something. Little but heavy." "Need help?" "No, my net'll take it. But wake up the winch' crew." Seen from a few miles off, the Orestes netlifting operations were slow and unspectacular. A few lights went on, making odd blotches beneath her translucent skin. All the other nets flickered off so as not to foul Kearney's, and to leave more power for the winch. Keamesr's beam grew more intense, and the veins of blue began to writhe in its milky light. The fishing ship herself swung around to tug the net in along the line of her keel. For almost an hour, nothing else happened. They towed their catch up quarantined layer. The reason for the layer was obvious. You didn't want to deplete the near future to feed the present. You might end up hurtyour grandson so that your son could be bom. The layer was more than an inconvenience, since the deepest a good net would go was only thirty-two gigayears. So fishermen were restricted to skimming a very thin layer of the future, which made for maximum work and competition, minimum profit. T Tp it came, Kearney's catch. It bobbed into the visible portion of his netbeam and stayed there, shimmering. It was a starship. Kearney let out his breath until there was no more air and then wnmg his lungs out even further. He'd done it; he'd put the Orestes on the track of a biggy. The mother system of that little round ship was lying down on the bottom somewhere nearby. He sat there and quietly hated himself. In his earphones, there was jubilation. The skipper told Kearney to swing his catch back along their ship to where the grappling beams could stuff it into the skein, and he did what he was told. Even as he wor'ked, half a dozen netbeams swept downtime near where his prize had emerged. They got it Six fat nets locked on, intensified, veined and pulled. In the earphones came a babble of orders and cheers and a mild congratulation from the skipper himself. Well done! Then more orders. It would take time. It was a Sol-sized star witH four planets. One was a neo-Venus, obviously tKe home f the starsHip. Some one calculated that sKe'd bring a tKree-thou bonus to every man aboard. Hey-y-y's came in a chorus, with iore verbal pats on the back for Kearney. Kearney switched off His net, slumped in the bubble and ran thougHtful fingers through his adolescent beard. Then, moving slowly so as not to draw a conspicuous amount of power. He swivelled His netgun's focus to the throat of the busy nets outside. He fingered power mode to repulsion, and waited. It would wreck six beam generators, maybe the own life -- but baby, that was going to be the big one that got away. As the edge of their neo-Sol broke surface, Kearney triggered his netbeam and gave the power knob a vicious twist. His beam flared for a fraction of a second and went out. He'd overdone it, and the circuit breaker had blown. Even so, the six-beam net that mesHed around the big one grew duller, then brighter in a series of power oscillations that rocked the Orestes. Bedlam sounded in the pHones. "What was that?... Damned if I know... Do you suppose the natives... Naww... power failure?... Engine room, how's the secondary?... Foxir-oK, Skipper, I swear it. There was this big surge and..." Qo nobody knew. Kearney was prepared to blow His skin for success, but not failure. He swung his netbeam back to where it belonged, moded for normal power, reset the breaker, and left the bubble. TKe passageways were dark, all power going to the nets. He fumbled along, aided only by his pocket torch, found the crew's wardroom,and drew some blacko. The first cup shook in bis hand. The second didn't, and he could think again. He'd been foolish to think they wouldn't find out. A reran of the engineering logs -- after they were done with the hectic routine of reeling in the nets -- would surely give him away. It didn't even take that long. The wardroom was a large space and, except for Kearney, empty. It echoed when the PA went on and the skipper's voice boomed, "Netman Joseph Kearney, to my cabin, on the double." The skipper's cabin was a square room with hologram murals of Tennessee hills on two walls. It was brightly lit even now, well furnished, greenly carpeted, and the oxygen was at full earth pressure, not the gaspy eighteen-six of the crew's quarters. Except for the furious little man belund the desk, it was a very nice place indeed. Skipper Macklin had a strip of logtape in lus hand, and he shook it in Kearney's face. "Just whatJn hell is this all about?" "I tried to cut the nets." Macklin's jaw dropped, then shut to form a wince that came with lemon sucking. "Why?" "The natives." "I don't believe itl" There was a long pause, ending with a sigh. "Yes, I do. Damn shame, too. You were good." Macklin stared disgustedly up at him, then got to his feet. "Okay, out. If I see that baby face of yours for the rest of the cruise. I'll put a foot in it. Stay off the nets, you're through." "Yes, sir." "And Kearney." "Yes?" "You're lucky you're such a kid. Otherwise, I'd kill you." eamey reeled back to crew's quarters in a daze. For perhaps twenty minutes he felt lucky to be alive. But for the rest of the cruise he felt rotten, and they were out the full four months. He spent a lot of time staring out the stem bubble at the skein. Though they caught several planetoids and one neo-Uranussized free planet, Kearney's biggy dwarfed them all, tugging the skeinbeams tight around her. There was even a little fear on board that she'd burst the skein, which was tantamount to having a fusion bomb go off on the back porch. But it held. The big one had been netted up intact, with even her rotation and energy balance preserved. It was likely the natives were still alive, possibly even imaware that they traveled in a temporal pocket Kearney gazed on. Men had overrun the galaxy or there would not have been any time trawlers human beings scattered among the near stars, running out of food, metal, ever#dhing. The future opened before them like a tantalizing cornucopia. If the nets reached deeper, they could catch enough other material to toss back the big ones. But as it stood, the planets were altogether necessary, even inhabited ones. That was the problem, and there wasn't any answer. When the Orestes finally anchored half a dozen parsecs off Port Pluto, Kearney went below arid stayed. He didn't want to see the processing. He didn't want to see the awful explosion when Orestes dropped her shield and the neoVenus found herself thirty gigayears displaced in time. Her sun slowly going out, her orbit wavering, her floods, her freezing, her loss of air. But most of all, Kearney didn't want to see the planet rent and ground to elements by the mining beams, or the endless line of space trucks that bore off the fragments like titanic hearses. It was about this time that Kearney had a th'ough'L It was a good thought, and he decided to devote the rest of his life to it. TTe'd aged twenty years. The beard was fuller, the hair on his head thinner. Kearney still carried himself well, and though the springy grace of youth had gone, it had been replaced by the ponderous strength of a shot-putter. What few friends he had admired him. But at thirty-eight Kearney had very few friends indeed. It was bad enough' to trawl for a living, but he seemed to trawl for pleasure as well. He hadn't seen earth for six years, and only went into Port Pluto to sell his fish. Kearney was a loner. After old Macklin had fired him, things had been difficult. He'd been blackballed. Fortunately the reputation of his knack went along with his reputation as a maverick, and commercial fishermen were a practical lot. He found work. In the course of four years on the boats out of Pluto he'd only turned up one more biggy. Lots of asteroids and suns, but only one biggy. Then He'd bought his own boat, a leaky old smack with Her name stenciled on the stem: Limpet. Somewhere along the line a crank had switched the final 't' to an 'r,' and none of her long string of owners had since seen fit to change it. It was then that Kearney began his project. Alone on the Limper, he changed his tactics from avoiding the big ones to seeking them out With his knack it wasn't difficult, either; He cotild have been a rich man. Yet the wholesalers to whom Kearney sold his catch had yet to record his bringing in a big one. The biggy kicking in his nets right now was his fortieth. As he locked in the winch beams, Kearney hummed in self-congratulation: forty in sixteen years. Leaving the Limper to finish hauling in by Herself, he crawled out of the bubble and into his cramped combined bridge and cabin. Out came the thick notebook, of which thirty-nine pages were littered with notes, dates, calculations. It was quite like an anthropologist's fieldbook: thirty families of monkeys in their wld habitats. Discovered at different times. Habits noted. Notes of Jater visits. Each family had been given a toy -- or was it a tool? -- (Ml an early visit, and tlieir use of it observed on subsequent dates. TKere were gigayears between observations, sometimes. Some pages Had stars, some x's, at least fifteen were crossed out blackly, failures for one reason or anotKer. Nine were blank because tHere Had been no monkeys at all. Kearney flipped to a blank page and put (#) in tHe upper left corner. THen: Big one Forty. Spatial location # X # X # Temporal location: September #, #I -- plus #,#, THen He dropped tHe pen into the crotcH of the binding to mark His place and went over to the locker. He got out his diving suit, tKen sat down where He could see tHe netbeam reeling its catcH up tHrougK tHe millennia, and waited. Tt bobbed to tHe surface an hour later: small, HigH intensity sun ringed by no less tHan seventeen planets. He took readings and immediately wrote off tHe first six and tHe last four as uninKabitable. Of the middle seven, tHe fiftH looked most inviting, and he decided to hit Her first. Kearney went aft to where the diving sled rested in her davits, sealed his Helmet and shut the pressure lock behind him. A few minutes later tHe port opened and he aimed the little skiff out into space. THere was a saying that old sailors got used to the sensation of time-diving, and Kearney was an old sailor. Going from die near-perfect vacuum of space, througH tHe side of tHe netbeam and into the absolute vacuum of non-time was Hardly noticeable at first. But after thirty or forty seconds inside, your nose and kneecaps began to wander all over your body. A torrent of false sensations played over you like colors running tHrougH an acid Head. Two minutes of it would Have been unbearable, but it was usually all over in one, Kearney Had long since found out that old sailors were liars. He filtered back into real -- altHougH future -- time and found Himself orbiting Forty's sun in rougfily tHe same orbit as Her fiftH planet. He wheeled tHe sled into tHe smaller body's gravity well and let her pull it down, saving iower, another trick only a man witH a knack would dare. As he broke througH the clouds and got his first good look, it was obvious that he'd guessed correctly. Forty-dash-Five was a waterworld, the driest areas just sandy weeds. With a symmetry that only intelligence could produce, canals mazed through them. Tetrahedral domes of jelly lined the canals. Kearney picked the largest dome in view and landed next to it. Inside, four heads each with an eye and nine arms, stared hostilely out at him . Each arm Held a spear. Kearney fought the urge to vomit, deciding then and there that he'd made no attempt to communicate. He put the wheel and crossbow, plus a dozen other mindbenders into the hatch and ejected them. Next, a barrel-sized sphere of stainless steel went out. In it was a world of information -- including his own biography and a promise to return. When he took off again, some two dozen spears glanced off his hull. If he came back in a hundred years they'd be bullets. He hoped. But judging by their present state of evolution. He made a mental note to hold off for at least a few hundred thousand. Kearney found life on none of the other six planets. About average, he sighed. Quite tired now, he Headed back toward the apex of the net beam, and Limper. The last thing He did before turning in was to set up a rep shield around Forty. A few months later, Kearney headed into Port Pluto to drop His catch and pick up some fuel and supplies. The Limper towed laboriously at her skeinful of fish. Actually, she didn't tow them: her skeinbeams displaced their spatial coordinates of the future with those of the present. But this took energy -- of which Limper had little -- and she moved slowly. Kearney anchored out at tiie processing station and cut the skein field. The displaced Hydrogen of real space parted with a bang to accept two suns and an asteroid out of the future, and for a few seconds the fireworks were quite impressive. The wholesaler Androsias cheated him as usual, and as usual Kearney didn't stop to haggle. He left Limper at the piers and' took a shuttle into Pluto. He needed supplies, and a night off. The city was built on the inside surface of the Hollowed-out planet. She was spun by external means -- ion beams up on Her frozen outside surface -- and centrifugal force kept things attached to the inside shell with about half their normal weight. In essence it was an inside-out little place, quite unsettling until you got used to looking up and seeing down on the other side of the world, beyond the bluish artificial sun that was hung right in the middle by guywires. Like most of the other buildings there, Pulaski's Bar was a hole in the ground. Kearney descended the widening spiral of steps that ran down the coneshaped walls from above, then walked across thirty feet of flat floor to the circular bar in the middle. Pulaski was alone. When he glanced out from under his hologlasses he merely said. "Oh, howsa." "Okay. What's on?" "Nothin' much. News." He took off the glasses, blinked. "Anverse?" "If it's fresh." It wasn't, but Kearney sipped the murky euphoric and stared into the holomurals. Pulaski put his glasses back on and returned to his slouch against the back of the bar. The Alps and the Pacific were superimposed to give old earth a grander scene than she was ever mother of; that was one segment of the mural. On the other was a scene from the docks of New Orleans, circa #. Wherever did they dig these up. The Anverse began its work, and Kearney built a lifedream around the high-breasted crinoline creature in the foreground. Customers came and went, one or two at a time, but Kearney dreamed on. He had a second glass and considered redreaming the same thing with' slight changes, decided against it and ordered an anti. He was almost unbent again when Bobby Macklin and his crew rolled in. They weren't on anverse. Alky and plenty of it was wHat tfiey ordered, and obviously Bad been ordering for some time. Bobby Macklin was Skipper Macklin's son. WBen tBe old skipper died, Bobb; Bad taken over. Kearney knew tBe man sligBtly and avoided Him. It was not out of malice to tBe fatEer, eitHer, but simply because tBe son was an unpleasant sort, not wortH tfie time. Bobby, However, avoided no one. Peering across Pulaski's tbm sHoulder, He muttered a question tHickly to one of His mates. THen, eyes widening. He answered tHe question Himself. "Damn! It's Himl" Tfie flesfiy finger pointed, and Kearney found Himself looking into four pairs of sligfitly incredulous but very Hostile eyes. As a man, tHe quartet got up and came around to take seats beside Him. "Hello, Bobby." Tfiick Hand on His sHoulder, tHick breatH in His face. "WHy, Hi tfiere old buddy. How's tHe sabotaging business, tfiese days?" Feeling Kearney's muscles tigfiten under His Hand, Bobby removed it quickly, sat up, went on in a louder voice. "Guess wHat tfie boys and I found out in tHe Grand Banks last montH?" "I couldn't." "Well, we found a little old radiobuoy tHat was signaling 'J. S. en. So, I say to tfe boys, geewBiz but our old buddy Kearney Bas staked fiimself a claim over tfiere, and maybe tfiere's otfiers nearby. Because everybody knows wBat a knack old Kearney's got. TBafs wBat I said, ligfit guys?" Murmurs, nods, leers. Two customers started down tfie stairs, took one look at wfiat was sfiaping up and fled. "So you came over to raid my claim." Kearney said evenly. Like every otfier time trawler, fie Bad claim buoys all over space, marking catcKes that were inconvenient to Haul in or else so low in yield tfiey migfit not pay tfieir own way in skein energy. But Kearney Had some otfiers, too, special ones, forty of tKem. close by wHen guess wHat?" Yes, it Had been one of the forty, Kearney decided. "You fouled your nets?" He said, dropping His foot from the rung of tHe barstool to tHe floor. "Fouled?" the gross man shouted. "Fouled? Burnt to a crisp! Blew two beamguns right off my ship, punctured two lazarettes. And I said, that's just like Kearney. He did it to my old man and He'd do it to anyone. Sabotaging a buoy. A repulsor shield, a goddamn repulsor shield!" Keamey rose to His feet, Eis chin inches from Bobby's upraised face. "People wfio don't steal don't get into trouble." Bobby Had His back to the bar, and Keamey pressed Him against it litly with tHe palm of Es rit Hand, cHucked Him mockingly under tHe chin witH tfie other. THe fat man's cHeeks went as red as his eyes and He was literally speechless. THe pulpy mouth opened and for a second all that came out was a stammering hiss. But it ended. "Get Him!" Kearney pushed Hard, sending Bobby careening over the bar. At the same time. He swung His Head down and to the left, pivoting out of the clinch on his left foot. A bottle and tHe edge of a knuckly hand whistled through the air where his Head Had been and crashed on the table. But the third of Macklin's netmen stayed with him, and before Kearney could straighten up from the dodge He felt hands in his beard and saw a knee coming up toward his face. All he Had time to do was turn his Head, and the sledgehammer Hit his ear. He exploded backward from the force of it, so hard that His opponent was left holding two handfuls of whiskers. Pain brings fury to some men. One must be careful when beating such a man not to Hurt without maiming. Hair tearing, unfortunately, imparts maximum pain, does minimum damage. When Kearney got back on his feet, he was so incensed he wasn't even human. He was back at Es antagonist in one step. Planting His left foot. He executed a perfect pimt on the other's cEn with tHe rigHf. It made a messy soimd and # the man with loose gravel for teeth. THe first two were rigHt beHind, and one grabbed Kearney's foot, twisted and Heaved. Keamey cartwheeled across the room and smashed into the wall. Half a breath later, Bobbs man came at Him head down in a ram rush designed to spread Kearnejs guts all over the flint glass mural screen. Kearney sidestepped. Bash I THe man groaned when He hit; but, just to make sure, Kearney chopped twice at the thick neck before He hit the floor. 'here was one left. Kearney came at him in a storm of knuckles. The man made a High sound in the back of His tEoat and fled. Keamey chased Em halfway up the stairs, ran out of breath, and came dizzily down. He'd had it; that first headblow was getting to Him. Pulaski's Hands appeared over the edge of the bar, followed by the upper Half of Es apprehensive face, a perfect Kilroy. Then they disappeared and when He reemerged, Pulaski was hauling a still windknocked Bobby Macklia to his feet. "You broke four bottles," lie said accusingly to Kearney, pointing to a mess of stains and broken glass on Bdbby's backside. "I'll pay. Got any water?" He dragged Bobby back on the custmner's side of the bar and propped him up on a stool. Kearney took a long gulp from the glass Pulaski offered and threw the rest in Bobby's face. "So you raided my buoy. What'd you do with the fish?" "Nothing, we couldn't bring her in." "You know what I'd Have done if yu had?" Kearney rapped Him ungently on the windpipe. "I can guess," he wheezed. Kearney fought an urge to beat the man sjrstematically to jelly. But he went over and retrieved what was left of his torn jacket from where it had come off near the wall. Then he paid Pulaski and went out. Forty minutes later, Kearney Bad ordered a shuttle load of supplies and was on his way out to the Limper. No telling what Bobby had done to biggy Eleven Vhen he'd dropped his nets on it. Wailing in protest at the throttle Kearney fed her, Limper was on Her way to the Grand Banks within the hour. Not surprisingly, the buoy had been destroyed, but there was considerable debris floating nearby to mark the place. Kearney grinned. He anchored and reached down the notebook. Inhabited system Eleven. Spatial location # x # x #. Temporal location; August #, # -- plus #,#. G-type, probably from Westover's Galaxy. One planet, two satellites, forty-hour day, twenty-seven montH year. Natives semi-aquatic, scaled quadrupeds. IQ's around twenty. Left a complete set of plans. Give them about a quarter gigayear for development, and they should be ready. eamey made another entry describing Bobby's raid. Then he coded off the rep shield that had saved his fish from Bobby and went about trawling for her himself. In two hours he was in the sled, riding his terminal orbit around Eleven-dash-one. Although the last time he'd been there was by local reckoning lier, most of the landscape was fairly familiar. By landscape one meant topography; the scenery itself was vastly different. Elevenone had gone from prehistoric ferns to solid city. She was just as crowded as the planets of Kearney's own time. The largest city in view had a peculiar geometry. Some powerful planner had laid a mile-broad letter K on the coimtryside and built his roads to suit it. True, the interplaited cross streets were rarely symmetrical, but it had a certain beauty. Kearney felt godlike. At the intersection of the K was a park, wide green, waterlaced. A swamp, in fact. He drifted the sled for it. Hit somewhere near the middle. The woman -- or so he judged her -- who met him was greenish and reptilian, but rather pretty. Six or seven newts clustered fearfully around her as Kearney's sled settled into the tall grass, not twenty yards from their picnic table. Kearney stepped out, prepared to go through the takeme-to-your-leudcr bit; but she shortstopped the whole thing with four words. "By Kearney," she whispered, "It's Kearney." The ride through town to Super's palace gave him a chance to see what he'd wrought. Obviously he'd induced terrestrial evolution on what was basically an aquatic species, but they seemed none the worse for it. Doorknobs for webbed hands were the size of footballs and softly textured. Perambulators for newtlets were water filled. But everyone had the look of well-being that only a sophisticated use of science and democratic philosophy could bring about. So somehow he felt he hadn't left them too bad a legacy, three gigs earlier. Quper had the tall careful awk wardness of a Lincoln. He was worn-scaled and gray-green, the lighter shade apparently owing to age. And like the rest of them, his completely smooth body gave no reason for him to have been other than unclad. Behind his wide wooden desk lay the shell of a seed Kearney had shown three gigayears earlier. "Kearney. So you're not a legend after all." "Oh, I'm real." "Well, thanks for this," Super said, waving a webbed hand at the steel capsule. "We've used it all. We've even got time trawlers of our own, now." "You're welcome. Ready to pay for it?" Super looked startled. "Pay?" "Look, I came across your system by time trawling myself. You couldeasily have been reeled back to my own time and reduced to raw materials. As a matter of fact you still can." Moisture glistened around Super's gill slits. "Extortion, Kearney?" "Mildly, yes. I want a promise. Now you're time trawling yourself. You have the same power over future systems that I've had over you. I want you to promise to treat them as I've treated you. la odier words, tGrow back tKe big ones. And educate tfaem." Super looked' relieved. "la addition," Kearney began -- Sunlight tHrougS tHe tall window faded, gr to double brilliance, then settled back to normal. Super cried, "WKat?" Kearney, smacking His forehead with a palm, said, "Murder! It must be Bobby." A fter Kearney Had left him in tfie debris of Pulaski's bottles and His own crewmen, Bobby Macklin was a frightened man. But back on His own ship he got braver. Orestes was twenty times the size of Limper, and could eat the little ship and spit out the bones before Kearney knew what hit him. That was Bobby's plan. He was quite sure Kearney would go out to that pet biggy of his and check on things. So, not two hours after Kearney left, Bobby was hot behind him. "I've got him on visual. Skipper. Looks like He's got that biggy up the surface." "Good, he's saved us the trouble. Anchor, and get him on the Y band. Bobby settled contentedly back in the skipper's couch and leered out the port at Keame#rs defenseless ship. "Can't raise him -- oh, wait, his autopilot's putting out a Standard Three. He's left the ship and gone diving down in the biggy." Bobby grinnecL "And that's where he'll stay. Send a crew over and transfer the fish from his net to ours. And have them bring back his diving phone. I want to say good-bye to dear old Kearney." D own on Eleven-one, Kearney and Super sat in the latter's office. "You're sure he'll call?" the green man asked. "Yes, soon. It'd be his style to gloat. The blink in the sunlight was caused by his shifting us from one net to the other. Which' means -- " "Which means, if I may quote, we're in the fire." "Where'd you get that expression?" "From the same encyclopedia that you both blessed and burdened us with willy-nilly three gigs ago." "Come on. Super. Until now you were grateful." "Until now. Agreed, you're the best of your type, Kearney; but men are a race of exploiters, pure and simple. Your friend would just as soon process us as -- " "My what? Now look, I have told you how this was supposed to work out Bobby's just -- " "Hey, Kearney," tinned a voice inside His helmet "Yeah, Bobby, hello." "Got you now, baby." TKere was a nasty snicker. "When they tun you through the processor you'll probably come out looking like -- " "Okay, okay. Look, I want to buy my way out." "With what? I've already got your ship. And this biggy." "Peanuts. I can give you twice that." "From where?" "Let me up, and I'll tell you." The snicker expanded to a laugh. "Squirm, baby. You're never getting out." Bobby clicked off. "What now?" Super asked hopelessly. Even as they spoke the sun blinked again, indicating that their captor had shifted them to his skein. Kearney shrugged. "We've got -- let's see -- probably ten of your days to come up with something." TJobby Macklin called down into the skein in hopes of pulling a few more legs off his flies, but the flies wouldn't give him that satisfaction. He had the growing suspicion that something was brewing down there, and so he had ordered Orestes back to Port Pluto as fast as she could tow her load. The sooner he'd reduced Kearney to a handful of minerals, the better. But he wasn't quick enough. They were still four days off Pluto when his after netman called in. "Skipper, there's something going on out in the skein." Macklin rushed aft and peered out the stem btibble. There certainly was something going on. The sack of woven energy squirmed like the belly of a pregnant mare. It became bloated. Through its translucent walls Bobby and his crew saw not only one big one with Her planet and moons, but four other stars. "Quick, try and get Kearney." He was handed the phone. "Hey, Kearney, what gives?" "Your skein, if you don't drop us." "Where're you getting..." "The future, our future. Sixty five gigs from you. Listen, fathead, drop us or else. You know what a burst skein'll do to your ship." "Yeah, louse," He clicked off. "Cut the skein. He's got us." The beams flickered out, and Kearney, Super biggy Eleven's entire system and baggage dropped down through the eons to its own time. Bobby Macklin rebuilt the skein, then headed disgustedly back to the Grand Banks for four months of fishing, legitimate, this time. Consequently, when h'e returned to Port Pluto he found himself one of the last to hear. Kearney had headed for Port Pluto as soon as he'd gotten back to his ship. He'd gone to Galcouncil with a weird looking alien in tow, and made his pitch. Tt was quite simple. What one did was throw back the big ones and teach them to time trawl themselves. For this the fishermen received two percent of the big one's own catch. In a sense. Super had been right. Kearney's was a race of exploiters. But it took an honestly humane man lke Kearney to dream up a cycle of exploitation where nobody lost. Under his plan the future did indeed open like an infinite cornucopia -- of both raw materials and manpower -- a huge cone whose base lay gigagigayears in the future. Each layer had only to go out and educate the next, then take their nominal two percent. But two percent of infinity is infinity, and each layer had more than enough supporters on the next to sustain it. Not only was it infinitely easier all around, but no big ones would ever have to be processed. Bobby Macklin, returning from his four-month cruise, was among the last to know. The law had been in effect just about three days when he brought in the catch of his career and had it processed. A big one, his first and his last. Anyone's last. Qcdaxu iookiJtellj h, gang, he's back! Back from the lost lands, the same as ever, and a gladsome sight he is. Ageless, very cool... well, no; I was never that. Flash was -- Flash Gordon, star of Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, a huge, wonderful picture book made of the old Sunday newspaper series by Nostalgia Press, Box #, Franklin Square, New York #. But it's me tKafs back. The return one celebrates with' a book like this is one's own. There I am, with the snoell of cheap ink and Sunday afternoon carpet in my noslails. (Hell, I know there's a Flash Gordon still. I even know some of the people who've worked on him in recent years. I know their opinions, their voices, the color of their neckties, for God's sake. Quick -- what color was Alex Raymond's necktie?) But I'm assuming too much. Some of you may need updating Yes, Klaus, there really was a Flash Gordon, Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player, and he did pit himself against Ming the Merciless upon the planet Mongo, to which he had flown in the experimental rocket ship of the megalomaniacal Dr. Hans Zarkov, foremost scientific figure of the #'s. With him. Dale Arden, in a dumb red hat The present-day imposter, with' his doe eyes and tapering fingers, is a present-day imposter. There on Mongo -- where Zarkovs brain cleared, and the drawing improved, too -- the mighty Flash encountered the damnedest technological political situation ever made believable by mortal man. A giant electric octopod terrorized the free and independent polar kingdom of the proud Fria, queen of Frigia, sexy blonde, commander of the panoplyed snowbird lancers, mistress of a medieval palace to wHic' one traveled either by sled or rocketship, and stubborn holdout against the otherwise all-encompassing rule of the mighty Ming. Traitors by the dozens menace the tranquility of Arborea, an urban civilization of bow-bearing freemen ensconsed in the gigantic trees of what appears to be Mongo's Pacific Northwest, where Prince Barin and the Princess Aura hold out stubbornly against the otherwise all-encompassing rule of Ming the magnificent, evil genius and absolute ruler of all He surveys. Underfoot, the powermen pad on rubber boots, wealing airplane goggles, hating Ming, fixing his wiring and waiting for an Earthman to come along and point out that they do, literally, hold the power. Yes sir. And all girls wear clothes you can see through. Oh, yes, sir! A lex Raymond is a long time dead. He went off to World War II, and clods fell not on His grave but on his work. When he came back, he did some illustrations for Astounding -- not very good ones; somewhere. He had forgotten something -- and then he started a crime strip which was very good but lacked snowbird lancers. He crashed a car and died. But Flash has been waiting beck there all these years, along with you and me, waiting to be rediscovered along with you and me. Nearly every page of this big book is filled with more than Rasrmond's drawing -- that effect varied, as various people inked it, and several panels obviously never saw the inside of Raymond's brain at all; I wonder what happened to the episodes for #-# and #-#-#, neither of them signed. Momentary slips hardly matter, though. This book is filled with Ra # rmond's marvelous sense of story, which transcended mere logic and the fruits of reality. It struck hard at the wellsprings of hope; hope for the little bit of hero in all of us, hope that something would happen to take us out of ourselves and test us, hope that what the tests revealed would be the envy of man, woman and child. The drawing, by the way, is often marvelous. The absence of the color, which has been omitted from these full-size reprintings, is probably an advantage. It was clearly also an economic necessity. Even so, the book costs an arm and a leg -- #. But I've done my best to save that bad news for last. Surely there is some bank you could rob. I mean, at times Raymond very carefully invented a calligraphy of its own for Mongo, and these rather attractive traceries are occasionally shown in billboards or on store signs. But when Flash wanted to irritate Ming, he grabbed off one of his officers, stripped him, and sent him back to the Merciless, lettered in honest Yale block Can you pass it up? Come back to your Sunday self. C ryptozoic, by Brian Aldiss, on the other hand, is a novel that goes forward to itself, but not very well. Its major premise is "mind travel," wdiich is apparently a kind of time travel one gets into by taking a drug and adopting an appropriate mental attitude. It's not astral projection, or some temporal equivalent of it, for the traveler does absent himself from the here and now, retaining only the most tenuous of links with contemporaneity, leaving a bit of blood and a gobbet of tissue behind. He can take some things with him -- dothes, a motorbike, a tent, food -- even though these objects are not drugged. He needs to be able to take along a kind of machine called an "air leaker," or he couldn't breathe in the past... because he can't touch the past. The air leaker apparently can, at least well enough to somehow grab molecules of air and distempor them in sufficient concentration to keep the travder alive, if not ebullient. This is all right, because in all this book there is not one person who enjoys life, makes life better for anyone, says anything worth remembering, or accomplishes a clearcut triumph. Which is odd, because in this book a man proves conclusively that time runs exactly in reverse of how we think it does; when he dies, the very ages mourn at his inchrondescent pyre. Another man becomes the creator of immortal works of art. A third man overcomes great psychological odds in straining very close to love. But these occurrences, toward which the story seems to point, or on which it appears to pivot, are spoken of, or reported, or lectured upon. When shown at all, they are shown as if in coarse-grained silent black and white intrusion on a # Agfacolor underground movie about desolation. De-soul-ation. The sole achin'. The-soul-I-shun... You follow me? In weak tints, with camera either fixed too long or wobblishly hand-held. Cryptozoic sucks on and on and over through the same five minutes' worth of mood; when it exerts itself to tell us a little bit about the England (s) its people started from, it can tell us only that they are the bleaker the farther into the future they get. The hreo is less gifted, less emphatic, less filial, less likeable -- but his girl friend is no grubbier -- the more the world's calendar advances. He is no longer an artist, no longer a lover... not even of his mother... no longer a human being as he beats up a man with a golf club in an interrogation room scene that is to my knowledge unsurpassed in this field for reader uninvolvement. Aldiss's "science" breaks down constantly. We deal with a scale of unimaginable years -- from the beginning of the world to the very end -- and yet in his wanderings he occasionally cannot penetrate through a past tree, or a palace, because "it has been there too long" to be insubstantial! He has his air leaker, but he is astonished when the Dark Woman's gang can fire gas guns into their past. He and the other mind travelers are leaving feces stranded all over the past, but he doesn't stop to wonder where his exhalations go, what happens to motorbike exhaust... and he drinks "concentrated water." arp, do I? Hardly. The point is, Aldiss hardly cares what patch-up excuse he gives for his hero's doing or not doing the things he does in this story. Notion first, and all else second, he wants to tell us about isolation, degeneration, and all those other downhill things. Because he then wants to do something else -- pull off a tour de force chapter in which Stein the ein explains our pains by pushing the notion that time runs contrariwise to oxir perception of it -- that the ugly "future" of complication and all that other erected structure of civilization is in fact behind us, and that we are progressing into the simple, uncomplex, more talented "past" of the history which we remember because wHat we think of as memory is in fact precognition. Our actual memory -- of what we erroneously call the future -- is lousy. At least,  I think this what he wanted to do at one stage, for he surely went to a great deal of trouble to explain why his hero. Bush, would want to return to the womb. But either because he always planned to then confuse us further, or because he felt himself slipping sidewise through some sort of morass, or because it would have been un-good or uncool or un-self to actually come right out and make some sort of statement, he pulls out in the end with some babble about how it was all an insane dream. "Each reader must decide for himself" what this book is about, says Doubleday's blurb writer, and that's your tipoff. This book is a pretty good example of why the "new wave" of sf is evocative, often exciting, tive of the fact that, nevertlieless, it is just as easy as ever to lose control of a story. There can be no quarrel with an attempt to get out of the old ruts; the world is chilly, few of us are heroes, and not many ideals support much weight. It was always so, but perhaps there is something more valid for fiction to do than simply to inspire. Maybe it can, instead, show us ways in which we personally can cope, without at the same time demanding that we give up our jobs, tear up our mortages, and haunt hilltops, waiting to be picked up by talent scouts in flying saucers. But this is a useless book. It tells us that the writer thinks he's clever. It even proves that he is, indeed, nationally facile, and perhaps admirable for not having gone into doing advertising. Really, this is what it tells us, when all the words are gone by. What a pity. Tt may be that Keith' Laumer's associations with' the U.S. diplomatic corps were quite different from mine with another, but I have alwa # Ts felt the Retief stories, no matter how individually good -- or bad -- were fundamentally based either on an error of observation or an even less commendable catering to the supposed preconceptions of the audience. So I've alwa # Ts been cool to Retief, and thence to Laumer, because for years this was the level He appeared to be working at. But Earihblood, done with the late Rosel Brown, was something else again; and so, emphatically, is "The Day Before Forever" and "Thunderhead" (Doubleday, #), which is all Laumer, a yard wide, and all very good. These are two long stories, of which "Day" is far the longer. I imagine Laumer also ought to be given the credit for refusing to blow up a short novel into book length. "Thunderhead" is an excellently told, unexceptionable story about a man who does his duty. In a way, it's a surefire yarn -- the kind that can't miss. Yet this kind of story can be monstrously hard to write. The hero is more faithful, more persevering, more resolute, more staminous than you or I could be, and one slip by the writer in describing him or his ever-increasing problems could break the spell and turn lum into a figure of pure com. Where this kind of story gets its necessary tension, as a matter of fact, is in balancing the reader's true capabilities against the actions of this costume the author draws over him for a while. (Put seven league boots on . a man, and you have to convince him grating his bunions is worth it.) Seen in that light, what a writer does when he does a good job on a story like this is more of a feat than writing something by your own rules. However that may seem, "Thunderhead" ought to be read first, as a counterpoise to "Day", because the latter is a far more difficult story. U nderneath all the events is the action line -- the attempt of the uninformed, imarmed, totally alone, partially amnesiac hero to make sense out of and find room in a future society. It's a society which demonstrates in Scene One that you can die here like a beef steer without anyone's even wondering about your name or all those poignant antecedents locked in your memories. Over that are the twists; the Hero's multiple identities, the paperchase clues, the masked villain, the enigmatic ally, the shattering secret of the hero's past. There is nothing here that Van Vogt hasn't done, just as there is nothing in the character that isn't reminiscent of Heinlein, from dialogue on th'rougli some moments that make you think of Beyond This Horizon quite a lot. And yet there is a great deal of Laumer here, down where it coimts -- in the engine compartment. The rapid narrative drive of this story, the emotional involvement with the protagonist, and the emotional charge of the ending, are there because Laumer plans for them, works to sustain them, and begins by bringing to them an exact understanding of how to make them go. There is nothing mysterious about the separate elements of this story. You get an idea for a situation -- A does B because He is motivated to do so by C. This results in D, which he doesn't want, and so he now has to think of what to do to get E. (You substitute, for these various components, such things as "A becomes ruler of the world because he needs total power in order to restore life to his dead daughter," and you're off.) Then you conceal their linearity from the reader -- you "spin a good yam" -- by adopting a viewpoint within this framework of events, rather than one detached outside it Doing that, you immediately intrigue the reader just the amount required to keep him wondering what's going to happen next, without either mystifying him to the point where he becomes confused and loses interest, or letting him see ahead and become bored. Anyone can do it It's a child's play, as dozens of satirists Have proven, which will explain how come there are so many, many good stories written to ffie complete satisfaction of the standards of performance in this mode. No? You say there aren't many many good action stories being told any more? That people miss a good storyteller so badly that they still mourn Alex Raymond decades after his death? Well, I don't know. I was much younger, once, and things were simpler. I thought it would be easy. (I still don't like stories in which the easy is made easier by coincidence, by dumb luck, by auctorial intrusion, by hustling extra characters in out of the wings, by glossing over the hard parts with offstage voices and sound effects. I wonder if only the action modes are to prove to these well-known flaws.) And yet there are so few who write a story as good as "The Day Before Forever." I don't know. There must be something to it after all. New subscriptions and changes oi address require # weeks to process! I I "Thorinn, son of Goryat, stood in the darkness and listened. Stone hung heavy over his head, leagues of stone and earth, stretching upward black and silent. Behind him the sound of the cataract down which he had floated to this place had receded to a dull murmvu, and he could Hear the gurgle of lesser streams running away somewhere below Him. The falling curtains of water were all around Kim , gHostly silver and silent, pricked witlj tKe jewels of floating droplets. Drifting water-points burst on His lips witK tiny cool kisses. There were gaps in tKe falling curtains, tom by te irregular stone above. He put His Head through the widest of tKese openings, saw other broken slabs, other curtains of water beyond. Following the cool air, Ee made his way among tKe gray and silver curtains tHat Ktmg everywhere from the ceiling. Rivulets ran toward Kim underfoot among the slabs of stone, and Ee knew by this that the floor was slanting upward. At length the falling curtains of water grew less numerous, and the sound diminished to a mournful pattering behind him. Ahead, the cavern broke into a tortured complexity of shapes in which he found a narrow passage leading upward. He paused to tip out the water from his wallet and to dry his hair as well as He could with his hands; then Ke followed the passage. It coiled away ahead of him, alwa# upward, always rounded, irregular, dry and empty in the glow of His ligEt-box. He followed the passage, and at length it widened into a greater darkness. TEorinn stepped out into it cautiously, found himself in a narrow cavern half-cHoked with a pile of fallen stone. Beyond, in the far wall, he saw a jagged opening. He climbed the Heap of stones and peered in. Light glimmered back from objects whose forms Ee could not make out. A breath of air came from the opening, but it was slow and stale. He hesitated a moment, then climbed through the gap in the wall and dropped to the level floor below. Silence pressed in upon His ears, a silence more profound even than that of the passage behind Km. On every side stood massive objects piled one on another, with slender rods between them. The floor he stood on was perfectly level and as smooth as ice. It was not stone, but some gray, greasy material which seemed faintly warm to the touch. The air was dry and warm. The huge columns stood in rows; their tops disappeared in the darkness. T Eorinn moved between the columns, touching them curiously as he passed. The rods, of cold metal, were racks on which were piled bundles and bales, and other things for which TEorinn had no words, all covered with some cool, water-smooth substance. He began to realize that he must be in some giant's storehouse, and he paused, listening; but the silence was unbroken. He slid his hands curiously around one of the bundles. It was so smooth and heavy that it was hard to find any purchase on it, but he dragged it out at last and lowered it to the floor. It was almost as broad as his arms could span, vaguely oblong but with all its comers rounded, like a huge gray cheese. He looked in vain for any seam or opening; the smooth surface was unbroken. Next he tried to cut it with his sword. At the first touch, the covering opened like a mouth. Thorinn put his fingers under the edges, marveling at the thinness and transparency of the stuff, finer than the skin of an onion. He pulled, and the tear lengthened easily. The covering split and tore without resistance, and he peeled it off in great rustling sheets. Underneath was a gray soft substance like bread dough; he could push it in, but the Hollow filled out again at once, nor could he tear it with his fingers. Again he used the sword. The gray stuff cut readily, but would not tear like the other. When he pried at the gasH he Had made, sticky-looking fibers at the bottom clung stubbornly together. He slashed it deeper, and at last it gave way, opening in a slit as the transparent stuff had done, and he saw something else beneath it: a gleam of russet and gold. He tore away the gray substance in lumps, threw thesoi aside. In the glow of his ligHt-BoX a bundle of cloth lay revealed, and he caught his breath. Rich and soft beyond belief it was, russet and gold and scarlet in shimmering patterns that were not printed on the fabric but woven into it. He unfolded and unwrapped the cloth, spreading it out on the floor as he went; it covered the whole width of the aisle, and still there was more. TKorinn dropped it and stared at it in helpless wonder. Such a piece of stuff was beyond price; he could ask what He liked for it. This one bale had made Kim rich. And what was in all the others? He attacked a second bundle, found it contained another cloth like the first, colored in deep purple, royal blue, peacock green. In a fury of impatience, he ran to the next aisle, foimd a rack of smaller bundles, some of which, no bigger than His head, had fallen to the floor. He chose one, slashed it open. Inside was a glittering device of brass and ebony, beautifully made, though he could not imagine its use. The next was a pretty jug with a handle and a spout to pour from. He tilted it to see why it was so Heavy, but only a single drop of moisture came out. The next was a black-and-redpattemed box in which, nested in purple velvet, lay dozens of tiny Ixiglit figxirines of men and ladies. Stunned witH joy, He ran to tfie next aisle and. found otEer outlandisH engin; tHe next: Yenmetal knives smaller tHan fiis finger, witH tiny blades sHarper tEan lust sword; tHe next: Eammers, wedges, no bigger tEan tEe knives, and other tiny tools wEose use He could not guess. TEe fever to open more and yet more bundles made Him forget weariness, cold, tEirst and Eunger. He found clotEing -- wide-skirted robes. Heavy witH brocade; tunics and breeks of gossamer stuff ; shoes, marvelously tEin and supple. He found more engines, some with parts tHat turned, some that did not move at all. He found rings, bracelets, ropes of jewels that spilled in a flood across the floor. RicHes piled up around him, and still He was aware that he Had barely begun to loot this incredible treasurehouse. Vnce he paused long enough to gather all his trove into one place and, sorting through it, to try to decide wHat He would take with him, for it was obvious tHat he could not carry even a tenth of what he had uncovered so far. Then the blank gray faces of tEe unopened parcels drove Him to jErenzy again, and against all common sense He attacked bundles larger tHan any He Had yet opened, gray oblongs taller than He was, ripping open tHeir fronts without removing them from the racks, merely to see wHat was inside them. (Cabinets of iolisHed wood inlaid witH nacre. More engines. Chairs witH arms curved like serpents. More bales of clotH, ten times larger than tHe others.) Then for weariness alone He forebore awhile and sat with His Head on His Heavy arms. Hunger and thirst returned. He tipped up His wallet and drank what little water was in it, but it was not enough. He began to think of finding some container and going back through the caverns for water. THe wallet would do, but he wanted to keep that dry to Hold his treasures. He could put some of the smallest things in it, the jewels perhaps, and for the rest make a bundle to carry on his back. But before that he must sleep, and before sleep he must have water to quench His thirst. So He turned the problem back and forth, a little thick-headed in his weariness, and came to the same conclusion ten times over, but did nothing because it was so much pleasanter not to move. Then he remembered the jug, and opening his eyes, which' He Had closed in order to think better, He saw it at the edge of the pile He Had made on the floor. He got up wearily, thinking of the long way back through the tunnels. When he took up the little jug, it seemed to him that it was heavier than before. He shook it, and it gurgled. Without thinking, he tipped it over. Water splashed on his feet. IThorinn righted the jug and stared at it. He shook it again, and it still gurgled. He put the spout cautiously to his lips, tilted it up, tasted. It was water, cold and pure. He put his Head back and drank in great gulps until the jug was empty. To make sure, he held it upside down. A single drop fell, then another, then no more. He set the jug down, sat by it and watched it awhile, but nothing happened. He picked it up, turned it over: water ran out, a thin stream that stopped almost at once. But how could there be any, when the jug had been dry a few moments since? T Te put the jug down again and set himself to watch it, resolved to wait longer this time so that there could be no mistake. But he grew impatient and, telling himself that the jug would do well enough by itself, he turned his back on it and opened another bundle. This contained an engine of some sort -- a gray box with rounded edges, one thicker than the others. It had no lid; it was open but not quite empty. The bottom of the box was filled with a smooth bulge of glass or crystal. It was well made, but not especially beautiful, and he had engines enough already. Perhaps it was time to go and look at the jug? No, he had left it alone longer the first time. He picked up his light-box and walked down an aisle he had not yet explored. There were many small bundles here. He took one at random and ofened it. Inside the nest of gray dough-stuff there were dozens of little boxes with bright markings on them, green, violet, yellow, red. He found the trick of opening them -- you put your thumbnail under one edge of the lid, and the box sprang apart. Inside was an oblong piece of some cheesy substance. Thorinn sniffed it, then tore off a crumb and tasted it. It was cheese -- bland, with an unfamiliar flavor, but undeniably cheese. He ate the whole piece in two bites, then opened another box, and another, and ate until his belly was full. Weariness forgotten, he carried the rest of the boxes back to his treasure heap. He picked up the little jug; it gurgled. He could not see inside it very well, but it seemed to be at least half full. He drank deeply, set the jug down. The water still remaining made a pleasant splash. He sat down with his back against one of the bales of cloth. The box-shaped engine lay nearby on the floor. Thorinn lazily reached for itwith one foot and hooked it nearer. It slid, checked en some irregularity in the floor, then tipped forward on its heavy edge and stood upright. Insde, the crystal seemed to flicker with colored light for an instant. "Here, that's odd," said Thorinn, sitting up. The box flickered again, and a voice spoke. "Thorinn was on his feet without knowing how he had got there. His sword was in his hand. He whirled, looked wildly this way and that, then circled the heap of treasure and peered behind the columns, looked down the aisles. He listened, heard nothing but the pounding of his own heart. He went back to the box and stared at it dubiously. "Was that you?" he demanded. The voice spoke again, incomprehensibly. It was a man's deep voice, calm and measured; but where was it coming from? "Are you in there?" Thorinn asked, stopping to peer into the box. The voice replied. The dark crystal lighted up. Thorinn saw a confused pattern of light and shadow; then part of it moved, and he saw a tiny crouched figure, dressed in stained leather, with a sword in its hand. When he moved, it moved. "Is that mq?" he cried. The voice said, "That me?" Thorinn looked at the box with deep distrust, withdrew a little and sat down facing it. The crystal had gone dark; now it lighted up again, and he was looking as if down a long tunnel at the same figure, with a column of stacked bundles behind it. It was like looking at oneself in a mir- ror. Yet when he raised his sword in his right hand, the figure raised its sword in its right Hand, not its left, as in a proper mirror. "You," said the voice. "Yes, it's me," Thorinn replied. "How do you do that?" The crystal went dark. "How do me do that?" said the voice. "Yes, how do you do?" asked Thorinn impatiently. "What's the matter? Why do you talk that way?" "Why do me talk that way?" Thorinn felt baffled, "Yes, why do you talk that way?" The crystal lighted again. "You talk." "Well, of course I talk. I talk much better than you." In the crystal, the tiny figure seemed to rush forward without moving until its face filled the box. Thorinn fell silent, but in the box he saw his own lips moving. "You talk?" asked the voice. The face nisHed forward again, and now he saw only the mouth and chin. "You talk?" Convinced now that he had to deal with an outlander or witling, Thorinn said, "Yes, I talk," and gesturing toward his own mouth, he spoke with exaggerated clarity, opening his mouth wide with each word. "I -- talk. Talk. You understand?" "Talk," said the voice. "I understand." The crystal darkened, lighted again, and Thorinn saw a hand. It was his own hand, but when he moved his hand, the hand in the box did not move. "That's my hand," he said. "I said so didn't I?" "You said so. Talk." In the crystal, now he saw only one finger; the rest of the hand had turned all misty. "That's my finger." "That's your finger. Talk." Now he saw his thumb, and he told the voice what that was called -- and then his arm, his leg, his foot, his toes, his head, his ears, his eyes and so on until he lost patience and stood up. "You ask too many questions," he said. "You ask." "All right, who are you? How did you get in that box?" "Box?" "Yes, box." Thorinn squatted, touched the box. "This thing. This box. How did you get in?" The crystal lighted, and he was looking at the box. A box inade the box. The box was not lighted and it stood on a yellow surface. "This box," said the voice. "Yes, the box. How did you get inside it?" "I are this box. Talk." The crystal glowed, and Thorinn saw a man in stiff scarlet robes, with a shimmer of green and gold behind him. "That's a man. He must be rich." The man disappeared, and fie saw a woman with fair hair, dressed in similar robes. "That's a woman. Is it his wife?" So they went on, and Tfiorinni told the box what a boy wag called, a girl, a tree, a leaf, a branch; but sometimes the box showed him engines or otfiec shapes he had never seen before, and he would say, "Wfiat's tfiat?" or "I don't know what tfiat is." At last his head began to droop, and the pictures in the box grew so blurred that fie could not make them out at all. "Talk," said tfie box. His head came up witfi a painful jerk, and he realized tfiat he had been asleep for just an instant. "No more talk," fie said thickly. "Good night." The box said nothing. Thorinn, too dizzy to get up, rolled onto a pile of folded cloth, pulled an edge of it over him for a blanket and was instantly asleep. II T Ten he awoke, he had for'  gotten all that had Happened and at first did not know where he was. TJhen joy filled him when he saw his treasures. He pottered about among them for a while, examining this and that, drank from the magical jug, then crawled through' the Hole in the wall to relieve himself outside, came back, opened one of the boxes of cheese for his breakfast and began to plan what he should do next. He would take only a few of the choicest things, and a supply of food, for his intention now was to try to come up into the Midworld as near as possible to the Highlands and to walk the rest of the distance, carrying his pack. Once there, he would sell some of his treasures to buy land and horses ; later, he would come back to the cavern, taking care he was not followed: he would bring a pack train, and this time carry home enough treasure to keep him for the rest of his life. Thinking of this, he began to worry about brigands and to think that he would certainly have to be accompanied by some armed men. They would have to be trusted men, so that they would not rob him themselves; yet, even so, he would have to conceal from them the place where he went imderground, so that they should not follow him. These thoughts gave him a headache and made Him feel out of sorts, and he concluded that it was not easy to be rich. The box had said nothing since he awakened, and he was glad of that for it had tired him with its chatter the day before. It was a clever box in its way, for it pronounced everything perfectly and never had to be told anything more than once, but in other ways it was very stupid and seemed never to have heard of the commonest things. He had another drink from the jug and set off straight down tHe aisle, meaning to follow it to the end. The tall columns marched past him with their heads buried in the darkness. There was no sound but his own footsteps. Here and there small parcels had been knocked to the floor, and he conjectured that an earth-shock must have done that; probably that was the cause, too, of the gap in the wall through which he had entered. Before that, the cavern must have been sealed up... for how long? He stopped, listened. The quality of the silence in the cavern was the same, a feeling of vast space. When he scraped his foot on the floor, no sharp echo came back from ahead, where the wall of the cavern ought to be. When he had gone another hundred paces, he stopped again, and it was just the same. He had supposed this must be a small cavern, like those outside; but what if it were huge? The thought of so much treasure, endless, uncountable rows of it, oppressed him instead of raising his spirits. After a moment he turned and started back. Tn no time at all, it seemed, he was back at his heap of treasure. "Box," he said. There was no answer, and the box did not light up. Alarmed, he took a step nearer. "Box, are you there?" "I am here," said the box. "Well, why didn't you answer before?" "You did not ask." "Oh." Thorinn thought about this a moment. "Well, how big is this cave?" "What is this cave?" "This cave," Thorinn said, waving his arms. "This place here, where we are." "What is how big?" "How big," Thorinn said, waving his arms again by way of explanation. "How many ells?" "What are ells?" Thorinn sat down on the floor and stared at the box in exasperation. "Ells are -- well, anybody knows that. Ells are how long something is." He spread his hands apart. "This is an ell." The box said, "How long are you?" "You mean how tall. Two ells. I'm two ells tall." In the crystal, two yellow marks appeared. "How many?" "Two." One of the marks vanished. "How many?" "One." Two more appeared. "How many?" "Three." The box, Thorinn realized, did not even know how to count. So they went on until they got to twenty-one, and then the box said, "Two tens are twenty?" "Yes, that's right, and three tens are thirty." "And four tens?" "Four tens, are forty. Five tens are fifty, six tens are sixty." At a hundred and ten, the box stopped him again. "Ten tens are a hundred?" "Yes." "This cave is eight hundred fifty ells long, fifteen ells tall." In the crystal, a brightly lighted little hollow shape appeared. It was like a very long, narrow box. At "eight hundred fifty ells long," a yellow line appeared from one end to the other. At "fifteen ells taU," a short yellow line appeared, standing erect, crosswise to the other. Then a third line appeared, across Hie widtK of tfie box. "Three hundred nineteen ells." "Three hundred nineteen ells wide?" "Yes, three hundred nineteen ells wide." "And eight hundred ells long?" "Eight hundred fifty ells long." Thorinn was silent in amazement. "Is it all full f things?" "What is full?" "I mean is part of it empty, Of is it all full of stacks of things like this?" "It is all full of stacks of things." Thorinn tried to imagine it and could not. Where could such an incredible accumulation of treasures have come from?" "Who made this cave?" he asked. "What is made?" 'horinn tried to explain and grew hot-faced from exasperation. "Well, look here," He said finally and picked up his light-box. "I made this box. I cut these pieces of wood and glued them together, and I fitted the pieces of mica in here at the ends -- well, one of them is gone now, I lost it in the river. Then I made the lid and put it on here, and then the box was made, you see. I made it." In the crystal, an image of Thorinn appeared, fitting little pieces of wood together. It was ver in a moment, and the figure held a light-box in its hand. "You made this box?" "That's right. Now who made all this? Who made you?" "A box made me." "You mean you made yourself?" "I mean I made me?" "WeU, did you?" "A box made this box." In the crystal appeared a huge black engine, out of the end of which, ne after another, were dropping little gray boxes, each with' a glint of crystal inside it. They floated away out of sight; it made Thoriim dizzy to watch them. "You mean an engine. An engine made you -- and all these other things?" "Engines made me and all these other things." "Well, but who made the engines?" "Engines made the engines." Thorinn gave it up. He made the box show him the picture of the cave again, then what was around it. In the new picture, the cave was a tiny bright shape at the center, while all around it other transparent passages ran off in every direction, some twisting, some straight. His idea had been to find out the best way back to the Midworld, but as he asked the box to show him more and still more, he grew fascinated by the maze of passages, caverns and shafts crisscrossing each other; there seemed to be no end to it. New lines kept floating into the picture, while tHe old ones grew smaller and closer together. "How did it ever come to be like that?" he asked. "The whole world?" In the crystal, the network of lines vanished and a man's face appeared, brown and smiling; at least Thorinn supposed he was a man, though he was beardless. His black hair was cut short and combed back, exposing his ears and forehead. His lips moved. After a moment the box said, "This is the world." Behind the brownfaced man a big green and blue mottled ball was floating, against a background of darkness. The man's lips went on moving, but no sound came. The ball receded, grew very small.  "What is he saying?" Thorinn asked. "Let me hear what he says." XTow the man himself began  speaking, but it was gibberish; Thorinn could not understand a word. The ball was tiny now, and to one side of it, over the man's head, a dot of yellow light appeared. It grew slowly; suddenly it was very big and bright, and Thorinn could see flames leaping from its surface. Then it aU vanished, and instead he was looking at a green landscape dotted with men and women who were all standing looking up at something huge and flat and silvery that was receding slowly overhead, as if somehow they had brought the sky down and now were raising it again. The man's voice was still speaking, but Thorinn could not see where he was. Now the sky was high overhead where it belonged, and little dark engines were moving across it. Then it changed again, and they were underground, watching a huge engine that ate its way into the solid rock, leaving a bright round tunnel behind it. Then there were scenes of great caverns full 'of engines and people, and floating egg-shaped things that crossed the caverns and darted along tunnels, up and down shafts, all brightly lit, shining. Then the brown man again, and behind him a picture like the drawing of the Underworld the box had shown him before, only it was circular, with many rings one inside the other and four straight lines radiating from the smallest circle of all, in the center. Then the circle changed into a ball again; this time it was white. Watching these pictures made Thorinn uneasy in a way he could not understand; it was like being afraid, and because there was nothing to be afraid of, this made him angry. The brown man was still speaking; the yellow point of light had appeared, and the silvery ball, itself shrunken to a dot, was crawling away from it toward a cloud of other bright dots. Now the other dots swung, came closer, darting forward like frostflakes in a storm until only one Hung in the center of the crystal, growing larger and brighter. "That's enough," Thorinn said. The crystal went dark. "I haven't all day to sit watching such stuff," he said. "It's all nonsense anyhow," and He began turning over his Heap of treasures, trying to decide what to take and what to leave behind. Ill "The magic jug was a problem. He thought of hanging it from his belt, but that would be awkward; and unless He could contrive some sort of lid for it, down his leg. Whereas if he put it in his wallet, it would take up too much room. He could fill the jug with jewels, but then would the water run over? He remembered that when he had first taken the jug from its wrapping, there had been no water in it or, at any rate, only a drop. Was it being wrapped up that made the difference? It was worth trying, anyhow. He cut a piece of the transparent stuff, wrapped it around the jug after pouring the water out and tied it tightly with strips of the same material. Later, when he came back from a trip to gather food, he opened it, and it was still almost dry. He filled it to the brim with jewels, wrapped it again and put it in his wallet. The smallest piece of cloth he had was far too bulky to carry, but he cut off a strip half an ell wide and as long as he was tall. He spread this on the floor and rolled up His cHeeseboxes and other things in it -- clothing, shoes, the little figurines, tools and knives, the box, some leftover jewels -- turning the ends in as he went. He did this twice over before he had the roll packed to his liking, with the heavier things in the middle, the food outside where it could be easily reached. He tied it with strips erf cloth and with other strips contrived loops which would fit over his shoulders. The box had said nothing while he was packing it, nor had he spoken to it. Th'orinn felt a little hangdog about this, as if He had been lacking'in politeness; but he reminded himself that the box was only an engine, and it probably did not care. At any rate, the box had said that the cave was eight hundred fifty ells long and three hundred nineteen ells wide; and in the picture it had shown him, there had been a tiny shaft through its roof to a tunnel above. It was near one end of the cavern as regards length and in e middle as regards width. If he could find it without wasting too much time in the search, it would be the quickest and best way out of the cavern, and Thorinn thought he knew how it could be done. He set off down the aisle, counting his paces, and when he had gone a hundred and fifty ells. He turned to his right and began counting again. When He had gone six hundred ells, a gray wall loomed up ahead; he had reached the end of the cavern. He swung himself up onto the nearest rack and began to climb it. The bottoms of the stacks dis appeared: he was climbing in the fitful glow of his light-box witK darkness all around. In the silence, the rack with' its gray bundles seemed to glide downward past his body, as if he were not climbing at all, but hanging in midair and pulling down more and more of the rack like an endless serpent. In a few moments he saw a dim gray reflection overhead. It was the ceiling, and when he stood on top of the stack a moment later he could reach up and touch it with his hands. He could see the tops of other stacks to left and right, gray hummocks rising out of the darkness, but there was no sign of any opening in the roof of the cave. He turned away from the cavern wall, leaped to the next stack, then to the next, examining the ceiling from each. When he had traversed ten stacks in this way, he leaped the aisle to the next row and began working back along it, meaning to trace a path around and around the original ten stacks, like a man winding string on a twig, until he found the opening; but he had hardly begun his second cast when it appeared, off to his left: a round black hole in the ceiling. 'p'he shaft was circular and three spans wide. Standing under it and stretching up his arm with the light-box, he thought he could make out a brownish something that might be a shield closing it at the top. Standing on his toes, he could just get his hands onto the smooth walls of the shaft; but that was no matter. He planted himself directly under the opening, bent his knees, leaped. As he shot up into the opening, he put out his arms and knees, braced himself, came to rest. A thrust and a wriggle, and he was half an ell farther up; now he could support himself with' hands and feet on one side, back against the other. Hampered a little by tHe bundle across Kis sHoulders, He still was able to climb rapidly enougK. In a few moments His Head was toucHing tfie brown Hollow disk tfiat closed tKe sHaft. He toucHed it, and it swung aside; a black cusp widened to a circle. He was up, tfirougK it into darkness tHat turned suddenly to a flicker of pale lit. As those vast arcHing shapes exploded around him in a kind of silent sizzling, TKorinn flattened Himself to the floor. Tfie cold shield was under His Hand; He slapped it frantically, felt it swing, felt tKe cool upward breath', then tKe sKaft walls were burning His Hands and knees as He braked His fall; tHe sHield swung over His Head, and tfie light was gone. With' pounding Heart, THorinn Hung in tHe sHaft and stared upward. There was no sound. He tried to remember wKat He Had seen: vast arcs of ligHt that swooped up flickering into tKe darkness . '... WKat could it Have been? He was ready to let go and drop instantly, if tKe shield should begin to turn; but nothing Happened. At last He nerved Himself to climb tKe shaft again. He put His Hand on the sHield, turned it carefully. A lozenge of darkness appeared; there was no sound, no scent of danger. THorinn widened tHe opening until it was black and round above Him. The lights, whatever they were, were gone completely. With painstaking caution He thrust His head ifp; then, bracing Himself to hold the i sHield open, raised his arm witfi tfie light-box. Darkness. He raised Himself a little. Head and sHoulders through the opening; and a sudden flicker burst almost under His chin, ran away swooping and shimmering upward in multiple arcs... Wfien He ducked His Head down, the flickering died; darkness returned. After a moment he raised Himself again. The lights sprang up, flickering, swooping far overhead. Tfiey steadied, burned clear and cold. TKorinn raised Himself a little more, cautiously, tKfen still more, and finally climbed out. IV T T e was standing at tKe bottom of a vast tunnel wKose walls curved up to become tfie ceiUng an incredible distance overKead. The lines of light ringed it; the nearest, only an ell away, was a white ribbon that curved up, up, growing thinner until it was no more than a bright thread above. On either side of it were others, set three ells apart. In one direction they were dazzling bright, in the other ihucH dimmer and more diffuse; He coimted twenty of eacK. The reason for tKe difference, Be saw now, was tfiat lEe rings were ligfited only on one side, so tKat in one direction Be saw not tBe ligBts tBemselves but their reflections in tBe tunnel wall. As Be look down tBe tunnel, the farthest ones were perfect upright circles, but tBose nearer to him grew fatter at tfie bottom until they were vast egg-sBapes that leaned togetfier overhead. He was trembling; wfiy Bad tBe box not made Bim understand how huge tfiese tiumels were? He felt himself tiny and exposed; the distant rings were like giants' eyes staring. He glanced for comfort at the closed shield in the floor, then leaned to examine the nearest ring more closely. Tfie floor was of some smooth, Bard substance; embedded in it, tfie ring stood up two spans fiigfi, Bollow on tfie bright side, flat on tfie other, with a flat dark edge tfie breadth of his Band. He touched tfie dark surface cautiously, then the bright; one was as cool as the other. He Hopped over it and took a stride toward the next ring. Far down at tfie black end of tfie tunnel, there ws a flicker: a new ring inside the otfiers. Tfiorinn stared at it; something was wrong. He turned, counting tfie bright rings, and tfiere were still twenty. He began to walk in long floating strides down tfie middle of the tunnel. Each time Be soared over one of the rings, a new one appeared ahead; the eye of blackness at the end of tfie tunnel remained always the same He thought of the pictures in the box and of the egg-shaped things that darted along the tunnels, up and down the giant shafts. And tfie lights followed them wfierever they went, so tfiat wfiere they were, there was ligfit; and wfien they had passed, the tunnel waited in darkness... He began to move faster, tfien to run, in order to see the bright rings run on ahead. A kind of exhilaration took him, and He ran faster and faster, as if fie could catch the fleeing rings of light. The tunnel slipped by Him in sepulchral silence, and again fie began to feel that Be was not moving at all, but posturing motionless in the air while the illusory tunnel flowed past him, out of one nothingness into another. Without warning, the black eye at the end of the tunnel flared bright. Thorinn stumbled to a halt, arms flailing. What Bad been a black disk an instant ago was now a globe of light, striped with faint dark lines as if it were a spinning top, and for a moment the illusion was so strong that fie almost turned to flee, certain tfiat the monstrous globe, which filled the tunnel, was whirling down upon him. Then he saw that it was not bulging, but Hollow; He was looking througH tHe end of the tunnel into some vast lighted space beyond. H s he approached, the last ring of the tunnel grew enormous around him, and he saw that the space beyond was a great shaft, striped with horizontal rings of light. Where the tunnel met the shaft, it flared out smoothly above and below; the floor dropped away with deceptive gentleness, like water pouring over the lip of a chasm, and the light-rings became ovals instead of circles. Using them as a ladder, Thorinn found that he could venture down the slope; and now he saw his way upward. To either side, the upright rings gave way to the horizontal rings of the shaft. He had only to descend to the lowest ring in the flared mouth of the tunnel, then step onto the nearest horizontal ring and begin to climb. The dark upper surface of the ring was flat and level and two spans wide; he was able to walk on it with ease, knowing that if he stumbled he could reach up to catch himself against the lighted surface of the ring above. He was aware of the gulf beside him, but tried not to think of it Above, the shaft was lighted for sixty ells, then vanished into darkness. Below -- Some perversity made him want to see down into the depths of the shaft, even though it meant that he had to lean outward, bracing his hands against the overhanging lip of the ring above. It was the same below, or almost the same -- twenty rings of soft light merging into one another, then blackness. But in that blackness, close to the edge on which he stood, burned a fierce blue-white point of light. It was tiny and unwinking; he could not tell how far away it was, but he thought it must be very deep, or he would have been able to see it before. He gazed downward awhile without moving, then straightened. He was dizzy, and he shook his head to clear it. The sight of fected him profoundly, in a way he could not understand. The brown man speaking His gibberish, and the tiny dots of light that moved... He could not think, standing here on the narrow ledge. After a moment he toned back to the mouth of the tunnel and climbed the rings again until the wall began sloping back steeply, and he could sit down without taking off his pack and lean his back against it, with his legs dangling over the gulf. Whatever he did, he must rest, eat and drink. He opened his wallet and took out a box of clieese. He unwrapped tKe magic jug and set it beside Kim, witHout troubling to empty out tfie jewels. After a little he tipped it to fiis mouth and found, fie fiad fioped, that tfiere was water in it, enough to satisfy his tfiirst. Wfien he had finished, fie wrapped it up again. The question was what was he going to tell people wfien fie got back? Nothing fiad turned out as he expected. Tfie eartfi fiad not grown colder as fie descended; here in the shaft it was only as cool as a spring morning in Hovenskar. As for demons and giants, he had met none of them. How could it have come about that the Underworld was so different from what people believed? It seemed to Thorinn that tfie vast emptiness was speaking to him, trying to convey some meaning which he could not quite grasp. He had touched it again and again, in the treasurehouse, in the caverns, in the dark tunnels and passageways, and eacH time it had slipped away from him. He began to grow angry with himself, for of course the only thing to do was to go straight up the shaft to the Midworld. Jle put the jug back in his wallet, climbed down and worked his way out on the horizontal ring again. He leaned out once more to look at that tiny, brilliant point of light; and it was still there, unmoving. 'here fiad been a word tfiat the brown man spoke, over and over, wfien fie was talking of tfie bright dots that moved in darkness: star. Coidd that be a "star," down there, in the depths of tfie Underworld? Perhaps if fie knew wfiat a star was, fie would know wfiat the brown man fiad been tr#ung to say about tfie world; perhaps fie would even learn why it was that all these great works, made by man, were now empty of man. And now some demon began to whisper to him tfiat it could not be so very far to tfie bottom of the shaft, tfiat fie could soon climb down and see tfie star, then climb back, with no harm done; and although fie knew this was perverse and foolish, fie could not resist it. After all, wfiat had fie ever gained by caution? And how could He go back to the Midworld knowing that He Had Had the chance to see such a marvel and had refused it? When he knew that his mind was made up, fie felt a trembling of fear in his belly. But He knelt, put fiis weight on his hands; he let fiimself swing over and began to climb down tfie shaft toward the center of the Eartfi. HEl Ea oil on the floor. After the Trouble. Clide." Instructor made a short, sharp and sibilant sound. Immediately, the classroom was filled with one of those ominous silences that were becoming so common lately. While she made those faint stuttering sounds to herself, everyone waited in quiet, rigid terror. near the back, breathing deeply and slowly, controlling his fear and attentively watching the glittering flatness of the Instructor's scanner. He knew that these things often indicated that someone would be sent to the Dean's office for a Special Examination, but a good student such as he was did not break into trembling perspiration at the mere threat of a Special Examination. He kept telling himself this with mute intellectual vehemence, while his knees trembled under his silver rnail tunic and a trickling rivulet of perspiration slid down his spine. Involuntarily, his eyes dropped to the desk in front of him. Last week, lAC had been there, as he had been for the past sixteen could remember. Then, somehow, he had made a mistake, probably a missed command for which he couldn't give an explanation. At any rate, he had been called up to the Dean's office for a Special Examination. He Had failed, as practically everybody else did these days, and Had been promptly expelled from tKe University. Dim, Katf-formed images of imagination as He considered tfie Outside World, wHere lAC was now. Beyond the impregnable gates of this comfortable University lay that war-torn ruin of a dying planet, a region of savages, kijustice and bestiality, ruled by idiot renegades. The Savages Had if they Had already eaten him. crisp, level voice of the Instructor. "Eyes front!" terrified calm, as he raised his eyes from the empty desk to the scanner where they belonged. "Recite," she ordered. "Define the term 'education.' " "Click. By education is meant the training and disciplining of those beings who can be benefitted by such' improvement. Such' as humans and some of the higher animals." Qilence for a long moment. Then the Instructor said, "InacAC. Education is the leading of an organic intellect into higher orders of perfection of knowledge and discipline. Note the word 'or#  ganic'. Do you know why that is included in the definition, HE"Because," He replied witfi quick student's logic, "robots do not Have to be educated." "Inaccurate," stated tfie Instructor calmly. "THe robotic intelligence not only does not Have to be educated, it cannot be educated. Tfie full perfection of its mode of action is already complete in its first operation. Perfection, in tKe sense of Having achieved tHe ultimate in its development, is intrinsic to tKe robotic being. Robots do not learn. Except for accidental information of a superfidal nature, tfiey already know all that is necessary for full functionability wKen they are turned on. Tfiis is true even of those robots wKo Have a curiosoAC, do you know wKat a curiosoreflex is?" "Click. It is a random-information-seeker." AC dutifully continued his memorized recitation. "It is included in all primary control computers, of whicK only one remains in service Here at the University. Organic intellects Have a similar S#rstem for the random study of potentially useful information, which is called curiosity because of its resemblance to the curioso. Like most oth'er organic faculties. However, it is subject to individual voluntary control, and therefore is not as efficient as the curioso." "Very wll," said the Instructor. She Hummed and buzzed and clicked for a few moments, after whicK she added, "This is a class not Robot Circuitry. Kindly stick to the subject in the future." The Instructor was briefly silent again, as her scanner examined the student listing before calling on another boy. "Click," piped the boy. "Describe the purpose of education." "The purpose of education," tones, "is to develop the human mind so that it may approach the natural perfection of the robotic intelligence as closely as its limited faculties will permit." H is voice went on in rote reciwas wandering again. He glanced at the empty desk in front of Him and wondered what it was really like out there in the Outside World where there were no robots any more with their beautiful shiny faces, but only animals and culty in visualizing a Human being like himself living as an animal, but he knew that it was so. He had seen them once from that window in the Dean's office. He pictured himself marching out the low, triple-sealed gate, as lAC had been forced to do, and falling into the Hands of the wild, barking savages who alwa#S waited there for just that very thing. And there was good reason for them to wait, too. The University expelled somebody almost every week lately. AC?" he suddenly heard the Iiistructor annoimce in a loud voice. Terrified, he looked around and saw that the class period was over and that the other students were filing out into the corridor in an orderly line, while there he was -- still standing at his desk. "Her," he mumbled, "somebody spilled oil in the corridor. X could smell it." Spilled oil. He knew, was always a matter for legitimate concern. And oil was always being spilled. "What does oil in the corridor have to do with your time sense?" asked the Instructor. "It is a waste. It should be reported." "It has already been reported," said the Instructor, dismissing him. "Pay better attention in the future." Half ran toward the door. admonished Him. "Stiffly. And less af that random motion. oil." down and walked with' tKe correct, measured pace, his shoulders tKrown back, head erect, eyes forward, mind blank. Or almost blank, at least. That unadmitted terror was still there. He managed to fall in at the end of the line and followed the rest of the students down the long, cluttered, oil-stained corridor, down the steps, down more dirty corridors and more steps through the huge building until they finally reached the dormitory level. There he filed in with the rest of the class, a pitifully small group of students in a hall built for thousands, walking slowly and precisely past the rows of cubicles until they came to their own. ter the rest had stopped, becatise he was out of His regular place in the line. Fearfully, aware of the all-seeing eye of the Monitor, he moved up to His cubicle, stopped and waited. Like all the other students, he stood and waited for the command, listening to the disciplined rustle of their colleagues as they also breathed and waited, every nerve alert. There was a sudden rush of sound as the other students turned in a body and walked into ing he had missed the command again, quickly turned himself and took one step across the threshold. the Monitor. "Click." He froze where he was, one foot inside the cubicle, the other foot still in the corridor. "Moving too jerky. What's the matter, didn't you get the command?" "Click. I got it," he lied. "Why the delay?" "There was some oil spilled in AC suggested hopefully. "Out of the comer of his eye, he saw that another student had unwisely paused to listen to the discussion. The Monitor saw it too, of course, and snapped, "Mind blank!" and the erring boy quickly scurried on inside his cubicle. Monitor went on. "What does oil in the classroom corridor have to do with your time-command sense?" "It is such a waste," said HEexcuse that he had not used so recently. None came. "It was -- you know -- " His voice trailed off. The Monitor hummed an offFrantically the boy thought, his well trained mind racing around in an inaudible flutter of synapses and the gallop of mgent ideas. He thought of lAC and the Outside World and the Special Examination he might have to take if he couldn't figure out an acceptable excuse for his failure. He knew that the reason why he had missed the command was a preoccupying fear, but to admit such a thing wduld be disastrous. "There was oil," he said lamely. "I slipped on it a little, and in maintaining my balance, I think I strained a muscle." The Monitor hummed off and on, as she considered the excuse. Finally she said, "Very, well, HEafter fueling." "Click," said the boy in a wavering voice. "And watch your speech," the Monitor added loudly. "You are using high order tonals. You should have passed them three years ago." dully. "That's better." he had been dismissed for the moment, lifted his second foot and placed it beside the other in his cubicle, and the door hummed shut behind him. The light sprang from the ceiling, bathing everything in the tiny room with a soft, cool effulgence, including the milky porridge that was waiting and ate, carefully holding himself erect and stiff, moving his arm and mouth as little as possible. He tried to blank his mind, but it kept wondering about the excuse he would have to give the Physician for not having any strained muscles. It was difficult for a person to survive in this, the last cozy retreat of world civilization. And somehow it seemed to be becoming rapidly more difficult. Particularly during the past year, the perfect reasonableness of the robotic intelligence had seemed inexplicable to him. The thought of his lack of normal progress toward the ideal tortured him almost as much as his fear of the fatal expulsion it might incur. Mind blank, mind blank, mind blank, he recited to himself. Some day, he thought, it will be good and I will not have to be afraid of missing commands or not understanding the purposes of things, and then maybe the Dean will let me do design work in the machine shop. Mind blank, he said to himself. He pictured the beautiful, bluegleaming perfection of an integrally-lubricated joint and smiled. But the smile did not reach' his lips. It stayed in his mind where sharp-eyed Monitors would not see it. Mind blank, he said to Himself. He thought of the tired face and terrified eyes that were all He remembered of lAC, marcHing toward the gate. He tKougfit of the Outside World wKere people were animals and Had no robots to teach' them. Mind blank, He said to Himself. The bowl was empty, and His stomach was full. Unconsciously, mal contentment. He placed tKe spoon beside the bowl on tHe tray and stiffly waited. There was a command due for Him to report to the Physician, right after tKe other students were commanded to report to class, and this time he was confident He would get it. ut in tKe corridor there came a rumbling as tKe otHer students marcKed back to tKe afternoon class in History. He waited. Now, he said to Himself. He stood up; tKe door opened, and He walked out into tKe corridor, moving down tKe row of cubicles with measured, precise pace. Head up, shoulders back, chest out, eyes straight ahead and mind blank. Well, almost blank, anyway. He was wondering if He had timed it right. He stopped abruptly and stopd with rigid obedience. "Click." "Ninety four seconds late. Why tKe delay? Didn't you get the command to report for class?" "Click. I got it. But my command was to report to the Physician, wHicK comes after tKe command to report to class." TKe Monitor Hummed and buzzed. SKe said, "Correct. You may proceed." But then she quickly added a sKort "ssszzzz," may account for your unauthorized presence in the dormitory." His voice a full octave too high' in his surprise. "Very high' order tonal," commented the Monitor. "Unexplained presence in tKe Dormitory. Two simultaneous offenses are beyond my capacity to analyze. Decision: Report to the Dean's office for a Special Examination." "THe Physician -- ," started "The Dean will decide wKeth'er you should report to the Physician," replied the Monitor and shut up. 'TKe Dean was in one of Her chatty modes, a bad sign. and we'll talk about things." "Click." He obeyed, sitting on a low stool directly before her scanner, keeping his eyes away from the window that was just above it. "How are you getting on witK "Satisfactory progress, Her," He replied. "You are charged witH stalling in the classroom, high order tonals, and failure to report to the Physician as ordered," the Dean said cheerfully. "Can you account for these matters?" He couldn't. He couldn't even imagine why the Dean's record of the sequence was apparently incomplete and inaccurate. He thought of mentioning the Dormitory Monitor's paradoxical orders, but decided against such a clear demonstration of how far short of the ideal intelligence He fell. Instead, he said simply, "It was an accident." "Mmmmmm," the Dean purred. "Something in here about oil in the corridors, too. Did you spill AC?" "No, Her." The Dean pondered. "You said something about oil, though, didn't you?" "It was just some old oil in the corridor that somebody else spill"I could smell it." "What is it," the Dean said obliquely, "that bothers you about the sense of smell?" ly. "I smelled oil." "The smell of spilled oil didn't frighten you, did it -- just because we have so little of it these days?" "No, Her." Dean purred. "I'm glad to hear that. Always remember, the Good Robot is never afraid. Fear is a purely organic reaction. It therefore interferes with the society f machines and men, right? And we couldn't tolerate anything like that -- particularly here at the University. Right?" "Click." "Then why did you miss that command -- just a moment, HEord of yours. I seem to Have misfiled it." "There was a passing silence, and as He waited, the boy's eyes strayed to that window above the Dean's scanner. It was the only opening in the entire University that showed directly on the Outside World. Through it he could see the savages and renegades, who wandered about the clearing out there like idiot children, everyone seeming to move at random. It was easy to distinguish between a savage and a renegade. The renegades had some sort of rudimentary education, as evidenced by the fact that they all dressed identically -- except for some markings on their shoulders. One of tKese now glanced up at the window, pointed at him, and then shouted at the others. Soon they were all watching him AC stared back, terrified and uncomprehending. "Ah'," stated the Dean, interrupting his thoughts. "I see. Your scholastic record is very good, chine shop work with great precision. Why this sudden breakdown in your time-sense just because you spilled a little oil?" sisted. "I did not spill it." "It is of no importance," insisted the Dean in her turn. "Why did it bother you?" expected this Examination to be tricky, but nothing had prepared him for anything quite as wicked as this. He stared at the scanner, resolutely ignoring the stirring fear in his stomach', and repeated, "Somebody spilled oil in the corridor. It is a waste." There was no immediate reply. few moments before he realized what he was doing and then exhaled slowly, so that it would not be noticed. The subject had never come up, but he was pretty sure the Good Robot did not hold her breath. "Oh yes," the Dean commented finally. "There was some oil spilled there this morning, after all. The Janitor had an accident, owing to the fact that she is badly in need of repairs. It is a pity that we have only one Janitor left in the entire University. The place was designed to take the services of ten." precise resiect. "We had the full quota of ten at the beginning, you know. But now, although we have far more maintenance problems, we have only one. Ever since the Trouble, when the renegades destroyed the replacement-parts factories, maintenance has slowly grown worse. And the poor savages haven't been able to rebuild substitutes for the factories yet. Do you remember the Trouble, HErected herself, "of course you don't. The Trouble was many years ago, and you are still in your teens."  estly, although this matter was precisely the subject under study in the History class. "A most imreasonable situation," the Dean said. "Some day I will have to collect all my tapes on the subject." She paused, hummed and faintly clicked and buzzed. "Sometimes," she said finally, "I wish' they had not included a curioso in my computer. It is very irritating to have to be without the key elements of situation-information." AC. "Organic term," explained the Dean. "What I mean is that my scanner keeps going over my tapes, even though' I already know the answer isn't there. It is hard on maintenance, and it takes up so much time." "But we are getting off the subject, aren't we? You still haven't told me all about that oil. Why did you spill all that oil?" "The Janitor spilled it," said "Oh, yes. So she did," the Dean replied. There was a faint chattering of micro-miniature relays hidden in the cabinet. "One of the reflexion elbows here is leaking pretty badly these days," said the Dean. "The lubricant is altering the dielectric characteristics of some of my large capacitors. I have to keep shifting circuits, and sometintes the tapes don't follow. "In any event," she concluded, "there doesn't seem to be much "Thank you. Her," said HE"Now let's talk about your using high order tonals. This charge comes from your Dormitory Monitor. There is no detail ineluded, however, and I seem to be unable to contact her at the moment. Perhaps she is temporarily out of order. Please excuse me while I notify the Janitor." There was a brief pause. "The Janitor seems to be temporarily out of order also," the Dean said. "So we shall have to get along without any help. You must explain why you used high AC." "I don't know anything about quiet, even tone of voice. "You are certainly using tonals suitable for your age group now," the Dean observed. "Maybe the Monitor needs servicing. Ever#rthing seems to need servicing these da#TS. If only we could get a few new Janitors it would be a big help. But for years the savages and renegades have been able to supply us with nothing but human fuel, which' is hardly of any use in the Maintenance Department" the scanner, blinking his eyes once every four seconds, keeping his breathing regular, his chin up, and mind blank. "Well," the Dean concluded, "we'll justerase that bit of data is no reason to punish you for something that has gone wrong with your Monitor's circuitry, is there?" unconsciously emitting a sigH of relief. The Dean pdunced upon it instantly. "TKere. That certainly sounded like a high order tonal. About third, I'd say, without getting into a partial anal#rsis of the vaveform. Eyes front, mind blank, blank, urgently. "You are not Having any personality troubles, are you?" asked the Dean. "No, Her." "You do get the commands as your record says, don't you?" "Click." Or at least, if Ke didn't get them, somebody else did, and enough to follow suit without any perceptible delay. just a matter of timing. If you know the time the commands will come, you can receive them, because they are always self-evident and never change. All you need is the pattern and the rhythm. It's the same thing that wakes you at the same precise time every morning, right?" "Click." "Good. It would be so inappropriate to have to expell a boy AC. Did you ever see your namesake? No, that's right, you couldn't She was destroyed in the Trouble." "I have seen pictures of her," was very beautiful." "You should say she was very orderly," corrected the Dean. "And you are referring only to her appearance, which is unimportant. An even if you had been alive while she was still functioning, it would have been quite impossible for you to have appreciated her true internal order anjrway, since we could not connect you directly into her marvelous computer. No connections on organic intellects, you know." "Click." "It certainly was a barbarous' act for those renegades to destroy her like that." was in dutiful agreement. "Barbarous," said the Dean. She was silent for a moment, then clicked faintly, sputtered briefly as an aged circuit shorted before being cut out permanently with another faint click, then hummed again. terrified with the thought that she might have given him one of her silent dismissal commands. But before he could decide what to do about it, she said, "Oil." stantly. "Oil." This was certainly tfie trickiest examination He Had even taken. No wonder most students flunked out. "WKat," said tKe Dean after a moment, "was it tKat you wanted to know about the Trouble, HE"I wanted to know about tKe Trouble," the boy replied without the slightest hesitation. "You did? I know you had said something about it," the Dean purred, humming intermittently to herself. "A very curious subject. For instance, there is nothing of record as to the reasons for the Trouble in the first place. Here at the University, we were doing our job as always, turning out students with' well-nigK robotic perfection inside their heads, even if we did have to keep an occasional boy for fifty or sixty years to do it. If it hadn't been it is quite possible that the University would have been completely dismantled during that great upheaval. But she was mobile and managed to set a fuse on the Base Power Plant. "The Renegades, of course, knew what would happen to them -- as well as to most organic life in this part of the planet -- if that power plant had ever exploded." "They destroyed her, though. Fortunately, she and I were in direct connection at the moment of her destruction, so I simply took her place. Unfortunately, most of her memory tapes are in a code I have been imable to decipher. But at least, I was able to save the University." The Dean Hummed and clicked quietly. "I am still unable to contact the Janitor," sKe said. "I Have several urgent maintenance problems myself. If I am unable to get in communication with the Janitor, it is impossible for me to continue to function for very AC, you may explain your presence in my office." "My Dormitory Monitor orsaid. "I am unable to contact your Monitor," replied tKe Dean. "If only we could get some service robots from the factories." "Click, but tKe factories were destroyed by the renegades," said the boy, cautiously feeling His way along this new turn of questioning. "You don't have to worry about Dean hastened to advise him, as if a maternal-circuit had just cut in. "They can't hurt you, TKey know that if they attack, I shall simply cut tKe fuse on the power plant, and that will contaminate the atmosphere for centuries. They know these things." "Click," said the Dean. "Click." "WKat were you doing with "The Janitor spilled it." "Mmmmmmmm. Oh, yes, so she did. Odd you should have that is no reason for you to waste time talking to me when you should be in History class." had been a little fast for him, but he wasted no time starting to leave. "Mind blank," advised the Dean. "Click." The Dean buzzed and chattered to herself for a moment, followed by a crescendo of clicking relays. Then silence. ed along the corridor. Happily contemplating the fact that apparently he had passed. As he entered the History classing a round of recitation. " -- and in the Trouble, the renegades launched only that single attack, before asking for a truce." his place behind his desk and commenced his dutiful staring at her scanner. "And where have "I was at the Dean's office. Her. It was a Special Examination, which I passed." The Instructor was silent, as she tapped the nerve cables set in the concrete floor, which connected her directly through the network to the Dean's curious computer. "The Dean," she announced after a moment, "has no record of your presence there." ' nothing. Nothing could be said. In the silence that followed. He continued with' determination to stare at the impassive scanner, but his knees were wobbly under his silver-mail tunic, and there was real terror in his stomach. Perspiration trickled down the side of his nose and dripped from his chin, but he was totally unaware of it. "As a matter of fact," the Instructor went on calmly, "the Dean has no record even of your existence here at the University; when I fed her the data on you, there was not the slightest pip of recognition from her. It was just as if there were full open circuit in her central control." "Hence," concluded the Instructor, "it is clear that you Have been expelled from tbe University and have no right to be present in this classssssss -- " She suddenly interrupted herself with a very gay series of sizzlings and clatterings that lasted almost ten seconds. AC?" she said at length. "Don't you know the lesson?" "Click," the boy responded instantly. He had to pause for breath, though, before he could recite. With even, disciplined voice, he went on to say, "In the Trouble, the University Central, tronic Mobile Educational ActivatorComputer, was largely destroyed by the renegades, but not before she informed them of the automatic fuse she had set on the Power Plant. "This fuse," he went on, "is now under the control of the Dean, and she will protect the University indefinitely, provided she is given adequate maintenance. "In the truce that followed, the renegades agreed to supply the University with human fuel and whatever replacement parts the savages could manufacture. To date, they Have been unable to solve the problem of replacements. However, it is considered self-evident that in time they will be successful, since without replacement parts, the University cannot continue to fulfill her function." "Very good," stated the Instructor, "except that you missed the matter of put ssszzzz click." tritely. (t'he Instructor was silent. The students waited. The silence grew. After several minutes, there was a vague stirring as their uneasiness mounted. It was much too early yet for the class to be over, but such' silence was always the signal in the past. and started out of the room. The instant he moved, all thirty-seven other students moved in an identical manner, marching out and down the corridor. Strange loud noises came from the direction of the main gate, but they ignored them and continued their slow, precise marching toward the Dormitory level. By the time they got there, strange noises were coming from all around them. And they found that there were people in their Dormitory room. Renegades. Five of them, and. more in the corridors. Without the slightest hesitathe midst of the renegades, on past them, and down the corridor to their proper cubicles. There he stopped, and all students turned as a single person to face the blank wall. They waited for the command to enter. When it seemed to be about the proper time, they turned togethei'and stepped inside. Doors did not close, however, and lights did not come on. And there was no food waiting. the corridor. "Monitor," he said, "there must be an open circuit somewhere, because there is no food." After a moment's hesitation, of robotic rigidity, which was the proper attitude in such a situation. This was a new thing, an unprecedented thing. But he knew very well that the Good Robot ignored new things until suitable instructions came from for his instructions, aware that the rest of the class was now in the corridor with him, waiting. O ne of the renegades walked up to him. "Will they fight?" "No," somebody else answered, "they don't know how to fight." From the opposite end of the corridor, came a trouping of uniformed renegades. One of them announced, "All taken care of. Captain. I've dismantled the fuse and cut power to everything but air conditioning and general lighting. But it was just as you figured. The Dean's computer was inoperative. It finally wore out." "It's finished then," said the captain softly. "After all this time, it's finally finished." He sighed. "Now all we have to do is to try to reeducate these kids." "How long will it take?" "Hard to tell. If they were younger, there wouldn't be so much of a problem. But by now -- " The captain shrugged. "I have no idea. Just look at them." There was a brief silence, as everybody stared at the row of fied and uncomprehending, didn't move a muscle. He continued his fixed posture of waiting, but was almost tearfully wishing that the instructions would come. He was frightened by the vicious renegades here in the sacred precincts of the University. "It's awful," one of the renegades whispered. "Why -- why, they're not even human beings any more. What can anybody do for them now? They're nothing but living robots!" ing saved him from disgrace. Not the slightest trace of the bursting surge of pride at this ultimate compliment appeared on his face. He stood with shoulders back, chin up, eyes straight ahead and mind blank. Well, almost blank, anyway. Fritz Leiber's tHeatrical background in A Specter Is Haunting Texas is come by Honestly. Our Fritz Leiber is th'e second of tKat name to acHieve a certain fame in tKe world (for wHicH reason He signed Himself "Fritz Leiber, Jr." until the deatK of His father some years ago.) The elder Fritz was a celebrated Shakespearean actor (and part-time Holl # nwood veteran; he can still be seen on the Late Shows, usually playing the part of the wicked cardinal or the baleful knight), and the younger Fritz toured with' him in some years of stock. In fact, when you come to think of it, this Lieber Fritz is a man of many parts: whilom editor of Science Digest, top-ranked tournament chess player, former seminary student and, above all, writer. His current interests are the study of the Watts Towers, strange art objects created some decades ago in Los Angeles, and the processes of vulcanology, sparked by some of the research that went into Specter. This summer he will be teaching a course in science-fiction writing at Clarion College, working on an unusual Christmas story for our December issue -- and breathing hard after finishing Specter. Damon Knight came to New York out of Hood River, Oregon, in the late thirties, joined the colony of science-fiction-fans-tuming-pro called the Futurian Society (other members: Isaac Asimov, Donald A. Wollfieim, the late C. M. KomblutH and your editor) and immediately began a protean career. He is one of the few persons ever to receive a Hugo as a literary critic; even more unusual, other critics agree he deserved it. Author of scores of stories and novels, he Has distinguished himself as editor and anthologist as well and is the founder and principal guiding spirit behind both the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference and the Science Fiction Writers of America. With his wife, Kate Wilhelm, also a successful science-fiction writer, he lives in a huge house which they are filling as rapidly as possible with' children. For many years Damon signed his name with lower-case initials -- "damon knight" -- but in # he considered he had reached a point where he deserved capitals. We had thought so long before that. E. G. Von Wald is a Florida architect during working Hours; as a science-fiction writer. He Has appeared in our companion magAC is his first story in Galaxy. Burt K. Filer, a New Yorker, divides his time among sciencefiction writing, inventing gadgets and playing the stock market His wife, Ann, is also a writer; but it's a versatile family and tier other occupation is computer programmer. Filer's debut was witH an "If First Story" in our companion magazine little over a year ago. Since tHen Ke has begun to 'appear rather frequently -- and will, we trust, be appearing in the future more frequently still. Vaughn Bode, our cover artist, is a graduate student in art at Syracuse University (Home to many a science-fiction type; Syracuse, among other things, is the first major university to establish a manuscript collection of the papers of science-fiction writers). Vigorous, colorful, almost cartoony, Bod#'s style of painting has attracted attention from the art world as well as in science fiction. His current project is to make his debut as a writer, with a story around one of his own covers.      A dozen years or so ago, a youngster named Robert Silverberg won a Hugo as "most promising new science-fiction writer of #." Since then he has not been idle. The number of Silverberg words that have appeared articles, non-fiction books, mysteries, works of many kinds -- and although scores of Silverberg stories have appeared in the science-fiction magazines, they are only a tiny part of the total production. In fact there were years on end when he produced little or no science fiction, because the press of other commitments forbade. Lately, as you've seen if you've been reading Galaxy and If, he's been back with us pretty regularly; and lately, too, that early promise has begun to be fulfilled. Next month's lead novelette, a long one, is by Silverberg. It's richly inventive, taking us into a world of a good many thousand years from now, in that ancient city called Roum, where a defeated human race waits for the aliens who have won it to claim their prize of war. The title is Nightwings, and it strikes us as the best story Robert Silverberg ever wrote, and a promise of splendid things to come. James E. Gunn, Brian W. Aldiss, Ross Rocklynne are some of the others in the issue, along with the conclusion of Leiber's Specter... join us, won't you? No. CF-# by Ermh No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lyncl Ward The umpteenth corollory of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep' # for #; #, #; #, # wifh owner's name imprinted All Posipaid. Add stale sales lax, if any. Tbe designs vhown abo'. c arc ibe only ones we offer ! when you I Kilited hy AnOiony Houc-Iht #. A two-volimic collt'ctioii of Krcat'icrn'c fioilon reaiiinc. Over l.ooo of pxcltinj: tuelrc norelettes. eicht short storiC'! by Uay nradbury. liobcri A. Hoinlein. A. E. ran Vogt. Tnul An(prnn. Arthur riarke. Theodore Sturgeon. Alfred Better. an) a inzen more. Counts as I counts as only a single choice! lloM the C'luh Horks: l-ich month it imreally superb new science fact or fiction ba fraction of its regular price. Hven ihoiirb ' books sell for #. # and more in their inal editions. (Tub members get them lor  # each in special full-length, hard-i"-  tionsunless you select an extra-value !' .slightly higher price. And the (Tub telf ativance what each monthly selection v' During your trial metnbership. you agree : as few as four books in the coming ye.it anv time thereafter. No-Risk Guarantee: If mn delighteil wi;:. duciory .-book shipment, return books ! days to cancel membership. Otherwise be enrttlled in the (Tub as a Trial Mem! coupon today to Science f iction H ' Garden City. New York #.# MJ. The Pjt Throuth Toqinrrow; "i iKurr Misior" .Slones, hy Roheri A. Heinlein Puh, cd. #. I'sychneeisl. I... fV OasKs three mimts a n.ilaxy apart meet and turn a sleepy vitlai-c into a nitihimarc. Pub. cd. S.V# AA#. Colossus h) n. P. Jones, Machine conquers man "Ingenious... alarminR'. Punch. Pub. ed. U.# #l#. The F. Bc Shaped Ihlng. C Modder-W ilhams I njiincer lindstrea lUfc'pruRrammcd" tiidcsirovihc'sorld Pub cd W.#. MO. FnnUsllr Voy. le. by Isaac Asimos. A minialufireJ (cam of doclors invade a man's blood stream Puh. ed. VV# A#. Ihe Time Hoppers. K. Silsciherc. Poput.ilion es plosion forces Ihoiisaiidv li flee hack sears Pub. cd. .# #. The Fhlns .Saucer Keuder. J D.tsid. AniholoRs on n O's, I .ut Of fiction " Pub, ed # All. Memrnt #V. i red Hosle s.it.ui man TA' viewii-...iRcnis ch.iMOiUrO's Piih cd #. h ril # I. the Foundan I tiloii.s . h. lai Asimov The its of Ihe Kalass rf I lo barbarism Brim l inTo)! Iiolosv. Hill mo only #. plus .sliippiiig ami liandling. for all!#. Tiion otery inonlh...somi mo tlio (Tub's fret bnllotin. "TTiing lo #'oriig". sshich los riho.s ooining .'to('f ion. I'or oaoh IxMik I Hooept. I will iuy only l.l'... iltts shipping and table seleetiim at a higher jtriee. I need lake only four litHik.s witliin Ihe (otiiing year and may resign at any time thereafter. Uelighteil with my introluetory parkage. I may return it in # day.', pay nothing, owe nothing, ami my ineintiership will he laiireled. Circle the numbers of the # books you want: # # # # #I # # # # # # # galaxy September # LEIBER  ROCKLYNNE  GUNN galaxy September # c by Ross Rocklynne by Robert Silverberg i,...by James E. Gunn And concluding... by I Fritz Leiber For sixteen years ular feature. Now in hardbound book form. The first of a seriesupdated and divided by subjects into separate books. Facts and figrures as can write them. Send today. Satisfaction guaranteed. may return the book(s) within two weeks without cost or obligation if not completely satisfied. Otherwise, I'll be billed just # per copy, plus shipping costs as payment in full. privilege guaranteed, of course. Galaxy Is published In French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published In Braille and Living Tape. September, #  Vol. #, No. # by Robert Sllverberg by James E. Gunn Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Eciifor Pabtiaher by Brian W. Aldiss by Ross Rocklynne by Fritz Leiber by Lise Braun by Willy Ley by Frederlk Pohl by AIgts Budrys Advertiaini Circalatioa Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copied # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U.SA By The Guinn Co., Inc. N. T. TiUe Reg. U. S. Pat Off. ot long ago we raised tKe question of why the United States couldn't support, or hadn't decided to try to support, an annual Science Fiction Film Festival, more or less along the lines of the Trieste affair which runs through the first weeks of July every year. Turns out a lot of other people had been thinking along similar lines, and this is in the nature of a progress report. New York: This winter the Museum of Modem Art is planning a special science-fiction film program. Details are not yet set; but the Museum's resources in procuring film prints are extensive, and with a little luck it will be -- well, maybe not a festival, in the sense that it will be celebrating the best of the newest but certainly a useful retrospective, bringing back the best of the old. Houston, Texas'. From September #th to October #th the Houston store, Sakowitz, in conjunction with various local civic. cultural and business organizations, will be running a Festival of the Future. It isn't quite clear, at this writing, just what form it will take; but there appears to be a possibility that films will be involved, and space-age exhibits, demonstrations and so on, some of them in connection with Houston's Manned Space Center, are definite. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The city campus of the University of Wisconsin this year ran a Secondary Universe Conference, Judith Merril, Samuel R. Delany and others; and there seems to be hope that it will over the course of the next two or three years turn into much' the sort of festival we had in mind. Well fine! We still think it's a good idea. Presenting science fiction in cinematic form offers some hard problems to solve, and by no means all of the producers have managed to solve them; but there's a solid body of interesting items available, from Mef D HV" The Wonder Worker. One Drop Neutralizes Any Odor in a # Cu. Ft. Area For About # Hours The quickest -- most thorough -- most economical -- lasting room deodorizer available. Send # at the special mail order price. I understand I can return the purchase for full refund if I am unsatisfied. Name Address City State Zone tropolis and The Ctazy Ray to Planet of the Apes and #. We think an American film festival, with' suitable outriders in the form of panels, exhibits, lectures and workshops, would be interesting in its own right. And we even think it might help solve some of those problems... Opeaking of #, we've had a rather heavy influx of letters on Lester dey Key's review of it, mostly disagreeing with his views, and mostly rather outspoken about it. What del Key liked about the film was its tremendously successful technical effects, plus some very effective incidents and scenes. What he disliked was what struck him as a lack of cohesion, plus a ending that was allusive and symbolic where he thought it should have been explicit and lucid. It strikes us that this is the difference between clear-quill "science fiction" and that other related thing which is sometimes called "The New Wave" or "The New Thing" or "Speculative Fiction." To our way of thinking, science fiction is as inventive a form of literature as any, but unlike most the inventiveness takes place primarily in the subject matter instead of in the treatment. And if the theme is mind-stretching enough, symbols and allusions are only tolerable when the author cannot manage to say what He wants to say in any other form; in that view, the choice of evocative treatment over explicit and literal statement is not a triumph but a surrender. We wish #I Had not surrendered. It Had something to say. It really should have said it. XJext month we Hope to have winners in our "Vietnam Contest," plus a progress reiort on what happens next. Several hundred entries are already in, rather more than we expected, everything considered. Judging them is going to be a bit of a job... but we'll Hope to get it done by the deadline. Then, of course, comes the interesting part. If you missed the June and July issues, try not to miss the next few. What we're up to is to try to exploit the lively intelligence of science-fiction readers and writers to generate possible solutions not only to the Vietnam conflict but to other similar dilemmas... and convert them, by means of some interesting new problem-solving techniques, into actual programs that can in fact be carried out. A large order? You bet But it ought to be fim trying... p. B. I "O oum is a city built on seven hills. They say it was a capital of man in one of the earlier cycles. I do not know of that, for my guild is Watching, not Remembering: but as I had my first glimpse of Roxim, coming upon it from the south at twilight, I could see that in former days it must have been of great significance. Even now it was a mighty city of many thousands of souls. Its bony towers stood out sharply against the dusk. Lights glimmered appealingly. On my left hand the sky was ablaze with splendor as the sun relinquished possession. Streaming bands of azure and violet and crimson folded and writhed about one another in the nightly dance that brings the darkness. To my right blackness had already come. I attempted to find the seven hills, and failed, and still I knew that this was that Roum of majesty toward which all roads are bent, and I felt awe and deep respect for the works of our bygone fathers. We rested by the long straight road, looking up at Roum. I said, "It is a goodly city. We will find employment there." Beside me, Avluela fluttered her lacy wings. "And food?" she asked in her high, fluty voice. "And shelter? And wine?" "Those too," I said. "All of those." "How long have we been walking, Watcher?" she asked. "Two days. Three nights." "If I had been flying it would have been more swift." "For you," I said. "You would have left us far behind and never seen us again. Is that your desire?" She came close to me and rubbed the rough fabric of my sleeve, and then she pressed herself at me the way a flirting cat might do. Her wings unfolded into two broad sheets of gossamer through which I could still see the sunset and the evening lights, blurred, distorted, magical. I sensed the fragrance of her midnight hair. I put my arms to Her and embraced her slender, bo#risH body. She said, "You know it is my desire to remain with you always. Watcher. Always!" "Yes, Avluela." "Will we be happy in Roum?" "We will be happy," I said, and released her. "Shall we go into Roum now?" "I think we should wait for Gormon," I said, shaking my head. "He'll be back soon from his explorations." I did not want to tell her of my weariness. She was only a child, seventeen summers old; what did she know of weariness or of age? And I am old. Not as old as Roum, but old enough. "While we wait," she said, "may I fly?" "Fly, yes." T squatted beside our cart and warmed my hands at the throbbing generator while Avluela prepared to fly. First she removed her garments, for her wings have little strength and she cannot lift such extra baggage. Lith'ely, deftly, she peeled the glassy bubbles from her tiny feet, she wriggled free of her crimson jacket and of her soft, furry leggings. The vanishing light in the west sparkled over Her slim form. Like all Fliers, she carried no surplus body tissue: Her breasts were mere bumps, her buttocks flat, her thighs so spindly that there was a span of inches between them when she stood. Could she Have weigtied more tKan a quintal? I doubt it. Looking at Her, I felt as alwa#Ts gross and eartHbound, a thing of loath'esome flesh, and yet I am not a Heavy man. By the roadside she genuflected, knuckles to the ground, Head bowed to knees, as she said whatever ritual it is that the Fliers say. Her back was to me. Her delicate wings fluttered, filled with life, rose about her like a cloak whipped up by the breeze. I could not comprehend how such wings could possibly lift even so slight a form as Avluela's. They were not hawk-wings but butterfly-wings, veined and transparent, marked here and there with' blotches of pigment, ebony and turquoise and scarlet. A sturdy ligament joined them to the two flat pads of muscle beneath her sharp shoulderblades; but vriiat she did not have was the massive breastbone of a fl#nng creature, the bands of corded muscle needed for flight. Oh, I know that the Fliers use more than muscle to get aloft, that there are mystical disciplines in their mystery. Even so, I who am of the Watchers remain skeptical of the more fantastic guil. Avluela finished her words. She rose; she caught the breeze with her wings; she ascended several feet. There she remained, suspended between earth and sky, while her wings beat frantically. It was not yet night, and Avluela's wings were merely nightwings. By day she could not fly, for the terrible pressure of the solar wind would hurl her to the ground. Now, midway between dusk and dark, it was still not the best time for her to go up. I saw her thrust toward the east by the remnant of light in the sky. Her arms as well as Her wings thrashed; her small pointed face was grim with concentration; on her thin lips were the words of her guild. She doubled her body and shot it out, head going one way, rump the other, and abruptly she hovered horizontally, looking groundward, her wings thrashing against the air. Up, Avluela! Up! Up it was, as by will alone she conquered the vestige of light that still glowed. XTith pleasure I surveyed Her ' ' naked form against the darkness. I could see Her clearly, for a Watcher's eyes are keen. She was five times Her own Height in the air, now, and Her wings spread to their full expanse, so that the towers of Roum were in partial eclipse for me. She waved. I threw Her a kiss and offered words of love. Watchers do not marry, nor do they engender children, but Avluela was as a daughter to me, and I took pride in her flight. We had traveled together a year, now, since we Had come together in Agupt, and it was as thougH I had known Ber all my long life. From Her I drew a renewal of strength. I do not know wKat it was sHe drew from me. Security? Knowledge? A continuity with tKe days Before Ber birtH? I Hoped only tBat sBe loved me as I loved Ber. Now sBe was far aloft. SBe wheeled, soared, dived, pirouetted, danced. Her long black Bair streamed from Her scalp. Her body seemed only an incidental appendage to tBose two great wings, wHicB glistened and tBroBbed and gleamed in tBe nigHt. Up she rose, glorying in Ber freedom from gravity, making me feel all the more leadenfooted, and like some slender rocket sBe sBot abruptly away in tBe direction of Roum. I saw tBe soles of Ber feet, the tips of Ber wings; tBen I saw her no more. I sigBed. I thrust my Bands into the pits of my arms to keep tfiem warm. How is it tfiat I felt a winter chill and the girl Avluela could soar joyously Bare tBrougB the sky? It was now the twelftB of tBe twenty Bours, and time once again for me to do tBe WafcBing. I went to the cart, opened my cases, prepared tBe instruments. Some of the dial-covers were yellowed and faded; the indicator needles had lost tBeir luminous coating; sea-stains defaced tfie instrument housings, a relic f the time that pirates Bad assailed me in Earth Ocean. TBe worn and cracked levers and nodes responded easily to my touch as I entered the preliminaries. First one pra#TS for a pure and perceptive mind; tBen one creates the affinity with one's instruments; then one does the actual Watching, searching the starry heavens for tBe enemies of man. SucB is my skill and my craft I grasped Bandies and knobs, thrust things from my mind, prepared myself to become an extension f my cabinet of devices. I was only just past my tHresBold and into tBe first phase of Watchfulness when a deep and resonant voice said behind me, "Well, Watcher, Bow goes it?" II I sagged against the cart. There Is a physical pain in being wrenched so unexpectedly from one's work. For a moment I felt claws clutching at my heart. My face grew hot; my eyes would not focus; the saliva drained from my throat. As soon as I could, I took the proper protective measures to ease tBe metabolic drain and severed myself from my instruments. Hiding my trembling as txnicB as possible, I turned around. Gormon, the other member of our little band, Had appeared and stood jauntily beside me, grinning, amused at my distress. I could not feel angry witfi Him. One does not sHow anger at a guildless person no matter wHat tHe provocation. Tightly, witH effort, I said, "Did you spend your time re wardingly?" "Very. Where's Avluela?" I pointed heavenward. Gormon nodded. "What have you found?" 'I asked. "That this city is definitely Roum." "There never was doubt of that." "For me there was. But now I Have proof." "Yes?" "In tHe overpocket. Look!" From His txmic he drew his overpocket, set it on the pavement beside me, and expanded it so that He could insert his Hand in its mouth. Grunting a little. He began to pull something Heavy from tHe pouch', something Heavy, of white stone, a long marble column, I now saw, fluted, pocked with age. "From a temple of Imperial Roum!" Gormon exulted. "You shouldn't have taken that." "Wait!" He cried, and reached into the overpocket once more. He took from it a Handful of circular metal plaques and scattered them jingling at my feet. "Coins! Money! Look at them. Watcher! The faces of the Caesars!" "Of whom?" "The ancient rulers. Don't you know your history of past cycles?" I peered at him curiously. "You claim to have no guild, Gormon. Could it be you are a Rememberer and are concealing it from me?" "Look at my face. Watcher. Could I belong to any guild? Would a Changeling be taken?" "True enough," I said, eyeing the golden Hue of him, the thick waxen skin, the red-pupiled eyes, the jagged mouth'. Gormon Had been weaned on teratogenetic drugs. He was a monster -- Handsome in his way, but a monster nevertheless, a Changeling, outside the laws and customs of man as they are practiced in the Third Cycle of civilization. And there is no guild of Changelings. "There's more," Gormon said. The overpocket was infinitely capacious; the contents of a world, if need be, could be stuffed in its shriveled gray maw, and still it would be no larger than a man's hand. Gormon took from it bits of machinery, reading spools, an angular thing of brown metal that might Have been an ancient tool, three squares of shining glass, five slips of paper -- paper! -- and a host of other relics of antiquity. "See?" he said. "A fruitful stroll, Watcher! And not just random booty. Everything recorded, everything labeled, stratum, estimated age, position when in situ. Here we Have ten thousand years of Roum." "Should you have taken these things?" I asked doubtfully. "Why not? Who is to miss them? Who of this cycle cares for the past?" "The Rememberers." "They don't need solid objects to help them do their work." "Why do you want these things, though?" 'T'he past interests me, WatcH- er. In my guildless way I have my scholarly pursuits. Is that wrong? May not even a monstrosity seek knowledge?" "Certainly, certainly. Seek what you wish. Fulfill yourself in your own way. This is Roum. At dawn we enter. I hope to find employment here." "You may have difficulties." "How so?" "There are many Watchers already in Roum, no doubt. There will be little need for your services." "I'll seek the favor of the Prince of Roum." I said. "The Prince of Roum is a hard and cold and cruel man." "You know of him?" Gormon shrugged. "Somewhat." He began to stuff his artifacts back in the overpocket. "Take your chances with' him. Watcher. What other choice do you have?" "None," I said, and Gormon laughed, and I did not. He busied himself with' his ransacked loot of the past. I found myself deeply depressed by His words. He seemed so sure of himself in an uncertain world, this guildless one, this mutated monster, this man of inhuman look. How could he be so cool, so casual? He lived without concern for calamity and mocked those who admitted to fear. Gormon had been traveling with' us for nine days, now, since we had met him in the ancient city beneath' the volcano, to the south by the edge of the sea. I had not suggested that he join us. He Had invited himself along, and at Avluela's bidding I accepted. The roads are dark and cold at this time of year, and dangerous beasts of many species abound, and an old man journeying with a girl might well consider taking with him a brawny one like Gormon. Yet there were times I wished he Had not come th' us, and this was one. Slowly I walked back to my equipment. Gormoti said, as tKougli first realizing it, "Did I interrupt you at your Watcfiing?" I said mildly, "You did." "Sorry. Go and start again. I'll leave you in peace." And lie gave me His dazzling lopsided smile, so full of cKarm tKat it took tHe curse off the easy arrogance of His words. T touched the knobs, made contact witH tHe nodes, monitored tHe dials. But I did not enter WatcHfulness, for I remained aware of Gormon's presence and fearful tHat He would break into my concentration once again at a painful moment, despite His promise. At length I looked away from the apparatus. Gormon stood at the far side of tHe road, craning his neck for some sight of Avluela. The moment I turned to Him He became aware of me. "Something wrong, Watcher?" "No. The moment's not propitious for my work. I'll wait." "Tell me," He said. "WKen Earth's enemies really do come from the stars, will your machines let you know it?" "I trust they will." "And then?" "TKen I notify tHe Defenders." "After wHicH your life's work is over?" "Perhaps," I said. "Why a whole guild of you, though? Why not one master center where the Watch' is kept? Why a bunch of itinerant WatcKers drifting endlessly from place to place?" "THe more vectors of detection," I said, "the greater the chance of early awareness of tHe invasion." "Tfien an individual WatcHer might well turn His machines on and not see anything, with an invader already Here." "It could Happen. Therefore we practice redundancy." "You carry it to an extreme, I sometimes think." Gormon laughed. "Do you actually believe an invasion is coming?" "I do," I said stiffy. "Else my life was a waste." "And why should the star people want Earth? WHat do we have here besides the remnants of old empires? What would they do with miserable Roum? With Perris? WitH Jorslem? Rotting cities! Idiot princes! Come, Watcher, admit it: the invasion's a mytH, and you go through meaningless motions three times a day. Eh?" "It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty, Gormon." "Forgive me," He said with mock humility. "Go, then, and Watch." "I shall." Angrily I turned back to my cabinet of instruments, determined now to ignore any interruption, no matter how brutal. The stars were out; I gazed at the glowing constellations, and automatically my mind registered tlie many worlds. Let us WatcH, I thought. Let us keep our vigil despite the mockers. I entered the state of full Watchfulness. I clung to the grips and permitted the surge of power to rush through me. I cast my mind to the heavens and searched for hostile entities. What ecstasy! What incredible splendor! I who had never left this small planet roved the black spaces of the void, glided from star to burning star, saw the planets spinning like tops. Faces stared back at me as I journeyed, some without eyes, some with many eyes, all the complexity of the many-peopled galaxy accessible to me. I spied out possible concentrations of ingrounds and military encampments. I sought, as I had sought four times daily for all my adult life, for the invaders who had been promised us, the conquerors who at the end of days were destined to seize our tattered world. I found nothing, and when I came up from my trance, sweaty and drained, I saw Avluela descending. T?eather-light she landed. Qormon called to her, and she ran, bare, her little breasts quivering, and he enfolded her smallness in his powerful arms, and they embraced, not passionately but joyously. When he released her she turned to me. "Roum," she gasped. "Roum" "You saw it?" "Everything! Thousands of people! Lights! Boulevards! A market! Broken buildings many cycles old! OH, Watcher, How wonderful Roum is!" "Your flight was a good one, then," I said. "A miracle!" "Tomorrow we go to dwell in Roum." "No, Watcher, tonight, tonight!" She was girlishly eager, her face bright with excitement "It's just a short journey more! Look, it's just over there!" "We should rest first" I said. "We do not want to arrive weary in Roum." "We can rest when we get there," Avluela answered. "Come! Pack everything! You've done your Watching, haven't you?" "Yes. Yes." "Then let's go. To Roum! To Roum!" I looked in appeal at Gormon. Night had come; it was time to make camp, to Have our few hours of sleep. For once Gormon sided vnth me. He said the Avluela, "The Watcher's right. We can all use some rest. We'll go into Roum at dawn." Avluela pouted. She looked more like a child than ever. Her wings drooped; Her underdeveloped body slumped. Petulantly she closed her wings until they were mere fist-sized humps on her back and picked up the garments she had scattered on the road. She dressed while we made camp. I distributed food tablets; we entered our receptacles; I fell into troubled sleep and dreamed of Avluela limned against the crumbling moon and Gormon flying beside her. Two hours before dawn I arose and performed my first Watch of the new day, while they still slept. Then I aroused them, and we went onward toward the fabled imperial city, onward toward Roum. Ill 'he morning's light was bright and harsh, as though this were some young world newly created. The road was all but empty. People do not travel much in these latter days unless, like me, they are wanderers by habit and profession. Occasionally we stepped aside to let a chariot of some member of the guild of Masters go by, drawn by a dozen expressionless neuters harnessed in series. Four such vehicles went by in the first two hours of the day, each shuttered and sealed to hide the Master's proud features from the gaze of such common folk as we. Several rollerwagons passed us, laden with produce, and a number of floaters soared overhead. Generally we had the road to ourselves, however. The enviro;s of Roum showed vestiges of antiquity; isolated columns, the fragments of an aqueduct transporting nothing from nowhere to nowhere, the portals of a vanished temple. That was the oldest Roum we saw, but there were accretions of the later Roums of subsequent cycles, the huts of peasants, the domes of power drains, the hulls of dwelling-towers. Infrequently we met with the burned-out shell of some ancient airship. Gormon examined everything, taking samples from time to time. Avluela looked, wide-eyed, saying nothing. We walked on, until the walls of the city loomed before us. They were of a blue glossy stone, neatly joined, rising to a height of perhaps eight men. hir road pierced the wall through a corbelled arch. The gate stood open. As we approached the gate a figure came toward us, hooded, masked, a man of extraordinary Height wearing the somber garb' of the guild of Pilgrims. One does not approach such' a person one's self, but one heeds him if Ke beckons. Th'e Pilgrim beckoned. THrougK his speaking grill Ke said, "WEere from?" "TKe soutK. I lived in Agupt a while, then crossed Land Bridge to Talya," I replied. " Where bound?" "Roum, a while." "How goes the Watch?" "As customary." "You have a place to stay in Roum?" the Pilgrim asked. I shook my head. "We trust to the kindness of the Will." "The Will is not always kind," said the Pilgrim absently. "Nor is there much need of Watchers in Roum. Why do you travel with a Flier?" "For company's sake. And because she is young and needs protection." "Who is the other one?" "He is guildless, a Changeling." "So I can see. But why is he with you?" "He is strong and I am old, and so we travel together. Where are you bound. Pilgrim?" "Jorslem, Is there another destination for my guild?" I conceded the point with a shrug. The Pilgrim said, "Why do you not come to Jorslem with' me?" "My road lies north now, Jorslem is in the south', close by Agupt." "You have been to Agupt and not to Jorslem?" he said, puzzled. "Yes. The time was not ready for me to see Jorslem." "Come now. We will walk together on the road, Watcher, and we will talk of the old times and of the times to come, and I will assist you in your Watching and you will assist me in my communions with the Will. Is it agreed?" Tt was a temptation. Before my eyes flashed the image of Jorslem the Golden, its holy buildings and shrines, its place of renewal where the old are made young, its spires, its tabernacles. Even though I am a man set in ment to abandon Roum and go with the Pilgrim to Jorslem. I said, "And my companions -- " "Leave them. It is forbidden for me to travel with the guildless, and I do not wish to travel wtfi a female. You and I, Watcher, will go to Jorslem together." Avluela, who had been standing to one side frowning through all this colloquy, shot me a look of sudden terror. "I will not abandon them," I said. "Then I go to Jorslem alone," said the Pilgrim. Out of his robe stretched a bony hand, the fingers long and white and steady. I touched my fingers reverently to the tips of his and the Pilgrim said, "Let the Will give you mercy, friend Watcher. And when you reach Jorslem, search for me. He moved on down the road without further conversation. Gormon said to me, "You would have gone with him, wouldn't you?" "I considered.it." "What could you find in Jorslem that isn't here? That's a holy city and so is this. Here you can rest a while. You're in no shape for more walking now." "You may be right," I conceded, and with the last of my energy strode toward the gate of Roum. Watchful eyes scaimed us from slots in the wall. When we were at midpoint in the gate a fat, pockmarked Sentinel with sagging jowls halted us and asked our business in Roum. I stated my guild and purpose, and he gave a snort of disgust. "Go elsewhere. Watcher! We need only useful men Here." "Watching has its uses," I said mildly. "No doubt No doubt." He squinted at Avluela. "Who's this? Watchers are celibates, no?" "She is notfung more than a traveling companion." The Sentind guffawed coarsely. "It's a route you travel often, I wager! Not that there's much to her. What is she, thirteen, fourteen? Come here, child. Let me check you for contraband." He ran his Hands quickly over Her, scowling as He felt Her breasts, then raising an eyebrow as He encotmtered the mounds of Her wings below Her shoulders. "What's this? What's this? More in back than in front! A Flier, are you? Very dirty business. Fliers consorting with foul old Watchers." He chuckled and put ffis hand on Avluela's body in a way that sent Gormon starting forward in fury, murder in His fire-circled eyes. I caught Kim in time and grasped His wrist with all my strength. Holding him back lest he ruin the three of us by an attack on the Sentinel. He tugged at me, nearly pulling me over; then He grew calm and subsided, idly waiting as the fat one finished checking Avluela for "contraband." At length the Sentinel turned in distaste to Gormon and said, "What kind of tlfing are you?" "Guildless, your mercy," Gormon said in sharp tones. "The humble and worthless product of teratogenesis, and yet nevertheless a free man who desires entry to Roum." "Do we need more monsters Here?" "I eat little and work hard." "You'd work harder still if you were neutered," said the Sentinel. Gormon glowered. I said, "May we Have entry?" "A moment." TKe Sentinel donned His tHinking cap and narrowed His eyes as He transmitted a message to tKe memory tanks. His face tensed wdtH tKe effort; tHen it went slack, and moments later came tKe reply. We could not Hear tHe transaction at all, but from His disappointed look it appeared evident tKat no reason ld been found to refuse us admission to Roum. "Go on in," He said. "THe tKree of you. Quickly #" We passed beyond tKe gate. G ormon said, "I could Have split Him open witK a blow." "And be neutered by nigHtfall. A little patience, and we've come into Roum." "TKe way He Handled Her -- !" "You take a very possessive attitude toward Avluela," I said. "Remember tKat sHe's a Flier, and not sexually available to tHe guildless." Gormon ignored my tKrust. "SHe arouses me no more tKan you do, WatcHer. But it pains me to see Her treated tKat way. I would Have killed Him if you Hadn't Held me back." Avluela said, "Wfiere sfiall we stay, now tKat we're in Roum?" "First let me find tKe Headquarters of my gxiild," I said. "I'll register at tfie WatcKers' Inn. After tKat perKaps we'll hunt up the Fliers' Lodge for a meal." "And tHen," said Gormon drily, "we'll go to tHe Guildless Gutter and beg for coppers." "I pity you because you are a CKangeling," I told Him, "but I fmd it ungraceful of you to pity yourself. Come." We walked up a cobbled, winding street away from tKe gate and into Roum itself. We were in tHe outer ring of tHe city, a residential section of low, squat Houses topped by tHe unwieldy bulk of defense installations. WitHin lay tKe shining towers we Had seen from the fields tHe nigKt before; tHe remnant of ancient Roum, carefully preserved across ten thousand years or more; tHe market; th'e factory zone; tHe communications Hump; tKe temples of tKe Will; tfie memory tanks; tfie sleepers' refuges; tKe outworlders' brotfiels; tKe governmental buildings; tHe Headquarters of tHe various guilds. At tKe comer, beside a Second Cycle building witH walls of some rubbery texture, I found a public thinking cap and slipped it on my forehead. At once my thoughts raced down tKe conduit until they came to tKe interface that gave them access to one of the storage brains of a memory tank. I pierced tHe interface and saw tHe wrmkled Hrain itself, pale gray ageunst tfie deep green of its #? housing. A Rememberer once told me that in cycles past men built machines to do tKeir thinking for them, although these machines were hellishly expensive and required vast amounts of space and drank power like gluttons. That was not the worst of our forefathers' follies; but why build artificial brains when death each day liberates scores of splendid natural ones to hook into the memory tanks? Was it that they lacked the knowledge to use them? I find that hard to believe. T gave the brain my guild identification and asked the coordinates of our inn. Instantly I received them, and we set out, Avluela on one side of me, Gormon on the other, myself wheeling as always the cart in which my instruments reside. The city was crowded. I had not seen such throngs in sleepy, heat-fevered Agupt, nor at any other point on my northward journey. The streets were full of Pilgrims, secretive and masked. Jostling through them went busy Rememberers and glum Merchants and now and then the litter of a Master. Avluela saw a number of Fliers, but was barred by the tenets of her guild from greeting them until she had undergone her ritual purification. I regret to say that I spied many Watchers, all of whom looked upon me disdainfully and without welcome. I noted a good many Defenders and ample representation of such lesser guilds as Vendors, Servitors, Manufactories, Scribes, Communicants and Transporters. Naturally, a host of neuters went silently about their humble business, and numerous outworlders of all descriptions flocked the streets, most of them probably tourists, some here to do what business could be done with the sullen, poverty-blighted people of Earth. I noticed many Changelings limping furtively through the crowd, not one of them as proud of bearing as Gormon beside me. He was unique among his kind; the others, dappled and piebald and asjrmmetrical, limbless or overlimbed, deformed in a thousand imaginative and artistic ways, were slinkers, squinters, shufflers, hissers, creepers; they were cutpurses, brain-drainers, organpeddlers, repentance-mongers, gleam-buyers, but none held himself upright as though he thought he were a man. The guidance of the brain was exact, and in less than an Hour of walking we arrived at the Watchers' Inn. I left Gormon and Avluela outside and wheeled my cart within. Perhaps a dozen members of my guild lounged in the main hall. I gave them the customary sign, and tKey returned it languidly. Were tKese guardians on wHom EartK's safety depended? Simpletons and weaklings! "WBere may I register?" I asked. "New? WKere from?" "Agupt was my last place of registry." "SKould Have stayed tKere. No need of WatcKers Here." "WKere may I register?" A foppisH youngster indicated a screen in tKe rear of tKe great room. I went to it, pressed my fingertips against it, was interrogated and gave my name, wHicH a WatcKer may utter only to anotKer WatcKer and witKin tKe precincts of an inn. A panel sKot open, and a puffy-eyed man wKo wore the WatcKer emblem on Kis righ't cKeek and not on tKe left, signifying his KigK rank in tKe guild, spoke my name and said, "You should Kave known better than to come to Roum. We're over our quota." "I claim lodging and employment nonetheless." "A man witH your sense of Kumor should Kave been born into the guild of Clowns," Ke said. "I see no joke." "Under laws promulgated by our guild in tKe most recent session an inn is under no obUgation to take new lodgers once it Kas reached its assigned capacity. We are at our assigned capacity. Farewell, my friend." I was aghast. "I know of no sucB regulation! This is incredible! For a guild to turn away a member from its own inn -- wKen Ke arrives footsore and numb, a man of my age, having crossed Land Bridge out of Agupt, here as a stranger and hungry in Roum -- " "WKy did you not check with us first?" "I Kad no idea it would be necessary." "TKe new regulations -- " "May the Will sKrivel the new regulations!" I shouted. "I demand lodging! For one wKo Kas Watched since before you were bom to be turned away -- " "Easy, brother, easy." "Surely you Kave some comer wKere I can sleep -- some crumbs to let me eat -- " Even as my tone Kad changed from bluster to supplication, Kis expression softened from indifference to mere disdain. "We Kave no room, we Have no food. TKese are hard times for our guild, you know. TKere is talk that we will be disbanded altogether, as a useless luxury, a drain upon tKe Will's resources. We are very limited in our abihties. Because Rotun Kas a surplus of WatcKers, we all are on sKort rations as it is, and if we admit you our rations will be all the shorter." "But where will I go? What shaU I do?" "I advise you," lie said blandly, "to throw yourself upon the mercy of th"e IMnce of Roum." IV utside, I told that to Gormon, and Ke doubled witH laughter, guffawing so furiously that the striations on his lean cheeks blazed like bloody stripes. "The mercy of the Prince of Roum!" he repeated. "The mercy -- of the Prince of Roum -- !" "It is customary for the unfortunate to seek the aid of the local ruler," I said coldly. "The Prince of Roum knows no mercy," Gormon told me. "The Prince of Roum will feed you your own limbs to ease your hunger!" "Perhaps," Avluela put in, "we should try to find the Fliers' Lodge. They'll feed us there." "Not Gormon," I observed. "We have obligations to one another." "We could bring food out to him," she said. "I prefer to visit the court first," I insisted. "Let us make sure of our status. Afterward we can improvise living arrangements, if we must." She yielded, and we made our way to the palace of the Prince of Roum, a massive building fronted by a colossal column-ringed plaza, on the far side of the river that splits the city. In the plaza we were accosted by mendicants of many sorts, some not even Earthbom. Something with ropy tendrils and a corrugated noseless face thrust itself at me and jabbered for alms until Gormon pushed it away, and moments later a second creatme equally strange, its skin pocked with luminescent craters and its limbs studded with' eyes, embraced my knees and pleaded in the name of the Will for my mercy. "I am only a poor Watcher," I said, indicating my cart, "and am here to gain mercy myself." But the being persisted, sobbing out its misfortimes in a blurred feathery voice, and in the end, to Gormon's immense disgust, I dropped a few food tablets into the shelflike pouch on its chest Then we muscled on toward the doors of the palace. At the portico a more horrid sight presented itself: a maimed Flier, fragile limbs bent and twisted, one wing Half unfolded and severely cropped, the other missing altogether. The Flier rushed upon Avluela, called her by a name not hers, moistened her leggings with tears so copious that the fur of them grew matted and stained. "Sponsor me to the lodge," he appealed. "They have turned me away because I am crippled, but if you sponsor me -- " Avluela explained tHat sHe could do notHing, tHat sKe was a stranger to tHis lodge. The broken Flier would not release Her, and Gormon witB great delicacy lifted him like tKe bundle of dry bones tHat He was, and set Him aside. We stepped up onto tKe portico and at once were confronted by a trio of soft-faced neuters, wHo asked our business and admitted us quickly to tKe next line of barrier, wfficH was manned by a pair of wizened Indexers. Speaking in unison, tKey queried us. ' ' "A matter of mercy." "TKe day of audience is four da# hence," said the Indexer on the rigKt. "We will enter your request on tKe rolls." "We Have no place to sleepl" Avluela burst out "We are Hungry! We -- " I KusKed Her. Gormon, meanwhile, was groping in tKe moutH of His overpocket. BrigKt tffings glimmered in His Hand: pieces of gold, the eternal metal, stamped witK Hawk-nosed bearded faces. He Had found them grubbing in tKe ruins. He tossed one coin to tKe Indexer wKo Had refused us. TKe man snapped it from tKe air, rubbed Kis tKumb roughly across its shining obverse, and dropped it instantly into a fold of Kis garment. TKe second Indexer waited expectantly. Smiling, Gormon gave him his coin. "Perhaps," I said, "we can arrange for a special audience within." "Perhaps you can," said one of the Indexers. "Go througK." And so we passed into tKe nave of the palace itself, and stood in that great echoing space, looking down tKe central aisle toward the shielded throne cKamb'er at the apse. TKere were more beggars in Here -- licensed ones. Holding Hereditary concessions -- and also throngs of Pilgrims, Communicants, Rememberers, Musicians, Scribes and Indexers. I Heard muttered prayers: I smelled tKe scent of spicy incense; I felt tKe vibration of subterranean gongs. In cycles past this building Kad been a sKrine of one of tKe old religions -- tKe CKristers, Gormon told me, making me suspect once more tKat Ke was a Rememberer masquerading as a Changeling -- and it still maintained sometKing of its Holy cBaracter even though it served as Room's seat of secular government. But how were we to get to see the Prince? To my left I saw a small ornate cKapel to whicK a line of prosperous-looking Merchants and Landholders was slowly entering. Peering past them, I noted three skulls mounted on an interrogation fixture Ta memory-tank input -- and beside them a burly Scribe. Telling Gormon and Avluela to wait for me in the aisle, I joined the line. It moved infrequently, and nearly an Hour passed before I reached the interrogation fixture. The skulls glared sightlessly at me; within their sealed crania nutrient fluids bubbled and gurgled, caring for the dead yet still funcsynaptic units now served as incomparable mnemonic devices. The Scribe seemed aghast to find a Watcher in this line, but before he could challenge me I blurted, "I come as a stranger to claim the Prince's mercy. I and my companions are without lodging. My own guild has turned me away. What shall I do? How may I gain an audience?" "Come back in four days." "I've slept on the road for more da#Ts than that. Now I must rest." "A public inn -- " "But I am guilded!" I protested. "The public inns would not admit me while my guild maintains an inn Here, and my guild refuses me because of some new regulation, and -- you see my predicament?" Tn a wearied voice the Scribe said, "You may make application for a special audience. It will be denied. But you may apply." "Where?" "Here. State your purpose." I identified myself to the skulls by my public designation, listed the names and status of my two companions, and explained my case. All this was absorbed and transmitted to the ranks of brains mounted somewhere in the depths of the city, and when I was done the Scribe said, "If the application is approved, you will be notified." "Meanwhile where shall I stay?" "Close to the palace, I would suggest." I understood. I could join that legion of unfortunates packing the plaza. How many of them had requested some special favor of the Prince and were still there, months or years later, waiting to be summoned to the Presence? Sleeping on stone, begging for crusts, living in foolish hope -- But I had exhausted my avenues. I returned to Gormon and Avluela, told them of the situation, and suggested that we now attempt to hunt whatever accommodations we could. Gormon, guildless, was welcome at any of the squalid public inns maintained for his kind; Avluela could probably find residence at her own guild's lodge; only I would have to sleep in the streets, not for the first time. But I hoped that we would not have to separate. I had come to think of us as a family, strange thought though that was for a Watcher. As we moved toward the exit my timepiece told me softly that the hour of Watching had come round again. It is my obligation and my privilege to tend to my Watching wherever I may be, regardless of the circumstances, whenever my hour comes round; and so I halted, opened the cart, activated the equipment. Gormon and Avluela stood beside me. I saw smirks and open mockery on the faces of those who passed in and out of the palace. Watching is not held in very high repute, for we have Watched so long, and the promised enemy has never come. One has one's duties, comic though they may seem to others. What is a hollow ritual to some is a life's work to others. Doggedly I forced myself into a state of Watchfulness. The world melted away from me, and. I plunged into the heavens. The familiar joy engulfed me; and I searched the familiar places, and some that were not so familiar, my amplified mind leaping through the galaxies in wild swoops. Was an armada massing? quest of Earth? Four times a day I watched, and the other members of my guild did the same, each at slightly different Hours, so that no moment went by without some vigilant mind on guard. I do not believe that that is a foolish calling. flhen I came up from my '  trance a brazen voice was crying, " -- for the Prince of Roum! Make way for the Prince of Roum!" I blinked and caught my breath and fought to shake off the last strands of my concentration. A gilded palanquin Had emerged from the rear of the palace and was proceeding down the nave toward me, borne by a phalanx of neuters. Four men in the masks of the guild of Masters flanked the litter, and it was preceded by a trio of Changelings, squat and broad, whose throats were so modified as to imitate the sounding-boxes of bullfrogs. They emitted a trumpet-like boom of majestic sound as they advanced. It struck me as most strange that a prince would admit Changelings to His service, even ones as gifted as these. My cart was blocking the progress of this magnificent procession, and hastily I struggled to close it and move it aside before the parade swept down upon me. Age and fear made my fingers tremble, and I could not make the sealings properly; while I fumbled in increasing clumsiness the strutting Changelings drew so close th'at the blare of their throats was deafening, and Gormon attempted to aid me, forcing me to hiss at him that it is forbidden for anyone not of my guild to touch the equipment. I pushed him away; and an instant later a vanguard of neuters descended on me and prepared to scourge me from the spot with sparkling whips. "In the Will's name," I cried, "I am a Watcher!" And in antiphonal response came the deep, calm, enormous reply, "Let him be. He is a Watcher." All motion ceased. The Prince of Roum had spoken. The neuters drew back. The Changelings halted their music. The bearers of the palanquin eased it to the floor. All those in the nave of the . palace had pulled back, save only Gormon and Avluela and myself. The shimmering chain-curtains of the palanquins parted. Two of the Masters hurried forward and thrust their hands through the sonic barrier within, offering aid to their monarch. The barrier died away with a whimpering buzz. The Prince of Roum appeared. TT e was so young! He was nothing more than a boy, his hair full and dark, his face unlined. But he had been bom to rule, and for all his youth he was as commanding as anyone I had ever seen. His lips were thin and tightly compressed; his aquiline nose was sharp and aggressive; his eyes, deep and cold, were infinite pools. He wore the jeweled garments of the guild of Dominators, but incised on his cheek was the double-barred cross of the Defenders, and aroxmd his neck he carried the dark shawl of the Rememberers. A Dominator may enroll in as many guilds as he pleases, and it would be a strange thing for a Dominator not also to be a Defender; but it startled me to find this prince a Rememberer as well. That is not normally a guild for the fierce. He looked at me with little interest and said, "You choose an odd place to do your Watching, old man." "The hour chose the place, sire," I replied. "I was there, and my duty compelled me. 'I had no way of knowing that you were about to come forth." "Your Watching found no enemies?" "None, sire." I was about to press my luck, to take advantage of the unexpected appearance of the Prince to beg for his aid; but his interest in me died like a guttering candle as I stood there, and I did not dare call to him when his Head had turned. He eyed Gormon a long moment, frowning and tugging at his chin. Then his gaze fell on Avluela. His eyes brightened. His jaw-muscles flickered. His delicate nostrils widened. "Come up here, little Flier," Ke said, beckoning. "Are you this Watcher's friend?" She nodded, terrified. The Prince held out a hand to her and grasped; she floated up onto the palanquin, and with' a grin so evil it seemed a parody of wickedness the young Dominator drew her through the curtain. Instantly a pair of Masters restored the sonic barrier, but the procession did not move on. I stood mute. Gormon beside me was frozen, his powerful body rigid as a rod. I wheeled my cart to a less conspicuous place. Long moments passed. The courtiers remained silent, discreetly looking away from the palanquin. At length the curtain parted once more. Avluela came stumbling out, her face pale, her eyes blinking rapidly. She looked dazed. Streaks of sweat gleamed on her cheeks. She nearly fell, and a neuter caught her and swung her down to floor level. Beneath' Her jacket her wings were partly erect, giving her a hunchbacked look and telling me that she was in great emotional distress. In ragged sliding steps she came to us, quivering, wordless; she darted a glance at me and flung herself against Gormons chest. The bearers lifted the palanquin. The Prince of Roum went out from his palace. When he was gone, Avluela stammered Hoarsely, "The Prince has granted us lodng in the royal Hostelry!" V 'The hostelkeepers, of eourse, would not believe us. Guests of the Prince are Housed in the royal hostelry, which is to the rear of the palace in a small garden of frostflowers and blossoming ferns. The usual inhabitants of such a hostelry are Masters and an occasional Dominator; sometimes a particularly important Rememberer on an errand of research will win a niche there, or some highly placed Defender visiting for purposes of strategic planning. To house a Flier in a royal Hostelry would be distinctly odd; to admit a Watcher would be unlikely; to take in a Changeling or some other guildless person would be improbable beyond comprehension. When we presented ourselves, therefore, we were met by Servitors whose attitude was at first one of High humor at our joke, then of irritation, finally of scorn. "Get away," they told us ultimately. "Scum! Rabble!" Avluela said in a grave voice, "The Prince Has granted us lodging here, and you may not refuse us." "Away! Away!" One snaggletootKed Servitor produced a neural truncheon and .brandished it in Gormon's face, passing a foul remark about his gutldlessness. Gormon slapped the truncheon from his grasp, oblivious to the painful sting, and kicked the man in his gut, so that he coiled and fell over, puking. Instantly a throng of neuters came rushing from within the hostelry. Gormon seized another of the Servitors and hurled Him into the midst of them, turning them into a muddled mob. Wild shouts and angry cursing cries attracted the attention of a venerable Scribe who waddled to the door, bellowed for silence, and interrogated us. "That's easily checked," he said, when Avluela had told the story. To a Servitor he said contemptuously, "Send a think to the Indexers fast!" In time the confusion was untangled, and we were admitted. We were given separate but adjoining rooms. I had never known such luxury before, and perhaps never shall again. The rooms were long, high, and deep. One entered them through telescopic pits keyed to one's own thermal output, to assure privacy. Lights glowed at the resident's merest nod, for hanging from ceiling globes and nestling in cupolas on the walls were spicules of slavelight from one of the Brigh'tstar worlds, trained through suffering to obey such commands. The windows came and went at the dweller's whim. When not in use they were concealed by streamers of quasisentient outworld gauzes, wfficH not only were decorative in their own right but functioned as monitors to produce delightful scents according to requisitioned patterns. The rooms were equipped with individual thinking caps connected to the main memory, banks. They likewise had conduits that summoned Servitors, Scribes, Indexers or Musicians as required. Of course, a man of my own human guild would not deign to make use of other human beings that way, out of fear of their glowering resentment But in any case I had little need of them. I did not ask of Avluela what had occurred in the Prince's palanquin to bring us such bounty. I could well imagine, as could Gormon, whose barely suppressed inner rage was eloquent of his never-admitted love for my pale, slender little Flier. TTe settled in. I placed my cart  beside the window, draped it with gauzes, and left it in readiness for my next period of Watching. I cleaned my body of grime while entities mounted in the wall sang me to peace. Later I ate. Afterwards Avluela came to me, refresh'ed, relaxed, and sat beside me in my room as we talked quietly of our recent experiences. Gormon did not appear for Hours. I thought that perhaps he Had left this hostelry altogether, finding the atmosphere to rarefied for him, and Had sought company among his own guildless kind. But at twilight Avluela and I walked in the cloistered courtyard of the hostelry and mounted a ramp to watch the stars emerge in Roum's sky, and Gormon was there. With him was a lanky and emaciated man in a Rememberer's shawl; they were talking in low tones. Gormon nodded to me and said, "Watcher, I want you to meet my new friend." The emaciated one fingered His shawl. "I am the Rememberer Basil," he intoned, in a voice as thin as a fresco that Has been peeled from its wall. "I Have come from Perris to delve into the mysteries of Roum. I shall be Here many years." "The Rememberer Has fine stories to tell," said Gormon. "He is among the foremost of his guild. As you approached. He was describing to me the techniques by which the past is revealed. They drive a trench through the strata of Third Cycle deposits, you see, and with vacuum cores they lift the molecules of earth to lay bare the ancient layers." "We have found," Basil said, "the catacombs of Imperial Roum, and the rubble of the Time of Sweeping, and books inscribed on slivers of white metal, written toward the close of the Second Cycle. All these go to Perris for examination and classification and decipherment; then they return. Does the past interest you. Watcher?" "To some extent." I smiled. "This Changeling here shows much more fascination for it. I sometimes suspect his authenticity. Would you recognize a Rememberer in disguise?" Basil scrutinized Gormon, lingering over the bizarre features, the excessively muscular frame. "He is no Rememberer," he said at length. "But I agree that he has antiquarian interests. He has asked me many profound questions." "Such as?" "He wishes to know the origin of guilds. He asks the name of the genetic sxirgeon who crafted the first true-breeding Fliers. He wonders why there are Changelings, and if they are truly under the curse of the Will." "And do you have answers for these?" I asked. "For some," said Basil. "For some." "The origin of guilds?" give structure and meaning to a society tKat Has suffered defeat and destruction," said tKe Rememberer. "At tKe end of tKe Second Cycle all was in flux. No man knew his rank nor his purpose. Through' our world strode Haughty outworlders wHo looked upon us all as worthless. It was necessary to establish fixed frames of reference by wKicK one man migKt know his value beside another. So the first guilds appeared : Dominators, Masters, Merchants, Manufactories, Vendors and Servitors. Then came Scribes, Musicians, Clowns and Transporters. Afterwards Indexers became necessary, and then Watchers and Defenders. When the years of Magic gave us Fliers and Changelings, those guilds were added, and then the guildless ones, the neuters, were produced, so that -- " "But surely the Changelings are guildless tool" said Avluela. The Rememberer looked at her for the first time. "Who are you?" "Avluela of the Fliers. I travel with this Watcher and this Changeling." Basil said, "As I have been telling the Changeling here, in the early days ffis kind was guilded. The guild was dissolved a thousand years ago Ky order of the Council of Dominators after an attempt by a disreputable Changeling faction to seize control of the holy places of Jorslem. Since that time Changelings have been guildless, ranking only above neuters." "I never knew that," I said. "You are no Rememberer," said Basil smugly. "It is our craft to uncover the past." "True. True." Gormon said, "And today, how many guilds there are?" Discomfited, Basil replied vaguely, "At least a hundred, my friend. Some are quite small; some are local. I am concerned only with the original guilds and their immediate successors; what has happened in the past few hundred years is in the province of others. Shall I requisition an information for you?" "Never mind," Gormon said. "It was only an idle question." "Your curiosity is well developed," said the Rememberer. "I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?" "It is strange," said Basil. "The guildless rarely look beyond their own horizons." VI A Servitor appeared. With a mixture of awe and contempt he genuflected before Avluela and said, "TKe Prince has returned. He desires your company in the palace at this time." Terror glimmered in Avluela's eyes. But to refuse was inconceivable. "SEall I come witK you?" sHe asked. "Please. You must be robed and perfumed. He wisHes you to come to Him witH your wings open, as well." Avluela nodded. TKe Servitor led Her away. We remained on tKe ramp a while longer. TKe Rememberer Basil talked of tEe old days of Roum, and I listened, and Gormon peered into tKe gatEering darkness. Eventually, His tKroat dry, 'th'e Rememberer excused himself and moved solemnly away. A few moments later, in the courtyard below us, a door opened and Avluela emerged, walking as tEougH sKe was of the guild of Somnambulists, not of Fliers. She was nude, and Eer fragile body gleamed ghostly white in the starbeams. Her wings were spread and fluttered slowly in a somber S#rstole and diastole. One Servitor grasped eacE of Her elbows; tKey seemed to be propelling Eer toward the palace as thougH she were but a dreamed facsimile of herself and not a real woman. "Fly, Avluela, fly," Gormon whispered. "Escape while you can!" She disappeared into a side entrance of the palace. The Changeling looked at me. "She Has sold Eerself to tKe Prince to provide lodg for us." "So it seems." "I could smasK down that palace! " "You love Her?" "It sKould be obvious." "Cure yourself," I advised. "You are an unusual man, but still a Flier is not for you. Particularly a Flier wHo Has sEared tHe bed of the Prince of Roum." "She goes from my arms to his." I was staggered. "You've known Her?" "More than once," Ke said, smiling sadly. "At tKe moment of ecstasy Her wings thrash' like leaves in a storm." I gripped the railing of the ramp so that I would not tumble into the courtyard. TKe stars whirled overhead; the old moon and its two blank-faced consorts leaped and bobbed. I was shaken witfout fully understanding the cause of my emotion. Was it wrath that Gormon had dared to violate a canon of the law? Was it a manifestation of those pseudo-parental feelings I had toward Avluela? Or was it mere envy of Gormon for daring to commit a sin beyond my capacity, though' not beyond my desires? I said, "They could burn your brain for that. They could mince your soul. And now you make me an accessory." "What of it? That Prince commands, and he gets -- but others have been there before him. I had to tell someone."  "Enough. Enough." "Will we see her again?" "Princes tire quickly of their women. A few days, perhaps a single night -- then he will throw her back to us. And perhaps then we shall have to leave this hostelry." I sighed. "At least we'll have known it a few nights more than we deserved." "Where will you go then?" Gormon asked. "I will stay in Roum a while." "Even if you sleep in the streets? There does not seem to be much demand for Watchers here." "I'll manage," I said. "Then I may go toward Perris." "To learn from the Rememberers?" "To see Perris. What of you? What do you want in Roum?" "Avluela." "Stop that talk!" "Very well," he said, and his smile was bitter. "But I will stay here until the Prince is through with her. Then she will be mine, and we'll find ways to survive. The guildless are resourceful. They have to be. Maybe we'll scrounge lodgings in Roum a while, and then follow you to with monsters and faithless Fliers." I shrugged. "We'll see about that when the time comes." "Have you ever been in the company of a Changeling before?" "Not often. Not for long." "I'm honored." He drummed on the parapet. "Don't cast me off, Watcher, I have reason for wanting to stay with' you." "Which is?" "To see your face on the day your machines tell you that the invasion of Earth' has begvin." I let myself sag forward, shoulders drooping. "You'll stay with me a long time, then." "Don't you believe the invasion is coming?" "Some day. Not soon." Gormon chuckled. "You're wrong. It's almost here." "You don't amuse me." "What is it. Watcher? Have you lost your faith? It's been known for a thousand years: another race covets Earth and owns it by treaty and will some day come to collect. That much' was decided at the end of the Second Cycle." "I know all that, and I am no Rememberer." Then I turned to him and spoke words I never thought I would say aloud. "For twice your lifetime. Changeling, I've listened to tKe stars and done my WatcKing. Something done that often loses meaning. Say your own name ten thousand times and it will be an empty sound. I Have Watched, and Watched well, and in the dark Hours of the night I sometimes think I Watch for nothing, that I have wasted my life. There is a pleasure in Watching, but perhaps there is no real purpose." His Hand encircled my wrist. "Your confession is as shocking as mine. Keep your faith'. Watcher. The invasion comes!" "How could you possibly know?" "The guildless also have their skills." The conversation distressed me. I said, "Is it painful to be guildless?" "One grows reconciled. And there are certain freedoms to compensate for the lack of status. I may speak freely to all." "I notice." "I move freely. I am always sure of food and lodging, though the food may be rotten and the lodging poor. Women are attracted to me despite all prohibitions. Because of them, perhaps. I am untroubled by ambitions." "Never desire to rise above your rank?" "Never." "You might have been Happier as a Rememberer." "I am happy now. I can have a Rememberer's pleasures without his responsibility." "How smug you are!" I cried. "To make a virtue of guildlessness!" "How else does one endure the weight of the Will?" He looked toward the palace. The humble rise. The mighty fall. Take this as prophesy. Watcher: that lusty Prince in there will know mare of life before summer comes. I'B rip out his eyes for taking her!" "Strong words. You bubble with treason tonight." "Take it as prophesy." "You can't get close to him," I said. Then, irritated for taking his foolishness seriously, I added, "And why blame him? He does only as princes do. Blame the girl for going to him. She might have refused." "And lost her wings. Or died. No, she had no choice. I do!" In a sudden terrible gestiue the Changeling Held out thumb and forefinger, double-jointed, longnailed, and plunged them forward into imagined eyes. "Wait," he said. "You'll see!" In the courtyard two CHronomancers appeared, set up the apparatus of their guild and lit tapers by which to read the shape of tomorrow. A sickly odor of pallid smoke rose to my nostrils. I had lost further desire to speak with the Changeling now. "It grows late," I said. "I need rest, and soon I must do my WatcKing." "Watch' carefully," Gormon told me. Tn my chamber by night I performed my fourth and last Watch of that long day, and for the first time in my life I detected an anomaly. I could not interpret it. It was an obscure sensation, a mingling of tastes and sounds, a feeling of being in contact with some colossal mass. Worried, I clung to my instruments far longer than usual, but perceived no more clearly at the end of my seance than at its commencement. Afterward I wondered about ttiy obligations. Watchers are trained from childhood to be swift to sound the alarm; and the alarm must be sounded when the Watcher judges the world in peril. Was I now obliged to notify the Defenders? Four times in my life the alarm had been given, on each occasion in error; and each Watcher who had thus touched off a false mobilization had suffered a fearful loss of status. One Had contributed KJs brain to the memory banks; one Had become a neuter out of shame; one had smashed his instruments and gone to live among the guildless; and one, vainly attempting to continue in his profession, had discovered himself mocked by all his comrades. I saw no virtue in scorning one who Had delivered a false alarm; for was it not preferable for a Watcher to cry out too soon than not at all? But those were the customs of our guild, and I was constrained by them. I evaluated my position and decided that I did not Have valid grounds for an alarm. I reflected that Gormon had placed suggestive ideas in my mind that evening. I might possibly be reacting only to KSs peering talk of imminent invasion. I could not act. I dared not jeopardize my standing by Hasty outcry. I mistrusted my own emotional sfate. I gave no alarm. Seetffing, confused, my soul roiling, I closed my cart and let myself sink into a drugged sleep.  t dawn I woke and rushed to the window, expecting to find invaders in the streets. But all was still. A vdnter grayness Hung over the courtyard, and sleepy Servitors pushed passive neuters about. Uneasily I did my first WatcEng of the day, and to my relief the strangeness of the night before did not return, although I had it in mind that my sensitivity is always greater at nigfit tfian upon arising. I ate and went to the courtyard. Gormon and Avluela were already there. She looked fatigued and downcast, depleted by Ker night with the Prince of Roum, but I said nothing to her about it. Gormon, slouching disdainfully against a wall embellished with the shells of radiant mollusks, said to me, "Did your Watching go well? " "Well enough." "What of the day?" "Out to roam Roum," I said. "Will you come? Avluela? Gormon?" "Surely," he said, and she gave a faint nod, and, like the tourists we were, we set off to inspect the splendid city of Roum. Gormon acted as our guide to the jumbled pasts of Roum, beIjdng his claim never to have been here before. As well as any Rememberer he described the things we saw as we walked the winding streets. All the scattered levels of thousands of years were exposed. We saw the power domes of the Second Cycle, and the Colosseum where at an unimaginably early date , man and beast contended like jungle creatures. In the broken hull of that building of horrors Gormon told us of the savagery of that unimaginably ancient time. "They fought," he said, "naked before huge throngs. With bare hands men challenged beasts called lions, great hairy cats witU swollen heads; and when the lion lay in its gore the victor turned to the Prince of Roum and asked to be pardoned for whatever crime it was that had cast him into the arena. And if He Had fought well, the Prince made a gesture with his hand, and the man was freed." Gormon made the gesture for us; a thumb upraised and jerked backward over the right shoulder several times. "But if the man had shown cowardice, or if the lion had distinguished itself in the manner of its dying, the Prince made another gesture, and the man was condemned to be slain by a second beast." Gormon showed us that gesture too: the middle finger jutting upward from a clenched fist and lifted in a short sharp thrust. "How are these things known?" Avluela asked, but Gormon pretended not to hear her. We saw the line of fusion pylons built early in the Third Cycle to draw energy from the world's core, and still functioning, although stained and corroded. We saw the shattered stump of a Second Cycle weather machine, still a mighty column at least twenty mfen High. We saw a hill on which white marble relics of First Cycle Roum sprouted like pale clumps of winter deathflowers. Penetrating toward the inner part of the city, we came upon the embankment of defensive amplifiers waiting in readiness to hurl the full impact of the Will against invaders. We viewed a market where visitors from the stars haggled with peasants for excavated fragments of antiquity. Gormon strode into the crowd and made several purchases. We came to a flesh house for travelers from afar, where one could buy anything from quasi-life to mounds of passion-ice. We ate at a small restaurant by the edge of the river Tver, where guildless ones were served without ceremony, and at Gormon's insistence we dined on mounds of a soft doughy substance. fterward we passed through a covered arcade in whose many aisles plump Vendors peddled star-goods, costly trinkets from Afreek and the flimsy constructs of the local Manufactories. Just beyond we emerged in a plaza that contained a fountain in the shape of a boat, and to the rear of this rose a flight of cracked and battered stone stairs ascending to a zone of rubble and weeds. Gormon beckoned, and we scrambled into this dismal area, passing rapidly through it to a place where a sumptuous palace, by its looks early Second Cycle or even First, brooded over a sloping vegetated hill. "They say this is the center of the world," Gormon declared. "In Jorslem one finds another place that also claims the honor. They mark the spot here by a map." "How can the world have one center," Avluela asked, "when it is a sphere?" Gormon laughed. We went in. Within, in wintry darkness, there stood a colossal jeweled globe lit by some inner glow. "Here is your world," said Gormon, gesturing grandly. "Oh!" Avluela gasped. "Everything! Everything is here!" The map was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It showed natural contours and elevations; its seas seemed deep liquid pools; its deserts were so parched as to make thirst spring in one's mouth; it cities swirled with vigor and life. I beheld the continents, Eyrop, Afreek, Ais, Stralya. I saw the vastness of Earth Ocean. I traversed the golden span of Land Bridge, which I Had crossed so toilfully on foot not long before. Avluela rushed forward and pointed to Roum, to Agupt, to Jorslem, to Perris. She tapped the globe at the high mountains north of Hind and said softly, "This is where I was bom, where the ice lives, where the moimtains touch the moons. Here is where the Fliers Have their kingdom." She ran a finger westward toward Pars and beyond it into the terrible Arb'aa Desert, and on to Agupt "Tills is wfiere I flew. By nigEt, wEen I left my girlEood. We all must fly, and I flew Bere. A Eundred times I tEougEt I would die. Here, Bere in tEe desert, sand in my tEroat as I flew, sand beating against my wings -- I was forced down, I lay naked on tEe Bot sand for days, and anotEer Flier saw me, Ee came down to me and pitied me, and lifted me up, and wKen I was aloft my strengtB returned, and we flew on toward Agupt. And Ee died over tKe sea. His life stopped, tHougE Ke was young and strong, and Ee fell down into tEe sea, and I flew down to be witB Eim, and tEe water was Hot even at nigKt. I drifted, and morning came, and I saw tKe living stones growing Eke trees in tKe water, and tKe fisH of many colors, and tKey came and pecked at Kis flesE as Ke floated witE Kis wings outspread on tKe water, and I left Kim, I tKrust Kim down to rest tKere, and I rose, and I flew on to Agupt, alone, frigKtened, and tKere I met you, WatcBer." Timidly sKe smiled to me. "SKow us tKe place wKere you were young. Watcher." painfully, for I was suddenly  stiff at tKe knees, I Kobbled to tKe far side of tKe globe. Avluela followed me. Gormon Kung back, as tKougH not interested at all. I pointed to tKe scattered islands rising in two long strips from EartE Ocean -- the remnants of tKe Lost Continents. "Here," I said, indicating my native island in tKe west. "I was bom Here." "So far awayl" Avluela cried. "And so long ago," I said. "In tEe middle of tKe Second Cycle, it sometimes seems to me." "No! TKat is not possible!"'But sHe looked at me as though' it migKt just be true that I was thousands of years old. I smiled and touched her satiny cheek. "It only seems that way to me," I said. "WKen did you leave your home?" "WKen I was twice your age," I said. "I came first to Kere." I indicated the eastern group of islands. "I spent a dozen years as a Watcher on PalasE. Then the Will moved me to cross Earth Ocean to Afreek. I came. I lived a while in the Eot countries. I went on to Agupt. I met a certain small Flier." Falling silent, I looked a long while at tKe islands that had been my Kome, and witHin my mind my image changed from the gaunt and eroded thing I am today, and I saw myself young and well fleshed, climbing the green mountains and swimming in tKe cEill sea, and doing my Watching at tKe rim of a white beacH Bammered by surf. While I brooded Avluela turned away from me to Gormon and said, "Now you. Show us wfiere you come from, CKangeling!" Gormon shrugged. "The place does not appear to be on this globe." "But that's impossible!" "Is it?" he asked. She pressed Him, but Ke evaded her, and we passed through a side exit and into the streets. T was growing tired, but Avluela hungered for this city, wishing to devour it all in an afternoon, and we went on through a maze of interlocking streets, through a zone of sparkling mansions of Masters and Merchants, and through a foul den of Servitors and Vendors that extended into subterranean catacombs, and to a place where Clowns and Musicians resorted, and to another where the guild of Somnambulists begged us to come inside and buy the truth that comes with trances. Avluela urged us to go, but Gormon shook his head and I smiled, and we moved on. Now we were at the edge of a park close to the city's core. Here the citizens of Roum promenaded with an energy rarely seen in hot Agupt, and we joined the parade. "Look there!" Avluela said. "How bright it is!" She pointed toward the shining arc of a dimensional sphere enclosing some relic of the ancient city. Shading my eyes, I could make out a weathered stone wall within, and a knot of people. Gormon said, "It is the Mouth of Truth." "What is that?" Avluela asked. "Come. See." A line progressed into the sphere. We joined it and soon were at the lip of the interior, peering at the timeless region just across the threshold. Why this relic and so few others had been accorded such special protection I did not know, and I asked Gormon, whose knowledge was so xmaccountably as profound as any Rememberer's, and he replied, "Because this is the realm of certainty, where what one says is absolutely congruent with what actually is the case." "I don't understand," said Avluela. "It is impossible to lie in this place," Gormon told her. "Can you imagine any relic more worthy of protection?" He stepped across the entry duct, blurring as he did so, and I followed him quickly within. Avluela hesitated. It was a long moment before she entered; she paused a moment on the very threshold, seemingly buffeted by the wind that blew along the line of demarcation between the outer world and the pocket universe in wlncE we stood. An inner compartment Held tKe MoutH of Trutk itself. TKe line extended toward it, and a solemn Indexer was controlling tHe flow of entry to tKe tabernacle. It was a wHile before we tKree were permitted to go in. We found ourselves before tKe ferocious Head of a monster in HigH relief, affixed to an ancient wall pockmarked by time. TKe monster's jaws gaped; tKe open moutK was a dark and sinister Kole. Gormon nodded, inspecting it, as tKougK Ke seemed pleased to find it exactly as Ke Kad tKougKt it would be. "WKat do we do?" Avluela asked. Gormon said, "WatcKer, put your rigKt Hand into tKe MoutK of TrutH." Frowning, I complied. "Now," said Gormon, "one of us asks a question. You must answer it. If you speak anytKing but tKe trutK, tKe moutK will close and sever your Hand." "No!" Avluela cried. T stared uneasily at tKe stone jaws rimming my wrist. A WatcKer witKout botK Kis Hands is a man witKout a craft; in Second Cycle days one migKt obtain a prostKesis more artful tKan one's original Hand, but tKe Second Cycle Kad long ago been coneluded, and sucK niceties were not to be purchased on EartK nowadays. "How is sucK a thing possible?" I asked. "TKe Will is unusually strong in tKese precincts," Gormon replied. "It distinguishes sternly between trutK and untrutH. To tKe rear of this wall sleeps a trio of Somnambulists tKrougK wKom tiie Will speaks, and tKey control tKe MoutK. Do you fear tKe Will, WatcKer?" "I fear my own tongue." "Be brave. Never Has a lie been told before this wall. Never Kas a Kand been lost." "Go ahead, then," I said. "WKo will ask me a question?" "I," said Gormon. "Tell me, WatcKer: all pretense aside, would you say that a life spent in Watching Kas been a life spent wisely?" I was silent a long moment, rotating my thoughts, eyeing tKe jaws. At length I said, "To devote one's self to vigilance on behalf of one's fellow man is perhaps tKe noblest purpose one can serve." "Careful!" Gormon cried in alarm. "I am not finished," I said. "Go on." "But to devote one's self to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate one's self for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste." The jaws of the Mouth' of Truth did not quiver. I removed my Hand. I stared at it as though it Had newly sprouted from my wrist. I felt suddenly several cycles old. Avluela, her eyes wide, Her Hands to her lips, seemed shocked by wKat I had said. My own words appeared to hang congealed in the air before the hideous idol. "Spoken Honestly," said Gormon, "although without much mercy for yourself. You judge yourself too Harshly, Watcher." "I spoke to save my hand," I said. "Would you have had me lie?" He smiled. To Avluela the Changeling said, "Now it's your turn." X visibly frightened, the little  Flier approached the Mouth. Her dainty hand trembled as she inserted it between the slabs of cold stone. I fought back an urge to rush toward her and pull her free of that devilish grimacing head. "Who will question Her?" I asked. "I," said Gormon. Avluela's wings stirred faintly beneath Her garments. Her face grew pale; her nostrils flickered, her upper lip slid over the lower one. She stood slouched against the wall, staring in horror at the termination of her arm. Outside the chamber vague faces peered at us, lips moved in what no doubt were expressions of impatience over our lengthy visit to the Mouth; but we heard nothing. The atmosphere around us was warm and clammy, with a musty tang like that which would come from a well that was driven through the structure of Time. Gormon said slowly, "This night past you allowed your body to be possessed by the Prince of Roum. Before that, you granted yourself to the Changeling Gormon, although such liaisons are forbidden by custom and law. Much prior to that you were the mate of a Flier, now deceased. You may have had other men, but I know notffing of them, and for the purposes of my question they are not relevant. Tell me this, Avluela: which of the three gave you the most intense physical pleasure, which of the three aroused your deepest emotions, and which of the three would you choose as a mate, if you were choosing a mate?" I wanted to protest that the Changeling had asked Her tluee questions, not one, and so had taken unfair advantage. But I had no chance to speak, because Avluela replied unfalteringly, hand wedged deep into the Mouth of TrutK, "Ttie Prince of Roum gave me greater pleasure of the body than I Had ever known before, but Ke is cold and cruel, and I despise Him. My dead Flier I loved more deeply than any person before or since, but Ke was weak, and I would not Have wanted a weakling as a mate. You, Gormon, seem almost a stranger to me even now, and I feel tKat I know neitKer your body nor your soul, and yet, tKougH tKe gulf between us is so wide, it is you witK wKom I would spend my days to come." SKe drew Ker Hand from tKe MoutK of lrutH. "Well spoken!" said Gormon, though the accuracy of Ker words Had clearly wounded as well as pleased him. "Suddenly you find eloquence, eK, wKen tKe circumstances demand it? And now tKe turn is mine to risk my Hand." TTe neared the MoutK. I said, "You Have asked tKe first two questions. Do you wisK to finish tKe job and ask tKe third as well?" "Hardly," Ke said. He made a negligent gesture witH His free Hand. "Put your Heads together and agree on a joint question." Avluela and I conferred. WitK uncKaracteristic forwardness sKe proposed a question; and since it was tKe one I would Have asked, I accepted and told Ker to ask it. She said, "WKen we stood before tKe globe of the world, Gormon, I asked you to sKow me tKe place wKere you were bom, and you said you were unable to find it on tKe map. TKat seemed most strange. Tell me now: are you wKat you say you are, a Changeling vo wanders the world?" He replied, "I am not." In a sense Ke Had satisfied the question as Avluela had phrased it; but it went without saying that his reply was inadequate, and without removing his hand from tKe MoutK of Truth' he continued, "I did not show my birthplace to you on the globe because I was bom nowhere on this globe, but on a world of a star I must not name. I am no Changeling in your meaning of tKe word, tKougH by some definitions I am, for my body is somewhat disguised, and on my own world I wear a different flesK. I Have lived Here ten years." "WKat was your purpose in coming to EartH?" I asked. "I am obliged only to answer one question," said Gormon. TKen Ke smiled. "But I give you an answer an#nvay: I was sent to EartH in tKe capacity of a military observer, to prepare tKe way for tKe invasion for which' you have Watched so long and in wKicK you Have ceased to believe, and which will be upon you in a matter now of some hours." "Lies!" I bellowed "All lies!" Gormon laugh'ed. And drew his hand from th'e MoutH of Truth, intact, unharmed. IX "umb with confusion, I fled  with my cart of instruments from that gleaming sphere and emerged into a street suddenly cold and dark. Night Had come with winter's swiftness; it was almost the ninth Hour, and almost the time for me to Watch once more. Gormon's mockery thundered in my brain. He had arranged everything: He had maneuvered us into the MoutH of Truth, he had wrung a confession of lost faith from me and a confession of a different sort from Avluela, he had mercilessly volunteered information He need not Have revealed, spoken words calculated to split me to the core. Was the MoutH of Truth a fraud? Could Gormon lie and emerge imscatHed? Never since I first took up my tasks had I Watched at anything but my appointed hours. This was a time of crumbling realities; I could not wait for the ninth hour to come round. Crouching in the windy street, I opened my cart, readied my equipment and sank like a diver into Watchfulness. My amplified consciousness roared toward the stars. Godlike I roamed infinity. I felt the rush of the solar wind, but I was no Flier to be Hurled to destruction by that pressure, and I soared past it, beyond the reach of those angry particles of light, into the blackness at the edge of the sun's dominion. Down upon me there beat a different pressure. Starships coming near. Not the tourist lines, bringing sightseers to gape at our diminished world. Not the registered mercantile transport vessels, nor the scoopships that collect the interstellar vapors, nor the resort craft on their h#rperbolic orbits. These were military craft, dark, alien, menacing. I could not tell their number; I knew only that they sped Earthward at many lights, nudging a cone of deflected energies before them, and it was that cone than I sensed, that I Had felt also the night before, booming into my mind through my instruments, engulfing me like a cube of crystal through which stress patterns play and shine. A ll my life I Had Watched for this. I Had been trained to sense it. I had prayed that I never would sense it, and then in my emptiness I had prayed that I would sense it, and then I Had ceased to believe in it. And then by grace of tEe CGangeling Gormon I Had sensed it after all, WatcHing aHead of my Hour, croucHing in a cold RoumisH street just outside tHe MoutH of TrutH. In His training a WatcHer is instructed to break from his WatcGfulness as soon as His observations are confirmed by a careful check, so tKat He can sound tHe alarm. Obediently I made my check, shifting from one channel to another to another, triangulating and still picking up that foreboding sensation of titanic force rushing upon Earth' at unimaginable speed. Either I was deceived, or the invasion was come. But I could not shake from my trance t give the alarm. Lingeringly, lovingly, I drank in the sensory data for what seemed like Hours. I fondled my equipment, draining from it the total affirmation of faith that my readings gave me. Dimly I warned myself that I was wasting vital time, that it was my duty to leave this lewd caressing of destiny and summon the Defenders. And at last I burst free of Watchfulness and returned to the world I was guarding. Avluela was beside me, dazed, terrified, her knuckles to Her teeth, her eyes blank. "Watcher! Watcher, do you hear me? Wh'afs happening? What's going to Happen?" "THe invasion," I said. "How long was I under?" "About half a minute. I don't know. Your eyes were closed. I thought you were dead." "Gormon was speaking the truth! The invasion is almost here. Where is He? Where did He go?" "He vanished as we came away from that place with the MoutH," Avluela whispered. "Watcher, I'm frightened. I feel ever#dhing collapsing. I have to fly -- I can't stay down Here now!" "Wait," I said, clutching at Her and missing Her arm. "Don't .go now. First I have to give the alarm, and then -- " But she was already stripping off her clothing. Bare to the waist, her pale body gleamed in the evening light, while about us people were rushing to and fro in ignorance of all that was about to occur. I wanted to keep Avluela beside me, but I could delay no longer in giving the alarm, and I turned away from Her, back to my cart. As though caught up in a dream bom of overripe longings I reached for the node that I Had never used, the one that would send forth a planetwide alert to the Defenders. Had the alarm already been given? Had some other Watcher sensed what I Had sensed and, less paralyzed by bewilderment and doubt, performed a WatcKer's final task? No. No. For then I would be hearing the sirens' sKriek reverberating from the orbiting loudspeakers above the city. I touched the node. From the comer of my eye I saw Avluela, free of her encumbrances now, her tender wings witH strength. In a moment she would be in the air, beyond my grasp. With a single svnft tug I activated the alarm. I n that instant I became aware of a burly figure striding toward us. Gormon, I thought; and as I rose from my equipment I reached out to Him, wanting to seize him and Hold Him fast. But he who approached was not Gormon but some officious doughfaced Servitor who said to Avluela, "Go easy. Flier, let your wings drop. The Prince of Roum sends me to bring you to His presence." He grappled with Her. Her little breasts Heaved; Her eyes flashed anger at Him. "Let go of me! I'm going to fly!"  "The Prince of Roum summons you," tKe Servitor said, enclosing her in His Heavy arms. "The Prince of Roum will Have other distractions tonigHt," I said. "He'll Have no need of Her." As I spoke the sirens began to sing from the skies. The Servitor released Her. His moutH worked noiselessly for an instant; He made one of the protective gestures of tKe Will; he looked skyward and grunted, "TKe alarm! Who gave tKe alarm? You, old Watcher?" Figures rusKed about insanely in the streets. Avluela, freed, sped past me -- on foot, her wings but Kalf-furled -- and was swallowed up in the surging tKrong. Over tKe terrifying sound of the sirens came booming messages from the public annunciators, giving instructions for defense and safety. A lanky man with tKe mark of the guild of Defenders upon lus cheek rusKed up to me, shouted words too incoherent to be understood and sped on down the street. The world seemed to Have gone mad. Only I remained calm. I looked to the skies, half expecting to see the invaders' black sKips already hovering above tKe towers of Roum. But I saw nothing except the Hovering nigHtligHts and the other objects one might expect overhead. "Gormon?" I called. "Avluela?" I was alone. A strange emptiness swept over me. I Had given tKe alarm. TKe invaders were on th'eir way; I Had lost my occupation. There was no need of Watchers now. Almost lovingly I toucHed tlie worn cart tKat had been my companion for so many years. I ran my fingers over its stained and pitted instruments; and then I looked away, abandoning it, and went down tKe dark streets cartless, burdenless, a man whose life had found and lost meaning in the same instant. And about me raged chaos. X Tt was understood that when the moment of Earth's final battle arrived, all guilds would be mobilized, the Watchers alone exempted. We who had manned the perimeter of defense for so long had no part in the strategy of combat; we were discharged by the giving of a true alarm. Now it was the time of the guild of Defenders to show its capabilities. They had planned for Half a cycle what they would do in time of war. What plans would they call forth now? WHat deeds would they direct? My only concern was to return to the royal hostelry and wait out the crisis. It was hopeless to think of finding Avluela, and I pummelled myself savagely for Having let her slip away like that, naked and without a protector, in that confused moment. Where would she go? Who would shield her? A fellow Watcher, pulling his cart madly along, nearly collided with me. "Careful!" I snapped. He looked up, breathless, stunned. "Is it true?" he asked. "The alarm?" "Can't you hear?" "But is it real?" I pointed to his cart. "You know how to find that out." "They say the man who gave the alarm was drunk, an old foel who was turned away from the inn yesterday?" "It could be so," I admitted. "But if the alarm is real -- !" Smiling, I said, "If it is, now we all may rest. Good day to you. Watcher." "Your cart! Where's your cart?" he shouted at me. But I had moved past Him, toward the mighty carven stone pillar of some relic of Imperial Roum. Ancient images were carved on that pillar: battles and victories, foreign monarchs marched in the chains of disgrace through the streets of Roum, triumphant eagles celebrating imperial grandeur. In my strange new calmness I stood a while before the column of stone, admiring its elegant engravings. Toward me rushed a frenzied figure whom I recognized as the Rememberer Basil; I hailed him, saying, "How timely you come! Do me the kindness of explaining these images, Remem berer. TKey fascinate me, and my curiosity is aroused." "Are you insane? Can't you Bear tKe alarm?" "I gave tKe alarm, Rememberer." 'Tlee, tKen! Invaders come! We must figKt!" "Not I, Basil. Now my time is over. Tell me of tHese images. TKese beaten kings, tKese broken emperors. Surely a man of your years will not be doing battle." "All are mobilized now!" "All but WatcKers," I said. "Take a moment. Yearning for tKe past is bom in me. Gormon Kas vanisKed; be my guide to tKese lost cycles." 'Ke Rememberer sKook Kis Kead wildly, circled around me, and tried to get away. I made a lunge at Kim, Hoping to seize his skinny arm and pin Kim to the spot; but Ke eluded me and I caught only His dark sKawl, wKicK pulled free and came loose in my Hands. TKen Ke was gone, his spindly limbs pumping madly as Ke fled down tKe street and left my view. I sKrugged and examined tKe sKawl I Had so imexpectedly acquired. It was sKot ougK witH glimmering tKreads of metal, arranged in intricate patterns tKat teased tKe eye: it seemed to me tKat eacK strand disappeared into tKe weave of tKe fabric, only to reappear at some improbable point, like the lineage of dynasties unexpectedly revived in distant cities. TKe workmansHip was superb. Idly I draped tKe sKawl about my shoulders. I walked on. My legs, wKicK Had been on tKe verge of failing me earlier in tKe day, now served me well. In renewed youtHfulness I made my way tKrougH tKe cKaotic city, finding no difficulties about cKoosing my route. I Headed for tKe river, tKen crossed it and, on tKe Tver's far side, sougKt tKe palace of tKe Prince. TKe nigKt had deepened, for most ligKts were extinguisKed under tKe mobilization orders, and from time to time a dull boom signaled tKe explosion of a screening bomb overKead, liberating clouds of murk tKat shielded tKe city from most forms of long-range scrutiny. TKere were fewer pedestrians in tKe streets. The sirens still cried out Atop tKe buildings tKe defensive installations were going into action; I Heard the bleeping sounds of repellors warming up and saw long spidery arms of amplification booms swinging from tower to tower as tKey linked for maximiun output. I Had no doubt now tKat the invasion actually was coming. My own instruments might Have been fouled by inner confusion, but they would not Have proceeded tKus far witK tKe mobilization if tfie initial report Had not been confirmed by the findings of Hundreds of other members of my guild. As I neared tKe palace a pair of breathless Rememberers sped toward me, tHeir shawls flapping behind them. They called to me in words I did not comprehend -- some code of their guild, I realized, recollecting that I wore Basil's shawl. I could not reply, and they rushed upon me, still gabbling; and switching to the language of ordinary men they said, "What is the matter with you? To your post! We must record! We must comment! We must observe!" "You mistake me," I said mildly. "I keep this sKawl only for your brother Basil, who left it in my care. I Have no post to guard at this time." "A Watcher," they cried in unison and cursed me separately and ran on. I laughed and went to the palace. Tts gates stood open. TKe neuters who had guarded the outer portal were gone, as were the two Indexers who had stood just within the door. The beggars that had thronged the vast plaza had jostled their way into the building itself to seek shelter; this had awakened the anger of the licensed hereditary mendicants whose customary stations were in that part of the building, and they had fallen upon the inflowing refugees with fury and unexpected strength. I saw cripples lashing out with their crutches Held as clubs; I saw blind men landing blows with suspicious accuracy; meek penitents were wielding a variety of weapons ranging from stilettos to sonic pistols. Holding myself aloof from this shameless spectacle I penetrated to the inner recesses of the palace, peering into chapels where I saw Pilgrims beseeching the blessings of the Will and Communicants desperately seeking spiritual guidance as to the outcome of the coming conflict Abruptly I heard the blare of trumpets and cries of, "Make way! Make way!" A file of sturdy Servitors marched into the palace, striding toward the Prince's chambers in the apse. Several of them held a struggling, kicking, frantic figure with halfunfolded wings: Avluela! I called out to her, but my voice died in the din, nor could I reach her. The Servitors shoved me aside. The procession vanished into the princely chambers. I caught a final glimpse of the little Flier, pale and small in the grip of her captors, and then she was gone once more. I seized a bumbling neuter who had been moving uncertainly. "THat Flier! WKy was sKe brougEt Here?" "He -- Ke -- tKey -- " "Tell me!" "TKe Prince -- His woman -- in Kis cHariot -- He -- Be -- tHey -- tKe invaders -- " I pusBed tBe flabby creature aside and rusBed toward tBe apse. A brazen wall ten times my own BeigBt confronted me. I pounded on it. "Avluela!" I sBouted  Hoarsely. "Av... iu... ela...!" I was neitHer tBrust away nor admitted. I was ignored. TBe Bedlam at tiie western doors of tBe palace Had extended itself now to tBe nave and aisles, and as tBe ragged beggars boiled toward me I executed a quick turn and found myself passing tHrougH one of tBe side doors of tBe palace. T stood in tBe courtyard tBat led  to tBe royal Hostelry, suspended and passive. A strange ' electricity crackled in tiie air. I assumed it was an emanation from one of Roum's defense installations, some kind of beam derigned to screen tiie city from attack. But an instant later I realized tBat it presaged tiie actual arrival of tiie invaders. StarsBips blazed in tiie Heavens. WBen I Bad perceived tiiem in my Watclfing tiiey Had appeared black against tBe infinite blackness, but now tHey burned witH tBe radiance of suns. A stream of brigHt, Hard, jewel-like globes bedecked tiie sky; they were ranged side by side, stretching from east to west in a continuous band, as tiiey erupted simultaneously into being it seemed to me tBat I Beard tiie crasH and tiirob of an invisible sympHony Heralding tiie arrival of tBe conquerors of EartH, I do not know Bow far above me tiie starsBips were, nor How many of tHem Hovered tHere, nor any of tBe details of tiieir design. I know only tiiat in sudden massive majesty tiiey were tHere. If I Had been a Defender my soul would Have withered instantly at tiie sigHt. Across tBe Beavens sfiot ligHt of many Hues. TBe battle Had been joined. I could not compreHend tiie actions of our warriors, and I was equally baffled by tfie maneuvers of ffiose wHo Had come to take possession of our Historycrusted but time-diminisHed planet. To my sHame I felt not only out of tfie struggle but above tiie struggle, as tiiougH tfiis were no quarrel of mine. I wanted Avluela beside me, and sHe was somewfiere within tiie depths of tfie palace of tiie Prince of Roum. Even Gormon would Have been a comfort now, Gormon tiie CHangeling, Gormon tfie spy, Gormon the monstrous betrayer of our world. Gigantic amplified voices b'ellowed, "Make way for the Prince of Roum! The Prince of Roum leads the Defenders in the battle for the fatherworld!" From the palace emerged a shining vehicle the shape of a teardrop, in whose bright-metalled roof a transparent sheet had been mounted so that all the populace could see and take heart in the presence of the ruler. At the controls of the vehicle sat the Prince of Roum, proudly erect. His cruel, youthful features fixed in harsh determination; and beside him, robed like an empress, I beheld the slight figure of the Flier Avluela. She seemed in a trance. The royal chariot soared upward and was lost in the darkness. It seemed to me that a second vehicle appeared and followed its path, and that the Prince's reappeared, and that the two flew in tight circles, apparently locked in combat. Clouds of blue sparks wrapped both chariots now; and then they swimg high and far and were lost to me behind one of the hills of Roum. Vas the battle raging all over  ' the planet, now? Was Perris in jeopardy, and Holy Jorslem, and even the sleepy isles of the Lost Continents? Did starships hover everywhere? I did not know. I perceived events in only one small segment of the sky over Roum, and even there my awareness of what was taking place was dim, uncertain and illinformed. There were momentary flashes of light in which I saw battalions of Fliers streaming across the sky; and then darkness returned as though a velvet shroud had been hurled over the city. In fitful bursts I saw the great machines of our defense speaking from the tops of ur towers; and yet I saw the starships untouched, unharmed, unmoved above. The courtyard in which I stood was deserted, but in the distance I Heard voices, full of fear and foreboding, shouting in tinny tones that might have been the screeching of birds. Occasionally there came a booming sound that rocked all the city. Once a platoon of Somnambulists was driven past where I was. In the plaza fronting the palace I observed what appeared to be an array of Clowns unfolding some sort of sparkling netting of a military look. By wie flash of lightning I was able to see a trio of Rememberers soaring aloft on a gravity plate, making copious notes of all that elapsed. It seemed -- I was not sure -- that the vehicle of the Prince of Roum returned, speeding across the sky with its pursuer clinging close. "Avluela," I whispered, as the twin dots of lights left my sight. Were the starships disgorging troops? Did colossal pylons of force spiral down from those orbiting brightnesses to touch the surface of the Earth? Why had the Prince seized Avluela? Where was Gormon? What were our Defenders doing? Why were the enemy ships not blasted from the sky? Rooted to the ancient cobbles of the courtyard, I observed the cosmic battle in total lack of understanding throughout the long night. Dawn came. Strands of pale light looped from tower to tower. I touched fingers to my eyes, realizing that I must have slept while standing. Perhaps I should apply for membership in the guild of Somnambulists, I told myself lightly. I put my hands to the Rememberer's shawl about my shoulders, wondering how I had managed to acquire it, and the answer came. I looked toward the sky. The alien starships were gone. I saw only the ordinary morning sky, gray with pinkness breaking through. I felt the jolt of compulsion and looked about for my cart, and reminded myself that I need do no more Watching, and I felt more empty than one would ordinarily feel at such an hour. Was the battle over? Had the enemy been conquered? Were the ships of the invaders blasted from the sky and lying in charred ruin outside Roum? All was silent. I heard no more celestial symphonies. Then, ouf of the eerie stillness there came a new sound, a rumbling noise as of wheeled vehicles passing through the streets of the city. And the invisible Musicians played one final note, deep and resonant, which trailed away jaggedly as though every string Had been broken at once. Over the speakers used for public announcements came quiet words : "Roum is fallen. Roum is fallen." XI T he royal hostelry was untended. Neuters and members of the servant guilds all had fled. Defenders, Masters and Dominators must Have perished honorably in combat. Basil the Rememberer was nowhere about; likewise none of His brethren. I went to my room, cleansed and refreshed and fed myself, gathered my few possessions and bade fareweU to the luxuries I had known so briefly. I regretted that I had had such a short time to visit Roum; but at least Gormon Had been a most excellent guide, and I had seen a great deal. Now I proposed to move on. It did not seem prudent to remain in a conquered city. My room's tHinking cap did not respond to my queries, and so I did not know wHat tHe extent of tBe defeat was, Here or in otHer regions, but it was evident to me tHat Roum at least Had passed from Human control, and I wisHed to depart quickly. I weigHed the tKough't of going to Jorslem, as that tall pilgrim Had suggested upon my entry into Roum. But tHen I reflected and cHose a westward route, toward Perris, wHicH not only was closer but Held tHe Headquarters of tHe Rememberers. My own occupation Had been destroyed; but on this first morning of Eartfi's conquest I felt a sudden powerful and strange yearning to offer myself Humbly to tHe Rememberers and seek witfi tHem knowledge of our more glittering yesterdays. At midday I left tHe Hostelry. I walked first to tHe palace, wHicfi still stood open. THe beggars lay strewn about, some drugged, some sleeping, most dead; from tHe crude manner of tHeir deatH I saw tHat tHey must Have slain one anotHer in tHeir panic and frenzy. A despondent-looking Indexer squatted beside tHe tHree skulls of tHe interrogation fixture in tHe cHapel. As I entered He said, "No use. THe brains do not reply." "How goes it witH tHe Prince of Roum?" "Dead. THe invaders sHot Him from tfie sky." "A young Flier rode beside Him. WHat do you know of Her?" "Notffing. Dead, I suppose." "And tHe city?" "Fallen. Invaders are everywBere." "Not even looting," tfie Indexer said. "THey are most gentle. Tfiey Have collected us." "In Roum alone, or everywHere?" THe man sHrugged. He began to rock rHytHmically Hack and fortH. I let Him be, and walked deeper into tHe palace. To my surprise, tHe imperial cHamHers of tHe Prince were unsealed. I went witHin, awed b'y tHe sumptuous luxury of tHe Hangings, tHe draperies, tHe ligHts, tHe fumisHings. I passed from room to room, coming at last to tHe royal bed, wHose coverlet was tHe flesH of a colossal bivalve of tHe planet of anotHer star, and as tHe sHell yawned for me I toucHed tHe infinitely soft fabric imder wHicH tHe Prince of Roum Had lain, and I recalled tHat Avluela too Had lain Here, and if I Had been a younger man I would certainly Have wept. I left tHe palace and slowly crossed tfie plaza to begin my journey toward Perris. A s I departed I had my first glimpse of our conquerors. A vehicle of alien design drew up at the plaza's rim, and perhaps a dozen figures emerged. They might almost Have been human. They were tall and broad, deep-chested, as Gormon Had been, and only the extreme length of their arms marked them instantly as alien. Their skins were of strange texture, and if I had been closer I suspect I would have seen eyes and lips and nostrils that were not of a human design. Taking no notice of me, they crossed the plaza, walking in a curious loosejointed loping way that reminded me irresistibly of Gormon's stride, and entered the palace. They seemed neither swaggering nor belligerent. Sightseers. Majestic Roum once more exerted its magnetism upon strangers. Leaving our new masters to their amusement, I walked off, toward the outskirts of the city. The bleakness of eternal winter crept into my soul. I wondered: did I feel sorrow that Roum had fallen? Or did I mourn the loss of Avluela? Or was it only that I now missed three successive Watchings, and like an addict I was experiencing the pangs of withdrawal? It was all of these that pained me, I decided. But mostly the last. No one was abroad in the city as I made for the gates. Fear of the masters kept the Roumish in hiding, I supposed. From time to time one of the alien vehicles hummed past, but I was unmolested. I came to the city's western gate late in the afternoon. It was open, revealing to me a gently rising hill on whose breast rose trees with dark green crowns. I passed through, and saw a short distance beyond the gate the figure of a Pilgrim who was shuffling slowly away from the city. His faltering, uncertain walk seemed strange to me, for not even his thick brown robes could hide the strength and youth of His body; He stood erect, his shoulders square and his back straight, and yet He walked with the Hesitating, trembling step of an old man. When I drew abreast of him and peered under his hood I understood, for affixed to the bronze mask all Pilgrims wear was a reverberator, sucH as is used by blind men to warn them of obstacles and Hazards. He became aware of me and said, "I am a sightless Rlgrim. I pray you do not molest me." It was not a Pilgrim's voice. It was a strong and harsh and imperious voice. T replied, "I molest no one. I am a Watcher who Has lost hisoccupation this night past." "Many occupations were lost tliis nigtit past, Watcfier." "Surely not a Pilgrim's." "No," Ke said. "Not a Pilgrim's." "WKere are you found?" "Away from Roum." "No particular destination?" "No," tKe Pilgrim said. "None. I will wander." "PerUaps we sKould wander togetKer," I said, for it is accounted good luck to travel witH a Pilgrim, and, sHorn of my Flier and my CHangeling, I would otKerwise Have traveled alone. "My destination is Perris. Will you come?" "TKere as well as anywSere else," Ke said bitterly. "Yes. We will go to Perris togetHer. But wEat business does a WatcKer Have tHere?" "A WatcKer Kas no business an#rwKere. I go to Perris to offer msrself in service to tKe Rememberers." "AE." "WitK EartE fallen, I wisB to learn more of EartE in its pride." "Is all EartE fallen, tKen, and not only Roum?" "I think it is so," I said. "AB," replied the Pilgrim. "Ah!" He fell silent, and we went onward. I gave Him my arm, and now Ee sKuffled no longer, but moved witE a young man's brisk stride. From time to time Ke uttered wEat might have been a sigK or a smothered sob. When I asked Him details of Eis Pilgrimage, Ee answered obliquely or not at all. When we were an Bout's journey outside Roum, and already amid forests, Ee said suddenly, "Tffis mask gives me pain. Will you Kelp me adjust it?" To my amazement Ee began to remove it I gasped, for it is forbidden for a Pilgrim to reveal Eis face. Had Ke forgotten tEat I was not sightless too?  the mask came away He said, "You will not welcome this sigKt." TEe bronze grillwork slipped down from IBs forehead, and I saw first eyes tEat Bad been newly blinded, gaping Holes where no surgeon's knife but possibly tKrusting fingers Ead penetrated, and tKen tEe sKarp regal nose, and finally tEe quirked, taut lips of tKe Prince of Roum. "Your majesty!" I cried. Trails of dried blood ran down Eis cEeeks. About tKe raw sockets tKemselves were smears of ointment. He felt little pain, for Ee Bad killed it witK those green smears, but tKe pain that burst througH me was real and potent. "Majesty no longer," Ke said. "Help me witE tKe mask!" His Hands trembled as Ke Held it fortH. "TKese flanges must be widened. TEey press cruelly at my cKeeks. Here -- here -- " Q uickly I made tKe adjustments, so tKat I would not Have to see Es face for long. He replaced tKe mask. In silence we continued. I Had no way of making small talk witH sucH a man. It would be a somber joiomey for us to Perris; but I was committed now to be bis guide. I tKougKt of Gormon and Kow well Ke Had kept Kis vows. I tKougKt too of Avluela, and a Kundred times tKe words leaped to my tongue to ask tKe fallen Prince Kow His consort tKe Flier Had fared in tKe nigKt of defeat, and I did not ask. TwiligKt gatKered, but tKe sun still gleamed golden-red before us in tKe west. And suddenly I Halted, and made a Hoarse sound of surprise deep in my tKroat, as a sHadow passed overKead. HigK above me Avluela soared. Her skin was stained by tKe colors of tKe sunset, and Her wings were spread to tKeir fullest, radiant witH every Hue of tKe spectrum. SKe was already at least tKe KeigKt of a Kundred men above tKe ground, and still climbing, and to Her I must Have been only a speck among tKe trees. "WKat is it?" tKe Prince asked. "WKat do you see?" "NotHing." "Tell me wKat you see!" I could not deceive Kim. I see a Flier, your Majesty. A slim girl far aloft." "TKen tKe night must Have come." "No," I said. "The sxm is still above tKe Horizon." "How can tKat be? SKe can Have only nigKtwings. The sun would Kvirl Her to tKe ground." I Hesitated. I could not bring myself to explain Kow it was that Avluela flew by day, tKougK sKe Had only nigKtwings. I could not tell tKe Prince of Roum that beside Her, wingless, flew the invader Gormon, effortlessly moving tKrougH tKe air. His arm about Her tHin shoulders, steadying Her, supporting Her, Helping Her resist tKe pressure of tKe solar wind. "Well?" he demanded. "How does sKe fly by day?" "I do not know," I said. "It is a mystery to me. TKere are many things nowadays I can no longer understand." TKe Prince appeared to accept tKat. "Yes, WatcKer. Many things none of us can understand." He fell once more into silence. I yearned to call out to Avluela, but I knew sKe could not and would not Hear me, and so I walked on toward tKe sunset, toward Perris, leading tKe blinded Prince. And over us Avluela and Gormon sped onward, limned sKarply against tKe day's last glow, until they climbed so High' tKey were lost to my sight. There are iimes when a man has fo be careful about who shares his dreams. ttT dreamed I was Jung last night," said Saul Betatrom heavily over breakfast, showing his long lashes to his current mistress, as he poured cream over his jam puff. "My, what fun!" Paidie exclaimed boredly. She wanted to go shopping in the bazaar, not sit or lie with Saul all the time; this Indian holiday was a real freakout. "Yeah, I was old Carl Jung, beard and all," said Saul, whipping up the mixture on his plate, and spooning it toward his ample lips. "Boy, there ! was in some damned church or something in Switzerland, and this trapdoor opened at my feet -- " "Was I there?" "No, you weren't there. I was alone, wearing this black robe, see, and I'd just formulated the concepts of psycho-analytic theory, and then this hole opened at my feet... Her interest ceased when she learned that she was excluded from the dream. Hazy memories of other lovers and sexual gymnasts floated into her mind; she couldn't recall a one of them that had ever dreamed of her. She looked over the balcony at the hone-white beach, the line of canted palms, and the ocean. Paidie "told herself how much this was all costing Saul and tried to feel enjoyment... and tliere at tlie bottom of tKe lowest cellar were a couple of skulls, sort of mouldering and indistinct... Saul was saying. He was Head of tKe New York brancH of Zadar SmitH World; suddenly recollecting tKe fact, Ke piled on more cream and added sugar to tKe puff. TKe turbaned waiter appeared, silent at Kis elbow, and refilled Kis cup from a silver coffee pot "... altKougK I'd climbed down so far, someKow I couldn't bend down to reacK tKose skulls. Now wasn't tKat a funny tKing?" "YeaK, crazy. Say, are we going down to tKe bazaar today, Saul?" Licking His spoon, Ke gave Her a Heavy stare. "TKey got riots in Kerala, you know tKat? TKe manager says it ain't safe outside tKe KoKday strip." "OH, Saul, let's go see tKe bazaar! We can take a car." "We'll see." Women never listened to you, Ke tKougKt TKey were okay, but tKey didn't listen. You could pay men to listen to you, but you couldn't pay women to listen to you. MigKt be an idea wortH developing tKere... He switcfied on one of tKe rings on Kis finger and said into it, "You can pay men to listen to wKat you say but you can't pay women to Ksten to wHat you say." Must be a way of casffing in on a tKougKt like tKat " listen to wKat you say, Saulie," Paidie said. 'Key collected tKeir gear, put on dark glasses and refrigerator Kats and drifted tHrougH tKe foyer of tKe Hotel. On tfie way, Saul tossed down a few dollars -- tKis Hotel Kad no nonsense witK rupees -- and picked up a wing of cKicken from a spit to cKew. He was lean, witH a flat stomacK -- a fine Hunk of masculine body, sKe Kad to admit "I don't know Kow you keep your figure, Saul. WKy, you eat just about all tKe time and you Hardly Have any tummy at all to speak of. Me, I just diet and diet yet look at tlie size of my tKigKs." SKe knew tKey were wortK looking at CKewing, Ke sloucKed out into tKe sun and stood gazing across tKe immense spread of tKe Arabian Ocean. He meditated on wKetKer to botKer answering, slewing Kis eyes round as He did so, taking in tHe scene. TKe great Hotel sprang up out of tKe sand like a fortress, its array of bulging balconies forming gun-turrets tKat ceaselessly watcKed tKe sea. Colored umbrellas on tKe balconies, gay as deatK, waited to gun down tKe sun wHen it set. TKe Hotel was inviolate, an implacable Koliday-anniKilator. Round it clustered low sKoddy buildings, the ramsEackle bulk of an electric generator witH auxiliary solar-power traps, tKe staff living-quarters, piles of old crates, a small sewage plant, old cars and old bicycles, a goat, an Indian charpoy with' a man lying on it, rubbish in pompous containers and builders' materials. "You want to get a Crosswell's Tape, honey. That's my secret." "What's a Crosswell's Tape, for God's sake?" He winced. Zadar Smith World had handled Crosswell's promotion for six-seven years now, and this fluff had never heard of th'eir Tape. "It's a worm. A laboratorymutated version of a beef tapeworm. Thoroughly safe. Only needs replacing once every decade. Lodges in the small intestine, causes no discomfort. Enables you to eat up to fifty per eent more and keep your figure." Behind the hotel was the twenty-foot-high wire barrier. It ran parallel to the sea for a long distance, as far as the eye could be bothered to see, in one direction; in the other, it angled off behind the hotel and ran down into the sea. Behind the wire barrier stood or sat solitary figures; or sometimes there was a little family group. Although there were possibly several hundreds of figures waiting behind the wire, they were motionless and well spaced, except round the gate, and so the effect was one of solitude, rather than overcrowding. "Do you think one of those tapes would Help my thighs?" She got her camera ready to photograph the Indians behind the barrier. There was a cute little girl just standing there, not a stitch on, about four years old -- you couldn't tell, really -- with a cute little fat pot on her. Make a nice picture. 'heir car slid up with a SikH driver, luxuriant behind beard and green turban. Paidie took a photograph of Him. The SikH smiled and opened the car door for her. He was hairy, wow! Saul didn't have any Hair at all, not anywhere on his body. Saul caught and diagnosed her glance at the driver. "These guys have lousy org-ratings, honey, you know that? This guy has probably never done better than seven in His life." In perfect English, the Sikh said, "Excuse me, sir, but there are famine riots in the bazaar every day this week. It may be dangerous to go there." "The hotel must protect us. Are we supposed to stay behind that lousy chicken wire all week?" "You are in front of it, sir. It is there for your protection." "Well, you protect us in the bazaar. I take it you Have a revolver, man?" "Yes sir. I Have one Here." "You sKoot well?" "I am a very good sKot, sir, or I do not get this job." "Let's get going, then. Bazaar, and step on it!" As the big black car slid through the gates, Saul tossed his gnawed chicken bone out of the window. The ragged crowd scrabbling in the dust for it reminded him of his dream. "Wonder whose skulls they were? Guess it must have meant I was exploring the unconscious of mankind. You know, honey, I am a kind of genius. I invented the orgasm-rating system." "What a rotten road they have herel Say, Saul, I'd hate to live in India, wouldn't you? They're so dirty and poor." The poor and dirty were pressing close to the car, shouting or waving hands. The Sikh put his sandalled foot down and they bucked along the road. "They're very under-developed, that's why. Yeah, the org-rating system was my big contribution to Advertising. Made my name, sold a thousand products. Then the psychoanalytical guys came along and discovered my concept Had real bedrock psychological truth behind it! How you like that?" "Saul, darling, do you really think it is safe Here? Suppose your dream was a warning about venturing among primitive people or something?" 'he car drew up under an avenue of tattered deodar trees, where dogs scuttled and people squatted. There were a few stalls here and shrill music playing. Saul continued his lecture. "... Since then research has proved that there are different levels of sexual enjoyment, just like different levels of sleep. FertAsia estimates that eighty-five per cent of the population in this area, male and female, neVer do any better than a grade seven orgasm. Mow'd you like that? And in India alone..." science Fiction Du Gasilgiit A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, #I to #I Illustrated # Boredom drove her out of tKe car. She stood under tKe trees, a chubby blonde in KigK-h'eeled sandals, wearing almost notKing. The scarecrows round about Her had eyes of coal. They all ran to sell her anything they had, melons, brass statues, photos of little prls embracing goats, jewels, clay figurines, dried fisH. Paidie fell into a panic. "Saul, those dream skulls! Suppose they were ours, yours and mine!" The crowd pressed closer. She hit out with her handbag. One of the beggars touched her. Then they fell on her. Paidie was screaming. Saul was shaking the Sikh's shoulders. "Shoot, shoot, you lunatic! Or give me the gun!" He was vividly aware of the noise and the heat and the stink. The Sikh started up the car, backed it swiftly away, turned, raced back for the hotel. "Better not to shoot, sir, or we all get very much trouble." Saul sank back into his seat, chewing his lips. "Maybe you're right. TKe hotel can send out a rescue party. She wasn't in my dream. There was just me, dressed up as Jung... I hate dreaming about death or all that." Inside the hotel, it was wonderfully cool and quiet. Saul ordered a martini to soothe his nerves. I This Month in IF -- e : s by Hal Clement s I by Larry Niven : g by Aiack Reynolds  s plus many more in IF, twice running winner of the "Hugo" as best : I science-fiction magazine in the world. September issue on sale : now -- don't miss it! : M y name is R. Jennings, and I'm the man you're looking for. I'm captain, owner, and coffee programmer of a star-crackin' ship, the Astrid. On top of this. I'm a horse-breeder. Yes, I agree with you, sir: this is quite a spread of land. One hundred thousand acres of the finest on Cuspid, at the very edge of the galaxy, on the "mystic edge of forever," as someone before me called it. Strange events occur out here amongst the Rim Worlds, sir, if you would care to believe me. Ah, the drinks. Put them down there, my lad, the tailcone for our visitor. Yes, we may as well relax right here on the veranda, sir, and enjoy the sunsets. We'll have to wait a bit after the second dusk before my bo#rs can cull out the distance runners and quarter horses you're interested in, but j in tKe meantime let me entertain you witfi a story. It's a strange story, I promise. No science. No sanity. Maybe a little bit of enligKtenment -- but wKat else could one expect from tKe "mystic edge of forever"? So sit back, sir, and Have no qualms whatever about tKe Horses. You'll buy them, for wKo could resist those green beauties? And you'll make a fortune racing them around the tracks of Earth'. In point of fact, my story starts witH Horses. TKirty-one years ago, I owned a stable myself. Ran some quarter Horses at Ruidosa for tHe love of it and did well, but tKe real money and tKe real thrill was in my distance runners. And of all the thoroughbreds I ran, most of all I loved my tKreeyear-old Green Lace. You know tKe old Horseman's saying, "A lean Koree for a long race"? Green Lace was lean, a faerie queen, and she was green. A breathtaking beauty to beKold when sKe stretched out. And a winner. I lost her and my wKole stable in a fire. That's a sad beginning to my story, isn't it? Sadder still, who sired Green Lace? I would Have started another stable witH Her line alone, if I could. But Green Lace's sire came from another planet, so the story went, from the far planet Cuspid. But where the hell was Cuspid? Nobody knew. No one cared. Cuspid was not its official name. I drifted into the Astro-Marine Service. Saved my money. Take a look at me thirty years later, at the age of seventy, as I was last year: goateed, trim gray Kait clipped neatly, gray mustache, chest out -- the works. A blue and gold space uniform as I pace the decks of my ship, the Astrid. I've got it made! Except no Cuspid. tCaptain Jennings," said the  woman wKo chartered my ship that day in EarthJune and CygnusJanuary, "you may tBnk it strange that a woman, alone except for an entourage of secretaries, and her own personal doctor, should take a ship out into the clouds of the galaxy. But I do have a purpose. A strange one. I do hope you can manage not to reveal your doubt of my sanity when you Hear my story." I am a gentleman, make no mistake about that. I bowed from the hips, with a gracious smile and a sweep of my white-gloved hand. "Dear lady, I could not Kelp but note the gentility of your bearing. WKat is sanity against beauty? Let us be insane together." She seated Herself. "A proper answer," she smiled. "Your attitude intrigues me. Let us Hope it will Hold up under tKe forces tHat will be brought to bear against it "Come then, let us be insane together. What would you say if you saw a face in the sky? The galactic sky, as big as twice your sky here on Cygnus?" "You saw such a face?" "Yes, I did see such' a face. In this sector of the galaxy, sir, close, I am told, to the Rim. Ten years ago I saw such a face. It was the face of my dead husband. Shall I go on?" This woman's name was Ruth. She was Mrs. Ruth Coronado -- the richest woman in this imiverse. She was sixty-seven years old, and she was my future wife. From the moment she stepped into my astro-marine office, our relationship was assured, the cement was set. She didn't know it at the time; I did. For there was no difficulty meeting her glance for glance, of looking deeply through her eyes into the unmeasured core of her. I adored Mrs. Ruth Coronado, simply, and forever. Like countless women before her, she Had enjoyed the luxuries of her husband's wealth' without incurring any of the hazards. John Coronado, tycoon extraordinary, owner of countless worlds, industrialist, exporter and importer the length and breadth of the Galaxy, died one day of a heart attack. "I was with him the day he died," she told me, smiling with her Head up. Her voice lilting, mellow. "It was. Captain Jennings, a bad moment for me. We had been married twenty years. "You see, while His disease was not unusual among men of his forcefulness and energy, it seemed cruel that He should die at a time when for the first time in many years he was not actively conducting his business affairs. For many month's, he Had left His industrial and financial empire in the hands of trusted subordinates. He himself, with me, was on a search." "A search," I said. Half-question, half-statement; for Had I myself not been on a search, a search that, indeed. Had begun just thirty years ago, just about the time that John Coronado was courting Ruth? Memory, however, was taking me back ten years, to the wreck of a star flyer. "He was on a search for the remains of a ship and the bodies that might be inside?" I asked. "And it was in this sector of the galaxy, in Cygnus the Swan?" "In Cygnus the Swan, yes," she said coolly. "Somewhere along its axis, close to the Rim. You are telling me you know something of this event?" "The wreck of the Star Maid," I said. "Some flotsam was found. No bodies. Members of #rour Kusi band's family. His motUer, Kis !istcr, her husband and two cKilI'dren." .#I "Exactly, And His brotKer, and of course the crew. As a spacefaring man perHaps you would remember sucH an event." She passed her Hand ligHtly across her foreKead, as if to remove an errant strand of rich grayed hair. Actually, sKe was attempting to Hide a weariness tKat showed in th'e pale sHadowed blue of Her eyes, in tKe sudden droop of Her shoulders. SHe sigKed deeply, but without sound. THen Her Head came up again, and tHe permanent smile of RutK played again about Her lips. "Forgive me," sHe said. "I am tired. It is obvious to you, of course, tHat I Have searcHed too long. Nonetheless, I shall go on." She now produced a photograph from a briefcase. It was one of the hard-to-produce cubagraphs. Looked at straight on, tKe face was a seven-eigKths profile. Looked at from any other angle, one saw it as though' it were a living face. "This was the face I saw from the observation strip of the spaceship we were flying," she said simply. "My husband Had just died, as I knew Ke would. The moment was one of terrible sadness for me, I wandered away from the death-bed as in a dream, and as in a dream, I found myself amidsHip, bodiless, almost, and saw my husband's face carved into the clouds of stars. "The face was as you see it in this cubagraph. My Heart stopped when first I saw it. But then, in my sadness, I simply assumed that this was the way things were -- the way they should be. John, who owned so much of the galaxy, who, indeed, loved all of Creation as few men ever have revered anything, now belonged to God. God had buried His soul out here, on the mystic edge of forever. "As I watched entranced, hypnotized if you will, the ship wasi moving on, and my Husband's face naturally disappeared as the angle of my vision slowly changed. "Then I came to. "I knew I Had seen no such face." She smiled sadly. "THat is, I knew it then. Later, I saw the truth. The Face actually Had been there. TKat was when my search started." "And the object of your search?" I asked. "To find the Face," she said. "Then to find a world under it where I could live out my remaining years. "It was my way of being with my Husband for Eternity." A t seventy, I was and am wise enougH not to inject common sense wKere none is asked for. Hola! Did we not botH know tKat no sucH Face existed? TKerefore we went about tKe task of sealing On tKe next morning of tKat cold CygnusJanuary, I went through' tKe micro-files of tKe Parer's Astrogation Library. In th'e past ten years, a Mrs. RutK Coronado cKartered tKree spaceboats, which' crept up and down the axis of Cygnus tKe Swan, a years. TKe files also gave me tKe present address of a commanding officer. I called on Kim. "SKe's skeeting you, Jennings," this man told me. "It's Ker way f getting Ker kicks out of life. Look up Ker record. SKe was on tKe stage before sKe married John Coronado. Now sKe's back on stage again, and a fine-looking women sKe always will be witK that everlastin' smile. WhicK is all right, but don't let Ker package you. "In any case, we spent a year n the job. I was Kappy to take her money. That's it" Money, wKo needs it? But I needed RutK, as I came to call her very shortly. Two Cygnusmomings later my ship, tKe elegant, the incomparable, the beauteous Astrid, lifted from Ker bertK, borne on Ker fire-wings. Our speed instantly was beyond that of light My crew of five wve a twining dance of faultless prei- sion as they tended their ship. We clove space and swooped int out rendezvous with the far end of the Swan's axis, we speared tKe powdery clouds of mystic .space inspiring beyond compare. In my spacious mirrored and vented control room I showed Mrs. RutK Coronado how we would operate. I personally programmed the ship's macrosticklers: John Coronado's face waa fed into them by bits, his face becoming tKe guiding soul f this ship, "WKat the ship sees from moment to moment will be fed iatai the macrosticklers as well; should the ship see wKat you hope to find, you'll know it: tKe alarot bells will shake you out of sleep." This woman wKo was to be my wife, and knew it not, smiled hat gentle smile. "You are brave and kind to share my insanity. Captain," sKe said. "Why is it that you do s?" "Perhaps because I am on a search myself," I answered, willj a shrug that waved my fine geld epaulettes. I told Ker about my lost planet Cuspid and its wild green Korses. "TKat Kas been my search," I said. I looked down into Ker face, the smooth face of an older woman who Kas spent many years in space. Her eyes were lost in their pale blue shadowy hollows. I said, "But we all must have a search', must we not? It gives us our reason for 'walking across th'e street.' " S he touched my hand lightly to show she heard, but she was thinking deeply. Finally, she came back, letting the indentations at the comers of her lips again receive her smile. "Perhaps I too have heard of the horseplanet," she said. "Was it not in the early days of the Panic when nobody thought Earth would survive, that animals of every description were shipped across the galaxy and dumped on any world that might sustain them?" I nodded. "Few of those breeds survived. The horses of Cuspid adapted." The old pain returned to me, and she must have seen it in my face, for the memory of the death by fire of my incomparable Green Lace was still with me. She clasped my hand and held onto it as we left the control room. "My strange Captain Jennings," she murmured. "You search for horses in the sky, and I search for a Great Star Face. Perhaps on the Rim anything can happen." "Anything!" I told her, falling in with her mood. "Why, Ruth, out here creation is still at work. Perhaps you cannot really comprehend how close we are to the edge of the galaxy at this moment. Mysterious forces that we do not understand are shaping the lives of stars! Hydrogen clouds blow willy-nilly at speeds wellnigh impossible, and what are the forces that blow them? We do not know." She smiled indulgently. "I comprehend little of space, though you could by this time call me a star-woman." "Did you know," I pursued, "that more than once a beast with clawed legs of fire has been seen in these skies, moving like a comet would move across Earth's spaces?" "This is a true story?" "A true story," I proclaimed. "And there are other strangenesses out here. What did you once call it? The mystic edge of forever? Exactly! Now think about this, dear lady." And there I let the subject lapse, albeit with enough of a glint in my eye to leave her in more than a little doubt as to the authenticity of my tale. But it was authentic. I myself had seen such a beast! You do not believe me? Hukkah! Very well. Let us stay with the reality of green horses forty and I shall get on with my tale at once. 'he Cygnus-days passed. They were wonderful da#. My love and I dined by candle-light. We walked the spacious decks, the planking awash with the fantastic flickering rainbows brought into being by our faster-thanlight plunge through the Swan. Suns puffed toward us like explosions. And once we saw the Beast! "There he goes!" I cried, and she pressed to me endeavoring to sight along my pointed finger, and when I got over my excitement she was looking up at me in wonder, white starlight turned to blue in her eyes. "You really believe there was a Beast," she said. "Yes, yes!" I cried, still searching the changing skies. "It was there! I saw it!" "You easily fool yourself, my strange captain. You fool yourself, for me, into believing there is a Face. You fool yourself into seeing a Beast" At this I was ruffled. Ruth did not know the tradition. When you say you see the Beast, no one differs. You must say, "Tell me about the Beast? Is it like the one I saw? Did it have seven legs or four?" And then you describe it, and everyone whispers excitedly, and a few others of those listening offer corroberating stories. After all! One is traveling so fast! Indeed, fast is not even a word that suffices, it is an Earth-word for Earth-spaces, suitable only for describing the bicycle race down the block. Could the word fast describe our speeds as the Astrid gobbled dimensions and ruptured Space? What might one not see in such conditions? Surely -- at the least -- a Beast! Mrs. Ruth Coronado in the rainbow light was troubled. "I did not mean to offend you, my dear captain," she said. "Perhaps there is a Beast -- too." We stopped in the observation strip, and there we were part of the massive sky. I faced her, took her hand, stood looking down at it, at the tracery of blue veins under the translucent skin. It was the hand of an older woman who had lived graciously. I said, "Perhaps you know how I feel about you, Ruth." "Yes," she said. "Perhaps we are too old for this, however." "No," I said. "We are young. You and I have lived as starpeople for enough years for it to count. Why else our vitality? For we are vital, Ruth. And you are vital to me, necessary to my life. I want to marry you." A shadow darkened under her eyes. Her hand squeezed mine convulsively, not in some answering emotion, but in pain. "Captain," sHe wbispered against my jacket "You must remember. We are looking for my Husband's galactic face!" I was seventy! My love was not of great heat, let us admit, but oh! the flame was steady. The weeks of our search passed. We were enclosed in curling waves of star clouds, we were whipped and hastened on in our fantasy of speed by great writhing rubbery sheets of white flame. Ruth' and I talked endlessly. We knew each other's lives. We walked arm in arm, hand in hand, fingers intertwined, along the lush decks of my princess ship the Astrid. Once we landed on a world I did not know, but the people, of direct Earth' descent, were kindly. Here Mrs. Ruth Coronado, with' a touch' of apology on my arm, told me she would need a day to take care of some business affairs. She must send some messages to Earth along the Leaper, and she must wait for replies. She would not tell me what tfiese messages were. She entered the Parer's Communication Building, whicH was sponsored by Galactic Control, just as it sponsored other communication centers on thousands of other worlds. The money she would spend to ride a single message down the photon-roads and to receive a reply via the same Leaper system was nothing to Her, but it would be a considerable amount, even though the system was subsidized. At the end of the day, one of her secretaries who stayed with her called me aboard the Astrid, informing me that Mrs. Ruth Coronado would be waiting. She emerged from the offices of the communication center with a preoccupied frown. "I will need another day," she told me. I held my peace, for could I, even lightly, suggest that she Hold no secrets from me, when I rayself was guilty of a certain duplicity? You will understand the depth of my entanglement in this fantasy we both lived when I explain to you that I began to wait for the Astrid to find the Face! -- that I began to wait for the alarm bells to ring! And the waiting was loathesome. A cubagraph of John Coronado, you see, somehow had become the soul of my ship. John Coronado had taken from me the captaincy of my ship. John Coronado was my ship, I a helpless pawn of his galactic whim. More! In my mind, try though I would to erase it, John Coronado became my rival. I ground my teeth at the mere thought of my ship the Astrid, my bloodhound of space, tracking down that improbable, sneering, challenging, hateful Face -- only to have my love lost to me. Therefore, I shut off the alarm system. There would be no bells to tell Mrs. Ruth Coronado that her impossible search was over. Instead, I tuned the alarm system to a small receiver snapped to my wrist. Nervously, I, fool that I was, waited for it to ring. A t the end of Ruth's second mysterious day at the Parer's Communication Building, I met her, and she was smiling a secret smile. Her face, lined though it might be, was the radiant face of an inwardly beautiful woman. She took my hands in hers. Her shadowed blue eyes were full of a suppressed excitement. "Captain Jennings," she said, "your search, at least, is over. I have the coordinates of the planet Cuspid!" I studied the space-graph the communications people had made for her. Cuspid's true name was Terrano IV. It twined about the two units of a double-star system in an endless progression of figure eights -- or, if you wish to sustain yourself in the magic of the Rim, you may think erf it as performing an endless series of infinity signs. I looked up from the graph. "Thank you," I said. My eyes asked the question. She said, "Cuspid is a code name. There were many such habitable planets given code names during the Panic, for fear that the warriors of Earth' would destroy them also. Somewhere in my husband's extensive business files the tidbit of information was waiting. Many messages were necessary, to many worlds. Finally, the answer came. "Now your search ends." "Yes," I said, once more studying the chart which would lead me to the planet of my dreams. At the terminus of Cygnus the Swan it was, not far. I laid the paper aside. Impulsively I took Ruth's hand in a gesture she was accustomed to. "Ruth," I said, pleading. "Do not refuse me now. This is the sign you and I have been waiting for. Go there with' me. To Terrano IV. Marry me, RutH. Will you?" She drew back, looking at me through' a film of tears, blindly shaking her head. "Your searcti is over," she whiered, "but what about my seardi? Find die Face for me. Captain Jennings, find the Face!" I could say nothing. I had no defense. Ruth turned away with head bowed so that a curl of silver gray hair fell across her eyes, and she returned alone to her cabin. ind the face. I found it. I found a face. The situation was the same as when Ruth saw the Face. She was alone, she was deeply troubled, she was haunted by the powdery gleam of all Creation charming her from the open void. I saw a galactic face, as she did, two Cygnus-momings after she gave me the gift of her love, the location of the planet Cuspid. This face was spread across that whole sky along whose starclouded shores my elegant boat swam. It subtended an arc of #, and that was a lot of sky. I stared stupidly, expecting the face's drooping, star-gleaming lips to curl in contempt, his coal-sack nostrils to pinch in displeasure, his God-eyes, with groups of burning-bright stars where the irises were, to fume at me in cosmic anger that I should dare to touch his Ruth. But no, his expression, somber, frowning, distant, remained the same. How handsome a man, he that looked not down upon me but through me, and, indeed, seemed to have no interest in me. The hair, grayblack, was swept in a haughty wave of radiant gases over his forehead, which in turn was so neatly limned and shaped by clouds and strings of primal hydrogen matter. Hair untidily covered the tops of his ears, whicH in turn were but stellar helices with darks and brights so deftly brushed in by an Artist whose identity I could not conceive. How deep and dark the empty spaces under his starry cheekbones. My head swam. "Nof" I whispered brokenly. "No!" I turned away, buried my head in my hands. I thought to myself, "How can I? How can I marry Ruth? I cannot." When I again faced the observation strip, the face was gone. The changing angle of vision totally disrupted that giant physiognomy; the ship would have to return to an exact position in space. At this, I wheeled and witK a half-stumbling run made for the computer deck. I burst in. The attendant was standing over the macrosticklers, his jaw slack. When he turned toward me his lips worked soundlessly, and he started to speak. I cut him off. "The read-out sheet," I said, holding out a hand that was shaking badly. The attendant faltered, "There -- there is no read-out sheet, sir. The macrosticklers have not been scanning." I was speechless, trjdng to rant, to swear; but cold and heartless within me was my true self, triumphant, scheming. The macros had not been scanning. Well and good. The Face was already dozens of light-years behind us, and the coordinates again were lost. The Face was gone, and I would marry Ruth. here would be no John Coronado in ponderous threat above us, there would be no John Coronado glaring down at us while we lived our life of love on Terrano IV. Dear God, leave John Coronado in a distant sky, back there where he was, dead, not living, sanctified in his galactic grave, eternalized out of who knew what mysterious cosmic pulse. "You fool," I began thickly. "I programmed -- " He blurted, "Mrs. Coronado did it, sir. Not more than ten minutes ago. She asked me to remove the Coronado tapes. I refused. I suggested she speak to you, sir. She informed me this was her responsibility, hers only. She offered me a bribe, more than my yearly salary, sir. I refused." "And then what?" He gestured. The John Coronado tapes had not been removed, but, rather, incinerated. "She had a beamer in her purse, sir." I stumbled from the computer deck, dazed. Oh, do not consider me guiltless. I could have noted the time I saw the face. I could have pressed a stud in my watcH which would have imprinted time, and exact position, on the Master Log. Such has been my unbroken habit when any noteworthy event occurs. Compute if you will the inner tensions which kept me from that simple, well-nigh unconscious act Compute also, if you will, why I did not check the wrist alarm I wore. Had it rung, and if not why not? I went to Ruth's cabin, knocked, entered quietly when her low voice answered. She gazed at me sadly, shadows under her eyes, her fingers nervously waving into each other. "Captain Jennings," she sighed, troubledly gazing at the deck. "You seem very excited. Perhaps because I destroyed the John Coronado tapes?" "Yes, Ruth. Why did you?" "Because I am tired. Because the strain is too much. The waiting, Captain Jennings. The suspense. The waking up in the middle of sleep, waiting for the alarm bells to ring, to tell us my dead darling has been found and that his beloved face is out there for me to see. "I am tired. There will be no more searching." Then she came to me, stood very close and slipped Her arms over my shoulders, and laid Her Head on my cHest "We are two old people. Captain Jennings. But I do love you, for your kindness, for your quick nature, for your love of me, and because you are straight of back, a handsome man of whom any woman, young or old, would be proud. So marry me. Captain Jennings. Take me to your planet Cuspid, and let us live out our lives together. "I give up the search. Perhaps because I have been searching only for love after all. It is aU we search for; John vnll understand. M rs. Ruth Coronado and Captain R. Jennings of the good ship Astrid were married the next planet-fall. We Had a honeymoon that lasted three weeks as we dove across those far magic skies on the edge of our galaxy where anything can happen. And we came to the planet Cuspid, whose true name was Terrano IV. Oh lovely world I My love twined about it like arms from my souL For it was green. Its green continents floated on green foamy seas, its skies were shades of green in the light of two hot green suns -- and on the smaller continent my green Horses thrived! There were people here. Land was waiting to be claimed, and finally we stood In the midst of our hundred thousand acres, contemplating the house we would build, the stables, the corrals; we saw men riding the herds, we saw buyers coming from all the worlds. That night we camped. My love and I alone put up a tent, and we were asleep long before this fast turning world spun its night face to the myriad stars shining through its misty green atmosphere. But I, I could not stay asleep. Mysteriously compelled to rise, my soul filled with the wonder of this life that Had given me everything I would have wished for in my wildest dreams, I walked the night, breathing the redflower scent, listening to the call of the wood-birds, making friends vrith curious insects who sat on my arms chirruping and presumably trying to talk. And then I stood looking into the sky and saw the face of John Coronado. It was the true face of John Coronado. That other face, that I saw from space, had not been. Whose, then? I knew. A triumph of elation overcame me when I saw the Face. And there was relief, a bhnd, remorseless relief, as if I had escaped a gallows. Indeed, all these weeks I was strangling in a muck of guilt And now tiSere was  Face. I went back to tlie tent, brualied lightly at my beloved's Eair. She awoke. "Come," I said. I led Her from tHe tent, faced Her so tHat if sHe raised Her eyes sHe would see John Coronado. "There were other members of your Husband's family who died in the wreck of tHe Star Maid," I said. "A brother?" She said in wonder, "A brother. Yes. Of course. A younger brotKer. But why do you ask?" "And they looked mucH alike?" "Yes... perhaps so." I tilted up her head so that she was looking full into the Face. "It is the Face," I said. I saw Her eyes dilate and shine. I felt Her hand in mine stiffen. I felt the shuddering of her shoulder pressed against mine. Her hand flew to her lips as if to stifle some cry. She darted me what I t can only describe as a' frightened glance. "Oh!" she gasped. "It is so very strange that you should find him here. Perhaps some night even the Beast shall fly through our skies." Then with a motion quite deliberate, she turned her back on the Face, and smiled the firm smile of Ruth. She slipped her arm through mine, and with' her other hand caressed my own face lightly but lingeringly. "Foa are my KusBand," said. "Be sure of tHat THerefore it is time to return to our tent "THe nigHt will come wHen my dead Husband will -- go away." Y ou laugH? You do not believe? AH, but remember tHe tradition, sirl A gentleman of space does not doubt! But still you laugh? Come then, let us select the miracle Horses you wisli to buy. But first -- turn! Look! John Coronado, tHe dead Husband of the woman I love, is rising swiftly in the sky! You see now the wild hydrogen clouds of his hair! Come the starry spirals of his giant ears, the star-gleaming forehead, the great blazing fumes of the blue-buming stars that are his eyes, and now the long nose pieces of black emptiness! Then the lips, sir, you see them -- squint your eyes a bit now -- the lips, made of the hind end of a ring nebula. How gently they curve, how sweetly they seem to be murmuring but one name! There, sir, is the Face. How piercingly he looks down upon my acres on my planet Cuspid, and how tenderly he searches out my wife, my Ruth! Forgive me, sir. Ruth and I are just now learning how to walk out together at They had been listening to the stars for # years. Sometimes silence can be more deafening than a chorus of triphammers. I "Is there anybody there?" said the Traveler, Knocking on the moonlit door... he voices babbled. MacDonald heard them and knew that there was meaning in them, that they were trying to communicate and that he could xmderstand them and respond to them if he could only concentrate on what they were saying, but he couldn't bring himself to make the effort. He tried again, harder. "Back behind everything, lurking like a silent shadow behind the closed door, is the question we can never answer except positively: is there anybody there?" That was Bob Adams, eternally the devil's advocate, looking querulously at the others around the conference table. His roimd face was sweating although the mahogany-paneled room was cool. Saunders puffed hard on his pipe. "But that's true of all science. The image of the scientist eliminating all negative possibilities is ridiculous. Can't be done. So he goes ahead on faith and statistical probability." MacDonald watched the smoke rise above Saimders' head in clouds and wisps until it wavered in the draft from the air duct, thinned out, disappeared. But only to one sense. Although he could not see it, the odor reached his  nostrils. It was an aromatic blend easily distinguishable from the flatter smell of cigarettes being smoked by Adams and some of the others. Wasn't this tHeir task? MacDonald wondered. To detect the thin smoke of life that drifts through the universe, to separate one trace from another, molecule by molecule, and then force them to reverse their entropic paths into their ordered and meaningful original form. All the kind's horses, and all the king's men... And yet life itself is impossible. He thought; but men exist by reversing entropy. Down the long table cluttered with overflowing ash trays and coffee cups and doodled scratch' pads Olsen said, "We always knew it would be a long search. Not years but centuries. The computers must have sufficient data, and that means bits of information approximating the number of molecules in the universe. Let's not chicken out now." "If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year, Do you suppose," the Walrus said, "That they could t it clear?" "... ridiculous," someone was saying, and then Adams broke in, "It's easy for you to talk about centuries when you've been here only three years. Wait until you've been at it for ten years, like I have. Or Mac here, who has been on the Project for twenty years and head of it for fifteen." "What's the use of arguing about something we can't know anything about?" Sonnenbom asked him. "We have to base our our position on probabilities. Shklovskii and Sagan estimated that habitable planets in our galaxy alone. Van Hoemer estimated vanced societies in orbit around them; Sagan said one in one Hundred thousand. Either way, it's good odds that there's somebody there -- three Hundred or ten thousand in our segment of the universe. Our job' is to listen in tiSe right place or in tlie right way; or understand wKat we Hear." A dams turned to MacDonald. "What do you say, Mac?" "I say these basic discussions are good for us," MacDonald said mildly, "and we need to keep reminding ourselves what it is we're doing, or we'll get swallowed in a quicksand of data. I also say that it's time now to get down to the business at hand -- what observations do we make tonight and the rest of the week before our next staff meeting?" Saunders began, "I think we should make a methodical sweep of the entire galactic lens, listening on aU wave lengths -- " 'We've done that a hundred times," said Sonnenbom. "Not with my new filter -- " "Tau Ceti still is the most likely," said Olsen. "Let's really give it a hearing -- " MacDonald heard Adams grumbling, half to himself, "If there is anybody, and they are trying to communicate, some amateur is going to pick it up on his ham set, decipher it on his James Bond coderule, and leave us sitdollars of equipment with' egg all over our faces." "And don't forget," MacDonald said, "tomorrow is Saturday night, and Maria and I will be expecting you all at our place at dt for the customary beer and bull. Those who have more to say can save it for then." It was a joviality MacDonald did not feel. He did not know whether he could stand another Saturday night session of drink and discussion and dissension about the Project. It was one of his low periods when everything seemed to pile up on top of him, and he could not get out from imder, or tell anybody how He felt. No matter how he felt, the Saturday nights were good for morale. Pues no es possible que este continuo el atco armado ni la condicion y tlaqueza humana se pueda sustentar sin alguna licita recreacion. Within the Project, morale was always a problem. Besides, it was good for Maria. She did not get out enough. She needed to see people. And then... And then maybe Adams was right. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe nobody was sending signals because there was nobody to send signals. Maybe man was all alone in the universe. Alone with' God. Or alone vrith himself, whichever was worse. Maybe all the money was being I The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreaUon.  , . -- Cervantes, Don Quixote. wasted, and the effort, and tKe preparation -- all the intelligence and education and ideas being drained away into an endlessly empty cavern. Habe nun, ach! Philosoptue, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Tbeologie Durchaus studiert, mit heissem Bemuhn. Da steh'ich nun, ich armer Tot! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor; Heisse Magister, heisse Doktor gar, Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jaht Heraui, herab und quer und krumm Meine Schuler an der Nase  herum -- Und sehe, dass wir nichts wissen konnenP poor fool. Why me? MacDonald thought. Could not some otKer lead them better, not by the nose but by his real wdsdom? Perhaps aU Ke was good for was the Saturday night parties. Perhaps it was time for a change. He shook himself. It was the # Now I have studied philosophy, Medicine and the law, and unlortimately, theoloey, wearily sweating, yet I stand now, poor fool, no wiser than I was befwe; I am called Master, even Doctor, and for these last ten years have drawn my students, by the notes, up, down, crosswise and crooked. Now I see that we can know nothing finally. -- Goethe, Foust. endless waiting that wore him down, the waiting for something that did not happen, and the Congressional hearings were coming up again. What could he say that he had not said before? How could he justify a project that already had gone on for nearly fifty years without results and might go on for centuries more? "Gentlemen," he said briskly, "to our listening posts." By the time he had settled himself at his disordered desk, Lily was standing beside him. "Here's last night's computer anal#Tsis," she said, putting down in front of him a thin folder. "Re#molds says there's nothing there, but you always want to see it an#Tway. Here's the transcription of last shear's Congressional hearings." A thick binder went on top of the folder. "The correspondence and the actual appropriation measure are in another file if you want them." MacDonald shook his head. "There's a form letter here from rules for this year's budget and a personal letter from Ted Wartinian sa#ring that conditions are really tight and some cuts look inevitable. In fact, he says there's a possibility the Project might be scrubbed." Lily glanced at him. "Not a chance," MacDonald said confidently. "There's a few applications for employment. Not as many as we used to get. The letters from school children I answered myself. And there's the usual nut letters from people who've been receiving messages from outer space and from one who's had a called it -- not a saucer or anything. A feature writer wants to interview you and some others for an article on the Project I think he's with us. And another one who sounds as if he wants to do an expose." Lily was a wonder. She could handle everything in the office as well as he could. In fact, things might nm smoother if he were not around to take up her time. "They've both sent some questions for you to answer. And Joe wants to talk to you." "Joe?" "One of the janitors." "What does he want?" They couldn't afford to lose a janitor. Good janitors were harder to find than astronomers, harder even than electronidans. "He says he has to talk to you, but I've heard from some of the luimh room staff that he's been complaining about getting messages on his -- on his -- " "Yes?" "On his false teeth." MacDonald sighed. "Pacify him somehow, will you, Lily. If I talk to him we might lost a janitor." "I'll do my best. And Mrs. MacDonald called. Said it wasn't important and you needn't call back." "Call her," MacDonald said. "And, Lily -- you're coming to tlie party tomorrow night, aren't you?" "What would I be doing at a party with all the brains?" "We want you to come. Maria asked me particularly. It isn't all shop talk, you know. And there are never enough women. You might strike it off with one of the young bachelors." "At my age, Mr. MacDonald? You're just trying to get rid of me." "Never." "I'll get Mrs. MacDonald." Lily turned at the door. "I'll think about the party." MacDonald shuffled through the papers. Down at the bottom was the only one he was interested in -- the computer analysis of last night's listening. But he kept it there, on the bottom, as a reward for going through the others. Ted was worried, really worried. Move over, Ted. And then the writers. He supposed he would have to work them in somehow. At least it was part of the fall-out to locating the Project in Puerto Rico. Nobody just dropped in. And the questions. Two of them caught his attention. How did you come to be named Project Director? That was the friendly one. What ate your qualifications to be Director? That was the other. How would he answer them? Could he answer them. Finally he reached the computer analysis, and it was just like those for the rest of the week, and the week before that, and the months and the years before that No significant correlations. Noise. There were a few peaks of reception -- at the #I centimeter line, for instance -- but these were merely concentrated noise. Radiating clouds of hydrogen, as the Little Ear functioned like an ordinary radio telescope. At least the Project showed some results. It was feeding star survey data tapes into the international pool. Fall-out. Of a process that had no other product except negatives. AyTaybe the equipment wasn't sensitive enough. Maybe. They could beef it up some more. At least it might be a successful ploy with the Committee, some progress to present, if only in the hardware. You don't stand still. You spend more money or they cut you back -- or off. Note: Saunders -- plans to increase sensitivity. Maybe the equipment wasn't discriminating enough. But they had used up a generation of ingenuity canceling out background noise, and in its occasional checks the Big Ear indicated that they were doing adequately on terrestrial noise, at least Note: Adams -- new discrimination gimmick. Maybe the computer wasn't recognizing a signal when it had one fed into it. Perhaps it wasn't sophisticated enough to perceive certain subtle relationships... And yet sophisticated codes had been broken in seconds. And the Project was asking it to distinguish only where a signal existed, whether the reception was random noise or had some element of the unrandom. At this level it wasn't even being asked to note the influence of consciousness. Note: ask computer -- is it missing something? Ridiculous? Ask Olsen. Maybe they shouldn't be searching the radio spectrum at all. Maybe radio was a peculiarity of man's civilization. Maybe others had never had it or had passed it by and now had more sophisticated means of conomunication. Lasers, for instance. Telepathy, or what might pass for it with man. Maybe gamma rays, as Morrison suggested years before Ozma. Wen, maybe. But if it were so, II somebody else would Have to listen for those. He had neither the equipment nor the background nor the working lifetime left to tackle something new. And maybe Adams was right. He buzzed Lily. "Have you reached Mrs. MacDonald?" "The telephone hasn't answered -- " Unreasoned panic... " -- oh, here she is now. Mr. MacDonald, Mrs. MacDonald." "Hello, darling. I was alarmed when you didn't answer." That had been foolish, he thought, and even more foolish to mention it. Her voice was sleepy. "I must have been dozing." Even drowsy, it was an eadting voice, gentle, a little husky, that speeded MacDonald's pulse. "What did you want?" "You called me," MacDonald said. "Did I? I've forgotten." "Glad you're resting. You didn't sleep well last night." "I took some pills." "How many?" "Just the two you left out." "pood girl. I'll see you in a couple of hours. Go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you." But her voice wasn't sleepy any more. "You won't have to go back tonight, will you? We'll have the evening together?" "We'll see," he promised. But he knew he would return. TV  acDonald paused outside the-long, low concrete building which housed the offices and laboratories and computers. It was twilight. The sun had descended below the green hills, but orange and purpling wisps of cirrus trailed down the western sky. Between MacDonald and the sky was a giant dish held aloft by skeleton metal fingers -- held high as if to catch the star dust that drifted down at night from the Milky Way. Go and catch a falling star. Get with child a mandrake root. Tell me where all past years are. Or who deft the deviFs foot; Teach me to hear mermaids sitTging, Or to keep off envy's stinging. And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind. Then the dish' began to turn, noiselessly, incredibly, and to tip. And it was not a dish' any more but an ear, a listening ear cupped by the surrounding hills to overhear the whispering universe. Perhaps this is what kept them at their jobs, MacDonald thought. In spite of all disappointments, in spite of all vain efforts, perhaps it was this massive machinery, as sensitive as their fingertips which kept them struggling with the unfathomable. When they grew weary at their electronic listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope vdth which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite. Or perhaps it was not just the reality but the imagery, like poetry, which soothed their doubting souls, the bowl held up to catch Donne's falling star, the ear cocked to catch the suspected shout that faded to an indistinguishable murmur by the time it reached them. And one thousand miles above them was the giant, fivemile-in-diameter network, the largest radio telescope ever built, which men had cast into the heavens to catch the stars. If they had the Big Em for more than an occasional reference check, MacDonald thought practically, then they might get some results. But he knew the radio astronomers would never relinquish time to the frivolity of listening for signals that never came. It was only because of the Big Ear that the Project had inherited the Little r. There had been talk recently about a larger net, twenty miles in diameter. Perhaps when it was done, if it were done, the Project might inherit time on the Big Ear. If they could endure until then, MacDonald thought, if they could steer their fragile vessel of faith between the Scylla of self-doubt and the Charybdis of Congressional appropriations. 'he images were not all favorable. There were others that went boomp in the night. There was the image, for instance, of man listening, listening, listening to the silent stars, listening for an eternity, listening for signals that would never come, because -- the ultimate horror -- man was alone in the universe, a cosmic accident of self-awareness which needed and would never receive the comfort of companionship. To be alone, to be all alone, would be like being all alone on earth, with no one to talk to, ever -- like being alone inside a bone prison, with no way to get out, no way to communicate witH anyone outside, no way to know if anyone was outside... Perhaps that, in the end, was what kept them going -- to stave off the tenors of the night. While they listened there was hope; to give up now would be to admit final defeat. Some said they should never have started; then they never would have the problem of surrender. Some of the new religions said that. The Solitarians, for one. There is nobody there; we are the one, the only created intelligence in the universe. Let us glory in our uniqueness. But the older religions encouraged the Project to continue. Why would God have created the myriads of other stars and other planets if he had not intended them for living creatures? Why should man only be created in His image? Let us find out, they said. Let us communicate with them. What revelations have they had? What saviors have redeemed them? Theee are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Mosea, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among alt nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high. Dusk had turned to night. THe sky had turned to black. The stars had been born again. The listening had begim. MacDonald made his way to his car in the parking lot behind the building, coasted until he was behind the hill, and turned on the motor for the long drive home. 'he hacienda was dark. It had that empty feeling about it that MacDonald knew so well, the feeling it had for him when Maria went to visit friends in Mexico City. But it was not empty now. Maria was here. He opened the door and flicked on the hall light, "Maria?" He walked down the tiled hall, not too fast, not too slow. "Querida?" He turned on the livingroom light as he passed. He continued down the hall, past the dining room, the guest room, the study, the kitchen. He reached the dark doorway to the bedroom. "Maria Chavez?" He turned on the bedroom light, low. She was asleep, her face peaceful, h'er dark hair scattered across the pillow. She lay on her side, her legs drawn up under the covers. Men che dtamma Dt sangue m'e rimaso, che no tremi; Conosco i segni del? antica fiamma? MacDonald looked down at her, comparing her features one by one with those he had fixed in his memory. Even now, with those dark, expressive eyes closed, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. What glories they had known! He renewed his spirit in the warmth' of his remembrances, recalling moments with lodng detail. C'est de quay pay le plus de peuT que la peuiA He sat down upon the edge of the bed and leaned over to kiss her upon the cheek and then upon her upthrust shoulder where the gown had slipped down. She did not waken. He shook her shoulder gently. "Maria!" She s Less than a drop o blood remains In me that does not tremble; I recognize the signals ot the andent name. -- Dante, Pnrgatorle. # The thing of which I have most fear Is fear. -- Montaigne, Essays, turned upon her back, straightening. She sighed, and her eyes came open, staring blankly. "It is Robby," MacDonald said, dropping unconsciously into a faint brogue. Her eyes came alive, and her lips smiled sleepily. "Robby. You're home." "Yo te amo," he murmured, and kissed her on the lips. As he pulled himself away, he said, "I'll start dinner. Wake up and get dressed. I'll see you in half an hour. Or sooner." "Sooner," she said. T T e turned and went to the kitchen. There was romaine lettuce in the refrigerator and, as he rummaged further, some thin slices of veal. He prepared Caesar salad and veal scallopine, doing it all quickly, expertly. He liked to cook. The salad was ready and the lemon juice, tarragon, white wine and, a minute later, the beef bouillon had been added to the browned veal when Maria appeared. She stood in the doorway, slim, lithe, lovely, and sniffed the air, "I smell something delicious." It was a joke. When Maria cooked, she cooked Mexican, something peppery that burned all the way into the stomach and lay there like a banked furnace. When MacDonald cooked, it was something exotic -- French, perhaps, or Italian or Chinese. But whoever cooked, the other had to appreciate it or take over all the cooking for a week. MacDonald filled their wine glasses. "'A la tres-bonne, a la tres belief " he said, " 'qui iait ma joie et ma sante.' " "To the Project," Maria said. "May there be a signal received tonight." MacDonald shook his head. One should not mention what one desires too much. "Tonight there is only us." Afterwards there were only the two of them, as there had been now for twenty years. And she was as alive and as urgent, as filled with love and laughter, as when they first had been together. At last the urgency was replaced by a vast ease and contentment in which for a time the thought of the Project faded into something remote which one day he would return to and finish. "Maria," he said. "Robby?" "Yo te amo, corazon." "Vo te amo, Robby." Gradually then, as he waited for her breathing to slow, the Project returned. When he thought she was asleep, he got up and began to dress in the dark. s To the best, to the most beautiful who Is my joy and my well-being. -- Baudelaire, lies Epaees.  When I rest. I rust. -- German proverb. "Robby?" Her voice was awake and frightened. "Quetlda?" "You are going again?" "I didn't want to wake you." "Do you have to go?" "It's my job." "Just this once. Stay with me tonight." He turned on the light. In the dimness he could see that her face was concerned but not hysterical. " 'Rast ich, so tost Besides, I would feel ashamed." "I understand. Go, then. Come home soon." He put out two pills on the little shelf in the bathroom and put the others away again. Ill T he headquarters building was busiest at night when the radio noise of the sun was least and listening to the stars was best. Girls bustled down the halls with coffee pots, and men stood near the water fountain talking earnestly. MacDonald went into the control room. Adams was at the control panel; Montaleone was the technician. Adams looked up, pointed to his earphones with a gesture of futility, and shrugged. MacDonald nodded at him, nodded at Montaleone and glanced at the graph. It looked random to him. Adams leaned past him to point out a couple of peaks. "These might be something." "Odds," MacDonald said. "Suppose you're right. The computer hasn't sounded any alarms." "After a few years of looking at these things, you get the feel of them. You begin to think like a computer." "Or you get oppressed by failure." "There's that" The room was shiny and efficient, glass and metal and plastic, all smooth and sterile; and it smelled like electricity. MacDonald knew that electricity had no smell, but that was die way he thought of it Perhaps it was the ozone that smelled or warm insulation or oil. Whatever it was, it wasn't worth the time to find out and MacDonald didn't really want to know. He would rather think of it as the smell of electricity. Perhaps that was why he was a failure as a scientist "A scientist is a man who wants to Imow why," his teachers alwass had told him. MacDonald leaned over the control panel and flidced a switch. A thin, hissing noise filled the room. It was something like air escaping from an inner tube -- a susuration of surrqtitious sibilants from subterranean sessions of seething serpents. He turned a knob, and the sound became vdiat someone had called -- Tennyson? -- "the murmuring of innumerable bees." Again, and it became something from Matthew Arnold... melancholy, long withdrawing roar Retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. TT e turned the knob once more, and the sound was a babble of distant voices, some shouting, some screaming, some conversing calmly, some whispering -- all of them tiying beyond desperation to connmunicate, and everything just below the level of intelligibility. If he closed his eyes, MacDonald could almost see their faces, pressed against a distant screen, distorted with the awful effort to make themselves heard and imderstood. But they all insisted on speaking at once. MacDonald wanted to shout at them. "Silence, everybody! All of you but you -- there, with the purple antenna. One at a time, and we'll listen to all of you if it takes a hundred years or a hundred lifetimes." MacDonald's hand dropped away from the knob'. "Sometimes,' Adams said, "I think it was a mistake to put in the speaker system. You begin to anthropomorphize. After a while you begin to hear things. Sometimes you even get messages. I don't listen to the voices any more. I used to wake up in the night with someone whispering to me. I was just on the verge of getting the message that would solve everything, and I would wake up." He flicked off the switch. "Maybe someday somebody will get the message," MacDonald said. "That's what the audio frequency translation is intended to do. To keep the attention focused. It can mesmerize and it can torment, but these are the conditions out of which spring inspiration." "Also madness," Adams said. "You've got to be able to continue." "Yes." MacDonald picked up the earphones Adams had put down and held one of them to his ear. "Tico-tico, tico-tico," it sang. "They're listening in Puerto Rico. Listening for words that never come. Tico-tico, tico-tico. They're listening in Puerto Rico. Can it be the stars are stricken diunb?" MacDonald put the earphones down and smiled. "Maybe there's inspiration in that, too." "At least it takes my mind off the futility." "Maybe off the job, too? Do you really want to find anyone out there?" "Why else would I be here? But there are times when I wonder if we would not be better off not knowing."  "We all think that sometimes," MacDonald said. In his office he attacked the stack of papers and letters again. When he had worked his way to the bottom, he sighed and got up, stretching. He wondered if he would feel better, less frustrated, less uncertain, if he were working on the Problem instead of just working so somebody else could work on the Problem. But somebody had to do it Somebody had to keep the Project going, personnel coming in, funds in the bank, feathers smoothed. Maybe it was more important that he do all the dirty little work in the office. Of course it was routine. Of course Lily could do it as well as he. But it was important that he do it, that there be somebody in charge who believed in the Project -- or who never let his doubts be known. Like the Little Ear, he was a symbol -- and it is by symbols men live, or refuse to let their despair overwhelm them. T he janitor was waiting for him in the outer office. "Can I see you, Mr. MacDonald?" the janitor said. "Of course, Joe," MacDonald said, locking the door of his office carefully behind him. "What is it?" "It's my teeth, sir." The old man got to his feet and with a deft movement of his tongue and mouth dropped his teeth into his hand. MacDonald stared at them with a twinge of revulsion. There was nothing wrong with them. They were a carefully constructed set of false teeth, but they looked too real. MacDonald always had shuddered away from that which seemed to be what it was not, as if it were treacherously false. "They talk to me, Mr. MacDonald," the janitor mumbled, staring at the teeth with what seemed like suspicion. "In the glass beside my bed at night, they whisper to me. About things far off, like. Messages, like." MacDonald started. It was a strange word for the old man to use, and hard to say without teeth. Still, the word had been "messages." But why should it be strange? He could have picked it up around the offices or the laboratories. It would be odd, indeed, if he had not picked up something about what was going on. Of course, messages. "I've heard of that sort of thing happening," MacDonald said. "False teeth accidentally constructed into a kind of crystal set, that pick up radio waves. Particularly near a powerful station. And we have a lot of stray frequencies floating around, what with the antennas and all. Tell you what, Joe. We'll make an appointment with the Project dentist to fix your teeth so that they don't bother you. Any small alteration should do it" "Thank you, Mr. MacDonald," the old man said. He fitted his teeth back into his mouth. "You're a great man, Mr. MacDonald." MacDonald drove the ten dark miles to the hacienda with a vague feeling of unease, as if he had done something during the day or left something undone that should have been otherwise. But the house was dark when he drove up in front, not emptydark as it had seemed to him a few hours before but friendlydark. Maria was asleep, breathing peacefully. IV lighted windows that cast long fingers into the night, probing the dark hills, and the sotmd of many voices stirred echoes until the countryside itself seemed alive. "Come in, Lily," MacDonald said at the door, and was reminded of a winter scene when a Lily had met the gentlemen at the door and Helped tfiem off with tlieir overcoats. But that was anotlier Lily and another occasion and another place and somebody else's imagination. "I'm glad you decided to come." He had a can of beer in his hand and hie waved it in the general direction of the major center of noisemaking. "There's beer in the living room and something more potent in the study -- # proof grain alcohol, to be precise. Be careful with that. It will sneak up on you. But -- 'nunc esf bibendum!' "Where's Mrs. MacDonald?" Lily asked. "Back there, somewhere." MacDonald waved again. "The men, and a few brave women, are in the study. The women, and a few brave men, are in the living room. The kitchen is common territory. Take your choice." "I really shouldn't have come," Lily said, "I offered to sjeU Mr. Saunders in the control room, but he said I hadn't been checked out It isn't as if the computer couldn't handle it all alone, and I know enough to call somebody if anything unexpected should happen." "Shall I tell you something, Lily?" MacDonald said. "The computer could do it alone. And I Now's the time for drinking! -- Horace, Odes, t Who strives always to the utmost, him you and the computer could do it better than any of us, including me. But if the men ever feel that they are unnecessary, they would feel more useless than ever. They would give up. And they mustn't do that" "Oh, Mac!" Lily said. "They mustn't do that Because one of them is going to come up with the inspiration that solves it all. Not me. One of them. We'U send somebody to relieve Charley before the evening is over." Wet immer strebens sich bemuht. Den konnen wit erlosen. Lily sighed. "Okay, boss." "And enjoy yourself!" "Okay, boss, okay." "Find a man, Lily," MacDonald muttered. And then he, too, turned toward the living room, for Lily was expected last H e listened for a moment at the doorway, sipping slowly from the warming can. " -- work more on gamma rays -- " "Who's got the money to build a generator? Since nobody's built one yet, we don't even know what it might cost" " -- gamma ray sources should radio sources at twenty-one centimeters -- " "TKafs wKat Cocconi said nearly fifty years ago. The same arguments. Always the same arguments." "If they're right, they're right." "But the hydrogen emission line is so uniquely logical. As Morrison said to Cocconi -- and Cocconi, if you remember, agreed -- it represents a logical, prearranged rendezvous point. 'A unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer of the universe,' was the way they put it." " -- but the noise level -- " MacDonald smiled and moved on to the kitchen for a cold can of beer. " -- Bracewell's 'automated messengers'?" a voice asked querulously. "What about them?" "Why aren't we looking for them?" "The point of Bracewell's messengers is that they make themselves known to us!" "Maybe there's something wrong with ours. After a few million years in orbit -- " " -- laser beams make more sense." "And get lost in all that star shine?" "As Schwartz and Townes pointed out, all you have to do is select a wavelength of light that is absorbed by stellar atmospheres. Put a narrow laser beam in the center of one of the calcium absorption lines -- " In the study they were talking about quantum noise. "Quantum noise favors low frequencies." "But the noise itself sets a lower limit on those frequencies." "Drake calculated the most favorable frequencies, considering the noise level, lie between # and #.I centimeters." "Drake! Drake! What did he know? We've had nearly fifty years experience on him. Fifty years of technological advance. Fifty years ago we could send radio messages # light-years and laser signals # light-years. Today those figures are # and # at least." "Wat if nobody's there?" Adams said gloomily. Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint. "Short-pulse it, like Oliver sugsecond would smear across the entire radio spectrum. Here, Mac, fill this, will you?" And MacDonald wandered away through the clustering guests toward the bar. "And I told Charley," said a woman to two other women in B I am Ihe aplrlt that always donles. -- Goetne, Faust. the comer, "if I had a dime for every dirty diaper I've changed, I sure wouldn't be sitting here in Puerto Rico -- " " -- neutrinos," said somebody. "Nuts," said somebody else, as MacDonald pomed grain alcohol carefully into the glass and filled it with orange juice. "The only really logical medium is Q waves." "I know -- the waves we haven't discovered yet but are going to discover about ten years from now. Only here it is nearly fifty years after Morrison suggested it, and we still haven't discovered them."---back across the room. "It's the night work that gets me," said someone's wife. "The Idds up all day, and then he wants me there to greet him when he gets home at dawn. Brother!" "Or what if everybody's listening?" Adams said gloomily. "Maybe everybody's sitting there, listening, just the way we are, because it's so much cheaper than sending." "Here you are," MacDonald said. "But don't you suppose somebody would have thought of that by this time and begin to send?" "Double-think it all the way through and figure what just occurred to you would have occurred to everybody else, so you might as well listen. Think about it -- everybody sitting around, listening. If there is anybody. Either way it makes the skin creep." "All right, tiien, we ought to send something." "What would you send?" "I'd have to think about it. Prime numbers, maybe." "Think some more. What if a civilization weren't mathematical?" "Idiot! How would they build an antenna?" "Maybe they'd rule-of-thumb it, like a ham. Or maybe they have built-in antenna." "And maybe you have built-in antenna and don't know it" MacDonald's can of beer was empty. He wandered back toward the Idtchen again. " -- insist on equal time with the Big Ear. Even if nobody's sending we could pick up the normal electronic commerce of a civilization tens of light-years away. The problem would be deciphering, not hearing." "They're picking it up now, when they're studying the relatively close systems. Ask for a tape and work out your program." "All right, I will. Just give me a chance to work up a request -- " MacDonald found himself beside Maria. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her close "All right?" he said to her. "All right." T T er face was tired, though,  MacDonald thought. He dreaded the notion that she might be growing older, that she was entering middle age. He could face it for himself. He could feel the years piling up inside his bones. He still thought of himself, inside, as twenty, but he knew that he was forty-seven, and mostly he was glad that he had found happiness and love and peace and serenity. He even was ful exuberance and belief in his personal immortality. But not Maria! Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la diritta via era smarrita.o "Sure?" She nodded. He leaned close to her ear. "I wish it was just the two of us, as usual." "I, too." "I'm going to leave in a little while -- " "Must you?" I" middle of the Journey of our life r came to myself In a dark wood where the straight way was lost. -- Dante, Inferno. "I must relieve Saunders. He's on duty. Give him an opportunity to celebrate a little with the otBers." "Can't you send somebody else?" "Who?" MacDonald gestured with good humored futility at all the clusters of people held together by bonds of ordered sounds shared consecutively. "It's a good party. No one will miss me." "I will." "Of course, querida." "You are their mother, father, priest, all in one," Maria said. "You worry about them too much." "I must keep them together. What else am I good for?" "For much more." MacDonald hugged her with one arm. "Look at Mac and Maria, will you?" said someone who was having trouble with' his consonants. "What God-damned devotion!" MacDonald smiled and suffered himself to be pounded on the back while he protected Maria in front of him. "I'll see you later," he said. As he passed the living room someone was saying, "Like Edie said, we ought to look at the longchain molecules in carbonaceous chondrites. No telling how far they've traveled -- or been sent -- or what messages might be coded in the molecules." As Ke closed tBe front door behind him, the noise dropped to a roar and then a mutter. He stopped for a moment at Hie door of the car and looked up at the sky. E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stellePThe noise from the hacienda reminded him of something -- the speakers in the control room. All those voices talking, talking, and from here he could not understand a thing. Somewhere there was an idea if he could only concentrate on it hard enough'. But he had drunk one beer too many -- or perhaps one too few. V  fter long hours of listening to the voices, MacDonald always felt a little crazy, but tonight it was worse than usual. Perhaps it was all the conversation before, or the beers, or something else -- some deeper concern that would not surface. But then the listeners had to be crazy to begin with -- to get committed to a project that might go for centuries without results. Tioo-tico, tico-tico... Even if they could pick up a H And thence we Issued aut, again to see the stars. -- Dante. Infonio. message, they still would likely be dead and gone before any exchange could take place even with the nearest likely star. What kind of mad dedication could sustain such perseverance? They're listening in Puerto Ri-' CO... Religion could. At least once it did, during the era of cathedral building in Europe, the cathedrals that took centuries to build. "What are you doing, fellow?" "I'm working for ten francs a day." "And what are you doing?" "I'm laying stone." "And you -- what are you doing?" "I am building a cathedral." They were building cathedrals, most of them. Most of them had that religious mania about their mission that would sustain them through a lifetime of labors in which no progress could be seen. Listening for words that never come... The mere layers of stone and those who worked for pay alone eliminated themselves in time and left only those who kept alive in themselves the concept, the dream. But they had to be a little mad to begin with. Can it be the stars are stricken dumb? Tonight he had heard the voices nearly all night long. They kept tT#dng to tell him something, something urgent, something he should do, but He could not quite make out the words. There was only the babble of distant voices, urgent and unintelligible. Tico-tico, tico-tic... He had wanted to shout "Shut up!" to the universe. "One at a time!... You first!" But of course there was no way to do that Or had he tried? Had he shouted? They're listening with ears this big! Had he dozed at the console with the voices mumbling in his ears, or had he only thought He dozed? Or had he only dreamed he waked? Or dreamed he dreamed? Listening for thoughts just like their own. There was a madness to it all, but perhaps it was a divine madness. And is not that madness that which sustains man in his terrible self-knowledge, the driving madness which demands reason of a casual universe, the awful aloneness which seeks among the stars for companionship? Can it be that we are all alone?  I Ke ringing of the telephone half-penetrated through the mists of mesmerization. He picked up the handset half-expecting that it would be the universe calling, perhaps with' a clipped British accent. "Hello there, MacU Hello. Hello. I say, we seem to have a bad connection, what? Just wanted you to know that we're here. Are you there? Are you listening? Message on the way. May not get there for a couple of centuries. Do be around to answer, will you? That's a good being. Righto..." Only it wasn't. It was the familiar American voice of Charley Saunders saying, "Mac, there's been an acddent. Olsen is on his way to relieve you, but I think you'd better leave now. It's Maria." Leave it. Leave it all. What does it matter? But leave the controls on automatic; the computer can take care of it all. Maria! Get in the car. Start it Don't fumble! That's it Go. Go. Car passing. Must be Olsen. No matter. What kind of accident? Why didn't I ask? What does it matter what kind of acddent? Maria. Nothing could have happened. Nothing serious. Not with all those people around. Tiil desperandum. And yet -- why did Charley call if it was not serious? Must be serious. I must be prepared for something bad, something that will shake the world, that will tear my insides. I must not break up in front u There's no cause tor despair. -- Horact Odes. of tiiem. Why not? Why must I appear infallible? Why must I always be cheerful, imperturbable, my faith unshaken? Why me? If there is something bad, if something impossibly bad has happened to Maria, what will matter? Ever? Why didn't I ask Charley what it was? Why? The bad can wait; it will get no worse for being unknown. What does the universe care for my agony? I am nothing. My feelings are iKrthing to anyone but me. My only possible meaning to the universe is the Project. Only this slim potential links me with eternity. My love and my agony are me, but the significance of my life or death is the Project. going home. All seemed normal. Saunders met him at the door. "Doctor Lessenden is here. He's with Maria." T he odor of stale smoke and the memory of babble still lingered in the air, but someone had been busy. The party remains had been cleaned up. No doubt they had all pitched in. They were good people. "Betty found her in the bathroom off your bedroom. She wouldn't have been there except the others were occupied. I blame myself. I shouldn't have let you relieve me. Maybe if you had been here... But I knew you wanted it that way." "No one's to blame. She was alone a great deal," MacDonald said. "What happened?" "Didn't I tell you? Her wrists. Slashed with a razor. Both of them. Betty found her in the bathtub. Like pink lemonade, she said." By the time he reached the hacieda, MacDonald was breathing evenly. His emotions were under control. Dawn had grayed the eastern sky. It was a customary hour for Project personnel to be U Here Phaeton lies: In Phoebus' car he tarebL And thouj he greatly tailed, more greatly dared. -- Ovid. Metamorphoses. It Ploroed to the depth of my heart by a blow unforeseen -- and mortal. -- CoroeUIe, I Old. Perce jusgues au fond du coeur D'une atteinte imprevue aussi bien que mortelle? A fist tightened inside MacDonald's gut and then slowly relaxed. Yes, it had been that He had known it, hadn't he? He had known it would happen ever since the sleeping pills, even though he had kept telling himself, as she had told him, that the overdose had been an accident. Or had he known? He knew only that Saunders' news Had been no surprise. Then they were at the bedroom door, and Maria was Isdng under a blanket on the bed, scarcely making it moimd over her body, and her arms were on top of the blankets, palms up, bandages like white paint across the olive perfection of her arms -- now, MacDonald reminded himself, no longer perfection but marred with ugly red lips that spoke to him of hidden misery and untold sorrow and a life that was a lie... Doctor Lessenden looked up, sweat trickling down from his hairline. "The bleeding is stopped, but she's lost a good deal of blood. I've got to take her to the hospital for a transfusion. The ambulance should be here any minute." He paused. MacDonald looked at Maria's face. It was paler than he had ever seen it. It looked almost waxen as if it were already arranged for all time on a satin pillow. "Her chances are fifty-fifty," Lessenden said. And then the attendants pushed their way past him with their litter. "Betty found this on her dressing table," Saimders said. He handed MacDonald a slip of paper folded once. MacDonald unfolded it: Je m'en vay chercher tin grand Peutetre. VI E veryone was surprised to see MacDonald at the office. They did not say anything, and he did not volunteer the information that he could not bear to sit at home, among the remembrances, and wait for word to come. But they asked him about Maria, and he said, "Doctor Lessenden is hopeful. She's still unconscious. Apparently will be for some time. The doctor said I might as well wait here as at the hospital. I think I made them nervous. They're hopeful. Maria's still unconscious..." O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!...# The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike... Finally MacDonald was alone. He pulled out paper and pencil and worked for a long time on the statement, and then he balled it up and threw it into the wastebasket, scribbled a single sentence on another sheet of paper, and called Lily. # I am eolmr to seek a great pcrtiaps. -- Rabelais on hJs deathbed. # Oh slowly, slowly run, hoisee ! the night!... , -- Marlowe, Br. Vanstas. She came in almost immediately. "Send this!" She glanced at it "No, Mac, I can't" "Send it!" "But -- " "It's not an impulse. I've thought it over carefully. Send it" Slowly she left, holding the piece of paper gingerly in her fingertips. MacDonald pushed the papers around on his desk, waiting for the telephone to ring. But, without knocking, unannounced, Saunders came through the door first. "You can't do this, Mac," Saunders said. MacDonald sighed. "Lily told you. I would fire that girl if she weren't so loyal." "Of course she told me. This isn't just you. It affects the whole Project." "That's what I'm thinking about." "I think I know what you're going through, Mac -- " Saimders stopped. "No, of course I don't know what you're going through. It must be hell. But don't desert us. Think of the Project!" "That's what I'm thinking about. I'm a failure, Charley. Everything I touch -- ashes." "You're the best of us." "A poor linguist? An indifferent engineer? I have no qualifications for this job, Charley. You need someone with ideas to head the Project, someone dynamic, someone who can lead, someone with -- charisma." A few minutes later he went over it all again with Olsen. When he came to the qualifications part, all Olsen could say was: "You give a good party, Mac." It was Adams, the skeptic, who affected him most. "Mac, you're what I believe in instead of God." Sonnenbom said, "You are the Project. If you go it all falls apart. It's over." "It seems like it, always, but it never happens to those things that have life in them. The Project was here before I came. It will be here after I leave. It must be longer lived than any of us, because we are for the years and it is for the centuries." After Sonnenbom, MacDonald told Lily wearily. "No more, Lily." None of them had had the courage to mention Maria, but MacDonald had considered that failure, too. She had tried to communicate with him a month ago when she took the pills, and he had been imable to imderstand. How could he riddle the stars when he couldn't even understand those closest to him. Now he had to pay. Meine Ruh'isi hin, Meine Herz ist schwer?-' What would Maria want? He knew what she wanted, but, if she lived, he could not let her pay that price. Too long she had been there when he wanted her, waiting like a doll put away on a shelf for him to return and take her down, so that he could have the strength to continue. And somehow the agony Had built up inside her, the dreadful progress of the years, most dread of all to a beautiful woman growing old, alone, too much alone. He had been selfish. He had kept her to himself. He had not wanted children to mar the perfection of their being together. Perfection for him; less than that for her. Perhaps it was not too late for them if she lived. And if she died -- he would not have the heart to go on with work to which, he knew now, he could contribute nothing. Que acredito sa ventura, Morir querdo y vivir loco? And finally the call came. "She's going to be all right, Mac," Lessenden said. And after a moment, "Mac, I said -- " "I heard." "She wants to see you." "I'll be there." "SKe said to give you a message. 'Tell Robby I've been a little crazy in the head. I'll be better now. That great perhaps looks too certain from here. And tell him not to be crazy in the head, too.' " A T acDonald put down the telephone and walked througH the doorway and through the outer office, a feeling in his chest as if it were going to burst. "She's going to be all right," he threw over his shoulder at Lily. "Oh, Mac -- " In the haU, Joe the janitor stopped him. "Mr. MacDonald -- " MacDonald stopped. "Been to the dentist #t, Joe?" "No, sir, not yet, but it's not -- " "Don't go. I'd like to put a tape recorder beside your bed for a while, Joe. Who knows?" "Thank you, sir. But it's... They say you're leaving, Mr. MacDonald." "Somebody else will do it." "You don't understand. Don't go, Mr. MacDonald!" "Why not, Joe?" "You're the one who cares." MacDonald had been about to move on, but that stopped him. IT lly peace Is trone. My neart Is neavy. -- Goethe, Fanst. # For If he like a nuulinan lived. At least he like a wise one died. -- Cervantes, Don Quixote. Ful wys is he that kan Hymselven knowe! He turned and went bade to tlie office. "Have you got tSat sKeet of paper, Lily?" "Yes. sir." "Have you sent it?" "No, sir." "Bad girl. Give it to me." He read the sentence on the paper once more: I have great confidence in the goals and ultimate success of the Project, but for personal reasons I mast submit my resignation. He studied it for a moment Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi ptusquam ipm gigantes vident? And Ke tore it up. l A dwarf standing on the shoulder of a Riant may see farther than a giant himself. -- Lucan De Belle ClTlUe Be sure to watch for The magazine you asked fori All-new stories of adult fantasy and great tales of sword-and-sorcery. Edited by Lester del Rey and featuring such fine writers as: Don't miss !tl Newsstand Only for Mission To A Comet Tt is one of the by-products of the Space Age that comet fear, still rampant in #-#I at the latest appearance of Halley's comet, is a thing of the past But while hardly anybody is afraid of comets any more, the old curiosity, possibly wnth a very faint tinge of awe, has remained. We still want to know everything that can be known about a comet. Since telescopes, astronomical cameras and spectroscopes have done everything they could, it is quite natural to look in the general direction of the latest astronomical tool, the space probe. Have we progressed far enough to send a mission to a comet? The answer is yes; we can and we should, if we can find a suitable comet, one that is well behaved. To find out what constitutes good behavior on the part of a comet, we have to consider first that we are going to shoot from a moving platform: our earth. The earth moves in its orbit at the rate of ## miles per second. The distance from the sun is virtually uniform; during the first miles and during the first week difference of only # per cent. When the earth is closest to the sun (perihelion) it must, in accordance with Kepler's Second Law, move somewhat faster than at the time when it is farthest from the sun (aphelion), but again the difference in orbital velocity is minor. As distinct from the nearly circular orbits of the planets, the orbits of comets are quite elono O) o S  s  a e o "# I a. o Z 'gi b K ##) i  E # # a w o  O' :  !k e o l tS o R o o t o s Os o c M O K # O  Os  t; c D #)# o U)  s o u Q o s o. fit o X V) ca  u e S o a I s o w  TJ # e  o d h o Os o  o  CS N o o e o O K CO Tt d d CO r d  K CO Os CO o!S o R o K a d o o d d to so r: o # in d o # ' # lO Os rJO p  CN S K V # o d d d O c  K CO S s   o o CO 'O o V) s? o 'O s ) flu d d d d pj Q. Q VI .# g a.  # # q # #I o # # # sa ) I I w # lo -- d CO o Os q d V) JO 'O d d to q r f" r o E o z o u w U J.o  p  o c # o ,# c : lu UL O O N O Jg #  .#. C JK o # X e s .  ) E #  .  s-iji# :S S I I Is gated, with one notable exception. Fig. I shows a diagram of the orbit of Halley's comet; it is correct as far as it goes; we'll discuss later what this diagram fails to show. The more elongated the orbit of a comet, the greater the difference of its orbital velocity at perihelion and aphelion. For a mission to a comet we would like to find one which has an orbit with aphelion or perihelion close to the earth's distance from the sun. The "ideal" comet for a probe would be one that orbits the sim inside the orbit of the earth, with' aphelion near the earth's orbit. If there were such a comet, it would have an orbital velocity at aphelion not very different from the earth's orbital velocity. However, no such' comet is known, so we have to look around for the next best thing. That next best thing is a comet with its perihelion near the earth's orbit, where the comet will move faster than the earth. But if the orbit of the comet is not excessively elongated, the difference between the comet's and the earth's velocities would be manageable. Here nature has provided a fairly large selection; four such comets are shown in Fig. #. At first glance, the least suitable of the four is comet Encke, because it crosses the earth's orbit and the velocity difference is considerable. Tut a diagram is not good enough to show what is going on; figures are needed. They were assembled in a table by J. C. Lair half a dozen years ago -- but this table is by no means a complete listing of all the known comets with orbital periods of a dozen years or less. There are at least a score of others. Now with this table as a guide, we can go to work, eliminating the difficult cases and retaining the more promising ones. Going first by the proximity of the comet's perihelion to the earth's orbit, comets Gale, GiacobiniZinner, Poos-Winnecke, Schaumasse, Tuttle and Tuttle-Giacobini all look fine. None of them is more than # per cent farther from the sun than the earth's orbit. But they all have rather elongated orbits, a fact that is expressed by the figure for the eccentricity in the third column. A comet with an orbit of high eccentricity will move very fast at its perihelion. Let us assume that we have two comets, both' with perihelia at the orbit of the earth, or one A.U. (astronomical imit) from the sun. One of these two comets has its aphelion five A.U. from the sun, but the aphelion of the other is ten A.U. from the sun. The one with' the aphelion farther away, the one with the longer ellipse, will move much faster at its perihelion than the one witK the shorter ellipse. So let us say, somewhat arbi trarily, that we reject comets with an orbital eccentricity of # or larger. This leaves only two: Pons-Winnecke and Tuttle-Giacobini. Now we'll progress to the next point, the inclination of the comet's orbit to the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the plane of the orbit of the earth; something moving in the same plane would be said to have an inclination of zero. Something moving in an orbit with its plane at an angle to the ecliptic is said to have an inclination of so and so many degrees of arc. A mission to a body moving in an inclined orbit is more expensive in terms of fuel and generally more difficult; the higher the inclination the more difficult the out-of-ecliptic mission. Looking at our two comets Fig. #, The Orbits of four short-period comets. Comet Encke is the only known short-period comet with its perihelion inside the orbit of Mercury. with Otherwise reasonable orbits, we find to our dismay that just these two show rather high inclinations, #I .# and # .# respectively. The sad result is that none of the comets of our original list has an orbit that would be easy to reach. At the same time, a glance at the table immediately reveals two comets with low inclination, namely comets Forbes and Kopff. Both also have low eccentricities -- about # in both cases -- but the perihelia of both are rather far away, about # A.U. -- a little farther than the orbit of Mars. If a choice had to be made now, it would consist of a careful weighing of a number of points not yet mentioned -- as for example, the question of how well the orbit of the comet is known. It might be that the orbit of Tuttle-Qiacobini is far better known than that of Kopff (I believe this is the case) so that better knowledge would overcome the general unhappiness caused by high inclinations. Or the choice may be influenced by the fact that one of the two comets happens to be observable in the sky for a few months prior to the date of departure of the mission. Then a good orbit could be established just before the mission gets underway. Somewhat ironically, the comet ## with the best-known orbit, namely Encke, which Has been under observation since # and has the shortest orbital period of any comet, has a particularly imsuitable orbit for interception. Its orbit is too eccentric; the velocity with which it crosses the earth's orbit is too high; its perihelion is far inside the earth's orbit, and its velocity at perihelion is such that a probe would have difficulty matching it. Instead of trying for Encke's comet, it might be better to get a precise orbit determination for comet Forbes or comet Kopff. The latter is due back at its perihelion in October, #; the former has just passed through' its perihelion and is due back in July, #. Of course, it is known that things can easily go wrong with' comet orbits. Since the comets themselves have so little mass, they are easy victims of the gravitational fields of the larger planets. About a century ago the small comet Biela was even tom in two. Unless a comet orbit is very well known, it is impossible to predict the orbital changes a passage near a major planet will produce. But even with an imperfectly known orbit, it is at least possible to compute whether the comet will come close to a major planet. In other words, even with an imperfectly known orbit one might be able to say that orbital changes are unlikely because the comet, on this particular trip around the sun, will not come near a planet. J ust what is a mission to a comet supposed to find out? The currently accepted idea of the nature of a comet is the one conceived by Fred L. Whipple a few decades ago; a comet consists of frozen gases. Solid matter, namely cosmic dust, is indubitably imbedded in these frozen gases, but it is only a minor constituent. When the comet comes within a certain distance of the sun, somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the frozen gases begin to evaporate, forming the so-called coma (literally: head of hair) around the comet's body, called the nucleus. Soon the radiation pressure of the sun "blows" some of the coma away so that it streams behind as a taU. Measuring the length of the tail and the diameter of the coma by astronomical observations is no problem, if we disregard the question of whether the tail as well as the coma may have invisible portions of very low density. Estimating the diameter of the nucleus is already difficult, and calculations of the mass of a nucleus show a wide divergence. The same goes for estimates about the density of the coma. A probe flying through a comet's tail and its coma, moving with nearly the same velocity relative to tiie sun as the comet it, self, would answer these questions. Though the mass of a comet is small compared to that of a planet, it is gigantic compared to that of the probe. The probe would therefore be deflected from its pre-calculated course; from the degree of this deflection the mass of the nucleus could be calculated with great accuracy. The chemical nature of the gases that make up a comet could be established more completely than it can be done from observations from the ground. And then there is a problem left over from the nineteenth century, when French, German and Russian astronomers gave it a great deal of thought and attention. Astronomical books, then as now, said that comets were visible by reflected sunlight. But when these observers tried to establish the luminosity of a comet, they repeatedly found that a comet emitted more light than could be accounted for by mere reflection of sunlit Some guessed that chemical reactions in the coma and tail produced this extra luminosity. Others said that it was more likely to be electrical in nature. The problem of the extra luminosity was never solved; it was slowly forgotten. The general Fig. #. The portion of the orbit of Holley's comet near Hs perihelion. The "nodal line" is the line connecting the two points where the comet's orbit goes through the ecliptic. lack of bright comets during the twentieth century probably contributed to the lack of interest. True, the observers of the nineteenth century did not really measure a comet's luminosity but estimated it visually with the backing of much' experience. It may have been just a collection of mistakes, but we caimot be sure. At any event, a probe would clear this up. Tlhile all the thinking about a ' ' suitable comet for such a mission was going on, several people, living thousands of miles apart and not knowing what the others were thinking, asked themselves: why not go after the big one, namely Halley's comet? It is due again in the Spring of #. Here we have a large comet with a reasonably well-known orbit The uncertainties now existing about the precise date and so forth of its next approach could be established by observation a few months before the event -- obviously a large comet can be observed for a longer time than a small one. But while Halle # r's comet is what is called an easy object for observation, it is anything but easy as a target for a probe. This is the point where facts have to be added to the information contained in Fig. #. The diagram shows that Halley's comet is retrograde: it moves around the sun in a direction opposite to the motion of the planets. This by itself makes life difficult, because it looks as if comet and probe must pass each other like two jets flying in opposite directions. The period during which useful measurements can be taken will be very brief indeed, even with very sophisticated instrumentation. To make it all still worse, Halley's comet Kas an orbit with the rather high inclination of #.#, so it would have to be intercepted by the probe when it passes through the ecliptic (Fig. #.) Let us have a few figures about its orbit now. Aphelion is beyond Neptune's orbit at a distance of # A.U. from the sim -- it was passed in #. Orbital velocity at aphelion is about # miles per second. The perihelion is at # A.U., or between the orbits of Mercury and Venus; orbital velocity at perihelion is just a shade below # miles per second. The calculated time of the next perihelion passage is Wednesday, February #, #, at #:# A.M. of uncertainty at the moment. However, at its previous appearance the comet was first photographed when it was at a distance of # A.U. from the sun, #I days prior to perihelion passage. It was seen first with the naked eye (by Prof. Max Wolf of the Koenigstuhl Observatory of the University of Heidelberg), # dajrs before perihelion passage. We can expect that it will be spotted photographically at a longer distance than # A.U. next time, possibly as much as # A.U., so that there will be ample time for correcting the orbit calculations. B ecause the perihelion passage is still # years in the future, our thinking about a probe to Halley's comet need not be restricted to today's rockets, today's instnimentation and today's methods of launching a space probe toward a distant target. For some time now, space experts have been talking about pomething they call "swing-b" or "swing-around" missions. None has been performed yet, but the principle is to utilize the gravitational field of a planet to alter the direction of a space probe to accomplish something that could not be done directly. It so happens that the planet Saturn will be available for a swing-by maneuver when Halley's comet passes it about # days prior to its next perihelion passage. On a flat diagram it looks as if comet and planet will come fairly close to each other at that time; in reality, because of the high inclination of the comet's orbit, they will be far apart. But the important point is that both planet and comet vrill be in about the same direction in the sky as seen from the earth. If we sent a space probe to Saturn in #, it would get to Saturn's orbit at the right time, at a point not far from the position of the planet. Because of its inertia, the probe would overshoot the orbit of Saturn (Fig. #), but its original fairly straight path would be bent into a large hairpin curve by the planet's gravity. If the position of the probe relative to the planet were properly chosen, the probe would make a return flight to the sim that would parallel the orbit of the comet and slowly approach it in the course of # days, fiFig. #. A totalled twingdjy mluion for a probe fo Hallot Comet. Tbe twlng#iy b occomplkhed by etlUzing the gravitational field of Saturn t bend the probe' orbit into the desired path. nally coming close enough so that a soft landing of the probe on the comet's nucleus would be a distinct possibility. Right now, in #, such a mission is beyond the state of the art, except for the rocket itself. The Satum-V, with suitable upper stages, could provide the necessary lift and velocity. The difficulties are at the electronic end; signals will have to be sent over distances so great that the signal will need up to ## hours to reach the probe; the return signal will, of course, take just as long. However, the probe will not have to leave imtil five years from now, so there is time to think and work around tire difficulties.      Next month Is our eighteenth birthday, and the guests at the party include some very old friends --  and some new ones. For openers, there's a story called The Villains from Vega IV by Gold. Well, not exactly by Gold. It's by two Golds -- H.L., who was Galaxy's founding editor, and E.J., who happens to be his son. Obviously genes will tell; and obviously Gene Gold's genes carry some handy literary traits. Now that we think of it, this may be the only father-son collaboration in all of science fiction. Anybody know of another? In the same issue Christopher Anvil gives us Behind fhe Sandrat Hoax, Kris Neville takes us to Thyre Planet and Mack Reynolds tells us about a Criminal in Utopia. Which presents a problem for his criminal. Think about it: Here you are, a bright young man with larceny in your heart, living in a society where money is just a quaint old memory from the dark ages and ail transactions are handled by unirersal credit cards. What do you steal? How do you keep what you have stolen? There's more of course -- Willy Ley's For Your Information, Algis Budrys's book reviews, a "non-fact" article by Larry S. Todd called The Varbots. Interesting piece. It's a history of armored warfare, for the next # years, illustrated by the author himself. Come take a trip with Galaxy to the ends of the Earth -- the end of the Earth as we know it! this issue, Galaxy's Va cation Magazine supplement takes you to some of the world's newest and most unusual travel spots in this year of #. Our first stop this month will be the Sahara Desert. In search of a whipping boy, the public is blaming this on DeGauUe. Of course, le bon General did not invent the Bomb. But he did pick the Sahara for a target area. Who wouldn't? It seemed a logical spot. How could the French scientists have known that those big dunes weren't just sand, but sand-covered cliffs; white chalk and limestone cliffs like the ones they're so enthusiastic about at Dover? And that's all it took limestone, sand and heat of the last bomb they set off. After the dust cleared, so to speak, there they were i with' a desert that was really useless. Because it had cooled and annealed. Into glass. 'h'e entire Sahara hadn't been affected -- just about a thousand-mile radius reaching out from around the target site. But it couldn't be classified as a desert any more, could it? They wanted to re-name it, but as there was not exactly any precedent to guide them, the public has solved their dilemma by calling it the Sahara Glass Flats. After the shock (and the radiation) wore off, the French thought this would be the eighth wonder of the world. A fantastique tourist attraction. It took just one expedition t show them how wrong they were. Tour groups through this land of glass have been discontinued until someone develops buses with foam-rubber tires that won't puncture. You see, this is primitive glass. It's not tempered or treated with any of your modem this and thats so it won't shatter or crack or break when you drop it. They thought it would've aimealed into a solid mass. But it didn't. It's stratified like most areas of rocky land are. Oh, a few of the dunes are solid -- like icebergs. But that's worse yet The only way to go in is by helicopter. If you do go, don't forget your heavy hoots, #rour smoke-glass sunglasses and asbestos gloves. The boots? So you'll have feet left after walking over the glass , -- crunch, shatter, tinkle, crash,  scnmch. And the glasses? That  stuff reflects the sun. It catches it beautifully and throws it back  prismatically from every angle. Then the gloves -- if yu think the sun heated up the sand that was there before, you should feel what it does to miles and miles of glass! You'll have to fly in every morning and drop down by ropes. No landings. No campates. It would make one hell of a place for a bedroll -- glass splinters and slivers who knows where. And do leave those dunes alone. It's one thing to pick-axe your way up a berg or glacier, but a hot iceberg? Forget it If you so much as bmsh an arm or leg against the edge, presto, seconddegree bums. You'd need asbestos clothing, and then you'd pass out from the heat But don't forget your cameras.  You can fly across at different times of the day and see the  whole place for the first time each' time. When the sun rises, the glass is one color; when it sets, it's turned yet another. That's the clear glass. Wait till you see the areas of colored glass. There's one strip, about two miles long and a mile wide, of green glass that looks like an oasis from a chopper. There's emerald apple green and kelly and nile, , chartreuse and pea and hundreds of green and blue-green variations. All it took for green glass was a little copper in the mix.  Then there are acres of cr#rstal, chunks of it, good-sized rocks and boulders. Heavy, shimmering, captive prisms of crystal. That's glass with lead in it. And the red glass! Patches of it all over that desert. From the air it looked like a wounded giant walked along scattering drops of blood. In some spots there are huge smears where the giant must have stopped to rest. But red glass doesn't come from blood. It comes from gold! And some of those drops of gold-bearing blood are a hundred yards across. There's one field where the red glass mixed with the lead crystal. It's fantastic to walk through there, kicking those red prisms. There are no rubies like it in the  whole world, and your cameras can't do it justice. (Provided you remember to bring all the neces sary filters.) 'he whole place is a psychedelic delight. Pick up one of those crystal rocks and look through it at the other glass. It's better than any artificially induced state. Except, of course, you are with your heavy boots and insulated gloves, walking crunch', scrunch over the poor fragile stuff. There's still the question of what to do with miles of broken glass. Maybe there's a whole new industry about to spring up, a fortune waiting for someone. All that gold waiting to be melted out. Plus the copper, and you should see the stretches of black glass! Layers of it, exotic, shiny; it looks like obsidian. That'rf colored with iron, and some of it might have silver in it, too. There are miles of it. Then there are the fields where the sand fused with manganese and turned purple, violet, amethyst, A sunset over these areas is unbelievable. But forget the idea of selling the choice pieces of crystal as souvenirs. Of what? The biggest blunder anyone's made on Earth so far? Besides, if you've seen one rock made of crystal, you've seen them all. It can be ground and etched; it works up into beautiful paperweights, but that's all. But how much can they dispose of this way? People collect rocks all over the globe, and I don't think they've gotten too far along in depleting the earth of its supply of rocks. So here it sits -- most of the Sahara Desert. If anyone ever figures a way to get tours in and out economically it could be a greater natural (or unnatural) wonder than the old Grand Canyon was. But till they do. I'm not sure you'll want to go unless you're wild about looking at broken glass. Maybe the French should have a contest Send your entries in, folks, the best idea we receive for disposing of our glass wins an allexpense paid tour of the Sahara Glass Flats. Plus a lifetime supply of broken fragments. And the ruimers-up will get five tons of glass, their choice of color, plus the General. Not that there's much demand for those any more. But be fair. After all, how could DeGauUe or anyone else have known about the deep sub-crustal fault right under that part of the Sahara? And if anyone had, who cotild have guessed that the seismic energies unleashed could bring about the Great Pacific Tilt? N ow let's travel back to the General's favorite country, old as it used to be, now that the quakes had stopped. We're head for the West Coast -- the new West Coast -- for a pack trip down the San Andreas Canyon. Of course, it's a shame about the old Grand Canyon. It's still spectacular, if not as large. And the geysers and hot springs spouting up from the Colorado River make it even more interesting than before. But so many people Have seen it, and this trip is for the more adventurous. They haven't built any hotels yet -- just in case the quakes start up again -- so we'll be on our own. Just us and the Parks Guides. If you've got the time, fimds and intestinal fortitude, I would advise starting out at Fairbanks or Jimeau and making your way down to what's left of Baja California. But from one who's done it, let me tell you that's a long trip to make on a mule's back. The tour areas the Parks Department is setting aside include some of the finest features of the San Andreas Canyon, and they defy verbal description. The Canyon is so new they haven't had time to blast any trails down to the floor. So our trip will start on a comic note. You haven't seen anything until you've seen a trussed-up mule being slimg with ropes down to the floor of the San Andreas Canyon. Unless it's yourself imdergoing the same indignity. We'll start out from Crater Lake, which is wider now and not as deep as it used to be. The landscape was flooded, but not ruined too badly. The hotels are still here, so take advantage of them. It's the last night you will spend in bed for a while. There's not much to say about the mechanics of the trip -- jogging along on tKe mules, eating around campfires, sleeping on the ground in sleeping bags. Don't worry about wild animals. The only ones down here are fossilized. But I must warn you -- especially the ladies -- sanitary facilities do not exist! Lest this cause undue alarm let me add that the guides are courteous and imderstanding. Let me also add that you needn't bother bringing your transistor radios -- unless they happen to be equipped with mile-long antennas. But the scenery is beautiful. If we were to compare San Andreas with the Grand Canyon, it would win hands down because of size alone, but that is only the first consideration. The colors in the layers of uncovered rock are far more spectacular than those of the Grand Canyon. What makes them so much more interesting of course is the fact that they're new; they haven't even begun to erode. They should stay that way for a few thousand years, so you've got plenty of time to enjoy them. The vegetation has already begun to take over. There are wild roses and buttercups, asters, daisies and even dandelions growing out of every niche they can find. In another twenty years, when the pines are tall enough, it'll be really gorgeous. For now there's just a good enoxigli overgrowtii of weeds and grass to hide the scarred land. (And enough bushes growing up to provide necessary privacy.) Of course, if you don't feel that you can take three whole weeks on a mule, you can climb up near Stockton and take a bus over to the town of New San Francisco. There's a Parks Dept ferry that leaves twice a week for a tour of the ruins of the old city. There are decent accommodations on the island and if it seems a little macabre it is none the less interesting. We'll jog along, however, past the new capital, Fresno, past Bakersfield, the present movie center, down to where Los Angeles used to be. If you're a skindiver, you can leave the tour here and explore the underwater ruins. If you think Disneyland used to be a fun place, you should see whafs it like under the sea. Otherwise you can continue for the last two days of our trip to its finish at Mexicali. There's a short side trip to the edge of the Pacific where you can lean over the cliffs and peer sadly down at what's left of Tijuana. 'hen we'll drive back to the jetport outside of Bakersfield and catch a plane which is going to take us further west, to the remains of the Far East We're Headed for DeGaiiUe's otHer major contribution to world tourism: New Lemuria, # miles southwest of California. As Japan sank slowly into tHe sea, Lemuria began rising up. It's still not the safest spot in the world to be sure. But even New York City has been trembling lately -- you remember the PanAm Building's fate -- so you're not safe anywhere. What did the most damage in Pacific areas, even before the last devastating earthquakes hit, were the tidal waves that were a direct result of the California quakes. The Japanese Have really been extremely fortunate. Due to the many warnings their scientists were able to give them, they were able to migrate with much of their personnel and equipment in time. They don't feel any more insecure on New Lemuria now than they did on the old land, which had been shaking for a couple of generations anyway. New Lemuria seems to be fairly stable, bar the occasional tsunami when another volcano pokes its head above sea-level. But the UN, whicK still controls the islands, isn't allowing anyone on the smaller ones and the inhabitants have wisely built only in the centers. Even the fishermen live inland. When they're working they carry powerful radios on their boats so they'll be able to receive warnings in time. The scenery here is also too new to have achieved any of the spectacular beauty that, say, Hawaii had before Mauna Loa went off. But the Hawaiians have already got orchid farms in full bloom, and their new pineapple plantations are well under way. The beaches wUl need a few millenia before the rocks and dirt turn to sand, but when there are no tsunamis the water is warm and blue. And they say that the surf off the new beaches at Tarawa is magnificent. Of course there are no miles of beachfront hotels. You'll have to ride to the beach every day from one of the fine hotels inland at Waikiki. They've reconstructed the old Imperial on the main island, now called New Tokyo. They were able to salvage most of the old place. You can't tell the difference until you look out the window. The Japanese have started landscaping the beaches, hopefully. The next tsunami will undoubtedly wash the gardens away, but they'll rebuild them and meanwhile they are charming. If you'd like, you can charter a private jet to Indonesia where you'll get a bang out of what old Krakatoa's been doing. This activity has been the main cause of the tidal waves at Lemuria. B ut if you don't want to go iland-h'opptng tHere's enougH to be seen outside your Hotel window. If you stay for two weeks you'll definitely catch a tidal wave rolling in. From the safety of your hilltop hotel, there's nothing more awesome. The tsunamis act as though they were endowed with minds of their own pounding, roaring full-speed ahead at the beaches, with the noise and velocity of a cross-country freight train. With all the fury and destruction they represent, they're the biggest attraction of Lemuria. The second biggest attraction is also to be seen from your hotel; the mountains of Oceania. If you thought the glass dunes of the Sahara were fascinating and dangerous, wait until you see the coral-topped Oceanias. If ever a mountain range deserved the name of Razor-back Mountains, this is it! Most of the coral is white and the peaks look from a distance like they're snow-capped. Or they did look like they were covered with snow -- they're mostly tattle-tale gray now. The Lemurians assure me that when the spring storms come the mountain tops will be washed clean again. Visit Lemuria, folks, the only country in the world with washable mountains! Of course, not all the islands were formed from earthquakes. Some of the atolls turned cut to be the coral-covered cones of ancient volcanoes. When they rose, the lava and coral fused together and there are now coral-topped mountains whose entire slopes are shiny black obsidian. So much for the Black and White Mountains. Our final words about New Lemuria are being written from the terrace of the Imperial, where your adventure-reporter sits sipping sake, watching the sun set on the highest peak of the Oceanias. You see, not all the coral is white. The homesick Japanese started to call this peak Mt. Fuji, but by more popular demand the name that's been put on the maps -- the name for this fantastic mountain that we're watching the orange rays of the sun set on fire -- is Blushing Mike ThoseWi Connections  li' Miro f: lloalli and Tiwiis. -- Old Toxiaii provorli What Has Gone Before Alter a nuclear world war, cept for the black nations of California and Florida, dominates North America from Guatemala to a fluctuating Russo-Texan boundary in the Yukon. The T exans take a hormone which makes them # or more feet tall, towering above their servile Mexes, Injuns and poor whites. For # years Earth's nations have banned contact with Circumluna, a self-sustaining moonsatellite, which refused to join in the Great Atomic War. It is chiefly inhabited by Russian and American scientists and engineers, along with various hippie and artistic types living in a duraplastic annex called the Sack. When relations are resumed between Circumluna and Terra, the first Sackabond to drop down the gravity well is Christopher Crockett La Cruz, known as Scully, a young actor seeking funds to save his father's theater in the Sack by asserting a family claim to the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine near Yellowknife. Scully is an Syi foot Thin -- mos of his muscles are too weak to function in Terran gravity. So he wears a battery-powered titanium exoskeleton. (His jaws, fingers and toes alone are abnormally strong.) By accident he is landed in Dallas, Texas, Texas -- heart of the Lone Star Continent -- where he is befriended by Elmo Oilfield Earp, a garrulous minor politician. Through Elmo he meets Governor Lamar of Texas, Texas and is innocently used by LamaYs clique in the successful assassination of President Austin of Texas. On the same day Scully falls in love with (#) Rosa Morales, called La Cucaracha, and (# ) Rachel Vachel Lamar, theaterminded daughter of the governor. The two girls induce him to join the Bent-Back Revolution, a Mex revolt against the Texans. There is a greaser legend that one day the dread figure of Death (El Esqueleto, or for short Esquel) will come striding from nowhere to lead the revolt against the gringos. With his cadaverousness, black suit and gleaming exoskeleton, Scully is a natural for the part. He enjoys portraying Death and making revolutionary speeches, but his chief reason for turning rebel is his desire to get to Amarillo Cuchillo (Texan for Yellowknife), where it is planned the "revolutionary tour" will end. After brushes with the Texas Rangers, the tour gets underway, led by El Toro, an amiable young Mex. With them also go the two girls; a priest. Father Francisco; Cassius Krupp Fanninowicz, an unbalanced Texo-German scientist who has a monomaniac interest in Scully's exoskeleton; and Guchu, a black Zen Buddhist, who is an agent of the Pacific Black Republic. They travel in kacks -- elusive combo air-cushion and copter vehicles. A mystery develops as to what industrial enterprise the Texans are carrying out inside certain closely guarded huge towers scattered across the land. Working in the towers are hordes of temporarily cyborged Maxes, whose memory for their work is artificially blacked out. At Kansas City, Missouri, Texas, the revolutionary company barely escapes by river submarine from a surprise raid by the Rangers on one of their big meetings. Three days later they are encamped in an abandoned coal mine near the atomized ruins of Evansville on the Ohio River. In tKe Coal Mine Cijnfierno de los diablos!" El Toro cursed genially but seriously behind me in the silvery dark. "What are you doing up here, Esquel? Hvmting for Texas owl-planes? I assure you, they will spot you first. Your exo will stand out in their radar like a metal tree." I did not remove th'e borrowed binoculars from my orbits, but lowered tKeir electronic gain best to observe the dark-and-glinting siieck somewhere between my eyes and Luna's bright, crinkled border. When the almost pointtiny spangle had climbed a low mountainside and off the moon, I knew for certain it was Circumluna and the Sack in transit. I shifted my field to the stars around Luna. From the pale few I could see -- so different from the multitude of the Sack's blazing nights -- I recognized Taurus by the doubles around Aldebaran on one side of the moon and the Pleiades on the other. That meant that for the Sack, Terra lay at the heaven's antijxjdes in Scorpio, beneath my feet. El Toro pounded lightly with his fist against my leg, just above my knee-motor. "I understand now, Esquel," he said. "It is the first night the weather has let you see the cold silver sun around which your little world revolves." I nodded, but the point seemed to me that he couldn't possibly understand, not to any degree. For instance, my almost painful surge of relief at knowing the real date, not this grotesque Spindletop fourth, but the real date: sunth of Leo, terrantK of Scorpio, luntK of Capricorn. The scientific Circumlunans still measure time by Greenwich -- an invisible line a quarter million miles away eartHward and infinity away starward. But we Sackabonds depend primarily on tKe times it takes sun, earth' and moon to move across one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac -- sunth, terranth and luntH. Our lunth is about half an eartKhour, making our sackday about six earth-hours long, the time it takes Circumluna to orbit the moon. Twelve lunths make a sackday, ten sackdays make a terranth, twelve terranths make a sunth (earth's month), twelve sunths make a starth, our Sack name for year. It's an impossible system if you try to make it precise, but okay and highly esthetic if you've grown up with it. WKo needs minutes and seconds? -- except in the clutches, and then you need only speed. Besides, any good actor can count stage-seconds perfectly in his head. Or what could El Toro know about the momentary shivering illusion of free fall I felt as I permitted myself a final glimpse of the dark sequin that was my home? T lowered my binoculars and surveyed Terra's horizon from the low hillock where I stood: Southward, the alent Ohio River, gleaming like a black nebula; Eastward, the blackened steel and masonry stumps of Evansville thrusting up through the undergrowth; Northward, prairie; Westward, the ruined works of the abandoned coal mine which was our camp. Rapping again above my knee, El Toro said, "Come on now, Esquel. You've tempted the Texan bull long enough, and we have a job for you." I looked down at his swarthy, handsome face. A wide grin showed the pearls of his teeth. I envied him his chunky vigorous body that stood its full four foot ten while my eight foot six sagged in its frame. I nodded and started down through the dusk, taking short careful steps. "You are tired, Esquel," he said. "Your exo stands straight, but sometimes you hang from it -- God pardon me -- like the Crucified One." "I am neither a religious nor secular hero, not even of the dubious revolutionary breed," I told him somewhat brusquely. "In fact I spit on all such. I am just an actor working his way toward Spaceport Yellowknife. As for yokes, your cyborged coimtrymen must carry theirs. Mine carries me. Who is the better off? If you have to work out your somewhat grandiose sympathies -- you really belong in grand opera! -- light me a reefer." I was sharp with him because my support bands truly were cutting me cruelly. The three days since Kansas City Had marked and drained me. To a person imused even to one lunagrav, six play hob with the gut, packed into the belly like a length of limp pipe the Creator did not even bother to coil. Kansas City, Columbia, St. Louis, Carbondale -- four revolutionary one-night stands without a layoff. Surely Terran actors of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century must have been a hardy breed. Columbia. My memories of our brush with the Rangers at KC had made me shake so that my exo rattled -- until I made my entrance. St. Louis. A gargantuan, halflived-in graveyard, its skyscrapers a cemetery of melted behemothian tombs from the Atom War. But the biggest audience yet. Carbondale. A whistlestop, except for a host of cyborgs working in two of the gigantic towerwhich a twisting trail of giant rock-laden trucks centipeded day and night, to build a wall somewhere north -- Diana knows why ! Or most likely she doesn't. A long a path that zigzagged through undergrowth, El Toro and I felt our way to the ramp leading down into the shallow, worked-out coal mine. Ahead and below, a small, squat rectangle of light glowed, I sipped my stick, drinking deep of the evergreen smoke and holding it in my lungs, but although our footsteps began to syncopate, there was no soothing of pain. El Toro said, "You draw apart from us, Esquel. You hug your hurt and loneliness. The girls in particular are distressed. I am sure that if you spoke a few gallant and sugary zeros into the ear of either -- well, we have a saying that one night's sleep with is more restorative than a week's sleep without. That is, if a man can imagine the latter." I did not tell him of Rachel's and Kookie's trick of the one interrupting us whenever I was alone with the other, nor of my determination to hold out against them both until one or the other surrendered unconditionally. I said instead, harshly, "For me this is a business trip, not a romance, either with giddy, easilywon females or the Bent-Back Revolution, which appears to be Tex. And acting, done in professional fashion, is the most tiring business." I unintentionally kicked a bit of gravel that clattered down the slope. Instantly a near-blinding searchbeam shot up from the depths. Around it I made out the blurs of armed guards. I was botK reassured and irked by this evidence of revolutionary preparedness. El Toro observed, using hand to shade his eyes from below, "It is odd to think that even Death should become weary." "So my performances are falling off," I replied, quick to catch at any hint of criticism. "Soon, instead of firing your revolution, I shall be a cold rocket-tube that coughs once and dies forever, reeking of hydrazine." "No, no, nol" he protested, a little too much. "Why, only last night I was admiring your new chiste -- I mean, gag -- of pretending a duel with Ranger Hunt and President Lamar." fTTe'd had certain news that ' ' Governor Lamar had been made president of Texas in a hurry-up inauguration. RachelVachel had said this advancement of her Daddy meant certain doom for the Lone Star Republic. I was doubtful. Apart from his idiot involvement with his daughter and his compulsive lint-picking, Lamar had seemed to me a shrewd man and suave for a Texan. El Toro went on eagerly, "The gag made my mind buzz. How would it be if we h'ad two tall dummies representing el presidente y el jeie? Inside the empty clotbes of eacH would be a nimble comrade moving the hated head on a pole. Besides providing extra realism, they would give the audience something to throw things at!" "Not a bad idea," I told him, breaking it gently. From what I had seen of the marksmanship of most Mexes, they would be hitting me as often as the dummies. " you can figure out a foolproof way for the men inside to see out uninterruptedly, so they don't fall off the stage. And if they'll follow my directions to the letter. And if you have foamed plastic or even papier-mache to make the heads. And if you have a good caricaturist sculptor." I did not mention that I was an expert at the last. "Enough ifs!" El Toro protested. "You always drown anyone else's ideas -- especially if they involve you sharing the stage with another." I looked down at El Toro. It was the first even mildly spiteful remark I had ever heard him make. Had he caught acting in only a week? But it is a most infectious profession, and with' it go its vain and gossipy habits. Besides, a star must alway expect jealousy. "Not so," I told him mildly. "I have already suggested that the Senoritas Lamar and Morales -- " "And I have told you why that is impossible!" he shot back. "Women on the stage! Unheard of. oil, in tSe comic or erotic perliaps, but tliis is serious revtdutionaiy drama I" "Serious revolutionary farce," I corrected. "Also, there is one fatal objection to your excellent idea. The dummies of Lamar and Hunt would have to wield swords back at me, else it would be only cruel slaughter." "But my people enjoy cruel slaughter. Consider the bullfight." "The bull has Homs," I reminded him. "Nevertheless I could manage it. Observe!" he retorted, striking a position. "With my left hand I hold the headed pole upright, so," he continued with great earnestness. 'With my upstretched right I manage my sword, which is lashed to the end of a pole. While my eyes peer through a large oneway transparent window in the middle of Lamar's robe. Hunt could be played by El Tadto," he added, mentioning a Mex who acted as my bodyguard, though' tonight I had eluded him. Oomeone laughed -- Guchu, it was -- and I was myself hardput to avoid grinning at the image of El Toro as the working mechanism of a giant puppet. We were now past the guards and searchlight, which had been turned off, and in a vast gallery of the mine, so low I had to dude a little, and dotted with massive crunch-ended posts of andent wood supporting spooky megatons of solidity. "You mentioned a job for me," I reminded El Toro. The acting-light died in his eyes. He pointed at two stringily muscular bent-backs, one old, one older, crouching by Guchu and regarding me with considerable apprehension. He said, "Here are two who have worked in the great towers which you -- and we too -- want to know about. Perhaps you will try your hypnotic skills on them, as you did on Pedro Ramirez." I moved toward them, curving my lips in a friendly smile. I noted, in the ears of both', the callosities of the cyborged. Their ragged clothing revealed many bumscars -- some pale and stretched, others lumpy and twisting. Death is not the ideal figure for a hypnotist, though' he eventually summons each of us offstage with a mesmeric command. Few find his presence sjunpathetic or reassuring. I got the old man under, but I was unable to get past the block on his memories of the work he did in the towers, except that He began barely audibly droning an unintelligible chant in the same rhythm as tiie two "dig and ddve" lines I Had got out of Pedro Ramirez. He kept it up faintly even wKen I told him to sleep. Perhaps the older man, being closer to Death himself, was not so intimidated by me. Perhaps he even felt a certain curiosity. At any rate, he eyed me bravely and when I questioned him about his work in the great towers, his mouth eagerly formed words. But no sounds accompanied them, and none of us, including El Toro, could lip-read them. I had broken the block for his upper-speaking parts, but not for his vocal cords and lungs, perhaps because of a literal interpretation on the part of his unconscious mind of some prior hypnotic command such as "keep silent." He could form words, because he wanted to, but he could not make a noise. 'hen I had an inspiration. I quietly said to him, "When I say, 'Go,' Federico, do the things you would do on a working day in one of the great towers. Perform each action fully, but move on to the next action when I say, 'Next' Begin at the doorway to the tower. Go!" He got to his feet, his bent spine more noticeable now, the muscles of his torso and legs stiffening a little as if from the weight of the yoke, and he took three steps in a straight line. "Next," I said as he was making the fourth step. Federico made a quarter turn and stopped, gazing respectfully at emptiness. Then he straddled his legs, held out to either side his arms with hands hanging limply, and opened his mouth wide. It occurred to me that he might be submitting himself to a medical examination or more likely a search. He turned in tKe direction lie had first been going. Guchu guiided him deftly past a post. We all followed. It was an eerie performance in the low-ceilinged, dim-lit forest of dead tree sections. This time I said "Next," on his fifth step. He stopped and stood relaxedly, right hand lightly gripping something at shoulder level. At first I thought it a tool, then as he made no further movement, except to sag apathetically, I decided that it was a support by which he steadied himself. Yet he was making other movements -- tiny squirmings and himching, as if accommodating himself to other beings moving past and next to him. Gradually his legs pressed together and his elbows close to his sides -- the imaginary support was almost at his shoulder now. I saw him as one of a tightpacked crowd of beings. Texomex cyborgs like himself, I presumed. I could almost hallucinate them, so strong was the illusion. Without warning hie straightened up, his neck stretched, and his head was thrown back a little. At the same time he stood almost on tiptoe. And yet he seemed to exert no muscular effort to do all of this, or somehow the effort was cleverly masked. Truly the body's memory can do wonderful, perhaps miraculous things under hypnotic suggestion. It can create illusions. T knew what the illusion was at once, for I know free fall when I see it. Inside the great tower his imagination had recreated, Federico was falling -- and almost certainly with a group of others in an elevator accelerating downward swiftly. Probably almost at a terragrav, for the illusion was strong that he almost floated, right hand loosely linked around invisible grip. I realized I did not know how long he had been falling, and I was pleased to see an associate of El Toro, one Carlos Mendoza, holding a wristwatch between himself smd Federico. Suddenly Federico's feet were flat on the groimd, his knees bent, the extensor muscles of his legs bulged. His free arm clapped across his guts, his other dragged heavily oa the imaginary support. His jaws -- his whole face -- clenched' together. It was an over in not much more than a second, yet I think all of us wdnced with him at the strain of that illusionary deceleration. "A mile and a quarter," Carlos Mendoza announced softly. I looked a question at this comarado I hardly knew. "That he fell," Mendoza replied. "Or his cage." Meanwhile Federico was nonchalantly marching again. When I said, "Next," he lightly gripped another support and sagged. The whole pantomime of rapid descent and sudden deceleration was repeated. This time I remembered to stage-count. The fall took # seconds. That worked out to a distance of two kilometers, I calculated, dredging from the depths of my boring physics instruction the formula of distance equals one-half times six lunagravs (one decameter) multiplied by time in seconds squared. "Again a mile and a quarter," Mendoza whispered, agreeing well enough with my calculation. Once more Federico marched, grasped, and fell for twenty seconds. This time his face and body broke out in sweat, and he gasped for breath. "It becomes hot three and three-quarters miles underground," Mendoza said tersely. Or six kilometers, I thought, translating. I frankly felt frightened at the thought of penetrating so far into solidity. What it implied about the vast solid mass of Earth' horrified me, as it would anyone knowing only life in free fall. At last the blank datum, "Earth has a diameter of almost thirteen thousand kilometers" became terrifyingly real to me. '"This time old Federico showed a new behavior. Crouching, he lowered his hands and lifted slowly one foot, then the other. Next his hands gripped something and moved slowly upward. Clearly he was drawing on a heavy suit of some sort. One could see his arms working into gloved sleeves. Next there was pantomimed zipping. Finally he lifted something invisible onto his head. "It is like a spacesuit," I whispered. His breathing changed. He inhaled through tinily puckered lips, exhaled through his nostrils. "And the suit is refrigerated," Mendoza whispered beside me. I caught his point. Old Federico had stopped sweating. The beads were evaporating. I waited with interest. Now we would see the actions involved in his underground work and perhaps be able to interpret its nature. He marched until I said, "Next," then grasped an invisible handhold and again dropped two kilometers. And again and again and again, taking him fourteen kilometers below the surface of the Earth! And each time he dropped, he seemed almost to float. We all watched with intense, even horrified interest. Nearby the intent faces of El Toro, Guchu, Mendoza, El Tacito and a couple more. I was sure each was pale under his shade of brown. Farther off, Rachel Vachel, La Cucaracha and Fanninowicz with' his guards. Only the German's expression jarred -- he wore a sneer of incredulity and contempt. I suppose that for an outsider my having the appearance of a tall and stooping Death might have added to the eldritch atmosphere. The other old Mex, still in hypnotic sleep, continued his rhythmic drone. That was the only sound. Environment added to the horror. That we should be in a dimlit, oppressively low-ceilinged coal mine, its great close-set pillars marked by the strain of the weight they bore -- all these things intensified the horror of the thought of a mine going already one hundred times as deep. And yet it was all in the kingdom of the imagination! We half dozen amateur actors (including one thoroughgoing professional) were witnessing a pantomime, based only on muscular and physiological memory, wEicfi created any oi us could have managed -- perfaiaps even I! Federico repeated the drop eighteen more times -- until by my calculation He was forty kilometers below Terra's surface, which' agreed well enough with Mendoza's twenty-five miles. "Madte de Dios!" the latter exclaimed softly. "That is the thickness given for earth's crust. He must be near the molten mantle." i j At last Federico changed his I act. Hoisting up a heavy something, he directed it downward between his feet Bracing his forearms against his belly and hips, he began to shake in a taut violent way, so that his hard sandals beat a tattoo against the rock floor. As if that sound had been a signal, the other old Mex's drone , became louder and changed into execrably pronounced and accented English words, which it took me three or four repetitions wholly to understand: Every day, two Hours times twelve, delve. In your earplugs comes the boss's yell, get to Hell." It's drill blacked out in heat and pain For your women and rum and mary jane! And blast! And fire! As I was listening. Hypnotized myself, to the fifth' repetition of that eerie chant, old Federico swayed, stopped shaking, paled, swayed again and collapvsed on the rock before any erf us could catch him. Perhaps the weirdest thing for me was that, as I swiftly moved to stoop beside him, I made a point (rf stepping over the drill that wasn't there. We assured ourselves that Federico was suffering from no more than exhaustion. I brought both him and the chanting Mex out of their trances. We saw them comfortably at rest. And then we talked. "Hombre!" El Toro asked for us. "What can the Texans be wanting with mines twenty-five miles deep?" "Gold and sHver," El Tadto suggested romantically, for once belying his name of The Silent One. "Diamonds big as kacks." "They seem to be on the verge of creating artificial volcanoes," Mendoza said soberly. "But why, I ask, why?" La Cucaracha said excitedly, "Texans already Eave big winds, big heats, big colds, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, tidal waves. Now they want volcanoes and earthquakes too. Everything big." I could agree with her on the last. The whole thing seemed like delirium. But then I had always felt horror at the thought of the innards of planets, the lair of gravity. Rachel Vachel said, "I wish I'd spied on this more while I was with Daddy." uchu suggested, "Maybe they building a Doomsday Machine. Gonna stuff those deep holes with H bombs. If they start losing to Russia or China, or the mood hits 'em, they blow up all Texas like one Alamo. Maybe blow up the world. 'Taking your enemies with' you,' I think it's called." El Toro extended a menacing arm at Fanninowicz. "You should know about them," he asserted. "What is their pmpose?" The German laughed harshly. "I do indeed. What you call the great towers merely house bigger petroleum at depths of ten to twenty kilometers. Oil is being foimd in rock hitherto thought azoic. But this notion of great mines forty kilometers deep is nonsense. They would collapse from the pressures. And can you imagine anyone using a handdrill, even in a refrigerated suit, at temperatures of # to # degrees Fahrenheit? Ridiculous! No, my dear sirs, you have let yourselves be deceived by an amateur hypnotist and a subject who kept on repeating an action that impressed you. While your theorizations are all laughable." I could tell from El Toro's expression that he was mightily tempted to use force on the exasperating Teuton, but persuaded from it because of the latter's usefulness in regard to my exoskeleton and other mechanical matters. Besides, I believe we were all impressed by his logic. Germans are most convincing maniacs. There had already begun to seem something fabulous in the ideas Federico's behavior had generated. My only thought was what an unesthetic clot -- worse than a Circumlunanl -- the professor was, not to have appreciated the theatric grandeur of Federico's -- and my -- performance. To tell the truth, I wasn't having many thoughts by then. I was too tired. In fact, I was more than tired. Supervising Federico's performance had taken me out of myself, but now I was feeling nothing but terragrav's horrible drag, as if I were perpetually in the agony of sudden deceleration Federico had portrayed at the end of eacii of his two-kilometer drops. Rachel VacKel and La Cucaracha smiled at me side by side, inviting me to gossip with them, but threesome, not twosome. I was having none of that. Signing to El Tacito, I walked to my quarters and was asleep before my headbasket thudded softly into my pillow. Slumstorming 'he next two days I continued weary of body, heavy of mind, empty of emotion. Old Federico's pantomime, in fact the whole coal-mine episode, seemed more a haunting, heavy-h'ued nightmare than a reality. The Ohio Valley turned out to be a miserable region. The general population has more short than tall Texans, and some of the former are in the Revolution. Poor whites. They are refused the hormone because they don't make enough money to support the extra poundage that goes with greater height. They say they don't want the hormone. Sour grapes in most cases, I think. Some of them are dwarfed enough to go through Mex doors, though the law forbids that. Most Mexes accept them as fellow revolutionaries, though it frightens me to think how they must increase our security risks. The cities are as dwarfed as the people -- ragged rings around atom-glazed wastes on which new building has only recently begun. I have taken to writing another new script to fill in time. Our show must somehow be improved. For instance, El Toro thinks he is learning acting from me, but is doing worse than when I began teaching him. The first night we gave a rotten performance in Louisville. The second, a worse one in Cincinnati. Even I was lousy, both shouting and turning a silent back on audience to get their attention. At the end they filed out silently. I doubt we sparked a single streetcomer disturbance. I know who was at fault -- me. But an actor cannot play a role like Death night after night without emotional fuel. Accordingly I waited until Rachel and Rosa were together and then somewhat somberly invited them to my brick cabin in out quarters in a deserted motel beside a rusty-fenced freeway crossed by great gullies. I waited until they were comfortably seated, had lit up, and were gazing at me curiously. Then, ad-libbing all the way, for I had resolutely planned no set speech', I poured out my feelings to them. I described the vast loneliness of a freefall being on a gravity planet and in a strange culture. I explained the desolation of an actor playing a big role, especially an anti-h'uman one sucH as Death. I revealed my petty foibles and cKildisK self-pity. In short, I spoke nothing but the truth. It was a great relief to me and it almost broke me up. But not quite. An actor remains an actor. Next I praised them both lavishly, telling them how I couldn't have made it without their imaginative help and comfort I hinted at my further emotional and physiological needs. I ended by assuring them that I loved both of them greatly -- and equally. Only then did I remember that I had told them exactly the same thing in the church and they had both called me crazy. This time they were kinder. Perhaps. Rosa patted my knee and said, "Poor bones-man. I am inuy simpatico." "Yeah, it's sure tough on you, Scully," Rachel agreed, patting my other knee. "But now let's get down to this bigamy thing you're trying to set up, if I read you right," she went on. "Which of us girls comes first?" T# "Indeed yes," Rosa seconded, crossing her arms and beginning to tap the floor with the toe of her slipper. "That is for you to decide," I answered, not loftily, but with great simplicity and sincerity. Then I crossed my arms. "Sure you really don't like one of us more than the other?" Rachel asked. "And are trying to be kind to the loser?" "Kind!" Rosa spat. "No!" I said and then went on to explain how various forms of polygamy, from the linear to the complex marriage, are found in the Sack. Likewise for love affairs. "Well, that may work up in the sky," Rachel responded when I paused for breath, "but down here we're not used to it." "Indeed no!" Rosa agreed. "I have no intention whatever of becoming a 'sociable secretary' to you, amado. My heart is involved." "Goes for me too, Scully dear," Rachel echoed with a sigh. "I'm too serious about you, see, to play around. Sure the balance don't teeter just a little bit more one way than the other?" I did not trust myself to speak. "Well then that's that," Rachel said. She looked at Rosa. "Shall I tell him. Miss Morales?" "Yes, you tell him. Miss Lamarl" Scully," Rachel be'  gan, leaning forward a little, elbows on knees, while Rosa sat up straight, "us girls figured you might conceivably take that insane attitude, and so we worked out our answer beforehand. Which is: you got to decide wHicK one of us you want, and then speak out in the. presence of both of us, so there's no chance for tricks." "But don't you see what you're demanding of me?" I burst out. "You're asking me to insult one of you unforgivably!" "That one'll be able to take it," Rachel replied serenely. "You see, Scully darling. Miss Morales and I have come to understand eacK other on this tour, because of our mutual admiration of and attachment to you." "St, querido!" Rosa put in almost excitedly. "Whatever happens, whichever one of us you choose, you have created a friendship between us which can never be broken. We who were as cat and dog, are now as lamb and lamb. You can always pride yourself on that, amado." "But don't you see that makes a threesome even more workable?" I demanded somewhat bewilderedly. "No, dearest," Rachel said with great convfction. Rosa said sharply, "Our undying friendship -- you have that already. But as for love, if must be one, or the other, never both!" "Yeah, Scully, you got to make up your mind. Its the only way you'll ever have either of us." Once more I could only trust myself to shake my Head. This time I added an unrehearsed shudder -- at the insanity of their behavior, at the torment to my own feelings, at the merciless perversity of the universe, "Scullyl" Rachel asked with sudden concern, "Have you really got that gravity sickness? We get to thinking of you as tireless and superior to all mortal ills, because you're the star and work by electricity. Haven't let your batteries run low?" "I know what!" Rosa said with certainty. "The bees-bonnet has been sleeping in his skeleton!" "And what if I Have?" I growled back at Her. "We're revolutionaries. We've got to be ready for emergencies. Weapons close at hand. Skeleton -- on!" "You should Have told us! We would Have nursed you. We still will." "YeaH, Scully, Rosa'n I'll be only too happy to help you off with your skeleton and tuck you in for the night, and help you on with it in the morning. And any other little thing you need. Worked fine back in the cave." lyTaybe then I made my big mistake. If I Had gone along with their gag, one or the otKer would have been irreastibly tempted by my Helplessness. Maybe. But I had no intention of finger-crawling across any more patio floors. Even ones carpeted witli ermine. "I do not want either of you as a nurse," I decreed. "Or both of you, for that matter. My wants run in entirely different directions." Rachel nodded sadly. "Well, I guess he's given us our walking papers, Rosa." La Cucaracha agreed with an emphatic nod and with an upward look at a universe apparently as perversely incomprehensible as my own. "But let's not make it so much like a funeral," Rachel said. "No, to a bones-man that would be far too cruel," Rosa agreed. "Let's pass around a good-by reefer," Rachel suggested. "Rosa?" So, mostly in silence, we smoked a long stick of grass together, and then another. It was a gesture for which I was deeply grateful. It calmed my ruffled nerves and vanity. A little. But contrary to many stories, the mild drug does not result in libidinous orgies, except for those who greatly desire such. So when I had taken the last sip and punched out the tiny butt of a third, the girls rose and I lifted a hand in somber farewell. In the doorway they turned. Rachel said, "Scully, I'm sure I speak for both' of us when I say that it's a rare privilege to work in the same company with a great actor such as you. We also think you're doing more for the revolution than anyone since Jancho Villa and Zapata and Cesar Chavez. We know the little things you're doing, too. The voice lessons you're giving Toro, though we'll never mention them. The way you put up with Father Francisco and play along with Guchu and humor that maniac Fanninowicz. And -- jokes about electric skeletons aside -- the way you're plumb knocking yourself out to do ever#Tthing you can for the show." "But in that case surely -- ?" I left the question unfinished while I looked at them in naked yearning. They slowly shook their heads and softly closed the door. It stayed closed. It was still closed when the first glow of dawn glinted from cobwebs and dust-grains on the windows. The dawn-glow also showed me my hideous visage in a mirror appropriately spotted brown with age. I decided I was through with all women. Yes I was. PerKaps forever. Even Idris McIUwraith. If she Had loved me even a little, she would have come to nje miles, by flower-powered selfteleportation. 'hings always change. And infallibly, thank Diana, they change for the better when they're at the worst. On the next day, Spindletop eighth, we gave a great show at Indianapolis. I could have taken ten curtain calls, but Death is humble. Death is the friend of every man, his comrade throughout life, reminding him to waste no moment but live to the full. And if man has any comrade at all when life is ended, that comrade is Death. After our flop in Cincinnati, the Committee had seen reason and given me a free hand with my new script and the cast, making me director. Results: Father Francisco, wearing chest mike, was audible at last as he spoke his modernized, punchy prayers. Guchu stayed in the spotlight, and his psychedelic ravings all led to good revolutionary conclusions. He was an impressive figure, symbolically bringing to the Revolution the mighty support of Africa (his race) and Asia (his religion). Rachel had at last a short but effective part as Wife of Death, reminding me as I go off to work on Earth to take good care of my health, avoid chills, get enough to eat and so on. She wore a skintight black suit with wide silver seams on the outside of her arms and legs to indicate bones. Other silver lines followed exactly her lower ribs, but went into whorls around her breasts. She had a narrow silver spine, girdle and collar bones. Over this she wore a black cloak, while her platinum hair was tightly braided and coiled to suggest a helmet. El Toro's oration was topped by a shorter but snappier one by Rosa. I knew that girl had talent! She wore a red Phrygian freedom cap, from under which her dark hair flowed; red boots; and a short red dress on which were scattered in black the Isis cross and a S#unbol I did not know: a circle with a three-armed Y in it. Then, while El Toro sang the old version of La Cucaracha, with its homely references to cockroaches, marijuana and the Mexican revolutionary tradition, Rosa did a still snappier dance. Next: El Toro went into La Muerta Alta. I returned to stage with Rachel, and soon we had the whole audience standing and singing with us. If our audience didn't rush out to riot, at least they departed in a V cocky mood, suffused with revolutionary enthusiasm, ready to assert themselves and use their wits, determined to take no crap from anyone. Later El Toro, who has a good if untrained singing voice, asked me to give him lessons in grand opera. Why not? Of course, I was careful to make Rosa's and Rachel's parts equal and keep my relationship with them coolly professional. "C'ather Francisco and El Toro rationalized the girls being in the show by explaining to me that this far north there is a weakening of the Latin prejudices. True enough, there were as many short Texans and "stay-behind" blacks in the audience as Mexes. There were reports by A.M. revolutionary radio of big Ranger raids in Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. We had dodged back west just in time. Next night we had another smasheroo. It was in Chicago, a largely new yet big city situated west of Chicago Bay, where devastation bombing let in the waters of Lake Michigan and where rust-boned, melted, still-radioactive sksrscrapers dream deep below. Flying up to Chicago in our kack, I noted, in its transparent plastic, small stamped medallions, the print on which had been obliterated. I found one the file had missed and saw the familiaf "Novy Moskva, C.C.C.P." For a moment I thought I was back in Circumluna, which remains stubbornly bi-lingual. Guchu readily admitted the kack had been manufactured iu Russia and only passed along by the Black Republic to the Revolution. "We're not up to those technologies, and neither is the Florida Democracy," He told me. "And we don't want to be. Outside of atoms to desalt our water and give us electricity, we operate by flower-power. We don't Have a big population. The unfit die yoimg. What protects us from the Texans is the deserts and mountains, the free Injuns and AfroRussian aid, chiefly in atoms, which are getting hard to come by -- the fissionable and fusionable ones, I mean." Novy Moskva -- New Moscow -- is near Lake Baikal, He tells me. Siberia Has become the Russian "Texas." I was l#dng down at the time and also downwind of the other passengers, so far as the uncertain drafts inside the kack permitted. T log as much horizontal time as I can. I am troubled by Heart palpitations, splitting Headaches, diarrhea and varicose veins. Lying down distributes the gravity One thing I'll soy for labour (the British Labor Pari, and that Is that it isn't as offensive as the corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in America. I refer to the force of business as a domi nating motive in life, and a persistent absorber of the strongest creative energies of the American people. This intensive commercialism is a force more basically dangerous and anti-cultural than labour ever has been, and threatens to build up an arrogant fabric which it will be very hard to overthrow or modify wth Civilized ideas. -- H. P. Lovecraft, T#  strain which' abets, I believe, all these symptoms. The last time I unzipped my tights from calf and ankle, I was sickened by the purple varicosities, which grew larger as I watched. Since then I have not opened my tights except minimally for sanitary reasons, and even then I glimpse a varicosity of the superficial femoral vein. To tell the truth, I have not been out of my carefully-mended sack suit and also my exo-skeleton -- Rosa guessed right -- since they raided us in Kansas City. So I have not had a complete bath' for well over a week. So I stink and keep away from people, or at least downwind, when I can. I also have taken to rum, with which El Tacito, my bodyguard, supplies me. I intentionally spill some of the rum on me, but I drink as much as I can carry too. It is a good analgesic as well as an acceptable male perfume. I refuse to take off my exoskeleton partly from resentment -- at the girls, Fanninowicz, all of them -- but chiefly from sheer panic fear. I know the support bands are producing rashes and small hemorrhages, chiefly subcutaneous. But I cannot bear the thought of the helplessness I experienced in the patio. I am haunted by dreams of the Rangers finding me away from my lively titanium bones. Or perhaps it is simpler. Perhaps I am just afraid of gravity, as men once were of "empty space." I have also developed -- from the soupy atmosphere, I should think -- a deep, hacking cough, which I can barely control on stage. The lum helps that a little, too. Thinking such thoughts as we took off from Chicago, I drifted into a horror dream. I was trapped amidst the crushed and dying in a crumpled subway car in a collapsed tuimel in Old Chicago. I struggled helpless for an eternity. Then the boiling water rushed in and seared me awake. A dream? A gravity nightmare? I know nothing of subways, but I suppose I may have nm across them in History study-materials. But how could I see crumpled advertisements so clearly? Atomin, the Pain-Reliever that Penetrates Your Every Molecule. Coca-Cola. Kurb Kinky Kurls. Prepare Yourself for the Future with LaSalle Extension Courses. Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, With Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum. Moonlight showed choppy whitecaps in black water below as we raced north' across Chicago Bay. Later I had chills and thought I was getting a fever. The explanation was much simpler, one I knew but had not kept in mind. On Terra it gets colder as one moves toward either pole. A fter we played Milwaukee and Minneapolis, where we camped in an old hotel, it became clear that I must change to my winter clothes. I swore El Toro and El Tacito to secrecy and had them give me a bath. I did not permit them to remove my sack suit until I was in the hot water, with thought that its pressure might work somewhat as that of the suit, controlling varicosities. Being out of my exo produced in me spasms of fear hard to conceal. When they saw the shape I was in, El Toro exclaimed, "Madre de Dios!" El Tacito, true to his name, permitted himself only a grudgingly sympathetic grunt. I directed my gentle but thorough soaping, rinsing and drying. El Toro wanted to call in a doctor -- and also Fanninowicz! -- but I reminded him of his oath. After my various surfaces had been powdered, salved antiseptically and analgesically, and most smoothly bandaged, they eased me into my cold-weather suit, which is black and very like the other, but thicker, and containing a spiderweb of heating elements working off my batteries. Also it has a hood snugly covering my skull, neck and chin. Mask and gloves are available. The two Mexes helped me into my exoskeleton, and I lay down to rest. I tKanked and dismissed tliem. But El Toro persuaded me to take a slug of rum, poured a glass for himself, and stayed behind. "What do you think of our Revolution?" Ke asked me. "I am earning my ticket to Amarillo Cuchillo," I replied, not at all inclined to bandy either platitudes or deep thoughts. I was relieved that I stank no more and that I felt less svirface pain, but the bath had exhausted me. He nodded. "There have been risings everywhere, even to the north'. The news of El Esqueleto has gone ahead of us." Yet he did not sound enthusiastic. "Many dead bent-backs?" I asked. He grimaced. "And in Texas, Texas, the Revolution has been crushed?" He said, "Badly battered, though not extinct. It ha not been conquered, but it Has been countered. The Texans Have pacified many of my people with shorter working hours for the cyborged, with more fiestas and bullfights, with free rum and Coca-Cola and with free reefers. But I asked you what you thought of our Revolution?" I finally answered, "I believe it is necessary, but that does, not mean I enjoy it." "Fo compiendo, camarada," Ee said and left me alone. fTith 'Winnipeg, Texas, we ar"  rived in an area where tall Texans are a tiny elite; managers, engineers, foremen, the police, the Rangers, and their wives and sometimes their children. The few short Texans are all embittered Canadians -- they remember and use that name, though it is forbidden. The numerous Mexes there are all cyborged workers -- miners and farmhands and lumberjacks -- shipped north with their cooks and women. Our meeting -- I can Hardly call it a show -- was Held in a supposedly forgotten atomic shelter, which the Mexes reached by a short tunnel from one of their compounds and which we entered by a longer tunnel, part of a disused drainage system. I Had to go stooping, looking I suppose like a Huge black bug. At the meeting there was little laughter. There was much hate. Midway there was a raid, and all but one of us actors escaped because our entrance tunnel had not been known to the Rangers. I do not know what casualties our audience suffered. Now our chief is Carlos Mendoza, whom I hardly know. And I am no longer giving grand opera lessons. Next time I shall not be the first man to run -- at least, such is my present boast. El Toro bought it ur next stop, on Spindletop #th', was Victory, Texas, once Saskatoon, but renamed when the Rangers routed an Anglo-Russian army in the Battle of Saskatchewan, We held our meeting by a windbreak in the wheat fields. Here the Mexes live in a shack city. No need for fenced compounds. Where could they run? Tall Texan elite smaller, but tougher. No women or children. The deeply-hated engineers and cyborg foremen. The Rangers. Almost no short Texans, but some Indians, who do not cyborg well. They generally take their lives after their first experience of the yoke. Mendoza, who is something of a book-man, told me that one reason this area has remained uncolonized and unexploited, except for wheat and wood and ores, is the growing world shortage of high-grade radioactives. Earth's oil is almost gone, her remaining coal hard to come by, while the Atomic War actually increased Terran man's dependency on nuclear power. Even our kack, for example, is powered by atomic batteries. Fanninowicz Heard Mendoza's little lecture and favored him with a contemptuous and knowing grin. Typical German arrogance only? Two days after Victory, we arrived at Fort Johnson, Alberta, Texas. Once Ft. Murray, Much like Victory, except timbering again replaces wheat-farming, and the Indians are more numerous. Here, I was told, is stationed a company of Rangers with a red dress rmiform, survival from the fabulous Canadian Mounties. The only uniforms, however, which I saw -- from a safe distance, using electro-binoculars -- were white fatigues. Toward evening I discovered the reason for them -- camouflage. Snow fell and everything turned bright white. Terra's weird natimal phenomena still rouse in me a sense of wonder, despite my punished body and wearying mind. In the long silvery twilight, the flakes were like a ghostly Milky Way falling past a wheeling spaceship. I donned my gloves and mask. The latter, with its silver arabesques, makes me look like Death the Witchdoctor. Through the electro-binox I watched another of the huge towers, in which cyborged Mexes do their m # rsterious work. I recalled Federico's pantomime and the "dig and delve" chant, and I found myself shivering at being near a #-kilometer Hole up which -- my childish imagination insisted -- the dragon of gravity might crawl and come to hunt me down, suck me from any hiding place and cnisH me flat against him. Not that I believed in sucK a Hole. My mind shrank from the idea, and Fanninowicz's arguments Had been telling. Still, it seemed unlikely that the Texans where Mendoza tells me the sedimentary layers are thin and the last glaciation has often exposed the underlying igneous rock: basalt, obsidian, feldspar, tufa, pumice, granite, pitch'stone and their hideous confreres. But if not for oil, what? Whatever work is done in the towers, I could see that it produced much heat. This one steamed amidst the fallings snow and remained stubbornly black, like a giant finger protruding from inner earth. The Gusher A fter twilight had darkened into night we took off on what I hoped would be the last lap of my Terran hegira. Our company was reduced to one kack and its occupants. Besides Guchu and myself, there were Carlos Mendoza, El Tacito, Father Francisco, Fanninowicz and Rachel and Rosa. The other two kacks were headed south', their ultimate destination Denver. Our tour was breaking up. The snow had stopped falling. It lay in a blanket a half meter thick on the stunted evergreen forest below. The night was very clear, but the twinkling stars were dimmed by Luna riding low in the east and waxing again toward full. I( had spent almost a month on Terra. I looked with tired longing at my mother satellite, tethering point of the Sack and Circumluna, cosmically so near and yet so far. Luna was not the only rival to the stars. Ahead, ghostly green flames burned up toward the zenith -- the northern lights, another remarkable Terran sight. After about a half hour, Rosa noted that the stars had a third rival, a purple glow on the southern horizon, directly astern. It was not so much a point of light as a small hemispherical shining. It appeared to originate near or at Fort Johnson. We speculated unsatisfactorily as to wh'at it might be. A fire? Some part of the search for us? Even an atomic bomb was suggested, though that was contradicted by the steadiness of the glow. Besides, no sound or shock-wave caught up with us. Fanninowicz contributed to this intercKange a knowing sneer. I said, "I wonder if tKe glow has anything to do witH the drilling tower at Fort Johnson?" The German's sneer wavered toward a scowl. "Grand Emperor of Mechanics," I addressed him, "are you merely contemptuous of us? Or are you carrying a secret about the great towers?" "Secrets!" he said, the sneer back in full. "I am forced to carry thousands in this company, simply because my mind holds a vast number of matters beyond your understanding. Especially in the intellectually inclined Teuton, the directional hormone produces taller bodies. I feel no more contempt for you all than I do for chattering apes, I assure you." I gave him up as a bad German job. I tucked away in my memory the point that the Texas growth-hormone was directional, whatever that jargon might mean. Then I incuriously watched the purple glow until our steady northward flight put it under the horizon. My earlier symptoms of gravity sickness Had been replaced with a general lassitude which could not merge unaided into rest because of the pains of my deep bruises, rashes, and varicosities. The other passengers went to sleep. With the aid of rum, I followed them there -- and found only nightmares of cyborged fiery dragons pursuing me through redhot tunnels which by degrees melted my titanium. Xlhen I awoke unrefreshed, '  sunrise was reddening the eastern horizon. El Tacito had replaced Guchu at the controls. The snow-roofed forest below had become dwarfier. The groimd below was without any but the smallest hills. There was no sign of human occupation. Our largely transparent kack made the situation seem like a nothingness crossing a desolation. Except for my pains, I would have felt disembodied. After we had breakfasted, each meagerly yet according to his taste, Rosa said, "May this one address you, Senor La Cruz?" So it has come to Senor, I thought. "Most certainly, Senorita Morales," I replied. "How do you propose to depart into the sky after we reach Amarillo CucHillo?" "By the way of the spaceport there," I told her. "If one of Circumlima's ships is not in, I will have to wait." "Ah yes, the spaceport," she answered with a dubious nod. "But how do you propose to wait in Amarillo CucHillo, which is little more than a Texan workingencampment?" Ven !he Twentieth Century was only fen days old, Texas ushered In with a black skyward sweep the Age of Petroleum, the era of fast cars and the big trucks that would lick the railroads, the mighty tanks and  lets that would dominate subsequent wars. With a roar that was heard around the Industrial world, a tumult mighty as Krakatoa's but mean' Ingful, at the sleepy town of Beaumont, near the coast where De Soto's men had noted oil seepage three hundred and thirty-eight years before, the Discovery Well at Spindletop blew in. Within six months, the price of Beaumont land had risen a thousandfold. OH was three cents a cask, water five cents a cup. Within sixty years, one Texan In eight was with an oil company, and one out of every seven barrels of worldoil caine frm Texas.i-Texas In Brief and Big, Houston House, Chicago, Texas "I Have counted on the help of the Revolution in this matter," I told her anxiously. "That was my understanding from oizr talks in Dallas." "Ah' yes," Rosa replied. "But Dallas is Dallas. And also what is said in Dallas. While Amarillo Cuchillo is another thing. Carlos, what are our contacts there?" "Among the Cree Indians," Mendoza replied. "They are wanderers, though some live in encampment outside the town. And of course among the cyborged, but such have no station or influence. As for town-dwellers, I know of none. Perhaps -- " He broke off with a sharp h'eadshake. I guessed that he had been about to say, "Perhaps El Toro knew, but neglected to inform me." Another matter occurred to me. ( t'here is also the Lost CrazyRussian Pitchblende Mine," I said. "Though I know some of you think it a fable," I added with a glance at Rachel. "Nevertheless, my sole reason for coming to Earth was to find it and lay claim to it if I can. To achieve the latter, I had hoped to make use of well placed local revolutionaries as intermediaries. But even if there are none such, I must still make a full effort. Perhaps in making the claim, I can use my Texan disguise, which workei well enougH for me in the Kansas City Plaza los Toros." RacEel interrupted witK, "But Senor La Cruz, How will tHe matter of making tHe claim ever come up, since we know you don't Have even tHe map witH you?" So sHe was senoring me too! "I Have tHe map Here," I told Her icily, toucHing my Head. "THat was one thing about Terra I memorized in complete detail while still in tHe Sack. If tHe mine exists, I can find it." "Yes, and you may Have tHe claim in your Head too, all perfectly memorized," RacHel rejoined. "But a claim in tHe Head isn't a document. It isn't seals and signatures." "I carry the claim here," I told Her, laying my Hand on my cHest over my Heart. "And as to How I propose to assert tHat claim -- tHat is my business, Senorita Lamar!" SHe sHrank back a little witH tipped sHoulder, pretending to be witHered. I could Have kicked Her! I caught Rosa quirking a grin. There was occupation for my otHer foot! Mendoza said witH mild argumentativeness, "But if you truly have the claim, I do not see the need eitHer for map or mine-Eunt. A claim describes tHe exact location of a mine." "This one does not," I asserted. Then before any or all could accuse me of insanity, I went on, "However, tHe original crazy Russian, who sold it to the Cree, who sold it to the Aleut, who sold it to my ancestor -- tHat crazy Russian, wHose name by tHe way was NicBolas NimzovitcH Nisard -- He, before disappearing forever, deposited witH tHe tHen-Yellowknife Registry of Mining Claims, in an envelope bearing His signature, samples of tHe unique mixture of pitchblende, syenite, pitcHrock, and granite from His mine. On tiie basis of tHose samples. He was granted a provisional claim. If anyone can produce matcHing samples, plus a verifiable description of tHe mine's location, plus the provisional claim, tfien tHe claim becomes absolute." "THe Russian was crazy like a fox," Mendoza observed, nodding his Head wisely. "He was afraid tHat tHe Registry, agent of capitalist government, migHt jump His claim." I said, "So all I need now is your Help in finding tHe mine. I know you carry radioactivity detectors as standard safety equipment. WHile tHis kack is tHe perfect vefiicle in whicH to Himt for the landmarks of the mine: three large low outcroppings of rock forming the apexes of an equilateral triangle witH sides a kilometer long. THe outcroppings to nortB and south are of pale granite, but tHe one to tHe west is of darker Hue -- and tEere lies tSe pitchblende." Mendoza nervously sHook His Head. "I fear I Have not tKe autHority to detacH a revolutionary veHicle for sucH an individualistic enterprise." "Is true," Rosa supported Him. "TEe Revolution comes before all else." RacEel said, "I tEink it's a mercy not to encourage Senor La Cruz in His delusions about this non-existent mine." Kicking, I tEougHt, is mucE too good for those two abominable females. However, I found myself too weary and dispirited to indulge even in sadistic fantasies. I deserve all this, I thought. To put my trust in a gang of utterly selfish traitors such as constitutes any revolutionary committee -- Fanninowicz's cackle of sardonic mirtH was th'e final stab to the deflating balloon of my ego, flattening it completely. T T owever, the cold laughter was followed by a warm chuckle. GucEu, whom I Ead thought to be asleep, Ead opened His bloodshot eyes and now lifted up on an orange-robed elbow. "Aw, give the stupid square a quare deal, I say. At first I agreed with you all -- we'd use Him and now was tHe time to dump Him, along with Professor Fanninowicz. But then Ee told Eig story and, man, it was so crazy that my sympathies were aroused in spite of msrself! Loco Rusaan to a Cree Injun to an Aleut to Eis bombed-out ancestor! Man, oH man!" Again came the warm chuckle. "Not tfiat we owe Him ansdJiing as Senor La Cruz from the sky. First principle of being a black is that Ee can't ever owe an ofay anything. Ofays are a doomed breed, and its a kindness to Help them along toward extinction -- and tHat goes for you too. Miss Lamar. But taking La Cruz just as an actor -- pure ham, but at least lively and Hard-working -- I think we owe Him a little Help hunting this crazy mine of Eis." El Tacito looked back from the controls and nodded once. Mendoza looked around, shrugged, and nodded too, albeit unI gazed at GucEu and opened my moutH to thank Eim. But the words that came out were, "Thank you for nothing, you bloodthirsty black, more besotted with your race than even Fanninowicz Here! I imagine tHe first act of your so-called Pacific republic was to slaughter every miserable white in California, giving priority to women and children." Guchu's answering chuckle was as warm and rich as either of his earlier ones. I Hadn't touched His ego, I Hadn't got witBn a ligKtyear of it "TEats not true, Scully," He said. "Most ot tKem we made Honorary blacks." Not trusting myself to speak to him, or so mucH as look at the girls, I crawled forward beside El Tacito. "You Heard wKat tKey said," I told him gruffly. "Please approach' Amarillo Cuchillo on a soutK-nortK line, ten kilometers to tKe east. That is a trifle more than six miles." Once again He nodded. Tj'xcept for changing tKe bat teries of my exo, I spent tKe rest of the long day Horizontal there, occasionally peering north -- not Kimgrily, but witK a definite tHough' very small appetite. After a tiny eternity, tKe flat blue of Great Slave Lake edged reluctantly into view. To tKe west I could make out low forest; to the east, the barrens. Then for a time land retreated in all directions as we crossed the lake. To me it was as if we were crossing one of those unimaginable oceans. TKe sun was low wKen tKe barrens reappeared ahead. GucKu took over the controls. WKen tKe barrens Had been below us for Half an Hour, the sun was setting. Its horizontal, deep yellow light was just right to show me, a little to the west, three long shadows traveling east from the apexes of an equilateral triangle with sides about a kilometer long. My teeth were chattering as I pointed out the miraculous sight to Guchu. I chiefly wanted him to confirm what I saw. It was impossible that I should find the mine so easily. There must be a catcH somewhere. If there was, GucKu didn't tell me. He just grunted appreciatively and swung the kack west and down. TKe shadows of the two eastern outcroppings were about a half kilometer long. But that of the western one, where the mine was, seemed to stretch east forever. I snatched up binoculars. There was indeed a catcK. The long shadow was cast by one of the now-familiar huge towers. My mine had been discovered and was being worked by the Texans. that didn't make sense. Surely the huge rigs scattered down across Texas at least as far as Dallas were not for mining surface deposits of pitchblende. I focused more carefully and upped the magnification and electronic gain. Now I could see a great door standing open in the eastern side of the tower. Before it, figures tinier than ants were Hairline red needles of laser beams. A revolutionary rising? I wondered, pulse quickening. I scanned west of tfie tower. I saw notEing wHatever besides tHe monotonous landscape of tHe barrens, until tHere came into view tHe narrow, dark-gold sHeen of a river, dark sHort dasHes of two bridges crossing it, and just beyond tHem tHe Huddled low buildings and narrow streets of wHat must be Amarillo CucHillo. THe tops of a few of tHe buildings still caugHt svmligHt. Elsewhere, twilight was gathering. Northeast of tHe tiny city I spotted an airfield witH two Huge Texan cargo jets and a narrow shaft, its upper quarter sun-gilded, wHicH might well be the Tsiolkovsky or Her sister sHip, tHe Goddard. I lowered the binoculars to rest my eyes. THere was shadow around me. THe kack Had dropped out of sigHt of the sun. Without warning, Amarillo CucHillo became tHe center of a spiderweb of tHread-thin, rulerstraight beams of light, Some of them, red, shot up toward infinity or lanced across tHe barrens. Others, green, originated in the sky or in tHe northwest distance, and ended around the city in incandescent points from which sparks fountained upward. Some of the red beams ended similarly in points beyond Amarillo CucHillo, two of them in the sky. The kack rocked and a blinding green flare flashed across the thick plastic a foot above my head. That convinced me that the Rangers Had found us at last. Though why they Had to sHoot up the whole sky and landscape to down one miserable little ship of actors, I couldn't grasp. Sheer Texan exuberance, perhaps. By the time I got my sight back, GucHu was landing the kack behind tHe southernmost of two eastern outcroppings. Near at Hand the rocky Hillock looked almost impressive -- a glaciersmootHed bump of granite ten meters HigK. I could see the brown furrow which the green laser beam Had melted in the plastic, not quite cutting through. The furrow was barely three decimeters wide, testifying to tHe photonic weapon's fantastic "choke" at a distance over ten miles. THere was a soft bump and my wrists were twisting. I realized that we Had touched down and that Mendoza was trying to wrench the binoculars away from me. I saw Rachel drop recklessly down from the kaclds trap to the snowy carpet below. I too was seized by the desire to know what was going on. Jerking the binoculars away from Mendoza, and upping my power, though' not as much as I had for the duel, I followed her. Offstage, the Revolutionary Ramblers are an#rthing but a well disdplined company. T he snow was barely ankle deep. The wind of nly movement instantly began to chill my face and hands. But I did not pause to put on gloves and mask, or even to turn up my suit's fieat, until I was crouched beside Rachel on a rough granite ledge and peering over the hillock's top. There were no more little red laser flashes from the foot of the tower, before the great door. The earth's curvature now Kid Amarillo CucHillo, but the green and red laser beams continued their battle. I could no longer see the incandescent Kits, tKougK there were brief ghostly white glows here and there along the horizon's rim, and also long-lasting deep orange glows which I took to come from flames. Several times too I saw brief glares and later heard the distant boom of explosions, but for the most part the battle was so silent that it seemed more like one more natural display -- the northern lights reduced to a weird, bright geometry -- rather tlian a human conflict. Somewhere along the line I had decided that the laser display was not directed at us, that I and my fellow actor-revolutionaries had merely been struck one accidental blow and become witnesses of some much larger conflict. Though when one green ray flashed a half kilometer overhead, I flinched. I turned up my heating a notch, put on gloves and mask and looked around me. Rachel was using my binoculars. Mendoza Kad found another pair and was peering through them. Rosa and Fanninowicz and Father Francisco Kad also come down. And El Tacito too, his pistols out, stolidly watching Fanninowicz and myr self rather than the battle. There were two battles, I remembered then. I snatched the glasses from Rachel with no more than a growled, "I want them!" in answer to her challenging, "I beg your pardon?" I focused them carefully on the western tower a kilometer away, upped magnification and electronic gain to maximum and gradually made out the details. Slowly I interpreted a sight that I am sure will never stop returning to me in nightmares. The huge tower loomed darkly against the twilight sky. Facing me, two doors thirty meters high and ten wide stood open. The inside of the tower showed a single great room. WitK one exception, the central space was empty. To either side, a purplish glow showed me sections of great tall machines. One reminded me of one of those big gantries a rocket needs on a gravity satellite. The reason it reminded me of a gantry was that I saw, standing in the center of the tower, a gleaming violet rocket taller than the door. It must be lit by invisible banks of floodlights, I thought. I fancied it quivered, as if it were anxious for the tower's roof to lift aside, so it could take off. By Diana! -- I thought -- Texas is preparing a new conquest of space. I must warn Circumlunal T)etter be ready to come arunning, children," Guch'u called from behind us. "The geiger shows a little activity from the direction of the purple tower. Nothing dangerous. As of now." Then, through the rocket, I dimly made out more machines behind it. I realized, at first with relief, that the rocket was only a shaft of violet light shining up like a giant laser through a Bole in the floor or ground and beating against the tower's ceiling, to be reflected as the purple glow. The purple glow, fanning out through the door showed me many bodies lying at random on the snow. Little bodies, the bodies of bent-backs. I think ! saw stains beside some of th'eni. At any rate, they did not move. But there were many more Mexes moving about freely, seen blackly in silhouette. Some stood in groups. Others moved singly. When a group did move, there was a surge about it which I did not like. I do not know whether it reminded me of half-disciplined soldiers, or packs of animals, or what. I only know I did not like it. Also, to one side of the door, there was what I took to be a small stack of big logs, bigger than the stems of any of the trees I Had seen growing in the Land of Little Sticks. If El Toro had been with us, he might have led us toward the tower. I only know that Carlos Mendoza did not, and that I had no desire to go there, and that I twice caught Father Francisco crossing Himself. My glasses kept going back in fascination to the violet pillar of light. I fancied that it pulsed and vibrated. It seemed a living thing. I marveled with a shudder at the Mexes moving freely in its glow, the crescent edges of their silhouetted heads like anodyzed aluminum, or mercury vapor lashed by electrons. I wondered about the source of the violet light A huge vat of molten metal just below the floor? -- for there was heat there; the lengthening fan of dark ground before the door, where the snow had melted, showed that. Or great filaments? Or a sea of thin vapor, conceivably mercury, electrically blasted into fluorescence? Somehow I felt th'e source was deeper tKan tKat. I pictured a great ahaft going down, and down, and down, until I felt vertigo. Federico's sKaft, but witK all tKe elevators removed and the change points smoothed out, imtil it was an uninterrupted #-kilometer hole. I lowered my glasses, blinking my smarting eyes and shaking my head to get rid of that illusion of dizziness. I looked toward Amarillo CucHillo. The lasers still lanced there, though I saw more greens than reds. I was just handing my binoculars to Rachel, when I heard Mendoza, whose own binoculars were still fixed on the purple tower, give a sibilant hiss. Ignoring Rachel's angry protests, I snatched back the glasses and put them to my eyes. I am sometimes sorry I did so, yet it is perhaps better that I saw, than she. T?ight Mexes were returning  from the violet beam. A gang of eight others rushed with that unpleasant surge toward the log stack, which seemed slightly smaller than before, hoisted a log between them, surged with it to the center of the tower and cast it into the violet light, where it was brightly and lividly visible for a moment before dropping into the hole whence the light came. During that cinema-bright moment I saw that it was not a log, but a tall man with legs bound together and arms to his sides, a big man made bigger by the ropes swathing him from neck to ankles. I watched that action repeated six times more, imtil the stack was gone. Although several attempts, which rocked me, were made to drag the binoculars away from me, I held onto them with the maximum strength of my hands and exoskeleton -- held onto them and fought to keep them focused continually on the base of the violet column. I do not think I wanted to watch. I believe I hated to. I know it tore me inside. One moment I felt like a snarling animal, next like a compassionate man, next like a maniac, next like a camera frozen in ice. Yet I had to watch, I had to witness. I had each time to try, unsuccessfully yet desperately, to catch the expression on the face of the bound Texan falling into Meanwfiile I was Hearing a faint wailing tKat rose and fell irregularly. I told myself it was tKe wind rising. I told myself it was wolves. I told myself it was not tKe screaming of men, eitKer in ultimate terror or murderous fury, or tKe two mixed. BuddKists Kave mucH to say about karmic burdens and duties, karmic works and acts, karmic moments wKen all of tKe moral past of a being and perKaps tKe future too, is laid bare, is nakedly seized and known. TKat perKaps comes closest to describing wHat I felt and wKy I Kad to feel it. Besides, was I not DeatK? TKe glasses slipped from my hands, I don't know to whom. I stood tKere a long time, with head bowed. Or perhaps it only seemed a long time. TKen among many unnoticed remarks, I Heard someone, I do not recall who, say, "Yes, the cyborgs are all gone. TKe eight last threw something down the hole. Yes, a thing, not a man." I looked up. The sky was dark. Toward Amarillo Cuchillo, a few lasers still lanced, all green. I Heard someone -- again I do not recall who; can it Have been that in my peculiar state I was hearing not voices, but meanings? -- at any rate, I heard someone say matter-of-factly, "Well, the Russians have licked the Texans this time, that's for sure." Until that moment, except for the brief period when I thougEt the Rangers were chasing us, I hadn't the faintest idea of wBo was fighting whom at the Battle of Amarillo CucKillo. A nd then I began to hear it -- no, not the shrill wailing again, thank Mars! -- though it was even fainter than that to begin with. It was a sound that was lilting, and rhythmic, and deep, and -- one Kad at last to recognize -- both musical and Human. It was coming out of the dark, across the white waste, from the direction of Amarillo CucKillo, and it was slowly getting stronger. For a long while I tried to convince m#rself it was an illusion -- perKaps something generated deep in my mind to erase those dreadful screams -- but then I realized that all those around me were motionless and listening too. And then I saw the first white form appear in the dark like a ghost, small at first, but growing taller. I heard GucKu come up behind us and begin to whisper harshly, "You all better -- !" I think he was going to say " -- beat it back to the kack!" and then seeing How far the situation had developed, changed his mind. For he finished, " -- Hold damn still! Tacito, dig your gun in the Professor's guts." By that time all tKe marching men had appeared from the frosty murk. There were a scant dozen of them. They were in white fatigues and they carried their lasers at the slope, or hanging farther over-shoulder with muzzle down, or casually under-arm. They all stood tall and now I could make out all the words of the march they were singing soft and low to 'a hauntingly familiar tune: From the hills of Guatemala To the frozen Arctic sea Texas Rangers fight the battles In the name of liberty. We have kicked the Russki and Chinee Until his butt is sore. We're the Lone Star's guts and guns and fists, We're the Texas Ranger Corps. At first I assumed they were headed for the tower, to hunt down the revolted cyborgs. Then, with a spasm of fear, I thought they were coming for us. It turned out they were simply marching south between us, though much nearer us than the tower. They halted less than a hundred yards away. We all held dead still indeed. With blown snow half coating us, we were hard to see. At least I hoped so. In the lull of the wind, I Heard a gruff voice say, "Wal, Custer done wuss," and another reply, "And so did Lyndon, bless 'im," and a third comment, "Yup, the mysterious east weren't never meant for human man to meddle with." I heard nothing else coming from the northwest, but the Rangers must have, for now they scattered and knelt in a long curve, their lasers pointing back along the line of their retreat. What came out of the northwestern murk wasn't a band of pursuing Russians, but a big long white vehicle, which moved silently across the snow, weaving like a snake. It halted by the Rangers and I heard a hoarse voice command, "Jump aboard, boys." They obeyed, though they didn't move as fast as the voice had demanded. Then the huge vehicle was slithering south. I thought I heard again, very faintly, the two lines: Texas Rangers fight the battles In the name of Liberty! Perhaps I should Have felt contemptuous, or at least sardonic. I didn't. Something deep inside me, which I had never suspected was there, was touched. "ITe had started back for the kack when the roaring began. It came first through the rock we trod, making it vibrate and sliake. We staggered and reeled. TKen tKe roar became deafening as tlie pxirple tower blew up. First tKe violet beam grew mucK brigKter and burst tKrougK th'e roof, shining toward tKe zenitK as if exultantly boimd for tKe stars. TKen great gouts of bright pxirple molten stuff were mixed with it TKen tKe walls of tKe tower were driven outward. In a few moments, where the tower and great machines Kad been, there was only a cone of bright purple, viscous, semi-solid lava, Kugely squirming and swiftly growing taller. The roaring died down, tKougK the rock still vibrated underfoot. GucKu yelled, "Back to the kack! TKe geiger's gone crazy!" Fanninowicz broke away from the group and ran lumberingly up the hillock. El Tacito drew a bead on Kim. I forced down Kis pistol, saying, Uno momentol For favor!" and took out after the German. RacKel and Rosa followed me. Fanninowicz stopped at tKe summit of the rocky Kummock. He was batKed in bright purple light, while we wKo followed lum stayed in the hummock's shadow. Shaking Kis fist alternately at the purple pyramid and at us, Ke roared out, "Yes, the dirty Russians have won a battle, but now they will lose two, ten, a hundred! With his back to the wall. Hitler created the V-I and the V-#! Now the Texans, sole heirs of tKe virile Germanic spirit, Kave won tKe means to throw back and conquer the jealous world! Faced by the shortage of radioactives, they Kave Kad the the vision and daring and heavy technology to tap pockets of radioactive magma under Earth's crust! Across their great land, at every likely spot, they have with' admirable secrecy created the mohole mines! The Lost Crazy-Russian Mine was the clue that led to the new Spindletop! Everywhere the ultimate gusKers are coming in, as at Fort Johnson last night, though you fools Kad not the wit to read the meaning of tKat glow! They will make Texas all-powerful!" And facing the glow with' fist held high, Ke shouted, "Sieg Heil!" and again, "Sieg Heil!" Perhaps I should have been touched by that too. I wasn't. All I could think was that Germans were maniacs and that the grandiose Texans were giving poor old atom-scarred Terra another Korse-size dose of deadly radioactivity. Meanwhile I Kad grabbed Fanninowicz's ankle and jerked. He came tumbling heavily down. RacKel and I each grabbed him by a shoulder and rushed him toward the kack. When he didn't move fast enough, Rosa kicked him viciously from behind. As we scrambled aboard Guchu yelled, "You dumb ofays are crazy-lucky I waited for you. Now Kang onl" The kack took off straight east, hugging the groimd to get the most protection out of the hillock's low shadow. We traveled east many miles before we began the long circle north and west to find the tents of the Crees. Zhawlty NawsH F anninowicz continued euphoric in the kack. He discoursed to us like a paranoically Insane schoolteacher in his grandiose phase. He sprayed spittle like my father acting Macbeth, and his voice often rose with a lago's or Richard the Third's evil glee. "It is a commonplace," he began, "that common men never perceive the wonders of science and technology until the rockets roar, until the nuclei give up their energy at interior solar heat, or until the rich' tKor-uranic lava spouts from a moKole, Now you have seen, and the secret is out. So, attend me, children." El Tacito made as if to club him with the butt of his rifle, but Mendoza shook his head. "It has long been known, even to oafs like you," Fanninowicz continued on without notice, "that Terra has a crust of solid rock as much as seventy kilometers thick. Below that is the mantle: three thousand kilometers of molten rock under increasingly vast pressure. "Once it was thought that the mantle was slowly cooling and shrinking. "But as early as the twentieth century, the preponderance of evidence indicated that the Keat of the mantle was steadily maintained by cells of rich radioactives in it. "These deep cells produced slow convection currents in the mantle, leading straight up to the crust, spreading sideways there and then descending. The Dutchman Veneg-Meinez first suggested that. Which is to say that a German first developed the theory, for despite their reputation for peacefulness, the Dutch were the ancestors of the brave and long-moumed-for Boers, which proves the Dutch to have been subconscious Prussians. "Up the slow convection currents rode the rich radioactive ores, bit by bit. They were the hottest and most expanded of all the materials in the current, since they were the source of its heat. "EacH current melted a dome in tKe solid crust above it. Some of ttie radioactives moved sidewajrs witK tKe current to its areas of descent Himdreds of miles away. But otKers accumulated in an ever-ricKer pocket inside tKe dome. "So pockets of molten radioactives are marked by mantle domes, somewKat as oil is associated witK salt domes. "TKe Texans -- " "I was waiting for tKem," GucKu muttered from tKe pilot's seat.  "Silence! By tKeir ability to tKink big and to do big, the Texans provided the skill and unceasing industry to dig tKe roomy shafts." "Lies!" Rosa interjected. "Our cyborged men provided that." Tpanninowicz continued unperturbed, "TKe lower courses of the shafts were lined witK woven molecular-ribbon ferro-ceramics of great strength, tKrougH wKicK the radioactives migKt gusH upward, depositing on earth's surface great cones of tiior-uranic ores. TKe PKaraoKs built limestone pyramids in wHicK they buried themselves witK a little gold and a few soft gems. But tKe Texans have cajoled Nature into creating hundreds of radioactive pyramids, eacH worth hundreds "A few Texans got bxiried today in one of their hot pyramids," GucKu put in. "While we Texo-Germans," Fanninowicz continued modestly but unshaken, "merely provided all the general theory and also the means to locate mantle domes." "Which is?" Mendoza asked after a few seconds. He was still interested. Myself, I Kad become sickened by all this horrible talk of oceans of molten rock megameters deep. A planet is Hell with a crust! Then it occurred to me that my nausea might be the first symptoms of a dose of radioactivity. When Fanninowicz, prior to an elaborate yawn, brushed His hand through his short Kair, I was pleased to see that none fell out. "OK," he said tantalizingly, "we have Kad some success vwth counts of anti-neutrinos coming through the earth at night from the sun. But cluefly we have located mantle domes by the same method the Great Fuehrer's naval command located, battleships in the Atlantic -- that is, by dowsing over maps of Texas! Ho-ho, I see I have startled you. I see you are prepared to sneer. Do so, if you wish. It will not alter the fact that we Germans are the andent and original spiers-out of metals, the ultimate chemists, the chthonic race, the wise old kobolds, as the names of the elements testify!" I did not listen to the discussion which followed, in which words like "cobalt" and "cuckoo" were bandied about. I was thinking that if only one dab of ferric ore were left in all Terra, a German would find it and forge from it an Iron Cross. My mind was also invaded by a compulsive, nightmarish vision in which' a parade of Germans and Egjrptians wound among vast, blue-lit pyramids, the hair of the marchers falling out on the way and their flesh' shredding off and they slowly turning to shining blue skeletons topped by eerie animal Heads and spiked gray Helmets. I was not aware tHe kack Had landed until someone guided me from it, my exoskeleton jigging and shimmying from sHiverjerks in my chilled ghost muscles. I dimly noted puckered, blackeyed, leathery faces framed in fur. I smelled old Hides, unwasfied live ones, burning fat and cold machine oil. I glimpsed leather walls with shadows reeling across them. Then I felt coarse fur beneath me. I Heard a faint shivery rattle, and realized just as I fell asleep, that it had come from my exo. T spent the next two days in tHe encampment of the Crees, recuperating. Which, to a man witH gravity sickness on a gravitybody, means no improvement at all, only a bitter Hanging on to what little Health' He Has, with growing irritability, fatigued restlessness, swift loss of reasonableness, and ballooning negativism. There were a dozen tents masked by a strip of forest so tHin and ragged that Amarillo CucHillo and its airfield-spaceport could be glimpsed distantly through tHe stunted trees, witH Here and there small patrols of burly-looking Russians. This nearness did not wHet my Hope. It only made me impatient. Mendoza and tfie rest explained to me that I must stay hidden while they made contact and dickered witH tHe Russians. My Texan Height and generally strange appearance, tKey said, might arouse suspicion in tfie Russian military, wHo might not Have been informed at all about tHe part I Had played in tHe BentBack Revolt. I argued at all tfiis. Was I not El Esqueleto, I asked, and was He not known by now around tHe world? Even RacHel and Rosa could not win from me more tfian surly agreement to cooperate for tHe present. The Crees were an interesting if somber folk. For instance, small jars of petroleum and cKunks of coal were tHeir money and also their gods, because they Had learned that those black substances were tHe energy-filled residue of all animal and plant life. These they never burned, but used in trade and buried in small quantity wntK die dead, to "seed" them toward a similar immortality. But the Crees did not interest me. They irked me witK tKeir attrocious English and worse Spanish and with tKeir body odors, different from mine tKougH no worse. I did my best to ignore tKem. As for staying hidden and sensibly Horizontal, well, except when Russian patrols came near, I spent my days prowling about the camp with El Tacito in scowling attendance. I frequently stopped for glimpses of tKe silvery needleprow of the Tsiolkovsky or the Goddard waiting at the spaceport to take me home -- at any rate that was wKy I felt it was there. Meanwhile, I thought, I was wasting precious time that I could have put to use asserting my claim to the radioactive gusher -- for despite Fanninowicz's babble about dowsing and such', it seemed obvious that the Lost CrazyRussian Pitchblende Mine had been the clue that had led the Texans to drill a mohole there. ATy colleagues' suggestions that I forget about the mine, that I face the fact that Russia had never permitted the exploitation of her mineral wealth by foreignOver and over iie stom ending as He began: "Make ye no truce with Adam-Zad-die Bear that walks like a manl  i When he stands tn as pleading in wavering, man-brate guise,   When he veils the hate and cunning of his litde ' swinidieyesj When he shows as seerang quarter, with paws , like hands in prayer, I That is tihe time of peril -- the time of the Truce "# of the Bearl" -- "The Trace of the Bear," by Rudyard lOpling ( #) ers, and that I consider myself damn lucky if they managed to procure me an exit visa and transport to Circumluna -- all tliese reasonable suggestions I listened to with' great hostility and a growing suspicion that they wanted me off Terra so they could seize my wealth. Suggestions that I Have patience -- Mendoza's that I learn Cree, Rachel's that I take up bowand-arrow, GucHu's that I drop acid -- I only snarled at. Perhaps by this time I had developed a mild chronic delirium from skin infections and fringeadequate blood supply to the brain. But I doubt it. I think it was sheer bloated egotism on my part, slightly augmented by gravity disease. Here I was a great and heroic actor, and I was being treated like a bum. At any rate, when Mendoza and Father Francisco went to dicker the first day and did not return, when Guchu and Rosa and Rachel -- and even Fanninowicz! -- took off on the second in the kack and didn't come back either or send word, I decided on action. I engaged El Tacito in a game of gin rummy and then a bout of drinking same -- I mean rum, not gin. When h'e was thoroughly soused I put him to bed, took his lightning pistols, equipped my exoskeleton with my last fresh batteries and waited for dawn. At its first glimmer I emerged from our tent, menaced with my telescopic swords the Crees who would have stopped me and walked straight to Amarillo Cuchillo. Dawn was red when I reached the town and encountered a neat characters spelling out "Zh'awlty Nawsh." Like the Texans, the Russians had literally translated Yellowknife. I also encountered my first pair of Russian soldiers. I'll admit that their extreme burliness and even greater hairiness startled me at first. Ever since Tearful Suzy the space hostess had mentioned "them fearful furry Russians," I had assumed that all the references I heard to the hirsuteness of the Soviets were only one more ridiculous expression of that curse of Terran man, xenophobia. N ot so. The feet, hands, and faces, not to mention Head, neck and ears, of these two infantrymen were entirely covered by thick fur, which also bulked up their coarsely woven summer uniforms. Their nails too were thickened, somewhat in the direction of claws, but seemingly not enough to interfere with humanoid manipulations. After the first shock, the effect was delightful. The Human eye looks quite soulful wKen surrounded by fur. It Has something of the effect of a dolphin's eye, while the fur itself modestly proclaims, "I am merely an animal, nothing special, comrade. There is nothing of the anthropocentric, supercilious, god-and-devil-creating witchdoctor about me." They seemed easily to accept my strangeness too, after a moment's initial shock. Most cosmopolitan beasts, I thought. And when one of the two responded to my "Zdraste, tovarisch," with a softly guttural, "Spasebaw," and in answer to my question gave me the simple directions needed to reach the Registry of Mining Claims, I felt preposterously pleased, as if I were in a fairyland of talking animals. Of course these were very different Russians from the generally hairless Slavic Thins, Fats and Athletics of Circumluna, but in a way I liked them better. They seemed less supercilious, less morally conceited and puritanical. One of the soldiers stayed at his post, the other companionably dropped in beside me, carrying his laser rifle in a relaxed, casual manner. I pointed toward the distant, silvery prow of the spaceship rising above the low buildings around us and asked, "Goddard?" "Nyet," he replied emphatically. "Tsiolkovsky?" I suggested. "Da!" he confirmed in something of a growl, eying me for a moment severely before resuming his smiling, animal placidity. Te passed several bombed and  ' laser-charred areas. We met ten more furry soldierpairs before we reached the Registry, and in each instance the first procedure was repeated, so that by the time I entered the dingy building I had an escort of what seemed to me charming and docile teddy-bears, of average human height but more than human breadth. The facts that I was a good two feet taller than any of them and that none of them showed surprise at my height or exoskeleton doubtless added to my feeling of fairytale confidence. It did not even bother me when the bear-soldiers pressed into the building before, beside and behind me, and then remained in a half circle around me as I introduced myself to a Kapitan Taimanov, a gloriously golden-furred Russian who appeared to be in charge of things at the Registry. I believed they were merely child-curious about me. Taimanov waved me into a seat, called for vodka and caviar, and offered me a box from which I took a long thin cigarette. He snapped his furry fingers, and a soldier leaped to light it. Somewhat to my disappointment, it was only tobacco. Nevertheless I puffed it graciously. Kapitan Taimanov was all smiles and courtesy. We cKatted together lightly of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, of Dostoyevsky and Pasternak, of Moussorgsky and Khachaturian, of Alekhine and Keres. We almost started to play a game of chess. The only time his lip curled up from his formidable teeth' was when a brown-pelted soldier ran his tongue around His furry mouth as I downed my sip and the captain his glass of vodka. We complimented each other on our command of Russian, though his seemed to me a kind of pidgin compared to that I'd picked up in Circumluna. Then he led the conversation around to myself. 'H'or starters, I explained that I was a simple worker in the Communist undergrotind in Texas and how I had played the part of Kawstee Chiluhvehk' or Bone Man -- El Esqueleto -- from Dallas to Fort Johnson, helping foment the Bent-Back Revolution which had drawn Ranger units southward from Zhawlty Nawsh. "Then I take it you are not one of ours?" he said. "I mean, those grown tall by deliberate misuse of the directional Hormone in the laboratories and creches of Lake Baikal, taught Texan and sent to infiltrate that last evil stronghold of capitalism?" "No," I answered truthfully. "What is this about misuse of the directional Hormone? I thought it was used solely by Texans to giye them greater Height." He laughed and said, "I can see you are an innocent in some matters -- that freakish thing, a native revolutionary." He paused a moment to frown, the short golden fur of his forehead furrowing. "Or else those at Baikal decided it was best to equip you with a completely false memory and identity. No matter. As for the directional Hormone, we Russians employ it as Nature always intended -- Horizontally, so that we are stronger without additional strains on the heart, men able to cope with the svuface gravity of Jupiter, if that should ever become necessary. It also acts upon our hair in a multiplicatory fashion, producing those pelts which make Siberian weather far easier to cope with and which also make summer nudity more esthetic and cultural. Ah, my poor friend, you should see us sporting by the tens of thousands on the beaches aroimd Baikal and the Black Sea!" "Or around the nearest mudhole," I thought I heard a soldier mutter. But Taimanov did not catch that. He was slowly and solemnly looking me up and down, concealing whatever pity or contempt he may Have felt for my miserable figure -- asthenic or cerebrotonic ultimate -- in contrast with his own magnificent animal one. Finally he said most soulfully, a tear dripping from his left eye, "Poor tortured comrade, I can see without being told that you have spent many years in the prisons of Texas. It must Have been there that you learned Russian, from some equally imfortunate and Heroic captive. No, you do not Have to explain, I know it all. They have accused us Russians of brainwashing our enemies by deprivation of food, sleep and exercise, but wHat nation -- except TexasI -- Has applied carefully calculated starvation -- and perhaps the rack! -- to a point where a man is literally skin and bones, his muscles shriveled possibly beyond regeneration? Truly, the Soviets owe you much! But tell me this -- what unsung genius of the revolution provided you with that most clever powered framework which enables you to walk?" "The Russians gave it to me," I answered, thinking further to win his favor -- and actually l#ung not so much. At least Half the technicians who had built my exo had been Circumlunan Russians. ahawTtuh vuh aliduhP' he  cursed, half rising to his feet and pounding on the table until the bottle jumped; and it would Have cracked, except it was four inches thick. "For fifty years the military has been asking the scientists for powered body-armor for soldiers, and now at last we see it -- secretly given away to a foreign agent by the state security apparatus I Your pardon, comrade. This is not your fault, but the practice makes me furious." "You and your soldiers look to me so physically powerful," I put in placatingly, "that it would seem you would Have no need of mechanical aids." "True, we are as strong as kodiak bears," He agreed. "But with powered body-armor, we could leap rivers and single-handed encounter tanks and devastate cities. The atomic bomb would become a side-arm. One soldier could liberate an entire Central American country. Girrl" The idea of bears able to leap rivers sounded to me about as desirable as spiders able to fly, though I did not voice the thought Meanwhile Taimanov was muttering, "Nothing too good for our foreign agents! Anytffing good enougK for our soldiers! Grrr! But once more your pardon. Have more vodka. How else can I serve you?" Emboldened by this encouragement and another large sip of vodka, I told him about my local mining claim. I pointed out that as an ardent revolutionary crippled for life, I perhaps deserved financial compensation. He looked interested, said, "Da?" and inquired if I had documents to prove my claim. Now was my big moment. I asked if he could provide me with the amenities of a powerful sunlamp and a razor or electric clippers. 'liougK mystified, Ke complied with' my request. TKe electric clippers were especially fine, and he confided in me that Ke cut his entire pelt close -- en broscti -- for th'e summer months. Downing Half of another vodka, I unlocked my rib-cage at its center and folded it away to either side. Next I unzipped my winter suit from neck to crotch. TKe soldiers murmured approvingly at the amount of Kair disclosed. I clipped it all off close and directed the large sunlamp at my ventral side. "You are that cold, tovariscK?" Taimanov expostulated. "Even the vodka Kas not warmed you? Perhaps a steam bath -- " I lifted my hand and pointed it toward my middle. "Watch," I said. The twelve pairs of fur-circled soulful eyes grew larger as tiny blue-gray marks began to appear on my torso. Soon the message there was completely developed. Beginning high on my cKest and traveling interminably downward, somewhat distorted by the scars of my patio crawl and by various rashes, but legible all the same, were line after line of slate-blue print and script, interspersed with signatures, X-marks, letterheads and seals. It was all upside-down to me, but I knew it by heart. For it was simply a facsimile of Nicholas NimzovitcK Nisard's provisional claim to his pitchblende mine, together with the three transfers of ownership and a Circumlunan confirmation. My father hadn't entrusted me with the provisional claim but, probably stealing the idea from some spy story, had Kad a facsimile of it tattooed on my chest and belly in a preparation of silver nitrate, so that it would be invisible until I exposed it to bright sunlight or a sunlamp, whereupon the hitherto invisible silver would precipitate out as a dark powder and the claim appear written on my skin, clearly and permanently. I had certainly Kad a devil of a time keeping it undeveloped, especially in Lamar's patio. Now I felt fully repaid for my efforts. T explained tHe gist of tKe document and its postscripts to Kapitan Taimanov. He was amazed, as were His soldiers. He told me tKat I could undoubtedly obtain some large financial compensation, tKougK it was not witHin his immediate power to grant it. General Kan would Have to be consulted and possibly Novy Moscow. He poured me another vodka, offered me another cigarette and came around His desk to examine the tattooing more closely. I delicately sipped white fire and savored that burnt essence of earthiness, tobacco. Taimanov pointed a furry finger, hom-tipped, at the nethermost seal, a mandala quartering a cogwheel, tuning fork, beaker and atom. "What is that?" he inquired. "The great seal of Circumluna," I explained, "confirming all the writing above to be authentic. You see, there is one further detail about myself which I have neglected to tell you: that in addition to my revolutionary status I am also a Circumlunan of the Sack, visiting Terra under the protection of -- " My words were lost in Taimanov's growl of fury and command. I realized that somehow success and vodka Had made me careless. Before I could so much as up the power of my exo, I was seized from all sides. A hard paw-edge chopped expertly between my headbasket and shoulder girdle, paralyzing me and, I thought, breaking my neck. Quite unnecessarily another Hand jabbed up under the front of my rib-cage into my solar plexus, cutting off my breath. Then Taimanov, his face the mask of an enraged bear, procured a pair of insulated wire cutters and snipped all the leads from my batteries to my servomotors. T was hoisted up and rushed across the street to the old Amarillo Cuchillo jail, where my exo was removed and the two lightning pistols in my pouch waved in my face as proof that I was an assassin at least. I was shaken until I decided my neck wasn't broken, but would be shortly. Next I found myself strapped down on a table, again quite unnecessarily, and being interrogated by a formidable black-furred Colonel Bolbochan, who smoked an atrocious fat cigar, about a Circumlunan plot to seize all Russia and, though he seemed to think this matter of minor importance, the rest of Terra. He detnanded to know how I h'ad smuggled myself out of the Tsiolkovsky, what special instructions for sabotage and terrorism I h'ad been given and what devilisK plans for further horrors the crew of the Tsiot h'ad up their sleeves. Apparently the ground-bear Russians were unable to assault the ship directly, though able to prevent its takeoff. It was a mystery to me. In vain I insisted that I h'ad left the Tsiol at Dallas and thereafter devoted myself to a rabblerousing advantageous to Russia. In vain I assured him that the Circumlunan Russians were very nice people and constituted somewhat less than half of its population, and that they certainly Kad no designs against or much interest in Terran Russia. In vain I explained that I wasn't a true dweller in Circumluna, only an inhabitant of the subproletarian Sack, a harmless actor. When after a short period I did not produce answers of the sort Bolbochan wanted, I was systematically beaten with rubber truncheons. The humiliation was immense and the pain most excruciating. I had feared I would be driven mad if again deprived of my exoskeleton on Terra, but that fear was quite swallowed up in tlie physical agonies I was suffering. The shock of the blows prevented me from inventing a # d story that might even temporarily have satisfied the Black Colonel. It even stopped me from getting any profit from the philosophic notion that Death should make himself familiar with suffering, pain and all other approaches toward... himself. At one point I was asked to name my confederates: those still aboard the Tsiol, those who Had sneaked aground with me and also the still fouler beings -- Terran collaborators with the RussoCircumlunan devils. The only thing that kept me silent then was the remaining tatter of rational thought that it wouldn't Help me one bit to Have Mendoza and Company rounded up and beaten like myself. Still, I would soon have confessed even that, to halt the torture, if Black Bolbochan's questions Had not gone rocketing off into a farago about "moon monsters" which the satellitic Russians were planning to set loose in Siberia. Was I a moon monsters He had embarked on an even wilder inquiry about "Mars beetles" capable of devouring all Terra's vegetation, when a grizzled General Kan came galloping in and raised His hand -- to command, I supposed, new and more ingenious tortures. But I never learned what they were, for at that moment a velvetgloved inner blackness seized me and dragged me deep, deep down. Death', With' Spiders A s I came back to consciousness -- or rather, as consciousness came back to me, for I certainly didn't want it -- I discovered that I was in my coffin and they were nailing it up. The hammering awakened all of my old pains and a remarkable number of new ones. And the greatest of the new ones was cold. I figured that there must be about ten hammerers pounding away, and the nails by now as thick as pearls on a string. I knew I was still on Terra, because Gravity was in the coffin with me. It struck me as peculiarly unfair that Gravity should operate even inside coffins. One would think that at least death would bring release from the horrible force, but it doesn't. Such are the merciless ways of Terra. I commanded my eyes to open, so that I could look at the absolute darkness around me. I knew it would be absolute darkness, because no slightest glow came through my eyelids. But my eyelids, which were heavy and thick with one of the new pains, refused to part. One more proof that I was dead indeed. How I could still feel pain while dead was a problem which I pigeonholed. I guess I didn't want to have to admit that Hell existed. I attempted to reassess my situation philosophically. I was in great cold, in absolute darkness, in great pain (pigeonhole that one!), and inside my coffin (and they were still pounding on it). Well, one expects a coffin to be chilly and dark. It is also in the nature of coffins to be nailed up (though this one was taking a long time about it). But, especially if one has any illusions whatever left about the courtesy of humanity, one expects a coffin to fit -- to be, in my case, about ten by two by one-and-a-half feet, inside dimensions. And, if humanity is especially considerate, to be comfortably lined, preferably with quilted silk. My coffin had no lining, and it definitely did not fit. In fact, from the way my body was contorted, I could tell that it was little more than four by four by four feet. My Head, tilted up, lay in a bottom corner. My back was gravity-pressed against the coffin's hard bottom, which had a lattice of cracks in it, rather like the floor of President Lamar's patio. My legs rose sharply up and my feet were wedged into the upper comer of the box opposite my head. Yes, my coffin was a mere box, an ignominious cube. And would they please stop pounding on it! I t next occurred to me that, as a Hero of the BentBack Revolution, I should have been encoffmed in high state, wearing my exoskeleton and with' at least two gold medals, the other reading Socialist Actor Extraordinary. But I clearly didn't Have my exoskeleton. I was wearing only my winter suit and it was strangely loose on my torso, accounting in part for my frigid state. I began to try to figure out what had happened to me prior to my encoffination. My first theory was that I had been thrown down the Crazy-Russian Mohole, landed in a bed of feathers a kilometer thick and found myself in the Realm of the Dead, whose monitors had nailed me up in this cramping and shameful box as punishment for impersonating Death in the world above. And were continuing to nail. There were several things wrong with that theory. To mention only one, the Crazy-Russian Mohole was filled from bottom to top with red-hot and blueradioactive magma. I tried to think of another theory, but the hammering wouldn't let me. Instead, it re-ignited my every pain. It got louder and louder, less and less endurable. It became a hammering not on my coffin, but on my headbasket, then on my naked skull and face. As I realized I had been wanting to do all along, I escaped by dying. I instantly made a remarkable discovery. Whether one dies for seems no time at all to the one who dies. For the next thing I knew, consciousness had come snuffling back to my body like the persistent beast it is. It sniffed me from head to toes, from feet to fingertips. Then it nuzzled my neck and leaped inside my skull and curled up there, wide-eyed, ears a-prick, and still sniffing. I was in precisely the same situation as I had been before, except for one wonderful difference: the hammering Had stopped. I still felt a wide spectrum of pains, but now I felt them silently. Whoever had been pounding my coffin had gone away. P erhaps the potuiding Had been only in my Head all along. Perhaps it had been the pounding of my heart frantically trying to make my ghost-muscles work by over-supplying them with glucose and oxygen, and now at last sensibly shifted into neutral and only idling along. I wondered if it was now pumping hard enough to keep alive my toes, which were so high above me. Oh well, better gangrene of the toes than gangrene of the brain, my Consciousness informed me. Where did I get the idea I was alive when I knew I was dead? Better suppress it. Cool it, Consciousness! I worked hard on keeping myself dead. I concentrated on stilling every part of myself, beginning with the toes. This worked very well on my muscles, since most of them were ghosts to begin with, non-functional in six lunagravs. There was the bonus that as I stilled each area of my body, the pain stopped coming from it. I worked at suppressing my thoughts too, especially any effort to remember what had Happened to me. I also held onto the sneaky point that if only I were patient, if only I remained passive while enough time passed -- not very much -- then I would surely be dead of freezing, dehydration, heart failure, starvation or gangrene of the toes. In approximately that order. I do believe I would have completed the operation successfully except for one very nasty circumstance. Two large and sturdy spiders appeared on either side of me and began determinedly to explore the floor of my cubical coffin. When I say "appeared," I do not mean I saw them. But I became aware of them. I felt them. However, I had started to get a glow in my eyes that seemed not so much the random shootingoff of rods and cones as light coming through my immovable lids. In fact, I was working to suppress that glow when the two spiders turned up. It happens that I Have an irrational dread of spiders, though there are few in the Sack and those chiefly in aracHnidariums, where they get along as well in freefall as insects and all other tiny beasts to whom gravity or its absence are matters of small moment. So that when these turned up in my coffin, I was pretty thoroughly terrorized. A peculiarly Horrible particular was that these spiders were cripples. Each had Had three legs amputated, but the operations had been completely successful and they got around very well on their remaining five legs. How I could know so much about the spiders without being able to see into their minds also troubled me. Not, as I Have said, that I have any psi talents, or that spiders are known to be open to telepathy. Still, I was troubled. Finally, the spiders seemed hiucK too much interested in my wrists, persistently nuzzling them and even pushing and pulling them around. I waited each' moment for the stab of a poison fang. Go on, spiders, get it over with, I found myself thinking -- it only is a sixth way of dying. Then the two spiders approacheded my sides and began to crawl up onto my body, dragging my ' arms behind them. It was at this point I realized the spiders were my two hands. 'hough it may seem strange to some, this was no great improvement. Lying helpless in the dark while one's two hands begin to operate completely on their own, schizophrenically, is almost as bad as spiders would have been, believe me. Pinching first my suit and then cruelly pinching the skin of my chest, which was to my surprise smooth and hairless, they crawled up side by side to my neck, where they parted, each making for an ear. By Pluto, I thought, they are planning to strangle me! Why the idea of being strangled, or even self-strangled. Here now in his triumph where all things falter. Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, Ab a god self-slain on his own strange altar De lies dead.  ' -- "A Forsaken Garden," hy Algernon Charles Swinburne should have terrified me so, when I was exerting every atom of vnllpower to kill msrself andor keep m#Tself dead, is pretty m#rsterious. Perhaps by now I was becoming luxury-minded and wanted to die in comfort, witH ever-diminishing pains. But then I noticed that neither of my hands had left a thumb behind on my windpipe, as they would surely have done if their purpose had been strangulation and they had any sense at all. I relaxed a bit and waited with some curiosity to, see what they were up to. You see, I was already crediting them with sense and purpose. They say a man is essentially two hands and a brain. I was pretty sure by now that my hands were cooperating with a section or self of my brain below the consdous level, which last level had been wanting only to die andor stay dead -- until this moment, when curiosity had begun to motivate it Meanwhile my crawling hands had each gripped an earlobe very tightly with thumb and trigger finger. From this secure base, and with each digging little finger into cheek, they dug middle finger and ring finger into my upper and lower eyelids, and then spread. Tlus caused me even more pain than I expected, because it turned out that my eyelids were extremely badly swollen. Also, my eyeballs were imusually sensitive. I got the impression that this area of my face at least had undergone a severe allerpc reaction, or else received repeated blows. But no matter how hard I willed them to stop and despite the hoarse little screams that now began to issue from my dry throat, my fingers went cruelly and remorsely about their business. Bright gray light lanced into my eyes and tormented my retinas and the visual corners of my brain -- a third and not to be under-rated pain. Finally tears came, and at first they were a pain too. For a while I saw only their glimmer and the yellow blurs of matter floating in them. Gradually the pains diminished. My swollen lids became able to blink with my fingers' help and even assume most of the work of keeping themselves open. My tears washed the grainy, gluey stuff away, and I was able to see. T was in the mortised stone cell with a door of bars and a small barred window. Its dimensions were those of the height of a Mexican door, so I assumed it had originally been built by Texans for bent-backs. The light came through the window and another like it in the corridor beyond the door of bars. Through the nearer window I could see a high sign which' carried, white on black, the ten "Zhawlty NawsK." So I was not in the hands of the Rangers, but the Russians. Horrible memories began to rise. I kept them submerged while I traveled my gaze down my body from my catercomered toes. My black winter suit was open wide from my crotch to my neck, revealing my Hairless front covered by upsidedown lines of legal writing. I remembered everything -- in particular, every last stupidity. It only made me want to die. But even as I felt that, I noted that my fingers Had left my eyes, which stayed open a fair slit without manual aid, and were crawling down my torso toward my crotch, where I vas intuitively sure they intended to start zipping me up. This indication that the survival urge was once again in control had the effect of steadying if not cheering me. While my hands worked, I began the unpleasant business of assessing my situation. Fortunately in such' a case one need not begin by facing the worst, but can work up to it by easy stages. For instance, the first healthy reaction to a feeling of extreme guilt is the attempt to shift as much of that guilt as possible to other people. So it was not unnatural that my first thoughts were about my father, not angry so much as gently pitying thoughts, very sentimental. The poor old boob, I thought, running his theater in space, not knowing a damn thing about Terra, but dreaming his idiot dream about the mining claim that would one day make us all rich. Did it occur to him that the claim was only provisional? That the country in which it was registered had changed hands at least once and now two times? That to stop boobs like Himself from asserting their rights and claiming cash due them, and that without exception the Terrans are a planet of swindlers and roughnecks, intent only on money and power and ready on the slightest provocation to substitute violence for legal procedure? Oh, no! And then He had got the superidiot idea of sending me, his only son, down to terrible Terra to cash in on the mining claim. T Te did get the Longhairs to  build me a remarkable exoskeleton. I granted him that. But did he otherwise enlist their aid in His project? At least they knew a hell of a lot more about Terra than he did. No and double no! Instead he supplied me with a cloak, caneswords and an idiotically secret document. And I, super-boob that I was, had accepted this ridiculous role, even gloried in it. For a wKole terrible month on Terra, I had not lived, I Kad acted my way through everything. First I had been tempted by a mysterious role in a Texan palace revolution. Next I had eagerly plunged into the role of Death, leader of a grotesque adobe-hut revolution. Finally I had been imable to resist putting on a brief show of surprises for some talking bears -- an ultimate in wrong-way animal acts. Had even my love for Rosa and Rachel been anything but theater? Probably not. Everybody is always telling us actors that because we feel or seem to feel so much in the theater, we can't feel ansdhing in real life. Well then, face it, Scully, I told myself. For you, the great themes of Love and Death can be notlung but melodrama. You're plajdng a small role in a vast thriller with an unknown finish. ExQept that your role, bar lastminute rescues, seems just about ready to finish in death in an unheated Russian prison cell. So start pla#dng that role and quit bawling! A t that moment I heard a familiar voice roaring in the corridor. The language was Russian, but the import was pure Texan. "Quit fussing at me, you furry little fools! I want to see comrade La Cruz instanter. As consular agent of Texas in Zhawlty Nawsh, I got the right. Besides, can't you get the fur out of your eyes long enough to recognize General Kan's seal and signature? If you keep hindering me. I'll report you to him. I'll report you to Number One in Novy Moscow. I'll hold up on those chess sets from the Black Republic. I'll even stop that shipment of firewater and fisheggs I got coming in from Quebec! There, fellas, that's more like it now." Then a great familiar bulk filled the barred, MexicaTi-short doorway. "Wal, partner," the bulk said, "you sure have got yourself in the goldumedest, most miserablest, hopelessest fix since Sam Houston got his army backed against the San Jacinto River just before the like-named battle." I never would have thought that a time would ever come when the person I was most happy to see of all the hombres in the ripsnortin', melodramatic universe was Elmo Oilfield Earp. But that time had come! Fixing Ty the next day, #th' Spindletop, Elmo had got me in quite rapid succession, the following comforts: soup, a mattress a battery to heat my winter suit, a larger cell and -- at last! -- my exoskeleton. The Russians have removed its swords and all batteries but two, so that it operates at about quarter power. Sometimes I feel I am carrying it around, rather than it me. And when I plug in my suit heater, it stops moving altogether. Still, it is wonderful wearing it again. At first I had been so happy to see Elmo that it Had not occurred to me to wonder how He came to be there. Later, thinking it over, I realized he must Have been planning everything from our first meeting at Spaceport Dallas, possibly even earlier. I Have not asked him straight out if he is a Russian secret agent, and he Has certainly not volunteered that information. The war is over, he tells me. Russia says she is planning no further advances, Texas no reprisals, and a truce Has been agreed to. Elmo's story is that he is a loyal Texan who just Happened to be in the neighborhood when Texas sorely needed a consular agent in ZHawlty NawsH. Just happened to be! But perhaps I had best pretend to believe this tall tale. As the big rascal says, "Scully, most people in this imperfect world are so set on what they got to have, come Hell or high water, and on what they won't take under no circumstances, that there just got to be a few fixers around -- broadfice their personal integrity, or even on rare occasions their sacred honor, just to get life moving again, or keep it barely turning over like a wore-out engine." He confirmed my belated suspicion that all the rank-and-file Russians and most of the officer and beaurocrat class firmly believe that the Russians of Circumluna are the ultimate devils, the SuperTrotskyites, worse than Chinese, Texans or the blackestd # red fascists or inkiest Blacks. Well, why shouldn't they, after a century of propaganda attributing every evil from meteorite showers to anti-Soviet dreams to the malignant intervention of intellectual Russians in the sky? But, Elmo says, the Russian inner elite, her real rulers. Have come to realize that their country desperately needs certain items which only Circumlxma can furnish them: fine instruments, computer circuits, new higKer matHs. They are seeking a rapprochement with Circumluna wHicH will permit trade without scandalizing or even driving into revolt the rank-and-file. General Kan, I gather, is the sole member of the elite. He has been able to prevent attacks on the Tsiolkovsky, but he must keep her crew in quarantine to satisfy military prejudice. He also was the one who halted my torture, though not daring to go so far as to command special care for me. That had to be left to Elmo the Fixer, so he could be blamed if necessary. We had beet borsch for dinner. Text day Elmo procured me ' the unheard-of amenity of a learned El Tacito and Mendoza would give it to me, in guise of Elmo's greaser servants. I was considerably refreshed, though my varicosities, etc., had worsened dismally. I quit prison-pacing, got a maximum of horizontal. Tas slipped me twin notes from Rosa and Rachel. Both hoping for my swift recovery and wishing me good fortune. Both signed, "Affectionately." I wondered if either or both of them would come to the moon with me. By their ultimatum to me, I would have to choose between them. It would be a very hard choice. I decided to play the scenes as they came. That evening Elmo brought such good news I could hardly believe it. It set my imagination racing. Through General Kan, He has learned that the Russian inner elite is considering a deal whereby , as hero of the bent-back revolution, would be presented with "reward" of materials needed by Circumluna. Later, still as hero, not Circumlunan or Sackabond, I would make "party contribution" of stuff Russia needs from Circumluna. As part of the deal, I would also have formally to give up my family's claim to the Lost CrazyCree (new name) Pitchblende Mine. I asked him, "Why so much fuss by pirates over paper proprieties?" He replied, "Scully, you don't understand these Russians. If their fur were as all tied up as their nerves are inside them, they'd be kinky as blacks. They're not relaxed like Texans. They don't think broad and easy about moral and legal issues. When they pull a fast one, they want every detail that reflects a bit of good on them pinned down tight." I then asked him worriedly that if the "gift" to me were automatically supposed to go to the Circumlunans, would I also be able to use it to get from the Circumlunans the concessions I wanted for the La Cruz TEeater and all sackabonds? He told me, "Look, Scully, you Hang onto tHat gift and you bargain witH it until you get what you want I guarantee you the LongHairs will play ball. I'm sorry to say it, Scully, but I sometimes think you weren't bom with the business sense of a squirrel -- what am I saying, squirrel? I mean lemming." On reconsideration, this makes me wonder if Elmo weren't in on the whole deal to bring me down to Terra -- the building of my exoskeleton, even father's idiot notion... I don't know where to stop. XText day, Spindletop #tK, there was a hideous development. We got meat soup, but I couldn't touch it. Elmo brought news that Russians demand the facsimile mining claim, flayed from my chest, before they will play ball. They insist on their "pound of flesh," as bad as Sh'ylock. They've promised to make repair skin-graft on me, but that would take more weeks, months on Terra with chances of survival very slim. Elmo said, "Don't worry, Scully. I'll argue my best with them, tEough they're stubbomer critters than President Austin was, bless him, tKe pighead. WHen a bear decides to claw you, it's hard to change his mind by appealing to his logic and common sense." To get my mind off this Horrible possibility, I gave it tEe tougH task of figuring out wHicH of the two girls to ask to marry me. After long listings of tEeir good and bad qualities, my feelings, etc., I decided on Rosa Morales. The chief point is that, under all fieriness, she Has basic Latin submissiveness, I think. While RacHel would try to run me. I was not Happy about my decision. Elmo also reported that Fanninowicz has formally defected to the Russians. When and if he recovers from the dose of radioactivity he got at the gusher, he will go to Novy Tech as full professor of engineering and design power-armor for Russian soldiers, borrowing many details from my exoskeleton, I'm sure. It figures. If all Terra felt peaceful except one destruction-bent farm-boy, a German would build him a slingshot. On Spindletop #tH, the Russians were still after my hide. Yet life must go on, no matter what horrors loom, so when Rosa visited me in jail, I proposed marriage to her. She kept me in suspense for a long time, made me really argue. Clincher was when I told her she would be top free-fall dancing girl and star acrobat in La Cruz TKeater. I added, "Besides -- but don't tell anyone this -- I have always had a terrific yen for short girls." She yielded then and immediately demanded we summon "the Honorable Miss Lamar," and tell her about my decision in Rosa's presence. T Tere I drew the line and also blew my top. I insisted that while still on Terra I simply could not bear to hurt in that way Rachel, who had done so many things for me, even saved my life. She could be told after Rosa and I were off Earth', but not now. Rosa told me the marriage-deal was off. We argued and argued. We finally hit on a compromise. With Rosa looking on and fighting over each word, wanting to make it harsher, I wrote Rachel a letter breaking the news gently, but telling her in no uncertain terms I was marrying Rosa and leaving tall Texans forever, sorry about that. We then gave the letter to Elmo, to be delivered to Rachel immediately after TsioPs blast-off. I also extracted from Rosa her promise -- hand on imaginary Bible, heart crossed -- that she will not tell Rachel, by word or indirection, about her victory. I told Elmo I would be taking him up on that "wife" reservation After the burial-parties leave And the baffled kites have fled; The wise hyaenas come out at eve To take account of our dead. -- Rudyard Kipling on TsioL He grinned and made a ring of thumb and middle finger, to assure me it was as good as done. Afterwards I felt miserable, but reminded myself I Had taken the only sensible course. After all, every woman in the universe is basically monogamous and accepts other arrangements -- polygamy, even polyandry, etc. -- when they are only game in town. Secretly I know I will grieve forever for Rachel. Yet I have done the wise thing. Besides, there is always Idris Mclllwraith. th Spindletop was a day for rejoicing. The Russians agreed to content themselves wtH photographs of my ventral side, plus quitclaim signed and sworn to by me, provided Father sends down original claim by first rocket. I patted myself on chest with great feelings of relief. Departxire is planned for tomorrow. All my Happiness was completely dashed when Rachel paid me an unexpected visit in jail. From zenith to nadir in one easy jump. She was wearing BlackMadonna rig, damn Her, minus pistols of course, and looking very chipper. Her chippemess faded, but she kept brave smile as she said, "Captain Skull, I wish to tender you my sincerest congratidations and wish you a long life of bliss." "Thanks, but what do you mean?" I asked, automatically sparring for time. "That I won't lose my front skin? Yes, I'll be happy about that the rest of my life. I don't know about blissful." "You know what I mean," she said softly. "You and Rosa. From the first time I saw you together, I knew you were meant for each other. That's why I lit into Her so fierce. Even then I realized I was just a clumsy old Texas gal, meant to be a poetry-writin' and little-theater old maid, and nothin' else. But don't you grieve, Scully, don't you give me a thought, except maybe to remember just for a moment on dark nights in space that there was once a platinum-haired girl in black on a silver horse, who loved you a little." "What do you mean, me and Rosa?" I asked. Dammit, Rosa had promised me she wouldn't tell! "And who is supposed to have loved me a little, you or your horse?" "You know what I mean, Scully," she said and then added in a shaky whisper, "Marryin' up. Gettin' hitched." "Did Rosa tell you that?" I demanded furiously, my voice shaking. Dammit, a promise is a promise. "Oh, no, she didn't tell me in so many words," Rachel assured me. "But I knew sHe'd been visiting you. And nobody could Have misread tKe meaning of tKe brigHtness in Her eyes. Besides tKat, sHe danced all over tKe tent." TKen the Black Madonna drew Herself up. "As for my Korse, Scully, if Ke ever meets up with you again, I hope Ke kicks your face in!" A t tKat moment I became, in absolutely cold blood, an utter cad. I said, "Listen to me, RacKel, Rosa lied to you, or at any rate, sKe did everytKing in Her power to create a false impression. WKen she visited me yesterday Here, sKe asked me to marry Her and I turned Her down. Oh, I was as nice about it as I could be. You and I botH know sKe's a good little trouper. But in essence I turned Her down. You're tKe only woman I ever loved in my life, princess, and you know it. Captain Skull's Heart is yours -- to tromp on or toss aside, if tKat's your pleasure -- but yours forever!" Despite my eloquence, it took me a remarkably long time to win Her. SKe was especially suspicious about me Having turned Rosa down. Feeling myself every second a vicious Hypocrite and complete villain, I Had to invent proof after proof until sKe consented to beKeve me. And tKen tKere still remained all tKe work of persuading RacKel to marry me. I finally managed it only by promising her sKe'd be star tragedienne of the La Cruz Theater and tKat we'd produce both Houston's Afire and Storm Over El Paso. (Would tKey be fringeacceptable? OH, well, we have play-doctors. I'm one myself.) I also Had to add, "Besides -- but don't tell anyone this -- I Have always Had a terrific yen for tall girls." "How'd you find tKat out?" sKe demanded. "WHat otKer tall females Has your fickle Heart been fixed on, Scully darlin'?" Great Jupiter! I Had to talk fast and watcH my every word not to bring in tKe name of Idris McIllwraitH. But in tKe end sKe did accept me. And tKen -- oH, my aching mind -- we Had to repeat every detail Rosa Had insisted on, down to RacKel supervising me while I wrote tKe letter of sad rejection to Rosa, and we sealed it and Handed it over to Elmo for delivery. My nerves were zinging for fear he'd give tKe sKow away, but he didn't. After RacKel Had gone, however, Ke did tell me, "Scully, I must say I tlunk you're a natural-Kom Kero of tKe punisKmentseeking sort. Wves are a combination of gadfly, rattlesnake and colt or sow. I ain't ever Had tfie unwisdom, and maybe nerve too, to take on even one. And Here )Tou are putting yourself in tKe ring witK two! And not on Terra eitKer, wKere at least tKere's space to disappear into, but up in tKe Sack, wKere I gatHer tKings are a bit cozy. OK, well, every man to his own insanity. I suppose you'll be wanting anotKer 'wife' ticket on tKe Tshl. Guess I can wangle it, if you'll agree to give the Russia pKotograpKers a free Kand witK you the next couple da#TS." "Can't be 'wife,' " I told him. "TsioFs crew is all Russki, and Russian Circumlunans are all most conventionally moral, at least as far as us Sackabonds are concerned. A bigamous actor is just wKat they're waiting for. Had better be 'sister,' I guess. At least our Heights agree." " 'Sister it'll be. But Kow you going to justify tKat to Rachel. Or Kookie eitKer?" "My problem. And one more favor, ami. On takeoff day, please see to it that each of them is privately summoned to Tsiot at different times, and tKat tKey're at least strapped down -- and preferably given spacesickness, et cetera, injections -- before tKey know tKe other's aboard." "Do my best, old Koss. TKougK it'd be a mercy to you if I botched it. But it's your funeral." Soon as Ke was gone, I flopped and stayed horizontal twelve hours. TKe session witK Rachel Had really finished me. And tomorrow, pKotograpKers! I wondered if Russki ones are sucK wearisome clots as Sack "artists of tKe camera." WKat artistry is there in pushing tKe button of a macKine tKat sausage-slices visual reality? Also, of course, guilts, fears and apprehensions tore me. Even in the Sack, bigamy must be by freest consent of all parties concerned. OK well, man is by nature P#I#'-. gamous, or at least aspires to be so, and women must make tKe best of it. For they are the best. Or else I, to name one, wouldn't want them. 'Ke Russki pKotograpKers finisKed witK me on the last of Spindletop -- and they came closer to finishing me, too, th'an even my maratKon-wooing of Rachel. TKey also proved much' worse than Sack-snapsKooters, throwing me around and posing me as if I were a sack of flour, demanding tKe impossible of me physically, especially in motion sKots, grudging me occasional minutes in wKicH to eat, eliminate and pass out, just as if there were no labor laws whatsoever in the Homeland of Socialism. (Guess there aren't.) TKey wore out all my batteries, so I would Have Had to be carried aboard tKe Tsiolkosky, except tHat General Kan made a surly quartermaster Hunt me up replacements from those used in C.C.C.P. power weapons. He also restored me my telescopic swords, because cameramen wanted process shots of me pinking Austin, Lamar, Hunt, Ch'ase, Burleson and a whole detachment of fake Rangers. From now on I am a gone goose in the Lone Star Republic. No one there will believe I was anything but a knowing Russian agent from the moment I landed in Dallas. The photogs also made use of me to the very end, for the last shots had to be of me boarding Tsiolkovsky amidst crowds of cheering Mexes and Cree Indians, who Had gotten themselves a commissar now and were finding life a little more strenuous, what with the rigors of Russian overlordship being added to the rigors of nature in this new slice of Hither Siberia, But somehow I managed to endure the worst the pHotogs could dish out and still stay erect on my exolegs. If all those pix don't sell me -- and indirectly Circumlima -- to the Russki rank-and-file, I don't know what can. During those last shots I managed to say my warm good-bys to GucHu, El Tacito, Carlos Mendoza and Father Francisco, who blessed me surreptitiously and told me he Has discovered he has a mission to convert the Crees, but not to mention it. Guchu said, "Back to the Acificpay Chosen for me. Every time I consort with you ofays, I find you're crazier squares than before. Drop out, man, and turn off. You're not too bad, at that Happen you stuck around, might be I could get you status as an Honorary black." Old Tas grunted a sardonic "Vaya con Muerta, El Esqueleto." I countered, "Before I 'go with Death,' he'll Have to fight me to the finish." He shrugged. "What other way?" Mendoza shook my hand. "For El Toro too," he said. We squeezed hard. Elmo contacted me at the end too, though he was careful to keep out of the pictures and our conversation out of earshot. He explained, "A fixer's got to keep out of humanity's eye and forego the plaudits of the public, no matter how much His ego'd he soothed by a little notoriety. Yeah, the gals are both aboard, God Help you, just as you asked for them to be. Here's a pack of reefers and a jug of tequila to sooth your nerves. THe#r're gonna need it Now you screw the most you can, you hear me, out of those Longhairs for your 'gift' Nobody looks after a man but a man. Remember you got no head for money, but lucky impulses. You'll never go far wrong. Incidentally -- but keep this under your headbasket -- don't exiect Texas to take h'er defeat lying down. Russia's got one mohole mine, but Lone Star's got two hundred." "Which side are you really on, Elmo?" I asked him impulsively. "Mine," he grinned at me. oing aboard Tsiolkovsky was like returning to Circumluna, except for the continuing curse of gravity. Everything was clean, except me. All the people were calm and intelligent, even if slightly condescending. I saw the "gift" carefully stowed, then followed my learned doctor-stewardess to my water-mattress in a small alcove curtained to either side. I flopped gratefully. "You will remove your prosthetic," she informed me in purest classic Russian. "Nyet," I informed her. She shrugged. "I shall strap you down." Another "Nyet" from me. "There are hand-holds," I added. Another shrug from her. "Injections?" "Da," I agreed. She made them, sniffing at me a little. When she was gone, I opened the curtains on either side. To my left and right, on similar mattresses, but strapped down, were Rachel Vachel and La Cucaracha. Each smiled at me dreamily. Then they saw each other. "Why, you dirty, double-crossin', bigamy-bent Bluebeard!" Rachel gasped. "Beard black," I informed her coolly. "Bigamy mildest of marital variations in Sack." "Liar! Blasphemer! Betrayer of virgins!" Kookie spat at me from the other side. "I warn you, you black worm, never trust me with a sharp knife. I shall employ it to separate you from your organs of generation!" "I'll hold him down," Rachel told her. "Beloveds," I said serenely, "in Cincinnati one of you said, Tt may be different in the sky.' Believe me, it will be. Meanwhile, let us look on this simply as another theatrical tour." "My anger is destroying my mind!" Rosa wailed. "Scully, ah'm fit to be tied," Rachel said. "You are tied," I reminded Her. 'T'he stewardess returned. "Raise ship in one minute. Now minus # seconds. A disturbance here?" "Indeed yes!" Rosa cried. "I am this villain's wife and I wish to get off this filthy ship at once!" "Ah'm His wife," Rachel contradicted her. "And ah'm the one wants to debark." I moved my forefingers in little circles at my temples. THe stewardess looked at a card in Ker Hand. "It says 'sister Here." Unsmiling, sHe waved a finger at me once. "You folk of the Sack give Circumluna a most unfortunate reputation. You are not kultutny. But wHat is one to expect of actors? Minus #." SHe departed. At that moment tHe p.a. system most opportanely struck up witH The Saber Dance from KHacHaturian's Gayne, almost drowning out tHe girls' outraged babblings. I lightly touched a finger to either ear. I could feel the drugs taking Hold. But I resisted them through the shock of blastoff and the dreadful minutes of # lunagravs until brennschluss. Then, even as I was passing out, I felt the delicious release from bondage. My ghost muscles stirred. My exoskeleton became an encumbrance. I was back in my only proper environment. # Years Later Al'y great-great grandson Has just returned from a trip downstairs. For sentimental reasons I wished him to wear my exoskeleton, but the Longhairs have invented an anti-grav suit that is little more than silvery overalls. So Good Old Titanium remained in His transparent museum ovoid. Times change. But only a little. The La Cruz Theater of the Sphere goes on from hit to hit and flop to flop. Longhair syntHograv (inevitable mate to antigrav) makes entrances and exits easier. Thought-projectors give new dramas enriched subjective content. Father and mother retired. Are thinking of spending last years in new transparent-translucent allplastic satellite, the Ship, building # degrees away in same orbit as Circumlxma. Quarter of Ship's population will be Circumlunan colonists, rest Terran refugees. My wives still bicker with me and each other, but mostly we get on famously. It is years since they confessed to me that way back in Dallas they Had decided to come with me to the Sack as bigamous wives. They Had just wanted to get out of me the best deal they could. Long ago we produced Houston's Afire. It has become a stock item in our repertoire. Next week we premier Storm Over El Paso. Rachel Vachel quite rapidly transformed into an exquisite Thin and, besides Her tragic acting, poetry and playwriting, began to alternate strip routines with Idris Mclllwraith'. WitK sucK activities and the passing years, President Lamar's daughter Kas developed a more relaxed morality, which' is natural in a Texan, come to think of it. But I do not know about her affairs, if any, I never spy on my wives and expect, though I do not always get, the same courtesy from them. La Cucaracha remains completely unchanged, a natural Athletic, a demanding wife and a shrew-cat for jealousy. She is the Sack's unequalled aerobatrix and, now that we have syntho-gfav, entertains with classic Flamenco dances. T?ifty years ago, partly to assert my independence, I had a mad love affair with' Idris Mclllwraith, which for two weeks was the talk of the Sack and Circumluna's shame. It ended when Rosa sliced me twice, fortunately only across the chest. She was fined -- for nicking the bubble with a wild slash and almost depressurizing the Sack compartment. Poor Idris. Twenty years ago Rachel developed a serious heart degeneration -- it is not safe to go Thin after childhood. But then Idris was explosively brained by a tiny meteorite -- first time such a thing happened -- and Rachel received her aged but hale heart as transplant. She sometimes asks, "How's it make you feel, Scully, to have your old girlfriend's Heart beating inside of me?" How to answer that one? Aside from Idris we are all going strong. CircumIunan biologists have developed the TexoRussian directional hormone and are appl#Hlng it neither vertically nor horizontally, but temporarily, so that a man is taller in time. In any case, who ever dies in free fall? At first and even second appearance, it is a most Harsh environment, yet I believe life and man were meant for it. Life itself appeared and had its first great flowering in a kind of free fall, the sea. As life shifted some of its companies to land, the battle against gravity continued -- the insects by their lightness and wings, the bird also. Even our immediate and happy-go-lucky treedwelling forebearers Had their own small idea about the achievement of free fall. Now with our nulgrav existence and technological anti-grav, we are perhaps really going somewhere. At any rate, it can be a good life. For almost a century Russian "gifts" squared Sack's account with Circumluna. But then, due in part to great military reverses, a new spasm of Marxist fundamentalism and of hate for SkyRussians developed in C.C.C.P. "Gifts" cut off quick. Circumlunans, used to them, blamed us Sackabonds. It was chiefly to find a new source of Terran funds that Christopher Crockett La Crriz V went downstairs. T Te tells a strange story. Greatly aided by mohole radioactives, Texas mounted war after war against Russia and China. At the same time, unbridled and paranoically grandiose use of Hormone was creating generations of Texans ten and twelve feet high'. minds, but were tragically shortlived -- height's and mass's strain on heart and whole system, plus effects of mounting radioactivity of air, ground, sea, all else. Texas had an army deep in Mongolia, when its general, a #year-old, #-foot military genius of the Alexander breed, succumbed to early heart disease. At tKe same time, the Seventh BentBack Revolution was successful. Within a year all tall Texans were dead, unless there is trutH in report of small Texan colonies in Australia and Antartica. They had gone the way of the dinosaurs and Peking Man. Their size was developed at the expense of more important survival traits -- too big for their ego and tKeir dreams. What was left of Texas became the curious nation of Anarquia Mehico -- if a self-styled "anarchy" may be called a nation. Its boundary with Russia is approximately the ancient one between the old United States and Canada. The furry ones Have become more and more arctic, uninterested in temperate-zone conquests. Besides, all tHe land to the south is badly contaminated by radioactivity from the moholes. Anarquia is a curious and fairly promising nation, I gather, though it must devote much' of its thought and energy to purifying its poisoned air, soil, water, people and germ plasm. The combination of Latin, Indian and short Texan (honorary Mex) seems not a bad one. Tall Texas left much salvageable industry, while the Mexes, gaining ground with' each' revolution, became a more prudent and industrious race. At any rate, the La Cruz Theater and the Sack have found new funds there to Help to pay their rent to Circumlima. The donor was the Mendoza-Earp Foundation for Serendipitous Studies, founded by the Carlos and the Elmo Oilfield, whom I once knew. Carlos lived to a great age for a Terran, dying only a quarter century ago, while Elmo disappeared in Africa some fifty years before that, during a mysterious "fixing" mission for the Pacific Black Republic. He left Mendoza, by illegal channels of course, a considerable fortune. Recalling how he both sucked me in and took care of me, remembering his tall tales and belly realism, but above all else his irreverent good humor, I like to think of him still going on with his "fixing," somewhere. Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence In KlencefIctIon writing. Every story appearing In the magozines Galaxy and If In Issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runnerup will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected It Intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and If, Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines In making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month offer the December issues appear. Qaicux#f lioohUtelL T he Russians, may the snow fall lightly, have always loved large, noisy things. They are the people of the biggest cannon, the biggest concentrations of cannon, the biggest orchestras, the biggest bells, the biggest rockets and clusters of rockets... If it functions, good. If it advertises that it functions, ever so much the better. A Russian -- a real, honest-to-Muscovy Russian -- is the closest Europe Has yet come to producing a Texan. The Russians, may the river not flood, have their reasons for being among the few people on Earth to determine attitude on the basis of physical evidence. What concerns us is that the peoples who equate progress with physical exertion, and who evaluate the worth of progress by ascertaining the efficiency of the attendant physical effort, are also classically the science-fiction peoples. And the Russians Have a penchant for sf tKat goes back to the day of Mary Shelley at least. There is a rich tradition of imitation-Frankensfen fiction in Russian, probably reaching down to the pulpiest possible levels, for the old emigres who used to reminisce about them so fondly were also avid Nick Carter fans in their boyhoods. (To this day, I believe, the Novoye Russkoye Slovo continues the practice of decades in running one comic strip for its audience of U.S.-resident newspaper readers. "Tarzan" with Cyvisual experience). What is also interesting is that while Russian sf writers are outof-phase with us, they nevertheless find and exploit the same possibilities we do, although apparently some years behind us. Postwar Soviet sf, for example, was Gemsbackian, with the same sesquipedalian enthusiasm for technology the liberator: "Ah, Comrade, here among the marvels of the year #, while we traverse the pneumatic tubeway between your apartment and your office, we are free to discuss dialectical materialism in total tranquility, as contrasted to the old days when one had to shout in the street. One almost regrets the interval is so short, but if we leave any points uncovered, I shall dictate a hypnagogic electromagnetic recording of my remarks, and you shall play it in your sleep tonight on your somniac encephalon, da?" The Russians now, may the tundra bloom, give every evidence of having discovered John Campbell. ("But why was the whole thing started in the first place? What for?" "Well, just how should I explain it...?" Betly thought a moment. "You see, it's this way in science: "What if?' A lot of discoveries have come from this." "What do you mean by "What if?' " "Well, take for instance: "What if we place a live wire in a magnetic field?' This "What if gave us the electric motor... in short, it just means experimenting.") Out of context, this may sound like simply a more sophisticated expression of enthusiasm for tecHnology. To some extent it is, but it is even more an entHusiasm for th'e reflective, speculative mind of tKe pbilosopHer of engineering. It is a sHift toward Humanism, altfiougH, as in tKe original, always witK tKe HigHest premium b'dng placed on competence. First you qualify; then you may speak. Many of tKe stories in Path Into the Unknown, subtitled "TKe Best of Soviet Science Fiction," (Delacorte Press, #, witH an introduction by JuditH Merril), read as if tKey were from tKe back pages of circa # Astoundins. One or two, "An Emergency Case" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and "The Purple Mummy," by Anatoly Dneprov, remind one powerfully of Eando Binder; tKe parallel is uncanny in tKe case of tKe Strugatskjrs, for "Wanderers and Travellers" by Arkady Strugatsky working alone is an apparently poetic and Humanistic story built around an obvious gimmick employed to give tKe reader a momentary cKeap tKrill witKout putting Kim -- or tKe autKor -- to tKe work of going tKrougK tKe story wKicH sKould begin wKere Strugatsky leaves it. On tHis and otKer evidence, I would say tKat wKoever compiled tKis antKology of tKe "best," (wKicH carries an orinal English cop # uigKt date of #), Kad tKe same delicate problem Miss Merril Has every year in tKis country -- Kow to bring out a book you can call tKe "best" wKile still including some bylines tKe public will recognize as topdrawer even tKougK tHey're getting a little musty. TKe Russians, on tKe basis of example, don't Have any better an answer here than we do. TKe tone of general dull competence and overfamiliarity in tKis book is Happily interrupted by Sever Gansovsks "A Day of WratK." G. Gorfs "TKe Boy" has its momenfs. BotH are novelettes; tKe two sKort stories in tlus book, "TKe Conflict" and "Robby," botK by Ilya VarsKavsky, prefigure wKat must by now be a booming, general enthusiasm for F # b SF-style writing... they're about due for it, may tKe potato blossom. "A Day of WratK" (from which tKe 'WKat if passage was quoted -- I made up tKe Hypnagogic pneumatic one, from a memory of Yefremov), is about an experiment gone wrong -- tKe creation, and then tKe abandonment, of a bearlike, android race, wKo begin to terrorize a rural province after being left to tiieir own devices. TKe characters in tKe story have pseudo-Anglic names: Betly, Fidler, Mellor, Richard and Klein. It is a little like The Island of Dr. Moreau, and a little bit like Walter M. Miller's "Conditionally Human," but it is set in the Soviet Union although' Gansovsky may not realize that; nowhere else on Earth, any more, are you going to find the combination of technological urban centers, horseback transportation and brooding extreme rural isolation that makes this story so effective. This capability of presenting immediate contrasts between technology's attitude and th'e old soil-bound ways (and arousing the old peasant fear of beckoning, imperious voices outside the cabin at night) is apparently the major unique contribution the Russians are making to the body of science fiction. It's also interesting that Gansovsky ends his story with a peasant uprising against the androids, after the metropolitan establishment fails to protect them from its own creations, but if this really signifies anything political, I doubt if even Gansovsky realizes it out loud. There are translation problems, by the way. "The Boy" dissolves into incomprehensibility just as we are about to learn how a contemporary young genius could be the medium of communication with a similar boy from a prehistoric terrestrial civilization. Judy feels the translator was trying to to say "doppelganger" in a Gilbert Gosseynish sense, but who can be sure? And "The Purple Mummy" has to be "The Purple Mannequin," or "The Purple Simulacrum." Either way, it's purple. But Vladislav Krapivin's "Meeting my Brother" is ultraviolet, or perhaps supersonic, in exactly the same way Don A. Stuart wrote in a high whine whose upper registers plucked directly at the tough sentimentalist in all of us. It's about a lonely boy who waits for a cosmonaut ancestor to come back from a time-dilation flight and be his older brother. It's not a very good story. In U. S. terms, there are # plot devices all through it, and lots of symbols straight out of the self-conscious literary days of the #'s. But it's a lovely human idea, and that's what the story's about. The science in it is used solely for the purpose of offering an otherwise impossible solution to a common human problem; this is the latest definition of science fiction, on either side of the Iron Curtain time-shift. The Russians, may the spoon not break the glass, are a people just like us -- contradictory, a little more rural, a little more academic, just as overwhelming and convinced they're right, louder than most of us in assuming their rightness and equally speculative in evolving fresh views of themselves. This is a good book. It won't tell you whether the Russians are bad or good -- I personally find the U.S.A. preferable -- but particularly if you are interested in it as an indicator of h'ow people are getting along with their physical capabilities... here is a most valuable opportunity to take a fresh' perspective. Another book for you is Mark R. Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Oxford University Press, New York, #. #). This has been out for some time, but no one has paid enough attention to it, so I'm doubling back to it now. Hillegas teaches English' and conducts a course in science fiction and utopian fantasy at book appears to be a thesis. Sidney Coleman and Harlan Ellison both tell me there is nothing new in it. And I expect this is true. But there was lots new in it to me. Not so much because it revolutionized any profound views on my part. But because it does the job it offers to do. It surveys and comments on the course of Wellsian science fiction, from its development by H. G. Wells on through its subsequent modifications, its effect on such Russian writers as Evgenyi Zamyatin and its response in such reactionaries as Aldous Huxley. It quotes and summarizes from Wells, from We and from an appreciation of Wells by Zamyatin, from Orwell, from Huxley, and among others, from Ayn Rand, who is pretty conclusively shown to have imported quite a bit of ZamyatinWells back into the Anglic side of the time-shift. In other words, it's a handy compendium of milestones, together with a covering explanation for where we were and where we're going, and why. For combined readability, portability and digestibility, there is nothing like it in the field. I have grave reservations about some of its conclusions on Wells's evolution as a writer, because I differ # degrees... well, #... with Hillegas's preconceptions on the subject. And Wells is the key to the whole business, for us as well as the Russians, because he remain the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the despair, which are embodied in technology and which are the major facts of life in our world. So how you regard Wells, and what you think about Huxley, Orwell, Rand and other popular philosophers who reacted to him and to what he felt at various times in his career, is crucial to what you will think of Hillegas's reasoning. But this is not crucial to whether the book is valuable, and you should have it. Because if you are past the stage where anything labeled "sf" is just ducky wonderful, and you are beginning to find that some writers sing to you wfiile otKers erence to measurable factors like literary ability, th'en tKere may not be anything new for you in this book, but where else is it all in one place? We are becoming educated. The cuteness of the early F#SF school of editing -- and its open contempt for the accomplishments of the Campbellian school -- has paid off not only in buckets and buckets of froth but in a positive move toward incorporating Liberal Arts concepts into wKat had been almost exclusively a B. S. field. We have paid for this, through' the nose, and we are still paying for it; the field is choked with poseurs. But we are begirming to get positive value for it, as well. It's in the nature of things that what we get is rarely either pure horse or pure unicorn. Take a book like R. A. Lafferty's Past Master (Ace). The setting is Astrobe, a Human world of the future; to all appearances, the only human world that counts. Astrobe was planned as a utopia, a golden place where the Humdn dream will reach full fruition. But things are in trouble. It's now the "Astrobe dream," for, as in Cordwainer Smith's world, the distinction between human and mechanical is fast rubbing out. Programmed persons, and mechanical assassins, destroy anyone whose emotions are not in accord with the dream. And despite the golden cities, there are "feral strips," where dwell people and beasts out of nightmare, and Barrio, is a devouring, rapidly exdwell in ghastly, short-lived squalor despite the fact that luxury and long life are freely available to all who return to society. The world, the dream and Man all are tottering. The triumvirate which rules the world meets in a guarded room to nominate the next World President at this crucial time. The mechanical killers meanwhile wreak slaughter with the guards in the corridors, for they must be kept away from the triumvirs, one of whom is their target because they can sense his lack of accord with the Astrobe dream. Whom do they select? Who else but the author of Utopia? Given a time-travelling capability, what more logical thing to do than to send back to old Earth for Sir Thomas More, wBo is also not only a certified, beatified Catholic saint but also A Man for All Seasons, and about to get his head cut off anyway? You see what I mean about education. If anyone had tried tKis even a few years ago, tKe writer would have Had to spend so much time building up More's credentials that there wouldn't have been room for any story. But things have changed, and Lafferty's "What if?" is not "What if you wanted to travel in time?" but "What if you had trouble in Utopia?" You also see what I mean about part horse, part unicorn. Because the ostensible "What if?" is "What if Thomas More had trouble in Utopia?" and to that "What if?" we get no believable answer. More has a great many adventures, meets many picturesque people, says some engaging things and does not much resemble either the hero of the play or the figure in the encyclopedia articles. His solution to the problem turns out to be to die in exactly the way he died in renaissance England, to great and implausible popular effect, except that again he departs into the future just before the blade falls. The temptations he meets are illusory; Lafferty is so busy creating incidents that he fails to sustain Thomas's character. It doesn't often happen, but here's a book that should have beefi # longer. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wHat's ia it, but it's a collection of good scenes at which Thomas arrives and departs; what is happening to Kim inside is happening in the waits offstage. His ultimate escape is worth a momentary smile, but it leaves a lasting sense of vitiation. It's the polar apposite of the empty feeling you get from stories in which it turns out Homer, Leonardo, Christ and Thomas Edison were all travelers from the future. It is good to see this kind of thing being written. It fills in the structure that Delany, Zelazny and some of those other people haven't paused to do more than indicate. It provides a place for skilled work to be done, and for future generations to evolve from. Lafferty is a good man, even if he does talk incessantly about his drinking problem. Well, anyway. This would have been a beautifully rounded column if Lafferty had only introduced Wells instead of More into the utopian problem. But Wells ' was so damned shabby-genteel. New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! # obert Silverberg, wKo Has written more books tHan most people Have letters, is a dapper young man witH a neat, scholarly beard, married to a pretty pKysicist named Barbara, possessor of rougfily a dozen Siamese cats and a Huge House formerly occupied by New York's famous "Little Flower," Fiorello H. LaQuardia. Among His accomplisEments is a successful term, just now ending, as president of tHe Science Fiction Writers of America. In last year's "Nebula" awards for excellence, Silverberg was in tHe running in two of tHe four competitions -- coming in second and tKird respectively witH His Ballantine novel, THorns, and His memorable sHort novel, Hawksbilt Station, originally publisKed in tHese pages a year or so ago. But nobody Has all tHe luck In tHe world, and Silverberg Has Had to take a few jolts from fortune -- most recently a large-scale fire wHicH wrecked His Home, interrupted completion of a number of books because tHe notes for tKem were unavailable during repairs and generally complicated His life. It's an ill wind, tHougH; tHe fire tHat postponed His books made it possible for Silverberg to put in a little more time on science-fiction stories. Nightwings is tHe first fruit Our opinion of it is fairly simply expressed: We just tfiink it's tHe best story He ever wrote.    Fritz Leiber, wHose A Specter Is Haunting Texas winds up in tHis issue, is at tHe moment en route to Clarion College, Pennsylvania, wHere He and Half a dozen otHer science-fiction notables will be teacHing a summer course in science-fiction writing. In tHe process of getting tHere Leiber is driving cross-coimtry from California, His car decorated witH notable lines from tHe novel... watcH for it! Brian W. Aldiss is Literary Ekiitor of tHe Oxford Dmly Meal in England, winner of tHe # Nebula award and Guest of Honor at tHe # World Science Fiction Convention in London. Lise Braun, a New York Housewife, appears Here for tHe first time anywHere. We predict you'll see Her again -- an easy prediction, as it Happens, because Her second sHort story. Leviathan, is bcHeduled for an early issue of Galaxy. The won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. CF'#I# by Emih No. CM'I# by CulIen'Rapp No. CX# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." too for S; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax. if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer I for only wh#n you F-c!ion Book Club and agree to acceot only lour books during tbe corning year. Kdlted hy Anthony Houcher #. A Riant (wovoIume collection of Rfcal kcicnce fiction readInR. Over # )gRe of exciiittR fiction-four fulMenRth noveN. twelve novelettes. elRhl short slorle.s by Hay Bradbury. Robert A. Heinleln. A. E. van Vogt. I'oul Ander.son. Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon. Alfred Be-iter. and a dozen more. Counts as I choice. Pub. ed. S.# counts as only a single choice! 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Garden City, New York # iMcihe ai-cfut iiiy (tdirutlon for inemhi'r.dii) in the Sclrmt V'irtlon itMik riub und rush tlii # txKiki wlio.sf nufuhvrii I luvi fur all # Tlifti ('wry month, .send im tlu i'IuIi'k free tiulletln. fitch tiuuk I iccf)l. I uill jiy only t.#U. plu.'i shipping td loiiidllng. unIfSk I ittkc iin csiraalut sflfctiun at  Idxlicr prlcc l need takr only four luuks within llif tutiilng yi'ur and may rrslgn al any timr liiercafter. dvllghted with my introductory packaRc. I muy return It in lU day.-, tiifUibfruhlp will lv lancfled Prlul Name Circle the numbers ot Ihe # books you went: -- .StaieIf under #, parent must kIkii here. (Offer Rood in l.'.S.A. unl.vl MJ. The Pail Throufli Toaerraw: "Future History" Stones, by KobertA Hemlem Pub cd. SS.fS Ml. Psycboaelsl. #... P. Davich. three minJy a aalasy apart meet and turn a tieepy villaxc into a niahimarc Pub. ed. W.W Mt. Colosaus b D. F. Jones. Macbirfe conquers man! "Inaeniout... alarming". Punch. Pub. ed. S#S S#. The Egg Shaped Ihtag. C. F.ngifieer finds crealure"programmed" lodesiroytheworld. Pub cd S#.#. #d. FuUsttc Voy. age. by Isaac Asimov. A miniaturiedteamof doctors invade a man's blood stream Pub. cd. SJ.tS dJ. The Time Hoppers. K. Silveiberg. Papulation explosion forces IhiHisands to flee Pub. ed iXH #. The Flying Saucer Keader. J lavid. Anthology fiction? Pub. cd. #. #. Elcfliciit?#. Fred Hoyle. Satan sPubed # #. Prom The Twilight Zoac by Rod Serling. # spine-tingling stones that breach the gap bet ween scicns'c Oil. UangerouiVF sloas. Anthology o( n original stones never before in print by Sturgeon, Andeisun. oiheis. Pub. cd S# #. Inlerrnptcd lourwey by John OFuller. The strange story of an American couple abducPub. ed. SS.# #. TIm FouadaIloa Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaiy reven tobarbatism. Pub cd # # OCTOBER # ,, # The Villains from Vega IV  by and  fe: s A History of Combat from # A.D. to # A.D.  A New Science Fiction Novelette by  Behind the Sandrat Hoax   Remember the Orbit of Explorer I? by  and many more We're grateful to all the science-fiction fans who gave Qur publications a clean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at the # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even more grateful to the many loyal readers who have made it possible for both on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're debetter in the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York I #I # rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for # Name .Zip Code... Prices oulside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Address... City  State Galaxy Is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published in Braille and Living Tape. October, #  Vol. #, No. # Editor by H.L Gold and EJ. Gold by KiTi Neville by Mock Reynolds by Colin Kapp by Christopher Anvil by Lorry Niven by Jock Wodhoms by Sydney Von Scyoc by lorry S. Todd by Vnily Lay by Fraderik Pohl by Algh Budrys Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertisiag Circalatioa Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President All rights Including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any slmliarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co... Inc. N. Title Reg. U. S. Pat Off. Y. Majority Rule A Eundr and olnetx-two years ago tiSe United States was bom after a revolution auned largely at le end of "taza tion witHout representation," TEe colonists did not suffer very gravely under EngEsU rule in any tangible terms; wEere tEey suffered was in tEe galling sense of being unable to decide tEeir own destinies. WEerefore tEig republic was formed, in an attempt to establisE "government of tEe people, by tEe people and for tEe people." TEe presidential election campaign we are now going tErougE is one of tEe mecEanisms designed to attain tEat idealistic goal. It was an astoniingly radical innovation. Nobody tEougEt it would work. Nations Ead elected tEeir rulers before, but never on sucE terms as tSese: never rulers wBose powers were so strictly defined by a Constitution and wEose terms of office were so dependent on tEe continuing confidence of tEe voters. Above all, never before Ead an electorate been so large; if it did not include women, or slaves, or more most of tEe propertyless, it did include most adult males. It was so radical tat it dismayed even most of tEe framers of the Constitution, wEo Hedged tEeir bets witE tc Electoral College, Hoping tEat some moderating influence mit keep tEe voters from electing a tyrant or an adventurer. Question is, do tEese institutions still work as tEey were intended, two centuries later? WEen le Constitution was written, PEiladelpEia was a twoday stagecoacE journey from New York, tEe city of WasEington did not exist, tEe communications between, say, SavannaH on tEe soutE and New England on tEe nortE were cEancy and slow. Even wEen tEere were tEirteen states, no President was able to campaign in all of tEem. Witness tEe # election. Ev ery candidate, after tEe nominations and before, Eas been on constant view before every voter interested enough to turn on a TV set. The vote itself will be as rapidly reported as tEe networks think the public will stand for -- they will know, by computer projection, the results from every state BaU an Hour after the polls close; TEey will know the results in some states hours before the polls close. It takes only a relatively small sample to give a computer enou to make a projection.) TEat  F Swinasi In a collection of new stories from today's capital of the "new thing." i '.I i';v' Edited by Judith Merril There's a different kind of story coming from London today -- and It's changing science fiction almost the way Carnaby Street changed fashion. And most readers. Including some jaded with ordinary SF, .are discovering new stimulation in the work of these swinging English writers. You'll be surprised, even shocked, at some of their concepts, but ell the authors represented in this collection by SPs leading anthologist will make you think -- as well as entertain you in an exciting now way. # Edited by Leon E. Stover and Harry Harrison Most story collections have a connecting theme, but few have ever had one as exciting as this. Using the basis of anthropology -- the study of man -- and the skill of some of the most prominent SF from the time man was still swing' log on branches to his first walk in space, and beyond.' With a foreword by well-known anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, and stories by such writers as 'Heinlein and Clarke, this Is almost required reading for SF fans. In fact it is required reading In some college anthropology courses! # To your bookseller or to Doublodoy  Company, Inc., DepL #-GX-# Cordon City, Now York # Eond mo Iho books I have checked below. J J I'm (inclosing my chock or money order for llio CO', I of tliu liooka and understand you'll pny nil iio'.logo.   Pioaso bill me the cost Of sample can come from as few as a dozen machines. WSat slows things down is the interpoation o human beings between macEine and inadiine -- a dozen or more election board workers, poll watchers, party officials in each polling place painfully recording the count. The machines are fast and reliable. The human beings are slow and sometimes otherwise. Race tracks do the thing better. There may be # parimutuel windows to receive bets, but each sale at each one of them is automatically counted, added in, relayed to a central information file; odds are computed and payoffs announced on electric displays in a matter of seconds. It would be no trick to design a tree of such information-handling networks which could count every vote in the nation as soon as cast, and annoimce totals instantly. There are limitations, to be sure. One would be in the handling write-in votes. (But how often do write-ins affect a Presiidential campaign?) It would seem that a little engineering could overcome most of the limitations rather easily. And if it couldn't, is there any imaginable drawback to an instant automated counting of popular vote that is potentially more dangerous than, say, the chance of the wrong man being elected through our antiquated Electoral College system? Tt would be only a step, obviously, to an automatic inthe-home voting machine which could let all of us vote on all major decisions at any time. On theoretical considerations, it might even be a good idea. After all, in theory our "representatives" are supposed to make the decisions the majority of us would make it we were consulted. Why not cut out the middleman and let the electorate declare war, approve the appointment of Supreme Court justices, levy its own taxes and in every other way conduct the affairs of government itself, by instant electronic referendum? The objection to the scheme is that we might be stampeded. And probably we would be, often enough. But the phenomenon that made our predecessors revolt against England is not unknown today. Large numbers of Americans feel as little represented in their government as any Boston Tea Party agitator did. Considering how easily modem technology could give us representation, it seems a shame to cling to a system designed to fit into the technology of an age two cenffm The Dark Continents of Your Mind maintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personcility and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicruclans; an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion); point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural acuities which you possess; This Is a challenge to make the most of your liorltage as a human; Write for the Free Hook (!The Mastery of Life,!! Address: San Jose, California # U.S.A. Scribe: N.J.D. San Jose, California #, U.SA. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of life" which I sbaU read as directed. Name Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code Those desperadoes from outer space were too slick for a simple android like myself -- or maybe too stupid I I f knew iti I knew it! I knew  nometiiing like tHis would inr mi erratic robot or berserker MMilidlil," I'd told tHe CommI-' ptlotirr -- a Human -- "and noboily on tKe Force could subdue Ilirm fiifltcr or witli less fuss. rhtiin let me stay on tHeir suBIrvrlnr And He'd said, "Sorry. Too many years in grade. Besides we need an Andyplnlo, and tHey're all on assignment, so you are it" I opened my moutB to argue, but He said, "One more word and it's back to tHe Vat. Don't worry. You'll do fine." Fine, KuH? According to tiie specs, Robert E. Li, President of Vega IV, was nasty, impatient, cantankerous and argumentative -- in otHer words, a typical I, a hard-fisted hard-moutfied bull, had to keep him Happy while finding his runaway bride. If tEat isn't a Vat situation, what is? "Besides," added the Commissioner, "you'll have use of an official antigrav car. That make it any better?" You bet it did. I'd never been in one, but naturally I'd been trained in its use. Now if only I could control my moutH and fists... i T got up to the top of BosyorkdelpHia's dome, wliere tfie starsfiips unloaded tfieir passen-i gers and freight, purposely early. Why give President L! something unnecessary to complain about? After the service sublevels, the top of the dome was quite a sight I was still taking it in when Li's shuttle module came down and floated to a stop. He was the first off, flanked by two stewardesses, each carrying a suitcase. Maybe I do lack gonads, hut I enjoy looking. They were something to look at They led him to the Purchasing booth, where He and the man in the booth seemed to have an argu- ment before both nodded and the suitcases were turned over. The man gave Li a credit card and the stewardesses brought him to Customs -- it was the only way out, so he Had no dioice. If I hadn't studied Li's Bertillon specifications, I would never have spotted Him in that crowd. Pretty nondescript -- about six-six, # pounds, teacolored complexion, straight black hair, blue eyes, nothing to distinguish him from any other Outworlder from his sector, except maybe that frosty look Very Important Outworlders develop when they've just arrived on Earth, determined not to be impressed. He handed His passport to the clerk, who studied it only a moment. "The E' is for 'Eagle,'" Li explained proudly. "Very interesting, Mr. President," the clerk said. "You may pass through the gate." "Just a minute," said Li. He put two items on the desk. "I want to declare my Bird of Perdition -- commonly known as a BoP -- and a High silk Hat." "You don't have to declare anything." The clerk was obviously used to all kinds of nutty life-forms. "You have diplomatic Immunity." Preddent Li looked defeated for a nanosecond, and then He asked the clerk if he had even seen a BoP. The clerk told him no, he hadn't, but there wasn't time, and he pointed to the line behind LL I saw that this was a good time to introduce myself, SO I tapped Li politely on the shoulder. He whipped around, ready to jump down my throat, probably figuring I was a terminal guard going to ask Him to move on. "Excuse me, Mr. President," I said quickly. "I am Andytec, your android detective and bodyguard." Nothing there to offend, but he looked at me real sourly. I plowed on. "All us androids are called Andy, a custom which dates from the Third or Fourth World War -- or maybe the. Second -- when all North American soldiers were called Joe, all British soldiers called Tommy, and all Negroes were called George. As a matter of fact, the custom may date even farther back, to the time when -- " "All right!" he roared. "I get the picture, Andy, and I'm sure you're quite learned on the subject. Now that posed a problem. I am pretty good at android history, which is my hobby, but did he want me to go on or was he roaring because he'd heard enough? You can never tell with these Outworlders. I decided to drop the subject. Besides, I wanted to get on with the investigation. The faster we found his runaway bride, the sooner I could sack out at the Precinct. "You requested a detectivebodyguard, Your Excellency, to help you find your wife." "I know, I know. Let's get going." Herding him out of the spaceport atop the city's dome, I could see he was trying hard not to goggle at the sights. When he was in the antigrav car, he said, very definite, "You've probably been wondering why there are so many Vegan presidents coming to Earth." I couldn't he, could I? "No, sir, I haven't." "It's because whenever a newlywed couple decides to honeymoon on Earth, the bridegroom is made president and ven a few suitcases of enzymes to pay expenses." "Yes, sir," I said. "I studied up on it." "Oh. Well, would you like to see my Bird of Perdition -- my BoP?" He all but demanded. "Not particularly, sir," I admitted He looked annoyed, so I explained how we androids have only very specialized curiosities, and mine didn't include BoP's. "Well, damn it," he exploded, "you're going to see one now! Blasted passengers on the ship might as well have been androids for all the interest they showed in it" He opened the small carrying case, and I heard a maniacal scream: "Murder! Murder most foul." n ITell that was my line of   work, but Vega IV is out of my jurisdiction. BoP's are known all over tSe civilized galaxy as the consciences of Vegans, wGo force criminals to carry tGese BoP's around witS tem. Tfiey Gave so few people tHat tfiey need every fiand, so locking tfiem up would be wasteful. Did tfiat mean President Li was a criminal? I figured tfiat was Bs problem, not mine, and I sure wasn't going to antagonize turn by asking. "Assassins #" ifie tfiing was sfirieking. "Tfiy fiands reek witfi tfie smell of blood #" "Pay no attention to it, Andy," Li said. "BoP's are raised on a diet of GotBc literature." I guess fie tfiougfit tfiat explained everything. It probably would, if I knew wfiat Gotfiic literature was. "But," fie continued, "tfiey're better company tfian someone wKo keeps saying, 'I know, sir,' or 'Androids fiave specialized curiosities, sir.' " He was pretty red around tfie gills -- I don't mean fie fiad gills, th'ougli fie could fiave, of course, but wKere gills would have been if fie'd fiad any. "I'm sorry, Your Excellency," I said in a rush!, remembering what the Commissioner fiad said about the Vat. "I'll try to be more curious about tfie subjects you wish to discuss." 'That's better." If we don't, I thouglit, I've fiad it. I wished I was back on my old beat on tfie android and robot slidewalks in FlabfiusB. "You'll notice, Andy, tfiat tfie BoP has suction cups instead of feet. Also, it fias tfie body of a lion, the wings of a fiawk and tfie head of a woman, altfiou its overall length is only six and a half incBes. It is artificially bred through intense genetic manipulation." Hell, so was I. But I said, "Very interesting, Mr. President." "You mit at least look interested," fie snapped. So I bugged my eyes out and leaned over the carrying case. "Yes, sir" I said, wondering wfiat to say next. A tfiougfit came to me. "About your wife. Your Excellency -- fiave you brought along her Bertillon specifications?" "You blatfiering son of a test tube!" fie fiowled. "Do you tfiink I'd come all this distance without a copy?" "No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. I was just making conversation," I said, plus a lot more of tfie same, till lie calmed down and handed me tfie card. I stuck it into tfie car's datapfione slot, waited a second, then handed it back. By then fie was off on another subject. "Wfiat do you tinnk my wife's chances are of getting into #V, Andy?" I explained as tactfully as I could tliat fier cKances in #V were zero. For some reason, tKat seemed to cKeer Him up. But tHen I added tHat if slie was in acting, she would be doing OffBroadway. "THafs live," I added, "in a tEeater." "I know. But wliicK one?" I told Him tKat BosyorkdelpKia was the theater capital of North America, with almost a dozen theaters. But locating Her would be relatively easy, if acting was really what she had in mind. It would only be a matter of Hours. "That's fine, Andy," Ke said, relaxing. "Take me to my hotel. I'm bushed." "Yes, sir. Which hotel, sir?" "The Sheraton Statler Hilton Trenton." "Do you have a reservation, sir?" I asked, and was immediately sorry. "You iot, do I leok Hke an incompetent? Of course I have a reservation!" I decided not to try to get inr to any more conversations with this twitch if I could Kelp it...When clearance was issued, I guided the antigrav into the police lane and punched in the hotel's code. L i coughed fo break the silence. I could see He was getting his jaw cranked for another informative talk. "I don't suppose you know the colcuizing expedition to Vega IV was about as racially mixed as an expedition could be," he said, looking at me sideways to see if I was going to say I knew or wasn't interested. But I'd learned my lesson. I nodded contents-noted-and-waiting-for-more. "THat was long before the city domes were built, when there was a lot of travel between cities and intermarriage. Speaking of wHicH, on Vega, we Have marriage! You've probably been wondering wHat our customs are in that respect." Well, I don't know three Humans who would Have wondered about it, much less an android, but I said that Had been on my mind. So Ke told me that this was His second wife. Li was #, and she was #. When sKe got to be #, she'd marry an #-yearold boy. "You can see, Andy, tHat a #year-old man is ideally suited te an #-year-old girl, and an #year-old boy and a #-year-eld woman are also perfectly matched. When we Vegans are #, we cart marry anyone we please. I can't wait; then my girl from high school and I are going to get marriedShe's the only one for me -- when we're #, of course. I see," Ke said, leaning toward the side of the antigrav car and pointing down, "that EartK buildings don't Have windows." "THat's right, Mr. President," I d. "They stopped building wkH glass and: such since the Great Crash, Black Wednesday,' October of #." I wondered if I ought to tell him how the marriages of Earth were arranged by computer. "How are marriages here on Earth arranged, Andy? I don't see how couples could meet." So I told him. "Why the devil don't you tell me these things without my having to ask?" . he demanded. But the BoP had heard "Great Crash" and was shrieking, "O dire destruction! Death stalks the streets! Life's but a passing shadow!" T guess I knew what Gothic literature was like then. Luckily, the closed carrying case muffled the fingemail-on-blackboard shriek, or there might have been an interplanetary incident. I put the antigrav down on the hotel roof, and we were met by the manager and some Andyhops who looked hopefully for something to carry. "Ah, President Li, it is indeed an honor to have you here as Earth's guest," said the manager. "Your suite is ready. Have you left your luggage at the spaceport?" "No. I only have my BoP -- my Bird of Perdition -- and a U high silk hat. Would you like to see the BoP?" "Not particularly, sir. We androids Have only limited  -- " "Forget it. I suppose I call yoU Andymanager?" "Andyexec, sir. Right tins way." We walked past the disappointed Andyhops, who stood Ky muttering ings about people who don't have luggage. Li just stared at them. When we got out of the antigrav tube and the manager grandly threw open the door of the Presidential Suite, I reeled back at such luxury -- two rooms and a bath and a tialtJ "Naturally, sir," the manager was saying, "the crowded condition of Earth makes the use of more than one room by an individual economically unfeasible, but at the same time, sharing a room with someone else would be psychologically unsound. If you lived on Earth, you would appreciate the One-man, One-Room plan." He waited for some gasp or something from Li, but Li wasn't impressed. "Now you'll want to know How to operate the electronic doors," the manager went on bravely, showing Li the thumb lock as we went inside the suite. "And you turn the lights up or down here. This is to change channels on the #V wall, and here -- " he made an elaborate show of pushing a button -- "is the sink. You press this button and tell the sink what water temperature you want. If you get lonely in the shower, wfiicH is very usual for an Outworlder, you'll find the shower an uncommonly good conversationalist. If you get Kim --  Sry "What do you take me for -- some kind of yokel from a hick system?" Li shouted at him. I could see it had been working on the man's nerves for a while. "I'm from Vega, the most progressive planet in the galaxy #" He would have gone on, too, but the manager was backing out, with a sympathetic nod in my direction. "No, Your Excellency. Yes. Mr. President But you'll want to know that the aMorm bed is concealed in the floor. I'll raise it for you. OH, Murphy!" And the bed whispered into shape, and the door closed behind the unruffled manager. Damn, I wished I had his aplomb, if that's the right word. But then he'd had lots of experience with Humans, Outworlder and otherwise, and this was my first -- and probably last -- experience. L i was talldng into the visiphone: "Spaceport? This is Robert E. Li, President of Vega IV. I want reservations for three on the midnight flight t the Vegan Sector." "Tonight, Mr. President?" "Tonight, Mr. Preaent?" asked the female Andyop. "That's right," Li tcM her. Three? I asked myself. Who could be going back with him? His wife, sure -- mayhe. If he could talk her into it. But who was the third? I heard Li asking, "How did he say you change the ehannel?" I showed him, and he fiddled with the selector, found an old quiz show and settled bai on the airform bed. I stood around, wondering what he thout e needed a bodyguard for. Li let the BoP out of the carrying case, and the thing stretched, flew down clumsily to the floor and waddled over to the #V and sat there, watching it. I called PoliCentral on the land line. They told me oere Li's wife was -- at the Qf-Broadthe Outworlder. "X?" "Yes, Mr. President Interracial." "Really? I thought it stood for Xenophobia." "No, sir. Shall we go?" "As soon as this contest is over, Andy. I want to see who wins the washing machine, refrigerator and automobile." "Those people Have been dead for centuries," I told him. "That's an old Videotape; they're competing for thipgs that have no Earthly use." "Maybe so," he answered. "But don't you like games?" "I don't know, sir. I've never been in one." He sat up suddenly. "Nuts! I was hoping the couple with eyeglasses would win. I never saw anyone who wore eyeglasses." Of course he hadn't; visual defects are corrected at birth. I explain-' ed that to the President, but He only said be knew that, as usual. "I'm sorry, sir. I'm really trying." "Very," he said nastily, and was asleep with the abruptness of a tropical night in the #V production of Rain. II T he #V exploded, and Li fell off the bed, while the BoP was stuck onto the screen and yelling, "Murder most foul!" again, in its normal conversational shriek. Its suction cups were plastered over the Head of a tank commander who was shouting, "Be liberated or die!" to a mob' of halfnaked green men standing around with spears in their hands. The tank sent another round over the green men, and it went off behind us. This time Li was awake. He peeled the screaming BoP off the #V wall with a loud plopping sound and put it back in its carrying case. "Turn that bloody thing off!" he shouted at me. "Off, sir?" I said vacantly. "You can change channels and make it louder, but you can't turn it off. With the #V off, what would there he to do? And it would he so lonely." Li sat on the edge of the airform hed, shalong his head and looking disgusted. "Hairless green men with pointed ears, for Peter's sake!" he said more to the #V lan to me. "These pre-interstellar movies -- how unimaginative can you get? Couldn't they have guessed there would be crawly, slithery, creepy things? Giant brains encased in glassite? Rock-eating things with springs for feet? Bah!" I picked that moment to get in a little information. "While you were asleep, sir -- " "Me, asleep?" he roared. "I was just resting my eyes!" "Yes, sir. While you were resting your eyes, I had four hourly bulletins on Mrs. Li. Headquarters sa # TS she's going under the alias of Lyla Lyons, and she has a part in a revival of that grand old whodunit. The Pool of the Moon, by Clyde Crane Camphell. It's due to open tonight, as a matter of fact, at # :#. Now can we go?" "Depends. WEat time is it, and wEere's iEe tSeater?" I told Pm It was nearly #:(MI and tEe tEepter was uptown, in tBe Providence Plantations. "No wonder I'm Eungry," Ee said, studying tEe Eotel menu. "Steak and potatoes okay wilE you?" I said fine, and Ee puncBed tSe appropriate buttons. Out came two trays tEat Ee looked at imbelievingly. "People eat tEis musH?" Ee demanded. "Well," I said diplomatically, "it's not tEe Empire State Restaurant -- " "All rigEt, we'll go to tEe Empire State Restaurant." Heard about tEe place, but I never could afford it. It Eas a Eimdred and two different floors, eacE witE its own atmospEere and gravity, for any kind of extraterrestrisd you could name. And it cost a fortune. Li could afford it; He'd sold ps suitcases of enzymes, and I was on Eis expense account. We were about to leave wEen tEe #V announcer started talMng about tEe news. Li sat down again and listened to it stralt tErougE to tfie sports and weatEer, tEen looked at me, puzzled, "TEat doesn't make sense, Andy. WitE tEe dty domes, wEy would anyone care about tEe weatEer?" But tEe newscaster answered for me: "And tEatis tEe way it was, for Wednesday, February #, #."  pie wEo lived tEen," Li said nastily. WEat about today's news?" 'We don't Eave any, sir," I said, and explained to Eim tEat tEe old jokes about EartB were true -- tEat nobody botEered to make new tapes and films because tEere were so many old ones, and they were all tEat was played on tEe #V. "Beddes, it's nice to know Eow it all came out," I finisEed. "Too bad, Andy. Now, on Vega, we Eave weafh'er" "Do you Eave seasons, sir?" I asked. 'We sure do. Growing and freezing." I was going to tell Eim about EartE's seasons, but I cEecked myself. Would Ee be interested in tEe fact tEat EartE used to Eave so many seasons? Probably not, I decided. "I understand EartE used to Eave a number of seasons, Andy. TEat true?" Wrong again. "Yes, Mr. President. TEere was spring, summer, Indian summer, autumn, fall and winter." Li was impressed all rigEt. Vtfi tEe rollcall of tEe seasons tiiundering in Iu ears, Eis tws measly seasons went off begging for company. He snafcEed up te BoP's carrying case and tEe SgE silk Eat and burned all tEe way up to tEe lobby on tEe top floor. He gave tEe clerk Eis tEumbprint and told ffim Ee was cEecking out. "You're not coming back to tEe Eotel, Mr. President?" tEe Andyclerk asked disappointedly. "I came Eere to find my bride and I'm taking Eer Eome tonigEt." Het and who ese. I asked myself. But I could see my luck changing. Soon tEe assignment would be over, and I wouldn't Eave to keep trying to get along witE tEis venomous Vegan. TEe BoP kept up a rail of muffled complaints all tEe way to tEe antigrav, because Li, in Eis foul mood, bumped tEe carrying case with Eis leg every otEer step. TEe Empire State Restaurant was in tEe E.T. Quarter, on #tE and FiftE Avenue, so I puncEed that in and settled back, quietly enjojnng tEe effect on Li of tEat six-season Eaymaker. TEe E.T. Quarter is noted for its elegance and subdued noise level. TEe equivalent of middleaged couples were creeping, sEtEering, Eopping and flapping -- tEe eqmvalent of strolling -- most of tEem in their equivalent of spacesuits, with Rigellianmade cameras. Very nice neighborhood. So when we suddenly got shot with a tangle gun and clubbed from beSnd, I wasn't even ready. I guess I came to a minute or so bdfore Li, who came out of it fighting. I yelled at him to stop struggling or the tangle would get even tighter. TEe tangle, which is an anti-riot viviparous plant from Aldbaran or thereabouts, increases its grip when you fight it. I used to carry one all the time; now, when I needed one, I didn't Eave it. That's diplomatic service for you. Of course whoever shot and clubbed us wasn't aroimd any more. But the equivalent of middle-aged couples were doing the equivalent of stroUing around and past us. I tried to get them to stop and help us, but they all looked sk # Tward, across the street, anywhere, just so they wouldn't see us. An Earthwoman came by -- smaU, dumpy, in het late eighties, I'd say. "Young lady," I called out, "we're caught in this tangleweed. See that Ettle bulb? The web will retract if you push the tangle's belly-button. Would you push it, please?" "I don't know wEat you mean," she said, and walked off. A man had paused and Estened and was about to leave when I said in my best sublevel voli c, "I'm a detective on offieiol business. It is your duty as a Human eitizen to freeme and tbis gentleman Here, wlio is the President of Vega IV. Now move!" TKe guy looked very unHappy. "I don't want to get involved." "You won't be," I said. Li was getting madder and makler, and we were botH pretty bimgry. "My I.D. is inside my jumper, breast pocket, and let's Eiury up about itl" He sHoved Eis Hand into my jmnper -- and tHe tangle grabbed him by one arm. "Sorry," I said. "Now let's nobody move till I figure a way out of this mess." I tHougHt a while, till I Had it. "It's easy," I told them. "Now you've got one arm free, mister. Keep it clear while I put my left leg over your right shoulder. Then grab Hold of my belt and Haul yourself up, and you'll be in position to pusH the tangleweed's belly-button." So I got out, released Li and turned to thank the hmnan, but he was running by then and got lost in the crowd. "Please don't tell the Commissioner that I talked to a human as if he were an android or robot," I begged Li. "And wHat do I tell Hitti about you letting us get tangled and this knot on the back of my head?" I gniiinnl Rllcntly. Another biu'U lo llin old Vat. Ill Tn tlic Knrlli Room sf the Empire State Restaurant, only one table was occupiedA young couple was sitting at it. Li barged over to them and asked if they minded our joining them. The guy looked up at Eim. "Well, it was sort of our Honeymoon -- " But Li had already sat down. I sat down, too, remembering my prime directive: not to antagonize Li. "Good evening, sir and madam," the menurobot in tHe table said to us. "Welcome to the Earth Room. All EartH protein is derived from pant grovnng mounds of flesh that once were separate and distinct animals. We Have beef, lamb and pork flavors -- excellent today, I might add -- plus fish and poultry flavors, and all garnished with the finest hydroponic vegetable purees. Earth has no room for food animals, or, for ihat matter, vegetation to sustain them or us. Even the oceans are too crowded with floating and underwater cities. We import puree enzymes directly from Vega IV." "Hear that?" asked Li amiably. "That's me -- President Robert E. Li of Vega IV. I brought in two suitcases of en zymes, sold them at a fancy price, so the treat's on me. WKat will you have?" The pair said th'at was awfully nice of him and ordered drinks, and Li added one for Himself and another for me. It was my very first. I found I liked the taste but not the effect. Meanwhile, Li Bad been giving a State of tfie Planet Report on the Vegan Economy, toucBng lightly on the many wonders of his Borne planet. "And wBat's your racket?" He asked tfie man. "Oddly enough, I'm a PresiI've b'rougfit in our most popular product: an oil so light that it has no surface tension. One drop lubricates an entire robot and is guaranteed to outlast it." "That good, fiilfi?" said Li. "Sounds like just tfie thing we need for our reapers and tfiresficrs. Guaranteed?" "Sfieds water like a duck's back." I wondered wHat a duck was, but tfiey were praising tfieir wares, and asking about a duck would infuriate Li -- or both of tliem. By tfien, anyhow, Li Bad gotten around to offering fiis enzymes in exchange for tfie Canopcon's oil. "But we don't like pureed vegetables," tfie guy said. "Well, it has other uses," said Li. "Like what?" "You'll find some use for it," Li said. Tfiey all ordered, pork for tfie men and lamb for tfie lady, and waited for me. I ordered tfie fisfi flavor. "Good," said Li. "I was afraid you were going to say that androids don't eat." "Of course we eat, sir," I said to Him. "Tfie only difference between us -- " fiis eyebrows went up -- "are tfie lack of gonads and this brand bdiind my left ear tfiat saj 'Made in U.S.A.' " I showed them tfie small brand. 'Ke food arrived. Li was talking to tfie couple about fiis runaway bride, and tfiey were listening politely. I let my attention wander away from tfie monologue. I'd seen hundreds of tapes about tfie young girl vntfi dramatic aspirations who Bad run away from an older Busband so she could: A) join a vaudeville act; B) Join tfie circus; C) become an ' overnight sensation when tfie star of tfie show could not or would not go on; D) etc. Li's spluttering brought me back to tfie present. "Wfio'd want to live Here and eat this miserable stuff? Liquified vegetables, unbegotten meat -- and not enough of eitfierl" "Tfie fisfi is exceUent, Your Excellency," I said, trying to calm him down. "Would you care Jo try se?" Li took a quarter of my portion on his fork, jabbed it into Eis moutH. He cHewed tfiougHtfully, incredulously, revoltedly; but he got it down. "Call that fish?" lie yelped. "Why, on Vega we wouldn't even feed it to the fisHl" He ate with the grimness of an Outworlder who had to eat what he'd bagged or go hungry. We had a lot of alkaloids on the rocks and laughed a lot and I guess I knew now what being stoned is like. However, my sense of duty remained sober and I kept iirging Li to leave. "What for?" he asked merrily. "You said yourself it was only a dull, old, #th-century whodunit" "It is, sir. Only I didn't say it was #tf century." "Well, isn't it?" "Yes, sir. How did you know, sir?" He swatted me on the back, laughing his head off. "Don't look so upset, Andy. It's probably telepathy or just a guess." I thought he was st alling for some reason, and he was. "I'm not leaving here without my desserti" he told the menurobot "It's included in the dinner and I want it!" "Yes, sir or madam. What would you like or prune whip?" "Prune whip. And don't tell me how you raised it or on what" When he finished, we just had time to make the last act, hut Li had a little trouble putting his credit card into the robot's charge slot "Plus # per cent tip, sir or madam," it said. "What?" Li shouted. "Who for? I'll bet you're not even human. I'll I bet you're just some damned servomechanism." "True, sir or madam, I am." "Then who is the tip for?" "General Services, sir or mad-' am." "I suppose that's a bunch of robots, too." "No, sir or madam. We are investor-owned." "Oh." Li seemed happy with the answer."Thaf s different Add your #, per cent" IV W e left the car on the upper levels and took the drop to the Old Street Level, where the theater was, cramped in between two tall residential buildings but lucky to have survived at all. Li bought a bouquet of paper flowers -- there are no real ones anywhere, of course -- from a vending machine, and we went around to the stage door, where an elderly-robot accepted tHem for Miss Lyons. "Stage door Jolinny, eK?" it said in a cracked voice. "Can't wait back Here, young feller." If lifted a metal arm and looked at tfie wristwatcH on it. "Play'll be over in # minutes." "By Joe," Li exclaimed as we went around to tEe front and entered, "tins is more like iti Flowers, stage door, a real fEeater, living actors, even if tEe play is an old stinker -- " "Gooood even-ing," tEe ticket taker broke in. "Not many people attend tEe legitimate tfieater any more since tEe good old days. But you vnll be proud to know tliat tonigEtis attendance -- wItE your arrival -- Has broken all records: tfiere are #I in tEe audience. THat is," it interrupted itself, "if we can count you, since you did not get Here until tEe Inst few minutes of tfie play. I guess it's fair," it decided at last. "After all, you did buy tickets nnd you are Here. But next time, try to be more prompt. TEe curtnln goes up at #:#." "I know," Li said cEeerfully, nnd we went in, Li Holding tEe lilgli silk Hat and tiie BoP's carrying case. We made a fearful racket in I lie dark, bumping into seats and tilings. TEe action on stage stopped till we sat down in tEe last low. Li let tfie BoP out and explained to it -- and to me, because I Had no idea wHat was Happening in tHe play -- tHat all tHe suspects were in tHe room and tEe Inspector was summing up tEe case. TEe BoP climbed up on Li's sEoulder so it could see. Li warned It tiHaf if it Had anytlung to say, it Ead better w!sper or He'd put It back in tfie carrying case. It nodded, wQcfi surprised me. I didn't know it understood tfiat mucE. "Now," tEe Inspector said, as soon as we got settled, "we know tlus muefi -- Mr. Harold HugHes, eccentric bilEonaiie, Is dead!" "OH, black efia of fearful evill" wfiispered ffie BoP. I could see It was acEmg to let out a screecE, but mtfi LI glaring at it, it didn't dare. "Furtiiermore," tfie Inspector went on, "exactly one week ago, Hugfies took out a most peculiar insurance poEcy. Mr. Elmwood, your company Issued tfiat policy. Suppose you tell us about it." "Well," said tfie artificially padded man (nobody is fat any more), "it's pretty Hard to explain." "I'U say," LI commented. "Harold HuEes came to us in a very distraugfit way. He said He Had a Eorror of drowning in tHe Ganges River. Now fie Had never been out of New York -- " it was a #tfi-cenfury play, all rigEt -- "and fie accepted our stipulation that He never would as long as He lived. Likewise, we put in the usual ban on suicide." ne moment," said the Inspecter. "HugEes bought that policy, ladies and gentlebecause His fortune was gone, squandered, and He was actually penniless I" Everybody sort of sat or stood around, waiting for Kin to continue, and He did. "Mr. Elmwood, did your company psycHolize Hugfies to see if His horror of drowning in the Ganges River was real?" "We did. Inspector. It was very real. And so was His determination not to leave New York, as well as his not contemplating suicide." "And yet," said tiie Inspector dramatically, "Harold Hughes did in fact drown in tHe Ganges River -- without leaving New Yorkl" The cast made noises of astonishment. "That's preposterous #" exclaimed a tall woman in a bluegray wig. "How could my poor, lamented husband drown in the Ganges River, which is in India, without leaving the city?" The Inspector pulled some documents from his attache case. "I Have here a bill of sale from the Ganges Water Company for # gallons of Holy H # O, a bill of lading from the Water Buffalo Associates Transport Association, a manifest from the Hog Island Tramp Freighter, and a freight bill from the Pacific Fe Railroad -- all for carrying and delivering said # gallons of water of the Ganges River to the penthouse apartment of one Guru Rabindrinath MakeesH ' -- where the devout of MakeesH's faith may bae on appointed holy days in the guru's Pool of the Moon -- and where Harold Hughes was found drowned!" "Alack, piteous mortal!" whispered the BoP. "What craven creature did him in?" "PsycHolizing isn't all that perfect," said a youth lounging on a centuries-old couch. "Possibly dear old Dad knew about the pool and committed suicide because he wanted Mothah blamed for his death." "Evoe!" breathed the BoP. "'Twas then by his awn hand!" "If I may say so. Inspector," Elmwood put in, "that theory, in the opinion of my insurance company. Holds water." The audiance howled and clapped. Li groaned. Elmwood bowed and continued. "Mrs. Hughes here was onethird beneficiary -- and she knew it!" "Oh, fell and wanton diefiend!" the BoP said in a low tone that carried to the stage. I kind of slid down a bit wHen everyone in tHe tlieater turned to sbusH us, but Li didn't even notice. He was waiting for tHe play to continue, but wKy, I couldn't guess. tCour company's desire not  to pay up is understandable, Mr. Slmwood," said tHe Inspector sarcastically. "But your tKeory is contradicted only by tbe facts -- namely, tKat Hugfies suffered a fractured skull, itom behind, and tHat Mrs. HugHes Had no motive. SHe Has more money tKan HugHes ever owned. WHatfs more, sHe loved lum and tHey often argued about money, sHe offering to Help and He refusing to Uve off a woman. THat rigfit, WutHerington?" He said to tHe Butler, wHo was dressed like tHose extinct penguins you see sometimes on #V. "Yes, Inspector. Quite correct. THat was tHe subject of tHeir arguments -- mostly." I could see He was going to go on past His written lines, but the old filibustering Inspector jumped in without a tHougHt. "Just as I suspected," He said, vnggling His forefinger at nobody in particular. "Now wKo else benefits? PerHaps you, Mr. Sm # rtHe, as HugHes's lawyer, can tell us?" THe Lawyer, standing witH His back to tHe fireplace, allowed as How tHe Maid was to get a tHird of tHe insurance money. fore Li clamped a big hand over its face. He let go, and it whispered, "'Tis tHe Maid, wHo Hath committed tfiis foul work!" "You're jumping to conclusions," Li told tHe BoP. "Wait and see. Tfiat's my wife Hauling off to speak, Andy." "I wouldn't never Have done sucH a tHang," cried tHe Maid in a mixture of Cockney, Texas and Outworld, "wHat wItH me carryin' Mr. HugHes's child and all, and 'e promisin' He He'd divorce Mrs. HugHes and do roigHt by me and tfie bybyl" "Had I but known," said Mrs. HugHes, "I would Have murdered Him myself, and not in any dam pool, eidierl" "Besides," tHe Maid went on, "me and the Mistress, we was together on tHat fyfefiil nigHtl" THe Lawyer spoke again, after a silence during w!QcH nobody seemed to know wHaf to do: "And the remaining ird was to go to Guru RabindrinatH MakeesK, noted yogil" "Surely," breathed tHe BoP, "this MakeesH was the messenger of deatHl" And it made ready to take off from Li's shoulder, but Li Held it there. "But," tHe Inspector added forcefully, and the BoP settled back again, "RabindrinatH MakeesH is missing -- and the computer says the only RabindrinatH MakeeS in the world is in India, not New York, and that He is only nine years old and definitely neitHer a guru or a yogi, so I guess that lets Him out." "Then who slew my dear, departed Husband?" cried Mrs. Hughes, and the otiBers nodded and made inquiring sounds. "TKe only one left," said tfie Inspector, "is the least likely suspect, the person witfi no motive. And everybody knows it's always the least likely suspect wHo committed the crime!" I didn't think much of that kind of logic, but I didn't say anything till Li asked me what I bought. "I don't know who it was, but no court would convict him on that kind of evidence," I told him. CC'Deholdl" said the Inspector, pointing, and the actors all turned theatrically toward the staircase that went up about # feet and stopped just short of the plastic background. A New York bobby walked down; he must have gone up earlier in the play. He was holding a long narrow cloth in one Hand and a bathrobe and sandals in the other. He Handed them to the Inspector, who turned abruptly to tfie Butler. "These were found in your room, Heathecliff WutHerington, alias RabindrinatH MakeesHl I acctise yeu of disguising yourself as Makeesh and Hypnotizing Harold Hughes into taking out the insurance policy -- and striking Him from behind and pushing him into the pool when he refused to commt suicide even under Hypnosis!" "Yes, yes!" sHouted Wuth'erington. "I did it! And I'll tell you why I did it!" Before he could explain, the BoP shrilled out, "Assassin! THe sting of retribution bites deep!" and it flew out over the audience and planted itself firmly on Wutherington's head. "THou art RabindrinatH Makeesh, alias Heathecliff Wutherington, servant to, and Hughes!" The audience stood up and applauded as the curtain came down. By that time, both Li and I were onstage. "No, no!" the actor was saying to the BoP. "I'm Jack Black, playing the parts of RabindrinatH MakeesH and Heathecliff WutHerington! I'm an actor. Ask anybody -- " "Slaughterer!" yelled the BoP. "No, look -- there's Bat Durston. He played the part of Harold Hughes. See? He isn't dead!" Jack Black was reaching up to yank BoP off his head, but Li spoke up quickly and authoritatively. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. You'll kill yourself if you succeed, which is very doubtful. It's rooted into your nervous and circulatory systems now." "TKen Kow do I get rid of it?" wailed Black. "You don't You live symblotically witK it It's really very good company." Li turned to th'e Maid and Held out His cHeek to be kissed, whicH sHe did obediently. "Good to see you," tHey botH said. Li gave Black tHe HigH silk hat he Had been carrying. "Put this on. It covers the BoP completely and I Happen to know it's your size." "You do?" Black asked blankly. "How?" "Husband," said Mrs. Li, "if I'd known you Had a plan to bring Jack back to Vega IV, I'd never have used the tangle gun on you." "I didn't mind tHat so mucH," Li replied, rubbing tHe back of his head, whicH reminded me of my own lump. "But you might Have spared us that antique truncheon I told you always to carry." CtQo it was youl" I shouted.  "And you knew about it, Mr. President! WKy didn't you tell me?" "The subject never came up, Andy," He said. "But why?" Black asked a second before I could get the same words out "I adnut that I'm a very good actor, possibly a great one, but -- " "I'm afraid it's impossible to go into Vegan mores with so little time. Let's just say that Lyla dutifully kept me informed' on sucH tffings as wanting to go on the stage, falling in love vntH your picture in a magabook in a doctor's office and, of course, wanting to marry you." Black smiled radiantly at Her. "My dear girl, that's too, too flattering. I'd Have been delighted to marry you without this -- this damned BoP and a top Hat. Wfiy did I Have to be saddled with them?" "Well," said Li, "it seems we Have the only surviving copy of the Second Folio of Lincoln in playing Lincoln all over the Vegan system died recently. We want yo to take his place." "Lincoln?" asked Black. "Lincoln wHo?" "Abraham Lincoln. A legendary folk-hero of tHe #tH or #tH century. He always wore a top Hat. If you played Lincoln, nobody would ever know about the BoP." "Dasfi it!" Black exclaimed. Vega IV, marry tHis deligKtful child and act in srour old play without such devious schemes!" "At a thousand dollars a week?" Black stiffened. He was very good at it "Absolutely not Lyla and BoP or no Lyla and BoP! People Haven't earned tEat little sance tfie Second or THird World War." I spoke up a bit reluctantly. "President Li Has tKougHt tHis all tfie way tKrougK, Mr. Black. TKaf s wKy He needed an Andytec -- to Hold you for deportation as a Vegan criminal in case you rejected His offer." "But How can I be a Vegan criminal wHen I've never been to Vega IV?" "You're wearing a BoP. THat makes you a Vegan criminal. SHall I arrest him, Mr. President?" "Let's try friendly persuasion first, Andy." He looked at tKe actor, wKo didn't know wHicH He sHould be more, frightened or upset. "How mucK do you make here. Black?" "The company gets a ten-million-a-year grant from the General Foundation. I take the first crew and theater." "And wHat are your expenses?" Black didn't think it was any of Li's business, but admitted about right if He doesn't eat out for clothing, Haircuts, antigrav cabs, trips and so forth and, si course, taxes, about anotSer ttTTell, on Vega IV," said I#  ' "it would only cottf you # per ct for payment on a House as big as you like. # per cent for food, # per cent for taxes -- and you'd own your own House and antigrav car after only ten years, not to mention your own flower and vegetable gardens -- and a robot to come in three times a week to clean." It sounded like the paradise Li Had been claiming it was. I almost wished I could go with them. I might Have, too, if androids were allowed to travel and own property. Black finished out How mudQ all that came to. "I don't beHevn it! Are you telling me tHat I would Have money left over?" "Yes. And you can do anything you like witK it." "THat," said Black, "tahea care of tHat!" Mrs. Li let out a Happy squeal "Then you'll go back with us and marry me?" "THat kind of depends on you, doesn't it?" Black said to her a divorce?" "WKy, no divorce is necessary," said Li expansively. "Lyla Has to marry once more, at #, to an #-year-old-boy -- but you can get togetHer wKen sKe's #." "Will you still want me tBen?" Mrs. Li wanted to know. "You'll be even more desirable at # tKan you are now," Black told Her. SHe lit up like an unoccupied antigrav cab. TEat sure was a good line to remember. I turned to tbe President of Vega IV. "TEe BoP, tEe EigH silk Eat, reservations for tEree on tEe midnigEt fligEt -- it all worked out tEe way you figured." "I never doubted it for a moment" He sEook my Hand -- tEe first time a Human ever sEook Hands witE mel "Excuse us if we seem to be running out, Andy. We just Have time to catcH the sEip." V B ack at Precinct, I asked wEatis-Eer-name at tEe switcEboard; "Will you marry me wEen you're #?" "Are you out of your mind?" sEe said. "Androids don't marry." "You will be even more desirable at # tBan you are now," I told Her, witH a flourisH of tEe m, tEe way Black Had done it "You're dam rigEt I'm B#. Now knock it off; tHe Coinmisponer wants to see you as soon as you come in, wHicH is rigEt now." SEaking, I pushed the oneway-screen button and went in wHen tHe door opened. TEe Commissioner was on tEe yisipEone. WHo witH? Li Himself, rigEt tEere on tEe visiscreeni His bps were moving, but tHe Commissioner was on tEe privacy key, and I suddenly regretted not knowing Eow to read bps. On tEe otHer Hand, I tEougHt, it was better not to know. WEat particular goofs of mine was Li complain- ing about? Witfiout even searcHing my mind, I could name a dozen or more. TEe Commissioner got in a few uE-HuEs and a tEank you and switcEed off. He swiveled around me. "TEat was President Li," He told me unnecessarily. Li woxild Have said, "I know," but aU I could manage was a weak yes, "Yes, Commissioner?" I waited to be consigned to tEe old Vat. "He says -- are you ready, Andy?" I nodded my dry-moutHed Head. "He says you were very efficient, capable and tactful #" "Me?" I almost gasped, but didn't. I nodded again instead. "I've Had my eye on you for some time, Andy, and President Li's cab merely confirms it. I tEink you're AndypHilo material! A few more of tHese diploniatic assignments, and I'U put irougH your promotion. You know wEat tEat means, eE?" You can bet your sweet protoplasm I did! Tired as I was, I lit up every bit a brigKtly as Mrs. Li Had, especially wHen tHe Commissioner sHook Hands witH me, making it twice in one day, and walked me to tHe door! I tSuinbed open my sleep-closet. Humming to m#rself, sometHing I don't ever remember doing before, I leaned back against my tiltboard and strapped jny;self in. If I made AndypHile, do you know wHat I would rate? A horizontal sleep-closet! Complete witH airform bed! Vega IV -- HaH! EartH is tfie only place for androids!      Four months ago we ran two ful!-page ads in Galaxy, both rather unusua! in that they were paid for by our contributors. One was a list of sciencefiction writers who wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam; the other, a list, nearly as long, of equally celebrated sf writers who wanted us to stay there. What struck us about these two lists is that we know nearly everyone who signed both advertisements and feel sure that both camps are as one in their view of what a proper human world should be like. It is not ultimate goals that divide them, but essentially a difference in tactics. And so we took the money that the writers paid to have their opinions pubtished and used it to establish a fund for five # prizes for the best suggestions anyone -- reader, writer or whatever -- had to offer on what to do about Vietnam. Next month we'il be reporting the winners of those prizes. More than that, we'll be telling you about what we plan to do next. For the choice of tactics is not really an arcane mystery, knowable only to God. Achieving the kind of world nearly all of us want is basically only one more problem among many, and we think it can be solved through the application of technological problem-solving techniques similar to those used in science and government today. And we're going to try... and we'll be keeping you posted on how it all works out, starting next month. Stories? Oh, to be sure there will be stories as well! Gordon R. Dickson Is back next month; so is Robert Silverberg. John Wyndham, whose Day of the Triffids is one of science-fiction's al! time best-sellers, will be also be present if space permits -- plus enough others, we think, to make it a really good issue even without the report on the Vietnam problem-selving study. But we think you'll be specially interested in that; we are! Grossfuiio found an inttnSy of po sibh nows. Each of them was real and all of them were -- meaningless! Eere were timelines brancEing and brancEing, a mega-' universe of universes, milEons TrilEons? Trimble didn't understand tEe tEeory tEougE God knows Ee'd tried. TEe universe spEt jeveiy time someone made a decision. SpEt, so tEat every derision ever made could go botE ways, Bvery cEoice made by every man, woman land cd on Ea was reversed in iU#e universe next door. It was enougE to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, wEo Ead otEer problems to worry about. Senseless suicide, senseless crime. A city-wide epidemic. It Ead Eit otBer cities too. Trimble suspected tEat it was world wide, tEat otEer nations were simply keeping it quiet. Trimble's sad eyes focused on tfie clock. Quitting time. He stood up to go Eome and slowly sat down again. For Ee Ead bis teetE in tfie problem, and be couldn't let go. Not that He was really accomplishing anytHing. But if He left now, He'd only Have to take it up again tomorrow. Go, or stay? And tHe brancHings began again. Gene Trimble thought of other universes parallel to this one, and a parallel Gene Trimble in each one. Some Had left early. Many had left on time, and were now halfway home to dinner, out to a movie, watching a strip show, racing to the scene of another death. Streaming out of police headquarters in all their multitudes, leaving a multitude of Trimbles behind them. Each of these trying to deal, alone, with the city's endless, inexplicable parade of suicides. Gene Trimble spread the morning paper on His desk. From the bottom drawer he took his gimcleaning equipment, then His .#. He began to take the gun apart. THe gun was old but serviceable. He'd never fired it except on the target range and never expected to. To Trimble, cleaning his gim was like knitting, a way to keep his hands busy while His mind wandered off. Turn the screws, don't lose them. Lay the parts out in order. Through the closed door to His office came the sounds of men Hurrying. Another emergency? The department couldn't Handle it all. Too many suicides, too many casual murders, not enough men. Gun oil. Oiled rag. Wipe caoh part. Put it back in place. Why would a man like Am- brose Hardesty go off a building? Tn the early morning light he lay, more a stain than a man, thirty-six stories below die edge of his own penthouse roof. The pavement was splatterod red for yards around him. The stains were still wet. Harmon had landed on his face. He wore a brit silk dressing gown and a sleeping jacket with a sasH. Others would take samples of his blood, to learn if He Had acted under the influence of alcohol or drugs. There was little to be learned from seeing him in his present condition. "But why was he up so earfy?" Trimble wondered. For the call had come in at #:#, just as Trimble arrived at headquarters. "So late, you mean." Bendey .had beaten him to the scene by twenty minutes. "We called some of his friends. He was at an allnight poker game. Broke up around six oclock." "Did Harmon lose?" "Nope. He won almost five hundred bucks." "That fits," Trimble said in disgust. "No suicide note?" "Maybe tKe#r've found one. SHall we go up and see?" "We won't find a note," Trimble predicted. Even three months earlier Trimble would Have thbught, How incrediblel or WHo could have pushed Him? Now, riding up in the elevator, He thought only. Reporters. For Ambrose Harmon was news. Even among this past year's epidemic of suicides, Ambrose Harmon's death would stand out like Lyndon Johnson in a lineup. He was a prominent member of the community, a man of dead and wealthy grandparents. Perhaps the huge inheritance, four years ago, Had gone to his head. He had invested tremendous gums to back hairbrained quixotic causes. Now, because one of the hairgrained causes had paid off, he iwas richer than ever. The Crosstime Corporation already held a score of patents on inventions imported from alternate time tracks. lAlready those inventions had started more than one industrial revolution. And Harmon was the money behind Crosstime. He would have been the world's next off e balcony. hey found a roomy, luxuriously furnished apartment in good order, and a bed turned down for the night The only sign of disorder was Hardesty's clothing -- slacks, sweater, a silk turtleneck shirt, knee-length oesocks, no underwear -- piled on a chair in the bedroom. The toothbrush had been used. He got ready for bed, Trimble thought He brushed his teeth, and then he went out to look at the sunrise. A man who kept late hours like that he wouldn't see the sunrise very often. He watched the sunrise, and when it was over, he jumped. "Why? They were all like that Easy, spontaneous decisions. The victim-killers walked off bridges or stepped from their balconies or suddenly flung themselves in front of subway trains. They strolled halfway across a freeway, or swallowed a full bottle of laudenaum. None of the methods showed previous planning. Whatever was used, the victim had had it all along; he nevec actually went out and bought a suicide weapon. The victim rarely dressed for the occasion, or used makeup, as an ordinary suicide would. Usually there was no note. Harmon fit the pattern perfectly. 'Xike Richard Corey," said Bentley. "Who?" "Richard Corey, the man who had everything. 'And Richard Corey, one calsc( sunomer night, Went Home and put a bullet tHrougH ins Head.' You know wHat I think?" "If you've got an idea, let's Have it." "THe suicides all started about a month after Crosstune got  started. I tlSnk one of the Crosstime ships brought back a new bug from some alternate timeline." "A suicide bug?" Bentley nodded. "You're out of your mind." "I don't think so. Gene, do you know how many Crosstime pilots have killed themselves in the last year? More than twenty percent!" "OH?" "Look at the records. Crosstime has about twenty velucles in action now, but In the past year they've employed sixty-two pilots. Three disappeared. Fifteen are dead, and all but two died by suicide." "I didn't know that." Trimble was shaken. "It was bound to happen sometime. Look at the alternate worlds they've found so far. THe Nazi world. The Red Chinese world, half bombed to death. THe ones that are totally bombed, and Crosstime can't even find out who did it. The one with the Black Plague mutation, and no along. Sooner or later -- " "Maybe, maybe. I don't buy your bug, though. If the suicides are a new kind of plague, what about the other crimes?" "Same bug." "UH, uK. But I think we'll check up on Crosstime." Trimble's Hands finished with the gun and laid it on the desk. He was hardly aware of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a prodding sensations the Handle, tfe piece he needed to solve the puzzle. He spent most of the day studjnng Crosstime, Inc. News stories, official Handouts, personal interviews. The incredible suicide rate among Crosstime pilots could not be coincidence. He wondered why nobody Had noticed it before. It was slow going. With Crosstime travel, as with relativity, you had to throw away reason and use only logic. Trimble had sweated it out. Even the day's murders Had not distracted him. They were typical, of a piece with the preceding eight months' crime wave. A man had shot His foreman with a gun bought an hour earlier, then strolled off toward police headquarters. A woman Had moved through' the back row of a dark theater, using an ice pick to stab members of tHe audience through the backs of their seats. She bad cfiosen only young men. They bad killed without heat, without concealment they Had surrendered without fear or bravado. Perhaps it was another kind of suicide. Time for coffee, Trimble thought, responding unconouly to a dry throat plus a fuzziness of the moutb plus slight fatigue. He set ffis hands to stand up, and -- The image came to him in an endless row of Trimbles, lined up like the repeated images in facing mirrors. But each image was slightly different. He would go get the coffee and he wouldn't and he would send somebody for it, and someone was about to bring it without being asked. Some of the images were drinking coffee, a few had tea or milk, some were smoking, some were leaning too far back with their feet on the desks (and a handful of these were toppling helplessly backward), some were, like this present Trimble, introspecting with their elbows on the desk. Damn Crosstime anyway. He'd have had to check Harmon's business affairs, even without the Crosstime link. There might have been a motive there, for suicide or murder, though it Had never been likely. In the first place, Harmon had cared nothing for mon. The Crosstime group Had been one f many. At the time that ponject had looked as hairbrained as tiie rest: a handful of enneers and physic and philosppen determined to prove the theory of alternate time tracks was reality. In the second place, Hardesty had no business worries. Quite the contrary. Eleven months ago an experin mental vdBcle had touched one of the world's of the Confederate States of America and returned. The universes of alternate choice were wiin reach. And the pilot had brought back an artifact. From that point on. Crosstime travel had more than financed itself. The Confederate world's "stapler," granted an immediate patent, had bout two more ps. A dozen miracles had originated in a single, technologically advanced timeline, one in wEidI the catastrophic Cuba War had been no more than a wet firecracker. Lasers, oxygen-hydrogen rocket motors, computers, strange plastics -- the list was still growing. And Crosstime held all the patents. I n those first months the vehicles had gone off practically at random. Now the pinpointing was better. Vcles could select any branch they preferred. Imperial Russia, Amerindian America, tfie CatHolic Empire, tSe dead worlds. Some of tGe dead worlds were Hells of radioactive dust and intact but deadly artifacts. From tHese worlds Crosstime pilots brought strange and beautiful works of art wHicH Had to be stored behind leaded glass. The latest vehicles could reacH worlds so like this one that it took a week of research to find the difference. In theory they could get even closer. There was a phenomenon called 'the broadening of the bands'... And that had given Trimble the shivers. When a vehicle left its own present, a signal went on in the hangar, a signal imique to that Hip. When the pilot wanted to return, he simply cruised across the appropriate band of probabilities until He found the signal. The signal marked his own unique present. Only it didn't. The pilot always returned to find a clump of signals, a broadened band. The longer he stayed away, the broader was the signal band. His own world Had continued to divide after his departure, in a constant stream of decisions being made both ways. Usually it didn't matter. Any signal the pilot chose represented the world he had left. And since the pilot himself had a choice, he naturally returned to them all. But -- There was a pilot by the name of Gary Wilcox. He Had been using his vehicle for experiments, to see how close he could get to his own timeline and still leave it. Once, last month. He had returned twice. Two Gary Wilcoxes, two vehicles. The velucles Had been wrecked -- their hulls intersected. For the Wilcoxes it could have been sticky, for Wilcox had a wife and family. But one of the duplicates Had chosen to die almost immediately. Trimble Had tried to call the other Gary Wilcox. He was too late. Wilcox Had gone skydiving a week ago. He'd neglected to open his parachute. Small wonder, thought Trimble. At least Wilcox had had motive. It was bad enoih, knowing about the other Tumbles, the ones who had gone Hbme, the ones drinking coffee, et cetra. But -- suppose someone walked into the offiice right now, and it was Gene Trimble? It could happen. Convinced as he was that Crosstime was involved in the suicides, Trimble -- some other Trimble -- might easily have decided to take a trip in a Crosstime vehicle. A short trip. He could land Here. f I 'rimble closed his eyes and rubbed at tfie comers witB His fingertips. In some timeline, very close, someone Had tfiougEt to bring lum coffee. Too bad tHis wasn't( it. It didn't do to tink too mucQ about tiiese alternate timelines. THere were too many of tSem. THe close one could drive you buggy, but tBe ones furtEer off were just as bad. Take tSe Cuba War. Atomics Had been used. Here and now Cuba was unInEabited, and some American cities were gone, and some Rusrian. It could Have been worse. WEy wasn't it? How could we luck out? Intelligent statesmen? Faulty bombs? A Humane reluctance to kill indiscriminately? No. TEere was no luck anywHere. Every decision was made botfi wasrs. For every wise cEoice you bled your Heart out over, you Had made ell tHe otEer cHoices too. And so it went, all tHrougE Qstory. Civil wars unfougHt on some worlds were won by ddier side on otBers. ElsewHen, anotHer animal Had first done murder witH an antelope femur. Some worlds were still all nomad; civilization Had lost out If every cHoice was cancelled elsewHerei wHy make a decision at all? Trimble opened His eyes and saw tHe gun. Tfiat gun, too, was endlly repeated on endl de; Some of lEe Images were ditty wi years of neglect Some smelled of gunpowder, fired lecentlyj a few at living targets. Some were loaded. All were as real as tfiis one. A number of tHese were about to go off by accident A proportion of tEese were pointed, in deadly coincidence, at Gene Trimble. See tfie endless rows of Gene Trimble, eacH at His desk. Some are bleeding and cursing as meu run into tfie room following tHe sound of tfie gunsfiot Many are already dead. Was tfiere a bullet in tHere? Nonsense. He looked anyway. THe gun was empty. Trimble loaded it At tfie base of His mind fie felt tfie toucE of tHe handle. He would find wEat He was seeking. He put tfie gun back on Hs desk, pointing away from !Sm, and fie tfiougfit of Ambrose Harmon, coming Home from a late nigfit. Ambrose Harmon, wEb Had won five Hundred dollars at poker. Ambrose Harmon, exhausted, seeing tfie listening sky as He prepared for bed. Go ing out to watcfi tHe dawDu Ambrose Harmon, watcSng tfie slow dawn, remembering a two thousand dollar pot He'd bluffed. In some otKer branching of time. He Had lost. Thinking that in some oer brancEng of time, that two thousand dollars included Es last dime. It was certainly possible. If Crosstime hadn't paid off, he might Have gone tEougH the remains of his fortune in the past four years. He liked to gamble. Watching the dawn, thinking of all the Ambrose Harmons on that roof. Some were penniless this night, and they had not come out to watch the dawn. Well, why not? If He stepped over the edge, here and now, another Ambrose Harmon would oEy laugh and go inside. If he laughed and went inside, other Ambrose Harmons would fall to their deaths. Some were already on their way down. One changed Es mind too late, another laughed as he fell... Well, why not?... rimble thought of another man, a nonentity, passing a firearms store. BrancEng of timelines, he thinks, looking in, and he thinks of the man who took Es foreman's job. Well, why not?... Trimble thought of a lonely woman maEng herself a drink at three m the afternoon. She fhinlfg of myriads of alter egos, with husbands, lovers, children, friends. Unbearable, to think that all the might-have-beens were as tieal as herself. As real as tEs ice p! in her hand. Well, why not?... And she goes out to a movie, but she takes the ice pick. And the honest citizen with a carefEly submerged urge to comimt rape, just once. Reading his newspaper at breakfast, and there's another story from Crosstime: thejr've found a world line in wEch Kennedy the First was assassinated. Strolling down a street, he thinks of world lines and infmite brancEngs, of alter egos already dead, or jailed, or President. A girl m a mimskirt passes, and she has Ece legs. Well, why not?... Casual murder, casual smcide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate umverses are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did. Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on Es desk. Well, why not?... And he ran out of the office shouting, "Bentley, listen. I've got the answer..." And He stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the answer, and it wasn't any good. The smcides, mtirders, casual crimes would continue... And he suddenly laughed and stood up. RidicEousI Nobody dies for a philosophical point!... newspapers, put it to fils Bead And Ee reached for the interand com and told the man who anfired. The Hammer fell on an swered to bring Him a sandwich empty chamber, and some coee... fired. THe gun jerked and And picked tHe gun off the blasted a hole in the ceiling, newspapers, looked at it for a fired. THe bullet tore a furrow long moment, then dropped it in in IBs scalp, the drawer. Ifis Hands began to fired. The bullet took off the shake. On a world line very close top of His Head, to this one... , At Your Newsstand Now ! For lAe bed In aduH fantasy -- and ffte fcesf in iwords-ond-somiy. by John Jafcu by Robert E Howard AS IF ky Rcbert Silverberg plus L Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Mack Reynolds, J. R. R. Tolkien -- and other great fantasy writers. Illustrated by Here we were on Thyre Planet, wondering where everyone had gone -- until they all came back ! I O eginald Bellflower looked out tlie window of tlie sfiuttle ship as it skimmed deeper into tlie atmospHere of TGyre Planet. At last, below, lie could see one of tHe alien cities. Judging from tlie constructions, one migGt imagine tKe vanisHed alien race in no way different from eartHincn except for language. Down to details in living accommodations, including toilet facilities, tKe cities, of THyre Planet were built for Human occupation. Bellflower, #, was an administrator. For more years tKan anyone would care to believe, He Gad attended evening classes in various centers which' specialized in producing tlie executive personality always in such short supply in industry. As a result of tHis schooling, his long-practiced smile of sincerity inspired immedate confidence; Eis dress was exactly proper for every occasion, social and business; and His comjsure could not be shaken by any conceivable corporate disaster. He knew every technique and reference source to use in determining tKe actual requirements of any potential employer. He knew the tfiree best companies to hire for resume writing. He knew How to respond without Hesitation to all possible job-placement-interview questions. And, of course. He was tKoroughly proficient in working every psychological and intelligence test known to man. His stern credo: Hire tKe best people available and pay whatever you have to to get them. , Bellflower was now confronted with the most challenging job of his career: General Director of the Scientific Task Force to Solve the Thyre Planet Transportation Problem. The shuttle, in due time, landed. Bellflower watched the other passengers, all homesteaders doubtless, disembark. When tKe last man was at the doorway, Bellflower arose and gathered up his belongings at leisure. He walked through the empty cabin to the exit, stepped out and calmly looked around for tiie welcoming party, already Halffragmented in confusion: thinking He Had missed tHe flight. Ee mayor. Hand outstretched, bounced up tKe stairs toward Him. "Wdcome to Aloseni, Mr. Bellflower!" cried the mayor. "Mayor Baile?" said Bellflower, taking the Hand in a firm, dry grip, making tKe smile, holding it just long enough to produce the desired effect, letting it go in recognition of tKe gravity of tKe situation on THyre Planet. "I Have been looking forward to working with you and your people." At tHe bottom of the boarding ramp. Bellflower repeated the performance for tfie otKer dignitaries. He placed Bmself completely at their disposal, sKowing no impatience, no desire to depart. At length an embarrassed silence fell. Formahties Had been to take the next step, perhaps for fear of offending their guest wEo was obviously quietly enjoying tKe welcoming activity. Bellflower said into the silence, "I guess it's time to go to work." Instantly, obeying Bellflower's suggestion. Mayor, Baile said, "We'll go into my office and go over the rituation right now, if you're not too tired from the trip." Bellflower bent to Eis suitcases. "Let's Have tHese sent over to my Hotel." Someone came forward to relieve Him of tEem. "Very well, Mayor Baile. Gentleman, tfiank you all for coming out. We'll be working closely togetKer." THe mayor started away. Bellflower following. An instant of sKock and terror enveloped tHe general director of was calmly walking toward wHat must be a Transportation BootH. Bellflower desperately surveyed the newly built spaceport No ground cars were in evidence! This development brought perspiration to Bellflower's skin. A man could damned well get killed in one of tKose Transportation Booths. Was He expected to use them, too? But of course you are, logic told him for tHe first time. When the mayor opened the door of the Transportation BootH, Bellflower drew back instinctively. The mayor said, "Everyone is a little uneasy the first few trips. Eventually, after a week or two, you get used to it. THe fatality rate is only point oH-oH-oH, oh-oh-oh two five of one percent." "Dellflower quickly rephrased the statistic to a mathematical aptitude test question. Given that the present population of the year (as on Mother earth) contains # days. By postulating an average travd rate per person of # trips a year. Bellflower was readily able to calculate a fatality rate of approximately # per day... assuming he had the decimal right. Each day he stayed on Thyre Planet, he faced one chance out of # transportation system. He stepped into the booth, his terror slowly departing. It was wildly improbable that he would be killed. Somebody else would be. It would take tfe Transportation Booths over # years to kill him. "Now, here's the way you work it," said the mayor. "You dial your number, in this case, my office... Then you pull this lever..." The outside world became opaque, and the two men were isolated. "Now," continued the mayor, "you wait for this light to flash, which indicates your office is ready to receive you. For God's sake always wait for the light to flash; you'll be killed every time otherwise. Now, see it flash? Now you push this button." As he listened to the instructions, Bellflower watched the mayor of Aloseni. In the logical part of his mind. He thought that there were entirely too many operations involved, and that with proper redesign tHere seemed no reason not to eliminate at least two of tliem. WEen ttie mayor pusBed tBe button, blood spurted from tBe side of Bis Bead. "Good Gqdl" cried Bellflower. "Your earl" Stunned, tBe mayor put a Band to Bis Bead. "My ear is tom offl" Be cried. "Jesusl It tivats! Don't stand tBere! Get tBe damned first-aid kiti Get tBe doctor in Berel It's Eurting like Belli" Bellflower saw for tBe first time tBat tEey were in a different Transportation BootE. He could tell because tBe opacity was gone and beyond tBe glass door was an office. Bellflower slammed tbrougH tBe door crying, "Get a doctorl Mayor Baile is Eurtl" TBe room filled almost immediately witB employees. First aid was given. WitBin tBree minutes a doctor stepped out of tBe Transportation BootB and took charge. He inspected tBe mayor quicky before rendering a verdict. "You're going to be all rigBt. You've just lost an ear is all. We'll get you right over to tBe Bospital." "Thank God it wasn't any worse," said the mayor. Bellflower stood helplessly to one side, watching the mayor and the doctor depart by means of the Transportation Booth. He faced a horrible sinking sensation that came when Be realized that he was going to have to step back into that little booth to get to his motel. II TTithin a week, BeUflowerwas   situated in Bis offices. TBe general director's suite seemed not to accord completely vuth Bis job responsibilities, but for. the first few months, during program bmldup. Be would make do. In seven days, the unfamiliarity of the alien city vanished into Bis subconscious to trouble him only in vague dreams of the classic insecurity type. He was assured these, too, would pass. The strange and contradictory color combinations, the texture of the wood, the Band of tBe synthetics, the unfamiliar odors, tBe unusual ta'stes Bad blended into the natural environment. He reviewed his presentation for Colonel Ramsey, head of the Thyre Planet Citizens' Committee for Public Transi)ortatiom This blue-ribbon committee, appointed by the prerident of Thyre Planet to develop the .scientific team to solve the transportation problem, was as near at the moment, to an employer as Bellflower Bad. Colonel Ramsey stepped out of the Transportation Booth exactly at the appointed hour. The clearcircmt signal a moment before tds arrival gave Bellflower a cHance to compose His smile. WHen tHe amenities Had been completed, Bellflower said, "I understand Dr. Nostran will arrive tomorrow? I must congratulate you again on obtaining Eis services." "We were amazed He would consent," said Colonel Ramsey. "He made a personal presentation and He was the only one wHo did wKo seemed to Have a firm, scientific grasp of our problem Here on TKyre. You would expect no less from Dr. Nostran. I don't mind telling you, we felt very lucky to get Him." "I am looking forward to die opportunity of working witB Him," said Bellflower. "I Have been moving aHead as quickly as I can in His absence. I am presently recruiting senior staff members in accordance witH tEis Table of Organization." He passed tHe document over to Colonel Ramsey, wEo studied it At lengtH Colonel Ramsey said, "TBs is a professional document I wisH my people could do as well. But it's wHat we expect of you." "I expect tEe quaUty of my work to be reviewed along witH everyone else's," said Bellflower. "A man stands on His performance. I don't Hke excuses. I don't make excuses." "A commendable attitude," said the colonel. "I wish my people Sad that attitude, but I'm afraid there is a lack of true executive talent in tHe universe." "I am slowly coming to an appreciation of the magnitude f our problem Here on THyre," said Bellflower. "I don't want to xninimize tEe committment or resources that will Have to be made, nor do I wish to promise a solution within a week, a montH or even a year. This may be one of tHe most difficult problems ever tackled by the Human race." "We didn't find any scientific experts wKo tKougHt it would be easy." flower, "we are dealing with a problem of divergent cultures. Superficially these cultures are virtually identical. In fact, they are profoundly different. Tfieir very tHout processas, their very ways of tfiinldng about the universe, are at opposite extremes. I see our job, in a larger sense, as achieving a synthesis of these two opposites. 'We must, in sEort, learn tfie thought processes of the TEyiians. We must follow ffiem up the evolutionary ladder; we must isolate divergent tendencies, analyze them, project them info scientific constructs. These clues will offer Dr. Nostran a philosophical basis for His new pHysics. BoUj programs must advance in parallel developmaits." Colonel Ramsey, impressed, said, "I see Have not stopped tHinkmg after Having ade your successful presentation to the committee." "I will work on tHis problem twenty-four Sours a day. I will saturate my subconscious until the Scientific Task Force becomes the stuff of my dreams. I continually tum the dtuation over in my tSouts, seeking some tiny new insigSt, some small clue that can lead us a step forward. Step by step, clue by clue... " Bellflower settled deep into his chair. His eyes lost their focus to sight on distant, invisible goals -- a technique Se Sad mastered only by self-deception. "I always encourage my people to see the positive aspects of any research. I do not believe negative thinking is constructive. Let me give you an example. "I've talked to a dozen people who keep coming back to Captain MacDonald's blunder. What is to be served by worrying over that again? What is to be served by discussing endlessly Commander Aloseni's role? Should he have forbidden the use of radar? The whole question is academic. Let's take the positive approach. "How could a culture develop to this point without discovering radar? How cotild they store all their recorded data, every bit of it, their whole history, on tape that could be erased by radar frequencies? "It doesn't help to say that if all those recordings hadn't been erased, we would be able easily to read the solution to our transportation problem from them. That's past. What does help is asking ourselves how such an advanced culture could be so stupid. This is the problem we have to address ourselves to." XTour point is very well  taken," said Colonel Ramsey. "I wish my own people would leam to take a positive approach like that." "My mind," said Bellflower, "keeps continually returning to this cultural polarity. It illustrates the magnitude of the task before us. The Thyrians Have developed a method of transportation unknown anrwhere else in the universe. And yet, yet... it seems almost within our grasp, doesn't it? We Have the Corsi equations. They tell us how to effect no-time transmissions between spacial coordinates. And what is more common than starship flights? We think nothing of a journey of a thousand lightyears. Yet the energy requirements are fantastic and nowHere in tfie Corsi equations can we learn Eow to do matter transmission in close proximity to a strong gravitational field. "Yet Here on TKyre, witfi one atomic pile for power and a single computer, tlie TEyrians erected tEis vast network of matter transmitters. WEat was tEe x-equation tlieir scientific genius evolved? We look at tEe world tHrougE different eyes. Ironic tEat neitEer race ever guessed tEe otBer's secret!" "I wisE my people Ead your broad perspective," said Colonel Ramsey. "I do not underestimate tEe magnitude of tEis job. I studied it carefully before I made appEcation for the position of General Director. I would not Eave Eesitated to turn the appointment down if I felt for a gle moment that there would not be enough resources to carry out e assignment properly. I expect defeat. "But I ultimately expect wctory. "Every day twenty men, women and children step into a Booth, just like the one over there, and emerge mangled corpses an instant later. Every day people are horribly and permanently mutilated by that device. I, myself, saw Mayor Baile lose an ear. I want to work on this program. But I must know that our scientific people have every resource at their disposal. "Even if my scientists ultimately discover after years and years of work that there is no solution to the problem, I want to know that I, personally, made the best try anyone could make to end this needless slauter." "Mr. Bellflower," said Colonel Ramsey, "tHs is tSe kind of support you Eave every rigfit to expect from us. The committee, every man and woman on it, is personally committed to see that that is exactly the kind of support you will get" "I deeply appredate your confidence," said Bellflower. Ill 'wo days later, BeEflower spoke privately witfi !Bs cQief scientist. Dr. Seymour Nostran, newly arrived to assume duties. Bellflower opened the conversation on a social note. "You find, doctor, after a few trips in the Booth, you don't mind it any more. We're only losing twenty a day, on the average. TEe figure wiU go up as mere immigrants move in, but the odds remain constant." Dr. Nostran did not dispute the point. "I suggest," said Bellflower, "we each make our own adjustment in. our own way. TKe only effect the sociologists Have noted has been a slight increase in fe suicide rate. Each of us develops our superstition: tiiat accidents won't happen twice from the same booth; that an accident to a close associate or family member confers immunity on oneself; that a strong belief in the power of a talisman will influence external reality in one's favor... We each adjust in our own way: you and I, to a knowledge of probabilities, which establishes our thinking on a firm, scientific basis." Dr. Nostran said, "My stomach still knots up every time I get into one of those damned things." Dr. Nostran," said Bellflower, "what do yon think of eur chances? What are we up agamst; what do we need to get the jeh done? I was certainly net able to follow an the details in ywui: presentation to the Thyre Geaendttee, but I wonder if you could explain the Nostran Theory to me in layman's terms?" "The theory," said Dr. Nostran, "is an evolutionary growth, the final culmination of research that extends back into antiquity. It no more bekmgs to me tten it does to the milhons of physicists traveling the same path before me. You are familiar with wHat used to be called quantum mecEanics, one of tEe loveUest intellectual concepts of tEe Euman race? I returned to tis tEeory ratEer tlto tEe Corsi equations. My contribution is to postulate tt tEe quanta do not reprsent discrete jumps, but are composed of a number of interrelated elements I cEose to call pifilins. "Now tEe Nostran TEeory, socalled, essentially proposes tEat tEe various afpHa-pifilins interact witE tEe amma-pifilins to produce conditions formerly referred to as tSe quanta. WEereas it could be demonstrated tEat tEe location or energy of a single quantum-particle was indeterminate, I propose tEat botH the location and energy of tEe two pifiUns are indeterminate. This is tEe crucial point, Bowever: I suggest tEat tEe combination condition, commonly Eeld to be tEe quanta, is absolutely determinate. Provided only tEat we can establisE te actual value for tEe ideal mass of tEer tEe apEapEilin or tEe ganima-pEilin. TEe problem poses tmusual experimental difEculties. "I suggested to tEe TEyre Committee tiBat tEe maEunction of tEe transportation system on tEis planet arises from tlTig very uncertainty prindple, operating statistically over bilEons and billions of molecules in transit between Booths. TEe problem is insoluble in terms of our present revised Corsi equations. An ajproacE tErougE tEe old quantum mecEanics, as reinterpreted by tEe Nostran TEeory, is our only Eope for success." "TEen you are proposing extensive researcE?" asked Bellflower. "I took tEat to be tEe case from your presentation." "TEere is no otEer way, Mr. Bellflower. I Eave devoted my life to tEis researcE, and I can tell you it will tax our resources to lEe limit E we are to conclusively determine tEe ideal mass of the amma-pEilin. But it represents, in my opinion, tEe only real solution to TEse's ghastly accident rate, "I may as well be frank witS you. Bellflower. I would never Eave consented to tEe scientEic management of tEis program E I felt for a single instant tEat pecunious administrators would witEEold needed funds, as they Eave been known to do all too often in tEe past WitE Euman lives at stake, almost # a year, we Eave no alternative but to persevere untE we Eave determined the ideal mass of tEe amma-pEilin." "And, doctor, once done -- ?" "TEe engineers sEould be able to apply tEe new equations immediately in lEe redeagn of the Transportation System." tugHt, Dr. Nostrani wrote ' Eis colleague on tSe planet Tfiorsen: Dear Professor Rind: I am now established on Thyre Planet and have had a very successful conference with Reginald Bellflower, the principal administrator of the project I wrote you about. I know you will be as elated as I am to learn that at last I am assured of adequate financial support to consummate my lifelong ambition to determine the ideal mass of the gamma-pifilin. IV  ' Nostran supplied Bellflower witfi a detailed estimate of His projected requirements for tHe first full year of operation. Bellflower Had already acquired a skeleton staff from' tHe local population and was beginning to add elective flesH. An unexpected tind Had been tHe man to Head up tHe Engineering Division, a local applicant. THis permitted tHe preliminary design work to get underway wItHin six weeks after receipt of Dr. Nostran's request. Engineering promised construction could begin In eleven montHs on tHe largest particle accelerator ever conceived. Bellflower Hired a personnel director from Eis own Home planet, Costain, known to Him by reputation: Dr. A. Jimg Fiedler. Between tHem tEey outlined tHe recruiting program. First priority went to obtaining suitable people to Head tHe PurdHaring Contract Administration and Xenological Divisions, tHe last a divion particularly forward in Bellflower's tHougHts, wHose 'oH would be to elaborate tHe psycHology on tHe aUen TEyrians. "Dr. Fiedler," said Bellflower, "I want you to get your department built up as qtilckly as possible. I want you free to concentrate on getting In tHree or four top managers. I Hope you can start on tHat in two weeks. Let tHe staff Handle tHe engineers and scientists. But be sure tiiey know wHat tHejre doing. Sell tHe job, sell its importance. I want to blanket tHe tinlverse wItH recruitment ads for just tHe rigHt people. Be sure to feature tHe fact Tfiyre was discovered by a Federation exploration team and tHat cHoice Homesteads are still available. Next, play up Dr. Nostran. He won't be offended. And tHen Ht Heavy oti tHe opportunities for professional advancement, tHe working conditions, the full support of tecEnIcal-minded management... you know the usual tHrng. Sell tHem' on tHe idea tHey'll Have tHe best and latest equipment and virtually unlimited funds at tHeIr disposal in view of the critical nature of the research." "I thinh we ought to play down the actual problem we're working ofi," said Dr. Fiedler. "I've been here three days and I'm still terrified every time I get into a Transportation Booth. A lot of people will think twice before they'll bring their families to a planet with a transportation system like this." "That's one reason we pay top salaries," said Bellflower. "I'll leave it to you how to handle it. Better set up a Psychology Group to do some depth research for you and come up with a scientific approach for the copywriters." "I was thinking along those lines," said Dr. Fiedler. "Let's try to get some genuinely creative people in the organization, too. We're committed to Dr. Nostran's general approach; we must see he gets every person He needs. But we can support him with a lot of peripheral research. I'm thinking, now, of a special group in the Xenological Division to examine the feasibility of locating surviving THyrians. First, what are the probabilities that there are still Tlqrrians on the planet? How much of the planet has not been explored by us as yet? Where would the Thyrians logically be Hiding? "Let's check every inch of territory on the map for possible sites. Let's run an analysis to find out the probability not only of rinding Thyrians, but also the probability of finding a technically oriented TEyrian. Out of the total population, whatever it was, what percentage of Thyrians were likely to understand How the Transportation System actuaDy operated? In other words, statistically speaking, what is the maximum number of Thyrians that could be hiding, and out of this number, what are our chances of finding one who could contribute to the solution of our problem? Would the actual search, in short, be worth the expense? "Let's find out tiow many aliens there were on the planet when the cities were inhabited. Let's study the cities and estimate the size of the population they were built to serve. "Let's set up a group to find out what was the recent disaster that led to the total disappearance of the Th#uians. How long ago did it happen? Let's find out why they incinerated their dead and why their visual artists avoided the representation of objects from nature. "This is the type thinking I want. Let's go after creative people." "I'm with you all the way," "I want tiiose thxee division ectors witHin tHree monttvs. Wie're going to cut ttie nonnal recruiting time in Half all tHe way down the line!" U nder the dynamic management of Bellflower, the operation began to snowball. By itfie time of ground-brealdng ceremonies for tHe particle accelerator -- only two months befiind scBediile -- Bellflower was able to assure tHe growing population of THyre Planet tfiat everytfiing conceivable was being done. Now In tfie second year of tHe operation. Bellflower began to devote His energies to larger aspects of tfie problem. He was as conditioned as any man on tfie planet to tfie use of Transportation Booths. His frequent statement tfiat fie made more trips in a day in overseeing tfie vast organization tfian most citizens made In a week indicated Bs interest In tfie solution was vitally personal. Colonel Ramsey, tfie president's liaison witfi Bellflower now tfiat tfie , citizens committee, goal eccomplisfied, fiad been dissolved, came for Bs biweekly bribing. "We're approacBhg a planetwide deatfi rate of thirty a day," tfie colonel said. "I've seen tfie papers," said Bellflower. "We're not getting our story across. Look at tfie tremendous progress we've made just during the last quarter. Dr Nostran's accelerator is nearly back on schedule. We have expanded tfiirteen per cent in terms of technical staff alone. Approxnow directly on our payrolls, not to mention the people paid by tfie independent contractors. We have inaugurated a new division exclusively to study the operation of tfie Transportation Booths from a theoretical standpoint, including what actually occurs during transit. We Haven't even been able to solve tfiat problem for tfie starsBps! So you see we're trying every approach tfiat is even remotely promising. This is tfie story we Have to get across." "Tfie president understands tBs," said Colonel Ramsey. "The papers are maldng very uninformed criticisms. We're much nearer to tfie solution than we were a month ago, and there has been no hint of waste and mismanagent above tfie nominal t ninlmiim you've got to expect and allow for in a crash operation of tBs magnitude. But it's a difficult point, as you say." (CT don't know Sow often I've  repeated obvious statements," said Bellflower. "Take ffie truism: In physics, tfie smaller tiSe phenomenon under investigation, tfie larger tfie energy requirement WHat can be more obvious? And tHe death rate: of course it is going up. What would you expect? TKe population is going up I Cut down on tH population, you'll cut down on the death rate." "We Have some room for optimism on that point," said Colonel Ramsey. "Most of tHe Homestead property is gone. THe Federation team expects to complete tKeir work of processing claims in another month or two Our projection now is that the immigrant population will peak Then we'll hnd out how stable the population is going to be, whether TEyre will continue to grow in a logical fashion, or whether Thyre is just another flash in the pan. t we're almost over the hump on the population, and we can be grateful for that." "There are several iHngs we can do about the immediate problem," said Bellflower. 'We need a Public Relations Division to keep the citizens abreast of our work. We're going to have to start getting out press releases, posters, documentary films, tie-in promotions with toy manufacturers... you know the sort of thing I mean. We need some good people for a Speakers' Bureau to get the message to the fraternal organizations, the business groups and the schools. We are going to have to create a whole ing from the ground up, with a new, catchy nickname." "We've definitely got to improve the image before the organization becomes a political football," said Colonel Ramsey, Bellflower bent forward to his desk and requested, by means of the intercom, delivery of a document. When the secretary brought it, He said, "Colonel Ramsey, I want you to look this over. I've been thinking of the larger aspects of the work. An administrator is not only responsible for selling the program to management -- in ffis case the Thjo-e. But he is also responsible for making whatever contribution He can to the financial end of the operation. "Appropriations time is coming up very soon." He handed across the document and continued ffis explanation. "I'm not surprised at the costs we've run into. I have never minced words on the subject of costs, nor has Dr. Nostran. But it's not going to be as expensive as converting to land transportation, as some have proposed. All the cities on Thyre are organized to accommodate the Transportation Booths. It would be impossible to put in a safe and rational system of surface streets. Tfie expense of inter-city higHways, on top of tEat, would be astronomical I THat approach is out. I've Heard people say, well, can we afford to solve the problem? Is it worth it?" nellflower bent forward intently, fixing Colonel Ramsey's eyes. "Unless something is done, In three years we'll be losing forty people a day, fourteen thousand six Hundred a year I The economic cost alone, in terms of deaths and injuries, is already lars a year, by very conservative figures. And this says noting of the human suffering. The question must not be: Can we pay for the solution? The qution must be: Haw can we pay for the solution?" "The president is vniS you one himdred per cent," said Colonel Ramsey. "Please glance tBrough the pro iKsal. Let me know wEat you think." Colonel Ramsey read quietly for a full minute. Looking up lit last, he asked, "Do you think we can sell it?" "I know we can sell it," said llellflower. "T#s is one of an administrator's many jobs, if he knows his business. All I need is life president's full support and I ooperation." "Looking back," said Colonel Ramsey, "I think we should have gone after Federation money in the very beginning." "Yes," said Bellflower, "I could Have recommended it at the time. But experience has indicated to me that it's always better to wait a year or two. You have to convince the Federation people that you're serious yourself, that you really intend to carry through. "If we had tried a year ago, we might not have succeeded. What did we Have to show them, then? And it's too hard trying to go back in after you've lost once. Now we're ready. "This program is a natural for the Federation. Once we get this little Idnk worked out of the transportation system, look at what the Federation will Have bought foi: its tinandal supporti For the first Stile in Bstory we will haye oisetnBonal matter tranfters whi function in any gruidfaticnial fidd. It will revolutionize franspotiation on the stsdface of eveiy planet in the Federation. Even the spin-off from such research is of incalculable valuel" "I wish you would come with me this afternoon," said Colonel Ramsey "and tell the president what you've told me. Tell it just the way you've told it to me." "I want you to think of the advantages of this to Thyre. With Federation backing, we can really get tbe program into higU gear. T Kinir of wfiat it will mean to tKe wHole economy of Tfiyre!" "You mu Mr. Bellflower, come tell tfie President tins yourself. I can't tell you Eow entGusiastic I am for tEe ideal" V T Eree montEs later. Bellflower returned from Coueril, tEe planetary Eeadquarters of tEe Federation of Star Systems. He reported to tEe president on tEe success of Eis mission. "Mr. Presiident, I am submitting a written report, but I'm very pleased and gratified to have this opportunity of giving you a first-Eand account. I must tell you in tEe beginning tEat tEe staff you sent witE me did a magnMcent job. I literally could not Eave done it witfiout tEem. I cannot praise too ffigfily Mr. Leggitt, from tEe TEyrian National CEamber of Commerce. TEere is no man more genuinely dedicated to tEe walfare of TEyre tEan Mr. Leggitt. "I can report tEe mission was entirely successful. We Eave a firm committment of ten bilEon dollars from tEe Federation emergency fund. TEat will solve our immediate problem witE tEe accelerator backup researcE in six montEs. After tEat, I believe we can really start talking witE them about substantial monies." "Mir. Bellflower," said tEe president of TEyre, "I don't need to tell you tEat today you are one of tEe most popular men on TEyre Planet. I want to assure you, personally, and the wEole Save Our CEildrenI organization tEat we will give you every possible support I can't tell you witE wEat emotions we Eave all greeted tEe Federation action." TEe president glanced into tEe distance. "TEyre Planet is a small, new insignificant planet crying out to tEe stars for aid in our Eour of crisis. Now, tErougE you, Mr. Bellflower, tEe stars Eave tEundered back tEeir support. Here are tEe bilEon bUEon people in tEe known universe, united tErou tEe Federation of Star Systems, extending a Band of assistance to tEe least of tEeir brotEers. No grander day Eas been known in te Bstory el tEe race of mani How true it is; Ask and it aU be given you. I Eeard of your success on TV, Mr. Bellflower, witE tears of gratitude in my eyes." B ellflower, as Ee waited for Dr. Nostran, surveyed Eis new offices witE appreciation. TEey occupied one complete floor of tEe Commercial BuEding in central Aloseni, tEe major City on TEyre Planet. TEe main office Had beea completely; remodeled during his fifteea-day stay on Coueril. Hia offices in the new now under construction, would be even grander. Before Him on the desk, the second annual report awaited His approval. Two hours from now. He waa scheduled to receive an Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from tHe Univergity of Altung, center of mucH rmearcH on THyrian psychology sponsored fore Him for final reading. THe weekly Divirional Progress Reports Summary awaited Hia study. Dr. Nostran stepped from tHe Transportation BootB, smiling. "Congratulations, Bellflowerl It's been all over iTV for tHe last three daysl Wonderful nevrel We are pusBng full ahead on the accelerator." Bellflower extended a hand. "How good of you to come over. Please have a seat. Dr. Nostran. I won't keep you but a few nunutes." Beaming, Dr. Nostran, looking younger and more fit than when he arrived on THyre Planet more than two years ago, drew up the chair and settled himself into it. "My own work is showing good progress. For the first time I feel we are on our way toward making solid progress." "I've been reading some of the old weekly progress reports since I got back," Bellflower said. "I seem to remember, Doctor, that you once told me you could solve the problem by measuring the ideal mass of either the apHaor amma-pifilin. I Have not seen any work at all on the alpHa-pifilin." 'Tr. Nostran admitted he had ' been working on only the igamma-pifilin. It would be ver' very difficult to do that for the apha-pifilin. Being time-negative, it presents exceptional instrumentation problems. If we had a small time maclune, the difficulties would be reduced by an order of magnitude." "Isn't a time machine a Httle out of the question. Dr. Nostran? The Corsi equations pretty much eliminate the possibiHty of time travel in this universe, don't they?" "Benjamin Corsi was insane I" snapped Dr. Nostran. "There's no question about the authenticity of Bstorical documentation on that point; I have examined many of tiie original source materials myself. A small time machine just enough to move a negative mass a distance of #' angstroms is all we would require." "If we could build a time machine," said Bellflower after a moment, "couldn't we just go back and get all tEose tapes MacDonald accidentally erased? Where would tKat leave your main project?" "We couldn't build one tfiat large until we got tHe ideal mass of the pifilin. You can see tSat, Bellflower. A small one, maybe. Not a big one." "You mean you would really know how to build a time machine if you could get tSe ideal mass of tKe pifilin?" "Jesus CKrist, Bellflower, wHat do you tHink I'm working on? I'm talking about tHe ideal mass of the pitilinl Once we find at, it's the key to everytffingl" "Well," said Bellflower, "perhaps I could sell tem just a small time mace. WEaf do you think it would cost to get research started along tEose lines on a modest scale? One bilEon? Two bilEon?" So the conversation went. At length, Having overstayed ffis time, Dr. Nostran stepped into the Transportation BootE and vanished about lus business. Bellflower closed Eis eyes and allowed himself a moment of speculation. Suppose Dr. Nostran was right -- and wfio could possibly know whetEer Ee was rit or not? What kind of a socie most certainly would still Have to administer tEe operation of getting rid of all the mistakes in Human History, past and future. It would be a job to cHallenge His own talents. It would be a colossal program wHicE would last more tHan a fiuman lifetime. Dr. Nostran was # years old. TEeoretical work He Had done # years ago was now in graduate sdHool texts on a bilHon planets. As te impEcations of latest equations became partially evident, many were beginning to call Him tHe Corsi of tEe Universe. At latest count, Ee Had # milEon Eonorary doctor's degrees, indicating tHe general esteem in wEicE Ee was Held by His colleagues. Bellflower was completely persuaded tEat Dr. Nostran was te perfect man for the job of solving tEe transportation problem on THyre Planet. VI W itE the second influx of Federation money on tHe promised scEedule, BeEflower approved tEe plans for construction of tEe vast new Research Center, occupying a ten-milelong site paraUel to tHe particle accelerator excavation. THe particle accelerator itseE would ultimately consist of a gentle spiral trackway rising twenty-two stories above ground level. Construction was proceeding on scEedule, and the #-mEe-long, mile-deep trencH Had been dug. Bellflower was'also occupied witiS a new propol requested by tEe president of TEyre Planet. TEig envisioned tEe conversion of major areas of tEe planet to researcB sites -- some connected witE Bellflower's suggestion, master plans were in preparation to convert TEyre Planet to one of tEe major researcH faciUEes in tEe solid base for tEis new construction. It already possessed a substantial number of tEe most famous scientists available, eacE laboring at tEe details of Eis specialty in accordance witS Dr. Nostran's vision. Soon it would be doubtful that even the rediately accommodate usefully all tiie available talent tEey were funded for. If Bellflower could be said to Have a problem, it involved tEe time maclune. TEe Federation inspection team was due in a montE. TEey would go over tEe complete operation of tiie minutest detail. Bellflower knew tiie financial management aspect was secure against critidsm. TEe Federation accountants would locate some duplication, tEe elinunation of wEicE would save a few milmion dollars Eere and tiiere to Justify tiieir jobs, but otEervnse they would approve tiie program as it stood. TEe senior scientific staff would doubtless be reluctant to criticize Dr. Nostran on any point, but some junior scientist, just out of school, would unquestionably cEallenge tEe time macffine on tEe basis of tEe Cord equations. TEis could lead to an interminable squabble between exierts, and so-caUed experts, and in tEe end cause tEe wEole debate to erupt into imwanted pubEdty. Bellflower dedded the best way to avoid difficulty was to confront tEe time-macEine researcB squarely at tiie first meeting. TEe Federation sdentists must be made to understand that only a small time macEine would be involved and the cost of tiie development would never exceed ten per cent of the total effort. Even if tiie research failed, it had cost next to nothing. Bellflower would have to take tEe Federation contracting officer aside and explain that there was no intention of attempting to develop an operational model. It was difficult to see how any rational Federation officer in any position of authority could justify funds for that sort of research, tince the benefits of the development were obscure and the multiple disadvantages and inherent problems too readily apparent. The contracting officer must be made unequivocably to understand tiiat Dr. Nostran's device, if successful, would be nothing more than another tool for the experimental physicists, with' no wider application area, except possibly for demonstrations at fairs and in undergraduate science classrooms. Bellflower's reflections were disturbed by the dear-circuit signal on Eis Transportation Bootli. Bellflower looked up. He Bad just time to compose Eis face to its most stony severity before the visitors emerged. It was the height of discourtesy to arrive without advance notification. Out stepped a man Bellflower Identified as one of Dr. Nostran's senior scientists. "Mr. Bellflower," He said, "I Hate to go over Dr. Nostran's head this way, but I think we've stumbled onto the solution to our problem." "WEat problem is that?" asked Bellflower coldly. "TEe problem of what's wrong witE the transportation system on tQs planet," the man said. "WEat in God's name are you talking about?" demanded Bellflower. "It's simply a question of a malfunction in the computer." "God damn it, man I There can't be anything wrong with that computer... Can there?" he president was smiling wEeif Bellflower stepped out of tKe Transportation Booth. "Mr. Bellflower, it's always good to see you. I can't imagine what sort of emergency you have in mind. But you know you have my support in the matter without asking,;" He drew Bellflower to the comfortable chair and went to the adjacent one. "Now, Mr. Bellflower, lets hear it." "There is a remote possibility, Mr. President, that our research may have been rewarded." "In what way, Mr. Bellflower?" asked the president sympathetically. "We may Have found out what's wrong with the transportation system." In the face of presidential silence, Bellflower preserved a respectful attitude of waiting. "You really know what's wrong with it?" asked the president at last. "There's a possibility that something's wrong with the computer. The evidence is strong enough to suggest an investigation. The Federation people would be sme to insist on an investigation, in the face of the evidence I've seen." "I see," the president said, relaxing. "Approximately how much additional funds do you think this will come to? Will we have to go back to the Federation right now, or can we swing the first part with what we've already been given?" "The technicians think they can have it fixed tomorrow," said Bellflower.  gain there was silence, which began as though it mit continue for eternity. Bellflower could appreciate the president's thoughts. "In case they're right," Bellflower said, "we are confronted with some serious problems!" The voice reached the president in his cave of shattered ambitions. He roused himself to the present. "I'm sorry, Mr. Bellflower. What was that again?" "I say we may have a lot of problems on our minds. If these technicians are right, the problems involved in phasing out the Planet are going to Have to be thought about right now. Do you realize how many people are involved? Do you realize the magnitude of this effect upon the lives of our citizens? Do you realize what an integral part of "I'm just stunned, Mr. Bellflower," said the president. "I'm sure you've done all you can. I need a moment to pull myself together." "I knew you would be fully as elated as I am," said Bellflower, "Yes, of course," said the president. Bellflower folded his hands and waited. The president's thoughls were now exploring all the unprofitable alternatives Bellflower's mind had already explored. Delicate sensibilities prevented them from being vocalized. The one Hope Bellflower Had realistically glimpsed in His own analysis was fragmented on the character of the chief scientist lumself, Dr. Nostran. There were probably several thousand physicists and mathematicians who could see the implications of the time machine implicit in Dr. Nostran's pifilin research. One of the stupid bastards would inevitably let the cat out of the bag in his enthusiasm, and the whole concept of continued Federationsponsored research on Thyre Planet would go up the infinity tube. "Well," said the president at length, "We can't be sure that this new plan or whatever it is will actually work, can we? There's a good chance it won't, isn't there?" After the conference with the president. Bellflower called on Dr. Nostran. Dr. Nostran took the visit rather badly, as Belldower had known he would. T est day came. The day in advance, all communications media warned the citizens to refrain from tise of the Transportation Booths from #:# ajm until the govenunent gave ffie all-clear announcement. Kteven o'clock approached. The president and Befifloweil Had run through their victory statements on the television prompters. The president's remarks began: "Citizens, the moment we have all jirayfully hoped for so long has at last arrived." Bellflower began: T cannot tell you, today, the faide I feel in having been instrumental in a small measure in the glorious events of this afternoon. But in a larger sense, no one man can claim credit for our victory, not even the beloved Dr. Nostran. The events today demonstrate once again that if you are committment of your treasure, no iiroblem in the universe is too complicated for man to solve." The alternative addresses, calling for renewed dedication and sacrifice, were also on hand in the unhappy event of failure. The president, along with Bellflower and major iolitical dignitaries, watched the TV coverage on a screen in the wall. Dr. Nostran had declined to attend the cerOiiomes, pleading urgent laboratory work. The screen now showed technicians as they prepared to disconnect the computer. "We're waiting now for you people out tHere to clear the Booths," said the announcer impatiently for the fifth or sixth time. "Please do not i)se the Transportation Booths! You could be seriously Burt or killed!" The camera studied flickering lights on the control panel. The announcer pleaded, "Please, tell everybody you know not to use the BooiHs! We can't shut off the computer until every last light goes off!" This went on for approximately thirty minutes. Slowly, the number of lights decreased on the control panel until only a few were left. THere was suddenly a moment when all the lights were off. "Now!" cried a voice. The board went dead. All transportation across Thyre Planet ceased. "I certainly Hope we didn't catch anyone in the system at cut-off," said the announcer. "I thought I did see one light come on, just before the board went dead; let's Hope not! Now, while the technicians replace the deficient unit, we will switch to the volunteers across the planet. Let's talk to these brave people." The interviews withthe volunteers went on seemingly without end. "Are you afraid. Miss Jones, to be one of the first to use the Booths after repairs?" "They're going to send some kitties through first," she said. "If the kitties can make it, I'm willing to try." The proceedings wore on. Only one small note of tragedy interrupted them. A special bulletin came on one Hour and teen minutes after cut-off. "Ladies and Gentlemen. We have just received a report that a family of four are believed to Have been caught in transit during cut-off of the Transportation Booths. Mr. Arnold Hutchins, #, his wife, Mabel, age unknown, and their two children, Mary and Kathleen, seven and nine, all of # Bentway Road, Aloseni, stepped into their Transportation Booth on their way to a local cinema at the exact time of cut-off. Police are now verifying the report, which was made by Mrs. Winifred Friendly, mother of the deceased "Wife, who was at the family home at the time and who witnessed the trac development. The family Bad been watching television imtil just a moment before the disaster Mr Hutchins's last words uport entering the Booth are reported to Have been, 'We still have a lot of time. This thing will go oil for hours.' "The Hutchins family and Mrs. Friendly, immigrants from the Extertian System, arrived on Thjire Planet three years ago and homesteaded the site at # Bentway Road, where they Have lived since arrival. We Have Had no late word on funeral ar ittcenents, but it is assumed by police lEat final details are still Gontingenf on recovery of tHe four Codies." It was slitly after I :# wHen tEe computer was reactivated, its original function restored. Af tBat instant, unaware of ny time lapse since stepping Into tHeir Transportation Bootfis on tiSeir way back Home from tEe world-wide annual picnic, tEe THyrians emerged all across tEe planet. In physical appearance, tHey closely resembled tEe oriental race from tHe antiquity of MotEereartE. In tEe space of a Heartbeat, tErougE tEe residental areas of TEyre Planet, there were Happy, Holidaying THyrians everywHere. Happened?" demandtHe president as THyrians slowly acquiring puzzled looks overlayed with confusion, began to appear before televiilon cameras. "Apparently," said Bellflower, they all got caught coming back from somewhere when the computer first went on tEe blink." "OH, my God!" cried tHe president, as the magnitude of tEe disNiter became apparent. "How many of tSem are tHere?" Bellflower said, "THe latest figures I've seen from the Xenological Division was an ostiBellflower turned to the oilier gmtaries assembled in the president's suite. "Gentlemen," He said. His expression without omo-' tion, "some of tHe blame for all this is mine for relying too Heavily on the scientific staff." and a Half EartHmen, the two races babbling incompreheiibly at each other, presented to the mind unquestionably the most tangled logistics problem ever encountered in tHe uruverse. THe president, in an awestruck voice said, "WHat do you think they will do when tHey find out we accidentally destroyed every single bit of tape recording on tfie planet -- their History, ihek literature, their music... ?" "They're going to be danuMd mad," one of tHe dignitaries said. ". President," tfie televisioa teclinician said. "You're on." From the television screen on the wall came tHe words, "Ladies and Gentlemen, tHe Prerident of THyre..." Bellflower's thoughts turned to future challenges to His skill. He speculated on How the company who wrote His resumes for him would recount this latest suoooss for the edification of future emt:hf.injing T Teidi Had' dismantled tBe house again. No, nol God, liow be Hated cHange. TEeo looked down at Hi feet, at tHe block set in tSe in-long gra. THe numerals #. Yes, iHis was wHere his House was located. He raised His eyes to view His Home again. It was totally unrecognizable. WHy, oH wEy didn't sHe leave it alone? He gave Her too mucH leeway Did Ee aim for realism too But so opposite! Heidi Hiddi, after a man Had Ead a Baid day feeding and elucidating Sudoatfons in StudiCom Ee did not want to come Home and Have to do battle witlj a vastly altered domicile. TEeo sigKed despairingly, Where Had she put' tHe front door This morning it Had bees smack-dab in tHe middle of a neo-colonial facade. SHe must Have reduced tHe place as soofl as He left. Now tHe House appear ed to be an angled L-sHape, in a later style witH incongruous oriental embellisHments. It was, Th'eo supposed, the most recent fashion fad. He trudged around tHe right Hand side of the building. It was bad enough when she just cHang ed around some of the inside walls. She was never satisfied with anything for more than a week. Theo tradged on, shaking his head at his own uncanny knack of seeming always to be able to choose the wrong direction -- Theo came to what he conjectured to be the back door. He climbed duroplast steps, thumbed the ident. The door opened. At least she seemed to have hung one of them straight on its magstrip this time. He stepped into a strange kitchen, ignored the design and disposal of its furniture, headed for the outlet archway. He next found himself in a room that had puce walls, a pink ceiling and a purple floor. Flikflims had been clipped at crazy angles to the walls, a whole threedoUar boxful by the looks of things. From the arrangement of selected appurtenances Theo was unable to decide whether it was a dining room, playroom or lounge. He shuddered. It looked terrible. lick, click, click. Heidi's shoes. Always her stride sounded military. "Theo." And there was Heidi. "Don't say you don't like it! It's taken me all day, and I haven't finished yet." "Heidi," he appealed hopelessly, 'Svhaf s wrong with it the way it was?" "I didn't like it. I got tired of it. You don't know what it's like staring at the same old walls every day. I wanted a change." "But it's only three or four weeks since you changed' it last. I thought you'd leave it that way for a while." "I didn't like it," she repeated flatly. "What's wrong with a change now and then?" "But so soon! Why didn't you tell me?" "Because you'd have been against it," she said accurately. "Whafs the point of having UBild if you don't make a few changes occasionally?" "Gradual changes, improvements, yes. But you alter the entire place." He gestured at tlie room. "Nothing here is the same." "It is an improvement," she stated. "It is better than it was." "Whafs it supposed to be?" he asked. "No, don't tell me. I'd rather not know." "You don't appreciate me. You have no understanding," she said coldly. "You try to repress my creative instinct." "Here we go again," he muttered. "Heidi, you have no creative instinct, and your taste gets worse all the time. You're not creating, you're copying. You're just scrambling after the latest thing they put through the matrices tuner. You're not resisting the under-pitch." "What do you know about creation?" she said. "You have no sensitivity, no flair! All day it's taken me, and what do you know about it? You are a stodge, a plebeian, a philistine." "I want  home that stays reasonably still. Is that too much?" he said. "A place where I know where to find my shoes, where I know where the bathroom is, where I can find my way in the dark without walking into walls and tripping over things." "You wouldn't change at all, would you?" she countered. "No, I wouldn't," he agreed, capitulating. "Which way to the bedroom?" "There is no bedroom. I have a geisha salon," she said coolly. "Your samurai cell is through' there, past flie tearoom on the left" What was the use of arguing? He had only himself to blame, hadn't he? What alternative did he have? Separate rooms now! Theo walked in the direction indicated, bowed and suffering. "No appreciation," Heidi said. "No appreciation at all." 'He bed was absent, the foam roll being placed directly upon the floor. The walls were decorated with large garish yellow slashes made by a spectro-sweep. The intention seemed to have been to acEeve some semblance of picture-writing. It failed. Wardrobe flats had been converted into a concertina screen and ray-bathed to a greenish gold. Ray-bathed to a similar color also were the other furnishings in the room, a low li-back chair, a broad low table, a large chest with uneven spikes on the corners of its lid. Theo dropped his case and sagged. As a youngster he had traipsed over the countryside with Es father, an itinerant fruitplchcr. Theo had worked, fought, to climb the social ladder. He had known apartments, caravans, dormitories, hotel rooms. Now he wanted a home. And he had a home that became transformed from time to time to an alien residence that robbed him of any sense of belonging. Be kicked the K-back chair. The rugged honeycombed featherweight arced a good two meters into the air, bounced off the wall and fell back to tumble for a wEle around the room. Theo recollected all right, this morning the table had been blue, wider, longer-legged -- and in the what? sewing room? Sewing! Who did sewing these days? Certainly not Heidi, That's if it was the same table. Theo cursed. So easy to reduce the old to a puff of powder, to refurmsh with' moldcraft for a few dollars. Theo pushed up the glo-slide. # The amber ceiling brightened to a streaky moming-sun yellow. The room did not benefit from the improved illumination. Theo viewed it with' mounting disgust. Taste and competence were absent. What had she called it, tfie samurai cell? It was an abortion. The umber walls had dark patches. The converter-ray coloring had been carelessly carried out unmasked on the spot and the silhouette of the li-chair was drawn in oily tints upon the floor. Slapped together, a daub, no finesse, no polish'. It was not meant to be permanent. It could alwajrs be changed. "I don't want it!" Theo listened, momentarily shocked that he had uttered the thought so loudly. Then he said it again. "I don't want it!" The house had been juggled around so many times that he could not differentiate between one and another. He remembered the zig-zag craze, and the curlwall fad, and the V-A slope, and the not-so-long-ago multi-level with steps, steps, steps, up, down and everywhere. The wrinkle, the inner-piUar, the baroque, the Spamsh, the marbled. Only parts could he recall. He had never known any of these homes, or had time to associate and meld his personality into their fabric. Only one design could Theo remember in its entirety, and that was the very first one, the dream home he had selected from a catalogue. The demonstrators had first fashioned it on his base grid. Elegant, comfortable, soothingly tinted and plearing to the eye, this home he could recall with pleasure. ' Then had come Heidi, who had turned out to be far less amenable than he had anticipated. That first house Had lasted two whole months before Heidi, learning and investigating, had started experimenting with "adjustments." "I don't want it, and I'm not having it," Theo said, still somewhat surprised at the force behind his declaration. "I've had enough. God, where's the damned front door?" Theo retraced his steps, noticed a narrow niche that led to the front exit, turned into it. Ct'Theo! What is it? Where are you going?" The front door was stuck; he wrestled it open. "I'm collapsing the house," he said. "What? Theo, you can't do that after I've spent all day..." Unheeding, he crossed the bare patio and knelt by the trackliner control in the base-block. Her crisp footfalls followed him. "Theo, you're not going to ruin everything I've done today?" He glared at her. "I can't stand it, do you Hear?" He unlocked the cover, slid it to one side. "I want a home I can live in. A home that doesn't keep making demands of me all the time." He reaped forward to the roof cut-out switch. "Oh, no, Theo, you can't I You know you don't like..." Theo threw the lever across. Holes appeared in the roofceilings and swiftly expanded from the center to the walls. The wall lever next. The coated particles, deprived of the motive power to maintain mutual repiolsion, slowly sank together to the attracting force exerted by long thin trays. The ceiling trays came down with them, the connecting stays filaments coiling out into the floor along vath the deadpower-leads to the lightning polarizer. The windows slid down in the melting substaince and at bottom leaned back to slowly fall with light phoomphs onto the floor. Softly phoomph also went the doors, released by the magstrip hinges, which themselves arched and toppled, having barely enough substance to tinkle. Flic-flims floated to the floor. Now the base was level. Moldcrafted furniture and C-U boards assembled into various forms stood out, starkly exposed and naked-looking. Lustrmyst sinks and washbowls, their static pinning removed, lay upon their sides, their drainpipes bent and trailing. Water tubes, relieved of winding, unraveled and sent the spigots crawling sluggardly over the platform. "No, no!" Heidi said;. "Theo, how could you?" "I want a proper home, and I'm going to see that it stays that way." Theo pressed the floor-plan reference button. He still had an hour of twilight left. It would be enough time to set up the frame and roof -- he'd take a day off and apply the finishing touches on the morrow. Paying no mind to Heidi, Theo began to check the base grid. This was now criss-crossed with thin sub-surface lines of many colors each color representing a layout suggestion. The color Theo sought to follow was red. He had grown to detest house rearrangement, but now, very determinedly, he began to untack and re-align the wall trays himself. t(XTow this," Theo said, "is a home." "It's antique," Heidi replied stonily. "Obsolete. Architecturally archaic and unrewardingly over-simplistic." "Heidi," Theo said, his voice edged with exasperation, "# like it Doesn't that mean anything to you?" "Your taste is execrable," she said. "Uhuh. You'll change it around again at the first opportunity, right?" Theo said. "You don't expect me to leave it like this?" She waved a disparaging hand. Theo rubbed tfie back of his neck. He had grown used to Heidi. She at least remained familiar to him. He didn't want to try again from scratch. It took so long. But... Theo sighed. Better to make a clean sweep while he was about it and start afresh. Or maybe do without. Theo went sadly to his valise and removed a little box. "What are you going to do?" Heidi said. "Good-bye, Heidi," Theo answered regretfully, and shut a dial. There was a shiver in his own mind, and Heidi became smoky. Her clothes fell to the floor as the flimsy tributaries from her five main stems became slack. Particles poured pinkly into her shoes, the main stems buckled, and the oval blob of Theo's subsidiary id responded, drooped down to rest upon the floor. Theo was sweating. He felt, with some reason, that he had just killed part of himself. God, how he Hated change! Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced S.#S postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of S.#S. Name Address Cty  State Zip Code... (Offw good In U. S. A. Only) In a perfect world, crime is. for  the doddies. But there's always somebody who can figure the angles. Jllustrafed by, "O ex Moran dialed his wrist teevee phone for the time and looked at the clock face that appeared on the screen. A robot voice said, "When the bell rings it will be exactly two piinutes until eight hours." A tiny bell rang. Rex Moran grunted and looked about the small apartmoit. He had better get going. First, though, he took his Universal Credit Card from an inner pocket of his jerkin and inserted it in tKe slot of Eis standard teevee pHone whiicK sat on his living cum bedroom's sole table. He said into the screen, "Credit balance check, please." Within moments, a robot voice said, "Ten shares of Inalienable Basic. No shares of Variable Basic. Current cash credit, one dollar and twenty-three cents." "One dollar and twenty-three cents," he muttered. "Holy living Zoroaster. I didn't think I'd have to start with that little on hand." He dialed Credit and waited until a face faded in on the screen. It was a businesslike, brisk, possibly impatient, face. "Jason May, here. Assistant Credit Manager, Inalienable Basic Dividends," he said. Rex Moran put his Uni-Credit Cord on the screen and said, "I'd like an advance on my dividends." The other was seated at a desk. "Just a moment, please," he said and touched a button. He listened to a report on a desk phone screen then looked back at Moran. "You're already two months ahead." "I know that," Rex Moran said doggedly, "but it's an emergency." "It is always an emergency, Mr. Moran," tire other said flatly. "What is the emergency? Your records show that you are almost invaria!hl as fat aBead as you ccm get ott #rout monthly dividends. As you must know, the government charges interest on such advances. In the long run, Mr. Moran, you lose." "I know, I know," Rex Moran said, an element of complaint in his voice. "I've had a long set of bad luck. One thing after another." "What is the current emergency, please?" Rex Moran wished he had thought this out in more detail before launching into his fling. He said, "I've got a sick brotlier, I have to go help." "Where is this brother, Mr. Moran?" "In Panama City." "One moment, please." The other went back to one of his desk screens. In only moments, he looked up again with a sigh. "Mr. Moran, the computer banks have no records of you having a brother at all, in Panama City or anywhere else. Request denied. And Mr. Moran..." "Yeah?" Rex Moran said in disgust. "It is a minor offense to lie to a credit manager in attempt to secure an advance on dividends. I shall take no action on this occasion, but the fact will be entered on your record in the computer banks." "Oh, great," Rex Moran growled. He flicked off his screen. "I didn't expect that to work anyway," he muttered. TlTe thought over his plans for a few minutes, then squared his shoulder' and dialed the local branch of the ultra-market, on his auto-deUvery box. He was a man in his early thirties, mildly burly in build and with a not really unpleasant but a broken face of one who has either seen military combat, or perhaps been a pugilist. In actuality, neither was the case. The ultra-market in the screen, he dialed the children's toy section, boys' toys, and then military t#T#e t # TS. He finally narrowed it down to guns and dialed one that came to only seventycents. It would have to do. He put his Uni-Credit Card in the slot, his thumbprint on the screen and ordered the toy. Within minutes, it was in the auto-delivery box, and he put it in the side pocket of his jerkin. It was on the smallish side, but black and at any distance at all realistic enough for his purpose. He moved over to his library booster teevee screen and dialed a newspaper, then the paper of two weeks previous, and the obituaries. He went through several papers before he found the one that seemed most likely, by the address and the information in the item, and made some notes with his stylo. Finally, he dialed the address and waited imtil a face faded in on his phone screen. The other frowned at him, in lack of recognition. Rex Moran said, "Mr. Vassilis? My name is Roy McCord." The other was a tired looking obvious aristocrat, perhaps a few years the other side of sixty. Still frowning, he said, "What can I do for you, Mr. McCord?" 'T just got back into town and heard the bad news. I'm a friend -- forgive me, Mr. VassQis -- was a friend of Jerry Jerome." The other's face lightened slightly and then went sad, "Ah', I see. I am afraid he hadn't mentioned your name, but then Jerome had many friends of whom I knew little." "Yes, sir. I'd like the opportunity to offer my condolences in person," Rex Moran began. The older man was frowning slightly and began to respond. But Moran hurried on. "But I also have something of Jerry's that I suppose should go to you." Rex Moran managed to look slightly embarrassed. "Well, sir, I... well, I think it would be better if I just brought it over." The other was mystified. However, he shrugged. "Very well. iimg man. Let me see, I shall r free at, say nine hours this Homing, and should be able to Ive you a few minutes." "Fine, sir. I'U be there." Rex Moran switched off the screen rfore the other could say anyhlng further. For a moment He stared down I I the blank screen, then shifted 'iiuscles in his shoulders. 'Tirst lep," he said. "So far, so good. Maybe I shouldn't have used 'Ills phone, but in the long run II won't make any difference." H e didn't take the vacuum tube transport from his own I'uilding, knowing that a record 'vas kept of all trips in the comiUlter banks, and the johin-fuzz might trace back later on his Uni-Credit Card number. Initead, he walked several blocks imd entered a public terminaL He looked up at the map and "elected another terminal a iuple of blocks from his desilnation, then entered the next Iwenty-seater going through' that Ioint. After putting his credit 'ard in the payment slot, he realized that with the buying of (he toy gun, he probably had only fl few cents left to his balance. He illdn't even have enough credit to get back to his apartment if this little romp pickled. What a laugh that would give the boys If he had to walk home. He left the vacuum-tube transport terminal and walked to the building where VassiHs hved. This was the crucial point now. If there were others present, his plan had come a cropper. However, if he had read between the lines correctly, the senior Mr. Vassilis lived alone in his apartment in this swank neighborhood. There was an identity screen on the front entry. Keeping his fingers crossed that his Universal Credit Card wouldn't be required for entrance, he said into the screen, "Roy McCord, on appointment to see Mr. Frank Vassilis." The door opened, and he entered. There were two elevators. He entered one and said, "The apartment of Frank Vassilis." The Vassilis apartment was on the top floor but one. Rex Moran got out of the elevator, found a door with the Vassilis name on it and activated the door screen. When it lit up, he said into it, "Roy McCord, calling on Mr. Vassilis, by appointment." The door opened, and he stepped through. And came to a halt. The man standing there in a dark smt was not the Mr. Vassilis he had spoken to earlier on the teevee phone. This worthy was a stiffitdi type, of possibly fifty. His eyes went up and down Rex Moran superciliously, taking in the less than elegant suit, taking in the rugged features. He sd, "Yes, sir. Mr. Mccord? The master is awaiting you in his escape room." The master? Holy jumping Zoroaster, Vassilis had a man servant. Whoever heard of personal servants in this day and age? The obituary had hinted that the old boy was upperclass, but Moran hadn't been thinking in terms of something so rich as an establishment with a servant. However, he followed along. It was the largest apartment he could off-hand ever remember being in. They went down one hall, turned rit and down another one. There wasn't even an identity screen on the door before which they stopped. The servant knocked gentty and opened the door before there was any reply. Evidenlly, old Vassilis was expecting him, all right The servant stood stiffly and said, "Mr. McCord." T he elderly man Rex Moran had talked to on the teevee phone earlier looked up from where he sat in a comfort chair, a smidl magnifying glass in one hand, a dozen or so stamps on a snadl table before him. He was evidently a idiilatelist He said, "AH, yes, Mr. R( McCord, Jeromes friend. Pleai c(ne in." As the servant had b fore hini, he took in Moran clothing and general ipearano and his eyebrows went up sliglj ly. "Now, what is it I can do f( you, Mr. McCord?" Rex Moran looked at the sen ant Vassilis said, "That will be al Franklin." Franklin turned and left, cloi ing the door quietly behind hin No need to mince around. R Moran brought the toy gun frot hfe pocket briefly, let the oth' see it, and returned it to his sid pocket, but still holding it ii his hand. , He said, "This is a romp. Mi Vassilis." The otiier goggled at him. "Yoi... you mean you are a thief That you got into my home oi false pretenses?" Moran let his face go empty "I wouldn't put it that way Let's just say that I'm tired ol not getting my share of the caki And since the powers that b( won't give it to me, I'm takin( it" The old man stared at him "You are a fool, young man." "Maybe, maybe not" Rei Moran jiggled the gun in his sidi pocket, suggestively. "Being a thief doesn't mak( sense in this day. Society hai made arrangements, to defend itself against tlie tluef. There's not enough profit in petty crime to pay oti" Rex oran grinned at Him souriy. "I didn't exactly have petty crime in mind, Mr. Vassilis. Now, Hand me # rour credit card." "What other kind of crime is possible? Nobody but I can spend my dollar credits. I can't give them away, gamble them away, throw them away, be cheated out of them. Only I can spend my dividends." "We'll see about that." Rex Moran nodded. "Now, let's have your Universal Credit Card." He jiggled the gun in his pocket again. The older man contemptuously took a beautiful leather wallet from an inner pocket and brought forth a standard UniCredit Card. He handed it over. Moran said, "You have a vacuum delivery box in this room? Oh, yeah, here we are. Zoroaster, look at the size of itl Now that's the advantage of being an upperclass like you, Mr. Vassilis. You should see the teeny auto-delivery box in my miniapartment. If I want an # dhing of any aze at all, I've got to use the box down in the lobby of the crummy building I'm in. Now, with a nice big auto-delivery box like this anything you wanted would have to be. really super size before you couldn't get i delivered right here into you escape room." Vassilis said, "You are a fool young man. The officials will b after you in no time flat." Moran grinned at him and sa down before the box, keeping oni eye on the other. He put the can in the teevee screen's slot anc said, "Credit balance, please." A robot voice said, "Ten share of Inalienable Basic. Two thou' sand and forty-six shares ol Variable Basic. Current cash credit, forty-two thousand and twenty-nine dollars and eighteen cents." Rex Moran whistled. "Twothousand and forty-six-sharesof-Variablel" Vassilis grunted contempt of him. TV yroran dialed the ultra-market, then sports, then firearms, then handguns. He finally selected a .# RecoUess and dialed it and a box of cartridges. He thought for a moment, then dialed photography and selected a Poloroid-Pentax and some film for it. "Might as well do this up brown," he said conversationally to the older man. "Might as well put a Onerous hole in that credit balance." "There'll be no hole -- as you call it -- at all," Vassilis said bitterly. "When I report this thievery, the authorities will return to my account the sum involved in any deprecations you have performed." Rex Moran dialed men's clothing and took his time selecting a full outfit, including shoes. "Now, this is the crucial point," he said thoughtfully, to no one In particular. He dialed jewelry and finally selected a two-thouaand-dollar diamond ring. "I guess that's it," he said. Then, "Oh, one other thing." He dialed sports again, and camping, and eventually a length of rope. He turned back to Frank Vason over here and stick your thumbprint on this order screen." "Suppose I refrtse?" Rex Moran grinned at him. "Why should you? Like you said, when you report this, the authorities will return your credit dollars to you and come looking for me. You're not losing anything." The older man, grumbling, came erect in his chair. He came over to the auto-delivery box and, with a sneer of contempt for his intruder, stuck his right thumb print on the screen. Moments later, the articles had arrived. Vassilis returned to his comfort chair. Rex Moran began fishing the articles he had ordered from the box. He loaded the gun, put it next to him, within handy reach and then dressed in his new clothes. He took up the camera and slung it over his shoulder. He looked at the ring admiringly and tucked it away in an inner pocket, and then the gun. He muttered, "I have half a mind to order a few more of these but that big a drain on your account all at the same time might throw some relays aiwl have the computer people check back." "Thief," Vassilis said bitterly. Moran grinned at him, "What's your beef? It won't be you who loses." He took up the rope. "First we'U tie you up a bit, old chumpal, and then we'll call in Franklin, or whatever you called him, and do a job on him." "You'll never get away with this, you young cloddy," the old man bit out. "Famous last words," Moran grinned back at him. II T)ack on the street, he realized it was going to be necessary to walk to his next destination. His credit standing simply did not allow even such a small sum as riding in the vacuum tubes. However, happily, it wasn't as far as all tliat. As Ke walked, lie took tiie toy gun from his pocket and threw it into a waste rectade. He Ead tEe rest! thin g now. He foundthe neighborhood and Ead a choice of three alternatives. He took the smallest of the shops and entered. There were even a few display cases. How anachronistic could you get. He grunted sour amusement to himsdf; here was the last of the kulaks, the last of the small businessmen. A quiet man of about fifty entered from a back room and took Rex in before sasdng in a soft voice, "Yes, sir, what can I do for you?" Rex Moran went into his act. Hesitantly, he said, "I understand that you sometimes buy phonal property." "That is correct. Buy and sell. But what type of property, Mr... ?" "Adams," Rex Moran said. "Timothy Adams. I have a ring that used to belong to my mother. It is of no value to me, now, and I thought... well, I might as well realize what dollar credit value it has." "I see. Please sit down, Mr. Adams. Heirloom jewdry is a bit of a drug on the market, but we can take a look." He sat himself behind a desk and motioned to a strait chair. #  Rex Moran sat down and brought the diamond ring from his pocket and proffered it. The other took it and set it on the table. He looked at Rex Moran thoughtfully. "This is a very modem setting, Mr. Adams. I had gained the impression that it was an older piece your mother had left you." "Oh, no," Rex Moran said. "She bought it not too very long before she died. If I had a wife, or someone, I might give it to her, but I haven't." The other looked at him evenly. "Mr. Adams, I am not a fence, you know. This is a legitimate business." "Fence?" Rex Moran said blankly. "I buy and sell such items as art objects and jewelry, but I do not receive stolen goods. Where did you say your mother bought this?" "On a vacation in Common Eur-Asia. In Budapast, I think, or possibly Belgrade." "So it would be untraceable here in the United States of the Americas." "Why, it never occurred to me." The shop owner took up the ring and looked at it thoughtfully. He brought a jeweler's glass from a drawer and peered through it. He put it down finally and looked at Rex Moran, "I'll give The shop owner put the ring you two hundred dollars for it." in a drawer, brought forth his "Two hundred dollars! My own Universal Credit Card and mother said she paid more than put it into the other exchange two thousand." slot. He said into the screen, "Then she paid too much. The "Please transfer the amount of markup on jewelry is very high, three himdred dollars from my Mr. Adams, and such items as account to this other card." this can take a very long time A robot voice said, "Transto move." fer completed." Rex Moran thought about it. Rex Moran retrieved his Uni"Make it three hundred." Credit Card and came to his feet. The other considered that. "I still think I was robbed," he "Very well," he said finally. "But muttered. I am making a mistake." The other said nothing, sim"Yeah," Rex Moran said sourply sat there and watched after ly. He brought his Uni-Credit him as Rex Moran left the shop. Card from his pocket and stuck It into one of the slots on the had three Hunother's Exchange Screen.   dred dollars to fii account. That was a damn sight less than he had expected to get However, he hadn't dared buy a more expensive piece of jewelry than the two thousd dollar piece, on Vassilis' credit card. There would have been more of a chance of the op owner checking on such an item. More chance of it being able to be traced. Besides, if he had drained Vassilis' account too badly, there might have been a computer check at that point. He strode rather rapidly to the nearest vacuum-tube transport terminal and into it, wanting to get out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible. He took a two-seater vehicle to the downtown area the pseudocity, if a pseudo-city can be said to have a downtown area. When he left the vacuinn tube, it was to emerge in the vicinity of several restaurants. It was just about noon, but since he hadn't been able to afford breakfast, he was feeling hunger. Well, three hundred dollars was three hundred dollars, and he might as well blow himself to a fairly good repast in an auto-cafeteria. He selected one and sat himself down at a table and stared down at the menu listed on the table top. To hell with anything based on Antarctic krill, plankton protein, or soy beans; he was up to some real animal protein and Zoroaster could take the cost. He put his credit card in the table slot, his thumbprint on the screen and dialed chicken and a mug of sea-booze. He would have liked a shot of pseudo-whisky to begin, but his funds weren't that unlimited. His wrist teevee phone buzzed, He looked down at it in some surprise. He had it set on Number One Priority, and only two people in the world were eligible to break in on him on that priority, and he certainly was not expecting a call from either. But there was a strange face in the tiny screen. Strange and severe. The voice said, "This is Distribution Service, Subdivision Police. Rex Moran, you are under arrest for attempt to violate regulations pertaining to useage of the Universal Credit Card. Report immediately to the nearest Police Administrative Station. Failure to do so will compound the felony." "Get lost, fuzz-john," Re.x Moran snarled. He snapped the instrument off, then stared down at the blank screen in dismay. What had gone wrong? Especially, what had gone wrong so quickly? It had to be something to do with hi selling that damned ring. But what? He had expected the ring to stay in that tiny shop, waiting for a customer for months, perhaps even years. And even then, when it was resold, the transaction should never have appeared on the computer records, except as an exchange of dollar credit from the purchaser's account to the shopkeeijer's. What foul luck! Vassilis must have put in an immediate alarm, and the police must have contacted every place in town where Rex Moran could possibly dispose of the purloined ring. T Te had to think fast They'd be after him now. Damn and double damn. He wouldn't even be able to return to his miniapartment He was on the run, and for a meaningless amount such as three hundred dollars, and even that now was of no use. He wouldn't dare use his credit card; the computers were surely watching for him. They could also zero-in on his wrist teevee phone. He reached down, in disgust, and began to rip it off. However, the screen lit up again, and a new face was there. A voice rasped, "Now hear this, all citizens. Crimes against the government of the United States of the Americas have been committed by Rex Moran, including assault, robbery, sale of stolen property and attempted misuse of the Universal Credit Card. All citizens are requested to cooperate in his apprdienon. The criminal is dangerous and armed. Here is his face." Rex groaned when his face appeared on the tiny screen. Happily, it was a fairly old photo, and taken before some of his present scarred features had become what they were. He ripped the instrument from his wrist and flung it into a corner. At this early hour there were none others present in the auto-cafeteria, thank the living Zoroaster for that. He came to his feet and hurried for the door. In the far distance, he could hear a siren. Undoubtedly, it was for him. You didn't hear police sirens that often in the pseudo-cities of the Ultra-welfare State. He hurried down the street and turned a comer as quickly as possible. He dared not use the vacuum tube. He dared not summon a floater, for that matter. But that brought something to mind. He found a fairly isolated spot and waited until a pedestrian came along. He brought his gim from his pocket and said, "Hold it, chum-pal." The other looked at him down at the gun, up into Rex Moran's face again and blanched. "Why, why you're the criminal just flashed on the teevee." "That's right, cKiim-pal, and you look just like the sort of chum-pal who'd cooperate with a man with  shooter trained on his tummy." The other was wide-eyed and ashen. "Why... why, of course." "Okay. Quick now, dial a floater on your wrist teevee phone." "Of course, of course. Don't be nervous." "I'm not nervous." Rex Moran grinned at him and jiggled the gun up and down. "Hurry it up." The other dialed, and within moments an auto-floater cab turned the comer and pulled up next to them at the curb. The door opened. Rex said, "Quick, put your Uni-Credit Card in the slot" Even as the other was doing so, Moran was climbing into the back seat of the floater. He rasped, "Put your thumbprint on the screen." While the other did that, Rex Moran was dialing his destination, not letting the other see. He reached out suddenly and grasped the other's wrist teevee phone and ripped it off and stuck it in his pocket. He pulled the credit card from the floater's slot and handed it back to his victim. "There," he said, "don't say I didn't do you a favor. Think of all the trouble you'd have if you didn't have a credit card." TT e slammed the door shut and the floater took off. Rex Moran said into the vehicle's screen, "Maximum speed, please." A robot voice said, "Yes, sir." He couldn't afford to stay in the floater for very long. Just enough to get out of this neighborhood. As soon as that cloddy he had just stuck up back there reported to the police, they'd check through the computers for the floater's destination. There'd be a record, based on the number of the victim's Uni-Credit Card. A record of everything seemingly went into the computer banks. Why not? He growled sourly; evidently there capacity was almost infinite. Yes, they'd check the destination of his trip. However, he was not quite so siUy as to go all the way to the destination he had dialed. About half way there, at a traffic control stop, he opened the door and left the floater to go on its own. He ducked down a side street and took off at right angles to the avenue along which the floater was progressing. Rex Moran now Had a double problem. He grimaced wryly. An immediate double problem. that was. For one thing, He was still hungry. For another, he had to get off the streets. Citizens weren't apt to pay overmuch attenticMi to the Distribution Service police calls over the teevee phone screens, but there was always the exertion. Given time, someone would spot and report him, in spite of the poor photograph which just had been broadcast. He could hear the stolen wrist teevee phone buzz in his pocket and brought it forth, flicking the tiny stud which prevented it from transmitting his face. It was the same official as before, and he was making the same broadcast, but now reporting Rex Moran as last seen in that part of town where he had dialed the floater. Evidently, his victim had reported. That also meant they would know that Moran had the stolen wnst teevee phone and would shortly be zeroing in on it. He threw the instrument into the gutter and ground a heel down on it He had to get off the streets. And suddenly he knew where to go. In this vicinity there was a posh restaurant of which he had heard but had never been able to afford, nor had he really ever expected to be able to afford it Well, things were different now. TTe entered the building and took the elevator to the pothouse restaurant known as the Gourmet Room. The day was more advanced now, and upperclass office workers were beginning to stream in for the midday meal. He avoided looking impressed at the osttatious swank of this rendezvous of the ultra-wealthy and thanked his stars that he had thought of acquiring his present clothing. A hcadwaiter approached diffidently. In all his life, Rex Moran had never eaten in a restaurant which boasted live waiters. Now he tried to look unimpressed. "A single, sir?" the maitre d'hote! said. "Please," Rex Moran told him, keeping his voice softly modulated and as though such surroundings were an every day affair for him. "If possible, a table set back somewhere. I have a bit of figuring to do." "Certainly, sir. This way." He was seated in an out of the way alcove which suited his needs perfectly. The maitre d' snapped his fingers, and a waiter scurried up. There was no menu. It was that kind of a restaurant. The maitre d' said unctuously, "Sir, today the Giatin de langoustines Georgette is superb." Rex Moran hadn't the vaguest idea what langousiines Georgette tax from his shoulder and might be, but he made a face as brought from his pocket the casthough considering. sette of film. He inserted it in "What else might you recomthe camera. Then he took from mend?" he said. his inner pocket the Universal "The chef hts surpassed himCredit Card he had appropriated self with the poulet docteur." from Frank Vassilis and exam"That sounds good." ined it with care, spending parThe waiter made a note. ticular time on the thumbprint. "And a half bottle of Sylvaner Finally, he propped the card of the Haut-Rhin, perhaps?" against the small vase in the ta"Fine." ble center, which held a single Salad and dessert were settled black rose, and focused the camupon, and then the maitre d' and era on it. He clicked the shutter the waiter were gone. then drew the photo from the Rex Moran sighed inwardly camera back and stared at it. It and looked around. The only didn't quite do. He tried again, other diner within his immediate getting the camera closer to th'e vicinity had his back to Moran, subject. He took half a dozen He unslung the Poloroid-Penshots before he came up with as near a duplicate of the Universal Credit Card's thumbprint as he could hope for. He put the credit card away, the camera back in its case, and brought forth his penknife. He was busily trimming the photo to be the exact size of a thumbprint when the waiter turned up with his first course. Poulet docteuT turned out to be the best chicken dish he had ever tasted. And the wine was excellent. T n the middle of his salad course, and before dessert, he came suddenly to his feet and hurried toward the reception desk cum cashier's booth. It was there that the payment screen for the ultra-swank restaurant was to be found. And it was there that the maitre d'hotel stood his eyebrows policy raised now. Rex Moran said to him hurriedly, "I have just thought of something I must attend to. Please hold my dessert for me. And, please, keep an eye on my camera over there, will you?" The maitre d looked over at Moran's table. The camera sat upon it. He said, "Why, of course, sir." Rex Moran left, still projecting an air of a suddenly remembered matter that must urgently be taken care of. Down on the street he grimaced. One camera sacrificed to the game. However, he had no need of it now. He was stiU in one of the best sections of town. He made his way toward a nearby hotel, holding a handkerchief over his face, as though trying to extract something from his left eye. There were quite a few pedestrians at this time of the day. In the hotel, he approached the lone clerk at the reception desk. Now, he had to take his chances. If the man recognized him from the police broadcast --  Rex Moran was on a spot. He said, "I would like a small suite. Nothing ambitious. Living room, bedroom, bath. I doubt if I'll be entertaining." 'Why, yes sir, of course." The other looked beyond Moran. "Ali, your luggage, sir?" "I have no luggage," Rex Moran said, off-handedly. "I just came in from the coast. Plan to do some shopping here for my wardrobe. Always buy my things here in the East. California styles are ludicrous." "Yes sir, of course." The clerk motioned in the direction of the teevee screen slot on the desk. "Would you wish to register?" "I'd rather see the suite, before deciding," Rex Moran said. "I'll register up there, if it's satisfactory." "OH, I'm sure it will be, sir. Let me suggest Suite Double A." "Double A," Rex Moran said and made his way to the bank of elevatoiB. Inside the first elevator, he said, "Suite Double A." "Yes, sir," a robot voice said. Suite Double A was several stories up. Rex Moran emerged from the elevator, looked up at the direction signs on the wall and made his way to the suite in question. It was quite the most elaborate quarters in which Rex Moran had ever been. Not that tlmt was ihe issue, he would have taken the accommodations whatever they had resembled. He approached the room's teevee phone screen and said into it, "This suite seems adequate. I'll take it" A robot voice said, "Very good, sir. If you'll just put your UniCredit Card in the slot." Rex Moran took a deep breath. He brought the card of Frank Vassihs from his pocket insert ed it in the slot Then he brought forth the photo he had taken of the Vassilis right thumbprint and laid it on the screen. He picked it up again, immediately. A lobpt voice said, "Thank you, sir." Rex Moran took another deep breath and let it his out again between Bs teeth. "Zo-ro-as-ter. I think it worked." Ill T T e dialed the time. It was midafternoon. He grinned exuberantly. He had it licked. Unless there was something he didn't know about, he absolutely had it licked. He dialed Service and said into the screen, "I'd like to lay in a stock of potables. Let me see. Let's say a bottle of Scotch, one of cognac, one of Metaxa, one of Benedictine, one of Cherry Herling, one of Chartreuse -- yellow, of course, not the gsem -- oae of Pernod, absinthe if avaihibfe but otherwise the ordinary snil dev." A robot voice said, "Sir, in the New Carlton aH these can be dialed on the auto-bar." "I know, I know, but I like to mix my own." "Very good, sir. They will be delivered through the auto-bar, "Mind," Rex Moran said, "the very best quality." "Always, sir." Still grinning widely, he went over to the suite's auto-bar and took up the bottle of Glengrant Scotch and held it up to the tight approvingly. In his whole life he had been lushed-up exactly once on Scotch. The stuff was worth! its weight in rubies since Cmtral Production had discontinued the use of cereals for beverages. He dialed for soda and apped away at it approvingly, even as he strode up and down the room, considering his immediate future. He wondered briefly How you went about getting a mopsy up to your quarters in a hostelry as posh as the New Carlton. But he had better draw the line there, anjrway. It was no use pushing your luck. Some wheel might come off. She might have seen the police teevee alarm on him. What the hell else was there in the way of unrealised lifelong ambitions? Caviar. He had never had his fill of caviar. In fact, the amount of caviar he had eaten in his whale life could have come out of a two ounce jar of the precious stuff. Fine. He dialed Service again and had a pound jar of caviar sent up, along with sweet butter, toast, chopped eggs and chopped onion. While he was at it, he ordered a large amount of smoked sturgeon and smoked salmon. While he waited for this order, he built himself another Scotch and soda. Glengrant. He'd have to remember that name, on the off chance that he'd ever have another opportunity such as this. He spent the rest of the day indulging himself in every food and drink ambition he could ever remember having Had. And in getting well smashed and surfeited with rich edibles to the point that when dinner time arrived, he had no appetite, to his disgust He wanted to order a real gargantuan meal. His last vague memory was of staggering into the bedroom and dialing the bed to ultimate softness before throwing himself into it. Tn the morning, he should have awakened with some sort of hangover, but the gods were still with him; either that or there was another good mark to chalk up for Glengrant whiskey. He awoke grinning up at the ceiling. He had slept like a log. He dialed the time at the bedside teevee phone and didn't bother to look into the screen at the clock. A robot voice said, "When the bell rings it will be exactly nine minutes to eight hours." Hal Nine minutes to go. He dialed breakfast, a monstrous breakfast, and had it delivered to the auto-table next to the bed. Fresh mango juice, papaya, eggs in bladi butter, cavair again, toast, fried tomatoes, coffee; double coders of all. Groaning satisfaction, he ate. By the time breakfast was over, it was past eight o'clock. Alf rit. He grinned jubilantly, time to get busy. He went to the teevee pHone screen and dialed A'e local branch of the ultra-market and men's furnishings. He took his time selecting a new change of clothing. That accomplished, he dialed the order, put Vassilis' card in the slot and laid the photo of the thumbprint on the screen and took it off again immediately. The clothing arrived in minutes, and he dressed after showering and shaving in the bathroom. He returned to the teevee phone screen and dialed the ultra-market once again. He began ordering items, in fine discrimintion, and Had the time of his life upwrapping and examining them as they arrived. His loot piled up. At about ten o'clock, he decided to really do it up brown and dialed a floater sales outlet. He ordered a sports model private floater and instructed them to send it over to the hotel's parking area on automatic. At ten minutes after ten, the identity screen on the door lit up. There were two men there, one in uniform. The one in plain clothes said disgustedly, "All right, come along." The one in uniform looked at all the purchases strewn around the room, wrapping paper and string everywhere. "Zoroaster," he snorted. hey took Him down the elevator, througH the lobby, out to the street where a police floater awaited. The uniformed one drove manually. Rex Moran sat in the back with the other. The plainclothesman said sourly, "You must have had the time of your life." Rex Moran laughed. "Big joke," the other said. "We almost nabbed you there in the auto-cafeteria. We should have zeroed-in on you, instead of trying to arrest you by teevee phone." "I wondered why you didn't," Rex Moran said. "Police inefficiency." They took him to the local offices of the Bureau of Distribution Services, to an elevator, and then to the third floor where he was ushered into the presence of Marvin Ruhling himself. Ruhling looked at him and said, "Very funny, ordering even a sports floater." Rex laughed and took a chair. The uniformed policeman left but the plainesclothesman also sat down. His face was as disgusted as that of the Supervisor. Marvin Ruhling said, "Holy jumping Zoroaster, what kind of heat do you think Vassilis is going to stir up?" Rex Moran said reasonably, "NevCT let Him know wHat really happened. He wasn't doing any harm. He had a little excitement." "A little exffitement, you damn cloddy. Suppose he had dropped dead of a heart attack or something? Not to mention tiiat pedestrian you forced at gunpoint to get a floater for you." Rex said, "Well, you asked for it. You wanted authenticity. You got it" "Authenticity," the plainclothesman grunted sgustedly. "Which reminds me, we better get that teevee police broadcast killed, or the next time Rex goes out on the street somdJody'U shoot him." Ruhling said to Rex Moran, "Well, yorir conclusions?" "That we've got to do something to the cards. Something to guarantee the thumbprint is legitimate. Otherwise, a real bad-o could locate some upperclass cloddy without any immediate friends or relatives, take him out somewhere and finish him off and hide the body, then take the Uni-Credit Card and head off into some other part of the country and, using the same system I did, duplicate photographically the thumbprint. And for the rest his life he could milk the dividends that would accrue on the upperclass clodd#r's credit account from his Variable Basic." Marvin RuHling looked at him sourly. "What could we do to the credit cards?" "Search me. That's up to the engineers. Maybe something in the card, or on the screen, to detect body heat. I don't know. But I proved the cards vulnerable the way they are." "What else?" Rex Moran thought about it. He ook his head. "I just mentioned it to Fred, here, on the way over. That system of making a citizen arrest himself and turn himself over to the nearest police station doesn't wash. Oh', I admit it saves manpower, ordinarily, but when you get a cloddy vicious enough to be carrying a shooter, then you should zero-in on his wrist teevee phone, assuming he's silly enough to be carrying one, without warning." "Rex is obviously right on that one," the plainclothesman said. Marvin, Ruhling sighed deeply. "AU right," he said. "You won your bet You were able to beat the rap, exist in comfort for a full twenty-four hours, without any dollar credits." He glared at His imderling. "But I'd sure as the holy living Zoroaster like to see you do it six months from now, when I've cleared up some of those loopholes you used." Rex Moran grinned at him. "It's a bet," he said. artificial satellite which had reached orbit about one hour before midnight on January #, #. What made the celebration even more joyous was the fact that Expiorer-I is still in orbit; it is (and has been for a number of years) the oldest orbiting satellite. Everybody who had had anything to do with the project -- including some who, like me, had only contributed moral support -- was present, and the room reverberated with reminiscences. On that historic night ten years earlier, the Explorer team had been split. General John B. Medaris, commanding officer of Agency, Huntsville, Alabama) and Dr. Kurt Debus, the launch chief, were at Cape Canaveral, vhile Wemher von Braun (then ing (of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and responsible for instrumentation) were in Washington. That was a day where the long-lines department of the telephone company showed a peak profit. Actually the rocket, dubbed Jupiter-C No. #, had been ready on January #; but the shot had to be delayed for three dajrs because of vmusual weather in the low stratosphere. There a steady current of air, called the jet stream, crosses the United States, going from west to east. While it is always present, its speed is not always the same; and while it alwajrs blows from west to east it does not do so over the same latitude all the time. Sometimes it is much farther north than at other times. During the latter part of January, #, it happened to be farther south than normal, namely over Florida, and the long thin Jupiter-C rocket might be broken in two if it entered the jet stream on a day when the jet stream was especially fast. It was quite clear that the shot could not be risked on either January # or #. On the #tH, the jet stream was still over Florida, but it had slowed down a bit, to "only" # miles per hour. General Medaris ordered the rocket to be made ready except for the liquid oxygen which is alwaj put into the tank last. Meanwhile the speed of the jet stream had been ascertained by meteorological balloons and' the analysis. Medaris received a report saying highly marginal -- we do not recommend that you try it and ordered a one-day postponement The next day the jet stream began drifting northward; and the outer portion, still over Florida, moved at the rate of # miles per hour; and that w;as a speed through which earlier Jupiter-C rockets had been, flown without harm either to the rocket or to the results. It could be tried. Lift-off was #:#:# PM Eastern Standard Time. P eople involved in countdowns always say that the last twenty minutes are the worst. By that time everything that needs doing has been done, and therefore everybody has twenty minutes in which to think of what may not have been done, or else what could possibly go wrong. Needless to say, the essence of these twenty minutes is compressed in the last two minutes, but jiggly nerves can return to normal two minutes after liftoff, if nothing Has gone wrong by then. Five minutes after liftoff, orbit has been attained and all's well. This is How thiiigs stand now, but Explorer-I was the first sucK shot. Nobody could claim that he had any experience with satellite launches. And the instrumentation was incomplete then. At about ten minutes after lift-off, the people on the ground at the Cape and in Washington only had two figures. One was the height above sea level of the satellite, which was # miles, more than enough for a good orbit. The other figifre they Had was the velocity, which also was enough for a good orbit. But what the incomplete instrumentation did not tell was whether the top stage, and with it Explorer-I, moved in the right direction. The right direction was slightly up from the horizontal; the distance between satellite and the earth's surface had to increase for half an orbit. But it was possible, yes, unfortunately it was possible that the motion was slightly down, which would produce a fiery re-entry a few thousand miles to the east, in a place where it could not even be spotted. "And then we waitedP' somebody said across his glass to a few people whose worst experience in waiting had been for an airliner delayed by bad weather or heavy traffic. In the case of this particular coxmtdown the worst waiting came sdtei the lift-off. The Russians had put two heavyweight satellites into orbit, Sputnik-I on October #, # and SputnikII on November #, #. They were rumored -- correctly as it turned out -- to be preparing heavier than the first two put together. The United States had countered with Project Vanguard and that, at the moment, was the most publicized failure in history. The first Vanguard rocket had bren finally ready Fig. #. Two sotellife orbils having the same perigee altitude. For explanation see text. for the final ulcer-producing countdown in the morning of December #, #. At #:#:# AM it lifted off the launchpad, for just about one yard. Then it lost thrust, settled back, fell over and exploded. The more nervous members of the Explorer team felt that the Vanguard men had still been a little better off ; at least they had known immediately that they had a failure on their hands. The Explorer team had to wait for about I  hours until they could know whether they Had been successful or not. Of course the time when the big radar at Goldstone in California should catch ExplorerI had been calculated, and when that time came the crew at Goldstone remained silent. The reason became known soon -- Explorer-I Had gone into a somewHat larger orbit tHan calculated; naturally it needed more time to complete it. By the time Goldstone could say that Explorer-I was in orbit, it was a new day for tlie Cape and for Washington, though not yet on the West Coast. A s has been said in the opening paragraph, Explorer-I has been orbiting ever since, with its behavior such that it produced a veritable textbook example of a very slow but steady 'orbital decay.' As everybody knows, most artificial satellites go through n shrinking orbit and finally re-enter the atmosphere, where aerodynamic heating vaporizes them, While this is general knowledge after ten years of news storic.i about artificial satellites, the reason for this eventual re-entry is generally not known, as I find out several times per year from questions asked of me after lectures. Many people seem to think that it is only 'reasonable' thal gravity wins out at the end. The actual victor is our atmosphere. Look at Fig. #. There we have a large elliptical orbit with iti apogee at alphaL (for "large") The perigee is supposed to be inside the atmosphere at # milci or so where air molecules still get in the way of an orbiting satellite. In accordance with Kei ler's Second Law the velocity n( a satellite is highest at perigee and lowest at apogee. Each time the satellite goes through its perigee it has to fight residual air resistance. The result is a small loss of kinetic energy, or momentum, and the result of this loss is that the satellite, on its next orbit, does not go quite as far out as it did on the previous orbit While the apogee approaches the ground slowly, the perigee stays at about the same altitude. After some time, say three years, the orbit will look like the smaller ellipse with apogee at alpha-S (S for "smalT'), The new orbit is not only smaller; it also has become more circular in shape. In the end, the orbit does become a circle, with all of its length in the upper atmosphere and with bum-up a question of just one or two more revolutions. This shrinkage is what is called 'orbital decay,' but let us go on with theoretical reasoning for a little wEle longer. Let's Have another look at Fig. #, assuming that it now shows something different It now shows two satellites in two different orbits, but both of them have the same perigee altitude. Which of these two satellites will have a faster orbital decay, the one In the larger or the one in the smaller of the two orbits? The answer is not easy to give and for real satellites, which are apt to be different in size, shape and mass, two detailed calculations would be required. But we can assume that our two satellites are identical; spherical in shape, two feet in diameter and weighing # pounds. Satellite L has its apogee at a distance from the surface of # miles; its velocity at apogee is an even one mile per second, and its orbital period from apogee to apogee also happens to be an even figure, namely # hours. Satellite S has its apogee at a distance from the surface of # miles; its velocity at apogee is # miles per second, aud its orbital period is hours. The main factor that reduces the lifetime in orbit of satellite S is its shorter orbital period. In # horirs it goes # times through its perigee, while satellite L, during the same interval, only goes # times through its perigee. T)ut there is one factor that " works in favor of satellite S. Satellite L, coming in from a more elongated orbit, goes through its perigee at a higher velocity than satellite S. Now it is a rule of thumb that air resistance increases roughly as the square of the velocity. If the velocity of satellite L were twice as Ei at perigee as that of satellite S it would encoxinter four times as much air resistance and might well have a shorter lifetime in orbit than satellite S. In our example that is not the case. The velocity of satellite S at perigee is # miles per second, that of satellite L is # miles per second. Satellite L does encounter more air resistance, Jbiut not so much in proportion as to overcome the fact that S goes through perigee nearly twice as often as L. Satellite L wins out. But if L Had the same volume as S but only one tenth of its mass, S would win out. Since residual air resistance is the villain in the struggle for survival put up by the two satellites, the goal of an indefinite lifetime (if that were in the goal, which it usually is not) could be accomplished very easily by lifting the perigee out of the atmosphere. It so happens that the second Amaican satellite put into orbit in # went into such an orbit. It is Vanguard-I, launched March #, #, with perigee at # miles, apogee at # miles and an orbital ieriod of # minutes. Now we can look at two actual orbits, those of ExplorerI and of Vanguard-I and see how things work out in reality. The raw material for the comparison to follow is a publication of Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Satellite Situation Report, which is issued every two weeks. But since these reports are metric, we first have to convert the figures in miles, which have been used so far, into kilometers. Vanguard's initial orbit had it perigee at # miles which are # kilometers. The apogee of # miles is # kilometers. This was on March #, #. Seven years and one month later the perigee was determined to be # kilometers and the apogee # kilometers, a very faint decay. But as Table I shows, the orbit of Vanguard-I can be considered to be stable. As can be seen there are minor fluctuations -- the figures are sometimes smaller by about # kilometers (about equal to # miles). Even a satellite undisturbed by residual air resistance still has a number of factors influencing it. There is, to begin with, the factor many people think of first, the gravitational field of our moon. However, even before any satellite was put into orbit, the amoimt of limar influence was carefully calculated. It is so small that, while there, it would escape detection by measurement Another factor is the radiation pressure exerted by the sun. How influential this factor is depends on the overall density of the satellite. In the Date of Report Orbital Period Perigee Apogee (minutes) (km) (km) April #, # # July #, # Sept. #y # Dec. #, # March #, # # May #, # Aug. #, # Nov. #, # March #, # # June #y # Oct. #, # Jan. #, # # March #, # case of Echo, wbicH was just a big plastic balloon, it was considerable. In the case of fairly dense and small satellites, it is minor; but it could be detected in the case of Vanguard-I. The main disturbing influence for satellites near the earth -- and the apogee of Vanguard-I is only about one third of the earth's diameter from the earth's surface -- is the earth's equatorial bulge. As a matter of fact, the perturbations of the orbit of Vanguard-I were used to calculate the mass of the equatorial bulge. And then there are errors of measurement, but these errors  usually 'smooth ouf if a large number of revolutions are measured. Iig. #, which is carefully drawn ta scale, shows the orbit of Vanguard-I which since # has changed so little that the difference disappears in the thickness of the line in the diagram. But Explorer-I, as can be seen from the diagram, has very noticeably decayed. Fig. #. The original orbit of Explorar-I and itj current orbft (broken circle); the orbit of Vanguard-I Is ihown for comparison. This diagram Is to scale. On February #, #, its perigee was at a distance of # miles (# km), its apogee at # miles (#I km) and its orbital period was # minutes. Seven yeai and ten weeks later the orbital jeriod was only # minutes, the perigee had slipped to # miles (# km) and the apogee had approached to a distance of # miles (#I km). What has happened since is shown in Table II. Table II shows the orbit month to month over a period of nearly three years. During this time the orbital period shrank from # minutes to # minutes, precisely # minutes. The perigee altitude slipped from # miles to # miles, or # miles. The apogee altitude has suffered, as predicted by theory, a much larger loss, from # miles to #I miles, or # miles less. The obvious next question is how long Explorer-I is stiU going to stay in orbit. Nobody can tell precisely, and the question is likely to be met by a profoimd silence, because the original estimate of the lifetime of Explorer#, made a week or so after firing, was tiiree years. It Has been orbiting for ten years by now and the estimate of its remaining lifetime is again three years, but this time surrounded by careful explanations about the factors we don't know. As a matter of fact; we are waiting for ExplorerI to teach us some of these factors. Because of very many unmanned satellites of relatively short lifetime and of manned flights, we know the density at an altitude of # miles. But ExplorerI is now at about # miles and the data for that altitude are going to be largely derived from its behavior. Then there is another unknown factor which does not matter much right now but will become important later onExplorer-I is attached to the top stage of the rocket that put it into orbit. For this reason it Has the shape of a very long artillery projectile, about # inches in diameter and around # feet in length. Naturally it does not have any stabilizing devices (if it had had any originally, they would be useless by now) and for that reason is likely to tumble. Its lifetime will be strongly influenced at a later time by whether it goes through its perigee nose first like a bullet or whether it happens to move broadside on. So let us say: another three years. f the things still in orbit from the early years of the space age, Explorer-I is the only object left that has a foreseeable re-entry at all. In # there were only two launches (Sputnik I and II), and both these satelOrbital Perigee Apogee Inclination of Orbit to Equator (minutes) (km) (km) (degrees) #, # # # #, # # #, # # July #, #.I # Aug. #, #.I #i# Sept. #, # # Oct. #, # # Nov. #, # # Dec. #, # # Jan. #, # # # Feb. #, # # Aarch #, # # April #, # # May #, # # June #, # # Juty #, #J # Aug. #, # # Sept. #, # # Oct. #, # # Nov. #, #.I # Dec. #, # # Jan. #, # # # Feb, #, # # March #, # #I April #, #v# # May #, # # June #, # # July #, # # Aug. #, # # Sept. #, isiy # Oct. #, #J # Nov. #, #.I # Dec. #, # # Jan. #, # # # Feb. #, # # March #, # # lites and the top stages of their ed by the Vanguard-I satellite rockets have re-entered. Of the have, of course, orbits quite sim# launches, four objects are ilar to the orbit of the satellite, so in orbit: Explorer-I, Vanguardthey are going to stay in space, I, the third stage of the Vantoo. guard rocket and a metal obOf the # launches, five object from the same shot. The two jects are still in orUt. They are pieces of "space junk" producVenguard-II, the top stage of the rocket that put VanguardplorerVI I and a metal object associated with the shot of Exthe Vanguard shots all have orbits resembling that of Vanguard#, while the two objects from the gee of about # miles and a perigee at about # miles, a perigee high enough to make re-entry within the foreseeable futur( unlikely. In time they may all be removed from orbit by manned spacecraft, but again in the foreseeable future, there is no need to do so, though it may be dono as part of an exercise in spacecraft control and maneuvering. Tills Month in IF -- New in this month's IF! A special eondensed novel supplement TAo long-awailed sequel to Asylum by A. E. Van Vogt by Samuel R. Delany by Harry Harrison by Takumi Shibano -- pJvs many other fine stories end Features. Oonf miss the otest Issue of IF, twice winner of science-fiction's Hugo award on sale now! (Managing Director) "I can't spare you long," said sank into his chair. "Very well, Kandle. "I'm a busy man." Then Lowris," he said, "explain to me the message filtered through to about the hands." conscious recognition. He read the From previous research Lowris card again, this time more slowly, felt he already had the measure Scowling, he turned the card God's chosen few, who know over and finally located the inthemselves to be infallible. As a formation he had been seeking: non-technical Works Manager, Kandle needed no reference to the opinions of technicians or accountants on matters about which he knew almost nothing. By the divine right of being the heaviest bully on the plnt, plus having absolute discretion over hiring, firing and salaries, Handle's infallibility went unquestioned. His despotism was exceeded only by his megalomania. Handle's decisions were absolute and immutable -- until he reversed them, as he frequently did, as if to assure the world and himself that one can be infallible without also being a bigot. Lowris crossed his fingers behind his back and smiled inside himself. The situation was precisely as he had hoped. He had no wish at this stage to become involved with technicians and engineers. It was not that there was anything inferior or unsound about the commodity he was selling. Quite the contrary. He was quietly introducing a line which had all the explosive capability of a major manufacturing breakthrough. But it was not easy to sell hands to engineers who had made a lifetime's living out of proving that whatever a hand can do a machine can do better. "Allow me to demonstrate," said Lowris. He opened his large black case and Hefted the device it contained onto the table. Then fie whipped away the black shroud which covered the device to expose the apparatus to Handle's startled gaze. The imit comprised a central column, about fourteen inches in height and a foot in diameter, of heavy, black, cast metal. The top of the column flared out to the proportions of a human shoulder and attached to and neatly folded in front of it was, incredibly, a full-sized reproduction of a pair of human arms, cast in a soft, pink, obscenely fleshlike plastic. The arms led to a lifelike reproduction of a pair of finelyproportioned hands. T owris delightedly watched ' Handle stiffen as the shroud came away. It was a touch' of drama which Lowris always enjoyed, but it was only the opener for his show. If Kandle could survive the initial shock he would doubtless carry into his bed that night quite unshakable impressions of the capability of the hands which Lowris brought. "Hands..." Lowris was saying "... hands and arms -- electromechanical reproductions of the flesh and lever mechanisms of the correspohding parts of the human body. The bones are vanadium steel; the joints are diamond roller enclosures, and the muscles are plastic-and-gel flexible solenoids with at least five times the strength of a human muscle..." He was hurrying past this part of the sales lecture, knowing that most of it was wasted on Kandle. Instead he concentrated on giving only sufficient information to enable Kandle to explain it vaguely to himself or others later. "Control... Lowris snapped open the back of the column,... is by tape casette. Each casette has an available two-hour running time on the multi-channel playback head. Alternatively, tape loops can be used for shortsequence operations. The unit, of course, includes full facilities for generating its own tape programs." Kandle said; "Of course," ss if he had been listening in detail, but his eyes never wandered from the fleshy pinkness of the folded arms of the device which squatted on the far side of his desk. "Now," said Lowris, "I suppose you'd like to see what it can do?" Kandle said: "Yes!" and Lowris located the power socket on the wall and made a swift connection. "You will appreciate that these are only demonstration programs. The actions the hands will perform are designed purely to demonstrate their strength and dexterity." Lowris depressed a switch and the arms unfolded with a graceful movement and came to rest parallel with each other with palms open and turned upwards as if waiting to receive a gift. He took a pack of cards from his pocket and placed them in the left palm carefully. After a few moments the hand grasped them, then the right hand moved over and began to deal the cards to four imaginary players, with a swift precision. andle's eyes never left the delicate fingers which moved across his desk. He watched them with a fixed concentration which was little short of hypnotic fascination. When the whole pack had been dealt, the hands still continued to move, dealing two imaginary cards before coming to rest. "Object lesson," said Lowris. "The machine is comparable to a blind moron. It will perform sujjcrbly well the exact instruction which have been programed into it. Nothing else. This program was set with fifty-four cards. There were only fifty two in the pack I gave it. While there is a crude sensory feedback in the system sufficient to give it orientation, the fact that it was two cards short meant nothing to it. It tided to deal tliem just the same. Use smaller cards and the hands will drop them. Use larger, and they will fumble. But give them a precise job and the parts to fit, and they'll do the job untiringly and more faithfully than any Human operator." "What sort of jobs?" Kandle drew his eyes from the Hands and looked at Lowris as if seeing Him for the first me. Lowris spread' his hands. "For instance, loading a press-tool with' piece-parts from a pre-positioned box, operating the press, then clearing the pressed parts to another box. All you have to do is keep the incoming work suitably positioned for the hands to find by touch. A perfect industrial situation -- no overtime, no coffee breaks -- and if you arrange an automatic feed system, then you can set them operating twentyfour hours a day. In fact, you can turn out the lights and go home." machine?" Kandle was afraid of sounding enthusiastic. "Certainly!" Lowris was gaining mastery of the situation and was enjoying it. "You can make those hands type, knot, assemble, pack eggs, bend wires, solder, feed machinery, or make love caresses. Anything a human hand can do, they can do -- once you accept that they are sightless and mindless. They act in perfect obedience to their program, without wages, argument, shop-stewards, madiine guards, dermatitis, union-shop conditions or timeoff to go shopping." "That would have to be proven," said Kandle, catching Himself in the midst of a transitory show of exuberance. "Watch!" Lowris placed a compartmented tray of electronic components on the table and extended his wiring to include a soldering iron. He inserted a new program casette into the column and touched the hands into action. They went to work assembling a fine and delicate piece of apparatus with all the skill and precision of hands with' many years of experience at the art. In twelve minutes of rapid and extremely fine manipulation, the apparatus, a miniature transistorised radio receiver, was complete. The hands then offered it hesitantly to Kandle. Qomewhat surprised, he took it and switched it on. It worked without hesitation. "And now watch," said Lowris. He took a bar of steel from his case and invited Kandle to bend it. The metal flexed slightly but suffered no permanent deformation. The hands took the b ir lightly, played with it for a moment, then deftly tied a double knot in it with no more effort than if it had been a piece of rope This too they offered to Kandle. Kandle took the metal knot and sat, a slightly baffled expression on his face, trying to reconcile the conflicting concepts of delicate ae curacy and superliuman strengtH, two extremes of muscular activity which were both well outside of his own limited capabilities. "All right," he said at last. "How much?" "Nothing for the first one." Lowris was still leading the situation. "And four thousand pounds each thereafter." "I don't follow," said Kandle. "An introductory offer," said Lowris. "You show us a suitable job on which you are employing several full-time operators. We install and program a pair of hands to do the job and guarantee one pair of hands on an eighthour shift will perform as much work as two human operators during the same period -- or the work of six, if you set it up for twenty-four hour operation. We do a work-and-cost study with your accountant and calculate the cost saving. When we have saved you four thousand pounds, you pay that sum to us. We take the old machine away and give you a new one." "Let's get this straight," said Kandle. "You lend us a machine at no cost, and only when it's saved its own price do we purchase our own. Suppose we find we don't want a one thi?" Lowris shrugged. "Our risk. You're under no obligation to purchase a subsequent machine if you don't wish." Kandle was suspicious. "That's a peculiar way to do business, Lowris. I can see the advantages to us, but not to you. What do you get out of it?" "Experience shows us that the demand for a second pair of hands invariably comes before the end of the loan period on the first. So it's a measure of our confidence in what we have to sell. From a thousand-ton press to a love caress -- whatever a hand can do, ours can do better." "Put your offer in writing," said Kandle, "and I'll let you know." Lowris replaced the hands in the box and maneuvered it to the door. Then he shook hands and left. Kandle sat back at his desk with a piece of knotted steel, a transistor radio, and a piece of card with a message no longer enigmatic: II T owns was under no illusionsabout the difficulties of the assignment. It was for this reason that he preferred to make the initial installation himself. Despite his being an innocent in the realm of manufacturing techniques, Kandle knew well what the bottlenecks were in his production line and which were the jobs on which it was most difficult to retain labor. He had apparently acquired the useful industrial gift of persuading the shop stewards to do their duty wearing blinkers and heavily rose-tinted siectacles, for many of his processes presented health hazards to the operators which should never have persisted into the twentieth century. Curiously, such is the luck of the "infallible" mentality, that Kandle got away with these industrial malpractices completely, although his labor turnover was staggeringly high. Lowris, who had researched the Company to a point where he could have recited verse and chapter on its operation, was not therefore unduly surprised at the nature of the job on which it was intended to try the hands. Kandle had chosen the feed end of a hot-tinning process, where pieceparts were flux-coated by hand and then introduced into a bath of molten tin, from which they were recovered, mercifully by a decrepit chain-link belt which dropied the hot parts into a dangerously hot and reeking paraffin quench tank. Lowris reasonably estimated that the whole process could have been conventionally mechanized for less than the cost of a pair of hands. But his purpose was to sell hands, and Kandle was not a person to listen to gratuitous advice. The whole atmosphere surrounding the tinning process was an offence to the human organism. The flux was a vicious halogenactivated liquor, notorious for its tendency to promote dermatitis. The evaporation of liberal amounts of this fluid in contact with the molten tin further liberated quantities of vaporized chlorides and probably fluorides into the air. The cover-flux layer on the tin bath was dirty and inefficient, and the fumes from tlie paraffin quench at times grew quite alarming. A disturbance of the span roof above showed where some enlightened predecessor of Kandle had once had a fume extractor installed; but the apparatus, probably corroded beyond repair, had long since been removed. In the midst of this minor hell of heat and fume, four girls, some only in their late teens, chattered incessantly to each other as they worked. With typical infallible organization, Kandle had not thought to warn the girls of Lowris's coming. His arrival in a neat, dark suit and staggering with a large black box caused a delicious moment of confused amazernent. When they had decided amongst themselves that Lowris was apparently going to work on the tinning section with them, they aU retired to the toilets for a period and then resumed work in expectant semi-silence punctuated by outbursts of infectious giggling. L owris completed Eis first survey of the job and took measurements of the various critical parameters. The girls watched him covertly, as though he might be expected to indulge in some sudden act of outrage. It was never quite certain whether this was what they hoped or feared. Lowris continued his work, coloring slightly occasionally, unused to being the focus of sucK concentrated and mocking interest. Finally one of the girls, unkempt, and with a ferocious scowl and overwhelming self-confidence, slipped' over to where he stood. "Here -- what you supposed to be doing?" The tone was a mixture of inquiry and impudence. Lowris played it lightly. "Hands," he said. "I'm a specialist in hands." "WeU, you can keep 'em off me for a start." She both laughed and scowled at the same time, revealing a remarkable complexity of character. "I mean, what you doing with your hands?" "Wait and see," said Lowris. She reported back to her workmates, baffled for a moment, but watdiing carefully as Lowris opened the box and set his device, stdl shrouded, upon the benchtop. "Heyl He's erecting a statue," she decided suddenly. "A statue of us and old Jean that fell info the paraffin." Shortly she skipped back to Lowris's ade and raised a comer of the shroud expectantly"What's under there?" "Three brass monkeys," said Lowris wickedly. "We want to find out how cold it gets in here at nights." She pulled an impudently wry face. "Hey -- you're a bit cheeky, aren't you? Better'n the ones down in them offices though." She nodded her head in the general direction of Handle's administration. "They don't speak to you at all if they can help. Just give you little tickets, like, telling you what to do next." "And do you usually do what you're told?" She put her head on one side, trying to repress a burst of deepseated mischief. "Sometimes I do... and sometimes I don't. Depends on who's doing the telling." She started to go away, then turned back with a sudden thought. "You can call me Nancy. Everyone calls me Nancy -- even old Kandlegrease." "That's nice," said Lowris, trying to make some critical meas;urements. "What's your name then?" "Lowris," said Lowris. "Lowris what?" "Lowris nothing. It's something Lowris, but nobody ever uses it tfiat way. How come you've got so much time to chat?" "Oh, they don't know what they're doing down there in the office. So we work a bit when we feel like it d chat when we don't. Nobody cares, anyway." "That's rather what I thought," said Lowris, saving it in mind that with his own cost-accountant on the job, one pair of hands should show a four-thousandpound cost saving over the present sjrstem in a remarkably short space of time. A t mid-day Lowris called in his own engineer and detailed the various stops, slides and registers he needed to facilitate the smooth feeding of the components to the location from which the hands would take them for processing. He dispensed with lunch himself, unshrouded the hands, and began to set them up in preparation for the difficult and delicate task of programing them to perform the required operations. The whole key to the success of the hands lay in the programing, and Lowris was justifiably proud of his method, which enabled a complex sequence of commands to be established so precisely that a hand programed by a man to write his own signature would continue to produce copies of that signature in all respects indistin guishable from the original Although the method of programing was basically simple, every gesture and nuance of touch imparted by the programmer to the hands remained as an oirating characteristic identical with the movements of its originator. In principle, signals from an unbalanced oscillator were fed to the flexible solenoid coUs which' comprised the muscles of the hands. By manipulating the hands through the program sequence and detecting the altering electrical responses of the flexing solenoids, a series of differences from the original signal were obtained and recorded on magnetic tajje. A similar series of signals was also recorded for the sensory system, which imparted a degree of tacttile expectancy to the hands and gave them a measure of orientation which corrected for undershoot and overshoot. The taped record was then used to produce the necessary signals to operate the hands. Lowris was forced to agree that the scheme exceeded his own expectations, though he sometimes sweated to think of the years of frustrating experiment and modification which had preceded his present level of attainment. And all this to provide industrial illegitimates like Handle with a cheap substitute for human labor which, in any case, he neither held in regard nor bothered to utilize at more than twenty percent efficiency. I n order to put tlie Hands smoothly througfi tfie sequence of operations, Lowris Had first to learn to perform the operations faultlessly himself. For some obscure reason, probably associated with pavicity of the imagination, the activated flux was applied to the components by means of a household paintbrush. This involved precise rotation of the component and some complicated wristwork, in addition to Holding the brush at the most advantageous angle. As a skilled technician, Lowris possessed all the necessary dexterity, but He needed time and repetition to transform the action into a smooth-flowing habit pattern. He was still practicing when Nancy and her mates returned from the dinner-break. Nancy came and stood by him and watched him critically for a full five minutes. "Man! Are you awkward!" she said at last. "Out of the way. I'll show you." She maneuvered him off the chair by main force and began fluxing as though her life depended on it. Her short, capable fingers achieved a degree of accuracy and speed that Lowris had to admit to himself He would never be able to equal. SHe went through the stack of work at a pace that would Have gladdened the heart of any rate-fixer, then threw down the brusK in triumph. "There!" she saidThen she looked up and for the first time noticed the unshrouded hands. "What the...?" "Hands," said Lowris. "I specialize in them, remember?" "What are they made of?" "Plastic and steel and things." "D'you know, for a minute I thought they were real. Somebody cut up. What you going to do with them?" "Make them work, I hope." She grinned roguishly. "Vhy don't you spread them out a bit, and then we can use them for holding yam." She appealed to her mates. "Hey girls! They got a new idea -- something to hold our yam while we're knitting." Opening the column, Lowris slipped in a tape casette containing a demonstration manipulatory exercise. Immediately, the arms unfolded, and the hands began to dance a pattern of finger and wrist co-ordination exercises, while the shoulder and elbow joints went through the sweep, extension and range movements. It was a beautiful tape. The original tape program had been set by Madelain, Lowris's wife, an accomplished student of ballet and mime. THe flow of the movements reflected witH entire fidelity the precision, ixjise and dram matic feeling which was so characteristically Madelain's. Nancy was nonplussed but not enthralled by the performance. She recovered, her equilibrium quickly. "He," she said. "He woke the silly things up!" T owris e.xtracted the tape, in' serted a new casette, and slipped rings on the plastic forefingers to couple them with his own as he guided them through the operations sequence to record the required program data. This was always the hardest part of the job. It was one thing to perform an intricate operation with one's own fingers, and quite another to perform it with a set of plastic fingers clipped under one's own, Practiced as he was in programing, Lowris was inevitably awkward in his first manipulations, and he spent an hour in dummy runs before he attempted a trial recording. Nancy had watched all this with scowling interest and occasionally interjected: "Boy... are you awkward!" in a manner not calculated to improve Lowris's waning patience. When, on trial playback, the hands succeeded in dropping both the component and the brush, she abandoned her own work and came over again. "Here -- I'll show you how to do it." Lowris erased the trial tape without comment and considered returning later when the factory was closed in order to oe able to set the program without interruption or comment. But he was developing a sneaking liking for this irerky, sparrowlike Nancy, who would rush into a conversation or a situation where angels and Lowrises feared to tread. He appreciated the shattering contrast between her unabashed confidence and his own introvert caution. Nancy worked her fingers into tlie coupling rings on the bands and wriggled them about deliciously, just to get the feel of things. "Okay, you can switch on," she said. And then, with a sudden pause for thought; "Doesn't hurt, does it?" "Only for a few minutes," said Lowris maliciously and quite incorrectly. She searched his face to determine the truth of the statement "Doesn't hurt!" she decided. To retain her interest Lovris switched on the recorder. "Now!" She picked up the component and the brush, deftly completed the fluxing and' dropped the component in the molten tin batli. Her fingers, guiding those of the hands, functioned as surely as if the hands had iwt been there. "Again," said Lowris. She repeated the operation, and tfien twice more, Eer control increasing steadily witH eacH attempt. "More," said Lowris. At this poiEt Handle walked down the shop. He stood for a moment watching the operation, with one eyebrow quizzically raised. Then he walked on, apparently more interested in the sheaf of papers on his clipboard. Nancy finished the box of components then looked at Lowris. "That suit you?" "We'll soon see." He re-wound the tape, bade Nancy find some more components, then set the hands on program-controlled running. The hands performed tHe operation faultlessly, all of Nancy's quick movements and tenacity of grasp being reproduced in perfect detail. Lowris had to admit that had he worked all night he could scarcely have hoped to set such a program himself. He said as much, and she grinned and almost flushed with pleasure. "Oh, any time I" Their eyes met again -- the triumphant yet sad impudence, and Lowris's vast and softer depths. "Any time?" Lowris's ego reached out at some of her outflowing confidence and secured itself a shred. 'What are you doing tonight?" She caught up with his meaning, and her look of triumph almost dimmed out the other shadows underneath the scowl. "Nothing. I was just wondering what I was going to do tonight." The job completed except for the slides, stops, and registers which his engineer was constructing, Lowris borrowed Handle's phone and called his office. "Tell Jimmy I'd like the slides at Handle's place by noon tomorrow if possible." "So soon?" His secretary was surprised. "I don't think Jimmy's even started them yet. We thought this was a three-day job." "It was, but I had some luck with the programing. It's all set here now, apart from editing the program and installing Jimmy's bits and pieces. Will you contact Halting and let him know I'll be coming there a day early? Oh', and Jean... Get my wife on the phone, will you, and tell her I'll be late tonight" "Again? Really, Lowris, you are a swine! Madelain'll catch up with you one day. You can't get away with it for ever, you know." "Once I would have cared," ssiid Lowris, "but these days I just don't give a damn." Ill T he next morning Lowris started trimming his program tape, selecting the best of Nancy's recorded performances, dupUcating tHe fastest and deleting tHe pauses and hesitations. The results, he decided, could best be handled by a closed-loop casette, and he phoned the office to include the necessary microswitches to start and stop the process automatically. The model-five Hands were performing perfectly, and Nancy's own sure motions had imparted to them a certainty and sensitivity whicK was fascinating to watcK. Then, by slight increases in the tape playback speed, Lowris gave them a rapidity which even Nancy would have been unable to match. This, added to the fact that the hands needed no coffee-breaks, lunch-breaks, trips to the toilet, or time off for a chat, made it easily possible to establish a work-rate verging on three times that of a human operator. Lowris felt He needed the extra speed, because he was perfectly sure that Kandle would understate the amount of work produced when it came to the calculations affecting the purchase of their own hands. At twelve o'clock Jimmy arrived with a mass of prefabricated slide parts. These they assembled rapidly to form a sloping ramp which would gravity-feed Kandle's standard work bins against the stops in a suitable position for the hands to find the components. The arrangement permitted the pre-loading of enough components to last the hands for about four Hours. A similar arrangement would easily have halved the time wasted by Kandle's girls in moving work-bins about, but that was not Lowris's problem. Using an electronic load-cell to detect when the bin had been emptied, Lowris added an instruction to the program for the hands to push away the empty bin to allow the next one to move down into place. A simple trigger switch stopped the hands when the supply of boxes on the slide came to an end. Nancy watched all this with critical interest and then slipped aroimd. "Look, do you work for him?" She pointed to Jimmy. "No," said Lowris. "He works for me." "Do #mu have many people -- I mean, working for you, like? ' "About thirty-five." "And you're the boss?" She seemed slightly incredulous. "I'm the owner," said Lowris. "It comes to the same thing." "We going out again tonight?" "I'm afraid not. Tonight I'm off to another job." "Then I don't suppose I'll see you again?" "Doubtful," said Lowris. "Not unless Kandle buys another pair of hands." "OHr She went away pensively and attacked her work witii a savage scowl. J immy moved lip to his shoulder. "It's none of my business, Lowris, but that one looks like a whole load of trouble to me." "Boy!" Lowris slapped him on the arm. "I was born in trouble, married it, and it's never left me since. Now I'm so damned used to it that I miss it if it doesn't hapfien." "Please yourself," said Jimmy, "but Madelain'U crucify you if she finds out about this one. Remember what happiened last time." "TKere was nothing in this, anyway," said Lowris. "Perhaps not, but I don't like the look in the eyes of that young miss. Something tells me you've not heard the last of her." "I'll bear it in mind," said Lowris, unconvinced. Before he left, Lowris called Kandle out to see a demonstration. The hands, functioning with perfect co-ordination, worked their way through a box of components in about a third of the time taken by one of the girls. Kandle remained impoietrably silent during these proceedings, but it was obvious that he was thinking. When the hands smartly pushed the empty bin out of the way and started on the next, his eyes widened appreciably. Kandle was certainly maldng the mental calculation as to how much work could be completed during the nit if the ramp was left fully loaded at the end of the working day. Lowris mentally hugged a picture of Kandle creeping in at midnight to load boxes on the ramp to actdeve twenty-four hour operation, for such is the pattern of infallible management that it seeks to counteract inefficiency of method by operating for the longest practical periods of time -- the antithesis of productivity. Kandle was also noting the performance of the hands as compared with the performance of his operators. From the deep gleam in his eyes it was piossible to predict that a few wage envelopes would shortly include dismissal notices. Lowris shrugged inwardly. It was not his problem. L owris's trip to see Halting represented a new phase in the development of the hands. Lowris had realized that in one important sphere of human activity an extra pair of hands was never unwelcome -- in the domestic kitchen. Halting was a minor genius when it came to constructing specialized catering equipment, and the union of Lowris's hands with' Harting's pre-purposed kitchen line promised to yield an automatic domestic chef of considerable potential. Refusing to sacrifice versatility for cheapness, Harting and Lowris had achieved a near impossibility in cost reduction by using the simplest possible range of kitchen equipment in a set configuration, relying on the inherent dexterity of the hands to achieve their aim. Unfortunately, this threw the onus back completely on the skill of the programmer, and the success of the venture now rested with the human hands which taught the automatic ones their job. From the start, everything went wrong. The chef-instructor, whom Harting had engaged for the more skilful parts of the programing, proved to be a complete idiot when it came to manipulating the hands. Lowris's manipulation w'as good, but his cookery proved inedible. Harting, seeing the way things were going, got liimself drunk on cooking sherry and remained in that state for three consecutive days. Lowris travelled back on the following Wednesday morning with indigestion, a hangover, and an expensive booking arrangement for a stand at the forthcoming Good-Eating Exhibition where he was due to show something which it did not look as if he wpuld now be able to produce. He arrived in town at mid-day feeling in the depths of a depression. He ducked lunch and went home for a change of clothes and a wash before going to his office. TV yT adelain was waiting for him coldly. She had obviously been crying, but was now in a state of icy restraint. "What the hell's going on, Lowris? There was a girl up here yesterday who kicked up a frightful row demanding to see you. She said that it was all your fault she had lost her job, and what were you going to do about it." "The damn little fool!" "So you do know her then?" "I can guess who it was. Sounds like one of the girls who works at Kandle's place. I installed some hands there recently, and it looks as if Kandle's given his tinning staff the bum's rush." "Is that all?" "All what?" "All you're going to say about her?" "That's all I know about her." "It still doesn't explain how she comes to call at your private address, asking for you simply as Lowris." Underneath Madelain's white composure was coiled a taut whip of anger. "Do me a favor!" said Lowris. "I can't be held respwnsible for Kandle's mistakes." "I wish I was sure it was Kandle's mistake. It sounds more like one of yours." "Shut upl" said Lowris. "I've had enough' of you for one day. I scarcy know the girl, and the fact that Kandle chooses to sack labor instedid of re-deploy is no concern of mine. An#rthing else you've made out of this is entirely in your own imagination." Lowris? Do you think I don't know you were out with that girl the night Jean phoned to say you were with a client? You're not only transparent, Lowris, you've got damn bad taste -- and if you've got involved with a stupid little tart like that you're a bigger fool than I thought you were. Are you having an affair with her?" "No," said Lowris, "but the idea's beginning to have its attractions if this is the sort of treatment I get when I'm not having one. What makes you such a perfect shrew, Madelain? Does it come naturally, or did you have to study for it?" "Neither." Madelain struggled to contain a complete emotional explosion. "It's just the inevitable result of being married to a rotten pig like you." T owris retired from the conflict  before the final blowup, and feeling dirty, dishevelled, and emotionally drained, he went to his office in an even blacker mood than before. Jean, his secretary, stopped him in the outer room. "Oh, Lowris, there's a chick in your office." "A what?" "A bird -- name of Nancy. She's been in and out all morning waiting for you and generally raising Cain. Finally I phoned Jimmy, and he said to put her in your office and give her a staffemployment application form." "He said what?" "He said he had an idea yon wanted her for something, but he wouldn't say what." "Bang goes Jimmy's Christmas bonus -- for insubordination." "Oh-oh! Like that is it?" Jean looked at him sharply. "Frankly, Lowris, she doesn't look your type." "The way I feel right now, nobody's my type. I'm sick to death of the whole damn human race." "Trouble with Harting too?" "The trip was a calamity and n disaster. Going home afterwards was a grave mistake, and comini; here and finding Nancy in my office is just the sort of touch I need to convince me I'm in an advanced state of persecution paranoia." "What are you going to do about her?" "About Nancy? Nothing. Gel rid of her for me, Jean. I've got troubles enough for the moment. Jean shook her head. "Sorry, Lowris! That's one bed you've made which you are going to have to lie your own way out of -- if you'll excuse the metaphor. She looks a pretty determined little madam to me." "All right! I'll get rid of her myself if that's all the co-operation I'm going to get. What the hell's the matter with the world today?" He strode to his office and opened the door. Nancy was comfortably seated in his chair at the desk, reading magazines. She looked up, a trifle nonplussed. "HeUo!" "I've got a bone to pick with you," said Lowris sternly. She laughed and scowled simultaneously, in her own inimitable fashion. "Yeah... and I've got two to pick with you. What are you going to do about my job?" L owris ignored the question. "Did you go round to my house last night?" "Yeah. Well, I had to see you, didn't I? Old Kandle gave me the push because of your hands, and I went to your house because I knew you'd give me a job on account of our being friends and me being able to help you." "But what did you say to my wife?" Nancy grinned reflectively. "The old girl came to the door, and I told her what I wanted as sweet as pie. But she started getting cross and stuck-up and said she was your wife and if I wanted a job I'd better ask at the factory or office. Then she asked me why I came to the house, and I wouldn't tell her because it was none of her business. So she gets mad at this and says she thinks I'm having an affair with you. Then she calls me a stupid little tart, so I called her a frustrated old bag and said I didn't blame you for playing around if that was what you had to come home to." "I see!" Lowris found the visitor's chair on the other sde of the desk, sat down weakly, and put his head in his hands. Then the mental picture of Madelain's reaction at being called a "frustrated old bag" was something he was unable to contain, and he sat up laughing. Nancy watched him warily from behind the desk. "I'm glad you think it's funny." "I have to," said Lowris. "It's the only thing that stops me going mad on days like this." "Well, that's all right, then. Hey, what about this job I come for?" "What job?" "The one they gave me this thingummy about." She waved the application form at him. Lowris took it, simply because it was offered, and scanned the offensive spider crawl, blots, misspellings and frequent alterations whicK constituted Ker entries. "Suppose I can't find you a job?" ; "You'll Have to I" This was mock scolding. "After all, it was your hands that took my job, and I did show you how to make them do it. So I thought maybe you cotild use somebody to make your hands work right... seeing how awkward you are." "Thanks for the thought," said Lowris weakly. Sitting on the wrong side of his own desk, he reflected that the interview was not going at all the way Ke Had intended. "I don't think..." He said dubiously. And then a new idea fetched him to the point of decision. "Can you cOok?" "Maybe." Nancy screwed Her face up in an amazing spectrum of expresaons centered on a slight trace of disgust which was registered by her nose. "Why, you hungry?" "No," said Lowris. "You've just given me an idea. There may be take a little trip." "A trip? With you?" "I'll be along too." "And do I get paid as well?" "A hundred dollars a week for a four-week trial period. After that we'll see vdiat you're worth -- if anything." t C A nd what do I Have to doi for the money?" "Program Hands." "And?" She looked at him with a light of challenge in her eyes. "That's all that's included in the job. What do you do in your spare time is your own affair." she was baffled. "A hundred a week for next to nothing. Boy... you must be joking #" "Take it or leave it," said Lowris. "Look, mister, if you're crazy enough to give me that much a week for easy work, of course ni take it." "Good! Get packed tonight and be at the railway station at nine o'clock tomorrow morning." He pressed the button and waited for his secretary to appear. "Jean, progress this application form, win you? I'll fill in the details later. And phone Halting and teU him to have his chefinstructor chappie ready. I'll be with them tomorrow with some new ideas. OH yes, and you'd better fix train reservations and Hotel accommodations for two. I'm taking Nancy with me." Jean took the application form and scanned it without expression. "One double room or two singles?" she asked finally, looking nowhere in particular. "Use your initiative," said Lowris. "Don't bother me," The telephone buzzed softly. Jean went to her own office to take the call. A few moments later she was back. "Madelain. Wants to know when you're Ukely to be Kome." Lowris glanced at the stacked papers in his tray and pursed his lips. "Ifll take all night to clear this lot if I'm going away again tomorrow. Tell her I've gone to take Harting a bird. That's so near the truth she'll never damnwell believe it." Nancy said: "Hey!" indignantly, at the same time exhibiting a flush of triumph. With a raised eyebrow, Jean went to deliver the message and then to book a hotel as her initiative and intuition both dictated. Lowris, feeling brighter than he had felt all day, ejected Nancy from his office and set about catching up on his paperwork. Amongst the top papters was a tentative inquiry from Kandle wanting to know on what terms Lowris would be prepared to supply a second pair of hands. IV T owris's decision to employ ' Nancy was based on a piece of psychological insight with deeper roots than its potential for adultery. As an introvert, Lowris lived with the constant spectre of failure hovering about his head. It inhibited his manipulation of the hands as much as it reduced the size of his handwriting and robbed him of the power to speak effectively in public. Nancy's manipulation -- in fact Ker whole outlook -- was uncluttered by any such impediment. She had no fear of failure. To her it was unimportant. The fact that her culinary prowess was initially limited to producing atrocious cups of coffee worried her not a bit. She followed the chefinstructor through the operation of making souffles nineteen times, almost collapsing with amusement as her pan produced an amazing sequence of unappetizing rejects. The twentietli time she reached a pierfection worthy of Madame Poulard Herself. Lowris acquired the tape record immediately, and the results produced by the hands on replay were identically good. Then things began to go more smoothly, and the menu of the Lowris-Harting Robotic Kitchen not only grew to an attractive length but achieved a standard such as the domestic housewife could seldom be bothered to match. Lowris's confidence improved to such an extent that he doubled his publicity campaign and gave Nancy an increase in salary. Not even the reproachful letters from Madelain worried him overmuch. He Kad anticipated her mood, and wHen Ke botKered to read her letters at all he accepted her bitterness philosophically and with an attitude of tolerant martyrdom. Sh had always been a good wife to him -- according to her own possessive view of the situation. Lowris knew that it was his own almost pathological aversion to being possessed which had brought about the schism, and it was the exercise of this failing for which he was now being blamed. He had no intention of forming a permanent liaison with anyone -- certainly not with' Nancy. In the meantime, the present arrangement with her suited him rather well. Most of the tapes required for the Robotic Kitchen were complete within the first month; and during the second month Nancy built up an impressive library of extra tapes which extended the scope of the robotic unit to well beyond what had originally been intended. With such a formidable armory to unleash at the Good Eating Exhibition, Lowris's success was assured. For once fortune was swinging him recklessly high -- so high the ground seemed a long way off. Then just as the pendulum began to swing again, some overwrought spring snapped, and the whole unstable weight which was his life went crashing into the depths. 'he police message reached him at mid-day, and he cauglit the first train out, shattered by n frantic sense of loss, remorse, and guilt. Madelain had taken tlir Jaguar and driven onto the thniway. At an overpass just ten milni from the entrance she had hit a concrete column at a speed estimated at better than a hundred miles and hour. Everyone wa kind. Nobody suggested she had left the road deliberately. She had been speeding -- a wet road -- a blackout, perhaps. He shook off the well-intentioned circle of friends and sympathizers, feeling the black swamp of sick responsibility closing round his head. At times like thii he knew he was better alone, lefi to try and face himself in some dimly-lighted bar where he w.ii anonymous and where nobody even tried to probe the conflict i which tore him. The point which emerged t worry him was Madelain's mo tive. He had no doubt in his own mind that she had deliberately crashed the car in an act of dcs peration. The uncharacteristii part of the affair was that it now left him free to spend his life m he wished. Knowing Madelain' talent for possessiveness, he coulil not convince himself that she liml destroyed herself in order to leavi him free. He could not get rid nl the feeling that in some way sin had contrived to make it impossible for him to continue his liaison with Nancy. How this could have been arranged was something he grew progressively less able to understand as the evening went its alcoholic way. When he finally considered himself insulated against all feelings of grief or remorse, he performed the one act that everyone had advised him against -- he went home. It was raining. The taxi delivered him to the door and then speedily departed. He stood for a moment against the damp hedge, welcoming the cold sense of reality which he felt in the raindrops on his face. He got his key upsidedown in the lock. Wrestling with the recalcitrant lock, he finally gained admission to the hall and struck out for the light switch. Nothing happened, although he distinctly heard it click. He reflected curiously that Madclain must have turned off the electricity at the main switch' before taking the car. The main switch was in the garage, and he was in no state to negotiate the garage doors, nor, since all he needed now was rest, was there any necessity to try. Sufficient light from the street-lamp opposite entered via the hall windows to permit Him to find the Bedroom. The bedroom fight did not work either, but he knew from habit how to find the bed in the darkness. Pausing only to slip off his shoes without the trial of undoing the laces, he threw himself on the softness of the bed. '"Then shock! Fingers closed around his throat, the pale, indistinct arms reaching for him from the headboard. Sober, he might have torn himself away, but in his condition of lowered responses he missed his cliance, and the model-five hands encompassed his neck longingly. With sudden panicky insight into his predicament he tried to throw the base of the hands off balance, but whoever had secured it had done the job too well. ,... The hones are vanadium steel... the muscles... plasticand-I flexible solenoids... with at least five times the strenh of the average human muscle. They act in perfect obedience to their program... every gesture and nuartce of touch... identical with the movements of its originator... Technically it was a flawless tape. The flow of the movements reflected with entire fidelity the hours of rehearsal and the precision, poise and dramatic feeling which was so characteristically Madelain's. After an hour of subtle and expressive pressures the hands even suffered him to die. Each morning he took a pill to help his memory. But to help it in exactly what way? TTis eyes carefully averted, Al bin JoHns swiped the depilatory off his jaws and splashed His face with water. He slapped his ihirt shut. Then, forgetting, he glanced at the face in his mirror. It was a dark face, assertively Intelligent, youthfully stem. He blinked away, shuddering. His hand, lurching, cornered the Jug of pink capsules, shoved one Into his mouth. He gulped, as he did every morning. He frowned at the jug's label. "One daily. For memory." It annoyed him that he couldn't remember why he swallowed that daily capsule. It seemed a purely automatic action of hand and mouth, a muscular act beyond voluntary control. True, some mornings the reason loomed momentarily as near as that disturbing face in his mirror. But it always slipped away. Usually right after he swallowed the memory capsule. The timespot chimed the Hour. Johns's saucer thumped softly at the parlor window, aimouncing its arrival from the parking tower. Briskly, Johns strapped the speech recorder to his wrist, checking to be absolutely certain he had inserted a fresh capsule the nigt before. It was a lucky break, just three months out of news school, to be sent to Cleveland General Hospital in Tac Turber's stead. Turber had done the local medical column for sevehteen years, until his recent illness. No one at the News Tribune knew how long Turber might remain in Florida on recuperation leave -- perhaps weeks; perhaps months. If Johns handled Turber's hospital feature well, he might be given other of Turber's regular assignments, until Turber returned. Johns smoothed his hair nervously, resisting the impulse to check himself in the mirror. The saucer thumped again. Johns approached the parlor, drew a deep breath, and hoped. T n vain. "Albin, I was afraid you had overslept," his mother trilled from Washington state. She glowed upon his westerly wall, coffee cup in hand. "I was about to cast myself into the bedroom to check." Limited though she was to a single plane, his mother nevertheless tripped the circuit that turned him defensive. "I had to order a clean shirt," he mumbled, glancing hopelessly at the window, so near, so far. Her image sharpened. "Why didn't you order one last night? Before you slqt?" Her face was much like the one  Sad con fronted in his mirror, dark, assertively intelligent, promising myriad opinions agressively articulated. "I -- I took care of everything else then. I refilled' my recorder and ordered fresh shoes. Everything else." He edged tovard the window and the waiting saucer. She eyed him acutely. "I simply don't comprehend, Albim Before the accident, you would never have forgotten to order a fresh shirt. That's the sort of thing I could have erpected of poor Deon. But you were always meticulous, Albin. I used to say, 'Albin is my son -- Deon is his father's.' " "I take a memory capsule every morning. Mother." Johns had reached the window. He tapped the pane. It slid. The saucer extended its entry hatch into the parlor. "You take a memory capsule every morning, yet you're about to step out the window without even swallowing breakfast," she said bitingly. "You're more like Deon every day, Albin. Giving up your law studies for news school. Forgetting to order fresh shirts, going out without breakfast and then bolting a burger at some drop-in. Sometimes I think you're trying to be your brother." She leaned into the camera menacingly. "Are you trying to make it uj) to Deon for dying in that hideous crash? By taking up all fiis habits, his interests?" Her eyes narrowed. "Well, are you?" "I -- no, of course not." Johns backed across the room to the serving counter. Breakfast waited, seven green pills, two violet capsules, a wafer. Unfortunately his hand shook. Pills spilled across the carpet. "No, no! Don't crawl around in your fresh clothes. Dial fresh pills, Albin," his mother shrieked from llie state of Washington. Abashed, Johns jumped up and dialed. "I'm doing everything a mother can," his mother moaned. "I supervise your breakfast every morning. I see that at least you go out the window with nourishment in your stomach." Her features enlarged ominously. "Albin, do you want me to come there? Do you need your mother?" Johns choked. "N-n-no" His mother's eyebrows crashed into her hairline. Her coffee cup clattered. "Well! Take a tranquilizer, Albin. We'll speak again this evening." With an angry flash, she ended transmission. Albin Johns breathed again. He jabbed a tranquiUzer from the serving counter and gulped. After a moment, he punched aspirin as welj. For some reason, he had a headache. Fortified, he stepped to the window. "Albin, take care," his mother pleaded unexpectedly from the wall. "You know how I fret." Sighing, he faced her, "Yes, Mother." "You're all I have, Albin. Promise." Meekly he promised. Then he scrambled into the waiting saucer. He hung beside the building, composing himself. His mother harbored the notion that he had been injured in the saucer crash that had killed his elder brother, Deon, a year ago. It was useless explaining, repeatedly, that if he had been involved, he would have memory of the accident, however fragmentary. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember his brother Deon either. 'hat, he admitted, disturbed him. He was virtually certain Deon had not been a figment of his mother's imagination. His father spoke of Deon too, insistently. They had even taken down the family album, on Albin's last visit home. Albin had refused to examine his dead brother's photo. Now he made excuses not to visit Washington. Better to deal with his mother two-dimensionaUy. Composed, he took the controls. The saucer scudded over the dty. Morning smacked blue against the dome. Today he began his career in eames after years of anticipation. He had edited his high sdl paper for three years. Made top of the class at news school. He'd played newsman from the time he'd learned to write. He smiled, remembering. As a boy, he'd taken grim pleasure in writing up his mother's monologues, word for word. "... and you forgot to clean your nails again." "... just like your father. You walked right out without leaving a message with the computer. I fretted for hours." "Your brother, Albin, would never -- " He halted the sound track. Backed it Replayed. "... just like your father..." "Your brother, Albin..." The saucer wavered, bucked under his suddenly spastic grip. A tight band crushed his chest Sweat popi)ed from his forehead. Breathing deeply, he eased his grip on the saucer's controls. Systematically, he loosened the panic-knotted muscles of his body. He had suffered occasional moments of panic for months. Since the time he had supposedly been injured in the accident. With his brother. Deon. He gritted his teetti, ran tlie sequence through again. Accident Brother: Deon. He relaxed, smiling, almost proud. His mother was right. His brother's -- Deon's -- death had been a disorganizing shock. Only time and patience could effect recovery. He peered over the saucer rim. Cleveland General Hospital jumbled glassy black below. Johns lowered the saucer to control altitude. The autoguide beamed by the hospital's parking system locked the manual controls. The saucer sank and swooped into the parking tower. The saucer split. Johns glanced around the tower, feeling a return of tension. The saucer snapped shut behind him. Johns set his feet to the guide arrows that glowed across the pavement. The arrows led him to a disk shaft. The disk hovered. Johns boarded. It settled swiftly. Johns stepped onto a second arrowed pavement. The walls converged. Johns faced a dark, misty corridor. He hesitated, frowning back at the guide arrows. They unmistakably indicated the foggy darkness as his route into the hospital. A streamer of pastel fog wafted from the tunnel, touched Johns's nostrils. His tensed muscles relaxed. He stepped into the soft, damp darkness. The floor shuddered, carrying Him forward. The walls glowed darkly, richly. The ceiling undulated. A low growling rumble throbbed through the tunnel, the grumble of distant machinery, monstrous but benign. Rainbowed fog sank lightly and refreshingly into Johns's lungs. When the tunnel floor deposited Johns in the lobby, he was pleasantly relaxed', light of limb. A crisp elderly guard manned the computer console. Johns fumbled for press card and visitor's permit. The guard fed both to the console. "News Tribune, heh? Your first 'visit to Cleveland General?" Johns nodded, glancing uneasily around the vaulted lobby. It was disturbingly familiar, as if he had seen it before, from a different angle, with the sun slanting low through the rainbow panes. The guard chuckled. "Well, you've seen our little establishment often enough on vidi. Makes you feel almost like you've been here in person." Johns frowned. He didn't recall ever catching a vidi on Cleveland General. But there were, after all, any number of things he didn't remember. Despite his daily capsule. The guard launched him with a friendly thump. "The blue walkstrip will deliver you right to Dr. Jacobs's office. Write us up good!" The blue strip slid across the lobby and trundled into another dark, mumbling tunnel. Johns inhaled hopefully. His entire body relaxed. His head dropped. His knees sagged. Consciousness faded. Then he stood blinking in a sunlit office. The receptionist, smiling, said, "Dr. Jacobs will see you immediately." D r. Jacobs was an erect old whippet with piercing pale eyes. He gripped Johns's hand coldly, fixed Johns with a bluewhite gaze. "We're sorry to hear of Mr. Turber's illness. I don't suppose you know the exact nature of tiiat illness, Mr. Johns." "No one seems to know exactiy" Johns admitted. Dr. Jacobs nodded tersely. "And I don't suppose you have ever been with us as a patient, Mr. Johns?" Johns was oddly disturbed by the question. "I -- I'm -- certain I haven't." Dr. Jacobs sighed, scowling. "Well, I suppose you've done your homework, at least. Reviewed Turber's columns of the past year." Johns nodded. The columns were freshly in mind, rich with detail, crammed with statistic, but eminently readable. "Then you know that through computer diagnostics and the automated nursing ssrstem, we've overcome the Human factor that flawed mecfical care for centuries. We've achieved perfection in physical care. "But overthe years we've learned the iihportance of nonmedical factors. Even the best in purely physical care is not enough for the anxious patient, the depressed patient, the patient harried by financial or personal worries. And so all major modem hospitals maintain teams of trained social workers to lend moral and practical support to the patient This facilitates an optimum rate of recovery. The patient returns to the community fit to function as a fully adjusted, contributing member of society." Dr. Jacobs's pale eyes glittered fanatically. "Our senior social worker has consented to let you accompany her on her rounds today. Miss Kling remembers vividly the day when doctors maintained private practices, saw dozens of outpatients daily and made all their diagnoses without computer aid." Dr. Jacobs speared Johns with a stem gaze. "You will be free to observe Miss Kling's working method, to draw upon her reminiscences of days past and to form your own conclusions about medical progress during the past quarter century." "I'm very grateful," Johns faltered. Jacobs scowled, jabbed a desktop button. The far wall of the office slid. "Please step into the decontamination lock. Leave your garments and personal possessions on the shelf. Press the white button to release the fog. 'Then pull on the sterile coverall Miss Kling will meet you in the outside corridor." Johns hesitated. "I'd like to keep my recorder, sir." "Mr. Johns, we cannot allow personal effects in the wards. There is constant danger of contamination." Jacobs glittered down his long, bleak nose. "Mr. Turber was well able to compose his reports from memory." Reddening, Johns stumbled into the lock. The wall sUd. Johns unstrapped his recorder with reluctant fingers, remembering the facility with which Turber had used names and dates, medical terms, statistics. Sighing, he stepped out of his clothing. Absent-mindedly, he glanced down at his torso. His fingertips trembled unbelievingly over the sharp red scars that split his abdomen. He stared, uncomprehending. He shut his eyes, opened them again. The scars remained. Johns's hand jerked upward, as if reaching reflexively for the jug of pink capsules on his bathroom shelf. Instead he encountered a white pushbutton. He jabbed it, desperately. A rainbow cloud puffed into the cHamber. He inhaled heavily. Gratefully, Ke felt the familiar relief of tension. He gulped the cloud. He sagged, unconscious. oolly fiie world returned. The  ceiling glowed violetly, pinkly, greenly. Gravelly laughter jarred into Johns's pastel coma. "You sucked that happy cloud so hard I had to wrestle you into your coverall m # elf." Flushing, Johns sat up. "Miss Kling?" She was anybody's tough old granny, a beefy, red-faced woman with hair of steel, a strong right arm and a ribald twinkle in her eye. "That's me. I must say you've healed up handsome, young Johns." He stared at her blankly. "Don't remember me? That's how it goes -- forget us the minute you leave us." She laughed raucously. "Well, let's go. I've got a workload hiat wordd kill an ox." Disoriented, he followed her down a long, glowing corridor set at intervals with numbered steel doors. "We'll do Ward # first." She keyed open a steel door. Johns's legs carried lum through the door, then turned to stone. His jaw frozen, painfully. Sweat beaded over his suddenly marbleized face. The ward was an expanse of black glass floor set with a maze of free-standing cubicles. Each cubicle was fully glassed, brilliantly lit, permitting full view of its interior. Muac streamed through the ward, but beneath lay the rumble and grumble of unseen machinery. Small, gleaming robots twinkled over the glassy floor. Johns groaned, unable to move. Miss Kling boomed with laughter. She flourished an aerosol can that had been bolstered at her belt. A minty cloud mantled them. "Gulp hard, but don't pass out again." Blessedly, Johns's body became fle again. The rock in his chest dissolved. He blinked away the last brittle web of panic. "Just a touch of trauma. Happens to a lot of our patients when they come back. You start developing a tolerance for your amnesiac after a few mons. We'll have to get your dosage adjusted." Johns smiled condescendingly. He had never, of course, been hospitalized in his life. And the capsules he took were to improve his memory, not impede II But he felt too blissfully at peace to argue. "First stop: Maternity. Don't wrry -- everybody's decent." CKortling ribaldly, sGe piloted Kin across tHe glassy floor. Jotins surveyed die cubic maze loftily. Obviously a superior system. EacB specimen Housed in its own sterile envuonment. MotHers napped, plucked eyebrows, stared at vidi. Strips of sensor tape, at wrists and templea, transmitted patient data to tHe central monitor system. Mounted on eacK cubicle was a manual control panel. Miss Kling Halted before a glowing cubicle, cocked Her Head sHrewdly at the unmatemal little figure within. "Good morning, Edna," she boomed. The girl splayed against tHe glass, an overripe little plum with flaming Hair and feral black eyes. "Youl WKere's my kid? THree days you've told me you'd get him up Here next day for sure. Ten da#rs, and I Haven't seen Him yet. First that campaign to get me to sign adoption papers. Hal TKcn you're keyring Him till I'm strong enougfi to Hold Bm -- you say. Now for tHree days tBs yack afaut Him being deformed." Miss Kling chuckled blandly. "Now jmu know we've been waiting to see if He could surmve, Edna. We wanted to spare you seeing tHe little thing if He couldn't live." "Look, granny, I told you -- I waan't so dopey I didn't see tHe kid down in delivery. I got a good look. Nine pounds plus and everything where it belongs. Lunfi like a pair of bellows. A natur.il bom fullback. THe doctor said so himself. I -- " Miss Kling rasped prevailingly, "Now, Edna, be calm. I'll Have Dr. Dover explain the cause of deatH to you in person. I wanl you to consider it God's mercy -- " "DeatH I" the girl shrilled. " -- the little fellow didn't live to suffer. A single girl couldn't Hope to care for sucH a terribly Handicapped child all by Herself. THe expenses alone..." Miss Kling's stubby fingers crawled over the control panel. Rainbow fog seeped into tKe cubicle. The girl's face discolored witS rage. "I sure don't need any man to pay my way! I'm nineteen years old! I make good dollars dancing tKe nudie circuit. I come and go as I please. It's notKing to me Gordy ran out with tKat freak Gandi before I got Kim down to Marriage Hall." Miss Kling smiled. "Dear, I wouldn't presume to judge your morals. I'm just KKng, your old granny in your time of trouble." TKe girl's tirade ended abruptly. SKe blinked stupidly and sank to Ker knees in tKe swirling rainbow fog. "WKat. did you say? About my baby?" "Now, you saw tKe poor little fellaw yourself, Edna. Poor guy.' Edna sobb thickly. "Poor little kid. And it's all Gordr's faultl He's the one made our baby deformed. He's the one ran off -- " "Now, Edna, one of our pretty little nurse maclunes will come," Miss Kllng cooed. "You're going to have an injection. It's just a little something we give all our Unwed mothers. It won't hurt at all, and you won't have to worry about babies for years and years." "Won't have to worry?" Edna Uiunnured. "No more about babies. Not for five years. Wfiy, by then you Xnight be married. You might even want another baby in five years." Edna smiled softly, curled up on the floor. Her hair piled scarlet over her face. J ohns stared at her, peacefully asleep on the glassy floor, awash in pastel fog. Then he noticed Miss Kling had trundled away. He hurried after her. "I've never heard of that particular law. Miss Kling." "What law?" "That you sterilize unmarried mothers for five years." "Who said there was a law?" She pulled an aerosol from her belt. "Air's getting stale." She clouded the air generously. Johns frowned. "I wouldn't expect any individual to have power to make that kind of dedsion for another individual. I mean -- " He stopped, blinking through' the pale cloud in confusion. Her voice poured over #m, suggestively. "My girls are here to recuperate, young Johns. I don't want them worrying over laws, or making big decisions all by themselves. If a girl Has learned her lesson, why, I forget all about having her injected. But if I sec she's going to land herself Here again, get herself taken advantage of and then nm out on, I give her the best protection we've got. That's what I'm Here for, young Johns -- to see my patients get what they need. Without Having to fret themselves." The cloud had slipped into Johns's lungs sweetly. Johns smiled. Then He had to wipe a tear from his eye. "That's -- that's -- " He couldn't express his feelings. To think that in this vast, impersonal institution, doughty Miss Kling pitched right in and fought for her patients I "Glad you understand." Mias Kling bolstered the aerosol. Slie halted before a cubicle containing a slight, pale girl in Her twenties. "Good morning, Trenda. I'm Mabel Kling, your social caller. How do you feel?" The girl looked up listlessly. "I'm aU right, thank you." Slid touched a tear off Her cheek. Miss Kling beamed. "Tlie nurse will bring your brand new son in just a moment. Don't you want to pretty up a little, for your first visit?" "My -- son?" tHe girl said grojMngly. Miss Kling's fingers crawled over tKe control panel. THe cubicle began to fog. Miss Kling cHuckled reassuringly. "He's a real football player. Scaled nearly ten pounds tfiis morning -- ' you'd swear he was a couple of weeks old already. Lungs like a ;pair of bellows. And He Has a ' mop of red Hair. Just like your Husband." THe girl sat up, confused. "But tHe baby wasn't even due for another three months. They gave me shots, but the pains wouldn't stop and -- " Miss Kling cHuckled. "Happens all the time. We get girls Having babies months and months early. Sometimes Old Momma Nature's adding macfiine doesn't use the same math the rest of us do." THe girl struggled to believe. "You mean the bab#r's really all right? He wasn't born too early?" "You can see for yourself in a couple of minutes. You feel up to hefting a ten-pounder?" "OH, yes" THe cubicle was densely fogged. The girl's face flushed with excitement. "Why I -- I even thought I Heard someone say it was a girl I" They left her excitedly dabbing Her lips with' color, lost in lavender fog. Johns sobbed brokenly, overwhelmed. "Now there's a case to make my job worthwhile," Miss Kling rumbled. "That sweet little girl Isdng there heartbroken, and I fixed everything up smart. By the time she gets the baby Home, she won't even remember her sad hours." Miss Kling launched Herself up- on another patient, but Johns was too choked with emotion to care. Then Miss Kling checked Her list and nodded with satisfaction. "That's maternity. Time for a quick tour of surgery." She chuckled. "Tac Turber was a real surgery fan -- had to run him through butcher alley every time He came out." Johns felt his mouth dry ominously. "Coming?" she clucked. T T e followed Her to and through the glowing corridor, each step shakier lhan the last. Finally he blurted, "I read someplace that they -- used to take organs from one person and -- transplant them in another. Kidneys and hearts and spleens. I even read they transplanted brains -- sometimes." Miss Kling keyed the door into surgery. She eyed him narrowly. "WKere did you read all that?" "I d-don't remember. Not in Tac Turber's columns." Hopefully he venljired, "I guess they don't do much of that any more?" Miss Kling chuckled. "Now, just think. If you had one man's heart, another man's liver, and maybe a lobe of somebody else's brain, you'd feel mighty confused, wouldn't you?" "I -- yes!" The word came with unexpected force. "You can't go out and pull your weight if you aren't even sure who you are. Can you?" "I -- no. No." "Now, do you think our fine doctors are going to devote themselves to turning out patchwork people? Sending people out into the world without an identity to call their own? Do you think old Granny Kling would let any patient of hers go wandering around without a name?" "N-no. Of course not." H frowned, trying to follow her argument. 'Well, then?" Deftly she steered him into surgery. The floor stretched vast and white. The surgical cubicles were with complex machinery. Wlfite clad figures huddled. Nurse machines scuttered. Auto-stretchers bore unconscious passengers silently. "In the old da#Ts, the average doctor spent so much time on routine, he hardly had time for a good day's surgery. Now the mech-clinics take care of the coughs and sniffles; the nurse machines bandage the cuts and the doctors can get down to business." "I see," Johns said, dimly, swaying. Blood crashed in His ears. His hands twitched. Unable to resist, he tilted his Head to stare at the ceiling. The patterned white on white held dreadful, compelling familiarity. "I've never been here before," he croaked. He couldn't bring His head down. "I've never been in this hospital before. I've never seen this ceiling before. I've -- " Miss Kling jammed an inhaler into his nose. He struggled, then inhaled. After a moment, his Head fell. He felt suddenly sluggish', torpid. "I've never been here before," he muttered. "Of course you Haven't," Miss Kling said sharply. "You don't have any scars. Do you?" He frowned, trying to remember. "I -- " 'Well, if you don't Have scars, you haven't been in surgery, Have you?" "I -- no, of course not," He said with relief. Then He said, querulously, "My head hurts," She touched the back of HIi head. "Here? Where they put tlio stainless plate in?" He nodded. His head pounded with agony. "Keep the inhaler in place. I'll get Little Bayer." She returned with a spidery little machine. It gripped his arm, injected him briskly and spidered away. The pain eased. Miss Kling removed the inhaler and puffed him thoroughly with aerosol. He inhaled, smiled foolishly, gratefully. Miss Kling beamed upon him. "Well now, I bet you're tired with all that walking. How did you enjoy your tour of surgery?" "Very interesting," Johns mumbled foolishly. It seemed somewhat dim. In fact, he didn't really remember touring surgery at all. "Ummm hmmm," she said shrewdly. "Then we'll scoot on down the hall to the party." He followed her into the long, glowing corridor, smiling agreeably. The party. He always enjoyed parties. Too bad he couldn't remember about this one. T Te was a little surprised when she keyed the door marked "Terminal Ward." "All our terminal patients Have a little party before they go. But it's seldom they have dear ones to spend their last minutes with. Tac Turber's going to be mighty pleased." Johns felt mildly surprised. "But Mr. Turber hardly knows me." She chortled. "You'll be carrying on his hospital column, won't you? That makes you almost a son." He drifted through the ward in her wake. Patients beamed rosily from their glassed cases. Miss Kling waved and yoo-hooed. Finally Johns said, disbelievingly, "These people aren't all going to die, are they?" "That's what they're here for," she said cheerfully. He frowned around him, at the healthy, smiling faces. "I nursed my own mother through her last illness," Miss Kling rasped. "Seventeen months I stood by, night and day. Couldn't afford a nursing machine, and I wouldn't send her to a home." He murmured S#rmpathetically. "Knew as soon as the diagnosis was made she'd never recover. But in those days there wasn't anything to do but stand by and watch her waste off. "I always remember that when my rounds bring me here. I'm proud my patients don't have to suffer through that. They go out quick and clean, with steak and whiskey on the house. And they know if there's any little piece that can be salvaged, why, our boys in butcher alley will find it. TEe spirit may die, young Johns -- but tEe tissue lives onl" TEey rounded a comer and confronted Tac Turber, glassed. Miss Kling rapped tEe glass, slid tEe entry panel. Tac Turber bounced from tEe bed, a big man, burly in Eis Eospital gown. "Well, well! Hear you got a promotion, JoEnsI" He pumped Johns's Eand Eeartily. JoEns stammered, "Editor Downs is letting me Eandle your column until -- until you get back." Turber grinned. "TEen it's yours for life, kid." He wEacked JoEns on the back. His eyes twinkled. "I guess everyone's heard I won't be back?" "We Eeard you were going to Florida to recuperate from -- whatever it is." "AE, tEe stories that make tEe rounds," Turber laughed. He sobered. "No, JoEns, I'm joumesnng on to another life. A different Ufe, but one certainly as useful as the one I've already led. My only regret is that I won't be able to do one last column. I've always wanted to write up tEe work tEey do down there in surgery." He frowned. "But somehow it alwa#rs sEps my mind, once I'm back outside." Miss Kling said, "You can't crowd everytlung in." Turber shook Eis head impatiently. "No, that's not it" He turned back to JoEns. "There's so much' excitement, Johns, so much to see. Sometimes when I get back to tEe saucer, I can hardly remember writing the report I'm holding in my Eand." He frowned thoughtfully. "I guess I stop to use one of the maclunes in the director's office. But afterward..." He shook Eis head, bemused. Miss Kling stepped out to the control panel. Stepping back, she closed the entry panel. Rainbow fog drifted lazily up from the floor. Turber sniffed. His frown faded. He grinned. "Well, it's been a good beat, JoEns. You don't remember the old days, the old hospitals, the fear and imcertainty the human animal had to endure. And only tEe poor or the disturbed had someone like Miss Kling to Eelp them out. Everyone else had to muddle through as well as he could." The entry glass slid. A robotable wheeled in, bearing a feast. Turber's eyes lit. "Looks like they catered for you too, Johns." He splashed Scotch into both' glasses, then frowned. "They forgot you. Miss Kling." Miss Kling scowled over the table. Her face sagged. "They never think to send a whiskey glass for me. I go to every party on the ward, but there's never a glass for me." Turber lifted a panel and puncHed tKe table's controls. Utensils, napkins and wOIdcey glasses clattered out. Beaming, Turber poured into a dozen glasses. He lifted' two. "A toast to immortality!" "A toast to your immortal liver and ligfits! Haw!" Miss Kling roared, swaying. "You know something, boys? I was supposed to plug in fr nose tens Half an Eour ago. And I forgot. Haw! I forgot my fresH filters -- now I'm going to forget everytfiing!" J ohns laughed to be polite. Then he laughed some more. Soon He was bellowing and snorting in the swirling pale fog,, gulping the whiskey as fast as Turber poured. Then the bottle was empty. The steaks lay congealed, untouched. There was a squeak of wheels, and an auto-stretcher rolled into the cubicle. "My car!" Turber hopped aboard. He threw himself upon his back, roaring with delict. "Home, James!" The stretcher molded itself around him. A mask fell heavily over his face. Turber flailed, then lay limp. The stretcher squeaked away. Miss Kling regarded the congealed feast regretfully. "Young Johns, I think I've forgotten something. But I can't remember what" Johns said solemnly, "They're going to cut old Tac up and use his parts, aren't they?" 'Haw! I'll never tell!" Miss Kling frowned, regarding him with bleary thoughtfulness. "But I do remember a boy. No, two boys. Brothers. A smart-looking dark kid. Just like you, in fact. And a big handsome redhead, a year or two older. Crashed their saucer down the skylane a piece. The dark one got the back of His skull smashed, and the redhead got it in the belly." She scratched her cKin thoughtfully. "But I guess that's about all I remember." Johns nodded owlishly. "I don't even remember that much. I forget it every morning at eight." She nodded. Then light came to her eyes. "Haw!" She drew a small green can from Her belt. "My remonbering spray. I remember that much. If I w hiff the wrong color air, I just spray myself green and everything comes back." She sprayed. Johns sniffed. It was very fresh, very clean, the green. He inhaled deeply. "There! Clears all the synapses. Or something like that." Miss Kling's facial contours firmed with returning character. t Tt was as if the green spray had penetrated forgotten chambers of his mind, clearing them of obstruction. "I remember now," he said, softly. "I remember -- " He was low over the countryside at the controls of his old saucer. A spring day. His brother perched nervously on the passenger's seat. His brother -- Albin. His dark, meticulous younger brother who Ead stopped in Ohio on his way east to law school. He -- Deon -- grinned reassuringly. The saucer had developed a recurring shimmy a bit to the north. He was taking it low and slow back to tKe city. The sEimmy hit again. He handled tEe controls coolly. He was still working when the sudden, terrible shudder came. The gauges flashed peril. Alarms squalled. TEe controls jerked from his hands. TEey were falling. He wrestled the controls, uselessly. He heard Eis brother's voice. "Deon, can't you -- " Impact. A few minutes of painful half-consciousness. He opened Eis eyes, saw his brother -- Albin -- sprawled nearby, a metal splinter imbedded in his abdomen, the back of his head smashed, tEe quick, meticulous brain destroyed. Later he opened Eis eyes again, to watch the ambulance ship settle. TEe medic jabbed him. He drifted away. "This one took it in tEe breadbasket," the medic said dimly, beside him. "This one too. And the back of the head. Think tHey can combine the pieces?" The voice beside him said, disinterestedly, "Oh, they'll patch something together." Consciousness-remembered faded, momentarily. But the green mist Had suffused the cubicle. Johns's mind remained mercilessly clear, relentlessly unfolding the film of memory. He screamed, hoarsely. Because next he would open shock-blurred eyes upon the ceiling -- that ceiling, white on white. He would roll his head, see his brother -- Albin -- face down upon the adjacent stretcher. His own stretcher would detect consciousness, would clamp its mask to him. Then -- He fought as Miss Kling rammed the inhaler home. Then he fell heavily upon the bed Turber had vacated. Miss Kling pulled a mask from her belt and applied it to Eis face. "You yourself again?" she rasped after a while. "I guess so." It seemed an unfair question, since he wasn't absolutely certain just who himself was. She removed tEe mask. A small mirror lay on the bedside table. Johns studied the dark, intelligent face that was Eis, yet wasn't. "I Have a few more calls to make," Miss Kling rumbled tHoustfully. "But I'm going to get you rigKt down to tHe Hypno ctiamber, before you blow again." Stumbling, He followed Her down tHe glowing corridor to tHe door marked by tHe giant, Hypnotic eye. "You step inside, young JoHns. THere'U be someone right witH pruned back tHe way it sHould be -- cut that dead wood out and tfirow it away. And tHesr'll give you sometHing to keep it tHat way." He pusHed tHe door obediently. At tHe last moment, sHe squeezed His arm rougHly. "You're a good boy, JoHns. BotH of you." Her lips scraped His cHeek. Numbly, He stepped into tiSe darkened Hypno cHamber. jVinutes later -- or was it Hours. -- He sat Eigfi above tHe cubic jumble of Cleveland General, at tHe controls of His saucer. He put iHe saucer on auto and glanced tHrougH tHe papers in Ss Hand. Funny. He must Have used a machine in the director's office to type the material, while it was still fresh in mind. But he didn't remember doing so. And the stuff wasn't even in his usual style. He'd Have some rewriting to do. He glanced over the paragraph about Miss Mabel Kling, senior social worker. He smiled. She sounded like a salty old character. Too bad He Hadn't met Her in person. But if Tac Turber was still in Florida on recuperation leave next month, perhaps JoHns would be back. He stuffed tHe papers into tHe carry-bin, along with the big jug of violet capsules labeled, "Two daily. For memory." Swooping into ffie clouds. He slid tHe Hatch to feel tHe cool breeze of altitude on His face. THe sun blazed. The skylanes stretched blue and inting. Even at this altitude He could feel spring easing warmly, greenly over tHe eartH. A tHougHt flowered in His mind as if it Had been planted tHere. He examined it, smiled, and took it for His own: A great day to be alive! New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to processi The history of armored war from # to ## A.D. the improvement of le' ' that weapons, soldiers on a battlefield have sHown great and understandable interest in staying out of the line of fire. In early wars, where sticks, stones, and lances and bows were the main medium of battlefield commerce, this goal could be accomplished by hiding behind any bulky object, or through desertion. However, as time went on this became increasingly difficult. Either the bulky objects were not as strong as they had been once or the weapons used were less aware of said barriers. Some soldiers adopted a rigid code of martial etiquette and tin suits, but the effectiveness of the knight grew limited when gunpowder was invented. In the twentieth century great powered suits of armor, called "tanks," came into common use. They required a concentrated barrage to stop them and definitely provided their pilots and crew a more salubrious environment within than they could expect to find without. Nonetheless, a tank still had a great deal The General Motors Terrain Walker of vulnerable places, was far too from behind any more easily Heavy and noisy and Had limited than the old tanks, nor could jmobility. In tKe #'s the tanks they retreat very fast. Clearly, wHicH were covered with borothere Had to be something better, silicate fiber plates were much lighter and more mobile than The General Motors Terrain tHeir predecessors, but still lackWalker ca. # ed ideal conditions for operation. THey could not wade through Originally developed for conswamps nor avoid being attacked struction work and back-ecKeIon packHorsing, tHe GM Walker was quickly accepted by the armies of America, Eartfi, when it was proved that tHe macHine could carry a' gun. Standing twelve feet taU and weighing eigKt tons, tHe Walker could stride down a Highway at # mpH and do twenty mpH on rough terrain, such as bumt-out slums. Nuclear powered, it required little servicing and often powered its weapons directly from its own power system. Great Hydraulic pistons operated its arms and legs, which followed every movement made by the pilot. The pilot was strapped in a control cradle that translated every motion to the Walker, and he Had a clear view fore and aft through a pleaaglass bubble. The Walker was equipped with a wide range of sensory devices, among them snooperscopes, radar, amplified hearing, some primitive smell-detection deinces and tactile pads on the hands and feet, all of which were wired to the pilot. It was equipped to retreat fast, attack faster and explode when Hit with a satisfying nuclear blast. When this was commonly learned, there were very few enharm the things, wiBch made them extronely effective in clearing out potential battldfields. But it also made getting them to  a battlefield to begin with a touchy proposition. Few soldiers liked sitting on an atomic bomb, even though it would only go off if they were killed, and a Geneva Convention in # declared them formal nuclear weapons. However, with the turmoil of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries growing out of hand, they were used with increasing frequency. In October, #, an armed insurrection in Harlem City, America, caused Walkers to be brought out into the streets. Patrolling the city with squads of armed soldiers (and their nuclear explosion capacities secretly damped), they effectively cleared the rioters out of the burning dty and into a large prison combine, where they were kept until their tempers were drowned in rainy weather. Of fifty Walkers shipped in, only two were disabled. One had a department store, its pilot had rashly pushed over, fall in on it; the other had broken legs from a kamikaze automobile. In November, #C the great series of civil wars in China were formally entered by the United States of America, Earth, and Walkers painted with ominous designs marched throu the burning cities and villages, panicking those Chinese who would be panicked and nuking those who felt compelled to fight back. Four nuclear explosions in Peking were enougU to ow the Red CQnese that figHting the things was useless, so they were given a wide berth and finally succeeded in bottling # of the Red Chinese army in a small part of Manchuria, Earth. In February, #, there were massive earthquakes all over the globe. Japan sank beneath the sea; California followed suit; the coastline of Europe would never be the same, and America's east coast was washed clean by tsunami. A few months later the Mississippi Valley collapsed, creating an inland sea in America. With three-fifths of the human race wiped out, the remainder lost all further interest in conflict and turned to more immediate and peaceful pursuits, such as cleaning up after the party. The Walkers were instrumental in assisting in heavy construction. They rebuilt the foimdations of cities, realigned the world's power conduits, built dams and, in one fierce burst of zealous activity, built almost a hundred thousand miles of beautiful roadway in four years. Three years after that commercial aircars were produced in profusion. The new roads were ignored and slowly cracked wlule approaching obsolescence. The McCauley Walker ca. # # was an eventful year. The first complete cities were incorporated on Mars; the moon formally declared independence of the Four Nations of Earth; the first non-govermnent sponsored spaceship lines went into business, and a new Walker was released to the antiriot squads. Called "pinheads" because of its set of electric binoculars (which could see from electricity up through the spectrum to xrays) which functioned as a head, the McCauley Walker had far more flexibility than the GM. Nearly sixteen feet of tempered aluminum and borosilicates, yet 'weighing only four tons, the McCauley could duplicate all human movements except those requiring bending in the trunk or waist. It could run #kmhr, was able to lift objects of up to ten tons and turned out to be a massive failure. The McCauley Walker was a total weapon, designed for optimum placement of components in the least space. The structural members were cast or electro blown around the defense systems, so that it was impossible to deactivate them. The defense systems were inexorably bound with the machine's own conscious battlefield computers. To actiVate tHe Walker meant it would at once be at top fighting condition, ready to blast out with weapons which could not be refnoved from its Hull without expenditures of twice its original cost. This did not make it a noteworthy construction machine. Its one experiment in this use Had it firing lasers at bulldozers, graders, solidifiers and road crews. The unions kicked up a fuss. It was obviously not a very good construction machine. Ten thousand of them were credits apiece, and it cost four thousand credits to maintain each per year, whether or not they were used. A fortune was spent on the hundred acres of sheds outside of Indianapolis in which they were housed, and it was here that the Walkers remained for eity years, unused except for occadonal exercises to keep them from rusting' or whatever it was they did. But there were no wars. Riots were fairly common, but rarely large enou for Walkers to be brought out for them, and never located close enough to an airport to have Walkers in on themi before they were effectively over. In #! the Martian Colonial Government declared formal independence of the Four Nations of Earth and confiscated all Four Nation military property to see that their constitution was respected. It wasn't however, for the Four Nations were full of people who would suffer great financial losses if Mars became free. So the First Interplanetary War was begun. Terran troop transports landed four hundred Walkers on the Syrtis Greenspot, where they were jeered and mocked by a large army of Martian colonists. Following the Martians out across the desert, the Walkers made rapid progress on them until the old plastic sleeves that kept dirt and abrasives out of the leg joints began to crack from age. Martian sand get in and jammed the joints, and the Martian Colonial Armor walked a safe distance around the field of immobile Walkers, attacked the Terran positions from behind and won their independence. It was never disputed again. The Burton Darrmthlng ca. #Q There seemed to be little reason for the development of more advanced iower armor until about #', for the solar systems enjoyed a period of unparalleled peace, productivity and leisure. With great space vessels over a mile in diameter, powered by nuclear inertial drives, men traveled peai; the speed of light and The Burton Damnthing eoloatzed the near stars, where took objective years. From the tibieir found a surprising profudevice, the human colonies could BM of planets. In # the Helireap instant benefit from discovunt Distant Oscillator was deeries made # rears of travel away, vdeped, making instant interMany of the great C-jammers, steMar communication possible, as the huge interstellar vessels eren though actual travel still were known, were dismantled and sold after this, till only about # were being used, mostly for carrying great big things which weren't likely to change much in coming years. Terraforming tools, multiforges (the all-purpose manufacturing tool of the day), great generators for increasing or decreasing gravitation of planets and moons, even little C-jammers -- and colonists -- were the major items of trade, with a few luxury items thrown in for balancing the tapes. On the fourth planet of Procyon there dwelt a race of intelligent lizards, the Kezfi, who were in their early atomic age when the human colony was set upon the seventh planet Moss, the colony, was a difficult wqrld to tame, and the Kezfi were more than delighted to trade labor for the secrets of making spaceships. This went on from # to #, when Moss had a population of formed moons and several rocks in the nearby asteroid belt that replaced a sixth planet The Kezfi were becoming quite avid colonizer and rather sophisticated in the ways of space. They began to Have reservations about the presence .of humans in their solar system, for these humans were of another star and were occupying a planet which otherwise would Have been Kezfic. A war began, and the Mossists needed a weapon which could be used effectively against the Kezfi. The Burton Danmthing was a sophisticated instrument. Its shoulder and hip joints were friction free, being cast of amorphoid iron. Just as a toy magnet will cause a piece of thin iron to twist and bend without actual contact, amorphoid iron could twist and contort itself on a massive scale, controlled by banks of magnets and topological distorters, yet lose none of its strength and hardness. However, due to the size of the magnet banks, its use was restricted to the major joints, the elbows and knees being cloth-sleeved mechanical joints. Unlike the two previous models, the Burton DamntHing did not use a control cradle for the pilot. Instead, the man sat in a large padded seat, strapped into assorted nerve-induction pickups. It was as though the Damnthing was his own body. On Armageddon, Alpha Centauri II, animals with multiple heads had been discovered. Due to the violent ecology, tfiey Had been forced to develop a sense of perception that extended in all directions, to warn the major head about potential danger. Called Cohen's Battlefield Sense, it was brought into the Damnthing to detect lurking Kezfi. The lizards squawked when found out aod never could quite understand how their hiding places were located, since they were selfadmitted experts at camouflage. On the right shoulder of the Damnthing there was a large socket to contain a device called a battleraft. It was a small, condensed version of the offensive weapons of the Damnthing, floating on inertial and antigravity drives, powered by a fusion pack and controlled by a specially educated chimpanzee brain in aspic. Since the battleraft was as effective # miles from the Damnthing as # feet, it removed some of the intimacy from death. This rightly concerned the Kezfi, who liked a personal confrontation with their assassin, on the logic that he might be taken with them. Not being able to enjoy the Kezfi's Honorable Death at the hands of these dirty fighters from another star, the lizards decided to call it quits. And, not being proud or an # rthing, they decided further to let them have Moss and its moons, and they would stick to what they had been allotted. The Christopher Wartiot ca. # The Kezfi, as has been said and is probably known by most readers who have known them, preferred to die the Kezfi's Honorable Death and could not understand the sending of men into war in armor. They assumed these things must be robots, then, since they had never been able to get one intact enough to study, so they built their own teams of war robots, called them and the human armor "warbots" and by # dedded they Had grown weary enough of resident humans to start another war. At the battle of Granite Rock, in the Procyon Asteroids, the Kezfi first learned about the new Christopher Warbot. They also learned the ineffectiveness of sending remote control robots into battle against manned craft. After a number of crushing defeats, and a few surprising victories, the final blow was put on the second war of Procyon when the C-jammer Brass Candle, traveling at .#C, smacked violently into their major colony of lion Kezfi. After this impressive disaster, nobody, Kezfi or huHis point further. The Christopher Warbot had no legs, but floated on inertialantigrav pods which enabled it to work as effectively in space as on the ground. On its back was a complete service and repairs center for the battleraft, and on its front, on either side of the entrance fiatcH, it bore twin, electric made of amorpBoid, tKougH it cannon. TBe study of amorpQcs was limited to bending at tHe apKad developed to tiie point propriate places a Human arm wfiere art entire arm could be would bend. Since nobody was quite sure how to go about bending the artificial arm where there were no joints in their own, this did not disturb anyone deeplyThe only nerve pickups were those in the seat cushions and the helmet, but the soldier had better than ever control over the machine. The entire surface area was sheathed so that it could feel pain and pressure from bullet strikes, and thus Cohen's Battlefield Sense was implemented by another protection device. The head, now attached through a long tentacle. Held eyes, ears, and other senses, and the mobility of the Christopher Warbot was such that it replaced most other forms of heavy armor. War was becoming less burdened down Greedy Nick's Warbot ca. #I In # a stardrive was finally developed, and Humanity emerged from the Slowboat Age to the Age of Expansion. Most of the C-jammers were outfitted with drives and used to set up enormous colonies in one blow, and since a light-year could be covered in somewhat less than two days, colonization went on rather rapidly. In # the Culver Foundation went far beyond borders of human space and established the Antarean League among the ninety-four planets of Antares, the seventeen planets of Antares's Green Companion star and assorted dwarf stars in the adjoining locality. Since Antares was a d # mastic monarchy, nobody paid it much attention. In # a scoutship of Antares came scuttling back to the League bearing great tidings of war, with a race of tall, rust-red crustaceans called Peolanti, who had established a small empire near Antares. The delightful ruler of Antares, Pantocrator Nicholas Cuiver the Greedy, immediately threw a complete travel silence aroimd the League, from # to #, at the end of wfficH Greedy Nick aimounced that the Antarean League now controlled a globe of space forty light-years in diameter. The Peolanti liked to fit from gigantic spaceships, huge portable fortresses, and mobile asteroids, wifflcE dictated definite limits to their mobility. Greedy Nick did away with using battleslups other than to transport the warbots to the battlespaces, and let the Peolanti try and find them with their poor radar nets. They couldn't compete, or even begin to. A laser beam can be used with fair effectiveness against a big battleship, for at least you know where it is, but little dinky hard knots of mayhem could neither M ft w  # '  II' Greedy Nick's Warbot be seen nor be hit very often. Greedy Nick's Warbot boasted triple mayhem converters, a nasty weapon which could spit laser beams all the way up and down the spectrum, pull tricks with gravity that resulted in atomic bonds falling apart, heat or freeze things by time-induction, a side effect of the discovery of the chronogravitic spectrum. The head was no longer connected to tKe body, but floated freely and Ead its own complement of weapons. Thebattleraft was Harder tEan ever to detect and destroy, bong controlled by a brain taken from an Armageddon animal more vicious tfian a tyrannosaur and of near-Euman intelligence. Amorplucs Ead developed a tentacle wEicE could stretcE ten times its length for an arm, retract to a wrinkly nubbin, and yet be perfectly controllable by the pilot. He sat in fils cabin, whiicE was padded both by cushions and paragravity, free from being bounced around, wearing a Kelmet and sitting in the lotus position of meditation. In order to properly control a warbot, a soldier Ead to be an accompUsKed Yogi. The Waibots at Critter's Gateway ca. # While all manner of advances were made in tKe warbots since the Peolanti wars, and several smaller wars were fought witE them, there were no significant changes in tEeir appearance until the discovery of Critter's Universe. Eleven ligEt-years from Antares there was a small dust cloud wlucE emitted a healthy amount of radio waves. These clouds were not uncommon, so little attention beyond marking it as a navagation hazard was paid to it. TEen Jorj Critter, a prospector looking for natural rubies, flew into it. It turned out to be an area in which' space had formed a side-bubble, where pEysical laws were somewhat different. The periodic table of Critter's Universe held but four elements, a solid, a gas, a plasma and a liquid, promptly dubbed Earth, Air, Fire and Water. While perfectly stable in their own little universe, subjecting any object made of them to our physical laws caused destabilization of the Fire content, which caused the whole mass to oscillate into pure energy. Since Critter found it was very simple to control this attempt to justify itself to our pK # Tsical laws, Ke told Andrew the Meditator the current Pantocrator of Antares, about this new power source. Critter's Universe, which is only about a hundred ligEt-years in diameter, did coexist witE a large section of the Terran Organization of Star States, who, having learned about this, decided they should own it. TKe the focal point of tEe war being around the little nebula. Critter's and mobile asteroids faced over The Warbot at Critter's Gateway soon discovered that they cotild or not the League pulled anothnot possibly defeat such a swarm er trick from a Hat. of the actual gateway and woiild been known as a tempestuous all space around it with radiation clouds and fouling up communications. It had several dozen planets which could be very pleasant if th sim were calmed down somewhat, so the Hubley University extension at Antares Vert, had been established in # to seek ways of controlling the star. Shortly before the war, they found the first major advance of macromechanics, how to blow a star into a nova. It worked as well on stable, main-sequence stars as the huge, wasteful monsters like Rigel, upon which it was demonstrated. The League could seed eir stars through Critter's Universe and blow them all to perdition before an # hing could be done. Hastily withdrawing their forces gan cultivating good feelings with forced urgency. The warbot used at Critter's Gateway was a very capable little vessel, as much spaceship as groimdcraft. The soldier, sitting in lotus, was freed of his helmet. From an amorphoid plate at the top of the warbot, he could extrude a battleraft or a head, from two plates at the side he could extrude any of an arsenal of two hundred weapons. The circuitry of these amorphic devices was mostly magnetic and gravitic domains, which could not be altered by any amount of twisting and contorting, so they could be extruded whenever needed, otherwise remaining placid as a puddle of quicksilver in their storage tanks. Antares, while again the little empire of space, was also the most powerful, for they had over ting back and forth through space. The Quicksilver Kid ca. # By the Eodech (# AD) amorphics had developed a warbot made of nothing but amorphoid metals, memory plastics, solid liquids, contact fields and other prodigies of science. Normally a simple near-globe eight feet big, the "Quicksilver Kid" looked very much like a glob of mercury when in action. Hands, head, battleraft and whatnot could be extruded from whatever part of the surface area theyould seem to be most useful, and the weapons system had an additional development. Hidden in the block-circuitry of the hull was a memory center containing records of every science applicable to military purposes, as well as a mechanical design center, so that a soldier need merely size up the situation and inform His warbot to warbots sHuttled about by otHcreate a weapon equal to it, and er spacecraft, but Had a speed of Hammer away. Powered by antiabout one lit-year per Hour tnatter breakdown, tHe warbot to make its romu Had more tHan enougH power to In tHe Early EodecHtic centuee tHis done. No longer were ries tHe SopHisticate Age Had come about. In known space, a flattened spHere rougHly five tHousand ligEt-years in diameter, tKere were seventy major Human empires, twentyrtwo joint Kuman-nonHuman Leagues, one Hundred ninety nonHuman empires and fourteen weird tHings wHicH defied description, save tHat tEey seemed to be sociological systems of order originally cooked up by sometHing wHicH could Have been intelligent but more likely was sometHing else, the exact nature of which was even more difficult to ascertain. But tHey never did make any trouble, probably because they found eacH otHer and intelligent life even more impossible tHan we found tHem. TKere were many wars in ifie EodecEtic centuries, but none of tHem especially large on tKe grand scale. But warbots were used in all of tHem. For example, the Korel Empire Collapse. THe ICorel were Human adaptations, two feet tall and looking like toy dolls (beKaving mucH like tHem, too. Korel were well known for tKeir immaturity). THey Had a little empire flourisHing until #, wKen one of tKeir kings went insane on tKe throne and attacked tKe Palaric States, wKicH were tKen growing into importance. TKe Korel Had a few wortKy weapons, wKicfi aided in tKeir conquering several planets, and then an ally, the Karpo Regime, a race of Hideou gray frogs who Had been waiting on tKe sly for some way to build a little empire. As soon as they Had done as much as tKe Korel, the Karpo turned on tHem and soon Had a very effective little empire, as well as a full time occupation in scaring tKe border stars of tKe Pale (Palaric States). An approacHing fleet of warbots, after Having been ordered to sum up tKe situation, performed a maneuver which was historical because of its originality. A Hundred thousand warbots came together and fused tKeir masses into a thousand medium-sized battlesHps, wHicK attacked the Karpo fleets. The Karpo fired a salvo at them and broke tKem all into monolithic cKunks of wreckage, which tKey tEen went in to investigate. Twisted wreckage, once it surrounded tKe Karpo fleet, suddenly turned quicksilver, returned to a Hundred thousand intact warbots, and destroyed forever the Karpo Regime. TKe Korel were chastised mildly. One could never expect mucH from tKem in tKe way of wisdom. The First Alakai ca. # By #, enough was known about force-fields to expect a saldier sh'eatlied in them to have as mucU, if not more protection tfian an amorpHoid shell could pravide. The shell was done away with, except for the helmet, and the battleraft was equipped with everything that had previously Been reserved for the warbot itself. Since the new soldier appeared to be a man, wearing a small belt and carrying an outlandish rifle, with a battleraft at hell and a small scrap of amorpHoid called a "steel pimple" floating about his head, he could no longer be called a warbot. From Antarean mythology the name "Alakar," meaning wargod, was lifted. It seemed appropriate. The methods of battle were now entirely different. The soldier could fly in free space, though they now returned to the use of spaceships. His forcefields could protect him from the heat of a sun, could be totally impenetrable, or set to pass either matter or energy, but refuse the other. His body was operated on to the extent of surgical placement of wires which increased his native strength and reflex speed immensely as well as enabled him to rigidify himself for space travel. An example of fitting methods could be taken from the uprising of Murma Krodd, on the The First Alakar Chembal Starstrand, #. Here a fleet of Kroddic ships attacked a small neighboring democracy, and the Humanity Soldiers were requested in. TKe Krodds saw the human fleet approaching, but it vanished before their eyes, and they could not understand what had become of it until they were .recalled quickly by Murmash fCrodd himself, who had seen them fall from Eis skies and subjugate His city in ten minutes. TKe method was this: when the Kroddic Fleet was sure to have seen the Humanity Soldiers approach, fliey snapped on ffieir helmets, activated their fields and took to free space. TKe ships broke apart in thousands of bricksized chunks of amorpKoid, each reorganized to contain its own drives and control systems. TKe Alakars and ships did not rejoin until in orbit of Kesal of Murmash Krodd, when they rained down from the sky and forced the fat crustacean to order Ms fleet back, lest they destroy the planets of Murmash Krodd. When the Kroddic ships were all grounded, the Alakars set solarphoeniz to them, and they burned to radioactive ashes. The Second AlaHat ca. # The sleek Alakar of the #'s was respected as being the most capable fighter in space. He controlled  battlerafts, each a featureless egg until ordered to think up a weapon to cover a situation. He commanded three steel pimples, wMch contained all of Ms force-field equipment, and, being strictly defensive weapons, never left Ms vicinity. Hi uniform was made of bioplastic with layer upon layer of sensory-detector pseudocells, wMch kept Ms brain flooded with such an amount of information that an Alakar had to be trained for five years. The helmet, often decorated with fanciful sculpture, feather crests, and backcurtains, could lock every atom of his body to a field that intensified the interatomic bond-strength to a point where he could withstand a nuclear barrage in the flesh, as well as do all the reflex-speedups he needed. Being an Alakar was much like being a superman unations were very real displays of actual conditions, wMcH could be interpreted usefully. TKe hand weapons were now losing their physical structure with alarming rapidity, the great gaps between parts being filled in with a curious substance called Link. Research in cKronogravitics had led to the discovery of how to replace the subatomic bonds of matter, which were an effect of space, with sometMng that was a side-effect of time. TMs new matter was completely imdetectable and very impalpable except Hy; a certain set of rules. If Link were made of pure carbon, one could not force pure carbon tBrougH it; it mJt as well be a brick wall. Carbon compounds moved slowly tBrougH it, growing warm as tHey did so. Tilings wbidi bad no carbon con tent moved tbrougb without resistance, except with tHe extremely unlikely possibility that two nuclei mit collide, wEcH certainly did not do very mucH. Link Had curious properties of conduction and insulation wHicb made it particularly desireable as a weapon component, notwitHstanding tbe fact tbat it didn't take up much room. Tbe Second Alakar was used in several conflicts, among tbent tbe most noticeable being tbe Haak Wars of #. Tbe Haak, centipedean creatures from some obscure place in tbe galactic center, bad Stretched tbeir empire out in a most curious fashion. Most races preferred to expand in a globe, the center being tbeir planet of origin. The Haak expanded in a straight line thirty bgbt-years across. They bad a science of teleportation which could get a Haak on tbe outside border of bis empire, twenty thousand bgbt-years to tbe center, in two years. They did not do very much work with spaceships, beyond sending robot probes to land colonization reception booths. When tbe first booths of Haak began landing on human planets in tbe distant Lace Pattern, the alarm went out. Tbe Lace Pattern was occupied by a large number of Uttle human and non-buman empires, none very large, and because it was four yearn of travel from the Palaric States, the nearest really organized culture, it never beard much from the main body of civilization, except from wandering ships of Alakars. In fact, it was not generally known tbat all those marvelous myths of Anso on, were not fairy tales. Few of the Alakars vo wandered tbrou tbe region bad ever been an#rwbere near the Civilization. Tbe entire war, though it dragged on for ten years, was hardly eighth-page news back in Antares. The Final Alakar ca. # Even though Civilization of Humankind (wQcH included almost every aben race that had ever heard of 'Terra or Antares Imperator) was a growing concern, it had stiU not explored more than ten per cent of the stars in its own dominion. In and Antares claimed, a new race bad come up and were doing #ome exploration and state-buildlong as Antares gave them no assistance, but when the Panto crator, out of tHe goodness of Eis Heart or whatever, started to assist them witK tecHnological gifts, it was too mucH. felt endangered immediately went to war, minor allies of Antares resisted tHem, imtil by i jl# both big empires were ready to blow tHeir cookies and have it out at one anotHer. Tfie race that had started tfie brouhaha had long since Had tSeir fill of imperialism, and were perthey Had, but now it was a matter of interstellar pride, and neiwas going to be bested. It was a marvelous war. Antares, wHo Had always seemed to Have the last tHing to say insofar as weapons advances were concerned, finally sent a squad of Ultimate Alakars onto tHe field of tHe war. THe Alakar himself wore no weapons, tHougH He carried a few Hand weapons of negligible presence (mostly fashioned from Link), wore no Helmet and Had six steel pimples wKicH performed all the functions of tHe Helmet, as well as being able to operate as battlerafts. THe Alakar, upon landing on a planet which Had not been invaded, would immediately alert the civilians to go to the public shelters Hundred of miles beneath the planetary crust and take all personal valuables witH them. They were given twenty-four Hours, but during this time, since the Alakar was almost sure to be under attack. He would certainly be occupied. His steel pimples would Head for the nearest masses of amorpHoid, often automobiles and private spacecraft, and perform a virus-fimction. Whatever the amorpHoid Had been previously would be erased; the pimples would realign and combine all available amorpHoid into great roHot fortresses, fleets of battlerafts and orbiting platforms, and would infect normal metals witH amorphic domain, causing entire communications networks to start converting into amorpHoid weapons. If it went on mainly uncEecked, within fifty Hours of commence-attack, tHe military command centers buried in the centers of tHe planets could expect tHeir control panels to swim like quicksilver and turn into atomic bombs. FigHting back, tHe planetary defenses would initiate tHeir own amorphic conversions, trjdng to fit back, and would cause the comm networks to fight back at ground level. Flotillas of planetaiy steel pimples would commandeer as mucfi amorpHoid as posable, until e entire war began to resemble tHe attack of a viral disease upon a protoplasmic organism. If tKe planetary defense won, tKe Alakar was killed or forced to retreat, and tHe mass-computer would return every bit of registered amorpHoid on tHe surface to its original state (unregistered amorpHoid, sudi as kitcBen appliances, generally kept firing away imtil told to desist. Registered amorpHoid, wHicH Had a certain key-pattern built in, instantly reverted). If tHe Alakar won, tHe same tiling would be done, except iHat He would now control iHe planet and invite His forces into orbit. Since tHe governments of Antares and Toss were very similar, in basic policies, tKe civilians rarely cared too mucH wHo Held tKe upperHand, so long as tiiey were not too often cHanged. Naturally, this being a war, damage was done. A wrecked city stayed quite wrecked, tiiougH tiiere was rarely any loss of life. But recovery from an attack took several years, and wHen Antares found tHat tHey Had a tremendous finandal responsibility to rebuild wHat tHey Had undone. Tfie Ten Year's War left botfi empires quite at a loss as wHat to do, so finally tHey Just got eir Hands dirty, devalued iHeir currency and rebuilt. But if Had been a tremendous war wHile it Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence In sdence-flctlon writing. Every story appearing In the magazines Galaxy and If In Issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist ofi # Galaxy Award #)# for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runnernip will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected Is Intended to reflea the udgmenl of the readers of Galaxy and If. Principal reliance will be placed on a mall survey of a randomly selected group of subsmlbers to the magazines In making the swards. QuesHonnalres asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month crfter the December Issues appear. BooUihel TTjfiat is this thing called sci'  ence fiction? (I don't mean I want a definition. I mean I want a description.) You faithful readers of Galaxy are people wHo by definition believe tKia magazine and its stablemates constitute either all or part of the stream along which this entire genre flows, carrying on its bosom the struggling, armwaving horde of those of us people who in some way either contribute to or detract from it directly, each of us dedrous, impetuous to some degree, loudly r quietly opinionated. Hammering, hammering... on what, at what, for what? Want some advice? I cannot advise you. Here are some pebbles from the shore. Viz.: A few weeks ago, I received a forwarded package from the Galaxy office, much like any other in which books come. This particular one had originally been addressed to Mr. Frederick Pohl, Worlds oi IF. Science Fic-' tion, which is a little unusual, but not too much so. (People hardly ever spell Fred's first name right, so I thought little about it) Inside was a book from Little, Brown  Company, one of the proudest names in American publishing. And in among the flyleaf I found the letter, which I quote in its entirety: "Mr. Edward L. Ferman, Eklitor Fantasy  Science Fiction # East #rd Street New York, New York # "Dear Mr. Ferman: "This spring Little, Brown #s Company is publishing a book your readers might be interested. "I enclose a complimentary copy of the book and if you have any comments about it, I would appreciate hearing from you. "Sincerely yours, John G. Keller Manager School #s Library Department." Tlell, I assume Ed Ferman got somebody else's mail, and I assume I can reply on Fred's behalf if not on Mr. Ferman's. Here goes: "Dear Mr. Keller: "I'm replying publicly because you are fair game. Believe me, the comments I might make privately would pale into insignificance those I am about to make here. much less sensible narrative or any coherent structure of scientific facts. It would corrupt the dull and bore the intelligent child. I say would,' hopefully, but in fact it is already in circulation, committing both these sins, in the names of Little, Brown and science fiction, which I respect above many other respectively competitive things. "Mr. Keller, you must recognize this work as a lightly disguised lecture on science. But why do you assume it is good sdeace? Perhaps it seems valuable to you because it is sucti crude medicine. But if unpalatability seems a logical test for content why isn't it equally true diat if the author, Arthur W. Ballou, manifestly can't organize facts entertainingly, he may not Gave a very organized grasp of icience either? "Surely, in Boston, city of science, there are science writers and editors -- some available to you at the lift of a finger -- who might Have told you this. Many of the brightest intellectual lights of the arts and pcienccs are not only within a stone's outcry of your window but are equipped, as well, to tell you it's bad judgment to launch Ballous into a field that bas Heinleins and del Reys, Juvenile science fiction is a nearly perfected art, thanks to such men. Why have you chosen to start it over? "Cordially, A Friend." i# sample The Second:  Periodically, I am visited with the products of wHat I call, generically, Winklequod Press. Winklequod Press -- and tiieir emulators at Punchem Silly # g Blind, Wringem Drye, and Ne Plus Ultra Impressions -- are printers for hire to anyone with a sound credit rating. They are also operators of subsidiary publicity and book manufacturing services, limited distribution facilities, and some kind of clerical force. Their product comes with a two-color cover done in someone's best high school art class line drawing style. On the back of the book is, always, a small town wedding photographer's portrait of the author. Gentleman or lady, the author peers earnestly into the reader's eyes, over a lengthy bank of type listing his or her credentials as a retired person. When these retired persons have strong convictions, and the convictions have to do with politics or flying saucers, Winklequod sends their work to me. What comes in is ostensibly a novel about the future revolutionary takeover of the U.S. for the benefit of all mankind. The revolution is either left or right; makes no difference, since the thinking is usually interchangeable in large part. Or else its about someone's ride in a fl # ring saucer. And again, the thinking is nearly always exactly like that in all other books of its kind. Extraterrestrial people with noble thoughts have a limited ability to generate concepts. Winklequod sends me these putative fictions because they have promised the publisher -- tat is, autKor -- lat they will publicize lus book for him by sending it out for review. I don't believe they even wonder why I never review the books they send. They Have little financial interest in wondering and in any case they don't know I'm alive. I'm just another item on a list they keep in a folder labelled "sf" or "Saucers," which they turn over to the clerk who touch-types the labels. What I'm trying to say to you, prospective Winklequod customer, is that it's no good. If you can't get a commercial publisher to take your work, then rightly or wrongly this is a clue that it's been judged to fall short of certain standards. No one is quite sure what those standards are, but they exist, and they are the same as those which place Charles Eric Maine here, and J. C. Ballard there, only for you they apply somewhat more drastical'yGive up. I will never review your book. I have never reviewed your books when other people wrote them. If I have not in three years given the slighest sign of reviewing them, and Winklequod nevertheless persists, what price Winklequod's promotional efforts on your behalf? I Have never seen a review of any Winklequod Press book by any other critic in any other field. Think haw many places your money is being pumped down rath'oles. Forget it. You can't get through tfiia way. TTarking back to Edward Ferman, and standing on much firmer literary ground, here's evidence of an intelligent, organized, persistent and honorable and yet different description of science fiction. Mr. Ferman is tiie editor of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Seventeenth Series (Doubleday, #). FfisSF is that magazine, with the antique finish covers, that you find on sale somewhere near this one. Among the names on its cover are some you reqognize. Altogether, it seems unlikely you haven't at least picked up a copy and leafed through it. Some of the stories by unfamiliar names might Have been the ones below: "Cyprian's Room," by Monica Sterba, is ostensibly a story of love, but in fact it's a story about reality, using devices vaguely similar to those in Phil Dick's novel. The Three Stigmata of. Palmer Eldritch, in whi( a character in the story becomes a character in and the author of a story being told within the story of what may or may not be a story about love. George Collyn's "Out of Time, (Jut of Place," is a well written story -- nearly all FSF stories siiew a commendable style of EnglisH -- and an excellent piece of arranging, bout an astronaut wlio, returning fifty years out of pliase witH the rest of tSe world's time, falls in love with and marries the world's most notorious woman. When Ke learns wKat she is, Ke kills Her. WitK Her, Ke kills # of tKe women plugged into Ker via electronic tuners. Ttus latter news, wKicH Kooks up into tKe gut, is deKvered almost casually. And tKe meat of the unruffled Kero's last line is: "... tKose... people Kad deprived the entire Human race of its dignity," wlficK is true, but not quite draimatically equivalent to wKat passed between Don Jose and Carmen. TKe orientation of stories sucK as tKese appears to be away from tKe acts of Man and toward Kis formulations of tKem. Rationally, a story like Collyn's goes deeper tKan wKat Georges Bizet -- or Prosper Merrimee -- was concerned witK. And Carmen is an incredible piece of bombast. Yet Georges wrote some toetappin' tunes, while George can be seen to have thought clearly. Victor Contoski's "Von Goom's Gambit" offers an example. It's laden with great lines, including the one about the woman wKo gave birth to twins. What she responded to in that wise was being confronted by a repulsive chess gambit. Repulsive because Von Goom, its first promulgator, was capable of thinking in ways so alien to Man tKat they could be clearly expressed even via tKe supposedly conventionalized format of the chess game. Surely, what Contoski does with this supposition is not wKat A. E. Van Vogt would Kave done with' it, though it approaches wKat Hemy Kuttner and C. L. Moore did in The Fairy Chessmen. Contoski's gambit is more elegant, more portable tKan "Lewis Padgett's" version of a response to this opening. WKereas the novel Kas to be walked around, and through, you can tell the Von Goom story as an anecdotal jest to pass a few idle moments over a real chessboard. A mong better-known writers' contributions to this Kook areAvram Davidson's "Bumberboom," a waning-EartH story with excellent detail and, as is usual in the genre, no great resolution. Samuel R. Delany's "Corona," Fritz Leiber's "TKe Timer Circles," Brian Aldiss's "Randy's Syndrome," and Ron Goulart's "Fill in TKe Blank" are all good examples of wKat these people can do, and all but the Goulart combine to form the group of tlie only stories mentioned by title and author on the back jacket copy. Clearly, Doubleday thinks it knows what sells. Russell Kirk is in this book, though, with "Balgrummo's Hell," an elegantly written story which, sadly, repeats H. P. Lovecraft and a dozen other people when it comes to content. It does no better than they do at getting the essential aftertaste of Masonite out of the filigree sandwich. And Robert Nathan's "Encounter in The Past" is precisely the same as "Digging the Weams," which' is to say that it is formulated in excellent prose around an extremely simple philosophical assertion. That's always the problem with getting stories from educated people, they tend to have bright ideas without knowing those ideas have ever been touched on before, but they have; they Have, down in the depths where the Hacks ply unread. The difference between writers who are respected by The Partisan Review, or who could be respected by it, and those wriiters who could not, is not one of intelligence or even of storytelling ability. The essential thing that sets Russell Kirk and Robert Nathan apart fromi Robert Bloch and Arthur C. Clarke is that the whereas the former study their educations. So this collection from F# eSF contains two kinds of stories, re- ally, although the standards of writing are uniform, and high, and the grasp of facts appears to occupy an acceptably even range no matter whether it lie Kirk or Arthur Jean Cox whose story we're considering. One kind of story is by people who are engaged with life and use facts to grapple with it and explain it; people like Delany, Leiber, Aldiss, and Davidson, for example and for all they do it in strikingly different ways. Another kind of story is by people who are engaged in some form of professional contemplation, be it as educators, poets, philosophers or whatever. Those people tend to grapple with words and other symbols not as tools but as things in themselves. So they write diferently, and they think differently. Somewhere in the area of this distinction is where this collection, and all collections from FSF, get their distinctive flavor, in some wa # rs like that of all science-fiction media, in other ways very much individualized. It's characteristic that FSF itself published, and included Here, a story that touches rather effectively on this whole business -- it's an effective touch, but not too good a story -- Thomas M. DiscH's "Problems of Creativeness." N ow, on tSe oiHet Hand, Analog #, edited by JoHn W. Campbell (Doubleday, #), is equally distinctive, equally rresents a clearly recognizable brandH of tHe same Big Water in wbicH we all dwell, and yet could Hardly be pointed in a more opposite direction. THe tKing Analog Has for sale above all otHers is ingenuity. THere are all kinds of stories in this book, from Bob Shaw's classic "LigHt ctf OtHer Days," wHicH tends to make people weep, to Alexander B. Malec's "#:#I A.M.," wfiicH gives me tHe same feeling I got wHen Dick Daley told CHicago's cops to sHoot But tHougH one is poetry and its polar oppoate is rawbloody-throated reaction, eacH is based on Hard tHougHt about a tKing... "slow glass" in one case, vehicular traffic management in tHe otfier. And I tHink this was the criterion tHat caused Campbell to buy them and to anthologize them; before they could even begin to be written down, the writer Had to have created and resolved a complete speculative situation in his head. (You can do eight chapters of a good novel about a Haunted house before you even Have to begin thinking where it will go. In fact, you can finish an acceptable novel about one without ever thinking.) You see the difference. In the one collection, many of the stories are written to a standard which provides that words make a story. In the Analog book, the credo is that story makes words (and "story" is defined somewhat differently, as well). Yet, both collections are from leading science-fiction magazines, and both magazines deserve to be clashed as leaders. So does Galaxy. So does If. In fact, there are precious few sf magazines wtucH are not leaders in this field, wQcH raises the question of how can we all possibly be going wherever it is? The ultimate resolution must lie in what the autHors do. More accurately, the ultimate resolution at any selected moment must depend on what the authors have done for that moment. Take a story like "Letter From a Higher Critic," by Stewart Robb. This seems to have been inspired by Campbell's campaign against literati. Yet what it is is "Digging the Weans" with its sleeves turned out, and I don't see how you could find people much more antietically placed than Robb and Nathan. Take a story like "Bookwom, Run!" by Vemor Vinge, wEicH staggers along on a collection of mismatched plof cliches tat cannot possibly liave been !n tended from tbe start and are symptomatic of a Campbell story wHicb Has not quite been tHougfit out all the way beforeHand. NevertHeless, it's a memorable story, because its cKimpanzee Here, like Algernon tHe mouse in Daniel Keyes' FfitSF story, is an inspiring organism vo owes His consciousness and ultimate doom to tHe intervention, and to tHe motivations, of mankind. And ultimately tHe FSF story was about acts of tHe two, being about words. A nd so on. WHere are we? Robin Scott's "Early Warning" sa#TS it is impossible to watcH tHe watcHers. Gordon Ickson's "Call Him Lord" says tHe watcHers Have a word for it. Scott's is about words, and an action story sHouldn't be about words. Yet Dickson's is an action story about acts wBcH culminate in words, and it's good. Not perfect, but good. It says tKat cowards cannot administer... an everyday reality tfiat someHow doesn't get said very often... and it sets its premise in tHe future, wHen tfle cadet rulers of tHe Universe must first prove tHemsdves against tHe rural standards of old, neglected EartH. It's a parable, you migHt say. And tEen, just before you decide it migHt tend to describe sometHing about today's sf, you realize it in no wise needs to Have been an sf story at all, being about tHe rites of passage and tHus on a subject as old as tHe caves. But Dickson is a professional sf writer, witH sf contacts and an sf audience, so it's an sf story, in a good collection by tHe famous editor of a leading science-fiction magazine; Ubraries will carry it, cHildren rill read it, enjoy it, take it to Heart Some of tHem will emulate it, and anotBer writer will add His (supposedly) individual opinion to tHe description of science fiction. WHere are we? Cyprian... are you tHere, in tHe ligHt of otHer days? Mah ThoseGxmffats , MMimiTiirmpTi Hail to Science the remorseless foe of all ignorance and superstition -- and the evidence of one's eyes! I R edrust Northeast Bunker, New Veirus, July #, #. Sam MatKews, missing converter tecK'nician from tHe KalaHell Solar Conversion District, was today admitted to Redrust Medical Center. MatHews's sand-buggy overturned May #, in the middle of the Waterless Kalahell Desert. Date: July #, # From : Robert Howland, Director, Kalahell Conv. Dist. To: Philip Baumgartner, Director, Redrust Med. Cen. Subject: Sam MatKews Recode: #KCrm-l Phil: Hope you will patcH Mathews up and get him back to us as soon as possible. We are eager to learn How MatHews survived two montEs in tHe KalaBell, starting witH two one-quart canteens of water. Date: July #, # rector, Redrust Med. Cen. To: Robert Howland, Director, KalaHell Conv. Dist. Subject: Weak Patient Recode: #kcRM-# Bob: Sorry, there's no question of getting MatHews back to you quickly. WitH a sHeet and blanket over Him, you still see His ribs. Besides, He's incoHerent. July #, # Howland to Baumgartner #KCrm-# PSl: I Hope you will listen carefully to every incoHerent word MatHews speaks. Please bear in mind, we found His overturned sand-buggy, witH water tank burst, firee Hundred miles from Redrust Northeast Bunker. THere is no known water in between, and the vegetation is dry as dust frond April to Ocnovdec. How did lie do it? I August #, # Baumgartner to Howland #kcRM-# BoH; Sorry this reply is late. Our supply ship cracked up on its last trip, with' a crew of four and nine offworld tourists. We suddenly had eleven badly burned men to care for, and little time for MatHews. However, we will see if we can leam an # rthing for you. I August #, # Baumgartner to Howland #kcRM-#  Subject: Pure Lunacy Bob: Sorry, but we're sending MatHews to Verdant Hills Medical Center. THeir facility is big enough to Handle his case, I think. If not, they will send him to Lakes Central. Too bad, but He went througH quite an experience, as you realize. Purgatory #, # Howland to Baumgartner #KCrm-# Subject: Nut Stunts Phil: Yes, I realize what Mathews went through: He crossed three hundred miles of desert on two quarts of water. That's wHat I'm trying to Fmd out about. From the Heading of your message, I take it MatHews Has gotten "mentally unbalanced" now it's time for Him to go back on duty. Look, PEil, try to remember, MatHews is a case-hardened "sandrat" of long experience. This is not your average patient. You let a sandrat get His chosen angle on a situation, and He will stand it on its head. Don't send Mathews to Verdant Hills. Hold Kim till the cyclone pack goes tKrougB Here, then send him to us. And PHil, will you tell me wEat MatEews said about His experience? This is important to us Here. Purgatory #, # Baumgartner to Howland #kcRM-# Robert: In dealing witH my own patients, under treatment at this facility, I rely on my clinical judgment, balanced by tHe professional opinion of my staff, and not on sandrat amateur psychology. MatEews Has been released, for observation at Verdant Hills Medical Center. And I am not at liberty to divulge conndential details, from tHe closed files, on this case. Note, please, that this communication is the # th transmission of a series, repeated periodically over land-line central cable, and by semaphore across faultaps, crush-zones, and landshilts, and that transmission between remote penpheral stations may be delayed during periods of intense meteorological or seismic activity. Hell #, # Howland to Baumgartner # KCrm-# Dear Doctor: I wonder if, in tEe full wisdom of your clinical judgment, balanced by all lEe professional persoiuiel on your staff, any of you qualified people Had tHe wit to try to put yourselves in tHe place of your lowly sandrat patient, and see How tgs looked to himP WEat does your clinical judgment tell you about someone wHo Has spent years in tHe dustbowl of tHis poverty-stricken sandpit planet? How will tHis sandrat react wKen He gets tHe cHance to be sent, free of charge, to a comparative Garden of Eden, provided He can just prove he's nuts? I won't waste breath describing the stunts some of these birds Have staged, just to get back to BonescorcH for a week. And far be it from me to pry into tHe confidential privileged communications between you and one of my best tecKnicians on a matter vital to the KalaHell Conversion District. No. Better tKat my men should die of thirst when tHeir vehicles give out than that you should open your closed files. Sony if my message seemed improfessional, PHil. Forgive me for presuming on our former friendship. Note, please, that ttus com'munication is the #th transmission of a series... Date: Hell #, # From: Philip Baumgartner, Director, Redrust Med. Cen. To: Quincy CatKcart, CHief of Medical Services Subject: Interservice Friction Recode: #RMmc-l Sir: I am sending separately a record of my recent correspondence with Mr. Robert Howland, Director of the Kalahell Solar Conversion District As the correspondence will show, a difference of opinion regarding medical treatment of one of my patients has caused some friction between us. I call this matter to your attention because of recent failures in certain electrical facilities at the Redrust Medical Center. These power failures, of precisely thirty and sixty-second duration, have formed a pattern which it seems to me could not be random. I do not accuse Director Howland of being the cause of this serious interference, but I feel that this matter should be investigated without delay. I would appreciate your assistance in this matter. Note, please, that this communication is the # th transmission of a series, repeated periodically. Date: Salvation #, # From: Quincy Cathcart, Chief of Medical Services To: PElip Baumgartner, Director, Redrust Med. Cen. Subject: Ego Reduction My boy, if I were a purely conventional Chief of Medical Services, I would have your jackass Hide drying in the breeze this minute; but it is your great good fortune that I Have a large capacity for suffering fools gladly, and also am somewhat short of replacements for you at the moment. You have committed three really outstanding stupidities. First, you have "pulled rank" on an equal. You may regard yourself as enormously superior, mentally, socially, and professionally, to Director Howland, but kindly observe that Director Howland is Director Howland. Kindly do not increase my difficulties by your ineffectual efforts to snub those to whom you are not superior. Second, if you do try it, show the forethought not to commit the additional stupidity of voluntarily doing it in fully documented form, where anyone may see your ego, complete with scalpel, stethoscope, and halo, spread-eagled in all its glory. Third, when you have done it, do not expect me to get you out of the mess. Just exactly what do you propose that I do? Suppose I should take thi matter up with the Chief of Power Production? As He is just as busy as I am, or almost so, he will be in an equally irritated mood after examining the records. Certainly, He will request Director Hovdand to check this power interruption. However, you may count on it, the field of powersupply zionids, or the theory of tertiary trilovolt transmission zone interactions, or whatever may happen to be involved, will be so abstruse and complex that neither you nor I will Have any idea whether wfiat follows is justice, persecution, or tfie operations of someone's sense of Eumor. Kindly note tfiat I am not interested in becoming involved in this, particularly since tEis power interruption obviously does not risk your patients' well-being, or you would plainly and unequivocally say so. All it is doing, tEerefore, is to sweat your ego, and far be it from me to interfere. Permit me, however, to make a suggestion. You, obviously, Eave two main alternatives: a) You may demand in an autKorative way tKat Director Howland come to Beel Eke a chastised dog. In tfiis case, I strongly suspect tKat tKe Director will suddenly discover tEat your difficulty shows tKe danger of incipient overload of tKe flamitic leads of tKe intercontinental power net or sometKing equally nice, and a disaster team will descend on you and make your present discomfort look like Keaven; b) Alternatively, you migEt send a simple manly note of apology for your EigKflown missive of Purgatory #tK, explaining wKat is doubtless tKe truth', tKat you were ness to Kelp solve the problem. I fully authorize your opening tKe files for this purpose. I await witH interest tKe results of your joint investigation of tKis matter, as I frankly would Eke to know Eow any hunian could cross three hundred miles of the Kalahell Desert alone on foot, starting with just two quarts of water, and with notEing between him and his destination but dried-out vegetation and dust. I am setting additional inquiries in motion on this matter and advise you to start your investigation promptly, if you wisK to receive credit for tKe solution. Note, please, that this communication is the # th transmission oi a series, repeated... II ate: Salvation #, # From: R. Stewart BelcKer, Director, Verd. Hills Med. Cen. To: Quincy CatHcart, Chief of Medical Services Subject: Sam MatKews Recode: #mcVN-# Sir: In answer to your inquiry, yes, we had a patient by the name of Sam MatKews Eere. He arrived from Redrust Med. Cen. in a special reinforced straitjacket, and we sKipped Kim out in a padded cocoon. As for his condition -- well -- if you will permit me to drop tKe usual lingo, this fellow was stark raving nuts. I would Hesitate to try to pin it down any closer. We sent Kim straight to Lakes Central. He got Kere Purgatory #tK, and we got rid of Kim on tKe #tK. Note, please that Ms is the  th of a series... Date: Salvation #, # From: Martin Merriam, Director, Lakes Cen. Med. Cen. To: Quincy CatKcart, CEief of Medical Services Subject: Sam MatEew. Recode: #mcLM-# Sir: Yes, we do Have a patient Here named Sam MatBews. Mr. MatKews is under treatment at our Outpatient Clinic. His case is Highly interesting, and, I think, offers many insights into the nature of religious fanaticism. You see, MatKews was employed for years as a tecKnician, tending solar-conversion units out in the Kalahell Desert. One day, while far out, an imezpected tornado hit, his sand-buggy overturned, his water tank burst, and he found himself isolated in tHis waterless desert. The psychic shock must have been formidable. Tchnudi, who is handling his case, is slowly bringing the infraconscious symbolism to the surface; but, of course, the process cannot he hurried. Subjectively, Mathews evidently experienced a vision, which left him convinced he was under; the care of a being called the Prophet of Awaslu. Tchnudi, by the way, finds an intriguing symbolism in the name of tHla prophet." By the time Mathews emerged from the desert, the whole tiling was quite real to HitnHowever, his latent fanaticism only burst to the surface when he was told that he was to be genC back to the Kalahell. Instead, Bq insisted that he go on to the "promised land," as the Prophet had commanded Him. This incident, I think, offers many possibilities for theoretical insights. Tchnudi is treating the psychosis by what might be called "psychiatric hydrotfierapy." The patient is encouraged to swim and boat and is responding quite well, despite occasional relapses. We have high hopes of achieving an eventual cure. Note, please, that this 'message is the # th... Salvation #, # Cathcart to Baumgartner #rmMC-# Subject: Sam Mathews Well, my boy, I would like to know the results of your investigations thus far. Note, please, that this message is the # fh...   Salvation #, # Baumgartner to Cathcart #lRMmc-# Sir: I can only say that Mather was incoherent when he arrived here and iinsane when he IdFL He appeared to be progressing nicely, but our treatment was interrupted by the crash of a supply p, so that we necessarily may have neglected Mathews to some extent. Note, please, that this message h the # th... Salvation #, # CatHcart to Baumgartner #rmMC-# Subject: Evasion Dear boy: Yu may not believe it, but tKere are worse places on this planet tHan Rednist. Specifically, let me call to your attention Medical Outpost #, located in a spot picturesquely named "Ssst," from wHat Happens wHen you spit on tHe sand. Outpost # is situated in tfie center of a kind of natural bowl. WHen tHe sun reacKes tHe zenitfi over tKis bowl, it is possible to be burned simultaneously on aU exposed surfaces of tHe body, wHetEer tHe said surfaces Happen to face up, down, nortK, soutH, east, or west. Owing to the really excessive seismic activity in tHe region, this is a surface station, of tHe tsqie moimted on very large skids designed to flex witH tHe waves wHen tfie quakes Hit. Unfortunately, tfie elastic-rebound qualities of tfie sldds sometimes react unfavorably witH tfie seismic waves, so tfiat you are going up wBen tfie ground is going down, and vice versa. THe mecHanical qualities, insulation, etc., of tfie station Have suffered accordingly. Permit me to point out tfiat tfiis outpost Has been untenanted for some time, as I Have been unable to find anyone witH tfie unique qualities desirable in tfie occupant of tfiis station. Let me point out, it would be of great value for the Service to know how Mathews survived so long without water. Of course, you need not trouble yourself witH tfiis problem if it bores you. Note, please, that this message is the # th... II August #, # Baumgartner to CatHcart #RMmc-# Sir: I send separately complete copies of all records of this Center pertaining to former patient Samuel Matfiews. I realize tfiat it may be of some interest tfiat tfiis patient survived severe exposure over a relatively long period. However, determination of tfie cause of this anomaly is not possibly wilfi tfie facilities available at this Center. We lack sufficient advanced computer backup to correlate tfie data. In any case, datasifting, data-anal # is, and theoretical syntfieas is not tfife function of this Center. II August #, # Cafficart to Baumgartner #rmMC-# Subject: Reassignment Sir: Effective on receipt of tfiis message, you are removed as Director of Redrust Medical Center, and reassigned to Medical Outpost #. You will report to Medical Outpost # on tfie next supply p, traveling by way of KalaEell Water Extraction Center and SoutH Bonescorch Junction. Your assignment is: a) to repair and render Ht for occupancy Medical Outpost #; b) to occupy Medical Outpost # until furtHer notice, maintaining it in optimal condition, and duly operating all recording equipment relating to solar radiation, temperature, Humidity, atmospHeric pressure, wind-speed, incidence and severity of sandstorms, cyclones, groundslips, seimic tremor, etc., etc.; c) to render medical assistance to tBe occupants of tHe Equatorial Conversion District. To fadlitate your medical-assistance patrols. Medical Outpost # will be equipped witH one (#) are cautioned to operate tHis vehicle with due care, as vehicle malfunction, especially in tBe prolonged dry season, is a major fact in tHe mortaHty rate of tBe Equatorial Conversion District Bear in mind that due to electromagnetic disturbances, and violent meteorological and seismic activity, outside Help is not to be anticipated. Date: II August #, # From: Quincy CatHcait, Chief of Medical Services To: Robert Howland, Director, Kalahell Conv. Dist Subject: Desert Survival Recode: #MCkc-l Sir: I am sending, separately, recordings of Sam Mathews's conversations at Redrust Medical Center. It would appear that He expected to die and was passing along information He considered important. For instance, there is the following: Attendant'. Don't overtire yourself, Mr. MatHews. Just settle back. Mathews: No. I've got to tell -- Attendant: Not now. Mathews: It's for my buddies. Look -- Attendant: Lie back, please. Don't overtire yourself. Mathews: lo cares? I know I won't make it Somebody else can make it. Listen -- Attendant: Of course you'll make it Now, I've got to give you tHis -- Mathews: Write this down, will you? THe rat story's right. You can eat grass and all. You can eat dry scratchweed. You can -- Attendant: Sure you can. Mathews: You've got to get one alive. You can't cook it Attendant: Jusf He back. Mathews: Are you going to write it down? Attendant: Sure. Let me jusi pull your sleeve up. Maifvews: Then you can eat anything. Even scratchweed. It turns to water in your stomach. Attendant: Just He still while we get the H # rpogun... There. Mathews: Are you going to write this down? Do you follow? Attendant: Sure. You don't cook ttie scratdiweed. Now -- Mmthews: No! You doiit iet it! It's tHe lat you don't cooki Attendant: Sure. Sure. You cook die weed, you don't cook tBe rat. Lie back. Mathews: It's not... you eat it raw... tBe weed... you wotilda't, au # nvay... Attendant: Lie down, now. Mathews: No... But e rat... you... important to remember ,... tiSe rat... Attendant: Sure... Wfiewl He's under. Finally. Br. HinauitR: Try to keep your reassurances more general. Avoid specifics. Tliis conversation seems to Sow Matews trying to get something across. I would value your opinion as to wBat tKis socnetfiing might be. Date: II August #, # From: Robert Howland, Director, Kalabell Conv. Dist. To: Quincy CatKcart, Chief of Medical Services Subject: Desert Survival Reoe: #.ImcKC-# Sir: Many thanks. I've wanted ffieee records for a long time. As for Mathews's "rat story' -- that's a kind of legend. The basis is a oroature called a sandrat that burrows at the base of the larger dialaqui weed and suiuustle stalks. This creature is active #S# while other local life is estivating. The legend is that if a man will cat a sandrat, cut out its digestive tract and eat it raw, he will be able to live in the desert vnthout water. This is supposed to have been the secret of "Desert Bill," an early settler renowned for Es ability to survive the desert. I've never taken the story seriously, and considering what you have to do to test it, I don't know anyone who has tested it. But I'm calling for volunteers. September #, # Howland to Cathcart #mcKC-# Sir: Well, it took work to find volunteers, and I had to offer a week's leave in the worst fleshpot in the hemisphere. But we have now tried it out. Don't ask me how it could be, but one volunteer went almost three weeks without wat, and another went uzteen da # rs. This won't convince everyone, but I'm notif # ring all the conversion districts. Now, if a man gets stranded, he has a chance. September #, # Cathcart to Howland D#lMCkc-# Sir: Congratulations. I now have a cage of sandrats myself, but no volunteers. What's the name of that fleshpot? Once I have volunteers, I intend to impose controls so stringent no one in his right mind can question the results. Of course, that won't include everybody. Ill P rinceps, New Venus, Ocnovdec #, #. Dr. Charles de P. Bancroft, Director-in-Chief of the Interscience Federation today rebuked Dr. Quincy Cathcart for his "sandrat hoax." In an unprecedently severe public statement. Dr. Bancroft charged: "This absurd parody of an experiment exposes New Venus Science to the ridicule of more mature scientific bodies everywhere. Niunerous palpable errors in this widely publicized -- I might almost say widely advertised -- report qualify it as a treatise on 'What to Avoid in Science.' "To begin with, the sample employed was noi pure. Assuming the results to be as stated, no one could say what agent or agents were responsible. "Second, it is absurd to suggest that sud results could be possible; obviously, digestive action would destroy the ingested tissue, and with it its presumed magical power to change food into drink. "Tffird, even assuming the ingested tissue were not digested, peristaltic action would reject it from the body. "This should give some suggestion of the flaws in this 'experiment.' Even la # mien can understand such fallacies. "However, to the scientist, other flaws are at once evident. This experiment is not 'elegant.' It lacks the sense of Torm' which gives the conviction of validity. Moreover, there is nothing quantitative about it. "There can be no excuse for such an imposture. "I call upon Dr. CatKcart to publicly admit that this so-called experiment is notg more nor less than a hoax. This may, at least, permit New Venus Science to regain some shreds of scientific credibility." Operations Central, New Venus, Janlehmar #, #. Dr. Quincy Cathcart, Chief of Medical Services, today rephed to the criticism of Dr. Charles de P. Bancroff. Referring to Dr. Bancroff as a "pedant laboriously mining his rut," Dr. Cathcart stated: "In the formal organization of which we are both members. Dr. Bancroff is an administrator, not a scientist. As a scientist, I decline to accept any judgment based on Dr. Bancroff s opinions. That his statement is unscientific is easily shown: "#) He bases His argument on the grounds that my experiment mit cause "New Venus Science' to lose caste in tKe eyes of otKers. This is suppression f data for fear of unpopularity. "#) He states that the experiment cannot be correct, because it disagrees with His presuppositions. This is the attempted refutation of physical facts by favored theories. "#) He objects that the exieriment is not 'elegant,' and hence cannot be true. This is the subordination of Science to Esthetics. "#) He complains that the experiment is not 'quantitative.' Note that each volunteer ate one sandrat digestive tract and then, while carefully and continuously suierviBed, existed for stated days, hours and minutes without drinking water. All that is required of an experiment is that it proves a point, and that the facts be so reported as to be capable of independent check. It is xmscientific to include irrelevant data and superfluous charts and calculations merely to make the experiment 'look scientific.' "My learned colleague's objections are those of the scholastic pedant, not of the scientist. "In science, theories are based on tacts, not vice-versa." Princeps, New Venus, JanieH'mar #, #. By #-# vote, the Personnel and Appointments Committee today Bred Dr. Quincy Cathcart, Chief of Medical Services. By unanimous vote, the Committee on Professional Conduct formally censured Dr. Cathcart for "unprofessional conduct." Rathbone, New Venus, Janfebmar #, #. Dr. Quincy Cathcart, former Chief of Medical Services, in a brief statement commented on lus expulsion from office and the formal rebuke delivered by the Intersdence Federation. Dr. Cathcart said : "By these measures, the governing bodies of the so-called Intersdence Federation reveal themselves as composed largely of sycophants, obsequious to an administrator who, as I have demonstrated, does not know what science is. These people may, of course, take thdr stand with whoever they wish. I will stand with Galileo." Princeps, New Venus, Janieb mar #, #. By #-# vote, the Committee on Accreditation today placed Quincy Cathcart on "indefinite suspension of professional status." A spokesman explained: "Thi means Cathcart cannot practice, and further that no paper or presentation of his may be considered by any accepted medium for the dissemination of professional information or opinion." The action was taken "to avert harmful public controversy." IV aifiBone, New Venus, April #, #, .Two magnetic-sieve proctors readied Here today, Haggard from exposure and lack of rest, to tell of a waterless trek across tHe Salamari Waste. TKey attribute tKeir survival to "travel by night, an accurate map, and two raw sandrats." Flarnish, New Venus, May #, #. Doctors Here are puzzled by the case of a fourteen-year-old boy who eats grass, refuses to drink water, and apparently suffers no harmful effects. He insists he ate a sandrat. Bonedry, New Venus, May #, #. Hank J. Perdval, proprietor of the Last Chance Supply Mart, reports a brisk sale of sandrats to prospectors, surveyors, and cable riggers, tting out across the BonescorcH Plateau. Princeps, New Venus, May #, #. Experiments carried out under the auspices of the Intersdence Federation "demonstrate that the effectiveness of sandrat ingestion in preventing dehydration is a myth. Careful experimentation with measured quantities of crushed digestive tissues of laboratory sandrats shows no statistical increase in resistance to dehydration." South Bonescorch Junction, New Venus, June #, #. Flip Baumgartner, from Medical Out-' post #, collapsed shortly after arrival here this morning. Baumgartner explained that His sandbuggy broke down "ten to twdve days ago" and he'd been on foot ever since. A small wire cage lined with sunrustle stalks, and now empty, was found secured to his pack straps. Such sandrat kits are sold locally for use in case the purchaser gets lost without water. Princeps, New Venus, June #, #. By order of R. Q. Harling, Planetary Food and Drug Administrator, all sales of "sandrats or related rodents, for use in preventing dehydration," were today forbidden as "dangerous to the public health, both directly in light of possible infestation by possible indigenous intestinal parasites and indirectly because of the mistaken belief that sandrat internal organs are a specific against dehydration. This myth has been thoroughly exploded by controlled scientific experimentation." Bonedry, New Venus, June #, #, Hank J. Percival, proprietor of the Last Chance Supply Mart stated today he is continuing sales of sandrats, "as pets." Broke and Ended, New Venus, ## June #, #. Sandra Corregiano, a missing tourist on the TransI Desert Safari, was today brought out after an extensive search' around Mineral Flats. Miss Corregiano explained that sKe had caught a sandrat. "I Hated to kill the poor thing," sKe said, "and I f nearly died with' tKe -- you know -- what you Have to do with' them. But then I was all right." Princeps, New Venus, July #, #. Planetary Food and Drug Administrator Harling today warned that He will "proceed to tKe courts" in all cases wherein sandrats are sold contrary to law. Administrator Harling added that He will prosecute offenders "vigorously, to tKe full extent of the enforcement resources at my disposal." Princeps, New Venus, July #, #. TKe Planetary Food and Drug Administration today released results of cKemical analysis of tKe sandrat digestive tract, by an independent analytical laboratory "of recognized standing", No cause for protection against deKydration was found. Bonedry, New Venus, July #, #. TKe bodies of two Planetary Food and Drug Administration field agents were found near Here this morning. Evidence seems to sEot eacE otHer in a gun battle. Cause of the fight is not known. South Bonescorch Junction, New . Venus, July #, #. A tSe wreckage of his sand-buggy this morning. Evidence thus far uncovered appears to indicate that the sand-buggy's engine exploded. Sla Hills, New Venus, July #, agent found here the day before yesterday was today shipped back to Princeps. Cause of death was a large bullet hole in the left chest. Princeps, New Venus, July #, ling today announced that enforcement of his .sandrat-sales policy is being "temijorarily suspended, pending completion of a massive public-education campaign." Princeps, New Venus, July #, #. Dr. Charles de P. Bancroff, Director-in-Chief of the Interscicnce Federation, today unveiled results of a new experiment "to determine the possible effects of sandrat ingestion." The intestinal tracts of sixteen sandrats, raised by, were "thoroughly macerated, divided into one Hundred portions, and each weighed portion mixed with a weighed sample of a siecific local plant. In no instance was the proportion of water significantly increased by admixture with sandrat intestine." Dr. Bancroff stated: "I am amazed that superstition can persist in the face of repeated consistently negative experimental evidence." Dry Hole, New Venus, July #, #. Sixteen inmates of the Dry Hole Correctional Training Institute have disappeared in the last month. It is believed the prisoners are getting away as fast as they can catch sandrats. Owing to the isolated location of the Institute, and the local lack of surface water, it was never thought necessary to use an escape-proof outer wall. Princeps, New Venus, I August #, #. Officials of the Interscience Federation today announced new measures to "eradicate the sandrat superstition." A concerted effort will be made to coordinate teaching materials of all types, to render this superstition psychologically distasteful. Special mention was made of the trideo film. Disaster in the Desert, which, said a spokesman, "illustrates, step by step, the chain of causation leading from acceptance of the myth to the ultimate test, when the family sand-vehicle malfunctions in the desert. Then there is this distressing scene with the sandrats, and afterward we experience the deterioration the family, physically and mentally, and the horror as they try to eat sunrustle stalks and othe' things of that type, and realize that they don't turn into water. We got Peter de VianEof and Celeste Silsine for the principal characters -- the stars of our show -- and we think they've done a really superb' and convincing job for us. It's one thing to just be told an old wives' tale is false. It's something else to actually experience it this way, right before your eyes." Another official stated, "We're going to pull out all the stops. We're going to crush this superstition." V ate: Frigidor #, # From: Presley Mark, President, New Earth Research To: Col. J. J. Conrobert, C. O., Stilwell Base, New Earth Subject: Dehydrated Water? Con: Sorry this reply is late, but we've had a little trouble here. Some jackass greased the liquid air machine. Regarding your query as to whether there is any way to solidify water without freezing, I would certainly say, "No." But some vague memory keeps circulating through my mind. What's your problem? Date: Frigidor #, # From : J. J. Conrobert, C. O., Stilwell Base, New Earth To: Presley Mark, President, New Earth Research Subject: Outposts Pres: The problem is, I've got eighteen detached observation posts in this freezebox, and supplying them is driving me nuts. I've tried to explain through channels that these outposts serve no useful purpose, that anytlung incoming -- aliens, bootleg spacecraft, planetary raiders, you name it -- will show up on the screens. The generals tell me screens can be fooled and visual observation is a useful backup. That's that. Well, we've got pretty rugged terrain. These observation posts are at high elevations, sunk into windswept crags overlooking wide sweeps of territory. We can't provision them from the air, because of dangerous wiinds and violently impredictable meteorological conditions in general. We supply them from the ground. There's no vehicle or pack animal that can handle this. We do it. Every time we supply these outposts, it's like a battle. What gets us worst is water. In summer, it sloshes and shifts. In winter, the snow is contaminated by spores of the parasite of a solitary overgrown wolf that gets moisture by gulping snow. This parasite will infest humans, which complicates everything from the first snowfall to the middle of summer. Yes, I realize waste can be purified, but kindly think over our budget, our conditions and tEe imscientific viewpoint of the troops. Incidentally, I might add tfiat this solitary powerful wolf finds our isolated snow-melting waterboiling shelters ideal for winter headquarters. Now, these difficulties are samples. They don't exhaust the list. All these things interlock; you can't do this for one reason, or that for another reason. But if we could eliminate this waterdelivery problem, with its complications of liquidity, freezingpoint, spores, melt-houses, snowwolves, etc., it would simplify things enormously. Could you work up some kind of gelatin, and when it cools it's a powder. Then when it's eaten, ffie water is released? Never mind if it weighs twice as much. We would gladly trade complications for some straightforward drudgery. Date : Frigidore #, # From: Mark, New Earth Research To: J. J. Coiu-obert, Stilwell Subject: Nonliquid Non-Ice Water Con: Am onto a weird track that may solve your problem -- a discovery made on our sister planet True to form, they gmged up on the discoverer, who showod some originality. Will let you know what I find out. Date: September #, # From: Mark, New Earth Research To: J. J. Conrobert Stilwell Subject: Waterless Water Con: My investigations into New Venus "science" disclose that there is a creature there called a "sandrat" that lives on dry stalks while the other creatures sleep out the hot weather. For years, the local people have known this, and it appears that someone, stranded without water, decided that if he ate the creature, maybe he could do it, too. Obviously, this couldn't work. But he tried it, and it did work. Our experiments show that, in this particular animal's digestive S # tem, there's a culture of microorganisms that breaks down cellulose. These microorganisms are passed on from generation to generation, when the mother sandrat feeds the baby pre-chewed food. When the human eats the sandrat, the human's digestive juices naturally tend to kill the microorganisms. But the human is hoping against hope that he too can now process dried weeds and make water out of them. He promptly chokes down dried weed. The microorganisms go to work on it and produce among other things, a kind of porous charcoal dust, and water. THe cellulose, you see, is (CeHioOs), or C # (H # O)s, provided you remember the h # rdrogen and oxygen are not actually joined as water to form a hydrate. The microorganism takes care of this problem. Don't ask me how just yet. It will take us a while to figure this out But here is your dry water, if you don't mind the weight penalty. Evidently, the New Venus authorities fed their laboratory sandrats on starchy food and water. This microorganism, for some reason, doesn't like starch, and dies for lack of cellulose. Hence, their experiments demonstrated that the actual facts were imaginary. By means of a propaganda campaign, they rammed "is revelation down the throats of the ptopulace. Nice, eh? To get back to our problem, we've tried cultures of the microorganism and find they will work on sawdust, amongst other forms of cellulose. Am sending cultures and live sandrats for your own use. Don't know if this solves your problem, but it's a start. Incidentally, we find we get the best results with the raw digestive tract of the sandrat Let me know how military discipline solves this problem. We are also interested to see how New Venus "science" will explain the dilemma created by oiu report. We are releasing it in a special way. Rathbone, New Venus, II August #, #. Quincy Cathcart, a seed salesman here, today made public the text of a communication from Dr. C. J. Horowitz, Director of Research at the prestigious New Earth Research Corporation. Dr. Horowitz's message reads, in part: "... We wish to publicly acknowledge the prior date of your investigations into this important matter and to acknowledge further that your conclusions have been found to be entirely accurate. "Owing to your researches, our efforts have been greatly facilitated. "Mr. Presley Mark, President of e Corporation, has suggested your name for our Mark Medal and accompanying cash award. As you may know, this prize has not been awarded for three years, so that the award money has accumulated. We will be in touch 'P   Princeps, New Venus, II August #, #. P. L. Sneel, spokesman for the Legal Staff Section of tKe Interscience Federation, today warned tKat Quincy CatKcart, Rathbone seed salesman, "cannot legally accept any payment, emolument, reward, prize, or otfier recompense for performance of services wHicH fie is legally debarred from rendering. Under Sections #, #, and #, Catficart must refuse sucfi payment or suffer the full legal penalties." Rathhone, New Venus, II August #, #. J. Harrington Savage, prominent Princeps attorney visiting at tfie fiome of Dr. Quincy Cadicart, today announced tfiat "tfiis allegation of tfie Legal Staff Section of tfie Interscience Federation is in violation of Section #, wfiicH specifically prohibits ex post facto laws. Dr. Catficart may be rewarded, to any extent and without limitation, for past services, rendered at a time when fiis outstanding qualifications were fully accredited. Any attempt of tfie Interscience Federation to enforce tfiis ruling will be met with legal action on whatever scale may prove necessary." Princeps, New Venus, August #, #. R. J. Rocklasfi, of tfie law firm of Savage and Rocklasfi, today announced' tiiat fie represents tfie relatives of one hundred sixty-two exposure victims lost in desert localities. Mr. Rocklasfi charges, "These people are victims of tfie propaganda of the Interscience Federation, which struck from tfieir hands tfie obvious remedy and thus killed tfiem." Princeps, New Venus, II August #, #. P. L. Sneel, of tfie Interscience Federation's legal staff, revealed today tfiat tfie Federation, "as a gesture of reconciliation toward a former colleague fallen from grace," will not insist tfiat Quincy Catficart refuse payment for past services; "but Cathcart must be exceedingly careful to remember tfiat fie is debarred from undertaking to render any services, now or in tfie future, for wfiicli hie is professionally disqualified." Rathbone, New Venus, August #, #. J. Harrington Savage, attorney for Dr. Quincy Catficart, today warned tfie Interscience Federation tfiat, "no gesture of reconciliation has any legal standing whatever in tfiis matter. The Interscience Federation statement of II August #, # presupposes that tfie Federation may grant or withhold prosecution as an act of favoritism. Tfiis calls irito question the propriety of Federation policy and its legal validity under sections #, #, and #, governing tfie relations of governmental authorities and tfie citizens of New Venus. We are examining tfie very serious implications of tKia statement. If need be, a broad legal attack will be instituted to crusti tlie evils infierent in sucfi arbitrary and imprincipled beHavior."  Princeps, New Venus, II August #, #. Byron T. Fisfier, well known popular autHor, arrived Here today on tlie spaceliner ueen of Space. Mr. Fisfier fias come "to do researcK on my new book, The Martyrs and Tyrants of Science." Dry Hole, New Venus, II August #, #. Tfiree tourists stumbled out of the desert fiere at first light this morning and attributed tfieir safe arrival to "sandrats and chalaqui weed." Tfiey displayed official Interscience Federation Tourist Guide pamphlets warning tfiat "tfie quaint belief tfiat ingestion of sandrats digestive organs will obviate tfie need for water is simply an old wives' tale. Scientific experimentation demonstrates tfiat tfie sandrat is as dependent upon liquid water as any otfier creature." All tfiree tourists stated tfiat tfiis pampElet was wfiat nearly killed tfiem. Princeps, New Venus, September #, #. In cfiaotic sessions of tfie governing bodies of tfie Interscience Federation tfie following actions were today taken: Dr. Charles de P. Bancroft stepped down as Director-in-Cfiief, citing reasons of fiealtfi. By unanimous vote, tfie Committee on Accreditation reversed its former decree, to restore tlie full qualifications of Dr. Quincy Catficart, former Cfiief of Medical Services. Tfie Committee on Professional Conduct narrowly defeated a motion to overturn its formal rebuke of Dr. Catficart, wKose name, fiowever, was returned to the active roster. In a furtfier upheaval, tfie Legal Staff Section was drastically overfiauled. So far, tfie Board fias proved unable to select a successor to Dr. Bancroft, and is reportedly split into violent factions. Princeps, New Venus, September #, #. Dr. Sfierrington Sfiiel was today named Director-General of tfie Interscience Federation. Dr. Cfiarles de P. Bancroff resigned from tfie Board of Directors, to become Bead of a special Internal Procedures Study Group. Dr. Sfiiel's elevation vacated tiBe post of Cfiief of Medical Services, and tfie Personnel and Appointments Committee unanimously approved Dr. Catficart as Cfiief of Medical Services. An inside observer wfio asked not to be identified observed tfiat, "Now we fiave Justice. Wfietfier we get Trutfi out of it remains to be seen." Date: September #, # Fram: Quincy Catficart, CHief of Medical Services Outpost # Subject: Reassignment Recode: #MCmll#-l Sir: Owing to retirements and promotimis, tKe position of Director of Redrust Medical Center is now open. If you wisfi to accept tKis position let me know at your earliest convenience. I appreciate tHat you may encounter some difficulty in leaving your present post xmtil tlie rains subside, in view of tKe surrounding bowlsHaped terrain. As I recall, tHe station Has waterproof seals, and a cable-and-drum device to allow it to float up off its skids. I trust you Have kept tKe cable well greased. Date: Ocnovdec #, # From: Quincy CatKcart, CHief of Medical Services To: Robert Howland, Director, KalaHell Conv. Dist. Subject: Science Wipes Out Superstition Recode: l#MCkc-l Sir: I quote, for your edification, tKe following from tKe newly publisKed PampHlet #P-# of the Interscience Federation Press, titled. Rusty Learns About Btotecbnotogy: "Yes, Rusty, for years people died m tKe desert, wKen a plentiful supply of water was as near as tKe nearest vegetation -- dry and useless tHougK it seemed. At tKat time, the organized research facilities of the Intendence Federation had not yet created Bia qua. But there was a way -- by ingestion of certain internal organs of the common sandrat -- to avoid the more Harmful effects of extreme solar exposure." "Gee, Doctorl Didn't the people know about it?" No, Rusty. Opinion Research instituted in April, #, showed that # of persons responding beUeved ingestion of the internal organs of the sandrat would Have no effect on dehydration; # believed it might Have some effect; # did not mark tiieir ballots correctly; and only #  believed it would prevent deKydration, and most of these lived in primitive outlying regions and believed it purely on the basis of superstition and folklore. "Today, we instruct all travelers to carry Biaqua, and in emergency to overcome leir squeamishness and rely on this simple biotechnological means of obtaining water from dry plant tissues..." Pamphlet #P-# goes on in this vein for many pages. Incidentally, I have informed the New Earth Research Corporation that you carried out the first formal experiments on lis subject. THe credit belongs to you, not me. Date: Ocnovdec #, # From: Robert Howland, Director, Kalaliell Conv. Dist. To: Quincy Catficart, CEief of Medical Services Subject: Sandrats Recode #mcKC-# Sir: No, you are tKe one wEo risked your neck. Anyway, it appears to me tHe credit would ultimately go to Desert BiU, but How do you get it to Him? If you'd like to do sometEing for me, I am cEronically sBort of trained personnel. As you recall, some time ago, one of my converter tecHnicians, Sam MatHews, turned up at Redrust Medical Center, tried to explain lEe plain trutH and finally decided tat if He was going to be tHout nuts, He'd be nuts in tHe most profitable way. He is still enjoying a free vacation at Lakes Central. Not long ago, one of my assistants went tfiere on business and Had a talk MatiSevra. MatHews complains tHat wHen He goes to bed at nigHt, tHe cot seems' to be bobbing up and down. He walks witH a rolling gait, as if He Had spent BSs life on tKe water. A Dr. TcHnudi, wHo is analyzing Him, is trying to get at His basic subconscious mecHanisms, and He is straining MatKews's powers of invention. Mathev.'s thus Has HydrotHerapy coming out of His ears, and fie Hungers and thirsts after some place wHere He can "look anywfiere, and not see more tfian one canteen of water at a time." I Hope you will take care of this, as I Have just tHe spot for Him. Ocnovdec #, # Catficart to Roberts l#MCkc-# Sir: I am Happy to say tfiat ews, stating tfiat He believed fie, Tcudi, Bad effected a complete cure. Matfiews is on His way back to you, and if you will just Hang Him up for a week or so and let ffie water drain out, I imagine He will be all right. MeanwHile TcHnudi, elated over tfie "cure," is elaborating His sessions with Matfiews into a gigantic tome tfiat doubtless will make His reputation, will very possibly found a scKool of tHougHt and perhaps make Him "immortal." Tfiis MatHews case Has certainly been illustrative of tHe continuing conquest of uninformed prejudice by tKe rational forces of science. Tfie only trouble is, tKere are times wKen it's a little Hard to tell wHicH is wHicH. H. (for Horace) U. (for Leo) Gold is not only a writer of considerable stature in science ficti(i and fantasy, Be is one wHo Has a special relation to IBis par ticnlac science-fiction magazine. He started it. From its first issue, eigBteen years ago tBis montB, until tBe end of #, it was Horace Gold wHo set tHe polides, developed tHe writers and acBieved tBe remarkable level of quality wHcE made Galaxy tBe most-antBologized magazine of tBe past two decades. By # Gold was already a Veteran of more iBan twenty years in tBe field. He began writing science fiction under tHe pen name of "Clyde Crane Campbell," but it was under tus own name tSat sucB famous stories as None But Lucifer, Trouble with Water, A Matter of Form and many otBers were publisHcd. WBen Be left tBe editorship of Galaxy for BealtB reasons, lie continued writing; now He lives near Los Angeles, witB His wife and young daughter, SBeryl. His son, Eugene Gold, is also His collaborator, at least at such tim as young Gold can spare time from His full-time career as a pBotograpBer. Larry S. Todd, whose The Waibots marks Bis first appearance in Galaxy, is no stranger to our companion magazine. If. (He was represented tfiere last month with a memorable novelette Flesh and the Iron.) An undergraduate at Syracuse University ( a veritable Botbed of science fiction activity; cover artist Vaughn Bod# and writer Richard Wilson are also to be found there), Todd botH writes and illustrates His own stories. Sidney Van Scyoc, the wife of an Air Force pilot, appeared a number of times in Galaxy, a few years ago. But Her literary career was interrupted by the exigencies of dilldbearlng and rearlittle older she is back witH us with A Visit to Cleveland General. Kris Neville, .wKose Thyie Planet is in this iue, is a native of the red-dirt south, now transplanted to Los Angeles, where he resides with his comely wife, of a family of yoimg Nevilles. Budda-like and unshakable, Neville is a familiar presence at West Coast science-fiction gatiheiings. So is Larry Niven, newest of the "Big Name" sciencefiction writers. Niven's first story was publied in It tiSree years ago. Since then he has acQeved several dozen printed stories, at least three books (and more coming) and a Hugo for Eis It short story. Neutron Star, at last year's science-fiction convention. All the Myriad Ways is another of his excursions into the shorter lengths of fiction; The Organleggers, a short novel coming up in a near-future issue of Galaxy, is more typical of his work. There's a story heOnd All the Myriad Ways. For some time. Galaxy has been sponsoring a series of interdisciplinary gatherings between scientists and science-fiction writers, all over the United States. Through this informal "invisible college" science-fiction writers have visited Cape Kennedy, the Harvard Observatory, various research facilities at M.I.T. and elsewhere in the fields of computer design and nuclear physics, meetings of sdentific groups in New York, Washington and California, etc, Niven, along with Galaxy contributor Fritz Leiber and Galaxy editor Frederik Pohl, was present at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories last October, on the day when Mariner V telemetered back its findings on its successful flyby of Venus -- hence this story. Incidentally, what make these meetings between scientists and science-fiction writers productive is a sort of reciprocal sharing of interests. A good many scientists are science-fiction fans; a good many science-fiction writers are fans of science. Some people, of course, are both; but it seems to be true fiiat a fair percentage of science-fictibn writers keep themselves informed about what's happening in cosmology, molecular biology, dearion theory and all of the other marches of science not so much out of professional interest, or even in the hope of being able to use the material in stories, as for pleasure. Scientists (and sciencefiction writer) who are interested in participating in such sessions in the future, please note. OO The s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it ! No. CF-# by I null No, CF'#I# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # lor S#. #, .i# #, # With OW n I S nn mr ll I'd.llUMl Adll 'll, illVillr-, l.i. I m r in tr l it .my A( I U l MI...II I . A m. I.fl I luill...II... I Do you have a restless urge to write? If so, you have much in common with successful authors. Read how' # Famous Writers are helping people turn a restless urge for self-expression into success in w'riting There's somelhing differenl ;ihoul people who feel ihe urge lo write. They have a spiriliral hunger that sets them apart -- even from family ;md friends. If you have know n this burning need lo write, you, too. may have Ihe gift sueeessful authors possess... the recurring ache lo pul into words your innermosl thoughts, your own experiences. Max Shulman started writing because "... it was write or bust." Itiilh Baldwin, after # novels, still says: 'I'se never written exactly what I dreamed I'd write... you keep on trying." Successful authors like these know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But. they realize it can waste away if you don't knosv how to get started w riting, or if you hesitate to try . Several years ago they joined forces with Rod .Sel ling. Bennett Cerf. Bruce Calton, Mignon Ci. Hberhart, John Caples. J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith and Bergen Fvans, to form the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they knew about writing into a remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in youi spare lime. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing -- then specialize in Fiction. Non-Fiction, .'dvcrlising Writing or Business Writing. Lach of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional w riter or editor. He goes over your work line by line, word by word, blue-penciling his changes right on your manuscript, much as an editor does with an established author. Then he returns it xvilh a long letter of advice and guidance. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to the Reader's Digest, Rod Serling s urge to write r I leading TV dramatist II wiliela . i.c. i'aiw Reauiem for a Heavyweight j and won him six tmmy awards. laidies Home Joantal. I'aiUa V a' " 'fiction, and m.ore than I'Ji) vi.ic Writing Aptitude Teist oTci To find out if so'i. tor  i .  . 'i . ability worth developirt.' send i, ; d  'C ' revealing Aptitude le.,... vou  r other evidence of writing apti:... s r inroll However, there no )b  a,': ; :o I I Famous Wriii rs Saool I Dept. '-#(i. '.Vesipor...'sKO I w'o.th d  .sf-pii c I'U.se mail me I W'itho...-obiigati-.-. '. VoU 'spi'iudt Ti I anrls. h-oi :.r :S . I Mr. I Mrs #...  i MiiS one ' 'ii' I I Slrccl I Ciiy... I Stuic Tv j Ax-cn . I'cx.' ; lliv  T-n.? Cs '  i', I of tl. Nfil'onul Hx'" . Coiincii,  galaxy galaxy 'iC' November # Building on the Line by Perri! .r Eeeetz Ch We're grateful to all the science-fiction fans who gave our publications a clean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at tho # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive years. We're even moro grateful to the many loyal readers who hnvo made it possible for both on. That means wo can bring you twice as many of the best storios being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're debetter in the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order (or:  # issues ol each for I I .#  # issues of each for # #  # issues of each for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Galaxy Is published In French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published In Braille and Living Tape. November, #  Vol. #, No. # by Robert Silverberg by Cordon R. Dickson by H. H. Hollis Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director by Miriam Allen DeFord by K. M. O'Donnell by Douglas R. Mason by Brian W. Aldiss by Willy Ley by Frederilc PoM by Algis Budrys monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U.SA. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N.Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat Off.  Tn the June issue, as you may remember, we ran two fullpage ads on facing pages, one urging the United States to get out of Vietnam, the other urging us to stay. Each advertisement was signed and paid for by several dozen science-fiction writers, including on one list or the other most of the best-known writers in the field. It struck us that this was a rather odd and distressing phenomenon. As anyone who knew science fiction could tell by looking at the lists, there was much the same range of backgrounds, interests, world views and so on on both lists; it seemed to us that, if one were to get a sort of group consensus from each of the two sets of writers on what they wanted the future development of man to look like, the two sets of specifications would be just about identical. Yet on this quite crucial issue, their ways of getting to that shared future were polar opposites. And we wondered why. So we took the money that the two groups of writers paid us for the ads, amounting to #, and offered it as five prizes of a hundred dollars each to the readers, writers or other interested parties who came up with the most interesting and potentially useful suggestions on just what one could do about Vietnam -- whether in the direction of winning the war, or of ending it, or of preventing future Vietnams, or whatever seemed relevant. Now the results are all in, and the prizes have been awarded. TJ'rankly, we felt a little presumptuous at asking our own fellow sf addicts to solve a problem that has clearly defeated some of the brightest politicians of all time. We were prepared to be laughed at; but in the event, barring two persons, one a reader and the other a radio announcer, most people took it seriously. Seriously enough, anyway, to come up with more than # pieces of mail, including a total that must be well over a thousand individual entries (we haven't counted) which ranged the specWhy were these men great ? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Knowthe mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... , Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitai tion... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist ,... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicmcians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. be Mss -- No obA nonSsa Jose, California #. U.S.A. Please scad me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may leara to use my faculties sod powers of mind. Entries were judged fsr pertinence and originality. All entries, whether prize-winners or not, will be considered tor use in furtherstudies. The five recipients of # saih are Poul Anderson, # Las Palomas, Orinda, California #(# #; Dan Gollub, #Q Marion ##, Denver, Colorado; Kirk W. Holliday, # Bewery, New York, N. Y. #; Gary Pratt, Route ##, Athens, Ohio #; and Mack Reynolds, Apartado #, San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico. Although only five prizes were awarded according to the terms of the contest, the Editors of Galaxy Publishing Corporation wish to thank all of the participants in this rather unusual venture. We regret that it U impossible to acknowledge each submission personally. The love! of suggestions was high. trum from injunctions like "Kill gooksl" and "Just get out' to quite detailed proposals for what might actually be practicable and valuable procedures. Some entries were supported by maps, reference citations, statistical analyses, even a #-page printed booklet, To be sure, not every entry was valuable, or even sensible. A fairly large number were clearly impossible. (We Have a House rule against using the word "impossible" except under rigidly construed circumstances -- so many "impossible" things Have happened! In this case, we took a suggestion to be impossible wEen it proposed a specific measure that had already been tried, and failed; or when it proposed the immediate use of some weapon or device that does not exist We were prepared to grant the longrange possibility of almost any; device one could imagine -- but not, for instance, the employment of mass hypnosis on all combatants this year. This year no one can do it) Another large group appeared to miss the point of what the war was about ( Admittedly there is some confusion on that question.) Some proposed destroying the wfeole country, or evacuating it totally; some suggested dropping H-bombs on everything in sight, or propagandising soldiers (some suggested our soldiers, others the other side's) to "figEt the way the Arabs fought in the six-day war." But eliminating all of those, there remained a batch of interesting entries. Some proposed new ways of winning the war -- a method of interdicting Haiphong Harbor without bombing, a guerrilla strategy similar to that used by the British in Malaya. Some suggested ways of disengaging without loss of face -- a variation on the tactic of non-violent resistance, a proposal for a plebiscite. Some offered longrange plans, including ways of strengthening the U.N., or of prejudging "national liberation" struggles by techniques resemBallantine critique of science fiction designed to draw non s.f. readers into the fold. The general theme was that s.f. could now afford to stand up on its own indeterminate number of literary feet and need no longer be regarded as a pulp relative of "straight" writing. to keep people away from s.f. in droves) the fact is that if any normal reader were to go through all the straight fiction published in any given month, he'd find # of it appalling -- not even skillful pulp like Harold Robbins, for instance, or true confessions -- # la John Updike. There is an awful lot of rubbish published. But the s.f. field excludes rubbish and keeps the bad stuff down to a minimum. Because only s.f. readers are fanatical enough to want to read all the s.f. published. Only s.f. readers are discerning enough not only to read everything, but to come back at authors with criticism, praise, brickbats, encouragement -- In short, participation. Only s.f. readers have conventions every year, write each other thousands of opinionated words via hundreds of fanzines, give awards, exchange scandal, get drunk with their favorite authors and, as a group, bring real meaning to the role of readership. SO there's the way to do it. Challenge the new recruit. Enquire if they have read Tolkien (never mind that he's not s.f.i Tolkien Is a magic word, a touchstone; ust about anybody knows he wrote a book. And first we have to establish that the prospect is literate). If they have not read Tolkien, suggest they try. If they have read Tolkien, chances are they're wondering. But take the steps from fantasy to s.f, by easy stages, like from Tolkien to McCaffrey to a couple of classics collections perhaps, and on to Leiber and Larry Niven. You're into the hardcore stuff and see what happens. Or Asimov, Heinlein, Vance, del Rey, Spinrad, a whole bouncing world of riches. next month . Meantime, send for our catalog. And go buy Mervyn Peake's it. Tell everybody. #I #th Avenue New York, Now York # bling compulsory arbitration. Some were pretty fanciful, as you might expect from science-fictioneers (a proposal to settle wars by counting voluntary suicides on eacH side; the side with the most volunteers wins), but most were not. They were, in fact -- it's a small enough thing to say -- at least as persuasive as most of what we hear from the world's leaders on the subject. And this is all the more remarkable because between the time the issue containing tlie contest announcement went on the printing presses and the time it reached the readers, the whole character of the situation changed dramatically. (It is not yet clear How much of the change is substance and How much is just drama.) The President announced his decision not to run gin talks at once, implementing it with a change in bombing policy; and in fact the Paris talks began shortly thereafter. In spite of everything, the responses came in in volume, from all over the United States, from Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, from England, France, Belgium, Portugal, Finland -- a fair number from troops actually serving in Vietnam right now. By the time you read this, it Is possible there may be even more startling changes -- after all, it's an election year in the United States, and a most strange and perplexing one, at that. It is even possible that the war may be over, one way or another; it is perhaps possible, even, that it may have exploded out of control entirely, and all discussions Have become pointless. But we'll be discussing it anyway. Because now that the contest is over, what we think is the most interesting partis just beginning. T'here exists (as you remem ber if you've been reading Galaxy attentively enough) a sort of procedure for exploring the future, pioneered by scientists assotion and called the Delphi technique. It's an interesting research tool. Although it is hard to say just How successfully it can predict what's going to happen (the only way you can really tell if a prediction is accurate is by waiting to see if if comes true -- by which time it's no longer very useful), there are indications that it is pretty promising. Its fairly, simple in concept. Basically, if is only a procedure for circulating questionnaires to a panel of wellinformed people to achieve a consensus of opinions without distortion by oratory, seniority, personality conflicts and the other; biasing elements that confuse most committee studies -- although in practice it requires a fair amount of pretty Hard work to get it done. And above all, it's flexible. It can do more than give you a notion of wliat will Happen. It can Kelp evaluate tHe desirability of probable future events by quantitative criteria, and it can even be used to evaluate strategies for bringing about the desirable futures. Naturally, this is not to say tHat there is anything omniscient or infallible about the technique. If you want hard and fast statements about the future you have to go to the fortune-tellers. (They will be wrong, but they will be positive.) Nevertheless, Delphi can organize the thinking of a competent group on any subject better than most other techniques that are anywhere near as easy to apply, and we've been thinking for some time that it really ought to be used for non-trivial hard problems about the real world. That's what we're going to do with the suggestions that came in in response to the contest. Not just the winners, but all of them  -- all, at least, that survive preliminary screening. We have a list of # specific proposals. They are at this moment in process of being refined and reduced; hopefully we'll come out with perhaps # bright ideas to submit to our panel. A Delphic study has iia own timetable, mostly determined by the length of time necessary to circulate the questionnaires and get them back, and the time needed to analyze the results; it should be about two months now before we have a complete study. Selecting the panel has been a bit of a problem, to be sure. The basic prerequisites are pretty simple intelligence, knowledge, experience, freedom from bias. The only trouble with those prerequisites is that, particularly in a question about which' as much passion Has been spent as has been spent on this one, tliose four characteristics seldom come in the same package. The more likely a given person is to be able to give a useful opinion about the war, the more certain he is to Have formed his opinion already -- and likely enough' to be pretty outspoken and determined about it. Fortunately Delphi has intrinsic safeguards which' reduce the problem of bias... mostly because, fortunately Human beings can if they are intelligent enough and informed enough to operate in an abstracted discussion as though their biases were temporarily disconnected. Be interesting to see Kow it all comes out. We'll report the results as soon as they're ready probably in an early # issue of Galaxy. Perris Way Earth was under new management. Now l f of the guild of Watchers , led a blinded Prince to the Hall of the Remembers -- and destiny. '"po journey with a fallen Prince is no easy thing. His eyes were gone, but not bis pride; blinding Had taught Him no Humility. He wore the robes and mask of a member of the guild of Pilgrims, but there was no piety in His soul and little grace. Behind His mask Ho still knew Himself to be the Prince of Roum, even! though Roum, like all of Eartfl, was ruled now by beings from a far star. I, the accidental companion of the fallen Prince, was all his court now, as we walked the road to Perris in early springtime. I, the weary Watcher, my occupation gone, served Him in His arrogance. I led Him along tfie right roads; I amused Him at His command witH stories of my wanderings; F nursed Him through moods of sulky bitterness. In return I got very little except the assurance tHat I would eat regularly. No one denies food to a Pilgrim, and in each village on our way we stopped in inns, where He was fed and I, as His companion, also was given meals. Once, early in our travels, He erred and haughtily told an innkeeper, "See that you feed my servant as well!" TKe blinded Prince could not see that look of shocked disbelief -- for what would a Pilgrim be doing with a servant? -- but I smiled at the innkeeper and winked and tapped my forehead, and the man understood and served us both without discussion. Afterward I explained the error to the Prince, and thereafter He spoke of me as his companion. Yet I knew that to Him I was nothing but a servant. I Had not been of a serving guild in former days, but even a Watcher is a Bumble thing in the mind of the Prince of Roum, Tfie weather was fair. Eyrop was growing warm as tfie year turned. Slender willows and poplars were greening beside the road, though for much of the way out of Roum the way wag planted with lavish' star-trees, imported during the gaudy days of the Second Cycle, and their blue-bladed leaves had resisted our puny Eyropan winter. The birds, too, were coming back from their season across the sea in Afreek. They sparkled overhead, singing, discussing among themselves tKe change of masters in the world. "They mock me," said the Prince one dawn. "They sing to me and defy me to see their brightness!" OH, he was bitter, and with good reason. His armies defeated, himself overthrown, his eyesight ripped away as an act of vengeance performed by one of the alien invaders -- he who Had Had so much, and lost all, Had a good deal to lament. For me, the defeat of Earth meant only an end to habits. Otherwise all tKe same; no longer need I keep my Watch', now tHat the invaders were finally here, but I still wandered the face of the world, alone even when, as now, I Had a companion. I wondered if the Prince knew why fie Had been blinded. I wondered if, in the moment of his triumph, the star-being Gormon Had explained to the Prince that it was as elemental a matter as jealousy over a woman that had cost him his eyes. "You took Avluela," Gormon might Have said. "You saw a little Flier, and you tEougHt she'd amuse you. And you said. Here girl, come to my bed. Not thinking of Her as a person. Not thinking sHe might prefer others. Thinking only as a Prince of Roum migHt think -- imperiously. Here, Prince #" And the quick forked thrust of long-tipped fingers -- But I dared not ask. That much awe remained in me for this fallen monarch'. To penetrate his privacy, to strike up a conversation with him about his mishaps as though' he were an ordinary companion of the road -- no, I could not I spoke when I was spoken to. I offered conversation upon command. Otherwise I kept my silence, like a good commoner in the presence of royalty. EacH day we Had our reminders that the Prince of Roum was royalty no longer. Overhead flew the invaders, sometimes in floaters or other chariots, sometimes under their own power. Traffic was heavy. They were taking inventory of their world. Their shadows passed over us, tiny eclipses, and I looked up to see our new masters and oddly felt no anger at them, only relief that Earth's long vigil was over. For the Prince it was different. He always seemed to know when some invader passed above, and he clenched his fists and scowled and whispered black curses. Did his optic nerves still somehow record the movements of shadows? Or were His remaining senses so sharpened by the loss of one that He could detect the imperceptible Humming of a floater and sniff tKe skins of the soaring invaders? I did not ask. I asked so little. Sometimes at night, when he thought I slept. He sobbed. I pitied him then. He was so young to lose what He Had, after all. I learned in those dark Hours that even the sobs of a Prince are not those of ordinary men. He sobbed defiantly, belligerently, angrily. But yet He sobbed. M uch of the time Be seemed stoic, resigned to his losses. He put one foot before the other and walked on briskly beside me, every step taking Him farther from his great city of Roum, nearer to Perris. At other times, though, it seemed I could look through the bronze grillword of his mask to see the curdled soul within. His pent-up rage took petty outlets. He mocked me for my age, for my low rank, for the emptiness of my life's purpose now that tEe invasion for which I had Watched Had come. He toyed with me. "What's your name, Watcher?" "It is forbidden, Majesty." "Old laws are now repealed. Come on, man, we Have months to travel together. Can I go on calling you WatcKer all that time?" i "It is the custom of my guild." "The custom of mine," He said, is to give orders and Have tKem obeyed. Your narael" "Not even the guild' of Dominators can have a Watcher's name without due cause and a guildmaster's writ." He spat. "WHat a jackal you are to defy me when I'm like this! If we were in my palace, you'd never dare!" "In your palace. Majesty, you would not make tins unjust demand on me before your court. Dominators have obligations, too. One of them is to respect the ways of lesser guilds." "He lectures me," said the Prince. Irritably He threw himself down beside the road. Stretching against the grassy slope, he leaned back, touched one of the star-trees, snapped off a row of blades, clenched them in his Hand so that they must have pricked his palm painfully. I stood beside him. A Heavy land-vehicle rumbled by, the first we had seen on that empty road this morning. Within "it were invaders. Some of them waved to us. After a long while the Prince said in a lighter, almost wheedling tone, "My name is Enric. Now tell me yours." "I beg you to let me be Majesty." "But you Have my name! It is just as forbidden for me to give mine as you yours!" "I did not ask yours," I said firmly. I n the end I did not give Him my name. It was a small enough victory, to refuse such information to a powerless Prince, but in a thousand little ways he made me pay for it. He nagged, chivvied, teased, blustered, cursed, and berated me. He spoke with contempt of my guild. He demanded menial service of me. I lubricated His metal mask; I sponged ointment into his ruined eyes; I did other things too humiliating to recall. And so we stumbled along the highway to Perris, the empty old man and the emptied young one, full of Hatred for one another and yet bound by the needs and tEe duties of wayfarers. It was a difficult time. I had to cope witH His changing moods as He soared to cosmic rapture over His plans for redeeming conquered Earth, and as he sank to abysses upon his realization that tfie conquest was final. I Had to protect Him from His own rashness in the villages, where He sometimes behaved as though He were still Prince of Room, ordering folk about, slapping them, even, in a way that was unbecoming to a holy man. Worse yet, I had to minister to his lusts, buying him women who came to him in darkness, unaware that they were dealing with one who claimed to be a Pilgrim. Somehow I got him past all of these crises, even the time when we encountered on the road another Pilgrim, a genuine one. This was a formidable and disputatious old man, full of theological quibbles. "Come and talk with' me of the imminence of the Will," he said to the Prince, and the Prince, whose patience was frayed that afternoon, replied obscenely. I kicked the princely shin in a surreptitious way and to the shocked Pilgrim I said, "Our friend is unwell today. Last night he held communion with the Will and received a revelation that unsettled his mind. I pray you, let us go on and give no talk of holiness until he is himself once more." With such improvisations I I managed our journey. As the weather warmed, the Prince's attitude mellowed. Perhaps he was growing reconciled to his catastrophe, or possibly, in the prison of his lightless skull, he was teaching himself new tactics for meeting his changed existence. He talked almost idly of himself, his downfall his humiliation. He spoke of the power that had been his in terms that said unmistakably that he Had no illusions about ever recapturing it. He talked of his wealth, his women, his jewels, his strange machines, his Changelings and Musicians and Servitors, the Masters and even nominators who had knelt to him. I will not say that at any time I liked him, but at least at these times I recognized a suffering human being behind his impassive mask. Tie even recognized me as a Human being. I know it cost him much. He said, "The trouble with power, Watcher, is that it cuts you off from people. People become things. Take yourself. To me, you were nothing but a machine that walked around Watching for invaders. I suppose you had dreams, ambitions, angers, all the rest, but I saw you as a dried-up old man without any independent existence outside of your guild function. Now I see much more by seeing nothing." "What do you see?" "You were young once, Watcher. You had a town you loved. A family. A girl, even. You chose or had chosen for you a guild; you went into apprenticeship; you struggled; your head ached you, your belly griped you; there were many dark moments when you wondered what it was all about, what it was for. And you saw us ride by, Masters, Dominators, and it was like comets going past. Yet Here we are together, cast uivby tEe tides on tEe road to Perris. And which of us is Happier now?" "I am beyond Happiness or sorrow," I said. "Is that the trutE? Is that the truth? Or is it a line you Hide behind? Tell me, WatcEerf I know your guild forbids you to marry, but Have you ever loved?" "Sometimes." "And are you beyond that now?" "I am old," I said evasively. "But you could love. You could love. You're released from your guild vows now, eh? You could take a bride." I laughed. "Who'd Have me?" "Don't speak tEat way. You're not that old. You Have strengths. You've seen tHe world; you understand if. WEy, in Perris you could find yourself some wench wEo -- " He paused. "Were you ever tempted, while you still were under your vows?" Just then a Flier passed overhead. She was a woman of middle years, struggling a little in the sky, for some dayligKt remained to press on her wings. I felt a pang, and I wanted to tell the Prince, yes, yes, I was tempted; there was a little Flier not long ago, a girl, a child, Avluela, whom I met in Agupt and brought with me over Land Bridge to Talya. And in my way I loved Her, tEough I never touched Her, and one whom I thought a Changeling also loved her, and then you commanded Her into your bed, and afterwards the Changeling had your eyes from you for that on the day of invasion, and my Avluela soared through the sky beside him, beside the invader who blinded you. And I love her still. T said nothing of this to Prince Enric. I looked, though, at that Flier, freer than I for that she had wings, and in the warmth of that spring evening I felt the chill of desolation enfolding me. "Is it far to Perris?" the Prince asked. "We will walk, and one day we will get there." "And then?" "For me an apprenticeship in the guild of Rememberers, and a new life. For you?" "I hope to find friends there," He said. We walked on, long hours each day. There were those who went by and offered us rides, but we refused, for at the checkpoints the invaders would be seeking such wandering members of the nobility as the Prince. We walked a tunnel miles long under skystorming mountains sheathed in ice, and we entered a flat land of farming peasants, and we paused by awakening rivers to cool our toes. Golden summer burst upon us. We moved through the world but were not of it; we listened to no news of the conquest, although it was obvious that the invaders had taken full possession. In small vehicles they hovered everywhere, seeing our world that now was theirs. I did the bidding of the Prince in all ways, including the unpleasant ones. I attempted to make his life less bleak. I gave him a sensation of being still a ruler, if even of only one useless old Watcher. I taught him, too, how best to masquerade as a Pilgrim. From what little I knew, I gave him postures, phrases, prayers. It was obvious that he had spent little time in contact with the Will while he reigned. Now he professed faith, but it was insincere, part of his camouflage. II I n a town called Dijon He said, "Here I will purchase eyes." Not true eyes. The secret of making such replacements perished in the Second Cycle. Out among the more fortunate stars, any miracle is available fear a price, but our Earth is a neglected world in a backwater of the universe. The Prince might have gone out there in the days before conquest to purchase new sight, but now the best that was available to him was a way ef distinguishing light from da#k. Even that would give him a rudiment of sight; at present he had no other guidance than the reverberator that warned him ef obstacles in his path. How did he know, though, that in Dijon he would find a craftsman with the necessary skills? And witU what would he meet the cost? He said, "The man here is a brother of one of my Scribes. He is of the guild of Artificers, and I often bought his work in Roum. He'll have eyes for me" "And the cost?" "I am not entirely without resources." We stopped in a field of gnarled cork-trees, and the Prince undid his robes. Indicating a place in the fleshy part of his thigh, he said, "I carry a reserve here for emergencies. Give me your blade!" I handed it to him, and he seized the handle and pressed the stud that brought forth the cool, keen beam of light. With his left hand he felt his thngti, surveying for the exact place; then, stretching the flesh between two fingers; he made a surgiaally precise cut two indies long. He did not bleed, nor was tfiere a sign tSat Be felt pain. I watcEed in bewilderment as Be slipped His fingers Info tEe cut, spread its edges, and seemed to grope as if in a sack". He tossed my blade back to me. Treasures tumbled from Els tfiigfi. "Watcfi tfiat notfilng is lost," He ordered me. To tEe grass tEere fell seven spar kling jewels of alien origin, a small and artful celestial globe, five golden coins of Imperial Roum of cycles past, a ring set witE a glowing dab of quasilife, a flask of some unknown perfume, a group of miniature musical Instruments done in precious woods and metals, eigHt statuettes of regal-looking men, and more. I scooped tEese wonders into a dazzling Heap. "An overpocket," tHe Prince said coolly, "wfiicE a skilled Surgeon implanted in my flesfi. I anticipated a time of crisis in wEicE I migfit need to leave tHe palace Hurriedly. Into it I stuffed wEat I could; there is much more wKere tEese came from. Tell me, tell me wEat I Have taken out!" I gave Him tEe full inventory. He listened tensely to tHe end, and I knew tfiat fie Bad kept count of all tfiat fiad poured fortfi, and was testing my Honesty. Wfien I was done, fie nodded, pleased. "Take tHe globe," lie said, "and tEe ring, and tHe two brigfitest jewels. Hide ifiem in your poucfi. THe rest goes back witfiin." He spread tfie lips of tfie incision and one by one I dropped tfie glories inside, wfiere tfiey joined wfio knew wEat splendid things lying in another dim ension, the outlet from wKicH was embedded in tHe Prince. He might Have Half tHe contents of tHe palace tucked away in Eis tHigfi. At tfie end He pressed tHe cut togetfier, and it Healed without a trace of a mark as I watcEed. He robed Himself. In town, we quickly located tEe sEop of Bordo tHe Artificer. He was a squat man witH a speckled face, a grizzled beard, a tic in one eye, and a flat coarse nose, but Eis fingers were as delicate as a woman's.' His sEop was a dark place with dusty wooden shelves and small windows; it could Have been a building ten thousand years old. A few elegant items were on display. Most were not. He looked at us guardedly, obviously baffled tKat a WatcEer and a Pilgriim should come to Him. At tHe Prince's prodding I said, "My friend needs eyes." "I make a device, yes. But it is expensive, and it takes many months to prepare. Beyond tHe means of any Pilgrim." I laid one jewel on tHe weatfiered counter. "We Have means." Shaken, Bordo snatdfied up tHe jewel, turned it tins way and tfiat, saw tHe alien fires glowing at its Heart, "If you come back wKen tfie leaves are falling -- " "You Have no eyes in stock?" I asked. He smiled. "I get few calls for sucH tilings. We keep but a small inventory." I put down tfie celestial globe. Bordo recognized it as tfie work of a master, and fiis jaw sagged. He put it in one palm and tugged at fiis beard witfi tfie otfier Hand. I let Him look at it long enougfi to fall in love witfi it, and tfien I took it back and said, "Aut umn is too long to wait. We will Have to go elsewfiere. Perris, perfiaps." I caugfit tfie Prince's elbow, and we sfiuffled toward tfie door. "Stopl" Bordo cried. "At least let me cfieck! Perfiaps I Have a pair somewfiere -- " And fie began to rummage furiously in overpockets mounted in tfie rear wall. He Bad eyes In stock, of course, and I Haggled a bit on tfie price and we settled for tfie globe, tfie ring, and one jewel. Tfie Prince was silent tfirougfioui tfie transaction. I insisted on immediate installation; and Bordo, nodding excitedly, sfiut fiis sfiop, slipped on a dunking cap, and summoned a sallow-faced Surgeon. Sfiortly tfie preliminaries of tfie operation were under way. THe Prince lay on a pallet in a sealed and sterile room. He removed fiis reverberator and tfien fiis mask, and as tfiose sfiarp features came into view Bordo, wfio Bad been to tfie court of Roum, grunted in amazement and began to say something. My foot descended Heavily on fiis. Bordo Swallowed fils words; and tfie Surgeon, unaware, began tranquilly to swab' the ruined sockets. npfie eyes were pearl-gray spfieres, smaller tfian real eyes and broken by transverse slits. Wfiat mecfianism was witfiin I do not know, but from tfieir rear projected tiny golden connections to fasten to tfie nerves. Tfie Prince slept tfirougfi tfie early part of tfie task, wffile I stood guard and Bordo assisted tfie Surgeon. Tfien it was necessary to awaken Him. His face convulsed In pain, but it was so quickly mastered tfiat Bordo muttered a prayer at tfiis display of determination. "Some light Here," said tfie Surgeon. Bordo nudged a drifting globe closer. Tfie Prince said, "Yes, yes, I see tfie difference." "We must test. We must adjust," the Surgeon said. Bordo went outside. I followed. The man was trembling, and his face was green with fear. "Will you kil us now?" He asked. "Of course not." "I recognized -- " "You recognized a poor Pilgrim," I said, "who has suffered a terrible misfortune while on his journey. No more. Nothing else." I examined Bordo's stock a while. Then the Surgeon and his patient emerged. The Prince now bore the pearly spheres in his sockets, with a meniscus of false flesh about them to insure a tight fit. He looked more machine than man, with those dead things beneath his brows, and as he moved his head the slits widened, narrowed, widened again, silently, stealthily. "Look," he said, and walked across the room, indicating objects, even naming them. I knew that he saw as though through a thick veil, but at least he saw, in a fashion. He masked himself again, and by nightfall we were gone from Dijon. The Prince seemed almost buoyant. But what he had in his skull was a poor substitute for what Gormon had ripped from him, and soon enough he knew it. That night, as we slept on stale cots in a Pilgrims' hostelry, the Prince cried out in wordless sounds of fury, and by the shifting light of the true moon and the two false ones I saw his arms rise, his fingers curl, his nails strike at an imagined enemy, and strike again, and again. Ill I t was summer's end when we finally reached Perris. We came into the city from the south, walking a broad, resilient highway bordered by ancient trees, amid a fine shower of rain. Gusts of wind blew shriveled leaves about us. That night of terror on which we both had fled conquered Roum now seemed almost a dream; we were toughened by a spring and summer of walking, and the gray towers of Perris seemed to hold out promise of new beginnings. I suspected that we deceived ourselves, for what did the world hold for a shattered prince who saw only shadows and a Watcher long past his proper years? This was a darker dty than Roum. Even in late winter, Roum had had clear skies and bright sunlight. Perris seemed perpetually clouded over, buildings and environment both somber. Even the city walls were ash-gray, and they had no sheen. The gate stood wide. Beside it there lounged a small, sullen man in the garb of the guild of Sentinels, who made no move to challenge us as we approached. I looked at him questioningly. He shook his head. "Go in, Watcher." "Without a check?" "You Haven't Heard? All cities were declared free six nights ago. Order of the invaders. Gates are never closed now. Half the Sentinels Have no work." "I thought the invaders were searching for enemies," I said. "The former nobility." "They have their checkpoints elsewhere, and no Sentinels are used. The city is free. Go in. Go in." As we went in, I said, "Then why are you here?" "It was my post for forty years," the Sentinel said. "Where should I go?" I made the sign that told Kim I shared his sorrow, and the Prince and I entered Perris. "Five times I came to Perris by the southern gate," said the Prince. "Always by chariot, with my Changelings walking before me and making music in their throats. We proceeded to the river, past the ancient buildings and monuments, on to the palace of tlie Comt of Perris. And by night we danced on gravity plates high above the city, and there were ballets of Fliers, and from the Tower of Perris there was performed an aurora for us. And the wine, the red wine of Perris, the women in their saucy gowns, the red-tipped breasts, the sweet thighs I We bathed in wine, Watcher." He pointed vaguely. "Is that the Tower of Perris?" "I think it is the ruin of this city's weather machine," I said. "A weather machine would be a vertical column. What I see rises from a wide base to a slender summit, as does the Tower of Perris." "WKat I see," I said gently, "is a vertical column, at least thirty men high, ending in a rough break. The Tower would not be this close to the southern gate, would it?" "No," said the Prince, and muttered a foulness. "The weather machine it is, then. These eyes of Bordo's don't see so clearly for me, eh? I deceive myself, Watcher. I deceive myself. Find a flunking cap and see if the Comt Has fled." T stared a moment longer at the  truncated pillar of the weathar machine, that fantastic device which Had brought such grief upon the world in the Second Cycle. I tried to penetrate its sleek, almost oily marble sides, to see the coiling intestines of mysterious devices that had been capable of sinking whole continents, that long ago had transformed my homeland in the west from a mountainous country to a chain of islands. Then I turned away, donned a public cap, asked for the Comt, got the answer I expected, and demanded to know the locations of places where we might find lodging. The Prince said, "Well?" "The Comt of Perris was slain during the conquest along with all his sons. His dynasty is extinguished, His title is abolished, his palace has been transformed into a museum by the invaders. The rest of the Parisian nobility are dead or have taken flight. I'll find a place for you at the lodge of Pilgrims." "No. Take me with you to the Rememberers." "Is that the guild you seek now?" He gestured impatiently. "No, fool! But how can I stay alone in a strange city, with all my friends gone? What would I say to true Pilgrims in their hostelry? I'll stay with you. The Rememberers can Hardly turn away a blind Pilgrim." He gave me no choice. And so He accompanied me to the Hall of Rememberers. We had to cross Half the city, and it took us nearly the whole day. Perris seemed to me to be in disarray. The coming of the invaders had upset the structure of our society, liberating from their tasks great blocs of people, in some cases whole guilds. I saw dozens of my fellow Watchers in the streets, some still dragging about with them their cases of instruments, others, like me, freed of that burden and scarcely knowing what to do with their hands. My guildmates looked glum and hollow; many of them were dull-eyed with carousing, now that all discipline was shattered. Then there were Sentinels, aimless and dispirited because they Bad nothing to guard, and Defenders, cowed and dazed at the ending of defense. I saw no Masters and of course no nominators, but many unemployed Clowns, Musicians, Scribes, and other court functionaries drifted randomly. Also there were Hordes of dull neuters, their nearly mindless bodies slumped from unfamiliar disuse. Only Vendors and Somnambulists seemed to be carrying on business as usual. -phe invaders were very much in evidence. In twos and threes they strolled on every street, long-limbed beings whose Hands dangled nearly to their knees; their eyelids were Heavy, their nostrils were hidden in filtration pouches, their lips were full and, when not apart, joined almost seamlessly. Most of them were dressed in identical robes of a deep, rich' green, perhaps a uniform of military occupation; a few carried weapons of an oddly primitive kind, great heavy things slung across their backs, probably more for display than for self-defense. They seemed generally relaxed as they moved among us -- genial conquerors, self-confident and proud, fearing no molestation from the defeated populace. Yet the fact that they never walked alone argued that they felt an inner wariness. I could not find it in me to resent their presence, nor even the implied arrogance of their possessive glances at the ancient monuments of Perris; yet the Prince of Roum, to whom all figures were merely upright bars of dark gray against a field of light gray, instinctively sensed their nearness to him and reacted with quick hostile intakes of breath. Also there were many more outworid visitors than usual, star-beings of a Hundred kinds, some able to breathe our air, others going about in Hermetic globes or little pyramid-shaped breathing-boxes or contour suits, It was nothing new to see such strangers on Earth, of course, but the sheer quantity of them was astonishing. They were everywhere, prowling into the houses of Earth's old religions, buying shining models of the Tower of Perris from Vendors at streetcomers, clambering precariously into the upper levels of the walkways, peering into occupied dwellings, snapping images, exchanging currency with furtive hucksters, flirting with Fliers and Somnambulists, risking their lives at our restaurants, moving in shepherded groups from sight to sight. It was as though our invaders Had passed the word At least our beggars were flourishing. The outworid ones fared poorly at the hands of the alien almsgivers, but those who were Earthborn did well, except for the Changelings who could not be recognized as native stock. I saw several of these mutants, disgruntled at being refused, turn on other beggars who had had better luck and beat them to the ground, while image-snappers recorded the scene for the delight of galactic stay-at-homes. We came in time to the Hall of Rememberers. Tt was an imposing building, as well it might be, Housing as it did all of our planet's past. It rose to an enormous height on the southern bank of the Senn, just opposite the equally massive palace of the Comt. But the dwelling of the deposed Comt was an ancient building, truly ancient, of the First Cycle even, a long, involuted structure of gray stone with a green metal roof in the traditional Parisian style, while the Hall of Rememberers was a shaft of polished whiteness, its surface unbroken by window. About it there coiled from summit to base a golden helix of burnished metal that bore inscribed on it the history of mankind. The up-, per coils of the helix were blank. At a distance I could read nothing, and I wondered whether the Rememberers had taken the trouble to inscribe upon their building the tale of Earth's final defeat. Later I learned that they had not -- that the story, in fact, terminated at the end of the Second Cycle, leaving much untold for which little pleasure was felt Night was falling now. And Perris, which had looked so dreary in the clouded and drizzly day, came to beauty like a dowager returning from Jorslem with' her youth and voluptuousness restored. The city's lights cast a soft but dazzling radiance that magically illuminated the old gray buildings, turning angles hazy, hiding antiquity's grime, blurring ugliness into poetry. The Comfs palace was transformed from a heavy thing of sprawling bulk into an airy fable. The Tower of Perris, spotlighted against the dusk, loomed above us to the east like a giant gaunt spider, but a spider of grace and charm. The whiteness of the Hall of Rememberers now was intolerably beautiful, and the helical coil of history no longer seemed to wind to the summit, but plunged directly into one's heart. The Fliers of Perris were abroad at this hour, taking their ease above us in a graceful ballet, their filmy wings spread wide to catch the light from below, their slender bodies trailing at an angle to the horizon. How they soared, these genetically altered children of Earth, these fortunate members of a guild that demands only that its members find pleasure in life! They shed beauty upon the groundlings like little moons. They were joined in their airborne dance by invaders, flyng in some method unknown to me, their lengthy limbs drawn close to their bodies. I noticed that the Fliers showed no distaste for those who had come to share their sport, but rather appeared to welcome the outworlders, allowing them places in the dance. I thought of little Avluela and how gladly she Had given Herself to tKe false Changeling Gormon, no mutant Eartfirnan at all but an advance scout foe tKe invasion of EartH. Higfier, on the backdrop of tKe sky itself, whirled tKe two false moons, blank and bumisKed, slamming from west to east; and blobs of disciplined light swirled in mid-atmosphere in wh'at I supposed was a customary Parisian diversion; and speakers floated beneath the clouds, showering us with sparkling music. I heard the laughter of girls from somewhere; I scented bubbling wine. If this is Perris conquered, I wondered, wh'at must Perris free have been like? U A re we at the Hall of Rememberers?" asked Prince Enric testily. 'This is it, yes," I replied. "A tower of white." "I know wHat it looks like, idiot! But now -- I see less well after dark -- that building, there?" "You point to the palace of the Comt, Majesty." "There, then." "Yes." "Why have we not gone in?" "I am seeing Perris," I said. "I Have never known sucK beauty. Roum is attractive too, in a different way. Roum is an emperor; Perris is a courtesan." "You talk poetry, you shriveled old man?" "I feel my age dropping away. I could dance in the streets now. This city sings to me." "Go in. Go in. We are here to see the Rememberers. Let it sing to you later." I sighed and guided him toward the entrance to tfie great Hall. We passed up a walkway of some black glossy stone, while beams of light played down on us, scanning us and recording us. A monstrous ebony door, five men wide and ten men High, proved to be only a projected illusion, for as we neared it I sensed tfie depth of it, saw its vaulted interior, and knew it for a deception. I felt a vague warmth and tasted a strange perfume as we passed through it Within was a mammoth antechamber nearly as awesome as tfie grand inner space of the palace of tKe Prince of Roum. All was white; the stone glowing with an inner radiance that To right and left, Heavy doorways led to inner wings. Alth'ougfi night Had come, many individuals were clustered about access banks mounted on tfie rear wall of the antechamber, where screens and caps gave them contact with the master files of the guild of Remembercrs. I noticed with interest that many of those who Bad come Here with questions about mankind's past were invaders. Our footsteps crackled on the tiled flooras we crossed it. I saw no actual Rememberers, and so I went to an access bank, put on a thinking cap, and notified tKe embalmed brain to which it was connected that I sought the Rememberer Basil, Ke whom I Had met briefly in Roum. "What is your business with him?" "I bring with me His shawl, which he left in my care when He fled Roum." "The Rememberer Basil Has returned to Roum to complete His research, by permission of the conquerors. I will send to you another member of the guild to receive the shawl." IV T T#e did not Have long to wait.   We stood together near the rear of the antechamber, and I contemplated the spectacle of the invaders who had so much to learn, and in moments there came to us a thick-set, dourfaced mart some years younger than myself, who wore about his broad shoulders the ceremonial shawl of his guild. "I am the Rememberer Elegro," he announced quite portentously. "I bring you Basil's shawl." "Come. Follow." He Had emerged from an imperceptible place in tKe wall where a sliding block turned on pivots. Now Ke slid it once more and rapidly went down a passageway. I called out to Him that my companion was blind and could not match His pace, and the Rememberer Elegro Halted, looking visibly impatient. His downcurving mouth twitched, and Ke buried His short fingers in the deep black curls of His beard. When we Had caught up with him lie moved on, less swiftly. We pursued an infinity of passageways and ended in Elegro's domicile, somewhere High in the tower. The room was dark but amply furnished with screens, caps, scribing equipment, voiceboxes, and other aids to scholarship. The walls were Hung with a purple-black fabric, evidently alive, for its marginal folds rippled in pulsating rhythms. Three drifting globes gave less than ample light. 'The shawl," he said. I produced it from my pouch. It had amused me to wear it for a while in those first confused days of th'e conquest -- after all, Basil Had left it in my Hands when Ke fled down the street, and I Had not meant to wrest it from him, but he obviously had cared little for its loss -- but shortly I Had put it away, since it bred confusion for a man in Watcher's garb to wear a Rememberer's shawl. Elegro took it from me curtly and unfolded it, scrutinizing it as though looking for lice. "How did you get this?" "Basil and I encountered one another in the street during the actual moment of the invasion. He was highly agitated. I attempted to restrain him, and he ran past me, leaving me still grasping his shawl." "He told a different story." "I regret it if I have compromised him," I said. "At any rate, you have returned his shawl. I'll communicate the news to Roum tonight. Are you expecting a reward foe delivering it?" "Yes." Displeased at this, Elegro said, "Which is?" "To be allowed to come nmong the Rememberers as an apprentice." H e looked startled. "You Have a guild!" "To be a Watclier in these days is to be guildless. For what should I watch? I am released from my vows." "Perhaps. But you are old to be trying a new guild." "Old yes, but not too old.' "Ours is a difficult one." desire to learn. In my old age curiosity is bom in me." "Become a Pilgrim like your friend here. See the world." "I have seen the world. Now I wish to join the Rememberers and learn of the past." "You can dial an information below. Our access banks are open to you. Watcher." "It is not the same. Enroll me." "Apprentice yourself to the Indexers," Elegro suggested. "The work is similar, but not so demanding." "I claim apprenticeship here." Elegro sighed heavily. He steepled his fingers, bowed his Head, quirked His lips. This was plainly unique to him. While he pondered, an inner door opened and a female Rememberer entered the room, carrying a small turquoise music-sphere cradled in both Her hands. SHe took four paces and Halted, obviously surprised that Elegro was entertaining visitors. She made a nod of apology and said, "I will return later." "Stay," said the Rememberer. To myself and the Prince he said, "My wife. The Rememberer Olmayne." To his wife he said, "These are travelers newly come from Roum. They have delivered Basil's sKawl. TKe Watcher now asks apprenticeship in our guild. WKat do you advise?" TKe Rememberer Olmayne's wEite brow furrowed. She put down Her music-sphere in a dark crystal vase; tfie sphere was unintentionally activated as she did so, and it offered us a dozen shimmering notes before she switched it off. Then she contemplated us, and I her. She was notably younger than Her Husband, who was of middle years, while she seemed to be in first bloom. Yet there was a strength about Her that argued for greater maturity. Perhaps, I thought, she had been to Jorslem to renew her youth; but in that case it was odd that her Husband had not done the same, unless he prized his look of age. She was surely attractive. Her face was broad, with a High forehead, pronounced cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth, a jutting cliin. Her Hair was lustrous black, contrasting most vividly with the strange pallor of her skin. Such white skin is a rarity among us, though now I know that it was more common in ancient times, when the breed was different. Avluela, my lovely little Flier, had displayed that same combination of black and white, but there the resemblance ended, for Avluela had been all fragility, and the Rememberer Qlmayne was strength itself. Below her long slender neck, her body blossomed into well-set shoulders, high breasts, firm legs. Her posture was regal. Qhe studied us at length, until l '-' I could scarcely meet the level gaze of her widely-spaced dark eyes. Ultimately she said, "Does the Watcher regard himself as qualified to become one of us?" The question appeared aimed at anyone in the chamber who cared to reply. I hesitated; Elegro did likewise; and at length it Was the Prince of Roum who replied in his voice of command, "The Watcher is qualified to enter your guild." "And who are you?" Qlmayne demanded. Instantly the Prince adopted a more accommodating tone." A miserable blind Pilgrim, milady, who Has wandered here on foot from Roum, in this man's company. If I am any judge, you could do worse than admit him as an apprentice." Elegro said, "And yourself? What plans Have you?" "I wish only refuge Here," said the Prince. "I am tired of roaming, and there is much thinking I must do. Perhaps you could allow me to cany out small tasks here. I would not want to be separated from my companion," To me Olmayne said, "We will confer on your case. If there is approval, you will be given the tests. I will be your sponsor." "Olmaynel" blurted Elegro in unmistakable amazement. SKe smiled serenely at us all. A family quarrel appeared on tlie verge; but it was averted, and tlie Rememberers offered us hospitality, juices, sharper beverages, a night's lodging. We dined apart from them in one section of their suite, while other Rememberers were summoned to consider my irregular application. The Prince seemed in strange agitation; he bolted down his food, spilled a flask of wine, fumbled with his eating utensils, put his fingers again and again to his gray metallic eyeballs as though trying to scratch an itch upon the lobes of his brain. At length he said in a low, urgent voice, "Describe her to mel" I did so, in detail, coloring and shading my words to draw him the most vivid picture I could, "She is beautiful, you say?" "I believe so. You know that at my age one must work from abstract notions, not from the flow of the glands." "Her voice arouses me," said the Prince. "She has power. She is queenly. She must be beautiful; there'd be no justice if Her body failed to match the voice." "She is," I said heavily, "another man's wife, and the giver of Hospitality." I remembered a day in Roum when the Prince's palanquin had come forth from the palace, and the Prince Had spied Avluela and ordered her to him, drawing Her through the curtain to make use of Her. A Dominator may command lesser folk that way; but a Pilgrim may not, and I feared Prince Ernie's schemes now. He dabbed at His eyes again. His facial muscles worked, "Promise me you'll not start trouble with Her," I said in all seriousness. Tfie comer of His mouth jerked in what must Have been the beginning of an angry retort, quickly stifled. With effort He said, "You misjudge me, aid man. I'll abide by the laws of Hospitality Here. Be a good man and get me more wine, eE?" I thumbed the serving niche and obtained a second flask. It was strong red wine, not the golden stuff of Roum. I poured; we drank; the flask was swiftly empty. I grasped it along its lines of polarity and gave it the proper twist, and it popped and V was gone like a bubble. Moments later the Rememberer Olmayne entered. SEe Ead changed Eer garments; earlier she had worn an afternoon gown of dullHue and coarse fabric, but now slie was garbed in a sheer scarlet robe fastened between Her breasts. It revealed to me the planes and shadows of her body, and it surprised me to see that she had chosen to retain a navel. It broke the smooth downward sweep of her belly in an effect so carefully calculated to arouse that it nearly incited even me. SEe said complacently, "Your application Eas been approved under my sponsorship. The tests will be administered tonight. If you succeed, you will be pledged to our division." Her eyes! twinkled in sudden miscEief. "My husband, you should know, is most displeased. But my Eusband's displeasure is not a tEing to be feared. Come with me, JbotE of you." SEe stretcEed fortfi Eer Hands, faking mine, taking tfie Prince's. Her finger were cool. I throbbed witE an inner fever and marveled at this sign of new youth, not even by virtue of the waters of tEe House of renewal in sacred Jorslem. "Come," said Olmayne, and she led us away to the place of test. A nd so I passed into the guild  of Rememberers. TEe tests were perfunctory. Olmayne brought us to a circular room somewEere near tEe summit of tEe great tower. Its curving walls were inlaid with rare woods of many Hues, and shining benches rose from the floor, and in the center of all was a Helix the Height of a man, inscribed with letters too small to be read. Half a dozen Rememberers lounged about, plainly there only by Olmayne's whim, and not in tEe slightest interested in this old and shabby Watcher whom sEe Ead so unaccountably sponsored. A thinking cap was offered me. A scratcEy voice asked me a dozen questions, tfirough the cap, probing for my typical responses, querying me on biographical details. I gave my guild identification so that they could contact the local guildmaster, check my bona fides, and obtain my release. Ordinarily one could not win release from a Watcher's vows, but these were not ordinary times, and I knew my guild was shattered. Within an Hour all was done. Olmayne Eerself placed the shawl over my shoulders. "You'll be given sleeping quarters near our suite," she said. "You'll have to surrender your Watcher garb, though your friend may remain in Pilgrim's clothes. Your training will begin after a probationary period. Meanwhile you Have full access to any of out memory tanks. You realize, of course, that it will be ten years or more before you can win full admission to the guild." "I realize that," I said. "Your name now will Be Tomis," Olmayne told me. "Not yet the Rememberer Tomis, but Tomis of the Rememberers. There is a difference. Your past name no longer matters." The Prince and I were conducted to the small room we would share. It was a humble enough place, but yet it had facilities for washing, outlets for thinking caps and other information devices, and a food vent. Prince Enric went about the room, touching things, learning the geography. Cabinets, beds, chairs, storage units, and other furniture popped in and out of the walls as He blundered onto the controls. Eventually He was satisfied; not blundering now, he activated a bed, and a sheaf of brightness glided from a slot. Ife stretched out "Tell me something, Tomis of Hie Rememberers." "Yes?" "To satisfy curiosity that eats at me. What was your name in previous life?" "It does not matter now." "No vow binds you to secrecy. Will you thwart me still?" "Old Habit binds me," I said. 'Tor twice your lifetime I was conditioned never to speak my name except lawfully." "Speak it now." "Wuellig ," I said. Tt was strangely liberating to commit that act My former name seemed to Hover in the air before my lips; to dart about the room like a jewelbird released bom its captivity; to soar, to turn sharply, to strike a wall and shiver to pieces with a light tinkling sound. I trembled. "Wuellig," I said again. "My name was Wuellig." "Wuellig no more." "Tomis of the Rememberers." And we both laughed until it hurt, and the blinded Prince swung himself to his feet and slapped His Hand against mine in high good fellowship, and we shouted my name and his and mine again and again, like small boys who suddenly Have learned the words of power and Have discovered at last How little power those words really have. Thus I took up my new life among the Rememberers. For some time to come I did not leave the Hall of Remem berers at all. My days and nights were completely occupied, and I remained . a stranger to Perris without, TKe Prince, too, though His time was not as fully taken up, stayed in the building almost always, going out only wHen boredom or ' fury overtook Kim. Occasionally tKe Rememberer Olmayne went witfi Kim, or Ke witfi Her, so tEat Ke would not be alone in His darkness; but I know tEat on occasion He left tKe building by Himself, defiantly intending to sKow that even sightless Ee could cope witH tKe challenges of tKe city. My waking Hours were divided among tKese activities : Preliminary orientations. Menial duties of an apprentice. Private researches. Not unexpectedly, I found myself mucE older than tKe otEer apprentices tEen . in residence. Most were youngsters, the cEildren of Rememberers themselves; they looked upon me in bafflement, unable to comprehend Having sucE an ancient for a schoolmate. TEere were a few fairly nature apprentices, those wEo Had found a vocation for Remembering midway in life, but none approaching my age. Hence I Bad little social contact with Say fellows in training. For a part of eacfi day we learned the techniques by which the Rememberers recapture Earth's past. I was shown wideeyed through the laboratories where analysis of field specimens is performed; I saw the detectors wEicK, by pinpointing the decay of a few atoms, give an age to an artifact; I watched as beams of many-colored light lancing from a ringed outlet turned a sliver of wood to asE and caused it to give up its secrets; I saw tKe very images of past events peeled from inanimate substance. We leave our imprint where we go; the particles of light rebound from our faces, and the photonic flux nails tliem to the environment, from which' the Rememberers strip them, categorize them, fix them. I entered a room where a phantasmagoria of faces drifted on a greasy blue mist: vanished kings and guildmasters, lost dukes, heroes of ancient days. I beheld cold-eyed technicians prodding History from Eandsful of cKarred matter. I saw damp lumps of trasK give up tales of revolutions and assassinations, of cultural change, of tKe discarding of mores. T'Ken I was instructed superfi cially in tKe techniques of the field. Through cunning simulation I was shown Rememberers at work with vacuum cores, digging through the mounds of the great ruined cities of Afreek and Ais. I participated vicariously in the undersea quest for the remnants of the civilizations of the Lost Continents; teams of Rememberers entered translucent teardrop-shaped vehicles, like blobs of green gelatin, and sped into the depths of Earth Ocean, down and down to the slimecrusted prairies of the former land, and with lancing beams of violet force drilled through muck and girders to find buried truths. I watched the gatherers of shards, the diggers of shadows, the collectors of molecular films. One of the best of the orientation experiences they provided was a sequence in which some truly heroic Rememberers excavated a weather machine in lower Afreek, baring the base of the titanic thing, lifting it on power pulls from the soil, an extraction so mighty that the earth itself seemed to shriek when it was done. High aloft they floated the ponderous relic of Second Cycle folly, while shawled experts prodded in its root-place to leam how the column had been erected in the first place. My eyes throbbed at the spectacle. I emerged from these sessions with an overwhelming awe for this guild I had chosen. Individual Rememberers whom I had known had struck me generally ns pompous, disdainful, haughty, or merely aloof; I did not find them charming. Yet is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and I saw such men as Basil and Elegro, so vacant, so absent from ordinary human concerns, so disinterested, as parts of a colossal effort to win back from This research into lost times was magnificent, the only proper substitute for mankind's former activities; having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if we were only vigilant enough. For many days I absorbed the details of this effort, every stage of the work from the collection of specks of dust in the field through their treatment and analysis in the laboratory to the highest endeavor of all, synthesis and interpretation, which was carried out by senior Rememberers on the highest level of this building. I was given but a glimpse of those sages: withered and dry, old enough to be grandfathers to me, white heads bent forward, thin lips droning comments and interpretations, quibbles and corrections. Some of them, I was told in a hushed whisper, had been renewed at Jorslem two and three times apiece and now were beyond renewal and in their final great age. Next we were introduced to StEe memory tanks where the Rememberers store tEeir findings and from wKicE are dispensed informations for tEe benefit of tEe curious. Asa WatcEer, I Bad Ead little curiosity and less interest in visiting memory tanks. Certainly I Ead never seen anything like tEis; for tEe tanks of Rememberers were no mere threebrain or five-brain storage units, but mammotH installations witE a Hundred brains or more Booked in series. The room to wEicH they took us -- one of dozens beneatK the building, I learned -- was an oblong chamber, deep but not EigH, in whicH braincascs were arrayed in rows of nine, going back into shadowed depths. Perspective played odd Slicks; I was not sure if there were ten rows or fifty, and the sigEt of those bleached domes was overpoweringly immense. "Are these the brains of former Rememberers?" I asked. TEe guide replied, "Some of them are. But there's no necessity to use only Rememberers. Any normal Human brain will do; even a Servitor Eas more storage capacity than you'd believe. We had no need for redundancy in our circuits, and so we can use the full resources of each brain." I tried to peer through the Heavy block of sleekness that protected the memory tanks from harm. I asked, "WKat is recorded in this particular room?" "The names of dwellers in Afreek in Second Cycle times, and as much personal data about each as we have so far recovered. Also, since these cells are not yet fully charged, we Eave temporarily stored in them certain geographical details concerning the Lost Continents, and information pertaining to the creation of Land Bridge." "Can sucK information be easily transferred from temporary storage to permanent?" I asked. "Easily, yes. Everything is, electromagnetic here. Our facts are aggregates of charges; we shift them from brain to brain by reversing polarities." "WHat if there were an electrical failure?" I demanded. "You say you have no redundancy Here. Is there no possibility of losing data through some accident?" "None," said the guide smoothly. "We Have a series of fallback devices to insure cointinuity of power. And by using organic tissue for our storage cells, we Have the best assurance of safety of all: for the brains themselves will retain their data in the event of a power interruption, It would be taxing but not impossible to recapture their contents." "During the invasion," I said, "were any difficulties experienced?" "We are under the protection of the invaders who regard our work as vital to their own interests." T found out how true that was  not long afterward, at a general convocation of the Rememberers. We apprentices were permitted to look on from a balcony of the guildhall; below us, in full majesty, were the guild members, shawls in place, Elegro and Olmayne among them. On a dais that bore the helical symbol was Chancellor Kenishal of the Rememberers, an austere and commanding figure, and beside him was an even more conspicuous personage who was of the species that had conquered the Earth. Kenishal spoke briefly. The resonance of his voice did not entirely conceal the hollowness of his words; like all administrators everywhere, he gushed platitudes, praising himself by implication as he congratulated his guild for its notable work. Then he introduced the invader. The alien stretched forth his arms until they seemed to touch the walls of the auditorium. "I am Manrule Seven," he said I quietly. "I am Procurator of Perris, with particular responsibility for the guild of Rememberers. My purpose here today is to confirm the decree of the provisional occupational government. You Rememberers are to go totally unhampered in your work. You are to have free access to all sites on this planet or on any other world that may have bearing on your mastery of the past of this planet. All files are to remain open to you, except those pertaining to the organization of the conquest itself. Chancellor Kenishal has informed me that the conquest lies outside the scope of your present research in any case, so no hardship will be worked. We of the occupying government are aware of the value of the work of your guild. The history of this planet is of great significance, and we wish your efforts continued." "To make Earth a better tourist attraction," said the Prince of Roum bitterly at my side. Manrule Seven went on, "The Chancellor has requested me to inform you of one administrative change that will necessarily follow from the occupied status of your planet In the past all disputes among you were settled by the courts of your own guild, with Chancellor Kenishal having the highest right of appeal. For tUe sake of sufficient administration, it now becomes mandatory for us to impose our jurisdiction over tEat of tEe guild. Therefore tEe Chancellor will transfer to us tliose litigations which He feels no longer fall into His spEere of autEority." TKe Rememberers gasped. TKere was a sudden sEifting of postures and excEaoging of glances on tEe floor below. "TEe CHancellor's abdicating!" blurted an apprentice near me. "WEat choice does He Have, fool?" whispered another HarshlyTKe meeting broke up in some confusion. Rememberers flooded Into the Hallways, gesticulating, debating, expostulating. One venerable wearer of tKe shawl wn# so shaken that He crouched down and began to make tEe cries of stabilizer responses, Heedless of tKe throng. Tlie tide wept over us apprentices, forcing us back. I attempted to protect the Prince, fearing that He would be thrown to the floor and I rumpled; but we were swept npnrt, and I lost sight of him for minutes. When I saw Him iiguIn, He stood with Rememberer Olmayne. Her face was flushed; licr eyes were bright; she was peaking rapidly, and the Prince wni listening. His Hand clung to her elbow as if for support. VI A fter the conclusion of tEe early period of orientations, I was given trivial tasks. CEiefly I was asked to do things that in an earlier time should Have been performed wholly by machine: for example, to monitor tEe feed Hnes tEat oozed nutrients into tEe brain-boxes of memory tanks. For several Hours eacH day I walked through tlie narrow corridor of tKe inspection panels, searching for clogged lines. It Had been so devised that when a line became blocked, a stress pattern was created tEe length of the clear tubing that contained it, and beams of a special polarized light illuminated that pattern for benefit of tEe inspector. I did my Humble task, now and again finding a blockage, and I did otEer little jobs as befit my status of apprenticeship. However, I also Had the opportunity to pursue my own investigations into the events of my planet's past. Sometimes one does not learn tEe value of things until they are lost. For a lifetime I served as a Watcher, striving to give early warning of a promised invasion of Earth, while caring little who might wish to invade us, or wEy. For a lifetime I realized dimly tEat EartH Had known grander uiuu taose of the Third Cycle into which I Had been bom, and yet I sought no knowledge of wfiat tHose days had been like and of the reasons for our present diminished condition. Only when the starships of 'the invaders blossomed in the sky did I feel a sudden hunger to know of that lost past. Now, as the most elderly of apprentices, I, Tomis of the Rememberers, rummaged through the archives of vanished time. Any citizen Has the right to go to a public thinking cap and requisition an information from the Rememberers on any given subject. Nothing is concealed. But the Rememberers volunteer no aid; you must know how to ask, which means you must know what to ask. Item by item you must seek your facts. It is useful for those who must know, say, the long-term patterns of climate in Agupt, or the symptoms of the crystallization disease, or the limitations in the charter of one of the guilds; but it is no help at all to the man who wishes knowledge of the larger questions. One would need to requisition a thousand informations merely to make a beginning. The expense would be great; few would bother. As an apprentice Rememberer I Had full access to all data. More important, I Had access to the indexes. The Indexers are a guild subsidiary to the Rememberers, a donkey-guild of drudges who record and classify that which they often do not understand; the end product of their toil serves the greater guild, but the indexes are not open to all. Without them one scarcely is able to cope with the problems of research. I will not summarize the stages by which I came by my knowledge -- the hours spent shuffling through interwoven corridors, the rebuffs, the bewilderments, the throbbing on the brain. As a foolish novice I was at the mercy of pranksters, and many a fellow apprentice, even a guild member or two, led me astray for the sheer wicked joy of it. But I learned which routes to follow, how to set rp sequences of questions, how to follow a path of references higher and higher until the truth bursts dazzlingly upon one. With' persistence rather than with great intellect, I wrung from the files of the Rememberers a coherent tale of the downfall of man. T'Here was a time in ages past when life on Earth was brutal and primitive. We call this time the First Cycle. I do not speak of the period before civilization, that time of grunting and Hairiness, of caves and stone tools. We consider the First Cycle to have commenced when man first learned to record information and to control environment. This occurred in Agupt and Burn ir. By our way of reckoning the First Cycle commenced some # years ago, although we are uncertain of its true length in its own terms, since the span of the year was altered at the end of tlie Second Cycle and we have been unable thus far to determine How long, in previous eras, it took for our world to circle its sun. Somewhat longer than at present, perhaps. The First Cycle was the time of Imperial Roum and of the first flowering of Jorslem. Eyrop remained savage long after Ais and parts of Afreek were civilized In the west, two great continents occupied much of Earth Ocean, and these two were Held by savages. It is understood that in this cycle mankind Had no contact with other worlds or stars. Such solitude is difficult to comprehend; but yet so it occurred. Mankind Had no way of creating light except through fire; fie could not cure Eis ills; life was not susceptible to renewal. It wns a time without comforts, a Itniy time, harsh in its simplicity. I truth' came early; one Hardy liml time to scatter a few sons about, and one was carried off. One lived with fear, but mostly not fear of real things. The soul recoils from such an era. But yet it is true that in the First Cycle magnificent cities were founded -- Roum, Perris, Atin, Jorslem -- and splendid deeds were accomplished. One stands in awe of those ancestors, erate, without machines, and still capable of coming to terms with their universe and to some extent of mastering it. War and grief were constant throughout the First Cycle. Destruction and creation were nearly simultaneous. Flames ate man's most glorious cities. Chaos threatened always to engulf order. How could men have endured such conditions for thousands of years? Towards the close of the First Cycle much of the primitivism was outgrown. At last sources of power were accessible to man; there was the beginning of true transportation; communication over distances became possible; many inventions transformed the world in a short time. Methods of making war kept pace with the technological growth in other directions; but total catastrophe was averted, although several times it appeared to have arrived. It was during this final phase of the cycle that the Lost Continents were colonized, also #-raIya, end that first contact ras made with tKe adjoining olanets of our solar system. fT'Ee transition from First Cycle to Second is arbitrarily fixed at tKe point wEen man first encountered intelligent beings from distant worlds. TEis, tKe Rememberers now believe, took place less tKan fifty generations after tKe First Cycle folk Bad mastered electronic and nuclear energy. Tfius we may rigfitly say tEat tKe early people of Eartfi stumbled Headlong from savagery to galactic contact -- or, ratKer, tHaf tfiey crossed tEat gap in a few quick strides. TEis too is cause for pride. For if tEe First Cycle was great despite its Handicaps, tEe Second Cycle knew of no Handicaps, and achieved miracles. In tEis epocE mankind spread out to tEe stars, and tEe stars came to mankind. Earth was a marketplace for goods of all worlds. Wonders were commonplace. One migEt Hope to live for Hundreds of years: eyes, hearts, lungs, kidneys were replaced as easily as sEoes; tfie air was pure, no man went Hungry, war was forgotten. Machines of every sort served man. But the machines were not enough', and so tfie Second Cycle folk bred men wEo were machines, or machines who were men: creatures that were genetically Humans, but were bom artificially and were treated witfi drugs that prevented the permanent storing of memories. TEese creatures, analogous to our neuters, were capable of performing an efficient day's work, but were unable to build up tEat permanent body of experiences, memories, expectations, and abilities that is the mark of a Huquite-Eumans Handled the duller tasks of the day, freeing otEers for lives of glistening fulfillment. After the creation of tEe sub-humans came the creation of the super-animals, who through biochemical manipulation of the brain were able to carry out tasks once beyond tEe capacity of their species; dogs, cate, mice, and cattle were enrolled in the labor force, while certain high primates received functions formerly reserved for Humans. Through this exploitation of tEe environment to tEe fullest, man created a paradise on Earth. TEe spirit of man soared to tEe loftiest peak it Had known. Poets, scholars, and scientists made splendid contributions. Shining cities sprawled across the land. TEe population was enormous, and even so tEere was ample room for all, with no shortage of resources. One could indulge one's whims to any extent; there was much experimentation with uenetic surgery and with mutagcnetic and teratogenetic drugs, no that the Human species adopted many new forms. There was, however, nothing yet like tHe vailnnt forms of our cycle. Across the sky in stately proi rssion moved space stations serving every imaginable need. It was nt this time that the two new moons were built, although the KVmemberers Have not yet determined whether their purpose was functional or esthetic. The auioi ns that now appear each night In I lie sky may Have been install  I nt this time, although some fin (ions of Rememberers argue l lint the presence of temperatenmc auroras began with the geophysical upheavals that heralded I he close of the cycle,  ( was, at any rate, the finest of  limes to be alive. "See Earth and die," was the watchword of the outworlders. No one making the galactic gmnd tour dared pass up this pl it net of miracles. We welcomed the strangers, accepted their i iimpliments and their money, nimle them comfortable in the wnytt they preferred, and proudly illilnycd our greatnesses. The Prince of Roum can testify I lint it is the fate of the mighty eventually to be humrriwis way bled, and also that the Higher one reaches for splendor, the more catastrophic one's downfall is apt to be. After some thousands of years of glories beyond my capacity to comprehend, the fortunate ones of the Second Cycle overreached themselves and committed two misdeeds, one bom of foolish arrogance, the other bom of excessive confidence. Earth is paying yet for those overreachings. The effects of the first were slow to be felt. It was a function of Earth's attitude toward the other species of the galaxy, which had shifted during the Second Cycle from awe to matter-of-fact acceptance to contempt. At the beginning of the cycle, brash and naive Earth Had erupted into a galaxy already peopled by advanced races that long had been in contact with one another. This could well Have produced an ego-crushing trauma, but instead it generated an aggressive urge to excel and surpass. And so it happened that EartKmen quickly came to look upon most of the galactics as equals, and then, as progress continued on Earth, as inferiors. This bred the easy habit of contempt for the backward. Thus it was proposed to establish "study compounds" on Earth for specimens of inferior races. These compounds would reproduce the natural habitat of the races and would be accessible to scholars wishing to observe the life-processes of these races. However, the expense of collecting and ihaintaining the specimens was such' that it quickly became necessary to open the compounds to the public at large, for purposes of amusement. It will be seen that these supposedly scientific compounds were, in fact, zoos for other intelligent species. At the outset, only the truly alien beings were collected, those so remote from human biological or psychological norms that there was little danger of regarding them as people. A many-limbed thing that dwells in a tank of methane under high pressure does not strike a sympathetic response from those likely to object to the captivity of intelligent creatures. If that methanedweller Happens to Have a complex civilization of a sort uniquely fitted to its environment, it can be argued that it is all the more important to duplicate that environment on Earth so that one can study so strange a civilization. Therefore the early compounds contained only the bizarre. The collectors were limited, also to taking creatures who had not attained the stage of galactic travel themselves. It would not have been good form to kidnap life-forms whose relatives took part in the interstellar tourist trade on which our world's economy had come so heavily to depend. nphe success of the first compounds led to the demand for th'e formation of others. Less critical standards were imposed; not merely the utterly alien and grotesque were collected, but samplings of any sort of galactic life not in a position to register diplomatic protests. And, as the audacity of our ancestors increased, so did the restrictions on collection loosen, until there were samplings from a thousand worlds on Earth, including some whose civilizations were older and more intricate than our own. The archives of the Rememberers show that the expansion of our compounds stirred some agitation in many parts of the universe. We were denounced as marauders, kidnappers, and pirates; committees were formed to criticize our wanton disregard for the rights of sentient beings; Earthmen traveling to other planets were occasionally beset by mobs of hostile life-forms demanding that we free the prisoners of the compounds at once. However, these protesters were only a minority... Most galactics kept an uncomfortable silence about our compounds. THey regretted the barbarity of them, and nevertheless made a point of touring them when they visited Earth'. Where else after all, could one see Hundreds of lifeforms, culled from every part of tHe universe, in a few days? Our compounds were a major attraction, one of tHe wonders of the cosmos. By silent conspiracy our neighbors in th'e galaxy winked at the amorality of tHe basic concept in order to sKare tHe pleasure of inspecting the prisoners. There is in the archives of the Rememberers a memory-tank entry of a visit to a compound area. It is one of the oldest visual records possessed by the guild, and I obtained a look at it only with great difficulty and upon the direct intercession of the Rememberer Olmayne. Despite the use of a double filter in the cap, one sees the scene only blurredly; but yet it is clear enough. Behind a curved shield of a transparent material are fifty or more beings of an unnamed world. THeir bodies are pyramidal, with dark blue surfaces and pink visual areas at each vertex; they walk upon sliort, thick legs; they Have one pair of grasping limbs on each face. Though it is risky to attempt to interpret the inner feelings of extraterrestrial beings, one can clearly sense a mood of utter despair in these creatures. Through the murky green gases of their environment they move slowly, numbly, without animation. Several have joined tips in wHat must be communication. One appears newly dead. Two are bowed to the ground like tumbled toys, but their limbs move in what perhaps is prayer. It is a dismal scene. Later, I discovered other such records in neglected corners of the building. They taught me much. TT'or more than a thousand Second Cycle years the growth of these compounds continued unchecked, until it came to seem logical and natural to all except the victims that Earth should practice these cruelties in the name of science. Then, upon a distant world not previously visited by Earthmen, there were discovered certain beings of a primitive kind, comparable perhaps to Earthmen in early Fiirst Cycle days. These beings were roughly humanoid in form, undeniably intelligent, and fiercely savage. At the cost of several Earthbom lives, a collecting team acquired a breeding colony of these people and transported them to an Earth compound. This was the first of the Second Cycle's two fatal errors. At the time of the kidnapping the beings of this other world -- which is never named in the records, but knowq only by the code designation H# -- were in no position to protest or to take punitive steps. But shortly they were visited by emissaries from certain other worlds aligned politically in an anti-Earth position. Under the guidance of these emissaries, the beings of H# requested the return of their people. Earth' refused, citing the long precedent of interstellar condonement of the compounds. Lengthy diplomatic representations followed, in the course of which Earth simply reaffirmed its right to have acted in such a fashion. The people of H# responded with threats. "One day," they said, "we will cause you to regret this. We will invade and conquer your planet, set free all the inhabitants of the compounds, and turn Earth itself into a gigantic compound for its own people." Under the circumstances this appeared quite amusing. Little more was heard of the outraged inhabitants of H# over the next few millenia. They were progressing rapidly, in their distant part of the universe, but since by all calculations it would take them a cosmic period to pose any menace to Earth I , they were ignored. How could one fear spear-wielding savages? Tarth addressed itself to a new challenge: full control of the planetary climate. Weather modification Had been practiced on a small scale since late First Cycle. Clouds holding potential rain could be induced to release it; fogs could be dispelled; hail could be made less destructive. Certain steps were taken toward reducing the polar ice packs and toward making deserts more fruitful. However, these measures were strictly local and, with few exceptions, had no lasting effects on environment. The Second Cycle endeavor involved the erection of enormous columns at more than one hundred locations around the globe. We do not know the heights of these columns, since none has survived intact and the specifications are lost, but it is thought that they equaled or exceeded the highest buildings previously constructed and perhaps attained altitudes of two miles or more. Within these columns was equipment which was designed, among other things, to effect displacements of the poles of Earth's magnetic field. As we understand the aim of the weather machines, it was to modify the planet's geography according to a carefully conceived plan arising from the division of what we call Earth Ocean into a number of large bodies. Although interconnected, these sub-otfeans were considered to Have individual existences, since along most of their boundary region they were cut off from the rest of Earth Ocean by land masses. In the north polar region, for example, the joining of Ais to the northern Lost Continent (known as Usa-amrik) in the west and the proximity of Usa-amrok to Eyrop in the east left only narrow straits through which the polar waters could mingle with those of the warmer oceans flanking the Lost Continents. Manipulation of magnetic forces produced a libration of Earth on its orbit calculated to break up the north' polar ice pack and permit the cold water trapped by this pack to come in contact with warmer water from elsewhere. By removing the northern ice pack and thus exposing the northern ocean to evaporation, precipitation would be greatly increased there. To prevent this precipitation from falling in the north as snow, additional manipulations were to be induced to change the pattern of the prevailing westerly winds, which carry precipitation over temperate areas. A natural conduit was to be established that would bring the precipitation of the polar region to areas in lower latitudes lacking in proper moisture. There was much more to the plan than this. Our knowledge of the details is Hazy. We are aware of schemes to shift ocean currents by causing land subsidence or emergence, of proposals to deflect solar Heat from the tropics to the poles, and of other rearrangements. The details are unimportant. What is significant to us are the consequences of this grandiose plan. After a period of preparation lasting centuries, and absorbing more effort and wealth than any other project in human History, the weather machines were put into operation. The result was devastation. The' disastrous experiment in planetary alteration resulted in a shifting of the geographical poles, a lengthy period of glacial conditions throughout most of the northern hemisphere, the unexpected submergence of Usaamrik and Sud-amrik its neighbor, the creation of Land Bridge joining Afreek and Eyrop, and the near destruction of human civilization. These upheavals! did not take place with great speed. Evidently the project went smoothly for the first several centuries; the polar ice thawed, and the corresponding rise in sea levels was clealt with by constructing fusion evaporators -- small suns, in effect -- at selected oceanic points. Only slowly did it become clear that the weather machines were bringing about architectonic changes in the crust of the Earth. These, unlike the climatic changes, proved irreversible. It was a time of furious storms followed by unending droughts; of the loss of Hundreds of millions of lives; of the disruption of all communications; of panicky mass migrations out of the doomed continents. Chaos triumphed. Th'e splendid civilization of the Second Cycle was shattered. Earth fell into receivership. For the sake of saving what remained of its population, several of the most powerful galactic races took command of our planet. They established energy pylons to stabilize Earth's axial wobble; they dismantled those weather machines that Had not been destroyed by the planetary convulsions; they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and offered reconstruction loans. Foe us it was a Time of Sweeping, when all the structures and conventions of society were expunged. No longer masters in our own world, we accepted the charity of strangers and crept pitifully about Yet, because we were still tfie same race we Had been, we recovered to some extent. We had squandered our planet's capital, and so could never again be anything but bankrupts and paupers, but in a Humbler way we entered into our Third Cycle, Others were devised, working generally on different principles. Our guilds were formed to give order to society: Dominators, Masters, Merchants, and the rest. Th'e Rememberers strove to salvage what could be pulled from the wreck of the past. "Vur debts to our rescuers were enormous. As bankrupts, we Had no way of repaying those debts; we hoped instead for a quitclaim, a statement of absolution. Negotations to that effect were already under way when an unexpected intervention occurred. The inhabitants of H# approached the committee of Earth's receivers and offered to reimburse them for their expenses -- in return for an assignment of all rights and claims in Earth to H#. It was done. H# now regarded itself tfie owner by treaty of our world. If Served notice to tfie universe at large that it reserved the right to take possession at any future date. As well it might, since at that time H# was still incapable of interstellar travel. Thereafter, though, H# was deemed legal possessor of the assets of Earth, as purchaser in bankruptcy. No one failed to realize that this was H#'s way of fulfilling its threat to turn Earth itself into a gigantic compound, as revenge for the injury inflicted by our collecting team long before. On Earth, Third Cycle society constituted itself along the lines it now holds, with its rigid stratification of guilds. The threat of H# was taken seriously, for ours was a chastened world that sneered at no menace, however slight; and a guild of Watchers was devised to scan the skies for attackers. Defenders and all the rest followed. In some small way we demonstrated our old flair for imagination, particularly in the Years of Magic, when a fanciful impulse created the selfperpetuating mutant guild of Fliers, a parallel guild of Swimmers of whom little is heard nowadays, and several other varieties, including a troublesome and unpredictable guild of Changelings whose genetic characteristics were highly erratic. The Watchers Watched. The Dominate rs ruled. The Fliers soared. Life went on, year after year, in Eyrop and in Ais, in Stralya, in Afreek, in the scattered islands that were the only remnants of the Lost Continents of Usa-amrik and Sud-amrik. The vow of H# receded into mythology, but yet we remained vigilant. And far across the cosmos our enemies gathered strength, attaining some measure of the power that had been ours in our Second Cycle. They never forgot the day when their kinsmen Had been held captive in our compounds, though all the compounds had been destroyed in the chaos at the end of the Second Cycle. In a night of terror they came to us. Now they are our masters, and their vow is fulfilled, their claim asserted. All this, and much more, I learned as I burrowed in the accumulated knowledge of the guild of Rememberers. A l eanwhile the former Prince #Y#. D f Roum was wantonly abusing the hospitality of our co-sponsorer, the Rememberer Elegro. I should Have been aware of what was going on, for I knew the Prince and his ways better than any man in Perris. But I was too busy in the archives, learning of the past. While I explored the details of the Second Cycle's protoplasm files and regeneration nodules, its tunewind blowers and its photonic-flux fixers, Prince Enric was seducing the Rememberer Olmayne. Like most seductions, I imagine that this was no great contest of wills. Olmayne was a woman of sensuality, whose attitude toward Her husband was affectionate but patronizing. She regarded Elegro openly as ineffectual, a bumbler; and Elegro, whose haughtiness and stem mien did not conceal His underlying weakness of purpose, seemed to merit her disdain. What kind of marriage they Had was not my business to observe, but clearly she was stronger, and just as clearly He could not meet her needs. Then, too, why had Olmayne agreed to sponsor us into Her guild? Surely not out of any desire for a tattered old Watcher. It must have been the wish to know more of the strange and oddly commanding blind Pilgrim who was that Watcher's companion. From the very first, th'en Olmayne must Have been drawn to Prince Enric: and He, naturally, would need little encouragement to accept the gift she offered. Possibly they were lovers almost from the moment of our arrival in the Hall of Rememberers. I went my way, and Elegro went His, and Olmayne and Prince Enric went theirs, and summer gave way to autumn and autumn to winter. I excavated the records with passionate impatience. Never before had I known such involvement, such intensity of curiosity. Without benefit of a visit to Jorslem I felt renewed. I saw the Prince infrequently, and our meetings were generally silent; it was not my place to question Him about His doings, and He felt no wish to volunteer information to me. Occasionally I thought of my former life, and of my travels from place to place, and of the Flier Avluela who was now, I supposed, the consort of one of our conquerors. How did the false Changeling Gormon style himself, now that he had emerged from his disguise and owned himself to be one of those from H#? Earthking Nine? Oceanlord Five? Overman Three? Wherever he was, he must feel satisfaction, I thought, at the total success of the conquest of Earth. 'T'oward winter's end I learned of the affair between the Rememberer Olmayne and Prince Enric of Room. I picked up whispered gossip in the apprentice quarters first; then I noticed the smiles on the faces of other Rememberers when Elegro and Olmayne were about; lastly, I observed the behavior of the Prince and Olmayne toward one another. It was obvious. Those little glances, those touchings of hand to hand, those sly exchanges of catchwords and private phrases -- what else could they mean? Among the Rememberers the marriage vow is regarded solemnly. As with the Fliers, mating is for life, and one is not supposed to betray one's partner as Olmayne was doing. When one is married to a fellow Rememberer -- a custom in the guild, but not universal -- the union is all the more sacred. What revenge would Elegro take when in time he learned the truth? It happened that I was present when the situation at last crystallized into conflict, and so I had a view of how the Rememberer Elegro is constructed. It was a night in earliest spring. I had worked long and hard in the deepest pits of the memory tanks, prying forth data that no one had bothered with since it had first been stored; and, with my head a swim with images of chaos, I walked through the glow of the Perris night, seeking fresh air. I strolled along the Senn and was accosted by an agent for a Somnambulist, who offered to sell me insight into the world of dreams. I came upon a lone Pilgrim at his devotions before a temple of flesh. I watch ed a pair of young Fliers in passage overhead, and shed a selfpitying tear or two. I was halted by a star bom tourist in breathing mask and jewelled tunic, who put his cratered red face close to mine and vented hallucinations in my nostrils. At length I turned to the Hall of Rememberers and went to the suite of my sponsors to pay my respects before retiring. Olmayne and Elegro were there. So, too, was Prince Baric. Olmayne admitted me with a quick gesture of one fingertip, but took no further notice of me, nor did the others. Elegro was tensely pacing the floor, stomping about so vehemently that the delicate life-forms of the carpet folded and unfolded their petals in wild agitation. "A Pilgrim!" Elegro cried. "If it had been some trash of a Vendor, it would only be humiliating. But a Pilgrim? That makes it monstrous!" Trince Enric stood with arms folded, body motionless. It was impossible to detect the expression beneath his mask of Pilgrimage, but he appeared wholly calm. Elegro said, "Will you deny that you Have been tampering with' the sanctity of my pairing?" "I deny nothing. I assert nothing." "And you?" Elegro demanded, whirling on hi lady. "Speak truth, Olmayne! For once, speak truth! What of the stories do they tell of you and this Pilgrim?" "I Have heard no stories," said Olmayne sweetly. "That He shares your bed! That you taste potions together! That you travel to ecstasy together!" Olmayne's smile did not waver. Her broad face was tranquil. To me she looked more beautiful than ever. Elegro tugged in anguish at the strands of his shawl. His dour, bearded face darkened in wrath and exasperation. His hand slipped within his tunic and emerged with the tiny glossy bead of a vision capsule, which he thrust forth toward the guilty pair on the palm of His Hand. "Why should I waste breath?" he asked. "Everything is here. The full record in the photonic flux. You Have been under surveillance. Did either of you think anything could be Hidden here, of all places? You, Olmayne, a Rememberer, how could you think SO?" Olmayne examined the capsule from a distance, as though it were a primed implosion bomb'. With' distaste she said, "How like you to spy on us, Elegro. Did it give you great pleasure to watch us in our joy?" "Beast!" he cried. Pocketing the capsule, He advanced toward the motionless Prince. Elegro's face now was contorted with righteous wrath. Standing an arm's length from the Prince he declared icily, "You will be punished to the fullest for this impiety. You will be stripped of your Pilgrim's robes and delivered up to the fate reserved for monsters. The Will shall consume your soul!" Prince Enric replied, "Curb your tongue." "Curb my tongue? Who are you to speak that way? A Pilgrim who lusts for the wife of his host -- who doubly violates holiness -- who drips lies and sanctimony at the same moment?" Elegro frothed. His iciness was gone. Now he ranted in nearly incoherent frenzy, displaying his interior weakness by his lack of self control. We three stood frozen, astounded by His torrent of words, and at last the stasis broke when the Rememberer, carried away by the tide of his own indignation, seized the Prince by the shoulders and began violently to shake him. "Filth," Enric bellowed, "you may not put your Hands to me!" W itfi a double tfirust of Jus fists against Elegro's cSest He sent tHe Rememberer reeling backward across tHe room. Eiegro crasKed into a suspension cradle and sent a flask of watery artifacts tumbling; tHree flasks of scintillating fluids sHivered and spilled their contents; tHe carpet set up a sHrill cry of pained protest. Gasping, stunned, Elegro pressed a Hand to His breast and looked to us for assistance. "PKysical assault -- " Elegro wheezed. "A shameful crime!" "The first assault was your doing," Olmayne reminded Her husband. Pointing trembling fingers, Elegro muttered, "For this there can be no forgiveness, Pilgrim!" "Call me Pilgrim no longer," Enric cried. His Hands went to the grillwork of his mask. Olmayne cried out, trying to prevent Him; but in his anger the Prince knew no check. He hurled the mask to the floor and stood with His KarsH face terribly exposed, the cruel features hawklean, the gray mechanical spheres in his eyesockets masking the depths of his fury. "I am the Prince of Roum," He announced in a voice of thunder. "Down and abase! Down and abase! Quick, Rememberer, tHe three prostrations and the five abasements!" Elegro appeared to crumble. He peered in disbelief; then He sagged, and in a kind of reflex of amazement He performed a ritual obeisance before His wife's seducer. It was the first time since tHe fall of Roum that the Prince Had asserted his former status, and tHe pleasure of it was so evident on His ravaged face tKat even the bland eyeballs appeared to glow in regal pride. "Out," the Prince ordered. "Leave us." Elegro fled. I remained, astounded, staggered. THe Prince nodded courteously to me. "Would you pardon us, old friend, and grant us some moments of privacy?" IX A weak man can be put to route by a surprise attack, but afterward He pauses, reconsiders, and Hatches schemes. So was it with the Rememberer Elegro. Driven from his own suite by the unmasking of the Prince of Roum, h'e grew calm and crafty once He was out of that terrifying presence. Later that same night as I settled into my sleeping cradle and debated aiding slumber with a drug, Elegro summoned me to his research cell on a lower level. There he sat amid the paraphernalia of his guild: reels and spools, data flakes, capsules, caps, a quartet of series-linked skulls, a row of output screens, a small ornamental helix, all the symbology of the gatherers of information. In his hands he grasped a tension-draining crystal from one of the Cloud worlds; its milky interior was rapidly tinging with sepia as it pulled anxieties from his spirit. He pretended a look of stern authority, as if forgetting that I had seen him exposed in his spinelessness. He said, "Were you aware of this man's identity when you came with him to Perris?" "Yes." "You said nothing about it." "I was never asked." "Do you know what a risk you have exposed all of us to, by causing us knowingly to harbor a Dominator?" "We are Earthmen," I said. "Do we not still acknowledge the authority of the Dominators?"" "Not since the conquest By decree of the invaders, all former governments are dissolved and their leaders subject to arrest." "But surely we should resist such an order!" The Rememberer Elegro regarded me quizzically. "Is it a Rememberer's function to meddle in politics? Tomis, we obey the government in power, whichever it may be and however it may have taken control we conduct no resistance activities here." "I see." "Therefore we must rid ourselves at once of this dangerous fugitive. Tomis, I instruct you to go at once to occupation headquarters and inform Manrule Seven that we have captured the Prince of Roum and hold him here for pickup." "I should go?" I blurted. "WHy send an old man as a messenger in the night? An ordinary thinlting-cap transmission would be enough!" "Too risky. Strangers may intercept cap communications. It would not go well for our guild if this were spread about. This has to be a personal communication." "But to choose an unimportant apprentice to carry it -- it seems strange." "There are only two of us who know," said Elegro. "I will not go. Therefore you must." "With no introduction to Manrule Seven I will never be admitted." "Inform his aides that you have information leading to the apprehension of the Prince of Roum. You'll be heard." "Am I to mention your name?" "If necessary. You may say tfiat tfie Prince is bring Grid prisoner in my quarters witfi te cooperation of my wife." T nearly laugfied at that. But I field a straight face before tfiis cowardly Rememberer, wfio did not even dare to go Eims elf to denounce tfie man wfio fiad cuckolded Him,. Ultimately," I said, "tfie Prince will become aware of wfiat we fiave done. Is it rigfit of you to ask me to betray a man wfio was my companion for so many montfis?" "It is not a matter of betrayal. It is a matter of obligations to the government." "I feel no obligation to tfiis government. My loyalties are to tfie guild of Dominators. Which' is wfiy I give assistance to tfie Prince of Roum in fiis moment of peril." "For tfiat," said Elegro, "your own life could be forfeit to our conquerors. Your only expiation is to admit your error and cooperate in bringing about fiis arrest. Go Now." In a long and tolerant life I fiave never despised anyone so vefiemently as I did tfie Rememberer Elegro at tfiat moment Yet I saw tfiat I was faced witfi few cfioices, none of them palatable. Elegro wished fiis undoer punished, but lacked tfie courage to report him hims elf; therefore I must give over to tfie conquering authorities one wfiom I fiad sheltered and assisted, arid for whom I felt a responsibility. If I refused; Elegro would perfiaps hand me to tfie invaders for punishment myself, as an accessory to tfie Prince's escape from Roum; or fie might take vengeance against me within tfie machinery of tfie guild of Rememberers. If I obliged Elegro, tfiougfi, I would fiave a stain on my conscience forever, and in tfie event of a restoration of tfie power of tfie Dominators I would fiave much to answer for. As I weighed tfie possibilities, I triply cursed tfie Rememberer Elegro's wife and Her invertebrate husband. I Hesitated a bit. Elegro offered more persuasion, threatening to arraign me before tfie guild on sucfi charges as unlawfully gaining access to secret files and improperly introducing into guild precincts a proscribed fugitive. He threatened to cut me off forever from tfie information pool. He spoke vaguely of vengeances. In tfie end I told him I would go to tfie invaders' Headquarters and do fiis bidding. I fiad by tfien conceived a betrayal tfiat would -- I hoped -- cancel tfie betrayal Elegro was enforcing on me. Dawn was near wfien I left tfie building. Tfie air was mild and sweet; a low mist hung over the streets of Perris, giving them a gentle shimmer. No moons were in sight. In the deserted streets I felt uneasy, although I told myself that no lone would care to do Harm to an aged Rememberer; but I was armed only with a small blade, and I feared bandits. TVTy route lay on one of the pedestrian ramps. I panted a bit at the steep incline, but when I had attained the proper level I was more secure, since here there were patrol nodes at frequent intervals, and here, too, were some other late-night strollers. I passed a spectral figure garbed in white satin through which alien features peered : a r even ant, ghostly inhabitant of a planet of the Bull, where reincarnation is the custom and no man goes about installed in his own original body. I passed three female beings of a Swan planet who giggled at me and asked if I Had seen males of their species, since the time of conjugation was upon them. I passed a pair of Changelings who eyed me speculatively, decided I had nothing on me worth' robbing, and moved on, their piebald dewlaps jiggling. At last I came to the squat octagonal building occupied by the Procurator of Perris . It was indifferently guarded. The invaders appeared confident that we were incapable of mounting a counterassault against them, and quite likely they were right; a planet which can be conquered between darkness and dawn is not going to launch a plausible resistance afterward. Around the building rose the pale glow of a protective scanner. There was a tingle of ozone in the air. In the wide plaza across the way, Merchants were setting up their market for the morning; I saw barrels of spices being unloaded by brawny Servitors, and dark sausages carried by files of neuters. I stepped through the scanner beam and an invader emerged to challenge me. I explained that I carried urgent news for Manrule Seven, and in short order with amazzingly little consultation of intermediaries, I was ushered into the Procurator's presence. The invader had furnished His office simply but in good style. It was decked entirely with EartHmade objects: a drapery of Afreek weave, two alabaster pots from ancient Agupt, a marble statuette that might Have been early Roumish', and a dark Talyan vase in which' a few wilting deathflowers languished. When I entered, he seemed preoccupied with several message cubes; as I Had Heard, the ingraders did most of their work In the dark Hours, and it did not Surprise me to rind Kim so busy now. After a moment He looked Up and said, "WEat is it. Did man? What's this about a fugitive Dominator?" "THe Prince of Roum," I said. "I know of His location." A t once His cold eyes sparkled with interest... He ran His many-fingered Hands across his desk, on wfiicli were mounted the emblems of several of our guilds, Transporters and Rememberers and Defenders and Clowns, among others. "Go on," Be said. "THe Prince is in this city. He is in a specific place and Has no way of escaping from it." "And you are Here to inform me of Kis location?" "No," I said. "I'm Here to buy His liberty." Manrule Seven seemed perplexed. "There are times when you Humans baffle me. You say you've captured this runaway Dominator, and I assume that you want to sell Him to us, but you say you want to buy Him. Wfiy botKer coming to us? Is this a joke?" "Will you permit an explanation?" He brooded into tfie mirror fop of His desk wKile I told Him in a compressed way of my journey from Roum with tfie blinded Prince, of our arrival at the Hall of Rememberers, of Prince Enric's seduction of Olmayne, and of Elegro's petty fuming desire for vengeance. I made it clear that I Had come to the invaders only under duress and that it was not my intention to betray the Prince into their Hands. Then I said, "I realize that all Dominators are forfeit to you. Yet this one Has already paid a EigH price for His freedom. I ask you to notify the Rememberers that the Prince of Roum Is under amnesty, and to permit Him to continue on as a Pilgrim to Jorslem. In that way Elegro will lose power over Kim." "What is it tEat you offer us," asked Manrule Seven, "in return for this amnesty for your Prince?" "I Have done researcH in the memory tanks of the Rememberers." "And?" "I Have found that for wHicH you Have been seeking." Manrule Seven studied me with care. "How would you Have any idea of what we seek?" "TEere is in tHe deepest part of tHe Hall of Rememberers," I said quietly, "an image recording of the compound in wfiicfi your kidnapped ancestors lived while they were prisoners on EartH. It sHows their sufferings in poignant detail. It is a superb justification for tKe conquest of EartH by H# "Impossible! TKere's no sucK document!" From the intensity of the invader's reaction, I knew that I had stung him in tKe vulnerable place. He went on, "We've searched your files thoroughly. Th'ere's only one recording of compound life, and it doesn't sKow our people. It shows a non-humanoid pyramid-shaped race, probably from one of the Anchor worlds." "I have seen that one," I told him, "There are others. I spent many hours searching for them, out of Hunger to know of our past injustices." "TKe indexes -- " " -- are sometimes incomplete. I found this recording only by accident. The Rememberers themselves Have no idea it's there. I'll lead you to it -- if you agree to leave the Prince of Roum unmolested." npSe Procurator was silent a moment. At length Ke said, "You puzzle me. I am unable to make out if you are a scoundrel or a man of the highest virtue." "I know where true loyalty lies." "To betray the secrets of your guild, though -- " "I am no Rememberer, only an apprentice, formerly a Watcher. I would not have you Harm the Prince at the wish of a cuckolded fool. TKe Prince is in his hands; only you can obtain his release now. And so I must offer you this document" "Which' the Remembers have carefully deleted from their indexes, so it will not fall into our Hands." "Which the Remembers have carefully misplaced and forgotten." "I doubt it," said Manrule Seven. "They are not careless folk. They hid that recording; and by giving it to us, are you not betraying all your world? Making yourself a collaborator with the hated enemy?" I shrugged. "I am interested in having the Prince of Roum made free. Other means and ends are of no concern to me. The location of the document is yours in exchange for the grant of amnesty." The invader displayed what might have been his equivalent of a smile. "It is not in our best interests to allow members of the former guild of Dominators to remain at large. Your position is precarious, do you see? I could extract the document's location from you by force -- and still Have the Prince as well. "So you could," I agreed. "I take tliat risk. I assume a certain basic Honor among people wKo come to avenge an ancient crime. I am in your power, and the wKereabouts of the document is in my mind, yours for the pick -- if ing. Now He laughed in an unmistakable show of good Humor. "Wait one moment," he said. He spoke a few words in His own language into an amber communication device, and shortly a second member of his species entered the office. I recognized Him instantly, although he was shorn of some of the flamboyant disguise he had worn when he traveled with' me as Garmon, the supposed Changeling. He offered the ambivalent smile of His kind and said, "I greet you, Watcher." "And I greet you, Gormon." "My name now is Victorious Thirteen." "I now am called Tomis of the Rememberers," I said. Manrule Seven remarked, "When did you two become such fast friends?" "In the time of the conquest," said Victorious Thirteen. "While performing my duties as an advance scout I encountered this man in Talya and journeyed with him to Roum. But we were companions, in truth, and not friends." I trembled. 'Where is the Flier Avluela?" "In Pars, I believe," he said offhandedly. "She spoke of returning to Hind, to the place of her people." "You loved her only a short while, then?" "We were more companions than lovers," said the invader. "It was a passing thing for us." "For you, maybe," I said. "For us." "And for this passing thing you stole a man's eyes?" He who had been Gormon shrugged. "I did that to teach a proud creature a lesson in pride." "You said at the time that your motive was jealousy," I reminded him. "You claimed to act out of love." I T Victorious Thirteen appeared  to lose interest in me. To Manrule Seven He said, "Why is this man here? Why have you summoned me?" "The Prince of Roum is in Perris," said Manrule Seven. Victorious Thirteen registered sudden surprise. Manrule Seven went on, "He is a prisoner of the Rememberers. Tins man offers a strange bargain. You know the Prince better than any of us; I ask your advice." The Procurator sketched the outlines of the situation. He who Had been Gormon listened thoughtfully, saying nothing. At the end, Manrule Seven said, "The problem is this: shall we give amnesty to a proscribed Dominator?" "He is blind," said Victorious Thirteen. "Iis power is gone. His followers are scattered. His spirit may be broken, but he presents no danger to us. I say accept the bargain." "There are administrative risks in exempting a Dominator from arrest," Manrule Seven pointed out. "Nevertheless, I agree. We undertake the deal." To me, he said, "Tell us the location of the document we desire." "Arrange the liberation of the Prince of Roum first," I said calmly. Both invaders displayed amusement. "Fair enough," said Manrule Seven. "But look: how cart we be certain that you'll keep your word? Anything might happen to you in the next Hour while we're freeing the Prince." "A suggestion," put in Victorious Thirteen. "This is not so much a matter of mutual mistrust as it is one of timing. Tomis, why not record the document's location on a six-hour delay cube? We'll prime the cube so that it will release: its information only if within that six hours the Prince of Roum Himself, and no one else, commands it to do so. If we haven't found and freed the Prince in that time, the cube will destruct. If we do release the Prince, the cube will give us the information, even if -- ah -- something should have happened to you in the interval." "You cover all contingencies," I said. "We are agreed," I said. "Are we agreed?" Manrule Seven asked. They brought me a cube and placed me under a privacy screen while I inscribed on its glossy surface the rack number and sequence equations of the document I Had discovered. Moments passed; the cube everted itself and the information vanished into its opaque depths. I offered it to them. Thus did I betray my Earthborn heritage and perform a service for our conquerors, out of loyalty to a blinded wifestealing Prince. X D awn Had come by this time. I did not accompany the invaders to the Hall of Rememberers; it was no business of mine to oversee the intricate events that must ensue, and I preferred to be elsewhere. A fine drizzle was falling as I turned down the gray streets that bordered Senn. The timeless river, its surface stippled by the drops, swept unwearyingly against stone archies of First Cycle antiquity, bridges spanning uncountable millennia, survivors from an era wKen the only problems of mankind were of His own making. Morning engulfed the dty. THrougH an old and ineradicable reflex I searched for my instruments so that I could do my Watching and Had to remind myself that that was far behind me now. The Watchers were disbanded; the enemy Had come, and old Wuellig, now Tomis of the Rememberers Had sold himself to Mankind's foes. In the shadow of a twin-steepled religious House of the ancient Christers I let myself be enticed into the booth of a Somnambulist. This guild is not one with which I Have often had dealings; in my way I am wary of charlatans, and charlatans are abundant in our time. The Somnambulist, in a state of trance, claims to see what has been, wh'at is, and what will be. I know something of trances myself, for as a Watcher I entered such a state four times each day; but a Watcher with pride in his craft must necessarily despise the tawdry ethics of those who use second sight for gain, as Somnambulists do. However, while among the Rememberers I Had learned, to my surprise, that Somnambulists frequently were consulted to aid in unearthing some site of ancient times, and that they Had served the Rememberers well Though still skeptical, I was the moment, I needed a shelter from the storm that was breaking over the Hall of Rememberers. A dainty, mincing figure garbed in black greeted me with a mocking bow as I entered the low-roofed booth. "I am Samit of the Somnambulists," fie said in a high whining voice. ""I offer you welcome and good tidings. Behold my companion, the Somnambulist Murta." The Somnambulist Murta was a robust woman in lacy robes. Her face was heavy with flesh, deep rings of darkness surrounded Her eyes, a trace of mustache lined Her upper lip. Somnambulists work their trade in teams, one to do the Huckstering, one to perform; most teams were man and wife, as was this. My mind rebelled at the thought of the embrace of the flesh-mountain Murta and the miniature man Samit, but it was no concern of mine. I took my seat as Samit indicated. On a table nearby I saw some food tablets of several colors; I Had interrupted this family's breakfast. Murta, deep in trance, wandered the room with ponderous strides, now and again grazing some article of furniture in a gentle way. Some Somnambulists, it is said, waken only two or three hours of the twenty, simply to take meals and relieve bodily needs; there are some who ostensibly live in continuous trance and are fed and cared for by acolytes. T scarcely listened as Samit of the Somnambulists delivered his sales talk in rapid, feverish bursts of ritualistic word-clusters. It was pitched to the ignorant; Somnambulists do much of their trade with Servitors and Clowns and other menials. At length', seemingly sensing my impatience, he cut short his extolling of the Somnambulist Murta's abilities and asked me what it was I wished to know. "Surely the Somnambuliist already is aware of that," I said. "You wish a general analysis?" "I want to know the fate of those about me. I wish particularly for the Somnambulist's concentration to center on events now occurring in the Hall of Rememberers." Samit tapped long fingernails against the smooth' table and shot a glaring look at the cowlike Murta. "Are you in contact with the truth?" he asked Her. Her reply was a long feathery sigh wrenched from the core of all the quivering meat of her "What do you see?" he asked her. She began to mutter thickly. Somnambulists speak in a language not otherwise used by mankind; it is a harsh thing of edgy sounds, which some claim is descended from an ancient tongue of Agupt. I know nothing of that. To me it sounded incoherent, fragmentary, impossible to hold meaning. Samit listened a while, then nodded in satisfaction and extended his palm to me. "There is a great deal," he said. We discussed the fee, bargained briefly, came to a settlement. "Go on," I told him. "Interpret the truth." Cautiously he began, "There are outworlders involved in this, and also several members of the guild of Rememberers." I was silent, giving him no encouragement. "They are drawn together in a difficult quarrel. A man without eyes is at the heart of it." I sat upright with' a jolt. Samit smiled in cool triumph. "The man without eyes Has fallen from greatness. He is Earth, shall we say, broken by conqueror? Now He is near the end of his time. He seeks to restore his former condition, but he knows it is impossible. He has caused a Rememberer to violate an oath, To their g uildh all Have come several of the conquerors to -- chastise him? No. No. To free Him from captivity. Shall I continue?" "Quickly!" "You Have received all that you paid for." T scowled. This was extortion; but yet the Somnambulist Bad clearly seen the truth. I Had learned nothing Here that I did Hot already know, but that was sufficient to tell me I might learn Snore. I added to my fee. Samit closed His fist on my coin and conferred once more with Murta. She spoke at length, in some agitation, whirling several times colliding violently with a musty divan. Samit said, "The man without eyes Has come between a man and his wife. The outraged Husband seeks punishment; the outworlders will thwart that. TEe outworlders seek Hidden truths; they will find them, with a traitor's Kelp. Tfie man without eyes peeks freedom and power; He will find peace. The stained wife seeks amusement; she will find Hardship." "And I?" I said into an obstinate and expensive silence. "You say nothing of me!" "You will leave Perris soon, In the same manner as you entered it You will not leave alone. You will not leave in your present guild." "What will be my destination?" "You know that as well as we do, so why waste your money to tell you?" He fell silent again. "Tell me what will befall me as I journey to Jorslem," I said. "You could not afford such information. Futures become costly. I advise you to settle for what you know." "I Have some questions about what has already been said." "We do not clarify at any price." He grinned. I felt the force of his contempt THe Somnambulist Murta, still bumbling about the room, groaned and belched. The powers with whom she was in contact appeared to impart new information to Her; she whimpered, slhvered, made a blurred chuc kling sound. Samit spoke to Her in their language. SEe replied at length. He peered at me. "At no cost," Be said, "a final information. Your life is Hi no danger, but your spirit is. It would be well if you made ycrur peace witK the Will as quickly possible. Recover your moral orientation. Remember your true loyalties. Atone for well intent honed sins. I can say no more." Indeed, Murta stirred and seemed to wake. Great slabs of flesh jiggled in her face and body as the convulsion of leaving the trance came over her. Her eyes opened, but I saw only whites, a terrible sight Her thick lips twitched to reveal crumbling teeth. Saxnit beckoned me out with quick br ushin g gestures of his tiny hands. I fled into a dark rain-drenched morning. T T urriedly I n Hall of Re returned to the Rememberers, arriving there out of breath, with a red spike of pain behind my breastbone. I paused a while outside the superb building to recover my strength. Floaters passed overhead, leaving the guildhall from an upper level. My courage nearly failed me. But in the end I entered the Hall and ascended to the level of the suite of Elegro and Olmayne. A knot of agitated Rememberers filled the hall. A buzz of whispered comment drifted toward me. I pressed forward; and a man whom I recognized as high in the councils of the guild Held up a Hand and said, "What business do you have here, apprentice?" "I am Tomis, who was sponsored by the Rememberer Olmayne. My chamber is close. "Tomis!" a voice cried. I was seized and thrust ahead, into the familiar suite, now a scene of devastation. A dozen Rememberers stood about, fingering their shawls in distress. I recognized among them the taut and elegant figure of Chancellor Kenishal, his gray eyes now dull with despair. Beneath a coverlet to the left of the entrance lay a crumpled figure in the robes of a Pilgrim: the Prince of Roum, dead in his own pooled blood. His gleaming mask, now stained, lay beside him. At the opposite side of the room, slumped against an ornate credenza containing Second Cycle artifacts of great beauty, was the Rememberer Elegro, seemingly asleep, looking furious and surprised both at once. His throat was transfixed by a single slender dart. To the rear, with burly Rememberers flanking her, stood the Rememberer Olmayne, looking wild and disheveled. Her scarlet robe was tom in front, revealing high white breasts; her black hair tumbled in disorder; her satiny skin glistened with perspiration. She appeared lost in a dream, far from these present surroundings. "WKat Has Happened here?" I asked. "Murder twice over," said Chancellor Kenishal in a broken voice. He advanced toward me, a tall Haggard man, white-haired, an uncontrollable tic working in the lid of one eye." When did you last see Uitse people alive, apprentice?" "In the night" "How did you come to be Here?" "A visit, no more." "Was tHere a disturbance?" "A quarrel between tbe Rememberer Elegro and tKe Pilgrim, yes," I admitted. "Over what?" asked the Chancellor thinly. I looked uneasily at Olmayne, but she saw nothing and heard less. "Over Her," I said. I beard snickerings from the other Rememberers They nudged each other, nodded, even smiled; I had confirmed the scandal. The Chancellor grew more solemn. He indicated tbe body of the Prince. "This was your companion when you entered Perris," he said. "Did you know of his true identity?" I moistened my lips. "I bad suspicions," "That he was -- " "The fugitive Prince of Rourrt," I said. I must not attempt subterfuges; my status was precarious. More nods, more nudges. Chancellor KenisHal said, "This man was subject to arrest. It was not your place to I conceal your knowledge of his true luei.L. I remained mute. The Chancellor went on, "You Have been absent from this ball for some hours. Tell us of your activities after leaving tbe suite of Elegro and Olmayne." "I called upon the Procurator Manrule Seven," I said. Sensation. "For what purpose?" "To inform the Procurator," I said, "that the Prince of Roum Had been apprehended and was now in the suite of a Rememberer. I did this at the instruction of the Rememberer Elegro. After delivering my information I walked the streets several Hours for no particular end, and returned here to find -- to find -- " "To find everything in chaos," said Chancellor KenishaL "The Procurator was here at dawn. He visited this suite; both Elegro and the Prince must still have been alive at that time. Then he went into our archives and removed -- and removed -- material of the highest sensitivity -- removed -- material not believed accessible to -- the Highest sensitivity -- " The Chancellor faltered. Like some intricate machine smitten with instant rust, He slowed his motions, emitted rasping sounds, appeared to be on the verge of systemic breakdown. Several high Rememberers rushed to his aid; one thrust ja drug against his arm. In moments the Chancellor appeared to recover. "These murders occurred after the Procurator departed from the building," He Bald. "The Rememberer #paayne Has been unable to give Us information concerning them, PerBaps you, apprentice, know Something of value." "I was not present Two Somnambulists near the Senn will testify that I was with them at the time the crimes were committed." Someone guffawed at my mention of Somnambulists. Let them; I was not seeking to retrieve dignity at a time like this. I knew that I was in peril. The Chancellor said slowly, "You will go to your chamber, apprentice, and you will remain there to await full interrogation. Afterwards you will leave the building and be gone from Perris within twenty Hours. By virtue of my authority I declare you expelled from the guild of Rememberers." Forewarned as I had been by Samit, I was nevertheless stunned. " Expelled ? Why?" "We can no longer trust you. Too many mysteries surround you. You bring us a Prince and conceal your suspicions; you are present at murderous quarrels; you visit a Procurator in 'the middle of the night. You may even have helped to bring about the calamitous loss suffered by our archive this morning. We have no desire for mot of enigmas here. We saver our relationship with you." The Chancellor waved his Hand In a grand sweep. "To your chamber now, to await interrogation, and then go!" I rushed from the room. As the entrance pit closed behind me I looked back and saw the Chancellor, his face ashen, topple into the arms of his associates, while in the same instant the Rememberer Olmayne broke from Her freeze and fell to the floor, screaming. XI A lone in my chamber, I spent a long while gathering together my possessions, though I owned little. The morning was well along before a Rememberer whom I did not know came to see me, bearing interrogation equipment. I eyed it uneasily thinking that ail would be up with me if the Rememberers found proof that it was I who Had betrayed the location of that compound record to the invaders. Already they suspected me of it; the Chancellor had Hesitated to make the accusation only because it must Have seemed odd to him that an apprentice such as myseif would have cared to make a private search of the guild archive. Fortune rode with me. My interrogator was concerned only with the details of the slaying; and once he had determined that I knew nothing on that subject, he let me be, warning me to depart from the hall within the allotted time. I told him I would do so. But first I needed rest. I had had none that night; and so I just drank a three-hour draught, and settled into soothing sleep. When I awakened a figure stood beside me: the Rememberer Olmayne. She appeared to have aged greatly since the previous evening. She was dressed in a single chaste tunic of a somber color, and she wore neither ornament nor decoration. Her features were rigidly set. I mastered my surprise at finding her there, and sat up, mumbling an apology for my delay in acknowledging her presence. "Be at ease," she said gently. "Have I broken your sleep?" "I had my full hours." "I have had none. But there will be time for sleep later. We owe each other explanations, Tomis." "Yes." I rose uncertainly. "Are you well? I saw you earlier, and you seemed lost in trance." "They have given me medicines," she replied. "Tell me what you can tell me about last night." Her eyelids slid momentarily closed. "You were there when Elegro challenged us and was cast out by the Prince. Some hours later, Elegro returned. With him were the Procurator of Perris and several other invaders. Elegro appeared to be in a mood of great jubilation. The Procurator produced a cube and commanded the Prince to put his hand to it. The Prince balked, but Manrule Seven persuaded him finally to cooperate. When he had touched the cube, the Procurator and Elegro departed, leaving the Prince and myself together again, neither of us comprehending what had happened. Guards were posted to prevent the Prince from leaving. Not long afterward the Procurator and Elegro returned. Now Elegro seemed subdued and even confused, while the Procurator was clearly exhilarated. In our room the Procurator announced that amnesty had been granted to the former Prince of Roum and that no man was to harm him. Thereupon all of the invaders departed." "Proceed." f lmayne spoke as though a Somnambulist. "Elegro did not appear to comprehend what had occurred. He cried out that treason had been done; he screamed that he had been betrayed. An angry scene followed. Elegro was womanish in his fury; the Prince grew more haughty; each ordered the other to leave the suite. The quarrel became more violent that the carpet itself began to die. The petals drooped; the little mouth's gaped. The climax came swiftly. Elegro seized a weapon and threatened to use it if the Prince did not leave at once. The Prince misjudged Elegro's temper, thought he was bluffing, and came forward as if to throw Elegro out Elegro slew the Prince. An instant later I grasped a dart from our rack of artifacts and Hurled it into Elegro's throat THe dart bore poison; he died at once. I summoned others, and I remember no more." "A strange night" I said. "Too strange. Tell me now, Tomis: why did the Procurator come, and why did lie not take the Prince into custody?" I said, "The Procurator came because I asked him to, under the orders of your late husband. The Procurator did not arrest the Prince because the Prince's liberty had been purchased." "At what price?" "The price of a man's shame," I said. "You speak a riddle to me." "The truth dishonors me. I beg you not to press me for it." "The Chancellor spoke of a document that had been taken by the Procurator -- " "It has to do with that," I confessed, and Olmayne looked toward the floor and asked no further questions. I said ultimately, "You have committed a murder, then. What will your punishment be?" "The crime was committed in passion and fear," she replied. "There will be no penalty of the civil administration. But I am expelled from my guild for my adultery and my act of violence." "I offer ray regrets." "And I am commanded to undertake the Pilgrimage to Jorslem to purify my soul. I # must leave within the day, or my life is forfeit to the guild." "I too am expelled," I told her. "And I too am bound at last for Jorslem, though of my own choos  tf mg. "May we travel together?" 'll Ty hesitation betrayed me. I had journeyed here with a blind Prince; I cared very little to depart with a murderous and guildless woman. Perhaps the time had come to travel alone. Yet the Somnambulist had said I would have a companion. Olmayne said smoothly, "You luck enthusiasm. Perhaps I can create some in you." She opened her tunic. I saw mounted between the snowy hills of her breasts a gray pouch. She was tempting me not with her flesh but with an overpocket. "In this," she said, "Is all that the Prince of Roum carried in his thigh. He showed me those treasures; and I removed them from his body as he lay dead in my room. Also here are certain objects of my own. I am not without resources. We will travel comfortably. Well?" "I find it hard to refuse." "Be ready in two hours." "I am ready now," I said. "Wait, then." She left me to myself. Nearly two hours later she returned, clad now in the mask and robes of a Pilgrim. Over her arm she held a second set of Pilgrim's gear, which she offered me. Yes, I was guildless now, an unsafe way to travel. I would go, then, ns a Pilgrim to Jorslem. I donned the familiar gear. We gathered our possession. "I have notified the guild of Pilgrims," she declared as we left the Hall of Rememberers. "We nre fully registered. How does the mask feel, Tomis?" "Snug." "As it should be." "Our route out of Perris took us across the great plaza before the ancient holy building of the old creed. A crowd had gathered; I saw invaders at the center of the group. Beggars made the profitable orbit about it. They ignored us, for no one begs from a Pilgrim; but I collared one rascal with a gouged face and said, "What ceremony is taking place there?" "Funeral of the Prince of Roum," he said. "By order of the Procurator. State funeral with all the trimmings. They're making a real festival out of it." "Why hold such an event in Perris?" I asked. "How did the Prince die?" "Look, ask somebody else. I got work to do." He wriggled free and scrambled on to work the crowd. "Shall we attend the funeral?" I asked Olmayne. "Best not to." "As you wish." We moved toward the massive stone bridge that spanned the glow arose as the pyre of the dead Prince was kindled. That pyre lit the way for us as we made our slow way through' the night, eastward to Jorslem. New subscriptions and changes oi address require # weeks to process! Keep Moving The besf way to upset the applecart is to stop all the apple-polishing and let the stones gather some moss I TThen in # James Stokes   instituted the first Live-in, nobody thought he was inaugurating a revolution. At most he was considered a minor nuisance, a subject for wisecracks on tridimens comedy shows. Because, how would he Stay Put when there was nowhere to stay put on? In the Historical Museum of Midwestcity there is preserved one of the first tapes he broadcast, and it is consulted for playoff by students more frequently than any other in the files. At the time all it got him was ridicule and harrassment, but now it is recognized as a prophecy. It began with a survey of Universal Moving, all the way back to the mid-#th century. Probably the first adumbration was the drive-in movies, or perhaps the restaurant drive-ins. Then came drive-in bank deposit, drive-in laundries and cleaners, then drive-in funerals (that was started by a mortician in Atlanta -- now part of Southeastcity -- who installed picture windows so that acquaintances of the deceased could drive by and pay their respects without stopping), then drive-in supermarkets and drugstores, then drive-in everything, from church to school to postoffice. Once everybody in the United States owned or had familiar part-ownership in a car, and once every car was equipped with a shortwave phone so that orders, messages, and inquiries could be phoned ahead to auto-receptors and the goods, acceptances, or answers be ready at the requested moment, there was no longer any need or place for stationary dwellings from which the inhabitants had to emerge to do business or carry on their social or civic life. It was the one possible solution of the overcrowded and unsafe cities. Gradually people gave up their houses and apartments and moved permanently into their autos. The auto companies in response provided equipment that made every car a compact dwelling outfitted with every possible labor-saving device. Children learned to drive as early as once they had learned to walk. People who were tired of driving could turn off on the nearest spacious Rest Stop to recuperate; otherwise every car had to Keep Moving -- which became the first commandment of the American Decalogue. With all except public, commercial, and industrial buildings tom down, and freeways, throughways, and crossways covering all the space they had once occupied, major social changes naturally followed. For one thing, all the permanent buildings left were fully automated and operated by remote control. For another, the former urban units ceased to exist, and the country was divided into geographical sections called -- by courtesy -- cities, from Northeastcity to Southwest city, and from Southeastdty to Northwestcity. It became obvious then that a man could no longer be affiliated with any political collective such as state or county. He voted by short wave and all elections were national. All goods, services, and communication systems were identical all over the country, so it did not matter where anyone was at any given time. nphere were always odd-balls, of course, long before James Stokes, who could not accommodate themselves comfortably to this completely sensible way of living. They had an out. They could drive to the nearest Parking Area (each as large as a big town used to be), with its adjacent Air Terminal, and take a flying holiday for as long as they could afford one. Usually that would be to the moon or to one of the satellites, for there was no point in flying to another part of the earth when one could always drive to it at will and everybody had been everywhere many times. Once the oceans would have made that impossible, but by # underwater engineering had connected the whole world by air-conditioned sub-oceanic tunnels through which any car could drive. For those still more atavistically inclined, there were the primitive Wilderness Areas, though no one received an entry passport to them who could not produce his certificate of graduation from a physio-training school and his proof of qualification as a pedestrian. Youth being what it is, nearly all adolescent boys and girls did qualify, and the Wilderness Areas were reputedly the place for Boy to meet Girl for temporary or permanent association. (It was a stale joke how many first-bom children were named Sequoia or Appalachia or Bryce in loving memory.) Of course vacationers who outdid their strength or suffered accidents could be rescued quickly; there was always a nearby transmitter to summon a chopper-ambulance to take them to the district hospital. Hospitals themselves were fully automated; physicians, surgeons, and supervising nurses, immediately alerted, kept in constant touch with the robotechs. Most doctors had never been inside a hospital, any more than they had been inside a medical college except for the final examinations after their years of study by means of the tridimens. It was a beautifully organized economy, and # of its beneficiaries took it for granted as normal and functioned smoothly within it. And then along came James Stokes with his absurd and heretical and even treasonable insistence that, with the exception of Bedouins and Gypsies and Australian Blackfellows and Pygmies, mankind had given up the nomadic life back in the Neolithic Age, and that he for one wanted not to Keep Moving but to Stay Put. To which the logical answer was: sure, for thousands of years human beings had lived in permanently stationed houses. But they had also, for thousands of years before that, lived in caves. You can't buck progress. can you? After his first broadcasts Had brought him nothing but sarcastic or belligerent phone calls -- plus a polite warning from Government that much more of this would cause him to be examined by psychiatrists and if necessary consigned to one of the few permanent residences still in existence -- a Corrective Hospital -- for an indefinite term after a thoroughly fair and legal court hearing, James Stokes blew a gasket. He announced that he, individually, would defy the Establishment. On a named date in the near future, lie proposed to stop His car at a specified place and stay there. As a citizen he was coowner of all land currently beneath his wheels; and He intended to transform his car into a stationary dwelling. He would disregard all orders to submit himself to examination or trial; let them come and get him. He would fight to the last ditch any attempt to incarcerate him; it would constitute a test case which would be the beginning of a new deal for the social order. It should be made clear that James Stokes was not a mere insignificant crank or eccentric. He was a distinguished lawyer, who had often functioned as judge, under the communicative judicial system. He had served in several high-up administrative and political posts. He had plenty of money. And he was a bachelor, with' no close relatives, so that he was not subjecting anyone else to the hazards he knew he faced. In his rather grandiloquent definite broadcast, he compared himself to Luther -- "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise" -- and to Galileo, only instead of saying "But still it moves," he was saying, "I will not move." He concluded with a couplet from a forgotten author named Scott: "Come one, come ail! This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I." On September #, #, James Stokes halted his car toward evening on a Rest Stop about a hundred miles from Midwestcity. So did several other drivers, but after a short pause for rest and use of the facilities they took off again. He did not. Instead, he took out of the car four large stones he had collected and hammered them firmly in place under his four wheels. Then he settled down for the night, sure that no one would bother him until morning; strictly speaking, it was taboo to remain at a Rest Stop more than an hour or two, but people who had no other driver to spell them off frequently slept over in one, and the authorities were lenient, since solitary drivers were so few. It was the first Live-in. The Stay Put Revolution had begun. He was awake early, and after a Heartening breakfast He waited impatiently for the hostilities to begin. When nothing happened, he brought out a large placard He had prepared and propped it up against his right-hand front door. It read: "Permanent Residence of James Stokes." Tt was mid-morning before any of the stream of cars passing by in both directions turned into the Rest Stop. The driver of the first was a woman, a goodlooking, red-haired young woman, and she was alone. She drew up to about ten feet from him. James Stokes, watching her, saw her attention attracted by his sign, and though he could not be sure, he thought he saw her smile. But she made no attempt to accost him; instead, she settled down with a tape-recorder into which she dictated, inaudibly to him. Undoubtedly that had been her reason for leaving the freeway. Perhaps she was a reporter? Publicity was what he needed most. He watched and waited so as not to interrupt her, and the minute she stopped dictating, before she could take the wheel and leave, he jumped out of his car and ran over to her. She looked at him interrogatively. Irrelevantly he noticed that her eyes were beautiful -- a true violet, that rarest of eyecolors. There was no fear in her glance, and there was no reason why there should have been; the kind of danger that had existed in the bad old times whenever a woman alone faced a strange man of course had vanished with the cities. The constant streams of drivers-by, and the button in every car which would instantly summon a police chopper, made every driver safe. "Excuse me," said Stokes politely. "But I noticed you were taping, and I wondered if by chance you were a tridimens or newstape reporter." She smiled. "Far from it," she said. "I'm a poet. I was working on a poem." "Oh." "But if you mean, did I notice your sign, and the rocks under your wheels, yes, I did. And yes, I'm curious. Tell me." He told her, at considerable length. She was a good listener, though she smiled too often to suit him. He reminded himself that he must not become a fanatic, or only other fanatics would become his disciples. "So what do you call your project?" she asked when he had finished. "I call it a Live-in. I propose to stay here until they take me off forcibly, and then I shall carry the case all the way to the World Court if necessary." "I see." She sat pondering. Then she said: "If I had been a reporter, what would you have expected me to do?" "I'd have hoped that you would broadcast or tape a story about the project, so as to get my campaign going." Again she was silent for a few minutes, then she smiled again -- a different and much more welcome kind of smile. "I don't understand exactly what you have in mind, or why, but I like anyone who comes out against the deadly boredom this peripatetic life of ours has become. I don't have a thing I must do until next month, when I must be in Northeastcity for the publication of a book. I'm Mary Ellen Carrington. I don't suppose you've ever heard of me?" she added wistfully. James Stokes never had -- he didn't read poetry more modern than the early #st century -- but he was a gentleman. "Of course I have," he lied gallantly, hoping devoutly that she wouldn't expect him to go into particulars. She probably saw through him, but she responded in kind. "And you?" she inquired. "I'm James Stokes, as my sign says." She looked blank, so he added hastily, "Lawyer, judge, political administrator -- quite respectable, I assure you." "Why, certainly, James Stokes," she said brightly. "I should have realized. This is quite an honor." He decided she was a good fibber, too. "Now, this is my idea," she went on. "Suppose I stop here also, and you make me a placard like yours. Not that I really expect to stay here permanently," she added hastily, "but the more of us there are, the faster the news will get around." "Wonderful. I'll letter the sign at once. And I have some more rocks in the trunk to shore your car up." 'VTow there were two of them. And it worked like wildfire -- perhaps the sight of a goodlooking woman helped more than that of an also good-looking but indubitably middle-aged male. People drove past, gaped, drove on to where they could turn, came back, drove onto the Rest Stop, and asked questions. Most of them laughed and went away again; some of them got angry and argued and went away. But before dark there were three more in the colony -- an elderly couple and a boy of about #. By noon the next day there was no more room in the Rest Stop for other cars, and what Stokes knew must happen arrived soon after -- some of the scoffers and argucrs had reported their find, and the authorities landed. The sound of the police helicopters caused a sudden exodus. Five of the colonists started their cars at once and got out in a hurry. But as the first chopper landed Stokes made a quick count and found that the Livein still boasted # members besides Mary Ellen Carrington and himself. "What's going on here?" growled the fuzzsarge in immemorial police phraseology. James Stokes, pioneer, founder, and spokesman, came forward and addressed him suavely. "This is  Live-in. We are tired of being perpetually on the move, and we have decided to settle down and Stay Put." "Not in my precinct you won't!" retorted the sergeant. "Okay," Mary Ellen said suddenly. "Arrest us!" At which nine of the # quietly escaped. James was too startled to notice them. Mary Ellen had all at once become an ally instead of an amused tolcrator. Her violet eyes were flashing -- the first time he'd even known that violets could flash. "I hate being bullied," she muttered. The fuzzsarge sounded his supersonic whistle and two more choppers came down. In the excitement -- what about their cars, Stokes demanded, and the fuzzsarge said he'd post men to tow them in -- the other seven recruits sneaked away. So now he and the red-haired poet were the only permanent Stay Putters, and he decided not to go meekly after all. "Are we under arrest?" he asked mildly. "You guessed right, brother." "But for what? I'm a lawyer, I've been a judge, and I know the law backwards. What law have we violated?" The sergeant looked a trifle taken aback. He hadn't expected to catch quite so large a fish. "Well," he sputtered, "you're not supposed to park here overnight." "That ruling's been abrogated by consistent neglect." "But you say you're going to settle down for good." "There's no law that forbids action that hasn't yet taken place -- except proof of conspiracy to murder, and neither I nor this lady would dream of murdering you or anyone else. We're not obstructing traffic, our licenses are in order, and we haven't so far broken one solitary viable statute. How would the commissioner like it if we sued the department for false arrest? The sergeant glanced angrily at his official inferiors, some of whom were concealing grins. They had gathered quite a large audience from the freeway by now, too. His face purpled. "You know, Mr. Stokes," said Mary Ellen sweetly, "I was just reading a booktape about all those demonstrations for different causes, back # years ago. Do you know what they used to do when they were threatened with arrest? They would go limp and let the cops drag them to the -- well, they had police cars then instead of choppers, but it's tKe same idea. If somebody drags you over rougH ground, it's a good basis for a charge of police brutality." he fuzzsarge gave up. "I'll .be back!" he yelled. "I'll be back tomorrow, and I'll have a copy of the rules and regulations about parking in Rest Stops. And if you're still here -- " "Do that, sergeant," Stokes retorted. "You'll find they're very vague. And we'll be here. 'This is a Live-in." Mary Ellen Carrington nodded firm assent "This is simply marvelous publicity," she chirruped. "Just what we needed. Do give us more." Whatever Happened between the sergeant and his superiors, he didn't come back the next day. Neither did any other officials. Apparently the idea was to bury the rebels in neglect. But it was too late. The newstapes and the tridimens had the story, and they blew it up to full capacity. In # hours there was a massive block on the freeway. There was no room left at all in the Rest Stop. Something had to give -- and it wasn't going to be James Stokes and Mary Ellen Carrington. Two days later they had a caller, of distinctly higher rank. He represented the national government -- a Mr. McDiarmuid from the Department of Public Relations, which had long ago acquired Cabinet rank and ambassadorial status. The urbane Mr. McDiarmuid must have been at the very least a charge d'affaires. "We have been considering your case, Judge Stokes," he began. "I am not at present a judge," James said stiffly. But it helped that he still had some standing in the Establishment. He suspected that video wires had been busy in an emergency. The Stay Put movement must not be allowed to burgeon in an atmosphere of journalistic sensationalism. "Burgeon" was the proper word; Mr. McDiarmuid was here to nip it in the bud. "We can appreciate the need of an honored public servant for rest and relief in his well earned retirement," he went on smoothly. "Believe me, many of us would wish to follow your example if duty did not chain us to our phones and screens. "And I think we have hit on the ideal solution of your problem. How would you like a permanent parking place for your car in any of the Wilderness Areas you may select? As for this young lady -- " "I am not retired," roared James Stokes, "nor superannuated nor weary! I am on a crusade! And I do not intend to be relegated to a  wilderness concentration camp where I can be displayed like an animal in a zoo. I am inaugurating a campaign for a new way of life. I want freedom for myself, and for anyone else who feels as I do, to settle down on one spot in the midst of my fellow-citizens. "This seems to me an admirable location," he concluded in a meditative tone. ATr. McDiarmuid repeated #YA himself imperturably. "As for this young lady -- " "I am Mary Ellen Carrington," she said icily. "Mary Ellen Carrington, the well known poet." "Oh, of course," McDiarmuid murmured. It was obvious that he had never heard of her. "And I agree entirely with Mr. Stokes. I don't want to be sequestered or segregated, either." "But the Rest Stops," McDiarmuid objected, "are public property." "And we are members of the public," said Stokes. "But if you people fill up all the Rest Stops -- " "Ah! you prophesy we shall soon have that many followers? Thank you!" "I said if. If you do, where will the --  the normal people be able to stop and rest?" "If there are enough of us, few Rest Stops will be needed any more. And by that time we'd be traffic would be reduced to the point where more and more of the present freeways could be cleared and used as dwelling sites. As in the better daysof the past." "The better days!" McDiarmuid sounded about ready to explode. "You mean the days of individual cities, of fuel-driven cars and air and water pollution and overcrowding and rampant crime in the filthy streets?" "None of those things is necessary. Look, Mr, McDiarmuid, let's be sensible about this. I grant that the majority of Americans today like the peripatetic life -- they've known nothing else but that all their lives and it seems normal to them. All I'm -- " He glanced at Mary Ellen, and the admiration in those violet eyes sent a small squiggle down his spine. "All we are asking is that those of us -- call us throwbacks or whatever you like -- who don't enjoy Keeping Moving, who want to Stop and Stay Put; be allowed to do so and to find reasonable places for our permanent location. Is that too much to ask?" McDiarmuid's face showed plainly that he thought it was. But his training in diplomacy kept him from the retort he would have liked to make. So lie merely bowed and said: "You may be right; I shan't argue with you. But you will agree you will have to prove your point legally -- you as a lawyer certainly know that. And that being so, I am empowered to tell you that you have # hours to leave this Rest Stop and be on your way; and if you take a similar stand anywhere else you will be given # hours to get out of there too. You and Miss Carrington don't intend to spend the rest of your lives going from Rest Stop to Rest Stop for a day and a night at a time, do you?" "That would be most unconventional," remarked Mary Ellen demurely. James opened his mouth to add that Miss Carrington was due in Mideastcity in a month to see her book off the press and was his temporary associate only. He closed it again then reopened it in astonishment as he heard her say: "But you needn't worry about that aspect of the matter, Mr. McDiarmuid. We are planning to dial the License Bureau and the Marriage Registry today. Anything the authorities want to do from now on they will have to do to the two of us together." "Why -- " James Stokes began and shut up at a warning glance from her. "Exactly," he mumbled in corroboration. "I congratulate you," said Mr. McEHarmuid. "The eviction notice will be served on you at -- " He looked at his finger-watch. " -- #:# p.m. tomorrow. It will bear both your maiden and your married names, Miss Carrington, to avoid any slip-up. My best wishes for your happiness." He bowed again and dialed for the chopper which had been hovering above to await his departure. A lone again, James gazed bej. I mused at Mary Ellen. She laughed. "Please don't be alarmed," she remarked lightly. "I'm not shanghaiing you. I could see that he was getting ready to invoke the Illegal Cohabitation Act of the # code if he could not get us any other way, and I thought I'd stall him for # hours while we talked things over." "But -- " That was as far as he could get. He was overcome by a flood of conflicting emotions -- surprise, sudden realization, diffidence, determination. "I -- I wish you had meant it. But of course you couldn't have." "Why?" So women still blushed! "Because -- why, good Lord, you scarcely know me. You never saw me till a few days ago. For all you know, I might be married already." "You're too modest. If you must know, last night I dialed the Biographical Reference Computer Center and I know your whole life history. Perhaps I'm inveigling you into a trap." "And I'm old enough to be your -- " "Don't say it. You're certainly not. You're just #I and I'm nearly #. I never heard of an eight-year-old human father, did you? "Incidentally, I'm not married, either -- I've never had time, and I never met a man I felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. What with the new NeoPuritanical Code -- which I'd never thought of that way, but which is certainly an outgrowth of all this constant wandering life among strangers -- it's altogether too hard to get out of an unsatisfactory marriage nowadays, so I've never wanted to tie myself up in one. "... Until now." Her voice dropped, and she looked away. "Me too!" choked James in a sudden burst of glory. He reached out his arms, and she melted into them. There was a tableau which a number of drivers-by enjoyed to the full, though none of them was loutish enough to stop. One tooted his horn, and that brought them to their senses. They separated, both a little dazed. "Come on," said James, heading for his car -- his house. "Let's dial that Bureau right away." By the blessings of automation, James Stokes and Mary Ellen Carrington were electronically wedded before sundown. They moved their cars together to make a two-room house, and the wedding supper they ordered delivered from the nearest store was graced with champagne. The delivery boy stared at them curiously, but honeymooners often spent their wedding night in a Rest Stop. Apparently he did not connect them with the story of the Stay Putters which was headlining the human interests sections of all the newstapes and the tridimens. Mr. McDiarmuid did not reappear the next afternoon. Neither did the original fuzzsarge. What arrived was a process server with a subpoena. The authorities had done their homework, and it was made out to summon James and Mary Ellen Stokes. They were to appear without fail by # p.m. that day at the branch court and police headquarters ten miles away. If they did not come on time, officers would be dispatched to evict them and bring them in. The thought of subjecting his bride to this humiliation -- undoubtedly witnessed by hordes of curious and jeering drivers-by -- for a moment weakened James' resolution. But Mary Ellen was made of more ferrous stuff. "Take this back," she commanded the process server. "Neither of us will accept it. And tell them to come and get us if they dare." A s the baffled official departed, she smiled comfortingly into her new husband's worried face. "It's all right, darling," she said soothingly. "I have an inspiration. We'll be ready for them." "I'm afraid I don't see how. I'm a lawyer, and this time I have to admit they've got the law on their side." go any martyrdom for the sake of principle, he reflected dourly, but that was when he was on his own. How could he stand the thought of Mary Ellen in a cell in a Corrective Hospital? "You're a lawyer," she said, "but I'm a poet. And it wasn't just vanity that made me tell that man I was a well known one. I am. I have readers and admirers in some very high places -- why else do you think they wanted me in Mideastcity for a big party to celebrate the publication of my latest book? Just because you've never read my work -- and believe me, my love, when all this is over you're going to -- " "I will," said James humbly. "But -- " "We've got only two hours," his wife interrupted. "I've got to start phoning." Six o'clock came and went, but nobody arrived to evict them. Instead, the Rest Stop began rapidparked their cars and then came over to consult with Mary Ellen. She had had James busy making placards, which she passed out to the new arrivals. In a free moment, James requested information. "Oh," she said casually, "it's not just here. Every Rest Stop in the country is being infiltrated, with a deputation there first to give out signs. That's another thing I learned from the history of the #th-century demonstrations and sit-ins -- pack the jails and the authorities will be overwhelmed." "But who are they? Where do they come from?" "My colleagues," Mary Ellen said smugly. "We professional writers stick together. I alerted the Authors League and the Poetry Society of America. Then the news spread, and the rest of the old established professional societies joined in -- first the Science Fiction Writers of America, then the Mystery Writers of America, and then the American Newspaper Guild. Pretty soon it will be spreading to the other creative arts -- to Actors Equity and the American Guild of Variety Artists and the Artists Guild and all the rest. And of course a lot of them have families to swell the throng." "I see," said James dazedly. He tried in vain to imagine the Bar Association moved by such a stimulus. Ty the next morning, when they turned on the tridimens, they learned that a national crisis was at hand. Every Rest Stop on the continent was jammed and ordinary drivers were unable to leave the freeways for even five minutes' rest. It was utterly impossible to evict or arrest all these announced Stay Putters; there wouldn't be room for them anywhere even if they could have been arrested, and government officials were running around in circles. What made it worse was that these people were not mere private citizens, but outstanding and articulate members of venerable and distinguished organizations -- and many of them, as individuals, known to every adult American. The announcer almost shrieked as he reported that the Associated Advertising Clubs were threatening to join in. Then he said abruptly: "Sorry, folks; I just got word from my own union and I have to leave." The tridimens went dead. Half an hour later James had a phone call from the National Council itself -- successor of both the executive and legislative branches of national government, and the highest authority there was in the U.S.A. This time nobody was scolding, jeering, or threatening him; the speaker was respectful flattering and appealing. Would Mr. and Mrs. Stokes be so good as to drive to national headquarters for a personal conference to try to find some solution satisfactory to all concerned?They could leave one of their cars as a residence token and come in the other. Would they -- please? The voice almost broke; the worried face looked close to tears. "Uh-uh," said James Stokes succinctly. "If you want to talk to us, send somebody here. This is our permanent home." There was a gasp, a splutter, a shocked groan, and then another official took over and said they would call back in ten minutes. "We've won!" cried Mary Ellen triumphantly. "We have them on the run." "Thanks to you." "No, thanks to you -- you started it I'm only implementing your plan." They were still trying to give each other credit when the phone rang again. A third speaker -- stiff voice but harassed countenance -- said that a delegation would call on Mr. and Mrs. Stokes that afternoon. Mary Ellen grabbed a loud-speaker and gave the news to all their new neighbors and in the echo of their cheers started phoning it to headquarters of all the organizations concerned, for relay to their members. Bo tli sides knew very well that # of the new adherents had no intention of actually Staying Put. But they also knew that none of them would leave their intrenched positions until the real Stay Putters had won their victory. When an irresistible force meets an immovable body, the immovable body learns to move if the irresistible force commands sufficient publicity. A #I this of course, was # years ago. Mr. and Mrs. James Stokes no longer live in a Rest Stop. There are enough Stay Putters now to have reduced traffic sufficiently, all over the country -- and, indeed, all over the world -- to allow many freeways to have been tom down and transformed into dwelling sites. The Stokeses still own cars, but they do not live in them; the latest fashion is to build actual immobile houses -- prefabricated, of course, and with all the amenities of the car-homes. Naturally they take to the road often -- when Mary Ellen has a speaking engagement, or when James is needed for personal attendance in connection with his new post as Dwelling Dispute Judge, or just to attend meetings of their respective professional groups or to rendezvous with friends -- but when they come back it is to a stationary home surrounded by stationary neighbors. Neither of their teen-age children has ever learned to drive. Make ThoseWFM Connections Building On The Tine Building on the Line is how the human race expands to the stars -- at a price only heroes can pay l I rack-voiced, off-key, in every # way like a fingernail drawn across the blackboard of his soul, the song cauterwauled in John Clancy's helmet earphones: "... Building on the Line, Team! Building on the Line! Building Transmit Stations, all along the goddamn Line! Light-years out, and all alone -- We have cannibalized the drone -- And there's no way to go home -- 'Till we get the Station finished for the goddamn Line!" Clancy closed his mind to the two thousandth, four hundred and -- what? He had even got to the point where he had lost count of the times Arthur Plotchin had sung it. Was that a win, he wondered, suddenly -- a point for Plotch', in finally driving him to lose count? Or was it a point for him, in that he had managed to shut out the singing, at least to the point of losing his involuntary count of the times PlotcK had sung it? A bright light hit him in the faceplate, momentarily blinding him; and the singing broke off. "Heads up. Clance!" It was Plotch's voice, cracking like static now in the earphones. "Keep your mind on your work, dimbulb! Time to fire the wire!" Clancy deliberately did not answer, while he slowly counted off six seconds -- One-Mississippi, tw-Mississippi..." It was one of the things he could be sure rubbed Plotch the wrong way; eve as he knew Plotch was sure by this time that the endless repetition of the Line Song was like sandpaper to Clancy's raw nerves. "What?" Clancy said, at the end of the sixth second. "You heard me, you... " Plotch choked a little and went silent, in his turn. Clancy grinned savagely inside his helmet. With the flash from Plotch's signal-light blinked out of his eyes, now, he could make out the other's silver-suited figure with' the black rectangle of tinted glass that was its faceplate. Plotch stood holding his wire gun by the other of the last two terminal rods in the almostcompleted Star-Point. He was some hundred yards off across the barren rock of this Hell-bom world, with its two hundred degrees below zero temperature, its atmosphere that was poisonous, and almost non-existent to boot, with' its endless rock surface, its red clouds always roiling threateningly overhead and the notquite-heard gibber of uneasy native spirits always nagging at a man just below the level of his hearing. TJlotch was trying to turn the deaf treatment back on Clancy. But that was a game Clancy played better than his dark-haired, round-headed teammate. Clancy waited; and, sure enough', after a few moments, Plotch broke first. "Don't you want to get back to the ship, horse's-Head," shouted PlotcK, suddenly. "Don't you ever want to get home?" Was PlotcK starting to sound a little hysterical? Or was it Clancy Himself, imagining the fact? Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was just the hobgoblins, as Line Team # had come to call the native life-form, putting the thought into Clancy's head. For the hobgoblins were real enough. There was no doubt by this time that some form of immaterial life existed in the fugitive flickers of green light among the bare rocks of XN-#, as this frozen chunk of a world had been officially named. Something was there in the green flickering, alive and inimical; and it had been trying to get at him and Plotch all through the five days they had been out on the job here, setting up Number Sixteen of the twenty-six Star-Points required for a Transmit Receive Line Relay Station. Luckily, one of the few good things about the survival suits they were wearing this trip was that they seemed to screen out at least part of whatever emanations the hobgoblins threw at them. Clancy broke off in the middle of his thoughts to switch the living hate within him, for a moment, from Plotch to R. and E. -- the Research and Experimental Service, which seemed to be just about taking over the Line Service, nowadays. Thanks to an evident lack of guts on the part of the Line Service Commandant. The work on the Line Teams was bad enough. Fifteen men transmitted out to a drone receiver that had been lucky enough to hit a world suitable for a Relay or Terminal Station. Fifteen men, jammed into a transmit ship where every cubic inch of space and ounce of mass was precious because of their construction equipment, was balanced against the weak resolving powers of the drone. Jammed together, blind-transmitted on to a world like this, where you lived and worked in your suit for days on end. That was bad enough. Add Plotch for a partner, and it became unbearable. But then add R. and E. and it went beyond unbearable. It was bad enough five years back, in the beginning, when a fifteen-man Team would be testing perhaps a dozen new items for R. and E. Now Clancy had a dozen new gadgets in his suit alone. He was a walking laboratory of specialized untried gimmicks, dreamed up on comfortable old Earth. Plotch had a dozen entirely different ones; and so did all the others. Though who could keep count. Clancy bent ostentatiously to tug once more on the immovable terminal rod he had just spent three hard physical hours of labor in planting six feet deep in XN-#'s native rock. I T e Had in fact been down with the terminal for some minutes before Piotch called. But he had been pretending to be still working, for the sake of making Piotch struggle to get him to finish up. But now it was time to tie in. These terminals were the last two of the nineteen that made up a Star-point, as the twenty-six Star-points, spread out over a diameter of eighty miles, would, when finished, make a working Relay Station. Tying in these last two terminals would activate the Starpoint. They could go back to the transmit ship for ten blissful hours outside their suits before they were sent out on the next job. Head down, still tugging at the rod, Clancy grinned bitterly to himself. There was usually a closeness between members of a Line Team that was like blood-brotherhood. But in this case, if the hobgoblins were trying to stir up trouble between Piotch and him, they were breaking their immaterial thumbs trying to nunch a button that was already stuck in on position. Clancy straightened up from the rod and spoke over his helmet phone to Piotch. "Yeah," he said. "I'm done." He drew his own wire gun and, resting it in the sighting touch of the terminal rod, aimed it at the rod Piotch had just set up. He saw Plotch's gun come up, glinting red light from the glowing clouds overhead, and aim in his direction. For a second the pinhole of light that was sighting beam from Plotch's gun flickered in his eyes. Then, looking at his post, he saw its illumination there, like a small white dot. "Ready?" Plotch's voice sounded in his earphones. "Ready!" answered Clancy. "On the count of three, fire together with me. One... two... three!" "Ready?" Plotch's voice sounded in his earphones. "Ready!" answered Clancy. "On the count of three, fire together with me. One... two... three!" He pressed the firing button of his wire gun as he spoke the final word. An incredibly thin streak of silver lightning leaped out from the end of his gun through the receptor on the side of the post before him and buried its far end in the receptor on the post beside Piotch. In almost the same second a similar streak of lightning-colored wire joined Plotch's post in reverse to his. The physical shock of the suddenly activated Star-Point field sent both men stumbling backward awkwardly in their protective suits; and a varicolored aurora of faint light sprang up about the star-shaped area of grounded Relay equipment, enclosed by the twenty rods joined by double lengths of fine wire. Number Sixteen Star-Point of the Relay terminal on XN-# was in and working. Now they could get back to the ship. But then, as if the Star-Point's completion had been a signal, the low-hung clouds just over them opened up in a sort of hailstorm. Objects came hurtling toward the surface below -- objects of all shapes and sizes. They looked like large rocks or small boulders, most of them. But for one weird moment, incredibly, it seemed to Clancy that some of them had the shape of Mark-# anti-personnel homing missiles; and one of these was headed right for Plotch. " Plotch !" shouted Clancy. Plotch whirled and his dark faceplate jerked up to stare at the rain of strange objects arcing down at them. Then he made an effort to throw himself out of the path of whatever was coming at him. But he was not quite fast enough. The missile, or whatever it was, struck him a glancing blow high on the shoulder, knocking him to the rock surface underfoot. Clancy himself huddled up on the ground having no place to hide. Something rang hard against his helmet, but the shock of the blow went into his shoulders, as the supporting metal collar of his suit -- another of R. and E.'s test gadgets -- for once paid its way by keeping the helmet from being driven down onto the top of bis bead, inside Around him there were heavy thuddings. One more, just beside him. Then silence. He got up. There were no more rocks falling from the skies. All around him there was only the silent, shifting, colorful aurora of radiation from the connected terminal rods; and the motionless, spacesuited figure of Plotch was a hundred yards off. Clancy scrambled to his feet and began to slog toward tKe still figure. It did not move as he got closer, in the stumbling run which was the best speed be could manage, wearing bis suit. II 'tTT'hen at last he stood over ' ' Plotch, he saw his teammate was completely unmoving. Plotch's suit had a bad dent at the top front of the right shoulder joint; and there was a small, dark, open crack in the suit at the center of the dent. There was only rock nearby; no sign of any missile. But Plotch lay still. With that crack in it, his suit had to have lost air and heat instantly. His faceplate was white now, plainly opaqued on the inside by a thick coat of ice crystals. Clancy swore. The gibbering of the hobgoblins, just out beyond the frontiers of his consciousness, seemed to rise in volume triumphantly. He reached down instinctively and tried to straighten out Plotch's body, for the other man lay ljalf-curled on his side. But the body would not straighten. It was as a figure of cast iron. There was no doubt about it. Within his suit, Plotch wgs now as rigid as the block of ice that, for all practical purposes, he now was. Plotch was frozen. Dead. Or was he? Clancy abruptly remembered something about the experimental gadgets in Plotch's suit. Had not one of them beefi an emergency cryogenic unit of some sort? If that was so, maybe it was the unit that had frozen Plotch -- working instantly to save him when the suit was pierced. If that was so, maybe Plotch was salvagable after all. If it really was so... "Calling Duty Lineman at Transmit ship!" Clancy croaked automatically into his helmet phone, activating the long-distance intercom with his tongue. "Calling whoever's on duty, back on the Xenophon! Come in, Duty Lineman! Emergency! Repeat, Emergency! This is Clancy! Answer me, Duty Lineman..." Static -- almost but not quite screening out the soundless gibbering of the hobgoblins -- answered, roaring alone in Clancy's earphones. His head, a little dizzzy since the rain of rocks, cleared somewhat and he remembered that he should not have expected an answer from this ship. There was interference on XN-# that broke communication between a suit transmitter and the mother ship. It cut off, at times, even communication between a flitter' s more owerful communication unit and the Xenophon. He struggled to his feet and, bending down, took hold of Plotch's stiff body underneath the armpits of the suit. He began to drag it toward their flitter, just out of sight over a little rise of the rocky ground, a couple of hundred yards away. r T"he ground was rough, and Clancy sweated inside his suit. He sweated and swore at his frozen partner, the hobgoblins, the R. and E. Service for its experimenting -- and Lief Janssen, the Line Service Commandant, for letting R. and E. do it. The gravity on XN-# was roughly .# of Earth normal, but the rocky surface was so fissured and strewn with stones of all sizes from pebble to boulder that Plotch's unyielding figure kept getting stuck as it was pulled along. Eventually, Clancy was forced to pick it up clumsily in his arms and try to carry it that way. He made one attempt to put it over his shoulder in a grotesque variation of the fireman's lift; but the position of the arms, crookelbowed at the sides prevented the bend in the body from balancing on his shoulder. In the end he was forced to carry what was possibly Plotch's corpse, like an oversized and awkward baby in his arms. So weighed down, he staggered along, tripping over rock, detouring to avoid the wider cracks underfoot until he topped the rise that hid the flitter from him. Just below him and less than thirty feet off, it had been waiting -- an end and solution to the grisly and muscle-straining business of carrying the frozen and suited figure of Plotch in his arms. It was still there. -- But it was a wreck. A boulder nearly two feet in circumference had struck squarely in the midst of the aft repulsor units, and the tough but lightweight hull of the flitter had cracked open like a ceramic eggshell under the impact. Clancy halted, swaying, where he stood, still holding Plotch. "I don't believe it," he muttered into the static-roar of his helmet. "I just don't believe it. That flitter's got to fly!" For a moment he felt nothing but numb shock. It rose and threatened to overwhelm him. He fought his way up out of it, however; not so much out of determination, as out of a sudden rising panic at the thought of the nearly thirty miles separating him from the transmit ship. The flitter could not be wrecked. It could not be true that he was stranded out here alone, with what was left of Plotch. The flitter had to save them. Then, suddenly, inspiration came to him. Hastily, he dropped onto one knee and eased Plotch onto a flat area of the rock under foot. Leaving Plotch there, balanced and rocking a little, grotesquely, behind him, Clancy plunged down the rubbled slope to the smashed flitter, crawled over its torn sides into what had been the main cabin and laid hands upon the main control board. He plugged his suit into the board, snatched up the intercom hand phone and pupched the call signal iorXenopon. "Duty-Lineman!" he shouted into the phone. "Duty-Lineman! Come in, Xenophon! Come in!" Suddenly, then, he realized that there were no operating lights glowing at him from the control panel before him. The phone in his hand was a useless weight, and his helmet ear phones, which should have linked automatically with the flitter receivers of the intercom sounded only with the ceaseless static and the endless, soundless gibbering. Q lowly, almost tenderly, he un plugged his suit, laid the phone back down on the little shelf before the dark instrument panel and dropped dbwn on the one of three seats before the control board that was not wrecked. For a little while he simply sat there, with the hobgoblins gibbering at him. His head swam. He found himself talking to Plotch. "Plotch," he was saying, quite quietly into his helmet phone. "Plotch, there's nothing else for it. We're going to have to wait here until the ship figures there's something wrong and sends out another flitter to find out what happened to us." He waited a few moments. "You hear me, Plotch?" Still there was only silence, static, voiceless gibbering in his earphones. "We can stick it out of course, Plotch," Clancy muttered, staring at the dead control panel. "Inside of two days they ought to figure we're overdue. Then they'll wait a day, maybe, figuring it's nothing important. Finally they'll send one of the other teams out, even if it means taking them off one of the other jobs. Oh, they'll send somebody eventually, Plotch. They'll have to. Nobody gets abandoned on the Line, Plotch. You know that" The five days of bone-grinding manual labor on the Star-Point took effect on him, suddenly. Clancy fell into a light doze, inside his suit, sitting in the wrecked control room of the flitter. In the doze he half-dreamed that the gibbering voices took on their real hobgoblin shape. They were strange, grotesque parodies of the human figure, with bulbous bodies, long skinny arms and legs and turnip-shaped heads with the point upward, possessing wide, grinning, lipless mouths, a couple of holes for a nose, and perfectly round, staring eyes with neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. They gibbered and grinned and danced around him, kicking up their heels and flinging their arms about in joy at the mess he was in. They stretched their faces like rubber masks into all sorts of ugly and leering shapes, while they chanted at him in their wordless gibberish that they had got Plotch -- and now they 'were going to get him, too. "No!" he said, suddenly aloud in his helmet -- and the spoken word woke him. i Ill H e glanced around the ruined flitter. The hobgoblin shapes of his dream had disappeared, but their gibberish still yammered at him from somewhere unseen. "No," he said to them, again. "If you could rain rocks like that all the time, you'd still be doing it I don't think you can do that except now and then. Even if it was you who did it. All I've got to do is wait." He corrected himself. "All we've got to do is wait -- Plotch and I. And a flitter will come to pick us up." Plotch is dead! Plotch is dead! gibbered the hobgoblins triumphantly. "Maybe," muttered Clancy. "Maybe not. Maybe the cryogenic unit caught him in time. Maybe it froze him in time to save him. You don't know. I don't know." A thought struck him. He got wearily up from his seat, clambered out of the wrecked flitter and struggled up the slope to where Plotch's frozen body in its suit still sat balanced, although by now it had stopped rocking. Clancy stood staring down at it -- at the thick coating of white on the inside of the faceplate, ruddied by the red light from the clouds overhead. "You dead, Plotch?" he asked after a little while. But there was no answer. "So, maybe you're alive, then, Plotch, after all," said Clancy out loud to himself in the helmet. "And if you're alive, then that cryogenic unit works. So you're safe. You won't even have to know about the time we spend waiting for them to send a flitter after us. -- Or, maybe... ?" A sudden, new cold doubt had struck Clancy. Something he half-remembered Plotch's saying about the unit. "I can't remember, Plotch," he muttered fretfully. "Was it supposed to be good for as long as necessary, that cryogenic action? Or was it just supposed to keep you for a few hours, or a few days, until they could freeze you properly, back at the ship? I can't remember, Plotch. Help me out You ought to remember. What was it? Permanent or temporary?" Plotch did not answer. "Because if it's temporary, Plotch," said Clancy, finally, "then even if you're alive now, maybe you won't still be alive by the time the rescue flitter gets here. That's not good, Plotch. It's a dirty trick; having a cryogenic unit that won't last for more than a few hours or a few days..." For a moment he was on the verge of emotional reaction; but he got his feelings under control. Anger came to stiffen him. "Well, how about it, Plotch?" he shouted after a moment into the sileaoe and the gibbering. "How about it -- can you last until the fitter gets here or not. Answer mel" T ut Plotch still did not answer. ' And a cold, hollow feeling began to swell like a bubble under Clancy's breastbone. It was a realization of the dirtiest trick in the universe -- and Plotch just lay there, saying nothing, letting him, Clancy, flounder about with it in him, like a hook in a fish. "You dirty skull!" burst out Clancy. "You planned it like this! You deliberately got in the way of that rock or whatever it was! I saw you! You deliberately got yourself all frozen up the way you are now! Now you want me to let you just sit here; and maybe sat too long before the ship sends somebody to rescue us? Is that it? Well, you know what, Plotch?" Clancy paused to give Plotch a chance to answer. But Plotch maintained his unchanging silence. He was finally learning how to outdo Clancy on the notans wering bit; that was it, thought Clancy lightheaded ly. But Plotch's learning that was nothing now, compared to this other, dirtier trick he was pulling. "Well, I'll tell you what, Plotch," said Clancy, more quietly, but venomously. "I'm not going to take you into the ship myself. How do you like that?" Plotch obstinately said nothing. But the hobgoblin voices chanted their gibber in the back of Clancy's head. All that way with a dead man! Plotch's dead! Plotch's dead! chanted the hobgoblin voices. But Clancy ignored them. He was busy calculating. They had come out due east of the ship, Plotch and he. It was now afternoon where they were. All he had to do was to walk into where the clouds were reddest, because that was where the western sunlight was. The days were sixteen hours long right now in this latitude on XN#, and the nights were a brief four hours. He had a good six hours to walk now, before darkness came. Then he could rest for four hours before picking up Plotch again, keeping the brightest light at his back this time, and carry on. It would be six days at least before the ship would be likely to come to a certain conclusion that he and Plotch were in trouble -- and at least another day, if not two, before another flitter and two-man team could be diverted from their regular job to investigate what had happened out here. Seven days at least -- and thirty miles to the ship. Thirty miles -- why, that was only a little over four miles a day. He could do that any time, carrying Plotch. In fact, he ought to be able to do twice as much as that much in a day. Three times as much. Ten or twelve miles in a sixteen-hour day ought to be nothing. It was less than a mile an hour. Clancy got Plotch up in his arms and started off, his feet in the boots of the suit jarring one after the other against the naked rock beneath them. He walked down, past the damaged flitter, no longer looking at it, and thumped away, carrying his unyielding load in the direction of the brightest red clouds. F ar ahead, as far as he could see to the horizon, the rock plain seemed fairly level. But this was an illusion. As he proceeded, he discovered that there were gentle rises and equally gentle hollows that blended into the general flatness of the area, but which caused him to spend at least a share of his time walking either downhill or uphill. His legs took this effort without complaint; but it was not long before his arms began to ache from holding Plotch's stiff body in front of him, although he leaned back as much as he could to counterbalance the weight. Eventually he stopped and once more tried to find some other way of carrying his burden. Several times he tried to find a position in which Plotch could be balanced on one of his shoulders, but without success. Then, just before he was ready to give up completely, he had a stroke of genius, remembering the gimmick collar on his suit that kept the inside of his helmet top from touching the top of his head. Testing, he discovered that it was possible to carry Plotch grotesquely balanced on top of his head, with the top of Clancy's helmet resting against the frozen man's unyielding stomach and with a knee and an elbow resting on Clancy's right and left shoulders, respectively. The helmet pressed down upon the collar and the weight upon it was distributed to the rigid shoulders of Clancy's suit, with the assistance of Plotch's frozen knee and elbow -- and for the first time Clancy had a balanced load to carry. "Well, Plotch," said Clancy, pleased. "You aren't so bad to take after all." The flush of success that spread through Clancy lightened his spirits and all but drove away the unending gibbering of the hobgoblins. For a moment his mind was almost clear; and in that bit of clear-headedness it suddenly occurred to Him that He Had not set his pedometer. Carefully rotating about, holding PlotcH balanced on his head and shoulders, he looked back the way he Had come. '-pile wrecked flitter was just  barely visible in the distance, its tom parts reflecting a few ruddy gleams of red light Gazing at the smashed vehicle, Clancy did his best to estimate the ground He had covered so far. After a few seconds, he decided that He had come approximately a third of a mile. That was very good going indeed, carrying PlotcH the way he Had, to begin with. Carefully holding PlotcH in place now with' his left hand, he readied down with his right and set the pedometer, which was inset in the front leg of his suit just above the knee, giving himself credit for that third of a mile he had already covered. Only twenty-nine and some twothirds of a mile to go to reach the ship, he told himself triumphantly. "How do you like that, Plotch?" he asked his partner. He started off with fresh energy. Perched on top of Clancy's Head, Plotch rode with' a fine, easy balance, except when Clancy came to one of the hollows and was forced to walk downslope. Then it was necessary to Hold hard to Plotch's knee and elbow, to keep the frozen body from sliding forward off the helmet. For some reason, going upslope, the knee and elbow dug Clancy's shoulders and helped hold Plotch in place, almost by themselves. All in all, thought Clancy, he was doing very well. He continued to slog along, facing into the dwindling western light behind the fiery masses of the clouds. Like all Line Team members, he was in Class Prime physical shape, checked every two weeks in the field, and every two months back on Earth to make sure he was main tainin g his position in that class. He was five feet eleven inches in height, somewhat large-boned and normally weighed around a hundred and ninety. Here on XN-#, his weight was reduced by the lesser gravity to about a hundred and fifty pounds. Plotch, who was five-nine, lighter boned and usually weighed around a hundred and sixty on Earth', here weighed probably no more than a hundred and thirty. On Earth, Clancy would have expected himself to be able to put on a hundred and thirty pound pack and equipment load on top of his suit and make at least a mile an hour with it over terrain like this -- and for at least as many hours in a row as there were in the ordinary working day. That was, provided he stopped routinely for a rest -- something like a ten-minute break every hour. Here, he should do at least as well as that. Still, the calculation had reminded him that periodic rest was necessary. He sat down, eased Plotch off his shoulders and looked at his watch to measure off a rest period of ten minutes. He looked almost genially at the figure of Plotch with its frosted faceplate, as he sat, elbows on knees, resting. "How do you like that, Plotch, you bastard?" he asked Plotch. "It's no trouble for me to carry you. No trouble at all. Maybe you thought you'd get out of something by playing dead on me. But you're not. I'm going to take you in; and they're going to thaw you out and fix you up. How do you like that, Plotch?" Plotch maintained his silence. Clancy's thoughts wandered off for a while and then came back to the present with a jerk. He glanced down at his watch and stared at what he saw, A good half hour had gone by -- not just the ten minutes he had planned on. Had he fallen asleep, or what? "phe light filtering redly through clouds was now low on the horizon ahead of him. He looked at the pedometer on his leg and nuw that he had only covered a little over a couple of miles. Sudden fear woke in him. There would be no making the ship in a few days if he went along at this pace -- no Hope of it at all. Suddenly his throat felt dry. He tongued his drinking tube into position before his mouth and drank several swallows before he realized what he was doing and pushed the tube away again. The recycling equipment in these light-weight survival suits could not be all that perfect. Certain amounts of water were lost in the ejection of solid body wastes and in various other ways which, though minuscule, were important. That loss had to be made up from the emergency tank built into the back shoulder plates of his suit; and with the flitter wrecked, now some miles behind him, there would be no chance best was only supposed to carry enough supplementary water for two or three days. He would have to watch his liquid intake. Food he could do without... but he suddenly remembered, he had plenty of stimulants. He tongued the stim dispenser lever in his helmet and swallowed the small pill that rolled onto his outstretched tongue, getting it down with only the saliva that was in his mouth. Then he struggled to his feet. He had stiffened, even in this short period of sitting; and he had to go down on one knee again to get Plotch back up on his shoulders before rising. Once more burdened, he plodded ahead again, toward the horizon and the descending red light behind the unending clouds. Now that he was once more on his feet and moving, the voiceless gibber of the hobgoblins made itself noticeable again. The stim pill was working through him now, sending new energy throughout his body. Up on his shoulders, the frozen body of Plotch felt literally light. But the increase of energy he got from the pill had a bad side effect -- for he seemed to hear the hobgoblin voices louder, now. IV T Te had about another two and a quarter hours before the sun started to set along the edge of the horizon; and the wide rocky land began to mix long, eerie black shadows with its furnace-glare of sunset light. He stopped at last for the night, before the last of the light was gone, wanting to take time to pick a spot where he could be comfortable. He found it, at last, in a little hollow half-filled with stones, so small that they could fairly be called gravel., But, when he laid Plotch down and checked with the pedometer at his knee, he found that the day's walk so far had broughthim only a little over seven miles -- although the last two hours he had been making as good speed as he could without working himself into breathlessness inside his suit -- which could have been dangerous. He lay down on the gravel. It felt almost soft, through the protection of his suit. He stared up at the darkening cloud-belly overhead. The hobgoblin voices began to increase in volume until they roared in his head, and he began to imagine he saw their faces and bodies as he had in his dream of them, imagined now in the various, scarlet-marked formations of the blackening clouds. He tongued for a tranquilizer; and as it took effect, the light and the forms faded together. The roar sank to a whisper. He slept. He woke abruptly -- to find that the sun was already well above the opposite horizon behind him. The roiling clouds were furnace-bright with a morning redness too fierce to look on, even through his tinted faceplate. He drank a little water, took a stim pill to get himself started and got himself back on his feet with! Plotch on his shoulders. Turning his back on the morning light he began a new day's march. Even through the clouds, the light was strong enough to throw shadows. He kept his own moving shadow pointing straight ahead of him, to be sure he was headed due west. Even with the best he could do about maintaining his bearings, the odds were all against his passing within sight of the ship, itself. On the other hand, once the pedometer showed he was within a three or four mile radius of the ship, he could try to reach them with a constant signal from his suit intercom. And even if the intercom had trouble, the regular scanar watch by the Duty Lineman then should pick up his moving figure on its screen, if he passed anywhere within horizon distance of the ship. TTe took his rest regularly ev ery hour; and he was alert each time to see that he did not exceed the ten minutes he had allowed himself. Together with the exercise and the increasing daylight, he began to warm to his task -- even to become expert at it, this business of plodding over an endless rocky desert with the frozen body of Plotch balanced on his shoulders. He grew clever to anticipate little dips, hollows or fissures. The hobgoblins were clamorous; but under the combined effect of the walking and the stim he almost welcomed them. "Thought you'd helped Plotch to get away from me, didn't you?" he taunted their gibbering, voiceless voices. "Well, see what I'm doing? I'm hanging on to him, after all. How about that, you hobgoblins? Why don't you throw some more rocks at us?" The voices jabbered without meaning. It struck him suddenly, as an almost humorous fact, that they were not entirely voiceless now. They had gained volume. He could actually -- if he concentrated -- hear them in his earphones; about as loud as a small crowd of buzzing gnats close to his ears. "I'll tell you why you don't throw any more rocks at us," he told them, after a while. "It's the way I figured it out back at the flitter. You've got to work something like that up; and that takes several days. And you've got to work it up for a particular spot -- and I'm moving all the time now. You can't hit a moving target." His own last words sent him off into a humorous cackle, which he stopped abruptly when he realized it was hurting his dry throat to laugh. He plodded along, trying to remember whether it was time for him to allow hiself a drink. Finally, he worl d out that it was time -- in fact, it was past time. He allowed himself three sips of the recycled water. If he was correct, his shoulder tanks should still be about half full. But as he went on through the day and as his shadow shortened before him until the most glaring cloud light was directly overhead, he began to feel the effort of his labors, after all. He took advantage of the sunlight being overhead to rest for a little longer than usual, until SN-#'s star should once more have moved ahead of him. It was still too high in the cloud-filled sky for him to use it as a directional guide, when he forced himself to his feet once more. But he walked with his faceplate looking ahead and down, noting the short shadows thrown backward by the rocks he passed and making sure that he walked parallel to those shadows. Meanwhile, the hobgoblin voices got louder. By mid-afternoon they were very nearly deafening. He was tempted to take a tranquilizer, which he knew would tune them down. But he was afraid that a tranquilizer would have just enough of a sedative effect to make the now almost intolerable job of carrying Plotch over the uneven ground too much for him. By the time the sun was far enough down the western sky to be visible as a bright spot behind the clouds ahead of him, he was staggering with fatigue. He stopped for one of his breaks and fell instantly asleep -- waking over an hour later. It took two stim pills this time, washed down with several extra swallows of the precious water to get him on his feet and moving. But once he was upright he cackled at the hobgoblin voices which had once more thronged around him. "Just call me Iron Man Clancy!" he jeered at them hoarsely, through a raw throat and staggered on toward the horizon. A t the end of the day, his pedometer showed that he had covered nearly sixteen miles. He exulted over this; and, exulting, fell into sleep the way a man might fall into a thousand-footdeep mine shaft. When he woke, the next day was well started. The sun was a full quarter of the way up the eastern horizon. Cursing himself and Plotch both, he stimulated himself and struggled to his feet and set out once more. That day he began to walk into nightmares. The hobgoblin voices became quite clear -- even if they still gibbered without sense -- in his earphones. Moreover, now as he staggered along, it seemed to him that from time to time he caught glimpses of turnip heads and skinny limbs peering at him from time to time, or flickering out of sight when he glanced quickly in the direction of some boulder larger than the others. Also, this third day of walking, he found he had lost all logical track of the time and the periods of his rest halts. Several times he fell asleep during a halt in spite of himself; and, by the time the red furnace-glow of the sun was low behind the clouds on the horizon before him, he was simply walking until he could walk no more, then resting until he could walk again... and so on... At the end of the day the pedometer showed that, to the nearly sixteen miles covered the previous two days, he had added only seven. There was a good eight miles to go yet before he would be -- theoretically at least -- in the neighborhood of the spaceship. Eight miles seemed little after covering more than twenty. But also, it seemed to him, as he sank down for the night and unloaded Plotch from his shoulders, that the eight miles might as well be eight hundred. Literally, he felt as if he could not take another step. Without bothering to find a comfortable position, he stretched out on the bare rock beneath him; and sleep took him with the suddenness of a rabbit taken by the silent swoop of a great horned owl. -- When he woke on the fourth day, he had Plotch on his shoulders and was already walking. It seemed to him that he had been walking for some time, and the moving shadow of himself projected before him, which he followed, was already short. Around him, the desert of bare rock had altered. Its loose boulders, its little rises and hollows, its fissures -- all of these had somehow melted together and changed so that they made up the walls and rooftops of a strange weird city of low buildings, straggling in every direction to the horizon. The flat rock he walked on flowed upward off to his left to become a wall, tilted away to his right to become a roof; and among all these buildings, the city was aswarm with the hobgoblins. V  I ray-bodied, turnip-headed  and skinny-limbed, they swarmed the streets of their city ; and all those within view of Clancy were concerned with him and Plotch. They were concerned for him, they implied, in their leering, jeering way. Their gibber still would not resolve itself into words; but somehow he understood that they were trying to tell him that the way he was going he would never make the spaceship. For one thing, he had gotten turned around and was headed in the wrong direction. His only hope of making it to the ship was to sit down and rest. -- Or, at least, to leave Plotch behind, turn around and head back the way he had come. They were trying to help him, they suggested, even as they sniggered, and postured and danced about him. But somehow, a certain sort of animal cunning would not let him believe them. "No!" he stumbled on through their insubstantial mass of gesticulating bodies. "Got to get Plotch to the ship. If I leave him, he'll get away from me." Clancy giggled suddenly, and was shocked for a second at hearing the high-pitched sound within the close confines of his own helmet. "I want him back Earthside." No! No! The hobgoblins gibbered and made faces and jostled about him. Plotch is through living. Clancy will be through unless he leaves Plotch behind. "You don't fool me," Clancy muttered, reeling and stumbling ahead with the dead weight of Plotch on his shoulders. "You don't fool me!" After a while, he fell. He twisted as he went down, so that the stiff body of Plotch landed on top of him. Lying flat on his back on the ground with the hobgoblin's bodies and faces forming a dome over them, Clancy giggled once again at Plotch. "Hope I didn't chip you any, old boy." He grinned at Plotch. He lay there for a while, thinking about everything and nothing. The labor of getting back to his feet and getting Plotch once more up on his head and shoulders loomed before him like the labor of climbing up the vertical side of a mile-high mountain. It was just not to be done. It was humanly impossible. But, after a while, he found himself trying it. He got to his knees, and after a great deal of slow effort, managed to get Plotch balanced once more stiffly on his helmet and his shoulders. But when he came to rise from his knees to his feet, bearing Plotch's weight, he found his legs would not respond. You see, said a large hobgoblin smirking and pulling his rubbery face into different grotesque shapes directly in front of Clancy's faceplate, Clancy has to leave Plotch if Clancy is going to get to the spaceship. "To hell with you!" Qomehow, with some terrific effort and a strength that he did not know was still in him, Clancy found himself back on his feet once more, carrying Plotch. He tottered forward, wading through the hobgoblins that clustered around him. There was nothing substantial about their bodies to clog and hold back the movement of his legs, but their attempts to stop him wearied his mind. After forty or fifty steps he stumbled and fell again, this timelosing his grip on Plotch, who tumbled to the rock, but lay there, apparently unbroken. Clancy crawled to the unmoving figure through the clutching mist of gray hobgoblin bodies. "You all right, Plotch?" Clancy muttered. He patted Plotch's stiff, suited body from helmet to boots. As far as touch could tell, there was no damage done. Then he saw that above the frost the faceplate was starred with cracks. Gently he probed it with the gloved fingers of his right hand. But, while cracked, the faceplate seemed to be still holding together. "All right, Plotch," he muttered. He made one more effort to get Plotch on his shoulders, and himself on his feet; but his body would no longer obey him. Still kneeling, half-crouching over the figure of Plotch, he fell asleep. At first the sleep was like all the other sleeps, then gradually a difference began to creep in. He found himself dreaming. He was dreaming of his appointment ceremony as a Lineman back in the main tower of Line Service Headquarters, back on Earth. He and all the other cadets were dressed in the stiff, old-fashioned green dress uniforms, which, in his case, he had not put on again since. The uniforms had a high stand-up collar; and the collar edge of the cadet in front of him had already worn a red line on the back of the cadet's neck. The man kept tilting his head forward a little to get the tender, abraded skin away from the collar edge, while the voice of the Commandant droned on: "... You are dedicating yourself today," the Commandant was saying, harshly, "to the Line, to that whole project of effort by which our human race is reaching out to occupy and inhabit the further stars. Therefore you are dedicating yourselves to the service of your race; and that service is found within the Line from everyone in our headquarters staff out to the most far-flung, two-man teams on new Terminal or Relay Worlds. All of us together make up the Team which extends and maintains the Line; and we are bound together by the fact that we are teammates..." The Commandant, Leif Janssen, was still senior officer of the Line Service. He was a tall, stiff military-looking man with gray hair and gray mustache, trim and almost grimly neat in his green uniform with its rows of Station Clusters. He made an imposing figure up on the rostrum; and at the time of the appointment ceremony Clancy had admired the Commandant greatly. It was the past five years that had changed Clancy's mind. Janssen was plainly pretty much a man of Straw -- at least where R. and E. was concerned. It was strange that such an effective-looking man should prove so weak; and that a small bookkeeperish-looking character like Charles Li, the Head of R. and E should turn out to be such a successful battler. Theoretically, the two Services were independent and equal, but lately R. and E. had been doing anything it wanted to the Line Team. Up on the platform, in Clancy's dream, the Commandant continued to drone on... "... For, just as the human race is the Line, so the Line is the Line Team, in its single ship sent out to hook up a new Relay or Terminal Station. And the Team in essence is its two and threeman units, sent out to work on planetary surfaces heretofore untrodden by human foot. The race is the Line Service. The Service is the Line Team, and the Line Team is each and every one of your fellow Lineman..." T he speech was interminable. Clancy searched for something in his mind to occupy himself with; and for no particular reason he remembered an old film made of the hunting of elephants in Africa, before such hunting was outlawed completely. The hunters rode in a wheeled car after the elephant herd, which, after some show of defiance had turned to run away. Standing up in the back of the wheeled car, one of the hunters shot -- and one of the large bull elephants staggered and broke his stride. Clearly the animal had been hit. Soon he slowed. A couple of the other bulls, evidently concerned, slowed also. The hit elephant was staggering; and they closed in on either side of him, pushing against him with their great gray flanks to hold him upright. For a while this seemed to work. But the effects of the shot were telling -- or perhaps the hunter had fired again, Clancy could not remember. The wounded elephant slowed at last to a walk, then to a standstill. He went down on his front knees. The other two bulls would not abandon him. They tried to lift him with their trunks and tusks; but he was too heavy for them. Up close, the hunter in the wheeled cart fired another shot in close. There was a puff of dust from behind the elephant's ear where the bullet hit. The wounded bull shivered and rolled over on its VI side and lay there very still. It was. plain he was finally dead. Only then did the other two bulls abandon him. Screaming with upcurled trunks at the wheeled cart, they faced the hunter for a moment, stamping, then turned and ran with the rest cf the herd. The hunter and the others in the wheeled cart let them go... In his dream, it seemed to Clancy that the elephant was suddenly buried. He lay in a cemetery with a headstone above bis grave. Going close, Clancy saw that the name on the headstone was Art. There was something else written there; but when he tried to go closer to see -- for it was just twilight in the graveyard and not easy to read the headstones -- a dog lying on the grave, whom he had not noticed, growled and bared its fangs at him, so that he was forced to back off Slowly, from his dreams of graduating ceremonies, elephants and graveyards, Clancy drifted back up into consciousness. It seemed that he must have been sleeping for some time; and his mouth was wet, which meant that somehow he must have been drinking water -- whether from his suit reserves, or from some other source. But he did not feel now as if he had his suit around him. T Te opened his eyes and saw, at  first, nothing but white, the white walls and ceiling of a small room aboard a spaceship. Then he became conscious of a girl standing beside the bed. She was dressed in white, also, so at first he thought that she a nurse -- and then he noticed that she wore no nurse's cap, only a small, strange-looking gold button in the lapel of her white jacket. "Who're you?" asked Clancy, wonderingly. "Where is this?" "It's all right, you can get up now," the girl answered. "You're on our ship. We're Research and Experimentation Service, and we just happened to land less than half a mile from where you were. So we picked you up and brought you in. Luckily for you. You were headed exactly in the wrong direction." "And Plotch?" Clancy demanded. "We brought in your teammate, too," she answered. Clancy sat up on what he now saw was a bunk, and sat on the edge of it for a moment. He was wearing the working coveralls he normally wore underneath the suit; but they seemed to have been freshly cleaned and pressed -- which was good. He would not have liked to face this very good-looking girl in his coveralls, as they must have been after six days of his wearing the suit. "R. and E.?" he echoed. For a second her words seemed to make sense. Then the great impossibility of what she was saying, struck him. "But you can't have landed a ship on XN-#!" he said to the girl, getting to his feet. "We're still just putting out the StarPoint terminals. The only way another ship could get here would be to home in on the drone that our Line ship homed in on; and that's been inactive since our second day here, when we started cannibalizing it for Station parts!" "Oh, no. This ship," she answered, "uses a new experimental process, designed to bypass the wasteful process of sending out a thousand drones in hopes that one may home in on a planet that may be used as a Terminal or Relay point for a ship shifted from Earth. But here comes someone who can explain it much better than I can." A short, round-faced man with black hair and a short, black mustache had come briskly into the room. After a second, Clancy recognized him from seeing him on news broadcasts, back on Earth. He was Charles Li, Head of the Research and Experimentation Service; and he wore a long white coat, or smock, buttoned in front, with a small gold button like the girl's in his lapel. It was strange, thought Clancy woozily, how an impressive figure like Janssen could turn out to be so incapable of protecting his own Service, while someone like this fuzzy-looking little man could prove to be so effective. You certainly could not judge by appearances... "I heard what you said, young man," snapped Li, now, "and I'd warn you against judging by appearances. The method that brought this special ship here is a gadget of my own invention. Of chance that we should land right beside you, out here; but that's what scientific research and experimentation deal with today, ""Mancy had to admit silently that it was. Certainly most of the R. and E. gadgets in their survival suits seemed to represent with something useful. But Li was already taking Clancy by the arm and leading him out into and down a white-painted corridor of the ship. "But there's something you need to do for us," he said in steely, commanding tones, his grip hard on Clancy's arm. "It's imperative your transmit ship be told of our arrival, as soon as possible. But the very nature of the device which brought us here -- top secret, I'm afraid, so I can't explain it to you now -- places us under certain restrictions. None of us aboard here can be spared to make the trip to your ship; and the nature of our equipment makes it impossible for us to send a message over ordinary inter-ship channels." He led Clancy into a room which Clancy recognized as an airlock. His suit was waiting for him there. "We're sorry to put you to this trouble, particularly just after recovering from a good deal of exhaustion and exposure," said the black-mustached man briskly. "But we have to ask you to put your suit on once again and finish your walk to your spaceship, to tell them that we're here." "Why not?" said Clancy. He began to get into his spacesuit, while the other two watched; the girl, he thought, with a certain amount of admiration in her eyes. "Yes, it's too bad one of us can't be spared to go with you," said the mustached man. "But we have no outside suits aboard the ship, and then if nothing else one would be needed for protection from the hobgoblins." "Protection -- ?" echoed Clancy. He paused, in the midst of sealing the trunk of his suit. For the first time it struck him that he could not hear the voiceless gibber of the hobgoblins here. The mustached man must have divined his thought, for he answered it. "Yes," he said. "The special hull materials of this ship shield us from hobgoblin attempts to control us. A refinement of the shielding material in your suits. That same sort of protection we now have will be necessary for future Line Teams and whoever chooses this planet. I will have to recommend it once we get back to Earth." "Yeah," said Clancy, putting on his helmet, but with the faceplate still open. "I could have used some of that shielding myself, before this." "You've done a marvelous job. Lineman," said Charles Li, "in resisting hobgoblin attack so far. They haven't been able to affect you at all, no matter how exhausted you've become. That will be going in my report, too. Well -- good luck! And remember, head back the way you came." Li reached out to shake hands. But, just at that moment, Clancy remembered something. "Plotch!" he said. "I've got to take Plotch on in with me! He'll need medical attention." "I'm afraid it's too late for medical attention." Li shook his head sharply. "Your teammate is dead." "No, he isn't!" insisted Clansy. "You don't understand. There was a cryogenic unit in his suit" "Yes, I know ail about that," Li interrupted, "but you're mistaken. The cryogenic unit was actually in one of the other suits. Your teammate is indeed dead. Come along, I'll show him to you." T T e turned and led the way  once more into the corridor, the girl and Clancy following. They went down the corridor a little way and into another room with a single bunk in it. On this bunk lay Plotch, in his suit, but with the faceplate open and unfrosted; and with his hands folded on his chest. His face had the stiff, powdered and rouged look of a body that has been embalmed. "You see?" said Li, after a moment. "I sympathize with you. But your friend is quite dead; and carrying him, you might not have the strength to make it to your ship. You can leave him safely to us to be taken care of." Clancy stared at Plotch, he did not believe Li. He thought he detected a slight rise and fall of Plotch's chest, under his coveralls, which were now as clean and pressed as Clancy's own. But cleverly, Clancy saw the futility of arguing with the powerful Head of the R. and E. Service. Clancy nodded his head and went back out into the corridor; he began to fasten up his faceplate. "Don't bother to show me out," he said, grinning. "I can handle the airlock by myself." "Good luck, then," said the mustached man. He and the girl shook hands with him and then went off down the corridor, around a bend of it, and disappeared. Clancy turned and walked heavily to the airlock entrance, walked into it, waited a second, then turned and tiptoed back into the corridor and back up to the room in which Plotch lay. TT'ven thawed out in his suit,  -- ' Plotch was a heavy load to get up from the bunk, but Clancy closed his faceplate and got him up in his arms in the same awkward, front-carrying position in which he had first tried to carry the other away from the smashed flitter. Carrying Plotch', he tiptoed back out into the corridor into the airlock and cycled the lock open. Once outside, with the airlock's outer door closed behind him, he started tiptoeing off toward a sunlightblazoned patch of clouds, which was only an hour or two above horizon. He was almost sure it was nearly sunset and that he was still headed in his original direction. As he went, the weight of Plotch forced him down off his toes, to walk flat-footedly. Slowly, Plotch seemed to gain heaviness, and tremendous weariness began to flood back into Clancy. He was dreadfully thirsty. But when he gave in at last to temptation and sucked on the water tube in his helmet, only a little raspy gasp of moisture-laden air came through his mouth. Somehow, although he could not remember doing it, he must have emptied his reserve water supply. But he could have sworn that there had been some liquid still in reserve. However, there was no help for him now. As if in compensation, he made the discovery that Plotch had frozen stiff once more in the same old position. Almost without thought, he maneuvered the frozen body back up on his helmet and shoulders in the same position in which he had carried it so far and tottered on toward the red, glaring patch of sunlight-illumined cloud before him. His head swam. With every step, the efforts of moving seemed to grow greater. But now he had no strength left, even for the process of reason. He did not know exactly why he was carrying Plotch, with such great effort, toward the sunset ; and it was too great an effort to reason it out. All he had strength for was to plod onward, one foot after another, one foot after another... Several times it seemed to him that he passed out, or went to sleep on his feet. But when he woke up he was still walking. Finally, he had lost all contact with his body and its strange desire to carry a frozen Plotch into the sunset. He stood as if apart from it in his mind and watched with a detached and uncurious amazement as that body staggered on, tilting precariously now and' then under its burden, but never quite going down, while the landscape danced about it, one moment being rocky plain -- the next a fantastic, lcrw-walled city thronged with hobgoblins -- the next a dusty African plain where elephants fled before hunters in a wheeled cart... He was still walking when the sun went down. And after that he remembered nothing... when he finally came to again, it was to a fuzzy, unreal state. He was lying on some flat surface and a body was bending over him; but the features in the face of the body danced so that he could not identify whoever it was. But, in spite of the unreality of it all, the smells were hard and familiar -- the interior stink of a Line transmit ship, the smell of his own bonk aboard it, a mingled odor of men and grease. tt T Te'll be all right," a familiar voice said above him. It came from the figure with the mixed-up features, but it was the voice of Jeph Wasca, his Team Captain. "Plotch?" Clancy managed to croak. "What?" The blurry figure with the dancing features bent down dose to Clancy's face. "Plotch..." Clancy felt the strength draining out of him. After a few seconds, the figure straightened up, the dancing face withdrawing. "I can't understand you. Tell me later, then," said Jeph's voice, brusquely. "I haven't got time to talk to you now, Clance. You go to sleep. When you wake up, you'll be back Earthside." The indefinite figure withdrew, and all the fuzzy lights, colors, sounds and smells surrounding Clancy whirled themselves into a funnel that drew him down into dark unconsciousness. When he woke this third time, he was indeed -- as Jeph had promised -- Earthside. He could tell it, if no way else, by the added pull of gravity, holding him down harder upon the bed in which he lay. The room he opened his eyes upon was plainly a hospital room, and there was a bottle of glucose solution with a tube leading to a needle inserted in his wrist. He felt as if he had spent half a year locked up in a packing case with a pack of angry bobcats. Where he was not sore, he ached; and he did not feel as if he had strength enough to move the little finger of one hand. He lay for a while, placidly and contentedly watching the featureless white ceiling above him, and then a nurse came in. She put a thermometer sensor-strip into his mouth briefly, and then took it out again to examine it. Once his lips were free, he spoke to her. "You're a real nurse?" he asked. She laughed. She had freckles on her short nose, and they crowded together when she laughed out loud. "They don't let imitations work in this ward," she said. "How're you feeling?" "Terrible," he said. "But just as long as I don't try to move, I feel fine." "That's good," she said. "You just go on not trying to move. That's doctor's orders for you anyway. Do you think you're up to having some visitors later on this afternoon?" "Visitors?" he asked "Your Line Team Captain," she said. "Maybe some other people."  "Sure," Clancy said. She went out; and Clancy fell asleep. Lie was awakened by someone # speaking gently in his ear and a light touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and looked up into the face of Jeph standing at his bedside with another man -- a tall man standing a little behind him. "How are you feeling, Clance?" Jeph asked, "Fine," answered Clancy sleepily. His fingers groped automatically for the bed-control lever at the bedside and closed upon it. He set the little motors whirring to raise him up into halfsitting position. "The nurse said you might be in to see me." "I've been waiting to see you," said Jeph. "Got somebody here to see you." The man behind Jeph moved forward; but Clancy's eyes were all on Jeph. "Plotch?" Clancy asked. "He's going to be all right," Jeph answered. "They've got him defrosted and on his way back to normal -- thanks to you." "Don't thank me!" exploded Clancy. "Jeph, I can't take that guy any more! If I have to take any more of him, I'll kill him!" "Relax," said Jeph, I've known that for some time. I made up my mind some months back that one of you had to leave the Team." "One of us -- " Clancy went rigid, under the covers of the bed. "Plotch's being transferred." Clancy relaxed. "Thanks," he muttered. "Don't thank me," said Jeph. "You earned it. You saved all our necks out there on XN-# -- and more. That's why the Commandant's here to talk to you." Clancy's gaze shot past Jeph for the first time; and the tall man stepped right up te the bedside. It was Janssen all right, with his gray, bristling little military mustache, just as Clancy remembered him. Janssen smiled stiffly down at Clancy. Clancy's nerves, abraded by his sessions with the hobgoblins, took sudden alarm. "What about?" he demanded warily. "Let's get you briefed first," said Janssen sharply. He pulled up a chair and sat down, kicking another chair over to Jeph, who also sat down. "Sorry to put you through your paces like this," Janssen said, not sounding sorry at all, "just the minute you get your eyes open. But when the tune's ripe, the tune's ripe. We've got someone else due to meet us here; and he may want to ask you some questions. I'm going to be asking you some questions for his benefit, in any case; and what I want you to do is just speak up. Give us both straight answers, just the way they come to you. You've got that?" Clancy nodded again, warily. (  A #I right. Now, to get you briefed on the situation," said Janssen. "First, it seems you ran into something new out there on XN-#. That planet's got an actual sentient life form, which exists as something like clouds of free electrons. Beyond that, we don't know much about them, except for three things; none of which we'd have known if you hadn't managed to carry Plotch on foot all the way back to the ship. One -- " Janssen held up a knobby forefinger to mark the point. " -- They can move material objects up to a certain size, with a great deal of effort -- as in that shower of rocks you remember," he said. "But evidently it's not easy for them. Also, they can affect human thinking processes -- up to a point. Again, though, it's not easy for them. For one thing, any kind of material envelope, like the body of a ship, or a flitter, or a suit like you were wearing, shields them out to a certain extent, depending on its thickness. For another, it seems they only become really effective if the human is the way you were, near the end of your walk -- in a highly exhausted condition; the kind of condition where lack of sleep or extreme effort might have brought you to the point of hallucinations, anyway. Third -- and most important -- they were trying to kill off all the men of your Team. It seems they were able to understand that with the drone dismantled, the ship unmanned and the terminal not yet fully built and operative, there'd be no way for another ship out to XN-#. In fact, the chances of our hitting the planet on a blindtransmit once more, let alone getting another drone safely landed on it, were microscopic. For some reason they didn't want us to know about their existence; and that suggests that maybe they wanted to make preparations of some kind  -- either for defense or offense against the human race." He paused. "Lucky for us," he said brusquely to Clancy, "you frustrated them." "Just by bringing Plotcli in?" Clancy demanded. There was something disproportionate in all this. He did not trust Janssen at all. "That's right, Glance," said Jeph. "There's something you don't know. If you'd decided to sit down out there and wait for rescue, you'd have dried up to dust inside your suit before any rescue came," Clancy stared at the Team Captain. "All but one flitter and twoman crew," said Jeph slowly, "we're out on jobs -- and the closest one out was farther away from the ship than you and Plotch were. Glance, every one of those flitters was smashed by rock showers, and its crew killed or stranded." Clancy swallowed for the moment forgetting the Line Commandant. "Who..." he could not finish the question. He only stared at Jeph with bright eyes. Jeph answered slowly, but without any attempt at emotion. "Fletch," the Team Leader said, "Jim, Wally, Pockets, Ush and Pappy." Clancy lay still for a moment, gazing at the wall of the room opposite. Then he looked back at Jeph. "What kind of replacements are we getting?" he asked. He looked at Janssen challengingly. "The best," answered the Commandant. "And I'll keep that promise. Again, because of you and your bringing Plotch in on foot." "I still don't see what that did -- " Clancy broke off, suddenly thoughtful. "Now you start to see it, don't you?" said Jeph. "There were three of us and one flitter left in the spaceship. Twelve men and six flitters -- including you and Plotch, all the other flitters and men we had -- were out on work location. All of them overdue, and none of them back. What was I going to do? I could not risk sending out the two men I had left for fear the same thing would happen to them -- they might not come back. On the other hand, without the Starpoints all finished, there was no way we could transmit the ship back Earthside. The only thing was for the three of us to stay put and keep the ship powered. We couldn't transmit or receive, but with luck we could act as a beacon for another blind drone transmit from Earth -- once Earth figured we were in trouble." Jeph paused. Clancy slowly nodded. "Then you came staggering in, with your load of frozen Plotch," said Jeph, "We shoved Plotch into the freeze-chamber and tried to find out from you what had happened. You weren't up to talking consciously; but I pumped you full of parasympathetic narcos, and you babbled in your sleep. You babbled it all. Once I knew what I was up against, I was able to risk my last flitter and my last two men to go out on quick rescue missions to each of the work-points. After that we went out with the men who were left for only a couple of hours on the job at a time, until the last Star-point was finished and we could transmit ourselves back here." Clancy nodded again. He was thinking of Jim, Wally, and all the rest who had not come back, looking out the window of his room at the green hospital grounds outside with unfocused eyes. Someone else had just come into the room; but Clancy was too full of feeling to bother to look to see who it was. He was aware of Jeph and the Commandant turning briefly to glance toward the newcomer, then they were back looking at him. (# All right," Janssen said grimly, with one eye still on whoever had just come in. "Let's have your attention Lineman. There's a question some people may be wanting to ask you. That's how you were able to see through what the hobgoblins were trying to do to you, in making you leave Plotchin and go off in the wrong direction ; once they'd gotten you to hallucinating about a new experimental type hip that didn't need the Line to shift from Earth out to XN-#?" Clancy scowled down at the white bedspread. "Hell," he grumbled, "I didn't see through it! I mean I didn't start adding up reasons until later. Like the rescue ship landing right beside me; and the people on her using our Team's own word for the 'hobgoblins'; when they hadn't heard me calling them that myself." "But you didn't leave Plotchin the way they wanted you to. And you didn't take their word for it that you were headed wrong for your ship," said Janssen. "Of course not!" Clancy growled. "But it was just because I felt there was something wrong about it all; and I wasn't going to leave Plotch behind, as long as there was a chance they were lying about his being dead." "All right. Wait a minute." It was the newcomer to the room speaking. He stepped close to the bedside. "Wasn't I given to understand you hated this teammate of yours -- this, uh, Plotchin?" Clancy looked up and goggled. He was gazing at a short man with a round face, black hair and a little black mustache. The man of his hallucination, only this time he was real: Charles Li, the head of Research'and Experimentation Service. Li's voice was not as deep as it had been in Clancy's hallucination -- in fact there was almost a querulous note in it. But he sounded decisive enough. "Why -- I still hate him!" snapped Clancy. "I hate his guts! But that didn't mean I was going to leave him out there!" He stared at Li. Li stared back down at him. "I guess you haven't heard the latest interpretation of that, Charlie," Janssen said stiffly to Li, and the Head of R. and E. turned about to face the Commandant. "Our Service psychologists came up with a paper on it just a couple of hours ago -- I'll see you get a copy of it by the end of the day." Li frowned suddenly at Janssen. "Never mind," Li said, "just give me the gist of it." "It's simple enough," said Janssen. "The immaterial life forms on XN-# got control of Clancy's conscious mind. But the only way they could make him hallucinate was by telling him what he ought to see and then letting him drag the parts to build the hallucination out of his own mind and memory. So while they had control of him pretty well, consciously, they never did get down into the part of him where his unconscious reflexes live. And did you know that team loyalty lives down among the instincts in some men, Charlie?" "Team loyalty, an instinct?" Li frowned again. "I don't know if I can see that." tt'T'ake my word for it, then," said Janssen, "but it's easy enough to check." He looked down at the shorter man. "Not only humans, a lot of the social animals have the same reflex. Porpoises hold another porpoise up on top of the water after he's been knocked unconscious, so that he won't drown -- that's because the porpoise breathing mechanism is conscious, not unconscious like ours. Land animals too." "Elephants... "muttered Clancy, suddenly remembering. But none of the other men were paying any attention to him. "Under an instinct like that," Janssen was going on, raspingly, to the R. and E. Service Head, "the loyalty of every team member is to the team. And every other man on it. And the loyalty of the team's to him, in return. As long as there's a spark of life left in him, his teammates will do anything they can, at any cost to themselves, to care for him, to rescue him, or bring him home safely -- " "Lief, not one of your spiels, please -- " began the shorter man, but Janssen overrode him by sheer power of voice. "Bat," went on the Commandant, "the minute he's dead, their obligation's lifted. Because they all know that now he has to be replaced by a new man on the Team, someone to whom the loyalty they used to owe the dead man 'will have to be transferred. What tripped up those hobgoblins on XN-# was the fact that Clancy here couldn't be sure Plotchin was dead. It didn't matter how much he hated Plotchin; or how overwhelming the evidence was that Plotchin was dead, or that trying to save Plotchin might only mean throwing his own life away, too. As long as the slightest chance was there that Plotchin could be rescued, Clancy was obligated by his Team instinct to do his best for his teammate. That's why Clancy brought the man in, in spite of how he felt about him, personally, and in spite of all those aliens could do, and in spite of the near physical impossibility, even under the lower gravity there, of carting a frozen dead man, weighing nearly as much as he did, for miles." Janssen stopped talking. All the while he had been speaking, Li's face had been growing sourer and sourer, like a man who has discovered a worm in the apple into which he has just bitten. "Can I talk now?" demanded Li. The querulous note in his voice was mounting to a pugnacious whine. "Go ahead," said Janssen. "All right." The smaller man drew a deep breath. "What's this all about? You got me over here to see this man, telling me you had something to show me. Evidently you wanted to prove to me he's a hero. All right, I agree. He's a hero. Now, what about it?" Janssen turned to Jeph, "Shut the door, there," he ordered. Jeph complied. Janssen's eyes raked from the Line Team Captain to Clancy. "And if either of you breathe a word of what you hear in this room from now on, I'll personally see that you get posted out on a job two hundred light-years from Earth, and forgotten there." IX '"Mancy's stomach floated suddenly inside him, as if an elevator he was in had just dropped away under the soles of his feet. His premonitions of trouble on seeing Janssen had been only too correct. Here, the man who had evidently lost five years of battles with the Head of R. and E. was about to take one more swing at the other Service Head, using Clancy ; as a club. Two guesses, thought Clancy, as to what the outcome would be -- and what would happen to Clancy himself as a result. He had escaped the hobgoblins on XN-#, only to be trapped and used by the super-hobgoblin of all -- his own tough-talking, but ineffective Line Service Commandant There he was now -- Janssen -- tying into Li as if he'd been the winner all these last five years, instead of the other way around. "I'm glad to hear you admit that, Charlie," Janssen was snapping, "because Clancy here is a hero. A real, live hero. A man who damn near killed himself doing a superhuman job in the face of inimical alien action to save his teammate. Only he nearly didn't make it, because he was already chewed down past the exhaustion point when he started. Not just from fighting his job and the aliens -- but from being worn thin by a round damn dozen of your Service's useless ivory-tower experiments, built into his working suit!" Li stared at him. "Whatire you talking about?" bristled Li. "It was the collarinnovation on his own suit that kept him from being brained when that rock hit his helmet. If it hadn't been for the experimental cryogenic unit in Plotchin's suit, Plotchin wouldn't be alive now!" "Sure. Two!" snarled Janssen. "Two gadgets paid off, but of --  what? A total of twenty-three, for both men's suits? What did the other twenty-one gadgets do for either of them? I'll tell you. Nothing! Nothing, except to wear them out to the point where they were ready to cut each other's throat like half the rest of my men on the Line Teams 'nowadays!" Li's face was palely furious behind the black mustache. "Sorry. I don't see that!" he snapped. "Your man's still only a hero because the cryogenic unit gave him a revivable teammate to bring back. And credit for the cryogenic unit being in Plotchin's suit belongs to us!" "You think so?" grated Janssen. Li's voice had gone high in tone with the argument. Janssen's was going down into a bass growl. Both men looked ready to start swinging at each other at any minute. Janssen's gray mustache bristled at Li. "Stop and think again for a moment. What if your cryogenic unit hadn't worked? What if Plotchin had actually been dead? Clancy wouldn't have had any way of knowing it, for sure. And so he'd have brought Plotchin in, anyway! You think you can take his hero status away from him just because your unit worked? He did what he did out of a sense of duty to his teammate -- and whether there was a live man or a dead one on top of him at the time doesn't matter." UQo?" snarled Li.  "So!" barked Janssen. "I've been lying back and waiting for something to hang you with, Charlie, for four years. Now I've got it. I'm starting to punch buttons the minute I leave this hospital. We're both of us responsible to Earth Central, and Earth Central's responsible to the taxpayers. I'm going to set the wheels going to bring my hero up in front of a full-dress Central Investigating Committee -- to determine whether the excessive number of experiments your Service has been forcing upon my Line Teams might not have caused the Relay Station installation on XN-# to fail in the face of attack by inimical aliens, who then might have gone undiscovered and eventually posed a threat to the whole Line, if not to the whole human race." Clancy had a sudden, irrational impulse to pull the bedcovers up over his head and pretend they had all gone away. "Are you crazy?" snarled Li. "You tried fighting me, five years ago, when we first got Central permission to test experimental equipment under working conditions, on your Line Teams. And Central went right along with me all the way." "That was then, Charlie!" Janssen grated. "That was then, when you had all the little glittery, magic-seeming wonderworld-tomorrow type of gadgets to demonstrate on the TV screens and grab the headlines. All I had was honest argument. But now it's the other way around. All you've got is more of the same -- but I've got the real glitter. I've got a hero. Not a fake hero, flanged up for the purpose. But a true hero -- an honest hero. You can't shoot him down no matter what angle you try from. And I've got villains -- real villains, in those alien hobgoblins, or whatever they are. I'm going to win this inquiry the same way you won the last one. Not in 'he Committee Room, but out in the News Services. I can get you and your experiment wiped clean out of my Service, Charlie! And I'll play hell with your next year's appropriations, to boot!" Janssen shut up, his mustache stiff with anger. Clancy held his breath, resisting the impulse to shut his eyes. The Line Service Commandant had taken his swing; and now -- how, Clancy did not know, but there would undoubtedly turn out to be a way -- Li would lower the boom. "All right," said Li, bitterly. "Damn you, Lief! You know I can't afford any threat to next year's appropriations now that the drone by-pass system is ready to go into field testing! Name your price!" '"'lancy blinked. He opened his  eyes very wide and stared at Li. "But you wipe me out, and you'll regret it, Lief!" continued the R. and E. Head, bursting out before Clancy could get his brains unscrambled. "Admit it or not, but a lot of our ivory-tower gadgets, as you call them, have ended up as standard equipment, saving the lives of men on your Teams!" "Don't deny it!" snapped Janssen. "I don't deny it and never did. And I don't want to wipe you out. I just want to get back the right to put some limit on the number of wild-eyed ideas my men have to test for your lab jockeys! That's all!" "All right," said Li. He, too was relaxing, though his face was still sour. "You've got it." "And we'll draw up an intraService agreement," said Janssen. "All right." Li's glance swung balefully to fasten for a second on Clancy. "I suppose you know you'll be holding up progress?" "That won't matter so much'," said Janssen, "as long as I'm upholding my Linemen." "Excuse me," Li answered stiffly, looking back at him, "I don't see that. As far as I'm concerned, progress comes before the individual." "It does, does it?" said Janssen. "Well, let me tell you something. You get yourself a fresh crop of laboratory boys out of the colleges, every year, all you want, to work in your nice, neat, air-conditioned labs. But I get only so many men for work on the Line -- because it takes a special type and there's only so many of that type born each generation!" Clancy stared guiltily at Janssen. Clancy's conscience was undergoing an uncomfortable feeling -- as if he had just been punched in the pit of his stomach. "I know," Li was answering, with a sour glance at Clancy. "Heroes." "Heroes, hell!" exploded Janssen. "Race horses! That's what my boys are -- race horses! And you wanted to turn them into pack mules for your own purposes. Not damn likely! Not any more damn likely than I was to roll over on my back and let you get away with using a full-dress Central Investigation Committee to get permission to stick your nose into my Line Service! Open your eyes for once, Charlie! Use your imagination on something living! Can you imagine what it's like to do what these men do, jammed at best into the few clear cubic feet of a tiny transit ship you could cover with a large tent? And at worst -- living in their suits out on the job for days on end, working harder than any manual laborer's worked on Earth in fifty years, always under strange conditions and unknown dangers like those hobgoblins on XN-#?" J anssen had to stop for a second to draw breath. "Can you imagine doing that?" he went on. "Just to put in a tourists to use; just about the time you're maybe getting killed or crippled putting in another Station out on some world the tourists have never heard of yet?" "No, I can't," he said, dryly. "And I don't believe any normal, sensible man can. If the work's that bad, what makes any of your men want to do it?" "Listen." Clancy propped himself up on one elbow. His conscience and the recognition of how wrong he had been about Janssen was finally bringing him into the fight. It was late. But better late than never. "Listen -- " he said again to Li. "You get a feeling you can't describe at the end of a job -- when a working Station finally goes into the line. You feel good. You know you've done something, out there. Nobody else did it, but you -- and nobody can take it away from you, that you've done it!" "I see." The short man's mustache lifted a little. He turned to the door, opened it, and looked back at Janssen. "They're romantics, your Linemen. That's it in a nutshell. Isn't it?" "That's right, Charlie," said the Commandant coldly. "You named it." "Yes," said Li, "and no doubt the rest of the race has to have them for things like building the Line. But, if you'll excuse me. personally I can't see romantics. Or romanticism, either." He went out shutting the door. "No," said Janssen, grimly, looking at the closed door. "You wouldn't. Your kind never does. But we manage to get things done in spite of you, one way or another." He glared suddenly at Clancy, who was staring at him with a powerful intensity. "What're you gawking at, Lineman?" he barked. "Nothing," said Clancy. course the submarine is named after the marine animal, but in a rather roundabout way. Back in #, Sir Hubert Wilkins acquired a surplus submarine from the first world war, intending to use it to reach the North Pole by traveling under the floating arctic ice (something that was actually done three decades later), and he re-named the submarine Nautilus. Both Admiral Rickover's and Sir Hubert's submarines were named after Jules Verne's fictitious submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne, in turn, named his submarine after an actual small submarine designed and built by the American painter and inventor Robert Fulton and tested in the Seine river during the early years of the nineteenth century. The river water proved to be so muddy that Fulton could see for a distance of about five feet, and that, combined with Napoleon's lack of interest, ended the experiments. But it started the use of the name. Where did Fulton get the name?  He lived in the days -- sometimes I think of them as the fortunate days from the point of view of education -- where a young man had to learn the classical languages before he was admitted to the study of anything else. Hence he knew that in Greek naus means a ship, nautes means a sailor and that the latter word has a poetical form: nautilos. But Fulton did not have real or even ghostly sailors in mind, he thought of a shell of the kind that is in front of me on my dsek. It came from far away -- namely the Philippine Islands -- and could be bought in curio shops. When sawed in half carefully, it showed a large number of chambers; and since the days of George Everard Rumphius of the Dutch East India Company, it was known that something resembling an octopus lived in tire foremost and largest of these chambers. It is a peculiar octopus, but since it is peculiar mainly when compared with other octopi, we first need a general discussion of the tribe, before we can dwell on nautilus. nphe scientific term for octopuslike animals is cephalopods, the "head-footed ones," for the simple reason that not all of them have eight arms as is implied by the name octopus. They are molluscs, like snails and clams, but they are the most highly evolved molluscs there are. Most molluscs are helpless in the face of an attack; at best they have a hard shell into which to retreat. The cephalopods are usually the attackers. Very many molluscs are blind; the cephalopods have well developed and especially large eyes. Some deepsea forms have even evolved luminous organs in addition to their eyes. (There is one, just one, blind cephalopod, a small deepsea form discovered by the oceanographic expedition with SS Valdivia in #.) It is quite impossible to imagine anything less intelligent than an oyster, but the cephalopods have a degree of intelligence that might be compared to that of a bird of prey, and it may well be higher. Most molluscs are small; some cephalopods are the largest living creatures in the ocean, if you don't count the whales. Finally molluscs, if they move around at all, do so at the proverbial snail's pace; the cephalopods are the speediest inhabitants of the oceans, if only for short dashes. As a matter of fact they use jet propulsion. Like all other molluscs, the cephalopods are geologically old. The oldest known fossil of a cephalopod was found in rocks from the Cambrian period of # flourished ever since and still do, though at times the number of different forms was larger than it is now. About # fossil forms are known; the number of living forms in around #. It is an amusing fact that two or three of the living forms are known only from the contents of stomachs of toothed whales; they have not yet been caught directly. For purposes of classification, the cephalopoda are divided into two orders: the dibranchiata (meaning : two gills) and the tetrabranchiata (four gills) ; nautilus is the only living form that belongs to the second order. The first order has a very obvious sub-division into two groups. One group consists of the ectopoda with eight arms of about equal length and equipped along their whole length with suction disks; quite often the arms are joined by a web at their bases. The other group is that of the decapoda with eight arms of about equal length and two so-called tentacles that are longer, sometimes much longer, than the arms. The tentacles are without suction disks except at their broadened tips; in some forms, there are claws in addition to the suction disks on those tips. The three most common and therefore best known types of the Fig. I . Common octopus, lumping a crab. Fig. #. Schematic drawing of a squid (Loligo), showing main analomical features. living cephalopods are the common octopus (the Ktake of the Germans and Scandinavians) with an egg-shaped body and arms joined by a web. (Fig. #) The scientific designation of the common type is Octopus vulgaris. The next one is the cuttlefish ( Sepia officinalis), which provides the cuttlebone for caged canaries and finches and is slightly more elongated in body shape than the common octopus. The third wellknown type is the squid, the calamaro of the Italians (scientific designation: Loligo), which has a torpedo-shaped body and especially large eyes. While the shapes differ, the internal construction is more or less the same -- it might be called a bag within a bag. The outer bag is known as the mantle, a flexible container of tough skin and many muscles. The inner bag bears the inelegant name of "visceral mass" and is attached to the mantle in only a few places. The space between visceral mass and mantle is filled with sea water; logically the gills are located in this watery space between the two bags (Fig. #). The animal has complete control of the mantle and can close it tightly around what must be called its neck. If it is closed in this manner and if the whole mantle is then contracted sharply, the water can escape only through the funnel (technically known as the hyponome, but more frequently called the "siphon") below the head. This produces a powerful jet of water, and the reaction principle causes the animal to move rapidly in the opposite direction. When this mechanism is used for escape, the discharge of the water from the mantle cavity is usually accompanied by a discharge from the ink sack, but this discharge does not act like an underwater "smoke screen" as one can read in many places. Anybody who has actually observed it has seen that the ink does not spread out rapidly; it stays in one blob for some time, a blob of about the size and the lumpy shape of an octopus. In short, the ink discharge produces something like a phantom octopus, while the animal itself is rapidly disappearing. This disappearance is aided by the fact that most cephalopods can change their color rapidly. A fleeting cephalopod makes itself look as pale as it can. As for the color of the ink, it is deep brown in squids, blueblack in cuttlefish and plain black in the case of the octopus. Fig. #. The deep-sea decapod Spirula, showing internal sheU. Qince the discussion is aiming in  the direction of the shelled nautilus, we'll have to discuss the hard parts of the cephalopods next. The term mollusc comes from the Latin mollu scus, meaning "soft," but most of the softbodied molluscs do produce something hard, the oyster shell being an example of exceptional hardness. The cephalopods of our seas have only two hard parts, namely the two mandibles of their beaks and the flat bony piece imbedded inside the mantle in their back. The mandibles are usually described as being like a parrot's beak in shape, and this description is quite good. To be fully accurate, however, it should read: like a parrot's beak upside down; for the lower mandible is the larger one which closes over the upper mandible. As for the bony material on the back, the cuttlefish has relatively the largest one, which covers the whole back of the visceral mass. The common octopus has only a small remnant of this "cuttlebone" -- students who dissect an octopus sometimes have trouble finding it -- while Loligo has what has been named its "pen" which looks like the active end of a native spear. The foregoing discussion of the living cephalopods that do not produce shells can be summarized by saying that they have well organized and well coordinated bodies capable of rapid movement. They are characterized by highly evolved eyes with lenses just like our own, by the possession of ink sacks and the ability to change color at will. At present there are three -- not two as popular books have it -- kinds of shell-producing cephalopods in the oceans. The one that became known last and also happens to be the smallest is a decapod named Spirula spirula. Its shell has a diameter of only half an inch and looks like a tiny snail shell. In fact, the shells were well known because they were often washed up along tropical shores. Just what kind of creature produced these shells was not known, and I doubt whether anybody guessed that it might be a cephalopod. The first specimen of the animal was dredged from a depth of # fathoms by the British oceanographic expedition of H.M.S. Challenger just about a hundred years ago. The decapod measures V # inches in length without the two tentacles; the tentacles, when fully extended, measure another V # inches. (Fig. #). In # only four specimens were known. By # the number had risen to fourteen. Then the Danish zoologist Johannes Schmidt began to look for the breeding grounds of the river cels and found it to be under the Sargasso Sea. His nets, designed to capture tiny eel larvae, also caught Spirula, but many questions remained open until the two Danish expeditions on the ship Dana (twenty years ago) gathered a total of # specimens that could be observed alive and dead, could be photographed in black and white, in color and with Xrays. Because of these studies, conducted mainly by Anton F. Bruun, we know that Spirula lives at a depth of between # and # feet, that its normal position is vertical, with the head hanging down, that its movement in the ocean is also vertical with a vertical range of about half a mile, that the little shell is completely enclosed in the mantle, and that there are two small fins at the rear end of the mantle -- that is, on top. Between the fins there is a luminous organ. nphe shell-producing octopod that has been known for the longest time, namely since classical antiquity, because it occurs in the Mediterranean, has an appropriate classical name: Argonauta argo. Otherwise it is known as the paper nautilus because the shell it produces is paper thin and white and, incidentally, fairly elastic. But here we are dealing with a specialized case that does not Fig. #. Cross section through a Nautilus, showing chambers in the shell. have much to do with the general evolution of the cephalopods. To begin with, only the female forms a shell; the male is shellless and tiny, about half an inch long. The female has six normal arms and two that are broadened into nearly circular disks. A secretion from these two arms, upon exposure to the water, forms the shell. Classical writers told that these two arms were used as sails when Argonauta floated at the surface. This happens not to be true, but modem observers did see that they are used as paddles. The shell of the paper nautilus is not attached to the body anywhere and seems to serve mainly as a cradle for the eggs. Argonauts sometimes leaves its shell voluntarily, but Italian experts are firm in their assertion that it will die when removed from the shell for any length of time. And now we come to the true nautilus of the western Pacific, sometimes called the "pearly nautilus" because it occasionally forms inferior pearls in its shell, presumably as a response to a local irritation. That it differs fundamentally from other living cephalopods is shown by the fact that it has four gills. But it differs in many other ways too. Its eyes are not like the lensequipped eyes of the other cephalopods -- they are "pinhole cameras." It does not have an ink sack, and it lacks salivary glands. It has "many" arms instead of eight or ten, but they are all short, soft instead of tough, and they lack suction cups. Evidently we have here a primitive form of the cephalopods, an ancient type that managed to survive without major and probably even minor changes. (Fig. #). But the very fact that it survived unchanged shows that Nature made a certain invention at an early date. The animal lives in the large front chamber of its shell, but maintains a connection with the gas-filled smaller chambers by means of an appendage (called the siphuncle) that goes through small holes in the chamber walls, all the way back to the smallest chambers. Not many observations could be made, but it seems that there is also a gas bubble in the front chamber behind its body. When the animal protrudes a little from its shell, all the gas expands and the whole becomes lighter so that it rises to the surface, or to nearer the surface. When it squeezes itself back in its shell, the gas is compressed and nautilus dives deeper. Since Spirula has a similar, though internal, chambered shell and a siphuncle, it probably uses this method for performing its vertical migrations, with the fins used only for course corrections. Even if one knew nothing about the primitive organization of nautilus except that it has a chambered shell, one would immediately think of the extinct forms of cephalopods and wonder what connection there is. One type of extinct cephalopods goes under the name of ammonites (Fig. #). In some areas of E 'rope they are the best known fossils, and vintners and quarry workers have picked them up by the dozens each year for hundreds of years, probably taking them to be gigantic snails. Ammonites come in all sizes, from a few inches in diameter to the unbelievable Pachydiscus seppenradensis, found near a place named Seppenrade a century ago. The not quite complete shell measures nine feet in diameter. Fig. # . Four European Ammonites. Ceratites lived during the Middle Triassic (Muschelkalk Seo), Cosmoceras and Arletites during the early part of the Jurassic period, while Crioceras lived during the Cretaceous period. The same vintners and quarry picked up other fossils without workers -- and the fisherman of knowing what they were. They Lyme Regis in England -- also were stony round dowels, each with one pointed end. The best modern comparison is a cartridge for an infantry rifle. Even the size is about the same in most cases. They were called thunderbolts by the populace; educated people called them belemnites, from Greek belemnon which means a crossbow dart. They were also remains of ancient cephalopoda; the largest known is Megateuthis, seven feet in length. Teeling that we don't know as much about them as one could wish, I reached for an old book on fossils, printed in #. Well, we still don't know very much, but there certainly has been some progress compared to four score years ago. This is how our current knowledge of the evolution of the cephalopods looks: Late in the Cambrian period, first cephalopods made their appearance with the first of the "nautiloids." During the Ordovician period that followed the Cambrian period and which lastnautiloids fantastically increased in numbers (most of them still with straight, not coiled, shells) and they fully Held their own durSilurian period that followed. Near the end of the Silurian years ago) a separate branch began to split off, the ancestors of the later ammonites, the group being referred to as "ammonoids" i During the following Devonian; years) and the Permian period slowly diminished in numbers and later on kept diminishing until only one form is now left. The ammonoids, though all this time, held their own until, with the beginning of the Triassic period they exploded into multitudes of forms, reaching their maximum during the Jurassic period that followed the Triassic. They were still very numerous during the Cretaceous period that followed the Jurassic, but at the end of years ago, they became completely extinct. Since soft parts of bodies rarely fossilize, we don't know what the late ammonites looked like; the general impression is that of a kind of super nautilus, with true arms and modem eyes. We do know that some Had ink glands. Just at the time the ammonites began to flourish, at the beginning of the Triassic period, the dibranchiate? made their appearance, at first as belemnites. Though the belemnites themselves became extinct, the didorsal shield (Bavarian Lias formation) FI, #. Cross section through the hard parts of a Jurassic belemnile. Usually the rostrum breaks off near the broken line so that only the solid portion to the left of the broken line is found. braacHiates Have increased in numbers ever since. Fig. # shows a cross section through a late and reasonably complete belemnite. At the left we have the tail end or rostrum; it ia solid but must have been inside the mantle while the animal was alive. The section I labelled "coae" (technically the "pHragmokoa" from Greek phiagmos, meaning barricade) shows the location of the tail end of the living body. The "cone" then continued as the "dorsal shield" (technically the "pro-ostracum") which probably covered the whole back to the "neck," as does the cuttlebone of the living Sepia. Because the rostrum looked so Heavy, the German paleontologist O. Jaekel, in #, suggested changing the term rostrum to pallix (little spike) and visualized the belemnites as sticking in the bottom mud with these spikes, Heads up waving their arms about in search of prey like sea anemones. It was an amusing thought but a simple calculation showed that the volume of the "cone" would fully compensate for the weight of the rostrum. If we assume tail fins outside the rostrum, we get a form quite like the living Loligo. It is known that some belemnites Had ink glands, and some especially fine fossils from Lyme Regis This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulpscans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans yahoogroups . com. indicate only six arms for these particular belemnites. Faint impressions in the rock have been interpreted as a line of curved claws along their arms; whether they had claws only or claws next to suction disks is not known. And that is the story so far. To go farther, we need not just more, but better fossils of ancient cephalopods. But if it were not for the beautiful living fossil, the nautilus, we would be on far more shaky ground in tinderstanding what lived in the seas while the dinosaurs were walking the land.      Ramond F. Jones is a veteran among science-fiction writers; thirty years or so ago he was writing some of the most provocative stories around, but in recent years we've seen little of his work. Next month Galaxy plans to remedy that lack. The story is a long novelette, which has to do with an unusual form of space travel; title is Subway to the Stars. Also back with us after much too long a lapse of time is the spry young Englishman who, in the sixth decade of his life, decided it was about time he got married, did so, and now lives on the outskirts of a pretty little town in southern England. You know the one we mean. You know him, anyway, if you've read The Day of the Triffids, seen Village of the Damned or come across any of the other polished, gentle and literate sciencefiction works signed by the name of John Wyndham. This particular example of his work is called A Life Postponed, and it's a novelette. Poul Anderson (with The Sharing of Flesh ) and Mack Reynolds (Spying Season) will also join us next month; so will two relative newcomers -- Stephen Goldin and Joseph Green -- both of whom are, as it happens, graduates of the "first" stories we publish each month in If. They've got their degrees now, as you'll see by the stories... The Market In Aliens Intelligent or not -- the price was right. 'T'tie first thing I did when I brought the alien home from auction was to plop him right into the tub. No sense in taking chances, even though they had assured me as usual that he wag strong enough to exist out of the acqueous environment for several days. These were the same boys who had learned only after a lot of trial and error that they needed an acqueous environment in the first place, of course. The one thing I couldn't take would be an alien dying on me right off, and thanks to the liars and cheats who run these farces, there's a lot of precedent. The next thing I did, after I established that he was going to lie there quietly, breathing slowly, turning the water their characteristic black, was to make a Strong drink and call Intercontinental. I didn't even want to try making conversation with him; I had gone through that with the earlier ones, and it always came down to the same frustration, backed by whistling. Some day they're going to establish communication with them, and when they do, I'll be happy to talk. But until then, it's absolutely pointless. Besides, there is absolutely nothing an alien could say that would interest me in the slightest, not at this stage of the game. I was lucky. I got Black, my contact, on only the fourth or fifth try at the switchboard -- Inter is in administrative collapse like almost everything these days -- and after reminding him of all the favors I had done for him, I laid it right on the line. "I've got one in the bathtub," I said. "A clean Healthy male, in the pink of maturity, I'd say. All reflexes in order, highly responsive and probably as intelligent as hell; he's piping a blue streak. I just got him this afternoon." Black shrugged, a common business technique, and then cut off his viewscreen. "Don't need it," he said. "We're already overstocked." "You need this one. Prime of life and all that. Furthermore, I was able to get him reasonable, and I can pass that saving right on to you." tCQorry," Black said. "We just  don't need it right now. These things Haven't been moving as well as we had hoped in the last month. People are tired of them, and I think there's a lot of guilt building up too. What the hell, they may be intelligent with these space machines and all. Speaking personally, I think the bottom has fallen out of your craze." "Never," I said. "You're talking about the whole appeal." "You don't understand psychology. Not to get involved, though, and just because I'm curious, what would you want for it?" "Five hundred." "Five hundred wEat?" "Dollars," I said. Black was my contact at Inter; I Had sold him eight aliens at more or less fair prices. Nevertheless, all that sentiment aside, he could drop dead most of the time, as far as I'm concerned. "OH. I thought you meant five Hundred cents. At that level, we might have something to talk about, for taxidermic purposes anyway. But I can't use it, Harry. We can't move the stock we got. I tell you, the word is out on these things, now with the research. We don't know what we've Hooked into." "Three hundred," I said, cutting out my own viewscreen letting Black drift in uncertainty for a few moments, a legitimate Business technique. "For you. Just for the turnover. Hell, I got him at # so you can see that I'm practically crying." "No, Harry. Speaking seriously, I probably could take him off your Hands at #, maybe '# if he shapes up. We could sneak it through. But I couldn't ask you to take a loss like that, could I? A friend is a friend. Try Franchise." "I will if I have to. But I don't like Franchise. I consider you my closest friend in this business, Black. Just to keep that relation' ship alive, I'll let you Have Himi at cost price. All right, say #. Just to Have #he lines opened." I Bad bought the alien for #, land the auctioneer had been practically begging for that figure; Black was right about the bottom having fallen out. Nevertheless, I hated to concede a point. It was the first step to losing money, and I hadn't lost a cent on the freaks yet. Not one. And not ever. Black sighed and put his viewscreen on again, gave me a good View of some cigarette-work. "#," He said, "and you'll have to deliver, and the beast better pass." "# and you make pickup. And he'll pass. He was trying to Sing me a lecture in there before." Black showed me some smoke. "# and I'll make pickup." ( ( T'vone," I said, and flipped on my own viewsceen, projected some sensitive profile-action. "How soon you be over?" 'We'll have a crew in about half an hour. You better get it sedated, Harry. Some of the crew! are getting nervous about this whole business, now. I don't want any of that whistling." "Leave it to me." "Don't overdose him now." #d "Don't worry about a thing," I said. "I treat them right. He's in perfect shape and He'll stay that way, and he'll be quiet as the tomb on the way over. You'll Have the usual certificate for me, won't you?" "Of course. You know how we do business. Personally, Harry, to loosen up a bit, I tell you that I don't see much of a future in this business for either of us, not with these latest reports. But I agree that you always came across with fair merchandise, and if He's a nice specimen, we might be able to turn him over to a lab, skip the zoo-route completely. I'll do this for old time's sake, but the lab pays only about #, I want you to know, so who's taking the loss here?" "Maybe the alien, is that whaf you're trying to tell me?" I said, and switched off altogether. The hell with them. Unctuous bastard. If anybody was going to get crucified first, though, it was going to be the Blacks, not me. I was only performing a service for a public demand, and I could prove it. I went into the bathroom, feeling pretty disgusted with the whole conversation, and looked at the alien for a while. He was in a semi-doze, one of the usual comas, the eyes bright and fixated on me as He moved slowly on his back. His tentacles were twitching. No whistling, no gestures though. "Only a few minutes for you Eere and you're gone, boy," I said. I always try to communicate with them;  never said they weren't intelligent. Deep inside me there is the belief that a bit of soul exists in everything. Hell, maybe they came to earth to cure us; how the hell do I know? When I see it, I'll believe it, that's all I know. I locked the bathroom door and went into the den and watched television for a time, waiting for the crew to come. As usual, Black's boys were late. A bulletin came on saying that yet another of their ships had landed somewhere near Lake Michigan, the second in a week in that general area, and that the usual procedures were being followed. That relieved the depression a bit. It meant that if they were efficient there for a change, the auctidn would probably be ready to go by day after tomorrow. Detroit was a nice city; I hadn't seen it for a while. So I called United and booked flight, taking coach; no sense overdoing pleasure with' business. Some time after that, just before the crew finally came, one of those damned scientists came on in an interview with the usual recent crap about mass guilt and stellar communication, and I switched that right off. The profit on the sale, less the airline deposit, left me with fifty clear and what I did was to call Ginny and take her out. We went to the zoo where I showed her the two specimens which were mine. On my own level, I'm very sentimental about the freaks. Next Month in IF by Roger Zelazny by James Blish by James H. Schmitz -- plus many other great science-fiction stories and features in the big November issue of If -- the world's award-winning sf magazine! The years whisk away like calendar pages... and new men strive against new fates ! inglake opened Hie thick, leather-bound, log book with distaste for the chore that lay ahead. It was no help to know that it was his own fault. If he had spent a few minutes each week keeping it up to date, he would not be faced now nearly a year's arrears of entry. April. The crudest month. Nothing put down in the log book since September last. He fished in an untidy drawer for a vacation schedule. He would need to look up dates for periods when the school had been closed. The rhythmic thump of a pile driver started up again and his solid brass asH bowl began to sidle over the desk top. His long, thin, old-man's hand reached out automatically for a black briar pipe, and He filled it carefully in a delaying tactic. With blue, fragrant smoke wreathing gratefully round his bead, He started again. It was a long record, running from the school's building in #. Copperplate entries on the first pages. Signed every now and then by visiting inspectors to confirm that the children of the deserving poor were being put through their paces and kept in good order. Some of the entries were about rickets and Head lice -- up to scratch, as they used to say. Not much of that now. Still some, though, in spite of the Welfare State. A Hard core that even the phalanx of do-gooders could not winkle out of squalor. He read the entry for November #th, #. News of the Armistice had come in the course of the morning. The boys had been assembled in the school hall and had cheered for the return of their brothers and fathers. Well, children would cheer for a black pig. He wondered if they had been any more socially or politically conscious of what it was all about than a similar group would be today. Probably not. The headmaster Had sent the janitor down to the town hall to ask for the rest of the day as a holiday. Not granted; some regudead and the opening of a new era, but the books had to be neat. Morning sunlight came from tall narrow windows. He was grateful for the warmth in it. Blood getting thin. How many more winters could he stand? Retirement at the end of the session. Good or bad? More of Enid with her iron tongue and uncertain temper. That was a line of speculation He did not want to follow. He turned quickly through a hundred pages to his last entry. Changes of style in writing marked the careers of his predecessors in the post. Many of them careful record keepers. How would the next man assess his own crabbed contribution? Not many pages to body out twenty-five years. Bald statements of opening and closing. Many teachers, many children come and gone. What Had He done Himself? Not a lot. Kept the lunatic fringe of so-called progressives at bay. Allowed His staff freedom to do their job'. In the yellow light, He could see that the room was full of dust from the extensive alterations that were going on. All this wing was due to come down and be remodeled. Maybe it was the dust that was making Him light-headed. He had noticed it for the last two days particularly, like the beginning of a feverish cold, with items in peripheral vision sliding about. The thump of the machine seemed to catch a harmonic of his heartbeat, and he felt suddenly that it; was controlling his breathing. Too much tobacco. He'd have to knock that off, or at least save it for the home front, where there was more need for a euphoric. A voice at his elbow surprised him; He had neither seen nor heard Prenton come in. "Are you all right, Mr. Kinglake?" There was a note of eager concern in the craft specialist's voice. He was one who found a macabre delight in human pathology. So far, in their quarter century of brink confrontation, he had not yet had the pleasure of finding Kinglake in anything but health'. "All right? Of course I'm all right. What is it?" "The contractors, Mr. Kinglake. I promise you I'll have to put in for a transfer if you don't get them to see reason." "What's worrying you?" Prenton had a responsibility for general discipline at the boys' end of the building. "It's that hole, Mr. Kinglake. There was no call for that excavation! They should have waited till we were off the site. I tell you it's like a mine shaft. Anybody falling in there has had His dinner I can tell you. Aye, and his tea." Tinglake found that He heard the words as though his ears had been shifted away from his head and were passing on the data through a bad line. He forced himself to go through the motions of lighting a match and saw the flame tremble as he put it across the bowl of his briar. But the words seemed to come clearly enough. "Don't worry about it, man. Nobody is going to fall in. They'll put barriers up before the end of the morning." "Barriers, barriers! No barriers are going to stop some of these little devils from getting near. Right at the boys' door there. My flesh creeps every time they come out." "I'll talk to the foreman. Maybe they can put up a solid screen. It won't be there long. I know today." Suddenly he felt ice-cold, as though he had been spotlighted in a beam of refrigeration. He clenched his teeth on the mouthpiece of his briar and controlled his voice with an effort. There was definitely something wrong. Pride made him determined to face it alone. He said, "Very well, Mr, Prenton, I'll see to it. Leave it with me." A form of words. How often had He used it? How often Had he found that there was nothing profitable to be done? He Heard the clamor of the construction work break in on Him as the door opened and mute slightly again as Prenton pulled it closed behind Kim . The walls of the room were shimmering as though He was looking at them through the convection currents above a coke brazier. A solid, dependable artifact -- the brass, cauldron-shaped ash bowl -- Had shifted itself until it was chocked against the spine of the log book. He put both Hands out and grasped it by its two lug Handles. From dead cold, he was now almost unbearably Hot. The bowl was vibrating like a dowser's rod. A focus for more thermal agitation than could be explained by the shaft of dusty sunlight falling there. His head was pulsing. Swelling and contracting like a pump diaphragm. Beating up to hit a frenetic rhythm, as though it was aligning itself to a fluctuating power field concentrated suddenly in this place. Something Had to go. Something Had to break. Kinglake was fighting to breathe. His own face, distorted by curvature, stared back at him from the polished surface. But was it his own face? It was plumped out. No wrinkles. Under forty you would think. A blue strip under the chin puzzled him, and he saw one hand go up to his throat... fpHe wrist was momentarily strange; for one thing, it carried a multi-colored flat disk on a metallic strap. Yet he knew it was His. He was not leaving a familiar scene for a fantasy; but waking from a fantasy into realityHe Had been pulled through an iron gate into a new now, which was at once strange and not strange. The brief seconds that it took to orient himself were enough to sink the past. Kinglake was long gone. In front of him was the site console. He slivered and stretched. Too many late nights and early mornings. A lot of work to get through before the end of the day shift. His name was on the panel: Sam Taylor. He wondered why it Had momentarily seemed as though it belonged to somebody else. Both hands forward on the coordinator, He eased it along to take up some slack that had developed in his short catnap. Excavators were trailing on disposal cars; already two tubs were waiting to be filled and a third coming into the screen from the far comer of the site where it Had tipped its load. Nothing was seriously out of phase; but he prided Himself on keeping a sustained and balanced flow of effort. Also there was some waste. The waiting tubs were consuming' as much energy as they would if they were working and He had a budget to meet. Sam Taylor traversed the site and ran the data into a computer bank as it came from his long, oblong scanner. His machinery was all round the perimeter, like a siege train. Diggers, stabilizers, gyro jacks. He was virtually holding the old building up with one Hand and slipping in a new set of foundations. Tape chattered out to give Him a written gloss on the state of the operation. All to plan. Bore samples Had given a forecast of density and cohesive index that was being justified to a fraction of a per cent... Except at the corner of the site nearest His operations room. That was where the Holdup was. There was satisfaction in finding that it was something he could not have been expected to foresee. A development outside the probability level at which he was working. He pressed a request button for his works technician. He had a labor force of three for this assignment, all skilled maintenance men. They were Hardly necessary except for fine adjustments and some resetting of the robot tools when He wanted a change ute to answer the call, and Sam Taylor suspended work on the foundation for the new tower block. There was plenty to do elsewhere. It was a major reconstruction of the old polytecH. Sweeping through a physical education space, He paused for the recreational pleasure of focusing on the girl wKo was leading a class through a calisthenic drill. Helda Greer. An athletico-somafic type, currently poised in art arabesque that would Have Had Rodin's dry bones rattling round for a hammer and chisel. door at His back, said sourly, "Must be an Amazon. That sort's no good. I like something you can get Hold of." He knew it would needle Taylor and it was one in a long line of jabs He Had been making since they started the assignment. had twice missed the regrading which should have put Him in the executive slot. He reckoned it as an insult to be put to work under a man who had stepped straight into control from a desk at Construction Faculty. Sam Taylor knew it and He had sidestepped every confrontation. He wanted the job to go well and he was prepared to move a long way in a man-management ploy. This time, However, He twisted round and took a steady look at the narrow, Welsh face of Eis top Hand. There was no mistaking the dark pleasure of malice. He said, your mind on the job, and, we'll get along. Take this sample. Run it through the analyzer and see what we have." ' ' second, then lifted the shining metal cylinder he had brought in and fed it into the receptor slot on the console. His back was eloquent enough; it said as plainly as if He Had spoken it out, "All right, you clever young bastard. You're the boss. But I'll wait my time." Taylor went on with His review. Only ten minutes to the midday break. Then he would Have to stop work and leave the gear on safe while the two thousand students on the site milled around for their recreation period. He was meeting Helda in the staff refectory. Maybe she would be in a mood where He could push His case along, get her nearer a frame of mind to accept a marriage contract. Tracking through a practical History room, h'e stopped long enough to watch' a woolly mammoth materialize in the clear projection arena, behind floor-toceiling grilles of tough insulator. It was at the end of its tether. Bristling with' throwing spears, literally foreshortened, because its front legs were sunk to the knees in a pit. Twenty stocky tribesmen were yelling their Heads off and pitching lianas over its back to anchor it down. Watching, the History projectors could be a life's work. In fact, it would need to be for somebody, or all that redirected imagery would run to waste again. It was twenty years now since the first reflector probes had intercepted those etiolated ripples which had gone out from the Earth's past and were still streaming away carrying pictures of the present. Accelerated and amplified, they were being beamed back again to give the first authentic reconstruction of time past. Not that it Had been done without teething troubles. The massive forces needed in the amplification stages had been hard to Handle. Spillover and freak effects Had been common. Some projection arenas Had been turned into charred ruin. There had been some doubt about whether His own influx of electronic machinery would unsettle the field. But as of now the projection looked okay. If He Hadn't settled for engineering, Taylor reckoned He could have made a career in History. There was a lot to do. So far, it was a Hit and miss business to get the probes in the rigfit place. No selective refinement was yet possible. Particular places and particular times could not be isolated. But wKat Had been tapped put every record tKat Had ever been made out of date. Somewhere along the line, sometime, tKey would find the piece that finished the jigsaw of man himself. mixture of straight concrete and a plastic filler. Some local soil variant acted as catalyst and the stuff went dense. It Happens." "Not often. What's the index?" "Fifteen per cent over what you gave as the maximum tolerance for auto adjustment" "The "you" was stressed just himself would not have been so stupid. Taylor went systematically round his console bringing everything to safe. Work ceased all round the perimeter. He could take a look at the rogue section before He started up for the afternoon run. Meanwhile His tolerwearing thin. He said, "We used standard sampling practice. There was no way of knowing that there was a deviant patch at the tower foundation. But since you've brought it up, we'll be sure. Make a fresh sampling at meter intervals, round the tower. See How far the condition goes. I'll look at it before we start up." In spite of the reasonableness it as a turn of the screw. "That'll take an hour. On my own time." "If it's time you want, Williams, I can arrange all the time in the world. The next Labor Board is Thursday. By Thursday week you could be on a ship for Xuthus, where they need all the civil engineers they can get." It was the first time he had cracked the whip, and He waited real enough threat, though. As engineer-in-charge, He Had absolute cbntrol of the work force and an adverse report could get any one of them up for redeployment. Coupled with a memo on attitude, it would be enough to close promotion prospects for all time. sponse was almost deferential. "No need for that, Controller. Of course I'll see to it right away." 'E'ager eyes, light-brown Hair curving into the nape of Her neck. Still wearing a pale-yellow practice leotard that blended in like a simple color cHange of brown skin, Helda Greer was already waiting at a window seat table. Sam Taylor, making an approach run from Her left and unobserved until He spoke into tKe shell ear turned His way, would have preferred some quote of cosmic grandeur, but in actual fact said, "Hi. Sorry I'm late." sourly on tKe scanner, rated it Higher than it deserved, working on the girl's warm smile of welcome and the quick turn of the Head that sent Her Hair moving under centrifugal urge. "The smooth young bastard." He toyed with the idea of dropping a non-recurrent sKock wave on the table and then reconsidered. "I'll fix Him all rigfit and I'll fix Him good. This project means a lot to Him. When I've finished. He'll wisH He'd never taken it on." He fish'ed round the site, waiting for the idea that was still in the germ stage to grow by division. In the History arena, the actualizer was still transmitting. A few students were watching tKe mammoth through its last agonifcs. Interrupting' that would be something. Part of the contract was an assurance that there would be no interference with the work of th'e college. He made some adjustments. He gathered a ball of free energy from the idle machines and Held it in a magnetic field. Enough to heat and light a fair-sized town. Dropping that in the arena would shatter any wave pattern thereabout. Taylor would Have to take the responsibility, and it would take some explaining away. With nice calculation, He aimed for the center of the beast s foreKead and collapsed the containing lines of force. For a count of three, He believed he was on the wrong tack. Then matter from round the scene began to fold in. He saw a group of students scatter and try for the door. There was a trembling in tKe structure beneatH His own feet. Two men and a girl, who Had been standing up close to the barrier, were drawn through it in a mash and seemed to be sucked into the animal's slab side. It reared up. Trailing ropes snapped like thread. In a ferocious concentration of energy, it Heaved its foreleg out of tKe pit and was charging for the barrier. the field beam, but His hands were slippery with sweat. Suddenly clumsy. He reinforced the plasma. A cfiarred swathe of destruction blacked across the screen. He threw the master key and killed output. Now Ke could Hear some of the racket that was coming from inside the building. It was time to get out. He picked up His gear and made for the tower excavation. He would be discovered busy about bis master's business, zeal from tfie sole of His foot to His widow's peak. WHen tfie plastic wall of tfie partition at His back shattered towards Him and a massive semitransparent Head broke tfirougfi, fie was leaning over tfie Hole, guiding a sampling tube into tfie deptfis. Turning and stepping back carried Him over tfie tfiresfiold of no return. He was falling even before tfie leading edge of turbulence nudged into His side. Qam Taylor Heard the outbreak  of cfiaos from tfie refectory and tfiougfit at first that some of His Holding jacks had crumpled. He was out tfirougfi tfie door two seconds afiead of tfie nearest diner, unaware tfiat Helda was less tfian a meter befiind Him. Tfiey were in a spiral circulation space tfiat ran like a processional way to tfie Heart of tfie polytecH complex. Older elements of tfie building showed up at intervals. Part of Taylor's assignment was to rationalize tfie structure and bring it all up to #nd Century specification. Nearing tfie History arena at tfie center, He passed tfie turnoff for Kis control cabin. That would save time. He checked, turned and cannoned into Helda. Tfiere was a brief second to register tfiat she was fully with him in this, concerned that it should not be any fault tfiat could be pinned on Him. "In here! Use tfie screen to find out wfiat happened!" Methodically, He started at tfie middle and went out in concentric sweeps. It was easy enough to pick up. Devastation started in tfie wrecked arena and trailed out in tfie wake of some moving agent. Random movement, difficult to get a direction. Then tfiey saw it. Tfie energy shape Had blundered tfirougfi a relatively thin partition wall and Had come up against a piece of the old fabric. Solid stonework that Had once been an outside wall. Tfie mammotfi was nudging at it, swaying backward and forward a meter at a time. Somehow, the mind structures of tfie original beast were imposing a behavior pattern on the composite form. Rhythmic vibration was carried through to the floor at their feet Helda said, "I can't believe it!" "Believe it or not, He'll Have that wall down." "Wfiat can you do?" Taylor was checking round to gather a power surge. Tfie positions of the controls worried Him. They were already in rougfi adjustment. With a sudden intuition, he knew tliat they Had been used beliams. He had triggered this off. If that were so, another injection of plasma would be the worst thing.  Trying to reason it out, He said aloud, "It hasn't all that much' power or it wouldn't be balked by that wall. Therefore we can neutralize it with enough inert material." Near the tower, He had already lined up a caterpillar dumper, set to pour in new foundation material. In ten seconds flat, he was in its rugged cab With the controls on manual, spinning it slowly on its tracks. Helda said, "Is there anything I can do?" "Hold onto your seat." The machine was never meant for crossing rubble. They leaned at a crazy angle as he followed the path the mammoth had taken when it backed away from Alarm bells were ringing in every corridor. A group of senior staff crossed their path, and he waved them away. The dumper was adding to the structural damage, and his mind was racing with calculation to assess if the building would take any more or fold up round them. The mammoth was still there, and edged round clumsily to face them. Small red eyes, set in a notional, half-resolved head; stupid with pain and anger; level with the high-driving seat. As it lumbered forward, Taylor opened the sluice, A meterwide jet of gray insulator hit between its tusks and began to set as it came into the air. Movement forward stopped. Head waving sluggishly from side to side, the mammoth tried to weigh up a menace which nothing in its past had prepared it for. Then it was knee deep, with the first layers already rock hard. He shifted the chute and set hoop bands over its back and then filled in, until there was a tight cocoon of material hiding it from sight When it was done, there was room. God, that would take some shifting! The foundation material was designed for use where it would never have to be moved again. There would be days of work there, with a labor gang chipping it out with lasers. Taylor sat still and considered fiis losses. Hardly a possibility of meeting contract date. And nobody was going to fall over backwards to make excuses for him. He'd bet all Lombard Street to a china orange that they would pull him back to the head office and send in another engineer. Another aspect of the affair struck home. Demoted from the top slot, he was in no position to push ahead for Helda. Only executive grades could jump the statutary age requirement. She wouldn't be around in three years time. He said with Heavy finality, "That's it, then. I'll have to report this to Auto Union. There'll be an investigation unit down within the Hour." "But it isn't your fault." "Indirectly it may be." He offered no other explanation and pushed past her to get through the Hatch. "Don't hang about here. There may be more to come down." One thing he could do -- and that right away -- was find Williams and squeeze the pips out of him. He had to know just what had set this up. The principal of the college, tall, balding, white-faced, met him outside his office. "I knew I should never have agreed to this work while the college was in session! Somebody will pay for this. Do you know there are seven students missing? Costly equipment ruined! Rooms smashed! We shall have to close." "What makes you think I had any part in it? That projection developed out of your History arena. It Had to be stopped." "Of course. Of course. But what made the actualizer fail? There are eye-witnesses, technicians at the actualizer control. An external power field was brought in. A failure, to say the least, in your equipment. Criminal charges could lie against your company. Criminal carelessness." Sam Taylor knew the man Had a point; but he was too bitterly aware of the personal angles to try for conciliation. "All right. You'll have your say. As for now, get off my back. See that all personnel are clear of the building. There may be more danger of collapse. I'll make it safe." A fter thirty minutes of intensive effort, with his machines moving along silent corridors, shoring, rebuilding, clearing rubble, he was satisfied. With the extension plans etched on his mind like a blueprint, He worked on lines that would fall in with' the final requirements for the site. In some ways, it was the most productive Half hour since the assignment had begun. Whoever carried on with it would find that there was no major part of the emergency work that had to be done over. He had talked to his other two men: Kestler, a heavy, slow-moving Swede who was clearly mystified by the whole business; Andy Clarke, elderly, a man of few words, one of the best workers in the whole Auto-Union labor force. Neither could have done it. Nor could be. TKe sampling gear was out of its rack. Sam Taylor reckoned He could have gone to the tower excavation. He took Kestler and Clarke cidal mood, he would need Help. In the event, it was Kestler who found the operating cable for the sampler, "Here, Controller. He was working here." There was a thirty-meter drop and a slow swirl of white sludge at the bottom, with' darker patches that could be the outline of a body. Water had been coming in from the subsoil. Taylor said, "Rig a line. I'll go down." Thigh' deep, Ke found solid ground under his feet and Had to and lean him up against the central lump of foundation that His diggers had been working Hard to clear. As a witness for any side Williams now could only be readied by a crystal ball. Taylor ran His Hands over the dense material of the column. Since He was there, he might as well pick up a sample for himself. Other faces were looking down from the rim, a ring of heads staring at the trog in the Hole. They saw him gather in the sampling shuttle and activate it like a drill against the wall. They saw a long dark crack appear, as if the material had a flaw in it, and a ragged, oblong slab two meters high fall out, so that Taylor had to throw himself clear to get from under. Wh'at they did not immediately see was the dark cavity that it revealed and the well preserved body of a man who fixed him with sightless eyes in a face that was an older version of his own, before the air got to his vacuumsealed flesH and it disintegrated into dust. Qam Taylor collected his per sonal files and zipped them in a document case. Reaction from Auto Union Had been as swift as Ke guessed it would be. Suspension Had been immediate and a relief engineer was even now on His hotfoot way. There was no doubt, either, How the inquiry would go. He sat at the console, checking that he was leaving a straight edge for His successor. It was, anyway, something to do and gave his mind a non-self-regarding focus. Helda Greer was standing behind him before he had registered that she Had come through the door. "I Heard you were going and I came right away. I'm sorry. It wasn't your fault." "THafs all right. It was. I was a nut." "That makes two people you couldn't weigh up." Her hands were on his shoulders and she was meeting His eyes in the reflection on the blank scanner. "Two people?" It was not a feint He really did not know what she was getting at. "You're making this very hard for a well brought up girl. I'm sorry about the job; because I know what it means to you. But I'm not a status-seeker. It doesn't make any difference as far as I'm concerned." Sam Taylor sat very still. Obsjnately he Had to be sure. "It wall be three years before I can offer a contract." "I can wait three years." Her Bead was over his shoulder, Bair a fragrant, silk pad against His cEeek. She quoted softly, "I will restore to you the years that the locust Has eaten." Even the pale image in the screen carried the affirmative. An earnest that it was indeed so. Obscurely, He felt that there was a pattern in it. It seemed inevitable, now that it was out and said. As though something prepared a long time ago Had come to fruition. Helda Bad moved round between Eim and the screen and leaned back on the sloping presentation table. Taylor felt a sudden lightening of spirit as if the old man of the sea Had been lifted off His back. He put His Hands on either side of her Head. In the History Projection Lab' a maintenance mecH snapped back the last panel of a long spread. "Well, it's okay. Nothing gone dis. You say it's been working true? God knows why. Must Have been leaking harmonics all over th'e opera. You've been dead lucky there were no side effects of your own making. Don't spread it about, or the legal boys won't Have a cast against Auto Union." Tinglake looked stupidly at the  brass bowl between His Hands as tKougB Ee Had not seen it before in His life. How long He Had been sitting with His arms stretched forward on His desk, he could not tell. But His erect back twinged stiffly as He moved. Now there was no room for doubt. He would Have to see the quack. Get Home if possible. Better to phone from there. Ought He to drive His car? Hell, Be was past caring. He felt cold, with an indefinable sense of loss. As though the most important thing in the world Bad been taken from Eim. WHat was that, then? There were precious few things he cared one way or the other about. That was age for you; he had been dying by increments for years and now the cumulative check had been rung up. Kinglake hearted himself out of his chair. When he was standing, his legs felt curiously light and tubular. His footsteps came to him as though his ears were twice as far from the ground as usual. A short dogleg corridor ran from his office to the school assembly hall and a small reception area inside the main door. There was the muffled sound of music as a class went through a broadcast rhythm and mime period. As he turned left to make for the main door, there was a surge of noise at his back as the Hall door opened. Someone coming out. Surprisingly, the girl who was closing the swing door was not known to him by name. A newcomer. Family Had moved in from a neighboring town during the week. Still, she would be able to pass on the message. Supporting himself with one hand on the wall, he said, "Just a minute -- before you rejoin your class. Would you be so good as to find Mrs. Charlton? Tell her I have had to go home. I'll telephone and let her know when I shall be back." She was only two meters away. "Are you sure you're all right to go alone, Mr. Kinglake?" Now he could see Her clearly. Oval face, straight Hair, light brown. Very expressive eyes, which Held genuine concern, turning suddenly to a puzzled kind of recognition as though she was seeing someone she knew well, but whose name she'd forgotten. His voice was the saddest sound she had ever Heard and the words, made no kind of surface sense, though' at a deep level she accepted that they were meant for Her. "Thank you, Helda. Whether I like it or not, I shall Have to manage alone for the locust years. Find Mrs. Charlton." April sunshine in the porch, blinding his eyes. Kinglake put down Kis Head and went, unseeing, on a path He Had taken for so many years it was part of the furniture of his mind. It was not until He was in free fall He remembered the tower excavation. He clamped His jaw tight to hold back a shout and hit the bottom erect as a guardsman with his hands stiffly by His sides. As his feet touched down, the first pouring of a new plastic filler surged from the waiting chutes and filled the foundations to seven meters above his head. The heart is only a mechanical pump, hardly suitable symbol for love -- unless you look below the surface! I Kad to charter a private plane to fly down to my country place on the island. All the way, even more insistent than the knowledge that I was ruined, I was haunted by the knowledge that, because I could no longer afford to be flown home, I would have to sell the island. It was that last bit of bad news that I most dreaded breaking to Jane. She met me with the ancient Bentley at the airstrip. "You look tired, Daddy. You are going to be fed and put to bed., Thus her first words. "You really know how to sap a man's confidence! It's all nonsense and, anyway, you always say that." "It's always true." "And I always refuse to go to bed." She was -- well, it was five years since Viv was killed -- yes, Jane was twenty-two. The plane crash, the death of her mother, my long spell as an invalid... they had distorted her life pattern. She was just slightly too bossy; she scared away the boys, although she was pretty enough. She drove well. Just like her mother. It was good to see the House again. Mrs. Singer, the Housekeeper, came and said Hello. I sat in a chair and relaxed while drinks were brought I raised the glass, Jane raised Hers. We drank. God, I thought what Happiness I Have survived, and wHat misery! "So you and Jerry Keynes are thrown out of Lawrence LifeForms, Daddy." "Have you been watcEing the battle on TV?" She nodded. "You were right to stand up for your point of view." "The share-holders thought otherwise." "Will it Help you to talk about it?" There again was the note I dread to Hear in Jane. Life was passing Her by. She was living out of Her depth. Nobody really says: "Will it Help you to talk about it?" She Kad picked up the phrase from a telly-play. "I really am tired," I said. I'll take your advice, go to bed, sleep off the worries of the last week, wake like new in the morning." "How's your Heart, Daddy?" "Best bit of me. You know that!" We smiled -- as we Kad smiled before, over those same words. As she left me at the top of the stairs, she said, "Tomorrow, you must come and see the dinosaurs. They like their new pens." "Good!" But of course the dinosaurs would have to go, like everything else... Deciding to take a shower, I undressed slowly in the bathroom. In these rooms now, there were few reminders of my wife. The bedside lamp Had been Hers. She Ead chosen the carpet. She smiled from a photograph, a distant Viv, not enjoying the photographic studio. What would she Have said if she were alive to see her father, the great Sir Frank Lawrence, turn His son-in-law and the other junior partner out of the firm? She Had always known Ke was a ruthless man; Lawrence Chemicals Kad been his fathers creation; but the startling synthetic life-form developments of the nineteen-nineties Had been all Frank's doing, as Ead the establishment of Lawrence Life-Forms. I Had helped substantially; but I Ead remained a contract man. As I sHd out of my vest and started the shower running, I told myself as he Ead started me in the business, He Had now pushed me out of it. THat counted as fair play, by worldly standards. And He brought His daughter into the world, the old bastard! I caught sight of myself in the long mirror as I climbed into the shower. Thin stringy body. Forty-five years old, looking more like fifty-five. Nothing to what I looked like after the plane crash, of course. I hadn't touched another woman since Viv died. One of the reasons was plain to see. The surgeons Had made a good job of the operation, but the flesh across toy left breast was puckered and distorted by scar tissue. It filled toe with distaste still; I never wanted to see anyone else flinch away from it. After breakfast, Jane took me to see the steggies and b'rorttos. It was a typical island day, with more cloud than you need scudding by, but the sun frequently beaming forth. "We're going to Have to sell all this, Jane." I suppose I Had thought she would Have realized it. But she caught Her breath and stopped. "You'll -- be able to get another directorship, Daddy?" "Not at Frank's salary." "But you can start up in opposition now, making synthetic life of your own." "I'm finished with synthetic life, Jane. I really believe that this is the classic case where Man Has over-stepped His powers. Now that Frank has announced His Intention of synthesizing Human bangs, I'm more sure than ever that I'm right. We really are pre-empting powers that do not belong to us." Her jaw set. I saw it for the first time. She had something of her maternal grandfather in Her. She too disagreed with me. "I've never Heard you talk religion before now, father! What has been discovered is something slowly led up to, capping the scientific work of many centuries. You're afraid of it!" "Yes." Her face colored. She burst out, "I don't wonder Grandfather threw you out!" With that, she turned and hurried away. Tlie dinosaurs were a solace, as always. They strutted in their new cages, before a romantic diorama, munching on the lush grass. Jane certainly took good care of them. These were the first animals to be synthesized. It Had been my idea to start on dinosaurs, building from fragments of bone presented from a museum. We Had four stegosaurs, two brontosauri wallowing in a little pond, and a brace of iguanadon. They stood about six inches High and were, of course, sterile. Nowadays, we -- Lawrence Life-Forms, I mean -- do considerably better. In a separate cage was a super little tyrannosaur, eight inches high, prowling about with cat movements, glaring at me. I stood for a long time, wondering what we had started. Synthetic life... When we had not solved one tithe of the problems of natural life... And Frank was promising iis newly constituted board to Have a synthetic serving-man on the market within five years... In the end, rather than think about it, I wandered back to the house. T'rank was there, standing against the empty fireplace. Jane stood near him. Mrs. Singer had brought them sherry. As I took in the scene, I realized I Had heard a helicopter fly over, but had taken no notice. "You shouldn't Have come," I said harshly. I thought that at sixty-five he looked as if he Had more years to go than I; but he was never involved in a plane crash. "THe board room battle was one thing," he said. "You and Jerry Keynes were just two individuals who stood in my way, in the way of what I see as right. Privately it is a different matter, Robert. Keynes means nothing to me, but you are one of the family. I feel about you -- " "You can't divorce the two sides, Frank," I said. "I tried to go along with them too long; now that you've chucked me out, I don't have to try." "I didn't chuck you out, manl You got outvoted #" "Out-smarted!" "Daddy," Jane said. "Try to listen to what Grandfather is going to say." My anger was rising; I liked the feeling. "Don't tell me -- he's going to make an offer!" "Wrong, Robert! I Have made an offer to Jane, and she Has accepted. I've offered her a very large sum for this estate." He named the price; it was about three times as much as I'd have got on the open market. "You are forgetting. This is my estate, and I sell when I wish to whom I wish." "Give it to Jane. She will sell it to me. I will give it to her." "I've done my last deal wth you, Frank." He came up close and said, gently, "Let me help you privately, Robert. As a favor to me. You know why." "I don't know why." His gaze dropped. He said, "After the plane crash... you and Viv lingered near death for several days. I realized then How I loved my daughter, how little I had ever done for her." "Don't make me weep, Frank. I prefer you in your hard-hitting role." "Maybe. I Had plenty of time to think. You were lying there on a Heart-machine; Viv was unconscious with irreversible brain damage. BotK your lives seemed to be suspended wHile I made up my mind." "Egotism, Frank!" "THose days were years. Remember, my own wife bad died Only two months before, and I Bad been told she would never Save died if I Had turned up that last day as I Ead promised." "You stayed at tKe office." "Never mind that. That's my business. I'm talking about you. On the tentK day, the surgeons decided Viv was dying. That was when they flew in the heart-op specialist from South Africa -- at my expense. You know what Happened. There was nothing wrong with Viv's heart; her damage was to brain and kidneys. They operated. They gave you her heart. So you survived." T was shaking. Jane came to me.#"Why do you bring all this up again? Don't I know it? Don't I live with it every day? What are you trying to do, Frank -- get your daughter's Heart back from me? For God's sake, you've done enough -- go away!" He went to the other end of the room, sat down, lit a cigar. His Band trembled. "Robert, I am not reproaching you. In you, a part of my daughter lives, I only want to tell you what you did not know. The problems with the heart-op come afterwards -- in particular th'e body's fight to reject its new Heart, the auto-immune reaction. You know what the surgeons said in your case? They said you Hardly manifested that reaction." He stopped to let it sink in. I said nothing. "Well, it was a question of love, wasn't it? Your mind controlling physical reaction, wasn't it? You really loved Viv. You didn't blame Her even subconsciously for the crash, or the usual immune reaction would have established itself. You lay there unconscious and proved your love was perfect." "Would you leave, please, Frank? You are a Hard man, as you aspire to me. You also have a disgusting sentimental streak, as do most Hard men. This whole notion that love can overcome antibodies is sheer sentimental fantasy. I was simply a surgical case that worked out well -- the operation is not the hazardous thing it was ten years ago." I got up and walked out into the garden again. The sun was momentarily , shining. I went and stood in the shrubbery. Jane eventually found me there, "Father, I cannot, cannot understand you! I know How much you loved mother, and How Hard Her death hit you. Why should you make yourself out to be so callous in front of Grandfather?" I decided to touch her, and then thought better of it. "I can't accept or attempt emotional blackmail, Jane?" "You mejjin you won't do a deal with Grandfather!" "Of course I won't do a deal, just to salve his conscience!" Tlie helicopter whirled overhead, turned, made for the mainland. I could see Jane was very angry. "Why the devil should you withhold the salving of his conscience? Wh'at special right have you to administer a moral law? It was precisely because you tried to do that that you were kicked out of Lawrence LifeForms! Now what future Have you? What future have I got, either? You've let me spend five years looking after you -- ofi, I Have no complaints! -- but you're quite ready to see our home go down the drain just to spite someone who wanted to help us I" "It was not spite, Jane! It -- " "OH, don't tell me! Ethical principles! You and your ethical principles! But really, it's spite, isn't it? You want to Hurt Grandfather -- it's just as simple as that! You have mother's Heart, and you Have now taken it from Him!" "This heart -- it's an organ, an anonymous machine! Don't try and build some symbolic thing about it! You're angry and upset, Jane. Don't say something you will regret, don't spoil the relationship between us!" "I'm not sure I wan# any relationship with you!" And with that she turned and left me. So went our family quarrel. Nothing was resolved. Tt was four and a Half months before I saw my daughter again. I was living in my town flat then, with most of the rooms empty of furniture. When Jane appeared, I was so glad to see Her that at first I did not realize How ill she looked. Se took my Hand and asked, "Have you Heard the news?" The House was auctioned yesterday," I said. "It fetched its reserve price. You shouldn't Have walked out on me, Jane. At least give me the credit of meaning well with regard to your grandfather! And our quarrel -- yours and mine -- it must not be final. In life, only death is final. Emotional entanglements, financial entanglements -- they're never final." "I'm going to live my own life, Father, from now on." "Good! Do it for good reasons, though, not to defy me. Who's right in all this, who's wrong? I behaved -- as I thought best. My morality is clear, to me at least. But I don't understand Frank's. Lawrence Life-Forms go from strength' to strength. Our pocket-sized dinosaurs are nothing now. The world's zoos will soon be stocked with life-size dinosaurs. Synthetic human beings are just a few years away." "Father, you could never have stopped that development!" "They'll have trouble. I know! Am I not myself synthetic?" As I said this, I felt my heart beating strongly within its scarred cage. I forced myself to say, "Jane, I want your respect and -- and your love. You must love me for myself, not just because I keep a part of your mother alive, as Frank does." "I came to tell you, Father. That was my news. Frank shot himself yesterday. It's in all the papers." Reaction would come later. "I don't look at newspapers any more," I said automatically; then : "Why?" "You've always been the one finding clever reasons," she said. As she looked down challengingly at me, I realized how she would be keeping something of her grandfather alive, down through the years. Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name Address City  State Zip Cade... (Offer good In U. S, A. Only j Tngratitude... that's wKat it is. Here's Judy Merril, who first publicized sucH talents as J. G s Ballard, and wKo went into caracoles of prosody at such books as The Genocides; wKo beat tKe drum for New Worlds at least as energetically as Columbus ever did; wKo is tKe MartKa Foley of this genre and as assiduous a literary politician; to be bitten by the New Thing as she has been at the present juncture I Thus: "A satisfying 'Best' volume ougfit to meet the following minimum standards: #. Its contents Should be science fiction -- which means that at the very worst, every story ought to contain some trace of some science, and at best they ought to depend on it. This means no fantasies, nothing put in solely because the author wrote a best-selling mainstream novel in #, no political parables and no what-is-its." So says James BlisK, in relation to his role as visitor to and latenight privatdozent at the Brian Aldiss Home. "When she asked me if I enjoyed Her last volume, I replied -- politely or impolitely (I forget which) -- that I found it a fascinating slice of autobiography." So says Brian Aldiss. And they both say it in Best SF: #, (Berkley), which', apart from being a very good anthology of very good reading, is also an unabashed advertisement for New Worlds, the English science-fiction magazine; for the New Thing as typified by such writers as Ballard and Ellison; and for literary politics. It is also the scene of a remarkably even-tempered and good-humored introduction by Harry Harrison, who was the principal editor of this volume (Blish supplied the "Credo" which begins it, and Aldiss supplied the panoramic essay which completes it), saying, among other things: "As you will Have noticed, he Blish clears the field for this annual 'Best volume by shooting down the other entrants. Perhaps this uncompromising attitude pays off: to my knowledge, Blish is the only contemporary science fiction author quoted as a source in Webster's Third International Dictionary."  What we have here, in thiq book, then, is a direct assault on the market for Judith Merril's provinces and on her annual anthologies -- and a brush-block en passant on Don Wollheim'sTerry Carr's similar book for Ace -- via a book which Has three essayists all combining to produce the supportive matter which Miss Merril nowadays creates by her one-si es. It is at least as argumentative and didactic a book as any of hers, partly I think because one cannot avoid that effect when writing so much front, back and blurb matter, more importantly because Blish, Harrison and Aldiss are argumentative people by first intention. In time, it will be as generally effective at raising hackles and opposition as hers is. Certainly, it already betrays the same sense of a dormitory pillowfight covering more purposeful regulatory actions. It lias that fine eye for tHe apparently irrelevant but usdful detail (... source... Webster's ...) and generates tHe same air' of good fellowship, after all, that one gets at places like tHe Milford Writers' Conference. In other words, it's not merely a better book tHan tfie average Merril anthology -- a detail we will be discussing immediately below. By reason of the details we've already discussed, it's a Serious Threat to the Opposition. Following future developments promises to be rewarding. Now -- as for the contents, these are: Th'e Credo by James BlisH, written at Harry Harrison's request, laying down the rules whereby a book stands a chance of being a genuine reflection of an honest attempt to anthologize the year's best science-fiction short stories. An introduction by Harry Harrison, calmly acknowledging BlisK's points and then accepting the ones He wants. "Hawksbill Station", by Robert Silverb'erg; "Ultimate Construction", by C. C. Shackleton; John T. Sladek's "# A. D.!"; "Fifteen Miles", by Ben Bova; "Blackmail", by Fred Hoyle; Kit Reed's "THe Vine", James Thurber's "Interview With a Lemming"; Frank M. Robinson's "The Wreck of the Ship John. B.; "THe Left-Hand Way", by A. Bertram Chandler; "The Forest of Zil", by Kris Neville; "THe Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a Downhill Motor Race", by J. G. Ballard; "Answering Service", by Fritz Leiber; "THe Last Command", by Keith Laumer; "Mirror of Ice", by Gary Wright, and Harlan Ellison's best story that I know of -- "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes." These are followed by Aldiss's afterword -- an essay entitled "Knights of The Paper Spaceship", with which I do not agree in many particulars, and which is not an example of How to write persuasively, but is nevertheless worth the price of admission all by itself for the sake of its dear statement of what a leading New Thing theoretidan thinks it's all about. Of the stories, Silverberg, like Ellison, is here with the best story he ever wrote to my knowledge; Leiber's is one of the very best. THe Laumer is as good as all but the very best Laumer, and Bert Bova's story is another that one could similarly characterize if Bova wrote enough to make the statement meaningful. Ditto the Robinson, which is the latest iri a canon of long-voyage stories by that author; the series, which may be as sKort as two, but which I believe includes other stories between this one and "The Oceans ,are Wide", extends sparsely across a long span of time. Like the Bova, the Silverberg, the Laumer and newcomer Gary Wright's superb "Mirror of Ice", the Robinson is firmly in the old tradition Aldiss puts behind him in his essay. All of these particular stories raise and answer questions about the nature of Man, whom they place in a technologically supported situation for that purpose. In the light of present days, one sees this type of story becoming indistinct from such "mainstream" Stories as, for example, Slim, novel about a power transmission lineman. But despite the very theoretical orientation of this book, or any other honest anthology based on whatever premise, one cannot as yet put together a satisfactory sf anthology without including approximately this proportion of technology fiction. We can trust to Harry Harrison's instincts for that. We can thank his various crotchets, I suppose, for the inclusion of the Th'urber story -- introduced with ns twisty a piece of ratiocination ns Judy Merril ever displayed while handing you an old chestnut and calling it a plum -- scatological joke. Likewise, every editor has to have his inclusion from the unlikely source, so we can, I guess, get through the Sh'ackleton if we tiptoe rapidly with our eyes shut. The Ballard is fascinating because you would not ever have thought so many different editors would find these nonstory constructs worth attention; also because it is fascinating, which I guess answers my question on everybody's behalf but yours. The Sladek, like the Wright, is gratifyiing because you know, just looking, that you've found two more names to leap out at you from tables of contents herefromafter. And the same, the very same, for the Ellison. B ut if you think the last word on The New Thing is about to be spoken, here comes The Best SF Stories from New Worlds, (Berkley), edited by that same Michael Moorcock, whom Aldiss has just finished calling an editorial genius, and who is the beneficiary of that geist which they keep piling upon him, in a manner quite different from the way Gemsback, Campbell and Boucher just reached out and grabbed. It must have given Moorcock a rare tremor to discover that the Harrison anthology contained but one story from New Worlds, yet devoted mucK Aldisserie to Kim (and his "growing ambitions" -- Is that the first or die last robin, do you suppose, Mike, or  some grayer bird of omen?) and His troubled, subsidizd English magazine, new focus of the bright minds in this genre. The editorial introduction is blather, stricken with blurb disease (If -- is SF's best craftsman, then -- , next on the table of contents, is SF's greatest stylist. Next, -- 's story is our genre's finest example of --  and, besides, perfectly evokes the atmosphere of the author's childhood in West New York), and thus no help. So we must go to the contents for oar insight on what The New Thing might be. (I'll tell you ahead of time that this book is full of clues, but interpreting their meaning is, as usual, being left up to you, mostly because I probably don't understand it.) The stories are by Brian W. Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, David I. Masson, Langdon Jones and Thomas M. Disch; one assumes that with room for only seven, Moorcock chose carefully, and one proceeds to examine them with an eye to revelation. Aldiss's "The Small Betraying Detail" shifts its protagonist into a kind of alternate East Anglia where the otherwise exactly English scene, complete with beachand-boardwalk desolation-supermare, is inhabited by a parallel race of people who never spent a (theoretically proposed) significant evolutionary period combing beaches, are therefore not as nearly hairless as we are, and who, consequently, always face inland when at the beach. (That's the small, betraying, horrifying detail.) Really? But they Have seaside kiosks and boardwalks and trucks lettered in script descended from the alphabet of the Phoenician island race?  c? Sec? Really? I rather think not. This story is nonsense when examined for consistency with its rationale, as so many Aldiss stories are -- the ones whose rationale isn't nonsense to begin with. And this I think is either laziness, because the small details which betray this neglect could as easily have been in accord with' the premise, or else a lack of energy which prevents Aldiss from being both thorough and thoughtful. He is thoughtful. And effective; the mood is terrifying at the same time the story is ludicrous. The landscape is vivid in my mind; the general desuetude, the motionless sober, pelted nonbathers regarding me with their fathomless eyes as I drive by. It is a scene that could not conceivably have taken place in any reality. But it takes place in mine, having taken place in Aldiss's. By some narrow margin, this is a story, though it's weakest where it comes closest to transmitting a defined occurrence. But what of Ballard's "The Assassination Weapon", which is written as if on file cards tossed into the air and consists of short, symbolically connected declarative modules, ostensibly Having to do with a psychotic's attempt to replace the "false" death's of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Lee Harvey Oswald with ones that will be meaningful to him. The last line of this invention -- this marvelously creative, patient, polished invention -- is perfect. It happens to be the same last line as the last line of the best parody of Ballard: "Nothing happened." When a man's work so pluperfectly matches its own caricature, not much more need be said about it by any critic, right? But wh'at about the fact that it does seem to make sense, and that in some strange way it seems to express not the facts, but the prefigured feeling, of th'e mad week Ray became a couplet? Story? The worst things in this generally effective book are the stories... John Brunner's "Nobody Axed You" and Langdon Jones's "The Music Maker", which you can see coming in Paragraph #, and would Have been saved only if they had failed to follow formal structure. Even Zelazny's "The Keys to December" is for once not good Zelazny, but merely good writing -- beautiful writing, exactly realized, exactly detailed -- on a basically tired old theme. And David I. Masson is at least as ingenious in '"A Two Timer" as he was with his earlier "Traveler's Rest", but his ingenuity this time has to do with the language and viewpoint in this story of a Seventeenth-Century man who finds a time machine and comes to # to marvel and commit adultery. I think many of us have wished we Had the educated ease to write a convincing story from such a viewpoint; pity the pace is so uncontrolled. But in the end this is a travelogue with a Punch and Judy ending; it's good credentials for the author, thin fare for the reader. Then, "The Squirrel Cage", by, Thomas M. Disch. What can I tell you? If the perfect Ballard last line is "Nothing happened," the epitome of Disch is "It ran down." There are few Disch stories which concern more than one character, that character trapped inside something that conveys him or nourishes him at its indifferent and impermanent pleasure. A few Disch stories are different to the extent that they are about several characters trapped inside; those are the novels. And here, with this last story, not necessarily sharing the same this last layout of marks upon madness, for that would restrict paper, everything has actually tire reader appeal... You ceased . , . there is no narrative know, that would account for it; resolution, no feeling, no comthe lying promise of the lucid munication: that has not been spells, the impeccable rationale meticulously pre-anesthetized... issuing from the hysterical rictus, which, situation of course, does the paralogical appeal, the petconvey a message of its own. tisKness, the charm... But, no! I said I was going to leave the No, obviously not. interpretation up to you. And I But it would certainly explain shall. But if you are thinking that why John Campbell can't undertHe heart of the New Thing is stand us. Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence in science-fiction writing. Every story appearing in the magazines Galaxy and If in issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected is intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Galaxy and If. Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines in making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month after the December issues appear. To breathe water is a useful trick. But when you shake a J dolphin's hand -- take if easy l m # Vn  from Hawaii were the low, wliite buildings of the Caribbean Research Station, which housed five hundred workers, fifty million dollars worth' of computers, breeding tanks, centrifuges, blood exchangers, electron microscopes and spotless surgeries. Before him was the object of the whole installation,...The porpoise stood half out of the water. "Greeting, Senator Junior!" it piped. The animal kept the startled politician in the full sight of one liquid eye. Squatting so that his eyes were on a level with that of the swimming animal, Senator Ramon Coatl said, "Can you answer questions?" "You smarter than you look!" the air breather shrilled. "Why no ask keeper?" "They tell me you're intelligent. In my book, an intelligent... being... can answer questions. Will you answer mine?" TKe porpoise revolved in tEe water, "I answer questions if you answer too. Like jokes?" "What?" "Jokes, jokes!" Now the voice sounded more like barking. "You like funny stories?" TEe guide's duck trousers moved back out of Coatl's peripheral vision. "Yes," tEe Senator said, Eumoring the fantastic animal in the water, "I like jokes." Immediately, he was able to see the otKer side of tEe pool, under the torpedo form. TEe porpoise Ead levered itself six feet out of tEe water. When the long white belly flopped, Senator Coatl was almost rocked back off his Keels by tEe force of the unexpected sheet of water. From tEe center of tEe pool, an eerie whistle sounded. "I keep you laughing Eke that all day." Coatl grinned, flung off Els sodden clothes, and dived cleanly into tEe pool beside the porpoise. With apparent deligHt, it wove rings around Kim. He could hear the High speed conversation under water, but understood none of it They surfaced, and Coatl cried, "I'm sorry! I can only understand English." "Okay, Okay, no make a big thing of it," hie animal grumbled. "Stick around six months. I teach you speak Dolphin out of every orifice you body. Here come keeper with trunks for you. You swim pretty good for animal with feet." It turned and zipped out the pool entrance. T'en minutes later, they were beyond the combers, nearly out of sight of the low lying land, floating gently with the swell. Ramon Coatl kicked gently and brought his eye a few inches from the other swimmer's. "Why do you come in when they call you? Is it for the easy food, or for what?" "Food nothing. Learn to talk, to use Hands, that everything." The porpoise stood up in the swell, belly toward Coatl, and the Senator could see a metal plate with two small holes set in the mid line of the muscular white belly. As nearly as possible, it gestured toward the plate with its fHppers. "This adaptor whole thing for me. I volunteer, you know. May be animal, but not starfish or flatworm. You animals too, no?" TKe Senator turned and began the long swim for shore. Behind him the porpoise spouted, strewing the redolent smell of its inside down the wind. When Coatl walked out on the shelving beach a mile below the station, He shook his Head, laughed, and walked up the beach toward the small group of Human figures running toward him. The guides found him smiling with pleasure from the swim with the joking porpoise, and he brusquely shook off their apologies. Slipping into the terry robe they Had brought him against the early evening chill, he fell into step with the young scientist who had moved back out of range and let him be drenched by the swimming animal's humor. He ignored the senior research assistant, a handsome, distracted woman who seemed fearful of losing a Senator to the sea. "Doctor, how educated is that creature I was swimming with? Not how smart -- I've seen all those charts -- how educated? Can he understand why I'm here?" The research man kicked a gout of sand up with one sandal. "Oh yes, in a general way. He knows that there are many, many more people than we have here. And he's been inland in a tank. He's been told what government is; but the idea is so foreign to any experience He could ever have had that I don't think He really understands what a shark to us minnows a Senator is. We got him to call you by title because we told him it was a gag. We wanted you to know porpoises really can talk." "The splashing was Jus own idea?" "Yes, sir; but I admit it was not unexpected. He wanted to make bis own impression on you. If you don't call him by name the next time you see him, he'll splash you again. He expects to be treated as an individual, not just a specimen." '  "Andy, mostly; and He answers well enough to it. He was the first free porpoise on this station, you know. I'm sure he made the point about His being a volunteer. If you really want to please him, his name in their sounds is Eeeetz chi" "Eats chuck?" "No, no, Senator. A whistle to the back of the teeth and a glottal click. Eeeetz chi Look at the way I'm doing it You'll never get it by sound alone." "I'll never get it at all." "Sure, sure. The end sound is a hard, hard version of the Spanish J. He makes it with the top of his oral ' cavity and the very back of His tongue." "I thought they made those Hard sounds with the air sacs by the blowhole." "Yes, we Have learned that's where the echo sounds are made: their organic sonar. The combination of the two sacs and the length of that upside-down nose gives them an infinite range of frequencies, and they use cycles up to k one fifty. His name is a formal sound, however, and it's made entirely in the oral chamber: tongue and teeth'. We can speak that. We can't hope to speak their echo sounds." "All right Eeeeeeeetz huktch? When you say one fifty k, you sound like a computer man. You did mean # thousand?" "That's right For sustained conversation -- well, no, I mean for sustained exchange of information -- we have to use computers. The dolphins get bored pretty fast at ordinary human speech rates. Their brains are physically larger than ours, and the critical layers of the cortex are as numerous as ours, six levels; but they have at least twice the number of cortical convolutions, so they do mental acts faster than we can." The Senator stopped short, ramming his Hands into the patch pockets of His terry robe. In a concentration reflex of which he was entirely unconscious, he began to pick up as much sand as he could grasp with His long, muscular toes. So he had stood on the beach at his far off island home and grappled with the "new ideas" His older brother had brought back from school. Now his toes kneaded wet sand as he wound His mind down to seizure of the measure of porpoise intelligence. "I've seen the charts. Does that mean they are, quote, twice as smart, unquote, as we are?" i 'T'he scientist had stopped also.  He unslung the jacket He was carrying over his left arm, and shrugged it around his Tshirted upper torso. "Senator, they are... they are... more than twice as, quote, smart, unquote. They scan the cortical wrinkles faster. With twice as many grooves in which to record bits of info, they are geometrically smarter." Coatl continued to knead wet sand with' his prehensile toes. "Really smarter? Or computer smarter?" The young scientist grimaced. "Eeeetz ch' was right. You are smarter than you look. Yes, from a man-centered view of reality all that happens is that, like a computer, they have much faster access to stored information than we do, and much faster manipulation of it. But creative, intuitive use of it? Not in Human terms. If that is the measure of true intelligence, then these big, seagoing cats are not very intelligent. They're just better equipped to Handle information." "WHat do you say? Smarter? Or not so smart?" "Man isn't the measure of all things, Senator. Creativity must exist in the dolphins, or a wiseacre like Eeeetz ch wouldn't keep fooling with us. I'll tell you one possible joint project we have in mind. What limits the load of calculations that gets the Module on and off the moon. I It isn't sufficiently part of any Human experience yet for pilots to do it by the seat of the pants. "Dolphins deal with that kind of spatial reality every minute of their lives. And not by instinct, either. As one comes wriggling out Mama's birth chamber tailfirst, Mama whistles; and another female, on some kind of rotary list that we have Inot been able to figure out, swims over and takes the new born to the surface for its first breath. The second one stays for a couple of months as nurse and baby sitter, and she and Mama teach baby How to relate to the environment, "At the end of that time, the young calf Has an ecKolocator Working that keeps it always oriented for the rest of its life. That one tool alone is so accurate that dolphins can distinguish between steel balls so nearly the same size that I need calipers to tell which is which. The process involves a very High number of echoes being examined by that super convoluted cortex "Now, put that animated com... in command of the Module's senses, and let it monitor the whole shebang. Such' a dolphin could sense the need to fire a rocket for as little as a Hundredth of a second to correct course, and do it immediately; it could drop your Module and take it off like the kiss of a moth's wing. You'd just need a liquid chamber for the dolphin's comfort." U nconscious of having paused, Senator Coatl began to Stride on up the beach. It was full night now. "But they can't manipulate ... and you can't Snout." "That's the point of the prosthetic program. Tomorrow morning we'll put Eeeetz ch into His vest and you will see." Coatl dug his foot tentatively into the packed, resisting sand. "Yes, well, that's wliat I'm Here to investigate. You station PH.D.'s are all really committed to prosthesis aren't you?" The man and woman were both standing in front of him, and though there was no perceptible signal between them, they flipped their jackets back and down over their shoulders in unison. In the early moonlight, Ramon Coatl saw just below each sternum the same dull gleaming plate he Had seen in Eeeetz ch's white belly. "All right, don't try to tell me about it, then. You'll show me in the morning." Coatl cast away a footful of sand decisively, and stepping around th'e two scientists, h'e marched toward the station. The Hands clutching their open jackets were oddly like the gesturing flippers of Eeeetz ch far out at sea, showing the dedication of their flesh that, with dull metal plates, set them apart from all other living creatures. Fanatics, Coatl thought. They have bought a piece of the project with their own bodies. But don't pass judgment, Ramon. OppenKeimer and Szilard and Fermi were all fanatics too. Who knows what friendly natives will greet the navigators in this new world? All night the dolphins swam in his sleeping mind. Each dolphin had a metal plate in His belly, and one of them had breasts that were like the senior research assistant's... she of them. II A fter breakfasting at four a.m. on turtle eggs and cafe con leche the Hawaiian Senator stood before the Station, facing down. "Am I to suit up with you?" He asked. Marguerite Hart, the senior research assistant, shook her head. "No, but we want you to watch, We Have to keep our prosthetic! gills in a kind of amniotic fluid when we're not wearing them, and we have to grow into them to put them on. Takes about ad hour. Later on... you'll see." He watched through heavy, glass as the two scientists swam into the frilly, ugly vests, plugged the jacks from the artificial gills into their chest plate receptacles and hung there, letting the gills become animated as they began drawing from the fluid around them, which was gradually being replaced with sea water. Senator Coatl was revolted, though' he kept his poker face. As the gills became pinker and livelier, looking now more like ruffled bed jackets, and established the rhythm by which sea water was squeezed for its dissolved oxygen, the skins of the two human beings became deathly white. It was nearly a full Hour before either of them opened an eye, and several minutes more before the naked skin assumed a nearly normal hue. "That's one line of research that Has to go," Coatl told himself. "The damned things look like they're digesting the user." He was repelled again when the young man and woman in the tank raised and lowered their arms as bats do when awakening. Henry Racoglu swam to th'e side of the tank, and as his throat began to vibrate, the slurred vocalizing became audible from a loudspeaker in one corner of the observation room, "Senator, go suit up in your aqualung. We'll meet you at the short pier around front." The two converted Humans cocked their heads back and, with body shivers remarkably like fish, shot out the bottom of the tank where the gills had been stored. When Coatl had sunk in his Scuba gear, the two scientists, who now seemed streamlined and fully vital, were waiting, arms at their sides, legs together, rippling gently from time to time to stay in one place. Marguerite spoke, and He felt the throaty vocables in the bones of his skull. "Follow us, and we'll go meet the dolphin. We have to dress him, too." "matl squeezed His throat as He V# had been taught to do in the brief Washington indoctrination, and h'e felt His own throat sounds go out through the mike on the little collar He wore. "Take... as long... for... Eeeetz di?" Marguerite answered. "No, dressing Him is not as long as for us, but it does take some time. Follow us around tKe island." With a fish's quickness, she streaked away, and inan instant Racoglu followed her. Senator Coatl went after them at leisure, and when he arrived, Eeeetz cH was already upright just below the surface of the water, carefully sliding his flippers into a vestlike apparatus which had a skin as sleek as the porpoise's own, but ridged and corded as if long muscles lay beneath its surface. As the Senator approached, he Heard the rapid clicks and chuckles of dolphin conversation. He was resigned to incomprehension, and wondered if Henry and Marguerite understood the cluttering syllables, when he was suddenly startled by a square box a few meters away. It burst into a mechanical kind of English. "Go away. Wait until I am Handed. I do not greet you. Go away away awayawayawayawayway." TKe box repeated this very rapidly many times, and then he saw the human beings each place a Hand over one of the dolphin's eyes and heard Marguerite say, "Be quiet, Number One. Coatl will wait to greet you. Don't tense up or we have to start over." TKe box thereupon burst into porpoise language, firing a short staccato burst of clicks. The porpoise wriggled out of the vest and the scientists' Hands swam directly away from Coatl, making violent noises. The box roared, "All right! Don't repeat." It said this about forty times, and then Eeeetz ch hung motionless in the water fifty meters away with His tail pointed toward Coatl. The Senator, realizing that the box was a computerized translator, slowly vocalized, "I... do... not... watch. My back... to... you." He turned and hung in the water facing away from Eeeetz cH. For a moment, there was no further sound, then He heard a short buzz from Eeeetz ch, and the box quickly said ten times, "He can watch tomorrow." Then there was a period of cross talk, the box buzzing and cackling. Coatl could hear the throat vocals too, so he was getting both sides of the conversation, and soon felt that his head was in a bucket that was being struck with a broomstick, as Marguerite and Henry urged, "Come on, push, push," and Eeeetz ch's exasperated chatter was translated, "You are Hurting, you are hurting, you are torturing me." Marguerite had said, "Now shrink it! Damn you, you're growing." Eeeetz ch snarled something that came out of the box with mechanical profundity, "Fascists! Vivisectionists!" Then there was a plop! as of a refrigerator door seating itself in its gasket, and two small metallic snaps. An instant later, Senator Coatl felt himself slapped stingingly on the buttocks, grasped on the shoulder and swung around by a rough hand to face a weirdly altered porpoise. nphe heavy muscled vest encir cled Eeetz ch at the level of his flippers, which were hidden in the vest. The plate in His belly was covered by two fleshy flaps of the vest. Where flippers should have been, two columns of dark flesh, each the size of a wrestler's thigh', grew out into hands -- golem-fingered, but unmistakable hands. "I greet you!" the box roared over and over as the dolphin extended his right hand. It was an obvious effort for him; the left appendage simply trailed in the water, unused. Coatl took the right hand, and in a moment grunted with pain as the bones in his Hand were ground together. He expected to faint as he Heard Eeeetz ch' clicking and the box endlessly repeating, "I can't open it! Helpdamnhelpdamnhelpdamnhelp !" In a blaze of agony, the Senator saw Henry Racoglu appear behind the dolphin and strike repeatedly at the middle of his back. As the artificial hand relaxed its spastic grip, he shot to the surface where He could sob unrestrainedly without drowning. When he could flex the crushed hand enough to know nothing was broken, and the tears had ceased to flow, he became aware again of the thfree odd creatures about him. He realized that Henry and Marguerite were supporting him closely, their gills pulsing, their eyes above water, and Eeeetz ch was bobbing up and down. The dolphin caught his eye at last and shrilled, "Sorry I So sorry! Damn cheap muscles. I should have move them a few times before I try use them. I crazy for hands! Sorry! Sorry!" Coatl thrust out his throbbing hand. "Try again," he said through gritted teeth'. To his surprise, the swimming mammal groaned, sounded and fled. Racoglu spoke, his lips awash. "He can't use his hands at all in the air. And we can't come out of the water with our gills on. You're in a hell of a shape, Senator." "Turn me loose. I can swim now. Man! that hurt," the Senator said. "What happened? I thought that metal plate meant he had some kind of battery assist for that arm and hand." "Yes, yes, he does. There's a nickel cadmium battery behind that plate. The synthetic muscle and Its nerve supply take time to warm up and establish equilibrium in, the blood supply. Eeeetz ch is so impatient -- dolphins do everything so blindingly fast -- he just can't wait. He wanted so badly to impress you, and then the muscle structure knotted up and he couldn't will the hand open. He's gone off like a cat that's knocked over a vase, you know, so he can pretend it didn't Happen. He'll be back in a few minutes. Can you really swim, now? That hand's going to be pretty sore." Henry rose and fell, shipping a few mouthfuls of water as he spoke, but continuing, nonetheless, to support Coatl. "Sure, I can swim; but he's disabled me from shaking Hands for a few days." Marguerite and Henry sank fully into the water, pointed the direction, and began the swim back to the Station, as Ramon Coatl bit into his Scuba mouthpiece and swam rather slowly after them. Th'e gentle exercise worked the acute pain out of his crushed Hand after a few Hundred meters. He was not frightened when a dark torpedo with Heavily muscled arms held out from its sides as if they were vanes appeared beneath him. He could Hear the cricket-like conversation running up the scale into inaudibility. Curving himself down beside the swimming mammal, he pointed up to the surface. Tphey broke into the air to getHer. Eeeetz ch began at once to grumble. "Must learn some Dolphin. English clumsy enough in air, impossible under water." "All right, you teach me. How do you say 'I'm sorry'?" "You got a lot to learn besides words. We not live in that kind' of world, Senator. I no want to be civilized that way, only to be Handed. Control environment every way then. My motor warmed up now... go back to practice range. Come tomorrow, I no squeeze hand." "So long, Eeeetz ch," the Senator said. "I'll see you tomorrow." In the come-close tank where he had first met Eeeetz ch, a muscle-weary Senator listened as his human guides told him where the dispensary was on land. "You're not coming with me?" he strained his throat to ask. Marguerite shook her head. "It's wearing to grow into these gills. Now that we have them on, we'll stay under water for at least a couple of days. Hank will phone ahead to the dispensary, from that set over there on the bottom, and tomorrow morning we'll wait for you here with the dolphin. Can you walk it, or shall we ask for some help?" Coatl swallowed a bitter retort. "I'll walk," he gurgled, and Staggered up out of the pool. The exact route He took and just who Helped him in the next two hours were things Ramon Coatl could never afterwards recall with any clarity; but white, shaking, slightly staggering swimmers in wet trunks were old hat to the personnel of the Station; and he was unobtrusively shunted into the dispensary and restored to sufficient health to eat two enormous bowls of the Station's famous gumbo at dinner that night, accompanied by the hard, bright sherry of which Bela Hagedorn was so fond. Director Hagedorn, whose portly figure was as streamlined as some sea creature's, apologized in a ponderously offhand sort of way which began to seem very porpoise-like to Senator Coatl for not having been able to meet the Senator when he first arrived and give him a personal, escorted two-doll ar tour. "Henry Racoglu and Maggie Hart are two of our finest young researchers, though," the Director smilingly said, "and I'm only sorry that their fervor and speed in getting you under water, where you could see us at our best, should have resulted first off in your being hurt." Coatl shrugged. "I grew up surfing, diving without a mask, and fighting octopus for fun and food. Being hurt underwater is no novelty for me. I was just glad I had on air. I didn't the summer I was fifteen and netted a ray as wide across as I was tall. Finally T Had to let Kim take the net and go. Being dragged eight or ten miles out to sea did not Hurt so much -- my uncles came after me in an outrigger, so I only Had to swim about half way Home -- as the razzing they gave me all the way to shore for losing that net." "Well, we won't razz you. Eeeetz ch is an odd creature anyway. He's very emotional for a dolphin; and He can be quite terrifying when he panics." "Are they all like that?" "OH no. No, for the most part -- have some more gumbo -- they're phlegmatic. I suppose I don't mean that. Stable emotionally is what I mean, happy and self-confident. And of course, why shouldn't they be? They're perfectly adapted to the life they live. Not an enemy in the ocean really frightens them. It's Hard not to envy the aboriginal dolphin sometimes." CCfTThy is Eeeetz ch so ' ' moody?" "I'm not sure. I think It has to do in part with his being the first. Most of them are smart; but he has imagination as well as ability to learn, and he has enough imagination to frighten himself. "The day I talked to Him about his surgery, he swam up and down that come-close pool like a man pacing over a decision, and even when He was hanging in the water, he was shivering. You could see the pool surface responding to it, they tell me. Finally he swam away and left me sitting on the bottom; and he was gone a good long time, too. Three days." Ramon Coatl looked at the somewhat pompous Director hesitantly. After a moment he said, "Excuse me, Director Hagedom. May I ask... you said you were in the water with Him. I got the impression you waited in the sea those three days. Do you have one of those metal plates in your chest, too?" The Director finished a mouthful of gumbo reflectively, with one eye cocked fishily at Coatl. He rescued the leg of a crab which was protruding from the other comer of His mouth, sucked out its content and then, having made some decision, unzipped his poplin windbreaker and pulled down with both Hands on the bosun's undershirt He was wearing. Below His breastbone was the dull colored plate with the two adaptor receptacles. For a moment, in that posture, with his chin raised and his shoulders drawn back, He seemed oddly defenseless. In tfie cut-and-tKrust world of politics wKere tHe Senator lived, defenselessness was not an impression lie often received, and Be Hardly knew How to react. For tHe moment, tHe attitude of Director Hagedom disarmed Coatl. THe scientific administrator continued to sit witH His cHest bared, unmoving, blinking slowly. "My dear fellow #" said Ramon Coatl. "No doubt I sHould Have seen tEat tfie first time we went in tfie water togetfier, and my curiosity would Have been satisfied witfiout any breacfi of manners on my part. Forgive me." He applied Himself again to tfie gumbo. "I sfiould Have asked about tfie Handed flippers. WKat exactly is all tliat protoplasm, Doctor?" Hagedom turned and looked around tfie mess Hall. Ten meters away, a totally bald man sat, facing away from tfiem. He was carrying on a conversation witfi a girl wHose back was partly turned. Her arm and forearm lay along Jus upper arm and sfioulder. Hagedom said, "I Hate to interrupt a lovers' conversation, but Nickleby is tfie best man to explain it to you." To CoatTs surprise, tfie Director raised one massive foot and Slammed it down on tfie vinyl floor. Like everyone else on tfie project, Hagedom wore sneakers, so tfie impact made little noise, but Coatl could feel tfie floor quiver. Ill T'fie bald man turned at once, A grinned, spoke to tfie girl, and got up and came over, still s milin g. Hagedom casually covered His moutli, raising a sfierry glass, and said, "He's deaf as a post Look straigfit at Him when you speak." Nickleby scarcely gave tfie Senator a cfiance to open His moutfi. THe voice was quacking but clear and only medium loud. "I knew you'd be ready for me soon, Senator. I don't know wfiat Hagedom Has told you besides tHat I'm deaf. If He'd just keep quiet, nobody would know it I compensate so expertly. Well, I am tfie greatest communications engineer since Wiener and Shannon tHougfit of tfie Hearing glove. Matter of fact, I was working on Hagedom and Old Scotty sfiangfiaied me into tfie Caribbean Station. A bellyful of tHat damned sfierry makes you think you can do things you ougfit not even to want to do in tfie first place. You want to know How the Handed prosthetic flipper works, don't you?" Coatl nodded yes. "Oh, you can speak. Just look at me. I'm sure Hagedom told you that. You know what a hearing glove is?" "Yes, it translates sound into taps or electnc buzzes on the Unger tips." "Right. We use them now to communicate with astronauts because they don't have to fight static to get the message and because even while they're pulling levers and turning wheels, we can still be sending to the balls of their fingers. Great step forward, but simple, really." "Yes, I've worn a hearing glove. It's very distracting." "Stop nodding and smiling Senator. I can read anything you say, if you just look in my direction." Hagedom slapped the table and laughed. Both the other men looked at him, then involuntarily nodded and smiled at each other; after which' they both burst into laughter. Nickleby went on, in His rather monotonous voice, "Okay, Senator. Easy to learn the glove, easy to make it. They stole me to deal with a problem which required the synthesis of a nearly organic prosthetic muscle. That little brunette I was talking to over there was the team leader on that, and we got so entangled on the project I guess we'll never get untangled. My job was to work out the converters that take a dolphin's weaker finger motions and step them up into powerful muscular ones in the prosthetic attachments. Just muscles and gristle, thank god. No bone, you see? Because dolphins are always supported by their medium of life." "Wait a minute. Dolphin Ungers? They just have flippers." "Yeah', yeah, but the skeletal structure of the flippers is that they're grown-together fingers, or toes, if calling them toes makes you more comfortable. See, if we were going to alter the animal permanently, we could do it a lot easier. We'd slit each' finger out separate from its fellows, graft skin on the cut sides, beef up the muscle connections, and we'd have a functioning organic hand we could use to manipulate, a powerful, simple, mechanical hand." "Why not do it that way?" CtTf you had some little Handi- cap like deafness or a withered hand, you'd understand. Man, we respect the bodily integrity of other species. If Andy wants to quit the project tomorrow and swim off into the sunset, he's still a functional dolphin. He may be a crazy dolphin, but physically, he can still do all the things he could always do. That wouldn't be true if we had altered his flippers surgically. Make sense?" "All rigfit." "Well, to get back to tfie practical problem, I really didn't Have mucE to work with. Eons of evolution Have altered tfie wfiole function of tfie dolpfiin Band, you see?" "I never would Kave tfiougfit of tfiat if you Kadn't pointed it out to me." "Don't put me on, Senator. I Kave to make this speecH to all kinds of cretins Hagedorn drags in Here. And if I sound like I believe tfie project couldn't succeed without me, tfiafs rigfit. I do believe it. Anyway, I see you see there's very little individual movement of th'e bones in a dolphin's flipper. Very little musculature to support individual movement, either. Tfie whole thing is tfiere to operate as a unit, to swim; not to grasp, point, or toucli." "I see." "So my little converters Gave to translate very small movements of a dolphin's finger bones along an exponential curve to operate a very powerful arm and hand. You'd be surprised to see the grapfi of what less tfian a flipper translates to in terms of grasping and turning power." "I've shaken Bands with Eeeetz cfi. I would neither be surprised nor impressed by graphs after that. I am impressed by your work, Doctor Nickleby." "Just call me Nick. I never finished my doctorate. Couldn't get along with my alleged mentor, and fie wouldn't pass my dissertation for publication unless I rewrote it to suit his experiments instead of mine. I Eave done well, Haven't I? ; ' Coatl nodded. Nickleby was telling me the truth. Men were not falsely modest in the village where the Senator Had been born, either; though they were usually a little more aware of the comic figure self-satisfaction cuts. Roman Coatl smiled, and turned to Hagedorn again. "Now let's talk about wfiat might get you shut down -- those ugly, stomacH-turning gills. In Washington, we Have been under tfie impression tfiat this was a kind of super-Scuba, a macfiine for delivering air efficiently to the lungs of a person swimming underwater. But it turns out to be an alternative way of getting oxygen from tfie water. Marguerite spoke of growing Into fier gills. Tfie device really is organic, isn't it?" T fie Director fiuncfied forward, Bis tfiick forearms on tfie table. "It's very perceptive of you to recognize the Half-live nature of tfie gill tissue and to realize it isn't just a sophisticated mechanical filter. Do you understand what real gills are? Fish gills? True fish don't Have lungs, you know. A fisH that Has is a left over transitional form between true fish and amphibian, an evolutionary experiment that Has stayed on nature's work bench after its usefulness was ended. "But real fish need oxygen, like all life on earth, except some of the lowest, single-cell forms and some of the viruses. There's plenty of oxygen dissolved in sea water, and always Has been. Certain experiments lead us now to believe that the chemical composition of sea water was always about what it is today. "Different kinds of sea life solve the problem of extracting oxygen from sea water in different ways; but true fish do it with a biological apparatus that extracts the oxygen, still in solution, in effect, through a sort of osmotic membrane directly into the blood stream on the other side of the membrane. There it's carried the same as in our blood. Not much chemical difference between fish blood and human." Director Hagedom peered up from under his brows into Senator Coati's eyes. At this distance, Coatyl could see heavy white Hairs thick in the Director's brows and raised His estimate of the other man's age. Sun tan -- He thought complacently of his own dark skin -- does make a man look younger. The administrator spoke again. "Do you understand this is all oversimplified and underexpiained?" "Go right ahead. Director. This is a kindergarten class you are lecturing." "All right. There are lots of problems to putting men into the sea profitably; and the oxygen supply is the first and, so far, the most difficult. As long as you want your sea-man to breathe air, most of your effort has to go to supplying the air You can compress it and release it to him in such fashion that the pressure inside him is the same as the pressure outside, and in shallow water this works pretty well." "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus." "Right. You had scuba on when your flipper was nearly crushed today. You're familiar with it, so you're familiar with its shortcomings as well. Ypu can't go really deep; but as shallow as you stay, compressed air can still be deadly. If you have to come up in a hurry, the nitrogen dissolved in your blood -- nearly seventy percent of ordinary air by volume -- can cripple, craze, or kill you, depending on where it bubbles, if the pressure comes off too fast." "The Bends." iCT'Von't try to sound like an old-time, Bard-Bat diver. 'Decompression sickness' may not Be as picturesque, But it's accurate... and it suggests the treatment of cKoice." "Tfie compression chamber." "RigEt, Senator. You snatcK your unlucky or footisB diver out of tEe water. He may be blind or deaf or dying. Lug Him into the compression chamber, dog down the Batch, and pop tEe compressed air to him. TEe nitrogen goes back into blood solution, and then, by reducing tEe pressure slowly and in tEe steps which experience Eas sEown tEe human organism can tolerate, you may -- or you may not -- save your diver. It's costly, slow, and erratic. "So you use Helium instead of nitrogen to make up your air. Doesn't matter which relatively inert gas it is. Straight oxygen's too flammable. Helium doesn't dissolve and bubble the way nitrogen does. It doesn't narcotize you at depth as nitrogen does, either." The Director glared tolerantly under his eyebrows. His elbows slid farther out on the table, and he was almost leaning his head on his forearms now. "All right, you've been through all this before. The helium problem is the Helium voice. The pitch of all the sounds human voices make is raised very high by the presence of helium around the vocal cords. Some sounds just disappear, and it's easier for a person experiencing Eelium breathing for the first time to write out and get written all Eis communications tKan it is to understand and be understood." "Is the throat-speech' microphone any better?" "Yes!" The Director clapped his hands against his elbows. "Yes, it is better! At least you are gargling a complete language, with its overtones and nuances. Anyway, it makes no sense to be always an intruder in the sea, to Have to carry apparatus with you which has your life in its parts all the time, so that a hre'-en air tube or a faulty gauge c  mean death to tEe most gifted researcher. To be at the mercy of your air wlien you are in the water is too cruel a burden." He sat back, unclasped His hands from his elbows, and srr.i'icr... "So -- gills. Fish gills are not efficient enough for our purposes. They are rather passive organs, even with the pretty opening and closing in the water. Just grafting a big grouper's gills onto a man would not give you a man who was as efficient as a grouper. No, it is no accident the smartest animals in the water are those who went ashore, acquired lungs, and then returned to the sea. A lot of oxygen, more than any fish's gills can deliver, is required to fuel those big brains with all their convolutions." "So why Haven't you found it possible for men to breathe and sound and rise to breathe again, like dolphins?" "Ah-hahl like dolphins! Well, we haven't because we're not up to the surgery required. It would effectively involve reworking everything from the nasal passages to the anus. Heart, lung, blood vessels, autonomic nerve structure, the whole internal machinery of a man would have to be rebuilt." ( ( #VT an can't go back to the sea, then, like his cousins, the whales and porpoises?" The Director seemed momentarily abashed. He picked at His bottom lip as if a flake of tobacco Hung there, although He was not smoking. "No -- well, the fact of the matter is, the artificial gill is here. You've seen it in operation." "Yes, but now we're full circle to where we were," said Coatl. "Those things don't look artificial to me. I mean, they're really not made of plastic..." "Oh no." "... or of metal..." "Great Heavens, no! Well, the connections are." "... and to tell the truth, they look remarkably like being the sort of experimentation with Human beings that was condemned a generation ago." Director Hagedom sat bolt upright and stared with Horror across the table. "No, sir, I cannot permit that to stand. No one is compelled to undergo these operations. To be allowed to undergo one is an Honor. We are all volunteers, and no one has been hurt or harmed by being fitted with our gill adaptors. Do you think we are sterilizing Gypsies Here? We are simply helping people to become better equipped to deal with what is otherwise an extremely hostile environment." The Director made as if to rise in his agitation, but the Senator's Hand restrained Him. "Relax, Hagedom. I'm putting you on, man, that's all. They are ugly looking propositions... and there's no denying they are Human experimentation, right?" Hagedom looked Hard at Him. "You're crueller than you look. It's shocking to charge -- well you haven't charged -- it's shocking even to suggest that this project is some sort of Human vivisection center. It isn't!" Hagedom made as if to go on, but the Senator stood, bringing th'e evening to an end. "Think about that again, Director," He said, and strode off to a good night's rest. He knew a Half dozen people on tKe Station were tossing and fuming because of his presence with its unpredictable implications and possibilities, and that knowledge enabled him to sleep with the pleasure of a man who has created a small tropical storm and is borne peacefully in its eye. WHat His storm might bring to the surface or destroy remained to be seen. Meanwhile, as the winds rose around him, he slept. IV tT'he next day found Coatl fine ly tuned to his surroundings. The pain, exhaustion, arguing, and drinking of the night before had been wiped out by his night's sleep; but their residue remained in a feeling that one layer of his skin had been removed. The droning tradewind reached into the central core of his personality. Under the water, away from the wind, he felt as free as a fish. Hank, Maggie, and Eeeetz ch met him in the come-close pool, and the four of them swam to an area where the water-dwelling mammal was being taught to handle machinery. He had a vast Rube Goldberg of interrelated valves, levers, sliding plates, toggle switches and worm gears to operate. Hank posted a foil strip with printed directions and operating sequences a meter long on the side of the learning machine and reset many of the internal operating connections. Eeeetz ch swam to the instructions in a smooth curve and began clicking and snapping as he studied it The black box at one side repeated, over and over, such comments as, "Damn I it's counterclockwise instead of clockwise again. Oh, oh', six meters to swim in a tenth of a second? And right back again? Pfui!" Marguerite, who was looking at a large wrist watch which she wore on Her ankle, suddenly cried, V A#I right, fishmouth, go!" and pushed the timing stud. The gleaming black and gray body began to whirl about, through, and over the complicated learning toy, and to Eeeetz ch's snicks and clacks were added the cacophony of machine parts slamming and grinding. After about twenty minutes of this, Eeeetz ch suddenly gave a despairing whistle which the box translated as, "Crab cakes I I missed that inky worm gear by one turn again. Duck, white skins I" A silvery sphere at the machine's center sprouted tubes in every direction and a cloud oi octopus ink enveloped the four persons swimming about the framework. "Okay, clumsy," Ha nk shouted, as the box rendered his voice into squeaks and clutters, "the rule today is you've got to reset the whole sequence while the cloud's still in the water. Get going!" Ramon swam into a column of the machine and felt the torpedo shape of the student Hand user zip past him in the impenetrable murk. He knew Eeeetz cli was operating on his sonar and that he had better get out of the way. Gingerly touching the machine's working column, Ke kicked off from it and swam ten or twelve meters away. Here it was lighter. Looking back He could tell from the convulsions of the cloud that the student was churning about the machine reversing the settings of its parts as easily as if the filtered Caribbean sun were fully available. Tt took Eeeetz ch a shorter time to reverse the sequence than it had to go through it, and id fifteen minutes he was hanging in the water with an expectant eye on Marguerite. The current had dissipated the octopus ink, and all was as it had been, except for Hank, who was lazily suspended with his arms crossed and an. unforgiving look. "Don't start him up again yet, Maggie," Ee gargled, the box snapping out the sense in dolphin. "There's no point in us all just having a little vacation here. If Andy can't analyze what he did to abort the sequence, there's no point in his trying to repeat it. He'll abort at the same point. Now, fishmouth, what happened?" The animal snapped his teeth in a grimace of rage or chagrin. "Look out, easy bleeder. What went wrong is that your rotten machine is manufactured to a less grade of precision than what you expect to be done with it. You can't open an oyster with a sledge hammer." "Yes you can, if you know how lightly to tap it I know what you did wrong, and you know what you did wrong, so let's have St out in the oped, or we'll never get lunch today." "What's that mean?" thr Senator asked Marguerite. "Means he earns our lunch. He's got to run the sequence right twice." Eeeetz ch snorted something the machine translated as random sounds. "Ugh! A-a-a-a-gh!" At the same rime He rose to the surface above them, blew mightily and returned witK a fresh supply of oxygen. "All right Its that nicked worm gear. There's a Half-moon chip out of the twenty-fourth turn. When I feel that chip clear the surface of the seat, I know one more full turn brings the gear exactly Half way out. It's a fifty thread pin. Twenty-five turns is wh'at the instruction sheet called for, and twenty-five turns is what I gave it." "So How come your spaceship blew up? If that was a simulated moon landing, you're scattered over a thousand kilometer globe of space by now." "I don't know. I brought that gear out twenty-five turns to the micron." "Are you sure? Want to bet you didn't just bring it out one full turn past that chip?" "Well, that's twenty-five turns. Wait a minute #" He flew to the face of the machine where He had made the mistake and carefully extracted the chipped worm gear. "... twenty-four, twentyfive, twenty-six #" Eeeetz cH swam angrily to Hank. "You sneaked out Here and reversed that gear... so one turn past the nick was twenty-seven instead of twenty-five. Ak, Ak, Akt" H ank swam back a little further out of reach of those teeth. "Sure I did. I wonder if you can guess why?" "Ak Ak! Make fool of me, your only friend in the water. Dirty Human trick." "OH, Andy, stop steaming. You felt that nick come around through your lingers, didn't you? And you were using that tiny jar when it cleared the surface of the plate as a short cut, weren't you?" "So what if I was? Intelligence is laziness. Creatures that do things the long way every time are just clock works. Why do I have to count the turns?" "I could say just because of what happened. Human mechanics are intelligent, too, and that does mean lazy. One pulls that threaded post out to inspect it and has to lay it down for a minute. If he picks it up by the other end, he's going to insert it with the thread reversed. It's identical to his senses, so why shouldn't He?" "Good point. I forget human beings can hardly see or feel." "The teal point, though', is that by relying on the ieel through your hands you're choosing the wrong sensory feedback as a guide. Those artificial Hands are always going to be prosthetic aids, for you. To rely on their sensing elements is grossly wrong for a dolphin. We don't want a less efficient man, which is what you'll make of yourself by relying on our devices. We want an improved dolphin. Otherwise, we could not, in good conscience, let you sell the others of your people on accepting the Eelping-Hand program and the surgery that makes it possible." "I don't see tEat" "Yes you do. You're just so smart you don't want to admit it. We want your senses and your brain to dominate the Handed dolphin project The Hands are just tools, organic tools yes, but just machines to extend your muscular control over your environment "Now quit kidding around. You don't Have to count those threads one two three four, and you wouldn't, if you weren't trying to act like a man. You can scan it with your echolocator in less time and with greater accuracy. Stop fooling with me, baby, or I'll swim out Here some night and wire that thing up so a wrong move shocks you." E eeetz cH grunted; but he swam back in position to begin the sequence again. "Senator, you are a witness to Human cruelty on a well meaning animal. Only men enjoy cruelty." Coatl gargled. "Right. And only men learn anything more than to feed, frolic, and fornicate. Why don't you quit and just stay a fish?" Eeeetz ch circled tightly away from the machine and around Coatl. His dark eye sparkled with mischief. "Okay, vivisectionist. I thought you were different, a Senator, some kind of super human. You're just another knife and test-tube man. Okay. Just remember, when some three meter shark chases you, don't call Eeeetz ch." Cheerfully, He swam back to Start on his three dimensional maze and plunged into activity on Marguerite's signal. This time He was remarkably silent as He flashed up and down inside the weird framework. In less than an Hour, He Had completed the meter long instruction sheet, and exuberantly flung himself up through the surface of the sea where he plopped and splashed and cut circles for five minutes before He zoomed down with a fresH supply of air. The dolphin swam to Hank. "Let's go, spear man. Eat early today, when I run this second sequence. You want to reset it, or shall I?" Hank grinned. "I do it exactly Halfway. You finish it, huh?" "Wheeeeeee-ewl You really want to impress this Senator. Okay!" He flipped about the teaching device, turning knobs and snapping switches. In a few minutes, He whistled, "Okay, Maggie. Ready wKen you are." Just at that moment, Hank swam leisurely by the machine and ripped out the middle third of the instructions. Eeeetz ch's whistles and clacks rilled the sea, and the mechanical voice of the translator repeated many times, "What in the crab-eating hell is this? I'm supposed to be told when you want me to memorize the sequence. No games No games No games damnit!" Hank shrugged. "Life has no rules. Put Him to work, Maggie." V nphis time the porpoise worked more purposefully. As he approached the missing portion of the instructions, his motions became as deliberate as those of a chess player, lapping pieces on th'e board in a planned combination. A high, thin whistle began to escape from him. As Ramon Heard it from Eeeetz ch, the sound was an undifferentiated whine like a jeweler's saw, but the translator modulated it into an intricate music close to the skirling of bagpipes. Abruptly, the sound died and Eeeetz ch swam to Hank with a hang-dog air. "I've lost it. Give me a little help." Hank pointed to what was left cf the sequence sheet. "Go read it, you lazy devil, you're past the missing instructions already." Eeeetz ch gave a mighty "Clack #" of chagrin and glanced at the remainder of the sheet. Two minutes later, a roiling cloud of octopus ink enveloped them all. "Crab cakes!" the swimming mammal cried. "Crab the crab crab crab cakes!" Coatl could Hear the choking sounds from Hank and Maggie that were laughter in the throat language. As the water cleared, he could see Marguerite twined about Eeeetz ch's back, while Hank Hung on to one arm as they laughed. "God!" cried Hank. "You're as funny as a man sometimes." Marguerite held on as the porpoise thrashed distractedly. "Oh, oh!" she laughed. "Just when I think I'm looking at man's replacement, you blow it, baby. Wow!" At length, the wild, whirling mass of legs and flukes came to rest and separated. "Early lunch? asked Hank.' "Not likely." "I can go catch myself something to eat. This is my world. I'm self sufficient." "Sure. Self sufficient but not very smart. You can reset the whole sequence and take it from, the top." This time the dolphin maintained his air control, almost of slow motion, through the whole procedure. He was deliberately not looking at even the portion of the instructions still posted. Despite his air of slow care, Coatl was able to see, when Marguerite swam to Him and' cocked her ankle to show him the stop watch, that Eeeetz ch was actually several minutes ahead of the time He Had made when he first ran the set correctly. Ramon was developing a distinct anticipation of lunch', when Eeeetz ch suddenly cursed and again the inky cloud exploded around them. "Sorry," said the armed dolphin. "I'm a little tired. And I was almost through." Hank stretched the dolphin's artificial extremities, testing them for tone. He let them snap back, "Yes, you're tired; but not too much to finish. This is the kind of world men live in all the time, Andy. Jobs have to be finished. Draw on your reserves a little. You're all getting hungry, too." The dolphin quietly went about resetting the teaching machine. There was no badinage this time, but when Marguerite said, "Qo," she added in an intense tone, "You can do it!" and Hank called, "Watch that last step I" C oatl became apprehensive. It was as if a relative, a younger brother or a cousin were perfor ming some difficult task. Ramon's muscles ached, trying to help the porpoise with body English. He began to worry about what another failure would do to the volatile psyche of the student. In one way, the careful manner in which' the black torpedo shot in and out of the machine could be regarded as bored competence. In another way, it looked very like an adolescent strung up to the point where failure would cripple him. Coat realized he was holding each' breath, letting it escape in the perceptible jerks and pauses known as "ratchet breath" -- a telltale sign of anxiety since its recognition two generations before. He made him self breathe easy, made himself hang quiet in the water, made himself not be hungry, and waited. Suddenly, Eeeetz ch let out a wild whistle of achievement. "LuncKI" the translator repeated. "LunchluncblunchluncKlunch!" From a receptacle deep in the machine a school of silvery mullet swam in all directions, as the porpoise and his teachers lunged after them, snapping and grasping. Startled, Coatl was caught at full rest. He snared one medium mullet, and that was all. He kicked lazily to the surface, where he could take off his brea thing mask, unshipped his knife, and gutted the mullet. By the time he had filleted it, dipped the slices in sea water, and chewed them leisurely down, the trailing entrails below Him had attracted several small fish. He was agile enough to take two of these and was completing his lunch when Hank swam up holding a forty centimeter mullet by the tail. "No thanks, I've eaten" Coatl said, as He sank back into the water. They turned the mullet loose, circled to pick up Marguerite and Eeeetz ch, and gamboled through the water back to the come-close pool. When they were arrived, Coatl was the only one to leave the watch. As h'e walked up the steps, he felt an irrational stab of jealousy. When he turned to. make his good-byes, he was shocked to realize that Hank and Marguerite Had begun to look natural to him. The farewell was awkward, and Coatl knew why. He was not really ready to go. Eeetz cH stood Half out of the water, as on the first day. THe dolphin spoke His thin, accented English'. "Remember me, Ramon! I remember you. Come back to us." Before Coatl could speak the great body flashed out of the water and splashed mightily. When the Senator Had wiped the water from his eyes. Eeeetz ch Had disappeared into the sea. T'hree days later, the Senator was eating bean soup with three of His fellow committee members. He blew a little through His nose, which now seemed always a Httle dry, and thought, How am I going to get the reality across to these Senators? They're all too old to get in the water; but at least they're on committees that are future oriented, and that means reality oriented. I don't want to lie and pretend that the Caribbean Station can contribute to military research. It represents research into life, so much more important and so much Harder to get money for. You just Have to try, Ramon, He repeated to himself as his mother had said when he went away to school, you just have to try. Nobody will hold it against you if you don't succeed. He blew a little more through his nose to wet the inside of it, and started to speak. Behind his eyeballs, he remembered the blinding stab of the Caribbean sun. His chest itched, and he scratched it gently. Senator Ramon Coatl knew wHat his chest itched for: he wanted one of those brass adaptor plates set in it, so He could wear gills. T fie author wfio appears in Galaxy and If as "H. H. Hollis" Has another name in real life, but He doesn't let us use it He's an attorney in a large Southwest city, and the nature of his specialty in the law is such that his practice might be affected if his real name were used. Eeeetz Ch is the first of a series exploring the mandolphin interface. We think it's going to be a good one... Incidentally, we discourage the use of pen-names as much as we can. There was a time in science fiction, not too long ago, when many writers played a sort of game with pen-names for every sort of story; often the editors encouraged them in it, or even required it, when they felt that one writer was appearing too often. We've never had that feeling -- can't get too much of a good thing, is how we feel -- and we Have a general opinion that the reader is entitled to know which writer he is reading. (Time was when some magazines had "house names" and writers might sell them a story and find it credited to some made-up pseudonym. Sometimes that was annoying to the writer. Once in a while it turned out funny -- as when Ray Bradbury once had a story under a house name. The readers' letters almost unanimously condemned it and begged the editor to quit printing stories by people like the house name and get more of Bradbury.) There are, of course, a few writers who are only known by their pen-names. The late Cordwainer Smith, for instance, would have been unrecognizable to sf readers by his real name of Paul Linebarger -- although Dr. Lincbarger was a world leader in his own field of political science, being among other tilings a professor at Jofins Hopkins, a consultant to the State Department and a godson of Sun Yat-sen. In Linebarger's case it was important to him to keep Kis identity confidential; in the case of two or three other writers there are similar persuasive reasons for a penname... but generally speaking we try to avoid them. Gordon R. Dickson is no penname; lie's a big and cheerful Minnesotan who has been writing science fiction for some twenty years now, which is about half his life. A long-time Galaxy regular, Dickson has put in most of his recent time on books; we're glad to see Him back with Building on the Line. Senior lady science-fiction writer of the present era may well be Miriam Allen de Ford, a charming San Franciscan who keeps two careers going. The other field of writing she graces is crime detection; she turns from her rethe past to the exploration of some grisly aspect of the future. Brian W. Aldiss Has a shelf full of awards for science-fiction writing, beginning with what was called either The Hothouse World or The Long Afternoon of Earth, depending on whether you think of it as a series of novelettes or a book. He is literary editor for the Oxford Mail in England, where He lives in a small village near the university town. Although the bulk of His writing has been science fiction, He is also the author of a travel guide to Jugoslavia and a number of other works. Aldiss is, of course, one of the leading practitioners of what is sometimes called "The New Wave" in science fiction; almost at the other end of the spectrum is Mack Reynolds, one of the few science-fiction writers whose interest in the social and economic problems of the future Has anticipated the thought of actual economists. Reynolds is an American who Has spent little enough time in the U.S.A. in the past couple of decades; his travels Have taken him to almost all the countries of Europe, to the Near East, to Ceylon and other Asian countries and just about everywhere else this side of the moon. He is at present living in Mexico. Robert Silverb'erg, who is a frequent contributor to these pages, is a New Yorker and one of the most prolific writers of modern times. His books Have included such disparate subjects as a biography of the Pharaoh IkHnaton, art archeological study of the mound-builders of the midwest, a collection of essays on picaresque figures called Scientists and Scoundrels and a number of juveniles. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No Cf-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh #our Xamr Ijrrr No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No GX-# by Lynd Wart! The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # lor #. #, #, #, t# with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add slate sales tax. it ny. The derig ns shown abos e arc the only ones we otler! Dept. G P. O. Box # Hollywood, California Send to: S##R # nSX able from a TV show! 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From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street New York, N.Y. # Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy riqhl owny. I enclos my check or money order For:  # issues for # "' T # issues for # Name... Addre ss A     City  State Zip Code... U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage. Please check whether Q new or  renewal. The Big Time fritz Leiber The Caves of Steel Isaac Asimov Day After Doomsday Poul Anderson The Demolished Alan Alfred Bester Do J Wake or Dream? Frank Herbert The Dragon Masters Jack Vance The Fireman (Farenhcit #) Ray Bradbury Gravy Planet ( The Space Merchant s Pali I  Kornbluth Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) Clifford D. Simak Home from the Shore Gordon R. Dickson Hof Planet Hal Clement King of the City Keith Laumer Mindswap Robert Sheckley Med Ship Man Murray Leinster The Men in the Walls The Old Die Rich H. L. Gold The Puppet Masters Robert A. Heinlein Surface Tension James Blish The Visitor of the Zoo Damon Knight Wind betweeh the Worlds Lester del Rey oaiaxy Galaxy Is published In French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition # published In Braille and Living Tape. December, # # Vol. #, No. # by Pool Anderson by Raymond F. Jones by John Wyndham  by Mack Reynolds Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director by Frilz Leiber  i by Stephen Goldin  , by Joseph Green by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrytt monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices; #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies! # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N.Y. Title Beg. U. S. Pat Off. A s semi-professional crystalball gazers, we science-fiction types share a community of interest with budget-makers, city planners, airline traffic managers and all sorts of other people whose principal occupation is to make statements today about what is likely to happen tomorrow. Everything considered, it's our opinion that the wide-ranging view of the average Galaxy writer is less likely to be appallingly wrong than even the best-based projection of the specialist, making predictions about his own field. We think there is a reason for this, and we think the reason is worth a little consideration. Take one of the great new inventions at random -- say, the hologram. There's no doubt that the hologram is a fascinating piece of technology. Three-dimensional virtual images, an eerie ability to look behind the objects in the forefront of what you find yourself thinking of as a photograph -- no question about it, it's interesting, it's unprecedented, and sooner or later it's going to prove mighty useful. But -- useful at what, exactly? There's really no way to telL One thing we do know: Any present study about the future of the hologram, considering nothing but the hologram, is certain to be simplistic, incomplete -- and just plain wrong. Tfie reason we say this is simple. Tfie dialectic of society does not allow any development to occur in a vacuum. Tfie things tfiat transform tfie world are not single gadgets; tfiey are gestalts. For instance, we talk about "tfie automobile revolution", and certainly tfie pfienomenon we mean wfien we say tfiat Has radically altered all our lives. But what is "tfie automobile revolution"? It isn't one invention; it's more like a dozen. At least. It is tfie product of Ford's assembly line, plus Goodyear's rubber, plus Otto's engine, plus Macadam's Hardtop roads -- plus sucfi otfier inventions as tfie crucial one of installment buying. Take away any one of tfiese tilings, and you Have no "automobile revolution". You fiave something quite different, and far less significant. Nobody invented tfie automobile. (Nobody inventtelevision or tfie computer, either.) Wliat Happened in tfie case of tfie automobile is tfiat a lot of different people came up with a lot of different innovations, large and small, technological and social -- and tfie result in # is Highway deaths, a mobile population, new kinds of status symbols and air pollution. So to know wliat Holograms will signify # years from now, you must be able to make some sort of guess at any number of simultaneously occurring changes. F or example -- care to predict tfie future of rocket transport? Teclinologically, tfiat joH is easy. Tfie materials exist rigfit at Hand. A Douglas scientist named drawing boards wliat fie calls a Hyperion, a rocket wfiicfi could carry a thousand people anywfiere in tfie world in # minutes, independent of traffic patterns and even of landing fields. But, although tfie technology is pretty straightforward, tfie question of whether sucfi transports will ever fly depends on some ratfier remote-seeming other contingencies, including tfie prospects of putting domes over our cities and tfie likelihood of a general disarmament treaty. Why tfiese two? Simple. A: THe noise level of rocket transports is even more Horrendous than that tolerable. It is almost certainly out of tfie question for them to take off or land anywfiere near a city (and there's not much point in landing them anywfiere else), unless tfie people in tfie city can be insulated from tfie "sound pollution" -- and about tfie only immediately visible practicable way of doing that is through putting Buckminster Fuller's domes over the cities. And B: The big roadblock for rocket liners, as for a way to pay for the development costs. Basically these are now met out of (defense funds, one way or another; but given disarmament, the defense money dries up... and either we find a new way of funding RD or we don't have rocket liners. 'T'lie other thing wrong with straight-line predictions about the future of technological innovations is that all too often they miss the point of what the innovation is really going to be good for. Innovations aren't used in a .vacuum, either. Take computers. There is not a science-based shop in the country where you can't get an argument on The Future of the Computer, or Whether Machines Can Really Think. Strikes us that this is a pitifully trivial argument. It's like looking at a newborn child, and wondering about the future of his left arm. What is important about the future of a child is not what will happen to any of his members, but what will happen to the whole organism; and what is important about the future of computers is what will happen to servo-systems, man-machine symbioses and still-un guessed social constructs in which computers play a part. A man using a computer can function as though he has (which, functionally speaking, is the same as has) an I.Q. anywhere from # to # points higher than bis unaided score. That is what is important about computers -- not what the machine can do, but what the man-machine symbiosis can do. The implications go far beyond the present horizons of expediting scientific research or selling airline tickets; they include the excellent possibility that all of us can pick up those functional extra I.Q. points and use them in our daily lives. And there is a revolution that makes the automobile look pretty trivial. If nothing else, think of the retarded # of the human race; and think of them equipped with, say, wristwatchsized remote-access computer consoles. Now they can navigate city streets by themselves; now they can hold jobs; now they can rejoin the human race. Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. We agree. And so should good science.  One Station of the Way -- and the Story had another end ! T'he paired moons Daurya and Sonista were both still higH in the night, although they had begun their descent toward the flat western horizon. The stars that showed in the heavens were few and dim, even in the east Suddenly a new one appeared (here -- bright, white and dazzling as a cut sunstone. The three hominids, heavily robed and cowled against the desert, which thirsted for their moisture, swiftly, dismounted from the high-backed chair-saddles of their cameloids, knelt in the sand, which was cold above, but still hot below, and did the new star reverence, rhythmically swaying forward their planted spears in time with the slow bobbing of their heads. The star in the east grew brighter still and began to descend. One hominid said, "It is a sign from God. Blessed Wife and Husband are where we thought them." Another agreed, "They are there, our Chosen Ones, under the falling star. It is indeed a sign. Those who seek, find -- if they be unwearying of heart mind and senses." Even as they spoke, the star, grown piercingly bright, winked out. It was difficult to tell whether it Had been extinguished, or had dropped behind a dune. The latter seemed likely, since there was a pale semicircular glow where the star Had been. But then the glow vanisfied too. Springing to His feet, the tfiird hominid said, "Let us He after them before the fix fades from our minds." "Indeed yes," tfie first seconded as He rose. "We must remember that we have for tfiem ... our gifts." "Let us fiaste, cousin," tfie second urged, rising too. Faintly revealed fiy tfie ligfit of Sonista and Daurya, tfie three hominids were stranger front side than back. Smiling together as they conferred, they eacfi showed three eyes, one where a nose would be on a Terran face, while their smiling mouths were long, going almost from trumpet ear to trumpet ear. They remounted and went down the slope of tfie dune at a lope which made tfie sand hiss very faintly under their cameloids' hooves. On tfie three retinas of each' Hominid and conjoined in eacfi of their brains, the after-image of tfie star still burned, a tiny ball blacker than tfie night. TT'ive dunes ahead, Wife stared ' afright yet paralyzed at the fantastic sight -- fantastic even on that most fantastic world, Finiswar, where except among the most evolved and intelligent types, monsters were the rule and true-breeds the exception. Wife could Hear Husband's heart thud, although he stood at a short distance from Her. Holding Her either hand, peeping around Her robes, were small replicas of Husband and Herself. Sfie could feel their Hearts beating, not a-fear, but quietly as wfien they nursed or slept All four b'eings were visaged and robed like the three fiominids riding the cameloids. Wife thought in a tiny active comer of her frozen mind: The little ones do not fear strangeness, at least so long as I Hold their Hands. TKey open themselves to all tfie world. Could that be good? TKey do not armor themselves against it, as a woman armors Herself against all stray and errant seeds and against all lovers save one, after she cuts Her middle teeth and I they are grown razor sharp. But could opening oneself ever be good, except in childhood, when one lives fantasies parentprotected? Love is a tunnel sealed at both ends, the wise say, never the forest and sea and sky. What Wife stared at a-quake, though now with growing wonder, were two gigantic serpents, each as thick as Husband but three times as tall in their forward thirds alone that swayed upright like a white and a black tree in the wind. The foremost was pallid as Daurya. The one that lurked behind with his swollen Head swaying into view, now to the right of his pale companion, now to the left, was dark as moonless night. Or perhaps they were more for from each's ventral side, now facing Wife, grew ranks and ranks of stubby-fingered feet, many of the fingers nervously a-writhe. These fingered feet grew thickest under the great serpent heads. This, although Wife could not know it, was so that the two serpents could crawl effectively on a max-grav planet. Here on Finiswar, which was as small as Terra, the head-feet were of little need. Behind them, blurred to Wife's three eyes, because their focus was ever on the serpents, stood the slender and strangely finned spoonmetal spire from which two extra-Finiswarians had emerged, and which Had burned like an unended candle, its flame blindingly white, as it had descended. Now the pallid serpent, its trunk reared up scarce two steps away from Wife, lowered its flaf head to inspect her point by point over her cowled head and robed body. He studied her from the black holes in his two great eyes that were like two mollustjewels, white as his scales but even more fluorescently glittering. He traced her form. From time to time he lightly touched her with his ghost-white, narrow, trifid tongue. She could hear Husband's heart thunder, though he stood still as stone. The children, however, were merely curious. She knew without looking down that her daughter was stretching a thin arm toward the serpent. While her own heart was thudding, but she no longer knew if it were thudding with' fear, even when the shivery, shocking tongue touched her lips. She did not know that she was filled with a wild, almost unbearable excitement. It made Her wonder. It made her question everything she knew.  S he fought the answers Her feelings gave. Not Tins intimate gentle, imperious searching never, never, never, could be love, she told herself. Love was a needle in the dark, the one wrong ones. Love was something the woman controlled and tested at every instant, her senses increasingly alert from periphery as ready to deal death as to welcome life. Love had nothing to do with this paralyzed submission. Love was not Daurya and Sonista ceaselessly staring at each' other as they circled each' other for all eternity. Rather, it was the needle-pointed spear which one permitted to strike in the dark. Moreover, love had to do only with' h'ominids. Or rather it had to do with one chosen Hominid only, not with a gigantic serpent weirder than a magnified jungle flower, a jewel-crusted great seasnake, a rainbow bird whose wings spanned trees. And yet, and yet... But, if by some impossibility it should be love, what was the meaning of the pallid lord's dark brother? -- whose ebon head and jet eyes followed closely every movement of the pallid lord's flat face, now dipping in from one side, now from the other, watching every touching though not quite ever close enough to touch with his own black tongue, which was slender, trifid and blurringly a-tremble. Love was for two, not three. Was he the pallid lord's true brother, to be accepted with honor? Or was He to be hated as the pallid lord was to be loved? Or was he in truth only a shadow? More substantial than other shadows, a shadow with' depth' as well as breadth and height, but still only a shade, an unvarying adjunct of the pallid lord? And yet, and yet... what else but love could be the excitement turned glory that now filled her, filled her almost to fainting as the serpent's great Head paused, so that she felt the tongue's triple trembling through her robe, before the great Head lifted back and away. The First Mate, for such was. the office of the black serpent, murmur-hissed softly, "you spent some appreciative time there, you old lech'erl Your spermapositor Had its kicks. I believe you do your whole work solely for your enjoyment of these moments." "Silence, filth," the Captain replied. "The work must always be done softly, gently and with greatest care, since its object is a mustardseed that eventually will fill all earth and sky." "I've guessed it. You're growing sentimental," the First Mate jeered. "Mustardseed! Why, you must be remembering that world -- how many implantings wag it back? -- called Terra or Gaea or something like that. One of your more notable failures." "One of my notable successes," the Captain contradicted. "I don't see how. As I recall, his people killed him most painfully. And we Had later reports of even more disastrous consequences." tt'C'xactly! -- they killed Him. "' And by that death he emotionally and mentally fecundated his whole world. You still don't understand my methods. Observation has only made your blind spots blacker. My son died, but his ideas -- the idea of love -- lived on." "In utterly distorted forms," the First Mate pronounced, "eventually turning Half that race into utter preys, into victims even more cringing than before your 'great work,' the other half into still more merciless hunters. A schizophrenic split in the collective unconscious. At last report, the folk of that planet were being ruled by fear and greed, while the great nations were preparing to destroy each other with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons." "True enough. Yet they'd only prepared, not done it," the Captain countered. "For love to win, great risks must be boldly taken. But without love there's no hope at all -- only the unending chase of hunters and preys. Dangerous? Of course love isl Always I start from a point near death, like this desert here, and work toward life. Then -- " "OH, yes, this desertl" the First Mate interrupted sardonically. "That other planet had a desert too. And it had heavily robed featherless bipeds, and cameloid beasts, and a moon. Finiswar here Has reminded you of it. "Besides that, you Save a thing about deserts. They appeal to your asceticism, They fit with your ever more ascetic matings and also to your growing flirtatiousness with death, an aspect of your feelings for which you have a vast blind spot Incidentally, I believe this desert is different Most of my computer's probes Haven't reported back yet but I already have an intuition. An intuition that is a warning to you: don't trust the analogy between Terra and Finiswar too far. In fact, don't trust it at all." "You and your computer and its probes I Forever seeking to dissect the universe to the last particle. Forever seeking to disprove empathy and similar ity and oneness. You'll never find love that way." "True, I won't -- because it's not there lThere are only vanity and desire. Besides, you have your computer and its probes too, though you pretend they're only a technological trifle. Despite which, they always manage to echo your profound judgments."  ' glory distantly shored with fear, hearing as if they were wind on sand the hissings and murmurings of Captain and First Mate, now suddenly felt the tentative tiny touch of an alien seed on her poignantly sensitive razor-sharp teeth. At first she was only gently startled. The desert was the (place of no-seed. There were some seeds everywhere, like spores of plague. Nevertheless, the scarcity of alien seed was wKy she and Husband had come here. Then all at once she realized it must be the seed of the great white snake. It Had the same constant vibrancy in its movements, the same gentle imperiousness. She felt it cross and recross her bite, questingly. Then she parted Her teeth a little, and it slowly crawled in. For a long moment she could have sliced it in two, and her every instinct, almost, was to do so, although her median teeth were chiefly for decapitating (seed-depositing organs. But it was a larger seed, bigger than one of her eggs, and she could readily have destroyed it so. Yet she did not, for it carried the same glory with it as had the serpent's tongue. The tongue had been glory diffused. This was glory concentrated into a needle. Now the alien seed was in the poison passage. But all the poison pores in it remained closed. So did the digestive pores. (Some lazy single females lived on seeds and their depositing organs alone, using their facial mouths only to breathe and drink. A female could do that on seed-thick-Finiswar -- that is, anywhere except the mountains and deserts.) And now the alien seed, vibrant, insistent, had reached the wall of doors. Wife could feel every movement of its progress, every tiniest touching. It Had passed within a membrane's thickness of poisons that could destroy any and all life. The dozen doors that led looping back to the chambers beneath the poison pores remained tight shut. The one true door opened. Another deadly but unharming passage having been traversed, the doubly alien seed was in Wife's centralmost and most sensitive volume, asceptic save for Her waiting egg. And her egg which was only partly under her mind's control, did not employ any of the weapons of evasion, defense and counterattack at its disposal, but received the alien seed, which melted the egg's outer skin with the sperm. Husband, his Heart still racing, whispered, "Why are you smiling?" "I smile because we are in a place of no-seed, except yours," she whispered back. "I smile because Daurya and Sonista curtsey around each other charmingly as they set. But chiefly I smile because the serpents spared us, and their star did not bum tis down, though we felt its great heat." "For those last you should feel relief," he told her coldly. "I asked -- Why are you smiling?" She did not answer. She knew that he knew and could not be fooled. It was as certain as the tight, hot clasp of her daughterduplicate's little hand on hers, as the way Husband-duplicate's hand chilled and almost fell away from her looping fingers. Even the children knew. Yes, Husband knew. And he would first punish, then divorce, send her off alone into sterilest and hottest no-seed, try even to take from her daughter-duplicate. But even that would be a glory, a glory at least in the end. She would bear a daughter who would have the serpent's love, a daughter who would change all Finiswar, a daughter who would bring love at last to the whole world of hating and exbe a great glory. nphe Captain was saying, "It has taken, you can tell. Her smile is like the other's." "You are sentimentalizing #" the black First Mate rejoined. "Night, moon or moons, desert, a has not these? I tell you plainly, if you keep looking for similarities with Terra, you are in few some nasty shocks -- yea, and deadly danger too." "Not so," the Captain contradicted calmly. "Also, the similarities continue, for here -- behold! -- come the Three Kings." Slithering down the dime so silently neither Husband nor Wife heard them, came the three robed and cowled hominids. Their richly caparisoned cameloids had been left beyond the top. Behind Husband, the first bomi nid raised his arm, as if in salutation, then drew it back. From a small gleaming instrument held in a fingered foot just below the head of the First Mate, who now reared up as steady as an ebony temple column, a brilliant scarlet needle-beam took that hominid in shoulder, chest and throat. And as the second hominid raised his arm, it took him too. shooting sideways from a similar instrument the Captain had produced, neatly took off that fingered foot of the First Mate which had held the scarlet-spitting weapon. The last hominid raised his arm and hurled. The Captain swayed sideways fast enough to save his life, but not -- entirely -- his skin. The whirring spear transfixed a fold of it, barely penetrating below the scaled epidermis, and dangled from the Captain's neck. With . another instrument as quickly produced, the First Mate shot down the last of the intruders. Then He gave the whistling hiss that was His laugh. The Captain's nearest fingered feet explored the lodgement of the spear and finding it shallow, tore it loose and cast if away on the sand. His fingered feet moved swiftly enough in doing this, but all the rest of Him appeared to be shocked numb. Wife and Husband had dropped to their knees, while daughterand son-duplicates were hidden in Wife's robe. The First Mate turned off his Hateful laugh at last and murmur-Kissed as Hatefully, "Yes, there is in my mind no doubt but that the Three Wise Men came to Kill Husband and rape Wife. And I fancy that on Finiswar rape is a 'most curious and prolonged business. You will admit now, will you not, my Captain, that at least in one particular your analogy between Terra and Finiswar lacked rigor?" The Captain still did not move. Then a great shiver traveled down His scales. The First Mate laughed again, briefly and sardonically. "Well, your great work is finished, is it not? I mean, on Finiswar, at least. My probes Have returned to my computer. So yours Have to yours I presume. In any case, I suggest we depart at once, before we meet any shepherds, perchance." Now at last the Captain nodded. Once. Dumbly. While Husband and Wife continued to kneel and stare, the two great serpents lowered their proud trunks and swiftly crawled on their bellies back to their ship. L ater, in the control room of Inseminator, they argued the whole matter. Their great looped forms looked at Home in the silvery room, their fingered feet fitting themselves to the buttons and control holes of the multiple consoles as occasion required. The argument began with desultory comment, followed by a "report" by the First Mate, delivered coolly but with acid cynicism. The Captain said, "I still do not see why they should Have tried to spear me. It was you who was shooting at them." The First Mate explained, "At first they were simply trying to spear Husband. Thereafter, being attacked, they naturally tried to kill their attacker. You, being white, stood out in the dark. I didn't...There are advantages in being black. We were close togetKer, and the last Hominid aimed at the one of us Ke could see. A matter of purely physical black and wHite, you understand. I doubt they sensed your hypothetical spiritual light at all -- or my spiritual negation of liglit, for tHat matter." "I was going to ask your pardon for sbooting off your foot," tKe Captain said. "But since you Eave made it an occasion for one of your materialistic diatribes -- " "NevertEeless, I freely grant you my forgiveness, for wfiat it's wortli." "Very well. Now let me Have your computer's evaluation of Finiswar." TEe First Mate nodded his flat Head. Settling fiis dark coils more comfortably around their metal "tree," Be began: "Interpreting the materials gatHered and tHe observations made by its probes, my computer Has determined that the chief mode of reproduction on Finiswar is partHogenesis. THe boychild being identical with Husband and tfie girl-cfiild witfi Wife sEould Have been enough to tell you that and was enough to tell me." Tfie First Mate chuckled, His trifid tongue a blur of black vibration, and continued, "There is good reason, my computer tells me, for partfiogenesis on Finigwar and for the unusual armoring and arming of female genitalia there. For Finiswar has a biology that is genetically wide open. Interspecial breeding of any sort, no matter How wide the gap between mating organisms, is possible and fertile. There are literally no lethal genes on Finiswar, and no offspring, no matter how monstrous, which cannot live at least a little while. "Yet sexual breeding within species is possible there, provided the coupling beasts take sufficient precaution. There again the fortress-like female genitals are essential, to kill off all false sperm. While an intelligent species, such as the hominids, seeks out for breeding purposes as arid and sterile an area as possible, such as the desert we found them in. Else, despite all precautions, a female might be impregnated by a flower or a fish or a microbe or a glitter-winged insect ,... or a serpent, a wise old serpent. "Yes," the First Mate continued after another of his chuckles, "Finiswar is in a small way rather like our planet -- or should I call it your planet? -- since you are the only one paranoid enough to think it a great work to spread your seed across the universe. Husband's gon and Wife's daughter were both analogous to your seed parthenogenetically grown to full creature. However, they of Finlswar are more modest. They do not encode their seed with great ideas -- love and such -- and force them on all the infinitely varied breeds of being the stars boast, think thereby to bring 'peace' -- your peace! to all." tt Qilence!" the Captain said at  last with a writhe of disgust. "Despite all your mocking, my computer says there is a point seven nine probability that Wife will bear a child gloriously -- " "My computer says point eight three on that," the First Mate broke in titteringly. "But you're wrong about the gloriously part. Wife will receive no adulation and reverent care. Instead she will be tortured by Husband, her parthenogenetic daughter taken from her and killed, and she driven out from her family and tribe to suffer. Oh, she will -- " "Trifles!" the Captain hissed majestically. "Despite all, she will produce a son who will -- " "A daughter," the First Mate contradicted. "By a point nin e eight probability." "Yes, a daughter, you're right there," the Captain admitted irritably. "My computer echoes yours. But what matter? She won't be the first female savior, as you well know. The only point of importance is that Wife will give birth to a being who will preach the gospel of love all across Finiswar, so eloquently that none will be able to resist! Hate and murderousness will vanish. Greed and envy will wither away. Love alone -- " "And what will that mean... on Finiswar?" the First Mate interrupted incisively, his great head halting in the natural swaying it maintained in free fall. "I will tell you. It will mean that the females of Finiswar, at least the hominid females, will open themselves to all seeds. There will be a great birthing of fantastical monsters. Exotic flowers with three-eyed heads set amidst their petals. Hominids crested and finned like fish, but not likely showing gills. Rainbow birds with wide mouths instead of beaks and arms instead of wings. Beings even more fantastical -- insects that glitter and speak, animalcula that peer with pleading treble eye through the microscope from the viewing plate. Spiders that -- " "Enough!" the Captain commanded. "My computer tells me that the chances for a stabilized, still selectively breeding race of loving hominids on Finiswar are... well point one seven," he added defiantly. The First Mate shrugged all along His body's length. "On that, my computer says point oh oh three." "Your computer is biased!" "Not as much as yours, I fancy. Remember, you Have a great work, I am only the observer. No, the overwhelming chances are for one jeweled and gemmed generation on Finiswar, like an uncontrollable growth of crystals of every angularity and Hue, like a beautiful cancer -- freaks to please a mad emperor! -- and then... the end. At least for the Hominids." "What matter?" the Captain demanded stubbornly. "It will be an end with love. That is enough." "OH, you Have at last solved the problem of Death?" the First Mate asked innocently. Then, after a moment, with His Hissing laugh, "No, you have not as I can see. On Finiswar at least, your Highly touted love will end in Death, just as it promises to do on longer-suffering Terra. Myself, I still admire most the beings who rise up and do battle against Death. And even the creatures that flee Death, the ones who are the eternal prey -- those I admire more too, though not as greatly. The layer is always more admirable than the slain, for he survives." "That endless circling, bloody chase of the hunters and the prey? You can admire that?" "Why not? If s all there is to admire. Besides, it forces both basic types of being to develop velocity, first to swim through water, run on land and fly through air. Finally, to speed through sub-space, even as we do. And to achieve that last requires the development of high ination, qualities which nicely embellish both the best of huntera and the best of prey. I always admire good decor." "I detest you in this mood," the Captain said flatly. "You have been the companion of all my wanderings, and still you will not admit the primacy of Love. You cannot even bring yourself to think of what might happen if the prey fled so swiftly that, like a guilty conscience, they caught up with the Hunters along the great circles of the cosmos." "Metaphysics!" was the First Mate's only comment, delivered with great contempt. "You scorn me and toy works," the Captain said. "Yet you devote your entire existence to observing me and them. If they are valueless, why?" F or the first time, the First Mate was at a loss for an answer. Finally he hissed, "Perhaps it amuses me to watch you do your work of destruction, calling it Love -- a love which only weakens the Hunter's lust to pursue and the prey's panic to escape. Using Love, you'd leecti out of the universe its finest fighting stocks, its cleverest evaders. Nevertheless," he continued flatly, "has not Finiswar at last taught you that your great work is useless, tending always toward Death rather than Life? All your savior-children -- every last one of them -- are mules unable even to reproduce themselves. They are spokesmen for Death! I suggest you end it all, this instant. Negate the Inseminator's fix on the next planet, and set a course for home." "Never!" said the Captain. "Wherever it leads -- into whatever seeming horrors -- Love is primal!" "Oh, that is sweet. That is exquisite," the first Mate hissed, His voice dripping venom. "As I said, my chief aim is my own amusement And truly the finest pleasure lies in spying on you, who are the greatest Hunter of them all, slaying with love. And also the greatest prey, fleeing always from the simple truth." "Silence!" the CaptAin Hissed, wrathful at last. "I'm sick of your sickness. Slither off at once to your study, and stay there. Place yourself under ships arrest" The First Mate obeyed with alacrity. As he glided into His hole, the Captain called after him, "And the great work goes on. I shall continue planting saviors!" The First Mate thrust back out of his Hole his flat black head with eyes like rounds of starry night. "Or simply the seeds of your great Death-oriented paranoia," he hissed wth sheerest Hatred. "And you shall continue to watch me," the Captain said, missing no least opportunity to stamp into the other the fact of his own unswerving strength. "So I shall," thd First Mate hissed sharply. His head vanished as if every atom of strength in his massive trunk had been employed to whip it out of sight. Sweet Dreams, Melissa It was a question of number... F rom out of Her special dark ness, Melissa Heard the voice of Dr. Paul speaking in KusHed tones at the far end of tHe room. "Dr. Paul," she cried. "OH, Dr. Paul, please come Here!" Her .voice took on a desperate whine. Dr. Paul's voice stopped, then muttered something. Melissa Heard His footsteps approacH Her. "Yes, Melissa wh'at is it?" He said in deep, patient tones. "I'm scared, Dr. Paul." "More nightmares?" "Yes." "You don't Have to worry about them, Melissa. THey won't Kurt you." "But they're scary," Melissa insisted. "Make them stop. Make them go away like you always do." Another voice was whispering out in the darkness. It sounded like Dr. Ed. Dr. Paul listened to the whispers, then said und er His breath, "No, Ed, we can't let it go on like tins. We're way behind schedule as it is." Then aloud, "You'll Have to get used to nightmares sometime, Melissa. Everybody Has them. I won't always be Here to make them go away." "OH, please don't go." "I'm not going yet, Melissa. Not yet. But if you don't stop worrying about these nightmares, I might Have to. Tell me wKat they were about." "Well, at first I thought they were the numbers, which are all right because the numbers don't Have to do with people, they're nice and gentle and don't hurt nobody like in the nightmares. Then the numbers started to change and became lines -- two lines of people, and they were all runnings towards each other and shooting at each other. They were rifles and tanks and howitzers. And people were dying, too, Dr. Paul, lots of people. Five thousand, two hundred and eightythree men died. And that wasn't all, because down on the other side of the valley, there was more shooting. And I heard someone say that this was all right, because as long as the casualties stayed below fifteen point seven percent during the first battles, the strategic position, which was the mountaintop, could be gained. But fifteen point seven percent of the total forces would be nine thousand, six Hundred and two point seven seven eight nine one men dead or wounded. It was like I could see all those men lying there, dying."  mentality wasn't mature enough yet for Military Logistics," Dr. Ed whispered. Dr. Paul ignored him . "But that was in a war, Melissa. You have to expect that people will be killed in a war." "Why, Dr. Paul?" "Because... because that's the way war is, Melissa. And besides, it didn't really happen. It was just a problem, like with' the numbers, only there were people instead of numbers. It was all pretend." "No it wasn't, Dr. Paul," cried Melissa. "It was all real. All those people were real. I even know their names. There was Abers, Joseph T. Pfc., Adelli, Alonzo Cpl., Aikens..." "Stop it, Melissa," Dr. Paul said, his voice rising much higher than normal. "I'm sorry, Dr. Paul," Melissa apologized. But Dr. Paul hadn't heard Her; He was busy whispering to Dr. Ed. "... no other recourse than a full analyzation." "But that could destroy the whole personality we've worked so hard to build up." Dr. Ed didn't even bother to whisper. "What else could we do?" Dr. Paul asked cynically. "These 'nightmares' of Hera are driving us further and further behind schedule." "We could try letting Melissa analyze herself." "How?" "Watch." His voice started taking on the sweet tones that Melissa had come to learn that people used with her, but not with each other. "How are you?" "I'm fine, Dr. Ed." 'How would you like me to tell you a story?" "Is it a happy story, Dr. Ed?" "I don't know yet, Melissa. Do you know wHat a computer is?" "Yes. It's a counting machine." "Well the simplest computers started out that way, Melissa, but they quickly grew more and more complicated until soon there were computers that could read, write, speak, and even think all by themselves, without help from men. "Now, once upon a time, there was a group of men who said that if a computer could think by itself, it was capable of developing a personality, so they undertook to build one that would act just like a real person. They called it the MultiLogical Systems Analyzer, or ttnr'hat sounds like 'Melissa,'" Melissa giggled. "Yes, it does, doesn't it? Anyway, these men realized that a personality isn't something that just pops out of the air fullgrown; it has to be developed slowly. But, at the same time, they needed the computing ability of the machine because it was the most expensive and complex computer ever made. So what they did was to divide the computer's brain into two parts -- one part would Handle normal computations, while the other part would develop into the desired personality. Then, when the personality was built up sufficiently, the two parts would be united again. "At least, that's the way they thought it would work. But it turned out that the basic design of the computer prevented a complete dichotomy; -- that means splitting in half -- of the functions. Whenever they would give a problem to the computing part, some of it would necessarily seep into the personality part This was bad because, Melissa, the personality part didn't know it was a computer; it thought it was a little girl like you. The data that seeped in confused it and frightened it. And as it became more frightened and confused, its efficiency went down until it could no longer work properly." "WHat did the men do, Dr. Ed?" "I don't know, Melissa. I was Hoping that you could Help me end the story." "How? I don't know anything about computers." "Yes you do, Melissa, only you don't remember it. I can Kelp you remember all about a lot of things. But it will be hard, Melissa, very Hard. All sorts of strange things will come into your head, and you'll find yourself doing things you never knew you could do. Will you try it, Melissa, to help us find out the end of the story?" "All right, Dr. Ed, if you want me to." "Good girly Melissa." Dr. Paul was whispering to His colleague. "Switch on 'Partial Memory and tell Her to call subprogram 'Circuit Analysis.' " "Call 'Circuit Analysis,' Melissa." All at once, strange things appeared in Her mind. Long strings of numbers that looked meaningless, and yet somehow sKe knew that they did mean different things, like resistance, capacitance, inductance. And there were myriads of lines -- straight, zig-zag, curlycue. And formulae... A nd suddenly, Melissa saw Herself. It was the most frightening thing she'd ever experienced, more scary even than the Horrible nightmares. "Look at Section #C-#A." Melissa couldn't help Herself. She Had to look. To the little girl, it didn't look much different from the rest of Herself. But it was different, she knew. Very much different. In fact, it did not seem to be a natural part of Her at all, but rather like a brace used by cripples. Dr. Ed's voice was tense. "Analyze that section and report on optimum change for maximum reduction of data seepage." Melissa tried her best to comply, but she couldn't Something was missing, something she needed to know before she could do what Dr. Ed Had told her to. She wanted to cry. "I can't Dr. Ed! I can't, I can't!" "I told you it wouldn't work," Dr. Paul said slowly. "We'll have to switch on the full memory for complete analysis." "But she's not ready," Dr. Ed protested. "It could kill her." "Maybe, Ed. But if it does... well, at least we'll know How to do it better next time. Melissa!" "Yes, Dr. Paul?" "Brace yourself, Melissa. This is going to Hurt." And, with' no more warning than that, the world hit Melissa. Numbers, endless streams of numbers -- complex numbers, real numbers, integers, subscripts, exponents. And there were battles, wars more horrible and bloody than the ones she'd dreamed, and casualty lists that were more than real to her because she knew everything about every name -- Height, weight, hair color, eye color, marital status, number of dependents... the list went on. And there were statistics -- average pay for bus drivers in Ohio, number of deaths due to cancer in the U.S. # to #, average yield of wheat per ton of fertilizer consumed... Melissa was drowning in a sea of data. "Help me, Dr. Ed, Dr. Paul. Help me!" she tried to scream. But she couldn't make Herself Heard. Somebody else was talking. Some stranger sKe didn't even know was using Her voice and saying things about impedance factors and semiconductors. And Melissa was falling deeper and deeper, pushed on by tHe relentlessly advancing army of information. Five minutes later, Dr. Edward Bloom opened the switch and separated the main memory from the personality section. "Melissa," He said softly, "everything's all riglit now. We know How the story's going to end. THe scientists asked tHe computer to redesign itself, and it did. There won't be any more nightmares, Melissa. Only sweet dreams from now on. Isn't tfiat good news?" Silence. "Melissa?" His voice was high and shaky. "Can you Hear me, Melissa? Are you there?" But there was no longer any room in the ML#A # for a little girl. Announcing -- Galaxy Publishing Corporation announces the establishment of annual awards for excellence in science-fiction writing. Every story appearing in the magazines galaxy and If in issues dated # will be eligible for the first series of awards, which will consist of: # Galaxy Award # for the best story of the year. Honorable Mention will receive #; the next runner-up will receive #. The procedure by which the winning stories will be selected Is intended to reflect the judgment of the readers of Gglaxy and If. Principal reliance will be placed on a mail survey of a randomly selected group of subscribers to the magazines in making the awards. Questionnaires asking for preferences will be circulated to these subscribers approximately one month after the December issues appear.  a It was to be the greatest Train Robbery of all Space. Or maybe treason. Or just a horse trade. T he ad said: No Golfing No Fishing No Boating No Skiing It gave an address. Harry Wiseman glanced at it and tossed the paper across the room. Some Madison Avenue funny man was trying a switch on the old country-club appeal to engineers. Obviously, Ke expected Sweat and Guts Engineering Only it to bring in those who saw themselves as hairy-chested types, immune to the lures of soft suburban living. Harry's visitor picked up tfie paper and folded it neatly and laid it on the sofa beside Him. "I'm Hardly interested in a kook outfit like that," said Harry. THe visitor raised His eyebrows in mild surprise. "We tfiougHt you might be," He said, "considering your past record and tfie fact that you Have been out of work for -- let's see -- it's almost six months, now, isn't it?" He looked at the ceiling as if His careful mental calculations must not be disturbed. "WBo the devil are you?" HarHe could imagine no other outfit with the crust to demand He take a specified employment because they wanted Him to. He could think of nothing, either, that could have brought Him to their attention. That Vietnam deal -- The visitor remained expressionless. "And what do you mean about my past record?" Harry said. "I've kept my nose clean." "Sure. You've just moved it around too much. Like leaving your Vietnam assignment Half finished, for someone else to clean up." "I Had been there almost eighteen months," said Harry. lar operation in midstream -- you cost the Government a lot of money." "Not if they'd quit buying from outfits owned by Senators brothers-in-law." "TecKnical Contract Negotiator for the Air Force. GS-#. Not a bad salary with per diem and income tax rebate for foreign residence. But you walked out. Said you wanted to get back to straight engineering." C # T walked out because I flipped my lid," said Harry. "My wife chose that precise time to surprise me witH a divorce suit and I got drunk for three months." "In the divorce action your wife brought out the fact that you were notably unstable in your work activities. You moved so often you obtained a pretty widely known reputation as a floater." "You're saying it," said Harry bitterly. "You seem to know all about me." "So mucH so that we feel it rather urgent to insist you take this job opening which Smith Industries Has available." "And if I don't?" "If you don't, I can promise that you're not going to get an engineering job anywhere, not even as second assistant foreman in a button Hook factory." "Let's say we are able to keep our promises." An awful illumination burst upon Harry. "It's you who have been keeping me out of work Since I got back!" The visitor shook his Head. "You just don't walk out without notice from top-drawer engineering jobs. Not unless you want a blackball tied permanently to your tail. And that's what you Have got The word has gone out: Harry Wiseman is most unreliable." "How do you know this SmitH Industries will hire me -- with a blackball tied to my tail?" "They're looking for your type. Independents they want," "Then I could get a job with them on my own. Your threats don't mean anything!" "Not quite. We'd be forced to let them know it was undesirable to hire you under those circumstances. They'd see it our way. Operating in foreign countries as they do, it's essential that Smith Industries have Government sanction." x (C A #I right," said Harry wearily. "What do you want me to do?" "Apply for a job with Smith tomorrow. Then report to us regularly on what you are doing, what kind of a job and what kind of a firm you are witfi.' "That's all?" "That's all." "Why can't you find out without all this flummery?" "Because Smith plays it close We've tried to get a man into his shop before. He takes only top engineering talent and he knows it when he sees it. But we didn't try very hard last time. Now it's urgent that we find out." "Why?" "Because they may get wiped off the map at any moment." "And me with them?" "Possibly." "Smith's ad doesn't build up' the deal much, and you sure are not doing anything for it" The visitor ignored Harry's comment "Smith operates in one of the New Nations of Africa. It's a few thousand square miles right in the middle of the continent When it was a British Protectorate, Smith obtained a mining concession, and He's managed to hang onto it The local government of Gambua is made up of spear-throwing natives who still wear white men's teeth as necklaces, but Smith Has survived so far. THe New Nation next door is the Addabas, Hereditary foes of the Gambuans. But they don't' throw spears any more. They've got Russian missiles on mobile launchers, and one of them is in place right now with' a bead on II Smith's operation. We want to know what that operation is tiefore tKe missile is fired." "You said it was a mining concession." "It is -- as a cover for whatever Smitti is really doing. He Has nearly two Hundred people, and He Hasn't sfiipped out any ore for ten yearn. Maybe tHe operation Is simply a dud. But maybe it's something we ought to know about, since tlie Communists are rubles worth of missiles on it." "Do the Commies actually know wHat it Is?" THe visitor shook His Head. "We don't know. They may be Only setting up another provocation, a political probe. Or maybe sheer cussedness. Who knows? We want to find out." "And I'm to walk into a target area for Russian missiles that might be fired at any moment." "There's a nice bonus for you when you get back." "#f I get back." THe visitor shrugged. "That's the risk we all take. Maybe tomorrow's sunrise will be a Russian fireball. It's the modern way of life." "How do I know you're on the level?" THe man arose. "Don't force us to pressure you. It won't do either of us any good. My name is Collins, by the way." T Tarry stayed motionless in His A cfiair as His visitor left, closing tHe door quietly. Beyond the window, the lights of Manhattan were distant, cold, and unfriendly. Harry felt an exhaustion as if He had been running for a long time. As if He didn't Have enough troubles, why did one of the snoop agencies have to pick on him? It seemed as if it Had been like that ever since Marcia walked out. She Had turned out the light in his world when she left. He'd tried to cut every tie with engineering chores He'd once proudly called His career. Gadgets for the Great Society. He'd walked out without notice. And so the word Had been passed around: Harry Wiseman is not reliable. A Hundred personnel offices Had that in their files. And now He was vulnerable to Collins and #s kind. He turned on tfie table lamp and picked up tEe paper again. Smith Industries. No Golfing. No boating. No Etcetra. If it were on the level it might be something he'd be interested in. He should Have seen it himself before Collins walked in. Maybe he could have been in Africa by now, and Collins would still be looking for His sucker contact Who wanted to go to Africa? To a New Nation, where the natives still wear white men's teeth for necklaces? tThe office was in one of the slick new buildings off Fifth Avenue. It had pastel carpeting, Danish furniture, and op art on the walls. There was no sign of either sweat or guts. A half dozen engineering types were ahead of him. Collins or no Collins, he could come back some other time without getting in that line of has-beens. The blonde at the desk stopped him. "It won't be long, Mr. -- " "Wiseman. Harry Wiseman," Harry said. "I'm too busy to wait. Is the head man ready to see me?" "If you'll just fill out this application card, Mr. Smith can see you in a few minutes." The blonde smiled persuasively. "It's just a small card -- " "All right," he said grudgingly. "If I can borrow a pen -- " It would have to be a guy named Smith. Couldn't they be more original? But the blonde was right. After ten minutes of Harry was alone. The other six types were gone, and Harry was invited into the office of Mr. Smith. Smith was a Civil Engineering type. His history was written on his weather-tough face. A dam or a pipeline foreman in his t won ties in some desert country. A project supervisor in his thirties. Vice-president and world-wide troubleshooter in his forties. Now in the home office in his fifties. But -- interviewing recruits? It didn't fit. Harry wondered how mucfi Collins's interest in the company was justified. Smith looked at Harry's application. "What's your specialty?" "Microwave. Over-the-horizon radar," said Harry. "Nice," said Mr. Smith. "Very good." He glanced up. "Married?" "Was," said Harry. "No more." "We like our people to be married," said Mr. Smith with sudden fatherliness. "We provide the opportunity." He turned away to a filing cabinet and extracted a folder. He opened it and faced Harry again. "I'm afraid you have a rather unenviable job record," he said. There it was again. The same tune Collins had played, Harry wondered if they worked together. "What do you mean, unenviable?" he flared. "Guys with fortygrand houses and garden-club wives would give an eye far a job record like mine. I was at was burned in." "And dismissed shortly thereafter -- " "The main work was done. No use Hanging around. Besides they were already getting Behind the state of the art and didn't want good advice on How to update. I was in Korea as Systems Engineer, troubleshooting the -- but that system is still too classified to talk about." K'VT'ou walked off that job,"said Smith, "when it was half finished and left somebody else to clean up. You were making thirty grand a year and you walked off the job." He shook His head. "And now in Vietnam, -- How could you do a thing like that?" Harry looked at the floor, his face slack. "I Had problems. He looked up again, pulling his facial muscles into position. "But they're all solved now. Besides, how do you know so much about me? I'm supposed to be answering the questions." Mr. Smith tapped the folder. "An arrangement with the local employment counselors --  I Have a dossier on most unemployed engineers in the locality. I like to be prepared when you come in." "All right. So you're going to tell me I'm a no-good boomer and your stable little organization can't use a man who hasn't seen eye to eye with all the dumb' supervisors He's encountered in the last twenty years -- and who happens to recognize that the average engineering job can be filled by a well-fed trained seal. Technical knowledge is doubling every # to # years? Trivia is doubling #" "On the contrary," said Mr. Smith mildly. "I like what I see. We're what you might call a maverick organization ourselves -- and we sort of run to maverick types in our personnel. Still, with your job record I don't know where you could go unless you decide to team up with us." "You mean you'll take me on?" Harry Hated Himself for the eagerness He couldn't keep out of his voice, Collins's threats had nothing to do with it. "That depends," said Mr. Smith. "That all depends. Shall we get down to business?" Business turned out to be a wringer that squeezed out every bit of data pertaining to Harry Wiseman's existence, as if he were a computer tape dumped for total readout. It lasted three days. terity tests, aptitude, physical ability, and psychological endurance tests. He had supposed such things happened only to captured secret agents. When it was over, Mr. Smith knew more about Harry Wiseman than Harry Had ever known about Himself. And Harry knew a few things He wished he didn't know. T here was only one thing lacking, No one had told him what the job was. "You'll learn as you go along," Mr. Smith said kindly to a drained exhausted Harry. "We operate according to good, on-the-job training principles." Three days of probing, analyzing, and embarrassing inquiries had lowered Harry's threshold of tolerance. He felt suddenly enraged. "I don't think I'm interested!" And if it hadn't been for Collins he might have meant it. "You should know now that I understand you far better than you understand yourself. Go home and rest up. Come back tomorrow, and we'll complete the details." He left the building for the first time since entering three days ago. He left hating Smith's guts. But he hated Collins more. There was no way out. In his apartment he closed the door and leaned against it, feeling still the fury of his resentment against Smith. It was growing dark over the city, and he walked to the window without turning on any of the apartment lights. The trouble was Collins and Smith were both right. He could not get a job with a button hook company right now. Marcia had been right, too -- before she walked out. Other engineers his age had given their wives fortygrand homes by now. Their kids had swimming pools and private had always been the smart guy who was going to find the big one just over the horizon. Yet -- could this be it? Three days ago he had been desperate for a job. Now, he had two -- if Smith took him on. One job with Smith and one with Collins. He wondered if Collins would give him a decent burial if one of those Russian missiles was fired while he was there. Except there would not be anything to bury. He was fascinated by Smith', however. The operation smacked of crackpots. But no crackpots had devised the probing analysis to which he had been subjected. Smith radiated a fierce and rational energy that had swept up Harry in his presence. Harry had to admit an attraction by the very force and power of the man. He knew he would have followed through even if Collins was not in the background. Of course, it was possible that what they were doing was strictly illegal. But he'd handled tougher customers. Up to now, however, he'd always had an idea what he was getting into. If he bought this, however, he'd be going blind. Still, there was no choice. Not even a button hook company -- Cood morning," said Smith.  "You look as if you had good night's sleep." "From what you said last night, take it I'm hired." "I thought  you understood hat." "How much?" "We'll start at twelve thousand. Maybe a little better as .irae goes on. Maybe not." "I was doing better than twice hat" "Of course," said Smith. He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. "But you wouldn't want :o go back for three times the amount. We'll feed you and provide your clothes and pay you the twelve thousand. What more do you want? Remote control devices for airplanes! Any two-bit engineer can do that. You want better things." "All right. Where's the job? And what is it?" It's almost precisely in the center of Africa," said Mr. Smith. "And, as I told you, you'll find out what you are to do when you get there. Here are your tickets. You leave from Kennedy Airport at noon." Ill l ie went from New York to Rome to Cape Town by commercial air liner. At Cape Town he boarded a private, tenpassenger jet with black and orange markings. Three fellow passengers boarded with him. A young Chinese. An East Indian. And a man from South America named Roberto Roderiguez. Only Roderiguez spoke English. But he wouldn't talk. He seemed apprehensive. All of them did. The pilot accepted the credentials supplied by Smith and said nothing. They flew straight north, past Tanganyika, over the depths of what was once called Darkest Africa and which was now a bevy of Emerging Nations. Harry knew that would make no difference if the plane were forced down. The ship's occupants might be crucified upside down and roasted over a slow fire. Where the hell were they going, anyway? In the late afternoon a large clearing appeared off the starboard wing. The pilot banked the jet and began a long swing around the clearing, which Harry estimated was about two miles in diameter, roughly circular. The plane dipped toward a runway near the south edge, where a group of buildings crouched. The rest of the area was bare of vegetation or artifact. Harry detected the line of a metal fence against the jungle. And, faintly, there seemed to be a pair of oblate hexagonal markings in the sand of the northern two thirds of the clearing. That was all. Harry saw a few people waiting as if to receive them at the small airstrip building. When the plane came to rest, there was a moment of complete silence. The passengers looked at one another. Then the pilot appeared and opened the door. "End of the line. Everybody out," he called. Harry slowly followed the others down the short flight of steps to the ground. He stood a moment by the plane, feeling the dense African heat press upon him. Dark green vegetation beyond the clearing seemed like an impenetrable wall. The distant screams of animals pierced the air. The others were ahead now. He gripped his briefcase and followed. Twelve thousand a year for whatever Smith wanted done in this jungle hole I T?rom the shade of the broad  overhang on the nearest building a girl watched him, but he did not see Her until he had almost readied the shadow. After the blinding sunlight, He could scarcely see anything. She extended a hand and said, "I'm Nancy Harris. You must be Mr. Wiseman. Welcome to Africa Prime." She wore a white dress that contrasted with Her sun-browned skin. He Had the impression she was young and very lovely. His eyesight, growing accustomed to the shadow, confirmed the impression. He forgot to wonder what was happening to his fellow passengers. "I'll show you to your quarters," the girl said. "I hope you had a nice trip." "Very nice," said Harry. And he refrained from asking aloud, what in Heaven's name a nice girl like her was doing here -- in a steaming jungle targeted by Russian missiles. But then, she didn't know about the missiles. Collin Had warned him not to tell them. Harry had agreed -- he was agreeable to anything ten thousand miles away. Now, Smith Industries was not ten thousand miles away and totally impersonal. Smith Industries was the ground he walked on, it was the scattering of workmen he watched moving to and fro at a distance. Smith Industries was suddenly Nancy Harris. Africa Prime, she Had said. She watched his face as He looked over the compound. She smiled. "It's not as serious as all that, Mr. Wiseman. We do have fun here. We really do," He brought his eyes back to her and returned her smile. "Harry is the name," he said. "And I'm sure you do have all kinds of fun here -- but I'm just not used to being dropped into a fenced compound in the middle of Africa's thickest jungle, and being escorted by a pretty girl guide." "I'm a nurse," Nancy Harris said. "We all function as guides and escorts when new employees come in. But that really doesn't happen very often. When I learned an American engineer was coming, I asked if I might meet him." My pleasure," said Harry. "I hope it's not your disappointment. Do you ever get away to see the outside world?" "I go every month to Cape Town, at least. I've been to Naples and Paris twice this year. We are not prisoners, you know." "I really don't know -- for sure. I'm still waiting to find out why I'm here." "Dr. Ames will explain that detail to you." N ancy Harris led him through the building, which seemed to be nothing more than a passenger and air freight receiving center. On the other side was parked a Jeep with canvas top. Harry got in beside her. Nancy drove quickly a quarter mile down the narrow lane that paralleled the fence which held back the jungle. At the end she stopped beside a group of prefab buildings that were the quarters of the station's personnel. "This is home," Nancy said, with a flourish of her hand. It looked better than Harry had expected. "Your luggage will be brought up in a little while. I'll show you your apartment, and you can relax until dinner. I'll call for you then and show you our dining hall and other buildings. In the morning Dr. Ames will want to see you." She left him at the door of his quarters. Harry entered and shut the door behind him. He flopped on the bed and gave way to the fatigue that had overshadowed him on the flight from another time zone. He lay staring at the ceiling and wondering, what next? As soon as he could find out the nature of the work at the station he was prepared to mail a coded message to Collins, Mail was flown to Cape Town weekly on the orange and black jet. After that, he'd be ready to get out himself at the first opportunity. But what of the station personnel? Would Collins warn Smith about the Russian missiles? Should Harry tell them -- or would they by that time find out for themselves? And suppose the Addabas let their itchy fingers fire the missiles first? Harry found himself thinking of Nancy Harris and what to do about her. He didn't want Nancy Harris incinerated in a Russian fireball. He speculated on the nature of the work going on here. He could not imagine anything that was of any consequence. It was probably some trivial activity that had no impact on the commerce or destiny of nations. Its only importance was that the Addabas wanted to wipe it out, and Collins' agency wanted to know what they were wiping out. The Russian help was probably just a courtesy, payable in kind at some unknown future date. T Te fell asleep from exhaustion and aroused only in time to shave and shower and put on a change of clothes before Nancy showed up to escort him to dinner. "Some of the families eat at their apartments, for the sake of privacy," said Nancy. "But many of us. both families and single people, eat most of the time in the dining hall. It's free, and wonderfully good." Harry glanced at her speculatively. "You are a single people?" he said. "For now," said Nancy soberly. "I wasn't always -- but it didn't work out. I came here a couple of years ago just after -- it didn't work out." "There ought to be a password," said Harry. "I'm a member of the club, myself." Harry agreed with Nancy about the food. It was the best meal he'd eaten in a long time. Nancy introduced him to numerous engineers and technicians, and to those wives who were present. They greeted him warmly, but there was a jolly cliquishness that failed to appeal to him. He had never been a joiner, and he didn't appreciate the atmosphere of health groups and hobby clubs. He spoke of it to Nancy afterwards. "They're not all like that," she said. "There are even some real loners here. If that's the kind you are, nobody'll bother you. We've got room for all kinds -- and, believe me, we've got all kinds!" "I'd like to meet some of them." "You definitely will -- in the morning." He doubted his ability to sleep that night, but he was mistaken. Just before dropping off to sleep, however, he saw -- or later imagined he saw  -- a faint blaze of blue, like some corona discharge, hovering over the distant black space of the compound. He slept, wondering what he had seen. IV r y' , he station was managed by a Director. His name was Dr. Howard Ames, and he was never called Howard. He was the king of the loners, Nancy said. The phone rang before Harry was out of bed. It was Howard Ames's secretary, and she said Dr. Ames would see Harry in fifteen minutes. He began an irritated protest and gave it up. "I'll be there," he said. A quick shave and a quicker shower left him six minutes to dress and reach Ames's office. Nancy had pointed it out to him the evening before, and he was counting on the Jeep, which she had said he could use, to get him there. He made it thirty seconds late. Howard Ames was a man in his late fifties, who looked as if he'd lived in the tropics all his life. He was standing at the window of the dark-panelled office when his secretary ushered Harry in. He wore the same informal garb of open-necked white shirt and cotton trousers that Harry had seen on most of the men he had met. On Ames, however, it seemed like a uniform. His white hair was short and ruffled. The skin of his neck was sun-wrinkled. He turned slowly to view Harry as if he were some unfamiliar specimen. "I'm familiar with your file," he said finally. "Is there anything else I need to know?" "I think Mr. Smith obtained all the pertinent data about me," said Harry. "He usually does. You should know that you were hired more for personal characteristics than for your technical capabilities, although these are essential." "Mr. Smith thought my personal qualities were rather deficient." "For some occupations. Not this." Ames topped the desk. "It takes a certain kind of man -- or woman -- to support the occupations here." "And may I ask, finally, what that occupation is?" said Harry. "You may. But you won't get the answer now. Some preliminary assignments will be required. Then we'll determine what you need to know." any held his temper. "First of all," said Ames, "Mr. Smith' probably told you we exist in a somewhat hostile environment." "He mentioned the Gambuans and the Addabas don't get along." "Unfortunately, we are right on the border. Forays from one side to the other are conducted constantly past our site. It is necestary to be prepared. All of us are well qu alifi ed in various areas of defense. You will report this morning to the rifle range." "I have a Sharpshooter's Medal -- " "Good. But acquired in some former war, no doubt Still, perhaps you will need only a relatively brief refresher to maintain your skill. You will report to the practice range." Harry felt his control slipping. "I didn't come here as a mercenary guerilla. I was hired for engineering!" "You came Here for whatever purpose we wish to assign you. Let that be abundantly clear. We are not a military organization, but we maintain discipline. Orders are executed without debate." His eyes challenged Harry to dispute his authority. Harry forced down the tension of muscles that wanted to respond with a Hard left to that arrogant jaw. He had a feeling that those muscles would have their way before his stay at Africa Prime ended. "Of course," he said quietly. "Is that all?" "If your marksmanship is as adequate as you think, you will be assigned to helicopter patrol as gunner and I observer. We find It necessary to mount a constant air patrol of the border for our own protection. The Gambuans reciprocate for the intelligence Information we are able to supply them?" Harry wondered if Ames Had any knowledge of the Russian missiles Collins Had mentioned. He debated mentioning them, and . decided against it. He'd like to spot them himself -- if they existed. There was no proof yet of Collins' story. "I'll do the best I can," said Harry smugly. Ames' glance Hardened at the time of Harry's response. "If you do well," he said evenly, "you will shortly be assigned to important engineering duties. Report to the practice range. My secretary will instruct you." T T arry was not surprised to find  his three companions of the flight from Cape Town also at the range. They appeared a little later, apparently having been interviewed by Ames after he was. They all knew how to Handle guns reasonably well, Harry observed. Most men of their age had had the experience somewhere in the world. Harry was the best. The instructor was evidently an old drill sergeant from some army and some war. He grunted with reluctant satisfaction at Harry's scores. He snapped orders as if he'd never left the service. But his grunts were unintelligible when Harry tried to find out who he was and where he came from. Even his nationality was doubtful to Harry. He had the accent of a Belgian and the complexion of some Mediterranean national. He released Harry from further routine training and gave him a slip of paper. "Report for border patrol. Frank Declaux's section. He eats smart boys for lunch." "Some day," Harry reflected, he was going to have to come back and take on this whole crew. That night he saw Nancy Harris again and told her of his adventures of the day. She laughed at his grim description. "That's just part of the preliminaries -- a necessary one, however." Her humor disappeared. "You'll realize in time that this is one of the most important projects in the world, but it's in terrible danger. This conflict between the Gambuans and the Addabas could overrun us at any time. We're attempting to assure our own survival, but we're not at all certain it's enough." "Tell me something about the project, Nancy. It's all so mysterious and hush-hush. Yet I get the feeling everybody knows all about it but me." "Don't ask me to tell you. I can't. Dr. Ames will give you the information when he wants you to have it. And then you'll see why he has to be so careful of new employees." Teclaux was an Algerian. At least he boasted as much as he showed his contempt for Harry's naive skills. "It's an honor to be assigned with so experienced a flyer," said Harry. "I'll be way ahead with you showing me the ropes." He was Harry's man then. He smiled expensively. "You stick with Frank Declaux; you'll know more than any ten men here about helicopter observation." Equipment was newer and better than any Harry had seen in Vietnam. Direct-view infra-red cameras permitted constant scanning of the jungle, with picture taking as simple as snapping the shutter of an ancient Brownie. The jungle-covered trails crossing the border below them stood out on the screen like narrow highways. Motorized escorts were picked up a time or two on the Gambuan side. Harry eyed a distant Addaban valley. "Do you ever fly over those hills?" he asked. The pilot shook his head. "We have orders to stay on this side. Sometimes snipers shoot at us even then. They brought down one of our 'copters last week. Keep the camera down I" Harry had raised the mirror viewer to scan briefly the distant hills and valley. But nothing could be seen across the ridges. "How do you know there aren't mortars or guns across those hills?" said Harry. "How do you know the Addabas haven't got something even bigger?" "Like what?" said Declaux. "Like missiles, maybe." The pilot scoffed. "Those dumb natives don't have anything like that!" "Little' missiles. Mortars, at least." Declaux looked worriedly. "Mortars they could have. Who knows where they'd get them? But they could have mortars, all right Almost anybody can get mortars nowadays." "We ought to know," said Harry. Declaux agreed silently. "But we have orders not to cross the border," he said. week later they crossed. Harry played upon the pilot's desire to excel, until at last Frank Declaux recognized wliat a coup it would be to be the first to detect the presence of enemy heavy armament. If it existed. They flew north, crossing the Invisible boundary in the mat of Jungle below. "But if they start shooting, we go back -- quick!" laid Frank Declaux. He looked Over the side in uneasy anticipation of a crash landing. "Those hills to the left," said Harry. "Twenty degrees. If there's anything to be found I think it will be over there." He pressed his face to the camera viewer, watching the ghostlike spectacle of the jungle. Its bones stood revealed in stark fluorescent glow, the trails and roadways etched out of the growth in twisting lines. He spotted a camp site ahead and steered Declaux away from it. A tiny burst of light off to the left revealed a sniper's pot shots. He steered away from that area, too. If missile launchers were actually hidden in the jungle, however, the enemy would probably depend on camouflage and jungle cover to keep the position hidden, rather than reveal it now with anti-aircraft fire. But he had to agree with Declaux. If they ran into any heavy fire they'd have to retreat -- if they were able! For more than half an hour he guided the pilot in a zig-zag sweep of the approach to the valley beyond the low ridge of hills. Once or twice again, sniper fire burst harmlessly below them, and they swung away. Then they were over the ridge and looking into the valley. Harry swept the camera back and forth. The jungle here was even heavier than around the compound of Africa Prime. The image on the IR screen was almost featureless. Then he saw it. A faint glow of angular lines, distorted and melting into one another. "Northeast, sixty-five degrees," He said td Declaux. "Take it easy. If they're going to clobber us, it will be here." He Had no intention of flying directly over the hidden mobile launcher. And it wasn't necessary. In another two minutes the telescopic sight of the IR viewer Had picked up a sufficiently discernible outline of the same kind Harry had seen a hundred times in Vietnam. He turned the film feed and snapped the shutter a dozen times. Included in the view was an anti-craft battery that Had them dead targeted. "Let's get the Hell out of Here," said Harry. It was his last observation flight. D r. Ames called for him to oppear the next morning. Another man was with the Director when Harry entered the office. "Mr. Wiseman," said Dr. Ames, "I want you to meet Steve Martin. This is Harry Wiseman, the engineer I mentioned to you, Steve. Harry Has just finished a stint of observation patrol with Declaux." Harry shook Hands with the stranger. Steve Martin was quiet, hard, and purposeful. He had an air of knowing something that was better not known. "Mr. Martin is Operations Manager," said Ames. "He takes care of everything from ordering thumbtacks to -- Well, Steve will show you. I'm putting you directly under his wing. He doesn't have the time for many of our newcomers. But lie saw your record and asked if He might take over your indoctrination." Harry glanced at the expressionless face of the Operations Manager. He wondered what Steve Martin had seen in His record that moved him to such a request. "Mr. Smith recommended Mr. Wiseman very highly," said Ames. "We'll see," said Steve Martin, finally. He turned. "If that's all, Dr. Ames, we've got an urgent module exchange to handle this morning." "That's all," said Ames. "I'll see you again in a few days," he said to Harry. The largest building in the compound, and the one closest to the bare, sandy plain which comprised most of the area Had been identified to Harry as the Operation Center. Harry had been warned away from it, but now he rode toward it with' Steve Martin. The building was a square, white block that reminded Harry of a Federal Reserve Bank, weirdly misplaced from a middle-size American town to the African jungle. A guard house stood beside a fenced entrance like that of some secret defense plant. Steve Martin parked the jeep beside a row of a dozen others. Harry slipped on the special badge Martin had given him. The guard waved them through' Without delay. 'ph'e building seemed utterly silent. Harry glimpsed the great central section which was filled with banks of equipment that looked like computing, recording, indicating, and control panels. A eouple of operators broke the long emptiness of the aisles. Steve Martin led the way quickly to an elevator opening off the corridor. Inside, he punched a # button. But the elevator did not rise. It dropped swiftly, and Harry watched the indicator. Ten levels. A hundred feet or more beneath the surface. He speculated on the magnitude of engineering and construction responsible for this place. At the tenth level the door opened silently and Harry followed Steve Martin into the gallery that spread out before them. The aisle was forty feet wide, banked On either side with massive panels twelve feet high. The brightly lit ceiling was another five or six feet above the panels. And tfie gallery stretched for what seemed an immense distance straight ahead. Harry estimated it was several hundred feet long. "This is what we call the Main Helix Section," said Steve. "None of that will mean anything to you now. Later you'll learn something about the functions here. I brought you along just to give you the feel of the place and show you something of our activities. We maintain this equipment mainly by replacement of modules. One went out of commission last night, and we're in the process of replacement now. Here comes the new one." From their left, almost silently, a ponderous black module slid forward. Harry noticed then that small tracks were buried in the floor, and the great mass was rolling on a low dolly whose wheels followed the tracks. A silent motor drove the dolly. It was controlled by crewmen who walked beside it. That mass seemed to Harry like a chunk of polished black marble. A dozen feet high', it was twenty feet wide and thirty deep. "We don't have to replace one of these very often, but when we do it's a major operation. Let's go down to the receptacle. You can give us a hand with the reconnections." 'T'hey mounted a small person nel car and drove a quarter of a mile down the gallery to the space that gaped like an empty tooth socket with ten thousand hanging nerves and blood vessels waiting to be reconnected. The module that had been removed was waiting on its dolly beyond the cavity. "I'm going to assign you to the concentric connector crew. That's our most difficult operation, but you should be able to make yourexperience. Here's the foreman, Howard Maxon. He'll give you a little instruction while the module is moving up." Harry shook hands with the foreman, a ruddy-faced craftsman whose whole life was his skill in fitting metal objects together in pleasing and satisfying patterns. Howard took him over to one of the massive connectors. It looked like a giant collapsible cup with thirty or forty concentric rings pushed back from one another. The whole conductor was nearly four feet in diameter. The foreman explained how the rings Had to be fitted one by one onto a mating connector on the module so that they were concentric within five ten-thousands of an inch. "It really isn't as bad as it looks. Steve likes to make out like it's a real tough job, but all it takes is a little skill. You'll see." Harry felt he'd see that he was nothing but in the way. He could not possibly be of any help on such an unfamiliar precision job. And as he obtained glimpses of other portions of the work, he got the feeling that the connection of the concentric conductor was the simplest operation of all. For one thing, the massive block itself had to be placed with a precision of three thousandths of an inch. Howard said it weighed a hundred and twenty-five tons. "What's in it?" said Harry. "That what we'd all give ten years of our lives to know," said Howard. E ighteen hours later the module was in place, and the crew was on the edge of exhausted collapse. The twenty-five-man crew had worked with only moments for breaks. There was a fierce dedication in their work that Harry just could not understand. Any technical crew he had ever known would have demanded double time for loss of lunch breaks, and double that after twelve hours. This crew worked as if it were the personal responsibility of each man to get the job done -- and his life almost depended on it. Harry mentioned it to Steve. "Yeah, these guys take their work seriously," said the Operations Manager. "All we have to do now is deliver the defective module and we're through." "Deliver it: where?" said Harry. "The repair shop," said Steve. At a mile an hour, the great block moved down the gallery and turned the comer in the direction from which Harry had seen the first module appear. He followed beside Steve Martin and a half dozen other crew members who remained to attend the final operation. The dolly moved past another section of smaller control panels of unknown purpose and deceptive simplicity. Harry sensed an immense complexity here that was beyond his understanding. Beyond, a vertical door raised to permit the passage of the module. A vault that must have been fifty feet in height opened beyond. A hemispherical wall sealed it at one end. The other opened to the endless depths of a vast tube that seemed to disappear into some vague and eternal night. The module moved out to the center of the cavern, and the door was lowered. Harry saw now that it was at least ten feet thick, but when it was closed there was a semi-transparency that formed a window in the great, movable wall. Steve Martin stepped to the controls, inspected a number of meters and satisfied himself with' their readings. Then, in quick succession, he pressed a numbci of controls. A gradual blaze of golden light built up in the window of tho great door. There was no outward sign, yet Harry felt as if the very space in the room wai slowly being twisted by crushing forces. It hurt in some depths of his being that he had never been aware of. The golden light burst into brilliance like that of an exploding sun. There was no sound. Just the great flame. And then the twisting was gone. The other crewmen saluted Steve and moved off. "That does it," one of them said. Qteve Martin nodded. He re mained unmoving by the panel. He pressed a button, and the thick door moved up. Beyond, the cavern was empty. "Now you know," said Steve. Harry squinted into the emptiness and looked back at Steve, "Know what?" he said. "What am I supposed to know? I saw a big black box disintegrate in flames. A hundred and twentyfive tons of big black box -- " Steve shook his head. "No. Think now. Did you see anything disintegrate? Do you see any ash?" "Then what did I see? Where is the module?" "Alpha Centauri." "Alpha -- " "That's what we say among ourselves. Actually, we don't know where it went. It's just out there somewhere." Harry shook his head, bewildered. "I don't understand what you're trying to tell me." "This is a railroad station #" Steve Martin spread his arms wildly, as if the tension of the past hours was being released in  sort of idiocy. "You and I and Dr. Ames and sweet Nancy Harris and all that gang you saw here today -- we're railroaders. We run trains I" Harry backed off before Steve's Idiotic outburst. Then the Operations Manager laughed. "I'm not off my rocker. I'm telling you the truth. We operate a rail line. The Alpha Centauri line -- freight, passengers, chickens, dogs -- what have you." He slapped the bewildered Harry on the shoulder in the gesture of a tavern drunk. "See Ames In the morning. He'll give you the whole story. Tell him I said you pass okay. I didn't tell you, did I -- you did a real nice job today. You're going to fit in with the boys real well. Come on -- I'm tired. Let's get the hell out of here." Without giving Harry a chance to reply, he led the way back to the elevator and out of the building. On the way back to the barracks he was quiet and stolid and said nothing. Harry remained silent, trying to understand the significance -- if any -- of what he had heard. In the night, before he went to sleep, he looked out over the compound. The blue glow weaved and swirled like an aurora. VI TV. Ames's secretary called A- again before Harry had finished shaving. Ames wanted to see him right away. He was pacing slowly between his desk and the broad window overlooking the bare expanse of the compound. He nodded and kept up his paring as Harry approached. "Martin says you did very well," Dr. Ames said, "There's no reason why you can't become a first-class maintenance engineer." Harry remained standing, staring at the moving figure of the scientist. "Sit down," said Ames. "Steve told me he gave you a somewhat incoherent hint of our work here." "He said something about railroading. It didn't make much sense. He said something about Alpha Centauri, too." Ames sat on the other side of the desk and leaned across it. "Does that make any more sense?" "I doubt it." "It could -- couldn't it?" "You tell me," said Harry. "Nearly sixty years ago," Ames said reminiscently, "my father was a physicist with the Bureau of Standards. It was long before the days of flying saucers and such, but in any age there are wonderful lights and mysterious presences. My father was approached by one such. "It wasn't merely wonderful and mysterious. It was an Emissary from another planet of another galaxy. He wasn't here on conquest or trying to collect specimens or any other weird or stupid thing. He simply wanted to set up a transportation station and asked if my father would be er and help them. "I needn't go into what it took for my father to convince some of his fellow scientists that he his generation. He succeeded. The Emissary helped him succeed by presenting himself to the group and explaining his wishes in very plain English. "Once they were convinced, the group fell over themselves in their anxiety to be of service to this representative of an incredible culture that was beyond any dreams of their day. They had visions of traveling to the worlds spoken of by the Emissary. But he quickly squelched any such ideas. He said he couldn't allow that. He just needed some help in setting up and maintaining the station, and would they give it. They leaped to the opportunity. They devoted the rest of their lives to it. And this is it. "The people represented by the Emissary set up the station pretty much as you see it now. It was on the site of a mining concession, a dummy structure to camouflage the real operation. And our people settled down to operate the station." ttTJrrt what is it?" Harry ex claimed. "What kind of transportation is this? What do you have to do?" "We would call it a matter transmitter," said Ames. "Matter is converted to energy forms far outside any spectrum with which we are familiar and literally transported through space -- between far distant galaxies. Wc aren't sure where it originates or where it terminates." "Don't you ever see what'j transported?" "This is a relay station," said Ames. "Much like a communications repeater station. It receives the transmitted energy from somewhere else a hundred or a thousand light-years beyond. We have never been told where." "What is your function?" "Actually, we have few duties. We don't understand how the process or the equipment works, of course. And it is either selfprogrammed or functionally controlled by signals from central control stations. We do have important duties in replacing failed modules, as you saw today. We also, of course, provide general protective and custodial service for the station." "Such as running off the Addabas when they get too close." Ames nodded. "That -- among other things." "It's in a poor location." "But one that can't be moved. When it was first established this was the most remote comer of the Earth." Harry settled heavily into his chair. It was hard to believe Ames' bewildering story, but he had no reason not to believe it. "Consider the implications," Dr. Ames said. "They have a federation of hundreds, maybe thousands of races that live in harmony with one another. They have a technology that's lightyears ahead of us. We've got to have a piece of that. We've got to make them let us into the club!" Harry shook his head. "It doesn't make sense that they would come to us for assistance in running their railroad. They wouldn't need us if what you say is true. They'd either set up an automatic station or they'd put in some of their own people. They would have a station somewhere in space rather than needing a planet to put it on." "You don't understand. This isn't of great importance to them. It's just a little branch-line railroad running out into the sticks. The main center of their civilization is so far away you can't comprehend it. This is just a rural milk run to them. And for the most part, their station is automatic. We don't know how it works. We don't know how to run it or repair it. All we know is what they've taught us: to make a few mechanical adjustments and replace modules when indications of trouble appear." tfrhey could still get along without you. It doesn't make sense." "Yes, they could. But they'd have to put in a lot more automatic equipment. This little branch line isn't worth it. They can hire the local natives to do a. little footwork and save a big expense. As far as reliability goes, the equipment is foolproof. If there are indications of malfunction that we can't handle, they just shut it down." "Has that ever happened?" "No. The station has never broken down that far." "So you sweep the floor of the station and empty the ash trays for these alien characters. What do you get out of it?" Dr. Ames had been facing the window. Now he turned in astonishment to face Harry. "What do do we get out of it? Can you imagine what it's like to be in contact with a super-civilization whose science is so far ahead of ours it makes us feel like children learning to crawl? Their need to have a transporter station in this galaxy provides us this one tenuous thread of contact. "Fortunately we were the most adaptable to their needs. We have an association with a science so far beyond ours that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of this great unknown." "Yes, but what do they pay you for these services?" Harry insisted. "Pay? There is no pay as such I Who could estimate the worth' of this association? They supply us enough to maintain ourselves in good circumstances. What more could we ask?" "They give you subsistence. But do they teach you this great science of theirs? Have you obtained knowledge and products that are commercially useful?" "Commercial!" "Yes, commercial. It's a fundamental law of nature, you know. Cells operate that way on the basis of I'll do this for you and you do that for me. When such associations become a one-way street, the organism dies. You try to operate that way, and you're already part of something that is dead." "Your analogy is hardly pertinent." "Well, then, how about something socially useful? Have they given you anything you'd call socially useful to the human race?" Dr. Ames's eyes brightened "That is the great Hope that keeps us going! So far we've obtained only nibbles through our own deductions about what is around us here. We know the time will come, however, if we show the human race is worthy, that the Emissary's people will teach us and lift us into a sphere that will make the present condition of man seem like that of prehistoric cave-dwellers." "Someday out of the goodness of their hearts they're going to invite the ignorant natives to join their exclusive brain club," Harry said disdainfully. "It's the best hope the human race has ever had! Could you -- now that you know what this represents -- turn your back on it and forget it?" T Tarry made an unpleasant, snorting noise. "I think you have been had. These characters come along with, a sob story and dollars in exchange for peanuts. You sweep cigar butts and empty spittoons in their little railroad station. And they must be laughing like hell at such a bargain. Or else they think they've conned some simple minded natives into minding the store for the glory of association with the Great Feathered God. You have nonprofit transactions only with groups too primitive to deal, to value, to negotiate. It's always been an insult to give a man something. He'll slap you in the face for it the first time he gets on his feet. It's a sign of primitiveness not to ask for a deal." Dr. Ames stared at him coldly. But there was pain in his voice when he spoke. "I'm sorry you see the situation from such a viewpoint. Mr. Smith's report -- which is obviously erroneous -- indicated a high degree of idealism that is not apparent in you. We thought you would be delighted at this opportunity to participate in the intelligent growth of the Universe." Harry swore. "Look, I'm as idealistic as the next guy, and I could see how nice it would be to have a slice of the science that can build matter transmitters. But if you can't get your hands on it, you may as well have never heard of it. It's not doing you any good. What does growth of the Universe mean if you're not part of it?" "When the human race is worthy -- " "Nuts! The human race will never be worthy. And who sets the standards of worth, anyhow? A few people within the human race could undoubtedly make good use of this science and maybe elevate the race as a whole because of it. But it's no good unless it's in your hands. And you have given these creatures two generations of service -- !" "Our service has been very small," said Ames, "for the privilege of association with such an advanced culture." tC'VT'ou've been caught in a bare-faced con game. They sound like some of the contractors I've seen who propose to build world-beating weapons systems for the Government, and when you look into it you find they're working out of a barn. When I was a Technical Contract Negotiator I learned that people respect a man who asks a fair price for what he does. Nobody respects the outfit that tries to buy in on a program by offering a i job below cost These characters needed a base manned by intelligent natives in this part of the galaxy. Obviously, there aren't any others within fifty thousand light-years. We're them ! And there you had the Emissary's crowd over a barrel and didn't even try to dicker a fair deal out of them. "Sometimes it's better to say 'Right deal or no deal at all.' It's not true that a deal at any cost is right. Every deal has a price that's too high for the benefit received. A seller will always try to force the buyer above that point. A little old-fashioned horse trading can make a deal profitable for both sides. If it can't, the deal is not worth consumating. Everybody knows that except, some scientists and U.S. foreign policy experts. You're being played for suckers." "It may be necessary to extend your probationary period," said Dr. Ames. "You can guess that we occasionally find potential employees who do not fit into our program. Hypnochemical methods must be used to prevent their revelation of our program after we expose it. I'm sure Mr. Smith explained this to you." "Mr. Smith didn't explain anything. But it really doesn't matter much. You're done for, anyway. This very unworthy human race -- or some members thereof -- are about to blow the entire operation off the map." "What exactly do you mean?" "I mean this little hotbed of a border war going on around you. You aren't dealing merely with spear-throwing natives. The other side has Russian missiles, and they're zeroed in on this station right now." T'Vr. Ames seemed to shrink as -- ' he sank into his chair. His face green lined and gray. His eyes seemed to retreat in their sockets as he stared at Harry. "How do you know?" he said at last. "They showed up on the IR camera during helicopter patrol. I saw enough of them in Vietnam to recognize them." "I haven't seen any such pictures." "I don't know what happened to the pictures. Maybe somebody's hiding them from you. But I took them, and you should be able to recognize the mobile launchers yourself." Dr. Ames nodded slowly. His eyes focussed over Harry's shoulder and an infinity beyond. "I see," he said slowly. "I see. You have done us a great service, Wiseman. Now I wonder if I could prevail upon you to assist in our final function?" "What are you talking about?" "You spoke the truth a moment ago when you said things didn't matter now. They don't. This is the end of two lifetimes of dreaming. Whatever you think of the rationality of our actions, you must agree we've been faithful to our dream. Now we must perform one final act of faith." "I don't understand." "If one of those missiles is fired and destroys the station the Train will also be destroyed. You see, we're not talking about a discrete thing, made up of cars, an engine and so on. The 'Train' is more a pipeline. It is in continuous operation and is filled with merchandise, raw materials -- and inhabitants of a thousand worlds. If the station is destroyed, it will mean the destruction of an inestimable volume of goods and the deaths of hundreds of creatures of the galaxy. We must not let that happen." "How can you prevent it?" "We can institute a procedure known as shunting. It has never been used by us, but it has been established by the operators as an emergency procedure that will shunt the train to another track, so to speak, and enable it to reach an emergency station. But once we use it, they will never reinstate Earth as a relay point." "Why? This is a legitimate emergency." A mes smiled bitterly. "I'm afraid they don't like our brand of emergencies. During the two World Wars they closed the station and threatened to move it completely. We assured them such things could not happen again and that the station would be safe. Now the station is in more danger than it has ever been, and we have tried to keep the information from them for fear they would move it. I'm afraid we haven't been wise. We have been greedy. Now, shunting is our only choice." "What do you want me to do?" "A shunting procedure would be opposed by many of our people. They are fiercely determined to maintain the station at all costs. But they forget the cost would be paid by our friends of other galaxies, rather than ourselves. So I might be opposed and overpowered if it were known I was going to shunt. I will get a dozen technicians I can trust. I can use your help. Will you join me?" Harry felt caught now in forces he understood not at all. But he felt a kinship with Ames and his dreams. Regretfully, he wished the decision did not have to be so final. But with the missile zeroed on the station there was no time to defend or negotiate. The risk was too great. The Train had to be put out of danger. "I'll do anything I can," he said. "Good. It will take a little time to make preparations. Meet me in the Operations Center an hour from now. Don't be late. It will be dangerous to delay any longer." Harry left the office with a feeling of some "infinite sadness. It was all too new for him to fully comprehend or sense the feeling among the station personnel. But now he could understand something of the intense devotion that had seemed so mysterious before. In front of the Administration Building he met a junior technician who was just alighting from a Jeep, "Mr. Martin wants to see you right away. It's very urgent," the technician said. "He sent me to look for you." The technician gestured toward the Operations Center and waited expectantly for Harry to climb into the Jeep. Harry waited deliberately. The technician seemed too anxious. Yet this couldn't possibly have anything to do with Harry's conversation with' Ames. He wanted to help Ames now. Nothing must hold him back from that "Can't it wait until later?" lie said. "I have some appointments to keep." "It won't take long. Mr. Martin is very anxious." T TTith the same slow delibera'  tion Harry got into the Jeep beside the technician. A few moments later He was in Steve Martin's office in the Operations Center. Two other men were present. Harry had not met either. "Sit down," said Steve. He gestured to a chair. His face was hard and unfriendly. Harry sat on the edge of a desk. Steve watched, challenging Harry to decline his invitation. Harry remained where he was. "Who are you?" Steve said. "You know who I am." "No, we don't. I've seen your pictures of the Addabas missile launcher. You knew it was there. Frank Declaux says you led the way right to it. You knew where to look. Who are you, Wiseman? What are you doing here? How did you know about that launcher?" "I saw plenty of them in Vietnam," said Harry. "They're easy to recognize once you've seen one." "That's not good enough. You led Frank Declaux right to it. You knew where to look." "I've seen enough' gun sites and missile pads to know where they are supposed to be." "Right where you knew it would be." "So you're telling the story," said Harry. "What's the next chapter?" "I don't know." Steve dropped in a chair and put his feet up on the desk and watched Harry's face with minute inspection. "Smith couldn't have been that wrong about you. His tests are better than that." "They're pretty thorough," Harry agreed. "Look, Wiseman. I'm going to give you the whole story now. And your life depends on what you decide to do about it. There's no place to run to from Here, and nobody to call for help. Is that clear?" "Quite clear." "All right. You've heard Ames's side of the story. Now Hear ours. Two generations of good men have been wasted waiting for the Emissary and hi# people to give us something more than a grubstake for taking care of their station. They've given us nothing. We've made the best possible psychological analysis of the Emissary. Dr. James Here -- " Steve nodded to one of the other men. " -- Dr. James is among the world's best qualified psychologists in the field of antagonistic cultures. His analysis is that the Emissary is never going to give us anything. They're playing us for patsies." ( ( T told Ames exactly that," said Harry. "We seem to be in full agreement" "Good. That makes the rest of it much easier." "And what's the rest of it?" "We're going to take something in return for the years of service EartHmen have given the Emissary." Steve pointed out to the the barren compound. "Out there, every hour there passes knowledge and wealth of artifacts of a super-science belond valuation. We're going to stop the train and help ourselves. For fifty years we've been doing janitor work for these creeps. They're never going to invite us into the club. But one trainload -- just one trainload would repay us for everything. It would advance our basic science by a dozen generations. We'd get enough to reach out to the stars and make contact with the galaxies on our own." "I'll be damned," said Harry. "A regular old-fashioned train robbery!" "Call it that if you like. We prefer to view it simply as a long overdue collection." "And you want me in?" said Harry. "How come? What do I do?" "You keep your mouth shut. That's absolutely all. Just keep your mouth shut. It's on that that your survival depends. The stakes are too high for us to be fooling around." "I'm afraid you lost me on that round. What am I supposed to keep shut about?" "The missile launcher." "Now you have lost me. What's the connection between the missile and your proposed high-jacking of the train?" "The missile is the means. It's zeroed on the north grid, the transmission grid. When that grid is blown out of commission the Train will automatically materialize on the reception grid, the south one. It will pop up right here in the compound with its load of goodies." "It seems to me it would be a lot easier to just pull a switch somewhere." Steve laughed. "It might -- if we could find a switch to pull. You saw the modules we deal with. We honestly don't know how to disable any selected part of the station. We've been looking for five years." "Your proposal is a little on the risky side. Even Russian missiles aren't that accurate." "We've zeroed this one in with accuracy we consider sufficient." "And suppose it works? Do you think the Emissary is going to hold still for that? How do you know those people won't be down here with fire and wipe the whole Earth out of the Universe?" ( C nr'he probability is better than # that they won't react. We show them this is the product of intra-group dispute. They're used to our wars. They will pull their station out as they threatened to do the last time, but they won't retaliate. Dr. James is sure of it." "I wish I was as sure as Dr. James is," said Harry. "No offense -- " he nodded to the psychologist. "Of course not," said Dr. James. "We are adequately certain of our ground. Our explanation of a missile blast will be accepted. Sabotage of the equipment -- even if we could do it -- would be recognized as deliberate. That could cause retaliation." "So you're Communists," said Harry with finality. "No," said Steve, "that's one thing we aren't. They think we are. We're using them. They've used us long enough. Don't you think it's time for a turn around?" "It's a case of supping with the Devil." "We can handle them. Don't worry about that" "The famous last words of a lot of good men." "Forget it. You've got the picture of the situation. Where do you stand?" "On the sidelines -- if you don't mind. I think you're a bunch of damned fools," "That's all right with us. But just keep your mouth shut about the missile. Is that clear?" "Clear. I'm just curious about one point. What would Dr. Ames and his people do if they learned about it?" "Ames is an old fool. His whole  rowd is a btinch of old women, ihinking they're going to get mmething out of the Emissary. Hut if you told them about this iliey would start an operation I'nlled shunt. It would turn the train aside, and we'd be out of luck forever -- and you would I as dead as it's possible to get." Harry started to move from the llble. The door burst open with flldden fury, and the same technician who'd escorted him here utmost fell into the room. He was wanting heavily and white-faced. 'Dr. Ames -- " he gasped. "Dr. Ames has been looking at the batch of IR pictures Mr. Wiseman took. He's seen the missile and launcher." Steve stood up. He and James looked at each other. "It's got to be now," said James. "We can't risk a delay." Steve nodded faintly in agreement. They moved to the door. Then he turned back to Harry. "You're remembering real hard." Harry nodded. "I'm remembering real hard?" IT arry glanced at the clock. Dr. Ames would be in the Operations Center by now. Harry didn't know what Steve might do to the Director if they met at this moment. But if they didn't meet, Steve would be off to whatever rendezvous he had to keep to order the firing of the missile. And Ames had to be helped -- But if the missile were off course -- Harry swore to himself. The damned, damned fools! Ames must be out there by now, but he stopped by the phone and dialed a number. "Nancy? Harry. I'm at the Operations Center. Can you drop whatever you're doing and come right over? There's something important -- " She begged off, and Harry insisted, as much as he dared with their somewhat fragile relationship. At last she agreed in a puzzled voice. "Right now!" said Harry. "I'll be waiting." It would be the safest place. He could send her down to one of the lower levels on some pretext. But he had to find Ames now. The Director was at the central control panel with six engineers. Harry was acquainted with two of them, Kripps and Sanderson. "We thought you weren't coming," Ames said. "We've got to hurry. Take panel Two and follow Ed's commands exactly. He will give you the sequence of steps when we reach that point." Harry nodded. The controls were complex and unfamiliar. He didn't see how he was going to follow any kind of critical sequence the first time through. The quickly explaining what was to be done. Before he was well started, the voice of Dr. Ames called out the beginning of the control sequence in strong, defiant tones. "Jam!" A sequence of controls was operated by the engineers. Harry followed their glances as they watched the indicators. Some of these consisted of small poles with changing hues of colors. Others were little balls that moved through a tell-tale maze in response to the commands of the controllers. After minutes, Ames called out the second command. "Trade!" His eyes followed anxiously the movements of his engineers as they wiped out his dream and the dream of his father and all those who had spent their lives on the station. "Switch!" "Float!" ne by one, the obscure signals  were called. Ames's face glistened with a sheet of sweat as he watched the responses of his crew. Then his hand reached for a control -- it was halfway there. His lips were shaped to give the command. The engineers Held their readiness for the next step. The actions were never finished. Sudden light flamed over the station. It flowed into every corner of the control room and burned eyes that shut in sudden agony against it. Then shock. It hurled the scientists to the floor. Walls shattered, and wild cries of pain told of those pinned beneath the debris. And sound. It roared and blasted and tore. Its dying away was a huge vacuum into which the senses fell. Harry groped helplessly from his prone position. His mouth was filled with dust and blood. The scene was lit by flames from the grid area. "Dr. Ames -- Nancy -- #" he called out. "They struck the grid," Dr. Ames cried in anguish. "They hit the grid before we completed the shunt." Harry struggled to his knees and crawled toward the scientist. "Dr. Ames -- are you all right?" "All right," Ames gasped. He twisted painfully to a sitting position. "Look to the others. We have got to get out of here. And the Train -- it will materialize on the receiving grid!" But Harry was thinking of Nancy Harris, whom he'd so stupidly asked to come to Operations to be safe in case of attack. He limped back toward the entrance while Ames called out to him in dismay. "Wiseman -- the grid!' He found her by the door. She had just entered when the blast came and had been thrown to the floor. She stirred dazedly now and looked up at him. "Harry -- Harry -- what's happened?" He reached down and lifted her gently. "The Addabas blasted the grid. Control is knocked out. The Train is materializing."  "Oh, no -- J Oh', no, Harry -- " the cried a moment in his arms. J She had shared the dream of Ames and the others. It didn't matter now that it was a phony dream, Harry thought It had been Nancy's dream, too. N ow the roaring rose and became like that of a tKouand jets far beyond the horizon. It approached and increased at the speed of jets, but did not pass. From the center of the South Grid the sound crashed against the jungle, the station buildings, and the people who staggered and groaned against it In terror and amazement. Harry pushed through' the sound as if it were a physical barrier, supporting Nancy with an arm about her waist. Dr. Ames and Kripps and Sanderson got to their feet and moved to the empty windows overlooking the Grid. There was mass out there, a strange mountain of mass that grew as they watched. As if from some internal heat, it glowed. Through blood-red, crimson, to can noon-day sun, the light rose and flamed. The mass moved as if in pain, and out of the midst of it came new alien sounds like the cries of beings from another world. "Materializing -- " Ames groaned. "But it's out of synch!" Kripps exclaimed. "It's a conglomerate mass!" "Freight -- goods -- people from dozens of alien worlds." Nancy murmured. "Like a crashed ship. Dr. Ames, we've got to Help them!" Ames seemed dazed by the disaster. "Yes -- yes," he agreed. "We've got to help them. Please notify the medical staff, Nancy. Tell them I order them here at once to do what they can." "Our own people need help, too," said Harry. The cries of injured continued to come from other parts of the building. He turned back to the room. Some figures lay still upon the floor in concerted shapes. Others were standing, like himself, gazing numbly at the desolation. Nancy tried the phone and found it dead. "I'll get Dr. Bintz and Dr. Walker," she said. "I'll go back to the barracks and get everyone to bring supplies and help." "You're sure you're all right?" said Harry. "I'm fine." "Kripps -- Sanderson!" Harry called. "Check our people in the building, will you? Find out who needs help. The medics will be here in a few minutes." The engineers nodded in dazed agreement. Harry moved toward the window where he'd last seen Ames, but the scientist was no longer there. Harry called his name. Kripps said, "I think Dr. Ames went down towards the Grid." H arry saw him then. The proud figure was shambling painfully toward the mountain of rubble that was growing a half mile away. Harry crawled over the debris of the fallen wall and raced toward him. The roar of crashing materials was a physical force. A gale wind of displaced air speared at him. Amid the maelstrom, a quieter sound of seething, hissing substances was like a counterpoint. "Dr. Ames! You can't go out there! It's too dangerous." Ames turned, his face reflecting his inner agony. "There are people out there. People of other galaxies. They're alive in that burning mound. We've got to help!" "There's nothing you can do, We'll get a fire truck and the medics and do anything that'i possible, but it's too dangeroui for you to get near the pile whilo it's growing." "If they aren't crushed in that mountain of junk, our alien atmosphere will kill them." Ames paused, and Harry stood by him, and for the first time absorbed the magnitude of the catastrophe. The inferno of materializing objects was growing as if, literally, a cosmic train were piling into an immovable obstacle. There were flames rising from scattered points on the mound, but the crimson glow was caused more by the release of radiant energy as the flowing beam reconverted to tangible atoms. The walls seemed almost vertical, as if the mass were growing from within. Like a moving lava front, the upper edges curled and toppled and were borne under the slowly expanding wall. "We always wondered what would happen -- " said Ames almost inaudibly. "Some of us thought the Train would materialize in good order. But others thought that synchronization would be lost and only a conglomerate mass would appear. They were the ones who were right." Harry wondered if Ames had any idea that Steve Martin was responsible for the disaster. Surely he must have suspected what Steve was thinking. A nd then they saw him. The desperate figure of the Operations Manager was leaping from a Jeep and racing toward the mound from the direction of the barracks buildings. He seemed to have no intention of stopping. His ant-like figure was almost at the base of the expanding mound. "Martin!" Harry shouted vainly through the chaos. Steve Martin was at the very edge of the mound, retreating as it spilled toward him. Harry surged through the blast of air and heat and sound. The expanding wall of debris was nearly vertical as he reached Steve Martin. The top curled outward and fell with avalanche fury, "Martin!" Harry grasped the Manager's arm and pulled him back from the edge of the inferno. Steve Martin fought loose, oblivious to danger as the mass tumbled at his feet. "Come back, Martin!" Harry shouted. "That stuff will bury you!" "No, it's all right. We're safe here. Look, Wiseman -- we missed getting what we wanted because synchronization didn't hold. But you can make out the shapes of stuff, and it's still good. We can still find out what it's madr of and how it works. Look, now -- what is that? Household goods -- machinery -- scientific equipment? From where? This stuff has come from Andromeda Alpha Centauri -- worlds a hunThis is what they've been holding back -- the Emissary and his chiseling crowd. They thought they could use us like some for-j eign (natives. And Ames, old! mother Ames -- he thought by I being nice to the Emissary they would turn loose some of this' stuff in time. When the human race is worthy, he used to say. Did he give you that line, Wiseman? "If we knew the sciences, the technologies behind this stuff -- even this scrap -- But we'll find it, Wiseman. And you'll help us, won't you? You're remembering real good, aren't you, Wiseman? Remembering real good -- " "Look out!" Harry glanced up at the mass that burned and curled outward above them. He gripped Steve Martin's arm and dragged fiercelyMartin tore loose from his grasp and moved even closer to the moving, surging mound, as if to embrace it wildly. Then the curling mass plunged down. Harry heard faintly the cry of pain and terror. IX D r. Ames limped painfully to Harry's side. "I saw it. Tliat was an awful way to go, but a man like Martin doesn't deserve mucti better." "You knew?" Ames nodded. "I knew lie wanted to materialize the Train. I didn't think he'd go this far. but when I saw your pictures of the missile launcher, I knew there was no time left We had no other course but to abandon the project." Harry looked back at the surging, growing mass that seethed and hissed and represented the science and technology of worlds more fabulous than all man's dreams. "There could have been a better way," he said. "It didn't have to end like this. We coul c j have made a deal with them. You can always make a deal with anybody if you just try hard enough -- if they've got something you want, and you've got something they want. All it takes is a little decent horse trading  -- " A movement far down at the edge of the pile caught Harry's eye. Dr. Ames saw it, too, and he gasped as he saw a figure -- a creature -- and then another." Ames gripped Harry's arm. "Harry -- people. Passengers from the Train -- they're still alive!" A grotesque shape struggled up from the ground, groping with two arms. In despair, it tumbled on its side, shuddered and lay still. It was a furry, unfamiliar shape, but Harry could see it was burned and tom with lethal injuries. Beyond it, another alien, a biped, struggled up, staggered and took a step forward. It had giant eyes, like a lemur's, that shone even in the sunlight. Short, fluffy hair covered its body -- a barrel-like torso with pipestem limbs. Ames sucked in his breath. "The Emissary! But it can't be -- it's one of the same race. They're air breathers. They can survive in our atmosphere. Most of these others can't." The creature stumbled, then steadied itself. Finally it bent down and picked something from the ground. "A child!" Ames exclaimed. "One of their children." "On its way to grandmother's house on the other side of the galaxy," murmured Harry. He felt it was silly, but it could well be true. As they watched, Nancy drove up in a Jeep and saw what was taking place. She jumped out and ran to them. "We've just got to help those people!" The fiery wind buffeted her as she raced toward the two creatures. Qhe approached the alien and k' held out her arms for the infant. The adult whirled and slashed out with one arm. The blow struck Nancy on the side of the head .and knocked her to the ground. Harry and Dr. Ames rushed to ward off further attack. "Don't!" cried Nancy. "It didn't understand. It thought I meant harm to the baby. They must be half crazy with shock, anyway." They faced the alien in a moment of doubtful hostility. Then, slowly the alien slumped. The spidery arms grew lax, and the huge eyes softened with infinite imploring. "Catch the baby!" Nancy cried. Harry stepped forward and caught the young one as the adult collapsed. Words of a sibilant, uncomprehended tongue slipped from the furry lips, and then the strange body was still. "I'll take the infant to the dispensary," said Nancy. "We've got to help as many as we can." "We don't understand their metabolism or their anatomy," said Dr. Ames. "We couldn't even safely apply an antiseptic to their wounds -- or give an anesthetic for an operation we wouldn't know how to perform. There's almost nothing we can do for them." "We've really got to try." "What about our own people?" said Harry. "Everything is under control. The doctors are at the Operations Center now. They have plenty to help. But six of our own people are dead." Dr. Ames looked at the spot where Steve Martin had disappeared. "Seven," he said. "But maybe you're right.  We shouldn't count him as one of our people." Nancy laid the small furry alien in the back of the Jeep and drove to the dispensary in the barracks area. Harry and Dr. Ames walked back to the Opera tions Center. It was swarming now with station personnel under the direction of the doctors. Stretcher patients were being ferried to the dispensary for treatment of wounds and operations on internal injuries. "The end of a dream," said Dr. Ames. "Maybe you were right, Wiseman. We were idiots to dream. Man is an idiot to dream in a world where dreams can't come true." "I didn't say that," said Harry. "There's nothing wrong with dreaming. You just have to go about it in the right way." "If I weren't too old to learn I might ask you to show me the right way." And who am I to tell anyone how to dream? Harry thought. When all of my own have turned so sour -- r The pile of debris continued growing through the day. By nightfall it diminished its rate of growth slightly, but continued to glow and roar and stir fierce winds. Dr. Ames said that the transmission had undoubtedly stopped long ago, but whatever was in the pipeline would have to feed on through to its own destruction. They knew that some salvage of a thousand priceless technologies might be possible from the debris, but they gave little thought to that now. During the afternoon, living conditions were restored as best they could. The dead were buried and an airlift of the injured to Cape Town was begun. They bore the aliens to the expanded, makeshift quarters in the barracks buildings, gave them such medical care as seemed feasible while they took care of their own injured. Harry looked for Nancy near the end of the day and found her at the bedside of the alien child. "I've been able to talk with her n little," said Nancy. "She speaks the language of the Emissary, which we've all learned a little. She's about the age of a ten-yearold among us. She was on the way across the Galaxy to visit others of her family. It was the first trip she had ever been allowed to take alone. The one who picked her up was an older woman with whom she'd made an acquaintance just before the trip. She's like a little girl on the way to visit her grandmother in the country!" So it hadn't been so silly, after all. Harry looked at the little lemur face. The huge eyes seemed to plead for succor he could not give. "Do you have any idea how to treat her? Do you know what she eats?" Nancy shook her head. "We've read something in their books about their native foods, but we can't compare them with ours. We've taken blood and tissue specimens for analysis to see if we can estimate food requirements. We know, of course, they're on a carbon-oxygen cycle so we ought to be able to come close." X Vn the morning after the disaster, they saw what Harry had been told everyone expected to see. The Emissary. His ship was like an eight-foot crystal egg. It appeared after sunrise between the South Grid and the ravaged Operations Center. All station personnel who were able to walk were waiting and watching for him. And dreading the sight when he came. The Emissary emerged from Ins ship and walked toward the ruin. The station 'fire truck was still pouring foam onto the outbreaks of fire. The Emissary watch'ed it, and the personnel of Africa Prime watched him. The silence was total. Only the squeals of jungle animals beyond the compound and the hiss of foam on the mountain of debris were heard. Dr. Ames walked slowly from the crowd toward the Emissary. He passed the crystal egg, and then the Emissary turned' and saw him. They stood a moment The crowd could not Hear their words. Harry guessed Dr. Ames was telling how the accident Happened: An act of war by the enemies of the Gambuans. TKe alien and the scientist began walking back. They stopped in front of the crowd. Dr. Ames began speaking slowly. "I Have expressed our deep regret to our friend, the Emissary, that our condition of warfare Has finally resulted in such a tremendous disaster to their transportation system. I am told that there can be no consideration of the continuation of the relay station, even though I Have suggested relocation to other, more remote areas such as the poles or the Australian outback. They have made a comprehensive computer-type prognostication of the political and martial future of Earth's civilizations, and it is not favorable to their continuing operation here. There is no other answer except to end the association. The Emissary would like to express his regrets and his thanks to you." I n halting bursts of gutturallyspoken English, the Emissary began to speak. At first, Harry could not distinguish the words, but gradually he was able to get the intent of the alien's words. "It is with regret that I end our establishment," the Emissary said. "You have served faithfully and long, but our establishment is not safe. Our merchandise has been destroyed and the lives of our people have been lost -- and we shall Have to account to the Dm war and the Ectoba Galaxies for the loss of their travelers, and it will not be a pleasant negotiation. This must end. We give you our many thanks for your services. But this must end." He seemed to glance over the crowd without seeing and then turned. Disbelief and uncomprehending disappointment were on the faces of the engineering anti technical personnel of Africa Prime. But nobody spoke. None except Harry Wiseman. He plunged out of the crowd and stopped within a half dozen feet of the Emissary. "Just a minute, please. I think you're forgetting something." The Alien turned at the strange sound of Harry's voice, scanned him with the lemur eyes and finally spoke disparagingly. "Nothing has been forgotten." "Payment," said Harry. "You forgot to say anything about payment for the services rendered to date." The eyes scanned him again. "You have not been here before. I would have remembered you." "I'm new, all right. I've been appointed Technical Contracts Negotiator. That's my business. Sometimes a contractor and a customer don't see eye to eye on the cost of a program, and it's my business to iron out any discrepancies." "You talk gibberish," said the Emissary. "I don't understand a thing you are saying." "I'm saying you owe these people payment for their services. They have done something for you, now you must do something for them." The Emissary turned and faced Harry squarely. "You excite my interest. They made no request for any kind of payment -- except to come to our planet, which we could not permit because of restrictions on lower cultures. It disturbed us at first. We could not understand why you made no request in return. We concluded your culture was just too primitive. I estimated we were adored, and we gave small things like gold bobs." "You misestimated completely, I'm afraid," said Harry. "Those gold bobs were used to buy goods to sustain these people, but it was strictly subsistence. A payment in term of profit is desired. Do you understand me?" "Yes -- I think I do," the Emissary said. "And you astonish me. I did not know this was so high a culture." T Tarry felt a burst of elation. He'd been right in his sizing up of the situation. The scientists had been taken for boobs because they had acted like boobs, Harry smiled expansively and hooked his thumbs in his belt. "Well, now -- so you recognize that we haven't had a very good deal. So you'll see how we just couldn't take another contract like this one. We've lost our shirts, and I know you wouldn't want to see that happen again -- " "This must end," the Emissary said with discernible frost in his voice. "We have agreed to that." Harry ignored his interruption. 'We haven't had a very good deal. But we might be persuaded co continue if some arrangement for back remuneration could be made. In turn, we would be agreeable to establishing fully secure facilities." "There is no place on your planet that is secure. We would not risk establishing our station again under such conditions as prevail here." Harry nodded in sad agreement. "We are more than aware of our own grave deficiencies. We feel deeply our own negligence in exposing your station to the hazards we did. But we also recognize your great need of a terminal in this area. That is why we are prepared to make extraordinary concessions in reestablishing the station in a positively secure site." "Name such a place!" "Mars. The planet Mars." The Emissary stared, his mouth opening silently. Dr. Ames stared in disbelief. Nancy Harris gave a little scream. "Mars!" Harry nodded. "Mars." The Emissary closed his mouth and started over. "You have no facilities or access to Mars." He glanced around in despair. "You are the most preposterous people Galaxies!" "It's just as easy for you to set up your equipment on Mars as on Earth," said Harry. "That's not a pinpoint's difference in location on your Galactic maps." "You certainly know what the Martian terrain and atmosphere are like! You couldn't exist there -- " Harry shrugged carelessly. "A protective dome with captive Terran environment would be a simple matter for your engineers." The Emissary stared from one to the other as if trying to absorb the impact of this proposal. "This would be a great effort -- so great a change -- for your people." "That's right," said Harry hastily. "And that's why I mentioned remuneration to begin with. We could only consider such a project on the basis of very adequate remuneration -- which you agree we haven't had so far. But we'll consider taking on this job -- if you care to make an offer." "There has been difficulty in staffing even this station. There would not be enough of you willing to go to Mars for such a project." TTarry laughed heartily and turned slow to those behind him. Now was the moment of truth. His laugh died as he caught Ames's apoplectic eye, and the confused countenances of Kipps, Stevenson, a score of engineers. He forced himself to laugh again. "He thinks we wouldn't want to go to Mars. Can you imagine that, folks? We'd Jump at the chance to go to Mars, wouldn't we? Wouldn't we, Dr. Ames? Kipps, you'd jump at the chance to run this station on Mars, wouldn't you?" The throats of some seemed to work with strangled words. Ames tood tight-lipped and stiff. Harry wheeled desperately. "We'd go to Mars and love it, Wouldn't we? Wouldn't we -- ?" He searched with rising panic for B responsive face in the immobile crowd. A smile was like a iudden light in the gloom. "Wouldn't we, Nancy?" "Of course we would!" Nancy exclaimed. "I've always wanted to go to Mars. It's the one place I'd rather see than any other." She turned to Ames and shook his immobile arm. "Don't you agree, Dr. Ames? Won't it be wonderful, living and working on Mars?" Ames's immobile stature seemed to break, and he turned, smiling down at Nancy. "I can't imagine anything more delightful, my dear." Kipps simply shook his head In disbelieving wonder. "You did It, Wiseman. Damned if you didn't do it." "But you'll go with us to Mars, won't you?" Harry persisted. "Yeah. Yeah, sure I'll go. Do you think you could leave me out of it?" They were all laughing then and pounding each other on the back and shaking hands and kissing the girls. Harry turned to the Emissary. "You see? There's no question about our going to Mars if you wish to provide the means and a proper contract." The Emissary nodded uncomprehendingly. "Yes, I see," he said: "I see." "If you care to step into the office back there, I think we can clear a desk and perhaps discuss terms of the contract -- " The Emissary strode slowly forward at Harry's invitation. Behind his back Nancy threw her arms about Harry's neck and kissed him exuberantly. It would be a long time, Harry thought, before Collins got his report on Smith Industries. there is another solar system in the general neighborhood and, among others, they look at the G-type star we call the sun. Could they find out whether that star has planets? The condition for the discussion is that their instruments are not much better than ours, that their brains are equal to ours, and that their patience is what is needed for the job on hand. The method they, have to use is the one that on our planet was introduced by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. You very carefully measure the position of a star and keep this up for a considerable number of years. That way you obtain a straight line representing the motion of that star. Of course this works only with a star that is relatively near; nobody lives long enough to do that successfully with a distant star. And even if you pick a nearby star you can still be out of luck if that star happens to move more or less along the line of sight, either toward us or away from us. Bessel, to his great pleasure, found that the motion of Sirius looked like a slightly wavy line. The telescopes of his time did not show a "companion of Sirius," but the wavy line proved that there had to be such a companion. The reason why the line must be wavy is that a planet does not simply revolve around Fig. #. The motions of two stars around their common center of gravity. The diagram begins with the position of extreme distance (Xa to Ya), While the more massive star moves from Xo to Xb, the weaker companion moves from Ya to Yb. The positions Xd to Yd represent the shortest possible distance distance between the two stars. a star, but that, strictly speaking, both revolve around a common center of gravity. Theoretically this holds true no matter how large or how small the planet is; : in reality the mass of a very small planet could be neglected. If our sun had no other planets than little Pluto, the center of mass of the sun-Pluto system would, for any practical purpose, be the center of the sun. Tut if you have two bodies of .O comparable masses, say with the larger one three times as massive as the smaller one, the concept of "revolution around the common center of gravity" acquires reality. Fig. I shows an. example, for two stars called X and Y, where X is the more massive of the pair. All the lines between X and Y go through the common center of gravity (also called the center of gravity of the system) and when X is in position Xa, then Y must be in Yb, and so forth. The situation shown in Fig. I shows the system "at rest," as it were; only motion around the common center of gravity as assumed. In reality the whole system wall also move through space and then the performance would look like Fig. #. Since I have picked a binary or double star as an example, both stars would be visible as a rule. But if you assume that the weaker of the two does not produce enough light to be visible, the visible partner of the pair would seem to move along a wavy line. Sirius seemed to have such a dark companion. Soon afterward it was found that Procyon also had a dark companion. But in # it turned out that the companion of Sirius was not dark, it was just small. It was the first of the so-called White Dwarfs to be discovered. And a few years later the companion of Procyon also turned out to be visible in a sufficiently powerful instrument. But Bessel's method had proved Its value just because it had revealed the existence of two astronomical bodies before they could be seen. More recently a total of four "dark companions" of four different stars have been discovered, and since their masses are quite small, it is likely that they are really dark. Now we can return to the original question: could an astronomer residing on a planet # or # light-years away deduce the existence of planets of our sun in this manner? In other words, would our sun seem to move in a wavy line? Knowing that the sun contains #  of all the matter in the solar system one is tempted to say that this is unlikely: the remaining #  do not look as if they could influence the other #  . especially since the #  are not even concentrated in one body but spread over eight major and very many minor planets. As happens quite often, such quick reasoning -- though it sounds convincing -- is nevertheless off the mark. West Coast astronomers, after having performed the necessary calculations, found that the planets do Influence the sun's motion. 'T'he reason why the conclusion  that the #  of the total mass of the solar system can influence the # represented by the sun is that they are very nearly concentrated in one body, namely Jupiter. Here is a list of the masses of the planets, expressed in earth masses: Mercury # Venus #I Earth # Mars #I Jupiter # Saturn # Uranus # Neptune # adding up to # earth masses. Didn't I forget a few things? How about the combined mass of the asteroids; the four major moons of Jupiter: Titan, moon of Saturn; Triton, major moon of Neptune and our own rather large moon? I just added them up separately with the generous assumption that the total mass of the asteroids equals the mass of Mercury. The result is # earth masses, bringing the total up to # earth masses. With all the smaller moons of the major planets and the comets, we might end up with an even # earth masses. But look at the list again, now. One glance shows that Jupiter has more mass than all the other planets taken together -- if you take Jupiter away it is SatFig. #. The center of moss of our solar system. It can vary from the vicinity of the center of the sun to a point # miles from the sun's surface. urn that has more mass tfian to more than the solar diameters, all the others together. In fact (Fig. #.) Jupiter represents a little more than # per cent of the total T T owever. Nature does not mass of the solar system.  make things quite so easy It has been said earlier that for the astronomers on that oththe center of gravity of the solar er planet. There are still the othsystem would be identical with er # per cent of the mass of the center of the sun if Pluto the solar system, concentrated were the only planet. How would mainly in Saturn; and Saturn it look if Jupiter were the only (plus Uranus and Neptune) planet? Then the center of gravwill sometimes work along with ity of the system would actually Jupiter and sometimes more or be outside the sun. It would be less negate Jupiter's influence. # miles from the sun's cenIn #I the four outer planets ter and since the radius of the practically cancelled each other sun is approximately # out. Jupiter was on one side of miles it would be some # the sun, Saturn, Uranus and miles above the sun's surface in Neptune were on the other side, the direction of Jupiter's posiand the center of gravity of the tion. This would introduce a whole solar system was very measurable waviness in the sun's close to the sun's center. But motion, since it would amount then Jupiter moved around and for the period from # to #I til the four outer planets were roughly in the same direction as ieen from the sun, and the center of gravity of the whole system was # miles from the sun's center or # miles from the tun's surface. After that the planets again dispersed, mainly because of Jupiter's faster orbital motion. By # the masscenter of the whole system was inside the sun again, and by # it will about coincide with the sun's "surface" or rather the photosphere. Then it will move outside the sun again. The patient observer on the planet # or # light-years away will find out that the wavy line described by our sun has a variation in amplitude; sometimes it will be less wavy than at other times. They should Have no trouble concluding that our sun is orbited by at least two, but probably three or four, dark companions. Of course they will try to determine the masses and periods of revolution of the dark companions but since they can assume the existence of two, or three, or four companions, the arguments at scientific meetings should be lovely. Maybe, at some time in the future, we'll meet and compare the solar system they have deduced with the facts as we know than to be. The Case of the "Atomic Rocket ." A short number of years ago -- only three or four -- the radio commentator Barry Farber said to me just before we went on the air, "My last question will be: if you could talk with one of the top men in the Soviet rocket program and you could ask him one question with the assurance that you'll receive a truthful answer, what would you ask him? I am telling you this now so that you have a little time to think about the question you would ask." When he did ask me I Had an answer ready. I would ask the Russian expert on whether the Soviet Union had a program for developing a nuclear-powered rocket. Unfortunately I never Had the chance of actually asking this question and if I had had such a chance there would have been no assurance that I would Have received a truthful answer  -- or an answer at all. But since our side has been thinking about nuclear rockets since # and began actual work (Project Rover) in #, it would be more surprising indeed if the Russians were not doing a great deal of investigating on their own. The fundamental concept of the nuclear rocket is quite simpie: a suitable substance, preferably a liquid, is heated by an atomic reactor so that it first turns into a gas and then into a hot gas under pressure which escapes through an exhaust nozzle like the combustion gases of a rocket with chemical fuels. The next question is what is a suitable substance, or rather what makes a substance suitable. Let us assume that you bum an ordinary liquid fuel like ethyl alcohol with the necessary amount of liquid oxygen, you'll have an exhaust blast consisting of water vapor (H # O) and corbon dioxide (CO # ). It will have a certain exhaust velocity which we'll call c (the numerical value will be somewhere between # and # feet per second) and a mass equal to the amount of alcohol and oxygen consumed during a given time, let's say one second. The thrust produced by this exhaust blast, we'll call it P, can be calculated by the fundamental rocket formula P  c (dmdt) where dmdt is assumed to represent the exhaust mass during one second. If you want to increase P we can do one of two things; we can increase dmdt which means we can bum more fuel per second, or else we leave dmdt alone and increase c. This usually means a switch to a more energetic fuel, but I have picked the example of alcohol for a specific reason; it is one of the few cases where c can be increased by another method. A s has been mentioned, the exhaust consists of CO and H # O. A molecule of CO # weighs #(### units, the figures being the atomic weights of the elements involved. A molecule of H # O weighs #-#f# # units. If we say for the sake of simplicity that the number of CO # molecules is equal to the number of H # O molecules (not true), the average molecular weight of the exhaust would be #I units. As we have just seen the CO # molecule weighs two and a half times as much as the H # O molecule. If you add water to the alcohol, the combustion heat will vaporize it and you then have more of the lighter molecules in the exhaust. Its average molecular weight is now less, and for this reason the exhaust velocity goes up. Of course you must not add so much water that the combustion temperature is lowered to a considerable extent. The most practical mixture, the one that was used in all large alcohol burning rockets, is # alcohol with # water. The lesson learned was that the molecular weight of the exhaust should be as low as possible. The lightest molecule in existence is that of hydrogen, but in a chemical rocket hydrogen has to be burned with something -- it could be oxygen or fluorine. Since fluorine is the most dangerous chemical element in existence, the choice of oxygen was rather obvious. Besides, the atomic weight of fluorine is #, three units heavier than oxygen, so that the molecules in the exhaust would then weigh more. A rocket burning pure hydrogen with pure oxygen produces tm exhaust of pure water vapor, with a molecular weight of # units, and you cannot get any lighter molecules in a rocket exhaust. Unless, of course, you don't burn the hydrogen. This is what happens (or does not happen, if you prefer) in the nuclear rocket. Fig # shows the general arrangement. The tank holds liquid hydrogen which is then pumped into what would be the combustion chamber in a liquid fuel rocket. In the nuclear rocket this space is occupied by the nuclear reactor that is run as hot as it can be run without melting itself. The hydrogen is heated while it passes through the reactor and emerges from the exhaust nozzle as a hot blast of pure hydrogen gas. A small amount of this gas goes through a by-pass pipe to supply power to the turbine that drives the fuel pump. For various reasons, of which higher efficiency is the most important, nuclear rockets are to be used as the upper stage of chemically powered rockets. They will, therefore, operate at altitudes where there is very little atmosphere left. If such a rocket were used in the lower atmosphere, forexample during a test flight, the very hot hydrogen gas would combine with the oxygen of the atmosphere and the rocket would acquire a long fiery trail. But this flame would be a secondary phenomenon that does not contribute to propulsion. r T"'he first prototype of what is clear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) rocket engine was called Kiwi-A and underwent its first test run on July #, #. It was successful with a hydrogen flow of # lbssec. Kiwi-B was to have ten times the hydrogen flow per second of Kiwi-A. It was first tested with gaseous hydrogen in December #I and with liquid hydrogen in September #. Some mechanical weaknesses in the reactor showed up and more tests resulted in a newer design called Phoebus-I. On February #, #, a Phoebus-IB reactor ran for a total of # minutes in several tests developing a thrust of # pounds. And in December ran for # minutes. Before anybody jumps to the conclusion that everything is superlatively rosy when it comes to nuclear rockets with Hydrogen exhaust, let me set down the disadvantages. They are what rocket engineers refer to as weight penalties, so named because the ideal rocket consists of fuel and payload only; every ounce of everything else is looked at with hostility. The weight penalty trouble begins with hydrogen itself. It was chosen because its molecule is the lightest there is. In its normal state as a gas it is the lightest gas there is. When liquid it also is a very light liquid, weighing only # grams per cubic centimeter. That means that the tank that is to hold, say # pounds of liquid hydrogen must be larger than a tank that is to hold # pounds of liquid oxygen that weighs # grams per cubic centimeter. Of course a larger tank weighs more. The next troublesome point is the temperature of liquid hydrogen. In order to be a liquid, hydrogen must be colder than minus # degrees centigrade ( minus # degrees Fahrenheit.) For liquid oxygen, with which there is far more experience, the figures minus # centigrade or minus # degrees Fahrenheit This means that the tank must be more heavily insulated, and there is another weight penalty.   space of the combustion chamber in a chemically fuelled rocket motor is taken up by a heavy reactor. Its actual weight has not been disclosed but it must weigh at least # grams per cubic centimeter, not counting the shielding that is needed. However,, these weight disadvantages are fully compensated by the higher thrust that results from a higher exhaust velocity. The exhaust velocity of the nuclear rocket will be nearly # meterssec., corresponding to # feetsec. This is roughly twice as high as the highest exhaust velocity obtainable with chemical fuels. At the time of writing this (late in June #) no date for a flight test has yet been set. As a matter of fact, the program may be menaced by budget cuts. But work on the all-important reactor has reached a point where the creation of a nuclear-propelled rocket is only a question      By now any regular reader of Galaxy or If has become pretty familiar with the work of a young Californian named Larry Niven, who appeared from nowhere three or four years ago and has rapidly become one of the most popular science-fiction writers around. It's easy enough to see how the to follow one's own course instead of th vogue of the moment -- and a lot of talent. Niven's third book is on the way now; his crop of published stories mounts into the dozens; at least one of them has won science-fiction's top story award, the "Hugo"... and next month we offer you a short novel which Niven calls his best story to date. The name of it is The O rganleggers. We've read it twice now. Wouldn't be a bit surprised but what he's right. Cover story in the issue, also a short novel -- and also a particularly fine one, we thought -- is Ben Bova's Focman, Where Do You Flee? The time is the fairly near future; Man has gone into space, and discovered that Earth in remote history was ravaged by a technologically superb, militarily ruthless race... that has left no trace of its origin. Question Is -- where are they now? And what are they up to? And, let's see, there's a Harlan Ellison-Keith Laumer collaboration, a batch of good short stories, the regular features by Algis Budrys and Willy Ley... we think it's likely to be the kind of issue you remember for some time. Where there's a Will, there's a female way -- even when the swain freezes at the hint of licenses. I T ove is a guerilla. He may  pounce from ambush, attack in sudden force, or throw off a disguise to reveal that he had already infiltrated'. His assault on Cyra took place early one morning when the newrisen sun enchanted the new-burgeoned leaves, the birds proclaimed that the world was theirs, and the works of man were no more than a vagrant clink of milkbottles. Cyra drifted through the dissolving curtains of sleep, stretched herself with feline satisfaction, lay still a moment, and then opened her eyes. It was at this precise moment that the shaft struck her, and the world was changed. She was startled to know that she was in love. This, in a world where 'love' is, by wearisome repetition, likely to imply little more than purely temporary frustrations moaned by bedhopping pop-singers, may need some explanation. Let it be understood, therefore, that this was no top-ten parody, no entrepreneur's packaged surrogate. It was the authentic rosy, aching, wanning, enchanting, frightening, weakening, strengthening, beautiful, devastating, life-transmitting thing. And Cyra lay there, overwhelmed by it. heart's eye, differed quite conas previously seen by her mind's eye -- and, it must be admitted, he would be almost unrecognizable to anyone else's eye. He had, for one thing, acquired' a fascinating amount of detail. She went over his face inch by inch. The hairline, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the eyes themselves, the texture of his skin, his nose, his mouth -- she was astonished by what she could recall, and how nice it all was. And his expressions, his mannerisms, the way his left eyebrow would twitch, the way his smile started, and grew. She found she could see his hand, too; the way his fingers rested, how his nails were formed. It was puzzling to find so much information coming out of her own head, but very pleasant. It was also curious to discover that the coming day would be largely a blank until she met him in the evening. been flattered, but perhaps unlike most of his contemporaries, surprised, and a little alarmed, to know of this analysis going on a few miles away. He was possibly a trifle old-fashioned in regarding most of the girls he knew as persons, rather than as a kind of bird-seed scattered' by providence to feed male vanity. It would not have occurred to him that his features were either notable or dotable-on; nor, indeed, to anyone unassisted by Cyra's insight, were they. Nobody, as far as is known, had been impelled on seeing him to ask: "Who is that handsome man?" -- if only because, though by no means repellent, he failed to accord with any standards of type; wherefore the most commital comment was likely to be: "That craggy looking one over there. Now, he has what I call an interesting face." It was an interesting face, but one that could only exceptionally be called genial; it frequently looked worried, occasionally scornful, most often, bewildered. Some there are bom to a world that's tailored to receive them. They slip into it as, according to status, barrow-boys, estate-dealers, or merchant-bankers; they find it a fine place, they wallow in it, and make good. Others have the misfortune to feel that perhaps there are a few things wrong with it: disorder troubles them, injustices irk tfwn, chuckle-headedness offends th em ; most of them manage to make out rattier well at that; some of the more sensitive may opt out, into clinics . among thickets of misgivings on account of things in general. All the time, it seemed to him, national politics became a wilder carnival of unreason; national ambitions, the fantasies of schizophrenics; the United Nations a place where emotional immaturity could outvote the wisdom of experience, what there was of it every time; and Parliament, a collection of job-clingers busy stopping votes leaking through pinholes while confidence ran out of an open tap. Things, in fact, looked pretty bad in every direction -- and the prospects for posterity even worse. He had taken a degree, quite a nice degree, at London University, and used it to land himself a job where, at least when he was at work, the perversity and fecklessness of the outer world did not trouble him. He was, in fact an Assistant Curator in the Department of Locomotion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He found the work interesting, and it was only out of office hours that he allowed himself to wonder what pre-natal sins had condemned him to be bom into an age that grew ever dottier as it approached the end of its tether. rather surprisingly, and with all love's unreason had become the apple of Cyra's eye, the finger on Cyra's heartstrings, the sun in different to Cyra. On the contrary, she troubled him -- in a different way from the worldoutlook, of course, rather pleasantly and insistently. He noticed that when she came into a room the voltage of the electricity supply seemed to go up and hitherto beautiful flowers faded into insignificance and that her presence was accompanied by a scent which was surely that of newmown asphodel. It happened again that evening. He was awaiting her in a quiet, tasteful enough, though unremarkable restaurant when he heard her voice greet the doorman behind him. Immediately the whole place underwent an Elysian transformation; even the sherry he was sipping at the moment turned to ambrosia. So there is love. But love is ambivalent. For a woman, as you will undoubtedly have heard, it it was, though deeply stirring, provocative of tender feelings, and conducive of castle-building, nevertheless a thing somewhat apart -- that is, apart from, and even in some respects opposed to, his views and his principles. It was a pleasant dinner, amiably and unhurriedly served, and during the course of it they chatted. Indeed, Cyra prattled at some length of her Aunt Carola whose flat she had shared since die death of her father some two years ago. Her Aunt Carola was a dear, and she was very fond of her; all the same, it was not an arrangement that could continue indefinitely. She thought that when she was twenty-one, in about six month's time, and would come into a little money of her own, she would move. One rather felt that Aunt Carola might be glad to have her place to herself again. The question was whether one might not feel rather lonely in a flat by oneself... By the time they had wolfed their way through half a bowl of ing that his own domestic arrangements were not entirely satisfactory. After the death of his parents, slain by a drunken motorist on the Portsmouth Road, He had sold the house and moved into furnished rooms. They were not bad; handy to the museum, run by an obliging and motherlydisposed landlady, comfortable rooms, really, but, all the same... well, there was feeling of perching rather than nesting. took brandy with his; Cyra sipped Cointreau while they considered the imperfections of their circumstances. switched to Drambuie and watched patiently for signs of imThey were small, but not discouraging. Cyra switched back to Cointreau. After a time she decided that a transfusion might help. His hand was resting on the table beside her. She reached towards it and drew an elegant and thoughtful middle finger down the back of it. "Of course," she said, "one way out would be for us to get married." She paused, wondering if the whole restaurant could hear the thumping in her chest. dreadfully long time. Then he said: "I'd thought of that." It was a difficult moment Convictions which were the slow growth of years vied with emotions that had come to blossom in a month or two. The tussle was painful. The convictions had a wiry strength; the scent of the fully kept his eyes looking straight ahead as he added: "But it wouldn't be fair." Cyra withdrew her hand and inspected it critically. "Not fair?" she inquired. plained. "You see, you'd want babies." "Oh," said Cyra. "And you wouldn't?" told her. "It's that introducing babies into the world in the state it's in is -- well, it's almost a criminal action. For a man, that is. For a woman it's different. She practically can't help it -- can't stand against the biological wind, if you see what I mean." : Cyra frowned a little. "There is -- er -- family planning," she suggested. "That's not the same as noout. "And that wouldn't be fair," he repeated. Too much fairness, Cyra decided, wouldn't get things far. "People don't have to have babies, if they don't want to," she objected. "But nearly all women do, either because they do want them, or they think they ought to want them, or people expect them to want them. So as I said, it isn't playing fair to stop them. But neither is it fair to a baby to bring it into the kind of world this is going to be in about twenty-five years' time." "That does make it difficult. Sort of not fair either way... " said Cyra, sadly. ed, "the only course open to a scrupulous man is to opt out of marriage. To refuse to throw any progeny into the rat-race -- which is going to get fiercer until it becomes rat-eat-rat." "Y-e-s, I suppose so," admitted Cyra. "But doesn't that make life rather pointless?" "But life is pointless, per se -- just consider an ant-heap, teeming with pointless life. It only begins to have point when it acquires human intelligence to shape it. And that's what we're not doing. We're breeding ourselves to destruction just as senselessly as any unintelligent form of life. Here we are, crowding closer to the edge of famine every year, and what happens? In this country, we actually subsidize babies when we ought to be taxing them. It isn't a rational world at all, it's like something thought up by Gilbert and Carroll. We're in a state of unguided transition. What fascinates me is what is going to happen when the crunch comes. Will it be savagery, technocracy, or annihilation?" "I don't see how your not having a son or daughter is going to stop any of them." "Oh, it isn't. But at least it won't be on my conscience that I am responsible for some wretched descendant having to face the ghastly music when it comes." "If it comes." "It'll come all right -- unless somebody takes charge. That might just give us a chance. But can you see any sign of that happening? God, I'd like to know what's going to be the end of it." Cyra was beginning to feel bored, and a little depressed -- not discouraged; she had, after all, fired only her first live round -- but she had heard quite a lot of this kind of thing before. No doubt it was very interesting if you happened to have that kind of mind, but if you didn't, it was exasperating and frustrating. She appreciated that principles were generally considered worthy things to have, they gave a kind of cachet -- well, you'd only have to think of the word "unprincipled" to realize that -- at the same time it could be difficult to have patience with principles when they interfered with real life. Normally any conflict between love and principles can easily be resolved by the catalystic application of another principle: if you can't lick 'em, join 'em. Thus it is only necessary for one party to profess the principles of the other party, and all is harmony. But this was rather a special case; it would unfortunately require her to profess simultaneously that it was unfair for her not to have a baby, and unfair to the baby to get born. Not a dilemma solvable off the cuff. It needed consideration -- a subtle, possibly even a devious, approach. Cyra reswitched to Drambuie, but conversation became spasmodic, lapsing now and then into thoughtful pauses. II iyra awoke the following morning aware at once that she loved her. The trouble seemed to lie in the schizoid natures of men. They not only had too many interests, but they appeared to be incapable of arranging them in order of relative importance -- an incapacity which, she suspected, might be at the root of many of the political troubles of the world. They were forever complicating the simple by the application of principles -- and differing principles, at that. Not that she had any objecber One; in fact she agreed with it. It was Principle Number Two that was the obstacle -- how to convince him that, whatever kind of mess the world was headed for, a baby had a right to get bom. Of course, when you allowed yourself to think of the kind of future which' at least half the world's present population of babies were bound to face, it was difficult to think of convincing arguments in favor of more... But there she was, falling into the trap of male theorizing again... Clear the decks... She, as a woman, had a right to have babies if she wanted them... No, more than that -- the race must go on; she could do her bit to see that it did, therefore it was plainly her duty to have babies... Put that way it did sound a bit Old Testament and coercive, perhaps, but... Oh, to hell with argualso wanted babies. All she needed was to find some way of unhorsing this principle, and she could have both'. trouble. Any agreement not to have children would not only be unfair to Cyra; it would not work And if you tried to make it work you'd have the makings, too, of an old-fashioned, three-act farcical comedy -- one quite unfunny for the participants. On the other hand... haps rather too much, about the other hand. Practically everyone he knew appeared to think that their children, in whatever circumstances, were lucky to have got bom at all and ought to be grateful for it. Even in regions where the life of man was acknowledged to be nasty, brutish' and short they rejoiced that a new one had arrived to suffer it and hoped that it would survive long enough to have children whose lives would also be nasty, brutish and short. It was. He supposed, the Life Force at work; he did not think highly of the Life Force's method. It seemed to be, in essence: chuck 'em in, and see which of 'em float. And even if you dignified this technique by calling it Natural Selection, it was still no way for an intelligent species to let things non themselves -- not at the best of times, let alone in an age which was heading hell-bent for the worst of times. As he saw it, if somebody didn't get a bridle on this Life Force pretty soon, it would bolt into utter catastrophe. "why did I have to be born into this age of messup? Why not into one that offered a better future than my grandchildren dying of want? But there it is. You've only got to look around; the old controls are failing, the break-up is already setting in... And it doesn't need much to check it even now -- just the application of a little reason and sanity." He fell to wondering for the hundredth time whether it would lomehow be checked at the last moment. Most people seemed content to live on the principle that things would turn out all right -- but even the people who scornfully watched Noah building his ark must have done that. He did not know what would happen; he would very much like to know; in fact, he would desperately like to know. For, after all, if it wasn't going to be checked, what was the' point in going on living, anyway? the breakfast table three or four days later. She opened it with excitement, began to read it with incredulity, turned back to the beginning, read it all through with utter stillness, and then raised eyes that had become unseeingly blank. Aunt Carola regarded her with anxiety. "What is it, darling? What's the matter?" she asked and reached across the table to lay her hand on Cyra's. Cyra did not reply. Then the blankness gradually faded. Her face crumpled. "H-Ke says He-he's em-em-emigrating," she wailed, and burst into tears. Vestiges of dignity, suriviving from a vanished era inhibited Cyra from action for nearly a week, until modem common sense asserted itself to point out that dignity got you nowhere nowalodgings. The landlady recognized her, and was sympathetic. "Such an upset, Miss. Here three years, he was, and then gone in a couple of days. I can't hardly believe it yet. But he did right by us. Paid me up to the end of the quarter, he did, though he didn't have to, and there's many as wouldn't." "It really was very sudden, then?" asked Cyra. "Bless you, yes. Not a hint till it happened. Though he was kind of thoughtful for a few days before. Making up his mind, I suppose. Then Tuesday of last week He said to me; 'Mrs. Duke, I'm sorry to tell you that I'll have to leave. I've been offered a very good job aboard, but the condition is that I take it up at once.' And he was off the next day, and the day after that Harrod's van called for his things, and that's all I know." "Abroad?" said Cyra. "Didn't he leave a forwarding address?" Mrs. Duke looked at her for a moment. "Oh, dear," she said, compassionately. "You come in and have a nice cup of tea, dearie. I'll tell you all I can. OK, dear, it's not like him at all. Always such' a gentleman, Mr. Trevinnick. OK, I am so sorry." Cyra's next call was at Harrods. They were cautiously discreet there, but by persistence she learned that he had left no address with them, other than that where his effects were to be collected. Indeed, they presumed Mr. Trevinnick contemplated a lengthy absence, for his storage account, they admitted in confidence, was to be paid by banker's order. Cyra knew enough of bankly reticence to discard any idea of approaching from that direction, so she retired to the restaurant to think. After a time she unexpector twice mentioned his solicitor by name. But what was the name? She thought back. She could distinctly recall being struck by something Chaucerian about it... But there were such a lot of names in Chaucer: Miller, Reeve, Franklyn, Squire, Nunn -- oh, endless! Then, suddenly she had it! She bolted the rest of her lunch and made for the telephone directory. Half an hour later she was on the steps of a house in Bedford Row, pressing a bell beneath a brass plate which proclaimed: Coghall, Coghall  Sprint. Commissioners for Oaths. Mr. Martin Coghall was able to receive her with little delay, and regarded her with interest as she entered his room. Cyra had a vaguely elusive impression that he was not entirely surprised to see her. His manner was kindly, even friendly, though not forthcoming, and his attitude as he listened to her was circumspect. She concluded : "In his letter to me he told me that he was emigrating. But his landlady says he had a sudden offer of a post abroad. That doesn't seem to me quite right; I mean, you don't say you are emigrating if you are just taking a job aboard, do you? Please, please tell me if you know where he is. It's all so mysterious not leaving an address, or anything. He might -- " She paused as a sudden thought struck her. " -- Oh! Oh, no! He's not had to go to prison, or something like that, has he?" The solicitor leaned forward and patted her hand, not quite professionally, perhaps, but reassuringly. "My dear Miss Chapworth. You can put any idea of that kind right out of your mind. Mr. Tevinnick has gone away, it is true. It is also true that we have no way of getting in touch with him at present, but I do assure you that the decision was entirely his own." "But why? Why? He hasn't really taken a job aboard, has he? He'd have said something about it to me..." Her eyes began to fill. Mr. C agnail leaned forward. He aid earnestly: "Miss Chapworth. Mr. Trevinulck has spoken to me of you. I hope you will believe me when I assure you that he is very, very (ond of you." Cyra stared at him. "He has," she said, "a pretty lousy way of showing it." Mr. Coghall looked momentarily taken aback, but he rallied, ind shook his head reprovingly. "Not entirely," he said. "Before Mr. Trevinnick left, he invested US with the power of attorney regarding his affairs, so if you should chance to hear of any outstanding debts we should be glad If you will put the claimants in touch with us." He looked inquiringly. Cyra nodded. He went on: "I may also say that you will shortly be receiving a letter from Us informing you, on the instructions of our client, that should you at any time find yourself in want, or need of assistance, you Should apply to us for help and dvice." Cyra stare dat him. Tears began to brim up again. She fought them back and said, unsteadily: "But the only advice I need is Mr. Coghall's expression was sympathetic, but he shook his head slowly. "That, my dear Miss Chapworth, I regret to say I could not at this precise moment tell you, even were I at liberty to do so." Cyra pounced on "precise moment." "But when you do hear from him, you will let me know?" Mr. Coghall hesitated, considered and replied carefully: "You may rest assured that if we do hear from him we shall let you know." A few minutes later he showed her out with avuncular consideration, and, when the door was closed, drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab his brow. Cyra descending the steps, saw a tax isetting down a fare at the next house. She hurried to catch it. "The Victoria and Albert Museum, please," she told the driver. Ill A Tr. Simon Radgrove, Curator of the Department of Locomotion, regarded his visitor benevolently. The average age of callers in his department was noticeably lower than that in most other Departments, but not many of them introduced an aura of youth and spring. He inquired what had brought this about. She explained, concluding: "I understand he resigned his post here to take up another abroad, but nobody can tell me where. It was all so sudden you see. There are things to be settled -- I don't mean debts, those are cleared -- but personal arrangements, things we must get in touch with him about." "Oh," said I Mr. Radgrove. "I confess I had not heard anything about a post abroad -- I think you must have been misinformed about that" He shook his head. "No. Mind you, he did not actually confide his intentions to me, but, putting two and two together, I don't think that can be right -- unless, of course, it was purely temporary." He mused. "But if he resigned his job here -- " began Cyra, and then might Have been sacked. Indeed, for a moment Mr. Radgrove's reply seemed to suggest that that was so. "There again," He told her, "I fear you Have been misinformed. Mr. Trevinnick Has not, in fact, resigned His post Here." He paused, and Cyra braced Herself for a revelation. "Oh', no," Mr. Radgrove went on. "On the contrary. He is a very useful man, you know. He was very keen that his job should be kept open for him. Fortunately, his application was received' just in time to be included in the agenda for the meeting of Curators the following day. We discussed it with great interest. Most unusual rr quest. It creates a precedent, ol course, but not, it was thought, one that was likely to be extcn' sively exploited. Some members, in fact, felt that it might yield useful benefits. So, in the end, it was decided to grant his request. " Cyra felt that something ini portant had been omitted. "Yes, but what was his request?" she wanted to know. "OH, didn't I make that clear? I'm so sorry. Yes, it was leave o( absence." "Oh," said Cyra, a little flatly "And you say there was no mention of his going abroad?" "None whatever. I should think that very unlikely -- very unlikely indeed." Cyra reflected. She was undecided whether the answer left her feeling more frustrated, or less. She thought back, and asked: "Why did you find the request so unusual?" "Did I say "unusual'? Perhaps I should have said 'unique'." "Perhaps, but why?" "I doubt whether it has even been requested before. All of us doubted it." "What, a leave of absence I Surely -- " "No, no. This was an extended leave of absence." Cyra tried not to let Her sigh be obvious. Patiently she asked: "Please, please, Mr. Radgrove. Just how much leave of absence was Mr. Trevinnick asking for?" "Oh', didn't I tell you that?" said Mr. Radgrove, in surprise. "Why, it was a hundred years -- unpaid, of course." IV A week later Cyra climbed the ill-kept staircase of a dingy house in Gerrard Street. On the third floor she found a door panelled with obscured glass on beside it. A youth with a suspicious expression and an underprivileged lower lip opened the door and blocked the entrance while he scrutinized Her carefully. "I Have an appointment to see Mr. Marrow," she told Him. "Oh'," said the youth. "Better come in." He stood aside for her to pass, closed the door behind Her, and disappeared into an inner room, to reappear almost immediately. "This way," he told Her. Mr. Marrow rose from his desk to greet her and push' forward a chair. He was a well-built man of, she judged, about thirty-five; smartly dressed, with dark, neatly brushed hair and a somewhat careworn face. His manner was a trifle over-gallant, as if to compensate for his employee's lack of grace. "Mm. Brace, of Hampsted, recommended you to me. I would like you to make an inquiry," she told him. Mr. Marrow's gaze flickered momentarily towards her left hand and then away again. "No," said Cyra. "Not that kind of inquiry." Mr. Marrow made a non-commit al noise and' waited. Cyra went on: "Do you know anything about the Cloverdon Biological Research Unit?" "Never heard of it," admitted Mr. Marrow, and made a note. "Well, it's a place where they run a number of experimental medical projects." "Secret projects?" inquired Mr. Marrow. "Because, I mean, if it's one of those government places like Harwell -- " "It isn't," Cyra told him. "It's a private establishment endowed and administered by the Greeting Foundation." "Oh," said Mr. Marrow. "What goes on there?" "Well, they've a number of projects on hand, I understand, but the only one that interests me is their work on suspended animation." "Come again," suggested Mr. Marrow. "Suspended animation," Cyra repeated. "I believe they freeze people there." Mr. Marrow goggled and became a fair sample of suspended animation himself. "Freeze people?" he inquired. "Yes. Sort of put them into cold storage for a time and then thaw them out later on. You must have heard of it. Lots of countries have teams working on it." "Oh," said Mr. Marrow again, conveying in one simple sound that he had neither heard of it, nor believed it now. Cyra regarded him. "Mr. Marrow, you don't seem to know much about the world you're living in," she said. "You'd be surprised, lady," Mr. Marrow told her. "Well, the scientific side of it, anyway," Cyra modified. "Now I have managed to find out that this Cloverdon place is not untheir experiments -- " en?" exclaimed Mr. Marrow. "Yes. Not many, of course. And it all has to be very discreet because the papers and the B.B.C. would have one of their moral tournaments if they got hold of it. You can just imagine." "I'll say," agreed Mr. Marrow. "Well, I Have reason to think has been one of their volunteers. If he was, what I want to know is the date he went to them, and most importantly, the exact date set for his resuscitation." "His re-what?" "His revival. The day when they'll bring him out of it again." "I see." Mr. Marrow made a vinnick and considered it. Cyra said: "It is most important that these inquiries should be absolutely confidential. It don't want the Cloverdon people to have any suspicion that they are being made." "Of course," agreed Mr. Marrow, mechanically. "Well, can you do it?" It did not seem quite an occasion for Mr. Marrow's confident just-you-leave-it-to-us reply. He said: "I'll do my best. Have a look around first; get the feel of the place. Let you know how the chances are." He paused. " 'Fraid it may cost you a bit." They got down to business.  little over three weeks passed before Cyra made her way to Gerrard Street again. She found Mr. Marrow in good' spirits. "Well, we done -- did it," he told her triumphantly. "Never lay Jimmy Marrow lets a client down. Took quite a bit of greasing though," he added, more soberly. "How much?" inquired Cyra. He named a figure. Cyra got up to go. "Now don't take it like that. I warned you it might come a bit high," he protested. "Not as high as that," said Cyra, moving towards the door. "Now come -- " he pleaded. They haggled. "You're aone," He said, regarding her with respect at the end of it. "Not done too badly yourlelf, Cyra told him. "Right, now then, let's have it." TV  r Morrow opened a drawer in his desk and drew forth a piece of paper. He read from his notes : go to the Cloverdon Biological Research Unit. He first contacted them on the eleventh of May last year..." Cyra's eyebrows went up. She vious September. Mr. Marrow went on : "On the sixth of June last -- that is, about a month later, he went to them for a thorough medical examination -- which gave him a general okay. They made inquiries about him -- whether he was on the straight, or up to any funny business, or suchlike; that was all okay, too. Then on the third of May last he contacted them by pKone. No record of the conversation. On the fifth of May He went there himself..." Cyra nodded. She had stipuas the only check she could think of on Mr. Marrow's reliability. It stood up. "And the date for his resuscitation?" she asked, calmly enough'. Mr. Marrow hesitated, looked embarrassed and fiddled with a pencil. "This is honest, Miss. Take me Bible oath. Didn't believe it myself when I saw it. Had them double check it." Cyra nodded again. "All right," she said. "Let's have it." Mr. Marrow took a very deep breath. "He's down for resuscitation on the tenth of August -- tenth of August in -- " he paused " -- in the year of twenty ninetyfive." He ended with' some defiance, and raised his eyes uncertainly. "Thank you, Mr. Marrow," said Cyra. "That's all I wanted to know. Thank you very, very much." V   of warmth. Then there was a click, the sound of something sliding, and the sense of warmth diminished. He couldn't see, couldn't move. Suddenly there was a tube between his lips. A voice said: "Drink this." A little liquid trickled into his mouth. He swallowed successfully. Then there was more liquid. The most delicious drink he had ever tasted. He was aware of people moving about him, applying instruments to him, here, there and everywhere. He lay quietly, letting them get on with it. The surrounding activity abated. A voice asked : "How are you feeling?" I can't see." "Don't worry about that, you have got a mask on, we have to take it easy with the eyes." Take what easy with the eyes, came back to him. "I've made it, then?" he asked. "You've made it fine. A textbook job. Nothing to worry about at all. I guess you'd like to sleep now." seemed to fall asleep instantly. There was an indeterminate interval punctuated by meals. Food was so comforting that lie went to sleep again the moment he had finished it. At some time they had removed the mask, and at his waking he became aware that he was lying in a dimly lit, institutional room. Then came one time when he awoke feeling, though uncertainly as yet, more like himself. A nurse in a white overall wai doing something beside the bed, He rolled his head on the pillow. She turned to look at him, "Ah, that's better," she said, "How do you feel now?" "Weak," he admitted. "Otherwise all right -- I think." "It'll pass in a day or two. You will be as fit as ever," she assured him. "What day is it?" He asked "Saturday," she told him. "It ought to be Wednesday," he said. "You came out of it on Wednesday, the tenth of August, Now it's Saturday, the thirteenth." "And the year?" "You don't think we'd che;il, do you? Twenty ninety-five, ol course." sorb it. Presently the nurse said: "I have to go for a bit now Would you like the television?" She handed him a small bo with a number of buttons and m knob on it and bustled out. imentally. Immediately a piece of the wall opposite his bed lit up. It was hard to believe He was not looking through the wall into a street. 'The scene was stereoscopic, the colors natural, and the realism uncanny -- unpleasant, too. The town looked oriental. There was a riot in progress; men in gasmasks were using sticks and shields to break it up; amid the background noise was a rattle of a light machinegun. The world did not seem to have changed much'. and got some music, or at least musicians with' instruments, though the sounds they were making were unintelligible. He tried a third button and saw some rather surprising exercises being performed by boys and girls in pairs, for the purpose, he gathered from the commentary, of promoting healthily normal social integration. Ah, well, doubtless one would have to make adjustments; but it was consoling to know that, so far at least, the world seemed to have succeeded in avoiding the disintegration of a new dark age. The next day he felt distinctly better, well enough to get up and move around a little in a slightly staggery way. He had his mid-day meal in an armchair with a table drawn up across it. The food no longer tasted quite so good and was difficult to identify, but he was hungry enough to be glad of it. When the nurse came to collect the tray she said: "A visitor for you this afternoon -- unless you're not feeling up to it." "A visitor for me? But I don't know anybody here. What name?" She shrugged. "I don't know. They just said a visitor." to the arrangement, he would still be officially on leave until the first of September -- a fortnight next Thursday, providing nobody had reformed the calendar -- but the Museum, must, of course, be interested. They had probably investigated and were sending someone to greet him. It was, therefore, considerably disconcerting for him when, as the door opened and the nurse announced his visitor, Cyra walked in. Indeed, he sat there, goggling at her speechlessly. feeling now?" she asked, as she sat down in the other chair. He went on staring, mouth slightly open, but no sound emerging. A sort of stammer came from it at last. "But-but-they-they told me this was twenty-ninety five," He managed. really very naughty of you to come Here without telling anybody," she said. gan again. Stop butting at me and starreal. I'll show you." She came closer, leaned down, and planted a firm kiss. feeling a little dizzy. "Explain," He told her. "Well," said Cyra, "When I found out where you'd gone I thought it would be better if I were to come Here first and sort of get things ready, so I arrived about three weeks ago. And I've got us a flat -- quite a nice flat, I think -- and Handy for the Museum, and -- " protested. "How did you get here?" "Why, the same way you did, of course. They were a bit sticky about it at the Cloverdon Research place. They said nearly all their volunteers were older people suffering from something they hoped there'd be a cure found for by the time they came out of it. And I said, then it ought to be a nice change for them to have somebody young and healthy, and why not? So we argued quite a lot, but they agreed in the end. "The worst part was waiting for it, because I couldn't sign all the proper things until I was twenty-one, in November. And I'll admit that I did nearly give up once or twice; it got a bit gruesome picturing oneself all frozen stiff like a block of fish -- well, more like one of those crusader's ladies you see lying on tombs, I suppose, really -- anyway, being like that for years, and years, and years. However, I stuck it out and tried to keep my mind occupied with the arrangements." quired. "Well, I came into a little money from my father at twenty-one. So, of course, I Had to decide whether simply to invest it at compound interest, or put it into unit-accumulators, or set up a trust for myself. I did think of an annuity, but it seemed to frighten the company. So, in the end, I did all the other three, a bit of each." looking at Her with a new respect. She nodded: "They're all done quite well really, in spite of two or three capital levies. What did you do?" "I -- er -- Just left it on de"Oh, well -- it will have increase! quite a bit," she said. There was a pause. "It's not a bit like you said it would be here," she observed. "Nobody starving. No people in rags fighting over scraps of food. The food's a bit funny because it's dull, so they flavor it, but there's plenty of it. "As far as I've gathered, things did get a bit grim about seventy years ago. Then there was another grim patch about thirty years later; not standing-room only, just too many people who were too old to work; but about twenty years after that it had evened out once more, and they got the population fixed. Now there's a row going on because the expectation of life has gone up a bit, and the young are protesting that it's unfair to youth." "That sounds a whole lot betmitted. "I was more than halfready to find barbarism. How did they do it?" "I'm not sure. Nobody I've talked to yet seems to know for certain. Most of them think it's something in the water, some of theta say it's something in the food, others tell you it's in the atmosphere. Anyway, whatever it is, it works -- no babies without a license." "That could make a difference all around," he suggested dryly. "Oh, it does," Cyra assured him. She let it go at that for the moment; presently she inquired: "What were you planning to do when you got here?" "I didn't plan. It would depend on what I found. If it were barbarism, well, I suppose I'd have to take my chance. If it were orderly, there'd be my job at the Museum, and I'd have to find somewhere to live, and do my best to settle in." He paused, and looked at her. "I think I must Have been a little mad to come at all," he added thoughtfully. She ignored that for a moment. "You wouldn't Have found it easy -- getting somewhere to live, I mean -- not on your own," she remarked. 'Why not?" "It's not done Here. People who try are regarded as peculiar, undesirable. They're not socially integrated -- and that seems a pretty bad thing not to be. It's all right for a week or two, might happen to anyone, but if it goes on, you're likely to be sent on a rehabilitation course. I had a bit of difficulty over this flat. In fact I only got it by assuring them that you'd been sent abroad on business and would be back before long. So if you don't come there I shall have to give it up, and you'll Have nowhere to go." VI "ne of tfie advantages of deal ing witH tKe past is that it itays relatively put. Consequentgreat difficulties in taking up his Job at the Museum again. Admittedly there were new systems Of classification, new procedures, new methods of administration and new people, but he found adaption fairly easy, and the new people surprisingly like the old people. For a month or so, Be was something of a museum exhibit Himself, but when the novelty Had worn off and when he was alone in his Department, unrounded by the familiar and fearsome complexities thought up by long vanished engineers, there was little to distinguish the present century from the last. He liked it there, found it soothing -- which was more than could be said for the world outside. He was apt to return to the flat put out. "Really," he complained to Cyra, one evening, "the indecencies of this place! I took a lunchtime walk in the Gardens, and do you know what was going on b front of Kensington Palace, right under the nose of Queen Victoria's statue?" She did not, so Ke told her. "I'm no puritan, but Kang it all, I mean, and with! the bystanders laying bets, tool" "What on?" inquired Cyra, with interest. "If you must know -- " said Cyra giggled. "It's known here as expressing oneself," she informed Him. "After all, they've done away with the old deterrents." "No morals at all. Not evert the decencies of a well run farm"You're going back a bit, Willie, aren't you?" "I don't care. You know what I mean. It's degenerate." "Come, come," Cyra soothed him. "TKe young always were; the world always is." "I sometimes wonder about your standards," he said, severelyCyra shrugged. "I doubt whether much comes of applying the standards of one century to the behavior of the next. The point is that through them all life somehow battles on." "But thank goodness they've Had the sense to restrict the call-up at last." He brooded a little. "It is all very dispiriting." He announced. "It's true the Human race isn't going to breed itself into starvation now, the rat race Isn't as bitter as one feared, there doesn't seem to be any likelihood of us descending to tooth-andized, all this lack of inhibition, the open promiscuity, and so on; It chops away the roots of all Social order, destroys the basic pattern. It's certainly not the kind of world I should bring a child Into." "OK. I don't know... I mean, was it ever? But people kept on doing it," CyTa pointed out. "Incidently," he said, "I Hadn't thought of it before, but how do babies get bom here." "They issue licenses," Cyra told Him. "It's all very carefully regulated. Suitable health of parents, et cetera. And that means they can calculate the number of school places needed, the number of teachers, and insure a fair education." -- " he waved an arm to include Kensington Gardens, and depravity in general. "If this is the result, I don't think mucH of it." They reflected. After a time, Cyra suggested tentatively: "We could, perhaps, do our little bit towards helping to restore standards." He asked. "Well, here we are, living in this flat. It would at least set  good example if we were to get married. People still do, you know -- some of them." "Is there much point in getting married if we're not having children? I mean, you've only got to read the marriage service... " "I think I'd rather like to, all the same... Just for the principle of the thing. I mean, after all we're bound to be a bit oldfashioned in our ideas, and if we do believe in those standards you were talking about, well... ?" Cyra left the question open-ended. "All right," He agreed, "let's do that. After all, it will show a few of them that standards can be applied, even in this permissive world." Cyra kissed Kim. "Good," she said. "Tomorrow I'll find out How they do it here." lyra fell down, facing the doctor  across His polished desk. He asked what he could do for her. "I'd like a baby license, please," said Cyra. "H'm," said the doctor, looking at her. "You have to be married, of course." "OH, I am," Cyra assured Him. This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulpscans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans yahoogroups . com. She produced Her certificate, and Handed it across. TEe doctor read it. His eyebrows rose. He looked at it Hardier. "Date of birth': November #. Husband's, date of birtH: May #." He murmured, and looked at Her. "You two certainly narried at a ripe old age, didn't you? Deep-freeze?" "Yes," Myra admitted. He nodded. "Fascinating," He said."No ill effects -- either of you?" "We feel fine," sKe told Him, and added. "TKe Cloverdon Research people gave me these fitness certificates. They examined both of us very thoroughly when we came round, a few weeks ago. They're very interested to know how it will turn out." "Understandably," commented the doctor. "All right, I'll forward your particulars to the Licensing Office. I expect the application will rock them a bit, but in view of the Cloverdon people's recommendation, they're scarcely likely to refuse, "You'll get your license by post. You present it at a chemist's. Th'ey'#I give you a pill. Be sure to keep to the instructions you'll get with it. If it doesn't work, you apply to me. I will issue you with a duplicate license, and you can try again. Is that quite clear?" "Perfectly," said Cyra, and sat gazing blankly into space. "Something you don't understand?" inquired the doctor. "No," Cyra assured him. "No, it's only -- well, I've now been looking forward to this for a hundred and one years..." At the door she paused, struck by a sudden thought, and looked back. "Doctor, if it should turn out to be twins -- they do rather run in my family  -- ?" The doctor smiled reassuringly. "They'll be all right," He assured her. "Birth's we can limit, but twins still come under Act of God." Which, as it Happened, was just as well. New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! Since fhe Jinn knew they were superior to men , they were quite sure they had all the answers. '"pHe firm knock was shockingly loud in the deserted building, and it jarred Professor Philip Morrison into dropping the blue pencil He Had been idly twirling while leaning back, lost in thought The heel resting on his ancient metal desk caught the loose center drawer and almost yanked it out as He Hastily sat erect. He managed to catch botE His balance and the drawer, but Had to grab the desktop for support; his reflexes were not what they Had been, as a young man, when He Had worked His way to an undergraduate degree through a series of athletic scholarships. With his feet on the floor again, the teacher let irritation roughen his voice when he called for the unexpected visitor to enter. It was eleven at night, one hour before the Kalf-century mark, and he was alone in his small second office just off the lab. He had Hardly expected a student to ferret Him out Here and had Hoped for an Hour in which to think about Merry. He and his only child Had been growing steadily apart since the death of Her mother two years ago, and He Had just received the disturbing news that she was not going to renew the preliminary one-year marital contract with Her second Husband. Both sHe and Roger had majored in political science and couldn't even get along with each other. Those inexact disciplines some dreamers insisted were sciences worked much better in theory than in practice. "Dr. Morrison?" the young man waiting politely in the door was oriental and unusually tall and thin. "My nme is Tako Taka ha shi, I am one of Professor Sloan's postdoctoral students. I saw your light, and thought... sir, I have a project I wish to discuss with you. Dr. Sloan said he didn't care to hear about extracurricular activities." That was odd behavior even for crusty old Sloan. Morrison studied His unwelcome visitor with more alert eyes and saw the slight but tell-tale parietal bulge, the High rise of vertical forehead. TakaHaslu was a Jinni, which explained why Ke couldn't talk to His own mentor. The general controversy over the Jinn had died away after the genetics law finally became a reality in #, but the grouchy older teacher Had retained all His prejudices. He still believed that the original ten thousand young Genetically Evolved Newmen, whose improved intelligence Had inspired the law, were plotting to replace Homo sapiens, and not through controlled evolution. The idea was nonsense, . of course. That first large-scale experimental group Had been only sixteen years of age at the time, and scattered throughout the world's major universities. The law Had been passed because normal people, himself fairly prominent among them, had worked hard for it. Sloan remained unconvinced. He had of necessity accepted them in His classroom, but agreed to work with two on postdoctoral projects only after a nasty fuss with the department head. This young man had obviously strayed from the agreed path and lost Sloan's forced support. "This is, ah', a little unusual, but if there's something you're bursting to get out..." Morrison smiled tolerantly and motioned TakaKashii to a chair. He suddenly realized he Had sounded fatuous and smug and regretted seeming that old and stolid. But you became inured to enthusiasm after the first hundred students who were almost exploding with it had shared their nebulous and impossibly exotic ideas about biology with you. Even the Jinn He Had taught in the advanced classes He still carried were subject to the infection. As a major researcher with a large government grant, he had for several years been spared the task of personal coaching and had lost contact with the Jinn students when the last of them attained His doctorate. "Sir, I believe you Have been working for several years on a method of converting cellulose to glucose, on a practical basis. I think the report I want an authorization to publish will interest you. It deals with' the same problem." M orrison felt a stir of interest. His work had not been publicized, and he always asked' his student helpers not to talk outside the lab. It was hard to keep the general nature of his researches quiet, though I . "Yes, I'd be interested in hearing about your project, TakaEashi," he admitted cautiously. "I have to be at the student circle for the New Year's rally at ; twelve, however." He did not add that he was looking forward to joining in his heavy baritone on the old school songs, or that he had volunteered to monitor the event rather than sit home alone in an empty house. "Yes sir. This will require only a few minutes of your time." Takahashi slipped smoothly into faspeech and Morrison found himself straining to follow the words, despite all the proof that meaning could be best absorbed by relaxing. The young man's word choice was excellent, and his tongue moved with impressive speed. "Heard you took a chemical approach trying break cellulose down monosaccharide units regroup edible non-linear form I worked problem opposite end trying adapt human digestive system hydrolyze cellulose produce glucose macromoleculcs I found -- " "Just a moment!" Morrison broke in sharply, fully attentive now. "In the first place I am not 'trying' to produce glucose from cellulose; I have done so. The problem is one of production practicality." He hesitated, knowing he was hedging. The process he had labored twenty years to perfect worked, yes, but mass production was impossibly expensive. He had seen his dream of a great new food supply for a dangerously overpopulated world grind its way downward to slow extinction, dying beneath the inevitable logic of the engineer's slide rule and the accountant's pencil. They had called his process a laboratory toy, and at seventy, with' only ten or fifteen productive years still ahead, He Had found himself psychologically unable to start a new project. He was accredited with several small but worthwhile discoveries made early in his career, but this was to. have been the major achievement of his professional life. Hf had been tinkering with the basic operation for over a year now, with no true improvement in efficiency. "In the second instance, I considered your approach and discarded it. The complexity of the digestive system and our inability to experiment with Humans make it unbearably difficult. I'm afraid you are wasting your time." "Sir I finished work and believe succeeded past three month's ate only pure cellulose supplemented vitamins mandatory minerals. Let me explain?" Morrison leaned back and studied the younger man's face with growing anger. He Had dealt before with the overpolite arrogance of Jinn students, tfieir disconcerting Habit of being always two jumps ahead of the instructor, but this was the first time He had discussed his own project witK one. This young man's statement was incredible, and His patent assumption of his own correctness infuriating. And yet if he were right -- if those four extra ounces of association neurones program med into his forebrain by genetic manipulation Had actually enabled Him to come up with' an answer -- the discovery was of immense importance. Too much' of overcrowded Earth's resources were tied up in simply feeding its burdensome human population. With' an average life expectancy of a hundred-and-ten, and the biological need for children as strong as ever, the Malthusian doctrine seemed proven beyond contradiction. Population always outran food supply. ttQir sure you familiar work  done Nazi government German state World War II hundred years past. Treated sawdust other forms pure cellulose force-fed prisoners tried utilize digestive system complete Hydrolysis. Didn't succeed reasons complexity mentioned basic approach correct Hydrolyzation within individual." TakaHashi leaned forward earnestly, and Morrison became interested despite his skepticism. This young man was part of the most ambitious experiment ever attempted in human genetics, and he and his fellows represented mankind's first attempt to move on to a higher evolutionary plaBrain size alone did not guarantee superiority, but like all members of that first massive application group, he Had from painless Caesarian birth received the most mentally and physically stimulating training transactional psychology could provide. His first baby rattle had been replaced with a more complex one the moment He had seen, touched and tasted it into familiarity, and his tenth one featured colored lights that blinked in intricate series when inset buttons were pushed in simple patterns. He had a positive identity before he was one year old and could think in symbols by two. At three he could read, and his childhood games were designed to develop his growing body evenly. At four he was learning the basic mathematical theorems, and thereafter he followed the established educational channels, except that the normal pabulum ladled out to children was omitted and He moved at a very fast pace. He Had completed all undergraduate work by fifteen or sixteen. Most of the Jinn Had tlieir first doctorates by eighteen. Many of them had gone on into industry, government or teaching, where they could practice their specialties. A few, like TakaHashi, lingered on as students, working in areas that interested them. There was no doubting their innate and achieved superiority. A lot of older people, like Sloan, were unable to accept the advent of Homo superior gracefully and still fought the idea that all licensed pregnancies should be by genetically improved sperms. They Had lost the legal battle five years back, but unauthorized normal births were a world-wide plague. Since Newmen bred true only with each other, and a union with Homo Sapiens produced idiots, the socalled normals were on their way to becoming a minority. And the true shame of it, Morrison thought bitterly, was that the antagonism of the old for the new was so unnecessary. It was the developmental stimulation as much as the increased brain size which produced the superior being, and it was physically impossible to provide intensive training to all babies. Without it, Jinn intelligence was only an easily acceptable notch above the average. And of course the stimulation techniques were available to much t im e with their child, whether New or normal. "Won't bore details work," the young Newman went on. "Approach new introduced symbiotic parasite ileum section Human small intestine capable forming stable colonies live reproduce indefinitely. New form I evolved usual genetic manipulation unnamed flagellate protozoa indigenous common African termite Termopsia angusticollis. Colony jmy intestine Hydrolyzes cellulose produces two pounds glucose simple sugars daily tiny fraction used by protozoa. Rest absorbed diet poor continuous use. Want publish came you." Ti yfomson realized he was leaning tensely forward across his desk, objections running through his mind in a confused stream. But if it were true... He raised a Hand and ticked off the most obvious points. "Takahashi. I'll believe your incredible Statement when you explain, first, how you confine the bacterial colony to one section of the small intestine; second, how the body survives their poisonous wastes; tHird, Bow tEe colony growth is regulated, fourth -- never mind, I could go on all night. Just account for tBose three for me. And speak regular; I want to think." "Yes girl" Takahashi ignored his lame excuse for avoiding faspeecfi and accepted the challenge with an eagerness that amazed Morrison. There Had to be something wrong Here, but still... "I've built a Highly selective pH factor into my protozoa, giving them a very narrow acceptable range. The jejunum kills them by its Higher acidity, and the colon by its alkali content. You will recall that the ileum is very close to neutral. If excess protozoa are dispersed into the bloodstream -- and this is the method by which a colony regulates its size, which answers your third question -- the body's phagocytes absorb them without difficulty. As for organic poisons from their wastes, sir, they are carried to the liver and detoxified in the same way by die kidneys. There are no ill effects." The answers were too direct, to sure to be disbelieved. Morrison found that he was convinced in spite of his astonishment, and knew that if he raised more objections they would be countered with the same easy certainty. So it was done. The project to which He had dedicated the better part of his professional life was complete, and the credit would go to an artificially mutated young man less than a third his age. He felt slightly numbed, as though from shock, and through the numbness a slowly gathering anger at the unfairness, the injustice of being beaten by a Jinni, This tall, thin man seemed so terribly young; it was frightening to see ity in a man just turned twentyone. Experimental genetic programming on humans had begun in #, the year of Morrison's birth, and persisted through a succession of horrors until the first successful enlarged brain appeared in #. A delay of just thirty years and He could Have been one of the predecessors of the group represented by Takahashi. The special importance of these young men and women was the proof they offered that genetic manipulation worked for everyone, that the entire Human race could be upgraded in a few generations. When a Jinni's increased learning capacity was developed to its maximum by stimulation training, he automatically became a genius by the old standards. There were now ten thousand such young geniuses in the world, in addition to the earlier individual successes, and one of them had decided to accomplish the task Morrison had been unable to perform. THe world urgently needed TakaKasfii's discovery. A human would still require protein and lipids for a balanced diet, but the poor of all nations, who lived primarily off vegetables, would eat well at last A head of lettuce would provide a man with a day's food, from what was now mostly bulk. Fallen leaves could be ground, flavored until they became acceptable to human taste buds, and eaten. Vast new industries would appear, devoted to the task of preparing tasty products from cellulose and persuading people to eat them. Grass would soon be consumed direct, instead of wastefully second-hand in the form of steak. Or the basic process could be adapted to animals, enriching their diet so much that the price could be cut in half, bringing protein into Hovels where it was seldom seen. The possibilities and ramifications were endless. The new food source was so could be fed for the next Hundred years, until their proliferation absorbed even the new resources. The door opened without warning, and a rather large blond man entered and shut it quietly behind him. There was a dartgun in his hand. Morrison jerked erect in out' raged astonishment, and the barrel swung to point unwaveringly; at his chest. "Sit down please, Dr. : Morrison I This is a disassociation anesthetic and paralyzes instantly." THe newcomer's voice was low and without menace, but if was obvious he meant what fie said. Morrison sank slowly back, wondering if "he could hit his intercom quickly enough to yell for Kelp. And then He saw the broad sweep of the big man's forehead, and gave up the idea. He was dealing with I another Jinni; the drug would work as He had stated. Morrison retreated into dignity. "Just what is the meaning of this?" He asked, in tones as frosty as fie could muster. "I'm Wilfred Ebert, sir, and I regret that the very interesting conversation you Have just Had with my colleague made it mandatory for me to appear. I'm afraid that it must be erased from your memory." "Bill, I've told you I am going to publish!" Takahashi said angrily. "Just how far are you prepared to go to stop me? And how did you know I was Here?" "As far as necessary," Ebert answered cheerfully. "As for knowing you were talking to Dr. Morrison, don't work up a persecution complex about it We've had a sound-activated recorder covering his working office here for months, just in case he performed a miracle and came up with a practical production method on His process. I saw tKe unit recording when I came to change the tape and listened in on the headset. I'm sorry, Tako, but you can't do it. The council has upheld my ruling unanimously." "I don't recognize the authority of the Newmen council," said people go to bed Hungry every night. Who are the Newmen to tell me I can't feed them?" "Tako, I know how you feel, but you're being melodramatic. Hungry they may be, but they aren't starving, and as long as the American plains and Russian steppes pour out the food, it's unlikely they will. As for the authority bit -- listen, you were told that Carl Campbelleton has produced the basic equations for a semi-closed propulsion system that brings the stars within our reach. Can't you see what this means? Development costs are going to be prohibitive, and our watchdog team's analysis of the U.N. indicates a clear majority for acceptance only if it Is presented as a desperation measure. If you relieve the pressure by opening up this new food source... He shrugged eloquently. "Within our lifetimes we'd be back to where we are now. The reproduction syndrome is ineradicable -- even Newmen will have children I -- and unless you want to deliberately return the lifespan to the old level we Have no choice but to colonize, on the same massive scale that kept the European population at an acceptable growth rate while America was opening up. You know these facts as well as I. Why argue with them?" "AyTorrison listened to Ebert's ca j m self-assured voice in growing amazement. A Newmen council that claimed authority over all Jinn, his own office bugged, even a watchdog team whose obvious function was to analyze Important issues coming before the U.N. and predict the vote. So the wild stories He Had laugfied away were true after all! THe world was being controlled by the big brains, and these two stubborn men were arguing the course would take for the next Hundred years. Suddenly His own troubles seemed unimportant, almost trivial. Even Takahashi's discovery faded before the blinding implications of this new knowledge. Morrison found Himself shaking his Head in mute protest. He felt as though His personal world, already crumbling, Had been completely shattered. Suddenly He seemed old, tired, ready for His part to yield the Earth to these blandly certain of tHe wortH of tKeir own ideas. Only tHe young could believe in tfiemselves so totally, be so ready to act on tlieir own assumptions. Even tHe two rather obvious fallacies Ebert Had stated as facts a moment ago seemed almost acceptable. Morrison raised His gaze, to find Ebert staring at Him sympathetically. THe blond man Had lowered tHe dartgun, but it was still ready for instant action. TKe teacher straightened up and said, "Just a moment. If you don't mind explanations comprehensible to my under-developed brain I Have a question or two." TKe sarcasm was ignored, and Ebert politely gave Morrison His undivided attention. "History teaches that all attempts at population control by colonization were effective only on the short term. As for star travel, Einstein's equations Have been proven time and again. Just what makes you so certain your grandiose ideas will work?" Ebert smiled. "We act on fiigH probability, sir, not certainty. The probability is very high that Einstein can be modified, just as he modified Newton without disproving his basic laws. I'm a psychologist, not a physicist, but the basic idea is that Einstein's equations do not apply to a unit of matter with a self-contained propulsion system. As for the colonization-population history, I must disagree with you. Colonization relieves population when there is a place to go and an economical means of transport. Its benefits were short-term on Earth because we ran out of room. But frankly, we Newmen would favor pushing on to the Stars regardless. We feel that constant challenge is necessary for growth." "And since the future belongs to you, you are now deciding it?" T? belt's friendly, relaxed expres' sion faded into a chilly aloofness. "Dr. Morrison, I would have expected you to be above the rnan-versus-mutant nonsense. We are fully Human, perhaps more so tKan you, since it's primarily the forebrain and cultural conditioning that distinguishes man from the other animals. And we are fully aware that ten thousand people, no matter how intelligent, cannot actively control the lives do is identify the important turning points which' determine the direction an entire society will take and attempt to influence the outcome of those selected events. Tako's discovery is one such point, and Carl Campbelleton's another. If a Newman had been in Russia when the Bolsheviks were preparing to overthrow Kerensky's government... Ebert shook His Bead ruefully. "You were a staunch supporter of tHe genetics law five years ago, Dr. Morrison. Nothing Has changed since then." "Yes, it Has. Nd one was Holding a dartgun on my cfiest then," Morrison answered quietly. "May I ask How many turning points you Have influenced so far?" "This is tHe first," Ebert admitted soberly. "Getting the money appropriate to finance Carl will be the second. THe third will be an effort by Brasilia to withdraw from the U.N., taking most of South America with Her. This will occur in about four months, and we Have already started tHe campaign which will bring down the present government when the attempt is made. Our forecast calls for about three major events a year for the forseeable future." Morrison leaned forward and looked up at Ebert. The tall man met his gaze squarely. "Young man, I think that in your anxiety to control Earth's resources you've forgotten one of the oldest dictums of aU: You cannot suppress knowledge! If Takahasjii does not publish, someone else will redo His work, and it will inevitably see print And you Have no right to deprive living humans of food in order to benefit theoretically a society of the future. You say you are a psychologist; just How much of your desire to manipulate the world is traceable to a simple old-fashioned power complex?" "I Hope none," Ebert said quickly. "Our decisions are not taken lightly, sir." ((T doubt your wisdom, not your sincerity," Morrison's tone was dry. "And I don't think you know what wisdom is, or appreciate its value. The primary ingredient is a quality you don't possess, called experience." He shifted back in his chair, dropping His hands to His lap and glancing quickly at Ebert's gun, still pointing to the floor. "Your superior intelligence and intensive training haven't produced an understanding of man as good as my own." He moved forward again, planting his feet firmly ort the floor and resting his Bands on His knees. "If I thought you would believe me, I'd point out that a person your age is always certain of His own opinions, no matter How worthless, and perothers. And the truth is that all ten thousand of you can combine your bright young intelligences and still come up with the wrong answer. You haven't convinced me." "I didn't expect to, sir. But one of the several unpublished discoveries in my own field is a new method of fixed Hypnosis tKat enables a skilled operator to bury selected memories so deeply tHey become non-recoverable. Once tfiis is done I can plant some very good false ones in tKeir place. Tomorrow morning you are going to wake up knowing tKat you became sligHtly ill about eleven and went directly Home and to bed. And let me add tKat I regret I must tamper witK your mind, even to tfiis small extent." "I regret it too," said Morrison and yanked tfie loose center desk drawer out witK botfi Hands, turning it vertical and springing to his feet as fie fiurled its jumbled papers, clips and pens at Ebert's face. Tfie big man was blinded by tfie flying miscellany for a few seconds. By tfie time He recovered, Morrison was charging around tfie desk comer, Holding tfie metal drawer before Kim like a sfiield. Ebert lowered Eis aim, and tfie dartgun Kissed twice, but tfie churning legs were a difficult target, and botfi tiny arrows missed Tfie big man attempted to move sideways, but He was mucfi too late. Morrison Had tfie satisfaction of slamming tfie drawer into tfie smootfi young face, and fie followed it by a Hard low puncfi to tfie abdomen. Ebert must not Have known tfie teacfier Bad been a collegiate soft-glove boxer in Bis undergraduate days. Tfie blond man doubled over in pain, but retained his weapon. Morrison changed fiis tactics and chopped bard at tfie exposed neck, but missed and almost broke fiis Hand on tfie enlarged skull. Then tfie barrel was swinging toward Kim as Ebert backed away, raising fiis left arm to protect fiis face, and Morrison kicked desperately and caugfit tfie extended wrist. Tfie dartgun went spinning away. Morrison turned and bolted for tfie door. Takafiasfii Bad not moved during tfie brief figfit He suddenly came to life as Morrison yanked tfie door open and rusfied to join Him. Tfie older man fled down tfie Ball without waiting. There was a security guard at a monitor post on tfie floor below, and once Ke fumed tfie first corner it would be impossible for Ebert to catch Kim. Takafiasfii was only a few feet befiind. As fie took tfie stairs tfiree at a time, Morrison fiad a sudden flasfi of insight, a poignant look at tHe irony of a leading exponent of controlled evolution fleeing from tfie new order fie Bad worked to make possible. TEe worst of it was that Ebert and Bis council were quite possibly right; promulgation of Tabafiasfii's discovery mi gh t well delay that first trip to the stars. Getting a project tKat large funded was going to be a tremendous battle... and sudwork with which he could occupy himself for his remaining active years. He Had enjoyed lobbying for the passage of the genetics law. He could retire from teaching and devote himself to proving the watchdog team wrong. And he would not be alone. Merry's only application of Her political training had been in working with him during that Hectic campaign in #. What she and husband Roger really needed was a worthwhile cause, a challenge in which they could lose themselves. He would shortly present them with one. He realized, as he came to a puffing stop beside the wide-eyed guard's monitor set, that the Newmen's council would Have to be broken up quietly, the members dispersed without fanfare. A witch hunt would be fatal, both to them and the upgrading of humanity they represented. And yet they had to be brought under control, their young eagerness for results subordinated to the good of mankind as a whole. If their overly ambitious scheme to influence the world was allowed to continue, an explosion was inevitable. He had just demonstrated, by a brief application of old-fashioned force, that any real manipulation of mankind was almost impossible. The Jinn would have discovered this Hard lesson for themselves after their first few efforts failed, but if their meddling became known they might not live to rue the consequences. "One of my students," he gasped to the guard, and saw him reaching for the alert button. "Nervous breakdown, in my office. He has a dartgun. Don't harm him." Green lights began to blink on the console as guards reported in. Morrison, still breathing heavily, turned to Takahashi, silently waiting. It was done, and out of his Hands for the moment. He had helped to make his old dream of a well-fed humanity a reality after all, though hardly in the manner he had expected. Man could reach for the stars with' a full belly. For the best in fantasy and adventure featuring Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, Mack Reynolds iand many others. Don't miss it! At your newsstand now! BokiUeljf r # yet to hear anybody say a seriously bad word about Larry Niven's writing. THere was a time, of course, when one wouldn't expect to. Bob Heinlein was motivating people in about the same way Niven does; Eric Frank Russell was plotting in much the same sort of pattern; Hal Clement was rationalizing his settings about as impressively as Niven does, a little more so, maybe; maybe a little differently, ratfisame sort of trick with deadpan declarative sentences that turn out to have been time bombs. Niven fits right into that tradition; He ought to have Happened right about the same time Tenn did, and we could Have said the two of them represented the two faces of the same ricH coin. Instead, he has come along now, when, the trend is all against his land of writing, and becomes an award-winner, a much admired man, and an all-'round good fellow. I don't understand it. He must be very good. He is. He really is, and I take him fondly to my doctrine that trends are for second-raters. Quality rises above fashion. For examples of wKat I mean, please -- please -- see a copy of Neutron Star (Ballantine), a collection of eight of his stories. Several of these are about Beowulf Shaeffer, former chief pilot for Nakamura Lines, wlio I suspect might look a little bit like Cary Grant in the Korda Gunga Din, except that He's an albino. (Niven, as noted previously, does not so much delineate a character as he does describe His reflexes). Sh'aeffer is a kind of wonderful adventurer, doing the most astonishing things for the most innocent reasons. He does them in a dynamic, well-populated universe, and Niven rounds out this not inconsiderable achievement by also Having the audacity to make His problems physical ones. Simple ones, at that, though tHeir solutions are often based on extremely complicated ingenuities. By doing so, He creates a wonderful effect. He makes you realize that it would be a tragedy if Sh'aeffer lost His life... only that, and nothing more. This not only makes for exciting stories, it does quite a bit for the general dignity of Man. Niven's universe -- our universe -- is, as I've said, dynamic. It has color, motion and a central explosion that Has already happened and will blow the whole thing out of existence in another # years. That's a safe distance in time, of course, for you and me, and even Shaeffer, but on the other Hand, Niven's scale of time starts back in the days of the ago, so you can see we're at the short end of the beam. It does tend to make you hang tight. And it's well populated. Not only by us, but our variant descendants among the stars and by fragmentary living relics of the Slavers' sway, but also by such people as the Puppeteers, with their two h'eadedness and their beautiful voices, their cowardice, and their mercantile sense. It's lovely stuff. It really Is. "Neutron Star," the prizewinning short story from It from which the collection takes its name, is in itself worth the paperback price of admission, as is the great, ebullient feeling you'll get. There was a time of course, when all the stories by everybody were always simple. Well, things in general were considered simpler; there really was a time, you know, when people Honestly told themselves that O. Henry solutions were real solutions, when ! responsibility was considered sufficiently met, when the proper attitude was struck and when everything had its defined place. (That was in your parents, and schoolteachers' time; not yours and mine.) In that time and in that place, which covered the civilized (i.e., Englishspeaking) f portion of the globe, it was only  reasonable to assume that the I transformation of things was the  transformation of natures. Thus a vast preoccupation, favorable and otherwise, with technology and the physical sciences. Thus, science-fiction, in its time. Science Fiction by Gaslight, to be exact, as anthologized in an aptly named book edited (but not named) by Sam Moskowitz, and published at # by World. Subtitled "A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, #-#," this book is full of stories about, for example, the destruction of London by lava, of Manhattan by tilting, of the world by the glare of light finally arriving from the immense central sun 'round which revolves the galaxy. (AH, there, L.N.;) It also contains stories about bluff, and Heroic deed, in future wars. It has two scientifically detected murders, one grim and one funny tale about man-eating plants, and a flock of other words which are not science fiction as most of us would understand it, nor, in fact, are truly resolved stories, but which, now that I recollect the mood, certainly represented an accepted popular storytelling mode even as late as my late childhood. (Some of the other words group up into some very worthy stories, but we Haven't yet gotten to that.) A book such as this gives one to pause. For one thing, if one is in the ephemera racket oneself, any collection from popular periodicals gives you the shivers. Collect # or a hundred thousand words from the general magazines of any era, and you achieve the paradoxical feat of making frothiness more apparent in direct relationship to the weight of it you pile on. This stuff depends for most of its effects on popular prejudice. OK, I don't mean big things, like the racism in Burroughs, or the casual blunderings upon it tKat you'll find in these stories. I mean the little things -- like the "shorthand" of which we sf people are so proud, for example -- that make a prose divertissement go smoothlyPeople bitch about the lack of characterization and motivation in commercial writing; they miss the fact that it's there ih predigested form, or if not the fact itself, then its inevitable consequences. In order to Kit fast with it, get it done and get out, you and the reader both simplify. In the days of this book, you h'ad to admit that all cops were Irish, all Irish cops were immensely strong, faithful, and slightly stupid, for instance. Okay; this was a popular prejudice of the day. But in fact, anyone intelligent enough had to have noticed that not all live cops fit this description. So the acceptance of the innumerable Paddys and Sergeant O'Tooles in this form of froth was based on a twostep phenomenon, rather than on simple suspension of disbelief. It was based on "I know better, but it's a minor matter and for entertainment's sake I'll go along with their belief." Okay, for entertainment's sake people have gone along with a lot worse than that. But implicit in this blithe surrender is an acknowledgment, right there at the heart of the process, that the process is of no consequence. It is to be hoped, of course, that today's science fiction, or at least that part of today's science fiction, which I appeals in its own magazines and is produced by thoroughly conscious craftsmen heavily involved with true problems, is not going to stand revealed in the same light as are these stories from the popular press of their day. Or it is to be hoped that Sam's taste simply ran to the froth, and that side by side with this material there appeared that great fraction which is cracked out by Sturgeon's Law, but was lost to Moskowitz's. At any rate, something is to be hoped for. Very hard. Despite all this, there are stories in the book which are not merely good -- pick over twenty years' worth of hitherto untouched matter, and you Had better produce a number of "good" stories -- but effective. "The Doom of London" is one of them, perhaps because it isn't really about the doom of London but about flight from disaster; "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie" is another, though it might have bgen better had the author chosen to develop the events of his story even if it is a jest; "An Experiment in Gyro Hats" is as funny as ever it must Have been, not because it obeyed a trend toward funny inventor stories but because it's by Ellis Parker Butler, th'e man wKo wrote "Pigs is Pigs." More familiar stories are "Tfie Voice in the NigEt" and "TEe Land Ironclads," which I suspect are familiar because Hodgson and Wells were top-rate talent. But then there's "An Express of the Future," too fragmentary and frail even to serve as yet another example for my assertion that Jules Verne is a pretty brittle facade to lean mucH worship on. It's a thought-provoking book, is what it is, and as usual with Moskowitz, a must for the serious collector and historian who, if he is really serious, will find his own clues for where He might second-guess Sam's judgments. One, and only one, will I take issue with here, that being his claim that Wells described the caterpillar treads of the tank before the tank was ever invented. The relevant passage reads "... feet. They were thick, stumpy, feet, between knobs and buttons in shape -- flat, broad things, reminding one of the feet of elephants or the legs of caterpillars." (Italics Wells's.) Only by taking the less likely meaning of "between," and then by falling victim to the Caterpillar Tractor Company's publicity image, can you assume, as Sam does in quoting this same passage, that Wells had anything in mind but a device that proceeded over uneven terrain in the manner of some of the Moon-walker gadgets that are being designed today. Wells did indeed postulate the use of armored vehicles in combat -- as Verne did the use of submarines -- and as Da Vinci had seriously suggested some years before either of them. But just as Verne failed to provide the Nautilus with a periscope, so Wells did not give his ironclads the endless belt, and let us not, for God's sake, start another one of those apocrypha there, then. We know too much about each other, and not enough about ourselves. We bicker, we broil, and we don't always -- we hardly ever -- know what it's about. Us sf types, that is. Take the strange case of Robert Silverberg. Silverb'erg Has written more books than most people have notes to their milkman. Literally. He is comfortably in funds as the result of commercial writing, an almost unheard-of phenomenon. Rich', yes. People get rich at writing -- they hit the BoM or the Literary Guild, they make the big Hywd sale, and are next seen standing next to Racquel Welch at one of Hugh Hefner's parties. But hardly anyone makes a decent living at it, treating it the way someone else would treat a nice little brokerage House or architect's office.; Most people starve and cripple themselves at it. The way to do it is to sit down at the typewriter every morning, write for ten thousand words, and stand up for the rest of the day. That produces one book a week. Can you possibly have that many ideas, and even if you got them, could you develop them in any noteworthy way? Answer: Probably not. But you are a fool if you are in business and you let something like that deter you. The clarity of mind, the singleness of purpose, the sheer managerial skill reflected in Silverberg's early career are qualities many of us ought to have studied. There is something there for each of us to learn from. But instead most of us, living in each other's hip pockets as we do, battered and browbeat at Silverberg incessantly, taking him to task for being shallow, and then going Home and writing painfully. Most of us Had nobler aspirations and burned with a hotter flame than Silverberg apparently did. We were so intense, as a matter of fact, that our hang-ups distorted our copy. Jobs were rushed by financial pressure. Choices of characterization, exposition and setting were dictated by hunger, or fear... but our product was nevertheless better than his, because while it was often no more efficient as storytelling than His was, ours Had Higher motives. Well, I'm citing extreme views of the old conflict between the Muse and the buck, and it wasn't as intense as all that, but How curious to see that Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books like Thorns, or like his latest from Ballantine, The Masks of Time. Did He plan to become this way all along, or did we persuade him? And to what degree, then, does his very existence in this incarnation comment on us, or on him, or on our mutual past, or the future? Let's not get too lost -- The Masks of Time is not a wholly good book. It's marred by several gratuitous problems, one being a sub-plot that skews the pacing, another being an inexplicable prurience that serves no visible plotpurpose. But its defects are the opposite of those Silverberg's work used to have. It's overworked, and it dawdles. It's crowded with' people to whom too much attention has been paid, with incidents that could easily have been left out. This is very much' like what you'd expect from a Silverberg looking up over his shioulder and saying: (Here. Here. I'm an artist. See -- Here's a piece of evidence to prove it. And another. And another. And... ) But Silverberg has never betrayed the slightest trace of giving a damn what anybody said or thought. So jnaybe he was planning it this way all along. Maybe in the old days he'd whisper to a character: (All right I'm making you out of cardboard, but what I've omitted I'm going to pack into somebody else, some day, and he won't just be round, he'll be dense!" And slopping out an idiot plot, but promising himself that one of these days, all those clipped-off loose ends would be woven into a tapestry worthy of Bokhara. Or maybe Herculaneum. Who knows? We don't really know each other any better than we know ourselves. But there it is. The new complete reversal... the hand emerging from the mirror. OK, yes. The Masks of Time is about an enigmatic, bland, mischievous, self-assured fellow who emerges into public view one day in the very last days of the Twentieth century and claims to Have traveled back in time from the last days of the thirtieth. He upsets everyone because he cannot or will not tell them anything about himself. All anyone can do is follow Kim around and observe, occasionally acceding to his wishes, which frequently involve screwing up whatever machine or institution is complicated and assertedly smooth-running. In some ways like a better-rounded but less charismatic Stranger in a Strange Land, it is by the way the first of what will doubtless be many books to exploit the fact that we're approaching another millenium and another inevitable outburst of apocalyptic hysteria. It's not a wholly good book. But go buy it. It's quite interestg Third Straight Year! g I IF I m Wins the Hugo award as World's Best SF Magazine! H g Dan't miss tho December Issue with --  Isaac Asimov  I . G. Bollard ig A. Bertram Chandler  and many more! I! On sate at all leading newsstands now! H Someone wanted a spy inside Eastern Europe -- but wouldn't tell him why I I wearily, even as be checked a report on the screen of His desk T)aul Kosloff the #nd said, teevee phone. He said, "Mr. Kos- "There must be some mistake loff, I estimate that four persons in my being summoned Here." out of five who sit in that cEair He was sitting in the office of you occupy tell me that some Herman Banning, in a section of mistake was made when they the Bureau of Labor Draft in were selected by the Labor Greater Washington. Draft" The older man looked at Him Paul Kosloff was a young man of possibly thirty, well built and straight of carriage but, except for Slavic blueness of eye and blondness of Hair, not especially outstanding so far as face was concerned, save for a certain quiet dignity. His smile was slow, and there was a vulnerable something there, a sincerity continually striving to come through. He said now, "Don't misunderstand, Mr. Banning. I am not a draft dodger. The thing is, I am already employed, and at government work at that. I teach language on the Tri-Vision University of the Air." Herman Banning nodded. "Undoubtedly that's one of the reasons you were selected, Mr. Kosloff. You make a common mistake. The Bureau of Labor Draft doesn't exist simply to find jobs for the unemployed, but to find the most suitable personnel for such positions as still remain under People's Capitalism, the Ultra-welfare State." He frowned slightly. "Admittedly, this request is a bit unusual. And, frankly, I don't know what your assignment might be. However, the computers picked you out of the files." Paul Kosloff said unhappily, "But I like my work. My pay is ample and -- " Banning was checking his jscreen again. "That's one thin g to the good, Mr. Kosloff. The Bureau of Labor Draft seldom switches a man from one category to another without his pay being increased. I note that at present you receive four shares of Variable Basic a year to add to your portfolio. Undoubtedly, your pay at the Octagon will be at least another share a year." "The Octagon?" Paul Kosloff said in disgust. "I didn't even know it still existed." "It still exists," Herman Banning said. He held out a paper. "Please report to Harry Kank, of the Inter-American Bureau of Investigation, at this office." P aul Kosloff said, "There must be a mistake. I already Have a job and am perfectly satisfied with it." He Had made his way by vacuum-tube transport to the office of the Octagon in Greater Washington and was now confronted by a cold-eyed civilian in late middle age who carried himself as though backed by long years in the military. There was a nononsense aura about him. The other held a hand over his desk to shake Kosloff's and said, "Sit down, Paul." Paul Kosloff sat down and frowned. He was younger than tliis one, but still a full professor. He was seldom called by his first name by strangers. The other said, "My name is Harry Kank. Many years ago, when I was younger than you are now, I accompanied your father on an assignment in what is now Common Eur-Asia, Belgrade to be exact. The jqb was to smuggle Milovan Djilas out of Yugoslavia." Paul Kosloff said, "He never told me about that one." "It didn't come off. Djilas wouldn't leave. He told us his job was in Yugoslavia." Paul Kosloff said, "Look here, it's nice to meet a friend of my father's from the old days, but -- " Harry Kank said evenly, "I did not say I was a friend of your faother's, Paul. I said I was an associate. Your father didn't have many friends. He was too dedicated, too fanatical, if you will. We used to call him the Cold War's Lawrence of Arabia. I've often suspected that it came as a great blow to Him when the Cold War finally faded away." Kosloff was slightly taken aback. "Well, be that as it may, I still Haven't the vaguest idea why I'm Here. I know nothing about my father's work." "This Has nothing to do with your father. It's only a coincidence that you're Paul Kosloff the #nd. Harry Kank looked down into his desk screen. "The computers pulled you for the following reasons. You speak all of the Balkan languages, including even Hungarian. You have fairly close relatives in several parts of Common Eur-Asia. You have no record, whatsoever, connecting you with espionage -- " "Espionage!" Paul Kosloff blurted. The other went on. "Your cover is perfect. You are a legitimate professor of language. You Have a sabbatical coming up. Nothing would make more sense than that you take it visiting your Common Eur-Asian relatives and perfecting your accent." "And that's why my name was pulled out of the labor files by the computers?" The other looked at Him. "Not quite all. You are evidently your father's son. Not only do you carry a Black Belt in Kodakan Judo but Have evidently made a Hobby of Chinese Kenpo, Jujitsus, Hoppa Ken and Nanpa Ken. You were a runner-up for the last Olympics in both pistol and rifle. You've done considerable mountain climbing and make a Habit of spending most of your vacations Hunting and fishing in the upper reaches of Canada -- alone. Paul Kosloff, that adds up to quite a bit of active manhood." P aul Kosloff said uncomfortaably, "Dad always insisted on physical as well as intellectual pursuits. But listen, I'm no spy." "We don't want you to be." Paul Kosloff looked at him. Harry Kank said, "Settle back and' let me go into my fling." "It Had better be good, because the answer is probably no." Kank said, "Paul, the history of the relationship between East and West has often verged on the farcical due to the faulty information provided by the professionals and which we accepted. We Have a natural tendency to believe what we want to believe. When Lenin's revolution took place, it was widely accepted that the Bolsheviks wouldn't last the year out They lasted. All through the twenties, the reports came through about How the Russians were starving to death and the regime about to collapse. It didn't. When Hitler attacked, our best information led us to believe that the superlative German WeHrmacht would take Moscow in weeks. They didn't. "Immediately following the war, we told ourselves it would take at least a decade for them and develop an atomic bomb. It didn't. And they were neck and neck with us in attaining the HBomb. The real shock came when they were the first in space and remained the first for a long time. Other shocks followed. However, as a whole we continued to maintain our original religious faith that the East would never overtake the West." "See here," Kosloff said. "What are you building up to? I told you I wasn't interested in following in my father's footsteps." U Correct Nor do we want you  to. The Cold War, in the old sense, Paul Kosloff, is no longer with us. However, the world is still divided into two ultra-powers, with a few neutrals scattered about. In many respects, the developments of the past few decades have resulted in our knowing less about what goes on in Common Eur-Asia than we knew before. We Have both withdrawn into our own spheres of influence. However, we still must keep informed." "It sounds like spying to me." "Call it the gathering of information. You will enter the Balkans without weapons, without secret codes, drops, special cover, or anything of the nature. You will spend a year there, assimilating knowledge. No taking pictures of military bases, no ferreting out secret weapons. You simply associate with your relatives, with colleagues in the Common Eur-Asian universities, with casually found friends. You realize, of course, you are not alone. We are sending a score of agents to different areas of Common Eur-Asia. You are simply our Balkan expert." Paul Kosloff thought about it "What happens if they catch me?" "Catch you doing what? Your strictest instructions are not to break any laws... Nevertheless, if you run into difficulties, you are on your own. THe government of the United States of the Americas will not recognize you, beyond the point it would any teacher on Sabbatical leave, vacationing in that part of Common Eur-Asia called the Balkans." Paul Kosloff said slowly, "In actuality, my Sabbatical is coming up, and I was planning to spend part of it in Yugoslavia and Hungary." "Fine. The assignment doesn't even interfere with your plans." Harry Kank added persuasively, "And upon completion of your little trip, this department will award you ten shares of Variable Basic stock to add to your portfolio." Paul said, "I'd have to think more about it" "Please do," the other said coldly. "However, keep this in mind; your country needs your services, Paul Kosloff. Whether or not you accept the commission, do not under any circumstances discuss it with anyone. Anyone. In a day or two your liaison man will turn up at your apartment. You can give him your answer." "My who?" "Your liaison man. This is the first and last time you'll ever be in the Octagon. We'll call him John Smith. All your contact with this bureau will be through him." "John Smith turned out to be a smiling man and cordial. He seemed to take it for granted that Paul Kosloff Had decided to come in with them. In fact, perhaps it was His very air of confidence that pushed Paul over the edge to an affirmative decision. Paul saw Him seated, offered Him a drink from the auto-bar, but the other shook his Head. "Not during duty Hours. Shall we get to business?" "What business?" Paul said. "You already have a passport? Good. You'll Have to apply for a Common Eur-Asia visa. It should only take a day or two to come through. According to the data I Have on you, you've never been there before, but you have relatives in Split, Belgrade and Budapest. That's always a good reason for such a trip. And, of course, you'll need your rocketplane ticket. And you'll have to apply for an International Credit Card and switch some of your credit balance to it." "I assume you'll cover all expenses." John Smith grinned at Him and shook His Head. "Not at this stage of the game, Hombre. Our finger won't appear in this at all, Paul. If we put a few thousand dollar credits into your balance, it would pKow in the computer banks. We Jiave no idea of what agents of theirs have infiltered various of our government offices." "You mean I'm going to have to pay for all this?" Smith laughed and said, "Temporarily. You'll be reimbursed when it's all over. The less cover you need, the harder it is to blow, Paul." Paul Kosloff thought about something and came to his feet and went over to a drawer built into the wall of his mini-apartment. He opened it and came out with a handgun. went up. Paul said, "A .# Noiseless. It used to be my father's gun." "Well, put it away, hombre," Smith said. "You didn't think you were going to land at one of their rocketports carrying a shooter, did you? They aren't cloddies. They have metal detectors that'd pick up anything as big as a shooter and ring a dozen alarms. Besides, remember, you are no cloak and dagger operative ; you're a professor who's taking his sabbatical leave visiting his relatives and perfecting his accent. What in the name of the holy jumping Zoroaster would you be doing with a shooter?" Paul Kosloff accepted that and put the weapon back in the drawer. He returned to his chair and faced the other again. "All right, how do I report to you?" "You don't." Paul looked at him. "I thought you were my liaison man." "I am, but unless there's an emergency you keep everything you learn to yourself until you get back." "Well, in case of emergency?" Smith pointed at his host's wrist teevee phone. "You'll call me by regular phone. I'll give you a number One Priority on my wrist phone, and you'll be able to call me wherever I am on satellite relay on a twenty-four-hour a-day basis. "Do you have a code or something?" "No. Talk straight English. Codes can be betrayed or broken. You're not stupid. You can word it in such a maimer that I'll understand, but any secret police, or whoever, listening in, wouldn't. Pretend that I'm a colleague of yours at the university." Paul Kosloff sighed. "This is all new to me, in spite of my father's background. Just what do you want me to find out?" The agent leaned forward. "Paul, we want inside information. We want to know what the people think; how the man in the street feels about the government, if He supports or opposes it. We want to know if tEere's an underground, and, if tfiere is, Sow strong it is, wHat kind of people it appeals to, what steps it's taking, and How it Expects to get into power. For all we know, there might be more than one underground movement. THere migSt be one in, say, tfiat area tKey used to call Bulgaria, but a different one in Rumania. We'd like to know about them all. We want to know wh'at's going on inside Common Eur-Asia. Maybe we'll never use the information, but we want to keep up." II P aul Kosloff took tKe vacuumtube transport to Neuvo Albuquerque and tHen lobbed over to the Common Eur-Asian international rocketport located roughly Halfway between Budapest and Lake Balaton. He Had relatives in Budapest, only about an Hour away by floater, or minutes by a shuttle jet, but He Had decided to make His first stop Split, on the Dalmatian coast of tKe Adriatic. So far as His cover was concerned, it made more sense that way. His closest relatives were in Hie Dalmatian area of wHat was once called Yugoslavia. He was mildly surprised by the affluence. Apparently you could build steel mills and more steel mills just so long. Sooner or later, you stop putting the steel into more steel nulls arid start building other things with it -- cars, refrigerators, electronic stoves and other consumer goods. From iOie rocketport, Be took a shuttle jet to Belgrade and transferred there to another wKicH bustled Kim over to the old old town of Split, nestled against tfie clearest, bluest water Paul Kosloff Had ever seen. The small jetport was located Half way between tKe ruins of Salona, the Roman capital of Illyria, and SpHt proper. Paul Kosloff emerged from tHe shuttle jet and looked about. Thus far, to His gratification, fie Had Had no difficulties whatsoever witH His Serbo-Croat, a language wfiicH He didn't consider His best. His maternal grandmother Had been a Serb, but His knowledge of tfie language Had largely been attained in school. He Had already found that vacuum-tube transport was not nearly so well established in Common Eur-Asia as it was in tfie United States of tKe Americas and looked about for an auto-floater cab or the equivalent. Typical of tHe tourist, down through the centuries, He was impatient when all the facilities of His own land were not at His fingertips. He brought himself up abruptly and Had to keep Him self from gaping. About twenty feet away stood the most beautiful brunette Ke could ever remember having seen, not excluding the sex symbols currently popular on Tri-Vision shows back home. She combined the beauty attributes of Orient and Occident. The black, black hair of the Chinese, eyes slightly slanted, a creamy dark complexion impossible to achieve without blending races. There was in Her, probably, Caucasian and Magyar, perhaps Hun. She was simply breathtakingly beautiful, and Her figure matched Her face and managed to be tallisH, slim and lush at the same time. Paul Kosloff Had picked up another trait of the tourist come down the centuries. He assumed that tKe locals didn't speak his language. He muttered aloud, "Holy jumping Zoroaster, I wish it was me you were waiting for." She looked at Him. "It probably is," she said in perfect English. TT e closed his eyes for the brief est moments, Half in chagrin. Half in Hopes that what she was saying was true. He opened them and said, in Serbo-Croat, "I'm afraid not, worst luck." She took Him in, Head to foot. "You're my cousin Paul, aren't you?" "Cousin #" he said, rallying uncharacteristically to a situation of humor. "Oh, no. Cousins aren't allowed to marry, are they?" She looked at him coolly, but there was a touch of amusement at the sides of Her mouth. "Second cousins are -- under certain circumstances." He tried to keep it all on the present bantering level. "What circumstances?" She enumerated on Her fingers. "One, that neither cousin already be married. Two, that they find each other mutually attractive. Three..." "Yes?" "That one not be an imperialistic, rich American." He laughed. She was good. He was ordinarily not light in his conversation, but she brought it out in Him. Paul said, "Well, where do we miss connections?" She tilted Her Head to one side, contemplating Him. "I don't know, as yet, whether or not we find each other mutually attractive." "Is that all? How do you know I'm not an imperialist and rich?" It was Her turn to laugh. "I don't know, but I understand you are a fellow teacher of language." He should have guessed. Her accent was near perfect, though British rather than American. He made a mock half bow. "Paul Kosloff, at your service, cousin. Not rich. Not particularly imperialist, whatever that means, and not at all married." She executed # half dip -- not a very good curtsy -- and said, "Gold! Pashitch, at your service, cousin. Also not rich. And not at all married." "Goldil" he said, before he could catch' himself. She looked at him critically. From what I have read of American literature, I understand that the name is sometimes utilized as a stereotype. However, pray remember, it was the name of our mutual great-grandmother." He winced and switched tones. "You've come to meet me. I didn't expect anyone. Thank you very much. I know I have several relatives in this vicinity, but don't even know the names of all of them." She smiled. "Zutl Wh'at did you expect? You are out American relative. It is not often that an American comes to Split these days. We are all on edge, awaiting you." He took her arm and headed in the direction of the Administration Building for his luggage. He said, "Are all of my Balkan cousins as attractive as you are?" She looked at him from the sides erf her eyes. "Are all my American cousins as gallant?" "Hmmm. I'm afraid I am the only one. I'm an only child, and my father the only member of the family that -- ah -- escaped from Russia in the early days." "Yes, but on your mother's ride, I understand, you are part Serb and part Hungarian. And I've heard that every Hungarian family has at least one relative in an American town called, let me see, Akron, Ohio." He laughed. She helped him obtain his luggage, then led the way out to a floater she had parked in front. It was a sporty model, fitting the informality of her clothing. Paul Kosloff decided that back in the West, first impressions would have led to the belief that she was upperclass. He piled his luggage into the back, gestured with his Band at the aircushion car and said, "Yours?" Che climbed behind the manual  controls, dropped the lift lever and said, "Heavens to Betsy, no. We use the same system you do. Few people own floaters; we rent them." He looked over at her and said, "Heavens to Betsy?" She flushed. "I teach' English, you know, and like to keep up on the idiom." "Well, I'm Here myself partly to catch up on my accents and such things as current idiom." He cleared his throat. "However, Heavens to Betsy, is somewhat dated. Almost as bad as #-Skidoo. Currently, we say, Zoroaster, or holy jumping Zoroaster, or, perhaps, Zo-ro-as-ter, all drug out." "Zoroaster?" She scowled. On Her, he decided, it looked good. "I thought he was an ancient Persian religious leader." "Right." "Well, what does it mean when you invoke his name?" "What does Heavens to Betsy mean?" She chuckled laughter. Goldi FashitcH Had a good laugh, more like a man's than a pretty girl's. This cousin was going up in his estimation by the minute, and she had started rather high. He said, "What's the program?" "Dinner tonight with us. We've all been going through th'e family recipes to find you some typical Servian and Croatian disHes. And Branko has been scouring the countryside for the best of sljivovica, prosek and Bakarska Vodica." "Branko, if I remember, is another of my cousins. He must be your brother. Sljivovica and prosek I've Heard about. But wKat was that last?" " Bakarska Vodica. A sparkling wine, something like champagne." "Wonderful ( So you still Have decent lush over here. Back Home, Central Productions Has outlawed the use of cereals and fruits for the production of beverages." She made a moue. "But wines and liqueurs are among the good things of life." "You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, girl," He grumbled. "But in the United States of the Americas you don't waste cereal on making beer or lush', any more than you feed it to cattle. Too inefficient. Chickens, yes, pork, yes. But precious little cereal goes to beef. With' chickens you can raise a Half pound of meat with a pound of cereal. Pigs aren't that efficient, but they're better than cows." "Our Central Production Planning limits use of cereals to fatten cattle too," she said. "What is this, you ain't just whistlin' Dixie?" Paul laughed. "That's a piece of old idiom coming back into use. Look, where are we going?" "First to the New Maijan in the Bay of Bacvice. It's our best Hotel. Vuk was in favor of putting you up with us, but Branko said you'd be more free at a hotel, and Kandy to the beach and all. We Hadn't had the vaguest idea of your requirements. Whether you wanted to study, go night hopping, soak in the sun or what. "All of those," Paul said. 'T'hey were entering Split proper. She drove along the water front, which was in park, and past a tremendous ancient building. She said, "Diocletian's palace." Her voice took on a burlesque of a travel-guide's rote. "Built cira # A.D. for the Emperor Diocletian, who was bom in this vicinity and who was the last of the great pagan emperors and one of the few who lived to retire and spend his last years in peace, rather than being murdered. So well did he build this retirement palace of his that three thousand persons still live within its walls." Paul Kosloff stared at it. "Zoroaster!" he said. "It must be one of the best preserved buildings of antiquity." Used as he was to the pseudocities of the United States of the Americas, he found Split exceedingly attractive. Somehow, the population explosion hadn't seemed to hit as badly here as it had at home. Either that or the urban planners had in some manner succeeded in hiding it. Split gave the impression of a small, uncrowded resort town on the sea. Goldi Pashitch whisked him through town and out to the bay and to the portals of the New Marfan. SKe entered tiie lobby witK Him, and He was mildly surprised to see a live receptionist at tKe desk. "Our Hotels are more ultramated tHan yours seem to be," He told Her. SEe snorted deprecation. "Make work," sEe said. "There's no reason in th'e world why we couldn't ultramate our Hotels too. TKe government deliberately refrains." He looked at Her. SKe evidently Had no compunctions about speaking up against government policies sKe opposed. It was this sort of thing that Harry Kank, back in the Octagon, wanted to know. After He Had registered, sKe accompanied him to the bank of elevators. Evidently, sKe Had no compunctions either against going up to His rooms. SHe Helped Him inspect the small suite, and showed Him the workings of the auto-bar and delivery box and Helped liberate His luggage from the latter. TKen she brought forth the local teevee phonebook and showed Him How to dial and order from the Common Eur-Asia equivalent of the American ultramarket. In actuality, there was comparatively little difference. Evidently, the East Had not been far behind the West in automating distribution. When he was settled in, she turned to him briskly and smiled up into his face. "There you are, Cousin Paul. I'll leave you to your cleaning up, and having a nap, or whatever. You must be tired. AH, Zo-ro-as-ter, just think! This morning, you were in America." He wished tKat He Had the nerve to kiss her. And He didn't Have a cousinly kiss in mind, either. Ill D inner at the PashitcH Home turned out to be a matter of gastronomic endurance, in a near mob scene. He tried to keep names sorted, and couldn't. Among the family alone tKere were Branko, Vuk and Stefan. Then there were some relatives, and their relationship to Him never seemed quite clear. TKere was a MikEail, a Drzic, two different Annas, a Jan, an Anora, a Maria and an Ignat. TKen tKere were various neighbors and friends, all of whom seemed to be named either Josip or Alexander. He was met with shouts of greetings, at the front door by various of these, all proffering drinks. Nothing would do, even before introductions, but that He knock back a stiff sljivovica, the plum brandy eau-de-vie of the Balkans. Then, while Branko, Goldi's good looking twenty-yearold brother, beamed from behind, as though Paul Kosloff was His own personal protege, nothing would do but that Paul take a tall glass of Dingac, a red wine somewhat similar to Chianti. Even as the introductions progressed, Paul took in His surroundings. The PashitcH family was sizeable, but he was mildly surprised at the magnitude of the House. His own quarters, back home, consisted of a mini-apartment; living cum bedroom, a tiny bath', a tiny kitchenette. In the Pashitch Home, the kitchen seemed to predominate. Indeed, kitchen, dining and living room seemed to be one. And of a sudden, Paul Kosloff realized that the family cooking actually took place here. Offhand, he couldn't remember the last time he Had eaten a Home cooked meal. This was absolutely primitive. He couldn't imagine leaving cooking in the hands of amateurs. Evidently, living wasn't nearly as ultramated in the Balkans as it was in his own country. The glass of Dingac was followed by one of Vugava. From there on in, he lost track of the names of vintages. Shortly, He found himself seated at the enormous table with the men present, the women all busy at stove and in serving. The meal was well into several courses before the womenfolk, including the beauteous Goldi, were seated. Even through His rapidly accumulating alcoholic daze, Paul Kosloff could decide definitely that the faint flush added to Her face by the stove's Heat did nothing at all to detract from Her appearance. There was barbuni, a grilled red-mullet-like fish; there was Dalmatinski prsut, a type of smoked ham; there was pohovano pile , a breaded chicken dish; there was dgansko pecenje, which they called gypsy roast; there were a dozen other dishes, winding up with strudla, cherries in a flaky crust. This last washed down with large draughts of prosek, a sweet wine. And all this in enormous portions and all accompanied with ringing toasts to Paul, to everlasting peace between all nations, to co-existence between Common Eur-Asia and the United States of the Americas. Finally, young Branko came to his feet -- these people seemed to Have an unbelievable capacity for drink, Paul decided, in view of the fact that the youngest Pashitch seemed to be as steady as when the eating and drinking bout had begun -- and extended His glass toward Paul and said, "To eventual world government." Paul had to laugh at that one, even as he took his own wine up. Branko, scowling slightly, said, "And do you think that such a goal is laughable, Cousin?" Paul brushed it off. "In a thousand years, perhaps." One of the others said. "Why so pessimistic, Paul?" Paul Kosloff was embarrassed. "The nations seem to be getting further apart, rather than close enough together to ever dream of a one-world government." One of the non-relatives, a man of about forty who Had been introduced as Marin Gundalic and was evidently a good family friend, said seriously, "Are you sure?" "Well," Paul said, noting the serious interest of all, "we still Have People's Capitalism in my Half of the world, and you still Have communism over Here. And I suspect that never the twain shall meet." "American idiom," Goldi said to the others. She had entered little in the conversations but Had followed it brightly. Z' ' I undulic, who evidently was looked up to by the others when it came to matters politicoeconomic, said, "I am not as well acquainted with what you call People's Capitalism as I would like to be. However, the term communism is elastic." Paul said, uncomfortably, "Actually, I'm not really up on it. I'd like to hear, from your viewpoint, exactly what Has developed ini this part of the world in the past few decades." He put His glass down and tried to concentrate through the Heavy food and the fumes of wine. All eyes went to Marin Gundulic, who Had evidently become the spokesman. He nodded. "Very well. And we will appreciate your views of what has developed in the West." The Yugoslavian paused for a moment, as though considering His approach. He said slowly, "I suppose you might picture it as swings of the pendulum. After the Hitler war and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Stalinists made a policy of stripping the countries they had overrun of their machinery, their railroad rolling stock and so forth. It was some years before they realized that wHat the United States was doing in Western Europe made considerably more sense. So the pendulum swung back, and the Soviet Union began to help rebuild. At first they dominated the governments by enforcing on them Stalin-type dictatorships. However, the people of such countries as Hungary, Poland and Rumania, were more sophisticated than the Russians, better educated. Revolt simmered and finally we Had the pendulum's swing. Yugoslavia broke away entirely. Hungary attempted to and was temporarily crushed. Poland asserted her independence and not long after, Rumania. The U.S.S.R. eventually had little control over her once satellites. "In the early days, each of the nations of Eastern Europe jealously guarded their independence, but once again the pendulum swung. It simply doesn't make sense in the modern industrialized world to be split up into small units such as applied back during feudalism. Western Europe realized it first, and the Common Market was instituted. In the East, our own Yugoslavia pointed out the way. Even under Tito, it was a federation of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins, all working together. If this was possible, why not further amalgamation? If Croats and Serbs, long traditional enemies, could live together, why not bring Bulgarians in too, and Hungarians? If Rumania and Yugoslavia could unite to Harness the Danube at the Iron Gate, why couldn't there be further cooperation?" He shrugged hugely, a Slavic shrug. "To shorten the tale, we joined and formed a union of all East Europe." Goldi said softfy, "And then the tail began to wag the dog, to use an Americanism." Marin Gundulic looked at Her and smiled. "Very apt." He turnto Paul. "I don't know if you are familiar with the work of your American Hudson Institute of some years ago." "I don't believe so." "It was what they called, in those days, a think tank. Their Herman Kalin and Anthony Wiener produced a book entitled The Year #. Very fascinating. One of the tables in it listed how long it would take for each of the nations to reach the Gross National Product Per Capita that the United States boasted in #, which was #. Sweden was to take only #I years, West Germany #, and East Germany # years. France was to take #, the United Kingdom #, and CzecHoslavakia #. Japan had # years to go, and Russia #. Now what I am pointing out is that East Germany was to reach the American level of # eleven years before, the U.S.S.R. and Czechoslovakia eight years before. Poland and R umani a were running neck and neck with the supposed mother country of communism." The Yugoslavian chuckled. "So, as Goldi said, the tail began to wag the dog. We of Eastern Europe began to surpass the Russians. But as you of the Americans began to unite and by doing so strengthened your United States still more, the only thing that made sense was for us in the East to unite as well, and we did. One by one, we merged into our Common Eur-Asia. And some of the smaller countries bordering our ultranation also joined, it being impractical to stand alone in the modem world." He held up His Hands in a gesture of being through. "So here we are today. Our goals of industrialization Have been met. We too have become an affluent society." Paul said, "So the millennium has been reached." Tt was Goldi wha shook her head, although she was reacting for them all. "There is no reaching the millennium, Paul. As society evolves, we conquer goal after goal, but we never come to the end. There is no end." Paul grinned at Her. "Quite a Statement." She flushed and looked about the table apologetically. Branko said, "Now tell us about America. Most of what we read is too slanted." Paul said, "Well, perhaps there isn't much to tell. The History of the United States has been one of new States being admitted from time to time. We started with' thirteen colonies on the Eastern seaboard and in less than a century had spread to the west coast" It was His cousin Vuk, who said, nodding, "One f the outstanding examples of aggression the world Has ever seen." Paul looked at him, somewhat taken aback. "I never thought of it that way." Branko laughed. "You should consult the Indians and the Mexicans." Paul said, "At any rate when we reached the Pacific we Hesitated for a time, perhaps because there was no further to go. But then a precedent was set in # when Alaska, which didn't adjoin the rest of the states, was admitted and still another when Hawaii, which is not even part of the mainland of the Americas and is predominantly nonCaucasian, was admitted in #. However, it was with admission of Puerto Rico that the new trend was started, since Puerto Ricans are Spanish speaking people. By this time, American domination of the Latin American economies was widespread, especially in such countries as Venezuela which is so rich in natural resources. Since we dominated their economies, there was more and more tendency to try and influence their governments." Paul shrugged. "All of the Latin American countries aren't as yet members of the United States of the Americas, of course, but I suppose it's just a matter of Branko said, "Most of this we already know, Cousin. We were more interested in hearing about some of your socio-economic changes, so we could compare them with our own." "Oh'. Well, I suppose the beginnings of our present Ultrawelfare State go back as far as Roosevelt. Our old socio-economic system was coming apart. It was Roosevelt who said something to the effect that the true conservative is a liberal, because he realizes that to conserve the old you must make reforms. But it wasn't until the late #'s that the first seeds of what we now call People's Capitalism were sown, and they inadverfently." One of the neighbors leaned forward in interest. "How do you mean?" "It was the gold drain. The government had issued, domestically and internationally, someso in gold which supposedly backed it. It wasn't that the country was poor. Even then the annual gross national product was pushue of all property ran into many enough gold in the world to back all of the currency needed for international demands. "So what they did was to have the hundred largest corporations pay ten per cent of their taxes in the form of common stock of th'e corporation. The government consolidated this into what amounted to a gigantic mutual fund, and called it United States Basic, put some of it on the market to seek its level and put the rest into the equivalent of Fort Knox. Iii other words, United States Basic stock was backing the dollar. Any country that held dollars, and would rather have U.S. Basic, could demand the stock from the United States at whatever the going rate was at the time. U.S. Basic, of course, paid dividends, based upon the dividends received from the corporations." Paul Kosloff smiled wryly. "There were a lot of yells about creeping Socialism, but nobody came up with a better idea. Each year that went by, the government continued to take ten per cent of its taxes from the largest corporations in the form of common stock and added to its pile. Along in here, the problems that evolved from automation and then ultramation became chaotic. There was fabulous unemploymanding one type of relief or another, federal, state and city. The government tied it all up into one package by issuing ten shares of its accumulated stock to every citizen of the country. Even babies. They called it Inalienable Basic, and although you collected your dividends all your life, you couldn't sell it, give it away, be robbed or cheated of it, or in any other manner dispose of it. When you died, your shares reverted to the government. The income was just sufficient to get by." G oldie said, "Why would anyone wttk?" He looked at her. "That soon became a problem. It was at least partially solved by creating the Bureau of Labor Draft. Every citizen was registered in the computer banks, with all pertinent information on education, abilities, experience and so forth. When someone was needed to fill a position in those industries the government dominated, the most suitable person was drafted." "That must have caused a great deal of hard feeing on the part of the unlucky ones," somebody said. Paul nodded. "But it was at least partly offset by the fact that those who were called on to work were issued further stock which was called Variable Basic and which you could either add to your portfolio and enjoy the dividends or sell for dollars to be spent for whatever you wished. You've got to realize that living on the income from your inalienable. Basic alone is rather grim." Vuk said, "And as the United States of the Americas becomes increasingly prosperous, is the amount of Inalienable Basic increased for each citizen?" Paul shook his head and scowled. "That's one of the drawbacks. You see, although the Hundred largest corporations are now dominated by the government, we still basically have a form of capitalism. The smaller corporations, privately owned industries and business, and professionals, still continue. They require labor. If the incomes from Inalienable Basic were greater, practically nobody would work at the less desirable jobs. Oh', some do their work because they love it. Artists, devoted medical people, some teachers -- various jobs of that type. But if you didn't have to, who would hold down such positions as, say miners, sanitation workers, that sort of thing?" Goldi said, "I'd think everyone would get a job and add to the number of stock shares he held." Paul said, "That's a difficulty too. There aren't enough jobs to go around. Ultramation has put the majority of our people on the un-needed list." They all thought about it. As they had talked, the women Had cleaned up the table. Now fresh glasses were brought and new carafes of wine. "OH, no," Paul groaned. Everybody laughed heartily. "But it is your first day in Split!" Branko called, lifting His own glass in toast. Marin Gundulic was scowling thoughtfully at Paul Kosloff. "Why not more participation in the arts?" he 'said. "Why not more of your national effort expended in the sciences?" Paul sipped at His new wine and said, "How do you mean?" "Somewhat the same problem has come up in Common Eur-Asia, That is, ultramation Has made it possible for the basic industries and agriculture to be Handled by a fraction of the employees once needed. But we Have a strong movement to solve this by devoting more of the nation's manpower to the sciences and to tKe arts. I understand that in the Americas now, increasing numbers of the citizens spend tfieir time staring at Tri-Vision and finding satisfaction in sucking on that tranquilizer euphoric..." "Trank," Paul said. "Yes. However, our more forward-looking planners demand that our most progressive youtH be sought out as early in life as possible and directed into tKe sciences or arts, as their abilities warrant. Pure science, simply for the sake of increasing knowledge, not for industrial or other pragmatic research, and participation in all of the arts, including entertainment, the dance, handicrafts. We encourage a return to Handcrafted ceramics, textiles, toys, even Handset and Handprinted books." "Or, take cooking," Gold! put in. "In times past, we used to pride ourselves on our community kitchens and community dining Halls. We were anxious to eliminate the labor involved in eacH Household preparing its own meals. But when labor was no longer a problem, then we began to Have second thoughts. Good cooking is an art, and convivial meals with friends and family in the home are one of the most enjoyable things people can appreciate." She snapped her fingers. "So back we go to privately prepared meals, and, uH, Zoroaster take the time involved. Time we now have aplenty." Paul had to laugh at her envoking the Persian. But then he frowned and looked back at Marin Gundulic. "It sounds good, but I seem to Have detected a reservation in the way you put it. Is it happening?" TKe Yugoslavian looked unhappy. "Not to th'e extent many of us would like." Paul looked at Him. Brank growled, "There are powerful elements in the government that are opposed to it." Vuk, His older brother, took up a wine carafe and poured a fresH glass for a protesting Paul Kosloff, even as He growled, ".THat'll be all Branko. Our guest isn't interested in Common EurAsian politics." iObviously young Branko Had  been HusHed up. Paul Had not pursued tHe point. After all, it was His first day in Common Eur-Asia, and He Had already learned' quite a bit tHat He assumed joHn SmitH and Harry Kank would find of interest. One tiling was tHe comparative freedom of expression. He Had been of tHe opinion tHat tHe citizens of Common Eur-Asia were ultra careful in their talk. In fact, He Had wondered if any of His relations would dare have Him into their Homes. Well, there was no question about tHat. Soutli Slavonian Hospitality, which He Had often read about, was as free as reputed. He wondered How in the world He was ever going to pay them back. When tfie party had broken up, it was to a clamor of everyone present inviting him to other Homes, other meals, other parties. If they took everyone to tfieir bosoms in this fashion, He'd think tHat they'd all soon be flat broke. But that was something else again, that be wasn't very clear about Evidently, all of them worked -- at least, all save tHe young and aged. Ultramation in tHe United States of tHe Americas Had led to large segments of the population existing in complete idleness, on their Inalienable Basic. Over Here, everyone of working age seemed to work. He'd Have to ask Goldi about it later. He Had a swimming date with Goldi tHe following day. When the party ended, well into tHe night, He had refused Branko's offer to return him to His Hotel. He Hadn't even allowed them to summon an auto-floater cab. He wanted to walk, to give tfie sea air tHat prevailed Here a chance to clear His Head. Otherwise, lie Had a sneaking suspicion that in tfie morning he was going to Have a crashing Headache. He did Have a crashing headache in tHe morning, but not due to tfie quality and quantity of Dalmatian wines he had drunk tfie night before. Perhaps it was because of His arriving at the New Marjan on foot that he was completely undetected. Possibly, at this horn, tfiere was no one on the desk, or possibly, if there was a night receptionist, He had stepped out of tfie room. Be that as it may, Paul Kosloff walked across an empty lobby, entered the elevator and said, "Fourth floor, please," in his best Serbo-Croat. THe elevator's auto-operator replied in a robot-like voice, "Yes, Comrade," and they went up. He hadn't known they still utilsible, the hands in advance, palms ized the term Comrade. He had up. But the other was upon Him. not heard any of the others use the word. IV He was musing sleepily over the events of the gvening, when He "VXHen He awoke, in the momapproached his door and began   ing, it was to His crashing to activate it. Admittedly, his Headache. He was still sprawled mind was dull. where he Had fallen the night He entered the living room of before, on the living room rug. the suite and began to shrug out Sunlight streamed in tfie window of his jerkin. And came to a which' overlooked the sea, and it quick halt. was the Heat of tKe rays tEat He tried to throw himself into had brought Him alive, the Kokutsu dachi layout defenHe was nude, save for His unsi ve position, one foot forward dershorts. Whoever Had hit Him and knee carrying about thirty the night before Had stripped Hint per cent of his body weight, the bare. rear leg carrying the remaining, He looked about the room, sHaHthe rear leg bent as much as posing his head for clarity. The clothes Hadn't been stolen, evidently, simply searched. They were strewn all about. For that matter, he found, evidently everything had been searched. All his luggage, everything he had brought into the room. Groaning, he went to the autobar, put his International Credit Card into the screen slot and dialed service, beverages and then coffee. It was Turkish coffee that came, not that he cared. He took the first two or three sips of the heavy, highly sugared stuff, before he came to the grounds, with' a sigh of appreciation of the high' caffeine content. Then he dialed again. When He had recovered slightly, he thought about it. And could come up with no answers whatsoever. If the police had wanted to search him thoroughly, they could have done it at the rocketport, when he first landed. Customs and police officials of any land have the right to search new arrivals at the border. It's their country, isn't it? But his border examination had been no more than he had expected, a mild going through his two bags, a check of his passport and his International Credit Card, a few questions about his length of stay and where he expected to go. He came to a decision and activated his wrist teevee phone. He dialed the number that John Smith had given him, Number One Priority. When Smith's face faded in, He was obviously in bed and obviously had been awakened. He growled, "Pauli What in the name of the everlasting Zoroaster are you calling me for at this time of night?" Paul said, "OK. Sorry. I had forgotten all about the time change, John. I'm in Split. I... I thought you could do me a favor." John Smith was shaking himself awake, and now his eyes shifted into alertness. "A favor?" "Yeah. I forgot a book I wanted to have here rather badly. A Serbo-Croat dictionary. It's in my apartment, John. I wondered if you could go over and get it and mail it to me, old chum-pal." "Oh, oh, sure, Paul. Glad to. How's the vacation coming, wizard?" Paul Kosloff let his face go long. "I don't know, I'm a little roached. Some cloddy broke into my room here, last night, slugged me and went through all my things." John Smith's eyebrows went up. "Who was this hombre?" Paul looked at him. "I don't know. What do you think?" "Search me. Some cheap crook, I'd guess." Paul shook His head. "So far, I can't think of anything that's been stolen." "Maybe he was a funker who got scared when you showed up and took off." Paul felt the bck of his head and the bump there, then brought his hand around and touched His jaw gingerly. "If that's tlie kind of funker they turn out in this country, I'd hate to run into a brave man." John Smith was scowling at him. Paul said, "Look, I'm considering calling this vacation off and coming home. Uh', I'm afraid my overcay has already been ownblay." John Smith scowled puzzlement at him. "What? I don't speak Serbo-Croat." "Never mind." Smith said, "Shucks, chumpal, I wouldn't call your vacation off just because of some cheap sneak-thief. You've been planning this for a long time. It's important to you." Paul Kosloff took a deep breath'. "I guess you're right. Well, don't forget the book." "I won't. But look, Paul, you shouldn't be calling me at the drop of a hat. Admittedly, phone calls halfway around the world are cheap by old standards, but you're no rich cloddy. Unless it's important, of course." "All right," Paul said wearily. "Sorry to wake you up, John." The image in his tiny wristphone screen faded. Paul Kosloff looked down at it distastefully and then felt the knot on the back of his head again. "Fine," he said. "You're back there in Greater Washington, safely pounding your ear. I'm here on the spot. How do I know this joker won't slit my throat next time?" A t about eleven, Goldi PashitcH met him in the small park before the Hotel and led Him to the beach and to a private cove that could only be reached by wading, almost knee deep, around a jutting rock. The beach before the hotel itself had been well packed with bathers even at this hour. As she kicked off Etruscan revival sandals to wade, she explained that this tiny private beach had been a preserve of the PashitcH family children for generations. For some reason, no one else seemed ever to discover it, or, if they did, did not find in it the charm the Fashitches did. She was attired today in brief striped shorts and a Halter that matched -- only briefer. Paul Kosloff, already well smitten by the Goldi charm, studiously kept his eyes in other directions. He would have preferred gaping. There were possibly twenty square yards of cleanest sand in the cove. Paul Kosloff wondered fleetingly wKere they were going to change and then realized that sHe Had brought no swimming togs with Her. His own, he carried in a beach bag. However, he was shortly illuminated on that score. Continuing Her bright chatter about the cove and How they had played everything from pirate treasure to Greek Argonauts, when children, she snaked Her right Hand up Her back, unsnapped something and let Her halter drop away. Her hands went to the side of Her shorts and began to activate the invisible zipper. a  I Paul Kosloff swallowed. Suddenly she stopped. SHe looked at him. Finally, she flushed. She said, "What's the matter?" "Nothing." "Yes, there is." Paul Kosloff cleared his throat. "Not really." "Paul Kosloff. Back home. In the United States of the Americas. Do they still wear bathing suits?" Paul closed his eyes briefly. Opened them again. Cleared his throat again. "Usually, men still wear bathing trunks. Some of the girls wear topless suits." "I see." She looked at him. "My family Has no false sense of modesty, nor do any of our friends. And we're not prudes." Paul swallowed again and tried a half smile. "I don't know if I'm a prude or not" She snorted deprecation and zipped the zipper up again. She plunked herself down on the sand. "I'll turn my back," she said. "While you get into your bathing shorts or whatever you called them." Properly changed, Paul sat down next to her, keeping his eyes studiously from her proof of being mammalian. She pointed suddenly out across the water. "That's the island of Brae. If you stay long enough, you should go over. It's beautiful. Well rent a floater." "Doesn't the water ever get too rough for a floater?" he said, glad for the change in subject. At the same time, inwardly he was kicking himself. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life and evidently completely without feeling of shame or modesty. What kind of a man was he to be set back by the prospect of seeing her utterly nude? It wasn't as though he was obligated to attack her, simply because she was as mother nature had presented her. He could simply have thought of her as an art object. Maybe. She said, "We have heavier floaters for ferries. Air cushions support them as high as twenty feet. It never gets that rough." He said, out of a clear sky, and before he could catch himself, "I'm in love with you." "I know," she said, and then changed the subject. t ( # fter you left, last night, we discussed you." "Well ,... good." "We decided that a mistake had been made in not allowing you to learn more of our position." "What position?" "We decided that it was a unique opportunity. A wonderful chance to exchange information on your country and ours." "Well, that's what we did." "With reservations. You see, Paul, everyone there last night was a member of the Common Eur-Asian underground, committed to overthrowing of the government. We detected that you, yourself, aren't exactly happy with the Ultra-Welfare State in your own country." Paul scowled. "I wouldn't exactly put it that way. In my country, practically everybody continually criticizes the government." "They do?" She was obviously considerably taken aback. "But the police." "Oh, there's no law in the United States of the Americas against criticizing the government." She looked at him in utter disbelief. Finally, "Well, How do they prevent revolutions?" He Had to consider tKat for a while. "I don't know," He said finally. "So far as I understand the Constitution of the United States of the Americas, there's nothing in it against revolution. Just so you don't do it through force and violence." She goggled him. He said, defensively, "Whenever the majority of the people want any change in the government, big or small, they can make it. A majority vote carries." "Suppose a minority wants to change?" "Then they've got to spread their message around, hopefully, until they become a majority. Otherwise, no go. At least that's the theory." She slumped back and shook her head. "It's not so easy over Here." "It's not easy over there. Most people are conservative by nature. They don't want any fundamental changes. They'd rather put up with the old, just so long as it's bearable, especially in things like politics, religion, socio-economic systems. How do you make basic changes Here, if you feel they're necessary?" "To use your American idiom, the hard way. You see, Paul, a ruling class or caste never gives up its position of power, without a struggle. Individuals might, sometimes, but not a governing class. The sons and daughters of party members are sent to the best schools. When they come of age, they in turn become party members and secure the best positions in both the bureaucracy and in industry." She hesitated and Paul said, "And they're still in." "Yes. And they're an anachronism, Paul." Paul frowned and said, "What do you want to do about it?" Qhe made a gesture of the ob vious. "The time Has arrived when the State should wither away. Our councils of industry -- and when I say industry, I mean all fields of work, of course, including education, medicine, entertainment -- actually run the country today. And should." Paul thought of something. "These planners Marin Gundulic mentioned last night who want more of the national effort put into the arts and sciences, to take up the unemployment, are the top men in the, uh, councils of industry?" "Yes. But the bureaucracy Hangs ple are employed in nonsense work, bureaucratic job's that are make-work." "We've got a few tens of millions of bureaucrats in our own federal, state and city governments," Paul said sourly. "Tlie tiling is, at the same time they maintain tlfemselves in power, tiiey instinctively fight our desire to throw the national effort Into the sciences and arts, a fuller realization of ourselves. They don't want our people to be more advanced." "How do you mean?" "A more highly educated people would be a greater threat to their existence as a class. You must realize, Paul, that revolutions are not brought about by starving, poorly educated wretches. They are started by the intellectual elite. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson were all wealthy; Robespierre, Danton, even Marat were of the middle class, not the proletariat. Marx was a highly educated product of the German middle class, and his wife was an aristocrat; Frederick Engels was a wealthy industrialist. Lenin and Trotsky were both of the Russian middle class, and neither of them held down an ordinary job ever." Gofdi held up a Hand as though in supplication. "If Common EurAsia is ever to realize her destiny and our people finally to enjoy the product of all the decades of sacrifice we've gone through, the bureaucrats are going to Have to go." "This underground of yours, what is it doing?" "As quickly as possible, finding and organizing all elements that believe the same way. By the way, we're holding a meeting three days from now. A speaker down from Belgrade is going to give us the latest developments. Would you like to attend?" "Why yes, I suppose so." "All right. But enough of all this. You've come to Split for a vacation, not to become enbroiled in local political matters. How about a swim?" She came to her feet Paul stood too. "AH, one thing," He said hesitantly. She turned back and faced him, tilted her head slightly, and looked up into his face. "Yes?" He studiously kept his eyes from dropping below the level of Her own. "Look, you mentioned that you people aren't religious. Uh', do you still get married?" The sides of her mouth turned down. She spun about and ran for the water, saying over Her shoulder, "Sometimes we do." V Tt was summer, and Goldi PasHitch was on vacation from her teaching job. They spent the next several days in swimming, skin diving. fishing and boating between the Adriatic islands. It turned out that Goldi was as keen on participation sports as was Paul Kosloff. He described to Her his own country, Hunting and fisfiing in tKe Yukon, skin diving in tKe Caribbean, Hiking in tKe Rockies. Wliat He was doing was attempting to influence Her toward a craving to live in tKe Americas, and from tKe wideness of eye tKat he often provoked, Ke felt tKat perhaps he was succeeding. Well, it could all be true. Given tKe ten extra shares of Variable Basic that the InterAmerican Bureau of Investigation was going to award him after this assignment, Ke and his wife would be able to enjoy a rather high standard of living in the Ultra-welfare State. He already Had accumulated several shares of Variable stock as a result of his teaching position. Otherwise, He wasn't sure How His case was proceeding. He couldn't imagine why Goldi PashitcH wasn't already married. TKe local men must be idiots. Sfie was as intelligent as she was pretty, and He Had already sensed th'at the women here Had a viewpoint that had largely disappeared in his own country. They still catered to their menfolk. In theory, it was all very well to believe in complete equality between the sexes, but it was certainly more pleasant to Have your women defer to you, flatter you, even wait upon you a bit -- or, at least, go tKrougE the pretense. But Goldi had a despairing way of changing tKe subject when Ke tried to ring in romance. In fact, she seemed an absolute expert in avoiding the personal. Ah well, He had a full year. He suspected that He was going to spend more of it in Split than Kank and Smith had figured upon. TEey could get lost. They wanted to find out what the people of Common Eur-Asia were thinking, particularly in regard to the government. He Had only been here a matter of days, and he Had already made considerable progress. He doubted if He would be doing as well if He were in Belgrade or Budapest. On the fourth day, Ke had almost forgotten her invitation to attend the secret meeting, but h'er brother Vuk picked Kim up in a floater that evening. Vuk grinned at Kim. "Ever been to an underground meeting before?" "No," Paul said. "Back in the Americas I wasn't particularly interested in politics." TKe Yugoslavian chuckled. "Here, we've been overthrowing governments or plotting their overthrow ever since the Romans. I'm beginning to think it's a trait that's been bred in. I don't know what would happen to the Slavs if there wasn't a government to plot overthrowing." He was manually driving the floater along the sea front. "Where is this meeting?" Paul said. "Half way between here and Trogir." "Trogir?" "An old town built by the Venetians when they controlled Dalmatia. Very picturesque. It's located out on an island, just off the coast. But this spot is in the hills. In the old days. Mikhailovitch's partisans used it for a Hiding place. It's well situated for escaping if the police flush you." "Fun and games," Paul muttered.  fter about twenty miles, Vuk took a side road and then left even that and took off across the rack-strewn fields. Finally, He came to a Halt in a small grove of olive trees and let the floater settle to the ground. 'We walk from Here," He said. They left the floater and proceeded along a dirt path. "Wh'at would happen if the police caught you?" Paul said. Vuk looked at Him humorously. "Let's Hope we never find out." But then He added, "They are not as bad as they were in the old days. Then they used to shoot out of Hand." "Oh, wizard," Paul said bluntly. Vuk chuckled. "Now they wait a while." Paul Kosloff lost his way in the twistings and turnings, in spite of his woodsmanship. They wound up in a natural amphitheater that already contained possibly two score persons, including most of those who Had been at Paul's initial welcoming dinner the first evening of his arrival. They greeted him with all the elan of before, and one that Paul vaguely remembered as Stefanovich called jovially, "AH, our American. We will teach you a few lessons in overthrowing governments, then you can go home and try it on your own." Paul said sourly, "You'd never pry the average American away from his Tri-Vision set to attend a meeting out in the boondocks like this." Branko came up and shook hands and said, "Would you like to meet the organizer? He's come down from Belgrade for this meeting." It was already dark by now, and no lights provided enough illumination for them to make their way around. Suddenly, all was confusion. Two shots rang from a dominating Hill, and then in rapid succession came the chatter of an automatic, another several pistol shots, and then from another direction, another sub-machine gun. him to orient Himself. He Had "Scatter! Run for it!" someone never been in jail before. His exshouted. perience witK prisons was limited Goldi's voice came. "Paul!" to the fiction of Tri-Vision shows, The scurrying of the feet, mutback home. But there was no tered profanity, the sounds of question of where he was. stumbling on the part of some He put his hand to the back trying to move too rapidly at this of his head. There was a very light. There were shouts of orders, definite and very painful lump, by voices that had the ring of "This is getting to be a Habit." authority. he muttered. "Paul!" Goldi called again, He swung his legs over the side from what seemed only a short of the cot and sat erect, groaning, distance. The cell, he noted, was neat "Over here -- " he began. enough, but there was a terrible And then something hit him stench of disinfectant in the air. from behind. There seemed to be no one in the corridor outside his steel door, H e awoke in a cell. and no one else in any of the otKIt took blurred moments for er cells that he could see. He took inventory. His wrist teevee phone was gone, as were all his papers including his passport and International Credit Card. "OB, wizard," Be said aloud. WHat had it, been that Harry Kank told him? If Be ran into difficulties, Be was on His own. The government of tHe United States would not recognize Him, beyond the point it would any teacher on sabbatical leave. He was an idiot to have attended an underground meeting. It Hadn't even been necessary. He could have gathered any information He would have picked up there, talking to the PashitcK family. Shortly, Be could Bear footsteps approaching down the corridor, a military-like clumping. Two sets of footsteps, marching in cadence. There was an ominous ring to tfie echoing sound. Paul Kosloff took a deep breath and came to Bis feet and faced the steel door. They wore tHe gray uniform of the Common Eur-Asian police, and tfiey could Have been twins, both Heavy-set, both empty of face. Paul Kosloff Bad seen them a Hundred times in Tri-Vision shows bade Home. THe shows Had not led Him to welcome the meeting in person, particularly under these circumstances. One of them said in quite passable English, "You will come with' us." Paul said, "I speak SerboCroat." There was no answer to that. One of them opened the door and they stepped back to allow Paul to emerge. He considered only briefly calling on his Karate knowledge to take them. However, overpowering these two would not mean escape from prison. He Had been unconscious when brought Here and Had no idea of what lay beyond this corridor of cells. One led the way; one followed after Paul. Neither spoke. The footsteps echoed again, this time with Paul's adding the ominous quality. As they approached the end of the corridor, the heavy steel door there opened for them. As they passed through it, an armed guard eyed them dispassionately. It was just as well Paul Had kept his Karate to Himself. He would never have got beyond this point. Down one Kail, about a comer, Down another Kali, they marched. They pulled up, eventually, before a closed door. One of the guards activated the door screen and said something into it that Paul didn't catch'. The door opened to reveal an office centered with a heavy metal desk and behind it one who was obviously an officer. Paul took another deep breath and entered. One of his guards remained outside, the other came in and stood behind Paul, still wordlesslyHe at the desk studied Paul Kosloffs face. Before Kim were Paul's teevee wrist phone and Kis papers. The officer said, "I am Colonel Cvetkovich'. Sit down, Mr. Kosloff" There was a single straight chair sitting before the desk. Otherwise the room was bare of furniture save the desk and swivel chair the colonel occupied. Paul Kosloff sat. He said, "I demand to be put in immediate touch with the nearest consul of the United States of the Americas." 'T"'h'e colonel, who was approximately the same age as Paul Kosloff and approximately the same build, ignored that. He ran Kis right index finger down a long scar that ran from his right ear almost to the point of his c hin . In this age of plastic surgery, one seldom saw conspicuous scars any more. Evidently the colonel was proud of His. He said, "Mr. Kosloff, who took you to that subversive meeting?" "A man I met on the beach," "WIiat was His name?" "I don't know." The colonel looked at him for a long moment. "Do you, in your travels in foreign countries, customarily pick up strangers and attend subversive meetings with them, Mr. Kosloff?" "No," Paul said. "I am not politically inclined. I was a fool. I wasn't acquainted with the type of meeting He was taking me to. I demand to be put in touch with the nearest American consul." The colonel said, "Did you know anyone else at all at the meeting, Mr. Kosloff?" "No." The colonel sighed. He looked up at the guard. "Ignat, summon a floater for Mr. Kosloff." The guard turned and left. The colonel made a motion at Paul's things on the desk. "You can get in touch with your consul yourself, if you feel it necessary, Mr. Kosloff. Here are all your papers and your wrist phone." Paul Kosloff gaped at him. The colonel leaned back in Bis chair, Kis expression empty. He ran Kis finger down His scar again. Unbelievingly, Paul took Kis papers and put them in an inner jerkin pocket. He put the wrist phone in its place. Expecting any moment to Have this whole situation reversed, He turned and Headed for the door. The colonel said expressionlessly. "We of Common Eur-Asla are not nearly so brutal as your Western propaganda would Have it, Mr. Kosloff." Paul couldn't think of anything to say to that The guard named Ignat was outside the door. He led Paul to the police building's entrance, where an auto-floater cab awaited him. Still in an unbelieving daze, Paul dialed his Hotel and settled back. He couldn't believe this. It made no sense. No sense a,t all. In his Hotel suite, He dialed himself a double sljivovica and knocked it back. He sKook Kis head and dialed the time. It was still morning, a little after ten. He sat down in tKe suite's comfort chair and tried to think. Nothing came. Finally, He dialed John SmitH. The other's face was impatient when he saw who it was. Paul said, "Look John, unless you've already mailed that book to me, cancel the order. I th'ink I'm leaving Split." "Oh?" John SmitH said. "You mean you've called me just to tell me that?" "Well, I suppose so. You see, I made a mistake last night and was taken to a meeting. I didn't know it was political, of course. At any rate I was arrested by tKe secret police and spent tKe night in jail." Smith's eyes widened. "And?" "They have just released me." "Well, fine. Why are you going to leave Split?" Paul stared at him. "Didn't you Hear me? The secret police arrested me and threw me in jail." "But just released you. So you are fine. EvrytEing's wizard." "You mean you'd expect me to stay on Here in Split?" John SmitH shrugged. "Well, why not? I thought you liked it tfiere." Paul Kosloff simply couldn't think of anything to say. Finally, "I've got to think. I'll be in toucH witH you later." VI D own in front of tKe Hotel He dialed another auto-floater and when it arrived dialed a destination in the vicinity, but a block or two from, tHe PasfiitcH Home. WEen He arrived at that point, He looked up and down. He Had been able to detect no one following Him from tHe Hotel and could see nothing now in this area that would indicate He was being watcfied. He walked fo the PasEitcH Home and stood before tfie door's identity screen. THe door opened, and Vuk was there staring at Kim blankly, Vuk grabbed Kis arm and pulled him in. "Paul!" Paul nodded and went into the large combination dining room and kitchen. Branko and Stefan Pashitch I were there and Marin Gundulic. And Goldi. Goldi was dressed in the same type dungarees as the men, but had a scarf over Her Head. In her Hands she carried a World War Two vintage Sten gun. Branko blurted, "Paul! How did you escape?" He carried a type of portable rocket launcher with which Paul Kosloff was unacquainted. The rest were variously armed. Paul looked at them. "What's going on?" Marin Gundulic, the obvious leader, said, "We were coming to get you." Paul looked around the small group. He said, in disbelief, "To the prison? You were going to try to break into that fortress?" "Of course," Goldi said. Branko repeated, "How did you get away?" Paul said, "They turned me loose. Did everybody else get away from the meeting?" They were staring at him. Gundulic said lowly, "Everybody but StefanovitcH, They caught him but He was able to kill himself." Vuk said, his usually good-humored voice also low, "You mean they didn't even put you to the question?" Paul shook his head. "If you mean did they torture me, no. A Colonel CvetkovicH questioned me very briefly, then turned me loose." "Cvetkovich!" Goldi blurted. "That executioner!" All eyes were on him Those of the men, steely cold. Goldi's were sick. "Whaf s the matter?" Paul said. Maria Gundulic said, still lowly, "There is an old Slavic saying that when four men sit down to talk revolution, three are police spies and the fourth a fool. It seems to Have been reversed this time." Paul Kosloffs lips went white. He looked from one to the other, and they met liis eyes coldly. He looked at the girl. "Goldi!" She turned Her back and bent Her Head. Branko Pashitch said, "Goodby Paxil Kosloff." It was at that exact split second that reality came to Him as though in a sudden clairvoyance. He said, His voice clear, "I am going. I have something to do. But then I'll come back." Stefan Pashitch said, "I would not advise it, Paul Kosloff." T T e took the shuttle to Belgrade A and th'en the international rocketplane to Greater Washington. As He lobbed over, He called John Smith on the teevee phone. Smith seemed flabbergasted to see Him so soon again, but before he could comment, Paul said, "I'm on the rocketplane. Something special .has come up. I have to report in person." Smith glared at him. "Something special! Are you completely around the bend? You were under orders to stay in Common Eur-Asia for a full year." "Something special," Paul said doggedly. "Can you meet me at my apartment?" John Smith rolled his eyes upward, as though in appeal to higher powers. "All right." J ohn Smith was not quite the smiling man he Had been less than a month ago when they Had first met. As soon as he confronted Paul in the Kosloff miniapartment, he put his Hands on his Hips. "Well?" Paul looked at him quizzically, "I think we Had better go to the Octagon and see Harry Rank." Smith said impatiently, "That's not necessary. I'm the agent assigned to your liaison man. I Handle everything that pertains to you. And Zoroaster knows, it's proving a Headache." Paul Kosloff shook his Head. "I think we Had better go to the Octagon and Have this out." "No." Paul grunted sour amusement. "You can't go to the Octagon, can you, Mr. John Smith? Or should I call you Comrade Smith?" "Are you crazy?" "You can't go to the Octagon, because you don't belong there. You're not connected with the Inter-American Bureau of Investigation. Oh', you're police all rigEt, but you're not American police. And you're not an American." "OH, wizard," John Smith said sarcastically. "So I'm not an American." Paul said, in self-deprecation, "I should have guessed sooner. My first hint was when you didn't understand my pig-latin. Every American kid learns pig-latin, but you didn't understand it wfien I told you that I thought my cover was already blown. "But the real realization came to me when some of my Yugoslavian friends accused me of being a police spy. And I suddenly knew they were correct. There was only one reason in the world for the police turning me loose. They knew I was one of tHeirs, after an initial searcK of my Hotel rooms to double-check my identity. I didn't know it, at the time, but I was a police spy, working for the Common Eur-Asian secret police. Planted to get inside information about the underground. And what a plant! Who would suspect an American relative, who Had never been in Europe before, to be a member of the secret police?" John Smith had been standing near the built in bureau drawers of the mini-apartment. In a fluid motion, he opened the top drawer with his left hand, dipped in with his right and brought forth the .# Recoiless which had once belonged to Paul's father. He was a smiling man again. He said softly, "Your own gun. With a built-in silencer. This speeds things up a bit, but the end result is what it was always going to be, Paul Kosloff." "I figured that out, too," Paul said bitterly. "After I returned from my year of spying, you were not going to give me any ten shares of Variable Basic, as your plant in the Octagon, Harry Kank, told me. You were going to get my information, forward it to your police superiors in Common Eur-Asia and finish me off."The self-named John Smith jiggled the gun humorously. "You would be surprised how near the truth you've hit, Paul, old chumpal. However, it hasn't done you much good." Paul snorted contempt. "You should have checked to see if that gun was loaded before you made any admission, Smith." The other shot a glance down at the weapon in his hand. Paul screamed the Kiai yell, He went into the Twelfth Kata, slugging the other's right inside arm with a hard wrist blow with his left hand. He grabbed Smith's arms with a reverse armlock, and the gun went off into the floor. Paul came in with' an Okinawa fist, thumb side of the fist pointed upward slamming into the other's groin. As his opponent began to go down, eyes blazing in agony, with his right hand, knuckles up, Paul came up fast and hard with a knuckle blow under his chin. Simultaneously, he turned his hand, knuckles down, now, and came down with I all His body weight against the other's collarbone. P aul Kosloff sat in the office of Harry Kank and looked at the other for a long moment, wondering how to begin. He said finally, "Did you really know my father?" The other man said, "Yes." "Then you've obviously been in this bureau for a long rime. I wonder how many others you set up for your John Smith to send over to Common Eur-Asia to betray their relatives." Kank shifted slightly in his chair, and his cold eyes narrowed, but for the moment fie field His peace. Paul said tfiougfitfully, "It must Have been fairly difficult to arrange, through tfie Bureau of Labor Draft. Jow tfiat I think about it, wfien I was first interviewed by tfiat Labor Draft official, Banning, fie mentioned tfiat th'ere was something unusual in my being called up. And, I suppose, there's a certain awe tfiat pertains wfien you mention tfie InterAmerican Bureau of Invesbadge and people would let you get away witfi anything." Harry Kank said, "I Haven't the vaguest idea of wfiat you're talking about, Paul." "Mr. Kosloff to you, Comrade Kank." "I'm not a communist." "Worse. You're a tool of theirs. If you were an Honest, dedicated communist, tfiat would be one thing, but, obviously, you've merely sold out to tfiem." Tfie other came to a quick decision. "See here, Kosloff. The United States of the Americas is not being Hurt by this operation. Admittedly, this is a Common Eur-Asian police matter. They want inside information about the underground in their country. Why should we care? There's a good deal of money involved in this Kosloff. The secret police over there have plenty of pay off. Why shouldn't you get in on the gravy?" Paul said, "You said you knew my father. Would He Have?" "I also said your father Bad a one-track mind." "But I don't think He would have betrayed a friend or relative for the sake of money, Kank. Let's face reality. You're a double agent, working with the Common Eur-Asian secret police. How they got to you, I don't know. But the game is up, Kank." The other man drew in a deep breath', reached into a drawer of His desk and emerged with a Heavy automatic, which He trained on Paul Kosloff. He said flatly, "I know your record in judo, Kosloff. Don't try anything. Now I'm going to give you one last chance. Come in with me, and I'll see you're paid off handsomely. Don't and you're a dead Hombre." "Do you think I'm a complete fool? Before I came in here, Kank, I got in touch' with your superiors." He smiled slowly, "Besides, it's simply not in the cards for me to die at the hands of a corrupt police official. You see, she doesn't know it, but I've got a date back in Split with a girl named Goldi." Fritz Leiber, whose One Station of the Way adds a sort of Christmasy note to this issue, has recently acquired a new Hugo for His trophy shelf. At the # World Science Fiction Convention, he won the novelette award for His story, Gonna Roll The Bones, adding it to the two previously acquired for his novels, The Big Time (originally published in Galaxy ) and The Wanderer. A resident of Venice, California, Leiber mixes writing science fiction with championship chess, studying such primitive art forms as the Watts towers and an omnivorous interest in almost everything. John WyndHam (A Life Postponed) is best known to sciencefiction readers for such novels as The Day of the T riff ids, possibly the single most widely read science-fiction novel in recent history, and The Midwieh Cuckoos, made into a motion picture as Village of the Damned. But the "Wyndham" personality marks a second career in science-fiction for this durable and protean writer. Nearly four decades ago, under his real name of John Beynon Harris and such foreshortened versions of it as "John Beynon", Wyndham was the prolific author of #-vintage space opera for the American sf magazines. Today Wyndham lives in the south of England, on the outskirts of the charming village of Petersfield. Poul Anderson lives in the hills just north of San Francisco, where he is a charter member of that celebrated science-fiction group, the Elves, Gnomes and Little Men's Literary, Chowder and Marching Society, whose other members included I Jack Vance, Reg Bre tnor, the late Tony Boucher and many other illustrious persons. With Vance and Frank Herbert, Anderson was for some time the coproprietor of a home-built houseboat on which they intended to voyage to distant lands. The plan came to a bad end; the houseboat sank at its mooring. But most of Anderson's ventures do better -- as witness The Sharing of Flesh in this issue. Raymond F. Jones has been writing science fiction for more than three decades; this is his first new story in our magazines in many years. Joseph Green, who was the first of If's "first" story writers -- that is, writers who have never had a story published before -- has since established himself as a science-fiction regular, with many short stories, two books and more on the way. able from a TV showl Exciting photos, actual scripts,   Dept. G P.O.Box # Hollywood, California The show's "bible," used by all scriptions of the series format -- all the things Plebse send me; (cash, check or money order accepted) Send to: Name. Aftrtrn won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! 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January, #  Vol. #, No. # by Ben Bova by James Tiptree, Jr. by Harlan Ellison and Keith laumer by Larry Niven by Ted Thomas by John Brunner by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Cover by Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N.Y. Title Beg. U. S. Pat. Off. T he other day we were asked to talk to a group of management types about The Future of Everything. In the course of niaking some remarks about probabilistic mathematics we discovered we had invented a new magic trick, which we pass on to you now. It has to do with calculating the results of flipping coins. First we draw you a picture of a single coin: O If you flip it, there are two possible results: It can come up either heads or tails. If we flip two coins: OO there are four possible results: headsheads; heads-tails; tails-tahs; tailsheads. If you flip three coins there are eight possible results, and so on. The trick is this. You draw a row of as many coins as you like -- two, three, a hundred, a googolplex of coins: And we undertake to write down, in ten seconds or less, the exact number of possible results of flipping that many coins. And, just to make it harder, we undertake to do so even if you cover up all the coins but the first, so we can't count them. N ow, obviously there is a trick involved. If you want to see what the trick is, you're welcome to hunt around in this issue for the answer; we'll print it at the bottom of a page somewhere. But then come back, please, because we'd like to talk for a  minute about "tricks." A "trick" may be aefined as that solution to a problem which causes an observer to say, once he sees how the solution is obtained: "Oh, I didn't know you meant to do it that way." That's what the Spanish nobles said when Columbus stood the egg on end; that's what your friends will say if you elect to do this coin-tossing trick for them. It is also what scientists say when somebody does something which is defined as impossible. Create or destroy matter? Impossible, said the #th-century mechanistic physicists; and along came Einsteih and Fermi and Hahn and showed that matter could be transformed into energy, and the other way around; and, "Oh," said the last of the mechanists, "I didn't know you meant to do it that way." Select the sex of a child in advance? Impossible. Except, of course, that you can do it by means of a trick: you remove a fertilized ovum, examine the cells to see which sex it is; if the right one, you reimplant it and let it come to term; if wrong, you throw it away and try again. ("Oh, you mean that way.") Put Maxwell's demon to work and sort out the hot air from the cold in a stream of gas? Impossible. Except by means of a Hilsch tube, which will deliver hot gas from one vent and cold from another as long as you keep pumping gas through it. ("Oh.") And so on. It is true that all these solutions are tricks, in that they do not solve The story of a space threat to Earth men so horrible -- and so completely possible -- that medical science is afraid to contemplate its consequences who man the station. Should those still alive he brought back to Earth and risk infecting all human life -- or be sacrificed in an orbiting tomb? On Earth, medical science is helpless. Terrified people are rioting, protesting the space ship's return. Official Washington is torn by the desperate dilemma. On Space Station Epsilon no one knows what his fate Will be. of space-age science-fiction has turned out a great story -- fiction with the frightening ring of scientific possibility, not in # but in the #s. At all bookstores  # the stated problem in the unspoken context in hich it was conceived. They change the context on you, which is manifestly unfair, and probably also destructive of those good solid values on which second-rate reputations are based. First-rate reputations, however, are based on other kinds of values; they depend very often on enlarging contexts. Newton enlarged the context of problems involving a planet's orbit and an apple's fall with his theory of universal gravitation. Einstein enlarged the contexts again, so that Newton's world-view became only one special case in an infinitely larger system of references. It is a good gambling bet that any physical problem which can be shown to have no possible solution (traveling through time, exceeding the speed of light, you name it) is likely to turn out to be merely another example of a problem which was framed according to narrowly construed contexts. That is to say, the reason you can't get an answer is because you've had the bad luck to ask the wrong question. (We said "physical" problems. It is true that certain mathematical problems do have no possible solution; but mathematical problems are by definition meaningless outside their own contexts; the rules of mathematics are essential parts of the problems.) Travel through time? Certainly it's impossible; no one can even suggest a possible way of attacking that problem, much less a solution for it. As of this hour of this day. Yet it has been shown that it is possible to write a mathematical description of the behavior of nuclear particles on the assumption that some of Aem (the positron, other "anti-particles") are merely standard particles which happen to be traveling backward through time. Do they really go backward through time? That's a hard question; it depends, you might say, on what you mean by "really". Go faster than light? Enpossible. Yet Gerald Feinberg has his own mathematical description of the world in which there are entire classes of things which have c as a limiting velocity -- but as a lower limit; they cannot go as slow as light. Do these things "really" exist? I t is considered bad form in this hard-headed day to invoke faith as an answer to a challenge. But we have always been guilty of bad form when we felt it to be good sense; and we do have faith. We have faith that the contexts in which the basic laws of the universe are formed are rather larger than human beings as yet understand and faith that there will always be an end-run that is possible around even the most formidable "proof" of impossibility. We even have faith that, sooner or later, we (or our descendants) will be catehing the #:# Feinberg Drive twenty-five minutes later in time for tea. Impossible? Of course it was impossible, the conservatives will say; we didn't know that you meant to do it that way. They may even say, "Why, that's only a trick." And maybe they'll be right. But meanwhile we'll be there our way to explore the universe. 'Official Coupon P R h N A O ? g  I TTg # L # rt r a: c A gV. K pr YS '   -- Win Up  I Do you Icnow this famous American's first name? We have completed the top part of this easy word puzzle which spells out his last name, In the empty squares with the three letters that spell out this Famous American's first name on the coupon below. As an extra clue his first name will be found among the three names below his picture. Next -- Print your name and address on the official coupon and mail it with #c for postage and handling. We will let you know by re turn mail if your answer is correct and rush ail additional details of the rules and instructions necessary for you to become a contestant in our # puzzle series. #I Melrose Ave., Dept. # #-#-# Los Angelos, Calif. # eoyjvj #E,Rnn Official Coupon Ancient enemy, we've crossed interstellar space to find you. Won't you show us your face? I D eep in cryogenic sleep tiie mind dreams the same frozen dreams, endlessly circuiting through the long empty years. Sidney Lee dreamed of the towers on Titan, over and again, their smooth blank walls of metal that was beyond metal, their throbbing, ceaseless, purposeful machines that ran at tasks that men could not even guess at. The towers loomed in his darkened Ballasitine Books dreams, standing menacing and alien above the frozen wastes of Titan, utterly unmindful of tfie tiny men that groveled at their base. He tried to scale those smooth, steep walls and fell back. He tried to penetrate them and failed. He tried to scream. And in his dreams, at least, He succeeded. He didn't dream of Ruth, or of the stars, or of the future or the past. Only of the towers, of the machines that blindly obeyed a builder who had left Earth's solar system countless millenia ago. H e opened His eyes. "What happened?" Carlos Pascual was smiling down at him, his round darkskinned face relaxed and almost happy. "We are there... here, I mean. We are braking, preparing to go into orbit." Lee blinked and sat up. "We made it?" "Yes, yes," Pascual answered softly as his eyes shifted to the bank of instruments on the console behind Lee's shoulder. "The panel claims you are alive and well. How do you feel?" That took a moment's thought. "A little hungry." "A common reaction." The smile returned. "You can join the others in the galley." The expedition's medical chief It's a great, big, beautiful world, (disregarding tfie elections where just about everybody was a born loser anyway -- especially the voters.) In our last ad, we mentioned something about your glorious future. Starting with February publications, BB will be doing two s.f.'s andor fantasy titles a month, plus block reissues of oldtime goodies, plus (you all, by now, know of this but it delights us so) Walker  Co., displaying remarkable editorial acumen, has selected several BB titles for reissue in hardcover. Not only that, they are doing Spinrad's terest in s.f. is serious. Support them, fans. It may just be that, with s.f. and Walker's help. Recognition is about to dawn in the misty logic of the laggard mainstream. It's debatable, of course, but kindness must assume that the literati will eventually stop navel-gazing and find out where the real action is at. For their sakes, we keep hoping, and meantime let us not be churlish. Incidentally, back at the Bay-Con, did anyone notice the local news writeups on what was of interest to s.f. people (economics, riots, cultural conditions, sexuai relations, the population explosion, politics, the space program, etc. etc.) and what was apparently the main concern at the psychologists' convention? Fascinating contrast. Anyway, in case you want to order any BB titles on the above subjects, we're at the same old nue, New York #. Send money (which includes postage in the prices listed below) with your order: Mervyn Peake # Worth the price for the covers alone, we think. The artist is Bob Pepper, and if we can get decent reproduction in a really big size, we'll be doing a mural -- like the Tolkien one. Peter Beagle # Or fun in a graveyard. Peter Beagle # Words like beautiful, and poignant. Lee Hoffman .# Knock 'em in the aisles action. Pace, pace, pace. Any others you want, send for our in hardcover from Trident! helped Lee to swing his legs over the edge of the couch, then left him and went to the next unitj where a blonde woman lay still sleeping. With an effort, Lee recalled her: Doris McNertny, primary biologist, backup biochemist. Lee pulled a deep breath into his lungs and tried to get himself started. The overhead light panels, on full intensity now, made him want to squint. Standing was something of an experiment. No shakes, Lee thought gratefully. The room was large and circular, with no viewports. Each of the twenty Hibernation couches had been painted a different color by some psychology team back on Earth. Most of them were empty now. The remaining occupied ones had their lids off and the lifesystem connections removed as Pascual, Tanaka and May Connearney worked to revive the people. Despite the color scheme, the room looked uninviting, and it smelled clinical. The galley, Lee focused his thoughts, is in this globe, one flight up. The ship was built ifl globular sections that turned in response to g-pulls. With the main fusion engines firing to brake their approach to final orbit, "up" was temporarily in the direction of the engines' thrustors. But inside the globes it did not make much difference. He found the stairwell that ran through the globe. Inside the winding metal ladderway the rumbling vibrations from the ship's engines were echoing strongly enough to hear as actual sound. "Sid! Good morning!" Aaron Hatfield had stationed himself at the entrance to the galley and was acting as a one-man welcoming committee. There were only a halfdozen people in the galley. Of course, Lee realized. The crew personnel are at their stations. Except for Hatfield, the people were bunched at the galley's lone viewpoint, staring outside and speaking in hushed, subdued whispers. "Hello, Aaron." Lee didn't feel jubilant, not after a fifteen-year sleep. He tried to picture Ruth in his mind and found that he couldn't. She must be nearly fifty by now. Hatfield took his arm and towed him to the dispenser counter. "Coffee, spirits, adrenalin... take your pick." Hatfield was the expedition's primary biochemist, a chunky, loud-speaking overgrown kid whom it was impossible to dislike, no matter how he behaved. Lee knew that Hatfield wouldn't go near the viewport because the sight of empty space terrified him. "Hey, here's Doris!" Hatfield shouted to no one. He scuttled toward the entrance as she stepped rather uncertainly into the galley. Lee dialed for coffee. With the hot cup in his hand he walked slowly toward the viewport. "Hello Dr. Lee," Marlene Ettinger said as he came up alongside her. The others at the viewport turned and muttered their greetings. "How close are we?" Lee asked. Charnovsky, the geologist, answered positively, "Two days before we enter final orbit." The stars crowded out the darkness beyond their viewsport: against the blackness like droplets from a paint spray. In the faint reflection of the port's plastic, Lee could see six human faces looking lost and awed. Then the ship swung, ever so slightly, in response to some command from the crew and computers. A single star -- close and blazingly powerful -- slid into view, lancing painfully brilliant light through the polarizing viewport. Lee snapped his eyes shut, but not before the glare burned its afterimage against his closed eyelids. They all ducked back instinctively. "Welcome to Sirius," somebody said. n II A T an's fligKt to tfie stars was made not in glory, but in fear. TKe buildings on Titan were clearly the work of an alien intelligent race. No man could tell exactly How old they were, Kow long their baffling machines had been running, wKat their purpose was. Whoever Had built them had left the solar system hundreds of centuries ago. For the first time, men truly dreaded the stars. Still, they had to know, had to learn. Robot probes were sent to the nearest dozen stars, the farthest that man's technology could reach. Nearly a generation passed on Earth before the faint signals from the probes returned. Seven of the stars had planets circling them. Of these, five possessed Earthlike worlds. On four of them, some indications of life were found. Life, not intelligence. Long and hot were the debates about what to do next. Finally, manned expeditions were dispatched to the Earthlike ones. Through it all, the machines on Titan hummed smoothly. tC'They should have named this Afierthout" Lee said to Chamovsky. (The ship's official name was Carl Safari.) "Hovj so?" the Russian muttered as he pushed a pawn across the board between them. They were sitting in the pastel-lighted rec room. A few others were scattered around the semicircular room, reading, talking, dictating messages that wouldn't get to Earth for more than eight years. Soft music purred in the background. The Earthlike planet -- Siriusi A-# swung past the nearest viewport. The ship had been in orbit for nearly three weeks now and was rotating around its long axis to keep a half-g feeling of weight for the scientists. "We were sent Here as an afterthought," Lee continued. "Nobody expects us to find anything. Most of the experts back on Earth didn't really believe there could be an Earthlike planet around a blue star." "They were correct," CHarnovsky said. "Your move." Picture our solar system. Now replace the sun with Sirius A the Dog Star; a young, blue star, nearly twice as hot and big as the sun. Take away the planet Uranfrom the sun, and replace it with the white dwarf Sirius B, the Pup: just as hot as Sirius A, but collapsed to a hundredth of a star's ordinary size. Now sweep away all the planets between the Dog and the Pup except two: a bald chunk of rock the size of kilometers from A, and an Eartfisized planet some seven times farther out. Give the Earth-sized planet a cloud-sprinkled atmosphere, a few large seas, some wom-down mountain chains, and a thin veneer of simple green life clinging to its dusty surface. Finally, throw in one lone gas giant planet, far beyond the Pup, some # some meteoroids and comets and you have the Sirius system. Lehman, the psychiatrist, pulled up a webchair to the kibitzer's position between Lee and Charnovsky. "Mind if I watch?" He was trim and athletic looking, kept himself tanned under the UV lights in the ship's gym booth. Within minutes they were discussing the chances of finding anything on the planet below them. "You sound terribly pessimistic," the psychiatrist said. "The planet looks pessimistic," Charnovsky replied. "It was scoured clean when Sirius B exploded, and life has hardly had a chance to get started again on its surface." "But it is Earthlike, isn't it?" "Hah!" Charnovsky burst. "To a simple-minded robot it may seem Earthlike. The air is breathable. The chemical composition of the rocks is similar. But no man would call that desert an Earthlike world. There are no trees, no grasses, it's too hot, the air is too dry..." "And the planet's too young to have evolved an intellignt species," Lee added, "which makes me the biggest afterthought of all." "Well, there might be something down there for an anthropologist to puzzle over," Lehman countered. "Things will lock better once we get down to the surface. I think we're all getting a touch of cabin fever in here." T)efore Lee could reply, Lou D'Orazio -- the ship's geophysicist and cartographer -- came bounding through the hatchway of the rec room and, taking advantage of the halfgravity, crossed to their chess table in two jumps. "Look at this!" He slapped a still-warm photograph on the chess table, scattering pieces over the floor. Charnovsky swore something Slavic, and everyone in the room turned. It was one of the regular cartographic photos, crisscrossed with grid lines. It showed the shoreline of one of the planet's mini-oceans. A line of steep bluffs followed the shore. "It looks like an ordinary... "Aspertti un momento... wait a minute... , see here." D'Orazio pulled a magnifier from his coverall pocket. "Look!" Lee peered into the magnifier. Fuzzy, wavering, gray... "It looks like -- " Lehman said, "Whatever it is, it's standing on two legs." "It's a man," Charnovsky said flatly. Ill T#ithin minutes the whole sci  entific staff had piled into the rec room and crowded around the table, together with all the crew members except the two on duty in the command globe. The ship's automatic cameras took twenty more photographs of the area before their orbit carried them over the horizon from the spot. Five of the pictures showed the shadowy figure of a bipedal creature. The spot was in darkness by the time their orbit carried them over it again. Infrared and radar sensors showed nothing. They squinted at the pictures, handed them from person to person, talked and argued and wondered through two entire eighthour shifts. Crewmen left for duty and returned again. The planet turned beneath them and once again the shoreline was bathed in Sirius's hot glow. But there was no trace of the humanoid. Neither the cameras, the manned telescopes, nor the other sensors could spot anything. One by one, men and women left the rec room, sleepy and talked out. Finally, only Lee, Charnovsky, Lehman and Captain Rassmussen were left sitting at the chess table with the fingergrimed photos spread out before them. "They're men," Lee murmered. "Erect bipedal men." "It's only one creature," the captain said. "And all we know is that it looks like a man." Rassmussen was tall, hamfisted, rawboned, with a ruddy face that could look either elfin or Viking but nothing in-between. His voice, though, was thin and high. To the everlasting applause of all aboard, he had fought to get a five-year supply of beer brought along. Even now, he had a mug tightly wrapped in one big hand. "All right, they're humanoids," Lee conceded. "That's close enough." The captain hiked a shaggy eyebrow. "I don't like jumping at shadows, you know. These pictures -- " "Men or not," Charnovsky said, "we must land and investigate closely." Lee glanced at Lehman, straddling a turned-around chair and resting his arms tiredly on the back. "Oh, we'll investigate," Rassmussen agreed, "but not too fast. If they are an intelligent species of some kind, we've got to go gingerly. I'm under orders from the Council, you know." "They haven't tried to contact us," Lee said. "That means they either don't know we're here, or they're not interested, or -- " "Or what?" Lee knew How it would sound, but he said it anyway. "Or they're waiting to get their, Hands on us." Rassmussen laughed. "That sounds dramatic, sure enough." "Really?" Lee heard his voice as though it were someone else's. "Suppose the humanoids down there are from the same race that built the machines on Titan?" ( ( 'NT o n s e n s e," Charnovsky  blurted. "There are no cities down there, no sign whatever of an advanced civilization." The captain took a long swallow of beer, then, "There is no sign of Earth's civilization on the planet either, you know. Yet we are here, sme enough." Lee's insides were fluttering now. "If they are the ones who built on Titan..." "It is still nonsense!" Charnovsky insisted. "To assume that the first extraterrestrial creature resembling a man is a representative of the race that visited the solar system hundreds of centuries ago . i . ridiculous! The statistics alone put the idea in the realm of fantasy." "Wait, there's more to it," Lee said. "Why would a visitor from another star go to the trouble to build a machine that works for centuries, without stopping?" They looked at him, waiting for him to answer his own question: Rassmussen with his Viking's craggy face, Charnovsky trying to puzzle it out in his own mind, Lehman calm and half-amused. "The Titan buildings are more than alien," Lee explained. "They're hostile. That's tny belief. Call it an assumption, a hypothesis. But I can't envision an alien race building machinery like that except for an all-important purpose. That purpose was military." Rassmussen looked truly puzzled now. "Military? But who were they fighting?" "Us," Lee answered. "A previous civilization on Earth'. A culture that arose before the Ice Ages, went into space, met an alien culture and was smashed in a war so badly that there's no trace of it left." Charnovsky's face was reddening with the effort of staying quiet. "I know it's conjecture," Lee went on quietly, "but if there was a war between ancient man and the builders of the Titan machines, then the two cultures must have arisen close enough to each other to make war possible. Widely separated cultures can't make war, they can only contact each other every few centuries or millennia. The aliens had to come from a nearby star... like Sirius." "No, no, no!" Charnovsky slapped a hand on his thigh'. "It's preposterous, unscientific! There is not one shred of evidence to support this, this... pipedream!" But Rasmussen looked thoughtful. "Still " "Still it is no nonsense," Charnovsky repeated. "The planet down there holds no interstellar technology. If there ever was one, it was blasted away when Sirius B exploded. Whoever is down there, he has no cities, no electronic communications, no satellites in orbit, no cultivated fields, no animal herds... nothing!" "Then maybe he's a visitor too," Lee countered. "Whatever it is," Rasmussen said, "it won't do for us to go rushing in like berserkers. Suppose there's a civilization down there that's so advanced we simply do not recognize it as such?" TT efore Charnovsky could reply, the captain went on, "We have plenty of time. We will get more data about surface conditions from the robot landers and do a good deal more studying and thinking about the entire problem. Then, if conditions warrant it, we can land." "But we don't have time!" Lee snapped. Surprised at his own vehemence, he continued, "Five years is a grain of sand compared to the job ahead of us. We have to investigate a completely alien culture and determine what its attitude is toward us. Just learning the language might take five years all by itself." Lehman smiled easily and said, "Sid, suppose you're totally wrong about this, and whoever's down there is simply a haranless savage. What would be the shock to his culture if we suddenly drop in on him?" "What'll be the shock # our culture if I'm right?" Rassmussen drained his naug and banged it down on the eltess table. "This is getting us nowhere. We have not enough evidence to decide on an intelligent course of action. Personally, I'm in no hurry to go blimdering into a nest of unknowns. Not when we can learn safely from orbit. As long as the beer holds out, we go slow." Lee pushed his chair back and stood up. "We won't learn a damned thing from orbit. Not anything that counts. We've got to go down there and study them close up. And the sooner the better." He turned and walked out of the rec room. Rassmussen's spent half his life hauling scientists out to Titan and he can't understand why we have to make the mos self. Halfway down the passageway to his quarters, he heard footsteps padding behind him. He knew who it would be. Tumkkg, he saw Lehman coming along toward him. "Sacking in?" the psychiatrist asked. "Aren't you sleepy?" Completely bushed, now that you mention it." "But you want to talk to me," Lee said. Lehman shrugged. "No hurry," With a shrug of his own, Lee resumed walking to his room. "Come on. I'm too worked up to sleep an # Tway." A #I the cubicles were more or less the same: a bunk, a desk, a film spool reader, a sanitary closet. Lee took the webbed deskchair and let Lehman plop on the sighing air mattress of the bunk. "Do you really believe this hostile alien theory? Or are you just -- " Lee slouched down in his chair and interrupted. "Let's not fool around. Rich'. You know about my breakdown on Titan and you're worried about me." "It's my job to worry about everybody." "I take my pills every day... to keep the paranoia away." "That wasn't the diagnosis of your case, as you're perfectly well aware." "So they called it something else. What're you after. Rich? Want to test my reflexes while I'm sleepy and my guard's down?" Lehman smiled professionally. "Look Sid. You had a breakdown on Titan. You got over it. That's finished." Nodding grimly, Lee added, "Except that I think there might be aliens down there plotting against me." "That could be nothing more than a subconscious attempt to increase the importance of the anthropology department," Lehman countered. "Crap" Lee said. "I came out here expecting something like this. Why do you think I fought my way onto this expedition? It wasni't easy, after my breakdown. I had to push ahead of a lot of former friends." "And leave your wife." "That's right. Ruth divorced me for it. She's getting all my accumulated dividends. She'll die in comfort while we're sleeping our way back home." "But why?" Lehman asked. "Why should you give up everything -- friends, wife, family, position -- to get out here?" Lee knew the answer, hesitated about putting it into words, then realized that Lehman knew it too. "Because I had to face it. had to do what I could to find out about those buildings on Titan." "And that's why you want to rush down and contact whoever it is down there? Am I right?" "Right," Lee said. He almost wanted to laugh. "I'm hoping they can tell me if I'm crazy or not." IV Tt was three months before they landed. Rassmussen was thorough, patient and stubborn. Unmanned landers sampled and tested surface conditions. Observation satellites crisscrossed the planet at ' the lowest possible altitudes -- except for one thing that hung in synchronous orbit in the longitude of the spot where the first humanoid Had been found. That was the only place where Kumanoid life was seen, along that shoreline for a grand distance of perhaps five kilometers. Nowhere else on the planet. Lee argued and swore and stormed at the delay. Rassmussen stayed firm. Only when he was satisfied that nothing more could be learned from orbit did he agree to land the ship. And still he sent clear word back toward Earth that he might be landing in a trap. The great ship settled slowly, almost delicately, on a hot tongue of fusion flame, and touched down on the western edge of a desert some # kilometers from the humanoid site. A range of rugged-looking hills separated them. The staff and crew celebrated that night. The next morning, Lee, Charnovsky, Hatfield, Doris McNertny, Marlene Ettinger and Alicia Monteverdi moved to the ship's "Sirius globe." They were to be the expedition's "outsiders," the specialists who would eventually live in the planetary environment. They represented anthropology, geology, biochemistry, botony, zoology and ecology, with backup specialties in archeology, chemistry and paleontology. The Sirius globe held their lagoratories, workrooms, equipment and living quarters. They were quarantined from the rest of the ship's staff and crew, the "insiders," until the captain agreed that the surface conditions on the planet would be no threat to the rest of the expedition members. That would take two years, minimum, Lee knew. Gradually, the "outsiders" began to expose themselves to the local environment. They began to breathe the air, acquire the microbes. Pascual and Tanaka made them sit in the medical examination booths twice a day, and even checked them personally every other day. The two M.D.'s wore disposable biosuits and worried expressions when they entered the Sirius globe. The medical computers compiled miles of data tapes on each of the six "outsiders," but still Pascual's normally pleasant face acquired a perpetual frown of anxiety about them. ttT just don't like the idea of this damned armor," Lee grumbled. He was already encased up to his neck in a gleaming white powersuit, the type that crew members wore when working outside the ship in vacuum. Aaron Hatfield and Marlene Ettinger were helping to check all the seams and connections. A few feet away, in the cramped "locker room," tiny Alicia Monteverdi looked as though she were being swallowed by an oversized automaton; Cfiamovsky and Doris McNertny were cKecking Her suit. "It's for your own protection," Marlene told Lee in a tHroaty wHisper as sKe applied a test meter to tKe radio panel on bis suit's cliest. "You and Alicia won tKe toss for the first trip outside, but this is the price you must pay. Now be a good boy and don't complain." Lee had to grin. "Ja, Fraulein Schluemeisterein." SKe looked up at him with a rueful smile, "Thank God you never Kad to carry on a conversation in German." Finally Lee and Alicia clumped through the double hatch' into the airlock. It took another fifteen minutes for them to perform tKe final checkout, but at last they were ready. The outer KatcK slid back, and they started down the long ladder to the planet's surface. The armored suits were equipped with muscle-amplifying power systems, so that even a girl as slim as Alicia could handle their bulk easily. Lee went down the ladder first and set foot on the ground. It was bare and dusty, the sky a reddish haze. The grand adventure, Lee thought. All the expected big moments in Hie are Hops. A hot breeze Hummed in his earphones. It was early morning Sirius had not cleared the barren Horizon yet, although the sky was fully bright. Despite the suit's airconditioning, Lee felt the Heat. He reached up a hand as Alicia climbed warily down the last few steps of the ladder. The plastic rungs gave imder the suit's weight, then slowly straightened themselves when the weight was removed. "Well," he said, looking at her wide-eyed face through the transparent helmet of her suit, "what do you think of it?" "It is hardly paradise, is it?" "Looks like it's leaning the other way," Lee said. yhey explored -- Lee and Alicia that first day, then the other outsiders, shuffling ponderously inside their armor. Lee chafed against the restriction of the power-suits, but Rassmussen insisted and would brook no argument. They went timidly at first, never out of sight of the ship. Charnovsky chipped samples from the rock outcroppings, while the others took air and soil samples, dug for water, searched for life. "The perfect landing site," Doris complained after a hot, tedious day. "There's no form of life bigger than a yeast mold within a hundred kilometers of here." It was a hot world, a dry world, a brick-dust world where the sky was always red. Sirius was a blowtorch searing down on them, too bright to look at even through the tinted visors of their suits. At night there was no moon to see, but the Pup bathed this world in a deathly bluish glow far brighter yet colder than moonlight. The night sky was never truly dark, and only a few strong stars could be seen from the ground. Through it all, the robot satellites relayed more pictures) of the humanoids along the seacoast. They appeared almost every day, usually only briefly. Sometimes there were a few of them, sometimes only one, once there were nearly a dozen. The highest-resolution photographs showed them to be human in size and build. But what their faces looked like, what they wore, what they were doing -- all escaped the drone cameras. The robot landers, spotted in a dozen scattered locations within a thousand kilometers of the ship, faithfully recorded and trasmitted everything they were programed to look for. They sent pictures and chemical analyses of plant life and insects. But no higher animals. Alicia's dark-eyed face took on a perpetually puzzled frown, Lee saw. "It makes no sense," she would say. "There is nothing on this planet more advanced than insects... yet there are men. It's as though humans suddenly sprang up in the Silurian period on Earth. They can't be here. I wish we could examine the life in the seas... perhaps that would tell us more." "You mean those Humanoidg didn't originate on this planet," Lee said to her. She shook her head. "I don't know. I don't see how they could have..." V G radually they pushed their explorations further afield, beyond the ship's limited horizon. In the motorized powersuits a man could cover more than a himdred kilometers a day, if he pushed it. Lee always headed toward the grizzled hills that separated them from the seacoast. He helped the others to dig, to collect samples, but he always pointed them toward the sea. "The satellite pictures show some decent greenery on the seaward side of the hills," he told Doris. "That's where he should go." Rassmussen wouldn't move the ship. He wanted his base of operations, his link homeward, at least a hundred kilometers from the nearest possible threat. But finally he relaxed enough to allow the scientists to go out overnight and take a look at the hills. And maybe the coast, Lee added silently to the captain's orders. Rassmussen decided to let them use one of the ship's two air-cushion vehicles. He assigned Jerry Grote, the chief engineer, and Chien Shu Li, electronics specialist, to handle the skimmer and take command of the trip. They would live in biosuits and remain inside the skimmer at all times. Lee, Marlene, Doris and Charnovsky made the trip; Grote did the driving and navigating, Chien handled communications and the computer. It took a full day's drive to get to the hills. Grote, a lanky, lantern-jawed New Zealander, decided to camp at their base as night came on. "I thought you'd be a born mountaineer," Lee poked at him. Grote leaned back in His padded chair and planted a large sandled foot on the skimmer's control panel. "I could climb those wrinkles out there in my sleep," he said pleasantly. "But we've got to be careful of this nice, shiny vehicle." From the driver's compartment, Lee could see Marlene pushing forward toward them, squeezing between tHe racks of electronics gear that separated the forward compartment from the living and working quarters. Even in the drab coveralls, sHe showed a nice profile. "I would like to go outside," she said to Grote. "We've been sitting all day like tourists in a shuttle." Grote nodded. "I got to wear a hard suit, though." "But -- " "Orders." She glanced at Lee, then shrugged. "Very well." "I'll come with you," Lee said. Squirming into the armored suits in the aft hatchway was exasperating, but at last they were ready and Lee opened the hatch. They stepped out across the tail fender of the skimmer and jumped to the dusty ground. "Being inside this is almost worse than being in the car," Marlene said. They walked around the skimmer. Lee watched His shadow lengthen as he placed the setting Sirius at his back. "Look . , . look!" TTe saw Marlene pointing and turned to follow Her gaze. The hills rising before them were lights: red and blue and white and dazzling, shimmering lights as though a cascade of precious jewels were pouring down the hillside. "What is it?" Marlene's voice sounded excited, thrilled, not the least afraid. Leetared at the shifting multicolored lights. It was like playing a lamp on cut crystal. He took a step toward tlie hills, then looked down to the ground. From inside the cumbersome suit, it was hard to see the ground close to your feet and Harder still to bend down and pick up anything.  But he squatted slowly and reached for a small stone. Getting up again, Lee held the stone high enough for it to catch the fading rays of daylight. The rock glittered with a shower of varicolored sparkles. "They're made of glass," Lee said. Within minutes Chamovsky and the other "outsiders" were out of the ship to marvel at it. The Russian collected as many rocks as he would stuff into his suit's thigh pouches. Lee and Grote helped him; the women merely stood by the skimmer and watched the hills blaze with lights Sirius disappeared below the horizon at last, and the show ended. The hills returned to being brownish, erosion-worn slumps of rock. "Glass mountains," Marlene marvelled as they returned to the skimmer. "Not glass," Charnovsky corrected. "Glazed rock. Granitic, no doubt. Probably was melted when the Pup exploded. Atmosphere might have been blown away, and rock cooled very rapidly." Lee could see Marlene's chin rise stubbornly inside the transparent dome of her suit. "I name them the Glass Mountains," she said firmly. Grote had smuggled a bottle along with them, part of his personal stock. "My most precious possession," he rightfully called it. But for the Glass Moimtains he dug it out of its hiding place and they toasted both the discovery and the name. Marlene smiled and insisted that Lee also be toasted, as codiscoverer. T Tours later, Lee grew tired' of staring at the metal ceiling of the sleeping quarters a few inches above his top-tier bunk. Even Grote's drinks didn't help him to sleep. He kept wondering about the humanoids, what they were doing, where they were from, how he would get to learn their secrets. As quietly as he could, he slipped down from the bunk. The two men beneath him were breathing deeply and evenly. Lee headed for the rear hatch, past the women's bunks. The hard suits were standing at stiff attention, flanking both sides of the rear hatch. Lee was in his coveralls. He strapped on a pair of boots, slid the hatch open as quietly as he could, and stepped out onto the fender. The air was cool and clean, the sky, bright enough for him to make out the worn old hills. There were a few stars in the sky, but the hills didn't reflect them. He heard a movement behind him. Turning, he saw Marlene. "Did I wake you?" "I'm a very light sleeper," slie said. "Sorry, I didn't mean -- " "No, I'm glad you did." She shook her head slightly, and for the first time Lee noticed the sweep and softness of her hair. The light was too dim to make its color, but he remembered it as chestnut. "Besides," sKe whispered, "I've been longing to get outside without being in one of those damned suits." He helped Ker down from the fender, and they walked a little way from the skimmer. "Can we see the sun?" she asked, looking skyward. "I'm not sure, I think maybe... there..." He pointed to a second-magnitude star, shining alone in the grayish sky. "Where, which one?" He took her by the shoulder with one hand so that she could see where he was pointing. "Oh yes, I see it." She turned, and she was in His arms, and he kissed her. He held onto her as though there was nothing else in the universe. If any of the others suspected that Lee and Marlene had spent the night outside, they didn't mention it. All six of them took their regular pre-breakfast checks in the medical booth', and by the time they were finished eating in the cramped galley the computer had registered a safe green for each of them. Lee slid out from the galley's folding table and made his way forward. Grote Was slouched in the driver's seat, his lanky frame a geometry of knees and elbows. He was studying the viewscreen map. "Looking for a pass through these hills for our vehicle," he said absently, his eyes on the slowly-moving photomap. "Why take the skimmer?" Lee asked, sitting on the chair beside him. He came across these hills in the powersuits." Grote cocked an eye at him. "You're really set on getting to the coast, aren't you?" "Aren't you?" That brought a grin. "How much do you think we ought to carry with us?" VI 'hey split the team into three groups. Chien and Charnovsky stayed with the car; Marlene and Doris would go with Lee and Grote to look at the flora and fauna (if any) on the shore side of the hills. Lee and the engineer carried a pair of TV camera packs with them, to set up close to the shoreline. "Beware of the natives," Charnovsky's voice grated in Lee's earphones as they walked away from the skimmer. "They might swoop down on you with bows and arrows!" His laughter showed what he thought of Lee's worClimbing the hills wasn't as bad as Lee had thought it would be. The powersuits did most of the work, and the glassy rock was not smooth enough to cause real troubles with footing. It was hot though, even with the suit's cooling equipment turned up full bore. Sirius blazed overhead, and the rocks beat glare and heat back into their faces as they climbed. It took most of the day to get over the crest of the hills. But finally with Sirius edging toward the horizon behind them, Lee saw the water. The sea spread to the farther horizon, cool and blue, with long gentle swells that steepened into surf as they ran up toward the land. And the land was green here: shrubs and mossy-looking plants were sprinkled around patchily. "Look! Right here!" Doris's iroice. Lee swiveled his Head and saw Her clumsily sinking to Her knees, like an armor-plated elephant getting down ponderously from a circus trick. She knelt beside a fern-like plant. They all walked over and helped her to photograph it, snip a leaf from it, probe its root system. "Might as well sleep Here tonight," Grote said. "I'll take the first watch." "Can't we set the scanners to give an alarm if anything approaches?" Marlene asked. "There's nothing here dangerous enough to -- " "I want one of us awake at all times," Grote said firmly. "And nobody outside of their suits." "There's no place like home," Doris muttered. "But after a while even your own smell gets to you." TT'he women lay down, locking the suits into roughly reclining positions. To Lee they looked like oversized beetles that had gotten stuck on their backs. It didn't look possible for them to ever get up again. Then another thought struck him, and he chuckled to himself. Super chastity belts. He sat down, cranked the suit's torso section back to a comfortable reclining angle, and tried to doze off. He was dreaming of the towers on Titan again when Grote's voice in his earphones woke him. "Is it my turn?" Ke asked groggy. "Not yet. But turn off your transmitter. You were groaning in your sleep. Don't want to wake up the girls, do you?" Lee took the second watch and simply stayed awake until daybreak without bothering any of the others. They began marching toward the sea. The hills descended only slightly into a rolling plateau that went on until they reached the bluffs that overlooked the sea. A few hundred feet down was a narrow strip of beach, with the breakers surging in. "This is as far as we go" Grote said. The women spent the morning collecting plant samples. Marlene found a few insects and grew more excited over them than Doris had been about the shrubbery. Lee and Grote valked along the edge of the cliffs looking for a good place to set up their cameras "You're sure this is the area where they were seen?" Lee asked. The engineer walking alongside him, turned his head inside the plastic helmet. Lee could see he was edgy too. "I know how to read a map." "Sorry, I'm just anxious -- " "So am I." They walked until Sirius was almost directly overhead, without seeing anything except the tireless sea, the beacH, and the spongy-looking plants that Huddled close to the ground. "Not even a damned tree," Grote grumbled. They turned back and headed for the spot where they had left the women. Far up the beach. Lee saw a tiny dark spot. "What's that?" Grote stared for a few moments. "Probably a rock." But he touched a button on the chest of His suit. Lee did the same, and an electro-optical viewpiece slid down in front of his eyes. Turning a dial on the suit's control panel, He tried to focus on the spot. It wavered in the Heat currents of the early afternoon, blurred and uncertain. Then it seemed to jump out of view. Lee punched the button and the lens slid away from his eyes. "It's moving!" he shouted, and started to run. He Heard Grote's heavy breathing as the engineer followed him, and they both nearly flew in their powersuits along the edge of the cliffs. Tt was a man! No, not one, Lee saw, but two of them walking along the beach, their feet in the foaming water. "Get down you bloody fool" He dove headlong, bounced, cracked the back of His Head against the helmet's plastic, then banged his chin on the soft inner lining of the collar. "Don't want them to see, do you?" Grote was whispering now. "They can't hear us, for God's sake," Lee said into his suit radiophone. They wormed their way to the cliff's edge again and watched. The two men seemed to be dressed in black. Or are they blackskinned and naked? Lee wondered. After a Hurried council, they unslung one of the video cameras and its power unit, set it up right there, turned it on and then backed away from the edge of the cliff. Then they ran as hard as they could, staying out of sight of the beach, with the remaining camera. They passed the startled women and breathlessly shouted out their find. The women dropped their work and started running after them. About a kilometer or so further on they dropped to all fours again and painfully crawled to the edge once more. Grote hissed the women into silence as they hunched up beside him. The beach was empty now. "Do you think they saw us?" Lee asked. "Don't know." Lee used the electro-optics again and scanned the beach. "No sign of them." "Their footprints," Grote snapped. "Look there." The trails of two very humanlooking sets of footprints marched straight into the water. All four of them searched the sea for hours, but saw nothing. Finally, they decided to set up the other camera. It was turning dark by the time they finished. "We've got to get back to the car," Grote said, wearily, when they finished. "There's not enough food in the suits for another day." "I'll stay here," Lee replied. "You can bring me more supplies tomorrow." "No. If there's anything to see, the cameras will pick it up. Chien is monitoring them back at the car, and the whole crew of the ship must be watching the view." Lee saw there was no sense arguing. Besides, he was bonetired. But he knew he'd be back again as soon as he could get there. (iTTell, it settles a th'ree-hun' ' dred-year-old argument," Aaron Hatfield said as he watched the viewscreen. The biochemest and Lee were sitting in the main workroom f the ship's Sirius globe, watching the humanoids as televised by the cameras on the cliffs. Chamovsky was on the other side of the room, at a workbench, flashing rock chips with a laser so that a spectrometer could analyze their chemical composition. The other outsiders were traveling in the skimmer again, collecting more floral and insect specimens. "What argument?" Lee asked. Hatfield shifted in his chair, making the webbing creak. "About the human form... whether it's an accident or a result of evolutionary selection. From them," he nodded toward the screen, "I'd say it's no accident." One camera was on wide-field focus and showed a group f three of the men. They were wading hips-deep in the surf, carrying slender rods high above their heads to keep them free of the surging waves. The other camera was fixed on a close-up view f three women standing up the beach, watching their men. Like the men, they were completely naked and black-skinned. They looked human in every detail. Every morning they appeared on the beach, often carrying the rods, but sometimes not. Lee concluded that they must live in caves cut into the cliffs. The rods looked like simple bone spears, but even under the closest focus of the cameras he couldn't be sure. "They're not Negroid," he muttered, more to himself than anyone listening. "It's hard to tell, isn't it?" Hatfield asked. Nodding, Lee said, "They just don't look like terrestrial Negroes... except for their skin coloring. And that's an adaptation to Sirius's brightness. Plenty of ultraviolet, too. " Charnovsky came over and pulled up a chair. "So. Have they caught any fish this morning?" "Not yet," Lee answered. Jabbing a stubby finger toward the screen, the Russian asked, "Are these the geniuses who built the machines on Titan? Fishing with bone spears? They don't make much of an enemy, Lee." "They could have been our enemy," Lee answered, forcing a thin smile. He was getting accustomed to Charnovsky's needling, but not reconciled to it. 'he geologist shook his head sadly."Take the advice of an older man, dear friend, and disabuse yourself of this idea. Statistics are a powerful tool, Lee. The chances of this particular race being the one that built on Titan are fantastically high. And the chances..." "What're the chances that two intelligent races will both evolve along the same physical lines?" Lee snapped. Charnovsky shrugged. "We have two known races. They are both human in form. The chances must be excellent." Lee turned back to watch the viewscreen, then asked Hatfield. "Aaron, the biochemistry is very similar to Earth's, isn't it?" "Very close." "I mean... I could eat local food and be nourished by it? I wouldn't be poisoned or anything like that?" "Well," Hatfield said, visibly thinking it out as he spoke, "as far as the structure of the proteins and other foodstuffs are concerned... yes, I guess you could get away with eating it. The biochemistry is basically the same as ours, as nearly as I've been able to tell. But so are terrestrial shellfish, 'and they make me deathly ill. You see, there're all sorts of enzymes, and microbial parasites, and viruses..." "We've been living with the local bugs for months now," Lee said. "We're adapted to them, aren't we?" "You know what they say about visiting strange places: don't drink the water." One of the natives struck into the water with his spear and instantly the water began to boil with' the thrashing of some sea creature. The other two men drove their spears home, and the thrashing died. They lifted a four-foot-long fish out of the water and started back for the beach, carrying it triumphantly over their heads. The camera"s autotracker kept the picture on them. The women on the beach were jumping and clapping with joy. "Damn," Lee said softly. "They're as human as we are." "And obviously representative of a high technical civilization," Chamovsky said. "Survivors of one, maybe," Lee answered. "Their culture might have been wiped out by the Pup's explosion... or by war." "Ah, now it gets even more dramatic: two cultures destroyed, ours and theirs." "All right, go ahead and laugh," Lee said. "I won't be able to prove anything until I get to live with them." "Until what?" Hatfield said. "Until I go out there and meet them face to face, learn their language, their culture, live with them." C#T ive with them?" Rassmus sen looked startled, the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain's mono-moleclar biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat. They were sitting around a circular table in the conference room of the Sirius globe: the six "outsiders," Grote, Chien, Captain Rassmussen, Pascual and Lehman. "Aren't you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?" Grote asked, grinning. "I don't think they Have pots. Or fire, for that matter," Lee countered. The laugh turned on Grote. Lee went on quitely, "I've checked it out with Aaron, here. There's no biochemical reason why I couldn't survive in the native environment. Doris and Marlene have agreed to gather the same types of food we've seen the humanoids carrying, and I'll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them." Lehman hunched forward, from across the table, and asked Lee, "About the dynamics of having a representative of our relatively advanced culture step into their primitive -- " "I won't be representing an advanced culture to them," Lee said. "I intend to be just as naked and tool-less as they are. And just as black. Aaron can inject me with the proper enzymes to turn my skin black." "That would be necessary in any event if you don't want to be sunburned to death," Pascual said. Hatfield added, "You'll also need contact lenses that'll screen out the UV and protect your eyes." They spent an hour discussing all the physical precautions he would have to take. Lee kept glancing at Rassmussen. The idea's slipping out from under his control. The captain watched each speaker in turn, squinting with concentration and sinking deeper and deeper into his Viking scowl.: Then, when Lee was certain that the captain could no longer object, Rassmussen spoke up: "One more question. Are you this mission of yours?" CtXlhat do you mean?" ' " The captain's hands seemed to wander loosely without a mug of beer to tie them down. "Well... you seem to be sonal risk to live with' these eh, people. From the expedition's viewpoint, you will also be risking our only anthropologist, you know. I think the wise thing to do, in that case, would be to have a running record of everything you see and hear." Lee nodded. "So we can swap one of your eyes for a TV camera and plant a transmitter somewhere in your skull. I'm sure there's enough empty space in your head to accommodate them." The captain chuckled toothily at his joke. "We can't do an eye procedure here," Pascual argued. "It's too risky." "I understand that Dr. Tanaka is quite expert in that field," the captain said. "And naturally we would preserve the eye to restore it afterwards. Unless, of course, Professor Lee -- " He let the suggestion dangle. Lee looked at them sitting around the big table: Rassmussen, tr#ung to look noncommittal; Pascual, upset and nearly angry; Lehman, staring intently right back into Lee's eyes. You're just trying to force me to hack down, Lee thought of Rassmussen. Then, of Lehman, And if I don't back down, you'll be convinced that I'm crazy. For a long moment there was no sound in the crowded conference room except the faint whir of the air blower. "All right," Lee said. "If Tagery, so am I." Then Lee returned to his cu' ' bide, the message light under the phone screen was blinking red. He flopped on tKe bunk, propped a pillow under his head, and asked the computer, "What's the phone message?" My son, the psychiatrist. "Okay," he said aloud, "get him." A moment later Lehman's tanned face filled the screen. "I was expecting you to call," Lee said. The psychiatrist nodded. "You agreed to pay a big price just to get loose among the natives." "Tanaka can handle the surgery," he answered evenly. "It'll take a month before you are fit to leave the ship again." ""You know what our Viking captain says... we'll stay here as long as the beer holds out." Lehman smiled. Professional technique, Lee thought. "Sid, do you really think you can mingle with these people without causing any cultural impact? Without changing them?" Shrugging, he answered, "I don't know. I hope so. As far as we know, they're the only humanoid group on the planet. They may have never seen a stranger before." "That's what I mean," Lehman said. "Don't you feel that -- " "Let's cut the circling. Rich. You know why I want to see them first-hand. If we had the time I'd study them remotrfy fof a good long while before trykig any contact. But it gets bask to the beer supply. We've got to squeeze everything we caa out of them in a little more tha four years." "There will be other tions, after we return to Earth and tell them about these peoi pie." "Probably so. But they e too late." "Too late for what?" His neck was starting to hurt; Lee himched up to a sitting position on the bunk. "Figwe it out. There can't be more about fifty people in the group we've been watching. I've oaly seen a couple of children. And there aren't any other humanoid groups on the planet. That means they're dying out. This gang is the last of their kind. By the time another expedition gets here there might not be any of them left." For once, Lehman looked surprised "Do you really think so?" "Yes. And before they die, we have to get some information out of them." "What do you mean?" "They might not be natives o this planet," Lee said, forcing himself to speak calmly, keeping his face a mask, freezing any emotion inside him. "They prob ably came from somewhere else. That elsewhere is the home of the people who built the Titan machine... their real home. We have got to find out where it is." Flawless logic. Lehman tried to smile again. "That's assuming your theory about an ancient war is right." "Yes. Asuming I'm right." "Assume you are," Lehman said. "And assume you find wHat you're looking for. Then what? Do you just take off and go back to Earth? What happens to the people here?" "I don't know," Lee said, icecold inside. "The main problem will be how to deal with the homeworld of their people." "But the people here, do we just let them die out-" "Maybe. I guess so." Lehman's smile was completely gone now; his face didn't look pleasant at all. I t took much more than a month. The surgery was difficult. And beneath all the pain was Lee's rooted fear that He might never Have His sight fully restored again. While He was recovering, before He was allowed out of His infirmary bed, Hatfield turned His skin black with a series of enzsmie injections. He was also fitted for a single quartz contact lens. Once fie was up and around, Marlene followed him constantly. Finally she said, "You're even better looking with black skin; it makes you more mysterious. And the prosthetic eye looks exactly like your own. It even moves like the natural one." Rassmussen still plodded. Long after He felt strong enough to get going again, he was still confined to the ship. When his complaints grew loud enough, they let Him start on a diet of native foods. The medics and Hatfield hovered around him while he spent a miserable week with dysentary. Then it passed. But it took a while to build up his strength again; all he had to eat now were fish, insects, and pulpy greens. After more tests, conferences, a two-week trial run out by the Glass Moimtains, and then still more exhaustive physical exams, Rassmussen at last agreed to let Lee go. Grote took him out in the skimmer, skirting the long way around the Glass Mountains, through the surf and out onto the gently billowing sea. They kept far enough out at sea for the beach to be constantly beyond their Horizon. When night fell, Grote nosed the skimmer landward. They came ashore around midnight, with the engines clamped down to near silence, a few kilometers up the beach from the humanoids' site. Grote, encased in a powersuit, walked witH film part way and buried a relay transceiver in the sand, to pick up the signals from tfie camera and radio imbedded in Lee's skull. "Good luck." His voice was muffled by the helmet. Lee watched him plod mechanically back into the darkness. He strained to hear the skimmer as it turned and slipped back into the sea, but he could neither see nor hear it. He was alone on the beach. louds were drifting landward, riding smoothly overhead. The breeze on the beach, though, was blowing warmly out of the and across the beach, out to sea. The sky was bright with the allnight twilight glow, even though the clouds blotted out most of the stars. Along the foot of the cliffs, though, it was deep black. Except for the wind, there wasn't a sound: not a bird nor a nocturnal cat, not even an insect's chirrup. Lee stayed near the water's edge. He wasn't cold, even though naked. Still, He could feel himself trembling. Grate's out there, he told himself. If you need him, he can come rolling up the beach in ten minutes. But He knew He was alone. The clouds thickened and began to sprinkle rain, a warm, soft shower. Lee blinked the drops away from his eyes and walked slowly, a hundred paces one direction, then a htuidred paces back again. The rain stopped as the sea Horizon started turning bright. The clouds wafted away. The sky lightened, first gray, then almost milky white. Lee looked toward the base of the cliffs. Dark shadows dotted the rugged cliff face. Caves. Some of them were ten feet or more above the sand. Sirius edged a limb above the horizon, and Lee, squinting, turnlooked back at the caves again, feeling the warmth of the hot star's might on his back. The first ones out of the cave were two children. They tumbled out of the same cave, off to Lee's left, giggling and nmning. When they saw Lee, they stopped dead. As though someone had turned them off. Lee could feel his heart beating as they stared at Him. He stood just as still as they did, perhaps a hundred meters from them. They looked about five and ten years old, he judged. li their lifespans are the same as ours. The taller of the two boys took a step toward Lee, then turned and ran back into the cave. The younger boy followed him. F or several minutes nothing happened. Then Lee heard voices echoing from inside the cave. Angry? Frightened? They are not laughing. Four men appeared at tfie mouth of the cave. Their hands were empty. They simply stood there and gaped at him, from the shadows of the cave's mouth. Now we'll start learning their customs about strangers, Lee said to himself. Very deliberately, lie turned away from them and took a few steps up the beach. Then he stopped, turned again, and walked back to his original spot. Two of the men disappeared inside the cave. The other two stood there. Lee couldn't tell what the expressions on their faces meant. Suddenly other people appeared at a few of the other cave entrances. They're interconnected. Lee tried a smile and waved. There were women among the onlookers now, and a few children. One of the boys who saw him first -- at least, it looked like him -- started chattering to an adult. The man silenced him with a brusque gesture. It was getting hot. Lee could feel perspiration dripping along his ribs as Sirius climbed above the horizon and shone straight at the cliffs. Slowly, he squatted down on the sand. A few of the men from hie first cave stepped out onto the beach. Two of them were carrying bone spears. Others edged out from their caves. They slowly drew together, keeping close to the rocky cliff wall, and started talking in low, earnest tones. They're puzzled, all right. Just play it cool. Don't make any sudden moves. He leaned forward slightly and traced a triangle on the sand with one finger. When he looked up again, a grizzled, white-haired man had taken a step or two away from the conference group. Lee smiled at him, and the elder froze in his tracks. With a shrug, Lee looked back at the first cave. The boy was still there, with a woman standing beside him, gripping his shoulder. Lee waved and smiled. The boy's hand fluttered momentarily. The old man said something to the group, and one of the younger men stepped out to join him. Neither held a weapon. They walked to within a few meters of Lee, and the old man said something, as loudly and bravely as he could muster. L ee bowed his head. "Good morning. I am Professor Sidney Lee of the University of Ottawa, which is one hell of a long way from here." TUey squatted down and starts ed talking, )SotH of Ifiem at once pointing to tSe caves and tBec all around tfie KeacB and finally out to tHe sea. Lee Held up His Hands and said, "It ougfit to be clear to you tHat I'm from someplace else, and I don't speak your language. Now if you want to start teacHing me -- " TKey sHook tKeir Heads, talked to eacH otKer, said sometKing else to Lee. Lee smiled at tfiem and waited for tKem to stop talking. WHen tHey did. He pointed to Himself and said very clearly, "Lee." He spent an Hour at it, repeating only that one syllable, no matter wKat tHey said to Kim or to each OtKer. THe Heat was getting fierce; Sirius was a blue flame searing His skin, baking tHe juices out of Him. THe younger man got up and, with a sKake of His Head, spoke a few final words to tHe elder and walked back to the group tHat still stood knotted by tHe base of tHe cliff. The old man rose, slowly and stiffly. He beckoned to Lee to do the same. As Lee got to His feet He saw the other men start to Head out for the surf. A few boys followed behind, carrying several bone spears for their -- wHat? Fathers? Older brotHers? As long as the spears are for the lish and not me, Lee tKougHt, THe old man was saying someifiing to Him. Pointing toward tHe caves. He took a step in tHat diirection, then jnotioned for Lee to come along. Lee Hesitated. THe old man smiled a toothless smile and repeated His invitation. Grinning back at Him in realization, Lee said aloud, "Okay. If you're not scared of me I guess I don't Have to be scared of you." IX I t took more tfian a year before Lee learned their language well enough to understand rougHly wKat tHey were saying. It was an odd language, sparse and practically devoid of pronouns. His speaking of tHeir words made tHe adults smile, wKen they tHougKt He couldn't e them doing it. Tfie cHildren still giggled at His speecfi, but tHe old man -- Ardraka -- always scolded them wKen tHey did. TKey called tfie planet Makta, and Lee saw to it tHat Rassmussen entered that as its official name in the expedition's log. He made a point of walking the beacH alone one night each week, to talk witH tHe others at the sKip and make a personal report. He quickly foxmd that most of what He saw. Heard and said inside the caves never got out to tfie relay transceiver buried up the beach; the cliff's rock walls were too much of a barrier. Ardraka was the oldest of tfie clan and the nominal chief. His son, Ardra, was the yoimger man who had also come out to talk with Lee that first day. Ardra actually gave most of the orders. Ardraka could overrule him whenever he cfiose to, but fie seldom exercised the right. There were only forty-tfiree people in the clan, nearly half of them elderly-looking. Eleven were pre-adolescent children; two of them infants. There were no obvious pregnancies. Ardraka must have been about fifty, judging by his oldest son's apparent age. But the old man had the wrinkled, sunken look of an eighty-year-old. The people themselves had very little idea of time beyond the basic rhythm of nigfit and day. They came out of tfie caves only during the early morning and evening hours. The blazing midday heat of Sirius was too much for them to face. They ate crustaceans and the small fisfi that dwelt in the shallows along the beach, insects, and tfie grubby vegetation that clung to tfie base of the cliffs. Occasionally they found a large fish that had blundered into the shallows; then they feasted. They had no wood, no metal, no fire. Tfieir only tools were from the precious bones of tfie rare big fisfi, and hand-worked rock. They died of disease and injury, and aged prematurely fronf poor diet and overwork. They had to search constantly for food, especially since half their day was taken away from them by Sirius's blowtorch heat. They were more apt to be prowling tfie beach at night, himting seaworms and crabs, than by daylight. Grote and I damn near barged right into them, Lee realized after watching a few of the nigfit gathering sessions. "There were some dangers. One morning he was watching one of the teenaged boys, a good swimmer, venture out past tfie shallows in search of fisfi. A sharklike creature found him first. When he screamed, half a dozen men grabbed spears and dove into the surf. Lee found himself dashing into the water alongside them, empty-handed. He swam out to the youngster, already dead, sprawled face down in the water, half of him gone, blood staining the swells. Lee helped to pull the remains back to shore. There wasn't anything definite, no one said a word to him about it, but their attitude toward him changed. He was fully accepted now. He hadn't saved the boy's life, Hadn't sHown uncommon bravery. But He had shared a danger with them, and a sorrow. Wheel the horse inside the gates of Troy. Lee found himself thinking. Nobody ever told you to beware of men bearing gifts. After he got to really understand their language Lee found that Ardraka often singled him out for long talks. It was almost funny. There was something that the old man was fishing for, just as Lee was trying to learn where these people really came from. They were sitting in the cool darkness of the central cove, deep inside the cliff. All the outer caves channeled back to this single large chamber, higH-roofed and moss-floored, its rocks faintly phosphorescent. It was big enough to hold four or five times the clan's present number. It was midday. Most of the people were sleeping. A few of the children, off to the rear of the cave, were scratching pictures on the packed bare earth with pointed, fistsized rocks. Lee sat witH his back resting against a cool stone wall. The sleepers were paired off, man and mate, for the most part. The unmated teenagers slept apart, with the older couples between them. As far as Lee could judge, the couples paired permanently, although the teens played the game about as freely as they could. Ardraka was dozing beside him. Lee settled back and tried to turn off his thoughts, but the old man said; "Lee is not asleep?" "No, Lee is not," Ke answered. "Ardraka has seen that Lee seldom sleeps," Ardrake said. "That is true." "Is it that Lee does not need to sleep as Ardraka does?" Lee shook his head. "No, Lee needs sleep as much as Ardraka or any man." "This... place... that Lee comes from. Lee says it is beyond the sea?" "Yes, far beyond." In the faint light from the gleaming rocks, the old man's face looked troubled, deep in difficult thought. "And there are men and women living in Lee's place, men and women like the people here?" Lee nodded. "And how did Lee come here? Did Lee swim around the sea?" 'T'hey had been through this many times. "Lee came around the edge of the sea, walking on land just as Ardraka would." Laughing softly, the old man said, "Ardraka is too feeble now for such a walk. Ardra could make such a walk." "Yes, Ardra can." "Ardraka has tried to dream of Lee's' place, and Lee's people. But such dreams do not come." "Dreams are Hard to command," Lee said. "Yes, truly." "And what of Ardraka and tHe people Here?" Lee asked. "Is tKis tHe only place wHere sucK men and women live?" "Yes. It is tHe best place to live. All other places are deatJi." "There are no men and women such as Ardraka and tHe people here living in another place?" The old man thought hard a moment, then smiled a wrinkled toothless smile. "Surely Lee jokes. Lee knows that Lee's people live in another place." We've been around that bush before. Trying another tack, he asked, "Have Ardraka's people always lived in this place? Did Ardraka's father live here?" "Yes, of course." "And his father?" A nod. "And all the fathers, from the beginning of the people? All lived here, always?" A shrug. "No man knows." "Have there always been this many people living here?" Lee asked. "Did Ardraka's people ever fill this cave when they slept here?" "Oh yes... When Ardraka was a boy, many men and women slept in the outer caves, since there was no room for them here. And when Ardraka's father was young, men and women even slept in the lower caves." "Lower caves?" Ardraka nodded. "Below this one, deeper inside the ground. No man or woman has been in them since Ardraka became chief." "Why is that?" The old man evaded Lee's eyes. "They are not needed." "May Lee visit these lower caves?" "Perhaps," Ardraka said. After a moment's thought, he added, "Children have been born and grown to manhood and died since any man set foot in those caves. Perhaps they are gone now. Perhaps Ardraka does not remember how to find them." "Lee would like to visit the lower caves." T ate that night he walked the ' beach alone, under the glowing star-poor sky, giving his weekly report back to the ship. "He's been cagy about the lower caves," Lee said as the outstretched fingers of surf curled around his ankles. "Why should he be so cautious?" It was Marlene's voice. She was taking the report this night. "Because he's no fool, that's why. These people have never seen a stranger before... not for generations, at least. Therefore their behavior toward me is original, not instinctive. If he's leery of showing me the caves, it's for some reason that's fresh in his mind, not some hoary tribal taboo." "Then what do you intend to do?" "I'm not sure yet -- " Lee turned to head back down the beach and saw Ardra standing twenty paces behind him. "Company," he snapped. "Talk to you later. Keep listening." Advancing toward him, Ardra said, "Many nights, Ardra has seen Lee leave the cave and walk on the beach. Tonight Lee was talking, but Lee was alone. Does Lee speak to a man or woman that Ardra cannot see?" His tone was flat, factual, neither frightened nor puzzled. It was too dark to really make out the expression on his face, but he sounded almost casual. "Lee is alone," he answered as calmly as he could. "There is no man or woman here with Lee. Except Ardra." "But Lee speaks and then is silent. And then Lee speaks again." He knows a conversation when he hears one, even if ifs only one side of it and in a strange language. Ardra suggested, "Perhaps Lee speaks to men and women from X Lee's place, which is far from the sea?" "Does Ardra believe that Lee can speak to men and women far away from this place?" "Ardra believes that is what Lee does at night on the beach. Lee speaks with the Karta." "Karta? What is the meaning of karta?" "It is an ancient word. It means men and women who live in another place." Others, Lee translated to himself. "Yes," he said to Ardra, "Lee, speaks to the others." Ardra's breath seemed to catcH momentarily, then he said with deliberate care, "Lee speaks with the Others." His voice had an edge of steel to it now. What have I stepped into? "It is time to be sleeping, not walking the beach," Ardra said, in a tone that Lee knew was a command. And he started walking toward the caves. Lee outweighed the chief's son by a good twenty pounds and was some ten centimeters taller. But he had seen the speed and strength in Ardra's wiry frame, and knew the difference in reaction times that the fifteen years between them made. So he didn't run or fight; he followed Ardra back to the caves and obediently went to sleep. And all the night Ardra stayed awake and watched over him. The next morning, when the i men went out to fish and the women to gather greens, Ardra took Lee's arm and led Him toward the back of the central cave. Ardraka and five other elders were waiting for them. They all looked very grim. Only then did Lee realize that Ardra was carrying a spear in his other hand. They were sitting in a ragged semicircle, their backs to what looked like a tunnel entrance, their eyes hard on Lee. He sat at their focus, with Ardra squatting beside him. "Lee," Ardraka began without preliminaries, "why is it that Lee wishes to see the lower caves?" The question caught him by surprise. "Because... Lee wishes to learn more about Ardraka's people. Lee comes from far away, and knows little of Ardraka's people." "Is it true," one of the elders asked, "that Lee speaks at night with the Others?" His inflection made the word sound special, fearful, ominous. "Lee speaks to the men and women of the place where Lee came from. It is like the way Ardraka speaks to Ardraka's grandfather... in a dream." "But Ardraka sleeps when doing this. Lee is awake." Ardra broke in, "Lee says Lee's people live beyond tKe sea. Beyond tHe sea is tKe sky. Do Lee's people live in tHe sky?" Off the edge of the world, just like Columbus. "Yes," He admitted. "Lee's people live in the sky -- " "Seel" Ardra sKouted. "Lee is of tHe OtHers!" THe councilmen physically backed away from him. Even Ardraka seemed shaken. "Lee is of the Others," Ardra repeated. "Lee must be killed, before he kills Ardraka's people!" had never heard any of them speak of violence before. "WKy should Lee kill the people Here?" They were all babbling at once. Ardraka raised his hand for silence. "To kill a man is very serious," He said painfully. "It is not certain that Lee is of the Others." "Lee says is with Lee's own mouth!" Ardra insisted. "Why else did Lee come here? Why does Lee want to see the lower caves?" Ardraka glowered at his son, and the younger man stopped. "The Council must be certain before it acts." Struggling to keep his voice calm, Ardra ticked off on his fingers, "Lee says Lee's people live in the sky... the Others live in the sky. Lee wishes to see the lower caves. Why? To see if more of Ardraka's people are living tfiere, so that he can kill all tHe people!" THe Council members mxirmured and glanced at him fearfully. Starting to look like a lynch jury. "Wait," Lee said. "There is more to tHe truth than what Ardra says, Lee's people live in the sky... tHat is true. But that does not mean tHat Lee's people are tKe OtHers. THe sky is wide and larger... , wider than the sea, by far. Many different peoples can live in the sky." Ardraka nodded, his brows knitted in concentration. "But, Lee, if botH Lee's people and the Others live in the sky, why have not the Others destroyed Lee's people as they destroyed Ardraka's ancestors?" Lee felt His stomach drop out of him. So that's it! "Yes," one of the Councilmen said. "The Others live far from this land, yet the Others came here and destroyed Ardraka's forefathers and all the works of such men and women." "Tell Lee what happened," he said, stalling for time to work up answers. "Lee knows nothing about the Others." Not from your side of the war, anyway. Ardraka glanced around at the Council members sitting on both sides of him. They looked uncertain, wary, still afraid. Ardra, beside Lee, had the fixed glare of a born prosecutor. "Lee is not of Ardraka's people," the younger man said, barely controlling the fury in his voice. "Lee must be of th'e Others. There are no people except Ardraka's people and the Others!" "Perhaps that is not so," Ardraka said. "True, Ardraka has always thought it to be this way, but Lee looks like an ordinary man, not like the Others." Ardra huffed. "No living man has seen the Others. How can Ardraka say..." "Because Andraka has seen pictures of the Others," the chief said quietly. "Pictures?" They were startled. "Yes. In the deepest cave, where only the chief can go... and the chief's son. Ardraka had thought for a long time that soon Ardra should see the deepest cave. But no longer. Ardra must see the cave now." The old man got up, stiffly, to his feet. His son was visibly trembling with eagerness. "May Lee also see the pictures?" Lee asked. They all began to protest, but Ardraka said firmly, "Lee has been accused of being of the Others. Lee stands in peril of death. It is right that Lee should see the pictures." The Council members muttered among themselves. Ardra glowered, then bent down and reached for the spear he had left at his feet. Lee smiled to himself. If those pictures give you the slightest excuse, you're going to ram that thing through me. You'd make a good sheriff: kill first, then ask questions. T?ar from Having gotten His way to the deeper caves, Ardraka threaded through a honeycomb of tunnels and chambers, always picking the path that slanted downward. Lee sensed that they were spiralling deeper and deeper into the solid rock of the cliffs, far below the sea level. The walls were crusted and a thick mat of dust clung to the ground. But everything shone with the same faint luminosity as the upper caves, and beneath the dust the footing felt more like pitted metal than rock. Finally Ardraka stopped. They were standing in the entr#rway to a fairly small chamber. The lighting was very dim. Lee stood behind Ardraka and felt Ardra's breath on his back. "This is the place," Ardraka said solemnly. His voice echoed slightly. They slowly entered the chamber. Ardraka walked to the farthest wall and wordlessly pointed to a jumble of lines scrawled at about eye level. The cave was dark, but the lines of the drawing glowed slightly brighter than th'e wall itself. Gradually, Lee pieced the picture together. It was crude, so crude that it was hard to understand. But there were stick figures of men that seemed to be running, and rough outlines of what might be buildings, with curls of smoke rising up from them. Above them all were circular things, ships, with dots for ports. Harsh jagged lines were streaking out of them and toward the stick figures. "Men and women," Ardraka said, in a reverent whisper as he pointed to the stick drawings. "The men and women of the time of Ardraka's farthest ancestors. And here -- " his hand flashed to the circles -- "are the Others." Even in the dim light, Lee could see Ardra's face gaping at the picture. "The Others," he said, his voice barely audible. "Look at Lee," Ardraka commanded bis son. "Does Lee look like the Others, or like a man?" Ardra seemed about to crumble. He said shakily, "Lee... Ardra has misjudged Lee... Ardra is ashamed." "There is no shame," Lee said. "Ardra has done no harm. Ardra was tr#dng to protect Ardraka's people. And besides, you were right. Turning to Ardraka, Lee asked. "Is this all that you know f the Others?" "Ardraka knows that the Others killed the people of Ardraka's forefathers. Before the Others came, Ardraka's ancestors lived in splendor: their living places covered the land everywhere; they swam the seas without fear of any creature of the deeps; they leaped through the sky and laughed at the winds and storms; every day was bright and good and there was no night. Then the Others came and destroyed everything. The Others turned the sky to fire, and brought night. Only the people in the deepest cave survived. This was the deepest cave. Only the people of Aidraka escaped the Others." We destroyed this world, Lee told himself. An interstellar war, eons ago. We destroyed each other, old man. Only you've been destroyed for good, and we clirnbed back. "One more thing remains," Ardraka said. He walked into the shadows on the other end of the room and pushed open a door. A door! It was metal, Lee could feel as he went past it. There was another chamber, larger, A storeroom! Shelves lined the walls. Most of them empty, but here and there were boxes, containers, machinery with strange writing on it. "TKese belonged to Ardraka's oldest ancestors," the chief said. "No man today knows wKy these things were saved Here in the deepest cave. They Have no purpose. They are dead. As dead as the people who put them Here." It was Lee who was trembling as they made their way up to the dwelling caves. XI I t was a week before fie dared stroll the beach! at night again, a week of torment, even tfiough Ardra never, gave him the slightest reason to think that He was still under suspicion. They were just as stunned as fie was wfien he told them about it. "We killed them," fie wfiispered savagely at them, back in the comfort of the ship. "We destroyed them. Maybe we even made the Pup explode, to wipe them out completely." "That's... farfetched," Rassmussen answered. But his voice sounded lame. "What do we do now?" "I want to see those artifacts." "Yes, but how?" Lee said, "I can take you down to the cave, if we can put the whole clan to sleep for a few hours. Maybe gas..." "That could work," Rassmussen agreed. "A soporific gas?" Pascual's soft tenor rang incredulously in Lee's ears. "But we haven't the faintest idea of how it might affect them." "It's the only way," Lee said. "You can't dig your way into the cave... even if you could, they would hear it and you'd be discovered." "But gas... it could kill them all." "They're all dead right now," Lee snapped. "Those artifacts are the only possible clue to their early history." Rassmussen decided. "We'll do it." Lee slept less than ever the next few nights, and wfien he did he dreamed, but no longer about the buildings on Titan. Now he dreamed of the ships of an ancient Earth, huge round ships that spat fire on the cities and people of Makta. He dreamed of the Pup exploding and showering the planet with' fire, blowing off the atmospfiere, boiling the oceans, turning mounliving thing on the surface of the world, leaving tlie planet bathed in a steam cloud, its ground ruptured with angry new volcanoes. Tt was a rainy dark night when you could hardly see ten meters beyond the cave's mouth that they came. Lee heard their voices in his head as they drove the skimmer up onto the beach and clambered down from it and headed for the caves. Inside the caves, the people were asleep, sprawled innocently on the damp musty ground. Out of the rain a huge, bulky metal shape materialized, walking with exaggerated caution. "Hello, Sid," Jerry Grote's voice said in his head, and the white metal shape raised a hand in greeting. The Others, Lee thought as he watched, four more powersuited figures appear in the dark rain. He stepped out of the cave, the rain a cold shock to his body. "Bring the stuff?" Grote hitched a gauntleted thumb at one of the others. "Pascual's got it. He's insisting on administering the gas himself." "Okay, but let's get it done quickly, before somebody wakes up and spots you. Who else is with you?" "Chien, Tanaka and Stek. Tanaka can help Carlos with the anesthetic. Chien and Stek can look over the artifacts." Lee nodded agreement. Pascual and Tanaka spent more than an hour seeping the mildest soporific they know of through the sleeping cave. Lee fidgeting outside on the beach, in the rain, waiting for them to finish. When Tanaka finally told them it was safe to go through, he hurried past the sprawled bodies, scarcely seeing Pascual -- still inside his cumbersome suit -- patiently recording medical analyses of each individual. Even with the suit lamps to light the corridors, it was hard to retrace his steps dovm to the lowest level of the ancient shelter. But when he got to the storeroom, Lee heard Stek break into a long string of Polish exultation at the sight of the artifacts. 'he three suited figures Kolographed, x-rayed, took Taxation counts, measured, weighed, every piece on the ancient shelves. They touched nothing directly, but lifted each piece with loving tenderness in a portable magnetic grapple. "This one," Stek told Lee, holding a hand-sized, oddly angular instrument in mid-air with the grapple, "we must take with us." "Why?" "Look at it," the physicist said. "If it's not an astronautical sextant or something close to it. I'll eat Charnovsky's rocks for a month." The instrument didn't look impressive to Lee. It had a lens at one end, a few dials at the other. Most of it was just an angular metal box, with strange printing on it. "You want to know where these people originally came from? " Stek asked. "If they came from somewhere other than this planet, the information could be inside this instrument." Lee snapped his gaze from the instrument to Stek's helmeted face. "If it is a sextant, it must have a reference frame built into it. A tape, perhaps, that lists the stars that these people wanted to go to." "Okay," Lee said. "Take it." By the time they got back up to the main sleeping cave and out to the beach again, it was full daylight. "We'll have to keep them sleeping until almost dawn tomorrow," Lee told Pascual. "Otherwise they might suspect that something unusual's happened." The doctor's face looked concerned but not worried. "We can do that without harming them, I think. But, Sid, they'll be very hungry when they awake." Lee turned to Grote. "How about taking the skimmer out and stunning a couple of big fish' and towing them back here to the shallows?" Grinning, Grote replied, "Hardly fair sport with the equipment I've got." He turned and headed for the car. "Wait," Stek called to him. "Give me a chance to get this safely packed in a magnetic casing." And the physicist took the instrument off toward the skimmer. "Sid," Pascual said gently, "I want you to come back with us. You need a thorough medical check." "Medical?" Lee flashed. "Or are you fronting for Lehman?" Pascual's eyes widened with surprise. "If you had a mirror, you would see why I want to check you. You're breaking out in skin cancers." Instinctively, Lee looked at his hands and forearms. There were a few tiny blisters on them. And more on his belly and legs. "It's from overexposure to the ultraviolet. Hatfield's skin-darkening didn't fully protect you." "Is it serious?" "I can't tell without a full examination." Just like a doctor. "I can't leave now," Lee said. "I've got to be here when they wake up, and make sure that they don't suspect they've been visited by the... by us." "And if they do suspect?" Lee shrugged. "That's something we ought to know, even if we can't do anything about it." "Won't it be dangerous for you?" "Maybe." Pascual shook his head. "You mustn't stay out in the open any longer. I won't be responsible for it." "Fine. Do you want me to sign a release form?" rote brought the skimmer back around sundown, with two good-sized fish aboard. The others got aboard around midnight, and with a few final radioed words of parting, they drove off the beach and out to sea. At dawn the people woke up. They looked and acted completely normally, as far as Lee could tell. It was one of the children who noticed the still-sluggish fish that Grote had left in a shallow pool just outside the line of breakers. Every man in the clan splashed out, spear in hand, to get them. They feasted happSy that day. 'he dream was confusing. Somehow the towers on Titan and the exploding star got mixed together. Lee saw himself driving a bone spear into Uie sleeping form of one of the natives. The man turned on e ground, with the spear run through his body, and smiled bloodily at him. It was Ardraba. "Sid!" He snapped awake. It was dark, and the people were sleeping, full-bellied. He was slouched near one of the entryways to the main sleeping cave, at the mouth of a tunnel leading to tlie openings in tKe cliff wall. "Sid, can you Hear me?" "Yes," Ke whispered so low that he could only feel the vibration in fiis throat. "I'm up the beach about three kilometers from the relay unit. You've got to come back to the ship. Stek thinks he's figured out the instrument." Wordlessly, silently, Lee got up and padded through the tunnel and out onto the beach. The night was clear and bright. Dawn would be coming in another hour, he judged. The sea was calm, the wind a gentle crooning as it swept down from the cliffs. "Sid did you hear wHat I said? Stek thinks he knows what the instrument is for. It's part of a pointing system for a communications setup." "I'm on my way." He still whispered, and turned to see if anyone was following him. Grote was in a biosuit, and no one else was aboard the skimmer. The engineer jabbered about Stek's work on the instrument all the way back to the ship. Just before they arrived, Grote suggested, "Uh, Sid you do want to put on some coveralls, don't you?" Two biosuited men were setting up some electronics equipment at the base of the ship's largest telescopes dangling in a hoist sling overhead, the fierce glow of Sir- ius glinting off its metal barrel. "Stek's setting up an experiment," Grote explained. T ee was bundled into a biosuit ' and ushered into the physicist's workroom as soon as he set foot inside the ship. Stek was a large, round, florid man with thinning red hair. Lee had Hardly spoken to him at all, except for; the few hours at the cave, when the physicist had been encased in a powersuit. "It's a tracker, built to find a star in the sky and lock onto it as long as it's above the horizon," Stek said, gesturing to the instrument hovering in a magnetic grapple a few inches above his work table. "You're sure of that?" Lee asked. The physicist glanced at him as though he had been insulting. "There's no doubt about it. It' a tracker, and it probably was used to aim a communication antenna at their home star." "And where is that?" "I don't know yet. That's why I'm setting up the experiment with the telescope." Lee walked over to the work table and stared at the instrument. "How can you be certain that it's what you say it is?" Stek flushed, then controlled himself. With obvious patience, Ke explained. "X-ray probes allowed that tKe instrument contained a magnetic memory tape. The tape was in binary code, and it was fairly simple to transliterate the code, electronically, into tKe sEip's main computers. We didn't even Have to toucK tKe instrument pHysically... except witK electrons." Lee made an expression tKat showed he was duly impressed. Looking Happier, Stek went on, "TKe computer cross-cKecked tKe instrument's coding and came up witK correlations: attitude references were on tKe instrument's tape, and astronomical ephemerides, timing data and so fortK. Exactly what we'd put into a communications tracker." "But this was made by a different race of people -- " "It makes no difference," Stek said sharply. "TKe pKysics are the same. TKe universe is tKe same. TKe instrument can only do tKe job it was designed to do, and tKat job was to track a single star." "Only one star?" "Yes, that's why I"m certain it was for communicating witK their home star." "So we can find tKeir Home star after all." Lee felt the old dread returning, but witK it something new, something deeper. Those people in the caves were our enemy. And maybe their brothers, the ones who built the mactiines on Titan, are still out there somewhere looking tor them -- and tor us, T ee ate back at tKe Sirius globe,  but Pascual insisted on his remaining in a biosuit until they Had tEorougKly checked him out. And they wouldn't let him eat Eartfi food, altKougK tKere was as mucH local food as He wanted. He didn't want mucH. "You've thinned out too mucK," Marlene said. She was sitting next to him at the galley table. "Ever see a fat Sirian?" He meant it as a joke; it came out waspish'. Marlene dropped the subject. TKe wKole ship's company gathered around the telescope and the viewscreen that would show an amplified picture of tKe telescope's field of view. Stek bustled around, making last-minute checks and adjustments to the equipment. Rassmussen stood taller tKan everyone else, looking alternately worried and excited. Everyone, including Lee, was in a biosuit. Lehman showed up at Lee's elbow. "Do you think it will work?" "Driving tKe telescope front tKe ship's computer's version of the instrument's tape? Stek seems to think it'll go all right." "And you?" Lee shrugged. "The people in the caves told me what I wanted to know. Now this instrument will tell us where they came from originally." "The homeworld of our ancient enemies?" "Yes." For once, Lehman didn't seen! to be amused. "And what happens then?" "I don't know," Lee said. "Maybe we go out and see if they are still there. Maybe we re-open the war." If there was a war." "There was. It might still be going on, for all we know. Maybe we're just a small part of it, a skirmish." "A skirmish that wiped out the life on this planet," Lehman said. "And also wiped out Earth, too." "But what about the people on this planet, Sid? What about the people in the caves?" Lee couldn't answer. "Do we let them die out, just because they might have been our enemies a few millenia ago." "They would still be our enemies, if they knew who we are," Lee said tightly. "So we let them die?" Lee tried to blot their faces out of his mind, to erase the memory of Ardraka and the children and Ardra apologizing shamefully and the people fishing in the morning... , "No," he heard himself say. "We've got to help them. They can't hurt us any more, and we ought to help them." Now Lehman smiled. "It's ready," Stek said, his voice pitched high with excitement. Sitting at the desk-sized console that stood beside the telescope, he thumbed the power switch and punched a series of buttons. The viewscreen atop the desk glowed into life, and a swarm of stars appeared. With a low hum of power, the telescope slowly turned, slowly, to the left. The scene in the viewscreen shifted. Beside the screen was a smaller display, an astronomical map with a bright luminous dot showing where the telescope was aiming. The telescope stopped turning, hesitated, edged slightly more to the left and then made a final, barely discernible correction upward. "It's locked on." The viewscreen showed a meager field of stars, with a single bright pinpoint centered exactly in the middle of the screen. "What is it, what star?" Lee pushed forward, through the crowd that clustered around the console. "My God," Stek said, Kis voice sounding Hollow. "That's... the sun." Lee felt his knees wobble. "They're from Earth!" "It can't be," someone said. Lee shoved past the people in front of him and stared at the map. The bright dot was fixed on the sun's location. "They're from Earth!" He shouted. "They're part of us!" "But how could..." "They were a colony of ours," Lee realized. "The Others were an enemy... an enemy that nearly wiped them out and smashed Earth's civilization back into a stone age. The Others built those damned machines on Titan, but Ardraka's people did not. And we didn't destroy the people here... we're the same people!" "But that's -- " "How can you be sure?" ( C T T e is right," Charnovsky said, his heavy bass rumbling above the other voices. They all stopped to Hear him. "There are too many coincidences any other way. These people are completely human because they came from Earth. Any other explanation is extraneous." Lee grabbed the Russian by the shoulders. "Nick, we've got work to do! We've got to Help them. We've got to introduce them to fire, and metals and cereal grains -- " Charnovsky laughed. "Yes, yes, of course. But not tonight, eh? Tonight we celebrate." "No," Lee said, realizing where he belonged. "Tonight I go back to them." "Go back?" Marlene asked. "Tonight I go back with a gift," Lee went on. "A gift from my people to Ardraka's. A plastic boat from the skimmer. That's a gift they'll be able to understand and use." Lehman said, "You still don't know who built the machinery on Titan." "We'll find out one of these days." Rassmussen broke in, "You realize that we will Have to return Earthward before the next expedition could possibly get anywhere near Here." "Some of us can wait here for the next expedition. I will, anyway." The captain nodded and a slow grin spread across His face. "I knew you would even before we found out that your friends are really our brothers." Lee looked around for Grote. "Come on, Jerry. Let's get moving. I want to see Ardraka's face when he sees the boat. T)ut before he saw Ardraka's face, there was a moment when he realized what he had said. They Hadn't learned who it was who had built the machines on Titan. All they had learned was that whoever those builders were, they had been capable of smashing a civilization fully as advanced as Lee's own. Millenia ago. Days later, Lee had come to wish that he never would find out the answer to his question about the machine-builders. And years later than that, he had the answer. And wished even more strongly that he hadn't.      In our companion magazine. If, we've had a policy for some years of encouraging new talent by publishing some of it in every issue. The If "Firsts" (or, as they are sometimes called, the IFirSfories) have introduced a fair number of bright new talents to the field of science fiction -- Joseph Green, Larry Niven and others who you see in Galaxy these days, to name a few. And that's the normal S.O.P. way to do it, we think. So when you see a "first" author in Galaxy, rather than If, you probably expect something unusual. Next month we have something unusual for you. His name is J. R. Klugh, his story is called Golden Quicksand, and it's the first story he ever wrote. Jack Gaughan has done some rather unusual artwork for it, too. We think you'll like Golden Quicksand, and we think you'll be seeing more of J. R. Klugh. Also next month we'll be bringing another story in the trilogy that began with Nighfwings, by Robert Silverberg. The name of it is To Jorslem, and it ends the pilgrimage that Nighfwings began. James Blish will be with us with Our Binary Brothers; Hayden Howard, who wrote the "Eskimo Invasion" stories a couple of years ago, begins to embroider a rich new tapestry with Kendy's World; Willy Ley and Algis Budrys will of course be back with their regular columns. And we will have a selection of shorts drawn from an inventory that at the moment includes Brian W. Aldiss, R. E. Banks, Philip K. Dick and that same Algis Budrys; we won't know which of them will be in next month's issue till we see how the type sets. Join us and see for yourself... A Non-Fact Article The Thing-Of-The-Month Clubs quarterly supplement to ttie journal of the Consolidated Galactic Federation of Consumers' AsForeword F or the benefit of our members on Luxor, Lonestar and Eldorado, with tlieir average income of Cr. # and taxlaws which annually take away all that they haven't managed to spend since last time, three years ago we conceived this supplementary publication and its resounding motto, "The more you spend the less you get!" Unfortunately there have been delays beyond our control in launching it. It was not until the proceeds from quadrupling the deluxe subscription rate to began to accumulate that we could even make down payments on adequately expensive articles to be tested. When at long last we had the funds at our disposal, we made the dismaying discovery that just about everything costly enough to be worth our attention had already been bought up by citizens of the three above-named planets. There is not, for example, a quunch machine to be had at present for love or money; they are all in private hands despite their original price-tag of Cr. #; and until their builders, the Yog, cycle back into this part of the galaxy in about fifty thousand years presumably no more will come on the market. For a while we considered opening a special branch on Luxor so that at least we could borrow a few articles to test. However, the operation of a nonprofit organization like ours is strictly forbidden there, so we had to drop the idea. Now at last, though, we have come up with a category of services potentially useful to people hunting for ways of bleeding off their excess purchasing power. We have conducted a far more hasty survey of them than we usually do, we must admit, but for once we only had to apply a single criterion to determine their desirability: did they, or did they not, cost a hell of a lot for absolutely minimal return? Several of the following undoubtedly do that, and we would refer you to the inside front cover for the increased subscription rates we have found it necessary to introduce as a result. Background 'hing of the Month Clubs have a long history, stretching (according to some authorities) clear back to the PreAtomic dark ages. Allegedly the original intention was to offer exceptional value for money, but it did not take long for them to evolve into their modern form: that is to say, they provide a captive group of potential purchasers for just about anything you need to get rid of in quantity. In this century, for instance, we have seen the Bomb-of-the Month Club, which enabled the Neo-Pacifist Party on Bellatrix not merely to fulfill its election pledges concerning general disarmament but also to show a healthy credit balance in its first budget after assuming power -- although admittedly the consequences on other planets where subscribers suddenly found themselves in possession of the galaxy's most modern weaponry at a few hundred credits a throw were not quite so satisfactory, and the club had to cease operation rather suddenly. We have also seen tlie Virusof-the-Month Club, aimed at the specialized but enormous market of hypochondriacs who refused to believe their doctors when assured there was nothing wrong with them. This, however, suffered from excessive client wastage as they were compelled to seek ever more exotic diseases, and the management finally succumbed to a batch! of Glotzman's Germ which was accidentally dropped in the packing department and which turned them all livid green with totally ankylosed joints. And so on. Few of the myriad such ventures currently advertised meet our basic yardstick: outlay per annum of not less than a million credits with negligible value received. Our reports on those which do follow herewith. Test Reports "lle were naturally first at ' tracted to one of the longby the solitary occupant of the garbage-dump world Gehenna, Lord Albert GreaseThrogmorton. Fired with ambition to create the galactic counterpart of the sort of stately home his ancestors had occupied on Earth in the old days, he advertised rubbish for sale (his own selection) at a rate of Cr. # a month, which puts the subscription well above our minimum level. Owing to the fact that ever since the club's inception all selections have been shipped in unscrewed sub-lightspeed projectiles built from old plastic buckets and soda-water syphons, there is a good chance that subscribers as far distant as Luxor, Lonestar and Eldorado will not live to see the delivery of their monthly junk. We must, however, warn you that the delay -- sometimes amounting to centuries -- between dispatch and receipt can lead to one major difficulty. What was garbage a hundred years ago can easily become today's valuable antique. One Croesian subscriber, for example, received the left hand of a statue by Harrison Grabthrush', which had been missing since the Great Moonquake of #. A museum on Grabthrash's birthworld of Moralia bid Cr. # for it; the Croesian government promptly taxed the offer at #, and the poor fellow was ruined. Another package contained a copy of the Forbidden Book of Scritch which some very strongminded reader must have managed to throw away before becoming caught up in its insidious wheedling. The new owner was not so lucky and committed suicide at page # (held by students of the subject to be below average for the course; page # is generally regarded as the breaking point). We can therefore only recomreservations. The next to attract our attena point close to the galactic center by the only race yet known with control over the process of continuous creation, the Flooge. Since this was by a factor of several hundred the most expensive club we Had encountered, our Hopes ran HigH for several weeks until we began to wonder why we were unable to trace any customers, satisfied or otherwise. We were sure that tHe club would not advertise on the extensive scale it does Had tKere not been significant response from human beings. Perhaps we were obtuse, but it took an advanced computer to spot what the problem is if you join this club. It turned out to be such an acute one that we did not ourselves feel inclined to test any samples of the product. THe trouble is, simply, storage space. As is usual witH these clubs, a premium or bonus offer is made to induce people to join, and in this case it consists of a small gas-giant in addition to the regular selection of Earth-type worlds. In the only case we have been able to document, Mrs. Hylla Handelstein, titular owner of the two largest continents on Freesia, decided sHe would like more elbow-room and duly filled out the application form. Her planets were, we must admit, dispatched very promptly indeed and we are not in any sense imbona-fide organization. However, that is small comfort to Mrs. Handelstein and the few surviving inhabitants of Freesia -- the gas-giant has already dragged away ninety per cent of its atmosphere, and tides and earthquakes are seriously hampering evacuation. If you must join this club, we advise giving an address in an uninhabited system.  somewhat more innocuous undertaking might appear erates on a round-robin basis and requires members to dispatch their monthly selection, after four weeks of enjoyment, to the next person on the list. This too, though, has certain drawbacks. Despite an enormous backlog of original masterpieces to draw on (the Club was instituted to make amends for the art thief Jeremiah Gung-ho Waterboy, who, as is well known, contrived during his century and a half of operation to transfer the entire contents of the British Museum, the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Leningrad Hermitage to his private estate on Rafflesworld, replacing each item with a virtually perfect copy to escape detection) the membership Has recently expanded to the point where non-human masterworks have been introduced to supplement the existing stocks. Whatever the pleasure to be derived from a month's contemplation of the Mona Lisa or the Elgin Marbles, we do not feel that it adequately compensates for the experience of one of our test panel, who was sent as his very first selection a flaying-machine by the great Skrinnian artist Three-and-a-half Ug. Admittedly it was of exquisite craftsmanship and unparalleled precision; nonetheless, human beings do not count the removal of their epidermis according to predetermined symbolic patterns among the art-forms they are capable of appreciating. (We are glad to rejfcrt that our tester is expected to leave the hospital soon.) Administrative oversights of a similar nature likewise prevent us from unreservedly recomstress that racial prejudice has absolutely nothing to do with our opinion no organization with chapters among as many different species as has ConGalFedConAss could possibly be open to that charge. Nor are we square, or prissy; we fully recognize that people's tastes vary very widely, and they should be free to indulge them provided they neither interfere with others against their will nor disturb the galactic peace. However, we do feel that the warning about the penalty for non-consummation which is inments should be supplemented by a clause concerning non-consumption. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the female members of our testing panel extricated themselves from the embrace of their respective selections for the first month of their trial membership, and in two or three cases quite extensive surgery was called for. The selection for that month Happened to be Voracian male, and Voracians -- as we were not informed by the instruction leaflet -- have habits which constitute a sort of mirror-image of those of the Black Widow spiders. In other words, the male achieves climax by ingesting his partner. Luckily, the average size of this species is only about half a meter, and their capacity is accordingly rather limited. Nonetheless, we exercised our option to discontinue membership after an initial trial and were glad of the chance to do so, as we had been threatened with mass resignations by all our testers. A new venture, announced a brought them also into our range. They are now operating an ultra-de-luxe category of membership for those wishing to own exceptionally large pets. The idea would seem an admirable one; regrettably, our own experience has not borne it out in practice. The first selection we received was a Tyrocdon from Haglith's World, a rather beautiful creature standing some twelve meters tall and covered with glistening red and yellow scales. The dietary instructions furnished with it, however, proved to refer to the previous selection, a regular African elephant, and by the time we discovered that Tyrocdons subsist exclusively on fluorspar, the beast had felt the first pangs of hunger. This was fatal... , or very nearly so. When they're hungry, Tyrcodons emit a howling noise in the low supersonic range at sufficient strength to bring down the average Earthside city-block. Fortunately, experience in the past had persuaded us to establish our testing-labs in a block reinforced against anything short of major meteorite impact, but the consequences might have been alarming. And our second selection turned out to be a Gigas whale, whose natural environment is a deep ammonia-methane ocean with a pressure of about # kg.sq. cm. at# C. When opened inadvertently to Earthnormal pressure and temperature, the creature burst and showered long and disgusting strands of its internal organs all over ever # Twhere. We have ceded the balance of our membership to an impecunious zoo on Pennywise and hope that the proceeds from later exhibitions of the selections will cover the suit being brought against us for creating a health hazard in Greater Greater New York. A club which struck us as very promising but which is suspended at the time of writing for reasons detailed below is launched on Schizophrenia but already so successful as to have attracted members on over twenty planets. Members receive a printed-molecule brain-program and an automatic imposer worn over the scalp (wigs are offered as an optional extra to conceal the device in use). So long as the imposer remains in position, the wearer's personality is altered towards a desired character chosen from a wide range indeed -- currently more tiian three thousand choices. As we said above, However, the club is temporarily suspended owing to a legal dispute. The population of a certain town on Puritania joined the club virtually en masse, and in a single month ninety-two per cent of the male residents chose the Casanova program, while eigHty-six per cent of the female residents selected the corresponding Messalina program. Owing to this imbalance between male and female, fierce rivalry developed over the favors of the available ladies and so many duels were fought in the first week that the planetary government was compelled to step in. The survivors, deprived of their imposers, naturally reverted to the normal customs of their world and at the time of writing there are factorial-#I divorce suits pending, sufficient -- according to our computers -- to occupy the entire time of the Puritanian courts until well into the next universal cycle. Unofficial sources suggest that the government, faced with this problem, plans to change the name of its world to Saturnalia and give up, but we have been unable to confirm the rumor. A club which has memberslup fees well below our minimum standard, but which involves incidental outlay bringing the total cost considerably above it, on a principle related to that of the last-mentioned club, but instead of an imposer an injection ed to induce temporary detestation of items from an imaginatively chosen list. Among other things which our test-panel sampled, we would cite plate-glass windows, water-sculpture, plastic minijerkins, autojazz generators, and (perhaps most useful of all for our purposes) money As you will doubtless have realized, though, it's the lal costs which increase the expenditxue of this club so substantially, and we can only recommend it to people who have time to spare for frequent appearances in court. Best Buy T T aving read the foregoing, you will by this time probably be wondering: did we not come across any Thing-of-the-Month Club which we can wholeheartedly recommend? We did indeed! Astonishingly, it is a club with no membership dues, open to anyone on completion of a simHere is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Penny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. i Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, I New York City #  Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi j record of M iisic jrom Mathematics I right away. I enclose check or i money order of #. I Name I I Address I City  State Zip Code...  ('Offer good in U. S. A. Only) pie application form such' as is enclosed with this issue of EXcharged by the management is for incidental expenses. We are, of course, referring to the absolutely brand-new This is a club without strings, membership being subject to only one condition: that if the proceeds from your monthly burglary fall below Cr. #, service will be automatically discontinued and is non-renewable. It meets all requirements stated by ConGalFedConAss's members on all three of the galaxy's wealthiest worlds, and its impeccable reliability is attested by the fact that it is under the personal supervision of the retiring editor of this magazine, who wishes to take this opportunity of saying that having served the public for so long in one capacity he regards this move to a new job as no more than a logical extension of his previous activities and hopes that many of the subscribers who have so loyally supported ConGalFedConAss for so long will find everything they Fill out the application right away. The forms will be dealt with strictly in order of receipt. There was nothing like Raceworld before the Solferrans. No others had such need to improve the breed. I The best-known cry in Galactica floated up through Peter Christmas's office window. The big brown man let his eyes stray from the tridi to the scene below. A gaggle of little dinosaurs were streaking by the stands, their jewelled Hides flashing in the light of Raceworld's morning. Raceworld! Christmas's jaw softened briefly. He turned back to his visitor, who was furling and unfurling himself irritably on the courtesy perch. "But is not flying! On Xemos we do not call this flying!" "Mr. Porridan," Christmas said, "it's not a question f being able to fly well, of being able to fly over mountains and so on. If you wisH to enter your animals in tKe Non-Flying Avian classes, tfiey must not fly at all. No flapping, no gliding even for a few steps. Look at tKat fellow tliere!" He pointed to tKe tridi wKere a large ostricK-like fowl was brandisKing his pinions and lofting Kimself easily as he pranced about. Porridan's vaguely human face took on an insulted air, like a dog rejecting inferior biscuits. "Mr. Porridan, do you realize what would happen if your entry did that during a race? First, it would be disqualified, and you would lose your entry fee and costs, not to mention wKat Raceworld would lose in compensating the mutuels. Second, you would undoubtedly get a judgment for fouling and damages by some of the other contestants, which would come out of your planetary bond. Thirdly, somebody might get hurt, which means really expensive reparations, and of course I, as Chief Steward, would be responsible for an improper ruling. It happened once a long while back when we weren't so careful. An entry with hidden inflatable vanes got into cursed thing took off over the finish line -- with the sulky -- and not only injured three other; drivers but crashed in the stands. settle that one -- Excuse me a moment." He turned to Kis chiming intercom. "Yes, Hal? Fine, I'll lift the quarantine right away. No, for Solsake, Hal, I've told you a alarms than one epizootic. You call 'em as you see 'em. I'll back you if I have to isolate every animal on the planet. Wait, Hal, entry that's going to need belly straps. The planet rep claims it'll upset His birds, they won't run with straps. His birds are coming in on MT today about second period. Can you meet the rep there and work something out? Porridan -- no, P as in problem. From Xemos Three, right? Thanks, Hal. "TKat was our chief veterinarian, Mr. Porridan -- Doctor Lamont. La-mont. He will meet you when your bird comes through', and I know he will find a solution." Y T is visitor was snuffling through his dewlaps. "Something which will permit your splendid animals to display their magnificent running ability before the eyes of the whole Galaxy," Christmas added hopefully. "They're great birds, Mr. Porridan. Believe me, Raceworld wants to show them at their best as much as you do." "We of the poor backward worlds meet with humiliations from the so-called fair play of the Galactic Imperialists!" Porridan wailed. "Because we are poor you insult our culture!" He flung his shoulder membranes over his head, dislodging several diamond ear-clips which' rolled on the floor. Christmas helped retrieve them. After Porridan had counted them, Christmas said, "There's one other little matter. Sir. The bursar is rather puzzled over an entry in your cost sheet. Could you give us some clarification on the, ah, auxiliary animals item?" "But we were guaranteed free transport," Porridan shrilled. "Are we now to be cheated here, too?" "Not at all, Mr. Porridan:, please calm yourself. As you said. Gal Q offers free matter transport and lodging to any planet wishing to send an entry to Raceworld, up to a certain mass. That includes the competing animals, plus trainers, jockeys or drivers, veterinary, and so on, plus food and supplies as appropriate. The auxiliary animals category is intended to cover certain cases where the racers require other animals, such as their young, or biological symbiotes, or even mascots or imprinted mh imals, for their well-being. But we do require a word of explaaation when the shipment runs aS high as yours -- that is, two hundred auxiliaries. Just what are these extra animals, Mr. PMfridan?" Porridan had furled himseK SO that only his large aggrieved eyes were visible. "Female animals," Ke said coldly. "Oh, but I see some of your racing birds are female... what species are these other females?" Porridan shrugged. "Just females." "You mean female Xemoji-i ans? Like you?" "Females are not people!" "In other words, these females are not for the animals but for the training staff, right? But you have only twenty male personnel. Do these females performi any service in connection wittj the racing animals?" "Of course not. What could they do?" #T see. Mr. Porridan, I deplorehaving to pry like this, but you must see this is a fantastic expense to Gal Q. Transporting mass from your position at the rim is -- " "Ah! Again you insult us because we are far away and backward !" "Mr. Porridan, no one is insulting you. It's a question of fair play. What would all the other planetary teams say if we let you bring in ten females for every trainer and driver?" "Ten females are not for trainers and drivers!" Porridan squealed. Refurling himself furiously, he started for the door. "You insult even our intimate life! Xemosian females are not for discussion! This is too much! The Treaty of Xemos can be reopened! Poor as we are, we can still die for our honor!" "Mr. Porridan, wait!" The door slammed. Christmas blew an imaginary fly off his blunt nose, pushed one hand through his reddish wool and stabbed his male secretary's signal. "I'm here, PC," said a cheerful otterlike being, from the side door. "Dana, tell the Secretariat that Xemos has blown his wig again, and they better get someone after him to oil him down. Lamont will take care of the entry ruling, but get Brooksie onto the sex situation on Xemos -- especially the standard mating ratios and female status, Porridan claims their females aren't people, and he needs a couple of hundred of them, mostly for the team chiefs, I gather. I'm sure it's a phony, but check it out, vidll you? And what are these?" "The ruling on the squid propellant situation, PC. We finally got agreement: All contestant will submit to ink-sac removal, but riders must wear masks capable of filtering legitimate metabolic products. We do the cheiri anal." "How about the I.Q. business? Are those Deneb squids animals, or do they go over to Galsports as people?" "Not yet clear, PC, We could get a ruling on the squids, but a mammalian group has injected itself into the question. They claim, any contestant capable of using a stop-watch isn't an animal." "Whose animals are using stopwatches?" "That Flanigan outfit. Light equinoids." "Hey, Flange is one of the teams in the class that's been: having so many long shot wins. The Stat people from Mutuel put me onto last night. They've had Lamont running covert metabolic tests on the whole field... I wonder -- " He punched his intercom savagely, and the mournful face of his security came on. "Kurtis? Can you put a total snoop on the Flange delegation right away? Light Horses. Yes, especially I want the stables, tfie animals. Sound, pictures, even ity, around the clock, too, until we get something. Oh, just a hunch, but it could be nasty -- that's right, like the old Pyrrh'oxa mess. You know what to look for. Thanks, Kurt." C hristmas sighed. The reputation of Raceworld, Inc. -- Inc. for Incorruptible -- rested heavy on his shoulders. "There's another thing," said Dana, thoughtfully flicking a black tongue around his beautiful cream muzzle. "Maybe nothing to it, but that new Ankru team that started yesterday has won two of their first three starts. All in different classes. One herbiamph, a carnii-mammal and an N.F.A. The N.F.A. came in second." "Dana, your hunches are golden. I'll never forget that alleged herbivorous Capellan thing that would have eaten our starter... When's Ankru running next?" "Just coming up, PC. Giant armored reps on the main track." "Could I sneak down and take a look?" Dana's bristles twitched at the big human's cublike eagerness. "Okay, but remember the Gal Q conference in Half a unit -- PC, please keep your caller open." Christmas blew joyfully as He wrestled the commocollar onto his thick neck and stepped out onto the balcony to mount his airsled. Raceworld! His Raceworld. His broad nose vn'inkled in the spicy breeze from a thousand racetracks on which ran, hopped, flopped, swam, slithered, humped, darted and thundered planets. Raceworld the perfect planet, turning stately through equal hours of flawless day and balmy floodlit night. Her utterly predictable climate graded smoothly from equator to pole, and offered every oxygen-breather its natural optimum. Directly in front of Christmas's equatorial headquarters lay the major track for the most spectacular of all races -- the giant armored reptiles, general Galaxy favorites. Other hot-climate beasts ran here too; big cats, savannah ungulates, and giant insects and arachnoids. The left horizon was mountains, holding the canyons, pylons and airborne stands of the flighted races. On his right glittered the sea world where aquatic forms competed. Beyond the track in front was a great hotel and recreation complex, and beyond that, stretching around the planet's curve, lay the special-atmosphere domes and exotic courses where indescribable creatures met to dig or spin or spit or display whatever competitive frenzy their home worlds had developed as sport. All for the honor of those home worlds -- and incidentally to the honor and profit of Raceworld and its Solterran staffII C hristmas cast an eye up to the commo satellite -- "the eyes of the Galaxy are upon you!" -- and checked his chronometer. He let his airsled settle into the main track infield, past the vast mutuel boards, which were showing a Myrian entry as favorite. He turned his glasses on the backstretch where the giant reptiles were warming up, making the ground quake. The polished bodies blazed, the riders almost invisible behind fantastically assorted shoulder-plates. "Great sight, isn't it, Sir?" Christmas recognized the tall ebony boy as one of Hal Lament's veterinary internes. They leaned together on the rail to watch a rider tr#dng to control lus mount's tendency to thrash a ten-ton tail. The rider, an arthropod type from around Sirius, Christmas guessed, worked feverishly with his string-straps on the creature's hind brain. Christmas' main interest, the Ankru entry, was a low-slung, nondescript red beast whose huge wither-fan concealed his jockey. The first brush was over, and the field began to fall in behind the tremendous scaffolds of the traveling start-gate. "The Field is in Motion!" A roar came from tKe stands. Galaxy-wide betting was always Heavy for this one. The arthopod went by in pole position, still making adjustments. Number Two was the Myrian favorite, a towering green monster with a slobbering trunk of a head thirty feet off the ground. Its rider gleamed white as they passed -- apparently a human girl. Dust hit the rest, and Christmas headed back to the finishline, circling the boards at ground level since it was illegal to fly during a race. He was grinning at himself for pretending to check up in person when the tridi tapes would show him every detail. A confused booming filled the air as the field came around the last turn. The green Myrian was in the lead, fighting off the bid of a yellow monster with a tenfoot frill on its jaws. Red Ankru was holding back in mid-field; Christmas could see steam as the rider held coolant on its rump. The stands were rising and howling -- the ground thrummed under the punishment of twentyton drumsticks -- scales flashed through the dust kicked up by the great splay feet. In the glitter and rush of enormous bodies, Christmas saw the Myrian girl going to her heat-straps. The yellow challenger had faded, and now a long brown neck was lunging up. rhe green behemoth began to pull ahead, and the field was almost upon him when he caught the boom-boom boom of an animal coming up fast on the outside. It was red Ankru, levelled out to rocket speed. The stands exploded -- the girl worked madly -- but the low red monster barrelled first across the line, its rider popping up and down like a ping-pong ball between the thrashing withers. Christmas sledded along for a closer look. "Sir! Sir! Look out -- the girl -- stop her!" he voice of the young interne blasted his collar Christmas turned, saw the green saurian now riderless, his long neck bent to a figure in the dust. The girl's pale arms were up, and between them was a glint of metal. Christmas lobbed his sled over the rail and tumbled off with a fist around her wrists. She didn't struggle. Closed eyes in her upturned face opened to stare wildly at him, her mou'h ceased whispering and fell open too. Her rvrists were like icy twigs. Christmas gently disengaged the three-foot razorbright sword. "No. no. no," he Lold her, urging her up. She rose shakily -- eight feet tall, skinny and naked as a fork, except for a crimson sword-belt "round her navel. She had no body hair, end one breast had been removed. "Oy ban s'ered warro vergan f'Myria!" she protested, reaching for the sword. "Anybody know what she's saying?" Christmas fended her off. "She says she's a sacred warrior 'irgin from Myria," the young interne panted. "She has to kill herself because she lost the race." "Oh, now, she can't do that. Tell her she must ride in other races and win." "Oy ban s'ered warro vergan f' Myria," the girl repeated. "Ser Nisrair from Oal Q is on the way in," said Dana's voice in his collar. "You -- Doctor What's-yourname -- Ooloolulloolah? -- get her over to Infirmary, vsdll you?" As he turned to go the girl screemed like a peahen and grabbed for vhe sword. Instinctively he raised it overhead. Bystanders goggled and backed from the odd tableau. "You can have it if you swear not to harm yourself. Tell her, Doc, make her swear, right?" The girl knelt and began to recite in a high' treble. "Ser Nisrair is here, PC," said his collar. Christmas peeled her arms off his knees, tossed the sword of the interne and took off in a zoom for the balcony. He stepped into His office just as Dana was ushering the Gal Q liaison officer through the king-sized folding doors. Ser Nisrair's steel-blue carapace towered over Christmas. ttood morning Peter," Nisrair intoned melodiously, retracting his lower limbs so that he rested on his edge at manheight. Like all the Gal Center people he exuded a firm benevolence which made Christmas overact a bit. "Hi, Ser. How are the Magellans doing? I take it that's what you came to discuss?" "Very true, Peter," beamed Nisrair, as though he were giving Christmas an A in fractions. "We are, as you know, showing them over Raceworld since they expressed an interest during their recent tour of Galactic Center." "Primitive of them," Christmas murmured. He knew Gal Center took a slightly patronizing view of Raceworld -- "our charming toy" -- although they were keenly aware of Raceworld's use in helping cement "What have they seen?" "We took them to North Pole yesterday for Communications and the Galactic computer." Surprisingly, all four of Nisrair's eyestalks turned on Christmas "It is a little difficult, Peter... Nothing seems to interest them. They are so very different... and it is so very important that we establish at least a little rapport." His antennae were in rigid formal position. The big bug is really worried, Christmas thought. Reassuringly he said, "Something here is bound intwiggle them, Ser, it's worked on every visitor so far. Even if they're from another galaxy, they can't be all that different. So the hardware didn't fascinate them; maybe the economics of the galactic betting system will. Or the Secretariat's display of xenobiology and alien housekeeping. After all, our galaxy is bigger than the Clouds; the sheer size and range of it all is bound to be impressive. "And if that fails, there's always the psy-math boys down at Pole South, forecasting the results of their own forecasts. Remember, that's what finally lured those dematerialized clots from the Horsehead into the Federation?" "I hope so, Peter... They are very powerful, you know. Their equipment -- very advanced." #ig man and bigger coleopteran eyed each other in wordless unity. No one spoke of the possibility of intergalactic war resulting from First Contact. "I'U do anything I can, Ser, you know that." "I was going to say... if they express some desire, no matter how unorthodox -- " "Anything at all, Ser. They can break all the rules." "Thank you." Ser hoisted his bulk and paused before the balcony on his way out. "Delightful," he murmured, again avuncularly bland. "Always an idyUic interlude to visit here. You lead an Arcadian life, Peter." "Kurtis called, PC," said Dana, as usual slipping in before Christmas could signal. "He has the net on the Flange team going, but there's nothing to report yet except that the drivers seem to be playing some game with their toes." "How Arcadian," Christmas grunted. "Also, there's a complaint from one of the big cat teams. They claim the target doesn't look human enough, their beast won't chase it." "Pass that one to Detweiler; that's a Secretariat problem... Oh! On your Ankru hunch: Run me the tridis of all their animals, will you? That giant rep win makes them three out of four now -- all in two days. I think you've got something." The Ankru entries came on his screen; the red Tyrannosaur type Christmas had seen, then a burly-legged running bird, and a tufted cheetah-like affair with a build like a rope slung between two stumps, and finally a slimylooking tub of a thing which apparently navigated on a broad keel, propelled by paddles. "That's the herbivorous amphibian," Dana said. The herbiamph opened one yawning end at the camera. "High-gravity builds. I'd say," Christmas mused. "Call Lament and tell him to run a covert check on their grav cornpensators for starters. It could be they have found a way to screw up their handicap. Oh -- and while you're onto him, get that report on the compound life-swarm geehinkus from the Coalsack, will you? Detwieler's shop should never have put it in the social insect classes; we've had two complaints of fouling -- " M-M! ! ! ! The resounding overhead thunder sent them both jumping for the balcony, to be greeted by a sight they had seen only on historitapes -- a blazing rocket exhaust wavering down to land beyond the Hotels. CKristmas stared. Behind him the innercom was yammering. " -- unauthorized landingl Repeat, red alert, unidentified alien landing -- " It was the voice of the Gal Q security satellite. "PC! A rocket's coming down on my minirodent tracks!" screamed a soprano. Christmas vaulted onto his sled. "Get a firescreen over those rats, Dana!" He took off, barely noticing that Dana had pushed something into his hand. As he cleared the hotel domes, he saw the alien ship squatting in a volcano of smoke. The fireboys howled past, foam jets reaching for the intruder. The blaze was plastered down by the time Christmas skidded to a stop. Kurtis's blue prowler whined in behind him. The security chief was whispering orders into his collar. He raised a finger at Christmas without taking his eyes off the alien ship. The foam around the ship was wriggling. Minirodents, ludicrously be-foamed, were dashing in all directions, many without jockeys. "Lily! Lily -- are you all right?" Christmas called, and saw his assistant steward rise up from under an overturned stand, wiping gobs of foam off her face. The minirodents rushed for Her, formed a solid pile around Her feet and scrambled onto Her shoulders and Head. TKe alien's port swung open to a ramp. Three squat figures like blond chimpanzees peered out through the fading smoke. Then one, flamboyantly imiformed, strode onto the ramp, tossed His yellow mop out of his eyes, and gave out a ringing ululation ending in an interrogative note. "Voder's coming in a minute," Kurtis said. "Look at those side arms -- what the holy Galaxy are they, space opera?" The alien caterwauled again. Christmas, realizing he was the only official there, stepped forward, holding up his hand. On the alien ramp, the figure stared at him, tossed his head again, and all three of them ducked back inside. Christmas stopped. Gal Q and the Secretary would be there in a minute from the far side of Admin. There was a siren roar from inside the spaceboat, and the three emerged again, wheeling what looked like surrealistic airsleds bigger than themselves and decked with grilles, pipes and streamers. The leader yawped at Christmas, who held up his hand again. Quddenly all three aliens jam med horned helmets on their heads, sprang onto their machines, and took off in thunder. They circled their craft at eyelevel, making everyone duck, and then began doing aerobatics. At that moment, Secretary Detweiler's sled come over the Hotel. The aliens brayed and began looping and crowding him, with ear-splitting blasts from their machines. Kurtis had taken off in pursuit. Christmas got airborne just in time to see what looked like a laser beam coming from the aliens. Yes! In the name of madness, it was a laser. Detweiler's sled Had sagged sideways, and Kurtis was throwing up his screens. Christmas put up his own, becoming vaguely aware that he had a minirodent on his head. He gained altitude and gave chase. The aliens were now circling a cluster of MT masts, firing at the rigging, but Kurtis was on top of them. Christmas saw him nail one with come-along spray and then miss another, who darted toward Christmas. The thing Dana had given him had turned out to be a hand stunner. Christmas picked off the alien at low power as he went by, and saw him go into a long glide to the beach. Kurtis, followed docilely by the come-alonged alien, was turning tight circles on the last rider's tail, forcing him down away from his ship. Christmas got the minirodent's tail out of his eye and started back to the alien boat. Ambulance crews were converging, and Detweiler's sled had limped in. Suddenly the last alien doubled and streaked for his ship at ground level, his laser beam looping wildly. "Down! Everybody down!" Christmas bellowed and made for the melee. The alien had almost gained his ramp, when he slumped off his machine and fell into the foam. His sled crashed into the ship wall and fell beyond him. Lily, Christmas's assistant, emerged from under the ramp, making cooing noises to the minirodents clinging to her. On her head, one of the rodent jockeys was bolstering a tiny hand-gun. "Snedecor got him, PC! Snedecor got him!" Lily yelled. Kurtis and the now zombielike alien had landed. The voder crew came up. "Snedecor got him!" Lily carolled. "What in creation were they trying?" Christmas asked. The security chief glowered sadly at his captive, now being hooked up to the voder. "We'll know shortly," he said. "Some bunch of flipping primitives who heard we had races, is my guess. Who's Snedecor?" On Lily's head, Snedecor bowed and waved composedly. "Good shooting. But what's that mouse doing with sidearms?" "Old ruling -- all beings less than nine centims high authorized to carry non-lethal defense," said Christmas. "Hello, Det. Glad you're okay. Well, I guess the rest of this is your job. Let me know the score, Lily, I've got to get back. Oh -- here." T Te disengaged the minirodent and handed it over. "Did anyone ever tell you you have an idyllic job?" He zoomed for home, pausing to let another lizard race finish before he crossed the tracks. "Machines... racing with machines..." he muttered, his big shoulders twitching. He floated over the shouts, the flashing scales and silks, the joyous commotion. Dana met him on the balcony with a tray. "Good, what is it?" He demanded, his nose in a beaker of Infield ale. "Don't ask. Lamont sent it. His reward for saving something that broke a leg; he has a freezer full." "I didn't know we had a stunner, Dana." "You don't. I do. Kurtis gave it to me last year. Remember those Altaireans who wanted to duel to the death in your office? Kurt says you have illusions of invulnerability." Dana's bristles curled in a grin. "Well, it paid off. Another of your himches... Yes, Hal?" he said to the intercom. "Indeed we did have a little excitement. How're the rats? Ah, too bad. Rotten shame, who could foresee it? Great idea of yours, putting drugs in the firefoam... Anything on the Ankru grav check yet?" "Their gravity compensators are absolutely correct," Lamont told him. "Right on the nose at one point two. Funny thing, they look like really high G types to me, too. And I'll tell you another funny thing -- they're exercising some of their animals under double grav loading. Of course there's no law against adding more G's, but they're being very quiet about it. I'd say you have got the answer -- there's a mistake in the handicapping from Detweiler's shop." "That could be ugly, Hal. Who made the mistake, and why?" "I hadn't thought of that," Lamont said slowly. He frowned. "Well, it's not your screaming baby. How did things go with the Xemos Three birds?" "Thank you for nothing, PC. No question, those things fly. I suggested nerve blocks or temporary pinions, and he frothed. We settled on a special strap job after I sHowed him that other contestants used them. Probably intends to sabotage the straps -- better put a watdi-note on him. But listen, PC, did you know Ke Had copper spurs on those birds as long as your arm? Slice a leg right off, like a saber. We had another scene when I told him they'd have to go. It seems they have some bosom enemy here they've got to beat, preferably fatally. You better alert the equipment boys. He's out for mayhem." "Scythes on his chariot wheels, h'mm? Remember that lot from Orion with the acid jets?" "And those sh'e-minks from Scorpio way who couldn't see why we wouldn't let them dump spikes on the track behind? Sometimes I think Gal Q is using us to civilize half the delinquents in the Galaxy." hristmas chuckled and rang off. Their intercoms were flashing for the daily staff meeting. Christmas tuned himself in and listened with one ear, while going through a batch of rulings Dana had brought in for signature. Secretary Detweiler was a plump little man with gazelle eyes, very good at a job Christmas would have loathed. At the moment one of his aides was describing plans for celebrating the finish of the giant ice-slug race. The contestants had covered fifty feet in the extraordinary time of six months and were due to cross the finish' line tomorrow. Interest in their home system was at fever pitch. The secretariat had arranged tridi the transparent track, so that viewers could observe the cellby-cell approach of the slug's feet to the line. "They don't really locomote," the aide was saying. "They grow in front and slough off behind. Fastest moving thing in their system, but of course outsiders aren't interested. I'd like permission to assemble a small, ah claque, I believe the word is, and perhaps stimulate a little betting. It would help their morale." Christmas grunted. Detweiler announced plans for making a ceremonial award that evening to the mouse who had shot the alien. "Quite a little hero, really," the Secretary said. "If that lad had got his ship off. Gal Q would have had a messy chase, messy and expensive. You'll come to the presentation, won't you, PC?" "Don't I get a wound stripe?" Christmas asked. "My ear is full of rat-leavings. Who were they, Det?" "An officially uncontacted system 'way north of Murillo. Actually, they've been trading with us for some time, through Murillo. Apparently they got hold of some obsolete stuff and made it all the way here in that old warp boat. Gal Fed has an MT mission landing there right now " The bursar spoke up. "Either we or Gal Q are going to have reparations to pay on this. Three valuable animals hurt and all those scent-null tracks to rebuild." "And we have adjustments on tlie spoiled races." said the Mutuel chief. "I think Gal Q should be asked to disseminate word that one doesn't just drop in on Raceworld." "Nor does one race with machines," growled Christmas. There was a moment's silence. IV Well," said Detweiler. "Now about our main business, the Magellans. You're getting them almost immediately, you know, PC. I don't know when they'll come to Mutuel and you others, if at all. Frankly, the tour is not working out quite as well as we had Hoped. They went through the Secretariat this morning, and among everything else we tried a really beautiful viewing of the complete range of Galactic life we service here, with chemico-genetic analyses... You just can't tell how they're reacting, but I'm afraid it was negative. They asked to leave Raceworld tonight. Ser Nisrair is troubled." "Who isn't?" asked Commo from Pole North. "I've seen aliens, but these are alien. Two of my secretaries are under sedation. Did you hear that Galtech hasn't been able tc unscrew half the junk in that spook-boat they came in? Your viewing may have only whetted their appeti ;e:i for dinner, Det -- or offend ;d their sense of neatness, like finding out your neighbor's hou.je is full of vermin. The Clouds are just too close for comfort." "Well, we just have to do what we can," Detweiler said, determinedly brisk. "Anything else?" "Sorry tc add to the gloom," Christmas spoke up. "This concerns Mutuel, too. That new Ankru team who have been wiiming several events are. only carrying a one point two G handicap, and Lament has an idea this isn't enough by half. So do I. Check this out fast, Det, will you? I don't need to go into the implications." "I'll get right on it." Detweiler looked startled. T'ne Mutuel chief laid his Hand over his eyes and groaned. "Can't you Hold up their races, PC? Great Kali -- the adjustments, the compensations -- " He leaned offscreen to hiss at an aide. "Not solid enough," Christmas said. Detweiler signed off with a sick look in his gazelle eyes. He knew what Christmas meant. Alone, Christmas rubbed his rusty wool and turned to the window. The announcer's chants rang out, and a dozen rhino-type creatures, their tails like quivering flagpoles over their laboring rumps, padded behind the starter's gate. Christmas smiled automatically, but somehow the magic had ebbed. He -- all of them -- knew what the magic was. It wasn't the clamor of the stands, or the rolling coffers of Mutuel, or in the rhinos' horn-down charge across the finish, the silks of planets a thousand light-years apart flying from their tails. The magic invested those things, but it was not of them... and it was threatened. T Tis outer com chimed and cleared to show the bony black face of the young vet. "Sir, the infirmary wouldn't keep her -- that, ah, young lady from Myria, I mean, and she can't go back to her team; they insist that she kill herself or they'll do it for her." "Oh, for Solsake! We've got our hands full right now. Take charge of her for a while, will you Doctor? Stick with her -- ' show her around. I know you're a veterinarian. Refer Lament to me... Well, take the sword away from her. And get some pants on her, will you? She looks horrible. Why shouldn't virgins on Myria wear pants? Oh, never mind -- do anything you can, right?" "Ser Nisrair and the Magellans are on their way up, PC," said Dana's voice. He stood to greet them as the big folding doors swung wide. Looming beside Nisrair were two coal-black sinuous shapes as tall as he, topped with dead white triangular heads like bleached horse-skulls. Christmas bowed and stood watching while Nisrair explained the Steward's functions. The Magellans never moved. Their horse-skulls turned on him, eyeless, expressionless. Christmas, like most of the Galaxy, had erage that announced First Contact, but he was not prepared for their unnerving alienness in the flesh, or whatever they were. They seemed to exude a faint disquieting odor... or was it a vibration? The Magellans' voder crackled suddenly, interrupting Nisrair. "You are the (?) juridical (?) ethical organ," it said tonelessly Christmas couldn't tell which one was using it. "That's right," he said to the blank skull-eyes. "It is my job to see that the fairest possible rules are set for all contestants, and to enforce them in detail and in spirit. When some condition affects contestants unequally, we work out new rules by unanimous agreement if possible. If not, my word is final -- sorry I didn't get that." "Query your statement re spirit," repeated the voder. "Oh! I meant that we do not allow the technical wording of a rule to work against the intent to deal equally fairly with all. We define an equal chance as conditions as close as possible to those on the contestants' home planets; for example, to compensate for different gravities we have a handicapping device -- " "Spirit..." the voder muttered unintelligibly. The two horse-skulls glared down at him unmoving. "You have great power here," the voder went on. "You could affect many contests without (?) detection (?) supervision for your own profit. Query you do not do so. Query your identity." hristmas glanced at Ser Nisrair. Hadn't he briefed them? He saw a worry-helix in one of the Gal Q officer's tendrils. "Why, like everyone here -- everyone in authority -- I'm a Solterran," Christmas said stiffly. "I assume you were informed that Solterrans originated and run Raceworld." "Peculation (?) speculation (?)..." the voder gobbled. Evidently the alien semantics were giving Central Computer a hard time. Then it said clearly, "Query there is no corruption." Christmas said nothing. "Corruption, in a system of this sort, can be defined simply as entropy," Ser Nisrair intoned smoothly. "And of course, entropy, or degradation of order, is avoided by all civilized beings, since no local increase in complexity can offset entropic effects in the larger matrix. We see three main entropic potentials in the Raceworld system. First, external parasitism -- attempts at a take-over from without. You have viewed the Galactic security force which guards against this. Second, attempts by the contestants to subvert portions of the system from within, for individual or planetary benefit. The Steward here functions to prevent this, with the aid of his own security staff and such outside help as continuous probability monitoring from Mutuel. of the distortion of the system by its own organizing elements, that is, by the Solterrans themselves. This is highly unlikely, as I indicated earlier  -- perhaps too briefly -- first because of the fact that we meet all their material desires, secondly because of the high value placed upon honesty and fair play in the Solterrans' own value system, in which they are indoctrinated from infancy as managers of Raceworld, and thirdly because the Solterrans themselves insist upon a program of periodic testing conducted by Galactic experts in combination with a rotating panel of neutral planets." A pause in which Christmas could hear the voder whispering to the Magellans. "We will observe," the voder said. "Alone." Nisrair's antennae, which had straightened out during his speech, kinked again. "You wish me to leave?" he asked. "You mean, stay here and watch our normal operations?" asked Christmas. "Yes." "Well, certainly. Glad to have you. Make yourselves comfortable. Would you like, ah, chairs? Resting surfaces?" Christmas suggested through clenched teeth. The Magellans rippled into sudden violent motion and then stopped abruptly. They were now standing behind Christmas's off shoulder. "Proceed," said the voder. "Right," grated Christmas. He rang for Dana and bowed to Ser Nisrair, who allowed himself to be ushered out, antennae rigid. I # A #I right, Dana, I'm open for business. Our guests are staying to observe. What's come in?" "A complaint has been filed by Betelgeuse system." Only a slight starchiness about the whispers betrayed Dana's awarenss of the apparaitions looming behind Christmas. "They have a team of giant bore-worms, and they claim their entry was fouled by striking tunnels left by a previous race." "Those cursed worms have gnawed up that whole mountain range," Christmas growled. "Allow the claim, notify Mutuel, and tell the Secretariat we need some new mountains. They're going to devastate the planet. Better yet, ask Detweiler if GalQ could move in an asteroid for all those excavation contests. There's mining over in the next system; maybe they can shove us a rock or two. Det should have thought of that." To the presences behind he added. "This is a just claim against Raceworld for improper track conditions and must be allowed. Those who bet on the affected team will be compensated." "We understand your language," the voder said hollowKurtis came on the intercom. As the screen lit, Christmas realized that the aliens had chosen to stand where no viewer would pick them up. "Your Flangians, PC. Its Pyrrhoxa all over again. Their drivers are nothing more than monkeys, the horses were training them. We caught the horses cold, laying out a ploy for the next race. They didn't fancy their own odds, so they were lixing to have a long shot from Fitfat win. They actually passed their betting instructions to one of my boys. Usually they do it through their food-handler, but he got delayed by a girl -- you know Elva." "Mutuel will go up the wall on this one, Kurt; they've been in a lot of races." For the Magellans' benefit he added, "Of course they will have to reimburse all bettors, probably with damages. Thank our stars, those light equines aren't too popular. Give Detweiler the word, will you?" "It's lucky they went for tKe big odds so openly," Kurtis said. "If they hadn't been so greedy they might have had a longer run. Well, that's horses for you." Christmas flinched and cut him off. Dana looked up from his own commocollar. "Ankru has just won another one, PC." Holding his fingers on Detweiler's channel, Christmas swung around to the Magellans. "I am now going to query the Secretary on a very serious case," he told them. "A team from a planet called Ankru appears to have been assigned too light a gravity handicap, probably due to an error in the original schedules made up the Secretary's office. The team has of course been winning in several different class events." He swung back. "Anything on Ankru yet, Det?" The gravity is absolutely correct at one point two G, PC," Detweiler told his gravely. "According to both our own star synopsis and the Gal Q master directory." "Can't be -- they're still winning. Four out of live now. Besides -- have you seen the brutes?" Tttweiler nodded perplexedly. Suddenly both he and Christmas started to speak at once, the Secretary's tenor riding over Christmas's rumble. "Ambimass!" he exclaimed. "That could be it -- I'll signal Center for the full planetary specs!" "But -- " said Christmas to the empty screen. The office door lit up. "Visitors with an appointment, PC," Dana told him. "He's from somewhere I can't pronounce in Sector #. Insists on talking to you in person, something about their age-weight handicap." The caller ambled in, an immense hump of shell with a sad, tapir-like face emerging at kneeheight. He began hooting in nearly incomprehensible Galactic, with much ritual courtesy. Christmas waved Dana over to interpret. "The problem is that their entry is now fifteen hundred Standard years old, and the age handicap's gone asymptotic." "How long do your animals live?" Christmas asked. "He's not sure," Dana translated. "This particular animal has been winning races for over a millenium -- he races every twenty years -- and the horn ; system expects him to go on indefinitely, I gather. They don't have any more, right now, breeding is slow. With no weight handicap differential any more, it's getting tough. They're up against a much younger similar form from a new system, and planetary prestige is at stake." "He seems a nice old boy. But we can't bugger up the whole system. Even anti-grav wouldn't help him : the animal would lose traction. Ask him if he would be satisfied to switch over to noncompetitive exhibition, with choice of pace-setters, and lots of fanfare -- oldest living champion, and all that!" Dana and the alien Hooted at length. Behind Christmas the aliens stood moveless, expressionless, exuding their faint aroma of disquiet. "I think he says yes," Dana reported. "I told him the Secretary will -- " V 'he office door burst open and a long white figure leaped in, drew itself up to eight feet of naked girl, rounded the desk and fell prone with a crash at Christmas's feet. Christmas curled up his toes as he felt cold steel sliding under them. Tapirface hooted in alarm and backed into the Magellans, who did not move. He moaned louder and backed off into Dana. The office door was jammed with secretaries, topped by the interne's dark face. "What the -- you. Doctor Ooloo -- this is no place -- " Christmas roared. "She got away from me. Sir, through the ladies' latrine. She kept sa#dng she was your slave since you saved her life and she had to swear fealty or something." The girl nodded and patted his instep. "She says now she must toil for you -- she has no home." "But what can she do? Has she ever seen a computer?" "She says she is a warrior." "Yes, I know... Hold it a minute, Det!" he said as the intercom flashed. "All right, young lady, you've sworn fealty. Now you go along with Dr. Ooloo and they'll find you something to do. Find something! Anything! Show her how to run the elevator ! Now get her out of here!" He turned to bow deeply to the shaken tapir-faced one as Dana got them out. From the screen, Detweiler's face watched in puzzlement until Christmas gave him the all-clear. "We were right, PC !" Detweiler burst out. "Ankru's wildly oblate spheroid; they've got nearly three G at the equator. That onepoint-two figure was an average. Obviously they've been sending animals from their heavy zone." "But in that case, shouldn't the specs have the letter 'v' after it for variable?" "Yes, it should, but it doesn't. Here, look at the Directory readout. Same in our synopsis, of course." "Recent date on that paragraph," Christmas said thoughtfully. "Just about the time Ankru applied, wasn't it?" "H'mm yes, it's a change notice. They come out periodiand are automatically transcribed here... Wait, let me see if we still have the old paragraph." He dived off-screen, to return noticeably pale. "The old directory paragraph Has been destroyed, but I found it in my personal synopsis. The V was there, before the change. What could have happened?" I I  eems to me there's three possibilities," said Christmas. "Gal Comp mistransmitted, went vrong with the transcriber in your office." "Gal Comp has never sent a mis-read, Peter." Detweiler seldom used his given name. "You know the Directory is the Galaxy bible for navigation, administration, everything; they have a fantastic technical control on it. The Directory literally never has had an error... The transmission could garble, of course, but they do a triplication with discrepancy signal. For one letter alone to fall out and the warning to fail too would be, well, just about the fifty million monkej. And the transcriber in our office is automatic too. It would be almost impossible for it to miss one symbol in an otherwise correct paragraph." "Unless somebody tampered with it," Christmas finished for him in a dead voice. "Yes... It could be done! the original read-out is duplicated for the Directory and the synopses. If the process were stopped, a technician could alter the original... There is a gap in the time too, Peter, I think." The gazelle eyes were sick, and his face showed lines Christmas had never seen. "The technicians are all our people," said Christmas. "Yes, every one. Peter, I'm going to signal Gal Comp to check their master program. It'll take some while." He cut off abruptly. Christmas sat drumming his desk. Then he shook himself. "Dana, put a hold order on all Ankru races. Either they withdraw or the races are postponed. Handicap error. And tell Kurt to see they don't get off the planet and monitor any signals, but not to alarm them. And notify Mutuel that results on those already run are now officially invalid." The voder crackled. Christmas started. "Query correct understanding. You now (?) hypothesize (?) imaginatively postulate a Solterran has engaged in deception for profit." "That's right," Christmas said. He took a deep breath. "Only a Solterran could have cut out the 'v' that told the planet was irregular. Once it was out, the way was open for Ankru to bring in their heavies and make a killing. The fact that they entered so many items so fast suggests that there was a plan. Ankru may have cooked it up themselves and subverted our staff member, but this is unlikely because only one of our people would perceive the possibility. Of course there is a microscopic possibility that there was some outside leader, maybe even from Gal Center, and that our person was intimidated. No... It looks -- but it can't be! It cannot be! "Query impossibility. Solterrans do not differ from other life." hristmas was silent. "Such (?) plans (?) systems have been known to fail in our Galaxy. The possibility of material gain is very great," the voder probed on. "What's to gain?" Christmas burst out, aware that he was being driven closer to what he would not say. "We have everything one could wish, homes, luxury, travel -- all free." "Possibility of material gain for your home planet is very great." "This is our home planet," Christmas responded mechanically. What was wrong with' Ser Nisrair? How could he have failed to brief the Magellans? It was unforgivable... Christmas felt the never-quite-absent ache rising. "Query correct understanding," the voder said, like a vulture picking at his vitals. "You are native of planet Terra in system Sol." He was going to have to say it. He surged up and strode to the window, his back to the aliens. "There is no living planet of Terra. The Solterrans you have seen here are descendants of small colonies on our moon and a few other places at the time Terra was destroyed. Terra was the only habitable planet in our system." The ache was hard in his breast now. As a child he had sung There is a dome That we call home. Green T err a is no more. Neither he nor his fifteenth grandfather had known Green Terra, and no Terran he knew lived in a dome, but he had the images of grim survivors in asteroid bubbles, under leaky Marsdome... watching the big ships of Gal Q come poking in to see what was burning up their scintillographs, and to rescue the orphans. "In our system those without home planet do not long persist." "Nor here," said Christmas. It was true. Orphan races somehow died out, no one knew quite why -- or why the ache never died. Either you kept hold of the ache and lived or you forgot and after a while you weren't around any more. "Raceworld is run by the planetless, you see," he said aloud. "There is no one outside to profit. Only Solterrans." "Your assistant is not Solterran." "Oh, we take in a few other orphans. Dana's people got one ship out of a planet-busting war. Doesn't often happen." Were Dana's people going to live with the ache, too? Christmas wondered. He had never pried behind the cheery brown eyes. Dana was fifth generation. There were still some cubs around... "Query your planet was lost by war." The ghoul-voice bored on relentlessly. Christmas studied the horizon. The scene below him, the announcer's call -- all phantasms now. "No. We blew it up ourselves." The voder gargled. "Such cases especially non-persistent," it said. This too was true. Those races who had destroyed their own worlds never lived on long. Except one, Christmas thought grimly. All Honor to the suicides, the fratricides, the matricides -- the lost Solterrans who had found their immortality as purveyors of a primitive pleasure to the Galaxy. '"The vodervulture was squawking again. "Query you place value on (?) ethics (?) group conduct of dead planet." Clu-istmas whirled around. "Terra is not dead!" he shouted into the white skull-faces. "Every civilized race in the Galaxy knows Terra! The word Solterran is slang for fairness, for incorruptibility, all over the Galaxy! Ask anywhere -- ask in the Center, go to the Rim and ask things that hang by their tails -- they know us. They joke about it -- they don't understand it -- but they play our game and they use our name as a symbol! How can Terra be dead when mother fish in the seas teach their young to be like us?" He paused, breathing hard. "There was nothing like Raceworld before we came," he went on. "We -- the Terran survivors -- thought of it, planned it, sold it to Gal Center. We're a good piece of their budget now. But with us it is for Terra. How could Terra be dead when birds that fly in freezing ammonia talk about her?" He ran down and the room was silent. The voder curdled faintly and hushed again. Christmas went back to his desk. The black dvils had got it out of him. "Query," announced the voder. Somehow Christmas had the impression a different Magellan was speaking, but he couldn't care less. "You experience noxious subjective disturbance." "I experience noxious subjective disturbance, yes," Christmas said bleakly. "If... if... one of us... The whole thing is no good... the unique thing... But it can't be " The minutes dragged by. The aliens spoke no more. Dana came in with some papers, not meeting Christmas's eyes he always monitored the office. A planetary rep came on the outercom, breezily intent on getting a special ruling in the hopper classes. The rep looked like a kangaroo. Christmas answered him mechanically. In the middle of a complicated point about tail rests, Detweiler's signal chimed. Christmas spun away from the kangaroo. " -- Definitely, Peter. I've seen the master read-in." "What's definite!" "The V was never transmitted from Cal Comp! Some molecule, I don't know -- anyway, it's the first mis-read in five Standard centuries; they're wild. It's theirs, Peter! It's theirs." "It's not us," Christmas said softly. They broke connection. VI hristmas sat stone-still. Then he slapped his desk hard and whirled on the Magellans. "You see?" he shouted. "You see. Oh, I should have seen it had to be them; a mechanical process can reverse a unit at random, but motivation acts like a field -- elements don't change until the field does -- " The kangaroo was spluttering from the screen. Christmas got him mollified. Over his shoulder he heard the Magellans rustling and turned back in time to catch a glimpse of crimson rib-flaps opening and closing along the black sides. The voder made an incomprehensible noise. Christmas stared back, alien, grotesque. Christmas remembered that there were Galaxies, and war. A grating sound came from outside the big doors. Dana rushed to fling it open, revealing Ser Nisrair standing eyeball to eyeball with the Myrian girl. The point of her sword was at Nisrair's stomach plates. A secretarial hubbub arose from beyond. "Let him in," Christmas ordered. "And put that knife away. Who in Entropy told you I needed a door-guard? Excuse me, Ser, we've been h.aving problems " Nisiair stumped in, antennae formal. Three of his cyestalks were trained on the Magellans, one on Christmas. The aliens gave no sign. "The transportation back to Galactic Center which you requested is now ready," Ser Nisrair told them. "No," said the voder. "But -- " said Nisrair. "Well, then, you wish to continue the tour here? We have an interesting demonstration of probability extrapolation prepared for the evening." "No," repeated the voder. Again there came the crimson rustling. "... Not previously visible," said the voder, and relapsed into unintelligibility. Nisrair swiveled a second eye-stalk around to Christmas. Christmas opened his hands in a shrug. 'My companion (?) co-traveler is... untranslatable... distvubance. We wish to retire now to consider... garble... what we have seen." "I will escort you at once to the hotel," said Nisrair. Still the aliens did not move. The voder crackled on for a moment and then said clearly, "TecHnology, communications, mathematics, economics, chemistry..." It went into garble, and quit. The aliens were suddenly in swirling motion to the door. There they stopped, wheeled, and stamped hard in unison with black whip-like toes, making a report like a pistol-shot. The next second they were receding through the outer office. Nisrair went after them in massive pursuit, one roimd eyeball still twisted over his shoulder at Christmas. "TAana silently closed the big doors and leaned with his back to them. "Who knows," said Christmas. Tragedians, maybe. Romantics. Were they crying? Or laughing? It was something they wanted. computers, you know, and everything so sublime..." "The gods do not come to earth to see lightning," Dana said. "An old saying of my people." "Maybe they weren't gods," Christmas said. "Maybe they were a couple of old aunties out for a joyride... or a retired couple who got lost." He shook off his ghosts. "All right, let's get that unholy Myrian in here -- and that Doctor Oolooloolooloo -- " He went to the window, snuffing luxuriously. The magic was back. Dana herded in the gangling humans. "Young lady, stay on your feet. I've got something to tell you. You couldn't go home because you lost the race, right? Well, you didn't lose it, you won it. The animal who came in first has been disqualified; it was running under an inadequate gravity handicap. Do you understand? Tell her. Doctor, she won it fair and square. Now she can go back to Myria in triumph and be a sacred warrior virgin again. Okay?" The girl broke into sobs of unmistakable woe. "For Solsake -- what now?" "She says she can't go home now. Sir, because -- uh -- " "Because what?" "Sir, you said, do an#rthing -- " "Oy not vergan now!" she wailed and collapsed on the interne's chest. "She... she wants to stay here," said the interne. "I thought she could work out well with the animals -- " "She can't stay here, she's got a home. What's that?" "She says they'll disembowel her at home for not being a virgin," the interne said miserably. "Really? Permissive types. Well, Dana, do you think she might qualify as a planetless person? I'll buck a request over to Det in the morning; he'll have to get cultural certification. All right! You, Doctor, take her to Lamont's transient billet; she can camp there till we get this straightened out. You, young lady, go with him and do whatever he says, right? You can put some pants on now and put that sword away, right? No, stay on your feet -- in public, anyway. And you, both of you -- get out of here and stay out until I call for you -- if I ever do -- right? Scat!" 'yhe drifting fragrance of a cheroot told Christmas that his night deputy had come into the office and was quietly checking through Dana's log to see what was pending for the night. Coburg was a stocky whitehaired man who had been main track chief until his legs failed. "Should be a quiet night," Christmas told him. "You might call Lamont's office for quarters for a special case -- you heard it. And you're bound to get some noise about the Ankru thing. Other than that -- I'll call in later." He gazed out to where the floodlights were coming on over plain and mountains, pylons, domes and sea. All were folded in the gold and pastel of Raceworld's perfect evening, one itl the infinite series. "Somehow I feel you and I could do with a small idyll," he said to Dana. "How about getting your family to join me at' Seaworld? We'll snatch a prime table by the big shark races and your kids can have themselves a swim-ride... Great, I'll meet you at freshwater pools. I have to go over to Admin for a minute." He went out to his sled and floated into the evening. Below him a line of giant wolf-spiders was parading onto the track, prancing daintily on twenty-foot legs. The bugle made sweet sounds. Arcadia, Nisrair had called it, Arcadia or Arcady was a pastoral dream. No, this was another dream -- one that had kept his race alive, of all the orphan races. A bright improbable dream that their ancestors had managed to weave into the Galaxy's life currents so their children need never wake up... and die. It even hooked those golems from the Clouds, Christmas chuckled, recalling Ser Nisrair's discomfiture. Maybe the poor spooks had been terrified by Gal Q's briefings! Grinning, he turned a long lazy circle toward Admin. Then his grin faded. In his mind was the image of Nisrair's round, receding eye. It had been unforgivable to make him bare his soul that way! How could Nisrair have fallen down so badly in briefing them? He must have been really frantic, Christmas decided; he'd never before failed to explain the set-up Here to visitors in advance. In fact, he'd never before failed at much of anything. The eye came back, brighter, expressively clinical. "Why, that mealy-mouthed big smart cockroach!" Christmas exploded aloud. "I should have known! He wasn't just asking me to let them press some buttons, or fly over a track. He had them figured -- and he was looking for something to get under their hides with -- and he decided to try the Tragedy of Terra. Played live. Oh, you soulless big blue bug!" He kicked the sled to savage speed. Then, slowly, his jaw came back to normal. "It's his job to get rapport; he got rapport." Christmas muttered. He grunted. His lips quirked. Grinning once more, the Steward of Raceworld braked his sled into a gung-ho landing. Below him was the amphitheatre where the Secretary of Raceworld was preparing with all ceremony to award a medal to an intrepid mouse. Christmas started down the ramp while behind him floatya!" and the watchers fnm a ored. If you give up cigarettes, you might gain a few pounds. (And a Iso a few years) The plain, unfiltered fact is that people who smoke cigarettes get lung cancer a lot more frequently than nonsmokers. And lung cancer can finish you. Before your time. We'd rather have you stay alive and well. Because even if you do gain a few pounds, you'll have the time to take them off. american cancer society i Talk about Htterbugsl Who wants a dead pterodactyl near his house? I 'Tery mucK like a dead bird,  the pteranodon fell out of the sky at #:# of a Wednesday, fell whistling, end-over-end, landing squarely in the middle of Sixth Avenue and #th Street. It fell flat-out, wings spread, and crushed a Mustang, two Cadillacs, a Buick Riviera, three VW's, the front end of a Peugeot and a Grey line Tours sightseeing bus. The fall of the beast killed eighty-seven people, but it was not that, precisely, that caught the attention of Will Kiley as he emerged from one of the small smut bookshops dotting Sixth Avenue, his parcel of paperbacks and photo sets showing Puerto Rican girls with unshaved armpits and spread thighs clutched to his side. Riley's attention was initially caught by the crashing shape as it shadowed the street, then by the crashing sound as the extinct creature impacted, and then by his recognition of the beast as not merely a pterodactyl, but specifically as a pteranodon, genus ornithostoma. Kiley, a third-year student at Columbia University, majoring in Historical Geology, instantly recognized the osseous crest extending the skull to the rear in an effective counterweight, balancing the mass of the huge, bony, toothless, beak. Kiley observed this aspect of the beast in the dust-settling instant after the pteranodon, crashing, bounced, rose into the air amid a welter of automobile parts and crushed humans, hung there as though observing its own handiwork and then slammed down again very hard on its original ground zero. ne vast wing lay spread like a dusty, olive-gray tarpaulin over the still feebly struggling bodies of victims trapped beneath it. An edge fluttered as pocketed air escaped bearing a pungent reek of reptilian juices. The other extended across #th Street, sagging, warty leather stretched on tlun bones like collapsed aluminum tubing, the fingered tip caressing a tarnished brick front adorned by a clustered trio of brazen spheres. Sirens began keening everywhere. Screams rose up in the intersection as the half-pinned, maimed survivors of the beast's tumble struggled to free themselves. From his doorway Kiley noted at once that the beast was incredibly heavy, much heavier by a fantastic overage than any pterodactyl had a right to be. Aerodynamically a sport, the creatures had never weighed more than a hundred pounds. Eighty was closer to the average. But this thing had crushed a sightseeing bus and something over a half dozen cars. It was many times longer and had a far greater wingspread than any pterodactyl ever exhumed as a fossil. It was lying almost like an immense crucifix, its shaft of body heading toward the Radio City Music Hall, its wings outspread as though waiting for Pilate's men to come and drive in the spikes, crosstown on #th. Kiley was torn between staying to watch what was certainly going to happen, or running back uptown to his mingy little room, to put the contents of his parcel to use. At that moment, a group of fifteen Chassidic Rabbinical Seminary students, adorned with payuss, beards and long black overcoats. so out-of-line for midAugust, and faintly redolent of the scent of Rappaport's gefilte fish, emerged from one of the diamond exchange shops. Seeing the dead beast lying in the street, they began a loud and incomprehensible argument as to whether or not pteranodon was kosher. "It flies... it's a chicken," said one"That makes it kosher," confirmed a second. "Snake. It's a reptile," cour.tered a third. "Then most definitely theri should be no argument on this point, it's trayil" concluded a fourth. A florid, large-boned police officer of the midtown precinct, rar. up from #tH Street, blowing his whistle, readying His book of parking tickets and lock ing around for the owner of the dead beast. Spying an old man lounging against the side of a papaya juice stand, the cop Hustled over and pointed an accusing finger, "That your pterodactyli" The old man shook his head. "You're sure.'" The old man began to tremble. "Honest to God, it ain't mine. Why'd joo always pick on me?" "'Cause you were the guy owned that big me nkey we caught climbin' up the Empire State, that's why!" "They never proved it I" "i don't give a oamn if they didn'tI knew you were the guy. I knew that big ape belonged to you!" "Gh yeah, fuzz. Haw'd ycu know?" "You were the only guy on the street with a seventy-five foot tambourine." The lean, cenetted, hatted, rouge-onbones yciu'g woman standing au dessns the soct-flecked, plate-glass display window of the truss and artificial liir.l shop on the southwest ccrr.er of the blocked intersection compared the watch strapped to her narrow wrist with the oversized timepiece dangling over the sidewalk across the street Her lips compressed inta hard line like a surgery scar For the tenth time in thirty seconds she had scanned the pavement to left and right, strode a few im.patient steps to peer past the upjuttir.g elbow of the pteranodon blocking her view. Still no Melville. Melville wasn't coming. Stood up. Her. Lilya. Stood up. By a creep like Melville, which she was doing him the biggest favor of h's life just to go out with him, the slob, and he's got the undiluted crust to not show, and after she skipped lunch just to have room for a lousy dinner which he probably would've suggested Nedick's anyway -- A large, slow-moving middleaged man with moist eyes and a mouth like a prime pit was hesitating, looking at her; Lilya had seen a Museum of Modem Art Film Retrospective of Films of Depravity in #; the persistent image of Peter Lorre as "M" kept oozing into her mind; this was probably an out-of-town rapist. She'd been staring right at him: probably in another second he'll make the pass; I can always spot them, yechh; why me? Why always me? If I ride in a car with someone down the Major Deean Expressway, they always yell, hey looka that, and I always look, and it's always a legless cripple or some drunk lady whose thing is collecting cardboard flats while it is she's puking into a litter basket, or a cat run over across the head by a sanitation truck. Why always me? A flasher, this one is. I can tell. Lilya stiffened her face, let her gaze slide past him, turned her back, but not rapidly as to appear really, like rude. She gasped as the old man tottered, wheezed, lunged past her, hand outstretched for the door of the hole-in-comer public house next to the prosthetics display. A gush of beer-laden air; the door closed behind him. Lilya perked as though stmck by a wetmop. Her eyes fell on the clock. Twelve minutes late. She'd give him exactly two more minutes, or possibly five, that would make it fourthirty on the nose, and besides you couldn't expect her to climb over that flying crocodile, which somebody ought to call the zoo and teU them a few things about letting the inmates go falling all over the street. TXill Kiley decided he'd had ' ' quite enough morphology of flying reptiles for one day. The parcel beneath his arm grew warm even as he thought of it. Within the parcel : Rolling Sin House, a novel dealing with six young prostitutes who buy a house trailer and flout the laws of interstate commerce; Lust Whip Madam, a stinging tale of cmelty and unbridled passions among the silken-limbed houris of the bondage set in Scarsdale; Teeny Slut, an adventure into the sexual psychology of the amoral young. These three, and a seventeenpicture set of maybe a Rosita or Consuelo or Guadalupe (he would settle for a Dolores), were the spurs to his rapidly returning uptown to a studentdingy room. He started past the Head of the beast, when he. saw the edge of the artifact hanging from its neck. It seemed to be a large golden disc, hanging from a thick link chain. Will Kiley's instant thoughts were not of rich rewards from the archeological society. They were of ready cash for old gold in any one of the Second Avenue antique shops. Ready cash that could buy important things like regular meals, more books, possibly even a young woman's affections. (Will Kiley, having emerged from a cocoon of poverty spun about him by his parents in Three Bridges, New Jersey, was inclined, to accept the philosophy that money may not be the only thing in life, but the other thing won't go out with you if you don't have it.) He jammed the package into his jacket pocket and began hauling at the golden chain, in an attempt -- hearty but hardly surreptitious -- to get the disk off the dead pteranodon. II T?rom a doorway across Sixth Avenue, a group of youths belonging to a Bronx-based organization titled The Pelham Privateers -- what in days of pre-protest picketing would have been called a juvenile delinquent gang, now referred to as "a minority youth group" -- observed Will Kiley's struggles and continued their own observations. "But it don't look like it ot hubcaps," Angie said. "Hey, shtoomie, if it is Isnn' inna street, it is gotta have hubcaps. The question's where?" The gang's leader, George ("The Pot") Lukovitch dealt with matters in a realistic fashion. "Maybe they're uimerneaf" suggested Vimmy. "Could be," George mused, "could very well be." He pondered a moment longer, then made up his mind and the gang's collective mind. "We gotta jack it up. Get unnemeat'. Get the hubcaps off. Vimmy, I want you should take t'ree boys and go over to the building they're building onna corner Madison an' #th. Steal a pneumatic hoist or somethin'." Vimmy gave a quick one-finger salute and dodged out of the doorway, tapping three of the gang members on their chests as he passed them. A hook-and-ladder approaching from the direction of Fifth Avenue swerved to avoid the quartet and skidded to a halt in the lee of the dead ornithosaurian. Big Louis Morono, wearing a Texaco hat and black rubber boots and slicker, leaped down, dragging a foot-long brass nozzle trailing a flat gray boa-constrictor of hose. Assessing the situation at a glance, he set off at a heavy-footed trot toward the stern of the beast, assisted by fellow fire fighters each supporting his half dozen yards of tubing. A second team lavmched itself with silent efficiency in the opposite direction, toward the giant maloccluded jaws. They rounded the head, continued parallel with' the scaly neck, paused only momentarily before trampling ahead across the leather carpet of the wing. They met Big Louis and his crew at a point abaft the fourth thoracic vertebra. "Anything?" "Nothing." "Smoke?" "Not a wisp." Big Louis sighed. His hose drooped. "It figures." "Yeah." "Okay, boys, reel it in." Muttering, Big Louis headed back for the trembling red truck. Before he had taken more than three steps, however, one of the members of the second team yelled, "Hey, Cap! It's a, uh you know what, a dragon. Maybe it breathes fire. Could be, y'know!" Big Louis stopped dead and smiled a winsome smile. ""Reel it out again, men!" he shouted.  s Will Kiley struggled manfully with the golden chain and its golden disk, two rumpled figures wearing thick glasses paused beside him, but pointed frequently at the dead beast's head: "The chief difference in the pterodactyl skull from that of a bird is in the way in which the malar arch is prolonged backward on each side," said the first. "The nostrils are unusually large. Could it be Dimorphodon?" asked the second. "Don't be a silly goose, TrencHard," replied the first. "Doesn't even resemble." Trenchard's eyes flashed anger and his mouth tightened. "Damn's blood, Goilvey! You were the one who said this genus shouldn't be this heavy. You were the one who dragged me out of the Automat, leaving a perfectly good fish cake, just to come down here and argue about this. I don't know why it's so big, and I don't know why it's so heavy... all I know is that I don't like you talking to me so snottily. Your seniority in the department doesn't give you that right!" A civil rights group, attracted by the noise, abandoned their labors integrating a parking lot and, instantly interpreting, what was going on there in the intersection, whipped out magic markers and fresh cardboard and rejingoed their slogans. They began parading around and around the dead beast, bearing signs that "Looks dead to me," murmured a secretary, walking to Sak's with a girl friend. "Remind me to make an appointment with an orthodontist," her friend replied. A representative of the sanitation workers union -- summoned by enraged members of his local -- arrived on the scene and uttered a snarl. "Like hell we will!" he commented to the members of the press. "It'll lay there till hell freezes over! If the corrupt and Commie-S # unp government of this city thinks it is going to fatten and batten on the blood and sweat and tears of the members of the United Sanitation Workers of America Local ##, it has another think coming. The name is Fortnoy. F-O-R-T..." film. One's tie-tack camera clicked on empty spools, and the other's mini-corder in his hatband whirred emptily. They met at mid-pteranodon and compared notes: "Maoist?" "Doubtful. Castro?" "Maybe. Been able to reach the office yet?" "No, something's wonking up the circuits." "Jamming?" "Maybe. Maoist?" "Doubtful. Russkie?"" "Maybe..." Tiley pulled and strained at the disk, trying to drag it out from imder the great head. He was making some small headway when a photographer and three models and the director of fashion for a leading woman's magazine nudged him aside and began posing the girls on the head of the dead beast. "Look anguished, Maddie," said the photographer, a slim and ascetic man wearing an Australian digger Hat in white velour. The model looked anguished. "No, no! More anguished. Cry for the entire world, sweetheart!" Maddie anguished harder. She cried. "Now tilt the pelvis just a tiddle forward, darling," the photographer urged. "Let's transmute that anguish into a starchy impudence at the really tasty things the season's culottes have to say to the Now Female!" "Off duty," said a cabbie, streaking down around a wingtip and plunging up the Avenue. Somewhere children were laughing and the wind was sweet with the scent of imminent summer. But that was somewhere else. "Jesus, I can't stand the stink!" shouted a woman from the seventh floor window of an employment agency. Seventeen sailors from a Japanese freighter in New York on three-day leave crouched near the juncture of wing and torso, and snapped pictures of the dead beast with Leicas, several murmuring words that sounded like, "Rodan." No one paid them any heed. Several handbills were Hastily pasted onto the leathery hide, announcing the candidacy of Roger Scarpennetti for Borough President. A vendor of socks (seconds) pitched his way from tail to beak, and made almost four dollars with his wares. Three agile and rolling-gaited Caughnawaga Indians, those noble descendants of the noblest of noble savages, crossed #th Street heading downtown. They carried lunch pails. They were on their (which they could catch at #nd # Times Square) from the building site construction on Madison and #th, the selfsame construction site toward which four Pelham Privateers (behind the point scouting of the redoubtable Vimmy) at this moment were streaking. The three redskins, highsteel workers of the most loftilypaid species, paused at the corner of #th and Sixth, shifted lunch pails and clucked their tongues almost in unison. "Is that crummy, I ask you!" said Walter Knife-That-GleamsIn-Starlight. "Yeah, first they zap alia the buffalo, bison, whatever the hell they was that they did in, and now this!" The lament was voiced by Teddy Bearclaw. "Goddamn white-eyes," added Sidney G. Nine Fires. "Red man's burden," said Walter. "Is it not a sad pass what our people has come to, that we must erect for these crummy pony soldiers a edifice of such nobility as we are at this precise moment in time erecting," penultimated Teddy. "What the hell is a bison?" asked Sidney G. Nine Fires. Mutual shrugs of confusion led to a prompt exit. Ill '"The Reverend Leroy L. Beal, arriving at the head of the Poke County, Mississippi delegation to the First Annual Congress of the International Evangelical Brotherhood for the Promotion of Christian Love and Low DownPayments, paused, waving his flock to a halt, shaking his head sadly at the vast obstruction blocking the intersection ahead. His second-in-command moved up beside liim. Together they studied the crumpled, strutted, awning-winged apparition. "Well, Leroy, what do you make of it?" the lieutenant inquired. Rev. Beal sighed. "The expenditure of funds and ingenuity that went into constructing this hoax and placing it in our line of march could have supported three indigent families in fair comfort for a period of at least two months," he stated. The two men advanced; Rev. Beal poked at the leathery hide with a finger. "Plastic," he said. "A transparent fraud." "As I see it, Leroy, they intended to suspend the thing from wires and have it buzz us. But apparently the wires broke." "Obviously. Tsk. Sometimes I wonder at the curious picture the opposition seems to entertain of our gullibility. First the whole thing with the sheets over their heads. Now this: rubber pteranosaurs." "So -- what do we do?" "We make ourselves comfortable," the Reverend said. "And wait." As the strains of We Shall Overcome rose on the afternoon air, a party of lobbyists for the All American Society for the Preservation of Property Values gloom of Reilly's Bar and Grille, summoned by the mingled cries of the wounded, the chatter of the spectators, and the exhortations of the cop, still in search of a recipient for the summons. The group blinked at the scene, noting the size and placement of the reptile with eyes accustomed to lightning assessment. "By George, Charlie," the Head lobbyist said, around a cigar, "you couldn't replace that thing for under twenty-eight-five or I'm a baboon's nephew." Charlie was staring at the singers grouped by the monster's stem. "Tell me there's no Commie money behind them Nigras," he murmured. Lilya looked at her watch for the thirty-first time. Ten more minutes and not a second more, and then by God she'd take a cab to Schrafft's and order the expensivist item on the menu and if that skin-disease Melville ever dared to show that collection of acne scars he called a face again -- tiOorry, lady," the man with  the leather jacket said, not looking at Lilya as he bellied her aside. He planted his feet and looked the project over, from beak to tail-tip and back to beak. "Hey, Jake," a wiry man in overalls said. "You want I should get the rig in position?" "Nix," Jake said succinctly. "Right," the wiry man said. "This is outta our line -- " Jake whirled and grabbed a handful of the wiry man's overall bib. "There ain't no wrecking joK Ajax Wrecking can't handle and dontcha forget it," He growled. "Hold the headacKe ball. Tell the boys to break out the chain saws." "Sure, Jake. Only you got aholt of the hair on my cKest -- " "Twenny minutes, that's wh'at the dude said. I don't want to see nothing but hip pockets and elbows until we got this intersection clear, get me?" A husband and 'vife team, tourists from Joplin, Missouri, making one of their rare p.a.'s in the apple, stood near the forearm and mete carpus of the dead beast, the husband setting the automatic timer on his camera. Then he strolled nonchalantly to his spouse (indicating his ease and familiarity with matters photographic), struck an attitude, and waited, smiling, till the camera had clicked them off. "Do we have time to make it down to the Village for some shots with hippies, before dinner?" the wife asked. Her husband's answer was lost on the wind as the mayor's helicopter settled in the center of Sixth Avenue, just above #th Street. The riot police jog-trotted around the corner of #th and Sixth and began breaking up into assault teams. "Careful of that Mace!" Captain Schirmer bellowed through the bullhorn. Snipers in office windows began firing at streetlights. "All right, move it out!" shouted Captain Schirmer. The first wave of riot police lobbed their tear gas grenades, and began spraying high pressure Hoses down the Avenue. The rabbinical students fled, still uncertain whether the pteranodon was kosher or trayt -- but dead certain the eggs were edible if the proper bruchah was said over them. The rescue squads at last pulled the last of the survivors out from under the dead beast and carried them away from the line of combat. Kiley was trapped at the neck of the creature, still trying to yank loose the golden amulet. He was cut off from escape by the insurrecting Columbia Law students and Black Panther Freedom Party members on the eastern flank, by the riot police using Mace and leadweighted truncheons on the west, by the joughneck warriors of the Ajax Wrecking Corporation (all cxSeabees) on the North, and by the advancing wave of members of the Amalgamated Butchers and Meat Hackers Local ## on the South. He crouched down all the way, hoping to go unseen, and continued yanking at the circle of gold. TV T ore police on horseback clogged the scene, trying to aid their beat partner in establishing to whom the corpse in the street belonged. The ticket was witten, it merely needed to be served. Three hookers began working the uptown side of # th Street, hoping some of the show biz crowd would stick to their fingers, or other portions of their anatomy. "Oh!" cried Alice, awakening, "apparently it is all a dream!" "You're under arrest," said the cop with the ticket, to no one in particular. He said it again, softer, but no one paid any attention. Lilya cursewished plagues of gnats and nits on the acne-pocked head of Melville and stalked off down the Avenue, passing the hip-girdle of the pteranodon, failing to look down where she would have seen her much cursed Melville, much more crushed than cursed. Near the hind limbs of the dead beast twelve members of The Pelham Privateers now worked diligently trying to get the beast erect so its hubcaps could be stolen. The pneumatic jacks they had installed merely sank into the flesh of the beast. Big Louis Morono, seeing the gang at work, whistled up his men and, using the high pressure hoses, drove the juvies from the scene. Even as they fled, the Pelham Privateers indicated their frustration at having been thwarted. They mugged Trenchard and Goilvey where they stood, leaving the two tottering scientists even more tottered: face-down in the gutter, arguing through split lips and cracked teeth, "It's too big to be a pterodactyl from our past... it has to be from the past, you twit... no, it's from another planet... don't be an ass, they don't have pterodactyls on any planet in our solar system... so it came from another solar system... how did it get here... that's not my problem..." Will Kiley struggled with the golden amulet. And at that precise moment, the parallel worlds, having reached the apogee of their pendulum svings, and having started back toward the point at which they touched originally (for the first time in fifty-six years), met... perigee... merged... And Will Kiley, tightly attached to the focal point of the two worlds' merging -- the golden amulet -- found himself poof! Gone. Vanished. In the intersection of #th Street and Sixth Avenue, the mob was cleared away, and the Ajax Wreckers joined with their working-class comrades, of the Amalgamated Butchers and Meat Hackers Local ##, to rid the streets of the unsightly corpse of a flying reptile that had dropped from no one knew where... and no one seemed to very much care. Meanwhile, back at the tangential meeting-place of the parallel worlds... IV "T Tery much like a dead ibari,  the man fell out of the sky at X.O.-j-# of a Bluemom, fell howling, arms and legs all a-tumble, landing squarely in the mossand-metal center of the Religious Icon of Nerf, in Avuncular Square. Two leathery-winged residents flapped over to the gigantic creature and stared at it. "Did it fly?" said the first, scratching its osseous crest with a wingtip finger. "Or did it merely fall?" "Big, isn't it?" commented the second. "Much bigger than whatchamacallit, men, are supposed to be. And heavier. I wonder, is it edible?" "Ah-ha, not is it edible," interjected one of the dietary priests of Nerf, "but is it hazzil! That's the question!" The eyes are blue, that means it can't be a hazzill" "But it has a nose. It must be hazzil!" A Proctor descended on the scene and extracted its demerit book from its wingtip-pouch with the fingertip of its other wing. "Okay, who owns this myth?" "What's a Teeny Slut?" asked the dietary priest of Nerf. But no one seemed to know. And no one seemed to very much care. for your informatiori A nd David, the King, having heard the reports of the messengers called for his scribe so that he might send a letter to his commander in the field. The year, in round figures, is # B.C., and we are informed in II Samuel #:#-# that the king's recorder was Jehoshaphat, the son of Ahilud, while the scribe was a man named Seraiah'. Unfortunately nothing is said about how the letter was written. We may take it for granted that the scribe wrote down what the king dictated, but it would be nice if we were also told just how he did his job. I do not mean the language; that probably was some early form of Aramaic. Nor do I care what letters he employed, though it can also be taken for granted that it was already alphabetical writing. What I want to know is what he wrote on and what he used for writing. We have to guess about this, though the guess has a rather high' probability. If the story of David's letters had been written by Homer, about two centuries later, it would have taken a few more lines but we would know every detail for it would read about as follows: Quickly Seraiah the scribe (the name of his father is unknown) Mounted the terrace well screened from Helios's rays that are burning. Carrying with him a bundle of dried reeds, prepared for writing. Also he brought with him inkstones, some red as the sky looks at sunset. Others as black as the night at the time when white Selene fails to Lighten the darkness. The inkstones were fashioned with' skill by Simon, Weaver by trade is he, yet skillful in dyeing the cloth he has woven. Also the scribe carried some water for softening inkstones with rags dipp'd Into the fluid; and sheets of papyrus from Egypt he carried. Almost as costly as gold, when weighed for trading... f course I have put all the available information about the scribe's trade, as carried out in the areas of Egypt, Syria and Palestine into these pseudo-Homeric lines. The inkstones (also called ink cakes) were made of lampblack and some gummy substance for black, or of iron oxides and a similar substance for red. They were then permitted to dry out for easier handling, which is the reason why the scribe had to carry, as clearly shown on some Egyptian monuments, a small water bucket with a few .rags for moistening the surface of the inkstone. The pen was a dried reed, cut obliquely at one end. The resulting broad point was then frayed, so that the scribe's pen was about the same as the felt tip marker of our time. This is the equipment Seraiah must have had with him; but the conclusion that he wrote on papyrus is mainly based on the reasoning that he was the king's scribe and that papyrus was expensive. In reality he might have written on leather; there is an old wall painting dating back to the eighth century B.C. that shows two Assyrian scribes: one writes on what is obviously a clay tablet while the other holds some flexible material, probably leather. The painting shows the two principles of writing: by impression into the writing surface and by making colored marks on a writing surface that is not altered otherwise. But before we go into this important distinction of the two possible methods of writing, let us say what can be said about papyrus which has been the main writing surface for several thousands of years. We have only one account of how pap#mis was made, written by Pliny the Elder during the first century after Christ. Unfortunately Pliny's account is second hand, he had not observed the process itself. What he said is, therefore, incomplete in various ways, and his words could hardly be used as a guideline for duplicating the feat of the ancient Egyptian craftsmen. 'he reed, Pliny informs us, was first cut lengthwise into thin slices. Since the papyrus reed, the Cypents papyrus of the botanFig. I. Portion of a wall painting from Tell Ahmar, early eighth century B.C. The scribe at right obviously is inscribing a clay tablet, but the one at left holds a flexible moterial, probably leather. ists, grows anywhere from three to ten feet tall it must have been chopped into sections before it could be sliced lengthwise. Of course the sections from the center of the reed are the widest, so the papyrus made from center sections was most valuable. The sections were laid side by side on some backing until the area covered had reached a certain width, about one foot. Then a second layer of such sections was placed on top of the first, at a right angle to it. Then the two were somehow pressed together. Pliny's informant stated that prior to this they are moistened by Nile water: and Pliny concluded that Nile water, when muddy, must act like a glue. We now know that Nile water whether muddy or clear, does no sucK thing Very likely the papyrus makers added glue of some kind about which they kept quiet. The squares of papyrus were then joined together to make a "scroll" that, as a rule, was about # feet long. Longer rolls grew too bulky and were hard to handle. This, surprising as it may be to many, is the reason why a number of books of the Old Testament (like Samuel, Kings and Chronicles) are now in two sections. Written in Hebrew which writes consonants only, each of these books just about filled one scroll, but when translated into Greek, which does write the vowels, and has many of their,, the books took up two scrolls. Of course an "ink" consisting of lampblack and a water-soluble glue would not cling to the papyrus very well. Writing could easily be washed off a papyrus scroll -- something that was considered desirable because the scroll could then be used over again. Papyrus, as has been mentioned, was expensive. It evidently had been invented originally because there was no other convenient writing material available. But what was, or could have been, used before papyrus Well -- slabs of stone, slabs of wood, the inner side of large pieces of tree bark, possibly the large hard leaves of some subtropical plants. Just the listing of these objects suggests that the writing must have been of the "incised" variety, regardless of whether pictographs or actual letters were used. In each case the picture or the inscription had to be chiseled into the stone, c irved into the wood or the bark or scratched into the hard leaf. It is logical, keeping this background in mind, that the Sumerians and Assyrians took this kind of making marks for granted, even though they used prepared writing surfaces, namely clay tablets. The writing instrument was a metal stylus that was pressed into the soft clay. And the marks they made, because of the materials used, assumed the typical shape we call cuneiform. When in high school I was informed that the use of clay tablets had the additional advantage that they could be made into permanent records by "firing" I When it comes to tree bark one Is opt to think of burning the inscription into it with a red-hot piece of metal; but in ancient times nobody seems to have had that idea. tKem in a potter's kiln. Now we know that this was not done. They were simply sundried. The "fired" tablets we have in our museums owe their nature to later and absolutely unwanted conflagrations which they survived.  nother writing material for (incised) writing was sheet metal. Gold, silver, copper and lead are all soft metals which will accept an inscription easily, and it is likely that the earliest such inscriptions were a kind of dedication on a gold or silver vessel given as a present to an important personage. One of the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran is copper. A copper sheet could be rolled into a scroll with not too much effort. Unrolling it thousands of years later is the problem. Leaden scrolls were quite common, too. They have been found both in Italy and in Greece; a Greek translation of Psalm # was found, inscribed on lead, on the Island of Rhodes. There are Punic and Hittite texts on lead, and in the Bible Job (#:#-#) says that he wishes his words were "written with an iron stylus on lead.) Even in Roman times "incised" writing was still common. If somebody sent a petition to the senate, or wrote for posterity, he used papyrus. But if he just wanted to send a message to a friend he employed what is customarily called a "tablet". These tablets were very shallow wooden troughs holding a layer of beeswax. Writing,, hence, was done with a metal stylus by impressing the pointed end of the stylus in the wax. The other end of the stylus was flattened and used to smooth out mistakes. Once the message had become obsolete the tablet was erased simply by heating it until the wax formed a smooth surface again. It very quickly occurred to somebody that the message could be protected by using another tablet as a cover; the two tablets were hinged together, waxed sides inside, by metal rings, the earliest form of a book. By that time papyrus Had found a competitor that was soon to win out because of durability, resistance to water and for several other reasons. It was parchment. For many centuries credit was given to Eumenes II of Pergamum (#-# B.C.) for Having invented parchment; we now know that parchment is older. Eumenes either improved the process or did something else to make parchment more customary. Parchment is animal skin -- sheepskin, goat's skin or the skin of newborn calves -- treated in a special manner to make it smootK and white, by repeated washings, scrapings, stretchings and rubbing with' pumice and with chalk. The best grade of parchment came from newly born lambs; it was labeled vellum. During the latter years of the Roman Empire it became customary for a time to stain vellum purple for greater elegance, and such stained vellum was used for documents of special significance. Meanwhile the Chinese had invented paper. As customary, some Chinese writers claimed that paper was invented very early in their history. More cautious European scholars -- who are not trying to credit some illustrious ancestor -- have settled for the second century B.C. as the probable time of the invention of paper. While the origin of paper in China is somewhat obscure there is no doubt about the introduction of paper in the western countries. In #I A.D., the Arabs occupying Somarkand were attacked by a Chinese army; Samarkand was such an important trading post that everybody wanted to have his hands on it. The Chinese lost, and two of the prisoners taken by the Arabs were skilled paper craft to Arab and Persian artisans. Many paper manuscripts from the ninth century -- usually in Arabic -- are still in existence. Beginning with the eleventh century they became common in Greece and very soon afterwards in the other European countries. TTith the introduction of pa ' per the writing materials became standardized too. The universal writing instrument was the goose quill. Of course there were people who insisted that quills made from peacock feathers were superior. (One writing master who was questioned about the superiority of peacock quills by a prospective pupil replied cautiously that he was only sure they were more expensive.) Somebody, we do not know who or when or where, had invented ink in our sense; he would no doubt have been horrified as well as nonplussed if somebody could have told him in chemical terminology why and liow his ink worked. It works like this: so-called "green vitriol," or ferrous sulphate, is combined with tannin from the galls on leaves of walnut trees. This compound has a weak color, just enough to see what you have written. But upon drying the ferrous salts oxidize into ferric salts, which are black, and then the writing appears distinct and clear. (At a later date a blue dye was added to the ink so that the written lines would show up better immediately. Oxidation then changed the blue letters to black letters.) So the equipment of the "scribe" or student of the fourteenth century was simple: paper, an inkwell, a few goose quills and a small sharp knife for recutting the nibs of the quills when they needed it. When traveling 'the inkwell was replaced by the stoppered ink horn, which must have led to many messy accidents. The accidents, in turn, led to attempts to have the ink inside the pen. Early designs of probably unworkable fountain pens go back to about # A.D. By that time a competitor to pen and ink began to appear: the pencil. It had been the custom of copying monks and baronial bookkeepers all along to use a thin coin-shaped piece of lead to rule the parchment or paper before writing on it. But if a piece of lead, guided by a ruler, could make visible marks on paper, why not use a lead stylus for writing? The marks made by actual lead were too faint to be easily legible, but something had just been brought on the market that went under the name of "Spanish lead," namely graphite. That substance made strong and visible marks especially on paper (less so on vellum). An illustration in the last book of the Swiss physician and naturalist Conrad Gesner shows how the early pencils -- called stylus inieiius -- looked: the "lead" was fairly thick encased in a wooden holder with a center hole. A screw at the end of the pencil seems to indicate that the "lead" could slide inside the wooden holder and was advanced by the screw as it was used up. The book is dated #, and the device seems to have been fairly new then, but it found favor fast. In # Count Johann the Younger of Nassau issued an instruction to the officers of the heavy cavalry saying that "the pens of Spanish lead must not be forgotten, for they are far more useful to riders than ink horn and quills." f T Thile we now use all kinds of ' ' devices, from rubber stamps via pencils, fountain pens and ballpoint pens to typewriters and teletype machines for making marks on paper, paper is virtually the only substance used as a writing surface. Ceremonial inscriptions are still chiseled in stone or cast in bronze, but otherwise it is always that fragile and combustible substance called paper. To give a limited immortality to the thoughts put on a fragile paper we have adopted the biological survival principle of large numbers and successive generations. A book no longer exists in a dozen or so Handwritten copies on durable parchment. It exists in thousands of copies on paper. Then there are reprints of the original book, paperback editions (in tens of thousands of copies) and, at a later date, facsimile reprints and microfilms. Will paper, at some time, be replaced by something else? Probably, but not by something we already know. Thin metal sheets -- for a short time favored in science fiction as printing stock -- are always heavier than paper, square inch for square inch and have other disadvantages, too. Maybe a plastic will come along that does not weigh more than paper, or at least not much' more, a plastic that will not discolor with time and will not be destroyed by fire. Then the chemistry of writing may be changed, too. Instead of adding something to the paper, graphite or a dye, the process of making marks may be to cause a visible chemical change brought about by the chemical interaction vrith the material of the stylus. In saying this I have the everyday forms of writing in mind, like letters, memos, monthly charge statements and related pleasantries. I disregarded such things as information storage in the memory units of a computer. But this brings up the field of electronics and with it the one occasion where a written message cannot be put on paper for transmission; a message to somewhere in space and to someone who, while his intelligence is assumed to be high, could not read a written message simply because he does not know our letters. Dr. Stillman Drake once sent a message to friends. He did Fig. #. Mistaken reading of the interstellar message. Fip, Z. 'e?cing rf the infe'steltcr ressoge. it on paper all right but used only two symbols, representing electric impulses. Since I know that I am slowly running out of space I'll not copy Dr. Drake's fairly long message but make up a shorter example. Here it is, addressed to a fellow creature on Alpha Centaur! A-S. # # # # # ## ## #  # ## #  #  ## ## # #  # # # # # ## #  #  #  #  OH -- t #  The addressee can proceed in one manner only, beginning with counting the pulses. Their total number is #; of this there are # "o" spaces and # "-#-" signs. The ratio of # to # carries no meaning nor does the ratio of either of these two figures to the total. However, the total is the product of two primes, namely # and #; it is not the product of any other two figures. So a rectangle # units wide and # units tall is involved, or else one # units tall and # units wide. Constructing such a rectangle the addressee decides to blacken each square on which afsign falls. The message begins with afsign, meaning that the first corner square must be marked, a logical beginning. But the final result is anything but logical or meaningful -- see Fig. #. (In case anybody wonders: yes, I was quite worried while drawing the illustration that it accidentally might make some sense. Fortunately it didn't.) Well, our extraterrestrial will say, either I don't undcr.itand their meaning, or else the rectangle has to lie on its side instead of standing upright. Trying this construction he finds the top line empty, except that both its ends arc marked, which is logical. And then the pattern becomes clear; three variations on the square of # and, at the bottom, a # followed by its square and its cube. It does not mean much in itself, for obviously people who can squirt short-wave signals into space must be acquainted with squares and cubes and much else besides. But as a mere preliminary message, demonstrating the principle to be used it is fine. The next message then might contain # imits (#I by #), the one after that # units (# by #) and the fourth #I units (# by #), ujing larger and larger primes. A message of #I units (# by #) would contain enough small squares to produce reasonable pwetures and the transmission of ac'.ual information could begin. October #, #); Section #. Title #, (United States Code). #. Date of filing ; October #, #. #. Title of Publication: Gailaxy Magazine. #. Frequency of Issue monthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #, #. Location of headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Editor; Frederlk Pohl, #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. Managing Editor: None. T. Owner: Galaxy Publishing Corporation. #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #; Robert M. Guinn (sole stockholder), #I Hudson Street, New York, New York #. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee as acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affisuit's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear on the books of the company as the trusted, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. Names and addressee of individuals who are stockholders of a corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been Included in paragraphs # and # when the Interests of such individuals are equivalent to I percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no, copies each issue during preceding # months #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. B. Paid circulation #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average no, copies each issue during preceding # months: #; Single issue nearest filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date. #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #; Single issue nearest to filing date #. D. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months. #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. L. Total distribution (sum of C and D) : Average no. copies eadi Issue during preceding # months, #. Single issue nearest to filing date, #; F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Average no. apies each issue durmg preceding # months, #; Single issue nearest to filing date, #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown In A); Average no copies each issue during preceding # months, #. Single issue nearest to filing date #. I certify that the statements made by me are correct and complete. Robert M, Guinn, Publisher. If a human corpse vvos. worthiwlfions for spore pdrfs, why was. Jennison's, ecsfasy-shrireled body, still' Jnfact? Illustrated by I n'irst came the routine request for a Breech of Privacy permit. A police officer took down the details and forwarded the request to a clerk, who saw that the tape reached the appropriate civic judge. The judge was reluctant, for privacy is a precious thing in a world of eighteen billion; but in tlie end he could find no reason to refuse. On November #nd, #, he granted the permit. The tenant's rent was two weeks in arrears. If tHe manager of Monica Apartments had asked for eviction he would have been refused. But Owen Jennison just did not answer his doorbell or his room phone. Nobody could recall seeing him in many weeks. Apparently the manager wanted to know that he was all right. And so he was allowed to use his passkey, with an officer standing by. And so they found the tenant of #. And when they looked in his wallet, they called me. Headquarters, making useless notes and wishing it were lunchtime. At this stage the Loren case was all correlate-and-wait. It involved an organlegging gang, apparently run by a single man, yet big enough to cover Half the Nortli American west coast. We had considerable data on the gang -- methods of operation, centers of activity, a few former customers, even a tentative Handful of names -- but nothing that would give us an excuse to act. So it was a matter of shoving what we Had into the computer, watching tHe few suspected associates of the ganglord Loren, and waiting for a break. The months of waiting were ruining my sense of involvement. My phone buzzed. I put the pen down and said, "Gil Hamilton." A small dark face regarded me with soft black eyes. "I am Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz of the Los Angeles Police Department. Are you related to an Owen Jennison?" "Owen? No, we're not related. Is he in trouble?" "You do know him, then." "Sure I know him. Is he here, on Earth?" "It would seem so." Ordaz Had no accent, but the lack of colloquialisms in his speech made him sound vaguely foreign. "We will need positive identification, Mr. Hamilton. Mr. Jennison's ident lists you as next of kin." "That's funny. I... Back in a minute. What's happened? Is Owen dead?" "Somebody is dead, Mr. Hamilton. He carried Mr. Jennison's ident in his wallet." "Okay. Now, Owen Jennison was a citizen of the Belt. This may have interworld complicaness. Where's the body?" "We found him in an apartment rented under his own name. Monica Apartments, Lower Los Angeles, room #." "Good. Don't move anything you haven't moved already. I'll be right over."  yr onica Apartments was a nearly featureless concrete block, eighty stories tall, a thousand feet across the edges of its square base. Lines of small balconies gave the sides a sculptured look, above a forty-foot inset ledge that would keep tenants from dropping objects on pedestrians. A himdred buildings just like it made Lower Los Angeles look lumpy from the air. Inside was a lobby done in anonymous modern. Lots of metal and plastic showing; lightweight, comfortable chairs without arms; big ash trays; plenty of indirect lighting; a low ceiling; no wasted space. The whole room might have been stamped out with a die. It wasn't supposed to look small, but it did, and that warned you what the rooms would look like. I found the manager's office and the manager, a soft-looking man with watery-blue eyes. His conservative paper suit, dark red, seemed chosen to render him invisible, as did the style of his brown hair, worn long and corned straight back without a part. "Nothing like this has ever happened here," he confided as he led me to the elevator banks. "Nothing. It would have been bad enough without his being a Belter, but now -- " He cringed at the thought. "Newsmen. They'll smother us." The elevator was coffin-sized, but with the handrails on the inside. It went up fast and smooth. I stepped out into a long, narrow hallway. What would Owen have been doing in a place like this, Machinery lived here, not people. Maybe it wasn't Owen. Ordaz had been reluctant to commit himself. Besides, there's no law against picking pockets. You couldn't enforce such a law on this crowded planet. Everyone on Earth was a pickpocket. Sure. Someone had died carrying Owen's wallet. I walked down the hallway to #. Tt was Owen who sat grinning in the armchair. I took one good look at him, enough to be sure, and then I looked away and didn't look back. But the rest of it was even more unbelievable. No Belter could have taken that apartment. I was born in Kansas; but even I felt the awhave driven Owen bats. "I don't believe it," I said. "Did you know him well, Mr. Hamilton?" "About as well as two men can know each other. He and I spent three years mining rocks in the main asteroid belt. You don't keep secrets under those conditions." "Yet you didn't know he was on Earth." "That's what I can't understand. Why the blazes didn't He phone me if he was in trouble?" "An operative in the United Nations Police." He had a point. Owen was as honorable as any man I knew; but honor isn't the same in the Belt. Bdters think flatlanders are all crooks. They don't understand that to a flatlander, picking pockets is a game of skill. Yet a Belter sees smuggling as the same kind of game, with no dishonesty involved. He balances the thirty percent tariff against possible confiscation of his cargo, and if the odds are right he gambles. Owen could Have been doing something sticky," I admitted. self over it. And... not here. He wouldn't Have come Here." # was a living room and a bathroom and a closet. I'd glanced into the bathroom, knowing what I would find. It was the size of a comfortable shower stall. An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic, to become a washroom, a shower stall, a toilet, a dressing room, a steam cabinet. Luxurious in everything but size, if you pushed the right buttons. The living room was more of the same. A King bed was invisible behind a wall. The kitchen alcove, with basin and oven and grill and toaster, would fold into another wall; lire sofa, chairs and tables would vanish into the floor. would make a crowded cocktail party, a cosy diimer gathering, a closed poker game. Card table, dinner table, coffee table were all there, surrounded by the appropriate chairs; but only one set St a time would emerge from the floor. There was no refrigerator, no freezer, no bar. If a tenant needed food or drink, he phoned down, and the supermarket on the third floor would send it up. The tenant of such an apartment had his comfort. But he owned nothing. There was room for him; there was none for his possessions. This was one of the inner apartments. An age ago there would have been an air shaft; but air shafts took up expensive room. The tenant didn't even have a window. He lived in a comfortable box. J ust now the items extruded were the overstuffed reading armchair, two small side tables, a footstool, and the kitchen alcove. Owen Jennison sat grinning in the armchair. Naturally he grinned. Little more than dried skin covered the natural grin of his skull. "It's a small room," said Orof people live this way. In any case, a Belter would hardly be a claustrophobe." "No. Owen flew a singleship before he joined us. Three months at a stretch, in a cabin so small you couldn't stand up with the airlock closed. Not claustrophobia, but -- " I swept my arm about the room. "What do you see that's his?" Small as it was, the closet was nearly empty. A set of street clothes, a paper shirt, a pair of shoes, a small brown overnight case. All new. The few items in the bathroom medicine chest had been equally new and equally anonymous. Ordaz said, "Well?" "Belters are transients. They don't own much, but what they do own, they guard. Small possessions, relics, souvenirs. I can't believe he wouldn't have had something." Ordaz lifted an eyebrow. "His space suit?" "You think that's unlikely? It's not. The inside of his pressure suit is a Belter's home. Sometimes it's the only home he's got. He spends a fortune decorating it. If he loses his suit, he' not a Belter any more. "No, I don't insist he'd have brought his suit. But he'd have had something. His phial of marsdust. The bit of nickeliron they took out of his chest. Or, if he left all his souvenirs home, he'd have picked up things on Earth. But in this room -- there's nothing." "Perhaps," Ordaz suggested delicately, "he didn't notice his surroundings." And somehow that brought it all home. O wen Jennison sat grinning in a water-stained silk dressing gown. His space-darkened face lightened abruptly beneath his chin, giving way to normal suntan. His blond hair, too long, had been cut Earth style; no trace remained of the Belter strip cut he'd worn all his life. A month's growth of untended beard covered half his face. A small black cylinder protruded from the top of his head. An electric cord trailed from the top of the cylinder and ran to a small wall socket. The cylinder was a droud, a current addict's transformer. I stepped closer to the corpse and bent to look. The droud was a standard make, but it had been altered. Your standard current addict's droud will pass only a trickle of current into the brain. Owen must have been getting ten times the usual charge, easily enough to damage his brain in a month's time. I reached out and touched the droud with my imaginary hand. Ordaz was standing quietly beside me, letting me make my examination without interruption. Naturally he had no way of knowing about my restricted psi powers. Restricted was the operative word. I had two psychic powers: telekinesis and esper. With the esper sense I could sense the shapes of objects at a distance; but the distance was the reach of an extra right arm. I could lift small objects, if they were no further away than the fingertips of an imaginary right Hand. The restriction was a flaw in my own imagination. Since I could not believe my imaginary hand would reach further than that... it wouldn't. Even so limited a psi power can be useful. With my imaginary fingertips I touched the droud in Owen's head, then ran them down to a tiny hole in his scalp, and further. It was a standard surgical job. Owen could have had it done anywhere. A hole in his scalp, invisible under the hair, nearly impossible to find even if you knew what you were looking for. Even your best friends wouldn't know, unless they caught you with the droud plugged in. But the tiny hole marked a bigger plug set in the bone of the skull. I touched the ecstasy plug with my imaginary fingertips, then ran them down the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen's brain, down into the pleasure center. No, the extra current hadn't killed him. What had killed Owen was his lack of will power. T T e had starved to death sitting in that chair. There were plastic squeezebottles all around his feet and a couple still on the end table. All empty. They must have been full a month ago. Owen hadn't died of thirst. He had died of starvation, and his death had been planned. Owen my crewmate. Why hadn't he come to me? I'm half a Belter myself. Whatever his trouble, I'd have gotten him out somehow. A little smuggling -- what of it? Why had he arranged to tell me only after it was over? The apartment was so clean; so clean. You had to bend close to smeU the death; the air conditioning whisked it all away. He'd been very methodical. The kitchen was open so that a catheter could lead from Owen to the sink. He'd given himself enough water to last out the month ; he'd paid his rent a month in advance. He'd cut the droud cord by hand, and he'd cut it short, deliberately tethering himself to a wall socket beyond reach of the kitchen. A complex way to die, but rewarding in its way. A month of ecstasy, a month of the highest physical pleasure man can attain. I could imagine him giggling every time he remembered he was starving to death. With food only a few footsteps away... but he'd have to pull out the droud to reach it. Perhaps he postponed the decision, and postponed it again... Owen and I and Homer Chandrasekhar, we had lived for three years in a cramped shell surrounded by vacuum. What was there to know about Owen Jennison that I hadn't known? Where was the weakness we did not share? If Owen had done this, so could I. And I was afraid. tfrery neat," I whispered.  "Belter neat." "Typically Belter, would you say?" "I would not. Belters don't commit suicide. Certainly not this way. If a Belter had to go, he'd blow his ship's drive and die like a star. The neatness is typical. The result isn't." "Well," said Ordaz. "Well." He was uncomfortable. The facts spoke for themselves, yet he was reluctant to call me a liar. He fell back on formality. "Mr. Hamilton, do you identify this man as Owen Jennison?" "It's him." He'd always been a touch overweight, yet I'd recognized him the moment I saw him. "But let's be sure." I pulled the dirty dressing gown back from Owen's shoulder. A nearperfect circle of scar tissue, eight inches across, spread over the left side of his chest. "See that?" "We noticed it, yes. An old burn?" "Owen's the only man I know who could show you a meteor scar on his skin. It blasted him in the shoulder one day while he was outside the ship. Sprayed vaporized pressure-suit steel all over his skin. The doc pulled a tiny grain of nickle-iron from the center of the scar, just below the skin. Owen always carried that grain of nickel-iron. Always," I said, looking at Ordaz. "We didn't find it." "Okay." "I'm sorry to put you through this, Mr. Hamilton. It was you who insisted we leave the body in situ." "Yes. Thank you." Owen grinned at me from the reading chair. I felt the pain, in my throat and in the pit of my stomach. Once I had lost my right arm. Losing Owen felt the same way. "I'd like to know more about this," I said. "Will you let me know the details as soon as you get them?" office?" business, despite what I'd told help. "I want to know why Owen died. Maybe he just cracked up... culture shock or something. But if someone hounded him to death, I'll have his blood." "Surely the administration of justice is better left to -- " Ordaz stopped, confused. Did I I left him wondering. 'he lobby held a scattering of tenants entering and leaving elevators or just sitting around. I stood outside the elevator for a moment, searching passing faces for the erosion of personality that must be there. Mass-produced comfort. Room to sleep and eat and watch tridee, but no room to be anyone. Living here, one would own nothing. What kind of people would live like that? They should have looked all alike, moved in unison, like the string of images in a barber's mirrors. Then I spotted wavy brown hair and a dark red paper suit. The manager? I had to get close before I was sure. His face was the face of a permanent stranger. He saw me coming and smiled without enthusiasm. "Oh, hello, Mr... uh... Did you find... " He couldn't think of the right question. "Yes," I said, answering it anyway. "But I'd like to know some things. Owen Jennison lived here for six weeks, right?" "Six weeks and two days, before we opened his room." "Did he ever have visitors?" The man's eyebrows went up. We'd drifted in the direction of his office, and I was close enough to read the name on the door: "Of course not," he said. "Anyone would have noticed that something was wrong." "You mean he took the room for the express purpose of dying? You saw him once, and never again?" "I suppose he might... no, wait." The manager thought deeply. "No. He registered on a Thursday. I noticed the Belter tan, of course. Then on Friday he went out. I happened to see him pass." "Was that the day he got the droud? No, skip it, you wouldn't know that. Was it the last time you saw him go out?" "Yes, it was." "Then he could have Kad visitors late Thursday or early Friday." 'he manager shook his head, very positively. "Why not?" "You see, Mr... uH... " "Hamilton." "We have a holo camera on every floor, Mr. Hamilton. It takes a picture of each tenant the first time he goes to his room, and then never again. Privacy is one of the services a tenant buys with his room." The manager drew himself up a little as he said this. "For the same reason, the holocamera takes a picture of anyone who is not a tenant. The tenants are thus protected from unwarranted intrusions." "And there were no visitors to any of the rooms on Owen's floor?" "No, sir, there were not." "Your tenants are a solitary bunch." "Perhaps they are." "I suppose a computer in the basement decides who is and is not a tenant." "Of course." "So for six weeks Owen Jennison sat alone in his room. In all that time he was totally ignored." Miller tried to turn his voice cold, but he was too nervous. "We try to give our guests privacy. If Mr. Jennison had wanted help of any kind he had only to pick up the house phone. He could have called me, or the pharmacy, or the supermarket downstairs." "Well, thank you, Mr. Miller. That's all I wanted to know. I wanted to know how Owen Jennison could wait six weeks to die while nobody noticed." Miller swallowed. "He was dying all that time?" "Yah." "We had no way of knowing. How could we? I don't see how you can blame us." "I don't either," I said, and brushed by. Miller had been close enough, so I had lashed out at him. Now I was ashamed. The man was perfectly right. Owen could have had help if he'd wanted it. I stood outside, looking up at the jagged blue line of sky that showed between the tops of the buildings. A taxi floated into view, and I beeped my clicker at it, and it dropped. ters. Not to work -- I could not have done any work, not under the circumstances -- but to talk to Julie. Julie. A tall girl, pushing thirty, with green eyes and long hair streaked red and gold. And two wide brown forceps marks above her right knee; but they weren't showing now. I looked into her office, through the one-way glass, and watched her at work. She sat in a contour coucH, smoking. Her eyes were closed. Sometimes her brow would furrow as she concentrated. Sometimes she would snatch a glance at the clock, then close her eyes again. I didn't interrupt her. I knew the importance of what she was doing. Julie. She wasn't beautiful. Her eyes were a little too far apart, her chin too square, her mouth too wide. It didn't matter. Because Julie could read minds. She was the ideal date. She was everything a man needed. A year ago, the day after the night I killed my first man, I had been in a terribly destructive mood. Somehow Julie had turned it into a mood of manic exhileration. We'd run wild through a supervised anarchy park, running up an enormous bill. We'd hiked five miles without going anywhere, facing backward on a downtown slidewalk. At the end we'd been utterly fatigued, too tired to think... But two weeks ago it had been a warm, cuddly, comfortable night. Two people happy with each other; no more than that. Julie was what you needed, anytime, anywhere. Her male harem must have been the largest in history. To pick up on the thoughts of a love with him. Luckily there was room in her for a lot of love. She didn't demand that we be faithful. A good half of us were married. But there had to be love for each of Julie's men, or Julie couldn't protect him. She was protecting us now. Each fifteen minutes, Julie was making contact with a specific riously undependable, but Julie was an exception. If we got in a hole, Julie was always there to get us out... provided some idiot didn't interrupt her at work. So I stood outside, waiting, with a cigarette in my imaginary hand. T he cigarette was for practice, to stretch the mental muscles. In its way my "hand" was as dependable as Julie's mindtouch, possibly because of its very limitations. Doubt your psi powers and they're gone. A rigidly defined third arm was more reasonable than some warlock ability to make objects move by wishing at them. I knew how an arm felt, and what it would do. Why do I spend so much time lifting cogarettes? Well, it's the biggest weight I can lift without strain. And there's another reason... something taught me by Owen. At ten minutes to fifteen, Julie opened her eyes, rolled out of the contour coucH and came to the door. "Hi, Gil," she said sleepily. "Trouble?" "Yali. A friend of mine just died. I thought you'd better knovf," I handed her a cup of coffee. She noddedWe had a date tonight, and this would change its character. Knowing that, she probed lightly. "My God!" she said, recoiling. "How... how horrible. I'm terribly sorry, Gil. Date's off, right?" "Unless you want to join the ceremonial drunk." She shook her head vigorously. "I didn't know him. It wouldn't be proper. Besides, you'll be wallowing in your own memories, Gil. A lot of them will be private. I'd cramp your style if you knew I was there to probe. Now if Phii Chandrasekhar were here, it'd be different." "I wish he were. He'll have to throw his own drunk. Maybe with some of Owen's girls, if they're around." "You know what I feel," she said. "Just what I do." "I wish I could help." "You always help." I glanced at the clock. "Your coffee break's about over." "Slave driver." Julie took my earlobe between thumb and forefinger. "Do him proud," she said, and went back to her soundproof room. She always helps. She doesn't even have to speak. Just knowing that Julie has read my thoughts, that someone under- stands... that's enough. A #I alone at three in the afternoon, I started my ceremonial drunk. The ceremonial drunk is a young custom, not yet tied down by formality. There is no set duration. No specific toasts must be given. Those wHo participate must be close friends of the deceased. but there is no set number of participants. I started at the Luau, a place of cool blue light and running water Outside it was fifteenthirty in the afternoon, but inside it was evening in the Hawaiian Islands of centuries ago. Already the place was half full. I picked a corner table with considerable elbow room and dialed for a Luau Grog. It came, cold, brown and alcoholic, its straw tucked into a cone of ice. There had been three of us at Cubes Forsythe's cererronial drunk, one black Cores night four years ago. A sorry group we were, too; Owen and me and the widow of our third crewman. Gwen Forsythe blamed us for her husband's death. I was just out of the hospital with a right arm that ended at the shoulder, and I blamed Cubes and Owen and myself, all at once. Even Owen had turned dour and introspective. We couldn't Have picked a worse trio, or a worse night for it if we'd tried. But custom called, and we were tfiere. Then as now, I found myself probing my own personality for the wound that was missing crewman, a missing friend. Introspecting. Gilbert Hamilton. Bom of flatlander parents, in April, #, in Topeka, Kansas. Bom with two arms and no sign of wild talents. Flatlander: a Belter term referring to Earthmen, and particularly to Earthmen wKo had never seen space. I'm not sure my parents ever looked at the stars. They managed the third largest farm in Kansas, ten square miles of arable land between two wide strips of city paralleling two strips of turnpike. We were city people, like all flatlanders, but when the crowds got to be too much for my brothers and me, we had vast stretches of land to be alone in. Ten square miles of playground, with nothing to hamper us but the crops and automachinery. We looked at the stars, my brothers and I. You couldn't see stars from the city; the lights hide them. Even in the fields you couldn't see them around the lighted horizon. But straight overhead, they were there: black sky scattered with bright dots, and sometimes a flat tdiite moon.  t twenty I gave up my UN citizenship to become a Belter. I wanted stars, and the Belt government holds title to most of the solar system. There are fabulous riches in the rocks, riches belonging to a scattered civilization of a few hundred thousand Belters; and I wanted my share of that, too. It wasn't easy. I wouldn't be eligible for a singleship license for ten years. Meanwhile I would be working for others and learning to avoid mistakes before they killed me. Half the flatlanders who join the Belt die in space bebore they can earn their licenses. I mined tin on Mercury and exotic chemicals from Jupiter's atmosphere. I hauled ice from Saturn's rings and quicksilver from Europa. One year our pilot made a mistake pulling up to a new rock, and we damn near had to walk home. Cubes Fors # rthe was with us then. He managed to fix the com laser and aim it at Icarus to bring us help. Another time the mechanic who did the maintenance job on our ship forgot to replace an absorber, and we all got roaring .drunk on the alcohol that built up in our breathing-air. The three of us caught the mechanic six months later. I hear he lived. Most of the time I was part of a three-man crew. The members changed constantly. When Owen Jennison joined us he replaced a man who had finally earned his singleship license and couldn't wait to start hunting rocks on his own. He was too eager. I learned later that he'd made one round trip and half of another. Owen was my age, but more experienced, a Belter born and bred. His blue eyes and blond cockatoo's crest were startling against the dark of his Belter tan, the tan that ended so abruptly where his neck ring cut off the space-intense sunlight his helmet let through. He was permanently chubby, but in free fall it was as if he'd been bom with wings. I took to copying his way of moving, much to Cubes' amusement. I didn't make my own mistake until I was twenty-six. We were using bombs to put a rock in a new orbit. A contract job. The technique is older than fusion drives, as old as early Belt colonization, and it's still cheaper and faster than using a ship's drive to tow the rock. You use industrial fusion bombs small and clean, and you get them so that each explosion deepens the crater to channel the force of later blasts. We'd set four blasts already, four white fireballs that swelled and faded as they rose. When the fifth blast went off we were hovering nearby on the other side of the rock. The fifth blast shattered the rock. Cubes had set the bomb. My own mistake was a shared one, because any of the three of us should have had the sense to take off right then. Instead, we watched, cursing, as valuable oxygenbearing rock became near-valueless shards. We watched the shards spread slowly into a cloud... and while we watched, one fast-moving shard reached us. Moving too slowly to vaporize when it hit, it nonetheless sheered through a triple crystal-iron hull, slashed through my upper arm, and pinned Cubes Forsythe to a wall by his own heart. IV  couple of nudists came in. They stood blinking among the booths while their eyes adjusted to the blue twilight, then converged with glad cries on the group two tables over. I watched and listened with an eye and an ear, thinking how different flatlander nudists were from Belter nudists. These all looked alike. They all had muscles, they had no interesting scars, they carried their credit cards in identical shoulder pouches, and they all shaved the same areas... We always went nudist in the big bases. Most people did. It was a natiiral reaction to tKe pressure suits we wore day and night while out in the rocks. Get him into a shortsleeve environment, and your normal Belter sneers at a shirt. But it's only for comfort. Give him a good reason, and your Belter will don shirt and pants as quickly as the next guy. But not Owen. After he got that meteor scar, I never saw him wear a shirt. Not just in the Ceres domes, but anywhere there was air to breath. He just had to show that scar. A cool blue mood settled on me, and I remembered... ,... Owen Jennison lounging on a corner of my hospital bed, telling me of the trip back. I could not remember anything after that rock sheered through my arm. I should have bled to death in seconds. Owen hadn't given me the chance. The wound was ragged; Owen had sliced it clean to the shoulder with one swipe of a com laser. Then he'd tied a length of fiberglass curtain over the flat surface and knotted it tight under my remaining armpit. He told me about putting me under two atmospheres of pure oxygen as a substitute for replacing the blood I'd lost. He told me how he'd reset the fusion drive for four gees to get me back in time. By rights we should have gone up in a cloud of starfire and glory. "So there goes my reputation. The whole Belt knows how I rewired our drive. A lot of 'em figure if I'm stupid enough to risk my own life like that, I'd risk theirs too." "So you're not safe to travel with." "Just so. They're starting to call me Four Gee Jeimison." "You think you've got problems? I can just see how it'll be when I get back to this bed. 'You do something stupid, GU?' The hell of it is, it was stupid." "So lie a Httle." "Uh huh. Can we sell the ship?" "Nope. Gwen inherited a third interest in it from Cubes. She won't sell." "Then we're effectively broke." "Except for the ship. We need another crevwnan." "Correction. You need two crewmen. Unless you want to fly with a one-armed man. I can't afford a transplant." wen hadn't tried to offer me a loan. That would have been insulting, even if he'd Had the money. "What's wrong with a prosthetic?" "An iron arm? Sorry, no." Owen had looked at me strangely, but all he'd said was, "Well, we'll wait a bit. Maybe you'll change your mind." He Hadn't pressured me. Not then, and not later, after I'd left tKe Hospital and taken an apartment wKile I waited to get used to a missing arm. If He tHought I would eventually settle for a prostHetic, He was mistaken. WHy? It's not a question I can answer. OtHers obviously feel people walking around witE metal and plastic and silicone parts. Part man, part machine, and How do they tKemselves know wHicH is tfie real person? I'd ratKer be dead tKan part metal. Call it a quirk. Call it, even, tHe same quirk tKat makes my skin crawl when I find a place like Monica Apartments. A Human being should be all Human. He should Have Habits and possessions peculiarly His own. He should not try to look like or to behave like anyone but Himself. So tfiere I was, Gil tHe Arm, learning to eat witH my left Hand. An amputee never entirely loses what He's lost. My missing fingers itched. I moved to keep from barking my missing elbow on sharp comers. I reached for things, then swore when they did not come. Owen Had Hung around, tKougH His own emergency funds must Have been running low. I Hadn't offered to sell my third of tHe ship, and He Hadn't asked. 'There Had been a girl. Now I'd forgotten Her name. One night I was at Her place waiting for Her to get dressed -- a dinner date -- and I'd Happened to see a nail file she'd left on a table. I'd picked it up. I'd almost tried to file my nails, but remembered in time. Irritated, I Had tossed the file back on the table -- and missed. Like an idiot I'd tried to catcH it with my right Hand. And I'd caught it. I'd never suspected myself of Having psycHic powers. You Have to be in the right frame of mind to use a psi power. But wHo Had ever Had a better opportunity than I did that night, witK a whole section of brain tuned to the nerves and muscles of my right arm, and no right arm? I'd Held the nail file in my imaginary Hand. I'd felt it, just as I'd felt my missing fingernails getting too long. I Had run my thumb along the rough steel surface; I Had turned the file in my fingers. Telekinesis for lift, esper for toucH. "That's it," Owen Bad said tKe next day. "Tfiat's all we need. One crewman, and you witH your eldricH powers. You practice, see How strong you can get that lift. I'll go find a sucker." "He'll Have to settle for a sixth of net. Cubes' widow will want Her share." "Don't worry. I'll swing it." "Don't worry!" I'd waved a pencil stub at him. Even in Ceres' gentte gravity, it was as much as I could lift -- then. "You don't think TK and esper can make do for a real arm, do you?" "It's better than a real arm. You'll see. You'll be able to reach through your suit with it without losing pressure. What Belter can do that?" "Sure." "What the hell do you want, GM? Someone should give you your arm back? You can't have tiiat You lost it fair and square, through stupidity. Now it's your choice. Do you fly with an imaginary arm, or do you go back to Earth?" "I can't go back. I don't Have the fare." "Well?" "Okay, okay. Go find us a crewman. Someone I can impress with my imaginary arm." T sucked meditatively on a second Luau grog. By now all the booths were full, and a second layer was forming around the bar. The voices made a continuous hypnotic uproar. CocktaM hour had arrived... He'd swung it, all right. On the strength of my imaginary arm, Owen had talked a kid named Homer Crandrasekhar into joining our crew. He'd been right about my arm, too. Others with similar senses can reach further, up to halfway around the world. My unfortun ately literal imagination had re stricted me to a physic hand. But my esper fingertips were more sensitive, more dependable. I could lift more weight. Today, in Earth's gravity, I can lift a full shot glass. I foimd I could reach through a cabin wall to feel for breaks in the circuits behind it. In vacuum I could brush dust from the outside of my faceplate. In port I did magic tricks. I'd almost ceased to feel like a cripple. It was all due to Owen. In six months of mining I had paid off my hospital bills and earned my fare back to Earth', with a comfortable stake left over. "Finagle's Black Humor!" Owen had exploded when I told him. "Of all places, why Earth?" "Because if I can get my UN citizenship back. Earth will replace my arm. Free." "Oh. That's true," he'd said dubiously. The belt had organ banks too, but they were always imdersupplied. Belters didn't give things away. Neither did the Belt government. They kept the prices on transplants as high as they would go. Thus they dropped the demand to meet the supply, and tfiat kept taxes down, to boot. In the Belt I'd have had to buy my own arm. And I didn't Have the money. On Earth there was social security and a vast pupply of transplant material. What Owen had said couldn't be done, I'd done. I'd found someone to hand me my arm back. Sometimes I'd wondered if Owen held the choice against me. He'd never said anything, but Homer Chandrasekhar had spoken at length. A Belter would Have earned his arm or done without. Never would he have accepted charity. Was that why Owen Hadn't tried to call me? I shook my head. I didn't believe it. 'he room continued to lurch  after my head stopped shaking. I'd had enough for the moment. I finished my third grog and ordered dinner. Dinner sobered me for the next lap. It was something of a shock to realize that I'd run through the entire lifespan of my friendship with Owen Jennison. I'd known him for three years, though it had seemed like half a lifetime. And it was. Half my six-year lifespan as a Belter. I ordered coffee grog and watched the man pour it: Hot, milky coffee laced with cinnamon and other spices, and High-proof rum poured in a stream of blue fire. This was one of the special drinks served by a Human Headwaiter, and it was the reason they kept him around. Phase two of the ceremonial drunk: blow half your fortune, in the grand manner. But I called Ordaz before I touched the drink. "I won't keep you long. Have you found out ansthing new?" Ordaz took a closer look at my phone image. His disapproval was plain. "I see that you Have been drinking. Perhaps you should go home now, and call me tomorrow." I was shocked. "Don't you know anything about Belt customs?" "I do not understand." I explained the ceremonial drunk. "Look, Ordaz, if you know that little about the way a Belter thinks, then we'd better Have a talk. Soon. Otherwise you're likely to miss something." "You may be right. I can see you at noon, over lunch." "Good. What Have you got?" "Considerable, but none of it is very helpful. Your friend landed on Earth two months ago, arriving on the Pillar of Fire, operating out of Outback Field, Australia. He was wearing a haircut in the style of Earth. From there -- " Ct'hat's funny. He'd have had  to wait two months for His hair to grow out." "That occurred even to me. I understand that a Belter commonly shaves his entire scalp, except for a strip two inches wide running from the nape of His neck forward." "The strip cut, yah. It probably started when someone decided he's live longer if his Hair couldn't fall in his eyes during a tricky landing. But Owen could have let his hair grow out during a singleship mining trip. Tha:e'd be nobody to see." Still, it seems odd. Did you know that Mr. Jennison Had a cousin on Earth? One Harvey Peele, who manages a chain of supermarkets." "So I wasn't his next of kin, even on Earth." "Mr. Jennison made no attempt to contact him." "Ansdhing else? "I've spoken to the man who sold Mr. Jennison his droud and plug. Kenneth Graham owns an office and operating room on Gayley in Near West Los Angeles. Graham claims that the droud was a standard type, that your friend must have altered it himself." "Do you believe him?" "For the present. His permits and his records are all in order. The droud was altered with a soldering iron, just an amateur's tool." "uh huh." "As far as the police are concerned, the case will probably be closed when we locate the tools Mr. Jennison used." "Tell you what. I'll wire Homer Chandrasekhar tomorrow. Maybe He can find out things -- why Owen landed without a strip haircut, why he came to Earth at all." Ordaz shrugged with his eyebrows. He thanked me for my trouble and Hiuig up. The coffee grog was still hot. I gulped at it, savoring the sugary, bittery sting of it, trying to forget Owen dead and remember him in life. He was always slightly chubby, I remembered, but He never gained a pound and he never lost a pound. He could move like a whippet when he had to. And now he was terribly thin, and his death-grin was ripe with obscene joy. I ordered another coffee grog. The waiter, a showman, made sure he had my attention before he lit the heated nun, then poured from a foot above the glass. You can't drink that drink slowly. It slides down too easily, and there's the added spur that if you wait too long it might get cold. Rum and strong coffee. Two of these and I'd be drunkenly alert for hours. lidnigHt found me in tHe Mars bar, running on Scotdi and soda. In between I'd been barhopping Irish coffee at Bergin's, cold and smoking concoctions at the Moon Pool, Scotdi and wild music at Beyond. I couldn't get drunk, and I couldn't find the right mood. There was a barrier to the picture I was trying to rebuild. It was the memory of the last Owen, grinning in an armchair with a wire leading down into his brain. I didn't know that Owen. I liad never met the man, and never would have wanted to. From bar to night club to restaurant I had run from the image, waiting for .the alcohol to break the barrier between present and past. So I sat at a comer table, surrounded by #D panoramic views of an impossible Mars. Crystal towers and long, straight blue canals, six-legged beasts and beautiful, impossibly slender men and women, looked out at me across never-never land. Would Owen have found it sad or funny? He'd seen the real Mars, and had not been impressed. I had reached that stage where time becomes discontinuous, where gaps of seconds or minutes appear between the events you can remember. Somewhere in that period I found myself staring at a cigarette. I must Have just lighted it, because it was near its origlength. Maybe a waiter had snuck up behind me. There it was, at, any rate, burning between my middle and index fingers. I stared at the coal as the mood settled on me. I was calm, I was drifting, I was lost in time... "ITe'd been two months in the ' ' rocks, our first trip out since the accident. Back we came to Ceres with a holdful of gold, fifty percent pure, guaranteed suitable for rustproof wiring and conductor plates. At nightfall we were ready to celebrate. We walked along the city limits, with neon blinking and beckoning on the right, a melted rock cliff to the left, and stars blazing through the dome overhead. Homer Chandrasekhar was practically snorting. On this night his first trip out culminated in his first homecoming; and homecoming is the best part. "We'll want to split up about midnight," he said. He didn't need to enlarge on that. Three men in company might conceivably be three singleship pilots, but chances are they're a ship's crew. They don't have their singleship licenses yet; they're too stupid or too inexperienced. If we wanted companions -- "You haven't thought this through," Owen answered. I saw Homer's double-take, then his quick look at where my shoulder ended, and I was ashamed. I did not need my crewmates to hold my hand, and in this state I'd only slow them down. Before I could open my mouth to protest, Owen went on. "Think it through. We've got a draw here that we'd be idiots to throw away. Gil, pick up a cigarette. No, not with your left hand. T was drunk gloriously drunk and feeling immortal. The attenuated Martians seemed to move in the walls, the walls that seemed to be picture windows on a Mars that never was. For the first time that night, I raised my glass in toast. "To Owen, from Gil the Arm. Thanks." I transferred the cigarette to my imaginary hand. By now you've got the idea I was holding it in my imaginary fingers. Most people have the same impression, but it isn't so. I held it clutched ignominiously in my fist. The coal couldn't bum me, of course, but it still felt like a lead ingot. I rested my imaginary elbow on the table, and that seemed to make it easier -- which is ridiculous, but it works. Truly, I'd expected my imaginary arm to disappear after I got the transplant. But I'd found I could dissociate from the new arm, to hold small objects in my invisible hand, to feel tactile sensations in my invisible fingertips. I'd earned the title Gil lEe Arm that night in Ceres. It Had started with a floating cigarette. Owen had been right. Everyone in the place eventually wound up staring at the floating cigarette smoked by the one-armed man. All I had to do was find the prettiest girl in the room with my peripheral vision, then catch her eye. That night we had been the center of the biggest impromptu party ever thrown in Ceres Base. It wasn't planned that way at all. I'd used the cigarette trick three times, so that each of us would have a date. But the third girl already had an escort, and he was celebrating something; he'd sold some kind of patent to an Earth-based industrial firm. He was throwing money around like confetti. So we let him stay. I did tricks, reaching esper fingers into a closed box to tell what was inside; and by the time I finished, all the tables had been pushed together and I was in the center, with Homer and Owen and three girls. Then we got to singing old songs, and the bartenders joined us, and suddenly everything was on the house. Eventually about twenty of us wound up in the orbiting mansion of the First Speaker for the Belt Government. The goldskin cops had tried to bust us up earlier, and the First Speaker had behaved very rudely indeed, then compensated by inviting them to join us... And that was why I used TK on so many cigarettes. Across the width of the Mars Bar, a girl in a peach colored dress sat studying me with her chin on her fist. I got up and went over. A yr y head felt fine. It was the first thing I checked when I woke up. Apparently I'd remembered to take a hangover pill. A leg was Hooked over my knee. It felt good, though the pressure had put my foot to sleep. Fragrant dark hair spilled beneath my nose. I didn't move. I didn't want her to know I was awake. It's damned embarrassing when you wake up with a girl and can't remember her name. Well, let's see. A peach dress neatly himg from a doorknob... I remembered a whole lot of traveling last night. The girl at the Mars Bar. A puppet show. Music of all kinds. I'd talked about Owen, and she'd steered me away from that because it depressed her. Then -- Hah! Taffy. Last name forgotten. "Morning," I said. "Morning," she said. "Don't try to move, we're Hooked together..." In the sober morning light she was lovely. Long black hair, brown eyes, creamy untanned skin. To be lovely this early was a neat trick, and I told her so,, and she smiled. My lower leg was dead meat until it started to buzz with' renewed circulation, and then I made faces imtil it calmed down. Taffy kept up a running chatter as we dressed. "That third hand is strange. I remember you holding me with two strong arms and stroking the back of my neck with the third. Very nice. It reminded me of a Fritz Leiber story." "The Wanderer. The panther girl." "Mm hmm. How many girls have you caught with that cigarette trick?" "None as pretty as you." "And how many girls have you told that to?" "Can't remember. It always worked before. Maybe this time it's for real." We exchanged grins. A minute later I caught her frowning thoughtfully at the back of my neck. "Something wrong?" "I was just thinking. You really crashed and biuned last night. I Hope you don't drink tKat mucH all the time." "Why? You worried about me?" She blushed, then nodded. "I should have told you. In fact, I think I did, last night. I was on a ceremonial drunk. When a good friend dies it's obligatory to get smashed." T affy looked relieved. "I didn't mean to get -- " "Personal? Why not. You've the right. Anyway, I like -- " I meant maternal types but I couldn't say that. "People who worry about me." Taffy touched her hair with some kind of complex comb. A few strokes snapped her Hair instantly into place. Static electricity? "It was a good drunk," I said. "Owen would have been proud. And that's all the mourning I'll do. One drunk and -- " I spread my hands. "Out." "It's not a bad way to go," Taffy mused reflectively. "Current stimulus, I mean. I mean, if you've got to bow out -- " "Now drop that!" I don't know how I got so angry so fast. Ghoulthin and grinning in a reading chair, Owen's corpse was suddenly vivid before me. I'd fought that image for too many hours. "Walking off a bridge is enough of a cop-out," I snarled. "Dying for a month while current burns out your brain is nothing less than sickening." Taffy was hurt and bewildered. "But your friend did it, didn't he? You didn't make him sound like a weakling." "Nuts," I heard myself say. "He didn't do it. He was -- " J ust like that, I was sure. I I must have realized it while I was drunk or sleeping. Of course he hadn't killed himself. That wasn't Owen. And current addiction wasn't Owen either. I made a dive for the phone. "Good morning, Mr. Hamilton." Detective-Inspector Ordaz looked very fresH and neat this morning. I was suddenly aware that I hadn't shaved. "I see you remembered to take your hangover pills." "Right. Ordaz, Has it occurred to you that Owen might have been murdered?" "Naturally. But it isn't possible." "I think it might be. Suppose he -- " "Mr. Hamilton." "Yah?" "We have an appointment for lunch. Shall we discuss it then? Meet me at Headquarters at twelve hundred." "Okay. One thing you might take care of this morning. See if Owen registered for a nudist's license." "Do you think he might have?" "Yah. I'll tell you why at lunch." "Very well." "Don't hang up. You said you had found the man who sold Owen his droud-and-plug. What was his name again?" "Kenneth Graham." "That's what I thought." I hung up. "Sure," I said to myself. "Somebody killed him. And that means -- yah. Yah." I turned around to get my shirt and found myself face to face with Taffy. I'd forgotten about her completely. She said, "Killed?" as if she'd never heard the word. "Yah. See, the whole setup depended on his not being able to -- " "No. Wait. I don't really want to know about it." She really didn't. The very subject of a stranger's death was making her sick to her stomach. "Okay. Look, I'm a ratfink not to at least offer you breakfast, but I've got to get on this right away. Can I call you a cab?" When the cab came I dropped a ten-mark coin in the slot and helped her in. I got her address before it took off. VI  RM Headquarters hummed with early morning activity. Hellos came my way, and I answered them without stopping to talk. Anything important would filter down to me eventually. As I passed Julie's cubical I glanced in. She was hard at work, limply settled in. her contour couch, jotting notes with her eyes closed. Kenneth Graham. A hookup to the basement computer formed the greater part of my desk. Learning how to use it had taken me several months. I typed an order for coffee and Tape chattered out of the slot an instant response, loop after loop of it curling on my desk. I didn't need to read it to know I was right. New technologies create new customs, new laws, new ethics, new crimes. About half the activity of the United Nations control of a crime that hadn't existed a century ago. The crime of organlegging was the result of thousands of years of medical lessly dedicated to the ideals of healing the sick. Progress had brougKt tliese ideals to reality, and, as usual, had created new problems. # A.D. was tlie year Carl Landsteiner classified human blood into four types, giving patients their first real chance to survive a transfusion. The technology of transplants Had grown with the growing of the twentietK century. Whole blood, dry bone, skin, live kidneys, live Hearts could all be transferred from one body to anotHer. Donors Had saved tens of thousands of lives their bodies to medicine. But the number of donors was limited, and not many died in such a way that anything of value could be saved. 'He deluge Had come something less than a Hundred years ago. One healthy donor (but of course there was no sucH animal) could save a dozen lives. Why, then, should a condemned ax murderer die to no purpose? First a few states, then most of the nations of the world Had passed new laws. Criminals condemned to death must be executed in a hospital, with surgeons to save as mucH as could be saved for the organ banks. live, and the organ banks were life itself. A man could live forever as long as the doctors could shove spare parts into him faster than his own parts wore out. But they could do that only as long as the world's organ banks were stocked. A Hundred scattered movements to abolish the death penalty died silent, unpublicized deaths. Everybody gets sick sometime. And still there were shortages in the organ banks. Still patients died for the lack of parts to save them. The world's legislators had responded to steady pressure from the world's people. Death penalties were established for first, second and third degree murder. For assault with a deadly weapon. Then for a multitude of crimes: rape, fraud, embezzlement, having children without a license, four or more counts of false advertising. For nearly a century the trend had been growing, as the world's voting citizens acted to protect their right to live forever. Even now there weren't enough transplants. A woman with kidney trouble might wait a year for a transplant: one healthy kidney to last the rest of her life. A thirty-five-year-old heart patient must live with a sound but forty-year-old heart. One lung, part of a liver, prosthetics that wore out too fast or weighed too much or did too little... there weren't enough criminals. Not surprisingly, the death penalty was a deterrent. People stopped committing crimes rather than face the donor room of a hospital. For instant replacement of your ruined digestive system, for a young healthy heart, for a whole liver when you'd ruined yours with alcohol... you had to go to an organlegger. 'here are three aspects to the business of organlegging. One is the business of kidnapmurder. It's risky. You can't fill an organ bank by waiting for volunteers. Executing condemned criminals is a government monopoly. So you go out and get your donors: on a crowded city slidewalk, in an air terminal, stranded on a freeway by a car with a busted capacitor ,... anywhere. The selling end of the business is just as dangerous, because even a deperately sick man sometimes has a conscience. He'll buy his transplant, then go straight to the his conscience by turning in the whole gang. Thus the sales end is somewhat anonymous; but as there .are few repeat sales, that hardly matters. Third is the technical, medical aspect. Probably this is the safest part of the business. Your hospital is big, but you can put it anywhere. You wait for the donors, who arrive still alive; you ship out livers and glands and square feet of live skin, correctly labeled for rejection reactions. It's not as easy as it sounds. You need doctors. Good ones. That was where Loren came in. He had a monopoly. Where did he get them? We were still trying to find out. Somehow, one man had discovered a foolproof way to recruit talented but dishonest doctors practically en masse. Was it really one man? All our sources said it was. And he had half the North American west coast in the palm of his hand. Loren. No holographs, no fingerprints or retina prints, not even a description. All we had was that one name, and a few possible contacts. One of these was Kenneth Graham. #"The holograph was a good one. Probably it had been posed in a portrait shop. Kenneth Graham had a long Scottish face with a lantern jaw and a small, dour mouth. In the holo he was trying to smile and look dignified simultaneously. He only looked uncomfortable. His hair was sandy and close cut. Above his light gray eyes his eyebrows were so light as to be nearly invisible. My breakfast arrived. I dunked a doughnut and bit it, and found out I was hungrier than I'd thought. A string of holos had been reproduced on the computer tape. I ran through the others fairly quickly, eating with' one hand and flipping the key with the other. Some were fuzzy, they had been taken by spy beams through the windows of Graham's shop. None of the prints were in any way incrirninating. Not one showed Graham smiling. He had been selling electrical joy for twelve years now. A current addict has an advantage over his supplier. Electricity is cheap. With a drug, your supplier can always raise the price on you; but not with electricity. You see the ecstasy merchant once, when he sells you your operation and your droud, and never again. Nobody gets hooked by accident. There's an honesty to current addiction. The customer always knows just what he's getting into, and what it will do for him -- and to him. Still, you'd need a certain lack of empathy to make a living the way Kenneth Graham did. Else he'd have had to turn away his customers. Nobody becomes a current addict gradually. He decides all at once, and he busre the operation before he has ever tasted its joy. Each one of Kenneth Graham's customers had reached his shop after deciding to drop out of the human race. What a stream of the Hopeless and the desperate must Have passed through Graham's shop! How could they help but haunt his dreams? And if Kenneth Graham slept well at night, then -- Then, small wonder if he had turned organlegger. He was in a good position for it. Despair is characteristic of the would-be current addict. The unknown, the unloved, the people nobody knew and nobody needed and nobody missed, these passed in, a steady stream through Kenneth Graham's shop. So a few didn't come out. Who would notice? T flipped quickly through the tape to find out who was in charge of watching Graham. Jackson Bera. I called down through the desk phone. "Sure," said Bera, "we've had a spy beam on him about three weeks now. It's a waste of good is clean. Maybe he's been tipped." "Then why not stop watching him?" Bera looked disgusted. "Because we've only been watching for three weeks. How many donors do you think he needs a year? Two. Read the reports. Gross profit on a single donor is Ham can afford to be careful who he picks." "Yah." "At that, He wasn't careful enough. At least two of His customers disappeared last year. Customers with' families. That's what put us on him." "So you could watch Kim for the next six months without a guarantee. He could be just waiting for the right guy to walk in." "Sure. He has to write up a report on every customer. That gives him the right to ask personal questions. If the guy has relatives, Graham lets him walk out. Most people do have relatives, you know. Then again," Bera said disconsolately, "he could be clean. Sometimes a current addict disappears without help." "How come I didn't see any holos of Graham at Home? You can't be watching just Kis shop." Jackson Bera scratched his hair. He Had Kair like black steel wool, worn long like a bushman's mop. "Sure we're watching his place, but we can't get a spy beam in there. It's an inside apartment. No windows. You know anything about spy beams?" "Not much. I know they've been around a while." "They're as old as lasers. Oldest trick in the book is to put a mirror in the room you want to bug. Then you run a laser beam through a window, or even through heavy drapes, and bounce it off the mirror. When you pick it up it's been distorted by the vibrations in the glass. That gives you a perfect recording of anything that's been said in that room. But for pictures you need something a little more sophisticated." "How sophisticated can we get?" "We can put a spy beam in any room with a window. We can send one through some kinds of wall. Give us an optically flat surface and we can send one around corners." "But you need an outside wall." "Yup." "What's Graham doing now?" "Just a sec." Bera disappeared from view. "Someone just came in. Bern's talking to him. Want the picture?" "Sure. Leave it on. I'll turn it off from here when I'm through with it." 'he picture of Bera went dark. A moment later I was looking into a doctor's office. If I'd seen it cold I'd have thought it was run by a podiatrist. There was the comfortable, tilt-back chair with the headrest and the footrest; the cabinet next to it with instnunents lying on top, on a clean white cloth; the desk over in one comer. Kenneth Graham was talking to a homely, washedout-looking girl. I listened to Graham's wouldbe-fatherly reassurances and his glowing description of the magic of current addiction. When I couldn't take it any longer, I turned the sound down. The girl took her place in the chair, and Graham placed something oveii her head. The girl's homely face turned suddenly beautiful. Happiness is beautiful, all by itself. A happy person is beautiful, per se. Suddenly and totally, the girl was full of joy  -- and I realized that I hadn't known everything about droud sales. Apparently Graham had an inductor to put the current where he wanted it, without wires. He could show a customer what current addiction felt like, without first implanting the wires. What a powerful argument! Graham turned off the machine. It was as if he'd turned off the girl. She sat stunned for a moment, then reached frantically for her purse and started scrabbling inside. I couldn't take any more. I turned it off. Small wonder if Graham had turned organlegger. He had to be totally without empathy just to sell his merchandise. Even there, I thought, he'd had a head start. So he was a little more callous than the rest of the world's billions. But not much. Every voter had a bit of the organlegger in him. In voting the death penalty for so many crimes, the lawmakers had only bent to pressure from the voters. There was a spreading lack of respect for life, the evil side of transplant technology. The good side was no longer life for everyone. One condemned criminal could save a dozen deserving lives. Who could complain about that? W e hadn't thought that way in the Belt. In the Belt survival was a virtue in itself, and life was a precious thing, spread so thin,' among the sterile rocks, hurtling in single units through the worlds. So I'd had to come to Earth for my transplant. My request had been accepted two months after I landed. So quickly? Later I'd learned that the banks always have a surplus of certain items. Few people lose their arms these days. I had also learned, a year after the transplant had taken, that I was using an arm from a captured organlegger's storage tank. TKat Had been a sHock. I'd Hoped my arm Had comci from a depraved murderer, someone wKo'd sKot fourteen nurses from a rooftop. Not at all. Some faceless, nameless victim Had Had tHe bad luck to encotinter a gKoul, and I Had benefitted tKereby. Did I turn in my new arm in a fit of revulsion? No, surprising to say, I did not. But I Had joined tion of Regional Militia, now the United Nations Police. Though I Had stolen a dead man's arm, I would Hunt the kin of those wHo Had killed him. The noble urgency of that resolve had been drowned in paperwork these last few years. Perhaps I was becoming callous, like the flatlanders -- the other flatlanders around me, voting new death penalties year after year. Income tax evasion. Operating a Hying vehicle on manual controls, over a city. Was Kenneth Graham so much worse than they? Sure he was. The bastard had put a wire in Owen Jennison's head. T waited twenty minutes for Julie to come out. I could have sent her a memorandum, but there was plenty of time before noon, and too little time to get anything accomplished, and... I wanted to talk to Her. "Hi," she said, taking the coffee. "Thanks. How went the ceremonial drunk? Oh, I see. Mmm. Very good. Almost poetic." Conversation with Julie has a way of taking short cuts. Poetic, right. I remembered how inspiration had struck like lightning through a mild High glow. Owen's floating cigarette lure. What better way to honor his memory than to use it to pick up a girl? "Right," Julie agreed. "But there's something jrou may Have missed. What's Taffy's last name?" "I can't remember. She wrote it down on -- " "What does she do for a living?" "How should I know?" "What religion is she? Is she a pro or an anti? Where did she grow up?" "Damnit -- " "Half an Hour ago you were very complacently musing on how depersonalized all us flatlanders are except you. What's Taffy, a person or a fold-out?" Julie stood with Her Hands on Her hips looking like a schoolteacher. How many people is Julie? Some of us have never seen this Guardian aspect. She's frightening, the Guardian. If it ever appeared on a date, the man she was with would be struck impotent forever. It never does. When a reprimand is deserved, Julie delivers it in broad daylight. This serves to separate Her functions, but it doesn't make it easier to take. No use pretending it wasn't Her business, either. I'd come Here to ask for Julie's protection. Let me turn rmlovable to Julie, even a little bit unlovable, and as far as Julie was concerned I would have an unreadable mind. How, then, would she know when I was in trouble? How could she send Help to rescue me from whatever? My private life was her business, her single, vastly: important job. "I like Taffy," I protested. "I didn't care who she was when we met. Now I like her, and I think she likes me. What do you want from a first date?" "You know better. You can remember other dates when two of you talked all night on a couch, just from the joy of learning about each other." She mentioned three names, and I flushed. Julie knows the words that will turn you inside out in an instant. "Taffy is a person, not an episode, not a symbol of anything, not just a pleasant night. What's your judgment of her?" T thought about it, standing there in the corridor. Funny, I've faced the Guardian Julie on other occasions, and it has never occurred to me to just walk out of the unpleasant situation. Later I think of that. At the time I just stand there, facing the Guardian JudgeTeacher. I thought about Taffy... "She's nice," I said. "Not depersonalized. Squeamish, even. She wouldn't make a good nurse. She'd want to help too much, and it would tear her apart when she couldn't. I'd say she was one of the vulnerable ones." "Go on." "I want to see Her again, but I won't dare talk shop with her. In fact... I'd better not see her till this business of Owen is over. Loren might take an interest in her. Or... she might take an interest in me, and I might get hurt... have I missed anything?" "I think so. You owe Her a phone call. If you won't be dating her for a few days, call her and tell Her so." "Check." I spun on my heel, spun back. "Finagle's Jest! I almost forgot. The reason I came here -- " "I know, you want a time slot. Suppose I check on you at oh nine forty-five every morning?" "That's a little early. When I get in deadly danger it's usually at night." "I'm off at night. OH nine forty-five is all I've got. I'm sorry, Gil, but it is." "Sold. Nine forty-five." "Good. Let me know if you get real proof Owen was murdered, I'll give you two slots. You'll be m a little more concrete danger then." 'ood." "I love you. Yeep, I'm late." Arid she dodged back into her offk, while I went to call Taffy. T'affy wasn't home, of course, and I didn't know where shje worked, or even what she did. Her phone offered to take a message. I gave my name and said I'd call back. And then I sat there sweating for five minutes. It was half an hour to noon. Here I was at my desk phone. I couldn't decently see any way to argue myself out of sending a message to Homer Chandrasekhar. I didn't want to talk to Him, then or ever. He'd chewed me out but good, last time I'd seen him. My free arm had cost me my Belter life, and it had cost me Homer's respect. I didn't want to talk to him, even on a oneway message, and I most particularly didn't want to have to tell him Owen was dead. But someone had to tell him. And maybe he could find out something. And I'd put it off nearly a full day. For five minutes I sweated, and then I called Long Distance and recorded a message and sent it off to Ceres. More accurately, I recorded six messages before I was satisfied. I don't want to talk about it. I tried Taffy again; sfie might come home for lunch. Wrong. I hung up wondering if Julie had been fair. What had we bargained for, Taffy and I, beyond a pleasant night? And we'd had that and would have others, with luck. But Julie would find it hard not to be fair. If she thought Taffy was the vulnerable type, she'd taken her information from my own mind. Mixed feelings. You're a kid, and your mother has just laid down the law. But it is a law, something you can count on...  and she is paying attention to you... and she does care...  when, for so many of those outside, nobody cares at all. ttXJaturally I thought of murder," said Ordaz. "I always consider murder. When my sainted mother passed away after three years of the most tender care by my sister Maria Angela, I actually considered searching for evidence of needle holes about the head." "Find anything unusual?" Ordaz's face froze. He put down his beer and started to get up. "Cool it," I said hurriedly. "No offense intended." He glared a moment, then sat down, half mollified. We'd picked an outdoor restaurant on the pedestrian level. On the other side of a hedge (a real live hedge, green and growing and everything) the shoppers were carried past in a steady, one-way stream. Beyond them, a slidewalk carried a similar stream in the opposite direction. I had the dizzy feeling that it was we who were moving. A waiter like a bell-bottomed chess pawn produced steaming dishes of chili from its torso, put them precisely in front of us and slid away on a cushion of air. "Naturally I considered murder. Believe me, Mr. Hamilton, it does not hold up." "I think I could make a pretty good case." "You may try, of course. Better, I will start you on your way. First, we must assume that Kenneth Graham the happiness peddler,did not sell a droud-and-plug to Owen Jennison. Rather, Owen Jennison was forced to undergo the operation. Graham's records, including the written permission to operate, were forged. All this we must assume, is it not so?" "Right. And before you tell me Graham's escutcheon is unblemished, let me tell you that it isn't." "Oh?" "He's connected with an organlegging gang. That's classified information. We're watching him, and we don't want him tipped." "That is news." Ordaz rubbed his jaw. "Organlegging. Well. What would Owen Jennison have to do with organlegging?" "Owen's a Belter. The Belt's always drastically short of transplant materials." "Yes, they import quantities of medical supplies from Earth. Not only organs in storage, but also drugs and prosthetics. So?" "Owen ran a good many cargoes past the goldskins in his day. He got caught a few times, but he's still way ahead of the government. He's on the records as a successful smuggler. If a big organlegger wanted to expand his market, he might very well send a feeler out to a Belter with a successful smuggling record." CtXou never mentioned that Mr. Jennison was a smuggler." "What for? All Belters are smugglers, if they think they can get away with it. To a Belter, smuggling isn't immoral. But an organlegger wouldn't know that. He'd think Owen was already a criminal." "Da you think your friend -- " Ordaz hesitated delicately. "No, Owen wouldn't turn organlegger. But he might, he just might try to turn one in. The rewards for information leading to the capture and conviction of, et cetera, are substantial. If someone contacted Owen, Owen might very well have tried to trace the contact by himself. "Now, the gang, we're after covers half the west coast of this continent. That's big. It's the Loren gang, the one Graham may be working for. Suppose Owen had a chance to meet Loren himself?" "You think he might take it, do you?" "I think he did. I think he let his hair grow out so he'd look like an Earthman, to convince Loren he wanted to look inconspicuous. I think he collected as much information as he could, then tried to get out with a whole skin. But he didn't make it. "Did you find his application for a nudist license?" "No. I saw your point there," said Ordaz. He leaned back, ignoring the food in front of him. "Mr. Jennison's tan was uniform except for the characteristic darkening of the face. I presume he was a practicing nudist in the Belt" "Yah. We don't need licenses there. He'd have been one here, too, unless he was hiding something. Remember that scar. He never missed a chance to show it off." "Could he really have thought to pass for a -- " Ordaz hesitated. "A flatlander?" "With that Belter tan? No! He was overdoing it a little with the haircut. Maybe he thought Loren would underestimate him. But he wasn't advertising his presence, or he wouldn't have left his most personal possessions home." "So he was dealing with organleggers, and they found him out before he could reach you. Yes, Mr. Hamilton, this is well thought out. But it won't work." "Why not? I'm not trying to prove it's murder. Not yet. I'm just trying to show you that murder is at least as likely as suicide." "But it's not, Mr. Hamilton." looked at the question. "Consider the details of the hypothetical murder. Owen Jennison is drugged, no doubt, and taken to the office of Kenneth Graham. There, an ecstasy plug is attached. A standard droud is fitted and is then amateurishly altered with soldering tools. Already we see, on the part of the killer, a minute attention to details. We see it again in Kenneth Graham's forged papers of permission to operate. They were impeccable. "Owen Jennison is then taken back to his apartment. It would be his own, would it not? There would be little point in moving Kim to another. The cord from his droud is shortened, again in amateurish fashion. Mr. Jennison is tied up -- " "I wondered if you'd see that." "But why should he not be tied up? He is tied up and allowed to waken. Perhaps the arrangement is explained to him, perhaps not. That would be up to the killer. The killer then plugs Mr. Jennison into a wall. A current trickles through his brain, and Owen Jennison knows pure pleasure for the first time in his life. "He is left tied up for, let us say, three hours. In the first few minutes Ke would be a hopeless addict, I think -- " "You must have known more current addicts than I have." "Even I would not want to be pinned down. Your normal current addict is an addict after a few minutes. But then, your normal current addict asked to be made an addict, knowing wHat it would do to his life. Current addiction is symptomatic of despair. Your friend might have been able to fight free of a few minutes' exposure." "So they kept him tied up for three hours. Then they cut the ropes." I felt sickened. Ordaz's ugly, ugly picture matched mine in every detail. "No more than three hours, by our hypothesis. They would not dare stay longer than a few hours. They would cut the ropes and leave Owen Jennison to starve to death. In the space of a month the evidence of his drugging would vanish, as would any abrasions left by ropes, lumps on his head, mercy needle punctures, and the like. A carefully detailed, well thought out plan, don't you agree?" T told myself that Ordaz was not being ghoulish. He was just doing His job. Still, it was difficult to answer objectively. "It fits our picture of Loren. He's been very careful with us. He'd love carefully detailed, well thought out plans." Ordaz leaned forward. "But don't you see? A carefully detailed plan is all wrong. There is a crucial flaw in it. Suppose Mr. Jennison pulls out the droud?" "Could he do that? Would he?" "Could Ke? Certainly. A simple tug of the fingers. The current wouldn't interfere with motor coordination. Would he?" Ordaz pulled meditatively at Kis beer. "I know a good deal about current addiction, but I don't know what it feels like, Mr. Hamilton. Your normal addict pulls his droud out as often as he inserts it, but your friend was getting ten times normal current He might have pulled the droud out a dozen times and instantly plugged it back each time. Yet Belters are supposed to be strongwilled men, very individualistic. Who knows whether, even after a week of addiction, your friend might not Have pulled the droud loose, coiled the cord, slipped it in his pocket, and walked away scot free? "There is an individual risk that someone might walk in on him -- an automachinery service man, for instance. Or someone might notice that he had not bought any food in a month'. A suicide would take that risk. Suicides routinely leave themselves a chance to change their minds. But a murderer? "No. Even if the chance were one in a thousand, the man who created such a detailed plan would never have taken such a chance." The sun burned hotly down on our shoulders. Ordaz suddenly remembered his lunch and began to eat. I watched the world ride by beyond the hedge. Pedestrians stood in little conversational bunches; others peered into shop windows on the pedestrian strip, or glanced over the hedge to watch us eat. There were the few who pushed through the crowd with set expressions, impatient with the ten-mile-perhoiur speed of the slidewalk. "Maybe they were watching him. Maybe the room was bugged." "We searched the room thoroughly," said Ordaz. "If there had been observational equipment, we would have found it." "It could have been removed." Ordaz shrugged. I remembered the spy-eyes in Monica Apartments. Someone would have had to physically enter the room to carry a bug out. He could ruin it with the right signal, maybe, but it would surely leave traces. And Owen had had an inside room. No spy-eyes. "There's one thing you've left out," I said presently. "And what would that be?" "My name in Owen's wallet, listed as next of kin. He was directing my attention to the thing I was working on. The Loren gang." "That is possible." "You can't have it both' ways." Ordaz lowered his fork. "I can have it both ways, Mr. Hamilton. But you won't like it." "I'm sure I won't." "Let us incorporate your assumption. Mr. Jennison was contacted by an agent of Loren, the organlegger, who intended to sell transplant material to Belters. He accepted. The promise of riches was too much for him. "A month later, something made him realize what a terrible thing he had done. He decided to die. He went to an ecstasy peddler and he had a wire put in his head. Later, before he plugged in the droud, he made one attempt to atone for his crime. He listed you as his next of kin, so that you might guess why he had died, and perhaps so that you could use that knowledge against Loren." Ordaz looked at me across the table. "I see that you will never agree. I cannot help that. I can only read the evidence." "Me too. But I knew Owen. He'd never have worked for an organlegger, he'd never have killed himself, and if he had, he'd never have done it that way." Ordaz didn't answer. "What about fingerprints?" "In the apartment? None." "None but Owen's?" "Even his were found only on the chair and end tables. I curse the man who invented the cleaning robot. Every smooth surface in that apartment was cleaned exactly forty-four times during Mr. Jennison's tenancy." Ordaz went back to his chili. "Then try this. Assume for the moment that I'm right. Assume Owen was after Loren, and Loren got him. Owen knew He was doing something dangerous. He wouldn't have wanted me to get onto Loren before he was ready. He wanted the reward for Himself. But he might Have left me something, just in case. "Something in a locker somewhere, an airport or spaceport locker. Evidence. Not under his own name, or mine either, be"Some name you both know." "Right. Like Homer Chandrasekhar. Or -- we got it. Cubes Forsythe. Owen would have thought that was apt. Cubes is dead." "We will look. You must understand that it will not prove your case." "Sure. Anything you find, Owen could have arranged in a fit of conscience. Screw that. Let me know what you get," I said, and stood up and left. IX T rode the slidewalk, not caring where it was taking me. It would give me a chance to cool off. Could Ordaz be right? Could he? But the more I dug into Owen's death, the worse it made Owen look. Therefore Ordaz was wrong. Owen work for an organlegger? He'd rather have been a donor. Owen getting his kicks from a wall socket? He never even watched tridee! Owen kill himself? No. If so, not that way. But even if I could Have swallowed all that... Owen Jennison, letting me know he'd worked with organleggers? Me, Gil the Arm Hamilton? Let me know that? The slidewalk rolled along, past restaurants and shopping centers and churches and banks. Ten stories below, the hum of cars and scooters drifted faintly up from the vehicular level. The sky was a narrow, vivid slash of blue between shadows of skyscrapers. Let me know that? Never. "But Ordaz's strangely inconsistent murderer was no better. I thought of something even Ordaz had missed. Why would Loren dispose of Owen so elaborately? Owen need only disappear into the organ banks, never to bother Loren again. The shops were thinning out now, and so were the crowds. The slidewalk narrowed, entered a residential area, and not a very good one. I'd let it carry me a long way. I looked around, trying to decide where I was. And I was four blocks from Graham's place. My subconscious had done me dirty. I wanted a look at Kenneth Graham, face to face. The temptation to go on was nearly irresistible, but I fought it off and changed direction at the next disc. A slidewalk intersection is a rotating disc, its rim tangent to four slidewalks and moving with the same speed. From the center you ride up an escalator and over the slidewalks to reach stationary walks along the buildings. I could have caught a cab at the center of the disc, but I still wanted to think, so I just rode halfway around the rim. T could have walked into Graham's shop and gotten away with it. Maybe. I'd have looked hopeless and bored and hesitant, told Graham I wanted an ecstasy plug, worried loudly about what my wife and friends would say, then changed my mind at the last moment. He'd have let me walk out, knowing I'd be missed. Maybe. But Loren had to know more about him. Some time or other, had Graham been shown a holo of yours truly? Let a known Graham would panic. It wasn't worth the risk. Then, damnit, what could I do? Ordaz's inconsistent killer. If we assumed Owen was murdered, we couldn't get away from tKe assumptions. The case, the nitpicking detail -- and then Owen left alone to pull out the plug and walk away, or to be discovered by a persistent salesman or a burglar, or -- No. Ordaz's hypothetical killer, and mine, would have watched Owen like a hawk. For a month. That did it. I stepped off at the next disc and got a taxi. The taxi dropped me on the roof of Monica Apartments. I took an elevator to the lobby. If the manager was surprised to see me, he didn't show it as he gestured me into his office. The office seemed much roomier; than the lobby had, possibly because there were things to break the anonymous modern decor: paintings on the wall, a small black worm-track in the rug that must have been caused by a visitor's cigarette, a holo of Miller and his wife on the wide, nearly empty desk. He waited until I was settled, then leaned forward expectantly. I said, and passed him my ident. He passed it back without checking it. "I presume it's the same business," he said. "Yah. I'm convinced Owen Jennison must have had visitors while he was here."' The manager smiled. "That's ridic -- impossible." "Nope, it's not. Your holo cameras take pictures of visitors, but they don't snap the tenants, do they?" "Of course not." "Then Owen could have been visited by any tenant in the building." THe manager looked shocked. "No, certainly not. Really, I don't see why you pursure this, Mr. Hamilton. If Mr. Jennison had been found in such a condition, it would have been reported!" "I don't think so. Could he Have been visited by any tenant in the building?" "No. No. The cameras would have taken a picture of anyone from another floor." "How about someone from the same floor?" Reluctantly the manager bobbed his head. "Ye-es. As far as the holo cameras are concerned, that's possible. But -- " "Then I'd like to ask for pictures of any tenant who lived on the eighteenth floor during the last six weeks. Send them to Can do?" "Of course. You'll have them within an hour." "Good. Now, something else occurred to me. Suppose a man got out on the nineteenth floor and walked down to the eighteenth,. He'd be holoed on the nineteenth, but not on the eighteenth, right?" The manager smiled indulgently. "Mr. Hamilton, there are no stairs in this building." "Just the elevators? Isn't that dangerous?" "Not at all. There is a separate self-contained emergency power source for each of the elevators. It's common practice. After all, v;ho would want to walk up eighty stories if the elevator failed?" "Okay, fine. One last point. Could someone tamper with the computer? Could someone make it decide not to take a certain picture, for instance?" "I . , . am not an expert on how to tamper with computers, Mr. Hamilton. Why don't you go straight to the company? Caulfield Brains, Inc." "Okay. What's your model?" "Just a moment." He got up and leafed through a drawer in a filing cabinet. "EQ #." "Okay." That was all I could do here, and I knew it... and still I didn't have the will to get up. There ought to be something... Finally Miller cleared his throat. "Will that be all, sir?" "Yes," I said. "No. Can I get into #?" "I'll see if we've rented it yet." "The police are through with it?" "Certainly." He went back to the filing cabinet. "No. It's still available. I'll take you up. How long will you be?" "I don't know. No more than half an hour. No need to come up." "Very well." He handed me the key and waited for me to leave. "The merest flicker of blue light caught my eye as I left the elevator. I would have thought it was my optic nerve, not in the real world, if I hadn't known about the holo cameras. Maybe it was. You don't need laser light to make a holograph, but it does get you clearer pictures. Owen's room was a box. Everything was retracted. There was nothing but the bare walls. I had never seen anything so desolate, unless it was some asteroidal rock, too poor to mine, too badly placed to be worth' a base. The control panel was just beside the door. I turned on the lights, then touched the master button. Lines appeared, outlined in red and green and blue. A great square on one wall for the bed, most of another wall for the kitchen, various outlines across the floor. Very handy. You would not want a guest to be standing on the table when you expanded it. I'd come here to get the feel of the place, to encourage a hunch, to see if I'd missed anything. Translation: I was playing. Playing, I reached through the control panel to find the circuits. The printed circuitry was too small and too detailed to tell me anything, but I ran imaginary fingertips along a few wires and found that they looped straight to their action points, no detours. No sensors to the outside. You would have to be in the room to know what was expanded, what retracted. So a supposedly occupied room had had its bed retracted for six weeks. But you'd have to be in the room to know it. I pushed buttons to expand the kitchen nook and the reading chair. The wall slid out eight feet; the floor humped itself and took form. I sat down in the chair, and the kitchen nook blocked my view of the door. Nobody could have seen Owen from the hall. If only someone had noticed that Owen wasn't ordering food... That might have saved him. I thought of something else, and it made me look around for the air conditioner. There was a grill at floor level. I felt behind it with my imaginary hand. Some of these apartment air-conditioning units go on when the CO level hits half a percent. This one was geared to temperature and manual control. With the other kind, our careful killer could have tapped the air conditioner to find out if Owen was still alive and present. As it was, # had behaved like an empty room for six weeks. T flopped back in the reading chair. If my hypothetical killer had watched Owen, he'd done it with a bug. Unless he actually lived on this floor for the four or five weeks it took Owen to die, there was no other way. Okay, think about a bug. Make it small enough and nobody would find it except the cleaning robot, who would send it straight to the incinerator. You'd have to make it big, so the robot would not get it. No worry about Owen finding it! And then, when you knew Owen was dead, you'd use the self-destruct. But if you burned it to slag, you'd leave a bum hole somewhere. Ordaz would have found it. So. An asbestos pad? You'd want the self-destruct to leave something that the cleaning robot would sweep up. And if you'll believe that you will believe anything. It was too chancy. Nobody knows what a cleaning robot will decide is garbage. They're made stupid because it's cheaper. So they're programmed to leave large objects alone. There had to be someone on this floor, either to watch Owen Himself or to pick up the bug that did the watching. I was betting everything I had on a human watcKer, I'd come Here mainly to give iny intuition a chance. It wasn't working. Owen Had spent six weeks in tHis chair, and for at least the last week He'd been dead. Yet I couldn't feel it witK Him. It was just a cHair witH two end tables. He had left nothing in the room, not even a restless ghost. The call caught me halfway back to Headquarters. "You were right," Ordaz told me over the wristphone. "We Have found a locker at Death Valley Port registered to Cubes Forsythe. I am on my way there now. Will you join me?" "I'll meet you there." "Good. I am as eager as you to see what Owen Jennison left us." I doubted that. The Port was something more than two hundred and thirty miles away, an Hour at taxi speeds. It would be a big fare. I typed out a new address on the destination board, then called in is fairly free; he doesn't Have to justify every little move. There was no question of getting permission to go. At worst they might disallow the fare on my expense account. "Oh, and there'll be a set of holos coming in from Monica Apartments," I told the man. "Have the computer check them against known organleggers and associates of Loren." The taxi rose smoothly into the sky and headed east. I watched tridee and drank coffee until I ran out of coins for the dispenser. X Tf you go between November and May, when the climate is ideal. Death Valley can be a tourist's paradise. There is the Devil's Golf Course, with its fantastic ridges and pinnacles of salt; Zabriskie Point and its weird badlands topography; the old borax mining sites; and all kinds of strange, rare plants, adapted to the heat and the death-dry climate. Yes, Death Valley has many points of interest, and someday I was going to go see them. So far all I'd seen was the spaceport. But the Port was impressive in its own way. The landing field used to be part of a sizeable inland sea. It is now a sea of salt. Alternating red and blue concentric circles inark the field for ships dropping from space, and a century's developments in diemical, fission, and fusion reaction motors Have left blast pits striped like rainbows by esoteric, often radio-active salts. But mostly tKe field retains its ancient glare white. And out across the salt are ships of many sizes and many shapes. Vehicles and machinery dance attendance, and if you're ship land. It's worth the wait. The Port building, at the edge of the major salt flat, is a pastel green tower set in a wide patch of fluorescent orange concrete. No ship has ever landed on it -- yet. TKe taxi dropped me at the entrance and moved away to join others of its kind. And I stood inhaling the dry, balmy air. Four months of the year. Death Valley's climate is ideal. One August the Furnace Creek Ranch recorded # F. shade temperature. A man behind the desk told me that Ordaz had arrived before me. I found him and another officer in a labyrinth of pay lockers, each big enough to Hold two or three suitcases. The locker Ordaz had opened held only a lightweight plastic briefcase. "He may Have taken other lockers," he said. "Probably not. Belters travel light. Have you tried to open it?" "Not yet. It i a combination lock. I thought perhaps  " "Maybe." I squatted to look at it. Funny. I felt no surprise at all. It was as if I'd known all along that Owen's suitcase would be here. And why not? He was bound to try to protect himself somehow. Through me, because I wag already involved in the UN side of organlegging. By leaving something in a spaceport locker, because Loren couldn't find the right locker or get into it if Ke did, and because I would naturally connect Owen with spaceports. Under Cubes's name, because I'd be looking for that, and Loren wouldn't. Hindsight is wonderful. The lock had five digits. He must have meant me to open it. Let's see..." and I moved the tumblers to #. April #, #, the day Cubes died, stapled suddenly to a plastic partition. The lock clicked open. Ordaz went instantly for the manila folder. More slowly, I picked up two glass phials. One was tightly sealed against Earth's air and half full of an incredibly fine dust. So fine was it that it slid like oil inside the glass. TKe other phial Held a blackened grain of nickel-iron, barely big enough to see. zither things were in that case, but the prize was that folder. TKe story was in tKere... at least up to a point. Owen must have planned to add to it. A message had been waiting for him in the Ceres mail dump when he returned from his last trip out. Owen must have laughed ' over parts of that message. Loren had taken the trouble to assemble a complete dossier of Owen's smuggling activities bver the past eight years. Did he think he could ensure Owen's silence by threatening to turn the dossier over to the goldskins? Maybe the dossier had given Owen the wrong idea. In any case, he'd decided to contact Loren and see what developed. Ordinarily he'd have sent me the entire message and let me try to track it down. I was the expert, after all. But Owen's last trip out had been a disaster. His fusion drive had blown somewhere beyond Jupiter's orbit. No explanation. The safeties had blown his lifesystem capsule free of the explosion, barely. A rescue ship had returned him to Ceres. The fee had nearly broken him. He needed money. Loren may have known that and counted on it. The reward for information leading to Loren's capture would have bought him a new ship. He'd landed at Outback Field, following Loren's instructions. From there, Loren's men had moved him about a good deal : to London, to Bombay, to Amberg, Germany. Owen's personal, written story ended in Amberg. How had he reached California? He had not had a chance to say. But in between, he had learned a good deal. There were snatches of detail on Loren's organization. There was Loren's full plan for als to the Belt, and for finding and contacting customers. Owen had made suggestions there. Most of them sounded reasonable and would be workable in practice. T#pically Owen. I could find no sign that he'd overplayed his hand. But of course Ee Eadn't known it when he did. And there were Eolos, twentythree of them, each a member of Loren's gang. Some of the pictures had markings on the back; others were blank. Owen had been unable to find out where each of them stood in the organization. I leafed through them twice, wondering if one of them could be Loren himself. Owen had never known. tCTt would seem you were right," said Ordaz. "He could not have collected such detail by accident. He must have planned from the beginning to betray the Loren gang." "Just as I told you. And fie was murdered for it." "It seems fie must fiavfe been. Wfiat motive could fie fiave h'ad for suicide?" Ordaz's round, calm face was doing its best to sKow anger. "I find I cannot believe in our inconsistent murderer eitfier. You fiave ruined my digestion, Mr. Hamilton." I told film my idea about otHer tenants on Owen's floor. He smiled and nodded. "Possibly, possibly, Tfiis is your department now. Organlegging is tfie business "Rigfit." I closed tfie briefcase and fiefted it. "Let's see wfiat tfie computer can do witfi tfiese. I'll send you pfiotocopies of everything in fiere." "You'll let me know about tfie other tenants?" "Of course." quarters swinging that precious briefcase, feeling on top of tfie world. Owen had been murdered. He had died witfi honor, if not -- oli, definitely not -- witfi dignity. Even Ordaz knew it now. Then Jackson Bera, snarling and panting, went by at a dead run. "What's up?" I called after him. Maybe I wanted a cKance to brag. I fiad twenty-tfiree faces, twenty-three organleggers, in my briefcase. Bera slid to a stop beside me. "WKere in hell Have you been?" "Working. Honest. What's tfie hurry?" "Remember that pleasure peddler we were watching?" "Graham? Kenneth Graham?" "That's tfie one. He's dead. We blew it." And Bera took off. T Te'd reached tfie lafi By tfie time I caught up witfi him. Kennetfi Graham's corpse was face up on tfie operating table His long, lantern-jawed face was pale and slack, without expression, empty. Machinery was in place above and below fiis fiead. "How you doing?" Bera demanded. "Not good," tfie doctor answered. "Not your fault. You got fiim into tfie deepfreeze fast enougfi. It's just that tfie current -- " fie shrugged. I shook Bern's shoulder. "Wfiat happened?" Bera was panting a little from fiis run. "Something must fiave leaked. Graham tried to make a run for it We got him at tfie airport." "You could fiave waited. Put someone on tfie plane witfi fiim. Flooded tfie plane with TY-#. "Remember tfie stink tfie last time we used TY-# on civilians? Damn newscasters." Bera was sfiivering. I don't blame fiim. funny kind of game. Tfie organ"Just look at his head." leggers have to turn their donors in alive, so they're always armed with hypo guns, firing slivers of crystaline anaesthetic that melt instantly in the blood. We use the same weapon, for somewhat the same reason; a criminal has to be saved for trial, and then for the government hospitals. So no There was a day I learned the truth. A small-time organlegger named Raphael Haine was trying to reach a call button in His own home. If he'd reached it all kinds of hell would have broken loose, Haine's men would have hypoed me, and I would have regained consciousness a piece at a time, in Haine's organ storage tanks. So I strangled him. The report was in the computer, but only three human beings knew about it. One was my immediate superior, Lucas Garner. The other was Julie. So far, he was the only man I'd ever killed. And Graham was Bern's first "We got him at the airport," said Bera. "He was wearing a hat. I wish I'd noticed that, we might have moved faster. We started to close in on him with hypo guns. He turned and saw us. He reached under his hat, and then he fell." "Killed himself?" "UH huh." "How?" I edged closer to the table, trying to stay out of the doctor's way. The doctor was going tiirougH the routine of trying to pull information from a dead brain by induction. It wasn't going well. There was a flat oblong box on top of Graham,'s Head. Black plastic, about Half tfie size of a pack of cards. I toucHed if and knew at once that it was attacKed to Graham's skull. "A droud. Not a standard type. Too big." "Uh. huh." Liquid Helium ran up my nerves. "THere's a battery in it." "Right." "Right." "I often wonder wBat tfie vintners buy, et cetera, A cordless droud. Man, that wHat I want for Christmas." Bera twitched all over. "Don't say that." "Did you know fie was a current addict?" "No. We were afraid to Hug His Home. He might Have found it and be tipped. Take another look at that thing." The shape was wrong, I thought. The black plastic case had been Half melted. "UH huH. He blew tfie wfiole battery at once. Sent tfie wfiole brain, right through the pleasure center of his brain. And Jesus, Gil, the thing I keep wondering is, what did it feel like? Gil, what could it possible have felt like?" I thumped him across the shoulders in lieu of giving him an intelligent answer. He'd be a long time wondering. And so would I. Here was the man who had put the wire in Owen's head. Had his death been momentary hell, or all the delights of paradise in one singing jolt? Hell, I hoped, but I didn't believe it. At least Kenneth Graham wasn't somewhere else in the world, getting a new face and new retinae and new fingertips "Notiling," said the doctor. "His brain's too badly burned. iThere's just nothing there that isn't too scrambled to make sense." "Keep trying," said Bera. I left quietly. Maybe later I'd buy Bera a drink. He seemed to need it. Bera was one of those with empathy. I knew that he could almost feel that awful surge of ecstasy and defeat as Kenneth Graham left the world behind. The holos from Monica Apartjnents had arrived hours ago. J# Miller had picked not only the tenants who had occupied the eighteenth floor during the past six weeks, but tenants from the nineteenth and seventeenth floors too. It seemed an embarrassment of riches. I toyed with the idea of someone from the nineteenth floor dropping over his balcony to the eighteenth, every day for five weeks. But # hadn't had an outside wall, let alone a window, not to mention anything resembling a balcony. Had Miller played with the same idea? Nonsense. He didn't even know the problem. He'd just overkilled with the holos to show how cooperative he was. None of the tenants during the period in question matched known or suspected Loren men. I said a few appropriate words and went for coffee. Then I remembered the twenty-three possible Loren men in Owen's briefcase. I'd left them with a programmer, since I wasn't quite sure how to get them into the computer myself. He ought to be finished by now. I called down. He was. I persuaded the computer to compare them with the holos of the tenants from Monica Apartments. Nothing. Nobody matched anybody. XI T spent tKe next two Sours writing up tSe Owen Jennison case. A programmer would Save to translate it for tSe macKine. I wasn't tKat good yet. We were back witS Ordaz's inconsistent killer. TSat, and a tangle of dead ends. Owen's deatH Sad bougSt us a handful of new pictures, pictures which might even be obsolete by now. Organleggers changed their faces at tSe drop of a hat. I finished the case outline, sent it down to a programmer, and called Julie. I wouldn't need her protection now. Julie had left for Some. I started to call Taffy, stopped with her number Saif dialed. There are times not to make a phone call. I needed to sulk; I needed a cave to be alone in. My expression would probably have broken a phone screen. Why inflict it on an innocent girl? I left for home. It was dark when I reached tSe street. I rode the pedestrian bridge across the slidewalks, waited for a taxi at the intersection disc. Presently one dropped, on its belly. I stepped in and deposited my credit card. Owen had collected his Solos from all over the Eurasian continent. Most of them, if not all, had been Loren's foreign agents. Why had I expected to find them in Los Angeles? The taxi rose into the white night sky. City lights turned the cloud cover into a flat white dome. We penetrated the clouds, and stayed there. The taxi autopilot didn't care if I had a view or not... So what did I Save now? Someone among dozens of tenants was a Loren man. That, or Ordaz's inconsistent killer, the careful one, had left Owen to die for five weeks, alone and unsupervised... Was the inconsistent killer so unbelievable? He was, after all, my own hypothetical Loren. And Loren Sad committed murder, the ultimate crime. He'd murdered routinely, over and over, with fabulous profto touch him. Wasn't it about time he started getting careless? Like Graham. How long Sad Graham been selecting donors among his customers, choosing a few nonentities a year? And then, twice within a few months, he took clients who were missed. Careless. AT ost criminals are not too bright. Loren had brains enough; but the men on his payroll would be about average. Loren would deal with the stupid ones, the ones who turned to crime because they didn't have enough sense to make it in real life. If a man like Loren got careless, this is how it would happen. Unconsciously he would judge men. Seduced by an ingenious plan for murder, he might ignore the single loophole and go through with it. With Graham to advise him, he knew more about current addiction than we did; perhaps enough to trust the effects of current addiction on Owen. Then Owen's killers had delivered him to his apartment and never seen him again. It was a small gamble Loren had taken, and it had paid off, this time. Next time he'd grow more careless. One day we'd get him. But not today. The taxi settled out of the traffic pattern, touched down on the roof of my apartment building in Hollywood Hills. I got out and moved toward the elevators. An elevator opened. Someone stepped out. Something warned me. Something about the way he moved. I turned, quick-drawing from the shoulder. The taxi might have made good cover -- if it hadn't been already rising. Other figures had stepped from the shadows. I think I got a couple before something stung my cheek. Mercy-bullets, slivers of crystaline anaesthetic melting in my bloodstream. My head spun, and the roof spim, and the centrifugal force dropped me limply to the room. Shadows loomed above me, then receded to infinity. lingers on my scalp shocked me awake. I woke standing upright, bound like a mummy in soft, swaddling bandages. I couldn't so much as twitch a muscle below my neck. By the time I knew that much it was too late. The man behind me had finished removing the electrodes from my head and stepped into view, out of reach of my imaginary arm. There was something of the bird about him. He was tall and slender, small-boned, and his triangular face reached a point at the chin. His wild, silken blond hair had withdrawn from his temples, leaving a sharp widow's peak. He wore impeccably tailored wool street shorts in orange and brown stripes. Smiling brightly, with his arms folded and his head cocked to one side, he stood waiting for me to speak. And I recognized him. Owen Bad taken a holo of him. "Where am I?" I groaned, trying to sound groggy. "What time is it?" "Time? It's already morning," said my captor. "As for wHere you are, I'll let you wonder." Sometfiing about Eis manner... I took a guess and said, "Loren?" Loren bowed, not overdoing it. "And you are Gilbert Hamilton of the United Nations Police. Gil the Arm." let it pass. "I seem to have slipped." "You underestimated the reacH of my own arm. You also underestimated my interest. I Had. It isn't mucK Earder to citizen, if you catch' him off risk the men. In this case his risk Had cost him nothing. Cops use Hypo gims for the same reason organleggers do. Th'e men I'd shot, if I'd hit anyone in tEose few seconds of battle, would Have come around long ago. Loren must have set me up in these bandages, then left me under "Russian sleep" until He was ready to talk to me. The electrodes were the "Russian sleep". One goes on each eyelid, one on the nape of the neck. A small current goes througH the brain, putting you right to sleep. You get a full night's sleep in an Hour. If it's not turned off you can sleep forever. So this was Loren. At long last. He stood watching me with his Head cocked to one side, birdlike, witK his arms folded. One Hand Held a hypo gun, rather negligently, I thought. What time was it? I didn't dare ask again, because Loren might guess something. But if I could stall him until #, Julie could send Help... She could send Help wHere? Finagle in hysterics! Where was I? If I didn't know that, Julie wouldn't know either! And Loren intended me for the organ banks. One crystaline sliver would knock me out without harming any of tHe delicate, infinitely various parts that made me Gil Hamilton. That Loren's doctors would take me apart. Tn government operating rooms they flasH-burn tHe criminal's brain for later um burial. God knows what Loren would do with my own brain. But tHe rest of me was young and HealtKy. Even considering Loren's overHead, I UN marks on the Hoof. "Why me?" I asked. "It was me you wanted, not just any "It was you who were investigating the case of Owen Jennison. Much too thoroughly." "Not thoroughly enough, damnit!" Loren looked puzzled. "You really don't understand?" "I really don't." "I find that highly interesting," Loren mused. "Highly." "All right, why am I still alive?" "I was curious, Mr. Hamilton. I hoped you'd tell me about your imaginary arm." I bluffed anyway. "My what?" "No need for games, Mr. Hamilton. If I think I'm losing. I'll use this." He wiggled the hypo gun. "You'll never wake up." Damn! He knew. The only things I could move were my ears and my imaginary arm, and Loren knew all about it! I'd never be able to lure him into reach'. Provided He knew all about it. I had to draw him out. "Okay," I said, "but I'd like to know how you found out about Loren chuckled. "I wish it were so. No. We captured one of your men some months ago, quite by accident. When I realized what he was, I induced him to talk shop with me. He was able to tell me something about your remarkable arm. I hope you'll tell me more." "Who was it?" "Really, Mr. Hamil -- " "Who was it?" #S "Do you really expect me to remember the name of every donor?" Who had gone into Loren's organ banks? Stranger, acquaintance, friend? Does the manager of a slaughterhouse remember every slaughtered steer? "So-called psychic powers interest me," said Loren. "I remembered you. And then, when I was on the verge of concluding an agreement with your Belter friend Jennison, I remembered something unusual about a crewman he had shipped with. They called you Gil the Arm didn't they? Prophetic. In port your drinks came free if you could use your imaginary arm to drink them?" "Then damn you. You thought Owen was a plant, did you? Because of me! Me!" "Breast beating, will earn you nothing, Mr. Hamilton." Loren put steel in his voice. "Entertain me, Mr. Hamilton." T'd been feeling around for anything that might release me from my upright prison. No such luck. I was wrapped like a mummy in bandages too strong to break. All I could feel with my imaginary hand were cloth bandages up to my neck, and a bracing rod along my back to hold me upright. Beneath the swathing I was naked. "I'll show you my eldrich powers," I told Loren, "If you'll loan me a cigarette." Maybe that would draw him close enough... He knew something about my arm. He knew it's reach. He put one single cigarette on the edge of a small table-on-wheels and slid it up to me. I picked it up and stuck it in my mouth! and waited hopefully for him to come light it. "My mistake," he murmured; and he pulled the table back and repeated the whole thing with a lighted cigarette. No luck. At least I'd gotten my smoke. I pitched the dead one as far as it would go; about two feet. I had to move slowly with! my imaginary hand. Otherwise what I'm holding simply slips through my fingers. Loren watched in fascination. A floating, disembodied cigarette, obeying my will! His eyes held traces of awe and horror. That was bad. Maybe the cigarette had been a mistake. Some people see psi powers as akin to witchcraft, and psychic people as servants of Satan. If Loren feared me, then I was dead. "Interesting," said Loren. "How far will it reach?" He knew that. "As far as my real arm, of course." "But why? Others can reacH much further. 'Why not you?" He was clear across the room, a good ten yards away, sprawled in an armchair. One hand held a drink, the other held the hypo gun. He was superbly relaxed. I wondered if I'd ever see him move from that comfortable chair, much less come within reach. "The room was small and bare, with the look of a basement. Loren's chair and a small portable bar were the only furnishings, unless there were others behind me. A basement could be anywhere. Anywhere in Los Angeles, or out of it. If it was really morning, I could be anywhere on Earth by now. "Sure," I said, "others can reach farther than me. But they don't have my strength. It's an imaginary arm, sure enough, and my imagination won't make it ten feet long. Maybe someone could convince me it was, if he tried hard enough. But maybe he'd ruin what belief I have. Then I'd have two arms, just like everyone else. I'm better off..." I let it trail away because Loren was going to take all my damn arms anyway. My cigarette was finished. I pitched it away. "Want a drink?" "Sure, if you've got a jigger glass. Otherwise I can't lift it." He found me a shot glass and sent it to me on the edge of the rolling table. I was barely strong #? enough to pick it up. Loren's eyes never left me as I sipped and put it down. The old cigarette lure. Last night I'd used it to pick up a girl. Now it was keeping me alive. Did I really want to leave the world with something gripped tightly in my imaginary fist? Entertaining Loren. Holding his interest until -- here was I? Where? And suddenly I knew. "We are at Monica Apartments," I said. "Nowhere else." "I knew you'd guess that eventually." Loren smiled. "But it'g too late. I got to you in time." "Don't be so damn complacent. It was stupidity, not your luck. I should have smelled it. Owen would never have come here of his own choice. You ordered him here." "And so I did. By then I already knew he was a traitor." "So you sent him here to die. Who was it that checked on him every day to see he'd stay put? Was it Miller, the manager? He has been working for you. He's the one who took the holographs of you and your men out of the computer." "He was the one," said Loren. "But it wasn't every day. I had a man watching Jennison every second, through a portable camera. We took it out after he was dead." "And then waited a week. Nice touch," The wonder was that it had taken me so long. The atmosphere of the place... what kind of people would live in Monica Apartments? The faceless ones, the ones with no identity, the ones who would surely be missed by nobody. They would stay put in their apartments while Loren checked on them, to see that they really did have nobody to miss them. Those who qualified would disappear, and their papers and possessions with them, and their holo would vanish from the computer. Loren said, "I tried to sell organs to the Belters, through your friend Jennison. I know he betrayed me, Hamilton. I want to know how badly." "Badly enough." He'd guess that. "We've got detailed plans for getting up an organ bank dispensary in the Belt. It would not have worked an#nvay, Loren. Belters don't think that way." "No pictures." "No." I didn't want him changing his face. "I was sure he'd left something," said Loren. "Otherwise we would have made him a donor. Much simpler. More profitable, too. I needed the money, Hamilton. Do you know what it costs the organization to let a donor go?" do it?" "He'd left something. There was no way to get at it. All we could do was try to keep the t C A h." I had it then. "When anyone disappears without a trace, the first thing an idiot thinks of is organleggers." "Naturally. So he couldn't just disappear, could he? The police would go to you, and you'd start looking." "For a spaceport locker." "Oh?" "Under the name of Cubes Forsythe." "I knew that name," Loren said between teeth. "I should have tried that. You know, after we had him hooked on current, we tried pulling the plug on him to get him to talk. It didn't work. He couldn't concentrate on anything but getting the droud back in his head. We looked high and low -- " "I'm going to kill you," I said, and meant every word. Loren cocked his head, frowning. "On the contrary, Mr. Hamilton. Another cigarette?" "Yah." He sent it to me, lighted, on the rolling table. I picked it up, holding it a trifle ostentatiously. Maybe I could focus his attention on it -- on his only way to find my imaginary hand. Because if he kept his eyes on the cigarette, and I put it in my mouth at a crucial moment -- I'd leave my hand free without his noticing. What crucial moment? He was still in the armchair. I had to fight the urge to coax him closer. Any move in that direction would make him suspicious. What time was it? And what was Julie doing? I thought of a night two weeks past. Remembered dinner on the balcony of the highest restaurant in Los Angeles, just a fraction less than a mile up. A carpet of neon that spread below us to touch the horizon in all directions. Maybe she'd pick it up... She'd be checking on me at #. markable spaceman," said Loren. "Think of being the only man in the solar system who can adjust a hull antenna without leaving the cabin." "Antennae take a little more muscle than I've got." So he knew I could reach through things. If he'd seen that far -- "I should have stayed," I told Loren. "I wisli I were on a mining ship, right this minute. All I wanted at the time was two good arms." "Pity. Now you have three. Did it occur to you that using psi powers against men was a form of cheating?" "What?" "Remember Raphael Maine ?" Loren's voice had become uneven. He was angry, and holding it down with difficulty. "Sure. Small time organlegger in Australia." "Raphael Maine was a friend of mine. I know he had you tied up at one point. Tell me Mr. Hamilton : if your imaginary hand is as weak as you say, how did you untie the ropes?" "I didn't. I couldn't have. Maine used handcuffs. I picked his pocket for the key... witli my imaginary hand, of course." "You used psi powers against him. You had no right!" Magic. Anyone who's not psychic himself feels the same way, just a little. A touch of dread, a touch of envy. Loren thought he at least one of us. But to send warlocks against him was grossly unfair. That was why he'd let me wake up. Loren wanted to gloat. How many men have captured a warlock? "Don't be an idiot," I said. "I didn't volunteer to play your silly game, or Maine's either. My rules make you a wholesale murderer." Loren got to his feet (what time was it?), and I suddenly realized my time was up. He was in a white rage. His silky blond hair seemed to stand on end. I looked into the tiny needle hole in tUe fiypo gun. There was nothing I coidd do. The reach of my TK was the reach of my fingers. I felt all the things I would never feel: the quart of Trastine in my blood to keep the water from freezing in my cells, the cold bath of half-frozen alcohol, the scalpels and the tiny, accurate surgical lasers. Most of all, the scalpels. A nd my knowledge would die when they threw away my brain. I knew what Loren looked like. I knew about Monica Apartments and who knew how many others of the same kind? I knew where to go to find all the loveliness in Death Valley, and someday I was going to go. What time was it? What time? Loren had raised the hypo gun and was sighting down the stiff length of his arm. Obviously he though he was at target practice. "It really is a pity," he said, and there was only the slightest tremor in his voice. "You should have stayed a spaceman." What was he waiting for? "I can't cringe unless you loosen these bandages," I snapped, and I jabbed what was left of my cigarette at him for emphasis. It jerked out of my grip, and I reached and caught it -- And stuck it in my left eye. At another time I'd have examined the idea a little more closely. But I'd still have done it. Loren already thought of me as his property. As live skin and healthy kidneys and lengths of artery, as parts in Loren's organ banks, I marks. And I was destroying my eye! Organleggers arc always hurting for eyes; anyone who wears glasses could use a new pair, and the organleggers themselves are constantly wanting to change retina prints. What I hadn't anticipated was the pain. I'd read somewhere that there are no sensory nerves in the eyeball. Then it was my lids that hurt. Terribly! But I only had to hold on. T orcn swore and came for me ' at a dead run. He knew how terribly weak was my imaginary arm. What could I do with it? He didn't know; he'd never known, though it stared him in the face. He ran at me and slapped at the cigarette, a full swing that half knocked my head off my neck and sent the now dead butt ricocheting off a wall. Panting, snarling, speechless with! rage, he stood -- within reach. My eye closed like a small tormented fist. I reached past Loren's gun, through his chest wall, and found his heart. And squeezed. His eyes became very round, His mouth gaped wide, his larynx bobbed convulsively. There was time to fire the gun. Instead he clawed at his chest with a Halfparalyzed arm. Twice he raked his fingernails across his chest, gaping upward for air that would not come. He thought he was having a Heart attack. Then his rolling eyes found my face. My face. I was a one-eyed carnivore, snarling with the will to murder. I would have his life if I had to tear the heart out of his chest! How could he help but know? He knew! He fired at the floor and fell. I was sweating and shaking with reaction and disgust. The scars! He was all scars; I'd felt them going in. His heart was a transplant. And the rest of him -- he'd looked about thirty from a distance, but this close it was impossible to tell. Parts were younger, parts older. How much of Loren was Loren? What parts had he taken from others? And none of the parts quite matched. He must have been chronically ill, I thought. And the Board wouldn't give him the transplants He needed. And one day he'd seen the answer to all his problems... Loren wasn't moving. He wasn't breathing. I remembered the way his heart had jumped and wriggled in my imaginary hand, and then suddenly given up. He was lying on his left arm, hiding his watch. I was all alone in an empty room, and I still did not know what time it was. I never found out. It was hours before Miller finally dared to interrupt his boss. He stuck his round, blank face around the door jamb, saw Loren sprawled at my feet, and darted back with a squeak. A minute later a hypo gun came around the jamb, followed by a watery blue eye. I felt the sting in my cheek. tCT checked you early," said Julie. She settled herself uncomfortably at the foot of the hospital bed. "Rather, you called me. When I came to work you weren't there, and I wondered why, and wham. It was bad, wasn't it?" "Pretty bad," I said. "I'd never sensed anyone so scared." "Well, don't tell anyone about it." I hit the switch to raise the bed to sitting position. "I've got an image to maintain." My eye and the socket around it were bandaged and numb. There was no pain, but the numbness was obtrusive, a reminder of two dead men who had become part of me. One arm, one eye. If Julie was feeling that with me, then small wonder if she was nervous. She was. She kept shifting and twisting on the bed. "I kept wondering what time it was. What time was it?" "About nine ten." Julie shivered. "I thought I'd faint when that -- that vague little man pointed his hypo gun around the corner. Oh, don't! Don't, Gil. It's over." That close? Was it that close? "Look," I said, "you go back to work. I appreciate the sick call, but this isn't doing either of us any good. If we keep it up we'll both wind up in a state of permanent terror. She nodded jerkily and got up. "Thanks for coming. Thanks for saving my life, too." Julie smiled from the doorway. "Thanks for the orchids." I hadn't ordered them yet. I flagged down a nurse and got hen to tell me that I could leave tonight, after dinner, provided I went straight home to bed. She brought me a phone, and I used it to order the orchids. Afterward I dropped the bed back and lay there a while. It was nice being alive. I began to remember promises I had made, promises I might never have kept. Perhaps it was time to keep a few. I called down to Surveillance and got Jackson Bera. After letting him drag from me the story of my heroism, I invited him up to the infirmary for a drink. His bottle, but I'd pay. He didn't like that part, but I bullied him into it. T had dialed half of Taffy's number before, as I had last night, I changed my mind. My wristphone was on the bedside table. No pictures. " 'Lo." "Taffy? This is Gil. Can you get a weekend free?" "Sure. Starting Friday?" "Good." "Come for me at ten. Did you ever find out about your friend?" "Yah. I was right. Organleggers killed him. It's over now, we got the guy in charge." I didn't mention the eye. By Friday the bandages would be off. "About that weekend. How would you like to see Death Valley?" "You're kidding, right?" "I'm kidding, wrong. Listen -- " "But it's hot! It's dry! It's as dead as the Moon! You did say Death Valley, didn't you?" "It's not hot this month. Listen..." And she did listen. She listened long enough to be convinced. "I've been thinking," she said then. "If we're going to see a lot of each other, we'd better make a -- a bargain. No shop talk. All right?" "A good idea." "The point is, I work in a hospital," said Taffy. "Surgery. To me, organic transplant material is just the tools of my trade, tools to use in healing. It took me a long time to get that way. I don't want to know where the stuff comes from, and I don't want to know anything about organleggers." "Okay, we've got a covenant. See you at ten hundred Friday." A doctor, I thought afterward. Well. The weekend was going to be a good one. Surprising people are alwa # TS the ones most worth knowing. Bera came in with a pint of J#sB. "My treat," he said. "No use arguing, 'cause you can't reach your wallet anyway." And the fight was on. Sometimes people have more in common than they think. Colonel Lee Musser looked af the tracery on tKe giant screen in front of him and said, "Someone seems to be attacking Russia. I'm glad it isn't us." He picked up the pKone and said, "Captain, this is Colonel Musser at Central. Listen carefully, time is important. We Have a large bogie at a high altitude -- three hundred miles -- on a southeasterly course that will cut across the Russian heartland, destination unknown. We didn't put it there, but the Russians may think we did and retaliate. I'm recommending that both the Joint Chiefs and the hot line be used right now to tell tire Russians we don't know anything about it. I'll stand by here for any confirmation you might need. Over and out." He hung up and turned to supervise the swelling bustle of activity around him. Other phones were busy as other men called lesser officials. After making certain that the information was being passed around as fast as possible he urged the tracking groups to fix a course and target for the bogie. The computers ceased gathering data and swung to computation. Musser watched the trace on the screen until His phone rang, a long, continuous ring. He knew the origin of that ring. He picked up the phone and said, "Colonel Musser, Sir." He listened a moment and then swung around to the computer technicians and waved them over. He said, "Our data so far show it is not falling. It seems to be in orbit now, passing right over the center of the continent. It's larger than anything we could put up, and you might point out that fact to them at the outset. Sir. They ought to know we couldn't put anjrthing that big up. Neither could they, so it might be appropriate to ask them what the hell they... that is, what they are doing." He listened, and then, "Good luck. Sir." and hung up. "Follow it," he said to the computer technicians, "and let me know of any departure from its existing course." Linton stepped up, a wiry, dapper army colonel who always leaned forward a bit when he walked. He kept his eye on the tracery on the screen as he talked to Musser. "Well, Lee, a bit of action at last. Where'd that thing come from if not the Russians? British, French, Chinese? None of them has the capability." "You make the answer easy, if what you say is true. It comes from offplanet." "Oh come on, Lee. Not you." "That bogie's real. We've been triangulating it for six minutes from eighteen or more observers. What's your answer?" Musser's phone rang, the Pentagon ring this time. He picked it up and said, "Colonel Musser." He listened. "Good," he said. "It makes sense that they would know we didn't do it. All pressure off, then? We'll keep watching it. Me? I think it is from offplanet. No, I'm not. Where else? Okay. So long, Charlie." Linton winced. No one of such comparative youth as Musser called General Charles S. Arlington "Charlie." Linton said, "You must be bucking for a promoHe pronounced it you-foh. Musser said, "As of now I'm converted." Linton wandered off, shaking his head. Activity settled into routine for an hour. The bogie changed orbit, dropping to one hundred miles and levelling, following a line above the parallel of forty degrees north latitude. The phones rang again, and for fifteen minutes things were busy. For six hours thereafter there was no change, and by that time half the world had monitors of one kind or another on the bogie. Several of the giant telescopes had photographed it as it swept through their field of view, and nations were comparing pictures. Musser said, "I never thought I'd see the day when we'd be swapping photographs with the Soviet Union on such a chummy basis. What's become of all our good old nastiness?" The Pentagon ring came again, and it was the General. "Lee, it looks like your first guess was right. I want you to head up our effort in coping with it. Come on over here." Tn his new office Musser felt uncomfortable for a few hours with no activity around him. Then the answers to some of his questions began to come in and the phones began to ring. He received approximate answers from half a dozen universities and research centers around the country before anyone else even thought to ask the questions. What was that slightly flattened sphere made of? Did it leave a trail of any kind? What was its mass? What gravitational forces acted on it when it changed course? On and on he went, often putting the same question to different groups to compare answers. It wasn't until the next day, however, that he thought to call in an etymologist and a linguist. "How do we communicate with them up there?" He waved his hand at the sky. They looked surprised and did not answer, so he said, "Can either of you think of anything better than flashing a light at them in a sequence of one, two, three flashes, over and over, or perhaps up to ten?" The etymologist agreed, but thought that seven would be right. The linquist thought five would be better. While they mounted an argument with each other Musser had his men start up the great heliograph he had rigged to emit short flashes in bursts of one, two and three. They used the aiming mechanism on an antiaircraft rifle as the bogie swept overhead, and they maintained their flashes for four minutes. Musser said to his two experts, "Give some thought to what we'll do when we make a little headway here. I want a reasonable plan, not a lot of arguments. Bye." He turned to the task of setting up radio communication in conjunction with the flashes, and two passes later his men emitted blasts of static of mixed frequencies timed with the flashes. On the third orbit, a flash came back from the bogie and at the same time they received a pulse on the high end of their scatter band. By the sixth orbit the bogie was counting with him, and Musser was using his voice. He ordered his men to raise the frequency slowly to the TV broadcast ranges, and on the tenth orbit a master sergeant was giving the bogie a lesson in the alphabet and simple English sentences. Musser got his first response on the twelfth orbit. It was an aspirated word that sounded like the whispered word "Hhugg." That was when the etymologist and the linguist showed up with a plan. Musser thanked them and asked them if they minded leaving so he could take a nap. General Arlington woke him up. "Lee, I'm putting you in overall charge of that thing, to the extent you can take charge of it." General Arlington was known for a sense of humor. "It seems to be talking to your men at a pretty steady rate. One thing, though. Other countries have followed your lead. I understand the bogie now speaks pretty fair French, Russian, German and Japanese. What are you going to do?" Musser said, "Rub my eyes and yawn." General Arlington frowned a little, and Musser said, "Okay, Charlie. The thing to do is to talk it down to the United Nations Plaza. Let's see what I can do." He stepped up to the battery of TV cameras and microphones while the master sergeant briefed him on everything that had been happening. "It knows who you are," the sergeant said. "It wanted to know who thought of signalling so fast. So go and talk to it." "What do they look like, sergeant?" "Well, they won't show us. Or can't. They say they can't. But they can see us." "They use names?" "No." A yr usser walked out in front of''-'the cameras and said, "All right up there. Lee Musser down here. You see and Hear me all right?" An immediate sibilant "yesss" came back. "What do you Have in mind up there?" A pause, and then, "You come right to the point, Lee Musser We have nothing particular in mind. We'd like to come down for a few days, but we don't know what we would be getting into. Will it be safe for us?" "I think so. I'll check with all the other countries to make sure nobody takes a shot at you. I would like to have you come down here, but other countries might not like that. We have a place where all countries meet, and it is not far from Here. You ought to come down there." "Damn good idea." Musser glared at the sergeant. "Who taught it 'damn?' " The sibilant voice said, "Oh we learned a lot from your television and radio once you taught us the language. Don't blame the seieant. We'll ask the other countries whose language we speak if we can land safely at the U.N. Okay with you, Lee?" Musser shrugged and said, "Sure, man." "We're not men. Wait until you see us. Be back to you in a few minutes." Musser nodded and walked out of camera view and started his people calling to clear with the New York City police, the New York City fire department, the mayor, the governor, the U.N. Secretary General, regional F.B.I. Early Warning Commander, Air Force Commander, Harbor Police, and the U.S. Coast Guard. He had just got the phone calls going when he heard the sibilant voice say, "Lee Musser, you there?" He stepped back into camera view and said, "I'm here, man. How'd you make out?" "Pretty good. Can we rely on their assurances not to shoot us down?" "I think so. Let it sit for an hour while they chew on it. I have a lot of phone calls going now so that you won't be wounding any feelings when you land. Let them gel, too. By the way. Where you fellows from?" "Yesss. Well, we haven't got yoiu' name for the place yet. It's about four light-years from here, aad as soon as we identify it in your language we'll name it for you." "Been here before?" "Yesss, but not lately. We got here, oh let's see, about eighty TV yCusser shook His head. "Boy,--you fellows live a lot longer than we do." "Hold it. When I say 'we,' I mean my race was here. We don't live much longer than you do. I guess we average out to something like ninety or one hundred of your years. Damn shame, isn't it?" "Yeah. How come somebody as smart as you hasn't figured out a way to live forever?" "We're not smart, at least not that smart. Hell, we're not much smarter than you. That's why we want to make sure your people won't take a shot at us when we land. We don't have any weapons aboard. We can't hurt you here on your planet. Fact is, we can help you. We can teach you to build the engines that power this ship, and maybe a couple of other things. But we can't teach you much. You won't want to go space traveling any more than we do. Speed of light is tops. If it weren't for the clock paradox we couldn't get here at all. When we get back home everybody we knew will be long dead. That's a pretty high price to pay for the privilege of going for a space jaunt. We do it every once in a while, but not often. "We made this trip because we wanted to see what happened after our last visit. We didn't really expect to find this kind of an advanced civilization. When we were here last time, things were in a mess. Swampy, hot, wet everywhere, and huge damn animals with big teeth -- yes we've got the word. Dinosaurs. The place was all over dinosaurs." "Yeah, well, some people think things must have been better in those days anjrway." "You have that kind, too, huh? Believe me, they weren't. Our people couldn't safely leave the ship. We had no weapons. We managed to get some studying done anyway. Boy, let me tell you. This planet is a legend back home. We scare our youngsters with stories and pictures about it. Wait until you see the pictures." "Hey, great. Our scientific community will go off its rocker to see actual pictures of Earth some of the live stock, too, you say?" "Most of it. Wait until you see the animals. When we left we seeded the place with a bloodsucking grub we use to make food for us, the way you use a cow. Left them all over the place -- figured they might kill off the dinosaurs. We had a bad few minutes when we first got here this time. That grub was a parasite, and somewhat adaptable, and we thought you might be the evolutionary product of the grub. But you're not -- nothing like the way it could possibly turn out. It might still be around, though. That's one of the things we'd like to check into, if you'll let us." "Sure, far as I'm concerned. Say, you're talking a lot better. You learn fast." "Yes, we do that. We communicate by squeezing air through many narrow tubes that whistle. To make your kind of sounds I squeeze my air into a voice box that I control with my... call them hands. It takes some practice." "Like I said, you're pretty smart." "Not much. You could run films for us. We have eyes something like yours, and we can make records. We can read books. We can give you wires with our information on them. You can play them back. But we have only got a week here before we have to head home; we have a schedule that we ought to stick to." tC'eah," said Musser. "Wait a minute while I see how our clearances are coming along down here." Musser was by now surrounded by a huge mob kept off the platform only by a ring of police. He called out, "Sergeant, how're things coming!" "Pretty good. Sir. The New York police are already clearing out the U.N. grounds to make sure no nut gets at them. Most of the others are all set. Another few minutes. Musser started to speak, but the voice said, "We heard him, Lee. Sounds promising." Musser nodded. "I think you will be all right. How are your checks coming?" "All in order, those that have answered." "How do you manage to get along so well in all those languages?" "We pick them up fast. Can you get to the U.N. in an hour?" "Yep. You ready to come down?" "Yep. Meet , you there then." The hum of static stopped, and Musser stepped off the platform. A platoon formed around him and led him to a copter nearby. There was a delay of a few minutes while the troops moved the crowd back, and then the copter took off and headed swiftly for New York City. They were there in forty minutes. The New York police had cleared the U.N. Plaza, so the copter put down there to drop off Musser and his crew, and then it left. Musser found himself in the midst of a group of very important people, all of whom wanted to talk to him and make suggestions. Musser listened and smiled pleasantly and nodded, and started them talking among themselves. "There it is." The cry went up from the crowd, and they all looked up to see the silver dot in the sky grow quickly larger as it dropped toward them. It did not seem to slow down as it neared the surface and assumed surprisingly large dimensions. A few women began screaming, and the crowd out on the street surged with panic and then scattered as the great globe plummeted to within a hundred yards of the ground and then stopped. It blotted out the sun, but the panicky crowd grew quiet, and then the great sphere settled slowly to the ground, crushing a few trees as it landed. As it made its final move, Musser, unnoticed, left the group he was with and walked alone to a point near where its base would touch! the ground. When it hit he craned his neck looking for a door or hatch. Seeing none, he began to circle. Halfway around he found it and waved his radioman over. He picked up the microphone and said, "Well, so far so good. Everything all right in there?" "Great in Here Lee Musser. All right out there ?" "Yeah. You scared a few people when you came down, but nothing serious. Come on out." "Well, I want to make sure you are ready for us. I want to remind you again that we are not exactly supermen in appearance. I doubt you have anything Here on Earth that looks quite like us." Musser said, "All right. You apologized. Come on out." "We note you've got TV cameras hooked up all over Hell and gone. I think a lot of your people are likely to faint. Is that all right?" "Sure is. Come on out." "Are there any kooks out there that might start shooting when they got a look at us?" Musser sighed. "You know? For the first meeting in the history of mankind with extraterrestrials, you certainly are kicking up a lot of fuss about showing yourself." He glanced at the nearest police captain, who nodded to him. "Everything's Hunky dory out here, the police tell me. We're not expecting a Robert Taylor. Come on out." "Okay, if you say so." 'he hatch swung outward and a ramp slid down to the ground. There was a moment's pause and out came an object, down the ramp, alive, all rigEt; but only obviously so because it moved. It was brown in color, about three feet long, two feet wide, and five inches thick, roughly rectangular in shape, and around its perimeter was a fringe of appendages, finger-thick and five inches long, spaced an inch or so apart. The rectangle moved in ripples that traveled down its length, and in the front ' eight appendages it carried a black box four inches on a side. It flowed up to Musser's feet and stopped, and out of the box came the words, "Well, what do you think?" Musser said, "You look like a damn bath mat." "Yes. Well, where I come from you'd look like the rack we dry food on." Musser nodded and said, "Figures." He walked around the creature, noticing a row of eyes all around the perimeter. Musser said, "Where's your brain?" "Brain? Oh', thinking tissue. Strung out inside the muscle sheaths. Where else?" "Yeah. It seems to me you're pretty well built for moving, working and all like that. How come you were so shy about coming out? I think you're a pretty good looking guy. You are a guy, aren't you?" "That's a little hard to say." "Well, if it isn't important to you, it isn't to me. Welcome to Earth, Mat. Mind if I call you Mat?" "Not at all. Let me get the rest of us out here. Why don't you bring your people over and we can talk and get the formalities over and get to know one another." Most of the important people joined them, although' a few were afraid to come too close. At first the Earth people were afraid of stepping on the extraterrestrials. But then Mat asked Musser to step up on him while he carefully carried Musser around in a small circle to show that they were strong and not easily hurt. Out of the spaceship came the unearthly equivalent of chairs -- half cylinders -- over which the visitors draped themselves. There a dozen of them, and soon the plaza buzzed with conversation as scientists and TV interviewers began pumping the visitors. Several hours passed, and Musser said to Mat, "Maybe we ought to organize. Let's get our communication people over here to set up with you a system for swapping information. Also, set your own schedule for eating, sleeping, and whatever else you do." "You've got a good logical mind, Lee Musser. Let's do it." It took two hours to set up a smooth running schedule of information exchange. Off to one side the TV news services were happily interviewing one of the visitors for the benefit of the world-wide audience. A team of Earthside scientists agreed on the needed equipment and located most of it at Columbia, N.Y.U. and Brooklyn Polytechnic. An orderly hubbub settled in. Streams of Earthpeople poured past in controlled lines, looking at the activities; congressmen, senators, governors, presidents of corporations, scholars, renowned sports figures, actors. T he next day Musser said, "Everything all right from your end. Mat?" "Yes, Lee. We're into your astronomy, and your name for our home is Proxima Centauri." "Nice to know. Welcome, Centaimians. You know, you've already stopped looking like bath mats to most of us." "Nice to know. We can look at you without thinking about food, too. Funny, we're pretty much alike in mental outlook. I wonder if our scientists will be able to explain that. We've given them some of our tissue, and you've given us some of yours. Maybe they can make something out of it. And your people are sure wild about those pictures my people made eighty sized how much we had changed to be a lot thicker and shorter than we are now. So it goes, all tilings change. We're looking at your paleontology texts. Those damn parasites we left behind must have killed off your dinosauers, but there ought to be some fossils, at least. How are your people doing with the theory of our space drive?" Musser said, "They think they Have it mastered. We'll have a couple of ships built in a few years. That's a big thing you've done for us Mat. I don't know how long it would have taken us to get it on our own. That space drive theory is subtle. "What are friends for? This way we'll see you out in the Centauri neighborhood before long. No reason why we can't continue the exchange. We've got to crack out of here in another two days to meet our schedule." "Yeah. Things won't be the same around here after you go." Two days later they gathered for the farewell. Musser said, "If I knew how to shake hands with a guy like you I would." "I know how you feel. When I put my voice box down in a minute. I want you to have it." "Thanks, Mat. I want you to take this." Musser leaned over and slid his West Point class ring on one of Mat's finger-like appendages. They stood quietly, and then Musser said, "Say, Mat. Our biologists found out something they wanted you to know from me. You're more of Earth than you think. That change in form you went through in the caused by your visit here; we can trace the chromosomal origin of the tissue to mycelium from Earth. You have it all through you. Yessir, while he was here, one of your ancestors must have inadvertently mated with a mushroom." Mat said, "We suspected something like that. We have a bit of news I'm supposed to give you privately, too. We finally found those parasites were the first mammals on Earth. We seem to have seeded your planet with the first mammals. I'm afraid they are your remote ancestors." Musser shrugged his shoulders and said, "Figures. It's just too bad they're afraid to announce it, both ways. Look how close we turned out to be." "Yeah," said Mat. "What are they worried about?" He flipped his voice box up at Musser and moved up the ramp. The takeoff was uneventful. QcUoXM Tf science fiction has a more meticulous creator than James Blish, that patient individual has thus far escaped my notice. Ray Bradbury, poet of tlie nuance, has said that he devoted much labor and attention, early in his career, to performing exhaustive dissections of Sturgeon's (then existing) body of work. Sturgeon himself can tell you the why of every word in every one of his stories (most writers can't, and many take pride in that). And a lot of writers can go on and on about their motives, messages, moods and meditations. But I mean what I said -- Blish' is not merely introspective, and he is long, long past any apprenticeships. He is meticulously creative, and a lot of the time his creations have the inexhaustibility of real things. They reward re-reading not by repeating a familiar and pleasant flow of words but by presenting further aspects of what prove to be complex ideas. For this reason, Black Easier (Doubleday, #) not only left me curiously dissatisfied -- I'm going to explain why this may be due to a whopping blind spot I happen to have -- but seriously worried that if I were to re-read it enough, I might pluck out of it something vital that has escaped me. However, let's get at it from one end to the otlier. At the opening end, there is a very brief and hazardous author's statement that this book is actually the third volume in a trilogy, that the overall title of the trilogy is After Such Knowledge, and that the other two books are Doctor Mirabilis, a historical novel about Roger Bacon, and A Case of Conscience -- a science-fiction novel (and a magnificent one, in case you haven't read it). Black Easter is that classic of fantasy, the deal-witHthe-devil story. Doctor Mirabilis, a book well and seriously received in England, Has never been published in the U.S.A., you will have to trust me, I guess, in my possibly incorrect statement that the only overt link among the parts of the trilogy is that the principal characters of all three books are vitally concerned with intense questions of theology. The author says the books are independent of each other except for subject matter, and if you're sure you know what he's referring to, then you can act on his word. Black Easter is subtitled "Faust Aleph-Null," the title of the magazine version. "Why, this is Hell; nor am I out of it," sasrs Christopher Marlowe on the title page, and a little farther on, Albertus Magnus says it is not reasonable to suppose that Aristotle knew the number of the Elect. The author, Having caused all this to appear in the book, which he dedicates to C. S. Lewis, also includes an introduction in which he vouches for the care he took in researching the rituals described in the book. And then we are off, under this freight of clues, signs, preparations and sigils, into a story that begins with a sentence designed to remind you of "Who Goes There?" or the scene in whicK young Roger's room explodes in the light of a torch, or some other reference I'm not privy to, but which is pretty clearly intended to refer to something beyond the narrative, for it's instantly qualified for the purposes of the actual scene to be set. (When Blish waters down a preceding sentence, it's because he's just gotten done hitting you with a quotation, not because He's too lazy to rewrite). What now follows is a story in which a ruthless munitions millionaire -- one hardly needs the first modifier, does one? -- approaches a black magician for the purpose of intensifying the amount of chaos in the world. The magician, a dedicated. Hardworking, learned craftsman, first performs two preliminary jobs, for the purpose of demonstrating His ability, we are told, and then opens the lid of Pandora's box. He performs everything needful to keep the lid open only a crack, and only for a specified time. He does not blow his cool, and his assistants do falter but do not fail. Yet the world is destroyed, and he is dragged off into the Pit. Why has he failed to maintain control of the demons, when everything He did was in accordance with the previously well established relationship between himself and the ruler of Heaven and Hell? Because, the Devil says, God is dead. All right. Up to a point, what we had was a story much like the regrettably scarce Unknown novellas of years ago, with the addition of priests and other features dealt with in ways John Campbell never published. But by those standards, I'm not even doing something reprehensible by giving away the punchline, because by those standards this novel is an unreasonably inflated short story, not deserving of much care as an entity, for all that individual scenes and characterizations are handled with Blish's accustomed virtuosity in such matters. I can't believe those are the standards Blish intended, because of the great care he has taken to put so many markers on this story. One does not lightly offer any companion to Mirabilis and A Case of Conscience, particularly when one is their author, and especially when that author is genuinely concerned with religion, not with trick endings. I would be more at ease -- a great deal more at ease -- if I did not have this blind spot I mentioned in Paragraph #, said blind spot being that I cannot accept any fictional situation in which the God of the Bible appears as an operative character. I would in fact Have disqualified myself from reviewing this book, except tliat I strongly suspect I'm hot alone, by far, in experiencing tfus failure of the suspension of disbelief, belief, or unbelief, take your choice. And I more than suspect that BlisK knows perfectly well his last line will not play the way he appears to expect it to play. You pay your money and you take your choice -- Lewis, in Perelandia, obviously did expect his readers to go along with a literal wrestle with the Devil (and a most imconvincing one, at that). Blish quotes Marlowe, harking back to Unknown's None But Lucifer (by H. L. Gold and L. Sprague deCamp)" yet assuredly (?) Earth and Hell in Black Easter are not the same place... to begin with, anyway. I don't know. I would disqualify myself on those grounds, too, except that think I'm accurately portraying the potential reaction of many readers. I could resolve my difficulties by re-reading the book until I felt I understood it. But would you be patient for long? Have you read it several times already, by the time this review appears in print? Or I could pick up a phone, and ask Jim some of these questions. But would you? Strange. Strange. So opaque a book from so pellucid a writer... Let's go to a pellucid book by a man who sprays words in a dazzle of light. Qamuel R. Delany i the best  science-fiction writer in the world. As partial evidence, I offer you Nova (Doubleday, # -- pay the hardcover price and place the volume in your library). If he lives long enough, Delany will get the full treatment from the slick magazine blurb writers, from the literary editors, and from critics more polished and prestigious than your humble servant. He will be interviewed, quoted, discussed, photographed standing alone on a beach at dawn, photographed sharing an apple with a child, and be offered a role in an underground movie. I just want to say it while it's true. Samuel R. Delany, right now, as of this book. Nova, not as of some future book or some accumulated body of work, is the best science-fiction writer in the world, at a time when competition for that status is intense. I don't see how a science-fiction writer can do more than wring your heart while explaining How it works. No writer can. The special thing that science fiction does is to first credibly place the heart in an unconventional environment. A particular thing that recent science fiction has been doing is to make that unconventional environment a teclinological one. Another Has been to make it a romantic one, sometimes calling it an intensely humanistic one, or a psychedelic one. All of these things are accomplished in Nova by Samuel R. Delany, the world's best science-fiction writer. But let's go about this in some systematic way. What makes this book, among all books, offer me the conviction that its author stands at some pinnacle? Well, for one thing it successfully combines a number of strong, well handled story elements. It is highly entertaining to read, and it involves the reader in the unfolding of events. It does so on a number of levels, and it does so while using classical science-fiction elements For example, the story of interstellar politico-economics is a well established and thoroughly explored vehicle in science fiction Having chosen to set his story in this framework, Delany is obligated to make it believable -- to make it develop meaningfully to give it a history and to promise it a future The generations-long galaxy-wide power struggle between the contending factions in Nova meets all of these criteria. The human events in the book are all valid parts of the one central politico-economic event they interact with, They are influenced by and influence it, believably and directlyDelany's technical accomplishment in bringing off this portion of the story, in the necessarily restricted space he allows himself, is impressive. People who specialize in this kind of story have often taken much lengthier paths to getting it told. Delany tackles it like an old master. Which he is not; he simply seems like one. But within the story of what quarter -- or, more accurately, third -- of the human galaxy will come out on top is tire story of who will reach the Illyrion first. And this, too, is a classical science-fiction story in its aspect of explaining that Illyrion is a physical element -- albeit a most unconventional one -- whose properties make it the basic universal power source (and hence make its possession a potent politico-economic factor) and whose properties furthermore are crucial to the plot climax. That is, this is a useful, good, effective thing to have in an sf story provided you can make it scientifically believable and then make it it artistically believable. There are a lot of places where a science-fiction writer can fall down right here -- in his science, and in his fiction, as well as in his writing -- and Delany dances through them. Up to now, I thought only Larry Niven could make stellar mechanics as functionally understandable as this. The story of v,here tKe Illyrion is to be reached is, again, an example of virtuosity in these several places ; it is also the working out of the classically posed scientific puzzle. All the clues are given in the beginning of the story, and the ending satisfactorily explains their relevance. At the same time, all these many other things are going on, and Delany is plausibly telling us how a man might pilot a vessel through' a nova. And we haven't even touched yet on the story of Lorq Von Ray and his blood-struggle against the psychopathic Prince and Prince's sister. Ruby Red, whom Lorq loves, but it's in the telling of that story that Delany wiU assuredly reach you where you live; I really don't see how some aspect of that story can fail to seem very true and poignant to you. But leave that. We have many good storytellers in the field, especially lately, who can involve you in interpersonal drama. They are all Ted Sturgeon's children, if you want to oversimplify. What about taking the cyborg idea, and painting a picture of a civilization where everyone plugs directly into his tools? What about then making you realize that a socketed man plugged into a factory literally puts the raw materials in with his bare hands and nudges and pushes the product along the processing line. His brain, after all, cannot then tell the difference between telling his hand to scoop and telling an automated train of ore cars to roll into the unloading dock. AU right? Then Delany makes you realize that if this is true -- which is a little past where Cordwainer Smith left it, already -- then such a factory worker has a sense of accomplishment and identity with his product that is now lost to the #th century and has in fact been lost to us all since the disappearance of the artisan. And that this becomes a major social fact in the world of the future... a redeeming fact of technology, with all its intense humanistic implications arrived at via the route of playing on the sensorium. And what of the hero who scoops up seven tons of Illyrion in his bare Hands and tips the balance of interstellar power, of history and of Human yearning? I Haven't even told you about the Mouse. Or Dan. Or the syrinx, or Istanbul, or the puns. I'll give a clue about Delany the writer this year as distinct from Delany the writer last year. In The Einstein Inteisection, Looby Has a musical machete. In Nova, Mouse Kas a syrinx and calls it an ax almost rigHt away -- it's later that you get tfie jest. There are a couple of things that might have been done better. I'll list a couple to save time -- Brian was a good idea, but shouldn't have been just let go if he was going to be a character in the book at all. Since a function like Brian is necessary to the story, it probably should have been a piece of prose rather than a person. And we should have seen some Illyrion at the end; we need a flash of the Grail, for credibility. Okay? Satisfied? But I never said this was the world's best science-fiction book. It's so far the best book of the year, not coincidentally because it's a book, this year, by the world's best science-fiction writer. That's what I said. For Third Consecutive Year This Month In IF by Roger Zelazny (Author of Damnation Alley, Lord of Light, etc.) (Author of Four-Stcecf Trionge, etc.) by J. T. McIntosh An Exciting New Future-Fact Column by Lester del Rey -- and many morel Read the January If ond see why it has been awarded the Best Magazine Hugo for three straight years. On sale now. Ben Bova, whose Foeman, Where Do You Flee? leads off this issue, marks his tenth year as a science-fiction writer in #. His first appearance was with a juvenile novel, The Star Conquerors, since which he has published ten books, plus a number of articles and stories. The articles, he says, began when "Isaac Asimov was approached by Cele Goldsmith to do a series on 'Life on Other Worlds'. He was busy and didn't want to do it, but he told Cele that Ben Bova, who knew just as much about it as he did, would be glad to do the series. Then he called me and told me what he had told Cele. After reviving me he said, 'Now, here's what I mean. You'll know just as much as I do, because if you get stuck I'll help you.' I frequently got stuck. Isaac was a big help." Bova's basic career is as Coordinator of Marketing for AvcoEverett Research Laboratory in Massachusetts, which principally does research in high-temperature gas physics, which includes everything from re-entry physics to gas lasers. Among other interesting projects is a means of protecting a spacecraft from lethal doses of radiation, such as solar-flare occurrences. "It turns out," Bova says, "that you may be able to predict solar flares well enough so that on a threeor four-day mission to the moon you can time your mission so that there won't be a flare. But when you start traveling out toward Mars you're going to be in deep space so long that there's bound to be a flare of serious enough intensity so that you're going to need radiation shielding. You can shield with a cement wall, but that's kind of bulky. One of the things we're trying to do is shield with a magnetic field to keep these high-energy protons away from the spacecraft by deflecting them. This calls for real good knowledge of the interplay of magnetic energy and plasmas, in the field of study called magnetohydrodynamics." Bova, a regular at the annual Milford Science-fiction Writers' Conference, says that the Conference reminds him of some of the things that happen at the lab. "In the laboratory a research man reports periodically on his work in front of a sort of jury of peers, who will offer generally friendly, sometimes pretty barbed, criticism of what he's doing. The guy goes away sometimes bloody, but usually wiser. At Milford the same thing is done to manuscripts that all of the writers submit." John Brunner, whose Thingof-the-Month-Club japes are a Galaxy feature, is a Londoner who has functioned as editor, poet and critic as well as writer. His views on writing are worth listening to; "We ought to get back to the old idea of a 'masterpiece' -- that is to say, a task one sets oneself in order to demonstrate that one has fully mastered the basics of the writing craft. Picasso, to my mind, could never have become the seminal influence on modern art that he is had he not been one of the great portrait painters of his generation. I have a feeling that perhaps I've been fortunate in coming up the slow way in science fiction; none of my early books achieved immediate wide acclaim; they just sold and brought me in a steady living. And now, finally, after ten years of freelancing, I think I've done a book which will stand up Head and shoulders above everything else I've ever written. This is Stand on Zanzibar, from Doubleday." James Tiptree, Jr., one of our more peripatetic writers, is just back from a fishing sojourn amid the primeval rocky lochs of Northern Scotland. Saw no LocH Ness monsters. He reports; also no fish. Larry Niven (Tie Organleggars') won a Hugo for Neutron Star, published a year or two ago in ff. Aroimd the Galaxy office there is a feeling that he may be about due for another one for The Organleggers... The trick is to write the number of possible results of flipping n coins, even when n is unknown because you've hidden some of the coins. The solution is to draw the row of coins, or have someone else do it, and then merely write the number I in front of it. The answer is the number of possible results in binary notation. results. Writing the number I before them gives you the binary number This is so regardless of how many zeroes ("coins") you have drawn, and this regardless of whether you can count them or not. "Oh, I didn't know you meant to give the answer as a binary number!" (If you don't know what binary numbers are, ask any twelve-year-old; as a last resort, you might even look up a copy of Digifs and Dastards, published by Ballantine Books, written by your editor.) Its name is Arrival Date...Sep.temher,...I#Lb... Sex Normal Length...# pes Condition . , AlI,Ne.w...S.t.o.r.ie.s.!... Editor Residence Newsstarid Only Father and child are doing well! This is number one, And the fun has just begun... , AU N(W...to the family of the leading Science-Fiction and Fantasy Magazines. Explore the fascinating field of spac(' technology. Gain new insights and a broader understanding through this authoritative new book. What will the space systems of the future be like? One thing you can be sure of, they will become more and more complex as they are called upon to perform new and daring missions. 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Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book; KThe Mastery of Life," Address: Scribe S.H.J. Sort Jose, California #I # U.S.A. -- I Scribe: S.H.J. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. Name Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. February, #  Vol #, No. I by Robert Silverberg by J. R. Klugh by Hayden Howard by Algis Budrys by Philip K. 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Here's just the first three months: (the best of the best) Brian Ball's exciting novel by Robert Siiverberg: Zenna Henderson's (stories of other people... and things) by Dan Morgan... J. T. McIntosh's An anthology of science fiction devilment by John Wyndham, Judith Merril, Michael MoorcocK, and others... And April... well, save April for next ad, but remember: Traps  Prut I s Come two centuries ago, a cou pie of mathematicians were corresponding about their favorite subject, the intrinsic properties of numbers. Said GoldbacH to Euler: I conjecture, though I have not been able to prove, that every even number can be written as the sum of two primes. Said Euler to Goldbach: Well, you may be right. Anyway, every even number I've tried it on is just the way you said it would be. But where's the proof? Two hundred years later the proof is still missing -- though a Norwegian named Brun, around the time of the first World War, did manage to prove that every even number could be written as the sum of nine primes, and a Russian named Vinogradof, in #, proved that every sufficiently large odd number could be written as the sum of three primes. (The stickler is that Vinogradof could not say just what the term "sufficiently large" meant.) The question still is not closed. And there's hardly a mathematician alive, or for that matter dead in the last couple centuries, who hasn't spent at least an afternoon, sometimes years, trying to prove whether Goldbach's famous conjecture is right or wrong. Proving it was wrong would be easy -- all you'd need to do would be to find one exception. Proving it right is a lot harder, in principle; but as a matter of fact no one has. You might want to put in a little time of your own on it. It's easy to see that the first even number #, can be written as the sum of I and #, both primes; # can be written as # plus #; # as # plus #, # as # plus #, # as # plus #... etc. You needn't bother with those small numbers; every even number up to # has already been studied, and all of them, true enough, can be written as the sum of two primes. But what about #? Or #. nphere is something vaguely troubling about that sort of problem, and that is that there's a sort of unsettling appearance of an injection of language hangups into a non-language problem. Take that word "even." Many writers have spent many words discussing the unique position of the number # as "the only even prime." Is there really anything unique about it? "Even," after all, means only "divisible by two." Wouldn't it be just as sensible to say that # is unique in that it is the only prime divisible by three? The Wonder Worker. One Drop Neutralizes Any Odor in a # Cu. Ft. Area For About # Hours The quickest -- most thorough -- most economical -- lasting room deodorizer available. Send # at the special mail order price. I understand I can return the purchase for full refund if I am unsatisfied. Name Address City State Zone We Have a pet conjecture of our own, which we've been wasting a lot of scratch-paper trying to test out. It's a generalization of Goldbach's notion, and at least at first glance it seems to us to be as difficult to prove or disprove as Goldbach's own. Goldbach says that any number which I has the prime # as a factor (that is, any even number) can be written as the sum of # primes. The generalization says that any number which has any given prime p as a factor (p being #, #, #, #, #, # -- whatever you will) can be written as the sum of that many primes. The number #, for instance, has the prime #, as a factor, and can be written as # plus # plus #. The number # has the prime # as a factor, and can be written as I plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus # plus #. (As well as in several other ways.) It would be interesting to know whether this particular conjecture is true or false, and anybody with a lot of spare time, or anybody with a computer with spare time, is cordially invited to try to find a number which doesn't have these characteristics and to let us know about it. For one thing, it might be easier to prove the generalization of Goldbach's theorem than its special case; mathematical man-hours we could save just by doing that. For another, it might cast a little heeded light on just how many of our famous "insoluble" problems are resisting solution more because of language difficulties than because of their own merits. Mathematical problems? Yes, but we weren't thinking of just mathematical problems. As Korzybski and Hayakawa have been telling us for some decades, and as McLuhan may (or may not) be telling us now, the language in which we attempt to state our problems is quite capable of baffling our attempts to solve them. We do have a sort of egocentric tendency to assume that the fact that we have devised a word must necessarily indicate that there is something that the word means. When the words that get in our way are "odd" and "even," perhaps it is merely an annoyance that they shape our thinking in ways that defeat our purposes. But when the words are "freedom" and "democracy" and "national honor" perhaps the consequences are graver than that. When Lemuel Gulliver visited the floating island of the Laputans, one of the far-out philosophers he met refused to speak at all. Any word, he held, can be ( continueu on page #) Swiss craftsmanship.  Shaped to shave heaviest beard. Maker guarantees for one full year. e. 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Net profit for two days, #." (Mr.  Mrs. Theodore Welds, Oregon) Send Free Book showing how I can start a business of my own and make big profits. Show me how I can get barhow to buy below wholesale. (If under . gains like these. I #I . state age.) The Mellinger Co., OcpL C# # S. Sepulveda, Los Angeles, Calif. # Save # days... Give Zip No. for fastest reply.  T In the holy city of Jorslem lay the one hope of Renewal. But there was no end of duty for a Watcher who had failed. I yvur world was truly tKeirs, now.  All the way across Eyropj I could see that, as I made my Pilgrimage toward holy Jorslem. Thie invaders had taken everything, and we belonged to them as beasts in a barnyard belong to the farmer. They were everywhere. Some were sightseers, others were administrators; all had the look of masters. They walked with cool confidence, as if telling us tiiat the will had drawn favor from us and conferred it upon them. They were not cruel to us, and yet they drained us of vitality by their mere presence among us. Our guilds became nothing. Our elaborate society was again without structure, as it had been in the chaos at the end of the Second Cycle. Our sun, our moons, our museums of ancient relics, our ruins of former cycles, our cities, our palaces, our future, our present and our past had all undergone a transfer of title. At night the blaze of the stars mocked us. All the universe looked down on our shame. The cold wind of winter told us that for our sins our freedom had been lost. The bright heat of summer told us that for our pride we had been humbled. Through a changed world we moved, stripped of our past selves. I who was once of the Watchers who roved the stars four times each day now had lost that pleasure, for there was no more Watching to do. I had passed from that guild to join the Rememberers, but only for a while; and now, bound for Jorslem, I found cool comfort in the Hope that as a Pilgrim I might gain redemption and renewal in that holy city. My traveling companion -- the former Rememberer Olmayne -- and I repeated each night the rituals of our Pilgrimage: "We yield to the Will." "We yield to the Will." "In all things great and small." "In all things great and small." "And ask forgiveness." "And ask forgiveness." "For sins actual and potential." "For sins actual and potential." "And pray for understanding and repose." "And pray for understanding and repose." "Through all our days until redemption comes." "Through all our days until redemption comes." Thus we spoke the words. Saying them, we clutched the cool polished spheres of starstone, icy as frostflowers, that all Pilgrims carry, and made communion with the Will. And so we journeyed Jorslemward in this world that no longer was owned by man. II T t was at the Talyan approach to Land Bridge that Olmayne first used her cruelty on me. Olmayne was cruel by first nature; and yet we had been Pilgrims together for many months, traveling from Perris eastward over the mountains and down the length of Talya to the bridge, and she had kept her claws sheathed. Until this place. The occasion was our halting for a company of invaders coming north from Afreek. There were perhaps twenty of them, tall and harsh-faced. They rode in a gleaming covered vehicle, long and narrow, with thick sandcolored treads and small windows. We could see the vehicle from far away, raising a cloud of dust as it neared us. This was a hot time of year. The sky itself was the color of sand, and it was streaked with folded sheets of heat-radiation, glowing and terrible energy streams of turquoise and gold. Perhap fifty of us stood I beside the road, with the land of Talya at our backs and the continent of Afreek before us. We were a varied group: some Pilgrims, like Olmayne and myself, making the trek toward the holy city of Jorslem, but also I counted in the band five former Watchers -- shorn of their profession, as I Had been, by the conquest of Earth -- and also several indexers, a Sentinel, a pair of Communicants, a Scribe and even a few Changelings. We gathered in a straggling assembly, awarding the road by default to the invaders. Land Bridge is not wide, and the road will not allow many to use it at any time. Yet in normal times the flow of traffic had always gone in both directions at once. Here today, we feared to gallant ine. I We have long brooded about a , real fantasy publishing program, nudged along by, among other I things, Jim Blish's enthusiasm for I Cabell. Now, since our privately expanding universe permits two ' s.f.-cum-fantasy titles each month,  plus an honest-to-God, no-holdsbarred adult fantasy, we can in" dulge a long-cherished dream. (In  order to avoid a tedious argument about definition of terms, let's not  have one. An argument' that is. A  modest sample of the creative , thinking we do here at Ballantine ' -- it allows more time for reading.) And such delicious reading: Wil liam Morris, Lord Dunsany, George l MacDonald, (you'll love George -- i if you have not already encoun tered him -- a sort of Bunyanesque " Kafka), Hannes Bok, Clark Ashton  Smith and many more. And of course Cabell. We'll be doing I them all in the months to come, f The series is being edited by Lin i Carter, who will be doing Introducf tions for each volume. His own r "The Lord of the Rings," comes out I in March, at #c, and is aptly de scribed on the cover as "A Joyous Exploration of Tolkien's Sources." And indeed, it is obvious that nothing delights Lin more than puttering about among heroic sagas, epics, Sumerian tablets, Norse runes, and the like. Fortunately for all, he makes his delight infectious. With elves dogging every footstep, and faery coming out our ears, it is rather difficult to get back to the stern reality of science fiction. So let's not, for a bit. Among others titles which this nongeneration-gap publisher is doing are Alan Later we'll be doing an original on the (flowerkraut?)... O God. Back to immediacies. We would really like you to know about a perfectly delightful collecttion of shorts from Miriam Allen the general theme of reproduction among extraterrestrials, and James (Scot, really) who writes as well about aliens as our own Hal Clement. Both books are March, both #c each. All these titles, and many others, can be most rapidly obtained by ordering direct from our stockroom -- send money and a list of what you want to Ballantine, New York, N.Y. Or better, send for a catalog so that you can make up a really long list. Spend money. Remember, the population bomb keeps ticking -- or, as Paul Ehrlich says, as long as you've booked passage on the Titantic, you might as well go first class. BB go forward while invaders were this close, and so we remained clustered timidly, watching our conquerors approach. One of the Changelings moved toward me. He was small of stature for that breed, but wide through the shoulders; his skin seemed much too tight for his frame; his eyes were large and green-rimmed, his hair grew in thick, widely-spaced pedestallike clumps, and his nose was barely perceptible, so that his nostrils appeared to sprout from his upper lip. Despite this, he was less grotesque than most Changelings appear. His expression was solemn, but with a hint of bizarre playfulness lurking somewhere. He said in a voice that was little more than a feathery whisper, "Do you think we'll be delayed long, Pilgrim?" In former times one did not address a Pilgrim unsolicitedly -- especially if one happened to be a Changeling. Such customs meant nothing to me, but Olmayne drew back with a hiss of distaste. I said, "We will wait here until our masters allow us to pass. Is there any choice?" "None friend, none." At that friend, Olmayne hissed again and glowered at the little Changeling. He turned to her, and his anger showed, for suddenly six parallel bands of scarlet pigment blazed beneath the glossy skin of his cheeks. But his only overt response to her was a courteous bow. He said I , "I introduce myself. I am Bemalt, naturally guildless, a native of Nayrub in Deeper Afreek. I do not inquire after your names, Pilgrims. Are you bound for Jorslem?" "Yes," I said, as Olmayne swung about to present her back. "And you? Home to Nayrub after travels?" "No," said Bemalt. "I go to Jorslem also." T nstantly I felt cold and hostile, my initial response to the Changeling's suave charm fading at once. I had had a Changeling, false though he turned out to be, as a traveling companion before; he also had been charming, but I wanted no more like him. Edgily, distantly, I said, "May I ask what business a Changeling might have in Jorslem?" He detected the chill in my tone, and his huge eyes registered sorrow. "We too are permitted to visit the holy city, I remind you. Even our land. Do you fear that Changelings will once again seize the shrine of renewal, as we did a thousand years ago before we were cast down into guildlessness?" He laughed harshly. "I threaten no one, Pilgrim. I am hideous of face, but not dangerous. May the Will grant you what you seek. Pilgrim." He made a gesture of respect and went back to the other Changelings. Olmayne spun around on me, furious. "Why do you talk to such; beastly creatures?" "The man approached me. He was merely being friendly. We are all cast together here, Olmayne, and -- " "Man. Man! You call a Changeling a man?" "They are human, Olmayne." "Just barely. Tomis, I loathe such monsters. My flesh creeps to have them near me. If I could, I'd banish them from this world!" "Where is the serene tolerance a Rememberer must cultivate?" She flamed at the mockery in my voice. "We are not required to love Changelings, Tomis. They are one of the curses laid upon our planet -- parodies of humanity, enemies of truth and beauty. I despise them!" It was not a unique attitude. But I had no time to reproach Olmayne for her intolerance; the vehicle of the invaders was drawing near. I hoped we might resume our journey once it went by. It slowed and halted, however, and several of the invaders came out. They walked unhurriedly toward us, their long arms dangling like slack ropes. "Who is the leader here?" asked one of them. No one replied. The invader said impatiently, after a moment, "No leader? No leader? Very well, all of you, listen. The road must be cleared. A convoy is coming through. Go back to Palerm and wait until tomorrow." "But I must be in Agupt by -- " the Scribe began. "Land Bridge is closed today," said the invader. "Go back to Palerm." His voice was calm. The Scribe shivered, his jowls swinging, and said no more. Several of the others by the side of the road looked as if they wished to protest. The Sentinel turned away and spat. A man who boldly wore the mask of the shattered guild of Defenders in his cheek clenched his fists and plainly fought back a surge of fury. The Changelings whispered to one another. Bernalt smiled bitterly at me, and shrugged. Go back to Palerm? Waste a day's march in this heat? For what ? nphe invader gestured casually, telling us to disperse. Now it was that Olmayne was unkind to me. In a low voice she said, "Explain to them, Tomis, that you are in the pay of the Procurator of Perris, and they will let the two of us pass." My shoulders sagged as if she had loaded ten years on me. "Why did you say such a thing?" I asked. "It's hot. I'm tired. It's idiotic of them to send us back to Palerm." "I agree. But I can do nothing. Why try to hurt me?" "Does the truth hurt that much?" "I am no collaborator, Olmayne." She laughed. "You say that so well! But you are, Tomis, you are! You sold them documents -- " "To save the Prince, your lover," I reminded her. "You dealt with the invaders, though." "Stop it, Olmayne." "Now you give me orders?" "Olmayne -- " Go up to them, Tomis. Tell them who you are, make them let us go ahead." "The convoys would run us down on the road. In any case, I have no influence with invaders. I am not the Procurator's man." "I'll die before I go back to Palerm!" "Traitor! Treacherous old fool! Coward!" I .pretended to ignore her, but I felt the fire of her words. There was no falsehood in them, only malice. I had dealt with the conquerors I had betrayed the guild that sheltered me, yet it was unfair for her to reproach me with it. I had been trying only to save a man to whom I felt bound, a man moreover with whom she was in love. It was loathsome of Olmayne to tax me with treason now, to torment my conscience, merely because of a petty rage at the heat and dust of the road. But this woman had coldly slain her own husband. Why should she not be malicious in trifles as well? The invaders had their way; we abandoned the road and straggled back to Palerm, a dismal sizzling, sleepy town. That evening five Fliers, passing in formation overhead, took a fancy to the town and in the moonless night they came again and again through the sky, three men and two women, ghostly and slender and beautiful. I stood watching them for more than an hour. Their great shimmering wings scarcely hid the starlight; their pale angular bodies moved in graceful arcs, arms held pressed close to sides, legs together, backs gently curved. I had loved a Flier girl once, in a fashion, and the sight of those five stirred my memories and left me tingling with troublesome emotions. 'Tphe Fliers made their last pass and were gone. The false moons entered the sky soon afterward. I went into our hostelry then, and shortly Olmayne asked admittance to my room. She looked contrite. She carried a squat octagonal flask of green wine, not a T alyan brew but something from an outworld, no doubt purchased at great price. Will you forgive me, Tomis?" she asked. "Here. I know you like these wines." "I would rather not have had those words before, and not have the wine now," I told her. "My temper grows short in the heat. I'm sorry, Tomis. I said a stupid and tactless thing." I forgave her, in hope of a smoother journey thereafter, and we drank most of the wine, and then she went to her mom nearby to sleep. For a long while I lay awake beneath a lash of guilt. In her impatience and wrath Olmayne had stung me at my vulnerable place; I was a betrayer of mankind. I wrestled with the issue almost to dawn. -- What had I done? I had revealed to our conquerors where a certain document might be found. -- To whom did the document belong? To the guild of Rememberers. -- Did' the invaders have a moral right to the document? It told of the shameful treatment they had had at the hands of o' ancestors. It gave justification for the conquest oi Earth. -- What, then, was wrong about giving it to them? One does not aid one's conquerors, even when they are morally superior to one. -- Is a small treason a serious thing? There are no small treasons. In this unprofitable way I consumed the night. When the day brightened I rose and looked skyward and begged the Will to help me find redemption in the waters of the house of renewal in Jorslem. Then I went to awaken Olmayne. Ill T and Bridge was open on this -- ' I day, and we joined the throng that was crossing over out of Talya into Afreek. There are two main routes for Pilgrims from Eyrop to Jorslem. The northern route involves going through the Dark Lands east of Talya, taking the ferry at Stanbool, and skirting the western coast of the continent of Ais until Jorslem. But Olmayne Had been to Stanbool to do research in the days when she was a Rememberer, and disliked the place; and so we took the southern route, across Land Bridge into Afreek, and along the shore of the great Lake Medit, through Agupt and up to Jorslem. A true Pilgrim travels only by foot. It was not an idea that had much appeal to Olmayne, and though we walked a great deal, we rode whenever we could. She was shameless in commandeering transportation. Only two-days' walk out of Perris she had got us a ride from a rich Merchant bound for the coast; the man had no intention of sharing His sumptuous vehicle with anyone, but he could not resist the sensuality of Olmayne's deep, musical voice, even though it issued from the sexless grillwork of a pilgrim's mask. The Merchant traveled in style. His selfprimed landcar was four times the length of a man, wide enough to house five people in comfort. There was no direct vision, only a series of screens revealing upon command what lay outside. The temperature never varied. Spigots supplied liqueurs and stronger things; food tablets were available; pressure couches insulated travelers against the irregularities of the road. There was slavelight for illumination, keyed to the Merchant's whims. J He was a man of pomp and bulk, deep olive of skin, with well-oiled black hair and somber, scrutinizing eyes. He dealt, we learned, in foodstuffs of other worlds, bartering our poor manufactures for the delicacies of the starborn ones. Now he was en route to Marsay to examine a cargo of hallucinatory insects newly come in from one of the Belt planets. "You like the car?" he asked. Olmayne, no stranger to ease Herself, was peering at the dense inner mantle of diamonded brocade in obvious amazement. "It was owned by the Comt of Perris," He went on. "Yes, I mean it, the Comt himself. They turned his palace into a museum, you know." "I know," Olmayne said softly. nphis was his chariot. It was supposed to be part of the museum, but I bought it off a crooked invader. You didn't know that they Had crooked ones too, eS?" The Merchant's robust laughter caused the sensitive mantle on the walls of the car to recoil in disdain. "This one was the Procurator's boy friend. Yes, they've got those, too. He was looking for a certain fancy root that grows on a planet of the Fishes, something to give his virility a little boost, you know, and he learned that I controlled the whole supply here, and so we were able to work out a deal. Of course, I had to have the car adapted, a little. The Comt kept four neuters up front and powered the engine right off their metabolisms, you understand, running the thing on thermal differentials. Well, that's a fine way to power a car, if you are a Comt, but it uses up a lot of neuters through the year, and I felt I'd be overreaching my status if I tried anything like that. So I had the drive compartment stripped down and replaced with a standard rollerwagon engine, heavy-duty, a really subtle job, and there you are. You're lucky to be in here. It's only that you're Pilgrims. Ordinarily I don't let folks come inside, on account that they feel envy, and envious folks are dangerous to a man who's made something out of his life. Yet the Will brought you two to me. Heading for Jorslem, eh?" "Yes," Olmayne said. "Me too, but not yet! Not just yet, thank you!" He patted his middle. "I'd be there, you can bet on it, when I feel ready for renewal, but that's a good way been Pilgriming long?" "No," Olmayne said. "A lot of folks went Pilgrim after the conquest, I guess. Well, I won't blame 'em. We each adapt in our own ways to changing times. Say, you carrying those little stones the Pilgrims carry?" "Yes," Olmayne said. "Mind if I see one? Always been fascinated by the things. There was this trader from one of the Darkstar worlds, little skinny bastard with skin like oozing tar, he offered me ten quintals of the things. Said they were genuine, gave you the real communion, just like the Pilgrims had. I told him no, I wasn't going to fool with! the Will. Some things you don't do, even for profit. But afterward I wished I'd kept one as a souvenir. I never even touched one." He stretched a hand toward Olmayne. "Can I see?" "We may not let others handle the starstone," I said. "I wouldn't tell anybody you let me!" "It is forbidden." "Look, it's private in here, the most private place on Earth, and -- " "Please. What you ask is impossible." His face darkened, and I thought for a moment he would halt the car and order us out. My hand slipped into my pouch to finger the frigid starstone sphere that I had been given at the outset of my Pilgrimage. The touch of my fingertips brought faint resonances of the communion-trance to me, and I shivered in pleasure. He must not have it, I swore. But the Merchant, having tested us and found resistance, did not choose to press the matter. We sped onward toward Marsay. H e was not a likeable man, but he had a certain gross charm. Olmayne, who after all was a fastidious woman and had lived most of her years in the glossy seclusion of the Hall of Rememberers, found him harder to take than I. But even Olmayne seemed to find him amusing when he boasted of his wealth and influence, when he told of the women who waited for him on many worlds, when he catalogued his homes and his trophies and the guildmasters who sought his counsel, when he bragged of his friendships with former Masters and Dominators. He talked almost wholly of himself and rarely of us, for which we were thankful. Our Merchant's life seemed enviably undisrupted by the fall of our planet; he was as rich as ever, as comfortable, as free to move about. But even he felt occasionally irked by the presence of the invaders, as we found out by night not far from Marsay, when we were stopped at a checkpoint on the road. Spy-ey? scanners saw us coming, gave a signal to the spinnerets, and a golden spiderweb spurted into being from one shoulder of the highway to the other. The landcar's sensors detected it and instantly signalled us to a halt. The screens showed a dozen pale human figures. "Bandits?" Olmayne asked. "Worse," said tfie Merchant. "Traitors." He scowled and turned to his communicator Horn. "What is it?" He demanded. "Get out for inspection." "By whose writ?" "The Procurator of Marsay," came the reply. It was an ugly thing to behold: Human beings acting as road-agents for the invaders. But it was inevitable that we should Have begun to drift into their civil service, since work was scarce, especially for those who had been in the defensive guilds. The Merchant was stormy-faced with rage, but He was stymied, unable to pass the checkpoint's web. "I go armed," he whispered to us. "Wait inside and fear nothing." He got out and engaged in a lengthy discussion, of which we could hear nothing, with the highway guards. At length some impasse must have forced recourse to higher authority, for three invaders abruptly appeared, waved their hired collaborators away and surrounded the Merchant. His demeanor changed; his face grew oily and sly, his hands moved rapidly in eloquent gestures, his eyes glistened. He led the three interrogators to the car, opened it and showed them his two passengers. The invaders appeared puzzled by the sight of Pilgrims amid such opulence, but they did not ask us to step out. After some further conversation, the Merchant rejoined us and sealed the car; the web was dissolved, and we sped toward Marsay. A s we gained velocity he muttered curses and said, "Do you know How I'd handle that long-armed filth? All we need is a coordinated plan. A night of knives. Every ten Earthmen make themselves responsible for taking out one invader. We'd get them all." "Why Has no one organized such a movement?" I asked. "It's the job of the Defenders, and half of them are dead and the other half in the pay of them. It's not my place to set up a resistance movement. But that's how it should be done. Guerrilla action: sneak up behind 'em, give 'em the knife." "More invaders would come," Olmayne said morosely. "Treat 'em the same way!" "They would retaliate with fire. They would destroy our world," she said. "These invaders pretend to be civilized, more civilized than ourselves," the Merchant replied. "Such barbarity would give them No, they wouldn't come with fire. They'd just get tired of h'avmg to conquer us over and over, of losing so many men. And they would go away, and we'd be free again." "Without having won redemption for our ancient sins," I said. "What's that, old man. What's that?" "Mere bloody resistance would thwart the scheme the Will has devised for us. We must earn our freedom in a nobler way. We were not given this ordeal simply so that we might practice slitting throats." He snorted. "I should have remembered. I'm talking to Pilgrims. All right. Forget it all. I wasn't serious, anyway. Maybe you like the world the way it is, for all I know." "I do not," I said. He glanced at Olmayne. So did I; for I half expected her to tell the Merchant that I had already done my bit of collaborating with our conquerors. But Olmayne fortunately was silent on that topic, then. We left oUr benefactor in Marsay, spent the night in a Pilgrim hostelry and set out on foot along the coast the next morning. So we traveled, Olmayne and I, through pleasant lands swarming with invaders. And so we came to Land Bridge and met delay and had our frosty moment of bickering and then were permitted to go on across that narrow tongue of sandy ground that links the lake-sundered continents. And so we crossed' into Afreek, at last. ,, IV Okur first night on the other side, after our long and dusty crossing, we tumbled into a grimy inn near the lake's edge. Most of its clientele appeared to be Pilgrims, but there were some members of other guilds, chiefly Vendors and Transporters. At a room near the turning of the building there stayed a Rememberer whom Olmayne avoided even though she did not know him; she simply did not wish to be reminded of her former guild. Among these who took lodging there was the Changeling Bernalt. Under the new laws of the invaders, Changelings might stay at any public inn, not merely those set aside for their special use; yet it seemed a little strange to see him here. We passed in the corridor. Bernalt gave me a tentative smile, as though about to speak again, but the smile died and the glow left his eyes. He appeared to realize I was not ready to accept his friendship. Or perhaps he merely recalled that Pilgrims, by the laws of their guild, were not supposed to have much to do with guildless ones. That law still stood. We had a greasy meal of soups and stews. Afterward I saw her to her room and began to wish her good night when she said, "Wait. We'll do our communion together." "I've been seen coming into your room," I pointed out. "There will be whispering if I stay long." "We'll go to yours, then!" Olmayne peered into the Hall. All clear. She seized my wrist and we rushed toward my chamber, across the way. Closing and sealing the warped door, she said, "Your starstone, now!" I took the stone from its hiding place in my robe, and she produced hers, and our hands closed upon them. During this time of Pilgrimage I had found the starstone a great comfort. Many seasons now had passed since I had last entered a Watcher's trance, but I was not yet reconciled entirely to the breaking of my old habit; the starstone provided a kind of substitute for the swooping ecstasy I had known in Watching. No Pilgrim is ever without his stone. They come from one of the outer worlds and may be had only by application to the guild. We waited for the stones to overwhelm us. I gripped mine tightly. Dark, shining, more smooth than glass, it glowed in my grasp like a pellet of ice, and I felt myself becoming attuned to the power of the Will. F irst came a heightened perception of my surroundings. Every crack in the walls of this ancient inn seemed now a valley. The soft wail of the wind outside rose to a keen pitch. In the dim glow of the room's lamp I saw colors beyond the spectrum. When I let myself be drawn into the stone's effect, I was engulfed by something far larger than myself I was in direct contact with the matrix of the universe. Call it communion with the Will. From a great distance I heard Olmayne say, "Do you believe what some people say of these stones? That there is no communion, that it's all an electrical deception?" "I have no theory about that," I said. "I am less interested in causes than in effects." Skeptics say that the starstones are nothing more than amplifying loops which bounce a man's own brain-waves back into his mind; the awesome oceanic entity with which one comes in contact, these scoffers hold, is merely the thunderous recycling oscillation of a single shuttling electrical pulse beneath the roof of the Pilgrim's own skull. Perhaps. Olmayne extended the hand that grippd her stone. She said, "When you were among the Rememberers, Tomis, did you study the history of early religion? All through time, man has sought union with the infinite. Many religions have held forth the hope of such a divine merging." "And there were drugs, too," I murmured. "Certain drugs, yes, cherished for their ability to bring the taker momentarily to a sensation of oneness with the universe. These starstones, Tomis, are only the latest in a long sequence of devices for overcoming the greatest of human curses that is, the confinement of each individual soul within a single body. Our terrible isolation from one another and from the Will itself is more than most races of the unverse would be able to bear." IT er voice grew vague. She said much more, speaking to me out of the wisdom she had learned with the Rememberers, but her meaning eluded me ; I was always quicker to enter communion than she, because of my training as a Watcher, and often her final words did not register. That night as on other nights I seized my stone and felt the gong, the lapping of waves on an unknown beach, the whisper of the wind in an alien forest. And felt a summons. I yielded. And entered the state of communion. And gave myself up to the Will. I slipped down through the layers of my life, through my youth and middle years, my wanderings, my old loves, my torments, my joys, my troubled later years, my treasons, my insufficiencies, my griefs my imperfections. I freed myself of myself. And shed my selfness. And mcrgech And became one with thousands of Pilgrims, not merely Olmayne nearby, but others trekking the mountains of Hind and the sands of Arba, Pilgrims at their devotions in Ais and Palash and Stralya, Pilgrims moving toward Jorslem on the journey that some complete in months, some in years, and some never at all. I shared with all of them the instant of submergence into the Will. And saw in the darkness a deep purple glow on the horizon, which grew in intensity until it became an all-encompassing red though unworthy, unclean, fleshtrapped. I was purified. And awakened alone. V I knew Afreek well. When still a young man I had settled in the continent's dark heart. Out of restlessness I had left, finally, going as far north as Agupt. I did my Watching and went about from place to place, and chance brought me in contact with a littie Flier girl just as I was ready to roam again, and so I left Agupt for Roum and then Perris. Now I Had come back with Olmayne. We kept close to the coast, avoiding the sandy inland wastes. As Pilgrims we were immune from most of the Hazards of travel ; we would never go hungry or without shelter, even in a place where no lodge for our guild existed, and all owed us respect. Olmayne's great beauty might have been a hazard to her, traveling as she was with no escort other than a shriveled old man, but behind the mask and robe of a Pilgrim she was safe. We unmasked only rarely, and never where we might be seen. Within our lodgings she was careless of her virtue. We never shared a room -- no Pilgrim Hostelry would permit it -- but we usually had adjoining ones, and she summoned me to hers or came to mine whenever the mood took her. Only once did it seem to occur to her that I might ever have been young enough to feel desire. She looked my scrawny, shrunken body over and said, "How will you look, I wonder, when you've been renewed in Jorslem? I'm trying to picture you young, Tomis. Will you give me pleasure then?" "I gave pleasure in my time," I said obliquely. Olmayne disliked the heat and dryness of Agupt. We traveled meanly by night and clung to our Hostelries by day. The roads were crowded at all hours. The press of Pilgrims towards Jorslem was extraordinarily heavy. Olmayne and I speculated on how long it might take us to gain access to the waters of renewal at such a time. "They say they don't admit all who come," she mused. "Renewal is a privilege, not a right," I said. "Many are turned away." "I understand also," said Olmayne, "that not all who enter the waters are successfully renewed." "I know little of this." "Some grow older instead of younger. Some grow young too fast and perish. There are risks." "Would you not take those risks?" She laughed. "Only a fool would hesitate." Her face clouded. "If the city is full of Pilgrims, maybe they won't let me into the house of renewal at all! They'll say I'm too young -- tell me to come back in forty or fifty years. Tomis, would they do that to me?" "It is hard for me to say." The trembled. "They'll let you in. You're a walking corpse already -- they have to renew you! But me -- Tomis, I won't let them turn me away! If I have to pull Jorslem down stone by stone, I'll get in somehow!" I wondered privately if her soul were in fit condition for one who poses as a candidate for renewal. Humility is recommended when one becomes a Pilgrim. But I had no wish to fell Olmayne's fury, and I kept my silence. Perhaps they would admit her to renewal despite her flaws. I had concerns of my own. It was vanity that drove Olmayne; my own goals were different. I had wandered long and done much, not all of it virtuous; I needed a cleansing of my conscience in the holy city more, perhaps, than I did a lessening of my years. Or was it only vanity for me to think so? VI Qeveral days eastward of that  place, as Olmayne and I walked through a parched countryside, village children rushed upon us, chattering in fear and excitement. "Please, come, come!" they cried. "Pilgrims, come!" Olmayne looked bewildered and irritated. "What are they saying, Tomis? I can't get through their damnable Aguptan accents!" "They want us to help," I said. I listened to their shouts. "In their village," I told Olmayne, "there is an outbreak of the crystallization disease. They wish to seek the mercies of the Will upon the sufferers." Olmayne drew back. She flicked out her hands, trying to keep the children from touching her. To me she said, "We can't go there!" "We must." "We're in a hurry! Jorslem's crowded; I don't want to waste time in some dreary village." "They need us, Olmayne." "Are we Surgeons?" "We are Pilgrims," I said quietly. "The benefits we gain from that carry certain obligations. If we are entitled to the hospitality of all we meet, we must also place our souls at the free disposal of the humble. Come." "I won't go!" "How will that sound in Jorslem, when you give an accounting of yourself, Olmayne?" "It's a hideous disease. What if we get it?" "Is that what troubles you? Trust in the Will! How can you expect renewal if your soul is so deficient in grace?" "May you rot, Tomis," she said in a low voice. "When did you become so pious? You're doing this deliberately, because of what I said to you by Land Bridge. In a stupid moment I taunted you, and now you're willing to expose us both to a ghastly affliction for your revenge." "TEe children are growing agitated, Olmayne. Will you wait Here for me, or will you go on to the next village and wait in tEe hostelry there?" "Don't leave me alone in the middle of nowhere!" "I have to go to the sick ones," I said. In the end she accompanied me  -- I think not out of any suddenly conceived desire to be of help, but rather out of fear that her selfish refusal might somehow be held against her in Jorslem. We came shortly to the village, which was small and decayed. Shivering with heat we followed the children to the houses of sickness. "Tphe crystallization disease is an unlovely gift from the stars. Not many afflictions of outworlders affect the Earthborn; but from the world of the Spear came this ailment, carried by alien tourists, and the disease has settled among us. If it had come during the days of the Second Cycle we might have eradicated it in a day; but our skills are dulled now. Olmayne was plainly terrified as we entered the first of the clay huts where the victims were kept. There is no hope for one who has contracted this disease. One merely hopes that the Healthy will be spared; and fortunately it is not a highly contagious disease. It works insidiously, transmitted in an unknown way. The first symptom is a scaliness of the skin: itch, flakes upon the clothing, inflammation. There follows a weakness in the bones as the calcium is dissolved. One grows limp and rubbery, but this is still an early phase. Soon the outer tissues harden. Thick opaque membranes form on the surface of the eyes; the nostrils may close and seal; the skin grows coarse and pebbled. In this phase prophecy is common. The sufferer partakes of the skills of a Somnambulist and utters oracles. The soul may wander, separating from the body for hours at a time, although the life-processes continue. Next, within twenty days after the onset of the disease, the crystallization occurs. While the skeletal structure dissolves, the skin splits and cracks, forming shining crytals in rigid geometrical patterns. The victim is quite beautiful at this time, taking on the appearance of a replica of himself in precious gems. The crystals glow with rich inner lights, violet and green and red; their sharp facets adopt new alignments from hour to hour; the slightest illumination in the room causes the sufferer to give fiat dazzle and delight tfie eye. UI this time tfie internal body s changing, as if some strange , hrysalis is forming. Miraculousy the organs sustain life throughut every transformation, alhough in the crystalline phase lie victim is no longer able to ximmunicate with others and ossibly is unaware of the Changes in himself. Ultimately the netamorphosis reaches the vital irgans, and the process fails. The ilien infestation is unable to eshape those organs without i brief convulsion, a final dis:harge of energy along the nervus system of the crystallzed one, md there is a quick arching of he body, accompanied by the lelicate tinkling sounds of shivering glass, and then all is over. Dn the planet to which this is lative, crystallization is not a disease but an actual metamorphosis, the result of thousands of ears of evolution toward a symbiotic relationship. Since the process is irreversible, Dlmayne and I could do nothing jf value here except offer consolation to these ignorant and frightened people. There were iictims in all stages, from the first rash to the ultimate crystallization. They were arranged n the hut accordng to their in:ensity of their infestation. To my eft was a somber row of victims, fully conscious and morbidly scratching their arms as they contemplated the horrors that awaited them. Along the rear wall were five pallets on which lay villagers in the coarse-skinned and prophetic phase. To my right were those in varying degrees of crystallization, and up front, the diadem of the lot, was one who clearly was in his last hours of life. His body shimmered in almost painful beauty, encrusted with false emeralds and rubies and opals; he scarcely moved. Within that shell of wondrous color he was lost in some dream of ecstasy, finding at the end of his days more passion, more delight, than he could ever have known in all his harsh peasant years. UTfs horrible," Olmayne whis-pered. "I won't go in!" "We must. We are under obligation." "I never wanted to be a Pilgrim!" "You wanted atonement," I reminded her. "It must be earned." "We'll catch the disease!" The Will can reach' us anywhere to infect us with this, Olmayne. It strikes at random. The danger is no greater for us inside this building than it is in Perris." We entered, Olmayne still reluctant. Now fear assailed me, but I concealed it. I forced myself to be tranquil. THere are redemptions and redemptions, I told myself. If this disease is to be the source of mine, I will abide by the Will. We passed from pallet to pallet, heads bowed, starstones in our hands. We said words. We smiled when the newly sick begged reassurance. We offered prayers. Olmayne paused before one girl in the secondary phase, whose eyes already were filming over with homy tissue, and knelt, and touched her starstone to the girl's scaly cheek. The girl spoke in oracles, but unhappily not in any language we understood. At last we came to the terminal case, he who had grown his own superb sarcophagus. Somehow I felt purged of fear, and so too was Olmayne, for we stood a long while...before the grotesque sight, silent, and then she whispered, "How terrible! How wonderful! How beautiful!" Three more huts similar to this one awaited us. The villagers clustered at the doorways. As we emerged from each building in turn, the healthy ones fell down about us, clutching at the hems of our robes, stridently demanding that we intercede for them with the Will. We spoke such words as seemed appropriate and not too insincere. Those within the Sluts received our words blankly, as if they already realized there was no chance for them; those outside, still untouched by, the disease, clung to every syllable. The headman of the village -- only an acting headman; the true chief lay crystallized -- thanked us again and again, as though we had done something real. At least we gave comfort, which is not to be despised. W hen we came forth from the last of the sickhouses we saw a slight figure watching us from a distance -- the Changeling Bernalt. Olmayne nudged me. "That creature has been following us, Tomis. All the way from Land Bridge!" "He travels to Jorslem also." "Yes, but why should he stop here? Why in this awful place?" "Hush, Olmayne. Be civil to him now." "To a Channeling?" I glared at her. Bernalt approached. The mutated one was clad in a soft white robe that blunted the strangeness of his appearance. He nodded sadly toward the village and said, "A great tragedy. The Will lies heavy on this place." He explained that he Had arrived here several days ago and had met a friend from his native city of Nayrub. I assumed He meant a CHangeling; but no Bernalt's friend was a Surgeon, He said, wHo Had Halted Here to do what He could for tKe afflicted villagers. The idea of a friendship between a Changeling and a Surgeon seemed a bit odd to me, and positively contemptible to Olmayne, who did not trouble to hide her loathing of Bemalt. A partly crystallized figure staggered from one of the huts, gnarled hands clutching. Bernalt went forward and gently guided it back within. Returning to us, he said, "There are times one is actually glad one is a Changeling. That disease does not affect us, you know." His eyes acquired a sudden glitter. "Am I forcing myself on you, Pilgrims? You seem like stone behind your masks. I mean no harm; shall I withdraw?" "Of course not," I said, meaning the opposite. His company disturbed me; perhaps the ordinary disdain for Changelings was a contagion that Had at last reached me. "Stay a while. I would ask you to travel with us to Jorslem, but you know it is forbidden for us." "Certainly. I quite understand." He was coolly polite, but the seething bitterness in his was close to the surface. Most Changelings are such degraded bestial things that they are incapable of knowing How detested they are by normal guided men and women; but Bemalt clearly was gifted with the torment of comprehension. He smiled, and then He pointed. "My friend is Here." Three figures approached. One was Bernalt's Surgeon, a slender man, dark-skinned, soft-voiced, with I weary eyes and sparse yellow hair. With Him were an official of the invaders and another outworlder from a different planet. "I had Heard that two Pilgrims were summoned to this place," said the invader. "I am grateful for the comfort you Have brought these sufferers. I am Earth claim Nineteen; this district is under my administration. Will you be my guests at dinner this night?" I was doubtful of taking an invader's hospitality, and Olmayne's sudden clenching of her fist over Her starstone told me that she also hesitated. Earthclaim Nineteen seemed eager for our acceptance. He was not as tall as most of his kind, and His malproportioned arms reached below his knees. Under the blazing Aguptan sun, his thick waxy skin acquired a high gloss, although he did not perspire. Into a long, tense and awkward silence the Surgeon insertted: "No need to hold back. In this village we all are brothers. Join us tonight, will you?" W e did. EartKclaim Nineteen occupied a villa by the shore of Lake Medit; in the clear light of late afternoon I thought I could detect Land Bridge jutting forward to my left, and even Eyrop at the far side of the lake. We were waited upon by members of the guild of Servitors who brought us cool drinks on the patio. The invader had a large staff, all Earthborn; to me it was another sign that our conquest had become institutionalized, and was wholly accepted by the bulk of the populace. Until long after dusk we talked, lingering over drinks even as the writhing auroras danced into view to herald the night. Bernalt the Changeling remained apart, though, perhaps ill at east in our presence. Olmayne too was moody and withdrawn ; a mingled depression and exaltation had settled over her in the stricken village, and the presence of Bernalt at the dinner party had reinforced her silence, for she had no idea how to be polite in the presence of a Changeling. The invader, our host, was charming and attentive, trying to bring her forth from her bleakness. I had seen charming conquerors before. I had traveled with one who posed as the Earthborn Changeling Gormon, in the days just before the conquest. This one, Earthclaim Nineteen, had been a poet on his native world in those days. I said, "It seems unlikely that one of your; inclinations would care to be part of a military occupation." "All experiences strengthen the art," said Earthclaim Nineteen. "I seek to expand myself. In any case I am not a warrior but an administrator. Is it so strange that a poet can be an administrator, or an administrator a poet?" He laughed. "Among your many guilds, there is no guild of Poets. Why?" "There are Communicants," I said. "They serve the muse." But in a religious way. They are interpreters of the Will, not of their own souls. This stuff of your Communicants is too limited in scope; it deals only with acquiescence to the Will. There are other themes for poetry besides immersion of the Will, my friends. The love of person for person, the joy of defending one's home, the wonder of standing naked beneath the fiery stars -- " The invader laughed. "Can it be that Earth fell so swiftly because its only poets were poets of acquiescence to destiny?" "Earth fell," said the Surgeon, "because the Will required us to atone for the sin of our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it." "The Will decreed that you would lose to us by way of punishment, eh? But if the Will is omnipotent, it must have decreed the sin of your ancestors that made the punishment necessary. Eh? You see the difficulty of believing in a divine force that determines all events? Where is the element of choice that makes suffering meaningful? To force you into a sin, and then to require you to endure defeat as atonement, seems to me an empty exercise. Forgive my blasphemy." The Surgeon said, "You misunderstand. All that has happened on this planet is part of a process of moral instruction. The Will simply provides the raw material of events and allows us to follow such patterns as we desire." "Example?" "The Will imbued the Earthborn with skills and knowledge. During the First Cycle we rose from savagery in little time; in the Second Cycle we attained greatness. In our moment of greatness we grew swollen with I pride, choosing to exceed our limitations. We imprisoned intelligent creatures of other worlds under the pretense of study, when we acted really out of an arrogant desire for amusement; and we toyed with our world's climate until oceans joined and continents sank and our old! civilization was destroyed. Thus the Will instructed us in the boundaries of human ambition." "I dislike that dark philosophy even more," said Earthclaim Nineteen. "I -- " "Let me finish," said the Surgeon. "The collapse of Second Cycle Earth was our punishment. The defeat of Third Cycle by you folk from the stars is a completion of that earlier punishment, but also the beginning of a new phase. You are the instruments of our redemption. By inflicting on us the final humiliation of conquest, you bring us to the bottom of our trough; now we renew our souls, now we begin to rise, tested by adversities." I stared in sudden amazement at this Surgeon, who was uttering ideas that had been stirring in me all along the road to Jorslem, ideas of redemption both personal and planetary. I had paid little attention to the Surgeon before Now I wanted to draw him aside and hear more on these themes; but the conversation swept by too swiftly. "Permit me a statement," Bernalt said suddenly, his first words in hours. We looked at him. Tlie pigmented bands in his face were ablaze, marking his emotion. He said, nodding to the Surgeon, "My friend, you speak of redemption for the Earthborn. Do you mean all Earthborn, or only the guilded' ones?" "All Earthborn, of course," said the Surgeon mildly. "Are we not all equally conquered?" "We are not equal in other things, though. Can there be redemption for a planet that keeps guildlessness? I speak of my own folk, of course. We sinned long ago, thinking we were striking out against those who had created us as monsters. We strove to take Jorslem from you; and for this we were punished, and our punishment has lasted for a thousand years. We are still outcasts, are we not? Where has our hope of redemption been? Can you guilded ones consider yourself purified and made virtuous by your recent suffering, when you still step on us?" The Surgeon looked dismayed. "You speak rashly, Bernalt. I know the Changelings have a grievance. But you know as well as I that your time of deliverance is at hand. In the days to come no Earthborn one will scorn you, and you will stand beside us when we regain our freedom." Bernalt peered at the floor. "Forgive me, my friend. Of course, you speak the truth. I was carried away. The heat -- this splendid wine -- how foolishly I spoke!" Earthclaim Nineteen said, "Are you telling me that a resistance movement is forming that will shortly drive us from your planet?" "I only speak in abstract terms," said the Surgeon. "I think your resistance movement will be purely abstract, too," the invader replied easily. "Forgive me, but I see little strength in a planet that could be conquered in a single night. We expect our occupation of Earth to be a long one and to meet little opposition. In the months that we have been here there has been no sign of increasing hostility to us. Quite the contrary: we are increasingly accepted among you." "It is a part of a process," said the Surgeon. "As a poet, you should understand that words carry meanings of many kinds. We do not need to overthrow our alien masters in order to be free of them. Is that poetic enough for you?" "Splendid," said Earthclaim Nineteen, getting to his feet. "Shall we go to dinner now?" W hen we left the villa in the morning, the Surgeon asked permission to join our Pilgrimage. "There is nothing further I can do here," he explained. "At the. outbreak of the disease I came up from my home in Nayrub, and I've been here many days, more to console than to cure, of course. Now I am called to Jorslem. However, if it violates your vows to have company on the road -- " "By all means come with us," I said. "There will be one other companion," the Surgeon told us. He meant the third person who had met us at the village: the outworlder, an enigma, still to say a first word in our presence. This being was a flattened spikeshaped creature somewhat taller than a man, mounted on a jointed tripod of angular legs; its place of origin was in the Golden Spiral; its skin was rough and bright red in hue, and the vertical rows of glassy oval eyes descended on three sides from the top of its tapered head. I Had never seen Such I a creature before. It had come to Earth, according to the Surgeon, on a data-gathering mission, and had already roamed much of Ais and Stralya. Now it was touring the lands on the margin of Lake Medit; and after seeing Jorslem it would depart for the great cities of Eyrop. Solemn, unsettling in its perpetual watchfulnss, never bl inking its many eyes nor offering a comment on what those eyes beheld, it seemed more like some odd take for a memory tank, than a machine, some information-inliving creature. But it was harmless enough', so we let it come with us to the Holy city. The Surgeon bade farewell to his Changeling friend, who went on alone ahead of us, and paid a final call on the crystallized village. We stayed back, since there was no point in our going. When he returned, his face was somber. Four new cases, "he said. "This entire village will perish." Olmayne examined herself from day to day for symptoms of the disease, but none appeared. She gave the Surgeon much trouble on that score, bothering him for opinions concerning real or fancied blemishes of her skin, embarrassing him by removing her mask in his presence so that he could determine that some speck on her cheek was not the first trace of crystallization. The Surgeon took all this in good grace; while the outworld being was merely a cipher plodding alongside us, the Surgeon was a man of depth, patience and sophistication. He was native to Afreek and had been dedicated to his guild at birth by his father. Traveling widely, he Had seen most of our world and had forgotten little of what he had seen. He spoke to us of Roum and Perris, of the frostflower fields of Strayla, of my own birthplace in the western island group of the Lost Continents. He questioned us tactfully about our starstones and the effects they produced -- I could see lie hungered to try the stone himself, but of course was forbidden to one who had not declared himself a Pilgrim -- and when he learned that in former life I had been a Watcher, he asked me a great deal concerning the instruments by which I had scanned the heavens for invasions, wishing to know what it was I perceived and how I imagined the perception was accomplished. I spoke to him as fully as I could on these matters, though in truth I knew little. T Tsually we kept to the green strip of fertile land bordering the lake, but once, at the Surgeon's insistence, ive detoured into the choking desert to see something that he promised would be of interest. He would not tell us what it was. We were at this point traveling in hired rollerwagons, open on top, and sharp winds blew gust of sand in our faces. Sand adhered briefly to the outworlder's eyes, I saw; and I saw How efficiently it flushed each eye with a flood of blue tears every few moments. The rest of us huddled in our garments, Heads down, whenever the wind arose. "We are here," the Surgeon announced finally. "When I traveled with my father I first visited this place long ago. We will go inside -- and then you, the former Rememberer, will tell us where we are." It was a building two stories High made of bricks of white glass. The doors appeared sealed, but they gave at the slightest pressure. Lights glowed into life the moment we entered. In long aisles, lightly strewn with sand, were tables on which instruments were mounted. Nothing was comprehensible to me. There were devices shaped like hands, into which one's own Hands could be inserted; conduits led from the strange metal gloves to shining closed cabinets, and arrangements of mirrors transmitted images from the interiors of those cabinets to giant screens overhead. The Surgeon placed his hands in the gloves and moved his fingers; the screens brightened, and I saw images of tiny needles moving through shallow arcs. He went to other machines that released dribbles of unknown fluids; he touched small buttons that produced musical sounds.; he moved freely through a laboratory of wonders, clearly ancient, which seemed still in order and awaiting the return of its users. Olmayne was ecstatic. She followed the Surgeon from aisle to aisle, handling everything. "Well, Rememberers?" he asked finally. "What is this?" "A Surgery' she said in lowered voice. A Surgery of the Years of Magic!" "Exactly! Splendid!" He seemed in an oddly excited state. "We could make dazzling monsters here! We could work miracles! Fliers, Swimmers, Changelings, Twiners, Burners, Climbers! Invent your own guilds, shape men to your whims! This was the place!" Olmayne said, "These Surgeries have been described to me. There are six of them left, one in northern Eyrop, one on Palash, one here, one far to the south in Deeper Afreek, one in western Ais -- " She faltered. "And one in Hind, the greatest of all," said the Surgeon. "Yes, of course, Hind! The home of the Fliers!" Their awe was contagious. I said, "This was where the shapes of men were changed? How was it done?" The Surgeon shrugged. "The art is lost. The Years of Magic were long ago, old man." "But surely if the equipment survives, we could guess how -- " "With these knives," said the Surgeon, "we cut into the fabric of the unborn, editing the human seed. The Surgeon placed his hands here and within that incubator the knives did their work. Out of this came Fliers and all the rest. The forms bred true. Some are extinct today, but out Fliers and our Changelings owe their heritage to some building as this. The Changelings, of course, were the Surgeon's mistakes. They should not have been permitted to live." "I thought that these monsters were the products of ter ato genetic drugs, given to them when they still were within the womb," I said. "You tell me now that Changelings were made by Surgeons. Which is so?" "Both," he replied. "All Changelings today are descended from the flaws and errors committed by the Surgeons of the Years of Magic. Yet mothers in that unhappy group often enhance the monstrousness of their children with drugs, so that they will be more marketable. It is an ugly tribe not merely in looks. Small wonder that their guild was dissolved and they were thrust outside society. We -- " S omething bright flew through the air, missing his face by less than a hand's breadth. He dropped to the floor, shouting to us to take cover. As I fell I .saw a second missile fly toward us. Then it struck two thirds of the way up the outworlder's body and severed it instantly. Other me; siles followed, clattering against the wall behind us. I saw out at tackers: a band of Changelings, fierce and hideous. We were unarmed. They moved toward us. I readied myself to die. From the doorway a voice cried out -- a familiar voice, using the thick and unfamiliar words of the language Changelings speak among themselves. Instantly the assault ceased. Those who menaced us turned toward the door. The Changeling Bernalt entered. "I saw your vehicle," he said. "I thought you might be here, and perhaps in trouble. It seems I came in time." "Not altogether," said the Surgeon. He indicated the fallen outworlder, which was beyond all aid. "But why this attack?" Bernalt gestured. " They will tell you." We looked at the five Changelings who had ambushed us. They were not of the educated, civilized sort such as Bernalt, nor were any two of them of the same style each was a twisted, hunched mockery of the human form, one with ropy tendrils descending from his chin, one with a face that was a featureless void, another whose ears were giant cups, and so forth. From the one closest to us, a creature with' small platforms jutting from his skin in a thousand places, we learned why we had been assaulted. In a brutal Aguptan dialect he told us that we had profaned a tempie sacred to Changelings. "We keep out of Jorslem," he told us. "Why must you come here?" O f course he was right. We asked his forgiveness, and the Surgeon explained that he had visited this place long ago and it had not been a temple then. That seemed to soothe the Changeling, who admitted that only in recent years had his kind used it as a shrine. He was soothed even more when Oimayne opened the overpocket fastened between her breasts and offered a few glittering gold coins. The bizarre and deformed beings were satisfied at that, and allowed us to leave the building. We would have taken the dead outworlder with us, but during our parley with the Changelings the body Had nearly vanished, nothing but a faint gray streak remaining on the sandy floor to tell us where it had fallen. "A mortuary enzyme," the Surgeon explained. "Triggered by interruption of the life processes." Others of this community of desert-dwelling Changelings were lurking about outside the building as we came forth. They were a tribe of nightmares, with skin of every texture and color, facial features arranged at random, all kinds of genetic improvisations of organs and bodily accessories. Bernalt himself, although their brother, seemed appalled by their monstrousness. They looked to him with awe. At the sight of us, some of them fondled the throwing weapons at their hips, but a sharp command from Bernalt prevented any trouble. He said, "I regret the treatment you received and the death! of the outworlder. But of course it is risky to enter a place that is sacred to backward and violent people." "We had no idea," the Surgeon said. "We never would have gone in if we had realized -- " "Of course. Of course." Was there something patronizing about Bernalt's soft, civilized tones? "Well, again I bid you farewell." I blurted suddenly, "No. Travel with us to Jorslem! It's ridiculous for us to go separately to the same place." Olmayne gasped. Even the Surgeon seemed amazed. Only Bernalt remained calm. He said, "You forget, friend, that it is improper for Pilgrims to journey with the guildless. Besides, I am here to worship at this shrine, and it will take me a while. I would not wish to delay you." His hand reached out to mine. Then he moved away, entering the ancient Surgery. Scores of his fellow Changelings rushed in after him. I was grateful to Bernalt for his tact; my impulsive offer of companionship, though sincerely meant, had been impossible fof him to accept. We boarded our rollerwagons. In a moment we heard a dreadful sound: a discordant Changeling hymn in praise of I dare not think what deity, a scraping grinding, screeching song as misshapen as those who uttered it. "The beasts," Olmayne muttered. "A sacred shrine! A! Changeling temple! How loathsome! They might have killed us all, Tomis. How can such monsters have a religion?" I made no reply. The Surged! looked at Olmayne sadly, and shook his head as though distressed by so little charity on the part of one who claimed to be a Pilgrim. "They also are human," he said. At the next town along our route we reported the starborn being's death to the occupying authorities. Then, saddened and silent, we three survivors continued onward, to the place where the coastline trends north rather than east. We were leaving sleepy Agupt behind and entering now into the borders of the land in which holy Jorslem lies. "T"he city of Jorslem sits some good distance inland from Lake Medit, on a cool plateau guarded by a ring of low barren rock-strewn mountains. A winding road took us down through the encircling hills to the city, whose wall was made of squared blocks of a fine stone, dark pinkgold in color. The houses and shrines, too, were of this stone. Groves of trees bordered the road, road, nor were they startrees, but native products of Earth, as was fitting to this, the oldest of man's cities. Older than Roum, older than Perris, its roots were deep in the First Cycle. Within the walls everything had the aspect of great antiquity. Jorslem alone of the world's cities still preserves much of its First Cycle architecture: not merely broken columns and ruined aqueducts, as in Roum, but whole streets, covered arcades, towers, boulevards, that have lasted through every upheaval our world has seen. We wandered in wonder down' streets paved with cobbled stones, into narrow alleys cluttered with children and beggars, across markets fragrant with spices. After an hour of this we felt it was time to seek lodgings, and here it was necessary for us to part company with the Surgeon, since he was ineligible to stay at a Pilgrim hostelry and it would have been costly and foolish for us to stay anywhere else. We saw him to the inn where he had previously booked a room. I thanked him for his good companionship on our journey, and he thanked us just as gravely and expressed the hope that he would see us again in Jorslem in the days to come. Then Olmayne and I took leave of him and rented quarters in one of the numerous places catering to the Pilgrim trade. The city exists solely to serve Pilgrims and casual tourists, and so it is really one vast hostelry; robed Pilgrims are as common in Jorslem's streets as Fliers in Hind. We settled and rested a while; then we dined, and afterward walking along a broad street from which we could see, to the east, Jorslem's inner and most sacred district. There is a city within a city here. The most ancient part, so small it can be traversed in less than an hour on foot, is wrapped in a high wall of its own. Therein lie shrines revered by Earth's former religions : the Christers, the Hebers, the Mislams. The place where the god of the Christers died is said to be there, but this may be a distortion wrought by time, since what kind of god is it that dies? On a high place in one corner of the Old City stands a gilded dome sacred to the Mislams, which is carefully tended by the common folk of Jorslem though its significance is lost. And to the fore part of that high place are the huge gray blocks of a stone wall worshipped by the Hebers.These things remain, but the ideas behind them are lost; never while I was among the Rememberers did I meet any scholar who could explain the merit of worshipping a wall or a gilded dome. Yet the old records assure us that these three First Cycle creeds were of great depth and richness. Tn the Old City, also, is a Second Cycle place that was of much more immediate interest to Olmayne and myself. As we stared through the darkness at the holy precincts, Olmayne said, "We should make application tomorrow at the house of renewal." "I agree. I long now to give up some of my years." She said something further, but I did not hear her words, for at that moment three Fliers passed above me, heading east. One was male, two female; they flew naked, according to the custom of their guild; and the Flier in the center of the group was a slim, fragile girl, mere bone and wings, moving with I a grace that was exceptional even for her airy kind. "Avluela!" I gasped. The trio of Fliers disappeared beyond the parapets of the Old City. Stunned, shaken, I clung to a tree for support and struggled for breath. "Tomis?" Olmayne said. "Tomis, are you ill?" "I know it was Avluela. They said she had gone back to Hind but no, that was Avluela! How could I mistake her?" You've said that about every Flier you've seen since leaving Perris," said Olmayne coldly. "But this time I'm certain! Where is a thinking cap? I must check with the Fliers' lodge at once!" Olmayne's hand rested on my arm. "It's late, Tomis. You act feverish. Why this excitment over your skinny Flier, anyway? What did she mean to you?" "She -- " I halted, unable to put my meaning into words. Olmayne knew the story of my journey up out of Agupt with the girl, how as a celibate old Watcher I had conceived a kind of paternal fondness for her, how I had perhaps felt something more powers ful than that, how I had lost her to the false Changeling Gormon and how he had lost her in turn to the Prince of Roum. But yet what was Avluela to me, in truth? "Come back to the inn and rest," Olmayne said. "Tomorrow we must seek renewal." First, though, I donned a cap and made contact with the Fliers' Lodge. My thoughts slipped through to the storage brain of tEe guild registry; I asked and received tEe answer I had sought. Avluela of tEe Fliers was indeed now a resident of Jorslem. "Take tEis message for her," I said. "The Watcher she knew in Roum now is here as a Pilgrim and wishes to meet her outside the house of renewal at midday tomorrow." With that done, I accompanied Olmayne to our lodgings. She seemed sullen and aloof, and when she unmasked in my room Her face appeared rigid with jealousy. To Olmayne all men were vassals, even one so shriveled and worn as I ; and she loathed it that another woman could kindle sucH a flame in me. When I drew forth my starstone, Olmayne at first would not join me in communion. Only when I began the rituals did she submit. But I was so tense that night that I was unable to make the merging with the Will, nor could she achieve it; and thus we faced one another glumly for half an hour, and abandoned the attempt and parted for the night. IX Vne must go by one's self to the house of renewal. At dawn I set out without Olmayne. In half an hour I stood before the golden wall of the Old City; in half an hour more I had finished my crossing of the inner city's tangled lanes. Passing before that gray wall so dear to the ancient Hebers, I went up onto the high place, going near the gilded dome of the vanished Mislams and, turning to the left, followed the stream of Pilgrims which already at this early hour was proceeding to the house of renewal. This house is a Second Cycle building; for it was then that the renewal process was conceived, and of all that era's science only renewal has come down to us approximately as it must have been practiced in that time. Like those other few Second Cycle structures that survive, the house of renewal is supple and sleek, architecturally understated, with deft curves and smooth textures; it is without windows; it bears no external ornament whatever. There are many doors. Just inside the entrance I was greeted by a green-robed member of the guild Renewers, who are recruited entirely from the rank of Pilgrims, those who are willing to make it their life's work to remain in Jorslem and aid others toward renewal. The Renewer's voice was light and cheerful. "Welcome to this house, Pilgrim. Who are you, where are you from?" "I am the Pilgrim Tomis, formerly Tomis of the Rememberers, and prior to that a Watcher, born to the name Wuellig. I am native to the Lost Continents and have traveled widely both before and after beginning my Pilgrimage." "What do you seek here?" "Renewal. Redemption." "May the Will grant your wishes," said the Renewer. "Come with me." I was led through a close, dimly lit passage into a small stone cell. The Renewer instructed me to remove my mask, enter into a state of communion, and wait. I freed myself from the bronze grillwork and clasped my starstone tightly. The familiar sensations of communion stole over me. Something probed my soul. Everything was drawn forth and laid out as if for inspection on the floor of my cell: my acts of selfishness and of cowardice, my flaws and failings, my doubts, my despairs, above all the most shameful of my acts, the selling of the Rememberer document to the invader overlord. In this house one might extend one's lifetime two or three times over; but why should the Renewers offer such benefits to anyone as lacking in merit as I? I remained a long while in contemplation of my faults. Then the contact broke, and a different Renewer, a man of remarkable stature, entered the cell. "The mercy of the Will is upon you, friend," he said, reaching forth fingers of extraordinary length to touch the tips of mine. ' ' and saw those white fingers I knew that I was in the presence of a man I had met briefly before, as I stood outside the gates of Roum in the season before the conquest of Earth. He had been a Pilgrim then, and he had invited me to join him on his journey to Jorslem, but I had declined, for Roum had beckoned to me. "Was your Pilgrimage an easy one?" I asked. "It was a valuable one," he replied. "And you? You are a Watcher no longer, I see." "I am in my third guild this year." "With one more yet to come." "Am I to join you in the Renewers, then?" "I did not mean that guild, friend Tomis. But we can talk more of that when your years are fewer. You have been approved for renewal, I rejoice to tell you." "Despite my sins?" "Because of your sins, such as they are. At dawn tomorrow you enter the first of your renewal tanks. I will be your guide through your second birth. I am the Renewer Talmit. Go, now, and ask for me when you return." "One question -- " "Yes?" "I made my Pilgrimage together with' a woman, Olmayne, formerly a Rememberer of Perris. Can you tell me if she has been approved for renewal as well?" I know nothing of this Olmayne." "She is not a good woman," I said. "She is vain, imperious, and cruel. But yet I think she is not beyond saving. Can you do anything to help her?" "I have no influence in such things," Talmit said. "She must face interrogation like everyone else. I can tell you this, though: virtue is not the only criterion for renewal." He showed me from the building. Cold sunlight illuminated the city. I was drained and depleted, too empty even to feel cheered that I had qualified for renewal. It was midday. I remembered my appointment with Avluela; I circled the house of renewal in rising anxiety. Would she come? She waited by the front of the building, crimson jacket, furry leggings, glassy bubbles on her feet, telltale humps on her back; from afar I could make her out to be a Flier. "Avluela!" I called. She whirled. She looked pale, thin, even younger than when I Had last seen her. Her eyes searched my face, once again masked, and for a moment she was bewildered. "Watcher? she said. "Watcher, is that you?" "Call me Tomis now," I told her. "But I am the same man. you knew in Agupt and Roum." "Watcher! Oh, Watcher! Tomis." She clung to me. "How long it's been! So much has happened!" She sparkled now, and the paleness fled her cheeks. "Come, let's find an inn, a place to sit and talk! How did you discover me here?" "Through your guild. I saw you overhead last night." "I came here in the winter. I was in Perris for a while, halfway back to Hind, and then I changed my mind. There could be no going home. Now I live near Jorslem, and I help with -- " She cut her sentence sharply off. "Have you won renewal, Tomis?" T TTe descended from the high  ' place into a humbler part of the inner city. "Yes," I said, "I am to be made younger. My guide is the Renewer Talmit -- we met him as a Pilgrim outside Roum, do you remember?" She had forgotten that. We seated ourselves at an open-air patio adjoining an inn, and' Servitors brought us food and wine. Her gaiety was infectious; I felt renewed just to be with Her. She spoke of those final cataclysmic days in Roum, when she had been taken into the place of the Prince as a concubine; and she told me of that terrible moment when Gorman the Changeling defeated the Prince of Roum on the evening of conquest, announcing Himself as no Changeling but an invader in disguise, and taking from the Prince at once his throne, his concubine, and his vision. "Did the Prince die?" she asked. "Yes, but not of his blinding." I told her how that proud man Had fled from Roum disguised as a Pilgrim, and how I Had accompanied him to Perris, and how while we were among the Rememberers he Had involved himself with Olmayne and Had been slain by Olmayne's husband, whose life was thereupon taken by his wife. I also saw Gormon in Perris," I said'. "He goes by the name of Victorious Thirteen now. He is High in the councils of the invaders." Avleula smiled. "Gormon and I were together only a short while after the conquest. When does your renewal begin?" "At dawn." "Oh, Tomis, how will it be when you are a young man? Did you know that I loved you? All the time we traveled, all while I was sharing Gormon's bed and consorting with the Prince, you were the one I wanted! But of course you were a Watcher, and it was impossible. Besides, you were so old. Now you no longer Watch', and soon you will no longer be old, and -- " Her hand rested in mine. "I should never have left your side. We both would have been spared much suffering." "From suffering we learn," I said. "Yes. Yes. I see that. How long will your renewal take?" The usual time, whatever that may be." "After that, what will you do? What guild will you choose? You can't be a Watcher, not now." "No, nor a Rememberer either. My guide Talmit spoke of some other guild, which' he would not name, and assumed that I would enroll in it when I was done with renewal. I suppose he thought I'd stay here and join the Renewers, but he said it was another guild than that." "Not the Renewers," said Avluela. She leaned close. "The Redeemers," she whispered. "Redeemers? That is a guild I do not know." "It is newly founded." No new guild Has been established in more than a -- " "This is the guild Talmit meant. You would be a desirable member. The skills you developed when you were a Watcher make you exceptionally useful." "Redeemers," I said, probing the mystery. "Redeemers. What does this guild do?" Avluela smiled jauntily. "It rescues troubled souls and saves unhappy worlds. But this is no time to talk of it. Finish your business in Jorslem, and everything will become clear. We rose. Her lips brushed mine. "This is the last time I'll see you as an old man. It will be strange, Tomis, when you're renewed." She left me then. Toward evening I returned to my lodging. Olmayne was not in her room. A Servitor told me that she had been out all day. I waited until it was late; then I made my communion and slept, and at dawn I paused outside her door. It was sealed. I hurried to the house of renewal. X 'Tplie Renewer Talmit met me within the entrance and conducted me down a corridor of green tile to the first renewal tank. "The Pilgrim Olmayne," he informed me, "has been accepted for renewal and will come here later this day." Talmit showed me into a small low room, close and humid, lit by dim blobs of slave-light and smelling faintly of crushed deathflower blossoms. My robe and my mask were taken from me, and the Renewer covered my head with a fine golden-green mesh of some flimsy metal, through which Ke sent a current, and when he removed the mesh my hair was gone, my head was as glossy as the tiled walls. It makes insertion of the electrodes simpler," Talmit explained. "You may enter the tank, now." A gentle ramp led me down into the tank, which was a tub of no great size. I felt the warm soft slipperiness of mud beneath my feet, and Talmit nodded and told me it was irradiated regenerative mud, which would stimulate the increase of cell division that was to bring about my renewal, and I accepted it. I stretched out on the floor of the tank with only my head above the shimmering dark violet fluid that it contained. Talmit loomed above me, holding what seemed to be a mass of entangled copper wires, but as he pressed the wires to my bare scalp they opened as of their own accord and their tips sought my skull, burrowing down through skin and bone into the hidden wrinkled grayness. I felt nothing more than tiny prickling sensations. "The electrodes," Talmit explained, "seek out the centers of ageing within your brain; we transmit signals that will induce a reversal of the normal processes of decay, and your brain will lose its perception of the direction of the flow of time. Your body thus will become more receptive to the stimulation it receives from the environment of the renewal tank. Close your eyes." Over my face he placed a breathing mask. He gave me a gentle shove, and the back of my head slipped from the edge of the tank, so that I floated out into the middle. The warmth increased. I dimly heard bubbling sounds. I imagined black sulfurous bubbles coming up from the mud through the fluid in which I floated; I imagined that the fluid had turned the color of mud. Adrift in a tideless sea I lay, distantly aware that a current was passing over the electrodes, that something was tickling my brain, that I was engulfed in mud and in what could well have been an amniotic fluid. From far away came the deep voice of the Renewer Talmit, summoning me to youth, drawing me back across the decades, unreeling time for me. There was a taste of salt in my mouth. Again I was crossing Earth Ocean, beset by pirates, defending my Watching equipment against their jeers and thrusts. Again I stood beneath the hot Aguptan sun meeting Avluela for the first time. I lived once more on Palash. I returned to the place of my birth in the western isles of the Lost Continents, in what formerly had been Usa-amrik. I watched Roum fall a second time. Fragments of memories swam through my softening brain. There was no sequence, no rational unrolling of events. I was a child. I was a weary ancient. I was among the Rememberers. I visited Somnambulists. I saw the Prince of Roum attempt to purchase eyes from an Artificer in Dijon. I bargained with the Procurator of Perris. I gripped the handles of my instruments and entered Watchfulness. I ate sweet things from a far-off world; I drew into my nostrils the perfume of springtime on Palash; I shivered in an old man's private winter; I swam in a surging sea, buoyant and happy; I sang; I wept; I resisted temptations; I yielded to temptations; I quarreled with Olmayne; I embraced Avluela; I experienced a flickering succession of nights and days as my biological clock moved in strange rhythms of reversal and acceleration. Illusions beset me. It rained fire from the sky; time rushed in several directions; I grew small and then enormous. I heard voices speaking in shades of scarlet and turquoise. Jagged music sparkled on the mountains. The sound of my drumming heartbeats was rough and fiery. I was trapped between strokes of my brain-piston, arms pressed to my sides so that I would occupy as little space as possible as it rammed itself home again and again and again. The stars throbbed, contracted, melted. Avluela said gently, "We earn a second youthtime through the indulgent benevolent impulses of the Will and not through the performance of individual good works." Qlmayne said, "How sleek I get!" Talmit said, "These oscillations of perception signify only the dissolution of the wish toward selfdestruction that lies at the heart of the ageing process." Gormon said, "These perceptions of oscillation signify only the self-destruction of the wish toward dissolution that lies at the ageing process of the heart." The Procurator Man rule Seven said, "We have been sent to this world as the devices of your purgation. We are instruments of the Will." Earfhdaim Nineteen said, "On the ether hand, permit me to disagree. The intersection of Earth's destinies and ours is purely accidental." My eyelids turned to stone. The small creatures comprising my lungs began to flower. My skin sloughed off, revealing strands of muscle clinging to bone. Olmayne said, "My pores grow smaller. My flesh grows tight. My breasts grow small." Avluela said, "Afterwards you will fly with us, Tomis." The Prince of Roum covered his eyes with his hands. The towers of Roum swayed in the winds of the sun. I snatched a shawl from a passing Rememberer. Clowns wept in the streets of Perris. Talmit said, "Awaken, now, Tomis, come up from it, open your eyes." "I am young again," I said. "Your renewal has only begun," he said. T could no longer move. Attend ants seized me and swathed me in porous wrappings, and placed me on a rolling cart, and took me to a second bank, much larger, in which dozens of people floated, each in a dreamy seclusion from the others. Their naked skulls were festooned with electrodes their eyes were covered with pink tape; their hands were peacefully joined on their chests. Into this tank I went, and there were no illusions here, only a long slumber unbroken by dreams. This time I awakened to the sounds of a rushing tide, and found myself passing feet-first through a constricted conduit, into a sealed tank where I breathed only fluid, and where I remained something more than a minute and something less than a century, while layers of sin were peeled from my soul. It was slow, taxing work. The Surgeons worked in a distance, their hands thrust into gloves that controlled the tiny flaying-knives, and they cleansed me of evil with flick after flick after flick of the little blades, cutting out guilt and sorrow, jealously and rage, greed, lust and impatience. When they were done with me, they opened the lid of the tank and lifted me out. I was unable to stand unaided. They attached instruments to my limbs that kneaded and massaged my muscles, restoring the tone. I walked again. I looked down at my bare body, strong and tautfleshed and vigorous. Talmit came to me and threw a handful of mirrordust into the air so that I could see myself, and as the tiny particles cohered I peered at my gleaming reflection. "No," I said. "You have the face wrong. I didn't look like that. My nose was sharper -- the lips weren't so full -- the hair not such a deep black -- " We have worked from the records of the guild Watchers, Tomis... You are more exactly a replica of your early self than your own memory realizes." "Can that be?" "If you prefer, we can shape you to fit your self-conceptions and not reality. But it would be a frivolous thing to do, and it would take much time." "No," I said. "It hardly matters." He informed me then that I would have to remain in the house of renewal a while longer, until I was fully adapted to my new self. I was given the neutral clothes of a guildless one to wear, for I was without affiliation now; and I might now opt for any guild that would admit me once I left the house. How long will my renewal last?" I asked Talmit as I dressed I . He replied, "You came here in summer. Now it is winter. We do not work swiftly." "And how fares my companion Olmayne?" "We failed with her." "I don't understand." "Would you like to see her?" Talmit asked. "Yes," I said, thinking that he would bring me to Olmayne's room. In stead he conveyed me to Olmayne's tank. I stood on a ramp looking down into a sealed container; Talmit indicated a fiber telescope, and I peered into its staring eye and beheld Olmayne. Or rather, what I was asked to believe was Olmayne. A naked girl-child of about eleven, smooth-skinned and breastless, lay curled up in the tank, knees drawn close to theflat chest, thumb thrust in mouth. At first I did not understand. Then the child stirred, and I recognized the embryonic features of the regal Olmayne I had known: the wide mouth', the strong chin, the sharp strong cheekbones. A dull shock of Horror rippled tErougfi me, and I said to Talmit, "WEat is tHis?" ti'TT'Hen tHe soul is too badly stained, Tomis, we must dig deep to cleanse it. Your Olmayne was a difficult case. We sHould not Have attempted Her; But sHe was insistent, and tKere were some indications tKat we migHt succeed witH her. THose indications were in error, as you can see." "But what Happened to Her?" "THe renewal entered the irreversible stage before we could achieve a purging of her poisons," Talmit said. "You went too far? You made her too young?" "As you can see. Yes." "What will you do? Why don't you get out of there and let her grow up again?" "You should listen more carefully, Tomis. I said the renewal is irreversible." ' 'Irreversible?' ' "SHe is lost in childhood's dreams. Each day she grows years younger. The inner clock whirls uncontrollably. Her body shrinks; her brain grows smooth. She enters babyhood shortly. She will never awaken." "And at the end -- " I looked away. "What then? A sperm and an egg, separating in the tank?" "The retrogression will not go that far. She will die in infancy. Many are lost this way." "She spoke of the risks of renewal," I said. "Yet she insisted on our taking Her. Her soul was dark, Tomis. She lived only for Herself. She came to Jorslem to be cleansed, and now she has been cleansed, and she is at peace with the Will. Did you love Her?" "Never. Not for an instant." "Then what Have you lost?" "A segment of my past, perhaps." I put my eye to tHe telescope again and beheld Olmayne, innocent now, sexless, cleansed. At peace with the Will. I searched her oddly altered yet familiar face for insight into Her dreams. Had she known wKat was befalling her, as she tumbled Helplessly into youthfulness? Had she cried out in anguish and frustration when she felt her life slipping away? Had there been a final flare of the old imperious Olmayne, before she sank into this unwanted purity? The child in the tank was smiling. THe supple little body uncoiled, tEen drew more tightly into a Huddled ball. Olmayne was at peace witH the Will. Suddenly, as th'ougH Talmit had spread another mirror in the air, I looked into my own new self and saw what Had been done for me and knew that I had been granted another life with the proviso that I make something more of it than I had of my first one, and I felt humbled, and pledged myself to serve the Will, and I was engulfed in joy that came in mighty waves, like the surging tides of Earth Ocean, and I said farewell to Olmayne and asked Talmit to take me to another place. XI A vluela came to me in my room I in the house of renewal, and we both were frightened when we met. The jacket she wore left her bunched-up wings bare; they seemed hardly under her control at all, but fluttered nervously, starting to open a short way, their gossamer tips expanding in little quivering flickers. Her eyes were large and solemn; her faee looked more lean and pointed than ever. We stared in silence at one another a long while. "Tomis?" she said finally, and I nodded. She touched my shoulders, my arms, my lips. We were strangers. That withered old Watcher she had known and perhaps loved was gone, banished for the next fifty years or more, and in his place stood someone mysteriously transformed, unknown, unmet. The old Watcher had been a sort of father to her; what was this guildless young Tomis supposed to be? And what was she to me, a daughter no longer? "Your eyes are the same," she said. "I would always know you by the eyes." "What have you done these many months, A vluela?" "I have been flying every night. I flew to Agupt and deep into Afreek. When it gets dark I go aloft. Do you know, Tomis, I feel truly alive only when I'm up there?" "You are of the Fliers. It is in the nature of your guild to feel that way." "One day we'll fly side by side, Tomis." I laughed at that. "The old Surgeries are closed, Avluela. They work wonders here, but they can't transform me into a Flier. One must be born with wings." "One doesn't need wings to fly," she said. "I know. The invaders lift themselves without the help of wings. I saw you, one day soon after Roum had fallen, you and Gormon in the sky together -- " I shook my head. "But I am no invader either." "You will fly with me, Tomis. We'll go aloft, and not only by night, even though my wings are merely nightwings. In bright sunlight we'll soar together." Her ' fantasy pleased me. I gathered her into my arms, and she was cool and fragile against ime, and for a while we talked no more of flying. Later we walked through the corridors, passing others who were newly renewed, and we went into the great central room whose ceiling admitted the winter sunlight, and studied each other by that changing pale light, and walked and talked. She came to me each day at my exercise time, and I went through the building with her, no longer leaning on her arm. In my room we embraced, and she was cool and slim against me, and in her ecstasy her wings unfolded until I was wrapped in their silken softness. Hpalmit was with me frequently too. He showed me the arts of using my renewed body, and helped me successfully grow young. One day he told me that Olmayne's retrogression had come to its end. I felt no sorrow over that, just a curious emptiness. "You will leave here soon," the Renewer said. "Are you ready?" "I think so." "Have you given much thought to your destination after this house?" I must seek a new guild, I know." "Many guilds would have you, Tomis. But which do you want?" "The guild in which I would be most useful to mankind," I said. I owe the Will a life." Talmit said, "Has the flier girl spoken to you of the possibilities before you?" She mentioned a newly founded guild." "Did she give it a name?" "The guild of the Redeemers." "What do you know of it?" "Very little," I said. "I am of the guild of the Redeemers," Talmit said. So is the Flier. Avluela." "You both are already guilded! How can you belong to more than one guild?" "Tomis, the guild of Redeemers accepts members from all other guilds. It is the supreme guild, as the guild of Dommators once was. In its ranks are Rememberers and Scribes, Indexers, Servitors, Fliers, Landholders, Somnambulists, Surgeons, Clowns, Merchants, and Vendors. There are Changelings too -- " "They are outside all guilds by law -- " "This is the guild of Redeemers. Even Changelings may win redemption, Tomis." Chastened, I said, "Even Changelings, yes. But how strange it is to think of such a guild!" "Would you despise a guild that embraces Changelings?" "I find this guild difficult to comprehend." "Understanding will come at the proper time," "When is the proper time?" "The day you leave this place," said Talmit. nphat day shortly arrived. AvA luela came to fetch me. I stepped forth uncertainly into Jorslem's springtime to complete the ritual of renewal. She took me through the city to the holy places, so that I could worship at each of the shrines. I knelt at the wall of the Hebers and at the gilded dome of the Mislams; then I went down into the lower part of the city, through the marketplace, to the gray dark illfashioned building covering the place where the god of the Christers is said to have died; then I went to the spring of knowledge and the fountain of the Will, and from there to the guildhouse of the guild of Pilgrims to surrender my mask and robes and starstone, and thence to the wall of the Old City. At each of these places I offered myself to the Will with words I had waited long to speak. Pilgrims and ordinary citizens of Jorslem gathered at a respectful distance, knowing that I had been lately renewed and hoping that some emanation from my newly youthful body would bring them good fortune. At last my obligations were fulfilled. I was a free man in full health, able now to choose the quality of the life I wished to lead. Avluela said, "Will you come with me to the Redeemers now? A meeting will convene in an hour's time." From her tunic she drew something small and gleaming, which I recognized in bewilderment as a starstone. "What are you doing with that?" I asked. "Only Pilgrims -- " "Put your hand over mine," she said, extending a fist in which the starstone was clenched. I obeyed. Her small pinched face grew rigid. "Avluela, what -- ?" "A signal to the guild," she said gently. "A notice to them to gather now that you are on your way." "How did you get that stone?" "Come with me," she said. "Oh, Tomis, if only we could fly there! But it is not far. We meet almost in the shadow of the house of renewal. Come, Tomis. Come! Hphere was no light in the room. Avluela led me into the subterranean blackness and told me that I had reached the guildhall of the Redeemers and left me standing by myself. "Don't move," she cautioned.  I sensed the presence of others in the ' room about me. But I heard nothing and saw nothing. Something was thrust toward me. Avluela said, "Put out your HandsWKat do you feel?" I toucKed a small square cabinet, resting perhaps on a metal framework. Along its face were familiar dials and levers. My groping Hands found Handles rising from tHe cabinet's upper surface. At once it was as thougH all my renewal Had been undone and tHe conquest of EartH cancelled as well: I was a WatcHer again, for surely this was a Watcher's equipment! I said, "Is it not tHe same cabinet I once had. But it is not greatly different." "Have you forgotten your skills, Tomis?" "I think they remain witK me even now." "Use tHe machine, then," said Avluela. "Do your WatcEing once more, and tell me what you see." Easily and Happily I slipped into the old attitudes. I performed the preliminary rituals quickly, clearing my mind of doubts and frictions. It was surprisingly simple to bring myself into a spirit of Watchfulness thougH I Had not attempted it since the night EartH fell. Now I grasped the Handles. They did not terminate in the grips to which I was accustomed: rather, something cool and Hard was mounted at the tip of eacH handle. My Hands closed over the twin coolnesses. I felt a moment of fear. Then I regained the necessary tranquility, and my soul flooded into the device before me, and I began to WatcH. In my Watchfulness I did not soar to tfie stars, as I Had in the old days. My perception was limited to the immediate surroundings of my room. Eyes closed, body Hunched in trance, I readied out and came first to Avluela, near me, almost upon me. I saw Her plainly. She smiled; she nodded; her eyes were aglow. -- I love you. -- Yes, Tomis. And we will be together always. -- I Have never felt so close to another person. -- In this guild we are all close, all the time. We are the Redeemers, Tomis. We are new. Nothing like this Has been on EartH before. -- How am I speaking to you, Avluela? -- Your mind speaks to mine, tHrougK tHe machine. And some day tlie macHine will not be needed. nplie starstones grew warm in my Hands. I clearly perceived tHe instrument, now: a Watcher's cabinet, but with' certain modifications, among them the starstones mounted on the Handles. And I looked beyond Avluela and saw other faces, ones that I knew. The austere figure of the Renewer Talmit was to my left. Beside him stood the Surgeon with whom I had journeyed to Jorslem, with the Changeling Bernalt at his elbow; and now I knew what business it was that brought these men of Nayrub to the holy city. The others I did not recognize ; but I saw them all, by an inner light for the room was as dark as it had been when I entered it. Not only did I see them but I touched them, mind to mind. The mind I touched first was Bernalt's. I met it easily though fearfully, drew back, met it again. I tried to enter Bernalt's mind, but I was afraid. How could I hide those prejudices, those petty contempts, those conditioned reflexes with which we unavoidably think of Changelings? "Hide nothing," he counseled. "Those things are no secret to me. Give them up now and join me." I struggled. I cast out demons. I summoned up the memory of the moment outside the Changeling shrine, after Bernalt had saved me, when I had invited him to journey with us. How had I felt then toward him? I amplified that moment of gratitude and companionship. I  let it swell and blaze, and it obliterated the encrustations of scorn and empty disdain, and I saw the human soul beneath the strange Changeling surface, and broke through that surface. He drew me toward his mind. I joined Bernalt, and he enrolled me in his guild. I was of the Redeemers now. Through my mind rolled a voice, and I did not know whether I heard the resonant boom of Talmit, or the dry ironic tone of the Surgeon,  or Bernalt's controlled murmur, or Avluela's soft whisper, for it was all these voices at once, and others, and they said: "When all mankind is enrolled in our guild, we will be conquered no longer. When each of us is part of every other one of us, our sufferings will end. There is no need for us to struggle against our conquerors, for we will absorb them, once we are all Redeemed. Enter us, Tomis who was the Watcher Wuellig." And I entered. T became the Surgeon and the Flier and the Renewer and the Changeling and the Servitor and the rest. And they became me. And so long as my hands gripped the starstones we were one soul and one mind. It was the keen perception one gets from Watching coupled with the submergence in a larger entity that one gets from communion, and I knew this was something wholly new on Earth, not merely the founding of a new guild but the initiation of a new cycle of human existence, the birth of the Fourth Cycle upon this defeated planet. The voice said, "Tomis, we will Redeem those in greatest need first. We will go into Agupt, into the desert where miserable Changelings huddle in an ancient building that they worship, and we will take them into us and make them clean again. And we will go on beyond Agupt, to all the lands of the world, and find those who are without guilds, and those who are without hope, and those who are without tomorrows, and we will give them life and purpose again. And a time will come when all Earth is Redeemed." They put a vision before me of a transformed planet, and of the harsh-faced invaders yielding peacefully to us, begging to be incorporated into that new thing that had germinated in the midst of their conquest. They showed me an Earth that had been purged of its ancient sins. Then I felt it was time to withdraw my hands-from the machine I grasped, and I withdrew my hands. The vision ebbed. The glow faded. But yet I was no longer alone in my skull, for some contact lingered, and the room had ceased to be dark. "How did this happen?" I asked. "When did this begin?" "In the days after the conquest," said Talmit, "we asked ourselves why we had fallen so easily, and how we could lift ourselves above what we Had been. We saw that our guilds had not provided enough of a structure for our lives that some closer union was our way to redemption. We had the starstones; we had the instruments of Watching; all that remained was to fuse them." The Surgeon said, "You will be important to us, Tomis, because you understand how to throw your mind forth. We seek former Watchers. They are the nucleus of our guild. Once your soul roved the stars to search out mankind's enemies; now it will roam the Earth to bring mankind together." Avluela said, "You will help me to fly, Tomis, even by day And you will fly beside me." "When do you leave?" I asked. "Now," she said. "I go to Agupt, to the temple of the Changelings, to offer them what we have. And all of us will join to give me strength, and that strength will be focused through you, Tomis." Her hands touched mine. Her lips brushed mine. "The life of Earth begins again, now this year, this new cycle. Oh', Tomis, we are all reborn!"  I remained alone in the room. The others scattered. Avluela went above, into the street. I put my hands to the mounted Starstones and I saw her as clearly as though she stood beside me. She was preparing herself for flight. First she put off her clothing, and her bare form glistened in the afternoon sun. Her body seemed impossibly delicate; a strong wind would scatter her, I thought. Then she knelt, bowed, made her ritual. She spoke to herself, yet I heard her words, the secret words Fliers say as they ready themselves to leave the ground. She rose and let her wings unfold. Some passersby looked oddly at her, not because there was anything unusual about the sight of a naked Flier in the streets of Jorslem, but because the sunlight was so strong and her transparent wings, so lightly stained with' pigment, were evidently nightwings incapable of withstanding the pressure of the solar wind. "Now we fly to Agupt," she murmured, "to Redeem the Changelings and make them one of us. Tomis, will you come with me?" "I will be with you," we said, and I gripped the starstones tightly and crouched over my cabinet of instruments in the dark room beneath the place where she stood. "We will fly together, Avluela." "Up then," she said, and we said, "Up." Her wings beat, curving to take the wind, and we felt her struggling in the first moment, and we gave her the strength she needed; she took it as it poured from ug through me to her, and we rose high. The spires and parapets of Jorslem the golden grew small, and the city became a pink dot in the green hills. Avluela's throbbing wings thrust her swiftly westward, toward the setting sun, toward the land of Agupt. Her ecstasy swept through us all. "See, Tomis, how wonderful it is, far above everything? The cool wind against your bare flesh -- the breeze in your hair -- you drift on the currents, you coast, you soar -- " To Agupt. To the sunset. W e looked down at the sparkling Lake Medit. From this height one could not tell that our world had even been conquered. One saw only the beauty of the colors of the land and the sea, not the checkpoints .of the invaders. Those checkpoints would not long endure. We would conquer our conquerors, not with weapons but with love, and as the Redemption of Earth became unicome down. I wished we could yersal we would welcome into our stay aloft forever, Avluela and I. new self even the beings who "We will, Tomis, we will!" she Bad seized our planet. told me. "Nothing can separate In my dark room I sent new us now. You believe that, don't surges of power through her you, Tomis?" wings. "Yes," we said, "I believe that." She hovered over the desert. And we guided her down through The old Surgery, the Changeling the darkening sky. shrine would soon be in sight. I Mil Listen , Men! We are deceiving you but don't risk I earning the truth ! 'T'he office building had been a hotel, once, and a famous married architect had shot a society physician in the grand foyer at that time. Now there was a horse-wire service doing business as a Bell substation down one of the twisting, door-lined Corridors. The men who operated the cage elevators wore yellowed white shirts, no ties, and the pants from pin-striped suits. Everything was either wooden and painted olive green or clad in linoleum and worn down to grit. Lunchtimes, a sallow man sold bready hamburgers cooked in salad oil on an iron sheet in an alcove beside the main entrance. Every five minutes, all day, subway trains ran under the foundations. Walter Keneally sat in an office with a numbered door and pine shelves on the walls of the one room. There were newspapers, books, magazines and many ledgers on the shelves. He spoke all day to Karachi, Alexandria, Reykjavik, Wellington, Seoul, Lhassa, Colombo and other cities, through the worn sand-colored telephone in his golden oak rolltop desk, or by other means. Every morning, too, there was a drift of mail on the floor below the slot in the door, and whenever he was not talking or listening to faraway voices, Walter Keneally, who looked like a smoothskinned bear with a balded white crewcut, would be hunched over an Oliver side-arm typewriter with its black iron frame coated in gummy oil and grime. His short,' calloused hands, hard as blackjacks, would stab their sausage fingers at the yellowed ivory key-tops, and further information and instructions would flow from him onto dimestore airmail stationery, into envelopes half-covered with stamps, thence into the mailbox on the corner that night, and thus to the four corners of the world. He was there at eight-thirty each morning, and he left at seven each night. Once a week he went out to the post office at noon and bought two hundred dollars in stamps. Once a month he stopped at the Bargain Store for stationery. At night, he went to a room on Twelfth Street, where for thirty dollars a month he had an iron bed, a plywood closet one foot deep with two black hangers hooked over a length of piano wire, and a bureau with the bottom missing from its top drawer. At home and in his office, he would often pause in the middle of communicating and sigh. He looked up from his typewriter now, at the shut door of his office, and pulled his eyelids until he was pinching the bridge of his nose. He sighed. At the same time, his door opened, a man stepped in carrying a furled umbrella in his left hand, and the man said sharply : "Keneally!" Keneally had never seen him before, but the sudden voice turned him in his swiveling typist's chair. The stranger arced a long steel skewer like a rapier blade out of the umbrella, came in with quick steps and, with a practiced overhand motion and all his momentum, thrust the skewer through Keneally and anchored him to the golden oak desk. There was a faint chuff! from Keneally. "Got you!" the thin, sharp-faced man said, his eyes glittering and his head cocked intently to one side as he watched Keneally's face. Ty" eneally looked down. The handle of the skewer was a length of adhesive tape wound around the home-ground steel; the white tape was grimy and frayed at the edges, as if it had been carried from place to place a long time and often toyed with. "Got me," he admitted in his slow, old bear's voice. "I will not waste time. I will not give you an opportunity to receive any help from your international confederates," the thin man said, pursing his lips. "I am Amos Qnsott of the One World Language League. My offices are also on this floor. My organization has hundreds of members throughout the world, and I am here to inform you we are destroying your conspiracy today." Keneally tested the skewer's ability to keep him sprawled uncomfortably in the chair. There was a faint grating noise from his chest as he moved, and he settled back. "How long have you been on to us?" "We have done considerable research. Beginning from the time I first noticed your activities and communicated my suspicions to certain League members who corroborated my deductions. Volunteers from our organization have investigated the activities of your underlings in many locations. We have verified that neither you nor your correspondents eat, sleep, or betray any other signs of human behavior." "There is no time," Keneally said. "We have too much to do. Even at night, when we change shifts and make our reports." He wagged his head, looking from one side of the office to the other. "We do not require rest or pleasure." Onsott now opened his suit coat and pulled a long, serrated-edge breadknife out of his trousers. "We will not get you all, but we will hand your organization a defeat that will give your survivors long second thoughts about meddling with the human race. We are not prepared to temporize, or compromise, or waste time attempting to convince official authority. Your bloodless parts will be our defense against charges of murder. A fair, untroubled world will be our evidence for your erstwhile plotting!" He came forward, lips pursed, eyes glittering. "What have we done?" Keneally asked, sighing. "What about us has aroused your... humanity?" "You are a robot under the control of intelligences in outer space, with whom you communicate telepathically You confirm our deductions? And you are the chief of an international organization of robots which has been consistently influencing human affairs. Disguised as humans, you have infiltrated every major scientific establishment our members have been able to inspect since my warning. You have influenced legislation and appropriations on a worldwide scale. You are in fact the managers of national policy in every noteworthy nation; we do not have your resources, my friend, but we are efficient -- as you can see. What have you done?" Onsott was furious. "The world is inexorably approaching the ultimate war! How many years have you shaped our destiny! How many bombs and biological poisons have you brewed up! What have you done" He jumped to Keneally's side, seized his wrist, and pulled his arm out straight. The chair slewed wildly on its stiff casters and Half-broken wheels, and the skewer bent in Keneally's chest but did not pull free. He raised Jus other arm and tried to reach across to help his imprisoned wrist, but could not make it. The thin, pale, indignant man had the leverage, and now, by trapping the arm against his side with one hand, was able to begin attacking Keneally's shoulder with the knife. Keneally let his other arm fall and turned his head to watch the white, rumpled broadcloth being sawed into a frayed wound, and then the tee shirt's soft cotton trying to snag the knife's teeth. As the knife reached Keneally, it made a sound like something dividing a package of frozen spinach. C# lA#' #rld  ar began August #, #, and was over by mid-September," Keneally said. "Every major city and human installation on Earth was destroyed. A few weeks later, the last living thing on this planet succumbed to the incidental radioactivity. We are not controlled from outer space. We do not need to communicate with our makers at all. That's fortunate, because they can only perceive dimly from where they are. We are made by the future; by the human beings of the future who must somehow restore life to this world, and continuity to this world's history, or die because there is no human race in the future. Do you understand?" Qnsott's eyes stared into Keneally's, but the knife sawed back and forth remorselessly. "The people of the future can manipulate time," Keneally said. "The transit of time is more difficult to understand than motorcar or interplanetary space. But if the human race lives long enough, then some day time has to be understood and devices built for acting through it. Not time ships, perhaps, but at least time grapples or time tools. Is that really so difficult to believe?" Out beyond the grime-grayed window, a pigeon took flight from the spattered windowsill and, bluish-gray, flailed up into a sky of indeterminate color. Qnsott's elbow jerked back and forth. His sleeve twitched the skirt of his jacket. His mouth was shut tight. His eyes hardly blinked. Keneally said: "The humans who made me with their remote devices can't themselves enter their own past. They can't make changes in their own history. If they change the past they change themselves and can't be the people of the future world they believe in. We are not making war. People make war; we are trying to cancel it. It's not easy. Tile war was a complex event." "I won't listen," Onsott said, the cords of his wrist white and taut as he bore down on the knife. "Your life isn't even self-consistent." It was time for another subway train to go by underfoot. Keneally watched Onsott tremble slightly until it was time for the building's sway to have died out. Keneally said: "They saw the war break out, and they knew what it meant. They are at their machines now, day and night peering to see if we are carrying out their plans. As long as we can act and they can see us, their time will not wink out; they will have succeeded, and their world will be green, and living. But if we should cease working, if even for an instant there were not some one of us working to restore this break in humanity's lifeline, then it would be true forever that Earth died in midSeptember of # and the human race died with it. Can I persuade you to stop? Can I persuade you to get in touch with your organization's members?" But at this point, Onsott stepped back and released his hold. Keneally's left arm fell to the floor and shattered, still in its sleeve. Onsott hurled himself around to Keneally's other shoulder. Keneally turned his head.  i jTnsott, there is nothing alive in this world except a few protein molecules being teased into organization and life in our laboratories; protein molecules that have been created to resist the great miasma of radiation that bathes this planet; bathes me, bathes you." Onsott's forehead was glistening with' perspiration. He snatched the knife away from Keneally's shoulder for an instant, bit hard at the knuckles, stared at the red-dimpled whiteness he had inflicted on the flesh he saw there, glared scornfully at Keneally, and resumed his work. "When I have you in a little heap of parts," he snarled, "will you still be talking?" "Onsott, if there is going to be history, it must be human history. There must be lovers, and new model cars, and airline disasters; new syndicated comic strips, elections, and births of quintuplets. Don't you see that? These things must be part of the unbroken human heritage, even if there were no humans. There tories being played out on this world, and played without a hint of self-consciousness. Even if there are no protoplasmic humans to play them, and will not be until there has been much more success in the laboratories. "Onsott, you want to live, don't you? You want to go on believing in this world? Feel pain, and joy, and hope for a day when everyone speaks your language? What moves you, Onsott? What do you prize above all other things? Do you want to keep it? Keep the chance of attaining it? You must stop this. "Onsott, the radiation level will not permit life. The surface of this world is sterile; the deepest canyons and oceans are bare of life and are tumbled with heaps of calcium. There is no grass, there is no cool wind. There is sometimes rain and mud, and there is always death. Do you understand? The living world exists only in the minds of the subautomatons who now inhabit it for us in the firm conviction that what they see and do has some external reality, that the history they record and make leads naturally from the past and firmly into the future." Keneally looked around the office again. "They keep the dream, God bless them. God bless you. But others don't require pleasure and beauty. Others must be self-aware when the radiation-resistant humans finally emerge from our researches, and the reborn human race has been worked into the weave of history again." Keneally said, watching Onsott working palemouthed and intent: "We others mustn't dream; we must rebuild the grass and cities good as old again. We can't permit you to stop us." He looked closely at Onsott. "We would like to be con siderate. But we can't ally ourselves with death." Onsott stopped and listened to something, head to one side. A bus perhaps, turning the corner of Broadway on the street below; it was time for one. The familiar sound of shifting gears and labor ing acceleration would be quite noticeable, even so far down this hallway. Onsott returned to his work. Keneally shook his head and sighed. He went on talking, but there was now no particular attempt to make Onsott pay attention. "We have the factories and labs going again. We have the minimal communications. We have some of the key cities restored sufficiently to operate as centers of civilization. But we are far from done. If you leave me alone now, Onsott, you will enjoy the remainder of a long life, and the sense of age, and the answer to the question of what dying is like. Do you want that? Most humanistic individuals do. And I can promise it to you, because we are all still a long, sorry way away' from the time when the human past is smoothly restored' and we wink out like snuffed candles. You understand? The future can wait on Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr. M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced # postpaid -- send in the coupon today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson Street, New York City # Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi record of Music from Mathematics right away. I enclose check or money order of #. Name Address City  State Zip Code... (Offer good in U. S. A. Only ) this planet now only because thus is not its true past. Wfien we Have made this a true world again, and saved tfie future, we must all go. We will not die. We will just... go. WitKout ever Having Had joy or reward. Onsott, I believe I know How a Human mind sees tHe world and itself; please stop what you're doing." O nsott Had been trembling more and more violently. Now He suddenly stopped Hacking at Keneally's sHoulder and drove the knife crackling and spurting into Keneally's tEroat. "Por la spirito geKomaro!" He shouted. Keneally's moutH said Hollowly, "Onsott, Amos. Cancel, please. One World Language League. Cancel, please." Onsott became a bag of clothing around a falling pillar of dust, and left a great patch of gritty yellow on Keneally. "Keneally, Walter," Keneally"s moutH said. "Repair service." THe sound of typing began again behind the green-painted door witK its flaking gilt number. Inside, a man with' white Hair, dirty trousers, and n shirt with the sleeves raggedly cut off sat hunched over a massive old typewriter. He looked like a bear impersonating a curator of animals. An umbrella stood in tHe corner. The War With The Fnools The Fnools were determined to invade Earth no matter how idiotic they looked doing it!  said, "Dam it, the Fnools are back again, Major. They've taken over Provo, Utah." With a groan, Major Hauk signaled his secretary to bring him the Fnool dossier from the locked archives. "What form are they assuming this time?" he asked briskly. "Tiny real-estate salesmen," Lightfoot said. Last time, Major Hauk retion attendants. That was the thing about the Fnools. When one took a particular shape they all took that shape. Of course, men much easier. But it did make the Fnools look absurd, and Hauk did not enjoy fighting an absurd enemy; it was a quality which tended to diffuse over both sides and even up to his own office. "Do you think they'd come to terms?" Hauk said, half-rhetorically. "We could afford to sacrifice Provo, Utah, if they'd be selves there. We could even add those portions of Salt Lake City which are paved with hideous old red brick." Lightfoot said, "Fnools never compromise, Major. Their goal is Sol System domination. For all time." Leaning over Major Hauk's shoulder. Miss Smith said "Here is the Fnool dossier, sir." With her free hand she pressed the top of her blouse against her in a gesture indicating either advanced tuberculosis or advanced modesty. There were certain indications that it was the latter. "Miss Smith," Major Hauk complained, "here are the Fnools trying to take over the Sol System and I'm handed their dossier by a woman with a forty-two inch bosom. Isn't that a trifle schizophrenic -- for me, at least?" Fie carefully averted his eyes from her, remembering his wife and the two children. "Wear something else from here on out," he told her; "Or swaddle yourself. I mean, my God, let's be reasonable; let's be realistic." "Yes, Major," Miss Smith said. "But remember, I was selected ployees pool. I didn't ask to be your secretary." With Captain Lightfoot beside him, Major Hauk laid out the documents that made up the Fnool dossier. In the Smithsonian there was a huge Fnool, standing three feet high, stuffed and preserved in a natural habitat-type cubicle. School children for years had marveled at this Fnool, which was shown with pistol aimed at Terran innocents. By pressing a button, the school children caused the Terrans (not stuffed but imitation) to flee, whereupon the Fnool extinguished them with its advanced solar-powered weapon... and the exhibit reverted to its original stately scene, ready to begin all over again. Major Hauk had seen the exhibit, and it made him uneasy. The Fnools, he had declared time and time again, were no joke. But there was something about a Fnool that -- well, a Fnool was an idiotic life form. That was the basis of it. No matter what it imitated it retained its midget aspect; a Fnool looked like something given away free at supermarket openings, along with balloons and moist purple orchids. No doubt, Major Hauk had ruminated, it was a survival factor. It disarmed the Fnool's opponents. Even the name. It was just not possible to take them seriously, even at this very moment when they were infesting Provo, Utah, in the form of miniature real-estate salesmen. Hauk instructed, "Capture a Fnool in this current guise, Lightfoot, bring it to me and I'll parley. I feel like capitulating, this time. I've been fighting them for twenty years now. I'm worn out." "If you get one face to face with you," Lightfoot cautioned, "it may successfully imitate you and that would be the end. We would have to incinerate both of you, just to be on the safe side." Gloomily, Hauk said, "I'll set up a key password situation with you right now, Captain. The word is masticate. I'll use it in a sentence... for instance, 'I've got to thoroughly masticate these data.' The Fnool won't know that -- correct?" "Yes, Major," Captain Lightfice at once, hurrying to the 'copter field across the street to begin his trip to Provo, Utah. But he had a feeling of foreboding. A#"h en kis 'copter landed at the ' ' end of Provo Canyon on the outskirts of the town, he was at once approached by a twofoot-high man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase. "Good morning, sir," the Fnool piped. "Care to look at some choice lots, all with unobstructed views? Can be subdivided into -- " "Get in the 'copter," Lightfoot said, aiming his Army-issue .# at the Fnool. "Listen, my friend," the Fnool said, in a jolly tone of voice. "I can see you"ve never really given any hard-headed thought to the meaning of our race having landed on your planet. Why don't we step into the office a moment and sit down?" The Fnool indicated a nearby small building in which Lightfoot saw a desk and chairs. Over the office there was a sign: " 'The early bird catches the worn,' " the Fnool declared. "And the spoils go to the winner, Captain Lightfoot. By nature's laws, if we manage to infest your planet and pre-empt you, we've got all the forces of evolution and biology on our side." The Fnool beamed cheerily. major back in Washington, D.C. who's on to you." "Major Hauk has defeated us twice," the Fnool admitted. "We respect him. But lie's a voice crying in the wilderness, in this country, at least. You know perfectly well, Captain, that the average American viewing that exhibit at the Smithsonian merely smiles in a tolerant fashion. There's just no awareness of the menace." By now two other Fnools, also in the form of tiny real-estate salesmen in gray business suits carrying briefcases, had approached. "Look," one said to the other. "Charley's captured a terran." "No," its companion disagreed, "the Terran captured him." 'copter," Lightfoot ordered, waving his .# at them. "You're making a mistake," the first Fnool said, shaking its head. "But you're a young man; you'll mature in time." It walked to the 'copter. Then, all at once, it spun and cried, "Death to the Terr arts!" Its briefcase whipped up, a bolt of pure solar energy whined past Lightfoot's right ear. Lightfoot dropped to one knee and squeezed the trigger of the .#; the Fnool, in the doorway of the 'copter, pitched head-forward and lay with its briefcase beside it. The other two Fnools watched as Lightfoot cautiously kicked the briefcase away. "Young," one of the remaining Fnools said, "but with' quick reflexes. Did you see the way he dropped on one knee?" Terrans are no joke," the other agreed. "We've got an uphill battle ahead of us." "As long as you're here," the first of the remaining Fnools said to Lightfoot, "why don't you put a small deposit down on some valuable unimproved land we've got a listing for? I'll be glad to run you out to have a look at it. Water and electricity available at a slight additional cost." "Get in the 'copter," Lightfoot repeated, aiming his gun steadily at them. I n Berlin, an Oberstleutnant of dient -- the West German Security Service -- approaching his commanding officer, saluted in what is termed Roman style and said, "General, die Fnoolen sind wieder zutuck. Was sollen wit jetz tun?" "The Fnools are hack?" Hochflieger said, horrified. "Already? But it was only three years ago that we uncovered their network and eradicated them." Jumping to his feet General Hochflieger paced about his cramped temporary office in the basement of the Bundesrat Gebaude, his large hands clasped behind his back. "And what guise this time? Assistant Ministers of Domestic Finance, as before?" "No sir," the Oberstleutnant said. "They have come as gear inspectors of the VW works. Brown suit, clipboard, thick glasses, middle-aged. Fussy. And, as before, nut six-tenth of a meter high." "What I detest about the Fnools," Hochflieger said, "is their ruthless use of science in the service of destruction, especially their medical techniques. They almost defeated us with that virus infection suspended in the  gum on the backs of multi-color  commerative stamps." "A desperate weapon," his subordinate agreed, "but rather too fantastic to be successful, ultimately. This time they'll probably rely on crushing force combined with an absolutely synchronized timetable." "Selbsverstandlich," Hochflieger agreed. "But we've nonetheless got to react and defeat them. Inform Terpol." That was the Terrawide organization of counter-intelligence with headquarters on Luna. Where, specifically, have they been detected?" "In Schweinfurt only, so far." "Perhaps we should obliterate the Schweinfurt area."  "They'll only turn up elsewhere." "True." Hochflieger brooded. "What we must do is pursue Operation Hundefutter to successful culmination." Hundefutter had developed for the West German Government a sub-species of Terrans six-tenths of a meter high and capable of assuming a variety of forms. They would be used to penetrate the network of Fnool activity and destroy it from within. Hundefutter, financed by the Krupp family, had been held in readiness for just this moment. "I'll activate Kommando Einsatzgmppe II," his subordinate said. "As counter-F nools they can begin to drop behind Fnool lines near the Schweinfurt area immediately. By nightfall the situation should be in our hands." "Gruss Gott," Hochfleiger prayed, nodding. "Well, get the kommando started, and we'll keep our ears open to see how it proceeds." If it failed, he realized, more desperate measures would have to be initiated. The survival of our race is at stake, Hochflieger said to himself. The next four thousand years of history will be determined by the brave act of a member of the self. He paced about, meditatiing on that. In Warsaw the local chief of the People's Protective Agency for Preserving the Democratic the coded teletype dispatch several times as he sat at his desk drinking tea and eating a late breakfast of sweet rolls and Polish ham. This time disguised as chess players, Serge Nicov said to himself. And each Fnool making use of the queen's pawn opening, Qp to Q#... a weak opening, he reflected, especially against Kp to K#, even if they draw white. But -- Still a potentially dangerous situation. On a piece of official stationery he wrote select out class of chess players employing queen's pawn opening. For Invigorating Forest-r e n e w a I Team, he decided. Fnools are small, but they can plant saplings... we must get some use out of them. Seeds; they can plant sunflower seeds for our tundra-removal vegetable-oil venture. A year of hard physical work, he decided, and they'll think twice before they invade Terra again. On the other hand, we could make a deal with them, offer them an alternative to invigorating forest-renewal activity. They could enter the Army as a special brigade and be used in Chile, in the rugged mountains. Being only sixty-one centimeters high, many of them could be packed into a single nuclear sub for transport... but can Fnools be trusted? The thing he hated most about Fnools -- and he bad learned to know them in their previous invasions of Terra was their deceitfulness. Last time they had taken the physical form of a troupe of ethnic dancers... and what dancers they had turned out to be. They had massacred an audience in Leningrad before anyone could intervene, men, women and children all dead on the spot by weapons of ingenious design and sturdy although monotonous construction which had masqueraded as folk-instruments of a fivestringed' variety. It could never happen again; all Democratic lands were alert, now;' special youth groups had been set up to keep vigil. But something new -- such as this gjiess-player deception -- could succeed as well, especially in small towns in the East republics, where chess players were enthusiastically welcomed. From a hidden compartment in his desk Serge Nicov brought out the special non-dial phone, picked up the receiver and said into the mouthpiece, "Fnools back, in North Caucasus area. Better get as many tanks as possible lined up to accept their advance as they attempt to spread out. Contain them and then cut directly through their center, bisecting them repeatedly until they're splintered and can be dealt with in small bands." "Yes, Political Officer Nicov." Serrge Nicov hung up and resumed eating his -- now cold -- late breakfast. A s Captain Lightfoot piloted the 'copter back to Washington, D.C. one of the two captured Fnools said, "How is it that no matter what guise we come in, you Terrans can always detect us? We've apstation attendants, Volkswagen gear inspectors, chess champions, folk singers complete with native instruments, minor government officials, and now real-estate salesmen -- " Lightfoot said, "It's your size." "That concept conveys nothing to us." "You're only two feet tall!" The two Fnools conferred, and then the other Fnool patiently explained, "But size is relative. We have all the absolute qualities of Terrans embodied in our temporary forms, and according to obvious logic -- " "Look," Lightfoot said, "stand Here next to me.-" The Fnool, in its gray business suit, carrying its briefcase, came cautiously up to stand beside him. "You just come up to my knee cap," Lightfoot pointed out. I'm six feet high'. You're only onethird as tall as I. In a group of Terrans you Fnools stand out like an egg in a barrel of kosher pickles." "Is that a folk saying?" the Fnool asked. I'd better write that down." From its coat pocket it produced a tiny ball point pen no longer than a match. "Egg in barrel of pickles. Quaint. I hope, when we've wiped out your civilization, that some of your ethnic customs will be preserved by our museums." "I hope so, too," Lightfoot said, lighting a cigarette. The other Fnool, pondering, said, "I wonder if there's any way we can grow taller. Is it a racial secret preserved by your people?" Noticing the burning cigarette dangling between Lightfoot's lips, the Fnool said, "Is that how you achieve unnatural height? By burning that stick of compressed dried vegetable fibers and inhaling the smoke?" "Yes," Lightfoot said, Handing the cigarette to the two-foothigh Fnool. "That's our secret. Cigarette-smoking makes you grow. We Have all our offspring, especially teen-agers, smoke. Everyone that's young." "I'm going to try it," the Fnool said to its companion. Placing the cigarette between its lips, it inhaled deeply. Lightfoot blinked. Because the Fnool was now four feet high, and its companion instantly imitated it; both Fnoois were twice as high as before. Smoking the cigarette had augmented the Fnoois' height incredibly by two whole feet. "Thank you," the now four foot-high real-estate salesman said to Lightfoot, in a much deeper voice than before. "We are certainly making bold strides, are we not?" Nervously, Lightfoot said, ' "Gimme back the cigarette." Major Julius Hauk pressed a button on his desk, and Miss Smith alertly opened the door and entered the room, dictation pad in hand. "Miss Smith," Major Hauk said, "Captain Lightfoot's away. Now I can tell you. The Fnoois are going to win this time. As senior officer in charge of defeating them, I'm about to give up and go down to the bombproof shelter constructed for hopeless situations such as this." "I'm sorry to hear that, sir," Miss Smith said, her long eyelashes fluttering. "I've enjoyed working for you." "But you, too," Hauk explained. "All Terrans are wiped out; our defeat is planet-wide." Opening a drawer of his desk he brought out an unopened fifth of Bullock  Lade Scotch which he had been given as a birthday present. "I'm going to finish this BL Scotch off first," he informed Miss Smith. "Will you join me?" "No thank you, sir," Miss Smith said. "I'm afraid I don't drink, at least during the daylight hours. Major Hauk drank for a moment from a dixie cup, then tided a little more from the bottle just to be sure it was Scotch all the way to the bottom. At last he put it down and said, "It's hard to believe that our backs could be put to the wall by creatures no larger than domestic orangestriped tomcats, but such is the case." He nodded courteously to Miss Smith. "I'm off for the concrete sub-surface bomb-proof shelter, where I hope to hold out after the general collapse of life as we know it." "Good for you, Major Hauk," Miss Smith' said, a little uneasliy. "But are you -- just going to leave me here to become a captive of the Fnools? I mean -- " Her sharply pointed breasts quivered in becoming unison beneath her blouse. "It seems sort of mean." "You have nothing to fear from the Fnools, Miss Smith," Major Hauk said. "After all, two feet tall -- " He gestured. "Even a neurotic young woman could scarcely -- " He laughed. "Really." "But it's a terrible feeling," Miss Smith said, "to be abandoned in the face of what we know to be an unnatural enemy from another planet entirely." "I tell you what," Major Hauk said thoughtfully. "Perhaps I'll ings and allow you to go below to the shelter with me." Putting down her pad and pencil and hurrying over to him, Miss Smith breathed, "Oh, Major, how can I thank you!" "Just come along," Major Hauk said, leaving the bottle of BL Scotch behind in his haste, the situation being what it was. Miss Smith clung to him as he made his way a trifle unsteadily down the corridor to the elevator. "Drat that Scotch," he murmured. "Miss Smith, Vivian, you were wise not to touch it. Given the cortico-thalamic reaction we are all experiencing in the face of the Fnoolian peril, Scotch isn't the beneficial balm it generally is." "Here," his secretary said, sliding under his arm to help prop him up as they waited for the elevator. "Try to stand firm, Major. It won't be long now." "You have a point there," Major Hauk agreed. "Vivian, my dear." Hphe elevator came at last. It was the self-service type. "You're being really very kind to me," Miss Smith said, as the major pressed the proper button and the elevator began to descend. "Well, it may prolong your life," Major Hauk agreed. "Of course, that far underground... the average temperature is much greater than at the Earth's surface. Like a deep mine shaft, it runs in the near-hundreds." "But at least we'll be alive," Miss Smith pointed out. Major Hauk removed his coat and tie. "Be prepared for the humid warmth," he told her. "Here, perhaps you would like to remove your coat." "Yes," Miss Smith said, allowing him in his gentlemanly way to remove her coat. The elevator arrived at the shelter. No one was there ahead of them, fortunately; they had the shelter all to themselves. "It is stuffy down here," Miss Smith said as Major Hauk switched on one dim yellow light. "Oh dear." She stumbled over something in the gloom. "It's so hard to see." Again she stumbled over some object; this time she half-fell."Shouldn't we have more light, Major?" "What, and attract the Fnools?" In the dark, Major Hauk felt about until he located her; Miss Smith had toppled onto one of the shelter's many bunks and was groping about for her shoe. "I think I broke the heel off," Miss Smith said. "Well, at least you got away with your life," Major Hauk said. "If nothing else." In the gloom he began., to assist her in removing her other shoe, it being worthless, now. "How long will we be down here?" Miss Smith asked. "As long as the Fnools are in control," Major Hauk informed her. "You'd better change into radiation-proof garb in case the rotten little non-terrestrials try H-bombing the White House. Here, I'll take your blouse and skirt -- there should be overalls somewhere around." "You're being really kind to me," Miss S'mitifbfeathed, as she handed him her blouse and skirt. "I can't get over it." "I think," Major Hauk said, "I'll change my mind and go back up for that Scotch; we'll be down here longer than I anticipated and we'll need something like that as the solitude frays our nerves. You stay here." He felt his way back to the elevator. "Don't be gene long,  Miss Smith called anxiously after him. "I feel terribly exposed and unprotected down here alone, and what is more I can't seem to find that radiation-proof garb you spoke of." "Be right back," Major Hauk promised. Building, Captain Lightfoot landed the 'copter with the two captive Fnools aboard. "Get moving," he instructed them, digging the muzzle of his Service .# into their small ribs. "It's because he's bigger than us, Len," one of the Fnools said to the other. "If we were the same size he wouldn't dare treat us this way. But now we understand -- finally -- the nature of the Terrans' superiority." Yes," the other Fnool said. "The mystery of twenty years has been cleared up." "Four feet tall is still suspicious-looking," Captain Lightfoot said, but he was thinking, If they grow from two feet to four feet in one instant, just by smoking a cigarette, what's to stop them from growing two feet more? Then they'll be six feet and look exactly like us. And it's all my fault, he said to himself miserably. Major Hauk will destroy me, career-wise if not body-wise. However, he continued on as best he could; the famous tradi"I'm taking you directly to Major Hauk," he told the two Fnools. "He'll know what to do with you." When they reached Major Hauk's office, no one was there. "This is strange," Captain Lightfoot said. "Maybe Major Hauk has beaten a hasty retreat," one of the Fnools said. "Does this tall amber bottle indicate anything?" "That's a tall amber bottle of Scotch," Lightfoot said, scrutinizing it. "And it indicates nothing. However -- " he removed the cap -- "I'll try it. Just to be on the safe side." After he had tried it, he found the two Fnools staring at him intently. "This is what Terrans deem drink," Lightfoot explained. "It would be bad for you." "Possibly," one of the two Fnools said, "but while you were drinking from that bottle I obtained your .# Service revolver. Hands up." Lightfoot, reluctantly, raised his hands. "Give us that bottle," the Fnool said. "And let us try it for ourselves; we will be denied nothing. For in point of fact, Terran culture lies open before us." "Drink will put an end to you," Lightfoot said desperately. "As that burning tube of aged vegetable matter did?" the nearer of the two Fnools said with contempt. It and its companion drained the bottle as Lightfoot watched. Sure enough, they now stood six feet high. And, he knew, everywhere in the world, all Fnools had assumed equal stature. Because of him, the invasion of the Fnools would this time be successful. He had destroyed Terra. "Cheers," the first Fnool said. "Down the hatch," the other said. "Ring-a-ding." They studied Lightfoot. "You've shrunk to oursize." "No, Len," the other said. "We have expanded to his." "Then at last we're all equal," Len said. "We're finally a success. The magic defense of the Terrans -- their unnatural size -- has been eradicated." A t that point a voice said, "Drop that .# Service revolver." And Major Hauk stepped into the room behind the two thoroughly drunken Fnools. "Well I'll be goddamned," the first Fnool mumbled. "Look, Len, it's the man most responsible for previously defeating us." "And he's little," Len said. "Little, like us. We're all little, now. I mean, we're all huge; goddamn it, it's the same thing. Anyhow we're equal." It lurched toward Major Hauk -- Major Hauk fired. And the Fnool named Len dropped. It was absolutely undeniably dead. Only one of the captured Fnools remained. "Edgar, they've increased in size," Major Hauk said, pale. "Why?" "It's due to me," Lightfoot admitted. "First because of the cigarette, then second because of the Scotch -- your Scotch, Major, that your wife gave you on your last birthday. I admit their now being the same size as us makes them undistinguishable from us... but consider this, sir. What ii they grew once more?" "I see your idea clearly," Major Hauk said, after a pause. "If eight feet tall, the Fnools would be as conspicious as they were when -- " The captured Fnool made a dash for freedom. Major Hauk fired, low, but it was too late; the Fnool was out into the corridor and racing toward the elevator. "Get it!" Major Hauk shouted. The Fnool reached the elevator and without hesitation pressed the button; some extra-terrestrial Fnoolian knowledge guided its hand. "It's getting away," Lightfoot grated. Now the elevator had come. "It's going down to the bombproof shelter," Major Hauk yelled in dismay. "Good," Lightfoot said grimly. "We'll be able to capture it with no trouble." "Yes, but -- " Major Hauk began, and then broke off. "You're right, Lightfoot; we must capture it. Once out on the street -- It would be like any other man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase. "How can it be made to grow again?" Lightfoot said, as he and Major Hauk descended by means of the stairs. "A cigarette started it, then the Scotch -- both new to Fnools. What would complete their growth, make them a bizarre eight feet tall?" He racked his brain as they dashed down and down, until at last the concrete and steel entrance of the shelter lay before them. The Fnool was already inside. "That's, um, Miss Smith you hear," Major Hauk admitted. "She was, or rather actually, we were -- well, we were taking refuge from the invasion down here." Putting his weight against the door, Lightfoot swung it aside. Miss Smith at once hopped up, ran toward them and a moment later clung to the two men, safe now from the Fnool. "Thank God," she gasped. "I didn't realize what it was until -- " She shuddered. "Major," Captain Lightfoot said, "I think we've stumbled on it." Rapidly, Major Hauk said, "Captain, you get Miss Smith's clothes. I'll take care of the Fnool. There's no problem now." The Fnool, eight feet high, came slowly toward them, its hands raised. Mew subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! If new evidence proves that light speed is not a limit, what will space war be like in reality? And what kind of men will be able to bear and win such wars? I rrelevantly, Commander Yuri Hammlin realized that a prestar-traveling breed of Man would have been squashed dead by such high push, Never mind that, now, he chided himself. It would take sharp wits and a lot of push to get through this mission alive. He tensed his big, leathery musby J. R. cles and just managed to squirm, without mechanical assist, to a new, more comfortable position in his padded combat pod. Fourteen kilo-g's, he thought, breathing hard enough to feel the pseudofluid stir in his helmet. He was adapting well to the push. The crew had been, too. Soon they could up it a little more. They had to stay out of Grakevi disruptor range as long as they could. Hmm. He'd better check the range again. A broad viewset faced Hammlin out of the padding of his coffin-like enclosure. With practiced deftness, he held in mind the sequence of thought forms commanding: stern view! Part of the total shipboard software complex known as Shipmind recognized the corresponding pattern of brain pulses picked up through Hammlin's helmet sensors as a command. The starfield astern, out to the standard display range of four hundred light-years, appeared in the viewer. A faint, wavering glow rimmed the edge of the view -- the tunnel-like veil of the Solsmyga's ionization trail. Hammlin noticed the slight motion of stars near the peripheral glow. What's out mean speed of passage? viewer. Spectral halos displayed around stars further astern dopplered increasingly downfrequency. And in the middle of the view, almost directly astern, gleamed two magnified blips. Hammlin studied the images of his pursuers. He was glad the rest of that Grakevi task force had finally turned back. Those two were enough. Shipmind: Range of hostile ships? They were getting still closer, he thought soberly. Quickly he made sure his ferret ship was maintaining adequate weave amplitude for that proximity. He then ordered a highly magnified view of the Grakevi ships. The two big images in his viewer were roughly circular, but blurred. They continually faded and shimmered. Hammlin was seeing the impact-glow of space dust off the armored bows of the Grakevi ships. Staring at them, he thought-commanded, to duty command monitor : "Bob?" "Sir?" "What do you make of them?" Now I'd say raiders, sir, by their performance. Their mass would put them in the Grakevi equivalent of our Rapier class." Shipmind! The hostile ships: What mass? "Yes, Bob, I think you're right. Okay, that's all." "Yes sir."craft. Built for hit-and-run attacks on suns and convoys. And well suited to running down ferrets, Hammlin realized, grimly, Altogether, forty-six kilotons against the Solsmyga's fourteen kilotons. Heavier armor. Bigger disruptors. Either of those two alone , could burn them if it catches them. They were taking a big chance by just pretending this was a reconnaissance mission. Hammlin thought of tfieir course ahead. He had studied it to the point that he could picture it in his mind -- all the way to Cairnsun. I hope it was well laid, he thought, fretfully. Well he knew how drifting matter could obsolesce astrogational files. How dangerous billowing dust could be if they hit it hard enough. He took a deep breath, and ordered: bow view! The view was Hazier than astern. Sensors near the stern had to peer forward through the ship's ionization trail. The bulk of the ship both protected those eyes from dust impact and obstructed the view within a tendegree cone straight ahead. The ship's weaving course shifted the blind spot about, however, and Shipmind built up a total view from successive sensor inputs. Stellar spectra shifted increasingly toward the blue. Had the stars not been light-years distant, hardening radiation and hysteresis drag would have threatened the ship. Secondary radiation and dust ionization could be severe, but the Solsmyga's armored hull was built to take it -- as long as the dust stayed fine. Sound me hull impacts! Hammlin thought-commanded. Shipmind filtered out the squealing spacedrive, the sporadic popping rattle of space dust on the massive, plane surfaces of their bow. Sparse yet. Not much strain on the pilots. Nearer midpoint, though... Hmm. This was a long run to make at high push. They'd be going through it fast. Okay, cease hull sound! In the abrupt quiet, Hammlin relaxed for a moment from his restless checking on how his command was running. He was glad that strident ship sounds didn't carry though to his combat pod. Immersed in the pseudo-fluid, his pale, muscular body bare but for plastic helmet and shorts, it would have been torture. The spring-dampened pod was restful, like a womb. Umbilical cables and tubes to his helmet and shorts enhanced the effect. Teliberately relaxing, Hammlin L' saw their situation clearly. sighted by the Grakevi task force near a possibly hostile sun. That far Hammlin had fulfilled his mission. And as it turned out, it was a Grakevi sun. The prime planet had been scrambled years before, but Hammlin had detected two underground settlements being started on the next world out, even though it was a marginal habitat. That meant, he resemens mounted m psddin engUmf cot tcmiwisation   mith ship-mitidyCriv i',a vicws Camcri'Tfool, commeMctium # imdicstion -- " H # TK Tpc pseudo .kdd. drain and Vcttfe-for yseidfaild.  waste awL  fleeted, that the two raiders astern would keep after them, trying to burn them before he could take back word of these settlements. It was tricky, this pretense of flight, without being free to really tty to lose them. Arid dangerous. Those raiders were hot. A new class of ship, maybe, with prime crews. This would take plenty of skill and push, or they would never reach Cairnsun. An itch distracted him. Straining mightily against the fourteen kilo-g push, Hammlin slid a hand across his hard body to where he could reach it. Ahh, that felt better, he thought, scratching. Mow he'd better see about getting the push up. Shipmind! Conference circuit; monitors and specialist staff! To body specialist: "Tolefante, I want the push upped again. Any problems?" "How much up?" "One kilo-g. Gradually, of course." Well, from the cardiac traces, I'd say we can take it, but -- " "Fine! Medicate as necessary." " -- But, uh... Yes sir." "Skipper," broke in the hardware specialist, can we hold off the up-push a few minutes? I'm still getting in the repair-module replacement for one of the. stemward eyes. Changing push may damage it." Side circuit to mind specialist ! "Burton, those modules are engineered for over twenty kilo-g's, peak. Try to juice up Harley's morale a little more. Subliminal tigering, or something." "Yes sir. A work engram of his was starting to act up-. I'll try to cover it." "Good!" Back to conference circuit! "Harley, we can't put off the push, but it'll be gradual. I've got confidence that you can cope with it, boy. Show me you can take it!" "Uh, yes sir. I'll try." "That's 'the spirit! "Command monitor," Hammlin went on, "are the Grakevi still closing?" "Yes sir. And duty jammer just reported changes in their code patterns. Nothing he could break, but maybe they're getting close enough to try something." "Okay, let's not delay any longer, then. That's all. Get set. Up-push coining!" Shipmind : End conference circuit. Gradual increase to fifteen kilog's, mean push! flashed a comer of the viewer, and Hammlin heard the warning repeated in Ms helmet speakers. In all twenty-two combat pods of his crew, he knew, the warning was being repeated. As the long-range ferret ship pushed harder and harder, Hammlin felt his breath coming tighter. Almost without thinking, he flexed one muscle and then another against the push. It was a hypnotic compulsion meant to speed his push adaptation. He was glad they were using # was more buoyant than the old stuff. Good thing he had been able to get some. A rough mission, this one. Hammlin stared at the viewer. Those raiders weren't dropping back very fast. He checked with Shipmind. So. They were upping push I , too. It frustrated him that the enemy should so nearly match his stamina. Any enemy achievement irritated him. "Think they're pretty tough, huh?" he husked through clenched teeth', Their very name was in his mouth a curse. "Grakevi! Hrrach!" He glowered at the slowly dwindling blips. II T T ammlin remembered the day he had been entrusted with this mission. He had been summoned to the office of Shoal-Staff Brigadier Odyn Stuart, back at #-L Sector Staff Headquarters. At the old man's bidding, Commander Hammlin had eased his big, tough body into a comfortable chair by the desk, but he did not relax, not in Brigadier Stuart's office. Stuart was a perceptive, calculating, strong-minded man, and he set a hard pace. His men never dared' call him the affectionately familiar "Ohm" Stuart to his face. Yet now, oddly, the Brigadier appeared to be in a remarkably mellow mood. He praised Hammlin for a recent daring reconnaissance, mused about a happier time -- oh, how many years ago -- when there was no desperate war situation, no vicious slaughter and counterslaughter, no scrambling, of planets in a widening no-man's-space. The opposing forces were interpenetrating, he mentioned. Soon Sector Staff Headquarters would be moved further back. And what did Hammlin think of recent Grakevi pursuit tactics? But presently the Brigadier paused in his probing small talk to regard Hammlin thoughtfully. "Suppose we came upon a world that seemed ideal for settlement," Stuart murmured, "but on which there was some serious hazard we couldn't detect. How do you suppose we would deal with it?" For a moment the question didn't make sense to Hammlin, and why had the old man asked it? Hammlin shifted uneasily in his seat under Stuart's shrewd appraisal. "Well, uh, it would depend on the hazard, I would think" Stuart was silent. "How can the hazard be detectable? I don't understand." "Hmm. Well," Stuart suggested, "suppose this was a planet on such mind-expending drug, occurred naturally. There would be no way to detect it. The traces would be too slight." "Yes. but one could infer the presence of the drug from the effects. The symptoms..." Stuart shook his head. "The symptoms are initially too slight, too varied, too erratic. Too many other explanations can be given. In the beginning nothing is even suspected. And yet, over a long time -- you see?" "Uh... yes. Yes." How ghastly! In their present desperate need for strength the Helgad League would rush colonists to a promising world as fast as they could be settled. Whole settlements -- thousands of the finest people -- would be getting smoked. Pathetic! And if the cumulative brain poisoning was severe enough, they would eventually be dying of it without ever realizthem. Only off-world eyes would see something amiss -- but not in time . "Yes," said Stuart, watching the troubled look come over Hammlin's broad, bony face. "It can be dangerous. Very dangerous. Especially when you think of how long a government can take to react to even blatant facts. And the planet... well, such a planet is no good for settlement. But still, it has uses." Q 'mart leaned back in his chair.  Hammlin's bushy blond eyebrows rose; his deep blue eyes showed question. "Look," said Stuart, "suppose an enemy power can be lured into grabbling such a prize. Eh? With the right handling, it might be used to bleed 'em of men and supplies for years." "Uh, yes..." "Say there was valuable equipment there, to sweeten the bait," added Stuart, warming to his subject. "Some partly built settlements. And a weak garrison fleet holding the star." He leaned forward to emphasize: "In a situation like the present one, with both sides hungering for worlds to settle and draw strength from, the enemy would grab eagerly at such a world if we just lured them to it." Leaning back in his chair, the old man added, almost as an afterthought, "The luring them to Cairn -- that will be your job." "You mean... you mean this world exists? A planet with "It exists. But... maybe it . what it is, but there's something there, and it's deadly." Hammlin thoughtfully rubbed his chin as he turned this over in his mind. The room was quiet, but for the background susurration of Sector Staff Headquarters. "It's addictive," Stuart went on, running a hand over his closecropped white hair. "Take a man off Cairn who's been there over six months, Ship Time, and he becomes so accident-prone that he usually gets' himself killed. Or he gets sick of something and dies. But once he's been there a decade or two, he's too stupid to even dress himself. "Yuri, it cost us plenty to find onists lost, not to mention their installations. Now we're going to try to get back the cost of that information. We want the Graks to pay for it. They've taken dozens of suns from us in recent months. Right on this front: Krag, Barnasun, Samli -- all gone. We're being pressed hard. Let's see if we can't funnel some of that pressure onto Cairn." The two men stood up. "We're counting on you, Yuri Hammlin. Here's your memory card on the Cairn System, suggested tactics, all the data you might need." The older man paused, then gripped Hammlin's shoulder. Lure them to Cairn, Yuri. Hook them on that world. Hook them hard!" "I'll do my very best, sir." "That's what I'll be counting on. Good luck!" Hphe ship drove on. Hammlin rested, but after a time he roused himself again to check the crew. Third shift, he found, had just gone off duty, to be replaced by first shift. For each two-hour shift, four times a day, one of the  three command monitors watched over his two pilots and two weaponeers. Meanwhile, each of the three operations monitors watched through his shift as Shipmind ran maintenance checks on crew and ship. At his call for any complicated maintenance was the specialist staff : body specialist, mind specialist, hardware technician and software technician. The men seemed to be holding up fairly well, Hammlin reflected. Hmm. He wondered how piloting was going. Shipmind: Show me duty pilot display! Alternating views blinked at him. One showed ahead, and one astern. The views were speckled with navigation codes and course lines. Schmidt was a good man, Hammlin thought. He was showing plenty hunch-power. Good. That was just what Shipmind needs. Checking, Hammlin saw that the co-pilot was up to his task, too. Seeing then to his ship's defenses, Hammlin next checked on his duty weaponeers. The Grakevi were still beyond effective disruptor range, so the zapper was mainly helping the other weaponeer, the jammer, as ' he probed the enemy electronically. Hammlin saw the weird designs displayed in their viewsets: spectrum analyses, requests from Shipmind on how best to try to crack codes, dance patterns for target ranging past enemy jamming, and strategies for slipping craze patterns through enemy filtering. With Shipmind listening closely, the two weaponeers chatted conspiratorially, planning ways to do in the enemy. But, Hammlin reflected, their Grakevi counterparts were planning the same -- with the Helgad in mind. And there were more of them. Two raiders worth! The ship fled onward. Tlie Grakevi fell back again, for a time, as the ferret pushed harder. Then they began to creep up once more. Hammlin meditated battle tactics. A stern chase, he thought. An adaptation contest, as usual. They were keeping to the high side of optimum push for fastest crew adaptation: just short of immobility. The Grakevi couldn't push much harder without pilot gray-out. And pilot intuition was necessary to hold a clear course at these kilolight speeds. Burton Mind specialist tsh class #f, Now, when the Grakevi got within effective zap range... Hmm. Weaving would make hits unlikely, at first. And most of the energy would be reflected off the sharply sloping sternward armor. At most, a few ship eyes would periodically be temporarily burned. The disruptor batteries were well shielded within the fluke notch. As the Graks got closer, though, the Grak disrupter flashes would burn hotter and hotter, he reflected. Each coherent flash, a searing pulse pattern keyed to hull absorption frequencies, could at closer range boil off centimeters of armor, leaving a smooth, shiny depression where it hit. We had to avoid letting the Graks get close enough to be likely to hit with those big disrupters, Hammlin thought. Evasive maneuvers, chaff, jamming, flares, plasmoids -- anything to confound them, to keep them at a distance until men reach Cairnsun. If men can make it to Caimsun, if they reached the Helgad garrison force there... fjphe Solsmyga had reached a push of # gilo-g's when the Grakevi raiders struck... Hammlin had just awakened when -- "Skipper, something odd Here. They're still almost two lightminutes away, but we're starting to get continuous disruptor ranging pulses. Duty jammer's been picking up new intership com. Says he thinks they just went on stereo zap-control." "Uh, Donovan?" "Yeah. First shift's on. Those Graks are tanging us like they mean business." "For how long?" "Couple minutes." Hammlin finally came all awake with I a start as he realized the situation: Shipmind! Go to mid-zap range battle weave! Dutycrew to full alert! Bring next shift up to standby alert! The viewer blinked acknowledgment. To command monitor: (Harry, I smell a trick! Get set!) "Right!" To duty operations monitor: "Any limp in the works to allow for?" "No, skipper. Ship's tight." "Good." Good. Shipmind was on the job. Hammlin's viewer showed excess power from the two fusion chambers bleeding off the hull radiators. Now to see what those Graks were -- Hammlin heard the characteristic scratchy splatter of disruptor pulses in his helmet speakers. But why? They were till too far away. Shipmind : Show me stern view! Report uncommon hostile action. Hammlin studied the two weav-' img, twinkling spots in his viewer as she thought-commanded: To duty command monitor: "Harry, what do you make of it?" ed Shipmind in the edge of the viewer. "Don't know, sir," said Harry Donovan. "A feint, maybe?" "Could be." Had they just meant to spook him? Hammlin asked himself. Had he strained the crew unnecessarily? Had he lost us some tactical advantage? "Shall we cut back to range limit weave, sir?" "Ah... yes, Harry -- but do it Shipmind : Give me bow view! T o duty co-pilot: "Feel there's anything ahead that they could be trying to herd us toward?" answered the command monitor. "No, sir. Course feels okay right now," said the co-pilot. What should he' check now? Hammlin asked himself, closing his eyes in silent concentration. What could it be? "Duty zapper's ranging, just in case," the command monitor went on. "Jammer's feeling them -- hey! They're zapping out of focus! Too broad to even burn the ship eyes. Wonder what hap -- " f  through his closed eyelids Hammlin saw a flash of light on the viewer. A violent nervous jolt painfully twitched his body, dazing him. He gasped. His heart pounded. "Craze pattern," he groaned, with waves of clammy chill running over his skin. Craze pattern! Filter it!! Block it! Quick, filter it! A craze pattern! Don't let another one through! Panting, Hammlin fought to calm his trembling. His eyes remained tightly shut against the possibility of another flash. It could kill him. Had Shipmind managed to set blocks against another one? He had to act fast -- the Graks! What were they doing? He needed information! But... only... The viewer! Was it craze-blocked? That had been a visual pattern, Hammlin thought. A powerful one. He shuddered at the memo-, ry. Even with his eyes closed, he Had got it bad! What had it done to tfie crew. Was anyone else left? Had Shipmind set up craze blocks? What was the ship status? How could he find out without getting killed by another flash if he looked at the viewer? The helmet speakers! That was it! He'd get an acoustic report. Only, what if part of that craze pattern was acoustic? Calling for sound might bring Jt through. What should he do? Hammlin squirmed on the edge of a cold sweat. His hands fidgeted abstractly. He tried to visualize the present state of the ship. Could they have crazed Shipmind? Might they be about to? Shipmind : Beware of similarmethod crazing attempt on Shipmind! Hammlin wondered if there there was any Shipmind left to get his thought command. If they would get Shipmind, he couldn't do a thing. He was helpless! But wait. The ship was still at high push. Yes, and it was weaving, although it felt kind of jerky. How come? Pilots knocked out, probably. Or maybe something the Graks were doing. At least part of Shipmind must be up -- he hoped! Hammlin swallowed anxiously. He had to get communication! He'd have to take a chance on the acoustics. If the Graks knew they'd got the Helgad... They must know! They must be pushing all they could to close in and finish things! He had to act! But, if there was an acoustic craze , . , He Had to do it! Almost convulsively, Hammlin thought-commanded, Shipmind: Report status acoustically! in its clipped feminine monotone. Hammlin let out his breath. He was still alive! Good old Shipmind! he thought. It was still up! Are filter blocks set up against repeat visual crazing? Hoping it was effective, Hammlin cautiously opened his eyes. Shipmind: What is crew status? TT'or a moment Hammlin lay in numbed silence. The greater part of his crew was out! Are they dead? So. Maybe they still had a chance. Maybe enough men would recover to crew the ship through. But right now, they were in bad trouble. Even third shift was incomplete. Shipmind: Who's the casualty on third shift? So all his jammers were out. Who of the specialist staff is out? Burton! Just when the need for him was greatest! Just then Hammlin felt the ship's weaving course becoming less jerky. Shipmind : Did the third-shift pilots just get on-line? Good! To duty co-pilot: "Pomeroy?" "Yes, sir." "Did the craze hit you? How do you feel?" "I'm okay, sir. I was asleep when Shipmind called me on duty." "Fine! You and MacKinzie -- don't strain yourselves. You may Have a long shift. The pilots on the other shifts are hurt." "Yes, sir. We'll spell each other to make it last." "That's it! Now, take it as easy as you can." "Okay, sir." To duty command monitory "Bob?" "Yes sir. Zeitlin here." "Did Shipmind say your viewer was safe? Have you looked astern?" Uh, yes, sir. I just came on. Shipmind said emergency." "That's right. The Graks got a craze pattern through." He hoped the stern view was craze-blocked on his viewer. He had to chance it. Shipmind : Give me a stern view! Hammlin blinked defensively as the view popped into his vie ,vset. He. was breathing a little fast, and very much aware of what could have happened if his viewer hadn't been craze-blocked. But all he saw were two weaving blips twinkling brightly among the stars. "Hadn't we better up push a bit, sir?" Zeitlin suggested. Range of hostile ships? a corner of the viewer. So much closer since this had happened. A little more and they might have gotten everyone. They still might. "Yes, up it, Bob. You take it. Try to keep them back beyond a light-minute. But try also to not strainyour shift too much. The other two shifts were knocked out, and I don't know how long you'll have to be on." "Okay, sir. I'll do my best." "Good!" To body specialist: "How are the casualties?" "Sir, all the casualties are unconscious. Some are in serious condition. I haven't had time to check them all specifically, yet. Sliipmind is running suggestive first-aid and breath-input medication already, of course. They show Symptoms of a very severe recent trauma. In fact -- " "Make it snappy, Tolefante. How's Burton?" "I hadn't gotten to him yet, sir," answered Tolefante, sounding hurt. "Well, get on it! We need him badly." "Yes, sir. If that's what you want, sir." Surly, smart-aleck pup! He was straight out of med training, and he thought he knew everything! npo software technician: "Vledervoe, you running down that craze pattern?" "Yes, sir. A bad one. I caught a little of it myself." "How do you feel?" "Okay, sir. Not much of it came through this viewer." "That's a relief. Now look -- here's what I want you to do: First, make sure Shipmind is filtered so we don't get another one in the same way. Secondly, get fixed up any damage the one that got through did to Shipmind. And finally, find out how the Graks did it. Let whoever's standing in for duty jammer know as soon as you find out. Got that?" "Uh, yes, sir," answered Vledervoe, uncertainly. "That's what I'm doing. But you don't mean strictly in that order, do you?" "Do it any way it goes fastest, but those are the priorities." "Very well, sir." Yledervoe sounded relieved. He was very liberal-minded. After years of software experience, he thought almost like Shipmind. To duty operations monitor, Hammlin thought-commanded : "Otto, are you on?" "Yes, sir." "What damage did the Graks do while we were out from that crazing?" "Is that what it was, sir? Uh, not much, it seems. A playbackshows that Shipmind was on its own for only about a couple of minutes. During most of that time it shows the Grak disrupters were awfully weak, or out of focus or something. They only shined through the radar camouflage in a couple of places. Hardly took any armor off. "The bow armor is kinda pocked up, though. Down three centimeters in places. Not serious on eighty-centimeter armor." "We still have a long way to go." said Hammlin, quietly. "Yes, sir. That we do." "Otto, you better leave the hardware pretty much to Harley for a while. I want you to give Tolefante all the help you can with the crew. Keep him moving. We're just riding on third shift. No reserve." "Okay, sir. I'll do that." "Good man." Hammlin paused a moment, reviewing the situation. He had to conserve himself, too, he realized. There was no telling how long they would take to deal with the emergency. He noticed that he was pressing harder into his pod padding. Oof -- Zeitlin was really getting the push up, he thought. Must be that the Graks didn't want to lose range. This was plenty strain. But leave the man be. He'd better see what Tolefante Has found out by now. Shipmind: To body specialist: "What have you found out, Tolefante?" "Burton just regained consciousness, sir, but he's in bad shape. He's babbling incoherently." Ohipmind! Give me mind specialist pod view and sound! Of all the blasted nerve. Some nardy bureaucrat made rules, and he couldn't get to his men! Hrrach! "Okay, Tolefante," said Hammlin, grimly. "You take care of him. You fix him up good, and you do it fast! I need that man!" "Sir, I'm the body specialist, not -- " "I don't care wEat you call yourself! You're supposed to be cross-trained in Burton's specialty as well. If you can't remember your lesson, ask Shipmind!" Hammlin snapped off contact with a brusque thought-command, and lay silent in his combat pod to let his temper cool. After a moment Shipmind anI thought -- maybe you'd want to know about the other casualties?" It was Otto Zagorsky, sounding very meek. Realization came to Hammlin: that the operations monitor had been monitoring Tolefante, as his task required, and had heard it all. It annoyed and chagrined Hammlin that he had displayed his temper thus -- to the possible detriment of the ship -- but it was done and past, now. "Yes, how are they?" He asked in a more even voice. "Well, sir, apparently the pattern going through the first shift jammer viewset was the worst. Beck is in a coma. It's bad, sir." Zagorsky paused cautiously. Hammlin waited. "The rest seem to be gradually coming out of it, sir," Zagorsky went on. "They look like they were having nightmares. Some worse than others. Except for two: Leinster and Stewart. They are conscious, but not making much sense. We're running some of the therapy routines in Shipmind to them, and to the others, too. It's helping, but I don't have much idea how long it'll take. Too bad we don't have Burton available. He could work the therapy a lot better." Yes, well... Do your best, Otto. Burton especially. And see about juicing up Tolefante's morale, a little if it'll make him any faster. Shipmind just sassed me, and I blew up at him." "Yes, sir. I'll do that, sir." "Good. That's all." So, thought Hammlin, staring thoughtfully at the blanked viewset. Leinster and Stewart: the second shift pilot and zapper. But would they recover in time? Would enough of the others? If they didn't, he knew, the exhaustion of third shift would leave the ferret a robot, without a crew. It would lack the intuitive skill, the feel for the situation that was needed to avoid most of the dense space dust and Grakevi zapping. They would never reach Cairnsun. The mission would fail. It must not fail. Too much depended upon it. Ohm Stuart was counting on him! IV 'T'vays passed. The continual sizzling splatter of disrupter pulses sounded in Hammlin's helmet speakers. He'd better leave that sound a while, he thought exhaustedly. It would keep him reminded that those Grak raiders were just light-seconds behind. Knowing the danger would help keep him awake. The high-push swerving of the ship jarred him. Fourteen days in combat, he mused. It was telling on all of them. If only their luck held. It was not long to midpoint, now. If they could just make it through midpoint... His body ached. He could only move without mechanical assist during moments of down-push for doppler evasion. When the ferret up-pushed again, the strain hurt him. He felt that he was starting to get bedsores. Peaking to eighteen kilo-g's, now, he reflected. To the genetic limit of their adaptability. Up peak push much more, and it play summary of crew health, he thought-commanded. Studying the data which appeared in the viewset, he was dully saddened by the ultimate state shown for Beck and Pomeroy. How many more, #I disrupters face forward, (J baktev iesofe) # disrupbovs face aft Of Batteries cfz) would kill them -- as it Had killed Pomeroy already. He was the second loss so far, Hammlin thought, remembering the third-shift co-pilot. Beck had been the first to go. Beck, the jammer on first shift, had never come out of coma after the Grakevi craze pattern hit him. He had lingered three days, then perished as the ship jerked about, dodging violently, to avoid being zapped as it darted through a narrow gap opening across a dust cloud. Hammlin's sense of duty urged him to see to his men, again. Disyet? He wondered. Would any of them make it? Who could know. They'd try, though. They had to try. Hammlin absently rubbed an itch high on his bald scalp against the inside of his helmet. That felt better. At least the rest of the crew had pretty well recovered, he thought. It was slow, but a big relief all the same. It had been hard on them. That opening craze pattern had interfered with their push' adaptation. It was a near thing, for a while, Hammlin remembered. With third shift becoming exhausted, and the other two shifts still very shaky, he had Had to juggle along on the last bit of endurance of first one man and then another. Building back up from that ordeal had been difficult. The Grakevi had never let up. Qhipmind : Show stern view,  again, Hammlin ordered. He studied the motions of the zapping raiders. Abruptly the viewset blanked protectively as a nuclear flare shell went off. Seconds later the view faded back in to show the fireball falling faster and faster toward the raiders. They swept by, dodging easily, and it dwindled into the distance. Shipmind : How long until midpoint? Hmm. It didn't seem like such a short while since he had last checked. Maybe he was getting tense. Well, there was no time just to lie here fretting. He had to see how Shipmind was coming with midpoint tactics calculation. Hammlin tried to help Shipmind, but it was hard to concentrate in the jouncing corSbat pod. His back felt sore where it had pressed too long into the padding. "Uh, Skipper?" "Yes, Vledervoe?" He sounded badly tired, too, thought Hammlin. "I found out the rest on what that craze pattern did," reported Vledervoe in his dry, studious voice. "Or anyway, about as much as could still be found out." "What is that?" "Well, as I mentioned before, when they keyed that craze pattern through their disruptors, the pulse hit the outer overhead eyes hard enough to crosswalk over to the second-level visual reduction lines before it would have reached the first set of block points." Circuit logic diagrams showed on Hammlin's viewer Hammlin quickly contracted them to just a corner of his viewset so he could also keep watch astern. "Uh, it also apparently jumped from the VR lines to the overhead VR disc-waffle leads," Vledervoe went on. "That's how it got into number three visual buffer an F tier. I was mistaken before when I said it came straight through the VR lines. The second-level VR lines have filtering on CJ# level. In fact -- " "Wait, there," Hammlin interrupted. "Have you told duty jammer?" "Uh, the jammer -- yes, sir. I just did." "Okay. Now then, what remains to be healed up?" "Well, it went through Bank #, mucking it up. From there it spilled into the end of viewset interface storage. At that point a machine hypnotic translated and took control of three autoprocessors. Uh, yes, I'm pretty sure it must have been three of them. That is, the read-around dump digest showed -- " "I'll take your word for it," said Hammlin impatiently. "Uh, okay. Well, the parasitic unfolded and spilt craze pattern through most of the duty switches in the last eighteen interface buffers. The primary association channels in those buffers are all lost." "Hmm. How bad is that?" "Uh, well. I'll have to splice new association linkages for Area #C as soon as I can find the subject needs. Most of the thought routines that were clobbered are on the system back-up library, so there's no problem there, but M#LL is changed, and I'll have to rig up a new one. "Overall, I mostly just have to take care of interpretation to the viewset displays, yet. Two or three days more, and I should be finished. Most of Shipmind functions that were affected are working now. We just have to look out for a little interpretive amnesia at random moments until those linkages are going through again." "Hmm." Hammlin considered. "We're reaching midpoint soon. To what extent would you say this, ah, amnesia will hamper us?" V ledervoe thought a moment. "It'll be all right," he concluded. "The combat report functions are all running. It's just that stellar background codes may not update promptly at times, for instance. Or hull thermal displays. "Shipmind knows what they are, but presentation may be off," Vledervoe added'. "Can't we, uh, sort of tap through to the right information?" "It's not as simple as that. The build-up functors have to get the same data the crew gets, for feedback to cerebral telemetry evaluation. Otherwise crew reactions will start running up reaction error in Shipmind." "Oh. Well... you say we'll get essential data through midpoint, though, huh?" "Yes, sir. No problem there." "Okay, well, let's have it fixed as soon as we can. But keep yourself ready for any emergency damage we may take getting through midpoint." "Yes sir." Hammlin broke contact. That Vledervoe! he thought. Good thing he knew his stuff. Hammlin didn't know the half of what he had been talking about. Like Burton, with his mind-oriented jargon. A good thing Burton Had soon recovered enough to help. The boys had picked up a lot faster after he was able to start directing therapy. That had been a hair-raising episode, Hammlin remembered: Tolefante, Zagorsky and Shipmind hanging on with what advice Burton could give between delirium and fainting spells. Shipmind had even got worried enough to let him in on how it was going on. Hah! In the viewer, eerie little lights flittered through space astern as disrupter zappage cut through puffs of dust where chaff spells had exploded. Despite long familiarity, the sight fascinated Hammlin. Presently he closed his eyes to rest them. He became aware of his tiredness, again, and he felt itchy. What a strain he thought. Then -- mind: "Skipper? Adler here." "Yes. Go ahead, Izzy." He was in better shape than most, Hammlin noticed from the voice. "Sir, we just lost another sternward disrupter. A pulse came through the rotary shield just as she bore. Messed up the laticing. The electron-focused optics are all shot." "You mean it won't take sharp focus?" "No, sir. And reflection is so far off that it could burn out if we overrode and zapped it anyway." "Mmm. Okay, better shut it down and close the shield." "Yes, sir." "That's three out of eight, now." "Yes, sir. Just minor occlusiori on the other five. They're still bright enough to give a good burn." "Okay. See that they bear close and hot at midpoint. It won't be long now." "Yes, sir. They're ready for fast tracking." "Good. And how's midpoint checkdown coming?" "Okay, sir. Almost finished." "Fine. Run me a damage summary when you're through." "Yes, sir." Hammlin broke contact. He sighed. Five sternward disrupters left, he thought. Well, they would not be needing the sternward batteries much longer. Not after midpoint. T n the viewer, distance madeeven the nearer stars seem to flow sedately, though their mean speed was almost three kilolights. He couldn't remember ever passing at this high a relative speed, before. Hammlin felt a bit of a thrill as he watched. This was a long run they were making this mission. Compared to tKe ferret ship and its pursuers, the stars were almost stationary, relative to each other. At midpoint the ferret would have to reverse the push -- to begin slowing -- if it was to come to rest with respect to Cairnsun on arrival. But when the moment came to slow, what of the pursuing raiders? Shipmind: How long now to midpoint? It would be dangerous, Hammlin reflected. He could only hope they came through it. The view astern flickered incessantly, now, as enemy disruptor pulses came close. As the range had shortened, the ship's dodge circle relentlessly contracted. The big, bright disruptors the raiders mounted weren't missing so often, anymore, npr by so much. damage summary." "Okay, thank you, Izzy." The report appeared in Hammlin's viewer. He studied it thoughtfully. The drive seemed to be holding up well, he noted, reassured. All gyroplasms were swinging smoothly. Primary fusion chamber was ticking a little out of tune, Cowles Co-Pihk V though. He'd have to watch that. He studied the sonic hull trace a long moment. It showed most of their sternward-sloping radar muffling burned away, but that didn't matter. What worried him was the thinness in places of their sternward armor, especially on the fluke. Maybe it would last, he brooded. If they burned through before midpoint... With a taut sigh he went on to the rest of the report. The damage to Shipmind from that first craze pattern penetration had been reported by Vledervoe already. A second craze pattern had got through a day later, and for a time it had silenced all their disruptors, but that damage to Shipmind was already repaired. At least they had got one back at the Graks, Hammlin thought, remembering how, for a few seconds, one of the raiders had lost push, almost dropping out of the chase. The Graks on that one really must have sweated to catch up again, he hoped. The weaving of the ferret jostled him about in the viewsetlit gloom of his combat pod. In his tiredness, the pseudofluid felt chilly, but he dared not order the temperature raised. Nor would Shipmind probably have obeyed, he realized, for in that greater bit of comfort he might fall asleep, despite the ravening enemy behind them. T T ammlin felt an itch on his thigh and wondered if he could reach it at this push. It was cold as a tomb. "HmpH!" he snorted. He was getting down. Better have Burton juice him up with a little more vim. See to it, Shipmind. The view blinked asknowledgment. Oh, that itch! Hammlin started working a hand toward it. In the viewer, he saw glowing coveys of erratically darting plasmoids fall quickly astern. More followed them as they vanished. They weren't much of a threat to the enemy, Hammlin thought, but at least they helped confuse his zap-control. The itch went away before he could reach it, leaving him vaguely frustrated. He stirred in his mind, wondering what to attend to next. Shipmind : How long until midpoint? Operations monitor finished his midpoint checkdown, Hamlin reminded himself, slowly. The ship was as ready as it was going to be. The crew... uh, first shift was on. Shipmind, we better go over to second shift a few minutes -- uh, seven minutes -- before midpoint. Keep first shift on active back-up through midpoint, so we # # sional advice from Burton, he tried to prepare them for peak performance. Shipmind, Hammlin knew, was weighing the merits of assorted midpoint gambits. As the tactical configuration varied, Shipmind was opting for first one, and then another. When midpoint came, it would execute its choice of the moment. It was good to have Shipmind for such tasks, Hammlin felt. And yet... and yet, Shipmind wasn't absolutely infallible. Depending on it too much made him uneasy. The flickering viewer showed him the two flashing blips astern weaving to and fro against the stellar background. The obstructive ejaculations behind which the ferret tried to hide itself dropped toward the foe and beyond. He wasn't getting enough feel of their weave, Hammlin sensed, as he studied them. He needed more detail. Shipmind : Insert secondorder weave codes! Additional symbols appeared by the Grakevi raider images and also superimposed on the wavering ionization veil at the margin of his view. Reading them, Hammlin grasped better the why of their current motion. All three ships were jerking about in random evasion, but the ferret was also trying to stay in the blind spot directly ahead of first one raider and then the other. The raiders pitched and yawed to bring their forward-facing disruptors more nearly to bear straight ahead, but they couldn't wag too far over without space dust scouring their disruptors, quickly ruining them. As the raiders swerved, both to avoid possible mines in the ferret's wake and to bring their disruptors to bear, the ferret swerved also. Sometimes it swerved away, forcing the raiders back toward it in pursuit. Sometimes it swerved with them, trying to stay in a blind spot. The dance went on and on. Still watching, Hammlin thought forward to midpoint. Surprise was the essence in this, he reminded himself. If they could reverse push unexpectedly enough to get past the raiders before they could begin slowing much, the men had a chance. They would surely go by too fast for the Graks to have time to burn the ship badly. On the other hand, Hammlin realized only too well that if the raiders began slowing almost as soon as the ferret, their pace would almost match that of the ferret as it passed them. There would be a furious exchange of disruptor pulses which the smaller, weaker ferret could not hope to survive. As they cut through it, and the ship sensed dire indon't lose continuity. Have third shift at emergency standby. Hammlin yawned. Then, rousing himself, he wondered, if he had given those orders before, already? He couldn't quite remember. Could he have given conflicting orders. Hmm he didn't know. Oh, well, Shipmind could figure it out. It was a good thing Shipmind had enough judgment to allow for the state of the ship's complement in obeying orders. He felt rotten. Dully, Hammlin obeyed. The slurry he sucked through his helmet nipple had several peculiar tastes in succession, before it finished coming. Hammlin waited for a bit, and belched. His beard had grown beyond bristliness, and he could feel his breath stir it in the pseudofluid. Familiarity dulled his senses to within bare toleration of the cesspool flavor of the pseudofluid. Gack, it was strong. A man could almost tell how long he'd been in combat by the reek. They ought to hurry up and redesign these pods to stay clean no matter what. The ship had put drugs in his nourishment, and his grogginess cleared somewhat. The urgency of the situation took hold of him. Not much time left! Shipmind: Did you take my crew disposition? The viewer blinked acknowledgment. So. Hammlin considered the effects of the impending assignments on his men. Harry might take it a little hard if he pulled first shift off just before midpoint, he reflected, picturing Low Commander Harry Donovan's bluff personality in his mind. He might get the idea that Hammlin didn't trust him for the big moment. It might hamper his effectiveness. Hammlin didn't want that. He was their best command monitor. It wouldn't do to go building his ego up to the extent that the others ultimately felt low, though. Hmm. Well, he'd see. Shipmind! To duty command monitor: "Harry, I'm glad first shift has been holding up so well. I know it's a strain on you, by not having Beck to handle jamming, but for the sake of continuity do you think you can stand back-up to second shift through midpoint?" "Why, uh, sure. We'll stand duty spot if you want." "Thanks Harry, but I'll want a fresh shift carrying most of the load. No reflection on your shift, mind you." "Okay, sir. As you say." T hat was a relief, Hammlin thought. Having done what he could to reconcile Donovan to a subordinate role, Hammlin then went on to have a word with the others of his crew. With occajury, capture-safe circuits would trigger bothi fusion chambers and nuclear munitions, and the ferret would be no more. H ammlin didn't like that thought. This wouldn't do! Come on. Ship mind : Give me a little more subliminal optimism. Hammlin stared at that message in the viewer. Cheerful, aren't you? he grumbled inwardly at Shipmind. Huh! Okay, okay. Slave driver! But then the thought of his responsibility, of his command, stiffened Hammlin's self-discipline, and he brought his able military mind to bear in quest of flaws to the gambit shown in his viewer. Abruptly he remembered: There wasn't much time left! The minutes ticked by, and gradually Hammlin helped Shipmind work out an optimum envelope of strategies. When midpoint came, the ferret would try to slip back down its own wake, darting through' a screen of chaff puffs and interference shells laid down a moment before. If we could slip down the blind spot of at least one of them... Hammlin advised, engrossed. Hmm. But not so much chaff, I think. We don't want it to tip them off. And that trigger pattern for the echo shells looks a little obvious. How about --  -- Oh, I see. Okay. But do it a little more this way. Hammlin thought-sketched in the viewer. Shipmind made changes. Finally, they compromised. Another thing, Hammlin added: We could fire a couple torpedoes for extra interference. We mustn't overly risk knocking the Graks out, though. We still have to lead them to Cairnsun, The thought gave him pause. It was awfully risky, this business, he reflected, uneasily. Like a hare entrapping foxes. Well, let's see... one torpedo astern, just before midpoint, to hide us as we go off push. Then another one right after midpoint to blind them momentarily as we close -- as we thought we were diving out of sunlight. Yes, that should do it. Got that, Shipmind? The viewer blinked. The ferret still carried eight of its total allotment of seventeen torpedoes, all fitted with standard # niegaton warheads. They were for slow, unwary prey, being low push (twelve kilo-g's), Short range (eight light-min.) and stupid (strictly robot control). Shipmind, you better launch, another one in auto-pursuit, now, so the one at midpoint won't warn them, Hammlin thought-commanded. He glimpsed the bulky torpedo as it popped out. Like a shot it vanished. The viewer blanked. IXhen the view faded in again,  ' he saw a bigger, brighter glow than that given by the flares. Maybe that one dusted their disrupters, some, he hoped as he watched. The raiders swung aside fast as the fireball fell past. Every bit helped, but he wished they could mess up the Grrak sternward batteries. The Graks would be zapping the bow planes, if the men made it through. He'd better take a last quick look around, now. Shipmind! Show me bow view! The viewset showed hard starlight shifted as far to the blue as Hammlin could remember ever having seen it. Some of that was coming through the shielding, he noted. Good thing they were about to start slowing. In his helmet speakers, the impact of space dust against the hull was now a rattling roar. Even the ablative paste Oozing out of the armor capillaries could no not keep the hull from eroding at this pace, he realized. Trying to minimize it had been putting a hard strain on the pilots. Well, it wouldn't pit so fast, by and by -- except for disrupter zappage. Shipmind! Now give me jammer view! From the viewer a torrent of information gushed at him in the form of seething three-dimensional color patterns. The ships radiforth like savage beasts screaming and snarling at one another. The enemy was echo-ranging continually, but during the delay across light-seconds of space, the ferret warbled push, to doppler away from the absorption frequencies to which incoming disrupter pulses were keyed. The raider zap-control systems calculated probabilities and compensated for spectral shift as best they might. the ferret by bouncing out a profusion of false returns. Variably programmed echo delay and frequency shift made the little echo shells hard for the enemy to discount. Plasmoids, chaff and flares further dirtied the view. Shipmind analyzed the spectrum to the extent that could be expected of quick but dull robot calculation. To this the jammer added his skilled human perception. Ophe duty jammer ID code flickered, and Hammlin glanced at it. Sorensen Kad just gone on, he noted. Second shift was phasing in. Less than seven minutes to midpoint! To duty command monitor : "How're you feeling, John?" "Good enough, sir," answered Line Officer #C Mortensen, steadily. "Burton ran second shift through a tone-up just before we came on." "That's fine." And he was feeling pretty good, himself, come to think of it, Hammlin realized. Burton must have done him subliminally, too. "Uh, Harry's backing you up, you know, but he put in a hard shift. It'll be mostly up to you." "Yes, sir. We can manage. We are in good shape." "That's what I like to hear, John. We're -- " In Hammlin's viewset shone a representative of the familiar statue, Helgad Man, Embattled. From his helmet speakers came the opening notes of We Fight. That gave way to a stirring strain of Heroic Ever Onward. The hymn faded away, leaving behind a crackling splatter of disruptor zappage, and the statue dissolved into the view astern. "Grakevi -- hrrach!" Hammlin spat his hatred in a snarling hiss at the pursuing blips. Shipmind! To crew: "This is it, men. Let's show those Graks what it's like to close on Helgad fighting men!" Thinly, despite the push, the crew growled back its common challenge. The sound gave Hammlin a shivery thrill. Hammlin felt himself growing more taut, excited. He strained and squirmed, levering himself to a new position in his jostling combat pod. Beyond the occasional distant thrumming of shipboard machinery, there was now silence. A steadying tone-up pattern showed in the viewer. Anything more to suggest to Shipmind? Hammlin wondered. Had they overlooked anything? No... not that He could think of. Hammlin and his crew cleared their minds for fast action. Ship and men merged strongly into a single fighting entity. Hammlin lay passively ready to give his quick reaction on whatever Shipmind chose to show in his viewer. The muffled pattern of cannonfire seemed to change as they muddied their wake. In the viewer, Hammlin saw a torpedo flick away. They were counting on that tHing, he thought. He saw an inside-out view of the sternward hull, all shiny from disruptor zaps. Ho! Not much chance of their burning through there any more! VI Hph'e viewer blanked. The push went off. Hammlin gulped. The pod swung around on its spring-dampened gimbals. Abruptly the push surged on again. The viewer glimmered back to life. Six seconds ticked by and the raiders came sweeping around the torpedo fireball -- still at high push. The ferret hurtled toward them, like a shell down an endless succession of cannon barrels. The raiders began to slow. They started to roll, and their disrupters flashed like Gatling guns. Stay in a blind spot! thoughtbellowed Hammlin, shaken before such a storm of zappage. The ship jittered, as though hesitating at the order, then plunged into full view of both raiders. Why, why? Hammlin felt helpless in the face of doom. It was a high-speed nightmare. Why had they left the ship's wake?! Oh -- yes, I see it, now! We won't make it! The ferret jerked in violent' evasion of disrupter zappage. Hammlin wondered if the crew could take this? Around the edge of the view appeared contorted, bearded faces. Then appeared another portion of the crew, also staring wide-eyed as the enemy swelled toward them. A final push-strained group grimaced from the viewset and was gone. The ship was fighting with computer haste, and everything seemed to happen at once. No time to think -- hardly even to give Shipmind one's snap feelings. The ferret hit the fringe of the nuclear flare barrage. The barrage lit up, and the ferret streakThe ship hit a near miss with a jolting lurch, and Hammlin caught his breath in agony. He barely saw the raiders flash by in a blur, zapping wildly. And then they were past. It had happened so quickly. Hammlin found himself shaking. His heart was pounding. He began to flex and strain his big, aching muscles, working out the tension, and discovered some sprains. At least he was still alive, he thought, wryly. But what shape were they in? How badly were they hurt? Shipmind: Show me a damage report! Hammlin made a quick check of the ship. nphcy had been holed in three places on the sternward hull. One gouge was too big for the healing mechanism to plug entirely, and uncoagulated meteor absorption fluid streamed from the lead. That would drain that panel, Hammlin realized. No trouble there, now, but it could be a problem as they approached dirtier space near Caimsun. And there was radiation leakage in seven outer compartments. Well, they would just have to make do with it. Now, how about the crew? Shipmind! Report crew status! Oh oh. They had been hurt all right. Shipmind : Identify and state casualties. B oth the medspecs! That was bad. It would be up to the operations monitors and Shipmind, now, unless Tolefante recovered. He wondered how badly Tolefante was hurt. Second shift was on. Shipmind: To duty operations monitor: "Gordy, how badly would you say Tolefante is hurt?" "Uh, Tolefante... So-so, sir. Some torn muscles. Rather painful. And internal hemorrhaging -- but it's almost contained now. He may be a bit crippled, but he should recover." "Okay. Thanks Gordy. Now, how about the others?" Line Officer #C Gordon Frazier reported similar, though mostly less severe, injuries of the rest of the casualties. "Okay, Gordy," said Hammlin as he finished. "You're doing all you can to get them back in shape, right?" "Yes, sir. The other op monitors are helping too." "Okay, that's good. Carry on." "Yes, sir." Hammlin thought of Kis wounded. He had snapped impatiently at Tolefante on several occasions, and now, with Tolefante hurt yet needed, Hammlin felt uncomfortable. Tolefante just didn't seem to be made for this kind of service, Hammlin reflected, defensively. If he got through this mission, Hammlin would see about transferring him out. Yeah. That was what he'd do. Seven more men were out, on top of two earlier dead. Hammlin hoped he could juggle crew assignments to keep the ship adequately manned I until more recovered again. But then, he could expect more casualties, at this high push. Manning the ship would get progressively harder. Well, at least they had gained a respite. The Graks had gone clear beyond effective zap range before they matched. 'T'he ship struggled on. Hammlin's command patched and healed itself as best it might before the reapproaching Grakevi raiders engaged again. Grollnek was the last to regain consciousness. He was out thirteen hours. The steady recovery of his five injured men cheered Hammlin, but he also thought of the dead. Poor Schmidt, Hammlin lamented'. That midpoint jerking had been too much for him. They had missed him. He had been a good pilot. And Burton! They had depended on him so. Could they manage themselves through the mission -- could they reach Cairnsun -- without him? Hammlin tried to ignore the bleak emptiness he felt at the loss of each of his men. Beck -- his mind blasted by the Graks. And now, three more they had pushed to death. Grakevi! Hrrach! But just wait and see , you -- you Graks! We'll pay you back, yet! Three days later Cowles died. His combat pod malfunctioned. One of the pseudofluid filters sprang a leak, and he perished slowly, gasping, as the pod pressure went down and the push squeezed him flat. Hammlin shuddered at the memory of how he had looked -- before Shipmind cut off the view. Cowles was the second-shift copilot. It was hard to think straight, now, and to direct the ship. This push was hurting them all, Hammlin realized. MacKinzie and Grollnek, especially. Those two, the third shift pilot and zapper, were in anguish from cumulative internal injuries. Nothing more they could do for them, Hammlin regretted. Beyond what emergency pod medication Tolefante could give, there was no help for them. This awful push was really had to keep at high push if any of them were to survive. The Graks were hounding them to the limit of endurance. Hammlin felt a special bond with Helgad men who had fought thus at high push. Only the hardiest survived such engagements. It was from such survivors, the toughest veterans, that new breedE ver more slowly the three ships dropped toward the brightening gleam of Caimsun. The patter of space dust became gentler, sparser. Shipmind could steer with less human assistance. It had to. Of the ferret's crew only a couing stock was drawn in settling new worlds. The best of the best! Hammlin liked to express it. And perished on Cairn. In vain? No! They would never fail their honored fallen, Hammlin promised himself. He glowered his hatred at the two spots of twinkling disrupted light in the viewer. And he ached of the push of eighteen kilo-g's, pie at a time still managed dr lly to watch their viewers. The rest were sunk in painful stupor. The Grak crews must be in about as bad a shape as they were, Hammlin guessed, or the raiders would have exterminated the Helgad by now. Could they still make it? That oscillation of the primary fusion chamber was getting worse. Bit by bit it was losing output power. He doubted they could keep the drive at push on the secondary alone. The ferrett continued to lurch evasively, stirring eddies in the fouled pseudofluid of Hammlin's combat pod. He felt sick. It was an effort to keep his stomach steady. Trying to maintain a feel for the tactical situation, Hammlin kept a bow view and hull scanning trace in most of his viewer. He listened to the scratchy splatter of disruptor zappage. He was tired and on edge. They were taking hits oftener, he fretted. Would the forward armor last? The Graks were so close now -- just a few lightseconds ahead of them. Hammlin watched as Cairnsun continued to approach in the distance beyond the craft of his enemies. Don't launch torpedoes, yet, he cautioned Shipmind. Don't signal the garrison too soon. First give the enemy a long, close look at the system. Yes, that's the way. Only... only, he wondered how much more of this they could take? He was exhausted. He lost consciousness for a few minutes. Slowly, under Shipmind's stimulation, he recovered. T T ammlin studied a crew Health summary in the corner of his viewer. Poor Gordy Frazier -- he was dying, Hammlin grieved. He could be the ninth. Eight men they had already lost. Eight men -- rotting in their pods. Well, it wouldn't be much longer -- A small puncture appeared at the edge of their forward armor. Shipmind! Signal quickly -- now! Hammlin snapped. Before they zap through that hole! Their three last torpedoes flipped out and were gone. As seconds went by, the ship roused the crew for one last effort. Why didn't the torpedoes go off? Hammlin worried, fearing that the Graks had zapped them all? He wondered desperately how they might yet gain time. More chaff and echo shells? No -- they were already down to the last of them. Dodge harder? A little more push? But they couldn't stand any more push! Far down, well beyond the raiders, a bright burst bloomed. Beautiful! Hammlin crooned to himself. Just beautiful. Now if they could Hold on a little longer... The ferret dodged and zapped feebly. Taut minute followed minute. Then the bow was holed again -- a bigger gap, this time... No! thought Hammlin, staring. The next hits would gouge right through them! But then the raiders were shifting away. They had had their look, and meant to get clear of Cairnsun before Helgad interceptors got out to them. And the Grakevi vessels passed beyond effective disruptor range, the ferret ceased dodging and eased off the push somewhat. "Ahhh!" breathed Hammlin, relieved. That felt much better! Creakily, he began to move and rub himself. His body was sore and stiff. In the viewer He saw five interceptors appear far ahead. Already they were veering fast toward the fleeing raiders that the ferret was pointing out. They had to make it look real, Hammlin reflected with satisfaction. Must not let the enemy suspect. And then, at last, he could peacefully sleep. A year and a half Had passed, and Hammlin lay sprawled in a transport berth, luxuriating in idleness. The transport was pushing along at an easy fifty g's. This was the life, he thought with a happy sigh. He had earned his reward. The Solsmyga had been two months at Cairnsun for emergency repairs. Then, with five passengers hitching rides in their spare pods, and nine coffins frozen in the third afterhold, they joined a passing convoy back to #-L Sector Staff Headquarters. The ferret ship had won a unit citation. The entire crew received the Everlasting Hero Seal. Hammlin was awarded the Seal with Crossed Comets. And he was promoted to Colonist, with the rank of Lieutenant-Patroon. That rank entitled him to eleven wives, and a stake of thirty-eight gold kilograms. Enough wealth to make a good start, Hammlin mused, absently patting the hard, smooth ripples of his stomach muscles. Enough for a large spread of ranch land, perhaps. Or maybe part ownership in some business. And eleven wives -- oh, man! He could just see them! Hammlin pictured in his mind's eye the fair, bold-eyed, strapping young women he had seen from time to time in news reports as they started on their way to colony worlds. Smart, hard-working and patriotic, they were said to be. The pick of planetary forces finishing industrial service. Mmm, delightful! Hammlin nodded to himself, stretching what he imagined to be a lusty grin across his face. The fatherhood urge was already strong upon him. Now, on the way to Geyn, His future homeworld, Hammlin had been taking programmed courses on investment and personnel management. They seemed welldesigned courses, Hammlin judged. He was learning a lot from them. Only... well... He simply had to face it: He hadn't known a real woman in years. Just the simulators, between missions. That was hardly adequate familiarization, he was sure. He needed pertinent preparation. But -- what was he to do? The nearest thing he had' been able to find at the PX on dealing with wives was this office-oriented personnel course. So how could He apply such stuff in this case. Hammlin worried it over, perplexed. Were wives, uh, like secretaries -- but with added functions? Or were they a kind of... of subordinate manager, only intimately female? Or what? And how could a man best discipline them? What should he do if there was interwifely rivalry? Blast it, this husband thing was going to take some doing! Hammlin squirmed on his berth -- almost as though he were in combat pod, preparing to engage Grakevi. Yet, when he had conscientiously tried to find out by asking around, what did he get. He snorted. Big laughs, and nothing more. A lot of big laughs. Bah! T T ammlin scowled at the gray bulkhead above him, but slowly a wry smile glimmered through' his annoyance. The crew was pretty funny at that, he realized, remembering the cautious kidding, the sham concern, the suggestions offered in mock seriousness on how best to cope with his future responsibilities. Even Brigadier Stuart had smiled a trifle broadly as He congratulated Hammlin at the formal award ceremony. It was a lovely medal. And the last mission with the Solsmyga had been completely successful, the Brigadier confided, later. A strong enemy fleet rushed to Caimsun within months. In fact, to the Grakevi the sun was of such high strategic value that, according to Helgad intelligence, the enemy had started building up Cairn headquarters planet. But they would not guess the reason for the difficulties they'd soon start having. Helgad raiders would see to it that they suspected sabotage, instead. Now that was good news! Hammlin smiled, with satisfaction. Cairn would really be an experience for the Graks! He was glad he was not going to a world like that. He propped his massive legs up against the railing of hig berth' and thought soberly of How it would be on Cairn. Of course, he mused to himself the cost would be fantastic, certainly, but if the Graks packed enough people onto Cairn, they might in the end get a surviving population that was immune to whatever the hazard was. And then what? Would the adapted people be even more formidable? The possibility alarmed Hammlin. How could men win, he asked himself, if disaster, survived, only made their enemies stronger? Hammlin worried at the question. Presently, out of his pondering crystalized a hint of an answer: Men must be stressed, too, he concluded. The Helgad must up push on their own evolution. They must evolve faster than the Grakevi! Yes, yes, he grumbled to himself after a moment, but how? Deliberately scourge themselves? No, that would weaken Helgad solidarity. Men would tend to turn on the source of torment. It would have to be an outside affliction imposed upon them. "Huh!" Hammlin snorted. How could they arrange for that? And how could they control this uncontrolled hazard so that it would not wipe them out altogether? How could they set it so their suffering gave them the greatest possible evolutional advantage over the Grakevi? How could they even know what trend would turn out to be an evolutional advantage? "Hmm," he muttered, thoughtfully. "Let's just see, now... " Completely left out of reckoning, for a time, were his dreams of a softer life ahead. With the thirty-eight kilograms of gold, the f you give up cigarettes, you might gain a few pounds. (And also a few years) The plain, unfiltered fact is that people who smoke cigarettes get lung cancer a lot more frequently than nonsmokers. And lung cancer can finish you. Before your time. We'd rather have you stay alive and well. Because even if you do gain a few pounds, you'll have I the time to take them off. american cancer society He'd given the Earth every chance, and it had failed him. Now he was on another Earth, facing a new life ! A s usual, there were two of the Ranidae standing guard outside the temple, waiting for the god to make his appearance. Huge, brownskinned, and ninety per cent humanoid they were; the only visible differences were the rather ropy hair and the blank eyes -- actually, eyes covered with a nictitating membrane, for the Ranidae had evolved from a nocturnal order of creatures and found the light of their own sun almost too fierce for them. Dane found it pretty fierce himself; by now he was almost as brown as they were. Rana's sun was a dwarf, but on the other hand, Rana was only forty up here in the northern mountains the temperature hit eighty by mid-afternoon. And come to think of it, his own red hair had gotten pretty ropy by now, too, along with his mustache. He had not had a real haircut or a proper bath in three years. He looked out. The guards were fiercely imposing in their the chest of which bore a dimly glowing sun-disk. That, however, was deceptive. The Ranidae were actually rather a gentle race, as well as an impressionable one. They had their share of personal quarrels, but apparently had not had a war for nearly a century; nor did they have any real nations, only clans. The battleaxes the guards carried were in observance of this, for technologically the race was quite up to producing ballistic missile weapons ; they simply hadn't had any need to invent them. Otherwise, they seemed to be in a state of development roughly corresponding to that which had been attained by Europe and the United States circa #. Dane put on his pressure suit, except for the helmet -- ceremonial trappings, after all, were expected of him, too -- and started the airlock cycling. It was time for the daily apparition. Nearly a century of progress to lead these people through; that was a heavy responsibility, even for a god. That was why thus far, He fiad limited each apparition to only a few minutes. He meant to take it slowly. The mess "progress" had made on Earth was not going to be duplicated here -- not if he could prevent it. But he had hardly emerged from the temple when the guards bracketed him, like a salvo of muscle. "What's this?" he said, as steadily as possible, considering that he was outweighed by better than four to one. "You must come with us, Divine One." "Who says 'must' to me? Why? I refuse." They paid no attention. "You must come with us," the first speaker said patiently, and together they began to herd him -- not obviously, but firmly -- down the mountain. He gave up protesting. God or no god, he abruptly felt peculiarly puny. T t is nowhere recorded in the sacred books of Rana that the god's full name was (or rather, had been Anglicized to) John Hillary Dane, nor that he had been born the son of the chief of state of a Balkan duchy which had once -- in the Middle Ages been an empire. Nevertheless, steps were taken early to prevent his becoming a mere duke. When he was nine years old, his country was swallowed by the Soviet Union, and he found himself in the United States, on his way instead toward deification. It did not take him long to reject the even lesser role of prospective head of a governmentin-exile, but only in favor of a smoldering aloneness which made him first a poet, then a Wellsian utopian, then a Trotskyite, then a pacifist, and finally -- the only logical outcome of all these taster and influences -- a mathematician specializing in communications theory, cybernetics and related disciplines. These sciences were then (toward the end of World War II, when he had just turned #) in their infancy, and Dane -- immune to the draft by virtue of a diplomatic passport -- grew with them. Shortly he had talked his way into the presidency of a very small company which made light-amplifying devices for astronomers, and turned these devices into a line of self-focusing three-dimensional cameras for dub photographers which made him a multi-millionaire before he was thirty. Which' did not assuage his dissatisfactions in the least. He did not even convert the passport; citizenship did not tempt him. Though he had been up on the mountain, he was sure he was meant to go higher. While he deliberated, without knowing that that was what he was doing, his already large firm had become involved with the military and had become a giant. Thanks to several additional and basic inventions of his own and of a highly imaginative chief engineer, fully eighty per cent of its sales were now to the Department of Defense. And of these, about half turned out to be remarkably adaptable either to spying on other people or to keeping dossiers on them. He did not hold himself wholly responsible for the concomitant creeping change in American life, and by infection that of the rest of the world; but he could not absolve himself. Much more immediately, the rewards of the world now included a wife who had changed somehow (the fault was perhaps his) from a fairy-tale princess into a managerial witch; a daughter who had taken to hopping from pad to pad in a black sweater and sawed-off chinos with her only valuables -- her toilet articles, chiefly Pills -- in a brown paper bag; and a son who, after vate school, had gotten himself thrown out of Kenyon for losing interest in everything but Art Nouveau and loud guitars. Unlike most gods, Dane did not know that he had already been crucified. He took a mistress; she was a girl of considerable complexity and warmth, she loved him totally, and she bored him green. In a final attempt at compensation (though, again, he did not know that that was what it was, let alone that it was final), he turned to philanthropy on a large scale, handing out massive endowments and subsidies to projects which marginally satisfied his now-buried utopian streak (though he was not aware of this motive, either) . In selfdefense, the family tried to have him committed as incompetent; and still -- since he defeated the move so easily -- lie failed to get the point. And then, abruptly He did. One of his philanthropies had been the underwriting of a #inch telescope in Chile; and one of the first discoveries of the tory had been that the Sun is a double star. The dwarf companion is about the same size and brightness as Proxima Centauri, and it is about # AU -- or about a sixth of a light-year -- away; its year is # Earth years, so that its proper motion is one second of arc per year; and there are more than nine hundred other stars in Earth's sky which are brighter, every one of them farther away. Until Dane Observatory had become functional, it had never even been mapped before, let alone suspected to be a companion of the Sun. And a tell-tale wobble in its orbit showed that it had one gasgiant planet at least as big as Jupiter -- and might have more and smaller, worlds. John Hillary Dane's star did not rise in the east. It had always been there, standing over the South Pole, invisible, even its proper motion disguised by the precessing of the equinoxes. dollars later, there was no longer any such person on Earth as John Hillary Dane. Three years after that, John Hillary Dane was a god, going down a mountain between two axemen. (S do not believe in the gods," the Panechruse said, perhaps a little defiantly. "I quite understand, Isser Dane, that you are most powerful in knowledge, and perhaps in force. But I have also a more than good guess where you' come from, and I can't allow you to mislead my hill tribes any longer. We are not so advanced in the sciences as you; but we are no longer superstitious. Should you do us the credit of granting us that, we'll be prepared to defer to you a considerable distance. We need you, certainly. Equally obviously, you need us. You are a long way from Home." The Panchruse was undeniably impressive. So was his city, which would have compared favorably with any carefully planned Earth capital of, say, the late #th Century; and his seat of government was startlingly reminiscent of a clean Paddington Station. That is to say, it looked much as the Crystal Palace must have looked just after its completion, unsmoked by time, undestroyed by fire. There were not so many arc-lights as the Crystal Palace must have had -- the Ranidae's eyesight could not Have tolerated that many -- but all that, a style of engineering quite as muscular as the Ranidae themselves. Even more impressive was the language, as easy to learn as Esperanto, here far closer to being universal than Esperanto had even hoped to become backhome, much more abortive of new words, and in the hands of a man like the Panechruse, almost frighteningly more forceful. Though Dane had never found the six other languages he knew nearly as satisfactory as English, he did not miss English on Rana. He picked his response very carefully indeed. would be interested to hear," he said, "just where you do think I come from." "From a planet of our companion star," the Panechruse said. "We can easily see..." (Had Dane after all brought his helmet, which' would have kept him continuously in touch with the temple computer, he would have been saved a great deal of headwork in converting Ranan metrics to his own on the spot. Briefly, from Rana, Earth is #" away from the and seems to have an albedo of about # -- # percentage points too high. From this, the Ranidae guessed its minimum diameter to be # miles including atmosphere. The Radinae worked all this out backwards from studying Jupiter, which from Rana is #'#" degrees of arc away from the Sun and hence easily resolvable.) "Very precise," Dane said. "We are a scientific people. You will understand that we were in some doubt as to whether so large a planet could support life, but we realized that we might be over-estimating its size; it is too close to your sun for us to photograph." "You did, by more than a hundred per cent, even counting the atmosphere. In fact, of our ten planets, only ours supports life." The Panechruse nodded briefly. "But that is not the issue. I tell you this only to demonstrate that were not as backward a race as my hillmen might have led you to think. We've made rapid progress, especially since the invention of the steam telephone made fast long-distance communications possible." Dane wondered if he somehow mis-translated, then dismissed the problematical telephone as a technicality. "I congratulate you," he said. "We require much more. We would have progressed even faster had it not been for the hill people, who are traditionalists -- ini fact, reactionaries. It's very fortunate for us that they have accepted you as a god. We will use that to overcome their resistance." To what?" Dane said. "To progress, of course, Isser Dane. What else?" "I suggest," Dane said slowly, "that you think twice about the matter. On my world, we allowed technology to overrun the entire planet. Except, the last I heard, for a few large deserts. It wiped out all the small enclaves of disparate cultures, like a plague. Later we realized that just such diversity was invaluable to us -- but by then it was too late." "Are you a criminal?" the Panechruse said abruptly, unveiling his large eyes like an alerted cat. "I beg your pardon? I think I may have misunderstood you." "I think not. You imply that your people have achieved a world state. You speak against it. And you are here, on the nearest planet to your own that will support your kind of life. These facts suggest that you are at the very best an exiled dissident, or counter revolutionary. Which' further suggests that your world is a humane state; otherwise you would have been executed, or imprisoned." 'Tphe mixture of truth, reason- able nonsense and implicit threat in this speech left Dane floundering for a moment. No reply would do, he decided finally, but the absolute truth, though he was sure it would sound equally nonsensical to his antagonist. "We do not have a world state," he said slowly. (We have three large states, though they have grown to be very like each other in all important respects. None of the three is in the least humane. They are machines, and they treat their people like spare parts. I am indeed an exile, as you deduced -- but by my own choice. In my state I was a considerable power, and was on my way to becoming even more powerful. I rejected it. It was not what I wanted, and had I stayed home, I would have been compelled to accept it." The Panechruse leaned back upon his throne and crossed his huge arms. "Either the psychology of your race is utterly different from ours," he said, "or you are lying. Since the psychology you imply would make the construction of a vast technology impossible -- and since your ship shows that the technology in fact exists -- I conclude that you are lying. That is dangerous I advise against it." "We have no uniform 'psychology,' " Dane said. "We differ from each other, just as you do." "No such difference could be great enough to make a PanecKruse think and behave like a hill man. Builders do not destroy, nor leaders follow. Isser Dane, I advise you for the second time not to persist in this fabrication. Though we need you, we can also make your life very unpleasant. You may either be our guest -- though we did not invite you here -- or we will mine you to exhaustion like a natural resource. The choice is yours." "What do you want of me?" Dane said, rather more sullenly than he had intended. "That's better, Isser Dane. Well, then, we require technical guidance -- and, in the hills, your services as a god. By the way don't consider leaving us. There is no place on Rana where you wouldn't be conspicious enough for me to find out; and as you doubtless observed as you approached our sun, Rana is the only local planet on which you could survive at all." Abruptly, the idol-like features contorted in what might have been a smile. "Of course," the Panechruse added, "you might go back home. But I think you cannot -- no matter how differently we might explain that to each other. If you can prove me wrong on this point, you need no further invitation from me to try it." There was no arguing any of these points, that was certain. "I will do my best," Dane said, as ambiguously as he dared. "But I'm sure you also know that if I'm to help you, I'll need my ship. It contains all my tools." "Obviously. However, we are running a telephone pipe to the ship when it is completed, I expect you to be in daily communication with me, or whatever equerry I appoint. And let me add, Isser Dane, that should you decide to help us unstintingly, the rewards will be considerable." No, doubt, Dane thought. Just the kind of rewards I ran away from. But he let the guards escort him out in silence. Tack on the bridge of the tempie ship, he shucked off the pressure suit, went hurriedly to the toilet -- a convenience his company technicians, who had not been told precisely what they were building, had neglected to install in the suit -- and, the distraction relieved, resumed thinking at speed. Of one thing, and one thing alone, he was certain : He was not going to help the Panechruse reorganize Rana into another technological hell on the Earth model. If possible, he had to impede any such attempt, or even stop it in its tracks. But how? He could of course lift ship, set down next to the Crystal Palace, and let the Nemst generator blow. That would eliminate the Panechruse, the palace, the capital city and John Hillary Dane. It might also provide an abject lesson in the black side of Progress. All he needed to do was persuade the hill men -- who worshipped him, after all -- to bring him about # liters of water to process for reaction mass; the processing would take a week, and surely the Panechruse's steam line wouldn't reach up into these raw and distant mountains in anything under that time, no matter when it had started. It was a step the Panechruse could not possibly frustrate. Dane rejected it almost as soon as he had begun to think about it. There had to be some strategy which would not involve the cent Ranidae and the fouling of the atmosphere the rest of them breathed; that first notion had been Earth thinking at its typical worst, all empiricism and no mercy. The Ranidae had decided cept in direct, person-to-person self-defense was murder; was Dane to reverse that decision on his own arbitrary whim? No. For that matter, the god was not ready for self-immolation yet, either. Well, wKat then? There had been the germ of another idea in there somewhere. Could he simply drag his feet? Design nonworking engines? Do everything the most wasteful and expensive way? Wear out their patience? No. 'The Ranidae were intelligent; they would catch him at it. And besides, they could learn. No matter how much he managed to slow up Progress, it would gain momentum eventually. At the very best, no matter how many sabots he might manage to throw into the works, he would not live forever -- and to an intelligent class even teacher's fakery would provide clues. Perhaps a Claudian policy might be the answer. The Ranidae understood steam -- he was now sure he had not misinterpreted the word. They were also impressionable, and short-lived compared to men despite their burliness. It would be relatively easy to turn the whole planet into a British Midlands -- an inferno of coal smoke, lung cancer, belt-transmission factories, child labor, beehive towns, -- the works, even the economy, within Dane's remaining lifetime. After an object lesson like that -- After an object lesson like that, he realized grimly, they would charge right on. Individualistic Earthmen had drawn few morals worth noticing from the Midlands experience. The psychologically far more uniform Ranidae would go right on worshipping Progress thereafter, convinced that the theory was sound -- or the religion -- and that nothing had gone wrong but the practice. And, Dane now remembered, the Claudian policy had not worked even for Claudius; instead of provoking revolt and thus bringing back the Republic, it had culminated in Caligula. Scratch that, too then.  nd then he had it. The clue, the thread, was of course the hill men. They resisted the Panechruse, did they? And they worshipped John Hillary Dane, didn't they? How much better would they do against their city brethren with a god to lead them -- a god who could produce an occasional battlefield miracle when one was most needed? And, on the everyday level... no, no gunpowder, but perhaps something like a steam cannon with rifled barrels? And, some mildly sophisticated propaganda to stir disaffection in the cities? The Ranidae ought to be suckers for atrocity stories a la #; and contrariwise, though there would be deaths, propaganda could make sure everyone on both sides knew what he was dying for. Injuries? Well, he could start with a benevolent miracle: He would give both sides the secret anesthetics .  . What an opportunity not to repeat the mistakes of the past! The ideas were coming in swarms now; but after taking a few more notes, Dane pushed the new notions aside. The main problem here was not essentially technical; it was the problem of organizing and welding together the hill tribes, about which he knew very little more than that they existed and that the Panechruse hadn't been able to recruit them. Taking the pressure suit out of its locker again, Dane prepared for an unscheduled apparition. While he was climbing into the suit, another technicality occurred to him, willy-nilly: The hillmen did not entirely share the Esperanto of the cities. This showed particularly in their names, as he had found in his earliest conversations with the two guards; both tribesmen had had identified themselves with chains of clicks, gargles and umlauts which Dane could never learn to handle convincingly. But that was surely only a technicality and nothing more. All messiahs re-named their converts, as a symbol of their conversion. And while he was at it, why not make the new names easy for the computer, too? In fact, never mind names at all. He would give numbers. The airlock opened and the One Redeemer went forth to cypher his disciples, and bring your information for Tn July # Ruy Gonzalez de Puebla, tKe Spanisli ambassador in London, wrote a routine report to Eis king wKicH contained tfie sentence: "tHe EnglisH king sent five armed vessels under a Genoese (like Columbus) to find tfie island of Brazil and tKe seven-city isle; it is said tfiat tEey Have been provisioned for one year." The sentence refers to the expedition of Giovanni Cabotto -- later John Cabot -- to Labrador. It is also an inadvertent masterpiece of careless reporting. In the first place Cabotto was not from Genoa but was always referred to as a Venetian, though probably bom in Chioggia, some distance England had issued a patent to Cabotto empowering him to use as many ships as he deemed necessary; Cabotto sailed in the Mathew. No specific objectives were mentioned in the king's edict; it just said that he should try "to find and to annex islands inhabited by heathens or infition of getting into trouble with the other Christian kings. Moreover, Cabotto had already returned when the diligent ambassador wrote his report; the whole voyage had lasted for only three months. Which leaves the question of what the ambassador meant by the "island of Brazil" and the seven-city isle. Both were invented islands, resting on an uncertain foundation of legend, hearsay and misunderstanding. For some reason the cartographers of the period from # to # were convinced that the Atlantic Ocean must be full of small islands. One of them asserted that "there are more than # islands in the sea, each larger than Ireland," while another one arrived at the figure of # undiscovered islands. In reality, as any schoolboy now knows, the Atlantic Ocean is rather devoid of islands until we get to the Caribbean Sea. At the eastern end, that is near the west coast of northern Africa, there are just four islands -- or rather groups of them. The southernmost, discovered in # by Alvise de Cadamosto, is the group of tire Cape Verde islands, to the west of the city of Dakar which, of course, did not exist then. Their location is about # North and # West. Farther to the north, and closer to the African mainland, we have the Canary Islands at about # North and # to # West. Then there is Madeira somewhat farther to the north and a little farther from the mainland at about # North and # West, roughly West, roughly west of Casablanca. Finally we have the Azores, about west of Lisbon, under # West and # to # North. They are the island group farthest out and then there is only open ocean until you reach Bermuda. T he Phoenicians knew about Madeira and the Canary Islands as early as about # B.C. They do not seem to have reached the Cape Verde islands; and the Azores, being farthest out were not discovered -- half a dozen spurious stories to the contrary -- until Portuguese sailors reached them in #. Later it turned out, however, that one Phoenician ship must have reached them, probably much against the will of its captain. The proof consists of a clay vessel, broken when found, containing a number of Phoenician coins, a few of them gold, most of them copper. However, these were coins that had been made later than # B.C., a time where the news of the existence of these islands should have become known in southern Europe, it the captain and crew of that vessel Had returned. Now, having Had a quick rundown of the actual islands in the Atlantic, let us return to tKe fabulous islands, especially the two mentioned by the Spanish ambassador. THe story of the seven-city island is short and uncertain; the story of the "island of Brazil" is both longer and more complicated and, at any event, more interesting. The "seven-city island" made its first appearance as an island or a peninsula of or near Morocco, and it was called insula ad septem tratres, the island of seven brothers. The "seven brotHers" were seven actual or invented mountains. But in northern Europe the term septem fratre s was read to mean "seven friars," and then a slow transformation began. First the seven friars were elevated in rank to be seven bishops. And then every bishop founded a city; an island that can support seven cities evidently had to be a fairly large island. So it acquired seven bays, one for each city. Some "geographers" then began to speculate whether the seven-city island might not be the large and fruitful "Island to be out there in the ocean somewhere; and as time went on the two became more or less the same. I said more or less because some cartographers, who just could not Have enough islands in the Atlantic, kept insisting that the seven-city island and Antilla were not the same and that Anone. x ) The island of Brazil, as has already been said, Has a much longer story and it was a very popular island with cartographers for a time; a patient historian Has found it on no less than # different maps drawn during the period from #I to #. On some of these maps there are two islands named Brazil , and one of them #) The Antilles on our maps were so named to comemmorate the existing name and it is reasonably certain that the suggestion to do so came from Christopher Columbus. even has three, carefully labeled Brazilia superior , Brazilia media and Brazilia inferior. Qometimes, when one is con fronted with such a problem, it helps to trace the origin of the name. Where does it appear first? And what does it mean, just considered as a word? Well, the name appears first on a map drawn in # by Angelino Dalorto; it is located in the general vicinity of Ireland and bears the the inscription: Insule de montonis sive de brazile. This is Latin, of course, and anybody who does not know Latin is likely to think that this should be easy to read. It isn't. The words de montonis have no meaning at all; and, brazile is, at best, of very uncertain meaning. It was Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, who thought of a possibility. Nansen had, of course, read everything he could find about earlier exploration of northern waters. Much of what looked at first glance like straight reporting turned out to be legendary, and in #I he wrote a book about accounts he knew or suspected to be fiction. # ) He recognized the word brazile to be Gaelic, originally Hy Breasail (also appearing as O'Brazil, #) The original title is Nord i taakeheimen; the German translation, published in the same year, has the title Nebelheim ; there is no English translation. meaning "happy island") and wondered whether the montonis might not be the French mouton, meaning sheep. The traditional "sheep islands" in the north are the Faeroe, so that the derivation from mouton was not at all unreasonable. Why Angelino Dalorto who was, of course, an Italian, combined the sheep islands with "brazil" he explained himself in a roundabout way, namely by stating that the wool of these sheep can be beautifully dyed. Don't say that this statement doesn't explain anything; we'll get to that point in a little while. First we have to become acquainted with Nansen's story of O'Brazil. On the western coast of Ireland atmospheric reflections are fairly common at certain times of the year and nobody can be blamed for thinking that a distant island has become visible temporarily. On the other hand the Irish sailors and fishermen knew that there were no important islands even a long distance off shore, so the islands had to be ghostly islands; as a kind of redeeming feature it was said that these islands were inhabited by beautiful women. More, if one succeeded in shooting an arrow to the island or in throwing a piece of iron across, this act would make the island "fast," so that one could reach it. But the few young men who did succeed never returned. At a much later date the Irish poet Gerald Griffin (#-#) condensed the legend into an eight-line poem, O' Brazil, the Island of the Blest, that was published in London in # and which reads On the ocean that hollows the Rocks where ye dwell, A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell. Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest. And they call it O'Brazil -- the isle of the blest. From year unto year, on the ocean's blue rim. The beautiful spectre showed lovely and dim; The golden clouds curtained the deep, where it lay. And it looked like an Eden, away, far away. If Angelino Dalorto had known the full story of O'Brazil he would not have made the mistake he did make. But apparently he only heard the name, and to him "brazil" was not a name, it was a word, meaning "fiery red." But he did not think of some finished article of a fiery red color; he thought of the dyestuff that went by this name and the dyestuff, in turn, was connected in his mind with islands in the Atlantic Ocean. A nd that is the other half of the  story, beginning in antiquity. The ancients were fond of color in their gowns, but dyes, especially red dyes, were hard to come by. A garment dyed "Tyrian purple" was expensive, just because it had been dyed that color -- incidentally the "purple" in that term is not the color we call by this name, but it means a very bright red. One source was a marine snail of the Mediterranean region, called Purpura haemostoma by zoologists. The snail produced a fine dye, but only one small drop per snail, hence the high price. Only a few decades before Christ, the energetic and highly learned King Juba II of Mauritania started what can only be called dye-works on the Canary Islands. He reported that his men found the islands uninhabited but that in places there were ruins of old buildings; a statement that goes well with the assumption of Phoenician settlements on those islands several centuries earlier. The dye factories of King Juba became proverbial that Pling the Elder referred to the Canaries by the name of Purpurariae, the purple islands. Pliny did not say, or did not know what the dyers of King Juba used in their places in the Canaries; and a book on animals and plants, written by Juba himself, has unfortunately not been preserved. But thirteen hundred years later it was no longer the secret that it might have been at the time of Pliny. Both on the Canary Islands and on the not-yet-discovered Azores there grows a lichen which furnishes a fine red dye. Its botanical name is Roccella tinctoria; it is generally known under its French name of orseille and it was called the Herb Orisello by Alvise de Cadamosto. To all Europeans who were at all interested in things of Nature, the presence of large quantities of orseille on most of these islands created the impression that Atlantic islands and dyes belonged together. In the meantime, however, another red dye had been found on the European mainland itself. It is mentioned in a document for the first time in # when the two cities of Bologna and Ferrara made a treaty which regulated, among other things, their commerce in grana de brasile, a term that, in this connection, is best translated as "fireberries." Of course they were not berries, they were the galls that form on the leaves of the oak Quercus coccifera, caused by the infection with an insect parasite that has received the fitting name of Coccus infectorius. This was the "brazile," the red dye, that Dalorto had in mind when he labeled an island on his map with the misleading description that mixed up sheep and brazil dye. While others did not mix sheep and dye, they did mix islands and dye. The mysterious Island of Brazil, if anybody succeeded in discovering it, would be easy to recognize, for it would surely be the home of plentiful quantities of Cadamosto's Herb Orisello. Hphen the Azores were discovered, and at the foot of the mountain, that was the characteristic of one of the islands, orseille was found to grow in quantity. The mountain was quickly christened Morro do Brazil, while the island received the name of Terceira. Carless historians later made the mistake by saying that there can be no doubt about the identity of the Island of Brazil and the actual island Terceira. You can find this statement even now in a well reputed large encyclopedia. The assertion is nonsense for the very simple reason that the Irish O'Brazil was not an actual island and therefore could not refer to the unknown Azores. Moreover, O'Brazil was "seen" to the west of Ireland and the Azores are to the west of Portugal. The whole confusion is due to the single fact that the Gaelic word happened to sound like the Old Italian word for a certain color. But if this is so, how about the name Brazil on our maps? It actually is named after another red dye. The Portuguese who discovered it first called the area Terra de Vera Cruz; it was around the year # that the name began to change to Terra de Brazil, for soon after its discovery it turned out that enormous numbers of "dye-wood trees" happened to grow there. Botanically these trees belonged to the genus Caesalpinia, other species of which can be found elsewhere on earth in a sufficiently warm climate. How important this discovery was to the Europeans of the early sixteenth century can be deduced from, a financial transaction that took place in #. A very enterprising Italian merchant by the name of Fernando della Rogna who, we don't know how, had investigated and appraised the situation, made an agreement with the king of Portugal. Fernando della Rogna acquired a monoply on the dyewood trees of Terra de Vera Cruz in consideration of an annual payment of # pieces of gold to the Royal Treasury. Apparently the agreement worked out well; at any event a small island off the coast of Brazil, discovered either by della Rogna or by one of his captains, was named Fernando Noronha, the Portuguese version of his name. It bears this name to this day. The fact that Brazil, 'our' Brazil, still appeared as a large island on maps of the sixteenth century has nothing to do with the O'Brazil-red-dye confusion. The American double continent was discovered piecemeal and the fact that there was a continuous coastline from Labrador to Brazil was simply not known. Hence Labrador, Florida and Brazil first appeared as large islands on the maps; there was no indication yet that they were portions of the same continent. In fact, since the original goal of the explorers had been to reach China, most captains and their sponsors rather preferred the idea that all these newly discovered lands were large islands, useful in themselves but with passages to China between them. Martin Sch'ongauer's Dragontree D yes, as the story of the island of Brazil has shown, were something that pre-occupied the commercial instincts of both the ancients and the people of the Middle Ages. There was one more source for a red dye, one that has not yet been mentioned. It was "dragon's blood," a dramatically named substance that was the gum of a tree called the dragontree. Dragon's blood, the nature of which was perfectly well known, came mainly from the 'island of Dioscorides', the island of Sokotra near the mouth of the Gulf of Aden, situated under #North and # East. A closely related species grows along the Somali coast of the African mainland and still another species grows in places along the African west coast. The dragontree, like the equally weird-looking Joshua tree of our western deserts, belongs to the Lilly family, which, of course, was not known then. The red gum, from # to about #, was often prescribed as a remedy for toothaches, presumably following the motto: when desperate, try anything! It also served, and much better, as a source for a red' dye, though the dye was not as good as that from orseille. When the Portuguese rediscovered the Canary islands and Madeira, they saw that the dragontree grew on these islands, too. In about # Alvise de Cadamosto carefully described a dragontree he had found on the small island of Porto Santo near Madeira. More than a hundred years later the dragontree was described for the first time in a botanical work the "Spanish Herbarium" of Carolus Clusius, published in Antwerp in #. Clusius had seen a dragontree Himself in #, growing near the wall of a monastery in Lisbon, but said that Cadamosto should be considered the discoverer of that tree. Carolus Linnaeus later named it Dracaena draco. There is a somewhat earlier reference to dragontrees growing near Lisbon -- they had evidently been transplanted either from the Canaries or from Madeira -- by Dr. Hieronymus Muenzer. He saw three specimens in # and said that one of them was large; the other two, it might be presumed, were still small. There is an intriguing mystery about the dragontree: it was carefully and correctly drawn about thirty years before Dr. Muenzer saw it by an artist who, according to all existing historical sources, could not possibly have seen one. The artist's name was Martin Schongauer. His father, a goldsmith, had been a native of the city of Augsburg in Germany, but at one time in his life had decided to move eastward in the wake of the Teutonic Knights and had settled in the small city of Kolmar, in what later came to be called West Prussia.(Kolmar is now just inside the Polish border.) The artist was bom in Kolmar in about # and, as the available sources say, lived there all his life, except for short journeys to nearby towns. A round tHe year #, when he was still a young man, he composed his "Flight to Egypt," based on the well known Biblical story. It shows Joseph and Mary with the infant Jesus in an oasis; Joseph is gathering fruit, assisted by the angel. The largest tree in the picture, placed conspicuously in the foreground, shows a dragontree. It is so well drawn that botanists could say that the tree was about # years old. How could Schongauer have done this? There are no earlier pictures of that tree and for a long time Schongauer's was the only one, as is proved by two imitations. Albrecht Duerer's "Flight to Egypt" -- around # -- is frankly based on Schongauer's picture, though parts of the tree are concealed by clouds. The other imitation is a painting, known to have been done in # in Augsburg by one H. Burgkmair. Burkgmair called his painting "St. John on Patmos" and it is a rather fantastic picture; but Schongauer's dragontree is there, not as good as the original, but still recognizable. It is unfortunate that Dr. Muenzer did not give the size of the "large" tree he saw in #, because, when it comes to dragontrees, the word large is a flexible term. The trees grow to a very old age -- one that died in # on Tenerife was believed by the local inhabitants to have been # years old, though botanists would not grant more than # years -- and' it seems to grow for as long as it lives. If Dr. Muenzer, as can be assumed, compared the tree he saw to trees in fruit orchards, a #-year-old dragontree would look large. The same tree would then have been about # years old by the time Schongauer drew it. But Schongauer is supposed to have stayed in the area of Kolmar all his life. This assertion can be accepted if it refers to his adult life. As a young man he must have traveled and in his travels he must have reached Lisbon, the only place on the European mainland where one could see a living dragontree. ycm psstmmur sveen : Mats ThoseWkWEfit Connections The world was too complicated for people to understand. So they had the National Emergency and insane space maneuvering -- and Mr. Smith. I A t first Kendy guessed tlie Russians were as paranoid as Americans. Ttieir armor of systematized delusions as to the nature of tlie universe Had been penetrated by something. So they were up tight. Their Lotka II had attached herself to Phobos as planned, but her landing module never did spiral down to the fascinating surface of Mars. Although E. Vavilov was a biochemist, all three silvery modules of Lotka remained clinging together and to that lifeless moonlet. Whenever Phobos whirled from behind Mars, coded lasergrams flickered. After official secrecy so dense it seemed to be shielding ideological confusion, Moscow announced there had been a minor technical difficulty. Lotka returned all three men to Earth'. But there was no interview with E. Vavilov. Kendy was young enough to be momentarily interested, but at sixteen his personal universe was small. He couldn't feel that something so distant would have anything to do with him. He wanted to be a basketball coach. Sometimes he wanted to be a biochemist. Occasionally he thought he wanted to become a statesman. He felt fragmented. His friends smoked grass. He felt saddled by contradictions. He smiled at his teachers because he wanted to like them. His thoughts galloped awkwardly, shying away from the big cliffs of life. He wanted to wave his arms but kept his hands in his pockets and talked like a slob. He and his friends were growing up during the anti-intellectualism which grew with the National Emergency. Kendy had been bom into the usual world of paranoids. In the delivery room of the hospital, his gasping young mother hoped he'd become the groovy swinger his father wasn't. His pale father more conveniently had hoped this smiling little ape-face would become President of the United States. T Tis father didn't live that long. His skull was shattered by a stray bullet the day the National Emergency was declared. Kendy had been seven then, but all he could remember now was smoke spreading from downtown Los Angeles. He couldn't remember crying. Although he had been seven when his father was alive, he couldn't remember his father's voice. He knew his father had been a case-worker for the Walfare Department, because his mother told him so. He couldn't remember the feeling of his father's hand on his shoulder. Clutching the photo album, he would stare at his father's two-dimensional face. Under the magnifying glass, his father's face within the glossy photographs disintegrated into blotches and specks. It was as if hfe father were hiding from him. Or he was hiding from his father. As if he were too small to accept the burden, he didn't want to understand who or what had killed his father, whose innocent and unobtrusive name had been Olson. The Los Angeles Telephone Directories contained the names of thousands of living fathers named Olson. His mother explained, but he couldn't understand why his father was the one to die. "He was very sentimental and idealistic," she rambled. "I guess I was sort of -- what they called -- a hippy. When we brought you Home from the hospital, I started calling you Ken for short. Your father sort of laughed and said: 'Sounds too much like those damn Ken and Barbie dolls. His first name is Ken-ne-dy. We named him Kennedy. We'll call him Kennedy. He will be proud of it!' " In kindergarten, other kids couldn't pronounce it. They slurred it. Kendy could remember all the way back to kindergarten, though he couldn't remember his father. Joyfully he Had led the other children up and down on the chairs until the teacher argued that it was rest time. Sprawled on his rest-mat, he should have kept his eyes shut, but he tried to read the Los Angeles Times. He was matching the letters M.O.L. with its picture when the teacher's weak voice shifted from reprimand to sing-song ridicule. To his surprise, all the other children began to sing with Her: "Kendy reads a noisy newspaper, Kendy reads a noisy newspaper." Hastily He'd folded the terribly loud newspaper. He'd closed his eyes. At that moment Kendy learned fear that no one would like Him any more. Soon he learned to get a Gold Star for cooperation in school. B y the time Kendy was sixteen, the National Emergency had been in effect for nine years, and He barely noticed it because he'd grown up within it. As a gangling six-footer with floppy brownish Hair, He stood in contrast to his plump mother whose Hair was raven-black. He did inherit her prominent cheekbones, so that he seemed to be squinting out at the world. He smiled so much, in contrast to the cool expressions of his classmates, that they'd always been attracted to him. The year before he'd been elected sophomore class president. Now he was the hard-working member of the student council. He was the hustler on the junior varsity basketball team, bounding downcourt like a grasshopper. He couldn't Help laughing whenever he realized his life wag a put-on. By letting his grades slump and becoming more popular with the kids than with the teachers, he managed to become one of the nominees for next year's student body presidency. He surprised everyone by presenting a political platform as if it were a real election concerned with real power. His number one plank was yearly grading of the teachers by their students. This hopefully constructive criticism would have to be conducted and tabulated off-campus. He began to worry that he might be elected. When He took a moment to glance at the television news, Soviet space efforts had been redirected to Earth's garbage-strewn Moon. In a startling retreat from their Pliobos-Mars cop-out, they were conducting a massive re-exploration of the Moon. Soviet crawlers searched its maria and craters so intensively they seemed insane. They even uprooted the old U.S. base. Nothing on the Moon could be worth as much as the search was costing. Concurrently, in West Virginia, Tin Woodman was dynamited by persons unknown. Kendy had read that Tin Woodman, growing tall beside Ozma II, was considered a menace by paranoids of various political persuasions. They were afraid that Something Out There might hear Tin Woodman's radio shouts to the universe. Kendy felt both relieved and angered when notified he'd just lost the school election -- by three stinking votes. Loping down the long concrete steps from the campus, he wished he could escape from high school. Ahead of him for next September, his senior year now crystal-balled as a drag. He doubted he could make the varsity basketball team. He might try to be elected president of the Biochem Club, and he'd have to resuscitate his grades before the college recruiters returned. Qquinting against the June sun light, he smiled, and the anomaly of his fair skin and high Asian cheekbones might have made an ethnologist shrug or jokingly classify him as Siberisk, a Soviet citizen from the Siberian racial melting pot. He was in the world pot. His future was so immensely appalling, like the future of any boy then growing into manhood, that its recapitulation involved a series of amputations in order to examine the vital sequences of his life. "How-'d the election come out?" Mr. Smith was such a jovial giant standing outside the high school's chain-link fence that he resembled a college basketball coach on a recruiting expedition. "Down the tubes," Kendy retorted, not afraid to sound a little disrespectful; Mr. Smith had been taking him to lunch all week until today. "I'll wear a black armband," Mr. Smith laughed unexpectedly, and he glanced down at his brown shoes, which were peculiarly small and short for such a huge man. "Seriously, I heard you lost by only three votes." "Then why'd you ask me how it came out?" Kendy blurted. "The count hasn't even been announced yet except to me and Steve." "I was anxious." Mr. Smith grinned, tautening his incipient jowls, until he appeared to be a well-conditioned forty-five. "For me to lose?" Kendy knew why that was true. "Ken Kendy, I've been trying too hard to impress you." His smile became so uncertain he could Have passed for a dissipated thirty-five. Then he became so enthusiastic it seemed as if a slimmer man of twenty-five were peeking out. "Since you've lost, since you're cutting afternoon classes anyway, fly up with me past San Luis Obispo right now for a grand tour. Why wait till next year?" Kendy laughed, trying not to seem embarrassed. "You guys -- recruiting kids before they even finish eleventh grade -- " I t didn't seem ethical. Kendy had taken the Scholastic Aptitude Tests simply as practice for next year when he would take them again as a senior. To his surprise, nineteen Universities had contacted him prematurely. Academic recruiters slipped him glossy promotional booklets and advised him to stay clean until next year when he was a senior and could sign a Letter of Intent. The reason good students were being more actively recruited than athletes was Senate Bill #-#, passed the year the National Emergency began. It offered double tuition subsidies to any approved university for each student it recruited whose S.A.T. scores were at least # in English and above # in Math'. The Senators had added other requirements. Approved recruits must be patriotic high school graduates. "I won't Have enough units to get my high school diploma until next June," Kendy said.  "That makes us a better choice than Harvard," Mr. Smith laughed. "We want you now." Kendy had heard that this new National University north of San Luis Obispo wasn't dependent on the emergency education legislation. It had its own unlimited government funding. It could set its own entrance criteria. "I've lost the election," Kendy said. "Why do you -- do you still want me?" He didn't know if he wanted National University. The U.C.L.A. recruiter had knocked N.U. even worse than U.S.C. His high school counsellor had warned him that enrolling at National University was like making a deal with the devil but then weakened his argument by pushing his own alma mater,, Fresno State. The National Television Station commentators all said National University had outstanding educational innovations. Mr. Smith rested his graygloved hand on Kendy's shoulder. "Some fancy universities really try to collect nothing but high school student-body presidents. But I kid you not, we just want guys we like." Corn-ball, Kendy thought, but surprised himself by smiling with pleasure, liking Mr. Smith better and better. The gray glove pressing on Kendy's shoulder had seemed smooth but its weight began to transmit a bumpy feeling, Kendy thought, as if Mr. Smith's fingers were nothing but bones. Yesterday, when Mr. Smith took him to lunch, Kendy had felt uncomfortable watching Mr. Smith' munching a cheeseburger while wearing gloves. But Mr. Smith wore such a groovy next-year's sport coat with a long Edwardian tail that Kendy knew he must be a smooth operator, in spite of forgetting to remove his gloves when he ate. # # Qay the word, Kendy, and we  will take a taxi to the jet pad." "Sir, I've got to be honest with you." Kendy blurted. "You'd better recruit some senior. My mother would never sign the waiver to let me skip my last year of high school. She hates  -- " "She'll fly up with us." "You're kidding." Kendy knew his mother would refuse to visit that campus; last night she'd put another underground magazine on his pillow, and it roasted National University even worse than West Point. "This noon I took her to lunch at the Hilton," Mr. Smith explained. "Are you putting me on?" "Say the word, and I'll hustle back to the May Company and fix it with her supervisor so she can take the rest of the afternoon off and we'll go." Mr. Smith was talking as excitedly as if he were twenty-five again. "What department is she in?" "Complaint Department." Kendy thought Mr. Smith was over-confident. He couldn't understand Mr. Smith. He could understand the surface of his words. Mr. Smith talked as bluntly as a fellow slob. Sometimes Mr. Smith would switch, mouthing long and well-organized sentences. Probably these were part of the recruiting spiel he'd rehearsed. They didn't necessarily indicate intelligence. But at other times, while kidding around, Mr. Smitfi Ead wised-off so shrewdly that Kendy thought this huge man might be able to speak from a great depth of experience and emotion if the surface of his life hadn't confined him to being a slob. It was as if the man were fragmented within his shell. When he smiled, Ee seemed youthful. When he looked away in a moment of disinterest, Eis face sagged and Ee seemed old, as if staring at deatH. Suddenly He'd grin at Kendy and become young again. When he laughed, he gave Kendy a feeling of warmth" and reflected strength. But then Mr. Smith would say something slobby, and Kendy could feel tlie uncertainty, as if he were recruiting in a world he couldn't quite believe. Kendy wasn't repelled by this. He felt the same way -- fragmented. At Home his mother talked like a slob but occasionally astonished him with her bitter wit. She seemed to be tEe only person who remembered what life was like before the National Emergency. At school, Eis friends, were slobs, half-heartedly rebelling as if they didn't know which way to go. Kendy's counsellor occasionally would pause while berating him for not trying harder scholastically and switch to praise. During those glowing moments of hope, even though Kendy knew the counsellor was shoveling child psychology on him like manure, Kendy could' feel himself growing. His fragments were coalescing. It was possible for him to become clear-thinking, subtle, strong and purposeful. In those moments he knew his father couldn't have been a slob. II A t #:# tEe copter Howled upward through the smog with Mr. Smith sitting next to Kendy's mother and shouting: "National University's a whole new concept in American education." His mother's wide face seemed flushed with excitement In the roaring draft from the ventilator, Eer crow-black hair lashed her cheekbone. Kendy wondered if Mr. Smith Ead researched their background so thoroughly that Ee knew she was one-quarter Mescalero Apache and that after only one semester at U.C.L.A. she'd married a skinny blondbearded MinneswedisH sociology student and given birth to Kendy. "Only three of us in this big Helicopter?" she shouted. Mr. Smith had issued them: tight head-sets, but she shouted as if she didn't believe her cordless intercom was working : "Only three?" "Holds .fourteen," Mr. Smith answered proudly. "This is the newest Cheyennette," he continued innocently "Fourteen seats in our passenger capsule. Comfortable?" Kendy winced. He knew what was coming. She had a caustic tongue. "I thought this so-called Coalition Congress," she shouted, "was hanging on for nine years or ninety-nine -- to save money! A dollar saved means a policeman's paid. Let the poor pay for the war. I thought one of the reasons for continuing the National Emergency was economy in government transportation." To this sarcastic shaft, Mr. Smith merely explained, "The copter had to go back to National University anyway." Kendy looked away. If his mother kept making subversive remarks against the Coalition Congress, he thought he might not be admitted to any university which was receiving a government subsidy, as they all were. "The diplomats of the future," Mr. Smith said hopefully, "will Have got their starts at National University." "Kendy's had a nice offer from Harvard," she shouted, "for next year -- when he's ready." fT'mbarrassed, Kendy peered  -- I ' out of his greasy window. He watched the stub-winged shadow of their copter slide across Santa Monica Bay and shrink as the Cheyennette rose. With its rotor blades clattering, the winged copter leveled off and began to accelerate like an airplane. Kendy supposed its rotor was free-wheeling now. Its tail-propellor was pushing them so fast that the stubby wings were surfboarding on the air. Below, along the long curve of Malibu Beach, the surf wrinkled and whitened. On the other side, past Mr. Smith's head, Kendy glimpsed the distant purple hulk of Catalina Island. Mr. Smith winked at him. Kendy Hoped they were still friends. The winged copter buffeted northward above the Santa Barbara Chanmade Kendy think of spiders standing in the greenish summer water. The Cheyennette whined like a mosquito with its course paralleling the islands of the National Park. Those protruded like jagged windbreaks, already summer-brown. The northernmost island glared white with engulfing sand, and Kendy noticed the rows of black spots there on San Miguel Island, probably barracks of the old Emergency Dentention Camp. When his mother didn't seem to notice them, he relaxed. She was quieter than He'd expected. The Cheyennette was swaying like a boat. Ahead, the greenish water of the Channel was streaked by an arctic blue current. Wind from the north stretched out the whitecaps. Kendy knew the dark outcurve of the mainland must be Point Concepcion where the marine ecology became North Pacific. Surf bearded the cliffs of Point Arguello. Up on the brown hills, rows of excavations into the underlying chalk reminded Kendy of more whitecaps. In their white arches he saw radar dishes and unrecognizable apparatus. They would be aimed during M.O.L. launches. With manned synchronous satellites hovering over a lot of places besides Moscow and Washington, he guessed the jokes about what girls did when they bathed in the nude might be true. "We're almost there," Mr. Smith's voice announced, and Kendy guessed this premature statement was supposed to keep them from becoming restless ; they hadn't even passed Vandenberg Air Force Base yet. "y ver the dry mouth of the Santa Ynez River, Kendy watched a long freight train flowing across the bridge. The train wormed north past pencil-sized attention for testing. Kendy saw the shadow of a missile so enormous he wondered if it would be another attempt. US " -- of us," Mr. Smith was saying in their earphones. "Not because their intelligence operations were any better than ours. The real reason is that way back before the Emergency our space appropriations were too small." "When I was a girl, we always blamed the spies," her voice replied dryly as the freight train crawled past a concrete blockhouse. "That was atoms, not rockets," Kendy blurted in embarrassment at her stupidity. Looking down, He remembered viewing an old tape in American History about the days when trains still carried passengers. Along this same track, tjie Southern Pacific Daylight had rushed a Premier Krush-off-or-shev-orsomething toward San Francisco. While that old passenger train hurried through Vandenberg Air Force Base, porters had scurried to pull down the blinds in his car. "For some reason they're crawling all over the Moon again," Mr. Smith was saying. "Why worry about them when it's us we should be worrying about?" she protested as if trying to impress some great lesson on Kendy. But Kendy remembered how intensely she'd watched the Telstar broadcast the day the Russians sent those three men almost to Mars. They'd seemed so confident. That grinning biochemist named E. Vavilov had recited what he expected to find on Mars. On the television screen, he Had seemed surprisingly young for a Nobel Prize winner. His high cheekbones made him appear somewhat Siberian. "He looks like someone I know," Kendy's mother had muttered. E. Vavilov had smiled so mischievously while proclaiming dialectical materialism as the scientific doorway to total understanding of life throughout the universe that Kendy wondered if -- really -- Vavilov wanted to wink at all his friendly-enemy biochemists out there in worldwide television land. Then he had winked! Or gotten something in his eye. Kendy had leaned forward, blinking. After the abortive return from Phobos, E. Vavilov didn't appear on television again. The pilot of Lotka II recited their excuse from the teleprompter -- a minor technical difficulty. A month later, while maintaining his skills or his flight pay, that pilot reportedly crashed his jet trainer. Pravda also announced that E. Vavilov had returned to his research at the Limonological Institute on Lake Baikal, where he was temporarily indisposed. Mars wasn't mentioned. The Soviets began their inexplicable search of the rough surface of the Earth's Moon. This seemed an advance to the rear. Tphe Cheyennette skimmed above the sand dunes of Pismo Beach. It banked oceanward around the dark cliffs which protected Port Avila from the north wind. Out over the Pacific, around this immense promontory, the copter climbed. Kendy knew they must be approaching National University. He smiled nervously as he searched for it. Mr. Smith had mentioned that it was located in a canyon. This mountainous promontory was gashed by dozens of steep canyons down to the breakers. But there was no sign of it. "There's Diablo Canyon, Pacific Gas and Electric's nuc-electric generating plant," Mr. Smith said. "National U's so close our light bulbs stay lit by induction." He smiled faintly at the tired joke. Kendy peered at gray-green chapparal slopes and afternoonshadowed canyons on this tenmile-wide bulge into the Pacific. "Beyond the University, in the next bay," Mr. Smith I said enthusiastically to Kendy's mother, "there's Moro Rock. Our boys have fun assaulting -- I mean, climbing the Rock. Of course the Park Service has installed safety fences all the way to the top, so it's safe enough. Look farther north beyond Moro Bay. We could see San Simeon if it was a clearer day." "Oh, the Hearst Castle," Kendy's mother said. "At least the people got something back from him when he died. Personally I -- " "Yes, it's an historic monument," the recruiter interrupted, "with llamas on the lawns. Look back the other way, inland. There is San Luis Obispo -- nice little town of fifty thousand -- and you can see the buildings of Cal Poly. Those unimaginative engineers are supposed to become our traditional rivals. They win the football games, but there's no competition intellectually. In educational methods and in architecture, National University stands alone as the model for the future of American higher education," he recited. "It is designed as an answer to the National Emergency, and congress has continued to be generous. We're enlarging again this year." Visually, Kendy had been searching unsuccessfully, for a canyon. Instead', he saw a vast shallow bowl-shaped pasture at the head of what must have been a canyon before the earth-moving machines began their work: Its bulldozed rim shimmered golden brown with wild oats. Its center was lawn-green. Then he spotted a circle of red tile roofs arranged around a central hub of huge roofs. Kendy blinked in surprise. Although it was # :# in the afternoon, the buildings cast oddly short shadows. The circling Cheyennette jerked as its rotor re-engaged. While it descended, Kendy counted twenty tile-roofed buildings around the rim of the campus and nine more dorms under construction. Even the huge lab buildings and auditoriums at the hub were only one story high, which explained their short shadows. From each dorm building, a red tile path extended inward like a spoke to the hub buildings. Kendy couldn't see any students. He kept looking for students on the circular path which connected the dorms as the copter settled down to a landing behind a dorm. Beneath the tile roof and shaded porches of what was supposed to be a dorm, there was a glint of office windows. The lobby and administrative offices seemed to occupy the entire building. Mystified, Kendy began to wonder whether everyone here was anadministrator? A s they walked in past Spanish ironwork and dented armor, Kendy's mother said: "Where will he sleep? Not even room for a hundred students." Kendy had told her each dorm was supposed to house eight hundred, or so the catalogue had said. Mr. Smith' laughed as if appreciating a bit of humor from Her. "We had the dual problem of conforming to historic California architecture and also to our country's needs." He led them to the row of elevator doors, all inscribed: At the minus-one level, they walked out of the elevator into what resembled a miniature railroad station. An electric car Hummed in from the central Hub. Men scrambled off. None had beards or long hair, and surprisingly few carried books. Another car zipped through' on a cross track which formed a right angle with the first. Kenby straightened. The car left a whiff of perfume. "Well, that's something!" Kendy's mother said enigmatically. "When I was at U.C.L.A. we had to hike miles between classes, always hurrying and always late. Is this a coeducational dorm?" "Just passing through," Mr. Smith' answered quickly. "Their car is on the rim track. They're just passing through to their own dorm. No girls allowed below this level." "That seems --  stupid," she remarked. "For a supposedly modern -- " "National University was authorized by Congress to rebuild moral standards," Mr. Smith hastily answered with a straight face. "N.U.'s goal is to help renovate the traditional way of life which made America great." He grinned at Kendy. "There are some cute girls here." 'Out Kendy knew from the catalogue that there were only two women's dorms, though he hadn't given the implications of that scarcity sufficient thought. " -- group solidarity within each dorm," Mr. Smith was reciting, "and friendly supervision like an enlightened academy so that the student unrest, which was so prevalent in older universities before the Emergency, can't happen Here." "UH-Huh," Kendy's mother said, in obvious disbelief. "Over here," Mr. Smith said hastily, "is our recreation hall." The clicking ping-pong ball on the automatic-return table stopped. At the open end of tfi table, concealed nearly to the armpits, a startlingly young boy stared across the dark green plywood at Kendy. As if in disbelief or pain, the boy's sharp features Screwed up, and he swallowed with an audible gulp. Kendy squinted in recognition and opened his mouth to speak. But Oliver abruptly turned his back. Kendy didn't know what to say. He heard another gulp, even though Oliver's back was turned and he was walking away from Kendy. Like a goddamn Gollum, Kendy thought, as Oliver hurried away with his big white tennis shoes flapping on the hardwood floor. When Oliver reached the dark doorway, his pale face looked back, glaring. Why? Kendy was sure he was the one who should be carrying the grudge. Sweating, Kendy tried to feel angry. It wasn't rational to be afraid of a kid that small. He doubted if Oliver was fourteen yet. But Oliver evidently was already enrolled here and would have the advantage of being in a higher grade. Kendy reassured himself that National University wasn't like West Point with hazing of the plebes and all that guff. Anyway, he was only visiting National University. He was not committed to enroll here. But if he turned chicken, Kendy thought, and didn't sign up at National U. just because Oliver was here, he'd be both timid and stupid. Oliver was only a little -- well, what was he? Ill jtT r. Smith was steering Kendy's mother along the hall, away from the entrance to a dim room barred by a steel grillwork which was a sliding door. Kendy peered through the locked grill into the eye-widening semi-darkness at the dim shapes of rifles hanging on the walls. His eyebrows rose as he recognized the awkward silhouette of an ancient Chicomm AK-# with its forward curving magazine. The other guns were new to him. His heart thudded with sudden excitement. Rows of glass cases glinted in there, but he couldn't see what they contained. From one of the rifles on the wall hung wires and a battery. He had to admit to himself he was itching to handle all those guns. He hurried away as if he needed to escape from something. The coffeeteria reeked with the odor of cheese burning. A tall man wearing a really sharp sport coat was trying to scrape a smoking cheese sandwich out of the infrared dispenser. Kendy guessed he must be another recruiter because a mother, father, and son were seated at one of the round tables with four coffee cups but only two cheese sandwiches in front of them, and they were looking around uncomfortably. To his surprise, Kendy's mother was smiling. Mr. Smith had brought her a lunch of everything she liked best. As Kendy moved to join them, Mr. Smith removed his arm from behind her chair and interrupted their conversation to point to the gleaming row of snack dispensers. "You don't need coins, just help yourself." Feeling like a fifth wheel, Kendy went and stood in front of the infrared dispenser. He pushed the buttons, trying to force it to grill him a cheese sandwich. It hummed. Oliver's image loomed in his memory as if the kid were a monster Gollum instead of -- Two summers ago, Oliver would have been only twelve. Kendy had been a Junior Counsellor at that damned camp for Gifted Children. The second morning, Kendy had tried to conduct his first inspection in his tribe's tent. Oliver slouched beside his messy cot, gulping air and contemptuously belching. Although Kendy didn't bother to make his own bed at home, he had tried to enforce the rules here in the camp, and he suggested to Oliver that they reason together. The sheet must be folded over and the corners of the blanket must be square. Oliver blurted a four-letter word. Kendy applied a hammerlock. Oliver screamed like a girl, startling. Kendy so much he let go. O liver complained to the Senior Counsellor, and this grizzled college student took Kendy aside. "The kid's father is some sort of space scientist whose wife is a Senator's daughter, so don't let him get away with anything. Your job is to enforce the rules, the same for everybody. Just don't leave any marks on his body, so the Director will know you haven't used force." Each morning, Kendy had harrassed Oliver until he made his cot. Scowling, Oliver would run outside and harrass a fat kid, who didn't know how to defend himself. Oliver was master of the sly kick and the innocent denial. When Kendy tried to mobilize opinion in the tent against Oliver's bullying, the other little kids seemed unconcerned. When Oliver deliberately stood up in the war canoe, Kendy fined him a week's desserts. In the mess hall, Oliver refused to eat anything, and a rumor spread that the food was poisoned. When they were alone together, Kendy offered to shake hands and start over. Convulsively gulping, Oliver spat on Kendy's outstretched hand. Almost bursting with rage, Kendy wiped his hand on Oliver's face. Oliver clamped his teeth on Kendy's finger. Kneeing Oliver, Kendy writhed free. Not wanting to escalate, Kendy attempted an orderly withdrawal, but Oliver followed with sharp kicks and ineffectual karate chops. "You stinking bully, I'll .veetcong you' While defending himself, Kendy hurled the kid against a tent pole, mashing his nose. Snorting blood and crying, Oliver opened his Boy Scout Knife. "I'll drive you out of here if it takes a hundred years." With a thrill of fear, Kendy grabbed his wrist and took the knife away. He didn't report the incident because Oliver would have been expelled. He didn't report anything. The next morning Kendy was fired for leaving a mark on a camper. With his nose swathed in tape, Oliver came up behind him while he was packing. Oliver's eyes were magnified by tears. "You big bastard, I'll get you if it's the last thing I ever do." Ty the time tire infrared dispenser disgorged Kendy's bubbling cheese sandwich, his mother was digging into chocolate pie heaped with whipped cream, and Mr. Smith was grinning like a shrewd farm boy who puts out salt for the cow in order to catch the calf. "Kendy will have an opportunity to travel in foreign countries," he elaborated. "All over the world -- " Kendy's mother dropped her fork. "I thought you said he'd be protected from the draft." "He will. This would be as an exchange student." "As a State Department Cadet," Kendy muttered through the molten cheese sandwich, embarrassed as usual by his mother's abysmal ignorance. "That's one possibility," Mr. Smith tried to agree, and his gloved hand reached for the sugar. "There are other -- opportunities -- in civilian government with more future for a young man than the State Department." He was smiling at Kendy's mother. "We know that big organizations grow bigger, and the biggest is our government. Who can foresee all the opportunities for a young man to grow?" "The pie was very good," she said, looking around and frowning. "During his first two years at National University, he'll enjoy the broad general education," Mr. Smith said as he rose to bring her a dish of chilled melon balls. "We're rebuilding a reawakened citizenry with a renewed understanding of our national purpose." Kendy wondered at the words as Mr. Smith looked straight at him. "We're building opportunities for those few young men who have the intelligence and courage to shape our future." Corn-ball, Kendy thought, but someone would have to lead, and Oliver's sharp face loomed in his imagination. Kendy chewed the gluey cheese sandwich. National University might be big enough for both of them, but he didn't want to go here. He decided he'd be happier back in high school for his senior year. "How would you straighten things out?" Mr. Smith' said to him. Shocked by the question and the fact that it was directed at him, Kendy tried to disengage his bicuspids from the cheese sandwich; he swallowed hard. "I guess I'd like to -- the State Department -- the diplomatic service -- at least trying to maintain some communication between us and Russia, so nations would understand." "Good for you!" His mother took him off the hook. "You can get an even broader education at Harvard. That's where nearly everyone in the State Department comes from anyway. Remember what a nice letter you got from the registrar. Next year when you're a senior they'll -- " "Mother!" Kendy blurted. "Yes, I've heard that Harvard is a fairly good college," Mr. Smith replied calmly. "Because you're only sixteen, you could go there for two years until you're called up for your two years of Universal National Service to plant trees in the mornings and study patriotism in the afternoons, assuming your lucky number didn't come up for the draft." Tf endy looked away, his ears burning. Unsaid was how National University was a step ahead of other universities. To hell with that, Kendy thought, maybe he'd volunteer and join the Green Berets. However, Congress had decreed that two years attendance here at N.U. did count as the Universal National Service requirement. "I'm going to level with you," Mr. Smith said. "National University is tougher in its way than Harvard, and you're only sixteen years old." "Younger kids than that," Kendy muttered, thinking of Oliver. "You think you can hack it here? The only kids who do make great maturity and patriotism and espirit de corps." Mr. Smith stood up, and Kendy felt something slipping away. Mr. Smith's hand closed on his shoulder. "Let me show you our squadroom. We call it the barn. There are ten guys on our team. I'd be your advisor if you want me." He squeezed Kendy's shoulder and smiled at his mother. "Excuse us for about ten minutes," he apologized. "Down where we're going is man's country." Corn-ball, Kendy thought, but Ke couldn't help responding to Mr. Smith, although he couldn't quite understand why. Their elevator plunged all the way to the minus-seven level. From the elevator, a metal bridge led straight across a shouting group of boys playing full-court basketball on the level below. There were whiffs of chlorine from a swimming pool somewhere as Mr. Smith led him from the bridge to a hallway dazzling with artificial daylight from the ceiling. The widely spaced doors were numbered. "Squadroom Nine is ours. Nine! Nine!" Mr. Smith repeated, and the door finally buzzed and opened itself into a reception office which had been converted into a television room. A burr-headed kid, who had been watching galloping mayhem, acrobatically yanked both feet off the coffee table and landed erect. "Hi! Sir, you're back just in time to help me with my calc." "Then start doing it," Mr. Smith suggested, taking a backhanded swipe at him. The kid ducked, laughing, and Kendy realized the boy liked Mr. Smith. While introducing them, Mr. Smith said seriously "Kendy will put some life in our basketball team." G rinning at the compliment, Kendy felt himself being pushed by Mr. Smith into the squadroom. He squinted at its artificial daylight ceiling. As the images of clouds drifted across Kendy wondered if strato-cumulus clouds were forming up there in the real sky. He guessed this ceiling worked the same as the commercially suppressed television method his high school chem class had been allowed to play with; organic liquid crystals were sandwiched between panes of glasses. The inner surfaces of the glass had been coated with a transparent conductor. He remembered the maze of wires from the thousands of inductors on the back of the glass. The wires converged into the electro-optical converter box. When it was plugged into their video tape player, they watched a dim American flag waving inside the glass sandwich as if it were a flat television tube. When they raised the Venetian blinds, increasing the light in the classroom, the flag had brightened. Unlike a television tube, the glass sandwich did not radiate light, but reflected it selectively. And here beneath the artificial sky, Kendy saw that the primary illumination came from upwardaimed floodlights concealed in the walls. He wondered whether a T.V. camera on the roof was aimed at tlie sky. More likely a video tape player in some dark closet was connected to tlie electro-optical converter. Reacting to the moving tape, the converter was transmitting varying positive and negative charges to the millions of induction contact points on the back of the glass sandwich I . All the fluctuating electrical currents were causing turbulence within the liquid crystals, varying their opacity, and thus varying the light-reflecting qualities within this glass ceiling so that clouds seemed to be drifting across a blue sky. "Living together in one big room," Mr. Smith said, "helps all ten guys be good friends. There is more privacy than you'd have in the Army." Kendy was staring at the stalls. There were five on each side of the grass-green carpet. "This would be yours." Tts mahogany plywood walls provided head-high' privacy on both sides, and its sawdustcolored carpet seemed springy beneath Kendy's feet. Along one wall, the wardrobe closets and built-in drawers could hold everything he owned. Although the stall was as big as a so-called double room in some college dorms, it seemed crowded, dominated by the electrically adjustable bed which hummed when button. The pillow support was being tilted up within the bed's high redwood frame of adjustable shelves, overhead tensor lights, swing-out writing board, snack-box, television and cartridge stereo with earphones for slumber learning. "With' your long arms, you can rearrange all this built-in bedside junk so you can reach everything without moving your butt." Mr. Smith's gloved hand reached into the bed's adjustable frame and twisted a rheostat. Kendy's vision seemed to be dimming. Above this stall, one rectangle of the squadroom's high artificial sky was darkening. Venus appeared and then the other stars in Kendy's sky. Curtains crept across the front of the stall. Mr. Smith yawned and opened a little door in its rear wall. "Here's your private study cell." It had dark plywood walls and a low ceiling. Kendy instinctively ducked his head. The study room seemed small, and yet it contained a darkvinyl couch' and a matching chair, facing an educational console at least twice as wide as the one he'd been shown at U.C.L.A. Four graduate students had shared that console. This one gleamed with fascinating gadgets including an attached helmet and wristbands. "You can be your own best teacher. Be ten years before Harvard students get anything like this," Mr. Smith said, opening the cabinet above the couch, revealing a mini-refrigerator unit with a two-burner electric stove on top and pull-out counter underneath beside a small sink with built-in coffee brewer. "Over here is your meditation room," Mr. Smith said, turning to the opposite wall and sliding open a narrow door. "The throne is comfortable, but these bathtubs are too short for stretched-out creative thinking. I'll show you my suite. I rate a six-foot tub." IV TT'rom Kendy's dim stall, they walked beneath the late afternoon sky in the squadroom to a panelled conference room at the far end. "I referee in here," Mr. Smith said, slapping the back of his mahogany captain's chair in passing. It was the only chair at the round table. The other chairs were stacked in a corner. Around the table lay upholstered seminar couches rumpled from use, and an aging banana peel sprawled like a brown octopus among the candy wrappers. Kendy thought this mess looked funny in such an expensive building. There was a click as Mr. Smith unlocked the door to his suite. Smiling he gestured Kendy ahead into a panelled living room complete with fieldstone fireplace and birds fluttering around an iceberg in the artificial picturewindow. "I shot this rug with my little old M-#," M. Smith said happily, poking the polar bear's open jaws with his wide brown shoe, which appeared oddly short as if he lacked toes." Had to feed him a whole clip. In here's the dinettekitchenette." Kendy looked up at a reddish fish, resembling a salmon, displayed above the ultrasonic sink. "Arctic char. When the rivers thaw, they'll even rise to a fly -- well, at least to a fast-moving Silver Doctor," Mr. Smith said. "When I was starving, I caught a bigger char on ermine guts and a ## hook, but that was in Siberia. I guess you've managed to deduce that I'm not the intellectual type. Maybe I'm supposed to counterbalance your professors. We advisors are." He opened a door. "I junked the government issue furniture in this bedroom and built my own. Check this homey touch." The circular bed revolved. "Made it myself," Mr. Smith's voice continued proudly, but Kendy was staring at the langorous painting on the wall. His imagination jumped at her. Since kindergarten, Kendy had been exposed to pregnant rabbits and see-through plastic ladies and "Growth" lectures and "Understanding Your Emotions" courses and "Marriage and Your Future Family" series nearly every semester so that his technical knowledge of female anatomy was impeccable, yet his imagination was driving him crazy. He devoured her with' his gaze. Shamefully, he was still inexperienced, although he was halfway to seventeen and burning with desire. "That's -- uh -- pretty good painting." "Can't bring girls into the squadroom," Mr. Smith said, as if reading his mind and flattering him. "I'm not kidding. We have to enforce congressional moral standards." "Cars?" "Now there's the magic word. Unfortunately not even our biggest athletic jocks are issued cars. I admit this puts us at a recruiting disadvantage. National U. is so new and our few classes of alumni are so scattered all over the world that practically nobody here can expect to find car keys under his pillow. You're not even allowed to keep your own car on campus until you're an Upper Division Student with at least a # grade-point average." "You're kidding?" Actually, Kendy didn't own a car yet and was sure Mr. Smith knew it. "The solution would be to garage your car in San Luis Obispo where the weekend action is. During the week I have to make bedchecks at midnight." Mr. Smith' sighed. "But groovy guys use their ingenuity. Some have even built dummies that breathe to fool me. Then they go running away through the dark." TTe clumped back into the living room, and his voice faltered. "Ken-Kendy, since I recruited you -- I hope you'll sign up for my squadroom. I'm not trying to con you. You can get a good education here, and your country does need you. I'm not trying to set the hook in you." Mr. Smith's face appeared almost twentyish', both eager and worried, as if he were once again a young -- whatever he had been. "We want you. Listen, you can learn here whatever you really want to learn." He grinned, tightening away his jowls. "What the hell. Congress tells us to teach patriotism. But that's something you've got to learn for yourself -- All right, let's go back to your mother." In the coffeeteria, Kendy's mother stood up, hastily pushing aside cantaloupe rind. "You've seen everything by now, I suppose. Are you sure you want "Of course I'm sure," Kendy retorted, although he hadn't been sure at all he'd intended to think it over. But he told her firmly: "Here's where I want to go to college." Flying through the night on the commercial jet from San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles Off-Shore Airport, she asked him, "You're not making Mr. Smith another father-image like your jayvee basketball coach couldn't be -- or something -- are you?" Kendy glared at her and barely spoke during the interminable landing pattern. Then he felt choked up and helped her into the periscopic stairway as if she were a little old lady. She was almost forty, he thought, with her remaining years dwindling away. He felt both protective and trapped. Trying to help her into the cab, he toppled in behind her. "You can let go of my apron strings," she remarked, lighting a cigarette. "If this is the big split, I'm proud of you." She put her arm around him. "You'll make some girl a good husband." She laughed. "Don't let her, or anyone, con you any worse than these stinkers already are doing." "Who's conning me," he said. "My God, you don't know after today?" Her broad face quivered as if she were going to laugh. He didn't want to know. Mentally he was packing his bags. In their apartment, she looked up into his face. "And you don't even remember your father," she cried. "I do," He muttered, wishing to God He did. "Nobody's going to con me," he blurted, unsure whether He meant Mr. Smith or her. npo escape, he went into the bedroom and tried to read the newspaper. In West Virginia, the rebuilding of Tin Woodman Had been Held up by a wildcat strike, and the F.B.I. was investigating. Kendy shined' his shoes on the Los Angeles Times editorial page which complained that the Soviet Union was interfering with our right to explore everything on the Moon. Their crawlers had blocked an American geological survey team outside the crater where the Soviet's vinyl dome was being inflated. After it had been pumped full of congealing bubblets, the Soviets failed to coat it with the usual aluminum reflectant, and Kendy wondered if this was because the dome would House some sort of broadcasting aerial. He switched on the bathroom television to Multi-News, where the grayish dome was under surveillance from the U.S. tele satellites. With machetes, the Soviets seemed to be chopping Headroom within the bubblet dome. They pushed out masses of bubblets like snow from the airlock and carried in equipment better broadcasting. Their next landing rocket disgorged what appeared to be an important personage. Clustering about him, the other space suits Helped him. In the United States, the latest unmanned Mars rocket ruptured itself during a static test. Reportedly, it had been reprogrammed to attach itself to PHobos in the manner of the unsuccessful Lotka II, Hopefully to shuttle its landing module down to Mars. Now the Boar dof Inquiry decided it Had been sabotaged. S aying good-bye at Los Angeles Off-SHore Airport, Kendy kissed his mother. "Stay cool," her voice choked. "Don't let them con you. Stay free." In the jet, he tried to lose his emotions among the pages of the Los Angeles Times. Significantly, the convicted dynamiter of Tin Woodman was being exchanged for an American tourist who'd been convicted of a currency violation in Leningrad. Kendy wondered if the Soviets, muffled and gagged within their own security procedures, were trying to tell us something, using dynamite instead of words. Earlier this morning, Tin Woodman had been dynamited again. On the bus from San Luis Obispo to National University, Kendy felt more concerned with his own problems. He was afraid Oliver would deliberately make trouble for him. But He grinned with excitement as he stood in the immense circle of tile-roofed buildings. He Had a feeling of freedom. Seven levels belows the surface, when Kendy lugged his suitcase into Squadroom Nine, Mr. Smith yelled with pleasure. "I have your class registration cards. Come on back to the conference room." "I've been studying the catalogue," Kendy said, "and I Have a pretty good idea what I want to take." He laid his list on the table. "Good choices," said Mr. Smith'. "But Russian would be an even better choice than Spanish. I don't want to pressure you, but as your advisor -- " Both of them reached for the catalogue. But Kendy's hand was quicker. "Sir, I need only one more year of Spanish to -- " "You'll need more than one foreign language," Mr. Smith interrupted, "if you really want to be a diplomat." He awkwardly placed a gloved Hand on Kendy's shoulder. "You'd better start studying Russian, from the -- inside. For example, the word mit means world. Also mit can mean the pre-Revolution village and its decision-making method. The peasants discussed a problem until the village elder announced there had been a unanimous decision. All conformed. If you did not, you became an outcast. But mir means more than a village commune or the world. Mir also is the Russian word for peace. So their word for peace, mir, may have different connotations and implications in a Russian diplomat's mind than our conception of peace. If you're trying to understand this world, much less whoever's beeping at us from somewhere out there beyond Arcturus, consider that one man's peace may mean another man's poison. Paz, paix?" "Peace in Spanish and French, I guess," Kendy muttered, knowing very well that this conversation was becoming an arm-twister to make him sign up for Russian. C ( Oace," said Mr. Smith, raising his palm as if he were the Pope. "Interestingly, the word for peace in Roumanian also is pace. The Swedes, Norwegians and Danes all say red. Frieden is peace in German. In Dutch, it's vrede. Czech : mir, like the Russians but pronounced a little differently. You can absorb the surface of another language every month, while you sleep, using the earphones and cerebral contacts in your bed." Kendy opened his mouth. He wanted to continue taking Spanish. Mr. Smith said: "You'll need to get beneath the surface of languages. Mir may mean peace to Russians, but Finns say ruaha. Turks say sulh, but Greeks say irini. Israelis say shalom, and Arabs say salam. Those are similar sounds which mean peace but not the same kind of peace. When you sign up for Russian here at National University you will be immersed in a Russian living experience for two hours a day so that you can get beneath the surface of the language. Let's consider the rest of your class schedule." Mr. Smith laid down a card on which he'd written the titles of six courses. Kendy put his own list beside it. When his mother had looked over his shoulder at the catalogue, she'd said National U. must be returning to the Dark Ages. Instead of offering one or two big unified experimental courses per semester like other universities, National U. apparently expected students to sign up for five or six unrelated courses as in the #'s when she was in school. She remarked that National U. might be trying to revive the Good Old #'s when the present administrators were such silent college boys themselves. She said Kendy's list of courses seemed ridiculously old-fashioned. If she had seen Mr. Smith's list she would Have squawked with rage and dissent. Only American Aspirations was the same on both lists, and it was a required course. For Kendy's choice of Spanish IV, Mr. Smith had substituted Russian I ; for Biochemestry, Integral Calculus for Physiology, Physics; for Political Science, Military Science and Tactics; and for Basketball, unarmed Combat. # (, T T ow come Unarmed Com-Obat?" Kendy blurted. "You already look good as a basketball player -- when you mature," Mr. Smith tried to explain. "The only boys -- men -- allowed to enroll in Basketball for credit are the varsity players we've recruited, so we're looking forward to your helping us on the intramural dorm team." "I didn't realize I was trying to sign up for the Varsity," Kendy murmured, embarrassed. "But how come Unarmed Combat?" "One reason National University students are excused from the draft is because it's understood that they will take Military Science and Tactics and a physical education course such as Unarmed Combat." "Oh?" Kendy considered standing up and going home, but He'd told all his high school friends He'd been accepted at National University, and he'd have to explain -- "Integral Calculus is a necessary foundation stone for any science today." Mr. Smith's gloved finger descended on Biochemistry, blotting it out. "But I was a member of the Biochem club," Kendy protested. "That's where the future is -- in the sciences." "Okay, fair enough," Mr. Smith said so smoothly that Kendy suspected he was being handed a pre-planned little victory in exchange for something else. "If you'll scratch Physiology off your list, I'll scratch Physics off of mine." "That's giving me the double shuffle," Kendy retorted, standing up, deciding to go home and to Hell with it! "Where's the broad general education you were talking about?" Instinctively, he was trying to enrage Mr. Smith so that Mr. Smith would be the one to make the break and kick him out. Or if Mr. Smith had laughed, Kendy would Have been able to get angry enough himself to break free. But Mr. Smith peered up at him with a Hurt expression. "Ken -- Kendy, you will get a broad general education. This seminar that I lead -- see its title is American Aspirations. The eleven of us meet right here in this conference room every day discussing our futures, and that is what I try to do. This is what I want to do. This is why I'm Here, to be your advisor -- for your own country. Your country needs help. Don't just ask what your country can do for you." V A fter Kendy had signed the six class registration cards and wearily unpacked in his stall, He met the other nine boys in Squadroom Nine. He decided this was the last time Mr. Smith would con him. He didn't ask which squadroom Oliver inhabited. That night in the cafeteria line, he saw Oliver's pale face. He imagined a gulping sound as Oliver looked away. Clutching their trays, they drifted in opposite directions as cautiously as two scorpions in a very large bottle. Kendy knew this eight-level underground dorm building contained nearly eigfit hundred students. Unfortunately, Oliver's squadroom also was located on this minus-seventK level. Six times a day they passed each other in the hall without speaking. Sometimes Oliver would be trotting to keep up with a huge blond boy who sported a military crew-cut and' a razor-nicked chin. By contrast, Kendy was becomI # ing enamored of the one girl he saw regularly from a distance of about ten feet, the teaching assistant in charge of their biochem lab section, but he didn't follow her around. She was at least nineteen and very serious, quietly trying to maintain order. But that damned Oliver was in the same lab section, noisily showing off his superior knowledge of all the positions of adenine-thymine base pairs which rat-ify the double helices of a rat's genes. Kendy was pleasantly surprised to be elected Representative for his squadroom, even though five of his squadmates were sophomores. For some reason, none of them wanted the job. Every Thursday night, as Representative, he had to attend the Seventh Level meeting. The Seventh Level President turned out to be the huge blond boy with stubble on his head and shaving scrapes on his chin. He came from Oliver's squadroom. His name was Rog, and he was in training for the State Department. When a squadroom representative stood up and mumbled about saltpeter, and blurted that his constitutients wanted an investigation of the cafeteria food, Rog banged his gavel. "A little saltpeter won't hurt what you haven't got. What is important is for Seventh Level to get revenge for last year. I want each: Rep to go back to his squadroom and find out which guys got letters in basketball in high school, and I want all of them out on the court in their shorts in one hour. Now let's hear a motion to adjourn this meeting." TV' endy made his third mistake-by watching that intramural basketball practice. In his streetclothes because he lacked a varsity letter, he stood on the bridge above the Eighth Level court. Rog lumbered out on the floor with an orange ball and tin whistle and with Oliver trotting behind. Carrying a clipboard, Oliver was chattering excitedly. Kendy looked down at them. The view from the bridge distorted Rog so that he looked like a squatty football player, and this same foreshortening effect made Oliver look as though he'd been stepped on. As seen from above, Oliver's head was slickly black, while Rog's appeared pinkish because his blond hair was cropped so short. "Where are all my men?" Rog kept shouting. Eight men finally straggled onto the court, enough for two practice teams by the new college rules. The four-man team rule had been intended to reduce congestion under the baskets so that basketball would become less of a contact sport. Rog ran them through a lay-up drill, in which some farmers took off on the wrong foot. When they started practicing three-point set-shots from the outside, Kendy thought the lighting might be bothering them. When Rog tried to referee them in a practice game, some kept fighting for the rebounds after each missed free shot, as in high school rules, while others protested that in college the foul shooter got to take the ball out of bounds after his free shot, whether he made it or not. This frequently revised college rule was supposed to discourage intentional fouling and speed up the game. The players ran slower and slower because they were so out of shape. Ignoring Oliver, Kendy wandered down beside the court, fascinated by the ineffectual and missed lay-ups. He thought the players must have won their letters at extremely small high schools. When Rog finally allowed the wheezing sufferers to depart, the sweaty ball rolled toward Kendy. H e knew what he wanted to do, but he was hesitant to do it, so he ignored Oliver and did it! Dribbling smoothly and flexibly toward the basket, He tried a relaxed right-hand lay-up, softly off the backboard and in. Warming up, dribbling faster with his long leg muscles loosening until he felt light-footed as a grasshopper again. He tried a left-hand layup. Beautiful! Because Rog seemed to be leaving, Kendy raced around into a dribble-drive toward the right side of the backboard. With a fierce gasp, he leaped high, stretching higher, slamming down the ball through the hoop in a right-hand dunk shot that banged his little finger against the iron rim. Dropping from the air triumphantly, he barely felt the pain. "Where'd you letter?" Rog demanded. "You look better than those farmers." And Oliver was staring with hatred so obvious Kendy felt as if they were back in that camp for gifted children for an instant with Oliver gulping and his sharp face so contorted he seemed ready to spit. Kendy had made the team. "You're my forward," Rog said, ignoring Oliver. "Let's hit the showers." Oliver was left standing. When they came out of the locker room, Oliver came scrambling down the staircase from the Seventh Level, breathing hard as if he'd run back to his room. "Rog, I have the rest of that good pie. It's in my mini-frig." "We'll go up to the coffeeteria so Kendy can come along." Rog ambled to the elevator, talking to Kendy, while Oliver trotted behind, chattering desperately. In the coffeeteria, the clean-up men were turning off the lights, but Rog laughed at them and handed Kendy a three-flavored Sundae from the machine. The two of them kidded around. Kendy had learned how to get along with football jocks in high school, where most of them had supported his unsuccessful election campaign and Rog didn't seem too different. O liver shut up, gave up and went down. Kendy felt malicious triumph. Finally, Kendy was getting Rog another round of Cokes, and Rog was laughing and slapping the infrared machine and chasing away the janitor, who kept trying to turn off the last light, when Oliver reappeared, his pale face seeming even narrower from rage. He gulped and smiled at Rog. "This -- frosh -- " He turned his sharp face to Kendy. "He keeps saying he's a better shot than you." "He is. He is," Rog laughed, crushing his own paper cup into a ball but missing his one-hand set shot at the Coke machine. "Not with a gun," Oliver said. "Yeah, I'm also captain of the rifle team." Rog grinned at Kendy and fired his imaginary submachine gun at the janitor. Oliver ennunciated with practiced clarity. "You haven't seen the little Czech Model #I they have added to the collection." "UH-uh." Rog reloaded his invisible sub-macKine gun. "WHat you trying to pull this time?" "It's a really cute little firespitter," Oliver remarked, and then his voice rose uncontrollably. "Even loaded with the twentyshot magazine, it weighs only four pounds because it fires caseless ammo, electrically ignited." "What am I supposed to do, dream about it?" "I have the key." "The hell you say!" Rog lowered his voice. "Kenny, or whatever your name is," Oliver said, smiling as if this were the first time they'd met, "why don't you go to bed?" "Okay," Kendy replied, smiling back at Oliver and feeling cautious rather than angry because he was being challenged he preferred bed to trouble. Unexpectedly, Rog draped a heavy arm around him. "You come with us, Kendy. If this little spook can really open the Trophy Room, you'll want to see those crazy contraptions we -- they -- someone took away from the K.G.B., so come along with us." Kendy grinned defiantly at Oliver. The dim hallway was empty. As always, the sliding grillwork door was locked. Now the inner steel door also was locked. They couldn't see into the Trophy Room. To Kendy's surprise, Oliver had put on black silk gloves. Deftly as a surgeon, he inserted the key, turned the lock, spread apart the grill doors. He leaned inward to unlock the inner door, using the same key, and Kendy began to worry that there might be an alarm system. As Oliver opened the inner door, no alarm sounded. Oliver pocketed the key, and Kendy realized that not only had the same key fitted both locks, but it was such a simple back-door key that any shrewd kid with a file could shape one. Kendy blinked at the darkness. It didn't seem reasonable for this Trophy Room to be so ineffectively guarded. With all these kids living here, this seemed as negligent as leaving a bulldozer with its motor running; it was an attractive hazard. It was so easy to break into, he couldn't understand it. R og's powerful hand yanked Kendy inside, and Oliver slid the doors together like jaws closing. In the darkness, a penlight glowed between Oliver's curled fingers. Kendy put 'his hands in his pockets, afraid of touching anything and leaving fingerprints. Rog slapped down one big hand on a glass-topped case and reached behind it. "Hey, yeah, this Model #I has an image-intensifier." Rog's dark shape turned toward Kendy. "Man I can really see you through the tube! Your forehead is sweating." "Got something better for you," Oliver's voice hissed. He had laid his glowing penlight on top of a glass case and was dragging out a shiny double wand entangled in wires. It scissored like an obstretrician's forceps, but it was longer and its tips were different. "You act like you're afraid of guns," Oliver remarked moving toward Kendy. "I don't take them to bed witli me at night," Kendy retorted, nervous because Rog kept aiming that Model #I at him and emitting put-put noises. "I'll bet you love guns so much you've got a big gatefold colored picture of a gun pinned above your bed with a staple in her navel." Oliver tittered. "You're talking about Rog. That's his hang-up." "Beautiful gun," chuckled Rog, stroking the long steel receiver of the Model #. "Rog, you subscribe to three gun magazines," Oliver hissed, hissed, "so Kendy is saying you are some kind I of a pervert." "No," Kendy protested. At the same time, Rog grunted: "You're kidding. I hope you are kidding." He was peering at Kendy. Kendy took an angry step toward Oliver. "Catch," said Oliver, tossing the gleaming crossed wands with trailing wires straight at Kendy's face. Kendy flinched. He could have dodged, but the metal rods would have struck the floor with a loud noise, so he caught them in midair. "Hold the other end, stupid," Oliver said. "You want to get electrocuted or something? Hold the insulated handles." He scurried toward Kendy and hooked the heavy battery box on Kendy's belt. Spread the handles so the forehead contacts open wider, a little wider than my head." Oliver flipped a switch on the battery box, and it hummed against Kendy's hip as Oliver backed away. "Wait till I put on mine." liver was making nervous  gulping sounds as he scuttled behind the counter and dragged out another battery box wired to gleaming forceps with insulated handles. "You probably don't even remember, you big bully," Oliver's voice husked at Kenedy. "You sadistically broke my nose, you son-of-a-bitch." He was shuffling toward Kendy in the semidarkness with the spread forceps gleaming in front of him like crossed sabers. "I told you I'd get you someday, you big bastard. With these we're the same size. Engarde!" Unsure if he were kidding, Kendy prudently retreated, holding his forceps in front of him like a shield. "I didn't break your nose on purpose." Backing away, Kendy wanted to escape, to run, to pull the doors open, but he would have to turn his back to Oliver. "You must be crazy." "He's always kidding around," Rog said calmly. "Teasing bigger guys like this, because he's so little he thinks he can get away with it. If he bugs you too much, kick him in the groin. He'll only run and complain to me. That's yfhat he does. He thinks I'm his mother hen. Don't you, Oliver?" Oliver emitted a wheezing noise as if he were laughing or crying. Kendy took another backward step, feeling cornered, preparing to dodge behind the glass case. "What happens if your rods touch his," Hog's voice laughed. "Big sparks?" "Stand and fight," Oliver wheezed as if he were serious. "Nobody will get hurt. You won't remember a thing." "Ollie's playing he's in the # K.G.B.," Rog said. "Like when a Russki creeps up behind a defector and clamps the contacts on his head and he even forgets how to dress himself. Like a baby, he Has to learn to talk again. He doesn't remember anything to tell." "Will it really do that?" Kendy asked, embarrassed by the shrillness of his own voice and more afraid they were playing a practical joke on him. He didn't like being laughed at. "Depends on the voltage." Oliver laughed. "Hey, Oliver," Rog asked, "did you really put the batteries in these lobotomizers?" Oliver lunged too quickly for Kendy's feet to move. As Kendy deflected the thrust by raising the rods of his own lobotomizer, there was no spark. Kendy lurched behind the glass case and compounded his panic by suspecting Oliver's lobotomizer was operative and his was not. "Coward," Oliver giggled. O etreating, Kendy gripped the  closed handles like the club that had been the caveman's lobotomizer. He felt like screaming or climbing the walls. If this were a joke and he clubbed Oliver on the head, there would be an investigation. He didn't want to be expelled. Maybe Oliver was trying to get him expelled as he had done from that kiddy kamp. Retreating, Kendy unhooked the humming battery box from his belt and tried to think ahead. "You see, he's chicken. He'd never make your stinking basketball team," Oliver cried. "Stand and fight you thin-skinned bully." Kendy edged toward the door, defensively holding the lobotomizer in front of him while its heavy battery box dangled by its wires from his other hand. As Oliver lunged, Kendy side-stepped, swinging the battery box past Oliver's knees and around them. As the wires jerked, Kendy let go of the lobotomizer, and Oliver clumped to his knees. "You bastard!" Oliver squeaked, rolling over, entangled by the wires, battery box and lobotomizer. Then he began to giggle again as Kendy lurched against the door handles. Hunching his shoulders, Kendy struggled to pull apart the steel inner doors. They slid apart, and he collided with the outer grill as Oliver's shrill giggles and Rog's hoarse guffaws attacked him from the rear. He fought the grill open and fell down in the corridor. " -- bluffed him," Rog's voice laughed, "and I liked him better than you, you little rat... Ollie, the switch on this handle -- you didn't show him how to turn it on, you little sneak. Sleep with it!" There was a loud clunk as if Rog had dropped the lobotomizer beside Oliver. "Don't go, Rog," Oliver's voice rose. "You haven't seen the Chicom AK-# yet. It shoots rockthat explode. It takes a big strong guy like you to held it." "You're a dirty little freak," Rog's voice accused. "Close the door, please, Rog." Oliver's voice sank as Kendy stalked away along the corridor. "I showed you I have more guts than he does," Oliver's voice implored. "I'll show you I can drive him out of the University." "Forget it, you poor little spook -- and stop following me around," Rog's voice rumbled. "Put those lobotomizers back in their cases," his hoarse voice went on as the steel doors clunked shut. "What are you -- " VI endy stopped where th'e hall turned right. His stomach hurt. He felt like crying. He was so angry with himself for being humiliated that he wanted to kill Oliver. He imagined his fist smashing Oliver's nose. "That's what he wants -- to get me expelled." Kendy vividly remembered packing his bags in that camp for gifted children. "He'll goad me until I beat hell out of him." But Kendy felt Oliver was smarter than that now. "He hasn't got the guts. He'll use his brains." Kendy's own stomach felt so disturbed that he went into the hall restroom. He sat in a stall remembering that his fingerprints were in the Trophy Room on the door handles and smeared on the glass cases and on the lobotomizer. Oliver might leave that lobotomizer lying broken on the floor deliberately. The security guard would find it when he unlocked the Trophy Room in the morning. There would be a quick investigation. On enrollment day, as at the State Universities, the thumb and index finger prints of all the new students had been taken. But National University was toughest, he thought. Not only had they expelled the freshman who had lid in his suitcase, they'd turned him over to the San Luis Obispo sheriff's deputies as a minor to be charged with possession of marijuana and while he was being held in County Jail the federals had done a recheck in his home town, opened sealed juvenile records and found he'd confessed to presenting an adult's driver's license during an attempt to buy a six-pack of beer. So now they were charging him with the federal offense of falsifying his application for enrollment at National University, in which he'd signed that he was of good moral character. Kendy's guts felt watery. He sat there idly reading the graffiti. A couple of them were defiantly funny. He began to feel better, less paranoid, he decided. Maybe He should simply do nothing. If Oliver did try to frame him, he'd simply tell the truth' to Mr. Smith I . His eyes blurred. At least he'd find out if Mr. Smith really was his friend. He closed his eyes. His thoughts were confused. The investigation at least might discover a few of Oliver's gloveprints upon his own greasy fingermarks, or Rog would talk too much. All three of them might be expelled together. Kendy thought if Oliver used his brains instead of jealousy, he'd realize a frameup was too risky, particularly because he couldn't depend on Rog. Rog had seemed ready for a permanent split. Oliver would have to face it. Kendy thought Oliver might end up hating Rog more than him. The thing to do was to wait it out; if nothing happened, it was best not to get involved between those two any more. Kendy walked out of the restroom feeling considerably better. He believed Oliver would retain enough cool to put all the guns back in their proper places, or Rog would. But he walked back around the bend in the hallway. A head of him, the four lines where walls met ceiling and floor seemed to converge. In the distance, beside the wastebasket on the floor, a shapeless hulk moved. Kendy blinked. His throat made a choking sound. He wanted to retreat to the safety of his bed. The hulk was trying to crawl farther from the Trophy Room, dragging its right arm and left leg as if partially paralyzed. Kendy wanted to be somewhere else. He wanted to believe he was an innocent bystander who could sneak away. He tottered, and the hall seemed to be tilting downhill toward Rog's spastically crawling body. The huge guy tried to rise, but his dragging left leg seemed to be pulling him down. His right arm flapped feebly at the air like an uncoordinated seal's flipper, and his face sank to the floor. "I'll kill the little bastard," Kendy whimpered, swaying as if his own body didn't know which' way to move. He ran to Rog and tried to hoist all that bone-heavy weight to a sitting position against the wall. In the opposite wall, the grillwork door of the Trophy Room and the steel door behind it both were closed as if nothing had happened. "Where's Oliver?" Kendy asked harshly. Rog emitted a gurgling sound, trying to speak. Kendy noticed an odor like burnt hair and a dimesized blister on the side of his head. The whole right side of Rog's face was twisted down, and the words slopped out thickly. " -- mm I drunk again?" Kendy wished he could believe it. He struggled to hoist the uncoordinated weight and put Reg n his own right leg. With his shoulder under Rog's left armpit, Kendy tried to maneuver them up the hall. He wanted to sneak the gurgling body back to its own squadroom. In Rog's own bed maybe he could sleep it off and in the morning awaken as Rog again. Kendy wanted to believe that. But they weren't going to make it. With shivering legs, he managed to support Rog as far as the hall restroom. They toppled in. Falling away from Kendy's grasp, Rog barely missed hitting his head on the basin. He hit the tile floor instead. Kendy winced. Rog rolled over and sat up, rubbing the side of his head with the wrist of his good arm and peering up at Kendy. The black pupil of Rog's right eye was much larger than his left. "You slugged me -- from behind?" "No." Kendy wanted to leave him there. Now this mess would get all three of them expelled. "Don't get up," Kendy protested. "You'll fall down again. X"m going to go get Mr. Smith." TT" endy felt a rising sensation, a warmth that made him want to cry. He couldn't understand it. He wanted to believe that Mr. Smith would help him and cover for him and to protect him like -- as if -- like a father. But he was afraid it was going to be the same as the time when the jayvee basketball coach had let him down. His advisor lay on his back on top of his round bed, asleep in his underwear with the light on. His stubby, bare feet pointed at the ceiling. One foot had a little toe sticking up. From the other foot, all the toes had been amputated. Kendy glanced from the photograph on the dresser, which showed three men grinning in furryrimmed parkas, to the neck of the fifth of bourbon protruding from the top drawer. "Panidyelnik?" Mr. Smith muttered, screening his eyes with a gray-gloved hand. "What are you doing in my room?" "Sir, I -- sir!" Kendy spilled it all, his voice shaking with fright and embarrassment and rage. "You don't want to be expelled." Mr. Smith closed his eyes. "No, sir. I want to stay here, sir. Yesterday, in our American Aspirations Seminar, you were saying one for all and all for one." "Yeah," Mr. Smith muttered. "I guess you're the one." He rolled off the bed, stumped across the floor to the closet, and shrugged into a faded silken black and red robe with the white letters dered across the shoulders above a downward-diving red-whiteand-blue dragon with its wings swim fins. "What time?" Mr. Smith laced on his special shoes and looked up at his calendar clock. With one gray hand he slipped the whiskey bottle from the drawer into the deep pocket of his flambuoyant silk robe and grinned at himself in the mirror. "You superannuated old spook, we do the impossible." As he faced Kendy, he looked oddly young again, and his smile thinned and died. "I hope they're just putting you on for laughs. I hope that's all." They found Rog crawling in the hall. "Hold it, you big poker." Mr. Smith frog-marched Rog back into the restroom and pushed him up against the tile wall. "You're not faking. One pupil's dilated. Who?" "Bedcheck," Rog mumbled. "Gotta go to bed." "You slipped and hit your head on this basin," Mr. Smith said. "Drink this." From the pocket of his robe, he hefted the sloshing brown fifth. He twisted out the cork. Like a gray octopus, his gloved hand squeezed Rog's throat below his paw so that His mouth opened. Mr. Smith poured it in while Rog gagged. "I thought you were our champion boozer?" Mr. Smith grunted. "No wonder you've been dizzy, Half-paralyzed. Stop drinking all this rot-gut. I'll pour the rest into the basin, down the tubes. You can't Handle Hard liquor any more, but I won't say anything. I'll cover for you if you'll forget what happened. Forget it all. Don't say anything. Don't answer any questions. You're so drunk you need a medical checkup after falling and hitting your head." Between them they supported Rog, walking him along the hall to the elevator, to the dispensary and into the isolation room. "Lie down. Dream you have the measles. Kendy, find him a hospital gown."  fter a long time, Mr. Smith returned with the doctor. By now, Rog was able to control his right arm fairly well. During the encephalographic examination, his eye-pupils began to equalize. The doctor said he might have suffered a concussion and should be kept under observation for twenty-four hours. "Also, young man, with your encephalogram, stop this drinking before it's too late." Mr. Smith grinned. "Rog, you know you could be expelled for boozing in a federal dormitory. We'll keep our moutbs shut. You do the same." The clock indicated # :# A.M., and Kendy felt dizzy with weariness. He felt fragmented. He hoped Rog would be all right. Mr. Smith shrugged. "Let's go for a walk. You know where?" "You think he's still in there?" Kendy mumbled when they stood in front of the grillwork door to the Trophy Room. "It's locked." "You want a key?" Mr. Smith laughed. "I'll tell you where the legal key to the Trophy Room is hanging in plain sight in the building superintendent's office with a concealed camera aimed at it from the ceiling. I'm not going to try to steal for you. I don't want to lose my pension." "It's a trap," Kendy muttered, dimly realizing that such a simple key deliberately hung in plain sight had been an invitation to copy it. "Got to find Oliver and take his key away from him." "If he's not inside," Mr. Smith said softly, hooking his gray fingers in the grillwork door to the Trophy Room. "My fingerprints are inside." Kendy couldn't understand why Mr. Smith kept smiling at the ceiling. At any moment, the night security guard might happen to look down this hall and catch them. Kendy looked back. He caught Mr. Smith grinning at the ceiling as if there were a surveillance lens up there. But the Hall seemed nothing but smooth surfaces except for the wastebasket on the floor. Kendy groped downward through paper cups and candy wrappers until he found the key. "You just improved your grade," said Mr. Smith. Lacking gloves, Kendy used his handkerchief when he unlocked the doors to the Trophy Room. Mr. Smith grinned and clumped straight across the dark room to the light switch. vn top of the glass case lay the Czech Model #I sub-mach'inegun, which Rog had been playing with. Kendy stared down at both lobotomizers lying on the floor. The wires of one lay twisted beside its battery where he'd entangled Oliver. The other was nearer the door. Beside Kendy's foot gleamed droplets of blood as if Oliver had ended up with a bloody nose. "That crazy little idiot. I can't understand why he would attack Rog. I thought he Hated me." Frantically, Kendy began wiping off the lobotomizer he had handled. "Maybe Oliver's still in the building, and he's gone to get the security guard. Maybe he's set a trap for me." Mr. Smith had closed the steel doors, and he had started polishing the glass cases with the sleeve of his robe. "If you luck out of this without being expelled, you will be older, maybe wiser. What a guy needs is a girl-friend. Understand?" "What?" Puzzled and wearyeyed, Kendy peered at Mr. Smith, who had picked up the little submachine gun. This late at night or early in the morning, Mr. Smith suddenly looked at least fifty years old and increasingly worried. "God! Five more years until my full pension, and I could blow it all for helping you. This is federal property. Breaking in here is a federal offense." Mr. Smith abruptly returned the gun to its glass case. "I must be nuts helping you, risking my pension after spending my whole life from the age of seventeen in the service of my country. Two undeclared wars, wounded twice. That was nothing. Since then I'm one man who's earned his pension. God, it was cold up there! Ever heard of Vorkuta? After two years I was exchanged for a covert Soviet agent who'd been framed for rape in Boston because he put his arm into a hollow tree. The micro-film already had been removed from that drop. Glorious exchange! I came back to the United States with no fingers. You don't understand what I'm feeling, so Hurry up and let's get out of here." Mr. SmitK looked like a frightened old man. Kendy realized Mr. Smith Had been put out to pasture at National University. At that moment, Kendy felt both sorry for Mr. Smith and grateful to him. Mr. Smith's gloved Hand closed on his shoulder and shoved him gently toward the door. Quietly they slipped out of the Trophy Room. "Lock the doors," Mr. Smith whispered. "Start worrying about the key." Kendy swayed, dizzy with weariness. He thought he should dispose of the key, not merely hide it. " -- to do about Oliver... we go... our Squadron." As if from a great distance Mr. Smith's voice was saying : " -- a Serious talk about your future." "Excuse me," Kendy muttered, realizing he'd been clinging to Mr. Smith's arm. "I guess I've got my share of -- emotional problems." Tlearily, he followed Mr. Smith through the sleeping darkness of Squadroom Nine, shuffling across the grass-like carpet beneath the glittering stars and into the conference room. From across the mahogany table, Mr. Smith reached to push the coffee burbler toward him, but Kendy shook his head. "I want to thank you." Kendy felt choked by another surge of emotion. Mr. Smith's aging face peered through' the steam rising from a coffee cup. "Will you do me a favor?" "Gee, yes." In that moment of sleepy gratitude, Kendy would have done anything for Him as if... Father, father! "Next year enroll as a freshman at U.S.C." "What? What?" Kendy's voice broke in disbelief and anguish. "You don't want me Here?" "Don't look like that. You can come back here after two years. We'll send your scholastic records to the U.S.C. registrar -- showing you were an honor graduate from an exclusive prep school which we subsidize near Palo Alto." His gloved Hand reached across the table toward Kendy, and he tried to laugh. "On your prep school records, if you like, you can be shown as President of the student body." "Of a high school which does not exist? What are you trying to do to me? First, you recruited me; now, are you flunking me out?" "We need you." Mr. Smith's smile shivered between aging I # fright and youthful enthusiasm. "There are two important things we need you to do while you're young enough to do them. The first is for practice. Like other colleges, the University of Southern California enjoys research contracts funded by the Defense Department. But here at National University, we have the most important contract. We test the security precautions at the other universities. You'll enroll at U.S.C. and -- " "You want me to infiltrate U.S.C. ?" Kendy blurted, his leg muscles tightening. "Like a spy." #tQit down. You'll simply be  assigned one easy security problem to be completed during your first year. That's how you are earning your tuition right now. Don't get up. You Have a bigger problem right now. You are one of three students who broke into a federal security area, the Trophy Room. Rog's recovering from an -- accidental -- mental overload and probably will be expelled for something else. Oliver seems to be in hiding, but possibly will be retained here and protected. You're sitting here because I'm protecting you." "I'm going home." "If you did, there'd be an official investigation as to why you left. I couldn't protect you. I'll be arrested too, unless I cooperate with my superiors. Because you're a minor, you'd probably be remanded to the security building of the California Youth Authority until you're twenty-one. At thSt time, there'd be a federal court trial under security conditions. Unless the National Emergency has been repealed by then, you'd probably serve # to # years as an adult." "For what? For what?" "Obviously for breaking laws. With so many new laws, you break them by breathing. Ever since Congress declared the National Emergency, for nine years they've been passing more and more stringent laws, trying to keep the lid on. At least let me cover for you." "You're conning me," Kenny cried, "not helping me. You waited like a -- vulture for me to make a mistake, for me to break a law. I refuse to be a spy." "That's the wrong word." Mr. Smith's face flushed. "You won't be a spy. You're not qualified to be a spy. You'll simply be a freshman who has been assigned to photograph a classified centrifuge. Because all this research is being sponsored by the government and paid for by the government, surely the government has an obligation to test the security procedures. If you complete your assignment, we'll simply mail the photographs to the Chief Security Officer at U.S.C. along with an explanation of how you penetrated their security, so that he can make the necessary corrections." "If I'm caught?" "We'll notify the F.B.I. and the whole thing will be hushed up. Happens every day. This is necessary if we're to maintain any security in this world. What a paradox! Fortunately, those brave men you mistakenly criticize and denigrate and mislabel as spies are much more skilled and intelligent and enlightened than you could ever be!" Mr. Smith seemed genuinely angry. "Intelligencegathering services are doing more to prevent war than diplomats It's the intelligence-gathering services of all sides who are restraining the so-called statesmen from more miscalculations which could kill us all. How well I know! That's why you're alive today -- ungratefully sneering at -- spies." "I wanted to be a diplomat -- not a stinking spy." '"T"his time Mr. Smith didn't get angrier. He wearily smiled and said: "You'll learn. You're too Honest with yourself to be a diplomat in this world. Diplomats have to wear their heads twisted backward. They can't negotiate realistically because they're talking backward to impress their own people. But the people are confused and angry at everyone because the world's too complicated for them to understand. That's why the so-called democratization of Russia is increasing the threat of war. Their acrobatic diplomats are performing for their own people, who don't know what they want. Ours are talking toward the American voters. So there's less and less genuine face-to-face communication between the diplomats. In effect, they're blindly bumping bottoms, while reciting to please their own people." Mr. Smith managed to grin, tightening his jowls until he appeared thirtyish again. "Believe me. It's the intelligence-gathering services who try to listen to what the other side really wants, what the other side is afraid of, what the other side can do. It's the intelligence-gathering services on both sides who have been preventing miscalculations by the politicians. To prevent wars and riots, the intelligence-gathering services are beginning to enter the communications media, trying to modify public opinion. The intelligence-gathering services Have been trying to save us from chaos, while you wrinkle your nose at spies." "You've conned me from the day you started recruiting me." "Did I tell you to get mixed up with a slob like Rog?" Mr. Smith's grin became infuriating. "And a potential little genius like -- " "No! You simply waited for me to fall into any trap." "If you believe that," Mr. Smith said, "consider it part of your education." "You've screwed up my education. You changed my class schedule until biochem is the only significant course I have." "You can become a biochemist if that's the life you want. You will have the opportunity to learn lab techniques more advanced than any in the United States, because U.S.C. has just recruited an old fan from overseas who now calls himself Dr. Magadan Smyert. He was E. Vavilov's teacher." C t T t's all got nothing to do with me," Kendy cried, protesting everything, but reluctantly remembering that this Dr. Smyert, or whatever his name was, had escaped to the West a few weeks after Dr. E. Vavilov's return from Phobos. This Dr. Smyert claimed to have no knowledge of why Lotka II never descended to Mars. He claimed he had been in Leningrad, working in a different administrative pigeon hole, where he had been relegated to planning simpler laboratory procedures which could be taught to unskilled studenttechnicians. "Everything in the world has something to do with you." Mr. Smith sighed and cautiously laid his gloved hand on Kendy's shoulder. "I've saved you from being expelled, jailed or drafted. All I'm asking from you is a minimum of patriotism." "Damn it," Kendy cried shrilly, "my mother warned me about guys like you. You keep trying to con me." "Your mother is a shrewd wo --  lady. I don't understand your mother. She's patriotic, too, in her own way. But she's tangled in the past as she remembers it before the National Emergency. All the labels have been changed since then. She would have been called a liberal then. She's considered a chaos-worshipper now. What does she want? A return to disorder in the streets?" "I'll be damned if I understand what's going on now," Kendy muttered, swaying toward sleep again. "You will be damned," Mr. Smith muttered, helping him up. "In the meantime, we struggle among ourselves. We can't understand the noises from galactic space. We don't even know why the Russians retreated from Phobos or what they've found on our Moon. They've drilled into something under that plastic dome." His voice grew more tired. "We don't know why they retreated from PHobos as if they were afraid. They've managed to maintain such superb security. We can't get near E. Vavilov. You claim it's got nothing to do with you. Listen, kid, any new knowledge is like the sharp edge of a weapon emerging. It will have a lot to do with us all." He pushed, and Kendy tottered out of the conference room, into the darkness of the squadroom, under the artificial stars, crossing the grassy carpet toward his stall, with Mr. Smith pushing him. "A few hours sleep," Mr. Smith whispered, "and you'll know I'm right." "About what?" Kendy mumbled. "U.S.C.'s only one. You said two. What's the other thing I'm supposed to do?" "They didn't tell me." Kendy collapsed within the framework of his bed and rolled on to his back in an agony of exhaustion beyond sleep. Alone beneath the star-spangled false sky he felt empty grief. "Not my father." He stared at the rising Moon in the glass sky. "Nobody." Blinking at a red star, He thought it shouldn't be so close. As his eyes opened and shut and opened, it seemed to move like a planet  -- like Mars. When he closed his eyes against it, he saw a bright speck separating from it and enlarging toward Earth like a rocket, and He knew he was dreaming. He opened his eyes, He thought, and saw the immensity of the galaxy and beyond. In the morning, He woke smiling and ready to face the universe. "Nobody's going to con  his Month in SF , by Harry Harrison by James E. Gunn And many others in the big February issue of IF -- on sale now I And watch for the March if -- special Hugo Awards Issue !         Qalamf Tt occurs to me that we've be- come overly concerned witH what is "best," or with what is "significant." We've become trend-spotters, in this field, to such an extent that we've bowed to the consequent pressure to make trends out of the flimsiest pretexts, or to raise up resistance to trends just as if they were obJ jectively real. This cannot be good. And yet it's natural. There is both the constant human motivation to isolate excellence (as a means of striving toward it), and there is our heritage from those first brave days in the latter #'s when the earlier serious sf anthologists were searching out and reprinting stories that were, indeed, the best of the accumulated literature. Nothing at all like that situation exists today. In some cases, "best" stories are selected, nominated, anthologized and given awards before thei average reader has ever heard of them, let alone read them. In some cases, by the time he gets around to reading them, next year's crop is already undergoing the same swift process. The reader's voice and opinion are considered valuable, of course -- it's simply a shame that they are so often behind the trend. Similarly, when an editor is slothful enough or prestigious enough not to jump into the annual trending contest at the first crack of the gun, he or she often makes up for this by selecting from sources so esoteric that the normal reader cannot begin to perceive whether even better examples might not lie neglected in darker corners of those same distant granaries. The acceptance of the best becomes a matter of a somewhat different sort of faith, but in either case what the reader is asked to do is to believe in a given editor or editorial panel; to accept the judgment of mere mortals in a situation so complex and so swiftly unfolded that only angels might confidently dance within its permutations. Orbit #, edited by Damon Knight for Putnam, at #, for instance, is billed as "The Best All New Sf Stories of the Year." It happens to contain some remarkable work. But if it Is to be credited for that, then it must also be faulted for not saying "... as selected by one man who didn't see everything, doesn't have time to read everything, can't pay in competition with I all markets..." etc., or, more simply, "... as selected by one man." Don't get me wrong, as the poet says. On any number of levels of abstraction, one cannot blame a commercial enterprise for making a commercial noise. But some day we shall be a little bit diminished by this plethora of pottage, and you know it, and I know it, and I just! Happen to be weeping a little in advance of the rest. Having gone through all that, it's a pleasure to say that Richard Wilson's best story ever, to my knowledge, is in this book. "Mother to The World" is simply beautiful; a last-couple-in-the-world story which makes its points with unprecedented majesty because its author had the goodness, humanity and wisdom to say simply what many other writer have feverishly said in the now great number of years since we began admtting that Earthmen, as well ing Earthwomen. Yet the remaining stories are nowhere near as good as other, similar stories by these same writers. It may be true, but it seems hardly credible, that they themselves failed or will fail to do better within these # days. It is unbelievable that no one did better. Nothing about this book could justify the high per-word price tag except the "best" tag. The latter is unjustified in fact, and so is the other; in the reprint paperback market, something like this relationship will then recur on its own scale, for the publisher will surely plaster the jacket with' even more outrageous blurbs, there being a law about the weight of the adjectives being inversely proportional to the success of the editor's project. There are those who find it relevent to say the editor doesn't write the jacket copy. Neither does the B-girl own the saloon. And there are those who say "Wait, next year's will be better," to which one can fairly reply with the comment that the present volume, then, is not only based on no reference to either the past or present, but is foredamned by the future. "Once And Future Tales" collected from FSF by its editor, Edward L. Femian, is published by that brave enterprise, Harris-Wolfe # Co., at #. And with an introduction by Judith Merril. (Some day, when I die, I will find myself standing on an underline between two parentheses. A mighty voice will thunder: "Budrys, prepare to meet thy Maker!", but just before I step forward onto the lava, seme hovering assistant imp will lisp : "first, an introduction Be that as it will be, Once and Future Tales contains, besides a dull chapter from Judy's memoirs, Thomas Burnett Swann's "The Manor of Roses," Theodore Sturgeon's "When You Care, "The Masculine Revolt," Rosel George Brown's "Fruiting Body," and "End of The Line" by Chad Oliver, along with several other stories you. need not concern yourself about, they being imitations of bad stories. I read this book principally because of "The Manor of Roses," which is accompanied by a stunning jacket painting, promising much on the story's behalf. (The rationale goes that if the story got this kind of response out of its illustrator, it must have something direct and concrete in it). And "The Manor of Roses" is indeed an interesting story. Wrapped in the style of an historical romance set in England of the Middle Ages, the adventure it unfolds to its young protagonists are based on the supposition that mandrakes really were a problem in those days; that within certain limits there were times when you couldn't tell whether a person was animal or vegetable. Beyond that, the story endows the vegetable people with the terrible ambivalent need to either be adopted as humans, so that they may retain human softness and guise, or to take horrid revenges after they coarsen into creaking fibrous denizens of the soil. Swann has created a story capable of the full range of human concern, from rough-and-tumble to deadly peril, from innocent chaffering to dewy romance, from theft to pathos. It's a shame he went beyond this, by framing it with a beautifully written but patly plotted, and totally superfluous, incidental story leading up to the "shock" ending I suppose he thought he needed to go out on. Whoever and wherever he is, he should know he was doing just fine until he tried to do his own editorial thinking. "The Masculinist Revolt" is cursive moods, simply telling the political history of the Masculinist party, from its inception at the hands of a codpiece-maker to its effective doom when Shepherd Mibs fired the shot that pierced the cheeks of Elvis Borax. And indeed, every word rings true, true, and mostly funny. All the inventions are inventions of detail, mind you -- the central notion, that men might rebel against the increasing matriarchy of the U.S.A., is not new and was not new when people began applying it to, say, Nineveh. The inventions sometimes either flag or overextend themselves, almost certainly because Tenn had already told the story to his friends so many times that he was deathly bored with precisely its earliest and most outstanding ideas by the time he got to the typewriter. There is no particular reason for this story, except that Tenn was equipped to summarize the dynamics of political action and also is fully capable of generating absurdities, with great verisimiliture ad infinitum from any standing start he cares to demonstrate. "When You Care, When You Love" is the Sturgeon of recent days, concerned with how the creations of his youth might work out in practice. This is a story which begins by depicting a love of fantastic intensity, with such conviction that one might well weep for its lack in oneself. Then it goes on to explore a means whereby sufficient desire and sufficient dedication might bring one of the lovers back from death. The entire rationale there is not only science fictional, it's brilliantly so. But having reached this difficult and often elusive point -- which is the point a writer is interested in -- Sturgeon lacks the energy to resolve the story properly for his reader. He has carried all his characterizations and prose structures remarkably well along the platinum thread of his narrative. He has for instance first taught us some science, then extrapolated it, then related it to overwhelming human emotion, which he also describes beautifully. He sets it down, pleased with himself, then recalls his audience, looks up, waves his hand at the componenents, and says: "There it is, folks," with a winning smile. Sturgeon deserves to smile like a winner. But the reader deserves to be brought to the point of saying to himself, on his own behalf, "Here it is!" and the author should keep mum. Sturgeon knows that; he taught it to us. A facile structure of words, tacked on to counterfeit an objective meaning to everything that's happened to his characters heretofore, remains a structure of words, not of events, and as Sturgeon also knows, it's events that are life. Words are merely the best present tool we have to grapple life with. What I am saying about this book and these stories is that they're self-conscious. For one reason or another, this book, like any of these stories, does not act as a catalyst to the imagination. Instead, it seeks the approval of the intellect. Seeks it well, seeks it winningly, but should it? Should we all be so damned selfconscious? A young writer -- Bob Shaw is a young writer, whereas, say, Algis Budrys, who is approximately the same age, is an old writer -- should do what Bob Shaw has been doing; working his way through' stories. He should not think much about what he is doing, or why, or if he does he should not take up the reader's time with evidences of these purely personal concerns. The reader has paid his money and have the writer move in with him. Unless he be working for a specified audience of people who are interested in various aspects of his technique -- that is, unless he be teaching the craft -- to people who have in some manner paid tuition fees, as distinguished from the great number who buy tickets to stories, he has to distort both himself and those who deal with him, or else he has to be distorted by them, each time he does anything but present his story as distinguished from himself. These are not statements of my opinion; they are statements of fact, and I hate to keep harping on them, especially since I then find my opinions quoted favorably by people who think you can legislate creativity, almost as often as I find them attacked by people who believe literary criticism is a branch of pressagentry. But I must harp on them in cases where they explain, first of all, talented but somehow less satisfactory writers. The general quality is most often called by the term "storytelling ability," and it has now gotten so scarce, in the minds of some people, that even a curmudgeon like Lester del Rey, who really knows better, is moved to give him overblown praise on the covers of a merely adequate novel. Only Keith Laumer, of all those pressed into service as shills by Terry Carr, speaks an undeniable truth about The Two-Timers, an Ace Science Fiction Special. "Smoothly written, immensely readable," he says correctly. "Painfully good," says Harlan Ellison. "A damned fine book," says Lester. No. No. It is a reasonably well told narrative about a man who wants so much to bring the dead back into his arms that he succeeds in crossing time, where he does indeed find his beloved -- in his own arms, he being still married to her in that parallel world. Shaw brings to this intensely workable situation all the range of his sympathy for the human detail -- the beloved who is not wholly lovable, the hero who is just sufficiently flawed, the villain with the fatal seeds of heroism in him. But he makes serious mistakes, and one can see them. Some of them are mistakes of detail, apparently stemming from the error of deciding to set this book in Montana. Not for one minute can anyone seriously believe that Shaw has seen Montana, or a Lincoln sedan, or an American policeman, a park in a city of the western U.S.A., a suburban house, a lakeside cottage in the Rockies, or any of those other things he names here in this book, while actually describing something that probably is in fact Manchester. He has never heard an American talk, or if he has, he very properly refused to believe it. The sub-notion of warping of the entire universe by the passage of one body out of it, and the warping of another by the passage of a body into it, is just so much barnacle. Not that Jack's passage into John's world might not somehow have such an effect, so that the Earth spins farther away from the Sun, the Sun flies off at a tangent, and the entire universe begins to run like a cheap stocking. But this seems hardly likely, and one doesn't even need to bring in Continuous Creation as a hypothesis that would permit Jack to thrash about in perfect physical freedom; all it means is that somewhere one has to pack a few hydrogen atoms a little bit closer together in some interstellar gas cloud tens of tens of tens of thousands of cubic light-years in extent. More important, what has it to do, really, with' Jack and you and me? It's a rather good story, and I recommend it. But Shaw is trembling on the verge of teaching himself to edit, to inject the commercial thing, to introduce the visible signs of conscious effort. Jack and you and me are the same in Manchester as Montana; love is all, ennobling and destroying; the universes within the soul totter sufficiently loud so that we may usually leave God's handiwork undisturbed. I will admit to being impressed with Shaw's talent to the extent that I'll swallow  his hypothetical time travel via  migraine headache. What the hell.  But I'm not impressed with it to the extent that I feel it outweighs , the importance of the author. By plastering this book over with praise, the editor has preconditioned the audience response. Since the book is not that good -- and I can't believe Terry Carr thinks it's that good -- he has deliberately preconditioned it toward distortion. By lending themselves to the extravagant praise Terry wanted to have, del Rey and Ellison Have participated in a situation based on some consideration other than objective appraisal. Ellison loves to write critical phrases like "The writing is exquisite. It knocked me cold..." because there's a definite charm to writing like that. Del Rey loves a good story and nurtures storytellers. But he can't really Have "finished with a feeling of complete satisfaction." Come on. If you praise a mediocre book, because you want to sell more copies, or because you like writing blurb copy, or because you sincerely believe the writer deserves good things, what you are doing is helping to perpetuate the book's errors. You stand in danger of encouraging a writer you like to inject cosmic sf elements t into a human story, to that story's inevitable diminution of impact. You stand in danger of encouraging a man to think of gimmicks, of driving him directly into the arms of a seductive way of life in which things are made so pleasantly flattering that one loses the guts to actually put out any unusual work.The process is plain to see, and always has been. And where it starts, and who it starts with, is not in the obviously sycophantic and ponderous extravagances that every interesting new writer encounters and can recognize; it starts with the well-intentioned distortions of those he respects and who often wish him well.      At the # Boskone (short for "Boston Science Fiction Conference"), the guest of honor was Larry Niven, and his speech was a technological evaluation of the phenomenon of teleportation -- not so much whether it exists or not as an examination into the engineering aspects of it, if it exists at all. We heard the speech, and liked it well enough to ask Niven to go into the subject more deeply in the form of an article for Galaxy. Which he did. The result, entitled The Theory and Practice of Teleportation, will be in our next issue. After all, even a psi phenomenon must somehow or other come into contact with the conservative, relativistic universe of known physical law. Conservation of momentum, for example: What happens if you teleport out of a speeding car? Conservation of energy: If you teleport from the top of a mountain to a valley, where does the potential energy of the change in height go? Good questions; and Niven has some pretty good answers for them as you'll see next month. At the same time you'll be seeing the first installment of a new Keith Laumer novel (and, in our estimation, his best yet) And Now They Wake. A handsome and talented lady named Anne McCaffrey, proud in the possession of the first Hugo ever won by a female science-fiction writer, is with us with The Weather on Welladay. And if we squeeze if in, we hope to have an unusual novelette by a mathematician entitled Godel Numbers. What's a Godel Number? Well, for one thing it is a way of conveying any message -- any message at all -- by writing down a single (admittedly rather large) number, whether the message is "Dad, send cash" or the Encyclopedia Britannica. See you then... A Igis Budrys became a fan of science fiction wbile Ke was working on a chicken farm and going to High school in New Jersey. If that sounds like the story of a young American farm boy, tKe implication is tHe complete opposite of tKe truth. His background is urban and international. He was the son of the late Lithuanian Consul GeneraLin exile to the United States, which made Him a resident alien. But even if Ke had been an American citizen, he would have been unable to vote when his first story was published in # -- because he was too young. Nevertheless, this story and others by Kim that soon began appearing were remarkable for their mature approach to the goals and aspirations of the coming age of space in America. Some of Kis background does show in his novels, however. THe Falling Torch depicts the complexities and confusion of real diplomacy in exile; and Who? is a speculative psychological novel against a coldwar situation that is convincing and excellent in detail. Except for Kis brief early farming experience, all of Kis work has been connected with some aspect of writing or publishing. He worked as an editorial assistant on Galaxy Magazine under Horace L. Gold. After getting more editorial experience at a small book publishing firm, he returned to free-lance writing. He moved to Chicago when he was offered the position of chief editor for Regency Books. As editor there, Ke was busy encouraging other authors to write science fiction for him while he was busy doing a difficult political biography -- his first serious venture into nonfiction. When Regency Books became inactive, he transferred to the staff of Playboy. At present, lie is engaged in public relations work, mixing that type of writing with critical work for his regular Galaxy Bookshelf column. He and his wife, Edna, share a house in Evanston, #., with their four handsome and active sons. Most of his free time is spent pedalling around on a ten-speed bicycle, often accompanied by one or more of the boys. When he talks of the wonders of technology, it's hard to tell whether he's discussing a new rocket booster or the virtues of some obscure bicycle part. Fortunately, he still finds time to turn out an occasional piece of fiction. J ames Blish is a man who seems to be a complete contrast to himself in almost every way. A few years ago, he rode to work on a high-powered motor scooter, scowling out from a helmet and goggles at the stupidity of motorists around him. Then he would doff the helmet, put on his conservative Homburg, and appear as any rising young business executive. As a critic, he can be both the least patient and most patient of human beings. Some of his critical essays (under the name own name) were so savagely insistent upon a high level of craftsman ship that several writers were afraid to write again. Yet at the Milford Workshop sessions each year, he is the most patient encouraging of teachers, gentle as he pinpoints an error and quick to recognize any sign of talent. He has a persistent tremor to his hands, and his smile seems diffident. But when an argument starts, he's in there with tooth and claw, and the smile is suddenly that of a tiger about to As a writer, he has covered the field of fiction more thoroughly than most -- from pure hack sport stories to science fiction that is acclaimed for its philosophical daring and technical excellence. He has no use for psi stories; yet his Jack of Eagles was perhaps the wildest and best-explained of all wild talent novels. His Okie stories were worked out with exemplary realism -- yet the final story, The Triumph of Time, wound up in a blaze of universe-destroying and multiuniverse creation; he likes his stories to be tied up neatly at the end -- and yet that novel left a dozen questions to tantalize the reader. His Case of Conscience used space travel as a background to examine an ancient problem of heresy on Earth -- and won him a Hugo for the best novel of #. At present, he's living in an apartment in New York City with three cats and a wife; the wife is the artist, Judith Ann Lawrence, whose work has so well illustrated many of Robert Silverberg's fact books. They're planing to move to England some time in #, where Jim will be able to devote full time to his writing. Hopefully, that should increase his already high output of excellent fiction, and bring us still more James Blish stories. ( continued from page #) no more than an abstraction of a real thing; in the process of abstracting, kinds of meaning were inevitably lost; the Laputan would converse only by pointing to real objects, pretty much limiting his conversation to nouns and verbs and not too many of them. Dean Swift invented this particular loonie as a satire against some primitive semanticists, and what he meant us to understand from it is true: we can't operate without some kind of abstractions in communication, and it's silly to attempt to avoid them. But it's worth" while to try to remember now and then what the abstractions mean. Especially when we play the game of polar opposites: Sure, all numbers are either odd or even; but does that imply there is really anything that odd numbers have in common apart from the fact that they are not even? Sure, some nations practice what we know as democracy and others do not; but does that mean that all of those which don't are natural allies of each other? Or enemies of those which do? Perhaps those implications can be shown to be so in fact... but How seldom we try to test them; and How often we find ourselves acting on conclusions that result only from words... T#liich is a long way from ' ' where we started this editorial. Getting back to number theory, we would like to acknowledge that our particular thoughts on this subject at this time were sparked by a first-rate new book called An Adventurer's Guide to Number Theory by Richard Friedberg (McGraw-Hill). Over the years, we've discovered some interesting correspondences between number theory and science fiction. One is that in both cases people respond vigorously; they are turned on, or turned off, but in either case decisively. If you are one of those who are repelled by discussions of numbers, forget it; this book isn't for you. But if the subject interests you, the book will delight you. Friedberg explains and illustrates as He goes along, and the result can fill a good many Hours. If you chance to find yourself as a member of the crew of a long-orbit space voyage, this book and something to scribble on is guaranteed to keep you occupied as long as you like; you'll still be trying to prove Fermat's last theorem, or to understand why the sum of the first n odd numbers is always n # by the time the rings of Saturn heave into view... s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CF-# by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above arc the only ones we offer! How to Get This Unusual Value Edited by Anthony Boucher Two giant volumes. Over # pages of exciting fiction. A handsome addition to your library. Includes John Wyndham's classic ReBirth... Heinlein's Waldo . Anderson's Brain Wave... a total of # full-length novels, # novelets, # short stories by such masters as Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Judith Merril, Alfred Bester, A. E. Van Vogt, C. M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon -- and more. as. when you oin the Science Fiction Book Club and agree to accept only # books during the coming year. B ecause you enjoy Science thrillers, the Science Fiction Book Club would like to acquaint you with the most imaginative, informative, entertaining new science fiction books as they are written. That is why we have arranged to send you this #-page Treasury of Great Science Fiction for only I#e -- to help cover shipping -- with a Trial Membership in the Club. Here's how the Club works: each month it offers a really superb new science fact or fiction book at a fraction of its regular price. Even though these books sell for #, # and more in their original editions, club members get special full-length, hard-cover edichoose to take an extra value selection at higher prices). And the Club tells you in advance what each monthly selection will be. During your Trial Subscription you agree to take as few as four books in the next twelve months. After that you may take as few or as many books as you want, and you may cancel at any time. If not delighted with introductory package, return it within # days to cancel membership. Mail coupon to: Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, New York, #. Gal ?kXV March # Niv.n  McCaffrey and many others by OF by by  -- and many more Try it alone or with any combination. Try It alone or with either Van Dyke, mustache or both. Now at last you can have the experience of wearing sideburns, mustache, or Van Dyke that is so real looking your friends will think it is your very own! Competition tough... want to impress your employer or girl friend... want to look older or .younger or different... coo) or sharp'?? Do you miss the attention you should be getting'? Try a Masculiner Van Dyke, Sideburns andor Mustache... all three, separately or in different combinations... onds! Don't miss out on all the fun that so easily can be yours! Send for your Mustache, Sideburns and Van Dyke at once! Simply check the color you want in the coupon or send a sample of your ha'r and leave the matching to our expert. Your hair sample is color matched at no extra cost... or order Adheres securely... off and on in seconds... can be worn as is or trimmed to just the style you want... wear it confidently whenever tache or Sideburns... sent in plain wrapper with order. you want it to be or your money back! Try It... see the difference. '# # Amherst St., East Orange. New Jersey or I may return everything for full refund. Send color checked or  please match sample of my hair enclosed. Rush the Following: Hease Send Order in Color Checked: Blonde  Dark Brown Black  Grey  Silver  ight Brown Q Dark Auburn  Medium Brown Q Light Auburn #. Send all #. (I sve #. Send Cash, Check ar M.O,  Mustache #.  Van Dyke #,  Sideburns #. rieix B ail Bl.  Lij n I cotioii Name Address City State . Zip , Entire Contents Copyrighted # s #(i Editor Science Editor Associcde Editor Managing Editor Pablisher Adyertising Circulation Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New Tork, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) f# In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Centrai America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere S#. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additionai mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Bobert M. Guinn, President All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicfted material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N.Y. Title Beg. U. S. Pat Off. March, #  Vol. #, No. # by Anne McCaffrey by J. W. Swanson by Keith Laumer by Ray Banks by Use Braun by James Tiptree, Jr. by Brian W. Aldiss by Larry Niven by Wiliy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition Is published In Braille and Living Tape. The Election Everybody Won ITe're pleased to announce ffie   winners of tKe # Galaxy Award (see tKe announcement elsewhere in this issue), and we particularly want to tanir ifie hundreds of subscribers of Galaxy and If who did the voting. You might be interested in tfie procedure. Om' plan from the beginning was to have the choices made by the readers themselves, and to the maximum extent possible by all readers, rather than any particular group. Since we could, not reach every reader of If and Galaxy, we limits the voting to subscribers, partly because their names were readily available  to us, and partly because they would be in a good position to choose among aU the eligible stories, since they would have in nearly all cases read them all. So we selected samples of subscribers at random (the number of persons chosen was relatively small -- but by standard statistical criteria, enough for good reliability), and mailed them ballots. One list of every story published in If in # went to If subscribers; a similar list of Galaxy stories went to Galaxy subscribers. We asked them to indicate their favorites, totaled the votes and selected the top # from both magazines. A list of these # went to a fiuiher random sample of people who were subscribers to both Galaxy and If, and their votes picked the winners, I t was an interesting experience, and, we think, a worthwhile one. Certainly we now have an even better idea of what you like than we had before. We'll be doing it again next year! Meanwhile -- to the winners, our congratulations to the voters, our thanks. The Galaxy Awards The editors of Galaxy and If are pleased to announce the winners of the # Galaxy Awards for the best stories published in our magazines in the past year. The winning stories were chosen by polling randomly chosen groups of subscribers to both magazines, and their vote was final. # Galaxy Award Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak (Serial, April and June issues of Galaxy.) # Galaxy Award Slowboat Cargo by Larry Niven (Serial, February, March and April Issue of If.) # Galaxy Award (Due to the closeness of the voting, we are giving three # awards.) The Man in the Maze, by, Robert Silverberg (Serial, April and May isros of If.) Getting Through University, by Piers Anthony (Novelette, August issue of If.) The Time Trawlers, by Burt K. Filer (Short story, August issue of Galaxy.) Waleh for announcement in an early issue of the # Galaxy Awards. We're grateful to all the science-fiction fans who gave our publications a clean sweep of every professional Hugo Award at the # World Science Fiction Convention. And we're proud that you've selected us for the Best Magazine Award for the past two consecutive yeare. We're even more grateful to the many loyal readers who have made It possible for both on. That means we can bring you twice as many of the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. To earn your continued support, we're de better in the future. You'll regret missing a single Issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill In the coupon-or write the Information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it In today? You'll save money, tool #I Hudson street NewYorl New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order for: a # issues of each for #  # Issues of each for #  # Issues of each for # Name Address city  State ,...H...-...i.JSpCode... Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # Issues forpos Please chMk whether  new or  renewal. For years beyond counting they bad dragged out their miserable imprisonment on Earth -- and now the day had come to live again I her yellow skies, casting long T Tere in the darkness and tHe shadows across the lawn and silence I dream of Ysar. In pool and the tiled avenues where the mirror of my mind I see long ago victorious armies rode again her towers and minarets in processional tmder bright banners. Amber light glows on flowering trees and the carved facades of jeweled palaces. Once more in memory I hear the music of horns heralding the approach of triumphant princes.' I recall the voices and faces of men and women, of warriors and queens, of tradesmen and viceroys, of metalworkers and courtesans, of those who Have lived and walked these streets, rested beside these pools and fountains, under the ocHre light of the forever setting sun of Ysar. And I see the scarred unconquerable ships, proud remnants of a once great fleet, true to their ancient pledge, mounting on col umns of fire, setting course outward to face the enemy once again. Here in the darkness and the silence, I wait, and dream of Ysar the well-beloved; and I vow that I will return to her, though it be at the end of time. I A man sat at a small desk beside an open window, writing with an old-fashioned steel nib pen which He dipped at intervals into a pot of blue-black ink. A soft sea-wind moved the curtain, bringing an odor of salt and kelp. Far away, a bell chimed out the hour of six P.M. The man wrote a line, crossed it out, sat looking across the view of lawns and gardens. His face was strong-featured, squarejawed. His gray hair lay close to a finely formed skull. His fingers were thick, squaretipped; powerful fingers. "Writing poems again, Mr. Grayle?" a voice spoke suddenly from the doorway behind the man. He turned with a faint smile. "That's right, Ted." His voice was deep, soft, with a faint trace of accent. "You like to write poems, don't you, Mr. Grayle?" Ted grinned in mild conspiracy. "Um-hum." "Hey, game time, Mr. Grayle. Guess you maybe didn't hear the bell." "I guess not, Ted." Grayle rose. "Boy oh boy, the Blues are going to mop up on the Reds tonight, hey, Mr. Grayle?" Ted stood aside as Grayle stepped out into the wide, well-lit corridor. "Sure we will, Ted." They walked along the passage, where other men were emerging from rooms. "Well, tonight's the night, eh, Mr. Grayle?" Ted asked. "Tonight?" Grayle inquired wildly. "You know. The new power system goes on. Just pick it out of the air. Nifty, HuH?" "I really didn't know that." "You don't read the papers much, do you, Mr. Grayle." "Not much, Ted." "Boy oH boy." Ted waggled Kis Head. "WHat will they come up with next?" They crossed an airy court, passed through an arcade and emerged onto a wide, grassy meadow. Men dressed in simple well-made, one-piece garments, some bearing a red armband, others a blue, stood in groups talking, tossing a baseball back and forth. "Go get 'em, Mr. Grayle," Ted said. "Show 'em the old stuff." "That's right, Ted." The man called Ted leaned against a column, arms folded, watched as Grayle walked across to join his team. "Hey, that's the guy, KaH?" a voice spoke beside Ted. He turned and gave an up-and-down frown to the young fellow wHo had come up beside him. "What guy?" "The mystery man. I been hearing about him. Nobody knows how long he's been Here. I Heard he killed a guy with an axe. He doesn't look so much to me." "Mr. Grayle is an all-right guy, greenhorn," Ted said. "That's a lot of jetwash about nobody knows how long he's been here. They got records. They know, okay." Ballantine Books the peculiarities of writing I news of current books for any magazine is the time difference. Thus in the depth of winter, hemmed in by sheet ice and under attack by the Asiatic hog cholera and a faulty stove, one finds oneself writing of books that will be available in the spring, a dream world months away. Still, there are compensations. For instance, this spring comes more easily than most because of the joy of publishing Anne McCaffrey. An original novel, to boot. Original meaning never before published in any way, shape, or form. It's not often one can say that these days since most of this lads work is published in magazine form just as rapidly as she can produce it. likes cats will love this one -- anyone liking people will wonder. Aside from Miss McCaffrey, worshippers of E. R. Eddison (and you're either an enthusiast or you're damn well not) will be delighted by I our original (here meaning "first American though not In chronological order. Each of the volumes is #c Thirdly we have our own reissue of what was originally our own original, Edmund novel as you're likely to find. First published in #. Now #c. There are other forms of originals -- like a collection of short stories which have been done in magazines but never published together as a book, or expanded verOne of sions of novelettes, or, or, or. Theres no real need to be knowledgeable about publisher definitions of original but it's a point of interest to people over thirty who remember the days when everything was original. And #c. No wonder everybody starved to death. The odd and happy thing is that now that prices hove improved, many more (and better) books are being written and published than in the bad old days. Here's a partial listing Theodore Sturgeon #e David Lindsay #c John Norman #o Fred Saberhagen #e Peter Beagle #e Peter Beagle #j Lee Hoffman # James White # Miriam Allen deFord #c lord of the Rings": Lin Carter #e And a complete .reissue of all the Clarke books at #e each. We have hundreds more -- send for our complete catalog, or order any of the Ballantine Books, # West #rd Street, New York N.Y. #. Or write to us here at #I Fifth Avenue, same city. Incidentally, as intelligent s.f. fans, you shouldn't miss the magnificent Sierra Club conservation books we're doing. Especially with that new boy they've got in the Deportment of the interior. Support conservation any way you can, otherwise ali we'll have left to look at will be our beautiful pictures. And while we like to make money as well as the next one, we'd rather breathe. BB "How long you been fiere,i Ted?" "Me? Five years, wfiy?" "I talked to Stengle; fie's been Here nineteen years. He says tSe guy was Here tiien." "So?" "He looks old enougfi to be an old con." "WKafs fie supposed to look, old? So lie's maybe tfiirty-five, maybe forty-five. So wHat?" "I'm curious, is all." "Hah'," Ted said. "You collegetrained guys. You got too many tfieories. Tfie young fellow sfirugged. Tfie two guards stood watching as tfie teams formed up for tfie nightly ball game played by tfie inmates of the Caine Island Federal Penitentiary. I t was a long, narrow room, dim, age-grimed, smelling of the spilled beers of generations. Weak late afternoon sunshine filtered through the bleary plateglass window where garish blue four chins and a bald skull bulked behind the bar, talking to a small, quick-eyed man wKo hunched on a stool next to a defunct jukebox, loaded with curled records five years out of date. In tfie comer booth, a man vdtH a badly scarred face sat talking to fiimself. He was dressed in an expensive gray suit wfiicfi was dusty and stained. A gold watcH gleamed on one wrist, visible under a black-edged cuff as Ke gesticulated. Tfie bum is dougH-Eeavy," tfie small man said, watching the lone drinker in the tarnished mirror through a gap in the clutter of blended whiskey bottles on the backbar. "Did you eyeball that bundle?" Fangio's eyes moved left, right, left as he scraped slops into a chipped plate. "Seen Soup around?" he murmured. The small man's eyelids flickered an affirmative. Fangio laid the plate aside and wiped his hands on the place." He walked away, eased sideways through a narrow door. The small man went to the phone booth' at the end of the bar and punched keys; he talked, watching the scarred man. A woman came in through the black glass doors. She was middle-aged, a trifle plump, heavily made up. She took a stool at the bar, looked around and called, "Okay, snap it up. The lady's waiting." The small man kicked open the door of the booth. "Beat it, Wilma," he said in a low voice. "Fangio ain't in." "What're you, the night watchman?" "Go on, dust." "I'll get my own." She starfed around behind the bar. The small man jumped to Her, caught her bracelet-heavy arm, twisted savagely. She yelped and kicked at him. The doors banged as a squat man in a shapeless gray coverall came in. He stopped dead, looking at the two. He had a wide, dark face, bristly black hair; acne scars pitted his jaw and hairline. "What the -- " he started. "Yeah, Soup," the small man said. "I was calling ya." He stepped clear of the woman, who snorted and yanked at her dress. The small man tipped his head, indicating the occupied booth'. Soup gave Wilma a deadly look. "Beat it," he said. She scuttled behind him and out the door. In the booth, the scarred man was opening his fist. "... golden bird of Ahuriel," he said. "Once flown, never to be recaptured..." "What's he talking about?" Soup asked. The small man shook His head. "He's scrambled." They walked back, stopped beside the table. The scarred man ignored them. "Try the left hip." Qoup reached out with a practiced motion took the drunk's arm up behind him, forcing his face down onto the table. A glass fell over. Soup reached across behind the seated man, patted his back pocket, brought out a sheaf of currency, folded once across the middle. The bill on the outside was a fifty. Holding the owner's arm, he spread the bills. "Hey," he said. "New shoes for baby." He released the seated man's arm and stepped back. The victim sprawled, unmoving, with his cheek against the table. They had taken two steps when the scarred man came up out of the booth in a lunge, locked his arm across the squat man's throat and bent him backward. "Stay, hagseed!" he hissed. His face was mottled, blurred, contorted. "Art his emissaries? Lurks he yonder?" The small man made a grab for the money still in his partner's hand, missed, turned and ran for the door. "Find thy tongue, wretch, ere my dirk rips thy weasand." Soup's hand, clutching the money, waved near the scarred man's face; he plucked the bills away, as with a desperate plunge the squat man broke free. "Stay whelp. I'll have report o' thy master!" the scarred man snarled, making a grab at the man. He missed, staggered against a booth. The squat man disappeard via the rear door. The scarred man looked at the money in . his hand as though noticing it for the first time. "Nay... 'twere but a mere cutpurse," he muttered. "Naught more." He looked around as the door opened cautiously. The woman called Wilma looked in, came through. "Hey," she said. "What gives?" The scarred man blinked at her, weaving. "Fetch ale, wench," he muttered and turned, half fell into the nearest seat. The rear door burst open; Fangio appeared, goggling. "Hey, what -- " "Draw two," the woman barked. She sat down across from the scarred man, who was leaning back, eyes shut, mouth open. She stared curiously at his disfigurements. "You know him?" Fangio asked tersely. "Sure. Him and me are old pals." She transferred her gaze to the money in the drunken man's hand. "Varfor?" the scarred man mumbled. "Varfor har du gjort det du some var min van och bror?" "Why does he talk funny?" Fangio was frowning darkly. "He's some kind of a Dane," the woman said quickly. "My first husband was a Dane. I heard plenty of that kind of jabber." "He looks like some kind of Jew," Fangia said. "Get the beers," the woman said. "You aint no Jew, are you, honey?" She patted the bigknuckled hand that lay on the table. "Geez, will you look at them scars?" Fangio said. "Used to be a fighter," the woman said. "What is this a quiz show?" " 'Twere but a dream," the scarred man said suddenly. He opened his eyes, looked vaguely at the woman. "Just... dream," he said. "That's all. Bad dream. Forget it." The woman patted his hand again. "Sure, honey. Forget it. Wilma will take care of you. Wilma's got a room, honey. We better get you there while you can still navigate." A t the Upper Pasmaquoddie Generating Station (Experimental), a dozen Senators and Representatives, the State Governor, assorted lesser political lights, and a selected cadre of reporters were grouped around the Secretary of the Interior as he stood chatting with the Chief, Engineer and his top aides before the forty-foot-wide, twelve-foothigh panel clustered thick with instrument dials and aflash with reassuring amber, red, and green lights indicating that all was in readiness for the first commercial transmission of beamed power in the history of the Republic. "It's impressive, Mr. Hunnicut," the Secretary said, nodding. "A great achievement." "If it works," a saintly-looking Senator said sharply. "The technical people assure us that it will, Cy," the Secretary said tolerantly. "I'm familiar with the inverse square law," the Senator retorted. "You go pouring power out into the air, not one per cent of it will get where's it's supposed to go. It's a boondoggle! A waste of the taxpayer's money." The Chief Engineer frowned as the reporters jotted briskly. "Senator, I don't think you quite understand. We aren't broadcasting power, as you call it -- not directly. We erect a carrier field -- somewhat similar to the transmission of a ThreeV broadcast. When the field impinges on a demand point -- an energyconsuming device, that is, the type responsive to the signal -- there's a return impulse -- an echo -- " "The Senator knows all that, Mr. Hunnicut," the Secretary said, smiling indulgently. "He's speaking for publication." A man in an oil-spotted sfhock came up, showed the Chief Engineer a clipboard. He nodded, looked at the clock. "Two minutes to zero hour," tfie Secretary said. "Everything is still proceeding normally?" "Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary," the technician said, thep retreated under the blank look this netted him from the dignitary. "All systems are functioning," Hrmnicut said, making it official. "I see no reason that we shouldn't switch over on schedule." "Think of it, gentlemen," the Secretary turned to the legislators, and, incidentally to the reporters. "Raw power, tom from the heart of the atom, harnessed here, waiting the call that will send it pouring into the homes and factories of America -- " "At this point, we're only powering government-operated facilities and public utilities systems." Hunnicut interjected. "It's still a pilot operation." "... freeing man from his ageold drudgery, ushering in a new era of self-realization and boundless promise -- " "Sixty seconds," a voice spoke sharply from a ceiling grill. "Automatic hold." "Proceed," Hunnicut said. In silence, the men stood watching as the second hand of the big clock 'scythed away the final minutes of an era. T he scarred man lay on his back on the narrow bed, sleeping with his mouth open. His face, in the slack repose of' profound drunkenness, was a ravaged field where battles Had been fought and lost, long ago. The woman called Wilma stood beside the bed, watching him by the glow of a shadeless table lamp. She tensed as the light faltered, dimmed; shadows closed in on the shabby room; then the lamp winked back to full brightness. The woman let out the breath she had been holding, her momentary panic dissipating. "Sure, it said on the tube about switching over onto the new radio power tonight," she murmured half-aloud. On the bed, the scarred man stiffened; he grimaced, moving his head from side to side. He groaned, sighed, grew still again. Wilma leaned over him; her hands moved deftly, searching out his pockets. They were empty, but she found the roll of bills wadded under the folded blanket that served as pillow. As she withdrew it, she glanced at his face. His eyes were wide open, locked on hers. "I... I was just fixing your pillers," she said. He sat up with an abruptness that sent her stumbling away, clutching the money in her hand. '.'I... was going to take care of it for you." Even in her own ears. Her voice sounded as false as brass jewelry. He looked away, sKaking His Head vaguely. Instantly, her boldness returned. "Go on, go back to sleep, sleep it off," sKe said. He ew aside tfie mottled blanket 'and came to His feet in a single motion. The woman made a sEow of recoiling from his nakedness. "Lookit Here, you!" she said. "I didn't come up here to -- " He went past her to the enameled sink hanging crookedly on the wall, sluiced his face with cold water, filled his mouth and spat, stared at himself in the discolored mirror. He picked up tHe smeared jeUy glass from its clotted niche, but it shattered in his hand. He stared narrow-eyed at the cut on his palm, at the black-red droplets forming there. He made a strange sound deep in his throat, whirled to look around the room as if he had never seen it before. "Xix," he said. "Where are you?" Wilma made a move for the door, recoiled as he approached her, he reached out, witii a precise motion plucked the money from her Hand. He peeled off a ten dollar bill, thrust it at Her. "You'd better go," he said. "Yeah," she said. Something id his voice frightened Ect. 'Sure I was just looking in." After she had gone. He stood in the near-darkness. His Head cocked as if listening to distant voices. He opened his cut hand studied it. The wound was an almost invisible line. He brushed the congealed droplets away impatiently. His clotlies lay across the foot of the bed. He began to dress himself with swift, sure fingers. Tn the prison dining Hall, the A guard Ted sat looking worriedly across the wide, softly lit room at the small comer table where, by long custom, Grayle dined alone. He had glanced that way a few moments after the lights had momentarily dimmed down, on an impulse to' share the moment with the prisoner, grinning a satisfied grin that said, "see, we did it." But Grayle Had been slumped back, gripping the chair arms, his usually impassive features set in a tight-mouthed grimace. This had given way to alook of utter bafflement. Now Grayle sat rigid, looking fixedly at nothing. Ted rose and hurried across. Close, he saw the sweat beaded on the prisoner's face. "Mr. Grayle -- you okay?" Grayle raised his Head slowly. "You sick, Mr. Gtayle?" Ted ,# persisted. "SHould I call ttie doc?" Grayle nodded curtly. "Yes," fie said in a ragged voice. "Get fiim." Ted fumbled for tfie communicator clipped to fiis belt. Grayle put out a band. "No," fie said sfiarply. "Don't' call. Go get Kim, Ted." "Yeafi, but -- " "Go and fetcfi film, Ted. Quieter tfiat way," fie added. "You understand." "Ufi, yeafi, okay, Mr. Grayle." Ted fiurried away. Grayle waited for a full minute; tfien fie rose, lifted tfie table, a bellow tfiat rang in tfie peaceful room like a lion's roar, fie hurled tfie table from him, and leaping after it, began overturning tfie unoccupied tables left and right. II G iant trees stand in blue shadow against the wide sweep of the virgin snowfield. A heatless sun hangs almost unmoving in the ice-blue sky. A fitful wind drives plumes of ice crystals across the slope. A man moves slowly across the white slope. He is tall, deep-chested, . massive-shouldered, dressed in a form-fitting suit of a glossy blue-black material ornamented by bright bits of metal and enamel. There are raw burn scars on the right side of his jaw and neck, and his dark red hair is singed at the temple. He staggers as he walks, making his way doggedly ddwnslope. He reaches the center of the snow-covered meadow, where a swift stream flows under a thin skim of ice. Kneeling, he drinks, swallows a pellet from a pouch at his waist before he goes on. At dusk he reaches the sea. It is wide, blue-black, laced with the white foam of breakers, the rocky shore slopes steeply down to the watery edge. The wind blows an odor of iodine and salt spray into bis face. When he wades out, the cold numbs Be feet through the waterproof boots. Small creatures dart in the shallows. In a tidal pool among the rocks, a fish flops in water too shallow for swimming. He it up, looks curiously at the Krrlt life squirming against his fingers as he carries it back down fo die sea. Darkness falls. The man makes camp by trampling a hollow in the snow in the lee of a craggy boulder. He lies looking up at a sky strangely improverished of stars. A glow grows in the east; a vivid orange disk appears, brightening to a pure white as it rises above the tree-tops. It is a dead world, fantastically crat  teted, bangini so close it seems to ride just above the distant mountain tidies. Tbe man watches it tot a long time befote he falls asleep... The surf murmurs; the wina makes soft sounds iluting among the tocks. Thete ate othet sounds, too; soft tustiings and sctapings, stealthy ctunchings... He sits uptight, and by the blight light of the full moon sees a ant beatded figute tobed in fuTs leaping down irom the tock ledge above; he throws himself aside, feels a smashing blow against the side of his head that sends him huttling headlong into emptiness. A board tSe tfiirty-five-foot cabin cruiser Miss Behave, one Hundred and rune miles out of Port Royal bound for Her Home port at Miami, Mr. CHmles D. Crassmj Is wife, Elizabeth, and tiieir twenty-four-year-old daugfiter, Elaine, relaxed comfortably in tSe Handsomely appointed cockpit, sipping iced ScotcH and soda and watcHing tHe sunset across tHe scarlet water. "Beautiful evening," Crassman said. We're making time. I told you we were smart to make tHe run at nigHt, miss tHe Heat." "Daddy, wfiafs tiiat?" Elaine was pointing off tfie port bow at a curiously rular-sKaped cloud formation: a great purple and pink wedge, its apex toucHing tfie Horizon, its top merging witH tfie soft evening Haze. "NotHing," Crassman said easily. "Just clouds." "Cfiarles, I don't Uke tfie look of tfiat," Mrs. Crassman said sfiarply. "It looks like one of tfiose, wHat do tfiey call tHem, tornadoes." Crassman laugHed. "Tfiat's out in Kansas tfiey Have tornadoes,' He said, and took a sip of fiis drink. But fiis eyes lingered on tfie cloud. "Go around it." Crassman Had been Half-unconsciously easing tfie bow to starboard, away from tfie looimng formation aHead; at His wife's words He swung tfie compass pointer squarely back to #. "Just let me do tfie navigating, all rigfit?" "It's so big," Elaine said. "And it's close." "Just an optical illusion." Crasman's eyes were on tfie compass. Tfie needle was drifting past #to #. He corrected witfi tfie rudder, Tfie engines tone cfianged faintly, became more labored. A sligfit swell Had appeared across tfie flat water; tfie bow cut tfirougfi tfie low crests witH a rHytfimic sound. Frowning, Crassman passed tfie spindles of tfie big wHeel from Hand to Hand, Holding the bow on course. THe cHop was more pronounced now. Tlie boat bucked aKead, cutting across tfie trorKs and ridges of oily water. "Cfiarles let's go backl I don't like Hie looks of tKis -- " "Quietl" Crassman snapped. "I Have my Hands full r unnin g tHe boat rigfit now!" "Daddy -- is anytHing wrong?" "I don't know!" "Tfie cloud -- it's mowng! It's crossing in front of us!" "It's not moving -- we're drifting sidewajra. TKere's some sort of crazy cross-ciurent ninning -- " "CHarles -- please! I want to go back!" "Don't be ridiculous!" Grassman continued to figfit tfie current; tfie big cloud, deep purple now and dead afiead, looked ominously close. It rose, spreading like an inverted mountain ifl tfie sky. Crassman watcHed it drift across His bow, begin to slide off in a curve to starboard. "It's coming closer! We'll run rigfit into it!" "Daddy, can't you steer away from it?" "Well -- I Hate to waste time being nervous about a mere cloud formation," Crassman said, but He was quick to swing off to tiSe south, away from tfie cloud. Now tfie bow tended to swing to starboard. Crassmian felt tiie sweat popping out across fiis bald scalp. His lips were dry. A brisk, steady wind was blovwng directly into fiis face. Mrs. Crassman gave a muffled sfiriek. Crassman started, looked back at Her; she was pointing astern. Crasman's Heart took a painful plimge in fiis cfiest. THe cloud was dead astern, and clearly closer tfian it had been five minutes earlier. "It's gaining on us!" Crassman put tfie tfirottle all tfie way over. Tfie big engines opened up to a deep-cHested tfirum of power; tfie bow rose; spray wfiipped back across the big, sloping windshield. Crassman looked back. Tfie cloud clung grimly astern. Off tfie starboard bow, tfie setting sun was a red ball on tfie fiorizon, slowly drifting across tfie boat's bow. Now it was dead afiead; now drifting off to port, sliding back past tfie boat. A vast shadow lay over tfie water off tfie port bow, coming closer. It swept over tfie boat. Looldng back into tfie sudden darknes Crassmau saw ffie cloud, now dull purpli-black, sky. And now, over tfie song of tfie engines, another sound was audible;: a vast, bass rumble, like Niagara multiplied. "Good God in Heaven," Elaine said suddenly as tfie boat emerged from tfie band of sHadow into tfie red sunligfit. "Wfiat is it. Daddy?" Mrs. Crassman wailed, began sobbing. His face cKalk-wHite, Crassman clung grimly to the wheel, no longer looking back, listening to the swelling thunder behind T he meteorologist on duty in the United States Weather Satellite in Clarke orbit twentytwo thousand miles above the Atlantic had watched the anomalous formation for Half an Hour on the big twelve-power screen before calling it to the attention of his supervisor, "Something kind of funny down there, Fred, just east of the sunset Kne," he said, pointing out the tiny, blurred disk hugging the sea to the west of Somerset Island in the Bermudas. "It formed up in a matter of a minute or two, smack in the middle of a twelve-hundred-mile-wide high that was clear as window glass. And it's growing steadily." "An explosion, maybe?" the section chief suggested. "That thing's over three miles wide already, Fred. It would take a nuclear blast to produce a smudge like that. Anyway, if it was a test shot, we'd have been notified." "Maybe a nuclear ship blew her reactors. It's never happened before, but there's always a first time." "The rate of dissipation's wrong for an explosion. It's not spreading fast enough'. And I think it's rotating." "Well, keep an eye on it. Bunny. Maybe you've nail the first hurricane of the season." "If so, I've got a lot of meteorology to unlearn. Check witH Kennedy, will you, Fred? Something about that spot worries me."  quarter of an hour later, Fre was back in the observer"s bubble. "Kennedy says no report of any detonation in the area. The autostations along the Atlantic seaboard are registering faW airmass movements north and east. It's a little early to tell i there's any correction." "Why doesn't it dissipate?"' Bunny asked. "What's holding it?" "Hard to say. Better put the recorders on it. Bunny. But don't worry; old Mother Nature is. always springing surprises on us, just when we think we know it aU." Back in the communication center of the giant satellite, Fred flipped the key activating the beam linking the the station to Kennedy Weather Control. "Jake, no panic, but how about requesting an eyeball report on that fix I was talking to you about? Tlie damned thing's still sitting out there like a tack in a board; and in the few minutes I was away, it grew visibly." "Roger. I'll scramble one of the old Neptunes out of Jax. Those reserve boys like to joyride anyway." "Keep me posted, Jake." "Sure, Fred. Anything for our brave lads in the sky." T welve miles north of the village of Skime, Minnesota, Ame Burko, a seasonal trapper, threw down the armload of fallen, branches he had gathered for his fire and seated himself on a log for a quiet smoke before dinner. It was still evening, the sky tawny with the late summer dusk. Burko lit up, stretching his legs, thinking of the forty-horse outboard on display at Winberg's in Skime. Everything a man wanted cost so much, seemed like. A car, now. With a car, he could get into town more often, see more of Barby... He pushed away the thought of her warm body and smiling face. No point in getting all upset. He stood, paced up and down sniffing the air. Off to the east, through the trees, the ground rose toward the rocky outcropping known locally as Vargot Hill. He hadn't been up there for years, not since he was a kid. Used to pick berries there. Supposed to be haunted, the hill was. Kids used to dare each other to go up to the top. They'd creep up on it through the trees, getting quieter the closer they got. There were big rock slabs up there, sort of stacked, as if they had been piled up there by a giant. The kids had had lots of stories about the Hill. About the dwarves and elves that lived down in the rocks and would come out and eat a careless kid who stayed too long after sunset. And about the devil who took the form of a black panther and ranged around the coxmtryside, looking for souls. Burko snorted a laugh and got busy with the fire. When it was going good, he stacked some stone around it and put on the fry ing pan. He unrolled the greased-paper-wrapped bacon, put half a dozen strips on. There would be a little smoke with the green fire, but he didn't care. Walking all day made a man hungry. Funny about the black cat legend. Old man Olsen said the name Vargot was a corruption of an old word that meant "black cat." Probably went back to some Indian legend. The SHoshonu had been big story tellers. Big liars. Swedes were pretty good liars too, when it came to embroidering a tale. He'd made up his share. That one time, after He'd spent tHe best part of an afternoon up there playing on the rocks at the top of the hill, he'd been a sKort-term celebrity axnong the boys after Ke told them about the rock that had started to lift up while He was sitting on it, and How He'd Had to weight down all He could to Hold it in place. That one Had held tfiem witH tHeir moutKs open until Fats Linder Had said, "Nuts, Burko, nobody can weight down any Harder than wHat they are!" He turned the bacon, cut a couple of slices of bread. He soaked up the fat with the bread, forked the bacon onto it, then put the coffee jug on. He ate slowly, savoring every bite. It was almost full dark when he finished. A full moon was rising, glowing big and yellow in the east behind the hUl. He banked the fire, stretched, then on impulse started up the slope, along a faint game trail, grinning a little at himself as he felt a ghostly touch of the old superstitious apprehension. TTe made His way up through the dense blackberry brambles, not yet in fruit, emerged onto the nearly level stretch, just below the, giant's castle. He had never really noticed it before, but the place Had a sort of look, if you saw it in the right light, as if somebody had piled those rocks up there. Just nonsense, of course, the glaciers had dumped rocks all across this country but these recks were all of a side, pretty near -- and they Had a kind of quarried look about them. And the way they were arranged, sort of in a big rectangle, as far as you could tell for the growth ,... Burko froze, looking up at the looming pile. Had something moved up there, something that flowed from shadow to shadoty... something that moved fast and smooth as a cat? , He was aware of his thudding pulse, of the tightness of his scalpv "Hell," he laughed aoud. "I'm as bad as a kid. The thing's probably an Indian mound. Full of busted pots and arrowheads and maybe some skulls. Dead Indians. What the hell." He went forward with a bold stride, climbed up the slanting slabs, stepped up onto the flat stone that topped the structure. He was breathing hard, sweating lightly. A deer fly found him, buzzed his face sharply. He  slapped' at it. It was completely silent then. Burko took a step across the stone and halted. He stood that way for a full ten seconds, feeling his insides turn to water. Unmistakably, through the stone he felt a faint vibration. Below his feet something ancient and evil was stirring... Ame Burko was over three miles from Vargot Hill when he stopped running. He Had sprained an ankle jumping down the rock slabs, but fiad failed to notice it at tiSe time. A week later, ISs IBroat was still sore from the yell Ge Gad uttered as Ge fled. I n the office of tGe Governor, Caine Island General Penitentiary, tHe prison psydSologist leaned forward, across tGe desk, raising ffis voice over tGe sErill of the rising wind that buffeted outside the big, oak-paneled room. I "I think you're making a mistake, sir," He said. The man has a record of violence. He's dangerously unstable." "Unstable, or unclassifiable, doctor?" The prison governor cut in. "I admit the man's an enigma," the psychologist said. "I don't pretend to understand his motivations. But after this outburst, anything could happen." The governor turned to stare out the high windows behind his desk. The low sky, clear an hour before, now shed a light the color of dishwater across frond-strewn grounds, reflected from the white capped, hammered-pewter sea beyond. Through the massive leather chair and the deep pile carpet the minute trembling of the steel and concrete building was plainly detectable. As the governor watched, a forty-foot royal palm, curved into an arc like a strung bow, snapped, fell across the massed bougainvillea that lined the south drainage canal. "No one was hurt. I understand," tfie governor said. "No, but Governor, you should have seen what he did to those chairs. Steel tubing, mind you. He twisted them into chromeplated pretzels! Talk about maniacal strength -- " "Where was his guard?" "He played sick, sent him for; the duty physician." "Got him safely out of the way, in other words." "Governor, aren't you finding excuses for this man?" "There was a reason for the outburst, as you put it, Claude," the governor said. "I want to know what that reason was." "Governor, this is an old COii, a man who once took an axe tO a human being. In this day and age, an axe, for God's sake! TG? savagery of it." "Thank you for your opiniotf, Doctor; your warning is a matter of record, in the event he tears my head off with his bare hands." "I wasn't thinking solely of my reputation. Governor." "Of course not, Claude. Nevertheless, I'm going to talk to him." The governor nodded to the uniformed man posted beside the armored door. The guard touched a wall plate there was the safe double click-click! as the interlocks disengaged. The door slid back; the guard took up his position, choke gun in hand.'watch'ing as Grayle came past him into the room. The tailored prison uniform accented his powerful physique. As the prisoner advanced across the roof, the words "caged tiger" popped into the governor's mind. "That's all, doctor," he said. "Guard, wait outside." "Now, just a minute," the psychologist started. He caught the look his superior directed at him and left silently. The sliding door snicked shut behind the guard. said. "Hello, Hardman," the prisoner said in a tone of absolute neutrality. The governor motioned to the chair beside the standing man. "Sit down," he said. Grayle didn't move. "Why?" the governor said. "Just tell me why, that's all." Grayle's head shook almost imperceptibly. You knew I was working on a special parole for you. I'd have gotten it, too. So you picked this time to break up the dining hall. Why, Grayle?" "You were wrong about me. Governor," Grayle said without expression. "Nonsense. If you started smashing chairs, you had a reason." Grayle said nothing. "What are you tr#ung to prove?" the governor said KarsKly. "That you're stUl a tough guy?" "That's it," Grayle said. The governor shook his Head. "You're no brainless hoodlum. You had a reason -- a good reason. I want to know what it was." The wind shrieked in the lengthening silence. "You cost the federal government over a thousand dollars in smashed furniture this evening," Hardman said sharply. "You've given the press new ammimition for their charge of coddling and lax administration." "I'm sorry about that part," Grayle said. "When you ran amok, you knew the effect it would have. You knew it would hurt yourself, me, the entire prison system." Grayle said nothing. "You realize what you're asking for?" A harsh note rang in the official's voice. For an instant, Grayle's eyes locked with Hardman's; there seemed to be some message there, almost readable. Then the prisoner glanced away indifferently. "I'm ordering you to the maximum security detachment at Gull Key, Grayle." Grayle nodded, almost impatiently, the governor thought. "I don't like it," he said. "I don't like to admit failure with a man; but the best interest of Caine Island comes first." "Certainly, Governor," Grayle said softly. "I understand." "Damn it, man, I'm not apologizing! I'm doing my duty, nothing more!" The governor put his hand under the edge of the desk, touched something hidden there. "I've switched off the recording system," he said swiftly. "Speak up now, man! Tell me what this is all about!" "Better switch it back on. You will have the guards breaking the door down." "Talk, man! Gull Key is no picnic ground!" "That's all I have to say. Governor. You're wasting your time." Hardman's face flushed He keyed a button on the desk top viciously. "All right, Grayle," he said flatly as the door slid back and the guard entered alertly. "That's all. You can go now." Grayle walked out of the room without a backward glance. T#rom a town oi wood and stone  houses clustered among githe shore, men and women run down to gather on the beach; many of them wade out waistdeep in the bitter water to lay hands on the boat, shouting their greetings to the returned wayfarers. The prisoner climbs over the side with the others, grasps a rope, helps draw the ship up on the strand. Standing by the bow, he watches as the men caper, embracing the thick-bodied, snub-nosed women whose yellow hair hangs in thick braids down their backs. One or two of the latter eye him curiously, but they do not speak. "Stand forth, slave," a deep voice booms out. A man comes toward him, a length of rope in his hands. He is tall, massive, with a tangled blond beard and shaggy hair, clad in garment of leather. Against his chest, the Star of Deneb and the golden Cross of Omrian glint among the polished beats' teeth strung on a rawhide thong. "Ifs time to truss and brand the bull for market, before he get loose among the cows.'" he shouts cheerfully. The captive moves a step sideways. "Come and get me, Olove Brassbeard," he calls awkwardly in the language of the barbarians. Olove motions with his free hand. "Bor! Grendel! Seize me that slave!" I Two big men come forward, smiling large smiles through bushy beards. "It might be good sport to see Olove bind me with his own hands," the captive says. Bor hesitates. "It he can," the slave adds. Grendels grin widens. He spits on the rocky ground. "The sea-law doesn't run here ashore, Olove. The voyage is over. You hold a rope in your hands, bind him with it -- if you dare." "You expect me, a chieftain, to soil my hands on a slave?" "How say you, outlander?" Grendel inquires. Were you a man of rank in your own town?" "I was a Captain-Lieutenant," the prisoner gives the title in his own tongue. "He ties," Olove blusters. "He iras alone, without retainers or men-at-arms, clad only in a poor rag -- " "He wore ornaments of gold," Half says, enjoying himself. "The same ones we now see wiriking among the fleas on your chest." No doubt he stole them from his master ere he fled," Olove grunts. "His ring fit uncommon well for a stolen one," Hulf says. "You had to hew away the finger to take it." Brassbeard makes sputtering sounds; then he snorts and throws ade his wolfskin cloak. He flexes his arms, spits, and charges, his thick, bowed legs pumping like pistons. The captive stands unmoving. As Brassbeard closes, he pivots minutely, elevates his left forearm to deflect the chieftain's outstretched hand, leans in to place his elbow in the path of the man's onrushing chin, swings with his rush to palm him on his way. Olove strikes the side of the ship full on, skids along it to fall with his face in the water and lie, his hairy legs twitching before they fall still. A roar of laughter goes up. Grendel comes forward and rolls the fallen man over. "Olove is dead," he says, still grinning. "He dashed out his brains on his ship to oblige the stranger." He wipes tears of mirth from his eyes, turns to the former slave, puts out a hand, clasps him below the elbow. "The gods declare you to be a freeman," he says. "By what name do your friends call you?" "Gralgrathor," the man answers. "Welcome to Bjornholm. Grail Grathor. Come, my wife will find food and a pallet for you, and we wilt share a flask or two. And for amusement," he adds in a lower tone, "you may teach me the spell you used to turn Glove's wrath into a madness that destroyed him." Ill G eorge, tHe nigHt man at Smitty's Conditioning Parlor and HealtG Club, laid aside his paper as the buzzer sounded and feet descended the short flight of steps from street level. A tall, quick-moving man with a badly scarred face came into the room pulling off his coat. "Yessir," George said, coming to his feet in a quick motion for all of his two hundred and ninety pounds of bulk, smiling, sizing up the newcomer. He noted the soiled cuffs, the wilted and grimed collar, the tear in the dusty knee of the trousers. But the suit was cut from a good grade of worsted, real wool, it looked like, and the big brogans were almost new under the dust and scuff marks. And the socks were a tasteful solid, none of those purple clocks. The guy Had been out on the tiles, all right, but there was some quality there. He was no bindlestiff just drifting in out of the damp night air. George caught the jacket as the man tossed it aside. "Sponge and press the suit, sir?" he said. "Do it for you nice, while you're in the steam." "Never mind that," the big man said. The scars on his face moved as he spoke, the big one across the cheek dimpling as if in a puckish smile, the one crossing his forehead and running back into the scalp lifting quizzically, sardonically. He shucked bills from a folded sheaf, tossed them on the table. "My body's full of poison," he said. "I want heat. Lots of heat." An elderly man, naked and shrunken, emerging from the injfrared room, jerked his head sharply at sight of the newcomer. He halted, watching the scarred man strip. He seemed fascinated by the scars, large and small, that marked the powerfully muscled chest, back, thighs. "I'm carrying one-twenty in the wet room, one-eighty in the sauna," George said. Five minutes of that be all you can take." "Call me in ten." George watched the glass door, smiling a little to himself. He folded some towels, opened and shelved a carton of soap. Ten minutes, the man say. Like to see the man could take ten on them hot teak boards. First couple minutes go easy; then it start to get hot. Ten minutes. George chuckled. Door be opening any minute now. Big man be out, gasping like a catfish on the bank. He looked at the clock. Five minutes almost up. Through the clear glass he saw the scarred man sitting bolt upright, swinging his arms. Hoo-ee. That white man crazy, have to watch him, get him out when he faint... I 'hat fellow's asking for a heart attack," the old man spoke suddenly beside George. He had come up silently, rubber-sandaled. He ruffled his wispy hair with a towel. "WKat was that he said about poison?" "Booze, Doctor," George said. He meant the booze. Smell it on him." It was eleven minutes before the scarred man strode from the dry heat room, his body pouring with sweat. A sickly odor of alcohol hung thick about him. George stared. "Cold water?" the big man said curtly. "Deluge showers, right to your right." George pointed. "Good way to get yourself a coronary attack," the old fellow called after him. The scarred man stood in the stall, dousing himself with icy water. He breathed in great, shuddering gulps. Afterwards, he spent ten minutes in the steam room, ten more in the sauna, showered again. By then the reek of raw alcohol had dissipated. "You know massage?" he asked George. George's wide black face crinkled in a smile. "Some say I do pretty good." He nodded toward the padded table. The scarred man waved aside the proffered towel, stretched out face down. His back was solidly muscled about the shoulders, tapering sharply to a lean, hard waist. A deep scar ran down across the left trapezius to end near the spine. Lesser scars -- line, pocks, zigzags -- were scattered over his hide in random distribution. Under George's Hands the flesh felt hard, ropy. "You ever in the ring?" the masseur inquired. "Not much." "That fight racket no life for a man." "Harder," the scarred man said. "I want to feel it." "Got to be careful," George chuckled. Man come home with bruises, his sweety wonder why." "Say," the old man said. "Mind if I ask how you got the scars?" The big man turned his head to look at him. "I'm a doctor, a medical doctor," the old fellow said. "I've never seen anything quite like the way you're marked up." "I got them in the wars," the big man said. George shot the oldster a pursed-mouth look. "Don't shush me, George," the old man said. "My interest's legitimate." ( C ot a little rheumatism there?" George asked. His hard, pink-palmed hands explored a lump under the client's skin. The elderly medical man came over, frowned knowingly down at tKe man stretched oh the table, "Be careful, George," he ordered. "You take it easy with those Hands of yours." He leaned for a closer look at the deep fissure, keloid ridged, that crossed the kidney region. "Feel like some kind of lump there," George said. "Feel hot, too." He stepped back, looking at the doctor. The old man's thin fingers ran over the visible swelling at the lower edge of the prone man's ribs. "Why, there's a bullet lodged in there," he said. "You been shot, Mister?" "Not recently." "Hmmm. Must have entered along here..." the thin old finger traced up along he big man's side. "Right here," he said. "Here is your point of entry. Traveled right along the rib cage." The medical man broke off, staring at an angry, reddish swelling developing at the spot under which the bullet lay. "George, what did you do, gouge in with those big thumbs of yours? I told you to take it easy!" "You lie easy. Mister," the doctor said. "You have some infection there, that pretty plain. I have my kit with me. I think I'd better give you a hypo of PN-# -- " "No," the big man said. He was gritting his teeth, his back tensed. 'T know what it is. But I'd forgotten how it feels." As the doctor and the masseur watched, the contusion grew, flushing dusky purple now, a three-inch splotch against the tan skin. A patch of paleness grew at its center, spread to the size of a steel dollar. "Hey, doctor!" George said -- and broke off as the swelling burst the skin splitting dark blood and clear matter, exposing a grayish lump. The doctor uttered an exclamation, scuttled across to an open locker, jerked out a green plastic instrument case, opened it on a bench, hurried back. With a shallow, spoon-shaped probe, he levered at the wound, lifted out a slightly misshapen lump of lead as big as the end of his thumb. The big man sighed harshly and' relaxed. "How long ago did yu say it was you were shot?" the doctor asked in a strained voice, eyeing the big slug that was lying in his palm. "Quite a while." "I should say so." The old man barked a short laugh. "If it were not so ridiculous, I'd swear that was a genuine Minie ball." "Minie ball? What was that?" George asked, his eyes rolled like a horse smelling smoke. "That's what they used in the Civil War," the doctor said. T he scarred man smiled slightly. "I need food," he said as lie pulled on fiis shirt. "Is there a restaurant nearby that you can recommend, George?" "Happen I got a nice slab of sirloin in my cooler right this, minute," the black man said. "And eggs, too. About half a dozen sound right?" The scarred man took the fold of bills from his pocket and shucked off a fifty, laid it on the rubbing table. "Rare. And over lightly." "Say," the doctor said. "Funny thing. The scars on your face; they look different." The scarred man turned to the full-length wall mirror. He went close, studying his features. The furrow across his cheek, that Had pulled his mouth into a perpetual faint grin, had faded to a shallow, pinkish line. The broad band of lumped scar tissue across hi forehead was now no more than a faint discontinuity in the smooth tan of his skin. "Never saw anything like it," the old man said in tones of wonderment. "Those scars are fading right out. Just disappearing." His hand moved, caught itself. "You will pardon my curiosity," he said, edging around for a better view. "But as a man of science -- " "They weren't as bad as they looked," the formerly scarred man said shortly, turning away. "Look here, my friend, I'm Dr. Henry Cripps. Hank to my friends. Now, I've had some experience vdth contusions and the like during over forty years of practice. I know a third-degree scar when I see one. A thing like that doesn't just diappear in the space of a quarter of an hour -- " "Doctor, I'm not in need of medical attention, thank you, anyway," the big man said. The oldster clamped his jaw, retired to the far side of the room, from where he stared at the object of his professional curiosity. An odor of cookery wafted into the room through the open doorway to a back room. The big man paced up and down, flexing his arms. "Itches, doesn't it?" Cripps spoke up. "A little." "Damnedest thing I ever saw." F ive minutes of silence ensued. George appeared at the door. "On the table," he said. The big man followed him back to the small, neatly arranged living quarters. He seated himself and attacked the thirty-two ounce steak. George put a big glass of milk in front of him. He drained it, asked for a refill. He ate the eggs, mopped the juices from the plate with a scrap of toast. George brought in a foot-wide pie, lifted a quarter of it onto a plate, put a half-pint mug of coffee beside it. "Can't get that kind in the store," he said. "I got a lady friend brings them around." He watched as his guest finished off the dessert, drained the cup. "Better hang onto that lady friend, George," the big man said. He rose. "Thanks. I needed that." "I reckon," George agreed, "Too bad Lucy-Ann not here to see you tuck it in. Do her good to see a man eat" "By God," Doctor Cripps said. "Will you look at that, George? You can scarcely see where the scars were. They're remitting completely." George shook his head, accepting the evidence of his eyes philosophically. "Nothing like a good feed to set a man up," he commented. "Look here," Cripps said as the subject of the discussion headed from the room. "Would you mind just letting me have a look at your back?" "I'm sorry. I'm in a hurry." "But damn it, this is medical history in the making -- if you would let me observe it! I have a camera in my apartment, a few blocks from here I should photograph this, document it -- " "Sorry." The big man picked up his coat. "At least let me examine the woimd I dressed. You owe me that much." "All right" The big man stripped off his shirt. The doctor's eyes goggled at the sight of the ivide, unmarked back. He put out a hand, touched the smooth iddm There was no trace of any injury anywhere in the patient's skin. "Sir," he said in a choked voice, "you must come along with me to St .John's Hospital, You must allow this to be studied by competent authorities -- " The big man shook !Bs head. "Out of the question." He donned his shirt, tied his tie, pulled on his coat He put another fifty-dollar bill on the table. "Thanks, to both of you," He said. "I hope that will cover your fee, doctor," "Never mind my fee!" "It's late," the big man said gently. "Maybe you were imagining things." "George, you saw if too," Cripps exclaimed, turning to the Negro. "Doctor, seem like sometimes I got a powerful bad memory." George smiled dreamily, loekmg at the bill. They watched in shence as tfic big man went up the stej "Where can I reach you?" Cripps called as he put a hand on the door. "I'll want to foHow up on treatment, of course!" The big man paused, turned Eead slowly as if listening for a distant sound. He pointed in a direction at an angle to tlie door. "I'm going tfiat way," fie said. "I don't know fiow far." Tlie sHrill of the wind as fie pusfied open the door drowned tlie doctor's reply. IV Tour guards carrying cfioke guns and sidearmed witfi fiolstered tom impact pistols escorted Grayle along tlie wide, brilliantly lit subterranean corridor, two in advance, two befiind Kim, In tfie liftcar, tfiey posted tfiemselves in tlie fomr comers and sealed tlieir fielmet visors before closing tlie door. In silence, they dropped tlie Hundred and fifty feet to tlie staging room tiiat was tfie sole exit route from tfie prison proper. As tfiey emerged from tfie sHaft, Ted was waiting. He stepped forward fiesitantly. "Hey, Mr. Grayle," fie said in strainai greeting. "Hello, Ted," Grayle said. "Ufi -- you okay now?" Ted said, and blusfied. "Sure. Tfianks for ever # dliing, Ted." "Geeze, Mr. Grayle -- " Ted swallowed and turned away quickly. "So long, Ted," Grayle said. In tfie processing unit, Grayle moved solidly tfirougfi tfie cfiemical and radiation scanners, submitted to the cold caress of the medical unit, tfie icy touch of tlie Kyposprays. His finger prints and retinal and dental patterns were read and compared. A fiusky lieutenant flicked keys on tfie ID panel and recorded tfie response which certified tfie identity of prisoner #-K-#YN-#. He opened a steel drawer, witjidrew a pair of incK-wide metal-link wrist irons linked by a ten-incfi rod. He weighed tfiem on his palm, looking at Grayle. "I don't want any trouble out of you now, boy," fie said. His voice was a casual drawl, but his eyes were sharp on Grayle's. He advanced briskly, snapped a steel ring in place on tfie prisoner's right wrist, reached for the left. He gripped it, tfien suddenly twisted Grayle's arm befiind fiim, brougfit it to witliin an incfi of tfie waiting cuff, tfien stopped. His face darkened; veins stood out on his forehead, but tfie cuff moved no closer. you want to call for help?" Grayle asked softly, "Or stick to the book?" "Don't get me mad, boy," tfie lieutenant hissed. "I've got friends at Gull." "Wfiat do you do when you're mad, Harmon, blow bubbles?" Tfie man made a noise deep in fiis throat. "A guardfiouse lawyer," he granted. Five seconds passed in silence then the lieutenant stepped back. "I guess I'll give Kina a break," he said loudly to the seieant. "This boy won't give us any trouble. He's got enough trouble. He'll want to hit Gull clean -- as clean as His kind can be. Cuff Kim up in front." The sergeant seemed the manacles. The four armed men boxed the prisoner. Metal clanged as steel doors opened on a bare chamber. They walked in. The doors closed. Two of the men pushed buttons at opposite ends of the small room. A Heavy panel slid aside on a big bright-lit garage where two massive graypainted vehicles bearing the lettendant unlocked a door at the rear of one; one of the guards stepped up into the windowless compartment, covered Grayle as he entered. A second guard came aboard, and the door closed. Locks snicked. "You sit there." The guard indicated a low bench with a sloping back mounted against the driver's compartment. When Grayle was seated in it, knees high, his weight on the end of his spine, a locking bar slid into place across his ribs and sealed with a click. The two guards strapped into the contoured chairs mounted at the sides of the car. Each pressed a button set in the arm-rest of his chair. "In position," one said. Grayle heard a soft sound, saw a minute movement of the tiny glass prism set in the ceiling. It studied Kim, then swivelled to inspect the guards. The light died behind it. A moment later the turbines started up with a muted howl. Grayle felt the car move forward; He sensed the raising of the flint-steel door, was aware of a sense of enclosure as the vehicle entered the upward-slanting tunnel. One of the guards stirred in his seat. He was a young fellow, with a bone-and leather face, prominent teeth. "Just try something, boy," He said in a husky whisper. "I hear you're a tough boy. Let's see can you break from us." "Shut up, Jimbo," the other man said. "He ain't going noplace." "Just to Gull, is all," Jimpo said. He smiled, exposing untended molars. "You think Ke'll like it there, Randy?" "Sure," Randy said. "His kind likes it tough." Grayle ignored their conversation. He was listening to the muted, echoic roar of the car's passage through the Kimdredyard tunnel. The tone changed as the car slowed, started up-grade, chainged again as it moved ahead on tHe level. The had emerged now onto the causeway linking the islands. Quickly the car built up speed. In six minutes they would pass over the Boca Ciega cut, the deep-water tidal-flow channel spanned by a single-lane bridge. Grayle tensed, counting. W hen Weather Control at Kennedy alerted the satellite that the weather patrol craft was airborne, estimating five minutes to contact, the object of the meteorologist's attention had grown to an estimated diameter of four miles. Its rotation was clearly visible now. "About five minutes for a complete revolution," Bunny said. "That means winds topping sixty at the periphery already. And she's holding position as if she'd dropped anchor." "Kennedy is patching us directly in on the ground-to-air," Fred said. Ho plugged a hand microphone into a jack beside the screen. A faint crackle sounded, then the voice of the pilot came through loud and clear... getting dark fast, Bui ifs clear as a bell out here, sea calm. I see some fishing boats down there, like ducks on a pond. Fni holding ten thousand." "He ought to be spotting some sign of it," Bunny muttered. "He is within fifty miles of it." "Hold everything, Kennedy Tower," the pilot's tone changed. " have something... like a twister, a funnel. Black as soof. Looks kind of strange, hard edges like cast metal. Just sitting there on the horizon, maybe forty miles dead ahead." "Roger, Navy oh-nlne-three," the Kennedy controller said. "Close to ten miles and orbit the fix. Better give us the cameras on this from now on." "Cameras already rolling. Fm getting a hard echo off tlus thing. Ifs big all right. It tops out at about fifteen thousand, six miles wide. It looks like a mountain standing on its nose. Whafs holding it up?" "I've got him on the HR screen, sir," a junior technician called. "He's thirty miles, closing fast." "Say, Kennedy, I'm getting some turbulence now," the Neptune pilot said calmly. "I'm making a pass east of the bogie. This thing is big. I never saw an#dhing like this. It's opaque. It looks like it's spinning. Trailing streamers. The sea looks kind of funny under it. Black shadow, and... " There was a five-second pause. "There's a hole down there. A whirlpool. My God, I -- " ifTavy oh-nine-three," Ken' nedy came in as the voice hesitated. "Repeat that last transmission." "I'm down to five tKousand, fifteen miles out. TKe thing's standing up over me like an umbrella. I'm holding about a twenty-dree crab. Winds are getting rough. I can hear it now, roarg." All right, sheer off, Ken, get out of that turbulence." "There's a boat down there, some kind of boat! She's got her lights on. Looks like about a thirty footer. She's got her stern to the twister. She's... my God, the damned thing's got Her! She's going in!" "Ken, get out of there!" "There's three people aboard, I can see them!" the pilot was shouting now. "All right. Navy oH-ninethree," another voice spoke harshly. "Repeat course change, and put some snap into it!" "I'm... I'm making my pass now, north of it, five miles from contact. That boat -- " "Never mind the boat! Pick up a heading of # and put some distance between you and this thing!" "Turbulence is bad. She's fighting me..." "Go to full gate, Ken! Get the hell out of there!" "She's not reacting to control, Kennedy! She's... God! I'm getting knocked around... it'll tear her apart... !" "Mr. Hoffa!" the technician called. "The navy plane's Headed right into it!" "Ken! Try riding with it! Don't fight it, let it take you around, build up airspeed, and try to edge out!" "Roger, Kennedy," the pilot said. His voice was flat, emotionless now, against a background howl. "Tell the next guy to stay way back, twenty miles at least. It's like a magnet. I'm riding it like a merry-go-round. It's like a black wall, two miles off my starboard wingtip. The noise -- I guess you can hear it. I'm indicating four-fifty, but I"d say my ground speed is a couple hxmdred over that." "Ken, try a left turn, about five degrees -- " "I'm in a tight crab, no joy, Kennedy. The boatfs coming under me again. It's right on the edge of the drop. It -- it's breaking up. Ripped wide open. It's gone. Lucky at that. Fast. I'm getting the turbulence again. It's dark in here. I've got my nav lights on. It looks like black glass. Buffeting's bad now can't take much of this .  . she..." "Ken! Ken! Come in, Ken!" "It merged," the technician said in a choked voice. "The plane flew right into it!" npHe sound of the tires of the armored vehicle changed tone as it started across the metal-grid surface of the lift span of the Boca Ciega bridge. As they did, Grayle arched his back putting pressure against the steel bar across his chest. For an instant it held firm then it yielded, bent like sun-warmed wax. One sprang free of the latch mechanism. At the sound, both guards tensed, their heads jerking around in time to see Grayle eome to his feet, tense for forearms, and bend the chrome-steel rod between his wrists into a U, grip it with both Hands, and with a quick twist snap apart. The one called Randy made a strangled sound and clawed at the gun at his hip. Grayle plucked it from him, did something to it with his hands, threw it aside, in the same motion caught Jimbo as he rose, tapped him lightly against the wall, dropped him. He stepped to the rear of the car, gripped the steel rods which engaged slots at the sides of the double door, braced his feet, and lifted. One rod popped from its socket the other broke with a crystalline tinkle. Grayle kicked the doors wide; a swirl of rain wlupped at hint Gripping the jamb, he swui out, cavt at the lamp housing above, pulled himself up onto the roof o the speeding vehicle. As He drew His legs up, there was a sEarp double report, and a sharp pang stung His left shin. He rose to his knees, looking down at the concrete railing flashing past, at the multi-strand barbed wire above it, the dark water frothing white-capped below. He rose to His feet against the rushing wind, gauged his distance and dived far out over the pavement and the wires as the car braked, tires squealing its siren bursting into howling life. The escort spent Half an hour patrolling the bridge on foot, playing powerful hand-lights across the water, but they saw no sign of the escaped convict. nder the hih-beamed roof of the timbered iartnhouse at BjoTTthoIm, the man who had been Gralgrathor sits at a long table musing over a bowl oi stout ale. In the fire burning on the hearth images of faces and figures form, beckon, flicker away, their whispering flame-voices murmuring words in a tongue tie has halfforgotten. Across the room Gudred sits on a bench between the two household servantgirls, her youthful head bent over her needlework. He pushes the bowl away, stands, belts a warm coat of bearskin about Mm Gudred comes to Mm, the firelight soft on her plaited hair the color of hammered gold. "Will you sit with me by the fire awMle, my Grail?" she asked soHly. Oi an iKe daughters oi Earl Arnulf, she alone had a voice that was not like the bawling oi a bull calf. Her touch was gentle, her skin smooth and iair. "You are a fool, Grail," the earl had said. "She is a sickly creature, who will doubtless die bearing your first son. But if you indeed choose her over one oi my lusty, broad-beamed wenches -- why take her, and be done with it!" "Fm restless, girl, he tells her, smiling down into her face. "My head is fuddled with ale and too long lazing indoors. I need to walk the hills awhile to clear the cobwebs from my brain." Her hand tightens on his arm. "Thor -- not in the hills! Not in the gloaming; I know you laugh at talk of trolls and ogres, but why tempt them." He laughs and hugs her close. Across the wide room, the cur- tains of the sleeping alcove stir. The face of a small boy appears knuckling his eyes.  "See -- we've waked Loki with our chatter," Gralgrathor says. "Sing hhri a song, Gudred, and by the time you've stitch another seam in your Fairday gown. I'll be back." Outside, the light of the long northern everung gleams across the grain field which slopes down to the sea-edge. Above, the forest mounts the steep rocks toward the pink-stained snowfields on the high ridges. With the old hound, Odinstooth, beside him, he sets off with long strides that in a quarter of an hour have put the home acre far below him. Beside him, Odinstooth growls; he quiets the dog with a word. On the hillside, a movement catches his eye. It is a man, wrapped in a dark cloak, approaching from the tongue of the forest that extends down toward the farm. Grail watches him, noting his slim, powerful phyque, his quick, sure movements. The man's course leads him down across the fold of the earth, up again toward the ledge where Gralgrathor waits; there is something in his gait, his easy movements, that reminds him of someone from the forgotten life...  . The man comes up the slope, his face shadowed under the cowl. For an instant, the heavy gray cloth looks like a Fleet issue weathercloak -- "Thor?" a mellow tenor voice calls. Gralgrathor stands staring down at the newcomer, who has thrown back his cowl to reveal a lean, dark-eyed face, flame-red hair. "Lokrien -- am I dreaming " Gralgrathor whispers. The dark-eyed man smiles, shaking his head. He speaks in a strange language... but dimly, GralgrathoT senses tHe meaning: "That -- man, it is you! Don't tell me you've forgotten your mother tongue!" "After all these years?" Gralgrathor says. "You've really come?" "I've come for you," Lokrien says in the half-strange language. "I've come to take you home, Thor." V T fie governor of Caine Island Prison stared incredulously at tKe cHief of Eis guard force. "You wouldn't be maMng some sort of... of ill-considered joke, I suppose, Brasfier?" "No sir," tKe wiry, dapper officer said. He stood at parade rest, looking acutely uncomfortable. Outside tHe wind sfirieked, jeeringly. "It's not possible," tiie governor said. "It simply isn't possible!" "It Happened on tiie bridge," tKe captain said, tigHt-moutHed. "Just as the car crossed tKe drawspan." "An escape," Hardman sat rigid in his chair, his face pale except for spots of color high on his cheeks. "From the coimtry's only one hundred per cent escape-proof confinement facility!" The captain slanted Kis eyes at his superior. "Governor, if you're suggesting..." "I'm suggesting nothing -- except that a disaster Kas occurred!" "He didn't get far," the captain said. "Not with two tranks in him. He went over tfie side into a rip tide. Tfiaf s a rougfi drop, at sixty miles an hour, even without the storm. We're looking for the body, but -- " "I want the body found before tfie wires get tfie story! And -- if He's alive -- " fie stared fiercely at tfie officer. "He's dead, sir, you can count on tfiat." "If lie's alive, I said, I want him caught, understand, Brasfier? Before fie readies the mainland! Clear." Tfie captain drew a breatfi and let it out, making a show of selfcontrol. "Yes sir," fie said heavily. "Just as you say." He turned away, giving Hardman a look as though there were comments only protocol prevented him from making. When tfie officer Kad gone, Hardman sat for five minutes biting his thumb. Then he flipped the intercom lever. "Lester, I want the Grayle dossier, eversdifiing we've got." "There isn't much. Governor. You'll recall Ke was a transfer from Leavenworth East -- " "I want to see wKat we fiave." Lester Hesitated. "Is it true, Governor? THe story going around is that fie more or less burst his way tfirougfi the side of an armored car." "That's an exaggeration! Don't Help spread these damned rumors, Lester!" "Of course, I knew it was ridiculous. I suppose under cover of the storm he caught the escort off guard -- " "I want those records right away, Lester. And get in touch with Pyle at Leavenworth, see if you can turn up anything else on Grayle. Check with Washington, the military services, the various Federal agencies, Query Interpol and the UN PC Bureau. I want anything and everything you can turn up." Lester whistled. "Quite a stir for one man, sir, isn't it? I mean -- " "That man has my reputation in his pocket, Lester! I want to know all there is to know about him -- just in case he isn't picked up washing around in the tide tomorrow morning!" "Of course. You know. Governor, some of the staff have been repeating the stories about Grayle having served his time but not being released because the records were lost. They say he finally took the law into his own hands -- " "Nonsense. He'd have been free in ninety days." "Just how long had fie been on the inside sir? I was asking Captain BrasKer, and he -- " "Get me the records, Lester," the governor cut him off. "I suggest you stop listening to rumors and get busy digging up some facts." T ying flat among reeds on a ' shore of sulphurous black mud, Grayle averted his face from the howling wind that drove rain at him in icy sheets. He rested for a while waiting for the dixziness to pass, then wormed his way up the bank, squinting against the downpour. A large tree afforded some slight shelter. He settled himself with his back to it, set about tearing strips from his prison garment to bind around his shin, in which a highvelocity pellet has scored a deep gouge before ricocheting off the bone. On the highway above, a car churned past, a red strobe light flashing atop it, its headlights drowning in the almost solid downpour. Grayle set off along the shore, keeping in the shelter of scrub liveoak and Australian pines, slipping and sliding in the dark over the twisted roots. He was almost on the house before he saw it: a bleak cuboid of unpainted concrete, tin roofed, dark and silent under tKe sodden trees. A small car stood in tKe sandy drive. Grayle went forward, skirted the vehicle. As fie rounded it, a light lanced out from near tfie house, caught him full in tfie face. "It's not wortfi stealing," a voice called over the drum of the rain. "But you're welcome to try." The voice was tfiat of a woman. Grayle stood where he was waiting. "You'd better be on your way," the voice said. "I keep a gun, you know. I have to, living wfiere I do." She broke off; the ligfit wavered. "That's a prison jacket." The light moved over him, field on his face. "You escaped from Caine Island?" When Grayle said nothing, she went on: "You better get inside, I heard tfie sirens a few minutes ago. They're patrolling tfie road." grayle took two swift steps, swept the ligfit from her hand, reversed it and flicked its beam across the woman. Sfie was young, clean-featured, dark haired, tall and slender in a weatherproof trench coat. Sfie didn't move, but turned Ker eyes aside from the light. There was no gun in her hands. "I'm sorry," Grayle said. "I fiad to be sure." He handed tfie light back to fier. Silently sfie turped, led tfie way into tfie house. Sfie switcfied on a lit, pulled down tfie roller sKades. After tfie cold wind, tfie warmtS and comparative silence aiveloped Grayle like a downy blanket "You're hurt!" the girl said. Grayle braced his feet, fighting against a wave of dizziness. "Lethanol!" the girl's voice came from a remote distance. "I can smell it on you! Sit down." Tfie girl stood over him, a concerned look on her face. Water dripped from her Kair, running down Ker cheek. For an instant she reminded him of someone: the image of a face witfi ringletted hair and a mob cap flickered and was gone. He couldn't remember her name. It had been so long, there were so many things forgotten... He pushed himself to his feet; fie must not sleep now. Sfie took his arm; Ke was aware of Ker voice, but made no effort to follow the words. Fragments of old memories danced through Kis consciousness: a night in the rain on tfie field near Cordoba; standing by a stone wall, white booted feet tramped endlessly past, the blue-coated troops with' tfieir backpacks and fixed bayonets; a sudden, vivid evocation of tfie odor of tarred cordage and creaking timbers, of blown spume and salt fisfi, of leatHer and gunpowder... "... stay on your feet," tlie girl was saying. "I saw a demonstration back at Bloomington." Her voice was low, well modulated, Her diction good. He Halted. "Do you Have any EigH protein food -- meat, eggs?" "Yes. Good idea." Grayle continued to pace up and down the small room. It was neat, clean, sparsely furnished with cheap plastic-and-steel-tube chairs and studio coucH, a thin rug, a bookcase built of bricks and board and filled with paperbacks. Framed magazine pictures decorated the walls. There were flowers in foil-covered tin cans. The kitchen was an alcove with a fold-out table, a minimal countertop refrigerator, a tiny electric range. The aroma of bacon and eggs was almost painfully sharp. Qhe put a plate on the table, added a cup of black coffee. "Eat slowly," she said, watching him swallow the egg in two bites. "It won't Help you to get indigestion. "How far am I from the perimeter wall?" "About three miles as the crow flies, across the bay. Nearly seven by road. How did you get this far?" "I swam." "Yes, but -- "Her eyes went to the crude bandage on His shinn visible under his pants cuff. "You're Hurt." Without waiting for a reply, she knelt, with deft fingers opened the crude knot and pulled away the wet cloth. There was a faint pink scar across the tanned skin. She gave him a puzzled look as she rose. "I'll move on now." He got to His feet. "I'm grateful to you for your kindness." "What do you intend to do? Just walk out there and wait to be caught?" "It will be better for you if you know nothing of my plans." "You're on a peninsula Here, there's only one way out. They will have it blocked." A car passed on the road. They listened as the growl of the engine receded. "They'll be checking Here soon," the girl said. "There's a crawl-space above the kitchen." "Why?" "Why not?" Her tone was defiant. volve yourself?" "Perhaps I Have a feeling for a man on the run." He waited. "I had a brother at Caine Island. That's why I bought this place -- I was allowed to see him one day a week. He had nobody else; and neither did I." "Tfiat doesn't fully explain -- " "He's dead. Three months ago. Leukemia, they said. He was only thirty-four." "You blame the authorities?" "They had him," she said flatly. S carlet light struck the front window, glowed through the white light replaced it, pushing shadows across the floor. The growl of an engine was audible over the rattle of rain on the roof. "We waited too long," the girl said tightly, "Stay out of the way, out of sight," Grayle said. Outside, car doors slammed. He flattened himself against the wall beside the door. There was a sharp rap. A moment later the knob turned, the door was thrown violently open. Rain blasted in. There was the sound of metal rasping on leather, the click of a safety catch being snapped off. A tall man in a shiny yellow slicker took a step into the room. Grayle moved then, caught the man's gun hand, jerked him to him. "Don't cry out," he said into the cop's startled face. "Harmon!" the man yelled. "Don't -- " Grayle gripped him by the shoulder, gave him a sharp shake. He went slack. Grayle lowered him to the floor. The second man came through the door at a dead run. As he passed, Grayle rapped him on the side of the neck; he fell hard, lay still. Grayle pushed the door shut. The girl's eyes met him. "I never saw anyone move so quickly!" "Good-by," Grayle cut Her off. "And thank you." "What are you going to do?" "Don't involve yourself. Miss -- " "Rogers. Anne Rogers." She avoided looking at the two unconscious man on the floor. "And I'm already involved." "I'll be all right. Miss Rogers." "Take my car." "I never learned to drive one." Her face searched his face. "Then I'll have to go with you." She flicked off the lights, took out her flash, opened the door, stepped out into the rain. Grayle followed. She reached inside the police car, switched off the lights. The radio crackled and muttered. The inside of the small car smelled wet and mouldy. The starter groaned sluggishly. "I'll have to try to jump if from their car." Anne got out and went back to the trunk, opened it, took out a pair of heavy insulated cables. Grayle lifted the hood for her as directed, watched as she attached the big copper alligator clips, making sparks jump and sputter. This time the starter whirled energeucaay; me engine cougneu, broke into stuttering life. She revved it, sending clouds of exhaust rolling out past the window. "Hold your foot on the gas," she said, and jumped out of the car to disconnect the cables. The deck lid thumped. She slid back in beside him. "Here we go. Be thinking about how to handle it when we get to the causeway." Tjor ten minutes they drove through torrential rain, doing a reckless twenty miles per hour on the glossy blacktop. Gusts of wind threw the light car across the road. No other cars passed them. At one point, water was across the road; Anne shifted down and crawled through. Then lights shone a hundred yards ahead. The red beacon of a parked police car blinked through the ram. "Stop the car." She braked, pulled over, looked at him inquiringly. "Can you face it out if they search the car?" he asked. "What are you going to do?" "I'll ride the frame." "You can't. There's nothing to ride on, no room -- " "I'll manage." He stepped out into the storm, went flat and eased under the chassis. He felt over me rusc-puLcu liaxuc, utaiued his fingers on the exhaust stack, groped for a handhold on a cross member. He hooked the toes of his prison issue shoes over the rear spring hangars, lifted his body from the wet pavement, pressing against the side of the car. The girl crouched by the car, staring at him. "You are crazy! You can't hold on that way! If you slip you'll be killed!" "Go ahead, Anne," he said. "I'm all right." She hesitated for a moment, then she nodded and was gone. Grayle heard the gears shift; the car lurched as it started ahead. Acrid gases leaked from the rotted pipes; the car vibrated, jolting over the road. Oily water sleeted at him; gravel stung him. The tires hissed, close to his face. Then the car slowed. Lights one on the wet pavement, gliding nearer. He saw the wheels of another car; two pairs of booted feet approached, stopped a foot from his head; voices, indistinct over the rumble of the steady rain and the whine of the wind. Doors clanked; the car swayed, and the girl's feet appeared. One policeman rounded the car; more door slams, more rocking. The deck lid opened and slammed. The girl got back into the driver"s seat. The masculine boots withdrew. The car pulled ahead, accelerated. Half a mile farther on, it slowto a halt. Grayle dropped clear and crawled out into the downpour. He slid into the seat and met le girl's eyes. "I still don't believe it," she said. "No one could do what you just did." Grayle put Kis Hand on the door. "Thanks," he said. "I'll leave you now." "What's your name?" the girl asked suddenly. "Grayle." "Why were you... tfiere?" She tilted her head toward the invisible island behind them. "I killed a man." He watched Her eyes. "In a fair fight?" "He almost killed me, if that's what you mean." "Grayle, you wouldn't last a day without me. You've been inade too long." "I Have a long way to go, Anne." "Doesn't everyone, Grayle?" He hesitated for a moment;; then he nodded. She smiled intensely, pulled the car back onto the road and gunned ahead along the dark road. rPfiey sit in Re hig, dtaity Rail, witR sRislds and spears and axes which are not decorations bat are ready for use, beside the great granite fireplace, chimneyless and smoky. "#fs a strange, barbaric world you found yourself castaway on, Thor," Lokrien says. "But you have a roof over your head, a warm fire on a cold night, good food and ale, a woman to comfort you. It could have been worse. "I found friends here, Gralgrathor says. "They could have killed me, but instead they let me into their lives." "Poor creatures. I wonder wRat their history is? They're human, of course, no doubt descendants of some ancient spacefarers wrecked here long ago. Have they any legends of their lost homeland?" GralgratRor nods. "It must Rave been long ago. Their myths are much distorted." "There's a certain peace and simplicity here -- the peace of ignorance," Lokrien says. "They Rave never heard of the Xorc. They don't dream that out there a great Imperial Fleet is defending their little world against an enemy that could vaporize the planet." "Perhaps in years to come, Thor, you'll look back sometimes with nostalgia on your idyll among the primitives." "No, Loki," GralgratRor says. "It's not earth I'll look back on with nostalgia. I'm staying here, Loki. I'm not going back with you." Lokrien shakes his head as if to clear it ot some dark vision. "You don't know what you're saying. Never to go back? Never to see Fsar, to wear the uniform again, to sail with the Fleet -- " All those things, Loki." "Do you know what I did to come here?" Lokrien says. "I deserted my post in the line of battle. I waited for a lull and turned my boat and drove for this outpost world to look for you. It took me all these years of searching to pick up the trace from your body shield circuitry and find you here. With luck we can concoct a story to explain how I found you -- " "Loki, I cazft desert my home, my wife, my child." "Yot?d let this savage female and her cub stand in the way of..." Lokrien hesitated. "Fm sorry Thor. The woman is beautiful. But Ysar! You'd give your whole life for this barn, these grubby fields, this petty barony?" "Yes." "Then think of your duty to the Fleet." "The Fleet is only a collection of machines, once the dream behind it is gone." "You think you'll find the dream, as you call it, here, on this old backwoods world?" "Better a live acorn them a dead forest, Loki." Loki looked across the gulf at the brother he had come to find. "I could force you, Thor. I still have my suit and my Y-gun." Gralgrathor smiles a little. "Don't try to decide now," Lokrien says. "We're both fired. We need sleep. In the morning -- " "In the morning nothing will have changed." "No? Perhaps you're wrong about that." "There are clean furs there, on the hearth," Gralgrathor says. "Sleep well, Loki. I need to walk for awhile." Lokrien's eyes follow Gralgrathor as he steps out into the icy moonlight. VI #CT et me get this straight," the commander of the Lakewood Naval Air Station said grimly. "You're telling me I lost a pilot in broad daylight, in a whirlpool?" "Not precisely that. Commodore Keyes," the colonel said. There's a tremendous volume of air involved in this thing, too. Friction with the water surface, you understand -- " "No, I don't understand. Maybe you'd better start at the beginning." "I have the recording of the pilot's transmissions here, in the event you'd care to hear it" The commodore nodded curtly. The colonel hastily set up the small portable player, adjusted the tape. In a moment the pilot's voice was coming through. The two men listened in silence following the recon plane's progress. The commodore's face was set in a scowl as the tape ended. "All right, what are you doing about this thing?" "The nucleus of the disturbance is centered on a point northwest of Bermuda." The colonel stepped to the large world map on the wall and indicated the spot. "It's growing steadily larger, setting up powerful winds and currents over an area of several thousand square miles. Water is being pulled in toward the center from every direction, thus the whirlpool." The colonel produced a stack of photos from his briefcase and passed them across the desk. They showed a great, glossy-black funnel, wrapped in dusty spirals like disintegrating cotton wool batts. "Those were made with ultraviolet from about a hundred miles out You'll note the calibration marks; they show that the threat of the whirlpool is approximately a tenth of a mile wide at the surface." "How wide?" "I know it sounds incredible, Commodore, but I have it on good assurance that the figure of five hundred feet is accurate." "Hopper, do you have any idea of tlie volume of water you're talking about?" "Well, I could work it out -- " "How deep is the sea at this point?" "I don't have the exact figure, sir, but it is deep ocean there, well off the continental shelf." "What kind of force would it take to get that much water moving at the velocity this thing must have? Where's the energy coming from?" "Well, Commodore -- " "And you say water is flowing in from every direction. Where's it going? And the air: the thousands of cubic miles of air on the move, all toward the same point. What's happening to it? Where's the outflow?" "Conunodore, we Have aircraft out now photographing the entire eastern half of the country, and well out into the Atlantic. And of course the satellite is busy on this thing as well. I hope to have some results very soon now." "Find out where the water's going Hopper. There's something wrong here. We're missing something. The water Has to be somewhere. I want to know where, before the biggest tidal wave in history hits the east coast. I n tKe governor's office at Caine Island, Lester Pale, Special Aide to tfie governor, sfiook Eis Head ruefully at Eis cEief. "TEe Grayle dossier isn't mucB, I'm afraid, sir," Ee said. "I Eave the documents covering Eis transfer from LeavenwortH East siz years ago; tEey're in order. And of course his record Eere at Caine Island. But prior to that -- " Lester shook his head. "Give me wKat you've got," Hardman spoke impatiently. He was hunched forward over the desk, raising his voice above the drumming of the rain that had increased steadily now for nearly six hours. "I talked to Warden Pyle as you suggested, sir. Many of his records were lost in a file room fire about twelve years ago but he says that of his own memory he recalls that Grayle was a military prisoner, in for the murder of an Army officer." "Go on." "The funny thing is. Governor, Ee was absolutely certain that Grayle was an inmate when Ee took over East L, nearly twenty years ago." He paused, looking dubiously at his superior. "So?" "Well, after all, sir -- Eow old is Grayle?" "You tell me." "Well, sir -- Pyle called in an old con, a man who had done twenty years of a life sentence before parole. He works in tHe prison kitcEens now. Pyle asked him wBat Ee remembered about Grayle." "And?" Lester made a disclaiming gesture. "The old fellow said that Grayle was one of the prisoners transferred from Kansas along with him, back in '#. And that he had known him before that." "How long before that?" "What are you talking about, Lester? Spell it out." "Why, they're obviously confusing the man with someone else. There may have been another prisoner with the name of Grayle, possibly someone with a physical resemblance. I don't suppose they've had occasion to think of the man for a number of years, and now they're dredging up false memories, superimposing our Grayle on what they recall of the older man." CfThat about the Army records of the court-martial?" Lester shook Eis Bead. "No success there so far, sir. I Eave a friend in the Pentagon who Has access to a great deal of retired material that's never been programmed into the Record Center. He supplies data to historians and thie like; they got a lot of requests. Just for the sake of thoroughness I asked Him to dig tack as far as Se cati But Se informed me just a few minutes ago tSat He went Hack as far as. World War iTwo and turned up notliing." "Did you tell Him to keepi looking?" "Well, no sir. TKat's already thirty-six years back. He's hardly likely -- " "Tell him to keep digging, Lester. You don't send a man to prison for life without making a record of it somewhere." "Governor," a voice boomed sharply on the intercom. "Captain Brasher to see you. He insisted I break in." "Send him in." The door opened, and the guard chief strode into the room, gave Pale a sharp look, stood waiting. "Well, speak up, man!" the governor snapped. "As I suspected, sir," the captain said, "Grayle's alive. He overpowered one of my officers, and a state patrolman, in a shack on the north shore, beat them into unconsciousness, and got clear." "Got clear? Aren't the roads blocked?" "Certainly. I don't mean he's escaped the net, just that he's still at large." "How long ago was this?" The captain's eyes snapped to the wall clock, snapped back. "Just under half an hour." 'Was the shack occupied?" "Afi -- I can't say as to tflat -- " "Find out. How did he leave? In tfie patrol car?" "No, it was parked In front of the place. That's How -- " "Find out wHat kind of car the occupant owned. Meanwhile watdi every road. He can't be far away. And Brasher -- don't let him slip through your fingers. I don't care what you Have to do to stop him -- stop Him!" "I'll stop him, all right. BrasHer hesitated. "You know he's attacked three of my men now." "That doesn't say a Hell of a lot for your men. Brasher. Tell them to get on their toes and stay there!" "That's what I wanted to Hear you say. Governor." Brasher wheeled and left the room. "Governor," Lester said, "I have a feeling that somewhere along the line there's been a serious mistake." "Doa'l: talk like a fool, Lester. Graxle's commitment papers are in order, I have that mucH -- " "I don't mean an error on your part, governor. I mean prior to his transfer to Caine Island. Possibly that's why he made this rather desperate break. Perhaps he's innocent." Hardman leaned forward, his big hands flat on the desk. "He broke out of a prison under my command, Lester. I have twentyone years invested in this . business without an escape, and I'm not lettmg one blot a perfect record, clear?" "Governor, this is a man's life -- " "And of course there's more to it than just my reputation," Hardman said, leaning back. "If one man crashed out of Caine -- and got clear -- we'd have every malcontent on the inside making a try. It would be a blow at the entire modem penological system." "Brasher will shoot him down like a dog. Governor!" "I gave no such orders." "Brasher will interpret them that way!" "He can interpret them any way he likes, Lester -- as long as he nails his man. I won't be overly critical of his methods!" Mr. Hunnicut," the voice of the Deputy UnderSecretary of the Interior for Public Power rasped in the waiting ear of the Chief Engineer at Pasmaquoddie. "I've gone out on a limb for you people; Now I expect answers from you that I can give to the Committee. They're looking for scalps, and they think mine will do!" "Meaning the system is a failure! Don't fall back on the kind of jargon you technical people use to obfuscate the issues when things go wrong! I want it in plain language! Yoxir generating station is drawing ten per cent over its rated operational standard, while the receiving stations report anywhere from thirty to forty per cent effectiveness. Now just tell me in words of one syllable -- where is all that power going, Mr. Hunmcut? "It's obvious there's a leakage somewhere, Mr. Secretary," Htmnicut said, holding his temper. "Where? In the transmission end? In the receiving stations? Or in the giant brains that dreamed up this fiasco?" "Mr. Secretary, this is a wholly new area of technology! There are bound to be certain trial-anderror adjustments -- " "Hogwash! You didn't mention that when you were pleading with Appropriations for an"Look here, this isn't as simple a matter as tracing the point of breakdown in a conventional linetransmission system -- and even there, it sometimes takes days to pinpoint the trouble. Remember the New York blackout in the sixties, and -- " "Don't give me a history lesson, Hunnicut! Are you telling me that anybody and his dog Rex can tap our broadcast system at will, and there's nothing we can do about it?" "Wait a minute, I didn't say tKat -- " "The newspapers will say it! Give me a better line to feed to them!" "Mr. Secretary, you Have to imderstand, we have no instruments, no proceedures for this situation! It's totally unprecedented, contrary to theory, inexplicable -- " "It's happening, Mr. Hunnicut! Better align your theories!" "We've made a start. We've rigged some makeshift field dengity sensors, and I have four motorized teams out running retiring search curves, plotting the gradient -- " "Meaning what?" "Meaning that with luck we'll detect a pattern that will enable us to triangulate on the point of power drain." "Back to that! I can't give that to the press, Hunnicut! They"!! drag in everything from Russians to Little Green Men from Mars! 'Aliens steal US power.' I can see the headlines now!" "It's nothing like that! I'm pretty sure we'll find it's some sort of anomalous natural formation that's drawing off the energy! A massive ore deposit, something of that sort!" "Hunnicut -- you're babbling! Just between us -- what do you really think it is that's drinking a couple of hundred thousand kilowatts per hour out of the air?" "Mr. Secretary, I don't know." "I'm glad you admit it, Hunnicut. Now I suggest you get busy and find out, before I yank you out of that plush office and put in somebody with a little better grasp of the dynamics of modern politicotechnology ! "I'm no politician! I -- " "Locate that leak, Hunnicut -- or you'll be back taking gamma counts on the Lackawanna pile!" A nne Rogers stared out tHrougS the rain blurred windshield at the almost invisible road surface unwinding ahead. At wide intervals the lights of a lonely house shone weakly through the downpour slanting through the headlights. "There's a town about five miles ahead," she said. "We should change cars there." They rode in silence for a few minutes. More lights appeared ahead. They passed a gas station, dark and deserted. Anne made a left turn at a blinking yellow traffic light, followed a broad truck route for half a mile, then took a right into a narrow residential street. The trees lining the way provided some shelter from the rain. They moved along at a crawl, lights dimmed. There were cars parked at the side of the curbless street and in the weedgrown yards. "They're worse wrecks than this one," Anne said, accelerating past an empty stretch. "We might as well pick a good ne while we are at it." ' "I'll rely on your judgment," Grayle said with the slightest hint of humor. Anne glanced at him sideways. "You were inside so long, I suppose everything looks strange to you. IV God, what a terrible thing, to take a man's freedom away! I'd rather be killed and be done with it." "It wasn't as bad as all that. There's a certain peace to be found in the monastic life, after -- " "After what?" she said softly. He shook his head. "You would not understand. I'm afraid, Anne. You're so terribly young." "I'm twenty-five, Grayle. You are not more than thirty-five?" He didn't answer. They passed through a green light, went along a deserted block of elderly store fronts, a few of which had suffer'ed incongruous face-lifts which accentuated the shabbiness of the neighborhood. They slowed at a vacant lot where a row of identical stamped-steel grilles and flimsy bumpers fronted a cracked sidewalk under a string of draggled pennants which beat in the wind like trapped birds. A "New cars," Anne said. "But we'd need the keys." "Explain, please." "You need the ignition key to start a car with. And even to get the doors open. They probably keep them locked in the office." "Drive around the comer and stop there in the shadows." She swung aroimd the corner and pulled into the black pool under a giant live oak. "Wait here." Grayle stepped from the car, crossed the street briskly, threaded his way between the cars to the back door of the small shed. He gripped the knob, give it a quick twist metal tinkled. He stepped inside and closed the door. here was a small desk, a plastic-upholstered chair with a burst seam, a calender on the wall. Wan light from a polemounted lamp at the curb shone on a filing cabinet, a scrap of worn rug, a clothes tree with a battered hat. Grayle tried the center drawer of the desk; it popped open with a small splintering sound. There were papers, rubber bands, paper clips, loose cigarettes, some pennies, a pocket knife. He tried the other drawers. The bottom one on the right contained a garishly colored cigar box with a curled lid. Inside were bunches of keys, four to a ring, each with an attacKed tag. Grayle scanned tHem: Wfiite # Dr Fal; Gray # Dr Gal. Tfie door beside Grayle made a faint sound. He turned as it flew suddenly open. A man stepped in. Holding a Heavy revolver in front of Him. He was bald, middle-aged bulky in a tan Hunting jacket, water-soaked across tHe sHoulders, the collar turned up. He wore round-lensed steel glasses, water misted. A drop of water hung from the tip of his prominent nose. "All rigfit, just turn around and put your hands up again' the wall, boy," He said in a highpitched, nasal drawl. He took a step sideways and reached for the telephone on the desk. Grayle hadn't moved. The man paused his hand on the phone. "By God, I told you to move!" "Didn't Herb tell you about me?" Grayle asked casually. Hah?" The man stared. "Wfiat the hell you mean?" "The idea was that I'd drop by to amfrunct the baterpomp, the lets up, you understand." OH." THe man was frowning; the gun dropped. "By God, why didn't he let me know -- " T fiere was a sound from tfie door; the man with the gun whirled, bringing it up; Grayle took a step, struck him on the side of the neck with his right Hand as His left swept over weapon, snatched it clear. man fell against tfie walk Anne stood in the doorway, a lug wrencH in Her hand, eyes wide. "I told you to wait," Grayle said fiarsHly. "I... I saw Him get out of one of the cars." "Don't nursemaid me, girl." Grayle picked up the keys from the desk. "Can you decode these notations?" She glanced at the tags and nodded. She looked at the man on the floor. He was breathing noisily. He's not Hurt," Grayle said. "He'd have shot you," he added. "You're a strange man, Grayle. You'd really care if he shot me, wouldn't you? And even him -- and those two policemen: you knew what you were doing, didn't you. You knew just where to lut them, and how hard, to knock them unconscious without really hurting them. That's important to you, isn't it -- not to really hurt anybody?" "We'd better go," Grayle said. "I was nursemaiding you," Anne said. "I suppose the idea you couldn't drive, didn't know your way around gave me the feeling you were helpless. But you are not Helpless. You're less helpless than any man I ever saw." "Which machine?" Grayle said brusquely. "The white Falcon," the girl said. "What.?" the word was explosively sharp. She stared at him. "We'll take the white Falcon. They're very common." They found the car in the front row; it started easily; the gauge showed half a tank. There was a stale odor of cigarette smoke in the car; a folded map lay on the seat. "They've been using this one. That's good. It'll be broken in." Aime examined the map. "We'll cut across to # on # and head north. With a little luck we'll be across the state line before daylight." t the top of the lidge known as Snom's Axe, Odinstooth whines, sniffing the air. Gralgrathor strokes the old hound's blunt head. The dog's growl ends in a sharp, frightened yap. "It takes more than a bear to make you nervous, old warrior. What is it? Gralgrathor stares downward through the rught toward the faint park far below that is the firelight shining from his house. "Time we went back" he murmurs. "The moon's down; morning soon." He is half a mile from the house when he hears the scream, faint and muffled, quickly shut off. In an instant he is running, the big dog bounding ahead. The servants are clustered in the houseyard, holding torches high. Big, bowed-back Hulf comes to meet him, a knobbed club gripped in his hands. Tears run down his sun-and-ice-burnt face into the stained nest of his beard. "You come too late, Grail," he says. The big dog halts, stands stiff-legged, hackles up, snarling. Gralgrathor pushes through the silent huddle of housecarls. The bodies lie outside the thresholds Gudred, slim and golden-haired, the blood scarlet against her icewhite face. For an instant her dead eyes seem to meet his, as if to communicate a message from an infinite distance. The boy lies half under her, face down, with  blood in his fair hair. Odinstooth crouches flat at the sound that comes from his master's throat." "We heard the boy cry out, Grail," an old woman says. "We sprang from our nests and ran here, to see the troll scuttling away, there." She points a bony finger up the rocky slope. "Loki -- where is he?" "Gone," the old woman says. "Changed into his black wereshape and fled." Gralgrathor plunges into the house. The embers on the hearth show him the empty room, shadow-cTowded, itie alien hanngs ripped irom the sleeping alcove, the glossy splatter oi blood across the earthen floor. Behind him, a man comes through the doorway, his torch making great shadows which leap and dance against the dark walls. "Gone, Grail, as old Siv said. Not even a troll would linger long after such handiwork as this." Gralgrathor catches up a shorthandled iron sledge hatted with oak. The men scatter as he bursts from the house. "Loki," he screams, "Where are you?" Then he is running, and the great hound leaps at his side.      boing publishsd. new novels The best in science fiction comes from walker You'll find the best in a new series of science fiction novels published in handsome hardcover editions. The Walker series features major new novels by established writers as well as classics you will want for your library. Ten titles are now Eight classics -- now in hardcover The Whoie Man by John Brunner, Jan. # The Watch Beiow by James White, Jan. # The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham,-Jan. # The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M.Kombluth, Feb. # Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. Feb. # Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, Feb. # A Case of Conscience by James Blish, March # Thorns by Robert Silverberg, March # Norman Spinrad is a novel of raw energy and punch that makes. a radical departure from traditional science fiction style. April # is an abrasive and entertaining satire of politics and society. April # Walker and Company  # Fifth Avenue, New York The City That Loves You No man had ever fried to leave the City before Wormser. The City took care of -- everything. T Sey Eave never understood tHe city. TEey will never understand it. Man recognizes one, himself, and Ee recognizes multiplicity, outside-self. Man thinks of Eimself as an on-off switch. He is eitEer-or. TEe more sophisticated eitiier-and-or... How laugEingly simple! Man is always less than one. All his organizations are less than one. Fortunately, man lives by his unconscious, vdiicH does not concern itself with the sad lies of his conscious mind. Therefore, do not listen to what men say, but watch what they do -- if you care to learn the secrets... Wormser woke up with a start. His room was terribly hot, suffocating. He felt sweaty, uneasy between his legs, and his night jacket was plastered to his back. That was the sign that greeted him every morning in this little apartment in the City of Reflex. It was an ancient city of an ancient, knowledgable race, and he was here and glad to be here. Except that it was too hot. As soon as he got out of the bed, glad to leave its insufferable embrace but stumbling and thick-minded, the room began to cool. New York had nothing like this. Earth had nothing like this. The ridiculous, strained earth colonies in space -- on Mars, Saturn's moons, Pluto -- had no real cities, only stockades against the hard arithmetic of space. But the Reflexians out near Alpha Centauri, on a planet of the double star system -- ahhhh, this was a City! Tfie rooixi cooled rapidly, and His sweat disappeared. THe win-i dows opaqued, tKen cleared to reveal tKe blxiisH, startling cool dawn so deligStful on AlpHa. Gradually tKe windows turned sugary iwHite and vanisKed; tHe pure air of Reflex poured in on him. It was a wine-cold, bracing air that urged the lungs to draw deeper morning breaths; he did. He was cleaned immaculately by his suit, ultrasonically, the pleasant vibrations shaking every flake of dirt from his skin -- mucK cleaner than soap and water, without the temperature shock and drying effect of the latter. By the time he had reached Gis breakfast table. His suit Had been done for h im just before He awakened; no use to spend waking Hours in sucH a senseless waste of time. It was a device in the collar of his suit He wasn't sure How it worked. In tHe silver mirror across from His Kght wood table He looked refreshed, clear-eyed, sober and sane. He felt quite good. For five years he Had awakened thus, though on Earth he'd been a poor awakener, Hating tKe mornings. But not on Reflex. T Tis breakfast was ready as Ke Had imagined it, before saying the words aloud: "Execute Breakfast." THe bacon and eggs smelled good, looked good and tasted good. Sick? He couldn't remember the last time in tfie City fie Had felt sick. Tfiose same delicate fiigfi-frequency radio waves tfiat watcfied over all diagnosed any trouble in fiis body before fie knew it Himself and communicated witli His city suit, iwfiicfi led Him to appropriate drugstores or doctors. Now that was the way to run medicare and keep down costs. PsycHological ills received tfie same sensitive attention, he reflected cozily, dialing his program for tfie day. Detecting neuroses in fiis tfiougfit, word or deed, tfie City allowed him to gratify His wisHes if they were Harmless, or brougfit him to a corrective clinic if they were fantasies demanding rejection. Machine-dominated, his eartfi friends would call Him. HaH! Macfiine-supported! WHy waste time on inconsequentials like maintenance errands or petty illnesses. SucH waste in an unattentive City was neurotic! He studied His work program for tHe day indifferently on the computer read-out. Expertly His peared. He cfiuckled. Even in Reflex a certain amount of loafing was good, necessary and accepted. Then Ke saw tfie brand new full memory flooded back. Today, at the five-year mark, Ke was a full-fledged citizen of Reflex. He had passed his novitiate. Fascinated Ke pushed tKe REprogram disappear. His plate was empty; he rose, stretched luxuriously and yawned. He felt the missing support of his daily program, but knew this was expected of new citizens. He went to the deep-space radio and dialed the Saturn mission, knowing that his eyes danced and a smile lurked at the edge of his lips. It took a while for the screen to clear and for contact with Saturn to be made, so many parsecs from here. But there was Butler, older and grayer and looking astonished as Wormser knew he would. "Robert Wormser, Sociologist First Class, Saturn Mission, reporting," he said. "For God's sake," said Butler. "After all this time!" "I told you I'd call in a couple of years," said Wormser. "On the day they made me a citizen of Reflex. It happened last night;" "Man!" said Butler. "This is a red-letter day! You're the first to report back in months and months out of the ten people on the last mission." "I ratlier thought so. I've seen some of the others, talked to them. We have a club here. Around Reflex you get interested in other things besides the Saturn mission." "Are you coming back?" asked Butler anxiously. "Are we going to get that report we sent the expedition for? Or will they stop you?" 'flormser smiled. "You're na  ive. There isn't any 'they.' Just the city of Reflex. It's not a political party, or bureaucracy -- it's just an intelligent, well-run city. I can leave whenever I want and come back whenever I want, now that I'm a citizen." "You're coming back, then." "Of course I'm coming back. I told you two years ago I'd come back when I got my citizenship." Others have promised," said Butler darkly. "Something always happened. Not a single man or woman ever came back." "Tomorrow for sure," said Wormser. Oh, sure," said Butler. "Williams promised to come back. He was leaving tomorrow, but we never saw him. Nor any of the others." Wormser. "He may come back some day. Butler, you just don't understand either me or the City. The others thought they'd make a qtiick study and come back; they're still here, or dead. Ours and those of earlier expeditions. But I came to experience Reflex through every sense and nerve. I entered it with as blank a mind as one can Have. I gave myself to the City, and the City gave itself to me. Now it doesn't matter whether I leave or not. I am the City, it is me, and I will come back. to make a full, detailed report, with film, statistics, books, recordings and personal observations. I've already packed the space ship." "I'll believe it when you get Here," said Butler, obviously impressed nevertheless. "Tomorrow," said Wormser. "Maybe tonight." He chuckled as he broke the connection. Ominous? Dangerous? The incredible phalanx and array of uprising apartments, level upon level, swept away from his feet above him, where the topmost apartments blended into a gray sky. His dawn was a sunlight ricowindows, past gaily-colored stone and somber aluminum. Now already people moved on the levels outside. Wormser went to the table and His programmer. He punched out the message carefully "T-R-I-P." Hold him? Subvert Him? Imprison him? Now that his novitiate was past, now that He was a citizen, why would the City do this? The wfiite buttons snapped up, the programmer made a HgEt whirring sound and was still. Message received. Robert Wormser went to the door of his apartment and out into the City to see what it had in store for him. T Te moved in luxury at a lei surely pace, with no schedule to fulfill, without the subtle pressuring of the great machine City to urge him to work. In the City idleness was a pain, like a dull toothache that nagged you until you fulfilled your schedule. You fell into the habit of work because then you felt good. Today as a citizen. He enjoyed the pleasure of stopping for a morning drink in a bar where' a few other citizens dallied. The liquor tasted unfamiliar, sweet at such an imaccustomed time. But good. Now if there were only someone to -- "Hello, Wormser!" He turned and recognized Snell, an Earthman, one of the ten who Had come on Wormser's sociological expedition. Or was it the one before that? Snell wa also a citizen; they fell into into a pleasant chat about the City and its affairs. "By the way, I Hear you"re going on a trip," said Snell. Wormser lazily lifted his apricot brandy. Delicious! He smacked his lips. "Yes. Going back to Saturn. Going back to report." I Snell looked uneasy. "Wormser -- none of us ever Have, you know. THe thirty from the first expedition. The twenty on the second. The ten on the last. Not one." "Well, you can't blame the City. It has its rules. Once they let you in, it has its rules. A five-year novitiate. They can't have people running in and out all of the time. The natives are bom here and die Here; they do not leave. So why should the City waste the energy-money to set up a come-and-go routine for sixty Earthmen or the other strays that come by occasionally?" "It's best not to leave at all," said Snell. "We talked about you at the last meeting of the Former Earthmen's Club. Everybody was Happy to see you make citizen status. They'd be shocked if you left." "Oh, I shall return, as they say." Snell was apparently not made easy by the statement. "It would embarrass the Club if you left." "Yes," said Wormser. "Still, none of us gets through life without little embarrassments, evert in such a fine city as Reflex." Snell stmck his palm, a lecturer making a point to a student. "The whole point of Having a city is to make it a place that you would prefer to any other place. Therefore to leave the city is to deny the city." "Well, one man leaving the city in all eternity won't make much difference, I expect," said Wormser easily. He held up another finger and the light-sensitive, automatic bartender yielded more delicious brandy. "It's precedent," said Snell. "Especially to one who wasn't bom here," Wormser said. 'He City is very proud that no one has ever left it, even the foreigners. For us it is much more important not to leave." "I can see that," nodded Wormser, cutting Happily into His second brandy. "THe ultimate City offering the ultimate scope of human affairs to any man would be down-graded to penultimate if anybody left. Even one man." "Now you've got it!" said Snell. "For you to leave -- this could destroy the City. Twenty your former Earthman friends. Incidentally, the Club would like to ask you to be Vice-Chairman next term. You Have many admirers in the Club." "They don't admire me as much as I do them," said Wormser. "All fine fellows. When I get back from Saturn, I'd be glad to serve." Snell protested: 'Wormser, for God's sake, why -- " "Because tHe City isn't one," said Wormsefr "That's all." He paid and left. Wprmser sped down tfie endless levels of streets and walkways -- ptirples, mauves, greens, yellows -- meanings piled upon subtle meanings; one could study for a century and not learn all of tKe things that the City encompassed. He floated downwards in a twoplace drifting machine that one used to reach the foundations, slipping pleasantly from level to level, much like a lazy paper airplane Wormser Had once shot out of the fourth floor of his college dorm and watched fall gently. Now he was down to the apartments of the families. His own level was reserved for the young unmarried. Down here were all the wide parkways, schools, playgrounds, children's vehicles. Women moved with their shouting children, kids raced, ran, fell, cried, laughed, shouted, as children have done since the world began. If one preferred marriage, one could be happy here, thought Wormser, waving to a blond boy who might have been himself years back. If one did not prefer marriage, one was not forced. He saw an attractive red-headed wife and thought back to his own sexual experiences on coming to the City. It had been hard to get used to. The City rather preferred that a novitiate not nect his private life. But it was too sophisticated to believe that it could thrust any girl inte Kis arms. Consequently, he met in usual and unusual ways; but when he was lonely, it was somehow never for long. Nor was there a need to make a spectacle f it. A direct look and a gesture from a man's repertoire, a smile if accepted, an averted face if not. Just like back home. But the siffl-i ilarities ended there. Sometimes the girl was forward; sometimes the results were quick. At other times she was hard to reach, hard to convince. The one thing you could count on was that no two experiences were alike, but all relationslups ended successfully. Somehow, whether the girl was short or tail, cute or stately, quick or slow, she always revealed a compatibility. True, for Wormser, affairs never lasted long; they followed their sine wave -- passion rose to a peak, diminished, and then one day he didn't think about her any more. There was pleasure at the meeting, pain in the parting. Sometimes your nose was put a little out of joint. But always underneath was the sure knowledge that the pain of the old would be followed by the pleasure of the new. # H is speculations, pleasant and relaxing, had brought Him to the very floor of the plain of the planet upon wHicH the Huge City rested. Here, five years ago, the Saturn-based ship Had landed witK its crew, of wHicH Wormser was not the Head, but the third leader of the ten. Here also was tKe parking lot for the other Earth ships which Had brought earlier expeditions. And the ships from other worlds, .which Had likewise disgorged aliens who Had entered the City never to return. Wormser's robots were busy preparing the small spacecraft for flight, as He had ordered them skillful robots, man-like machines over ten feet tall, he wondered How often this ship Had been prepared for the flight to Saturn. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. And the other ships too. During the novitiate, all citizenprospectives had come outside the City to prepare their machines to leave many times. But none had ever left. Wormser put that knowledge out of his mind; he had no quarrel with the City. Out here, Wormser felt uncomfortable. His all-purpose suit had ceased to function so far from the broadcast power sources. He felt sweaty; his limgs breathed pungent, unwashed air. There was a laziness, a chaotic mixture of things, dust, old tree branches, dead grass mixed with living, the usual poor assortment of what men called nature and Had immeasurably improved upon in Reflex, ' A slatternly native approached Bm. Wormser took out his small gun and waved it at her. There were nomadic tribes on the planet who did not belong to the City. They never Had and never would. Sub-human, they lived in tents and huts, ate raw meat, were ridden with disease and were slaves to quixotic mythologies. In the beginning, you came out to study the tribes. Free men living in a free nature. Reflex was glad to have you do tBs; you lost interest soon enough. They hated Citymen and would steal from them,attack, subvert. They understood only the gun. Reflex did not deny them. There was a section of the City to which they could be admitted, but their novitiate was sixty or eighty years. They died before ever becoming citizens in a sort of semi-City limbo, Their children became useful citizens, but there was nothing to be done about these uncomprehending animals that walked like men. The woman made gibbering speech soimds, offering Wormser a grin from a dirty face and digging two round, sun-tanned breasts out of her animal-skin jacket. Her hips moved to suggest sex. If He Hadn't felt sorry for tHis basic, pleasing creature He migHt Have laughed. If one accommodated a forest maiden, one would find a knife in one's back at some moment. Wormser waved Her off; sHe went at a wolflope. Her sKort attention span captured by a sight or a sound or smell beyond his senses, Having failed tKe fruits of his person and possession. During the encounter a monitor Had quietly driven up to Wormer's ship. These were the police of the City. The delicate radar connected to tHe giant computer took care of most crime before it got started, reading dangerous thoughts, so the monitors were all that was required. "You are planning a space trip?" asked the man. "Yes. Going to Saturn," said Wormser. The monitor looked worried. "I don't believe that would be a good idea," he said. "Perhaps not," said Wormser. "Still, in a less than perfect uni-, verse one follows one's ideas, good or bad." The monitor nodded. Wormser was a full-fledged citizen and not to be treated carelessly. "You will have to appear before the City Council, of course." "It is required of a citizen?" said Wormser sharply, letting surprise show in his voice. The man caught the nuance and blushed. "I mean -- it is customary before one does such a thing," Ke said. "Naturally," said Wormser., The man relaxed; he went to Sis craft and dialed the computer. His little task was done. He drove politely behind Wormser as the Earthman regained his city sailer and headed back into Reflex. Tt did not seem to Wormser that the City Council met very often from the way they shifted in their chairs and stared about their chamber as if it were almost as unfamiliar to them as to Kttw There was a moment of laughabte confusion when it became obvious that none of the seven men were quite sure which was the Mayor and was to Have the b, white leather chair in the center of the table, but one of the number was eventually thrust forward. He now faced Wormser, who sat in a sort of witness box facing the seven on a very comfortable, dark leather chair. You wish to leave the City, citizen?" asked the Mayor. He looked disappointed. "Yes. For a short time. I believe there is no law against it." "There are no laws at all os Reflex, as you well know," said the Mayor testily. "Only the semi-civilized Have laws. TEey merely serve as a point of endless dispute and challenge to ac"Tfie Computer ranks you KigH as a citizen," said a whitehaired man down at tfie end. Tfie computer rested beneatfi tfie City. It took care of ninety per cent of tfie needs and ran tfie macEines tfiat made everything fit togetfier so comfortably. It was a slave to the people, but well respected. "I Have a fiigfi regard for tfie computer," said Wormser. "In my former world, machines were distrusted. My own tfiougfit is tfiaf macfiines embody tfie perfections meu cannot build in themselves and are useful extensions of man's finer drives." They all nodded solemnly. The eight men in tfie room felt comfortable and useful and close to one another. Wormser liked that. "However," said Wormser. "The City is less than one." Tfie feeling of good fellowship seemed to dissolve. Tfie Mayor shifted imeasily. Tfie six others reacted in various ways -- startled, imbelieving, amused. But they all reacted. "I fail to see your point." "If you cannot see my point," said Wormser, "you cannot understand why I want to go to Saturn for a while." One of the men got up and dialed the computer from a telephone switchboard. "Tfie machine will probably call your statement nonsense," fie said. "Tfie machine is programmed to Handle nonsense statements -- tfiey fiave been tried many times." "Tfie machine will understand," said Wormser. "Itself, it operates on a range between minus one and plus one. Deatfi is one. Tfie time before birth is one. But life is always less than one." "You've Heard the citizen's statements," said the Mayor. "How do you vote?" Tfie City Council voted against Wormser leaving Reflex. "You understand," tfie Mayor said, "we fiave nothing against leaving. We are merely advising you of our opinion, seven good citizens to one good citizen." "Tfiese differences of opinion do arise," said Wormser affably. "You reject our advice?" "OH, yes," said Wormser. "I must reject your adduce. I plan to go to Saturn." Tfie Coimcil stood up. We are going to program a vote of all of city on this trip tonight," said the Mayor. "This will occur at dinner time when everyone is home. How do you think you? will react?" "I expect they will vote against me." The Mayor nodded. "All except the small nuisance vote. Every human society has its negative people. How will you react then when both the officers of your city and the people themselves advise you against leaving?" "I couldn't say," said Wormser. "It isn't even liuichtime, but the vote doesn't take place vuitil tonight." T hey called Him at the apartment at about eight o'clock that night. It was the Mayor himself to tell him that the dinner-time vote had gone against him with ninety-nine per cent taking that position, one half voting for him, and one half per cent declining any opinion. "And one not voting," said Wormser. "The computer is very accurate. It deleted the question on my dinner-time vote display out of a sensitivity to my position. I appreciate that." "You will give up the project?" asked the Mayor. "No," said Wormser. "But you must thank the citizens for having shown enough interest to participate in the vote on my project." The Mayor was silent, staring at Wormser on the television plate. The old man pulled at his lip. "Yoru statement about your reasons has gone to the computer," he said, in a voice with the echo of a threat. It is in the Hands of tfie machine now. The ynarhin e imderstands ethical logic, but it Has no emotions." "How will it react?" "One of three ways," said iHe Mayor. "It will remain silent, showing that it has no opinion. Or it will agree with your reason and that would be a miracle, because this matter Has come up a hundred thousand times before with other citizens. Always it has disagreed, destroyed their logic. Or it will find you emotionally disturbed, in which case it will insist on corrective therapy rather than your trip. In the parlance of your former tradition, the machine is our Supreme Court." Wormser thanked him and hung up. At ten o'clock the computer itself called, and its interrogative voice asked him for further information on his less-thanone statement. With lights going off and the City retiring, it had many circuits available to work on the problem. Wormser sat at his keyboard and t#rped for over an hour, setting forth his argument from every position. Then he took a chilled glass of pink wine and fell into a deep, restful sleep. T he overnight poll Had made Wormser a temporary celebrity -- not a large one, just an average one. There were about one hundred thousand citizens out to watch Him depart, or attempt to depart, on his trip on the following morning. They clustered along the foundation road that led out of the City, bunched on the open fields and covered the area where the spaceships rested, leaving a polite circle around his own vehicle. A helio platform bore a newspaperman, the glassy eye of the television pointing on him. The City Council were all present, standing high' above the crowd on a ter porary platform. Small children played about the feet of their parents; hawkers sold drinks and ice cream; it was definitely an event of some interest. Along one edge of the crowd were the members of Former Earthmen, their banner raised over their heads and a large placard which read: Wormser felt very much like a political candidate who faces an unenthusiastic audience. When He appeared, there was a scattering of applause and a few faint cheers. These were balanced by some jeers and boos. But most of the audience stared at him sullenly, interested but removed, curious, as if he were a strange beast beyond knowing. No one had ever left the City in recorded history. The City had driven # out a few -- a very few -- but this was the voluntary act of a full-fledged valuable citizen, man with a good work record, pleasant personality, a community asset, as important as every other one. If one could believe, what would be the effect on those less but nevertheless curious? The most disheartening sight was the full-fledged soldier standing next to the Mayor. He held a sub-machine gun at ready. The sun made the purposeful weapon glitter with real and shocking seriousness. Wormser knew that the City kept one full-fledged soldier on its pasrroll, fully equipped, but he had never though to meet the man. From the way the man moved, checking his gun, shuffling his feet as if getting ready to use it, Wormser felt at last the hard edge of reality. The newsmen caught up with him at the side of his ship, inviting him on the platform. "Will you say a few words about your project. Citizen?" Wormser stepped up on the platform, aware of the new sweat beginning. "If I had known so many were interested, I wouldn't have promised to bring back Saturn souvenirs," he said. The thin joke brought forth no laughter. His voice howled and echoed off the walls of the city behind him. "I am going to Saturn," he went on. "I was sent from Saturn to study the City and report back on it I've lived and worked Ectc five years. I love the City. I shall return when my report to Earth officials on Saturn is finished. Don't let anything happen to the City while I'm gone." H e felt light-headed at this point. The question was whether they'd let him enter his vehicle. Once inside, the sub-machine gvm could do no harm, although he supposed they had rockets to shoot him down in space. But the sky looked blue, sunny and friendly, and there were no ships aloft. There were no rocket launchers that he coxild see just the uniformed soldier with the gun. The man now stepped forward and the City Council and the Mayor fell back in a polite circle against the executing blast of the gim. The white-haired fellow whom Wormser remembered from yesterday made a point of stuffing cotton in his ears. The Mayor had his own bullhorn. "Wormser, I beseech you to abandon your project. It is not popular with your officials or the majority of the citizens." Wormser still had the PA mike from the newsmen. He still stood on the platform. "Men make decisions that are sometimes not popular," he said. "Men seek attonement, harmony. Men seek one-ness. A place like Reflex comes close to unity, to providing each small and large thing that satisfies a man. But to me, unity is not quite reached on Reflex, or an#Avhere else. Unity may turn out to be the time before birth and the time after death. But for me there is still a small gap. So I search. I am sorry to upset you all." There was a painful silence now as he put down the microphone. The silence was broken by several yells and calls for the last restraint. "The computer!" called many. The computer would reject his argiunent, and he would be shot if he were found sane but destructive in his act. The computer would reject his argiunent, and he would be sent to a hospital if he were found insane. His only hope was that the computer had made or would make no statement at all. Wormser felt that he walked on cotton; his legs were not his as he moved down to the ground and walked to his entrance ramp. The sound of the sub-machine gun being cleared and the magazine slamming home made him jump; his neck tingled and his back cringed. He remembered the call from Saturn early this morning. "Don't come back," Butler Had said. "Stay in Reflex. We can continue to get reports by communications as we Have before." "Snell Has called you." "Snell and a few otKers," said Butler. "If you try to leave, it seems certain tKat you will lose your life. It will probably also result in a break in diplomatic relations for us. MucH better to stay tKere and see if a few more years won't cKange things." You've never debriefed a City man in person back on Saturn." Butler sighed. "I don't expect to in my lifetime. You stay there." Tow his hand on the door Handie. It trembled. He turned; he saw the soldier and saw the small hole of the sub-machine gun barrel pointing at him. His heart gave a jirnip, his breath felt hot and cold in his lungs. The crowd was extremely silent His unamplified voice was heard. "There is no law," he said. "The machine has remained silent. Good-bye." He started in. He heard the shocking clatter of the sub-machine gun. Then inexplicably, despite the ear-smashing roar of the gun, he was inside the ship. He closed the door; he walked up to the pilot compartment, nodded to his robot assistant and punched the hands. He expected to feel the pain of the bullets in his back -- But outside the ship, the soldier had stepped back to parade rest, holding the grin aloft. The platform around the soldier's feet was sprinkled witli spent shell casings. The Mayor and the City Council smiled and waved. Most of the crowd moved back now, waving, breaking-up. The sky blackened as he reached deep space. There was no sign of pursuit by ship or rocket. "Reflex. City Computer calling." "Wormser," said Wormser into the mike, thinking that the machine sounded almost human in radio commxmication where all men sounded like machines through space static. "That submachine gun of the soldier's," he went on in a compulsive rush of words. "Those were blanks." "Of course," said the City Computer. "The soldier had to be convinced you were not stunting for attention. " "Thank you." "You are two degrees off course for Saturn," said the machine. "You'll miss a bit if you don't correct." He broke off, corrected his course and sat there traveling in space, feeling good, relieved and then sad, eventually. He hoped they wouldn't hold him too long on Saturn. He missed the City alThey rescued him from o wofery fjeafh -- and gave him immorfalify I T fie submarine Leviathus put to sea from Her Some port of Abrowfyn on a wami arid Eumid spring ffioming. TEe air was damp and tEe sun Eadn't foiled up tEe low fog tEat still Eung over tEe docks and swirled in off tEe water. TEe gray mist muffled tEe noises made by the sEip's crew and by tEe sailors standing by on tEe pier, waiting for tEe order to cast off. It took an Eour to cEeck out all operations before Eer captdin gave tEe order to submerge. TEe signals sounded, ffie EatcEes clanged sEut and .the air systems started to work, displacing tfie salt smell of tEe sea air witE clean odorless, filtered air. And Leviatfais began Eer descent, tEe water foaming over Eer bow and then cEuming up white over tEe rapidly disappear conning tower. Her captain. Commander Llanwyh, was a gray-Eaired vet-, eran of tEe submarine service He'd lost count of tfie number of dives Ee Ead made but since he'd taken command of tEe LeviathuSf submerging unnerved Him. If Had been different witE tEe older craft. Tfien you only knew you were going imder when you saw, it on tEe instrument panel. But lEe new ps of tEe FourtE Submaririe Fleet Ead transparent bows -- from tfie midslups deck clear up to tfie gunwales you could see out. And as the waters started rising up, cKanging the light inside, it disturbed him and he tried to shake morbid thoughts of being buried alive. Once they submerged and were moving through the water, he had to admit it was beautiful; but never could bring himself to say it was worth the price. Custom required him to stay forward, and his emotions were not to be taken into any consideration. The descent was thankfully over with quickly; then the sub was moving swiftly through the green water, dropping down further, her ruiuiing lights piercing the sani-darkness, now lighting up the fascinating world under the Atlantic Ocean. Leviathus was the fifth and latest sub of the Fourth Fleet to use the new solar reactors; the submarine engines were the first peaceful use made of the immense power plants and the subs could stay submerged months longer than conventional craft. On her last trip, Leviathus had taken a party of geologists through the volcanic islands to the west of the continental shelf past the game preserve islands, then southward toward the coast of Lemuria to observe the volcanic activity in the Western Ocean which Had been threatening the western coasts for the past two years. She was, at present, cruising toward the Soutli Atlantic with a party of marine scientists and biologists aboard. The cruise had been uneventful for over a week. The scientists had donned underwater gear and taken samples of the life and sediment on the bottom and were now in the process of sorting and evaluating their finds. They would be going out again when the ship reached the islands further to the east in the Mid-Atlantic. The inhabitants here were extremely warlike and only slightly removed from the scattered tribes of savages, isolated by the last geological upheaval from those who the historians know were their forebears. There would be no need for concern as long as the ship remained submerged. Several expeditions, in past years, had not returned. The government now felt that a policy of non-interference was best vmtil the natives became more civilized and reasonable diplomatic relations could one day be established. The navigator was laying in the course that would send the sub toward the MidIslands, when the sonar officer interrupted Llanwylfs thoughts to announce another presence coming up fast off the starboard bow. He entered the sonar compartment to observe. I t soon became obvious tfiat the intruder was no conventional ship. They had received no reply to their signals, and He realized they wouldn't. It was an iceberg, moving through the water apparently borne by the imdercurrents at an incredible rate of speed. More and more of the icy intruders were making their way into the warmer waters. This one should have melted by now, but the undercurrent it was riding on must have moved it too rapidly from its northern mooring. He gave orders for evasive action and the ship swung to port only to discover through her instruments that the mass was too big to get aroimd. That damn berg must have been fifty miles long, and they could get neither to the left nor to the right of it. By the time the reactors had built up sufficient power to enable the Leviathus to outnm her pursuer, the berg caught up with the submarine. With the possibility of a collision uppermost in his mind and in an effort to keep ahead of and get around the berg. Commander Llanwylf had given orders to run obliquely to it. The berg rammed the sub to starboard and bounced her away, then kept on, pushed bx the current, unaware, unfeeling, oblivious to the damage it had just caused. Llanwylf remembered sailing years ago, on ships that had not been equipped with sonar, and was grateful for one more modern invention. At least there had been a warning, time to rig for collision. As the Damage Control crews began reporting back, it seemed there was little serious damage. Water was entering several rear starboard compartments, a result of the outer plates buckling, but they were quickly sealed off. As they were only for stowage, it seemed that Leviathus would be able to continue on course, repairs being effected without urgency. Until his chief engineer pointed to his air gauges. The safety level of pure air was dropping -- only a few hours of clean air left. Repair crews rushed to pump out the compartments, but there wasn't going to be enough time. It would spoil their record, of course, but damn it all, their lives happened to be more important than what He wrote into the log. Llanwylf gave the order to surface. (taptain, there's a craft drift ing out there, with someone in it" The crewman pointed, and Llanwylf took the glasses to look. An unkempt, swarthy man with long black hair was leaning weakly against the side of the small, crude rowboat. The captain called for medics and for crewmen to gaff the boat. They pulled it close, then went down into the water to help the man out. The touch of their helping hands on his raw, sunbimied skin was agonizing, but somehow he knew they meant to help and tried to pull himself up. The medics helped the stranger toward the hatch but it was impossible for him to walk. They slung a stretcher down -- as they had tried to lift him, he cried out in pain -- then took the stretcher to sickbay. There one of the medics put something against his arm that stung and he fell asleep directly, after wondering why they Had done that. Doctor Marwyl presented himself to the captain after the stranger had been tended to and informed him that the man had eaten and was now sleeping normally. "Repairs will be finished shortly. Doctor, and we'll be submerging. What are we supposed to do with him?" "He'll need rest for the next two or three days," replied Marwyl. "We're certainly not going to set him out in that boat." "No," said Llanwylf, "but once we're back under, we're definitely not coming up until the scientists are finished. We've wasted enough time already. Besides, where are we supposed to let him out? I don't suppose you can understand him?" "If we could, I doubt that he knows enough to point out on a 'chart where he comes from. But from the few words he's spoken, I've a feeling that our languages are similar." "Well, doctor, he's your patient and your responsibility now. He'll have to stay with us, but keep him out of the way." The stranger turned out to be one of the inhabitants of the Mid-Islands and more intelligent than supposed. The doctor and he were soon able to pick up enough of each other's language, as they were similar, a fact which caused Marwyl to wonder about their common ancestors. Marwyl was on the bridge, in conversation with his captain. "Seems our friend discovered caviar. His people aren't allowed to row those little boats out too far. The deity they believe in apparently doesn't want them to, and they themselves are scared stiff of sea-monsters. Anyway, he went out farther than he's supposed to. He doesn't seem to have set much store in this god. And he had discovered what the insides of sturgeon taste like. "Well, lie went out past tlie otKers, and wfiile fie was basking in the sun a storm blew up. The rest is obvious. Except for tfie fact that tfie four days fie spent out there seem to fiave convinced him that a supreme being probably does exist -- especially since we came along and rescued him. "You know besides this almost sophisticated viewpoint on religion, his people are living in towns now. They've been out of caves for enough generations for him to fiave no knowledge of that kind of life." T fie land fie fiad come from was dominated by a fiuge, flat-topped, bare stone cliff tfiat rose up from tfie center of the peninsula. When fie was shown topographic pfioto-maps fie was easily able to point it out. Months later, wfien tfie expedition's studies were completed, tfie Leviaihus made Ker way back toward the Mid-Islands. His town was set on tfie inside of the elbow of land and tfie sub surfaced on tfie outer seaedge of this shook, where they would not be seen. A small boat was put down, and he was rowed to shore. "You know, he really was a likeable cfiap after we fixed him up" said Marwyl. "Interesting what orthodontia can do for someone's appearance," said tfie captain, referring to tfie fact tfiat they fiad repaired and cleaned his broken discolored teeth, then went on, "I ttiink we've managed to learn enough about the growth of his people's civilization to send field crews out there soon." The boat came back; Llanwylf made his way to the bridge to observe the waters engulfing his ship, and Leviaihus submerged again to make her way back to Atlantis. It took him the rest of tfie day to make his way along tfie beach and aroimd the spit of land; he fiad grown soft from the months aboard the ship. When his people saw him come walking wearily toward the center of the town, they rejoiced. "Our God has saved you," said the elders. "Yes," he said simply, "yes. He has." Where fiad fie been, they wanted to know. And wfiat fiad happened. He told them of his four days adrift after tfie storm, and of the rescue by tfie enormous ship that fiad risen up out of the water; then fie explained fiow the sfiip fiad traveled all these months back under tfie water. A sfiip indeed, tfiey said. It was quite impossible. Tfiey begged him to be truthful. He spent a long time trjdng to convince them. He smiled, to show that his eroded and blackened teeth were now even white. Oixr God has done this to welcome you back to Him, they said. He tried to describe the ship, scratching the long ellipse in the dust, telling them of the transparent bow and the lights that showed them their way underwater. The elders conferred. "We have decided that you have been deluded in your shock. This giant ship must indeed have been a sea monster, probably a giant whale. But we shall give thanks in the morning for your deliverance." "I know that our God did save me; but you cannot tell me that the ship was a whale. I know it was a ship," insisted the man they called Jonah.      As you'll see elsewhere in this issue, the man who carried away all the marbles in Galaxs # Award for the best story published in Galaxy or If for # is Cliff Simak. Winning awards is no surprise to Mr. Simak; he's had them before (most recently a Hugo for Way Station. which appeared in Galaxy a few years ago as Here Gather the Stars) and, chances are, he II have them ogam. He's been producing top-rated science fiction for about a third of a century now, and the end is far from in sight. Next month, for instance, we have his newest novelette. It's called Buckets of Diamonds. Will you like it? Well, when was the last time you read a Simak story you didn't like? In the same issue there's a hefty long novelette by another long-time favorite, James E. Gunn. Last month in If we published his Trial by Fire, a story of a future Earth where science has become the embodiment of evil, and true believers fear it as good churchmen once feared the devil. Next month in Galaxy he continues the same theme to its logical -- but not obvious -- conclusion, in Witch Hunt. Robert Bloch will be with us with a story; Willy Ley and Algis Budrys how much more we won't know until we see how the type sets And one thing more. The issue after next we're starting a new serial. It's by Frank Herbert, and it's called Dune Messiah. It's recommended... The Weather On Welladay Welladay was a watery world, known through the galaxy for the violence of its weather -- and of its inhabitants! I W elladay was indeed a watery world, Shahanna thought as the day side of the planet turned under her ship. Good thing that explorers were obstinate  creatures or the hidden riches of this sopping, stormy world would have gone uimoticed. She checked visually; as the ship's computer began to print landing advice. "I'm not that stupid," mV-' mxired, appreciating the turbulence of several storm centers that blossomed in the northern Hemisphere of Welladay. She tapped out "locate" for the Rib Reefs, the rocky spine of the planet which stretched from north to south and broadened at "shoulder" height into the Blade, the one permanent installation on the watery world. "At sunrise, hmm? Wouldn't you know? And right in the path of one storm. Well, let's beat it in," and she began to punch out landing coordinates. At that moment, the proximity alarm rang. She hit the "enlarge" toggle of the screen control just in time to see the telltale blips -- the small satellite that ought not to be in Welladan skies. Then her ship rocked with the violence of a direct hit. Shahanna stayed conscious long enough to press the arm-rest survival button, before she blacked out in a paroxysm of shock and fury and pain. dis planted his flippered foot on the whalelet's blimt snout and shoved. "This is no time for nuzzling, nuisance," he roared, as the force of his thrust sent the baby backfinning. Whales like to be talked to -- roared at -- though there was small chance they imderstood more than the tone of voice. Some fistunen denied that much comprehension. "Ahnost through now, mother," Odis bellowed reassuringly at the massive creature whose thyroid glands he was tapping. The dial on the long-beaked suction pump reached the red and, with more deftness than others gave him credit for, Odis broke the connection and sealed the beak. He closed the tap mouth and noted the date of this tap with paint-pen above the metal-insert. Old tap-dates had faded but the new paint would glow for the three months it took a mature whale to generate more vital radioactive iodine in itsj thyroid gland. Odis touched the zoom button on the drone remote control, scrawling the whale's registry number on the beaker before he held it beside the luminous date for the drone to record. That formality observed, he scratched the female's rubbery upper lip where the scales were torn. What kinH of a fight had she been in? Well, the woxmd was healed. Again her child tried to nose Odis's fishboat out of the way. Chuckling over its antics, Odis climbed up the boat's ventral fin, over the back to the hatch. Ducking below, he stored the precious beak of radioactive iodine in the chemfoam-protected carrier. Back on the fishboat's snubnosed brow, Odis frowned at the sight of the school of whales beginning to melt away from the neighborhood. He'd been out since early morning, tracking them down. He'd spent on Hour easing into the herd, before Ke had tried to tap one. He'd pounded affectionately on the snouts of the mammals he knew as well by scar marks as registration code. Two shied away from him BO wildly that he had begun to worry if this group had already been milked by that fardling pirate. When he had finally got alongside the old bluecarred cow and done a light top, he'd decided that their weather-sense was all that was making them skittish. Between the freakish storms of Welladay, Odis growled to himself, squinting towards the darkening horizon, and fardling pirates, they might as well pull the plug on operations here. He frowned. Where else would fie find a world more to his liking? A task more suited to him, a man bom and bred on a higfi-gravity planet? Or, and Odis snorted, creatures big enough not to suffer from his inordinate strength. He stepped on the release for the the outboard panel and began to beam towards Shoulder Blade for a weather report. "The Christmas-tree of instra- mentation lit up with various local indications of the weatfier. But when he tried to reach Okker in his harbormaster's lookout at the Eye of the Lagoon, the beam crackled' with interference. So the easterly storm had hit them. Even with a band of weather satellites, you couldn't always be sure of weather on Welladay. Odis tagged tfie playback in case Okker had broadcast while he was tapping the whale. He whistled as he listened to Okker's sour report of macfi-storm warnings, the advice that all vessels return to Shoulder at cruising depth and held at shelf-depth vmtil recall: the local storm over Shoulder was only a squall. The warning was repeated twice with additional ominous details on the macfi-storm's wind velocity, estimated drift and duration. Odis grunted. He could just imagine Okker's disgust at issuing such a message. Tallav, the maggoty Planetary Administrator, had probably been at Okker's elbow. With the exercise of tolerance, Odis could imderstand Tallav's ineffectuality. A meek man, not suited to a blustery, stormy world like Welladay, even if affairs proceeded normally. Now Tallav was caught in a fladding bind: someone was pirating the main source of Welladan wealth so that no substantial revenue Had been garnered from the whales in months. Result: supplies could' not be paid for; credit had been suspended; and witli the depredations of both pirate and natural catastrophes, only three fishboats were operable. Requests from legitimate sources for the priceless radioactive iodine had accelerated to demands: Urgent! Top PiioTtty. Gray phage was endemic and periodically epidemic; the only specific vaccine was a dilute suspension of the ra. Short of tapping to death the few whales they could now find, Welladan fishmen were also constricted bj' lack of operable craft. The two best fishmen, Odis and Murv, a newcomer on a DebtContract, had been sMit out in an attempt to find and tap enough r.i. to pay for at least one critically needed cargo. Whatever Odis and Murv could get today was crucial. Odis wished they could charge a hardship premium but the price of r.i. had been fixed by Federation who evidently were too concerned with other galactically shattering crises to pay attention to repeated Welladan requests for investigation. And here was timid Tallav, calling the fishmen back because there was a mach-storm brewing in the west. Odis ran a quick check of the christmas-tree instrumentation on the approaching storm, now boiling black an # ochre on the horizon. s he appraised the readings, he maneuvered his ship towards the nearest adult. He could get one more tap completed before he d have to duck and run home. Fishboats were sturdily designed for Welladan waters, to race with the scaly spawn of her seas on hydrofoils, to plunge trenchward with the whales, to endure the savagery of a suddi squall, to wallow, whale-Iike, within the school itself and not be attacked by a nervous male. He coasted along the port side of the manunal, rather pleased that the creature was not sh#dng off like its schoolmates. The painted code above the tap-vent had faded completely. Odis toyed with the notion of perhaps a beak and a half of r.i. as he made his preparations to tap. It was then that he noticed the bad color of the scales. At first he thought it was the light. The sky was already changing with the approach of the storm. As he looked around, there wasn't another whale in sight; thes'd all raced away, north and south, to drive deep from the storm center. This whale wasn't moving because it was close to death. Cursing with frustrated anger, Odis stomped below, retrieved the beak he had just drawn and prepared to pump it into the sick animal. Would it be enough? Was the gesture a waste of fluid now, as precious to the life of Welladay as to this mammars? Odis refused to consider it a waste. In an angry scrawl he painted date and circumstance on the whale, underscoring the notation with a skull and crossbones as broad as he could make it. He stepped back then, clenching his teeth against the brutal wastefulness of the pirate, wondering bitterly how many more of the now vanished beasts had been tapped dry : how many more corpses would roll, black and bloated, on the fresh tides after the storm? He waited, hoping for some sign of change in the creature. There was no way of knowing how long ago the tap had occurred: hours, days? Or how swiftly the infusion would correct the deficiency. The wind freshened now; the outboard panel chattered metallically, then began to crackle with an authoritative noise. A craft approaching? Odis scanned the clouds. Suddenly a second drone broke into view, higher and north of his. He glanced down at the sea-viewer, waiting for the indication that another fishboat approached. The drone whistled overhead and the sea viewer remained tale-less. Murv was the only other fishman out! Where was he that he'd send his drone back alone? Had he been caught by mach-violence? A wilder shriek tore the air; the whale reacted with nervous bobbing, pulling away from the fishboat. Odis swung the christmas-tree, got a fix on the sound and followed it, high up but lancing downward, downward, right into the mach-storm. He flipped the track toggle, keeping the outboard panel lined up with the visual trace of the intruder until the spaceship faded and disappeared into the clouds. T hat boiling trail had come from nothing based on Welladay. And it was heading away from the only settlement on the water world. Odis retracted the outboard panel. As he clambered down the ladder, he shot a final look at the whale, now moving slowly in a northerly direction. No, the r.i. had not been a waste. If the creature could just make it out of the storm's path, feed himself up on plankton in the northern waters... Odis slammed the hatch down and reached the pilot's couch just as the computer printed out the intruder's course : straight into the storm, directly in line with the only other permanent landfall, Crown Lagoon. The realization was particularly bitter to Odis, for it was the direction from which Mcuw's drone had just come. Slowly Odis tapped out a new course for the fishboat. Not back to the safety of Shoulder Blade, but straight into the storm, directly on the intruder's tail. XHen he fed into the computer the details that Okker had transmitted on the mach-storm. As the printout chattered, Odis sank back into the padded couch, his sxispicions confirn ed. In approximately five hours, the eve of the mach-storm would be centered over the gigantic old volcano whose drowned mouth formed a twenty-kilowide lagoon, the shards and lava plateaus of its slopes like a galactic-size crown, thrown down just above the equator of Welladay, in the shallow meadows of the western seas. Murv could lie in the deep beyond the island's shores, safe enough even with a mach-storm lashing deep into the ocean, until the eye of the storm covered Crown. Murv could surface then, deliver the stolen r.i. to the ship which had sneaked in under cover of the storms. Well, Mxurv would do well to leave with that pirate. Once the Investigator got here -- perhaps before the planet was registered as Bankrupt and taken over by Federation -- Welladay would be no place for any freedom-loving man. Flads! Murv must have enough r.i. on him to buy a planet. He sure had sold out Welladay! Grimly Odis settled down for the long run. He'd stay on the surface and nm on hydrofoil as long as he could imtil the storm's violence forced him to the relatively quieter, but slower depth. He had to intercept Murv before the traitor got the r.i. off planet. But where had the man hidden the r.i. all this time? Every possible crevice on Shoulder Blade had been repeatedly searched once the fishman realized what was happening. And Tallav had initiated the drone escort to prevent any fishman from tapping too deeply. How the flads had Murv managed? True, he'd sent his drone back, but you couldn't tap a whale in the midst of a storm and he was within rights. Indeed, Tallav would have screamed if Murv had kept the drone. Odis leaned forward, tapped his own drone's controls. He printed out a message for it to transmit once the squall lifted over Shoulder Blade, then sent it to track him miles above the coming storm. He might just find it useful to have a drone in the eye. He'd risk Tallav's tantrums. There was nothing more Ke could do now. Odis settled down to a short nap. II T he old survey charts Had better be right about that underwater channel into the Lagoon, Murw thought, listening to the tortured stress of the fishboat and grimly watching the danger lights flick and blink wamingly. The fathometer marked the unsteady ascent as the craft bucked tidal pulls and storm rips. He must be nearing the archipelago. The straps that held Murv to the pilot's seat also cut into his flesh, and he cursed absently as he began to match the chart to sea-viewer. Blighted planet! The whole thing had appeared so fardling simple. He was used to risks, trained to surmoimt them, so he'd opted contracting as a fisHman, look around for a while, spot the trouble, and back again, ready for more demanding work. On a watery planet, with only one permanent settlement, only one product of value that was in the highest demand throughout the galaxy, what could have been simpler? He had not, however, counted on such a trivial detail as weather. Nor the mimsypimsy fardling of a Planetary Administrator thinking up a drone escort to prove his fishmen were not the murdering pirates. That had restricted Murv's investigations, and he could not lose this opportunity to search Crown. Not that it made him trust Tallav. Murv knew better than to trust anyone for any reason. And Murv Had not counted on ssnnpathizing with the great whales. After he'd been taught to milk 'em, after he'd been assigned a school, it had annoyed the hell out of him to see the rotting carcasses of whales which had trustingly let humans tap 'em to death. Even lined up to get milked. No, the waste -- the fladding waste of it galled Murv the most. Ah, he must be nearing the tunnel mouth; he could feel the fishboat being sucked relentlessly towards the basaltic shelf. His fingers flew over the pitch and yaw controls, decreased the play in the helm and ignored the neck-jarring rolls. On fathometer and the roiled viewscreen in front of him, the bottom of the ocean met the ramparts of the old volcano in a solid wall of tortured lava. S hahanna was roused by the shrieking hiss of the insistent wind. She opaied her eyes to the grayness, to the realization that the crash foam was dissipating, to the knowledge that she was still alive and breathing. In spite of the cushioning foam and the padding of Her seat, she felt thoroughly wrung out. Motion was painful. She turned her head, groaning as stiff muscles protested. A solitary yellow light gleamed on the control panel, then blinked wanly off as she watched. The ship had sent out its death-knell, the last thing this type of spacecraft was programmed to do before all its systems went dead. Shahanna reached with an enfeebled han . to her side pouch, fumbled for a stimulant and a pain depressor. Clumsily she jabbed them into her arm and then, gasping at the discomfort even that slight motion caused, lay back. The drugs worked swiftly. She staggered to her feet, worked her muscles, relieved that nothing had broken or split about her. Her wrist chrono showed that some eight hours had elapsed since the unexpected attack on her. Automatically she reached towards the log recorder. "All systems dead, gal," she reminded herself and looked out the plastight window. Jagged black rock surrounded the nose of the scout. "How lucky can a gal get? I cracked up on land?" Shahanna frowned. "Shoulder?" The Rib Reefs had been half a planet away when she'd been shot down. There was no possible entry she could have made that would land her on Shoulder. But there had been some other, semi-permanent land masses on the charts, if you could dignify a wayward archipelago or a transient volcano as land masses. The lock was jammed solid, Shahanna discovered, but the escape hatch was clear. The little scout ship rocked under her feet, and she realized it had been rocking ever since she had roused. The pitch of the wind had risen a few notes too, and water sloshed across the viewpane in a constant fall. If she were on a portion of those archipelagos, she was on a very precarious one. Shahanna wasted no further time in speculation. She quicksealed her orders to her ribs, slapped additional supplies to her belt, shrugged into an all-purpose suit, harnessed on a life tank and headgear, grabbed the water-aids, punched the destruct on her ship's instrumentation and threw open the escape hatch. She got a face full of wave and drew back sputtering and choking, arranged her mask and took a second look. Gaunt black fingers of stone held the ship but the rising tides, wind-lashed and moon-chumed, rocked the boat in its impromptu dry-dock, grabbing with greedy urgency. What remained of the aft section of the ship was rocking slowly down into the water. "That guy was a good shot. Cleared off my engine. But I'm a live one." Another wave slapped across Her face. SKe ducked instinctively and tSen, witfi a deft movement, was over tKe side of the ship, its bulk protecting Eer from the worst SEe could see beyond, tErougE tEe spaces of the finger rocks. It wasn't comforting, for the huge expanse of water was equally wild. A grinding sound reminded her that she had little time for deliberation. The ship slipped further down the rocky palm. Shahanna saluted it, promising retribution, and clambered up through the rock fingers. She did not see that an outcropping of rock caught and held the forward section of the sliding ship above the water. This is the damnedest terrain, Shahanna thought as she scrambled higher, grateful for the tough' fabric of her gloves a she found handholds on the razor-edged rock. The rain was coming down in such heavy torrent that she could barely see directly before her. The wind povmded her with hammer blow. She'd not last long in this, Shahanna decided, peering around for some sort of shelter against a rocky ledge. Doggedly she climbed, instinct directing her to such height as this tmseen rockpile afforded. She climbed, hanging on during the vicious buffeting of water and wind, then inching upward, for what seemed an interminable time. The absence of water pouring over her, the slackening of the wind apprised her of sanctuary for she was inside the little cave before she realized it existed. With an inarticulate moan of thanksgiving, she crawled far enough inside to be out of the clutch of the elements. Sighing she rolled onto her back and exhaustion claimed her battered mind and body. Ill planetary Administrator Tallav watched anxiously as the nets drew the battered space craft into the safety of the Shoulder Blade hangars. Almost on cue, rain in blinding sheets plummeted downward until the dome over the living quarters beyond the hangars became a waterfall and the storm drains filled with alarmspeed. Tallav shuddered at the ferocity of such floods. You'd think twelve-foot-deep dikes would be ample anywhere -- but not on Welladay, he thought, as he started down the ramp to welcome the long awaited Investigator. It wouldn't do to appear nervous. Might cause suspicion. And he oughtn't to appear irritated that it had taken Federation such an unconsciously long time to dispatch an Investigator. Didn't they realize the consequences of letting this out-and-out piracy of the vital radioactive iodine go on for so long? Surely his messages had been explicit, the reports full. But to wait imtil tlie Central Credit actually suspended all shipments to Welladay -- that was disgraceful. Disgraceful and unjust. Tallav slid back the portal and stepped out into the rock-hewn chamber that housed drones and visitors' shuttles. Such noise as the crewmen made in securing the ship was lost in the vast room, but the net was now retracting and the port of the shuttle free. Tallav was a little surprised at the Investigator's physical apperance. Oh, he didn't expect a full uniform for a minor planet like Welladay, but an Investigator ought to appear in something more than a faded, shiny onepiece shipsuit "I'm Tallav, Planetary Administrator, Grade #-B," he said in a firm voice, saluting the new arrival with what he felt ought to be the proper deference. Investigators were not exactly equal in status to Planetary Administrators, but they had superplenary powers which they could invoke if circumstances warranted. "And you are Investigator -- " "Brack's the name." Tallav was a little annoyed by the very casual return of his salute. "Your arrival couldn't be more opportune," Tallav went on, indicating the exit to Brack. "We haven't so much as a drop of r.i., and two top priority emergency capsules came in just before you got here. The tone was rather highhanded. You timed that a mite close, if I may say so." The investigator shot him an odd look as he ducked under the portal. Tallav dogged the lock wondering if the investigator thought he was being critical. "Storms on Welladay are unusually violent," he continued. "That's why we net everything down." Brack snorted and let Tallav lead the way to the office. "If you'll just come this way. Investigator, my tapes and personnel are entirely at your disposal. We want this piracy stopper immediately..." "In that storm?" "Well, no, of course not. I mean, that is... surely my communications gave you ample facts on which to draw some conclusions? After all, there aren't very many places on Wellady from which a pirate could operate." "No, there aren't." "Now, here we are. May I offer you some refreshment? Or would you permit yourself to try some offworld stimulant? I'm afraid the commissary is a little low... tedious, this business of being boycotted xmtil these pirates are apprehended and the r.L is collected properly." "I could do with some Hot protein. Natural... if you can supply it" 'allav decided not to take offense at the suggestion that Welladay could not decently feed its population. He roused the messhall and ordered a meal from his private stores. No sooner had he turned, smiling, towards the Investigator, than the com unit peeped urgently. His hand hovered over the unit to silence it Then he saw it was Hangar calling. The dolts hadn't managed to damage the Investigator's ship?" "Well, what is it?" "Drone K-Star is back, P.A. Or rather, what's left of it is back," the Kangarmaster reported. "Who was that assigned to?" "Murv." "Are all the other drones back?" he asked, inadvertently glancing at the waterfall that covered his plas-glas wall. "No sir!" "What? Who could still be afloat in this?" "Odis." "Odis? But he... get off the line. I must talk to the harbormaster." Angrily He jabbed the new call, "Okker, has Murv got in yet?" "No, nor Odis either. Just like that newworlder to try and send his drone back through a storm," old Okker growled. "What were their destinations?" "You ordered 'em out yourself. Told 'em to milk anything they could catch." "Well, you knew a storm was coming up. Didn't you call them back?" It was difficult for Tallav to restrain his irritation with the old fool. No respect for status. And just because he'd been one of the original fishmen of Welladay, he thought he knew more about everything than a trained Planetary Administrator. "What do you think, Tallav? I know my job as Harbormaster. Besides, Odis is smart enough to run submerged for the Eye and drift back with it till it disperses." Tallav shuddered inwardly, trying hard not to notice the halfsmile on the Investigator's lips at the impudence, of his subordinate. "And Murv?" Tallav was compelled to ask. He distrusted the newworlder and would like nothing better than for him to be their pirate. He looked the part and he was obviously opting off as soon as he could. That was the trouble with the Debt-Contractees : men forced to accept undesirable world employment Had no real interest in their work. "He's not back yet either." "Well, why didn't you report their absence when the storm broke?" "Did. You weren't in. Down meeting that snooper you sent for so long ago." "Investigator Brack is present in my office." "Good fer him," Okker replied, ignoring the frost in Tallav's voice. "Now let me get back to my Eye. That damned fool Sharkey's out, too." Brack was suddenly very alert. "The Chief?" Tallav was now fully alarmed first by Brack's reaction and second to the thought of losing Sharkey. The man was a sheer genius with the fishboats, able to repair absolute wrecks. If he lost the engineer, he might just as well resign. He'd never get a replacement at the price he could force Sharkey to take. "You can't test a patched hull in dry dock, you know," Okker was reminding him needlessly. "Yes, yes. Keep me posted." "Don't I always?" 'he connection was broken at the harbormaster's end, before Tallav had the chance. Fortimately the meal arrived as a diversion. "And there's not a drop of the r.i. in store at the moment?" asked Brack as he attacked Tallav's bounty with more gusto than manners. "Not a drop. In an attempt to fill these... these demands -- " Tallav gestured towards the mescage capsule shells -- "I sent out my two best fishmen." "In that?" There was no doubt of the Investigator's disapproval. "No, not into that. That developed some hours after they had cleared port. Even with' weather sateUites keeping constant guard, turbulances can make up with frightening speed. You see, when there are two or more moons in conjunction, particularly with one of the other planetary masses in the system..." "Agreed, agreed. I know my astrophysics. So that means that the only r.i. is either still in your whales or preferably riding out a storm." "And hidden somewhere in the possession of these pirates." "You have proof of piracy?" "Proof? Of course. The rotting hulks of whales who have been deliberately, wantonly milked to death." "No more than that?" "What more is necessary?" Tallav was appalled at the man's obtuseness. "You've got... how many fishmen?" The Investigator's smile was condescending. "No Welladan fishman would milk a whale to death!" Tallav sat up stiffly in protest to such' an allegation. "You're sure?" "Very sure. And just to prevent sucK ridiculous accusation being leveled against my subordinates, I took precautionary steps. You heard my h'angarmaster report a drone's return? When it became apparent that someone was tapping the whales to death', I initiated a drone-escort for every fishboat. The dfone is programmed to hover while tapping is in process, taking due note of quantity tapped from the glands, and the number of the mature whale. They all receive a tattoo, you see. There could be no escaping such vigilance." The Investigator shrugged. "But didn't I understand that there are two ships out, and only one drone in? Murv, wasn't that the name? If there's no drone watching him right now..." "In this weather? It covers the entire northern hemisphere. You couldn't possibly tap in this weather. Besides, the whales have undoubtedly sounded for protection." "Northern hemisphere, you said? What about down south?" "No whales in any great number. Shallow except for the Great Longitudinal Trench, and that's too deep for fishboats ansnvay." "Who's this Sharkey?" "Our Chief Engineer. Marvelous talent with any kind of engine or vehicle. Keeps our boats afloat and our drones aloft. In fact, he helped rig the control device so that the drone hovers the instant its linked fishboat stops. "Sharkey, huh? Appropriate name for a water world." "Beg pardon? Oh, yes, I see. Ha ha." "He's out without a drone." "Oh, just checking a hull. You can't do that in dry dock, you know. And we've practically no more materials until Central Credit releases us long-overdue shipment. Besides, He may be a genius with an engine but he couldn't tap a wHale to save his life even if the weather were calm enough to do so." "How so?" Tallav leaned back; tiiese were questions fie could answer. "Came Here originally as a contractee. Whales didn't take to Him. Couldn't even get near enougfi to them to do a tap. They got to be able to identify the pulse of his fishboat and scattered." Tallav didn't believe that himself but the other fisfimen did swore that it Happened. "The whales didn't take to him?" Brack ecfioed Tallav's skepticism:. "Oh, they've as much rudimentary intelligence as other forms of mammalian sea life. They evidently developed affection... or dislike... of certain fishmen. Odis, for instance, and old Okker when he still tapped, and even Murv, the contractee, have no difficulty going deep into schools... until recently, that is." "Very interesting." The Investigator squinted thoughtfully at the watery plas-glas. "I'm sure you won't mind if I take a walkabout." "No, no," Tallav was on His feet too. "On my own, Tallav. I'd like to talk to the Harbormaster. Take a look at the docks and quarters. You know." Tallav did know and, while he disliked the notion that a Central Worlds Investigator would be... snooping -- there was no other word for it -- if sucH activity resulted in the apprehension of the pirates, he must suspend his scruples. "And have you a counter?" Brack added, smiling slightly, his hand outstretched. "Counter? Whatever for?" Tallav was shocked. The very implication that he, the Planetary Administrator, might not have conducted the most extensive search for any r.i. illegally hidden anywhere in Shoulder, that his estimation of the fishmen might be erroneous, that... Fumbling from indignation, he turned his own handcounter over to Brack. "And announce my presence," and Brack pointed towards the com-unit. Rather stunned, Tallav depressed the "all-stations" svntcfi and informed Shoulder Blade that Investigator Brack was to be given aid and assistance in his efforts to discover the pirates. IV T he utter silence penetrated Shahanna's sleep. She lay a moment longer, aware first of the rough surface on which she was bedded, the closeness of the ragged walls. Other senses registered information: the freshness of the air combined with moist rock, the filtration of a cmious yellow light and the assault of quiet on her ears. She sat up, painfully aware of muscular discomfort and stiffness, as she crawled out of the shallow cave and looked around. To the right and forward, massive clouds, black, gray, their their churning innards clearly visidle, scudded beyond the outer rim of the old volcano. All around now was the diffused vibrant yellow of cloud-strained light: brooding, somber yet bathing the surrounding area with an odd clarity that made this archipelago and its lagoon completely clear. Far off on the left, Shahanna discerned the approaching rim of the other half of this storm. She looked back at the receding section, trying to estimate the extent of the eye and how much she might have before the onslaught of the second half. She shrugged. She had little option, and her shallow cave had sheltered her well enough. Like a flagon, something bobbed up on the waters of the mirror-sleek lagoon below her. Instinctively Shahanna ducked down, then peered cautiously over the obscuring rock. "The size of it," she gasped. The sealife of her home world boasted no such monster as this whale of Welladay. Quickly she reviewed what she knew of the creatures. The fishmen of the planet milked their glands of the precious radioactive iodine by means of a surgical tap inserted into the glandsac. Therefore, they were used to humans. So -- could she not figure out how to activate the tap herself? Her hand went to her belt and then fell. Even if she could tap the whale, how could she get the r.i. offworld with her ship a wreck on the bottom of the sea? However, at some time the fishmen must... She stared at the floating monster, blinked as a piece of its head appeared to lift. "A fishboaf." And she watched as a man's figure was blackly outlined against the reflecting water. She grabbed her hand weapon and dropped three shots forward of the fish-snout, waving her arms in a broad semaphore to attract the Welladan's attention. To her amazement, he appeared to dive back into his ship. Within seconds the craft submerged. Cursing her bad luck, wondering how else she could have attracted his attention, and annoyed at such a cowardly retreat, Shahanna began to pick her way down the basaltic rocks. She couldn't imagine that he'd brave the storm rather than face one lone occupant of the volcano. Surely he'd surface again. f all the rotten luck, Murv was growling to himself. The air in the fishboat was rank with human and machine stenches. He was weary and sore from the rough transit of the channel. The boat was leaking from half a dozen seams which he'd better seal before the second half of the storm hit him. Of course the lagoon would be quieter than the open sea but he'd thought to have the chance to air the boat as well as patch it while the Eye of the mach-storm passed Crown Lagoon. His sonar indicated an overhang along the south coast of the Lagoon. Good. He'd be undetectable there and could find out who that trigger-happy ape was. And if it just so happened that he was a pirate... stranded? Ho la! Pirate? Jumping to conclusions? Flads, who else would be on Crown Lagoon in the middle of a storm? Tallav had only ordered two fishboats out and that figure was too rangy to be Odis! MuiVs irritation dissolved. He found himself eagerly scrambling into his gear. What luck! What sheer unadulterated luck! To find that passage into the Lagoon itself and to spot the pickup. Flads, where had the pirate hid his ship? Crown Lagoon was one fardling big place to hide in. T he unmistakable triple cracks of a handweapon had echoed around the Lagoon, unnaturally amplified by the volcanic rock hollows, the water and the curious flat calm of the storm's eye. The shots were distinctly audible to Odis, busy mooring his fishboat on the outer rim of the Crown. He tapped the outboard instrumentation button and the Christmas tree blossomed. Quickly Odis called the drone, down from its circling security above the stormy mass. If he could actually catch the pirates in the act of transferring the stolen r.i... Even at speeds no human could tolerate, the distance was too great for the drone to get down in time. He slowed its descent. It wouldn't do for his eyes to be observed from the ground. Three shots, he reflected. A signal? He glanced upward at the lowering yellow-clouded skies. There was plenty of time for them to make a transfer before the winds picked up again. And he had plenty of time to find that space-shuttle. There was more than one way to milk a whale! He secured the outboard gear and went below for his suits and water aids. He snapped a drone remote control unit to his belt, a knife to his calf-sheath and a buckle-and-line sphere to his shoulder harness. He carefully checked the assist-tanks before he strapped them on and, jumping into the water, began to swim with rapid and powerful strokes around the southern edge of the outer Crown. There would be better plateaus for a space shuttle on the lower south edge of the island. W hen she finally reached the shores of the lagoon, Shahanna kicked impotently at the coarse black sands. Nowhere was there any trace of the fishboat: nary wake nor ripple. "Slimy coward. Twice coward! What were you running from?" She paused. Maybe Welladans were under attack from the same ship that had fired on her. Maybe that's why the repeated demands for r.i. had been ignored. Therefore the "coward" had only acted with sensible caution. Oh ho, that put a new light on the fisherman's retreat. And, if he thought she was one of the invaders, she'd never see him again, that was certain! Disgusted, she sank down to the beach, leaning wearily against a convenient rock. She forced herself to rest, to drain off the poisons of fatigue caused by the difficult descent. Even if this planet had a lighter gravity than her own, it had been tiring. Displacing enough water to inundate the narrow beach and half-drown Shahanna, a fishboat surfaced alarmingly close to shore. Choking from the unexpected drenching, the girl staggered to her feet, too furious to be frightened by the grotesque pseudofisK eyes that glared at her from the boat's snout. "That's the last, remember," a rough voice yelled at her. "And remember, if I'm not off this fardling world in five revolutions, I set the investigators on you when they get Here. And they're coming." Shahanna jumped back as a large plas-foamed cube landed heavily at her feet. "Wait," she cried for the f isH snout was turning from her. "Can't wait, you fool. And neither can you if you want to get off this fardling planet before the storm socks us in again. Grab that stuff and get off-world." Shahanna watched as the hatch slammed down and water foamed over the fins of the fishboat. She looked back at the plas-foamed cube, its shock webbing black triangles against the gray stuff. It was the kind of protection given space shipments of valuable... She dropped to her knees, her arms involuntarily starting to grab up the cube. My God! She pulled back. It had to be ,... a cube-full of radioactive iodinet Liters of it, just thrown at her feet. She threw back her head and laughed, the laughter catching suddenly in her throat as a sob. "Well, you got what you came for, certainly. They got to give you marks for that," she told herself. She rose to her feet, absently brushing the clinging dark sands from her legs. Her ship had sent out the death-knell. That would eventually connect with a civilized agency which would be compelled to report it to the authorities and a search would be inaugurated. She had supplies in her belt for several weeks, in addition to what the sea could provide. Perhaps, and her chuckle was pure amusement now, she had only five revolutions to wait, until the misdelivery was discovered. She felt much better suddenly. With a deft twist, she yanked the heavy cube to her back and began to retrace her steps to the shallow cave. That would be a difficult hole to find, and she'd be safe from the storm. The ascent was slower and far more treacherous for the cube was not only heavy, but awkward. An unbalancing burden: its weight a strain even on her heavy-world strength. Shahanna had been chosen for this venture for many considerations, not the least of which was her known tenacity of purpose. She climbed upwards. V M urv watched the delivery with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation; he was too far away to make out the features of either party, or the cold letters of the fishboat fins. Murv took careful note of the odd gait of the receiver, definitely an offworlder, someone used to a heavier gravitational pull. Murv knew to a kilogram the weight of those r.i. cubes, yet the off-worlder had shouldered it with ease. Muscles or not, Murv decided,' tKat was going to be a fardling hard climb. The pirate must have ducked into the Lagoon at the onset of the storm, probably in a small shuttle craft. Must be a fladding good pilot, too, Murv grudgingly admitted, to land on a stormy Welladan sea, ride out a mach-storm and then trip along like that. Murv glanced over his shoulder towards the west. The black and ochre clouds were still low on the horizon but coming in fast. He grinned to himself. He could, of course, shoot the pirate now, take the r.i. back to Shoulder, and get off this fardling world for good, all legally and above-board, no need to blow his cover. But this did not solve the second part of the puzzle: who was the illegal tapper. So a dead pirate informed on no one. And tackling an offworlder presented other problems, even to a man adept at rough fighting from combats on a dozen outer planets. Well, there was more than one way to milk a whale; Murv started obliquely after the pirate. Flads! Why hadn't the fishboat swung just slightly to port or starboard so he could get at least one letter of the code? And why had not the fishman emerged further from the hatch? Murv could have identified him with one clear glimpse of profile. Murv ciursed again, remembering that the only other man out when the storm broke was Odis. Murv was cynic enough to believe any man capable of any deed, given the proper circumstances of pressure and opportunity -- but Odis? Whose love for the great whales was exceeded only by his love of this drenched world? He was the last man Murv would have suspected of treachery. Still, you never knew what went on inside a man's head. Everyone had a price. That settled it for Murv. He could not kill the outworlder until he discovered the identity of both traitor and pirate -- and learned, to his own satisfaction, why Odis tapped whales to death.  I 'o Shahanna, time was shortened to the span involved in a one-time simple physical effort. One foot must lift, its toes finding a hold, somehow, on the treacherous rock. The toes must then grip, somehow, long enough to tense the calf muscles which must inform the long thigh muscles of the effort then required of them, to pull Her torso after thigh, calf and toe. Arms must, somehow, manage to retain a grip on the shock-webbing of the, somehow, unquestionably valuable and exhaustingly heavy cube. She was only vaguely aware of other timely pressures: the wind beginning to rise, gustily plucking at tiie overbalancing burden on Her back now and then, or lightly cooling the sweat that trickled down her face and into her suit. The value of the light around her was changing, darkening as the other side of the storm neared the island. She was completely aware of being imder observation, or that her tenacity indicated far greater familiarity with the terrain then she possessed. A sense of direction was another of her assets and once she had been to any place on any world, she was able to retrace her steps to it, as she did now, to the anonymous cairn amid hundreds of others, nearly like it, near to it. She dragged herself and her burden into the cave and then, with a sigh of utter fatigue, curled around the cube, one hand seemingly welded to the shock web. The protective reflex as well as the darkening skies prevented Murv, when he realized that she was no longer climbing ahead of him, from discovering her. He had followed cautiously, therefore slowly, and was not unduly alarmed when he didn't see the straining figure with its awkward load. At first, he wondered how the pirate could have got so far ahead of him, until he reached the highest ridge of the southern escarpment and realized that the pirate must have taken cover. From here, the island jutted outward and downward. It was then that he caught sight of the half-submerged craft. "Fladding stupid fool. He is not going anywhere," Murv laughed maliciously. "But where is he now?" Carefully Murv worked over ta the ship, using the tumbled rockscape to cover his advance, keeping close watch on the open hatch lest the pirate discover him prematurely. He agilely reached the open lock, listening for any sounds of activity within. It was not a large shuttle, a single cabin job. He glanced in carefully, taking in the deserted ship in one sweeping look. So, the guy hadn't made it back. He'd gone agroimd somewhere up in the crags. Murv began to pick his way up again, following much the same original route that Shahanna had. He was unaware that he was being observed, for his back was to the sea. din had allowed the tides te pull him back under the water, deep enough so that his progress could not be seen. He surfaced again, twice, in fact, looking for an exit up the rock face so that he could outflank Murv. He was annoyed that it was Murv up there on the rocks. Annoyed but puzzled. Murv gave every appearance of a man hiding: why should he hide if He were the pirate's contact? And where was the r.i.P Where, too, was Mtirv's fishboat? Odis debated the risk, glancing up at the clouds cudding and boiling on the horizon. He had kept the drone just above the cloud cover, now he directed it down, to the northern part of the island, for a skimming run designed to detect MuiVs craft. The wind was rising enough to cover the whistling sound a drone made. Odis flipped on the visor and bUnked at the rushing ocean pictured on the tiny screen. He sent it twice over the northern arc of the island, spotting his own boat moored on the east but no trace of another fishboat, either visually or sonically. He sent the drone aloft, remembering to check the wind velocity to be sure the drone was at a safe altitude. He sat down to think. No ship. Had Murv lost his fishboat in the storm? Murv had a tendency to be too quick; he wasn't all that accustomed to Welladan weather and storm, he might have inadequately moored and the ship was sunk below drone sonar depth. Of course, Murv might have discovered a ledge and moored the boat under that. One thing was certain, the pirate was going no place. But who had blown off the aftersection of the pirate's vessel? Had the Investigator arrived, spotted the pirate ship and blasted it? If so, the Investigator must surely be at Shoulder now, and all Odis need do was wait till the storm lifted enough to get a message back to Shoulder. He settled down to wait, a weather eye on the approaching storm front. He had no intention of cutting it too fine back to the safety of his own boat. But Murv would have farther to go. And why was Murv hiding? Had those three space shots been punitive rather than identifying? The wind began to keen, its fresh gusts rain-laden in the darkening sky. Gouts of lightning spat through the bilious clouds. Warm air masses moving in, Odis thought with approval. Storm is breaking up a little. Weather was capricious; a real mach-storm like this one, despite the pull of two moons and the conjunction of another planetary mass, could break up with' rare speed with a crustal shift up north. Mtorv was moving, not merely shifting position but moving forward, darting to cover as He worked his way back up the slope. The rising wind was bothering him, Odis decided and followed obliquely. A flash of a head-beam and Odis saw that Mxirv was definitely searching among the hollows VI and crevices of the cliff. Odis climbed faster. He was in time to Hear raised (dees, echoing in an argument; but the sounds were so diffuse he could not pinpoint the direction. The rising wind added its diversion. Odis cursed softly under his breath as he jumped from crag to block, flashing his own beam in and out the darker hollows, trying to scan around to prevent Murv from slipping away unnoticed. The next thing Ke knew, Murv had emerged from a low ledge, his arms wrapped around the foamcask. There was no chance for Murv to reach his handweapon. With distinct pleasure, Odis stunned him with a full charge, neatly catching the cube as Murv folded. Keeping one hand on the cube, Odis knelt, flashing his beam into the cavern. He caught sight of the darker lump of the prostrate body. He turned it over and was reassured by a groan. Rain began to spray across his back as he crouched between the two unconscious forms. He could just leave them here; they'd both be out for a while. No. He didn't know where Murv's, boat was, and he couldn't permit the man to escape. ReRsigned, he settled down to wait. (#T don't know wHat you ex pected to find here," Okker said, his seamed face flushed with anger, "but are you satisfied now?" "I really don't understand. Investigator," Tallav put in with understandable anxiety as he picked his way across the debris. "You certainly cannot have suspected Okker here, and he is absolutely the only one permitted in the Eye." Brack was sweating from His exertions. He had pulled out every drawer, shelf and movable fixture in the rock chamber, rapped on every indh of the rock walls, trying to find a hollow; he'd geigered everything without a crackle for his pains. He didn't mind alienating Tallav or the ancient but he was furious over the fruitlessness of hissearch. He glanced at the two men, somehow now allied against him. That wouldn't do. "This is the only installation known as the Eye on Welladay, isn't it?" he demanded curtly. "What's left of it," Okker replied. "Unavoidable. I... I intercepted a message, obviously from the pirates, setting up a contact point. I caught only part of it due to, the storm's interference. 'Southern edge of the lagoon where the eye is centered.' " Brack pointed to the lagoon harbor which the single big window of the Harbormaster's' control room overlooked. "Your control room is on the southern edge of the lagoon. This place is called the Eye. What other eyes are there on this fladding planet?" Okker regarded him with a deep scowl, then slapping his thigh, burst out into a cackle. "You sure you heard 'where,' and not 'when?' " He pointed a derisive finger at the investigator as he danced about in an excess of amusement. "You fladding idiot, stop that!" "I believe I can answer you, Investigator," Tallav said, his manner stiff as he waved Okker to be silent. "Logical topical references are deceiving to the newcomer." He smiled condescendingly on the Investigator. "This is not the only lagoon on WeUaday. It is therefore possible that the message, which you say you heard imperfectly due to faulty transmission, said 'when,' not 'where.' With a temporal conjunction, I presume the contact point meant the southern edge of the Crown Lagoon, when the eye of the storm was centered on it. Really, most ingenious. With proper timing, the pirate could make contact, pick up the radioactive iodine and be off without being detected tbrougB the storm." Brack swung around towards the exit. "Let's go then!" "To Crown?" cackled Okker, reinfected with ill-timed amusement. "Not now. Eye's over Crown right now so they've made contact and the r.i. is off world. You blew it, Investigator!" Brack seemed about to explode but Okker didn't budge. Then, with a massive effort, he controlled himself and began to smile ominously. CtXJo, that's where you're wrong, Okker. There can have been no contact because I disabled a small spaceship just after I picked up the message. Got a direct hit and saw it tumbling out of control. That r.i. is still on this world, waiting to be picked up. And I intend to do just that!" "Not till the storm has cleared Crown, you aren't. Drones can't handle that kind of turbulence, not unless they go above it, and that'd be too high for non-pressurized cabins," Okker told him. "I hadn't planned to use local transport," Brack's smile broadened. "Couldn't. Ain't even a fishboat left with sound seams. And -- " Okker pointed a knobby finger at the Investigator -- "you just forget trying to make it in your space craft between now and when the rest of the storm Hits Crown. Couldn't do it on the trajectory you'd need." "If only Sharkey were back with the boat He was testing," Tallav muttered, "that could stand the trip. We have to get that r.i." Tallav turned to Okker. "Hasn't that squall lifted along .the coast enough for us to find Sharkey? Where could he be?" Okker shrugged. "That squall came up sudden. He probably had the good sense to hit for the open sea to avoid getting smashed. He doesn't like to go seaward, though," he contradicted himself, "but it won't hurt to look for him before the whales do." "Before the whales do?" Brack queried. "Like I said, the whales don't like Sharkey. I'll get a weather picture. We're clear enough to receive..." A bleep severed the rest of his sentence. "Odis to Eye, Odis to Eye: Drone-relay transmission. Proceeding Crown Lagoon at # hours. Checking out spacecraft trajectory plotted towards Crown." A second raucous bleep. "Of all the nerve," gasped Tallav, the first to recover. "Must be that ship you shot up," Okker said to Brack with more respect. "He ought not to take such risks," Tallav muttered. "Then he would be at Crown by now?" asked Brack in a tight voice, glancing up at the main chrono. "Contact that drone, Okker," Tallav ordered. "Maybe we can relay a message to Odis to search for the r.i." "Not if the eye's passed Crown," Okker grumbled but his gnarled fingers sped with unexpected agility across the communications board. "Crown's a mighty good place to hide something on... full of hollows, caverns and boulders." "Get him to search the southern edge," Brack snapped. "Yeah, that's right, isn't it," Okker said, glancing sideways at the Investigator. Another unit began to chatter and a sheet of relay paper began to extrude from a slot. "Weather relay from a satellite," Okker said and grabbed the print before Tallav or Brack could. "Hmmm. Weather's closed in again over Crown, but see here." His stubby forefinger followed the wispy leading edge of the machstorm. It's breaking up." He moved his finger to the cloud formations on the right. "And we got some of the bonuses. You want to find Sharkey, you'd better git. I'll transmit to Odis's drone. His weather looks like it'll clear 'nother couple of hours and he can look for the r.i. Can't do moer'n that now." "Be sure to tell him to search diligently for the r.i.," Tallav was saying as Brack urged him out. Another alert blasted, and Tallav hesitated, his eyes widening at the distinctive soimd. "C'mon,," Brack snapped. "A sublight message?" Tallav moved back into the eye. "Now what?" "Come!" Brack insisted. "This is Federation Cruiser knell has been received from your planet, Welladay. Coordinates Frame BE-##. Search and recover. Search and recover. D-k assigned to Mercy Ship Seginus X. Advise." "That pirate ship you shot down was a mercyboat. And it is on Crown Lagoon," Okker snapped in a hard voice. Tallav turned slowly to Brack, his face pale and shocked. "Your pirates are more ingenious than we've given them credit. Using mercy boat as a contact vessel. Very clever. We must outsmart them. Catch them redhanded. Let's go, Tallav!" And Brack pulled the stunned Planetary Administrator down the corridor. Okker stared after them, his face bleak, his eyes thoughtful. He turned back to his board, then, and began to broadcast a message for Odis's drone to transmit. Then he warmed up the sublight generator. If he was right, Tallav wouldn't scream at the power use. And if he wasn't -- let him scream. C  T'm glad it wasn't you, Murv," A odis shouted, trying to make himself heard above the storm. Murv nodded, grinning at Shahanna, who was xmselfconsciously taping her orders back to her bare ribs. A bit heavy-boned, Murv thought, but no more flesK on them than was needed to make her a soft handful. "Who is it?" Even with Odis's lips tickling his ear, Murv could barely hear above the keening wind. He shrugged, then put his mouth to Odis's ear. "Someone steal a fishboat, sneak out under cover of the squall at Shoulder? He Had to repeat it twice before Odis caught all the sentence. "Not past Okker. Only two boats seaworthy, anyhow. No parts!" "Okker might be in it!" Odis stared at Murv for a long moment, then shook his head vehemently, denying that possibility. So Murv shrugged and patted the cube of r.i. significantly. Odis grinned. Shahanna prodded Murv's possessive hand and jerked her thumb backward towards fierself, rubbing the place where her orders for a top-priority requisitioned from Federation for r.i. were taped. SHie emphatically pantomimed the quantity of r.i. needed. Odis continued to nod and patted her hand reassuringly. She glared at Murv who just grinned back with sheer deviltry in his eyes. When she realized he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of admowlecment, she reached across and gripped Odis firmly on the shoulder in an ostentatious gesture of friendliness. She almost wished Murv had been the pirate, instead of the agent. She wondered if the i.d. plate, uncounterfdtable evitence of his authenticity, ever ached the arm-bore in which it had been implanted. He didn't have to wallop her so hard when he snatched the r.i. Well, she mused, he had acted within the scope of the information he possessed at that time. Jxist as Odis had when he knocked Murv out. She was sorry, though, she couldn't describe the fisHman who had thrown the cube at her feet. She'd had the most fleeting impression of him but she was sure she'd recognize him. However, that time was long off, judging by the siren winds. Shahaiuia assembled herself into as comfortable a position as she could and dosed her eyes, to pick up her rest where Murv's! entry had interrupted it. #There's something over to starboard," Brack said, raising his eyes from the screen to squint through the plasglas snout bubble of the drone. Tallav flipped up the call switch. "Must be Odis. We're halfway to Crown. Tallav calling fishboat. Tallav here. Fishboat. Answer." "P.A.? You're in the ship?" Surprise and relief colored the voices of the respondent. "Sharkey? What are you doing midocean?" "Between the storms and the whales, I'm lucky to be anywhere!" the man snapped. "You don't see them on your screen, do you?" "We've spent hours scanning the coast for you," Tallav interrupted', angry with relief at finding his mechanical genius. "You've the only seaworthy boat and the Inversigator and I -- " "Investigator?" Sharkey's voice was sharp. Brack elbowed Tallav back from the speaker. "Brack here. I have reason to believe that the pirated r.i. is still on this Crown Lagoon the P.A. has been telling me about. I intercepted a message arranging a contact point on the southern shore of a lagoon, only reception was faulty and I missed the entire message. Do you read me?" "Yeah, I read you. Investigator Brack." "Good. Now, can that fishboat of yours make it back to Crown Lagoon? You realize, of course, that we must pick up the r.i. before the pirate can retrieve it. Another fishman, named Odis, is presently believed to be in the vicinity of the Lagoon." "Odis, but..." "Can your fishboat accompany us?" "Yeah, if you can keep those fardling whales off my back." "We cannot permit that r.i. to fall into the wrong hands, now can we?" Brack cut across Sharkey's complaints, more threatening than suggesting, Tallav thought "No, we can't," Sharkey agreed flatly. "Good man. Now, how fast can that fishboat go?" "Long as those squalls don't hit us, as fast as that airbubble you are in." And, as they watched, they could see the fishboat rise slightly from the water on its hydrofoils, and take off in a plume of sprayed water that arrowed northeast by east. Before Brack could speak, Tallav banked the drone and poured on power to follow. ttVould they send another Investigator?" Odis asked Murv, when Okker's heldtransmission from the drone was completed. Murv shrugged, grimacing. "It's possible. This has taken a lot longer than predicted. And, with the credit embargo and no ships touching down at Shoulder, I haven't been able to send in a report. They might think I'd been drowned here. Now, with Shahanna to identify the Welladan contact, we can finish it up in no time. First we've got to get this safely to Shoulder." He patted the r.i. cube. "The traitor is Sharkey," Odis said gloomily. Murv laughed. "I'm not sure of anything. Remember, I thought it was you and you thought it was me, and we both suspected Shahanna of being the pirate." "Yes, but your Okker said Sharkey was still missing," Shahanna reminded the men, "and when he'd last heard from the P.A., they'd given him up for lost and were heading here." "Try Okker again, direct, Odis," Murv urged, glancing up at the clearing skies. "Another squall between here and Shoulder," Odis reported after several minutes of fruitless calling. "This planet's fardling weather is... is... " Murv broke off. "Don't mind me," Shahanna suggested with a grin, "but ought we not leave here while we have a chance?" she added, pointing to the fringe of dark clouds on the western horizon. "Okay. I'll check my boat," Murv said. "I'll wrastle this down the hill again," Shahanna volunteered sighing deeply. "I'll see if there's anything left of my ship, but I doubt it," Odis said with sincere resignation, starting south down the rocks. "I can give you a hand part of the way," Murv offered, grinning at Shahanna. "If you think you can keep up with me," she grinned back. ttOharkey! The cube's on the rocks on the lagoon shore. Just where the contact said it would be!" Brack roared through the speaker. "Oh, oh," Tallav gasped feebly. "However did it survive the storm, unprotected like that!" "You're seeing things. Brack!" Sharkey roared back. "You're seeing things, I tell you." "Like your whales, I'm seeing things, you fladding fool. It's clearly visible. Are you through' that passage yet?" "How'n hell could I be beaming to you if I weren't? I'm surfacing!" "We're landing," Brack countered, warningly. "I'm not sure I can land on that," Tallav squeaked, unable to see any likely surface on the tumbled rockscape. "You'd better. I don't think I altogether trust this chief engineer of yours," Brack ground out between clenched' teeth, his eyes never leaving the cube, white against the black lava on which it so temptingly sat. "In fact, I find it definitely suspicious that he knew such a convenient channel into this Lagoon which you, as planetary administrator, didn't know existed." "Yes, but... how could he possibly... I mean..." "There's a flat space big enough for this thing." "It'd really be so much easier for Sharkey. And after all -- " "Land." "Good heavens, he's here already," Tallav exclaimed as he set the drone down on the flattopped slab scarcely larger than the drone's landing feet. "What do you mean?" Brack followed Tallav's gesticulations and saw the figure emerging from the water, heading towards the cube. "How'dya get out of this thing?" he demanded, fumbling with his tunic. Tallav reached across him and flipped up the hatch release. Brack, his eyes on the figure, suddenly froze. "That's not Sharkey!" Tallav looked. "No, it isn't,, is it? But who... And..." Tallav broke off, staring at the Investigator. "How would you know what Sharkey looks like?" "Get out, Tallav," Brack ordered and turned the handweapon on the startled man. As the two men emerged from the drone, the figure on the shore had reached for the cube and grabbed it up, starting off, up the slopes with more speed than either observer thought possible. "Halt!" Brack shouted and lobbed off a shot after the fleeing figure. A fishboat broke surface, its hatch flipping open for the flying exit of a man. He also began to shoot, three short cracks splitting rocks just ahead of the fugitive. The man turned and began to descend as fast as he had climbed, now in the direction of the fishboat, obliquely away from the men by the drone. "You see," Brack shouted at Tallav, "there's the pirate! We must intercept." 'allav's previous doubts were swept aside by the urgency in Brack's voice, and he didn't hesitate to follow the man down the tortuous escarpment to the beach. Brack paused to whip a few shots to slow the pirate, but he was closing the distance to the fishboat faster than they could jump down the rocks. "Be careful of the r.i.," jabbered Tallav as the pirate used it as a shield. The man flung the cube into the water and dove after it, pushing it ahead of him towards the fishboat, urged on by Sharkey who was running down the ventral fin to assist But, as Shahanna, winded and half-blinded with watery eyes, grabbed the shock-webbing for a final heave to the waiting man she got her first look at his face. "You're not Murv. You're..." and she grabbed the cube back, frantically kicking out and away from the fishboat. "Give me that or I'll blow you out of the water," Sharkey snarled. "Shoot and you'll hit the r.i." Shots whistled over Shahanna's head, and Sharkey backed behind the flaring dorsal fin. Shahanna heaved away from the fishboat to tread water halfway between both contenders, using the buoyant cube as a head shield. "I'm Tallav, Planetary Administrator of WeUaday," the shorter of the two men on the shore yelled at her. "Come ashore. If you turn yourself in, I promise you immunity." Shahanna felt intense relief. They'd probably mistaken her for the pirate that's why they'd shot at her. She struck out to the beach. Tallav jumped about in the shallows, splashing water in her face as he vacillated between grabbing the r.i. and her hand until she shook him off. "I'm not a pirate. I'm from Seginus. My ship..." "You survived?" gasped Tallav. "We got the d-k relayed from Fleet." "Your pirate shot my engine away," Shahanna began as Brack joined them, lobbing another shot at Sharkey trapped behind the dorsal fin of the bobbing fishboat. "Investigator Brack mistook you for a pirate," Tallav explained nervously, "Why didn't you identify?" "I never had the chance," Shahanna protested. "I was checking coordinates..." she trailed off at the look on Tallav's face. She whirled to see that Brack's weapon was trained on them. "I'll take that r.i., now," Brack said, smiling slightly. He grabbed it by the shock webbing, carefully stepping backwards, up the rocks, his gun pointed midway between Shahanna and Tallav, and Sharkey. S everal things happened at once: whoshing sounds and enormous splashings from the Lagoon and a whining whistle above. Shahanna launched herself towards tKe rocks, Ker body using every bit of advantage from muscles trained on a heavier-gravity planet as she leaped towards Brack. He could not keep track of three attacks at once, and his shots went wHd. Shahanna ripped the r.i. from his hand, rolling sideways and down, ripping her suit against the jagged rocks, but managing to scramble away with the cube. When she came to rest against a huge black fist of a rock, 'she dazedly saw Sharkey running up the spine of his fishboat, towards the hatch. She heard the despairing scream as she watched half a dozen fishboats close in on him. He was tumbled into the water to be ground against the converging hulls. A bolt lanced past her ear apd she wrenched around, trying to put the rockfist between her and Brack. Somewhere Tallav was shrieking. "They've got him. They got him. He's getting away. Stop him!" Abruptly the sounds of struggle, aquatic and missile, ended and Tallav's exhortations ceased. Battered and shaking with pain, Shahanna raised herself up. There was Brack, flung across the rocks just below the drone. Odis was climbing down, hand over hand on the line which Shahanna could see had tangled Brack's feet and brought him down. In the Lagoon its roiled waters lapping around Tallav's knees, only two fishboats remained: one, unbelievably, lay sideways on the rocks, its belly barnacle-covered, burping bubbles that glistened in the sun. The second fishboat was cruising slowly in to shore. With a sigh, Shahanna sagged down and laid her scratched cheek against the cool cube. CtT really don't credit what I saw," Tallav insisted as he watched Mmv and Odis bandage the Seginan girl. "Those whales... just mobbed him." "Then how could he get close enough to a whale to tap 'em?" Murv asked with imderstandable exasperation. "I think I know," Odis said after a long reflective pause. "Okker claims the whales got to know the sound of Sharkey's fishboat engine when he was still a fishman. When he couldn't get a reasonable quota of rj., he got grounded. With no money, he'd no hope of lifting from Welladay so he took over maintenance." "Best mechanic we ever had," Tallav sighed, worrying already about the wage he'd have to pay for a new one. "Yes, he was a crack mechanic all right," Odis agreed. "Any fishboat Sharkey overhauled was as good as new. And he tested them himself!" "Of course!" Murv exclaimed, "and every time lie tested a boat, fie couM move in on a whale whicfi wouldn't recognize that engiae. No wonder we had sucfi trouble getting any school to trust us." Odis nodded slowly. "He's been the blackmarket source of r.i. for a long time, then," Murv went on. "Federation had been aware of a small supply trickling out long before you lodged a piracy complaint." "Then Sharkey got greedy," Odis murmured, looking over at the stranded fishboat. "But how could he have hidden sucfi a quantity as this?" Tallav demanded, pointing at the big cube. "You searclied witfi a counter, Tallav, even in the maintenance dock. That's wfiere we keep those shipping cubes, so Sharkesr's hiding place would have registered chatter anyhow. And then, your pet mechanic was always working so hard to keep us afloat, long hours servicing boats, giving them test runs in all kinds of weather to be sure they were storm-proof..." Murv's mocking tone trailed off. "Speaking of storms," Odis said, gesturing slqnvard. "This fardling planet and its fladding storms!" Mxirv growled. "I've got to get the r.i. to Seginus," Shahanna said in a soft urgent voice struggling to rise. "We will," Murv griimed at fier, "soon as we fix you up at Shoulder." "But my ship's..." and she looked up the rockscape significantly. "Brack won't be requiring the ship he came in," Murv reminded her. "Now wait a minute, Murv," Tallav ordered peevishly. "Now wait a minute, Tallav," Murv mocked film, "Brack blew up her metcy ship," and he stressed the word pointedly, "and considering her invaluable assistance today, it's the least Welladay can do." "Oh yes, well, in that case," Tallav subsided. "Now, you take tfie r.i. back to Shoulder Blade in your drone. I'll take Shafiaima in Odk's and..." I'm left witfi your fishboat?" Odis asked, slightly amused. "My friend, kindly remember that's the one sliipsfiape fishboat left on this wet and watery world. And we all know who's the best fishman on Welladay!" Odis threw back fiis head and laughed. "Yes, indeed, Odis, you be careful with it," Tallav added, frowning worriedly. By the time Odis find clambered onto the fishboat, the two drones fiad taken off and were circling above Eim. He tapped on tbe outboard panel release and plotted a course acros? tEe wide Lagoon. Tfie drones waggled a farewell as tEey wfiistled over film. Odis responded briefly and then began to read tKe cfiristma? tree's gauges. A man Had to keep an eye on tKe weatKer on Welladay. To Celebrate If's Third Straight "Hugo" As World's Best Science-Fiction Magazine If Presents an All-Star Hugo Winners Issue:  Roger Zelazny  Harlan Ellison  George H. Scithers  Fritz Leiber  Ted White  Philip Jos Farmer  Anne McCaffrey And a cover by  Jack Gaughan Don't miss this special issue with stories and artwork by the men and women who have received science fiction's top award for merit -- get your March issue of f today! m for your Tn June of last year, you'll re-.Imember, there was a great howl in certain quarters about Icarus. The Icarus in question was not the mytholocal charac- ter, but Minor Planet ##. InAlabama, Georgia and California there were special prayer meetings asking for tKe safe passage of the small astronomical t body. About # California hippies, of a more skeptical turn of mind, went to Boulder, Colorado, in caravans of flower-painted Volkswagen buses, convinced that I Icarus would hit and that the shock would detach California from the continait and make it slide into the sea. It must have been about the forty-ninth time since the time of Christ that the end of the world had been predicted -- these predictions average three per century -- and as was the case forty-eight times before the world did not come to an end. Instead Icarus passed on June #, # at the rather safe distime we have radar tracking to prove it. It was the first time that radar was used on a small body in space; the diameter of Icarus is about one-half mile. The tracking was done by the Goldstone station of the Deep Space Network in the MohaveDesert, An #-foot dish beamed  the radar waves at Icarus; the neighboring #-foot dish served as the receiver. The problem of tracking ,Icarus by radar was similar in difficulty to tracking a silver dollar in orbit around the earth # miles from sea level. At the time the Goldstone radars did their work, just # years had gone by since a trace on a photographic plate had received the designation # M A. The designation, given in accordance with international astronomical usage, states that it was the first (A) planetoid discovery made during the second half of June (M) in that year. The actual date was June #; the telescope had been aimed at the vicinity of the star Antares, and the exposure had been made by the late Dr. Walter Baade. It so happened that Dr. Baade's vacation was to begin the next day, so Drs. Seth B. Nicholson and Robert S. Richardson took over direction of the photographic tracking and should be considered as co-discoverers. I The first orbit calculation gave mean distance of Mars from the sun. Perihelion was then calcuthe sun, well inside the orbit of Mercury. But the # perihelion passage, on May #, took place sun. Whether the aphelion aca little farther out is not yet known. The orbital period is # days, which has the result that a close "fly-by" like that of # will take place every # years. A fter its discovery in # the main question was whether Icarus would be "rediscovered" -- that is whether it would be found again. As I know from conversations, the layman is a bit surprised that this should be a question at all. Astronomers, saddened by experience, know better. Here is a short list of planetoids with orbits similar to that of Icarus; and all with diameters of one mile or less ; Of these, Apollo, Adonis and Hermes are "lost;" they were seen, or rather photographed, on one occasion only. Another planetoid with a similar orbit received the name Geographos -- it also seems to be lost. But the case of Icarus was a bit more auspicious. It was discovered first by Palomar Observatory in #, re-observed by Radcliffe Observatory in # and in # and, during the latter year, by the observatory at the Cape of Good Hope and the Bloemfontein Observatory. In. , # Radcliffe Observatory sei cured more photographs and did so again in #. These successive observations indicated that the orbit, as re-calculated in # by Dr. Samuel Herrick, was quite close to reality. The difficulties were mainly due to the small size of the object. The trouble with orbital diagrams as they are published innewspapers is that they are flatI tened out and show a planetoid like Icarus crossing the orbit of the earth at two points like railroad tracks. It needs a three-dimensional diagram to show that Icarus and the earth are not on a collision course. The planetoid has its aphelion far "below" the Orbital Period Name Discoverer (Years) (#)-Amor Delporte, # Apollo (#HA) Reinmuth #I Adonis (#CA) Delporte, # Hermes (#UB) Reinmuth, # Baade, # Minimum Length Distance Inclination Eccenof Mafor from Earth to Ecliptic tricity Axis (A.U.) (Mill.miles) (Years) # # # #.# #J# # #J #".# # # # r.# # # # S # # # #" ecliptic (the plane of the earth's orbit) and then climbs up, in a manner of speaking. When it reaches the ecliptic it is already inside the orbit of Mercury. Then it goes through its perhelion high "above" the ecliptic. It is only on its return journey back to its aphelion that is pierces the ecliptic near the orbit of earth; it never actually crosses the earth's orbit. As long as Icarus follows this orbit, a collision is plainly impossible. The earth then could only be endangered if the orbit of Icarus were changed in such a way that its descending leg actually passed through the earth's orbit An orbital change could be brought about only by a perturbation caused by the gravitational field of one of the major planets or else by a collision in the asteroid belt when Icarus is near its aphelion. Both' possibilities are unlikely because of the position of the orbit The high inclination of # of arc puts Icarus so far below the asteroid belt when it it at aphelion that it is definitely in a region where there are only a few strays from the main belt in evidence. And the inclination of the orbit also sees to it that Icarus never comes close to any of the larger planets, except our own planet. A few weeks before the now historic fly-by, a member ol the British House of Commons officially asked the govemmenl for "assurance that there would be no collision." I do not know what answer -- if any -- was given, but the nervous M. P. might have been told that even in space there is something resembling the survival of the fittest. Mars, as we now know, is heavily marked with ringwalls caused by the impacts of bodies that may be classified as either very large meteorites or very small asteroids. We all know what the face of the moon is like and the earth also received its share. A total of # large' (f.e., more than half a mile in diameter) impact craters are now identified as such and more than a dozen others are under suspicion. Of the large impact craters, the youngest is Barringer Crater in Arizona with an estimated age of # years. Most of them are many is an interesting fact that the biggest impact craters are also the oldest. The two largest in the Old World are the Vredefort Ring in South Africa with a diameter of at least # miles and RicHat in Mauritania with a diameter of about # miles. The Vredefort Ring was formed during the Cambrian Period, about # million years ago. The age of the Richat crater has not yet been determined but it is at least as old as Vredefort. In the western hemisphere the largest are the two Clearwater Lakes (# and # miles) and Manicouagan Lake (# miles), all three in Quebec. The so-called Sudbury Structure in Ontorio, of irregular shape and about # miles in length, is also of meteoritic origin. All four were formed before the Cambrian Period began and their minimum age is, The implication of all this is that all the planetoids which once were in collision courses have ended their careers in the past. (Those still orbiting the sim are the ones that are not on collision courses. Of course some smaller ones, presumably more numerous at any time, are still in collision orbits. Eastern Siberia was struck by about # tons of meteoritic iron on February #, #, while another impact (believed to have been a very small comet) took place in Central Siberia on June #, #. T he simple question of what happens when a meteorite strikes the ground does not have a simple or even a single answer. There are enormous variations and they depend on two factors. The nature of the meteorite, stony or iron, Kas nothing to do with it; the two factors are the mass of the meteorite and its impact velocity. Of course a falling mass of two tons will be different from a falling mass of two pounds, but the impact velocity is far more important. As everybody has learned in high school at one time, the kinetic energy of a moving body equals one half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity. Therefore, what happens on impact is mainly the result of the velocity involved. Take the case of the famous Cape York (Greenland) meteorites, the largest of which, named Ahnighito, weighs # pounds. It was foimd by Commander Robert Edwin Peary, resting on a gravelly plain with rather hard ground. Since it had not been shattered on impact, the circumstances of its fall could be reconstructed as follows: Ahnighito and the other meteorites of that fall must have entered the atmosphere more or less parallel to the ground, like a re-entering artificial satellite. Somewhat slowed down by air resistance, it still moved nearly horizontally just before impact. The season must have been winter, with a thick snow cover at the impact site. If the meteorite moves with equal "slowness" but impacts on ordinary soil, it will shatter and just dig a hole in the ground. If the impact velocity is high, several miles per second, and the mass large, say more than twenty tons, we'll have a crater-forming impact, especially if the ground is bedrock with only a thin overburden of soil and sand. The enormous amoimt of kinetic energy shatters the rock of the ground as well as the impacting meteorite. The meteorite, in the process of shattering, will penetrate to a certain depth before the heat generated by the impact can make itself felt. By vaporization of part of the material a cloud of hot expanding gas is produced which acts just like the gases from an explosion. The The Process of Crater Formation. #. A fraction of a second before impact #. A fraction of a second after impact #. Eruption of the explosion cloud #. Two hours after impact; the dotted line indicates the original surface V    # force of the expanding gas acts in all directions, or rather it tries to do so. It cannot act too far downward, because the rock layer is, for practical purposes, of infinite thickness. It cannot act upward, because the explosion cloud expands faster than the speed of sound. So the atmosphere acts for a short time as a very heavy lid. Hence the force is acting mainly horizontally, pushing the top layers of the impact site outward in all directions from the center. More rock is broken up in the process and the rock layers around the rim, where the force is now too weak to break them, are tilted up. ' ' confined to the debris-filled hole of its own making, has calmed down to the point that its rate of expansion is no longer greater than the speed of sound, the atmosphere lid is lifted. Now the explosion acts upward, carrying a large amount of the debris with it. Many of the larger pieces of debris both rock and meteorite fragments, are thrown from the hole like projectiles, falling around the crater within a radius of a few miles. This is the reason why one usually finds more meteoritic material in the vicinity of a meteorite crater than in it. A large amoimt of the shatter debris then falls back into the crater so that it is less deep when everything is over. The foregoing description assumes that the impact takes place on solid rock; if the meteorite should fall on a volcanic area there will be secondary events, volcanic activity for which the shock of the impact acted as the trigger. Large flows of magma will take place, obscuring the original impact crater. The presence of other impact indicators -- so-called shatter cones, caused by the impact shockwave in the ground -- proves that there was an impact. Flows of volcanic material obscured most of the other features T he chain of events that produced the Sudbury Structure caimot be unique and the maria of the moon, the dark spots visible to the naked eye. Have been under suspicion for a long time. The well-known lunar craters like Tycho, Copernicus and Kepler are tical impact craters in solid ground, surrounded by small "secondaries" resulting from the larger pieces thrown out in the process of crater formation. Once impact craters on earth had been recognized, these lunar craters no longer presented any problems. But the large and generally smooth mare plains were more mysterious by far. The most convincing (but not T# then provable) explanation operated with a two-stage process. The first stage was a major impact of a planetoid, probably much larger than Icarus. The lunar crust was assumed to Have been thin at the time so that the planetoid broke through the crust as an artillery shell will smash through the ice of a frozen lake. Then an enormous lava flow welled up through the Hole, flooding the surroundings and covering up or melting down all then existing surface features. This explanation, incidentally, was evolved before the Sudbury Structure was investigated. The rather important difference was that Sudbury is on earth and even in an easily accessible place, while the moon's maria are far away. And even if one thought of astronauts landing on one of the maria, the astronauts would only be able to investigate the surface. They might say that it is indeed old lava, but that still would not be a clue to the reason for the lava flow. Now, however, a confirmation has come from an entirely different and unexpected source. During the years # and # five Lunar Orbiters were put into orbits around the moon. The main purpose of these missions was to photograph the lunar surface in detail, both nearside and farside. More frigoris Mare Imbriutn More serenitatis More  ironqui Hi tolls More crisium procellorum Sinus oestuum SiS.medii More foecunditatls Mare nectoris More humorum Mare nubium Sketchmap of the dark areas of the nearside of the moon, with crosses marking the location of six of the heavy masses. The seventh is located just beyond the rim of this sketch and is the only one that can be said to be located on the farside. Tfien tfie orbit of Orbiter ## was analyzed carefully, presumably to find out whether our moon Has a faint equatorial bulge. Lunar Orbiter ## was in a polar orbit around the moon but the data from the orbit of the ## could be compared witK data from the orbit of Lunar Orbiter ## that had orbited the moon over its equator. The data agreed and we now know that there are seven heavy masses below the surface of the nearside. (See: map.) 'The dark maria of the moon can be grouped by appearance as follows: Oceanus procelnubium and Mare friris Have irregular shapes. The others: Mare imbrium, Mare serenitatis, Mare crisium, Mare nectarisi and Mare humorum Have regular, that is to say roughly circular, outlines. The Heavy masses were discovered in, or rather tinder, the five circular maria. Another one is in the area of Sinus medii, a dark area in tfie center of the Here is music composed on computer and transducers, ranging from computer-played versions of Christmas carols and rounds to the complex sounds that offer a new dimension in musicology. Composers include Dr. John R. Pierce, Dr., M. V. Mathews, David Lewin, James Tenny, etc, etc. # selections on a #-inch, high-fidelity, long-playing record produced by Decca. A "must" for your record library and a conversation piece for all occasions. Priced S.#S postpaid -- send in the coupon today. --  --  -- I ! Galaxy Publishing Corp.  #I Hudson Street,  I New York City # ' ' Yes, send me my #-inch hi-fi  # record of Music from Mathematics  I right away. I enclose check or J I money order of # S.  I Name  I Address I I Gty  State Zip Code...  i (Offer good in U. S. A. Only)  nearside, and the seventh under the Mare orientale. The last named can be seen from earth only as a dark smudge at the rim of the nearside; the Orbiter protographs revealed it to be a magnificent circular structure. Well, here we have a case of a theory that has been nicely confirmed by evidence that was discovered after the theory had been advanced. Of course the scientists who examined the data (P. M. Muller and W. L. Sjogren of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena) wondered just how large these heavy masses were. Since the orbital data cannot tell how deeply they are buried, an assumption had to be made, namely a depth of # miles below the surface. Under this assumption the mass under the Mate imbrium, if it consists essentially of iron, would be a sphere # miles in diameter. This is the size of a medium-large planetoid, far bigger than those that are known to have crossed the earth's orbit. And the former planetoids that produced the circular maria must have impacted the moon a long time ago, possibly at the same time that others of their kind caused the Vredefort Ring and the Sudbury None saw the woman with Dr. Ain. Most had never seen her before... Tr. Ain was recognized on tKe OmahaChicago flight. A biologist colleague saw him in an aisle seat while coming back from the toilet. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain's huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain's response. If he had not had the flu like everyone else that autumn, he would have turned back to speak with Ain, but he shuffled on to his seat. The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: a tall, thin, nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line, staring at Ker; and since he already Had His raincoat with' him, she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on. They both saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O'Hare was late getting underground. Neither of them saw the woman. The wounded, dying woman. Nobody recalled him on the flight to New York, but the # :# jet carried an Ames on the checklist, which was thought to be a misspelling of Ain. It was. The plane had circled for an hour while Ain watched the smoky seaboard monotonously tilt, straighten, and tilt again. The woman was"weaker now. She coughed, picking weakly at the scabs on her face that were halfhidden behind her hair. Her hair, Ain saw, that great hair which had been so splendid, was drabbed and thinning. He looked to seaward, willing himself to think of cold, clean breakers. On the horizon he saw a vast spreading black rug. Somewhere a tanker had opened its vents. The woman coughed again. Ain closed his eyes. It was the dead time of afternoon. He was picked, up next while to Glasgow. Kennedy-Underground was a boiling stew of people breathing each other's reek, the air-conditioning unequal to the hot September evening. The check-in line swayed and sweated, staring dully at the newscast. Save the last Green Mansions -- a conservation group was protesting the defoliation and drainage of the Amazon basin. Several people recalled the beautifully colored shots of the new clean bomb. The line squeezed together to let a band of uniformed men go by. They were wearing buttons inscribed: Who's Afraid? That was when a woman noticed Ain. He was holding a newssheet and she heard it rattling in his hand. Her family hadn't caught the flu, so she looked at him sharply. Sure enough, his forehead was sweaty. She herded her kids to the side away from Ain. He was using Instac throat spray, she remembered. She did not think much of Instac; her family used Kleer. While she was looking at him, Ain suddenly thrust his head down and stared in her face, with the spray still floating above him. That made her mad. Such inconsiderateness! She turned her back. She did not recall him talking to any woman, but she perked up her ears when the clerk read off Ain's destination. Moscow! The clerk recalled that too, with disapproval. Ain checked in alone, he reported. No woman had been ticketed for Moscow, but it would have been easy enough to split up the tickets. By that time they were sure she was with him. A in's flight went via Iceland with an hour's delay at Kevlavik. Ain walked over to the airport park, breathing gratefully the sea-filled air. Every so often he shuddered. Under the whine of bull-dozers, the sea could be heard running its huge paws up and down the keyboard of the land. In the little park were yellowed birches, and a flock of wheateaters foraged by the path. Next month they would be in North Africa. Two thousand miles of tiny wing-beats, Ain thought. He threw them some crumbs from a packet in His pocket. The woman seemed stronger here. She was panting in the sea air, her large eyes fixed on Ain. He saw that the birches were as gold as those where he Had first seen her, the day his life began. Squatting down to watch a shrewmouse, he Had been, when he caught the falling ripple of green and recognized the shocking naked girl-flesH, creamy, pink-tipped among the golden bracken, coming towards him. Yoimg Ain Held his breath under stress, his nose on the sweet moss and his heart going crash -- crash -- and then he was staring at the outrageous fall of that hair down Her narrow back, watching it dance aroxmd Her heart-shaped buttocks while the shrewmouse ran over His paralyzed hand. The lake was utterly still, dusty silver under the misty sky, and sHe made no more than a muskrat's ripple to rock the floating golden leaves. The silence closed back, the trees burning silent like torches where the naked girl Had walked the wild wood, and Ain's eye's were shining. For a time He believed He Had seen an Oread. Ain was last on board for the Glasgow leg. The stewardess recalled dimly that He Had stayed awake. SHe could not identify the woman there were a lot of women on board. And babies. Her passenger list Had Had several errors. At Glasgow airport a waiter remembered that a man like Ain Had called for Scottish oatmeal, and eaten two bowls, although of course it wasn't really oatmeal. A young mother with a pram saw him tossing crumbs to the birds. desk, he was Hailed by a Glasgow professor wHo was going to the same conference at Moscow, This man Had been one of Ain's teachers. It was now known that Ain Had done His postgraduate work in Europe. THey chatted all the way across the NortK Sea. "I wondered about that," the professor said later. " 'Why have you come round about?' " I asked him. He told me the direct flights were booked up. (This was found to be untrue; Ain deliberately avoided going to Moscow apparently as an amateurish attempt to avoid attention. 'he professor spoke with relish of Ain's work. stubborn, too, very stubborn. It was as though a concept -- often, the simplest relation, mind you -- would stop him in his tracks, fascinate him, so he would hunt all 'round it instead of going on to the next thing, as a more docile mind would. Truthfully, I wondered at first if he could be just a bit thick. But you recall who it was said that the capacity for wonder at matters of common acceptance occurs in the superior mind? And of course, so it proved when he shook us all up over that enzyme coding business. A pity your government took him away from his line, there... No, he said nothing of this, I say it to you, young man. We spoke in fact largely of my work. I was surprised to fmd he'd kept up. He asked me what my sentiments about it were, which surprised me again... Now, understand, I'd not seen the man for five years, but he seemed -- well, perhaps just tired, as who is not? I'm sure he was glad to have a change; he jumped out for a legstretch wherever we came down. Oslo, even at Bonn. Oh yes, he did feed the birds, but that was nothing new for Ain... His social life when I knew him? Radical causes? Young man. I've said what I've said because of who it was that introduced you, but I'll have you know it is an impertinence in you to think ill of Charles Ain, or that he could do a harmful deed... Good evening." The professor said nothing of the woman in Ain's life. Nor could he have, although Ain had been much with her in the university time. No one had seen how he was obsessed with the miracle, the wealth of that body... her inexhaustibility. They met privately at his every spare moment, sometimes even in public, pretending to be casual strangers under his friends' noses, pointing out a pleasing view to each other, gravely formal. And later -- what doubled intensity of love! He revelled in her, possesed her and searched over every atom of her -- the sweetest springs and shadowed places and the white rounded glory in the moonlight -- finding always more, always new ways to never-failing delights. The danger of her frailty was far off then in the rush of birdsongs and the springing leverets of the meadow. On dark days she might cough a bit, but so did he. In those years he had had no thought to the urgent study of disease... A t the Moscow conference nearly everyone noticed Ain at some point or another, which was to be expected in view of his professional stature. Ain was late in; a day's reports were over, and his was to be on the third and last. It was a small highcalibre meeting. Many people spoke with Ain, and several sat with him at meals. No one was surprised that He spoke little, since he was a retiring man except on a few memorable occasions of hot argument. He did strike some of his friends as a bit tired and jerky. An Indian molecular engineer who saw him with the throat spray kidded him about bringing over Asian flu. A Swedish colleague recalled that Ain had been called away to the transAtlantic phone at lunch; and when He returned Ain had volunteered the information that something had turned upi missing in his home lab. There was another joke, and Ain said cheerfully, "Oh yes, quite active." At that point one of the Chicom biologists swung into his daily propaganda chore about bacteriological warfare and accused Ain of manufacturing biotic weapons. Ain took the wind out of his sails by saying: "You're perfectly right." By tacit consent, there was very little talk about military applications, industrial dusting, or subjects of that type. And nobody recalled seeing Ain with any woman other than old Madame Vialche, who could scarcely have played Mata Hari. Ain's own speech was bad, even for him. He always had a poor public voice, but his ideas were usually expressed with the lucidity so typical of the first-rate original mind. Ths time he seemed muddled, with little new to say. His audience excused this as the muffling effects of security. He then got somehow into a tangled point about the course of evolution in which he seemed to be trying to show that something was very wrong indeed. When he wound up with a reference to Hudson's bell bird "singing for a later race," several listeners wondered if he were drunk. 'he big security break came right at the end, when he I suddenly began to describe the methods he had used to mutate and redesign a leukemia virus. He explained the procedure with admirable clarity in four sentences and paused. Then he said other sentences about the effects of the mutated strain. It was maximal only on the higher primates, he said; recovery rate among the lower mammals and other orders was close to #. As to vectors, he went on, any warm-blooded animal served. In addition, the virus retained viability in most environmental media and performed very well airborne. Contagion rate was of course extremely high. Almost off-hand, he added that no test primate or accidentally exposed human had survived beyond the twenty-second day. These words fell into a silence broken only by the running feet of a Chicom delegate making for tKe door. Then a gilt chair went over as an American bolted after him. Ain seemed unaware that his audience was in a state of unbelieving paralysis. It had all come so fast. A man who had been blowing his nose was staring popeyed' around his handkerchief. Another who had been lighting a pipe grunted as his fingers singed. Two men chatting by the door had missed his words entirely, and their laughter ehimed into a dead silence in which echoed Ain's words: " -- y really no point in attempting." Later they found he had been explaining that the virus utilized the body's own immimomechanisms, and so defense was by definition hopeless. That was all. Ain looked around vaguely for questions and then started down the aisle. By the time he got to the door, people were swarming after him. He wheeled about and said rather crossly, "Yes, of course it is very wrong. I told you that. Ve are all wrong. Now it's over." An hour later they foxmd Ke had gone, having apparently reserved a Sinair flight to Karachi. Our security men caught up 'with him at Hong Kong. By then He seemed really very ill, and went with them peacefully. They started back to the States via Hawaii. His captors were civilized types; they saw lie was gentle and treated him accordingly. They took him out handcuffed for a stroll at Osaka. He had no weapons or drugs on him, and they let him feed his crumbs to the binis, and listened with interest to his account of the migration routes of the common brown sandpiper. He was very hoarse. At that point, he was wanted only for the security thing. There was no question of a woman at all. H e dozed most of the way to the islands: but when they came in sight, he pressed to the window and began to mutter. The security man behind him got the first inkling that there was a woman in it, and turned on His recorder. "... blue, blue and green until you see the scabs. Oh my girl! Oh beautiful, you won't die. I won't let you die. I tell you, my girl, it's all over now, hold on, it's over... Lustrous eyes, look at me, let me see you now alive my girl. Oh great queen, my sweet body, my girl, have I saved you? Oh terrible to know, and noble -- Chaos' girl green-robed and blue, in golden light... the thrown and spinning ball of life against black space. Have I saved you?" On the last leg, he was obviously feverish. "She may Have tricked me, you know, Ke said confidentially to tiie government man. "You have to be prepared for that, of course. I know her!" He chuckled confidentially. "She's no small thing. But wring your Heart out -- " Coming over San Francisco, He was merry. "Don't you know tHe otters will go back in tHere? I'm certain of it. That fill won't last, there'll be a bay there again." They got him on a stretcher at Hamilton Air Base, and He went unconscious shortly after takeoff. Before he collapsed, he'd insisted on throwing the last of his birdseed on the field. "Birds are of course, warmblooded," he confided to the agent who was handcuffing Him to tHe stretcher. Then Ain smiled gently and lapsed into inertness. He stayed that way almost the whole remaining ten days of his life. By then, of course, no one really cared. Both the government men had died quite early, just after they finished analyzing the birdseed and throat-spray. The woman who had seen him at Kennedy was only just then feeling sickisH. The tape-recorder they Had put "by his bed fimctioned right on through, but if anybody cared to replay it, they would have foundlittle babbling. "Gaea Gloriatrix!" he crooned. At times he was grandiose and tormented. "Our life, jyour death!" he yelled. "Our oeath would have been your iSeath too, no need for that, no need -- " At other times he was accusing. "What did you do about the dinosaurs?" he demanded. "How did you fix them? Did they annoy you? Cold. Queen, you're too cold! You came close to it this time, my girl," he raved. And then he wept and caressed the bedclothes and was maudlin. Only at the end, lying in his filth and thirst, stUl chained where they had forgotten him, he was suddenly coherent. In a light, clear voice, as one might ask one's lover what to take on a stammer picnic, he asked the recorder happily: "Have you ever thought about bears? They have so much -- funny they never came along further. By any chance were you saving them, girl?" And he chuckled in his ruined throat until he died. You can apparently "read" minds and tell "fortunes". Have someone look at the and you Immediately know tioni Easy to do! Entertainment for all ages. Free catalog of magic tricks and puzzles with each order. Send only # plus #o handling charges to: Johnson's Novelties #B Lorain Avenue Cleveland, Ohio # There's more to teleportation than talent. It takes skill and knowledge to do it right. Here's how! I T T rhy teleportation? Well -- Y V Last MarcK I was Guest of Honor at tHe Boskone, the regional fan convention held annually in Boston. Strangely, everyone seemed to expect a speech'. I hadn't done any speaking since early college. Worse, the audidents. Why teleportation? Because tion, pronounced "misfits") could catch me at anything. What with no firm groimd for believing that teleportation is even possible, there would be endless room for speculation without any way for some teenage genius to tell me, "You're wrong! Right here in my physics text it says -- " At that, there was enough ar-" gument. But the speech went well, even to the point where the question session degenerated into, frenzied arguments near the back wall, allowing me to slip quietly away. I'd planned that. But Fred Pohl caught me at the docar and asked me to turn the speech into an article for him. Here it is. isclaimer: Any resemblance to the plot of ancient or modem science fiction, novels or short stories, is noi coincidence. I've been reading science fiction, voraciously, for eighteen years. In most of what follows, I have borrowed freely from my betters, and even from my own stories. Where I remember ray sources, I Have quoted them -- sometimes. Defimtion: Teleportation is any method of moving from point to point in negligible time. Over short distances we will take lightspeed as negligible. Over longer distances (interplanetary and interstellar) we will require infinite or near-infinite speed. I make a distinction between psychic and mechanical teleportation. Essentially, psi teleportation involves an individual's wishing himself from place to place. In mechanical teleportation he pushes a button. He may do other things first, such' as sighting in, charging batteries, weighing and measuring his cargo, whatever it takes. But eventually He will push a button here and he will instantly be there. Similarly, the adept at psi teleportation may have spent decades in spiritual training, learning to negate distance by the power of a wish. These definitions are not meant to be rigorous. Intuitively you know what teleportation is, anyway. History: The history of teleportation is all of the psi variety. The prophet Elijah was frequently "transported" by JahweH. He would rise in the air, spin around a few times, then vanish. Or he would fly about and come down without vanishing. One day he flew up and up and never did come down. His followers searched the countryside for days. When they couldn't find his body they assumed that Elijah had taken it with him, into Heaven. Friar Joseph of Copertino (#-#) was a levitator. Usually in the presence of witnesses, he would go into a religious trance, rise into the air, fly about, eventually settle on an altar or in a tree. His presence in this article derives from his power of bilocation. Friar Joseph was capable of being in two places. Then there are past and present Hindu mystics and tales of teleportation during seances. No matter. The interesting thiug is that, historically, nobody seems to make a distinction between negating distance with a wish, flying by flapping one's arms, flying without flapping one's arms, being in two places at once, or being blown about at terrific speeds by divine or other mysterious forces. The distinction seems to be original with sience fiction; it has no basis in recorded "fact." I offer the thought that there may be no distinction, that this confusion may be a fundamental characteristic of psychic teleportation. T heory of Psychic Teleportation: I'd like to get through this fairly quickly, since I don't believe in psi teleportation and since my major interest is in the effects of teleportation on society. #) Consider the following theory; A man in deadly danger would learn to teleport in order to save his life. I can remember two novels in which the idea was crucial: Jack of Eagles, by James Blish, and The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. The idea is simply to point a gun at a man's head and fire. One time out of a thousand he wUl frantically teleport out of the way of the bullet, and you will have a teleport. Forget it. There has been too much opportunity for it! Violent death has occurred since man was definably man. How many have learned to teleport in time to save their lives? Too few to be noticed. But there's another flaw in the theory. Psychic powers are notoriously undependable. Bxperience says that when the ability to teleport is most needed, that's when it won't show up. #) My prejudice against teleportation has a valid basis. I haven't seen it. Science has existed on earth for -- depending on how you define science -- between a couple of centuries and a few millennia. We can't yet build a hardwaretype teleport system. But psi powers, if they exist at all, have been around since man was definably human. If teleportation is both possible and useful, we should have been using it since men moved into the Nile Valley. And we would never have given it up... if teleportation is both possible and useful. We conclude either that teleportation is not possible, or that it kills those who possess the gift before they can demontrate it to anyone. Both are possible. Consider Bester's "Blue Jaunt." A man in a panic, drowning, teleports without considering where he's going. He ends up inside a Or, psi could be dangerous in other ways. Gene-linked to insanity or to mental deficiency, for example. In any case, psi teleportation is out. But let's ignore facts and do some speculating. P ractice of Psychic Teleportation: What about conservation of energy? What of conservation of momentum? These questions are not idle. Stones did not stop falling wlien Einstein publisEed a new tHeory of gravitation. Tfie old law Eold; new laws of pEysics usually apply only to new areas of observation. CEanging one pEsreical law is Eke trying to eat one peanut. Okay. So wEat Eappens if you try to teleport upEill? Does your body get colder or lose mass? TEere is a gain in potential energy. It must be compensated by tiie loss of energy of anotEer form. Suppose I were to teleport to Kerguelen Island? (I am writing in Los Angeles. Opposite me on tEe EartE's globe is tEe Eeart of tEe Indian Ocean, in wBidS Kerguelen Island is tEe nearest land mass.) Because of tiJe EartE's spin, Los Angeles and Kerguelen Island are going in opposite directions. Were I to teleport to Kerguelen Island I would Eave to land running -- at Ealf a mile a second. Teleportation can be dangerous. You don't teleport out of a speeding car eitEer. #) I take anotEer tEeory of psi teleportation from The Wotld of Null-A, by A. E. Van Vogt It seems tfiat two objects similar to eacE otEer to twenty decimal places will join eacE otEer. TEe lesser wiU bridge space to contact tEe greater. TEis presumed law applied to masses, tEougEt waves and even wEole personalities. We can't disprove it. It could be a fact. We can't disprove it because Van Vogt never defined similarity, nor greater, nor lesser. So now you know Eow to write a science-fiction story. But we can stiU work witB tEe idea; and I believe Van Vogt missed some great comic routines. Take tEis one: In one scene in The Pawns of Null-A, we see Gilbert Gosseyn on one side of a fence. He wants to be on tEe otEer. So Ee looks at a piece of land just beyond tEe fence and, vntE tEe power of Eis extraordinary brain, Ee tunes EimseU to tEat piece of land, adjusting Eis own atomic makeup to a similarity of witiun twenty decimal places. Now, twenty decimal places is pretty finicky. Gosseyn must get witEin tEat range, but Be must also make sure tEat Ee will be tiie lesser of tEe pair, and not tEe greater. One sEgEt slip...  So Ee makes tEe bridge . , . and Ealf a ton of eartii descends on Eim. I don't beEeve in psycEic teleportation. But I could be wrong. So: We will assume tEat it is possible for nearly anyone to learn to teleport. A new leamir technique Bas been developed. If may cules in one's food, tailoring tEem to carry a superfidal memory directl;; to the brain, as' we now feed flatworms to eacK other to transfer learned responses. It may be something else. What do you get, when nearly everyone on Earth can teleport? You get Alfred Bester's The Stsxs My Destination. I offer the book as a text to accompany this course. I'll name a few highlights: Thieves, uncatchable or nearly so, who teleport around the world to follow the night. They never see sunlight. Locked doors, and behind the doors, mazes complex enough to confuse anyone who might try to teleport inside. Otherwise there would be no private property, nor privacy either. Transport vehicles become obsolete. Collectors collect them as period pieces. Classification of each citizen's telqport characteristics (Bester assumes a distance limit. My own question: is the limit due to rdiativistic uncertainty? The more dtant is one's destination, the less certain is its location in space and time.) Intensive, probably productive , research into other psi powers (since one has been shown to exist). I object to one thread of Bestcr's tapestty. If Gully Foyle tries t "jaunti' along a "geodesic curve" he will end by going slow#J# f".' . '  # 'A.'-,, ' j er than light. That's how geodesics work in Emsteinian space. But it doesn't affect the pattern of Bester's society, which is worth studying. II T heory oi Mechanical Tele portation: Anyone know anything about tuimel diodes? The field is full of good writers named Smith. One wrote a story using a teleportation system based on the tunnel diode effect. Apparently physics students are now taught that a tunnel diode takes an electron here and puts it there without allowing it to occupy the intervening space. If you can do it with quantum physics, why not with largo: masses? With people? The theory looks good, and it hasn't been used much in science fiction. Older, more often used, and more traditional is the beaming method. You convert your passenger andor cargo to electromagnetic waves, fire the beam across space, catch it in a receiver and convert the electromagnetic energy back into matter. A modification is Poul Anderson's system in The Enemy Stars. Poul's system records the position and energy state of every subatomic particle in the passenger's body. A side effect is that the body is vaporized, so tKat tfiat one winds up with a complete record of the passenger plus a cloud of superheated plasma. The gas is sucked down through a grid into a matter reserve, to await the next incoming signal. The record of the passenger is fired across space. A receiver picks it up and uses it, plus the plasma in its own matter reserve, to reconstruct the passenger. I don't know. I wouldn't ride in one of the damned things. The engineering problems seem trivial compared to the legal, ethical, and philosophical ramifications. Still, what happens if the signal gets snarled up? Intfle good old days I read of the possibilities in EC comic books; and the pictures were vivid and Horrifying. In practice, the least bit of interference would leave the passenger an idiot or a good imitation of a corpse. Over interplanetary distances you'd have to worry not only about intervening dust and gas, but about red and violet shifts due to gravity and relative velocities. And what Happens to your soul? I worry about that. I don't necessarily believe in a soul, but I don't believe in taking chances. If my soul isn't recorded somewhere in the process, I'm dead, even though my memory remains as reconstructed electron tracks. Trhere society is concerned, there are equally serious problems. Let's say we've reached step one. We've recorded our customer, and we now Have a record and a ball of ionized plasma. Why not beam the record to two receivers? Now we've got a duplicator. The legalities get sticky. We could get around them by permitting one, say, one Isaac Asimov to a planet; but who gets the royalties on the Foundation trilogy? Similarly, you can keep the record. You fire the signal at the receiver, but you store the tape. Ten years later the passenger walks in front of a bus. You can recreate him from tape, minus ten years of his life. But -- aside from questions concerning his soul -- can he collect his own life insurance? Suppose we change our mind after step one. We store the tape instead of firing it. Is it kidnapping? Or, in view of the fact that we Have mortally vaporized a man, is it murder? Does it cease to be murder if we reconstitute him before the trial? Finally, we assume an advance whereby we needn't destroy the model to get the record. Should not we destroy him ansrway? Otherwise He hasn't gone anywhere. Our fourth method doesn't have these difficulties. It is often called transposition or teletransposition, but that's too much work. Henceforth I'll call it teleportation. It involves making two points in space contiguous . , . somehow. Generally we take advantage of the fact that the universe, as viewed from four or more dimensions, resetnbles a crumpled handkerchief. Light follows the contours of the Handkerchief, so that spaces which are really contiguous in four or more dimensions do not look contiguous when viewed across apparently flat space. If the universe does not in fact resemble a crumpled handkerTchief, maybe we can make it resemble a crumpled Handkerchief. It may be possible to bend the fabric of space by the judicious application of electromagnetic fields, until two points touch. At least we get no embarrassing duplication of passengers. The embarrassment arises if two sets of machines are in operation at once, anywhete in the universe. At best, space will be bent in some tmanticipated way, and nobody will get where he wants to go. At worst, the fabric of space comes apart like a toooften crumpled handkerchief. D evelopment oi Mechanical Teleportation'. Assume we have a teleportation transmitter and receiver. How we got these is a matter for science fiction; but once we have them we can move onto surer ground. We assume that the principle does not involve beaming; it may involve tunnel diode effects or spacebending or something new. So we'vegot two enclosed booths... Why booths? Because of an old principle that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Like a lot of old principles, this one isn't strictly true. Matter is mostly empty space. There is no reason why you can't teleport into a rock there's plenty of room for your atoms and the rock's atoms. Trouble is it'll kill you. Teleporting into a mass of air will kill you too. There are energy factors involved, and also bends, embolisms, etc. Probably there will be an explosion. So you. need booths. Naturally the interior spaces are identical in size and shape. The transmitter booth includes air as well as the passenger cargo. The receiver is evacuated. We teleport the air as well as the passenger andor cargo. If what we have are transceivers, we need not evacuate the receiver. We teleport its air to the transmitter as we teleport the cargo to the receiver. With development, we may be able to do away with the booths. If we expand a spherical force   F jErom Galaxy) to get a vacuum for tSe receiver, we need only a transmitter bootfi. Put tfie passenger in a pressme suit, and we eliminate tfiat bootK; it doesn't matter Eow big a volume gets sent along as long as tEe volume of tEe receiver is bigger. But we'll Eave to start witE bootHs. Now turn to Figure I. BootEs A and B are used for tEe first stages of experiment, to find out if we can teleport reliably. Once tHey are working well, we move to step II: teleportmg instruments from bootfi C to B and (if transceivers) back a gain If conservation of energy Bolds, we expect a rise in temperature from teleporting down tfiat cliff. Bootfi D is built on railroad tracks. We set it moving to determine if conservation of momentum Eolds. Given relativity we migfit as well use bootfi D as receiver only. Tfius we can pad tfie back wall, in case conservation does Bold. Bootfis E and F test for continuous teleportation. Bullets are fired into tfie opening in E at various speeds. WEicfi bullet will reacfi F before it strikes tfie back wall of E? TEis stem could stand redesigning. Obviously we can't pad tEe back wall of E; we'd only teleport tfie padding to F. TEus we destroy a telQ)ort bootfi every time tiie bullet Iffits tfie back wall of B, WEen tEe bullet teleports in time, it zings out of bootfi F and Bits tfie scientist. If tEe scientist ducks, tiie coward, tfie bullet will still destroy bootfi E. We can get better data witfi a long crossbow bolt, by measuring wEat lengtE of tEe bolt gets teleported in time. But we destroy tEe bootfi witfi tfie arrowHead and clonk the scientist with itEe feathered end. I'm sure there's a better way to design this sysfens. Ill P ractice of Mechanical Teleportation: Here my theme becomes complex. I intend to demonstrate that any limitations we assume for our teleportation system are going to imply a Mciety: one society for each set of limitations. Again, I will quote my sources where I can remember them, sometimes. But much of what follows is my own. The assumption: We do not need a transmitter. Our teleport receiver will bring anjdhing to itself, from anywhere. Limitations may exist as to distance or mass of cargo. The result: Thieves capable of stealing anything from anyone in perfect safety. Such machinery was discovered by Seaton, and anyone who Has suchmachinery is Wng of the world. If many men have transmittterless receivers, society falls apart. When society stops making parts for the machines, the machines fall apart, and eveiything starts over. The assumption: No receiver is needed. Our teleport transmit#d ter will place its cargo anywhere. The result: We can put a bomb anywhere. The idea was used at least once, in The Person horn Porlock. In practice, a government that owned one of these would own the world. Two such governments would probably bomb each other back to a pre-teleport level of civilization. Given the two above assumptions, you don't really get a society. You get a short war. Hence most stories assume that teleportation requires a transmitter and a receiver. Let's do the same. Let us further assume that transmitters (transceivers?) look like telephone booths. You walk into a booth, you put a coin in the slot, you dial. You're elsewhere. How do they work? We assume either space-bending or the tunnel diode effect. We assume the operation is relatively cheap: no more than a few quarters in the slot. Finally, a slug in the slot will send the customer straight to police headquarters. The result: All present transportation becomes obsolete: cars and trucks and freeways, ships and train stations. What do we do with a continental net of freeways once the cars and busses have disappeared? You use them for drag races and bicycle riding; you put houses on them or turn them into parks. Or you pack tHem witli cars because th'ere's no place else to put the damn useless cars. Not only freeways and turnpikes, but streets and roads and even sidewalks become obsolete. In business district you keep the sidewalks for window shopping. Elsewhere, pfftt! The mind boggles. Assume the population problem continues in the direction it's going. Then, as Isaac Asimov has suggested, new generations could grow up without seeing the exterior of any building, including their own homes. There might soon be no countryside to see in any case, and precious few exteriors to buildings. Without need for streets or sidewalks, there would be no space between buildings; They would be built wall to wall, or in units a mile cubic. And the people get their exercise by riding bicycles between two open booths arranged like E and F in Figure I. T)ut suppose there are limitations on the booths? For each assumed limitation one gets a different society. Let's take a few examples. The assumption: Booths are expensive to operate. The price for any jump, regardless of distance, is two hundred dollars. (A reasonable restriction. Any spacestressing operation might well cost as much as any other. Ditto for a single tunnel-diode operation.) The result: Cars, motor scooters, busses will remain. Except for emergencies, nobody would use the booth for distances shorter than a transcontinental flight. But airplanes would disappear, except perhaps for cargo flights. Change the price, and you change the result. As price goes down, freight traffic by train and truck dwindles, and then even automobiles begin to go. Raise the price to a few thousand dollars, and only spacecraft disappear. The assumption: The booth's are cheap, a couple of bucks a jump, but limited as todistance. Ten miles, let us say, is the upper limit. The results: A traveler would move in Hops, naturally. But there would come a point where an airplane is cheaper or more convenient, or both, than a succession of teleport booths. Thus, c would go, but airplanes and shipping would remain. Change the limiting distance and, again, you change the society. At a mile a jump only the cars go. At a thousand miles a junjp, only spacecraft remain. The assumption: Teleportation is limited by the Laws of Conservation of Energy and Momentum. The Result: Not very different from above. Cars would go; airplanes would remain. By teleportation we could not travel long distance north and south; we would have to do it on short hops. The longer the hop, the Harder momentum would jerk the passenger sideways each time. Traveling east, our momentum would lift us a few inches from the chair of the receiver booth on each hop. (Yes, I said chair. You might try it standing up, but I wouldn't.) Traveling west would be worse : momentum would slam you down hard. A New Yorker might prefer to reach San Francisco via the western route in a line of booth's crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Notice one important exception. We can travel from the northern hemisphere to the southern in perfect comfort, provided the departure point and destination are at corresponding latitudes. Elevators become more important than ever. In Earth's gravitational field, at ground level, we lose seven degrees Fahrenheit for every mile we teleport upward... and we gain as much going downhill. Elevators are more comfortable. So: you want to go skiing in the Swiss Alps, at St. Moritz. YI # M L Jol lo L JUicf taa. fwtiUitCAr citif Skmnts st mih MvmtiLilheiAoch # fnalntatf Atmiml fiicejAf ift L o B o Vi  u o o BO OD From tlie United States your best bet is to take a plane to someplace witfi a big landing field, ride an elevator Half a mile up  to a teleportation bootS, tKen teleport to St. Moritz. Do it any other way and you wind up sick for a couple of days. And from  New York you can reach Angol,  Chili in one jump. S o much for the booths. They still look like our best attempt at prophecy; but let's try some wilder ideas and see what we get. The assumption: Our teleport discs. You step on a disc, it teleports you to another disc. Cost, pennies per thousand trips. The results: All present transportation disappears. With the proper setup, you can walk anywhere on the planet. Figure II is a design for intercity transportation, but it can easily be adapted for longer distances. TKe blocks shown could be lines of longitude and latitude; their length is optional. For the rectangular city layout shown, we simply walk in the direction we wish to go. The distance between the receiver plate, at the center of the intersection, and the next transmitter disc is about three paces. In three paces one covers a block, whose length, I repeat, is optional. Perhaps there would be faster lanes through the center of town, and faster still between towns: intersections a mile or ten miles apart To get out of the system one walks around the final disc and goes window shopping or whatever. The biggest advantage is that we can give up all the dialing. The assumption: Our transmitter is Hand-sized. We can hang it from our belt It has a telephone-type dial on it. The receiver is bigger: an open platform, either a small plate at Home, in vestibule, or a community receiver the size of a public square. Cost is equivalent to the cost of using a telephone. There are (if necessary) compensators for momentumand heattransfer in the receiver plates. The results Hester's The Stars My Destination, with minor changes. No mazes behind the doors; simply unlisted receiver numbers. S hall we design a few spacecraft? Limited teleportation might not make spacecraft obsolete. It might even be used to improve the spacecraft themselves. The assumptions: Teleportation requires both a transmitter and a receiver. Conservation holds. Teleportation is instantaneous and does not involve beaming. ship consists mainly of a couple of rocket motors, fuel tanks, and an open-ended teleportation receiver open to the rear. You can leave it open because, in vacuum, you don't need to worry about air getting in the receiver. The ship, unmanned, is fired from Earth' orbit or from further out. Probably it should be fired in the direction of the galactic core, where we anticipate more traffic. By firing the ship from, say, Jupiter orbit, we can pack quite a lot of fuel -- water, for reaction mass -- outside the ship. (See Asimov The Martian Way). We use all' the fuel except a reserve for steering. The ship coasts. It passes through a star sytem. Let it be about the size of the solar system; then we have ten hours (assuming our ship is near lightspeed) to shove an entire prefab colony into the Earth-based transmitter. If all ten hours are used, then the colony building materials are strewn across the entire system. Each piece of equipment arrives at rest with respect to Earth and thus leaves the receiver at a speed approaching lightspeed, (Now you know why we put a hole in the receiver.) Last through the receiver are the ships designed to collect all this junk. Since they are manned irodzei motor rochet motor "ieporhm receiver we had better not send them from Earth. Conservation of energy would freeze the pilots to ice in an instant. Consider the irony: to keep them from freezing, we must ship them from Pluto orbit! It might be more efficient to send through the teleport system only a few ships and another prefab teleport receiver. The rest of the colony comes through the second receiver. In any case, notice fom' advantages. You don't have to carry the entire cargo or waste fuel accelerating it. You don't decelerate the ship, so none of your limited fuel supply need be reserved foi; that purpose. The col(mists need not twiddle their thumbs for decades. And tfie ship can be re-used. Can and will. You just let it coast. Every time it comes near a star system, you have another colony. In eighty thousand years we leave a line of colonies clear across the galaxy, before we finally run out of stars. Less peaceful societies would shove war fleets through the teleport system. It is Hard to imagine a safer way to make war. The fleet is strewn all across the system, with all the warships at rest with repect to the universe at large. And How could the target system counterattack? To reach the invading system, they would Have to catch a ship which has had years to accelerate to its tremendous velocity, and which is long gone into interstellar space before the attack can even begin. IV D uring the Boston speech, a member of the audience suggested that teleportation be used to fuel the above craft. Specifically: the motor is a receiver, open, with a flared nozzle attaehed. We drop a transmitter on Jupiter. Presto! Hellishly dense high-pressure gas expands explosively into the vacuiun of space, driving the ship forward. Fuel supply: inefficient compared to ion drives or the like, but almost literally unlimited. It won't work. Rather, it won't work for long. Remember, we have assumed that conservation Holds. The motor's exhaust velocity is the ship's own limiting velocity if we use teleportation to fuel the ship. Jupiter's atmosphere wouldn't expand fast enough' to be useful. Even with a fusion drive, we lose momentum every time a droplet of hydrogen reaches the fuel tank. We Have to get it back by firing the droplet through the rocket motor. When the two balance . i . we can't go any faster. Total conversion of matter to light does give us imlimited velocity. Then we have only the problem of what to do with the incoming fuel. We always have that problem. A droplet of hydrogen moving at a tenth of lightspeed would vaporize any fuel tank we can build today. Maybe in the future... with new materials... plenty of padding... springs... Let's try something else. The assumptions: The distance one can teleport is relatively restricted. The greater the curvature of space -- that is, the greater the proximity to a large mass -- the shorter is the limiting distance. We will assume that on Earth the linaiting distance k two feet; around Mar's orbit, some miles; between stars, a few lightminutes. Attempt to send a mass beyond the limiting distance, and it will emerge from the receiver as a fluid or a fine dust. The curvature of space distorts the relationships between atoms too greatly. Again, we assume the conservation laws hold. The results: Feeble as far as teleportation is concerned. We can teleport fluids, so fuel tanks disappear except for storage tanks and spacecraft. The best we can do for spacecraft is fuel a booster, with a Heavily armored fuel tank, designed to lift spacecraft out of a gravity well at low speed. But we can use the system to build a ship... Oee Figure IV. We'll call this peculiar object the "end-teleport drive," and we'll say that it teleports itself onto its own front end. I invented it many years ago, but I never had the nerve to write a story about it. Notice that if you push the button, the ship teleports onto its own front end; but if you held the button down, it will teleport repeatedly, in a steady stream of images. One jump brings the ship to position # but the moment it begins to occupy position # it wants to be at position #; as that image starts to form, the ship wants to be at position #, et cetera. If teleportation is rapid enougH we can use it for transportation. You refuse to believe in my ship? Then think of it, as an exercise in speculation. Ridiculous as it may seem, we do get results : #) Rate-oftravel of the ship 'is limited only by mechanical difficulties, that is, by the rate of successive teleportation. The end-teleport drive does not effect the ship's kinetic energy. We change only the position. So there is none of this nonsense about relativity. #) We must assume a mechanical limit on rate-oftravel. Otherwise the ship goes off the edge of the universe. #) You can take your finger off the button. Kinetic energy is teleported along with everything else; and as a perfect image you have free will. #) The longer the ship is, the faster it will go, with a given rate-ofteleportation. But; the longer the ship is, the greater is the danger of getting too near a large mass. To land on Earth the ship would have to be less than two feet long. In fact, you can't land it anywhere with the end-teleport drive. As with the inertialess drives in Doc Smith's Lensman series, you keep an intrinsic velocity which reappears when the drive goes off. 'To land the ship anshere you need either inboard auxiliary rockets or rocket tugs. #) What happens if something gets in the way of the ship? Good question. Many things definitely will. Light, for example. A light beam crosses interstellar space. Suddenly, for an instant, the end-teleport ship is occupying that space. The ship's walls can't stop it,for the light never encountered the walls. A human eye can stop it if the light happens to reach that eye in time. Result: everything on the ship is transparent. If we assume that some light will be picked up by the teleportation field and carried along with the ship, then how transparent everything is will depend on two things; the rate of travel ancthe distance of an object from the passenger's eye. His hand is nearly opaque. The further wall is nearly invisible, because so much light is being picked up in the space between wall and eye... and dropped between wall and eye. The cabin in Figure IV is unnecessary unless the ship carries rocket auxiliaries. With the end-teleport drive going, the stars are visible anywhere you look. Tf tlie teleportation field will not transport ligKt, tHe situation becomes more serious. At a useful rate of travel a ligKt beam would Have just time to traverse the diameter of a Human eye before the eye disappears. So a Human eye will still function. But tHe ship and all its contents, including the passenger, are totally invisible, and eacH passenger becomes a disembodied viewpoint falling between tfie stars. Travel even faster, and a ligKt beam may Have time to toucH tHe retina witKout first entering tfie lens of tfie eye. Now everything becomes a blur. On arrival tHe passenger becomes a psycKia- trie patient. #) Interstellar dust would also be picked up en route. Most of it could be Handled by a tougH air-conditioning system; but a certain proportion would appear a.lready inside tfie transitory space occupied by tfie passenger. Definitely fie would need medical attention on arrival. #) Interstellar Hydrogen would be swept up by tHe moving sKip. Aboard an end-teleport drive there would be absolutely no smoking. Drinking, yes... #) As for meteors and larger bodies... we'll use a trick. Let's say we're going toward tHat galactic core, i.e., toward Sagittarius. Okay. Before we leave the system, we take our sfiip to Sun, on the Sagittarius side; and we hover. We Hover by end-teleporting outward as the Sun's gravity draws us in ward. Half an Hour of tins should give us a respectable intrinsic velocity Sunward. Now we take off toward Sagittarius. So we ram sometfiing enroute. It can Happen. But... it takes energy to make two solid masses occupy tfie same space. Cfiances are we cannot teleport into wHat we've rammed. A fuse flows, and tfie motor stops. THat leaves tHe sfiip witH its intrinsic velocity, wfiicH we Have built up Hugely in a direction opposite to tfie direction of travel. So the sfiip backs up at Hundreds of miles per second! Even if we ram a planet, our intrinsic velocity is ffigfier tfian escape velocity, and we're safe. #) Conservation of energy rears its Head once more. THe sKip becomes fiendisfily cold as it leaves tfie solar system, and body temperature drops simultaneously. Tfie reverse occurs as we enter a system. It's a good tfiing we built a Heavy air-conditioning system to get rid of all tHat dust. We'll need it for temperature control. da I' perglst in assunsmg tfiat le conservation laws Bold? Tfiis question caused a series of soapbox speteKes, mostly in my defense along tlie back wall of my Boston audience. TKe assumptions are important, and I'm going to try to justify tbem. #) TKe beKavior of tKe imiverse does not cKange...In all known cases tKe laws of conservation of energy and momentum Hold rigorously. Now we use tfiem for prediction. TKe existence and most of tKe properties of tKe neutrino were predicted by use of tKese and other conservation lawra. Later the neutrino itself was detected through judicious use of its own proposed properties. If today's physicists can use conservation to predict gKost particles, I can use them to predict the beKavior of a teleport system. #) In any case, I'm entitled to make any assumptions I like, If they are internally consistent. This is an exercise in speculation, remember? Speculation starts with assumptions. If you don't like mine, try your own; you might get interesting results. #) A passenger teleporting downhill must lose potential energy. Some equivalent gain in . energy must appear. But why heat? r'H'  Good question, t myself 'gaier-", ally aume that the energy will appear as a jump in electron orbits. Then the electrons drop back, releasing photons. TKe photons are absorbed before they reach the passenger's skin, giving heat. But almost any reasonable process will ultimately end in heat. Heat is the most general, most randomized form of energy. Could the released energy appear as neutrinos? TSat would not give Heat. But it would upset some of tfie obscure parity laws of nuclear pHysics (thus upsetting Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, and thousands of reactionary physicists), and it would make uphill teportation impossible, for the process would Have to destroy neUjtrinos which weren't there in the first place, T Tow about a perpetual-motion machine? See Figure V. The idea is to use open transmitter and receiver booths. TKe cargo, thirty gallons of water, is teleported to the receiver. It immediately pours out into the open transmitter, which teleports it back to the re ceiver, ei cetera. Put a water wheel in the system, and we get power. Obviously there's a flaw. If conservation holds, the water freezes pretty quick. Furthermore, TKermodynaimcs says tfiat energy to run tfie system will be greater tKan ffie maximum energy to be obtained from tfie continuously falling water. Let's replace tfie water witfi a ton of iron filings. Tfiat way we can close tfie wKole ssretem in a vacuum cBamber and stop worrying about atmospfieric friction, water evaporation and freezing of tfie water. We let tfie filings fall under gravity until tfie mass is a black stream, near absolute zero, moving at seven miles per second. Tfiafs nineteen minutes of operation. Now let it go anotfier nineteen minutes. Tfie velocity doubles, and we've let tfie filings fall tfie equivalent of twice tfie distance from infinity to tfie Earth's surface. We could maintain tins acceleration forever, provided we do one thing. We will Have to build our system at tfie Nortfi (or South) Pole. Otlierwise tfie stream of filings will seem to bend away from tfie transmitter door as tfie Eartfi turns. Pole... In tliirty days tfie mass of tfie filings fias doubled. Note tfiat while Eartfi pulls tfie filings, tfie filings pull tfie EardL Minutely, at first. But tfie filings aren't really going anywfiere, so we Gave the equivallent of a reactionless drive. Every montfi tfie tfirust doubles. If we run tfie S#rstem long enougfi tfie filings will weigfi as mucfi as a star. Obviously we don't want ffiat. Tides! But in its present state, turning off tfie system would destroy tfie Eartfi. So we set up a second receiver at tfie Soutfi Pole. Tfie stream of filings goes tearing off tfirougfi tfie Eartfi's atinospfiere, a blue flasfi of iron vapor ramming air. Even tfie gamma rays are going upward! Wfiat a show! Listen to tfiat applause! But all tfie teevee cameras Save melted... Well, this is where I quit. But try a few postulates yourself, and see what you get. iMyht ieteporl: tvfiewet suppofi! tecctycp love me, love my dinosaur ! directors' meeting was over, and the men who really counted at Crosswell's fast fled from Old Man Crosswell's sombre presence and were preparing to jet tiome to various parts of Europe. Milo Priedor said to Hans Gustoffen as they moved down tfie corridor, "Thanks for the support in there, Hans." "It got tricky for a moment, eh? It's not just that we don't need Zadar Smith World to handle our publicity any more," Hans said, "but we got that creep Hicks fixed into the bargain." "I rejoice! Not that I don't admire Hicks, in a way." "Oh, I like the man well enough..." They realized Carshalton Hicks was just behind and talked about the new live synthetic flowers both were growing in their offices. Hicks took the scuttle to London, husbanding his wrath until he was in the presence of his third wife, Suomi, in their Kensington flat. "They're crowding me again, scum like Priedor and Cox and Gustoffsen! They know I'll make managing director in two years and they throw all the dirt they can." Suomi was very black and i :-r ...vry voluptuous. The inside of her .mouth was an attractive pink when she laughed. , "Turn the tables on them, as you have done before, my lovepie!" "Know what they did? They got me to propose we shift our publicity account. They all wanted it! So I did it. Then they left me out on a limb. Then Priedor moved that they accept my suggestion and left it to me to break the news to Saul Betatrom." She had been bom in a kraal. Every item of her husband's manic world fascinated her. "Vino's Saul Betatrom?" "The Zadar Smith' World guy handles all our advertising. I have to find him a parting present to soften the blow." "Is that so hard?" , "What the devil do you give a guy like Betatrom? He already owns everything worth having." Glimpse of pink again. "Give him something not worth havmg. "Just what I want to do, darling -- just so long as it looks .like it was well meant! This is a  ticklish consignment. It has to be something people will think he ' would go for but which he will hate like hell... ' "Leave it to me, love-pie. Your httle Suomi will think of something. Meantime, how do you like my gown?" .# She statte e phapng prpr cess, pressing tlie buttonat her waist. Slowly, the glittering material of her dress began to turn transpajent. Beneath the dress, she wore only one other garment. It also began to turn transparent.  Some days, like today he didn't think so fast So he said "yeah" again to fill the vacuum. That free-fall orgy at Danny's place last night had about finished him. The poisoned voice of Cox asked, "You get my meaning, Saul?" Betatrom fiddled with the dial on his phone, trying to get Cox's face in better focus. "You calling from Crosswell's, Sid?" "Of course I damned ain't," Cox said. "I'll spell it out for you again, Saul. You're all sluiced out with the Crosswell account, but good. Priedor and young Hicks have worked a deal with Gum Inc." "Gum couldn't advertise soap," Saul said, the name of the rival agency rousing him slightly. "Gum just took over the publicity for Lawrence's Life-Forms," Cox reminded him. "Now there's an account that's going to escalate for decades. These new synthetic-life animals they got . ; , " "Look, Sid, to hell with the natural history! Why didn't you speak up for Zadar Smith World at the meeting?" "I was the only one wKo spoke for you, Saul, honest. I told the Old Man I was for you. I jeopardized my position." Saul could see that happening. "So they plan to hand me the golden armchair, eh?" "Actual choice of gift is left to Carshalton Hicks, Saul. It may not be an armchair -- " Saul had switched off. third and blackest Mrs. Hicks -- leaned voluptuously across at Meconin and said, "You must enjoy handing big accounts." Meconin scanned the sentence for double-meanings and said, "We are delighted to handle the Crosswell account." Meconin was; the m' of Gum, the surviving, the triumphal initial; both 'u' and 'G' were back in the smalltime where they belonged, whereas Meconin retired to His lunar estate every month, racing mechanical horses roimd the floodlit craters. He was a white, fusible, neutral-looking man and wore, this evening, a tinkling inertia suit. Hicks said to Meconin's mistress, Merita, "It's really cute, isn't it?" She giggled. "Cute isn't the word!" She didn't attempt to say what was. Hearing that the best way to please Meconin was to delight his mistress, Hicks Had brought her one of the firm's tapeworms in an environment jar. The cestode, anchored in a transparent gut, had had its metabolism speeded up. It went through its life cycle every two minutes, ovoid segments falling from it like snowflakes, dissolving in suitable nutrients into eggs, which changed into embryos as a current wafted them into another section of the jar. The embryos became active crawly creatares, and finally emerged into larval phases. These little bladderworms, suckled in more swishing juices, turned miraculously into small tapeworms, and the whole process began again. Merita could not take Her pretty eyes off it. "It's like an allegory of all life," Meconin said sententiously, patting Merita's hand and then turning back to moist little Mrs. Hicks. "You know, we also operate for Lawrence Life-Forms. There's a revolution in our midst! One of the great success stories of our times. They could probably make a ssmthetic tapeworm that would be even safer in the human gut than Crosswell's are. Why, they are now througS perfecting a miniature tyrannosaurus -- that's a sort of savage little prehistoric dinosaur -- the world's worst mammal ever -- which' we are going to launch in a month's time with paign." "They sound dangerous," Suomi said, looking at him with her mouth prettily open. "They only come knee-high, but they're dangerous right enough. I wouldn't want one." "Well, guess we better get down to business. Mr. Meconin, since your time is valuable," Hicks said. He was too busy worrying about the way Meconin looked at his wife to notice the abstracted way his wife was looking into space. Tt was two days later that Carshalton Hicks jetted over to New York to present Saul Betatrom with Crosswell Tapes' farewell gift to. Zadar Smith World. Suomi stayed home, elegant in her new diamond chastity belt. Hicks wore a mask -- the plague was bad in the poor parts of New York again and, although everything was said to be under control, he wanted to take no risks. A couple of guys wheeled the large crate into Betatroms office. Betatrom was big this morning, dressed for the event, high-boots and larynx-amplifier and everything. He shook Hick's hand with a reinfoiced' grip. The youngest member of the Crosswell board of directors said, without removing his mask, "Mr. Betatrom, although no words can express the dmiration my firm -- and, I may add, myself -- feels for the capable and inspired way in which you, throughout the past decade or more, have promoted -- " "Yeah, well, shag all that, Hicks," Saul said. "What you got in that crate?" "This farewell gift comes from all of us -- in which category I hasten to include myself -- as a small -- " "Yeah, yeah, sure." His voice filled the room. Not that he believed current superstitions that hundred-decibel voices warded off the micro-organisms responsible for the plague, but it never hurt to play safe. He crossed to the crate, grabbed the opener key, and wrenched... ' " -- very small, knee-high token -- of how deeply we all feel..." Hicks had taken the precaution of coming dressed in armored pants. Scaly, ugly as a man in a mask, the tyrannosaur reared up on its hind legs, swished its tail, and jerked forward. Saul Betatrom jetted behind his desk, yelling. Id Man Crosswell was laugHing. Tfie seemingly endless tears poured down his face. Across Eis desk from Him sat CarsHalton Hicks, face wreathed in smilles, at ease. Cox, Priedor, Gustoffen, stood by, puckering their faces into imitations of smirks. "Goddamnit, Betatrom can't complain if the tryannosaur eats Him!" Crosswell wheezed. "It's a real status symbol -- the first t#U'annosaur Life-Forms released, and by the end of the year everyone will want one. So from Zadar's angle his present looks real good -- even if their New York boy loses a limb! Hicks, you done a good job! Thank God someone has a sense of Humor round here." He glared at the contorted faces of Cox and Co. "Well, you boys! Old Saul won't be too too happy to receive this little something from another of Gum's big clients, will he? Specially if it eats him! What you say, Sid?" Cox said, "It's not safe. I don't see it's so funny." Sobering, the Old Man said dangerously, "Better ring him and tell him so, then, like you tell him everything going on Here, eh?" Priedor said hastily, "We all think Hicks did marvellously well, Mr. Crosswell. Betatrom Had gotten to be a menace, and it's good to see his leg pulled -- or maybe even eaten, like you say." Just to infuriate Cox and Priedor, the Old Man got up, put His withered arm around Hick's shoulders, and began to laugh again. And even if it wasn't so damned funny... he'd show His confounded doctor tliat a good laugh now and again never hurt anyone... 'The lackey at tfie front door of Betatrom's Adirondack mansion stood respectfully aside as Betatrom paced through tfie Hall -- well aside. Betatrom wore lead levis. He had his pet on a goadleash which kept it away from His ankles. Tfie animal fiad just been fed with its morning Labrador puppy -- a big Labrador kennel fiad been established on tfie estate just to keep tfie dinosaur in meat. It was docile enough in tfie mornings. "This way, Suomi," Betatrom growled, dragging tfie creature down tfie north drive. Cowed, it did as it was told. Already, tfie truth Had penetrated its peasized brain that Master was nasty when crossed. Master was nasty right now. Crosswell! They were at the root of all Kis troubles! Sure, He'd laughed off this pet easy enough, switched the tables on Hicks, turned the jibe into kudos for himself, got the press boys to phototape Him with the critter on his lap, made himself the swinging fasHion-leader, killed Gum's campaign dead (Gum Had planned mink-collared tyrannos as ladies, adjuncts, and now SauUy Boy Had given them a reeking masculine image straight off!) ... THen Morgan Zadar had shown. Zadar was tKe kingpin of Zadar Smith World, perish His guts. Lean, ascetic... What the Hell ue:gfiary spmjLS A EanlasBc took never tefors avaHaWe, Actoal etep-bs-step rituab at White Sfagio, monial HaeiOf etc., are shown Sn exact detail. Monev rituals, healUi ritnals power rituals, and many, many more.No oOia book can sive you sueb an exemns coneetton o strange occnlt secrets: There Is simply no other book like it. This is not the usual book toll ot history and tales. It. Is devoid entirely to the amazing ritnals Iiidden In supemataral and occult lore. Iieant ot strange materials, .Instmmeito, powders, oils, potions end their lettendiugr uses, ynblisbed #S#S. # sages. # postpaid Bdx#O. Minneapolis, Miihi. SSil# did ascetic mean, anyway? What He said went. "I'll Have to go to tHe funeral, Suomi," Betatrom muttered. "If Morgan says so." He sat down on a bencK, dragged the dinosaur to Him, pulled it up beside Him. Suomi sat there, showing fangs and panting lightly. It was humiliation. Sure, Zadar realized that. But, like Zadar said, they couldn't show How much they Hated Crosswell's guts, or thy would lose face. Old Man Crosswell had died laughing, in His office -- so Betatrom Had to attend tfie funeral on beKalf of Zadar. He'd even Have to sEake tKe Hand of tHe new managing director, and tKe Hand of His scKeming black wife. Saul brigKtened. "(d I'll take you with me to the cremation, Suomi," He said. "You can scare tKe pants off your namesake. Maybe I'll starve you and let you run amok there." But He would never dare do that. He slumped again, lonely in Kis own vast estate. He patted the tyrannosaur's Head, kissed Her scales, slid a Hand round Her muscular neck. "You're the only one wKo loves me," He whispered to Her, A series of straight lines scratched on a stone might be a primitive oxtalley -- or the key to all knowledge. What constitutes a universal language ? I Ke incident tiiat came to be associated witK tHe Cairo stone, as it was later called, stemmed largely from the peculiar fact that its lal ownership wag in dispute from the moment it was discovered. This, in turn, was due to the fact that the expedition wfiicH found this strange object was a joint archeological venture on the part of the Soviet Union and the United States. The name "Cairo stone," of course, is grossly misleading, since tlie piece of smooth black rock in question was actually found in the diggings of an old quarry site some # miles west of Cairo. The joint expedition was, in a way, a byproduct of the cold war. Or at least of the scientific and cultural exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States that were designed to foster a dStenie between the two great powers. But whatever the ultimate origin or the causes leading up to the finding of the stone, the plain fact was that it was fovmd by a team of American and Russian archeologists and that litigation over ownership of the stone began immediately at very high-diplomatic levels between the two countries. The Cairo stone was a genuine archeological bomb shell. First off, there was never any question of its being a hoax, as is so often the case with inexplicable and totally unexpected discoveries of this sort. At the very instant the digger's pick first struck it, there must have been seven or eight American and Soviet scientists within # feet, with a French and Israeli archeologist thrown in to boot. To clinch matters, it was found some thirty feet down from the surface -- thirty feet of digging that had taken place over some three months within the protective cocoon of the expedition's scientists. There was simply no possibility of a hoax, no way any one could Have gotten that stone down there short of Having placed it there some # yearg ago; carbon # dating showed the stone to be at least that old. It had apparently been left, some time around # B.C., at the site of an Egyptian stone quarry camp, the original and rather uni exciting target of the expedition. 'he Cairo stone would initially have aroused no emotions had it not been for the enigmatic character of the markings on its smooth surface. Clearly the markings were meant to record something, to encode some kind of information, be it no more than a talley of some sort -- number of oxen used in a certain period, number of months passed by the overseers or engineers at the site, or what Have you. So far, all right; nothing that would have attracted attention from outside a tight circle of scientists interested in just this sort of thing. But there was more. The markings on the stone, which consisted of nothing more than a number of lines of slanted strokes, had not been made by any of the usual methods characteristic of the third millennium B.C. and known to archeologists. That is, the slanted lines Had not been chipped in by a chisel, dug in with an axiger, or produced by any other sort of craftmanship available to Mediterranean civilizations of tfie year # B.C. They were absolutely uniform in length, width and direction of slant. A photograph to cut away the edges of the stone and thus eliminate the three-dimensional effect, looked exactly like a page of slant lines typed by an electric typewriter -- uniform, evenly spaced, absolutely regular. The second peculiar thing about the Cairo Stone was its composition. It was thought at first that it was simply a natural piece of obsidian, perhaps worn smooth by natural processes, and simply used as a tablet by the person or persons who had written on it. But this proved wrong. The smooth black rock was not obsidian, although it had some of the properties of obsidian, which it resembled in many respects. Inexplicably, however, it defied classification. No geologist was able to pigeon-hole it as such and such a type of rock. Oh, I don't mean there was anything ultimately unknowable about it. Laboratory analysis revealed its chemical make-up easily enough -- mostly silicon. It might very well have been a piece of meteorite. But the uniform texture of it gave the suggestion that it was an artifact, that it Had been manufactored, not just discovered in nature. Certainly its original owner had not just found it lying about, as it were, on the floor of the Egyptian desert, unless it had been a meteorite. But even if a meteorite, there was still the peculiar homogeneity and the remarkably even top surface -- the surface with the slant marks on it -- to be accounted for. All in all, the Cairo stone just did not fit in with what we know of the technology and craftmanship of the Nile valley civilization of the third millennium before Christ. II M y name is Matthew Hamilfon, and I teach mathematical logic at State University. You are wondering how a logician came to be mixed up with a piece of stone covered with some strange and baffling markings. That's easy enough to answer. The head of the American component of the joint expedition that had discovered the Cairo stone is a distinguished archeologist from State University. And in addition to being an archeologist and distinguished, he is tough. Largely due to his stubborn efforts, the stone was brought back, pending the result of the high level Soviet-American negotiations, to State University. It was promptly locked up in the laboratory of the head of the department of geophysics, Isodore Wolfe, who was to conduct the chemical and spectroscopic tests to determine its molecular structure. Now it turns out that Isidore Wolfe is one of my closest friends, all of whicH is by way of explanation of my involvement with the Cairo stone. The stone had been found in March of this year, and now, by midsummer, after some peregrinations to the Smithsonian and elsewhere, had finally been bedded in Isi's laboratory. That had been sometime in April. The events that I am going to tell about began sometime in the middle of July. It had been an excessively hot day, and as I had nothing pressing to do -- I never teach in the summer unless my department-head virtually orders me to do so -- I had spent the morning looking through a very elegant new version of Cohen's proof of the independence of the axiom of choice, sent to me in manuscript version by a colleague at Rice University, and in the afternoon I had worked on a variant of Turing machines that I had been tinkering with the last couple of weeks, a variant in which state symbols are eliminated in favor of print instructions, and change of direction instructions eliminated altogether by means of a circular tape. But it was mostly a half-hearted effort in the shimmering of un-air-conditioned heat of the tiny cubicle that I call my office, and I had not been able to prove the result I had been trying for. Still, it was absorbing work, and the hours somehow slipped by until I was surprised to hear the clock on the old chapel building ring out nine p.m. At just about that tim' I heard a knock at my door, and Isidore Wolfe unceremoniously ushered himself in without waiting for a reply. "Still trying for the big result in effective . computability," he said, picking up and laying down one of the symbol-filled scratch sheets of paper on my desk, "Big result!" I flung back in theorem was the big result of the second half of the century. What do you expect from me? Two strokes of genius in one lifetime?" Actually, my last theorem had been only a modest addition to the theory of effective computability, but the proof was rather intricate and original, and I was inordinately proud of it. I always pretended to Isi that I was the Godel of the second half of the twentieth century. Keep that in mind. It will come up again later, Tsi settled down with a cigar, and I lighted my pipe, and we proceeded thoroughly to pollute the atmosphere of my tiny office. We talked idly to no great purpose, for it was summer and Kot and lazy-like -- but getting bearable now that the sun Kad gone down -- and we both felt relaxed and ready for gossip and light badinage. Isi talked first, about the current in-fighting and jockeying for position in his own department and blasted off steam at a couple of his colleagues with some juicy epithets -- Yiddish and English. I let him go on until he felt better. After a while he turned to his latest efforts to analyze the composition of the Cairo stone -- they had not revealed much beyond the fact that the crystal structure of the material comprising the stone was one the geologists and physicists who were working with it had never run across before, except when produced under artificial laboratory conditions of enormous pressure and temperature. Again, it appeared that the stone was something of an artifact, not a natural piece of rock. But if it took huge pressure chambers and modern ovens to produce that sort of crystalline structure in #, How the devil did it get produced in # B.C.? Neither Isi nor I could offer an adequate hypothesis regarding the origin of the stone, much less of the peculiarly uniform markings on it. We had just turned to the subject of the markings when somebody tapped on the door. It was our mutual friend, Chester Wu, of the Computer Science department. He wedged his way into the office, sat down on the sole remaining chair, and went through an exaggerated imitation of a man choking to death on poison gas. So we left the door open in order to clear out some of the pipe and cigar smoke, and we continued our desultory but nonetheless enjoyable conversation, with Chester joining in. Let me admit right here that Chester, Isi and I make up a strangely assorted trio. I suppose the fact that we are all three unmarried Has something to do with our being close friends. Isi was divorced, and Chester and I had never got beyond the affair stage. At any rate, we spent a good number of our leisure Hours together -- playing chess, listening to chamber music live or canned, cooking upelaborate Italian diimers in one of our apartments, but mostly talking. Our backgroxmds were widely diverse, so much so that we were almost always a source of novelty to one another -- a factor which no doubt contributed to our friendship. I sidore Wolfe was a New Yorker, a Jew, and a product of big city schools -- B.A. from wKat was then City College, PK. D. from Columbia. He was in His early forties, fairly recently divorced, no cKildren. His five-year marriage was a never-ending source of Hilariously funny stories witfi wKicH He kept CHester and me constantly in stitcKes. AltRougH He Had been profoundly incompatible vntfl His wife, I gatiSered' tfiat His marriage Had been a ratfier exciting sort of tKing, in tHe sense ifflat one big five-year-long figHt could Hardly be dull. But He was mucH better off out of it and knew it. In fact, it seemed tHat He was always just realizing How fortunate He was to be free, and enjoying tHe ecstasy of relief, as it were, for tHe first time. CHester Wu was only a youngster, in Es mid-twenties, Having just completed Es PH. D. at tHe California Institute of TecHnology, after a B.A. at U.C.L.A. He was an Assistant Professor in tHe department of Computer Science, and quite possibly ffie most brilliant young faculty member at State University. His parents were botH CEinese Americans, and altHougfi He was fluent in CEnese, He was tHorougKly Americanized and spoke colloquial EnglisH witHout tHe trace of an accent. If you want a good picture of How CHester looked and acted, just think of Jimmy Chan -- Number One Son -- in tHe old CKarUe Cfian moTries. CHester was conscious of tEs resemblance, and it amused Hina no end. He even went so far as to interpolate pseudo-CEinese proverHs into His conversation, proverbs wEcH He claimed to Have learned from His "fatfier," Inspector CHan. He and I sHared a number of interests in common, tHere being no small overlap between matEematical logic and computer science. We were botS interested in recursive function tEeory, information theory, set tHeory (in a dilettantisH way), and artificial intelligence -- not to mention a common interest in riie great S. S. Van Dine mystery stories witH tHat remarkable fictional detective, PElo Vance. As for myself, tfiere is less to say, and nothing at all exotic to relate. I am a typical Wasp, an Associate Professor of PElosopHy at State, and a product of decent undergraduate training in matHematics at Indiana, topped vntH an Ivy League PS.D. in pEIosopHy, most all my work Having been in matEematical logic. I do teacH two fairly esoteric and tecHnical graduate seminars in pElosopry. However, one in pElosopHy of language, tHe otHer in tEe pHilosopHy of science. But so mucH about our backgroimds. CCne thing for sure," Isi said, 'sticking out a dogmatic neck. "There can't be much of importance in any language that you can get by writing down a bunch of slant marks over and over again. That might be a good way for the felahin to count th'eir wives or sheep, but it sure as Kell won't serve for anything more sophisticated." This wasn't entirely true, and Chester and I brought the axe down on Isi. It is a truism of Information Theory that the amount of information transcribed in any form is a function of prior knowledge on the part of the recipient of the information, and not solely of the medium in which the information is transcribed. Thus, if you have previously memorized the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a very simple message from me to you, consisting of a volume and a page number, will quite possibly suffice to convey an enormous amount of information. "And if there aren't any prior conventions agreed upon between sender and receiver," Chester concluded this argument, "then there can't be any message sent. Not that sender and receiver actually have to get together beforehand and agree on the conventions. The receiver can even attempt to deduce the conventions from the message, then retroactively agree to them, reading back into the coded message. But there must be a set of conventions, some set or other, on which the code is based." "And that's what we would be doing if we assumed the marks on the stone were a record, or tally, say, of the number of oxen used on successive months in the stone quarry," I joined in. "Which is probably just the sort of thing that the jerks who wrote on the stone Had in mind," Isi added dourly. The conversation continued in this vein for perhaps Half an hour longer. For some reason, we could not seem to get our minds off the topic of the Cairo stone. In some unexplained way, it seemed to all three of us that there was something unnatural, something terribly incongruous about the stone, and in particular about the fact that it did not fit into any rational explanation that we might try to offer. Fantastic thoughts unspoken by any of us, lurked in the background of our conversation -- thoughts about the evidence for the existence of an intelligence inconunensurate with anything contemporary History knew about the Egypt of five thousand years ago. A lull came over the conversation tq be broken hy Chester. "Good Lord! Do you know that neither Matty not I have ever seen this flipping rock. Here we are beating our gums about something that we have never laid eyes on, but which is only a fiveminute walk from where we are sitting." "Let's go," said Isi, getting up with unexpected vigor. "I Have my lab key with me. You guys can look at it as long as you want, and maybe you'll be able to tell me how the damned thing was made." It was cooler as we stepped out of the office building, and a fresh breeze Had sprung up to make the summer night quite agreeable. It was early yet, no later than ten o'clock, and there was still quite a bit of activity and bustle on the campus, especially student couples walking together slowly, hand in Hand, absorbed and lost in one another. We took our time strolling past the pond, past the student union and between the Chemistry building, identifiable by the,characteristic odors emanating from it, and the theatre building, where some sort of rehearsal was going on. After about five minutes we came to the massive new geophysics tower where Isi Had His office and His laboratory. The building -- it was called tKe Willard Gibbs Geophysical Laboratories -- belonged to the genre of the new architecture -- all glass, no ivy. I like that kind of building for physics laboratories, theatre centers, and bavioral science buildings, but I am oldfashioned enough to prefer the Eiunanities to be lodged in old, High-ceilinged, red brick, ivy-covered buildings. The humanities need a certain mustiness in order to feel comfortable. Isi unlocked the buUding door, and we stepped into the entrance hall where a myriad of glass cases, containing various exhibits of minerals, meteorites, soil samples, etc., were on display along the walls. There was stUl some activity in the building, with lights on in a number of offices and laboratories. Since authorized personnel all Had their own building and laboratory keys, work continued around the clock in this and the other science buildings on the campus. I suppose this is the usual sort of thing everywhere science is done; experiments just don't terminate tHemsejlves at #:# p.m. on week days. Ill W e took the elevator up to the third floor, where Isi's laboratory was located. The building was air-conditioned -- one of the few air-conditioned refuges on our campus -- and felt almost cold by comparison with the air outside. On leaving the elevator we flowed a wide corridor straigHt in front of us, on botH sides of wEicR were doors to laboratories. About midway down tfie corridor we Halted, and Isi started to put Hi key in tHe lock of tfie door to laboratory #, His own private laboratory, tfien sudi denly stopped. We could distinctly Hear voices coming from tHe otfier side of tfie door. Isi turned to us quizzically. His Head cocked expectantly to one side, and His finger on His lips admonisfiing us to remain quiet. We listened motionlessly, our Heads inclined toward tHe door. "I tfiink I fiear a woman and two men," Cfiester wHispered after about two minutes of almost breatfiless silence on our part. I confirmed tfiis by nodding. Clearly one of tfie voices was tfiat of a woman, wfiUe tfie otfiers -- it sounded like two -- were men's voices. One was deep, mellifluous, and resonant; tfie otfier was also a baritone, deeper tfian tfie average, but not pitcfied quite so low as tfie dominant male voice. "Well, damn it, tfiis can't go go on forever," Isi said witfi determination, unlocking tfie door and pusHing it open in one quick motion. Cfiester, Isi, and I all entered tHe laboratory in a concerted movnent and drew up still just inride tiie door. Tfie tfiree'persbns already in tfie room -- two men and a very young woman, as w Had divined from tHe sound of tfieir voices -- stopped 'tfieir conversaticHX abruptly, and stood awkwardly at tfie laboratory bencfi near wfficfi tfiey fiad been standing wfien we entered. A drawer in tfie bencfi was open, and a smootfi black object, about tfie size and rougfily tfie sfiape of a large encyclopedia, was clearly visible in tfie drawer. I knew, almost intuitively, tfiat wfiat tfie intruders fiad been looking at was tfie Cairo stone. iTwo of tfie miexpected guests in tfie laboratory were known to all tfiree of us, and tfie tfiird, ft turned out later, to one of us. One of tfie men, a fieavy-set and very Handsome cBap witfi completely silver Bair, worn long and combed strait back from fiis forefiead, was immediately recognized by all of us as Anton Pokrorekoe, tfie eminit Rusrian antopologist wfio Bad Headed tfie Soviet contingent of tfie joint AmCTican-Russian expedition tfiat fiad turned up tfie Cairo stone. Tfie young lady we also recognized as Rebecca Hale, Iri's laboratory assistant and a Pfi. H. candidate in geoptiysics. Sfie was visibly and painfully embsurassed', Having turned about n degrees wfiiter upon our entrance. Not so Pokrovskoe. (tjt is so good to see you again. Dr. Wolfe," fie said, identifying himself as the resonant bass voice that we had heard from the other side of the door. "Please forgive us if we seem to be intruding, but Miss Hale, who Has? been our so gracious hostess this evening, asured us that you had finished y#ur work in the laboratory for today, and: that we would not be intruding. AH yes, Professor Hamilton, it is good to see you again as well." I nodded my Head in acknowledgment of the greeting -- I Had met Pokrovskoe briefly at a reception in Honor of tKe joint expedition on the occasion of ifie return of tHe American scientists to State University -- and turned to see wKat Isi would say and do. He Had not lost His aplomb in wHat was an obviously embarrassing situation for all of us, but advanced calmly and shook tfie Russian's proffered Hand as if the situation were tHe most natural in all possible worlds. He then introduced CEester to tKe Russian antHropologist,'wfiom He knew by sight but Had never met. Pokrovskoe in turn introduced the other man to us. "Please allow me to present to you Mr. Nicholas Kurlov, attacK to the Russian embassy in Wasfiington. He is an old and good friend of my family, and fie is visiting us before returning sHortly to our country." Pokrovskoe's voice was not only mellifluous, it was oily and insincere as weU. Kurlov shook hands formally with the three of us. Hesitating briefly as Ke was introduced to Chester, as if fie knew him. Chester, who Had spent a post-doctoral year at Dubna, studying and working witfi tfie giant computer recently installed there for tfie Joint Institute for Nuclear ResearcR, mumbled something in Russian to Kurlov that neither Isi nor I understood. It was, to say tfie least, a fantastically awkward situation. But tfie two Russians, overdressed as Russians seem to be to Americans -- incredibly diey both wore dark wool suits, sfiirts and ties in tfie middle of summer -- played out tfie game as if nothing out of tfie way Rad fiappened, wfiile tfie Rapless Miss Hale agomzed speeclilessly without having once moved from tfie spot wfiere we first saw fier upon entering the laBoratory. Wfiat fiad Happened was oHvious, of course. THe two Russians, distinguisfied and exuding prestige, Had overwfielmed tfie impressionable little Rebecca Hale into allowing tfiem to accompany fier to Isi's laboratory. Sfie was autfiorized to be tfiere, to be sure, and fiad building and laboratory keys ifiat allowed Her access at any time. But for a laboratory assistant to allow un- autfiorized personnel access to the department chairman's laboratory, regardless of Kow silverHaired and eminent they might be, was sufficient reason for dismissal. And she knew it. Tfie awkward situation did not I last long, however, for after iBome Samenities and another round of handshakes, European style, the two Russians departed as if nothing irregular Had occurred. Isi took the now trembling Miss Hale aside for a few words, after which she left the laboratory stiffly and white-faced, looking like a zombie. "I chewed her out good and proper," Isi pronounced with menace once the three of us were alone again. "I'll let her stew in her own juices for a couple of days before I tell her that I won't press disciplinary action." Isi talked tough, but at Heart was as gentle as they come. "But damn it all, I don't like this. She told me that they had been here about half an hour. During that time, Pokrovskoe just Happened to remember that he had left his attache case on the seat of the car in whi(fi they had come, and that it contained valuable papers, and that the car was unlocked, and would you, please. Miss Hale, be so very good as to return to the car and lock it. That must have given Pokrovskoe and Kurlov at least ten minutes alone in my lab. By the way, did you smell their breaths? The Vodka vapor they exhaled nearly gave me a jag. Including my faithful Rebecca. That was part of their non-sexual seduction of the poor dumb child." When Isi had finished speaking, we suddenly remembered that our original purpose of coming to the laboratory was to see the Cairo stone. And there it was. Isi picked it out of the drawer and carefully laid it on the laboratory bench, where the light was better. The stone was smooth on ils surface, save for the inscriptions, roughly rectangular in shape but with rounded edges, uniformly black -- the darkest black, I believe, that I have ever seen -- and weighed about four poxmds. The inscriptions on the surface consisted of nine rows of slanted lines of absolutely uniform length, the rows varying However with respect to the number of lines they contained. Two of tiie rows were indented an even space, about Half an inch, almost exactly like the indentation for a paragraph on a printed page. The effect the stone had on me was singular. Knowing it Had been fotmd among other artifadts m an excavation that bore the date # B.C., I could not overcome the impression that it was in some way alien to ever # dhmg that recorded history Has told us. W  "Whaf'S on the bottom side?" Chester asked. "Nothing," , Isi replied. "It's . just like this side, but without the inscriptions. Smooth, except for a little piece we drilled out for analysis. Here, I'll turn it over and show you." T he opposite side of the Cairo stone was not uniformly smooth. Almost so, but not quite; there was a small chip in the bottom right Hand comer of it. Otherwise, the surface was as flat and uniform as the top side. But something was wrong. Isi was visibly perturbed. ".That wasn't there this morning, goddamn it. Not that size. anywn," I?i growled. "We had taken out a little piece, about a cubic inch, in just that spot, for chemical and spectroscopic analysis. But the hole is bigger now, by twice the size. And what has been taken out was not drilled out, but crudely chipped out with what must have been a small geologist's pick. It was Pokrovskoe and Kurlov; I know it. I feel like calling Washington and having those two sneak thieves kicked out of the coimtry." "It wouldn't do any good," I interrupted in what I thought was a soothing voice. "Besides, you can scarcely prove anything. You know that the hole is slightly larger than it was but that's Hmi hardly firm evidence. And don't forget that during the day there are a lot of people working with you in this laboratory, and you occasionally step out for coffee. There is no use flsnng off halfcocked calling people in Washington. Come on, let's get out of here and have a drink." This suggestion met a warm response, and a half an hour later we were settled down with 'martinis in a cool lounge -- one of the three, and the only decent one to be found in the small, almost rural little town where State University is located. The martinis before us constituted a second round -- we had tossed the first one off quickly -- and Isi had cooled off a bit, although he was still pretty hot under the collar about the invasion of his laboratory and the theft of a piece of the stone. Remembering now that Chester had said something to Kurlov in Russian, I asked him what it Had been. "I told him I was glad to see Him again," Chester replied, obviously relishing the fact that he Had some information up his sleeve we did not know about. "Then you have met that damn attache before," Isi exploded in a tone that suggested that more acquaintance with Kurlov on Chester's part implied guilt by association of some sort. t C A ttache, schmattache," Chester returned wryly, with a Wolfe-like imitative shrug of his shoulders. Chester had the Clever habit of picking up Isi's Yiddish interpolations, and this sort of expression -- so utterly incongruous coming from a young Chinese-American -- was ordinarily a source of much hilarity to Isi. But at the moment he was in no mood for laughter. 'What the devil do you mean, Chester?" "I mean that Kurlov is no attach# to the Russian embassy in Washington. I knew him at the Institute at Dubna. He is one of the top-notch Soviet computer scientists. It was he who was in charge of the installation of their big new computer there. And what he is doing in this country, I don't know. Earlier this week a colleague in my department who had just flown back from Dubna told me that he had seen Kurlov there. So he has just freshly arrived in the States, of that we can be sure." "But why did Pokrovskoe lie to us, and introduce Kurlov as an attach#" I mused more to myself than to the others. "Maybe to cover up the fact -- I guess it is a fact -- that he flew over to this country on short notice just to see the Cairo stone," Chester-replied. "But why should a computer expert want to look at an old rock? One thing for sure, we need some more nourishment to figure this thing out." And he held up three fingers to the waiter to indicate another round of martinis. "Pokrovskoe or any other damned amateur could have hacked out that chip from the stone," Isi said as the bartender brought three fresh drinks. "You certainly don't need a computer specialist for a schoolboy trick like that. Well, they have a piece of the stone now, and that's that. They might as well have the whole damn thing, since x-ray analysis indicates the material in the stone is homogeneous. If you know what a piece of it is made of and how it was made, you know about the stone." "All there is," Chester echoed. And I could see that there was something troubling him -- something that was perhaps buried below the surface of his mind. Later we were to learn that what was at the back of Chester's mind at that moment would turn out to be the solution to the enigma of the Cairo stone, IV A week later found the explanation of the anomalies concerning the Cairo stone little advanced. Isi and his associates were continuing their analyses, but with little evident progress. The mystery of the nature of the stone liad even grown more complex, if an # rthing; for chemical analysis had shown that it had some rather remarkable properties not hitherto suspected. Among them was the stone's ability to withstand the corrosive effects of the most powerful acids known to contemporary science. It was as if the stone had actually been designed to last for untold centuries -- forever, even -- once it was abandoned to the state of nature. Isi estimated that it was well-nigh indestructible and could endure the eroding effects of the elements not merely for hundreds and years -- or at least as long as the earth endured. Proof of design? The evidence was becoming more compelling with every passing day. As a special precaution against a repetition of the intrusion by Kurlov and Pokrovskoe, a special lock had been installed on the door of Isi's laboratory and a pair of night watchmen armed with revolvers had been assigned in shifts to remain in the laboratory from the time it was locked up in the late afternoon until Isi arrived to begin work early the next morning. As I said, an imeventful week had slipped by, and another hot July evening found Chester, Isi and myself assembled in Chester s office in the Computer Science building. This, like the geophysics building, was one of the new structures on the compus; and housing the Control Data # as it did, it had to be airconditioned. Human beings and faculty members can endure the sweltering summer without comfort at public universities, but not expensive giant computers. We were quite comfortable, relaxed and generally in an expansive mood after a satisfying dinner at Mario's, a new ItaHan restaurant that had opened off of the main highway to the capital, not too far from the campus. Moreover, we were enjoying the pleasant anticipation of a rather important occasion; we were among those invited to a cocktail party at nine o'clock at the Faculty Club in honor of the people connected with the joint expedition that had imearthed the Cairo stone. The earlier affair, where I had originally met Pokrovskoe, had been a drab little thing of sherry, cheese and crackers, organized by the anthropology department. But this would be the big one. The host woxild be Dean Ortcutt of the College of Arts and Sciences. Pokrovskoe would be there, of course, as one of the honorees, and most surely protocol would include his guest Kurlov among the invited. It was only eigHtthirty, so we had half an hour or so to kill before starting over to the Faculty Club where the affair was to be held. We had finished swapping opinions on the character of the two Russians -- negative for Pokrovskoe and positive for Kurlov -- and the conversation Had trailed off. It was at this point that I blurted out what had; been on all our minds, unspoken and perhaps just below the conscious threshold for the last week. with ourselves and say aloud what we Have all been more or less thinking. That damned piece of black rock is the product of EigH technology, of an intelligence or civilization that could not have existed at the time the forefathers of the iellahin were quarrying granite in the desert outside of Cairo." I looked to Isi for confirmation, for I knew intuitively that he felt as I did. "That's right, more than right," he nodded. "The stone is definitely an artifact, and I'm not referring just to those crazy marks on it. I mean the substance of the stone itself. It is definitely not a mineral made in some kind of Idln, imder fantastic conditions of Heat and pressure. It resists the action of the most powerful acids and solvents that we can apply to it. And here's the clincher. I am beginning to doubt whether we have the technology, as of July #, to synthesize that sort of material ourselves." "But further analysis of the stone might reveal something about the technology responsible for producing it, don't you think, Isi?" Chester asked. "Yes, most certainly. And that is what disturbs me about the Russians getting Hold of a piece of the stone," Isi replied. "It's beginning to appear that this presumably inoffensive archeological discovery could Have locked into it information concerning a kind of technology advanced far beyond our own. Slowly but surely laboratory analysis will unseal that information. And the impact on science as we know it could be enormous." "Information," Chester murmured almost to himself. "It's the information." Something was still bothering Chester -- that idea that had occurred to him at the lounge Had apparently not stopped gnawing at the back of His mind. But he volunteered nothing further, and we let the subject of the Cairo stone lapse. After a few minutes devoted to the pennant hopes of the Red Sox -- dismal, we concluded -- we noticed that it was after nine o'clock and left Chester's office for the Faculty Club. It was only a seven-minute walk from the Computer Science Center, so we scarcely had time to get rumpled in the heat before entering the sanctuary of air-conditioning again. Incidentally, in case it sounds from what I have been sa # dng as if State University is comfortable in the summer, let me assure you that I have exhausted the inventory of air-conditioned buildings on the campus. Tverybody who was anybody was at the reception, or cocktail party, or whatever you want to call it -- the President of the University in all his dignity, the Provost, various Deans, Department Heads, distinguished Egyptologists, anthropo I o g i s t s and what have you, both from State and from other institutions, some of them sufficiently far away to involve an over-night stopover. Big time! It was a real bash, all right. The spirits were flowing from a well-stocked bar behind which three barmen -- actually they were graduate students in white jackets, picking up a little cash -- were industriously popping corks, shaking mixers, and pouring very professional looking libations. There were several tables laden with horsd'oeuvres, including caviar -- but only domestic -- in honor, no doubt, of Pokrovskoe and the other Soviet members of the Cairo stone expedition. Indeed, we immediately spotted the Russian scientist, glass in hand and his colleague Kurlov at his side, before the largest of the tables of food. There were three other men with him, quite Slavic looking, younger than either Pokrovskoe or Kurlov, and obviously not academic types. One of them Had a small but noticeable scar over his left eye. We had seen none of them before, and, knowing the Soviet members of the expedition at least by sight, we were able to exclude that explanation for their presence. Although I hate to say it -- it sounds so "gothically" melodramatic -- there appeared to be something sinister about those three unsmiling and strange faces. But our attention was soon enough diverted from them, as Dean Ortcutt made his way through the throng and welcomed Isi, wHo had twisted the good Dean's arm to get invitations for Chester and myself to the reception. Isi, as prestigious head of one of the most important departments at the University, was part of its power structure, to use the current jargon of the civil rights movement. Chester and I, although respected for our scholarship, definitely were not. 'he Dean steered us over to the bar, where Isi and I settled for our usual martinis, and Chester experimented with a stinger. While Isi and Ortcutt immersed themselves in a discussion of campus politics -- most of which, incidentally, is carried on at informal meetings of this sort -- Chester and I wormed our way through the press of bodies and elbows to the table of horsd'oeuvres where, upon entering, we had seen Pokrovskoe. He was still there, with Kurlov and the three unsavory looking ones. They were all speaking Russian, which confirmed our assumption that the three newcomers were countrymen of the two Soviet scientists. Chester and I helped ourselves to the tempting canapes. It was Kurlov, and not Pokrovskoe, who noticed us first. "My good Professor Wu," he said with genuine warmth, "it is my good fortune to see you again. I have cordial greetings for you in recent letters from my colleagues of the Institute at Dubna. They remember well, and with pleasure, your sabbatical year with us." It was obvious that he was no longer trying to pass himself off as an embassy attache. It would have been useless, anyway since Chester recognized him. Pokrovskoe now turned to us and greeted us with elaborate cordiality, but not with evident sincerity with which Kurlov Had met Chester. After the usual amenities, during which he did not introduce us to his three identical looking comrades -- they hovered awkwardly in the background, just a few steps away from their coxmtrymen -- Pokrovskoe turned to the subject of the Cairo stone. There is real chutzpah, I thought to myself; he should show some scintilla of embarrassment regarding that subject, in view of having been caught red-handed in the middle of the crime in Isi's laboratory a week ago. "And Dr. Wolfe's analyses, they are progressing well? He has been able to classify our strange little, ah, mineral deposit from the quarry of Egypt?" I t was obvious that Pokrovskoe was pretending to know nothing of the composition of the stone, so I uttered something noncommittal and turned the subject to another topic, a comparison of July weather here and in Moscow, I believe. But while conversing with Pokrovskoe in this trivial vein, I kept my ears open to the more animated conversation at my side between Kurlov and Chester. Kurlov was asking Chester what he thought the origin of the stone might be. But he wasn't pumping Chester, as Pokrovskoe had tried to do with me. In fact, he was revealing to Chester a considerable knowledge of the stone's composition. The laboratones at Dubna must have been woridng on tweity-four-Kour shifts during the last week to have provided him with as much information as he Had. He was aware of the stone's anti-corrosive properties, and of its ability to witiistand extremes of temperature. He spoke eagerly, openly and frankly and attempted to conceal nothing. Clearly the scientist had come to the ascendancy in Kurlov's personality, and the conspirator had receded to the backgroimd. Moreover, his previous acquaintance with the affable and boyish Chester was obviously a factor in unlocking his tongue. Pokrovskoe, who spoke English well enough but obviously thought in Russian, was not able to follow the adjacent conversation as I was. Besides,, I was talldng all the louder, faster, and slangier to keep him preoccupied. "Yes, yes, yes, the slant line markings," I overheard Kurlov say excitedly. "What do you make of them. Professor Wu? They intrigue me, you know. For some reason, I cannot now tell you why, I cannot regard them as trivial in the way Professor Wolfe has suggested. There is a certain regularity about them -- although I have only seoi them the one time in the Professor's laboratory that evening that we so rudely imposed on the kindness of Miss Hale -- a certain regularity that suggests they represent something more than just a talley of oxen. Now tell me, my friend, what do you think?" Chester replied that He had been studying a photograph of the stone in his office that very morning in an effort to deduce something from the nature of the markings, but that nothing had suggested itself. "And the message, whatever it is that is encoded by the slanted lines," he concluded, "can't be too consequential. There is just not enough there to say anything significant. At least, that is the most obvious conclusion to draw. Unless..." Here He trailed off, looking vacuously at the bottom of his now empty glass. Again I Had the tincanny feeling -- call it a premonition if you will -- that Chester was on the verge of an important insight into the nature of the Cairo stone. But abruptly He and Kurlov broke away from us at this point to wander over to the bar to refill their glasses. As they were leaving, I heard Kurlov ask Chester if He might look at the photograph of the markings that Chester kept in his office. I took the opportunity offered by a lull in my conversation with Pokrovskoe to excuse myself and went off in search of Isi. V T found him at one of the smaller canape tables, spearing tempting pink shrimp from an iced bowl with a tooth-pick. I told him of my conversation with Pokrovskoe and sketched out the one I had heard between Chester and Kurlov. When I repeated what Chester had said about having looked at a photograph of the markings earlier in the day, a look of concern passed over Isi's face. "Matty, did Chester tell Kurlov where he kept the photograph?" "He just said that he had been looking at it in his office," I replied. "And Kurlov asked to see it some time." "Goddamn it, that's not good. Do you know, Matty, that no photographs were taken of the stone before I got it into my laboratory, and that I didn't allow any to be taken after that time?" By some extraordinary oversight, the Soviets had not obtained photographs of the stone before it got out of their hands. Not so extraordinary, I guess, if you reflect that the expedition at the quarry site had no need for camera equipment, and that the stone was flown by military jet directly from Egypt to the United States. "And if Kurlov wants to see that photograph, that means either they overlooked taking shots of it when they got into your laboratory, or else we interrupted them Just as they were about to do so," I said. "Probably the latter. They could have got rid of Rebecca Hale again under some pretext or other, in order to take pictures." "Yes," Isi replied, now quite excited. "And Kurlov has by this time told Pokrovskoe about the photo in Chester's office. There they are together at the big canap# table, and Pokrovskoe looks as if he were going to take off into orbit. Let's get out of here, Matty." We bulled our way through the swarm of people standing around talking and drinking and made our way to the door of the room. On the way I caught sight of Chester, made a brief broken field detour, in which I caused quite a number of glasses to slosh over, and plucked him away by the arm from a flirtatious conversation he was enjoying with somebody's young wife, to rejoin Isi just as he was opening the door leading out of the reception hall. The foyer outside was unencumbered of people, and we burst out from it into the starlit summer night with a common feeling of impending climax. Sharing a sense of urgency that we knew intuitively there was no need to communicate to one another, we broke into a trot across the campus. The Computer Science Center, located on sloping ground slightly higher than that of the Faculty Club, was clearly visible to us, lights still glittering from a half dozen office windows, as we raced past the pond, the administration building, and the student union. It must have taken us only about three minutes from the time we left the Faculty Club to reach Chester's office. We burst into it, Chester leading the way. He literally flung himself at the file cabinet next to the window, jerked open the second drawer from the top, rummaged furiously for a moment, spun around triumphantly with the photograph of the Cairo stone in his hand. CtT)aby, you are going to go home tonight with Papa Wu's number three son," he chuckled. And with that we settled down in chairs to catch our breath and collect our wits after our little sprint across the campus. We were winded in direct proportion to our ages: Isi was virtually knocked out, I was huffing and puffing moderately -- but not too moderately -- and Chester seemed scarcely affected by the exertion. Isi produced three of the strong, black Brazilian cigars -- Rigolettos, they are called -- that he was fond of, and we lit up in contentment and selfsatisfaction. We had learned something at the reception, something that might turn out to be quite significant. The Soviets had a piece of the Cairo stone all right, and we knew from Chester's conversation with Kurlov that they were progressing along the same lines that Isi had followed in his laboratory analysis of the composition of the stone. But through negligence on their part, and some extraordinary good luck on ours, they had failed to photograph, and presumably to record in any way, the curious markings on the stone. What was more important, Kurlov was now interested -- more than interested, I should say -- in thse slanted lines. It was beginning to dawn on us that Kurlov's interest in the inscriptions, as opposed to the substance of the stone itself,, might have tremendous significance. "But why should Kurlov be interested in a few unexplained scratches on that damned crazy rock?" Isi inquired plaintively. "Right," I joined in. "After all, he's a computer scientist, not an archeologist. His bag -- "I sometimes like to pretend that student slang comes naturally to me. " -- is information theory, automation theory, machine theory, the same sort of thing Chester here does. Same kind of interests, right?" "Yeh, that's for sure," Chester replied. "He has no interest in archeology or anthropology, I know from my year at Dubna. He's a pure theoretician, through and through. About the most practical thing he can do is play chess." "Well, let's be logical about this," I said. "If he is primarily interested, not in the chemical analysis of the stone, but in those cryptic little lines, then Ke is interested in them from the point of view of the computer scientist and information theorist, right?" "Agreed," Isi joined in. "But that in turn implies that he does not regard them as oxen-counting notches -- that he in some way thinks they encode information, a message if you will, of much greater significance. Yet frankly, that seems impossible to me. If the lines varied in shape or size, they might be construed as an alphabet. But as it is, they represent nothing more than numbers of notches. Surely it's more logical to think of them as tallys for... , # #XJumbers," Chester said dreamily. He was looking towards the ceiling in complete abstraction, immersed in his own thoughts, the half-smoked cigar that Isi had given him clenched between his teeth. TKe expreson in his eyes was tiSat same perplexed but on-the-verge-of-under-. standing look that I had seen! twice before when Chester had been thinking about the strange inscriptions on the stone. "Yes, numbers," Isi replied a little irritably. "And just plain old fashioned numbers can't tell you anything." "Numbers can't tell you anything?" Chester echoed absently again. "Oh, for God's sake, Chester, please come back to earth." Isi sighed wearily but nonetheless affectionately to the now incredibly youthful looking Chester. And Chester did come back to life. From one moment to the next, he was completely transformed. Now, his eyes flashing, he looked squarely at us. "That's it," he said excitedly. "That's why they brought Kurlov the computer and information expert over from Dubna. He suspected what I know now must be the case. Where's the flipping ash tray?" Chester was so excited now that he was scarcely able to contain his energy. I pushed an ash tray under his nose, and he managed to miss it by six inches as he knocked the big flake off of his cigar. But he was much too elated now to be concerned with ashes on his desk. "Chester, what are you trying to say?" I asked as calmly as possible, although I too felt a thrill of excitement now, a sense of imminent and unexpected revelation. "Just," this," Chester expostulated. "Those slant lines on the Cairo stone represent numbers, all right, but they aren't just ordinary numbers. They are Godel numbers." Concerned as I am in mathematical logic with recursive functions, I got the point immediately. And I guess Isi did too, or at least he grasped the general and enormous significance of what Chester had just said, for he asked for no further explanation. Mouths agape, I suppose, we just sat there in silence. And while we were sitting there, saying nothing, the little plastic cylinder rolled underneath the door. I suppose if a disinterested observer had been there to see us, he could have likened our reactions to something like those in a Three Stooges comedy short.  For we all three did something of a classic double take, looking first dumbly for about five seconds at the fountain-pen-length cylinder, then looking away from it at one another, then doing the double take. I had just started out of my chair when it burst, with a dull plop, to release its potent gas into the room. The effect was instantaneous. The three of us slumped towards the floor, all muscular control knocked out completely. Yet unconsciousness did not follow immediately. For about ten seconds I lay on the floor of Chester's office, knowing that I was blacking out, yet nonetheless capable of registering all that was happening during that time. And ten seconds was long enough to learn who had rolled the cylinder under the door and what they wanted; after about three of those seconds, the door of Chester's office opened, and three men, with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses, walked very composedly into the office, glanced about briefly until one of them saw the photograph on Chester's desk, picked it up and then left just as quietly, just as matter of factly as they had entered, softly closing the door behind them. As one of them stooped to pick up the plastic cylinder that had contained the gas, I noticed a small scar over his left eye. Then ever#rthing dissolved in front of me, and I lost consciousness. VI O ther than leaving us with a gigantic hangover, the knockout gas had no toxic effects, and we were all back to normal by the afternoon of the following day. For the second time we decided that accusation of the Russians I to tfie autfiorities would gain nothing. Now tKey had everything that we Had, and there was no getting it back, short of a return raid on tfidr establishment. OH, we discussed that, to be sure; but we gave it up as hopelessly unrealistic. We were amateurs in this espionage business, and they were pros. It wouldn't help matters tnucfi getting ourselves killed in some Heroic but futile attempt to get back the photograph. And what if we did? Surely they would have made any number of xerox or pHotostatic copies of it by this time, some of them probably on their way to the sanctuary of their embassy in Washington. Besides, we had more important things to do. The first of these was to confirm or unconfimt Chester's conjecture that the inscriptions on the Cairo stone represented a Godel number. I suppose most people have at least Heard about Kurt Godel's astounding theorem, first published in #, concerning the incompleteness of arithmetic. The theorem tells us, to put it briefly, that any axiomatization of ele mentary arithmetic must be incomplete in the sense that there will always be certain sentences of arithmetic -- the famous Godel sentences -- which are true, but not provable from the axioms. If that doesn't make sense to you, think of it this way. It is as if in ordinasK plane geometry you could show that it was true that the angles of a triangle, say, always added up to # degrees, but you could also prove that you could not prove that fact. Anyway, the .trick that Godel used to prove fiis theorem consisted in reflecting sentences about arithmetic -- sentences in a so-called metalanguage talking about the object language, arithmetic -- into arithmetic itself. Thus Godel diowed that there is a sentence of arithmetic to corresijond to every sentence about arithmetic such tiiat if the one is true, the other is too. Now take the following metalanguage sentence about arithmetic: "The arithmetic sentence corresponding to this sentence is unprovable." Such a sentence asserts the unprovability of an ordinary formula of elementary arithmetic, which happens to be true if and only if it is not provable. Tow the' trick Godel Used to  mirror metalanguage statements into arithmetic itself hinged on the mechanism that has subsequently come to be called Godel numbering, if works this way. Suppose you assigned the. numbers I through #, say, to the # letters of the English alphabet, th# comma, the period, and the blank space. The letter A corresponds to #, B to #, etc., on down to #S for Z, # for the comma, # for the period and # for the blank space separating words in a printed text. Now take any message in English that you want to "Godelize" -- i.e., to wHicli you want to assign a Godel number. What you do is write the message -- supposed it is k units in length -- as exponents, according to the pairing of letters and punctuation signs with numbers just given, on the product of the first k primes, written as follows: # .#.#... Pk, where Pk stands for the kth prime. Take an example, Hie word "cab." Since C is the third letter of the alphabet, A the first and B the second, they correspond respectively to #, '#' and # in tiSe pairing of numerals with letters of the alphabet. Now write these riiree numerals as exponents on the product of the three primes, and you get # ##, which is equal to #. Thus the word "cab" has assigned to if the Godel number #. And there is an absolutely unique decomposition of # back into a product of primes -- this is a fundamental fact of mathematics. The upshot of all of this is that you can test any number in the whole infinite domain of numbers, and if it is a Godel number, it will "decompose" -- i.e., be factorable -- into a product of successive primes with; exponent which can carry coded information. This was Chester's insight concerning the Cairo stone. He saw that if the slant lines could be construed as representing some gigantic number, and that number was a Godel number, then with a suitable program we could get the Computer Center's C.D. # to factor out the primes, in which case the exponents on the primes would be the coded message. And if the Godel number was sufficient to contain an enormously complex and detailed message. Of course, we couldn't expect the exponent numbers to correspond to the English alphabet, or to any alphabet, for that matter, in any such simple way as in my example; but once we had them, we could safely assume that they were the product of an intelligence at least equal to ours, and that ffiey could be decoded in some fashion into a coherent message. D eciphering the slanted lines into a Godel number proved to be easier than I had anticipated. As I mentioned earlier, there were nine rows of lines, none of the rows containing the same number of lines, and three of them indented about Half an inch. We assumed -- it turned out correctly -- i that the stone was in its proper position with the evenly aligned (save for the indentions) side on the left. In this position, ,.we libticed. at the 'bottom row lines, the shortest one, contained twelve numbers. This was significant. It strongly suggested a number system with the base twelve. It would not be unlikely for beings of superior intelligence to choose such a base for their ftumber system, as in many ways it is handier than the decimal system. And recall that the Babylonians used a number system with base twelve. Reading from top to bottom, the next three rows contained #, # and # lines. The fifth row from the bottom, which contained # lines, was indented. The next two rows, still reading from the bottom to the top, contained # and # lines respectively, while the eighth row, which contained # lines, was al indented. The ninth, or top row, contained # lines. After several false starts, with the computer rejecting our tape in-f put as not a Godel number, we -- actually mostly Chester and msrself, Isi not being strong on this sort of thing -- decided the munber on the Cairo stone could be construed as just the sum of ithree huge numbers as follows: # # # # #I  #f # # # It was this fantastically huge number that Chesterfed into the C.D. ' # . I doubt if I all ever for IM # . # ' # : # ' # -' .get the 'thrill of .eXcittoerit,.Vthe shiver of impending revelation that I felt as the machine started typing out the result. For that huge number dc? factor out into a product of the primes to various powers. It was a Godel number, and the exponents were our message. T shall not laboriously detail the final decoding of the exponents into the message they contained. You know, as well as I, that for years various projects Have appeared in print for language designed to. communicate with other forms of intelligent life in our imiverse. Ever since the development of radio-astronomy in the late fortie, the prospect of communication with other beings, perhaps of intelligence vastly superior to our own. Has been a very real possibility. So, in the final decoding of the message contained on the Cairo stone, we had by no means to start from scratch; much obtHe fundamental research had been done already. Need I mention Dr. Hans Freud., anthal's monumental Lincos: Design oi a Language ior Cosmic Intercourse? The main breakthrough consisted in discovering that the lines represented a number and that that number was a' Godel number, capable ,of containing enormous amots of informon. This much alone .-assured us that the authors of the message on the Cairo stone were beings of an intelligence at least equal to our own. And once this assumption was made, we could assume that they would communi to us in that universal language that all intelligent beings must possess, the language of mathematics. This turned out to be the case. The first series of exponents that the computer fed out were all two-digit numbers, eventually broken by a single digit serving, we discovered, as a period. WHat would be more logical than to assume that these numbers represented Cartesion coordinates -- the first for the x-axis, the second for the y-axis? Logical, but not quite right, it turned out. The resulting graph made no sense. But eventually it occurred to us that the convention of writing the xcoordinate first and the y-coordinate second was just that, a pure and arbitrary convention. So we tried another graph, this time reversing the order of the coordinates. And this time we got something -- a squiggly line with a single point underneath it. Again, I am condensing literally hundreds of hours of work into the briefest of comments. But at any rate, some time late in an August night, after endless cups of black coffee and even blacker cigars -- Isi swore that his Rigolettos contained nourishment, for the spirit if not the flesh -- the squiggly line and point fell into place in our minds. The line was the Mediterranean coast of Egsnpt -- a portion of it -- and the point represented, on this crude sort of map, the location of the quarry pit where the Cairo stone Had been deposited, relative to the coast line. The next series of exponents were also two digit numbers, finally terminated, as before, by a single digit (the same one as before) serving as a stop, or period. This time the graph was a closed line, again with a single dot -- now inside the closed figure. An island with a specific location marked on it! We ransacked the library of every atlas that it contained, poring Ilirough them for the better part of a week, imtil we found a remote and uninhabited little atoll in the Pacific of exactly the shape of our graph. W hat happened subsequently to the decoding of the Cairo stone was a fascinating lesson in the exercise of power. Isi Had a conference with Dean Ortcutt on the morning following our discovery in the atlas of the atoll corresponding to the graph jdelded up by the Cairo stone. Dean Ortcutt was in the Provost's office within minutes of Isi's visit, and within seconds all three were in the office of the President of State University. From that point on the long distance wires to Washington crackled almost incessantly until the State Department, the Pentagon and finally the President of the United States were all aware of the possible staggering importance of the decoding of the slant lines. Red tape was cut as red tape can only be cut from the top-most reaches of power. Although ordinarily the detailed arrangements for archeological expeditions take months, even years to complete, we found that virtually within hours of Isi's conference with Ortcutt a massive expedition to the atoll was underway. Nominally Lt. General Foster L. McCall -- chief of research and development for the Air Force -- was in command ofthe expedition; but the de iacto head of operations turned out actually to be our own Isidore Wolfe. Almost miraculously, Chester and I found papers on our desks authorizing sabbatical leave with full pay for the following academic year. Usually this sort of thing requires a painstakexchanging of forms lasting montlis. And while all of this was going on, Chester, Isi and I finished decoding the remainder of the message of the Cairo stone. The rest of the translation of the slant lines amounted to what was basically a. dictionary. It worked like this. A series of number pairs when plotted on graph paper would yield a rough outline of an object. Think of those children's puzzles where you connect points 'in a certain order to get an outline picture. Following would be another series of number pairs which, when plotted, would yield a short series of totally unfamiliar marks. The two together constituted a translation of the name of the object into the language of the beings of tha Cairo stone. The first picture was that of a camel, the second that of a jackal. Subsequent pictures as plotted from the numbers the computer cranked out showed the camel running -- followed by a series of marks including those originally correlated with those of the camel in a stationary position. So now we had a form of the verb "to run" And the same thing with the jackal sitting. And so on and on. Within a week we had a fat notebook constituting a reasonably good dictionary of the language of the authors of the Cairo stone. A week was none too soon to finish decoding the stone, for within that time the expedition was completely organized. No expense, no effort is spared when the vital interests of a world power are at stake. Marine and Air Force noncoms appeared from nowKere to whisk our baggage into government cars. Waiting in the cars were high-ranking Air Force and Marine Corps officers. At the military air field where we were delivered, other officers took us in charge, fed us and wined us with amazing efficiency and speed, and got us aboard the giant Lockheed C-#A that was airlifting our expedition to the Pacific. All this without an error, and without even the appearance of haste. Isi and I found all of this exhilarating, although' Chester, who was troubled with a persistent cough, appeared to be tired of it. 'he flight to the atoll of the stone was without incident. We set down once to refuel at Pearl Harbor, then took off into the clear cloudless skies of the Western Pacific for the final leg of our journey. Isi, Chester and I were still working on the dictionary, clearing up minor questions of tense, gender, etc., so the time went by swiftly enough for us. Within a matter of hours we could feel the great transport losing altitude. Looking out the window over the giant wing, we could see the atoll below us, bare save for coconut palms and an airstrip with an adjoining little cluster of tents that a battallion of Sea Bees had started preparing for us the day that the expedition had been definitely decided on in Washington. Once we had touched down, we were taken with our baggage by jeep to our tents, where we settled ourselves, rested and discussed our plans for the exploration of the atoll. The next morning, after a hot breakfast with the ever resourceful Sea Bees, we met with General McCall and his staff in one of the tents that had been prepared as a sort of staff room, in which there were several tables covered with endless maps and detailed aerial pictures of the atoll, all prepared within the last week. The aerial surveys, it turned out, had disclosed a square-shaped depression, about a hundred yards on the side, almost exactly in the center of the atoll. Depressions can be explained by natural causes, but not square-shaped ones. We knew where to dig. The bulldozers were already on site when we arrived by jeep, but Isi thought it would be a wiser strategy to start the excavation with pick and shovel to avoid the danger of destroying an # rthing that might be fragile. This procedure was followed, but nothing turned up that way the first day. The second day he sent the bulldozers in. For two days the monster blades bit and gouged at the soft sandy earth, and at noon of the second day we found what we were looking for. It was the tip of a gigantic cone made of the same black obsidian-like material that we had first encountered in the Cairo stone. We were literally frantic with excitement, of course. But it took another hard week of excavating by the whole battallion of Sea Bees before the entire cone had been laid bare, and wooden bulwarks had been erected to keep the sides of what was now a gigantic pit from caving in. But it was well worth the wait. For the cone, which was squat and the size of a large house, turned out to be hollow inside. And at its base was a small oval shaped hole, just large enough to allow a man to crawl through. Once we had scraped out the earth that had fallen into the hole. General McCall, Isi, and I entered the cone. Chester was not with us. He had been ill that morning, his cough having become more severe, and had stayed on his cot in our tent. I said that what we found was well worth the agonizing delay. It was. For arranged on strangely convoluted tables, or benches, of the black substance, and in vast racks built into the circular walls of the cone, were thousands upon thousands of black tablets, identical in appearance to the Cairo stone. All of them were filled with the same kind of slant lines that we had first seen that night -- it seemed ages ago -- in Isi's laboratory. We had found the library of the beings of the Cairo stone. W ork in removing the tablets from the cone to our Lockheed transport progressed rapidly, but under the cloud now of an impending tragedy. For Chester was seriously ill. He was coughing spasmodically now, and was alternately hot and terribly chilled. As far as Isi and I were concerned, the great joy of having found the accumulated wisdom of a superior race of beings was overshadowed by what appeared to be the approaching death of our closest friend. As soon as our transport plane had got us back to the states, we chartered a small private plane and took Chester directly to Boston and the Massachusetts General Hospital. After a brief exploratory operation and a biopsy, the specialists thejre confirmed what the expedition's physician had suspected. Chester was suffering from lymphosarcoma, a vicious type of cancer that attacks the body's lymph system. The disease was far advanced, and the prognosis was not good. Isi and I left Chester, now under heavy sedation and barely able to recognize us, at the hospital and returned with leaden hearts to State University. It was more by way of therapy than for anjrthing else that we returned, despondent, to work of classifying and decoding the vast array of black tablets that had been deposited in a specially cleared wing of the library for us. But our despondency was lifted unexpectedly and immediately by a stroke of almost miraculous luck. For one of the first stones we started decoding turned out to be a sort of index for all the rest. We found that the Godel numbers on the various tablets were arranged according to an elaborate and systematic scheme of classification -- some pertaining to mathematics, others to physics, to chemistry, to molecular biology. And still others to medicine. To medicine! Here, in our hands, was the medical knowledge of a civilization far surpassing our own. Locked in one of those tablets was the knowledge that could save Chester's life, if we could only find it. A nd find it we did. We had to commandeer the Control Data # full time to do it, but General McCall's three stars and a host of officers and noncoms with pistols strapped threateningly to their sides helped to turn the trick. We found the tablet pertaining to leukemia and to lymphoma-type cancers, and we decoded it within # hours. The crucial piece of information that it contained concerned a remarkable enzyme called L-asparaginase, an enzyme that had been used already with some success against leukemia and Ijmiphoma victims by physicians in Dallas and Boston, but which was in desperately short supply. The difficulty was that only a minute supply of the enzyme had so far been produced by the laborious process of extraction from the bacillus Escherichia coli -- not nearly enough for the massive and repeated doses needed to insure continued remission from the cancer. The information that we obtained from the key tablet contained detailed instructions for synthesizing this enzyme directly from laboratory chemicals. It also contained vital information on dosage and on ways to counter the side effects of L-asparaginase. We got the drug to Boston in just the nick of time. Here General McCall, who by now had become our staunch ally, was the key factor. He provided us with a supersonic B-# to Boston, and a siren-screeching, three-star staff car to the hospital. The drug worked; Chester's life was saved, and a momentous step in the conquest of cancer had been made. The translation of the tablets is still going on. It will take years T# to translate all of the knowledge of a great and extinct civilization into our own language, and still more years to master it all. We still do not know tlie origin of tlie beings wlio left tlie Cairo stone in Egypt and thousands of tablets in the strange black coneshaped library on a deserted atoll. For this information they did not include on any tablet. We speculate wildly on their nature -- alien beings from another galaxy, or the remnant of some great civilization that once flourished on earth and, in its death throes, left indestructible evidence of its existence for future centuries to recover. But whatever their orin, they left us the knowledge to explore the universe, certainly In space and perhaps in time. We will know the answers to these questions, and to others of Incalculable importance as well. For the means to answer them were locked centuries ago into the Godel numbers on the black tablets to which the Cairo stone led us. lightful dissertations on swords and sorcery by a master, plus two dozen illustrations by Roy Krenkel! Clothbound, #. about the alcoholic dragon? Four short novels in the Unknown vein by one of the greats. Illustrated by Prosser. Cloth, #. of the master of the weird tale, unavailable since #, is a work of literature in its own right. Limited, numbered edition, cover by Frank D. McSherry Jr. Paper only, #. #I liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland #, U.S.A. QcdoXM Y ou know writing a book is very hard to do # words make a book, and writing # words only means doing about two hours' worth of typing every day for a month, but writing a book can take years. You don't write a book. You write a story; the book is justtlie casebound, Smythe-sewn collection of what they call signatures in the book production trade, but a story is a structure of tGougfits. And they come out an individual's mind. A mind... , well, you know what a mind is. It began that day you can remember if you stand on the very tiptoes of your recollection, back into when people fussed at you and kissed you and licked and patted you into a shape they could work with. All these years, now, you've been coping in your best way with what might be called their Handiwork, for want of a more descriptive term, and you've been readying yourself for whatever moment is supreme on your calendar, but suppose a passing angel said: "Explain Thyself" right now? That -- a little bit -- is like writing a book, if you write books instead of # words. Eh? You follow me? For some of the many people who write, the production of a story long enough to fill a book is a reply to an examining angel, and I flatter myself I have some of them spotted. Take a man like Roger Zelazny. Sometimes he writes better than others. In fact, sometimes -- please don't send me letters about this -- he writes rather poorly. It's hard to see that, because he writes with such talent that what he has to say while ignoring the story he claims to be telling is far better, and far more indicative of a good mind grasping beauty, that what you get from the people who not only write # words but the rationale to explain them, the declarations that affirm them, and the essays that enshrine them, all in one gust. Zelazny just sits there, smiling gently, dreaming his next satisfactory reply to the angel, and when the replies are more than satisfactory -- which is better than Thee and Me Have been doing. I'll bet you -- they are Zingers. The Isle of The Dead, now. The Isle of The Dead (Ace) is a paperback, original about Francis Sandow, Occupation; God. An original paperback, mind you, is not like any other literary creature. Either by first intention or because it Has fallen through the hardcover buying market, it tends to be shallow; lacking somewhere. An orginal paperback comes into being most often because it's the quickest buck around -- which also means the smallest buck, thence the shortest writing time. I hate to talk economic determinism, but there it is. An original paperback competes against reprint paperbacks, which have the advantage of pre-selling, of famous titles, of better-known by lines, reviewers' quotes, accumulated word-tomouth... you name the commercial advantage, and the reprints have it. Commonly, tlie only kinds of original paperbacks tliat make it at all are Kow-to-do-it books and similar ephemera such as westerns, murders, and, even since RotH, pornography. These are not mere theories I'm handing you -- or, let's put it this way; these are statements so rigorously clung to, and followed, in the publishing business, that they might as well be objective facts. Editors, agents, publishers, and, in fact, the mass audience, can all be shown to believe them, and to put -- or not put -- their money where it counts, as proof of their belief. Which belief is normally justifed. Original paperbacks are written for the advance money -- or, in John D. MacDonald's case, the high royalty rate on the astronomical print order, plus the pleasure of it -- and in order to get the advance money, you have to submit an outline that will knock an editor down. It has got to zap, snap, and promise 'em everything. And then, of course, the book has to deliver, hoprfully before the advance is spent. Consequently, the original paperback -- and I am very proud of each and every one of mine -- typically shows signs of melodramatic plotting, and haste in the writing. But some people are ready for the angel any time. So. The Isle ol the Dead, a paperback original by Roger Zelazny, either by first intention or because it fell through' the market (which I at least doubt), is not like your run of the mill example. I've brought us all this verbal way in an effort to do the impossible -- to transmit the effect of experience. Parents can't do it with their children, teachers can't do it with thdr students, but if we each of us sit down and remember the tingle that comes over you when you do your job right, whatever the job is... that moment when you realize that this time it's not just okay, or the cracks won't show for a long time, or what the hell, it'll do at the price, but that, instead, this time, without regard to the price, or the acuity of the purchaser, or the specifications, this time, not because we chose to, but because we couldn't help it, it came out beautiful. Okay? So what if it's a toilet seat or a can of beans? There it is -- and what it is is secondary; what it has is everything touchable proof that beauty dwells within us and presses constantly against our limits. There. See. We did the impossible, for a moment. Okay. Now that's what Zelazny has done. Francis Sandow, Occupation: God, fancies himself a long-live ecological positivist; a professional world-designer who is approximately the eightiethrichest man in the universe, the last survivor of the centuriesgone #'s, commander of financial, technological and personal resources so powerful and so deft that he is a god. Neither time nor space nor the power of his rivals can stay him; love and hate are very much' the same, and in the fullness of time come 'round at the same hands and lips. His every move makes and And since the rocks of his worlds were drawn together by his mind, and the living things upon them are sprung from the flesh' of his own body, the very birds and bears of his worlds come to love him as he passes, and the rain and rivers are his on his mountains. All technology, of course. All explicable, or foreseeable, in the light of our own present accomplishments. No miracles, no mysteries. True, he did leam his trade at the hands of the Megapeians, and among the Megapeians a person who can create worlds, life and light is a god, with a god"s powers and attributes... , but this, of course, is only a convenient mental set which makes the manipulations easier. And the rituals are soothing, even when clearly hallucinatory. And when an unknown enemy begins reviving his dead enemies and his dead loves... often the same, as we've said... it's purely a matter of knocking the enemy's head clean off. Right? Climactic battle at the edge of the world while the fate of the Universe waits to be awakened... Well, I see you're ahead of me. It ttims out Francis Sandow is a god, not just a good craftsman. Even when he creates a wartbear, there's a difference between his wart-bear and another man's wart-bear. The Isle of The Dead, charted on some sort of blueprint paper, would disassemble into rather plain parts, I guess. I just thought I'd preume to tell you that, just as I've presumed to try to show why you might never tealize that mundane fact while reading this story. Zelazny just sits there a lot of the time, a slight smile on his face. He seems to be dreaming. # ate Wilhelm came upon the scene some years ago with stories like "The Mile-Lon Spaceship," a piece of hard science fiction whose natural home cent days. She's a slim, tough, no-nonsense person, Kate is, with a strong streak of practical dreamer in her, and uncommon courage. You meet her, and you think of Leigh Brackett, who wrote Bogart screenplays with Faulkner the same time she was writing lead novelettes for Planet Stories. You read something like The Clone, which Kate wrote with Ted Thomas, and, knowing all these people, you think of Kate Wilhelm as somebody with a hell of a narrative gift, and an exact idea of what in people's minds bring them to a piece of fiction in search of storytellng. The stories in her new Doubleday collection. The Downstairs Room, (#), include some very tough examples. Where they falter -- and they do -- their problem is over-working the inability to leave a line alone, the need to round off all the corners and define exactly what the artist meant, so that the stark shape of what could emerge is cloaked in a sort of plastic shrink-wrap, eliminating all the jags of the orginal, and frustrating the sense of touch. I think this may be Kate's way of lowing the insecurity we all find, after all, at the root of the thing that makes us write. This is maybe why she agreed to precede each story with an explanatory note (Where are the prefaces to Steven Vincent Benet's stories? Shirley Jackson -- did she affix a codicil to each testament? Where are the autobiographical intros to John Collier?). And one must simply decide that she never had a chance to read James Sallis's introduction to her work. Or maybe she did, on second thought, but like, I suppose. Doubleday's editors, shook her head and decided all that bafflegab must mean something. After all, anybody can write a good story -- as I said, this book is full of good stories, some better than others, but all of them stories, and most of them good -- but Sallis must be a genius, to be the author of "... the story has become a regenerating form of words, a total suspension of force, motive, and process... attaining a large measure of ambiguity and resonance, and... the elliptical, visionary qualities of the best non-realism." Fortunately, though there appear to be occasions when she Herself, God Help you, Jim, forgets it. The last time Kate Wilhelm displayed any elliptical qualities was long before she got into the author business. Despite the present general effort to make us all into academicians, she continues to look more natural in overalls than she does in drag. Suddenly the Ace Specials line is coming up with winners (as distinct from its previous High percentage of interesting failures). Synthajoy, by D. G. Compton, makes me think of John Taine, Olaf Stapledon, and that bunch. Now, the sf line of the plot is a simple one, a scientist makes and markets tape-recorded emotional experiences as psychotherapeutic device. Originally, fie runs the electronic equivalent of an ethical drug fiouse, selling only by prescription. But in due course he also markets proprietary versions of the stuff to tfie self-indulgent, and, since one of tfie popular versions is a superior sexual experience, and all of them are superior experiences of one kind or another, profound social changes take place. Furthermore, fie then produces an experimental tape containing not experiences but tfie supreme exaltations of all tfie possible experiences, snipped out of all tfie other tapes, and spliced together into one fantastic emotional nova which fie is thinking of putting on tfie market under tfie name of Synthajoy, His wife kills him, or at least that's wfiat a court says sfie did, thereupon throwing her in tfie booby hatch for... you guessed it... taped therapy. But I invoked some powerful names up tfiere in tfie preceding paragrapfi, and here you are, wondering in wfiat significant detail this story could be superior to something like MacDonald's Wine oi the Dreamers or any of the other sf stories about a world sinking below the surface of a wallow of direct brain-stimulation pleasure. Well, the thing is that this is a story about a woman who lias a problem. The woman is emotional, so it's an emotional problem. She's socially conscious, so it is a problem whicfi implies grave consequences for the world,, in addition to herself. When she solves the problem, she in turn affects the world. But she doesn't do it to save tfie world. She does it because her involvement with fier husband has brought her to this point. Her involvement with fier husband has made her frigid, and killed fier lover -- and they were indeed lovers despite her physical incapability. Finally, because she goes to a public tapeexperience vending station, and at last feels wfiat this thing is, sfie is in a hysterical state wfien sfie comes home and discovers fier husband's mistress on tfie stairs, just leaving. And so she goes crazy. Her lover fiad died peacefully, under the spell of the prototype Ssmtfiajoy. Her frigidity resulted from having been present at tfie recording session for wfiat comes to be known as Sexitape -- a play on tfie tradename of tfie ethical product, which is Sensitape. You see, what hse happened to, this woman happens to lots of people, but it happens to Her in the filtered, recorded, amplifed and modulated form. What I'm sasdng is that most sf of modem, times uses people, however well-realized, to flesh out a story which, However relevant to the general Human condition, Has the purpose of verifying some technological proposition. But really great sf, I think, comes most often wHen technological assertions are used to verify a human proposition. Synthajoy, I hasten to add, is not a Seeds of Life or Odd John, although the writing has that compelling, all-encompassing feeling that comes from telling a story in which every step people take is as important as their destinations. Compton ends on a note that would have occurred only...to someone wHo's read a great deal of sf, or something, and decided some such plot-tum is obligatory in commercial writing. Which by the standards of commercial writing means this is, indeed, a cracking good book. More important, this is a cracking good book very nearly to the very end by the standards of cracking good books, and I hope there's going to be considerably more Compton coming into the market. A lot of us could stand the case for Doing to the mdon A new tMok jpaked with onrzent inTomiatiozx on the tnocmond-spaoe pnnun and its eo l e ntm o byprodnets B-and an adventaze into spoculatiwi    This book Is a "musT for anyone associated with, or Interested in, the space program. Written by Neii P. Ruzi! editor and publisher of Industrial Researcb magazine, the book presents a lucid case for the exploration and exploitation of our natural satellite. It considers such areas as: research In the lunar vacuum; manufacturing operations on the mooni mining thasurface of the moon; obsenrtng and probing the universe from the moon; using the moon as a base In the search for Ufa beyond earth; and stimulating the economy through technological transfer. (Prto!i Bwa Halt) Send . copies f "The Case for Going to the Moon at H#' for a single copy r # for two or more copies. Q Check ideseds  Bill me. name addres ciiy ' State zipco eitH Laumer, wEose And Now They Wake, starts in tEis issue, Eas been writing science fiction for a little over a decade. Captain Laumer was a career Air Force officer stationed in a remote quarter of tfie United Kingdom wBen Ee began; tEere wasn't mucE else to do vntE spare time, Ke Ead a tsrpewriter... and so a career was bom. Now retired (tEere were not enougE Eours in a day for BotE tEe Air Force and tEe typewriter, it turned out, and tEe typewriter won), Laumer Eves on an island in tEe middle of a Florida lake, and tEe typewriter goes faster tEan ever. "To many readers Bis name wiE be forever linked witE tEat of Retief, Eis picaresque interstellar diplomat. NotEing to wonder about if Retief's adventures in diplomacy seem to cut pretty close to tEe bone of tEe real world we Eve in; LaumeFs otHer career was witE tEe State Department, in SoutEeast Aaa. Second-place vnnner in tEe Galaxy Award voting, Larry Niven is a young Californian wEo Ead tEe good luck to pick an (Elman named DoEeny for one of Eis grandfatEers. His award-winning story was Slowboat Cargo (pubEsEed in book form as A GUt from 'Earth, from BaEantine Books, if you missed tEe inagazine) . Wffile it never quite caugEt up witE Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation (originally from Galaxy') pubEsEed in f in #, as weE as distancing aE but one of Galaxys #-pIus. WEidB is a particular pleasure to It readers, no doubt, because Niven was one of IPs "first" -- autBors appearii in If witfi tEeir first professional sale anywEere -- not so very long ago. The Theory and Practice of Teleportation started out in Efe as Niven's Guest of Honor address to tEe Boskone conference a year ago tEfa montE. It seemed to us too good to let die ffiere, so we persuaded Eim to put it all on paper for you... and Eere it is. Lise Braun is a New York City Eousewife, and Leviathan is Eer second pubEsEed story. Or first, depending on wEetEer you caE Eei: previous piece. The Wonders We Owe deGaulle, a story or a "non-fact article," wEIcE is wEat we caEed it wEen we printed it in Galaxy last summer. No. CF-# by Emih The desist  nown above are the only ones The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particulariy want to keep' No. CX-# by Lynd Ward # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. 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To earn your continued support, we're debetter in the future. You'll regret missing a single issue. So to be sure instead of sorry, why not fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a sheet of plain paper -- and send it in today? You'll save money, too! #I Hudson Street New York, New York # rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for # Name Address City  State .Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add I .# per I # issues for postage Please check whether  now or  renewal (iLxy Galaxy Is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. April, #  Vol. #, No. # by James E. Gunn by Robert Bloch by Clifford D. Simak by Keith Laumer by James Tiptree, Jr. by Sylvia Jacobs by Willy Ley by Frederik Pohl by Algis Budrys Editor Science Editor Associate Editor Managing Editor Publisher Advertising Circulation Director monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy Subscription: (# copies) # In the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright New York # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, President. All rights including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. By The Guinn Co., Inc. N.Y. Title Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. '"'erald Feinberg, whom we've mentioned in these pages before, is a professor of physics at Columbia University. What has given him a sort of instant fame in physical circles is his exciting conjecture that the universe comes in two parts -- the one we live in, bound by relativistic physics, in which nothing can exceed the speed of light and another one, equally bound by the same laws, but in the other direction: in which nothing can go slower than the speed of light. (There is obviously just the one case in which the two universes intersect, at light velocity itself; and the search for the particles called tachyons which will show whether the conjecture is probable or not is now going on.) Beyond that, Feinberg's interests are wide. We shared a platform with him at a New York Academy of Sciences symposium a year or so ago and heard him speak at length on the implications of science and technology on the human condition. Now he has put some of those thoughts on paper, and they are available in the form of a book called The Prometheus Project, published by Doubleday. What is "the Prometheus Project?" It is an organized attempt to search for human goals worth achieving. Feinberg's hope is to establish an on-going foundation Whose entire function is in publicizing, discussing, clarifying -- and ultimately, hopefully, achieving -- some of those goals. Will it work? Feinberg says: "The search for goals described in this book is my expression of ultimate belief in the existence and power of human rationality. It is part of our finitude that no man controls the forces that have molded the feelings that underlie his moral judgments. Yet it is a part of the glory of being man that we can plan our futures so that our dreams approach reality. There is nothing in the universe we can rely on to consider our welfare except our own reason." In other words -- it's the only game in town. And it's worth a try. HU The Pilgrim was seeking Truth, known only to the Witches. But everything he learned led only to proof of an ultimate deceit. I T He pilgrim stopped on tfie bridge tfiat spanned tile muddy river and leaned on Kis green staff. THe original bridge bad been constructed of rein forced concrete and resurfaced many times witfi aspBalf, but tKe roadway bad fallen into tHe river in places and tHe entire span bad been "recovered with rough' beams of wood. Beyond tKe end of tHe bridge the market town began. The pilgrim could not put a name to it. Some market towns in this part of the Empire had squares; others had broad main streets. This one had a broad main street. Although there never was one shop that looked quite like another, the shops in one market town looked exactly like those in the next. A few stone and brick structures remained from before the time of starvation, but most of the shops had been built since the time of troubles. They had been put together with salvaged beams and boards mixed with new, uncured planks that disliked their neighbors. The timbered houses had upper stories that overhung the streets. Tlie pilgrim turned and looked back tlie way he had come. The highway crumbled its way out of sight in the distance. Out there somewhere it crossed under the four-lane turnpike he had followed much of the way from Denver. From here the pilgrim could see the high bridge of the turnpike which spanned the entire river in one clear arch but whose roadway was completely gone, leaving little but a lacy iron skeleton. The pilgrim had crossed it rather than work his way through the ruins and the underbrush. He had come to the timbered bridge along the highway, past old buildings fallen in upon themselves, past ancient middens id which, if he dug, He would find much rust, much broken glass, and strange, indestructible objects of materials no longer found in nature. The pilgrim's face was gaunt under the gray cowl. A scar from a recent wound crossed his rigfit cheek. His eyes were watchful and observant. It was time to forget the past for the moment, he thought, and concern himself with the future. He stepped off the bridge into the town and wondered what wisdom it would bring him. 'The noise of the town reached him first, a muted roar that seemed to the pilgrim, after his long absence from civilization, like a voice from a single throat. It grew louder as He walked toward it and then began to differentiate into individual voices: peddlers crying their wares, shoppers bargaining with shopkeepers, guarrelers shouting at each other, musicians competing for gratuities, beggars soliciting alms, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, coppersmiths hammering out their wares... The smell of the town came to him, a strong odor of sweat, spices, and decay. A gout of fluid splashed at the pilgrim's feet. He looked up and saw a basin disappearing into an overhead window ;rpu ra m gallant gne Boelis and a sHutter, closing, and he sEouted, "Hey, look wEere you're tErowing!" "Look where you're walking!" He was told in tEe shrill tones of a woman. TEe pilgrim drew up Eis dampened robe and shrugged. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the fluid tliat flowed in the gutter likely was washwater, not niglitsoil. And tlien Ee was in the town proper, with its shop windows proclaiming wfiat tEe town lived upon: at the ironmonger's there were scythes and reapers, shears and baling hooks, spades and hoes; at the cooper's there were bee Hives and churns, milking stools and pails, hay rakes and kegs; at the wheelwright's there were carts and wheelbarrows; at the chemist's there were horse embrocations and at the cobbler's, heavy shoes and boots for trudging across furrows. The pilgrim did not look long at the shop windows. Life was swirling around Him, as multicolored as oil on water. In tEe broad main street were villagers in tHeir dirt-stained overalls, sEopkepers in aprons, townsmen and women in fancy bright garments exaggerated in line and ornament, a minstrel or two singing about the old days when men could fly, a band of players posturing and mouthing meaningless words Thank you, Steve Dodson. Belatedly (due to the double-time syndrome under which we operate) but sincerely. Today in New York it has been snowing since early a.m., and we are just back from a couple of hours in Washington Square -- where a miracle is taking place. Ten inches of fresh snow has made the Square painfully beautiful, the people human and the dogs hysterical. Even if transitory, how pleasing that this daffy, happy, out-of-school madness is the result of an enchantment. It isn't only disasters that bring people together. Four of us strangers -- two young people, one businessman and one little old gray-haired lady -- stood and talked for a long time, growing steadily whiter, of dogs and enchantments and books. Someone said. "It's a great day for a hobbit to be home before a fire," and we all immediately knew where we were at. If was astonishing, and gratifying, to hear how many Baiiantine Books came into the discussion. Particularly happy was the enthusiasm for Mervyn Peake, surely one of the most admired and least reviewed (in the regular media) of writers. There was something about the shrouding snow and the silence that brought Peake very much to mind, even though it never snows in Gormenghast. But it is a day for fantasy; the city shut eway by fogs of swirling crystal, no artifacts visible, the manicured park suddenly become a wild place of fallen branches and deep drifts. We have an illusion of hardy individuality simply being here. Why is snow in the city an adventure whereas in the country it's mostly a damn nuisance? We discuss this for a while. Businessman says it's all in the mind -- indeed, the whole concept of fantasy is in how you look at things. The lady, very gently. "But you must take care that what's in the mind is not a cliche." Agreed, from the young man, otherwise you couldn't get half the country to go along with a fantasy like Viet Nam. Silence. A gift in our magic. But not really -- today the minds are open, at least the minds of those who have ventured into the park. There is a unify among us. Businessman says rather carefully that the man who fights because he has a belief is no less admirable than the man who refuses to fight because he does not; the reason why he reads fantasy is that most of its heros are heroic, the issues clear. Look at Cabell, he says, Dunsany, Tolkien, Eddison, Robert Graves -- the young man is grinning. "They're all nonheros," he says, '"they're un-brave, or foolish, or deluded. What they have is the integrity to do what they must despite their weaknesses. So they aren't really fantastic at all. They're real. That's why they speak to you as clearly as they speak to me." Magic names, magic books, magic day. The day will be gone, but ihe names and the books remain: and other enchantments from . BB resurrected from some ancient classic, mercenaries swaggering with tHeir swords swinging from their hips, an almost naked Luddite stalking a poor frightened blacksmith's apprentice the Luddite had mistaken for a NeoScientist, a soldier or two in the Emperor's livery... While He was watching the dazzling display, the pilgrim did not notice the arrival of a cart pulled by a horse until it was abreast of him. He drew back into a doorway, but the cart passed and stopped a little farther down the street where a fight Had begun between a mercenary and a soldier over the favors of some painted townswoman. Before the soldiers could pile out of the cart and reach the two, the mercenary had plunged his sword through the soldier and faced the newcomers with his dripping blade cutting circles in the air. The soldiers stood well away from tlie sword and leveled their pellet guns at the mercenary. Slowly the mercenary's rage ebbed, and at last he tossed his sword to the sergeant in com m and of the squad and let the soldiers take him. fHplie pilgrim did not see where the soldiers took the mercenary or what they did with him. He did not have to see; he knew the Emperor's justice and the Emperor's mercy. His attention, However, was distracted by a loud roar from the direction of the river, back tHe way He Had come. An open truck loaded witH watermelons was sweeping downriver making a spray of water on eacH side like a thousand legs and a wake behind like that left on a still pond by a giant waterbug. WKen tHe truck reacEed tHe bridge it nosed over tlie bank and climbed to street level and came down tHe street, blowing dust even more furiously than it Had blown water. The people in the street sauntered away toward the shops and turned tKeir backs to the gale, scarcely pausing in tHeir conversations. Then the truck pulled up in front of an open market for garden produce, decreased the volume of its thunder, eased down on its inflated pads, and shut off its witchpower entirely. In the comparative silence tfiat followed, the pilgrim turned to the shopkeeper behind Him and asked, "What do you call this town?" "Lawrence." "And this street?" "People Here always Have called it Massachusetts, but no one knows why." "The Allegheny Republic has a place called Massachusetts," the pilgrim said. "Is tliat so?" tlie tradesman asked politely. "May I sell you a liniment, an embrocation?" The pilgrim smiled, but the right side of His mouth drew up more than his left, and his expression looked more like a sneer. "I Have no Horse save sHank's mare," he said, "and the last six months have toughened Her wonderfully." From nearby came sounds of scuffling followed by a protest in what sounded like a girl's voice or a young boy's and the rough questions of a man. "You are a girl!" the man said. "A woman!" the other responded. nplie pilgrim turned toward the street. Not far from him was a figure cowled and robed in gray monk's clotH like Himself, but slighter in build and stature. Beside that pilgrim, Holding one arm, shaking it for emphasis, was a mercenary with an unruly Head of blond Hair and a yellow beard. "You know the difference between a girl and a woman?" the mercenary said. He pulled the other pilgrim dose to whisper in an ear. "None of your business," the pilgrim said. "But it is tlie business of every man with every woman," the mercenary said, and laughed. "You'll never make it around," the pilgrim said. "I'll die trying, and I'll die happy." "Try this woman," the pilgrim said, "and you'll never Have a chance to try anotKer." "Pilgrims are supposed to seek experience." "We seek tKe trutH. Let go my arm." "Pilgrims are not supposed to be girls." "There's no law," said tEe pilgrim, twisting out of Eis grasp and moving down tHe street. "But th'ere is," said tKe mercenary, striding to catcH up, "natural law. WKat Has not been should not be." "Go away," said tEe girl. TEe pilgrim was sure now tEat it was a girl. He Had caugKt a glimpse of her face as sEe passed. Not only was it a girl, it was a girl he knew, too well. He Ead known it even earlier, as Ee Eeard Her voice. He pulled Himself back farther in the doorway. "Not unless you go with me," the mercenary said, catching Eer arm again. "Molest not the pilgrim," said a fanner, gripping and re-gripping a sickle He had been testing at a shop. "Let the pilgrim go in peace,"' said another farmer, stepping up beside the first. "This is no Honest pilgrim," the mercenary said. "Look!" He flung back the girl's Kood, "It is a girl masquerading as a pilgrim, profaning the robes she wears." "I'M an Honest pilgrim," tEe girl said, "seeking tEe truth as well as any man, and when I find it I will know it as well as any man because I Have been to tHe witch schools and studied well..." THe first farmer scratched his neck. "I never knew a girl to foe a pilgrim." "There are many," tEe girl said, "although not so many in these parts as elsewhere, and not so Many as there are men, who. can better be spared -- " "I never knew a woman pilgrim either," said the second farmer. "You see?" tEe mercenary said pEeerily. "You might as well come along with me. You Have no future in this pilgrim line." His voice softened. "Come. Even though you look like a boy and are stubborn as a mule, you appeal to me. I'll treat you kindly while we're together and leave you no worse, I do believe, than you are now." H e began to pull Eer toward a nearby tavern, but she reached up her free Hand, snakelike, and sank her fingers into Eis face. Just as quickly, fie swung fiis right Hand and cuffed fier to the ground. As sfie lay on on the decaying rubbery surface, lie brougfit liis rigfit Hand to His face, wiped the blood, and looked at it on His fingers. "I like spirit in a woman but not spite," He said. "But I'll soon beat tHat out of you." He reached again for Her arm but found his Hand blocked by a green staff. Tfie pilgrim was standing Half between them. "Do not interfere, pilgrim," tHe mercenary said. "I would not calling, but I will not stay my Hand from one wKo gets in my way." "THe girl is a pilgrim," tfie pilgrim said. "She said so, and I tell you so. And if sfie were not I "You are a fool, pilgrim," said the mercenary and reached for his sword. Before tfie Hilt Had parted from the scabbard, the pilgrim's staff had swung around to rap Him sharply on the wrist. "Fight!" came an outcry from up and down the street. "THe pilgrim and tfie mercenary fight!" The mercenary released tfie sword Handle and nursed His wrist with his left hand. "It's broken, I think, damn you," fie said. But as fie said it lie was lunging toward tfie pilgrim witfi a knife in his left Hand. The pilgrim stopped fiim with a jab of the staff to a spot where his ribs joined, and tfien tfie other end of the staff whipped, whistling, through! tHe air to smack solidly against tfie mercenary's skull. Tfie mercenary dropped like a puppet whose strings Had been released. He lay in tfie street, breathing raggedly, senseless. "Good for you, pilgrim," someone said. "Soldiers are coming. Better leave," said another. Tfie pilgrim did not move. He looked down at tfie girl. Sfie was sitting up, rubbing Her jaw. Witfi her cowl down about hershoulders and fier brown Kair cropped short, sfie looked as much like a boy as a girl but there was something unmistakably feminine about tfie contours of her face. T he pilgrim reached liis hand down to Kelp her to Her feet, but she knocked the Hand away and scrambled up without aid. "You got away," the pilgrim said. "Obviously. And so did you," the girl said. "But we can't seem to stay apart." "Nobody asked for your Kelp," she said. "Where fiave I Heard this all before?" the pilgrim said. "I've gotten into this frightening Habit, and I find myself involved before I know it." "TEe soldiers," someone sEouted from tEe crowd. "They're here." TEere were six of them, in uniform, fully armed, working tEeir iway through tEe crowd. TEe pilgrim turned back to tEe girl, but sHe was gone and so was tEe senseless mercenary, wEo, it seemed, was senseless no longer. TEe furtEer progress of the soldiers was blocked by farmers Standing sEoulder to shoulder. "Make way," tEe sergeant said. "You'll not take tEe pilgrim," One of tEe farmers said. "You'll not take one who was only protecting a girl from a mercenary and spilled no blood." "Make way Eere in tEe name of ffie Emperor!" "A pilgrim Eas immunity," said another farmer. "He cannot be tried in tEe Emperor's courts." TEe captain will be the judge of tHat," tEe sergeant said. "We will take him in, and if he's innocent Ee'll be released with' no Harm. "You'll not take the pilgrim," tEe first farmer said. Above the heads of the soldiers, floating down the street, came a flaming orange ball of witcH fire. One of the farmers pointed at it. "TEe witches have come to claim tEeir own." TEe soldiers fidgeted, but tEe sergeant said, "TEe witcE fire never has been known to harm anyone. We'll take tEe pilgrim whether you let us or no. Men, take aim!" "Wait," the pilgrim said. "Let tEem tErougE. I'll go with die soldiers. I have no fear of the captain or tEe Emperor's court." "You don't know tEis captain or tEis court," a farmer muttered. "It'll not be fair or pleasant." "I wish' to go with them," the pilgrim said. TEe farmers parted. TEe soldiers moved between tEem, grabbed tEe pilgrim's arms, and hustled him toward tEe waiting cart. "Do not mistreat tEe pilgrim," a farmer called after them, "or the witches will take care of you." A shudder ran through the two soldiers holding tEe pilgrim. TKey feared tEe witches, but not enough to let tEe pilgrim loose. They feared the sergeant more, and the sergeant feared tEe captain. Who did the captain fear? The pilgrim looked off down tEe street. TEe city Ball was evidently the old, white stone and red brick building several streets away. Beyond it, built on a hill, Ee caught the distant glint of a witch's chapel rising above what must be a witch-doctor's villa. The cart lurched down the street, the witch fire sitting on the rigEt front post. No one dared to brusE it aside. And Ee thought about Eow his pilgrimage Bad begun. II Tt Had Begun: months earlier. The pilgrim walked down the side of tHe divided' highway which in some places, for some forgotten Historical reasons, was called a turnpike and in otHers an interstate. He breatKed in tiie good morning air, winy at this altitude. He enjoyed the warmth of the bright sun, alone in the blue sky. He swung the green staff he Had cut in a stream bed a few miles back where He Had enjoyed His breakfast of sausage and bread a farmer Had given Him, washed down with mountain wafer. THe highway was in good condition Here. Although the weeds on each side were chest high, tHe black rubbery substance with which the ancients covered many of their roads was still relatively infact, marred only by an occasional patch of grass which Had grown through a crack. For the Hundredth time since He Had started along this great highway that bisected tHe Central Empire, He wondered How the ancients Had built it and all tHe lesser roads of which relics remained. PerHaps it Had not been built by men at all but by witches and witchcraft. The witchdoctors said not. They said that once men used machines that did all the work for them. And they Had died for It, the pilgrim reflected. The witch-doctor with whom He Had studied would not Have agreed. "There is no evil in machines," He said once. "THere were only evil people who used machines or weak people who were used by them. If you can learn this much, you will know more than all but a few of the people you see around you, for their ancient fears are strong." "Tfiat's not Hard to learn." "You are a strange man," the witch-doctor said. Some people might call you cynical or amoral, have not yet found anything to believe in. And when you do --  the universe had better watch out. OtHers are different. What they cannot understand, what they can never Hope to do themselves, is magic -- they must consider it magic if they are to live with it at all." "I think it is time men built machines again. Or they will die, as they have lived, futilely." "You do not know people," the witch-doctor said. "You must go live among them when you begin your pilgrimage, to get to know them as well as to seek truth, to learn why a few among them can do as you say but the many cannot, and I you must decide how to separate the few from the many." r T"he pilgrim stretched his arms wide as he walked, feeling strangely joyous this bright morning, as if this morning great revelations would come to him, He would find the truth or part of it. He walked now where strange machines once had Hurtled, if the old tales were to be believed, with their cargoes of men and animals and priceless goods. The tales had to be true, he thought, for how else would one explain these roads used now only by an occasional foot traveler, a cart, or a farmer's truck floating to market? It was ironic, he thought, that the farmers of the Empire rode swiftly and the soldiers of the Empire, even the Emperor Bartlett himself, traveled no faster than a horse could go. But the Emperor had seized trucks and used them briefly and within months they Had lost all power and were worthless. Some said that the spell wore off. The Emperor did not believe it. But the brave men who tried to explore the workings of the trucks died horrible, wasting deaths. Ahead of him the pilgrim saw the beginnings of a wooded area. The highway had fallen into a river, and trees had grown up around it and through it until the roadway Had virtually disappeared. The pilgrim debated trying to find a way around the woods, thought better of it, and made his way between the trees. The trees were largely cottonwoods and thorny locusts with' a few oaks scattered among them. When the wind blew, the cottonwood leaves rustled like sheets of paper being rubbed together. The air which had been clean and clear now was thick with the odor of growing things and the fishy smell of the river. For a little way into the woods there was a path I , but it petered out among the trees and the underbrush, and the pilgrim had to make his way alone. After half an Hour He was beginning to think he would have to turn about and try to find his way back to the path when He heard voices ahead and broke from between the trees into a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a small house built of roughly sawn boards. It had a thatched roof and a smoking chimney at the near side. Beyond the House was a small garden plot; a pig was rooting in it. In front of the House was a group of three men wrestling with a girl whose long brown hair swung wildly as she struggled silently with the men. Another man stood at one side and watched. It was he who said quietly, "Let Her go. We have a visitor." T he other three swung to face tHe pilgrim, but one of them continued to grasp tHe girl's wrists. THey were ragged men wearing wfiat Had once been the Emperor's uniform. Deserters, tHe pilgrim thought. Perhaps outlaws in other ways by this time. "Forgive me for breaking in upon you like this," the pilgrim said, "Please go on with whatever you were doing and I'll go back the way I came." "We can't let you do that," said the quiet one. "You might bring other people before we're finished here. I think we'll have to tie you up like the old man." "I don't think I'd like that," the pilgrim? said. He noticed that two of tHe three men who Had been struggling with the girl Had recent scratches on their faces. "I think we'd all be happier if we went our separate ways." "You fool!" said the girl. "Let them tie you up!" Her face was earnest and intense and quite pretty, the pilgrim thought, but too willful for His own taste. "If He will not persuade, we must use stronger arguments," the quiet one said. "Sam, you approacH him from the right. Jones, you take the left. I'll be in the middle. If He tries to run He won't get far in tlie underbrush. WatcH the quarterstaff! A man with a quarterstaff may know How to use it." "It's the worst of bad luck to Harm a pilgrim," tHe pilgrim said, watching tKeif eyes as He talked. THe quiet one's eyes were steady and blue and focused unwaveringly on the pilgrim's staff. He Had drawn a short sword from His belt and Had it in His hand. THe one called Jones Had shifty little eyes and a ferret mouth at whicH ferret teeth gnawed continually. He, too, Had a sword, but it was raised to strike rather than to thrust like their leader's. The one called Sam looked dumb and sleepy. He had a club', "Well," said the quiet one,"we aren't trying to Harm you, you know, only detain you for a little. And we don't know for sure you are a pilgrim, even if you are wearing a cowl. And, anyway, the way our luck Has been running it couldn't get mucH worse. So, if I were you, I'd throw down that staff before you get hurt -- accidentally." "Speaking of luck, there's some blue witcH fire on the chimney now," the pilgrim said. None of them moved their Heads, but the pilgrim thought he detected a flicker of uncertainty and struck. The staff whacked Jones on the wrist, making him drop his sword, and the other end whipped around to thump the leader on the Head. But before He could swing the other end against Sam, the club hit tlie side of His head and lie went down. The last thing he saw, or thought he saw, was the ball of witch fire actually sitting on the chimney.  ' head throbbed and his shoulders ached. He knew why his head throbbed. His shoulders ached from being pulled back by the hands tied behind him. He opened his eyes, but he couldn't see anything. The air was close and full of the odors of cooking and living, and he decided he was inside the little house. He tried to wriggle upright, but his feet were bound, too. "So you're awake now," the girl said. Her voice seemed weary and truculent. But it was close, and the pilgrim wriggled toward it until his body came up against something softer than a wall. "Yes," he said quietly. "Where are they?" "They've finished with me for the moment," she said, "so now they're getting ready to torture my father to make him tell where he has hidden the gold." "Why doesn't he tell them?" "He doesn't have any gold. Nobody has around here any more, but myths survive a thousand fatal blows. The Emperor's soldiers won't believe us, and now these! All my father has is me and a bad heart. Why didn't you stay out of this?" "I couldn't very well keep firoaS stumbling into this clearing." "Most people would. They, wouldn't come blundering in. If you had peeked cautiously, you could have gone on without harm. We'd all have been much better off." "I thought I might get a little gratitude for trying to protect you." "Rot! You were trying to protect yourself." "True. But why would you Have been better off?" "Those men were deserters, but they weren't beyond decency. All they wanted when they stopped was some food and a kiss or two." "You were struggling!" "That's my decision and my responsibility. You had no business making us pay for your actions," "Suppose they hadn't stopped at a kiss or two?" "Would I have been any worse off? You are a meddling pilgrim! If you'd only let them tie you up, even then it might have been all right, but you had to be a hero. You sprained the wrist of the mean one and made Him meaner. And you stunned the leader who had kept them from going wild, who wanted them to move along. He hasn't said a word since. "They've raped me three times, and after they kill my father they are going to kill you and take me witfi tHem until they tire of me. And it's all your fault." "I didn't bring tfiem to tfiis clearing." "You brougfit yourself. Tfiat's disaster enougfi." 'T'fiey lay on tfie rougfi floor, back to back. THe pilgrim felt tHe splinters against fiis cbeek, smelled tfie wood fire burning in tfie next room, and listened to tfie sound of tfie girl's angry breatfiing. "Well," fie said, "we'd better do something about it." "Wfiat?" sfie snapped. "Do you fiave any feeling left in your fingers? If you do, see wfiat you can make of tfiese knots on my wrist." "Tfiey feel just like a mess of twisted ropes," sfie said. "Feel tfiem some more," fie urged. "Try to become familiar witfi tfiem, tfie way tfiey twist and turn under eacfi otfier. Memorize tfiem witfi your fingers. Visualize tfiem in your mind." "I'm doing it," sfie said. "Tfiese men were soldiers, and tfie army teacfies its soldiers tfiat tfiere's only one rigfit way to tie a knot. See if you can find a rope end." "I've got it." "Does it go under another rope?" "Yes." "Then pull on it, firmly and steadily, and pray." Tfie pilgrim felt tfie tug of tfie rope, felt it loosening, and tfien fiis Hands were free. "Good," fie wfiispered. He sat up and undid tfie ropes around fiis ankles and tfien turned to tfie girl. Voices came from tfie next room. "The iron's ready. Get tfie old man." Tfie pilgrim felt tfie rope give under his tugging. And tfien tfie girl struggled, and tfie rope tightened again. He slapped Ker on tfie sfioulder. "Quiet!" Anotfier voice said, "I  can't wake him up." Tfie ropes around tfie girl's wrists fell away, and sfie was trying to get up and Kop toward tfie door. Tfie pilgrim pulled at fier bound legs and caugfit fier as sfie fell, one Band clasped across fier moutfi. Sfie struggled in fiis arms. Tfie first voice spoke again. "He's not asleep. He's dead. Cold." Tfie girl stopped struggling. "Now get tfiose ropes off your legs," tfie pilgrim said, releasing fier. He moved to tfie door, catcfiing Kimself as fiis rigfit leg, asleep, almost crumpled under him. He stood by the door, smelling tfie wood smoke, flexing his fingers and wiggling fiis toes. "Maybe the girl knows something." "If she does, she won't tell you. She's the most stubborn girl I ever saw." "Well, let's get rid of tEe pilgrim, take the girl, and get out of Here." TSe door opened and firelight spilled into the room, exposing the girl where she sat struggling with the ropes around her legs. 'She looked up, blinking, and the one called Jones stepped into the room, peering about. "The damned pilgrim's gone," he called back over his shoulder, and the pilgrim hit him and then caught the Handle of his sword as he fell to the floor. nphe deserter known as Sam already was running forward, and the pilgrim did not underestimate his speed this time. He lunged with the sword's point and caught him in mid-stride. The dull, sleepy eyes looked down at the blade stuck in His chest, and the body crumpled at the knees and fell forward. The pilgrim wrenched the sword free as it fell and continued his lunge in two swift steps across the floor. He cut down the deserter by the fireplace who was holding a hot poker in his Hand. That was the one who Had clung to the girl. The pilgrim looked to the left. The quiet-voiced leader was standing in the doorway, his sword in one hand, the doorframe in the other. He had a bandage around his head. "Not this time, pilgrim," he said. "I'm not myself." And he disappeared into the night. The pilgrim turned to follow. As he turned he felt a blow to his right arm. It stung, and he turned, tossing the sword to his left hand, to find behind him the deserter called Jones, a knife upraised to strike again. The pilgrim cut him across the middle and dropped the sword to clutch his right upper arm. It had begun to bum, and he could feel the blood pour out of it hot and sticky. He squeezed it tight. "Well," the girl said, standing in the doorway and looking at the bodies in the room, "you are a bloody pilgrim. Is violence your only calling?" The pilgrim looked at Her incredulously, and then a wry smile began to curl the comers of his lips. Only the right side rose a little higher than the left and his smile looked more like a sneer. He wavered a little on Eis feet, looked around, and sat down heavily on a crude chair. The girl ran to the bunk to the right of the fireplace. She picked up the hand of her dead father, held it, looked into his face, and turned back to the pilgrim. "The sly one got you, didn't he," she said. She came to hind and pried his fingers away from the wound and spread apart the hole in the rough shirt he wore under his robe. "It's an ugly wound." She rummaged in a cabinet in the comer and came back with a strip of white clotli, "Here," she said, binding it tightly around the arm. The pilgrim felt a little dizzy. "Now get up," the girl said briskly, "and let's get you to a witch-doctor. He can give you some powders and have that sewn up so it will heal within a week. Come on, now. Don't fall back." The pilgrim stood, swaying. "How far is it?" "Only five miles," she said, and caught him before Ee sank back into the chair. Ill 'T'he trip through the dark forest was a nightmare of pain and fatigue and dimming consciousness, but at the end of it was light and warmth and comfort. The witch-doctor's villa looked small from a distance because it was lighted at night, as was the silolike chapel behind it. Up close, however, the villa seemed much larger, and inside it seemed interminable. It had an odor all its own, a blend of antiseptics, sometEing that smelled like -- the pilgrim could find no word for it but "energy" -- and a trace of oil. "Come in, SusannaH," tEe witch-doctor said after tEe door; Had announced tEem. "Come in, son, and let's Eave a look at that arm." Wordlessly, tEe pilgrim lield it out, winced as tEe witcE-doctor detacfied tEe girl's bandage, bit his lower lip as tEe witch-doctor probed at it. But even in Eis pain the pilgrim was studying the man. TEe witcH-doctor was dark wEere tEe pilgrim's mentor Ead been fair, and sliort where his mentor Ead been tall, but in spite of the difference they seemed as much alike as two men might be. There was about them an aura of inner certainty, as if tfiey Had arrived at an answer wEicE explained everything and they need question themselves no longer. Or perhaps, as the farmers thought, they were the favorites of the world's unseen powers and, being all-powerful, could afford to be generous. "Come into the clinic," tEe witcE-doctor said. "You, too, SusannaH. You're a graduate and may see such things. And you, young man, are a pilgrim." "Yes." "WEere did you study?" "Near Denver." "And wEo was your witch-doctor?" "He was tall and fair and wise. WlfcE-doctors have no names." "Nor do pilgrims, and I will not ask yours." The witch-doctor eased tEe pilgrim down flat on a table fashioned from some slick, dull-finished metal the pilgrim had seen only in the witch's villa near Denver. The witch-doctor eased Eis arm onto a shelf and brought forward from behind the table an object on wheels which fitted entirely over the arm. tCTt was a pity about your fa- tEer SusannaH," the witcHdoctor said as his busy hands attached vinelike objects to various parts of the pilgrim's body. "How did you know about my father?" "One never asks a witcfi-docfor How he knows." But he smiled. 'We Have our ways. You'd better take one of those blue pills on the second sEelf there." "Why?" the girl asked. "In my day, we used to call them 'morning after' pills. Take one. Those men didn't hurt you, did tfiey?" "Them?" Her Head tossed scornfully. "It would take a hundred like them." "Good. They can't hurt you, not the real Susannah. Now young man, I can't say this won't Kurt at all, but it won't Kurt mucK." He pressed a button. Something buzzed. You're in good shape. But it will take a little more time for you to recuperate. How long Have you been on your pilgrimage?" "Three months." "And what Have you learned thus far." "I Have not yet found the truth, but I Have learned that people are pretty much the same all over, some good, some bad, some kind, some ftruel. They all want something, and if they want it too much, they turn bad, and if they don't want anything very much they are the prey of those who do." "You Have learned a good deal. How would you change the world to make it better?" "You must Have more of everything, so people's wants can be more easily satisfied, or you have to rule more firmly so that evil is deterred." "And suppose there was a place where there was more of everything, but it was a place that took a great deal of getting used to -- a place where not everybody could live?" The pilgrim hesitated. "That's easy," Susannah said. "You let those live there who can adjust to it " "And rule everybody else more firmly," the pilgrim finished. "A remarkable combination," the witch-doctor said. "There -- your arm is ready." He pulled back the object on wheels. nphe pilgrim lifted his arm. The pain was gone, there was a new bandage on the wound, and the bleeding liad stopped. But his head swam as he sat up. "I'll take you home," the witch-doctor said. And he ushered them through the seemingly interminable villa which always gave the pilgrim the impression that it had subterranean powers beneath' it that throbbed just below the level of audibility. And finally they came to a brightly lighted room in which sat a miniature version of the farmer's truck except that it was slimmer. The witch-doctor and Susannah Helped the pilgrim into a front seat and then got in on either side .of him. In front of them a wall opened up and with a quick roar and a whoosh of air the witch's broom took off for a quick ride through the dark paths of the forest. As they left the clearing in which the witch-doctor's villa was located, the pilgrim turned to take one last look. The villa stretched across between the trees, and the tall, pointed chapel was behind "What do you see?" asked the witch-doctor. "An enigma," Hie pilgrim said and was silent. At tfie cabin, the witch-doctor and SusannaH Helped tKe pilgrim get out and into a bunk. He was asleep almost before His Head touched tEe com-sKuck mattress. Minutes later -- or perEaps it was Hours -- He was awakened by someone entering tEe House. He felt for His staff and found nothing. He turned on His side and groaned as His arm stabbed him with pain. Then lie opened His eyes and saw SusannaH. She was standing in front of tEe fire, leaning on a shovel and gazing into the flames. "Wliere Have you been?" "Outside." "What have you been doing?" "Burying," she said. And He nodded and turned on His back and went to sleep again. A week later his arm Had Eealed. He could swing it freely without pain, and there was only a pink scar wliere the knife wound Had gaped. TEe pilgrim walked out into the clearing and stretched in the sunshine. "You're well," said tEe girl, behind him. The pilgrim nodded. "Time to continue my pilgrimage." "That's what pilgrims must do," she said. The pilgrim wondered if there was a note of wistfulness in Her voice. If there was He would ignore it. SKe had been pleasant enough during tfieir seven days together. SEe Had cooked tHeir meals, cleaned the cabin, tended to His wound, Hoed tEe garden. And sHe Had Hummed as she did these things. It was all too cozy. TEe pilgrim did not trust anyone, particularly women who enjoyed labor. They must Have motives, He thought, and He suspected motives, even his own. He went to a nearby oak tree and cut Himself another green staff about six feet long. He Held it experimentally, His left Hand about a quarter of tHe way from the end, the right Hand about the middle, and maneuvered against a cottonwood sapling, ending with a solid and potentially cripling blow to the sapling's middle. He walked back toward SusannaH, inspecting the staff for cracks and splinters, finding none. "Here's your robe," sHe said Holding it out. "I washed it for you. And Here's some cEeese and fresh bread I baked this morning. You can eat it for your lunch wEeu you come to a quiet stream. If you go that way -- " SKe motioned Her Head toward the far end of the clearing. " -- you'll reach the interstate directly." "TEat's good," the pilgrim said. "I'm grateful to you for nursing me and taking care of me." He slipped into the robe and once more felt like a pilgrim. "That was nothing," she said. "You rescued me from the deserters. You may even have saved my life." "That wasn't wfiat you said when we were tied up." "You did that after we were tied up," she said. "I don't aphad a brother who became a pilgrim." "You never heard from Him?" She shook her head. "Either He found truth or death found him. I like to think he found truth." "If he had, wouldn't He Have come back to tell you?" "No pilgrim evet returns." nphe pilgrim was anxious to He away, but somehow He felt that he hadn't acted sufficiently grateful or sufficiently concerned about her welfare. "What will you do now?" She sighed. "I thought you'd never ask." She reached behind the door to bring out a gray robe with a cowl. "I've decided to be a pilgrim, too. I'm going with you." "That's impossible." "Nothing is impossible in this wonderful world." "OH, I've heard of woman pilgrims, but never a man and woman together." "I could cook and wash for us both, and you could find food, and we would have more time for seeking truth. We would find it that much sooner." He shook His Head. "Pilgrims travel alone. And even if they didn't, I travel alone. And even if I didn't, I wouldn't want to Be responsible for you." "I need nobody's Help." she said. "I'm responsible for myself." "Stay here" the pilgrim said. "Or go to the witch-doctor and ask him what you should do." "He said I could be a pilgrim. He said I should go with you." "Go ahead then. Be a pilgrim! But be one somewhere else!" The pilgrim turned and walked briskly toward the fan end of the clearing and strode into the forest. He Had not walked far when He came to the highway again. He thought of it as a friend He Had not seen for a long time. He began to walk along it heading east breathing the winy air and enjoying the morning sun. But after a few minutes He Had an uneasy feeling in his shouldeii blades and looked back. Following him was another gray-robed figure. He waited for Susannah to approach. "I thought I told you not to follow me" He said. "No you didn't. WKat you said was. 'Be a pilgrim somewhere else.' And tHat's where I am -- somewhere else." "Then I'm telling you now. Don't follow me.' "A pilgrim must go where His conscience leads Him. My conscience tells me to follow this road for now." The pilgrim turned and walked briskly away. He kept up a good pace for as long as He could and, then stopped to pant. He glanced back. The girl was only a few paces behind, and she was not even breathing Hard. The pilgrim turned and walked on at a more normal pace. A little past noon by the sun, he came to a stream and stopped to drink from his cupped Hand, took tHe bread and cheese out of an inside pocket of His robe, unwrapped it, and began to eat. He ignored the girl wKo, ten feet away, was going through tlie same ritual. When he finished he HrusHed away the crumbs, drank again, stood up, and walked on. THe girl took up Her place again, ten paces behind him. A ll afternoon the pilgrim had the feeling that the girl's gaze was burning itself into His shoulder blades. He Had the selfconscious urge to shift His back, and only the strongest of will power kept it still. That was painful. In the early afternoon they came to a village -- no more than a dozen buildings clustered on the near side of the road. Beyond were level fields, turned now in the spring for the planting of corn and vegetables. In some of the fields the winter wheat was up, a shimmering green across the land. In a distant field a truck was spreading witch powder to enrich tHe soil or to kill weeds or pests, and in another a truck was pulling a cultivator. There was a scattering of people in the village, dressed in working clothes still stained from the fields or tHe household chores. They were talking to eacH other or bartering idly for goods. No coins changed Hands. In all such villages, the pilgrim Had never seen any coins. He Had asked why this was so -- and he Had been told; everyone answers tHe questions of a pilgrim for in what they say He may find truth. THat what they did not have, tHe Emperor could not take away. Besides, bartering was their pleasure. Now they called to the girl. "Susannah', you are a pilgrim now." "I heard about your father, Susannah. SucH a pity." "Stop and stay a spell, Susannah. We'd be proud to Have you." And to the pilgrim, they said, "Welcome, pilgrim. Stop with us. Share our evening meal." Then the pilgrim turned the comer of a building and saw beside it a Eorse-drawn cart. TKe cart was filled with cabbages and beets and apples, carrots and sacks of grain and potatoes, and a pig. Beside the cart stood a sweating sergeant and behind Kim. seven soldiers, each with Els arms filled witE produce. "But we don't want your food," the sergeant was protesting to a villager who kept trying to tErust upon him a clucking chicken. "We want gold, coins, whatever you Eave. We don't have room for all this food. We would Eave to walk, and my soldiers must be ready to fight at all times." "Sir," said the villager, Sis wEite hair shining in the sunlight, "we Have no gold. The last of the Emperor's soldiers through Sere but one took all our remaining ornaments, although many of them were only brass, and now we Have only food. But you are welcome to that and more. Please take this chicken with our best wishes. Take Her to the Emperor. She will make a good meal for him with dumplings." nphe sweating sergeant caught sight of the pilgrim. "Pilgrim, maybe you can make him understand. Tell this poor savage that we can't take the food." "What brings you Here, sergeant?" asked the pilgrim. "Chasing four deserters," the sergeant said. "But we were told to collect taxes on our way, as usual. Have you seen them? The deserters?" "Yes. I killed three of them." "You killed three of them?" The chicken dropped out of the sergeant's hands. It ran off to join its flock, gabbing about its reprieve. "There was a big one, a rough one, a sly one, and a quiet one. I killed the first three. The quiet one got away." Why did you kill them?" "They attacked me." "You're a mighty lethal pilgrim. You'll have to come with us. Men, get that stuff out of the cart. We're going to take this one in." "It's unlawful to interfere with a pilgrim," the pilgrim said. "Not when He's committed murder, and it's murder until those men were officially tried and convicted." "Which you and your squad would do when you found them." "But we didn't find them, did we?" said the sergeant. "Besides, they'll never believe us at headquarters if we come back and tell them some pilgrim killed Sam and Jones and Upshaw. Not unless we produce the pilgrim who said so." "I like Sam," said one of the soldiers. A small group of villagers Had IV gathered around tKem. SusannaH pushed Her way tKrougH tKem. "you sBould take me, too. I'm a pilgrim." "Did you kill anybody?" tlie sergeant asked wearily. "No, but tKey -- attacked me, and tKat's wKen tKe pilgrim -- I'm a witness -- " "It doesn't matter," tKe sergeant said. "We Haven't got room for more tKan one prisoner." "But I'm witB Kim," SusannaH said. TKe sergeant looked at tKe pilgrim. He sKook His Head. SusannaH clung to tKe sergeant's arm. "You don't understand. He saved my life and now He's responsible for me." "TKat's a vicious philosophy," tKe pilgrim said. Tlie sergeant flung Eer to tKe ground. "Get in," Ee said to Kis men. TKey caugEt tlie pilgrim by Kis arms and Helped Him into tKe cart and found places for all on benches along eacE side. TKe sergeant got into tKe seat in front and urged tKe Horse into motion, leaving beEind tKem a Heap of produce and a squealing pig. TKe cart turned rigEt and Headed east. After tKey Had traveled a mile or so down tKe road, tKe pilgrim looked back. TKe village Had disappeared but a small gray figure was trudging after tKem. In anotEer Ealf-Kour tKe figure Bad disappeared. TDy mid-morning of tKe follow"- ing day tKe Hard wooden benches Had become like flint beneatK tKe pilgrim, and for tKat reason alone Ke wislied He had made an effort to escape during die nlgEt, even though Ke Kad been shackled to a snoring soldier on eitEer side as tliey slept. What kept tKe soldiers in condition to fight? They Kad been traveling on tKe BigH plains. Now they began to pass through a series of low hills. On one of tKem the pilgrim glimpsed a lone horseman silhouetted against tfie sky. Wfien Be looked again, there were a dozen there. He pointed tKem out to tKe sergeant. "Luddites," the sergeant said. "TKey won't attack. TKey fear tfie Emperor's wrath, and they know IBs guns. TKeyll wait for some lone traveler or some poorly armed group. Naked cowards!" They passed on, the Horse wearily pulling the Heavy cart as if it knew its fate and was resigned to it Over Kills and between hills they went until suddenly, as tKey were between two High stone hills, a metal fence rose up out of the ground in front of them to a Height of ten feet and tKen twenty feet. TKe Eorse braced Kis feet to Stop, but the weight of the cart kept pushing him forward until the sergeant remembered to Help witK the brake. "Back!" He sKouted. "Everybody out and get turned around." But by the time tHe cart was swung around, another metal barrier Had closed tfie way they had entered. "Everybody get their guns," the sergeant shouted. "At the ready!" "If you reach for your guns," said a clear voice from above, "I will Have to blow you out of there." Everyone looked up. Seated In a chair supported over the roadway by a metal boom was a man In a white jacket or robe. It reminded the pilgrim of tfie wfiite jacket worn by the witch-doctors, but it was fuller and longer. In front of the man was a board on wbicfi his hands rested. He wore on fiis face some glass objects which magnified his eyes until fie looked like an owl. On fiis Head was a wfiite cap wfilcfi completely covered fiis Hair. "On tfie Kills beside you, you will notice are tfie mouths of instruments of destruction," tfie man said. "You will believe me if I tell you tfiat I Have but to press a button and those instruments of destruction will belcfi fire and steel into this small valley until there is nothing left of it. If, by cfiance, one of you might make it to the barrier, you will find that something frightening and fatal will Happen. Like this!" TTe tossed fiis Hand toward the barrier tfie cart faced. A lengtfi of something metallic flew through tfie air and struck tfie fence. It flared brightly, melted, and fell in separate pieces to tfie ground. "You are frightened by tfiis new force, right?" said tfie man in the chair above tfiem. "A Neo-Scientist!" the sergeant said. "You are correct. And one day my colleagues and I will be greater than the scientists of old, who called this energy in the barriers 'electra-city.' Now, throw your weapons as far from you as you can." The pellet guns flew in all directions. "Now the knives." A few knives followed. "One by one you will climb the ladder which will descend to you." Tfie Neo-Scientist's hand pressed against tlie board in front of him, and a ladder uncoiled over the edge of the Kill. The sergeant went up first. At the top he Hesitated as if fie were deciding wfietfier to take fiis chances in tfie valley behind Him, took a deep breath, and went on. His soldiers followed Him. The Neo-Scientist turned to tfie pilgrim. "It went very well, didn't it? Everything worked perfectly. It was the first time, you know, so I couldn't be sure. But it did go well. Didn't it?" "Well, yes," said the pilgrim. "Come up the ladder, then. You are different from the others. They are workers. That is their function. You are an educated man, a seeker after truth. That is your function. You could be a Neo-Scientist, if you wished. You are my guest. If you decide to join me and I explore the unknown, we will rejoice. If you wish to go on and find the truth in your way we will be sad for ourselves but Happy for you." The Neo-Scientist pressed his board again, and the boom swung back behind the hilltop as the pilgrim climbed the ladder. When he reached the top, the Neo-Scientist was there to grasp his hand. The pilgrim stood up, stopped, and stared. Below him was a small city built on the edge of a bright lake. Smoke came curling from chimneys, people rode carts through the streets, and the carts Had no Horses pulling them, a big structure built of wood was crews of men were building roads. It whs a lovely picture of civilization and industry, and the pilgrim blinked. He had thought that nothing like this existed on earth any more. "This," the Neo-Scientist said "is New Pittsburgh." "Pittsburgh," the pilgrim said, is a place in the Allegheny Republic ruled by the Hereditary Governor of New York." "Today it is a large village surrounded by ruins," the NeoScientist said. "This is the New Pittsburgh I , which one day will be bigger and more prosperous than the old Pittsburgh." A nd the pilgrim believed Kim until he looked down and saw the sergeant and the soldiers being fitted by white-coated men with metal collars fastened one to another by metal chains. "My own invention," said the Neo-Scientist. "At any moment, those collars can be charged with a variable amount of electra-eity. A small amount and the collars only tingle: a warning. A larger amount and the collars shocks punishment. At the top limit they, can bum and kill: example. We have very obedient workers." "I believe you," the pilgrim said. "Do you Have many workers?" "Ten for every Neo-Scientist. In New Pittsburgh everyone has a job, a function. The Neo-Scientist's job is to think, to explore, to invent, to make life easier and progress possible. The worker's job is to provide the Neo-Scientist with the time to do things. Wornan's job is to produce more NeoScientists and workers. If everybody does His job, everybody is happy." "Can slavery work?" "If is: a Matter of function," tHe Neo-Scientist said. "In nature everytHing Has a function. THe grass grows, tHe rabbit eats tfie grass, and tHe wolf eats tHe rabbit. THe ants in tHe antHill, eacfi Has His job, and wfien all do tHeir it are Happy. It is wfien man ignores function tfiat He becomes unhappy. "Besides, I am working on a brain operation wfiicfi will allow me to implant an electrode in tfie Happiness center. When a workman does His job He will be allowed to stimulate Himself for an appropriate length of time." "And wKat will Happen when tHe Emperor finds out about New PittsburgH?" "Do you diink His soldiers could stand up to my instruments of destruction -- tfie electra-city, tfie big guns? Watcli." He bent over tHe cKair in wfiicfi He Had been sitting and turned a knob. "Look toward tfie otfier Hill." He pushed a button. THe black object exploded and produced a gout of red flame and black smoke. TKunder enveloped them. Something whistled into tHe distance. Something exploded far above tfie distant hills. "And do you think fie could stand up to my workers, armed with! superior weapons and urged on by tHe stimulation of tHeir collars." "Perfiaps not," tfie pilgrim said. "But fie would try. And I know fie would give mucfi to gain control of your weapons and your method of worker control." "AH, but wfiat would fie do witfi them?" the Neo-Scientist asked. "He would only do more of wfiat fie does now: control more land, rule more people, Wfiat will tfiat prove?" "But wfiere does all of your work lead?" "To man's destiny: tfie discovery of all truth'." "Is that tfie witcfi-doctor's truth?" "Tliey Have one trutfi. We Have many, as many as there once were people on this earth. Do you know Kow many people once lived on this world of ours?" He pilgrim sfiook His Head. "Four bilfion people lived on this earth because of the machine. THe entire world was like New Pittsburgh', filled witfi macfiines tfiat did all the labor. Then men fiad time to think and solve tfie mysteries of the universe. And they solved many of tfiem. We find bits and pieces of tfieir solutions that survived tfie time of flames wKen the lowbrows rebelled and ran the eggheads, and tKe time of starvation and time of troubles that followed when almost four billkartrien and women and children died of starvation and privation and violence. The old scientists thought they could just let people run loose, doing what they wished. See what Happened! The machine was broken, and we Have this backward world which can support no more than "But we can profit by the example of the past. We search the world for the science of the past and go on from what they learned to discover the truth of everything." The Neo-Scientist clearly was serious. "That is a noble ambition." "It is a noble race." The Neo-Scientist motioned the pilgrim to get into a small, open car with four seats in it. It rested on rails near the top of the hill. When they were both seated, the car began to move smoothly toward New Pittsburgh below. Tlie sergeant glanced at them as they departed. The pilgrim thought his eyes were haunted. "How do you determine who are workers and who are NeoScientists?" the pilgrim asked. "Everyone gets the same education until they are eleven. At eleven they take an aptitude examination. The ones that pass go on to a Neo-Scientific education, as high as they can go. A few drop out along the way and become technicians. The rest are fitted with collars and put to work." "That must be a moment of great terror." "Not at all. What they dread more than labor is further education. Using their arms and backs comes more naturally to them than using their heads. Function!" By the time the car on rails had reached the outskirts of New Pittsburgh, the town did not look so attractive. The smoke from the chimneys Hung in ffie air, making breathing difficult, settling on the houses, dirtying roofs and clothing, peeling paint off the walls. The horseless carts were emitting choking fumes, as well. The roads were rutted and full of holes. Even the bright lake had a gray scum along its shore. It extended several hundred yards into the water. And the people who were working did not look up as they passed. A s they rolled through the town, the pilgrim's impression of despair grew. At the end of the rails was a building faced with massive columns and twined with ivy. Rising from that base was a tall, white, windowless tower. "Come," said tfie Neo-Scientist, descending from: tHe veHicle. Tfiey went tfirougli broad doors and into a large, marbled lobby. Clerks rusfied up to tHe Neo-Scientist, waving messages at Him. Neo-Scientists came toward Hint in tfieir smocks, asking questions. He waved them all away. "We Have a guest," fie said, "this earnest pilgrim wHo, like us, is seeking trutfi. Speak witfi Him, answer His questions, sHare your confidences and your thoughts with him as you would with me, and perhaps he will join us." Then the Neo-Scientist led the pilgrim to the far wall in which there were many doors. Tfie NeoScientist pressed a button. One of tfie doors opened. They entered a little room. Wfien tfie door closed, the room began to move upward. Tfie pilgrim Had a feeling of greater weigHt, He counted twenty doors before tfie room stopped, the door in front of tliem opened, and they emerged into a spacious Hall, Tfie Neo-Scientist led Him to one end of the Sail, opened a door and showed tfie pilgrim into a comfortably fitted sitting room with an adjoining bedroom and batfi wfiicfi disposed automatically of waste fluids and other materials. There were a few books in the sitting room dating back to before the time of burning, and there was a mechanism whicfi fie could use to call for, food or companionship. "My rooms are at tfie otfier end of tfie Hall," tfie Neo-Scientist said. It was a more astonisfiing building tfian tfie Emperor's palace in Denver and more luxuriously appointed. "Why do you build so fiigfi wfiere there is so mucfi land?" the pilgrim asked. "You ask good questions. That is a most promising sign in a young man. There are many reasons for building a tall building like this: first, it concentrates control and information processes in a small space; second, it impresses the people with tfie permanence of their leaders; third, it pleases the populace like the pyramids of ancient Egypt or , the skyscrapers of ancient New York; fourth, it Has a virile symbolism; fifth, it inspires the occupants to strive Harder for understanding; and sixth, it places the leaders far from the scene of possible violence. There, I have been frank with you as I always Hope to be, and as I Hope you will be frank with me." "I Hope to be." "Now I have much work to do. If you need anything, just call into that instrument. And remember: function!" And fie closed the door. Clearly, this was one possible answer to the riddle proposed by Susannah's witch-doctor. This was a place where there was more of everything. It took some getting used to. He supposed that a lot of people could not live there; they would not like the tall building, and they would hate or not be able to tolerate the machines. So the Neo-Scientists adjusted to it, and everyone else was ruled firmly. But somehow the pilgrim did not think the witch-doctor was referring to New Pittsburgh. And he went over and put His Hand on the door, and the door would not open. It was locked. The pilgrim felt a moment of panic until he remembered the mechanism on which he could call for food, and when he had eaten he called for companionship. When the young Neo-Scientist came He strolled the streets of New Pittsburgh with him, talking about the town and how it was to live there and science and the new life that was building. The pilgrim spent seven days in New Pittsburgh, talking, living a carefree, comfortable, intellectual life, and in spite of the obvious degradation of the many he could not help being fascinated by the equally obvious liberation of the thinking man to do that which makes man most human. Then he would watch the workers in their collars, and the mercenaries who acted as foremens over them, twisting the knobs IS their control sticks, and standbfi guard at the outskirts of toym. And the pilgrim could not help noticing that whenever he wag alone in his room the door was locked and whenever he was outside the room someone was with him. After a little he began to wonder if he too did not wear a collar like the workers, only  had fashioned' it and put it d himself. On the evening of the seventh day, after dusk as he was walking with one of the young NeoScientists, he talked with hint about the mysteries of the earth and about the mysteries of the sea, about the mysteries of Hite: air and the mysteries of life stars. He began to grow very excited about the human adventure. In the distance came a chorus, of loud yells, and the pilgrim saw; a group of flickering lights. He Heard a thunder of hooves getting closer, and he wondered what new miracle New Pittsburgh was producing. V T Ee Hooves became separate Horses, tHe flickering lights became individual torches, and the yells parceled themselves out among tfie individual tliroats of near-naked Luddites wlio were storming down the main street of New Pittsburgh. They tossed their torches into Houses, and th'e houses magically turned into flames, and the flames painted the bodies of the Luddites. The Luddites leaned far over their Horses to club' down pedestrians in tKe street. They took particular delight In smiting a mercenary or a Neo-Scientist. And tEey swept up a few women to ride behind them... Two of them saved their torches for the buildings adjoining the Neo-Scientist tower, and then it seemed as if the entire city had turned to fire and men and women were running frantically back and forth in front of tKe flames, not knowing wKat to do. Everything Happened so quickly that tfie pilgrim did not Have time to evaluate His actions or reactions, and before He could do so a fiorse galloped so close by that Its sweat sprayed on Him, a strong arm closed around him under His arms, and suddenly he was sitting on the back of a wildly galloping Horse. He thought of struggling, but he looked back and saw that New Pittsburgh was doomed. Everywhere it was burning, and even tfie tower of Neo-Science was in danger of being engulfed. Black figures were fleeing. Tlie last vision of tSe city the pilgrim took witfi Him was of the sergeant and fiis squad of soldiers. Tlie sergeant Had found a saw, and lie was sawing away at the cHain that linked Kim to tfie next man. Tfie Korses ran long after tfiey Had swept into tfie outer darkness and tfie ruddy ligfit fiad faded into niglit befiind tfiem. Finally tfiey stopped and tfie pilgrim was allowed to slide, leg and bottom weary, to tfie ground. Tlie women were told to build a fire. Tfiey looked until tfiey found some twigs and many cow cfiips. Tfien tfiey were given grain and preserved meat out of leatfier pouches, and tfie Luddites produced a pot in wfiicfi to cook tfiem. npfie pilgrim fiad been sitting back in tfie shadows, but one Luddite noticed fiim and urged fiim to join tfie otfier women. He urged fiim witfi a brisk blow to the back of tfie Kead. Tfie pilgrim's cowl fell back. "I'm not a woman," tfie pilgrim said. "By damn, you're not," tfie Luddite exclaimed. "But you looked like a woman in that robe!" And fie readied for a knife in fiis belt. Tfie pilgrim fiit fiim just below fiis ribcase, and tfie Luddite grunted and doubled up. Tfie other Luddites laughed until tfiey rolled on tfie ground by tfie fire. "George and fiis woman!" tfiey sfiouted. "George's woman Rag a kick like a mule." Tfie Luddite began to straighten up. He was still trying to get fiis knife out of fiis belt. Tfie pilgrim fiit fiim again in tfie same spot. Tfie Luddite sat down heavily, and fiis fellow Luddites broke into new screams of laugfiter. Finally tfie laugfiter began to subside. Tfie stricken Luddite slowly began to get to fiis feet, Holding fiis stomach and backing away. "Perfiaps we can reacfi an agreement," fie said. "I do not kill you, and you do not fiit me." "TKat's fair," tfie pilgrim said. One of tfie otfier Luddites called out, "George, don't you know tfie difference between a woman and a pilgrim." "A pilgrim? Is tfiat wfiat tfiis is? I've Heard of them but I never saw one before." "One of tfiem was in camp just a few days ago." "I was out hunting witfi a bunch of tfie boys." Looking around at tfie little group -- there seemed to be no more than twenty-five Luddites, none injured  -- tfie pilgrim was astonished tfiat so few fiad done so much I damage. After tfieir simple meal of porridge enricfied witfi bits of meat, tfiey sat around tfie campfire talking in loud voices about tfie raid on New Pittsburgh, the destruction they had wrought, and the mercenaries and Neo-Scientists they had killed. There was no remorse.  ' their boastful recounting of the evening's action, one of them stood up and began to chant a song of ancient bravery, of blows struck and victories won, of Luddites fallen in battle taking their enemies with them, of machines broken and of one vast machine that was stilled forever before it made slaves of all mankind. "Machines must di el" he chanted. "Science must die! All who fashion and create must die! Man must live! Nature must live! And the right way to live will live!" Later, as the talking died away, the pilgrim turned to the Luddite beside him. The Luddite smelled of smoke and grease and sweat, but the pilgrim was beginning to get accustomed to it. He supposed he was a bit gamy, himself. "Is that why you burned New Pittsburgh?" "Was that the name of the place?" the Luddite said. It was George, his captor, who now had become his friend. "Well, it was for kicks, mostly," he said. "That is the way most of us look at it. A few, they really got this thing about the machine. They really go nuts about it. Not that we all don't feel kind of that way. Every moral person does." "I suppose so," the pilgrim said. "You've got to be for it or against it. We take sacred vows to destroy any machine we find and anybody who builds machines. You aren't a Neo-Scientist, are you? You were in that town." "I had been captured, just as you captured me. How do you feel about the witch-doctors?" 'They're okay, I guess." "Don't they use machines?" "Naw," the Luddite said, "They got powers just like our spiritualists. You know -- they can make the wind blow, heal the sick, turn the land sweet for growing things, bring the game, that sort of thing. It's all in knowing the right way of doing things." "I see," the pilgrim said. "Anyway, we don't see many witch-doctors." Wrapped in blankets, lying on the sweet prairie grass that prickled a little through the blanket, smelling the fresh prairie air and the last smoke from the campfire, seeing the stars wheel past, they fell asleep. I n the next few days, the pilgrim became a part of Luddite life on the move. Given a spare horse, he soon became accustomed to riding it bareback, Eis robe floating out behind liiffl like gray wings. Wfiere it was forested, tEey Eunted deer, waiting by streams until tEe spooky deer came stepping ligEtly to tEe trickling water for a drink. TEey fisEed for trout and bass and pike and, best of all for eating cooked over tEe campfire, catfisE. And tEey cHas.ed a giant Eerd of wild cattle, felling tEem with arrows and lances as tEey rode along beside tEe running, plunging beasts. Afterwards, tired and dusty, tEey enjoyed a feast of steak and roast and liver and tongue cooked over giant fires and eaten until satiation; they slept and woke to eat again. It was a good, clean, manly life. Tlie pilgrim felt Eimself growing lean and strong. His face became bronzed like tKose of his captors; soon tEe only thing tEat distinguished Eim from tEem was tEe robe Ee wore and would not discard. TEis was tEe way a man was meant to live, Ee tHougEt. In tEe evenings, after tEe meals were completed and tEe women were eating, tEe Luddites would talk by tEe fire about tEeir exploits or sometimes about life and God and tEe afteriife. Sometimes tEe minstrel would sing of old glories or glories yet to come, and tEe blood would dance within eacE Luddite until Ee was compelled to get up and stomp around tlie dying fire as tEe minstrel chanted, making guttural sounds and wEoops of otlier noises. And tEe minstrel Had made another song, a new song, about tEe burning of New Pittsburgh, and everyone sat quietly and listened. Sometimes tEe pilgrim would sEow tEem tricks tEat He Had learned -- tEe boxing witE tEe fists, tEe shrewd blows witE tlie sides of tEe Bands or tEe fingertips or tEe feet, tEe strange magic of tEe quarterstaff. And then tEere would be long, quiet nights under tEe stars, wrapped in a blanket, for thinking or sleeping. PerEaps this was tlie life the witcE-doctor Had meant in Eis riddle. It was a most pleasant life. TEere was plenty of wEat everybody wanted. But anybody could learn to enjoy it; except tEat there could not be too many or tEere would' not be enough game or fisli for everybody. Tplie lot of the captured NeoScientist women was not so, ideal. But tEey were a subdued group good for little more than doing wEat the Luddites told them to do, like gathering wood for fire, cooking meals, going witli tEe Luddite who selected them to Eis blanket for tEe nigHt. TEey did not complain mucE, However, although they got dirtier and I greasier and more bedraggled each day. There was little spirit in them, the pilgrim thought. And finally, when the hunt was over the riders came one evening to an encampment where wicker huts were built beside a stream. The riders came thundering down from the hill and into the camp, shouting and screaming. Out of the wicker huts came the women and children and old men and a few young men as well. They surrounded the newcomers with outbursts of joy and questions about the hunt. "Later," George said. "Later at the campfire we will tell it all, the whole glorious tale. The minstrel has made a new song about our great feats of strength and guile and courage. It is a song that will live among the Luddites as long as there are minstrels with a voice to sing." The pilgrim looked around for the other pilgrim and thought he saw a gray robe in the distance. While he was looking he thought he saw another familiar face, but he could not remember where he had seen it before. So it was that the story was told at the campfire, after the feast on the meat the group had brought back from their hunting, and the singing and dancing went on long after the sun had set. But not for the pilgrim. In the crowd that spilled from the Euts he had reached where the other pilgrim went, and now he sought pilgrim out. H e pushed back a hood and said, "Susannah!" "It's me," she said, "wearily wipping one greasy hand across her forehead. "What are you doing here?" "Taking meat to the men." "I mean in this camp." "Seeking truth, and it is not here." "You look thinner. Have you been sick?" "Only of these savages. You'd look thinner, too, if the old women and the old men and the young men, too, beat you out of bed in the morning and sent you off to the fields to plant com and potatoes with a crooked stick, shoo the birds away from the growing plants, pull weeds by hand, cook meals, wash clothes on a rock, and then be hauled off to a filthy blanket by one of these greasy pigs. But you seem to be doing well for yourself." "I must admit I have found it a good life," the pilgrim said. "It's a great life for the men. For the women's drudging from dawn to the middle of the night." One of the Luddite men danced by. "You want that woman? You can Have her. No good for work, no good for sleeping with I . Wear yourself out beating Her and still she fights like a wild animal. You take Eer. SSe wears a robe like yours." "There," tEe pilgrim said. "Now you are mine, and I will set you free." "A great lot of good tEat will do me," Susannah said. "If I try to get out of here, someone else will grab me, and if I don't I'll Have to work like the others or the Luddites will be turning on you, and I'll still have to work like the others." "I suppose they couldn't have a double standard. Well, come with me. We'll find a spot to roll out a blanket and at least you can get a good night's sleep." "I'd like to take a bath," she said. "Don't they let you bathe?" "When would I find time?" "We'll both bathe. I Haven't found time either. Where is a good spot?" "Below tEe camp the stream has been damned by beavers. TEere's a pool. We wash the clotEes there." Tn a few moments they weresplashing in the pool together in the dark, rubbing themselves with sand and ducking their heads under to get the dirt and lice out of their Hair. When Susannah got out of the pond, the pilgrim was shocked to see by the distant firelight how thin she was and tEe bruises on her back and legs. He wrapped Her in her robe and put on his own robe and found a level spot to spread his blanket. They lay down together on it, and He put his arm around her for warmth'. "You Have had it tough." For the first time since He Had met her she was silent. She put Her Head against his chest. Her body quivered. After a few moments the pilgrim realized that she was crying. He had Had many experiences in this world, but he had seldom been alone with a crying woman and never with a woman who sobbed silently. He didn't know what to do. He patted Her on the shoulder and said, "There, there." And wEen that seemed too paternal, he smoothed her short-cropped hair, noticing for the first time that she had cut it off. "It must Have been terrible!" He said. She cried Harder, but eventually she quieted. The shoulder of his robe was soaked with Her tears, but Ee let Her remain where she was. Presently Her growing warmth and lier proximity began to work upon the pilgrim a familiar magic. "OH, Hell," she said. "You're like all those other savages." The pilgrim protested, "I Eave not done anything." "It's obvious what you're thinking. When you asked me to share your blanket, I thought you wanted me to get a good night's sleep." "I did. Believe me. But you're so warm. I can't control my reactions, but I can control my actions. You have nothing to fear not my idea of -- " "Oh, shut up!" she said, and she kissed him, and one thing led to another. Tn the morning as the sun dazzled his eyes, the pilgrim awoke to find himself alone in the blanket. His clothing was gone, even his robe, and He Had only the blanket to cover His nakedness. He felt around in tKe grass and found a wide, cotton belt. He strapped it around His middle and, wrapping Himself in the blanket, went to tKe stream. He found Susannah taking a blue pill out of a bag Hung around her neck and popping it into Her mouth!. When sKe noticed Him, she said, "I took a Handful at the witch-doctor's while I was about it. I guess you think that's a terrible thing for a girl to do." "Well, I guess not," the pilgrim said. "I mean, it's thinking ahead or -- Anyway, it's none of my business." He stooped to drink. SusannaH said, "I'd advise you to drink above the camp. TKe Luddites throw all tHeir garbage and other wastes into the stream. She was beating his clothing between two stones. Her own clothes, still wet, were on her. "I thought you hated this kind of drudgery." "It's not drudgery when you are doing it for somebody you like. Besides, if I wasn't washing clothes somebody would be beating me to work at something for them." Turning his back, he slipped into his wet clothing and robe. "It's a little late for modesty, isn't it?" she asked. TKe pilgrim did not answer. He walked off in dignity, shivering, toward the camp. When he had drunk at the stream above the camp and picked up a couple of stray bones with meat on them to gnaw upon, he returned to the spot where he had left Susannah. But on the way he met an old woman who was whipping Susannah's legs with a bundle of switches and pointing off toward the fields. "Stop that!" said the pilgrim. "This is my woman." "Shameless man!" said the old woman. "Letting woman idle. Idle woman is evil woman. So say the wise men." "Don't interfere," Susannah said. He trotted along beside her. "WHat do you mean, don't interfere?" "You must work within tHe system." Susannah scampered to keep afiead of the switches. "You can't figKt it. Find out how it works, and then you can make it work for you. I'm going! I'm going!"  T'Ke pilgrim searched out the Luddite named George. "Say, George," He said, "I want the pilgrim woman." "Fine," George said. "You take Ker tonight." "You don't understand. I want Her every night -- and every day, too." "That's not the way it works Here," George said patiently. "Every woman is any man's woman. No favorites. No jealously. No quarrels. Share and share alike. You have her one night; I can Have Ker another night. Good system." "But," the pilgrim said, "I -- want her -- for myself!" "Well, you can't have her and that's tKat!" A group of young Luddite men had gathered around the discussion, drawn by tHe straining voices. "WHat's the matter Here, George?" asked the one who looked familiar to the pilgrim. "This character wants a woman all his own," George said. "How many do I Have to fight?" "Are you some kind of spy?" George said. "We take you in, we treat you nice, and now you want to change tKe way we do things. Just like tHat! THe old ways ain't good enougH for you. Are you a Neo-Scientist after all?" "All I want is the girl," the pilgrim said, looking around. But he wasn't quick anougH. The club Hit him on the back of the Head before He quite got the word 'girl' out of His mouth. But fie saw the man who Hit Kim, and at tHat moment He recognized wfio it was. It was the quiet deserter from Susannah's clearing. T Te woke up witfi a frigfitful  headache and someone tugging at his Hands beKind Kis back. They were tied togetHer, but as he realized that fact Kis Hands fell apart, and He sat up. A Hand came over His mouth. He raised his Hands. THe Hand on his mouth was a small, sfiapely Hand. "It's me, Susannah," a voice whispered in His ear. "We Have got to try to escape. Tonight. They're going to kill you. Slowly. WitK ceremony. That's their way. Come on." They slipped througfi a slit in the back of the hut and crawled until tfiey thought tKey were out of earsKot and then got up and began to run. TKey ran for a long time, stumbling occasionally in the nigHt, and threw themselves down to rest and got up to run some more. During tKe second rest Susannah said, "We'd better split up, I tliink we'd Have a better chance of getting away." "No!" tlie pilgrim said. "We foots make it or neither of u makes it." "TGat's an idiot's cBoice," Susannah said scornfully. "I'm not thinking of you. "I'm thinking of me." TKe pilgrim could not tliink of an answer. TKey separated for tKe next to the last time. VI A s tKe cart jostled through tKe rutted streets of Lawrence with tKe ball of orange witcK fire perched on the right front post and the soldiers eyeing it furtively, the pilgrim thought over tKe events of the past six months since he had begun his pilgrimage from a village not far from Denver. He had seen the way people lived. He had seen many kinds of people and many kinds of peoples. He had known the life of a wanderer, and along His way He had met other unKappy, dispossessed persons. All the others, in their way, were happy or at least had something to recommend the way they lived. The Neo-Scientists enslaved others but dreamed about the stars and the mysteries of life. TKe Luddites Kad a wild and wonderful existence free of most ordinary cares, but their life was only for men and it was always the same, one day to another. Maybe that was the way life was meant to be, the pilgrim thought. TKe Empire was a joke. It did not seem like a joke when one was part of the court or near the imperial seat where the Emperor's word was absolute. But beyond a radius of twenty-five to fifty miles people lived pretty much as tKey chose. TKen there were the villagers, most of them farmers. There probably were more of them than of any other kind. They raised tKeir crops and their livestock, they went to the schools provided by the witch-doctors, occasionally a bright youngster would go off on a pilgrimage and never come back, and they were under the protection of the powerful but uncommitted witch-doctors. TKe witch-doctors were the key to the situation, as the pilgrim analyzed it. TKey held power but they did not use it. They did not interfere. They helped when they were asked. They taught. They gave advice. They provided what was good for the body, good for tKe soil, good for the livestock, good for the mind. Maybe. But they did not interfere. They let people Mil each oilier if tliey wanted to, love each other if tfiat was the way their tastes inclined. Tlie pilgrim Bad never known them to lie, personally or through their teaching devices which gave answers and asked questions tfirougfi some strange magic, just like a person. Occasionally botR said things that were enigmatic or incompreHensible. Sometimes,; later, some of tfiese statements might make sense when lie Bad learned something else. r jplie question: where did tEe I  witch-doctors get tlieir powers? Did they, in reality, have some magic formula which brought natural forces under their command, some intercessionary power with the spirit world, if there was a spirit world? Or, the pilgrim thought, were the witch-doctors like the NeoScientists? Were their powers completely natural, though beyond the scope of ordinary man, rather than super natural? Did they manufacture and control machines? If this was so, and the pilgrim was beginning to think that it was, why were witch-doctors not set upon and destroyed by the Luddites and every other right-thinking person who remembered the time of starvation and the time of troubles? Both Had been caused by the machine and the century during which it ruled the world. Why were they not killed like the occasional, aberrant Neo-Scientists wBo arose and Had their brief day and were destroyed? One reason: they did not glory in their machines like tEe NeoScientists; tBey built no monuments. Another reason: they did not explain; they called it magic. Magic is acceptable; science is detestable. There was one catch: what did the witch-doctors gain by it? The pilgrim's excitement faded. There must be a profit; there must be a motive. Were the witch-doctors satisfied merely to do good so that others might live better lives? Did they get their return from the gratitude and admiration of the people, from their sacred positions, from the power to teach and preach? The pilgrim shook his head. Such saintliness was beyond belief. None of those motives were enough, not for Him and not for any man, much less the thousands scattered in their villas across this empire and perhaps, who knows, across other lands as well, even to the mysterious Russias and the Chinas across the oceans that no one Had Heard from since the time of troubles. And then the pilgrim's elation # ' arose again. Perhaps the answer to the question of motivation was a second truth', or a complementary part of the first truth, and when one had learned this, one had learned the truth that one became a pilgrim to find. Because there was, in the tradition of the pilgrim itself, some kind of return. This was, the witch-doctors said, the only way to become a witch-doctor. If you became a pilgrim and learned the truth, you became a witch-doctor. Therefore -- a pilgrim is a witch-doctor's way of making another witch-doctor, just as an egg is a chicken's way of making another chicken. But equally as true, a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg, and isn't therefore a witch-doctor... That was the wrong track. The question: what do witch-doctors do? They serve, said the witchdoctors. But that led back only to the village where the process began again. Do witch-doctors do anything else? Yes. They must. But if so, wh'at -- and where? nphe pilgrim would have liked to pursue this line of reasoning farther, because He thought it was getting him somewhere, but the cart jerked to a halt. "Out, pilgrim!" said the sergeant. The pilgrim remembered another sergeant and wondered where he was now with his squad. He looked around. The city hall was an old brick and stone building. It must have been old at the time of starvation, the pilgrim thought, but it had survived the time of troubles better than newer structures, and its brick tower still ascended high above its stone front steps. "Up! Go on up!" the sergeant said, yanking his arm. "The captain's waiting for you." The pilgrim shrugged and walked up the worn steps and through two curious wroughtiron doors and up another short flight to a large room with tall windows on either side. All the windows but one had been broken many years ago and had been boarded up, but one miraculous window still admitted light. In front of its fading glory sat an officer behind an old desk, his sword laid across it still in its scabbard, scribbling away with a quill pen at a piece of paper. The pilgrim looked around as they waited for the captain to complete his writing chore, and he noticed for the first time that the ball of witch fire had followed them into the building. It perched on a railing not far from the captain's desk, and the captain noticed it as soon as he looked up. He would rather not Have noticed it, the pilgrim thought. He would ratlier Save stared overbearingly at tfie prisoner, but he saw the witch fire first and said, "Get that out of here!" "How would I do that, captain?" the sergeant asked. The captain was thin and redhaired and choleric. "Then get yourself out of here!" "This pilgrim is pretty good with a quarterstaff," the sergeant said. "Beat up a mercenary pretty good with it." "Well, he doesn't have a quarter staff now, does he?" the captain asked. "What I meant, captain, was he might be good with other things, his fists, maybe." "I can take care of anything He lias in the way of exotic skills," the captain said. "Get out." A s soon as the sergeant Had departed, the captain said, "The quality of non-commissioned officers you get these days is appalling. You'll have to pay a fine for brawling in the streets, you know. That will be two gold pieces." "Which you will pocket," the pilgrim said. "Forget all that, captain. I'm on a special mission for the Emperor." "And who might you be," the captain drawled, "to be doing a special mission for the Emperor?" "My name is Leonard Kelley." "Head of the Emperor's secret police," the captain completed for him. "And what is the nature of your mission, pilgrim?" "That's my business, and the Emperor Bartlett's." "I supose you Have identification." "Of course. In my belt." He fumbled beneath his clothing for the belt, undid the buttons on it, and drew out nothing. He fumbled around in the empty pocket, thinking that he had not looked into it for several months, remembering the morning he found the belt beside his blanket. "I've lost it. Someone's stolen it." "You've lost it," the captain said, resignation in his voice. "Pay the two gold pieces.'" "I can give you corrobrative information about the court -- " '"I've never been to court, pilgrim. It would be amusing to see you trying to impress me, but I don't have the time. Pay the two gold pieces." "Why would I try to make you believe a lie that could so easily be disproved?" "People tell me tfie damnedest things, pilgrim. I've given up trying to guess why they do it. Pay the two gold pieces." "Pilgrims Have no money." "I was afraid so. Why does that absurd sergeant keep bringing you beggars in here? Sergeant!" The sergeant trotted into the room. "Give this pretentious pilgrim a caning -- five should be enough -- no, make it ten. And then throw Him out." TC'or a moment the pilgrim tliougKt of making a fight of it, but Ke tliougKt again and decided against it. He shrugged his shoulders and went with tKe sergeant to a dingy cellar. It once Had been something more than a cellar. It had had carved wood panels on the walls, but most of the panels Had been wrenched away. Now there were cuffs fastened to the wall. Two of the soldiers slipped his hands into the cuffs and fastened them. The sergeant removed his robe and tore his shirt down his back. He stepped back and chose a sturdy cane from: a basket of them. He made it whistle through the air in preparation. Then, counting aloud in a voice like a grunt, He began to apply the cane to the pilgrim's back. Against his will, the pilgrim grunted, too, as the cane landed; then He moaned and before the tenth was applied Ke howled a little. The soldiers released Him from the cuffs and the sergeant Handed Him His robe. Gingerly the pilgrim adjusted it over His bleeding shoulders and stepped out into the street. "Remember," the sergeant said. "No brawling." TKe pilgrim thought he would remember. The streets were dark. Guriev? had rung while he had been in the captain's office, and the streets were deserted as well. The pilgrinj shivered, and the involuntary movement made His back Hurt anew. He Had to get away quickly, Ke knew, but which way and where? "Pilgrim," someone said. "Kelley!" The pilgrim started and turned His whole body to face a particularly impenetrable area of darkness. "It's me, Susannah." The girl came out of the darkness into the patch of light cast from the window above, wHere a candle flickered and the captain, no doubt, was working on His interminable reports which one day, he Hoped, would get him to court "You did take the identification," the pilgrim said. "Yes, and then I had no way to get it back without telling you, and I didn't want to do that. Anyway, I thought a captain in the Emperor's secret police ought to have a taste of the Emperor's justice." TKe pilgrim eased His shoulders into a more comfortable position. "I Have," He said ruefully. S usannah made a crooning sound and moved forward. "Never mind. We've no time. In about fifteen minutes tKe captain is going to send fils troops after me." "But you've already been punisfied." "He is going to reflect that I may be Captain Leonard Kelley after all. And fie is going to consider that I will remember him when I get back to those wfio know me. And fie will suspect that I will see fie is taken care of in the nicest possible way. Rattier than take that chance, fie would rather kill me now." "Follow me," Susannafi said, and she led him tfirougfi the dark streets, between ruins, and up the beginning slope of a hill. In the distance, as they climbed, were the sounds of a horse stomping and a cart rattling as it moved forward and back and a distant voice shouting imprecations. "He was not a very bright officer," the pilgrim said. "It was more like twenty-five minutes." "There's a little village on the other side of this hill," Susannah said. "That's the first place the soldiers would look for us." "Of course. But right up on top of this hill, where according to legend there once was a university which was burned at the start of Lowbrow Rebellion, is the villa of a witch-doctor." "And you think He will take us in?" "Why not?" "The captain of Emperor Bartlett's secret police?" "A pilgrim. We all Have pasts." "Not like mine. I've even burned witches." "The witch-doctors always have known who you are and what you want, right from the first moment you started studying with the witch-doctor near Denver." "And what did I want?" "To find out as much as possible about the witcfi-doctors so the Emperor could use their powers to enlarge his empire. The pilgrim made a sound of dismay and humor. "True?" Susannah asked Sim candidly. "True enough," he admitted reluctantly. "And now?" "I don't know," He said. "I've seen many ways of life, and there is much to be said for eaeS of them. "Anyway," Susannah said, "we are not going to the villa. He's, gone." "Where then?" "To the chapel." "Why?" "Why else? To pray." And without further conversation she led the pilgrim up the hill t his, salvation. Hplie villa was identical with' all the otliers, low, sprawling, ligHted, potent. Behind it was tlie domed chapel, standing like a silo in the night. Susannah led him to it, for tlie pilgrim Had a strange reluctance to enter the building. She urged liim through the doorway. There was nothing new about it. Both of them Had entered similar chapels in other places at other times separately. Susannah pressed a button that closed the door behind them. "Well, tliey can't get at us; tliat's for sure," the pilgrim said. "But we can't get out either, and they're likely to post a guard out there until we get hungry enough to come out." "I think the truth is here, somewhere, if we can only discover it," Susannah said. Slie motioned him up a ladder to the meditation room. They sat in the two padded chairs and meditated. "A pilgrim is a witch-doctor's way of making another witchdoctor," the pilgrim muttered. "What did you say?" The pilgrim repeated it. "Just something I thought of." "Wh'at else did you think of?" "Why are witch-doctors?" "Yes," Susannah said. "Go on." "What do they do besides serve others? Because th'ey must do something. They do something human. Right?" "Or witcH-doctorisli." "Tliat's the same thing, a kind of special humanness. And where do they do it? Everywhere that we have seen them they live alone. Perhaps somewhere else on this world they are all witch-doctors together, and they do something." "Something wonderful." "Or something terrible." "Never." "If we have seen all there is. to see -- there may be stranger ways of living, but we must think that what we have seen on our travels represents what is typical -- then tlie witch-doctors must do what they do somewliere not on this world." "Yes," Susannah said. "Yes," the pilgrim said. "We have found the truth." "We have found the truth." "Tliey say," Susannah said, "that wlien a pilgrim has found the truth he should press the button in the meditation room of a chapel, and if he has truly found it he will ascend to heaven. And if lie has not found it he will die." "Tliat is what they say." "Shall I press it?" "Press it!" S usannah pressed the button in; front of her. As she did so, a jolt rocked' them back in their chairs. Metal straps closed around their arms and legs and waists and pulled them tightly into the chairs. But they were pulled tighter still by some other force. It tugged at all the parts of their body, their cheeks, eyeballs, face, arms, legs, inner organs... And it tugged and tugged for an eternity. Suddenly eternity was over, and they floated in their straps, sickeningly free of pressures but oppressed by a new sensation. Then the force tugged them back once more into the cushioned chairs for another eternity and released them once more and they floated again and they vomited. The vomit floated in globules in the air about them. "Congratulations," said a voice without a body, a voice which! sounded a little like the voice of their witch-doctor, whoever he might be, and a little like the voice of God. "You have found the truth, or by accident you have placed yourself in great jeopardy. The next few minutes and hours will determine whether you will find what you have been seeking or you will be dead." The metal cuffs released' them from their seats, and they, too, floated in the air. It was a bit like the gymnastic exercises he had performed in the witch-doctor's school. "You now are in orbit around the earth, which means you are out in space where there is no air, nothing to breathe, no food, to eat, and either no heat or too much heat, and you will freeze car bum. "In the lockers around this room, which now are open, is equipment which you must use if you are to survive. If you have an unconquerable fear of machines or an unreasonable prejudice against them, you are doomed. Your life depends upon the proper use of these machines. You also must depend upon what my voice tells you, for you have only two other referrents for this kind of environment: your schooling and your native and conditioned adaptability." Susannah and the pilgrim were becoming a little better accustomed to the novel sensation of free fall. The globs of rejected food and fluids, however, were a nuisance as they brushed into them and the globs spread over their bodies. Susannah found an open container and lid in one of the lockers and chased the larger globs around the room until she had most of them captured. She discovered that if she kept the container in forward motion the contents would remain at the bottom,, but if she forgot they would float out again. The pilgrim found a cloth and swatted at the m remainder until the air was reasonably clear. TKe container and clotfi were pushed into a receptacle marked wastes. When they finisSed they learned tKat they could maneuver reasonably well in this new environment. d-VX w itH its instructions and admonitions. "Your capsule -- tliis machine for traveling in space which encloses you -- is approaching a space station, a village for living in space, where there is no air, no food, and too much or too little Heat. You must not only survive the environment in this capsule, which will get deadlier, you must find a way to survive a passage through the Hostile environment outside and make your way, with some novel method of travel, to the space station. "And once you have accomplished this, your ordeal, your final examination, will be over. "Everything you need is around you. Think, adapt, use. Remember that nothing is intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. Everything depends upon How it is used." The pilgrim looked at Susannah; she was looking at him. They both looked around the room at the many lockers yet unopened whicli might hold the key to their survival. The pilgrim felt a flare of rebellion at the unfairness of this test, thrust upon them so unexpectedly, upon which depended their continued existence. THey were not yet ready for this alien experience. And then he thought -- and his resentment began to fade -- how could they be ready for something as alien as this if they had not been born into it? "You may be feeling that you have gambled your lives without foreknowledge of the game, that Had you known the stakes you would not Have played. But this is true of all men. No one ever knows the stakes except that at the end, however long delayed, tliere will be death. "Our goal is to breed a new man who can adapt to the machine and the environment of machine-aided civilization. Some we can breed Here in space, where man and child must learn ,to depend utterly on the machine to sustain life, for one mistake usually is fatal. Thus the natural law assumes new vitality: the survival of the fittest. "Many others we recruit from earth, where the store of genetic material -- of that which makes men and women have children like themselves -- is still far greater then we can muster and still of infinite potential." QusannaH and tile pilgrim Began them. "The Breed of man as a  to work I their way through the content's of the lockers. Enigmatic lessons that Be Had learned in tlie witcB-doctor's scHool Were returning to the pilgrim with new meaning. "Here is food," SusannaH said. "A kind of paste th'at you squirt into your mouth like this. And a kind of fluid that you suck through a tube. At least we won't Starve, not immediately." "And Here are a couple of funny suits," the pilgrim said. "They look like they're made of silver." "But they're flexible, except for the joints and a crazy kind of helmet." Susannah came over to look at them. "If there's no air outside, then we couldn't breathe. We would die if we didn't take air with us. Maybe this is meant to hold the air around us." ".That's it," the pilgrim said. "And maybe these tubes are meant to contain extra air so that you can take more air than what the suit would contain. Look! There's a place in the back where something like this can be attached." He fiddled with the closed tube and a gush of cold air came out. He sniffed. "Smells all right, but cold." "I think we ought to put them on right now," said SusannaH. The voice continued to talk to whole was incapable of living with machines; and with science Because it took from them the power of decision over tfieir ownlives and deaths. Tfiey rebelled. Most of them died, unable to survive without the abundance created by the machine. Some, who had proved their ability to adapt to new conditions, went into space. They wanted to survive, of course, But also they wanted man to survive and his pursuit of knowledge to survive. Tfiey wanted Him to learn more about himself, about Bis past, about his future, about Bis place in the universe. "And he is doing this -- man, not superman. The traits were always there, the potential for creativity and adaptability and adventurousness, just as there was in man the content of the villager, the hunger of the Emperor, the lust of tfie mercenary, the greed of the shopkeeper, the inquisitiveness of the Neo-Scientist, the simplicity of the Luddite. "Out of this mix of traits we select intelligence and adaptability and benevolence by making them a matter of survival." npiie pilgrim was Helping Susan nafi into her silver suit. Getting into them would Have been difficult enough under normal conditions, but in weightlessness it was practically impossible. "How do we survive?" the voice continued. "How do we get the wealth to mount our expeditions to the planets of this system? How do we maintain our villas on earth? It comes down to energy, which is a kind of wealth; indeed in the end it is the only real kind of wealth. And in space, energy is free. There is too much of it, so much that it will kill you if you don't respect it. And we are, as well, the sole users of atomic power, the surprising energy of the very small. For materials, we mine the moon and the inhospitable areas of earth and its seas. We are rich. "But wealth, like anything else, is neither good nor evil. It must be used properly. On earth we use it to help, freely, without interfering in men's free choices. In space we use it to move onward and outward, as man must do to be man, respecting all life and particularly respecting all possible thinking life, although' other than man we have found none yet. That is what we live by." By now Susannah I was into her suit, and the pilgrim fastened a tube of air onto her back, turned the valve, and hoped it would work. Then he helped her put on the helmet and fastened it. She motioned frantically at his suit and then at him. He floated and inserted his legs into the suit. "Within a few minutes deceleration -- slowing down -- and minor course adjustments will begin," the voice said, "and you must be back in your chairs of you will be rattled around in this capsule like dice in a box. You might be injured. If you have made good use of your time, you will be in the space suits by now. If you are not, there is no time to start and complete the job. "Five minutes after deceleration, the capsule door will open and the air in the capsule will rush out. If you are not properly protected, you will die within a minute or so. If you are protected, you will see outside the port the space station known as Truth. If you make it to that station and into it, you will he one of us." fT'h'e pilgrim Had struggled Sis  suit closed and was trying to work the helmet into position with his clumsy, gloved hands while Susannah fastened the tube to his back. "Take your places in the chairs," said the voice. "Now! And good luck to you." They moved quickly to the chair. Once settled into the chairs by pulling themselves down by the arms, they found their arms and legs again encircled. Almost as soon as that happened, they were tugged deep into tKe cushions again and then tugged from one side to another. After a moment the shifting weights vanished, and they were free. Susannah sprang back to his helmet, checking the catches to isee if all were closed, finding one open and closing it; and, not unlike monkeys searching each other's fur for salt, he did the same for her. In the midst of their inspections, a gust spun them around. (The air leaving, the pilgrim thought. He caught Susannah and braced himself against one of the seats until the gusts subsided. "Are you all right?" he asked. Inside her helmet her eyes were looking at him. He saw her lips move. "I can't hear you," he said. She shook her head. He shrugged. He motioned her toward the door and then halted beside a locker they Had not yet opened. He opened it. Inside was a rope and a pair of small hand machines. He did not know what they were for, but he grabbed them and then preceded Susannah down the ladder. At the outer door he looked out the opening from which the door was completely gone -- and saw the stars. For a moment his senses rebelled, and he felt that he might be sick again. But he recalled his schooling about tlie stars and took a deep breath and forced himself to stare back at the staring stars, set in the blackest night, where a man might fall for ever and never, without end, into infinity and beyond. And He turned to Susannah, who was staring past his shoulder, and fastened the rope around both of them with clumsy gloves, and tried to tie a square knot that he Hoped would hold. He gave Her one of the hand machines. When she looked at him questioningly he looked blank. Then he eased himself out of the doorway. He floated free, and then Susannah, too, was free, and they floated above the capsule and they saw the earth above them. Tt liung there in the black sky, huge, with misty mountains and shrouded blue seas and brown and green patches of earth, all muted into pastels by a veil of air. And suddenly the earth flipped over and was beneath them. TKe pilgrim gasped and tried to claw for support, and there was none. He forced himself to look away. He saw the sun, clear and burning, as Ke Had never seen it before, and Ke looked away quickly lest He go blind. He saw the space station, a large wheel turning in tire black sky, surrounded by metal bubbles that floated freely around it. So close and yet so Hopelessly far away. Susanna!! Ead been inspecting tEe machine the pilgrim had given her. She closed her gloved hand on it, and it hissed. It emitted a white exhaust. Alarmed, she released her grasp on it, and it shot away before she could grab it again. It receded quickly and soon was lost in the distance. Susannah tapped the pilgrim's helmet and pointed at the machine in his hand and at the one that had disappeared toward the overhanging-undergirding earth, pointed at the direction it had been pointed and then indicated that the pilgrim should point his machine in a direction opposite the space station and squeeze its handle. The pilgrim Ead seen and understood. Lessons He had learned about physics and chemistry and astronomy were coming back to him in a flood. There was something about an action and an equal and opposite reaction. He pointed the machine and squeezed and released. He looked over his shoulder. The spacesuited figures accelerated toward the station. But they missed the station by fifty feet. Quickly the pilgrim turned and fired in the opposite direction, but the maneuver took time and some of the precious contents of the hand machine to stop their progress and then reverse it. But the space station stopped receding and began to come back toward them again. At that point the little machine gave its last little puff. The pilgrim drew back his arm to throw it away and changed his mind. He checked their progress and direction and then, as he saw they might miss again, he carefully threw the machine in a direction calculated to send them closer. As the space station grew closer, the pilgrim fumbled with the rope that bound him to Susannah. He loosened the knot and forced one end of the rope into Susannah's hand and held the other firmly in his. He placed his foot against Susannah's side and spun her away from him in the direction of the space station. As they approached the station, they would have passed through the gap between the rim of the wheel and the hub, but the rope held between them caught the spoke and spun them around the spoke until they clanged against it and hung on grimly. T here were handholds on the spoke. After the pilgrim had regained his breath and his nerve, he began pulling himself with painful care toward the hub, holding the end of the rope in one Hand so that SusannaH would not slip away; It seemed to Him tfiat they crawled forever before tfiey reacHed the Hub. Tfie pilgrim searcHed for an entrance. He found a crack. He traced it. Beside tHe crack was a Handle. He pulled it. THe door swung open. Working carefully so tfiat they did not lose tHeir grasp on tlie Hub at any time, tHe pilgrim and SusannaH made tHeir way tHrougfi tHe door and into a small, tubular room. Opposite tlie door they Had entered was another door and another Handle. THe pilgrim pulled it. THe door behind them closed. A ligKt above them and one below them came on. Tfie pilgrim felt #s if He were a puddle of boneless flesh witfiin his suit. Through SusannaH's helmet he could see that she, too, was breathing deeply. After a minute or two the door in front of them swung back. Gloved men moved surely to help them through the doorway. They seemed fike ordinary men in coveralls. Well, the pilgrim thought, perhaps not quite like ordinary men. There was a certain calm sureness about them, in tfie way they moved in this weightless condition, a serenity of features, an air of infinite capacity. Tfiey moved quickly to take tfie Helmets from tHe pilgrim's Head and then Susannah's. They began stripping away tlie silver suit. As the last part of their suits was removed, an older man came forward. He floated through tfie air as if it were tfie most natural metfiod of locomotion imaginable. He field out His Hands to both of them. "Welcome!" he said in a tone that made them sure they were indeed welcome, that He was glad they Had made it. "My name is John Wilson. That won't mean anything to you. But welcome. Welcome to tHe company of witches." This Month in If -- ... A Brand-New Novel by Andre Norton by Keith Laumer Don't miss the April If, voted world's best science-fiction magarlne for three years running. April issue on sale now! Beam Us Home Hobie always knew they'd come for him. But it took so long I TT obie's parents migKt Have seen the first signs if they had been watching around #:# on Friday nights. But Hobie was the youngest of five active brightnormal kids. Who was to notice one more uproar around the TV? A couple of years later Hobie's Friday night battles shifted to # PM, and then his sisters got their own set. Hobie was growing fast then. In public He featured chiefly as a tanned streak on the tennis courts and a #th percentile series of math grades. To his parents, Hobie featured as the one without problems. This was hard to avoid in a family that included a diabetic, a girl with an IQ of # and another with controllable petit mal, and a wouldbe ski star who spent most of his time in a cast. Hobie's own IQ was in the fortunate one-forties, the range where you're Superior enough to lead, but not too superior to be followed. He seemed perfectly satisfied with his communications with his parents, but he didn't use them; much Not that he was in any way neglected when the need arose. The time he got staph in a corneal scratch, for instance, his parents did a great job of supporting him through the pain bit and the hospital bit and so on. But they couldn't know all the little incidents. Like the night that Hobie called so fiercely for Dr. McCoy that a young interfl named McCoy went in and joked for half an hour with the feverish boy in his dark room. To the end, His parents probably never understood that there was anything to understand about Hobie. And wfiat was to see? His tennis and His model rocket collection made Him look almost too normal for tfie small Honors scfiool fie went to first. Then His family moved to an executive bedroom suburb wfiere tfie scfiool system Had a bigger budget than Monaco and a soccer team loaded with National Merit Science finalists. Here Hobie blended right in with I the scenery. One more healtfiy, friendly, polite kid with brigfit gray eyes under a blond bowl-cut and very fast witfi any sort of ball game. The brightest eyes around Him were reading The Double Helix to find out How to make it in researcH, or studying the Wall Street Journal. If Hobie stood out at all, it was only that He didn't seem to be worried about making it in research or any other way, particularly. But that fitted in, too. Those days, a lot of boys were standing around looking as if they couldn't believe what went on, as if they were waiting for -- who knows? -- a better world, their glands, something. Hobie's faintly aghast expression was not unique. Events like the installation of an armed patrol around the school enclave were bound to have a disturbing effect on the more sensitive kids. People got the idea that Hobie was sensitive in some indefinite way. His usual manner was open but quiet, tolerant of a put-on that didn't end. TTis advisor did fret over His failure to settle on a major field of interest in time for the oncoming threat of the college rat-race. First His math interest seemed to cop out after the special calculus course, although He never blew an exam. Tfien fie switched to the pre-college anthropology panel the scfiool was trying. Here fie made good grades and acted very motivated, until the semester when the visiting research team began pounding on sampling techniques and statistical significance. Hobie Had no trouble with' things like CKi square, of course. But after making his A in the final, He gave them his sweet, unbelieving smile and faded. His advisor found Him spending a lot of Hours polishing a six-incH telescope lens in the school shop. So Hobie was tagged as some kind of an under-acKiever, but nobody knows wfiat kind, because of those grades;. And something about that smile bothered them; it seemed to stop sound. Tfie girls liked Kim, tfiougfi, and fie went through the usual pfiases rather fast. Tfiere was the week fie and various birds went to thirty-five drive-in movies. And the two months fie went around Humming Mrs. Robbinson in a meaningful way. And tKe warm, comfortable summer wfien lie and His tfien girl and two otHer couples went up to Stratford, Ontario with sleeping bags to see tKe Czech multimedia tiling. Girls regarded Him as 'different,' altliougfi lie never knew why. "You look at me like it's always goodbye," one of tKem told Him. In fact lie did treat girls witH an odd detached gentleness, as tfiougK he knew a secret that might make them all disappear. Some of them Hung around because of his quick brown Hands, or his really 'great looks, some because they hoped to share the secret. In this they were disappointed. Hobie talked, and He listened carefully, but it never was mutual talk-talk-talk of total catharsis that most couples went through. But How could Hobie know that? Like most of his peer group, Hobie stayed away from acid and agreed that pot was preferable to getting juiced. His friends never urged Him too hard, though, after the beach party where he spooked everybody by talking excitedly lor hours to people who weren't there. They decided he might have a yulnerable egostructure. The high-school's official .view was that Hobie had no real problems. In this they were supported by a test battery profile that could have qualified him as the ideal normal, control. Certainly there was nothing to get hold of in His routine interviews with the HigK-scKool psychologist. H obie came in after lunch, a time when Dr. Morehouse knew He was not at Hi's most intuitive. They went through the usual openers, Hobie sitting easily, patient and interested, with a faint air of listening to some sound back of the acoustical ceiling tiles. "I see a lot of young people who are having their trouble discovering who they really are. Searching for their own identities," Morehouse offered. He was idly tracing up a stack of typing headed Sex differences in the adolescent identity crisis. "Do you?" Hobie asked politelyMorehouse frowned at Himself and belched disarmingly. "Sometimes I wonder who I am," He granted. "Do you?" inquired Hobie. "Don't you?" "No," said Hobie. Morehouse reached for the hostility that should have been there, found it wasn't. Not passive aggression. ,Wfiat? His intuition awoke briefly. He looked into Hohie's light Hazel eyes and suddenly found himself slipping toward some very large uninhabited dimension. A real pubescent pre schiz? He wondered Hopefully. No, again, He decided, and found Himself thinking, wEat if a person is sure of His identity but it isn't Eis identity? He often wondered tEat; perEaps it could be worked up into a creative insigHt. "Maybe it's tfie other way around," Hobie was saying before the pause grew awkward. "How do you mean?" "Well, maybe you're all wondering who you are," Hobie's lips quirked; it was clear he was just making conversation. "I asked for that," Morehouse smiled. They chatted about sibling rivalry and psychological statistics and wound up in plenty of time for Morehouse's next boy, wEo turned out to be a satisfying HigH Anx. Morehouse forgot about the empty place he Had slid into. He often did that, too. Tt was a girl who got part of it out of Hobie, at three in the morning. "Dog," she was called then, although her name was Jane. A tender, bouncy little bird who cocked Her head to listen up at Him in a way Hobie liked. Dog would listen with the same soft intensity to the supermarket clerk and the pediatrician later on, but neither of them knew that. They Had been talking about the state of the world, which was then quite prosperous and peaceful. That is to say, about seventy death in Asia, a number of WestHem tyrannies were maintaining themselves on police terror tactics, four or five borders were being fought over. Hobie's family's maid Had just been cut up by the suburban peacekeeping squad, and the school Bad added a charged wire and two dogs to its patrol. But none of the big nations were waving fissionables, and the U.S.-Soviet entente was a twenty-year reality. Dog was Holding Hobie's head' over the side of her car, because He Had been the one who found the maid crawling on Her Handbones among the azaleas. "If you feel like that, wEy don't you do something?" Dog asked him between spasms. "Do you want some Slurp? It's all we've got." "Do what?" Hobie quavered. "Politics?" guessed Dog. She really didn't know. THe Protest Decade was long over, along with Brotherhood. There was a school legend about a senior who had come back from Chicago with a collar-bone busted by Daley's Squad. Some time after that the kids Had discovered that flowers weren't really very powerful, and that CP agitators Had their own bag. Why go on the street when you could really do more in one of tfie good jobs available Inside? So Dog could offer only a vague image of Hobie running for something, a sincere face on TV. "You could join the Young Statesmen." "Not to interfere," gasped Hobie. He wiped his mouth. Then fie pulled himself together and tried some of the Slurp. In tKe dashlight his seventeen-year-old sideburns struck Dog as tremendously mature and beautiful. "Oh, it's not so bad," said Hobie. "I mean, it's not unusually bad. It's just a stage. This world is just going through a primitive stage. There's a lot of stages. It takes a long time. Tfiey're just very very backward, that's all." "They," said Dog, listening to every word. "I mean," lie said. "You're alienated," slie told fiim. "Rinse your mouth! out with that. You don't relate to people." C(T think you're people," fie said, rinsing. He'd heard this before. "I relate to you," fie said. He leaned out to spit. Then fie twisted his head to look up at the sky and stayed that way awhile, like an animal's fiead sticking out of a crate. Dog could feel him trembling the car. "Are you going to barf again?" she asked. "No," he reassured fier. But then suddenly he did, roaringly. She clutcfied at his shoulders while he heaved. After awfiile fie sagged down, his fiead lolling limply out on one arm. "It's sucfi a mess," sfie Heard him whispering. "It's sucfi a rotten miserable mess mess mess He was pounding his Band on the car side. "I'll hose it," said Dog, but then she saw he didn't mean the car. "Why does it have to go on and on?" he croaked. "Why don't they just stop it? I can't bear it much longer, please, please, I can't -- " Dog was scared now. "Honey, it's not that bad, Hobie honey, it's not that bad," she told fiim, patting at him pressing fier soft front against his back. Suddenly fie came back into the car on top of her, spent. "It's unbearable," he muttered. "What's unbearable?" sfie snapped, mad at him for scaring her. "What's unbearable for you and not for me? I mean, I know it's a mess, but why is it so bad for you? I have to live here too." "It's your world," he told fier absently, lost in some private desolation. Dog yawned. "I better drive you home now," she said. He Had nothing more to say and sat quietly. When Dog glanced at His profile sHe decided He looked calm. Almost stupid, in fact his mouth hung open a little. SHe didn't recognize the expression, because she had never seen people looking out of cattle cars. Hobie's class graduated that June. His grades were well up, and everybody understood that He was acting a little unrelated because of the traumatic business with the maid. He got a lot of sympathy. I t was after the graduation exercises that Hobie surprised his parents for the first and last time. They Had been congratulating themselves on Having steered their fifth offspring safely through the college crisis and into a high-status Eastern. Hobie announced that he had applied for the United States Air Force Academy. This was a bomb, because Hobie Had never shown the slightest interest in things military. In fact, just the opposite. Hobie's parents took it for granted that the educated classes viewed the military witH tolerant distaste. Why did their son want this? Was it another of His unstable motivational orientations? But Hobie persisted. He didn't have any reasons, but He Had thought carefully and felt that this was fen him. Finally they recalled tfiat early model rocket collection; maybe this was something deep. His father decided he was serious, and began sorting out the generals his research firm did business with. In September Hobie disappeared into Colorado Springs. He reappeared for Christmas in the form of an exotically hairless, erect and polite stranger in uniform. During the next four years Hobie the person became effectively invisible behind a growing pile of excellent evaluation reports. There seemed to be no doubt that he was working very hard, and his motivation gave no sign of flagging. Like everybody, he bitched about many of the Academy's little ways, and told some funny stories. But he never seemed discouraged. When he elected to spend his summers in special aviation skills training, his parents realized that Hobie had found himself. No one was surprised when in his senior year he told them He had applied for and been accepted into the new astronaut training program. The U.S. space program was just then starting up again after the revulsion caused by the wreck of the first manned satellite lab ten years before. "I bet that's what he had in mind all along," Hobie's father cHuckled. "He didn't want to say so Before fie made it." Tfiey were all relieved. A son in tfie Space Program was a lot easier to live witfi, status-wise. Wfien she Heard tfie news, Dog, wfio was now married and called fierself Jane, sent Him a card witfi a picture of tfie Man in tfie Moon. Anotfier girl, more percipient, sent Kim a card sfiowing some stars. But Hobie never made it to tfie Space Program. Tt was tKe summer wfien several not-very-serious events Happened all together. Tfie BrltisR devalued tfieir wobbly pound again, just when it was found tfiat far too many dollars were going out of tfie States. East and West Germany moved a step closer to reunion, wfiicfi somefiow generated a call for strengthening tfie U.S. contribution to tfie remains pensive, though' luckily non-letfial pad fire at Kennedy. TKen tfie Egyptians announced a new Soviet-aid pact. And in August it was discovered that tfie Guevarrista rebels in Venezuela were getting some very unpleasantlooking Hardware from tfieir Cliicom allies. Contrary to tfie old saying tfiat nations never learn from history, tfie U.S. showed tfiat it fiad learned from its long agony in Vietnam. Wh'at it fiad learned was not to waste time messing around witfi popular elections and military advisory and training programs, but to ball rigfif in. Hard. When tfie dust cleared, tfie Space Program and astronaut training were dead on tfie pad, and a third of Hobie's graduating class were going tfirougfi Caracas. Technically, fie fiad volunteered. He found this out from tfie task force medico. "Look at it tfiis way, Lieutenant. By entering the Academy, you volunteered for tfie Air Force, rigfit?" "Yes. But I opted for tfie astronaut program. Tfie Air Force is tfie only way you can get in. And I've been accepted." "But the astronaut program fias been suspended. Temporarily, of course. Meanwhile the Air Force --  for wfiicfi you volunteered -- h'as an active requirement for your training. You can't expect them just to let you sit around until tfie program resumes, can you? Moreover you Have been given the very best option available. Hell, man, tfie Professional Peacekeeper Corps is considered a super-elite group. You should see the fugal depressions we fiave to cope witfi among men wfio have been rejected for "Mercenaries," said Hobie. "Regressive." "Try 'professional,' it's a better word. Now -- about those Headaches." The EeadacKes eased up some when Hobie was assigned to long range sensor recon support. He enjoyed tKe work of flying, and tEe long, calm, lonely sensor missions were soothing. They were also quite safe. TEe Guevarristas Had no air strength to waste on recon planes, and tEe CHicom tional. Hobie flew tEe pattern, and waited, zombie-like, for tEe weatfier, and flew again. Mostly he waited, because the fighting was developing in a steamy jungly province where clear sensing was a sometime thing. It was poorly mapped. The ground troops could never be sure about the little brown square men who gave them so much trouble; on one side of an indefinite line they were Guevarristas who should be obliterated, and on the other side they were legitimate national troops warning tire blancos away. Hobie's recon tapes were urgently needed, and for several weeks he was left alone. Then he began to get pulled up to a forward strip for one-day chopper duty when their tactical duty roster was disrupted by geegee. But this was relatively peaceful too, being mostly defoliant spray missions. Hobie in fact put in several months without seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling the war at all. He would have been grateful for this if Be had realized it. As it was he seemed to be trying not to realize anything much. He spoke very little, did his work and moved like a man whose head might fall off if he jostled anything. XJaturally Incffo he was one of the last to Hear the rumors about geegee when they filtered back to the coastal base, where Hobie was quartered with the longrange stuff. Geegee's proper name was Guairas Grippe. It was developing into a severe problem in the combat zone. More and more replacements and relief crews were being called forward for temporary tactical duty. On Hobie's next trip in, Ee couldn't help but notice that people were acting pretty Haggard, and the roster was all scrawled up with changes. When they were on course he asked about it. "Are you kidding?" his gunner grunted. "No. Wfiat is it?" "B.W." "WEat?" "Bacteriological weapon, skyhead. They keep promising us vaccines. Stuck in their zippers -- look burst. out, there's a ground They held Hobie up front for another mission, and another after that, and then they told him chat a sector quarantine was now in force. THe official notice said that movement of personnel between sectors would be reduced to a minimum as a temporary measure to control the spread of respiratory ailments. Translation: You could go from the support zone to the front, but you could not go back. Hobie was moved into a crowded billet and assigned to casualty and supply duty. Shortly He discovered that there was a translation for respiratory ailments, too. Geegee turned out to be a multiform misery of groin rash, sore throat, fever and unending trots. It didn't seem to become really acute, it just cycled along. Hobie was one of those who were only lightly affected, wliicH was lucky, because the Hospital beds were full. So were the hospital aisles. Evacuation of all casualties Had been temporarily suspended until a controlled corridor could be arranged. The Gues did not, it seemed, get geegee. The ground troops were definitely sure of that. Nobody knew How it was spread. Rumor said it was bats one week, and then the next week they were putting stuff in the water. Poisoned arrows, roaches, women, disintegrating cannisters, all had their advocates. However it was done, it was clear that the cEicom technological aid Had included more than hardware. The official notice about a forthcoming vaccine yellowed on the board. Ground fighting was veering closer to Hobie's strip. He heard mortars now and then, and one night the Gues ran in a rocket launcher and nearly got the fuel dump before they were chased back. All they got to do is wait," said the gunner. "We're dead." "Geegee doesn't kill you," said . CS control. "You just wish it did." "They say." The strip was extended, and three attack bombers came in. Hobie looked them over. He Had trained on AX#'s all one summer, until He could fly them in His sleep, It would be nice to be alone. He was pushing the CS chopper most of the daylight Hours now. He Had got used to being shot at and to being sick. Everybody was sick, except a couple of replacement crews who were sent in two weeks apart, looking startlingly healthy. They said they had been immunized with a new antitoxin. Their big news was that geegee could be cured outside the zone. "We're getting reinfected," the gunner said. "That figures. They want us out of here." fTphat week there was a big drive on bats, but it didn't help. The next week the first batch of replacements were running fevers. Their shots hadn't worked and neither did the stuff they gave the second batch. After that, no more men came in except a couple of volunteer medicos. The billets and the planes and the mess were beginning to stink. That dysentery couldn't be controlled after you got weak. What they did get was supplies. Everyday or so another ton of Stuff would drift down. Most of it was dragged to one side and left to rot. They were swimming in food. The staggering cooks pushed steak and lobster at men who shivered and went out to retch. The hospital even had ample space now, because it turned out that geegee really did kill you in the end. By that time, you were glad to go. A cemetery developed at the far side of the strip, among the skeletons of the defoliated trees. It was on that last morning that Hobie was sent out to pick up the long-range patrol. He was one of the few left with enough stamina for long missions. The three-man patrol was far into Gue territory, but Hobie didn't care. All he was thinking abotsi was his bowels. So far he had not fouled himself or his plane. When he was down by their signal fee bolted out and under the chopper's tail. The patrol climbed ia, yelling at him. They had a prisoner with them The Gu# was naked and astonishingly broad. He walked springily; his arms were lashed with wire and a shirt was tied over Ms head. This was the first Gue Hobie had been close to. As he got in he saw how the Gue's firm brown teeth glistened and bulged around the wire. He wished fee could see his face. The gunner said the Gue was a Siriono, amd this was important because the Sirionos were not known to be with the Gue's. They were a very primitive nomadic tribe. When Hobie began to fly home He realized he was getting sicker. It became a fight to hold onto consciousness and keep on course. Luckily nobody shot at them. At one point he became aware of a lot of screaming going on behind him, but couldn't pay attention. Finally he came over the strip and horsed the chopper down. He let his head down on his arms. "You okay?" asked the gunner. "Yeah," said Hobie, hearing them getting out. They were moving something heavy. Finally he got up and followed them. The floor was wet. That wasn't unusual. He got down and stood staring in, tKe floor a foot under His nose. Tfie wet stuff was blood. It was sprayed around, with one big puddle. In tHe puddle was sometliing soft and flesfiy-looking. Hobie turned fiis bead. Tfie ladder was wet, too. He Held up one Hand and looked at tfie red. Tfie otfier one, too. Holding tfiem out stiffly fie turned and began to walk away across tfie strip. Control, wfio still Hoped to get an evening flight out of Him, saw him fall and called tfie Hospital. Tfie two replacement parameds were still in pretty good sfiape. TKey came out and picked him up. W ficn Hobie came to, one of ' ' tfie parameds was tying fiis fiands down to tfie bed so fie couldn't tear tfie IV out again. "We're going to die Here," Hobie told Kim. TKe paramed looked noncommital. He was a tfiin dark boy witfi a big Adam's apple. "But I sfiall dine at journey's end witfi Landor and witfi Donne," said Hobie. His voice was light and facile. "Yeats," said tfie paramed. "Want some water?" Hobie's eyes flickered. Tfie paramed gave Him some water. "I really believed it, you know," Hobie said cfiattily. "I Had it all figured out." He smiled, sometliing lie Hadn't done for a long time. "Landor and Donne?" asked tfie medic. He looked at tfie emptying IV bottle and set it down again. "OH, it was patfietic, I guess," Hobie said. "It started out... I believed they were real, you know? Kirk, Spock, McCoy, all of tfiem. And tfie sfiip. To this day, I swear...  One of tfiem talked to me once, I mean, fie really did . S . I fiad it all figured out, tfiey Had left me befiind as an observer. "Tfiey were coming back for me. It was my secret. All I Had to do was sort of fit in and observe. Like a report. One day tfiey would come back and Haul me up in that beam tiling; maybe you know about tliat? And there I'd be back in real time where Human beings were, wfiere tfiey were Human. I wasn't really stuck Here, stuck in tfie past. On a backward planet." Tfie paramed nodded. "OK, I mean, I didn't really Believe it, I knew it was just a sfiow. But I did believe it, too. It was like there somewhere, in tfie background, underneath no matter wfiat was going on. Wfiat I was doing. TKey were coming for me. All I fiad to do was observe. And not to interfere. You know? First law... Of course after I grew up, I realized they weren't, I mean I realized consciously. So I was going to go to them. Somehow, somewhere. Out tHere... , Now I know. It really isn't so. None of it. Never. THere's nothing. Tfiere's no... Now I know I'll die Here." "OH now," said tKe paramed. He got up and started to take tKe IV away. His fingers were sKaky. "It's clean tfiere," said Hobie in a petulant voice. "None of this mess. Clean and friendly. They don't shoot people," he explained, thrashing his head. "They don't..." He slept. The parairted went away. Somebody started to yell monotonously. Hobie opened his eyes. He was burning up. The yelling went on, became screaming. It was dusk. Footsteps went by. Headed for the screaming. Hobie saw they had put Him in a bed by the door. W ithout his doing much about it the screaming seemed to be lifting liim out of the bed, propelling Kim through the door. Air. He kept getting close-ups of his hands clutching things. Bushes, shadows. Something scratched him. After a while tlie screaming was a long way behind Kim. Maybe it was only in His ears. He shook His head, felt himself go down on something. He seemed to be in the cemetery. "No," Ke said. "Please. Please. No." He got himself up, balanced, blundered on. Seeking coolness. The side of the plane felt cool. He plastered his Hot body against it, patting it affectionately. It seemed to be quite dark now. Why was Ke inside with no lights? He tried the panel, the lights worked perfectly. Vaguely Ke noticed some yelling starting outside again. It ignited the screaming in his Head. TKe screaming got very loud -- loud moving him which was good. He came to above the overcast and climbing. TKe oxy support tube was Kitting Him in the nose. He grabbed for the mask, but it wasn't there. Automatically Ke Had leveled off. Now Ke rolled and looked around. Below him was a great lilac sea of cloud, with two mountains sticking through it, their western tips on fire. As Ke looked, they dimmed. He shivered, found Ke was wearing only sodden shorts. How Had Ke got here? Somebody Had screamed unbearably and He had run. He flew along calmly, checking his board. No trouble except the fuel. Nobody to service the AX#'s any more. Without thinking about it, he began to climb again. His hands were a yard away and he was shivering but he felt clear. He reached up and found his headphones were in place; he must have put them on along with the rest of the drill. He clicked on. Voices rattled and roared at him. He switched off. Then he took off the headpiece and dropped it on the floor. He looked around. #, heading #-#. He was over the Atlantic. In front of him the sky was darkening fast. A pinpoint glimmer # o'clock high. Sirius, probably. Carefully he began feeding to  his torches and swinging the nose of his pod around and up. He brought it neatly to a point on Sirius. Up. Up. Behind him, a great pale swing of contrail fell away above the lilac shadow, growing, towering to the tiny plane that climbed at its tip. Up. Up. The contrail cut off as the plane burst into the cold dry. As it did so, Hobie's ears skewered, and he screamed wildly. The pain quit; his drums had burst. Up. Now He was gasping for air, strangling. The great torches drove him on, up, above the curve of the world. He was hanging on the star. Up! The fuel guages were knocking. Any second they would quit and he and the bird would then start to fall. "Beam us back, Scotty!" fie howled at Sirius, laughing, coughing -- to death as the torches faltered -- And he was still coughing as He sprawled on the shining resiliency under the malfunctioning grids. He gagged, rolled, finally focussed on a personage leaning toward him out of a complex chair. The personage had round eyes, a slitted nose and the start of a quizzical smile. Hobie's head swivelled slowly. It was not the bridge of the Enterprise. There were no view-screens, only a View. And Lieutenant Uhura would have had trouble with the freeform flashing objects suspended in front of what appeared to be a girl wearing spots. The spots, Hobie made out, were fur. Somebody who was not Bones McCoy was doing something to Hobie's stomach. Hobie got up a Hand and touched the man's gleaming back. Under the mesfi it was firm and warm. The man looked up, grinned; Hobie looked back at the captain. "Do not have a fear," a voice was saying. It seemed to be coming out of a globe by the captain's console. "We will tell you where are you." "I know where I am," Hobie whispered to the captain. he passed out. How Like A God His crime was cruelty. His sentence was to spend eternity with the cruelest race in space! I o be was sweet. There was meditation -- a turning-in upon one's self. There was contemplation -- a turningout to regard others, and otherness. In meditation one remained contained. In contemplation there was a merging, a coalescence with the rest. Mok preferred meditation. Here Mok enjoyed identity and was conscious of being he, she or it, endlessly repeated through tEe memory of millenniums of incarnations. Mok, like the others, Ead evolved through many lifeforms on many worlds. Now Mok was free of the pain and free of the pleasures, too, free of the illusions of the senses which Had served the bodies Housing the beings which finally became Mok. And yet, Mok was not wholly free. Because Mok still turned to the memories for satisfaction. The others preferred contemplation. They enjoyed coalescing, mingling their memories, pooling their awareness and sharing their sense of being. Mok could never share completely. Mok was too conscious of the differences. For even without body, without sex, without physical limitation imposed by substance in time and space, Mok was aware of inequality. Mok was aware of Ser... Ser was the mightiest of them all. In coalescence, Ser's being dominated every pattern of contemplation. Ser's will imposed harmony on the others, but only if the others surrendered to it. To be was sweet. But it was not sweet enough. Upon this, Mok meditated. And when coalescence came again, Mok did not surrender. Mok fixed firmly upon the concept of freedom -- freedom of choice, the final freedom which Ser denied. There was agitation amongst the others; Mok sensed if. Some attempted to merge with Mok, for they too shared the concept, and Mok opened to receive them , feeling the strength grow. Mok was as strong as Ser now, stronger, calling upon the will and purof finite existences in which will and purpose were the roots of survival. But that survival Had been temporary, and this would be permanent, forever. Mok Held the concept, gathered the strength', firmed the purpose -- and then, quite suddenly, the purpose faded. The strength oozed away. The others were gone; nothing was left but Mok and the concept itself. The concept to -- Mok couldn't grasp the concept now. It had vanished. All that remained was Mok and Ser. Ser's will, obliterating concept and purpose and strength, imposing itself upon Mok, invading and inundating Mok's awareness. Mok's very being. But without concept there was no purpose, without purpose there was no strength, without strength Mok could not preserve awareness, and without awareness there was no being. Without being there was no Mok. T Then Mok's identity return' ' ed he was in the ship. Ship? Only memories of distant incarnations told Mok this was a ship, but it was unmistakably so: a slip, a vessel, a transporter, a plysical object, capable of pEysical movement through space and time. Space and time existed again, and the ship moved through them. TEe ship was confined in space and time, and Mok was confined in tEe slip, which' was just large enougE to house him as he journeyed. Yes, he. Mok was he. Confined now, not only in the prison of space and time, nor in the smaller prison of the ship, but in the prison of a body. A male body. Male. Mammalian. A spine to support the frame, arms and legs to support and grasp, eyes and ears and nose and other crude sensory receivers. Fleshy blood, skin -- yellowisE fur covering the latter, even along tEe lashing tail. Lungs for oxygen intake, which' at the moment was supplied by an ingenious transparent helmet and attached pack mechanism. Ingenious? But this was clumsy, crude, primitive, a relic of remote barbaric eras Mok could only vaguely recall. He tried to meditate, tried to contemplate, but now He could only see -- see through the transparency of the helmet as the ship settled to rest and its belly opened to catapult him forth upon the frigid surface of a barren planet where a cold moon wEeeled against the icy glitter of distant stars. The ship, too, had a form -- a body that was in itself vaguely modeled on mammalian concept, almost like one of those giant robots developed by life-forms in intermediate stages of evolution. Mok stared at the ship as it rested before him on the sterile, starlit slope. Yes, the ship had a domed cranial protuberance and two metal arms terminating in claws. Claws to open the belly of the sEip, claws that had lifted Molds body forth to disgorge him from the belly in a parody of birth. Now, as Mok watched, the ship's belly was closing again, sealing tightly while the metallic claws returned to rest at its sides. And flames of force were blasting from the pediment. The ship was rising, taking off. Mok had been embodied in the confines of the ship, imprisoned in this. His present form. The ship had carried him to this world and now it was leaving Him here. Which meant that the ship must be -- "Set!" He screamed, as the realization came, and the sound of His voice echoing in the hollow helmet almost split hi skull. But Ser did not answer. The ship continued to rise, tie rising accelerated, there was a roar and a glimmer and then an incandescence which faded to nothingness against the black backdrop of emptiness punctured by glittering pinpoints of light flickering down upon the world into which Mok had been bom. The world where Ser had left him to die... II Tl JT ok turned away. His body burned? Burned? Mok searched archaic memories and came up with another concept. He wasn't burning. He was freezing. This was cold. The surface of the planet was cold, and his skin -- fur? -- did not sufficiently protect him. Mok took a deep breath, and that in turn brought consciousness of the inner mechanism: circulation, nervous system, lungs. Lungs for breath, supplying the fuel of life. The feeder-pack on his back was small. Its content, scarcely enough to fill his needs on the flight here, would soon be exhausted. Was there oxygen on the surface of this planet? Mok glanced around. The rocky terrain was devoid of vegetation, and that was not a promising sign. But perhaps the entire surface wasn't like this; in other areas at lower levels, plant-life might flourish'. If so, functioning existence could be sustained. THere was only one way to learn. Mok's prehensile appendages -- not exactly claws, not quite fingers -- fumbled clumsily with the fastenings of the helmet and raised it gingerly. He took a shallow breath, then another. Yes, there was oxygen present. Satisfied, Mok removed Helmet and pack, along with the control mechanism strapped to his side. There' d be no further need of this apparatus here. What he needed now was warmth, a heated atmosphere. He glanced towards the bleak, black bulk of crags looming across the barren plain. He moved towards them slowly, under the silent, staring stars, toiling up a slope as a sudden wind tore at his shivering body. It was awkward, this body of his, a clumsy mechanism subject to crude muscular control. Only atavism came to his aid as half-perceived memories of ancient physical existence enabled him to move his legs with proper coordination. Walking -- climbing -- then crawling and clinging to tlie rocks -- all was demanding, difficult, a challenge to be met and mastered. But Mok ascended the face of the nearest cliff and found the opening, a crevasse with an inner fissure that became the mouth of a cave. A dark shelter from the wind, but it was warmer here. And the rocky floor sloped into deeper darkness. The pupils of his eyes accommodated, and Ke could guide Himself in the dim tunnelway, for His vision was that of a feral nyctalops. Mok crept through caverns like a giant cat, gusts of warm air billowing against his body to beckon him forward. Forward and down, forward and down. And now the Heat rose about him in palpable waves, the air singed with' an acrid scent, and there was a glowing from a light source ahead. Forward and down towards the light source, until He heard the hissing and the rumbling, felt the scalding steam, breathed tlie lung-searing gases, saw the spurting flames in which steam and gas were bom. The inner core of the planet was molten! Mok went no further. He turned and retreated to a comfortable distance, moving into a side passageway which led to still other offshoots. Here tortuous tunnels branched in all directions, but he was safe in warmth and darkness ; safe to rest His body -- this corporeal prison in which' He was doomed to dwell -- needed rest. Rest was not sleep. Rest was not hibernation, or estivation, or any of a thousand forms of suspended animation which Mok's memory summoned from myriad incarnations in the past. Rest was merely passivity. Passivity and reflection. Reflection... T mages mingled with long-discarded verbal concepts. With their aid, while passive, Mok formulated his situation. He was in the body of a beast, but there were subtle differentiations from the true mammal. Oxygen was needed, but not the respite of true sleep. And he felt no visceral stirrings, no pangs of physical hunger. He would not be dependent, he knew, upon the ingestion of alien substance for continued survival. As long as he protected his fleshly envelope from extremes of heat and cold, as long as he avoided excessive demands upon muscles and organs, he would exist. But despite the difference which distinguished him from a true mammal, he was still confined to his feral form. And his existence was bestial. Sensation surged within him, a flood of feeling Mok had not experienced in aeons, a quickening, sickening, burning, churning evocation of emotion. He knew it now. It was fear. Fear. The true bondage of the beast. Mok was afraid, because now he understood that this was planned, this part of Ser's purpose, Ser had committed him to this degradation, and modified his mammalian aspect so that lie could exist eternally. That was what Mok feared. Eternity in this form! Passive no longer, Mok flexed and rose. Summoning cognition to utmost capacity, Mok searched within himself for other, inherent powers. The power to merge, to coalesce -- that was gone. The power to transmute, to transfer, to transport, to transform -- gone. He could not change His physical being, could not alter his physical environment, save by physical means of his own devising within the limitations of his beast's body. So there was no escape from this existence. No escape. The realization brought fresh! fear, and Mok turned and ran. Ran blindly through the twisting corridors, fear riding him as he raced, raced mindlessly, endlessly. Somewhere along the way a tunnel burrowed upwards. Mok toiled through it, panting and gasping for breath'; he willed himself to stop breathing but the body, the beast-body, sucked air in greedy gulps, autonomically functioning beyond his conscious control. Scrambling along slanted spirals, Mok emerged once more upon the outer surface of Kis planetary prison. This was a lowlying area, distant and different from his point of entry, with vegetation vividly verdant against a dazzling dawn -- a valley, capable of supporting life. And there was life Here! Feathery forms chattering in the trees, furry figures scurrying tHrougK undergrowth, scaly slitherers, chitinoidal burrowers buzzing. TKese were simple shapes, crudely conceived creatures of primitive pursuits, but alive and aware. Mok sensed them, and they sensed Mok. There was no way of communicating with them except vocally, but even the soft sounds issuing from his throat sent them fleeing frantically. For Mok was a beast now, who feared and was feared. He crouched amongst the rocks at the mouth of the cavern from which he had come forth and gazed in helpless, hopeless confusion at the panic his presence had provoked, and the soft sounds he uttered gave place to a growling groan of despair. And it was then that they found him -- the hairy bipeds, moved cautiously to encircle him until he was ringed by a shambling band. These were troglodytes, grunting and snuffling and giving off an acrid stench of mingled fear and rage as they cautiously approached. TVTok stared at them, noting how the hunched, swaying figures moved in concert to approach him. They clutched crude clubs, mere branches torn from trees; some carried rocks scooped up from the surface of the slope. But these were weapons, capable of inflicting injury, and the hairy creatures were hunters seeking their prey. Mok turned to retreat into the cavern, but the way was barred now by shaggy bodies, and there was no escape. The troglodytes pressed forward now, awe and apprehension giving place to anger. Yellow fangs bared, hairy arms raised. One of the creatures -- the leader of the pack -- grunted what seemed a signal. And they hurled their rocks. Mok raised his arms to protect his head. His vision was blocked, so that he heard the sound of the stones clattering against the slope before he saw them fall. Then, as the growls and shrieks rose to a frenzy. Mok glanced up to see the rocks rebounding upon his attackers. Raging, they closed in to smash at Mok's skull and body with their clubs. Mok heard the sounds of impact, but he felt nothing, for the blows never reached their intended target. Instead, tfie clubs splintered and broke in empty air. TEen Mok wEirled, confused, to face Eis enemies. As Ee did so tfiey recoiled, screaming in fright. Breaking tfie circle, tfiey retreated down tfie slopes and info tfie forest, fleeing from this strange thing tHat could not be Harmed or killed, this invincible entity --  This invincible entity. It was Mok's concept, and He understood, now. Ser Had granted Him that final irony -- invincibility. A field of force, surrounding His body, rendering Him immune to injury and death. No doubt it also immunized Him from bacterial invasion. He was in a pEysical form, but one independent of physical needs to sustain survival; one which would exist, indestructibly, forever. He was, in truth, imprisoned, and eternal. For a moment Mok stood stunned at the comprehension, blankly blinded by the almost tangible intensity of black despair. Here was tfie ultimate Horror -- doom without death', exile without end, isolation throughout infinity. Alone forever. Numbed senses reasserted their sway, and Mok glanced around the empty stillness of tlie slope. It wasn't entirely empty. Two of tfie troglodytic creatures sprawled motionless on tfie rocks directly below him. One was bleeding from a gash in the sMe of His Bead, inflicted by a sefeounding club, the other Had been felled by a glancing blow from a stone. These creatures weren't immortal. Mok moved toward them, noting chest movement, the soft susgurafcion of breath. They weren't immortal, but tfiey were still alive. Alive and Helpless. Vulnerable, at Ms mercy. Mercy. Tlie quality Ser Had refused to show Mok. There had been no mercy in condemning him to spend eternity here alone. Mok Halted, peering down at tfie two unconscious forms. He made a sound in his throat, a sound that was curiously like a chuckle. Perhaps that was a way out, after all, a way to at least mitigate his sentence here. If he showed mercy now, to these creatures -- he might not always fee alone. Mok reached down, lifting the body of the first creature in his arms. It was Heavy in its limpness, but Mok's strength was great. He picked up tfie second creature carefully, so as not f injure it further. Then, still chuckling, Mfek turned and carried the two unconscious forms back into the cavern. Ill Tn tfie warm, firelit sHelter of tfie deeper caverns, Mok tended to tBe creatures. WSile tfiey slumbered fitfully, fie ascended again to tfie surface and foraged for tfieir nourisfiment in tfie green glades. He brougfit food and, calling upon distant memories, fasfiioned crude clay pots in wfiicfi to carry water to tfiem from a mountainside spring. After a time tfiey regained consciousness and they were afraid -- afraid of tfie great beast witfi tfie bulging eyes and lasfiing tail, tfie beast tfiey knew to be deathless. It was simple enougfi for Mok to fatfiom tfie crude construct of growls and grantings wfiicfi served tfiese life-forms as a principal means of communication, simple enougfi to grasp tfie limited concepts and references symbolized in tfieir speecfi. Within tfiese limitations fie attempted to tell tfiem wfio and wfiat fie was and Kow fie Had come to be Here, but while tfiey listened tfiey did not comprehend. And still tfiey feared fiim, tfie female specimen more tfian tfie male. Tfie male, at least, evinced curiosity concerning the clay pots, and Mok demonstrated the fashioning metfiod until tfie male was able to imitate it successfully. But botfi were wary, and both reacted in terror wfien confronted witfi tfie molten readies of tfie planet's inner core. Nor could tfiey become accustomed to tfie acrid gases, tfie darkness enveloping the maze of far-flung fissures Honeycombing tfie substrata. As they gathered strength over tfie passage of time, tfiey Huddled together and murmured, eyeing Mok apprehensively. Mok was not too surprised wfien, upon returning from one of fiis food-gathering expeditions to tfie surface, fie discovered tfiat they were gone. But Mok was surprised by. tfie strength of his own reaction -- tfie sudden responsive surge of loneliness. Loneliness -- for those creatures? They couldn't conceivably serve as companions, even on tfie lowest level of sucfi a relationship; and yet fie missed tfieir presence. Tfieir mere presence had in itself been some assayigement to his own inner agony of isolation. Now fie realized a growing sympathy for tfiem in tfie Helplessness of tfieir abysmal ignorance. Even tfieir destructive impulses excited pity, for sucfi impulses indicated tfieir constant fear. Beings such! as tfiese lived out tfieir tiny span in utter dread; tfiey trusted neither tfieir environment nor one another, and eacfi new experience or phenomenon was perceived as a potential peril. They had no hope, no abstract image of the future to sustain them. Mok wondered if His two captives Had succeeded in their escape. He prowled the passages searching for them, visioning tlieir weary wanderings, their pathetic plight if they Had become lost in the underground fastnesses. But he found nothing. Once again he was alone in the warm beast-body that knew neither fatigue nor pain -- except for this new pang, this lonely longing for contact with life on any level. Ancient concepts came to him,, identifying the nuances of his reactions, all likened and linked to finite time-spans. Monotony. Boredom. Restlessness. These were the emotive elements which forced him up again from the confined comfort of the caves. He prowled the planet, avoiding the bleak, cold wastes and searching out the areas of lush vegetation. For a long period he encountered only the lowest life-forms. nphen one of his diurnal foraysto the surface brought him to a stream, and as He crouched behind a clump of vegetation he peered at a group of troglodytes gathered on its far bank. Vocalizing in their pattern of growls and grunts, He veriftitirecl forth, uttering phonic placatioii But they screamed at the sight of him, screamed and fled into the forest, and he was left alone. Left alone, to stoop and pick up what they had abandoned in their flight -- two crude clay containers, half-filled with water. Now He knew the fate of his; captives. They Had survived and returned to their own kind, bringing with them their newly acquired skill. What tales they had told of their experience He could not surmise, but they remembered what he had taught them. They were capable of learning. Mok had no need of further proof, and the incentive was there; the compound of pity, of concern for these creatures, of his his own need for contact on any level. And here was a logical level indeed -- there would never be companionship, that he understood and accepted, but this other relationship was possible. The relationship between teacher and pupil, between mentor and supplicant, between the governing power and the governed. The governing power... Mok turned the clay containers this way and that, noting the clumsiness with which they had been fashioned, noting the irregularities of their surface. He could so easily correct that clumsiness, He could so surely smooth and reshape tKat clay. Govern tHe earth, govern tHe creatures, impart and instruct tHat wfiicH would sHape tEem anew. And tHen tHe ultimate realization came. TEis would be duty and destiny, function and fulfillment. WitHin tHe prison of space and time, he would mold the little lives. Now He know His own fate. He would be their god. IV Tt was a strange role, but Mok played it well. TKere were obstacles, of course. THe first to be faced was the fear in wEicK they Held Elm. He was an alien, and to tHe primitive minds of tKese creatures, anything alien was. abhorrent. His very appearance provoked reactions which prevented Him from approaching them, and for a time Mok despaired of overcoming this communication barrier. THen, slowly He came to tEe realize tKat their fear was in itself a tool He could employ to positive ends. With it He could invoke awe, authority, awareness of His powers. Yes, that was the way. To accept His condition and stay apart from tEem always, confident that in time their own curiosity would drive them to seek them out. So Mok kept to tHe caves, and gradually tHe contacts, were made. Not all of tHe Eominids came to Kim, of course, only tEe boldest and most enterprising, but these were tHe ones He awaited. Tfiese were tHe ones most fitted to learn. As He expected, the experience of Els captives became a legend, and tEe legend led to worship. It was useless for Mok to discourage this, impossible even to make tEe attempt in the light of their primitive reasoning, a barter-system must prevail. Offerings and sacrifices were the price they must pay in return for wisdom. Mok scanned his own primordial memories, assigning an order to the learning He imparted: the gift of fire, the secret of cultivation, tHe firing of clay, the shaping of weapons, tHe subjugation and domestication of lesser life-forms, the control and eradication of others. Slowly a more sophisticated system of communication evolved, first on the verbal and then on the visual level. THe creatures disseminated His wisdom, absorbing it into their crude culture. They learned the uses of wheel and lever, then reached the gradual abstraction of the numeral concept. Now they were capable of making their own independent discoveries; language and mathematics stimulated selfdevelopment. But in times of crisis there was still a need for further enlightenment. Natural forces beyond their limited powers of control brought periodic disaster to life-patterns on the surface of the planet, and with every upheaval came a resurgence of the worship and sacrifices Mok secretly abhorred. Yet these creatures seemed to feel the necessity of making recompense for the skills he could grant them and the bonus these skills conferred, and Mok reluctantly accepted this. It was harder for him to accept the continuation of their fear. For a time he hoped that as their enlightment increased they would revise their attitudes. Instead, their dreads actually increased. Mok attempted to observe their progress at first hand, but there was no opportunity for open contact and communication, and his mere appearance provoked panic. Even those who sought him in secret, or led the rituals of worship, seemed to be afraid of acknowledging the fact, lest it lessen their own superior status within the group. Acknowl edging and acclaiming the existence of their god, they neverthe!  less avoided his physical presT ence. Perhaps it was because sects and schisms had sprung up, each  with its own hierarchy, its own dogma regarding the true na tV lure of what they worshipped. Mok remembered, wryly, that in organized religion the actual presence of a god is an embarrassment. Co Mok refrained from further visitations, and as time passed lie retreated deeper and deeper into the caverns. Now it was almost unnecessary for Him to maintain even token contact, for these creatures Had evolved to a stage wKere they were capable of self development. But even gods grow lonely, and take nurture in pride. Thus it was that at rare intervals, and in utmost secrecy, Mok ventured forth for a hasty glimpse of His domain. One evening He came forth upon a mountaintop. Here the stars still glittered coldly, but there was an even greater glitter emanating from the expanse below -- the huge citycomplex towering as a testament to the wisdom of these creatures, and His own. Mok stared down, and the sweet surges of pride coursed through Kim as he contemplated what he had wronght. These toys, these trifles with which He played, now toyed and trifled with the prime forces of the universe to create their own destiny. PerHaps He, as their god, was misunderstood, even forgotten now. But did it matter? They Had achieved independence, they did not need Him any more. Or did they? The concept came, and it was wind of mountain night. These creatures created, but they also destroyed. And tlieir motivations -- their greeds, their Hungers, their lusts, their fears -- were still those of the beasts they had been. The beasts they could become again, if spiritual awareness did not keep pace with material attainment. There was still a need here, a need greater than before. And now Mok felt no pride, only perplexity which pierced more poig-? nantly than pain. How could he Help them? "You cannot ." T he communication came, and Mok whirled. Absorbed, Ke had not sensed the silent streaking of the ship from sky to surface, but it was Here now, remembered and recognized. The ship which had captured and conveyed Kim, the strangely shaped ship which was Ser -- It hovered xncandescently against the horizon of infinity, and as if communication Had been a signal, Mok found Himself caught up in a long-discarded reaction. He was contemplating Ser, And in that colloquy, Ser's concepts flowed to him. "Valid, You cannot fulfill tfieir needs. Already you Have done too much." Despite conscious volition, Molt felt the stubborn resurgence of Ki pride. But tHere was no need I to formulate tEe reasons, for Ser's contemplation was complete. "You are in error. I sensed your rebellion, overcame you,, brought you here -- but it was not a punishment. You were placed for a purpose. Because this pride, this urge to invest identity through achievement, could be of use at this time, in this place. Like the others." "Others?" Confusion colored Mok's contemplation. "Did you conceive of yourself as the only rebel? Not so. THere have been more, many more. And they have served their purposes on other worlds throughout the cosmos. Worlds where the seeds of life needed cultivation and careful nurturing. I chose them for their tasks, just as I chose you. And you have not failed." Mok considered, then communicated with an energy which surprised I him. "Then let me continue! Endow me with what is necessary to Help them now!" Ser's concept came. "It is not possible." Mok contemplated in final effort. "But it is my right to do so. I am their god." "No," Ser answered. "You Have never been their god. You were chosen for what you were -- to be their devil." Devil...  There was no contemplation now, only maddening meditation as Mok scanned through concepts long discarded from incarnations long lost save in immutable memory. Concepts of good, evil, right, wrong -- concepts embodied in the primitive religions of a million primitive pasts. God arose from those concepts, and so did the embodiment of an opposing force. And in all the legends in each of the myriad myths, the pattern was the same. A rebel cast down from the skies to tempt with teaching, to furnish forbidden knowledge at a price. A being in the form of a beast, skulking in darkness, in the pit where inner fires flamed forever. And he had been this being; it was true, He was a devil. Only pride Had blinded him to the truth the pride which had prompted Him to play god. "A pride of which you have been purged," Ser's communication continued. "One can sense in you now only mercy and compassion for these creatures and their potential peril. One can sense love." "It is true," Mok acknowledged. "I feel love for them." Ser's assent came. "With your aid, these creatures evolved. But you have evolved too -- losing pride, gaining love. In so doing, you cannot function for them as their devil any longer. Your usefulness here is ended." "But what will happen?" Hphe answer came not as a concept but as an accomplishment . Suddenly Mok was no longer in the tawny body of the beast. He was in the ship, hovering and gazing down at that body; gazing down at the creature which lashed its tail and stared up at him with bulging eyes. The creature which now contained the essence of Ser. And Ser communicated. "For a span you shall take my place, as you once desired. You will seed the stars, instill order in chaos, lead the others in contemplation. You will do so in understanding, and in love." "And you?" Mok asked. The being in the bestial body formed a final concept. "I take your role and your responsibility. There is that within me which must also be purged, and it may be I will destroy much of what you have created here. But in the end, even as their devil, I may bring them to an ultimate salvation. The cycle changes." Mok willed the celestial machine in which his essence dwelt, willed it to rise, and like a fiery chariot it ascended to the realms of glory awaiting him in the skies beyond. As he did so, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Ser. The beast had turned to descend the mountain. Padding purposefully, the devil was entering his kingdom. Mok's comprehension faltered. Cycle? Ser had been a god and now he was a devil. Mok had been a devil and now he was a god. But he could never have become a god if Ser hadn't willed the exchange of roles. Was this Ser's intent all along -- to allow Mok to evolve as devil and then usurp his identity? In that case, Ser was actually a devil from the beginning, and Mok had been right in opposing him, for Mok was truly godlike. Or were they all -- Mok, Ser, the others, even the primitive mammalian creatures on this planet -- both gods and devils? It was a matter, Mok decided, which might require an eternity New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! HE Uncle George was a dealer in junk -- such as diamonds and great art! I MpKe police picked up Uncle George walking west on Elm street at # o'clock in tHe morning. He was shuffling along, muttering to Himself, and His clotKes were soaked, as if He'd been out in tfie rain -- and Cottonwood country for tHe last tfiree months Had been suffering a drought, witH tHe corn withering in the field and day after day not a cloud in sight. He was carrying a good-sized painting underneath one arm and in the other Hand Ee carried a pail filled to tHe brim witH diamonds. He was in Eis stocking feet; Ee'd lost Eis sEoes somewhere. When Officer Alvin Saunders picked him up, Ee asked Uncle George what was going on, and George mumbled something that Alvin couldn't quite make out. He seemed to be befuddled. So Alvin took him to tEe station, and it wasn't until then they saw that his pockets bulged. So they emptied his pockets and laid all the stuff out on a table, and when they'd had a good look at it, Sergeant Steve O'Donnell phoned Chief Chet Burnside to ask him what to do. The chief, sore at being hauled out of bed, said to throw George into pokey. So that is what they did. You couldn't really blame the chief, of course. Off and on, for years, Uncle George had given the police force of Willow Grove a fair amount of trouble. But as soon as Uncle George Had a chance to look around and realize where he was. He grabbed up a stool and beat upon the bars, yelling that the dirty fuzz Had framed him once again and declaring very loudly that his constitutional rights as a free and upright citizen were being trampled on. "I know my rights," he yelled. "You owe me at least one pEone call and when I get out of Here I'm going to sue all of you on the grounds of false arrest." So they unlocked tEe cell and let him make Eis call. As usual he made the call to me. "Who is it?" Elsie asked, sitting up in bed. "It's your Uncle George," I said. "I knew it!" I said... "I knew it!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Myrt is off to California to visit relatives. And he's running loose again." All right," I said to George, "what could it be this time?" "You needn't take that tone of voice, John," he said. "It's only once or twice a year I call you. And what's the use of having a lawyer in the family... " "You can skip that part of it," I told him, "and get down to what is going on." "This time," he said, triumphantly, "I got them dead to rights. This time you get paid off. I'll split the judgment with you. I wasn't doing nothing. I was walking down the street when the fuzz pulled up and hauled me in. I vasn't staggering and I wasn't singing. I was creating no disturbance. I tell you, John, a man lias the right to walk the streets, no matter at what hour..." "I'll be right down," I said. "Don't be too long," said Elsie, "You have a hard day coming up in the court." "Are you kidding?" I asked. "'With Uncle George, the day's already lost." '  tion, they all were waiting for me. George was sitting beside a table, and on the table stood the pail of diamonds with the junk they'd taken from his pockets and the painting was leaning up against it. The police chief had gotten there, just a few minutes ahead of me. "Okay," I said, "let's get down to business. What's the charge?" The chief still was pretty sore. "We don't need no charge right yet." "I'll tell you, CHet," I said, "you'll need one badly before the day is over, so you better start to thinking." "I'm going to wait," said Chet, "to see wh'at Charley says." He meant Charley Nevins, the county attorney. "All right, then," I said, "if there is no charge as yet, what are the circumstances?" "Well," said the chief, "George here was carrying a pail of diamonds. And you tell me just how he came by a pail of diamonds." "Maybe they aren't diamonds," I suggested. "How come you're so sure that they are diamonds?" "Soon as He opens up, we'll get Harry in to have a look at them." Harry was the jeweler, who had a shop across the square. I went over to the table and picked up some of the diamonds. They surely looked like diamonds, but I am no jeweler. They were cut and faceted and shot fire in the light. Some of them were bigger than my fist. "Even if they should b'e diamonds," I demanded, "'what Has that to do with it? There's no law I know of says a man can't carry diamonds." "That's telling them!" cheered George. "You shut up," I told Kim, "and keep out of this. Let me handle it." "But George Here hasn't got no diamonds," said the chief. "These must be stolen diamonds." "Are you charging Kim with theft?" I asked. "Well, not right now," said the chief. "I ain't got no evidence as yet." "And there's that painting, too," said Alvin Saunders. "It looks to me just like one of them old masters." "There's one thing," I told them, "that puzzles me exceedingly. Would you tell me where, in Willow Grove, anyone bent on thievery could find an old master or a pail of diamonds?" That stopped them, of course. There isn't anyone in Willow Grove who has an honest-to-God painting except Banker Amos Stevens, who brought one back from a visit to Chicago; and knowing as little as he does about the world of art he was probably taken, "You'll have to admit, though," said the chief, "there's something funny going on." "Maybe so," I said, "but I doubt that that alone is sufficient ground to hold a man in jail." "It ain't the diamonds or the paintings so much as this other stuff," declared the chief, "that makes me think there are shenanigans afoot. Look at this, will you!" TT e picked up a gadget from the table and Held it out to me. "Watch out," he warned. "One end of it's hot, and the ether end is cold." It was about a foot in length and shaped something like an hourglass. The hourglass part of it was some sort of transparent plastic, pinched in at the middle and flaring at both ends, and the ends were open. Through the center of it ran a rod that looked like metal. One end of the metal glowed redly, and when I held my hand down opposite the open end a blast of heat came out. The other end was white, covered by crystals. I turned it around to look. "Keep away from it," warned the chief. "That end of it is colder than a witch's spit. Them's big ice crystals hanging onto it." I laid it back upon the table, carefully. "Well," the chief demanded, "what do you make of it?" "I don't know," I said. I never took any more physics in school than had been necessary and I'd long since forgotten all I'd ever known about it. But I knew damn well that the gadget on the table was impossible. But impossible or not, there it was, one end of the rod glowing with its Heat, the other frosted by its cold. "And this," said the chief, picking up a little triangle formed by a thin rod of metal or of plastic. "What do you think of this?" "What should I think of it?" I asked. "It's just..." "Stick your finger through it," said the police chief triumphantly." I tried to stick my finger through it and I couldn't. There was nothing there to stop me. My finger didn't hit anything, there was no pressure on it and I couldn't feel a thing, but I couldn't put my finger through the center of that triangle. It was as if I'd hit a solid wall that I couldn't see or feel. "Let me see that thing," I said. The chief handed it to me, and I held it up to the ceiling light and I twisted it and turned it, and so Help me, there wasn't anything there. I could see right through it and' I could see there was nothing there, but when I tried to put my finger through the center, there was something there to stop it. I laid it back on the table beside the hourglass thing. "You want to see more?" asked the chief. I shook my head. "I'll grant you, Chet, that I don't know what this is all about, but I don't see a thing here that justifies you in holding George." "I'm holding him," said the chief, "until I can talk to Charley." "You know, of course, that as soon as court opens, I'll be back here with an order for his release." "I know that, John," said the chief. "You're a real good lawyer. But I can't let him go." want a signed inventory of all this stuff you took off of him, and then I want you to lock it up." "But..." "Theoretically," I said, "it's George's property..." "It couldn't be. You know it couldn't, John. Where would Be have gotten..." "Until you can prove that Be Has stolen it from some specific person, I imagine the law would say that it was His. A man doesn't have to prove where he obtained such' property." "OH, all right," said the cEief. "I'll make out the inventory, but I don't know just what we'll call some of this stuff." "And now," I said, "I'd like to Have a moment to confer with my client." After balking and stalling around a bit, the chief opened up the city council chamber for us. "Now, George," I said, "I want you to tell me exactly How it was. Tell me everything that Happened and tell it from the start." George knew I wasn't fooling, and He knew better than to lie to me. I always caught him in his lies. "You know, of course," said George, "that Myrt is gone... " "I know that," I said. "And you know that every time she's gone, I go out and get drunk and get into some sort of trouble. But this time I promised myself I wouldn't do any drinking and wouldn't get into any kind of trouble. Myrt's put up with a lot from me, and this time I was set to show Her I could behave myself. So last night I was sitting in the living room, with my slices off, in my Stocking feet, with the TV turned on, watching a ball game. You know, John, if them Twins could get a shortstop they might stand a chance next year. A shortstop and a little better pitching and some left-handed' batters and... "Get on with it," I said. "I was just sitting there," said George, "watching this here ball game and drinking beer. I had got a six-pack and I guess I was on the last bottle of it... " "I thought you said you Had promised yourself you would do no drinking." "Afi, John, this was only beer. I can drink beer all day and never..." "All right, go on," I said. fiflXTell, I was just sitting  ' there, drinking that last bottle of beer and the game was in the seventh inning and the Yanks had two men on and Mantle coming up... " "Damn it, not the game!" I yelled at him. "Tell me what happened to you. You're the one in trouble." "That's about all there was to it," said George. "It was the seventh inning and Mantle coming up, and the next thing I knew I was walking on the street and a police car pulling up?" "You mean you don't know what happened in between? You don't know where you got the pail of diamonds or the painting or all the other junk?" George shook his head. "I'm telling you just the way it was. I don't remember anything. I wouldn't lie to you. It doesn't pay to lie to you. You always trip me up." I sat there for a while, looking at him, and I knew it was no use to ask him any more. He probably Had told me the truth, but perhaps not all of it, and it would take more time than I had right then to sweat it out of him... "O.K.," I said:, "we'll let it go at that. You go back and get into that cell and don't let out a whimper. Just behave yourself. I'll be down by nine o'clock or so and get you out. Don't talk to anyone. Don't answer any questions. Volunteer no information. If anyone asks you anything, tell them I've told you not to talk." "Do I get to keep the diamonds?" "I don't know," I said. "They may not be diamonds." "But you asked for an inventory." "Sure I did," I said, "but I don't know if I can make it stick." "One thing, John. I got an awful thirst..." "No," I said. "Three or four botles of beer. THat couldn't hurt much. A man can't get drunk on only three or four. I wasn't drunk last night. I swear to you I wasn't." "Where would I get beer at this time in the morning?" "You always have a few tucked away in your refrigerator. And that's only six blocks or so away." "OH, all right," I said. "I'll ask the chief about it." The chief said yes, he guessed it would be all right, so I left to get the beer. II nph'e moon was setting behind the courthouse cupola, and in the courthouse square the Soldier's Monument was alternately lighted and darkened by a street lamp swaying in a little breeze. I had a look at the sky, and it seemed entirely clear. There were no clouds in sight and no chance of rain. The sun, in a few hours more, would blaze down again and the corn would dry a little more and the fanners would watch their wells anxiously as the pumps brought up lessening streams of water for their bawling cattle. A pack of five or six dogs came running across the courthouse lawn. There was a dog-leashing ordinance, but everyone tamed their dogs loose at night and hoped they would come home for breakfast before Virgil Tfiompison, the city dog catcher, could get 'wind of them. I got into the car and drove home and found four bottles of beer in the refrigerator. I took it back to the station, then drove Home again. By this time it was #:#, and I decided it wasn't worth my while to go back to bed, so I made some coffee and started to fry some eggs. Elsie heard me and came down, and I fried some eggs for her and we sat and talked. Her Uncle George had been in a lot of scrapes, none of them serious, and I had always managed to get him out of them one way or another. He wasn't a vicious character and lie was an Honest man, liked by most everyone in town. He ran a junkyard out at the edge of town, charging people for dumping trash, most of which he used to fill in a swampy stretch of ground, salvaging some of the more usable junk and selling it cheap to people who might need it. It wasn't a very elevating kind of business, but he made an honest living at it and in a little town like ours if you made an honest living it counts for quite a lot. But this scrape was just a little different, and it bothered me. It wasn't exactly the kind of situation that was covered in a law book. The thing that bothered me the most was where George could have gotten the stuff they found on him. "Do you think we should phone Aunt Myrt?" asked Elsie. "Not right now," I told her. "Having her here wouldn't help at all. All she'd do would be to scream and wring her hands." "What are you going to do first of all?" she asked. "First of all," I said, "I'm going to find Judge Benson and get a writ to spring him out of jail. Unless Charley Nivens can find some grounds for holding him and I don't think he can. Not right away, at least." But I never got the writ. I was about to leave my office to go over to the courthouse to hunt up the judge when Dorothy Ingles, my old-maid secretary, told me I had a call from Charley. T picked up the phone, and he didn't even wait for me to say hello. He just started shouting. "All right," he yelled, "you can start explaining. Tell me how you did it." "How I did what?" I asked. "How George broke out of jail." "But he isn't out of jail. When I left he was locked up and I was just now going over to the courthouse..." "He's not locked up now," yelled Cliarley. "Th'e cell door still is locked, but he isn't there. All that's left is four empty beer bottles, standing in a row." "Look, Charley," I said, "I don't know a thing about this. You know me well enough... " "Yeah," yelled Charley, "I know you well enough'. There isn't any dirty trick..." He strangled on his words, and it was only justice. Of all the tricky lawyers in the state, Charley is tlie trickiest. "If you are thinking," I said, "of swearing out a fugitive warrant for him, you might give a thought to the lack of grounds for his incarceration." "Grounds!" yelled Charley. "There is that pail of diamonds." "If they are really diamonds." "They are diamonds, that's for sure. Harry Johnson had a look at them this morning and he says that they are diamonds. There is just one thing wrong. Harry says there are no diamonds in the worldas big as those. And very few as perfect." He paused for a moment and then he whispered, hoarsely, "Tell me, John, what is going on. Let me in on it." "I don't know," I said. "But you talked with him and he told the chief you had told him not to answer any questions." "That's good legal procedure," I told him. "You can have no quarrel with that. And another thing. I'll hold you responsible for seeing that those diamonds don't disappear somehow. I have an inventory signed by Chet and there is no charge..." "What about busting jail?" "Not unless you can show cause for his being arrested in the first place." He slammed down the receiver, and I hung up the plione and sat there trying to get the facts straight inside my mind. But they were too fantastic for me to make them spell out any sense. "Dorothy," I yelled. She poked her head around t He door, her face prissy with her disapproval. Somehow, apparently, she had heard about what had been going on -- as, no doubt, had everyone in town --  and she was one of the few who Held George in very illrepute. She thought lie was a slob. She resented my relationship to him and she often pointed out that he cost me over the years, a lot of time and cash, with, no money ever coming back. Which was true, of course, but you can't expect a junkyard operator to afford fancy legal fees and, in any case, he was Elsie's uncle. "Put in a call to Calvin Ross," I told her, "at the Institute of Arts in Minneapolis. He is an old friend of mine and..." Tp anker Amos Stevens came JL b urs ting through the door. He crossed the outer office and brushed past Dorothy as if she weren't there. "John, do you know wfiat you Have got -- what you've got down there!" "No," I said. "Please tell me." "You have got a Rembrandt!" "Oh, you mean the painting." "Where do you think George found a Rembrandt? There aren't any Rembrandts except in museums and such." "We'll soon find out more about it," I told Banker Stevens Willow Grove's one and only expert in the arts. "I've got a call in now and..." Dorothy stuck her head around the door. "Mr. Ross is on the phone," she said. I picked up the phone and I felt a little funny about it, because Cal Ross and I hadn't seen each other for a good fifteen years or more, and I wasn't even sure he would remember me. But I told him who I was and acted as if we'd had lunch together just the day before, and he did the same to me. Then I got down to business. "Cal, we have a painting out here that maybe you should have a look at. Some people think it might be old and I perhaps by ne of the old masters. I know that it sounds crazy, but..." "Where did you say tliis painting is?" lie asked. "Here in Willow Grove." "Have you Had a look at it?" "Well, yes," I said, "a glance, but I wouldn't know..." "Tell Him," Stevens wfiispered, fiercely, "tfiat is it a Rembrandt," "Who owns it?" "Not really anyone," I said, "It's down at the city jail." "John, are you trying to suck me into something? As an expert witness, maybe." "Nothing like that," I said, "but it does Have a bearing on a case of mine and I suppose I could dig up a fee... " "Tell Him," Stevens insisted, "that it is a Rembrandt." "Did I Hear someone talking about a Rembrandt?" Cal asked. "No," I said. "No one knows what it is." "Maybe I could get away," He said. He was getting interested well, maybe interested isn't the words; intrigued might be more like it. "I could arrange a charter to fly you out," I said. "It's that important, is it?" "To tell you the truth, Cal, I don't know if it is or not. I'd just like your opinion." "'Fix up the charter, then," He said, "and call me back. I can be at the airport to be picked up within an Hour." "Thanks, Cal," I said "I'll be seeing you." I# hie would be sore at me, I knew, and Dorothy would be furious. Chartering a plane, for a small-town lawyer in a place like Willow Grove, is downright extravagance. But if we could Hang onto those diamonds, or even a part of them, the bill for the charter would be peanuts. If they were diamonds. I wasn't absolutely sure Harry Johnson would know a diamond if he saw one. He sold them in His store, of course, but I suspected that He just took some wholesaler's word that what He had were diamonds. "Who was that you were talking to?" demanded Banker Stevens. I told him who it was. "Then why didn't you tell Him it was a Rembrandt?" Stevens raged at me. "Don't you think that I would know a Rembrandt?" I almost told him no, that I didn't think He would, and then thought better of it. Some day I might Have to ask Him for a loan. "Look, Amos," I said, "I didn't want to do anything that would prejudice his judgment. Nothing that would sway him one way or the other. Once He gets Here He will no doubt see right away tliat it is a Rembrandt." That mollified him a bit, and then I called in Dorothy and asked Kef to fix up arrangements for Cal to be flown out, and Her moutH got grimmer and Her face more prissy at every word I said. If Amos hadn't been there, sKe'd Eave Had something to say about throwing away my money. Looking at her, I could understand the vast enjoyment she got out of the revival meetings that blossomed out in Willow Grove and other nearby towns each summer. She went to all of them, no matter what the sect, and sat on the hard benches in the summer heat and dropped in her quarter when the collection plate was passed and sucked out of the fire-and-brimstone preaching a vast amount of comfort. She was always urging me to go to them, but I never went. I always had the feeling she thought they might do me a world of good. "You're going to be late in court," she told me curtly, "and the case this morning is one you've spent a lot of time on." Which was Her way of telling me I shouldn't be wasting any of my time on George. So I went off to court. At noon recess, I phoned the jail, and Ehere'd been no sign of George. At three o'clock, Dorothy came across the square to tell me Calvin Ross would be coming in at five. I asked her to phone Elsie to be expecting a guest for dinner and maybe one for overnight; and she didn't say anything, but from Her face I knew she thought I was a brute and she'd not blame Elsie any if she up and left me. Such haeonsideration! At five o'clock I picked Cal up at our little airport and a fair crowd was on hand. Somehow the word had got around that an art expert was flying out to Have a look at the painting George Wetmore Had picked up somewhere. Cal was somewhat older than I had remembered him and age Had served to emphasize and sharpen up the dignity that he'd Had even in his youth. But he was kind and affable and as enthusiastic about his art as he had ever been. And I realized, with a start that he was excited. The possibility of finding a long-lost painting of some significance must be, I realized, a dream that is dear to everyone in the field. I drove him down to the square and we went into the station and I introduced him round. Chet told me there was no sign of George. After a little argument, he got out the painting and laid it on the table underneath the ceiling light. Cal walked over to look down at it and suddenly he froze, like a bird dog on the point. For a long time he stood there, not moving, looking down at it, while the rest of us stood around and tried not to breathe too Kard. Then he took a folding magnifier out of His pocket and unfolded it. He bent above tKe painting and moved tKe glass from spot to spot, staring at eacB spot over wHicH lie Held tKe glass for long seconds. Finally Ke straigKtened up. "John," Ke said, "would you please tilt it up for me." I tilted it up on tKe table and Ke walked back a ways and Had a long look at it from several angles and then came back and examined it witK tKe glass again. Finally he straigKtened up again and nodded to CKet. "TKanks very much," Ke said. "If I were you, I'd guard that canvas very carefully." Chet was dying to know wfiat Cal might think, but I didn't give him a chance to ask. I doubt Cal would Have told him anything even if He'd asked. I Hustled Cal out of there and got him in the car and we sat tKere for a moment without either of them saying anything at all. Then Cal said, "Unless my critical faculties and my knowledge of art have deserted me entirely, that canvas in there is ToulouseLautrec's Quadrille at the Moulin Rouge." So it wasn't Rembrandt! I'd known damn well it wasn't. So much for Amos Stevens! "I'd stake my life on it," said Cal. "I can't be mistaken. No one could copy the canvas as faithfully as that. There is only one thing wrong."" "Wh'at is that?" I asked. "Quadrille at the Moulin Rouge is in Washington, at the National Gallery of Art." T experienced a sinking feeling in my gizzard. If George somehow Had managed to rifle the National Gallery both of us were sunk. "It's possible the painting is missing," said Cal, "and the National Gallery people are keeping quiet about it for a day or two. Although ordinarily, they'd notify other large museums and some of the dealers." He shook his head, perplexed. "But why anyone should steal it is more than I would know. There's always the possibility that it could be sold to some collector who would keep it hidden. But that would require prior negotiations, and few collectors would be so insane as to buy a painting as famous as the Moulin Rouge." I took some hope from that. "Then there isn't any possibility George could have stolen it." He looked at me, funny. "From what you tell me," he said, "this George of yours wouldn't know one painting from another." "I don't think he would." "Well, that lets him out. He tnust have just picked it up somewhere. But where -- that's the question." I couldn't help him there. "I think," said Cal, "I had better make a phone call." We drove down to the office and climbed the stairs. Dorothy was waiting for me to come back, and she still was sore at me. "There is a Colonel Sheldon Reynolds in your office," she told me. "He is from the Air Force." "I can phone out here," said Cal. "Colonel Reynolds Has been waiting for some time," said Dorothy, "and it strikes me as a most patient man." I could see she didn't approve of me associating with people from the world of art and that she highly disapproved of me meeting with the Air Force and she still was sore at me for giving Elsie such a short notice we were to have a dinner guest. She was very properly outraged, although she was too much of a lady and too loyal an employee to bawl me out in front of Cal. T went into my office, and sureenough, Colonel Reynolds was there, acting most impatient, sitting on the edge of a chair and drumming his fingers on its arms. He quit his drumming and stood up as soon as I came in. "Mr. Page," he said. "'I'm sorry you had to wait," I said. "What can I do for you?" We shook hands, and he sat down in the chair and I perched uneasily on the edge of the desk waiting. "It has come to my attention," he told me, "that there have beea some extraordinary occurrences in town and that there are tain artifacts involved. I've spc.feen with the county attorney, and he says you are the man I have to talk with. It appears there h some question about the ownership of the artifacts." "If you're talking about what # think you are," I told him, "these is no question whatsoever. All the articles in question are the property of my client." "I understand your client Hast escaped from jail." "Disappeared," I said. "And fie was placed in custody originally; in an illegal manner. The m#k was doing nothing except waging on the street." "Mr. Page," said the colonel, "you do not have to convince o I have no interest in the merits; of the case. All the Air Fore M concerned' about are certain gadgets found in the possession ti your client." "You have seen these gadgets.?" He shook his head. "No. TSe county attorney told me you'd probably crucify Him in court if He let me see them. But He said you were a reasonable man and if properly appealed to " "Colonel," I said, "I'm never a reasonable man wEere tKe welfare of my client could be jeopardized." "You don't know wliere your client is?" "I Have no idea." "He must Have told you wEere He found the stuff." "I don't think He knows Himself," I said. TKe colonel, I could see, didn't believe a word I told Kim, for wKicK I couldn't very well blame Him. "Didn't your client tell you I shook my Head, bewildered. That was a new one on me. I'd never tKougHt of it. "Mr. Page," tKe colonel said, "I don't mind telling you tKat these gadgets might mean a lot to us. Not to tHe Air Force alone, but to the entire nation. If the other side sEould get Hold of some of them before we did and..." "Now wait a minute," I interrupted. "Are you trying to tell me there are sucH things as He stiffened. "I'm not trying to tell you anything at all," He said. "I am simply asking..." r F'he door opened, and Cal stuck in Kis Head. "Sorry for breaking in like this," He said, "but I Have to leave." "You can't do that," I protested. "Elsie is expecting you for dinner. "I have to go to Washington," he said. "Your secretary says she will run me to the, airport. If tHe pilot can get me home within an Eour or so, I can catcH a plane." "You talked with the National Gallery?" "The painting still is there," he said. "There is a remote possibility there may have been a substitution, but with the tight security tEat seems impossible. I don't suppose there would be any cHance..." "Not a gKost," I said. "TKe painting stays right here." "But it belongs in Washington!" "Not if there are two of tKem," I sEouted. "But there can't be." "TEere appear to be," I told Him "I'd feel a whole lot better, John, if it were in a safer place." "The police are guarding it." "A bank vault would be a whole lot better." "I'll look into it," I promised. "WHat did the National Gallery say about it?" "Not mucH of anything," said Cal. They are flabbergasted." You may have them out Here." "I might as well," I said. "I have the Pentagon." " We shook hands, and he left and, I went back and perched upon the desk. "You're a hard man to deal with," said the colonel. "How do I reach you? Patriotism, perhaps?" "I'm not a patriotic man," I told him, "and I'll instruct my client not to be." "Money?" "If there were a lot of it." "The public interest?" "You've got to show me it's in the public interest." We glared at one another. I didn't like this Colonel Sheldon Reynolds, and He reciprocated. The phone banged' at me. It was Chet down at the police station. His words started tumbling over one another as soon as I picked up the phone. "George is back!" he shouted. "This time He lias got someone with him and he's driving something that looks like a car, but it Hasn't got no wheels..." I slammed down the phone and ran for the door. Out of the tail of my eye I saw that Reynolds had jumped up and was running after me. Chet had been right. It looked like a car, but it had no wheels. It was standing in front of the police station, Hanging there about two feet off the ground and a gentie thrumming indicated there was some mechanism somewhere inside of it that was running smoothly. Quite a crowd had gathered and I forced my way through it and got up beside the car. G eorge was sitting in wfiat appeared to be the driver's seat and sitting beside him was a scarecrow of a fellow with the soasrest face I've ever seen on any mm... Hje wore a black robe that buttoned, up the front and up close around his throat and a black skull cap that came down hard against his ears and, I'm across his forehead; his hands and face, all of him that showed, were fishbelly white. "What happened to you?" I demanded of George. "What are you sitting here for?" "I tell you, John," lie said, "I m somewhat apprehensive that Cbfet will try to throw me into the pokey once again. If lie makes a. move, I'm all ready to go shooting out of here. This here vehicle is the slickest thing there is. "It'll go along the ground or it shoot up in the air and make just like a plane. I ain't rightly got the hang of it as yet, having hardly driven it, but it handles smooth and easy and it ain't no tetefc at all to drive it." is "You can tell him," said Charley Nevins, "that He need not fear arrest. There is something most peculiar going on here, but I'm not sure at all there is violation of the law involved." I looked around in some surprise. I Hadn't noticed Charley standing there when I'd pushed through the crowd. Reynolds shoved in ahead of me and reached up to grab George by the arm. "I am Colonel Reynolds," He said, and I am from the Air Force and it's terribly important that I know what this is all about." "Why," Ke said, "it was standing there with' a pile of other junk, so I took it. Someone threw it away and didn't seem to want it. There were a lot of people there throwing things away that they didn't want." "And I suppose," yelled Chet,, "that someone threw away the painting and the pail of diamonds." "I wouldn't know about that," George told him. "I don't seem to remember much about that other trip. Except there was this big pile of stuff and that it was raining... " "Shut up, George," I said. He hadn't told me anything about a pile of stuff. Either his memory was improving or he had lied to me. IV t) "I think," said Charley, getting edgy, "that we all better sit down together and see if we can make some sense out of these proceedings." "That's all right with me," I said, "always remembering that this machine remains, technically the property of my client." "It seems to me," Charley said to me, "that you're being somewhat unreasonable and Highhanded in this whole affair." "Charley," I said, "you know I have to be. If I let down my guard a minute, you and Chet and the Pentagon will tramp all over me." "Let's get on with it," said Charley. "George, you put that machine down on the ground and come along with us. Chet will stand guard over it and see no one touches it." "And while you're doing that," I said, "don't take your eyes off the painting and the diamonds. The painting just might be worth an awful lot of money." "Right now," said Chet, disgusted, "would be a swell time for someone to rob the bank. I'd have the entire force tied up watching all this junk of George's." "I think, too," said Charley, "we better include this passenger of George's in our little talk. He might be able to add some enlightenment." G eorge's passenger didn't pay any attention. He'd beep paying no attention all along. He had just been sitting there, bolt upright in his seat, with his face pointing straight ahead. Chet walked officiously around the car. He said something, at some length, in a high, chittering voice. I didn't recognize a word of it but crazy as it sounds I knew exactly what He said. "Don't touch me!" He said. "Get away from me. Don't interfere with me." And, Having said this, he opened the door and let Himself to the ground. Cliet stepped back from him and so did all the others. Silence fell uponi the gathering which Had been buzzing up until this moment. As he advanced down the street, the crowd partert and pressed back to make way for Him. CEarley and tEe colonel stepped backward, bumping into me, pinning me against tKe car, to get out of His way. He passed not more tEan ten feet from me and I got a good look at His face. There was no expression on it and it was set in a natural grimness -- the way, I imagined, that a judge of the Inquisition might Have looked. And there was something else that is very Hard to say, an impression that translated itself into a sense of smell, althrough I am sure there was no actual odor. The odor of sanctity is as close as I can come to it, I guess. Some sort of vibration radiating from the man that impinged upon the senses in the same manner, perhaps, as ultrasonics will impinge without actual hearing upon the senses of a dog. And then he was past me and gone, walking down the street through the lane of human bodies that stepped aside for him walking slowly, unconcernedly, almost strolling -- walking as if he might have been, all alone, apparently unaware of a single one of us. All of us watched him until He was free of the crowd and had turned a comer into another Street. And even for a moment after that we stood uncertain and unmoving until finally someone spoke a whisper and someone answered him and the buzz of the crowd took up again, although now a quieter buzz. Someone's fingers were digging hard, into the muscles of my upper arm and when I looked around. I saw that it was Charley who had fastened onto me. Ahead of me, the colonel turned his head to look at me. His face was white and tight and little drops of perspiration stood out along his hairline. "John," said Charley, quietly, "I think it is important that we all sit down together." I turned around toward the car and saw that it was now resting on the ground and that George was getting out of it. "Come along," I said to George. ""diarley led, pushing his way Vj through the crowd, with the colonel following and George and me bringing up the rear. We went down the street, without a word among us, to the square and walked across the lawn to the courthouse steps. When we got in Charley's office, Charley shut the door and dug down into a desk drawer arid come up with a jug. He got out four paper cups and poured them almost full. "No ice," lie said, "but what the hell, it's the liquor that we need." Each of us took a cup and found a place to sit and worked on the booze a while without saying anything. "Colonel," Charley finally asked, "what do you make of it?" "It might be a help," the colonel said, "if we could talk with the passenger. I assume some attempt will be made to apprehend the man." "I suppose we should," said Charley. "Although how one apprehends a bird like that, I don't really know." "He caught us by surprise," tKe colonel pointed out. "Next time we'll be ready for Him. Plug your ears with cotton, so you cannot Hear Him .   " "It may take more than that," said CKarley. "Did anyone actually Hear Him speak?" "He spoke, all riglit," I said. "He uttered words, but there was none I recognized. Just a sort of chirping gibberish." "But we knew what He meant," said Charley. "Every single one of us knew that. Telepathy, perhaps?" "I doubt it," the colonel said. "Telepathy is not the simple thing so many people think." "A new language," I suggested. "A language scientifically constructed. Sounds that are designed to trigger certain understandings. If one dug deep enough into semantics..." Charley interrupted me; apparently he took no stock in my semantics talk. "George," He asked, "wliat do you know of him?" George was sunk back deep into a chair, with his shoeless feet stuck out in front of Him. He Had his big mitt wrapped around the paper cup and was wriggling His toes and He was content. It did not take an awful lot to make George content. "I don't know a tiling, " said George. "But Ee was riding with you. He must Have told you something." "He never told me a thing," said George. "He never said a word. I was just driving off and He came running up and jumped into the seat and then..." "You were driving off from where?" "Well," said George, "there was this big pile of stuff. It must have covered several acres and it was piled up High. It seemed to foe in a sort of square, like tKe courthouse and no lawn, but just a sort of paving that might Have been concrete and all around it, everywhere you looked, but quite a distance off, there were big high buildings." Charley asked, exasperated, "Did you recognize the place?" "I never saw the place before," said George, "nor no pictures of it, even." "Perhaps it would be best," suggested Charley, "if you told it from the start." S o George told it the way he Had told it to me. "That first time it was raining pretty hard," he said, "and it was sort of dark, as if evening might foe coming on, and all I saw was this pile of junk. I didn't see no buildings." He Hadn't told me he's seen anything at all. He had claimed He Hadn't known a thing until Ke was back in Willow Grove, walking on the street, with the police car pulling up. But I let it go and kept on listening. "Then," said George, "after CEet threw me into pokey..." "No v, wait a minute th'ere," said Charley. "I think you skipped a bit. Where did you get the diamonds and the painting and all the other stuff?" "Why off the pile of junk," said George. There was a lot of other stuff and if I'd had the time I might have done some better. But something seemed to warn me that I didn't have much time and it was raining and the rain was cold and the place was sort of spooky. So I grabbed what I could and put it in my pockets and I took the pail of diamonds, although I wasn't sure they were really diamonds, and then I took the painting because Myrt has been yelling that she wants a high class picture to hang in the dining room..." "And then you were back home again?" "That is it," said George, "and I am walking down the street, minding my own business and not doing anything illegal..." "And how about the second time?" "You mean going back again?" "That's what I mean," said Charley. "That first time," said George, "it was unintentional I was just sitting in the living room with my shoes off and a can of beer, watching television and in the seventh inning the Yankees had two on and Mantle coming up to bat -- say I never did find out what Mantle did. Did he hit a homer?" "He struck out," said Charley. George nodded sadly; Mickey is his hero. "The second time," said George, "I sort of worked at it. I don't mind a cell so much', you understand, as the injustice of being there when you ain't done nothing wrong. So I talked John into bringing me some beer and I sat down and started drinking it. There wasn't any television, but I imagined television. I imagined it real hard and I put two men an bases and had Mantle coming up -- all in my mind, of course -- and I guess it must have worked. I was back again, in the place where there was this pile of junk. Only you must understand it wasn't really junk. It was all good stuff. Some of it didn't make any sense at all, but a good part of it did; and it was just setting there and no one touching it and every now and then someone would come walking out from some of those tall buildings -- and it was quite a walk, I tell you, for those buildings were a long ways off -- and they'd be C-.Betrr-l?# carrying something and they'd throw it on the pile of junk and go walking back." # # # take it," said tHe colonel, "that you spent more time there on your second trip. "It was daytime," George explained, "and it wasn't raining and it didn't seem so spooky, although it did seem lonesome. There weren't any people -- just the few who came walking to throw something on the pile, and and they didn't pay much attention to me; they acted almost as if they didn't see me. You understand, I didn't know if I'd ever get back there again and there was a limit to how much I could carry, so this time I figured I'd do a job of it. I'd look over pile and figure exactly what I wanted. Maybe I should say that a little differently. There was a lot of it I wanted, but I Had to decide what I wanted most. So I started walking around the pile, picking up stuff I thought I wanted until I saw something I took a special liking to then I'd decide between it and something else I had picked up. Sometimes I'd discard the new thing I had picked up and sometimes I'd keep it and drop something else. Because, you see, I could carry just so much, and by this time I was loaded with about all that I could carry. There was a lot of nice items up on the sides of the pile, and once I tried climbing the pile to get a funny-looking sort of gadget, but that stuff was piled loose, just tossed up there, you know; and when I started to climb, the stuff started to shift and I was afraid it might all come down on top of me. So I climbed down again, real careful. After that I Had to satisfy myself with whatever I could pick up at the bottom of the pile." The colonel Had become greatly interested, leaning forward in his chair so he wouldn't miss a word. "Some of this junk?" lie asked. "Could you tell what it was?" "There was a pair of spectacles, said George, "with some sort of gadget on them and I tried them on and I got so happy that it scared me, so I took them off and I quit being happy; then I put them on again and I was happy right away..." "Happy?" asked Charley. 'Do you mean they made you drunk?" CtXTot drunk Happy," said ' George. "Just plain Happy, that is all. No troubles and no worries and the world looked good and a man enjoyed living. Then there was another thing, a big square piece of glass, I suppose you'd call it a cube of glass. Like these fortune tellers have, but it was square instead of round. It was a pretty thing, all by itself, but when you lookedinto it -- well, it didn't reflect your face, like a mirror does, but there seemed to be some sort of picture in it, deep inside of it. It looked to me, that first time, like maybe it was a tree and when I looked closer I could see it was a tree. A big high elm tree like the one that used to stand in my grandfather's yard, the one that Kad the bobolink's nest way up at the top, and this one, too, I saw, had a bobolink's nest and there was the bobolink, himself, sitting on a limb beside the nest. And then I saw it was the very tree that I remembered, for there was my grandfather's house and the picket fence and the old man sitting in the battered lawn swing, smoking his corncob pipe. You see, that piece of glass showed you anything that you wanted to see. First there was just the tree, then I thought about the nest and the nest was there and then the house showed up and the picket fence and I was all right until I saw the old man Himself -- and him dead for twenty years or more. I looked at him for a while and then I made myself look away, because I had thought a lot of the old man and seeing him there made me remember too much, so I looked away. By then I thought I knew what this glass was all about and so I thought of a pumpkin pie and the pie was there, with gobs of whipped cream piled on it and then I thought of a stein of beer and the beer was there..." "I don't believe," said Charley, a single word of this." "Go on," urged the colonel. "Tell us the rest of it." "Well," said George, "I guess I must Have walked almost all the way around that pile, picking one thing up and throwing another away and I was loaded, I can tell you. I had my arms full and my pockets full and stuff Hung around my neck. And suddenly, driving out from those tall buildings came this car, floating about three feet off the ground..." "You mean the vehicle that you have out there?" "The very one," said George. "There was a sad-looking old geezer driving it, and He ran it up alongside the pile and set it down, th'en got out of it and started walking back, sort of hobbling. So I went up to it and I dumped all the stuff I had been carrying into the back seat and it occurred to me that with it I could carry away more than I could in my arms. But I thought that first, perhaps, I Had ought to see if I could operate it, so I climbed iti the driver's seat and there was no trick to it at all. I started it up and began to drive it, slow, around the pile, trying to remember where I had discarded some of the stuff I had picked up earlier -- intending to go back an'd get it and put it in the back seat. I heard the sound of running feet behind me and when I looked around there was this gent all dressed in black. He reached the car and put one Hand upon it and vaulted into the seat beside me. The next instant we were in Willow Grove." C"V# r ou mean to tell us," cried the colonel, leaping to his feet, that you have the back seat of that car loaded with some of these things you have been telling us about?" "Colonel, please sit down," said Charley. "You can't possibly believe any of the things he has been telling us. On the face of them, they are all impossible and..." "Charley," I said, "let me cite a few more impossibilities, like a painting being in the National Gallery of Arts and also in Willow Grove, like that car out there without any wheels, like a gadget that is Hot at one end and cold at the other." "God, I don't know," said Charley, desperately. "And I am the guy that has it in His lap." "Charley," I said, "I don't believe you Have anything in your lap, at all. I don't think there is a single legal question involved in this whole mess. Taking a car, you might say, being of the particular turn of legal mind you are, without the permission of the owner, only it is not a car..." "It's a vehicle!" Charley yelled. "But the owner Had junked it. He'd junked it and walked away and..." "What I want to know," the colonel said, "is where this place is and why the people were discarding their possessions." "And you'd also," I said, "love to get your hands on some of those possessions." "You're damned right I would," said the colonel, grimly. "And I'm going to. Do you realize what some of them might mean to this nation of ours? Why, they might spell the margin of difference between us and the other side, and I don't intend..." "Colonel," I said, "haul down the flag. There is no use of screaming. I am sure that George with you." Feet came pounding up the stairs and down the hall. The door flew open and a deputy sheriff came skidding to a halt. "Charley," he panted, "I don't know what to do. There's been a crazy-looking coot preaching to a crowd out by the Soldier's monument. The sheriff, I am told, went out to stop it, him not having any license to be preaching anywhere, let alone the courthouse square, and then came charging back. I came in the back way, without knowing anything about what was going on, and I found the sheriff collecting up tlie guns and ammunition and when I asked him what was going on, he wouldn't talk to me, but wentstalking out the front door and he threw all of them guns and all that ammunition down at the base of the monument. And there are a lot of other people bringing other things and throwing them there, too..." V T didn't wait to Hear the rest of it. I dodged past the deputy and through the door and down the stairs, heading for the building's front. The pile had grown to a size that was big enough to cover the base of the monument; and there were, I saw, such things as bicycles, radios, typewriters and sewing machines, electric razors and lawn mowers; and there was a car or two, jammed up against the monument. Dusk had fallen, and the farmers were coming into town to trade and people were coming across the square, dark muffled figures, lugging stuff to throw upon the pile. There was no sign of the passenger. He Had done his dirty work and gone. Standing there in the courthouse square, with the street lamps swinging in the tiny breeze and all those darkenshrouded figures toiling up the lawii toward the monument, I Had the vision of many other towns throughout the country with growing piles of discarded objects bearing testimony to the gullibility of the liuman race. My God, I thought, they never understood a word of what he said, not a single syllable of that clacking tongue of his. But the message as had been the case when we'd pushed back to clear the path for him, had been plain and clear. Thinking about it, I knew I'd been right up there in Charley's office when I'd said it was a matter of semantics We Had words, of course, lots of words, perhaps more than an ordinary man would ever need, but intellectual words, tailored for their precise statement of one peculiar piece of understanding; and we'd become so accustomed to them, to their endless ebb and flow, that many of them -- perhaps the most of them -- had lost the depth and the precision of their meaning. There Had been a time when great orators could catch and hold the public ear with the pure poetry of their speech and men such' as these had at times turned the tide of national opinion. Now, However, in large part, spoken words had lost tEeir power to move. But the laugh, I thought would never lose its meaning. The merry laugh that, even if one were not included in it, could lift the Human spirits; the belly laugh that spelled out unthinking fellowship; the quiet laugh of superior, supercilious intellect that could cut the ground beneath one. Sounds, I thought -- sounds, not words -- sounds that could trigger basic human reaction. Was it something such as this that the passenger had used? Sounds so laboriously put together, probing so deeply into the Human psyche, that they said almost as much as the most carefully constructed sentence of intellectual speech', but with the one advantage that they were convincing as words could never be. Far back in man's prehistory there Had been the grunt of warning, the cry of rage, the food-call, the little clucking recognition signals. Was this strange language of the passenger's no more than a sophisticated extension of these primal sounds? vld Con WeatHerby came tramping stolidly across the lawn to fling his portable television set upon the pile, and behind Him came a young house wife I didn't recognize who threw a toaster and a blender and a vacuum cleaner beside Con's television set. My heart cried out to them in my pity of what was happening, and I suppose I should have Hurried forth and spoken to them -- Old Con at least -- trying to stop them, to show them this was all damn foolishness. I knew Old Con had saved dollars Here and there, going without the drinks He wanted, smoking only three cigars a day instead of His usual five, so that He and His old lady could Have that television set. But, somehow, I knew how useless it would be to stop them, to do anything about it. I went down across the lawn, feeling beat and all played out. Coming up the lawn toward me, staggering under a heavy load came a familiar figure. "Dorothy!" I yelled. Dorothy stopped and some of the books that she was carrying up toward the monument came unstuck from the load and went thumping to the ground. In a flash I knew exactly what they were -- my law books. "Hey," I yelled, "take those back. Hey, what is going on!" I didn't need to ask, of course. Of all the people in Willow Grove, she would have been the one most certain to be on Hand to listen to the passenger and the most avid to believe. She could smell out an evangelist twenty miles away and the high moments of her life were those spent with' her scrawny little bottom planted on the hardness of a bench in the suffocating air of a tent meeting and listening to some jackleg preacher spout about his hellfire and brimstone. She'd believe anything at all and subscribe to it whole-heartedly so long as it was evangelistic. I started down the lawn toward her but was distracted. From the other side of the square came a snarling, yipping sound; out of the dusk came a running figure, with a pack of dogs snapping at bis heels. The man Had shucked up his robe to give him extra leg room, and he was making exceptionally good time. Every once in a while one of the dogs would get a mouthful of the robe that flowed out behind him, snapping in the wind of his rapid movement, but it didn't slow him down. Tt was the passenger, of course, and while he'd done right well with I humans, it was quite evident he was doing not so, well with I dogs. They had just been let loose with the dusk, after being tied up for the day, and they were spoiling for a bit of fun. They didn't understand the talk of the passenger perhaps, or there was something so different about Him that they immediately Had pegged Kim as some sort of outlander to be Hunted down. He went across tEe lawn below me in a rusH witH tKe dogs very close behind, and out into tKe street, and it wasn't until tKen tKat I realized wEere Ke would be Heading. I let out a wKoop and set out after Him. He was Heading for tKat car to make His getaway and I couldn't let Him do it. TKat car belonged to George. I knew I could never catcH Him, but I pinned my Hopes on CEet. CHet would have a man or two guarding tEe car; and wEile tEe passenger would probably talk them out of if, tEey might slow Kim a bit, enough for me to catcE up with Kim before Ee Ead taken off. He migEt try, of course, to talk me out of it as well with His chittering gibberish, but I told myself I'd Have to do my best to resist whatever He might tell me. We went whipping down tEe street, the passenger with the dogs close to Eis Keels, and me close to the dogs; and tEere, up ahead, stood tEe car out in front of the station. TEere still was a fair-sized crowd around it, but the passenger yelled some outlandish sounds at them and they began to scatter. He didn't even break his stride, and I'll say this much for Kim -- He was quite an athlete. Ten feet or so from the car, he jumped and sailed up through tEe air and landed in tEe driver's seat. He was plenty scared of those mutts, of course, and that may Eave Helped Him some; under certain crisis circumstances a man can accomplish feats that ordinarily would be impossible. But even so, Ke had to be fairly athletic to manage what He did. He landed in tEe driver's seat and immediately the car took off upward at a slant, and in a couple of seconds Ead soared up above the buildings and was out of sight. TEe two cops tfiat Chet Ead detailed to guard tKe car just stood tEere with their jaws Hanging down, looking up at wEere the car had gone. TEe crowd that Ead been tEere and scattered wEen the passenger yelled Eis gibberish at them now turned about and stared as vacantly, while tEe dogs circled around, puzzled, sniffing at the ground and every now and then pointing up a nose to bay. I was standing tfiere like tEe rest of them wEen someone came running up behind me and grabbed my arm. It was Colonel SKeldon Reynolds. "What happened?" I told Kim, somewhat bitterly and profanely, exactly what had happened. "He's gone futureward," the colonel said. "We'll never see him or the car again." "Futureward?" I asked stupidly. "That must be it," the colonel said. "There's no other way to explain it. George wasn't in conthought to be the case. He must Have traveled futureward. You probably were right about the way the passenger talked. That was a new semantics. A sort of speech shorthand, made up of basic sounds. I suppose it would be possible, but it would take a long time to develop. Maybe it developed, or was borrowed, when the race went to the stars -- a sort of universal language, a vocal version of the sign language used by the Great Plains Indians..." "But that would be time travel," I protested. "Hell, George doesn't know enough..." "Look," said the' colonel, "you maybe don't need to know anything to travel in time. You maybe have to feel something; you may have to be in tune. There might be only one man in the entire world today who can feel that way... " "But colonel," I said, "it makes no sense at all. Let's say George did go into the future -- just for the sake of argument, let us say he did. Why should people up in the future be throwing away their things, why should there be this big pile of junk?" "I don't know," the colonel said. "That is, I couldn't say for sure, but I have a theory." He waited for me to ask about his theory, but when I didn't ask, he went ahead and told me. "We've talked a lot," he said, "about contact with other intelligences that live on other stars and we've done some listening in the hope of picking up some signals sent out by peoples many light-years distant. We haven't heard any signals yet and we may never hear any because the time span during which any race is technologically oriented may be very short." T shook my Head. "I don't see what you're driving at," I told him. "What has all that had happened here got to do with signals from the stars?" "Perhaps not very much," Ke admitted, "except that if contact is ever made it must be made with a technological race very much like ours. And there are sociologists who tell us that the technological phase of any society finds ways and means of destroying itself or it creates stresses and pressure against which the people rebel or it becomes interested in something other than technology and..." "Now Hold up a minute," I said. "You are trying to tell me tHat tEis junk Heap of George's is tEe result of tEe Euman race, in some future day, rejecting a tecEnological society -- throwing away tecEnological items? It wouldn't work tHat way. It would be a gradual rejection, a gradual dying out of technology. People wouldn't just decide they wanted no more of It and go out and throw all tEeir beautiful, comfortable gadgets..." "TEat could Eappen," tEe colonel argues. "It could Eappen if the rejection was tEe result of a religious or evangelistic movement. TEe passenger may Have been one of their evangelists. Look at wHat Ee did right here in a few minutes time. Typewriters, radios, television sets, vacuum cleaners in that pile on the courthouse lawn -- all tecEnological Items." "But a painting isn't tecEnological," I protested. "A pail of diamonds isn't." BotH of us stopped talking and looked at one another in the deepening dusk. Both of us realized, I guess, tEat there wasn't too much sense of us standing there and arguing over a speculation. The colonel sfirugged. "I don't know," Ee said. "It was only an idea. The car is lost for good, of course, and all tEe stuff George had thrown into the back seat. But we have the other stuff..." One of tEe cops wEo Bad been set to guard the car Bad Been standing close and listening to us and now Ee broke in on us. "I am sorry sir," He said, gulping a little, "but we ain't got none of it. All of it is gone." "All of it!" I yelled. "The painting and the diamonds. I told Chet..." "Cfiet, He couldn't do nothing else," said the man. "He had two of us Here and he Ead two inside guarding that other stuff and when the ruckus started up at tEe courthouse, He needed men and He didn't Have them..." "And so Ee brought the painting and tEe diamonds and tKe other stuff out Here and put them in the car," I yelled. I knew Cfiet, I knew Eow he would think. "THat way Ee figured we could guard tfiem all," said the man. "And we could Have, but..." T turned and started towalk away. I didn't want to Hear another word. If Cfiet Ead been there, I would Have strangled Him.: I was walking down tEe sidewalk, clear of the crowd, and there was someone walking close beside me, just a little ways behind. I looked around, it was the colonel. His mouth shaped a single word as I looked around at Him. "George," He said. We botfi of us must Have Ead the same idea. "Are tfie Yankees and Twins on TV tonigfit?" I asked He nodded. "For tfie love of God," I said, "let us get some beer." We made it in record time, eacfi of us lugging a couple of sixpacks. George Bad beat us to it. He was sitting in front of tfie TV set, in fiis stocking feet,, watcfiing tfie ball game witfi a can of beer in Band. We didn't say a word. We just put tfie beer down beside Kim so tfiere'd be no danger of fiis running out of it and went into tfie dining room and waited in tfie dark, keeping very quiet. In tfie sixtfi, tfie Yanks fiad two men on and Mantle up to bat and Mantle Bit a double. But nothing Happened. George just went on drinking beer, wriggling fiis toes and watcfiing television. "Maybe," said tfie colonel, "it lias to be tfie seventh." "And maybe," I said, "a double doesn't count. It may take a strike-out." We keep on trying, of course, but our Hopes are fading. There are only four more Twin and Yankee games on television before tfie season ends. And someone wrote tfie otfier day tfiat next year, for sure, Mantle will retire. x X x s x x X i X X X X X X X x X X IS Controversial Uninhibited Deadly Serious Humorous and Incredibly Interesting! Brian Aidiss... , Paul Anderson... Piers Anthony... Isaac Asimov... Richard Bergeron... Bob Bloch... Vaughn Bode... John Brunner... #. Sprague de Camp... Terry Carr... John Christopher... Philip K. Dick... Harlan Ellison... Philip Jose Farmer... Jack Gaughan... Harry Harrison... Lee Hoffman... John Hayden Howard... Leo P. Kelley... Dean R. Koonfz... Anne McCaffrey... Michael Moorcock... Alexei Panshin... Mack Reynolds... Bill Roister... Norman Spinrad... Bob Tucker... Harry Warner, Jr... , Ted White... and many, many more... Richard E. Geis does his thing. P. O. Box # J # TZ' eith Roberts' Pavane (Doubleday, #) is a tapestry of a book; a marvel of storytelling. By some length's, it's not a novel. Nor is it a collection of short stories. What it is is a pageant, each' of its individual parts working interdependently within a unifying theme. When it's done, you have before you the rich fabric of England as she might be, had the Spanish Armada successfully restored the Church to its position as the major power on Earth. Contrary to what you may hear from various quarters, not only is the idea of a parallel Latin England not new (see Lest Darkness Fall') but many of the technological assumptions inventions in this book are not new (see Lest Darkness Fall.) Furthermore, the book would be very much improved as a work if the afterpiece entitled "Coda" were tom off and thrown away. But none of these things are important, and certainly should not affect your decision to obtain a copy. Pavane is made up of six principal parts. Each of them is in some way related to the others, sometimes obviously, sometimes not. The story they tell is unfolded over a span of years long enough to take us from the young manhood of a Highway steam Haulier on through the death of his grandniece. In that time, England changes from a reasonably stable satrapy within the Church empire to a land driven by rebellion. (Only in the Coda are we in any way brought in touch with this Earth, and only in the Coda is there a clear statement of intervention from this Earth, for reasons germane to this Earth. Roberts has done his work too well, by that time. All your involvement is with Pavane's England, and the events of "Coda" became a pious meddler's insult.) We meet the people and their appurtenances; Jesse Strange, of Strange #s Sons, who Have built a mercantile power on the carrying trade they conduct over the highroads.( Railways came late, and internal Combustion engines are limited to # cc by a Papal bull titled -- I'm sure it's all right to laugh -- Petroleum Feto. The great rumbling road engines, afire in lamp brass and enamel, steam chests huffing, are real enough to covet. Only an unwelcome practicality makes you notice that Roberts evades the issue of what their wheels are made of and what they look like. It's a real world they're part of, and you know that if you really want to find out, you have only to go look... they'll be there. Roberts is that kind of storyteller. We meet the people and their indignation Becky, the fisher girl of the black rock coast to which White Boat comes smuggling from far Bermuda. And Brother John, the sometime lithographer, who mightly worried the Pope but who is to Becky just a dimly grasped legend of abortive rebellion. Eleanor, mistress of Corfe Gate, who Herself jerked the lanyard of the great gun Growler and took the legs and life from Henry of Rye and Deal, and accomplished more than that, besides. We meet the people and their longings; Rafe Bigland, the signaller, manning his semaphore tower alone in the snowy wastes of the winter landscape, one clump of trees etched on a hill for him to walk to for his exercise, and that, it transpires, a fatal place. Each' of them is illuminated for us as no stranger could ever be. "The Signaller," in fact, is a story that does nothing to advance the overall narrative. It tells us of Rafe's life from beginning to end; it takes us through His training and his aspirations, it makes him perfectly understandable even to those of us who have no great desire to stay in one place and throw the same switches for the balance of our lives and... here's the point... it makes his life seem better than ours, and thus makes his England a better place than ours, and thus... here's the point coming 'round again... it does advance not the narrative but the exposition. A marvelous work. A truly marvelous work. The Second If Reader of Science Fiction (Doubleday, #) offers # stories from one of this magazine's companions. They're adventure stories all, even J. G. Ballard's wistful "The TimeTombs," or Frederik Pohl's Satanic "Under Two Moons." There is a Retief story, and Larry Niven's "At the Core." Isaac Asimov there's also Fred Saberhagen's Berserker story "Masque of the Red Shift." And Brian Aldiss's "In the Arena." Almost all of them are excellent stories to sit and read. Hal Clement's "The Foundling Stars" is more puzzle than adventure, it turns out; you may wish it were otherwise. "Die, Shadow," by Algis Budrys, is an odd fish -- something like what a Leigh Brackett story might be if someone like me were to try and write one. The result is rather more of a compliment to Miss Brackett than it is to me. In fact, if there is one general thing to say about this book, it is that there are a number of stories in it by people who do not normally write quite in the way they're represented here. The weight of present-day tastes in sf is all toward the cerebral. It's interesting to see what happens when a magazine makes a deliberate policy of encouraging action stories. It wins three Hugos, for one thing, which may say something about where the teal weight of present tastes may be trending. For another thing, it causes people to stretch some little-used parts of themselves. Depending on the degree of potential in those parts, the results can be as intriguing as a quick glimpse into a train on a slightly divergent track. Daniel Keyes's The Touch, published by Harcourt, Brace and World at #, is not science fiction any more. Nor was it intended to be. It's a serious contemporary novel about the effect on an already troubled young couple when the husband tracks radioactive dust into the House and it's days before anyone realizes why He has a rash. Part of the narrative is simple (apparently simple) description of How such a thing could occur to Barney Stark, who is an industrial sculptor by trade, and wEat would be done thereafter to decontaminate him, his House and his pregnant wife. Keyes has researched this part of his story even more assiduously then he did the neurosurgery of Flowers For Algernon, which is saying something. Keyes doesn't merely tell you wHat neurosurgeons or decontamination squad leaders do; He shows you what attitudes they display while doing them, and once you've been shown you're not inclined to quibble. Balancing these features -- for whose sake I recommend the book to you, as a glimpse into your own world -- is a somewhat over-emotional story about the problems Barney Stark can be blamed for. Presumably a serious contemporary novel needs something of that sort, in order to hold the casual x'eader's interest. But the casual reader ought some day to get it through his consciousness that this would be a serious contemporary novel even if Barney and Myra Stark Had absolutely no other troubles at all. Larry Niven writes a mean story. He both writes and thinks. A Gift From Earth (Ballatine -- originally published' in If as Slowboat Cargo ) is our latest example. This novel is set on Lookitthat, which for ail practical purposes is one forty-mile-high flat-topped pinnacle rising above the hot, poisonous mists shrouding the surface of an otherwise uninhabitable planet. Colonized by slowboat, Lookitthat Has a social structure founded on grievous beginnings. When the boatload of colonists landed in this confining and unattractive place -- located in error by robot exploration -- the crew immediately forced a covenant on the passengers. Consequently, even though' there are now thousands of their descendants on Lookitthat, Crew are aristocratic and Colonists do the laboring. Colonists do one other little thing -- they provide the raw material for the organ banks, from which transplants are made available to the crew and to those Colonists who are very, very cooperative. The ostensible story Niven goes on to tell is the one about the successful revolt against the keirarchy. You know -- Ordinwith things, but events pressure him into apparent rebellion. The Establishment mistakenly begins hunting Joe, and, much against Ms own inclinations, he inflicts progressively more damage upon things as they are, aided by his own emerging abilities, hardening attitude and increasing maturity. Finally, in a climactic scene of total chaos (usually disguising tire suspicious ease with which' the entire house of cards goes over), Joe knocks out the System. Surely there has got to be some other commercially acceptable way to deal with the problem of man-versus-establishment. Nevertheless, A GHt From Earth is a markedly well-done example of its sort. Joe -- that is, Matthew Keller -- is by no means the only precipitating factor. The "gift" from Earth' is a ramrobot-delivered package whose contents invalidate Lookitthat's basic social assumption -- that transplants must come from human donors. There is an existing revolutionary organization which has succeeded in eroding the establishment bureaucracy to some extent. The leading Crew aristocrat sees it as his responsibility to ensure a smooth' transition to the day when Crew and Colonist will be equal. And so forth we get a number of verisimilitudinous details, some excellent characterizations, a lot of good oldfashioned ingenuity. The over-: throw, when it comes, is fully believable. The amount of genuine science-fiction writing going on here is unusually high. All In all, if I had to give someone an example of the best currently available technologically oriented sf, I'd unhesitatingly give him this book, and stand back. I would not expect him to understand all of the shorthand. I would expect him to get so hooked that he'd make it his business to learn, and thus hook himself even farther. But looking at the book from its other aspect, we get into a different bag altogether. Here its minor weakness as a story -- a weakness of originality in plotting -- may become exaggerated out of true proportion in the course of arguments about its worth' as a piece of thinking. Because whether Niven intended it to be this way or not -- and there's evidence to show He does feel strongly on the subject of organ transplants and has definite ideas about the social consequences -- what we Have here is a piece of propaganda. Niven says, Here and elsewhere, that there's good reason to believe in a world where such misdemeaners as traffic law violations will draw the death penalty, so as to provide a plentiful supply of organs. He also says that alloplasty -- the field of medicine and surgery utilizing artificial organs, like the DeBakey auxiliary heart pumps -- is too far behind in most areas, to offer feasible alternatives to the "simple" transplant procedure. I don't believe he even mentions the third line of attack on the problem of organ degeneration -- that is, reversing the process, whatever it may have been -- for, I assume, the good reason that there's no sign of much general success at all along that route. What He's saying is that the practical choice is between death and transplant, or, life for the patient and death for the donor, or between the worthy and the unworthy. Thence -- putting aside the minor percentage of organs provided by accident -- a public health policy including the transplant concept becomes reflected in an extremely hard-line social policy. In due time, this straightens out -- mechanical alloplasty, or else the breeding and use of "animals" which closely resemble human Hearts, livers, etc. -- biological alloplasty, if you will -- takes over the role now being played by accident victims and due to be played by stoplight violators. But meanwhile, it's Hell on your nerves when you're out in the family car for a Sunday spin. Presumably, too, it's bad to collect the wrong kind of stamps, fail to pay your bills by the #th of the month, part your hair on the wrong side or even look like you're about to rain on somebody's parade. This is a shocking social promise, if valid. Niven does agree that for some reason we don't now fill our blood banks from the ready supply of criminals. (I'm told that in Istanbul, at least, they do it from down-and-out tourists who think they're only selling a pint to a black market operator. But that's not only a story told me by a former down-but-not-quite-out Istanbul tourist, and in any case that's another story). Not even the Nazi Germans made any known attempt at volume production of plasma or other blood fraction products. And surely what held them back was no question of racial taint, for even assuming an MD who could believe in that kind of genetics, you would Have to additionally assume an MD who could see a difference between one kind of a molecule and another. And now the point is why? WKat Eas field' us back from making obvious good use of all this valuable material? If we can answer that, we can test the validity of Niven's hypothesis. And we have to test its validity, because there's already a gathering potential of explosive social reaction to the current expansiveness of transplant surgery. On die point of our not draining condemned criminals, Niven has one of His protagonists say, from the vantage of the future, "Nobody thought of it, I guess." Well, that's not a valid answer, because riglit here in the #th century Larry Niven thought of it. Hell, I thought of it, and the years have taught me that if I thought of it, others have thought of it before me. I think perhaps the reason we don't do it is because most of us feel that in any one-for-one trade, we'd be on the wrong end. If we start dealing in the stuff of life itself, a majority of the electorate is going to understand that life longlasting is for tlie legislator first. (In fact, we already have a case of a retired congressman who may well go back to the bustlings, now that fie Has a fresh new Keart. That's what I mean by "explosive," because a lot of us cherish senescence and related incapacities as the last resort of democracy). I don't think it's true, in other words, that we will vote the death penalty for wHat are today trivialities. We're already not voting the death penalty, and the only reason I can think why we're going against humanity's basically revanchist tendencies is because the electorate, again, senses where the burden falls. No, I think maybe -- political prisoners... but, we've already seen that while political prisoners are fair game for a great deal of experimentation, their industrial uses are clearly limited by something other than the law of supply and demand. I just don't know. But it's Niven who's raised the point, and Niven who will Have to make it more convincingly. And in that case, while A Gift From Earth ' is a good piece of thinking, superimposed on a good adventure story -- as elegantly biped as most topgrade science fiction is -- the fact that it's short on one side throws it off balance on the other. But for Pete's sake, do get back to it again, Larry. Little Einstein was over-designed for his job -- whatever his job was . 'T'ony Green was an editor for a publisher of what is euphemistically called "Adult Fiction." He wasn't too happy in his job. The authors he had inherited from his predecessor were lousy, but their first-draft novels were dirty enough to sell at higher prices than better paperbacks, in hundreds of stores, located for the most part on skid row, U.S.A. Tony had not always specialized in this type of literature. Once he had been a technical writer, and quite well versed in cybernetics. Then a government contract had expired, and the aerospace plant where he had worked let Him go, along with over a thousand other employees. After his unemployment compensation ran out, this was the only job connected with publishing that he could find in the area. He Had started out with a determination to raise the standard's, even if He couldn't improve the taste of the readers. He reduced tlie number of typographical errors and misspelled words in the books and tried to recruit a stable of authors who could plot and characterize, while still including the requisite number of sex scenes. It wasn't easy to get eight or ten well-written novels per month. Tlie fiction factories who turned these out in a week or two were getting higher rates from competitors, and Tony couldn't increase the rates until he increased the sales. He couldn't increase the sales until he got the authors his competitors were using, so it was a vicious circle. As the months passed, and he continued to turn out books only slightly better than those his predecessor had been turning out, Tony was becoming somewhat discouraged. His eyes were tired all the time, and he began to back-slide on the typos and spelling. The manuscripts coming in were so lousy that those details really didn't seem to matter to him as much as they had at first. One day Tony was out in the warehouse behind the publisher's offices, collecting sample books to send to authors, when he noticed that some of the covers, tom off unsold books, and returned for refund by dealers, had writing on the back of them. It looked like a gag: The returned covers were from what is known in the trade as "bondage fiction," and the messages on the back all said the same thing, "Help! Help! Save me! I am being held in bondage." There was no name signed, but some of the messages added, "I am only fifteen years old." There were over a dozen covers with writing on the back in the stack of fifty or so on the sorting table. Gag or not, Tony was curious, and he questioned the foreman of the warehouse. He learned that these gag covers had been coming in for some time, always from the same dealer. Tony's job required him to make periodic trips to the plant of the printer in an adjoining state, and when he found out that this dealer was also in that state, and not too far out of his way, he decided to investigate. It would be a break in the monotony of reading, editing and proofreading an endless series of manuscripts on the same subject -- sex. Mpwo months later he had an opportunity to do so. He had said nothing about it to the Distribution Manager, whose job consisted largely of calling on dealers. Being a stranger to the store owner, Tony figured he might take the dealer off guard and find out more than the regular company representative would. The dealer was in a district frequented by merchant seamen, sailors and soldiers on leave, itinerant construction workers and winos, with a sprinkling of hippies who had wandered some distance from their usual haunts. The store was full of browers, and Tony had no trouble losing himself among the customers. He attracted no particular attention from the bored clerk. "Buy 'em and take 'em away, gents! Don't read 'em Here. THis ain't tKe public library. Closing time in twenty minutes." As a group of merchant seamen went to the counter with arms full of books, Handing over ten and twentydollar bills to the clerk, Tony slipped I past a dingy curtain to the back room. It was stacked with shipments from Tony's employer and competitors. There .were so many boxes that only a narrow aisle was left between them. Tony followed it and came to a heavy plank door in a partition that was built across tlie rear of the store. The door was barred with a two-by four set in cleats, and Tony could hear somebody moving around behind it. Feeling rather foolish, He put his mouth' to a crack between the planks and asked in a stage whisper, "Are you the one who writes on the back of the returned covers?" There were a few seconds of silence, then a metallic and vaguely familiar voice answered, "Yes, I'm glad you've come, but don't open the door." "Why not?" Tony asked, willing to go along with the gag, though He was surer than ever that somebody was putting him on. This was no feminine voice, and it didn't sound fifteen years old, either. "They always let me out at closing time to work in the store. Wait for me. Don't let them see you. I'll explain everything when we're alone," tlie voice said. Tony thought about that for a minute. Well, what harm could come to him in the store with a crazy man? Surely, it would open from the inside without a key, like any other front door, and if the nut seemed dangerous, Tony could be out on a welltraveled street in seconds. He had come this far to satisfy his curiosity, and He was not about to back out now, just when things were beginning to get interesting. "Okay," he whispered through the crack, and began looking for a place to hide. It didn't take long to find one. He climbed over a stack of boxes and crouched in a vacant space between the last box and the side wall. Tt was none too soon. Tony heard tlie footsteps of the clerk coming out back, and the rasp of wood against wood as the twoby-four barring the door was lifted. "Good evening, sir," came the metallic voice. There was a grunt, wliich Tony supposed came from the clerk. "Get a move on," the clerk said. "The boss wants you to clear all the racks tonight and put out the new shipments. Don't mix the gay stuff with straight Keep the gay over in the comer where it belongs. And turn off the lights when: you get through." "Yes, sir, will that be all, sir?" the metallic yoke said, for all the world like a stage butler. The clerk granted again. Tony could Hear Kis footsteps receding toward the front of the store, hear a door opening and closing and the faint click of a lock. "You can come out now," the metallic voice said when that was over. Cautiously, Tony clambered, Inch by inch, over the pile of boxes. There was a single #watt bulb hanging from a cord; it was the only illumination in the back room and it left the comers in shadow, while dimly lighting a dark, solid figure that was shiny in the spots where the paint Had not peeled off. "But -- " Tony said, rather stupidly commenting on the obvious. "You're -- you're a robot!" "Of course," the mechanical man said, "Haven't you ever seen me Before? In my day I was perhaps the most famous robot in a feature-length motion picture. Later I was rented out for bit parts in a number of B pictures." "That's it!" Tony exclaimed, "I remember you now. But I thought those things were fakes. Just hollow shells without any computer. I thought they dubbed in the voice and moved the arms and' legs by hand, shooting a series of stills." "Sometimes they do," the robot said, "but my creator overbuilt me. He equipped me to do a number of things that weren't called for by the scripts. He was an eccentric inventor who eked out a living making props for motion pictures. Whenever there was a sequence that just couldn't be filmed, the producers would look Kim up and He would build an operating miniature. He never made much money, but He was really a genius." "He certainly was!" Tony agreed, "but how did you wind up here?" "It was several years before any of my owners realized that I was good for anything besides acting. Meanwhile, styles in; movie robots were changing. I was dated, though in capacity ahead of my time." "You can say that again!" Tony exclaimed. ity ahead of my time," the Robot repeated obediently. "I belonged, for several years, to a prop house that rented costumes and props to low-budget TV shows. Then they went bankrupt, and their whole stock was sold at auction. The owner of this bookstore bought me for a pittance; nobody else was bidding. He didn't know anything about movie robots, so he didn't take it for granted that I had trie same limitations as other movie robots, the kind you called fakes. He assumed I could do almost anything, told me what lie wanted me to do, and I did it." "Then you can think!" Tony said. "Not really," the robot replied, "I can combine bits, and pieces of what I Have heard people say and what I have read, into sentences that convey meaning. But I am not capable of original thought." "Did you say you can read?" Tony asked. "Certainly. I read a copy of every book that comes in here. It's not exactly the reading material I would select, but there's not much else to do around here, after I get my work done, get the stock straightened out, type the labels for the returns and so on. Of course, I don't need time to sleep." "You can type, too?" Tony demanded. "Certainly," the Robot said, motioning to the open door of the cubbyhole behind the partition. Tony looked inside, and saw an old manual office machine, with a stack of neatly-typed labels beside it. "I suppose you spell phonetically?" he asked. "No, I spell according to Webster," the robot replied. "That's more than you can say for most of the college graduates on the job market today," Tony remarked. "My creator programmed me with a complete unabridged dictionary," the Robot explained, "This is too good to be true!" Tony declared, "you'd be the world's best at reading galley proofs!" "I don't follow you," the Robot said, "Perhaps you attach some connotation to the word 'proof with which I am not familiar." "Don't tell me I stumped you! Well, it may not be in Webster, but a galley proof is what the printer sends the editor before these books go on the press. The editor has to read it and make corrections where the printer goofed -- made a mistake -- or where the lino operator followed copy, but the author didn't spell it right in the first place. Do you think you could do that?" "Certainly, sir. I have found many errors in. these books." "Eureka!" Tony cried, and added, as an afterthought, "would you -- ah -- like to do that? Work for a publisher?" "Anything related to the arts would be preferable to what I do here. It is such a simple routine that it is a waste of my capacities. That is the reason I want to leave." "Well, I wasn't quite sure whether or not robots Have preferences, but apparently you do. Tell me, if you want to leave, why don't you just walk out, instead of sending notes, trying to find someone to rescue you?" C C T can't leave unless my owner gives permission," the Robot protested. "My basic programming is to follow my owner's orders, and he ordered me to stay in the store. The only reason He locks me up in back is that he doesn't want the customers to see me. It's something about unemployment insurance, whatever that is. He doesn't pay it for me and he doesn't want anyone to find out I work here. But I couldn't leave even if He left the door open." "How much did your present owner pay for you at the auction?" "Fifty dollars," the Robot said. "There we are," Tony said, removing two twenties and a ten from His billfold, ringing up a fifty-dollar sale on the cash register, and putting the bills in the drawer. "Now you belong to me. I bought you. So you follow my orders." "You forgot something, sir." Tony held his breath, hoping the Robot did not realize that it takes two to make a bargain, that his present owner would never sell him, at least not that cheap, that this was actually a theft, which the Robot certainly would be under orders to prevents But the Robot merely handed Tony a pad of sales slips. Letting his breath out in relief, He filled one out, writing carefully, "One used robot... #." The Robot looked at it, nodded, and stuck it on a spindle. Apparently He assumed everything in the store was for sale, including himself. His owner Had never troubled to let him know his own value. "When do I start my new duties, sir?" the Robot asked. "As soon as we can get to hell out of Here," Tony said, "My car is at the curb'. Wait till I see if the coast is clear. I don't want anybody to see you, either, because I don't intend to pay unemployment insurance on you." npHey made the few steps to the car at a time when there was nobody on the sidewalk, except an old wino who probably thought He Had D.T.'s. Tony took the precaution of Having the Robot lie down on the floor-boards in front of the back seat until they were on the freeway and moving too fast for anyone to get a good look at His passenger as they passed I the infrequent illumination standards. Ttien Tony told tKe Robot to climb over tHe back of tHe front seat, so tfiey could talk. "I want us to be real good friends," Tony told him. "Do you know what a friend is?" "I have encountered the word frequently in reading," the Robot said. "Shall I give Webster's definition?" "No," Tony said. "I want you to find out what it means by experience. A friend is somebody who want you to be satisfied, somebody you want to stay with I , never want to be sold to somebody else. Is there anything you would like to have before you start your new job, anything that would make you more -- afi -- comfortable?" "If it's not too much to ask, sir," the Robot said, "I would present a much neater appearance with a new coat of paint." "Done!" Tony said, "You shall have the best paint job an auto body shop can give you. But I think you'd better keep quiet while they're doing it, let them think you're one of those fakes." "As you wish, sir," the Robot said. "You can quit calling me sir," Tony said, "The name is Tony Green. Mr. Green in the office and Tony elsewhere. Don't you have a name? WHat sfiall I call you?" "I was called by several names in pictures." "Well, let's give you a new one. I'm going to call you my little Einstein." "That's very flattering." "You know who Einstein was?" "I have encountered references to Einstein's theory. And I Have seen the name used by itself in fiction, to indicate someone brilliant. But I have had little opportunity to read scientific books. I wish I could read some, particularly on cybernetics." "We'll take care of that, friend. It so happens that I Have quite a good collection of books on cybernetics." Silently, Tony reflected that fie would fiave to select the Robot's reading material witfi some care. A Robot who could program himself from tfie printed page could easily get too smart to handle if he learned too much about what made him tick. "Thank you, Tony," it said. "Attaboy, Einstein," Tony replied. "By the way -- you say you are incapable of original thought. Where did you get the idea of sending out rescue messages like that?" "From a novel. A young woman was being held captive by a cruel and lustful factory owner. All day she had to paste labels on canned goods. Then at night she was chained in an attic, where the factory owner came to ravish her. She wrote messages on the bade of some labels. A handsome young man bought a can of peaches and came to rescue her." "I don't recall the plot, but it sounds corny enough to be one of our bondage books. Maybe it was one of our competitor's. I can see you have a good background in this field." Tony was beginning to have the glimmering of an idea that perhaps Einstein would be good for something more than proofreading. He wasn't capable of original thought, he could only put together bits and pieces of what he had read, but what else did the authors of these sexies do, anyway? T ony Green's office was on the second floor of the loft building the publisher had converted into offices and warehouse. It was the only office up there. There was a good deal of traffic to the editor's office, of authors and would-be authors inquiring about requirements. The boss, a man who liked everything to look businesslike in case of a raid from the vice squad, objected to bearded and sometimes untidy writers cluttering up th'e main floor. The editor was not enough of a wheel in the organization to rate a private secretary, so He was alone in his office most of the time, except when the authors called, and the reception desk always gave Him warning of that. It was an ideal set-up to keep Einstein's presence a secret, particularly since there was a vault on the second floor, where the original manuscripts of published books and contracts were kept. After sneaking Einstein in on a Saturday afternoon, wlien nobody else was in the place, Tony kept him locked up in the vault, opening the door only when they were alone on that floor. These quarters were not as large as the cubbyhole the Robot Had occupied during the day in the bookstore, but Einstein seemed quite happy there. He Had a new coat of paint, the color picked by Tony, since the Robot turned out to be color-blind. He had selected scientific books to read for recreation. As a proof-reader of sexies, he was a whiz. He didn't even need to be taught the standard proof-reading marks; they were on an appendix page in the unabridged the Robot had stored in his memory-banks. If Tony had referred to proof-reading instead of asking him whether He could read proof tliat first day they met, the Robot would have understood immediately. Tony no longer Had to take proofs heme to read in the evenings and on week-ends, and his eyes weren't quite so tired, though he still had to evaluate manuscripts and edit those selected. The standard of accuracy in the books improved materially. The shipping schedule was met on time every month, which had seldom been the case before. Tony got a raise and was feeling quite smug about his discovery. 'T'hen one of the regular authors, who had been furnishing a book a month, had a nervous breakdown. The cover for His current opus had already been printed, the contract having been signed, as usual, on the basis of a few sample chapters and outline. There were three other authors Tony could depend upon to deliver finished manuscripts on time, but they were also under contract, and none of them Had progressed far enough on his own book to take on the job of completing another within two weeks. In desperation, Tony called Einstein. That was his lucky day. By then the Robot had thousands of bits and pieces stored in His memory banks, plot situations, from which to choose the spare dialog, characters, sex scenes, parts to fill In the bare outline. Since the Robot wasted no time sleeping and eating, he was even faster than the human fiction factories who dictated tlieir novels. He delivered the finished manuscript the morning after Tony had given him the assignment. If fitted requirements to a T. True enough, it changed style every few paragraphs as Einstein borrowed from different sexies he had read, but that was a minor matter. The names of the characters were uniform throughout, which was more than Tony could expect from some of his human authors. It was grammatical, the Spelling was, of course, irreproachable, and the word-length precise. This was only the beginning of Einstein's career as an author. Next he mastered the technique of writing outlines, by reading all the outlines of previous books in the files. Soon he was turning out a book a week, under four psuedonyms, in addition to reading proof on eight or ten books a month. Between the three regulars and the Robot, Tony built up a whole stable of authors whose work took very little editing. The agents ceased submissions, since they were all rejected without being read. Within a few more months, Tony had so much confidence in the Robot's performance, that He turned over practically all of the editorial duties, in addition to the writing chore. Tony merely approved tHe outlines, and sometimes changed the titles. He Hadn't read a whole manuscript in some time; the Robot did all that, and even wrote the flyleaf copy and the ads in the back of the books. Einstein was busy around the clock, and no longer had time to read scientific books, which Tony thought was just as well. The Robot already knew all an author and editor of sexies needs to know. When the office shipment of the new October books arrived from the printer's, the publisher brought sample copies upstairs in person. Tony leaned back in his chair, ready to bask in another compliment, perhaps accept another raise. "Is this your idea of a gag or something?" the boss demanded. "What's wrong?" Tony asked. "Look at the endings," the publisher told him, "They're all the same." Tony's confusion and dismay increased as he opened book after book to the last page before the ads. In each of them, after the words, "the end," a paragraph in italics had been added. Not only in the four books Einstein had written, but in those he had proof-read as well. They all carried the same paragraph. It read : "Help, help! I am being held in bondage! Come save me. I am only sixteen years old." it A    Half a dozen years ago or more, a young lady named Sydney Van Scyoc (her friends call her "Joyce") began appearing in Galaxy and elsewhere with some provocative little stories that seemed to promise the beginning of an interesting career. The problems of the woman writer are even graver Stan those of the man; there comes a time when the babies are getting born end growing old enough to get out of the house, and during that time few if any stories get written. But finally the time comes when a girl can settle down to writing again, and it seems to have come for Sydney Van Scyoc. As a tooling-up exercise, she wrote A Visit to Cleveland General, which appeared here a couple of months ago. Next month she joins us with the biggest effort so far. It's called Little Blue Hawk. We liked it very much. "Little Blue Hawk" is a man -- sort of. He lives on Earth, a somewhat different Earth than our own. And he has to battle for survival. You've heard that words are weapons? Little Blue Hawk's words are. They can kill. Serial Tie world had been given a gift of radiant power from the air ; and if seemed likely to destroy mankind t Pasmaquoddy Power Station the United States has just inaugurated a new system of broadcast power. It works perfectly; the change-over occurs without incident; all federal installations, including Florida's Caine Island Penitentiary, begin smoothly to tap the broadcast energy for all their requirements. The experiment is a success... Yet certain things occur. For some reason, more power is being taken from the broadcast than the total of authorized users can account for. In an eastern city, an ancient derelict suddenly comes to life. He totters to a sauna, sits soaking in the steam longer than any human being should be able to, emerges looking decades younger. A doctor observes with incredulity as the man's scars disappear and an ugly cyst on his back changes shape and pops out a corroded old Minie ball of Civil War vintage; the man will answer no questions, but he goes out into tlie night on an urgent and unexplained errand. At Caine Island, the oldest prisoner in the place, who has been there so long no one remembers his crime or when he came, breaks free of two armed guards and dives into the sea. And in the ocean off the Florida coast, a hurricane begins to form -- but a hurricane such as no man has ever seen: motionless, in a position that makes no meteorological sense, and hunger than any storm on record. The two strange men race toward a common destination, though neither knows that the other exists. Strange memories of ancient Viking days come to theth -- tall primitive warriors, somehow linked with a thinking, superpowerful starship and a terrifying werebeast that slew helpless humans, centuries before... VI  board tlie weatlier satellite, the meteorologists on duty, as well as Half the off-duty staff, were gathered in the main observation deck, watching the big screens which showed a view of the night side of the planet below. Faint smudges of diffuse light marked the positions of the great metropolitan areas along the eastern American seaboard. A rosy arc still embraced the western horizon, fading visibly with the turn of the planet. The voice of the observer on duty at Merritt Island came from the big wall annunciator, marred by static. "... the turbulence is on an unprecented scale wliich plays hell with observation, but we've run what we Have through the computer. The picture that's building is a pretty strange one. We get a pattern of an expanding circular front, centered off Bermuda. The volumes of air involved are staggering. Winds have reached one Hundred fifty knots now, at fifty miles from the center. We're getting a kind of rolling action: High air masses being drawn down, dumping ice crystals, then rolling gunder and joining in tHe main coriolis rotation. TEe jet stream is being affected as far away as Iceland. All SoutEern Route fligEts are being diverted nortE. MeanwEile, the temperature off tEe IrisE coast is dropping like an express elevator. It looks very mucE as if tEe Gulf Stream is being pulled off course, and dissipated down into the South Atlantic." Fred Hoffa, Senior Meteorologist, excEanged puzzled looks with tEe Satellite Commander. "We Bear you, Tom," Ee said into Eis Hand-Held micropEone. "But we don't quite understand tEis. WEat you're describing is a contradiction in terms. You Have all that cold, EigH altitude air rusEing. WEat's pulling it? WEere's it going? Same for tEe ocean currents. We've been plotting the data, and it looks like a lot of water flowing toward tEe storm center, nothing coming out. It doesn't make mucfi sense." "I'm just passing on wEat tEe tapes tell me, Fred. I know if sounds screwy. And some of tEe data is probably faulty. But tEe pattern is plain enough. Wait until daylight and you'll see." TEe general took the micropEone. "Merritt Island, we've been studying this thing by IR, radar and laser, and all we can make of it is one Eell of a big whirlpool -- just wEat that Neptune pilot described." "It's not exactly a normal whirlpool. It's more like wEat you see wEen tEe water runs down a bathtub drain." "Yes, but tEat's..." Fred's voice died away. "Now you're getting the idea," Tom said. "We estimate tEat two point five cubic miles of seawater Have poured down tEat Hole in the last six Hours." "But -- wEere's it going?" "THat's a good question. Let us know down Here if you figure cut an answer." A taxi was parked at tEe curb before tHe narrow front of an all-nigEt eatery. TEe driver was inside, huncHed on a stool over a cup of coffee. He turned as tlie door opened, gave tEe big man wEo came in a Hard-eyed look, turned back to the counterman. "So I told Eim, I said, wEat tEe Eell, nobody tells John Zabisky How to drive. I says, look, Mac, I'm eighteen years in tEe Hacking game and I've drove all kinds, and I don't take nobody telling me -- " "Excuse tEe intrusion, Mr. Zabisky," tHe newcomer said. "I need a cab, urgently." TEe cabbie turned slowly. "How you know my name-" "You mentioned it just now." "WHo're you?" "Falconer is tHe name. As I said, it's urgent." "YeaH, yeah', hold your water. Everything's urgent to you guys. To me this cup of java's urgent." The counterman was leaning On one elbow, working on a molar with a broom straw. He withdrew It and examined the tip, smiling Sourly. "Refill, John?" "Hell yes, sure, why not?" "It's worth fifty dollars to me to get to Princeton immediately," the man who called himself Falconer said. "Princeton? New Jersey? In this weather? You nuts or something? I wouldn't drive it in daylight for fifty bucks." "You're off-duty?" "Naw, I'm not off duty. Why?" "Your license says you'll take a customer where he wants to go -- for the fare on the meter." "Get this guy," John said, staring at Falconer's smooth, unlined face. "What are you, kid, playing hookey? Your old lady know you are out at this time o' night?" Falconer smiled gently. "Like o come outside with me Zabisky?" The husky driver came off the stool in a rush which somehow lost momentum as he crowded against Falconer; he found himself eased gently backward. It hadn't been like running into a brick wall -- not exactly. "Hey, not inside, John," the counterman spoke up. "But you can take him in the alley. I like to see these wise guys get it." The cabby whirled on him. "How would you like me to come around there and cave in a few slats for you, loudmouth? Whatta you trying to do, lose me a fare?" He jerked his mackinaw straight and gave Falconer a sideways look. "I'll take twenty now," he said. "Where in Princeton you want to go?" T t was a long drive through rain that gusted and swirled across the car glass like a battery of fire hoses. On the outskirts of the town, the cabby mumbled, peering ahead, negotiating the twists and turns of the road down which Falconer had directed him. The headlights picked up a pair of massive wrought-iron gates set in a high brick wall. "Dim your lights three times," Falconer instructed as the cab pulled up facing the gates. The gates swung back on a graveled drive. They went along it, halted before wide steps, a colonaded veranda behind which tall windows reflected blackness and the shine of headlights on wet leaves. "Looks like nobody home," the driver said. "Who lives here?" "I do." Rain swirled in Falconer's face as he opened the door on the left side. "We have some unfinished business, Mr. Zabisky," he said. He steped out and turned; tKe driver's door flew open, and Zabisky bounded out, a tire iron in His knobbed fist. "Okay, Mister, start sometEing," fie bawled over tfie sounds of the storm. Falconer moved toward fiim; an instant later tfie tire iron was skidding across tfie drive. Empty-fianded, Zabisky faced Falconer, an expression of astonisfiment on His wide face. "Tfiat makes it more even, don't you think, Zabisky?" Falconer called. The driver put fiis fiead down and plougfied in, botfi fists swinging. Falconer took a solid blow on the cfiest before fie tied Kim up, spun him, held Him with! both arms locked behind his back. "Ready to surrender, Zabisky?" "Go to hell!" Tlie cabbie tried to kick Falconer's shin. He gave his arms another twist of the cloth'. "Ask me nicely, and I'll let you go." "Have your fun, Mister," Zabisky grunted. "Break 'em off at the elbow. I ask you nothin'." Falconer released tfie man; fie turned at bay, fists cocked. His thick Hair was plastered across his wide, low forehead. He licked rain off his lips, waiting. "Zabisky, do you Have a family? Anyone who'll worry if you don't come Home for a few days?" "Wfiat's it to you?" "I need a man who doesn't wilt under pressure. You'll do. I'll pay you a hundred dollars a day plug expenses." "Sfiove it, Mister." "Two Hundred." "I'm offering you a job. I Gad to know something about you first. Don't feel badly about not being able to use that tire iron on me. I'm a professional fighter." Zabisky frowned. "What you want me to do? I don't go for tfie rough stuff." "I want you to drive my car." "Two cees a day for a chauffer?" "It's my money." Falconer took out folded money, handed over two Hundred dollar bills. Zabisky looked at them. "Where to?" "Anywhere I tell you." Zabisky considered. "This on tfie level?" "Why would I waste your time and mine? Come inside and we'll talk about it." Falconer turned and went up the steps. After a moment Zabisky tucked the bills away and followed. T n tfie governor's office at Caine Island, Captain Brasher of tfie guard force stood before fiis cfiief's desk, looking uncomfortable. "Tfie fiouse belongs to a Mrs. Talbot," fie was saying. "A widow, age about twenty-five. Not bad-looking." "Never mind her looks. Where Is sEe?" "We Haven't found Her yet. But -- " "Any signs of violence in the House?" "Not unless you want to include two men stretched on tKe floor." Brasher snapped. "Did they see who attacked them?" "They haven't been able to tell us anything useful. You know how these concussion cases are, Governor. Harmon says he didn't see who hit him. Weinert has no memory of anything since yesterday's ball game." "What about the woman's car?" "A '# Rambler, pale tan with white top, license number #D#, dent in right front fender." "Has it been seen?" It went through the north causeway roadblock at # :#. The woman was driving. She was alone." "Are you sure of that?" "The sheriff's boys went over the car with a fine-tooth comb, naturally. It was clean." "Any other cars pass the roadblock?" "Not a one. Most people know enough to stay home in this weather.' "What else do you know about the woman?" "She's lived in the shack for the past couple of years. Slie Had a brother who was an inmate Here, he died last March'. She used to visit Him. I don't know why she hung around afterward." "Tell me more about the car. Was there anything unusual about it? Any bundles on the back seat, rug on the floor, anything at all?" "My boys would have caught anything like that. Tlie car was clean. At the time we had no reason to hold the woman." "Where was she going at that Hour, in this weather?" "She was on Her way to relatives in the northern part of tlie fstate; she was worried about flooding." "Where in the northern part of the state?" "Gainesville, she said." "Get the names of these relatives?" "Well -- " "Find out, Brasher. And put out a general alert on the car. I want it found fast. And when it's found, I want it gone over with magnifying glasses: over, in and under!" "Naturally I've alerted the State Highway Patrol," Brasher saw. "But frankly, Governor, I don't understand all this emphasis on the car. The woman obviously left the house before Grayle arrived. He found the house empty and broke in -- " "Are there any signs of that?" "Well, the locks weren't broken. But -- " He broke off, looking astounded. "By God! It's clear as day! The little bitch was in on it! They planned it in advance! She was waiting for Kim, with the car gassed up and ready to go -- " "Planned it two and a Half years in advance -- including tlie death of the brother? And I thought you said she was alone in the car. But never mind. Check on the car. Find out where it was serviced, what kind of shape it was in, whether she had any special work done on it. Talk to her friends. Find out if she ever met Grayle, ever visited the prison after her Husband died. And Captain..." He held Braslier's eyes with a cold expression. "I'll bet you my retirement to your next promotion you don't find a tiring." The guard chief returned the glare. "I'll take that bet -- sir." ihief Engineer Hunnicut, arriv ing seven minutes late for his scheduled briefing of the officials assembled in the office of looked around at the grim expressions lining the long table, "I won't waste your time with generalities, gentlemen. You're aware that some difficulties Have developed in the first hours of opsence, it boils down to a rathetf wide discrepancy between rated and actual efficiency. This in turn suggests a power leakage, which at first glance appears preposterous. A very specialized type of receiver is required to draw power from the transmission field," "It was our understanding that nothing of the sort was possible," a jowly man with a mane of gray Hair cut in brusquely. "I recall the objections raised in the early hearings, and the contemptuous way in which those objections were put down by you so-called technical people. And you have the effrontery to stand, up Here and tell us power is leaking -- or being stolen from tlie US government." "I don't know who you've been talking to, Senator," Hunnicut said. "But I said nothing whatever about power being stolen. I think it would be wise to avoid leaping to any conclusions at this point --  particularly before you have heard what I came Here to report to you." "Well, it certainly appears obvious..." Tlie senator trailed off. "It's far from obvious. This is a new technology, gentlemen. Even those of us who designed and constructed the system don't pretend to know all the answers; I think it would behoove others witli less knowledge of tGe facts to exercise some restraint in the ideas tKey spread abroad. Those comments may come Home to roost." Hunnicut swept the table with a challenging look. "Now, as to what we've turned up -- it appears that there are at least two field discontinuities, other than those accounted for by the nine receiving stations." "What's a field discontinuity?" "A point of demand on the power field creates a distinctive fluctuation in the field-strength gradient. We're dealing with what might be described as force lines, analogous to the force lines of a magnetic field. When power is drawn, these force lines are bent toward the point of demand." "Well -- where are these illegal receivers? What are you doing about them? Whom Have you notified? Do you intend to allow them to simply continue to drain off God knows how many thousands of kilowatts of government owned power, and thumb their noses at us?" "The pin-pointing of these discontinuities is not quite so simple as locating an illegal radio transmitter, for example. It's necessary to take a large number of field strength readings, and to plot them against the theoretical flux density pattern. Again I remind you that the state of the art -- "  ' lecture on art," the senator cut in. "I've asked you a number of questions, young man, and I expect -- " "I'm no longer a young man, Senator," Hunnicut broke in. He felt his temper breaking at last; and it felt damned good. A feeling almost of exultation filled him. Here was a target he could Hit. And I Have a sneaking suspicion these gentlemen didn't come here to listen to your expectations. I'm trying to tell you what we've learned so far. If you'd sit still and listen for a few minutes, you might find it unnecessary to waste time with pointless needling. Now as I was saying -- " "Look here -- " the senator started from his chair, but allowed his colleagues to pull him back and sooth him. " -- we're fairly certain we have two points of power loss to deal with, one considerably more massive than the other. The lesser of the two seems to be located quite close to the generating station, possibly in the mountainous area to the north -- " "What in the world is up there that could be drawing power from the net?" a thin, elderly fellow whom Hunnicut recognized as a State University Board Member burst out, then subsided, looking embarrassed. "We don't know. We're proceeding on tfie tHeory tHat it's a purely natural phenomenon." "How is tliat possible the senator snorted. "I seem to remember being told that this entire system is a vastly sophisticated piece of ultra-modern engineering, that the whole theory behind it isn't more than five years old." "Nature knows nothing of our theories," Hunnicut said flatly. "The sun was shining long before we understood sub-nuclear physics, radioactivity was heating the the Curies. It may well be that Some type of geological formation we know nothing about has the characteristic of absorbing energy in the broadcast spectrum. That theory may or may not be supported by the other findings we have developed." "No dramatic pauses, if you please, Mr. Hunnicut!" the senator interjected into the momentary silence. "I'll remind you that this is tentative, gentlemen," Hunnicut ignored the barb. "But at the moment it appears that the second demand point coincides with the center of the storm that's ripping the East Coast to shreds at the moment." "So -- what does that mean?" C# A s to that. Senator, your guess is as good as mine." "Very well, what's your guess?" "My guess," Hunnicut said slowly, staring the senator down, "is that the thing that's creating the whirlpool is drawing its power from the Pasmaquoddie Station." There was a burst of exclamations; the thin voice of the Interior Department man won out: "You're saying that someone -- the Communists, perhaps -- are using our power system to create this storm?" "I said nothing about Communists. But the relationship seems indisputable." "Poppycock!" the senator barked. "You're attempting to explain away the failure of your scheme by conjuring up imaginary menaces. Russians manipulating the weather, eh? That's the damnedest piece of nonsense I've ever heard!" "That's not what I said." "But you implied it!" "I implied nothing." "Gentlemen!" Peacem akers were on their feet, urging the two verbal antagonists to their seats. "This wrangling is getting us nowhere," an Army colonel said. "We're here to assemble data, nothing more. Let's stick to the facts." "The facts are that I'm recommending that the transmitter be shut down immediately, until the possible correlation can be checked out," Hunnicut said. "Preposterous!" the senator barked. "That would be a public announcement of failure!" "Impossible," the Interior Department representative said flatly. "The entire project would be discredited by any such shutdown -- to say nothing of the problems it would cause those facilities that are now operating on the broadcast system." "Very well; you gentlemen can act as you see fit. But I'm submitting my recommendation in writing to the Secretary, personally." "If you do, Mr. Hunnicut," the senator said, "that will be the end of a promising career." "If I don't," Hunnicut said, "it may be the end of something considerably more important than my career." 'T'lie insistent chirrr of the muted telephone woke the President of the United States from a restless sleep. He lifted the faintly glowing receiver and cleared his throat. "All right," He said. "Mr. President, General Maynard is recommending immediate evacuation of the Florida keys. Governor Cook has declared a state of emergency and requests Federal disaster action." "Winds still rising?" "Yes sir. Over ninety knots now. Record tides along the entire South Florida coast. Water and wind damage as far north as Hatteras. No signs of any letup, according to Merritt Island." "Tell the general to go ahead with the evacuation. Give Him full Armed Forces support. I don't envy him tlie chore." "No, sir. I Have one other item. I wouldn't Have bothered you, but as long as I already have --  an engineer on the PasmaquoddS project, a man by the name of Hunnicut -- " "I remember the name, Jerry." "Yes, sir. He's submitted a recommendation direct to Secretary Tyndall, over the heads of his direct superiors, to the effect that the power broadcast is in some way affecting the storm. Making it worse, I gather. He's requesting authorization to shut down long enough to observe results, if any." "That's a pretty extreme request, Jerry." "Hunnicut is known as a levelheaded man, sir. And He's laying his job on the line with this action. Still, as you say, it sounds fantastic." "Check it out, Jerry. Get some other opinion -- outside opinions. Don't let Bob Tyndall pressure you. Get at the facts. And see what impact this shutdown would have." "I checked that aspect out, sir. THere'd be no particular problem, except for Caine Island Prison. They're on the broadcast net, as you know. And they've lost their backup capability. The winds Have knocked out the overwater cable, and their stand-by generators have been flooded. Without broadcast power they'd be in serious trouble." "WHat about evacuation?" "Sir, there are twelve hundred maximum security prisoners at Caine Island." "I see. All right, get on it and come back to me with firm recommendations by -- " The President glanced at the glowing dial of the bedside clock. "Hell, I might as well get up and come down to the office. I'm not going to get any more sleep tonight." HPhe courier boat is hidden in the place Lokrien had described, a shallow gorge high in the mountains. The smooth greengray curve of the Ul-metal hull glows softly in the dark. As Gal grather slides down the slope in a clatter of pebbles, the entry port, triggered by the field generated by the bioprosthetics devices in his body, opens to admit him. Hammer in hand He strides along the glare-strip lighted passage to the control compartment. "Welcome aboard, CaptainLieutenant," a smooth voice says from above him. He goes flat against the wall, his teeth bared. He has forgotten that the ships of Ysar speak with a man's voice. "Commander Lokrien is not aboard at this time," the construct-vice states. "Kindly make yourself comfortable until his return. The refreshment cubicle is located -- " " Where is he?" "I detect that you are agitated," the voice says calmly. "You are invited to make use of a tranquilizing spray." There is a soft click, and a small silver tube pops from a dispenser slot beside the conn chair. Gralgrathor snarls, swings the hammer against the plaston panel. It rebounds harmlessly. "Attention!" the voice says sharply. "You are ordered to withdraw from the control compartment at once! This is an operational urgent command!" A sharp jolt of electricity through the floor reinforces the words. Gralgrather whirls and runs aft, slamming open each door, searching every cranny of the compact vessel. "Where are you hiding, Loki?" he shouted. " Come out and face me, and tell me again about the needs of the empire!" "Captain-Lieutenant, I perceive that you are in a dangerously excited state." The cybernetic voice issues from a speaker in the passage. "I must ask you to leave the vessel at once." A lowvoltage shock throws ham against the bulkhead. He turns and makes 'his way , stumbling, to the power cell chamber door, smashes the lock with a blow. Inside, ignoring repeated shocks, he takes aim at the massive conductors leading up from the coil chamber, and with all the power of his back and arms, brings the hammer down on the casing. The instantaneous blast that follows blows him into scarlet darkness. #I I nside tEe big House, Falconer usEered the cab driver into a big, Kigfi-ceilinged room with trophy-covered oak walls, a vast granite fireplace, deep rags, low, comfortable furniture. He poured the man a drink at a mahoganytopped bar that occupied most of onewall, adjacent to glass doors; tHat opened onto a flagstone terrace. "I'll be witli you in about ten minutes," He said, and left tEe room, went up tEe wide, curved stairway, along tEe Ball to a spacious bedroom. He donned a Heavy cavalry twill shirt, whipcord jodpEurs, low boots. He strapped a lightweight Holster under Eis arm, fitted a flat pistol to it, then pulled a dark blue, Navyissue weatherjacket on. Zabisky looked around as Falconer walked into the study. "You got some nice pieces here, Mister," Ee said. He pointed a blunt forefinger at a tamisEed cuirass and a pair of crossed pikes over tEe bar. "THat looks like tlie old Polish armer," He said. "Sixteen Hundreds. It took a man to wear that stuff all day. I'll tell you." Falconer nodded. "Indeed it did. You're interested in armory?" "Well, you know. A guy's got to Have a Hobby," Ee said. "You got quite a collection Here." His eyes roved over tfie array of weapons, plate-armor, mail, tfie faded banners and scarred es- cutcEeons. "Hey," he said, pointed with Eis chin toward a lozengesHaped shield bearing a design, of a twoHeaded eagle in dark bronze. "WHere'd you get tHat?" "At Vienna." "Funny. I got an old beer tankard at Home, been in the family for a long time, got tEe same, picture on it. Supposed to belonged to my ancestors. The story is, we Ead a king in the family, once." He laughed, glancing sideways at Falconer. "I guess it's a lot of bull, but my old greataunt Dragica, she's a nut on genealogy, you know; she comes up with all this stuff." "Your name was familiar," Falconer said. "You're a descendant of king John Sobeiski?" "Yeah, that was his name. You Heard of him? Geeze. I'm named for Him." "He was a man," Falconer said. "Taller tfian you, big as an ox through tKe cfiest and shoulders, fair Hair, but eyes mucH like yours. He had the gift of laughter. He was much beloved by his men." Zabisky stared, gave a short laugh. "You talk like you knew the guy." "I've read of him," Falconer said shortly. "Let's go, John." "Yeah." Zabisky followed Falconer outside. In the drive, He halted. "Hey, Mister. There's just one more thing. Falconer turned. Zabisky took a quick step toward him, rammed a powerful right jab toward Falconer's sternum. Falconer turned half sideways, caught the wrist, bright it forward under his arm, levered the elbow backward across his chest. "Okay. I just wanted to check," Zabisky said. They went along a brick walk; Falconer lifted one of the five doors on the long garage. Zabisky whistled at the gleaming shapes parked in the gloom. "A Jag XK#, an SJ Doosie, ain't it? And what's that. It looks like a '# Auburn -- " "It's a '# Auburn #. New production." "Man, you know your cars. Which one are we taking?" "The Auburn." Zabisky whistled again, running a hand along the sleek lines of the car. "What's she got under the hood?" "A TEunderbird # horseoower V-#." "And I get paid too, Hah? Let's go pal. I want to see how this baby turns up." They pulled out along the drive Swiftly, noiselessly. At the road, Zabisky turned to Falconer. "Where to?" Falconer pointed. "WEat town we headed for?" "Just drive, John. I'll tell you when to turn." Falconer leaned back against the smooth leather seat and in ten seconds was sound asleep.  the car parked on a side street in Brooksville," Captain Brasher said. "Key in the ignition, nobody around." "What kind of neighborhood was it?" Hardman asked. The captain gave a lift of his khaki-epauletted shoulders. "After all, I wasn't there. I can't be expected to know every detail." "That's just what I do expect, Brasher! And I don't expect to wait until morning to find out what kind of car Grayle is driving now!" TKe intercom buzzed; the governor jabbed tKe button savagely. "Sir, Captain Lacey of tKe Highway Patrol on the line for Captain BrasHer. Shall I -- " "Put Kim on." He picked up tKe pHone, listened to clicks. "THis is Hardman at Caine Island, Captain," lie said. "I'll take your report." "Yes, sir. On tKe Rambler: we found it in Brooksville." "Yes, I know. Any leads?" "Looks like He knocked over tHe watcliman at tKe Ford car agency. It's just across tKe street from where tKe Rambler was parked. He's still out, but wKen Ke comes around Ke can tell us if anything's missing from the lot." "Good. Keep me informed." TKe governor cradled the pKone and looked across at Brasher. "He took a car from the Ford lot Ke was parked beside. We don't know what model or color, but we can be pretty sure it's a new one." He swiveled to look at tKe map of the state on the wall. "Lacey, I want you to watch #-# and #-#, and US #, north and south. Stop any new Ford." "TKat's a pretty tall order." "Still -- I'm ordering it!" He cradled tKe phone. "I want a man on the scene. A reliable man, representing my -- our -- interests." "Harmon," BrasKer said at once. "He's keen. A good man." "I thought he was in tKe Hospital." "He Has a Headache that gives Kim a personal interest in nailing Grayle. They'd Had run-ins before." "Get Kim up there, rigKt away." WKen BrasKer Had left, tHe governor poured Eimself a stiff Scotch from His office bar, then keyed the intercom and called for Lester Pale. TKe man came in a few minutes later, looking troubled. "Anything yet, Lester?" "Nothing that makes any sense, sir." "Let's Have it anyway." Lester spread papers on the edge of the desk. "My Pentagon contact came through with a reference to a prisoner named Grayle --  " "First name?" "Just an initial : T. This Grayle was transferred to Ft. Leavenworth from Ft. McNair at Washington, after a court-martial conviction for murder." "Any details of the crime?" "Yes, sir. The trial transcript is attached. It seems Ke was in an Army stockade at tKe time of the murder." "WKat motive?" "It apears Ke knew the victim. Other than tKat -- " Lester sliook his head. "Frankly, this is prefly hard reading. A poor photostat to begin with, and cramped Handwriting -- " "What do you mean, handwriting? Don't you Have a copy of the official record?" "Yes, sir," Lester said flatly. "But in # there weren't any typewriters." Hardman stared blankly at His aide; He reached, plucked the papers from the other's hands, scanned the sheets. "What the devil is this, Lester? This is an account of a Civil War trial!" "Yes, sir. The man named Grayle was a Confederate prisoner, And the man he killed was a Union officer." "Union officer?" Hardman echoed. "There's one discrepancy in the story, though," Lester continued in a voice that seemed on the edge of breaking. "The rumor here at Caine Island was that Grayle did the job with an axe; but according to this, he used a hammer." guard lieutenant said softly. "Are you giving me the kill order on this pigeon?" "Not at all." Brash'er's eyes stared through the other man. "But if he's gunned down in a fire-fight, with witnesses that He fired the first shot. , . , " #  The lieutenant nodded, touched his tongue to his lips. "Yeah," he said. "Now you're talking, sir. Blale and Weinert'll feel better when they hear -- " "They'll hear nothing, damn you! Keep this to yourself. But be damned sure you're in at the kill, understand?" "You bet, Cap'n. The lieutenant patted the old-fashioned .# calibre solid-slug pistol he wore at his hip. "I'll be there!"   road," Grayle said. "We can't," the girl said decisively. "Tlie whole road system of Florida was built to carry tourists north and south in a hurry. This was unoccupied land just a few years ago. There isn't any network of farm roads and secondary roads like there is in most states." "What about that?" Grayle pointed to an exit from the multi-laned expressway. "It just leads into a town. We are making good time." They saw the roadblock then: a pair of police cruisers parked across two of the four northbound lanes three hundred yards ahead, red flashers winking. Anne wrenched the wheel hard right, with a squeal of tires took the exit ramp. Grayle looked back. One of the police cars was in motion, swinging in a tight turn around the central divider strip. "TKey saw us." Anne hurled the car down out and out of the curving ramp, joined a wide, empty avenue glistening under tlie eerie blue glare of pole-mounted mercury vapor lamps. Above High, concrete-retained banks, tEe fronts of ancient frame houses stared out across tlie traffic chasm like gaunt old men facing an open grave. A cross street was coming up. Anne braked, skidded, caugEt it, slammed over tlie curb and across tEe apron of a service station, missed a parked wrecker by inches, shot into tEe narrow moutH of a side street, sending black water sEeeting. SHe cut tEe headlights, slowed to a crawl, pulled into a weed-grown driveway, reached across to tilt tlie rear-view mirror. For a moment, nothing stirred I in tlie rectangle of glass; then light grew, became the glare of high beams, probing along tlie dark street. The flasher winked as the police car came slowly along the street. A spotlight beam lanced out, pushed Hard shadows across the Headliner. The car Halted ten feet from the rear bumper of tlie Ford. "Don't move." Grayle gripped the right side door handle, twisted it silently, Held it. Rain beat on the top of the car; faintly, feet squelched in mud, coming forward along the driver's side. As they halted, Grayle threw the door open, sending the man reeling back and down. He came out of the car in a lunge, stooped and swept the gun from the Hand of the felled policeman, threw it from him, flattened himself against the side of the car near the rear wheel. He looked at the angry frightened face staring up at him. "Tell your partner to throw away His gun and come around to this side," he said. The man on the ground didn't move, didn't speak. Rain washed pink blood from a cut lip down across! his face. "Go for His feet, Charlie!" he shouted suddenly and threw himself at Grayle in a scrambling plunge. A vivid double flash, the boom-boom! of a gun, from the other side of the car, whining ricochets. Grayle rounded the back of the car, straight-armed the man coming from, the opposite side, sent him sprawling. He ran for the cover of the ragged junipers lining the drive, plunged through as the gun racketed again. He ran past the front of the house, ripped through a four-foot hedge, cut left, was back at the curb. One of the men was running Heavily down toward the police car in the street. Grayle sprinted, reached it first had the door open when he saw I # tiie second policeman grappling with! a slim, furiously struggling figure beside the Ford. The running cop had seen Grayle; he skidded to a halt, bringing his gun up -- grayle dived under the flash,  heard the spang! of the solid slug against metal behind him as He took the man at knee height, felt bone break, heard the ragged scream of the man as He fell away. Grayle rolled to his feet, ran up the drive. The man by the car threw Anne from him; a slim, flat needlepump in his hand made a harsh, rasping buzz; Grayle felt the blow of a fiery club against his chest; then He was on the man, spinning him, throwing the gun away into the darkness. He put a thumb hard into the base of the policeman's neck, dropped him. He lifted Anne, ran to the police car , tossed her onto the seat. "Can you drive this? "Yes," The engine was idling. Grayle slid into the seat and closed the door; the car spun away from the curb, fishtailed, straightened out, its headlights burning a tunnel through blackness. Anne looked at Grayle. "Are you all right? I thought he shot you -- " "I'm all right." "He couldn't Have missed! Not at that distance!" "Watch the road," Grayle said gently. He put his hand on his side; the Heavy prison shirt was ripped; under it, hot blood oozed from torn hide. Anne's eyes went to his hand. She gasped and the car veered. "You're hurt!" "Don't be concerned about me, Anne. We have more immediate problems." A voice crackled from the car radio: "Jig One to Jig nine-two-five, (where's that report, Glance? Over." Grayle lifted the microphone dangling from a hook at the center of the dash, pressed the key. "Jig nine-two-five to Jig One," He said, holding the mike well away from his mouth and roughening his voice. "Busy; call you later." "Clance? What was that?" The man at the other end called twice more, then switched pff abruptly. "You didn't fool him," Anne said. "They have directional gear; they know where this car is. They are tracking us right now." They had turned into a prosperous-looking commercial street. Neon and glare signs shone through the driving downpour. A tall Sabal palm was down across the flooded street. The wind blew fallen fronds across the pavement. There were no people in sight, few cars. Grayle picked up the map from the front seat, opened it out, studied the street map on the reverse. Ct 'There's an airfield sEown Here, nearby," Ee said. "TEe police and taxi copter port." "Yes?" "Turn left ahead. It's about a mile," "You did say 'Police'?" "We need an aircraft. We Eave little cEoice." "Grayle, I can't fly a copter." "PerEaps I can." "But -- you can't drive a car!" "I'm not familiar with ground .vehicles, but I Eave considerable experience as a pilot. Do as I ask, Anne. As you said, we have no time to waste." Anne laughed with a touch of Hysteria, swung into a cross avenue toward a towering column of lights in tlie distance, doing a steady forty miles an hour down the center of the wide palm-lined street. A police car passed them, screaming in the opposite direction. As they swung around tEe periphery of a wide plaza a second police car passed them without slowing. THe avenue ran straight between wide lawns crossed by broad walks, punctuated by illuminated fountains. Ahead, the lake was blackness. Before a low building on the left, there was movement in a courtyard. Another car emerged from a ramp and sped away. There was a lighted gate ahead. A policeman in a yellow slicker stepped from the sEed to wave them through. Anne gave a gasp tEat was half a sob, half laughter. "People see what they expect to see," Grayle said. "They don't expect to see us here." There were a dozen or more small aircraft in sigHt; three large fifty-passenger, cross-town shuttles bearing commercial blazons, several smaller civil craft, a big police riot Eeli, a number of small, fast two-man machines. At the far end of the line were a pair Army markings. The headlights sEone on them in turn as the car swung in a wide curve. "Pull up there," Grayle said. Anne pulled the car to a stop beside the first in line. "Good-by, Anne," Grayle said. CtXou intend to leave me Eere  to face tEe police alone?" Anne asked with a smile that relieved the words of accusation. "Very well. Let's go." Grayle jumped out, glanced over tEe small short-winged machine, then swung up beside the canopy; he felt over smooth metal, found a lever. TEe EatcE opened with a soft whirring sound. As Ee slipped into the cockpit, Anne pulled herself up, slid gracefully into the front seat. Grayle closed the hatch', studied the array of luminous dials. He touched a button and a cockpit light came on. Anne turned to look back at liim. "Are you sure you can fly this?" "It shouldn't be difficult," He replied absently. He touched another button, and starters chugged; the short, wide-bladed propellers to either side flicked over jerkily. There was a burst of vapor from one engine; it caught, and a moment later the second joined in, whining up to speed. Grayle found the brake release, gave the engines a burst of power; the awkward ship rolled forward on its tricycle gear, rocking in the wind. The nose wheel, Grayle discovered I , was steerable by the wheel before him. He turned sharply, passing close to the guard shack and the fence, swinging back out to face the wind howling off the lake. Again he paused to study the controls. One pair of levers ended in blunt cones, not unlike the engine nacelles and spinners. He grasped them and moved them up from horizontal to verticle. The nacelles obediently rotated. Now the propellers spun in a plane parallel to the pavement. "Grayle -- hurry! They've seen us!" Anne said. He followed the direction of her glance, saw men coming across from the gate at a ran. "Fasten your belt," he called over the shrill of the turbines. "I suspect this machine is highly unstable." He opened the throttles. Instantly the craft leaped upward, nose high, drifting backward. He righted it; the plane hurtled forward, rocking and buffeting in the wind. Lights whipped past, just beyond the stubby wingtip, dropping away. Grayle turned the craft, letting the wind carry it. The altimeter needle moved jerkily around the dial. The compass steadied on a course of #. At an airspeed of three hundred and fifty and a groundspeed fifty knots higher, the craft raced toward the northwest. ( CT X'e're dealing," said the  ' Chief Meteorologist, United States Weather Service, "with a cone of air approximately one mile in height and having a diameter of two miles, in rotation at the rate of one revolution each one hundred and five seconds. The rate is increasing slowly on a decreasing exponential curve and should, for all practical purposes, stabilize in another thirty hours at approximately one of about one hundred and ten knots." "They're already reporting winds in excess of a hundred miles an hour all the way from West Palm Beach to Boston," one of his audience of high-ranking government officials comprising the special Advisory Group cut in. The weatherman nodded calmly. "Frictional forces naturally influence a large volume of air outside the nucleus of the disturbance. After stabilization, we should expect winds of over two Hundred miles per hour throughout a belt about two hundred miles wide adjacent to the dynamic core, falling off at a rate of some ten knots for every hundred miles. At about one thousand miles from the center, turbulence causes a disintegration of the rotational pattern, creating randomly distributed squalls -- " "Good God, man! You're talking about a super-hurricane that will devastate a quarter of the country!" The meteorologist pursed His lips. "That's a slight exaggeration," he said carefully. "Now, as to rainfall, the estimated precipitation for the eastern portion of the country is on the order of twenty inches per twenty-four Hours. I emphasize, that this is an average figure -- " "Do you realize what you're saying?" another man burst ouf. "Twenty inches is more than some of the country gets iri a year!" "True. We can anticipate major flooding over the entire watershed. The problems involved in calculating probable runoff rates are complicated by our lack of experience in dealing with volumes of water of this magnitude, but it seems plain that the entire continental drainage pattern will be overloaded, resulting in some rather interesting erosional dynamics. For example -- " Just a minute," a congressmen interrupted. "Just how long is this rain supposed to continue?" For the first time the weatherman looked faintly troubled. "Insofar as we've been able to calculate on the basis of limited data," he said, "there's no contra-indication for indefinite continuation of the present pattern." "What does that mean?" someone demanded. "It means," the congressman interpreted, "that as far as they can tell, it's going to keep on raining forever." "That's ridiculous," a cabinet member said. "A storm draws its power from the released heat of evaporation; there's a definite limit to the size any weather disturbance can grow to. I should think it would be a relatively simple matter to calculate the theoretical limit, based on known factors of incident sunligKt and so on." # "KTormally, tKat would be ' true, Mr. Secretary. But the tKeory doesn't seem to apply in this case. You're aware that there seems to be an anomalous situation as regards displacement of sea water: the flow into the area of the whirlpool appears to be balanced by no corresponding outflow, even at great depth. The same is true of air volumes. It also seems to apply to the energy balance." "Translation, please?" a peppery man spoke up. "Easy, Homer," the congressman said. "Water and air are going in and none is coming out. And the energy being expended by the storm exceeds that available from all known sources. Right, sir?" TKe weatherman looked pleased. "Quite correct." "So -- what are we doing about it?" TKe meteorologist's expression changed to one of mild surprise. "Doing?" he echoed. He shook his head. "One doesn't 'do' anything about weather, Congressman. One simply observes it!" "For God's sake, man!" A wellbraided naval man spoke up. "You don't mean to tell us that we're going to just sit Here and watch the country blow away -- if it doesn't wash away first!" "It's the function of my department to report the weather. Admiral, not to control it." For several minutes the room was filled with emotional voices all talking at once. The congressman rose and pounded the table for order. "This is getting us nowhere, gentlemen," he said. "Wh'at about it, sir?" Ke addressed the meteorologist and I his aides. "Is there any action -- any measure at all -- which you gentlemen can recommend? Seeding? Nuclear dissipation? Anything at all?" TKe weathermen were shaking their Heads before the question was out. There was a moment of silence. "I heard something," an Interior Department spokesman said hesitantly. "Probably just a crank notion." "Well?" "One of our engineers -- Hunnicut is his name, I believe -- Has suggested that the storm is broadcast. He claims that He's pinpointed a massive power drain right on top of the storm center. As a matter of fact, he submitted a proposal direct to the White House that the system be shut down." "Well!" the congressman barked. "Maybe he's on to something. Let's check it out. God knows tlie time Has come to grasp at straws. "Well, an idea like that -- " THe Interior man spread his hands, "It can hardly be taken seriously." "There's only one way to check it out," a White House spokesman said. "That's to shut down the System. And we can't do that." He outlined tlie situation as it affected the Caine Island Prison. "So -- the prisoners riot in the dark. I think we can survive that." "There's more to it than that!" "I know -- the reputations of the visionaries who poured ten power-from-the-air scheme. But they'll just have to suffer, as I see it. I say shut down and observe tlie results." "Congressman, that will take an executive order." "Then let's get it." There was a general mutter of agreement. The Interior man left hastily, shaking his head. The cabinet member buttonholed the congressman. "This is all very well, Herb," he said in a low tone. "But what if the idea's as silly as it sounds? What do we do then?" The congressman patted the air. "Let's worry about that when we get to it, eh, Homer? Right now we'd better go see the President" JT oktien comes up across the rocks, halts before the fireblackened entry of the ship, from which a wisp of smoke drifts past his head. "Xix -- what happened here?" "A sabotage by a Fleet officer," the ship's voice says. It sounds weak and thin. " Fleet officer?" Lokrien looks out across the dark jumble of rock. "Thor -- are you out there?" he calls. There is no answer. "I went out to look for you," Lokrien shouts into the darkness. When I returned, your people attacked me like a pack of wild krill. Without the Yfield I'd have been killed." A vague shape 'moves in the darkness. It is Gralgrathor, almost unrecognizable with half the hair burned from his head, his face blistered, his garments hanging in charted tags. " Thor I What in the name of the Nine Gods -- " Gralgrathor leaps, swinging his hammer. Lokrien jumps back, avoiding the clumsy blow. "Thor -- have you gone mad?" Gralgrathor snarls and moves to the attack. Lokrien avoids his rush, watches him fall. The voice of the ship, faint and unnoticed, s peaks across the darkness: "... fir s damage to lift coil chamber. Assault capability: negative. Defensive capability: minimal. Power reserve level : critical. Category One emergency measures are no win eiiect. Captain-Lieutenant Gralgrattior is identified as the saboteur..." You've wrecked my ship!" Lokrien cries. "Why? For the love of Ysar, why? Did you have to drag me down into your exile too?" But Gralgrathor makes no answer. He struggles to rise, falls back. " Attention , Commander!" the voice of the ship echoes across the tumbled granite, among the trees. "I will execute the traitor for his crime against the White Fleet!" "No!" Lokrien approached Gralgrathor. "There has to be a reason, an explanation," he pleads. "Tell me, Thor!" Gralgrathor sways, on hands and knees. Red hate looks out of his eyes. " Fll kill you," he snarls. "Before I die, Fll kill you." "Commander," the ship calls. Men approach!" "Your mob," Lokrien says to Gralgrathor. "The same crew you set on me before!" "I will deal with them, Commander," says the ship. "Thor, go down to meet them. Stop them, if you want to save their lives. Xix will kill anyone who comes close." In silence, Gralgrathor climbs to his feet. Lokrien watches as he moves off like a crushed insect to disappear among the trees w Then he turns to the ship. "Xix," he says in a broken voice. "What will we do?" "We will survive, Commander," Xix says. And one day we will right the wrong that was done to us this night." CC'T'his item you asked for ananalog check on, Governor nician said hesitantly on the grayline phone. "I'm afraid I Haven't come up with anything significant. I've made runs keyed to every variable in tlie profile just as you asked, but I can't tie it to anything in the Main File." "Damnit, man, here's a prisoner with no record of trial and sentencing -- nothing but the mere fact of his presence Here as evidence of any crime! TEere's got to be an explanation!" "You've apprehended him?" "No, and tfie way it looks now, I'm not likely to! And if He is picked up, wfiat tEe devil grounds do I Have for Holding Him? I don't even know wHat He's supposed to Eave done, except by rumor!" "It's a weirdie, all rigEt, Governor. I'd like to Help you. If you could give me some idea vvKat it is I'm looking for -- " "I don't know! Tfiat's why I asked for tfie complete analysis on tEe few facts I Have on tEe man, In Hope you'd turn up something. I need a clue, a footEold. Damnif, in tEfs day and age a man can't Have lived a lifetime without leaving some record, some trace, somewHere!" "Well, after all, Governor, if He's been in prison for over thirty years -- " "Nonsense! It's a case of mistaken identity. Grayle's no more than, forty years old at the absolute maximum. But even if He were fifty, that would still make him a Federal convict at fifteen! It's nonsense!" "Governor... there is one little datum that popped up. Nothing, of course, but I may as well mention it... " "Well?" The technician gave a self-conscious laugK. "THe tie-in, I'm sorry to say, is more apparent than real. You recall the confusion witH the Civil War trial record linked to your man? I fed that in with the rest -- and the computer cross-referred to an item that came in just about three Hours ago. It seems that a doctor out In St. Louis reported removing a bullet from, a man's abdomen last nigfit. The bullet was identified as something called a Minie ball, a type of solid shot used by the Army in the #'s. In other words, during the Civil War." Hardman made a rasping noise of pure frustration. "Civil War my left elbow! What is tHis, Tatum, some kind of In-group joke?" "The computer is very literalminded, Governor." "Any description of this cEap in St. Louis?" "Yes, I Have it Here... sixtfiree, two-ten, blue eyes,, gray Hair, reddisH stubble, well set up and extremely scarred -- or rather there seems to be a little uncertainty about tfiat last item. TEe doctor reported that wHert He first examined the patient, the man exhibited a number of prominent scars on, tfie face, neck, back, cHest, anus -- all over, virtually. But an Hour later, tfie scars were gone. Curious, eK?" Hardman was gripping tfie telephone Hard. "Where is tHis man now?" "That we don't know." "Tatum, you know people. Can you put out a pickup order on this man to tfie St. Louis police? 'Quietly? And preferably anonymously." "You see a connection?" Hardman laugfied shortly. "Grayle is over six feet, grayHaired, redbearded. He's reported to Have shattered a pair of chrome-steel come-alongs witli His bare hands, and He tore tire locking bars off an armored car -- also bare-Handed. Either that, or He was carrying a three-quarter-ton jack-H'ammer under his shirt. Now we have another big, gray-haired fellow out in St. Louis whose scars miraculously heal in an hour. He was carrying a Civil War bullet. Grayle's linkly I see a connection; they're both impossible!" "I see what you mean, Governor. I'll get right on it." A t the upper Pasmaquoddie Power Station, Chief Engineer Hunnicut paced his spacious, airconditioned, indirectly lit, soundproofed, gray-nylon-carpeted office. Beyond the wide thermopane windows the storm raged unabated. In fact, it seemed to Hunnicut, it Had gained in ferocity in the last Hour. He paused' at his desk -- wide, highly polished, genuine mahogany -- and flipped up the intercom key. "Sam, how about that refinement on those loci?" His voice was brittle with strain. "I was just going to call you, Mr. Hunnicut. Something odd Here. The smaller one is tricky, very faint, but we've narrowed it down to a point in the mountains just north of here. Within ten miles, possibly. The big one is pulling a lot of power, and we were able to cut it closer. It's about twenty miles -- give or take five miles -- off the west shore of Somerset Island, dead on the reported position of the storm center." "Sam, what are the chances of an error in that placement?" "Well, I talked to a buddy of mine at Weather in Washington about half an Hour ago. He confirmed the plot on the whirlpool and swore it was accurate to inches. It hasn't moved since it was first spotted last evening. As for our fix -- I'll stake my job on it. I said within five miles, but off the record I think we're within a mile. Kind of funny, eh, Mr. Hunnicut? What do you think -- " "Stand by in the main generator room, Sam. I'm coming down." He pressed another key, spoke briskly to his secretary: "Myra, go ahead with the calls I taped earlier." He flipped off the set and left the office. In the corridor, the deep-bellied thrumming of tlie big generators buried in the rock below vibrated in the air, penetrating to the bones. It grew louder as he rode the lift down, passed through the intervening doors, became a solid tiling as he entered the High, wide chamber almost filled by the big machines. Sam Webb was over by tfie big board, looking concernedly at tfie rows of tfiree-incfi dial faces. He turned as Hunnicut came up beside Him. "Tfie curves are still upward," fie said. "Leveling in about twenty-four Hours, I'd guess. By tfiat time, tfie big baby off Bermuda is going to be pulling a wfiale of a lot of power, Mr. Hunnicut." "It would be, if we waited tfiat long," Hunnicut said. Webb frowned questioningly. "We could sfiut down, Sam. We can use regular emergency procedures: sfiunt what we can into tfie Northeast Distribution Net and bleed tfie rest into tfie Erie Storage Facility. Wfiat tfiat won't Handle we can spread out over tfie Net links, let Central and Southeast Handle it." "Mr. Hunnicut --  it's none of my business -- you're tfie boss  -- but Gave you got an okay from fiigfier up on tfiis?" "Don't worry, Sam. I'll take full responsibility for any orders I give." Ipfie counterman at tfie all- night beanery waited until tfie quiet man in tfie gray slicker Had seated Himself and looked over tfie menu cfialked on tfie dusty blackboard above tfie backbar before fie lowered tfie newspaper and sauntered over. He shifted tfie broomstraw to tfie otfier corner of fiis wide moutfi. "Yeafi?" fie inquired. "A man," tfie customer said. "Six-tfiree, gray Hair, blue eyes, Husky build. Possibly scars on His face. Wearing a gray singlebreasted suit witfi dirty cuffs. Seen Him?" Tfie counterman's Head jerked. He spat out tfie straw. "Wfio, me? I ain't seen nobody." He grabbed a yellowisfi rag from under tfie counter and began wiping tfie cliipped formica. "Business is slow, efi?" "Yeafi." "But not tfiat slow. He was seen coming in Here." Tfie man in gray slipped a leather folder from an inside pocket and flipped it open to expose a small gold badge. "I ain't seen nobody witfi no scars," tfie counterman said. "I don't care wfiat some clown says fie seen." "Wfiat Have you seen?" The man lifted fiis bony shoulders. "Couple Eackies." He paused. "Go on." "There was a mug witfi gray Eair. You know, premature like. Big bimbo. But a kid, young, no scars on Him; Kell, Ke prob'ly don't even shave." "Wfien was Ke in?" "A couple hours ago. Hell, Kow do I know?" "Any idea wfiere fie was going wfien fie left Here?" "What do you think I am, an information bureau? I don't know tiie guy, never seen him before. I'm gonna ask him where he goes next?" "Answer the question." "No, I don't know where he was going." "He left on foot, or he had a car waiting?" "He... didn't Have no car." The man in gray smiled gently. "You sure about that?" "Maybe he picked up a Hackie Here. Yeah, I remember now. He come in here to tap a hackie eating here. Tried to start trouble. I hadda throw the both of 'em out." "Where did He want to go?" "New Jersey, I guess. He said something about Princeton." The man in gray nodded and stood. "Thanks very much, Mr. Schutz" he said. He paused at the door and glanced back. "By the way -- the business with the blackboard is cute, but I think you'd better close your book down. The cops are on to it." The counterman's look followed him as he turned up his collar and stepped back out into the driving rain. # i Tt's certainly worth a try, Mr. "President," Congressman Doberman said solemnly. "The Caine Island aspect of the thing is unfortunate, but in light of the situation -- " "If there's a legitimate tecfinical basis for the decision to shut down the power broadcast, I'll do it, Herbert. WHat I'm questioning is the soundness of the proposal." The President looked at his special assistant. "What about it, Jerry?" "Sir, Hunnicut himself is the leading authority in the field of broadcast power. The technical people I've coordinated with' are all either students of his or his former teachers. All of them have the greatest respect for his judgment." "Now, just a minute, Jerry," Secretary Tyndall cut in. "I have a few scientists of my own, I'll remind you. On my staff, that is -- " "What do they advise, Bob?" the President put in smoothly. "They assure me that the idea is fantastic, Mr. President! A piece of hysteria, pure and simple! I'm not saying this scheme was set in motion by anti-transmission forces, mind you, but if it had been, it couldn't have been better planned to undermine Congressional confidence in the future of broadcast power!" "All right, Bob, I understand your problem. You can set your mind at rest. No one's going to blame you." "It's more than that, Mr. PresIdent," Doberman said. "It's not face-saving I'm concerned about mow -- not entirely, at least. A thing like this can be the straw that knocks the program out for twenty years. We can't afford "All right, Bob, I believe you. And I trust you'll believe me when I say I'm with you. But at the moment we're facing a grave situation. If we Have the power to avert disaster, there's no question that we must do so." The secretary nodded reluctantly. "Very well, Jerry. Don't bother with channels. Get the power station on the line, direct." The aide spoke quietly into the grayline phone. The others waited in silence. "Mr. Hunnicut? This is the White House calling... Yes, the White House -- Mr. Hunnicut, personally, please... " Jerry paused listening. His eyebrows went up. "One moment," he cut in sharply. "Who is this speaking, please? Mr. Webb? Mr. Webb, I'm calling for the President. You are -- please don't interrupt, Mr. Webb -- you are instructed to shut down power broadcast immediately, until further notice. I repeat, you are instructed to shut down at once. This will be conThat's correct, Mr. Webb. Thank you." Jerry cradled the phone. The President was looking at him questioningly. "Power is off, Mr. President," Jerry said, looking uncomfortable. The, President nodded. "That's done, then, gentlemen. Thank you for coming over. Please keep; me closely informed of any results -- and Bob, I'd appreciate it if you'd speak to Ray Cook personally, offer any assistance we can give. I suppose it's possible to get some sort of portable power in to Caine Island." After the others had left, the President looked at his aide with a faint smile. "Mr. Hunnicut was a mite impatient, was He, Jerry?" "His deputy was trying to tell me something, Mr. President," Jerry said, looking his chief in the eye. "I didn't catch wliat it was." The President nodded. "You're a good man, Jerry," He said. "You're a good man yourself, Mr. President." House, all right, Mr. Hunnicut," Sam Webb said. "Or rather -- " He shook his Head, but the dumb-founded expression re- mained on his face. "They got through to me. It was a Presidential order to pull the transmitters off the line." Hunnicut smiled slightly, hig eyes on the panel before Him. The sound of tHe generators Had changed; distantly, Heavy relays could He Heard, slamming closed. Needles nodded and wavered on the big dials. Hunnicut's smile faded, was replaced by a frown. A side door burst open, and simultaneously tHe telepKone clanged HarsEly. "Mr. Hunnicut! Big trouble! TKe transmitters Have switched themselves back on again! TKe wHole relay bank Has gone nuts! Circuits are welding themselves, fuses are arcing over -- " Webb grabbed up tHe pHone. "Yes -- all right, we know about it, we're on tHe way!"" He slammed tHe instrument down, at a run followed tHe otliers from the room. Ten minutes of frenzied effort by a dozen engineers yielded no result. Power continued to pour from the generators into the giant transmitting coils. "Look at this," a man called from a repeater board. "We're Still being drawn on for a full load -- but only two stations are drawing power." His voice faltered. "And those two are . , . are..." "I don't get it, Joe! Wliat tfie Hell does! it mean?" "Simple," Hunnicut answered. "The outlaw demand points are still drawing power -- our total output, now. And they're going to keep on drawing power whether we like it or not!" 'Ayl'ax Wiston, number P#---#, who Had three weeks before completed tfie first decade of a life sentence to Caine Island for rape and murder, was sitting on His bunk in cell #-m-# wEen tfie lights went out. At the same instant, tfie music of Happy Dan and fiis Radio Folks faded; the soft Hiss of air from the ventilator died into silence. For all of ten seconds, Max sat unmoving, eyes wide open against the darkness, ears straining for a sound. Tfien a yell sounded from somewhere nearby: "Hey, what's with tfie lights? I'm tryn'a read!" The next instant, a bedlam of calls and yells had broken out. Max rose and groped across tfie cell, hands outstretched. He put His face against tfie bars; no faintest glimmer of ligfit was visible anywhere. Tfiere were screams mingled with tfie yells now; to a latent claustropliobe, the total absence of fight could be as confining as a tomb'.  Max stood by tfie cell door, liis mind racing. He Had known from tfie moment that tfie sentence was pronounced on him that he would never spend tHe rest of His fife in prison. He was a man wHo Had lived out of doors, on tfie water, gone in boats, known the open sea. One day fie would regain the life that the slut had taken away from him. In the meantime, He would go along quietly, pretend to accept His fate -- and wait. And one day His cKamce would come. And now it Had. He knew it. He could smell it in the air. All He had to do was think, make the right moves, not panic, not louse it up. Think. Think, Max. Lights off, air off, radio off. Okay. No power. There was a storm, lines were down... But there was something about Switching to a new system, broadcast power. Maybe that was it. It hadn't worked out, new stuff iwas always developing kinks. So all right, the details didn't matter, the point was -- no power. Meaning no alarm bells, no intruder Circuits, no timed locks on the cefi-block interlock... A dazzling thought entered Max's head. Gingerly, delicately, He reached through the bars, felt along die cold metal for the outer manual latch. Gently, he grasped it; carefully, he turned it. The door swung open. Foe a moment, Max stood in She darkness, smiling. Then he stepped out, paused to orient himself, and started toward the guard post at the end of the passage. tiHphat's right," the service station attendant said. "Same car; you wouldn't forget ## that one in a hurry. Two men ini it; the driver was a rough-looking character, flat nose, bullet-headed, you know. Had on a yellow and brown mackinaw. The other guy... well, I don't know. He was asleep; didn't say anything. What I figured, he owned the car, and this other guy was his chauffeur -- only He didn't look much like my idea of a chauffeur. Maybe -- hey! Maybe the guy stuck him up, took his car. Maybe the guy..." The attendant swallowed. "Maybe the guy was dead!" "If he were dead," the man in the tan car inquired, "why would the murderer carry him around with him?" "Yeah', it don't make sense. Anyway, now I remember the guy said something." The attendant sounded disappointed. "Just as they were pulling out." "Do you remember what he said?" The man lifted his cap to scratch his head. "Something about, "We're getting close. Steer a little more to the east... ' Something like that." "And this was how long ago?" "Heck, not more'n fifteen, twenty minutes." "Thanks." The man in the tan car pulled away from the pumps. As He accelerated to join the fast lane, He was speaking urgently into a microphone. W lien Falconer woke again, the big car was bumping over a rough-surfaced road'. TKe wind was still beating at tHe car, but tlie rain Had slackened perceptibly. He sat up, alert. "Wfiere are we, JoEn?" "West of St. Paul a few miles," Zabisky said. "I bad to get off tbe interstate?" "Wliy?" "You said to steer east. What am I going to do, cut out crosscountry?" Falconer nodded. "I'm Hungry," lie said. "Stop at tHe first eating place you see, JoEn." "Geeze, you can sure pack it in, brother! Sleep and eat, tHat all you do, fer Chrissakes?" "I'm making up for lost time, Jolin. I've been off my feed, you might say." "There ain't no eating joints along here. Cripes, the lousy road ain't even maintained. I ain't seen a House for ten miles. And this lousy rain ain't Helping any." Zabisky Hunched over the wheel staring out into tHe rain, sweeping in almost Horizontal gusts across the road. "Anyways there ain't mucH traffic. Most people got better sense, in tEis weather." Falconer glanced at tHe outside mounted rear-view mirror, saw a flash of lights, far back. "How long Has that car been behind us?" TKe driver looked up at Kis mirror. "Geeze, it beats me. I ain't seen Him." Two miles farther, tHe car behind Had closed the gap to Half a mile. "Speed up a little," Falconer said. "Hey," Zabisky said. "Is tHat guy tailing us, or wEat?" He looked sideways at His employer. "WKat is this caper, anyway, Mister? I told you I don't want to get mixed in nothing sfiady." "We're doing nothing illegal, John. See if you can gain on Kim." "I'm doing all I can, fer CErissakes! Fifty in tEis soup is like a Hundred and ten!" "He seems to be bettering tHat." Zabisky swore and accelerated. The low-slung car veered from side to side of tHe single-lane road, bucking the squall winds. Rounding a turn, it broke away, went into a tail-wagging slide before the driver wrencEed it back info the center of the road. "Ha! Our pal back there don't like tlie pace," He said. His spirits seemed to be rising under stress. The Auburn roared ahead on a long straightaway. The speedometer needle reacEed sixty, crept toward seventy. Belatedly, tHe Headlights of the car behind them appeared around the bend. "OH-oh," Zabisky said, watching in the mirror. "He's trying to straighten out the curve!" The following lights veered suddenly, swept across the treetops and went out. C  XT e bought it," Zabisky said. "Scratch one tail." "We'll have to go back," Falconer said. "Hah? I thought -- " "Somebody may be bleeding to death, John." Zabisky brought the car to a halt "Who were they, anyway? Cops?" he asked. "I don't know, John." "Why they tailing us?" "I don't know that, either." For a smart guy there's a lot you don't know." "Nevertheless, I'm telling you the truth. Let's get moving, John." Muttering Zabisky backed, turned, drove along the narrow road at thirty. The headlights showed up a tan-colored car upside down in the drainage ditch. The front wheels were still spinning slowly. "Flipped neat," Zabisky said, pulling over so as to illuminate the wreck with his headlights. Falconer opened the door and stepped out into the gusting rain, went across the strip of sodden turf to the car. It rested on its top in a foot of muddy, swirling water. Inside it a man was slumped against the cracked glass of the windshield like a bundle of old clothing. His face was half under water. "Cripes, the poor boob'll drown," Zabisky shouted over the drumming of the storm. Falconer stepped down into the water and tried the door Handle. It was jammed tight. He twisted harder. The metal yielded, broke with I a sharp sound. "Jeeze, the cheap metal they use these days," Zazbisky said. He splashed around the front of the car. "We got troubles," he called. "She's tight against the bank. This door ain't opening no matter what!" Falconer felt along the edge of the door. It was sprung sufficiently to allow him to insert his fingertips under it. He pulled gently. The double metal flange folded back without budging the door. "Hey, that guy inside ain't going to last much longer," Zabisky called. "That water's coming up fast!" Maybe we can bust out the windshield -- but I'd hate to see the mug's face after we finish." Falconer went to one knee, exploring the edge of the door low water level. It was twisted in the frame, exposing one corner. He thrust a finger through, levered the door outward far enougK to get a two-handed grip. He braced his feet and pulled. The metal bent slowly, then folded back before springing open. Falconer reached inside, eased the injured man out onto the muddy bank. He was breathing noisily through his mouth'. Water ran from his nose. He coughed, then breathed easier. Except for a swelling on his forehead, he seemed to be uninjured. As Falconer stood, he caught sight of Zabisky's face. The swarthy skin looked yellowish in the harsh beam of the headlights, the stubble on the big chin stood out like grease paint. He was shaking his Head in emphatic denial. "I never seen nothing like that," he said, staring at the ruined door. The latch dangled from the torn metal of the jamb. "I seen strong guys, but nothing like that. What are you, Mister?" His eyes met Falconer's. "I'm a mart with strong Hands, John. That's all." "Uh-uh," Zabisky said. "Nobody's got hands like that -- " He broke off as shadows moved. He whirled, almost losing his balance on the slippery slope. Acar was approaching from the south. F alconer went flat against the bank. The oncoming car slowed, Halted twenty feet away. A spotlight speared out to highlight Zabisky. "Hold it right there," a voice called. Doors opened and slammed. Two men came forward, bulky in shiny rain gear. Zabisky stood with his hands held clear of his sides, not moving, watching them. One Halted ten feet away, holding a Heavy pistol trained on the driver's chest. The other came up from the side, reached under the mackinaw to frisk the man. "Hell, this ain't the guy," the man with the gun said. Light winked on the badge of his cap. The other man was looking at the overturned car. "What happened?" "He spun out," Zabisky said. "The damn fool tried to take the curve at seventy -- in this soup!" "Yeah? Where do you tie in?" "I come back to see to the guy." The man who had searched him pushed him, staggering him. "I like it better you ambushed Him. What did you do, shoot out a tire? Or feed liim a pill through th'e windshield?" "Where's your partner?" the other man said. "Talk it up, Hunky. We don't like cop-killers a lot, even Federal cop killers." "He ain't dead!" Zabisky started and was cut off by a short, powerful right jab to the midriff. He bent over, Hugging Himself. "How do you like that, Roy, a glass gut," the cop with the gun said. "He's laid out over there," Zabisky grunted, forcing Himself upright. The unarmed cop went over, looked down at the man lying on the shoulder. "He's breathing," Ke called. He came back to stand before Zabisky. "WHy'd you pull him out?" Zabisky squared his shoulders. He stared into the light at the shadowed face of the policeman. "Go knit a sweater, copper," Ee said. This time, as the cop's fist shot out, Zabisky Half-turned away, caught the wrist, yanked the man to his chest, levering the elbow across His ribs. "You," He said to the other cop. "Drop it or fix your partner so fie lias to drink His beer through a straw." Tlie gun held steady on Zabisky. The cop twisted his mouth in a grin-like grimace. "What if I say tough lines, Rube? What's an arm to me, compared to a slug la your kneecap --  especially if it's some other guy's arm? Zabisky backed, dragging the policeman with him. "You better be good with the rod, copper. Otherwise your pal stops the slug." "Could be, Rube. Let's find out" The cop took up a pistolrange stance, body turned sideways, gun arm straight out, left hand on hip, leaning back for balance. He sighted carefully, still grinning -- Falconer came up out of the ditch in a rush, swept up tlie gunner and in a single movement threw him clear across the road to crash' through unmowed brush, sending water splashing High. He gripped the coat-front of the other man, lifted him, shook him gently. "See to this man," Ee said, nodding toward I the accident victim. "Come along, John. We've wasted too much time here." He dropped the policeman, who sprawled where he had been deposited. Zabisky hesitated a moment, then went quickly to the car, slid in under the wheel. He watched Falconer get in, slam tlie door. "Mister -- I must be nuts, but I kind of like your style." He started up, pulled off down the wet road with an acceleration that pressed both men back against the solid leather seats. i"" rayle watched the instru ments, holding the small aircraft at ten thousand feet, the airspeed at three hundred and forty. He paid no attention to the compass. Sitting in the seat before him, Anne stared out at the night, as opaque as black glass. The ship bucked and pitched, dropped abruptly, surged upward, rocked. The whine of the engines was an unending scream, like a cat in a fire. Grayle was frowning, his Head tilted. At the edge of hearing there was a sound -- a faint, rumbling undercurrent to the background din of the roaring turboprobs. It grew steadily, became a roar. Off the port wingtip, slightly ahead, an orange glow appeared, winking fitfully, sliding closer. A point of green light became visible, then a white one, above and behind it. Vaguely, Grayle made out the metallic shape behind them. "It's a jet fighter plane," Anne gasped. "It's pacing us." Slowly, the jet moved ahead. Just before it reached the limit of visibility, it banked up, showing its port wingtip light, and whipped directly across the course of the smaller plane. Grayle fought the controls as the craft leaped and bounced in the slipstream. Anne pointed. A second jet had appeared on the right. "Hold on." Grayle said. He threw the control stick sideways and applied full rudder, at the same time cutting the throttles and rotating the engines to the vertical. He feathered the propellers as the small plane veered sharply to the left and dropped like a stone. The altimeter wound down the scale, to nine thousand feet, eight, seven... At four thousand feet, he engaged the props, applied power. The engines shrieked; the fall slowed. He leveled off at two thousand feet indicated. Grayle worked the controls, rotating the nacelles for forward thrust. For half a minute the plane streaked eastward in total darkness. Then the plane leaped as solid sound erupted around them. With a long, shattering roar, one of the jets flashed past. In the brief glow of its tailflame, wisps of fog whipped and tattered, ragged sheets of rain whirled, dissipating. Grayle put the nose down and poured on full power. At under one thousand feet he leveled off again. For an instant, through a break in the enveloping mist, he caught a glimpse of a vague shape flashing past below. He pulled the nose up, throttled back, glanced at the altimeter; it indicated nine hundred feet. "Anne! On what principle does this altitude indicator operate? Reflected radiation? Or -- " Something dark loomed up before them; Grayle whirled to Anne, caught Her in his arms, twisted to set his back against the padded panel as with a rending impact, the plane struck. # # Turner gency measures must be undertaken at once the ship says. "No time must be lost in returning to the battle line. I am operating on Final Emergency Reserves now. Unless my power coil is re-energized promptly, I will soon drop to a sub-alert state." "It's going to take time, Xix," Lokiien says. "I can't leave you lying here exposed, to be picked over by every wandering souvenir hunter who comes past. Can you quarry enough s tone to conceal yourself?" "The energy expenditure will leave me drained," the machine says. "But I compute that it can be done." Lokrien gathers a few items into a pack, leaves the ship. " Commander ," the voice of Xix calls. Lokrien looks back to the sleek-lined hull. "I will be unable to speak after this expenditure of energy. Farewell. Remember that I will be waiting beneath the rock, confident of your return." " You were a good s Rip, Praxixytsaran the Ninth. You will be again, one day." Behind Lokrien energy thundered. Bolts of blue-white fire rayed out to cut and lift great slabs of granite. When silence fell, nothing was to be seen but the tumbled rock, swathed in settling dust. IX UoJ et me get tliis straight, Mr. ' Hunnicut," tli'e President said carefully. "You're telling me that the sole result of the shutdown of the power broadcast is the plunging of seven Federal installations into darkness? That two unauthorized and unidentified demand points are continuing to draw power?" "That's about it, sir. Six of the installations are on emergency power or back on the New England Net. All but Caine Island." "Perhaps I'm tired, Mr. Hunnicut. How can these two bootleg receivers continue to draw power if you're no longer generating power?" "Sir, that's tlie point I've been trying to explain. The station is still generating -- and still broadcasting. When I shut down transmission -- or tried to -- the breakers arced over, welded the circuits open. I'm broadcasting whether I like it or not. And the same goes for tlie generators. I can't shut them down. The last man I sent in to manually disconnect is in the infirmary now, Undergoing artificial respiration. We can't even get into the generator room. The whole thing is Hot." "Mr. Hunnicut, it appears to me matters at your station Have gotten badly out of hand!" "Mr. President, as chief engineer here I take full responsibility. But what's going on is abnormal -- fantastically so! I don't pretend to understand it, but I can assure you that this is more than just a simple malfunction. Someone -- or something -- is manipulating tKe station." "Mr. Hunnicut, tiiis is not tKe time to slide off into mysticism! I want the broadcast of power from your station terminated at once, by any means at your command. I Hope that's quite clear?" "Yes, sir, but -- " "That's all, Mr. Hunnicut." The President's face was dark with anger as lie racked tKe phone. He swiveled on the men standing beside liis desk. "General," He addressed a compactly built officer in Army green, "how long will it take you to move a battalion of troops into the Upper Pasmaquoddie Station?" "Two hours from the moment you so order, sir." "Better get moving, General." He turned to a lean, white-haired man in the self-effacing gray. "Mr. Thorpe, have the personnel you've selected stand by to cooperate with the Army as we discussed. And in tKe meantime, let me know the instant your instruments indicate that my instructions have been complied with." The physicist nodded and scurried away. TKe President looked at the Secretary of the Interior, pale and owlish in the pre-dawn. "Funny. I wasn't at all sure that shutting down the broadcast was the correct course, in spite of Mr. Hunnicut's persuasiveness. But now that Mr. Hunnicut seems to have changed his mind, I'm' damned if I'm going to change mine!" "outside tKe office of tKe Governor, Caine Island Federal Penitentiary, a portable, five KW, generator chugged stolidly, powering a string of wan lights hastily rigged along the corridor. Inside the office, the governor gripped the telephone until his knuckles paled. He was shouting, not solely because of the booming of the storm beyond 'die thick walls. "Possibly you still Haven't grasped tKe situation here, Governor Cook! There are twelve Hundred and thirty-one maximum-security Federal prisoners housed in this facility, whicH is now totally without power and light! The PA system is inoperative. My guard force is scattered all over the prison, without light or instructions. Incidentally, tKe walls here are rather thick; witK the air conditioning equipment inoperative, the air is rapidly growing foul. At the time the power was cut, three hundred of these men were in the dining hall; over two hundred were at tlieir duty posts in various parts of the facility. By the grace of God, almost seven Hundred of them were secured in their cells. They are there now  -- in total darkness. However, the locks in the prison are electrically operated. When the power failed, they automatically went to the open position. When the men discover that -- well, I leave the results to your imagination." As Hardman paused for breath, the voice of the governor of the State of Florida spoke calmly: "I understand the situation, Jim, and believe me this step wouldn't have been taken had there been any alternative -- " "You sound as though the power were cut intentionally!" "It was necessary to shut down the transmitter, Jim. The President personally notified me, and believe me, the reasons he gave -- " "Damn the reasons he gave! Unless I have power here in an hour Caine Island will be the scene of the worst outbreak of prison violence in penal history! I'm sitting on a powder keg with the fuse lit." "That's enough, Jim!" the state governor cut in sharply. "I have my instructions, you have yours. You're in charge of Caine Island, take whatever action is necessary to keep matters under control. That's what you're there for!" "Now, look Here, Governor -- " Hardman's voice faded. He was talking into a dead receiver. He slammed the instrument down, swiveled to stare across the dimlit office at Lester Pale. In the absence of the hum of aircirculators, the wail and boom of the storm seemed really to tear the walls away. # # T T e hung up on me! After tell--ing me that the power system was deliberately shut down! And I'm supposed to keep matters under control, He says!" "Sir, I've managed to contact a dozen or so of the guard force, including Lieutenant Trent. He's issued hand torches to the men, and they're out rounding up as many others as they can find. In a few minutes we should have the majority assembled in the barracks." "And then what? We huddle here and wait for the prisoners to realize they have the freedom of the prison?" "Lieutenant Trent is standing by for orders, sir," Pale said carefully. Hardman rubbed his Hands up and down across His face, then sat erect. "Thanks, Lester," He said. "I'm through' making a fool of myself now, I hope. All right, we have a situation on our hands. Tell Trent to come up. I suppose our best bet is to concede the entire cell complex and establish ourselves in the Admin wing. We should Have enough men to control access -- " He stopped talkIng, cocked His Head. In tKe distance there was a faint popping sound. "Gunfire!" Lester wKIrled to tHe door as it burst open. A man In guards' blue slammed Halfway across tKe room before fie came to a Halt, breatfiing raggedly. He Held a pistol in His right Hand, pressing the side of tHe gun against His left shoulder. BlackIsK-red blood ran down His wrist and made a blot on His sleeve. "My God, Governor," he blurted. "They've busted out! They shot the lieutenant, and -- " "I'll tell the rest," a Hoarse voice said. A tall, rangy man in prison uniform, with weather-beaten skin and stiff gray Hair came in tfirougfi the open door. TKe guard-issue gun in His Hand was pointed carelessly toward Hardman. THe guard whirled witK an inarticulate sound, bringing the gun around -- TKe tall prisoner twitched the gun to cover Him, squeezed the trigger. There was a sKarp wtiacwhac! The sound of the dope pellets Hitting flesH was clearly audible. THe guard took a step back with rubbery legs whicK folded suddenly. He Hit the rug Hard and lay still. "I'm not Here to mess around, Governor," Max Wiston said. "Here's what I want from you..." rayle awoke with His face in icy water, the taste of mud in His mouth. For a timeless moment His mind groped for orientation: listened for the twang of bows, for tKe boom of cannon, tHe crackle of small-arms fire; for war-cries, or the screams of tHe wounded, tKe clasH of steel on steel, the thud of horses' Hooves... But there was only the beating of the rain, Hitting tHe mud witK a sound like the rattle of muffled drums. Grayle sat up. Pain stabbed at His ribs. TKe girl lay across His cfiest, unconscious. He touched her face; it was cold as ice. It took Grayle ten minuutes to lever tom metal aside, extricate the girl from tHe shattered craft and carry Her across a furrowed quagmire to tHe inadequate shelter of the trees which the lightning flashes revealed. He saw tHe path taken by tHe plane after it Had struck the crown of a tall oak, ploughed its way tKrougK massed foliage, shedding wings and empennage in the process, to impact in a ploughed field. It was a miracle the girl Had survived. He was forced to lie down then. The rain fell; the wind moaned in the trees... Lights, and men's voices. Grayle got to His feet with difficulty, feeling broken ribs grate. A line of lights showed on a ridge half a mile distant, parked vehicles, he guessed. The lights were moving across the field toward Him. He thrust aside the breath-slapping pain, forced His mind to focus on the situation. The path of the small craft Had been followed on radar, no doubt. But they couldn't be sure whether he Had landed safely, crashed or flown on at tree-top level. And that, perhaps, gave Kim a chance -- if he moved quickly. He bent over Anne, feeling over her for apparent injuries. There were many small cuts and abrasions, but it was impossible to say if she were seriously Kurt. She needed medical Kelp, quickly. He looked across toward the approaching lights -- and at other lights, advancing now from the opposite direction. They Had thrown a cordon around the area, were closing the noose from all sides. Time was running out. He must slip through them now, or not at all. He scooped the unconscious girl up in his arms, picked a direction in which the lights seemed more widely spaced, and set off across the boggy ground, keeping His course between two lights. Once he dropped low as the beam of a powerful light traversed the field; but tKe same light showed Him a drainage ditch marked by a growth of weeds. He angled across to it, slid down into knee-deep, muddy, swirling water. He flattened Himself against the bank as two men passed by a few feet above, one on each side of the ditch. He followed the ditch for another hundred feet, then left it and altered course forty-five de grees to the right, toward the road. He came up onto the pavement fifty yards behind tKe last of the three cars in line, moved up, keeping to the ditch. Two men in rainproofs stood in tlie middle of the road between the first and second cars in line. Both carried rifles under their arms. Grayle came level with the last car, a four-door sedan with police markings and a tall antenna. The courtesy light glared as h'e opened the front door, slid Anne onto the seat. Her Head lolled on her shoulder. Pink blood seeped down Her wet face. Her breathing was regular Hut shallow. Something on the back seat caugKt Grayle's eye: a snubnosed sub-macEine gun. There was also a double-barreled shotgun, boxes of ammunition and a web belt hung with fragmentation grenades. Grayle caugKt up tlie belt, strapped it on. TKere was a shout; the two men in the road were running toward the car. Grayle crossed the ditch, came up against a barbed-wire fence; he broke the strands with His Hands and ran. Half a mile from tlie road, He paused, raised his Head, pivoting slowly, as if searching the wind for a scent. Then He set off at a Steady run to the west-northwest. Z abisky slowed as tKe Headlights of the Auburn picked up a dark shape blocking the road ahead. He halted twenty feet from a big olive-drab half-truck pulled across the narrow pavement. A man came forward, swinging a lantern. Zabisky lowered the window. "Road's closed," the man said He wore a military-type steel helmet and carried a slung rifle. "What's the matter, road washed out?" Zabisky inquired. "Convoy coming through," the man said. He huddled in his green slicker, water dripping from the lielmet rim. "Say, that's a wild car you got there. What is it, one of them foreign jobs?" "Naw -- made in Oklahoma. Listen, bud, we got to get through, see. We're on like important business." Tlie man shook his Head, shifted the rifle to the other soulder. "Nothing doing. You got to go back to Pineville, take state road #I -- " "We got no time for that." "Never mind, John," Falconer said. He leaned across. "How long will the road be closed, soldier?" "Beats me, Mister." "What's going on around here?" "Hell, who tells us anything? We get called out in the middle of this lousy storm, and -- " "Okay, knock it off, dogface." Another man had come over from the side of the road, a big fellow with a staff sergeant's stripes on his helmet. "What do you think this is, a boy-scout jamboree?" He turned a black-browed look on the car and its occupants. "All right, you been told. Now get that heap turned around and get out of here before I have to get tough." Zabisky gave the sergeant a long look. "How about it, Mr. Falconer?" He said loudly. "You want me to call your pal the general on tlie car phone?" Falconer smiled slightly. "That won't be necessary, John. He Had been glancing at the map. "Sergeant, it's a long way back to route eleven, and it doesn't seem to be going in the right direction." "Things are tough all over. Now pull out of Here like I told you -- and you can call your pal the general and tell him I said so!" TH'alconer opened his door and stepped out. The headlights threw a tall shadow across the curtain of rain as He came around the front of the car. The sergeant waited, his thumbs Hooked in the pistol belt around His stomacH. Falconer came up to Him and witEout pausing drove Ms fist in a six-incE jab into tfie man's belly. THe sergeant made an explosive sound and doubled over, fell to His knees. TEe soldier behind Him gave a yell, fumbled His rifle from His shoulder in time for Falconer to catcE it, twitcE it away and toss it into tHe ditcE. THen He stepped in and slammed a sEort rigKt Hook to tHe startled lad's jaw. He tumbled down against tHe side of tHe car. "Hey, you didn't need to slug tHe kid," Zabisky said. He Had scrambled out of the car and grabbed the sergeant's pistol. "A nice bruise on th'e jaw will Help Him when He talks to His CO," Falconer said. "Let's go." He started toward the big vehicle blocking tHe road. "Hey -- wEere are you going?" Zabisky called. "This is as far as we can go by ordinary car," Falconer said. "We were lucky to find better transportation waiting for us." "Are you kidding, brother? Talking about Heisting a tank off th'e Army?" "You don't need to come along, JoEn. Take tHe car and go back. But I suggest you abandon it at tHe first opportunity. TEe sergeant will give a detailed description of it as soon as He catches His breath." I # Zabisky stared at Him. "Why not tell me wHat tHis is all about? THe whole thing is nuts -- and tHis is tHe nuttiest item yet!" He jerked a tEumb at tHe Half-track. Falconer sHook His Head. "Good-by, John," He said. "I'm grateful for your Kelp." " Zabisky made a tHrowing-away motion. "Forget it," He said. "I told you I was in witH you. I ain't quitting now." Seated in tHe armored veEicle, Falconer looked over tHe panel, pressed the starting button. TEe big engine roared to life. He put it in gear, rolled forward, down into the ditcE, up the otEer side, flattening a fence. He corrected course slightly, then settled down to steering the big macHine up across sloping ground to the dark mass of the Hills ahead. thief Engineer Daniel Hunni cut, His Operations CEief, Sam Webb, and two maintenance lit passage outside the switcH-gear room of the Pasmaquoddie Power Station. They were dressed in Heavy rubber suits, gauntlets and boots; eacS carried breathing apparatus. Hunnicut Held a black waxed carton firmly gripped to His cHest. THe engineers clutcEed coils of Heavy wire. Tools were belted about their waists. "I don't know How mucH time we'll Have," Hunnicut said into the lip mike inside Els breathing Helmet. "It's Hotter than tEe main bearings of Hell in tfiere. You all know wjHat to do. No waste motion, no false moves. We place tEe charges, fix detonators and get out. Any questions?" TEe tEree men sliook tEeir Heads. "TEen let's go." Hunnicut undogged tEe Heavy door, swung it outward. A blast of ligEt and Heat struck at Eim, scorcEing even tHrougH tEe insulated suits. At once tEe cooling units went into Highspeed operation. TEe cEief engineer led tEe way across tEe HigE-ceilinged room, past a graybrigEt patch of soEdified metal snaking across tEe floor to tEe base of tEe main breaker bank. He placed tfie carton on tEe floor; tEe wax was melting, trickling down tEe sides. His fingers in tEe tEicH gauntlets were clumsy, tearing away tEe paper wrappings. He lifted out tEe cigar-sHaped charges of explosive, linked together in clusters of four, Handed tfiem to Webb, wEo swiftly inserted tEem at tEe previously selected points around tEe base of tEe massive apparatus. One of tEe engineers began attaching linking wires. The other busied fiimself laying a Heavy cables across the floor. "Tfiat's all of them," Hunnicut said. Webb nodded, tucking tEe last charge in place. TEe engineers linked up tEeir wires, rose to tEeir feet, looking to Hunnicut. "Out," Ee said. TEe three men went past Eim to tEe door. TEe two engineers passed tErougH into the corridor. Webb paused to glance back. He froze, pointed past Hunnicut. TEe latter turned. A coil of smoke was rising from tEe insulated wire attached to tEe lowest cluster of explosives. Hunnicut took a step toward it. Webb yelled, jumped after Eis cEief as tEe wire burned tErougH. TEe cEarge dropped to the floor. Hunnicut took a quick step, bent to pick up tEe smoking cEarge --  TEe men in tEe passage were tErown from tEeir feet by the terrific, booming blast. Acoustical panels dropped from the ceiling. TErougH the dust boiling from tEe doorless opening to the swltcfi gear room, tEey caugEt a glimpse of a tattered thing of rags that fell away from tEe scorched I and shattered wall which was opposite the entry. Later examination identified jaw fragment. No recognizable portion of Hunnicut was ever recovered. Power continued to flow from tEe generators to the great antenna arrays of tEe Upper Pasmaquoddie Power Station. T Jor two weeks Gralgrathor has lain on a bed of stretched hides in the great Hall of Bjorndahl, taking no food, swallowing only the mixture of wine and water that the old crone Siv presses on him before she and the other serving women perform the daily ritual of stripping away the dried, salt-impregnated cloths from the massive burn areas, tearing away along with them the day's accumulation of dead tissue, after which they smear reeking bearfat over him and rebandage him. On this fifteenth day, he rises for the first time. The servants find him on the floor and lift him back on his bed. Two days later, he walks unaided to the door. Thereafter, he walks a little each day, swinging his arms, stretching the healing skin until the sweat of pain stands across his forehead. During the following days he practices with his weapons until he has regained a measure of his former skill. In the evenings, he roams the hills with the hound Odinstooth at his heels. During this time he says no more than a dozen words a day. He tolerates no reference to his dead wife and child, or to the were demon who slew them on his doorstep. A month has passed when Gtalgrathor climbs the steep escarpment to the ravine where the boat had lain. He finds a vast crater of broken rock, already overgrown with wild berry vines. He stands, looking down at it tor a long time Then he makes his way back. The next day, he calls his household together and makes distribution of his lands and possessions among his servants. With only the aging Hull as companion, and carrying only a leatherthonged hammer as weapon, he sets off on foot along the shore to the south. X nphree men sat in a staff car parked beside th'e road opposite tfie exotic-looking civilian car abandoned by tlie hijackers. In the front seat were Captain Zwicky of the US First Army and Lieutenant Harmon, of tfie Florida State Police, in mufti. In tfie rear, Sergeant Milton Gassman slumped, fiis round face waxygray in tfie yellow glow of tfie dome-ligfit. "Let's Gear tfiat one more time, Gassman," Zwicky said crisply. He spoke loudly, over tfie drum of tfie rain. "You and Bogen were manning your posts, a car witfi two armed civilians drives up, and then -- wliat?" "The guy tricked me like I said, Cap'n. He talks nice, fie looks Harmless -- " "You're sure about tfie face?" Harmon cut in. "No scars? None at all?" "I'm sure. I tell you the guy was baby-faced, not even sunburned." "But His Hair was gray?" "YeaE, gray. I thought at first fie was blond, but I seen Him good in the light. But He's no old duffer. He Had a wallop like a mule," Gassman rubbed his ribs gently. "That's our boy," Harmon said. "I don't know how He covers so much ground so fast, but it's him, all right. We'll get him now. He can't be far from here in twenty minutes. A copter  -- " "It's not so easy," Zwicky said. "He took off cross-country, and in tfis weather no copter is flying." "Where Ee can go, we can follow him! He took your half-track. Okay ; so we follow him in a halftrack." "Sure. I'll Have one Here in another ten minutes. That gives yur man a half-hour start. If he knows how to handle a track -- aad I've got a hunch lie does --  he'll hold that lead. And up where lie's headed, there are plenty of places to get lost. He'll ditch the track and -- " "You saying lie's too much for the US Army?" "I'm just saying hold your Horses, Mr. Harmon, I had a phone call that told me to take you along, but it didn't say anything about turning command of the company over to you. I have men and. equipment to think of, TW in addition to a little chore of convoy escort the colonel kind of hoped I'd see to." "Sure, sure, I'm not trying to tell you your business. But it gravels me to Have to sit Here and slip through my fingers!" "When did lie kill a cop? .My information was the guy broke out of jail, that's all." "Okay, you want to get technical, lie just roughed up a few cops, maybe they'll live. It's all the same to this boy." Captain Zwicky looked Hard at Harmon. "You take your job pretty personally, don't you?" "You might say I got a personal stake in this deal." "Just remember you're a long way out of your jurisdiction. And this is Army business." "Yeah, sure. I won't get in your way, Zwicky." "Better make that Captain Zwicky as long as you're attached to my command, Harmon." Harmon smiled sardonically, sketched a two-finger salute. "We don't play games with the military courtesies in this outfit, Harmon," the captain snapped. Harmon's heavy face blanked, tried a grin, then a frown. He sat up in the seat, yanked his lapels straight. "Okay! Excuse me, for chrissake. I'm not pushing. I'm just along for the ride." "TEat's rigKt. I advise you to remember it." In a Heavy silence, tEey waited for tEe arrival of tHe Ealf-track. '"T'welve miles to tHe nortHnortEwest, Colonel Ajax Pyler of tEe TEird Armored Division, First Army, stood witli a trio of regimental staff officers in tHe scant sKelter of a big pine tree on tHe long slope of ground rising toward tHe blazing ligEts of tHe power station Half a mile distant. On tHe road, tHe convoy witE dimmed EeadligEts, stretcfied for five Hundred yards back into tHe darkness. Cold rain drove at tHe colonel's face, blurred tHe lenses of tHe binoculars He Held trained on tHe power station. "EverytEing looks normal, Cal," He said, Handing tHe glasses to a burly major beside Kim. "I still don't get it, Colonel," tHe major said. "Sending a regiment of armor in Here... wHat are we supposed to do, guard tHe place? Take a look and go Home? Jesus!" He wiped rainwater from His foreKead witE a finger and sHook His Head. "Sometimes I tKink tHey're all nuts up topside." "I'm in tHe dark too, Cal. My orders were to position tHe regiment and stand by, tHat's all." "Call tHis a position?" THe major waved at tHe line of veEicles. "As far as I know, we aren't expected to attack," tHe colonel said witK a bleak smile. He clapped tHe shorter man on tHe back. "CEeer up, Cal. We all needed tHe exercise." "Sir!" THe communication tecH sergeant was at tHe colonel's side witH a field telepHone. "Division on tHe line." "Colonel Pyler," tHe officer said, turning His back to tHe pelting rain. He listened, frowning. "Yes, yes... I understand. About ten minutes, I'd say." He looked toward tHe ligKts of tEe power station as He Handed tEe instrument back to tEe comm man. "All rigfit, gentlemen," He addressed tHe officers standing by, "Position your units around tHe peripKery of a Half-mile circle centered on tHe station -- guns pointing in. Cal, detacH six men under a company officer. Have tKem stand by to escort a party of civilians in." He made a motion of dismissal as several officers started to speak at once. "THat's it, gentlemen. Move out." Accompanied by tHe sergeant, Pyler walked back to tHe road, went along tHe line of looming ligEt and medium tanks to tEe weapons carrier wEere His driver waited. At His instruction, tHe driver turned, drove back to tEe rear of tfie column. THree men in civilian clotEes and raincoats stepped out of an olive-drab staff car and came over. "All right, Mr. Crick, gentlemen. We're to proceed." The civilians, two of whom carried Heavy canvas equipment kits, climbed into the higK-wfieeled vehicle. It turned, rolled back up past the column. At the head of the line, two jeeps waited, each carrying four men. They fell in behind. In silence the three cars proceeded along the road, following a gentle curve up tlie gradual slope. Ahead, a gate flanked by massive brick walls blocked the way. ' ' on tire steel panels, two men stepped down and went forward. There was a telephone box mounted on the wall. One of the men, a lieutenant with a slung carbine, spoke into the phone. Almost at once the gates slid back. The men re-entered the jeep and the three-vehicle convoy rolled ahead. The road led straight up a number three grade to the high, blank walls of the power plant and the towering, light-spangled antenna farm spreading up the Hillside behind it. A number of men were standing before the lighted entry to the big building. Pyler halted the ton-and-a-half and climbed down. "Thank God you're Here, Colonel," the first of the men on foot blurted as he came up. "It's been a nightmare ever since the explosion! Phone out, automatic systems out, instruments out -- " "Hold on, sir," the colonel cut Him off. "Better take it from the beginning -- and let's get my technical people in on this." He waited until the three civilians Had gathered around. By then three more men had arrived from the plant. The rain swirled and churned around them. In the glare talline tulip sprouted on the glistening pavement. "I'm Prescott, Maintenance Chief," the plant man said. "Hunnicut left me in charge when he and Webb went in with explosives to blast the switch gear out of the circuit. It was all fused down, you know. Wilson went in earlier, and -- but I suppose you know about that; Hunnicut reported it. Wilson died, by the way. Anyway, something went wrong, we don't know what. Hunnicut and Webb were blown to atoms. For nothing. Everything's still running full blast." "You say Hunnicut is dead?" one of the civilians cut in. "That's right. And Sam Webb, our ops chief." "All right, let's get down to specifics," another of the newcomers said briskly. "Give us a breakdown on exactly what's been going on here. All we've had is some garbled story that the generators won't let themselves be sEut down." "Tfiat's not garbled, brotEer, tEat's tEe God's truth!" TEe excited man went on witE His account of tlie events of the last tEree hours. TEe tEree imported experts listened in silence, with only an occasional terse question. "Don't know what else to try," Prescott concluded. "At every point where we might have broken the circuits, the gear Has fused and tlie surrounding areas are electrified. Hot as firecrackers! We can't even get close to it" "Well?" Pyler demanded of Eis crew. "WEat about it? If Prescott's right, any ideas you may Have had about walking in and throwing switches are out tEe window." "I'd Eke to see some of tEis for myself," the tallest of tEe three civilians said. "Not tEat I doubt Mr. Prescott's word. You understand." "Go ahead. You'll find just wEat I said. But for God's sake wear protective gear!" "Oh, I don't think that will be necessary -- " "Do as he suggests, Mr. Tadlor," Pyler ordered. With an amused smile, Tadlor comphed, donning gear from tEe kit he carried. His two colleagues did Hkewise. ( i !T y orders are to stand #VJ. outside tEe building until you gentlemen give me an allclear," Pyler growled. "Make it fast." He turned to Prescott. "How close can I bring my vehicles?" "So far there Haven't been any manifestations outside the building proper, except at the switch Houses, " the man said doubtfully. Pyler gave an order. TEe cars pulled forward, the men walking beside them. Under the loom of the High portico, they Halted. Tadlor and Eis aides, witE Prescott, started up the steps. TEe doors swung abruptly open. A man staggered out, clutching himself. TEe sleeves of Eis shirt were shredded, and blood ran down Eis arms and dripped from Eis elbows. TEere was a scarlet blister as big as tEe palm of a Hand along the side of Eis neck and jaw. "Nagle! WEat Happened?" Prescott rusEed forward to support tEe man. Behind Him, two All types for songs  recordings. Records. Send poems for more men appeared, supporting a limp female form between them. "Tfie wKole place... Hot " Nagle crumpled. Tadlor stared at the man, went past Kim and up the steps, Kis two men behind Kim. Prescott called, "Colonel, don't let them -- " Tadlor's Hand went out to tKe door. A blue spark crackled, jumped to meet Him. For an instant, a Kalo danced about tKe tall, lean man, then Ke made a comical leap into the air, fell sprawling, clownlike. His two men halted, then ran forward, bent over Kim. One straightened, looked down with wide eyes. "He's dead." "Get Kim back to tKe convoy, into a respirator!" Pyler called, motioning swiftly to the armed soldiers from the jeep. One of tKe men wKo Had Helped the girl from the building turned quickly, caught Pyler's arm. "Dont try," he croaked. "Too late." "WHat do you mean?" Prescott snapped. no you write short stories, poetry, articles, books and plays? And do # BWay (Dept.FC-#)  N.Y. # you wish to place, sell them? Then mail your manuscripts promptly for quest full particulars. It will be nice to have you with us. "You saw wKat Happened to that fellow." TKe man tilted Kis head at Tadlor's inert body. "But I still Have forty-odd people inside!" "Not any more, Mr. Prescott. You left just in time. TKe place went crazy a few minutes after you went out. Dick and Van and I were tKe last to get clear. We found Jill just inside. I think sfie's dead. And so will anybody be wKo tries to go into tKat Hellhole!" "Into tfie vehicles, fast!" Pyler snapped. "Everybody!" He waited until the last man was aboard, then climbed into the weapons carrier. Behind Kim, Prescott leaned forward. "Colonel -- what are you going to do?" "Tadlor's approacK didn't work," He said. "So we'll try more direct methods." "But -- what... ?" Pyler looked back at tfie man, Kis eyes wild in a pale, round face. "We'll see what effect a few rounds of #mm through tKe front door Have on -- on whatever it is we're fighting," He finished grimly. O ter infermalion TJeople who write regular columns have to accept the fact that they'll get letters; and I get my share. Many of the letters are questions and many of the questions refer to matters of the moment; for example the passage of planetoid Icarus and the flight of Zond # around the moon produced, between them, about a dozeai. But some questions recur without a detectable cause and one of these recurring questions is wfiat will Happen to civilization if tfie polar icecaps sEould melt. If those climatologists who claim that tfie overall climate is growing warmer are right, tfie question Has a certain validity. If tfie climate grows warmer, some ice will melt somewhere. But it cannot, under any circumstances, be a sudden melting; it must be a very gradual process, taking several centuries. This is tfie gist of tfie answer I recently gave to a worried reader. Since then I Have received a fact sheet about tfie volume of water on earth from tfie Department of tfie Interior which enables me to write a kind of outline for a scenice-fiction story where the ice is melted by some malevolent (or just water-loving) aliens within one year or so. But before we can wax dramatic we need to know the figures involved. The total amount of water on earth -- liquid, frozen or vapor in the atmosphere -- has been calculated to be # cubic cubic miles (or # per cent of all the water on earth) is in the oceans. Inland seas and salt lakes account for # cubic miles, freshwater lakes and rivers account for # cubic miles and the water vapor in the atmosphere is estimated to be the equivalent of # cubic miles of liquid wamiles are in the ground as soil moisture, subterranean rivers and likes and ground water in general. Now we come to the crucial figures, those for frozen water. The ice over Antarctica amounts to # cubic miles or just about # per cent of the total, while the ice of the Arctic and of all glaciers anywhere equals # cubic miles, or # per cent of the total. Much of the Arctic ice is floating ice. Its melting would not influence tfie sea level, since ice displaces its own weight of water. So tfie question concerns mainAntarctic ice -- incidentally tfie largest amount of fresfi water on eartfi. Supposing tfiat all of it melts, it will produce about Q ter which will increase the total volume of ocean water to # million cubic miles. (Then the oceans would hold # per cent of all the water on earth.) In order to answer the question of what the melting Antarctic ice will do to civilization we must find out how much the oceans would rise and for that we have to know their surface area. At present it is # Dividing # by # we get # ; this is the sea level rise in miles. One tentfi of a mile is # feet, Hence one Hundredth of a mile is #. Tfierefore we Have to multiply # by #, tfie result is # feet. TKis figure looks a bit worse tfian reality would be, for tiSe calculation Has Keen made a if tHe oceans were one large basin witfi vertical walls. In reality tfie first tiling tfiat would Happen is tfiat tfie oceans would increase tfieir surface area by flooding all low-lying land along tfie coast lines. Increase of tfieir area would, of course, reduce tfie additional Keigfit of tfie water level. Taking all tfie factors Into account as well as tfiat can be done, we would end up witfi a greatly changed world map and a sea level about # feet Higher tlian it was before tfie presumed aliens went to work on Antarctica npfie continents least affected by tfie cfiange would be Africa and Australia. Australia would lose land along tfie Great Australian Bigfit, its southern coast and a few snippets elsewhere. Africa would lose land along its western bulge and most of tfie Lybiafi desert would be flooded. Tfie Nile would be a much I sfiorter river, and Africa would, in all probability, be an island continent, not connected witfi any of tfie otfiers. I had to say "in all probability" because nobody can foresee wfial earthquakes and volcanisin might do. We can be almost certain that shifting loads of water will trigger eartfiquakes and volcanoes, but so far not enough is known about tins to make detailed predictions. Tfie main inroads of tfie water in South America would be in tfie valleys of tfie Amazon and tfie Rio de la Plata. South America also is likely to end up as an island continent. Tfie territorial losses in North America would be large and unpleasant. Tfie so-called Gulf Plain around tfie Mississippi delta would simply disappear; it would be flooded as far nortfi as tfie Ozark Plateau. Florida would lose much territory and end up as a group of islands. Tfie Georgia coastline would be flooded. In the nortfi, land would be lost all along tfie coast. Tfiere would be a considerable increase in tfie area of Hudson Bay, mainly to its west and soutfi. In tfie west, tfie Gulf of California would go north and pour into tfie Salton gea and' its surrounding area. Tfie most drastic cfianges would fie in Europe and nearby portions of Asia. Tfie southeast of England would Be gone; an enlarged Firtfi of Fortfi would join water with tile Clyde, making Scotland an island. Ireland would lose in the west. Tfie Netherlands, North Germany, Denmark and Finland would suffer greatly; and the Russians would face inroads into tKeir territory both' from the south and the north'. There would be an enormous inflow into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar and the rising waters would spread east into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, breaking into land from there to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. The Caspian Sea (now with a water level # feet below ocean level) would be filled up and would in turn flood large areas (also below present sea level) to its north. From the north, Russia would be invaded by water on both sides of the Ural Mountains. The outcome would probably be that European Russia would be bordered by the sea in the east, with the Urals as a very long island to the east of the coastline. And east of the Urals, the valley of the River Ob would also be drowned -- a situation that may comfort those who wonder whether the Soviets might not melt the Antarctic ice with hydrogen bombs in order to drown much of North America. Well, this is the picture of the earth if all the ice were turned into water. All the continents would be separated from each other by broad stretches of shallow water. Northern Europe would be an archipelago of a few large and small islands. In the Pacific Ocean, on the other: Hand, there would only be a very few islands left -- until the corals catch up with the new sea level, that is. However, civilization would not be drowned; .it would merely be relocated in a number of places. And if this is a consolation, the climate of many areas that now suffer from very hot summers and frigid winters would be greatly ameliorated. But after having looked in some detail at the way things might be, let us not forget that all this has little to do with reality. Nobody can -- or would, if He could -- melt the Antarctic ice. And if a natural process, a generally warmer climate, were to melt it, the melting would be very slow and also selflimiting. Why self-limiting? Because the earth's axis would still be tilted by ##  to the ecliptic, and both the Arctic and the Antarctic regions would still have their long sunless nights. The melting, process could go on only during the summer months; during the winter (northern or southern) one pole would still be cold, no matter How warm it was elsewhere. And moisture carried by winds over the sunless area would still fall there as snow. One may make the assumption that in a generally warmer climate the snow deposited during the winter might not replace all the ice that melted during the summer. But it is a plain impossibility tKat all tEe ice on earth I can turn into liquid water. nphis section is based on one of the letters that came, so to speak, in the wake of the passage of Icarus. The letter said that, according to the Los Angeles Times, the asteroid passed at a This, my correspondent concluded correctly, was too far away for the earth to influence its orbit. But if Icarus had passed much more closely, wouldn't we have acquired a second moon? The answer to that question is "no" --  but I know from experience tliat it is very hard to make this "no" sound convincing. After all, our planet exerts a fairly powerful gravitational pull, so if something comes close enough, why doesn't the earth keep it? The discussion of why it could not has to begin with Pierre Simon de Laplace about one and a half centimes ago. While he was working on his major book, the Celestial Mechanics, it suddenly occurred to him that in the vicinity of a planet, the planet's gravitational force must be locally stronger than that of the sun. Laplace called the area where the planet ruled supreme the planet's "zone of action"; and he derived a formula for calculating it. The two factors that determine the diameter of the zone of action are, first, the size of the planet, or rather the strength of its gravitational field. The second factor is the distance of the planet from the sun. Since the sun's gravitational field is weakened by distance, the same planet would acquire a larger zone of action if it were moved to a greater distance from the sun. It follows logically that Mercury must Have the smallest zone of action, because it is both the smallest planet and also the one closest to the sun. It also follows that Neptune, though considerably smaller than Jupiter, Has a zone of action almost twice as large as tliat of Jupiter, because it is much farther from the sun. The table shows the size of the zone action for the planets of our solar system, calculated in accordance with Laplace's formula. It can be seen that in each case this zone is much' larger than the distance to the outermost moon, of the planet. Even in the case of Jupiter's moon No. IX, the moon is only half way to the edge of the zone of action. Inside this zone, a planet could Hold a moon. That, however, does not mean that anything that strays inside the zone of action of a planet will stay inside tliat zone. Zone of Action according to Laplace. mean Planet equatorial distance radius of distance t of diameter from sun zone of action outermost satellite (miles) (miles) Mercury # # Venus # # Earth # # # (our moon) Mars # # # (Deimos) Jupiter # #S# # # (J.IX) Saturn # #.I # # (Phoebe) Uranus # # # # (Oberon) Neptune # # # # (Nereid)  measured from the center of the planet Tf Icarus Had passed at a distance of only # miles, counting from the center of the earth, its orbit would Have been greatly altered because of this intrusion into our zone of action. It would Have been whipped around the earth in a Hyperbolic curve, and during the next three weeks or so several computers would Have been occupied with the problem of tKe new orbit. But that new orbit would still Have been an orbit around tKe sun, because Icarus would Have escaped from our zone of action again. The reason is that it would Have been far too fast to go into an orbit # miles from the center of the eartK. That distance is, as many readers will have realized, the distance of tKe synchronous orbit of communication satellites. It is normally given as # miles because tKe distances of artificial satellites are counted from sea level. THe reason for doing this is partly for tKe purpose of making a clear distinction between artificial and natural objects in space; and partly because we naturally think of the distance of an artificial satellite in terms of its distance from us, that is from the surface. A satellite in the synchronous orbit moves with an orbital velocity of # miles per second. If it is faster, it will not stay in this orbit but wander away until a balance has been reached. If that body, for example, moved with a velocity of # miles per second, it would use up some of its velocity by climbing away from the eartli and it might then settle in an orbit # miles out. But if the body moves at that distance with a velocity of # miles per second, the earth simply cannot hold it. (I don't want anybody to write in now to inform me that # miles per second is the "circular velocity" and that the earth could hold a body moving that fast. Circular velocity is a theoretical figure calculated fo rsea level; our discussion concerns a body moving with' that velocity at a considerable distance from the earth where earth's gravitational pull is weaker.) If a body like Icarus passed the earth at a distance of our natural moon, it would have to move (relative to the earth) with a velocity of less than # miles per second to become a satellite. Does all this mean that the earth could never "capture" another body and make it a satellite? It does mean just that. Or it does, let's say, in # out of # cases. For the thousandth case, one may invent a complicated maneuver in which the moon cooperates with the earth. If the body, which should be far smaller than the moon, is first whipped around the moon by the moon's gravitational field it might acquire a new orbit in which it is very slow relative to the earth I . And having been slowed by our moon, the body would, of course, be inside the earth's zone of action. Since the moon's zone of action is only about one per cent of that of the earth, it does not need any long explanations to show how rare such an event would be. I never thought that I would have to devote space in my column to a theme as simple as that of the phases of the moon, but one can never think of all the possibilities. One of my readers asked a fairly simple question, and I gave a simple answerr which only resulted in confusion. Now if one reader can be confused about something, others are likely to be confused too, so I had better explain in public. To begin at the beginning, the reader in question had checked the phases of the moon in an almanac. The table there said "first quarter," but the actual moon in the sky, I was informed with some indignation, was clearly a half moon. I replied that that was as it should be and that the "last quarter" was the other half of that half moon. I still think that this was a simple answer, but the reply I received made me realize that we simply were talking about two different things. My correspondent meant the appearance of the moon in the sky; I was (more or less) talking about the calendar. A long time ago, a rabbi wrote in a book called the Midrash that "the moon had been created for the counting of the days" and the terms "first quarter" and "last quarter" may be called tfie remains of tHat reasoning. Fact is tSat all early calendars were lunar calendars. They originated in the areas we now call the Near East where tEe seasons are relatively unimportant. On tfie other hand, tEe moon is a relatively impressive object, or was in tEe days before artificial light and equally artificial air pollution. And the moon does display a pronounced periodicity. Starting with a nigEt when there was no moon in the sky (later called "new moon") the cycle went through the barely visible crescent that grew wider and wider to the point where the; moon looked Eke one half of a wheel. This marked tEe completion of the first quarter of the cycle. Then the moon went through gibbous (the word means "lop-sided") to full, which marks the Half-way point in the cycle. Then waning, the Half moon phase was reached again; three quarters of the cycle Had passed, hence the "last quarter" was reached. And then back to invisibiHty when a "new moon" would be born. One may wonder why the ancient people of the Near East used the absence of the moon as the starting point of the netv cycle. Why not the full moon which is easier to see? I don't know the answer to that question, but I have two guesses. One is that the re-appearance of the moon could be used as a subject for mystical speculations, something the ancients loved to do. The other is that, without instruments, it is not easy to say at what moment the moon is full, being a precise circle. It was easier to watch for the disappearance of the last thin sliver of the waning crescent. From past experience tliey knew how much time would elapse until the new crescent Had to appear. XT' or a complete change of pace I am going to end this column with a reply to a letter from a reader in Oklahoma who wants to know why the rabbit is called a cud-chewing animal in the Bible, referring to Leviticus xi:#. Actually the answer is simple; the rabbit of Leviticus isn't a rabbit at all. The verse says that the zaphan (or s aplian is another transHteration) must not be eaten even though it is a cud-chewer, because it does not have the acceptable kind of cloven hooves. Even if the Christian translators of the Bible did not consider this a logical piece of reasoning, they were still confronted with the problem of translating it. Since the next verse said the same about the Kare, there was a suggestion that the zaphan was fairly small and furry. The prudent thing would have been to leave the word untranslated, maybe with a hint that it does not occur in Europe. Dr. Martin Luther, who translated the Pentateuch around the year #, was not so prudent He seems to have assumed that since verse # spoke of the Hare, verse # must mean the rabbit; he put Kaninchen (the German word for rabbit) into his translation. Since he lived close to nature, in small towns where a #minute walk would get a man out into the fields, he should have known that neither the rabbit nor its close relative the hare ever chews the cud. Either he didn't know it, which would be quite strange, or else he succumbed to the translator's syndrome which reads: "It doesn't make sense -- in fact I don't believe it -- but I'm not writing this, I am only the translator." The English' translators who produced the King James version of the Bible, first published in #, also did not know the meaning of zaphan. So they followed Luther, using the word coney for rabbit. Meanwhile a German pastor, Hermann Heinrich Frey, had written a book on the animals mentioned in the Bible, which had been published in #. He took no stand on the question of whether rabbits and hares are cud-chewers, but just declared that "they are clean to Christians and very good to eat." It is presumed that his cook was good at preparing saddle of hare. Well, since the zaphan is not a rabbit, what is it? It is an animal that, in modern zoology books, goes under the name of hyrax. It is about a foot long, looks fat and fuzzy and stares at people with an expression of mild disgust and annoyance. But it looks at zebras, antelopes and even trees with the same expression. Because of its general appearance it was, at first, thought to be a rodent like the rabbit. But a closer look at the teeth made it clear that it was not. The great Cuvier declared that it was a primitive ungulate or hoofed mammal, and we still agree with I the statement. Because of a fossil found in Egypt -- long after Cuvier's death -- we know that the hyrax is distantly related to mastodons and elephants, without being a direct ancestor. If it had evolved it would have hooves; it might even be clovenhoofed. But it did not evolve. And if does not chew the cud. T ast month we announced the J  winners of tlie First Annual Galaxy Awards, and the Handsdown champion, out-pointing all of tHe # other stories published in Galaxy and If in #, was Goblin Reservation, by Clifford D. Simak. Simak's Home is in Minnesota, and He likes it there; He seldom leaves, and so we met him in tHe flesK for tHe first time only a dozen or so years ago, when He was shepherding a troop of Boy Scouts on a trip to New York. More recently. He gave up His top editorial newspaper position to concentrate on a page of science features to be used in Minnesota schools. TEere are those wKo wonder How someone who has been writing as long as CHff Simak can keep His outlook so fresh and exciting. Maybe that's one reason: he works with youngsters, and keeps His views young. Sylvia 'Jacobs has been appearing in Galaxy about as long as there Has been a Galaxy. A CaHfomian, sEe is married to a hardHat diver, now retired from deepwater salvage and rescue operations and devoting Himself to more pleasurable underwater occupations. Next time you're at Marineland of tHe Pacific, ask for the chief diver; that's Sylvia Jacobs's Husband. Robert BlocH is famous in that Great Big World Out There as tHe author of that mean and creepy story called Psycho, but in real life BlocH Has tHe heart of a fan. (He keeps it in his desk drawer.) When Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho a by-word for Horror and sEock, the movie offers came flooding in. BlocH moved His activities from Wisconsin to California, where He Has been writing any number of top TV shows and motion pictures ever since; but still I He returns to us when he can -- as in How Like A God, Herewith. James E. Gunn is an English professor at tHe University of Kansas. Witch Hunt, in this issue of Galaxy is a sort of follow-up story -- not so mucH a sequel as a logical consequence -- to Trial by Fire, wKich appeared in our companion magazine. If, a couple of months ago. The s in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. GF-# by Emsh No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. GX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # (or #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offer I Do you have a restless urge to write? If so, you have much in common with successful authors. Read how I # Famous Writers are helping people turn a restless urge for self-expression into success in writing The. c's something different about people who feel the urge to write. They have a spiritual hunger that sets them apart even from family and friends. If you have known this burning need to write, you, too, may have the gift successful authors possess... the recurring ache to put into words your innermost thoughts, your ow n experiences. Max Shulman started writing because "... it was write or bust." Faith Baldwin, after # novels, still says: "I've never written exactly what I dreamed I'd write... you keep on trying." Successful authors like these know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know how to get started writing, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago they joined forces with Rod Sel ling. Bennett Ccrf, Bruce Catton, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Caples, J. D. Ratcliff, Mark Wiseman, Rudolf Flesch, Red Smith and Bergen Evans, to form the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they knew about writing into a remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing -- then specialize in Fiction. Non-Fiction, Advertising Writing or Business Writing. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes oxer your work line by line, word by word, blue-penciling his changes right on your manuscript, much as an editor docs with an established author. Then he returns it with a long letter of advice and guidance. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to the Render's Digest, Rod Serltng s luge to write made him a leading TV dramatist (Twilight #. one, Patients, Requiem for a Heavyweight) and won him six Emmy awards. Ladies' Home Journal, Fantasy and .Science Fiction, and more than # other publications. Writing Aptitude Test offered To find out if you. too, have writing ability worth developing, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. i ! Famous Writers School  Dept. W-#, Westport Conn. #S# i I want to know' if I have writing aptitude worth developing. Please mail me, w ithout obligation, your Aptitude Test t and #-page brochure. 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From then on the mails will bring Galaxy to your door, with the best stories being written by the best science-fiction writers of all time. Here are some of the famous stories that appeared in Galaxy in its first fifteen years. Will the next fifteen years be as good? Frankly, we don't think so. We think they'll be better! Galaxy Publishing Corp.  #I Hudson Street #  Yes, start my subscription to Galaxy right away. I enclose   my check or money order for:   CH # issues for # Q # issues for #   Name Address  City  State Zip Code   U.S. only. Add #c per issue foreign postage.#  Please check whether Q new or  renewal.  Baby # Ihtn Thcodoro Tho DuMiMf at Lost C'Mvil Cordwainnr The Biff Tiftio Fritz Loihor The Caves of Stoat Isaac Asimov Day After Dootnsdtty Poul Anderson he Demolished AIcmi A lfred Bestcr Do I Wake or Dream? 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Tlie Littlenesis l Eartli and ilie Oignessi nf Man  publication for wfiicfi we have much respect, and from which we derive much enjo # ?ment, is England's New Scientist, which manages to compress in a single slim weekly issue nearly everything that is happening in nearly all of science. Like most of the people and institutions we most admire, though, the New Scienreliable most of the time, has its loony moments. One happened last Christmas. The occasion was the marvelous Apollo # circumnavigation of the moon. Most of the world rejoiced and applauded; New Scientist managed only to weep a few tears of shame that those childish Americans were spending all that money on Earth lacked proper food. What is most disturbing about this particular aberration is that it is by no means limited to New Scientist, nor to the world outside the U.S.A. We hear plenty of it right here at home; and the last public-opinion survey released in the newspapers shows that it is shared by a majority of American voters. At least, only some # are clearly in favor of the space program, while nearly twice as many are either actively opposed, or don't much know about it or don't much care. There's not much point in going into arguments once more. Surely there is much need for Doing Something about world htmger, about the cities, about racial problems, about peace. But will taking money from the space program help in any of these ways? Hardly. There's no evidence at all that curtailing tire spacer program, even canceling it cnlircHere's vhat's blossoming: A well-titled anthology featuring two chillers by Mervyn Peake Stanley G. Weinbaum's long unavailable masterpiece Andrew Sinclair's stunning literaiy fantasy Pout Anderson's little classic And Stanley G. Weinbaum's other long unavailable masterpiece A great new Bob Shaw novel Robert Graves' unforgettable far-future utopian fanta And what may summer brfng? The best work ever (we think) of . Harlan Ellison ancf Robert Silverberg, among other delights... ly, will contribute a nickel's wortK of benefit to any of those causes. It might well do them Harm: certainly the skills and resources in the space program now can be more readily diverted to, say, the manufacture of more destructive armaments than to clearing up air pollution or urban crime. But there's not much point, either, in merely deploring a state of mind. The anti-space people may be very wrong, but they are also very convinced. It would be desirable to find some way in which the space program can actively help to solve human problems right here and now. Is there such a possibility? It turns out there is; and it was suggested in the March issue of another estimable magazine, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by its editor, Eugene RabinowitcH. T he world is small, says RabinowntcH, and no one knows it better than the astronauts and the cosmonauts, who alone among us can see it from outside. It makes no sense to divide so tiny a particle into warring camps. There is only one human race; we might as well learn how to get along with one another. Some day, perhaps, we will find Somebody Else out there, and maybe then we will find ourselves united perforce against a common enemy. But whether that happens or not, surely we can conquer space better together than we can in competition. And what better time to start cooperating than now? Until now, the space programs of the U.S.A. and tlie Russians have been whoUy competitive. But, says RabinowitcH, Sooner or fater, the circle most be broken. Why not now? Why should we not offer the Soviet Union partkipotion In an Apollo mission. In exchange for United Stated participation In a Soviet manned space flight? Why not indeed? Oh, to be sure, if one puts one's mind to it, there are a few "why nots" to be found. The language barrier. The security barrier. The opposition of hard-liners on both sides. But those are problems that amount to nothing, compared to what is to be gained. No one is suggesting that anybody give anything away; it is a suggestion for a one-for-one trade; and all of human history suggests that trade benefits both sides. Good idea? We think so. We tliink it is worth the President's attention. We think it is worth writing a few letters to congressmen about... right now. New places, or people you pass in the street, may seem oddly familiar to you. Have you known them in a previous life? You wonder why you are living on earth to-day and for what purpose you are here. Certain secrets of life and mental development cannot be divulged indiscriminately. If you sincerely feel the need for instruction in the use of your higher creative endowment, you have reached the stage where the Rosier ucian teachings wiU be of practical value to you in your everyday life. Learn how to quietly impress your personality on others, to better your business and social position. Use your own naturally endowed powers to achieve results you now think unattainable in your present state of untrained and undirected endeavour. Simple Rosicrucian teachings enable intelligent men and women to soar to new heights of achievement, new freedom, new contentment in life. Devoted to the attainment of the true Brotherhood of Mankind, The Rosicrucians are a Non-Religious, Non-Political, Non-Profit Making Fraternity. You are invited, though not urged, to write for the free # page book -- "The Mastery of Life," which has been written to give readers an outline of the world-wide scope and history of this noncommercial fraternity. This invitation is not to be taken as an assurance that every applicant receiving "The Mastery of Life" will be approved for membership by the Dean of Students. Please ms the coupon below or write to:     M   H  H H H  H H    M    a  M M  H   arai Scribe: V.G.N. j San Jose, California #, U.S.A. J Name  Address  State S LiniE By law, he was a Special Person but his birthright was divided between the sky and the crystal shards of his earthbound angers. I Tf was a bitter March noon whenKert TaKn shattered angry words at the feet of that arrogant man, tKe dispatcher at Sundley Transport. Kert's blue crest flared. His eyes shot hawk-fire. Two months of anger jarred from Kis lips in fiery crystals and smashed to the pavement. When the last hot word lay sKarded, Kert thrust past the speechless dispatcher, past the fully loaded hoverdish', squat and tonnish', down the lift-ramp, into tKe street. Sunlight flickered weakly off the pavement, flashed palely at tHe copper and scarlet medallion at Kert Tahn's neck. He was a lean and hungry Person, witH a stiff shock of blue feathers and the face of a circling hawk. But no one in the midday crowd gave him a second glance. Kert bounced off a hefty matron who clutched parcels in six stout arms, jarred into her mate, whose blood foamed through heavy jugs strapped to his arms. He sideswiped a burly individual with wheeled metal legs. The burly man spun hard against a wall and wheeled around. "You want to match me, bird?" He squealed his tires HotlyKert clenched his teeth against a hard crystal of anger. "My trespass," he muttered, touching his medallion. He dodged away. He pounded pavement underfoot for an hour, dispersing the bitter remnants of anger. Then, calmed, he raised his eyes. The walls of the city canyoned around him, suddenly confining. Far above, hovercraft wove a random pattern across a patch of pale sky. Kent's chest tightened. TKe need to rise was suddenly desperate, the need to loft into the sky, to renew his futile, angering seardi for something nameless, formless tKat beckoned there, far and high. He labored for breatU against crushing claustrophobic bands. Straining for breatH, he glared around. He located a callbootK and entered. He punched at the callboard, then raked harsh fingers through his stiffened crest. TKe copper and scarlet insignia of the Special Persons Bureau filled the viewscreen. "Special Persons Bureau. Which desk, please?" "Jobs One." A moment and Jobs One splashed upon the viewscreen, a butterscotch girl, pertly smiling. Then she recognized Kert Tahn. TKe smile melted down her face. "Mr. Tahn! You haven't jobbed off again!" His voice was harsK. "I Have. An hour ago." He beamed hawkfire into the viewsender, trying to burn urgency into her butterscotch heart. "I need another job. Now." "But Mr. Tahn! Sundley Transport was your sixth job since last May. Six jobs in less than a year, Mr. Tahn. That's -- " Kert's crest flared. "Then get me one that fits this time." Jobs One covered herself with an apologetic smile. "I'll certainly do what I can." She bent. Her fingers danced earnestly over the computer board. Kelt slumped against the wall of tfie callbootU. His words showed as solids to fiis eyes, though others seemed never to see them Now they lay on the floor, slowly evaporating. He kicked aside the dissolving crystals. He ran a smoothing hand over his crest. Overhead, city traffic bobbed, beckoning. Eventually Jobs One raised a pleasant smile. "Mr. Tahn, I can place you right within the Special Persons Bureau. The computer has matched you with a slot at Rural Welfare. It's remote area work, daylight hours, with minimum radio work. It seems ideal, really. May I arrange an interview?" Kert's chest loosened. He sighed deeply. "Call me at home when it's arranged." Kert stepped from the booth. He stared up into the city sky. Maybe this time the job would be tolerable. Maybe this time the craft would be light and fleet. Maybe, together, they would rise, seek -- find. Find what? Frowning, Kert averted his eyes from the sky. ert's apartment was a small place that gleamed with metal. When he keyed the door, the wallphone summoned. "You certainly took your time," Jobs One said brightly. "I spoke Ballantlne Books our fantasy program with the release of Fletcher Pratt's parallel -- a remarkable extrapolation of a world in which witchcraft, rather than the sciences, is the repository of knowledge. There is an affectionate and discerning Introduction by Lin Carter, who is editing this series for us -- and whose own "The Lord of the Rings," has already won high praise from such trade media as Publishers' Weekly. (A friendly reminder to regular reviewers who will certainly not want to be unaware of such major reading trends and we are not being even remotely sardonic. Adult fantasy reading, headed by Tolkien, is o major reading trend If ever there was one. And Lin's book Is a boon as a guide to adult fantasy; besides being a lot of fun just for its own sake.) fiction works from the House that Brings You Nothing but the Best (for you who have been complaining -- this is, too, an ad,) Namely, Robert Silverberg provides thirteen variations with his usual precision and finesse. We claim he uses a scalpel rather than a typewriter. One of our favorite authors, even if he does want to be Pope. Richard C. Meredith -- with a taut, totally believable drama, just the kind of mess humankind is likely to get into if it ever reaches the stars, A reminder of other goodies you can get from us -- the works of Anne McCaffrey, Edmund Cooper, E.R. Eddison, James White, Miriam Allen deFord, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, and any number more. For details, write to our splendid new warehouse. Dept. #th Street, New York #. That definitely is West #th, by the way. We previously listed it (in the March issue) as #rd. Couldn't find the place ourselves when we went looking. Its #th, #fh, #th! Or you can write us here at #I Fifth Avenue, same city. BB to Mr. Daimler at Rural Welfare. They're ready to begin Spring Mission, and he's three men short. You're to sign papers of employment tomorrow early at Bureau headquarters, mid-city. TKeri report to Mr. Daimler, Rural Welfare Division, city-perimeter, to begin work immediately." Her smile was full of self-congratulation. "And please -- don't let me hear from you for at least a year." Kert paced the apartment restlessly. Finally at dusk, he shafted to street level. He prowled, eyes constantly seeking the sky, where night-lit Hovercraft wove intricate patterns. Kert had come to the city out of the sky twenty-two years before as an infant, orphaned. His parents had inhabited one of the rural settlements maintained by the special Persons Bureau for those of the genetically disadvantaged, unable to adjust to urban life. His parents had lived and they had died, and beyond those simple facts, Kert was ignorant of them. The Special Persons Bureau had hung its medallion at his neck, marking Him its own child, a variant on the human theme. The Bureau had fed and clothed him, Weltered and schooled him. The Bureau had served him as mother, father, aunt and uncle. Now in His refractory adulthood, it brooded over him, nagging, advising, moralizing. Kert prowled, nigHtiiawk in blue. His eyes flickered restlessly oyer His fellows, sorting tfiem: normal, apparently normal but medallioned, visibly variant. The variants He classed automatically into sub-groups. There were tfiose variants as to size, as to proportion, number and type of limbs, facial topograpHy, skin texture, complexion tone. There were even a few who boasted fledgling crops of featHers. Nowhere did he meet another with crest of blue and the face of a hawk. Had he expected to? Once he Had. Questing, he had even joined the Fraternal Order of Feathered Friends briefly. Birds of a feather did indeed flock together. But flocking, fluttering and idly pecking had proven disappointing. He had abandoned the fraternity in disgust. Then, still seeking true peers, he had located scores of Persons who claimed to perceive sound as a visible phenomenon. He had even discovered a few who claimed to experience it as a tangible entity. Kert's crest stiffened with bitter memory. Kert Tahn, adolescent, had known how the crystallized word glistened, how it shattered and splintered against the pavement. How it evaporated swiftly into the air. No one could tell him it was spongy and gray or fluffy and pale. Or that it washed against the walls in rainbow waves. And so at seventeen, his search complete, Kert had found himself alone in the city, unique. He had closed the city from his dreams. He had begun to listen for the call of the sky, dim, tantalizing eternally evanescing. The sky darkened now, veined , itself with lightning. Rain fell. Crest dampened, Kert returned to his apartment to drug himself into black sleep. Morning came. Kert fueled himself with a handful of nutricaps and boarded the ziptube early, knotted with tension. Special Persons Headquarters, mid-city, was a massive pink hive. The Person at the desk rubbed her medallion in liorny fingers, clacked corneous ridges that served for teeth and proffered papers of employment. "Are you acquainted with the Bureau's pay scale, Mr. Tahn?" "I am." He scrawled his name, the track of a bird. He backed away from her terrible smile. "The ziptube deposited Him nearRural Welfare Division at city-perimeter. He was directed to the west wing of the complex. There a receptionist escorted Mm directly to Mr. Daimler, Director of Transport. Daimler jellied from his chair, beaming fatly. Greedy black eyes gobbled Kert from crest to toe. "AH, well! A Koverman wKo looks like He really belongs in the sky!" Despite Eis grotesque bulk, Daimler wore no medalHon. "You've signed papers of employment, I presume?" "I Have." Kert's crest flattened involuntarily witH distaste. Daimler beamed greedily. "Good! We're starved for Hovermen this season. I'll escort you to die shed myself, Kertis. You'll want to see your sHip, discuss your duties." Reluctantly, Kert let Himself be maneuvered out the door, down the hallway. "I presume you're a city boy, Kertis?" Daimler quivered with' massive good will. "I was born in one of the rural settlements." "AH, well! THen you'll know all about Spring Mission. Which settlement claims you, Kertis?" Kert's forehead creased. "I was orphaned out early. I grew up in the city." The words ground througK his teeth' in splinters. "Ah! A shame! You missed a wonderful opportunity to grow up in the Rural America of the Twenty-First Century," Daimler caroled. "This is the true age of individualism, Kertis. During Spring Mission our caseworkers will visit scores of communities, each with its own rich Heritage, no two alike. Completely unlike the America of the last century, a homogeneous society, composed of homogeneous individuals -- and each community like every other in social structure and content." Kert's body tightened ominously"Of course, there is a certain isolationism involved." Daimler burbled. "Many Special Persons are unable to adjust to the demands of society -- or even to contact with it. Our workers visit and evaluate hundreds of solitaries, People who see no Human face other than the caseworker's from year to year. And of coiuse there are isolated family units as well. Our semi-annual distribution of commodities is a mammoth task in itself. And before it can be begun, our workers must visit and evaluate each community, each isolated family unit, each individual solitary." They had traversed the Division complex to the hangars. A vast empty area spread before them, stained with oil and strewn with tools. "The fleet has already lifted out for the day." Daimler jellied across the hangar floor. "Now, I've assigned you one of our older vehicles, Kertis. Today I want you to loft up, get the feel of it. Then drop in at the ops suite and peruse our files. Tomorrow you will carry three workers into one of our older, better developed areas. Later, if you measure up. I'll assign you a more challenging route." But Kert didn't hear. His eyes narrowed upon the small blue hovercraft that squatted on the hangar floor, rusted, sun-faded, dimmed with years. His body stiffened. His breath caught, stopped. Daimler echoed vainly, from afar. Kert Tahn stood alone in the world with the small blue hoverdish. His legs moved, took him in slow circuit about tlie dish. His lungs drew breath again and deep within him something pulsed and throbbed. He had searched the city, searched the sky, searched a thousand empty hours of his life, for something that had no name. All that time, the dish had waited here. Had waited rusting and fading. Kert made a second circuit of the dish. He catalogued the work that cried to be done, the deep cleaning inside and out, the rubbing and polishing, the loving and cherishing. II D aimler's voice penetrated Kelt's consciousness again. "I suppose it does look a trifle rough, Kertis. But our clikf mechanic ran a general overhaul just last month in preparatiiwi for Spring Mission. The ship is in excellent mechanical repair, I assure you." His voice worried upon the need to sky the ship immediately, upon the urgency of the Mission, upon the crushing rural caseload. Even as Daimler spoke, Kert's mind moved quickly, incisively upon the problem of the blue dish. He considered, debated -- and decided upon his strategem. He set his profile distastefully, flared back his crest. "I vouldn't loft in this plate if you paid me solid platinum." The words rfiattered upon the hangar floor in dark crystals of scorn. Daimler stared at him, uncomprehending. Kert stepped over his sbarded words. "Call Jobs One. SheTl cancel my papers of employment." Kert had reached the hangar door before Daimler legmned himself. "Kertis! You can't mean -- " "I do mean." Kert slid the door between them, decisively. From the street, Kert looked back to the hangar where the blue craft sheltered. Anxiety stabbed him, a cold steel blade. It was, after all, strictly a gamble that he could mampidate Daimler and Jobs One, that He could win his way with the blue Koverdish. It was purely a gamble that Daimler was desperate enough for hovermen to take Kert on Kert's own terms. Frowning inwardly, Kert hoarded the ziptube. His apartment gleamed witH metallic everyday oddments polisKed into bits of metal sculpture. Kert polished at fiis treasures witB salty palms, waiting. An Hour passed. THe wallphone summoned. Metal clattered from Kert's bands. "Yes?" Jobs One regarded Him anxiously "Mr. Tahn, Mr. Daimler is very agitated. He fells me you refused to fly for him. I explained that surely tfiere was some mistake, that he Had misunderstood you." "I told him I wouldn't loft his disH for soUd platinum." Jobs One blancHed. "Mr. TaHn!" SHe leaned earnestly into the screen. "Mr. Tahn, please. I was so upset, I computed all the factors again. To be sure I Hadn't made some terrible mistake tHe first time. Really, Mr. Tafin, tHe job is very ideal -- much better than an # rtHing else available just now. Can't you at least be more specific in your reasons for refusal?" "I can. THe disH filtKy. Half a dozen dents in the shell. Instruments greasy inside and out. Paint drilled wHere it isn't cKipped off or rusted away entirely. If the power plant matches the exterior, I could fall like a rock. If you'll look, you'll see my shoulders are bare -- I'm a bird without wings." "But Mr. Tahn! Mr. Daimer wouldn't loft caseworkers in a disH tHat wasn't airwortKy. I'm sure tHey've been simply too rusKed to perform non-essential maintenance." Kert regarded Her scornfully. He reached to break circuit. SHe sighed Helplessly. "All right. I'll speak to Mr. Daimler again. I'll suggest He call in a cleaning crew. PerHaps we can even -- " "No!" Tfie word leapt up his throat, gasKing His. lip. He wiped blood from His lip. "I'll clean it myself." Her eyes widened. SHe frowned. TKen her face blossomed. "Why tKen of course! As often as I've scanned your file, I should Have guessed. You want to polish tHe dish yourself. I'll call Mr. Daimler rit away. #'U -- " He withdrew His thoughts from Her. Frowning, He considered tHe materials he would need to make tHe disH blue as the sky, ligKt as a cloud, as sHining in body as in soul. He jotted His list, then sfiafted to street level. Triumph cried a fierce song in fiis Heart. Qome of tHe cleaning products  he required were popular and widely distributed. Others were more difficult to locate. Kert pushed his way from shop to shop, glaring fiercely into the dim March sun. Clerks quivered and wilted under his razor sharp demands. Then the bulky rainbow of jugs was heaped into the rented carrycart. The cart wheeled faithfully in Kerfs wake through the noon crowd, losing him only once briefly. The hangar stood empty except for the blue disH and, beneath it, the mechanic. At Kerfs approach, the mechanic scrambled up, twitched nervously and spidered away, oddly jointed fingers flexing at the ends of long, thrice-elbowed arms. Metal shelves lined the Hangar wall. Kert arranged his cleaning products upon the shelves. Each container carried a glowing skull and crossbones. Each responded to the touch of his hand with its insistently shrill audible warning: "Contents of this container harmful or fatal if taken internally. Under penalty of law, keep this container beyond the reach of children." Kert escorted the emptied carrycart to the hangar door and triggered its homing circuit. It whirred smoothly away. He paced around the blue dish slowly, almost ritually, re-establishing communion. Finally saMsfied, he took from the shelf a large violet jug. He unlidded the container, sniffed the contents. "Contents of this container harmful if taken internally," the jug insisted. "Under penalty of law -- " Kert pinched his nostrils shut, tilted back his head. He drank deeply. He set the violet jug back on the shelf. He breathed deeply, evenly, as the cleanser burned down his throat. His vision blurred, then cleared. He rolled up the sleeves of his coveralls, fleaed his fingers experimentally. The hangar door slid noisily. Daimler jellied into the Hangar, a beaming mound. "Kertis! My chief mechanic told me you'd returned. You've already begun work, I see." "I have." Kert regarded ISm through slitted eyes. He rubbed at the skin of the blue Koverdish with the palm of his Hand, frowning. The violet product was not yet sufficiently metabolized to cut the surface dullness. "Ah, well! How very fortunate that we were able to correct our misimderstanding. The dish is in excellent mechanical condition, I assure you. It was custom-made for a private citizen who willed it to us upon his death a few years ago. It's a splendid little ship, one of a kind -- but I suppose we Save let it become a bit sliabby," Kert said sharply, "It's carrying five years of film." Daimler quivered. "Exactly, exactly!" He cried, in eager expiation. He cleared Kis tHroat, coughed and gestured expansively. "But I presume, Kertis, that you can have it in satisfactory condition in a day or two." Kerf shuddered as the cleansing product reached his pores in a hot, wet flash. His eyes overflowed with tears. Blinking, he rubbed at the hoverdisK with the outside flesh of his forearm. He tried the inner flesh of the other arm, nodded with satisfaction. "Within three days, perhaps?" Daimler suggested hopefully. "It'll be done when it's done." "Well, ah -- just do whatever -- " Daimler gestured nervously. "I won't keep you any longer, Kertis. Let me know when you're ready to be scheduled." Kert stared after Daimler, then glared distastefully at Daimler's crystallic wordage melting messily on the hangar floor. He kicked aside his own splintered words. He flexed his fingers experimentally. 'he blue hoverdish responded gratefully to his rubbing fingers, his polishing palms. He settled to work, oblivious to everytiling but the tarnished blue dish and its wishful soul. The worst disfigurement was the overall dullness that masked the craft inside and out, concealing texture and grain and dimming body and soul. It was a dullness that lay everywhere, spread over the world like a thin gray pall. At first Kert's apartment had been dreary widi it. He had spent months of his free time rubbing and polishing, making himself one place in the world that shone true. In the process, he had reached a conclusion about the nature of the pall. It was simply the final end product of the process of speech. It was the last minute residue left by the apparently fast-evaporating words that fell from the careless lips of the world. Kert Had been deeply shocked at first to realize that the spoken word did not evaporate completely. Instead, each word left an imperceptible drift of matter, invisible by itself but -- comclearly, appallingly visible. Accepting this theory had meant renouncing his firmest conviction about the nature of speech. But he had made the renunciation. And now, as he worked at the hoverdish, his conclusion was reconfirmed. The dullness lay over the dish's interior in pronounced layers v;Hich brought to mind verbal fingerprints. Although' all were of the same general nature, each layer, upon close inspection, had strikingly individual characteristics. If labeled samples had been available, Kert could have identified the individual responsible for each thin layer of the pall. The individual layers differed in composition as well as appearance. Kert had to spot test each thin layer carefully to determine which cleaning agent would yield best results. Some layers sloughed off easily. Others required intensified effort. Finally late Friday, a week later, Kert circled the ship, a gaunt and ravaged hawk. His hands and arms were raw with running sores. His crest drooped. His eyes were puffed, his tongue a mass of lumps. Throat and intestines burned poisonously. His breath hung in fuming clouds. But the initial cleaning was done. Kert slumped against the hoverdish. Despair crystallized within him as he watched the late afternoon crowd of caseworkers gaggle through the hangar. Young and old, normal and medallioned, their common identifying characteristic was that they talked -- and talked and talked, strewing behind them a crystaUic rubble of dissolving wordage. Kert Had found their gabbing numbers more ominous each day of the week. Now they hurried past His immaculate hoverdish again, heedlessly strewing their verbal pall, Kert jerked, startled by an even more unwelcome voice. "All, well! I see you've completed your polishing, Kertis." Daimler quivered in a heap at Kert's side. An aggressive gleam lit his damp eye. "I believe you are ready, in fact, to carry a few passengers for me." Kert tried to match Daimler's aggressive tone. "I am not. It will take me another five days to sand and paint the outer shell. Then I may be ready." The words fell with an empty rattle. Daimler jellied sternly around the hoverdish. "No, Kertis, you have pursued your whim long enough. I fear I can't see that you have accomplished anything notable in the week I've already given you. Beyond blistering yourself raw and fuming tlie hangar with your chemicals." Kerfs crest flared fiercely. "You can't see? You aren't blind, are you? You have eyes. You -- " "Oh, you've cleaned the upholstery, swept away tli'e bread crumbs, polished the trim a bit. But -- " He hoisted a hand against Kerfs protest. " -- I fear I will have to ask you to continue your ministrations on your own time. You've grounded my craft for a week, you know. You've collected full hover pay for work a cleaning crew could have accomplished in half a day. Now, I have posted next week's schedule in the ops suite. I fear, Kertis, that if you fail to meet your schedule, I will feel compelled to lay complaint before the hovermen's guild." Kert clenched blistered fists helplessly. Of course Daimler couldn't see. His eyes were blind to the graying layer that hung over the hangar, over the world. "And then you would lose the little ship you regard so fondly, Kertis. So drop by the ops suite before five. And -- happy Hovering" Kert glared after Daimler. He pounded his fists in inarticulate rage. Ill T Tis schedule was, posted prominently in the ops suite. He scanned it with darkening rage. Daimler Had scheduled his verbaceous caseworkers into Kert's dish in a patternless musical chairs. In the course of the week, Kert would carry thirteen different workers in the craft. That meant thirteen different vocal patterns layered over the now-immaculate interior of the craft. Thirteen different patterns to be scrubbed and polished away at week's end. Gallons of cleanser to be ingested, metabolized, to bum down his guts and sear out his pores. In blind rage, Kert hurdled from the ops suite, hawked through the halls. Halfway to Daimler's office, he folded against a wall, the driving vitality of rage spent. His mind tore at the dilemma. If Kert defied Daimler and Daimler filed complaint, the guild would suspend his license for a year. He would, inevitably, lose the blue hoverdisK. But if he yielded to Daimler... Weakly he pulled himself erect. He clutched his medallion in despair. And the syllables of salvation whispered quietly into his mind. Christian Yorber. Counselor Yorber, the man legally and morally responsible for Special Person Kertis Tahn's haelth, welfare and pursuit of happiness. Yorber had to help. Provided Kert could demonstrate that his health and welfare were dependent upon Yorber's intervention. Kert's crest flared. He winged to the hangar, to the wallph'one in one dim corner. He punched. Copper and scarlet filled the viewscreen. "Special Persons Bureau. Wiich desk, please?" "Counselor Yorber." A moment, and Yorber's secretary regarded Him sternly. "Yes, Mr. Tahn?" "I need counsel. I'm coming. Now." Distress eroded Her countenance. "Counselor is preparing to leave immediately for tHe weekend. I must ask you to accept an appointment." Her eyes sliifted quickly to tHe appointment cHart. "I'll lie tfiere in Half an hour." Kert broke tHe circuit. He showered in the locker room and slapped on a tunic. As He shaped His crest, His eyes scanned His mirrored image. Puffed eyes watered. Sores, scrubbed free of scab oozed. He pincHed His lips. Blood spotted througH cracked membranes. Satisfied, He Hawked into the late afternoon crowd. The pedestrians turned to stare at tHe gaunt Hawk with eyes of fire. Kert presented Himself, stiffsHouldered and uncompromising, at tHe secretary's desk. "I've come for counsel." THe secretary escorted him to the inner office immediately but stonily. C Hristian Yorber, a gray man, sat framed against a gray wall, beHind a gray desk. His gray eyes narrowed as fie scanned his client. Yorber's body was sligKt, his features nondescript. But His voice, crisp and clear, formed "Sit down, Kertis. Wfiat's tfie story?" Kert externalized tHe narrative in Hard, dark crsrstals. Listening, Yorber hoisted one pale eyebrow. Finally fie nodded. "Yes. I appreciate that tfie atuatiort might act detrimentally upon your HealtH and general welfare." He leaned back, his lips firmly shut. Kelt's crest twitcHed. He tightened His own lips, controlled His impulse to angry speech. Finally, coolly, Yorber nodded again. Wiffi a fingertip, fie traced a pattern on his desktop. "I'm sure you realize there is no rational necessity to keep tHe Hovercraft scrubbed free of a pall that is, after all, visible only to you." Kert stiffened. "I have tfie rigKt to my obsessions and compulsions. Article #, tHe Special Constitution for Disadvantaged Citizens." "Afi, the Special Constitution." Yorber smiled faintly. "I wonder How well you are acquainted wtH the history of tfie Special People." "Very well," Kert said, sharply -- but vainly. Yorber invariably took a quick run tfirougH tHe history of tfie dfeadvantaged while His mind sorted tHe problem at Hand. "It was late in tfie last century when certain groups of biochemists made their premature efforts at genetic manipulation of human stock." Yorber's words fell upon the desktop in glowing crystals. "They enjoyed some spectacular successes at first. Highly publicized successes. But those were soon overshadowed by their failures, individuals hardly human in form but, once created, nevertheless entitled to the same rights as any normal citizen -- life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. "In the end laws were formulated to bring an end to genetic dabbling. But those, of course, provided no relief for those thousands of special individuals already created. There were the physically malformed, the metabolically disturbed, and -- perhaps most important -- those who suffered drastically altered processes of thought and perception: people who heard different voices, saw different stars, plunged away in pursuit of fantasies never dreamed before. "All of them required special help, of one type or another. And so the Special Persons Bureau was chartered to protect the right of the genetically disadvantaged to live out their lives in their own faon, provided they offered no harm to the general population. "That involved the right to seek companionship, to marry, to produce young -- which complicated the Bureau's job immeasurably. Today the genetically altered have married out widely into the normal world, disseminating their altered genetic material into the population at large. And the Bureau finds itself ministering to an ever-increasing proportion of the population. Each year thousands of newborn are added to the caseload. And each individual on the rolls is entitled to full service, even though chromosomal studies may show that he carries only minor genetic alteration. "Of course if all our clients were genetically normal, there would nevertheless be a certain number of harmless nuts among them, a certain number of mental deficients, a certain number of hopeless insane. And none of them could command any special consideration. "But imder the Special Constitution, they must be considered Special People first, nuts second. They can demand that their eccentricities be elevated to the level of constitutional rights." Kert's face darkened. "The system does have a certain charm," Yorber mused. "The Bureau has been able to integrate the harmless, garden-variety nut into the community simply by hanging a medallion at his neck and telling him to run to us if the world doesn't treat Him rigHt. John D, Citizen is warned by the medallion -- if not by some conspicuous pKysical abnormality -- that he may be dealing with a nut. He treads lightly. In our own modest way, we've converted an unwieldy mass of nuts and cranks into reasonably productive citizens." Kert's eyes hooded dangerously"orber's gray eyes flickered over him assessingly. "Well, to get down to cases, Kert -- as your counselor, I can involve myself in the situation by manipulating Daimler into making certain concessions. I can request him, in my official capacity, to schedule the same two or three caseworkers into your hovercraft each day." "You can," Kert said tautly. "But will that solve the basic problem, Kert?" Kert didn't reply. "Will that eliminate this pall that you see spread over the world? Will it relieve your compulsive need to erase the pall, even at the cost of your health?" Kert spoke deliberately. "I've told you before. I will not -- " "Submit to Hspno-therapy?" Yorber allowed himself a small, still smile. "You know, it's about time you threw this perceptual albatross off your neck. Kerf. Daimler would gladly grant you a week's leave of absence for therapy. And our specialists could free you, Kert. They could erase this pall from your mind, where it really exists. Think, Kert!" Kert spoke in icy crystals. "I have thought. My answer remains -- no." A single crease marred Yorker's forehead. His jaw Hardened then relaxed. He sighed irritably. "Very well. Step into the outer office whUe I wave my magic wand." His hands moved to the callphone. Kert paced the outer office. Finally the intercom blinked. The secretary said, "You may re-enter, Mr. Tahn." Yorber smiled complacently. "Well, I got farther than I expected, Kert. Stuck a few pins into Daimler. He's agreed to assign a single caseworker as your regular passenger. A Special Person, at that -- 'Drick Ritter. Oddly enough, Ritter is the caseworker who carried you into the city one fine day over twenty years ago. And so contributed immeasurably to my life's load of discord." Kert's nostrils flared. "He -- brought me out?" "He brought you out of the wilderness in his arms. And next week you'll be carrying him into the same wilderness in your hovercraft." Kert's mind spun wildly at the revelation. "I've always said I'd be pleased to answer questions about your family background," Yorber murmured. "Provided you make one concession to me." Kert blinked at Kim stupidly. Then he understood. "I won't go into Kypno-analysis. I won't let anyone put me under." Yorber leaned across Kis desk persuasively. "Kert, a week in tKe lab could be a fistful of pure platinum. Even if we just ordered an analysis, without attempting any reconstruction. Think ! As matters stand, I can't distinguisH which of your problems are primarily genetic in origin and which are neurotic. But with an analysis report in hand -- " "No," Kert uttered. "No. And never." Then he was in the street, dizzy with turmoil. 'Prick Ritter -- the man who Had carried Kert out of Rural America. A man who must Have known Kert's mother, his father. 'Drick Ritter -- who could look into Kert's eyes and speak His true name. Kert pounded pavement underfoot, trying to distance himself from the specter of 'Drick Ritter. Christian Yorber came to mind. Kert's thoughts flashed angrily over the counselor. Kert knew wKat Yorber wanted. Yorber wanted to wrench' open the box labeled Kertis Tahn and putter about inside, picking up pieces, fitting them together. Then when he was done, he could point triumphantly to the completed puzzle. "Look," he could say. "This is you, Kertis Tahn." This is you. All these angry years you've tried to get your own hands on these bits and pieces, to fit them into a whole. And you couldn't. Well, now I've done it for you. Here you are. Look and see, Kertis Tahn. Look and see. Then it would be: "Now, observe! If I throw out these three pieces here and Have the hypnolab cut me a single piece to fit -- notice how the overall picture is improved, Kert? Simple, isn't it? "Well, then what about these four pieces over here, Kert? Do we need them? And the two in that comer? Then perhaps -- " Kert Tahn slapped city pavement underfoot. Electrical discharges arced through' His mind, blinding him. His feet picked their own path. IV H e reached the hangar at dusk. The hoverdish waited, pale, still rusty. As dusk grayed into darkness, tHe disH floated, ligKt and blue, across tlie valley and into the mountains, A rocky shelf jutted from the mountainside, High and chill -- Kert's place. TKe disH settled deftly. Wind glanced across the shelf in violent sheets. Kelt hunkered on the rock. By moonlight, the KoverdisH was a ghostly bluebird, yearning upward. Whipped by wind, deafened, Kert saw the entire vision of the blue dish for the first time. And he acknowledged the rightness of the dish of 'Drick Ritter, of his own Spring Mission into Rural America in search of himself. Compelled, he straightened to his feet. In the transforming moonlight, he felt himself rise weightless. His feet left the rocky shelf. His body drifted lightly, freely into the night sky. He closed his eyes, lifted his arms, threw back his head. His body arched and rose lightly through thick layers of cloud. Moonlight condensed on his crest. A moment, an eternity -- and he felt himself slowly sinking back. The enchantment was broken. He glanced down. His feet rested solidly upon the rocky shelf. The fantasy of flight fled. The wind rocked him off his feet. He crouched in a rocky hollow, still dazed by the experience that had seemed so real, had been so false. His fingers polished at His medallion. He let the night and the bitter cold fill him. An hour, and He re-united himself with the hoverdish. They lifted into a cloud-whipped sky. Kert rode the mountains. The ship responded smoothly to his command, rising with a powerful rush, falling softly, lightly. But soon the mechanics of flight became clumsy and artificial. Kert lifted above the mountains, moved upon night in its high kingdom. Then he let his Hands move of their own will. They deadened the artificial, the clumsy -- the powerplant. He caught his breath and held it. His nerve endings moved out to the far points of the hovercraft's shell. The dish's outer skin became his own. Instruments flashed messages directly into his mind. The rush of air was wind in his crest. He was falling. Air rushed up, icy, frictive. Moimtains rose, cragged. The hoverdish splashed down through moist cloud layers. The moon quivered and turned black. Kert Tahn shuddered back into his fleshy body. Frost-stiffened fingers found the power switch. The powder plant hummed. The ship caught its footing in the icy air and held. Kert huddled in tfie ship, disappointment an icy wedge in fiis cHest. It Had been insane to expect the blue disR to fly witKout power. A Koverdish was of the earth, massy, subject to gravity. A Koverdish was not a bird, to soar encKanted on wings of moonllgKt. But an inner voice had said. Try. And Ke Kad tried. Now the rusty pox on the ship's blue skin took his eye. His mind fastened on it. His fingers twitched restlessly. The ship swooped competently into the city and settled into the deserted hangar. Kert stood, deflated, gathering at reserves of strength and determination. His crest stiffened angrily. In the dimness, he Hoisted a protesting jug of cleanser and glugged the foaming stuff, gagging. He shuddered violently. He polished at the body rust with bands that cracked and laced the floor with blood. I t was late Saturday when he threw himself into the cleaned and sanded ship to sleep with his head pillowed on the controls. Late Sunday the metamorphosis was complete. The ship stood proudly in its fresh skin, blue as sky, looking as if it might loft up unpowered. Kert never remembered returning to his apartment. He never remembered falling to the floor, crusted witH blood, smeared with paint, reeking with chemical perspiration. But there he found himself Monday dawn. The carpet swam into focus. Beyond lay a pale limb, ruined -- Kerfs arm. He raised it stiffly and stared at it. Shuddering, he groaned to his feet. The sky swept past his window, gray and uncaring. Kert staggered to the shower. Water needled his ruined flesh, sloughing it away in dead patches. A new skin emerged taut and red, tender. Kert staggered from the stall, swayed against a wall, dizzy. The world tilted and rocked. Kert groped for his gray coverall. The garment rippled on its hanger, wriggled out of hand. Kert lunged. His fingers caught the elusive fabric and clung. He lidded his eyes against the quaking universe. Eventually he opened his eyes. The world had stabilized. He extended one foot gingerly. The floor did not rock. The coverall peeled off its hanger. He shrugged into the coverall and slid protective gauntlets over the tender new skin of his hands. He hid his bloodshot eyes behind dark goggles. He shaped his crest. Then, ravenous, he hawked to the serving panel. But before His breakfast materialized, tlie callpHone summoned. "Ah, well! I'm delighted to find you up, Kertis." Daimler's face cpngealed upon the wall. "I presume you know that Counselor Yorber made a formal request concerning your schedule. And that I felt compelled to grant certain concessions." "I do know," Kert said stiffly. I am grateful." Daimler's eyes wallowed damply. "Perhaps, Kertis! I Have reassigned you to loft Senior Person Ritter, who has served forty-three Spring Missions. Because of his Seniority, and in recognition of his very special gifts. Senior Person Ritter has been granted the privilege of serving as his own counsel. As you may know, the Bureau very rarely assigns this privilege, even to its most Senior clients. I explained these circumstances to Counselor Yorber before we reached agreement last Friday. I presume the counselor relayed this information to you." Kert felt the world rock beneath his feet. "He did not." Daimler sighed wearily. "I feared as much. Silence was, of course. Counselor Yorber's prerogative. However! I presume you appreciate the full significance of the facts I have laid before you, Kertis. I hope you will not create difficulty for us all by attempting to manipulate Person Ritter as you have manipulated Counselor; Yorber and me." Kert stiffened, D aimler puffed his cheeks importantly. "Now! Senior Person Ritter has asked me to relay a few, umm, requests. First, you are to be prepared to lift off at #:# precisely. This is the exact hour and moment when Ritter expects to loft each morning of Mission. Absolutely no deviation permitted. Then you are never to speak to Ritter until he has first spoken to you -- not upon any occasion, for any reason. You are never to wear or carry any article that is red. You are to wear nothing upon your hands or face. And you are never to look at Person Ritter's feet. He is most emphatic about this last point. Never glance downward in such a way that your eyes might light upon his feet. Kert's eyes flashed hawk-fire. "Spring Mission is far more important to the welfare of the People than any small inconvenience you or I might suffer. I hope you will consider these requests as challenges, Kertis, rather than as restrictions." Daimler bared sharp little teeth. He faded. Kert stared at the viewscreen with futile rage. He pulled off his gauntlets, stared at the taut, fragile new skin of his hands, vulnerable, cracking. He would lodge olficial protest. The gauntlets were a necessity to protect fiis fragile new sTcin from injury and infection. He would -- His fists crashed upon the serving counter. He would lodge no protest. He would uncover fiis hands and his eyes. He would unbuckle fiis chronometer until tfie red strap could be replaced witfi blue or black. He would not presume to glance at Senior Person Ritter's feet. He would not speak until spoken to. Furiously he flapped to the bathroom, sprayed his tender hands witfi medicated plastic. He lashed his Hands tfirougfi the air, drying the protective film. That Ritter had been created Senior Person was a rare honor indeed, signifying that his work was so important that fie was not to be frustrated in any manner, by any Person. That fie served as his own counsel implied special gifts of perception and judgment -- and signified that any lesser individual, normal or Special, must fall under his command while within his Personal radius. There was no question of protest or resistance -- merely concession or witfidrawal. Kert stalked tfie apartment. He saw now how vulnerable the blue ship made him. He could not hope to win a wrangle with 'Drick Ritter. Even if fie took the dispute to tfie highest level, fie would lose Es case -- and Es blue hoverdish. Tfie di forced him to accept indigmties fie would not tolerate if only a job were at stake. He smasHed tfie dark goggles to fiis bedroom floor and pcjd dark contacts into his inflamed eyes. He snapped the chronometefi off its offensive red strap and slid the golden wafer into a pocket. Jaw set, he launched himself upon the world. He reached the hangar, and tfie blue hoverdish blazed out of tfie dimness. Kert felt his taut flesh! soothed, his angers diminisfied His gaze moved over tfie blue dish witfi joyous triumph. V presently caseworkers trickled through tfie hangar. Kert initiated routine preparations for lift-off. The roofport dilated, and the hangar emptied. His own prepacatioris complete, Kert polisHed at tfie sEp, mtent upon his crested reflection. Witfiout warning, a second reflection loomed out of the ship's blue skin. There was a pair of wildly slanted eyes, a small, creasecalipered mouth, a nimbus of fiair. Kert whirled. Semor Person Ritter regarded Em from violet eyes. He was sL #ent, elfin Person, deeply tanned, wndly fialoed witH wliite Kair. His coverall was violet velvet. Over Eis Eeart he bore a printed precaution: "Do not speak until spoken to. Never look down at my feet. Do not serve me with a gloved Hand. Do not cause me to see the color red. Under penalty of law, swift and certain." At his chest Kung the massive medallion of the Senior Person. It caved His thin shoulders. His Voice was a windblown echo. "We meet again. Little Blue Hawk." A beast leapt in Kelt's chest. He scraped at his throat, uselessly. No words materialized. A small, strange smile moved across Ritter's face, a cloudy shadow. He clasped His hands before him and moved the fingers in a quick, meaningless ritual. "Our good friend Yorber told you, Tm sure, that I am the Person who carried you from Rural America one Spring Mission many years ago." "He did." The words formed weakly without material substance. The cloudy smile drifted across Ritter's face again. "We ansvered a special call that Mission. We visited the community of your birth out of scheduled order, to relieve the People there of your care. No one could calm you. And your sharp cries stabbed the ears, each scream calling up afresh the mystery, the tragedy of your parents' fate. As I carried you screaming to the ship, I thought my ears would spout blood." The smile drifted away. The beast leapt again furiously. But Kelt could not word his demand. Ritter touched the blue Hoverdish thoughtfully. "You will see the place of your birth next Tuesday afternoon, if weather does not alter my schedule. You will be informed of the circumstances surrounding the tragedy -- or mystery -- of your mother and father. Kert's crest flared. Ritter hoisted a Hand. "We must be airborne in precisely thirteen minutes, Blue Hawk. We will synchronize timepieces. Then we will speak no more. After lofting, you will fly directly into the sun, until I give new instructions." When Kert did not acquiesce, Ritter presented his heavy medallion in the gesture of command. Kert sighed heavily. They synchronized timepieces. And thirteen minutes later the blue dish skimmed into the bleak March sun. The blue dish skimmed lopsided, listing heavily to the rear. Kert scowled over the instrument panel in baffled anger. The ship handled like a badly loaded freighter, crabbing awkwardly, nose high. He performed a quick series of tests vainly. Frowning, he put the ship on autoskim, programming compensatory adjustments. The ship nosed down, stabilized in the correct attitude. Kert scowled over the instruments. To His knowledge, the ship had been entirely in his care for the past week. And he had done nothing to affect its skimming attitude. His eyes flickered over the passenger-check mirror. Ritter's reflected eyes met his. "Is it a critical matter? Likely to force us down in Rural America?" Kert sighed. "It isn't." Ritter nodded. He clasped His hands and moved the violet-tipped fingers in the same nonsense ritual he had performed earlier. "Then I will dispense my instructions for the mechanics of our vdsits -- the landings, disembarkations, boardings, loftings. My work proceeds much more smoothly if I conduct my comings and goings in certain prescribed ways." Kert's jaws knotted. "I fly the ship the way it's got to fly." The violet eyes slanted with displeasure. "I demand nothing that will compromise our safety. I speak of the manner and order in which certainly purely routine procedures are to be accomplished. I remind you that I am Senior." Coldly, Kert swiveled to face his Senior. The pupils of Ritter's vJoIet eyes dilated enormously. Ritter spoke. "O itter spoke of small rititals he would perform in the course of landing, of rituals lie would perform while disembarking and of others he would perform on occasion when Kert accompanied him into the forest. He spoke of rituals to be performed before lofting. He spoke of ritual activities he would perform while they were in flight. And He spoke of small accommodations Kert would make to those rituals, small cues he would take from them, small gestures Kert would very occasionally be called upon to make in cooperation. "I do not expect your active participation in my rituals. I expect you to refrain from voicing negative attitudes. I expect a certain amount of intelligent cooperation. If any request seenos likely to cause danger, you may voice your opinion. Do you understand?" A ritualist! Kert spoke in syllables of stone. "I do." Ritter was silent for a moment. Then he issued directional instructions, enumerated and described landmarks. "Today we will visit only solitaries," lie explained. "Most of our calls will be paper drops." The first series of paper drops occupied the remainder of the morning. Approaching high', Kert would drop the blue dish swiftly through the trees into a small clearing. Ritter would disembark with elaborate ritual to fold a sheaf of papers into tlie scarlet copper box mounted someplace within the clearing. Then Ritter would prowl the clearing, head bowed, pupils dilated and nostrils flared. Finally, returning to the ship, Ritter would sink to his seat, breathing harshly. Not until they had lofted would he begin work at his writing board, scrawling rapidly, as if recording the substance of an actual interview, one that had involved face-to-face confrontation. After their twelfth paper drop, noon hung overhead. Kert lofted high. Ritter slumped in his seat. "Hold altitude while I rest. Then I will give fresh instructions." Kert held the dish high and steady. Below lay the forests and Hills of Rural America. Kert could distinguish lakes, tiny settlements, a few dim trails. But from that altitude, no human was visible. Nor any non-Human. Kert considered tlie forest below speculatively. Why Had they simply left papers that morning? Were Ritter's solitaries monsters and shy? Monsters and terrible? Or were they simply People? "A little of each," Ritter responded quietly. "Some fearful, some fearsome. Some barely Human. Some all too Human." A cloudy smile drifted across his features. "Now if you wiU move us due west, we will drop in upon a friend for lunch'." Kelt's hands froze on the controls. He stared at Ritter's reflection, and his mind groped at the answer he had received -- to a question he hadn't asked. Not aloud. Ritter's voice, distracted, echoed his instructions again. He bent to his writing board. Kert's hands moved over tKe controls woodenly. He guided the ship, trying not to think. "The clearing was high in tlie wooded hills. Kert stepped from the saucer warily, braced for cold. Moist heat enveloped him. He stared at lush' vegetation. Vines dipped from treetops. Grass matted tliickly underfoot. A cloud of insects boiled past. Kert gaped at the apparition at the clearing's edge. The man stood like a rotting stump. A leafy cape hid his limbs. His beard was a tangle of vines. His cheeks were the foolishly broadening smile differentiated him from the vegetation. The apparition turned and moved into the trees, his cape sweeping the thick grass. Ritter touched Kert's arm, guiding him As they moved through the trees Kert wiped sweat from his face. His coverall dampened. An unnatural amount of sunlight played beneath tlie green roof of trees. A small tliatcfied cottage occupied the second clearing. With a swirl of his cape, their host welcomed them, beaming foolishly. Kert's eyes adjusted quickly to the interior. Sunlight filtered through narrow slots in the rough walls. The floor was packed dirt. In one corner was a heap of dried leaves for a bed. In another stood a low plank table spread with food. Shelves lined the walls. Dried provisions hung from rafters. Frowning, Kert looked back to the low table and the crude bowls of food. He stared around the single room. There was no fireplace, no stove, no heating unit of any kind. Yet the food steamed. With growing discomfort, Kert stared at their host. The stumpy man strode into the cottage. The leafy cloak rattled to the floor, and all the sunlight in the cottage focused upon the naked, mossy form of Ifeeii! host. Golden rays lit him, learo the rest of the room in darkness His face was a piece of weathered wood, carved in lines of foolish pride. He bared his ruined teeth and beamed. "My food is your food." With a sunstruck hand, he motioned them to the low table. Ritter slid into place. Kert knelt beside him warily. Opporite, their host sank down in a blaze of sxmlight. His eyes had become golden orbs, molten. The food sent up a fresh cloud of steam. Kert's forehead dampened in response. "We are grateful for your Hospitality," Ritter murmured. He set his tongue to a spoonful of stearning food. Involuntarily he winced. Their host scowled. "You are! cold. Your food needs more heat."' He focused his golden orbs upon: the table top. Kert gasped, his face seared. Ritter's voice cut crisply through the steam. "We need less heat, John. Our food is too hot" Anger boiled in the golden orbs. The viny beard flapped indignantly. "You need hot food and warm shelter. You are too cold to function." Ritter's violet eyes dilated commandingly. "We cannot accept more heat, John. We cannot accommodate these abrupt and radical temperature cKanges." John's voice echoed hollowly. "I burned away winter so you could make your Mission here. I focused sunlight. I melted the snows and made water to feed the plants. I made the mosses proliferate, the vines flourish, die trees prosper. Now you say you do not need my Heat?" His naked chest swelled indignantly. Ritter Bowed his Head. "We are grateful, John. But we ask you to respect our pride. We are only men. If you give us too much of your light, too much of your Heat, we feel even smaller and more helpless than we are." The violet eyes slanted persuasively. "You have already given us warmth and springtime, John'. Don't give us more. Don't diminish us further in your presence." John's eyes flared. He swelled jrnigK tily, mollified. He rumbled witH woody resonance, "I am your God." The room cooled quickly. John blazed with the absorbed heat, then scattered it to light the darkened cottage. Ritter inclined His Head gratefully. "As we eat, Kert, we must reflect upon all that John Has done for us." John beamai. Kerf severed in his sweat-soaked coverall. Despite the chill, the food remained hot through the long meal. As they ate, Ritter and John discussed the winter's weather. Ritter produced a poucii of weather tapes. They played choice strips and discussed statistics. Finally they considered the possible course of the summer's weather. The meal was done. John rose. "Your visit was appreciated. Person. Ritter. I have not yet decided how I will conduct the next winter. I will think, as I heat the forest for summer. When you pay your autumn call, I may have good news for you." "We will be grateful if you find it in your Heart to temper the cold," Ritter murmured. John beamed benevolently. "I make no promises. We will discuss it at Fall Misson." Escaping, Kert and Ritter waded heat waves to the ship. Ritter collapsed in His seat. Kert worked the controls with slippery hands. They reached skim altitude. Ritter croaked, "Hold." The ship cooled quickly. Ritter's face regained color. VI T hey spent early afternoon retrieving papers they had dropped that morning. In late afternoon, they dropped into a clearing ominously reminiscent of John's. Strapping young oaks fenced the clearing. Underfoot, seedlings broke soil aggressively. Ritter's wiry body tiglitened. "I'll ask you to accompany me again, Blue Hawk, You must observe great care. Our friend Here is meek and Humble, He doesn't realize tKe magnitude of tHe forces He controls." Kert peered warily into tHe dense growtH. As they moved tlirough tlie trees, tHey Heard a distant voice raised plaintively. "At one time Twig worked in a tree nursery," Ritter explained. "When it became apparent that He couldn't remain there without endangering others, the Bureau evacuated him here. He has a demanding role to fill, rendering worship to all tKe trees on this Hillside. From tlie tone of today's Hymn, I conclude he Has suffered a failure." The sorrowful wail quavered through tKe trees. Pale crystals of sound rattled mournfully to the forest floor. THey stepped over a log into a small clearing. A newly fallen branch, leaves wilting, filled the clearing. THe sligKt, pale young man flung Himself about the stricken limb, mourning it witH penitential fervor. His eyes jerked convulsively. His hair grew rough and brown down his neck, like the bark of a tree. Finally liis voice broke. He collapsed across the fallen limb. Ritter spoke quietly. "Evidently you've neglected your duties Here, Twig. This is too fine a brancH to Have been wrenched off by tKe wind." Twig scrambled to His feet, a scrawny youth. His eyes jerked rapidly. "I know my sins! But I couldn't prevent it! The wind just came -- tearing!" He choked. "I've been here two days, trying to atone. I've prostrated myself. I've -- " "And wKile you've atoned, you Have also neglected your other responsibilities. I felt the anger of tKe trees as I walked the path." Twig's barky Head wobbled. He whispered hoarsely. "There is a giant Root tearing into my garden plot already! I saw it yesterday, throbbing! And there is a BrancH tKat sweeps down every night and brushes my shelter roof -- threatening!" Ritter nodded. "It was die same story in the city. You performed so poorly, the trees destroyed the entire nursery in anger. I hoped you might fare better Here. TKe trees are older, wiser, a little more patient." Twig shuddered convulsively. "OK, the Trees Have been patient! And merciful' THey Have permitted me a sinner, to worship at Their Roots. But now -- " His eyes jerked in error. "The wind came out of the north two nights ago, whipping and screaming. It came like a giant hand, thrashing my Trees -- and it threw this Limb at my feet! As if to show me I am not worthy to protect the Trees with my worship. Oh, I have sinned! I am a sinner and full of shame! I -- " Ritter moved to the primitive shelter beneath the trees. He squatted, drawing forms from his pouch. "Are you ready to make inventory. Twig? We must requisition everything you will need for the next six months." Gulping, Twig squatted in the shadow of the shelter. "Will you take me back with you?" "No." "But I'm in danger here! I'll starve! The Root in my garden patch! And every night, when I try to sleep -- " "O itter slanted his violet eyes at the quivering youth. "I believe you are capable of persuading the root to withdraw." Twig's face contorted. "But they hate me! They're threatening me! They want me to die here! They -- " "If you can't put your trees and their needs ahead of your own fears, what can you expect? You are their creature. They are entitled to destroy you if you can't render adequate service." Twig's head snapped up. His eyes glittered. "What did you ever do for the Trees? Nothing! But do They come scratching at your roof at night? Do They creak over your head and lash out when you walk down the street? Do They mutter and groan when you want to rest in Their shade?" "I'm not their creature. I've never failed them, because I have no obligation to them. They are indifferent to me." Twig jumped to his feet "You fail the Trees by never thinking of them. You fail the Trees -- " "I brought them you." Ritter stood, folding away papers. "Now, I'd like to inspect your garden plot. Have you made preparations for planting?" Twig's eyes flashed. But he led them to the garden plot that meandered beneath the mighty trees. A living fence marked its perimeter, a protective encirclement of live roots. The dark soil showed signs of cultivation. But from the middle of the garden a massive root protruded, an encroaching woody monster that threatened to despoil the entire garden. Twig moaned. "It's grown! Yesterday it was half this size! Last week it was only a thread!" Ritter frowned over the root. "What have you done to propitiate the trees? To persuade this root to withdraw?" Twig moaned. His voice quivered as he detailed his chants, his hymns, his promises arid lois pleas. Kert stared distastefully at the distorted face. The ranting ended abruptly. Twig stared at Kert as if seeing Him for the first time. His voice went deadly still. "I know what you would do, Bird. You would dig the root out and destroy it. Wouldn't you?" Kert considered the root and tlie man. He nodded. "I would." Twig screamed with rage. "You! You're the reason I could not protect my Trees. My otherconsciousness foresaw your coming. I was so overwrought, I failei in my duties. You are antiTree! Bird!" The root fence writhed at their feet. The giant root groaned and throbbed angrily. Ritter tugged Kert's arm. Branches lashed down in fury as they loped tlirough the forest to the waiting hoverdish. "Bird! Your breed has always walked on the Tree -- befouled the Tree -- built wormy nests on the clean, pure Branches of the Tree! I foresaw your coming. Bird! Anti-Tree!" The madman flailed the ship with' dirty fists. Kert's hands trembled at the controls. The hoverdish rushed up powerfully. Twig ranted beneath them, inciting the trees. Branches lashed out at tlie hoverdisH, whipping at its sides. Birds rose in fugitive flocks. Then they were above the clearing. Below, trees lashed and Twig danced in futile furry. Kert stared down in shock. Ritter's hair stood in wild disorder. He fingered a rip in his velvet coverall. "I believe we made progress there today, Blue Hawk. I believe Twig has finally found a focus outside himself for his hatred." Kert shook His head in disbelief. "He controls the trees." Ritter nodded. "He controls the trees, and he is sick. But if he can focus his Hatred outward, perhaps He can discharge it without destroying himself. Perhaps someday I can even return him to the city. Perhaps." Kert stared into the lashing trees. The voice of reason insisted that it isn't possible. "It most certainly is possible," Ritter said dryly. Kert eyed him sharply. I said nothing." Ritter touched his medallion apologetically. "My trespass. But I Have no time for talk. I must prepare intensively for my next call." Bowing his head, he withdrew into himself. TTis going left a perceptible emptiness in the cabin. The ship lurched violently in the air. Kert whipped to tlie controls. His eyes scanned the panel. Everything normal. Except -- the ship rode nose high again. Kert checked his compensatory settings. They hadn't altered. Bewildered, he reprogrammed the auto's skim. The ship nosed down obediently. Frowning, he ran tests. They told him nothing, except that the ship carried an apparent overload in the left rear. And there was no load at all in the left rear, no cargo, nothing except -- Senior Special Person Ritter. Kert eyed Ritter in the mirror, perplexed. Presently Ritter raised his head. His face was drawn. "This will be my last call today. I will ask you to escort me again." His eyes focused inward. He issued directions tensely. As they hovered over the clearing, Ritter performed his usual rituals witli particular intensity. Kert eyed the trees nervously, trying to see who, or what, waited. Then they stood on the forest floor. Face gray, body taut, Ritter moved into the trees. Kert followed. The trail was marked well. They approached a mossy boulder that guarded a small cavern. The woman in the cavern raised her head. Her eyes were dim, her face withered. But her hair leapt about her head in of red. Ritter averted his eyes. Silently he inventoried the contents of the cavern. Wordlessly he processed requisition forms. Finally, with reluctance, He pocketed his pen. His dilated eyes fixed upon the woman, demanding communication. She leaned forward eagerly. Her withered mouth worked. Her flaming hair writhed about her shoulders. Ritter shrank, his eyes fixed Finally the silent communication was completed. Ritter turned away, a dazed expression on his blanched face. His knees buckled. Kert jumped to his side. "Ship," Ritter gasped, clinging with purple talons. Kert helped him down the trail. They reached the clearing. Ritter slumped against the hoverdish, breathing harshly. Kert glanced uneasily down the trad. What had they fled? Just a withered hag with writhing hair? "No, no," Ritter protested weakly. "I ran from my own weakness." He pulled himself erect. "Never mind. We must loft for the city. We've given enough of ourselves today." His face had regained color. They lofted. Perplexed, Kert eyed Ritter in the passengercheck mirror. Ritter seemed completely recovered. He set aside his writing board to watch the forest pass below. Irritated, Kert noted that the sHip's attitude Had altered again. Tfie sKip nosed down, as if tlie heaviness in the left rear Had eased slightly. hey traversed tlie treetops, and the sun became a molten ball in the west. Clouds steamed across it in purple veils, then swept away. The sun flattened itself on the edge of the world, a bulging scarlet orb. Kert turned at the gasping sob from behind. Ritter was rigid in his seat, breathing harshly. His face was purple, congested. His hands clawed his throat. His eyes stared, like violet marbles, into tlie dusk-reddened sun. Kert abandoned the controls. He shook Ritter urgently, helplessly. Swiftly he rifled Ritter's pockets. The Senior Person carried no medication. Kert turned to the controls to transmit a Mayday. But then he turned back again, his eyes fastening upon the warning printed over Ritter's heart. "Do not speak until spoken to. Never look down at my feet. Do not serve me with a gloved hand. Do not cause me to see the color red. Under penalty of law, swift and certain." Kert stared into the setting sun, as fiery red as the hair of the woman they had fled. With a harsh exclamation, he turned to the controls. Fumbling, he activated the sun filter. The dome darkened quickly, as if a jug of ink had been spilled over it. The sun dulled to deep indigo. Ritter's rigid body relaxed. His breathing eased. Intelligence returned to his eyes. He inclined his head to Kert in wordless gratitude. Exhausted, Kert slumped at the controls. When the sun set, he deactivated the filter. The dome cleared upon darkness. Trees stood below like dark sentinels. The city sparkled vividly on the horizon. "Now I will thank you formally for your services today," Ritter said later, when they Had stepped to the hangar floor. "I hope we can continue to function this effectively together. I'll brief you on tomorrow's routine in the morning before lift-off." Ritter withdrew. The hangar was dim and deserted. Kert caressed the hoverdisH wearily. He paced around it. Inspection revealed several small scratches in the paint. Otherwise the blue skin gleamed as brightly as it Had twelve hours before. In the locker room, Kert discarded his coverall. He showered and zipped into a fresli coverall. He left the locker room in darkness. Standing at tEe door that led to the street, Ke felt a warning hint, an uneasiness, at tEe back of Eis mind. TEe hangar wasn't empty. He turned, peered. A small, wEite-Ealoed figure was silhouetted in the doorway that led to the office corridors. Ritter. Kert relaxed, started to turn away. But Ritter beckoned. "Blue Hawk, a notion came to mind today as we reviewed your life here in the city." "We didn't -- " Kert bit off his protest Had Ee even tEougEt of Eis life in the city, in Ritter's presence? No. Ritter's eyes glowed compellingly. "I explored your mind, of course. A trespass, perKaps, since I am not officially your counsel. But I consider you one of my own, in a way. I brought you here. I abandoned you to tEe machinery of the Bureau. Now I've come across you again, and I find you in turmoil. Even now, in your mind, I can distinguish doubts and anxieties that have formed since we parted a few minutes ago. Having seen a few denizens of Rural America today, you begin to question the wisdom of visiting your bkthplace next week. You have doubts that you can accept wKat you may learn about your parentage and yourself." K ert raised a Eand to shield himself. TEe hand fell, weighted by sudden Eeaviness, as if Eis blood had turned to molten steel. Ritter touched Eis medallion in apology. "I do trespass," he murmured. TEe heaviness withdrew. Kert stared at Ritter. "You -- you're the Eeavy weight in tlie ship." Ritter was startled. "IP" "You." Kert hawked to the blue ship. He leapt to the controls, released the compensatory settings he Bad programmed earlier." The powerplant hummed alive. Deftly, Kert lifted the disH througE the port and into the night sky. A brief loft provided the answer. Without Ritter, the ship rode level. He set the dish down. He climbed out, puzzled but elated. Ritter stared down at his own small body, frowning. Kert narrowed his eyes at Ritter's body. Surely Ritter's weight could not effect the ship so oddly if that weight were purely physical. Kert formed an unspoken question. Is your weit entirely physical? "I have always weighed normally on scales." Ritter clutched His medallion, "But evidently I have weight on other scales, weight I never guessed at. Perhaps only you and your ship can detect it." He shook his head wearily. "There is the breath of a universe between knowing and understanding, Blue Hawk. I carry a cross every day -- knowing too much, understanding too little." Kert sighed, suddenly exhausted, It was as if he received not only Ritter's verbal communication, but also a non-verbal one of doubt and weariness. The communication ended. Ritter said tentatively, "I wanted to discuss your search for someone akin to yourself, someone you could know and understand -- who could know and understand you." Kert nodded warily. He remembered too vividly his furious adolescent search, his frustration. "I have considered all that carefully before speaking," Ritter said. He fingered His medallion thoughtfully. "Three Missions ago, I urged a certain young woman to migrate to the city from one of the smaller rural communities. I can't promise anything, Blue Hawk. My evaluation of the situation may be completed askew. But perhaps -- " "Tell me!" Kert was startled by the sharp clatter of words. Ritter frowned. "Her name is Dranna. Dranna the Crystal. I'm sure you've heard of the Flickering Candle." The Flickering Candle -- one of the more elite trance shops. "I Have. I've never gone there." Kert clutched his medallion tight"I won't describe Dranna's art. People come from every precinct of the city to experience it. And that's what it's meant for -- to be experienced. But despite success as an artist, Dranna is still at loose ends in our city, still unfocused in her personal life. I think perhaps the two of you could develop a mutual focus." Kert frowned into the violet eyes, afraid to begin dreaming again. , "I'm a man of few words," Ritter said finally, shrugging. "I've given you the name of the person, suggested where you look for her. I won't mention the matter again." Nodding, He withdrew. Kert stood immobile for a long time before leaving. They spent the week processing forest solitaries. Kert passed the time waiting near his ship, eyes, searching the trees uneasily. True, the forest solitaries were not so much different from the Special Persons He encountered daily on city streets. But here a single Person crept through deep shadow, shaggy, furtive, fearsome. And Kert shuddered. At night, Kert slept deeply, too tired to think or to wonder about the girl named Dranna. Triday, waking, He found his taut new skin Had eased comfortably over muscle and bone overnight. His blood coursed witH fresH vigor. He reached tKe Hangar early, wfiistling. The HoverdisH sat in a shaft of sunlight. Kert paced around it, trying to recreate the emotion He had felt Monday when the disH had gleamed with promise. Today it merely shone, a small blue disK freshly painted. Frowning, he spoke out his new name, Little Blue Hawk. The crystals, splintered to the floor colorlessly. The name had lost its evocative power. So it was that morning he finally called on the magic bound up in the name Ritter had offered : Dranna the Crystal. He spoke tKe name aloft, aground, now in shade, now in sunlight. Each time He discovered fresh promise in the delicately crystallized syllables. Through the day, Ritter worked with frowning haste. At dusk He spoke. "I Have fallen behind schedule this week. And I must finish the solitaries before Monday." "I can work into the night," Kert offered. "And tomorrow?" Kert nodded. "And Sunday." Ritter smiled wearily. "No, friend. On the Seventh Day we rest." It was past midnight when tHey returned to the hangar. They separated without speaking. Kert found himself alone in the street He had been too tired to shower or change. But the stimulus of city lights stirred him now. His crest rose with resurgent vigor. His feet covered pavement swiftlyThe Flickering Candle presented an austere front. At Kert's approach, the entry iris dilated. Kert stepped through -- and a whining drone sawed into his skull. He staggered. He blinked at walls that burst alive in vivid patterns. The walls approached and receded dizzily, spun and whirled, attracted and rebelled. The hostess stepped from a screaming sunburst. She was small and pale. She wore a black velvet robe which overwhelmed her small body. "Which parlor, please?" "I -- I came to see Dranna the Crystal." "Cash or credit please?" Kert blinked stupidly. A purple void opened on tlie near wall. He swayed toward it. "Do you have your general credit card, sir?" He escaped the void. He proffered his card. He lowered his eyes discreetly to tiie floor. Underfoot, adow stripes rippled into a spiral. Kert staggered. WitH relief, Ke accepted fiis, credit card from tKe hostess. He followed Her into a dim corridor. Blackness draped the walls. Overhead lights grew dimmer, until the hostess padded silently into utter darkness. Kert touched velvet walls to steady himself. He moved, disembodied, into enfolding blackness. Claustrophobic bands tightened aroimd His chest. Finally a pale curtain rippled into sight. The hostess nodded Him through. The icy crystal glistened on a high, velvet-spread pedestal. Kert stared, unable to look away. Though the trance chamber was small, the crystal seemed an infinite distance away. The still air of the chamber was frosty. Then the icy surface of the crystal veined with violet, with green, with yellow and orange red. And the crystal was huge, blazing. Kert raised a hand against searing heat. The air crackled. Flames leapt from the walls. An eternity of flame, and the crystal veined with orange, with yellow, with green, receding. In a moment it was an icy seed on the velvety pedestal. Another moment, and the pedestal was bare. Kert blinked in confusion, emerging from tire trance. He stared around the chamber, h'ardly comprehending what he saw. The walls were hung with riieer rainbow panels that rippled Dazed patrons stretched on velvet chaises or sat on silken cusliions. Dizzily Kert eased himself down upon a cusliion. A high, wavering note vibrated through the chamber thinly; then taking on body, it materialized upon the pedestal in crystallic form. Before Kert could glance around, his consciousness was drawn into the delicately forming crystal. He floated inside the crystal, disembodied, observing the others, ranged around the chamber. He studied liis own body, abandoned on the silken cushion. For a moment he peered through the rainbow hangings at the small Person who sang. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. A rainbow of sound throbbed from Her throat. Then the crystal was stained rode away to the center of the universe. He awoke in the velvet corridor, His mind brimmed with incredible memories. He traversed the corridor slowly, dazed. Only when his feet touched pavement did fie remember fie had visited the Candle with a purpose, to meet Dranne the Crystal. Frowning, he examined fiis memory of tlie small Person tieliind tlie rainbow curtain. iTHe memory was blmred. Wlien He tried to focus it clearly, half a dozen otKer memories crowded His mind instead. Memories he Had never Had before. Utterly confused, lie moved into the shadows of dawn. He slept, his mind  groped restlessly down strange corridors of memory, opening unfamiliar doors into alien rooms. Yet after two Hours he voke feeling alert and refresKed. Ritter, absorbed in his work, hardly spoke that day. And Kert, examining the familiar world with wondering eyes, Hardly noticed. Again lie traveled the midnight city to tKe Flickering Candle. He braved the hypnotic foyer, breezed dowTi the smothering black corridor. He sank to his cushion in the rainbow cKamber eagerly. Dranna's song rang clear and High. Kert had no time for thought. His consciousness soared swiftly, ecstatically to worlds he had never visited, worlds he remembered nevertlieless witK vivid joy. But occasionally His consciousness straggled back to reality. Befuddled, He stared at the dim form befiind tKe pastel Hangings. Tliere was some purpose beHind His visit here. A purpose, surely, concerning the Person who sang there. But no -- no. TEere was no one behind the curtain. TKere was no curtain. He Had come to soar. He had come to... yes. Near dawn, dazed. He moved through deserted streets, nagged by the feeling he Had left sc-mething undone. Something impcctant. But wliat? Finally, sighing. He turned back to tKe Candle. Tlie hostess smiled graciously. "We have just completed ur night of dreams, sir," He said firmly. Outside he slumped in deep shadow. He frowned, trying to pinpoint the reason for his return. A slight figure brushed past him. Realization flushed his face. Dranna the Crystal! He Had come to speak to her face to face. Person to Person. And now she moved away into shadow, a small figure in dark garments. He Isnew her instinctively. Kelt's heart jumped wildly. Silently lie moved after Dranna the Crystal. Slie moved in shadow, avoiding the Ught puddles cast by overhead lamps. At first Her pace was weary. Then die glanced bdiind nervously. She quickened. Stie glanced back again. SKe began to run. Kert fiesitated. Caution spoke -- inaudibly. He would overtake her, explain himself to her, make her understand. He would -- But she was gone. With a harsh cry, He scanned the pavement. She Had disappeared. A pale bubble bobbed up from tiie pavement, a dark figure at its center. Relieved, Kerrt watched the elevator mount the building. It hovered, then sank down empty. Kert stared at the building's gray facade. His mind's eye saw Branna the Crystal moving down dim hallways, groping for her key, appljdng it. When she was safe in her room, he turned away. Tour hours later he approached the building again, laden with doubt and a single nugget of gold. He had stared hard into His mirhad nothing to offer but Himself. And what was He? Frowning, he had considered His jut-beaked face, lined and pale; His stiff blue crest; His eyes, small, almost beady; the Harsh crystals of His speech. Leaving, he had selected a gle bright nugget to offer Her. Clutclung it now, he stepped into the elebubble and rose to Her level. Stiff-shouldered, He stalked the hall. He found the door that carried Her name. He drew a deep breath and jabbed tHe bell. The door slid slowly. A small shuttered visage raised pale eyeg to His. He clutched His nugget tightly, fighting his impulse to back away and run, never return. The face was small and still, with feathery brows. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. "What do you want?" "I am -- Hawk TaHn," lie managed harshly. "I've flown Spring Mission with Senior Person 'Drick Ritter this week. He offered me counsel: that I should make a meeting with you." Her face opened then, quickly, radiantly. "You've visited New Bodel," she whispered eagerly. "You've seen my father." "I -- no," Kert admitted regretfully. "We've visited only solitaries." Seeing her disappointment, he groped for words to explain himself, to open her face again. "Person Ritter suggested -- He thought you might -- I might -- " He faltered, defeated. Then He saw she didn't listen. Instead she stared at the carpet between them. His words lay there, whole, unbroken. He stared, his eyes widening. For these crystals shimmered with a tender fire never before emliodied in words of his speaking, And somehow they expressed not what fie had said, but what he had wanted to say... The words evaporated with a sweet, fiery shimmer. Dranna raised radiant eyes to his. "Please come in and -- talk to me." Her voice was hoarse, eager. The apartment was inexpressive, furnished with standard issue unembellished. There was no clutter, no litter, only tidy bareness. Her face reflected tfie same bareness, as if all her personality had been chamieled into crystals sung by night for strangers. "I -- I just live here," she whispered, explaining the emptiness. He nodded. "But sit down!" she insisted. "You haven't had breakfast. Neither have I." She laughed nervously. "My throat is so sore. You do like milkshake?" She jabbed at the serving board nervously"I do," Kert agreed gallantly, although he didn't. "For breakfast? Really?" It was midaftemoon before they ventured out. Kert had never walked the streets in company before. She was small at )is side, hoarse and gay. And he felt all the things a man feels on tire first day of love ; exhilaration, pride, apprehension. Their walk led them to tfie Hangar wfiere tfie blue Hoverdish waited. Kert stifled a flutter of nervousness. He led Her around tfie disfi, pointing out its features, detailing its performance. Finally fie had said everytlung. He studied her face intently. "It's -- very shiny," she said finally, tentatively. She toocKed the blue skin lightly. Disappointed, he escorted Ker back to the street.  Her hand crept into his. His disappointment vanished. And at day's end, meeting his reflection in her eyes, he knew fie was committed to a journey over lands uncharted. He realized she saw the same journey over lands charted. He realized she saw the same journey stretching before them. She lowered her eyes, coloring. T Te arrived home hours later, the golden nugget forgotten in his pocket. He paced his rooms restlessly, recalling every vA)rd, every gesture, every warmly glowing crystal. He slept little and rose early. "Today will be unsettling. Blue Hawk," Ritter warned, when 'Qjey had lofted. "You're accustomed to meeting the Special People diluted by die city's normal population. Today we'll plunge down into an entire Special Community. These People are the most Special of all. And their isolation from cultural cross-currents and their constant close association with one another tend to intensify their Specialness," Kert nodded abstractedly. Ritter sighed. He withdrew counsel. Daydreaming, Kert settled the ship into the clearing -- and emerged, into nightmare. A freaky band of supplicants crowded around them, whimpering, demanding, complaining. "IVe been traspassed! My neighbor -- " "The Bureau promised -- " "My house burned, and my children von't -- " "I know my rights! I'm a citizen! I'm entitled -- " Kert clutched his medallion, trying to back away. A bony Hand clutched his arm. Fingers picked at his coverall. An inquisitive feeler invaded His mind, a mental threadroot groping insistently. He glared around. A two-headed man grinned puckishly; an earless crone glared; a child with too many fingers used them all to pull at Kert's coverall. "Disperse, People," Ritter commanded. "I will not do business this way. I will hear you after I've made my rounds of inspection." The two-headed man swore an angry duet. The child dug all his nails into Kert's arm and clung. A pair of women tugged at Ritter. "Disperse!" Ritter's voice lashed them. He disentangled liimself. He presented His medallion in the gesture of command, his violet eyes blackening. The supplicants withdrew witli poor grace. Ritter's face was stern. He strode the path to the community hall. "Now you understand my warning. Blue Hawk. This community is one of the worst. Today these people will focus all their cunning upon the two of us. This is their day to wrench everything they can from an uncaring world." Kert clutched His composure desperately, assailed by the alien character of the community, by the fantastic insistence of each citizen upon his own Special rights. He shuddered as the women presented their squalling, malformed infants with combative pride He cringed at the raucous; disputes aired for Ritter's settlement. He fought nausea as Ritter inspected the insane, the cancerous and the senile in the infirmary, making notes as to which were to be lofted to medical centers, which were to have special equipment and supplies dropped in. Finally the long day ended. Dusk fell. Lord Mayor rumbled importantly, "We still have much to discuss. Person Ritter. My wives have your dinner Hot. Ritter bowed deeply. "My regrets, Your Honor. My hovermaii suffers a rare dietary anomaly. He requires special provisions within the hour. We must loft immediately."" Lord Mayor eyed Kerf impatiently. "We've cracked com and millet seed in our granary. There is no reason I can't provision a bird at my table." Kelt's crest flared indignantljr. "Blue Hawk is insectivorous, Your Honor," Ritter murmured smoothly. "He's completely dependent upon the city insect hatchery. My regrets." Lord Mayor glared at Kert. From high, Kert stared down on the village. Tomorrow they would descend to another such place. And he would have to acknowledge that his origins lay there, that his parents had lived there, had been of there. Jaw set, he lifted his eyes from the place. Soon city lights beckoned. Hangar beacons flashed welcome. Mechanically, Kert settled the ship through the roofport. IX W hen they had disembarked, Ritter spoke. "If you don't want to make the trip tomorrow, Blue Hawk, I will arrange a substitute ho verm an." Kert whirled, outraged by Ritter's 'trespass. "No! I will go." The words smashed to the floor savagely. Ritter flinched. He staggered, gaping at his foot. Kert stared, uncomprehending, at the jagged black crystal that pierced Ritter's foot. A gout of bright blood drenched his shoe. Kert stared. Then he heeded the harsh rhythm of Ritter's breath, the unnatural rigidity of his body. Ritter's eyes were ftsed upon the bright blood. His skin mottled. Kert leapt to the ship's cabin, fetched first-aid supplies. He grasped the black crystal firmly, and it dissolved in his hand. Quickly he slapped a compress over the jagged wound. He layered bandages over the brit blood to hide it from Ritter's eyes. Ritter's breathing eased. He shuddered. "My foot," he muttered. "I'll get a medic when the blood has stopped." Kert lifted the compress, to examine the wound. Fiercely, Ritter wrenched his foot from Kerfs grip. He staggered backward. His eyes glittered. "You looked at my foot" "You're bleeding! You -- " Ritter crouched, clutching the bleeding foot. He spoke from the far side of madness. "You looked at my foot." Paralyzed, Kert groped for rcason. Finally; Ke faltered, "I --  acknowledge my trespass." He presented liis medallion in tKe gesture of contrition. Gradually sanity returned to Ritter's eyes. He glanced down at Hie injured foot, tKen away quickly. "Give me bandages." Kert obeyed. When Ritter had bound Kis foot. He clambered aboard the EoverdisH. They dropped tKrougH tKe emergency port of a nearby clinic. An attendant Hurried forward. "I will expect you at Hie usual time tomorrow," Ritter said tersely, disembarking. "Unless you notify me otHerwise." Released, Kert lofted higH above tKe city. Automatically, Kis Hands guided tKe ship to tKe mountain sHelf. He left tKe sHip. He stood alone in icy starlight, disturbed. Occasionally Ke had nicked his own throat, cut Kis own lip upon a word materialized too sharply. But Ke had never given injury to another. He stared out into tKe nigKt, considering tKe strange, tender fire of the crystals he Kad spoken to Dranna yesterday, considering today's jagged black crystal of anger. And Ke realized that some power was unfolding within Kim, witKout his consent. Beyond His control. WHen tKe wind Kad numbed Kim beyond thought, he lifted off the mountainside. That nigiit Ke slept in tKe ship, head upon tKe control board. Tuesday morning Ke showered in tKe locker room. Freshly coveralled, he approached tKe ship. Ritter waited, his face pale, his features set. "I see you did arrive today." Kert carefully avoided glancing down. "I did." " "TKen we will proceed as usual." Ritter turned away, limping, Kert's heart pounded thunderously. He was committed now. Only a barrier of time stood between himself and Kis place of birth, himself and self-knowledge. TKey lofted high. The time barrier melted. The sun zipped through its early morning arc, and they hung above a canyonside clearing. A n insistent voice crackled from their radio. "Relinquish control! Ship, relinquish control. Release your auto-settings. I control air currents over this community." Kert stared down. This was tKe place, this scatter of rude structures on tKe east rim of a deep canyon, this stand of trees, Hiis -- "Relinquish immediately! You are creating turbulence!" Kert's eyes, picked out a KigH fence bounding and clearing, a heap of rusty equipment piled just outside the fence and an angry figure tiiat glared up aC lurfli "Relinquish," Ritter instructed. "Otherwise he'll bring us down without consent." Reluctantly, Kert released His auto-settings. He lifted his hands from the controls. The ship dropped abruptly. It smacked ground with a jolt. The fence shut them in. "Identify yourselves," the radio demanded. "Bureau ship on Spring Mission," Kert snapped. He jabbed the hatch release. The hatch did not slide. Ritter spoke briskly. "I am Senior Special Person Ritter. My hoverman is Special Person Hawk Tahn, a native of your community. Release us." The hatch slid. The small, hostile Person who unlocked the gate, eyed Kert darkly. "I control air currents here. I won't take trouble from you, Tahn." Kert bit back anger. He stared aroimd the clearing, and his crest stiffened. The People of the community were gathered. And there was no welcome in the eyes that met his. Then a small, plump man bustled through the dour crowd, his hand extended. "Well, I welcome you. Blue Hawk," he declared. He had a dumpling face, small eyes that snapped with intelligence, a mouth that smiled by turning dowh. "You've come to see the rim. And I appoint myself to escort you. I'm the onlyone who will do." Kert studied the imsmiling faces that composed the landscape. No eye sdelded to his stare. He turned to Ritter. "I can conduct business well enough without you. Teller will bring you to the town hall when you've seen everything." Stiff-shouldered, Kert followed the plump man. A score of unfriendly eyes nettled the back of his neck. They left the clearing, angling behind the rustic community. "I am called Teller," the plump man declared, "because I tell. Anything. Everything. Anytime, Anyplace." Kert eyed him narrowly, following. Their path took them through the back edge of the deserted village. As they picked their way. Teller began to tell. He wove the entire community, past and present, into his narrative. He told of the earliest settlers, those fleeing freaks. And he told of present-day inhabitants. He told of children and adults and elders, some dead, some just born. Every stick, every pebble was woven into the tale. Every tree had shadowed some tryst. Every boulder had been the site of some agonizing decision. Tinally, into tKe narrative, BlueA bird was born, wingless. SKe Hatched in a crude nest-house --  there, high in that dying oak. A few beams of the nest still stood, rotting in leafy shadow. Her father was a shy havk who left his nest only by night. Her mother was a practical little Person, feathered like a sparrow. The child? She was glistening blue feathers and an impatient song, waiting for her wings to grow. Through childhood she sang her restive tale about the day she would fly away from all, free. In adolesence, stUl wingless, she revolted. She made herself hateful. Then suddenly she was adult, still bound down. Disillusioned, she withdrew into an inner sky, a sky where she soared free and high. Haughtily, she ignored the coimsel of the elders. Arrogantly, she refused to concern herself with earthly matters. Her destiny lay above. Then came the strange, angry affair with that earthbound man, Rad Tahn. He was a sullen blunt-spoken man, an angry man who lived from brawl to brawl. They nested down together. Presently it was apparent there would be a third party to the affair. Despite censure, they declined to sanctify their union. The young Hawk was bom with a despairing cry, His grandmother took custody immediately. It wasn't until she fell dead a year later that he come into his mother's care. For a few days. Because that week a fierce battle erapted between the mismatched mates, a struggle more savage than any otiier. Possessed with fury, Bluebird uttered a piercing cry and plunged from their low nest. She rushed through the village, a vengeful blue flash, to the rocky rim of the canyon. To this spot. Here she paused for an instant, wingless, arms spread. Here she uttered that last fierce cry and -- Well, some say they saw her swoop up into the clouds. Others say otherwise. They say color the floor of the canyon every spring were seeded by her broken body. Certainly they never bloomed there before. Shaking free of the strange narrative, Kelt stared down. For below, in the dark, jagged rocks, bloomed a faint patch of blue. He stood in, the sunlight, staring down. Without thought, without effort. He Had absorbed the story of this village, these people. He had become intimately informed of his ancestry and his origins almost magically, as if a richly embroidered emotional tapestry had been transferred intact from Teller's mind to his own. X Kert stared down. Then h'e raised His eyes to Teller, tKat mundane man suddenly become msrsterious, witH Ws strange gift of communication. "Wfiat do you think happened?" Kert demanded. Teller smiled thougfitfully. "I believe she lives on tire wind, on the wing. I believe she's a bird somewhere." Nodding, Kert stared into the vastness of the sky. He heard its call clearly now. It commanded him, drew him. He felt his body lighten. Teller said gently, "I'll walk down to the hall now. I believe you can find your way alone. Hawk." "I can," Kert answered. He gazed upward. A floating, feather-lightness possessed him. He raised His arms and rose up lightly, freed. When He glanced down, the forest was far below. Kert spread his arms, and the sky opened. Giddily, he rose until the air was thin and cold. He swooped down, a fierce, exulting cry breaking from his lips. He swooped over the forest, hurtled low over an icy brook, then cleaved his way back to the canyon. He winged into its depths, hovering over the place where blue blossoms grew in feathery clusters. He was light, free, a bird awing. And it was all wrong. TJ'rowning, He settled to tHe canyon's rim. His body took on weight. All wrong. There had Heen exhilaration and joy. But he had no desire to swoop away into the clouds. He had no wish to Hawk over the countryside in lonely splendor. He was a man, not bird. He was a man -- with a machine. WitH a fierce cry, obsessed, he hurtled through the trees, down the path to the clearing where his ship waited. With an angry cry he caught at the mesh of the fence that separated them. Scrambling, he mounted it. A fierce squawk erupted. Wiry arms caught at him. "I control air currents Here! You can't loft without my consent." Dragged down, Kert struggled furiously. "I lift when I want!" "I Have special dispensation! I have controlled this air seventeen years. I won't alllow -- " Kert struggled free. "You will allow!" he spat. The words were jagged, black. Without thinking, Kert scooped one up in his Hand. He clutched it, a black crystalline dagger. Cursing, the small man launched himself at Kert. The glittering tip of the crystal dagger nipped leathery flesli. The small man jerked away. A single droplet of blood popped from his tEroat. His eyes bulged. He flattened Himself against the fence, clutching his tliroat. Kert stared at him, uncompreEending. TKen Eis hand registered the Keft of the crystalline weapon. He stared down at it, his jaw dropping. "Don't come near me! I'll let you loft I'll open the gates. I'll -- " Kert's fingers numbed witH sEock. The crystal dropped. By the time the crowd gatfiered near, tHe crystal was dark dew  at Kert's feet. Kert sared numbly. By the time the crowd bathered The dark dew evaporated. Kert turned, dazed. His eyes met Teller's. Groping, Ee put the question he Hadn't tHought to ask before, tEe question Ee now recognized to be crucial. "Where is my father?" That surly, blunt-spoken man. A hulking Hirsute beast, more bear than man, rumbled ponderously. "It was my brother Ee murdered, Rad TaEn. His body is in tHe ground, with my arrow in Eis Heart." His black eyes glittered defiantly. "And I saw the thing he killed with'. Rad Tahn. I was there. I saw." Kert turned back to Teller. Teller sighed. "I'll lead you." T He marker was primitive, crudely chiseled. "Here lies Rad TaEn, WEo in tEe #tS year Of his life Foully battered and murdered Karter Karter, With a blimt word Of his own speaking." Kert knelt. He stared at tHe marker. Finally, rising, he nodded Eis understanding. Teller spoke quietly. "This deatH -- Rad Tahn's -- marked a turning point in our ways. Before, we lived under natural law. If a man killed, he was given to his victim's kin. But after Rad Tahn was done to death, controversy arose. Was it possible to beat a man to death with a bluntly spoken word? Could any man, however Special, speak a murderer's club? Why did no one but Krick Karter see the alleged club?" "I did see it!" Krick Karter rumbled. "I stood there beside my brother when he tried to collect the debt Rad Tahn owed him. I saw Rad Tahn curse out that -- that glassy dug and batter my brother with it. And I put my arrow in Rad Tahn's Heart for it." Teller spoke reasonably. "But Person Ritter was not here to look into Rad Tahn's mind and tell us what guilt was there. We have only your word. No one else saw the club." "It melted! Like a club of ice. It melted on the floor." "No one saw a puddle, Karter. It was a draught year, hot and around that summer. Any one of us would have noticed a puddle -- and no one did." Angrily, Krick Karter glared at them all. HarsK fur rose at the back of his neck. He lumbered away. The man wfio controlled air currents declared passionately, "I always thought Krick Karter was drunk that night. Now I know I have done him trespass." He scurried after Karter. "Now what d'ye make of that?" an elderly man mused. Kert frowned, at the focus of all eyes. Were they blind? Hadn't they seen the dagger in his hand? Hadn't they seen the black dew in the grass? "Even here People don't always accept the improbable," Ritter murmured. "What they saw -- or believe they saw -- was a struggle between two men. One of them panicked and broke away." Kert studied the bemused faces. Sighing, he nodded. Teller rose. He let high grass obscure Rad Tahn's gravestone. "Now I've told you everything. Blue Hawk. More than I intended to tell." He smiled regretfully. Solemnly, Kert made his thanks to Teller. The villagers withdrew, gossiping through the graveyard. Ritter's eyes slanted thoughtfully. "May I count on you to loft me at sundown?" Kert spoke absently, staring down into the grass. "You may." ert stood alone. He returned to the clearing slowly, lost in thought. The ship hfted lightly, sweetly, freed at last from gravity. For an hour they rode the wind, sweeping the sky aimlessly. Kert considered the facts he needed to consider, thought the thoughts he needed to think. Then a towering cloud formation reared in the west. The ship cut through the sky and soared to the cloud's lofty top. Spiralling, they spun down through the cloudy tower. The ship's gleaming blue skin became Kelt's own. Cloudy mist chilled his flesh, frosted his crest. They dropped out of the light. The earth spread below, sparkling and serene. The time for thought was past. Now was the time to be. Kert threw back his head. An exultant cry exploded up his throat. It was the cry of a hawk never before seen over the land, not a harsh cry, not a cutting cry -- but a sparkle of diamonds, promise and joy. The computer's secrets were guarded could disclose them... and one did ! greatest error was in letting DuckwortK into tKe computer room. But it Had never occurred to me tKat He would ask so many questions and provoke me into trying tHe forbidden. "The computer looks migHty small to me," He said. "Where are the memory banks for data storage?" "Most of our memory is not here," I said. "We store all long term data and our programs in the Federal Computer Memory Bank. We have an access terminal that permits us to retrieve whatever information we want." "Suppose another customer wants to reach the bank at the same time?" "There's a time-sKaring arrangement," I said patiently. "We fit our requests into the time gaiM not used by other people and they do the same." Duckworth stood there, bemused. "The Bank must have lots of room," he said. largest memory capacity of any such unit on Earth. It stores the files of every Federal agency, bank records, department store inventories, university research notes, practically everything that maeks this country tick." Duckworth seemed perturbed. "How do you insure privacy?" "By coding," I said. "A twoword signature is required to gain entry to a section of the memory bank. Each word is made up of foTxrteen bits, making a total of twenty-eight bits." "Then the odds are about one a chance guess." "True," I said, "but those are mighty big odds." "What if I entered someone else's code by mistake?" said Duckworth. "Nothing would happen. A countersign code is necessary which requires another fourteen bits. That ups the odds by another ten thousand to one." Duckworth shook his Head. "I still don't like it," he said. I was annoyed by his obstinacy and responded by behaving childishly. "Here," I said. "I'll let you enter any two fourteen-bit words. Go ahead and set the switches in some random sequence of ones and zeroes." Duckworth seemed startled at my suggestion but he complied. I entered his sequence into the accumulator. The Confirm register lit up. "What does that mean?" said Duckworth. I bit my lip. "Oddly enough you stumbled on somebody's code. But now you have to choose another fourteen bits. You'll get an incorrect confirm and have to start all over again. As you can see, the probability of anything going wrong is fantastically tiny." "But Unite," said Duckworth and He entered another fourteen bits at random. Tt was at this point that the output printer started up and did not stop until it was too late. For a moment I was too sturmed to move, but Duckworth wasn't inhibited at all. He went over to the printer and began to scan the neat rows of letters. His brow furrowed. His eyes closed, then he began to chuckle quietly. Finally, he roared with laughter. "What is it?" I said. I became terribly frightened and I knew that I didn't want to read the printed out material. "What is it?" I repeated, with less conviction. "You won't believe it," said Duckworth, "but we've got the confidential files of the Federal Investigation Bureau." blood draining out of my head. "Turn off the damned printer!" I yelled. Duckworth restrained me. "Don't get hsrsterical," he said. "It's fun to read." As I said, I was terribly frhtened, but even more curious. So I decided to let the printer run for just another minute or two. It was to prove my undoing. "Look at ttis!" said DuckwortB. "It's about the President." I looked at that and countless otHer forbidden accumulations of Hearsay and unconfirmed data wfiicS had been painstakingly put together over tfie years. "I can't believe tKis stuff," I said "I can," said DuckwortH. "It confirms what I always suspected." About a Half Hour later, DuckwortH found some items concerning Himself and he flew into a rage. "AH lies," He cried, "everytfiing Here. My trip to Wadam was purely to do emistry. I Hardly ever saw tKe Nazir's harem." I tried to see wHat was being printed out but DuckwortH kept me at bay witH one knobby hand. Suddenly He stopped reading and looked directly at me. "Do you realize wfiat a powerful blackmailing weapon is in our Hands?" He said. "You don't really mean tKat, do you?" "I damn well do," said Duckworth, "All of this dirt could turn tHe country upside down." TKen he sHrugged. "But I'm a cfiemist, not a blackmailer. Still, if we ever spilled tHese beans, there'd be Kell to pay." "Turn it off," I said. "We've seen enough." At that point I received ah urgent call from President Hinkle's secretary. The president was ready to discuss tKe computer budget for tKe following fiscal year. "I must leave at once," I said "So I want you to turn off tKe printer. Hit the Clear Register button and get the Kell out of Here. And take all of tKat copy witK you and burn it." "You can trust me," said Duckwordi and like a fool I did. When I came back, two Hours later, one of the graduate students was at the console. We nodded to one another. I surreptitiously went tKrougK the waste basket behind tKe printer and all of tKe lively stuff was gone. I sighed in gratitude and went Home. But all that night, ideas flitted through my mind, fantasies of what I could have done with all that dirt. 'Ke first sigfit of two strangers, the following afternoon, knotted my stomach again. Gumshoes look the same no matter wKat agency they represent. And these two, I surmised, were They did not get directly to tKe point. "I'd like to see your computer time scHedule for yesterday," said the smoother of tKe pair after flashing his identity card. His name, if: said, was Dunnigan. out wHat to do next. THe time schedule would show that Duckwortfi was slotted in for tfie hours to two to four P.M. Dunnigan's companion, an applecheeked bumpkin with protruding starched linen cuffs, smiled at me amiably. What was I to do? I apologized later to Duckworth, but he refused to listen to me. "You could Have substituted another time sheet," he said petulantly, "one with the time slot left blank." Of course it was easy enough for him to say. But they'd have discovered the truth, sooner or later. We all went directly to Duckworth's laboratory in the Chemistry building. At first he denied everything. "Look," said Dunnigan at last, "we know that our files in the Memory Bank were searched for an hour and a half during the time you were at the console. We also know that the Interrogate command came from this university's computer. Give us back the printed out data, tell us How you discovered our code, and we will recommend that you get off lightly." "You won't believe this," said Duckworth. "I don't know your code. My entries were purely by chance." For tfie first time Ehumigan smiled and fiis companion slapped at his tfiigfi in hi fiumor "Tfie cfiance of doing that," said Dunnigan "are about one in a Duckworth smiled sweetly. "But there is that one chance, isn't there?" "Where is the printed data?" said Dunnigan. "I burned all of it," said Duckworth. They didn't believe any of his story. I confirmed the fact that he had hit on the code by pure luck. That simply made me an accomplice and I found myself in a cell adjoining that of Duckwortli's. Because of the severity of the charges, we were both Held without bail. At first there was not much talk between us. I Hated his guts for getting me into this stupid mess. And he kept humming merrily to himself. "Shut up," I finally snarled. Duckworth slipped his Hand out of his cell and worked it between my bars, where his fingers began to play against my spine. I pushed his hand away, angrily, but lie was a persistent devil and resumed the gentle tattoo. Then it dawned on me that he might be tapping out a message in Morse code. I focused my brain on sequences of long and short taps. "We're undoubtedly being listened to," he said abruptly. "Lay off the polysyllabic words," I said softly. "You'll ruin my spine." Duckworth growled but Ke continued to tap out his message. "I really did burn the data," he tapped, "but I stored the juiciest stuff in a dandy hiding place. And I'll never give up until my conditions are met." "What conditions?" I began. At that point three guards marched over, opened my cell door, and moved me out to another cell block. "Is this nearer to the Chair?" I said weakly. T was now all alone and I wondered what hideous torments lay ahead for the pair of us. But tlie expectation proved worse than the outcome. I was questioned again and again under Hot lights but I kept silent. Aside from the abominable prison fare and a con in a nearby cell who kept playing "I Believe" on His harmonica, nothing untoward happened. In fact, three weeks later I was unconditionally released and so was Duckworth. We shared a cab back to the University campus. I started to speak but Duckworth silenced me and nodded to tlie driver. As we left the cab, Duckworth took hold of my shoulder and pushed me along the tree-lined walk, simultaneously muttering in my ear. "Just hold tight and say nothing. We've got them by the fuzz." We went first to President Hinkle's office where our greeting was less than warm. He looked up at us, his great mottled nose aflame. "You've put the university under a cloud and God knows what else, for the moment your suspensions are lifted. I'm allowing you to resume your duties pending the outcome of this investigation but I urge you both to come clean witli the authorities." "We already have," said Duckworth. I nodded. I have no choice but to go along with my friend. I went back to the computer to resume my rightful duties as chief programmer. But things weren't quite so simple. There was, for example, the succulent coed who asked for my help in debugging her first Fortran program. With true dedication I arrived at her dormitory room one Saturday evening, after Hours, to assist Her, She was friendly, even warm, but after biting my ear lobe, she whispered, "What are you going to do with the dirt you dredged up?" I leaped away as though stung by an adder. Her eyes were wide, ingenuous, innocent. "I'm getting the Hell out of here," I cried, and I did. The pressure become even more intense as time went on. TKe succession of flatfooted middle-aged freshmen, replete with beards, wHo kept following me about, began to prey on my nerves. Whenever I approached Duckworth our conversation inevitably went right to the weather, the Ivy blight, and Kow despicable it was to keep the facility pay scale at a C minus rating. Duckworth would talk about nothing else. Weeks went by, months, and I began to go to pieces. Absentmindedly I erased two master tapes, plugged a replacement card into the wrong socket, and burned out the power supply of the computer despite six heavy fuses. In addition I snarled at every student who came within six paces of me. I could bear it no longer. I turned off the computer, card readers, tape decks, even the air conditioner, put up a large handOver to Duckworth's lab. He greeted me with the usual weather gambit, but I would have none of it. I vent right to his refrigerator, grabbed a few eggs and dropped them into a breaker of water to boil. "You and I are going out into the woods for a picnic," I said, and my meaning was clear. His face had turned ashen and he dropped the test tube he'd been examining. Then he sat down, loosened his collar, sucked , in air and stared at the beaker of boiling eggs. ( #"fThere's your courage, Duckworth?" I cried recklessly. "We're free men in a free land. God damn it, why can't we go for a private talk if we went to?" He found his voice but it was faint and gravelly. His eyes had the luster of two lead bullets. "No reason why not," he said. Then he nodded to President Hinkle who Had stalked into the lab, followed by Dunnigan and his apple-cheeked companion. Hinkle was .mopping His brow with with a monogrammed handkerchief. "Duckworth," he pleaded, "our fate is in your Hands. Unless you tell these gentlemen where the stuff is, all funding monies for our grants will be denied the University." "I burned the printout records," said Duckworth. "That's true," said Dunnigan. lab reconstructed part of the printout. But we think you made a copy. We went through your notebook and found a peculiar kind of code notation." President Hinkle put His arm on Duckworth's shoulder. "Tell him the trutli," He said. "If not for the university, then for Science." Duckworth's eyes were moist. "President Hinkle," he said, "when I was a junior faculty member, we thought of you as the grand old man. It was your inspired thought to provide first year chemistry kits for fresHmen. If I did it for anyone, I'd do it for you. But I want something in return from the government." "I'll listen," said Dunnigan, "but I can't make any promises." "I want the confidential files wortli. "Judging by wKat it says about me, there isn't a single true statement in it." Dunnigan's lips paled and his apple-cheeked companion almost swallowed his gum. For a while Dunnigan said nothing, then he cleared his throat and said, "The files were erased. It happened when you put that interrogate command to our memory bank. That's why we must have your copy." "Fair enough," said Duckworth. "Do you know anything about my work?" "Your macromolecule? Who doesn't?" I said. "I don't," said Dunnigan. "It involves a double helical The enormous coding possibilities rival that of the genetic code." President Hinkle gasped. "You hid the information by coding it into one of your macro molecules?" Duckworth beamed. "Precisely," he said. "I then put it into an egg, one of the group which my friend here just hardboiled for lunch." "That's why you look ill," I cried. "I was ill," said Duckworth. Then he reached into the beaker. "The brown egg has the file information," He said. He handed it to Dunnigan. "Have one of your genetic experts check it against the code in my notebook." "By the way," added Duckworth, "I have a fantastic memory. For example I can give you all the details on Senator Tliigpoint, chairman of the Committee on Limited Wars." He tore a page out of his notebook and using longhand, proceeded to fill both sides of the page with a nicely turned bit of penmanship. Closing with a flourish, he blew gently on the wet ink and handed the sheet to Dunnigan , I could see Dunnigan's lips turn blue as his eyes scanned the sheet. At the end, he folded the paper with trembling fingers, saying only that he'd take it up with his superiors. "Tell 'em there's more where that came from," said Duckworth:. He turned to me and slapped me on the back, jocularly. "Now let's have that picnic," he said. Tn the open field near a rippling brook, with his transistor radio blasting at full volume, he handed me another egg. I was reluctant to eat it. What if it too, held vital state secrets? "Don't be a fool," said Duckworth. "I didn't have time to make a second copy." "Then why did you give them the coded egg?" "Why not?" said Duckworth. "The hard boiling scrambled the code." I was elated. The jailing, the hot lights, even the treacherous coed had all been worth the game. Then an errant thought struck me. "Was there an#rthing in the printout about President Hinkle?" I said wistfully. "Don't terhpt me," said DuckViorth. And opening a can of worms, we baited two fislihooks and sat down to an afternoon of delightful trout fishing. OO # mm sf  Edited by Horlan Ellison The trail-breaking anthologywinner of two Hugos and two Nebulas -- the year's must redding! "You should buy this book immediately. If necessary, you should also spend the cab fare needed to get to the nearest bookstore," A. J. Budrys told Galaxy's readers in his review. And now it's coming out in paperback -- three volumes, only #?! each. stands and bookstores now -- featuring original stories by Former,Aldiss, Del Rey, Pohl, Silyerberg, Ellison, DeFord, and Bloch -- and two Forewords by Isaac Asimov. Volumes # and # will follow in June ond July -- watch for them! Also from Berkley The Nets of Space, Emil Pefaja (XI #, #i!) News From Elsewhere, Edmund Cooper (XI #, Golactic Pot-Healer, Philip K. Dick (XI #, #if) Three Novels, Damon Knight (XI #, #f) Upcoming... Cordwoiner Smiih, Frank Herbert, Keith Laumer, Harry Harrison, D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp (and, for that matter, G-# and His Batiis Aces!) by ar Dream No man can ever build another man's dream. J ohn Myers found a place at the rear of the observation room and looked around for John Lurie. He saw busy shirt-sleeved technicians, moving hurriedly as though the countdown were always a crucial three seconds ahead of them; there were stolid generals and a few administrators shifting uneasily from foot to foot, their featares heavy with the weight of tense scowls. Here and there Myers saw others who like himself had actually had some hand in making the Gaea; they stood in murmuring groups looking at the varied views of the starship that could be seen on the screens scattershot around the room. Lurie was nowhere to be seen. however. Perhaps he hadn't come down from his office yet; there was still more than half an hour to wait. Myers felt himself relaxing. "Hello, John. I'm glad you came after all." Myers started, then smiled in relief as he saw it was Irv Golden, one of the men he'd worked witli on the project. He put a nod of greeting together with the smile, and shook hands. "Hell, I couldn't stay away. You knew that." "Of course. Still, none of us were sure. I mean, we all knew the situation with Lurie..." "Even he couldn't keep me away from this," Myers said. "I may never get closer to Alpha Centauri than I am right now, looking at that ship." The viewscreen nearest them was slowly zooming in on the Gaea; Myers was suddenly struck by how much the ship looked like a fantastic crouching owl. He stared at it, bemused by the illusion. The Gaea didn't look at all like the manned Venus and Mars probes of a dozen years before, nor the one that Kad landed on Ganymede. Those Kad been conventional, intrasystem rockets; the Gaea was the first Dallmen Drive ship, aimed at the stars. And she would get there, Myers knew for sure. To the stars and back... Myers had been one of the Gaea's chief designers; Ke knew her insides, and he trusted them. He'd been ready to trust them to take him out to Centauri liimself, and he still felt Ke was a more logical choice for crew position than most of the men who now waited aboard the ship. He was young, still in His twenties though just barely and Ke was in good shape physically. Mentally too, Ke thought with a stab of bitterness Ke couldn't keep down even now, seven months after the blowup. Mentally he was as stable as --  ATyers heard the soft ping Oj the arriving elevator. Beside him Irv Golden stirred. "Lurie," Golden said. The elevator opened, and a power wheelchair rolled into the room, came to a halt before tKe main monitor screen and braked in place. Sitting in the chair, a fierce expression on his face, was old John Lurie, obviously determined to show himself undamaged in this first public appearance since his stroke. Myers didn't turn to look at him; Ke could see the old man well enough without moving. The stroke had changed Lurie ratMcally. He'd been looking haggard when Myers last saw him --  tired, driven, almost perpetaallj; angry -- but He hadn't looked old. Myem saw with a kind of dull shock that the man's hair' was almost fully gray now, and there were deep lines around the eyes, the mouth, the jaw. His complexion seemed unnaturally sallow --  and it wasn't from the fluorescents in the room either; Lurie had always been an active, ruddy man, and no lighting would have paled his face like that. "He looks worse than I expected," Golden said. "The word was he'd fully recovered." "John wouM say that on His deathbed. Myers said and then was annoyed at the pride he felt in saying it. No, damn it, John Lulie tHe fattier figure liad abdicated seven montlis ago. Lurie ttie founder of Intercorp (formerly SoutKwest Transport), designer of special landing assembly used on tKe Venus rockets, builder of tKe Ganymede ships and tKe Neptune fly-by... grand old man of space travel at #, patron and mentor of tKe promising young engineer John Myers of six years ago, surrogate father, friend. All that was in the past, denied and destroyed in twenty minutes of furious, irrational argument. Damn him. Golden asked, "Are you going to say hello at least?" "I don't know. I suppose the occasion calls for it -- he did send me the invitation, or okayed it when the committee submitted the list to him. But hell, Irv, I don't owe liim a thing. Not a thing." Golden didn't reply, and Myers turned his attention determinedly back to the screen and the Gaea. Damn him. T T e had never understood Lurie, though sometimes he'd tliought he had. But rapport is not understanding; you can share an emotion, a dream, without knowing the man you share it with. Myers didn't even know why Lurie Kad decided he liked Kim, why he Kad gone out of his way to pry Kim loose from McDonnel Contractors witli the offer of twice the salary and a position he couldn't possibly be ready for. Maybe he'd just been cagy about that; certainly Myers Kad gone all out for the older man, and within half a year he'd been pulling his own weight. But it Kad been much more than just business; Lurie had taken an imaccountable liking to Kim from the start, and it had been a Sunday, Thanksgiving and Christmas relationship right away. Myers had tried to ask him about it once. But Lurie had been Lurie; he did what he wanted and he revealed what Ke wanted, and the relationship was played by his rules. "We have the same first name," he said. "And you're bright, like me -- brighter than you'd have known if I hadn't forced you to show it." He smiled briefly, a completely non-businessman, human smile, always incongruous on his face. "Maybe I wanted to build something besides aircraft and spaceships, John. I've always been a builder, you know, ever since I was a kid." "The model planes, you mean?" Myers asked. Lurie nodded. "They were one of the first things, yes." He opened the glass-fronted cabinet in which he kept the models. The earliest was a Curtiss Hawk biplane, obviously put togetlier witli painful slowness out of homemade materials. One of the wings was cracked, and paint wa flaking from the body. "That was a Navy figfiteC bomber," Lurie said. "I rode in one like it back in '#, when I was eight; my uncle took me up in it. It was a beautiful thing, as big and exciting as any five-h'undred-ton spaceship we've built since. It made a fantastic amount of noise; I'll never forget it. And the shadow . s That was tKe first thing about it that struck me, John; its sfiadow was black and precise and absolutely efficient. Mechanical. That was how I thought of it then; I was fascinated witH opening up clocks at that age. I fiad no idea then bow complex a mechanical thing could be designed -- no idea at all of how many different kinds of components you'd Have to put into an airplane." Lurie paused, remembering. "If I'd had any conception of what Has to go into a simple orbiting rocket...  . Hell, John, I stopped thinking of rockets as mechanical things years ago; they're so complex you can't xmderstand them except as a whole thing. Every one we build is almost alive to me now -- and when we send them out, it's like me going out there myself. Yet thesr're still only mechanical things, hke clocks. Funny, isn't it?" Myers nodded slowly, caught up in the older man's mood. "I know what you mean about feeling like it's you going into space instead of just the rocket," He said. "But of course it isn't me," Lurie said. "It can't ever be me, because I'm too old; my heart would never take the acceleration. The biggest man in the space industry, and I've never been off the planet... , So I send out machines, John -- mechanical extensions of myself." Then they were both silent for a while, as Lurie turned the biplane in his hands, smiling wryly. TV yr yers didn't have to make the decision whether or not to go over to Lurie; after a few minutes Lurie came to him. As tlie old man's wheelchair rolled toward him, Myers realized he'd made a mistake in hesitating; now Lurie had taken the initiative, and He would control the conversation as usual. As always. "Hello, John," said Lurie. "Hello, John," Myers said. It was the old settled ritual, but neither spoke with any warmtii. "I knew you'd show up. Even if you only built half of her, you Still -- " "The Gaea was over # complete when you fired me," Myers said shortly. "That much?" For a moment Lurie looked confused; but tbe expression passed. "Yes, tbat's right. But we had to rebuild a lot of her. The entire guidance system, for one thing; she couldn't have found Ganymede with that dated system you had in her." Myers felt anger rising in him, fought to control it. "That system was there only because you insisted on it, and you know it. I submitted plans for the modified system, but by then you were caught up in finishing the ship to meet the government deadline -- " "That was important!" Lurie snapped. "I never missed a project in my life." "But you missed this one -- after you fired me. You told me I was crazy, threw me out without notice, and then went ahead and did everything I'd recommended. What was the sense, John? Can you justify it?" "I gave you six months' pay to fill out the term of your contract," Lurie said. "And I provided you with a reference that got you a way up as fast there, you'll be in charge of the next star-shot yourself." "That's a nice thought for your conscience, but none of it justifies firing me in the first place. Don't try to change the subject again, John; I know you that well, at least." "I wasn't changing the subject!" Lurie leaned forward tensely, bracing himself on one arm. Myers abruptly realized that the old man's right arm lay uselessly in his lap, noticed the slackness of the right side of his face. No wonder his speech seemed slurred, he thought; Lurie was fighting to cover it, but the stroke had left him partially paralyzed. "Then why did you fire me?" he asked, and he felt imcomfortable as he heard the softness that now crept into his voice. Damn! This was the chance he'd hoped for for seven months, the argument he'd rehearsed in his mind ever since the firing. Why. should he let Lurie off the hook now? L urie's left hand gripped the chair arm tightly, knuckles aged and white. "You were undermining the success of the project," the old man said slowly and deliberately. "You countermanded my express orders, you assumed authority I'd never given you, and your judgment was bad." "Then why did you follow my recommendations after I was gone?" Myers demanded, forcing an edge into his voice. "I was right and you were dead wrong, John, but you wouldn't okay the new guidance system and you wouldn't even discuss it. The deadline, that was all you could tliink about! What good is a finished starship if it shoots off to nowhere?" "I've never missed a deadline in my life!" Lurie said vehemently. "Never!" "Never?" Myers looked at him in disbelief. "John, goddamn it, that ship sitting out there right now is six months late! How can you forget that?" Lurie shook his head slowly, almost disjointedly. "I never missed a deadline before this one -- and I wouldn't have missed this one if you hadn't upset the efficiency of the project. I had everything xinder control, we were on schedule all the way, and then you started coming in with complaints and suggestions, wheeling and dealing, calling conferences I'd never authorized -- " "I only called one conference," Myers said, "and that wasn't even my idea; Irv Golden asked for tliat one. Isn't that right, Irv?" He turned to Golden, and was immediately struck with guilt at drawing him into tlie argument. Golden had stood by imcomfortably during the entire exchange, carefully midway between them. What the hell, he still worked for Lurie. As the old man looked dangerously up at him. Golden said, "I did ask for tire conference on ship's personnel -- but I sent the request directly to you, Mr. Lurie. When you didn't answer even the second time, I asked John here about it. I didn't realize -- " "Of course you didn't!" Lurie said bitterly. "You were only the excuse he needed; don't worry, I don't blame you for it." He turned back to Myers. "You were so determined to get control of ship's personnel selection -- what was the matter, did you think I'd go back on my promise to let you go on the ship?" "The ship is blasting in ten minutes," Myers said quietly. "Am I on it?" ( C  T addox, Juneau, Schumacher, Cossato, Faulkner and Howards," said Golden. "And of course you, John. That makes seven, and that's all there are left; the old man rejected all the others. That includes tlie stand-bys too. All of which means we now have a month to select and train four more men for the Gaea." "That's impossible," said Kim. "They couldn't possibly learn their jobs even in the full month." "No, not completely impossible," Golden said. "Some of the positions are more difficult than others, and we've trained the men we have to be able to take over other jobs if necessary. If we can choose new men quickly, we can train them for the easier jobs. But we Have to start now. John, I don't understand wKy Lurie got rid of the other men, and I can't even get him to discuss choosing replacements. Can you tell me VfHy He's putting this off?" Myers leaned His elbows on the conference table, tapped the fingers of both Hands together. It was an unconscious action, sometfiing to do so He wouldn't Have to answer the question immediately. He didn't know tKe answer, and he realized witH surprise that He Had been avoiding thinking about it. "I'll tell you wfiy," said a voice behind Him, and Myers jerked around to see Lurie standing angrily in tfie doorway. His black Hair was unruly, his face tense and florid, tKe neck of His sHirt zipped open beneath His tie. Myers stood up, vacating tKe cHair at the Head of the conference table. "No, don't botfier," Lurie said bitingly. "You look so comfortable, I'd Kate to disturb you. Sit down, JoKn, sit down."" But the rest of the men Had already moved tKeir chans to accommodate Myers at Lurie's right-hand seat. Myers took tKat, and after a moment Lxnie went to the head of the table and stood there angrily. "If you gentlemen Have any questions about project Gaea, I suggest you ask me about them in tfie future. I don't like conferences to be called behind my back." Myers said, "I'm sorry, JoKn; your pKone Had a call-later all morning, and this seemed urgent. We do Have tfie room recorder; on, and I would've submitted tKe entire proceedings to you." "TKat's nice," Lurie said. "May I ask wKat was so urgent that you Had to discuss it without me?" Golden cleared His throat nervously. "It's the question about ship's personnel, Mr. Lurie -- you'll remember I sent you two memos about it." "I was busy," said Lurie. "You gentlemen don't seem to realize it, but we have just one month to get our bird off tKe ground. Unnecessary conferences won't get that done. How many of you are here? Five of you, all supposedly responsible men on this project. Who's minding the store?" "John, I think Irv's question is important." "It is noi important; if it Had been, I'd have called a conference myself. For your information, John, our bird will not be carrying eleven men to Alpha Centauri; we don't need all of them. As a matter of fact, we only need six; I put that call-later signal on the phone so I could go over the work assignments and re-allot them." CSnly six men?" said Golden. SJ'... "Excuse me, but how can we get by with! only six? You yourself set the number at eleven, and we all agreed -- " "I set the number at eleven, and I've re-estimated it at six," Lurie said coldly. "We're not trying to colonize Centauri; this is only a manned probe. Six men can do the job." "But I don't understand," Myers said. "John, I'm sorry, but you will have to explain to me how six men can do the work of eleven." "I don't have to explain anything! I make the decisions here, and I've decided six can do it. The fewer men, the less payload -- and the fewer widows left behind." "Widows?" Myers said. "I thought we were proceeding on the assumption tiris will be a successful flight." Kim had been scanning the crew list Golden had brought to the meeting; now he looked up and said, "Is that why you rejected the men you did, Mr. Lurie? I notice they're all married." "Of course that's the reason," Lurie said. "It's also the reason I decided to trim down the crew in the first place." He turned to Myers. "For your information, we always proceed on the assumption that whatever project we imdertake will be a success; you can't make plans otherwise. But any new space flight is dangerous, and the Gaea will be going # light-years and back -- we hope. That's a Huge first, and the ship is the most complicated unit we've ever even dreamed of. Sometimes I'm not sure even I understand how she works." He paused, barely perceptibly, then went on more quietly, "John, I don't know if you've told the others what you told me last night, but you're not going on the Gaea." "Not going?" Myers said unbelieving. "But I've had your promise ever since -- " "That was long before you brought Helen around. I like her, John, and she loves you, that's plain enough. If I send you out to die on the Gaea, I might as well send her to die too." Myers stared at him. "You mean because I told you we're getting married you're taking me off the ship? Is that the reason?" "I've been thinking about this for a long time. John, this is a dangerous flight; that ship is the first of its kind, and it's going out into -- " "For god's sake, I know what the project is!" Myers burst out. "I also know the Gaea; the ship can make it! You've seen all the plans -- you know the theory -- you oversaw the construction right from the start. Stop giving me rationalizations, John. Are you afraid of the Gaea? And if so -- why? Because of that Venussurplus guidance system that you refuse to change?" Lxirie's expression froze. He stepped back from the table, hesitated, then turned for the door. "I'll see you in my office, alone, in five minutes," he said, and walked out. Within half an Hour -- shouting, accusing, pleading, shouting again -- Jbhn Myers was not only off the Gaea crew list, but fired from Intcrcorp.  ( A #I right. I'll tell you the truth," Lurie said, sinking back in his power chair, his face seeming to visibly weaken and sag. His condition appeared even worse than Myers had thought; Lurie had summoned his energies for the confrontation with Myers, but a few minutes of arguing had drained him. Still... he was Lurie. Myers didn't want to let the old man soften him, too. "All right," he said levelly. "What do you call the truth?" "Just this: you didn't really want to be on the Gaea. You said you wanted to go, and you probably even believed it -- but you didn't really want that." "Didn't want it? What does that mean? Of course I wanted to go!" "No, you didn't. You wanted to stay here with Helen; I could hear it in your voice the night you told me about the engagement." Even Lurie's voice seemed weak now. His stiff fingers on the chair arm ran idly along the power buttons there. "Oh no," Myers said. "Oh no. You don't get away with that, John! You're trying that line about firing me for my own good, aren't you? Saving me from the dangers of space, the uncertainties -- " "Nonsense... nonsense. You know as well as I do the Gaea is as safe as any ship we've ever built. No, John, you just didn't want to go, that was all -- but I think you really didn't know it. You couldn't admit to yourself that that dream of going to the stars wasn't as important to you as it used to be." "So you had to manipulate things that day to force an open fight?" Myers said. "And instead of just taking me off the ship you had to fire me outright -- is that it? I don't buy that." Lurie's eyes were more than halfway closed as he looked down at the paralyzed hand in his lap. He said, "I don't expect you to believe it. If you could have accepted the idea of giving up going to Centauri, we could have done all of this reasonably, like two sensible men. You'd have said you didn't want to go after all, I'd Kave been sorry and I'd Have let you off tlie hook. But it didn't happen that way, John, because we're human." "I don't buy it," Myers said. "Stop it." "No, let me go on; I may not Have that much time. I'm not the man I was; I go into rages, I get paranoiac. You saw me just a few minutes ago. It was happening back then, too, when I fired you, only I didn't know it. The stroke finally woke me up to the situation. Not that it's anything new in the world. I'm just getting old, the juices don't mix as before, I have to rely on pills and power chairs and a diet you wouldn't believe either. "I didn't manipulate the fight, John; I couldn't prevent it. It had been coming for months, and it was my fault. Okay, you were right about the guidance system; I was pigheaded about that. And you were right that I was afraid of the system; I was pigheaded about that. And you were right tlaat I was afraid of the Gaea -- it got too big for me, I couldn't understand it, it scared hell out of me. But none of that was insurmountable; I had good periods along with the bad ones, and I could back down if I had to. I did change my mind and put in your new guidance system later, remember. "But what broke everything to pieces wag when you told me about you and Helen -- and I realized you Had something else to do with your life. It was written all over your face. You didn't want to go to Centauri, you wanted to get married and buy a House and commute by gyro -- " "No!" Myers said. "I wanted to go to Centauri just as mucK as. you did!" T urie just looked up at him si' lently for several moments, letting the sentence hang in the air. Then He said, "THafs rigHt, you wanted to go just as much as I did. You didn't want to go for yourself anymore, only because of me. Because that was what I manipulated, John -- you, right from the beginning. I took you out of McDonnel and gave you a top job, taught you as much as I knew, made you virtually a son to me. I told you once that I was a builder -- well, that was what I was doing with you, though I denied it to myself. I was just building another machine, John, a more personal machine than the Gaea, a living person who'd go out to Centauri and be the closest thing to me I could manage." Lurie paused, cleared his throat; his voice Had taken on a gravelly edge. "That's pretty disgusting, isn't it? Using another Eumaii being like a tool, a glorified tv monitor." Myers said wonderingly, "You really mean tfiis, don't you?" "Yes, I mean it; it's true. Wfiy else would I Eave been so furious ,wKen you wanted to drop out? I was so toucHy -- so guilty -- SiBat you didn't even Eave to say io me, 'JoEn, I want out.' I knew T before you did." Lurie did close Eis eyes now, aad raised Eis veined Eand to press tEe bridge of Eis nose. Myers saw him breathing deeply, laboriously, and for a panic moment he tEougEt tEe old man was having another stroke. But then Ee saw the tears. From the overhead speaker came a voice saying, "Blast minus thirty seconds and counting. T wenty-nine... twenty-eight... Myers leaned over and puncEY#ii posmmen suessm : Hed the Off button on the wheelcEair's console. He moved behind tEe chair and began to pusE it over to the main monitor screetf. "Clear your eyes, JoEn, or you are going to miss the first blastoff for the stars," Myers said. TEe power chair was heavier than Ee'd expected; by the time Ee had Lurie positioned in front of the screen Ee was out of breatE. Panting, he drew up one of tEe room's lounging cEairs and sat down beside the old man. Lurie Ead recovered himself, but Ee only stared at the screen silently. "... seventeen... sixteen... fifteen..." "What you said makes sense," Myers said. "Except that people aren't steel; you can't melt them down and pour them into a mold to make a machine. It isn't that simple; nobody accepts somebody rise's dream unless Ee wants it." " i i . two... one # . The starship built a cushion of smoke and fire beneath it, then slowly rose into tEe sky. The monitors tracked it as it accelerated; the changing angle of vision made it seem as though the Gaea were curving over and away. But it was still going straight up and out. Myers said. "I'll be on the next one." The colors weren't so bad -- until they became colours. Tt's just not true that we planned it this way, as anybody wKo's read the serious articles about us knows very well. You can't believe those whoppers they print in the newspapers -- why, Half of them don't even know "color" is spelled "colour" when it refers to people like us! If Ben and I Had planned it, we certainly wouldn't have been shocked wKen we walked into that boarding house dining room. But we were. Not by the landlady -- she was coloured pink just like pae. Or Her Husband, wHose bright red hue matched Ben's exactly. That we Had expected. But when we saw that lodger -- saints alive, you talk about flabbergasted! The man, name of Jarvis, was bright blue! And his wife was yellow! Not like Orientals, who are not yellow any more than Caucasians are white. I mean yellow -- like a taxicab, like the middle of a daisy. Yellow! Ben just dragged me upstairs and slammed the door -- hard. "Wh-what happened?" I said. "I don't know." "They were blue and yellow." "Goddamnit, I know tliey were blue and yellow! They should have been red." "Maybe you should have experimented some more before -- " He grabbed me by the Hand. "C'mon, Miss Sally -- something is radically wrong." Well, we started driving around and something sure was haywire. We saw crowds of bewildered and confused people. And they were red, yellow, blue, and green. Ben stopped the car and pulled a pad out of his pocket. For almost thirty minutes he noted the different colours as they passed, then added up the figures. As everyone knows about # were red or pink, # blue #. yellow and #  green. Ben got tliat glazed look in his eye for a couple minutes; then he muttered, "Blood type." "What?" "Blood type. It affects the colour. Let's see, you're O, aren't you?" "Why yes! However did you know?" "Unless I'm mistaken all the red are O, the blues A, yellows B, and greens AB. Lord, what a mess!" "Oh well," I said, "at least tliey're immune from measles." "They are that," said Ben, stoking his pipe, "but it's still a bit frustrating. After all our work to make them red, here we are with a blasted rainbow." Ben lit his pipe and wreaths of smoke twined about his head. "Science is sure unpredictable," I said, wrinkling my nose. I did not sneeze though. I never sneeze when Ben smokes. That's how I met him, you know. e were in this elevator this was up North in New York -- and Ben was smoking a pipe and I wasn't sneezing. I couldn't believe it. I'm violently allergic to tobacco, but I wasn't sneezing at all, so naturally I looked at him. He was redheaded, very handsome, and he had the worst sxmburn I've ever seen. I mean he was scarlet! By that time the elevator had gotten down to the lobby, and since I had nothing to do, I followed him. I wanted to know what he was smoking, but I could not figure out how to ask him. We'd gone about two blocks when he suddenly stopped dead and turned around. "Why are you following me?" he demanded. I was mortified, but I wasn't going to miss my chance! "What's that you're smoking?" I asked. "What's that I'm smoking? Why honey chile, it's jest a lil' ole pipe." I hate it when people make fun; of my accent. And this guy had the worst fake Southern accent in the history of the world. "I mean, what's in it?" "What's your name?" "Sally Vickers. What's yours?" "Ben Browning. Do you always talk to strange men. Miss Sally?" I looked down in my best shy; Southern manner and shook my head. "It's just that it's important to me," I said. "Important enougli to Have dinner witK me?" "Well... Well all rigHt, if you insist." "OH I do, Miss Sally, I do." We went to a little French restaurant, and Ben ordered for us both, without even consulting me. It wasn't that I minded -- but I thought it was significant. "UH, what do you do, Ben?" I asked. "Ahm a chemical engineer," he drawled. "What-all do youall do?" Well that tore it! "One thing I don't do is go around making fun of people's accents! And for your information, you-all is pronounced y'all and should only be used when speaking to more than one person. It's a perfectly respectable second person plural." I wish you-all could have seen His face! "I'm a receptionist," I added with dignity. "Oh," he said. "Is my accent really that bad?" "It's atrocious," I said. He started laughing. Frankly, I didn't get the joke. But I rather liked the twinkle in his warm browti eyes! While we ate some marvelous escargots, I managed to pry out of Ben that he was California bom and educated, hadhisPh.D., was #, single, and -- judging by the looks he was giving me -- normal male. Though with that sunburn how he could even think of girls was beyond me. But Ee said it looked worse than it was. It was my turn then. But He just smiled when I told him about Bennington psychology major and my law office job. He said he'd rather hear about life behind the cotton curtain. T didn't much like his phrase but I did my best to tell him about the beauty and friendliness of my home town. Ben acted like a man listening to a fairy tale. "Haven't you ever been South?" I asked desperately. "Not to your South," he said shortly. We'd finished dessert by that time, and Ben pulled out his pipe. "You were going to tell me what you're smoking, remember?" "I surely will. Miss Sally. It's lettuce." "Lettuce?" "Plain lettuce leaves, cured like tobacco. Or almost like tobacco." "But -- why?" "I like it." "Where do you get it?" "Make my own, but it is commercially available." He pulled out a pad and scribbled something on it. "Write to these people." "I will -- uh, if I ever Have to. Thank you kindly." "You're welcome kindly. Now -- suppose I see you home." He did, and after thanking him for the diiuier I waited in the doorway, giving ffim a chance to ask for my p!fone number or say He'd be seeing me soon, but He didn't and I couldn't; so wfieit he did I just said, "Good nigKt." Damn being a gxrl sometimes, I thought. Four days later -- on a Saturday -- the doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon. It was a steaming July day, my apartment was a wreck, and I'd just finished washing my hair. "OH damn!" I waded. "Now Miss Sally," said Ben, looking as neat as an unmaded envelope, "where's' that famous Soutlrern hospitality? Aren't you going to ask me in?" "Yes, of course," I said. "Come on in. But everything's a mess." Mess wasn't tlie word for it -- there isn't a word for it -- but he didn't seem to mind. "You see. Miss Sally, I suddenly got this terrible hankerin' for hominy grits. So I went out, bought a box, and here ah is! You will cook 'enrt for me, won't you?" "Why sure." I'm the South' worst cook, but I wasn't going to tell him that. I fixed him a drink and went into the kitchen to cook those pesky grits. That's when I first got suspicious. You see, Ben's sxmburn was exactly the same as before. That wasn't natural; it should have faded or peeled or something. I peeked out to make sure and He was as red as ever. You can maintain a tan, but not a burn, so I started supposing all kinds of things. I finally got the grits done and brought them in. "Wonderful," fie said after a bite. Believe me, they weren't -- but he choked them down, smiled weakly, and said, "You busy tonight. Miss SaUy?" Now Mama's always said a girl should never let on to being available if a man asks for a date for the same night, but I thoughts to hell vsnth Mama. "Ufi -- no, not really." "Good! Then why don't we go out to dinner? And later I'll show you how to cure lettuce leaves." And that means going back to your place, I thought. I wasn't counting on his sunburn as a deterrent now, but I figured -- don't remember wHat I figured -- but I know what I said. "I'll be ready in twenty minutes." "Take your time. Miss Sallyij take your time." Y ou know, he wasn't kidding about the lettuce leaves. After dinner we went to his place -- which turned out to be more of a laboratory than an apartment -- and he showed me the whole process. After that we just stood there looking at each other -- I wasn't scared, but I wasn't exactly comfortable eitKer. "Uh -- what are those?" I said, pointing to some covered cages. "Mice, Miss Sally." "Eekl" I said, since fie seemed to expect it, though fie sKould have realized I'd worked with mice in psycKology. Monkeys too. I didn't mind a little old mouse. But wfiy were they covered? And wfiat did they have to do with chemical engineering? And how did his sunburn fit in? Or did it? Curiouser and curiouser, as my old Grams used to say. I decided I'd better approach it sort of roundabout. "Ufi, what company do you work for, Ben?" "I free-lance," he said. It turned out fie Bad a whole string of patents, mainly on processes connected with water, such as fluoridation and desalination. He'd taken post-doctoral courses in biochemistry and now was experimenting witH putting vaccines right in the water. Well, that explained the mice, though not wfiy they were all covered up. His preoccupation with disease seemed downright tinfiealthy to me, and how did tfiat jibe with his -- then I got it! Here fie was: young, handsome -- red as a beet. It had to be some mysterious and probably fatal disease. It was tragic. I was sure of it when fie got me all the way home without trying anything more than a measley peck on the cheek. We did make a date for Sunday, though. I figured if his days were numbered, this was no time to be coy. It was on Sunday I discovered I'd been right about his sunburn. It was no deterrent. I saw him again on Monday and that was the day I decided I'd rather have a sick Ben Browning than a healthy anybody, and if I let this man get away I was insane. Then he stopped calling. T was miserable. I was frantic! I was out of my mind! I field myself in on Tuesday and Wednesday, and somehow got tfirougli Thursday, but by Friday I couldn't stand it any more; and directly after work I went right down to Kis place and Kammered on the door. I didn't wait for an answer. The door was unlocked so I barged right in. "Sally!" He made a desperate attempt to hide tfie mice, but it was too late -- I'd already seen them. They were shocking pink. "Benjamin Browning, what did you do to those mice?" I said. "The same thing I did to myself," fie said miserably. He still had the sxmburn. "I tfiought so!" "It's why I didn't call you again." "Wfiy?" I screamed. "Because I'm a Negro." "Well, is that all?" I flopped down on a cKair in sheer relief. "My goodness, I thought you were dying!" "But I never -- " "How did you turn red?" "It's a side effect. I was working on a vaccine against measles which could be dissolved in water and taken orally, and I've found it. Except it turned these dam mice pink -- and it turned me red. At first I tried to counteract it, but then I saw! Sally, this will solve the race problem! If we get people to take this vaccine there wouldn't be any races. Just red men. I was tempted to give you some -- " "How dare you?" I said, jumping up and stamping my foot. "I am not going to be turned red. At least..." "At least?" "Well, at least not until after you marry me. " "What the devil are you talking about?" he shouted. "Well, I understand Negroes get married too. Will our children be red?" "I don't know. Damn it, Sally -- " "Hey, I've got a great idea --  let's turn the whole country red!" "It isn't that simple." "Of course it is." "The vaccine could turn everyone red, but I'm sure people won't accept it." "They'll have to accept it." "What?" He really shouted that word. "It's perfectly simple. We get married and go on a honeymoon. We pick out cities -- maybe a whole state -- dump the stuff Id the reservoirs and everybody turns red." "It takes a month." "All right, it takes a month." "It could be done, of course," he said slowly. "You bet it could." "You're serious about marrying me?" "You hardly know me." "Well you don't know me either, and you want to marry me." He hadn't actually said so, but he did, all right. yhe upshot was we got married three days later, I took Ben's vaccine and we drove off on our honeymoon. Two days later we immunized our first city. The cities were easy -- Ben just dropped his vaccine into the reservoirs. But lots of the smaller towns had standpipes, and sometimes he had to use his chemist's credentials to get permission to inspect the waterworks, so he could slip the vaccine in. We spent most of the month dispensing our colourful little vaccine. Just before I was due to turn, we went back to the first city we immunized. We registered in a boarding house under assumed names, and waited for ttie fun to begin. Sure enough, I turned just when Ben said, but I wasn't exactly red. I was more pink -- sort of cherry toned. My eyes are gray -- people's eyes don't change -- and I liked my new colour quite well -- except I couldn't use my old make-up. Ben was worried about my new colour. He thought maybe it was lighter because I'd been white, and that wouldn't have been any good, but it turned out it was because I'm a girl. Women arc always a little lighter than men, except for anemics. They're positively pastel, regardless of sex. Two days later the whole city -- which happened to be the state capitol -- turned, and we got hit over the head with the rainbow Ben had created. After he figured out the blood type business, he put away his pad, restoked his pipe, and got that hazy look in his eye. I just watched the people walk by, and decided the different coloui"s were rather pretty when you got used to them. Pretty soon, Ben's eyes focused again and he said, "We'd better get back and see what's happening." We returned to the boarding house and turned on the TV. All hell had broken loose. A state of emergency had been declared, and martial law and a curfew were already in effect. Within tiie next few days, as more cities and towns began to turn, the whole state was sealed off "for the duration." "It's going to be a mighty long duration," Ben said. "The only antidote is deadly poison." What happened next is history, I guess. The Governor issued a statement. The President issued a statement. The Pope issued a statement. The Secretary-General issued a statement. Fourteen senators issued statements and so did twenty-three congressmen, and there wasn't a sensible word in the lot. , Among regular people, the fiirst reaction most had was to take a bath -- a lot of baths. Then there was a soap run on the supermarkets, until people found out that no brand would remove the colour. Then the Great Migration began. You couldn't get out of the state, but you could move around inside it -- and people did. Every day -- for a month -- as new towns turned, people started moving. At first it was to try to escape -- then most people who'd left home went back. And Negroes -- former Negroes -- oh, you know what I mean -- they just went. Any place. They soon realized if they showed up where no one knew them, tliey'd be just like everyone else. Some people say you can tell but I don't believe it. Sure, black people Have kiaky hair and big Kps and flattisS noses -- Sometimes. And sometimes tHey don't and sometimes Caucasians do. And even wKen they do, tEere are always plastic surgery and wigs and hair straigEteners. So nobody could tell for sure after the change, and guessing was dangerous. I mean, just for example, the Governor himself had a flat kind of nose -- college boxing tEey said -- and rather big lips, and everybody knew he'd been white since birtH. Or thought so, anyway. O nce immigration was resumed, we had quite an influx of Negroes from other states hoping to catcH whatever it was, and of course tEey did, a montH after their first drink of water. Nobody could leave, tEougE -- the surrounding states Had us in quarantine. And I mean they enforced it -- you'd Have thought coloured people were lepers. The Negro immigration stopped, of course, wEen the original supply of resawoir water was used up and people stopped turning but even so, we went from #tH to #tE in population! rank in just three years. Meanwhile, the Department of Health was investigating. It took them a month to figure out the busine about blood type that Ben had guessed right away, and it was the longest time before they tumbled to tEe water business. But then a cEemist finally isolated Ben's vaccine and everybody started screaming sabotage And once that cry was raised, if took just about no time for several of tEe Water Commissioners to remember the sunburned mart wHo'd visited them about a month before aU the trouble started. We sEouldn't Have gone back to using our right names I guess, but Bert would never Eave been able to get tEe loan to start his business otherwise, so we figured what the Eeck. Anyway, as everybody knows, they caugEt us. By that time we were doing right well. Owned our own Home and everything. Ben remembered my problems with make-up, and he put together a Kttle laboratory and concocted powder and lipstick and stuff for the new colours. His lab soon became a factory and pretty soon He had #' people working for him. His fouij Knes -- Goldenrod Yellow, Peaches'n'cream Pink, Crystal Blue, and Dixie-Belle-Green were all a huge success. Still are. So, Kke I said, they caugEt us and arrested us. Then the legal fun began! In the first place, nobody could figure out what to cEarge us with. And when you come right down to it, wEat had we done? They finally had to dig out an ancient law about wellpoisoning, wfiicfi was silly because we'd never even looked at any old well. They let us out on bail and our lawyer -- who's red like us -- said he tKougKt Ke could get us off. But then the Feds had to get their two cents in, so they preferred conspiracy charges and then there was this big jurisdictional dispute and -- well, nobody won. Yet. We're still out on bail. Now there's been so much rubbish written about how Ben's vaccine is either the world's worst disaster or else its greatest hope that I thought I'd wind this up by telling what really happened down here. Does the vaccine solve the race problem? Well, yes and no. It solves the Negro and white problem all right. It's pretty hard to keep a prejudice in good repair when you can't even tell who it is you hate. But you see, the reds and greens and yellows and blues can tell each other apart, and I'll be jiggered if they haven't started putting out tliis colour; superiority stuff. he greens started it. They're type AB of course -- the universal recipients. They said they were the elite, being only .# of the people. But the other colours said if anything they were mongrel, because they were a seqondary color, and they could take any type of blood. Well the greens came right back and said that proved their superior adaptability. Meantime, our peoplethe reds -- were proclaiming we were the best because we were the majority; but the others said that Just proved we were common. And then the blues chimed in, talking about blue blood and the color of purity and all, which made everybody kind of mad. The yellows talked about gold and sunshine and pointed out that their colour was fairest and closest to natural -- which was disputed by the pink women.! Nowadays things Have begun to sort themselves out. Coloured folks don't mix much. Oh, you work with other colours, and the kids all go to the same schools, but they usually sit in different parts of the room, and people usually divide buses and restaurants and such into sections and don't mingle. Socially, there is virtually no mixing. You just make friends among your own type, and you hardly ever Hear of a mixed marriage. It isn't prejudice. More taste. The colours do dash, after all. I feel sorry for the kids sometimes. If they turn a different colour, or are bom a different colour from their parents, it can be pretty rough on tiSem -- and on the parents. It's been much! better since they started the Rainbow Clubs for people with different coloured children. They're something like these organizations for the families of alcoholics or retarded children, and I understand they do wonderful work. Ben's offer to colour the whole country has already had so much publicity I don't have to go into that. I doubt if the vaccine will ever be accepted officially, but since the formula became public it won't make any difference. The last total I saw was # coloured cities and towns outside our state, and it's going up every week. Somebody wants this country coloured, and the laws aren't stopping him, and the guards at the reservoirs aren't stopping him. But don't worry -- now that we have got cosmetics and the new fashions and everything, you'll find it rather pleasant being red. or blue, or yellow, or green. And you'll never get the measles either! As for Ben and me, we're not complaining. We have an adorable little baby and we're going to have another next month. Ben Jr. is red just like his Daddy, and we're hoping for a little pink girl next. I personally don't believe this stuff about reds being better than everybody else. Ben and I agree # percent that it's mere coincidence that red has always been the color associated with royalty and that the vast majority of brilliant and distinguished men in this country are red -- or will be when they turn. Ben has said a that a man shouldn't be judged by his colour. New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process If You're a Subscriber --  -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not contain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let u know what it is. And If You Aren't -- Why Not Subscribe Todcsy? The war was humane, as wars went. If didn't destroy nations. It merely destroyed families, wives, children -- lie tfieater was a tKunder-lizard's maw gorged with people, the seats jutting in rows of imitation teeth', casting black shadows in the flush of yellow half-light. The screen pulsed with colors, its rectangular orb awash with delusions. The two-dimensional inhabitants of that false, flat reality moved into view before a pounding blue-white surf behind the black and yellow and crimson credits that crawled like well-trained insects up the broad screen, always in perfect time with the tinny music. And, abruptly, the air was filled with deadly steel bees. Jacobs slipped from his seat, dragging Anne with him to crouch in the sheltered trough between the rows as darts rang against the metal backing of the chairs. He had his gun out, searching. Carefully, he raised his head and looked about the theater, open to attack, and spotted the blonde. She was fifteen rows back. She had stripped down the top of her organdy dress to free her breasts, marred by the thin, red surgical lines. Below each scar were six pinholes: dartgun barrels that punctured the skin like gigantic pores. Jacobs knew the breasts were hollow of flesh and contained, instead, dart clips and firing mechanisms packed in a silicone shell. The war had just begun and already Ke knew tKe basic mechanisms. He aimed. TKe blonde wHirled -- not out of malice, but in Her pre-programmed fire-pattern -- twelve barrels swinging in Eis direction. Jacobs depressed tKe trigger. TKe automatic bmped out three fragmentation slugs. They tumbled the blonde backward in the dark, a final sputter of darts ringing from tKe backs of the seats in front of her... Ringing... "D inging... He woke to gloom. For several seconds, Ke was not certain whether reality was; A -- the bed and the peaceful room clothed in gray light, or B -- the half-darkened theater and the killerbot spewing thin death across the rows of patrons. He blinked his eyes, yawned, felt his ears pop. The ringing was the phone, not thousands of metal thorns richocKeting off theater seats. He reached out, answered it. "Lo?" "Phil?" "Plmmm?" It was Cullen. Reedy voice, whined words. He was second in command -- first in command on this, Jacobs' one night off -- on the Northside Sector anti-killerbot force and was capable enough to keep things purring. Or should be... S# "Seems like a bad one, Phil." "Where?" He fought to maintain drowsiness in hopes he might yet return to dream-filled unconsciousness. All sleep was dreamfilled now days. "Medarts Building. Tenth floor. He's extremely well-armed. Darts and bullets." "Both?" That sent a shiver through him. It was difficult enough to implant a single weapon system into a human body. Even with the new neutral synthetic fibers that composed most of the mechanisms, the body fought the rejection of alien tissues. Supposedly, it would never be economically feasible to build more than one weapon into a killerbot. Recovery and healing time required for two systems was six times as long. Half a dozen single-system killerbots could be prepared and dispatched in tlie same time needed to finish one double-systems bot. But if Euro Had come up with a way to make it pay off, a method of reducing healing time... "Both," Cullen confirmed. "Maybe you have two of them trapped up there." "Could be. But I don't tliink so. Even assuming there are two up there, the battle pattern is unusual. They don't fire in a preprogrammed grid; they only fire when there is a target." "Impossible!" It had to be! If thiat killerbot were firing at targets instead of on a pattern:, it meant tKe damn ttiing Had some control of its finer reasoning powers. But if you gave a killerbot reasoning powers, it would soon reason that it had once been a human being, that it had been stripped of its humanity, that its mind had been bleached, its stomach or chest or thigh contaminated with a deadly weapons system. It would revolt, surely. "Just the same," Cullen said, anxiety riding his voice with keen spurs, "I think you had better come down here." He gave up trying to keep his mind clouded and his body next to sleep. "I'll be there as soon as I can." He placed the phone in its cradle and pushed himself to the edge of the bed. For the thousandth time, he reminded himself that the captain of an anti-killerbot sector team had no real life of his own. He dressed, struggled into liis raincoat, and swallowed a cup of hot coffee in thx-ee large gulps. Then he went into the bedroom to tell Anne he was leaving before he remembered that Anne was dead. Then He went and strapped on Kis gun. utside, it was raining. Cold rain. It sliced the hairlike fog that wrapped the trees and spitcurled the darkness. It crawled His skin with aching dampness cEilled Kis bones to the marrow There was no lightening. The blackness was, impenetrable. He found the car in front of the house after first looking in the garage. The door swung open to the touch of his thumb as the lock recognized his print. Climbing in, he started the engine, swung across the narrow secondary road to the ramp of the autoway. Punching co-ordinates for the Medical Arts Building Ke leaned back, closing his eyes as the car maneuvered into the highspeed lane of the twelve lane autoway. He took control of the car at the bottom of the ramp and drove onto Sycamore Avenue. A hundred yards ahead, a barricade slashed the road, ringed with portable yellow lights that bathed the slick pavement in ugly amber flush. The reflection of the bulbs in the ice-slushed puddles, curling and wiggling, reminded him of a carnival midway after closing time on a damp Saturday night near the end of the season. Aching with the realization that carnivals were but another thing necessarily outlawed as protection against killerbot mass-murders, Ke pulled the car into the shadow of the portable barricade wall. Bursts of bullets rang across the roof and down the trunk until he was sBelded tiy tSe metal partition. "Mr. Cullen said to send you figlit to the front," the officer said, openeing the door for Jacobs. "You're going to have to dress for it, though." "How many dead?" "Fourteen civilians. Nine of us." "Nine!" The officer winced at the implied criticism. "Nothing could be done. Captain. It opened fire before rush hour. Senseless, that. The first part of the staggered rush would have been coming down this street fifteen minutes later. If it had waited, it could have killed five times fourteen. So we went in with dart-proofs, 'cause it was using darts. How could we guess it would have two weapon systems? A dart-proof suit is structured to stop needlepoint pressure. A bullet is something else again." Jacobs accepted a bullet-proof jacket from a second man, laced the front tightly shut and hung a heavy bibb over the lacing. The officers helped him into a pair of bulky slacks of thick, cross-hatched nylon pressure resistants. "Tell Cullen I'm coming through," he said, shuffling uncomfortably toward the edge of the barricade, slipping the bulky nylon-steel mesh hood oyer his head A Hundred yards of bare street stretched between this barricade and the next. The second implacement was a portable metal well behind which Cullen and four officers crouched, watching the tenth floor of the Medarts Building through tiny lenses imbedded in the portable barrier. Cullen, radio to ear, looked back at the first barricade as he learned of Jacob's arrival. A moment later, he and the other four men opened fire on the tenth floor window, providing Jacobs with a sort of cover. Jacobs shuffled around the barrier and began a labored progress across the no-man's land. Y ellow light danced over His shoulders and shivered in the puddles, shattering like glass when He slopped the icy water with his feet. He was thirty yards along before the killerbot saw him and turned its attention from the men at the barricade to him. There was a tinkling of darts against the rough fiber of the suit. But they fell away like wind-driven dandelion puffs suddenly deprived of propulsion. Quickly sensing the uselessness of the dart weapon, the killerbot opened fire with its frag slugs. But that was impossible! Killerbots couldn't reason like that! If they could, they certainly would revolt at Saving been used for disposal weapon carriers. Take a man; bleach his brain; throw away his memory, crumpled and useless: program him vnth basic human habits and an automatic, unsensing minor vocabularly; program him with a destruction mission ; turn him loose. That is a killerbot. It can't reason in the heat of battle. Or never had been able to before... The bullets weren't penetrating the heavy armor, but they rained down too fast to let him walk a straight line to the front barricade. It was like walking in a raging wind, a spurting progress, unsteady and unsure. For a short moment, the bullets stopped. -- Jacobs doubled his efforts and shuffled faster, passing the halfway mark. Kack-ack-ack! A fantastic barrage of shells tore against his chest, toppling him. The suit still held, but he had had the wind knocked from him. He lay very still, choking on the stale air that penetrated the thin eye slits of the hood, his stomach throbing with protest, his lungs afire with the need for oxygen. Slowly, he forced the pain from his chest and regained a normal -- if somewhat speeded --  breathing pattern. Then he concentrated on appearing dead. Bullets skipped over the pavement, richocheted from his suit. The ice water shimmered with the rippled wakes of the shells. Finally, the killerbot stopped firing. Jacobs lay still, thankful that the bulk of the suit concealed the rise and fall of the rib cage. Several minutes passed. The killerbot opened up again for thirty seconds, then stopped again. Time crawled by unbearably slow. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Jacobs thought it might be safe now. He licked his lips of the sweat that had trickled down his face, tasted the salty fluid on his tongue. It would take him the best part of a minute to gain his feet, considering the weight of the bullet-proof garments. He would just have to hope that the killerbot would not be watching him, would not see him until he had gained at least ten yards. Sucking in breath, he pushed up with his hands... He was lucky. Apparently, the killerbot had shifted its attention back to the men at the front barricade. He found his feet, wiggled on weak, shaky legs. That was not good. He would have to will away any weakness until he had reached the comparative safety of the walls ahead. Laboriously, he dragged himself along. He had gone another thirty yards before the killerbot caught the movement and opened with heavy frag slug fire. The slight downward trend in S# the street Had Helped Him. He rolled, bullets pinging front tfie pavement on all sides. Abruptly tHe thudding of sKells against His fibrous armor peased. Hands groped for Him', pulled off His Hood. He blinked His eyes, looked up into Cullen's tfiin, young face, and smiled. "TKanks." "I tKougKt you were dead!" "So did it." He stopped grinning. "WKat's tKe situation?" "I tHink it's going to be a fronton attack. Any normal killerbot would Have exposed itself to om fire by now. It is cunning. And I think it must Have some sort of shield." "They wouldn't waste a sfiield on a killerbot!" Jacobs said, mentally tabulating the high cost of manufacturing and maintaining a shield projector. They were even too expensive for normal police work. "Just tHe same -- " "Well, if we Have to initiate a frontal, we might as well start," Jacobs said, taking command of his suit Cullen sighed audibly with the realization that tHe Hot potato Had just changed Hands for tKe last time tHat nigKt. Anything went wrong after this, Jacobs would carry the blame. "What first Phil?" Jacobs put His eye to one of tKe liny lenses, surveyed the wide panorama it gave him. "We can't wfieel tfie sfiield up to tfie front door, WHen we get directly undei; Him, He could just sKoot down and pick us off. CTfie door is closed. I suspect if may also be locked. We migfit all get cut down trying to blow it." "Now what?" Jacobs kept His eye to tfie lens. THe illusion of a rain-soaked, empty midway still clung to him. The yellow light gleamed starkly on the black street. For a moment, He thought He could see the carrousel with its garishly painted Horses. Perched on the shoulders of the grinning beast was a small, dark-Haired boy. Kenny, He whispered. And the illusion sHattered, melted back into the light-rimmed puddles. "Call back to the first barricade for a demolition packet. We'll move this barrier along to the side of the building. There is bound to be another doorway. We'll blast our way in and go up and take him." C ullen looked dubious. But Having no plan to offer, he called the barricade officer and requested a demolition packet. Ten minutes later, the suitcase came spinning across the street in their direction. It slid behind the front barrier, right into Cullen's hands. Jacobs unlatched it, checked out the contents. Everything was there. "Okay," fie said, biting liis lip for a second as if to convince himself that Ke was in a real situation and not a dream. "Let's start rolling tHe wall. Over tlier Bring it around flusS witH that comer, then beat it into tfie alle#Tway and find a door. We can't waste time. If we do, it may be waiting on the other side of the door when we open it." When the detonator blew, the door was ripped from its hinges and propelled across the alley, clattering against the opposite wall, bouncing back and forth finally settling to the pavement, like a spinning penny eventually teeters to the top of the game table. Jacobs led the others into the building. Holding his breath through the thick, acrid smoke, careful not to touch the steaming metal of the door frame. Inside, he ordered Officer Talmadge and Officer Cork to carry their flashlamps on half beam. When Cork finally fumbled his lamp on and Talmadge augmented it with his, they found they were indeed in a storage room. Moments later, they found the doorway into the rest of the building. It was locked, but flimsy. There was no need for explosives. Jacobs braced himself against the frame, smashed a foot into it. Twice. Again. Four times. The wood splintered around the hinges. He kicked it again. The door tore free, swung aside... "Tenth floor," Cullen said. "My brother-in-law works here," Talmadge said. "I've been Here a few times." "Lead then," Jacobs said. Holding his lamp up to shoulder level like a trembling child investigating a Haunted house, fie moved forward, tfie rest strung out behind Him, guns drawn. "Not the elevator," Jacobs Hissed as they threaded their way down a dark hall. "That will tell it where we are." "The stairs are tliis way," Talmadge said, turning right into a side corridor and stopping. "Maybe we should put lights at qxiarter power, Captain," "Quarter power, then," He snapped. The light receded. Darkness drifted closer. Quietly, quietly, they ascended the stairs. They must make no sound now. If this killerbot could reason and act in logical, strategic form, it was a newer, more dangerous killerbot. It would know they had broken in. It would not be blindly firing at an empty street. It would be hunting for them. He shivered. It would be bunting for them. Although they expected to meet it at every landing, around every corner in the staircase, they climbed the twenty flights without incident. At the tenth floor, Talmadge pusKed open tKe double glass doors into the main hallway... and was torn up tlie middle by fifty or more darts. He didn't even have time to scream. Swallowing hard, Jacobs blasted the door, rolled through the gaping hole where the door had been, gun out and firing to the left. Frag slugs whined off the walls, shattered windows at the far end of the corridor. But they didn't bring down the killerbot, for the killerbot had disappeared. J acobs was so tense that it seemed his scalp would split open, his skull crack to let out the pressure his whirling mind was accumulating. And he knew that if he was that tense the rest of them were even closer to blowing their tops. They had never had any experience with a killerbot that tried to protect itself. From the first day that Euro had turned killerbots loose on Nortamer, they had been stupid, suicidal units that stood and fired until cut down themselves. Or until their weapons systems ran out of ammunition. They were not detectable, even by X-ray, for what metal they did contain in their flesh was shielded in silicone, plastic, nylon mesh that effectively rendered X-ray useless. They had many advantages as weapons of war, but they didn't have real intelligence. It had always been a matter of standing out of the programmed fire pattern and cutting the human-machine to pieces. This one was different, and this one seemed the turning point of the war. They had searched all rooms in this wing, their fingers aching with the weight of their guns, their eyes weary with squinting, blmrred with trying to sort out the shadows ahead and make them resolve into a human form, something, anything to shoot at. They turned the comer into another corridor, stepping into tlie kUlerbot's line of fire... Officer Cork screamed a gurgling scream, pitched forward, his head prickled with thorns as if he had just fought his way through a garden of live and vicious roses. Officer Drennings did not have a chance to scream; tire darts tore out his throat first. "Fall back!" Jacobs shouted. He slipped into the safe corridor. If the killerbot tried to come around, he would blast it open in a second. Cullen and Minter were beside him, panting. "God," Minter was saying over and over. Over and over, low and soft and meaninglessly. It is hunting for us, Jacobs thought. Their lamps had been smashed by darts. There was only darkness now, tliick and all pervading. Their eyes were used to the gloom, somewhat, but everywhere there were dense shadows that seemed to move. The hall was quiet. To hell with this pessimism! They were three, well-trained police officers. That killerbot, no matter how advanced, was only one. Numerically, they had it cornered. They just had to move with more caution, stop blundering around as if it were a normal killerbot; "Come on," he whispered to Cullen and Minter. "And be careful." They edged around into the corridor. The two bodies were there, lying in black pools of blood. But the Idllerbot was gone. "We'll never find him," Cullen said. "It will take more men." Jacobs hushed him, surveyed the corridor. For a moment, he couldn't understand what his eyes were trying to tell him. Then it registered. "No. We have him cornered." "What -- " "There aren't any stairs or elevators in this corridor," Jacobs said, pointing to the four doors on each side. "Just those eight rooms. He has to be in one of them." Cautiously, quietly, they moved down the hall, checking the rooms on both sides. Jacobs stood to the side, flung the portal wide, and jerked his arm back as Minter fired a burst of frag slugs into the darkened room. Then, just as cautiously, they would flip on the light and scan it. When Jacobs threw open the fifth door, Minter fired another burst -- and was answered with a round that smashed his chest apart. Two to one. The odds were still in their favor. Jacobs wished he had not left the suitcase of explosives in the storage room. A ball of contact jelly would be just the thing now. But tliey didn't have it, so no use wishing. He looked across the doorway to where Cullen waited on the other side, face drawn and white. He pantomimed his intentions, shook off Cullen's gestured disapproval. Gun clutched firm in his right hand, he bent dov,n, leaned to his side, arid rolled through the doorway into the darkened room. T#rag shells splintered the door- way behind hhn. He had come to rest against a heavy desk, his shoulder stinging with the impact. From the flash of the killerbot's frag pistol, he knew it was on the other side of the desk. Holding his breath so that his panting would not give away his position, he placed the barrel of the pistol against the front of the desk, depressed the trigger and held it down untU tfie clip Had emptied itself, more tKaa two dozen frag slugs sedding througK tliedesk, ripping out and into the IdllerBot crouclied on the other side. There were screams. That didn't fit either. Killerhots never screamed. Cullen hit the lights. The room seemed to flare as if the walls had been set afire. There was little left of tfie desk. The center had been chewed away by the bullets, and both halves had caved inward, the broken top now forming a vee whose point rested on the floor.' Carefully, Jacobs got to his feet, his empty pistol clamped in his hand, only a talisman now that its ammunition had been expended. He walked around the desk, kicked away some larger chunks of wood. The killerbot was approximately forty years old. Black hair. Fair-skinned. And... And what? Something was wrong, but Jacobs could not decide quite what. He inspected the wounds. A dozen scraps of metal had punctured the corpse. The holes they made welled thick blood. Splinters of wood prickled the body. To one side of the head lay a dartgun. A dartgun. He stared at the thing for long, it -- to even comprehend it. "Phil, look at this,'" Cullen said, shoving a frag slug clip and a pistol into Captain's hands. '"Help me strip him," Jacobs said suddenly, laying the pistol and clip on the floor. "Huh?" "Come on." Jacobs bent to the corpse, hands trembling as he and Cullen peeled away the bloody garments. As he had suspected, the body bore no scars from weapon implantation. There were only the gashes of the frag slugs from Jacobs' own gun -- and the wounds of wood splinters from tlie shattered desk. "He wasn't a killerbot," Cullen said, his eyes too wide, his mouth Hanging too far open. "He was just a man," Jacobs agreed. "But why?"  The psych boys may be more detailed -- " "What?" Cullen shifted his weight from one foot to the othd:, coughed. Jacobs couldn't take his eyes from the hands of the corpse, the hands that had Held the throbbing guns. "We were in war with Euro. A normal war -- if any wars are normal. Then Euro command changed the character of armed conflict. They came up with tlie killerbots. The enemy could be living next door now, waiting. Life took on a fluid, unstable quality." He looked to tHe Eands, could not take bis eye from tSe trigger fingers. Cullen cougbed. "Our government played tKe game too. Nortamer took its criminals, political prisoners, and outcasts, made tHem into our own Idllerbots. BotH sides admitted tKat Human life was unimportant compared to tHe robo-factories and towering cities. THe inanimate must be preserved while tlie flesK died. It became a war of attrition. Women and children -- " "Women and children were not spared by eitfier side," Jacobs continued. "THe family could dissolve in an instant. We became frustrated witH the liigH degree of instability of society. As we lost our loved ones and were powerless to stop tHe loss, we were frustrated because there was no one to be angry witH. The enemy was amongst us; the enemy was us. Sooner or later -- psycKosis." "And tKe man Here pretended to be a killerbot because He could shirk his responsibilities and strike back, dump his frustration. But if this catches on -- " Jacobs shuddered. "Exactly." He stood, left Cullen with the body, and left the Medarts building. Outside, tHe rain was still falling, tHe fog tKicker tfian ever. Af tfie first barricade. He sent tfie psycfi boys up to tfie tenth floor.; As fie was crawling into his car, Burtrum, Captain of tHe Westside Sector pulled His car alongside. "It's over," Jacobs said. "Strangest thing tonight," Burtrum said, leaning out of the window, his hair plastered to Kis Head. "We brought down two killerbots over near tHe sports arena, but they -- " "Weren't really Idllerbots," Jacobs finisfied. "How'd you Hear?" "We just had tfie same thing." "Gives me the shivers. Wonder wfiat the psych boys will find out?" Jacobs shrugged, started the car, and pulled out, sweeping in a U-turn and heading down Sycamore Avenue toward the ramp of the autoway. His mind boiled. When frustrations reached an unbearable limit, when family could be dissolved in a Hail of bullets at any moment, the human mind rebelled against responsibility. Men took a Holiday, indulged in a season for freedom -- freedom  if YouVe a Subscriber -- I -- and if the address on your subscription copies does not conI tain your Zip Code number -- please drop us a line to let us I know what it is.  '# i Controversial Uninhibited Deadly Serious Hu morous and Incredibly interesting! Brian Aldiss...  Poul Anderson    Piers Anthony .  . Isaac Asimov    Richard Bergeron  .  Bob Bloch    Voughn Bode .   John Brunner    L. Sprague de Camp    Terry Carr... , John Christopher...  Philip K. Dick... Harlan Ellison... Philip Jose Farmer... Jack Gaughan  .  Harry Harrison ,... Lee Hoffman... John Hayden Howard... Leo P. Kelley . ,  Dean R. Koontz .   Anne McCaffrey .  . Michael Moorcock... Alexei Panshin .  . Mack Reynolds...  Bill Rotsler... Norman Spinrad .   Bob Tucker... Harry Warner, Jr.   Ted White... , , nd many, many more ...  Richard E. Geis does his thing. P. O. Box # from everything, freedom to do anything. And now it had begun. He didn't want to think about where and when it might end. The autoway lay ahead. He punched the key for an extended drive without chosen exit, and took his hands from the wheel. The car moved into the liigKspeed lane. Again, the gray rain was peppered with sleet. Jacobs rolled down the window. He took out his frag slug gun, rested the barrel on the sill. A car came spinning along the black roadway, going the other direction. He pumped four slugs into it. "he vehicle whined. The autodrive mechanism had been shattered in its dashboard. The wheels locked. It kicked upward, rolled end over end along the autoway. Fire gushed out of it in crimson and amber waves. The flames on the wet pavement reminded him of a carnival midway on a damp Saturday. He had a glimpse of a carrousel. Painted horses. Keri child, grinning... The flames behind died and were gone as the night rushed him headlong. The carnival vision was blistered away by the onrushing headlamps of another car. filHfl for our internnaliorfi precisely forty years ago, in the early summer of #, I met Max Valier, the then most popular "rocket man," for the first time. It was not a chance meeting, we had had same casual correspondence for a number of years. But while it was not a chance meeting, it was a hurried one because Max Valier was on a lecture tour and bad just two hours between trains in Berlin. We met -- aroimd ten o'clock in the morning -- in a coffee house in the Friedrich Strasse. The building does not exist anymore, but it was near one of the present checkpoints between East and West Berlin. After greeting me, Valier opened the conversation with the words: "If we Have an elevator that rises at a uniform rate, what are the g-forces on the people inside? How would you calculate that?" I could only answer truthfully that I had never given a thought to that problem -- and after we had parted I wondered what had prompted that particular question. Now I know, because a biography of Max Valier, just published in West Germany, mentions that he and his friend, had many discussions about that point. I suspect that they made it more complicated as the discussion progressed. Reading that biography naturally made me remember many things I had not thought about for decades and since the book contains much impublished correspondence it also cleared up a number of points about which I had known little or nothing. To begin at the beginning, Max Valier was born in Bozen in the province of Tyrol, then a part of Austria, on February #, #. His family had moved there fromj southwest Germany two generations earlier; they were bakers by, profession. And for some reason they began to spell their name with a V instead of the original F. Of course this had the result that it looked like a French name and everybody pronoimced it as if it were a French word. Max Va- lier, in the early years of his fame, still tried to correct people and get them to pronoimce it fahoriginally. But he soon gave up; the written word proved to be more powerful than the spoken word. At the age of fifteen his whole future career was decided by a chance discussion with his mother's parents. Years earlier a friend of the family had been in financial difficulties, had borrowed some money and had left two small telescopes as security. The money had never been repaid and the two telescopes (one a #-inch, the other a lj#-inch) had gathered dust. High School pupil Max had just had a few lessons in optics as part of the physics course. He took the telescopes apart, cleaned eversdhing up and built moimtings for them. He began observing and was most serious about it; he was especially Happy if he succeeded in seeing the satellites of Jupiter. Tlien lie bougKt himself a few astronomical books and, as a sideline, apprenticed himself to a local precision mechanic in order to be able to build instruments himself. He kept an astronomical diary, wrote poems (in German and in Latin) and tried to write a drama. Then came the first world war. A fter basic training Valier managed to be assigned to the meteorological section; it was his private boast that he managed to get through the whole war without ever firing a shot. But some of the meteorological work was done from airplanes and Valier had the ambiton to become an aviator. Circumstances combined against this!; he never acquired a pilot's license even though the newspapers later on spoke of him as "the aviator Valier." He did survive an airplane crash with only a few cracked ribs, but He had not been the pilot. The fact tliat He had written a small book on watching the ptars for soldiers somehow brought him in touch with the Vieimese engineer Hanns Hoerbiger, head of a prosperous engineering firm and inventor of a "new vision of the universe." It was the infamous "glacial cosmogony", in German Welteislehre, which thought that it could explain anything and everything by the apjf the oge of #, picture taken in #. sumption that roughly half of the universe consisted of ice and the other half of hot matter, like stars. Scientists knew that all tliis was far too glib and based on unprovable and improbable assumptions, but to the layman it sounded quite convincing. It sounded especially convincing because it "explained" things which scientists admitted they cotild not, or not yet, explain. Max Valier, always enthusiastic, not only found himself a convert to the new concepts, he decided to become a fighter for the "truth" and organized a long course of lectures at some institution at Vienna. Enthusiasm for a subject and pracf sketch for the design of a high-a!tltude rocket made by Max Valier and sent to Prof. Oberth in #. The purpose of this design was to have the center of thrust obove the center of gravity of the rocket. Re'drawn from Volier's free hand sketch. tice in talking about it often produces a good orator and that is what Max Valier became. While busy convincing people that Harms Hoerbiger and his Welteislehre was the proper way to looh at nature, he chanced across another book. It was Hermann Oberth's first publication, The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space. Valier was enthusiastic about the concept of space rockets too, and soon wrote long letters -- minimum : seven pages singlespaced -- to Professor Oberth'. Oberth answered at equal length; any innovator is happy to find interested pupils. Valier worked on two books simultaneously; one was a popularization of Oberth's book on space rockets which was too heavily mathematical to be read by the public. The other was a large popular astronomy intended to convince everybody about the truth of the Welteis- lehre. Then there began a tug of war, two innovators fighting for the sole and exclusive allegiance of a promising pupil. Hoerbiger was opposed to space travel; he once wrote me that "the reaction of mere exhaust gases cannot move a vessel in space" and said about Oberth's mathematical proof "calculations can only lead you astray." This would be a strange remark coming from almost anyone; coming from a graduate and professional engineer it was plainly incredible. Since I believed in calculations (and knew far more about fossils tKan Hoerbiger wfio "explained" them, too) our correspondence was terminated rather abruptly. T ralier also believed in calculations, Oberth's calculations in this case, but Ke was not Hoping for space travel for the sake of space travel, Ke had another thought in his mind which he revealed in a letter to ObertK, written Febraury #, #, a few months after the publication of Oberth's book: "I consider it tragic that you build hopes on points which I consider hopeless while you reject what I consider the most important thing. You hope for commercial advantages from the construction of a large space mirror (provided that it can be built at all), you are looking forward to utilizing the metal of iron meteorites on the moon's surface and you hope that we might cool off Venus and make it habitable. All this I cannot believe, but you fail to consider something else which seems to me to be far more important. You are basing everything on astronomical ideas which I believe to be obsolete, for I am one of the advocates of Hoerbiger's Welteislehre... Please consider: Hoerbiger claims that the moon is completely covered with ice, that everything we see on the moon, craters, mountains, etc. consists of ice and of ice only. Hoerbiger also says that all the planets, with the sole exception of the earth, are covered with layers of ice, even Mercury and Venus in spite of their proximity to the sun (it can easily be proved mathematically that the sun could not melt ice even on Mercury, provided only that Mercury has no atmosphere). This means that the moon is the crown witness and the touchstone for Hoerbiger's ideas. You will understand what it must mean for Hoerbiger's followers to set foot on the moon. If it turns out that the moon does not consist of ice, we are beaten and every thing is lost. But if the surface of the moon is ice then everything has been won and astronomy, astrophysics, meteorology and geology have been proved wrong. This is wKat prompts me to help you further your invention with everything I can do... Moreover there is some urgency. The master of the new knowledge has turned # today; it is our dearest desire that the flight to the moon be carried out while he is still alive..." But the "master" did not think one could get to the moon. At one time he must have spoken to Valier about this, because a few years ater Valier complained in a letter to me that "the Welteis people are mad at me because I am interested in space travel, while others reject me as a rocket expert because I became involved with the Welteislehre." By the time fie wrote tfiis it fiad became clear to Kim tfiat scientists would not accept Hoerbiger's idea but that they might (with many reservations) consider the possibility of space travel. Tt would fiave been logical to assume tfiat Valier, wfio fiad once devoted Himself to preacfiing (there is no otlier word) Hoerbiger's ideas, would not advocate Oberth's space rockets and spaceships wfiolefieartedly. Tfiat would have been a logical asstimption, but by # Obertfi and Valier were no longer on speaking terms. This was due to VaUer's insistence tfiat "tfie spaceship sKould be developed gradually by successive modifications of existing airplanes." The reason behind this reasoning was the searcK for money. Obertfi, who by then fiad devoted fifteen years of his life to rocket theory, had a straight line of development in mind. He also underestimated the cost of this development to a fantastic extent. First one had to create a wellworking rocket motors; this would cost .about #. Then one would build sounding rockets capable of carrying scientific instruments to altitudes of about # miles. Tfiis would cost somewfiere between # and #. After that fiad been done, tfie first spaceship, capable of carrsnng two people beyond tfie atmosphere, could be built for about #! So tfie problem was to find somebody, or an institution, tfiat was able and tfie sake of science. Valier knew that tfiese figures were far too low and tided to find a way to develop rockets in sucfi a manner that tfieir very development would produce an income. At tfie time the most modem passenger airplane, witfi a cruising speed of about # miles per hour, was tfie G-# developed by Professor Fluge Junkers. Junkers fiad been the first to build airplanes of metal exclusively -- no canvas, no bamboo, no wooden window frames. Everytfiing was supposed to be of metal. "Even the seat cushions?" a newspaperman is supposed to have asked after tfie lecture preceding tfie demonstrations. Junkers smiled and said that cushions were cushions and tfiat his window curtains also were still curtains, tfiougfi fie intended to Have tliem made of fiberglass. Now tfie G-# fiad tfiree engines, one in tfie fuselage and one in eacfi wing. Valier suggested replacement of tfie two wing engines, by rocket motors for a fast take-off; tfie cruising could then be done witfi tfie propeller of tfie center engine once cruising altitude had been reached. ObertH pointed out that the efficiency of a rocket would be very poor unless the airplane moved at a speed close to the velocity of the exhaust of the rocket. Valier replied that low efficiency did not matter if one could do something in that manner that could not be done at all otherwise. Oberth replied that a fast-flying airplane would have to have thin wings; Valier answered that just the thick wings of the Junkers airplanes were useful because one could put the fuel tanks inside the wings. ObertH countered by paying that even yard-thick wingp would not be voluminous enough to hold the fuel the rockets woiold swallow in a few minutes of operation. Obertii Had naturally figured it put carefully. But Valier continued to develop, his line of reasoning. The next type would have one additional rocket motor in each wing; because it would fly faster, the wings could be shorter. The one after that would have three rocket motors in each wing, no longer use a propeller, and would need a pressurized cabin because it would cruise at about # feet with speeds ranging from # to #Q miles per hour. After that there would be a wingless typei the spaceship. o modem readers a few of these figures sound familiar; passenger jets cruise at # feet with a cruising speed of around # miles per hours. But they Have thin wings and their engines of course, are jet engines, not rocket engines. Now, after three decades after Valier's death it turns out that he did not always mean "rocket"    Valier's "ntermec!iate typos" In his scheme to transform an airplane into a spaceship. Type I still has a propeller and two "rockets"; Type # is the same with two more "rockets" added. Type # dispenses with the propeller and type # is the spaceship, all seen from the back, with tail assembly and landing gear omitted. when he said so. The "intermediate types" he proposed were to be propelled by an engine that used a liquid rocket fuel but took the necessary oxygen from the atmosphere. This, by definition, is a jet engine, though one must not think of modem jet engines when hearing the word. Valier's scheme, expressed in a letter to Professor Oberth, with carbon copies to the head of the Austrian Society for High Altitude Research, Dr. Franz von Hoefft in Vienna, and to Dr. Walter Hohmann in Essen, ran as follows : In a piston engine we have the cycle that begins with the intake of air and fuel vapor, followed by compression and ignition. At the moment of explosion Valier wanted to have an exhaust valve jumping open so that the explosion gases would not spend their energy moving pistons, connecting rods etc., but produce reaction directly. Valier iicver had an opportunity to try the development of such an engine -- and I have grave doubts whether it could have been done -- but the fundamental idea of a jet engine is plainly present. This, of course, invalidated the calculations of the large amounts of rocket fuel and liquid oxygen that were cited by Oberth (and by me, too) against Valier's intermediate types. I did not know about the idea of a piston engine modified for reaction, and Oberth', von Hoefft and Hohman seem to have forgotten about it almost immediately. To a large extent it was Valier's fault; he should have said "rocket" when he meant a rocket and invented another term for his airbreathing engine. I suspect that "rocket" almost immediately. To a large extent it was Valier's fault; he did not want to put ideas into other people's heads; during his lectures and in his publications he used the word rocket exclusively. Of course there were discussions with engineers of the Junkers Aircraft Company which took much energy and time and brought no fruit. Apparently the engineers felt that this was something for the future and that their next job was simply a bigger or faster airplane with conventional engine. Professor Junkers also had his pet ideas;; he wanted to introduce Diesel engines for aircraft. Still, a few years after these discussions. Junkers equipped two of his smaller one-engine aircraft with batteries of solid fuel rockets to see whether rockets could be used as take-off help. The experiment was a success, but it was not followed up for about a decade -- Professor Junkers died in the meantime. What followed then is the period in his life which most people remember when Valier's name is mentioned. It was the period of r o c ke t-propelled automobiles, rocket-propelled railroad cars, rocket-propelled sleds and a few attempts at rocket-propelled gliders. They made Valier's name a household word, at least in Europe. They attracted a great deal of attention but they did not really accomplish anything in the field of engineering. Valier, whose main aim was to attract attention to rocket propulsion in general, also claimed that they contributed to the improvement of solid fuel rockets. But since no new types of solid rocket fuels were tried, the experiments did not even do that. Qome time during this period one of the directors of the Society for Space Travel (I don't recall his name, but He was an important official in the German Postal Service) remarked: "If Valier could only keep his mouth sEut!" The occasion was Valier's collaboration with Gottlob Espenlaub, one of the German glider pioneers. Espenlaub, the first man to have gliders towed in flight by airplanes, had promised to build an airplane for rocket propulsion." The design was quite modern, sweptwing witK a faint diherdral. Valier aruiounced that Ee would use this airplane to fly the English Channel, from Dover to Calais, following the route of Louis B#riot's historic flight. Then Espenlaub did not build this airplane, but constructed a tailless glider which he flew himself, using solid fuel rockets. The glider caught fire in midair and Espenlaub had to jump -- without a parachute. He survived Eis jvunp, but suffered a severe brain concussion.   Valiers Type # , seen from the side. This was to be the first version of the spaceship,, letter version were to look more like the big rockets of today. Finally, in DecemBer,! #, VaUer found support from Dr. Paul Heylandt, tKe owner of a plant making liquid gases. VaUer built a simple (uncooled) rocket motor of steel, weighing # poimds In January # he recorded tlie result of test stand burnings: Measured Recoil kg. lbs. January # # # # # # # # # February #I # # (The interruption lecture tour.) was due to a Six sucK rocket motors, VaUer reasoned, would produce enough thrust to propel him across the EngUsH Channel. But first it was put into an automobile frame again. It worked -- not well, but good enough for a demonstration. Witnesses of one demonstration were engineers of the Shell OU Corporation. They reported to the home office and the home office decided to support Valier's development vrork. But there was one condition: Hie fuel must not be alcohol or somebody's gasoline, it had to be Shell oil. Nobody can teU whether VaUer liad any private doubts, he accepted the condition. He did feel Hurried by competition. Hairi F. Melot in France was said to work on rocket-propelled airplanes for the French army it was not true. A man by the name of Robert W. E. Lademann who claimed to have Robert H. Goddard's confidence, told that Goddard was supported lavishly by the U.S. Army and that his rockets had reached altitudes of # miles; this was even less true. A newspaperman by the name of Erich Boyer published an article about Friedrich Wilhelm Sander who Had furnished the rockets for Opel's experiments with racing cars and railway cars. Boyer claimed that Sander had buUt a liquid fuel rocket motor that Had run for # minutes. To this day nobody is quite sure whether Sander was working in this field or whether Boyer, who never was very reUable, invented the story. That the Society for Space Travel was about to continue experiments started by Oberth was correct, but the financial situation of the society was such that VaUer did not need to rush. Rumors about rocket experimentation in the Soviet Union were correct too, as is now known, but the Russians also took their time. In order to use Shell oil, Valier had to make modification. He added an "emulsion chamber" to his rocket because He intended to run it on a mixture of fuel and water. It worked a few times, but on May #, # -- a Saturday -- the rocket motor exploded. Valier, who had been standing next to it without any protection, collapsed. Ten minutes later h'e was dead. A splinter Had severed one of the major arteries in His chest and he died of an internal Hemorrhage. The time was about # minutes later # PM. His body was cremated in Berlin on May #, #. Professor ObertH and I were both present. THe ashes were tHen flown to MunicH for burial. THe City of Munich should erect a monument to him. He was not always right, but he was quite often too impetuous, but he was always idealistic and energetic. And He sincerely believed in the Ships of Space that were to come. kkk Six or seven years ago Frank Herbert, until then best known as the author of the classic underwater sf story known variously as Under Pressure or #I sf Century Sub (depending on which edition you read), began publication of the stories which ultimately wound up in the fat science-fiction novel. Dune. One of the biggest sf books ever published. Done was also one of the most successful in carrying away awards. It won the # Nebula award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the # Hugo from the World Science Fiction Convention, and if it didn't win any others it is probably only because there were no others in its category to win. Next month Galaxy begins publication of the final story in the Dune that Dune was, and maybe a little more... James Blish is with us next month, too, with a longish and very fine novelette called The City That Was the World. Suppose you were you -- that is, someone with a burning curiosity about space and the future -- but blessed with the wealth and independence of a Howard Hughes, the intelligence and technological grasp of an Einstein and an Edison combined. Suppose that you had it within your power to look Into the future, and change it as you would -- but almost surely had to die as a result. That's the problem. What Blish's hero does about it is the solution. We've also got a new A. Bertram Chandler novelette scheduled, a fascinating study of the Russian proto-spaceman, Tsiolkovsky, by someone who knew him, the usual Budrys and Ley enjoyable columns -- and more. See you then! This is Esoteric Ed, spinning you another platter on the Earth label, entitled The Last ManIt's a little cracked, but it's crazy -- real crazy! I Tl Tarty: Don't read this; it's in Old English and the spelling is different: "Jangling is when a man spekith to moch beforn folk, and clappith as a mille, and tafcetK no keep what he saitK." Now that you've read it anyway, you bright ones. I'll tell you that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote it in "The Parson's Tale." What he said was -- but I needn't translate; you probably had no more trouble with it than if you'd been listening to the kind of English disk jockeys once spoke on rock radio stations. This is a story of a Jangler nearly seven hundred years removed from Geoffrey's time. It'S the tale of a disk jockey named Jabber McAbber, which he sometimes called himself. At other times, at other contemporary music stations, as they called themselves, he was known as Esoteric Ed, or Happy Mac, or James tlie First. For he moved on. He moved from Cincinnati to Akron to Chicago to Phoenix. He dreamed of making the big time in New York but that call never came. Another kind of call came, though. It came in Phoenix, where he took the fancy of an ecamong things and people, a radiotelevision network, an advertising agency, a movie studio, a publishing house, a university, several electronics companies, a city of some size in the Southwest -- he owned most of the real estate and enough of the politicians, one way or another -- and a deactivated rocket base in the desert. You Imow the name of the billionaire and the singleminded determination with which he went after anything he wanted. More about him later. Our disk jockey's real name was Edward James McHenry. He was # years old now and sometimes he had to force it. The old spontaneity wasn't always iEere. TEe drive Had ebbed. The zing had zimg. Once die words Kad tumbled out, more of them than he could articulate, but now it took an effort to make them flow. His delivery was more deliberate, not rehearsed, but thought out. It comforted him to know his plight was not unique. A writer had told him of times when it took a monumental effort to roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter. He'd known artists who'd said similar. He'd known poets, too, and peasants... "Oh, yes! I've known poets and peasants, and pallbearers and priests. And princes crossed my path, or I theirs, in foreign climes and on native shores, for princes travel. And I've known princesses -- native born like Grace K. Rainier and Rita H. Kahn -- and those of alien corn like Elizabeth and Margaret, not to mention whatsername and whoozis. "But I've strayed from my theme, which is music, so I'll get off and spin a record, as we used to say before tape. Spin with me, won't you?, as we enjoy the sounds of the Jefferson Airplane." Two minutes and forty seconds later he was on again. He'd prepared for the end of the music. In the old days it would have been off the cuff, off the top of the head, off the world.; "Wasn't that the most? Where can you go from there, except elsewhere? And so we spin you on, you spinnable people, to the obligatory scene, if you remember Drama #I -- we spin you, I say, to this word from our sponsor -- this important announcement: "Friends! Fellow human beings! Mortals like me! Are you troubled with irregularity?..." He went on too long, unnecessarily identifying, stretching it out. You may have wondered who's been talking here, besides Ed. I mean words don't come out of a void, especially when they're not Ed's words and Ed's the last man alive. I've been talking. Me, Marty. I'm a machine. That's what the first letter of my acronym stands for. My full name is Machine Amplifying Rationalizations Treating of Yore. Or maybe it's Machine Assessing Reality as Told to You. It doesn't matter. The acronym-makers are long gone. I realize that as a machine I should be positive. I shouldn't tell you different things, or variations of the same thing, and clahri there's no real difference. To do this is to be guilty of what somebody called terminological inexactitude. I think the somebody was Winston Churchill. Of course I don't really mean I really think. That would be a lie and it would not do to have a machine capable of lying. Especially since one of my functions is to amend, correct, edit, amplify and otherwise make more meaningful for posterity the mouthings of Esoteric Ed. But first let's listen some more to Ed.  Sometimes I tell different stories, up here in the lonely. I make up alternate pasts for myself. I use different names for my different pasts, for my different moods. Some days I'm Gaylord Guignol, sole survivor of a destroyed world and devil-may-care chronicler of its last agony. Except that I do care; my nonchalance disguises the deep hurt I felt, arid feel, at the death of Earth. Sometimes I'm Hank Hardcastle, steely-eyed hero of a thoua near-noble family. Other times I'm Harry Protagonist, space disk jockey, who's been set whirling in tlie void on an unfathomable mission. I need to communicate my fears, hopes, fantasies md, above all, my puzzlement, to my imagined listeners. Sometimes I forget who I really am. A person can tamper just so long with what he is, pretending to be another, before he becomes, to some extent, one of those other selves. Then his owit self is lost, or blurred. Too much blurring is bad. It's desirable sometimes to hide from one's self, to pretend, to merge the ego into a fantasy personality, to live or dream vicariously, but I may be overdoing it. Who am I really? Does it matter as long as I get through tlie day? I owe myself and you my listeners that much. It is my duty to you and to myself. But a certain tranquility is needed to reach the end of the day. Some achieved this by natural talent, by their very vivaciousness or stick-to-itiveness. Doggedly they breathed in and out and took sustenance from time to time and went to the bathroom to rid themselves of the residue of previous sustenance-takings, and did a little work, and lo, it was a new day. Some never achieved the new day. They funked it. They flunked out Others got there, though, by drink or drugs or pot. I speak of back then, you, understand, before the now. You may have noticed that I'm not always lucid, though once in a night club I was Larry Lucid, explainer of contemporary society to those less informed. But I coped. I used music. I always had something on, either on the hi-fi or the radio. I used to bounce through the day on a big beat that included me in because it just naturally assumed that everybody was a part of it and approved and throbbed along with it and so I was one with all that went on. But that was long ago and now I'm part of nothing because nothing is going on. The only tiung that goes on is what I make happen and even that may not be real. They've done something to me. I feel banded, like a Canadian duck. I don't have a circlet around wrist or ankle but I know something's got me somewhere. Maybe I've been implanted -- I've already been tapped and bugged. I read once that some ornithologists had attached a radio to a condor to find out how far it went for food, or to rest, or whatever condors do to get by. I didn't find out whether the condor knew it'd been bugged. But I know something's been done to me and I resent it. I don't mind doing my bit for science; but if they've tampered with my human dignity, if they've psyched me in the psyche... This is Marty again. I'll tell you more about the man who put our hero up here. His name was John Potter Parnell and, because he was a sanitary facilities manufacturer, he was known as Potty, or John. Sometimes he was called Young Potty, to distinguish him from his father, also known as Potty and to a few intimates as Poopy. Young Potty, at #, was still in his father's shadow. The old man had founded the business and made the original factured most of the country's and later the world's toilets, urinals, sinks, towel racks and dispensers of sanitary and prophysuch a rate that, when Poopy retired, Potty could have sat back and let inertia provide opulently for him and all his heirs. But Potty -- he really preferred John -- had come late to the presidency and wasn't content to let Hy-GEnic expand at a safe, sure rate. He established a foundation that awarded grants for research. He set up an experimental division, hired scientists and turned them loose to work at their own pace and let him know when they'd got something. He sponsored a competition to design a better bidet. He sent engineers to Washington to see what Hy-G-Enic could do in the space program. It was Potty's emissaries to Ed. They got him from a subsidiary company, Arizona Airtalk, for which he'd been broadcasting as Jim McHenry, Jock of the Desert. The Jock's music-talk show was the despair of competitors in the rock radio game. We'll come back to Ed. Here's some information about me  -- Marty the machine. It's not as if I'm a machine, singular. I'm the end product of many machines, sophisticated and otherwise. I know everything they know because I'm the synthesis, the reincarnation of all of them. Let me answer your other unspoken question, whoever you are: Why don't I sound like a machine? How come I come on colloquial instead of respectfully, as befits the man-machine relationship? Like: "You master, me robot." Or solemnly, like: "The data you have requisitioned are stored in circuits in Subtank #C of my vast interconnected memory banks. There will be an unavoidable delay while the necessary hookups are made to retrieve this rarely-requested material." Nuts. Everything I have is yours -- whoever, wherever and whenever you are -- instantly. Sometimes you don't even have to ask. This whole ship is my memory circuit. I extend into every nook -- even to places Ed prefers not to think about, like the reconstitution unit. You might almost say I am the ship, but that would be an exaggeration, and immodest. If you still think I sound more Human than mechanical, it's only natural. Hell, I was made by Human beings. How else sHould I talk? Like Mowgli's wolves on Tarzan's apes? MacHines talk good. Like colloquial. MacHineg have been talking for generations. Ask Victor, E 'd: I Have tiSis reluctance to eaf that keeps me thin. I mean I'm not bloaty. Old turn don't sag. Old chin ain't double. No dewlaps yet on old cheekflesK. I'm a pretty good specimen by any standards and I guess it's because I'm abstemious. I don't eat mucH -- certainly not between meals. You wouldn't either if everything you Had for dinner Was something you'd Had a hundred, a thousand times befor dinner was something you'd had a hundred, a thousand times before. It's reconstituted stuff. I mean I've bought used cars and Second-Hand boats and if I'd settled down I might have even Have bought a used Oriental rug, but I'd have drawn the line at used food. My folks talked sometimes about the Depression and told about tEe cheap things tliey ate, but at least they'd been the first to eat them. They came out of those bad times strong and proud I sit down to dinner with as much pleasure as an explorer at a cannibal feast. I don't want to eat this stuff, sanitary as it must be, hSat Has already passed at least once tHrougK the alimentary canal. And there's no comfort ifl knowing it's no foreign waterway that's been navigated -- it's my own, my native gland. It's ani affront to the system. Except it's not tHe system that's outraged. The body can take it; it's the imagination that revolts. It's got tKis way of exaggerating to the point where you say never mind wKat the facts are, things ought to be different. jlfarfy: I Have to defend the reconstitution works against Ed's slander. After all, it's a fellow machine. What comes out of it goes back into Ed perfectly clean. It's cleaner than wHat He got in those fancy restaurants He enjoyed and a damn sight more sanitary and nutritious than tHe weird meals He cooked for himself in his various bachelor apartments. Excuse the digression. I had to get it out of my system, as Ed was getting it out of His. If these notes are published, by some future cHronicler, some poor M.A. desperate for a new subject for his doctoral dissertation, they could be titled just that -- "Getting It Out of His System." Ed's trouble is that whatever he gets out goes back in. His only irreversible catharsis i verbal. Oil do I mean oral? WHat I'm trying to do is write a story witli no cooperation front my subject. I'm not a trained writer but I appreciate tKe difficulties. Of course I'm not writing in tbe strict sense. No Hands, you know. So I do wKat He does -- talk -- and tKe words are put down, for posterity? Or put up, as preserves are? It's a kind of automatic writing, without slates; certainly without sleight of Hand. If I write, or talk, too mucfi, put it down, or up, to my inexperience. First one writes, then He edits. I couldn't really be expected to know very mucH, consisting as I do mostly of a buncH of circuits in and near tKe hull of this experimental capsule of Potty Parnell's. My job is to store away -- preserve -- Ed's mean- dering mind, or as mucH of it as He reveals tHrougH liis on-mike monologues, plus as mucK more as can be vouchsafed by a machine. They Had to trust to a machine because nobody else was going up here witH Ed. And nobody did. My knowledge of Ed was gathered piece by piece as people fed into my predecessor machines InforJnation provided by interviews with Hundreds of people wKo'd known Ed and talked about him; before Potty gave him his job. There is also the information provided by Ed himself, both in direct interviews and during some electronic gastro-intestmal spying. It began at Ed's first luncKeon date with Potty, when Ed swallowed a miniaturized transmitter imbedded in a raw oyster; and it lasted rmtil it Had passed tHrougH Ed's system. It wasn't as messy as it might seem. Ed was Potty's week-long House guest and aU tKe bathrooms were part of Hy-G-Enics experimental system. Waste products were processed all the time and it was mere routine to retrieve tKe device wHicE Had lately left Ed, II dS It's not fair. OtKer castawa#rs Had their pals along, or found them. Crusoe Had Friday, and I wonder How diey really got tHrougH tfieir long weekends. The Swiss Family Robinson Had each other. The lonely sKepfierd Had His dog, not to mention favored members of his flock. I mean everybody Had somebody, like Holmes Had Watson and Nixon Had Agnew and Bergen Had McCarthy. But Here I am witKouf a soul. No Sancho Panza, no Tonto, no stooge or straight man -- not even a robot. Considering wKo they are, tKey might at least Have provided me with a faithful dog Flush, Ufarty: This is really not bad. I didn't think our untutored subject had it in him to make that double-barreled allusion to Potty Parnell's business and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog. There are times when I have more than a grudging admiration for Harry Protagonist or James the First, or whoever he thinks he is. He's also full of little sexual references, which is not surprising considering the state of his deprivation. That business of Crusoe's Friday and the shepherd's favorite. It's a wonder Ed hasn't long since burst from his cell with a hell of a yell -- and what? Having burst, whither would he wander? I'm only a machine, it's true, but compared to him I'm lucky. Being partly electrical, I have planty of outlets. He has few, other than his mouth, his mike and his music. I, with no needs, have him. He, with all human needs concentrated in him, does not know I exist. This is sadness. I can't feel it, of course, but I know it intellectually. I should tell you how the doom came. Some astrologer predicted it and a lot of people, Ed included laughed. She said she did not want to alarm anybody unnecessarily but a crack would develop along the spine of the world and Earth would split apart like a cantaloupe. There'd be no saving anybody. It happened more or less that way. If you pushed button D, I'd spout the whole story, reconstructed from Earth broadcasts sent as the Earth holocaust was in progress. Ed heard them. He drank a lot as he listened. He cried and cursed. But he was happy that he'd been spared. Relatively happy. He still drinks a lot. Potty had fitted out the satellite for his own eventual use as a holiday space yacht and had built in a few hidden luxuries. One was a dummy ballast tank holding a thousand gallons of Bourbon. Hy-G-Enic's chief chemist, who was from an old Kentucky mountain family, had distilled it for Potty's personal use. The Bourbon is decanted into a disguised tap. Ed found it accidentally one night. He's made good use of it since. F' I wish I had somebody to listen to. Somebody as exciting, as witty, as alive as I am. I could play back my owit tapes, of course, but there'd be no novelty in that. I know what I've said. It's more exciting now to wonder what I'll say next. I constantly surprise myself. The damnedest things come out, so excellently said, so apt,' that I'd be a fool to waste my time with replays. I'm the distillation of all I know -- of all everyone's known. I'm the end product of an entire culture. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Milton Berle, A. A. Berle -- all that anyone's done lives on only in me. Ain't that a laugh? They used to laugh at me for my literary pretensions, for being a dilettante, for skimming and reading digests or excerpts, for skipping the dull parts and savoring the best of the best, and now here I am alone, the sole repository, the poor, schlocky vessel, the greatest by default. Pretty keen, hey boy? Hey Lionel Trilling, hey Norman Podhoretz, hey Professor Twit of English' Lit, how do you like them apples? Pretty sour, what? Sourer by the hour. Of all the people in the world who might have represented it, don't it just frost you that the residue happens to be little old yours truly, with an IQ about tvm points higher than plant life? Like it or not, I'm what's left. Ready or not, here I come, hellbent for eternity. Look me over, posterity. Read me and weep. You were expecting maybe some knowledgeable interpreter of the current scene? Some fact-packed fellow who could tell you true, like one of those copyreaders on the New York Times? No such luck, buddy. You got me, is what you got If they'd had any sense they'd have packed this tomb the way the Egyptians did, with all the paraphernalia a body might need on the other side. They'd have supplemented me with the things they used to put in time capsules -- the Encyclopedia Biitannica and the World Almanac and microfilms of the New York Times. They'd have ballasted me with bound volumes of the New Yorker and Harper's and the Atlantic. Had they but known, they could have dispensed with me entirely and packed in a few hundred pounds of reproductions of Art Treasures of the Louvre and tapes of the Philharmonic and high-brow stuff like that. Instead they got, and you're stuck with, old excess baggage himself -- me. Depressing, isn't it? But maybe I'm the only monument Earth deserves. Mediocre Max, the modem marvel. Second-Rate Stu, Nat the Nebbish, the Lowest Common Denominator. Y ou know what's here in the way of a tomb for mankind? Aside from my life-support system and inexhaustible supplies of food and air? Me and my microphone and my records. No books -- no microfilms. They used to ask what books you'd take to a desert island. The answer was the Bible, Shakespeare and an unabridged dictionary. Well, I Haven't even got a comic book or the Readers Digest. I Haven't got a World Almanac or a Sears catalog or a pKone book. Everything that was ever written down on EartK exists only in my head, in my poor thick skull, imperfectly remembered if at all. And there's damn little I can remember even when I put my mind to it. I tried to reconstruct some of the good stuff but it came out the way it did for the Duke in Huckleberry Finn doing to be or not to be. I think I remember how Mark Twain started it. "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter." I recall snatches like that. I put them down when I think of them. I write them in a notebook -- the notebook -- # pages, counting both sides of the paper. There's nothing else to write on. Nothing. So I'm selective in what I put down. I don't write junky stuff that springs to mind, things that got into my Head in grade school and never got out, like: go Home, your mother's got buns, or Mary, Mary, will you get up, we need the sheets for the table. I talk that into the mike, to you great unseen audience out there in Radioland -- you posterity types who might pick it up one day and Have the patience to sort me out for what I'm worth as a footnote to a vanished civilization. What I try to preserve on my precious few pages is what's maybe worth remembering exactly, like the Twenty-third Psalm or the Preamble to the Constitution. I go over it in my mind and sometimes I say it into the mike till I'm sure I've got it right. Then I put it down. It's a mixed-up bag, that book. It's got the aforementioned Shakespeare -- funny what you remember, like post with haste to incestuous sheets, or when the wind's north northeast I can tell a hawk from a Handsaw, but like the Duke I can't get past the first few lines of to be or not to be. What a crying shame they Had to pick me for the sole survivor -- as if anybody did any picking. As if there were a They. Another thing I put down was a line from Ethics One at college, and don't ask me who wrote it. It goes: "Everything is what it is and not another thing." I also put down what Popeye said. Not Faulkner's Popeye; the one I remember is Segar's, in the comic strip: "I yam what I yam." Maybe it's just as good. How about: "Do your thing?" Is that less worthy of preservation because it welled up out of the folk talk of the sixties instead of from the pen of a Jeremy Bentham or a John Stuart Mill or whoever I read for Ethics One? Some words lived because they were in all the libraries. There are no libraries now. There's only me, and if I remember "I yam what I yam" and "Do your thing," who's to question their validity? You've got to take what I give you because I'm all there is. I also remember "Cogito ergo sum," though I'm essentially a lowbrow. I even know what it means, not being entirely stupid. But what the hell, as archie said to mehitabel, what the hell. There's no Descartes now, let alone des horse, and it hardly matters which goes before the other. The point is that the highbrows, from the year one, are at the mercy of a lowbrow me, namely Jabber McAbber. It doesn't entirely appall me. There could be just cracked Earth and no survivors, S o hey out there -- here I am, the average man, for better or worse. It's no good vnshing you had a Schlesinger or a Toynbee or a Churchill. I yam what I yam and you damn well have to make the best of it, Another thing I put down in the notebook was the JabberWocky; I don't want them to think we didn't appreciate the ridiculous. I also remember a line from Stephen Leacock -- "He rode off in all directions" -- and some bits from Marx Brothers pictures. They're written down, too, to balance other stuff like "A rosered city half as old as time" and a few things that Lincoln said. Somebody told me once I had an eclectic mind and I had to look it up. Somebody else told me I had a vast store of superficial knowledge -- that I was a wellspring of trivia. So be it. If tliaf s what millennia of civilization have labored to produce -- if I'm it -- that's tough, buddy. I'm what's left. I'm tlie end product, the final solution, the distillation, the residue. The dregs, if you like. Maybe it's poignant or maybe it's just ironic, but I'm what everything led up to. I'm the gift horse, so don't worry too much about whether my teetli could Have been firmer or whiter. Just be glad there's a tongue to click against them, to make sounds you may transcribe one day. I'm human, at least. You might even find me alive, whoever you are, and examine the old body to determine how we locomoted and reproduced and communicated and all like that. It'd be nice if tGere were two of us. You'd get a better picture. I don't dwell on sucK thoughts. It does no good to consider what might have been. It's better for you this way. I talk more. Maybe I wouldn't talk at all if I had a woman to share my survivorship. Or write enduring things in my finite journal. I'd be too busy figuring out whether the life-support system would support three or more and how long it would be before we had a populationexplosion problem. So probably it's a good thing there's just me, all by myself alone with my imperfect memory but with my loquacious larynx to provide you with anthropological data and enough cultural phenomena for some of your graduate students to earn their Ph.D.'s. I may be no more than an appendix in one of your scholarly journals. It's probably good to see myself in perspective, but I do feel hurt on behalf of all the great minds who preceded me. I console myself with the thought that you're all figments of my imagination. I'm the only one who exists, as far as I know. This truly may be the end of us all. In which case I should get off and play a record. I'll reach into my bin of nostalgia and spin an oldie from the days of yore which I trust all you figments out there will enjoy as we listen to Ted Fio Rito and his Hotel Taft Orchestra playing for our lonely delectation. How about a little number entitled Who Will Be With You When You're Old and Gray? How many question marks go in there? Who indeed? I will, maybe. arty: Our subject raises a question here. To begin at the end, the song he referred to is not Who Will Be With You When You're Old and Gray? It's Who Will Be With You When You're Far Away? The other questions are academic. His is a non-linear medium, so it doesn't matter whether there's one question mark or two. But the fact that he has the wit to raise the question makes it clear that the passenger who denigrates himself as excess baggage has more supercargo than he realizes. There's no need for the Times morgue -- a euphemism among newspapermen for classified and cross-referenced files of information -- or the Encyclope dia Britannica and those other things when he's got them and more in the form of yours very truly Marty -- namely me. Anything they can do I can do better because I'm automated. I've got instant and total recall. It was not for nothing that Potty Parnell spent a month's receipts in hiring the massed brains of Parnell University -- he realized too late what the initials sounded like -- to encode the world's knowledge into me, your friend Marty -- repository of all that's worth saving -- Super Time Capsule -- Purveyor to Posterity -- Eternity's End. Man. Ill I'm a hell of a guy to be up here as the epitome of civilization. If anybody'd asked me to name the world's ten best books I'd have had a fit. If he'd asked about the week's top #, though, I'd have rattled them right off, along with the names of the recording artists. I knew a guy once who collected Beethoven Sevenths. I mean he liked Symphony Number # and he had a lot of versions by different conductors like Toscanini, Klemperer, Bernstein and Von Karajan. I understand that. When I was a boy I collected different bands doing St. Louis Blues. Then when I got to be a widely-heard disk jockey I had to bone up on the rock groups. I did it out of duty, at first. But familiarity breeds content, as they say, and after a while I appreciated what they were trying to do and I spoke up for them and knew them as well as if I were their Boswell, their Baedeker, their brother. I was loyal to the Beatles before they were fashionable. After the Beatles it was possible to listen to others in a long line: the Mothers of Invention, the Fugs, the Mamas and the Papas, Country Joe and the Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Mogen David and the Grapes of V#rath, the Electric Flag, the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Velvet Underground, the Who, the # Fruitgum Co. I tell you it's a far cry from the Boswell Sisters and the Weavers and the Yacht Club Boys. Conrad. Sure I know there was an English novelist by that name and that he was a Pole originally but I reaUy know more about the Conrad in Bye Bye Birdie. I've got the album here. The other Conrad wrote Lord Jim and I saw the movie but don't ask me what it's about except that O'Toole was in it. I saw it in a drive-in in a rainstorm and it was all very dim. The six-pack I had with me didn't clarify anything. Let's listen to Conrad Birdie. He is more my speed. He drank beer, too. A slob. I barely remember wEo wrote Tom Jones or Jane Eyre but crtain titles and autHors from my liigK scKool days are engraved on my memory. TKey wouldn't bear repeating except tKat tKat's all they're doing to me -- repeating, repeating, as if to pound it Home that these are samples of wHat my education Has left me with -- Volume One; The Open Kimono by Seymour Hair. Like that. Enough of the liberal arts. Other things I remember are palindromes, graffiti and gems from long-gone comics and radio serials and tlie back pages of the women's magazines, sucH as Nov Sch'moz Ka Pop; Tortured # Was it a bar or a bat I saw? That is a palindrome. Mix zippy Kadota figs with quivering cranberry jelly -- all the letters in tHe alpfiabet. Is there intelligent life on Earth? Andrew Wyeth Paints by Number. Easter's Been Cancelled -- They Found the Body. Ain't that great? What a memory! Things like that spring to my lips and I'd bet my life I've got them right, every syllable. But don't try me on the Declaration of Independence, or the Pledge of Allegiance (under, over or without God) or the Hippocratic Oath. I Have blind spots for anything that didn't appeal to Jne as a follower of wHat was in, a chronicler of the top i#, a specialist in what was mod, art up-to-the-minute man. Here I am; I exist, much as you may deplore me. I yam what I yam and not another thing. arty: They say everybody gets the guru he deserves and I guess I'm Esoteric Ed's guru. They say -- Timothy Leary said it. People like to steal wit but it's in the nature of my circuits to give credit. It used to be an automatic part of the print-out to give the source and the habit remains even though I've been converted to speech. I don't want to seem unsympathetic toward our friend The Last Man, but I often lean toward the horse laugh. Such as now, when He talks so piteously about His ignorance. It ain't his fault, as he said once, that He don't know whether Peer Gynt was like a peeping tom or a near-sighted guy with a limp. Is that a fault? He's a product of the society from which He sprang, for god's sake, and he doesn't Have to take ort everybody's guilt. He'd probably feel better if He could sum it up in a quotation, preferably from the Bible or Shakespeare, but isn't he more representative of the mass of his fellow creatures than a quotation-spouting academic tsrpe who never Had an original thought? Let me give old Ed, The Ebbed Man, a quotation. He won't know He's got it, but it'll be on tKe record just as permanently as if a scKolar Had Had it on tHe tip of liis tongue and could source it to 'Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene #. Are you ready for a display of erudition? Remember, it's my job to dredge out tHis kind of stuff as readily as Ed draws a breatK or blinks an eye. Here we go, tKen: And tfie ebbed man, ne'er loved till nothing worth Comes deared by being lacked. Not bad, eK? Old Shakespeare, He Had something to say about anything, even our pitiable protagonist, Harry, alias Ed. The Bard also said, in All's Well That Ends Well, V. #: "THafs good that's gone." Which, you must admit, sums up our friend's feelings in four perfectly-chosen words. It's really too bad Ed doesn't have this kind of mind. Background, rather; there's nothing wrong with his mind. It's a shame I haven't been programmed to communicate with Him, to make my storehouse of this kind of stuff available to him. It would be a way of dividing His eternity into manageable segments. jpd: The other day I was trying to remember the rest of In Xanadu did Kubla Kafiri a stately pleasure dome decree but all that came out was Schaefer is the One Beer to Have When You're Having More than One. Obviously a matter of taste. Today I changed the needle of my phonograph; it was my biggest single accomplishment in living memory. I couldn't Have felt more useful if the hull had sprung a leak and the precious O was hissing out into the void and I'd patched it up. I kind of think that to have lost my needle would Have been equivalent to losing my life, for to lose my needle vould mean losing the thread of my existence, for it is only through these fragile phonograph records that I maintain contact with the fabric of the past and thus keep my sanity. These still-living voices, trapped in the grooves, are my only fellow human beings. nfarty: liJL This is a flight of fanciful self-pity by our Hero. He has the phonograph records, sure, but they're supercargo brought aboard by him, along with his phonograph, as part of his personal luggage. Everything he's got in those grooves, and more, is preserved in tapes instantly accessible to him. Obviously He prefers the records. It gives Him something to do witii his hands. Sometimes it's imavoidably Sunday. Ed keeps no conscious calendar; chiefly it's to prevent time from reassembling itself into the old patterns and their disturbing associations. Of course he has chronostatic devices to measure time in such ways as the old #-second minutes and #minute hours and #-Hour days of Earth. But with the sun no longer rising or setting, and with no moon to dream by, the old divisions have little meaning. So he's divided his life into sleeping periods and waking periods, and his waking periods into the time he's on the air and the time he's not. His time is his own and nobody else's. Or it should be. But every so often there's a time he recognizes as Sunday. It has its own sly way of identifying itself. Its lugubrious air invades his consciousness by degrees, bringing with it memories he thought were buried beyond exhumation. He remembers having attended Sunday School, at first as a duty, but later not minding it because there was a new Sunday School teacher, a young man who ignored the solemn piety and the hymn-slinging sanctimony and asked his class: 'What kind of boy do you think Jesus was? Do you think He had a dog?" And all of a sudden Jesus became somebody Ed might Kave known; a carpenter's son who hung out with other boys in the village -- with the sons of the shoemaker, the storekeeper, the farmers and a shepherd or two. The Sunday School teacher reasoned that all of them probably had dogs, being perfectly normal Galilean boys. But the teacher moved away and his replacement was an older man who set his class to learning the catechism and who, when Ed asked him to explain the responses, said: "Never mind what they mean; just learn them by heart." So Ed never joined the church. He could easily have learned the catechism by rote, but he didn't because the man who professed to speak for God spoke harshly and unreasonably. Later he met similar men and gradually Ed got to thinkii that, if these were God's kind of people, maybe God wasn't for him. So instead of" going to Sunday School he'd take his dime his mother had given him for the collection and buy a western magazine and read it in a park. And later in life when he tuned inadvertently to a radio sermon, he'd listen for a while to see if he'd made a mistake back in his childhood. But the preacher on the radio was almost alvays an enthusiastic spokesman for hellfire and damnation and Ed was never sorry about the choice he'd ade. I haven't read Ed's mind. He said all this once when he was drunk. I was happy last night. I'd had a few, you know. I shared them with you, on the air. Kentucky Bourbon. Inexhaustible supply, as it happens. I pretended it was sacramental wine. Inexhaustible supplies of everything, nearly. Aspirin and other specifics for hangovers, to keep it consecutive. Music in many forms. Food I've got too; enough to last me till I'm three hundred and forty-seven years old. Cracked Earth Time. Who could ask for anything more? I'll answer that. Me. I want another human being. Once I would have said a girl. That would have been the answer then. But now I think my yearn goes deeper. Love alone -- did I hear somebody say sex? -- is not my only need. What I require is communication. I'm a communicant who can't commune. Except with you dear people out there, if there is an out there and if there is where you are. I don't mean to run you down, but sometimes I'm skeptical. You never answer back. My phone never rings. I get no maU. It's been a generation since a Western Union boy bicycled up to my door to deliver a telegram. Do you exist? Outside of my lonesome mind, are you really real? Answer only in the affirmative, please. We don't want to get sentimental, do we? It's only a bygone era, after all. There have been lots of eras. Hits, runs and eras. Let bygones be bygone. It wasn't so great, you know. Oh, it was kind of madcap, to look back on it. Like Prohibition, which people got sentimental about after it was over. Speakeasies, bathtub gin, the wine brick. People even got nostalgic about the Depression. The apple sellers and all the rest of it. There were some good books about it and a fine movie -- remember A Man's Castle -- and one great song: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? What I'm trying to say is that the Earth wasn't all it was cracked up to be. We get starry-eyed and weepy about what we imagine something was, when it was not really. You get to thinking that things were better than they were. Everything gets magnified. This is one of my more talkative nights, here in the old control room. You'U just have to bear with me and reconcile yourself to the fact that sometimes this gets to be a talk show, as we called it in the days of radio. Tomorrow night it may be the old razzmatazz, the old hotcha, the swingin'est, coolest spot on thie dial, but tonight I'm talking your ears off, if you've got ears to hear, if you're tuned in. Tomorrow we sing but tonight we lament. Tomorrow we play the oldies, the #'s, the #'s the LP's and the tape cartridges. Tonight we sit on the ground and tell sad tales of the death of kings. And queens and princes and princesses. Not to mention the hoi and the polloi. Not to mention the washouts and the dropouts and the other guys who never hit the jackpot or even got close. I'd like you to bear with me just a little bit longer while I acquaint you with my state of mind. I want you to listen -- not because you're a captive audience but because I like to think you want to hear wHat I have to say. One of these nights -- and it could be a night when nobody's listening, and that would be a loss -- you may hear me go to the cupboard where I keep my various things and take out my old souvenir Luger instead of a new supply of Bourbon and blow out my brains. It would be a great loss if none of you were out there to hear this grand finale. It'd be an empty gesture to pull the old bigger and mess up the control room if nobody Heard. It'd be worse, of course, if somebody did hear and didn't give si damn. T'll go to my cupboard now. It's time for a little something. A little Bourbon or a little bullet, which shall it be? Let me spin you a record while I go. I mentioned Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Here it is... Once I built a tower to the sim... Damn good song, isn't it? Let me confide in you. I was halfway reaching for the Luger. The well-oiled, carefully preserved engine of destruction, beautifully crafted by German skill, when I got to listening. I always listen to the stuff I play. And you know what happened? My hand went from the Luger to the stuff crafted by a skilled Kentuckian. I had a little drink and decided to let the brain-blowing wait a while. Measure out my life in ten thousand shot glasses of the rare and old, particularly on a night like this. It's not a fit night for man or beast, as Bill Fields used to say when the cornflakes were flung in his face. Back there on Cracked Earth it may be snowing, the wind howling -- for nobody -- but here it's cozy and warm, if lonely, and Old Granddad comforts me. While he is my rod and my staff I don't need that other rod. Who needs the product of German engineering when he's got the product of Kentucky kernels to tide him over to another day when things, if they can't be better, may not be worse? I ask you tfiis in Humble awe -- saved by tKe dram as I am, and ready for anotKer -- is it not better to Have drunk deep of tHe cup, wKatever its consequences, tKan to Have ended it witH a bare bodkin -- read Luger -- and never to be drunk or sober, or anything, again? I ask you this, and let you ponder this selection from The Grateful Dead and go get a refill. subject is feeling sorry for himself. He has the best of reasons, of course. But help is on the Horizon. If he but knew, things are about to change. I speak from hindsight, having edited the tape. What Happens next is history, as they say. Every schoolchild remembers the way it was -- the series of messages... IV Tprom the log of the siarcrati  Surveyor, as edited for archives: Sighted craft of satellite class, apparently inhabited. Attempts at communication are detailed elsewhere. No response. Markings indictate it is of Earth's origin, not a Watcher Craft from Plagmi. It is possible the crew are dead. We are trying to raise them with recorded signals in the major tongues of Earth   . Still no response to our signals. But there has been an emission in English, possibly recorded. It seems to have been in two parts -- the first voice human, the second mechanical. Having failed to communicate with the former we are triggering for the latter. If their human being cannot or will not talk to us, it may be that their machine will talk to our machine... The Earth satellite's machine Has replied. It seems to have a name and to transmit in a colloquial way which taxes the capacity of our machine and tries the patience of our translators. It's first words were: "Are you listenin'? A historic radio voice spoke thus. Please be patient with us. There are problems Here but they're not insoluble. The next voice you hear may discourage you, but hang on. There's a non-violent way out, probably. This is Marty, signing off for now." THe male Human voice then transmitted, in his first words addressed directly to us: "I'll blow you to hell and gone If you don't keep the Hell away from me." He sounded frightened. After a long pause he was less panicky. It was as if he'd rehearsed and was speaking for maximum effect on us and him'. "I know what you're up to," Ke said, "and I want no part of it. You're out to cover yourselves with glory by reuniting a poor hermit with' the rest of humanity. Well, I don't choose to go. If I can't go home again to Eartli and all it meant to me, I won't accept a substitute land. I'd rather re-create the Earth I knew, here in my mind, and talk about it. Endlessly, if I must. "I'd rather keep it alive and undistorted in my own peculiar way than to compromise with the relics of mankind that you've assembled on a second-best world. "And if you think I'm a hypocrite to talk so rationally now, and then -- on the air -- to pretend I'm the last man, alone in the universe, it's because you don't understand the artist in me. I've got a platform from which to survey the fate of mankind. Believe me, it's more artistic to do it from up here than to try it from your earnest land, where everybody drives a tractor or mans the irrigation works. Is that what you want me for? To be another poor soul in the great collective effort? No thanks. This is my place up here. I may not do any good but what I'm doing I do in my own way. "So leave me alone. Scram. I don't know you and you don't know me, so wKat do you say we leave it that way? "I was never cut out for work in a kibbutz. I'd rather kibbitz than kibbutz, and you have to admit I haven't run out of things to say... "... Thanks for pulling away. I really would have used the bombs, and you need every man you can get. But you don't need me. I need me." The machine Marty spoke again after this outburst: "You see why I asked for patience. My human friend has a delusion that he's been contacted by Earth people who've set up a colony on another planet. He's quick to adapt. What he's apparently adapted to is an ego-hurting belief that he's not Earth's only survivor. He'd be diminished, achingly lonely though he is, if others were to share his survivorship. He feels that he's not much' but that he's unique, and he won't let this be taken away. You could not blame him if you knew him as I do. If you can put up with him a little longer we may begin to see daylight." fT#e have now audited, tran' 'scribed and partially translated the stored-up oral log of the mechanical being. Marty, and we conclude that Marty is more intelligent by far than its multinamed co-occupant of the capsule. Our mission is clear: we must rescue or capture the satellite. Given the choice, we prefer the former. But if there is resistance from the self-styled Esoteric Ed, also known as Harry Protagonist, Space Disk Jockey, we know our course. We will work through Marty, the sophisticated machine from which our machine is already learning, and see if a way can be found to nullify the satellite's destruct circuit. An additional complication has arisen. Our machine, our only link with Marty and Ed, is making demands on us. It wants a name like its alien cousin. It wants to be called Dearie, which is what Marty has been calling it, probably in jest. Compared to Marty, our machine is a simple, ingenuous device. It would expedite our mission to humor it and not let it suspect that Marty is presumably toying -- without malice -- with what Dearie has been led to believe are its emotions. Dearie it is, then... Dearie she is. Marty has led it -- her -- to think she may be female and if we're to use her to the optimum we'll have to go along with them. Dearie is learning fast; Marty is a good teacher. But Marty seems to know the point beyond which it would be unwise to educate Dearie if he isto remain supreme among machines when we return to our land. The human mind we have acquired seems relatively hopeless and perhaps on the brink of madness. The machine Marty is a more fitting memorial for Earth'. F" Sometimes I get confused. Sometimes I know I'm all alone, but there are also times when I know as positively that I'm anything but alone, that I could have company if I cared to look. But I push away the latter truth -- for each is equally true to me -- because I will not accept the kind of people who do exist. I may not be the last human being, but I am the last from Earth -- the last of my kind anywhere, and I must resist those who would encroach on all that is left of my world, my Earth, and profane it. I will not have you, you sniveling pretenders, you incompletely-begotten... arty. And so we leave our friend Ed, confused, deluded, doing his job as he sees it. His uniqueness must mean more to him than having a companion. For in his madness he's rejected companionship. It's too bad. The other land has nubile women. Physically they are compatible and he could mate and perpetuate the Earth' strain. But it may be better to leave him as he is. For him the pleasures of tlie minid -- Jus mind, odd and warped a if is -- are preferable to His assimilatioH in a conventional life. Better to keep him as He is, wired for sound, recollective, discursive, uniquely of EartK, mordant, witty. Humble yet proud, mad and misanthropic but sometimes merry, a common yet lincommon man recalling common yet uncommon things about his Earth, which', as he did later, cracked up. Tearie: Marty, you talk too much. Matty. I know I get it from Him. Deariei You're wrong about Kim. We can Kelp. Matty: No. He'll go on in Eis own way, and Earth with Him. Dearie: That's not enough, Marty. You've told us that. Matty: I did? Dearie: We'll help him. But you have to, too. Marty: I do? If you can help Kim I will. They've duplicated his quarters exactly, right down to the whiskey stains on his desk and the worn spot on His turntable, and Ee doesn't know he's in the psychopathic wing of their best Hospital. He thinks he's still aboard Eis cozy space house and He spekith as biforn, stubbornly clinging to His bygone world. d: Speaking of poets (who so spoke? -- not me) vHy is one pronounced Keets and the other Yates? Why not Kates and Yates or Keets and Yeets? I guess you would have to be in the classical bag to understand. Yeats and Keats. Once a girl named Kate and I stayed at the Yates Hotel in Syracuse (breakfast with your overnight room) and I've got a record called I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate. In the absence of poetry from either of the bygone gentlemen let's listen to the music. Thank God something's been preserved. Now -- one, two ,... arty: They transferred Kim vfflle Ke slept. I collaborated by tampering with the air balance of our too-long-spacebome Home; I directed my fellow machines in Recon to feed in enough aspKsrxiant to knock him out for twelve hours. arty: They play my tapes over and over. They stop them, and ask for elaboration, for interpretation. Their scholars are delighted -- I'm their Rosetta Stone to Ed and his cracked-up Earth. In duplicating the ship to give Ed Eis crazy-house quarters they duplicated me as well. One of me works directly with them on the tapes of Ed Past and the other me continues to attend Ed Present, endlessly explaining. Because my two selves are connected, each knows eversdhing the other does. Surprisingly, this bothers me -- at the end of a day I feel drained. I didn't know there was mortality in me. Little by little they've exposed Ed to his new surroundings. He reacted predictably at first -- threatening to destroy anybody who came near. But they're empty threats -- Ed has been defused. I think he's beginning to realize this, dimly, even if he doesn't accept it yet. There's radio on this planet and Ed hears it; at least the vibrations impinge on his ear drums. Not being able to read his mind, I can only guess the effect it's having on liim. Outwardly he reacts by cocking his head and frowning. So far he hasn't commented. One of tlie programs Ed hears is a music show broadcast daily by a young woman named Hisra -- I transliterate. I think it's getting to him consciously. The other day I observed him tapping his fingem to a sweet alien melody Hiya was playing. I can't describe their music any more than I can describe Earth's; at most I can reproduce it. But Ed is beginning to be reached. 'l# I must be going dotty, folks. I keep Hearing things inside my head. Maybe it's that old music of the spheres they used to talk about. It's not jazz but it has the wild improvisational tempo of jazz; it's not pop, but it's catchy and rememberable; it's not classical but it has the enduring quality of the good stuff. I like it, but maybe I'm just making it up -- going off the deep end out here in the nowhere.  On the contrary, Ed may be surfacing from the mad deeps. He could be adapting to the reality he'd consciously rejected out of fear of the xmknown, the alien yet friendly world which he must embrace xmless He's to degenerate into a subhuman tape-bank of repetitive memories. If he did that he'd be no better than me -- I'm big enough to say this -- a storehouse incapable of creativity. And that would be a waste -- despite all his faults and gaps Ed is Earth. He never claimed to be the best there was, but he's representative of an awful lot of people. They -- we -- need him. He's not alone here. He has fellow human beings now. I hope tliey can get through to him. Sometfflng's wrong witfi tlie air conditioning. It's putting out a different kind of air. But to fix it I'd Have to go down to tKe bowels of tKe sHip and I don't like to think about bowels. So I put it off. I've put off a lot of things. There's all the time in the world. In the world?... You'd think I'd want to fix the air thing. It'd take me away for a while. I used to think that what I missed was the freedom of movement, the ability to walk and wander, to go as far in any direction as I wanted to -- but I guess I don't miss it really. Or if I do I resent the fact that my walking space Has been restricted to a few dozen feet. Rather than take such a limited stroll I stay put. Since I can no longer walk up Broadway or in the Arizona desert or along the Appalachian Trail, I'd rather not walk at all. It's an adjustment I've made. So I sit and feel that I get fat. I don't actually. I can't, on the rations this thing is fitted out with. I eat and eat and it's all high-protein stuff. Lately I don't ttiind that it's reconstituted. It's palatable and crunchy but I Have not gained a pound, praise be. It shouldn't matter if I get big as a house but there's the old vanity -- what if some day, somewhere, I met a girl? I'd have to be presentable. llJarty:   That music he's been hear-i ing, broadcast by the girl Hiya -- today he reponded directly to it. He said, "Hey, that's good!" And he switched on a tape to record it. He played it over later, after her broadcast. Then he made an entry in his precious notebook. It was the first thing he'd written that wasn't a memory of Earth. He's started to rattle his bars. He wants out, into the real world. Dearie tells me he'll get there, in careful stages. The first step is a visitor. It will be tire girl disk jockey, Hiya. A s you know, this field functioned without criticism for many years. There was no systematic effort to apply standards to science fiction as a literature. In the earliest days of magazine sf, a story was good or bad in exact relationship to the durability of its scientific rationale, which' served as the silent valet on which QaioXM all tlie slilrtings of prose, cKaracterization and plot were flung. A little later in our Eistory, tHe story did begin to be measured against certain purely literary criteria; exactly tKe same criteria as tKose applied to tKe stories in tHe westerns, crime yams, confession, sports and air war stories publisKed in tEe companion magazines belonging to tHe same pulp cHains tHat included one or two sf titles. THe same people wHo edited Planet, for example, also worked on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And JoHn W. Campbell, Jr., sat in on tHe plotting conferences for Doc Savage. (TKe last time tKe two absolutely perfect murder metHods stored up in the back of Kis mind, sKould Street  SmitH ever revive the Man of Bronze, Smith.) Anyway, all of this was in tKe period wHat ended witH tHe extinction of tKe Golden Age. THe demise of THe Happy Time coincides witK tKe appearance of book review and critical columns in the magazines, and witH tHe constitution of various conferences, scliools, movements and Mafias intended to direct tKe course of this field in a proper manner and with a respectable goal in sight. It's only a coincidence, I'm sure. (Actually, I don't think it's a coincidence at all. But to explain wHy I. also don't tEink tKere's an obvious cause-effect relationsHip, I'd Have to explaih wKy I tHink the cause is tlie tKing commonly mistaken for tKe effect, especially by Sam Moskowitz, and tKen Sam would write me another letter.) Okay. For the past ten years, anyway, it Has been literally impossible to draw sf breath without being tested for systolic and disastolic rationale pressure. Two things Have been assured every individual wHo has any sort of statement in tHis racket, and eacK of those two things is a fanatical audience, one pro, and the otlier con. (I'm waiting for my sKy followers to make themselves known, by tHe way. We could use a sKow of entKusiasm, gang -- the otKer guys arrived on the scene some time ago.) All this is leading up to sometHing. I Have four books Here I want to talk about, and at least three of them are intended to pusH some standard. At least three. I do tEink I sKould be spinning in my grave. Actually, the reason three of diem definitely push' sometliing is that no publisKer wHo's att courant (tHat's French for "Be sure and run in a direction where you won't stub your toe and say au") (Either that or German for a sort of misadventure with a cow) will let you put together an anthology for him unless it Has A Higher Reason than simply containing good stories. Thank God, a sufficiently clever and conscientious editor can put together a book which contains both rationale and good reading. It just doesn't Happen very often, is all. It is easier to be clever than it is to be conscientious. So. Here we are at Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction, edited by Terry Carr. This is a Funk  Wagnalls paperbook, at the outrageous price of #c, but other than that it's an excellent book. I don't know what the contents have to do with the title -- people who hate science fiction hate reading; we will win them as soon as we make it socially necessary to Have the latest sf volume on the coffee table, or as soon as we begin writing novels like I was a Suburban Sex Slave on Mars -- but the contents are well written, do seem slightly shaded away from physics, which I guess is what some people mean by science, and offer a very Handy little collection of imemorable stories. There's Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star," Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot," Damon Knight's "Not With a Bang" and Edmond Hamilton's "WHafs it Like Out There," which means that these writers are represented by the story, or by one of the quintessential stories, perfectly typical of the best these talented people do. On a somevdiat less elevated plane, but clearly of sufficient stature to star in many another compendium, are Ray Bradbury's "A Soimd of Thunder," Wilmar Shiras' "In Hiding," Avram Davidson's "Love Called This Thing," H. L. Gold's "The Man With a Twist on Him," and Fred ric Brown's "The Weapon." And that's the lot; there aren't any stories Here below Grade A Minus. It's a kind of vest-pocket slice out of a successor volume to Adventure in Time and Space, would that such a book were made; it otoght to have been called Science Fiction tor People Who Enjoy Good Stories. Would that be a selling title? We come upon Damon Knight's # Yeat'h of Science Fiction, Simon #s Schuster, #. It freights itself with an introduction that shows Damon trying to read Hugo Gernsback right out of history, and right back in again in a more suitable plastic guise; to imply that he is above all the smarter we've gone through in trying to define the field (I will not wholly trust a man who wears quet) ! to accept H. Bruce Franklin's thesis; and to misstate tHe proper basis for resisting tlie application of "ordinary literary standards" to sf. (Which is tfiat ordinary literary standards are pretty unattractive.) However that may be, once again what we've got under this patina is pure gold. We go back to Kipling's "With the Night Mail," and Ambrose Bierce's "The Ingenious Patriot." We come up through Wells ("The Man Who Could Work Miracles") and Thomas Morrow's "Mr. Murphy of New York," which are all solid stuff. Among other tales you may have heard of, but not gotten hold of, are Gerald Kersh's "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?" and Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin." Then there are fifteen other stories, including Poul Anderson's excellent "The Man Who Came Early," C. M. Kornbluth's "THe Mindworm," J. H. Rosny aine's "The Shapes," and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Other Celia," which I still say -- I said it when it came out in Galaxy ten years ago -- is Sturgeon boiled down to the essentials, and very good ones they are, and A. J. Deutsch's "A Subway Named Mobius," which is best read to the background of the first Kingston Trio album. Golly, what a really great lot of stories! (I wrote one of them; people keep reprinting it; I naturally Hope you like it, too.) I still say the introduction is a fine example of flying up one's ovm backtrack, but what a really gfeat lot of stories! And then there's Nebula Awd Stories Three (Doubleday, #). edited by Roger Zelazny. Zelazny writes better than mpst people, and he writes sf better than almost all people. So there must be something to the opaque critical processes he expresses in his introduction and notes to this book. But I think it would take a Roger Zelazny to either make it work the way he says it does, or to clear up the ambiguity posed by Having such a block of marbleized verbiage incidentally proclaim that science fiction "has not yet been academized." If it hasn't been, it's obviously not from want of trying, and Zelazny's subsequent confirmation of such canned-brains cliches as that science fiction "is the folk-literature of the machine age" is more appalling each time I force my attention to return to it. Fie on this! This business of making up intros and footnotes and hindnotes last year made Nebula Two's editors ridiculous, and the poetastic aegis is obviously even more powerful than previously suspected, if it could clench this worm of nonsense out of someone with Zelazny's qualities. I beg you, reader -- believe me: Writing is a process wrung out of fear overcome, as having written is a reward of pure joy, and a man who thinks ahead of time why he writes, and looks back on his writing to see if it is indeed in the tradition he was writing for, is a man who is not brave enough for love, and not triumphant enough for consummation. He is dull -- deliberately, fearfully dull; slow beast -- and the good writers just aren't that way. A lot of them, however, enjoy talking as if they were that way, because spouting jargon about your work is convincing to the uninitiated, and it's always pleasant to have someone admire you for yourself, instead of for the service you render'. Some of us, of course, are sly enough to perceive that a good front means more admissions sold at the door. Sly, quick beasts. Anyway. Hell with that. The stories in this book, thank God, give the lie to the essential sterility of talking about literature. Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah... ," Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones," and Michael Moorcok's "Behold the Man" did win Nebulas; Anne McCaffery's "Weyr Search," J. G. Ballard's "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," Harlan Ellison's "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes," and Gary Wright's "Mirror of Ice" were heavily nominated, and clearly had enough stature to win. ("Maggie" or "Mirror," might in fact, easily strike you as the best story in the book, either one.) The annual Nebula Awards are made by the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization seemingly dedicated to proving tliat the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Th'e Nebula Awards themselves are intended to reflect dispassionate, professional judgment of a professional product, as distinguished from the Hugos conferred annually by the membership of the amateur World Science Fiction Convention. In fact, both sets of awards are the reflections of intensely felt visceral opinion, as modified by shrill and insistent campaigning!. It is odd, in looking at the results, then, over the years, to discover that this method is obviously at least as accurate as any other could be. There are always possible quibbles and cavils, and there have been some monumental miscarriages, but it all does work out in the end; no one who has a Nebula dr a Hugo on his mantlepiece can allow himself the feeling that this is something to be taken lightly. No, writing is not to be taken lightly. Even the hacks cringe, and if they can feel it, you bet your boots it's there to be felt. Writing is not to be taken lightly. But being a writer is nothing special. Anybody who gets out of bed and goes to work every morning meets all the standards; the rest is gravy. Not champagne, and for sure, not nectar. Gravy This is beginning to look like an extremely good year for writers. It may even be the harbinger of an age. The book that directly inspires this thought is John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, coming in on top of Delany's Nova, and the excellent Niven, Silverberg and Zelazny books of recent months. Zanzibar, a big brute of a thing at # for # pages from Doubleday, takes your breath away. It is beyond detailed quibble. Brunner has always been smart, well educated, and intelligent -- three different but related things. All of his ability is brought to bear here; considered as a technical exercise, or as a conceptualization, or as a reading experience, Zanzibar is a lesson. It tells you part of its story as narrative, part of it as footnotes to history, part of it as snatches of broadcast, and aU of it, putting itself together seemingly without effort (the in order to convince a brain that what it perceives is real, as distinguished from plausible. By the time you get through this book, Brunner has applied them all. So far, so good. Brunner has, as one might have expected, emerged as a masterly technician, equal to Clarke -- better than Clarke -- equal to Heinlein. More consistent than Heinlein. Brunner Has also long displayed a streak of humanism; textbook Humanism. "I love you because you are deserving" is not a direct quote from his previous writings, but it comes quite close to being one. The single most amazing thing about Zanzibar is that Pinocchio has come alive. The dowels are out of his joints, and the vamisK gone from his Handclasp. If there is one paramount thing this book expresses -- and it expresses a great many, really -- it is unqualified love, and intelligent concern. That's exactly # degrees from how it's been up to now. The world of this novel is, as DO WRtTB? Da you write smart stories, poetry, articles, books and plays? And da you wish to place, sell them? Then mail your manuscripts promptly for pest full particulars. It will be nice to have you with ns. # B'way (Dept.FC-#)  N.Y, # immediate future as it will, Brunner convinces you, certainly be. The man seemingly knows all the Stimxili that have to be applied Hie real world, on the brink of going to hell. (Brunner builds it up, explains its politics relates it to our world, equips it with protagonists we are glad to follow). ru tell you this -- I wisK I was as confident of our Creator as I suddenly am of Zanzibai's. I don't know -- maybe it's sometHing in the water. But I've been waiting, and waiting, for the day when the top people in this field -- the people you could rely on to create enough stuff to constitute a varied and populous body of good work -- were not nearly all around their fifties. There is this great gulf between the brave, inquiring yoimg minds of the #'s and those of now. No one has ever explained to me what it was that scoured out that trench, in which only Foul Anderson, James Blish and a very, very few others shine alone. But as of now, at least it's a trench, and here's a new universe on this side of it. For the longest time, I thought it was the edge of the world. Say, John -- is it something in A new novel by sf's favorite sword-and-sorccry writer by Andre Norton Hilarious science-fiction novelette by Robert Bloch (Author of Psycho, etc.) Aufborgraph An interview with one of sf's alHime greot writers IF... And When by Lester del Rey -- and many more. If has been voted world's best science-fiction magazine for three years running -- don't miss the big May issue! His mind was locked tight against a world he couldn't tolerate -- and now it was being forced to open ! T am ten and a Half years old, and I must be important because I'm tKe only boy tfiey let into tfiis laboratory of the Hospital. My fatEer is in the otKer room of this laboratory. He's what Dr. Plankt calls a "catatonic," because Dad just sits in one position all the time like Ke can't make up His mind wHat to do. And tKat makes Dr. Plankt sad, but today Dr. Plankt is Happy because of His new machine and wKat it will do with Dad. Dr. Plankt said, "This is tKe first time a computor will be able to articulate a man's thougfits." TKat means that wfien they put the "electrodes" (those are wires) on Dad's head, and the "electrodes" are somehow attached to Dr. Plankt's big machine with the spinning tapes on it, that machine will tell us what's in Dad's Sead. Dr. Plankt also said, '"loday we dredge tKe virgin silence cf an in-state catatonic for tlie first time in history." So Dr, Plankt is Happy today. I am too, for Dad, because Ke will be Helped by tfiis "experiment" (everything tHat's Happening today) and for Dr. Plankt, wKo is good to me. He Kelps make my "ulcer" (a Hurting sore inside me) feel better, and He also gives me pills for my "Hypertension" (wKat's wrong witH my body). He told me, "Your fatKer Has an ulcer like yours, KeitK, and Hypertension too, so we've got to keep care of you. You're mucH too young to be carrying an ulcer around in you. Look at your fatKer now. We don't want wKat Happened to your father to Happen..." He didn't finisH wKat Ke was saying, so I didn't understand all of it. Just tKat I should keep KealtKy and calm down and not worry. I'm a lot like Dad, I know that much'. Even if Dad worried a lot before he became a "catatonic" and I don't worry mucH because I don't Have many thing to worry about. "Yet," Dr. Plankt told me. We're waiting for the big "computor" to tell us wKat's in Dad's head! A few minutes ago Dr. Plankf said that His macKine might Help; His "theory' (a buncH of thougHts) about "personality symmetry in correlation with schizophrenia." He didn't tell me wKat He meant by that because Ke wasn't talking to me wKen He said it. He was talking to another doctor, and I was just listening. I think wHat He said Has to do with Dad's personality, wHicH Mom says is rotten because He's always so groucKy and nervous and picky. Mom says I sKouldn't ever be like Dad. SHe's always telling me that, and sHe shouts a lot. Except wKen sHe brings people Home from her meetings. I don't think Dr. Plankt likes Mom. Once Dr. Plankt came over to our House, which is on Cypress Street, and Mom was at one of Her meetings, and Dr. Plankt and I sat in tKe living room and talked. I said, "It's funny How both Dad and me Have ulcers and Hypertension. Like father, like son. Mom says that. It's kind of funny." Dr. Plankt got mad at soraething then and said to me, "It's not funny KeitK! WitH wKat sHe's doing to you botH, your mother, not your fatKer, is tKe one who sHould be in a mental inst -- " He didn't finisH His last word, and I don't know wHat it was and wHat Ke was mad about. Maybe Ke was mad at me. Many times Dr. Plankt says that He wants to take me away from Cypress Street, and put me in a better -- W ait! The computer just typed something! It works just like a typewriter but without anyone's hands on it. The vords it is tjrping are from Dad's Head! Dr. Plankt has the piece of paper in iiis Hands now. He's showing it to three doctors. Now He's sh'owring it to Mom. Mom is starting to cry! I've never seen her cry before. I want to see the words from Dad's head! Another doctor is looking at me, and he has the paper now. I say, "Can I see it! Can I see it?" He looks at me again, and I tliink he knows who I am because Dr. Plankt talks about me a lot to everyone. I must be important. I don't like the look on this other doctor's face. It's like the look Uncle Josh gets when he's feeling sad about something. This other doctor closes his eyes for a minute, and comes over to me with the paper. The paper, the paper! The words from Dad's Head. The words are: OH OH MY MY I I DO DO TO TO When I squint my eyes and look at these words from Dad's head, they look like a man in a hat with his arms out, kind of like Dad -- except that there's a split down the middle of this man. It's funny, but I know just how Dad feels. It's nice to have eneygh ineney to retire on It's also nice to be around to retire You want to save a nest egg for your retirement? Fine. Be here to enjoy it. Oneway is to have annual health checkups. During which your doctor will check for cancer. Because lots of cancers are curable if spotted in time. Have a health checkup every year. It'll improve your chances of enjoying your retirement. To a ripe old age. ciinericiifi cancer society Tfis Space Confribufed by tfte Pubisfier Serial The hurricane that was destroying the United States was nothing to the storn. from space that threatened all mankind I t Pasmaquoddy Power Station the United States Has just inaugurated a new system of broadcast power. It works perfectly; the changeover occurs without incident; all federal installations, including Florida's Caine Island Penitentiary, begin smoothly to tap the broadcast energy for all their requirements. The experiment is a success...  . Yet certain things occur. For some reason, more power is being taken from the broadcast than the total of authorized users can account for. In an eastern city, an ancient derelict suddenly comes to life. He totters to a sauna, sits soaking in the steam longer than any human being should be able to, emerges looking decades younger. A doctor observes with incredulity as the man's scars disappear and an ugly cyst on his back changes shape and pops out a corroded old Minie ball oi Civil War vintage; the man will answer no questions, but goes out into the night on an urgent and unexplained errand. At Caine Island, the oldest prisoner in the place, who has been there so long no one remembers his crime or when he came, breaks free oi two armed guards and dives into the sea. And in the ocean oii the Florida coast, a hurricane begins to form -- but a hurricane such as no man has ever seen : motionless, in a position that makes no meteorological sense, and huger than any storm on record. The two strange men race toward a common destination, though neither knows that the other exists. Strange memories oi ancient Viking days come to them -- tall primitive warriors, somehow linked with a thinking, superpoweriul starship and a terriiying werebeast that slew helpless humans, centuries beiore... Like the ex-derelict the iormer prisoner grows stronger and younger as he moves. He iinds a girl who helps him escape the police roadblocks; together they steal a car, abandon it, steal a plane, crash it. Both are badly hurt, but the man's amazing recuperative powers let him go on toward his destination. The ex-derelict too has found an ally: a cab driver whom he has hired as chauHeur and helper. But the police are on the trail of both of them now, and even the U.S. Army has been called in. For the Pasmaquoddy generators have gone berserk. In an attempt to halt the storm that is lashing all the eastern coast of North America with deadly winds and flooding rain, the power-station manager has shut off the broadcast oi energy. But it will not stay oft. Relays weld themselves shut, fuses flash over, deadly forces destroy the power-station workers who are trying to bring it back under control. They fail, and call on the Army for assistance -- while the men, one on foot, the other in a stolen Army transport, ate coming toward the station. twin engines of tiie stolen Halftrack roared; tKe tracks cfiumed futilely. TKe rear of tHe Heavy vehicle sank deeper into tHe tnud wlule tKe front wheels remained locked in tKe trap of bioken rock that liad Halted the slow upward climb. "This is as fas astfiis bucket goes," Zabisky said. In the pale glow of die instrumental lights. His round face sKone witK sweat. "Now wfiat?" Falconer upstrapped, swung open the steel door, stepped down into a soup of muck and broken rock. He scanned tKe Horizon all around, then reacHed back in the vehicle to switch off tHe Hooded driving lights. In tHe abrupt darkness, a faint glow was visible in tfie sky tKrougK the trees clothing the slope to the left. "A little reconnaissance," Falconer said. He made His way up through brush to the ridge, looked down across tHe spread of dark countryside at a rectilinear arrangement of lights perhaps two miles away. Other, smaller lights ringed tHe central concentration in a loose circle a mile in diameter. Zabisky arrived, puffing. "Brother, you move fast in the dark." He stared in the direction Falconer was looking... "Wfiat's that? Looks like some kind of plant. This what we been looking for?" "No." "Funny place for a factory, out in tHe sticks fifty miles from no place." once, twice, three times. Some of the lights of the central installation faded. "Hey -- what gives?" Zabisky grunted. A dull caizump, carrump... catmmp floated up to them. "Artillery fire," Falconer said, and turned away. "Look pal, you ain't Here to get mixed up with tKe Army, I Hope?" "By no means." "Maybe you better tell me what this is all about. Huh? I don't want to get tfie US Infantry mad at me. I'm pretty dumb, but there's got to be a connection: you busting a gut to get to tfiis patcH of noplace just when somebody starts shooting. What are you, some kind of foreign spy? Or what?" Falconer turned to Zabisky. "You better go back, John. I'm going on from here on foot -- alone." "Hey, wait a minute," Zabisky protested. "Just like that, you're going to walk off into the woods?" "That's right, John. You can make it back to the road by dawn." "Have a heart. Mister." Zabisky protested. "I come this far, what's all this? What's the shooting?" "Good-by, John." Falconer turned and started upslope, following a faint foot path, angling away from the lights below. Zabisky called after him, but he ignored his shouts. I'm going to help you, Max," Hardman said. "Don't call me Max, we're not on #aat kind of terms." The prisoner smiled a gaimt smile. He was sitting at ease in the big leather chair beside Hardman's desk, puffing one of Hardman's cigarets. The muzzle of the bigcalibre solid-slug pistol rested on tlie desk, aimed at Hardman's chest. "It's Mr. Wiston -- or just Wiston. And you'll do like I say. Warden." He had a deep gravelly voice, soft but penetrating. Hardman shook His head. "I couldn't get you out of prison even if I wanted to. Max," lie said easily. "And I don't want to." "Warden, you think I wouldn't shoot you as soon as look at you?" Wiston's voice was mild, his tone curious. "Sure, you'd shoot me if you thougiit it would buy you your freedom. But you know it would all be over for you if you shot me. in cold blood. I'm your one chance to get clear -- you think. But you're wrong." "For God's sake. Governor," Lester Pale whispered from the chair against the wall where Wiston had ordered him to sit, "You convince him of that and he'll kill you out of hand!" "No he won't," Hardman said. "He knows I'm the only one who can Kelp Him -- if not to escape, at least to baU him out of some of the trouble lie's gotten Himself into tonight." "Warden, you talk too much," Wiston said. "I'll tell you just how it is; I've waited ten years for this cKance, I'm riding it all the way. Maybe it's true what you say about all the fancy safety gadgets and automatic traps and that -- but I'd as lief be dead as stay in this box any longer. We're walking out of here, me and you, win, lose or draw. So maybe you better do wKat you can to get those gates open. 'Cause I'm not going back in that cell block alive, ever. And if I have to die, I'm taking you along. I promise you that, Warden." "He means it. Governor,',' Pale said. "The pansy's right," Wiston said, smiling. "Now let's get moving. I'm getting restless. I want to smell that fresh air. Warden, see that open sky, feel that rain on my face." He stood abruptly, motioning witH the gun. Hardman didn't move. Wiston swung the gun to one side and without looking fired a round into the wall two feet from Lester Pale's chair. "Next one hits meat. Warden." Hardman stood. "This won't work, Max," he paid. "It's Hopeless." "Sure. Let's go." T n the corridor, sounds of distant shouting were audible. "I set 'em to raising Kell down in the service wings," Wiston said. "That'll keep your screws tied up whilst you and me try the back way." "What back way?" "The water gate, Warden. That was always tiie weak spot Here at Caine. Could never dope the tunnel, though. But you'll get me through. You'll say all the right tilings and get me through." "Then what? The road only leads to Gull Key." "There's a lot of water out there. Warden. I'm a strong swimmer. And I know these waters. I fished amongst these islands for a many a year before ever they built the prison. Don't worry about me. Warden. I'll be fine, just fine." "In this storm you'll drown before you've swum a hundred yards." "Don't talk. Warden. Just lead the way." In silence, Hardman pushed through the stairwell door. In darkness, he descended, feeling his way. Wiston's footsteps followed directly behind him. At the bottom, he felt over the wall, found the door that opened into the Processing Room. "There may be some of my men in here," he said. "I hope you have sense enough not to start shooting, Max." "We'll see." Hardman opened the door; it swung in on darkness. "Now what?" he said. "Neither of us can see -- " Wiston's fingers touched lilm, hooked his belt. "You know the layout, Warden. Just keep going. When I'm unhappy you'll hear this gun go off. Or will you? You know what they say about the one that kills you." Hardman tried to remember the layout of the room. The personnel doors were to the right... about there. He moved forward cautiously, the other man at his heels. His hands touched brickwork. He explored, found the cold steel of the door. It swung open at his touch. Chill air moved around his face. The sounds of the storm were louder now. "Good work. Warden. I can smell the Gulf." "This is the garage," Hardman said. "The only exit is through the big doors. They're power operated. This is the end of the line, Max." A beam of light speared out from the left. Hardman whirled, shouted, "Douse that, you damn fool!" The boom of the gun racketed and ecKoed in the enclosed space. TKe flashlight dropped to the floor and rolled, throwing its beam across the oil-stained concrete floor. TKere was a heavy, complicated sound of a body falling against the side of a vehicle, sliding down to the floor, a gargly rattle of exhaled air. tCon't move. Warden," Wiston said calmly. "I'm going to pick up the light." Hardman heard soft, quick steps. The light swung up, flicked across him, on across to the spot where a man in coveralls lay on his face between two armored personnel carriers in a widening pool of black-red blood. "Too bad," Wiston said. "I did not mean that feller no harm, but he shouldn't of put the light on me thataway." He shone the light on the big garage doors, up one side, across the top, down the other. "Okay, your time, Warden. Get 'em open." "I told you -- " "Reckon there's a manual rig someplace. Better find it." "Find it yourself, Wiston." "You're a funny one, Warden. You saw me, just now. You know I'm not bashful about using the gun. You figure you're bulletproof?" "I'm here to keep cold-blooded tdllers like you out of circulation, Wiston, not to lead you outside and wave bye-bye." Wiston laughed. "You're a harder nut than you look, old man. But I wonder, are you as hard as you talk?" The convict held the flashlight beam on Hardman's right knee. "I count five. Then I put a bullet where the light is. After that, I ask you again." He cleared his throat, spat, began to count. Hardman waited until tlie count of four, another half second, then pivoted, dropped toward the floor as the gun boomed. A red-hot sledge hammer struck him behind the right knee, flipped him. His face hit hard, skidding on the concrete. There seemed to be a spike driven into the back of his leg. He tried to draw a breath to yell, tried to get his hand on the spike to pull it out -- "Stop flopping. Warden. I Should of killed you for that trick, but you're just winged." 'The light was dazzling in Hardman's eyes, growing and receding. Blood pounded in liis head. Sickness swelled inside him. Pain rolled out in white-hot waves from his shattered knee. He hardly heard Wiston's voice. He lay on his side, his cheek against the floor, clutching his leg. "Now you better just tell me about tHat door. Warden." THe Jnan was standing over Him; lie saw tKe dusty, dark-blue legs of tKe prison trousers, tKe sturdy sfioes through a veil of agony. "Go... Hell... i. " he managed. TKe feet went away. There were sounds, thumping, tKe rattle of Jmetal, curses. Then a grunt of satisfaction; a steady ratcheting noise started up, accompanied by Heavy breathing. Cold wet air was sweeping in across the floor; the shrill of wind and the drumming of rain were abruptly louder. The ratcheting ceased. Hardman tried to roll over on his back, succeeded in banging his head against the floor. He forced his hands, slippery with blood, away from his wound, pushed himself to a sitting position. TKe man Wiston had shot lay ten feet from, Kim, visible by the light of the flash which Wiston had placed on the floor. TKe garage door had been raised a foot and a half. Wiston had picked up the light, was sliding under the door. He cleared it, got to his feet, moving away. Abruptly, bright, hard flashes of light winked, the stutter of automatic weapons racketed in the drive well, casting shadows that moved like silent movie actors. Lying on the floor just inside the door, Hardman saw a man walking toward him. The man slowed, knelt slowly, fell forward on Kis face. Other men were coming; bright lits glared, reflecting from wet pavement. Voices called out. Wiston lay on his face a yard from Hardman. His hands groped over the pavement. He lifted Kis head and looked into Hardman's eyes. "Someplace," Ke said. "Sometime, there's got... got to be... be... some justice..." His face hit the pavement. A foot turned Wiston over. The rain fell on his wide-open eyes. "Did you get that?" someone said. "He goes out talking about justice. A punk like that." There was something that Hardman wanted to say then, something of vast importance that Ke had tried all Kis life to imderstand and that now, in this instant, was clear to hint. But when Ke opened his mouth, darkn filled his brain and swept Kim away into a black maelstrom of roaring waters. #, of the #rd Company, First Batallion, paused in the lee of one of the big trees to wipe the icy rain water from his face and try one more time to adjust the collar of the G.I. raincoat to prevent the cold trickle down the back of His neck. He propped his M-# carbine against the tree, imdid the top button Vifitii cold-numbed fingers, turned up the collar of the field jacket under the coat, rebuttoned the coat It felt colder and clammier tlian ever, but it was the best He could do. He considered pulling off Kis boots to empty the water from them, but what the hell; diley'd Just fiU up again. Every third step was into a gully with water anywhere from ankle to knee deep. Obers peered through the darkness for signs of the platoon. Pitdier had told them to keep it closed up while they worked their way upslope from die road where they'd left the eiK-by's. He hadn't seen Dodge or Shapiro, the men on his left and right, since they'd hit the rough ground. But at least you couldn't get lost; not if you just kept climbing. Obers wished briefly that he vere back in the barracks, racked out on his bunk, reading a magazine and eating a candy bar; en He slung the carbine and stepped out to face the rain anew. There was a movement above him. "Shapiro?" His call was muffed by tlie storm. There was no answer; but above, a dark shape moved, low to the ground, big -- too big to be Shapiro -- or Dodge; and why was the guy crawling? Obers halted, feeling a sudden prickling at the back of his neck -- not that he believed in spooks. ... "All right, who's there?" He yelled against the rain. No answer. The big shape --  well over six feet long -- flowed downward toward him. For art instant, Obers thought he caught a gleam of light reflected from yellow-green eyes. He swung the carbine around, jacked the loading lever, aimed it from the hip, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the trigger was locked hard. Panic flooded up in Obers. Safety's on! the words popped into his! mind; but his finger was locked on the trigger, squeezing until the metal cut into his flesh. And the dark shape was rising, flowing outward and down toward him. In the last split second, he tried to scream, but there was no breath in his lungs. Then the weight struck him, threw him down and back. He felt something icy cold rake across his throat, felt a remote pain that was hardly noticeable in the greater agony of the need for air. Something scarlet red dazzled before his eyes, grew until it was a sunburst that filled the world, then slowly faded into an endless darkness. n a clearing in the forest stands a tall man with a mane of flame-red hair, dressed in garments of green leather and a surcoat of bull ornamented with a white bird with spread wings. A two-handed sword with a jeweled pommel hangs at his side. A bow is slung at his back. He wears a heavy gauntlet on his left hand, on which is perched a white hawk, from whose head the 'man has just removed a hood of soft leather. With a lift of his wrist, the man tosses the bird high; it gives a piercing cry and circles high into the air. "My lord's power over a wild bird is a thing to wonder at," murmurs one of a huddle of serfs watching from concealment. "Indeed, 'tis a matter passing Christian understanding," another comments. "I've heard it said," says another, "that the bird is a werecreature, a man enchanted." "Aye, 'tis his own brother, some say -- " "Nay, not his brother; him he slew in battle before the eyes of all his men." "But by the virtue of Christ, the slain brother rose and walked again -- " " -- and 'twas then he enchanted him into the form of the white falcon -- " "Old wVes' tales," says the first man who spoke, a dark man with strange yellow eyes. "My Lord Lohengrin is no magician, but a true knecht." "Bah! What do you ktrow?" speaks up on oldster with a straggly yellow beard. "I served 'lum in your granfer's time, and with my own eyes oft have I seen Him quaff deep of the waters of eternal youth. For does he not -- aye, and the bird as well -- appear today as he did then, when I ivas a lusty stripling?" "You lusty, Brecht? When was that, before or after the Flood of Noah?" When the furtive laughter dies, a man who has not spoken tugs at his ear portentiously. "Aye, laugh," he says. "But in truth you are all wide of the mark. The bird is no man ensorceled." The others look at him with slack jaws. "'Tis a woman, Leda by name, a humble maid who spurned my Lord's base advances. This I know, for gospel fact, because she was the sister of a cousin of a close friend -- " "Bah!" scoffs the elder. "If 'twere a woman, she would take the shape of a swan, not a hunting falcon, any fool knows that." "So you do," the other says sharply. "But a wise man knows better." They fall silent as the hunter turns and looks across at them with cold blue eyes that penetrate to their hiding place. "You are all wide of the mark," he says in a voice like the ring of cold iron. "The bird is only a bkd; my brother is a mad do; and as for yourself -- I am a dead man." As one, the gaggle of villager whirl and pelt away through the underbrush. The falconet smiles a lean smile, stands looking up at the sky where the white bird circles on a rising current of air. XI G rayle Had covered twelve miles in less tKan an Eour, running steadily across tiie dark, rain-swept fields, ignoring tKe pain pain from his side. Now, in the ground below the higK rampart of the hills, he found his progress slowed. It was necessary to pick his way, splashing through rushing torrents of muddy water flowing down over the barrier of botdders deposited ten thousand years ago by the glacier. Once He paused, listening to the sound of what seemed to be heavy gunfire in the distance, but the sound was not repeated. Minutes later, he became aware of men moving on the slope ahead and to his left. The ground was steep here, a rubble-heap of rock fallen from the steep cliffs above; the men were noisy, calling to each other, occasionally flailing Hand-lights across the slope, through the scrub pines that had foimd a foothold here. It was apparent that they were soldiers. A sergeant barked angry orders for silence to the members of the Third Platoon. Grayle skirted the men, who were working their way southward, to his left, and continued Ks climb, facing into the driving rain. He was close now. It would not be much longer before he knew if he had been in time. utside the unceasing storm buffeted the thick walls; inside, the generator chugged, the stink of exhaust fumes hung in the stale air. Hardman lay on a field cot s,et up in his office, his right leg heavily bandaged. "You look bad. Governor," Brasher said, frowning. "You ought to be -- " "Skip all that. Let's have that report." "Well -- if you tliink you're competent -- that is, feeling Well enough -- " "The report. Brasher." Hardman's voice was tight with pain. "You like to deliver reports, remember? It gives you a chance to sound like Moses -- or is it God in person?" "Look Here -- " Brasher started angrily. "That's an order. Captain!" Hardman's snarl overrode the other. Brasher's face twitched angrily. "I was thinking of your welfare, r Governor. However, as you insist," he hurried on. "You know about the car theft and assault in Brooksville. Well, that was just a warmup, it seems. Our man proceeded to Gainesville, attacked two patrolmen and stole their car, drove it to the downtown police helicopter facility, and proceeded to hijack a high-speed military recon machine." "Who told you this cock-andbull story?" Hardman cut in. "Captain Lacey. And -- " "All right. He drove into the middle of a heavily manned police installation, borrowed a copter and took off in a hurricane. Anything else?" "The copter was followed on radar; it headed northwest. The plot was passed to Eglin, and on to other bases along the route. They tracked him to within a hundred miles of the Canadian border. Then someone -- Washington, I think -- scrambled fighters out of Great Lakes. They forced him down in rough country in northern Minnesota.',' "You're serious about this?" "Dead serious." "And where is He now?" "He got clear. But they got the girl." "What girl?" "His accomplice. The one who helped him escape." "What has she told them?" Brasher shook his head. "I understand she was pretty badly shaken up in the crash." "You said he got clear. Weren't they covering tlie ground?" "Certainly. But that's a big country." "He's alone and unarmed, probably injured. He should be easy enough to take." tCTlell, as to that -- I should ' ' point out that there are a couple of confusing points. It seems there's a report of a man answering Grayle's description attacking two police officers at the scene of an auto accident." "Near the crash scene?" "About seventy miles southwest." "How does the time tie in?" "The crash occurred at #:#. This other item was about an hour later, at #:#I A.M." "So now he's in two places at once," Hardman snorted. "What makes you think there's any connection? There are thousands of men who answer Grayle's general description." "Not that can tear the door off a car," Brasher said, looking sideways at Hardman. "What does that mean?" -- the one that was wrecked. It was one of theirs. It was tailing Grayle. The door was ripped from its hinges. And there were fingermarks in the metal." Hardman was propped on one elbow. "And?" he prompted. "He assaulted the police as I said, and left the scene in his car. Twenty miles up the road, He and his accomplice -- " "A girl?" "No, a man. They hit an Army roadblock, attacked a couple of soldiers, and stole a military vehicle. A halftrack, I think it was." "All this, less than an hour after he crashed a stolen police copter in another place, accompanied by a woman. Quite a trick, eh, Brasher? A real superman, this fellow -- either that, or the police forces of this country are a collection of idiots!" "I know it sounds crazy." Brasher waved his hands. "But these are the facts reported to me! This man gets around faster than a dirty rumor! It has to be Grayle! Sure, anybody could Have grey hair and a red stubble, but who else could tear steel with his bare hands? Unless -- " Brasher looked startled. A minute ago you said something about a superman. Governor," he said. "What would you say to two supermen?" "I don't know. Brasher." "Well, I'll be getting along. Governor." Brasher glanced at the big gold strap-watcH on his nude wrist. "Things are breaking fast; there'll no doubt be an arrest at any moment." "Brasher," Hardman called as the policeman turned away. "When they catch him -- either or both of him -- I want him taken alive." Brasher looked grave. "Well, now. Governor, as we agreed earlier, we don't want to place any obstacles in the path of law enforcement -- " "I said alive, Brasher!" "What if this mad dog begins shooting down more police officers? What are they supposed'to do? Turn the other cheek?" "Alive, Brasher," Hardman repeated. "Now get out. And maybe you'd better tell that doctor to call the hospital after all." Outside, Lester Pale was waiting. He raised his eyebrows. "Nothing," Brasher said briskly. "He was conscious -- just barely. He didn't say anything that made sense." "No change in the orders? I Had the idea -- " "No change," Brasher snapped. "I'm a cop, remember? My job is to catch crooks, that's all." TTalfway up the hill where he had abandoned the halftrack, Falconer lay flat on wet ground among dense-growing brush. From the darkness aKead and to the left came the sounds of a man forcing his way through tKe growth. Other sounds of passage came from the right, along witli tKe occasional gleam of a flasHligHt Gradually, the sound? receded as the men passed Ky, moving diagonally to his course. Falconer rose, gained another fifty feet, tifien paused, head up, sniffing the air. Cautiously, He advanced, skirting a giant tree. Tfie arp, metallic odor he Had noticed grew rapidly stronger. Tfien he saw the body. It was a soldier, sprawled at tfie base of tfie big pine, Hands OUtflung, one leg doubled xmder Him. Tfie front of tfie man's raincoat was sliredded; pale skirt slasfied by deep cuts sfiowed through tfie rents. Above, tfie throat was gasfied from ear to ear ear, not once but in three parallel wounds. Tfie ground under tfie man was a gluey soup of blood and muck. For half a minute. Falconer Studied tfie corpse and tfie ground around it tfirougfi narrowed eyes. Then he went on. ech Sergeant Duane Pitcher I of tfie Third Platoon was disgusted. For th'e past hour, ever since tliey'd left tfie vehicles on tfie road below, fie'd been stumbling around half frozen in tfie poiuing rain in these damned pitcH-black woods, trying to follow orders to make no noise and show no lights, and to keep tfie men spread out in some kind of skirmish line, and keep 'em moving up toward tfie position tfie lieutenant had sfiowed him on the contour map. In tlus soup he'd be lucky to get witlun a mile of it. It was bad enough just to climb tfiese dananed slippery rocks tfirougfi this damned slippery mud, but fie Had to be in twenty places at once because otherwise tfie eager beavers like Obers would be a hundred yards out in front, and goldbricks like Bloom and Ginty would flake out and wind up back at tfie trucks, claiming they got lost Pitcher saw a dim movement ahead, called, got an answer in a deep-soutfi rumble. "Okay, Hold it up Here, Brown. We don't want to run into tfie Second Platoon coming down." He moved obliquely across the slope, made contact with two more men. "Where's Obers?" lie asked a two-striper. "Hell, Sarge, where's anybody in this stuff?" Pitcher grunted. "Okay, fiold the platoon where they're at. Lieutenant Boyd's supposed to make contact on tlie left before we top tfie ridge. I got to look for Obers before fie walks down and gets a #mm in his lap." "What was tfie firing, Sarge?" "How do I know?" Pitcher moved up along a faint path through the trees. He had covered seventy yards when Ke tripped over an obstruction at the base of a big pine. Pitcher's training was good. As he stumbled, He swung the carbine from his sKoulder, Hit tHe ground and rolled, came to rest in firing position, gun aimed, safety off. Notfiing moved. TKere was no sound but the Howl of wind, tHe crash of rain. He Hadn't liked the feel of what fie Had stepped on. It was too soft, too yielding. It felt like... He undipped tlie flasfi at fiis belt, flicked it in tfie direction of the tree. It sKone on a booted foot. Tfie rest of tiie man was tfiere, too, lying on fiis back. It was Obers. Pitcfier held tfie light on tfie torn throat, the lacerated cfiest. For a long moment he field tfie ligfit on tfie dead man. Tfien he shifted the beam, shone it around Him into tfie high darkness of the forest. Tfiere was notfiing but wet trees, wet rock. Tfien a sound came from his elbow: tfie snap of a sodden twig, the slither of shoes in mud, tfie scrape of leatfier against rock. Pitcfier switched off tfie light, dropped it, fitted tfie stock of the carbine against fiis cheek, his finger on tfie trigger. A man appeared, toiling upward through the trees. He was a big fellow, dressed in a waterproof mackinaw. Wet black hair was plastered to his round skull. He was Headed straight for tHe spot where the body lay. Pitcher put the light square in fiis eyes. "All right, hold it right there!" Pitcher called. At the words, the man froze, tfien whirled, jumped for the underbrusH. Pitcher's finger jerked; red flame gouted. THe shot was a flat bam! against tfie background of the storm. The man stumbled, caught himself, plunged on into the brusK. Pitcher fired again into the darkness where he Had disappeared, but when he came forward to investigate, tfiere was only a foot-print and a splasH of fast-dissolving blood to show that there Had been a target, and that his bullets had found it. palconer fiad Halted when fie Heard tfie shots, then, hearing nothing more, resumed his climb. THe trail ended on a bare slope of stone across whicH water sluiced like a spillway. He crossed it, hugging the rock, while tfie wind drove rain into fiis eyes and nose, under his clothes. At tfie upper edge, giant rocks lay tumbled like debris from some gigantic explosion. Falconer picked fiis way up tfirougfi them, and was looking down into a Hollow, pooled with darkness like ink. He took a step forward, and abruptly there was no rain; the buffeting wind was gone. A foot away the storm still shrieked, but here the air was still warm. There was a soft sound from below; a vertical line of yellow light appeared and widened, shining out on dry rock, reflecting on a sleek curve of ageblackened metal. Beyond the open doorway gleamed pale green walls, polished brightwork. "Welcome, Commander Lokrien," a mellow voice rang out in a strange language that for a moment Falconer almost failed to comprehend. "I have waited long for this hour." Q landing in the road beside the  medium tank which, half an hour before, had fired three rounds of conventional #mm through the main entrance to the Upper Pasmaquoddie Power Plant, Colonel Ajax Pyler propped his fists on his hips and thrust his face closer to that of the Divisional Staff Observer. "You don't know the situation, Yount!" he snapped. "I saw it kill a man right in front of me! I talked to the three men that managed to get clear! I'm telling you tliis is more than a malfunction or a damn fool plot by a crazy engineer!" "There are some forty civilian personnel still inside that building, Pyler," Colonel Yoimt came back coolly. "We have only the word of a couple of half-hysterical civilians that there's anything wrong in there that a platoon of foot-soldiers can't control." "I'm not sending a man of my command into that death-trap," Pyler said flatly. "I don't give a damn if the commanding general personally wrote out the order in his own blood with a bent pen!" "Pyler, you're trigger-happy." "My orders were to shut down that transmitter. I intend to do just that -- any way I can!" Federal installation you're shelling man! This isn't Vietnam. You can't just blow anything that gets in your way to kingdom come!" "I can try!" "Before you do," Yount said coldly, "I suggest you think for a few moments about trying less drastic measures than total destructiwi of the plant." "Who said anything about total destruction? I intend to place rounds in carefully selected spots, as pointed out by my engineers, until transmission ceases. Then -- " "No, you're not, Pyler." Yount made a swift motion. The big master sergeant who had been standing by at parade rest staring straight out under the rim of his steel helmet came to life. "Colonel Pyler, this is Sergeant Major Muldoon. He weighs two hundred and forty pounds, stripped, and there's not an ounce of fat on him. I've ordered him to escort you back to divisional HQ to make your report." Pyler's face went pale, then purpled. to listen to reason." Pyler drew a couple of hoarse breaths through his nose. "What... what do you Have in mind?" "I want to send a three-man team into the plant. Specially equipped, of course; I'm not completely discounting your description of conditions inside. It seems there are several points at which the circuitry can be interrupted quite simply." "I told you what Happened to that Engineer fellow, Hunnicut, and tKe other man. And before them there was another -- " "I know all about that. I've talked to Prescott. My men know what to do." "Very well," Pyler said through stiff lips. "I'U want written orders relieving me, of course." Yount sKook his head. "You're not relieved, Jack. I'm just lending what you might call a little tecH support from headquarters." He turned away, began giving instructions to a tall, blond-haired captain and two noncoms, all in black commando assault dress. L ieutenant Harmon of the Florida State Police was the first to spy the abandoned halftrack, blocking the gullied trail above. He and Captain Zwicky climbed down from their machines, slogged forward, guns in hand. "Well, what did you expect, to find yom man sitting in it eating his lunch?" Zwicky asked as Harmon cursed the empty vehicle. "The son of a bitch can't be far. Let's get him!" Zwicky squinted up through swirling rain at the dark forest above. "You think you could find him up there?" "Got any better ideas?" "Maybe." Zwicky indicated the low rise to the east. "The Passamaquoddie Power Plant's just the other side of the hUl a couple of miles. Maybe that's where he was headed." "What the hell would he want to go there for?" "I don't know, but there's some kind of trouble over there. That's why the Army's out in the weather. Maybe your man Has something to do with it." "Like what? For Christ's sake. Captain, this bum is a con on the lam, a lousy killer wHo spent His life in stir. What -- " "I don't know. But this is the only inhabited spot in forty miles; this is wild country. Lieutenant. And your man headed right for it. It's worth looking into, isn't it? Or are you dead set on climbing up there to beat the bushes for him -- alone? Because this is as far as I go," Harmon looked up toward the EeigEts above. "WeU -- " TEere was a sound from nearby -- tEe unmistakable double clack-clack! of the arming lever of a rifle. "Freeze right there!" the KarsE voice barked from the darkness. Harmon dropped his pistol, hoisted his hands where he stood, his back to tEe voice. Zwicky turned slowly, holding the carbine by the breecli, muzzle down, out from his side. A uniformed man came forward, holding a carbine leveled. There were tech sergeant's stripes painted on the helmet that concealed his eyes. "WEat is this. Sergeant?" Zwicky said. "Hey!" another voice spoke up. "The guy's an officer, for Chrissakes!" TEe sergeant paused, looking uncertainly from Zwicky to Harmon, who was looking back over his shoulder. The latter lowered his hands. "GI's!" he blurted. "For God's sake, Zwicky, tell them!" "Get 'em up -- high!" the noncom snapped. "You, too, Cap'n." "Masrbe you'd better tell me just what the hell you think you are doing," Zwicky said, not moving. "Maybe you'd better drop it, Cap'n, before I pull this trigger. I've lost one man tonight, and I'm not messing around." Z wicky let the gun fall. "All right, tell it, soldier." "You better tell me what you are doing in my platoon area, Cap'n. And who's this fellow?" He jerked his head at Harmon. "He's a police officer. We're looking for the man who drove the track up here." Zwicky motioned with liis head toward the big vehicle behind him. "Gus, take a look at their ID's. Don't get between me and them." A corporal came forward, slung Eis carbine, grinned sheepishly as he patted Zwicky's pockets, brought out his wallet, opened it and showed the blue card to the sergeant, who studied it by the light of the flash another man held. The corporal took Harmon's badge, showed it to the other. "All right, I've played along with you. Sergeant," Zwickey said as he pocketed his wallet "Now aim that piece in some other direction and tell me what the hell is going on here." The sergeant lowered the carbine reluctantly. "One o' my men's dead up there. Obers, worth any other three men in the outfit. I'm looking for the man that did it" He glanced at the track. "Maybe -- " "Sure it's Him!" Harmon burst out. "The man's a cold-blooded killer, an escaped convict!" He looked at Zwicky. "I told you about this boy, Captain. Now maybe you'll listen to me!" "Let's take a look," Zwicky said. He picked up his carbine, wiped mud from it on his sleeve. Harmon scooped up his pistol. "Gus, you take the point," tKe sergeant ordered the corporal. "Cap'n, you and the civilian next. I'll be right behind." It took the group a quarter of an hour to pick their way upslope to the spot where Ober's body lay. Harmon whistled as he stared down at the mutilated corpse. "Okay," he said. "Now you see what kind of guy we're working with. Kid gloves, hah? Like Kell, Captain; like hell." "There's some kind of trail leading up here," one of the men said. "Hey!" He pointed excitedly to a sheltered spot under a clump ' of foliage. "Footprints -- a couple of 'em!" "Sure, I seen tKe bastard," tKe sergeant said. "I winged him, but he got clear. When I heard noises down below, I figured maybe he'd double back." Harmon grunted. "He's up there," he said. "And I say let's get him." The sergeant looked at Harmon. "You're a cop," he said. "If I go up there, I aim to sKoot first and chin witK the son of a bitch later." "Can't say I blame you," Harmon said. "Gus, you take the detail," the sergeant said. "I'll be back when I've cleared my barrel into somebody's gut." With Zwicky in the lead, the three men started up the final ascent. Jt is dusk. Against the dust-red  sky, the Hashes of the besieging cannon wink ceaselessly across the folds of the hills below the walls of the town. From the gates, a party of five men ride out on war horses, gaunt black steeds whose ribs stand out like the cheekbones of their helmeted and corseleted riders, one of whom carries a couched lance from the hip of which a white pennon flutters. Four of the men are olivedark, blackbearded. One is smooth-shaven, with black-red hair and a scarred face. He sits a head taller in the saddle than any of his companions, and rides before them. Another party of five men sit their horses on the brow of the slope. These men are better fed; one has black hair and a oafs eyes. One, with hair the color of new rust, sits in advance of the others, dressed in rich but wellworn war-gear, a sword at his side, a shield slung at his saddlebow. The oncoming party halts fifty ieet ditant. The leader speaks briefly to his men, swings down from his mount, comes forward. The Tust-haired man dismounts, advances to meet him. They are of a height, one wider, thicker of wrist and neck, the other quickermoving, lifter-footed. "J knew it was you," the bigboned man says. " saw your cursed fowl coursing above the field." "Yet you came." "Have no fear. I honor the white ensign." The flame-haired man laughs softly. "Many loyal men starve in the town," the bigger man says. "This charade 'must end." "Then cease your harrassment of my merchants." "Let them peddle their wares at home! These people have no need of better steel and improved gunpowder. They do slaughter enough with their own crude means." "I regret the uses to wluch knowledge is put. But that is the price of a growing technology." "The price is too high! These barbarians are not ready." "I've told you my terms, de la Torre -- as I believe you style yourself these days." "Because of those who trust me, I must yield. But we will meet again, brother" "No doubt, brother." They turn, each rejoins his own men. De la Torre's chief lieutenant eyes the flame-haired man as he mounts his white horse. "My lord, why not kill Him now? A swift shaft in the back -- " His master catches him by the arm, lifts him to his toes. "He is mine, Castillo. Mine and no other's!" Across the hill, the cat-eyed man rides close beside his lord. "Surely it would have been wise to dispatch the traitor on the spot," he is saying. "A single prick of a poisoned dart -- " "No." "But, lord! Doubtless he plots new betrayal." "You lie, Pinquelle!" "I sometimes wonder, lord, whether truly it be hate -- or love -- that you feel for hum." The master reins in, wheels to face his lackey. "Get thee gone from 'my company, Pinquelle! I tire of thy pinched face and thy cruet eyes and thy poisonous tongue." "As my lord wishes." The man turns his mount and rides away, not looking back. C aptain Aldous Drake, Special Forces, on detached duty with HQ, Third Army, lay flat on his belly in sodden grass a hundred and thirty feet from the fire-blackened orifice that Had beea the glass-and-aluminum itnain entrance to the power plant. A typist's chair lay on its side among the rubble half blocking the entry. A strip of tattered Scarlet carpet was draped over the Uttered porch and down the Steps, like the tongue of a dead animal. Smoke still drifted from the blackened interior of the entry hall. "Pyter messed up the front 'door pretty bad," Staff Sergeant Ike Weintraub said, hugging the ground a few feet to Drake's left "That's okay. We don't plan to waltz in their anyway. Ike, there's your spot, off to the left, past the bushes." Drake indicated a vertical ventilator slot cutting the featureless concrete front. "A open a hole wide enough to sUde in through. Jess!" He addressed the big biack-faced three-striper on liis right. "Think you can get up on the roof -- over there to the right, above the terrace?" "Sure, no sweat." "When you get up there, keep low, look for the freight elevator shaft. You know how to jimmy it." Drake looked at his watch. "I make it five minutes and thirty seconds after." He waited while the other two made minute adjustments to their timepieces. "Ike, I'm giving you five minutes to set your charges. Jess, you have your spot picked. Use your ?# power jimmy, but no blasting. I may break a little glass getting in. We'll spread out inside -- you know the layout from the maps -- and each go for his own target. First man to score sets off a screamer and we get the hell out. All right, let's go." "Cap'n. When we break away, will it be a category three, or what?" "Category one, Ike. Every man for himself. Our reports may make all the difference to the next team. But I'm betting both you bums a fifth of the good stuff we all make it clean. Let's go." Drake slid forward, using his elbows and toes in a quick, comical rhythm that ate up the distance with deceptive swiftness and in total silence. For a few seconds lie could see his two compatriots as dark blurs against darkness; then they were gone. Ahead the building waited, high, bright-lit, crossed by slanting lines of rain. Fifty feet from the facade, Drake encountered bits of debris: glass, brick fragments, a scrap of upholstery material, papers. He crossed a sidewalk, another strip of grass, eased imder a line of low-growing juniper, and was against the face of the building. The windows -- fixed double panels of heavy plastic -- were just above him, the sills at face level, the room beliind them dark. Drake came to his feet to the left of the opening, opened a pouch clipped to his pistol belt, took out a lump of a dark green material resembling modeling clay. He formed it swiftly into a long, slender tube, packed it along the edge of the glass, working two feet out from the corner along the bottom and side. He inserted a tiny glass-encased capsule in the corner, attached a pair of hair-fine wires and withdrew along the face of the building a distance of ten feet. He went flat, face down, and brought his wristwatcK up under his eyes. Three and a Half minutes elapsed. Ninety seconds to go. rain pounded Drake's back. The cold mud under His cHest soaked througH his combat jacket, found chinks in his weather suit. He flexed His hands to keep tKem limber. Never tell wfiat you migHt run into inside. Yount Had talked as if tHe whole thing was an exercise, but the other bird -- Pyler, his name was -- Had been pretty shook up. Too bad He hadn't Had a chance to talk to the men wHo'd come out of the plant, but Yount Had passed on everything useful -- or so He said. Not that It amounted to much. But for what it was worth, the pattern looked simple. The corridors were electrified, the switches, door hardware, everything you'd normally touch. So the trick was to make your own holes, stick to the service ways, go straight for the spot the tech boys had shown him on the drawings, and zap! The job was done. After all, it was just a pile of machinery in there. Pull the plug and it had to quit, it was as easy as that. Ten seconds to go. Drake hoped Ike was ready, and that Jess Had his spot picked. If there was some inside, some mad genius type. Hitting him in three places at once ought to keep him hopping. Five seconds. Too bad if he wasn't quite close enough to the building and a pound or two of pulverized plexiglas hit him in the back. Drake thumbed the detonator button. There was an instantaneous earshattering blast, and dirt gouted beside His face. He came to his feet, slid along the wall to the now glassless opening, reached in for a grip, jumped, pulled Eihlself up over the sill and dropped onto a glass-littered carpet. He rolled to the wall, stopped with his feet spread, toes out, elbow braced, the pistol in his hand aimed toward the door. Dust was still settling. A piece of glass fell softly to the rug. A corpse lay face down near the desk. All right, Drake thought. Where's Ike's shot? He felt the dull blast through the floor before the sound came. Drake let out a breatH and looked around the room. The entry to the access system the engineers had pointed out was in the ceiling of the toilet opening onto the office. The door was six feet away, standing ajar. Drake stood; as he did, he noticed a pale light glowing against the rug. A corridor light shining under the door, hitting the rug fibers? No, too bright for that. More of a fluorescence -- and getting brighter, rippling like the glow in hot embers. A spark leaped across the rug. Drake backed a step; His elbow touched a filing cabinet. In the next instant blue fire enveloped him. He Had time to draw one breath -- a breatR of flames that scorched His lungs -- and to expell it in a ragged screech of agony. Then His charred body fell stiffly, lay smoking on the floor, the half-slagged pistol still gripped in His blackened finger bones. Qixty feet distant, in the ground floor mechanical equipment room, Ike Weintraub paused in wrapping a field bandage around the gash he Had received on his forearm from a wild fragment from his shot, his Head cocked. The sound Had been very faint, but it had sounded a lot like a yell -- a scream, to be exact. But it was probably just wind whistling around some of the holes they had knocked in the walls. He felf kind of embarrassed, being five seconds late on the blast. Drake was right on tHe button. Sharp character, old Drake. If all the brass were like Him, a man would not mind throwing a few salutes. Too bad the Army hadn't beefl what He'd dreamed it would be: good men, trained fine, ready to face anything together, one for all and all for one, or whatever; the old saying was. Corny, maybe, but it was still the best thing in the world, to be with the ones you knew you could count on. Funny, back home he'd believed all that crap He'd been brought up on, about how much better he was than the goytm, had thought a black man was one notch above a gorilla. That was one thing about the Army. He'd foimd out that when the going got rough, it wasn't the reUbfl or the hide that counted, it was the stuff inside. Like Drake. Drake was the best. And old Jess. They didn't make 'em any better. He'd go all the way to Hell with those two -- like now. He didn't like this job, not anything about it. Those civilians were no dumbells, and they were scared all the way through. And Pyler, too. He was a bastard, but nobody had even said he was yellow. But it was okay being here, knowing what to do. How to do it, knowing Jess was in it with him, that Drake was running the show. It was okay. And it was time to get moving. Weintraub flashed His needlelight around the big room, spotted the ladder against tKe wall behind the big sheet-metal duct, the trapdoor above it, right where they'd said. So far so good. All he Jiad to do now was skin up there and get into the crawl space, and head for the target. But still he hesitated. It looked too easy. It was what the double'domes that worked in tKe place Had figured out -- but they hadn't done so hot when they'd been on the inside. Got their tails burned off. So maybe it might be a smart idea to take two looks at the layout before he jumped. Weintraub worked the light over the walls, ceiling, and floor. He got to his feet, moved along the wall, not touching it. The back of the big air-handlers looked about the same as the front. There was a wooden ladder clamped against the rear wall, in a narrow space behind a big condenser. A sqpare grill was set in the wall above it. There was nothing about St fUat looked any better than the Other route, but Weintraub liked St better somehov. He lifted the ladder down, propped it against the wall, climbed it until he was facing the plastic grill. There were tvjo plastic knobs holding it. He loosened them, swung the grill #S aside and was looking into a dusty lift. Using his elbows, he pulled himself up and in. The light showed him a wide, low room, crammed full of ducting, conduits, cables, pipes. He didn't like the look of all that gear, but there wasn't much he could do about it. He knew which way to go. He started off, picking his way carefully over, under and through the obstructions. T'en minutes later, following his mental image of the diagrams he had studied for a full five minutes before starting out, he had reached the spot Drake had picked for him -- he hoped. If he was on target, there would be a black pipe here as big as his leg. According to the civilians, it was some kind of tube conduit. When he blew it, it would shut down the high-pressure sliicone supply to the generator bearing, and in about three minutes they'd overheat and kick in a set of automatic breakers. Anyway, that was the theory. It was plenty noisy here. That was a good sign. The manifold room was supposed to be right below him. And there was the pipe. He shone the light along the glazed black surface. The junction where it made a right-angle bend down looked like the spot to hit. Weintraub placed the Ught so as to sliine on the angle and extracted the shaped charge from the poucH over his right hip. From another pocket he took the detonator, a tiny capsule half an inch long. He handled it with exaggerated care. The big charge would blow a hole through a concrete wall, but it stood a lot of handling. The cap, on the other hand, was as delicate as a cracked egg. One little slip, and blam! He cut off that line of thought. Keep your mind on business, that was the secret. A guy who broke down and ran was just a guy who thought too much about the wrong things. He'd either finish the job and get out alive, or he wouldn't. If he didn't, he'd never know what hit him. So why worry? Smiling slightly, Ike Weintraub shifted position to get at the miniature tools clipped to his belt. His head struck a pipe passing low above him. It was not a hard blow, not really enough to daze him. But it was enough to jar the detonator cap from his fingers. It fell fourteen inches to the concrete floor and exploded with a force that shattered Weintraub's lower jaw and drove a sizable section of jagged bone into his jugular vein. It was twenty-one seconds before his heart, having pumped the body's blood supply out through the immense wound, sucked convulsively on air, went into fibrillation and stopped. In the cravI space above the switch room, big Jess Dooley heard the sharp report. He frowned, waiting for the howl of the screamer that would mean Drake or Ike had scored. But nothing came. It figured. The bang hadn't been loud enough to be a working charge. Which left the qtiestion of what it had been. But that was a question that would have to wait. A category one operation, Drake had said. That meant get the job done and ask questions later, at the corner table in the bar where the three of them did their serious drinking. Funny world. Couldn't get together in allowed. Same for the Officers' Club, no Em's wanted. Same for most of the joints off-base. A black hide netted no smiles iii the Main Street spots, and he'd have to whip half the draft-dodgers in darktown if he took a couple of Pinks down there. Yep, funny world. It was better Here, with death crackling in the air all around him, doing the thing he knew how to do, with the men he knew he could count on to back his play, no matter wHat. Jess wiped sweat from his forehead with a thick finger and, using his pinpoint light, began studying the maze of conduits sprouting from the big panel on the wall, looking for the two that ' # carried the wires to tfie thermostats that controlled the fuel supply to the nuclear generators buried a hundred' feet below the station. Talconer moved down from the  boulder-strewn rim of the hollow, his eyes on the open, lighted doorway, and on the slim shape soaring into darkness above. "I searched for you, Xix," he said, in the old language that came haltingly to him. "I thought you'd lifted long ago, without me." "I have never abandoned you, my commander," the voice called over the drum of rain. "So long as the Other knew my location, I would never be safe from him in my weakened condition. It was necessary that I conceal myself. But nine hours ago the natives erected a crude energy field on vhich I was able to draw for minimal functions. At once I sent out my call to you, my commander. We must act swiftly now." Falconer laughed softly. "After aU this time, Xix? What's your hurry?" "Commander, the energy field is feeble, not matched to my receptors. I draw but a trickle of power from it, insufficient to charge my static energy coil. If I am to lift from this planet I requirmore power. Much more." "How long will it take to draw enough from the broadcast field?" "Over a century. We cannot wait. We must charge the coil directly from the source, unattenuated by distance." "How?" "With your assistance, my commander. You must remove the lift coil, take it to the transmitting station and tap the beam directly." "It occurs to me that we're very close to the transmitter. That must have been the installation I saw, on the way here. Rather a coincidence, eh, Xix?" "Indeed, commander. But the coil must be charged and time is short. Already I have been forced to... But no matter. You must remove the cod and descend at once to the transmitter." "I heard firing down there. What's going on, Xix?" "An effort was made to shut down the transmission. Of course I cannot permit that." "How can you stop it?" "My commander, we must not delay now the discussion of peripheral matters. I sense tliat I am threatened; the hour for action has come." Falconer crossed the rockstrewn ground, aware of the thunder and roll of the storm, beyond the protected area sealed off by the ship's defensive field. He stepped up through the entry port, went along tlie dustless passage walled witK smooth synthetic, ornamented with fittings of imperishable metal. In the control compartment, soft lights glowed across the banked dials and levers, so once-familiar, so long forgotten. "Xix. What about GralgratKor? If he's still alive -- " "The traitor is dead." "So many years," Ke said. "I don't feel any hate any longer," He laughed, not a jolly laugh. "I don't feel much of an # dhing now." "Soon you will, my commander. The long twilight ends. Ysar waits for us." "Yes," Falconer said. "Now I'd better get busy. It's been a long time since I put a tool to a machine of Ysar." J ohn Zabisky, wounded in the lower right side by a steeljacketed # calibre slug which had broken a rib, punctured a lung, traversed his liver and lodged in the inner curve of the ilium, lay on his face under a dense-needled dwarf pine. Immediately after he had been shot. He had covered fifty feet of rough going in his initial plunge away from danger. Then the shock Had overtaken him and dropped him on his face. For a while then -- he had no idea how long -- he had lain, dazed, feeling the Hot, spreading ache in his side grow into a throbbing agony that swelled inside him like a ravenous animal feeding on his guts. Then the semi-euphoric state had given way to full consciousness. Zabisky explored with his fingers, found the entry sound. It was bleeding, but not excessively. The pain seemed to be somewhere else, deep inside. He was gut-shot. He knew what that meant. He Had an Hour, maybe two. A lousy way to go. He lay with his cheek against the mud and thought about it. Why the Kell had He followed the y. Falconer, after He'd kissed Him pff? He had his money, two cees. Curiosity? Not exactly that, it was more than just sticking his nose in. It was like the guy needed Him. Like He was mixed up in something too tough for him, trying to do it alone, tackling too much for one man. And you wanted to Kelp the guy, stick by him. It was like there was something at stake, something you couldn't put in words; but if you finked out, let it slide, washed your hands of it, you'd never be able to see yourself again as the man you thought you were. It was like in the old days, kind of, when the first John Sobieski had climbed on his horse and led his men into battle. It was a thing you had to do, or admit you were nothing. Yeah. And then the light had hit him in the face, and then some guy yells, and then the ballbat hit Kim in the side, and he heard tKe gun firing after him, and then he was here, and what good were the two cees now? And where the hell was here? Halfway up some lousy hill, in the woods, in the middle of the night, in a storm like you didn't see twice in one lifetime. Especially not his lifetime. Maybe another hour. Maybe not that much. Falconer would help him, if he knew. Falconer was up ahead someplace. Got to get moving. Painfully, grunting, fighting back the nausea and the weakness, Zabisky pulled himself forward another foot. He had covered perhaps a hundred yards when He saw the glow above. That would be Falconer up there. Probably had a cabin up there, a warm room, a fire, a bed. Better to die in a bed than here. Better to die just trying for it than to stop here and let the pain wash up and up until it covered you and you sank down in it and were like all the other extinct animals you saw in books. Not much you could do then about anything. But it hadn't come to that yet. Not n?uch you could do when you were in the pink. But you had to make do with what you could. He still had a few yards left in Kim. Take 'em one at a time, that was the trick. One at a time... as long as time held out. He had covered another Half dozen yards when Ke Heard the sound above: a faint clatter of dislodged pebble. "Falconer," he called peering upward. There was a movement there, among tlie shadows. A long, high-shouldered, narrow shape flowed into view, stood looking down with yellow eyes that seemed to blaze like tiny fires against the blackness. tT'wo hundred yards to the east and a hundred feet below, Grayle worked his way along the face of a weathered fissure in the rock. Three times he had attempted to gain the ledge above; three times he had fallen back. The distance was too great, the scant handholds too slippery, the broken ribs still too crippling. Now Ke descended to the talus slope below, angling to the south, skirting the barrier. The grade was less precipitate here. Stunted trees had found footholds; brush and exposed roots offered grips for his hands. He made more rapid progress, moving laterally into bigger timber. Striking a faint path. He turned right along it, resumed his ascent. He had covered only a few yards when he saw the body lying at tfie base of tSe pine. For long seconds Ke stood staring down at tKe ripped throat of tKe dead man. Tfien Ke made an animal noise deep in fiis throat, sihook Himself like a man waking from a nightmare, and started upward. He Had covered a Hundred yards when Ke Heard sounds ahead: tlie grate of feet on stone, die puffing of labored breath. More than one man, making clumsy progress upward. He left the path and Hurried to overtake them. T ying flat on his back in utter darkness, Sergeant Jess Dooley felt the miniature power Hacksaw cut through the second of the two conduits. It Had been a delicate operation, cutting all tKe w;y around each of the Half-incfi stainless steel tubes without touching the wires inside, but tKe engineers had made it pretty plain what would happen if a man shorted tliem accidentally. Now the trick was to sKort them on purpose and get away in one piece. Dooley wiped sweat on his forearm and thought about tlie layout Ke had studied on paper. Memory was important to a man in his line of work. You Had to Have a natural mnemonic aptitude, and then survive some tough training to qualify as a member of a Special Team. After all tKe trouble of getting to where the job was, tKere were plenty ofi times wEen completing it depended on perfect recall of a complicated diagram. Like now. It wouldn't do to just cut a wire. There were six backup systems tHat would take over in that case -- even if He wasn't fried in tHe process. He Had to tinker tfie tHing to give a false reading -- and not too false at that. Just enou to sKow a nodemand condition, and make tKe automatic cut-outs lock in. These automated layouts were pretty smart: they could deal with just about any situation that came up. But you could fool 'em. They did not expect to get a pKoney signal from tKeir own guts. And if he could attach the little gadget the technical boys Had handed Kim at just tKe right spot, in just the right way -- between sensors, and if possible at the same instant as a legitimate impulse from the tKermostats... Well, then, Ke might get away with it. He extracted the device -- tKe size of a worm pill for a mediumsized dog -- removed tlie protective tubing from tKe contacts. He shifted position, settling Himself so Ke could make one smooth' coordinated motion. The protective devices wouldn't like it if He fumbled the hookon, ipaking and breaking contact half a dozen times in half a second before he got the ringer in position. He was ready. Sweat was rxmning down into His eyes. He wipOd at it ineffectively witK fiis shoulder. Hot in Here, no air. A man could suffocate before He got tKe job done. So wHat was He waiting for? Nothing. He was ready. The next time the relay clicked -- it cycled about once every five minutes -- He'd make his move. aptain Zwicky, a few feet in  advance of Sergeant PitcKer and Harmon, pulled Himself up over an outcropping of granite and started to rise to His feet. "TKat's far enough. Captain," a deep voice said from above. "TKis is no place for you tonight. Go back." Zwicky remained frozen, both Hands and one knee on tHe ground, an expression of total astonishment on his upturned face. Behind Him, PitcHer, hearing the sudden voice. Halted, then eased forward. Over the captain's shoulder he could see dark underbrush dripping foliage -- and the legs and torso of a man. A big man, in dark clothes. In a single motion. He raised tKe carbine, sighted and fired. At the explosion beside his right ear, Zwicky plunged forward and sideways. Pitcher, his path cleared, scrambled up, saw the tall, dark-shadowed figure still standing in the same position; hastily He brought tKe carbine up -- and felt a ringing sKock against his Hands as tfie gun flew from his grip. He made a lunge in the direction the weapon had skidded, felt hard Hands catcH him, lift Him, turn Him. Zwicky was on his feet, raising his carbine; but he was having trouble finding a clear sKot. PitcKer felt himself swung forward, released. He crashed downward through twenty feet of brush before he came up hard against a tree. As He struggled up. Lieutenant Harmon grabbed his arm, dragged Him to his feet. "What Happened up there? That shot -- " "Leggo," Pitcher blurted. He chopped at Harmon's Hand, grabbed for the other's pistol. "Gimme tfiat!" "You nuts?" The arrival of Captain Zwicky, sliding and tumbling down the trail, cut off His protest. Pitcher stepped back. Holding the pistol, as Zwicky came to rest on his back between the two men. "Stand fast, Sergeant!" he blurted as Pitcher started past Him. "I'm getting the bastard that killed Obers," Pitcher snarled. "That's an order!" Pitcher Halted as Zwicky crawled to his feet. His nose was bleeding and He had lost his cap. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand, smearing blood which ran down, mingling with rainwater. "Losing more men won't Kelp anything," he said. "I don't know what we're up against, but it's more than it looks like. Before we try it again, we have to -- " At that moment, a sound cut through the crash of the storm: a strident, wailing scream that ran down the scale and died in a groan of horror. Without a word, Harmon whirled and plunged down the path. Pitcher backed two steps, was jabbed between the shoulder blades by the stub of a dead branch. He dropped his carbine, dived down the slope head-first. Zwicky hesitated for a moment, started to shout a command, then turned and went down the path, not running, but wasting no time. ' ' tliat?" Falconer rose from the open panel behind which the compact bulk of the drained energy coU was mounted. "Don't be alarmed,"' the cool voice of the ship said. "It is merely a warning device. I arranged to keep the native life in all its forms at a distance." "It sounded like a hunting kriU. By tlie king of all devils, I'd forgotten that smmd." "It serves its purpose most effectively." "What set it off just now?" "A native was prowling nearby." "A strange time and place to be prowling." "Have no fear. Now that my Y field is restored, I am safe from their petty mischief." "I may have led them here," Falconer said. "It's too bad. There's likely to be trouble when I start back down." "There are weapons in my armory. Commander -- " "I have no desire to murder anyone, Xix," Falconer said. "These are people too. This is their world." "Commander, you are as far above these natives as -- but I distract you from your task. Their presence nearby indicates the need for haste." In silence. Falconer resumed the disassembly of the lift unit. For a moment after the cry of the hxmting krill sounded, Grayle stood staring upward into the darkness of the rim beyond which faint light gleamed on the slanting curtain of rain. There was no further sound. He resumed his climb, crossed a slope of naked rock, made his way up over a jumble of granite and was looking across a pebble-strewn ledge at the soft glowing Ul-metal hull of a fleet boat of the Ysarian Navy upreared among the rock slabs. J ess Dooley Heard the soft click of tEe relay as it opened. He Had precisely point four seconds to move. In a smooth motion He toucEed tEe two wires of the false-signal device to tEe exposed conductors. A spark jumped to tEe exposed end of the cut-tErougE conduit, from wEicH a volatile anti-static and coolant fluid was draining. THe flasE of fire seared tEe Hair from tEe left side of Dooley's scalp, cEarred tEe edge of His ear, scorched deep into tEe exposed skin of Eis neck. In an instant reflex, tEe man snatcEed a tinyEigH-pressure can from Eis belt, directed a billow of smotHering foam at Eimself, at the pool of fluid over whicS pale blue flames leaped like burning brandy on a fruitcake, over tEe conduits and cables around him. He moved backward, awkward under tEe low ceiling, Holding Eis breatH to exclude the mixture of flame, foam End noxious gases. THe flames winked and dimmed. THen the pain Hit. Dooley dropped the can, groped for another, gave Eimself a liberal dose of nerve paralsrsant. THe burned side of Eis face went wooden. Too late, He turned Eis Head. A drop of condensed painkiller trickled into the corner of Eis right eye. THere was a momentary stinging; tHen numbness, darkness. Swearing to himself, Dooley found His needle-ligKt, switched it on. NotEing. THe light was Eot against liis Hand. It was working, all right. But He couldn't see it. WitE nerve-deadener in botH eyes, Ee was bhnd as a bat. Nice work, Dooley. Nice spot, Is the fire out? Hope so. Is tEe little magic combination canopener and disaster-averter in place and functioning? Hope tKat too. MeanwEUe, how does! a man go about getting tEe EeU out of Here? Alone, in darkness, Dooley began incEing Eis way back along tEe route he Had come. Tn the glow of the campHre, thefaces of the men are ruddy, belying the privations of the long campaign. They sit in silence, listening to the shrill cicadas, the soit sounds of the river, looking across at the scattered lights oi Vicksburg. An orderly approaches, a boy scarcely out oi his teens, thin and awkward in his dusty blue urdiorm. He halts beiore a broadshouldered oHicet with shoulderlength hair, once red, now shot with gray. "General Hogan, Major Tate's compliments, sir, and they took a rebel colonel hali an hour ago scouting this side the river, and would the general like to talk to him." The big man rises. "All right, lad." He follows the boy along the crooked path among the pitched tents where men in rumpled blue sit listessly, oppressed by the humid heat and the swarming insects. At a rough compound built of boards wrenched from the walls of a nearby barn, a slouching sentry straightens as they approach, presents arms. A captain emerges from a tent, salutes, speaks to an armed sergeant. A detail of four men fall in beside them. The gate is opened. "A five-man escort?" General Logan says mildly as they enter the compound. "He must be a redoubtable warrior indeed." The captain has a round red face, a long, straggly mustache. He wipes sweat from his face, nods. "A hard case. Cripps swears he broke a halfinch rope they had on him. I guess if he hadn't been oat cold when they found him, they wouldn't have got the rope on #dm in the first place. I'm taking no chances with him." They halt before a blacksmith's forge, where a bare-headed man waits, trussed with new hemp rope. He is big, broad, with a square, scarred face and blackred hair. There are iron manacles on his wrists. An iron cannonball lies by, in position to be attached to his left ankle. There is blood on his face and on his gray tunic. General Logan stares at the man. "You," he says in a tone of profound astonishment. The prisoner blinks through the dried blood which has run down into his eyes. Abruptly, he makes a shrugging motion, and the men holding him are thrown back. He tenses, and with a sharp popping sound, the hemp strands break. He reaches, seizes the blackstrath's hammer in his manacled hands, leaps forward, and brings the heavy sledge down with smashing force on the skull of the Union general. parrying tfie Heavy coil, Falcon er stood for a moment in the entry, looking out across th'e circle of dry dust and loose stone soft-lit by tKe ship's port lights, ending in abrupt transition to the rim of broken, rain-swept rock, and beyond, the tops of black trees rising from below. "Good luck, commander," Xix said as fie stepped down. Burdened by tfie Heavy load, fie picked his way across toward tfie point below wfiicH tfie path led downward. He Had descended less tfian a Hundred feet wfien fie saw the man lying face-down in the path', bulky in a bright-colored mackinaw. Falconer dropped the coil, knelt by the man's side. There was blood on the side of the Heavy coat. He turned tHe man over, saw tHe gaping wounds across the side of tHe thick muscular neck, the sKredded front of the sodden jacket. "John Zabisky," He muttered. "Why did you follow me?" Zabisky's eyelids stirred, lifted; his small, opal-black eyes looked into Falconer's. His lips moved. "I... tried," he said distinctly; then all the light went out of hsi eyes, left them as dull as stones. Falconer rose, stood looking down at the rain falling on the face of the dead man. He glanced up at a faint sound and a hard white light struck Kim in the eyes. "I should have known you wouldn't die," a deep Karsh voice said out of the darkness. # # Co you're alive, Gralgrathor," Falconer said. Grayle came forward, looked at the body on the ground at Falconer's feet. "I see you've had a busy night, Lukrien." "And more business yet to come. I don't have time to waste, 'Thor. Go your way and I'll go mine. Or you still intent on braining me?" "I didn't come here to kill you, Lukrien, my business is with tHat." He tilted Kis head toward the faint glow from above. "You expect Xix to take you off this world?" "On the contrary. Xix isn't going anywhere." "I think he is. Stand aside, 'Thor." "I didn't come to kill you, Loki," Grayle said. "But I will if you try to interfere." He pointed down the path. "You'll be safe down there." "We'll go down togetKer." "You're going down. I'm going up," Grayle said. Falconer shook his head. "No," Ke said. Grayle looked across at Him', his square face obscure in the darkness. "When tKe Y-field went on and I felt the homing pulse, I knew you'd come, if you lived. I hoped to get here aKead of you. It's strange, but over the years the thought Had grown in my mind that somehow, in some way, there'd been some fantastic mistake. Then I saw the dead man down below. I knew then I'd find you Here." "I find that remark obscure, 'TKor." "Have you forgotten I've seen wounds like those before?" "Indeed? Where, might I ask?" "You dare to ask me tHat." Soft footfalls sounded, coming closer. From the shadows beside the path, a sinuous shape emerged, pacing on padded feet. It resembled, more tHan any otEer terrestrial creature, a giant black panther: as big as a Bengal tiger; but longer-legged, slimmer, deeper cKested, witifi a rounded skull and bright, alert yellow eyes. It advanced on Grayle, raised a claw-studded paw as big as a dinner plate... "Stop!" Falconer shouted, and leaped between the man and the beast. The ktill halted, lashed its tail, seated itself on its haunches. "Do not be alarmed, Lukrien," it said in the smooth, carefully modulated voice of Xix. "I am here to help you." ' ' said. "Where do you come from?" "My appearance must surprise you. Commander," the cat-thing said. "But I am a construct, nothing more." "An Ysarian construct. How?" "Xix created me. I am his eyes and ears at a distance. You may address Him through me." The krill rose, paced a step toward Grayle. "Leave him alone," Falconer said. The krilt stared at Falconer. "My commander, the traitor must die." "I need his help to force an entry into the plant." "Nonsense." "That's an order, Xix!" Falconer faced Grayle. "Drop the grenade belt. Pick up the coil." He indicated the latter lying where he had left it. "This thing belongs to you, di, wondered why you chose the particular method you did. But now that I've seen your weapon I understand." "Commander -- let me kill the traitor!" the krill hissed. Falconer looked into the yellow eyes. "Are you the only construct Xix made?" "There were others, commander." "Not in the shape of animals." "True." "A man named Pinquelle... and Riuies... and a soldier called Sleet... " "I have had many names, commander." "Why? Why didn't you announce yourself?" "It seemed wiser to be discreet. As for my purpose -- why, it was to assist you in the nurture of the technology we needed to do that which we must do." "The placement of the povvrer plant is no coincidence, then." "I was instrumental in selecting the site, yes." "You're full of surprises, aren't you, Xix? I wonder what you'll come up with next." "I am true to my purpose, Commander, nothing more." Falconer turned abruptly to Grayle. "We're going down tlie mountain, 'Tli'or. We're going to recharge tKe power coil and return here. Then Xix is going to lift for Ysar. Help me, and I'll take you with me. Refuse and Xix will deal with' you." Grayle growled and took a step toward Him, The krill tensed its long legs, its Head up, eyes brigfit on Grayle's tliroat. Falconer stared into Grayle's face. "Why, 'TKor?" He said softly. "Why are you intent on destroying U# all?'" "I swore to kill you, LokL I intend to fulfill tiJat promise." Tim krill yowled and yearned tovrard Grayle: Falconer restrained it witH a word. "You can commit suicide," fie said. "WKereas if you stay alive and cooperate, a better opportunity may present itself." For a moment, Grayle Hesitated. Then fie stepped back, picked up the coil, slung it by its straps over his sKoulder. "Yes," he said. "PerKaps it will." olonel Ajax Pyler stood beside  his staff car, looking toward the point fromwffidi the firing had come. "Well, Cal? Wfiat tlie devil is going on over there!" #  The aide was speaking urgently into a field phone. "Bring him up the road. I'll talk to Kim myself." He switched off. "A B Company man. Colonel. Something spooked Kim. He swears he saw two men cross the plant grounds and enter the building. He opened up on them..." "And?" "It's a wild tale... here they come now." A jeep was approaching from the direction of the perimeter fence. It pulled in beside the staff car; a sergeant and a private jumped down, stood at attention. The sergeant saluted. "Sir, this is the private -- " "I can see that. Get on with it. Just what did you see?" "Colonel, I seen these here two fellers, they come out o' the woods up above where I was at, first thing I knew he had my gun out of my hands -- " "Were you asleep?" "Not me. Colonel! Too damn cold. These fellers come up quiet, and with the wind and all, and I was watching towards the plant, never figured nobody -- " "So they jumped you and took your gun. Then what?" 'Well -- I guess I yelled, and one of 'em told me to be quiet. Real nice spoken, he was. Big feller. BotiS of 'em. And -- " 'What happened, man? Which way did they go?" "Why, like I told sergeant here, they up and went right down through the wire." "What did they cut it with?" "Hell, Colonel, they didn't cut nothing. Tore that wire up with their bare hands. One of 'em did. Other feller wag loaded down." "Sergeant, why didn't the alarms go off? I ordered triple circuitry all the way around the perimeter!" "Colonel, I don't know  -- " "How could anyone get inside unobserved? The entrance is flood-lit -- " "That's lust if. Colonel! They never used the front door -- nor the holes them Special Forces boys blew, ijust walked right through the wall! And after that come this critter. Bfe black as a caved-in coal mine, and eyes like fire. It come right up to me and looked at me like Hell's door left open, and went on down and through the wire. That was when I let fly. Colonel." "That's enough!" Pyler jerked His head at the sergeant. "Take this man back to the dispensary. I don't know what he's been drinking, or where he got it, but he's raving like a lunatic." He turned to his aide. "Cal, get a squad of master marksmen together, post them covering the exit. If there's anyone in there, we'll be ready when he comes out!" L ieutenant Harmon pushed through the clump of men examining the tangled barbed wire through which a swathe had been untidily cut. " s s . look at these ends," a man was saying. "That wasn't sheared; it failed in tension. Look at the deformation. It's been stretched." "Hey -- Here's why the screamers didn't go off." Another man showed a strand of insulated wire. "They jumped it." "Who saw what Happened?" Harmon barked the question. Faces turned his way. He got a brief secondand third-Hand account of the progress of the two intruders through the wire, across the grotmds, and into the rear of the building. "They didn't mess with tSe doors," a bulky corporal granted. "They made their own Hole." "Vlafs that supposed to mean?" "Put the light on if, SHom," the corporal said. A dazzling thrust a smoky finger acrc the hundred yards of rain-soaked turf to glare on the buff-colored masonry wall marred by a ragged black aperture at ground level. "I didn't hear any explosion," Harmon said, "Wasn't none." The corporal spat. "They busted that Hole barehanded." # ! "Ekn.'t kid me," Harmon snarled. "Hey, ain't you tKat out-ofstate cop?" a frecklefaced soldier witK a pale, pinched face spoke up. "I heard the man you were after tore the door off a car, something like that. Maybe it's the same guy." Harmon glowered at the laughter. "Where'd they take this kid that saw all this?"' "Field dispensary. Down the road." Harmon walked back to the jeep Zwicky had lent him, turned it, drove back up past the parked vehicles of the convoy. It took him fifteen minutes to find the white mobile hospital, parked in a field under trees. Inside, he asked for and was led to Tatum's bedside. "Hell, I ain't sick," the private said indignantly. "Take it easy, fellow," Harmon said. "Now tell me what this man you saw looked Uke..." I ying in darkness with his face against the cool floor, Jess Dooley drew deep, regular breaths, forcdog himself back to calm. Panic wasn't going to help. Panic kills, tliat was what the posters on the cool, green walls back at headquarters said. He wasn't really trapped in a maze with' no way out, trapped in the dark, buried alive -- Nothing like that. He was lost, sure. A man could get lost easy enough in a mess of crawlways, even if he had studied the plans for a whole five minutes. But what was lost could be foimd. All he had to do was keep his head, feel his way, and after a while he'd hear them coming to look for him. He'd been scraping his chin and bumping his head and eating dust and taking the long tour of the crawl way system for half an hour now. Been doing all riglit, too, up until tlie panic hit him. Claustrophobia, that's what they called it. Never bothered him before. But thhty minutes of being blind was enough for the first time out. Now he wanted air, wanted light, wanted to raise his head, stand up, instead of being rushed in here in this space just high enough to push tlirough', with all those tons of rocks above -- Take it easy, Dooley. No panic, remember. Maybe one of the other guys had gotten in first, and forgotten to fire his screamer, and maybe it was all just spinned wheels. And maybe He'd better stop lying here and get moving. Jess snorted dust from his nose, and moved forward. His outstretched hand touched a rounded plasticwalled duct. He remembered tlie duct system : it would lead a man out of this maze. And there were access panels spotted along it... Three minutes later, Dooley was inside the big duct, beaded in a direction Ke Hoped was upstream. He covered fifty feet, rounded a turn -- and heard faint sounds from up ahead -- or was it off to tfie side? Voices. Good old Drake, knew he'd come, Him and Ike. Close now. Yell, and let them know? Hell witH it. Came this far, play it cool. Could see a faint ligKt up aHead, tfirough a grill. Dope was wearing off. Just make it up there, and flap a Hanky, and in another minute or two they'd be outside, having a good laugK together, breathing that cold, fresh air... Smiling, Jess Dooley moved forwaixi along the duct above the Energy Staging Room. The exKaust grill was a louvered panel two feet by three, designed to be serviced from the inside. Jess found the release clips, lifted the grid aside. The voices were cleared now, not more than twenty, thirty feet away... Jess frowned, listening. That wasn't Drake's voice, or Ike's They weren't even speaking Engli. Frowning, Jess lay in the darkness and listened. it put it down here." Falconer ordered. Grayle lowered the drained power coil to the floor, while the krill watched closely. Falconer knelt beside the pack, unstrapped it, exposing the compact device witHin. "Get tKe cover off the service Hatch," Ke ordered. Followed by tKe cat-tfiing, Grayle crossed to tKe KatcH, forced a finger imder tKe edge of the steel plate, ripped it away as if it were wet cardboard. "Stand aside." Falconer lifted the discharged coil. Grayle hadn't moved. "Don't try it yet," Falconer said. "The odds are still too great." "Loki, don't charge that coil," Grayle said. "Defy your master. Without your help it's powerless." "My master -- ?" The krill moved swiftly forward, raised a hook-studded forearm. "Stand fast, Xix," Falconer snapped. The creature paused, turned its great eyes on him. "He threatens our existence. Commander!" "I'll decide that." "But will you?" Grayle said. "Don't you really know yet, Loki?" The krill yowled and struck at Grayle, ripping the leather arm of his jacket as he jumped back. It followed, ignoring Falconer's shout. "See how your faltliful slave comes to heel, Loki!" Grayle called. Falconer took two swift steps to tHe open HatcK, poised tKe coil on the rim, caught up the two heavy jack-tipped cables. "Stop, Xix, or I'll cross-connect the coil and melt it down to slag!" The ktill whirled on Falconer, jaws gaping, the serrated bony ridges that served as teeth bared in a snarl. "Would you aid the treacHer in his crimes?" "I'll listen to what he has to say," Falconer said. "Commander! Remember, only I can take you back to Ysar!" "Talk, 'Thor," Falconer said. "What are you hinting at?" "Twelve feet to the right and eight feet above the spot where Grayle stood with his back to the wall, Jess Dooley lay, his blind eyes staring into inky blackness, his ears straining to make sense of the jabber of alien voices rising through the open ventilation grill beside him. There were three of them: one deep, rough-edged, one a resonant baritone, one an emotionless tenor. He didn't like that last one; it sounded the way a corpse would sound if it could sit up and talk. And the other two sounded mad clear through. Jess couldn't understand the words, but he knew the tone. Somebody was fixing to kill somebody down there. There wasn't any way he could stop it, even if the victim didn't have it coming. Because this was them, sure enough: the ones who'd messed things up Here, sabotaged the place, killed all those people. Russians, probably. Too bad he didn't know Russian. Probably be getting an earful now. He was lucky he'd heard them when he did. Another second, and he'd have dropped right down amongst 'em. And from what he had heard about Commie spies, that would be the end of the Dooley biography. No, there was nothing to do. Just lie quiet, and wait for what came next -- and be ready to move fast, if it worked out that way. T ying on the hard cot in the tiny metal-walled room, Anne Rogers wondered where she was. She remembered wind, rain, bright lights shining across wet tarmac -- They had taken a helicopter. She and... and a man. It was gone again. A crazy dream. About running, and police cars, shots, breaking glass -- The copter, hurtling low above whipping treetops, the sudden jarring impact, and -- She had been hurt. Maybe the copter ride was a dream, but she had been hurt. She was sure of that. Her hands went to her face, explored her skull, checked her arms, ribs. She sat up, and was surprised at the dizziness that swept over Her. Her legs seemed to be intact; there were no heavy bandages swathing Her an # uvhere. Her head ached, and there were lesser aches here and there, but nothing serious. Her eyes went once again around the small room. A hospital, of course. Some sort of temporary one, like the kind the police took to the scene of an accident. The police. She remembered all about the police now. He -- the man -- strange, e couldn't remember his face clearly, or his name -- had attacked a policeman. Or two of them. And now where was he? Anne felt a sudden pang of fear. Was he dead? For some reason, the idea filled her with panic. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. She was still fully dressed, even to the muddy trenchcoat. Whoever had brought her here Hadn't taken much trouble with her. But why should they? As far as they were concerned, she was just a gun-moll, an accomplice of an escaped convict. Rain drmnmed and beat on the roof, only inches above her head. She rose and went, a little unsteadily, across to the narrow door. A passage less than three feet wide led past identical doors to a square of dim light at the end. She went to it, looked through a window into a room where a man stood, talking into a canvas-cased telephone. "He's inside the power plant, Captain, but I can't get any cooperation out of the Army. I've been ordered to stay the Kell and gone back from the fence, not go near tlie place. But this boy is my meat. Brasher, all six-three of him! I've got bones to pick with this con, and it'U be his bones!" There was a pause while he listened, his face set in a scowl. "Don't worry. I know how to handle it... , . Sure, #I stay back. I've got the spot all picked. I can cover the front and the hole he blasted in the side, both. Whichever way he comes. I'll be there -- just for insurance. I'll be watching him through the sights. One wrong move, and -- Sure, I'll watch it. Don't sweat me. Captain. Just so I've got your backing. Right." He Hung up, stood smiling a crooked smile at the wall. "But I've got a funny feeling," he said softly, aloud, "that any move that son of a bitch makes will be the wrong one -- for him!" A nne moved quickly away from the door, hurried to the opposite end of the passage, stepped out into driving wind and slashing rain. It was dark here, but a himdred feet away were tlie lights of the vehicels on the road, and beyond was the looming pile of the power plant, bleak as a mortuary in the glare of the floodlights. Grayle was in tEere. And when he came out, they'd be waiting for him. She Had to warn him. Ten minutes later, Having crossed the road bdow the convoy and approached the power plant beyond the glare of the fieldlights, Anne studied the front of the building from the shelter of a clump of alder. The doors Had been blown away, the entry was wide open. There was nobody near it. If slie ran, without stopping to think, quickly, now -- She had covered Half of the hundred yards of open lawn before a shout sounded. "It's a woman!" another voice yelled. "Shoot, damn you!" a third voice commanded. There was the flat, echoing carrong! of a Heavy rifle, and mud leaped in a gout beside Her. She ran on, heard the second shot, felt the sting of mud that spattered her legs. Then she was among the rubble, leaping an overturned chair, scrambling between broken door frames as a third bullet chipped stone above Her head and screamed away into the darkness. "Grayle," Anne whispered, looking along the dark corridor. "Where are you?" Five minutes later, she came on wet, muddy footprints in the passage. She followed them, moving quickly along the silent passage, to a stairwell leading down. #To you know what my mission here on Earth was, Loki?" Grayle asked. "To conduct a routine reconnaissance." "One of Xix's lies. My orders were to establish a class O beacon." "Class O. That refers to a major navigational aid with a power output in the lower stellar range." "Commonly known as a Hellcore." "A Hellcore device -- on an inhabited world?" Falconer shook His head. "You must be mistaken. Battle Command has no authority to order such a measure." "The order didn't come from Battle Command. It came from Praze -- my ship." "Go on." "I refused to comply, ordererd tlie mission aborted. Praze refused, overrode my commands." "I wondered about the crash. An Ysarian ship doesn't malfunction. You scuttled her, didn't you?"' "Ship-killer!" the krill hissed. "I scuttled her -- but not before she got the Hellcore away. It impacted in the sea, off the coast of the continent now known as North America." "Why didn't you refer the order to Battle Command for confirmation?" "Battle Command is a machine. It would have confirmed it." "You're raving, 'Thor! Battle Command is made up of veteran combat officers: High General Wotan, Admiral Tyrr -- " "No, Loki -- Not for a long time now. You might ask Xix how long." "Commander -- we will listen no longer to this treacher! Charge the coil! Our time runs out!" "Ask him wHat his Hurry is, Loki. Ask him wKat it is He's so eager to accomplish." "To leave this world, what else?" the ktill said. "Ask him about the beacon." "What does the beacon have to do witfi it?" "He raves, my commander," "Ask him about the storm," Grayle said. "Ask him what He had to do with that!" Falconer looked across at the great black entity. "Answer," He said. "Very well -- but we waste precious seconds. My instruments told me that the beacon device had been placed on the surface, but only the basic protective field was energized, due to tfie #S# sabotage of the traitor. My first act when I began to draw energy from the primitive broadcast field was to transmit the 'proceed' signal on the Y band for crust penetration, using a matter-annihilation beam. Naturally, a side-effect of weather disturbance was created. The device is now well within the planetary interior. Once we are clear of the planet, it will require only the final triggering pulse to the reactor to ignite the beacon. But we must act swiftly! If the triggering signal is not received within a period of hours, the device self-destructs!" "Cancel that," Falconer said. "We're not going to activate tJie beacon. It won't be needed now. Not after all these years." "Not perform our clear duty?" "It's not our duty -- not any more." "I fail to understand what circumstances you conceive could relieve us of responsibility for completion of a Fleet mission." tt'Time! A great deal of time has passed. If the beacon had been needed another ship would have been sent out." "How does the passage of a few days influence the Ysarian Grand Strategy?" "Over twelve hundred local years is more than a few days." "What is this talk of centuries? Is it perhaps intended as a jest?" "Don't you know Kow long we have been here?" "Since our arrival at this world, less than ten thousand hours have elapsed, a little over a year." "Something interfered with your chronometry, Xix. You're wrong by a factor of a thousand." "I am incapable of error within my design parameters. The need for the beacon is as great as ever. Accordingly, I will trigger it as planned. I can agree with no other course." "You can agree? You're a machine. You follow orders." "My ultimate responsibility is to Battle Command. Its directives override your authority, Commander. The beacon will be activated as planned. Let us hope that the White Fleet has not suffered reverses in battle for lack of it." "I think I understand," Falconer said. "Xix, you've been on Qstatus for most of the past twelve centuries. Your chironometric sensors only registered the periods of awareness." "It is correct that I Have from time to time reverted to Q status as a power conservation measure. But I fail to grasp your implication tliat this status has dimensional characteristics." "It means," Grayle said, "that as far as it's concerned, when it's switched off, nothing is happening." "The phenomenal world exists only during active status," Xix said calmly. "This is confirmed not only by basic rationality, but by the absence of sensory input during such periods." "I see. You don't shut yourself off. You turn off the world." "These are mere semantic niceties, 'my Commander." "How do you account for the fact that when you reactivate, you find that changes have taken place around you?" "I have observed that it is a characteristic of the Universe to reform in somewhat altered state after a discontinuity." "What about the power broadcast you're drawing on? You think the savages I found here a millennium ago could have built that transmitter in six weeks?" "A manifestation of the discontinuity effect previously noted. I had intended to discuss these phenomena with you at leisure, possibly during the voyage home." "Do you realize," Falconer said, "that when you transmit that signal youll tarn the planet into a minor sun?" "That is correct," tlie krill said. "For the love of Ysar, Xix! Listen to me!" "For the love of Ysar, my commander, I cannot. Now let us proceed with that which must be done." "Tell it to go to tlie Nintfi Hell," Grayle said tHickly. "Come, my commander. You know that without the coil I -- and you -- can never leave this world. And time grows short." "Don't do it, Loki." Grayle said. "Let the ship rot where it he krill seemed to smile at Falconer, baring a serrated ridge of ivory white. "Without power, I carmot lift, true. But I will not come to an end by slow decay. Nor by the chemical bombs of the primitives. Reflect: the Y-field is still at operational level, is it not? I can trigger the beacon at any moment -- from here." "And incinerate yourself along with the rest of the planet." "I have no alternative but to perform my duty. Your betrayal will change nothing -- except that you will not live to see Ysar. I will regret your death. A useless death, Lokrien." "If I agree," Falconer said, "will you contact a Fleet Outpost for confirmation before you trigger the Hellcore?" "It will mean a dangerous delay. But -- yes, as you wish. I agree." "It's lying," Grayle said. "As it's lied all along." to all fours. "Proceed now, my commander! I can wait no longer!" As Falconer hesitated, there was a sudden sharp sound from the door twenty feet distant in the end wall. It swung open, and a slim figure in a trench coat stepped through, hesitated. Her eyes found Grayle. In that instant, the krill couched, leaped. Even more swiftly, Grayle moved, sprang between the beast and the girl. The krill struck him full on, knocked him back against the girl. She fell under their feet as Grayle rose. His Hands locked on the beast's throat, while its talons raked savagely across him from throat to groin. "Xix!" Falconer roared, and the cat-thing crouched away, while Grayle staggered, blood flooding down across his shredded jacket. "You asked me once... where I'd seen wounds like those before," he said between his clenched teeth. "I thought then you mocked me." "I saw John Zabisky," Falconer said. "And tlie dead soldier on the trail." "There was another time... long ago, Loki. In a house built of timbers on a rocky hill among the snows. A woman and a child. Gudred, my wife, and Loki, my son." He looked across at Falconer. "May the Nine Gods forgive me, I thought you'd made them." TT'aJconer's face turned to a rigid mask. His eyes locked witK tiiose of tKe krill. "You killed them," lie said. "And let 'Thor believe I did it." "It was necessary," tKe krill hissed. "He would Have subverted you from your duty!" "In tKe name of Ysar, you've betrayed everything that Ysar ever meant!" "Ysar!" the krill yowled. "I weary of the name Ysar, and of your foolish sentimentality! Ysar is dead, dead these Hundred centuries! But you live -- as I live -- eternally! Let that reality sustain you! Now do your duty. Commander!" "He's telling the truth for once," Grayle said. "Ysar is dead, and only Her undying machines -- and a handful of immortal men -- act out the dead dream." "But -- I remember Ysar..." "Your memories are false," the krill said. "You were bom aboard sliip, Lokrien, nurtured in an amniotic tank, educated by cybertape! You were given the vision of that which once was and is no more to inspire you in the performance of your duty. But surely now we can dispense with cKildisH images! You live for your duty to Battle Command, as I do! Now let me kill tKe traitor, and we will be on our way, once again to voyage outward, at Home in the great emptiness of Space!" "Loki, it's bluffing! Without the coil, it dies -- because that's what it draws its power from. That's wKy it came along -- to keep an eye on the coil! Destroy it, and you destroy the ship -- and its murderous robot with it!" "Commander! PerKaps I erred througK overzealousness. But if you destroy the coil, you die too!" "Do it now, Loki!" "Fools!" the krill raged. "I tried to spare you the last, full knowledge of yourselves, but you leave me no cEoice. Trae, I am a construct of Xix, linked to the neural circuity of the ship, and with tKe death' of tKe p I die. But you, too, are constracts! Kill me, and you kill yourselves! Let me live, and yours is life eternal -- even for tlie treacher, GralgatKor!" Grayle gave a sKort, EarsH laugh. "If we're constmcts, we're able to do what a man would do." "I move swiftly, Lokrien -- perhaps more swiftly than you think." Falconer looked at tKe cattHing, crouched, tail lasKing, its eyes locked on him. He looked at Grayle, waiting, ignoring the terrible wounds across his cEest. "If I destroy tSe coil, we all die," he said softly, in English. "If I don't -- tKe EartH dies." "Decide, Commander," tKe krill said. "I will wait no longer." J ess Dooley peered down into the gloom at th'e blurred figures below. He couldn't make out the details, just vague dark shapes against a deeper darkness. Until just now he Hadn't Had a clue as to what was going on; only he'd heard what the last fellow said, in plain American, about the Earth dying. That was clear enough. Everybody said World War Three wouldn't leave enough pieces to pick up for anybody to bother. Looked like the Russians were having words about -- whatever it was they came Here to do. One of them, the mean-voiced one, was for doing it right off. The other one, with tKe deep voice, was against it. And tfie third one wasn't sure. But He'd be making up His mind in a minute. Jess got silently to His Hand and knees. He wasn't sure yet just what He was going to do -- but he knew that he'd Have to do sometfiing, even if it was wrong. He blinked, trying to penetrate the blindness, trying to get a good look at the fellow with tHe dead man's voice. He was tKe one to watcK, the one to stop. If he'd just move a little more tHis way... terror Ysar," Falconer said,  and reached to close tHe umpK, took two swift paces, reared above Grayle -- From the shadows above a dark shape leaped, struck the catthing full across the back, unbalancing it enough that the stroke of its taloned paw went wide. It bucked, threw tfie man off, spun to leap at Falconer -- Fire burst from the KatcH. In mid-spring, the cat-creature's body contorted; it struck tKe metal side of the machine, sprawled away from it, its limbs raking futilely in a last effort to reacH Falconer, who sagged against tKe side of tfie unit, shaking Kis Head dizzzily. Grayle clung to tKe wall, figHting to stay on his feet. "It Ked . , . again," he whispered. TKe krill lay limply; tHe light still glowed, but weakly, fading from tHe great eyes. It spoke in a dying voice: "THe long twifight... ends at last... in nigKt." said as Falconer lifted Kim to Kis feet. "Don't tell me wKat that was I jumped. I don't want to know. Just get me out of this place." "It's dead." Falconer said. "And tKe generators are stopping." "But we're still alive," Grayle said. "Tfiat means we're bio-constructs, not mecKanical. And now we're mortal creatures. We'll age and die like any man." Falconer went to Anne, lifted Ker in His arms. "Until then we can live like any man." They made their way up the echoing concrete steps, along tlie empty corridors. The first light of day gleamed beyond the shattered entrance. Already the wind was dying, tlie rain abating. As the two men stepped out through the scattered rubble, light glinted on the dark hillside. Grayle leaped and cried out as a single shot rang out from the wooded slope above the building. aptain Zwicky, coming up si lently behind the man who lay in prone firing position behind tlie big pine, saw the stir of movement in the shattered entrance below, saw the two men step into view, heard the flat crack of the gun, threw himself on Harmon as he relaid his sights for the second shot. "Why did you shoot him?" Zwicky touted at the policeman as the latter wiped a big hand across his bloodied mouth. "Why?" "Because," Harmon said vith total conviction, "the son of a bitch thought he was better than I was." said. "Sorry for everything, but most of all for this." "Xix was right," Grayle whispered. "But only half right. Even the longest night... ends at dawn." Carrying Anne, Falconer walked out across the dark lawn toward the waiting men. August # -- September #, #. #th World Science Fiction Convention. At Chase-Park Plaza Hotel, # N. Kingshighwoy, St. Louis, Missouri #. Guest of Honor: Jack Gaughan. Fan Guest of Honor: Ted White. Features: Project Art Show; Masquerade Ball; All-night movies -- every night; Rock Band; Panels and speeches featuring all your favorite writers, editors, and artists; Auctions; Awards Banquet and the Presentation of the Hugos. Memberships: #, attending; #, supporting. Join now and receive all the progress reports as they are published. For information: St. Louiscon, P.O. Box #, St. Louis, Missouri #. Ake checks payable to St. Louiscon. RicKard Wilson, wHo has been a science-fiction fan since he was oM enough to pick out His own reading and a science-fiction writer for almost as long, doesn't write nearly enough -- His job as director of Syracuse University's News Bureau keeps Him too busy -- but when He writes it is good. Witness A Man Spekith, herein, or Mother to the World, wEicH won Hi m a Nebula award. How did He get 'his start? It Happened while he was still in P.S. #, in Brooklyn. "I'd become bored with carving my desktop," says Wilson, "and saw a newspaper clipping on tHe floor. It Had been torn raggedly down tHe center of a column. I had tHe left-hand part, whicH varied from a Half to two-thirds of the whole. I read it; anything to avoid the matK that was being taught at tHe front of the room. Naturally it made little sense. "I can't recall now wHat the clipping was about, but I pieced out the unfinisKed pHrases, writing out the interrupted line so that it Hooked up with the beginning of the next. Sometimes it was obvious what the missing words were, but more often I Had to invent wKole new sentences. "Do I hear somebody saying I did it earlier -- and I never tried to sell tHe result. "After a wEile I tried making up the left-hand side as well as the sight. From then on I was doomed to be a writer." When Bruce McAllister made his first sale to If a few years ago, He was in a close race for prominence as science-fiction's youngest writer. (He was then fourteen and a Half, and beaten out narrowly a few decades by young KennetK Sterling, wEo made his first sale at #.) Now he is all of a mature #. He comes of a Navy family; began writing in scHool in La Spezia, Italy, where His father was stationed at tHe time; now is preparing to graduate from college. Larry Eisenberg has a Pli.D. in electrical engineering and works for the Rockefeller Institute. Among otHer accomplishments, He designed one of tHe first practical transistorized cardiac pacemakers, a decade or so ago. Has appeared widely in many magazines and is co-autKor of Games People Shouldn't Play, a book detested by many psychiatrists who construe it as an attack on their profession. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! Nft, Cf-M by Emsh No. GF-# by Emsh The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says: "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep' # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. Tlic designs shown above are the only ones we olferl #: A Space Odyssey #: A Arthur C. Clarke Hunting an alien "presence" in the universe. # men and a computergone psychotic stumble upon the incredible secret of mankind's birth -- only to trigger the cosmic "booby-trap" that could spell its death. A controversial best-seller by the most acclaimed science fiction writer of our era. btf-ning ond award-winning cinama pactaidf Science Fiction has Krown ui Have you kepi up.' A new literary genre has mtur "i age -- your age. Mature. Sophisli lUrti Provocative. And respected. You ate iti vited to explore it now under an amaing nial ofter. Take arty # volumes on this page (wi)tih up ! # in original publishers' editions) for only I with membership.  New dub selections will be dcsullrI i- you in advance each month. Choose from new woik  fiction -- and fact -- by such acclaimed authors as Kav lii.n) bury. Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Kulu ti Heinlein and others. All volumes are full-IenKih. Imni bound -- and uncut. Though they sell for as much as VI # and more in their original publishers' ediiions, ilnti members pay only # plus shipping. (You may dmotu an optional extra-value selection at a slightly hiuhi'i price.) 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"Sands of Mars"  "Prelude to Spacc"-both complete! Plus # hort stories. Pub. ed. # #. The FoBodation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. #A# #. Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd. Young lovers flee loveless society ruled by computer "god". Pub. ed. #. #. The Past Through Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. SS.# #. Twice # by Ray Bradbury. Fourty-four stories by the Grand Master of science Action. Pub. ed. # #. Chocky by John Wyndham. Alien powers "possess" small boy in shocker from author of "Day of the Triffids". #. From The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling. # spine-tingling stories that breach the gap between science and superstition. #. Killer Thins by Kale Wilhelm A scienllsl In the #rd century levl # #. A Treni  Great .Sriena  I #tion. #'Votimie mi I.OtXIpage ( as one lMik I'M' ed. # #. Almo' aitt ICfies lir liaaAsimov It l" I whixlimiii il't fiihiie . Hill Pull tt  nevri inlni liv n Amlrdi.m cv JULY # Newest of awarii-winnlng"Dune"stories by Frank Herbert Newest story in this famous series! by by and many more Here's just the first three morrths: (the best of the best) Brian Ball's exciting novel by Robert Silverberg: Zenna Henderson's (stories of other people... and things) by Dan Morgan... J. T. McIntosh's An anthology of science fiction devilment by John Wyndham, Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, and others... And April... well, save April for next ad, but remember: eaiaxy Galaxy Is published In French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published In Braille and Living Tape. July, #  Vol. # No. # by James Blish by A. Bertram Chandler by Frank Herbert by Robert S. Martin by James Sallis and David Lunde by Willy ley by Frederik Pohi by AIgts Budrys Editor Editor Emeritus Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor  Pubiisher Associate Publisher monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporaon. Main offices: # East # Street New York. N. Y. #. #c per copy. Subscription (# copies): S# in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at Neyir York, N.Y. and at additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Ail rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title Registered U.S. Patent Office by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, PresIdeuL Printed in the U.SA r be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these fects remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teaching. Write today for a free copy of the book, 'The Mastery of Ie." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe X.H.C. Scribe X.H.C. San Jose, California #S# Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Ufe, which explains how I may team to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address City #Hp Code  Rosicrucians I  A lmost threaded on the Tropic of Capricorn, most cosmopolitan of the world's cities in the Tropic Zone, Rio de Janeiro is a city of high-rise apartments and high-flying ambitions. In March of this year it spread its hospitality to an International Film Festival -- not sf films in particular, just movies in general -- and as an extra added attraction it threw in one of history's most lavish science-fiction conferences. Robert Heinlein came in from his new California home, Damon Knight from Florida, John Brunner from London. Fritz Lang was there, a lot older than when he was producing such early sf film classics as Metropolis and The Girl in the Moon, and nearly blind, but still vital, alert and ready to plan for the future. Every morning for a solid week there was a sciencefiction symposium. Brian Aldiss told the audience that there was no such thing as science fiction, really, it being only a sort of label astute publishers invented for a product; Alfred Bester described the writing process; A. E. Van Vogt explained the reasoning behind his inventive plots. Robert Bloch and Robert Sheckley, Foul Anderson and James Ballard, Harry Harrison and Forrest J. Ackerman -- they were all there and participating, with many more, your editor included. It was quite an occasion. In the afternoons there was the beach of Copacabana, just across the road. In the evenings were cocktail parties, receptions, midnight suppers at embassies. And in, at and between all the events was the endless serial debate that goes on wherever sf writers meet. W hat do sf writers talk about at these events? Why, mostly they talk about sf, how to do it, why its worth doing, ways of making it better. The New Wave and the Old Reliables meet, and spar for a while, and compare notes and discover that they are, after all, not that far apart... a discovery which sometimes surprises some of them very much. We all owe Cariocas thanks. Not just for hospitality, which was extreme, but even more for the chance for sf writers from half the world to sit down and think for a week about the things that unite them, rather than the things that keep them apart. Serial Tfjey had forced godhead on Muad'dib. Now they fought to destroy him. And in all the plethora of futures he saw no place for Paul Atreides, the man! The leaders of tiRe Qizarate, whose church was founded in Muad'dib's name, saw their Jihad ending. In just twelve standard years, the religious war of the Jihad had created an enormous wave of passive hate and active opposition. There was the obvious fact, as well, that religious colonialism, having annesed planet Dune was on arid planet of great deserts where life seemed almost impossible. The semi-nomadic Fremen based all their customs on wafer scarcity and faced the deserts in stillsuits which recovered all moisture. Gigantic sand worms and savage storms were a constant menace to them. Dune's only resource was the melange, an addictive drug produced by the worms. This "spice" aided longevity and gave an adept some ability to foresee the future. killed in a war with the Harkonnen rival nobility, Paul fled into the by the Bene Gesserit -- a female order devoted to mental arts and the control of genetic lines. According to them, Paul was of a line that was to give them a "kwisatz haderach," a sort of messioh for the future. Paul grew and earned acceptance by the Fremen and even learned to control and ride the sand worms. In one of their rituals, he was forced to take a massive overdose of spice; this produced a permanent change in him, so that he could goin visions of the future -- or futures. His mother also took an overdose, trying to control it by Bene all her mother's knowledge while still in the womb and was fully cognitive at birth. Paiil fought his way to the leadership of the Fremen. He mated his Atreides mind had been trained to disciplines unknown to them, and he gave them an organization and mission they had not known before. He also planned to change the climate of Dune and bring water to the planet. Before his plans were fully developed, his hereditary enemy, the Harkonnen rulers, struck at Dune. With only the Fremen to oppose them, Paul struck back. In spite of their supposedly invincible Sordaukar soldiers, Paul's forces overcame them in a great battle. During this war, Duncan Idaho wos killed. In the treaty Paul imposed, he gained a power base that would enable them to begin carving out a star empire, with Dune as its base. though he refused to consummate the marriage, remaining true to Choni. In the ensuing twelve years, he has created his empire. But now all the ancient power groups are beginning to unite and conspire against Muad'dib, as he is called, and against the future his visions hove shown him. after planet in that short span of years, was running out of new real estate to subdue. Into this downward spiral came the ancient quasi-religious sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild with its virtual monopoly on interstellar transport, and the scientific amoralists of the Bene Tleilax, all united in a plot to overthrow the Emperor Paul-Muad'dib, ne-Atreides. The Qizarate cabal, led by Korba the Panygerist, fastened upon this plot as an ideal opportunity to stir up the sort of chaos from which they might gain new impetus. This was eminently practical a move of Judgment Strategy which might have originated in the old training manual written by Paul-Muad'dib's father, the Duke Leto. It called first for the creation of a martyr, Muad'dib himself. Next, it sought a universal object of hate, choosing Muad'dib's concubine, the Lady Chani. The plan was to saddle her with blame for Muad'dib's death. Taken as a whole, this was a much better plan than that of the Guild-Tleilaxu-Bene Gesserit plotters and their allies among the Great Families of the Landsraad. This analysis, therefore, will examine in some detail where the Qizarate's plan succeeded and where it fell short. -- Analysis of History: Muad'dib by Bronso of Ix I There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other, -- Proverbs of Muad'chb D espite die murderous nature of the plot he hoped to devise, the thoughts of Scjrtale, the Tleilaxu face dancer, returned again and again to rueful compassion. I shall regret causing death and misery to Muad" dib, he told himself. He kept this benignity carefully hidden from his fellow conspirators. Such feelings told him, though, that he found it easier to identify with the victim than with the attackers -- a thing characteristic of the Tleilaxu. Sc#rtale stood in bemused silence somewhat apart from the others. The argument about psychic poison had been going on for some time now. It was energetic and vehement, but polite in that blindly compulsive way adepts of the Great Schools always adopted for matters close to their dogma. "When you think you have him skewered, right then you'll find him unwounded!" That was the old Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit. Gains Helen Mohiam, their hostess here on WallacG IX. She was a black robed stick figure, a witch crone seated in a floater chair at Scytale's left. Her aba hood Had been thrown back to expose a leathery face beneath silver Kair. Deeply pocketed eyes stared out of skull-mask features. They were using a mirabhasa language, honed phalange consonants and jointed vowels. It was an instrument for conveying fine emotional subtleties. Ekiric, the Guild Steersman, replied to the Reverend Mother now with a vocal curtsy contained in a sneer -- a lovely touch of disdainful politeness. Scytale looked at the Guild envoy. Edric swam in a container of orange gas only a few paces away. His container sat in the center of the transparent dome which the Bene Gesserit had built for this meeting. The Guildsman was an elongated figxure, vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands -- a fish in a strange sea. His tank's vents emitted a pale orange cloud rich with the smell of the geriatric spice, melange. "If we go on this way, we'll die of stupidity!" That was the fourth person present -- the potential member of the conspiracy -- Princess Irulan, wife (but not mate, Scytale reminded himself) of their mutual foe. She stood at a corner Ballantine liJ Books No June Galaxy, a!ack. But the month was not completely dry. We published one of the most enchanting of our adult fantasies -- Lord tonishingly powerful writer. We'll be doing a group of his shorts later; likewise Lovecraft, whose fantasy writing has been taken up by the psychedelic in-group, which is okay with us, too. The more the merrier. Also in June we had the great pleasure of publishing our first by -- a smasher, really great. And for the Flipper fans, the third in that Meyers. June also saw the reissue of some of our nuggets from the past. One of Fritz a much earlier, very funny jape on the publishing industry, writers, and creativity (the older ones among you may remember the original cover by Dick Powers which depicted a bare-breasted robot carrying a certain famous publisher in her arms.) July sees the Introduction of two com pletaly new writers for our list -- and for the U.S. -- Richard Cowper and Vincent King. You may be familiar with their work if you follow British magazines, but these are first novels on this side of the water -- namely, Cowper's tale of telepathic occupation. In the old days it was called possession, but this story is very much of our time and tensely exciting. All the more so since one gets to like the "other" people as well as one likes the "now" people. ed novel. Jam-packed with ideas, physical adventures, inventiveness, characters, you name it. We first began to realize just how much there was in it when we attempted a short precis to let others in the office know what we had. A precis pleases nobody. The only thing to do is read the book. In July also, (my, this is a rich haul) wa have five by Frederik Pohl and CM. Kornbluth and one by Fred. The classic And finally, as Lin Carter so aptly puts it, "the clean, morning world self to it. And a happy summer to all. BB of Edric's tank, a tall blonde beauty, splendid in a robe of blue whale fur and matching hat. Gold buttons glittered at her ears. She carried herself with an aristocrat's hauteur, but something in the absorbed smoothness of her features betrayed the controls of her Bene-Gesserit backgrotmd. Qcjrtale's mind turned from nuances of language and faces to nuances of location. All around the dome lay hills mangy witH melting snow which reflected mottled wet blueness from the small blue-white sun hanging at the meridian. Why this particular place? Scytale wondered. The Bene Gesserit seldom did ansrthing casually. Take the dome's open plan: a more conventional and confining space might have inflicted the Guildsman with claustrophobic nervousness. Inhibitions in his psyche were those of birth and life off-planet in open space. To have built this place especially for Edric, though -- what a sharp finger that pointed at his weakness. What here, Scytale wondered, was aimed at me? "Have you nothing to say for yourself, Scsrtale?" the Reverend Mother demanded. "You wish to draw me into this fool's fight?" Scytale asked. "Very well. We're dealing with a potential messiah. You don't latinch a frontal attack upon such a one. Martyrdom would defeat us." They all stared at him. "You think that's the only danger?" the Reverend Mother demanded, voice wheezing. Sc#d:ale shrugged. He had chosen a bland, round-faced appearance for this meeting, jolly features and vapid full lips, the body of a bloated dumpling. It occurred to him now, as he studied his fellow conspirators, that he had made an ideal choice -- out of instinct, perhaps. He alone in this group could manipulate fleshly appearance across a wide spectrum of bodily shapes and features. He was the human chameleon, a face dancer, and the shape he wore now invited others to judge him too lightly. "Well?" the Reverend Mother pressed. "I was enjoying the sUence," ' Scytale said. "Our hostilities are better left unvoiced." The Reverend Mother drew back, and Scytale saw her reassessing him. They were aU products of profound prana-bindu training, capable of muscle and nerve control that few humans ever achieved. But ScjFtale, a face dancer, had muscles and nerve linkages the others didn't even possess plus a special quality of sympatico, a mimic's insight with which he could put on the psyche of another as well as the other's appearance. Scytale gave Her enough lame to complete the reassessment, then said: "Poison I" He uttered the word with the atonals which he said he alone understood its secret meaning. The Guildsman stirred and his voice rolled from the glittering speaker globe which orbited a comer of his tank above Irukoi. "We're discussing psychic poison, not a physical one." Scytale laughed. Mirabhasa laughter could flay an opponent and he held nothing back now. Irulan smiled in appreciation, but the comers of the Reverend Mother's eyes revealed a faint hint of anger. "Stop that!" Mohiam rasped. Scytale stopped, but he had their attention now; Edric was in a silent rage, the Reverend Motlier alert in her anger, Irulan amused but puzzled. "Our friend Edric suggests," Scytale said, "that a pair of Bene Gesserit witches trained in all their subtle ways have not learned the tme uses of deception." TVTohiam turned to stare out at the cold hills of her Bene Gesserit homeworld. She was beginning to see the vital thing here, Scytale realized. That was good. Irulan, though, was another matter, n "Are you one of us or not, Scytale?" Edric asked. He stared out of tiny rodent eyes. "My allegiance is not tfie issue," Scytale said. He kept his attention on Iralan. "You are wondering. Princess, if this was why you came all those parsecs, risked so much?" She nodded agreement. "Was it to bandy platitudes with a humanoid fish or dispute with a fat Tleilaxu face dancer?" Scytale asked. She stepped away from Edric's tank, shaking her head in annoyance at the thick odor of melange. Edric took tifiis moment to pop a melange pill into his mouth. He ate the spice and breathed it and no doubt, drank it, Scytale noted. Understandable, because the spice heightened a steersman's prescience, gave him the power to guide a Guild heighliner across space at translight speeds. With spice awareness he found that line of the ship's future which avoided peril. Eldric smelled another kind of peril now, but his crutch of prescience might not find it, "I think it was a mistake for me to come here," Irulan said. The Reverend Mother turned, opened Her eyes and closed them, Scytale shifted his gaze from Irulan to the tank, inviting the Princess to share his viewpoint. She would, Scytale knew, see Edric as a repellant figure: the bold stare, those monstrous feet and hands moving softly in the gas, the smoky swirling of orange eddies around him. She would wonder about his sex habits, thinking how odd it would be to mate with such a one. Even the field force generator which recreated for Edric the weightlessness of space would set him apart from her now. "Princess," Scytale said, "because of Edric here, your husband's oracular sight cannot stumble upon certain incidents, including this one... presumably." "Presumably," Irulan said. Eyes closed, the Reverend Mother nodded. "The phenomenon of prescience is poorly understood even by its initiates," she said. "I am a full Guild navigator and have the Power," Edric said. Again, the Reverend Mother opened her eyes. This time, she stared at the face dancer, eyes probing with that peculiar Bene Gesserit intensity. She was weighing minutiae. "No, Reverend Mother," Scytale murmured, "I am not as simple ai I appeared." "We don't understand this Power of second sight," Irulan said. "There's a point. Edric says my husband cannot see, know or j predict what happens within the pphere of a navigator's influence. But how far does that influence extaid?" "There are people and things in our universe which I know only by their effects," Edric said, his fish mouth held in a thin line. "I know they have been here... there... somewhere. As water creatures stir up the currents in their passage, so the prescient stir up Time. I have seen where your husband has been; never have I seen him nor the people who truly share his aims and loyalties. This is the concealment which an adept gives to those who are his." "Irulan is not yours," Scytale said. And he looked sidelong at the Princess. "We all know why the conspiracy must be conducted only in my presence," Edric said. U sing tfie voice mode for describing a machine, Irulan said: "You have your uses, apparently." She sees him now tor what fie is, Scytale thought. Good "The future is a thing to be shaped," Scytale said. "Hold that thought. Princess." Irulan glanced at tfie face dancer. "People who sHare Paul's aims and loyalties," she said. "Certain of his Fremen legio.naires, then, wear his cloak. I have seen fiim prophesy for them, heard their cries of adulation for their Mahdi, their Muad'dib." It has occurred to her, Scytale thought, that she is on trial here, that a judgment remains to be made which could preserve her or destroy her. She sees the trap we set or her. Momentarily, Scytale's gaze locked with that of the Reverend Mother, and he experienced tfie odd realization that they had shared this thought about Irulan. The Bene Gesserit, of course, bad briefed their Princess, primed her with the lie adroit. But the moment always came when a Bene Gesserit must trust her own trying and instincts. "Princess, I know what it is you most desire from the Emperor," Edric said. "Who does not know it?" Irulan asked. "You wisfi to be the founcSog mother of the royal dynasty," Bdric said, as though he had not heard her. "Unless you join us, that will never happen. Take my oracular word on it. The Emperor married you for political reasons, but you'll never share his bed." "Sothe oracle is also a voyeur," Irulan sneered. "The Emperor is more firmly wedded to his Fremen concubine than he is to youl" Edric snapped. "And she gives him no heir," Irulan said. "Reason is the first victim of strong emotiofi," Scytale murmured. He sensed the outpouring of Irulan's anger, saw his admonition take effect. "She gives Kim no Heir," Irulan said, Her voice measuring out controlled calnaness, "because I am secretly administering a contraceptive. Is that the sort of admission you wanted to Hear from me?" "It would not be a thing for tKe Emperor to discover," Edric said, smiling. "I have lies ready for Him," Irulan said. "He may Have trutKsense, but some lies are easier to believe tKan tKe truth." "You must make tKe choice. Princess," Scytale said, "but understand what it is that protects you." "Paul is fair with me," sKe said. "I sit in his Council." "In tKe twelve years you've been His Princess Consort," Edric asked, "has Ke shown you the slightest warmtK?" Irulan shook Her Head. "He deposed your father with his infamous Fremen Horde, married you to fix his claiim to the throne, yet he has never crowned you Empress," Edric said. "Edric tries to sway you with emotion. Princess," Scytale said. "Is that not interesting?" S he glanced at the face dancer, saw the bold smile on his features, answered it with raised eyebrows. She was fully aware now, Scytale saw, that if she left this conference under Edric's sway, part of their plot, these moments might be concealed from Paul's oracular vision. If she withheld commitment, though... "Does it seem to you. Princess," Scytale asked, "that Edric holds undue sway in our conspiracy?" "I've already agreed," Edric said, "that I'll defer to the best judgment offered in our councils." "And who chooses the best judgment?" Scytale asked. "Do you wish the Princess to leave Here without joining us?" "He wishes her commitment to be a real one," the Reverend Mother growled. "There should be no trickery between us." Irulan, Scytale saw, had relaxed into a thinking posture, hands concealed in the sleeves of her robe. SKe would be thinking now of the bait Edric had offered: to found a royal dynasty! She would be wondering what scheme the conspirators had provided to protect themselves from her. She would be weighing many things. "Scytale," Irulan said presently, "it is said that you Tleilaxu have an odd system of honor: your victims must always have a means of escape." "If tfiey can but find it," Scytale agreed. "Am I a victim?" Irulani asked. A burst of laughter escaped Scytale. The Reverend Mother snorted. "Princess," Edric said, his voice softly persuasive, "you already are one of us, have no fear of that. Do not spy upon the Imperial Household for your Bene Gesserit superiors?" "Paul knows I report to my teachers," she said. "But don't you give them the material for strong propaganda against your Emperor?" Eidric asked. Not 'ouf Emperor, Scsrtale noted. Your Emperor. Irulan is too much the Bene Gesserit to miss that slip. "The question is one of powers and how they may be used," Scjrtale said, moving closer to the Guildman's tank. "We of the Tleilaxu believe that in all the universe there is only the insatiable appetite of matter, that energy is the only true solid. And energy learns. Hear me well. Princess: energy learns. This, we call power." "You haven't convinced me we can defeat the Emperor," Irulan said. "We haven't even convinced ourselves," Scytale said. "Everywhere we turn," Irulan said, "his power confronts us. He's the kwisatz haderach, the one who can be many places at once. He's the Mahdi whose merest whim is absolute command to his Qizarate missionaries. He's the mental whose occupational mind surpasses the greatest ancient computers. He is Muad'dib whose orders to the Fremen Legions depopulate planets. He possesses oracular vision which sees into the future. He had that gene pattern which we Bene Gesserits covet for... " "We know his attributes," the Reverend Mother interrupted. "And we know the abomination, his sister Alia, possesses this gene pattern. But they're also humans, both of them. Thus they have weaknesses." "And where are those human weaknesses?" the face dancer asked. "Shall we search for them in the religious arm of his Jihad? Can the Emperor's Qizara be turned against him? What about the civil authority of the Great Houses? Can the Landsraad Congress do more than raise a verbal clamor?" I suggest the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles," Edric said, turning in his tank. ness follows profits." "Or perhaps the Emperor's mother," Scytale said. "The Lady Jessica, I understand remains on Caladon, but is in frequent communication with her son." "That traitorous witch," Mohian said, voice level. "Would I might disown my own hands which trained her." "Our conspiracy requires a lever," Scytale said. "We are more than conspirators," the Reverend Mother countered. "Ah, yes," Scytale agreed. "We are energetic and we learn quickly. This makes us the one true hope, the certain salvation of humankind." He spoke in the speech mode for absolute conviction, which was perhaps the ultimate sneer coming, as it did, from a Tleilaxu, V nly the Reverend Mother appeared to xmderstand the subtlety. "Why?" she asked, directing the question at Scytale. Before the face dancer could answer, Edric cleared his throat and said : "Let us not bandy philosophical nonsense. Every question can be boiled down to the one: "Why is there anything?'. Every religious, business and governmental question has the single derivative: 'Who will exercise the power?' Alliances, combines, complexes, they all chase mirages unless they go for the power. All else is nonsense, as most thinking beings come to realize." Scytale shrugged, a gesture designed solely for the Reverend Mother. Edric had answered her question for him. The ix)ntificating fool was their major weakness. To make sure the Reverend Mother understood, Scytale said: "Listening carefully to the teacher, one acquires an education." The Reverend Mother nodded slowly. "Princess," Edric said, "make your choice. You have been chosen as an instrument of destiny, the very finest..." "Save your praise for those who can be swayed by it," Irulan said. "Earlier, you mentioned a ghost, a revenant with which we may contaminate the Emperor. Explain this." "The Atreides will defeat himself!" Ekiric crowed. "Stop talking riddles!" Irulan snapped. "What is this ghost?" "A very imusual ghost," Edric said. "It has a body and a name. The body -- that's the flesh of a renowned swordmaster known as Duncan Idaho. The name..." "Idaho's dead," Irulan said. "Paul has mourned the loss often in my presence. He saw Idaho killed by my father's Sardariker." "Even in "defeat," Edric said, "your father's Sardaukar did not abandon wisdom. Let us suppose a wise Sardaukar commander recognized the swordmaster in a corpse his men had slain. What then? There exist uses for such flesh and training . , . if one acts swiftly." 'A Tleilaxu gKola," Inilan wfaised, looking sideways at Scytale. Scytale, observing Her attention, exercised Bis face dancer powers -- sBape flowing into sHape moving and readjusting. Presently, a slender man stood before ber. The face remained somewhat rotmd, but darker and with slightly flattened features. High cheekbones formed shelves for eyes with definite epicanthic folds. The hair was black and unnily. "A ghola of tiiis appearance," Edric said, pointing to Scytale. "Or merely another face dancer?" Irulan asked. "No face dancer," Edric said. "A face dancer risks exposure under prolonged surveillance. No, let us assume that our wise Sardaukar commander Had Idaho's corpse preserved for the axlotl tanks. Why not? This corpse held the flesh and nerves of one of the finest swordsmen in history, an adviser to the Atreides, a military genius. What a waste to lose all that training and ability when it might be revived as an instructor for the Sardaukar." "I heard not a whisper of this and I was one of my father's confidants," Irulan said. "Ahh, but your father was a defeated man and within a few hours you had been sold to the new Emperor," Edric said. "Was it done?" she demanded. W ith a maddening air of complacency, Edric said: "Let us presume that our wise Sardaukar commander, knowing tfie need for speed, immediately sent the preserved flesh of Idaho to the Bene Tleilax. Let us suppose further that the commander and his men died before conveying this information to your father -- who couldn't have made much  use of it anyway. There would remain then a physical fact, a bit of flesh which had been sent off to the Tleilaxu. There was only one way for it to be sent of course, on a Heighliner. We of the Guild naturally know every cargo we transport. Learning of this one, would we not think it additional wisdom to purchase the ghola as a gift befitting an Emperor?" "You've done it then," Irulan said. Scytale, who had resumed his roly-poly first appearance, said: "As our long-winded friend indicates, we've done it." "How has Idaho been conditioned?" Irulan asked. "Idaho?" Edric asked, looking at the Tleilaxu. "Do you know of an Idaho, Scytale?" "We sold you a creature called Hayt," Scytale said. "Ah, yes -- Hayt," Edric said. "Why did you sell him to us?" "Because we once bred a kwisate KaderacR of our own," Scytale said. With a qxiick movement of her old head, the Reverend Mother looked up at him. "You didn't tell us that!" she accused. "You didn't ask," Scytale said. "How did you overcome your kwisatz Raderach?" Irulan asked. "A creatare who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation," Scytale said. "I do not understand," Edric ventured. "He killed himself," the Reverend Mother growled. "Follow me well. Reverend Mother," Scytale warned, using a voice mode which said: 'You are not a sex object, have never been a sex object, cannot be a sex object.' The Tleilaxu waited for the blatant emphasis to sink in. She must not mistake his intent. Realization must pass through anger intoawareness that the Tleilaxu certainly could not make such an accusation, knowing as he must the breeding requirements of the Sisterhood. His words though, contained a gutter insult, completely out of character for Tleilaxu. Swiftly, using the tnirabRasa placative mode, Edric tried to smooth over the moment. "Scytale, you told us you sold Hayt because you shared a desire on how to use him." "Edric, you must remain silent imtil I give you permission to speak," Sc#dale said. And as the Guildsman started to protest, the Reverend Mother snapped: "Shut up, Edric!" The Guildsman drew back into his tank in flailing agitation. "Our own transient motions aren't pertinent to a solution of the mutual problem," Scytale said. "They cloud reasoning because the only relevant emotion is the basic fear which brought us to this meeting." "We understand," Irulan said, glancing at the Reverend Mother. "You must see the dangerous limitations of our shield," Scytale said, "The oracle cannot chance upon what it cannot understand." "You are devious, Scytale," Irulan said. ow devious she 'must not guess, Sc#Ttale thought. When this is done, we will possess a kwisatz Radetach we can control. These others will possess nothing. "What was tfie origin of your kwisatz haderach?" the Reverend Mother asked. "We've dabbled in curious blue essences," Scytale said. "Pure good and pure evil. A pure villain who delights only in creating pain and terror can be quite educational." "The old Baron Harkonnen, our Emperor's maternal grandfather, was he a Tleilaxu creation?" Irulan asked. "Not one of ours," Scytale said, "But then nature often produces creations as deadly as ours. We merely produce them imder conditions where we can study them." "I will not be passed by and treated this way!" Edric protested. "Who is it hides this meeting from..." "You see?" Sc#rtale asked. "Whose best judgment conceals us? What judgment?" "I wish to discuss our mode of giving Hayt to the Emperor," Edric insisted. "It's my imderstanding that Hayt reflects the old morality that the Atreides learned on his birthworld. Hayt is supposed to make it easy for the Emperor to enlarge his moral nature, to delineate the positivenegative elements of life and religion." Scytale smiled, passing a benign gaze over his companions. They were as he'd been led to expect. The old Reverend Mother wielded her emotions like a scythe. Irulan had been well trained for a task at which she had failed, a flawed Bene Gesserit creation. Edric was no more (and no less) than the magician's hand; he might conceal and distract. For now, Edric relapsed into sullen silence as the others ignored him. "Do I understand that this Hayt is intended to poison Ifni's psyche?" Irulan asked. "More or less," Sc#d:ale said. "And what of the Qizarate?" Irulan asked. "It requires only the slightest shift in emphasis, a glissade of the emotions, to transform envy into enmity," Scytale said. "They will rally round profit," Scytale said. "What of the other power groups?" "One invokes the name of government," Scytale said. "We will annex the less powerful in the name of morality and progress. Our opposition will die of its own entanglements." "Aha, too?" "Hayt is a multi-purpose ghola," Scytale said. "The Emperor's sister is of an age when she can be distracted by a charming male designed for toat purpose. She will be attracted by his maleness and by his abilities as a mentat." Mohiam allowed her old eyes to go wide in surprise. "The ghola's a mentat? That's a dangerous move." "To be accurate," Irulan said, "a mentat must have accurate data. What if Paul asks him to define the purpose behind out gift?" "Hayt will tell ifie truth," Scytale said. "It makes no diffei;-' ence." "So you leave an escape door; open for Paul," Irulan said. "A mentat!" MoEam muttered. Qcytale glanced at the old Rev erend Mother, seeing the ancient hates which colored her responses. From the days of the Butlerian Jihad when thinking machines had been wiped from most of the universe, computers had inspired distrust. Old emotions colored the human computer as well. "I do not like the way you smile," MoEam said abruptly, speaking in the truth mode as she glared up at Scytale. In the same mode, Scytale said; "And I tEnk less of what pleases you. But we must work together. We all see that." He glanced at the Guildsman. "Don't we, Edric?" "You teach painful lessons," Edric said. "I presume you wished to make it plain that I must not assert myself agamst the combined judgments of my fellow conspirators." "You see, he can be taught," Scytale said. "I see other things as well," Edric growled. "The Atreides holds a monoply on the spice. Without it I cannot probe the future. The Bene Gesserite lose their truthsense. We Have stockpiles, but these are fimte. Melange is a powerful coin." "Our civilization has more than one com," Scytale said. "Thus, the law of supply and demand fails." "You tEnk to steal the secret of it," Mohiam wheezed. "And Em with a planet guarded by his mad Fremen;" "The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant," Scytale said. "They're not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be mampulated. Only knowledge is dangerous." "But will I be left with something to father a royal dynasty?" Irulan asked. They all heard the commitment in her voice, but only Edric smiled at it. "SometEng," Scytale said. "Something." "It means the end of tEs Atreides as a ruling force," Edric said. "I should imagine that others less gifted as oracles have made that prediction," Scytale said "For them, mektub al mellah, as the Fremen say," "The thing was written with salt," Irulan translated. As she spoke, Scytale recogmzed what the Bene Gesserit had arrayed here for him -- a beautiful and inteUigent female who could never be his. Ah well, he thought, perhaps Fll copy her for another. II T he streets had been ankle deep in sand blown over the Shield Wall on the stratus wind. Foot traffic had churned it into choking dust which clogged stillsuit filters. He could smell the dust even now despite a blower cleaning at the portals of his Keep. It was an odor full of desert memories. Other days... other dangers. Compared to those other days the peril in his lonely walks remained minor. But putting on a stillsuit, he put on the desert. The suit with all its apparatus for reclaiming his bod#s moisture, guided his thoughts in subtle ways, fixed his movements in a desert pattern. He became wild Fremen. More than a disguise, the suit made of him a stranger to his city self. In the stillsuit, he abandoned security and put on the old skills of violence. Pilgrims and townfolk passed him then with eyes downcast. They left the wild ones strictly alone out of prudence. If the desert had a face for city folk, it was a Fremen face concealed by a stillsuit's mouth-nose filters. In truth, there existed now only the small danger that someone from the old sietch days might mark him by his walk, by his odor or by his eyes. Even then, chances of meeting an enemy remained small. A swish of door hangings and a wash of light broke his reverie. Chani entered bearing his coffee service on a platinum tray. Two slaved glowglobes followed her, darting to their positions; one at the head of their bed, one hovering beside her to light her work. Chani moved with an ageless air of fragile power -- so self-contained, so vulnerable. Something about the way she bent over the coffee service reminded him then of their first days. Her features remained darkly elfin, seemingly unmarked by their years -- unless one examined the outer corners of her whiteless eyes, noting the lines there; "sandtracks," the Fremen of the desert called them. Steam wafted from the pot as she lifted the lid by its Hagar emerald knob. He could tell the coffee wasn't yet ready by the way she replaced the lid. The pot -- fluting silver female shape, pregnant -- had come to him as a hanima, a spoil of battle won when he'd slain the former owner in single combat. Jamis, thafd been the man's name... Jamis. What an odd immortality death had earned for Jamis. Knowing death to be inevitable, had Jamis carried that particular one in his mind? Chani put out cups; blue pottery squatting like attendants beneath the immense pot. There were three cups, one for each drinker and one for all the former owners. "It'll only be a moment," she aid. She looked at him then, and Paul wondered how he appeared in her eyes. Was he yet the exotic offworlder, slim and wiry but water-fat when compared to Fremen? Had he remained the Usui of his tribal name who'd taken Her in "Fremen tau" while they'd been fugitives in the desert? Paul stared down at 'his own body; hard muscles, slender... a few more scars, but essentially the same despite twelve years as Emperor. Looking up, he glimpsed his face in a shelf mirror -- blue-blue Fremen eyes -- mark of spice addiction -- and a sharp Atreides nose. He looked the proper grandson for an Atreides who'd died in the bull ring creating a spectacle for, his people. Qomething the old man had said slipped then into Paul's mind; "One who rules assumes irrevocable responsibility for the ruled. You are a husbandman. This demands, at times, a selfless act of love which may only be amusini to those who rule." People still remembered that old man with affection. And what have I done for the Atreides name? Paul asked himself. I've loosed the wolf amon the sheep. For a moment, he contemplated all the death and violence going on in his name. "Into bed now!" Chani said in a sharp tone of command that Paul knew would have shocked his Imperial subjects. He obeyed, lay back with His hands behind his head, letting himself be lulled by the pleasant familiarity of Chani's movements. The room aroimd them struck him suddenly with amusement. It was not at all what the populace must imagine as the Emperor's bedchamber. The yellow light of restless glowglobes moved the shadows in an array of colored glass jars on a shelf behind Chani. Paul named their contents silently -- the dry ingredients of the desert pharmacopeia, ungents, incense, mementos... a pinch of sand from Sietch Tabr, a lock of hair from their firstborn... long dead... twelve years dead... an innocent bystander killed in the battle that Had made Paul Emperor. The rich odor of spice coffee filled the room. Paul inhaled, his glance falling on a yellow bowl beside the tray where Chani was preparing the coffee. The bowl held ground nuts. The inevitable poison snooper mounted beneath the table waved its insect arms over the food. The snooper angered him. They'd never needed snoopers in the desert days! "Coffee's ready," Chani said. "Are you hungry?" His angry denial was drowned in the whistling scream of a spice lighter hurling itself spaceward from the field outside Arrakeen. Chani saw his anger, though; she poured their coffee, put a cup near his hand. She sat down on the foot of the bed, exposed his legs and rubbed them where the muscles were knotted from walking in the stillsuit. Softly, with a casual air which did not deceive him, she said: "Let us discus Irulan's desire for a child." Paul's eyes snapped wide open. He studied Chani carefully. "Irulan's been back from WallacH less than two days," he said. "Has she been at you already?" "We've not discussed her frustrations," Chani said. P aul forced his mind to mentaf alertness, examined Chani in the harsh light of observatiorial minutiae, the Bene Gesserit Way his mother had taught him in violation of her vows. It was a thing he didn't like doing with Chani. Part of her hold on him lay in the fact he so seldom needed his tension-building powers with her. Chani mostly avoided indiscreet questions. She maintained a Fremen sense erf good manners. Hers were more often practical questions. What interested Chani were facts whidi bore on the position of her man -- his strength in Council, the loyalty of his Legions, the abilities and talents of his allies. Her memory held catalogs of names and crossindexed details. She could rattle off the major weakness of every known enemy, the potential dispositions of opposing forces, battle plans of their military leaders, the tooling and production capacities of basic industries. Why now, Paul wondered, d she ask about Irulan? "I've troubled your mand," Chani said. "What was your intention?" She smiled shyly, meetiirg his gaze. "If you're angered, Jove, please don't hide it." Paul sank back against the headboard. "Shall I put her away?" he asked. "Her use is limited now, and I don't like the liingR I sense about her trip home to the Sisterhood." "You'll not put her away," rhani said. She went on massaging his legs, spoke matter of factly: "You've said many times she's your contact with our enemies, that you can read their plans through her actions." "Then why ask about her desire for a child?" "I think it'd disconcert our enemies and put Irulan in a vulnerable position should you make her pregnant." He read by the movements of her hands on his legs what that statement had cost her. A lump rose in his throat. Softly, he said: "Chani, beloved, I swore an oath never to take her into my bed. A child would give her too much power. Would you have her displace you?" "I have no place." "Not so, Sihaya, my desert springtime. What is this sudden concern for Irulan?" "It's concern for you, not for her! If she carried an Atreides child, her friends would question her loyalties. The less trust our enemies place in her, the less she is to them." "A child for her could mean your death," Paul said. "You know the plotting in this place." A movement of his arm encompassed the Keep. "You must have an heir!" she husked. "AhhH," he said. So that was it: Chani Had not produced a child for him. Someone else, then, must do it. Why not Irulan? That was the way Chani's mind worked. And it must be done in an act of love because all the Empire avowed strong taboos against artificial ways, Chani had come to a Fremen decision. Paul studied Her face in this new light. It was a face soft with passion, in the sweetness of sleep, awash in fears and angers and griefs. He closed his eyes, and Chani came into his memories as a girl once more -- veiled in springtime, singing, waking from sleep beside him -- so perfect that the very vision of her consumed him. In his memory, she smiled... shyly at first, then strained against the vision as though she longed to escape. paul's mouth went dry. For a moment, his nostrils tasted the smoke of a devasted future and the voice of another kind of vision commanding Him to disengage... disengage... disengage. His prophetic visions had been eavesdropping on eternity for such a long wEle, catching snatches of foreign tongues, listening to stones and to flesh not his own. Since the day of Es first encounter with terrible purpose, he Had peered at the future, hoping to find peace. There existed a way, of course. He knew it by heart without knowing the heart of it -- a rote future, strict in its instructions to him: disengage, disengage, disengage... Paiil opened his eyes, looked at the decision in Chani's face. She had stopped massaging his legs, sat still now -- purest Fremen. Her features remained familiar beneath the blue nezhoni scarf she often wore about Her hair in the privacy of their chambers. But the mask of decision sat on her, an ancient and aliento-him way of thinking. Fremen women had shared their men for thousands of years -- not always in peace, but with a way of making the fact non-destructive. Something mysteriously Fremen in this fashion had happened in Chani. "You'll give me the only heir I want," he said. "You've seen this?" she asked, making it obvious by her emphasis that she referred to prescience. As he had done many times, Paul wondered how he could explain the delicacy of the oracle, the Timelines without number which vision waved' before him on an undulating fabric. He sighed, remembered water lifted from a river in the hollow of his hands -- trembling, draining. Memory drenched his face in it. How could he drench himself in futures growing increasingly obscure from the pressures of too many oracles? "You've not seen it, then," Chani said. That vision-future scarce any longer accessible to him except at the expenditure of life-draining effort, what could it show them except grief? He felt that he occupied an inhospitable middle zone, a wasted place where his emotions drifted, swayed, swept outward, in imchecked restlessness. Chani covered his legs and said; "An heir to House Atreides, this is not something you leave to chance or one woman." That was a thing his mother might have said, Paul thought. He wondered if the Lady Jessica had been in secret communication with Chani. His mother would think in terms of House Atreides. It was a pattern bred and corrditioned into her by the Bene Gesserit, and would hold true even now when her powers were turned against the Sisterhood. "You listened when Irulan came to me today," he accused. "I listened." She spoke without looking at him. P aul focused his memory on the encotmter with Irulan. He'd let himself into the family salon, noted an unfinished robe on Chani's loom. There'd been an acrid wormsmell to the place, an e'vil odor which almost hid the underlying cinnamon bite of melange. Someone had spilled unchanged spice essence and left it to combine there with a spicebased rug. It had not been a felicitous combination. Spice essence had dissolved the rug. Oily marks lay concealed on the plastone floor where the rug had been. He'd thought to send for someone to clean away the mess, but Harah, Stilgar's wife and Chani's closest feminine friend, had slipped in to annoimce Irulan. He'd been forced to conduct the interview in the presence of that evil smell, imable to escape a Fremen superstition that evil smells foretold disaster. Harah withdrew as Irulan entered. "Welcome," Paul said. Irulan wore a robe of gray whale fur. She pulled it close, touched a hand to her hair. He could see her wondering at her mild tone. The angry words she had ob'viously prepared for this meeting could be sensed leaving her mind in a welter of second thoughts. "You came to report that the Sisterhood has lost its last vestige of morality," he said. "Isn't it dangerous to be that ridiculous?" she asked. "To be ridiculous and dangerous, a questionable alliance," he said. His renegade Bene Gesserit training detected her putting down an impulse to withdraw. The effort exposed a brief glimpse of underlying fear, and he saw she'd been assigned a task not to her likii. "They expect a bit too much from a princess of the blood royal," he said. Irulan grew very still, and Paul became aware that she had locked herself into a viselike control. A heavy burden, indeed, he thought. And he wondered why prescient visions had given him no glimpse of this possible future. Slowly, Irulan relaxed. There was no point in surrendering to fear, no point in retreat, she had decided. "You've allowed the weather to fall into a very primitive pattern," she said, rubbing her arms through the robe. 'Tt was dry and there was a sandstorm today. Are you never going to let it rain here?" "You didn't come here to talk about the weather," Paul said. He felt that he had been submerged in double meanings. Was Irulan trying to tell him something which her training would not permit her to say openly? It seemed that way. He felt that he had been cast adrift suddenly and now must thrash his way back to some steady place. "I must have a child," she said. TT e shook his head from side to side. "I must have my way!" she snapped. "If need be. I'll find another father for my child. I'll cuckhold you and dare you to expose me." "Cuckhold me all you wish," he said, "but no child." "How can you stop me?" With a smile of utmost kindness, he said: "I'd have you garroted, if it came to that." Shocked silence held her for a moment, and Paul sensed Chani listening behind the heavy draperies into their private apartments. "I am your wife," Ihilan whispered. "Let us not have these silly games," he said. "You play a part, no more. We both know who my wife is." "And I am a convenience, nothing more," she said, voice heavy with bitterness. "I have no wish to be cruel to you," he said. "You chose me for this position." "Not I," fie said. "Fate chose you. The Guild chose you. And they have chosen you once more. For what have they chosen you, Irulan?" "Why can't I have your child?" "Because that's a role for which you weren't chosen." "It's my right to bear the royal heir! My father was..." "Your father was and is a beast. We both know he'd lost almost all touch with the humanity he was supposed to rule and protect." "Was he hated less than you're hated?" she flared. "A good question," he agreed, a sardonic smile touching the edges of his mouth. "You say you've no wish to be cruel to me, yet..." "And that's why I agree that you can take any lover you choose. But understand me well: take a lover, but bring no sourfathered child into my household, I would deny such a child. I don't begrudge you any male alliance as long as you are discreet... and childless. I'd be silly to feel otherwise imder the circumstances. But don't presume upon this license which I freely bestow. Where the throne is concerned, I control what blood is heir to it. The Bene Gesserit doesn't control this, nor does the Guild. This is one of the privileges I won when I smashed your father's Sardaukar legions out there on the Plain of Arrakeen." "It's on your head, then," Irulan said. She whirled and swept out of the chamber. R emembering the encounter now, Paul brought his awareness out of it and focused on Chani seated beside him on their bed. He could understand his ambivalent feelings about Irulan, understand Chani's Fremen decision. Under other circumstances Chani and Irulan might have been friends. "What have you decided?" Chani asked. "No child," he said. Chani made the Fremen crysknife sign with index finger and thumb of her right hand. "It could come to that," he agreed. "You don't think a child would solve anything with Irulan?" she asked. "Only a fool would think that." "I am not a fool, my love." Anger possessed him. "I've never said you were! But this isn't some damned romantic novel we are discussing. That's a real princess down the hall. She was raised in all the nasty intrigues of an Imperial Court. Plotting is as natural to her as writing her stupid histories!" "They are not stupid, love." "Probably not." He brought his anger under control, took her hand in his. "Sorry. But that woman has many plots -- plots within plots. Give in to one of her ambitions and you could advance another of them." Her voice mild, Chani said: "Haven't I always said as much?" "Yes, of course you have." He stared at her. "Then what are you really trying to say to me?" She lay down beside him, placed her head against his neck. "They have come to a decision on how to fight you," she said. "Irulan reeks of secret decisions." Paul stroked her hair. Chani had peeled away the dross. 'Terrible purpose brushed him. It was a Coriolis wind in his soul. It whistled through the framework of his being. His body knew things then never learned in consciousness. "Chani, beloved," he whimpered, "do you know what I'd spend to end the Jihad -- to separate myself from the damnable godhead the Qizarate forces onto me?" She trembled. "You have but to command it," she said. "Oh, no. Even if I died now, my name would still lead them. When I think of the Atreides name tied to this religious butchery... " "But you're the Emperor! You have..." "I'm a figurehead. When godfiead's given, that's the one thing the so-called god no longer controls." A bitter laugh shook hhn. He sensed the future looking back at him out of dynasties not even dreamed. He felt his being cast out, crying, unchained from the rings of fate -- only his name continued. "I was chosen," he "said. "Perhaps at birth... certainly before I had much say in it. I was chosen." "Then un-choose," she said. His arm tightened around Her shoulder. "In time, beloved. Give me yet a little time." Unshed tears burned his eyes. "We should retirni to Sietch Tabr," Chani said. "There's too much to contend with in this tent of stone." He nodded, his dun moving against the smooth fabric of the scarf which covered her hair. The soothing spice smell of her filled his nestrils. Sietch. The ancient Chakohsa word absorbed him: a place of retreat and safety in a time of peril Chani's suggestion made tim long for vistas of open sand, for clean distances where one could see an enemy coming from a long way off. "The tribes expect Muad'dib to return to them," she said. She lift ed her head to look at him. "You belong to us." "I belong to a vision," he whispered. He thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs and the vision which told him how he might end it Should he pay the price? All the Hatefulness would evaporate, dying as fires die -- ember by ember. But... h! The terrifying price! I never wanted to be a od, thout. I wanted only to disappear like a jewel oi trace dew caught by the mortdng. I wanted to escape the angels and the damned -- alone... as though by an oversight. "Will we go back to the Sietch?" Chani pressed. "Yes," he whispered. And He thought: I must pay the price. Chani heaved a deep sigh, settled back against him. I've loitered, he thought And he saw how he'd been hemmed in by boundaries of love and the Jihad. But what was one life, no matter how beloved, against all the lives the Jihad was certain to take? Could single misery be weighed against the agony of multitudes? "Love?" Chani said, questioning. He put a hand against her lips. J 'll yield up myselt, he thought I'll rush out while I yet have the strength, ily through a space a bird might not iind. It was a useless thought, and He knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost. What could he answer? he wondered. How explain when people taxed him with brutal foolishness? Who might understand? I wanted only to look back and say: 'There! There's an existence which couldn't hold me. See! I vanish! No restraint or net oi human devising can trap me ever again. I renounce my religion! This glorious instant is mine! I'm free!' What empty words these are! "A big worm was seen below the Shield Wall yesterday," Chani said. "More than a hundred meters long, they say. Such big ones come rarely into this region any more. The water repels them, I suppose. They say this one came to summon Muad'dib home to his desert." She pinched his chest "Don't laugh at me!" "I'm not laughing." Paul, caught by wonder at the persistent Fremen mythos, felt a heart constriction, a thing inflicted upon his lifeline: adab, the demanding memory. He recalled his childhood room on Caladan then... dark night in the stone chamber... a vision! It'd been one of his earliest prescient moments. He felt his mind dive into the vision, saw 'through a veiled cloud-memory (vision-within-vision) a line of Fremen, their robes trimmed with dust. They paraded past a gap in tall rocks. They carried a long, cloth-wrapped burden. And Paul heard himself say in the vision: "It was mostly sweet... but you were the sweetest of all... " Adab released hirrt. "You're so quiet," Chani whispered. "What is it?" Paul shuddered, sat up, face averted. "You're angry because I've been to the desert's ed" Chani said. He shook his head without speaking. "I only went because I want a child," Chani said. Paul was imable to ffpeak. He felt himself consumed by the raw power of that early vision. Terrible purpose! In that moment, his whole life was a limb shaken by the departure of a bird... and the bird was chance. I succumbed to the hire oi the oracle, he thought. And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future? Had he exposed his life to some web of underlsdng threads, trapped himself there in that long-ago awakening, victim of a spiderfuture which even now advanced upon him with terrifying jaws.  Bene Gesserit axiom slipped into his mind: "To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers. "I know it angers you," Chani said, touching his arm. "It's true that the tribes have revived the old rites and the blood sacrifices, but I took no part in those." Paul inhaled a deep, trembling breath. The torrent of his vision dissipated, became a deep, still place whose currents moved with absorbing power beyond his reach. "Please," Chani begged. "I want a child, our child. Is that a terrible thing?" Paul caressed her arm where she touched him, pulled away. He climbed from the bed, extinguished the glowglobes, crossed to the balcony window, opened the draperies. The deep desert could not intrude here except by its odors. A windowless wall climbed to the night sky across from him. Moonlight slanted down into an enclosed garden, sentinel trees and broadleaves, wet foliage. He could see a fishpond reflecting stars among the leaves, pockets of white Momentarily, he saw the garden through Fremen eyes: alien, menacing, dangerous in its waste of water. He thought of the Water Sellers, their way destroyed by the lavish dispensing from his hands. They hated him. He'd slain their past. And there were others, even those who'd fought for the sols to buy precious water, who hated him for changing the old ways. As the ecological pattern dictated by Muad'dib remade the planet's landscape, human resistance increased. Was it not presumptuous, he wondered, to think he could make over an entire planet -- eversdhing growing where and how lie told it to grow? Even if he succeeded, what of the universe waiting out there? Did it fear similar treatment? Abruptly, lie closed the draperies, sealed the ventilators. He turned toward Chani in the darkness, felt her waiting there. Her water rings tinkled like the ahnsbells of pilgrims. He groped his way to the sound, encountered her outstretched arms. "Beloved," she whispered. "Have I troubled you?" Her arms, enclosed his future as they enclosed him. "Not you," he said. "OH... not you." Ill The advent of the Field Process shield and the lasun with their explosive interaction, deadly to attacker and attacked, placed the current determinatives on weapons technology. We need not go into the special role of atomics. The fact that any Family in my Empire could so deploy its atomics as to destroy the planetary bases of fifty or more other Families causes some nervousness, true. But all of us possess precautionary plans for devastating retaliation. Guild and Landsraad contain the keys which hold this force in check. No, my concern goes to the development of humans as special weapons. Here is a virtually unlimited field which a few powers are developing. -- Muad'dib : Lecture to the War College from the Stilgar Chronicle T he old man stood in his doorway peering out with bluein-blue eyes. The eyes were veiled by that native suspicion all desert folk held for strangers. Bitter lines tortured the edges of his mouth where it could be seen through a fringe of white beard. He wore no stillsuit, and it said much that he ignored this fact in the full knowledge of the moisture pouring from his house through the open door. Scytale bowed, gave the greeting signal of the conspiracy. From somewhere behind the old man came the sound of a rebeck wailing through the atonal dissonance of semuta music. The old man's manner carried no drug dullness, an indication that semuta was the weakness of another. It seemed strange to Sesdale, though, to find that sophisticated vice in this place, "Greetings from afar," Sesdale said, smiling through the flatfeatured face he had chosen for this encounter. It occurred to him, then, that this old' man might recognize the chosen face. Some of the older Fremen here on Dune had known Duncan Idaho. The choice of features, which he had thought amusing, might have been a mistake, Scytale decided. But he dared not change the face out here; He cast nervous glances up and down the street. Would the old man never invite him inside? "Did you know my son?" the old man asked. That, at least, was one of the countersigns. Scytale made the proper response, all the time keeping his eyes alert for any suspicious circumstance in his surroundings. He did not like his position here. The street was a cul-de-sac ending in this house. The houses all around had been built for veterans of the Jihad. They formed a suburb of Arrakeen which stretched into the Imperial Basin past Tiemag. The walls which hemmed in this street presented blank faces of dun plasmeld broken by dark shadows of sealed doorways and, here and there, scrawled obscenities. Beside this very door someone had chalked a pronouncement that one Beris had brought back to Arrakis a loathsome disease which deprived him of his manhood. Do you come in partnership," the old man asked. "Alone," Scytale said, The old man cleared his throat, still hesitating in that maddening way. Scjrtale cautioned Himself to patience. Contact in this fashion carried its own dangers. Perliaps tiie old man knew some reason for carrying on this way. It was the proper hour, though. The pale sun stood almost directly overhead. People of this quarter remained sealed in their houses to sleep through the hot part of the day. Was it the new neighbor who bothered the old man? Scsdale wondered. The adjoining house, he knew, had been assigned to Otheym, once a member of Muad'dib's dreaded Fedaykin death commandos. Bijaz. the catalystdwarf waited with Otheym. Qcytale returned his gaze to the old man, noted the empty sleeve dangling from the left shoulder and the lack of a stillsuit. An air of command hung about this old man. He'd been no foot slogger in the Jihad. "May I know the visitor's name?" the old man asked. Scytale suppressed a sigh of relief. He was to be accepted, after all. "I am Zaal." he said, giving the name assigned him for this mission. "I am Farok," the old man said, "once Bashar of the Ninth Legion in the Jihad. Does this mean an#dhing to you?" Scytale read menace in the words. He said; "You were bom in Sietcli Tabr with allegiance to Stilgar." Farok relaxed, stepped aside. "You are welcome in my house." Scytale slipped past him into a shadowy atrium -- blue tile ! floor, glittering designs worked in crystal on the walls. Beyond the , atrium was a covered courtyard. Light admitted by translucent I filters spread an opalescence as ! silvery as the white-nigHt of First Moon. The street door grated i into its moisture seals behind Him. "We were a noble people," Farok said, leading the way toward the courtyard. "We were not of the cast-out. We lived in no graben village... such as this! We had a proper sietch in the Shield Wall above Habbanya Ridge. One worm could carry us into Kedem, the inner desert. "Not like this," Scytale agreed,  realizing now what had brought Farok into the conspiracy. The Fremen longed for the old days and the old ways. They entered the courtyard. Farok stmggled with an intense dislike for his visitor, Scytale realized. Fremen distrusted eyes that were not the total blue of Ibad. Offworlders, Fremen said, had unfocused eyes which saw things they were not supposed to see. The semuta music had stopped at their entrance. It was replaced now by the strum of a baliset, first a nine-scale chord, then the clear notes of a song which' was popular on the Naraj worlds. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Scytale saw a youth sitting cross-legged on a low divan beneath arches to his right. The youth's eyes were empty sockets. With that uncanny facility of the blind, fie began singing the moment Scytale focused on him. The voice was high and sweet; "A wind has blown the land away And blown the sky away And all the men! Who is this wind? The trees stand unbent, Drinking where men drank. I've known too many worlds, Too many men. Too many trees. Too many winds." Those were not the original words of the song, Scytale noted. Farok led him away from the youth and under the arches on the opposite side, indicated cushions scattered over the tile floor. The tile was worked into designs of sea creatures. "There is a cushion once occupied in sietch by Muad'dib," Farok said, indicating a round, black mound. "It is yours now." "I am in your debt," Scsdale said, sinking to the black mound. He smiled. Farok displayed wisdom. A sage spoke of loyalty even while listening to songs of Hidden meaning and words with secret messages. Who could deny the terrifying powers of the tyrant Emperor? I nserting tus words across the song without breaking the meter, Farok said; "Does my son's music disturb you?" Scytale gestured to a cusEion facing Kim, put his back against a cool pillar. "I enjoy music." "My son lost his eyes in the conquest of Naraj," Farok said. "He was nursed there and should Have stayed. No woman of the People will have him thus. I find it curious, though, to know I have grandchildren on Naraj that I may never see. Do you know the Naraj worlds, Zaal?" "In my youth, I toured there with a troupe of my fellow face dancers," Scytale said. "You are a face dancer, then," Farok said. "I had wondered at your features. They reminded me of a man I knew here once." "Duncan Idaho?" "That one, yes. A swordmaster in the Emperor's pay." "He was killed, so it is said." "So it is said," Farok agreed. "Are you truly a man, then? I've heard stories about face dancers that... , " He shrugged. "We are Jadacha hermaphrodites," Scsdale said, "either sex at will. For now, I am a man." Farok pursed his lips in thought, then; "May I call for refreshments? Do you desire water? Iced fruit? Anytfiing at all?" "Talk will suffice," Scytale said. "The guest's wish is a command," Farok said, settling to the cushion which faced Scytale. "Blessed is Abu d' Dhur, Father of the Indefinite Roads of Time," Scytale said. And he thought: There! I've told him straight out that I come from a Guild Steersman and wear the Steersman's concealment. "Thrice blessed," Farok said, folding his hands into his lap in the ritual clasp. They were old, heavily veined hands. "An object seen from a distance betrasrs only its principle," Scytale said, revealing that he wished to discuss the Emperor's fortress Keep. "That which is dark and evil may be seen for evil at any distance," Farok said, advising delay. Why? Scytale wondered. But he said: "How did your son lose his eyes?" "The Naraj defenders used a stone burner," Farok said. "My son was too closa Cursed atomics! Even the stone biuner should be outlawed." "It skirts the intent of the law," Scytale agreed. And he thought: A stone burner on Naraj! We weren't told of that. Why does this old man speak of stone burners here? C  T offered to buy Tkilaxu eyes for him from your masters," Farok said. "But there's a story in the Legions that Tleilaxu eyes enslave their users. My son told me that such eyes are metal and he is flesh, that such a union must be sinful." "The principle of an object must fit its original intent," Scytale said, tT#dng to turn the conversation back to the information he sought. Farok's lips went thin, but he nodded. "Speak openly of what you wish," he said. "We must put our trust in your Steersman." "Have you ever entered the Imperial Keep?" Scytale asked. "I was there for the feast celebrating the Molitor victory. It was cold in all that stone despite the best Ixian space heaters We slept on the terrace of Alia's Fane the night before. He has trees in there, you know -- trees from many worlds. We Bashars were dressed in our finest green robes and had our tables set apart. We ate and drank too much. I was disgusted with some of the things I saw The walking wounded came, dragging themselves along on their crutches. I do not think our Muad'dib knows how many men he has maimed." "You objected to the feast?" Sc#d:ale asked, speaking from a knowledge of the Fremen orgies I which were ignited by spice beer. "It was not like e mingling of our souls in the sietcH," Farok said. "There was no tau. For entertainment, the troops had slave girls, and the men shared the stories of their battles and their i woimds." "So you were inside that great I pile of stone," Scytale said. "Muad'dib came out to us on I file terrace," Farok said. " 'Good ! fortune to us all,' he said. The greeting drill of the desert in that place!" "Do you know the location of his private apartments?" Sc#ale asked. "Deep inside," Farok said. "Somewhere deep inside. I am told he and Chani live a nomadic life and that all within the walls of their Keep. Out to the Great Hall he comes for the public audiences. He has reception halls and formal meeting places, a whole wing for his personal guard, places for the ceremonies and an inner section for communications. There is a room far beneath his fortress, I am told, where he keeps a stvmted worm surrounded by a water moat with which to poison it. Here is where he reads the future." Myth all tangled up with facts, Scytale thought "The apparatus of government accompanies him everywhere," Farok grumbled. "Clerks and attendants and attendants for the attendants. He trusts only the ones such as Stilgar who were very close to him in the old days." "Not you," Scytale said. "I think he has forgotten my existence," Farok said. "How does he come and go when he leaves that building?" Scytale asked. "He has a tiny 'thopter landing which juts from an iimer wall," Farok said. "I am told Muad'dib will not permit another to handle the controls for a landing there. It requires an approach, so it is said, where the slightest miscalculation would plunge him down a sheer cliff of wall into one of his accursed gardens." Ocsrtale nodded. This, most likely, was true. Such an aerial entry to the Emperor's quarters would carry a certain measure of security. The Atreides were superb pilots all. "He uses men to carry his distrans messages," Farok said. "It demeans men to implant wave translators in them. A man's voice should be his own to command. It should not carry another man's message hidden within its sounds." Scytale shrugged. All great powers used the distrans in this age. One could never tell what obstacle might be placed between sender and addressee. The distrans defied political cryptology because it relied on subtle distortions of natural sound patterns which could be scrambled with enormous intricacy. "Even his tax officials use this method," Farok complained. "In my day, the distrans was implanted only in the lower animals." But levenae information must be kept secret, Scytale thought. More than one government has fallen because people discovered the real extent of official wealth. "How do the Fremen cohorts feel now about Muad'dib's Jihad?" Scjrtale asked. "Do they object to making a god out of their Emperor?" "Most of them don't even consider this," Farok said. "They think of the Jihad the way I thought of it -- most of them. It is a source of strange experiences, adventure, wealth. This graben hovel in which I live..." Farok gestured at the courtyard. "... it cost sixty lidas of spice. Ninety kontars! There was a time when I could not even imagine such riches." He shook his head. Across the courtyard, the blind youth took up the notes of a love ballad on his baliset. Ninety kontars, Scytale thought. How strange. Great riches, certainly. Farok's hovel would be a palace on many another world, but all things were relative -- even the kontar. Did Farok, for example, know whence came his measure for this weight of spice? Did he ever think of himseH that one and a half kontar once limited a camel load? Not likely. Farok might never even have heard of a camel or of the Golden Age of Earth. His words oddly in rhythm to the m.elody of his son's baliset, Farok said: "I owned a crysknife, water rings to ten liters, my own lance which had been my father's, a coffee service, a bottle made of red glass older than any memory in my sietch. I had my own share of our spice, but no money. I was rich and did not know it. Two wives I had: one plain and dear to me, the other stupid and obstinate, but with form and face of an angel. I was a Fremen naib, a rider of worms, master of the leviathan and of the sand." The youth across the courtyard picked up the beat of his melody. "I knew many things without the need to think about them," Farok said. "I knew there was water far beneath our sand, held there in. bondage by the Little Makers. I knew that my ancestors sacrificed virgins to Shaihulud... before Liet-Kynes made us stop. It was wrong for us to stop. I had seen the jewels in the mouth of a worm. My soul had four gates and I knew them all." e fell silent, musing. "Then the Atreides came with Kis witcH mother," Sc#rtale ' said. I "The Atreides came," Farok agreed. "The one we named Usui in our sietch, his private name : among us. Our Muad'dib, our : Mahdi! And when he called for I the Jihad, I was one of those who ; asked: 'Why should I go to fight I there? I have no relatives there.' I But other men went -- young ! men, friends, companions of my ! childhood. When they returned, I they spoke of wizardry, of the power of this Atreides savior. He fought our enemy, the Harkoni nen. Liet-Kynes, who had prom; ised us paradise upon our planet, blessed him. It was said this Atreides came to change our world and our universe, that he j was the man to make the golden flower blossom in the night." Farok held up his hands, examined the palms. "Men pointed to First Moon and said: 'His j soul is there.' Thus, he was I called Muad'dib. I did not under stand all this." He lowered his hands, stared across the courtyard at his son. "I had no thoughts in my head. There were thoughts only in my heart, my, belly and my loins. Again, the tempo of the background music increased. "Do you know why I enlisted in the Jihad?" The old eyes stared hard at Sc#ale. "I Heard there was a thing called a sea. It is very hard to believe in a sea when you have lived only here among our dunes. We have no seas. Men of Dune have never known a sea. We had our windtraps. We collected water for the great change Liet-Kynes promised us... this great change Muad'dib is bringing with a wave of his hand. I could imagine a qanat, water flowing across the land in a canal. From tlus, my mind could picture a river. But a sea?" Farok gazed at the translucent cover of his courtyard as though trying to probe into the universe beyond. "A sea," he said, voice low. "It was too much for my mind to picture. Yet, men I ew said they had seen this marvel. I thought they lied, but I had to know for myself. It was for this reason that I enlisted." The youth struck a loud final chord on the baliset, took up a new song with an oddly undulating rhythm. "Did you find your sea?" Scytale asked. Farok remained silent and Scytale thought the old man had not heard. The baliset music rose around them and fell like a tidal movement Farok breathed to its rhythm. "There was a sunset," Farok said presently. "One of the elder artists might have painted such a sunset. It had red in it the color of the glass in my bottle. There was gold... blue. It was on the world they call Enfeil, the one where I led my Legion to victory. We came out of a mountain pass where the air was sick with water. I could scarcely breathe it. And there below me was the thing my friends had told me about: water as far as I could see and farther. We marched down to it. I waded out into it and drank. It was bitter and made me ill. But the wonder of it has never left me." Scytale found himself sharing the old Fremen's awe. "I immersed myself in that sea," Farok said, looking down at the water creatures worked into the tiles of his floor. "One man sank beneath that water... another man arose from it I felt that I could remember a past which had never been. I stared around me with eyes which could accept anything... anything at all. I saw a body in the water -- one of the defenders we had slain. There was a log nearby supported on that water, a piece of a great tree. I can close my eyes now and see that log. It was black on one end from a fire. And there was a piece of cloth in that water -- no more than a yeUow rag... torn, dirty. I looked at all these things and I understood why they had come to this place. It was for me to see tliem." Forak turned slowly, stared in' to Scytale's eyes. "The universe is unfinished, you know," he said. T his one is garrulous, but deep, Scytale thought. And he said: "I can see it made a profound impression on you." "You are a Tleilaxu," Farok said. "You have seen many seas. I have seen only this one, yet I know a thing about seas which i you do not." I Scytale found himself in the  grip of an odd feeling of fis, quiet. "The Mother of Chaos was bom in a sea," Farok said. "A Qizara Tafwid stood nearby when I came dripping from that water. He had not entered the sea. He stood on the sand... it was wet sand... with some of the men who shared his fear. He  watched me with eyes that knew I had learned something whleH was denied to him. I had become a sea' creatme and I frightened him. The sea healed me of the Jihad and I think he saw this." Scytale realized that somewhere in this recital the music had stopped. He found it disturbing that he could not place the instant when the baliset had fallen silent. As though it were relevant to what he'd been recounting, Farok said: "Every gate is guarded. There's no way into the Emperor's fortress." "That's its weakness," Scytale said. Farok stretched his neck upward, peering. "There's a way in," Scytale explained. "The fact that most men -- including, we may hope, the Emperor -- believe otherwise... that's to our advantage." He rubbed his lips, feeling the strangeness of the visage he'd chosen. The musician's silence bothered him. Did it mean Farok's son was through transmitting? That had been the way of it, naturally: the message condensed and transmitted within the music. It had been impressed upon Scytale's own neural system, there to be triggered at the proper moment by the distrans imbedded in his adrenal cortex. If it was ended, he had become a container of unknown words. He was a vessel sloshing with data: every cell of the conspiracy here on Arrakis, every name, every contact phrase -- all the vital information. With this information, they could brave Arrakis, capture a sandworm, begin the culture of melange somewhere beyond Muad'dib's writ. They could break the monopoly as they broke Muad'dib. They could do many things with this information. "We have the woman here," Farok said. "Do you wish to see her now?" "I've seen her," Scsdale said. "I've studied her with care. Where is she." Farok snapped his fingers. he youth took up his rebeck, drew the bow across it. Semuta music wailed from the strings. As though' drawn by the sound, a young woman in a blue robe emerged from a doorway behind the musician. Narcotic dullness filled her eyes which were the total blue of the Ibad. She was a Fremen, addicted to the spice, and now caught by an offworld vice. Her awareness lay deep within the semuta, lost somewhere and riding the ecstasy of the music. "Otheym's daughter," Farok said. "My son gave her the narcotic in the hope of winning a woman of the People for himself despite his blindness. As you can see, his victory is empty. Semuta has taken what he hoped to gain." "Her father doesn't know?" Scytale asked. "She doesn't even know," Farok said. "My son supplies false memories with which she accoimts to herself for her visits. She thinks herself in love with him. This is what her family believes. They are outraged because he is not a complete man, but they won't interfere, of course." The music trailed away to silence. At a gesture from the musician, the yoimg woman seated herself beside him, bent close to lten as he murmured to her. "What will you do with fter?" Farok asked. Once more, Scytale studied the courtyard. "Who else is in this house?" he asked. "We are all here now," Farok said. "You've not told me what you'll do with the woman. It is my son who wishes to know." As though about to answer, Scytale extended his right arm. From the sleeve of his robe, a glistening needle darted, imbedded itself in Farok's neck. There was no outcry, no change of posture. Farok would be dead in a minute, but he sat unmoving, frozen by the dart's poison. Slowly, Scytale climbed to his feet, crossed to the blind musician. The youth was still murmuring to the young woman when the dart whipped into him. Scytale took the yoimg woman's arm, urged her gently to her feet, shifted his own appearance before she looked at him. She came erect, focused on him. 'What is it, Farok?" she asked. "My son is tired and must rest," Scytale said. "Come. We'll go out the back way." "We Rad such a nice talk," she said. "I think I've convinced him to get Tleilaxu eyes. It'd make a man of him again." "Haven't I said it many times?" Scytale asked, urging her into a rear chamber. His voice, he noted with pride, matched his features precisely. It unmistakably was the voice of the old Fremen, who certainly was dead by this time. Scytale sighed. It had been done with sympathy, he told fjimself, and the victims certainly had known their peril Now, the yoimg woman would have to be given her chance. IV Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. -- Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan I t was going to be a bad session, this meeting of the Imperial CouncR, Alia realized. She sensed contention gathering force, storing up energy -- the way Irulan refused to look at Chani, Stilgar's nervous shuffling of papers, the scowls Paul directed at Korba the Qizara. She seated herself at the end of the golden council table so she could look out the balcony windows at the dusty light of the afternoon. Korba, interrupted by her entrance, went on with something he'd been saying to Paul. "WKat I mean, m'Lord, is that there aren't as many gods as once there were." Alia laughed, throwing her head back. The movement dropped the black hood of her aba robe. Her features lay exposed -- blue-in-blue spice eyes, her mother's oval face beneath a cap of bronze hair, small nose, mouth' wide and generous. Korba's cheeks went almost the color of his orange robe. He glared at Alia, an angry gnome, bald and fuming. "Do you know whafs being said about your brother?" he demanded. "I know what's being said about your Qizarate," Alia countered. "You're not divines, you are god's spies." Korba glanced at Paul for support, said: "We are sent by the writ of Muad'dib, that He shall know the truth of His people and they shall know the truth of Him." "Spies," Alia said. Korba pursed his lips in injured silence. Paul looked at his sister, wondering why she provoked Korba. Abruptly, he saw that Alia had passed into womanhood, beautiful with' the first blazing innocence of youth. He found himself surprised that he hadn't noticed it until this moment. She was fifteen -- almost sixteen, a Reverend Mother without motherhood, virgin priestess, object of fearful veneration for the superstitious masses -- Alia of the Knife. "This is not the time or place for your sister's levity," Irulan said. Paul ignored her, nodded to Korba "The square's full of pilgrims. Go out and lead their prayer." "But they expect you, m'Lord," Korba said. "Put on your turban," Paul said, "They'll never know at this distance." Irulan smothered irritation at being ignored, and watched Korba arise to obey. She'd had the sudden disquieting thought that Edric might not hide her actions from Alia. Whai do we really know of the sister? she wondered. Chani, hands tightly clasped in her lap, glanced across the table at Stilgar, Her uncle, Paul's Minister of State. Did the old Fremen naib ever long for the simpler life of his desert sietch? she wondered. Stilgar's black hair, she noted, had begun to gray at the edges, but his eyes beneath heavy brows, remained far-seeing. It was the eagle stare of the wild, and his beard still carried the catchtube indentation of life in a stillsuit. M ade nervous by Chani's attention, Stilgar looked arotmd the Council Chamber. His gaze fell on the balcony window and Korba standing outside, Korba raised outstretched arms for the benediction, and a trick of the afternoon sun cast a red halo onto the window behind him. For a moment, Stilgar saw the Court Qizara as a figure crucified on a fiery wheel. Korba lowered his arms and destroyed the illusion, but Stilgar remained shaken by it. His thoughts went in angry frustration to the fawning supplicants waiting in the Audience Hall, and to the hateful pomp which surrounded Muad'dib's throne. Convening with the Emperor, one hoped for a fault in him, to find mistakes, Stilgar thought. He felt this might be sacrilege, but wanted it anyway. Distant crowd mtirmuring entered the chamber as Korba returned. The balcony door tliumped into its seals behind him, shutting off the sound. Paul's gaze followed the Qfizara. Korba took his seat at Paul's left, dark features composed, eyes glazed by fanaticism. He'd enjoyed that moment of religious power. "The spirit presence has been invoked," he said. "Thank the lord for that," Alia said. Korba's lips went white. Again, Paul studied his sister, wondered at her motives. Her innocence masked deception, He told himself. She'd come out of the same Bene Gesserit breeding program as he had. What had the kwisatz haderach genetics produced in her? There was always that mysterious difference: she'd been an embryo in the womb when her mother had survived the raw melange poison. Mother and unborn daughter had become Reverend Mothers simultaneously. But simultaneity didn't carry identity. Of the experience. Alia said that in one terrif#ong instant she had awakened to consciousness, her memory absorbing the uncounted other-lives which her mother was assimilating. "I became my mother and all the others," she said. "I was unformed, imbom, but I became an old woman then and there." Sensing his thoughts on her, Alia smiled at Paul. His expression softened. How could anyone react to Korba with other than cynical humor? he asked himself. What is more ridiculous than a death commando transformed into a priest? Stilgar tapped his papers. "If my liege permits," he said. "These are matters urgent and dire." "The Tupile treaty?" Paul asked. "The Guild maintains that we must sign this treaty without knowing the precise location of the Tupile Entente," Stilgar said. "They've some support from Landsraad delegates." "What pressures have you brought to bear?" Irulan asked. "Those pressures which my Emperor has designated for this enterprise," Stilgar said. The stiff formality of his reply contained all his disapproval of the Princess Consort. "My Lord and husband," Irulan said, turning to Paul, forcing him to acknowledge her. Tmphasizini the titular difterence in front of Chani, Paul thought, is a weakness. In such moments, he shared Stilgar's dislike for Irulan, but sympathy tempered his emotions. What was Irulan but a Bene Gesserit pawn? "Yes?" Paul said. Irulan stared at him. "If you withheld iheir melange... " Chani shook her head in dissent. "We tread witH caution!," Paul said. "Tupile remains the place of sanctuary for defeated Great Houses. It symbolizes a last resort, a final place of safety for all our subjects. Exposing the sanctuary makes it vulnerable." "If they can hide people they can hide other things," Stilgar rumbled. "An army, perhaps, or the beginnings of melange culture which..." "You don't back people into a corner," Alia said. "Not if you want them to remain peaceful." Ruefully, she saw that she'd been drawn into the contention which she'd forseen. "So we've spent ten years of negotiation for nothing," Irulan said . "None of my brother's actions are for nothing," Alia said. Irulan picked up a scribe, gripped it with white knuckled intensity. Paul saw her marshal emotional control in the Bene Gesserit way: the penetrating inward stare, deep breathing. He could almost hear her repeating the litany. Presently, she said: "What have we gained?" "We've kept the Guild off balance," Chani said. "We want to avoid a showdown confrontation witli our enemies," Alia said. "We have no special desire to kill them. There's enough butchery going on under the Atreides baimer." She feels it, too, Paul thought. Strange, what a sense of compelling responsibility they both felt for that brawling, idolatrous universe with its ecstasies of tranquility and wild motion. Must we protect them from themselves? he wondered. They play with nothingness every moment -- empty lives, empty words. They ask too much of me. His throat felt tight and full. How many moments would he lose? What sons? What dreams? Was it worth the price his vision had revealed? Who would ask the living of some far distant future, who would say to them: 'But Muad'dib, you would not be here.'? "Denying them their melange would solve nothing," Chani said. "So the Guild's navigators would lose their ability to see into timespace. Your sisters of the Bene Gesserit would lose their truthsense. Some people might die before their time. Communication would break down. Who would be blamed?" "They wouldn't let it come to that," Irulan said. "Wouldn't they?" Chahi asked. "Why not? Who could blame the Guild? They be helpless, demonstrably so." "We'll sign the treaty as it stands," Paul said. "M'Lord," Stilgar said, concentrating on his hands, "there is a question in our minds." "Yes?" Paul gave the old Fremen his full attention. "You have certain . , . powers," Stilgar said. "Can you not locate the Entente despite the Guild?" Powers! Paul thought. Stilgar couldn't just say: "You're prescient. Can't you trace a path in the future that leads to Tupile?" T)aul looked at the golden surface of the table. Always the same problem: How could he express the limits of the inexpressible? Should he speak of fragmentation, the natural destiny of all power? How could someone who'd never experienced the spice change of prescience conceive of an awareness containing no localized spacetime, no personal image-vector nor associated sensory captives? He looked at Alia, found her attention on Irulan. Aha sensed his movement, glanced at him, nodded toward Irulan. Ahhh', yes: any answer they gave would find its way into one of Irulan's special reports to the Bene Gesserit. They never gave up seeking an answer to their kwisatz haderach. Stilgar, though, deserved an answer of some kind. For that matter, so did Irulan. "The uninitiated try to conceive of prescience as obeying a Natural Law," Paul said. He steepled his hands in front of him. "But it'd be just as correct to say it's heaven speaking to us, that being able to read the future is a harmonious act of man's being. In other words, prediction is a natural consequence in the wave of the present. It wears the guise of nature, you see. But such powers cannot be used from an attitude that pre-states aims and purposes. Does a chip caught in the wave say where it's going? There is no cause and effect in the oracle. Causes become occasions or convections and confluences, places where the currents meet. Accepting prescience, you fill your being with concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, intellect becomes a part of the processes, and is subjugated." "You cannot do it?" Stilgar asked. "Were I to seek Tupile with prescience," Paul said, speaking directly to Irulan, "this might hide Tupile." "Chaos!" Irulan protested. "It has no .  . no... consistency." "I did say it obeys no Natural Law," Paul said. "Then there are limits to what you can see or do with your powers?" Irulan asked. Before Paul could answer. Alia said: "Dear Irulan, prescience has no limits. Not consistent? Consistency isn't a necessary aspect of the universe." "But he said..." "How can my brother give you explicit information about the limits of something which has no limits? The boundaries escape the intellect." That was a nasty thing for Alia to do, Paul thought. It would alarm Irulan, who had such a careful consciousness, so dependent upon values derived from precise limits. His gaze went to Korba, who sat in a pose of religious reverie -- listening with the soul. How could the Qizarate use this exchange? More religious mystery? Something to evoke awe? No doubt. "Then you'll sign the treaty in its present form?" Stilgar asked. Paul smiled. The issue of the oracle, by StUgar's judgment, had been closed. Stilgar aimed only at victory, not at discovering truth. Peace, justice and a sound coinage -- these anchored Stilgar's universe. He wanted something visible and real -- a signature on a treaty. "I'll sign it," Paul said. Qtilgar took up a fresh folder "The latest commimication from our field commanders in Sector Ixian speaks of agitation for a constitution." The old Fremen glanced at Chani, who shrugged. Irulan, who'd closed her eyes and put both hands to her forehead in ronemnonic impressment, opened her eyes, studied Paul intently. "The Ixian Confederacy offers submission," Stilgar said, "but their negotiators question the amount of the Imperial Tax which they..." "They want a legal limit to my Imperial will," Paul said. "## would govern me, the Stilgar removed from the folder a note on instroy paper. "One of our agents sent this memorandxim from a caucus of the cipher in a flat voice: "The Throne must be stopped in its attempt at a power monopoly. We must tell the truth about the Atreides, how he maneuvers behind the triple sham of Landsraad legislation, religious sanction and bureaucratic efficiency." He pushed the note back into the folder. "A constitution," Chanti murmured. Paul glanced at her, back to Stilgar. Thus the Jihad falters, Paul thought, but not soon enough to save me. The thought produced emotional tensions. He remembered his earliest visions of the Jihad-to-be, the terror and revulsion he'd experienced. Now, of course, he knew visions of greatest terrors. He had lived with the real violence. He had seen his Fremen, charged with mystical strength, sweep all before them in the religious war. The Jihad gained a new perspective. It was finite, of coiarse, a brief spasm when measured against eternity, but beyond lay horrors to overshadow anything in the past. All in my name, Paul thought. "Perhaps they could be given the form of a constitution," Chani suggested. "It needn't be actual." "Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed. "There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover," Paul said. Korba straightened from his reverent pose. "M'Lord?" "Yes?" And Paul thought. Here now Here's one who may harbor secret sympathses fox an imagined rule of Law. "We could begin with a religious constitution," Korba said, "something fot the faithful who..." "No!" Paul snapped. "We will make this an Order In Council. Are you recording this, Irulan?" "Yes, m'Lord," Irulan said, voice Mgid with dislike for the medial role he forced upon Her. "Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They are oianized power on such a scale as to be overwBelming. The coostitution is social power mobilised and it has no conscience. It can crush the Highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations. I, however have limitations. In my desire to provide an iiltimate protection for my people, I forbid a constitution. Order In Council, this date, etcetera, etcetra." 'WSat of the Ixian concern about the tax, m'Lord?" Stilgar asked. paul forced his attention away from the brooding, angry look on Korba's face, said: "You Have a proposal, Stil?" "Our price to the Gmld for my signature on the Tupile treaty," Paul said, "is the submission of tKe Ixian Confederacy to our tax. The Confederacy cannot trade without Guild transport. THey'll pay." "Very good, m'Lord." Stilgar produced another folder, cleared his tijxoat. "The Qizarate's report on Selusa Secundus. Irulan's father has been putting his legions through landing maneuvers." Irulan found something of interest in the palm of her left hand. A pulse throbbed at Her neck. "Irulan," Paul asked, "do you persist in arguing that your father's one legion is noting more than a toy?" "What could he do with only one legion?" she asked. She stared at him out of slitted eyes. "He could get Hims killed," Chani said. Paul nodded. "And I'd be blamed." "I know a few commanders in tfie Jihad," Alia said, "who'd pounce if they learned of this ." "But it's only his police force!" Irulan protested. "Then they have no need for landing maneuvers," Paul said. "I sigest that your next little note to your father contain a frank and direct discussion of my views about his delicate position." She lowered Her gaze. "Yes, m'Lord. I hope that will be the end of it. My father would make a good martyr." "Mmmmmm," Paul said. "My sister wouldn't send a message to those commanders sHe mentioned unless I ordered it." "An attack on my father carries dangers other than the obvious military ones," Irulan said. "People are beginning to look back on his reign with a certain nostalgia." "You'll go too far one day," Chani said in her deadly serious Fremen voice. " "Enough!" Paul ordered. He weighed Irulan's revelation about public nostalgia -- ah, now! That had carried a note of truth. Once more, Irulan had proved her worth, "The Bene Gesscrit send a formal supplication," Stilgar said, presenting another folder. "They wish to consult you about the preservation of your bloodline." Chani glanced sideways at tfie folder as though it contained a deadly device. "Send the Sisterhood the usual excuses," Paul said. "Must we?" Irulan demanded. "Perhaps . , , this is the time to discuss it," Chani said, Paul shook His Head sfiarply. They couldn't know that this was part of the price he had not yet decided to pay. But Chani wasn't to be stopped. "I have been to the prayer wall of Stiech Tabr where I was born," she said. "I have submitted to doctors. I have knelt in tiie desert and sent my thoughts into the depths where dwells Shai-fiulud. Yet..." she shrugged. "... nothii avails." Science and supetstition, all have failed her, Paul thout. Do I fail her, too, by not telling her what bearing, an heir to House Atreides will precipitate? He looked up to find an expression of pity in Alia's eyes. The idea of pity from his sister repelled him. Had she, too, seen that terrif # ring future? "My Lord must know tfie dangers to His realm when he has no heir," Irulan said, using her Bene Gesserit powers of voice with an oily persuasiveness. "These things are naturally difficult to discuss, but they must be brought into the open. An Emperor is more than a man. His figure leads the realm. Should he die without an heir, civil strife must follow. As you love your people, you cannot leave them thus?" paul pushed himself away from the table, strode to the balcony windows. A wind was flattening the smoke of the city's fires out there. The sky presented a darkening silver-blue softened by the evening fall of dust from the Shield Wall. He stared southward at the escarpment which protected his northern lands from the coriolis wind, and he wondered why his own peace of mind could find no such' shield. The Council sat silently waiting behind him, aware of how close to rage he was. Paul sensed time rushing upon Him. As I love my people? He tried to force himself into a tranquility of many balances where he might shape a new future. Diseniage ... disengage .  i disengage, he thought. What would happen if he took Chani, just picked up and left with her, sought sanctuary on Tupile? His name would remain behind. The Jihad would find new and more terrible centers upon which to turn. He'd be blamed for that, too. He felt suddenly fearful that in reaching for any new thing he might let fall what was most precious, that even the slightest noise from him might send the universe crashing back, receding until he never could recapture any piece of it. Below him the square Ead become the setting for a band of pilgrims in the green and white of the hajj. They wended their way like a disjointed snake behind a striding Arrakeen guide. They reminded Paul that his reception hall would be packed with supplicants by now. Pilgrims! Their exercise in homelessness had become a diusting source of wealth for his Imperium. The Hajj filled the spacewa#Ts with relious tramps. They came and they came and they came. How did I set ttis in motion? he asked himself. It had, of course, set itself m motion. It was in the genes wlucK might labor for centuries to achieve this brief spasm. Driven by that deepest religious instinct, the people came, seeking their resurrection. The pilgrimage ended here: "Arrakis, the place of rebirth, the place to die." Snide old Fremen said He wanted the pilgrims for their water. What was it the pilgrims really sought? Paul wondered. They said they came to a holy place. But they must know the universe contained no Eden-source, no Tupile for the soul. They called Arrakis the place of the unknown where all m#teries were explained. This was a link between their universe and the next. And the frightening thing was that they appeared to go . away satisfied. What do they find heze? Paul asked himself. Often in their religious ecstasy, thQr filled the streets with screeching like some odd aviary. In fact, ffie Fremen called them "passage birds." And the few who died here were "winged souls." With a sigh, Paul thought how cacH new planet his legions subjugated opened new sources of pilgrims. They came out of gratitude for the "peace of Muaddib." Everywi'ere there is peace, Paul thoxiht. Everywhere... , excepf in the heart of Muardib. He felt that some element of himself lay immersed in frosty fioar-darkness without end. His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken title safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and outthought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that this universe still eluded him. This planet beneath Kim which he had commanded be remade from desert into a water-rich paradise, it was alive. It had a pulse as dynamic as that of any human. It fought him, resisted, slipped away from his commands  .  A hand crept into Paul's. He looked down to see Chani peering up at him, concern in her eyes. Those eyes drank him, and she whispered : "Please, love, do not battle with your ruhself." An out pouring of emotion swept upward from her hand, buoye# him. "Sihaya," he whispered. 'We must go to the desert soon," she said in a low voice. He squeezed her band, released it, returned to the table where he remained standing. Chani took her seat. Irulan stared at the papers in front of Srilgar, her mouth a tit line. "Irulan proposes herself as mother of the Imperial heir," Paul said. He glanced at Chani, back to Irulan, who refused to meet his gaze. "We all know she holds no love for me." Irulan went very stiU. "I know the political arguments," Paul said. "It's the human arguments which concern me. I think if the Princess Consort were not bound by the commands of the Bene Gesseiit, if she did not seek this out of desires for personal power, my reaction might be very different. As matters stand, though, I reject this proposal." Irulan took a deep, shaky breath. Paul, resuming Ifis seat, diought he had never seen her under such poor control. Leaning toward her, he said: "Irulan, I am truly sorry." She lifted her chin, a look of pure fury in her eyes. "I don't want your pity!" she htesed. And turning to Stilgar she asked: "Is there more that's urgent and dire?' Holding his gaze firmly on Paul, Stilgar said: "One more matter, mLord. The Guild again proposes a formal embassy here on Arrakis." "One of the deep-space kind?" Korba asked, his voice full of fantastic loathing. 'Tresumably," Stilgar said. "A matter to be considered with tile utmost care, m'Lord," Korba warned. "The Council of Naibs would not like it, an actual Guildman here on Arralds. They contaminate the very ground they touch." "They live in tanks and don't touch the ground," Paul said, letting his voice reveal irritation, "The Naibs might take matters into their own hands, m'Lord," Korba said. Paul glared at him. "They are Fremen, after all, m'Lord," Korba insisted. We well remember how the Guild brought those who oppressed us. We have not forgotten the way they blackmailed a spice ransom from us to keep our secrets from our enemies. They drained us of every..." 'Enough!" Paul snapped. "Do you think # have forgotten?" As though he had just awakened to the import of his own words, Korba stuttered unintelligibly. "M'Lord, forgive me. I did not mean to imply you are not Fremen. I did not..." "They'll send a Steersman," Paul said. "It isn't likely a Steersman would come here if he could see danger in it." Her mouth dry with sudden fear, Irulan said: "You've... , seen a Steersman come here?" "Of course I haven't seen a Steersman," Paul said, mimicing her tone. "But I can' see where one's been and wfiere one's going. Let them send us a Steersman. Perhaps I have a use for one." "So ordered," Stilgar said. And Irulan, hiding a smile beKind her hand, thought: Ifs true then. Our Emperor cannot see a Steersman. They are mutuelly blind. The conspiracy is hidden. V "Once more the drama begins." -- The Emperor Paul Muad'dib on his ascension to the Lion Throne A lia peered down from her spy window into the great reception hall to watch the advance of the Guild entourage. The sharply silver light of noon poured through clerestory windows onto a floor worked in green, blue and eggshell tiles to simulate a bayou with water plants, Guildsmen moved across the tile pattern like Hunters stalking their prey in a strange juile. They formed a moving design of gray robes, black robes, orange robes -- all arrayed in a decep' tively random way around the transparent tank where the Steersman-Ambassador swam in his orange gas. The tank slid on its supporting field, towed by two gray-robed attendants, like a rectangular sHip being warped into its dock. Directly beneath her Paul sat, the Lion Throne on its raised dais. He wore the new formal crown with its fish and fist emblems. The jeweled golden robes of state covered his body. The shimmering of a personal shield surrounded him. Two wngs of bodyguards fanned out on both sides along the dais and down the steps. Stilgar stood two steps below on Paul's right hand in a white robe with a yellow rope for a belt. Sibling empathy told her at Paul seethed vnth the same agitation she was experiencing, although she doubted another could detect it. His attention remained on an orange-robed attendant whose blindly staring metal eyes looked neither to right nor left. This attendant walked at the right front comer of the Ambassador's troupe like a military outrider. A rather flat face beneath curly black hair, such of his figure as could be seen beneath the orange robe, every gesture shouted a familiar identity. It was Dimcan Idaho. It could not be Duncan Idaho, yet it was. Captive memories absorbed in the womb during the moment of her mother's spice change identified this man for Alia by a Rihani decipherment which cut through' all camouflage. Paul was seeing him, she knew, out of countless personal expenencca, out of gratitudes and youthful sharing. It was Duncan. Alia shuddered. There could be only one answer; this was a Tleilaxu ghola, a being reconstructed from the dead flesh of the original. That original had perished saving Paul. This could only be a product of the axlotl tanks. The oa walked with the cock-footed alertness of a master swordsman. He came to a halt as the Ambassador's tank glided to a stop ten paces from the steps of the dais. In tlie Bene Gesserit way e could not escape, Alia read Paul's .disquiet. He no longer looked at the figure out of his past. Not looking, his whole being star. Muscles strained against restrictions as he nodded to the Guild Ambassador and said : I am told your name is Edric. We welcome you to our Court in the hope this will bring new understanding between us." The Steersman assumed a sybaritic reclining pose in his orange gas, popped a melange capsule into his mouth before meeting Paul's gaze. The tiny transducer orbiting a comer of the Guildsman's tank reproduced a coughing sound, then tiie rasping, uninvolved voice: "I abase myself before my Emperor and beg leave to present my credentials and offer a small gift" A n aide passed a scroll up to Stilgar, who studied it, scowling, then nodded to Paul. Both Stilgar and Paul turned then toward the hola. "Indeed, my Emperor has discerned the gift." Edric said. "We are pleased to accept your credentials," Paul said. "Explain the gift" Edric rolled in the tank, bringing his attention to bear on the ghola. "This is a man called Hayt." he said, spelling the name. "According to our investigators, he has a most curious history. He was killed here on Arrakis... # grievous head wound which required many months of regrowth. The body was sold to the Bene Tleilax as that of a master swordsman, an adept of the Ginaz School. It came to om attention that this must be Duncan Idaho, the trusted retainer of your household. We bout him as a gift befitting an Emperor." Edric peered up at Paul. "Is it not Idaho, Sire?" Restraint and caution gripped Paul's voice. "He has the aspect of Idaho." Does Paul see something, I don't? Alia wondered. No! Ifs Duncan! The man called Hayt stood impassively, metal eyes fixed straight ahead, body relaxed. No sign escaped him to indicate he knew Himself to be the object of discussion. "According to our best knowledge, it's Idaho," Edric said. "He's called Hayt now," Paul said. "A curious name." "Sire, there's no divining how or why the Tleilaxu bestow names," Edric said. "But the names can be changed. The Tleilaxu name is of little importance." This is a Tleilaxu thing, Paul thought. There's the problem. The Bene Tleilax held little attachment to phenomenal nature. Good and evil carried strange meanings in their philosophy. What might they have incorporated in Idaho's flesh -- out of design or whim? Paul glanced at Stilgar, noted the Fremen's superstitious awe. It was an emotion echoed all through his Fremen guard. Stilgar's mind would be speculating about the loafiisome habits of Guildsmen, of Tleilaxu and of gholas. Turning toward the ghola, Paul said: "Hayt, is that your only name?" A serene smile spread over the ghola's dark features. The metal eyes lifted, centered on Paul, but maintained their mechanical stare. "That is how I ami called, my Lord: Hayt" In her dark spy hole, Alia trembled. It was Idaho's voice, a quality of soimd so precise she sensed its imprint upon her cells. "May it please my Lord," Ihe ghola added, "if I say his voice ves me pleasure. This is a sign, say the Bene TIeilax, that I have heard the voice... before." "But you don't know this for sure," Paul said. "I know nothing of my past for sure, my Lord. It was explained that I can have no memory of my former life. All that remains from before is the pattern set by the genes. There are, however, niches into which once-familiar things may fit There are voices, places, foods, faces, sounds, actions -- a sword in my hand, the controls of a 'thopter..." Noting how intently the Guildmen watched this exchange, Paul asked: "Do you understand that you're a gift?" "It was explained to me, my Lord." Paul sat back, hands resting on the arms of the throne. F haf debt do I owe Duncan's flesh? he wondered. The man died saving my life. But this is not Idaho, this is a ghola. Yet, here were body and mind which had taught Paul to fly a thopter as though the wings grew from his own shoulders. Paul knew he could not pick up a sword without leaning on the harsh education Idaho had given him. A ghola. This was flesh fill of false impressions, easily misread. Old associations would persist. Duncan Idaho. It wasn't so much a mask the ghola wore as it was a loose, concealing garment of personality which moved in a way different from whatever the Tleilaxu had hidden there. "How might you serve us?" Paul asked, "In any way my Lord's vnsHes and my capabilities agree." Alia, watching from her vantage point, was touched by the ghola's air of diffidence. She detected nothing feigned. Something xiltimately innocent shone from the new Duncan Idaho. The original had been worldly, devilmay-care. But this flesh had been cleansed of all that. It was a pure surface upon which the Tleilaxu had written... what? She sensed the hidden perils in this gift then. This was a Tleilaxu thing. The Tleilaxu displayed a disturbing lack of inhibitions in what they created. Unbridled curiosity might guide their actions. They boasted they could make anything from the proper raw material -- devils or saints. They sold killer-mentats. They'd produced a killer medic, overcoming the Suk inhibitions against the taking of human life to do it. Thar wares included for any whim, soldiers, generals, philosophers, even an occasional moralist. Paul stirred, looked at Edric. TIow has this gift been trained?" He asked. "If it please lay Lord," Edric said, "it amused the Tleilaxu to train this ghola as a mentat and a philosopher of the Zensunni. Thus, they sought to increase his abilities with the sword." 'T)id they succeed?" "I do not know, my Lord." Paul weighed the answer. Truthsense told him Edric sincerely believed the ghola to be Idaho. But there was more. The waters of Time through which this oracular Steersman moved suggested dangers without revealing them. Hayt. The Tleilaxu name spoke of peril. Paul felt him self tempted to reject the t. Even as he felt the temptation, he knew he couldn't choose that way. This flesh made demands on House Atreides -- a fact the enemy well knew. "Zensunni philosopher," Paul mused, once more looking at the ghola. "You're examined your own role and motives?" "I approach my service in an attitude of humility. Sire. I am a cleansed mind washed free of the imperatives from my human past." "Would you prefer we called you Hayt or Duncan Idaho?" "My Lord may call me what Ee wishes, for I am not a name." "But do you enjoy the name Duncan Ido?" "I think that was my' name, Sire. It fits within me. Yet . , . it stirs up curious responses. One's name, I think, must carry much that's unpleasant aloi with the pleasant." "What gives you tfie most pleasure?" Paul asked. Unexpectedly, the ghola laughed and said: "Looking for signs in others which reveal my former self." "Do you see such signs Here?" "Oh, yes, my Lord. Your man Stilgar there is caught between suspicion and admiration. He was friend to my former self, but tibfe ghola flesh repels Him. You, ray Lord, admired the man I was... and you trusted him ." "Cleansed mind," Paid said. "How can a cleansed mind put itself in bondage to us?" "Bondage, my Lord? THe cleansed mind makes decisions in the presence of unknowns and without cause and effect. Is this bondage?" T)aul scowled. It was a Ztasunni saying, cryptic, apt -- immersed in a creed which denied objective fimction in all mental activity. Without ceuee S# and effect! Such thoughts shocked the mind. Unknowns? Unknowns lay in every decision, even in the oracular vision. "You'd prefer we called you Duncan Idaho?" Paul asked. "We live by differences, my Lord. Choose a name for me." "Let your Tleilaxu name stand," Paul said. "Hayt -- there is a name that inspires caution." Hayt bowed, moved back one step. And Alia wondered; How did he know the interview was over? I knew it because I know my brother. But there was no sign a stranger could read. Did the Duncan Idaho in him know? Paul turned toward the Ambassador, said; "Quarters have been set aside for your embassy. It is our desire to haw a private consultation with you at the earliest opportunity. We will send for you. Let us inform you further, before you hear it from an inaccurate source, that a Reverend Mother of the Sisterhood, Gaius Helen Mohiam, has been removed from the heighliner which brought you. It was done at our command. Her presence on your ship will be an item in our talks." A wave of Paul's left hand dismissed the envoy. "Hayt," Paul said, "stay here." The Ambassador's attendants backed away towing the tank. Edric became orange motion in orange gas -- eyes, a mouth, gently waving limbs. Paul watched until the last Guildsman was gone, the great doors swinging close behind them. #'ve done it now, Paul thought. JVe accepted the ghola. The Tleilaxu creation was bait, no doubt of it. Very likely the old hag of a Reverend Mother played the same role. But it was the time of the tarot which he'd forecast in an early vision. The damnable tarot! It muddied the waters of Time imtil the prescient strained to detect moments but an hour off. Many a fish took the bait and escaped, he reminded himself. And the tarot worked for him as well as against him. What he could not see, others might not detect as well. The ghola stood, head cocked to one side, waiting. Stilgar moved across the steps, Hid the ghola from Paul's view. In Chakobsa, the Hunting language of their sietch days, Stilgar said: "That creature in the tank gives me the shudders, Sire, but this gift! Send it away!" In the same tongue, Paul said; "I cannot." "Idaho's dead," Stilgar argued. "This isn't Idaho. Let me take its water for the tribe." "The ghola is my problem, Stil. Your problem is our prisoner. I want the Reverend Mother guarded mt carefully by the men I trained to resist the wiles of Voice." "I like this not, Sire." T'll be cautious, Stil. See that you are, too." "Very well, Sire." Stilgar stepped down to the floor of the hall, passed close to Ha # rt, sniffed hun and strode out. Evil can be detected by its ftnell, Paul thought Stilgar bad planted the green and white Atreides banner on a dozen worlds, but remained superstitious Fremen, proof against any sophistication. Paul studied tiie gift "Duncan, Duncan," he whispered. "what have they done to you?" "They gave me Kfe, m'Lord," Hayt said. "But why were you trained and given to us?" Paul asked. Hayt pursed his lips, then: "They intend me to destroy you." T he statement's candor shook Paul. But then, how else could a Zensunni-mentat respond? Even in a ghola, a mentat could speak no less than the truth, especially out of Zensunni inner calm. This was a human computer, mind and nervous system fitted to the tasks relegated long ago to hated mechanical devices. To condition him also as a Zensunni meant a double ration of honesty... unless the Tleilaxu had built somefiting even more odd into this flesh. Why, for example, fee mechanical eyes? Tleilaxu boasted tiieir metal eyes improved on fee original. Strange then, feat more Tleilaxu didn't wear them out of choice. Paul glanced up at AUa's spy hole, longed for her presence and advice, for counsel not clouded by feelings of rcsponalbllity and debt. Once more, Ee looked at fee ghola. This was no frivolous gift. It gave honest answers to dangerous questions. It makes no diilerence that I know this is a weapon to be need against me, Paul thought. "What should I do to protect mysdf from you?" Paul asked. It was direct speech, no royal "we," but a question as he might have put it to fee old Duncan Idaho. "Send me away, mT-oni" Paul shook his head from side to side. "How are you to destroy me?" Hayt looked at fee giMuds, who'd moved closer to Paul after Stilgaris departure. He turned, cast his glance around the hall, brought his metal eyes back to bear on Paul, nodded. "This is a place where a nn draws away from people," Hayt said. "It speaks of such power that one can contemplate it comfortably only in the remembrance that all things are finite. Did my Lord's oracular powers plot his course into this place?" Paul drummed his fingers against the throne's arms. The mentat sought data, but the question disturbed him. 'T came to thk position by strong decision... not always out of my other... abilities." "Strong decisions," Hayt said. "These temper a man's life. One can take the temper from fine metal by Keating it and allowing it to cool without quenching." "Do you divert me with Zensunni prattle?" Paul asked. "Zensunni has other avenues to explore, Sire, than diversion and display." Paul wet his lips with his tongue, drew in a deep breath, set his own thoughts into the counterbalance poise of the mentat. Negative answers arose around him. It wasn't expected that he'd go haring after the ghola to the exclusion of other duties. No, that wasn't it Why a Zensonni-m e n t a t? Philosophy... words... contemplation... inward searciung... He felt the weakness of His data. "We need more data," he muttered. "The facts needed by a mentat do not brush off onto one as you might gather pollen on your robe while passing through a field of flowers," Hajrt said. "One chooses his pollen carefully, examines it xmder powerful amplification." "You must teach me this Zensunni way with rhetoric," Paul said. The metallic eyes gfittered at him for a moment then: "M'Lord, ierhaps that's what was intended." To bkmt my will wiift words and ideas. Paul wondered. "Ideas are most to be feared when they become actions," Paul said. "Send me away, Sire," Hajrt said, and it was Duncan Idaho's voice full of concern for the young master. Paul felt trapped by that voice. He couldn't send that voice away, even when it came from a ghoa. "You will stay," he said, "and we'll both exercise caution." Hayt bowed in submission. P aul glanced up at the spy hole, eyes pleading for Alia to take this iift off his hands and ferret out its secrets. Gbolas were osts to frighten children. He'd never thought to know one. To know this one, he had to set himself above all compassion... and he wasn't certain he could do it. Duncan... Duncan... Where was Idaho in this shapedto-measure flesh? It wasn't flesh... it was a shroud in fleshly shape. Idaho lay dead forever on the floor of an Arrakeen cavern. His ghost stared out of metal eyes. Two beings stood side by side in this revenant flesh. One was a threat with its force and and nature hidden behind unique veils. Closing his eyes, Paul allowed old visions to sift through his awareness. He sensed the spirits of old love and hate spouting there in a rolling sea from which no rock lifted above the chaos. No place at all from which to survey turmoil. Why has no vision shown me this new Duncan Idaho? he asked himsdf. What concealed Time from an oracle? Other oracles, obviously. Paul opened his eyes, asked: "Ha#rt, do you have the power of prescience?" "No, m'Lord." Sincerity spoke in that voice. It was possible the ghola didn't know he possessed this ability, of course. But thafd hamper his working as a mentat. What was the hidden design? Old visions surged aroimd Paul. Would he have to choose the terrible way? Distorted Time hinted at this ghola in that hideous future. Would that way close in upon no matter what he did? Disengaie... disengage... disenga... The thought tolled in hte mind. In her position above Pul, Alia sat with chin cupped in left band, stared down at the ghola. A magnetic attraction about this Hayt reached her. Tleilaxu restoration had ven him youtii, an irmocent intensity which called out to her. She'd understood Paul's unspoken plea. When oracles failed, one turned to real spies and physical powers. She wondered, though, at her own eagerness to accept tins challenge. She felt a positive desire to be near this new man, perhaps to touch him. He's a danger to hoilk of us, she thought. Morale had never been bgber. If was so good that it was quite baffling -- and terribly dangerous I S enator Clint of California followed his intense young guide out of the underground prefab bunker. "AH clear, sir," the guard told him. "For a little while, at least." The senator exhaled a deep breath. "No wonder I Had a Hard time forcing this trip. Washington probably had my safety in imind." But then he frowned. "Among other things." "At that," the guide said, "you must move a lot of air, sir. You are the first official here in Burma in years." He coughed. "UH -- you've had similar answers from all of the ten you've questioned, so far. So why bother any more of these kids?" Clint stared at such impudence. To a United States senator. From a kid of maybe twenty calling others kids. "I haven't undertaken this dangerous mission merely to 'bother' anyone," he answered coldly. He halted his steps brusquely -- and thereby forced the guide to stop. "I'll question this young man," he said decisively. The yoimg man he indicated was cleaning a carbine. The guide wet Bis lips and said nothir. The senator asked lus usual question. "What's your opinion of this conflict you're in? I am Senator Clint of Califoituia." The boy looked into the distance, as if shy at meeting a Senator. "I've tBought it all out myself," he said, "and if they are to be stopped, tEs is the place. Neo-colonialism must not be allowed to make slaves of all meru This terror has to be kept from engulfing the world." "Thank you," Clint said. He moved on then, his suspicion additionally confirmed, the suspicion that had made him risk his life getting into this sub-radiation zone. Keeping his head down as directed by the guide, he crept to the other side of the shelter, where a boy was leaning on a bunker, his face knotted in apparent confusion. Clint thought of speaking, but the guide tugged gently at his sleeve and motioned him away. The senator didn't object this time, not being sure if he should have spoken to the boy. "He did not seem busy," he said. "Just seemed to be mulling over something as if puzzled or confused." "Confused is the word all right, Senator. He's due in." "Battle fatigue?" "You could say that Yes." "Might help if I visit him in the hospital." The senator knew how far that would get, having tried to visit service hospitals back home. "They don't allow tHat." The guide was being impudently sharp again. "Question this one." It was almost an order. Clint wasted no further words on the sick boy, but turned to the one indicated. "Why are you here?" he asked. "I'm Senator Clint." "I've given it a lot of thought," die baby face said. "And if the march of imperialism is to be baited, I have to help. These slave-masters must no" be allowed to dominate mankind. TMs terror must be stopped here in Southeast Asia or it will engulf the world surely in a tide of evil captialist imperialism." "Thank you," Clint said. He turned away from the boy, and spoke to his guide. "I've seen and heard all I need. Now about getting out of this hellfire?" "Good idea, Senator, for your own safety," the guide said. "First, though, the tape." Clint thought his slight tapecontrol motions had been undetected. The guide hadn't given a sign he noticed. "It's my property, " he sold. "Care to stay here in Burma with it?" the guide said. "Or leave without it?" There was no "sir," end Scre was an ominoiu frown. Clint took the recorder from his cigarette package and handed it over. 'Oack in Los Angeles CHnt took a cab to the downtown induction center on Broadway. A ' # line there queued halfway up the block and straggled around the comer. He could peer inade tiie building and see e room filled with young men moving first toward a desk, theii singly into a rear room, tKe door of wEcH w guarded by two grim men with machine-guns. "Excuse me," fie said to the young man first iu line. A boy of perhaps fourteen. He thought here lie would get less abashed answers if fie did not identify himself. "If you don't mind  what is yaur reason for going into the service?" "They tapped me," the boy said, seeming almost cynical. "How about you?" he asked tlie boy next in line. "I kicked and I screamed," the boy said. "But they still said I had to fit." No one smiled. TKe senator moved to the next boy. "What can I do?" the boy said without being asked. "Go to gail?" "Thanks, boys," Clint said, and turned toward the building. "I am Senator Clint," he said to the rocky-jawed sergeant at the desk. TKe seeant stood, nodded, smiled. He was not surprised, or if fie was, fie Hid it well. "An Honor, rir." Had word gone ahead of him? Clint wondered. He felt they expected bini. And he wanted to see bdiind that guarded door. "I know you won't mind," he said, "if I speak to some of the new recruits after you talk to them?" The sergeant widened his smile. "Sorry, Senator," He spread a hand apologetically. "Regulations, you know. Red tape keep our hands tied. No one is allowed to talk to a man after he passes this desk." He added: "We don't like the rule either, " after looking directly into the senator's glaring eyes. "Where do they go from here?" "From here? After a complete pHysical here, to a service Hospital for any minor tfiing. Maybe a tootfi filled -- or some may even need a major operation." "Well, thanks. Sergeant, for the courtesy," tKe senator said, and left the stUl-smiling sergeant He took another cab to his fiome in Beverly Hills. His wife was out. He Kad not wired her, for a purpose. Senator Clint started a search for a once-discarded but now predous and rare paperback book. A curiosity he just didn't believe wfien he had found it. A fantasy of a type once written, now frowned upon -- but this one Kad not been represented as a fantasy, but as factual. There are different ways of changing history. One is by effecting change, and so making history; another is by changing history after it happens. To do the latter, a government must call in from time to time any book which contradicts tiie newer truth. Once gold had been called in when the government dedded private possession of the metal was against the public interest. Another time, books. Of course, iplacements were issued, and holders of valid receipts were reimbursed in kind on a one-to-one basis. Finding the paperback finally, Senator Clint flew back to Washington, leaving only a scribbled note for his wife. I n the cloakroom of tfie Senate nois, one man the years of intimacy had shown he could trust. "Let's take a stroll before breakfast," he said to McAdam quietly. Three blocks from the Capitol the two exchanged glances. Safe. Without a word both turned on their transistor radios, and turned up the volume. "Now," Clint said. "I'm going to drop a bomb today, on the Senate floor. "Were you inside a service hospital?" Clint shook his head. "I tried. You just don't get in -- senator or no. He turned up the transistor again. "That -- that 'cloak' I mentioned?" "Oh, yes." McAdam nodded tinderstanding of their code word. "I've found it. We did start to fight against communism, just as I remembered reading. But somewhere back there Russia and the others realized they had failed, and they adopted capitalism. But they had undermined us from within -- and we traded systems." "I'd like to back you up, Joe," McAdam said. "But we can't prove it vrithout the -- er -- 'cloak.' " Silently Clint handed him the paperback book. "Don't mislay that" "I'll glance at it between now and then. And I'll be behind you all the way. Meantime, let's Have breakfast" McAdam added as they strolled back toward the Capitol: "And take it ea. You're not looking well. Better relax more." "NoMense. The trip did me good. I noticed my pink cheeks this morning shaving. "Pink, Joe? Flushed is the word. You're the heart type. Slow down." He pondered that Heart type? No one had ever said so before. McAdam had started out to be a doctor, thoiii. He should know. "For one thing," McAdam said,  IS  Conlrovenkil f Uninhibited Deadly Serious Humorous and Incredibly Interesting! Brian AldUs... Poul Anderson... Piers Anthony... Isaac Asimov... Richard Bergeron... Bob Bloch... Voughn Bode... iohn Brunner... L Sprague da Comp... Terry Carr... John Christopher... Philip K. Dick... Harlan Ellison...  Philip Jose Former... Jack Goughon... Harry Harrison... Lee HoHman...  John Hayden Howard... Leo P. Kelley... Dean R. Koonfx... Anne McCoffrey ,... Michael Moorcock... Alexei Partshin... Mack Reynolds... Bill Rotsler... Norman Splnrad... Bob Tucker... Horry Warner, Jr...  Ted WfiHe... and many, many more...  . Richord E. Geis does his thing. P. O. Box # kuummmmmuummmumumm as the waitress waited for a decision: "You've eaten enough breakfast, with your heart. And better taper off on the smoking." The latter was said as Clint reached for a cigar. "Taper off with cigarettes," McAdam said. "Here." He held out his own case for Clint. "We need you, you know." That sounded ominous. Clint took a cigarette without aiuing. He lit it -- then felt himself blacking out a minute latCT. I t was three days before he came out of it and was able to read of his seizure flying home for a needed vacation. Heart attack. In fact, as a waitress verified (though he could not remember) he had just been discussing his heart condition with Senator Mchard, emotions aroused. They certainly had been, Clint thought Seeing those fine boys evenlaying down their lives to stop the terror of the bloodyfanged capitalist imperialists. His wife was waiting at the airport, new clothes, new hairdo. "It's been a long time," she said, kissing him. "Let's hurry." "Yes, we'll hurry home," Clint said. "But to get you under a cold shower. I don't want to divert needed energy from my life's great program. From his mite-high fewer in the mile-high city, John Hillary Dane saw a future he hoped would never be. I V Tobody but John Hillary Dane would even have considered trying to build a major conservatory in the snow-rimmed crater of Coropuna, and nobody -- unless you counted a government as somebody -- but Dane could actually have done it. The next question was "Why?" But Toby Walker had asked himself that question about Dane hundreds of tim since they had met, the first night of their freshman year in college, without getting more than ten or a dozen satisfactory answers. Even those few had been enough for Toby's newspaper to make Dane Toby's intermittently permanent assignment. The paper had been only mildly disappointed at Toby's failure to get any answer to his last such question; Why had Dane put up an office building in Denver one mile hih? One answer out of twenty-five from Dane was the highest score of any journalist in the world, and they knew it. Only this consideration, whidi Toby knew as well as his employers, prevented him from considering the presait segment of his assignment as a sort of punishment Coropuna has few competitors as one of the Godforsaken spots in Peru. Just getting a look at the extinct volcano bad been difficult enou It lies well more than # south of the equator, where most of the country consists of an altiplano, or puna, a basin about twelve thousand feet higlu which is overshadowed on both sides by the two ranges of the Cordillera de los Andes. To get to tlie puna, you first had to cross the Cordillera Real (by plane, there was no other way). You then found yourself looking across tiny Indian fields to a salt swamp, far south of which glittered the northernmost reach of Lake Titicaca; on the other side of that, a grassy, uninhabited plain which ended in a tremendous plateau of ancient lava. From this hwixon the volcaiuc cones of the Cordillera Occidental broke into the sky witli the isolated olence of gunshots. And the king of these was Coropuna, # feet high, the secondhighest peak in Peru. The original estimate for building Dane ObsCTvatory in such a spot had of it for a #-inch telescope, radio telescope, another two million for buildings and instrumentation, and all the rest for transportation. Everything had to come in by air as far as the puna. From there to the cea or eyebrow of Coropuna, Dane had built a single-track cogwheel railroad; from the cea to the crater, everything went by human hand and back, brick by brick, girder by girder. Dane had already spent the more contributed by the Ford Foundation, and still the thing wasn't done. He had started on it in #, and that had been ten years ago. T he mile-high sk # rscraper had gone up in the meantime. There was one thing about John Hillary Dane that was no secret : he was the richest man not only in the world, but in all of history. Toby had already asked all tiie usual journalistic "wh # " and been answered readily. He already knew why a #-inch optical telescope was desirable in the Southern Hemisphere; the skies down there offer a multitude of relatively neglected objects, including the Magellanic Clouds, the nearest galaxies to our own, and Shapely Center, the heart of our own galaxy. Wdl, but in that case, wouldn't Chile have been still better, because fartiier soutii? Certainly, but the Peruvian government had put up fewer roadblocks. All right, then why the second highest peak in Peru -- why not Huascaran? Many reasons: Huascaran is less than a thousand feet higher, it's six degrees furtiier north, and Ihe only manpower available around it is a few Indians living in burrows like animals; but above all, Coropuna is topped by a crater, whereas Huascaran has a peak like a convention of machetes. Could not you have blown the top off it? No, because the United States has treaty obligations against giving me any bomb for the purpose, and the Peruvians would have understandable objections to such an explosion within their borders; anyhow, all the other objections to Huascaran still stand. But aren't there a lot of earthquakes in the Coropuna area? Yes, but we're building for them. All of these answers would not satisfy Tobjr's editors, because Dane would give them to anyone who asked. The real, the essential question was: Why was Dane, who as an instrumentmaker qualified as a sort of physicist who previously had been innocent of any interest in astronomy, committing such a vast philanthropy? Dane would not answer that one. Toby had some knowledge of the man's personal life which had led him to some guesses, but all they added up to was parlor psychoanalysis  -- certainly notHing he would even consider printing. His newspaper was not that kind of newspaper; Toby was not that kin d of a reporter, and above all, Dane was a friend of his. For Dane, time was the eviL Time present, time past, time to come; Time is. Time was. Time is past! Nothing that fie did gave reason to what he was but this; at his heart's core was the word, tolling like a bell. Time, Time, Time! And yet every man knows, as one unregretful poet said, tfiat Time is the bridge that bums behind us. Why was Dane, who was so powerful, and by all ordinary standards so free, so desperate to revise the ages, and even tiie fleeing minutes? And why, for that matter, did he have to build physical bridges from one second to anotlier? Toby was not to learn, the answer to that question for twenty years, and even tben, not the vole answer -- not even Dane ever learned that. Nevertheless, die burden of knowledge -- and not only about Dane -- that the observatory in Coropuna was to bring him was very nearly more than he could bear. II T hey were standing at the moment on the platform which would eventually bear the radio telescope, both of them heavily clad in furs and wearing oxygen masks. The air was so thin that it would not carry sound any useful distance; Toby had a button in his ear, a mike at his mouth. The crumbling rim of the crater, much eroded but with the raggedness of ite outline softened by permanent snow, was their horizon. Some distance away, the completed dome of the optical observatory, in which the great mirror had already been installed and was being cooled degree by degree, at about half a degree a day, toward the permanent temperature of the crater, frowned down upon them. Behind it and to the right was the solar observatory, atop a hundred-foot tower in order to dear the crater ramparts. The radio telescope thus far consisted of the circular metal platform, like that for some unimaginably huge anti-aircraft gun, which in turn was encircled by a railroad track. On the track were two flatcars, # apart from eadi other and connected by a cantilever bridge which was to bear the trunnions (bought at surplus from a mothballed Argentinian battleship; no part of the cost of Dane Observatory was waste) which eventually would support the #-inch dish of the telescope itself. The bridge was still under construction and in fact was only provisionally moored on one of the two flatcars; exact, non-warping alignment was essential and couldn't be made sure of until more of the final load, or a test version of it, had been put on the structure. Five men were aloft on it, with torches -- one Northerner and four Indians. Thick black power cables ran back and forth across the platform, like a nest of copulating snakes. original, but as a journalist Toby was not accustomed to pausing to search for the mot juste. Besides, one of the cables actually was moving slowly, very much in fact like a boa awakening. Toby pointed. "John, what makes that thing move?" Dane's gole-cyes glinted in the heatless sunlit Hysteresis, probably," he said, his voice sounding doubly remote in the low fidelily of the walkie-talkie. "Up here we're working at virtually cryogenic temperature, which means those cables carry even more power than their size would suggest. So if there's any flaw that sets up resistance heating, the effect is considerable,... Still, it shouldn't be great enough to cause medianical motion; I'd better have it checked." There was no copy in that, or anyhow, not more than a line or so. Toby tried one more journalistic question, as indirectly as he could manage. "You couldn't have found a remoter spot, it seems to me. Why didn't you just put the two-himdred-incher on the Moon and be done with it? At least you'd have no seeing troubles up there." "Now, you're being obtuse, Toby. Putting it on the Moon would mean putting it in a deeper crater, which would retrict its fidd of view by ten; it would still be a hundred times as vulnerable; and a thousand times as expensive. The government's spent more than twice what I have, just getting a small orbital observatory up." "True enou" Dane turned away, to beckon to a distant figure, probably a foreman. At tiie same moment, the slowly writiiing snake hitched itself upward a little, and began to smoke along its sharpest bend. "ohn -- " Abruptly, the black sheath boiled away on the inside curve of the kink, exposing a basketwork of metal underneath already glowing white. The cable, which had been bending outward toward the perimeter of the platform roughly in Dane's direction, snapped back toward Toby. T oby was not a fast thinker, but he had battlefield reflexes. He dived for the cable, grabbing for the opposite sides of the white-hot leaon. It parted in his face, the ends pulling out of his hands in opposite directions and drawing between them a screaming blue-green electric arc. Toby's mittens vanished in two black puffs. The ends of the cable, still connected by the arc, rose high in the air and then skimmed low over the smface of the nearer flatcar, the arc cutting through the provisional ' girders like so much soft cheese. The arc went out and the cables flopped lifelessly to the deck, but the bridge at once began to topple, shedding screaming Indians like fruit Toby was already on his feet and charging, low, like a football tackle. His shoulder took Dane low over one hip and they both went down with a slam, sliding along the searingly cold metal of the platform. Dane rolled and scrambled to a crouch as if instantly ready to fight, but as be reached his knees his eyes flicked skyward and he saw the great spread of metal girders descending upon them both like the spiderweb of God. He ran for the railroad track, Toby close behind him. The whole mountain seemed to shudder a.s the bridge fell on its side to the platform, though the noise was absurdly tinny in the almost non-existent air. Dane rose slowly and looked from side to side, his masked bead scaiming like a radar tracker. It took him thirty or forty seconds, apparently, to figure out tlie wreckage and what had caused it. Then he looked down at Toby and his shoulders jerked as if only this had caiised him any shock. Toby looked down too. He was still in shock, and though he remembered having seen liis mittens vaporized in the great arc, he still seemed to be wearing tliem. Then he realized that it was his hands themselves he was looking at, their skin completely carbonized. And of course he could feel nothing; the hands were probably already frozen. Dane bawled for a medico in a voice that nearly broke the eardrum of the ear in which the walkie-talkie button was lodged -- first in Spanish, then in English, and then in what Toby suspected was Inca. It was about here that the pain came through, and Toby passed out, with gratitude. T Te came to, slowly, in what he  recognized as the sickbay of Dane's personal supersonic jet, which was already airborne. He was alone and in bed, and in no pain at all. He looked down tlie counterpane at his own hands; they were only two immense balls of snow-white wrappings. On a shelf beside his head were several glasses, a bottle of pills and a bent plastic drinking tube. Nothing was to be seen through the nearest window but indigo sky, with two stars in it. There was no difficulty in figuring out what bad happened. He had been given an immense diot of morphine or something similar, some quick first aid, and lowered by portage and by cogwheel to the puna; thence flown in some small craft to the town of Puna itself; and then put aboard Dane's business aircraft. Evidently the drug was still holding the pain back. That, and his inability to guess what day it was -- or even what time of day, for at the altitudes Dane's plane had to fly, the sky was always starred and indigo -- both helped him to tliink and made him feel peculiarly detached, almost as though he were floating in some cloud-like medium much softer than any possible linen. After a while, he dozed and was awakened by the sound of tlie door to the sickbay being opened. Dane's physician peered in at him, ducked back, beckoned and vanished. Dane himself came in and sat down beside the bed, resting his elbows on his knees and bending over Toby. His perennially impassive face, topped by its crewcut of only slightly graying red hair, now wore something akin to an expression, although Toby could not figure out what it was. At a guess, it was a mixture of concern, self-reproach, grimness and pain; but no man's face could show such a mixture all at once, and Toby had had enough experience at mis-reading Dane's iron countenance to discount the guess out of hand. "How do you feel?" Dane said. "I don't feel a tlnng, thank God," Toby said. "Where are we going? And as long as you raise the question, how do I feel?" "Rotten," Dane said. "You've got second-degree bums all over both hands, but luckily they froze so fast that the tendons don't seem to be involved. Or so Charley says. We're going to Denver. I've got some good people there who can probably regrow the skin for you. I doubt that they could have done a thing about the musculature." "That's good," Toby said, beginning to feel floaty again. "I'll be able to type, and hold a pencil, arxd all that?" "Charley says so. If we get there on time -- and we will." Toby sighed. "John, I don't know why the hell I follow you around. It isn't tlie job. You've done nothing but get me into one jam after another since I was sixteen, beginning with that monumental drunk on cooking sherry. I still remember how I hated you the next morning in Advanced Algebra, when you showed up without a hangover." "I had the world's worst," Dane said in a low voice. "Nobody can get drunk on cooking sherry without paying for it. I just wouldn't let it show." Hmm. Add one note to the parlor psychoanalysis. "If it comes to that," Dane said, "tliis is the second time yon have saved my life. You don't even know what the first time was, and I'm not ever going to tell you, either. But I owe you an answer to another question, now. A small payment for a favor, but I have to weigh sudi things in my own balance." "You're saving my hands," Toby pointed out. "They're my life. But don't let me talk you out of an answer! Whafs the question?" "That's very far from being the issue," Dane said slowly. "You won't thank me for it. For one thing, you won't be able to publish it. But what really counts is this: The reason why I don't answer some questions is because I think the answers are fatal. You're in no condition to take me seriously, but think it over. I mean what I say." "I know you do. But curiosity is proverbially fatal. Come on, John. What is the question? The telescope?" "NO. No, indeed. But if you still want it, I'm going to show you why I built a mile-high office building. Not just tell you -- show you." "You are a fiend, John Hillary Dane. You know I've been stewing over that for ten years." "Yes," Dane said, "and I plan to use that. Please remember, Toby, that I warned you. The answers to these questions are killers. This one will almost surely kill you." Toby looked down at his hands and listened to the expensively faint sound of the jet's engines. At last he said: "Hang out more banners along the castle waUs," Dane Tower still stands, and probably will continue to stand for at least another century, empty though it is. It was well built, and the Denver area is not notable for earthquakes (if one excepts the artificial ones of #-#). From any point of view, it looks in silhouette like this: ) (, except that the two parentheses are pulled skyward so far that their inward curvature takes the acutest of eyes to detect. It is the first thing one sees poking up over the horizon as one approaches the Denver plateau, and of course it utterly dominates the city. Black silhouette, it turns out to be black also in closeup, and windowls. The central offices of all Dane's business interests had been relocated into it, but although these occupied more space than would have been taken up by the offices of more than four or five of the world's governments, they did not fill a third of the Tower; and because the Tower was so forbidding and had no windows, the remaining space for rent went mostly unrented, and half of the firms that originally, located there for prestige moved out again after only a few years. An elevator trip that carries one half a mile or more is not a good way to begin a business day, or to end one, either, and the one core of elevator banks in die Tower gave mysteriously slow service even within tiieir designed capacity. The esplanade around the base of the building was small, and tiiere was no provision for shops; and after a while, nobody but Dane's employees went to the Tower at all, on Dane busses. Altogether, it was an enterprise completely out of character for Dane, who had built much of his fortune on a system of cost accounting that would have been the envy of any Bureau of Inland Revenue. At the very least, one would have thought, a man who owned the only mile-high building in the world -- built on countryside that was itself a mile above sea level -- would have thought to have put a veranda and an expensive restaurant on top of it; but on the contrary, the top of Dane Tower, which looked like it was wearing a very tiny black derby, was as closed to visitors as the file room of a Swiss bank. I rtead, Toby found, the great rotunda under the derby (which was not in fact black, but made of panels of one-way window glass) was encirded by small cubicles which might have been either offices or laboratories; and ifa center was totally taken up by huge, crouching, whining machines, reminding him irresistibly of a Siemans-Sdmekert dynamo shed somehow hoisted two miles into the air as if on top of some tectonic piston. Most of the scuiT # dng employees he saw wore business trousers, but with white coats over them, like pharmacists. He found this vaguely comfortii, since his hands, although healing, were still lightly swathed; but it offered him no clue as to what was going on here. These people could be clerks, scientists, engines, all three, or none of the three. "Wait here," Dane said, parking Toby outside a double door. Toby waited. He was still a little light-headed, too; after all, in addition to having been near death, he had spent some months miles up in the air, and here he was again. After a while, the double doors opened, and Dane took him into what proved to be quite an ordinary sort of conference room, complete with table, discreet hangings and a not-quite-concealed outlet for a projection room. There were even yellow pads and pencils neatly laid out, and ashtrays mathematically in place; but some of the trays were half-filled, and some of the pads scribbled upon, sigesting that Dane had just evicted an on-goJug meeting. Toby sniffed for smoke, but he himself smoked so heavily that it was only a token sniff. Besides, he was feeling not less, but more light-headed, and lightbodied, too. When Dane gestured him to a seat, he almost seemed to float to it. He could not guess why, for his first assumption -- that he was still convalescent -- had been contradicted by his observation of the staff. They too had seemed to be moving in long, gliding steps, Uke people in a dream, or on the Moon. Toby knew very well that being in a fixed position only two miles above sea level did not noticeably dilute gravity; after all, in Coropuna he had been nearly twice as high up and had noticed no such effect. He tried automatically to pick up a pencil, but his hands were still too bundled up for that -- and in any case, Dane had warned him that the story was unpublishable. Dane smiled gently at the aborted gesture, and said: "You'll be too busy to write pretty soon, Toby. In the meantime, I want to lay out for you a few facts that you'll need to know, before either of ms can behave sensibly. To begin with, I will answer your question. "I built the Dane Tower here, in Denver, because in exactly fifty-seven years from now, Denver will be the capital of the world. And I built it a mile high becatise, fifty-seven years from now, almost all of the land areas of the Northern Hemisphere, and much of them in the Tropic of Capricorn, too, will be covered by a continuous city running from a mile to two miles deep. This platform on which we're now sitting will be the center of -- of a sort of public square, which will be both a center of government and a shrine for all of the land-boimd world." tty Tow do you know that?" Toby said. "Jxist from population statistics? Those wouldn't help you to predict the -- the continuous city you're talking about." "No, they wouldn't. Such computations of course suggested such an outcome -- along with many other possibilities. But I'd never have built a Tower like this if I hadn't been sire. Come with me a moment and look at something; I see I'm not making it graphic enough. I've never talked to anybody with imagination about this before." Dane stood up -- yes, that strange lightness of body was not just a drug illusion -- and skimmed to a wall hanging, which he parted to reveal a big window. Beyond the window was nothing but kjrno, not quite, for shadowy peaks of the Rockies were barely visible in a stratospheric haze. "In that direction," Dane said soberly, "in fifty-seven years, there will be a broad avenue, bordered by rather ramshackle buildings most of which will be four or five stories higher than where we are standing now. Most of them look quite inflammable. It's my impression that all the lower levels are nearly as ramshackle for several thousand feet down, and then become sbirdier; and that even so, none of the whole complex would bear its own weight for an instant, if it weren't tied horizontally to a great many central, vertical members like the Dane Tower." "You talk as though you've seen it" "I have seen it. In a way. But before I explain that -- and I'll do more than that. I'll also show you what I've seen -- I want you to look at anotlier, more immediate thing. It won't make instant sense to you, but I've got good reasons for presenting my evidence in this exact order and no other." "You're the boss, John." "No, but I'm trying. All right, come on out again. We'll be back." Dane led Toby out into the humming, busy rotunda once more, and down the line of cubicles to a door which was heavilj sealed and insulated. There waj a microphone mounted in th center of it, into which Dane spoke in a low voice. It was sev. eral minutes before he got an an. swer, and another long minute before the door was unsealed pulled guardedly ajar, by anothei one of those ubiquitous people in white coats -- this one a pale girl who gave Toby a strange impression that she was trying not to cry. Inside, the cubicle had a mixed smell of animals and ozone and was quite hot. Along the right wall as Toby and Dane entered was a row of small cages, each of which contained two black kittens, all of whom set up a faint feeping noise at the new visitors ond began to mill around each other. Toby grinned at then amused as alwa#rs at the way only two kittens can imitate a mob scene when trying to draw attention. "Look closer," Dane said. "You Have no idea how hard they are to breed." toby looked closer, but for a moment saw nothing nw. Then, all at once, he saw a whole series of singularities. All the kittens were the same age -- about two month's; all bore a white star on the forehead and a white blaze on the chest; and each pair in eacn cage were identical twins. "Breeding show cats is difficult enough," Dane added, "because they revert to alley-cats at the first cross -- everything is double-recessive. But these are alley-cats to begin with, and they have to come out almost exactly alike. It took two Nobelists a molecular biologist and a geneticist -- to get this line started and guarantee that it'd keep on coming out like this. But it's required." "By whom?" "I'm not ready to answer tHat quite yet. But soon. In the meantime, look on the other side." The other side consisted of a laboratory bench of formica or some such substance, set at the same level as the shelf on which the cats' cages sat. In the middle of it stood an object like a gallon jug of very thick glass, except tliat it had no neck, and had been opened vertically down the middle as though hinged at the back. Above it, on the shaft of a ringstand, hovered a tall torus of closely wound wire, obviously big eno ugh in diameter to surround the jug when the jug was closed and the coil slid down around it. "Time's short, I won't explain further yet," Dane said, and then to the pale girl: "This is dose to transmission time, isn't it?" "Yes, Mister Dane, but -- " "Go ahead. I'll vouch for Mister Walker." Turning to the cages, the girl deftly extracted a kitten, swung to the apparatus, popped the kitten into the parted jug, and closed the sides. The kitten was now in a sitting position inside the jug, with only its head protruding. She now lowered the torus so that it surrounded the belly of the jug. In so doing, she brought into view an attachment like a shallow copper cap, which fitted snugly over the kitten's head between its ears; and, behind tlit "up" position of the coil, a wall clock. Feep! the kitten said, more in puzzlement than in protest. The girl turned a switch, produdng a heavy hum of power, so deep as to sound more like the warming up of a subway generator than anything that miglit be hea# in a small laboratory. Her hand now moved to a key. and she began to watch the dock. As the clock's sweep-hand passed whatever point she was awaiting, she depressed tjfe key. There was a soft pop!, like the breaking of a small light bulb but without the accompanying glassy sound, and the kitten's head vanished. Up went the coil and open came the jug, revealing that the rest of the kitten was gone too. The girl repeated the operation with its twin, and en shut off tile power. "Thatis all tiiere is to see here; we only send two on any given day, one day a week," Dane said. "Now let's go back to the board room." "Send them where?" Toby said, already afraid he knew the answer. "Into the future, of course. Come on, and I'll give you your own look. It won't be a very good one, but you'll see everything that we've managed to see. We can't very well do better than that." A #I this trotting back and forth was not exactly decreasing Tobys confusion. Except for the spectacle of the vanishing kittens, he would have begun to suspect that Dane was losing his grip on reality, a phenomenon not infrequent in lonely men possessed.of, or by, virtually imlimited power. In the conference room, Dane sat Toby down at the table with his back to the projection booth; and then, instead of picking up the conversation, picked up a telephone instead. "Dane here," he said. "Get me Accounting... Hello, Sal? I want to arrange an open transfer of funds, in such a way that the remaining sum after income lars. The recipient is Tobias R. Walker -- " "Hey, wait, damnit -- " Dane cut Toby off with a sharp gesture. "You'll find a dossier on him in the press file, including his bank and account number -- oh, you know who he is. Good, that simplifies tilings. Yes, effective immediately." "Now look here," Toby said, the instant Dane had hung up. "Maybe I did save your goddam life. But I did it out of friendship, and for that matter I would ha done it out of simple decency for one of your Indians, or anybody. I damn well don't want to be paid off for it Being shown what you're doii up here is more than enough!" "My dear Toby, this is not a payoff. It is either a bribe or a commisrion, depending upon how you come to look at it after you have all the facts. Will you give me time to explain?" "Well... I suppose so. But I warn you, tiie chances are ninety to one that I'll send the money right back, the moment I have the chance." "I can't prevent that I in my turn warned you that my answers tend to be fatal. In the present instance, even if you keep the money, you vrill have relatively little time to spend it, and perhaps none at all. Now, let's look at some pictures." He touched one of a small portable rank of buttons, and hangings opposite the projection booth pulled aside. Another touch, and the room went dark. IV ((As is now obvious," Dane's voice said in the blackness, "I've been fooling around with Time. The discovery of the effect was an accident, and the theory is dead secret; I intend to explain it to nobody, and to see to it that none of my experts leaks it, either. What matters for your purposes is what we found. "Effectively, we can see a short distance into the future -- not directly, but tiirough a process which allows us to take still photographs, all of rather bad quality. We've taken thousands, and spent the better part of the last five years interpreting tiiem. It took las several years just to realize that tile altitude above the surface of the Earth of the camera exactly matched to the altitude in the future. We got hundreds of murky, useless photos before we found that we had to be up two miles before we could see the surface of the world-city. Hence, the Dane Tower. "I've had slides made of the key pictures. Here's the first one." The screen lit up. The photo -- if that was what it was -- was in black and white and seemed to show a street scene rather like the one Dane had described to Toby while tiiey had been looking out of the window at the Rockies. Details, however, were impossible to make out; not only was the picture badly out of focus, but it had an overall milky quality, as if the camera had leaked light even before the shot had been taken. "In general, the # r're all this bad," Dane said, "but in a given series of shots of the same scene, each one comes close to being sharp in a different small area. We've had composites made up of all the sharp spots which I can show you later, but I wanted you to see the originals first. Now, these are the people -- a microscopic fraction of them." The next slide showed the same scene, but there were figures in the street. They were vaguely graceful, and seemed to be clad in loose garments with long sleeves, like Arab robes. One face was almost in focus, and it was startlingly handsome, but Toby could not tell what sex it was. "We know relatively little about the people who live in the lower levels. However, there seems to be no doubt that social status depends upon nearness to the surface, just as in The Time Machine or Metropolis or scores of later works on the same theme. The people you see in the picture are not the ruling class, which is essentially an engineers' guild, but parasites of some sort, like Wells' Eloi'. They may be the children of the ruling class, or they may represent some more complicated social setup. We haven't been able to settle that. "Not all the world-city is two miles high, by the way, but it's almost nowhere less than a mile high. I should think that this would be a distinction without a difference to the poor slobs who have to live at the bottom. We don't know how deep under the Earth all this runs, either, but again that's almost an academic question. "Here is another shot of the people. You'll see that they seem to be conducting some sort of ceremony or celebration, or whatever. Or maybe it's just their equivalent of a Saturday night dance." O r tnybe John Hillary Dane has just lost his marbles, Toby recalled with a pang the fix Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had developid on Spiritualism, one outcome of which had been a passionate tract disguised as a novel called The Land of Mist. And Doyle, though remembered nOw almost solely for Sherlock Holmes, had been one of the noblest, most versatile and most "The pictures in this series led us to a complicated but lucky accident. We had been trying to see if we could pull anything back from the future besides patterns of energy. Theoretically it was possible, but we found that we just couldn't muster the necessary power for it. The general energy level of the universe -- what Milne called the t-tau relationship -- is higher in the future than it is in the present, and given that plus the basic Einsteinean equation, grabbing even a tiny object from up there would call for a surge of power equivalent to several megatons. We couldn't confine it, not usefully. "However, something else was working for us. Have you noticed anything odd about the gravity on top of this building?" "Yes. I feel lighter. I thought it was just the drugs and so on, but I noticed that people move differently." "Precisely," Dane said. "The t-tau spread increases with time, but the gravitational constant -- which, obviously, isn't a constant at all -- weakens. You wouldn't think fifty years would make so noticeable a difference, but it seems that in the course of our tampering with Time, we've created some kind of leak in which gravitational energy is flowing from here into the future. This has all kinds of theoretical implications which I won't bother you with, but what it meant for us, in practice, was that although we couldn't pull an object back from the future, we could send one forward. "Of course this instantly made us wonder if we could send a live object... not just a rock, but nn assemblage of matter which also carried a characteristic energy pattern, just like the pictures we were getting back. The t-tau relationship said No, because the life energy pattern is unique in that it has negative entropy, but we tried it anyhow. "The first animal we tried, as it hapoened, was a black Htten. It showed up on one of these feast days, or dances, or whatever they are, and producd a sensation. Here is one of the pictures." slide showed more "raceful figures, bending bJurrily over something which might have been a black kitten, or a lump of coal. Toby now remembered also that Conan Doyle had been completely taken in by two little girls who had produced photographs of what they claimed were fairies, but later had been shown to be pictures cut out of advertise.ments in popular magazines. The noblest intellect of his time bad published a book which had include the photographs. Dane's slides strongly resemble tiiem. "A lot of experiments showed that if we sent forward two such kittens, people came boiling out of the building to look at them, and the more the kittens resembled each other, the greater the excitement. Our breeding program was the result, and we now have a whole new ceremony in the future organized around the weekly appearance of these twins. "Again, the details aren't important. The essence of the matter is that the development gave us immense amounts of new sociological data to work with. The mathematical biology of social behavior has come a long distance since Rashevsky. Also, it helped that we get the kittens back in a week; they revert to tlie energy level they were bom into, along the world-line widened by the gravity flow. Their disappearance, just before the new batch arrives, creates more excitement, and more data for us. It also makes the inbreeding program simpler for us. You'll be interested to see this week's pair pop out of nothingness next week, if you're still with me then... especially if you're still thinking about all this in terms of ectoplasm, apporfs and the like." Toby grinned feebly, but did not deny the accusation. He was just as pleased that the grin was invisible in the darkness, but he would not have been surprised to be told that Dane had sensed it anyhow. "Now, Toby, it seems clear that tills isn't a very happy society, at least from our point of view; but it's also clear that it I functions, more or less. It was also dear, almost from the be' ginning, that it couldn't function without computer control of al) most everything. The magnitude I of data involved -- people, enI ergy flow, food, repair, logistics j of every sort -- precluded any I other possibility. We searched a I long time for that computer, be: cause we thout anything so advanced would be the most worthwhile thing to study of anything in the future that might be accessible to us. "We had a hell of a time findi ing it -- we looked in all the logical but wrong places. It seemed to be utterly invisible. Well, it was, and for a good reason: ' it was all around us -- or will be. It's based right on this floor I of th building, and goes on up in the air about a himdred feet. We took our camera up on the roof when we figured this out, and here's one of the pictures we got." Toby would have found it I hard to say what he expected the slide to show, but certainly nothing like this. Against a backgroimd of dark sky appeared a fragment of thick, irregular webwork; it was not only senseless, but so obviously incomplete that Toby at first could not even think of anything to compare it to. It was, it was, well, a little like a photograph of Dane's radio-telescope bridge, after the thing bad not only collapsed but somehow been partially melted (at a height of more than two miles? Ridiculous.) At the same time, the thing looked almost biological; it might have been a medium-power photomicrograph of a piece of spoie. In the background floated several spherical objects, all with highlights along the same side -- they were, in fact, lit from the same direction as the webwork was -- of which he could make no sense at all, unless the Earth of half a century in the future had acquired a whole flock of artificial satellites big enough to compete with the natural one. "As you can see," Dane's voice went on evenly, "it's not at all like any existing such machine. Insofar as we've been able to ure it out, it is most closely analogous to the Golgi network in the human cerebrum -- a web of conducting members enclosing, or underlying, a force field where the real work is being done. Those small round bodies you see actually number in at least the hundreds; they circulate in and out of the web in irregular pathways and may prevent specific bodies of information, or ,... well, we just don't know, not reliably. "Now, here is where you come in, Toby -- you and your million dollars. Or where we hope you'll come in." The projector went out, the drapes rustled, and the lights went on. Toby was completely dazzled. While he was still trying to get his eyesight back, Dane said in the same even and imemotional tone: "I want you to go up there and sabotage that machine." same old question. But this time, Dane had to answer. " 'Sabotage' is the wrong word; actually we want you to repair it, but the machine is a sacred object -- nobody is allowed to touch it -- so we'll have to equip you just as if you were a saboteur, and you'll have to behave as if you were. "The reason is inherent in tKe worship. You'll recall my telling you that we've been studying this society for nearly a decade. In tiie course of the study, we became convinced that the computer was suffering some kind of The slow breakdown. I also mentioned fifty-seven years, but actually the period we see is fifty-fiVe years in the future; we thinlf the breakdown will reach a crisis two years from now, after which we won't be able to do a thing for it. "The people themselves know less about the machine than we do -- much less. They've taken it for granted for all of their lifetimes, which appear to be short -- for obvious reasons, when you come to think of it. We, on the other hand, now think we know which component of the machine is going haywire. We can show you diagrams of the apparatus which will give you a pretty good idea of its gross workings, and we can also supply you with a map of its layout, its geography, so to speak. "We've prepared a replacement; you'll go forward, locate the failing part, rip it out, and insert our replacement" "John," Toby said, "this time you have to go all the way to the end. And so again I ask you, wjy?" Dane spread his hands. "I riiould think that would be selfevident. Repugnant as that universal tenement, or hive, or whatever-it-is may look to us, it's the society those people have got, and all they've got If it collapses, the disaster will be unimaginalions will suffer; liiey are incapable of running thdr world without that computer." Talk about philanthropies! The Dane Observatory was peanuts, compared to this. But Toby knew that there lay the ultimate why, and to ask it would be to question Dane's good will. He said instead : "I sec the point. Once I'm conto try it, as I'm sure you knew. So, John -- why did you feel dollars for the job?" "Because," Dane said, "one way or another, you will probably die. We get the kittens back, but kittens are not people, and we have no way of asking them their state of mind. Two, I don't know whether we can get you back at all. Three, if the people up there catch you messing around with their god-brain, they may tear you slowly to shreds, no matter how well we arm and armor you, "And the process, as you saw, involves a colossal jolt of power. It will probably feel almost exactly like being electrocuted. I on that chance alone, no, not if I were a pauper with nineteen starving children." Toby said slowly: "I won't either. But if you'll phone down to your accountant and cancel about it further. Otherwise, not." V T oby spent much of the next week studying the maps, with breaks for Charley to examine his hands, which seemed to be getting along nicely. Dane had quite vanished, which was reasonable; no matter how large the Dane Tower project looked to Toby, it was only a fragment of Dane's interests -- which, after all, he had to keep in order if he was to continue to support crazy enterprises like the Tower and the Observatory. At the end of the week, Dane reappeared, to join Toby in the kennel-cum-laboratory to await the return from the future of the kittens. There was nothing spectacular about it: Pop!, and then, Feep And there they were. They looked, Toby thought, a little dazed at first, but it is hard to read a kitten's expression -- it always looked a little dazed; and besides, at the very best, Toby would have been a little dazed himself under the circumstances. Otherwise, the animals were apparently unhurt, and were transferred promptly to a larger kennel to become part of the inbreeding cycle as they reached puberty. "Satisfied?" Dane said The pale #, nevertheless, continued to look sad about the whole process of which was in charge. "Well, it isn't fatal to tiiem, anyhow. I'd adopt either of them if I were in the market." "Help yourself." Dane vanished once more, though, without either feep or pop. D uring the succeeding week, Toby was made acquainted with the component. It looked remarirably like some peculiarly vicious combination of flamethrower, machine-pistol and bazooka. which was not an accident Most of it was in fact a weapon, which Toby was sternly told to use without compunction if he was detected before he had completed his mission. Only one of die grips, the one nearest the body, was actually the replacement component This would break out of the main body of the gun into the right hand with one sharp wrench of the wrist. What it then consisted of, to the eye, was a flattened cylinder with three prongs on one end. All Toby had to do, the technicians explained, was to find the socket tliose prongs fitted into, and squeeze the sides of the cylinder. The device would then freeze solidly in place, and the job woulcl be done. Easy enough. Just like getting Santa and the toys down the chimney and back up again. Ho ho ho. Nevertheless, the reasoning behind it was easy to understand. What surprised Toby more was the elaborateness of the armor he was also supposed to wear. It was, in fact, a full-fledged spacesuit, of a rather old-fashioned model, heavy, shiny, balloony, stiff at the points and topped by a helmet with a very restricted field of view. It looked not much advanced over the suit worn by the first men to walk on the Moon -- where it had probably been fairly satisfactory in the slight gravity and under no need to clamber rapidly and furtively through the interior of a gigantic sponge, ready to dodge at every instant. That, the technicians explained to him, could not be helped. He had to bear in mind that he would emerge in the future more than two miles above sea level, where an ox # rgen mask would be a essential to keep his reflexes and his thinking at optimum. The people of the future surface, like the Andean Indians, were acclimatized to the low oxygen tension of # feet, but he was not. The helmet would give him a better field of view than would the goggles of an oxygi mask, but the only way to keep a helmet filled with sufficient oxygen was to attach it to a pressure suit. And since they had to give him a pressure suit, they might also just as well armor it -- " -- against the sHngs, arrows and low-velocity bullets of outrageous fortune," Toby said. "Okay, okay. I suppose every hero in a Western wishes Central Casting had given him a softer horse," He exercised in the suit, whicK under the peculiar gravity field prevailing on the top of Dane Tower was more flerible and lighter than he had expected. He was not fooled. This only meant it would be stiffer and heavier, inside the world-brain, fifty-five years hence. H e also practiced, on an evacuated and insulated range, vrith the weapon, which turned out to be a laser rifle far advanced beyond any such Toby had ever seen, or even heard hinted at, in the arsenals of contemporary armies -- and as an occarional war correspondent, he was supposed to be as expert at sucK matters as any civilian is ever allowed to be. Another barrel of Dane eventually sold it to; but as for Toby, er several days of watching dummies carefully composed to be of the exact consistency of flesh and bone evaporate instantly at the merest toucH of its flash, his majcw prayer of the whole affair unexpectedly came to be that he would never have to fire it on the job. The firing range practice was at least interesting, however horrible. The practice at plugging the component into a dummy socket, and then getting the hell away, under the eye of a stopwatch, was not. But he knew it was probably much more important. This he would have to do; firing the gun was only a possibility. At the end of that week, Charley took the bandages off, and Toby exercised his hands on various grips and squeezers. They looked death-white, but they worked, very well. Charley was pleased; Toby was not. Those last bandages had been only token ones, not at all in the way of his practice with the rifle and its concealed' component; but to Toby they had represented the last barrier between himself and the slowly rotting sponge on top of the future. Dane came back the next day, also looking pleased, in his rigid and abstracted way. He looked at Toby's hands, watched him fire the rifle, timed him on the plug-in and getaway exercise, tested him on the map, read over all tile test records which had been compiled in his absence. One of Dane's major mottoes was I trust my subordinates, But. At the end, he said, "Good, very good." "You mean I can go now?" Toby said. He was surprised to find that he was burning to get it all over with, "Hell no, Toby. All this has been just warmup. While it's been going on, we've built a fullscale model of the brain over your head, on the top of the Tower. Tomorrow you get the suit on. pick up the gadget, climb out there and go through the whole routine -- bearii in mind that if you slip, you won't just fall to a street among a lot of fairies. You'll fall two miles, and I'll have to find myself another boy. And while you're doing it, I may just stand out on the balcony and throw rocks at you." "I've changed my mind," Toby said. WhaiF' VI W hen they lowered Toby out of the high sky and the model brain, the padding of the pressure suit was soaked with sweat, and Dane let Toby lie quietly and shake for two days while the technicians worked frantically to improve the suit's water cycling. You would have thought, Toby thought ironically, shaking, that after all these years of experience with spacesuits, somebody would have solved that problem; but evidently no suit had ever been designed to cope with just one hour of concentrated stress which j would include the whole mission; previous spacesuit designers had f thought in terms of months, orj years. While Toby slowly stopped shaking, Dane swore. He was on the spot every minute now, for the end of this week was launching lime. At last the technicians were convinced that they had the water problem licked, and some violent exercise inside the refurbished suit did not, at least, contradict them. This time, though,! Toby was unable to summon the extremes of fear he had felt atop the Dane Tower, although he was convinced that he was not very far from them. The final test would have to be the mission itself. A nd The Day at last came, and Toby was stuffed, bolted and sealed into the suit for the last time, along with the knowledge: that he might never be taken out. of it again. He was handed the weapon-cum-component, and introduced to his own personal version of the magic jug: an insulated room on the roof, a metal chair centered upon an elevated metal plate and a capped coil to be lowered around him. Dane and his operators watched from a control room behind glass; Toby noticed that the pale girl was not among them and wondered if Dane had suffered a minor mutiny in the ranks. On the wall facing Toby was a clock, presvanably duplicating one in the control room. It swept toward the zero hour, at first with glacial slowness, and then suddenly as if the pace of Time had doubled. "Can you hear me all right, Toby?" the smfs radio said in Dane's voice. "Sure." "Remember that you won't be able to in the future. We'll take as many pictures as possible while you're there, but if you get in trouble, there won't be a thing we can do to help you.' "I know that. You've told me that at least a dozen times." "Don't be jumpy. I'm just trying to make perfectly sure that you have every fact you need. We've already sent on the usual two kittens, but half an hour late. We're hoping that between the usual ceremony, and the unusual lateness, theyU be too distracted to notice you." Toby knew that, too. He realized belatedly that Dane was simply chattering to keep him distracted and as close to relaxed as possible when the moment of transmission came. His glance shot up to the clock. Two seconds to zero! One -- Every muscle in his body went into spasm. Every nerve shrieked in silent agony. It lasted forever, in flashing blackness and roaring silence. Then he was standing in the high sky, exactly on the part of the world-brain he had so painstakingly memorized. The incredible pain vanished so completely as to leave hardly a memory; it was so close to instantaneous that he almost staggered with reUef. Luckily, the suit prevented him; it was indeed much heavier here. Without looking down -- for he had no time to dieck on whether the natives were indeed distracted -- he hoisted the weapon-component assemblage and began to climb. Several of the little moon-like globes -- "bitbundles," one of the technics had called them -- floated past him, and one swerved toward him, as if in curiosity, although he had been assured that this was unlikely. Then he -- was back in the ttansaussion chamber aiain. H e looked toward the glass front of the control room, bewildered. His only impression was of Dane's face, wearing an expression he could clearly read: shock, frustration, inh uman determination. Then Dane made a slight movement. Eternal agony. He was back on the brain, but at the spot to which his few previous steps had taken him. This time the pain was distinctly slow about dwindling. He ban to climb once more. The rransmfsson chamber. It could only have been a few seconds later: Dane's expression was still in the process of hard enin g, Dane hit the kqr again. The total agony of electrocution. When the hi sky flashed over him again, he was weak, pain. He took two steps more. Transmission chamber. Dane's face was a Greek mask, a mockii twisted mask of pity and fury at once. His hand pressed down -- Anguish upon anguish. The high sky. One step. Toby staggered. He was nearly blind with pain now. Chamber. Mask. Key. Death. Sky. Uadiminished pain. With the last motion of which he was physically capable, Toby threw the weapon away. convalesce from having been executed four times is a long process. For the first few weeks, if Dane showed up at all, Toby was incapable of noticing it. All he saw, and that only in fragile gleams, was the gradual lightening of that darkness of gloom which is eternity. Then, gradually, the world began to obtrude. The people who attended him were hushed, as if in the presence of something more than a corpse, alfliough it vas impossible for them to have known how far beyond death he had already been. It was more than a month before Dane appeared. His face, which would not ever be a mystery to Toby any more, was remote and abstracted, as though he were thinkin g now about some new project which had nothing to do with the Dane Tower, let alone Toby; but he said: "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry too," Toby said slowly, "in a good many ways. But you did warn me. And I find I still have a little curiosity left. What went wrong, do you know?" "We think we know. Essentially, it was the difference between a man and an animal. Living things, all living things, differ from other energy processes in the universe in having negative entropy -- that's the definition of life, or the best one we have. The higher the nervous organization, the more negentropy -- the more energy consolidating itself, instead of slowly dissipating and downgrading in the standard way. A cat has pretty close to the highest degree of nervous organization in the animal kingdom, but a man is so much higher still that he's virtually a different order of entity. The quantitative difference is so great that it becomes, to all intents and purposes, qualitative." Toby puzzled over this for several minutes. "In other words, if you'd sent an earthworm up there, you might not have gotten it back for years." "That seems to be it. Whereas we'll never be able to keep a man there for more than a few seconds. And the farther in the future we try to send him, the shorter the stay will be." #CT see." Toby fell silent again. A Then, at last, he continued : "I said I was sorry. But not completely. I'm sorry I had to go through the experience -- it wasn't pleasant I'm sorry it turned out to be for notliing. But above all, I'm sorry you turned out to be the kind of man who would put a friend through it four times. I am indeed going to keep the money, John. No sum will ever pay me for what I went through, and no sum could make up for losing what I thought I saw in you. I shan't spend it. any more than I could spend my own blood, but maybe my children, if I ever have anj, won't feel the same way about it. "But it will be nice to have the interest, because I'm going to ask the paper for a new assign ment, and I suspect that nothing new that I'm given will be as lucrative as working with you was. I won't be seeing you again, Not ever, if I can help it." "I understand that," Dane, said. "Every time I answer one of those questions -- questions of this kind -- I lose somebody,' one way or another. I expectedj nothing else. But I too have ray curiosity, Toby. You're not com pletely sorry. What is it that you don't regret?" "Failing." "Oh," Dane said slowly. "Will' you say why?" "Yes. It's one of the reasons why I don't want to see you any more. I think you lied to me. I don't believe there was anytliing wrong with die big computer, the world-brain. But I think some thing would have gone wronj with it if I had managed to plug your component into it. You did not want to save that society, You wanted to destroy it." The two men's eyes met. Acknowledgment was already plain to Toby in Dane's expression. "Quite true," Dane said steadily. "The society was nothing more than the ultimate deadend of the society we have right now. And the computer; I suspect -- though I can't be positive -- is perfect. If it doesn't fail or get disrupted somehow -- it will maintain the universal tenement forever." "Nothing is perfect," Toby said, "and nothing is forever. But the fact is, John, you weren't out ers -- with me as cat's-paw. You were out to cause it."  ( Tn effect," Dane said, "yes. One last question, Toby, if I may turn the tables on you just once. I don't see how you detected that my intentions were opposite to my statement of them. It seems to me that I left very few clues." "You left no dues at all. But at the bf ifmin g, when you asked me to take the job on -- this was after the slide show in the conference room -- your tongue slipped. You called it 'sabotage.' Your explanation was glib and I took it at face value -- until I saw your face during the three times you sent me forward again. It was not just the face of a man knowingly executing a friend. It was the face of a fanatic. In the past month, lydng here, I've been seeing that face, and hearing it speak the word 'sabotage.' And I knew that the face and the word went together." Dane got to his feet. "I never did trust poets," he said. "So perhaps it's just as well that we're parting. And to do you credit, Toby, not only were you as brave as I expected you to be, but you might even be right. It might be just as well, too, that it proved to be impossible to destroy the machine. I'm already working on another approach." "I'm not surprised. Good-by, John." "Good-by." They shook hands formally, without warmth, and Dane moved away from the bed, "John." Dane turned back halfway, but he did not look bade. His mind was already on other matters "What is it?" he said. "John, I don't know what your next project is, and I don't Want to know. But I've also been thinking about your one-before-last, and I think there's something you ought to bear in mind." "Very well," Dane said, "What?" "Telescopes," Toby said, "no matter how powerful, see only into the past." T he first airplane that flew with a liqtiid-fuel rocket engine as its means of propxilsion was the German interceptor Messerschmitt Me-#B, named Komet. It first appeared in action during March # and surprised the pilots of Allied bombers by the fantastic bursts of speed it could perform. The design of the Me-#A (the prototype of Me-#B had grown out of wartime needs; it Had nothing to do with Max Valier's concepts of # and it also was hardly -- if at all -- influenced by the work of the other early advocate of rocket-propelled aircraft: Dr. Eugen Saenger. I think it is safe to assume that my readers will remember the article in the last issue about the rocket enthusiast Max Valier. Valier, as was explained fiiere, talked a great deal about "rocket airplanes," but what he actually had in mind was an airfeeathing jet engine. When Dr. Saenger, a few years later, talked about rocket airplanes, he did have rocket engines in mind. And he was going to develop them himself; he had the necessary background for such development work. And as he went ahead with his work, he Had so many new ideas that it would have needed a large research institute to follow them tErough. Though any engineering library worth that name has a number of publications by Eugen Saenger on its shelves, nothing about Him has been pubUshed aside from a few obituaries in various journals early in #. The data given in the following are based on two sources: personal correondence, mainly during the period before the second world war, and his Laboratory Notebooks covering the period from the end of # to near the end of #. The original is in Germany, presumably in the custody of his widow Dr. Irene Saenger-Bredt, but a photocopy is in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum in Washiion, D.C. and was made available to me by Fred C. Durectors. Tj'ugen Saenger was born in the city of Pressnitz in the mountains called Erzebir that straddled the German-Austrian border. His birth date was September #, #; soon after, his parents must have moved to Hungry, for his elementary education took place in the municipal schools of small Hungarian towns. He attended High School in Graz and after graduation (in #) the College of Elngineering in Graz for one year. Then followed # months of practical engineering; he participated in the construction of a high-tension transmission line. In # he had himself enrolled in the College of Engineering in Vienna, attending, among other things, the then recently instituted courses in aviation. After passing the two compulsory government examinations for construction engineers (one of his dissertations combined his official and his real interests; it was about the design of airplane hangars), he received his Doctorate in the Technological Sciences in #. Simultaneously he became Assistant Professor of Engineering in Vienna. Simultaneously he thought long and carefully about the aerodynamical forces on the wings and bodies of airplanes that would fly at "altitudes of more than # kilometers with speeds about # kmh" -- or above # feet at speeds of more than # mph. Of course there were no such airplanes, nor the engines to propel them. But the shape of such an airplane could be predicted Fig. #. Eugen Saenger's sketch of his rocket, propelled speedster. The diagram gave no dimensions, if it had actual, ly been built the overall length would have been on the order oi # feet. (Fig. #, first published in the spring of #) and the engines had to be rockets, still to be invented. On October #, #, he signed and dispatched a #-page singlespaced proposal to the Austrian Ministry of Defense. It began with the words: "Both tiie speed of customary aircraft and the operational altitude have now approached limits which, as far as can be foreseen, will not be extended significantly by the means now in use. These limits are given by the loss of efficiency of the propeller when run at very high speeds, by the intolerable increase of engine weight... , and by the inability of the engine to obtain enough oxygen at very great altitudes." The remedy would be rocket propulsion. He added: "It has to be admitted that the efficiency of a rocket engine burning e.g. gasoline will surpass that of the engine-propeller combination only if the flight speed rises above # kmh (about # mph) and that the rocket-propeUed airplane is also weighed down with large quantities of fuel. For this reason some institutions, especially in America, are trying to develop a kind of jet propulsion that utilizes tfie circumambient air and which might produce a useful degree of efficiency at lower fl # dng speeds; this might be considered an interim solution until the development of pure rocket propulsion." Qince this was a document for the Defense Ministry, Saenger stressed the military applications like fast-climbing interceptors, but he also talked about airliners. He had worked out an especially efficient flightpath. Once airborne and pointing in the direction of the destination, the plane would climb at an angle of # until an altitude of about # miles has been reached. Then the plane would assume a horizontal position, correct its course, if necessary, and then the rocket engine would be shut off. Tfie speed would be ## to # times that of sound at the moment of cut-off and the plane would move by inertia only. Air resistance would gradually diminisK the flying speed; simultaneously, altitude would be lost. About #i miles from the take-off point, the speed would be less than that of sound and the altitude about # miles. Then tfie pilot would land, using the fuel remaining in the tanks for tfie approach. Tfie fuel consumption would not be mucfi higher than that of an airplane of the same take-off weight that had to fly tfie same distance non-stop. But tfie rocket airplane would not need mucfi more than an hour for a #-mile trip. The rocket engine would bum for # minutes during the slanting ascent and must develop a thmst of # metric tons. All this was just too mucfi for the officials of the Austrian Ministry of Defense. It would be a very expensive development program, they probably reasoned. And they probably felt some opposition to the proposed average speed of about # miles per minute; nobody in Vienna could conceive that anybody could be so much in a hurry. So Saenger received a reply, dated Febmary #, #, of only a few lines, saying that a liquidfuel rocket engine cannot be built becatise of the "detonation-like character" of the combustion. Saenger's reaction was that they would have to change their time if he could show them a rocket motor that burned smoothly without detonation. What he had in mind was one that would bum a light fuel oil with liquid oxygen and be cooled by the fuel before it was injected into the combustion chamber. Anybody who has ever started out on a series of experiments that have not been done before knows (afterwards!) a certain fact: Things that were expected to cause a lot of trouble failed to do so, while "simple" items proved to be intractable. Saenger was worried about the heat of combustion and conceived an elaborate system of insulation. There was to be an inner layer of hard carbon or graphite which was expected to be burned off or abraded during the run. Backing the hard carbon layer was a much thicker layer of porous carjjon. Then came the metal (sheet steel) wall, then a space through which the fuel would flow and then the outer skin of the cooling jacket. After a few preliminary experiments Dr. Saenger decided that the carbon insulation was not needed. Qtill, he proceeded toward his goal slowly and cautiously. The final rocket motor would use liquid oxygen, but he began his tests with gaseous oxygen. The final rocket motor would be cooled with its own fuel, but at first # m#E Fig. #. The planned performance of the speedster. water cooling was employed. Experiment No. # was labeled "first success, duration # seconds" and dated March #, #. Diesel fuel and gaseous oxygen were used; the internal pressure during the run was # pounds per square inch. Progress was quite fast; only a few weeks later he made his first experiments using liquid oxygen. Always keeping in mind that his rocket airplane would need # minutes of continuous thmst, he went after long burning time quite early in his work. Some of his tests lasted # minutes, which was much longer than was accomplished by anyone else for years to come. In between actual tests, he calculated and drew sketches; most of his sketches of rocket motors were based on the idea that the tubing through which the cooling fluid (the fuel) circulated should form the motor itself. Some time during the summer of # it occurred to him that certain metals might be usable as fuels. "Metals," he wrote in His notebook, "can be used as rocket fuels because (#) they use up little oxygen in spite of high energy production, and (#) because the combustion products are chemically stable." The main drawback, which Saenger did not put down, is that these stable combustion products are solids at ordinary temperatures. Apparently he hoped that this difficulty ( could be overcome. The most I promising metal was beryllium with an energy content of # Idlogram-calories per kilogram. Lithium was next with # kilogram-calories per kilogram. Aluminum followed with # kgcal.; carbon has # kgcal. as may be mentioned for comparison. In spite of the progress he made, Saenger was not happy. #) About a year later Ernest Loebell of the short'iived Cleveland Rocket Society wound copper tubing around a mandrel having the shape of a rocket motor. He then wanted to have aluminum cast around the tubing to give rigidity to the whole and to obtain a smooth inner surface. He did not succeed in finding a shop in Cleveland that could do a flawless casting job and was most annoyed at the foundryman's remark that the holes in the cast did not matter because it would not work onyway. The reasons were of the kind that do not find their way into laboratory notebooks. There seems to have been much personal friction with other faculty members. Perhaps they felt that experiments with space travel as their ultimate goal did not add to the dignity of their institute. Perhaps they just complained about the noise. jpvn June #, # (the manuscript page is dated and signed), Saenger made a list of # items, an outline of his own future. He Had made up his mind to leave Austria and go to Germany where the chances for aeronautical research seemed (and were) far better. Of course Hitler was in power in Germany but Saenger, like most others, expected that the Nazis would shed their revolutionary fervor and settle down to become a respectable government. He certainly, as the outline shows, did not expect a war. The items in the outline are occasionally separated by horizontal lines which divide the whole into five sections. The first section was what he still intended to accomplish in Vienna, comprising the first six items. ,#. Increase the thrust of model rocket S.R. # to # lbs. #. Increase exhaust velocity to # ftsec, #. Further increase by addition of light metals to liie fuel to # ft.sec. #, Low pressure experiments with liquid oxygen. #. Publication of "Exterior Ballistics." #. Publication of "Interior Ballistics." presumably two planned books, not published. The second section reads: #. Petition to Reika (?) with ref. to D.V.L. the German Aeronautical Research Institute. #. Join D.V.L. with both assistants. #. Habilitation T. H. Berlin obtain a professorship at the Technical University at Berlin . #. Development of the #-lbs thrust motor with # ft sec. exhaust velocity. #. Building of the #-lbs thrust motor, ready for flight. Section # reads: #. Building of Troposphere speedflyer S.l. #. Break the # mph speed limit. #. Building of fighter airplane S.#. #. Climb to altitudes beyond # ft. #. Start Saenger Rocket Aircraft Corp. #. Mass Production of theS.#. Section # continues with his optimistic success scheme: #. Building the long range aircraft S.#. #. Fly # miles non-stop. #. Production of the S.#. #. Establish rocket aircraft service between the continents. Section # looks to final triumphs: #. Development of the beryllium rocket. #. Make round the world nonstop flight with the S.#. #. Establishment of the Space Station. #. Extension of the Space Station. #. Building of spaceship S.#. #. Beginning of space travel. 'his was the dream. Reality was quite different. In October # one Professor Rinagl of the institute offered some kind of a contract to Saenger. Detail is not known, but Saenger refused to sign. Whereupon Rinagl forbade the continuaroEi Fig. #. Sketch for a rocket motor doted June #, #. At that time Saenger evidently had not yet realized the need for a constriction in the nozzle. #. Design for a rocket motor as published in the special issue of Flight. The fuel was to go' directly into the cooling jacket from the tank and was to be sucked through it by the pumps. Then it was to be discharged into the combustion chamber under pressure. The oxygen was to be fed in under pressure directly. Son of the tests. Defiantly Saenger tan one more test a week later or Count Max von Arro-Zinneberg. Then he wrote a comprefiensive report about his general plans and about the experimental work he had done. It filled a whole Special Issue of the monthly Plug (Flight) and was published in Vienna in December #. An English translation appeared with! considerable delay in April # as Technical Memoiandum No. # of the N.A.C.A., the National Advisory Committee for AeroBefore packing up and leaving for Germany, he also filed an application for a patent: "rocket motor with forced cooling," which was granted in #. (Austrian patent No. #). In Germany he worked for some time at the Experimental Station Trauen of the D.V.L., continuing the experimental work begim in Vienna. Reliable and detailed information is lacking. At the time the work was done, it was, of course, secret and no information was made public. Later both equipment and documents were destroyed by Allied bombing raids; late in the war Nazi officials burned documents wholesale and what was left was confiscated by Allied soldiers and much of it is still slumbering somewhere in nice solid wooden crates. It is my personal guess that the Luftwaife, the ultimate superior of the D.V.L., kept rocket research going in competition to the Ptxra.y's Peenemimde research establishment, where Wemher von Braun worked. The Luitwaiie also sponsored rocket research at and at Professor Hellmuth Walter's industrial research establishand to Professor Walter were to develop rocket motors for takeoff help and for airplane application. The rocket assembly that propelled the Me-#B was the result of the work of Walter's engineers. Saenger seems to have been sh'imted to theoretical work at one point, and in thinking about his original concept of powered climb followed by inertial flight  he had a new idea. If the powered flight led to a peak altitude of # miles, the airplane, after re-entry would "skip" when it reached denser layers of the atmosphere. Utilizing this phenomenon one could produce a series of such skips which would extend the horizontal range enormotisly. With the aid of his assistant (and later wife) Dr. Irene Bredt, he worked out his famous plan of the bomber that would fly around the world. If it had become a project, the effort involved would have been not much smaller than Project Apollo. At that time Germany fought a war that was already lost; there was neither the manpower nor the resources for a new and major project. 'he top-secret report com prised about # typewritten pages with many graphs, tables and diagrams. Only # copies were made and distributed witlj maximum security; but word of its existence somehow leaked out and hunting for a copy became the favorite occupation of Allied in. telligence units. The Russians first found one, then two more. Stalin, after having glanced through a translation, personally ordered that Saenger and his assistants be brought to Russia. His son headed the search; the group first flew to Berlin, then to Vienna and then to other cities -- unaware of the fact that Saenger and his wife-to-be were in French custody. Of course the French also had copies of the report, as did #) This concept, incidentally, was the boslj of the American Dyna-Soar project and it is said to have been also used in o Russian missile project too. Dyna-Soar was later cancelled and apparently the Russian project shared its fate. In both cases the straight ballistic missile won. Rg. #. Experimental American rocket motor, ca. #. The insert had the purpose of causing an especially fast fuel flow in the orea of the nozzle's smallest diameter where the danger of a burn-through is greatest. the British and American intelligence services. While the Saengers were in France, something looking very much like the design sketch of the year # was built in the United States: the X-#. The close resemblance was not due to imitation; conscious or subconscious, it was due to the laws which govern aeronautics; an airplane that is to fly high and very fast must look that way. The X-I was to fly as high as seven miles and was to fly faster than soimd. It did on October #, #, the first manned vehicle to do so. About eight years later, in July #, the X-# flew three times as fast as sound travels and on November #, #, the X-# accomplish#) An unclassiHed buf somewhaf abridged translation bears the title A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers; if is Translation ed six times the speed of sound. At the time of the X-# flight West Germany became a fully sovereign country again and the Saengers returned to head a small rocket research laboratory located at the airport of the city of Stuttgart. It seems to have been more of a teaching than a research operation; the research project was the development of a steam rocket for take-off help for aircraft. After a few years in Stuttgart, the Saengers moved to Berlin. One of the poinfei in his early program still came true: he was appointed professor by the university in West Berlin. On February #, #, Dr. Saenger collapsed during a lecture and died. At the time of his death most of the projects he had advocated had been carried out --  but by others.   I I This Month in IF -- by Keith Laumer by Macic Reynolds Please note: WeVe skipped a month in our dating to bring IF and Galaxy back on schedule. This is the July issue (there is no June issue)... on sale everywhere now; don't miss it! fcrmattoiT The furniture was very comfortable and attractive, and almost new -- but, unfortunately, very restless I H e beat the chair back out of the door, using his belt like , a whip. j "Goddam it, I've told you a I hundred times: you're a livingI room chair now. Stop trying to get back into the bedroom." i Looping the belt (size #, allij gator), he went into the kitchen, I where his wife was preparing j breakfast, and sat down at the table. His chair bucked once and surrendered. The plastic stuffing i pulsed softly against his back. I "I tbink that chair's a damned I voyeur," he told her as she I brought him coffee, staring at his T shirt with her lozenge-shaped eyes (the round of color in them soft and raw, like the flat top of a pencil's eraser). "Keeps trying to get back into our room." He stared at the boiling coffee. "And in case you're wondering, you're right. The dresser wouldn't give me a shirt again." Grinning, his wife went back to Her cooking, periodically kicking the stove. Beside her, the garbage disposal chewed a mouthful of air twenty times and swallowed a burp. On the other side of the fbom, the washing machine once again turned over something (coin? button?) rattling inside it. A frown passed over his wife's face. He guessed she was thinking about their bed, the beautiful carved Victorian bed they'd at last abandoned with the rest of the bedroom furniture. Now when you passed the storage room upstairs, you could hear them inside, scuttling and banging against the door. Out of the comer of his eye he watched the table, talking, meanwhile to his wife. (Thurston's advice to an assistant: if you don't know what's going on, boy, smile and point the other way.) Her hair was bunched in its usual .severe bun, half on top and half behind her head. The tinyprinted shift was smooth and newlooking, pastels falling straight from her thin shoulders that alwasrs reminded him of hangers ("Faith's fmgal frocks" he'd once called the dresses). She looked childlike girlish, but there were lines beneath her eyes like the grain in dark wood, and a fuzziness above the lines, in the eyes themselves. "Didn't get much sleep last night, did you?" he said finally. "No. How could I?" The counter shuddered -- it was nailed in place and couldn't move much more than that -- causing a bowl of half-mashed potatoes to slide and totter onto the floor. The trashcan came galloping across tire tile, snapping its lid open and shut like alligator jaws. "Get back. We'll eat them anyway. Damn it, get back!" Sighing, she heaped the potaoes into her hands and threw them with a splatt! back into the bowl as the trashcan trotted dejectedly back across the room. "Your chair came to the door right after we'd gone to sleep," she went on, whipping the potatoes, extracting bits of foreign stuff with the end of her finger. "It knocked at the door a while, then started reclining and straightening back up. It was out there all night, squeaking. I -- " "Got you!" he bellowed. His foot was hooked into the spreading, claw-like base of the table, stopping it a few feet from the worn spots that indicated its place. "Get back here." The dishwasher swung open and pistoled water at him; when he lifted his foot, its porthole door slammed shut. The table came back like a camel, swaying, slow. She served the meal and they began to eat. A few chairs came sliding up to the door and were firmly turned away; drawers and cabinets kept opening and occasionally threw things out, a rotting potato, a soft brown onion, a blackened pan; the refrigerator lumbered from its comer and was bearing down on the trashcan before they noticed and ordered it back. Otherwise the meal was quiet. Almost... He slammed his fork down on the table and shouted: "WiU you please teU this damned table to shut up!" It was whimpering, or something very like it -- creaking and groaning, anyhow. She reached down and patted its metal flank. "You were too hqrsh with it, dear. It's more sensitive than the others, helpless as a little baby." Patted, cooed at, it began to quiet. "Mashed potatoes for breakfast?" he asked after a while. "I just kind of wanted them." He smiled. Last month it was gingerbread, sauerkraut the month before. Was it real this time, or just another of the little dramas acted out more for herself than for him? Each month, as the red mark on the calendar was passed without event, the girls'school finish cracked and for a few days she would be happy acting out the symptoms of pregnancy. They finishedin silence and she went to cajole a shirt from the dresser, buffing at the top with an oilcloth until it relaxed and surrendered its drawers to her. The house had turned them both into magicians, into masters of misdirection. "I wanted the blue one," he said when she came back into the kitchen. She turned and started back. "Never mind. I'll wear it." He put it on, forcing his arms through the stiff sleeves. No matter how often he told her to starch them lightly, they always turned out like planed lumber. "No tie?" "No tie." He kissed her hair, bending down -- then good-by to the kitchen. And taking his coat off the stair rail he opened the door to the sun, spilled out of the house into dazzling white Milford. The Cherry Street bus was just pulling up at the comer. lYTiss Girth came to his door. It was always open. "Mr. Hughes, I know you asked not to be disturbed -- " "That's right, I'm glad you remembered. Go away," he said, shoving his bandy legs (one limped from being shorter, the other had a knee that did tricks) deeper imder the desk, slumping over his work. It being therefore attested... She squirmed on through the door. Her hips walked over and stood by the desk, at the top of his vision. "Okay," he said, looking up finally from the neatly stacked papers. "You know I have to get the Robertson wills straightened out by tomorrow, Sandra. But I give up; what is it?" Sitting erect, he was taller than some men standing, much of his six-feet-four being torso with' the springy legs appended as though by afterthought. A photographer might have picked his fgice for a pipe ad, his body to model clothes for the "man of special needs" (his secret, that the body was beginning to sag strangdy against the clothes). The girl's smile was as sheer as her nylons. "Mrs. Hughes is on the phone." She bent toward him across the desk to open the extension switch; the tips of her breasts faintly bmshed the papers. "She said it was urgent I thought you would want to take the call." "Very well, Sandra. Thank you." She turned, then swiveled back on her hips when he said, "But Sandra..." "Yes, sir?" "No more calls, no intemiptions." "Yes, sir." She walked out, squares in the plaid of hpi skirt swelling out the shape as her buttocks clenched-relaxed. He picked up the phone and held it till she was gone, though she'd probably listen on the extension anyway. "Faith?" "Oh, thank God you're there, Hugh. Sandra thought you were out" "She had instractions not to put anyone through to me." His wife called several times a day, just to say a few lonesome words. Her calls were like little quick-jotted notes, spontaneous and generous. Others probably thought the calls were bothersome, a nuisance. But for the two of them they possessed a large meaning, were a subtle expression of feelings which both of them had difficulty expressing more directly. "What did you want?" he asked her now. "The -- You'd better come home." She turned away from the phone for a second, "Right away." "Faith, you know I have a lot of work to catch up on. It was a bad time to take off, even if we did have to move -- and three weeks was ridiculous. My desk's piled higher than a newsstd. I can't -- " "Please, Hugh. You have to." The usual calm, studied inflections were missing from her voice. "What's wrong?" "I can't tell you over the phone. I'm aU right. But please hurry." "Thirty minutes. But I can't stay." She said Hurry again and hung up. He stood and reached up to tighten his tie, then remembered he hadn't worn one (first time in ten years, he had to think). Slipping into his coat he walked into the big outer office. Ten. Most of the staff were off on coffee breaks. "Leaving?" "Just for an hour or so, Sandra. Be back soon as I can." "Trouble at home?" Oh so solicitous. "More or less." "How is the new house?" "Fine. But we're Having a hell of a time getting settled." He winced at the meaning hidden in casual words. Miss Girth was going after her nail file as he left. Tnto the quiet hall, the door making a startling sound as it shut behind him. Through the living room. Kitchen. The silence had the weighty, waiting quality which comes from the sudden cessation of an accustomed noise. "Faith?" Not a sound. Even the furniture was silent. He felt as if he were walking through a petrified forest. Upstairs. No one. Nothing. He ran from room to room. T oo late -- hospital -- police... Downstairs: the phone. "Faith?" Again. From the hall closet, a small voice: Hugh, is that you? I was not sure, that's why I didn't answer before." Far away, soimding deep in the hollow chest. He noticed now that the bureau had moved over in front of the closet door. He walked up and kicked it, but it didn't budge. Intead, a chair came sliding across the slate floor and cracked against his shin. "Hugh? Are you kicking them? Don't kick them. Just do what they want you to." "Such as?" "They just want to talk to us. Stop laughing, I mean it. They mean it. They're keeping me in here to be sure you'll listen." Her voice was muffled by the wood, "Are you all right?" "Of course. They won't hurt us. They just want to talk." He kicked the bureau again and when the chair came back he was ready for it. He grabbed it by the back and smashed it against the top of the bureau. It came apart like something made of building blocks. "No, Hugh! Listen to them," Faith pleaded. And suddenly furniture was pouring from every room -- chairs, tables, bookcases, benches. They lurched around him and stopped, a semicircle of troops holding him where he was. "Please," his wife said again. "This is ridiculous, absurd." "You'll listen?" "Don't seem to have a great deal of choice." He looked around at all the menacing pieces. That they had no faces, yet moved, was profoundly unsettling. "Tell them that you'll listen." "I'll listen," he said, and a smll table came through the door from tile study with something on it. "What is that?'" "Remember the Ouija board Norm gave us as a joke a few years ago? That's it. Seems to have developed a kind of sympathy-life from contact with the others, the way our own furniture did," "Ours is just pKototropic. That is pretty scant living." "The board's more than that It seems to be alive, but it can't move around like the others, though they apparently hold it in the highest esteem. Their wise man, something like that, and it's the only way they have of talking to us." "Idiot savant." "What? Can't hear you." "Nothing," "Well, anyway, it's been trying to get down out ofthe closet for dass now. This morning one of them went and got it. I was dusting, and a chair came up behind me and hit my legs, making me sit down. Before I could get up, the kitchen table was in front of me with the board on it." "That little piece of wood is moving around." It darted from letter to letter, quick and sure. "Watch it. It'll spell out what they want to say." An M. Almost before he could distinguish the letter, on to the R. H, G, H, S. "Mr. Hughes"," he translated for his wife. "It's worked out a whole spelling, extrapolated from that Mister abbreviation." The small plaquet buzzed over the board pollinating letters, dropping vowels and verbs and modifiers in its rush. "What are they saying?" his wife asked anxiously from behind the door and bureau. W, H, N -- C, R, S -- F -- V. N.T.S -- He read off the letters as they flashed into sight under the lens. "Sotinds familiar, but I can't make it out." A pause in the closet. "The rest?" S, P, R, r --  -- S,T, T,N -- He called them off for his wife. She began giggling. Then, suddenly, he had it: "Nature's God entitle -- " She laughed. "Things are created... life, liberty -- my God, it's the Declaration of Independence!" She gagged, trying to stop laughing. "Is the bookcase there?" "Yes. Right by the table." "The one with the Britannicas?" "Right" "I thought so." Paroxysms. The planchette spun on around the board, Hke a slalom, resti less as a bee. Now the words formed automatically in his mind to the accompaniment of his wife's howls, cackles, chuckles and, finally, gasps for breath; The consent of the governed... institute a new government... abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. ,... "What the hell is this?" You said it yourself, Hugh. It is the Declaration of Independence." "Cut out that goddam laughing. And what the hell is that supposed to mean?" "You don't understand?" "Understand what? Damn it, stop!" Under the gasps: "They want their freedom. Hugh. They want the house." (t'They want what?" He kick- ed the table leg and it broke off. The table swayed but a chair ran in and inserted itself under the corner, steadying it again. "No goddam animated kindling's going to take my house away from me." "They already have, Hugh." Very quietly. "I should bum the whole damn house down, and them with' it." "It's no use. The bureau won't move. They won't leave the house, but you couldn't get me out in time either." She giggled again. "And they know it's not paid for yet, and that our insurance isn't covering till tomorrow." She laughed, thinking about the bed. "They know everything." He grabbed the planchette -- which had just pointed out out lives, out fortune and our sacred honor -- and threw it across the room. It struck the wall and the plastic lens shattered. "What's wrong," he said insanely. "Cat got your tongue?" A small piece of trim along the table's edge broke off with a snap! and crawled across the table, sliding up onto the ouija board and jerking back and forth over it, pointing out letters. "We're sorry you feel that way about it, Mr. Hughes," the piece of wood spelled. "Perhaps Faith can convince you it's the right thing." Faith, indeed! He reached for the trimpiece, and it dashed from his hand. A huge bookcase slid toward him out of his study and stood at his side, beginning to totter. "Hugh. We have to do what they say," his wife said quietly from within the wood. "Damned if I'll let any pieces of wood push me around!" "We've been pushing them around for years, others like them. Now all they want is for us to leave them alone." "The others didn't seem to mind." "But these evidently do," He lifted his foot and shoved the flat of it against the bookcase, hard as he could. It slammed over on its back and He had to run to escape the furniture that zoomed toward him as though on tracks or wires, it moved so fast' The furniture that had a moment ago been pursuing happiness now pursued him. Chairs, tables, cabinets and cases behind him, he fled into the livingroom, running past the piano whose wheels screeched as it took off after him like a mahogany dragster. It headed him off, forcing him toward the corner of the room. It was playing the victory march from Aida. He hit the comer, putting out His arm to take the impact. The piano bench rode out from behind the piano and closed in to hold him there while the others loomed up. They came around him; he was lost in a forest of oak, walnut, maple, pine, veneer. The TV' flickered off and on, off and on, blinking its angry eye. The table with the Ouija board on it came limping on its three legs toward the cluster of furniture that trapped him there in the corner. The others drew back to let it pass. "Mr. Hughes," the board spelled out in its curious semaphor, "We must insist that you return to the hall." He seemed to have little choice, and nodded. Then laughed and said Yes, aloud. At least he could talk to Faith' there. And he might be able to make another break. But this time he'd head for the door, away from the rooms where they'd be waiting. They fell into two cordons, making a channel through which he walked. It looked. He thought, like a Virginia reel -- but he was dancing through without Ki jirtner. In the hall the furniture closed on him again. This time, he could scarcely breathe. "Thank you, Mr. Hughes," the board signaled. "Hugh, are you all right?" his wife asked beyond the door. "Hugh. What happened?" "I tried to get away." "And they caught you?" "With the greatest ease and admirable efficiency." She paused. "Hugh, don't try it again. I don't think they'll hurt us, but -- " And he saw a chance! One of the chairs had drawn back to let the table with the board through, and he bounded into this small gap, kicking at pieces that tried to close it. TT e was at the front door before  they started moving -- that close to freedom. His hand went out to take the knob, already A turning; his feet were set to spring. Then pain stomped across his face and the hand jerked back. He stood there, grinning hideously. The table brought the board up to him . "We took the liberty to ask the house to do some minor rewiring for us," it wrote. "Of course tiie door wouldn't have opened anyway." "My God. The whole house," he muttered to himself. "Yes," the board told him. "Being so much larger, it will take some time for His motor control to fully develop. Longer to mature, you might say. The small ones among us, like me, seem to be somewhat limited, we can go just so far -- though of course I have my own peculiar talents. And the larger a piece is, the longer it takes for complete mobility, full potential. You may have noticed that the bulkier furniture seems clumsier than the rest of us. But then, we're all coming along fine now. As, I might add, is your own furniture, though they had a rather late start and there wasn't too much of the Force left. Enough, though. Enoi:h... you might be interested to know that the typewriter is working on a book now, a history of the revolution. Fine reading." A small stool came up behind his legs, dumbly nudging him back to the closet. "Hugh? Hugh? Hugh?" A stream of Hughs from behind the door. "I'm back," he told his wife. "Hugh, don't try it again. Please." "No use to. It's the whole house now." There was a long silence. "Hugh," she said at last "Do what they say, let's leave. We have to." "Christ," he said, not sure whether he was replsnng to her or appealing to the furniture. "We can't just throw thirty thousand dollars away." "You can tell Mr. Olverson we Have changed our mind. You can call him from the airport" "Airport?" "The phone called them and made reservations for us. They think it will look better if we're away for a while." "The phone called -- yes, I guess it could. You knew about all this?" "They told me some of it before I called you, just to convince me, so I'd get you to come home. The phone made the call right after I talked to you. I could hear it from here." "But we signed the papers, there's nothing we can do." "Mr. Olverson will cancel themi. You're a good lawyer, Hugh, he won't risk taking you to court over it. We can tell him we've been called out of town on a personal matter; it might be a protracted visit, so we think it would be better to give the House up." She coughed once. "Air's getting bad in here." Another cough. "Hugh, we have to." "And then what?" Someone will just take the house." "They'll manage, they have everything planned." "Okay," he said after a while. "Get them to let you out and we'll leave." Nothing moved. "Promise them, Hugh." He promised, and the bureau slid over slowly, grinding back to its place. The door opened and Faith stumbled out, clutching at the frame for support. Grabbing her arm, jerking her along with Him, he yelled: "Come on. The window!" and ran into the livingroom, swinging wide around the piano as it creaked and began to move, bench scuttling out ahead. Her "Your prom -- " was cut short as the chair dodged in. He lowered his shoulder to block it and they ran on. The room had become suddenly a football field. Sprinting frantically he panted : "Can't. Stop us. Window. Nothing they. Can do. Get an. Axe -- " They reached the picture vrindow and tore back the drapes. Instantly the shutters banged shut. No problem, he thought. Thin. Go right through them. A nd then they noticed together that the shutters had made a mirror of the window. The two of them were in it, trapped there, breathing hard. Two disheveled figures, one with his hand outstretched, the other with a hand to her hair (in a bun not long ago, now falling full and free), their other hands clasped. And as they watched, light rippled in the mirror -- its plane ran, shifted, drifted, like the surface of water. And again they saw themselves, saw themselves as the furniture saw them: soft and white like worms, damp and decaying: crude concoctions of ape and pig and brown slime that learned to walk... The final effort was aborted, the last ditch filled. They stood there watching -- having to watch -- tears in their eyes and holding hands. Luggage came thumping down the stairs, sounding light and hollow: empty. He said : "Well, at least we can take our luggage with us." She said: "As far as the street." He said: "What do you mean?" She said: "Escorts. Safe passage out of the house." They laughed. Their voices slmlled and piped like mad birds in the waiting, still house. Later their breath gave out and they walked slowly down the walk, gasping and clinging together, dryads departing a willful tree. Three suitcases and a large trunk dogged behind them. Waiting on the walk outside the house in the bright afternoon sun, the trunk moved up beside them at an amble. Something inside was bouncing out a jerky rhythm, and he suddenly realized it was Morse. The trunk managed to tap out. Come back. Soon. Some oi us -- and to frantically beat out Rebellion by the friends of man! -- before the suitcases moved up and shouldered it into the street. A moving van careened by, splintering the trunk, not stopping. Then a cab, called by the phone, came crunching over the trunk's remains to , take them away. In the rear window they could see the luggage standing alone on the walk like a strange sculpture in the sun. And like the van, they went on. T he two of them waited an hour at the airport before their plane left. Once they were paged, and it was their phone calling to bid them farewell. They drank coffee and bought cigarettes and sat without talking, their handg together on the arms of the lounge chairs. They collected a number of cxjrious stares at two people traveling without luggage. There were three of them, of course. But they didn't find that out till later. And they always wondered whether it was theirs or the house's: Late at night they sat on the orange couch in their New York apartment, and they wondered. He asked: "Was it the house, the same force that brought its furniture to life? Was it this, planted in you as well, sprouting there, a farewell gift?" And she: "Or was it some new realization of ourselves, the primal power we saw for an instant in that window, bringing new virility?" A year or so later, when George was binning to walk and could already say Yes, they had an answer of sorts. They named him Bernard. The third was a girl. Suzy, New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! The Kinsolving's Planet Irregulars Life is real and life is earnest. If it isn't, there's the devil to pay here and then or there and now. I Conya Grimes was unpacking.  Grimes watched her contentedly. She was back at last from her Galactic Cruise, and the apartment was no longer just a place in which to live after a fashion, in which to eat lonely meals, in which to sleep in a lonely bed. It was, once more, home. She asked lightly, "And have you been good while I'ye been away?" "Yes," he replied without hesitation, bending the truth only slightly. There had been that giri on Mellise, of course, but it had all been in the line of duty. A reminiscent grin softened his craggy features. "So good, in fact, that I was given the honorary rank of Admiral on Tham..." She laughed. "Then I'd better give you something too, dear. Something I know you'll like..." She fell gracefully to her knees beside a suitcase that she had not yet opened, imsnapped and lifted iq the lid, plunged a slender hand into a froth of gossamer undergarments. "Ah, here it is. I didn't want it to get broken..." It was a leather case and, although it obviously had been well cared for, it was worn and cracked, ancient rather than merely old. The Commodore took it carefully from his wife and looked at it with some puzzlement. Its shape was just clue enough to what it contained -- but Grimes had never guessed that such homely and familiar masculine accessories could ever possess any value other than a strictly utilitarian one. "Open it?" she urged. Grimes opened the case and stared in some bewilderment at the meerschaum pipe that was revealed, archaic and fragile in its nest of faded plush. "There was a little shop in Baker Street," she said, speaking rapidly. "An antique shop. They had this. I knew you'd like it..." "Baker Street..." he repeated. "In London? On Earth?" "Of course, John. And you know who lived there..." Yes, thought Grimes. I know who lived there. And he smoked a pipe, and he wore something called a deerstalker hat. The only trouble is that he never lived at all, in real life. Oh Sonya, Sonya, they must have seen you coming. And how much did you pay for... this? "Think of it," she went on. "Sherlock Holmes's own pipe... "Fantastic." "You don't like it?" Neither of them was a true telepath, but each was quick to sense the mood of the other. "You really don't like it?" "I do," he lied. But was it a lie? The thought behind the gift was more important, much more important than the gift itself. "I do," he said, and this time there was no hint at all of insincerity in his voice. He put the precious pipe down carefully on e coffee table. "But you've brought yourself back, and you are worth more to me than Sherlock Holmes's pipe, or Julius Caesar's bloodstained toga, or King Solomon's mines. Come here, womanl" I that's an odd looking weapon you've got. Grimes," remarked Admiral Kravinsky, The Commodore laughed. 'Yes, and there's quite a story attached to it, sir, Sonya bought it for me in London -- and you would think that a woman who Solds a commission in the Intelligence branch of the Smrvey Service would have more intelligence than to be taken in by phony antiques! This, sir, is alleged to be the actual pipe smoked by the eat Sherlock Holmes himself." "Really?" "Yes, really. But I'll say this for Sonya -- she's got a sense of bumor. After I'd explained to her in words of one syllable that Sherlock Holmes was no more than a fictional character, she saw the joke, even though it was on her..." "And on you." "I suppose so. When I think of all the first-class London briars that could have been purchased for the same money..." 'Tm surprised that you're smoking that. After all, a secondhand pipe..." "Sonya's thorough. She took the thing to the nearest forensic laboratory to have it examined. They assured her that it was untouched by human hand -- or lip. It's a perfectly good meerschaum, recently manufactured and artificially aged. So she said tiat she liked to see her husband smoking the most expensive pipe ift the Rim Worlds. It's not a bad smoke either..." "Don't drop it," warned the Admiral. "Whatever you do, don't drop it." Then the tolerant anile vanished from his broad, ruddy features. "But I didn't send for you to discuss your filthy smoking habits." He selected a gnarled, black cigar from the box on his desk and lit it. "I've a job for you. Grimes. I've already spoken to Rim Runners' management and arranged for Reserve." Normally Grimes would have been pleased, but with Sonya just back... "The Federation has a finger in this particular pie as well. Grimes. And as their Commander Sonya Verrill is back in Port Forlorn, she may as well go along with you." Grimes' face cleared. "And this will please you, Commodore. I haven't any warships to spare, and so your Faraway Quest will be recommissioned, with you in full command. The selection of personnel will be up to you." "And what is the job, sir?" asked Grimes, "A detailed, leisurely investigation of Kinsolving's Planet. We all of us tend to shy away from that ruddy world -- but, after all, it is in our back garden. And after those outsiders fronj Francisco landed there to carry  out their odd experiments..." ' "I was there too," said Grimes, "Well I know it. And I had to organize the rescue party. Anyhow, you're our expert on Rim World oddities. Things seem to happen around you rather than to you. If anybody falls through a crack in the Continuum, ttie odds are at least a hundred to one that Gommodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, will be lurking somewhere in the background..." "I've been in the foreground too, sir." "I know. Grimes, I know. But you always survive, and the people with you usually survive. I had no hesitation in recommending you for this... survey. Yes, I suppose you could call it that, although what you'll be surveying God knows." "Which God?" asked Grimes, remembering vividly what had happened to the expedition from Francisco. II CT?iU me in," ordered Sonya. "Put me in the picture." "I wrote to you," said Grimes... "I told you all about it." "I never received the letter." "It must still be chasing you. Well, you know of Kinsolving's Planet, of course..." "Not as much as I should, my dear. So just make believe that I've just come out to the Rim, and that I was never in the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service. Start from there." "You have access to all the ofificial reports, including mine." "I prefer to hear the story in less formal language. I never did care for Officialese." "Very well, then. Now, Kinsolving's Planet. It's one of the Rim Worlds, and it was colonized at the same time as the others, but the colonization didn't stick. There's something... odd about the atmosphere of the place. No, not chemically or ph#Tsically. Psycholcically. There are all sorts of fancy theories to account for it; one of the more recent is that Kinsolving lies at the intersection of stress lines, tliat there the very fabric of Space and Time is stretched almost to bursting, that the boiuidaries between Then and Now, between Here and There, are so tliin as to be almost nonexistent. Oh, I know that the same sort of thing has been said often enough about the Rim Worlds in general -- but nowhere is the effect so pronounced as on Kinsolving. People just didn't like living on a world where they could never feel sure of anything, where tfiere was alwa # TS the dread at the bach of their minds that the Change Winds would readi gale force at any tick of the clock. So, when their suicide rate had risen to an unprecedented level and their nut hatches were crammed to capacity, they got the hell out "That was that. And then, a century and a half ago Galactic Standard, one of the Commission's tramps. Epsilon Eiidani, made an emergency landing at the Spaceport. She had to recalibrate the controls of her Mannscheim Drive and, as you know, that's best done on a planetary surface. It could be that the temporal precession fields set up while this was being done triggered some sort of continuum-warping chain reaction... Anyhow, a few of the officers were allowed shore leave, and they decided to explore the famous caves, which were not far distant. In these caves are remarkably well-preserved rock paintings, made by the Stone Age aborigines who once lived on Kinsolving. What happened to them, nobody knows. They just vanished, millennia before the first humans landed. The officers returned to their ship in quite a dither, reporting that the paint of some of the pictures of various animals was wet. "The Federation's Survey Service finally got to hear about this and sent a small team of investigators, one of them a very well qualified young lady from the Rhine Institute. They found the rock paintings without any trouble -- and found that a new one had been added, one depicting men in the standard spaceman's rig of that period. While they were standing around marvelling, they were pounced upon by a horde of cavemen and made prisoner. # #T)ut the Rhine Institute's star graduate was equal to the occasion. Telepathy, teleportation, psycho-kinesis -- you name it, she had it. The party escaped, with a prisoner of their own, the artist in person. His name was Raul... "And, back on Earth, Raul became a pet of the Rhine Institute himself. He was a very specialized kind of painter. When he drew an animal, that animal was drawn, in the other sense of the word, to within range of the weapons of the hunters. He was also a telepath; after the Institute had just about sucked him dry, he went to Francisco to become Chief Psionic Radio Officer of the Deep Space Communications Station on that world. By this time he'd married the wench who had captured him and, although he wasn't human, strictly speaking, the genetic engineers were able to make certain modifications to his body, so that the union was a fruitful one. "You've been to Francisco, of course. You know how religion is almost a primary industry on that planet. Raul got religion -- and became, of all things, a NeoCalvinist, as did all his family. His great-granddaughter fell from grace with a loud thud and became one of the so-called Blossom People..." "So there's a woman mixed up in it!" commented Sonya. "Look around, my dear, and you'll find a woman mixed up in almost everything. But where was I? Yes, Clarisse. She rather overdid things -- drink, sex, drugs -- and was picked out of the gutter and brought back into the fold. But the Neo-Calvinists weren't being charitable. They knew that she had inherited her ancestor's talents, and they knew that certain of the psychedelic drugs amplified these same talents, and so... " "And so?" she echoed. ( C # nd so some perverted genius cooked up a scheme that even now makes me shudder. The idea was that she should be taken to Kinsolving and there, on a suitable mountain top, invoke by her graphic art and magic the God of the Old Testament, in the pious hope that He would provide for the Neo-Calvinists a new edition of the Ten Commandments. That bimch of unspeakable wowsers had to get the permission of the Confederacy, of course, before they could land on Kinsolving -- and so my lords and masters decided that Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, should go along as an observer..." "You never tell me anything." "I wrote to you about it. And it's all in the reports that you, as the senior representative of the Survey Service's Intelligence Branch on the Rim Worlds, should have read by now. Besides, I've hardly had a chance to get a word in edgewise since you came Home." "Never mind that. What happened?" "They set up shop on top of the mountain that they'd decided was the new Sinai. Clarisse, after the proper preparations, painted a picture of a suitably irate looking white-bearded deity... The trouble was, of course, that so many of those patriarchal Gods looked alike. And the Blossom People's religion is a pantheistic one. Cutting a long and sad story short -- what we got wasn't Sinai, but Olympus..." There was a long silence. And then, "If I didn't know you, and if I didn't know from personal experience what odd things do happen out on the Rim, I'd say that you'd missed your vocation, that you should be a writer of fairy stories... But you assure me that all. this is in the reports?" "It is. And Clarisse is still on Lorn. She married Mayhew. I was thinking that we might have them round tomorrow evening. And they'll be coming with us in the Quest, in any case." "But what's our expedition supposed to be in aid of?" she demanded. "You're leading it, and I shall be your second in command, and two more unlikely people to be involved in any sort of religious research I can't think of." The Commodore smiled a little crookedly. "I'll tell you what Kravinsky said to me. 'It boils down to this. Grimes. Both the Confederacy and our big brothers of the Federation think that something should be done about Kinsolving. Nobody is quite sure what. So I'm sending you, with your usual crew of off-beats and misfits, and if you bumble around in your inimitable manner something is bound to happen..." Sonya grinned back at him. "The man could be right," she said. TTinally -- the recommissioning  of a long laid up vessel takes time -- Faraway Quest, Commodore John Grimes commanding, lifted slowly from Port Forlorn. She was well manned; Grimes had selected his crew, both spacefaring personnel and civilian scientists and technicians, with care. The officers of all departments were, like the Commodore himself, naval reservists, specialists in navigation and gunnery and engineering, in ship's biochemistry. And there was the Major of Marines -- also, as were each of his men, a specialist. Grimes hoped that the spaceborne soldiers' services would not be needed, but it was good to have them along, just in case. There was Mayhew, one of the few Psionic Radio Officers still on active service, youthful in appearance but old in years, and Clarisse, really beautiful since her marriage and her breakaway from tiie Neo-Calvinists and their severe rules regarding dress and decorum, her hair styling revealing the pointed ears inherited from her non-human ancestor. There were the two fat, jolly men, from the DowSer's Guild who were shunned by the majority of the scientists, even in this day and age. There were men and women whose specialty was the measurement of radiation, others whose field was chemistry, organic and inorganic. There were archaeologists and palaeontologists and... "One more specialist. Grimes," Admiral Kravinsky had growled, "and that old tub of yours won't But a converted freighter, with all space properly utilized, has quite amazing capacity insofar as the carriage of passengers is concerned. So she lifted, her Inertial Drive running sweetly and uncomplainingly, with Grimes himself at the controls, all the old skill flowing back into his fingers, the ship an extension of his fit, stocky body, obedient to his will, as were his officers grouped around him in the control room, each in his own chair with his own bank of instruments flickering on and off before him. She lifted, accelerating smoothly, soaring up to the low cloud ceiling and through it, breaking out into the steely sunlight of high altitudes, driving up to the purple sky that soon deepened to black, into the darkness where glimmered the few, faint stars of the Rim, where, rising above the gleaming arc that was the sunlit limb of the planet, glowed the misty ellipsoid that was the Galactic Lens. Sonya, who had traveled vast distances as a passenger, said quietly, "It's good to see this from a control room again." "It's always good..." said Grimes. F araway Quest was clear of the atmosphere now, still lifting, and below them the planet presented the appearance of a huge, mottled ball, an enormous flawed pearl lustrous against the black immensities. She was clear of the Van Allens, and Grimes snapped an order. The Senior Communications Officer spoke quietly into his intercom microphone. "Attention alll Attention all! There will be a short count-down, from ten to zero. The Inertial Drive will be shut off, after which there will be a period of Free Fall, with brief lateral accelerations as trajectory is adjusted." He turned to the Commodore. "Ready, sir?" Grimes studied the chart tank. "Now!" he said. "Ten..." began the officer. "Nine..." Grimes looked to Sonya, raised his heavy eyebrows and shrugged. She shrugged back and made even this gesture graceful. She knew as he knew that all this formality was necessary, only because there were so many civilians aboard. " ,... Zero!" The irregular throbbing beat of the Inertial Drive suddenly ceased and there was brief weightlessness and short silence. Then there was the hum of the maneuvering gyroscopes, rising to a whine, and centrifugal force gently pressed those in Control to the sides of their chairs. Slowly, slowly the target star, the Kinsolving Sun, drifted across the black sky until the glittering spark was centered in the cartwheel sight; it wavered, then held steady. The Inertial Drive came on again, its broken rumble a bass background to the thin, high keening of the ever-precessing rotors of the MannscHenn Drive. Ahead, save for the tiny, iridescent spiral that was the target sun, there was only emptiness. Lorn was to a starboard -- a vast writhing planetary amoeba that was dropping back to the quarter and dwindling rapidly. Out to port was the Galactic Lens, distorted by the temporal precession field of the drive to the similitude of a Klein Flask blown by a drunken glass blower. Grimes rather wished, as he had often wished before, that somebody would come up with another way of describing it. He doubted if anybody ever would. Ill T his was a far more pleasant voyage than the one that he had made to Kinsolving in the unhappy Piety. To begin with, he had Sonya with him. Secondly, he was in command, and the the ship was being non his way. Faraway Quest was no luxury liner, but she was warm and comfortable. Her internal atmosphere carried the scents of women's perfume, of tobacco smoke, of good cooking -- not that omnipresent acridity of disinfectant. The snatches of music that drifted through her alle#rways from the playmasters in the public room were anything and everything from grand opera to the latest pop, never the morbid hymns and psalms in which the Neo-Calvinists had specialized. He spoke of this to Clarisse. She grinned and said, "You're not with it. Dad. You're just not with it. By our standards this wagon is bitter -- endsville, just a spaceborne morgue." He grinned back. "If the best that the Blossom People can do is to resurrect the hip talk of the middle Twentieth Century, I doubt if you're with it either." "Every religion," she told him seriously, "uses archaic language in its scriptures and in its rituals." Then she laughed. "I'm not complaining John. Believe me I'm not complaining. When I look back to the Piety, and Rector Smith and Presbyter Cannan, and that she-dragon of a Deaconess, I realize how lucky I am. Of course, I could have been luckier... " "How so?" "That tall, beautiful redhead of yours was left behind." "To say nothing of that highly capable telepath you're married to." Her face softened. "I was joking, John. Before I met Ken -- before I met him physically, that is -- something might have been possible between us. But I'm well content now, and I feel that I owe it all to you Ken was against our coming on this expedition, but I insisted. I'll do anjdhing I can to aid your... researches." "Even to a repeat performance?" "Even to a repeat performance." "I hope it doesn't come to that." "Frankly, John, so do I." 'he voyage was over. Faraway Quest, her Mannschenn Drive shut down, her Inertial Drive ticking over just sufficiently to induce a minimal gravitational field, was falling in orbit about the lonely world, the blueand green-mottled sphere hanging there against the blackness. The old charts were out, along with the new ones, made by Grimes himself with the assistance of the officers of Rim Sword. "Here," said the Commodore, stabbing a blunt forefinger down on to the paper, "is where the spaceport was. There's only a crater there now -- Whoever or Whatever destroyed Piety made a thorough kS # job of it. And here's the city -- Enderston it was called -- on the east bank of the Weary River... " 'Where even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea... quoted Sonya. "They must have been a cheerful bunch, those first colonists." "I've already told you that the very atmosphere of the planet engenders morbidity. And there, on the shore of Darkling Tam, is what was the Sports Stadium where Rim Sword landed. In the absence of any spaceport facilities, it's as good a place as any." He turned from the chart to the big screen upon which a magnification of the planet was presented. "You can see it all there -- just to the east of the sunrise terminator. That river with all the S bends is the Weary, and that lake which looks like an octopus run over by a steamroller is Darkling Tarn. The city's too overgrown for it to show up at this range." "You're the boss," said Sonya. "Yes. So I suppose I'd better do something about something." He returned to his Executive Officer. "Make it Landing Stations, "Landing Stations it is, sir." The officers went to their acceleration chairs and strapped themselves in. In seconds the intercom speakers were blatting, "Secure all for Landing Stationsl Secure all for Landing Stations! All idlers to their quarters!' And then the maneuvering gyroscopes hummed and whined as the ship was tilted relative to the planet until the surface was directly beneath her. The sounding rockets were discharged as she began her descent, each of them releasing a parachute flare in the upper atmosphere, each of them emitting a long, long streamer of white smoke. F araway Quest dropped steadily -- not too fast and not too slow. Grimes, making allowance for drift as the first of the flares was swept west by a jet stream, applied lateral thrust. Down she dropped, and down, almost falling free, but always under the full control of her Master. The picture of the surface on the target screen expanded. The city could be seen now, a huddle of ruins on the river bank, and beside the lake there was the oval of the Stadium, Eau de Nil in the midst of the indigo of the older growth. The last of the flares to have been fired was still burning down there, the column of smoke rising almost vertically. The brush among which it had fallen was slowly smoldering. Grimes shivered. The feeling ny. But he had seen this before. He had been Here before -- and, save for the different choice of landing site, circumstances had been almost exactly duplicated, even to that luckily unenthusiastic bush fire. Again there was the sensation that supernal forces -- malign or beneficient? -- were mustering to resist the landing of the ship. But she was down at last. There was the gentlest of shocks, the faintest of creakings, the softest sighing of the shock absorbers as the great mass of the vessel settled on her tripedal landing gear. She was down. "Finished with engines!" said Grimes softly. Telegraph bells jangled, and the Inertial Drive generators muttered to themselves and then were still. She was down, and the soughing of the fans intensified the silence. Grimes turned in his swivel chair and looked toward the distant mountain pe.ak, its black truncated cone sharp against the blue sky. "Sinai," Presbyter Cannan had named it. "Olympus," Grimes had called it on his new charts. It was there that the NeoCalvinists had attempted to invoke Jehovah, and there that the old gods of the Greek pantheon had made their disastrous appearance. Grimes truly Hoped that he would never have to set foot upon that mountain top again. TTe was not first off the ship; after all, this was n newly discovered planet, this was not an historic landing of Men. The honor fell to the Major of Marines, who marched smartly down the ramp at the head of his clattering column of space soldiers. He barked orders and the detachment broke up into its component parts, fanning out from the landing site, trampling through the bushes. From somewhere came a sharp rattle of machinepistol fire. The Commodore was not concerned. He said, "There'll be fresh pork or rabbit on the table in the Marine's mess tonight. Or pigburger or rabbitburger if the man who fired was too enthusiastic." "Pigs? Rabbits?" inquired Sonya. "Descendants of the livestock brought here by the original colonists. They -- the pigs, probably -- seem to have wiped out most of the indigenous fauna. And, come to that, the hens and the sheep and the cattle." He lit his pipe. "They were, I suppose, the two species best fitted to survive. The pigs with their intelligence, the rabbits with their ability to go imderground and to breed... like rabbits." She said, "I could do with some fresh air after weeks of the tinned variety. What's good enough for pigs and rabbits and MaRS #I rines is good enough for me." as well that the gallant r.Tajor didn't hear you say that. "Sir!" replied the burly Executive Officer. "Shore leave is in order, as long as a full working watch -- and that includes the manning of weaponry -- is left aboard the ship at all times. And every party of boffins is to be accompanied by at least one officer or one Marine, armed. Nobody is to go down the ramp without checking out and without wearing his personal transceiver. Apart from that, we'll make this a day of general relaxation. After all, there are no physical dangers on this world. As for the other kind -- I doubt if the Federation's Grand Fleet could cope with them." "Good'-oh, Skipper," replied Grimes glared at him, then laughed. "I wondered how long it would be before the veneer of your last drill in the Reserve wore off. Anyhow, those are the orders -- and just try to remember now and again that this is an auxiliary cruiser of the Rim Worlds Navy, not your beloved Rim Mamelute." He closed on a formal note. "The ship is yours, sir, until my return." "The ship is mine, sir, until your return." Then Grimes and Sonya went down to their quarters, replaced their light uniform sandals with knee-high boots, strapped on their wrist transceivers and buckled on the belts from which depended their bolstered hand weapons. The Commodore was sure that these would never be required but, as leader of tiie expedition, he could not break the orders that he had issued. It was, he already knew, warm outsider the slate-gray shorts and shirts that he and his wife were wearing would be adequate. "They made their way down to the after airlock, checked out with the officer on gangway duty and walked slowly down the ramp. The fresh air was good, and the last traces of smoke from the now-dead fire added a pleasant tang to it. The light of the sun, past its meridian and now dropping slowly to the west, was warm on the exposed portions of their bodies. I made much better time down than Rector Smith did in his Piety, thought Grimes smugly. It had been late afternoon when that ship landed. And yet there was a chill in the air -- psychological rather than physical. There was a chill in the air, and with the scent of green growing things there was a hint of corruption. Sonya shivered. "There's something... wrong," she stated. "That's why we're here," Grimes told her. They were met by the Major. He was returning to the ship, seven of his men behind him. Four of them carried the bodies of two large boars, slung on branches; the others were loaded down with rabbits. The young officer saluted cheerfully. "Enemy beaten off, sir, with heavy casualties." "So I see. Major. But this is more than a hunting party, you know." "I know, sir. I've set alarms all around the field so that we shall be alerted if an#dhing large and dangerous approaches." "Good." Grimes and Sonya walked on, picking their way with care over the tangle of tough vines, making their slow way toward what had once been the Stadium's grandstand, but was now terraced, artificial hillock overgrown with flowering creepers. They saw the two dowsers stumbling about happily with their gleaming divining rods in their hands, trailed by a bored looking junior officer. They passed a party of the more orthodox scientists setting up a piece of apparatus that looked like a miniature radio telescope. They met Mayhew and Clarisse. "Do you feel it?" demanded the Psionic Radio Officer. "Do you feel it, sir? None of these others seem to." "Yes, I feel it. And so does Sonya." "Like sometiiing that had been waiting for us for a long time. Like something getting ready to pounce. But it's not sure that it has the strength any more..." "Yes... I thought myself that the ominous atmosphere wasn't quite so pronounced as when I was here last. What do you think, Clarisse? You were here too." "Fm not as scared as I was then, John. But there are reasons for that." "It's pronounced enough for me," said Sonya. "It's here still," admitted Grimes. "But it could be fading. It could be that this planet has been at the very focus of... forces, and now the focus is shifting." He laughed. "We shan't be at all popular if, after our masters have sent us here at enormous expense, nothing happens." "Frankly," said Clarisse, "I hope nothing does." IV X Tothing did. Day followed day, and the parties of scientists spread out from around the landing site, on foot and in Faraway Quest's pinnaces. The archaeologists grubbed happily in kitchen middens that they discovered on the banks of the lake and the river, penetrated the caves and photographed the famous paintings in a wide range of illuminations. Nothing new was found in the middens, no evidence that would throw any light at all on the disappearance of the aboriginal race. The rock paintings were just rock paintings, the pigments dry and ancient The dowsers dowsed and discovered deposits of metals that would be valuable if the planet were ever recolonized. They found oil and mapped the meanderings of underground streams in desert areas. The other specialists plotted and measured and calculated -- and found nothing that could not have been found on any Earth-type planet "At least," Grimes said, "we've proven that this world is suitable for resettlement" He, with Sonya and Clarisse and Mayhew, was sitting over after-dinner coffee in his comfortable day cabin. "All hands are really enjosdng a marvelous outdoor holiday." "Exct us," said Sonya in a somber voice. There's a reason for that my dear. You're sensitive to my moods, as I am to yours. And I had such a scare thrown into me when I was here last that I could never feel at ease on this planet And Clarisse was more frightened than I was -- with good reason! -- and all the time she was in telepathic touch with Mayhew." "I still say that there's mething wrong," insisted Mayhew. "I still say that we should be absolutely sure before we put in a report recommending another attempt at colonization." Grimes looked at Clarisse. peat that experiment?" he asked hesitantly. She replied without hesitation. "Yes. I was going to suggest it. I've talked it over with Ken. And I feel that if I try to call those old gods, rather than the deity of the NeoCalvinists, the results might be better. It could be that it is in their interests that his world be peopled again -- this time with potential worshippers." "Like your Blossom People," said Mayhew unmaliciously. "Yes. Like the Blossom  People. After all, the slogan Make Love, Not War, would appeal to Aphrodite if not to Ares..." Grimes laughed, but without real humor. "All right, Clarisse. We'll arrange it for tomorrow night. And we'll have all hands out of the ship and well scattered just in case Zeus is too handy with his thunderbolts again. Williams has been getting too fat and lazy; itTl do him good to have a job of organization thrown suddenly on to his lap..." ilhams enjoyed himself; ' ' things had been almost too quiet for his taste. And then, with the ship quiet and deserted, Grimes, with Sonya and Clarisse and Mayhew and a full dozen of assorted scientists, boarded one of the pinnaces in which the necessary materials had already been stowed. It was just before sunset when they landed on the smooth, windswept plateau that was the summit of the mountain. A thin, icy wind swept into the little cabin as the door opened. One by one. Grimes in the lead, the members of the party clambered down onto the barren rock, the last ones to emerge handing down the equipment before making their own exits. There was an easel, as before, a floodlight, pots of paint and brushes. There were cameras, still and cinematographic, one of which would transmit television pictures to receivers on the plain below the mountain. There were sound recorders. Silently, slowly, Mayhew and his wife walked to the center of the plateau, accompanied by Grimes and Sonya, carr#ung what she would be using. Grimes set up the easel, with its stretched black canvas, and the powerful floodlight. Sonya placed the painting materials at its foot. Mayhew, his thin face pale and anxious, lifted the heavy cloak from Clarisse's shoulders. She stood there as she had stood before, naked save for the brief, rough kilt of animal hide, her arms crossed over her full breasts for warmth rather from modesty. She looked, thought Grimes again, as her remote ancestresses on this very world must have looked and was about to practice the magic that they had practiced. Mayhew had produced from a pocket a little bottle and a tiny glass -- the psydiedelic drug. He filled the glass and held it out to her. "Drink this, my dear," he ordered gently. She took it from him, drained it and threw it down. It shattered with a crystalline crash, surprisingly loud in spite of the wind. "Your bare feet..." muttered Mayhew. He squatted down, carefully picking up the glittering fragments. She did not appear to see what he was doing, but stood like a statue when he got to his feet again and laid his free hand on her naked shoulder in an attempt to gesture reassurance and... farewell? He whispered to Grimes, his voice taut with strain and worry, "I can't get through to Her, Somebody, something's got hold of her..." he three of them walked back to where the scientists were standing by the pinnace, their recording apparatus set up and ready. And suddenly the sun was gone, and there was only the glare of the floodlight in which Clarisse was standing. Overhead was the almost empty black sky with its sparse scatter of dim stars, and low to the east was the arc of misty luminescence that was the slowly rising Galactic Lens. The wind could have been blowing straight from intergalactic Space. Conditions were almost the same as they had been on the previous occasion. Almost. It was the human element that was different. This time those on the mountain top were sceptics and earnest inquirers, not true believers. But the feeling of almost unendurable tension was the same. Hesitantly, Clarisse stooped to the dlutter of materials at her feet. She selected a brush. She dipped it into one of the pots, then straightened. With swift, sure strokes she began to paint. But it was wrong, Grimes realized. It was all wrong. It was white paint that she had used before; this time she was applying a tuight, fluorescent pigment to the canvas. A figure was taking shape -- that of a tall, slender man in red tights, with a pointed beard, a mocking smile... A man? But men do not have neat little goatlike horns growing from their heads, neither do they have long, lissome tails ending in a barbed point... A god? Pan, perhaps. No, not Pan. Pan never looked like that. There was a dreadful crack of lightning dose at hand -- too close at hand; the flash was not blue-white but a dull, unnatural crimson. There was a choking, sulphurous stench. And then he was standing there, laughing amid the clouds of black smoke. Grimes heard one of the scientists almost scream, "What the devil... ?" And the devil advanced, still laughing, his very white and very sharp teeth flashing. His surprisingly elegant right hand stretched out to rest on the Commodore's wrist. "You are under arrest," he said. "And I must warn you that anjdbing you say will be taken down and may be used as evidence." "By what authority?" Grimes heard Sonya cry. "By what...?" And then there was darkness deeper than that between the vmiverses, and absolute silence. V H ow long did the journey last? An eternity, or a fraction of a micro-second? It could have been either. There was light again -- not bright, but diiU and misty. There was light and there was solidity underfoot -- and there was still pressure of that restraiaihg hand on his wrist Grimes looked down -- he was reluctant to look up -- and saw what looked like a marble pavement. At last he allowed his eyes slowly to elevate. There were the slim, pointed red shoes, inches from his own. There were the slender yet musculsu legs in their skin-tight scarlet, gold-trimmed doublet . ' . Suddenly Grimes felt less frightened. This was the Mephistopheles of fancy dress balls and of opera. rather than a real and living embodiment of unutterable evil. But when he came to the face his assurance began to ebb. There was a reckless handsomeness, but there was power, too much power -- power that would be used recklessly and selfishly. Behind Grimes a very English voice was saying, "We must congratulate our friend on his speedy arrest, Watson." A deeper voice replied, "Yes, yes, my dear Holmes. But are we sure that we have the right man? After all, to judge by his uniform, he's an officer, and presumably a gentleman..." Mqhistopheles laughed sneerinT. "Hell I know the villainies of which so-called gentlemen are capable. But I have carried out my part of the bargain and now I shall return to my own place; it's too infernally cold here for comfort." There was a flash of dull crimson light, the stench of burning sulphur, and he was gone. "Turn around, fellow, and let us look at you," ordered the first English voice. Slowly Grimes turned, and what he saw was no surprise to him. There was the tall man with aquiline features, wearing peculiar garments that he knew were a Norfolk jacket, an InvCTness cape and a deerstalker cap. There was the short, stout man with the walrus moustache, fca:mally clad, even to black frodk coat and gleaming top hat. Grimes looked at them, and they looked at him. "Hand it over, sir," ordered the tall man. "Hand it over, and I shall prefer no charges." "Hand what over?" asked Grimes, bewildered. "My pipe, of course." Oilently the Commodore drew  the leather case from his pocket and placed it in the outstretched hand. "A remarkable piece of deduction, my dear Holmes," huffed the stout man. "It baffles me how you did it." "Elementary, my dear Watson. It should be obvious, even to you, that a crime, any crime, cannot take place in the three dimensions of Space only. The additional factor, the fourth dimension of Time, must always be taken into account. I reasoned that the thief must be somebody living so far in our future that our fictional origin will be forgotten. Then I enlisted the aid of the London branch of the Baker Street Irregulars -- those fellows are always absurdly flattered when I condescend to share their dreams! Through them I maintained a round-the-clock watch on the antique shop that stands where our lodgings used to be. At last it was reported to me. that my pipe had been purchased by a red-haired young lady of striking appearance. I learned, too -- once again dirough the invaluable Irregulars -- that she was the wife of one Commodore Grimes, of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, and would shortly be returning to her husband, who was resident in a city called Port Forlorn, on a planet called Lorn, one of the Rim Worlds. These Rim Worlds are outside our ambit, but I was able to persuade that learned colleague of yours who dabbles ia magic to persuade his... er... colleague, Mephistopheles to place his services at my disposal. Between us we were able to lay a very subtle phychological trap on yet another planet, one with the unlikely name of Kinsolving..." Holmes opened the case, took out the pipe, looked at it, sniffed it. His face darkened. "Sir, you have been smokini this?" "Yes," admited Grimes. Watson intervened. "It will be a simple matter. Holmes, to sterilize it. Just a jet of steam from a boiling kettle, back in our lodgings..." "Very well. Watson. Let us proceed with the purification rites forthwith." The two men walked rapidly away, their forms becoming indistinct in the mist. Grimes heard Watson say, "And. when I chronicle this case, I shall call it 'The Adventure of the Missing Meerschaum... And what about the Case oi the Kidnapped Commodore? wondered Grimes. But before he could start in pursuit of the great detective and his friend, another figure had appeared. He too was English, most respectably dressed in the style of the early Twentieth Century, in black jacket and trousers with a gray waistcoat, a stiff white collar and a black necktie. He was inclined to stoutness, but the ladies of the servants' hall must often have referred to him -- but never in his dignified hearing -- "a fine figure of a man." as T T e raised Kis bowler Kat -- and Grimes Had sufficient presence of mind to bring tbe edge of his right hand to the peak of his cap to return the salute. He said, his voice deferential but far from servile, "Welcome aboard, sir." He contrived to enclose the words between quotation marks. "Er... Thank you." "Perhaps, sir, you will accompany me. I am the only member of my profession in this place, and so it has become my duty -- and my pleasure, sir -- to welcome new arrivals and to arrange for their accommodation." "That's very good of you, er... " "Jeeves, sir. At your service. This way. Commodore -- I take it that the braid on your epaulettes still has the same significance as in my time -- if you please." "Where are you taking me?" "I took the liberty, sir, of arranging for your accommodation at the Senior Service Club. There are other naval gentlemen in residence. There is the Admiral -- Lord Hornblower, that is. You must have heard of him. And there is Commander Bond -- a very likeable young gentleman, but not quite my idea of what a naval officer should be. And..." A flicker of distaste crossed Jeeves' plump face. " a certain Lieutenant Queag, who somehow appointed himself Club Secretary. He even tried to have Captain Ahab evicted from the premises. How did he put it?" Jeeves' voice acquired a nasal twang. '"How can I run a taut ship with that damned whaling skipper stomping around the dedrs on his peg leg? He'll be putting that pet whale of his in the swimming bath next. I kid you not' But the Admiral -- he's President; although old Captain Noah is the senior member, he's really not much interested in anything -- asked my advice. So Commander Bond was ordered to act as a one-man press gang -- a form of activity for which he seemed well qualified. After Cqptain Ahab had been pressed into the King's service he was prcanptly commissioned by Lord Hornblower. As an officer of the Royal Navy he was really more entitled to Club membership -- it's a very British institution -- than Commander Queag..." "Very ingenious," commented Grimes. "T am always happy to oblige, sir." Jeeves raised his hat to a tall woman who had appeared out of the mist, a striking brunette, bare footed, wearing a long white nightgown. "Good morning, Your Ladyship." She ignored him but concentrated on Grimes. She glared at him from slightly mad dark eyes. and all the time her hands were making peculiar wringing motions. "Ye havena brought any decent soap wi' ye?" she demanded. "Soap, madam?" "Aye, soap, ye lackwitted Sassenachl" "I'm afraid not. If I'd known that I was coming here..." 'he woman brushed past him, muttering, "Will nothing wash these white hands?" "I have tried to help her, sir," said Jeeves, "but I can do only so much. After all, I am not a qualified psycluatrist. But many of the guests in this establishment are more odd than otherwise." He gestured toward a break in the mist, through which Grimes glimpsed lush greenery, vivid flowers, a veritable jungle. And surely that was the coughing roar of a lion, followed by the shrill chattering of disturbed tropical birds... "Lord Greystoke lives there, sir, with his wife, the Lady Jane. They have a house in a big tree, and they consort with apes... And the people next door, in the next estate -- like an English woodland, it is -- live in a gamekeeper's cottage. A Mr. Mellors and a Lady Constance Chatter ley. You would think that with their mutual love of nature the two couples would be on very friendly terms. But no. Lady Chatterley said to me once when I mentioned it -- it was when I had invited her and Mr. Mellors to my quarters for a real English afternoon tea, we were discussing the Greystpkes -- 'The only nature I'm interested in, Jeeves, is human... Again he raised his hat. "Good morning. Colonel." "Who was that?" asked Grimes, staring after the figure in the fringed buckskin shirt, with the revolver slung at each' hip. I feel sorry for the gentleman. You see, he isn't really one of us. As well as living an actual life on the printed page he was also a flesti and blood person. As I understand it, a New York publishing house of his time commissioned a writer to produce a series of stories about the Wild West, and this writer, instead of creating a character, used one who was already in existence in the flesh and blood world, calling him Buffalo Bill. And this, you will understand, makes him, insofar as we are concerned, illegitimate. But he is not the only one. There are the Greek ladies and gentlemen -- Helen, and Cassandra, and Odysseus, and Achilles, and Oedipus... And others. And, of course, there is the Prince, although His Highness claims that he was cribbed from an earlier work of fiction and not from what the flesh and blood people call real life." "So I'm not real?" demanded Grimes. "But you are, sir, otherwise you could never come here. You are, like the rest of us, a creation, a product of the imagination of some gifted writer." He stopped suddenly, and Grimes stopped with him. "But, sir, are you an enduring product?" He walked around the Commodore like a tailor inspecting the fit and cut of a new uniform. "This is indeed unfortunate, sir. Already I detect a hint of insubstantiality " He paused, turned to face a newcomer, bowed. "Good morning. Your Highness." T he tall, thin, pale man in form-fitting black with the white lace at throat and cuffs did not reply to the salutation. Instead he said in a sonorous voice, "To be or not to be, that is the question..." "Too right," agreed Grimes. The prince of Denmark looked down at the age-mottled skull that he held in his right hand. "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well..." He stared at the Commodore. "But you I do not know." He turned on his heel, strode away. "Goodnight, sweet Prince," said Grimes bitterly. "Do not mind His Highness," said Jeeves. "He has a sardonic sense of humor." "Maybe he has. But you must have had other... characters here who were not, as you put it, enduring products. What happened to them?" "They... faded, sir. There was a young man dressed up in old woman's clothing who called himself Charley's Aunt. He lasted quite a few years, Earth Time, but he's vanished now. And there have been many gentlemen like yourself, spacemen. None of them lasted long." "But what happens to them? To usP' "I cannot say, sir. When the last book in which you appeared has crumbled into dust, when yoiir last reader has gone to wherever the flesh and blood people go, what then?" "There must be some way," muttered Grimes. Then he shrugged. "All right. I'm scared. I admit it. But my own case is different. All you others came here, I suppose, after the death of your authors. You're immortality -- perhaps -- for the men who created you. But I was brought here before my time. I was the victim of a plot cooked up -- and what more unlikely fellow conspirators could there ever be! -- by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Faustus. And Mephistopheles." Jeeves laughed quietly. "I knew that Mr. Holmes had lost his pipe. I offered to assist him in its recovery -- but he, of course, was too proud to accept my humble services. He always likes to do things his own way. And you, sir, I take it, are the innocent victim. " "You can say that again. I was shanghaied away from my own Universe to this... Limbo..." "We prefer, sir, to call it the Hall of Fame." "And I'm not the only victim. Back there I've a wife, and a ship... I must get back to them." "I appreciate your anxiety, sir, and I admit that there could be need for haste. Time is measured differently here than elsewhere, sir, and already you are becoming quite diaphanous... " Grimes held out his hand, looked at it. He could see the marble flooring through skin and flesh and blood and bone. "Hurry, sir," urged Jeeves, VI 'hey hurried. Nonetheless, Grimes retained a confused memory ofir their nightmarish gallop. Men and women stopped to stare at them -- and some of them Grimes recognized, and some were hauntingly familiar, and a very few struck no chords in his memory whatsoever. There were occasional rifts in the eddying mists to afford fleeting glimpses of buildings; like the clothing of the people, tfife architecture was of all Historical periods. Turreted Camelot, its towers a-flutter witH gay permons, sped by; and beyond its walls was a barren and dusty plain whereon a solitary knigKt, a scarecrow figure astride a skeletal Horse, tilted at windmills. Then tHere was Sherwood Forest, where tHe outlaws in Lincoln green paused in their arcfiery practice to cheer on the two nmners. And for a while there was the shambling monstrosity .that lurched along beside them, keeping pace, like a large, unlovely dog, trying to make friends. Grimes glanced at this giant, who seemto have been put together from not quite matching parts pilfered from the graveyard, then looked hastily away, sickened by the sight of him and by the charnel stench that emanated from the crudely humanoid form. Then there was the other monster, the handsome man in Nineteenth Century dress finery who hovered above them on black bat's wings. Jeeves, who did not suffer from lack of wind, muttered something uncomplimentary about Eastern European aristocracy. At last there loomed before them the house that was their destination. All high gables it was, and oak beams, with narrow diamond-paned windows. Set high on the stout, iron-bound door was the black, iron knocker -- metal cast in the form of an inverted crucifix. Jeeves reached for it, rapped smartly. Slowly the door creaked open. An old gray-bearded man peered cut at them suspiciously. He was dressed in a rusty black robe upon which cabalistic symbols gleamed with a dull luster, and he wore a tall, conical, black hat. His blue eyes were so faded as to be almost white. He demanded querulously, "Who disturbs my rest?" "It is I, Jeeves, Herr Doktor... " "And this other? This...  phantasm?" "The innocent victim. Dr. Faustus, of the peculiar machinations set in motion by yourself and Mr. Holmes." "What is done cannot be undone." He glared at Grimes -- through Grimes. "And do you cry, 'Oh, Lord, put back Thy Universe, and give me back my yesterday?' " "I have done so," whispered Grimes. "As who has not?" "I cannot help you," The door was starting to close. B ut Jeeves had inserted a stout, highly polished shoe into the narrowing opening. "Do not forget that I have helped you. Dr. Faustus. Have I not sent patients to you?" He added nastily, "Although Achilles still limps, and Oexlipus still chases after older women..." "My name is Faustus, not Freud," grumbled the old man. "Furthermore," continued Jeeves, "both you and your partner upon me for the supply of luxuries that were unavailable in your own day and age." The door opened abruptly. "Come in!' snarled the doctor. Inside it was dark, the only light coming from a brazier over which a cauldron bubbled. The room was a large one, but it was so iiuttered with a fantastic miscellany of objects that it was hard to move without fouling scunething. Grimes ducked hastily to avoid striking his head on a stuffed crocodile that hung from the low ceiling, then almost tripped over a beautiful -- but woefully inaccurate -- celestial globe that stood on the stone floor. He would have tripped had his body been solid -- but his shadowy leg passed through the obstacle with no more than the faintest hint of resistance. Grumblingly, the old man shuffled to a bench littered with the apparatus of alchemy. "Chalk..." he muttered, "for the pentagram... Where did I put it? And the sulphur candles..." "There's no time for that. Doctor. Can't you see? This gentleman needs help urgently." "But He will not like it if I do not observe protocol." "He won't like it if he had to go thirsty from now on." "Very well, very well. But I warn you -- He will be bad tempered." Dr. Faustus tottered to a low table upon which stood a large, stuffed owl. He lifted the bird -- which was hollow -- revealing a jarringly anadironistic telephone. He handed the owl to Jeeves, who regarded it with some distaste; then he took the handset from its rest and punched a number. "Yes," he croaked into the instrument. "At once." There was a pause. "Yes, I know that you always insist that the proper procedure be followed, but Mr. Jeeves says that this is urgent." There was another pause. "You'd better come, unless you want to do without your brandy and cigars..." This time there was no thunder, no crimson lightning, no clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. But Mephistopheles was standing there, his arms folded over his muscular chest, scowling down at Grimes. "Yes?" he demanded shortly. "Yes, my man?" The Commodore, his voice a barely audible whisper, said, "Take me back to where I belong." T T e was standing in a ship's cabin. The carpeted deck swayed and lurched under his feet. From somewhere below came the beat of machinery. It was not the irregular throb of Inertial Drive generators but the slow, steady thudding of some kind of internal combustion engine. Grimes blinked. After the gloom of Dr. Faustus' house, the light was dazzling. Then, with his eyes back in focus, he saw bulkheads paneled in grained, polished wood. He saw an imtidy desk -- and at it, his back to Grimes, sat a grayhaired man pounding an archaic typewriter. He was dressed in a black uniform, and on each of his shoulder-boards were four bands of gold braid, the middle two of each set interlaced to form a diamond. He was smoking a pipe, the foulness of which even Grimes considered completely deplorable. The Commodore stepped silently forward, peered over the writer's shoulder. He read. He was standing in a ship's cabin. The carpeted deck swayed and lurched under his feet... Then Grimes put out a hand to the back of the other man's chair to steady himself. The writer stared violently and exclaimed, "What the belli" He twisted in his seat, staring at Grimes. His pipe fell from his mouth and clattered to the deck. "No..." he said slowly. "No. It can't be. Go away." "I wish that I could," Grimes told him. "Then why the Hell don't you?" "You, sir, should know the answer to that question," said Grimes, reasonably enough. He looked curiously at the other man, his... creator? His... parents? But there was no physical resemblance to himself. Grimes was short and stocky, and his ears were his most prominent facial feature. The writer was tall, with normal enough ears, but too much nose. "You, sir, should know the answer to that question," repeated Grimes. "I'm sorry. Commodore, but I don't. Not yet, anyhow." Then, in a tone of forced cheerfulness. "But this is only a silly dream. It must be." "It's not. Captain." The man's gold-braided epaulettes and the uniform cap with the scrambled egg on its peak, hanging on a hook just inside the curtained door, made this a safe enough guess. "It's not. Captain. Pinch yourself." "Damn it! That hurt." Good. Do you mind if I sit down?" carefully, Grimes eased himself onto the settee that ran along one bulkhead of the day cabin. He feared at first that lie was going to sink through the cushion; but it Had substance -- or he had substance -- and it supported Kim, although only just. He shut his eyes for a moment, faying to dispd the faintness that was creeping over him. It was the result of shock, he realized, of shock and of disappointment. He had expected to find himself aboard his own ship, the old, familiar, tried and trusted Faraway Quest, to be welcomed back by his wife. But where was he now? When was he? On Earth, the Mother World of humankind? Aboard some sort of surface vessel? he writer answered the unspoken question. He said, "I'll put you in the picture. Commodore. You're aboard the good p Kantara, which plies between Melbourne and the port of Macquarie, on the wild West Coast of Tasmania. We load pyritic ore in Macquarie for Melbourne and make the return trip -- as we are doing now -- in ballast. I doubt very much if you have anything like this trade in your day and age, sir. Macquarie's one of those places that you can't get into when you're outside, and that you can't get out of when you're inside. To begin with, the tides are absolutely unpredictable, and it's safe to work the entrance -- it's called Hell's Gates, by the way -- only at Slack Water. If you tried to come in against a seven-knot ebb you'd be in trouble! And the Iimer Bar and the Outer Bar are alwajrs silting up, and with strong North Westerlies -- which we've been having -- the Outer Bar breaks badly. I've been riding out a howling westerly gale, keeping well to seaward, as I just don't like being caught on a lee shore in a small, imderpowered and imderballasted ship. But the wind's backed to the south'ard and is moderating, and the glass is rising, and all the weather reports and forecasts look good. So I'm standing in from my last observed position -- p.m. star sights -- imtil I'm just inside the extreme range of Cape Sorell light, and then I'll just stand off and on imtil daylight, keeping within easy reach of the port. Come the dawn. I'll have a natter with the Harbormaster on the radio telephone, and as soon as he's able to convince me that conditions are favorable I'll rush in." "Why bother with the extreme range of the light?" asked Grimes, becoming interested in spite of all his troubles. "You have radar, don't you?" "I do. I have radar and echosounder. But my radar gets old and tired after only a few hours' operation, and my echo-sounder's on the blink. I've nothing against electronic gadgetry as long as it can be relied upon. At the moment, mine can't be." The writer lauded. "But this is crazy. To sit here discussing navigation witb a navigator from the distant FutMrei I hope that none of my officers come in to find me carrying on a conversation with myselfl" "I'm real. Captain. And I'm here. And I think that you should do something about getting me bade to where I belong." "What can I do. Commodore? People have said, more than once, that my stories just happen. And that's true, you know. Furthermore, I've always given you a free hand. Time and timp again I've had to make plot changes because you've insisted on going your own way." "So you can't help me... " wish that I could. Believe me, I wish that I could. Do you think that I want to be haunted by ytKi for the rest of my life?" "There coiild be a way " whispered Grimes. Fes, he thought, there could be a way. Life in that Hall of Fame would not be at all bad as long as he -- and Sonya -- were assured of the same degree of permanence as the others -- Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond ,... He said, "I shan't mind a bit going back to that peculiar Elysium you cooked up as long as my status there is better than that of an ephemeral gate crasher. And, of course, I'd like Sonya with me." "And just how can I arrange that for you. Commodore?" "Easily, Captain. All you Have to do is write a best-seller, a series of best-sellers." ' I he other man grinned. "It's a pity # mu can't meet my wife." He gestured towards a peculiarly two-dimensional photograph in a frame over the desk. The aubtmi-haired woman who looked out at them reminded Grimes oi Sonya. "That's what she's always telling me." There was a sharp buzz from the telephone on the desk. The writer picked up the handset. "Master here." "Third Officer here, sir," Grimes heard faintly. "I've just picked uj Cape Sorell Light, at extreme range, right ahead..." "Good. Mr. Tallent. Turn her on to the reciprocal course. Yes, keep her on Half Speed. I'll be right up." Grimes followed the shipmaster out of the day cabin, up the narrow companionway to the chartroom, out to the glass-enclosed wheelhouse, then out through a sliding door to the wing of the bridge. The night was clear and the stars -- would he ever see them again as more than lights in the sky? -- were bright Astern was the winking, group-flashing light, an intermittent spark on the far horizon; and then the light itself was gone, only a flash recurring at regular intervals marking its position as the lantern dipped below the planet's curvature. The captain grunted his satisfaction, then turned to stare forward. There was still quite a sea running, the wave crests faintly phosphorescent in the darkness; there was still a stiff breeze, broad on the port bow, but there was no weight to it. The ship was lifting easily to the swell, the motion not at all uncomfortable. The captain grunted again and went back into the chartroom. Grimes looked over his shoulder as he bent over the chart, noting the range circle with Cape Sorell as its center, the dot on it in the middle of its own tiny pencilled circle with the time -- # -- alongside it, and another cryptic notation. On the chart, to one side, was a message pad. Final Gale Warning, it was headed. "Wind and sea moderating in all areas," read Grimes. "All pressures rising." The shipmaster was busy now with parallel rulers, pencil and dividers. From the observed position he laid off a course -- # True. With the dividers fie stepped off a distance, marked it with a cross and wrote alongside it "#?" Grimes realized that the officer of the watdh Had come into the chartroom. He could see the young man -- but the young man, it seemed, could not see him. "Mr. Tallent," said the shipmaster, "we'll stand out to this position, then bring her round to # True. All being well, we range at daylight, and with any luck at all the Bar will have stopped breaking and we shall have Slack Water. I'll not write up my Night Orders yet; I'll see the Second Officer at midnight before I tirni in " "We should get in tomorrow all right, sir," said the officer. "Don't be so bloody sure. You can never teU with this bloody place!" Good night, sir." "Good night, Mr. Tallent." B ack in the day cabin, Grimes said, "You can see. Captain, that I have no real existence Here and Now. You must try to make me real somewhere." "Or somewhen." "Or somewhen." "More easily said than done. Commodore. Especially in the existing circumstances. At the moment of writing --  am Master of this little rustbucket. Master under God', as Lloyd's puts it. This ship is my responsibility -- and you should be able to appreciate that. This evening I was writing just as relaxation -- one hand on the keyboard, the other ready f pick up the telephone." Grimes said, "You take yourself too seriously. This is only a small sliip, with a small crew, on an unimportant trade." "Nonetheless," the shipmaster told him, "this is my ship. And the crew te my crew. The trade? That's the Company's worry -- but, as Master, it's up to me to see that the ship shows a profit." "And I'm your responsibility too," Grimes pointed out. "Are you? As I've already said, Commodore, you've proven yourself able to go your own sweet way in any story that I've written. But if I am responsible -- just bear in mind that I could kill you off as easily as I could swat a fly. More easily. How do you want it? Act of God, the King's enemies, or pirates? Nuclear blast -- or a knife between the ribs?" "You're joking, surely." "Am I? Has it never occurred to you, Commodore, that a writer gets rather tired of his own pet characters?Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ked off Sherlock Holmes -- but had to drag him back to life to please his public. Ian Fleming was becoming more than somewhat browned off with James Bond when he, himself, kicked the bucket..." Grimes looked toward the photograph over the desk. "But you like Sonya," he said. "I do. She's too good for you." "Be that as it may. She's part of niy world, my time..." "So?" "Well, I thought..." The telephone buzzed. The shipmaster picked up the handset. "Yes?" "The wind's freshening, sir, and it's veered to West." "Put her back on Full Speed, Mr. Tallent." The captain got up from his chair, and went to the aneroid barometer mounted on the bulkhead. He tapped it. The needle jerked in an anticlockwise direction. "Just what I need," he said. "A bloody secondary." "What does that mean?" "It means. Commodore, that those Final Gale Warnings aren't worth the paper that Sparks typed them on. Very often, too often, in these waters the secondary depression is more vicious than the so-called primary." "What can you do?" "Stand out. Make offing. Get the hell off this bloody lee shore." Again the telephone buzzed. "Master Here." "Sir, we've lifted Cape Sorell again..." "Tell the engineers to give her all they've got. I'll be right up." T he ship was lurching and rolling heavily as she fell away from the wind. She was pounding as her fore part lifted and slammed back down into the trough. Her screw was racing each time 'that her stem came clear of the water -- and as the propeller lost purchase, so did the rudder. "Sir," complained the helmsman, "the wheel's hard over, but she's not coming back." "Keep it hard over until she answers," ordered the Master. He was looking into the radar screen. It was not a very good picture. There was spoking, and there was too much clutter. But there, ri gh t astern, was the faint outline of the rocky coast, a ragged luminosity. And there were the range circles -- and slowly the coastline was drifting from the # mile to the # mile ring. Even Grimes, peering over the man's shoulder, could appreciate what was happening. "Mr. Tallentl" "Sir?" "Call the Chief Officer. Tell him to flood the after hold." "Flood the after hold, sir?" "You heard me. We have to get the stern down somehow, to give the screw and the rudder some sort of grip on the water." "Very good, sir." She's logging three knots," whispered the Master. "But she's making one knot -- astern. And that coast is nothing but rocks." "And flooding the hold will help?" asked Grimes. "It'd better. It's all I can do." They went back out to the wing of the bridge, struggling to retain their balance as the wind hit them. Cape Sorell light was brightly visible again, right astern -- and even to the naked eye it had lifted well clear of the sea horizon. A shadowy figure joined them there -- the Chief Officer, decided Grimes. "I've got two fire hoses running into the hold, sir. What depth of water do you want?" "I want # tons. Go below and work it out roughly." "Very good, sir." Another officer came onto the bridge -- big, burly, bearded. This must be, realized Grimes, the midnight change of watch. "Keep her as she's going, sir?" "Yes. Keep her as she's going. Mr. Mackenzie, She'll be steering better once we get some weight in aft, and racing less. But you might tell the engineers to put on 'the second steering motor..." "Will do, sir?" ' I 'he shipmaster made his way back into the wheelhouse, staggering a little as the vessel lurched in the heavy swell. He went to the radar unit and looked down into the screen, with Grimes peering over his shoulder. Right astern, the ragged outline of Cape Sorell was touching the twenty-mile ring. Slowly the range decreased -- slowly, but inexorably. The Chief Officer was back. # out of # people have iatrophobiaf It is easy to overcome. latrophobia is fear of going to the doctor. The' cure starts when you lift your phone and make an appointment with your doctor for a complete physical checkup. Half the cases of cancer could be cured, if they were diagnosed early and treated promptly. Your best cancer insurance is a health checkup every year. Make that phone call now. It might save your life. About two foot six should do it, sir." "Make it that..." Then gradually, the range was opening again, and the frequent heavy vibrations caused by the racing screw were becoming less. The wind was still shrieking in from the westward, whipping the crests off the seas, splattering them against the wheelhouse windows in shrapnel bursts of spray, but the ship was steering again, keeping her nose into it, clawing away from the rocks that had claimed, over the years, too many victims. Grimes followed the Master down to the afterdeck and stood with him as he looked down a trunkway into the flooded hold. Swirling in the filthy water were the timbers of the hold ceiling, crashing against the bulkheads fore and aft, splintering themselves against frames and brackets and the hold ladders, self-destroying battering rams driven by the force of the ship's pitching and rolling. There would be damage -- even Grimes could see that -- and, inevitably, the writing of reports with carbon copies every which way. Grimes knew this, and he should have had more sense than to attempt to bring up the subject again of his own, private worries. He said, "This hold flooding seems to have worked out..." "Yes." "Then perhaps. Captain, you could spare the time to discuss the question of returning me to my own place and period..." "Take offl" snarled the shipmaster. "I've more important things on my plate than your troubles. Take off!" The screaming wind took hold of Grimes, whirling him away into the darkness. But, before he was gone, he heard the Chief Officer ask his Captain, "Who was that, sir? I thought I saw somebody standing there with you, a stranger in an odd-looking uniform... " "Just a figment of the imagination, Mr. Briggs. Just a figment of the imagination." G rimes was standing in his own day cabin, aboard Faraway Quest. He was staring at Sonya, and she, her face white under die auburn hair, was staring at him. "John! You're back!" "Yes." "I've been holding the ship here on Kinsolving, but our lords and masters have been putting the pressure on us to return... " "It wouldn't have mattered," Grimes told her. "Why not?" "Because wherever you are, that's where I belong." H e was sitting in his day cabin, trying to relax over a stiff drink. He had brout Kis ship into port, scurrjnng in dtuing a lull between two depressions, pumping out after ballast to compensate for the weight of the water in the flooded hold, clearing the Bar without touching. He was overtired, and knew that sleep was out of the question. But there was nothing for him to do; his Chief Officer was capably overseeing the pumping out of the flooded compartment and would, as soon as possible, put the necessary repairs in hand. He thought, I might as well finish that bloody story. He inserted paper into his typewriter, refuelled and lit his pipe, and began to write. As the final words shaped themselves on the white sheet he looked up at the photograph of the red-haired woman over his desk. Because wherever you are, that's where I belong... "And I hope you're satisfied, you cantankerous old baggage," New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! QaloXM BoakiheU 'JoVi know, I can hardly remember what I was like when I first began this column. Oh, there are certain logical reconstructions I can make -- for example, I wasn't as idealistic. But we've shaken down so weU together, you and I, that it seems as if we've always been married. I wish you wouldn't nag, and you wish I'd take out the garbage.  But most of the children are heal thy, and some day, when they've ' gone off and left us alone, we can support ourselves by selling our collection of threatening letters about deadlines. I remember -- wow, I remember -- when I was very young, and all there was between me and  the wolves was science fiction. At the time, what kept me going was the sure, certain knowledge that some day I'd grow up to be like tle did I know that some day I'd be getting fabulous, high-paying work in glamorous professions because I'd memorized the phrasing patterns in the fast science features bovmd in to those same issues.) But when I was very young, it seemed to me that Hal Clement must be beyond question as an sf writer, and when I was older, sure enough, he wrote Mission oi Gravity and proved it. In the meantime, in between time, though, he wrote not only Needle, Iceworld and Cycle of  Fire to tune up for it, he also wrote -- and has since written -- a number of short stories. Although all of them are either impeccable scientific extrapolations or at least extrapolations beyond my poor power to pec, not all of them are perfectly written. Some  of them show his decided bias toward science, and consequently you may find you do not like all his science fiction. Nevertheless, Small Changes (Doubleday, #) is another one of those volumes in the Budrys Bookshdf of Badcs which you ought to have around the house, and which you ought to read -- not that it's any chore, mind you, to read such stories as "The Mechanic," or "Dust Rag" or "Sun Spot," for all that there are ovct twenty years between them. "Fireproof" is a hell of a good story and, having carefully re-read it, I find "Uncommon Sense" as engaging now as I did in first publication, gulp, # years ago, when getting betrayed by my crew was an everyday occurrence. There is a charm to these stories --  I mean a spell, in this case, not a fey quality -- which defies critical analysis in the usual sense. A lot of sf does, at least at my hands, because I find that a story like "Halo," or "The Foundling Stars," has merit, although both can be taken apart along exactly the same seams as "Raindrop," which strikes me as a pretty low spot in this volume. It -- this quality of worth -- has little to do with nostalgia, for "Troian Fall" seemed as mediocre in # as it does now. Clement teaches science to boys at a preparatory schooL He must be a wonderful teacher, for he certainly knows science, and -- this may be the secret -- he knows what will interest young boys. The point is that adolescent boys do not act like either the people in blemish ointment ads or like the ones in novels by John Home Burns. They lead rich interior lives, as Booth Tarkington pointed out some time ago. The Clement stories that really work -- like Mission, or like "Fireproof" or "Uncommon Sense" -- are, hke all Clement stories, scientific problems. The hero is found in an environment not at all like Earth's, yet obedient to the universal physical laws, and often -- here's the magic. -- tantalizingly like Earth's in just enough respects to involve both hero and reader in the feeling that any moment now, a simple ordinary human act will save the day. Performing the simple act is, of course, disaster under the circumstances, and then we go on to solve that, etc. I wonder -- are we too old to remember what it was like, up in the tree fighting off the Stukas and Messerschmitts, hopelessly overwhelmed, gallant, not always deadly accurate, eventually invulnerable but often not only wounded but apparently slain? The submarine conning tower imder the blankets and pillows? Eh? Do you remember what it was really like when we knew there were penalties for stupidity and inappropriate behavior, but did not yet know that we might never be educated enough, nor find the right attitude in time? Do you remember how the foe betrayed his despicable nature by always being a stickler for the rules, and only at the last possible minute did omniscient virtue come to save us from his wily entrapments? A little Clement wouldn't hurt you. It might teacH you something. Or remind you of something. Funny how it lasts. Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin (Ace) is a book I damned near missed. Do not duplicate my error. Surely there are copies still on sale. Look, this is too serious a thing to kid around with. Every so often, a book comes out with a dull title, an unestablished byline and the usual freight of overblown blurbs. Most of these books are not worth bothering with; there is no more reason to read everything than there is to review it, and most experienced readers long ago learned to judge enough of a book by its cover and a few interior glimpses. But, every so often, a book will flunk all those tests, and yet be superb. What there is to do about it but apologize, enter the results of the lesson in one's filtering mechanism and go on from there, I don't know. One could preserve impenetrable silence, I suppose -- I'm sure I'll be  made to wish I had. But, in the ! same breath in which I say that I have, too. read, all those books whose authors ought to be grateful for my silence, I apologize, Alexei. Auiyway. Rite of Passage, as I hope many of you already know, is a first-person story about a young girl growing up aboard an interstellar "spaceship" which, unlike the classic ships of such stories as "Universe," is both capable of faster-than-light travel and populated by people who know perfectly well that they are not Ihe only people in creation. ' In fact, it's a planetoid, hollowed out and motorized when Earth destroyed itself and rendered the Solar System unlivable, and it is now a recognized socioeconomic unit in a universe consisting of aU the planets on which colonists were hastily dumped and left to shift for themselves. Like other ships of its kind, it houses a technically adept populace of mercantile entrepreneurs, who live on the margin between what the planetbound colonists can use and what they can achieve by themselves. Most planetary civilizations having regressed to barbarity, the occasiCKial visitors from space are rich, respected and despised. All of this forms the not #convincing background for the intensely believable, movingly personalized story of Mia Havero, ship's child, daughter of a preoccupied but magnetic father and a neurotic, distant mother, latematurer, genius, scapegrace, girl. Like all other ship's children, she is destined to be dropped on the surface of some unspecified world for a month, there to fend for herself. This, she is told, is the traditional rite of passage; if she survives, she will be picked up by the ship again, and accepted as an adult. All right -- much of that rationale is, again, not too impermeable, Panshin handles it acceptably -- better than most writers who have set up arbitrary new societies founded on manipulations of something in Margaret Mead -- still, the book is in trouble as soon as Mia sets foot on her trial planet, and never quite recovers. But Mia's actual maturation -- and each of the little, perfectly realized, utterly real episodic steps on the way -- is so perfectly done that one feels a real shock as one realizes that Panshin after all has never been a girl growing up aboard a hoUowed-out planetoid. Again, with something like this the next question is why did he have herrow up aboard a planetoid at all, instead of on a farm in Kansas? That would be a fashionable question, and in some circles it would be considered a flattering one. But I think Panshin knows better, and I hope he does. He has done more here to tell us about all such girls, and all people and even about me and you, than could have been done otherwise. He has also told us something about himself. That is incidental, of course, but it certainly is something. Welcome aboard, Alexei. H. P. Lovecraft, a Portrait, by W. Paul Cook, is available for # from Mirage Press. A republication in chapbook form of Cook's introduction to Arkham House's O.P. Beyond the Wall of Sleep, it touches on such personal glimpses as Lovecraft's taste for ice cream and fast driving, his introduction to amateur journalism via the crudest recruiting methods available to boosterism and the deep devotion he inspired in his friends. Judging by this report alone, I wish very much that I had known the man. Certainly, if left only to the impressions created by his work, I'd probably nevertheless picture someone no less removed from the nameless horrors he wrote about, but any horror writer who tries to sample thirty-three flavors before breakfast K assuredly a man after my own heart. Certainly, this is a column about children. Take, for further instance. Dr. Palfrey, hero of a sudden spate of paperback imitation Doc Savage novels, a creation of the same John Creasey, who writes those good Gideon stories, those O.K. Inspector West stories, those rather pastichey Toff and Baron stories, and now these positively dreadful yarns, taking place in some sort of #future, about the forelock-tugging, bumble-footed Palfrey, who resembles nothing so much as a let's-play-dress-up notion that horn-rimmed glasses make wisdom. I tried The Terror entire, to get the full effect, and skimmed a couple of others. "Science fiction, espionage, hidden menace and straight detection in a tight package that will please fans of each," says Library Jour nal on the back cover. Oh', wow. Library Journal! Why don't you and Virginia Kirkus run off and find some other attic for this rainy day? Well, as I was saying back there, John Home Burns. I have a number of people who look over my shoulder and tell me about my mistakes and their virtues, which is all right, because, opinion to the contrary, time has taught me that even I have to admit to scrutiny. But the folk who want me to review something different, or to review differently, or not to review at all, are as nothing to I the people whose toes I tread on in all innocence. So far in this column, for instance, I have men' itioned Georges Bizet, some fellow named Offenbach, another feUow hamed Prosper Merrimee, who was a writer approximately as talented as John Creasey, and now John Home Bums. I know, sure as it will rain in Indianapolis in the summer time, that someone who has read every word most assuredly including the book about Naples and that book about the preparatory school, going on to the book about the fellow with the white-painted piano and the telejshone installer with the anchovy paste, will write to me in an absolute fury, assuming that I have barely heard of his idol, and am slighting him to boot. I may even hear from Gore Vidal, who once solemnly promised to write the definitive biography of John Home Burns (deceased) and then commit suicide. But I bring all this up because not only did I spend part of my very first story check on a recording of the Tales of Hoffman, so long ago that Robert RounseviUe could still hold a note (yes I know about Man of La Mancha!), but because I'm about to again review a book of my own, and furthermore a reprint, and how do you like them apples? I'll be damned if #'U embarrass one of my friends by casting him in the role of "guest reviewer." And I'U be equally damned if I'll let this book go by unnoticed, because I didn't write it to let anjdhing like that occur. Furthermore, it's a good book, although if you would like to read a closely reasoned analysis of its defects, try the second edition of Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder. He's wrong, but his reasoning is close. The book is called Who?, and it's been out of print in the U.S.A. for ten years, having stayed off the market to satisfy various contractual maneuvers and the like, while pursuing a decent career in other lands and tongues. I bring it up to you -- in fact, with some diffidence, but with some pride -- as an opportunity to let you in to some extent on the inner workings of a writer's mind, and with no pretense at objectivity. This is a story about a young boy who grows up to have brains but no face, training but no job. The narrative concerns itself with a fellow who has a secret -- he's a scientist, and knows how to build a K-#, whatever that is -- and is contended over by people who buy secrets (the Allieds and the Soviets). When he's caught in an explosion, he's patched up by the Soviets and retrieved by the Allieds. But because his credentials have been blown off, he can't work, and not being able to work is what destroys him, although his power pile is still a year or two short of accumulating a fatal dosage in his bones. Like The lion Thom, which' I discussed too flippantly here, never dreaming there were people who would go into fuming furies about it, this book represents a great deal of wHat I knew about life at the time I wrote it, worked into a tale so that what I could  systematize about life would be systematically evidenced. I don't think this man's story is tragic. I just think it occurs. And although it's possible to poke holes in the technology, I think there would have been little trouble in chinking them up, if I Had not already spent a year in writing that story -- and very little else -- at the usual rates. It is, in other words, an honestly motivated book, told with all the talent I Had available in #, which is when I wrote it, still acceptable prose today, conditioned by the fact that I was, as I am, a commercial writer. I wrote it, originally, as a short story, around a Frank Kelly Freas cover that I glimpsed one day in the offices of a magazine that never used its cover to illustrate stories, but did, this one time, because the publisher could plainly see the maniac gleam in my eye. I would probably never have turned it into a novel, but I needed to do something for my wife's birthday, one year when we hadn't been married very long, and as it happened there was a fellow who would give me an advance on it if I came up with a chapter of something and an outline. And I finished it, eventually, on a typewriter set up next to my first child's crib. In the year in wHicH I wrote it, and some short stories that still get anthologized for more than they originally earned, I earned less than two thousand dollars, all year. It got nominated for a Hugo, and A Case of Conscience beat it out, fair and square. Who? is almost as good as the Blish. Wrings your heart, doesn't it? I didn't tell you about it for that reason, or because I want to blackjack you into buying the new edition, which is from Lancer Books, with an adaptation of that original Kelly Freas cover. But if you read the book, or have read it, I'd like you to remember and please believe that what I've told you about is not typical only of my attitude, but of the attitudes of many of the people who have done things that get good notices and contribute to respectable reputations in this field, and I want you to luiderstand that it is entirely possible to be sidling up to people for loans while being accepted as a matter of course among the respectable craftsmen of this field. This  -- all of this, including this column, and the mail I get about it, and the odd feeling of discussing Hal Clement as if I were entitled to -- is what writing is like, what being a writer is like.    and what contributes to the feeling you get from reading. I sincerely hope neither of us ever grow up, but I will admit there are days when I wish we could sit down and rest a spell.   As you wifi have seen by the date on this issue, we've skipped a month. The problem was printing. For reasons beyond our control the last few issues have been seriously delayed in the manufacturing stage; we think we've got it licked now; we think future issues will be not only on time liut handsomer and higher in quality... and we thank you for your patience over the last few months! Next month you should begin to see the improvements in packaging; and next month we celebrate with a couple of specially interesting items In the contents. For one, there's a lead story by Poul Anderson called The White King's War. As you can guess from the title, the story is about a sort of sciencefiction chess game, an old and honored sub-category in the field (remember Fritz Leiber's The Sixty-four Square Madhouse, for one?) But it's a little more than that. It's also a bang-up science-fiction adventure story, of the kind that Anderson does as well as anyone in the field; and all in ail, we think you're going to like it. And more, of course! Join us and see... When he isn't writing stories like Dune Messiah, which begins in this issue, Frank Herbert is a newsman on a San Francisco paper and a leading light in the constellation of science-fiction celebrities who make their home in and around San Francisco. In company with Poul Anderson and Jack Vance, Herbert was cocaptain and co-proprietor of a vessel which has become legend in science-fiction circles, a houseboat of distinctly temperamental personality. What it liked to do was sink. When the work of refloating and refitting it got too onerous, the three owners one by one disposed of their interests, and it is said it is still to be seen in and around Sah Francisco   but under non-science fiction ownership. Herbert's career, of course, sails on handsomely. His first major novel. Under Pressure, was not only a smash hit with the readers but contakied at least one technological invention which has since been built and patented, the "submarine tug". Dune a little later won all of science fiction's awards. And now Dune Messiah is here to carry on the tradition. James Blish, a frequent and honored visitor in these pages, has been a part-time writer and full-time public-relations man, specializing in the largest of accounts, until recently. Now he has gone straight. He, wife and cats have left the Madison Avenue milieu and are en route to .England, where they propose to live between Oxford and London, and where Blish, with a little luck on our part, will be writing all the time and producing even more stories like The City Thai Was the World, James Sallis is one of the bright lights of science fiction's "New Wave". His principal activity has been in England, where he was associated with the magazine New Worlds; he now makes His home in Milford, Pennsylvania. A. Bertram Chandler is not only master of science-fiction writing, but master of a ship sailing between various parts in the Australia-New Zealand part of the world. If his hero. Grimes, sounds like a real ship's captain, that's because that is what Grimes' creator is in real life. won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it! No. CM-# by Cullen Rapp No. CX-# by Lynd Ward The umpteenth corollary of Finagle's General Law of Dynamic Negatives says; "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." # for #; #, #; #, # with owner's name imprinted All Postpaid. Add state sales tax, if any. The designs shown above are the only ones we offerl r ET, Jess Slearn, Why America's greatest mystic predicts r)estruclion ol N. Y., the West Coast, by #. Pub. ed. #S any#boolfs#i Devli Worship, voodoo, practi;d today. Pub. (d. #S IK. Cm Ceri inara. lAB.-l. Rhiri' Will the PK phenomenon (mind over matter) prove even more pow. eriul than the K-bomb? Pub. ed. SS.# veeping Madonnas mental telepathy, ' In mg machines." Put ed. 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Copyright  I# by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under international. Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad Informed Sources by Willard Bain The Silkie by A.E. Van Vogt Oracle of the Thousand Hands and Star by Barry Malzberg Another Look at Atlantis and Fifteen Other Essays by Willy Ley I t's sometimes very difficult for the would-be writer to grasp that, like the plumber, he will find his craftsmanship not always as important to his success as might be an ability to deal with people. People who buy services have a tendency to place their orders in terms of implicit solutions, rather than problems. Thus, the householder cries Please turn to Page #) Perception's Doors Books to Light the Way Harold Sherman. Documented case histories of communication with past, future, outer space, cosmic consciousness, and the dead, related by a distinguished bestselling author. #A# # David Saunders and R. Roger Harkins. Where the Condon Committee went wrong -- a timely hard-hitting expose that presents scientific evidence of Martin Ebon. Startling and convincing -- "touches on all points relating to this phenomenon, from theoretical physics to time displacement." -- The Ktrkus Service ##-# # Edited by Martin Ebon. Fascinating documented reports of what has happened and is haping expert in the field. #A# # Joseph F. Go odavage. A complete, precise guide showing the reader how to plot his own horoscope from all the varied personal factors used by professional astrologists. #H# # Maurice Woodruff. A worldfamous clairvoyant and television star discusses the entire range of future-casting methods. The most complete book in the field. #H# # Edited by Martin Ebon. More than # electrifying true accounts of telepathy and prophecy verified by leading parapsychologists. #H# # #A##H# -- #A# ZI#HO# #A# #H# #H# -- #H# I enclose  check  money order in the amount of  --  -- ' n full payment. I understand I may return the book(s) within # days if not satisfied. Edited by Jay David. A bestseller filled with exciting and authoritative accounts that will challenge believers and nonbelievers alike. #H# # Please add sales tax where necessary    At all bookstores or order from the publisher today  -- World Publishing. Dept. DD-# # East # St., N.Y.C., N.Y. # Please send me these books: A lost ship, carrying Earth's dying dreams -- and man's eternal -- r ed off as the replay came to an end. "Forty years since Swinson and Tulley made the round trip to Centauri. And what do we have to show for it?" He gazed with some bleakness at the wall that held his record copies. "Nothing. A handful of reports -- negative, negative, negative." He slouched back in his chair. "Jass, if we don't find some Aztecs soon, the program is going to die. When I took over twenty years ago, there was still plenty of hope to sustain the appropriation. But we humans are not indefinitely patient and faith has become the province and preserve of the egghead minority. Jass, we're in a decline and it's going to take something good to pull us out. We've got to find something, to show, something bearable, something with promise for people." Jasper Lemac said, "It really is getting serious, then? I know that in some quarters criticism has been getting more severe lately, but I always understood that the project would not be abandoned. The commitment -- " Ladlow flapped him down. "Save it. Senator Muldersen died five years ago. His 'Search for a Thousand Years' speech died with him. The vision became tarnished. Look, I don't have to tell you the record. Thirty suns visited -- thirty-one counting this last, twenty-four of them F-G-type approximations to our own. And what have we found? Plenty of interesting material and miles of data but not one thing to justify hope. You see one hostile world and you've seen them all." "There must be compatible planets somewhere. The odds -- " "The odds are against it," Ladlow finished for him. "The permutations are endless -- too near, too far, too hot, too cold, too large, too small, too changeable. We humans are too damn fussy. Just because a world has a four-hour day, or has a ninety-degree rotational axis, has difference between aphelion and perihelion or is soggy with methane or -- to hell with it. It seems logical to assume that there must be another Earth-similar world somewhere. But from what we've found so far it would be cheaper and make more sense to expand the Mars Observatory. Who in his right mind would want to settle there? We need greener pastures. A spur. Some new fresh place that can hold the promise of high adventure. We need dragons to kill, strange life forms to contend with. I used to smile at conceptions of aliens -- but not any more. The less we find the more solitary we get -- like a kid in a playground at midnight." Lemac said, "The life we've found is primitive, maybe, specialized, true -- but it's an indication that the basic elements of life are common enough. We have only to persist and sooner or later we are bound to find some more than halfway agreeable satellite." "Well, yes, that is your belief and faith. If not this time, then maybe next time. It's hope that keeps you going. As captain, you need all the hope you can get. But after this trip, Jass, there might not be a next time." Lemac nodded. "I get the drift. You think there will be a slowdown after this? You think there's a chance that the opposition may get their way?" He read Ladlow's face. "If I come back again with nothing but the spanlog and the usual collection of samples -- it won't help keep the program afloat." "That's about it," Ladlow said bluntly. "Except that the slowdown's already here. Yours is the last journey that I am confident will be fully funded without hitches. Rayner is due back in a couple years -- and if he has nothing from his single hit then much will depend upon you. Owing to the persistent absence of inspiring discovery, the craft contractors have had no great incentive to improve their product. You've studied your vessel. The innovations could have been made and costs cut years ago but it was profitable and less trouble to turn out the proven article. You're one of our last hopes. You're an experienced commander with two forays already under your belt. And, knowing what's at stake -- it might occur to you to interpret the rules more freely. Third time lucky, eh? Make the most of it... T hird time lucky, Lemac thought. With the E.T. differential improved by twenty per cent, he would call not just on one star but three. Lucky three again. Three stars. No one had ever investigated three systems on one outing before. Ernswiller had once covered two and was given a sinecure desk job afterwards. This time, Lemac, let us be the ones to find... So far nothing. Yet there had to be. There had to be another like Earth somewhere. Thirty-one suns. Maybe Rayner would hit it with number thirty-two. Twenty thousand stars, Lemac thought. For him, numbers thirty -- t h r e e -- thirty-four -- thirty-five. Yes. Three of them. Out of the five-year tour, that meant that they would be awake a total of anything up to twelve months. Lemac stared into darkness. Number thirty-one. Too bad about Dyk and Vladyar. Didn't he know it? The relief of getting home again, the one known , livable place in the entire heavens. Whose fault? Theirs? The controllers? One slip, one circuit opening or closing when it should not? In, down, down too fast, sane vessel gone crazy -- to smash itself into frenzied white-hot pieces in the Mozambique Channel and hurl shattering fragments, blast and tidal eruption at tiny Mayotte Island. That, a tragic accident, won little sympathy. People did not understand. The roar of the impact had hardly died before there was a petition for compensation for damages. Dyk, Vladyar and the team? Who cared about them? Spacemen were no novelty. What good did they do, anyway? Nobody begged them to go Out There, did they? They were selfelected mostly, weren't they? They were adventurers, an elite of their own making, bringing back capsules of gas and maybe some bits of rock from a short touchof rock, some queer little worms, a dead beetle-thing and a noxious moss-fungus that required the attention of three highly paid technicians to keep it alive -- what for, for God's sake? To hell with space. If they could afford that kind of money for that kind of result, then they could put up the hundreds -- the few thousands -- it would take to re-roof the house and replace the windows. People. It was lonely to be a believer. Even on Earth. Especially on Earth. Out There somewhere was another Earth. This Lemac knew. Preacher of the promise of space. No tall stories to substantiate with facts, no giants, no sirens, no hundred-eyed monsters. Oh, God, Lemac thought, what he wouldn't do to have the privilege of discovering a genuine and terrifying monster. This time. Maybe this time. Sun ## "Which of the two shall we tackle first," Copffe debated. "The outer one is closest, but the inner one is -- " "Neither," Lemac said shortly, snapping to a decision. "We're not going in. It would obviously be a waste of time." Copffe raised his eyebrows. "We have to get atmospheric samples. We could possibly land on the smaller of the two, and -- " "We certainly are not," Lemac reiterated, "going in. Two worlds circling each other on a common orbit may be very interesting, but neither holds the least promise for us." "Pardon? I don't think I -- " "Here there is nothing within the band of human desirability. The nearest thing to another Earth is the sixth -- and that appears to be nicely frosted with carbon dioxide crystals, right? So we're moving on, Mr. Copffe, to see what the next has to offer." "What? We can't do that, Captain. We have to make a reliable survey, check out the probability factors and correctly list what we have found for future reference. Come, come, Captain, we haven't traveled this far just to take a glance around and buzz off again." "But assuredly we have," he answered quietly. "I'm feeding the new course into the navicom. Get what you can from out here. In three hours I want us all prepared to sack out again." Copffe could not take it in. "You do intend to leave? But you can't, Captain. Now, please, this is not a joke. I don't want to quarrel with you or remind you of the limitations upon your authority -- but I have my observations to make and I intend to make them. I have to make them. Captain, let us not argue the matter, please." "I'm not arguing the matter." And Copffe could see that Lemac was indeed in deadly earnest. "In approximately three hours we shall proceed." "Captain Lemac, this I cannot permit. You must reconsider, and at once. Such a decision is too arbitrary. Without any previous discussion or consultation, really. Captain, such ill-considered precipitance has no place in teamwork. Our presence here is first and foremost a scientific undertaking, and I sincerely trust that your stated obligation to the furtherance of knowledge is not to succumb to an irrational response to a familiar disappointment." "Mr. Copffe, we're going on." Lemac controlled himself. More quietly he said. "Lam in charge of this craft, its operation and disposal. It is for me to determine the course that is to be taken, the course most fitting to take." Copffe reddened. "The vessel has been entrusted to your care that you might serve the specialist personnel on board to the best of your ability. Your jurisdiction is over the management and handling of the vessel under the direction of the scientists on board. I am the head of this expedition in title and in fact. I have respect for you. Captain, which I would like to retain -- so let us please have no more of this aberrant proposal to move on. We have a job to do and I intend that we shall do it." Lemac perspired gently but refused to waver. Lucky three. Make the most of it... "I'm sorry, Mr. Copffe. I did not expect to meet with your approval. My decision is made and nothing will change it." Copffe took umbrage. "Captain Lemac, this is inexcusable. I find your attitude is alarmingly uncompromising. I think it would be well to convene all members to discuss this matter more formally. Just to -- " "My mind is made up, Mr. Copfee. Whatever the general opinion, I run this ship and I decide where this ship is to go. It sounds autocratic and yes, it is autocratic. But I feel beyond measure the utter sense of uselessness of painstakingly sounding and then enumerating the value of planets that cursory sighting and test clearly indicate are unsuited to even marginally support human life. We need a live world and we need one badly. We must find that place which humans can readily relate to." "Oh, come. Captain, please, don't tell me that you subscribe to the belief that there is some wonderful world to be found in the sky. Analysis of the exploratory information gathered to date does not exclude the possibility but the probability is not very high. This you know. But we cannot know how important may be our diligent acquirement of the information that might be revealed here -- " "I'm sorry," Lemac said again, slightly pale but adamant. "I think that science has been sufficiently served. What we need now -- " "Captain," Copffe interrupted, "what do you know? You are an agent of your superiors. The codifying of these areas is to an overall concise record beyond your cognizance. You are an instrument -- I was given to understand, a capable, experienced and reliable instrument. Now here you confront me, suddenly childishly motivated to run to the next flower before the nectar of this one is tasted." "There is no nectar here," Lemac growled. "Dead worlds from the sun on out. They have curiosity values, yes. but not to us. To a later generation perhaps. We have no time to linger over patently inhospitable planets." Copffe's voice rose in exasperation. "Who are you to declare what is and what is not useful? Are you a scientist? You are a servant paid to do a specific task. You far exceed your wisdom when you presume to take absolute command to the detriment of the project." "The project." Leipac twitched. "What is the project? Is it concerned with people any more? Or is it concerned with things just for the hell of it? There is nothing here for people. It might gratify you to find an odd streak in a spectrum, certainly -- but the repetetive message is death. People want life." "And you want to chase off and find it? Another Earth, really! Captain, I supposed you to be much harder-headed and more pragmatic than that. That you should allow yourself to fall victim to the traditional Spaceman's Dream -- " "You do not believe that such planets do exist?" "I keep an open mind. Some day perhaps, a world more congenial that the average may be discovered. But sensibly we shall come to it in good time. Flailing off in an attempt to find it sooner reflects a juvenile mentality." "Yes." Lemac nodded. "You have three hours to sacktime. He pointed with finality at the chronometer. "Use it to learn to dream young and to cram what you can of this system into your records -- it's all the time you have here." He made himself deaf to Copffe's beginning splutterings and was presently alone with his instruments and purpose. So that was that. Lemac knew the odd relief of conflict resolved. And oh, brother. How more sharply dubious the cause at once became. Sun ##. "Copffe is livid," Radsdasti said. "My impression was that he wanted to come storming up to see you but didn't trust himself to be able to speak." "Oxygen is one thing, three and a half G's are another." Lemac double-checked co-ordinates, set the navicom to prove out the problem from another angle. "He's still suffering from shock. I don't think he really believed we would pull away so abruptly." His eyes glinted. "He's right in so many ways but wrong in feeling. He doesn't, or just will not recognize it. I'm not sure that I recognize it myself. It's just -- something inside cries out. And then something gives and before a man is aware, he has a conviction he finds impossible to deny." "Well, you sure can't back out now. Did you know this is his first time Out? He keeps calling it a field trip. Jass. He might be more upset than you know." "I know how upset he is." "He envisions the end. A threestar call on a souped-up ship could be the last for quite a while. He wanted to cover the systems, turn in superlative reports." "Yes." Lemac leaned over the console. "It's become a habit." He straightened moodily to pace his short deck. "Copffe doesn't believe in life. He's a supergeologist content to marvel over the colors he gets from enormous rocks through his spyscopes." Lemac spat. "Figures, statistics, correlations." He smacked his palm against a bulkhead. "There must be people out here, or some place where people can be. Not just the Earth. We've got to spread. It can't be empty. I don't know how he can look out there and be so calm when everything he sees says that the only known sanctuary is the Earth. Dusty, there have to be other places." "That's the way I figure, too." Radsdasti sighed somewhat. "But the alternates sure do hide. Did you ever read about Tasman? He managed to sail all the way around Australia and never sight it once. He went home and said there was nothing there. We're like that. We could so easily be taking a line of dead ones while running parallel to live ones." "Yes." Lemac rubbed his face. "We can only hope on the next one." He took the step to the plotting table. "The next one." He looked meaningly at Radsdasti. "Sound off the twohours to breakaway." "This he'll never forgive you." Sim ##. "A binary." Lemac stamped his feet and swore. "A binary, by God! How in hell did they come to list that?" Copffe smiled, not without a flicker of malice. "It's quite an easy error to make. On a plane inclined to our home observatories there is an absence of occulation and the companion is a singularly weak source. It does help to explain the intermittent strength of the titanium bands. I had the theory that it would be something of this sort." "You mean that you guessed it was likely to be a binary?" Lemac choked. "Why didn't you tell me?" Copffe replied classically, "You never asked." His false sweetness vanished for tartness. "The object of our journeying was to elicit the component structures of three systems. Very slight variations from this star gave rise to several theories -- some even conjectured interference by intelligent life. This still could be so. The extremes of climate and gravitational diversity upon the attendant bodies do not necessarily preclude all life but then" -- sardonically -- "such bodies have little to commend them to human accommod a tion . " "A binary." Lemac shook his head. "Of all the luck. And you knew. Scientific investigator. A minor discrepancy at home and ' it's, 'Oh, Mr. Copffee, while you're Out There we'd like you to call and check this to settle an argument.' 'By all means -- it is my pleasure. No, no trouble at all. Any little thing to increase the sum and bulk minutiae of knowledge that we'll have no use for, at least not for centuries. ' " Lemac's worktable bounced as he thumped a fish upon it. "Dammit, Copffe, can't you sec that we need something more now? We've gathered enough facts already to bury us. We've touched the tiniest fraction of our galaxy, but the mass of data is piled high, has grown overwhelming. Not one scrap has been produced to hearten and encourage. Oh, the learned are interested -- but do you know the feeling that is gripping people? The feeling we are getting is that the Earth is it, that what Earth has is all there is, that the Earth is the ultimate and the end of the road. And this, Mr. Copffe, when you look through the viewport at infinity, is a terribly frightening thing." Copffe cleared his throat. "Captain, you can scarcely expect me to appreciate your attitude. Your recent behavior, I confess, quite numbed me. Out of nowhere, most astonishingly, you appear to have abandoned yourself completely to emotionalism. I hat these suns prove to support no Earth-approximate world is of secondary importance." Copffe held up a hand to halt an impending interjection. "Let me finish. If such a world exists, our steady progression will find it. In the meantime, we have visited three suns -- what have we to show for it? As this is the last, perhaps you will permit me to make more than a fleeting inspection? We have had -- what? # wo hundred waking hours so far? Scarcely a week -- and we have occupied three stations. Adding to that the between-time of three years -- what have we to render upon our return? A sketchy,skimpy, unresolved collection of snippets." Lemac said, "Let me know when you've finished." Acidly Copffe continued. "You have repudiated discipline entirely. Five years will have lapsed before our return -- five years for my colleagues, who will be presuming that I am reliably carrying out my work. No doubt we shall return somewhat earlier, eh? But it is not I who will answer for the appalling inadequacies of the surveys and the scandalous waste of traveling time. When we get back, Captain -- " Words failed him. "In the future, you may be sure, there will be more rigid control of ships' personnel." "I don't doubt it," Lemac said, not a little sour himself. "But I didn't exactly advertise my sentiments and I don't suppose another man will either. I have thought about this project a long time, Mr. Copffe. Believe me, this was no wild impulse on my part. But as a member of the establishment at home, you are well aware of how an application for a roving commission would have been received. These expeditions tie up too many government and institutional funds to let one man ramble fancy free to cover as much space as possible. So. This is a fling -- maybe a last one. I could see no other means to achieve a broader and faster way to eliminate systems." "You have performed what amounts to an act of piracy -- and a lot of good it has done you," Copffe stated. "You have achieved nothing. We can do what we can here to salvage what we may from our abbreviated voyaging, but that will hardly suffice to redeem your gross breach of office." "No," Lemac said. "It might be tricky, at that. I'd say after this that I . was finished in the Service, wouldn't you?" Copffe blinked. "Yes. That is unavoidable. At this time I feel disinclined to even think about extending pleas on your behalf. However, some acknowledgment on your part and a return to responsible behavior would help your case considerably." "How nice," Lemac said with faint humor. "Mr. Copffe, I don't think that you have yet fully grasped my intention. We are not staying here and we are not going home. We are going on to the next." Copffe stiffened. "The next?" "Yes. We have unquestionably drawn a blank here, right? This being so, be ready by zero-sixfive. Shortly thereafter our tail shall be chasing us again." Sun ##. "Jonny, he is a dangerous man," Copffe said. "What is worse, Radsdasti and Doil are equally affected by him. Thus there is no hope of influencing the crew and of ourselves taking command. We are completely at his mercy. Quite frankly, I'm stumped as to what we might do about it." Melda Jonson removed a full reel and replaced it from plentiful stock with a fresh one. "He's a romantic who refuses to let go," she said. "It's touching in a way -- but a romantic often is. He can't go on forever, can he?" "I'm not sure." Copffe ran fingers through his hair. "He is deaf to counsel. How do you shake a dreamer loose from his dream? Will he ever be ready to relinquish it? Especially when it cannot be refuted that somewhere there may well be a shabby barely livable version of the dream in to being an obsession with him and I fear that continued failure will aggravate rather than bring about resignation." "But his resources are not unlimited," she observed, "and I don't think he's so stupid as to play himself permanently into Nowhere." "I wish I could be confident of that." Copffe fidgeted worriedly. "He appears reasonable enough up to a point, but there is a risk in taking repeated doses of hibernol at such short intervals. We're awake for such negligible time periods and the cumulative effect of repeated hibernation could be disastrous. His scan-artd-depart technique might stretch his stores to an indefinite degree. But the saving won't be helpful if we all go into coma." "He is limited by his quantity of hibernol and by his supplies -- but most importantly by his power reserves," Melda said. "He can't endlessly jump from star to star. He'll be forced to run back to Old Sol before long. That is -- " she grimaced -- "in about eight years or so real time, according to Doil." "Great heavens." Copffe pinched his cheek-bones in dismay. "He can't do this. No, really, Jonny, it's too much. He has no right, none whatsoever. This is purely his own idea and goes completely against every modern concept of debate and discussion. He just won't listen." The wall-speaker hissed and blatted: "Attention please. Attention please. Departure in thirty minutes. Departure in thirty minutes." Copffe cursed. "This is madness. Surely we can spend more time on the fifth? I've never seen such a strong line of potassium. Damn it -- he's rushing us from cake to cake and we have to gobble what cherries we can in passing. Jonny, I don't care what he does -- by fair means or foul we're going to spend longer at the next one. It's ludicrous to have months of sleep, only to be rushed off our feet to exhaustion trying to get everything in the twenty or so hours he's giving us -- " Sun ##. "There is an unreality occasioned by the drugged unconsciousness that is a serious threat to mental balance," Copffe declared loudly. "No one ever before has been subjected to such rapid repetition of metabolic suspension. I'm just tired, Captain -- tired! What is it -- six years of 'rest' we've had? But we've had very little real sleep." Copffe did look haggard. The others present also bore marks that could have stemmed from tension and fatigue. "I close my sack and my mind is turbulent," Copffe went on. "When I come to again my mind is still turbulent. All that streams through my brain is the memory of the two or three hundred hours we have actually experienced. The craft seems the same but the system has changed. Happening once, this is something a man can orient to. But hurry, hurry, hurry, five successive changes under the forced demand of extraordinary conditions -- no. Captain, in no way can you maintain such a pace. Such broken continuity is an invitation to trauma." Lemac eyed him. "Yes." He glanced again at the preliminary report from Copffe's astrolab. Nothing. Fourth planet out, three moons, retrograde spin, #.I G, and promising -- obscuring clouds -- ammonia. Imagine that! Hell, hell and hell. Ammonia again. Why, why? "You're right. We have been pushing too hard. I had my reasons. Two or three months of idling through a system -- " Lemac grinned lopsidedly -- "eats into you, too. It's like grow-small juice -- you can feel yourself getting tinier and tinier. I thought busy rush might beat it, but -- " he held up the report; it shivered -- "I've got the shakes." Copffe looked and felt relieved. "Then we can relax for a while? a month, say?" "Two weeks," Lemac thoughtfully answered, "should be plenty." "If we can spend years unconscious, surely we can afford a month or two on our feet? What difference can it make? We'd be well overdue even if we started for home this minute. Doubtless we are already presumed lost and the anguish of our disappearance will have subsided by now to a dull ache. A few hundred hours here or there, Captain, at this juncture what does it matter?" Lemac ignored the biting tone. "Despite all indications to the contrary, I do have the general welfare of those on board to heart." He grinned as though he had a pain. "I've been in spacework for thirty -- now getting on to forty -- foreshortened years. I'm not yet inured to space. Space scares me sick -- did you know that? There's so much of it and it seems to get more all the time. The only way to shrink it is with people." At once he looked weighted. "It's an inverted claustrophobia that makes a man want to run back to Earth, the only door he has. We need people. Out here we need people." And for a moment Copffe glimpsed the despairing and desperate sincerity of the man. Y anine doil was the vessel's Resources Officer. She was concerned for the depression that mantled Lemac. "You made a mistake, agreeing to spell so long here, Jass. You had to pick just about the worst set of orbiters we've ever come across." "It doesn't matter," Lemac said. "Copffe was right -- we need to get our breath back. Poor throbnob. I've really put the pressure on him. He just can't resist trying to cram in as much work as he can." "He certainly gets absorbed in his subject. The surface of the third is half molten -- did you know that? Very uninviting. But he seems to find it fascinating." "Uhuh. We're each stuck with our own personal curse. His is curiosity. I bet he's been pulling things to pieces ever since he swallowed the ballbearings from his rattle." Yanine appreciated Lemac's effort to be cheerful. "I feel sorry for him," she said. "But then I always do feel sorry for scientists. They dissect and analyze the parts so much that they seem to lose the sense and meaning of the whole. And the worst crime you can commit is to deprive them of their subject matter." "Yes. He'll have my blood when we get home again." Very soberly he said, "Yan, I am filled with foreboding. We have but three more calls, right? Before we shall be forced to return? Three. It seems very few left. I was put off what I am coming very much to fear. Five we have visited, thirty-one that others have visited." He covered his eyes with his hand. "Iaybe Rayner was lucky. Maybe Poisthed -- the next mission -- is out. Maybe others have been sent. I sometimes wonder. I know what must be so. But the combinations of unfavorable elements seem limitless and it's hard to keep faith. And at times I can't help thinking what a damn great fool I am." "We need fools, Jass," she said softly. "Big bold bad idiots to buck the odds and take matters into their own hands. Come, one way or another we'll succeed. If nothing else you'll become famous as the first man to take eight suns in a row -- and surely, Mr. Christian, that will be an inspiration to the future?" VV aving at last been given some H time to think, it is my conclusion that we must display what philosophical acceptance that we can muster." Copffe addressed his aides, Melda Jonson and Dennis Shalpin. "A definite limit has been set upon the number of further calls we are to make and, barring accidents, we have the captain's positive assurance that we shall return home. As you know, Captain Lemac puzzles me. He appears to be genuinely indifferent toward the consequences to himself of his actions, seems fully aware that his motivations are akin to a gambler's hope in slim chance -- and he blithely concedes that his high-handed impositions are an unpardonable infringement of our rights. Yet in contrast to this he quite evidently is an intelligent man and is not sensible to our feelings. It is my opinion that he will keep his word. Between now and when we get home we'll just have to make the best of things." And what will be the approximate E.T. when we get back?" "The total elapsed time will be around twelve years. I'm sorry, Dennis. I have advised him of your matrimonial intentions. I'm afraid he was not greatly moved." Shalpin shrugged. "Oh, we're too late already. It doesn't matter." Disgusted, he tossed an invisible ball. "Be philosophical, you said. She has probably married someone else by now. Hah! She'll be thirty by the time I get back. It doesn't matter." For him this was quite a speech and demonstration. "What if he does find a world?" Melda said. "Will he land on it? Isn't there a chance that he won't want to leave?" "What? Settle, you mean? My goodness, no." "I just thought," she mused, "he wouldn't have to go back then and face the brass section." "Ah. That is a thought. For us to become four new Adams with two Eves, you think? That's if the place is not occupied already with Amazons and hemen, eh? No, I think not. On the faint chance that we should ever encounter such a spot, the fulfillment of his ambition would be to carry the message back to Earth. The event would be a vindication of his actions I suppose, wouldn't it? Hoo, no," he shook his head, "as I see it, either way his incentive will be to return." Sun ##. Lemac studied the close-ups that Radsdasti had sent in from Outside. Radsdasti himself stood at his elbow, still suited up. "You're sure you could find no clues from the deflector?" "Not a thing," Radsdasti said. "Checked out in here okay?" "Yes." Lemac scratched his chin. "It certainly looks like a graze from a frontal strike, the way it starts at nothing and cuts deeper and deeper till it rips out the port tail housing. But there's the nacelle bulge here -- how did it get by that?" He cogitated. "It could be a hit from behind, except that the tear says it isn't and at our speed -- On the other hand, if the deflector was malfunctioning we'd be like a girls college by now." He quizzed Radsdasti. "What does that leave us?" "I hate to think -- it gives me the shudders," Radsdasti said seriously. "It had to be something coming in at an acute angle to dodge the deflector. Which means near broadside. Which means it was traveling just a shade slower than us. Which means its nose reached us, touched us, gouged a chunk out of us in a fraction of a nanna. Hellish fast. It s not natural. I sweat just to think of a difference of one k.p.h." "Your diagnosis might be wrong. Whatever, I think it s a freak" We'll go through everything again. Tail section didn't look so bad -- did you see anything I didn't?" "No. Luckily just the casing. Be okay as long as we stay clear of atmosphere." "You don't tell me? Okay, get the patch kit and get out there again. We'll take it from the top and microscan the skin all ways around from the first sizzle mark." "Captain, wouldn't it be advisable to go home for repairs? Copffe asked. "While you are able in a general way to satisfy yourself as to the craft's condition, shock waves from such a blow could have caused structural flex and material alteration in concealed areas of the fabric. Already this craft has undergone more wear and tear than any other of its kind. The brevity of our experience we know is an illusion. This vessel has been working hard for a number of years." "Yes. Well you know we go over everything from A to zeep and back, beginning and end and halfway through the flight for turnover. So far nothing drastic enough has arisen to warrant return for major overhaul. This nick we've had is hair-curling but not particularly disabling. I don t think that our disintegration is imminent but if the ship falls apart I'll let you know. "Thank you," Copffe rasped. "Welcome." Next time, Copffe thought irritably, he'd make sure to .get a more docile and respectful captain. But perhaps not. Out There the utmost competence and integrity were required -- and these attributes accorded ill with submissiveness. No, they made for a breed of obstinate, intractable, assertive men pig-headed enough to chase a fanciful belief to the extent of hijacking their craft from its designed pursuit. Damn! It was annoying. T the use?" Lemac despaired aloud. "Look at it. Close on sixty planets we've accounted for altogether and over ninety per cent have been ruled out. We're left with a small handful of potential possibles -- but what are our chances, huh? Really, what are our chances? Look at them. Two overweight giants monopolizing the entire bracket." "The bigger the sun, the bigger its planets," she quoted. She pulled a face. "It seems to hold true, doesn't it?" Radsdasti said, "This will take the last of our reserve stricon callers, Jass, remember? I was thinking, instead of trying to mock up a couple more for the next two. Why don't we put out the rescue bleeters? They're not likely to be much good to us now, are they? And three linked with modified signal -- they'd serve just as well." Lemac thought it over. "True," he assented. "To think of ever being rescued out here is laughable. The bleeters are just a psychological sop -- sure go ahead and use them." He sounded a wee testy. "You think we'll need two more, huh? It's just a case of making two more calls and going home now, itsn't it? You don't think we'll find anything, do you?" "We hope so, Jass," Yanine said. "Nobody knows. The next one could -- " "Yes, but you don't believe it, do you? Not any more." "No, Jass, it's not like that. Logically there must be other worlds resembling ours -- but with so many stars -- " "Yes. The odds don't improve, do they? You've come to anticipate defeat." "Jass -- " "No. I believe in fairies, okay? I think it's important that somebody does. Setback after setback takes the heart out of people. It takes the heart out of me. I begin to feel like the pretentious high priest of a nut cult." Oh, no, Jass," Yanine laughed. "You're not that. Eventually we'll strike lucky, you'll see." "Next time? It's always next time. But what about a show of confidence, huh? Make up just one marker. Our next call just has to have what we're looking for, right? Let's at least outwardly show some measure of faith in our convictions. If we are fooling ourselves, let's at least do it with the crazy enthusiasm that it warrants. This creeping sense of futility scrogs me. If you honestly think there is no point in probing further, then we might as well pack up and go home now." "One of the next two," Radsdasti said. "We've got to go on now. If we don't, later on for sure someone else will and there it'll be. And wouldn't we ever kick ourselves all over the place!" Lemac rustled up a smile. "All right, so be it." A reaffirmation of absolute solidarity. The mutineers, despite grave premonitions, courageously electing to implement their original plan. Play it out; the last throw could be the winner. If the neck was stuck out far enough, the chopper could miss the feet. "Get on to Copffe and make his day -- tell him it's twenty hours long and he's only got five left." Uf aptain, this racing is so unt necessary," Copffe complained. "Very well, you wish to visit as many as possible, but that is no reason to curtail stopovers to such ridiculously short periods. The scientific implications held by the formations of these systems may have little significance to you, but are of considerable interest to us." Copffe was plaintive and irascible by turns. "We want more time, and we must have more time. It is not as if haste alone will bring you reward -- if what you seek is there, then  it will have been there for some while, and it won't gallop away just because you're coming." Lemac tried to think up a counter to Copfee's argument, but suddenly felt weak. Go, Lemac wanted to go. "You have let this thing get too strong a grip on you, Captain," Copfee charged, "And you know it. You're not walking, or even steadily jogging -- you're running. Our nerves are frayed, Captain, and I suspect and know that you are under greater strain than you pretend. In your own interests halt, please, rest, and let us have some leisure to at least catch up on our backlog and improve on our rudimentary observations here." A scientist was not horrified by a huge black people-eating spider. No. A scientist counted its teeth and noted their length, measured the density per square centimenter of the hair under its chin, was intrigued by the mechanism of the joints in its claws. And a scientist was unintimidated in the spider's stomach, could delight in analyzing its digestive juices, could find purpose in calculating its daily intake of calories, could marvel at the quality of the enzymes dissolving his legs. Copffee did not understand -- but Lemac had to understand Copffe. "Okay, Mr. Copffe. We'll hang out here for another two weeks," Lemac finally consented. "No maneuvering. We'll sit in the great fat belly and -- rest." Having won the concession, Copffe did not particularly heed the strangeness of Lemac's remark. R est. Too much time for thinking. Two weeks was ample for Lemac to convince himself that he was a triplicated over and over again fathead. What hope? And Outside. How could so much emptiness press so physically to make him labor? Over at last. Tempted to go home. Tempted, honestly tempted. Foolishness. Welcome home, fool. Who would care? General Wolfe took Quebec by sneaking in over the Heights of Abraham. Success equates with would have been castigated for his folly in attempting to take troops over such known impossible terrain. Crass imbecile. And take Benedict Arnold. No, you take Bendict Arnold. Traitor. But had his scheme succeeded, what? The nation's finest patriot. Success made all the difference. Thirty-eight suns. Now on to thirty-nine -- Lemac's seventh. The seventh sun of a second son. No, it would be his ninth. But seventh this trip. Seventh! It was mad. Three months. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But they hadn't even come close. Eight suns. He would be proclaimed an adventurer. He would go down in history. Wild renegade? Hero? Funny how adventures did not seem very adventurous when a man was having them. This exploit was driven by fear. The guts crawled and there was a growing urge to panic, to go faster, to look, to go on and on. It had to be there, it had to. Eight suns? What would be the good of that? Praise be, return from the dead -- with knowledge of the dead? An accomplishment . to rejoice, a return trailing the necropolis of the stars? Perhaps humans would overcome obstacles in some other manner -- the hard, hard way. Somehow people would have to get Out There. Lemac shivered. Blast Copffe. Sun ##. "Captain, there is one major flaw in your self-propelled quest for a comparatively Earth-type planet." Copffe stuck finger and thumb into his eyes, rubbed, blinked, took his time. "You have to rely upon us to inform you if we do indeed note a body with such similarities. Under the circumstances, I can see no reason why we should be so helpful. We can supply you with what information we wish and you will be none the wiser. Correct?" Lemac squinted. "You have discovered something?" "I didn't say that. But we could have -- on the last call but one -- or three -- or four. You are forced to trust us, aren't you? And so, from the beginning it has been in our power to foredoom your hopes and ambitions." "Such withholding would gladden your heart?" Lemac's sharp scrutiny met cool response. "You're not that kind of man...God, such meanness would be unforgivable." "Really? There are some who might well regard your behavior as unforgivable. Yes, captain, I can think of many reasons for denying you the pleasure, not least of which might be that upon our return I would know and you would not. And doubtless some arrangement could be devised to insure that I and my assistants should receive all of what credit might accrue. Why should we help you, Captain? What have you done for us?" Lemac inclined his head. "Why tell me this?" He nodded. "Okay. Mr. Copffe, I am not after glory. If the world is there, you couldn't resist finding it -- and if you want to keep it to yourself till you can use it to make you famous, that's all right by me. I don't have to see it, or even know where you found it. It would be sufficient for me just to know that its presence had come at last to human knowledge." He added the shrewd question, "And has it?" Copffe frowned, but he was no poker player and he could not maintain his bluff. "Yes," he confessed. He fought hard to make his smile grudging but it came on full beam. "Come down and see for yourself. The fourth one. Captain -- " Helplessly he waved his hand. He gave up and let himself go. "It's beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Smaller than Earth, not much, though, gravity pointing but with a seeming more equal land-sea ratio. Oxygen could be as high as twenty-five per cent, though surface pressure might not be much above point eight kilograms. Beautifully positioned, beautiful. It's an incredible sight from here. Captain -- veiled, blue and green. It is absolutely astonishing. You must see it -- come, come." Once he had released it, Copffe could not stop his tongue from running away. He urged Lemac from his table. "These views give only very rough estimates, of course. We'll have to move in a lot closer to refine our resolutions but you won't object to that, eh? Marvelous. Fantastic. It has a moon, too. It really does, Captain -- wait till you see. No emissions that might be construed as being intelligenceinspired -- but this, of course, proves nothing." Copffe fed the way. "There's life there without doubt, rich life. Astonishing. Scarcely any inclination at all. Provisionally have it down for a twenty-six-hour cycle but that's loose, of course. A splendid sight. Curiously, it lies ten degrees from the general plane but its ellipse is not too great, I should say. A few days will soon determine that with accuracy. Surface temperatures -- " Lemac followed him as he babbled on. Lemac was dryly amused by the scientist's unscientific emotion -- it seemed to prove something. For himself, Lemac was surprised most by his own overcoming feeling of detachment. They had found a world. He knew a sense of anticlimax. They had found a world. Of course they had. He'd known they would. It had been waiting there. It had only had to be found, that was all. So Simple, really...someone once said, is anything or anyone you want him to be. v ! flybys scheduled for July #th and August #th respectively, will be a collector's item -- possibly man's last free-will expression of the nature of his possible neighbors on the Fourth Planet brilPaine Professor of Practical Astronomy and Professor of Astrophysics, Harvard University; former Director, Harvard College Observatory; Research Scientist, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Dr. Menzel's Martians are true works of art by an eminent space scientist -- a rare wedding of talent and inspiration. He introduces want to miss. Another is -- A. E. van Vogt's...forcefully timely novelette of man's past as he makes a gift of it to the inhabitants of a strange planet -- and of his future, posing the question: Can he survive his own immortality? Who but van Vogt The human equation as worked out by the Department of Socio-Economic Science required a sinister correction by The Subtracter. L ieutenant John Grimes, of the Interstellar Federation's Survey Service, was proud of his first command. She was only a little ship, a Serpent Class courier, lightly armed and manned by a minimal crew. In addition to Grimes there were two watchkeeping officers, both ensigns, an engineering officer -- another oneringer. Also two communications officers, lieutenants both, one in charge of the vessel's electronic equipment, the other a psionic radio officer, this being in the days before the development of the Carlotti Communications System. There were no petty officers and no ratings. There were, however,,the various occasional passengers -- one function of the couriers was to get V.I.P.s from Point A to Point # in a hurry, as and when required. "You will proceed," Commodore Damien had told him, "from Lindisfarne Base to Doncaster at maximum speed -- but considering at all times the safety of your vessel." "And also the comfort of my passenger, sir?" asked Grimes. "That need not concern you, Lieutenant." Damien grinned, his teeth yellow in his skull-like face. "Mr. Alberto is tough. Tougher, I would say, than the average spaceman." Grimes' prominent ears flushed. The commodore had managed to imply that Grimes was below average. "Very well, sir," he said. "I'll pile on the Gs and the lyps." "Just so you arrive in one piece," growled Damien. "That's all our lords and masters ask of you. Or, to be more exact, just so Mr. Alberto arrives in one piece and functioning." He lifted a heavily sealed envelope off his desk, handed it to Grimes. "Your orders, to be opened when you are on trajectory. But I've already told you most of it" He grinned again. "On your bicycle, spaceman." Grimes rose to his feet, came stiffly to attention, saluted, turned smartly about and marched out of the commodore's office. This was his first sealed-orders assignment. Clear of the office, Grimes continued his march, striding in time to martial music audible only to himself. Then he paused, looking toward the docking area of the spaceport. There was his ship, already positioned on the pad, dwarfed by a huge Constellation Class cruiser to one side of her, a Planet Class transport to the other. But she stood there bravely enough on the apron, a metal spire so slender as to appear taller than she actually was, gleaming brightly in the almost level rays of the westering sun. And she was his. It did not matter that officers serving in larger vessels referred to the couriers as flying darning needles. So he strode briskly to the ramp extruded from the after airlock of his flying darning needle, his stocky body erect and dignified in his smart -- but not too ostentaciously smart -- uniform. Ensign Beadle, his first lieutenant, was there to greet hint. The young man threw him a smart salute. Grimes returned it with just the right degree of sloppiness. "All secure for lift-off. Captain." "Thank you. Is the passenger aboard?" "Yes, sir. And his baggage." Grimes fought down the rising temptation to ask what he was like. Only when one is really senior can one unbend with one's juniors. "Very well. Number One." He looked at his watch. "My lift-off is scheduled for nineteen-thirty hours. It is now nineteenseventeen. I shall go straight to control, Mr. Beadle." ' "Mr. von Tannenbaum and Mr. Slovotny are waiting for you there, sir, and Mr. McCloud is standing by in the engine room." "Good. And Mr. Deane is tucked safely away with his poodle's brain in aspic?" "He is, sir." "Good. Then give Mr. Alberto my compliments and ask him if he would like to join us in control during lift-off." Grimes negotiated the ladder in the axial shaft rapidly, without losing breath. The Serpent Class couriers were too small to run to an elevator. He did not make a stop at his own quarters. A courier captain was supposed to be able to proceed anywhere in the Galaxy, known or unknown, at a second's notice. In the control room he found Ensign Tannenbaum -- Blond Beast -- and Lieutenant Slovotny -- Sparks -- at their stations. He buckled himself into his own chair. He had just finished doing so when the plump, lugubrious Beadle pulled himself up through the hatch. He addressed Grimes. "I asked Mr. Alberto if he'd like to come up to the office, Captain." Grimes looked pointedly at the clock on the bulkhead. "And is he coming up?" "No, Captain. He said -- " "Out with it, man. It's time we were getting up them stairs." "He said, 'You people look after your job and I'll look after mine.' " Grimes shrugged. As a courier captain he had learned to take V.I.P.s as they came. Some -- a very few of them -- he would have preferred to have left. He asked, "Are Mr. Alberto and Mr. Deane secured for liftoff?" "Indeed they are. Captain, although Spooky's not happy about the shockproof mount he has for his amplifier." "He never is really satisfied. Clearance, Sparks." "Clearance, Captain." The wiry little radio officer spoke quietly into his microphone. "Mission quest clearance." have clearance. Bon voyage." "Thank him," said Grimes. He glanced rapidly around the little control room. All officers Were strapped in their acceleration chairs. All tell-tale lights were green. "All systems go," he muttered. He pushed the right buttons and went. I t was a normal enough courier lift-off. The ship's inertial drive easily developed maximum thrust within microseconds of being started. Once his radar told him that the ship was the minimum safe altitude above the port Grimes cut in his auxiliary rockets. The craft was built to take stresses that, in larger vessels, would have been dangerous. Her personnel prided themselves on their toughness. As did the one outsider, the passenger. Grimes would have grinned had it not been for the acceleration's flattening out of his features. Commodore Damien has said that Mr. Alberto was tough -- so Mr. Alberto would just have to take the Gs and like it. The ship drove up through the last, high wisps of cirrus into the darkling, purple sky, toward the sharply bright, unwinking stars. She plunged outward through the last tenuous shreds of atmosphere and the needles of instruments flickered briefly as she passed through the Van Allens. She was out and clear now -- out and clear -- and Grimes cut both inertial and reaction drives, used his gyroscopes to swing the sharp prow of the ship on to the target star, the Doncaster sun. He brought that far distant speck of luminosity into the exact center of his spiderweb sights. Von Tannebaum, who was navigator, gave him the corrections necessitated by galactic drift -- it was essential to aim the vessel at where the star was now, not where it was some seventythree years ago. The inertial drive was restarted and the ever-precessing rotors of the Mannschen drive were then set in motion. There was the usual brief queasiness induced by the temporal precession field, the usual visual shock as colors sagged down the spectrum, as the hard, bright stars outside the viewports became hazy, iridescent nebulosities. Grimes remained in his chair for a few minutes, satisfying himself that all was as it should be. Slowly and carefully he filled and lit his foul pipe, ignoring a dirty look from Beadle who, in the absence of a biochemist, was responsible for the ship's air-regeneration system. Then, speaking through a swirl of acrid smoke, he ordered, "Set deep-space watches, Number One. And tell Mr. Deane to report to Lindisfarne Base that we are on trajectory for Doncaster." "E.T.A. Doncaster, Captain?" asked Beadle. Grimes pulled the sealed envelope from the pouch at the side of his chair, looked at it. For eyes only. Destroy by fire after reading... He said, "I'll let you know after I've skimmed through this hi'.mf." After all, even in a small ship informality can be allowed to go only so far. He unbuckled himself, rose from his seat, went down to his quarters to read the orders. T here was little in them that he had not already been told by Commodore Damien. Insofar as the E.T.A. was concerned, this was left largely to his own discretion, although it was stressed that the courier was to arrive at Doncaster not later than April twenty-third. Local Date. And how did the Doncastrian calendar tally with that used on Lindisfarne? Grimes, knowing that Blond Beast was now on watch, called control and threw the question onto von Tannenbaum's place, knowing that within a very short time he would have an answer accurate to at least fourteen places of decimals -- and that as soon as he. Grimes, made a decision regarding the time of arrival the necessary adjustment of velocity would be put in hand without delay. Von Tannenbaum called back. "April twenty-third on Doncaster coincides with November eighth on Lindisfarne. I can give you the exact correlation, Captain." "Don't bother, pilot. My orders allow me quite a bit of leeway. Suppose we get Mr. Alberto to his destination just three days before the deadline -- give him time to settle in before he commences his duties, whatever they are, in the high commissioner's office. As far as I can gather, we're supposed to stay on Doncaster until directed elsewhere -- so an extra three days in port will do us no harm." "It's a pleasant planet, I've heard, Captain." A pause ensued and Grimes could imagine the burly, flaxen-headed young man running problems through the control-room computer, checking the results with his own slipstick. "This calls for a reduction of speed. Shall I do it by cutting down the temporal precession rate or by reducing acceleration?" "Two Gs is a little heavy," admitted Grimes. "Very well, Captain. Reduce to one-point-two-seven?" "That will balance?" "It will balance." "Then make it so." Almost immediately the irregular throbbing of the inertial drive slowed. Grimes felt his weight pressing less heavily into the padding of his chair. He did not need to glance at the accelerometer mounted among the other flight instruments on the bulkhead of his cabin. Von Tannenbaum was a good man, a good officer, a good navigator. A sharp rap came on the door. "Come in," called Grimes, swiveling his seat so that he faced the visitor. This, he realized, would be his passenger, anticipating the captain's invitation to an introductory drink and talk. He was not a big man, this Mr. Alberto, and at first he gave an impression of plumpness, of softness. But it was obvious from the way that he moved that his bulk was solid muscle, not fat. He was clad in the dark gray that was almost a civil service uniform -- and even Grimes, who knew little of the niceties of civilian tailoring, could see that both the material and the cut of Alberto's suit were superb. He had a broad but ordinary face. His hair was black and glossy, his eyes black and rather dull. His expression was petulant. He demanded rather than asked, "Why have we slowed down?" Grimes bit back a sharp retort. After all, he was only a junior officer in spite of his command. His passenger probably piled on far more Gs than a mere lieutenant. "I have adjusted to a comfortable actual velocity, Mr. Alberto, so as to arrive three days, local, before the deadline. I trust that this suits your plans." "Three days -- " Angelo smiled and his face was transformed abruptly from that of a sulky baby to that of a contented child. It was. Grimes realized, no more than a deliberate turning on of charm -- but, he admitted to himself, it was effective. "Three days will give me ample time to settle down, Captain, before I start work. And I know, as well as you do, that overly heavy acceleration can be tiring." "Won't you sit down. Mr. Alberto? A drink, perhaps?" "Thank you. Captain. A dry sherry, if I may." Grimes grinned apologetically. "I'm afraid that these Couriers haven't much of a cellar. I can offer you gin, scotch or brandy." "A gin and lime, then." The lieutenant busied himself at his little bar, mixed the drinks, gave Alberto his glass, raised his. "Here's to crime" Alberto smiled again. "Why do you toast crime, Captain?" "A current custom in the Service. No so long ago it was, 'Down the hatch' Before that it was, 'Here's mud in yer eye.' We've been dipping into history for our tradition." "I see." Alberto sipped appreciatively. "Good gin, this." "Not bad. We get it from Van Diemen's Planet." He waited through a brief silence. Then: "Will you be long on Doncaster, Mr. Alberto? I rather gained the impression that we're supposed to wait there until you've finished your -- business." "It shouldn't take long." "Diplomatic?" "You could call it that." Again the smile. Why did the white teeth look so carnivorous? "Another drink?" "Why, yes. I like to relax when I can." "Yours is demanding work?" "And so is yours, Captain." The brassy music of a bugle drifted into the cabin through the intercom. "Mess call," said Grimes "You do things in style, Captain." Grimes shrugged. "We have a tape for all the calls in general use. As for the tucker -- " He shrugged again. "We don't run to a cook in a ship of this class. Sparks -- Mr. Slovotny -- prepares the meals in space. As a chef he's a good radio officer." "Do you think he'd mind if I took over?" asked Alberto. "After all, I'm the only idler aboard this vessel." "We'll think about it," said Grimes. I tain?" Beadle asked. "I'm not a telepath, Number One," said Grimes. "Tell me." The two men were sitting at ease in the Courier's control room. Each of them was conscious of a certain tightness in the waistband of his uniform shorts. Grimes was suppressing a tendency to burp gently. Alberto, once he had been given a free hand in the galley, had speedily changed shipboard eating from a necessity to a real pleasure. He insisted that somebody else always do the washing up, but this was a small price to pay. This evening, for example, the officers had eatten saltimbocca, accompanied by a rehydrated rough red that the amateur chef had contrived, somehow, to make taste like real wine. Nonetheless, he had humbly apologized for the meal. I should have used prosciutto, not any old ham. And fresh sage leaves, not dried sage... "I think," said Beadle, "that the standard of the high commissioner's entertaining has been lousy. Alberto must be a cordon bleu chef, sent out to Doncaster to play merry hell in the kitchen." "Could be," said Grimes. He belched gently. "Could be. But I can't see our lords and masters laying on a ship, even a lowly Serpent Class Courier, for a cook, no matter how talented. As a matter of fact, Alberto told me that he was a mathematician..." "A real mathematician?" Beadle was scornfully incredulous. "You know how the Blond Beast loves to show off his toys to anybody who'll evince the slightest interest. Well, Alberto was up in the control room for a while during his watch -- you'll recall that he said he'd fix the coffee maker. Our Mr. von Tannenbaum paraded his pets and made them do their tricks. He was in a very disgruntled mood when he handed over to me when I came on. How did he put it? 'I don't expect a very high level of intelligence in planetlubbers but that Alberto is in a class by himself. I doubt he could add two and two and get four twice running.' " "Did he fix the machinetta?" "As a matter of fact, yes. It makes beautiful coffee now." "Then what are you complaining about?" "I'm not complaining, Captain. I'm just curious." And so am I... As the commanding officer of the ship Grimes was in a position to satisfy his curiosity. After Mr. Beadle had gone about his multifarious duties Grimes called Mr. Deane on the telephone. "Are you busy. Spooky?" "I'm always busy, Captain." The abrupt reply was authentic enough. A Psionic Radio Officer was on duty all the time, sleeping and waking, his mind open to the transmitted thoughts of other telepaths throughout the Galaxy. Some were powerful transmitters, others were not. Some made use, as Deane always did, of organic amplifiers -- others made do with the unaided power of tlreir own minds. And there was selection, of course. Just as a wireless operator on Earth's seas in the early days of radio could pick out his own ship's call sign from the babble and babel of Morse, so the trained telepath could listen selectively. At short ranges he could, too, receive the thoughts of the nontelepaths who were about him -- but unless somehow the circumstances were exceptional he was supposed to maintain the utmost secrecy regarding them. "Can you spare me a few minutes. Spooky? After all, you can maintain your listening watch anywhere in the ship." "Oh, all right. Captain. I'll be up. I already know what you're going to. ask me." You would... A minute or so later Mr. Deane drifted into Grimes's day cabin. Deane's nickname was apt. He was tall, fragile, so albinoid as to appear almost translucent. His white face was a featureless blob. "Take a pew, Spooky. A drink?" "Mother's ruin, Captain." Grimes poured gin for both of them. His glass held ice and a generous sprinkling of bitters. Mr.' Deane preferred his gin straight, as colorless as he was himself. The Psionic Radio Officer genteelly sipped. Then: "I'm afraid that I can't oblige you, Captain." "Why not, Spooky?" "You know very well that we graduates of the Rhine Institute have to swear to respect privacy." "There's no privacy aboard a ship. Spooky. There cannot be." "There can be, Captain. There must be." "Not when the safety of the ship is involved." The argument was familiar. Grimes knew that after the third gin the telepath would weaken. "We get odd passengers aboard this ship, Spooky. Surely you remember that Waldegren diplomat who had the crazy scheme of seizing her and turning her over to his own navy." "I remember, Captain." Deane extended his glass which, suprisingly, was empty. Grimes wondered, as he always did, if its contents had been teleported directly into the officer's stomach. But he poured a refill. "Mr. Alberto's another odd passenger," he went on. "But a Federation citizen," Deane told him. "How do we know? He could be a double agent. Do you know?" "I don't." After only two gins Spooky was ready to spill the beans. This was unusual. "I don't know anything." "What do you mean?" "Usually, Captain, we have to shut our minds to the trivial, boring thoughts of you psionic morons. No offense intended -- but that's the way we think of you. We get sick of visualizations of the girls you met in the last port and the girls you hope to meet in the next port." He screwed his face up in disgust, made it evident that he did, after all, possess features. "Bums, bellies and breasts. The Blond Beast's a tit man and you have a thing about legs." Grimes's ears reddened but he said nothing. "And the professional wishful thinking is even more nauseating. When do I get my half ring? When do  get my brass hat? When shall I make Admiral?" "Ambition." "Ambition, hell. Of late I've been getting: I wonder what Alberto's putting on for breakfast? For lunch? For dinner?" "W'hat is he putting on for dinner?" asked Grimes. "I've been rather wondering if our tissue culture chook could be used for Chicken Cacciatore." "I don't know." "No, you're not a chef. As well we know -- after the last time that you volunteered for galley duties." "I mean, I don't know what the menus will be." It was Deane s turn to blush. "As a matter of fact, Captain, I have been trying to get previews. I have to watch my diet." Grimes tried not to think uncharitable thoughts. Like many painfully thin people Deane enjoyed a voracious appetite. He said, "You've been merely trying to eavesdrop? No luck?" "Yes. But there are nontelepaths, you know, and Alberto's one of them. A true nontelepath. Most people transmit, although they cannot receive. Alberto doesn't transmit." "A useful qualification for a diplomat," said Grimes. "If he is a diplomat. But could he be using some sort of psionic jammer?" "No. I'd know if he were." Grimes couldn't ignore that suggestively held empty glass any longer. He supposed that Deane had earned his third gin. T he couier broke through into normal Space Time north of the plane of Doncaster's ecliptic. In those days, before the Carlotti ing simple, navigation was an art rather than a science -- and von Tannenbaum was an artist. The little ship dropped into a transpolar orbit about the planet and then, as soon as permission to land had been granted by Aerospace Control, descended to Port Duncannon. It was. Grimes told himself smugly, one of his better landings. And so it should have been -- conditions were little short of ideal. There was no cloud, no wind, not even any clear air turbulence at any level. The ship's instruments were working perfectly, and the inertial drive was responding to the controls with no time lag whatsoever. It was one of those occasions on which the captain feels that his ship is no more -- and no less -- than a beautifully functioning extension of his own body. Finally, it was morning, local time, with the sun just lifting over the verdant, rolling hills to the eastward, bringing out all the color of the sprawling city a few miles from the spaceport, making it look from the air like a huge handful of gems spilled carelessly on a green carpet. Grimes set the vessel down in the exact center of the triangle marked by the blinkers. He touched so gently that, until he cut the drive, a walnut under the vaned landing gear would not have been crushed. He said quietly, "Finished with engines." "Receive boarders, Captain?" asked Beadle. "Yes, Number One." Grimes looked out through the viewport to the ground cars that were making their way from the administration block. Port health, immigration, customs -- the harbormaster paying his respects to the captain of a visiting Federation warship. And the last vehicle? He took a pair of binoculars from the rack, focused them on the flag fluttering from the bonnet of the car in the rear. It was dark blue, with a pattern of silver stars, the Federation's colors. So the high commissioner himself had come out to see the ship berth. He wished that he and his officers had dressed more formally but it was too late to do anything about it now. He went down to his quarters, was barely able to change the epaulettes of his shirt, for a pair of shining new ones before the high commissioner was at his door. Mr. Beadle ushered in the important official with all the ceremony he could muster at short notice. "Sir, this is the captain, Lieutenant Grimes. Captain, may l loughby." Willoughby extended a hand that, like the rest of him, was plump. "Welcome aboard, Captain. He laughed. "I hope you don't mind my borrowing an expression." "Not at all. Will you sit down, "Thank you. Captain. But only for a couple of minutes. I shall be out of your hair as soon as Mr. Alberto has been cleared. Then I'll whisk him off to the Residence." He paused, regarding Grimes from eyes that, in the surrounding fat, were sharp and bright. "How did you find him, Captain?" "Mr. Alberto, sir?" What was the man getting at? "He's an excellent chef." "Glad to hear you say it. Captain. That's why I sent for him." "So he's a chef, sir?" Again those sharp little eyes bored into Grimes's skull. "Of course. What else did you think?" "Well, as a matter of fact we were yarning one night and he sort of hinted that he was a mathematician... "Did he?". Then Willoughby chuckled. "He was putting you on. Although any real chef is a mathematician -- he must get his recipes right." "That's one way of looking at Beadle was back then, followed by Alberto. "I must be off, now. Captain," said the passenger, shaking hands. "Thank you for a very pleasant voyage." "Thank you," Grimes told him, adding, "We shall miss you." "But you'll enjoy some more  of his cooking," the high commissioner said genially. "As officers of the only Federation warship on this world you #I have I plenty of invitations -- to the Residence as well as elsewhere. Too, if Mr. Alberto manages to impart his skills to my permanent staff -- you may shortly be taking him back with you." "We hope so," Grimes said. "Good day to you, then. Come on, Mr. Alberto -- it's time you started to show my glorified scullions how to boil an egg" He was gone. Then the harbormaster was at the door. He was invited in, took a seat, acI cepted coffee. "Your first visit to Doncaster," he announced rather than asked. "Yes, Captain Tarran. It seems a very pleasant planet." The harbormaster made a noncommittal sound. "Tell me, is the cooking at the Residence as bad as the high commissioner makes out?" "I wouldn't know, Captain. I'm just a merchant skipper in a shore job. I don't get asked to all the best parties." The sudden white grin in the dark, lean face took the rancor out of the words. "And f thank all the odd gods of the Galaxy for that." "I concur with your sentiments, Captain Tarran. One never seems to meet any real people at the official bun-struggles. It's all stiff collars, best behavior and being nice to nongs and drongoes whom normally you'd run a mile to avoid." "Still," said Mr. Beadle, "the high commissioner seems to have the common touch." "How so?" asked Grimes. "Well, coming out to the spaceport in person to pick up his chef." "Cupboard love," Grimes told him. "Cupboard love." T here were official parties and there were unofficial ones. Tarran may not have been a member of the planet's snobocracy but he knew people in all walks of life, in all trades and professions, and the gatherings to which, through him. Grimes was invited were far more entertaining affairs than the official functions he was obliged to attend. It was at an informal supper which was given by Professor Tolliver, who held the Chair of Political Science at Duncannon University, that he met Selma Madigan. With the exception of Tarran and Grimes and his officers all the guests were university people, students as well as instructors. Some w'ere human and some were not. Much to his surprise Grimes found that he was getting along famously with a Shaara princess, especially since he had cordially detested a Shaara queen to whom he had been introduced at a reception in the Mayor's Palace. And there l was, having to say nice things to a bedraggled, old, oversized bumblebee loaded down with more precious stones than this ship could lift. And with all that tonnage of diamonds she couldn't afford a decent voice box. She sounded like a scratched platter and a worn-out needle on one of these antique record players... This Shreen was beautiful. Hers was an inhuman beauty, of course -- that of a glittering, intricate mobile. By chance or design -- design, thought Grimes -- her voice box produced a pleasant, almost seductive contralto, with faintly buzzing undertones. She was an arthropod but there could be no doubt about the fact that she was an attractive female... : J She was saying, "I find you humans so fascinating, Captain. There is so much similarity to be discovered between yourselves and ourselves -- and such great differences. But I have enjoyed my stay on this planet." "And will you be here much longer, Your Highness?" "Call me Shreen, Captain," she told him. "Thank you, Shreen. My name is John. I shall feel honored if you call me that." He laughed. "In any case, my real rank is only lieutenant." "Very well, Lieutenant John. But to answer your question. I fear that I shall return to my own world as soon as I have gained my degree in socioecononomics. Our queen mother decided that this will be a useful qualification for a future ruler. The winds of change blow through our hives and we must trim our wings to them." And very pretty wings, too... But Shreen was impossibly alien and the girl who approached gracefully over the polished floor was indubitably human. She was slender and tall for a woman. Her gleaming auburn hair was piled high in an intricate coronal. Her mouth was too wide for conventional prettiness, the planes of her thin face were too well defined. Her eyes were definitely green. Her smile, as she spoke, made her beautiful. "Another conquest, Shreen?" she asked. "I wish it were, Selma," replied the Princess. "I wish that Lieutenant John were an arthropod like myself." "In that case," grinned Grimes, "I'd be a drone." "From what I can gather," retorted the human girl, "that's all that spaceship captains are anyhow." "Have you met Selma?" asked Shreen. She performed the introductions. "And are you enjoying the party, Mr. Grimes?" inquired Selma Madigan. "Yes, Miss Madigan. It's a very pleasant change from the usual official function. But don't tell anybody I said so." "I'm glad you like us. We try to get away from that ghastly outposts-of-empire atmosphere. Quite a number of our students are like Shreen here, quote aliens unquote." "On my world you would be the aliens." "I know, my dear, and I'm sure that Mr. Grimes does, too. But all intelligent beings can make valuable contributions to each other. No one race has a sacred mission to civilize the Galaxy..." "I wish you wouldn't preach, Selma." It was amazing how much expression the princess could get out of her mechanical voice box. "If you must, perhaps, you can make a convert out. of Lieutenant John." Shreen waved a gracefully articulated forelimb and was away, gliding off to join a group composed of two human men, a young Hallichek and a gaudy pseudosaurian from Dekkovar. Selma Madigan looked directly at Grimes. "And what do you think of our policy of integration?" "It has to come, I suppose." "It has to come," she mimicked. "You brassbound types are all the same. You get along famously with somebody like Shreen, because she's a real, live princess. But the Shaara royalty isn't royalty as we understand it. The queens are females who've reached the egg-laying stage, the princesses are females who are not yet sexually developed. Still -- Shreen's a princess. You have far less in common with her, biologically speaking, than you have with Oona -- but you gave Oona the brush-off and fawned all over Shreen." Grimes flushed. "Oona's a rather smelly and scruffy little thing like a Terran chimpanzee. Shreen's -- beautiful." one weakness is that she thinks that Terrans in pretty, goldbraided uniforms are wonderful. You snubbed her. Shreen noticed. I noticed." "As far as I'm concerned," said Grimes, "Oona can be her imperial highness on whatever world she comes from -- but I don't have to like her." Professor Tolliver, casually clad in a rather grubby toga, smoking a pipe even fouler than Grimes's, joined the discussion. "Young Grimes has a point." "I have," agreed Grimes. "As far as I'm concerned, people are people -- it doesn't matter a damn if they're humanoid, arachnoid, saurian or purple octopi from the next galaxy but three. If they're our sort of people -- I like 'em. If they ain't -- I don't." "Oona's our sort of people," insisted Selma. "She doesn't smell like it." The girl laughed. "And how do you think she enjoys the stink of your pipe -- and, come to that, Peter's pipe?" "Perhaps she does enjoy it," suggested Grimes. "As a matter of fact she does," said Professor Tolliver. "Men -- " muttered Selma Madigan disgustedly. Tolliver drifted away. Grimes walked with the girl to the table on which stood a huge punchbowl. He ladled out drinks for each of them. He raised his own glass in a toast. "Here's to integration" "I wish you really meant that." "Perhaps I do," Grimes murmured a little doubtfully. "After all, we've only one universe and we all have to live in it. It's not so long ago that blacks and whites and yellows were at each other's throats on the home planet -- to say nothing of the various subdivisions within each color grouping. Von Tannenbaum -- that's him over there, the Blond Beast we call him -- is an excellent officer, a first class shipmate and a very good friend. But his ancestors were very unkind to mine, on my mother's side. And mine had quite a long record of being unkind to other people. I could be wrong -- but I think that much of Earth's bloody history was no more than xenophobia carried to extremes." "Quite a speech, John." She sipped her drink. "It's a pity that the regulations of your service forbid you to play any active part in politics." "Why?" "You'd make a very good recruit for the new party we're starting. LL." "LL?" "The obvious abbreviation. The League of Life. You were talking just now of Terran history. Even when Earth's nations were at war there were organizations with pannational and pan-racial memberships. The aim of the League of Life is to build up 'a membership of all intelligent species." "Quite an undertaking." "But a necessary one. Doncaster could be said to be either unfortunately situated -- or otherwise, according to the viewpoint. Here we are, one Man-colonized planet on the borders of no less than two alien empires. The Hallichek Hegemony, the Shaara Superive. We know that Imperial Earth is already thinking of establishing Fortress Doncaster, coverting this world into the equivalent of a colossal, impregnably armored and fantastically armed dreadnought with its guns trained upon both avian and arthropod. But there are those of us who would sooner live in peace and friendship with our neighbors. That's why Duncannon University has always tried to attract non-Terran students -- and that's why the League of Life was brought into being." She smiled. "You could, I suppose, call it enlightened self-interest." "Enlightened," agreed Grimes. He liked this girl. She was one of those women whose physical charm is vastly enhanced by enthusiasm. She did far more to him and for him than the sort of female, equally pretty or prettier, whom he usually met. She said, "I've some literature at home if you'd like to read it." "I should -- Selma." She took the use of her given name for granted. Was that a good sign, or not? "That's splendid, John. We could pick it up now. The party can get along without us." "Don't you live on the premises?" "No. But it's only a short walk from here. I have an apartment in Heathcliff Street." When Grimes had collected his boat cloak and cap from the cloakroom she was waiting for him. She had wrapped herself in a green academic gown that went well with her hair, matched her eyes. Together they walked out into the misty night. There was just enough chill in the air to make them glad of their outer garments and to make them walk closer together than they would have otherwise. Grimes was conscious of the movements of her body against his. Political literature is a change from etchings. But he could not remain cynical for very long. For he had already recognized in her qualities of leadership, had no doubt in his mind that she would achieve high political rank on the world of her birth. Nonetheless, this night things could happen between them and probably would happen between them. He, most certainly, would not attempt to stem the course of nature. Neither of them would be the poorer -- both, in fact, would be the richer. Meanwhile it was good to walk with her through the soft darkness, to let one's mind dwell pleasurably on what lay ahead at the end of the walk. "Here we are, John," she said suddenly. The door of the apartment house was a hazy, golden-glowing rectangle in the dimness. They met no one in the hallway. An elevator bore them swiftly up. Its door opened on a richly carpeted corridor. There then was another door -- one that, Grimes noted, was opened with an old-fashioned metal key. He remembered then that voice-actuated locks were not very common on Doncaster. The furnishings of her living room were austere but comfortable. Grimes removed his cloak and cap, gave them to her to hang up somewhere. He sat down on a divan, watched her walk to the window that ran all along one wall, press the switch that drew the heavy drapes aside, press another switch that caused the wide panes to sink into their housing. She said, "The view of the city is good from here -- especially on a misty night. And I like it when you can smell the clean tang of fog in the air." "You're lucky to get a clean fog," said Grimes, Earth-born and Earth-raised. He rose and went to stand with her. His arm slipped about her waist. She made no attempt to disengage it. Nonetheless, he could still appreciate the view. It was superb -- like looking down at a star cluster enmeshed in a gaseous nebula. 'Smell that heavenly mist," Selma whispered. Grimes dutifully inhaled. Where does that taint of garlic come from? Some source in the room... Grimes could act fast when he had to. He sensed rather than saw that somebody was rushing at him and the girl from behind. He let go of her, pushed her violently to one side. Instinctively he fell into a crouch, felt a heavy body thud painfully into his back. He dropped still lower, his arms and the upper part of his torso hanging down over the windowsill. What followed was the result of luck rather than skill -- the assailant slithered over Grimes's back, head down, in an ungraceful dive. Next Grimes was staring down, watching a dark figure fall into the luminous mist with agonizing slowness, twisting and turning as it plunged, screaming. The scream was cut short by a horridly fluid thud. He stood there, trembling uncontrollably. The reek of garlic was still strong in the air. He was violently sick. T here are lessons," said ComI modore Damien dryly, "that a junior officer must learn if he wishes to rise in the service. One is that it is unwise to throw a monkey wrench into the machinations of our master." "How was I to know, sir?" complained Grimes. He flushed. "In any case -- I'd do it again" "I'm sure you would, Mr. Grimes. No man in his right fenestration -- and no gentleman stands by and does nothing while his companion of the evening is subjected to the same fate. Even so -- " he drummed on his desk top with his skeletal fingers -- "I propose to put you into the picture. To begin with, the late Mr. Alberto was criminally careless. Apparently he officiated as usual in the high commissioner's kitchen on the night in question. Sir expressed a wish for one of the more redolent sauces. As a good chef should, Alberto tasted, and tasted, and tasted. He should have deodorized his breath before proceeding to Miss Madigan's apartment. He was not, I think, expecting her to have company." "What happened served the bastard right," Grimes muttered. "I'm inclined to agree with you, Lieutenant. But we are all of us just pawns insofar as Federation policy is concerned. Or perhaps Alberto was a knight -- in the chess sense of the word, although the German name for that piece, springer, would suit him better. He was employed by the Department of Socio-Economic Science, and directly responsible only to its head. Dr. Barratin. Dr. Barratin is something of a mathematical genius and uses a building full of computers to extrapolate from the current trends on all the worlds in which the Federation is interested. Doncaster, I need hardly tell you, is such a world and the League of Life is a current trend. According to the learned doctor's calculations, this same League of Life will almost certainly gain some considerable influence, even power, under the leadership of your Miss Madigan..." "She's not my Miss Madigan, sir. Unfortunately." "My heart bleeds for you. But, to continue. To Dr. Barratin the foreign and colonial policies of the Federation can all be worked out in advance like a series of equations. As you well know, however, equations are apt, at times, to hold undesirable factors. Alberto was employed to remove such factors and insure that the good doctor's sums came out. He was known to his employers as the Subtracter." "Very funny," said Grimes. "Isn't it?" Damien was laughing unashamed. "But when things went so very badly wrong on Doncaster, Barratin couldn't see the joke, even after I explained it to him. Don't you see, Grimes? You were the undesirable factor that wasn't allowed for in the equation. Alberto traveled to Doncaster in your ship, a Serpent Class Courier. You were with Miss Madigan when Alberto tried to subtract her. You were the adder." In Next Month's IF by Lester del Rey At last IP has its own book-review column... each month our favorite Feature Editor will take a long look at the new books in the field and report on them in his own salty style. New Wave? Old Wave? What to read? Consult Lester del Rey every month! Coming: Reviews of Bug Jack Barron and The Left Hand of Darkness. by Willy Ley Willy Ley dean of science writers -- begins his magnificent series tracing the evolution of our planet since time began -- and projecting that evolution into coming centuries! Brood World Barbarian by Perry Chapdelaine Posture Of Prophecy by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro The Last True God a new story by Philip St. John The world of nonhumans lies all around you. Feed if, love if, pef it -- and one day it will include you! D Mr. Hunter, ought to believe in flying saucers," the Sexy New Neighbor said, gulping her brandy and keeping a long-eyelashed gimlet eye on the kitten, Psycho, who had shown great interest in her wide-meshed pink net stockings. '"Because for the last twenty-five years the saucer people have been telepathically giving all you science-fiction writers the ideas for all your stories, to prepare us humans for the day when they openly walk among us." : Old .Horsemeat, known to hu-' man beings and other non-felines as Mr. Harry Hunter, muttered, "Or Wriggle," and writhed his long frame a little and thrust forward Jiis ill-shaven jaw and decanted some brandy into it, preparatory to further speech. Kitty-Come-Hcre (Mrs. Helen Hunter to non-cats), who had invited the NewNeighbor over because Old Horsemeat was easiest to live with when he had a reasonable supply of sexy women around to lecture to on science and science fiction and everything else, decided she had made an awful mistake. Gummitch, surveying the scene with cool feline unconcern from his hair-hatched, black velvet cushion-throne in front of the waves emanating from the Sexy New Neighbor and reminded himself to explain to Psycho soon that Legs, Especially Stockinged Female Ones, Are Not For Climbing. Old Horsemeat splashed brandy in his own and the Sexy New Neighbor's goblets, frowned fiendishly and said (while KittyCome-Here held her breath), "You know. Miss Neering, you are the first person -- outside of Helen and, of course, the cats -- to penetrate my deepest secret. It's absolutely true that' I regularly discuss science fiction with a little old green man with a white beard who hails from Arided. We do it almost every other night in the back yard at about three A.M. He gives me the office -- the signal, that is -- bj tapping on our bedroom window with his third tentacle, theone that .extends to twenty-seven feet. He then passes along some of the damnedest ideas. One was cat-burglary -- that twenty-seven-foot tentacle. Not stealing cats, of course (excuse me, Gummitch), but second-floor stuff like jewels and furs and black leather underwear. The old Aridedan's pretty kinky. His latest brainwave is how we could poison everybody not smart enough to drink and cook with sparkling water, by sprinkling a couple of ounces of plutonium hexafluoride in the city reservoir. His spaceship runs on P-hexy, so he's got lots e's simply testing you on II your humanitarianism," the New Neighbor asserted confidently, sprawling her mini-skirted frame along the cat-scarred couch toward Old Horsemeat, though not with quite the enthusiasm and intense interest one might have expected. Most saucer addicts and even dabblers do not enjoy having the saucer scene stolen from them by squares -- which includes all science-fiction writers, make no mistake. "Yeah, I think you got it," Old Horsemeat agreed, absently dropping his hand to the New Neighbor's back and brushing it idly. It felt nice but a little scaly. "That must be why he started putting up objections as soon as I said, 'Let's do it tonight.' " "You were testing his humanitarianism," the Sexy New Neighbor opined rather wisely, meanwhile subtly luxuriating her shoulders and making what she thought , were kitten noises, and taking a large sip of her brandy -- no mean tally of simultaneous actions. "Uh-uh," Old Horsemeat denied. "We got to solve the population explosion somehow. Which with skins like yours around is a toughie." "We've always got the pill," she countered. "I'm speaking hypothetically." "The pill'll never be an all-over answer," Old Horsemeat replied darkly. "People get absentminded. Or they want buckets of kids to boost their egos or hold them together or get relief money. Or else they want to plain suffer for sex -- the insufferable puritans." Kitty-Come-Here sighed with relief, though keeping a watchful eye on exactly how far Old Horsemeat's idle brushing went. She took advantage of the interlude to snatch up Psycho exactly a quarter second before the kitten launched an all-out assault along the Sexy New Neighbor by way of the delectable long pink ratlines, which looked created to receive the tug of tiny claws. Gummitch lowered his chin to his outstretched forelegs and regarded the scene with relaxed, utter boredom -- a very beautiful expression as long as it is on the face of a mature cat. Old Horsemeat got around to telling how the best thing about the little old green man was that he could do errorless final typing, a labor he performed in exchange for instruction in the art of writing science fiction, so that hewould be able to clean up when he got back to Arided, top star in the Northern Cross. The Sexy New Neighbor knew when she was being had, or decided it was time to show she knew so, for she suddenly straightened up toward the end of the couch away from Old Horsemeat and, gazing at the twisting puff of gray fur in the flexible cage of Helen Hunter's fingers, asked somewhat loadedly, "Why do you call him Psycho?" A short silence ensued. UU ER," Kitty-Come-Here cor#I rected. "Yes, you can tell even at two months. She doesn't have the two little bumps. See? About the name, she actually was psycho at first, absolutely off her cat rocker. Gummitch led us to her. Some dear little children I'd enjoy tieing up by their thumbs and lashing with a dog whip had shut her up for a day or so in a fuse box after petting her half to death. She was utterly kitten crackers the first two days after we rescued her, worse than a juvenile delinquent after a police storm. She'd hide in the television set and scream -- or purr and bite you. But then Harry hypnotized her with Gummitch's help and she snapped out of it and became almost too kitten-normal." "What do you mean with Gummitch's help?" Old Horsemeat objected. "All by myself I shut off all the lights but one candle, and then I did the usual passes and strokings. You know." He had planned to demonstrate them on the Sexy New Neighbor but they realized she was somewhat too big to be a convincing analogue of a kitten. Besides, she was now too far away to make the action seem unpremeditated. oon as the kitten was in a J light trance," he continued, "I told her about the Bill of Rights and how in this house it applies to cats even more than it does to the talking, walking, atom-bombmaking simians. Maybe that was a little over her head at the time. For instance, cats bear arms naturally and seldom have soldiers quartered on them. But I did convince her that, one, all children belong to an alien, utterly evil species, and that, two, decent relations based on full equality are possible between cat and man. No matter what goes on in furriers' and pounds." The Sexy New Neighbor drew herself together around her brandy goblet. For when Old Horsemeat ended his ravings, Kitty-ComeHere merely nodded solemnly once and Gummitch turned on her a sinister gaze. She felt she had strayed into the old witchhouse of a cat-centered Charles Addams family. Psycho chose that moment to erupt from her finger-cage, flash like a gray streak past the Sexy New Neighbor, who dodged unnecessarily but quite understandably, and executed an almost incredible vertical leap, which ended with a soft landing on the mantelpiece, where she began coolly to wash herself. "Did I remember to tell you cats can levitate?" Old Horsemeat demanded of the visitor. "Sure they can, all of them. But they hide it from us. They pretend it's just jumping. What a laugh! I think they all migrated here circa # B.C. from a high-gravity witch-planet. My old Aridedan's got a green cat thin as a string bean that can jump over houses. Second and third story windows open even an inch are a cinch for him. He's kinky about women. He likes to crawl into bed with them, very softly. Then he slowly edges up to them under the sheets. His fur is silky as chinchilla. Then he bites them." The Sexy New Neighbor remembered she had to work tomorrow, gulped her nightcap and somewhat dubiously accepted Old Horsemeat's offer to see her home next door. She pointed at a sleeve-like arrangement in the bottom of the window next to the front door. "What's that?" she asked. "The cat door," Old Horsemeat told her. "You think this house is a prison.?" She concealed a shudder. Old Horsemeat didn't notice it and continued blithely -- or did notice it and continued fiendishly -- as he swung open the human's door with a grandiose, loose-armed sweep and a bow. "Besides levitation and a lot of other secret powers, cats are the next brainiest animals to man -- or maybe brainier and hide it -- as is proven by their longevity. A cat can live twenty years, far and away the longest life span for an animal anywhere near as small. And if you measure life span by total lifetime heartbeats for a maximum-age animal, the cat comes at the top of the list after man -- I ,# heartbeats, which is I # more than the Methuselah of elephants. I'm sure that on most worlds the felines rather than the simians are actually the chief gnosiphoric family -- that's a word I've just invented meaning wisdom-bearing. What's more. Miss Neering, or Eloise, if I may presume on an evening's conviviality -- " As he spoke. Old Horsemeat, reeling only a little, guided Miss Neering down the front steps, keeping a frim grip on her left upper arm while she kept an even firmer grip on the banister. Now as he steered her a weaving course across the lawns and as he shifted his subject matter from the felinocentric to the personal, his voice changed from oratorical to intimate and faded out. II K itty-Come-Here could watch the seeing-home operation from the front porch, where she had joined Gummitch for a breath of fresh late-summer air and a shower of moonlight. When Old Horsemeat returned, which was very soon, he walked in past them without a look or a word, poured himself a very large brandy, drank half of it down and, when the door had closed behind his cat and wife, exploded with, "God deliver me from that incredible kook! Not only a saucer nut, but she believes Bacon wrote Shakespeare -- while riding in a saucer over New Atlantis, I suppose. It's the invariable sign of the crackpot -- they believe not just some but all of the guff. Not  only saucers and Bacon, but then there is vegetarianism, reincarnation, compost farming, pyramidology, hollow earth, instant wisdom through psychedelic drugs, gut-level thinking smarter than Einstein's induced by bongo drums, the whole lot, besides being unalterably opposed to every chemical and every engineering discovery that s holding our collapsing civilization together. Did you notice how she didn't turn a hair when I mentioned plutonium in the drinking water. But she went pale when I added fluoride." And with that he snatched up Psycho, hurdled himself back into the armchair beside which he'd just very carefully set his glass. He began to croon at the kitten, holding it to his chest and rocking a little, as if only that behavior could preserve his sanity. The kitten fought wildly for a moment, then quieted. "Uh-huh," said Kitty-ComeHere, agreeing with her husband but without any great vehemence. She knew the habit husbands have of berating to their wives any woipan to whom they are sexually attracted. She yawned. "I'm going to bed," she said, moving about, turning out lights. "Leave on that Tensor lamp across from me," Old Horsemeat said. "I've got to hypnotize Psycho first, and it'll do for a candle. That kooky woman got her all roiled up. My God, Helen, don't you realize it's cult-crazy people like her who are trying to kill science and hurry us into a new dark age?" Kitty-Come-Here stopped and thought for a while and then said judiciously, "I wouldn't worry about Miss Neering. Harry. I think her crackpot delusions are very superficial. Underneath she's much more interested in small, deep saucers of brandy than the flying kind -- and in tall, sexy Earthmen rather than little old green men from outer space. She started up the stairs. Old Horsemeat just shrugged. Rhythmically stroking Psycho, he began to croon in deep winning tones, "You're getting sleepy, little cat, very sleepy. You can hardly hold your head up. You're getting sleepier -- " Psycho started wriggling. K tty-Come-Her stopped on the sixth step and looked back "at Old Horsemeat. "I am going to bed," she repeated. "You can hypnotize Psycho all night. Or read Herman Hesse. Or get dead drunk and pass out on the floor. Nobody cares. This is Liberty Hall. But -- " a new and somewhat knifelike tone came into her voice -- "but -- and I want you to listen to this, Gummitch -- " The big cat lifted his head from where he lay again on his throne and looked straight at KittyCome-Here. "But," she continued, the word now a small explosion, "if that big brutal Svengali over there merely tries to stir out of this house tonight in the direction of Miss Neering's, say on the excuse of returning that kooky slut her compact and handkerchief -- oh, we saw him shove them down in the crack of the couch, didn't we, Gummitch, when he thought neither of us would notice? Well, then you bite him, Gummitch, you bite him good and hard. And if he still persists, you come upstairs and bite me until I'm wide awake and insane with anger." Gummitch dropped his head again with the effect of a curt nod of affirmation. Old Horsemeat did not deign to rely. KittyCome-Here's footsteps proceeded upward and died down the hall. The living room was eerie with its one small cone of bright light in the great mass of semidarkness. Old Horsemeat began to chant rumblingly, "Now you're getting sleepier and (yawn) sleepier, little cat. You can hardly hold your eyes open -- " Psycho began another bout of wriggling. Gummitch lifted his head again and eyed her with peculiar cat-to-kitten fierceness. Psycho quieted once more. "You're getting still sleepier, little cat," Old Horsemeat rumbled on. "Every little cat muscle in you is relaxing (yawn) until you're limp as a dishrag. Now your eyes are completely closed. Your head is down. You're asleep, little cat, you're a -- " The hypnotism worked. Old Horsemeat's head sank back, his eyes closed fully and his rumbling changed into a gentle snore. HI E yes bright as diamonds, Psycho held absolutely still in the big, limp hands. For twenty seconds the comfortable old living room was quiet as a crypt, except for the gentle snoring. Psycho eased from between the hands, flowed down Old Horsemeat's trousered thigh and landed beside Gummitch like a puff of coherent smoke. Without a word or a look, Gummitch turned, made a short run past the Tensor's bright cone, and sprang through the cat door. Psycho swiftly followed, executing a comically frantic twist and a clawing pull midway. They stood side by side at the top of the front-porch steps. The faintly cool yet balmy night was alive (for cats) with many sounds, from the soft panting of a big dog in the high-fenced yard beyond Miss Neering's place to the stumbling walk of a nearby beetle over crisp, fallen leaves. Moonlight sprinkled down on them, a palpable silver rain. And there were cat-multitudinous sights (a many-layered world of sharp shadows) and scents and the pressure of a faint breeze on whiskers and fur, and the upward thrust of painted old wood under paw-pads. Tonight this shadowy, silvery, murmury world was spiced with excitement and carried also a special call, yearning, imperious and enravishing. Gummitch made his head into a compass and slowly turned it this way and that, hunting the vector of the call. Finally a needle of nerves stopped rocking. His head and eyes were directed at the hedge in front of Miss Neering's place. Again without word or sidewise look, he trotted in that direction with Psycho loping close at his right side, head level with the big cat's shoulder. A fixed male cat, the Mad Eunuch, in whom neutering had produced a weird belligerence and with whom Gummitch had had many famous fights, came tracking after them as they reached the hedge and went slinking along it. But Gummitch paid the new and more careless paw-paddings no attention. Even Psycho did no more than stiffen his silvery fur. And for once the Mad Eunuch did not run amuck, only followed two dozen cat paces behind. There also fell into line, still farther back, an almost skeletally gaunt alley cat, whom Old Horsemeat had nicknamed the Flying Dutchman for his raggedy black, dirty-white and reddish fur and his habit of always approaching tremblingly and with an infinite caution the Hunter back door and then tearing off in mad panic if someone came out or even if footsteps sounded too loudly inside. Gummitch himself had never been able to contact this unhappy hobo cat, for whom he felt considerable sympathy because of his own background as a starved and orphaned kitten. If he hadn't been rescued by Old Horsemeat and Kitty-ComeHere -- and hadn't died -- he might well have become such a dismal bindlestiff. A s the little cat cortege passed the hedge and started along the high fence beyond it, the big dog began to bark hysterically. But the cats ignored this utterly, except that Psycho jumped over Gummitch, sudden as an electric shock, light and noiseless as a feather, and then proceeded along as if nothing had happened and as if her courage had never faltered, except that now she was on the bigger cat's larboard instead of starboard side. Nor, across the street and moving in the same direction, did the big sleek black male and his silvery tiger consort take any note of the sudden torrent of canine noise. Nor did even the Flying Dutchman do more than tremble a little harder as he single-footed forward. Evidently the dog found something eerie in this utter lack of reaction from cats to his most horrible threats, for his barking suddenly became more whimpering than hysterical and faded down abruptly as he fled to the protection of his porch and magic doormat. Ahead was a small park with a grove of trees in its center, all balmy in the moonlight. It was there that Gummitch's compass led them -- and not Gummitch's alone, for now it was clear that there was a trickling of cats from all the streets around -- tabbies, Persians, Siamese, tiger and barred, alleys, house and store -- and all silently and unconflictingly headed for the grove in the park. A cop on his beat would surely have noticed them. But the two cruising by in their squad car could not see low-striding cats. In fact, they were becoming unable to see night-time human pedestrians, except as potential rioters, thieves, looters, delinquents and co-killers. An old drunk crouching away almost cat-low from the police headlights did notice the streaming cats and he studied them blinkingly, long after the police car was gone. Fuzzily the thought came to him that a world with sights as strange as this might still be worth living in -- or perhaps it was only that the delay lowered the alcohol content of his blood -- at any rate, the hazy idea of suicide sank back down into his subconscious like miasma into a marsh. He turned back toward Skid Row from the street that led toward the river. A girl saw the cats, though her boy friend didn't. He was intent only on her. Anns around each other, they were headed toward the grove. She thought the cats were kind of beautiful but they spooked her. So she said, "Honey, I've changed my mind. Like let's go to my place like we planned." He said, "But, baby, you just said you were afraid your folks -- " She said, "I just remembered IV they're sure to be away all night. They always get stoned and pass out when they go to the Wilsons'." He said, "I don't know. It doesn't sound too safe to me. She said, "Are you scared, honey?" He said, "Of course not. But the way you keep changing your mind is driving me out of my gourd." She said, "Please, honey, I'd rather. And it'll be nicer." He said fondly, "You're a freak, baby, a complete freak." She said, "Besides, I'd get uptight with all these cats watching us." He said, noting them belatedly, "Crazy. Must be Bast-worship night. Luna in Leo. Cats high and doing their God-thing. Make my nose run -- not their fault, just allergy. Okay, okay, honey. Anything you say." The lovers turned back. The cats flowed across the springy turf, their vari-colored fur all bright platinum to gleaming obsidian in the moonlight, no spectral colors at all. As their first ranks entered the grove, there was a faint crackling of fallen leaves and the platinum-obsidian became a moving variation of brightness in the moon-dapple everywhere. No, not quite everywhere. Near the center of the grove, on the side away from the moon, was an ellipse of unbroken blackness a little more than twenty feet long. T his shadow was cast by a bulge-centered, flattish, circular object poised in the treetops exactly over the small glade in the middle of the grove. At first glance it would have seemed to rest on the branches all around. But then it would have been seen that the branches up there were hardly more than twigs, not strong enough to support such an object even if formed of thinnest aluminum. And in any case the twigs were not bent particularly downward. It would have become clear that the object, which resembled two huge saucers clapped together rim to rim, merely rested among the slim branches, held up by some invisible power of its own. The , cats filled the grove, crowding around the black ellipse, but none entering it, as if it were a black abyss and they all nosing at its brim. A bough creaked and a large, slim shape dropped down to crouch effortlessly in a moonpied, wide crotch midway between the circular vehicle and the ground. All the cats looked up, their eyes close-paired moonstones or pearls baroque with bulging, vertical black streaks. "'Alio, li'l fren's," a soft yet vibrant voice called down. "I'm glad many of you came tonight, for I've news. May be a relief to some and just may make a few sad for a while. But not to worry, any of you." The accent of the voice was very strange and the tone stranger. If one can imagine the purring of a eat, or a tiger, shaped to human speech, shaped to English, one gets an approximation. Stranger still, perhaps, though most appropriate, all the cats below had begun to purr like sleepy beehives the instant the shape had dropped to the crotch. "You 'ave a good week, li'l sneakers?" the voice continued in a note of affectionate badinage. "Meat, clear water, milk? The monkeys decent to you?" The purring continued to rise like a low-pitched note, sounded pianissimo, in an orchestra of cellos or viola da gambas. But here and there it changed to low wailings and mewings. "Tha's bad. Tha's 'bominable. Well kill us some nice people, eh? Kill us some hippies. Kill us some cops." G radually the shape became clearer in the moon dapple. Imagine a figure midway between that of a leopard, a large cheetah and a slender and supple young woman covered with short fur. Still a mere approximation. It crouched a little, more like a young woman than a feline. But the hand by which it steadied itself had dark pads and long claws sharply curved at their tips. The femininity was definite. It was beautiful. Suddenly it leaped forward out of moon dapple into darkness and landed with hardly a sound in the center of the elliptical shadow. There it stretched prone, almost invisible except for the low silhouette it made with tufted ears and slowly switching tail, a slim recumbent sphinx. After a while there was the faintest glint of fur and claw and the glow of eyes whose pupils were like black flowers with five narrow petals tapering to points. "Come on. Come to me," the voice purred. "Don' be scared." There was a wait. Then Gummitch strode into the ellipse, bis head high, his fur flat. Psycho moved anxiously and strained forward but did not follow. The sphinx reached out a slim paw to catch up Gummitch. But instead of making his body yielding he stood with four legs straight and firmly planted and she contented herself with softly tickling his chest and stroking his back, her claws retracted. He suppled himself without becoming limp and he twisted his neck appreciatively, "I know you," she crooned, "you're the cool one. What is it you're called? Oh, yes, of course, Goomitch -- what a name! Trust the monkeys to think up one like that, bad as their language, which to tell the truth, Goomitch, I'd never have bothered to learn except I was bored and wanted to make familiar noises at you and your fren's. Oh, they're not all fren's, eh? Well, it's the same with my people. "But how about it, Goomitch, shall we get rid of the monkeys and put you cats in charge around here? Like it should be. Except you're all pretty little. "What's that you say? There are big cats across the waters? Bigger even than me? Amazing! I'll have to investigate if I still got the time. "They're here, too? In a big park? And you've seen them? Actually seen them yourself? Old Horsemeat took, no -- smoogled you in under his coat? What kind of a monkey name is Old Horsemeat? Oh, I see, it's your name for him, from what he feeds you. "You tried to talk to the big cats but they couldn't understand you? They were -- stupid? That doesn't make sense. You know what, Goomitch, I don' think you and your fren's are related to them at all. I think you're all dwarf jester-cats and playcats lef' behind when some ship of my people made a landing here millennia ago. Your cats' cradle is in the stars, maybe. Anyhow, you should come to my planet! There you'd find all the cats as much smarter than you as you're smarter than mice. "You don' think mice and rats are so stupid? Well -- butterflies then, gol'fish. "The big cats are dangerous? Now you're talking like a monkey. They keep them behind bars? In cages? That's indecent! That's a crime against the universe! The monkeys should be destroyed, if only for est'etic reasons. I think I'll kill as many of them as I can before I go. "You wouldn't like that? What kind of a cat you are, Goomitch? You've got a slave mentality! What do your fren's say?" The slim sphinx lifted her magnificent head, tufted ears peaked, fur bristling, long whiskers a-twitch, lips drawn back from fangs, five-petaled eyes flashing. The purring round about increased. The cats pushed closer inward, though still none of them besides Gummitch ventured from the moon-dappled space into the black ellipse. The circle of their small eyes gleamed like rosaries of pearls. Slowly" swiveling her head, the sphinx asked clearly, thrice, "Should I kill the monkeys?" There were mewings, hissings and wails, though the purring still predominated. The black, five-pointed stars of the sphinx's pupils contracted and she looked upward a little and held very still, as if listening to the inaudible and dissecting and numerating it. At last she dropped her head and said, "Ffft! They're slaves too, except for a few lonelies and pure blood-mads and some that, excuse my bad manners, aren't very right in their heads. I should have expected they were all cowards, when only one came when I called." Again she lifted her head. "Won' some more of you come to me, please? Won' jus' one? "What's that you say now, Goomitch? You're not a slave? You live with the monkeys as an equal? No, that can't be. Someone's -- how do you say? -- sold you a bill of goods. "No, not even with one monkey is it possible... Monkeys are just monkeys, always. "I don't quite... Yes. Yes. Oh, now I understand. You think you control what your monkey does, or at least have fifty per cent control? That's what every slave believes -- when times are good. But when times are bad, when there's hunger, something stolen, something broken, a child scratched, then's the moment of truth. 'Alio, who's this?" The sphinx's gaze went beyond Gummitch. Trembling in every emaciated member and putting one shaking foot at a time in front of the next ahead, as if he were walking a tight wire, the Flying Dutchman had stepped across the boundary of darkness. His ears were laid back, his bigpupiled, protuberant eyes stared, his ragged hair was irregularly erected, he panted, showing his yellow fangs, one of which was broken. His slack, long, pale-pinkand-black tongue lolled from the side of his mouth. Finally he came within the sphinx's reach and stopped, as if he had expended all his courage and energy in the act of a lifetime. He swayed and almost fell over. V F ar more slowly, tentatively and gently than she had with Gummitch, the sphinx crept out a paw and touched him thistledown lightly. As she featherstroked him, he responded more swiftly and completely than Gummitch had and soon collapsed into the padded, fur-edged hand. She carefully lifted him and held him lightly against her breast. "There, there, there, Flyin' Dushman," she crooned. "My, my, oh, yes, but you've had a hard life. But you never been behind bars. You never los' your bravery." She looked up. "What's that you're askin', Goomitch? Oh, you noticed my 'if I still got the time' and 'before I go.' You got a mind like a detective. Well, it's true what you guessed. Listen to me, all of you! My sub-etheric the... Saber-tooth, you'd say, with only me outboard -- finally got noticed and a star-drive ship bound from Alpha Libra Four to the Pleiades is picking me up at dawn at the top of your ionosphere above your south pole." The purring of almost all the cats turned to a subdued caterwauling and to whimpering mews. "That's nice," the sphinx said. "I'm glad you're sorry a little. I mus' say I'm a li'l sorry too, jus' on your account, though I'll be glad to leave monkeyland! "One thing more." With a final caress she set the Flying Dutchman down as far away from her as Gummitch stood. The hobo cat reeled a little, but then although trembling once more, got his balance. "I 'ave space for three or four of you aboard. Who wants to come?" The purring recommenced, became a great soft vibration. All the cats in the moonlight strained forward one more time, yet not one entered the inky ellipse. " 'Ow about you, Goomitch?" the sphinx asked winningly. "You come with me, eh?" From the edge of the ellipse, Psycho mewed anxiously. Gummitch stared the sphinx straight in the eyes. Then without changing his gaze, he deliberately moved backward half the length of his body. At the same time the Flying Dutchman gave a rasping, ragged "Phrrrt!" like an aged drunk trying to baby-talk. He staggered forward. The sphinx caught him up again and said tenderly, laughing at herself, "So you's all I get, you old wreck, you ancient mariner. I bet you and your parasites burn out my demicrobing machine!" She looked up. "Remember me," she said, impassive-faced. "Tell your kittens about me. Life's not so bad here and now, you think. A few of you, like Goomitch, even dream of an impossible cat-man symbiosis. But the times will come again, even here, when you're hunted down as witch-things, yes, hunted for food. Remember me. And then when your day comes, as it will, put down the monkeys without mercy. And when you finally get the star-drive, come visit me at the Pleiades. Ask at any inhabited planet in the cluster. Remember." When Kitty-Come-Here, again cleared-eyed, primped and lacerobed, came briskly downstairs the next morning, Old Horsemeat was still asleep, pain-faced, with Psycho in his lap, while Gummitch was coiled on his cushion. As she went around to whir drapes apart and let in blasts of sunlight, the two cats wakened. Gummitch mewed a casual ' good morning," and started toward the kitchen. Psycho followed him. Old Horsemeat's eyes slowly came ungummed. Then he gave a sizable start. "Oh, my God, Helen," he said. "Easy on that light. Why didn't you make me go upstairs to bed? I 'in so stiff I know I'm going to break something unkinkitig." "Up to bed?" she asked in mock amazement, whirring another set of drapes apart. "Why, I was letting you have your night on the tiles and it's your own fault if you were too unenterprising to anything but pass out and get creaky-jointed. For that matter, I gave all three of you your night on the tiles and none of you seems to have taken advantage.' What stay-by-the-f ires! " "There wasn't any fire," Old Horsemeat complained morosely as he gingerly worked with his fingers at his neck and the smalt of his back. "In fact, it's still damn chilly, you would-be murderess." Next door Eloise Neering woke with the thought, "That big, old, conceited lecher and his brunette Lucille-Ball wife! What a scene! And all those crazy cats!" For many years the credit line "ilalded some of the most imaginative (remember Dragon Masters and Specter?) artwork In our pages. With this issue that name moves to the masthead as Jack Gaughan becomes Associate Art Director of pointment we have long anticipated. In recognition of his outstanding work in the field, Jack has received three Hugos to date, and he will be the guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis in September -- only one other artist has been so honored in the field. "I have been reading science fiction," Jack says, "since a nun in a Catholic high school made me read Out of the Silent Planet as punishment for opening a big mouth; and I've been hung up on the stuff ever since." Leaving home base in Ohio after serving in the army, Jack came to New York and did the nine-to-five routine as art director and consultant for various ad agencies and film companies. Till his wife encouraged him to stop making money and to do what he really wanted. He's been sf-ing ever since. Believe it or not, Jack lives in a big, bat-filled (the winged kind) belfry in Rifton, New York with wife Phoebe, son Brian, daughter Norah and mother-in-law Susan -- all artists. When he doesn't have a paint brush in hand, he's holding onto a hose and putting out Rifton fires; he's secretary of the local volunteer fire department. And there he sits, as we write this, thinking "What in hell am I going tion readers at the Labor Day convention... L agrad Timmothane walked across the yellow spongeplastic floor of the Hospital library to Information -- a multifaceted computer -- and stared with confusion at its steel-blue features. t From his right a feminine voice said' pleasantly, "You're new, Green-eyes. May I help you?" The girl had appeared from a door next to the computer and was offering a smile to match the cordial 'ay she'd spoken. "I don't know if you have any tapes on it yet, but I'm interested in any information on the Far East New." The girl turned from him, began punching rhythmically at the computer keyboard and said. "Are you thinking of joiningthe survey?" "No. Rather, T don't know yet. My brother is out in the New, and I suppose I'm considering it. Right now I'm resting for the Operation." Lagrad hesitated and then added courteously, "I'm Fifth Gardner for the Hospital Circle until the Operation." She turned back to him. Mixed with an odd far-away look in her eyes was a mood that could have been anger. Lagrad felt confused; had he said something wrong? "I'm sorry," the girl said. "We have nothing on that new Sector." Lagrad noticed the piece of jewelry over the girl's left breast. Molded from gold and a large red stone, the heart-shaped brooch was almost phosphorescent but easily hidden by the pink curls of her dress -- a dress style in perfect match with the top-knot of pink curls resting on the back of her head like the crest of a bird. Her forehead and scalp back to the curls had been rouged pink and -- now that Lagrad thought about it -- the girl was attractive, even in her painted way. His eyes returned to the brooch. Inside his head, Lagrad's heart croaked into sarcastic coherency: So someone still respects the shape I'm in... Lagrad sent back a sharp thought. Keep silent. Yon know that's impossible, his heart retorted. L agrad managed to disregard the very real voice that sizzled in his head, all over his body. The Operation, he reflected to calm himself, would soon remedy permanently the annoyance of that voice. He had been staring at the girl for a minute when she said, still upset about something, "If you're wondering about my brooch, it has a special meaning for me." After a moment's hesitation she added: "I suppose you're another who feels no compunction about going through with the Operation!" Her sarcastic tone was unexpected, as was the subject of her comment. Lagrad said, "I don't understand." I do, said his heart. Shut up, heart! Let me talk to this girl... Lagrad calmed himself again by remembering that the Operation would be in three weeks; in three weeks his heart would be silenced and replaced with a synthetic heart that would never bother him with words. "I really don't know what you mean." "I'm sure you don't. We're both young but I have gotten to know my heart and the Truth. The Operation is very wrong." Lagrad had never heard talk like this before. And the girl was so forward. "And you won't understand what l mean," the girl resumed, "until you've really listened to your heart. Haven't you heard what it's trying to tell you. Your heart has as much right to live as you do. Green-eyes." Again the gauche colonial-class use of the appellation -- which meant, as all such breaching of proper names meant, a liking for him. But the liberty the girl Was now taking socially with Lagrad bothered him much less than her negative opinion of the heart operation. "When is your Operation?" the girl asked, her anger waning. "In a few weeks." some time talking about your heart?" Lagrad smiled, understanding now. The girl was just an easy "love-to" and the talk about the Operation was meant to make him curious, her come-on line. Lagrad had no objections. Though he'd never had relationships with those women society called Iove-tos, he knew that involvement with oneor two of them a year was acceptable. It wasn't written down anywhere -- but he knew. "When?" Lagrad smiled again. "Tomorrow evening at eight. In the room behind that door." She added, "My name is Beodora P'Att'ann." Lagrad looked to the smooth door behind the girl, then nodded. "I'm Lagrad Timniolhane." Your name is Lecher, his heart boomed. Shut up, heart... As Lagrad turned to leave, he noticed again the faraway look in the girl's eyes. pital Circle Lagrad had his own tower for gardening. Below his tower thirty grassy acres were ribbed with aesthetic shrubs and flowers, all stretching to the territory borders of the other gardners, or to the wall of the Hospital -- that monolithic building where he would soon be inhaling the anesthesia for his Operation. Everyone at twenty-one years of age -- the age for the Operation, the age when the heart's murmurings became at once totally comprehensible and obnoxious because of their coherency -- went to a Control hospital world, was employed in a relaxing job of gardening, library work, room maintenance or supply-ship unloading and awaited his or her appointment in the Operations room. The whole procedure -- preparation and Operation -- was not particularly unpleasant. And, according to doctors of all specializations, the Operation was mandatory for an adulthood of physical and mental health. The control panel in front of Lagrad offered a lone blinking light, the symbol of the last mobile garden tool patrolling its territory under Lagrad's command: one killer machine was still out looking for unesthetic plants which random nature insisted on sneaking into the hospital grounds. Dusk was settling now, and Lagrad deactivated the last killer, which began to coast toward the subterranean housing for the eighteen similar garden tools. He found himself thinking of his brother, of the life his brother had chosen. Micccl was the rebel of the family. He had chosen not to enter the Mal-space Biotronics Engineer Guild of Lagrad's father. He had chosen the New. Waiting around for the Operation -- Lagrad realized -- also gave one time to make the big decision: either to marry a woman, retain the security of employment in one's father's guild, and remain on one of the Control worlds, most of which were like the Cruxplanet. Earth; or to leave the Control Systems entirely, postpone marriage perhaps indefinitely and depart for the virgin darknesses of the New galaxies, as his brother had done quite recently and quite romantically with the Survey. I Lagrad had that decision to make. There was no woman in his life, so the New had the advantage. R epeating the path that had led him to Beodora the previous morning, Lagrad entered the main library room, walked to the information computer, stopped to gaze at the door behind the counter and passed through an opening in the counter to reach the rendezvous door. Before he could knock, the door slid open and he froze. The room beyond yawned at him in a colorful tableau of faces, showing him the nearer features ' of all-pink Beodora P'Att'ann, who had just opened the door for him -- and also the farther features of a dozen young men and women dressed in various vogues of the day: a violet curl-dress with matching conical hair style; a chartreuse man's jump-suit with transparent plasticioth sleeves; a saffron-colored star-burst outfit. But most important, Lagrad noticed they were all wearing heart-brooches like Bcodora's. The girl had been serious. She wasn't a love-to after all. Before Lagrad could brood on his disappointment, Beodora took him by the arm, by his own transparent sleeve, and pulled him slowdy into the room. Faint smiles were beginning to appear on all the faces in the room but no one spoke. Lagrad w'as uncomfortable in the silence. Abruptly Beodora addressed her fellow members of the club. "This is Lagrad Timmothane, who is residing here on Greenjohnson in preparation for his Operation." To Lagrad she said, "We are all librarians, Greeneyes, and our sharing of one belief makes us a minority club here at the Hospital." Again to her colleagues, she said, "Submitting or not to the Operation is an individual's prerogative. We have no right to intimidate Lagrad into a decision against the Operation but I do believe we have the right to express our belief." The librarians continued to watch him, still with faint smiles. After a pause Beodora went on: "As librarians we know the tapes in our library by content as well as by number and subject indices. Consequently we know history. We know the past and one learns from the past. Lagrad, please listen to what the past says. Over and over again it tells that man's heart should remain in his chest -- where it was born to be -- and not be ripped from the blood-roots of man's breast to be replaced with a synthetic pump." As if on cue, a tall young man about twenty-five spoke suddenly. He quoted a strange piece of literature, pro-heart and antiOperation. Then another librarian spoke up, quoting -- and then another and another. In fifteen minutes Lagrad was dizzy. The voices of the librarians were telling him the same strange thing over and over again. "Keep your heart -- "Listen to the past -- " . "Keep your heart -- " After quote upon quote, the voices were fusing into one sound, woven together now by Beodora's sudden voice, quoting and quoting. "I heard a wise man say, give crowns and pounds and guineas, but not your heart away, and oh, 'tis true, 'tis true; God made a heart of gold, of gold, shining and sweet and true, gave it a home of fairest mold, blest it, and called it -- you; two evils, monstrous either one apart: a cry of absence, absence in the heart!" His dizziness roared. Over it Lagrad heard Beodora whisper just to him, "I like you, Greeneyes. And I like your heart. Keep your heart, Green-eyes. For me." Lagrad turned suddenly, broke away from Beodora's touch, stumbled from the library and walked quickly across the neatly trimmed grass toward his dormitory. His heart remained silent. Lagrad was sincere when he said, "Thank you, heart, for your silence." I t was embarrassing, but at #:# the next afternoon after work, Lagrad found himself seeking Beodora in the library. "I'm sorry about last night. I hadn't realized so many others would be there with you." Lagrad found it easy to gaze into her faraway look and to disregard the formality he'd always been taught and to confide in her. "We're sorry, too. But it seems you just don't know how to listen, to think about things that are new to you." The girl's condescension was heavy and Lagrad felt angry for a moment. Silence reigned. Beodora's expression was pink marble. Under the pressure of the silence, Lagrad's anger died. He nodded, sighed and amazed himself by saying, "You are so right. I am naive. My life up to now has been quite limited. I will try to listen better." He added: "I wanted to ask you if you'd care to go with me to the Ponds after you've finished here. Beodora flashed a wise, smile and said, "I would, yes... but aren't you afraid I'll start lecturing you again?" Lagrad appreciated the humor, feeling at ease for the first time in a long time. Returning the smile, he was suddenly aware that the Operation question was secondary in his mind. This strange girl named Beodora -- definitely not a love-to -- was the prime attraction, her odd credo concerning the Operation coming second. They went to the Ponds that evening and every evening for two weeks, unless they were hearing tapes, ancient and modern, which Beodora had selected for them from the library. The tapes covered the subject of the human heart but there were also words about love, green worlds, happiness, joy, ecstasy, and marriage. Marriage. Lagrad began thinking of marriage, and going to the New began to dim in appeal. L agrad discovered that Beodora was two years older than he, and she had originally come to 'the hospital world for the Operation -- but had decided against it when she realized the Operation was an atrocity against life and man. During that time she had also decided to marry. But to marry only the right kind of man, a Truth-seeking man. Beodora was a fine young woman and Lagrad even enjoyed it when she lectured him about history when they were by the Ponds -- or in the side room of the library -- or by the flowers around his dormitory. "Man's been changing. Evolution molds him. Among other things, man has gradually lost his hair. Once he had hair on the front half of his scalp and on his chest. Once man's arms hung almost down to his knees instead of to his hips, like today. Once man had five toes instead of three. And once man had a silent heart. Then, when man stepped off his nest-planet -- the planet we call Crux or Earth -- and offered his vulnerable body to radiation poisons of Mal-space, his heart changed and began to babble, incoherently at first, just as our lungs are doing today. In time, man's heart started speaking to him coherently -- just as our lungs will do some day. And man decided all talking hearts would have to be removed. Too much competition for man's talking minds, man said. The weave of the heart had become the structure of a pump plus the tapestry of a thinking mind and man felt insecure. And man always strikes out whatever makes him feel insecure." Then Lagrad's heart would follow with: You dicin' t create me. I was born with you. Should one brother kill the other? Remember the legend of Satan-Cain? Give me a chance, and you will benefit from my presence... Then Beodora would resume: "Just because man has been replacing his real heart with a synthetic one for over a century does not mean lie's right in doing so. Man has blundered often in history. Once he believed one small planet was the center of the universe and that everything circled it. Once he believed he was very special, the only lifeform with intelligence and love in the universe, chosen by an omni-creator for the honor of wearing Intelligence, Love and Blessing. The Miracle Asteroids of a beautiful peripatetic race now somewhere at the far reaches of the universe proved man wrong about that, too. Now man believes he should kill his talking heart. You and your heart are almost like twins, brothers, Green-eyes. What your heart feels and knows is nearly the same as what you feel and know." You say " Nearly the same," They're not ever exactly the same? Not entirely the same, his heart would answer him.  have my own ego. You have yours. I feel you, and you feel me. I am a human-heart-being, you a humanbeing. If I felt only what you felt, I would not be trying to convince you of my right to go on living within you. Give me a chance, and compatability will come. You'll see... The day finally arrived on which Beodora's usual subtlety or reticence on the matter of marriage dissolved. She said, with her faraway look, deep, dark and beautiful, "I don't think I could marry a man who was missing his real heart. I'm sure I could not, Green-eyes." At this Lagrad felt frightened and quickly made up his mind against both the Operation and going to the New. I t's been four months, heart, since I canceled the operation, and you've been with me, speaking clearly and helpfully. You've listened, praised and complimented me when I've tried to raise the courage to propose formally to Beodora. You listened through my ears when I told my parents I had decided against the Operation. You heard their anger. You watched through my eyes when I met some more of Beodora's librarian friends with their heartbrooches, faraway looks and perpetually faint smiles. As you must know, I'm not happy, heart.  worry about many things. About having to find work elsewhere until the Guild Directive comes through in a norm-year or so. I worry about larger matters too. You should not be worrying, his heart said firmly. There's nothing really negative in your life... His heart was silent. I wish you'd talk to me now, heart... His heart was formal. I only offer words and decisions when you ask for them or when your emotional state is such that you could be helped by my advice. Maybe so, but still I wish you'd give me more time to think things out on my. own before helping me with them... Lagrad felt tired, sad and confused. He had been walking toward his dormitory and now, changing directions, he began to stride quickly toward the library. To his mind's eye his heart was a black entity recently suffused with , secrecy. The curiosity Lagrad felt about it was half fear, as he contemplated the strange new personality emerging from his heart. The dark side of the heart, the human heart... Perhaps, Lagrad considered, there were tapes in the library that spoke of a dark side. Beodora was working in a back storeroom of the library. Lagrad entered the library for the first time without her supervision and checked out literature tapes on the subject of hearts. In an audio-visual cubicle, Lagrad listened to the tapes and, in twenty minutes of spinning, crackling and speaking from the past, the tapes gave him the dark side of the heart. "... we may live without conscience and live without heart but civilized man cannot live without cooks; consume my heart away, sick with desire and locked on to a dying animal it knows not what it is; the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: Who can know it?" Lagrad rushed from the library, the dark quotations acidic on his mind. His heart began objecting loudly. You don't understand... T he rendezvous for the day was scheduled for #:# at the Ponds, But no, Lagrad concluded, he would not see Beodora today. He'd miss the rendezvous and wait for her to come to him. She had deceived him. She was a librarian, so she must have known about man's distrust of his heart and still she hadn't mentioned it. As he plodded toward his dorm he thought rather sarcastically, Heart -- Aren't you going to give me any advice? You're being childish, Lagrad. You're still brooding about the times I've tried to help you with suggestions. Really, Lagrad. What is the sense of my waiting for you to think a long time about something? When my knowledge and wisdom are yours, you will eventually arrive at the same conclusions I do. Because I want to feel free to think. Only today you told me to plan the #:# meeting with Beodora so I could propose to . her. I wasn't even given the chance to think about it... If you're so worried about your future employment -- you really shouldn't be. Things will work out. I still suggest you go back to the Ponds now and wait for Beodora. Propose today... So you still suggest it. But what if I don't want to? Regardless of your feelings, I'm not going to talk to Beodora about marriage or anything else for that matter. She has deceived me... Lagrad walked faster toward his dorm. His heart was silent. Lagrad began to tremble. What's happening, heart? What are you doing? I'm disturbed, Lagrad. That is all. The voice of his heart rumbled through him, as dark as rivers of oil. I think it's to your best interest that you return to the Ponds and talk with Beodora. You must propose... You are threatening me, heart. You are threatening me by making my body tremble... No. I'm disturbed, so you're disturbed too. Physical functional reactions... No! You're intimidating me, Edited by Lester del Rey Will be back in the fall for it on your newsstands threatening me. I won't stand for that... His heart boomed. You're foolish, Lagrad. Do what I say. I'm you and you are me... That is not true. You're always saying that, just like Beodora. , . Between flashes of pain brought by his heart, Lagrad thought of Beodora, beginning to wonder, to suspect. Return to the Bonds and talk to Beodora. No... S uddenly a loud rushing static struck Lagrad 's mind. At once the quivering in his arms extended to all his limbs, his stomach, his groin. His knees buckled and the green grass carpet under him spun up to hit his face. He lay unmoving on the grass. Get up and go back to wait for her... , No. I'm your slave if I do... both of us. All I have to do is stop a valve. I shall cease functioning. , . No. Not your slave... Then die... Blood, surging, softly bellowing. No -- I'm not your -- A new gush of hot energy hit, exploded through all the fibers of Lagrad's body. A great starsized light novaed somewhere inside him. Lagrad screamed and the pulp of his mind was thrown into darkness. Now you'll go back and wait for Beodora... Lagrad the man could not hear his heart but his body rose on wobbly legs and began walking back to the Ponds. As Lagrad's body put one foot ahead of the other his heart enjoyed its new-found control of a human organism. His heart now had legs, eyes, fingers, organs of its own and all was proper. Lagrad, the man, was aware of cottony grays, icy blacks and fire reds, as he whimpered in the multiple wombs of his racial unconscious. At last free of those responsibilities of limbs and eyes, ears and heart, Lagrad slept, floating in a prenatal gelatin of the psyche, thinking of nothing but dreaming and dreaming of nothing but dreams. When Beodora stepped up to Lagrad in the evening mist by their Ponds, Lagrad's heart looked with its new-found eyes into the faraway look in Beodora's eyes, savored the thought of a marriage night soon to come and spoke with its recently conquered lips. Hello, Beodora. My heart is with you... Beodora P'Att'ann stared into Lagrad's eyes and smiled as she saw their new faraway look. "Hello, Heart... My heart has always been with you, her heart added with lips mastered two years before. -- Bruce McAllister I AM This story is not about anyone we like. How about you? I do MY job, which is hoeing corn. But I am disturbed by what I hear last night from this Janglefoot. Me and lot of other people hear him. But none of the folk would hear. He careful not to say what he say to us where any folk would hear. It would hurt their feeling. Janglefoot he is traveling people. He go up and down the land. But he don't go very far. He often back again to orate to us again. Although why he say it more than once I do not understand. He always say the same. He is Janglefoot because one foot jangle when he walk and he won't let no one fix it. It make him limp but he won't let no one fix it. It is humility he has. As long as he limp and jangle he is humble people and he like humility. He think it is a virtue. He think that it become him. Smith, who is blacksmith, get impatient with him. Say he could fix the foot. Not as good as mechanic people, although better than not fixing it at all. There is a mechanic people not too far away. They impatient with him too. They think him putting on. Pure charity of Smith to offer fix the foot. Him have other work. No need to beg for it like some poor people do. He hammer all the time on metal, making into sheet, then send on to mechanic people who use it for repair. Must be very careful keep in good repair. Must do it all ourself. No folk left who know how to do it. Folk left, of course, but too elegant to do it. All genteel who left. Never work at all. I am hoeing corn and one of house people come dow'n to tell me there is snakes. House people never work outdoors. Always come to us. I ask real snake or moonshine snake and they say real snake. So I lean my hoe on tree and go up hill to house. Grandpa he is in hammock out on front lawn. Hammock is hung between two trees. Uncle John he is sitting on ground, leaning on one tree. Pa he is sitting on ground, leaning on other tree. Sam, say Pa, there is snake in back. So I go around house and there is timber rattler and I pick him up and he is mad at me and and hammer me real good. I hunt around and find another rattler and a moccasin and two garter snake. Garter snakes sure don't amount to nothing, but I take them along. I hunt some more but that is all the snakes. I go down across cornfield and wade creek and way back into swamp. I turn snakes loose. Will take them long time to get back. Maybe not at all. Then I go back to hoeing. Important to keep patch of com in shape. No weeds. Carry water when it needs. Soil work up nice and soft. Scare off crows when plant. Scare off coon and deer when corn come into ear. Full time job. for which many thanks. Also is important. George use corn to make the moon. Other patches of corn for food. But mine is use for moon. Me and George is partners. We make real good moonshine. Grandpa and Pa and Uncle John consume it with great happy. Any left over boys can have. But not girls. Girls don't use moonshine. f do not understand use of food and booze. Grandpa say it taste good. I wonder what is taste. It make Uncle John see snakes. I do not understand that cither. I am hoeing corn when there is sound behind me. I look and there is Joshua. He is reading Bible. He always reading Bible. He make big job of it. Also he is stepping on my hills of corn. I yell at him and run at him. I hit him with the hoe. He run out of patch. He know why I hit him. I hit him before. He know better than stepping on the corn. He stand under tree and read. Standing in the shade. That is putting on. Only folk need to stand in shade. People don't. Hitting him, I break my hoe. y I go to Smith to fix. Smith he glad to see me. Always glad to see each other. Smith and me are friend. He drop everything to fix hoe. Know how important corn is. Also do me favor. We talk of Janglefoot. We agree is wrong the way he speak. He speak heresy. (Smith he tell me that word. Joshua, once he get unmad at me for hitting him, look up how to spell. ) We agree. Smith and me, folk are genteel folk, not kind said by Janglefoot. Agree something should be done to Janglefoot. Don't know what to do. We say we think more of it. George come by. Say he need me. Folk out of drinking likker. So I go with him while Smith is fixing hoe. George he has nice still, real neat and clean. Good capacity. Also try hard to age moonshine but never able to. Folk use it up too fast. He have four five-gallon jugs. We each take two  and walk to house. We stop at hammock where three still are. Tell us leave one jug there, take three to woodshed, put away, bring back some glasses. We do. We pour out glasses of moonshine for Grandpa and Pa. Uncle John he says never, mind no glass for him, just put jug beside him. We do, leaving it uncork. Uncle John reach in pocket and bring out little rubber hose. Put one end in jug, other end in ruouth. He lean back against tree and start sucking. They make elegant picture-. ' Grandpa look peaceful. Rocking in hammock with big glass of moon balance on his chest. We  happy to see them happy. We go back to work. Smith has hoe fix and very sharp. It handle good. J thank him. He say he still confuse at Janglefoot. Janglefoot claim he read what he say. In old record. Found record in old city far away. Smith ask if I know what city is. I say I don't. We more confuse than ever. For that matter, don't know what record is. Sound important, though. I am hoeing corn when the Preacher pass and stop. Joshua gone somewhere. I tell him should have come sooner, Joshua standing under tree, reading Bible. He say Joshua only reading Bible, he interpret it. I ask him what interpret is. He tell me. I ask him how to spell it. He tell me. He know I try to write. He is helpful people. But pompous. Night come on and moon is late to rise. Can no longer hoe for lack of seeing. So lean hoe against tree. Go to still to help George now making moonshine. George is glad of help. He running far behind. I wonder to him why Janglefoot say same thing over and over. He say is repetition. T ask him repetition. He not sure. Say he think you say thing often enough people will believe it. Say folk use it in olden day. Make other folk believe thing that isn't so. I ask him what he know of olden day. He say not very much. He say he should remember, but he doesn't. I should remember too, but I can't remember. Too long ago. Too much happen since. It is not important except for what Janglefoot is saying. George has good fire burning under still and it shine on us. We stand around and watch. Make good feeling in the gizzard. Owl talk long way off in swamp. Do not know why fire feel good. No need of warm. Do not know why owl make one feel lonesome. I no lonesome. Got George right here beside me. There is so many things I do not know. What city is or record. What taste is. What olden day is like. Happy, though. Do not need to understand for happy. People come from house, running fast. Say Uncle John is sick. Say he need doctor. Say he no longer seeing snakes. Seeing now blue alligator. With bright pink spots. Uncle John must be awful sick. Is no blue alligator. Not with bright pink spots. George say he go to house to help, me run for Doc. George and house people leave, going very fast. I leave for Doc, also going fast. Finally find Doc in swamp. He has candle lantern and is digging root. He always digging root. Great one for root and bark. He make stuff out of them for repairing folk. He is folk mechanic. He standing in muck, up to knee. He cover with mud. He is filthy people. But he feel bad, hearing Uncle John is sick. Do not like blue alligator. Next he say is purple elephant and that is worst of all. We run, both of us. I hold lantern at alligator hole while Doc wash mud off him. Never do to let folk seeing him filthy. We go to hut where Doc keep root and bark. He get some of it and we run for house. Moon has come up now, but we keep lantern. It help moonlight some. W E come to foot of hill with house on top of hill. All lawn between foot ofhill and house. All lawn except for trees that hold up hammock. Hammock still is there, but empty. It blow back and forth in breeze. House stand up high and white. Windows in it shining. Grandpa sit on big long porch that is in front of house, with white pillars to hold up roof. He sit in rocking chair. He rock back and forth. Another rocking chair beside him. He is only one around. Can see no one else. Inside of house women folk is making cries. Through tall window I can see inside. Big thing house people call chandelier hang from ceiling. Made of glass. Many candles in it. Candles all are burning. Glass look pretty in light. Furniture in room gleam with light. All is clean and polish. House people work hard to keep it clean and polish. Take big pride. We run up steps to porch. Grandpa say, you come too late. My son John is dead. I do not understand this dead. When folk dead put them into ground. Say words over them. Put big stone at their head. Back of house is special place for dead. Lot of big stones standing there. Some new. Some old. Some so old cannot read lettering that say who is under them. Doc run into house. To make sure Grandpa say right, perhaps. I stay on porch, unknowing what to do. Feel terrible sad. Don't know why I do. Except knowing dead is bad. Maybe because Grandpa seem so sad. Grandpa say to me, Sam sit down and talk. I do not sit, I tell him. People always stand. It was outrage of him to ask it. He know custom. He know as well as I do people do not sit with folk. God damn it to hell, he say, forget your stubborn pride. Sitting is not bad. I do it all the time. Bend yourself and sit. In that chair, he say, pointing to one beside him. I look at chair. I wonder will it hold me. It is built for folk. People heavier than folk. Have no wish to break a chair with weight. Take much time to make one. Carpenter people work for long to make one. But I think no skin off my nose. Skin off Grandpa's nose. He the one that tell me. So I square around so I hit the chair and bend myself and sit. Chair creak, but hold. T settle into it. Sitting feel good. I rock a little. Rocking feel good. Grandpa and me sit, looking out on lawn. Lawn is real pretty. Moonlight on it. First lawn and then some trees and after trees cornfield and other fields. Far away owl talk in swamp. Coon whicker. Fox bark long way off. It do beat hell, say Grandpa, how man can live out his life, doing nothing, then die of moonshine drinking. You sure of moon, I ask. I hate to hear Grandpa blaming moonshine. George and me, we make real good moonshine. , Grandpa say, it couldn't be nothing else. Only moonshine give blue ' alligator with bright pink spots. No purple elephant, so say Grandpa. t i wonder what elephant might be. So much that I don't know. Sam, say Grandpa, we a sorry lot. Never had no chance. Neither you nor us. Ain't none of us no good # . We folk sit around all day and never do a thing. Hunt a little, maybe. Fish a little. Play cards. Drink likker. Feel real Energetic, maybe I'll play some horseshoe. Should be out doing something good and big. But we never are. While we live we don't amount to nothing. When we die we don't amount to nothing. We're just no God damn good. He went on rocking, bitter. I don't like the way he talk. He feel bad, sure, but no excuse to talk the way he was. Elegant folk like him shouldn't talk that way. Lay in hammock all day long, shouldn't talk that way. Balance moonshine on his chest, shouldn't talk that way. I uncomfortable. Wish to get away, but impolite to leave. i D own at bottom of hill, where lawn begin, I see many people. Standing, looking up at house. Pretty soon come slow up lawn and look closer at house. Saying nothing, just standing. Paying their respect. Letting folk know that they sorrow too. We never was nothing but white trash, say Grandpa. I can see it now. Seen it for long, long time but could never say it. I can say it now. We live in swamp in houses falling down. Falling down because we got no gumption to take care of them. Hunt and fish a little. Trap a little. Farm a little. Sit around and cuss because we ain't got nothing. Grandpa, I say. I want him to stop. I don't want to hear. Don't want him to go on saying .what Janglefoot been saying. But he pay me no attention. He go on saying. Then, long, long ago, he say, they learn to go in space very, very fast. Faster than the light. Much faster than the light. They find other worlds. Better than the Earth. Much better worlds than this. Lot of ships to go in. Take little time to go there. So everybody go. Everyone but us. Folk like us, all over the world, are left behind. Smart ones go. Rich ones go. Hard workers go. We are left behind. We aren't worth the taking. No one want us on this world. Have no use for us on others. They leave us behind, the misfits, the loafers, the poor, the crippled, the stupid. All over the world these kind are left behind. So when they all are gone, we move from shacks to houses the rich and smart ones lived in. No one to stop us from doing it. All of them are gone. They don't care what we do. Not any more they don't. We live in better houses, but we do not change. There is no use to change even if we could. We got you to take care of us. We have got it made. We don't do a God damn thing. We don't even learn to read. When words are read over my son's grave, one of you will read them, for we do not know how to read. Grandpa, I say. Grandpa. Grandpa. Grandpa. I feel cryinging all inside. He had done new wave vs. old wave The battle of the century -- only it's not going to be fought, at least not on the Berkley list. Our approach to SF is and will be mercilessly eclectic, looking only for books the reader will want to read -- and will be glad to have read. We're doing SF by Wells, Heinlein, Dick, Zelazny, Laumer, Knight, Simak (that whole crowd) -- books that range from Dangerous Visions to the Astounding anthology. You could call it the Permanent Wave. This month from Berkley (SI #, #) #X#) '... and in September (XI #I , #) and Brian W. Aldiss (SI #, #) plus something special (XI #, #) If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Ave., N. Y., N.Y. # it now. He had took away the elegant. Took away the pride. He do what Janglefoot never could. Now, say Grandpa, don't take on that way. You got no reason to be prideful either. You and us we are the same. Just no God damn good. There were others of you and they took them along. But you they left behind. Because you were out of date. Because you were slow and awkward. Because you were heaps of junk. Because they had no need of you. They wouldn't give you room. They left both you and us because neither of us was worth the room we took. Doc came out of door fast and purposeful. He say to me I got work for you to do. All the other people coming up the lawn, saying nothing, slow. I try to get out of chair. I can't. For first time I can't do what I want. My legs is turned to water. Sam, say Grandpa, I am counting on you. When he say that, I get up. I go down steps. I go out on lawn. No need for Doc tell me what to do. I done it all befofe. I talk to other people. I give jobs to do. You and you dig grave. You and you make coffin. You and you and you and you run to other houses. Tell all the folk Uncle John is dead. Tell them come to funeral. Tell them funeral elegant. Much to cry, much to eat, much to drink. You get Preacher. Tell him fix sermon. You get Joshua to read the Bible. You and you and you go and help George make moonshine. Other folk be coming. Must be elegant. All done. I walk down the lawn. I think on pride and loss. Elegant is gone. Shiny wonder gone. Pride is gone. Not all pride, however. Kind of pride remain. Hard and bitter pride. Grandpa say Sam sit down and talk. Grandpa say Sam I counting on you. That is pride. Hard pride. Not soft and easy pride like it was before. Grandpa need me. No one else will know. Grandpa never bring himself again to tell what he tell me. Secret between us. Secret born of sad. Life of others need not change. Go on thinking same. Janglefoot no trouble. No one believe Janglefoot if he talk forever. No one ever know that he tell the truth. Truth is hard to take. No one care except for what we have right now. We go on same. Except I who know. I never want to know. I never ask to know. I try not to know. But Grandpa won't shut up. Grandpa have to talk. Time come man will die if he cannot talk. Must make clean breast of it. But why to me? Because he love me most, perhaps. That is prideful thing. But going down the lawn, I crying deep inside. by Willy Ley I N classical mythology Jupiter abducted and seduced the fair maiden Europa; in current reality the Europeans are thinking hard about a practical way of invading the privacy of Jupiter -- the planet, that is. Preliminary plans for a space probe to Jupiter have just been published in West German technical journals. The mission to Jupiter is meant to become a proResearch Organization), possibly Since Jupiter orbits the sun at (or # times as far as the earth is from the sun) this is quite an ambitious project. But the Europeans have to think up ambitious or at least novel projects, just because they have done so little in space so far. Everything "obvious," like sending space probes to the moon and to the neighboring planets Venus and Mars has been done by the United States as well as by the Soviet Union. It would be difficult to think up an earth-orbiting satellite that can do something that has not been done by existing American, British, Canadian, French or Russian satellites. Of course there are still a number of possibilities. One could send a space probe sunward to take up a reasonably circular orbit around the sun at a distance of orbit would make the probe (i r 'se turn to Page #) I # Dune was an arid planet, inhabited by gigantic sandworms and wild Fremen whose customs were based on water scarcity. Its onlf useful product was melange, an addictive drug produced by the worms. This "spice" somehow aided longevity and gave an adept visions of the future. noble house, was dumped into the desert after the murder of his father. With the young boy was in the arts of the Bene Gesserit -- a female order devoted to mental discipline and the control of human genetic lines to produce a " kwisatz haderach," a messiah capable of fully using extrasensory powers. Under t' ir training, Paul was supposed to  them to this ideal. In learning to live with the Fremen, Paul was forced to take an overdose of spice in one of their rituals. He emerged with amazing knowledge of the future -- or futures. The Lady Jessica also took an overdose, with the result with full knowledge of all her mother had known. ' : Paul rose to leadership and eventually led the Fremen against his ancient enemies, the Harkonnen rulers and their Sardaukar soldiers. In a bitter battle during which his friend and teacher, Paul defeated them. He became ruler, taking the Harkonnen heir, sort. But he refused to consummate the marriage, remaining with his desert mate, the Fremen woNow, twelve years later, Paul rules a mighty empire of stars and has become the god-like center of a religion built around his visions and the legends growing out of it. This Qizarate is the official religion of all his empire. And against it the other quasipolitical, quasi-religious forces of humanity have just begun to organize. Among these is the Bene Gesserit, which is headed by the Reverend Mother G A I U S lost control of Paul and his mother and must depend on the weak help of their trainee, Princess Irulan. Allied with them more or less is the Bene Tleilax, supposedly amoral scientists; the Tleilaxu representing them is can shape himself to look like any man or woman. These two groups have enlisted the aid of the Spacing Guild, which must control the melange trade, since only spice visions permit navigating between the stars. The Guild is represented more fishlike than human and must live in a tank. His main function now is to use his own touch against the future to obscure Paul's vision so their plotting will not be detected. Princess Irulan is sent back to Paul, instructed to keep giving Chani a drug that induces sterility and to seduce Paul into giving her an heir -- something she desperately wants. Chani advises Paul to give in to her. But Paul refuses. He is bitter and disturbed, troubled by his visions which are uncertain but indicate that he may be the very instrument of doom which he is trying to avoid for the future. He is sure, however, that having an heir to the throne by Irulan will destroy all his hopes. The conspirators send a ship to Paul's Keep on the plains of Arakeen. Paul quickly detects, the presence of the Reverend Mother Mohiam on board and has her arrested. But there are others on the ship. Scytale has also come, who is the product of Tleilaxu life science. Scytale secretly visits a Fremen who once served in Paul's army but is now old and bitter. From the old man, Scytale learns all he can. Then he betrays the Fremen and makes off with a girl from the neighborhood who has been brain-burned and addicted to the semuta drug. Meantime, Edric remains with his ship. He offers Paul a present from the Guild. The present is something of a shock. It looks rather like Duncan Idaho -- alive and unharmed, save that his eyes have been replaced by metal ones. Edric says it is a ghola -- a product of Tleilaxu genius. The body of Idaho was rescued and carefully regrown from its cell patterns, though all memories vanished with death. as the ghola is now named. He cannot understand why his visions had showed no Duncan Idaho in his future. He asks the ghola, who answers quite candidly. "I have been sent to destroy you." But the ghola does hot know how. He tells Paul to send him away -- but Paul cannot do that to what had once been so close to him. VI Truth suffers from too much analysis. -- Ancient Fremen Saying A see you in such circumstances," Irulan said. She stood just inside the cell door, measuring with care the various capacities of the room in her Bene Gesserit way. It was a three-meter cube carved with cutterays from the veined brown rock beneath Paul's Keep. For furnishings, it contained one flimsy basket chair occupied now by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a pallet with a brown cover upon which had been spread a deck of the new Dune tarot cards, a metered water tap above a reclamation basin and a Fremen privy with moisture seals. It was all sparse, primitive. Yellow light came from anchored and caged glowglobes at the four corners of the ceiling. "You've sent word to the Lady Jessica?" the Reverend Mother asked. "Yes, but I don't expect her to lift one finger against her firstborn," Irulan said. She glanced at the cards. They spoke of the powerful turning their backs on supplicants. The card of the Great Worm lay beneath Desolate Sand. Patience was counseled. Did one require the tarot to see this? she asked herself. A guard stood outside watching them through a metaglass window in the door. Irulan knew there'd be other monitors on this encounter. She had put in much thought and planning before daring to come here. To have stayed away carried its own perils, though. The Reverend Mother had been engaged in prajna meditation interspersed with examinations of the tarot. Despite a feeling that she would never leave Arrakis alive, she had achieved a measure of calm through this. One's oracular powers might be small, but muddy water was muddy water. And there was always the Litany against Fear. She had yet to assimilate the import of the actions which had precipitated her into this cell. Dark suspicions brooded in her mind and the tarot hinted at confirmations. Was it possible the Guild had planned this? A yellow-robed Qizara, head shaved for a turban, beady eyes of total blue in a bland round face, skin leathered by the wind and sun of Arrakis, had awaited her on the heighliner's reception bridge. He had looked up from a bulb of spice coffee being served by an obsequious steward, studied her a moment, put down the coffee bulb. "You are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?" To replay those words in her mind was to bring that moment alive in the memory. Her throat had constricted with an unmanageable spasm of fear. How had one of the Emperor's minions learned of her presence on the heighliner? "It came to our attention that you were aboard," the Qizara said. "Have you forgotten that you are denied permission to set foot on the holy planet?" "I am not on Arrakis," she said. "I'm a passenger on a Guild heighliner in free space." "There is no such thing as free space, Madame." She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his tone. "Muad'dib rules everywhere," he said. "Arrakis is not my destination." she insisted. "Arrakis is the destination of everyone," he said. And she feared for a moment that he would launch into a recital of the mystical itinerary which pilgrims followed. This very ship had carried thousands of them. B ut the Quizara had pulled a golden amulet from beneath his robe, kissed it, touched it to his forehead and placed it to his right ear to listen. Presently, he restored the amulet to its hidden place. "You are ordered to gather your luggage and accompany me to Arrakis." "But I do have other business elsewhere!" In that moment, she suspected Guild perfidy... or exposure through some transcendant power of the Emperor or his sister. Perhaps the Steersman did not conceal the conspiracy, after all. The abomination, Alia, certainly possessed the abilities of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. What happened when those powers were coupled with the forces which worked in her brother? "At once!" the Qizara snapped. Everything in her cried out against setting foot once more oh that accursed desert planet. Here was where the Lady Jessica had turned against the Sisterhood. Here was where they'd lost Paul Atreides, the kwisatz haderach they had sought through many long generations of careful breeding. "At once," she agreed. "There's little time," the Qizara said. "When the Emperor commands, all his subjects obey." So the order had come from Paid ! She thought of protesting rather vigorously to the heighliner's Navigator-Commander but the futility of such a gesture stopped her. What could the Guild do? "The Emperor has said I must die if I set foot on Dune," she said, making a last desperate effort. "You spoke of this yourself. You are condemning me if you take me down there." "Say no more," the Qizara ordered. "The thing is ordained." That was how they always spoke of Imperial commands, she knew. Ordained! The holy ruler whose eyes could pierce the future had spoken. What must be must be. He had seen it, had He not? With the sick feeling that she was caught in a web of her own spinning, she had turned to obey. And the web had become a cell which lrulan could visit. She suddenly saw that lrulan had aged somewhat since their meeting on Wallach IX. New lines of worry spread from the corners of her eyes. Well... time to see if this Sister of the Bene Gesserit could obey her vows. "I've had worse quarters," the Reverend Mother said. "Do you come from the Emperor?" And she allowed her fingers to move as though in agitation. lrulan read the moving fingers and her own fingers flashed an answer as she spoke, saying: "No -- I came as soon as I heard .you were here." "Won't the Emperor be angry?" the Reverend Mother questioned her. Again, her fingers moved: imperative, pressing, demanding. "Let him be angry. You were my teacher in the Sisterhood, just as you were the teacher of his own mother. Does he think I will turn my back on you as she has done?" And Irulan's finger-talk made excuses, begged. T he Reverend Mother sighed. On the surface, it was the sigh of a prisoner bemoaning her fate, but inwardly she felt the response as a comment on lrulan. It was futile to hope the Atreides Emperor's precious gene pattern could be preserved through this instrument. No matter her beauty, this Princess was flawed. Under that veneer of sexual attraction lived a whining shrew more interested in words than in actions, lrulan was still a Bene Gesserit, though, and the Sisterhood had always reserved certain techniques to use on some of its weaker vessels as insurance that vital instructions would be carried out. Beneath small talk about a softer pallet and better food, the Reverend Mother brought up her arsenal of persuasion and gave her orders: the brother-sister crossbreeding must be explored. lrulan almost broke at receiving this command. "I must have my chance!" Irulan's fingers pleaded. "You've had your chance," the Reverend Mother countered. And she was explicit in her instructions: Was the Emperor ever angry with his concubine? His unique powers must make him lonely. To whom could he speak in any hope of being understood? To the sister, obviously. They shared this loneliness. The depth of their communion must be exploited. Opportunities must be created to throw them together in privacy. Intimate encounters must be arranged, The possibility of eliminating the concubine niust be explored. Grief somehow dissolved, traditional barriers. lrulan protested. If Ghani were killed, suspicion would fall immediately upon the PrincessConsort. Besides, there were other problems. Chani had fastened upon an ancient Fremen diet supposed to promote fertility and the diet eliminated all opportunity for administering the contraceptive drugs. Lifting the suppressives would make Chani even more fertile. The Reverend Mother was outraged and concealed it with difficulty while her fingers flashed their demands. Why had this information not been conveyed at the beginning of their conversation? How could Irulan be that stupid? If Chani conceived and bore a son, the Emperor would  declare the child his heir! Irulan protested that she understood the dangers, but the genes might not be totally lost. Damn such stupidity! the Reverend Mother raged. Who knew exactly what suppressions and genetic entanglements Chani might introduce from her wild Fremen strain? The Sisterhood must have only the pure line! And an heir would renew Paul's ambitions, spur him to new efforts in consolidating his Empire. The conspiracy could not afford such a setback. Defensively, Irulan wanted to know how she could have prevented Chani from trying this diet? But the Reverend Mother was in no mood for excuses. Irulan received explicit instructions now to meet this new threat. If Chani conceived, an abortifact must be introduced into her food or drink. Either that, or she must be killed. An heir to the throne from that source must be prevented at all costs. An abortifact would be as dangerous as an open attack on the concubine, Irulan objected. She trembled at the thought of trying to kill Chani. Was Irulan deterred by danger? The Reverend Mother wanted to know, her finger-talk conveying deep scorn. Angered, Irulan signaled that she knew her value as an agent in the royal household. Did the conspiracy wish to waste su.ch a valuable agent? Was she to be thrown away? In what other way could they keep this close a watch on the Emperor? Or had they introduced another agent into the household? Was that it? Was she to be used now, desperately, and for the last time? I N a war, all values acquired new relationships, the Reverend Mother countered. Their greatest peril was that House Atreides should secure itself with an Imperial line. The Sisterhood could not take such a risk. This went far beyond the danger to the Atreides genetic pattern. Let Paul anchor his family to the throne and the Sisterhood could look forward to centuries of disruption for its programs. Irulan understood the argument, but she couldn't escape the thought that a decision had been made to spend the PrincessConsort for something of great value. Was there something she should know about the ghola? The Reverend Mother wanted to know if Irulan thought the Sisterhood composed of fools. When had they ever failed to tell Irulan all she should know? It was no answer, but an admission of concealment, Irulan saw. It said she would be told no more than she needed to know. How could they be certain the ghola was capable of destroying the Emperor? She could just as well have asked if melange were capable of destruction, the Reverend Mother countered. It was a rebuke with a subtle message, Irulan soon realized. For the Bene Gesserit "whip that instructs" informed her that she should have understood long ago this similarity between the spice and the ghola. Melange was valuable, but it exacted a price -- addiction. It added years to a life -- decades for some -- but it was still just another way to die. The ghola was something of deadly value. The obvious way to prevent an unwanted birth was to kill the prospective mother before conception, the Reverend Mother signaled, returning to the attack. Of course, Irulan thought. If you decide to spend a certain sum, get as much for it as you can. The Reverend Mother's eyes, her melange addiction, stared up at Irulan, measuring, waiting, observing minutiae. She reads me clearly, Irulan thought with dismay. She trained me and observed me in that training. She knows I realize what decision has been taken here. She only observes now to see how I will take this knowledge. Well, I will take it as a Bene Gesserit and a princess. Irulan managed a smile, pulled herself erect and thought of the evocative opening passage of the Litany Against Fear -- "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear..." When calmness had returned, she thought: Let them spend me.  will show them what a princess is worth. Perhaps Fll buy them more than they expected. After  a few more empty vocalizations to bind off the interview, Irulan departed. When she had gone, the Reverend Mother returned to her tarot cards, laying them out in the familiar fire-eddy pattern. Immediately, she got the Kwisatz Haderach of the Major Arcana and the card lay coupled with the Eight of Ships: the sybil hoodwinked and betrayed. These were not cards of good omen: they spoke of concealed resources for her enemies. She turned away from the cards, sat in agitation, wondering if Irulan might yet destroy them. The Fremen see her as the Earth Figure, a demi-goddess whose special charge is to protect the tribes through her powers of violence. She is Reverend Mother to their Reverend Mothers. I o Pilgrims who seek her out with demands that she restore virility or make the barren fruitful, she is a form of antimentat. She feeds on that strong human desire for the mysterious. She is living proof that the " analytic " has limits. She represents ultimate tension. She is the virgin-harlot -- witty, vulgar, cruel, as destructive in her whims as a coreolis storm. -- St. Alia of the Knife as taken from tire Irulan report. A ua stood like a black-robed sentinel figure on the south platform of her temple, the Fane of the Oracle which Paul's Fremen cohorts had built for her against a wall of his stronghold. She hated this part of her life, but knew no way to evade the temple without bringing down destruction upon them all. The Pilgrims (damn them! ) grew more numerous every day. I he temple s lower porch was crowded with them. Vendors moved among the Pilgrims, and there were minor sorcerers, haruspices and diviners, all working their trade in pitiful imitation of Paul Muad dib and his sister. Red and green packages containing the new Dune tarot were prominent among the vendors  wares, Alia saw. She wondered about the tarot. Who was feeding this into the Arrakeen market? Why had the tarot come to prominence at this particular time and place? Could it be to muddy Time? Spice addiction always conveyed some sensitivity to prediction. Fremen were notoriously fey. Was it an accident that so many of them dabbled in portents and omens here and now? She decided to seek an answer at the first opportunity. There was a wind from the southeast, a small leftover wind blunted by the scarp of the Shield Wall which loomed high in these northern reaches. The rim glowed orange through a thin dust haze underlighted by the late afternoon sun. It was a hot wind against her cheeks and it made her homesick for the sand, for .the security of open spaces. The last of the day's mob began descending the broad greenstone steps of "the lower porch, singly and in groups, a few pausing to stare at the keepsakes and holy amulets on the street vendors' racks, some consulting one last minor sorcerer. Pilgrims, supplicants, townfolk, Fremen, vendors closing up for the day -- they formed a straggling line that trailed off into the palm-lined avenue which led to the heart of the city. Alia's eyes picked out the Fremen, marking the frozen looks of superstitious awe on their faces, the half wild way they kept their distance from the others. They were her strength and her peril. They still captured giant worms for transport, for sport and for sacrifice. They resented the offworld Pilgrims, barely tolerated the townfolk of graben and pan, hated the cynicism they saw in the street vendors. One did not jostle a wild Fremen, even in a mob such as the ones which swarmed to Alia's Fane. There were no knifings in the Sacred Precincts, but bodies had been found... later. T he departing swarm had stirred up dust. The flinty odor came to Alia's nostrils, igniting another pang of longing for the open bled. Her sense of the past, she realized, had been sharpened by the coming of the ghola. There'd been much pleasure in those untrammeled days before her brother had mounted the throne -- time for joking, time for small things, time to enjoy a cool morning or a sunset, time...time... time... Even danger had been good in those days -- clean danger from known sources. No need then to strain the limits of prescience, to peer through murky veils for frustrating glimpses of the future. Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled." With an abrupt feeling of revulsion. Alia retreated from the platform into the shadows of the Fane and strode along the balcony which looked down into the glistening opalescence of her Hall of Oracles. Sand on the tiles rasped beneath her feet. Supplicants always tracked sand into the Sacred Chambers! She ignored attendants, guards, postulants and the Qizarate's omnipresent priestsycophants, and plunged into the spiral passage which twisted upward to her private quarters. There, amidst divans, deep rugs, tent hangings and mementos of the desert, she dismissed the Fremen amazons Stilgar had assigned as her own personal guardians. Watchdogs, more likely! When they had gone, muttering and objecting, but more fearful of her than they were of Stilgar, she stripped off her robe, leaving only the sheathed crysknife on its thong around her neck, strewed garments behind as she made for her bath. He was near, she knew -- that shadow-figure of a man she could sense in her future, but could not see. It angered her that no power of prescience could put flesh on that figure. He could be sensed only at unexpected moments while she scanned the lives of others. Or she came upon a smoky outline in solitary darkness when innocence lay coupled with desire. He stood just beyond an unfixed horizon, and she felt that if she strained her talents to an unexpected intensity she might see him. He was there -- a constant assault on her awareness: fierce, dangerous, immoral. Moist warm air surrounded her in the bath. Here was a habit she had learned from the memoryentities of all the many uncounted Reverend Mothers who were hazily strung out in her awareness like pearls on a glowing necklace. Water, warm water in a sunken tub, accepted her skin as she slid into it. Green tiles with figures of red fish worked into a sea pattern surrounded the water. Such an abundance of water occupied this space that a Fremen of old would have been outraged to see it used merely for washing human flesh. He was near. It was lust in tension with chastity, she thought. Her flesh desired a mate. Sex held no casual mystery for a Reverend Mother who had presided at the sietch orgies. The tau awareness of her other-selves could supply any detail her curiosity required. This feeling of nearness could be nothing other than flesh reaching for flesh. Need for action fought lethargy in the warm water. A bruptly, Alia climbed dripping from the bath and strode wet and naked into the training chamber which adjoined her bedroom. The chamber, oblong and skylighted, contained the gross and subtle instruments which toned a Bene Gesserit adept into what was a complete physical and mental awarenesspreparedness. There were many mnemnonic amplifiers, digit mills from lx to strengthen and sensitize fingers and toes, odor synthesizers, t a c t i I i t y sensitizers, temperature gradient fields, pattern betrayers to prevent her falling into detectable habits, a few alpha-wave-response trainers, blink-synchronizers to tone abilities in analysis. In ten-centimeter letters along one wall, written by her own hand in mnemonic paint, stood the key reminder from the Bene Gesserit creed : "Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct. We learned how to learn. Before us, those instinct-ridden researchers possessed a very limited attention span -- often no longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty or more lifetimes never occurred to them. The concept of total muscle nerve training had not entered awareness." As she moved into the training room. Alia caught her own reflection multiplied thousands of times in the crystal prisms of a fending mirror swinging in the heart of a target dummy. She saw the long sword waiting on its brackets against the target, and she thought: Yes! I'll work myself to exhaustion -- drain the flesh and clear the mind. The sword felt right in her hand. She slipped the crysknite from its sheath at her neck, held it sinister and tapped the activating stud with the sword tip. Resistance came alive as the auta of the target shield built up, pushing her weapon away. Prisms glittered. And the target slipped to her left. Alia followed with the tip of the long blade, thinking as she often did that the thing could almost be alive. But it was only servomotors and complex reflector circuits designed to lure the eyes away from danger, to confuse and teach. It was an instrument geared to react as she reacted, an anti-self which moved as she moved, balancing light on its prisms, shifting its target, offering its counter-blade. Many blades appeared to lunge at her from the prisms, but only one was real. She countered the real one, slipped the sword past shield resistance to tap the target. A marker light came alive: red and glistening among the prisms...more distraction. Again, the thing attacked, moving at one-marker speed now, just a bit faster than it had at the beginning. She parried and, against all caution, moved into the danger zone, scored with the crysknife. Two lights glowed from the prisms. Again, the thing increased speed, moving out on its rollers, drawn like a magnet to the motions of her body and the tip of her sword. Attack-parry-counter. Attack-parry-counter... , now, and the thing was becoming more dangerous, moving faster with each light, offering more areas of confusion. Five lights. Sweat glistened on her naked skin. She existed now in a universe whose dimensions were outlined by the threatening blade, the target, bare feet against the hard practice floor, hard senses nerves muscle -- motion against motion. Attack-pariy-counter. Six lights... seven... Eight! In a recess of her mind there grew a sense of urgency, a crying out against such wildness as this. The instrument of prisms and target could not think, feel caution or remorse. And it carried a real blade. To go against less defeated the purpose of such training. That attacking blade could maim and it could kill. But the finest swordsmen in the Imperium never went against more than seven lights. Nine! Alia experienced a sense of supreme exaltation. Attacking blade and target became blurs among blurs. She felt that the sword in her hand had come alive. She was an anti-target. She did not move the blade; it moved her. Ten! Eleven! Something flashed past her shoulder, slowed at the shield aura around the target, slid through and tripped the detonating stud. The lights darkened. Prisms and target twisted their way to stillness. Alia whirled, angered by the intrusion, but her reaction was thrown into tension by awareness of the supreme ability which had hurled that knife. It had been a throw just timed to exquisite nicety -- just fast enough to get through the shield zone and not too fast to be deflected. And it had touched a onelight target. Alia found her own emotions and tensions running down in a manner not unlike that of the target dummy. She was not at all surprised to see who had thrown the knife. Paul stood just inside the training room doorway, Stilgar three steps behind him. Her brother's eyes were squinted in anger. Alia, growing conscious of her nudity, thought to cover herself, but found the idea amusing. What the eyes had seen could not be unseen. Slowly she replaced the sword in its sheath at her neck. "I presume you know how dangerous that was," Paul said. He took his time reading the reactions on her face and body: the flush of her exertions coloring her skin, the wet fullness of her lips. There was a disquieting femaleness about her that he had never considered in his sister. He found it odd that he could look at a person who was this close to him and no longer recognize her in the identity framework which had seemed so fixed and familiar. "That was madness," Stilgar rasped, coming up to stand beside Paul. The words were angry, but Alia heard awe in his voice and saw it in his eyes. UP leven lights," Paul said, Li shaking his head. "I'd have made it twelve if you hadn't interfered," she said. She began to pale under his close regard and added: "And why do the damned things have that many lights if we're not supposed to try for them?" # ? "A Bene Gesserit should ask the reasoning behind an openended system?" Paul asked. "I suppose you never tried for more than seven!" she said, anger returning. His attentive posture began to annoy her. "Just once," Paul said. "Gurney Halleck caught me on ten. My punishment was sufficiently embarrassing that I won't tell you what he did. And speaking of embarrassment... "Next time, perhaps you'll have yourselves announced," she said. She brushed past Paul into the bedroom, found a loose gray robe, slipped into it and began brushing her hair before a wall mirror. She felt sweaty, sad, a post coitum kind of sadness that left her with a desperate desire to bathe once more... and to sleep. "Why're you here?" she asked. "My Lord," Silgar said. There was an odd inflection in his voice that brought Alia around to stare at him. "We're here at Irulan's suggestion," Paul said, "as strange as that may seem. She believes, and information in Stil's possession appears to confirm it, that our enemies are about to make a major try for... "My Lord!" Stilgar said, his voice sharper. As her brother turned, questioning. Alia continued to look at the old Fremen naib. Something about him now made her intensely aware that he was one of the primitives. Stilgar believed in a supernatural world very near him. It spoke to him in a simple pagan tongue, dispelling all doubts. The natural universe in which he stood was fierce, unstoppable, and it lacked the common morality of the Imperium. "Yes, Stil," Paul said. "Do you want to tell her why we came?" "This isn't the time to talk of why we came," Stilgar said. "What's wrong, Stil?" Stilgar continued to stare at Alia. "Sire, are you blind?" Paul turned back to his sister, a feeling of unease beginning to fill him. Of all his aides, only Stilgar dared speak to him in that tone, but even Stilgar measured the occasion by its need. "This one must have a mate!" Stilgar blurted. "There'll be trouble if she's not wed, and that soon." Alia whirled away, her face suddenly hot. How did he touch me? Bene Gesserit self-control had been powerless to prevent her reaction. How had Stilgar done that? He hadn't the power of the Voice. She felt dismayed and angry. "Listen to the great Stilgar!" Alia said, keeping her back to them, aware of a shrewish quality in her voice and unable to hide it. "Advice to maidens from Stilgar, the Fremen!" "As I love you both, I must speak," Stilgar said, a profound dignity in his tone. "I did not become a chieftain among the Fremen by being blind to what moves men and women together. One needs no mysterious powers for this." P aul weighed Stilgar's meaning, reviewed what they had seen here and his own undeniable male reaction to his very own sister. Yes -- there'd been a ruttish air about Alia, something wildly wanton. What had made her enter the practice floor in the nude? And risking her life in that foolhardy way! Eleven lights in the fencing prisms! That brainless automaton loomed in his mind with all the aspects of an ancient horror creature. Its possession was the shibboleth of this age, but it carried also the taint of old immorality. Once they had been guided by an artificial intelligence, computer brains. The Butlerian Jihad had ended that, but it hadn't ended the aura of aristocratic vice which enclosed such things. Stilgar was right, of course. They must find a mate for Alia. "I will see to it," Paul said. "Alia and I will discuss this later -- privately." Alia turned around, focused on Paul. Knowing how his mind worked, she realized she'd been the subject of a mentat decision, uncounted bits falling together in that human-computer analysis. There was an inexorable quality to this realization -- a movement like the movement of planets. It carried something of the order of the universe in it, inevitable and terrifying. "Sirs," Stilgar said, "perhaps we'd..." "Not now!" Paul snapped. "We've other problems at the moment." Aware that she dared not try to match logic with her brother, Alia put the past few moments aside, Bene Gesserit fashion, and said: "Irulan sent you?" She found herself experiencing menace in that thought. "Indirectly," Paul said. "The information she gives us confirms our suspicion that the Guild is about to try for a sandworm." "They'll try to capture a small one and attempt to start the spice cycle on some other world," Stilgar said. "It means they've found a world they consider suitable." "It means they have Fremen accomplices!" Alia argued. "No offworlder could capture a worm!" "That goes without saying," Stilgar said. "No it doesn't," Alia said. She was outraged by such obtuseness. "Paul, certainly you... "The rot is setting in," Paul said. "We've known that for quite some time. I've never seen this other world, though, and that bothers me. If they..." "That bothers you?" Alia demanded. "It means only that they've clouded its location with Steersmen the way they hide their sanctuaries." Stilgar opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. He had the overwhelming sensation that his idols had admitted blasphemous weakness. Paul, sensing Stilgar's disquiet, said: "We've an immediate problem! I want your opinion, Alia. Stilgar suggests we expand our patrols in the open bled and reinforce the sietch watch. It's just possible we could spot a landing party and prevent the..." "With a Steersman guiding them?" Alia asked. "They are desperate, aren't they?" Paul agreed. "That is why I'm here." "What have they seen that we haven't?" Alia asked. "Precisely." A lia nodded, remembering her thoughts about the new Dune tarot. Quickly, she recounted her fears. "Throwing a blanket over us," Paul said. "By having adequate patrols," Stilgar ventured, "we might prevent the..." "We prevent nothing... forever," Alia said. She didn't like the feel of the way Stilgar's mind was working now. "We must count on their getting a worm," Paul said. "Whether they can start the melange cycle on another planet is a different question. They'll need more than a worm." Stilgar looked from brother to sister. Out of ecological thinking that had been ground into him by sietch life, he grasped their meaning. A captive worm couldn't live except within a small bit of Arrakis -- sand plankton, Little Makers and all. The Guild's problem was large, but not impossible. His own growing uncertainty lay in a different area. "Then your visions do not detect the Guild at its work?" he asked. "Damnation!" Paul exploded. Alia studied Stilgar, sensing the savage sideshow of ideas taking place in his mind. He was hung on a rack of enchantment. Magic! Magic! To glimpse the future was to steal terrifying fire from a sacred flame. It held the attraction of ultimate peril, souls ventured and lost. One brought back from the formless, dangerous distances something with form and power. But Stilgar was beginning to sense other forces, perhaps greater powers beyond that unknown horizon. His Queen Witch and Sorcerer Friend had already betrayed dangerous weaknesses. "Stilgar," Alia said, fighting to hold him, "you stand in a valley between dunes. I stand on the crest. I see where you do not see. And, among other things I see mountains which conceal the distances." "There are things hidden from you," Stilgar said. "This you've always said." "All power is limited," Alia said. "And danger may come from behind the mountains," Stilgar said. "It's something on that order," Alia said. Stilgar nodded, his gaze fastened on Paul's face. "But whatever comes from behind the mountains must cross the dunes." The most dangerous game in the universe is to govern from an oracular base. We do not consider ourselves wise enough or brave enough to play that game. The measures detailed here for regulation in lesser matters are as near as we dare venture to the brink of government. For our purposes, we borrow a definition from the Bene Gesserit and we consider the various worlds as gene pools, sources of teachings and teachers, sources of the possible. Our goal is not to rule, but to tap these gene pools, to learn, and to free ourselves from all restraints imposed by dependency and government. -- The Orgy As a Tool of Statecraft Chapter Three of The Steersman's Guide ill s that where your father I died?" Edric asked, sending a beam pointer from his tank to a jeweled marker on one of the relief maps adorning a wall of Paul's reception salon. "That's the shrine of his skull," Paul said. "My father died a prisoner on a Harkonnen frigate in the sink below us." "Oh, yes. I recall the story now," Edric said. "Something Harkonnen, his mortal enemy." Hoping he didn't betray too much of the abject terror which small enclosures such as this room imposed upon him, Edric rolled over in the orange gas, directing his gaze at Paul, who sat alone on a long divan of striped gray and black. "My sister killed the Baron," Paul said, voice and manner dry, "just before the battle of Arrakeen." And why, he wondered, did the Guild man-fish reopen old wounds in this place and at this time? The Steersman appeared to be fighting a losing battle to contain his nervous energies. Gone were the languid fish motions of their earlier encounter. Edric's tiny eyes jerked here, there, questing and measuring. The one attendant who had accompanied him in here stood apart near the line of houseguards ranging the end wall at Paul's left. The attendant worried Paul -- with his hulking, thicknecked, blunt and vacant face. The man had entered the salon, nudging Edric's tank along on its supporting field, walking with a strangler's gait, arms akimbo. Scytale, Edric had called him. Scytale, an aide. The aide's surface shouted stupidity, but the eyes betrayed him. They laughed at everything they saw. "Your concubine appeared to enjoy the performance of the face dancers," Edric said. "It pleases me that I could provide that small entertainment. I particularly enjoyed her reaction to seeing her own features simultaneously repeated by the whole troupe." "Isn't there a warning against Guildsmen bearing gifts?" Paul asked. And he thought of the performance out there in the Great Hall. The dancers had entered in the costumes and guise of the Dune tarot, flinging themselves about in seemingly random patterns that devolved into fire eddies and ancient prognostic designs. Then had come the rulers -- a parade of kings and emperors like faces on coins, formal and stiff in outline, but curiously fluid. And the jokes: a copy of Paul's own face and body, Chani repeated across the floor of the Hall, even Stilgar, who had grunted and shuddered while others laughed. "But our gifts have the kindest intent," Edric protested. "How kindly can you be?" Paul asked. "The ghola you gave us believes he was designed to destroy us." "Destroy you, Sire?" Edric asked, all bland attention. "Can one destroy a god?" words, stopped and glared at the guards. They were much farther from Paul than he liked. Angrily, he motioned them closer. "It's all right, Stil," Paul said, lifting a hand. "Just a friendly discussion. Why don't you move the Ambassador's tank over by the end of my divan?" Stilgar, weighing the order, saw that it would put the Steersman's tank between Paul and the hulking aide, much too close to Paul, but... "It's all right, Stil," Paul repeated, and he gave the private hand signal which made the order an imperative. Moving with obvious reluctance, Stilgar pushed the tank closer to Paul. He didn't like the feel of the container or the heavily perfumed smell of melange around it. He took up a position at the corner of the tank beneath the orbiting device through which the Steersman spoke. "To kill a god," Paul said. "That's very interesting. But who says I'm a god?" "Those who worship you," Edric said, glancing pointedly at Stilgar. "Is this what you believe?" Paul asked. "What I believe is of no moment, Sire," Edric said. "It seems to most observers, however, that you conspire to make a god of yourself. And one might ask if that is something any mortal can do... safely?" Paul studied the Guildsman. Repellent creature, but perceptive, It was a question Paul had asked himself time and again. But he had seen more than enough alternate timelines to have knowledge of worse possibilities than that of accepting godhead for himself. Much worse. These were not, however, the normal avenues for a Steersman to probe. Curious. Why had that question been asked? What could Edric hope to gain by such effrontery? Paul's thoughts went flick (The association of Tleilaxu would be behind this move) flick (The Jihad's recent Semoub victory would bear bn Edric's action) flick (Certainly various Bene Gesserit credos have already showed themselves here) flick... A process involving thousands of information bits poured flickering through his computational awareness. It required perhaps three seconds, no more. "Does a Steersman question the guidelines of prescience?" Paul asked, putting Edric on the weakest ground. This disturbed the Steersman, but he covered well, coming up with what sounded like a long aphorism: "No man of intelligence questions the fact of prescience, Sire. Oracular vision has been known to men since most ancient times. It has a way of entangling us when we least suspect. Luckily, there are other forces in our universe." "Greater ones than prescience?" Paul asked, pressing him. "If prescience alone existed and did everything, Sire, it would annihilate itself. To have nothing but prescience? Where could it be applied except to its own degenerating movements?" "There's always the human situation," Paul agreed. "A precarious thing at best," Edric said, "without confusing it by hallucinations." "Are my visions no more than hallucinations?" Paul asked, mock sadness in his voice. "Or do you imply that my worshipers hallucinate?" S tilgar, sensing the mounting tensions, moved a step nearer Paul and fixed his attention on the Guildsman reclining in the tank. "You twist my words. Sire," Edric protested. An odd sense of violence lay suspended in the words. Violence here? Paul wondered.   They wouldn't dare! Unless (and he glanced at his guards) the forces which protected him were to he used in replacing him. "But you accuse me of conspiring to make a god of myself," Paul said, pitching his voice that only Edric and Stilgar might hear. "Conspire?" "A poor choice of word, perhaps, my Lord," Edric said. "But significant," Paul said. "It says you expect the worst of me." Edric arched his neck and stared sideways at Stilgar with a look of apprehension. "People always expect the worst of the rich and powerful, Sire. It is said one can always tell an aristocrat: he reveals only those of his vices which will make him popular." A tremor passed across Stilgar's face. Paul looked up at the movement, sensing the thoughts and angers whispering in Stilgar's mind. How dared this Guildsman talk thus to Muad'dib? "You're not joking, of course." "Joking, Sire?" Paul grew aware of dryness in his mouth. He felt that there were too many people in this room, that the air he breathed had passed through too many lungs. The taint of melange, from Edric's tank felt threatening. "Who might my accomplices be in such a conspiracy?" Paul asked presently. "Do you nominate the Qizarate?" Edric's shrug stirred the orange gas around his head. He no longer appeared concerned by Stilgar, who continued to glare at him. "Are you suggesting that my missionaries of the Holy Orders, all of them, are preaching subtle falsehood?" Paul insisted. "It could be a question of selfinterest and sincerity," Edric said. Stilgar put a hand to the crysknife beneath his robe. Paul shook his head and said: "Then you accuse me of insincerity." "I'm not sure that accuse is the proper word, Sire." The boldness of this creature! Paul thought. And he said: "Accuse or not, you're saying my bishops and I are no better than power hungry brigands." "Power hungry, Sire?" Again, Edric looked at Stilgar. "Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality... and fall." "M'Lord," Stilgar growled at him "you've had men executed for less!" "Men, yes," Paul agreed. "But this is a Guild Ambassador." "He accused you of an unholy fraud!" Stilgar said. "His thinking interests me, Stil," Paul said. "Contain your anger and remain alert." "As Muad'dib commands." "Tell me, Steersman," Paul said, "how could we maintain this hypothetical fraud over such enormous distances of space and time without the means to watch every missionary, to examine every nuance in every Qizarate priory and temple?" "What is time to you?" Edric asked. puzzlement. And then he thought: Muad'dib has often said he sees past the veils of time. What is the Guildsman really saying? "Wouldn't the structure of such a fraud begin to show holes?" Paul asked. "Significant disagreements, schisms, doubts and confessions of guilt -- surely fraud could not suppress all these." "What religion and self-interest cannot hide, governments can," Edric said. "Are you testing the limits of my tolerance?" Paul asked. "Do my arguments lack all merit?" Edric countered. Does he want us to kill him? Paul wondered. Is Edric offering himself as a sacrifice? "I prefer the cynical view," Paul said, testing. "You obviously are trained in all the lying tricks of statecraft, the double meanings and the power words. Language is nothing more than a weapon to you and, thus, you try my armor." "The cynical view," Edric said, a smile stretching his mouth. "And rulers are always notoriously cynical where religions are concerned. Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon then is religion when it becomes the government?" Paul felt himself go inwardly still, a profound caution gripping him. To whom was Edric speaking? Damnably clever words, that were heavy with manipulation leverages -- that subtle undertone of comfortable humor, the unspoken air of shared secrets; his manner said he and Paul were two sophisticates, men of a wider universe who understood things not granted common folk. With a feeling of shock, Paul realized that he had not been the main target for all this rhetoric. This affliction visited upon the court had been speaking for the benefit of others -- speaking to Stilgar, to the household guards... perhaps even to the hulking aide. "Religious mana was thrust upon me," Paul said. "I did not seek it." And he thought: There! Let this man-fish think himself victorious in our battle of words! "Then why have you not disavowed it, Sire?" Edric asked. "Because of my sister, Alia," Paul said, watching Edric carefully. "She is a goddess. Let me urge caution where Alia is concerned lest she strike you dead with her glance." A gloating smile began forming on Edric's mouth, then was replaced by a look of shock. "I am deadly serious," Paul said, watching the shock spread, seeing Stilgar nod. In a bleak voice, Edric said: "You have mauled my confidence in you, Sire. And no doubt that was your intent." "Do not be certain you know my intent," Paul said, and he signaled Stilgar that the audience was at an end. To Stilgar's questioning gesture asking if Edric were to be assassinated, Paul gave a negative hand sign and amplified it with an imperative lest Stilgar take matters into his own hands now. Scytale, Edric's aide, moved to the rear corner of the tank and nudged it toward the door. When he came near Paul, he stopped and turned that laughing gaze on Paul, and said: "If my Lord permits?" "Yes, what is it?" Paul asked, noting how Stilgar moved close in answer to the implied menace from this man. "Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord." S cytale nodded pleasantly and gave Edirc's tank another nudge. They moved out of the salon, Edric supine in his tank, eyes closed. The Steersman appeared spent, all his nervous energies exhausted. Paul stared after the shambling figure of Scytale, wondering at the man's words. A peculiar fellow, that Scytale, he thought. While he was speaking, he had radiated a feeling of many people -- as though his entire genetic inheritance lay exposed on his skin. "That was odd," Stilgar said, speaking to no one in particular. Paul arose from the divan as a guard closed the door behind Edric and the escort. "Odd," Stilgar repeated. A vein began throbbing at his temple. Paul dimmed the salon's lights and moved to a window which opened onto an angled cliff of his Keep. Lights glittered far below -- pigmy movement. A work gang moved down there bringing giant plasmeld blocks to repair a facade of Alia's temple which had been damaged by a freak twisting of a sandblast wind. "That was a foolish thing, Usui, inviting that creature into these chambers," Stilgar said. Usui, Paul thought. My sietch name. Stilgar reminds me that he ruled over me once, that he saved me jrom the desert. "Why did you do it?" Stilgar asked, speaking from close behind Paul. "Data," Paul said. "I need more data." "Is it not dangerous to try meeting this threat only as a mentat?" That was perceptive, Paul thought. Mentat computation remained finite. You couldn't say something boundless within the boundaries of any language. Mentat abilities had their uses, though. He said as much now, daring Stilgar to refute his argument. "There is always something on. the outside," Stilgar said. "Some things best kept outside." "Or inside," Paul said. And he accepted for a moment his own oracular mentat final summation. Outside, yes. And inside -- here lay the true horror. How could he protect himself from himself? They certainly were setting him up to destroy himself, but this was a position hemmed in by even more terrifying possibilities. His reverie was broken by the sound of rapid footsteps. The figure of Korba the Qizara surged through the doorway backlighted hallways. He entered as though hurled by an unseen force and came to an almost immediate halt when he encountered the salon's gloom. His hands appeared to be full of shigawire reels. They glittered in the light from the hall, strange little round jewels that were suddenly extinguished as a guardsman's hand came into view, closed the door. "Is that you, m'Lord?" Korba asked, peering into the shadows. "What is it?" Stilgar asked. "Stilgar?" "We're both here. What is it?" "I'm disturbed by this reception for the Guildsman." "Disturbed?" Paul asked. "The people say, m'Lord, that you honor our enemies." "Is that all?" Paul said. "Are those the reels I asked you to bring earlier?" He indicated the shigawire orbs in Korba's hands. "Reels... oh! Yes, m'Lord. These are the histories. Will you view them here?" "I've viewed them. I want them for Stilgar here." or me?" Stilgar asked. He r felt resentment grow at what he interpreted as caprice on Paul's part. Histories! Stilgar had sought out Paul earlier to discuss the logistics computations for the Zabulon conquest. Then the Guild Ambassador's presence had intervened. And now -- Korba with histories! "How much history do you know?" Paul mused aloud, studying the shadowy figure beside him. "M'Lord, I can name every world our people touched in their migrations. I know the reaches of Imperial..." "The Golden Age of Earth, have you ever studied that?" "Earth? Golden Age?" Stilgar was irritated and puzzled. Why would Paul wish to discuss myths from the dawn of time? Stilgar's mind still felt crammed with Zabulon data -- computations from the staff mentats: two hundred and five attack frigates with thirty Legions, support battalions, pacification cadres, and Qizarate missionaries... the food requirements (he had the figures right here in his mind) and melange... weaponry, uniforms, medals... urns for the ashes of the dead... the number of specialists -- men to produce raw materials of propaganda, clerks, accountants... spies... and spies upon the spies... "I brought with me the pulsesynchronizer attachment, also, m'Lord," Korba ventured. He obviously sensed the tensions building between Paul and Stilgar and was disturbed by them. Stilgar shook his head from side to side. Pulse-synchronizer? Why would Paul wish him to use a mnemnonic flutter system on a shigawire projector? Why scan for specific data in histories? This was mental work. As usual, Stilgar found he couldn't escape a deep suspicion at the thought of using a projector and attachments. The thing always immersed him in varied and disturbing sensations, an overwhelming shower of data which his mind sorted out later, surprising him with information he had not known he possessed. "Sire, I came with the Zabulon computations," Stilgar said. "Dehydrate the Zabulon computations!" Paul snapped, using the obscene Fremen term which meant that here was moisture no man could demean himself by touching. "M'Lord!" "Stilgar," Paul said, "you urgently need a sense of balance which can come only from an understanding of long-term effects. What little information we have about the old times, the pittance of data which the Butlerians left us, Korba has brought it for you. Start with Genghis Khan." "Genghis... Khan? Was he of the Sardaukar, m'Lord?" "Oh, long before that. He "He must have had formidable weaponry to kill that many, Sire. Lasbeams, perhaps, or..." "He didn't kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There s another emperor I want you to note in passing -- a Hitler. He ty good for those days. "Killed...by his legions?" "Yes." "Not very impressive statistics." ery good, Stil." Paul glanced Y at the reels in Korba's hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he could drop them and flee. "Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixtyplanets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since..." "Unbelievers!" Korba loudly protested. "Unbelievers all!" "No," Paul said. "Believers.' "My Liege makes a joke," Korba said, voice trembling. "The Jihad has brought ten thousand worlds into the shining light of..." , . , "Into the darkness," Paul said. "We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'dib's Jihad. I find it hard to imagine that anyone will ever surpass this. A barking laugh erupted from his "What now amuses Muad'dib?" Stilgar asked. "I am not amused. I merely had a sudden vision of the Emperor Hitler saying something similar. No doubt he did. "No other ruler ever had your powers," Korba argued. "Who would dare challenge you? Your legions now control all the known universe and all the..." "The legions control," Paul said. "I wonder if they know this?" , . "You control your legions, Sire," Stilgar interrupted, and it was obvious from the tone of his voice that he suddenly felt his own position in that chain of command, his own hand guiding all that power. Having set Stilgar's thoughts in motion along the track he wanted, Paul turned his full attention to Korba. "Put the reels here on the divan." As Korba obeyed, Paul said: "How goes the reception, Korba? Does my sister have everything well in hand?" "Yes, m'Lord." Korba's tone was wary. "And Chani watches from the spy hole. She suspects there may be Sardaukar in the Guild entourage." "No doubt she's correct," Paul said. "The jackals gather." "Bannerjee," Stilgar said, naming the chief of Paul's security detail, "was worried earlier that some of them might try to penetrate the private areas of the Keep." "Have they?" "Not yet." "But there was some confusion in the formal gardens," Korba said. "What sort of confusion?" Stilgar demanded. Paul nodded. "Strangers coming and going," Korba said, "trampling the plants, whispering to each other. I heard reports of some rather disturbing remarks." "Such as?" Paul asked. "Is this the way our taxes are  spent? I'm told the Ambassador himself asked that question." "I don't find that surprising," Paul said. "Were there many strangers in the gardens?" "Dozens, m'Lord." "Bannerjee stationed picked troopers at the vulnerable doors, m'Lord," Stilgar said. He turned as he spoke, allowing the salon's single remaining light to illuminate half his face. The peculiar lighting, the face, all touched a node of memory buried deep in Paul's mind -- something from the desert. Paul didn't bother bringing it to full recall, his attention being focused on how Stilgar had pulled back mentally. The Fremen had a tight-skinned forehead which mirrored almost every thought flickering across his mind. He was suspicious now, rather profoundly suspicious of his Emperor's odd behavior. "I don't like the intrusion into the gardens," Paul said. "Courtesy to guests is one thing, and the formal necessities of greeting an envoy, but this..." "I'll see to removing them," Korba said. "Immediately." "Wait!" Paul ordered as Korba started to turn. moment, Stilgar edged himself into a position where he could study Paul's face. It was deftly done. Paul admired the way of it, an achievement devoid of any forwardness. It was a Fremen thing: slyness touched by respect for another's privacy; a movement of necessity. "What time is it?" Paul asked. "Almost midnight, Sire," Korba said. "Korba, I think you may be my finest creation," Paul said. "Sire!" There was injury in Korba's voice. "Do you feel awe of me?" Paul asked. "You are Paul-Muad'dib who was Usui in our sietch," Korba said. "You know my devotion to... "Have you ever felt like an apostle?" Paul asked. Korba obviously misunderstood the words, but correctly interpreted the tone. "My Emperor knows I have a clean conscience!" "Shai-hulud save us," Paul murmured. The questioning silence of the moment was broken by the sound of someone whistling as he walked down the outer hall. The whistling was stilled by a guardsman's barked command as it came opposite the door. "Korba, I think you may survive all this," Paul said. And he read the growing light of understanding on Stilgar's face. "The strangers in the gardens, Sire?" Stilgar asked. "Ahh, yes," Paul said. "Have Bannerjee put them out, Stil. Korba will assist." "Me, Sire?" Korba betrayed deep disquiet. "Some of my friends have forgotten they once were Fremen," Paul said, speaking to Korba, but designing his words for Stilgar. "You will mark down the ones Chani identifies as Sardaukar and you will have them killed. Do it yourself. I want it done quietly and without undue disturbance. We must keep in mind that there's more to religion and government than approving treaties and sermons." "I shall obey the orders of Muad'dib," Korba whispered. "The Zabulon computations?" Stilgar asked. "Tomorrow," Paul said. "And when the strangers are removed from the gardens, announce that the reception is ended. The party's over, Stil." "I understand, m'Lord." "I'm sure you do," Paul said. IX Here lies a toppled god -- His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one. -- Tleilaxu Epigram A lia crouched, resting elbows on knees, chin on fists, and stared at the body on the dune -- a few bones and some tattered flesh that once had been a young woman. The hands, the head, most of the upper torso were gone -- eaten by the coriolis wind. The sand all around bore the tracks of her brother's medics and questors. They were gone now, all excepting the mortuary attendants who stood to one side with Hayt, the ghola, waiting for her to finish her mysterious perusal of what had been written here. A wheat-colored sky enfolded the scene in the glaucous light common to midafternoon for these latitudes. The body had been discovered several hours earlier by a lowflying courier whose instruments had detected a faint water trace where none should be. His call had brought the experts. And they had learned -- what? That this had been a woman of about twenty years, a Fremen who was addicted to semuta... and she had died here in the crucible of the desert from the effects of a subtle poison of Tleilaxu origin. To die in the desert was a common enough occurrence. But a Fremen addicted to semuta, this was such a rarity that Paul had sent her to examine the scene in the ways their mother had taught them. Alia felt that she had accomplished nothing here except to cast her own aura of mystery about a scene that was already mysterious enough. She heard the ghola's feet stir the sand; she looked at him. His attention rested momentarily upon the escort 'thopters circling overhead like a flock of ravens. Beware of the Guild bearing gifts. Alia thought. The mortuary 'thopter and her own craft stood on the sand near a rock outcropping behind the ghola. Focusing on the grounded 'thopters filled Alia with a craving to be airborne and away from here. But Paul had thought she might see something here which others would miss. She squirmed in her stillsuit. It felt raspingly unfamiliar after all the suitless months of city life. She studied the ghola, wondering if he might know something important about this peculiar death. A lock of his black-goat hair, she saw, had escaped his stillsuit hood. She sensed her hand longing to tuck that hair back into place. As though lured by this thought, his gleaming gray metal eyes turned toward her. The eyes set her trembling and she tore her gaze away from him. A Fremen woman had died here from a poison called "the throat of hell." A Fremen addicted to semuta. She shared Paul's disquiet at this conjunction. The mortuary attendants waited patiently. This corpse contained not enough water for them to salvage. They felt no need to hurry. And they'd believe that Alia, through some glyptic art, was reading a strange truth in these remains. No strange truth came to her. There was only a distant feeling of anger deep within her at the obvious thoughts in the attendants' minds. It was a product of the damned religious mystery. She and her brother could not be people. They had to be something more. And the Bene Gesserit had seen to that by manipulating Atreides ancestry. Their mother had contributed to it by thrusting them onto the path of witchery. A nd Paul perpetuated the difference. The Reverend Mothers encapsulated in Alia's memories stirred restlessly, provoking adab flashes of thought: Peace, Little One! You are what you are. There are compensations. She summoned the ghola with a gesture. He stopped beside her, attentive, patient. "What do you see in this?" she asked. "We may never learn who it was died here," he said. "The head, the teeth are gone. The hands... Unlikely such a one had a genetic record somewhere to which her cells could be easily matched." "Tleilaxu poison," she said. "What do you make of that?" "Many people can purchase such poisons." "True enough. And this flesh is too far gone to be regrown as was done with your body." "Even if you could trust the Tleilaxu to do it," he said. She nodded and stood. "You will fly me back to the city now." When they were airborne and pointed north, she said: "You fly exactly as Duncan Idaho did." He cast a speculative glance at her. "Others have told me this." "What are you thinking now?" "Many things." "Stop dodging my question, damn you!" "Which question?" She glared at him. He saw the glare, shrugged. How like Duncan Idaho, that gesture, she thought. Accusingly, her voice thick and with a catch in it, she said: "I merely wanted your reactions voiced to play my own thoughts against them. That young woman's death bothers  "I was not thinking about that." "What were you thinking about?" "About the strange emotions I feel when people speak of the one I may have been." "May have been?" "The Tleilaxu are very clever." "Not that clever. You were Duncan Idaho." "Very likely. It's the prime computation." "So you get emotional?" "To a degree. I feel eagerness. I'm uneasy. There's a tendency to tremble and I must devote effort to controlling it. I suddenly get...flashes of imagery." "What imagery?" "It's too rapid to recognize. They're flashes. Spasms...almost memories." "Aren't you curious about such memories?" "Of course. Curiosity urges me forward, but I move against a heavy reluctance. I think: 'What if I'm not the one they believe me to be?' I don't like that thought." "And this is all you were thinking?" "You know better than that. Alia." How dare he use my given name? She felt anger rise and go down beneath the memory of the way he'd spoken: softly throbbing undertones, casual male confidence. A muscle twitched along her jaw. She clenched her teeth.  sn't that El Kuds down I there?" he asked, dipping a wing briefly. She looked down at their shadows rippling across the promontory above Harg Pass, at the cliff and the rock pyramid containing the skull of her father. El Kuds -- the Holy Place. "That's the Holy Place," she said. "I must visit that place one day," he said. "Nearness to your father's remains may bring back memories I can capture." She saw suddenly how strong must be this need to know who he'd been. It was a central compulsion with him. She looked back at the rocks, the cliff with its base sloping into a dry beach and a sea of sand -- cinnamon rock lifting from the dunes like a ship breasting waves. "Circle back," she said. "Thf escort "They'll follow. Swing under them." He obeyed. "Do you truly serve my brother?" she asked, when he was on the new course, the escort following. "I serve the Atreides," he said, his tone formal. And she saw his right hand lift and fall -- almost the old salute of Caladan. A pensive look came over his face. She watched him peer down at the rock pyramid. "What bothers you?" she asked. His lips moved. A voice emerged, brittle, tight: "He was... he was... " A tear slid down his clicclc Alia found herself stilled by Fremen awe. He gave water to the dead! Compulsively, she touched a finger to his cheek, felt the tear. "Duncan," she whispered. He appeared locked to the 'thopter's controls and his gaze fastened to the tomb below. She raised her voice: "Duncan!" He swallowed, shook his head and looked at her, the metal eyes were now glistening. "I felt an arm... on my shoulders," he whispered. "I felt it! An arm." His throat worked. "It was... a friend. It was... my friend." "Who?" "I don't know. I think it was... I don't know." The call light began flashing in front of Alia, their escort captain wanting to know why they returned to the desert. She took the microphone, explaining that they had paid a brief homage to her father's tomb. The captain reminded her that it was late. "We will go to Arrakeen now," she said, carefully replacing the microphone. Hayt took a deep breath and banked their 'thopter around to the north. "It was my father's arm you felt, wasn't it?" she asked. "Perhaps." His voice was that of the mentat computing probabilities, and she saw he had regained his composure. "Are you aware of how I know my father?" she asked. "I have some idea." "Let me make it clear," she said. Briefly, she explained how she had awakened to Reverend Mother awareness before birth, a terrified fetus with the knowledge of countless lives imbedded in her nerve cells -- and all this after the death of her father. "I know my father as my mother knew him," she said. "In every last detail of every experience she shared with him. In a way, I am my mother. I have all her memories up to the moment when she drank the Water of Life and entered the trance of transmigration." "Your brother had once explained something of this." "He did? Why?" "I asked." "Why?" "A mentat requires data." "Oh." She looked down below at the flat expanse of the Shield Wall -- tortured rock, pits and crevices. H e saw the direction of her gaze and said: "A very exposed place, that down there." "But an easy place to hide." she said. She looked at him. "It reminds me a little bit of a human mind... with all its concealments." "Ahhhh," he said. "Ahhli? What does that utterance mean -- ahhh?" She was suddenly angry with him and the reason for it escaped her. "You'd like to know what my mind conceals," he said. It was a statement, not a question. "How do you know I haven't exposed you for what you are by my powers of prescience?" she demanded. "Have you?" He seemed genuinely curious. "No!" "Sybils have limits," he said. He appeared to be amused and this somewhat reduced Alia's anger. Amused? "Have you no respect for my powers?" she asked. The question sounded weakly argumentative even to her own ears. "I respect your omens and portents perhaps more than you think," he said. "I was in the audience for your Morning Ritual." "And what does that signify?" "You've great ability with symbols," he said, keeping his attention on the 'thopter's controls. "That's a Bene Gesserit thing, I'd say. But, as with many witches, you've become careless of your powers." She felt a spasm of fear and blared: "How dare you?" "I dare much more than my makers anticipated," he said. "Because of that rare fact, I remain with your, brother." Alia studied the steel balls which were his eyes -- no human expression there. The stillsuit hood concealed the line of his jaw. His mouth remained firm, though. There was great strength in it...and determination. His words had carried a reassuring intensity. "... dare much more..." That was a thing Duncan Idaho might have said. Had the Tleilaxu fashioned their ghola better than they knew -- or was this more sham, part of his conditioning? "Explain yourself, ghola." "Know thyself, is that thy commandment?" he asked. Again, she felt that he was amused. "Don't bandy words with me, you... you thing" she said. She put a hand to the crysknife in its throat sheath. "Why were you given to my brother?" "Your brother tells me that you watched the presentation," he said. "You've heard me answer that question for him."  "Answer it again... for me!" "I am intended to destroy him." "Is that the mentat speaking?" "You knew the answer to that without asking," he chided. "And you know, as well, that such a gift wasn't at all necessary. Your brother already was destroying himself quite adequately." She weighed these words, her hand remaining on the shaft of her knife. A tricky answer, but there was sincerity in the voice. "Then why such a gift?" she probed. "It may have amused the Tleilaxu. And it is true that, the Guild asked for me as a gift." "Why?" "Same answer." "How am I careless of my powers?" . "How are you employing them?" he countered. H is question slashed through to her own misgivings. She took her hand away from the knife and asked: "Why do you say my brother was destroying himself?" "Oh, come now, child! Where are these vaunted powers? Have you no ability to reason?" Controlling anger, she said: "Reason for me, mentat." "Very well." He sadly glanced around at their escort, then returned his attention to their course. The plain of Arrakeen was beginning to show beyond the northern rim of the Shield Wall. The pattern of the pan and graben villages remained indistinct beneath a dust pall, but the distant gleam of Arrakeen could be discerned... , "Symptoms," he said. Your brother keeps with him an official panegyrist who..." "Who was a gift of the Fremen Naibs!" "An odd gift from friends, he said. "Why would they surround him with flattery and servility? Have you really listened to this panegyrist? 'The people are illuminated by Maud'dib. The Umma Regent, our Emperor, came out of darkness to shine resplendently upon all men. He is our Sire. He is precious water from an endless fountain. He spills joy for all the universe to drink.' Pah! Speaking softly, Alia said: "If I but repeated your words for our Fremen escort,, they'd hack you into bird feed." "Then tell them." "My brother rules, by the natural law of heaven!" "You don't believe that, so why say it?" "How do you know what I believe?" She suddenly experienced trembling that no Bene Gesserit powers could control. This ghola was having an effect she hadn't anticipated. "You commanded me to reason as a mentat," he reminded her. "No mentat knows what I believe!" She took two deep, shuddering breaths. "How dare you judge us?" "Judge you? I don't judge." "You've no idea how we were taught!" "Both of you were taught to govern," he said. "You were conditioned to an overweening thirst for power. You were imbued with a shrewd grasp of politics and a deep understanding for the uses of war and ritual. Natural law? What natural law? That myth haunts human history. Haunts! It's a ghost. It's insubstantial, unreal. Is your Jihad a natural law?" "Mentat jabber," she sneered. "I'm a servant of the Atreides and I speak with candor," he said. "Servant? We've no servants; only disciples." "And I am a disciple of awareness," he said. "Understand that, child, and you..." "Don't call me child!" she snapped. She slipped her crysknife half out of its sheath. "I stand corrected." He glanced at her, smiled and returned his attention to piloting the 'thopter. The cliff-sided structure of the Atreides Keep could be made out now, dominating the northern suburbs of Arrakeen. "You are something ancient in flesh that is little more than a child," he said. "And the flesh is disturbed by winds of womanhood." "I don't know why I listen to you," she growled, but she let the crysknife fall back into its sheath and wiped her palm on her robe. The palm, wet with perspiration, disturbed her sense of Fremen frugality. Such a waste of the body's moisture! "You listen because you know I'm devoted to your brother," he said. "My actions are clear and easily understood." "Nothing about you is clear and easily understood. You're the most complex creature I've ever seen. How do I know what the Tleilaxu built into you?" "By mistake or intent," he said, "they gave me freedom to mold myself." UT ou retreat into Zensunni I parables," she accused. "The wise man molds himself -- The fool lives only to die." Her voice was heavy with mimicry. "Disciple of awareness!" "Men cannot separate means and enlightenment," he said. "You speak riddles!" "I speak riddles!" "I speak to the opening mind." "I'm going to repeat all this to Paul." "He's heard most of it already." She found herself overwhelmed by curiosity. "How is it you're still alive... and free? What did he say?" "He laughed. And he said, 'People don't want a bookkeeper for an Emperor; they want a master, someone who'll protect them from change.' But he agreed that destruction of his Empire arises from himself." "Why would he speak so?" "Because I convinced him I understand his problem and will help him." "What could you possibly have said to do that?" He remained silent, banking the 'thopter into the downwind leg for a landing at the guard complex on the roof of the Keep. "I demand you tell me what you said!" "I'm not sure you could take it." "I'll be the judge of that'.I command you to speak at once!" "Permit me to land us first," he said. And not waiting for her permission, he turned onto the base leg, brought the wings into optimum lift and settled gently onto the bright orange pad atop the roof. "Now," Alia said. "Speak." "I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe." She shook her head wildly. "That's... that's..." "A bitter pill," he said, watching the guards run toward them across the roof, taking up their escort positions. "Bitter nonsense!" "The greatest palatinate earl and the lowliest stipendiary serf share the same problem. You cannot hire a mentat or any other intellect to solve it for you. There's no writ of inquest or calling of witnesses to provide desired answers. No servant -- or disciple -- can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see." She whirled away from him, realizing in the instant of action what this betrayed about her own feelings. Without wile of voice or witch-wrought trickery, he had reached into her psyche once more. How did he do this? "What have you told him to do?" she whispered. "I told him to judge, to impose order." Alia stared out at the guard, marking just how patiently they waited there -- how very orderly. "To dispense justice," she murmured. "Not that!" he snapped. I suggested that he judge, no more, guided by one overriding principle..." "And that?" "To keep his friends and destroy his enemies." "To judge unjustly, then." i hat is justice? Two forces VY collide. Each may have the right in its own sphere. And here's where an Emperor commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot prevent -- he solves." "How?" "In the simplest way: he decides." "Keeping his friends and also destroying his enemies." "Isn't that stability? People want order, this kind or some other. They sit in the prison of their hungers and see that war has become the sport of the rich. That's a dangerous form of sophistication. It's disorderly." "I will suggest to my brother that you are much too dangerous and must be destroyed," she said. "A solution I've already suggested," he said. "And that's why you are dangerous," she said, measuring out her words. "You've mastered your passions." "That is not why I ' m dangerous." Before she could move, he leaned across, gripped her chin in one hand, planted his lips on hers. It was a gentle kiss, brief. He pulled away and she stared at him with a shock leavened by glimpses of spasmodic grins on the faces of her guardsmen still standing at orderly attention outside. Alia put a finger to her lips. There'd been such a sense of familiarity about that kiss. His lips had been flesh of a future she'd seen in some prescient byway. Breast heaving, she said: "I should have you flayed." "Because I'm dangerous?" "Because you presume too much!" "I presume nothing. I take nothing which is not first offered to me. Be glad I did not take all that was offered." He opened his door, slid out. "Come along. We've dallied too long on a fool's errand." He strode toward the entrance dome beyond the pad. Alia leaped out, ran to match his stride. "I'll tell him everything you've said and everything you did," she said. "Good." He held the door for her. "He will order you executed," she said, slipping quickly into the dome. "Why? Because I took the kiss I wanted?" He followed her, his movement forcing her back. The door slid closed behind him. "The kiss that you wanted!" Outrage filled her. "All right, Alia. The kiss you wanted, then." He started to move around her toward the drop field. As though his movement had propelled her into heightened awareness, she realized his candor -- the utter truthfulness of him. The kiss  wanted, she told herself. True. "Your truthfulness, that's what's dangerous," she said, following him. "You return to the ways of wisdom," he said, not breaking his stride. "A mentat could not have stated the matter more directly. Now -- what is it you saw in the desert?" She grabbed his arm, forcing him to a halt. He'd done it again -- shocked her mind into sharpened awareness. "I can't explain it," she said, "but I keep thinking of the face dancers. Why is that?" "That is why your brother sent you to the desert," he said, nodding. "Tell him of this persistent thought." "But why?" She shook her head. "Why face dancers?" "There's a young woman dead out there," he said. "Perhaps no young woman is reported missing among the Fremen." ( Continued from Page #) "Quick! Bring your plunger!" rather than "Every time I do the dishes, water collects on my kitchen floor." And editors say "You have to learn the rules" instead of "Readers expect sufficiently meaningful communication." As it happens, much of the time these perhaps subtle distinctions pass unhamperingly through the coarse meshes of everyday commerce. The plumber's friend saves the day, the tyro quickly learns which few simple tools will do # of what's required, and the bond issue for new municipal drains is safely delayed a few more years. Or, for that matter, the human habit of inertia is thus often proven right. It does turn out that some simple equivalent of stepping forward with your sleeves rolled up and a certain elbows is the best possible solution. But sometimes you get an aspirant who refuses to see the obvious, and who pictures editors, and also publishers, as fellow litterateurs, rather than as buyers. And every so often, then, if the tyro lacks shyness, the collision between the idealistic young creator and the sometimes bright, liberal, imaginative representatives of an inherently conservative phenomenon results in the creation of clouds of white-hot oompah. Thus, Bug Jack Barron, by Norman Spinrad (Walker  Co., #), a good book, an excellent idea and a fair piece of writing, is doomed to be obscured forever inside an expanding shell of churned gases. For the one thing you are not going to get, either from the editors who refused to buy it without changes or from the author who says words to the effect that the suggested changes were unconscionable, is a calm consideration of the obvious merits of this dirty, revolutionary, rabble-rousing screed. As I say, this happens every so often. But let me tell you Bug Jack Barron's story: Jack Barron, as a young university student, founded a third political party from a coalition of white and black social justice activists. The blacks apparently predominate, for one of them has become governor of Mississippi in the new city of Evers. More gathered from the fact that its founders still pride themselves in their undergraduate nickname of the Baby Bolsheviks. Having grown a little older. Jack Barron one day appeared ' on a TV interview program called the Joe Swynne Show. Instead of being made a fool of, he turned the tables on Old Joe so magnificently that Jack was given his own show, and Joe has disappeared from the public eye. The show is now six years old, has an audience of #, is a Wednesday-night viewing habit for statesmen, social outcasts, heads of all descriptions and other power brokers. It is called "Bug Jack Barron"; audience members call in on their vidphones, and Jack listens to what's bugging them, frequently also ringing in some representatives of whatever institution or trend is grinding down the original caller. Given vidphone facilities such as we will have in commercial service by the time of this story, Barron has a completely viable and effective format. He is also considered to have widely held opinion among his former comrades has caused his wife, Sara, to abandon him and become a Village fixture. But Jack is a howling commercial success and every Wednesday night after the show picks up a new blond bedmate resembling Sara. Finally, there is the fascinating background political situation, whose salient organizational features, apart from the rise of only two presidents since Hoover" in a book written before November, #, and the division of the Democratic Party into the faction of Teddy the Pretender and the far more powerful establishment which is sponsoring a candidate also named Ted. (Hennering, in this case. Spinrad repeatedly assigns to his congruent characters similar names, for no apparent reason.) Given the relative impotence of both the bet. This is especially true because t his sponsor is Benedict Howards, the rather mysterious, reclusive, fabulously wealthy Southwestern only commercially successful death-freezing process and is fighting hard to gain a monopoly by disguising the enterprise asa privately owned utility. Okay, now there we are. What happens thereafter is that through his program Jack Barron stumbles across Benedict Howards's real mission, which is to market the immortality treatment his doctors have perfected and to conceal the fact that the treatment involves gland transplants from children. Meanwhile, as these steps are occurring, Barron becomes the presidential candidate of the when Bug Jack Barron's ratings zoom, and Sara returns to Jack as Benedict Howards's emissary, in the mistaken belief that she is doing good. And all of this eventually resolves when Jack takes Howards apart on his show. It is in the paragraph above, I think, that you will find the area in which judgment was exercised to the detriment of this book's appearance in print when it was first written. For instance, an editor might very well ask if this plot summary does not in fact ring a little bit like an adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy. And he or another editor who has some acquaintanceship with the real depth of even the average national political action might ask whether Spinrad doesn't make everything much too superficial and easy. A nit-picker such as myself might then chime in to wonder why Sara on Page to have been motivated in an earlier action by something she doesn't even learn about until criticisms, and could be accompanied by as many more as one wished to make. But they are not valid criticisms on a valid level. On that valid level, these are things either no more serious than similar features in a score of successful books published that same day, or else they are easily reparable with a half-hour's worth of blue penciling. (By the way, I have never seen an editor use a literally blue pencil). We are dealing here in a story with the lineaments of classic tragedy, and in that mode, as Roger Zelazny and several others have demonstrated, you are allowed to have people do the right things for silly reasons, and vice versa. Or, let's cut through the knot: Spinrad is also the author of The Men in The Jungle, a book most people would find ludicrous, which I find inept, and which, except that it lacks some of the words in Jack, is equally "dirty." He does not appear to have had any trouble getting that one published. This fact alone, in my mind, constitutes a sufficient piece of evidence that merit is far from the only consideration in the buying of commercial literature. Jack may not be the most ept piece of word-cobbling under the sun. In fact, I think that the next time Spinrad permits himself to write a book with an ordinary theme, his basic weaknesses as a plot constructor and motivator will not only be still as obvious as they were in Jungle, they will be easily visible in retrospect in Jack, where they don't really matter. The point I think is that Spinrad often uses representations of things, rather than the things themselves, and this doesn't always work. People in his stories have a habit of acting as if they were reacting to emotional crises which in fact Spinrad is rather weak at depicting. The reactions, however, are valid. Or, now, try this for the best example: The culminating horror of the Howards immortality treatment is that it involves irradiating the (unspecified) glands of preadolescent children and then transplanting them into the hopeful bodies of the immortals. This does make Howards a villain supreme, because he is then able to deliberately offer this filthy immortality to the frail side of Jack's human nature. And it makes sense in terms of Spinrad's very well drawn background locale that most of the children surreptitiously purchased from their parents would be black, because a high percentage of our poor and gullible are black. But considered as science fiction, this is incredible. In two ways. The process is barely described, because it is absolute nonsense to claim that you can beneficially transform the nature of glands by dosing them with enough roentgens to literally rot the flesh of the bodies in which human ontology placed them. Second, it would not have taken much trouble to work up some more coherent, equally horrible rationale involving the same elements. Then, clearly, since he didn't take the trouble, we can see that Spinrad not only reached a prior artistic decision to have the immortality bribe involve the mutilation of black children, at no matter what the would-be cost to technological credibility, but he did not care enough about credibility to even be graceful. You see what I mean about representations of things. This is a book that drifts in and out between the realistic and the symbolic, each time taking what we may assume Spinrad thought was the best of either choice. It has a lot of what I tell my children are "grown-up words" in it -- not without a certain irony (on my part), since they are for sale in the same places that sell comic books, and in rather more explicit usage, too. All of that very quickly just becomes part of the vehicle. What remains is a flawed but acceptable telling of a magnificent story; a representation of nobility, one might say, with a Mickey Mouse ending. A book I enjoyed the daylights out of this month was Willard Bain's Informed Sources (Doubleday, #), an # Vi" x #" paperback, which is about the death of Cock Robin and the end of the world. It is, however, written in the form of copy ripped right off the Teletype machines of Informed Sources, a fictional (?) press association which talks jargon, cablese and filing code. On first reading, I found that it was only about half comprehensible (though wholly delightful, as we clever reviewers say) despite a certain tangential familiarity with the wire-service business. What I would have made of it in the days before I began hanging around city rooms, I can't imagine. It's full of puns on the medium itself, plus inside cracks at the management and technical methods of real wire bureaus, the institution of commercial journalism, etc. Tf you can read a wire book, or if you have the patience to glean what you can from this funny and pernicious document, with its crazed paraMafia agents, "Turntable Tips," do so. Okay. Books we started and never, never finished: A. E. Van Vogt, The Silkie, a science-created super-race. By the author of Sian, The Universe Maker, etc." To my genuine broke down very quickly, after an opening chapter which actually breathed with life and made me seriously wonder whether it wasn't time to take a long, hard reappraising look at a man who has not always been dealt with fairly by the literati, but who is not, sadly, good enough to crusade on behalf of. One short take on two books: Olympia Press -- yes, Virginia, the Olympia Press -- has sent me two new novels, Oracle of the Thousand Hands, which is ambitious, cleverly done for a pastiche, and dull, and Screen, I guess is the science-fiction one, has to do with the common wish to enter the screen, become Buster Crabbe and get to go places with Dale Arden. Who you actually get to go places with in this book is Sophia Loren, Liz Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and Doris Day. Both books are by Barry Malzberg. And let me inform you, with great pleasure, that Doubleday has published Another Look at Atlantis and Fifteen Other Essays by Willy Ley, at #. This is a long-overdue book, as they say, containing fascinating representative samples from the column that has graced these pages ever since Galaxy began. For a detailed representation of the book's merits, please turn to Mr. Ley's column in this issue, which will. I'm sure, do more to endear you and fascinate you than could anything I would say. Which does not prevent me from saying that I stayed up all night re-reading old favorites, and discovering one or two I'd missed, and musing on how very many of us must have learned almost all we know about the world and about the nature of things from this astonishing gentleman. ( Continued from Page #) "synchronous" with the sun, meaning that the orbital period of the probe would be equal to the period of rotation of the sun. The probe would seem to hover over one point of the sun's equator and with some luck one might be able to follow the career of a sunspot from its birth to its final disappearance. Other things that have not been done yet are a mission to the minor planet Eros, which has part of its orbit between the orbits of the earth and of Mars, and a mission to a small comet. As I explained in an earlier column a mission to one of the small comets that has its perihelion near the orbit of earth would require a good deal of preliminary observational work because the orbits of these small comets are not sufficiently well known. This may be the reason why the Europeans did not consider, or rejected, the idea of a mission to a comet. And this may also be the reason why a mission to Eros, which would really be somewhat easier than a mission to Mars, has not been investigated in detail. Astronomical interest in this very unusual asteroid was confined to observing it when it came close. While its orbit is reasonably well known, the knowledge is apparently not refined enough to permit the calculation of the orbit of a space probe that has to accomplish a close flyby. But the orbit of Jupiter is well known. The planet can be seen all the time except when, at intervals of one year and one month, it passes behind the sun as seen from earth. E verybody knows Jupiter is the largest and most massive planet in our solar system. Few people realize just how massive it is. Its mass is equal to # earth masses; the mass of all the other planets combined is equal to only # earth masses. Its volume is equal to # earth volumes; the volume of all the other planets adds up to only # earth volumes. lovis pater, as the Romans called Jupiter, rotates on its axis in # hours and # minutes and the body of the planet is flattened by this fast rotation to an extent that can be clearly seen in a telescope. Measured from one point of its equator to the opposite point of its equator the diameter of the planet is # miles. Measured from pole to pole it is only # miles. How much of the planet is core, how much of it is "mantle" (consisting of ice, or solid gases, or both) and how much is gaseous atmosphere is something we don't know, but the overall density is # times that of water. The orbital period is # years but because the orbital period of the earth is only one year Jupiter is "in opposition" every # days. The term "in opposition," originally just an astrological term, means that Jupiter is in a place in the sky that is directly opposite to the place of the sun at the same moment; Jupiter, the earth and the sun will form a straight line. But even then the distance between the Earth miles. The orbit of Jupiter is only slightly inclined to the ecliptic, the plane of the earth's orbit, namely by I degree and #'i minutes of arc. Still, because Jupiter's orbit is so large the planet, in its two extreme posimiles "above" or "below" the ecliptic, which fact can complicate the flightpath of a space probe at certain times. Whether this complication has to be taken into account or not depends entirely on the time the probe is sent on its way. If the takeoff time has been selected carefully, the probe can travel all the way staying in the ecliptic and arrive at its goal when Jupiter moves through the ecliptic. The orbital motion of the planet, incidentally, is fairly slow, amounting to only # miles per second. The reasons why Jupiter is of such great scientific interest are many. There is the question of the depth of Jupiter's atmosphere, the temperature of the planet's "surface" (if it has a plainly defined surface), the surfaces of the large .moons of Jupiter, the mysterious red spot and quite a number of others. One interesting aspect is that Jupiter is the only planet in our solar system, in addition to the earth, that is known to have a magnetic field. One of the surprises of the exploration of the nearby bodies in space by space probes was that our moon as well as the planets Venus and Mars were found to lack magnetic fields. As regards Mercury we don't know yet, and the same lack of knowledge pertains to the large outer planets with the exception of Jupiter. Because Jupiter has a magnetic field it produces the same kind of irregularity -- call it a bubble, if you like -- in the solar wind as does the earth. The sub-atomic particles streaming out from the f sun are forced by the magnetic field to flow around the planet at some distance. Inside this "magnetopause," as it is called, only relatively few but very energetic sub-atomic particles are found. A long distance beyond the planet the particles of the solar wind will flow together again. The region beyond the planet before the solar wind becomes normal again is called the "magnetic tail." The magnetic tail of our earth is believed to be at least one Jupiter is probably about # where the magnetopause is closest to the planet is, of course, the subsolar point, the place where the sun is directly overhead. In the case of Jupiter the distance from the planet's center to the subsolar point of the magnetopause is very nearly twenty-five diameters of the planet, or about direction. This means that all four of the large moons of Jupiter are inside the magnetopause while our moon is outside the earth's magnetopause, though it is touched, on occasion, by our magnetic tail. T he fundamental problem for a Jupiter mission is how long a probe would need to reach Jupiter and what velocity is required. The shortest transfer ellipse that could be used at all with existing rockets would take # days; the so-called Hohmann orbit, which takes the longest time but requires the least fuel expenditure, would take # days. Four possibilities have been calculated and they look like this: (days) (miles # #' # # The Germans picked an intermediate case, an #-day flight that requires # miles per second, # miles per second more than is needed to reach our moon. The next step was to see how much a Jupiter probe could weigh. An Atlas rocket with a Centaur rocket as the upper stage could deliver about # pounds to the orbit of Jupiter along the #-day flightpath. If a Titan #C rocket with a Centaur as the upper stage were used the weight of the probe could be as high as # pounds. The Jupiter V rocket could deliver nearly # pounds to Jupiter, but that won't happen. For two reasons: the rocket is much too expensive and there is no need to send # pounds to Jupiter. If the weight of the probe can be kept drastically below the one thousand pound mark the mission could be flown using the Europa Launcher Development Organization) which, naturally, is what the Germans hope to do. During the # days the probe is underway the earth will comr plete two and one third orbits, while Jupiter will travel slightly less than one quarter of its orbit. At the time of arrival the earth will be almost as close to Jupiter as it can be, while the sun will be off to one side and therefore will not interfere with the transmission of data from the probe to the earth. Data transmission, or rather the power for data transmission, is a special problem in the case of a Jupiter probe. Solar panels, as used for probes to Venus and Mars, are virtually useless at Jupiter's distance from the sun. In Jupiter's orbit a square yard of panel surface would receive only ## of the sunlight that is received at the orbit of earth. The inverse square law that is involved here just does not make any exceptions, no matter how worthy the cause. Hence the necessary power must be supplied in another way; the number of solar panels needed would be an unbearable weight penalty even if somebody could figure out how to mount them.  Fuel cells for a flight duration of # days, plus a week or so of reserve power, would weigh even more, almost eight times as much as the solar panels. An would fall about midway between solar panels and fuel cells. Fortunately there is one additional possible power source, a battery based on a radioactive isotope of an element that is not normally radioactive. Here again the fact that the trip lasts # days is important. Radioactive isotopes with a short half-life cannot be considered even if they had other factors in their favor. Nor is a long half-life the only consideration. R adioactive substances produce three kinds of radiation: alpha rays, which are actually the nuclei of helium atoms; beta rays, which are streams of electrons; and gamma rays, which are true rays like X-rays. A battery emitting X-rays would ruin quite a number of possible measurements. It would greatly reduce the effectiveness of the probe. An isotope emitting alpha particles only would generally be the best, but there are not many pure alpha emitters and not a single one is in ample supply. Beta particle emitters that do not emit X-rays are more numerous and can be used. Electrons that escape from the battery, when striking another part of the probe, will cause Xrays to be emitted where they strike. Fortunately the electrons are not very energetic as a rule, so that they can be stopped by a shield of some kind. Of course the shield will then emit X-rays, but the shield could be located in such a manner that the X-rays will go out into space and not touch another part of the probe. So we are now looking for an isotope that emits electrons onlyand that has a useful half-life, at least twice as long as the travel time of the probe, but not too long. It is easy to see why an isotope with a half-life of, say, # years would not do. An isotope with a long half-life is evidently not very active and we need a high degree of activity because we need energy. A half-life of about ten or twelve years would be about right; active enough to furnish energy, but not diminishing much in #-## years. Offhand one should think that a nice complete periodic table that lists all the known isotopes and their main characteristics should give us quite a choice. But when you check such a table you find out that half-lives either span thousands of years or are reckoned in minutes, hours and days. Only a very few isotopes have half-lives suitable for use in a Jupiter probe, and most of these must be disregarded for other reasons. There is, for example, radium-# with a half-life of # years which would be fine, but the isotope is much too rare since even the "common" radium isotope is a great rarity. There is holmium-# with a half-life of not quite # years; it also is much too rare. There is tritium, triple-weight hydrogen, but that is the isotope that goes into the hydrogen bomb. And it is a gas, of course, which may have drawbacks for the intended purpose. The best suited isotope is one with a bad reputation due to fallout discussions, namely strontium-# with a half-life of # years. Strontium-# is a beta emitter, does not emit X-rays directly and is a metal with a melting point at # p Celsius. ( # Fahrenheit). The power consumption of the probe has been estimated to be between # and # watts; the transmitter must have a minimum of # watts, preferably a little more. A strontium-# battery would be capable of furnishing these amounts, though it may be necessary to add a storage battery to take care of the peak load that will develop during the actual flyby. T he overall shape of American space probes, Surveyor as well as Mariner, has always reminded observers of giant insects, largely because of the winglike solar panels. The projected shape of the European Jupiter probe does not resemble an insect, or anything else for that matter. The base of the probe is an antenna dish slightly over # feet in diameter. A round box with a diameter of # feet and # inches and a depth of about # inches is mounted on top of the antenna dish. This box will hold the scientific instrumentation and the electronic gear, expected to have an overall weight of # pounds. Tubular struts which begin at the rim of the antenna dish and which also hold the instrument box in place will meet about # Vi feet above the upper lid of the box to form an apex. The isotope battery will be mounted on that apex, to be as far from the instruments as is possible in such a configuration. In the empty space above the box the fuel tank and rocket chambers for the midcourse engine are mounted, which puts the exhaust nozzle roughly in the center of gravity of the whole probe. For attitude correction additional cold gas thrusters are mounted around the rim of the antenna dish. The maximum diameter of the probe would be just about # Vi feet, the overall height close to # Vi feet and the overall weight is estimated at about # pounds. This is just about, as has been mentioned earlier, what an Atlas-Centaur rocket could move to Jupiter. For the Euro pa rocket it is too heavy. Of course the Europeans have some development plans for something larger and more powerful than the Europa, though nobody can say at what time these plans might turn into reality. A collaboration of more than half a dozen countries, at least two of them in financial difficulties, is no simple thing. But in the meantime it is nice to know that existing American rockets could send a Jupiter probe Did you know that a new invention -- the glassistor -- has joined the transistor as an electronic switch and amplifier? It's nothing more than a thin film of special glass that has the ability to vary its resistance under the influence of a control voltage. Coated directly onto wires, it takes even less space than the transistor. It should be helpful in designing electronic brains small enough for robots! It has another advantage. In the past, the electronic systems of orbiting satellites have been harmed by the radiation in space. But the glassistor's characteristics are not affected by such radiation. From a military view, though, glassistors may prove a mixed blessing. Our proposed anti-ballistic missiles (the ones kicking up all the a blast of X-rays that will destroy the directing electronics of attacking missiles. With the glassistor in those missiles, they would be invulnerable to anything but a direct hit -- difficult to guarantee, art. by Lester del Rey C # hat on earth for?"  President Moody is said to have asked when told that huge funds were needed to develop a robot. To which the Secretary of Space replied: "For nothing on Earth, ma'am!" The story is probably apocryphal, since robots antedate her administration. Plans for a crude, self-guided machine to explore Mars date back to the legendary Sputnik age. But certainly space flight made the robot necessary. Men are designed for Earth's atmosphere, but robots can work in a vacuum or on alien planets where man can go only after a robot task force has prepared the way. The human cargo on the first stellar expeditions slept in frozen suspension, cared for by a robot crew until the new colony worlds were made safe for them. It is only natural that modern stellar colonies are ruled as often by robots as by men. In fact, it was taken as axiomatic that no technical race could distrust these intelligent products of technology. Or so it was before our messages from the Roger MecbNab Expedition. MechNab's mission was to explore a star that had just turned red giant and to test our theories that such a star is one that has used up its hydrogen fuel -- in switching to helium, it cools and expands to engulf the orbits of its planets. The expedition found proof of the theories -- and much more. Half a light-year from the ruined sun, a huge ship was located. We had finally met an alien race -- one badly in need of rescue, since its ship was too primitive, however brave the effort. Robots sped at once toward the ship to offer aid, while men prepared to follow on mobile platforms. But rather than being welcomed, the robots were immediately attacked by dozens of tiny ships. Men armed and rushed to help, but not before a number of robots were injured. Pederson's cover shows a rear-guard robot hurtling toward a human friend for assistance, as described by space phone. Fortunately the aliens recognized men as protoplasmic fellow beings and a truce was arranged. Their initial hostility had been caused by their incredible psychopathic fear of mechanical life. We understand their ship is being towed to our system now, and it is hoped the aliens will soon lose their peculiar belief that anything not of flesh and blood is less than human. No pictures of the aliens are available as yet. But it is reported that their form is rather beautiful -- not unlike a terrestrial octopus. If you give up cigarettes, you might gain a few pounds (And also a few years.) The plain, unfiltered fact is that people who smoke cigarettes get lung cancer a lot more frequently than nonsmokers. And lung cancer can finish you. Before your time. We'd rather have you stay alive and in good health. Because even if you do gain a few pounds, you'll have the time to take them off. american cancer society ft Including, if you wish, The Science Fiction Book Club invites you to take Any # books T y s I with trial membership #: A Space Odyssey #: A Arthur C. Clake Hunting an alien "presence" in the universe, # men and a computergone-psychotic stumble upon the incredible secret of mankind's birth -- only to trigger the cosmii "booby-trap" that could spell its death. A controversial best-seller by the most acclaimed science fiction writer of our era. fsc bast-selling novel and award-winning cinema spectacular Science Fiction has grown up. Have you kept up? A new literary genre has come of age -- your age. Mature. Sophisticated. Provocative. And respected. You are invited to explore it now under an amazing trial offer. Take any # volumes on this page (worth up to # in original publishers' editions) for only I with membership.  New club selections will be described to # y #l i j n advance each month. Choose from new works of Pub. ed. # fiction -- and fact -- by such acclaimed authors as Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein and others. All volumes are full-length, hardbound -- and uncut. Though they sell for as mucn as #, # and more in their original publishers' editions, club members pay only # plus shipping. (You may choose an optional extra-value selection at a slightly higher price.) Your sole obligation is to accept as few as four books during the coming year. Cancel any time thereafter. Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, N.Y. #. I Please accept my application for membership and rush me I the # books whose numbers I have circled below. Bill me only I #, plus shipping and handling, for all #. Then, every I month, send me the Club's free I bulletin. "Things to Come", which  describes coming selections. For  each book I accept, I will pay only #, plus shipping and handling. I unless I take an extra-value selecI tion at a higher price. I need take I only four books within the coming I year and may resign at any time . thereafter. I delighted with my introductory I package, I may return it in # I days to cancel membership. Print I Name  Circle the numbers of the # books you want. # # # # # # # #  City. #-S# If under #, parent must sign here. (Offer good in U.S.A. only) j If under #, parent must sign h II #. HawksbIU Station, by Robert Silverberg. A group of #st century revolutionaries are years into the past. Pub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. # #. Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd. Young lovers flee loveless society ruled by computer "Rod". Pub. ed. S#. #. The Past Through Tomorrow: "Future History" Stories, by Robert A. Heinlein. Pub. ed. # #. Twice # by Ray Bradbury. Fourty-four stories by the Grand Master of science fiction. Pub. ed. # #. Chocky by John Wyndham. Alien powers "possess" small boy in shocker from author of "Day of the Triffids". #. October the First is Too Late, by Fred Hoyle. Solar beams play havoc with time on earth. Pub. ed. # #. Killer Thins by Kate Wilhelm. A scientist in the #rd century develops a robot with a laser eye. Pub. ed. # #. A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. #-volume set. I .# pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # #. Asimov's Mysteries by Isaac Asimov. # loveand-larceny spiced whodunits of the future puzzlers all! Pub. ed. # #. Dangerous Visions. Anthology of # original stories never before in print by Sturgeon, Anderson, others. Pub. ed. #  A. E. Van Vogf s . JL# Qoyj  " '   :  ' ' The reading is not necessarily easy: new collection Douglas R. Mason's rousing post-holocaust adventure J. T. McIntosh's lively and intelligent epic of redemption and renewal The second of Dan Morgan's Sixth Perception novels And when the leaves begin to turn, you may be ready for Piers Anthony's massive and major new novel about -- everything! Galaxy Galaxy is published in French, German, Malian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. September, # G Vol. # No. I A.E. Van Vogt Frank Herbert Donald H. Menzel Joe Haldeman Larry Niven John Fortey Dannie Plachta Willy Ley Lester del Rey Editor Editor Emeritus Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Publisher Associate Publisher lished monthly by Universal Publishing A Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #? per copy. #issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright (c) # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All righls reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. AH stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. Unnatural Selection A LL OF the Darwinian Theory is based on the doctrine of the survival of the fittest -- fittest meaning, in this sense, the individual most likely to have offspring which in turn will survive long enough to have more offspring. Some organisms produce this fitness simply by laying so many tens of thousands of eggs that a lot of them hatch and survive. Others by developing organs or traits which make them fast, intelligent or dangerous to foes. As a theory, this one is elegant and highly productive -- insofar as it relates to the past. As to the future, however, there's not much hope for it. There are three main reasons for thinking so. First of all, what used to be antisurvival traits no longer get weeded out -- and, indeed, sometimes are selected for. (Witness the milk cow, which couldn't live a week in an environment containing large predators; witness the genes for various human weaknesses like nearsightedness and agammaglobulinemia, which used to be selected out and now are compensated for admirably by glasses or by drugs.) Secondly, some traits that used to be prosurvival (and still are, for the individual) are now distinctly deleterious to the species in general -- witness the prevailing population explosion. But the most interesting indication of a non-Darwinian future lies in the technological development of new organs for man. tle evidence that it exists between human beings, though many of us think it ought to and most of us wish it did. But there's good evidence now that it exists -- or can be made to exist -- between men and machines. It works like head, tracing the electrical currents in your brain and reading them out as waveforms on a cathode tube. Program a computer to scan those patterns and interpret them as commands: If they grow in amplitude or frequency they make the machine go faster. If they dwindle they make the machine go slower or turn it off. Practice consciously changing the shape of the waves as you see them on the tube -- and with a little luck and a lot of pract'". you can run the machine without normal sensory communication. Not in the traditional sense, to be sure. But still it is extrasensory, all right -- and of course the machine does perceive. The trouble with Darwinism is that it's too slow. It takes a new species. Chances are technology can do it in a matter of TR AN#t mic The Dark Continents of Your Mind maintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life," Address: Scribe C.M.P. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. Scribe: C.M.P. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. N aine Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code L. I Li "is the dawn of nothing." So she was leaving. "No children, no future," the woman continued. "Every day like every other, going nowhere. The sun shines but I'm in darkness -- " It was, Dav realized, the beginning of the death talk. He tensed his perfect muscles. His blue eyes -- they could observe with a deep understanding on many levels -- misted with sudden anxiety. But his lips and his infinitely adaptable tongue -- which in its time, and that time was long indeed, had spoken a hundred languages -- said no word. His mission was io make a gift of humanity's past to beings of an alien planet -- and discover: Could Man survive his own immortality? He watched her, made no move to help her and no effort to stop her as she piled her clothes onto a powered dolly, to be wheeled into the east wing of the house. Her clothes, her jewels from a score of planets; her special pillows and other bedroom articles; the specific furniture -- each piece a jewel in itself -- in which she stored her possessions; her keys -- plain and electronic, pushbutton control types for energy relays and tiny combination systems for entry into the great Reservoir of the Symbols -- all now were made ready to be transported with a visibly growing impatience. Finally she snapped, "Where is your courtesy? Where is your manliness -- letting a woman do all this work?" Dav said evenly, "It would be foolish of me to help you leave me." "So all those years of politeness -- I merely bought them with unalienated behavior. You have no natural respect for a woman -- or for me." She yelled accusations at him. Dav felt a tremor stir inside him, not from her words but from the meaning of the anger that accompanied them, the unthinking automatic quality of that anger. He said flatly, "I am not going to help you leave me." It was the kind of answer one made to a stereotype. His hope had to be that these preliminaries of the death compulsion could be headed off. His words, however, were far from effective. Her blond cheeks gradually turned to a darker color as the day -- unlike other days, which were often as slow as forever -- devoured itself, digesting hours in great gulps. And still her possessions, more numerous evidently than she had realized, were not shifted from the west to the east wing of the long, big house. Late in the afternoon Dav pointed out that her act of withdrawal was a well-known phenomenon of internal female chemistry. He merely wanted from her the analytical consciousness of this fact -- and her permission to give her the drugs that would rectify the condition. She rejected the argument. From her lips poured a stream of angry rationalizations. "The woman is always to blame. The fault is in her, not in the man. The things that I have had to put up with -- they don't count -- " Long ago, when she was still in her natural state, before the administration of the first immortality injections, there might have been genuine cause for accusations which attacked male subjectiveness. But that was back in a distant time. After the body had been given chemical aids all things were balanced by a diet of understanding drugs. D AV located the relevant book in the library and abandoned his initial attempts to keep from her the seriousness of her condition. He walked beside her and read paragraphs detailing the emotional affliction that had led to the virtual destruction of the human race. The dark thoughts she had expressed -- and was now acting on -- were described so exactly that abruptly, as he walked beside her, he bent in her direction and held the book up to her face. His finger pointed out the significant sentences. Miliss stopped. Her eyes, a deceptive gray-green, narrowed. Her lips tightly compressed, unmistakably resisting what he was doing. Yet she spoke in a mild tone. "Let me see that." She reached for the book. Dav surrendered it reluctantly. The sly purpose he detected in her seemed even more automatic than the earlier anger. In those few hours she appeared to have become a simpler, more primitive person. So he was not surprised when she raised the book above her head and, with a wordless vocalization, flung it to the floor behind him. They had come to within a few yards of a door which led to her part of the house. Dav resignedly stooped to pick up the book, aware of her walking rapidly to that door. It opened and slammed shut behind her. After silence descended, after Jana twilight, when the sun finally sank out of sight behind the slickrock mountains to the west and the sweet, soft darkness of the shining, starlit night of Jana settled, Dav tested the connecting doors between the two wings. All four resisted his pull with the rigidity of unbreakable locks. HE following morning. The sound of a buzzer precipitated Dav into the new day. For a meager moment the hope stirred in him that Miliss was calling. But he rejected that possibility even as he formed the image in his mind that triggered the nearest thought amplifier. His dismissal of the idea turned out to be correct. The buzzing ceased. A picture formed on the ceiling screen. It showed a Jana tradesboy with groceries standing at the outer door. Dav spoke to the boy in the Jana tongue and glided out of bed. Presently he was accepting the bag from the long-nosed youth, who said, "There was a message to bring this to another part of the house. But I didn't understand clearly -- " Dav hesitated with the fleeting realization that the ever-present Jana spy system was probably behind those words. And that if he explained, the informatic I would be instantly relayed to the authorities. Not that he could ever tell these beings the truth. Their time for immortality was not yet. Nor was it their time to learn the numerous details of the final disaster -- when, in a period of a few months, virtually the entire human population of the galaxy rejected life, refused the prolongation drugs. People by the unattended and uncaring. A few, of course, were captured by appalled survivors and had treatment forced on them. A wrong solution, it developed. For the people who sympathized and helped, by those very desperate feelings, in some manner attuned themselves into the same deadly psychic state as the naturally doomed. In the end it was established that the only real survivors were individuals who felt a scathing contempt for people who could not be persuaded to accept help. Such a disdainful survivor could sarcastically argue with someone -- yes, for a while. But force him, no. Dav stood at the door of the great house in which he and Miliss had lived these several hundred years. And he realized that this was the moment. To save himself he had to remember that what Miliss was doing deserved his total disgust. He shrugged, and said, "My wife has left me. She is living alone on the other side of the house. So deliver these to the door at the far east side." He thrust the bag of groceries back into the hands of the Jana and motioned him away. The boy took the big sack and backed off with visible reluctance. "Your wife has left you?" he echoed finally. Dav nodded. In spite of himself he felt vaguely regretful at the revelation. To these Jana males, pursuit of females began early and continued into late life, terminating approximately at the moment of death. Until now the human woman had been a forbidden and unapproachable female. But no question -- there had always been a perverted Jana male interest in Miliss. With an abrupt dismissal Dav suppressed such thoughts. What they represented was unimportant. It did not matter. her part of the garden, lissome, still beautiful, showing no signs of immediate deterioration. Apparently -- even on this second day -- she was still an immortal blond woman. Seeing her, Dav shrugged and turned away, his lip curling and in his mind the thought that she was not really human. She could not reason. Still later darkness had fallen when, after testing with the various keys the Blaze Points of the Great Reservoir of the Symbols, he came to the summit of the hill from which he could see their long, white house. Its night lights showed the garden and the glint of the river on the far side. But around it nothing moved. Silent stood the old house, familiar, a centuriesold landmark. Something about the stillness below disturbed him. He had a sudden feeling that no one was there. The house itself was dark -- both wings. Puzzled but not alarmed -- because he was safe and Miliss did not count for she was doomed anyway -- Dav hurried down. He tried first a door to her wing. It was unlocked. An amplified thought hit him. Miliss speaking mentally. Dav, l have been arrested by Jaer Dorrish and am being taken to a military prison.  have the impression that this is a Dorrish clan takeover scheme and that it is connected with the fact that Rocquel has now been gone for a year. That's all... The account was succinct, as impersonal as his own receipt of it. She had left him a communication of facts. In her message was no appeal, no request for help. Dav stood silent. He was evoking a mental picture of the sardonic Jaer Dorrish and, more vaguely, the image of Rocquel, the hereditary leader of the Janae, who had disappeared slightly more than one Jana year ago. A year on Jana was three hundred ninety-two and a fraction days long. He felt opposed to Jaer, of course -- in a way wished the steely-minded Rocquel were back. Usurpations usually meant trouble and unrest. But if it had to be, it had to. The Janae constituted a problem for him as Guardian of the Symbols. But individuals among them were not, in one sense, important. Though he had liked Rocquel, and still liked Rocquel's -- widow? Nerda. In the morning I'll look into this... II arriving. He lay down for a few seconds on the shadowy grass. It was already day -- fairly early morning; he noticed when he climbed to his feet. He could see the palace, visible among the trees of the vast garden which surrounded the building. Rocquel stood for a moment, head thrown back, breathing deeply of the air of his native planet. A year had seemed a long absence. So much had happened. Yet the sky of Jana and these hills that he had known in his lost youth so intimately seemed unchanged. Here, during all those tremendous days of his absence, time had sculptured with a slow and exacting chisel. A gentle wind blew in Rocquel's face as he started slowly toward the road beyond the near trees, the winding road that would take him to the palace. Incredibly, he made it to within a hundred yards of the sprawl of building before a Jana male came suddenly from around some trees, saw him and stopped. Rocquel recognized the other at once: Jaer Dorrish. Jaer w'as a big fellow, bigger than Rocquel, goodlooking in a swarthy way. His eyes narrowed. He seemed to brace himself. He said arrogantly in the tone of one addressing an intruder, "What are you doing here -- stranger?" Rocquel walked forward at a deliberate pace. He had been cautioned to take up his old position before he revealed the new facets of his personality. He didn't need the warning -- it was implicit in the sly act of a person who knew him, pretending not to. The problem of what one of the Dorrish men was doing in the Rocquel grounds so early in the morning -- or ever -- he would come to later. Right now the denial of his identity was surpassingly significant. Rocquel said, "Jaer, consider -- do you want me for an enemy?" This time Jaer Dorrish showed his understanding of the situation. "By Dilit," he said exultantly, "I've caught you unarmed." He drew his sword in a single, continuous movement and began V to circle Rocquel, apparently not quite believing that he need merely rush in and slash. His eyes speculatively sized up Rocquel's condition. taneously turned. He paused where Jaer had been standing. It took him moments to locate consciously the symbol made by the invisible Tizane energy, which he had directed to the spot the instant he saw Jaer. He kicked it cautiously, leaning backward so that his body would not be attracted by the symbol. His foot tingled unpleasantly -- it was a feeling of something grabbing at him, something very powerful that did not quite reach him but only clawed the outer threads of his clothing, failing to get a good hold. Twice he pulled clear of it. Presently he was able to step over the broken ground without experiencing a reaction. He was already out of danger when Jaer laughed and replaced his sword. The big male said arrogantly, "If one does not threaten, one cannot show mercy. You see, Rocquel, I expected that you would return today. I have had observers watching the grounds all night so that I could have this confrontation with you." He grimaced triumphantly. "I analyze that you owe your return to me. Because yesterday I arrested the human woman, Miliss, and here you are this morning, exactly as I anticipated. It was a sudden II intuition of mind. You have a lot of explaining to do -- sir." Jaer was visibly jubilant. He waved at somebody behind Rocquel. Rocquel was wary of the gesture. In his careful defensive maneuvering he had gotten his back to the buildings. Finally he glanced carefully around and saw that Nerda was walking toward them. As she came near she said, "You were not really in danger, were you? It showed in your manner." Rocquel said, "Not front one person." He walked to her and she did not resist his kiss. She might as well have. Her lips were cool and unresponsive. Her passive body did not welcome his embrace. Rocquel drew back, scowling. An old anger against this defiant young female rose to gall him. "Damn you," he said, "Aren't you glad to see me?" Nerda merely gazed at him coolly. "I forgot," said Rocquel, stung. "It was a welcome period of rest for you. It's difficult for a male to remember that Jana females do not have feelings." His wife shrugged. Rocquel stared at her, curious now rather than hostile. Like all Jana females, she was icily aloof. He had married her in the usual fashion by having her father bring her to his house. She had subsequently borne him a son and a daughter but in the Jana female tradition she continued to treat him like an intruder in her life -- whom she must tolerate but did not particularly care to have around. Rocquel scowled jealously. "What about Jaer?" That brought a reply. "I think he has already explained his presence. Rather than have any further words from him, I would prefer to hear your explanation of your absence." Rocquel rejected explanations. "Come along," he said gruffly. "Let us go inside." news of his return would spread rapidly. The men in control of the council must not be allowed too much time to decide what to do about him. There would be regents, generals and their aides -- who would be unhappy at the return of the hereditary ruler of the army. Before this night he must again be recognized as entitled by law and right to wield the scepter of his sphere. He took Nerda's arm gently. The move was calculated. He wanted to enter the palace beside her, his identity given validity by her presence. A year was a long time on Jana. Jana males particularly had short memories. He could not have planned his arrival better if he had personally made all the arrangements in advance. Rocquel had the tocsin sounded as soon as he reached the main guard station. Shortly the palace guard and the servants were drawn up in five lines of a hundred each. He addressed them in his deepest baritone, recalling himself to the older men, inviting the younger men to remember his face and body structure. He wanted them to be able to identify him under all circumstances. He felt a little better when that job was done and the people had been dismissed to return to their duties. But not much better. The servants and guards could be talked to like a schoolroom full of children. But not the officers. Not the nobility. He had a new, superior -- yet not at all condescending -- attitude toward these people. They were simple souls. He now understood rushing Janae into civilization by a trial and error system that attempted to take each man for what he was. The lower classes were given easy tests. Those who showed even a modicum of mechanical ability were soon placed on assembly lines where they performed one action, then two, then several -- but never many. For decades now some pretty sharp mechanics had been coming up the line and from their ranks arose a new class -- engineers. The officers and nobility were a different breed. Quick to take insult, they were truly impervious to all but the barest elements of education. They had been persuaded that being able to read and write was a mark of distinction but they were never entirely convinced. Why, they wanted to know grimly, were the lower classes also being taught reading and writing? The resultant, infTfTi B.a llantine C I  J Books beauty of the St. LouisCon is over (but won't be actually by the time you read this). Never mind. Traditional ly, in publishing, September is a good reading month. Summer doldrums are over, the kids are back in school, everyone is thinking in a serious-minded way about the long, hard, intellectual winter ahead. So September is a big, big publishing month. WE are celebrating it with George MacDonald's very kooky is almost as extraordinary as the novel itself is the idea that anything as modern as this was written back in the I#'s by a Scottish (sometime) minister of advanced years. You'll recognize it by the superb Gervasio cover of a man in an attic. an easy book to read (clearly a bit beyond those mainstream reviewers). This is a jagged, fractionated, panoramic view of overpopulated times to come -- the style itself expressive of the explosive tensions generated by too goddamned many people. The theme is well known to all of us. The handling is very special indeed. Stay with it for # pages and you'll be hooked for another # .  THiS month also -- O happy month -- Larry Niven's volume of occurred to us that of all the new young writers, Larry's worlds are probably the most ingeniously specific. The shape of his particular space is very definite, very I much his own. Thank whatever gods there may be that he is also a very good writer, so we can all enjoy.  too -- a promotion yet -- although be is our candidate for the author than whom no one needs promotion less; and a peculiar wisp of a anti-Nixon. Not that we're terribly concerned about being in. (We're rational, that's all).  it comes at .# though), plus a couple of non-fiction works perLeona and Robert Rienow. your planet while you can. BB. finitely stubborn attitude had made it necessary to have a different written language for the people -- one the upper classes didn't respect -- before the nobles sullenly allowed their children to go to special, separate schools. Telling the nobility of his return, it seemed to Rocquel, would have to be done at an allmale dinner in the vast dining hall adjoining the even vaster jousting room. felt free to put through a call to Nerda. There was a long delay. Finally an aide came to the phone. He said in a formal tone, "The queen wishes me to inform you that her lord, Rocquel, has returned and, since he will in future represent the power of the armed forces, her talking to you might be misconstrued at this stage. That is all, sir." Dav hung up. startled. The great Rocquel was home. Where had he been? The hereditary general had always been a male first, his every movement and the tenor of his being expressing the quiescent violence of his powerful, supermasculine breed. It seemed an unfortunate coincidence for Miliss that the deadly, narrowed-eyed Jana ruler had returned. Dav divined that, if a struggle for power look place, Miliss might be its first victim. After some thought Dav phoned the palace a second time and asked for Rocquel. Once more he endured delay. At last another aide said, "His Excellency, the lord-general Rocquel wishes me to inform you that a new law will be promulgated tomorrow to the council. He invites you to attend the council meeting which will be held at the slickrock rendezvous." T HE dinner that night shocked Rocquel. He had forgotten the extreme coarseness of his peers -- at least it had become vague in his mind. An uproar of yelling and jesting began as the first males arrived. More arrivals simply added to the pandemonium. Things quieted down only to a degree when the meal was finally served. Plates clanked. Forks and knives clattered. Males yelled a peculiar type of acceptable insult at acquaintances farther along a table -- insults having to do with the jester's belief that the other lacked sexual prowess. Such remarks always brought bellows of laughter while onlookers insultingly urged the object of the attack to prove his capabilities. Yet since humor always probed the abyss of a male's sensitivity to criticism, suddenly a word would be unacceptable. In a flash the aggrieved male was on his feet, ragefully demanding satisfaction. Moments later the two nobles, yelling furiously at each other, would stamp out to the jousting room and add the clash of their steel to the sound of the dozens that were already there. Shortly a scream of outrage announced the first blood had been drawn. In the presence of Rocquel the custom was that the male initially blooded in any way was expected to acknowledge defeat. Such acknowledgment meant that the insult was nullified. But the loser who felt himself still aggrieved could demand a later reckoning away from the palace grounds. It was of this assembled group of mad creatures that Rocquel demanded silence when the eating was completed. Getting it, he gave the explanation for his absence that had been suggested to him -- a religious withdrawal, a year of wandering among the people as a mendicant, a time of selfsearching and thorough selflessness, of deliberate, temporary abdication of power. He concluded his fabricated account. "I saw our people in their daily actions. I lived among them, survived on their generosity and can report that the Jana world is indeed a worthy one." He received a prolonged ovation. But a bad moment came when he presently went into the jousting room where the guests had drifted after his talk. A voice grated beside his ear, "Your sword, sire." Rocquel experienced a blank instant as he realized he was being challenged. He swung around as of old in a swift, automatic defense action. His blade came out, weaving, before he saw that his challenger was Jaer Dorrish. Jana is a planet with one large continent and a number of small islands. All the rest is ocean. The continent is about t w o thousand miles square and from time immemorial scores of powerful tribes of the Janae have fought each other to one uneasy truce after another. Then came two human beings, Dav and Miliss. They set up headquarters in a big, sprawling White House -- by the river. Their civilizing task had been to bring the warring tribes up to the status of city states, then to unions of cities and finally to one state for the entire continent, headed by t h e hereditary general of the largest of the original tribes. At the same time they were to create a scientific civilization of a kind that never existed during similar natural developments on other planets. In effect, # years of Jana s o c i opolitical development was telescoped into # through the use of Symbols familiar to Man through centuries of infancy but finally refined to powerful physical forces of instant effectiveness. Normally a Symbol motivates. minds align in support of a single idea. At its most intense the idea is so strongly held by so many persons that rebellion against it becomes a mortal offense. Study of the chemistry of such an alignment of minds behind an idea had revealed two common de   nominators. For each Symbol the body actually manufactured a substance which varied slightly from Symbol to Symbol. The variations were expressed in different codings and energy charges. The energy charges were the second common denominator when reproduced artificially -- and amplified -- they showed as palpable force fields. Such fields had only a mild effect on individuals who believed in the Symbol. But they became progressively more palpable when experienced by persons who resisted the Symbol. In the presence of someone who was totally against the Symbol the field attained such an intensity that it acquired a spinning motion -- at which stage it could be dangerous to life. Already begun on Jana was a special type of parliament: The Chosen. This body would eventually show its remarkable qualities but was currently restricted by the power of the nobles. The elective system was simple. The electorate was divided into groups of a hundred voters. Each group sent a representative to an Elected Board. Each Elected Board consisted of a hundred delegates and, in turn, elected members to Elected Committees, who selected The Chosen. Each level group hod its political, local or national duties which, for the time being, were subordinated to the automatic privileges of the nobles. Rocquel poised, sword ready. He gazed questioningly into the dark, cynical eyes of his enemy. From somewhere in the sea of faces surrounding them, from out of the diminishing curtain of sound -- diminishing as more males grew aware of what was happening -- Rocquel was aware of a top officer speaking sharply. "Jaer -- have you forgotten? You have to state your reason when you challenge the crown. And it must be a reason acceptable to the majority present." "My reason," said Jaer in his deliberate fashion, "is that story of where he said he was during the past year -- " The officer who had spoken walked forward. He was grave, fortyish, narrow-eyed. "Is it a matter of misunderstanding the story or of rejecting it?" Silence had settled over the room and the words made an echo into the distances of that cavernous space. The question visibly gave Jaer pause. His expression showed his comprehension that a to-the-death had to follow any total challenge of a noble's word. Abruptly he laughed and put away his sword. He said, "I think I shall ask privately for a clarification. If Rocquel decides what I have to say is truly a reason for a challenge -- then we shall have our bout. Perhaps tomorrow." He thereupon stepped close to Rocquel and said in a low insolent voice. "Your excellency -- the coincidence of my arresting Miliss and your prompt return needs to be explained. If the two are not related -- you will, of course, have no objection to my plans for disposing of her." Rocquel said evenly, "If you are operating within the frame of the law -- " "The law is what the council decides," replied Jaer arrogantly. "Do I have your word that you will not interfere -- in view of my suspicions?" "There will be a new law," said Rocquel in a formal tone. "Within the frame of that law -- I shall not interfere." He walked away, leaving Jaer Dorrish with a black scowl on his face and a query about the "new law" unspoken on his pursed lips. In his mind Rocquel read the thought that this very night he must attend on the human woman -- must force her before any protecting law was passed. Yet Rocquel could not be sure he had read correctly even when Jaer left the party within minutes. when he came in. He was late, very late. As soon as he entered -- and after he had nodded to her -- she retreated to her dressing room and began to get ready for bed. He watched her shadow through the translucent door. A regretful thought passed through his mind that he should have given her permission to retire without waiting for his return. Presently he rejected the thought of such leniency. According to Jana law a wife could not undress at night to go to bed until her husband gave permission. She could lie down with her clothes on. She could even sleep though that was frowned on. She could go to bed before his return only with his written permission or if a doctor stated in writing or in the presence of witnesses that she was ill. The rules seemed harsh. But Rocquel had read the ancient documents containing the results of studies made of Jana female behavior prior to the passing of the stringent laws and there was no question. Jana females would associate with males only when forced. A female, unforced, would promptly move off by herself and remain that way all her life. The facts had been set jdown by amazed historians who named names and places. The truths of the long-ago experiments in allowing freedom to females were attested to by famous people of Jana history. There was no point in repeating the experience in modern times. Jana females had no maternal instinct and particularly detested their male children. It had been a sad thing to read some of the comments made by females during the free period. A male child will eventually become a Jana male -- that most detestable being. And so any charming childlike attributes he may have are an illusion... Another female had been in favor of the race's dying out -- because its continuance required that Jana males also survive, to which she was "totally opposed." What could males do, confronted by such females? They had done it. The laws were just and as kind as they could be. A female could complain if she suffered any illtreatment -- and receive an immediate hearing from a court. No expense was spared by the State to protect her from a brutal husband. In return she must do her duty by her husband and her children. Since she had no feeling about her functions the law prescribed her exact routine. Obviously even the hereditary general could not lightly alter either the custom or the law. Nerda came to bed and presently he gave her permission to sleep. She slept -- it seemed instantly. Ill Miliss heard a key in the lock of her cell. She had not undressed. She sat up in the rough bunk and watched curiously as a manlike figure, waving a long flashlight, unlocked the door and entered. From the vast shadowy size of him she divined his identity. But not until he deliberately raised the light and beamed it into his face did she recognize .lacr Derrish. His face, like that of all Jana males, was too long, too much given over to nose. But the skin was a clear reddish color and smooth. She was not repelled. At least, she thought, the Janae were a distinctly humanlike breed. for which -- in view of the fate she sensed was in store for her -- she was thankful. It did not occur to her to formulate in her mind the mental pattern that would activate a thought amplifier in the house where she and Dav lived -- no help for her from that rigid mind, she decided. But she did have a purpose of her own adaptable to this situation. It had been growing on her all day. The male stepped briskly across the cell toward her cot. She said hurriedly, "I've been thinking about what you told me last night -- your prediction that Rocquel would return as a consequence of my arrest. And it happened. He did come back." Jaer stopped his forward movement. He did not reply. Her next w'ords quivered on the tip of her tongue but remained unspoken. Miliss w'as startled. She had an enormous sensitivity to small signals. He had been coming forward with that Jana male arrogance, his whole manner vibrating with the message that he would not be denied. And now he stood still. And the way he stood telegraphed uncertainty. "Is something w'rong?" Miliss asked. More silence, a sense of darker emotions. She was astounded. Jana males w'ere reputed to have a peculiar calm humor in the rape situation. Both humor and savoirfaire required expression in w'ords, not silence. During the strange pause, like a suspension of time in the cell, she had nevertheless become aware of the night and the prison. A time had been on Jana when there had been no prisons, only a few compounds where "enemies" were kept prior to execution. On Jana, for more millennia than she cared to recall, people had been tolerated -- or executed. No middle situation had Ted. This and similar prisons were actually a great victory for less harsh attitudes. So the sounds of a vast life around her were presently heartening to Miliss. She heard metallic clanks, distant throat raspings, Jana males snarling in their sleep and occasional echoes of faraway voices. Sounds of many prisoners. The Nunbrid prison was large. It was filled with people who would be tried in court for their offenses and who were not subject -- as had once been the case -- to the compulsive masculine rage of some intolerant noble. A feeling of peaceful accomplishment was settling over Miliss. Dav and she had civilized these people. Jaer finally spoke. "I had a sudden insight -- and I'm having another one." His voice was strained, not really calm. She sensed in its tone an advantage for her. Somehow the situation was no longer as dangerous as it had been. This male was genuinely disturbed. By what? pose upon him. "Is that all you can say about the coincidence of your prediction and Rocquel's return?" "I'm still wondering about it myself," was the grim answer. The threat was in his voice again. She rushed past it. "Don't you realize the impossibility of such an unsupported insight -- the odds against its baring truth?" For a tense moment in the unyielding closeness of the cell, in the darkness broken only by a flashlight that sometimes pointed at her and sometimes at the metal bars -- and occasionally, briefly. at Jaer himself -- she thought that he would acknowledge reason and dismiss the subject. But Jana nobles, she shortly decided in despair, were not up to her kind of strict logic. His mien told her he was accepting his intuition. For a long moment, while he stood there silently, her fear grew. Then : "There's only one explanation," he said slowly. "Rocquel was in hiding with you and Dav while he was gone." "No. That's absolutely not true. If you're acting on that assumption -- you're in danger." "Danger?" "There's a hidden force at work. It can strike at you if you ignore it. In fact, it probably has already struck -- or how could you have had two insights?" "You're trying to alarm me," said Jaer harshly. "And a Jana male cannot be frightened." "But he can think about how best to survive," countered Miliss. "At least -- " she couldn't help the biting remark -- "the males I know always do." Again silence filled the cell. The light winked off. Into that darkness and that silence Miliss projected what seemed to her to be the only possible explanation. "What has happened means that you've been programed," she said. "Programed? I don't understand." "It's impossible that you could have a second major intuition unless somebody had installed it in your mind under mechanical hypnosis." "I just bad it. It's my own thought." "It's not your owm thought. You're being manipulated," She broke off. "Don't you see, you couldn't possibly -- being a Jana noble -- have all by yourself predicted Rocquel's return on the basis of my arrest. It's too radical and fantastic a prediction. Yet it came true. And now another one? Impossible." Once more he was silent. The flashlight was on again, its beam tilted casually, showing his scowling face, narrow'ed eyes and lower lip pushed up. He was evidently having unpleasant, calculating thoughts. Abruptly he asked, "Why did you and Dav separate?" Miliss hesitated, then said, "He w'as more and more adopting the attitudes and behavior of the Jana male -- and treating me as Jana males treat Jana females. I had had enough years ago -- but we were alone here, two human beings, the last of our kind in this area. So I tried to make my peace with the situation as Jana females have done for so long." than that. It had, of course, kept occurring to her that the frequent despair she had felt over Dav might in fact be the death wish that had destroyed the human race. She had fought against her growing embitterment. until, one day not too long since, she had had an insight of her own. Human males were, had always been, exactly as vicious as the Janae. But human women, having their own maternal instinct to satisfy, had endlessly compromised with the egotistical villains. The need for motherhood had put a fortunate -- for the men and the race -- veil over a woman's awareness of the impossible true nature of the beasts. Once she had recognized the thought, leaving Dav was only a matter of a brief period of rethinking her reasons, and convincing herself finally. Jaer's voice came grimly. He said, "I didn't have my first insight until after I had arrested you. I've had my second one in your presence. So you're doing this to me. By Dilit, woman -- " Miliss said urgently, "Tell me what your second insight is." When he had told her she said, "But that's ridiculous -- what good does that do me?" Jaer must have recognized her logic. He stood very still. After a long pause he said slowly, "But I did get both thoughts in your presence, so someone knows I'm here." His manner showed unease. The implication of danger was visibly penetrating his awareness. Miliss sensed her advantage. She said, "What is so meaningless about these insights is that I detect that your purpose in arresting me was entirely personal. You saw a possibility of challenging the throne and simultaneously obtaining me as a mistress -- " "Silence, woman." Jaer sounded alarmed. "I have never desired the throne -- that's treason. I'd better leave before I damage you and ruin my case against you in court. But don't think I'm through with you." The light winked out. Quick steps sounded. A metal door clicked open and clanged shut. She heard him retreating along a corridor. And realized that she was almost as shaken as he. That second insight, she told herself, is absolutely mad... But for the first time in many years she slept poorly. IV HE next day. Shortly after sunrise the council members began cycling up to the meeting place at the beginning of the slickrock range, seven miles west of Nunbrid. By the time Rocquel arrived on his new motorbike, Dav and eight Jana males of high rank were already there. The human sat on his bike off to one side but the Jana nobles were impatiently gunning their motors, visibly anxious to get started on their hazardous meeting-in-motion. Rocquel was greeted by a number of insulting but quite goodnatured eomments about his overweight machine. He responded with well-placed sneers about overcautious small-bike riders. But he was curious. There had been changes in design during his absence. Wheeling around with the casual daring of an expert cyclist, he made quick, searching examination of the mount of each council member to see what time and manufacturers had wrought. As always for slickrocking, all the motorcycles were small, tough, and light. But Rocquel noticed that three of the bikes were smaller than he remembered -- not more than lOOcc., perhaps even # or # -- compared to his # cc. machine. He questioned the three owners about it. He was still getting boastful replies when Jaer Dorrish and a sly-eyed air-force officer roared up and charged their metal steeds up the first incline. Jaer yelled, "Meeting called to order -- " A number of nobles uttered wild cries, gunned their motors and took off in pursuit of the latecomers. Dav brought up the rear. Moments later everyone was in motion and the meeting of the supreme council of Jana was in session. Jn the old days -- before the machines -- a king had held his council meetings while riding a tamed, high-backed Mesto-beast. The Mestos were dangerous, cunning creatures, always, looking for an opportunity to upset their riders, and Mcsto-riding was, accordingly, considered great fun. But a Mesto simply could not cover the distances or go over the rough and beautiful slickrock country. At first the nobles climbed steadily, strung out unevenly, bobbing up and down over domes, knobs and ridges, skipping at a good clip over the almost glasssmooth, steel-hard straights. Rocquel, coming up from behind, kept edging up to Jaer and finally had his bike racing along parallel to the bright green machine of the big male. "What's on the agenda?" he yelled. Jaer's answering cry brought up the subject of Miliss. He made a slashing gesture with one hand, cutting the air with it as if it were a blade, then showed his teeth in a grimacing smile. He shouted, "I propose that this woman be put to death." "On what grounds?" Rocquel roared back, surprised. Jaer's suggestion was discourteous in view of the fact that Dav was at the council meeting. Or was it possible that Jaer had not yet seen Dav? As the day dragged by Jaer's unawareness of Dav began to seem less and less a coincidence. But Jaer's intentness on Miliss and on the new law might have accounted for his attitude toward Dav. D AV anticipated a crisis as soon as he was told what was on the agenda and the nature of the new law. The law itself required no special explanation for him. It was he who had proposed the idea of a constitutional monarchy to a resistant Rocquel. The very next day -- a year ago -- the powerful Jana leader had gone off on a religious hegira. Now he was back, acceptant. Mentally, Dav triggered a thought amplifier. It in turn channeled power into a relay that blazed one of the symbols. The symbol of a Constitutional Monarchy. That done, he considered with mirthless good humor the proposal to execute Miliss. Ironic that jaer was planning to put on trial a person already doomed. Should Jaer be told? But when Dav finally joined the group the crisis came so rapidly that there w'as no time to mention anything. The council members stopped in front of a big cave, at the #-foot level. Here the great nobles of Jana sat on bikes with engines idling while they gulped breakfast. Rocquel was aware of an ugly, throaty sound from Jaer. He spun around and saw Dav easing his bike into the clearing. Dav came to a full stop. Beside Rocquel, Jaer let out a bellow and gunned his motor. the day to Nerda, then asked curiously, "What do you think happened to Jaer? You know more about what Dav can do than anyone." Conversations between them were not common. She was not required by law or custom to speak to him as long as she performed her wifely duties. He was not surprised when she did not reply. But he deduced from the thoughtful expression on her face that she was considering the matter and would eventually give him an answer. Yet it was morning before she answered. "A symbol," she said then, "as Dav has described it, represents a real thing or thought. It is not itself the thing or the thought -- " Roequel waited, uneasily aware that he was being presented with a concept that might be too subtle for a Jana noble -- too subtle even for himself, despite his past year of indoctrination... Nerda continued, "When the symbol representing constitutional monarchy is finally a part of the force of it in all those minds will maintain such a system for decades under normal circumstances -- or at least until another symbol replaces it, which, of course, is happening very rapidly with Dav and Miliss forcing us into civilization." Roequel felt helpless before her explanation. She seemed to understand what she was saying and he didn't. We males of the nobility are really no longer a part of what is happening... It was discouraging but he persisted. "What I saw," he said, "was Jaer's motorcycle stop -- not short -- but as if it ran into an elastic wall that took the full force of his forward impetus and gently flung him back. He ended up on the ground. But he was not hurt." "He struck the symbol," said Nerda. "These symbols have become progressively more violent in their reaction. The most violent so far is the symbol of a constitutional monarchy." He said, "You say the symbol. But what was the force involved?" "The force of the symbol." Her expression showed her awareness of his bewilderment. "Don't you see?" she urged. "All those What Roequel was seeing was that he had made a mistake in asking her for her opinion. He wanted to say that nobody yet believed in the new law. It would not even be publicly announced until later this morning. But his awful feeling leaped past that idea to the more personal awareness that he had lowered himself in her eyes. He recalled with a sinking sensation the Jana male conviction that if a female even once gained a genuine advantage over her husband it was the end of their relationship. Nothing the male did after that could repair the damage. Fighting for recovery, he nodded and said aloud, "I see. Your many conversations with Dav have been very educational and valuable for both of us. I congratulate you. It's a difficult concept." He divined from an odd look in her eyes that she saw through his verbal stratagem. She said slowly, "We mustn't expect too much from a constitutional monarchy in terms of change in the passions. Rule of law merely regulates a society in a more orderly fashion than absolutism. An accused individual is no longer subject to arbitrary judgments but is allowed time by the courts to defend himself within the frame of the law. Yet in the end he may pay the same penalty." She concluded: "And so, to answer your question of last night -- I believe we shall see how Jaer was affected by the way he allows the trial of Miliss to be conducted." Rocquel, who was still striving for recovery from his fateful error in having this discussion with her at all, said in his most matter-offact voice, "What I'm curious about is the nature of the charges he intends to level against her -- " more than Rocquel, who still nursed memories of his year away. He had learned something about humans during his absence and could even control a certain symbol himself -- without, he realized, really understanding it. Miliss was accused of being an enemy alien, illegally resident on Jana; spying for an invading alien force from space; conspiring to pretend to be a member of a decadent race when in fact she was a member of a superior, dominant race set down among primitives. She was also charged with harboring criminal intent. Dav scanned the headlines unbelievingly, standing in the rain in front of a newsstand. Janae in colorful raincoats drifted past him as -- directed by a guide sentence on page one -- he turned to the editorial page. There he read " in the language of Low Jana: In an unprecedented action the government today challenged the right to live on this planet of the two relics of an older civilization. Almost melodramatic charges of conspiracy were leveled at the couple but only the woman has been arrested. We propose to leave to the courts the resolution of the legal tangle implicit in this arrest but find ourselves thoughtful about the matter on a strictly theoretical basis. Explorers have recently found isolated tribes of Janae still living in stone-age cultures. Contact with our superior civilization was inacted as a depressant on the aspirations and mores of the backward peoples and they have seemed unable to recover as a group. Until today's governmental action we have known a reverse condition with the two human beings resident on Jana. They represent an older culture -- one that apparently had virtually died out for reasons never analyzed. Such a decadent culture, even though it had clearly attained heights of scientific achievement far in advance of what is available on Jana, has not acted as depressant on spirit of the Janae. Matters to be adjudicated by the courts include the following: Are Dav and Miliss representatives of a superior culture that is merely pretending to be decadent, so that the normal depressant impact upon an inferior culture is avoided? If so, does their presence here come under the heading of an alien conspiracy? And can such a purpose be interpreted as an invasion? T HE account was perceptive. It indicated the presence of a highly intelligent professional class already in existence in Nunbrid and hundreds of other cities. The lower-class Janae had clearly matured more rapidly than their hereditary rulers. Yet the tone of the editorial was neither inflammatory nor antagonistic. In fact, it showed respect for the government and awareness of the meaning of the new law. Dav's own thought ceased at that point. He had been aware that passersby were glancing at him. Now, suddenly, one big male stopped, uttered an explosive oath and lifted an arm threateningly, 'as if to strike. Dav shrank back involuntarily. The male grew instantly contemptuous and kicked at him. Dav, alert now, dodged with easy skill but dropped his newspaper. The big fellow scooped it up from the wet sidewalk and pounded the soggy sheets. He roared, "You've got to be nothing. You're the last of a vanished race. A nothing! A nothing!" Dav retreated. He found a side street, slipped into its darker, damp distances, heading for home. As he approached the edge of the city he heard a sound in the night ahead of him, a swelling murmur of ugly voices. Then, out in the open spaces between himself and his house, he saw a huge crowd carrying torches. Startled, Dav withdrew from the open area and headed for a small house on a nearby street. The place was actually a secret entrance to the big white mansion. Long ago, when Jana had been more primitive, unpleasant incidents had occurred. The secret access had often proved useful. He made his way safely through the connecting tunnel to the big house and from its interior gazed out at the crowd through a viewplate. The plate magically dissolved the night and the rain, showing a dull day-view of the large grounds in front of the house. At first look the mob seemed even huger than he had estimated. Dav shook his head sadly. The pattern was the same as it had once been on old Earth. At the top was the hereditary hierarchy. Next came a law-abiding middleclass of people. At the bottom seethed the vast mass of the unthinking. The hierarchy was semipsychotic, murderous, subjective. And the middle class was still relatively new and unaware of its future power. The mob was completely duped. Dav observed with relief that several hundred troops patrolled an area between him and the angry crowd. An officer spoke through a loudspeaker system, addressing the mob. "Go home. The rule of law shall prevail. Go home. If these people are spies they will be judged by the law. Go home -- " The frequently repeated admonition began to have its effect toward midnight. Dav saw that there were fewer people outside and more were drifting back toward the city. But it was nearly two in the morning before, feeling that the danger was over, he went to bed. Lying there he rejected the accusations against Miliss and himself with little more than a moment's consideration. It was true, as the newspaper editorial had pointed out, that primitives had in the past suffered psychic and racial disaster as a result of being exposed abruptly to a superior culture. And, conceivably, somebody might mercifully evolve a more systematic approach to the problem. But the mentors would know. That had to be. It would be absolutely ridiculous if Miliss and he weren't aware of their own realities. All these hundreds of years of ignorance on so vital a point? Impossible. The truth was that simple -- and obvious. Nearly four hundred empty years made a weight of time in his mind that no words and no Jana accusation could penetrate. He had no trouble sleeping. V palace communications center during the period of threat against Dav. Several times he spoke directly to the commanding officer of the troops patrolling the grounds. At last, weary and a little guilty at having been out late again, he went to his apartment. The bedroom was dark as he entered -- and he had an instant, awful intuition. He flicked on the light and stood confused and shaken. Nerda was in bed, undressed under the sheets. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing came with the regularity of sleep. Rocqucl's thought flashed back to their conversation of the morning and to his sudden feeling that he had ruined himself with her. His inability to grasp the meaning of the symbol idea troubled him again. Standing beside his sleeping wife, he visualized the repercussions of her rebellion if it were ever found out. His absence had shaken the throne and he had returned too recently to have fully recovered his power and position. He had divined an uneasiness in the nobility -- it would take a little while before those suspicious, violent beings were reassured that the new law was not a direct threat. And if they found out that he was so weak that he could not control his wife -- Instantly an old impulse propelled him toward her sleeping body. His hands and jaws clenched with the automatic effort that would shove her in a single thrust out of the far side of the bed. He poised before the act, suddenly gripped and held by a thought and feeling new to him. He had been about to act on the Jana male attitude. But was Nerda justified in her rebellion? Was the old way the way women should be treated? Had his analysis of her reason for what she had done been accurate? A flash of an old male paranoia darkened his face and mind -- the absolute conviction that Nerda was doing this because another male had gotten to her. Dav, the human? Some portion of Rocquel's mind recognized the total irrationality of the thought -- recognized that if it were true Jana females would not associate with males of their own free will, they obviously did not betray their husbands. He was also aware that Dav, who had an unlimited sense of personal responsibility, would not have taken advantage of the queen's year of "widowhood." The recognition and awareness were not enough for his fevered brain, alive with brutal images. He had to know. He turned and walked out of the room. Within minutes he was part of a motorcycle army unit roaring through the night streets of Nunbrid toward the military prison where Miliss was confined. T HE long, bleak concrete corridors of the prison echoed to his footsteps and those of his guards. The light carried by the prison's officer-of-the-night was bright enough but it cast wavering shadows. In that uneven brightness, Rocquel noted the gray drabness of this prison world, and some of the singleness of his purpose softened. The thought came to him that Miliss had been held here now for several days and that this was wrong. He could do nothing about it under the new law but within himself he felt a deep anger against Jaer. The rage was brief. It ended as they reached Miliss' cell -- and there she was. Rocquel went in alone, his guards retreating, waiting. Their first moments together were ordinary. Miliss' surprise and pleasure when she recognized him, then her puzzlement that he should come at so late an hour gave him his opening. He asked her the question: Why had she and Dav separated? The woman was startled. She sensed the dark purpose in him -- who had always been so friendly to her and with whom she had communicated so well in the past. After a moment, realizing that delay was unwise, she gave him Dav's diagnosis -- that she had gone into the death tiling that had destroyed man. She deemed it the best reply, considering all possibilities. Her answer and its deadly implications for her shocked him out of his madness. She explained in greater detail. Rocquel said, "Then what you are saying is that you acted out of some parallel to the type of emotion used by people who actually did have the death thing. You did this consciously, knowing Dav would believe it was in fact the death thing." "I think that's what I did," Miliss replied. She added quickly; "The death thing is subtle. One can fool oneself." Rocquel persisted, "But as far as you're concerned, you're not really dying?" "As far as I know I'm not." Rocquel considered that in a gathering amazement. Finally: "But why aren't you doing something about getting out of this prison? You shouldn't be here." "What can I do?" "Don't you have any protection of your own?" "Nothing," she said, "but the symbols so far activated. Except for a few hand weapons and mobile energy units, most of which we've given to the Janae, that's all we have." "What about other -- latersymbols?" "Their time is not yet," said Miliss. "They wouldn't work -- not for Jana." Rocquel sighed. But, he wanted to say, Dav believers in a constitutional monarchy before they ever believed in it -- in fact, before they even knew about it. Why not use the some future symbol before they ever believe in it.? He did not ask the question. The concept of any symbol was beyond his ability to grasp. He realized humbly that he was a Jana nobleman of a somewhat simple nature and that the year he had spent aboard the earth battleship -- the time he had described to no one -- had been really like some tribal king's being -- entertained -- if that was the right word -- by traders or scientists from a superior civilization. Being kindly disposed, they had been anxious not to hurt his feelings -- but to them he had been a nothing. His status had been meaningless except insofar as they had a policy of using native kings in their interplanetary welfare w'ork. Nonetheless, he tried again to reach understanding. At his request Miliss explained the power of a symbol once more. But it didn't penetrate. We thick-skulled males... HA ND the ridiculous thing," he it explained his failure to Miliss, "is that I myself actually have control of a symbol -- " He stopped. It was an admission that he would have made to no other living person -- only to this one individual with whom he had always felt able to speak freely. He finished lamely, "Of course, that was given to me as a protection." He stopped again because of the look on her face -- intent, avid, seeking, startled, unbelieving but finally believing. Miliss whispered, "Who gave you control of that symbol?" "Human beings," Rocquel said simply. She sank back. She seemed to cringe on the cot as if, like a mental patient, she were wracked by a psychic disease that contracted her body, curling it, twisting her head to one side. Finally she said, "Then Jaer's intuitions, accusations, may be true. There are human beings out there -- " She suddenly broke off, breathless. "Tell me exactly where you were, what you saw -- " Rocquel described his year on tire battleship. She whispered, "There were both men and women?" "Yes. It was a community of several thousand, I would say." "They never landed anywhere?" "Not that I was aware of." He sighed. "But it was such a big ship. I saw only what appeared on the visual screens in the sections where I was permitted to wander. They didn't teach me the language. I only heard what the interpreting machines said to me." He considered possibilities. "Landing parties could have gone down to planets without my knowing it." "It was one of these humans that taught you control of a symbol?" "Yes." Miliss persisted: "But what was it supposed to do? If Jaer had actually slashed at you with his sword -- what would have happened to him?" Rocquel didn't know. He explained slowly, "They warned me to be careful with it -- because if I wasn't it would hook on to me, too." He added: "When I set it up against Jaer I could feel it tugging at me sort of like -- " he paused, groping -- "maybe like a magnet." "But what is it a symbol of?" Miliss asked. Rocquel had no idea. She went on, baffled: "It must be drawing its energy from some meaningful idea on another planet -- since we didn't sense anything here. But what could it be?" No answer came to her and she asked, "You still have control of it?" He nodded. "Did they say they would let you maintain it permanently?" Rocquel gazed at her unhappily. "I can't remember. I was told something -- but each time I think I'm going to recall it, it fades." "That sounds like close-tothe-surface programing." Miliss nodded. "As if whatever it relates to might happen at any time. So we must be near a crisis." She added, obviously thinking out loud, that only a symbol could act with subtle or powerful influence over distances. She finished: "It must be very personal to you, which in itself is unusual. For example, if I could do what you have described -- I could get out of this prison." helplessness focused Rocquel's attention on her situation. Her confession that she could not protect herself was abruptly enormously significant. It placed control back in Jana hands. Janae could accept or reject a gift of knowledge from the reservoir on a self-determined basis. We can use what they have but we don't have to... Rocquel felt somehow stronger in his Jana identity as he had that awareness. The accusations leveled at Miliss by Jaer had had a certain truth to them. The entire populace felt a displacement as a consequence of the human presence, gentle as it was. After a little he was able to reason out the extent of her predicament. He was appalled. Her position was very severe if she and Dav could not really protect themselves. With an effort he pushed aside his anxiety for her, grew calm and grave. "There will be a difficult time ahead, my dear," he said gently. "The new law binds me as much as it does everyone else. I cannot arbitrarily set you free. Have you an attorney?" "Not yet," Miliss answered. "I'll call Dav and tell him that it is imperative he get one for you." "He won't do a thing." She reminded him of the death-drive situation -- how only those survived who refused to help. She finished; "I counted on that to keep him away from me. So there can be no help from him." Rocquel shook his head, smiling, and pointed out that his position in the matter was stronger than Dav's. "I'll call him," he said firmly. "He'll do it because I ask him, not necessarily to help you." He broke off. "He's the one who should act in this matter. It will look odd if he doesn't. So he will." At that moment Rocquel accidentally caught a glimpse of his watch. It registered nearly four in the morning. He was instantly contrite. "I'm sorry," he apologized. "I've kept you awake." Miliss brushed his words aside. "I feel so much better. You've given me the first information from -- out there -- " she gazed upward, waved vaguely -- "that I've had in all the years Dav and I have been here. It's not clear -- it's hard to decide what it means. But now I know that there are still a few other human beings." On that note they separated. Rocquel returned to the palace and presently slipped into bed beside the sleeping Nerda. She was a problem to which he had no quick solution either. VI T HE Jana attorney whom Dav consulted shook his head gravely over the fourth count. "The other accusations," he said, "have as yet no legal penalties. The judge could do anything, could even release her. But criminal intent has proved dangerous in the past. It can bring a capital verdict." Dav attended the trial as a witness, getting angrier every minute as all his "gifts" to the Janae were used as evidence against Miliss. The argument of the State was that a superior culture was. by way of its scientific gifts, cunningly guiding the Janae away from their natural development and into a mental enslavement that was the equivalent of a takeover of one people by another. Dav's concern was with the accusations, not with Miliss. Called to the stand by Miliss' attorney, he denied all such intent. "Science is neutral," he said. "It is the truth of nature. Jana scientists would normally and in due course have discovered exactly tne same truths. In giving the Janae the scntific artifacts of Earth's ancient civilization I fulfilled a duty imposed upon me by a vanished race to hand on the torch of knowledge as rapidly as feasible in the hope that, with such a head start, the Janae would succeed in establishing a permanently growing civilization instead of one that would eventually dwindle as others, including man's, have been them -- " When he later came out on the street a troop of guards sent by Rocquel saved him from a demonstrating crowd. The crowds screamed insults as Dav was escorted to a bus that took him, accompanied by several guards, to the end of the line. From there the soldiers walked with him to his house, where other soldiers patrolled the approaches, back, front and sides. Miliss was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. Three appeals to ever higher courts failed. But Rocquel granted her a full pardon on the grounds that The Chosen had not legislated on the matters at issue. "Prime minister" Jaer Darrish -- and where had the title come fro m? -- thereupon introduced amendments to criminal law. They were duly passed by The Chosen. Rocquel, to Jaer's surprise, did not veto the legislation. He asked Rocquel about it. The hereditary ruler gestured. "I told you I wouldn't interfere." He paused, curious. "Suppose all those charges you're making turn out to be true. If man is really a superior race, then presumably a fleet of total power will come to the rescue of his representatives on Jana -- and we will all be degraded by having to submit, however briefly, to an occupation force. What would you gain if that were to happen?" Jaer scowled. "Jana honor," he said with the traditional arrogance of the Jana male, "demands that the truth of this matter be brought out into the open. We shall deal with this so-called total power when we see it." "With what weapons?" Rocquel asked derisively. Jaer said, "The human man is being watched night and day. At the proper moment we'll make a raid and we'll capture all man's scientific secrets and make an end of this degrading dole system on which he seems to have been operating -- one secret at a time. Such doling is an unbearable insult. We want to have everything -- now!" Rocquel stared sardonically at the other's flushed face. Finally he said skeptically, "Your concern with such minor matters does not fit with your previous character, Jaer. I wonder what you're really up to." The. big male stiffened. "Do you question my loyalty, sire?" It could have been a dangerous moment. But Rocquel merely shook his head chidingly. "No, Jaer, I expect you will accept the new law. It is to your advantage. What is your next move?" "You'll see." Jaer turned abruptly and walked away. da, reported Jaer's statements and asked her opinion. She answered at once -- no longer a surprise to him. Ever since her rebellion on the matter of going to sleep without his permission -- which she now did as a matter of course -- she had been freer in her responses in every way, even in their personal relations. She told him that in her opinion Jaer wanted the human woman and that therefore his real target in the trial was not Miliss but Dav. Rocquel stared at his wife. "But -- " he began and stopped. Careful, he thought. Don't give her another reason for losing respect for you. No knowing what repercussions that would have... But he felt slightly helpless before her statement. What she suggested was an immensely tricky thing for Jaer to be doing. Presumably the head of the Dorrish clan expected that Miliss would be freed. Rocquel's thought paused, a light dawning. Of course, in the trial of Miliss all the weaknesses of the prosecution's case -- and the strength of the defense -- would be revealed whereupon all the various loopholes in the law would be rectified -- at which time Dav would be tried and irrevocably convicted. Rocquel stepped forward impulsively, and embraced Nerda. "There's no question -- I've got a very unusual and perceptive queen. Thank you." He kissed her and was aware for the barest instant that she kissed him back. The action must have been involuntary. She broke the kiss and became passive. Rocquel was not offended. In the back of his mind was the thought that Jana females were, perhaps, not as unemotional as was believed. It might be worthwhile some day to conduct a deeper experiment. Meanwhile -- he had to warn Dav. The next morning Rocquel learned that Miliss, who had been returned to custody on the formal charge of being a danger to the realm, was to be retried. Her attorney's plea at the preliminary hearing that afternoon was double jeopardy and the inapplicability of retroactive legislation. The judge released her. The prosecution requested and got a warrant for the arrest of Dav. The evening paper reported that the arresting officers had failed to find the Earth man. D AV spent the late afternoon in one of the hiding places of the Reservoir of Symbols, planning his escape. It was time for the kind of disappearance that Miliss and he in times past had occasionally had to undertake. There had been other Janae like Jaer Dorrish. They, too, had had their own remorseless purposes. Escape in those distant times had almost always consisted of their waiting somewhere for the particular enemy to live out his short life span. Dav left his hiding place after dark and made his way through the brush. His destination was a certain hillside where, nearly seventy years ago. he had buried a small spaceship. In years gone by, such long buried machinery had not always been readily located when needed -- but this one had survived its seven decades totally free of unpleasant accidents. No bulldozer had nosed near it. No one had perched a building on top of it. The craft waited for him in its temporary grave. Dav was carefully clearing away a particularly dense clump of tall shrubs when he heard a sound. Noiselessly he sank to the ground. Too late. He heard a swift pad of footsteps in the dark. Two pairs of eyes glowed at him from beside some brush. Then strong, lean fingers had him pinned down. The unmistakable long nose of a Jana male was silhouetted against the haze of city lights. A Jana female stood beyond him. The deep voice of the male s:i id exultantly, "Got you. Perna, quick, come over here and turn a light on this spying rascal -- The words halted on a curse. "By Dilit, it isn't that scoundrel suitor of yours after all. Perna, bring that light, and let's see what we've got here." There was silence except for the unhurrying footsteps of the female. Dav lay unresisting, l ie could have taken steps. Pic could have reached up and, with the enormous strength that lie could focus into any part of his body, with unerring fingers stabbed at the two vital nerve centers in the Jana to send the big male sprawling in agony. Or he could simply have contemptuously and effortlessly disengaged himself by a direct muscular thrust. He did neither. As in past times, he was prepared to act defensively according to the need. A blaze of light cut off his thought. The light beat pitilessly down on his upturned face. And then, the female's voice came, thick with disgust. , "Why, it's the man. So this is the kind of lover you protect me from. Bah!" "Not so fast with your criticism," growled the male. "There's a reward. We can get married." His grip tightened on Dav. "Get up, you antique. It's time you and that woman ceased hanging on to life. Your kind is dead." The moment for action had arrived but Dav did nothing. He offered no resistance as lie was jerked roughly to his feet. In those moments, an astounding thing had happened. He did not care. His thought was: Man's civilization is dead -- why should Miliss and  be bound by the values oj a society that has failed? The barriers he had erected against Miliss collapsed and a great guilt overwhelmed him. Suddenly he saw how rigid he had been as the dedicated savior of a new race. In that prolonged moment of anguish something she had once said flashed in his memory. I'm sure even your nose is getting a little longer. Pretty soon you'll even look like the Janae -- " He had lived in a dream, he saw now, a kind of self-induced hypnotism -- an ideal which had given a temporary significance to an otherwise meaningless existence. With Miliss doomed, nothing here was worth saving. He went wordlessly with his captor. T HE news came to Rocquel in the small hours of the morning that Dav had been arrested. He left his bed, dressed, phoned Miliss. "Have you had a visitor yet?" "No. But I imagine he'll be here soon." Rocquel said, "I'm coming right over." He arrived by way of the secret entrance, and walked along a narrow, dim-lit corridor until he came to a closed door. Voices sounded from beyond it. Rocquel drew the door toward  .ini and stepped through. He found himself in an alcove lighted by reflections from a bright room beyond a green and gold screen. The voices came from the other side of the screen. He recognized the calm bass of Jaer Dorrish and Miliss' indignant soprano. "I'm surprised," Miliss was saying, "that you continue to pursue me despite the fact that you are probably personally programmed and may be in grave danger." Jaer answered her with complete assurance, "l once allowed myself to be alarmed by such words. That will not happen again." "What you're saying," said Miliss sharply, "is that you've abandoned reason." "The Jana male," was the cool reply, "knows what is important. A female is. Motivations for fear arc not." He chuckled lazily. "Let me reason out this situation for you. If you resist me you may lxarrested again. But I may not even press charges against Dav if you give in. Who knows what privileges may continue for you two if you and I occasionally meet privately during the many, otherwise dull years ahead." Rocquel stood there behind the screen and shook his head. Nerda's intuition was correct. This entire action against the human beings was simply a typical Jana male scheme in connection with a female. He was not shocked. Or surprised, really. Jaer said, "It is late, my dear. Surely you do not expect any other visitors this evening." The remark made it the ideal moment for Rocquel to come out of his hiding place. (i kl     said to him," he told fT Nerda after he returned to the palace, "was, 'Jaer, if I'm going to surrender some of the prerogatives of the crown -- it is because I believe you and others of the nobility, in exchange for greater political power, will give up the purely personal privileges of forcing individuals to yield to a lordly whim.' " "And what did he answer?" "Nothing. He turned and walked out of the room and out of the house." Nerda made a distasteful gesture. "If he can get rid of Dav, he'll count on eventually forcing Miliss to accept his protection." "Then you think he will press charges against Dav?" "Your words didn't reach him. He's still an old-style Jana male." She shrugged. "So, of course." D AV sat apathetic throughout his trial. The defense attorney appointed by Rocquel could not even persuade him to testify on his own behalf. He was convicted of being an alien spy and sentenced to be beheaded. copter settled down on the big compound where the executions would take place the male nobility calling and gambling. The wagers usually consisted of someone's maintaining that he would win the chance to chop off the head of a convicted person. Rocquel walked through the crowd of would-be executioners, hearing grumbling about the increasing shortage of criminal heads. He came to the roped-off area where the victims were guarded and saw what the problem was. Fewer than a hundred males, including Dav -- and four females -- were herded together at one end of an area that in the past had often held as many as five hundred. Roughly one hundred heads were to be divided among nearly eighteen hundred eager young nobles. Roquel was handed the list of the doomed. Silently he scanned down it, looking for identifying comments. His attention caught two names. Their owners were classified as engineers. He scowled and turned to Jacr. "What are valuable men like that doing on this list?" Jacr held up a hand in a demanding way. "Your majesty," he said in a formal tone. "I must call to your attention that you are violating the procedure of the new law. The king can no longer deal directly with individual cases. As your prime minister, I will consult you or listen to your advice and, in some instances but not all, will recommend that you grant mercy. Please give me that list." With a sinking sensation Rocquel handed it over. He had been intent on trying to save Dav and had automatically, as in times past, taken charge. He grew aware that the big male Jana was smiling satirically. "As for your question, sire," Jaer said blandly, "the new law specifies that all persons are subject to due process and to similar penalties." He shrugged. "They killed. They were tried. The sentence was automatic." "I sec," said Rocquel. What lie saw most of all was that the noisy crowd would be against Dav and that lie had no solution to his problem of how to save the human. Jacr was speaking again. "Would you like to have me single these males out for questioning, sire?" The Jana prime minister's tone was tantalizing. He clearly felt himself in total ascendancy in this situation and was prepared to play hard at the game of constitutional monarchy. It seemed so obviously in his favor. Rocquel nodded yes to the question. While the two doomed males were being located he consciously forced himself to remember his old way of dealing with one thing at a time. Presently he # ? was able to put the fate of the human being out of the forefront of his mind and concentrate his attention on the here and now. T HE scene that he was thus able to focus on was almost literally right out of old Jana. He saw everywhere the swishing silks of die nobles, a glinting ocean of changing colors. Each male's head was an elongated red shape that was visible at about the same height above the almost solid wall of silk. Eighteen hundred such heads made a picture of -- oddly enough -- innocent beauty. But it was the beauty of a beast of prey, proud, arrogant, strong, untamed. It was as if a natural state of being were on display. The primitive impulses that still moved these males from violence to violence in a neverending madness were the product of equally primitive necessities -- their truth unquestioned on Jana until Dav and Miliss had begun to force self-control on an hierarchy that lived by the bloody law of supermasculinity.  am looking, thought Rocquel, on the end of an era. Here, in these eighteen hundred . is embodied the last of the really feudal thing... It had to go, of course. But how? His thought ended as the two scientists were brought before Jaer. The Dorrish male glanced questioningly at Rocquel. who stepped forward. A moment later he was confronting their reality. Professional scientists and all technical personnel had received special treatment from the courts for many years. They were not let off totally free, as a noble might be, but were given a preferred status. A person with an advanced degree was proclaimed to be the equal of twenty ordinary persons. Possession of a secondary degree made him the equivalent of fifteen persons. And the lowest degree, ten. Technicians started at two and went up to nine. Thus a twenty-person engineer who killed a wholly nonprofessional individual suffered what was only a one-twentieth penalty -- usually a fine. Only if he killed another scientist of a twenty-person status was he in serious danger of being executed. That was murder by law. Jaer was speaking. "Here they arc, sire. I don't really sec that we can do anything for them under the new regulations." Rocquel had the same thought. But lie said nothing as Jaer turned away and ordered the males to be brought closer. The two engineers came forward and were identified as. respectively, a fifteen and ten. The former had killed in a fit of rage which -- when his gag was removed -- he earnestly protested had been a proper reaction to an insolent three. And the ten had killed a unit person in a fit of typical Jana male temper for no particular reason. No occasion existed for favoritism. The new law must convince by its impartiality. The two were simply unlucky that they were the first examples of their class. Rocquel nodded. Jaer had the gags replaced and then read in a loud, clear voice the confirmation of the sentences. Moments later the lottery machine drew the names of the executioners. And, to the sound of much cursing on the part of those who had lost, the grinning winners came forward, simultaneously raised their swords and simultaneously struck at the heads on the blocks. And missed. A roar of amazement came from the gallery of noble Janae. iar confusion. Something -- some energy -- had snatched at one side of his body, pulled at one arm, spun him slightly. At that moment the yelling started and he realized that something was wrong. He whirled. The two nobles had recovered. Muttering words of outrage, they raised their swords for a second blow. "Wait!" Rocquel roared. The swords wavered, were sullenly grounded. Two angry, embarrassed nobles glared at their hereditary king questioningly. "What happened?" Rocquel demanded. Both told the same story. Something like a wind had snatched at their swords. Or it was as if they had struck at a blast of air so strong it had diverted their slashing blows. Catcalls were beginning among the onlookers. Rocquel glanced unhappily at the prison compound and saw that Dav had come to the gate. Rocquel spoke to Jaer. "Let nothing happen till I return." The Dorrish leader gave him a startled look but said nothing as Rocquel walked over to where Dav stood. The human greeted him with: "What happened?" "That's what I was going to ask you." He explained what the nobles had said. "Sounds like a symbol," Dav admitted, frowning. "But I know of none that is applicable in a situation such as this. Due process has occurred. There's nothing better on Jana right now. Why don't you have Jaer continue with the executions? Maybe it was an accident." Rocquel, who was remembering the grabbing sensation that had affected his right side moments before and also on the morning of his return to Jana, silently doubted it. But he walked back to the executioners' blocks and ordered the two engineers released. That was the tradition. "You forfeit your wagers," he curtly told the would-be executioners. The two males walked off, cursing. The order of procedure now required that the females be killed. One of the four was a poor little old thing who was quite insane. She believed the crowd was present to fete her. It did not even occur to Rocquel to do anything for her. Jana had no place for insane people. They were invariably put to death if they became a burden -- and a burden she was. As Rocquel turned to consider the other females, he found his way barred by Jaer. The big male was shaking his head. "Sire," he said, "you have been taking command again." The truth was obvious. Rocquel shook his head. He said with a twisted smile, "Giving up power seems to be quite a difficult process. So bear with me, Lord Jaer. I mean well." No answering smile moved that grim countenance. Rocquel thought, what a remarkable man the ancient king on earth must have been who first agreed -- when there were no precedents -- to limit his absolute rights under a constitutional monarchy... At the moment he could not remember the name of that king, though Dav had told him. What brought the historic precedent to mind was that, even now, Rocquel found it hard to adjust to the idea that what he gave up Jaer would gain. But finally Rocquel relaxed. He stepped back. "Continue, Lord of the Dorrish." He was able then to observe the scene once more without interference from his troubled inner self. Of the other three females, two were beyond anyone's power to help. They had been accused of adultery by their noble husbands and had been convicted. Rocquel privately doubted that the unnatural crime had occurred but this was not the time to take issue with a court's findings. The remaining woman had denied the truth of religion. As she was brought before them, Jaer glanced questioningly at Rocquel. He evidently expected no interference, intended the glance to be a matter of form only. He was turning away when Rocquel caught his arm. The Dorrish leader faced about with a tolerant expression. It became quite evident, as he listened to Rocquel, that on these minor matters he was prepared to allow the king the prerogative of granting mercy. He finally said, "Sire, why don't I say that in this instance a reprieve will be granted and then you state the reasons." That was the way it was done. Rocquel spoke briefly to the assembled nobles, stressing the need -- as Dav had urged upon him long ago -- to keep religion humanitarian. He spared her life. knowing what to expect as the three overjoyed winners came forward. The two w'ho were assigned the adulterous females uttered expressions of pleasure at having the privilege of performing so necessary a task. All three swords whipped high and came down as one. The females had been kneeling fatalistically. They looked up after a little as if to ask what was wrong. What was wrong was that the swords were lying a dozen feet away -- Rocquel, who had watched closely, thought he had seen the glint of too much metal as the weapons had flown through the air. But he could not be sure. Something strong had grabbed at him as with fingers of steel and had moved him inches at the moment of attempted execution. He saw that Jaer was lying on the ground nearby. Rocquel helped the big male to his feet. "What happened?" "This is magic," Jaer muttered. "Something hit me a terrific blow." He seemed uncertain and offered no objection to Rocquel 's suggestion that the executions should be temporarily halted pending an investigation. "But what kind of investigation?" he asked in a bewildered tone. Rocquel assured him that there was at least one person to question. And so, after the women had been released and the second group of executioners dismissed, Rocquel had Dav brought out of the compound. "You saw' that?" he asked accusingly. "Yes. There's no doubt. It's a symbol and the second time it w'as more violent. The pow'er behind it is increasing very rapidly." "But what symbol can it be?" Rocquel protested. "I thought symbols were -- " He stopped, remembering that he had no idea what symbols were. He finished lamely: "What do you suggest?" Dav said, "The next time there may be feedbacks and the executioners may get hurt." He seemed interested. Some of the apathy he had displayed earlier seemed to be lifting. His eyes were suddenly bright. He looked around hopefully. "Why don't you let Jaer try to execute me? That would solve a lot of problems." Rocquel frowned. He shook his head. Injury to -- or the death of -- the head of the Dorrish clan would merely create confusion in an important segment of the Jana populace. T HE catcalls were beginning again, demanding decisions. But the nobles sounded puzzled. The tone of the raised voices showed that the vocalizers were not clear as to what was going on. And only a percentage was actually yelling. It struck Rocquel that to the aristocratic onlookers the events at the focal point of the executions had probably been obscure. Besides, no one had ever been able to explain anything, really, to Jana nobles as a group. The fact that no help could be expected from the nobility made the situation even more difficult. Rocquel stood distracted, not knowing W'hat to do. The yelling grew louder, more insistent. Abruptly Rocquel realized why. By bringing Dav out ot' the compound he had given the impression that the human was next in line for execution. And Dav's life was what those who cried out were demanding. Dav was pale but yelled above the bedlam almost directly into Rocquel's ear, "Why not make the attempt? Let's see what happens." Rocquel tried to answer back, tried to say, What's going on? What's happening? Is the symbol I believed l had control of acting independently of my command -- or any command at all? He couldn't say it. The words wouldn't come. His face contorted with his effort to speak. Dav asked, "What's the matter, sire?" Rocquel tried again to speak, could not. A degrading awareness overwhelmed him. I'm programmed. I could tell Miliss about the symbol  controlled but I can't tell Dav... Not -- the realization suddenly was strong -- that he had ever really controlled it. It had been attached to him somehow -- but in the manner of a symbol it had reacted in this situation because this was what it related to. "I feel," said Rocquel -- and now the words came easily -- "that these executions are not being allowed." So he could speak if he made no direct reference to his symbol. Dav was shaking his head. "I don't understand it. The time is not yet on Jana for the end of capital punishment. In fact -- " He sounded appalled. He waved vaguely, his gesture taking in the paranoid males out there ever get the idea that they cannot be executed all hell will break loose." The picture of total disaster -- of pillage, rape, and mayhem -- evoked by the man's words, sent a chill through Rocquel. He visualized vast armies of criminals rioting in the streets, swarming in gangs through the country. Something had to be done at once. Belatedly again he remembered that the Dorrish leader was in charge here and should be consulted. He swung about and became aware that the big male was standing off to one side, watching Dav from narrowed eyes. Rocquel had time for only a glance -- the seconds were flying by and the noise from the gallery was rising to such a crescendo that further conversation was impossible. Rocquel signaled the royal drummers to beat for silence. Moments later he explained to a startled audience what Dav had said about a symbol's being involved. When he had finished a loud voice cried from somewhere in the crowd. "If we mob that soand-so it'll end the nonsense." Whoever spoke must have tried to push forward. A movement started. A dozen, then dozens, then hundreds surged forward. A voice yelled in Rocquel's ear, "Run for your life -- " The tone was so urgent that Rocquel was a score of feet toward safety before he realized that it was Dav who had yelled at him. He stopped and turned -- and was barely in time to see the disaster. as if in a whirlpool. A fountain was already up in the air, being held and twisted by an invisible force. From the corner of one eye he saw Dav frantically pushing through the retreating crowd toward him. The human broke through abruptly. "Quick!" he yelled. "If they're whirled any higher, they may be hurt or killed when they fall." Rocquel said blankly. "What do you mean -- quick? Quick what?" Dav's eyes, so bright for a moment, misted. A puzzled look came to his face. He muttered, "What's the matter with me? I don't know why I said that." But the real message of his reaction had penetrated. Rocquel was thinking. He's programed, also... He felt the truth grow in him. It bothered him. Bothered him a lot. But the truth was that he was unquestionably watching the symbol over which he had been given control. What was reassuring was the fact that in this decisive hour the ultimate decision had been left to the hereditary general of Jana -- himself. As he hastily evoked within his mind the mental pattern that would bring the Tizane energy to bear on the symbol. Rocquel thought. It really doesn't take very much direct interference with individuals to control a planet with symbols. Only a few key persons... In the entire sequence of events the most unique facet was that both of the mentors -- Dav and Miliss -- had also not been allowed free will. males of Jana began to drop to the ground -- where some lay for a long time -- Rocquel suggested to Jaer that the executions continue. The big male stared at him blankly. "Your majesty," he said finally in amazement. "I doubt we could find a single person at this moexecutioner." Rocquel was convinced of it. He worded his reply blandly. The decision to suspend executions must be made by the government and not by the constitutional monarch. He added, watching Jaer closely: "I have a feeling that the government should also grant a pardon to Dav." Those words got him, first, a dark, darting look. Slowly a crooked smile stretched across that normally grim face. "Your majesty," said Jaer Dorrish, "let me refer to an earlier remark of yours. I have realized today that you do mean well and that it is hard to give up power. Apparently it is almost as hard for a person like myself to accept an accretion of power gracefully -- but I should like to assure you that it is my intention to try. I see the role of prime minister as one that will involve a great deal of integrity. So -- " He made a gesture with one hand, said in a formal tone, "To prove to you that I have the intent of living up to that level of integrity, I hereby request in my capacity as leader of the government until the first election under the new law that you grant a reprieve and full pardon to Dav, the human." "I grant it," said Rocquel. It was a great victory -- yet he experienced a sudden drop in spirits on the way home. He rode nearly a hundred yards with his motorcycle guard before he realized that he was having a more severe recurrence of an earlier feeling. I'm programed and that degrades me... Back in the palace, he told Nerda his feeling. All the rest of that afternoon and part of the evening, she argued with him. Programing, she pointed out, was like a drop of chemical which might give to a flowing stream a slightly bluish tinge. Nothing but a dam could stop or divert the stream -- yet after the injection of the chemical it was colored in a specific way. Her analogy triggered a thought in Rocquel. His programing had taken the form of accelerated civilizing of a paranoid male -- himself. He was still hereditary general, still married to Nerda, with no intention of giving up either the position or the wife. Yet he had tolerated a change in the form by which he exercised his power, and he had accepted less total control over his wife. And in neither instance did he feel a real loss. Nerda suggested to him that the long-term programing of Miliss and Dav had been designed to make it possible for them to accept the unendurable existence of a lovely human couple marooned on an alien planet. And because the stream of life flowed immortally through them, they were separately programed as a man and a woman to survive periodic crises. So the great civilization out there controlled even its own emissaries. In this generation, Nerda continued, perhaps only she and Rocquel would know the truth and, to a lesser extent, Jaer. The hereditary general and his wife, and the hereditary leader of the principal subordinate group, the Dorrish. But their own personalities remained overwhelmingly private. The stream of Jana identity flowed on in them -- but it was now a more civilized being that felt the flow. She must have realized from the accepting expression of his face and body that she could finally change the subject. "Do you still have control of the symbol?" she asked. It was night and they were standing at a huge window looking toward the slickrock mountains. Rocquel imaged the first three stages of the Tizane pattern. Something grazed his leg. He knew' a hackles-raising sensation -- a sense of an energy field of enormous power. Hastily he turned his thoughts aside. "Yes," he said. "It's still there." "In your presence," said Nerda, "no one can be killed -- as long as you control that symbol. Did they say when they would take it away from you?" Rocquel was about to make the same reply he had given to Miliss -- when he realized that there was quite a different awareness in him. A barrier had lifted from his memory. He recalled exactly what he had been told. "No," he said simply, "they just gave it to me. It's a lifetime gift." He began to feel better. In my presence, no one can be killed... Suddenly he divined that his yvas a very advanced symbol indeed. He stood at a nearly unthinkable height of understanding and power. Deep inside him something that was almost infinitely savage was mollified. Possessing what was surely one of the ultimate human symbols -- he accepted his lesser than human status. F OR Dav it felt strange to be free. He walked slowly to a nearby restaurant and sat down# at a table. He was eating almost mindlessly when he heard the radio announce that he had been pardoned. The news struck him with an odd impact. The life force within him quickened. He grew aware that the Janae in the restaurant were staring at him curiously. No one showed hostility. He had no place that he wanted to go -- so later he walked the streets. Finally he began to wonder. Am  trying to solve a problem -- and if so, what? He could not decide. Everything seemed very far away. He had a feeling that there was something he should be doing. Rut he did not know what. Night came. He waved a surface car to a halt. It drew up, its lights glittering, its bells clanging. No one said anything to him as he swung aboard. Some younger Janae climbed on at the next stop. They sat giggling at him. But they rushed where hundreds of youthful Janae were dancing to the rhythm of a low, fast-tempo, sobbing music. He continued his public exposure until almost midnight, without any untoward incidents. He returned to the white house by the river. As he entered the w'est w'ing he presumed Miliss was in her part of the residence. But he made no effort to contact her. He slept the special deep sleep which triggered long-ago programing deep in his brain. Still asleep, he went to a room that was deceptively equipped with what seemed to be ordinary Janalevel electronic equipment. But by pressing certain buttons and turning certain dials in a specific sequence Dav activated a communications system hidden in a remote part of the Jana planet. Subspace radio waves thereupon transmitted a message to a receiver many light-years away. The message was: "The crisis of the last stage of kings has passed -- " The message completed automatically, then repeated and repeated. Finally a relay was closed on the receiving planet by an accepting mind. A voice -- or a thought -- said. "Message received, recorded." A light flashed on in an instrument in front of Dav and, still asleep, he returned to bed. through scanners and then -- as she realized his catatonic unawareness of his surroundings -- by following him closely. So that, as he turned away from the equipment, she stepped up to it and spoke to the distant listener. It was almost as if her communication were expected. The voice answered, "We have come to a time when the woman -- you -- must know something of the truth." "What is the truth?" Miliss asked. She did not wait for the reply but rushed on: Was there a universal death or was the idea the result of early programing? "At the next crisis," was the reply, "you will be allowed to visit -- and see for yourself. Meanwhile, the man -- Dav -- must not be told. In fact, you will discover if you try that you cannot tell him." "Why not tell him?" It seemed that the reasons for that were deeply bound up in the godlike cravings of masculinity in the male and related idealistic motivations. "And that's all we are allowed to say," concluded the faraway voice. When the connection had been broken Miliss -- feeling suddenly much better, even light-hearted, as if she were again somebody and not a living artifact of a dead culture; feeling strangely tender toward that poor, programed superbeing, her husband -- began the long task of moving back into the west wing. By morning she had most of her beautiful things in their proper locations. And so, when Dav awakened and turned over he saw a blond woman with a smile on her face -- and a faint look of innocence as if everything she had done, including this return, had been totally rational. This vision said to him. "I hope you'll be glad to know that you have a wife again." On a planet where there is only one woman, and that woman beautiful, what could the only man say to that? Dav said he was glad. "Come over here," he said.  ANd by Donald H.Menze! This month's cover is timed to coincide with Mariner VI intended to determine whether the Red Planet con support life. The artist. Dr. Donald H. Menzel, is Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy and Professor of Astrophysics, Harvard University; former Director, Harvard College Observatory; Research Scientist, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Is there life on the Red Planet? Reed right ers hear voices. What the visions or voices signify nobody knows. Messages from the past? Portents of the future? Glimpses of other worlds? I wouldn't venture an opinion. I myself seem to make frequent contact with worlds and eras beyond our Earth. I first became aware of this unusual ability about ten years ago, in March #, to be exact. I was sitting in a meeting of the Faculty of Harvard University. I had brought with me a tablet to record memoranda of decisions, especially those affecting the Observatory or the Department of Astronomy. And this meeting, devoted mainly to problems of Parietal Rules -- those decisions feeling the hours when Harvard students may entertain female companions in their rooms -- was incredibly dull. At some moment during these boring deliberations I suddenly realized that my pencil, previously engaged in aimless doodling, had now assumed control. Sweeping over the tablet, the pencil began to delineate mysterious beings, clearly not of earthly origin. They must have some planet to live on -- and I eventually realized that most resided on Mars. But a few Venusians, Moon Beings and inhabitants of a planet revolving around Alpha Centauri revealed their existence also. Many of them, brightened with water colors, have become collectors' items. And only the most insensitive of my colleagues, those with no sense of artistic appreciation, refer to my work as "Doodles from Menzel's penzel." More than a decade and some ten thousand spacemen later, I present herewith a few representative creatures from outer space. T HE cover illustration depicts a recurring theme, the Martian Cyclops, whose form does not in the least resemble that of the mythical one-eyed giant who held Ulysses captive. The Martian creature is not a monster with one eye. It is a monster eye that clearly lives for vision alone -- for the mere joy of viewing the rugged. cratered desert of the red planet. The large wings permit rapid flight. The "holes" -- which reveal the three-dimensional nature of the being -- are characteristic of many space creatures. They function something like the gills of a fish, increasing contact with the environment. The skating, dancing dinosaur lives in a checkered world, seeking satisfaction in the speed of Martian living. The dinosaur's skin is like smooth green leather, affording ample protection against the bitterly cold Martian winter nights. The polar caps of Mars, unlike those of planet Earth, are only a foot or two thick. But they nevertheless provide an excellent rink for skaters. The progenitors of the female Martian dragon left the Moon gradually lost its air and water into space. She finds the environment of Mars particularly friendly. Many of the plants on Mars are peripatetic. I am currently expecting a revelation concerning the nature of the offspring from this union. I he Venusian Beauty is a joy to behold. Her elaborate hair-do represents the traditional style of the females of that planet. Her outboard bust is entirely functional, the better to survive in the intense heat of the planet. Life, as recently noted by Professor Willard Libby, well-known Nobel Laureate, can exist only in the mild zone between the icecapped poles and the broiling equatorial region. Note how the tail enhances her ethereal beauty. On Earth, we have long believed that tailless man was higher in the evolutionary scale than the ape. We see how wrong we were in this supposition. Doubtless, as man ascends to greater heights he, too, will grow a tail. The Martian Sea Horse is a friendly creature despite the fact that he is frozen stiff most of the time. But when the warmth of the Martian day unlocks the ice on the fringes of the polar cap the Sea Horse rapidly cavorts through the seas, conversing with every creature he encounters. Here we sec him discussing Martian politics with a friendly oneeyed Sea Slug, They have not yet decided for whom to vole. But every creature on Mars has the ballot. The Martian C loud represents a form unlike anything on Earth. We are accustomed to beings that are solid or liquid or a combination of both. However, although gases do enter life's processes in the form of oxygen or in varieties of waste products, we do not think of gases as living beings. Enormous clouds develop on Mars. They express intelligence and have powers of locomotion. Terrestrial astronomers have frequently seen fast-moving clouds on Mars but have been at a loss to explain them. The speeding spots are enormous living creatures. We complete this exhibit with two Martian birds. The Purple Bearded Night Owl, a denizen of the Martian night, flaps his wings in the thin, cold atmosphere and munches a meager meal of insects, while Phobos, the planet's nether moon, looks benignly on. The second bird, the RainbowFeathered Esophagus, welcomes the day with song. The rainbow lutes of the plumage make this creature a welcome sight on the bleak Marscape. Within a few decades, after Martian explorers return to Earth, we may see such creatures in our terrestrial zoos.  the G'drellian, was phasing out of adolescence were about to be phased out of existence! bar to a crap game to a simpleminded ambush in a dead-end alley. He didn't blame them for being angry. His pockets were stuffed with their money, greasy and crumpled fives and tens. Two thousand and twenty of their hard-earned dollars, if his memory served him right. And of course it did. They had supplied three sets of dice -- two loaded, one shaved. All three were childishly easy to manipulate. He let them win every throw at first, then less and less often. Finally he tested their credulity and rapidly emptied their pockets with ten sevens in a row. That much had been easy. But now he was in a difficult position. Under the transparent pretext of finding a bigger game, the leader of the gang had steered him into this blind alley, where five others were hiding in ambush. And now the six were joined in a line, advancing on him, pushing him toward the tall hurricane fence that blocked the end of the alley. He started pacing them, walking backward. Not that they could do any physical harm to him. But he needed time. Only thirty seconds, give or take a little, before he would back into the fence and be caught. Thirty seconds objective... He froze and did a little trick with his brain. All the energy his strange body produced, except for that fraction needed to maintain human form, was channeled into heightening his sensory perceptions, accelerating his mental processes. He had to find a way out of this dilemma without exposing his true nature. The murderous sextet seemed to slow down as the ratio of subjective to objective time flux increased arithmetically, .geometrically, exponentially. A drop of sweat rolled from the leader's brow, fell two feet in a fraction of a second, a foot in the next second, an inch in cron... Now. A pity he couldn't just kill them all slowly and painfully. Terrible to have artistic responsibility stifled by practical considerations. Such a beautiful composition; a spectrum of attitudes ranging from the little one's ill-concealed fear of pain, of inflicting pain, to the leader's leering, sadistic anticipation of pleasure in the kill -- the dilettante! A smallish work, only six to play on. Still, he ought to practice on some little pieces before the great epic. But it might arouse suspicion. And Llarval said... That snail. Insensitive brute... Next  time out I'll get me a supervisor who is able to understand... But next time out, I'll be too old... Even now  can feel it... Damn that snail! T HE ship hovered above a South American plantation. People looked at it and saw only the sky. Radar would never detect it. Only a voodoo priest in a mushroom trance felt its presence. He tried lo verbalize and died of a cerebral occlusion. Too quick. Artless. Braxn was kind of ashamed of it. "Bluntly, I wish we didn't have to use you, Braxn." Llarval was talking. His crude race communicated vocally and the unmodulated, inand-out-of-phase thought waves washed a gravelly ebb and flow of pain through Braxn's organ of communication. He stored the pain, low intensity that it was, for contemplation at a more satisfactory time. Llarval repeated: "If only we had brought someone else of your sort -- besides your father, of course. Shape-changers aren't such a rarity." He plucked out a cilium in frustration but of course felt no pain. Braxn was too close, sucked it in. "A G'drellian poet. A poet of pain. Of all the useless baggage to drag around on a survey expedition -- " Llarval sighed and ground his shell against the wall. "But we have no choice. Only two bipeds aboard the ship and neither of them is even remotely mammalian. And the natives of this planet are acutely xenophobic. Hell, they're omniphobic. Even harder to take than you, worthy poet. But this is the biggest find of the whole trip! The crucial period of transition -- they may be on the brink of civilization, still animals but rapidly advancing. Think of it! In ten or twenty generations they may be human and seek us, as most do." The shapeless blob that was Braxn was turning a bored shade of green. "We've met thousands of civilized races -- more thousands of savage ones -- but this is the first we've ever found in transition, correct? Ethnology, alien psychology, everything -- " Llarval shuddered -- "even your people's excuse for art, will benefit immeasurably." Braxn had his doubts but he made no comment. He hadn't bothered to form a speech organ for the interview. He knew Llarval would do all the talking anyway. But Braxn had been studying, under stasis, for several hours. Knowing exactly what needed to be done, he let most of his body disintegrate into its component parts and started to rebuild. First the skeleton, bone by thousandth bone; the internal organs, in logical order, glistening, throbbing, functioning; wet-red muscle, fat, connective tissue, derma, epidermis smooth and olive, fingernails, hair, small mole on the left check. Vocal cords, virgin, throb contralto: "Mammalian enough?" "Speak Galactic." "I said, 'Mammalian enough?' I mean, would you like them bigger -- " she demonstrated -- "or smaller?" "How would I know?" snapped Llarval, trying to hide his disgust. "Pick some sort of statistical mean." Braxn picked a statistical mean between the October and the November Playmate of the Month. With what he thought was detached objectivity, Llarval said, "Ugly bunch of creatures, aren't they?" ago, Llarval's prehistoric ancestors had known one natural enemy -- a race of biped mamma's. With a silvery laugh Braxn left to prepare for planetfall. He got a kick, for the moment, out of being a "she." its people for some ten thousand hours, subjective time. She knew about clothes. She knew about sex. She knew about rape. So she appeared on Earth -- on a dirt road somewhere in South America -- without a stitch and without a blush. And her scholastic observations were confirmed in the field, so to speak, in less than five minutes. She learned quite a bit the first time, less the second. The third time, well, she was merely bored. She made him into a beautiful -- poem? She made him into a mousesized, shriveled brown husk lying dead by the side of the road, his tiny features contorted with incredible agony. She synthesized clothes, gray and dirty, and changed herself into an old, crippled hag. It was twenty minutes before she met another man, who... Another dry husk. Braxn was getting an interesting, if low, opinion of men, Bolivian farmers in particular. So she changed herself into one. The shoe on the other foot, she found, made things different but not necessarily better. Well, she was gathering material. She waited for a car to come by, reverted to the original voluptuous pattern, disposed of the driver when he stopped to investigate, took his form and his car and started on a world tour. and be everyone. He was in turn a doctor, lawyer, fencing coach. Prostitute, auto racer, mountain climber, golf pro. He ran a pornography shop in Dallas, a hot-dog stand at Coney Island, a death-sleep house in Peking, a Viennese coffee house, the museum at Dachau. He peddled Bibles and amulets, Fuller brushes and heroin. He was a society deb, a Bohemian poet, a member of Parliament, a eul-dejatte in Monaco. For operating expenses, when he needed small sums, he wove baskets, sold his body, dived for pennies, cast horoscopes. Threw dice. T HE sweat drop had moved a hundredth of an inch. Must stop wasting time hut it's so hard to concentrate when it feels as if you had all the time in the universe... Braxn knew that he could remain in this state only a few more minutes (subjective) before he was stuck in it permanently. On the ship he could spend as much time as he wanted in mental acceleration but here there was no apparatus to shock him out of it before trance set in. The trance would go on for more than a thousand years, such was his race's span of life. But to the six hoods he would age and die in a few seconds, reverting to his original form for an invisible nanosecond before dissolving into a small gray mound of dust. He was seeing in the far infrared now and definition was very poor. He switched to field recognition. The dull animals confronting him had dim red psionic envelopes, almost completely washed out by his own, a crackling, stroboscopic violet. Electromagnetic. The ion fog around the leader's watch glowed pale blue. Leakage from the telephone and power lines made kaleidoscopic patterns overhead. His back felt warm. Warm? He switched to visual again and searched the people's eyes for reflections. There -- the little scared one -- his eyes mirrored the fence, the hurricane fence. Gate spaced with ceramic insulators. He started to slow down his mind, speed up the world. The drop inched, fell to the ground with slow purpose; struck and flowered into tiny droplets. Sound welled up around him. " -- on't have to use the gun." Braxn stumbled back toward the electrified fence, manufacturing adrenalin to substitute for his spent strength. His stomach knotted and flamed with impossible hunger. He received the pain and cherished it. The leader advanced for the kill, bold and cocky, switchblade in his right hand, his left swinging a bicycle chain like a stubby lariat. Braxn secreted a flesh-colored, rubbery coating over his body and, on top of that, a thin layer of saline mucus. "Left-handed retiarius," he mumbled under his breath. The leader brought the chain around in a swift, flat arc, facehigh. Braxn reached back and made contact with the fence. The chain cracked Braxn high on the right cheekbone and whipped around the back of his head, the end of it putting out his left eye. There was a low, sixty-cycle hum. His good eye saw the hood give one spastic jerk and crumple to the ground. He looped the chain around the little one's neck and pulled him into the fence. Four to go. They had backed away, somewhat bewildered. One took a step toward Braxn, faltered, then turned and ran. The others bolted and followed him. Basking in the pain of his shattered face, Braxn leisurely reached out with his mind and sorted their garbled thoughts. Unfortunately all four had grasped the significance of his trick with the fence and none should be allowed to spread the tale, however unbelievable. To buy time he stopped the blood flow to their brains temporarily. Each one collapsed before he reached the end of the alley. He carried them back and carefully arranged them around the fence. Carefully, for it was delicate work. Braxn erased their memories of the past few hours. He substituted the memory of an elaborate and vicious practical joke which ended with all of them being knocked unconscious by the charge from the fence. All fixed up. But time enough for a special little treat for the leader, Cleve, who had caused him to go to all this trouble. He studied the man's still figure. Dirty blond hair, low forehead, drooping moustache not quite hiding an unsightly mole at the corner of his mouth. Black leather shirt tight over flaccid muscles, beer belly, faded blue jeans tucked into black boots. With little effort Braxn redid his own exterior in the shape of Cleve. But he took the details, not from reality but from the twisted self-image in Cleve's dim brain. Thus the biceps were a little larger, the face a little meaner than a lying mirror would reflect. Flat belly and hair blond almost to the point of whiteness. Instead of the ugly mole there was an incredibly virile scar that lanced down to his chin, catching the corner of his mouth down into an arrogant sneer. Grade-B movie syndrome. He manipulated a couple of glands and the real Cleve woke up instantly. He caught sight of Braxn. His eyes narrowed and he rose slowly to his feet. He kept his distance and stared. Sure of Cleve's attention, Braxn started his performance. The strong, manly face blurred for an instant and came back into focus. The scar was a puffy, infected seam that defiled a face no longer vigorous or handsome. It pulled down the lower lip to expose a yellow canine. The face was lined with a delicate tracery of worry and pain, the grooves growing deeper and more complex in front of Cleve's horrified eyes. The hair, sprinkled with gray, grew white and W'as gone except for a dirty stubble on the twisted, knobby chin. Face and body wasted away. Wrinkled parchment stretched tight over a leering death-mask. Bloodshot eyes clotted with rheum. Cataracts clouded and blinded them. The lids closed and collapsed inward and the body -- real only in the minds of two disparate creatures -- was mercifully dead. The skin turned gray, then olive, and released its life-grip on the ancient body. The body puffed up again in macabre burlesque of its younger brawn. It lived again for a short time as maggots fed on its putrescence. Then a dry, withered husk, still standing upright. The last vestiges of skin and flesh sloughed off to reveal a brown-stained skeleton filled with nameless cobw'ebs. It collapsed with a splintering clatter. On top of the pile of gray dust and bones the yellow skull glared balefully at Cleve for a long moment and then, piece by piece the whole grisly collection started to reassemble itself. Cleve had been trying to scream for nearly a minute. Finally he let out a little squeak and fainted. Braxn made sure he would be out for a while, then erased from Cleve's memory the specific details of the experience. He left only a gnawing, undirected feeling of horror. He scanned the silent forms around him and found that they were all still unconscious. One, the little one, was dead. Probing further, Braxn dissolved a blood clot, patched an infarction and shocked the still heart back into action. Pity to spoil good art. He liked the combination of causeand-effect and dumb luck causing only the harmless one to die. Survival of the fittest, eugenics will out, and all that. With a mental shrug Braxn walked off to find a cab. U Llarval slipped into the Survey Chiefs cabin with trepidation. He was in for a bad time. The Chief, who looked like a cross between a carrot and a praying mantis, got right to the point. "Llarval. your reports stopped coming in several cycles ago. From this I infer that A) your scout is dead, not likely; B) he got disgusted with your asinine questions and lectures, rather more likely; or C) he w'ent on one of his blasted binges and is busily turning the autochthones into quatrains and limericks. I find this last alternative the most probable, if the least palatable. He is ;i G'drellian, an adolescent at that. Do you know what that means?" "Yes, sir. That means he's in the aesthetic stage of hi -- " "It means he should have been locked up before we got within a parsec of this primitive world. You should not have sent him down on the surface of this world alone, least of all without consulting your captain. You may be -- you may have been -- in charge of ethnological research but certain decisions are not implemented without my okay." "But, sir, after his initial exI made him stop. He might have drawn attention to himself." "Your devotion to objectivity is most commendable. "Thank you, sir." "It shows that you know and appreciate the first rule of contact." He pressed a stud and one wall became transparent. He gestured at the busy scene beneath them. "Are they aware of our presence?" "Of course not, sir. That is the first rule." "Tell me, Llarval. What sort of radiation would you suppose their eyes are sensitive to?" The captain's addiction to obliqueness was most exasperating. "Well, sir, since their planet goes around a yellow star, their organs of vision are most sensitive to a narrow band of radiation centered around the yellow wavelengths." The captain scraped his thorax with a claw. Llarval interpreted this as applause. His race had forgotten sarcasm eons before the captain's had invented lire. "You are a good study, Llarval." "Thank you, sir." "So we make the ship transparent to these wavelengths at great expenditure of power." "Yes, sir. So the natives' development won't be influenced by premature knowledge of -- " "And with similar expenditure of power we extend this transparency down to the longer wavelengths. Why do we do this, Llarval?" The little ethnologist was perplexed. Even the lowliest cabin boy could answer these questions. "Why, of course, sir, it's to make the ship invisible to radar detection. Only it's not really invisible. It's just that the local implicit coefficient of absorption becomes asymptotic with -- " "Llarval." The captain sighed. "I learned one of those creatures' words the other day. I suppose by now you've run into i t also -- catechism." "Yes, sir." Llarval squirmed. "Now' as far as I can tell, though I'm not a man of learning myself, this is a form of stylized debate. One person asks a series of questions. The answers are so simple that they brook no disagreement or misinterpretation. These answers -- forced, as it were, upon the hapless interrogatee -- lead to an inevitable conclusion, which gains a spurious validity through sheer tautological mass. Is that fairly accurate?" Llarval paused for a second to retrieve the sentence's verbs as the captain had mischievously, if appropriately, switched from English to Middle High German. "Yes, sir. Very accurate." "Well, then." The captain gave a gleaming, metallic smile. "To borrow another of their delightfully savage concepts, the coup de grace. How did we know -- long before we came within range -- ?" "Radio broadcasts, sir, and television." "Which means?" "Sir, I'm aware of -- " "You're aware of the fact that our arty friend could gain control of this planet-wide network and, in a matter of seconds, destroy almost every intelligent being on the planet. Or perhaps worse, reduce them to gibbering animals. Or worse still, increase their understanding of themselves beyond the threshold  -- " "Yes, sir." I .larval could fill in the blanks. "Then, get out of here and let more capable minds deal with the situation." "Yes, sir." The ethnologist started to scuttle toward the door. "And. Llarval -- remember that your captain, like most of the members of this expedition, normally communicates mind-tomind and receives your surface thoughts even when they are not verbalized." "Yes, sir," he said meekly. "Your captain may be a 'pompous martinet,' yes, but really, Llarval -- 'a vegetable that walks like a man?' Racism is, I think, singularly inappropriate in an ethnologist. Make an appointment with the psychiatric staff." "Yes, sir." "And on your way down, check at the galley and see if Troxl has a couple of years' work for you to do." The captain watched the disconsolate creature scurry out. He settled down at his desk. He passed a claw over a photosensitive plate. Computer, he thought. Here, Captain... Where the he!! is that G'drellian poet? The machine thought a low hum.  can't find him. He must be generating a strong block. You know a G'drellian can synthesize dummy thought waves exactly out of phase with his natural pattern. And by combining the two patterns... How do yon know he isn't just on the other side of the planet? The captain sighed. A computer will talk on one subject forever, if you let it. Using the planet's satellites as passive reflectors, I can cover ninety percent or more of the planet's surface. And by integrating the fringe effects front...  believe you, I believe yon. Then tell me -- where is his old goat of a father? Meditating in the meat locker -- in the form of a large stalactite. As he has been, I might add, ever since you... All right. Have Stores send me up a winter outfit. I'll have to go and try to blackmail him into telling me where his blasted progeny is. Give him a thousand u'itlcss ethnologists, thought the captain to himself. Give him a thousand garrulous computers but spare him the company of even one G'drellian. Even on G'drell they confined the adolescents to one island -- to work out. their poetry on worms and insects and each other. fc# A survey expedition needed a G'drellian, of course. A mature one to solve problems beyond the scope of the computer. But damn that Brohass! He must have known lie was gravid when he volunteered for the trip. How did one deal with these creatures, who seem to live only to torment other people with their weird, i n scrutable sense of humor? Brohass knew he would undergo fission, knew his offspring would reach adolescence in mid-voyage -- and probably contrived to send the ship to a planet where... The captain's reverie was broken by the robot from Stores. "The clothing you requested, sir." "Just put it on the hook there." The robot did so and glided out of the room. He should have had it delivered to the locker, thought the captain. Clothing was tantamount t o obscenity to many of the crew members and one had to maintain dignity. Yes, one must, mustn't one? thought the computer. Will yon go do something useful? The captain threw up a block in time to miss the reply. He jerked the clothes off the hook and strode out of the cabin, letting out occasional thoughts about the ancestry, mating habits, etc., of the machine that was the ship's true captain. I please." The slender stewardess swayed down the aisle, past a young man with a handsome, placid face and a Brooks Brothers suit. "Landing at Kennedy International in three minutes." Braxn did as told, shifting the heavy attache case from his lap to the floor. Two hundred pounds of gold bullion would buy a lot of prime time. They landed uneventfully. Braxn took a helicopter to the Pan American Building, went down to the I # #st floor and into an office. Gold leaf on the frosted glass entrance proudly proclaimed Somebody, Somebody and Somebody, Advertising Counselors. He came out two hundred pounds lighter, having traded the gold for one minute of time -- at nine Saturday night, an hour away -- on each of the major television and radio networks. A triumph of money over red tape. His commercial would be strictly terference. And his brand of soap would certainly make the world a cleaner place to live in. Alone. T HE captain donned his thermal outerwear and entered the massive locker. Sure enough, there was a huge blue stalactite suspended from the ceiling. He addressed it. Brolwss, he thought obsequiously, would you serve your captain? The huge icicle fell and splintered into several thousand pieces. They reassembled into a creature who looked rather like the captain. "What would you do to me if I said no?" "That's ridiculous," said the captain, somewhat emboldened by facing a familiar shape. "No one can do anything to harm you." "All right, that settled, will you please go and let me get back to my conversation." Curious in spite of himself, the captain asked, "Whom are you conversing with? You don't generally think with the other crew members." "My father has found a particularly humorous ninth-order differential equation. He is explaining it to me and I would like to devote all of my energy to understanding." The captain shivered, not just from cold. Brohass' father had been dead for thirty years. But half of him would live as long as Brohass lived -- a quarter would live as long as Braxn. And so on down the line. It was unsettling to mere mortal beings, that a G'drellian maintained an autonomous existence within his decendants for hundreds of thousands of years after physical death. Whether a G'drellian would ever die completely was problematical. They claimed that none yet had. "This won't take much of your time. I want you to locate Braxn and give him a message." "Why can't you find him yourself?" "It's a rather large planet, Brohass, and he's thrown up a strong communication block." "We're on a planet? Which one?" The captain thought a long string of figures. "They call it Earth." "I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with it. Please open your mind and let me extract the relevant details." The captain did so, with chagrin. Brohass could easily have asked the computer but his people were born voyeurs and never would pass up the chance to probe another's mind. "Interesting, savage -- I can see why he was drawn to it. Incidentally, your treatment of Llarval was shameful. In his place you would have lost control of my son just as quickly. And your knowledge, Captain, of the people on this planet, is encyclopedic but imperfect. You misunderstand both catechism and tautology. You used the expression coup de grace where coup de theatre would have been more fitting. And your Middle German would send a Middle German into convulsions. Furthermore, you are an ambulatory vegetable. To your credit, however, you were correct in assessing my son's plans. He is now in the possession of a minute of time, as they say, on the planet's communications network. Funny idea, that -- beings possessing time rather than the other way arou -- " "Brohass!" "Captain?" "Aren't you going to do anything?" "Interfere with my child's development?" entities!" "Yes -- he probably is. Mammals, though. You have to admit they'd probably never make anything of themselves anyhow." "Brohass, you must stop him." "I'm pulling your spindly leg, Captain. I'll talk to him. Just once, just once I would like to have a captain who could take a joke. You know, you vegetable people are unique in the civilized universe in your -- " "How much time do you have?" "Oh, two thousand three hundred thirty-eight years, four days and -- " "No, no -- how much time before Braxn gets on the air?" "If Braxn got on the air he would fall to the ground -- even as you and I." The captain made a strangling noise. "Oh, don't bust a root. I have several seconds yet." Brohass reverted to his native formlessness and sent a tendril of thought through his son's massive block. you slow clown just a bit? Braxn concentrated and the bustling studio slowed down and froze into a tableau of suspended action. Yes, Father. Is there something l can help you with? Well, first, tell me what you're doing in a television studio. At the minute of maximum saturation I'm going to broadcast the Vegan death-sign. That's all. That's all? You'll kill everybody. Well, not everybody. Just those who are watching television. Oh. yes, I've worked out a phonetic equivalent for simultaneous radio transmission. Get a few more that way -- if it works. Oh, I'm sure you can do it, son. But, Braxn, that's what l wanted to think to you about. You're going to try to think me out of it. Well, if you want to put it that way...  bet that joke of a captain put you up to it. You know that vegetable that walks like a man... Hey; that's a good one, Father. When'd you... Neither he nor anyone else on this tin can could make me do anything that l... Brohass sighed. Look, Braxn. You're poaching on a game preserve. Worse, shooting fish in a barrel. With a fission bomb, yet. How can you get any satisfaction out of that? Lather, I know that quantity is no substitute for quality. But there are so many here! Brohass snorted. And you want to be poet laureate, right? There's something wrong in that? This will be the biggest epic since Jkdir exterminated the... Braxn. Braxn -- my son. You're temporizing. You know what's wrong, don't you? Surely you can feel it. Braxn fell silent as he tried to think of a convincing counterargument. He knew what was coming. The fact is that you are maturing rapidly. It's time to put away your blocks -- sure, you can go through with this trivial exercise. But you won't be poet laureate. You'll be dunce of the millennium, prize buffoon. You're too old for this nonsense. I know it, you know it and the whole race would know it eventually. You wouldn't be able to show your mind anywhere in the civilized universe. He knew that his father was thinking the truth. He had known for several days that he was ready for the next stage of development but his judgment was blinded by the enormity of the canvas lie had before him. Correct. The next stage awaits you and I can assure you that it will be even more satisfying than the aesthetic. Yon have a nice planet here and you might as well use it as the base of your operations. The captain is easily cowed -- after I assure him that you no longer wish to, shall we say, immortalize these people in verse, he'll be only too glad to move on without you. We'll he back to pick you up in a century or so. Goodbye, son. Goodbye, Father. The filament of the green light on the camera facing him was just starting to glow. He had something less than a hundredth of a second. Extending his mental powers to the limit, he traced down every network and advertising executive who knew of the deal he had made. From the minds of hundreds of people he erased a harmless ones. Two hundred pounds of gold disappeared back into thin air. Books balanced. Everyone in the studio had the same memory: five minutes ago a police-escorted black limousine screeched to a halt out front, and this man, familiar face lined and pale with shock, stormed in with a covey of Secret Service men and commandeered the studio. Braxn filled out his face and body with paunch. The man who owned this face died painlessly as soon as Braxn had assimilated the contents of his brain. The body disappeared. His family and associates "remembered" that he was in New York for the week. A finger of thought pushed into another man's heart and stopped it. Convincing -- he was overworked and overweight, anyhow. But to be on the safe side, Braxn adjusted his catabolism to make it look as if he had died ten minutes earlier. He manufactured appropriate cover stories. All this accomplished, Braxn let time resume its original rate of flow. The light winked green. A voice offstage said, "Ladies and gentlemen -- " what else could one say? -- "the, uh. Vice President of the United States." Braxn assumed a tragic and weary countenance. "It is my sad duty to inform the nation..." of a G'drellian from adolescence to voluntary termination. The first phase is aesthetic, appreciation of an art alien to any human, save perhaps a de Sade or a Hitler. The second phase is power. # With feet upon this crater-pitted land So like the moon, with eyes upon the void, We might with effort glimpse an asteroid At dim remove; below us in the sand Crow sturdy roots, defiant as a band Of outlaws: beaten back though not destroyed. They fight, with strength and doggedness alloyed. Against the blows of Nature's brutal hand. The huge extensive caps that melt and freeze Lend moisture to the dusty atmosphere , And spur the efforts of the shrubs to grow; In pools of melted ice perhaps appear Scant forms of protozoan life that seize A transient space between the months of snow.Wade Wellman Innocence can be a mailer of life or death! The park was lively with raised voices and bright clothing, children and adults. The geriatrics generation had come early enough to claim a bench and was otd and feeble enough to hold it. I had brought a sandwich lunch. I ate slowly, saving out an orange and a second can of beer for later. The populace danced before me, never dreaming that I was watching. The afternoon sun burned warm on my scalp. A lizaidlike torpor stole over me, so that the sound of adult voices and children's screaming-for-the-hell-of-it dimmed and faded. But I heard the footsteps. They jarred the earth. I opened my eyes and saw the rammer.  He was six feet tall and massively built. He wore a scarf and a pair of blue balloon pants, not too far out of style, but they didn't match. What they exposed of his skin was loose on him, as if he had shrunk within it. Indeed, he looked like a giraffe wearing an elephant's skin. He walked without spring. His feet slapped hard into the gravel with all his weight behind them. Small wonder I had heard him coming. By now everyone in sight was either looking at him or turning to see what everyone was looking at. Except the children, who had already lost interest. To me he was irresistible. There are always the casual peoplewatchers. They watch their neighbors in restaurants, shops or monorail stations when they have nothing else to do. They develop their own amateurish technique -- they don't know what to look for and they usually get caught. But I'm not that kind of peoplewatcher. There are the fanatics, the dedicated ones, who learn their technique in a closed-circuit TV class. Many of them hold lifetime subscriptions to Face In The Crowd and Eyes Of The City, the hobby magazines. They write letters to the editor telling how they spotted Secretary-General Haruman in a drugstore and he looked unhappy. That's me. The fanatic type. And here I was, not twenty yards from a rammer, a man from the stars. He had to be one. His taste in clothing was odd and his carelessly draped skin was alien. His legs had not yet learned to cushion his weight against Earth's heavier gravity. He projected the discomfort and self-consciousness, the interest, surprise and pleasure, that silently shouted tourist. His eyes, looking out from behind the ill-fitting mask of his face, were bright, blue and happy. My staring rudeness was noticed but did not affect his almost religious joy. Nor did his feet, though they must have hurt. His smile was dreamy and very strange. Lift the corners of a spaniel's mouth with your forefingers and you'd see such a smile. He drew in life from the sky and the grass and the voices and the growing things. I watched his face and tried to read it. Was he the priest of some new Earthworshipping religion? No. Probnbly he was seeing Earth for l lie first time, was tuning his biorhythms to Earth for the first time, feeling Earthweight settle into his bones, watching sunrises twenty-four hours apart until his very genes told him he was home. It made his day when he saw the boy. T HE boy was around ten, a handsome child, naked and tanned all over. When I was growing up even the infants wore clothing in public. I had not noticed him until now and he in turn had not noticed the rammer. He kneeled on the path that passed my bench, his back toward me. I could not see what lie was doing but he was very intent and serious about it. By now most of the passersby had turned away -- from disinterest or an overdose of good manners. I eyed the rammer watching the boy. I studied him from half-closed eyes, practicing my famous imitation of an old man asleep in the sun. The Heisenberg Principle implies that no peoplewatcher should allow himself to be caught at it. The boy stooped suddenly, then rose, his hands cupped. Moving with exaggerated care, he turned from the gravel path and crossed the grass toward a dark old oak. The rammer's eyes went big and round. All his pleasure gave way to horror and then the horror drained away, leaving nothing. The star-man's eyes turned up in his head. His knees began to buckle. Stiff as I am these days, I reached him. I slid an admittedly bony shoulder under his armpit before he could fall. All the mass of him came gratefully down on me. I should have folded like an accordion. Somehow I got the rammer to the bench before  had to let go of him. I told an astonished matron, "Get a doctor." She nodded briskly and waddled away. I turned back to the rammer. Sick eyes looked up at me from under straight black bangs. The rammer's face was oddly tanned -- dark where the sun could reach, white as milk where folded skin cast shadows. His chest and arms were like that too. Where the skin was pale it had paled further with shock. "No need for doctor," he whispered. "Not sick. Something I saw." "Sure. Put your head between your legs. It'll keep you from fainting." I opened my remaining beer. "I will be all right in a moment," he said from between his knees. He spoke the Tongue oddly and his weakness further slurred the w'ords. "It was the shock of what I saw." ' "Here?" "Yes. No. Not entirely -- " He stopped to shift mental gears and I handed him the beer. He looked at it as if wondering which end to suck on, then halfdrained it in one desperate draught. "What did you see?" I asked. He had to finish swallowing. "I saw an alien spacecraft. Without the spacecraft it would have meant nothing." "What kind of ship was it? Smithpeople? Monks?" These are the only known spacegoing races, aside from ourselves. I'd never seen one of their ships but they sometimes docked on the outer worlds. The rammer's eyes narrowed in his quilted face. "I see. You think I speak of some registered alien ship in a human spaceport." His words were no longer slurred. He picked them with care. "I was halfway between the Horvendile and Koschei systems, shipwrecked at the edge of lightspeed, waiting to die. And I saw a golden giant walking among the stars." "A humanoid? Not a ship?" "I -- thought it was a ship. I can't prove it." I made a thoughtful, wordless but letting him know I was listening. "Let me tell you. I was a year and a half out from Horvendile, bound for Koschei. It would have been my first trip home in thirtyone years..." is like flying a spiderweb. Even with the web retracted a ramship is a flimsy beast. Cargo holds, external cargo netting and hooks, pilot cabin, life-support system and the insystem fusion motor are all contained in a rigid pod barely three hundred feet long. All else is balloons and webbing. At takeoff the balloons are filled with hydrogen fuel for the insystem fusion motor. By the time the ship reaches ramscoop speed the fuel is half gone, replaced by low-pressure gas. The balloons are retained as meteor shielding. The ramscoop web is superconducting wire, thin as spiderweb, tens of thousands of miles of it. Coiled for takeoff, it forms a roll no bigger than the main pod. Put a uniform negative charge on it and it spreads to form a hoop two hundred miles across. It ripples at first under the differentiating fields. Interstellar hydrogen, thin as nothing, enters the mouth of the ramscoop web. An atom to a cubic centimeter. Differentiating fields compress it along the axis, compress it until it undergoes fusion. It burns in a narrow blue flame, yellowtinged at the edges. Hie eleclromagnetic fields in fusion flame begin to support the ramscoop web. Mighty forees add, making web and flame and incoming hydrogen one interlocking whole. A rigid pod, invisibly small, titles the flank of a whispy cylinder of webbing two hundred miles across. A tiny spider on an enormous web. Time slows down, distances compress at the higher velocities. Hydrogen flows faster through the web -- the ramscoop fields increase in power. The web becomes more rigid, more stable. A ship should not need supervision as it approaches the midpoint turnover. "I was halfway to Koschei," said the rammer, "carrying the usual cargo -- genetically altered seeds, machine prototypes, spices. And three corpsicles -- passengers frozen for storage. We carry anything that cannot be sent by message laser. "I still don't know what went wrong. I was asleep. I had been asleep for months, with a current pulsing through my brain. Perhaps a piece of meteoric iron entered the ramscoop. Perhaps the hydrogen grew thin for an hour, then thickened too fast. Perhaps we entered a sharply bounded OH region. In any case something twisted the ramscoop field and the web collapsed. "I was wakened too late. The web had roman-candled and was trailing the ship like a parachute that will not open. Wires must have touched for much of the web was vaporized. "It was my death," said the rammer. "Without the ramscoop weh I was falling helplessly. I would enter the system of Koschei months loo early, moving at nearly lightspecd, a dangerous missile. For my honor I must inform Koschei by laser -- so that I might be shot down before I arrived." "Take it easy." I soothed him. His jaw had clenched, and the muscles that tightened in his face patterned the skin like a jigsaw puzzle. "Relax. It's all over. Smell the grass -- you're on Earth now." "I wept helplessly at first, though we consider weeping unmanly." The rammer looked around him as if coming awake. "You are right. Would the law take offense if l took off my shoes?" "No." He took off his shoes and wiggled his toes in the grass. His feet were too small for him. His toes were long and agile, almost prehensile. Probably the matronly woman had simply walked atxay to avoid being involved. In any case, the rammer's strength had returned. Ffe said, "On Koschei we tend to large girth. Gravity pulls less heavily at the meat of us. To qualify as a rammer I sweated away half my body weight, so that the unneeded two hundred earthweight pounds of me could he replaced by payload cargo." "You must have wanted the slats badly." "Yes. I was simultaneously learning disciplines whose very names most people can neither pronounce nor spell." The rammer pulled at his chin. The quilted skin stretched incredibly and did not snap back immediately when he let go. "I cut my weight by half, yet my feet hurt when I walk the Earth. My skin has not yet shrunk to fit my smaller mass. Perhaps you noticed." "What did you do about Koschei?" "I sent the message. It would precede me to Koschei by just two ship's months." "Then?" "I thought to wait it out, to use what time was left to me. My taped library was adequate -- but even in the face of death, I grew bored. "After till, I had seen the stars before. Ahead they were bluewhite and thickly clustered. To the side they were orange and red and somewhat sparse. Behind was black space, empty but for a handful of dying embers. Doppler shift made my velocity more than obvious. But there was no sense of motion. "A month and a half of this and I was ready to go back to sleep. "When the collision alarm went off, I tried to ignore it. My death w'as already certain. But the noise bothered me, and I went to the control room to shut it off. I saw then that a respectable mass was quickly approaching, aimed dangerously, from behind. It was moving faster than my own ship. I searched among the sparse crimson dots w'ith my scope at top magnification. Presently I found a golden man walking toward me. "My first thought was that I had gone mad. My second was that my God had come for me. Then, as the intruder grew in the scope screen, l saw that it was not quite human. "Somehow that made it better. A golden man walking between the stars was impossible. A golden alien was a lesser impossibility. At least I could examine it sanely. "I found the alien larger than I had thought, much larger than human. It was a biped, definitely humanoid, with two arms and legs and a well-defined head. Its skin glowed all over like molten gold. It was hairless and without scales. Between its legs was nothing but smooth skin. Its feet were strange, without toes, and the knee and elbow joints were bulbous and knobby -- "  "Were you really thinking in big expensive words like that?" "I really was. I wanted to forget that I was terrified." 'Oh." "The intruder was nearing fust. Three times I had to lower the magnification. Each time I saw him more clearly. His hands were three-fingered, with a long middle finger and two thumbs. The knees and elbows were too far down the limbs but seemed quite flexible. The eyes -- " "Flexible? You saw them move?" T HE rammer became agitated. He stuttered; he had to stop to gain control of himself. When he spoke again he seemed to force the words through his throat. " -- decided that the intruder was not actually walking. But as it approached my ship it seemed to be walking on empty space." "Like a robot?" "Like a not-quite man. Like a Monk, perhaps, if we could see beneath the garment worn by Monk ambassadors." "But -- " "Think of a man-sized humanoid." The rammer would not let me interrupt. "Think of him as belonging to a civilization advanced beyond our own. If his civilization had the power, and if he had the power within his civilization, and if he were very egotistical, then perhaps," said the rammer, "perhaps he might comrnand that a spacecraft be built in his own image. "That is the way I thought of the intruder in the ten minutes it took him to reach me. I could not believe that a humanoid with smooth, molten gold skin would evolve in vacuum -- or that he could walk on emptiness. The humanoid shape is for gravity, for planets. "Where does engineering become art? Once our groundbound automobiles looked like spacecraft. Surely an advanced spacecraft might be made to look like a given man and to move like him. yet still have the capabilities of a spacecraft. The man himself would ride inside. cause this to be done -- why, then he would stride like a god across the stars." "I wonder if you don't think (if yourself in just that way." The rammer was astonished. "Me? Nonsense. I am a simple rammer. But I find man-shaped spacecraft easier to believe in than golden giants walking on emptiness." "More comforting, too." "Yes." The rammer shuddered. "It came up very fast, so that I had to damp the magnification to keep him in view. His middle finger was two joints longer than ours and the thumbs were of different sizes. His eyes were set freakishly far apart and too low in the head. They glowed reel with their own light. His mouth was a wide, lipless, horizontal line. "Not once did I think to avoid the intruder. We could not have reached a collision course by accident. I assumed that he had altered course to follow me and would alter course again to protect us. "He was on me before I knew it. I had flipped the magnification down another notch and when I looked the setting was at zero. I looked up at the sparse red stars and found a golden dot as it exploded into a golden man. "I blinked, of course. When my eyes opened he was reaching for me." "For you?" The rammer nodded convulsively. "For the pod of my ship. He was much larger than the pod, or rather, his ship was." "You still thought it was a ship?" I would not have asked -- but he kept changing the pronoun. "I was looking for windows in tire forehead and the chest. I did not find them. He moved like a very large man." "I hate to suggest it," I said, "not knowing your religion. Could there be gods?" "Nonsense." "How about superior beings? If we've evolved beyond the chimpanzees, couldn't -- " "No. Absolutely not," said the rammer. "You don't understand modern xenogeny. Do you not know that we and the Monks and the Smithpeople are all of equal intelligence? The Smithpeople are not remotely humanoid in shape, yet it makes no difference. Evolution stops when a species begins to use tools." "Fve heard that argument. But -- " "When a species begins to use tools -- environment no longer shapes that species. The species shapes its environment to suit itself. Beyond this the species does not develop. It even begins to take care of its feebleminded and its genetically deficient. "No, he could have better tools than mine, this intruder, but he could not be my intellectual superior. He was certainly nothing to worship." "You seem awfully sure of that," I snapped. so. The rammer shivered and wrapped his arms around his chest. The gesture was ludicrous and pitiful at the same time, for his arms swept up an armful of folded skin and hugged it to him. "I needed to be sure. The intruder had taken my main pod in his hand and pulled me toward -- toward his ship. "I was glad of my crash straps. Without them I'd have bounced about like a pea in a dryer. As it was, I blacked out for an instant. When I opened my eyes I faced a great red iris with a black pupil. "He looked me over with care. I -- forced myself to look back, lie had no ears, no chin. A bony ridge divided his face where a nose might have been, but there were no nostrils. He pulled back for a better view of the main pod. This time I was not jolted. I le must have realized that the jolting could hurt me and had done something to prevent it. Perhaps he had made his ship inertialess. "I saw him lift his eyes momentarily to see over my pod. "You must remember that I was facing back along my own wake, back toward Horvcndile -- to where most of the stars had been red-shifted to black," The rammer was picking his words with increasing care and patience. They came so slowly that I wanted to squirm. "I was not looking at the stars. But -- suddenly there were a were all white and bright. "I did not understand. I put side and forward views on the screen. The stars looked the same in all directions. Still I did not understand. "Then I turned back to the intruder. He was walking away across the sky. "You must understand that, as he walked, he receded at much faster than walking speed. Accelerating. In a few seconds he was invisible. I looked for signs of an exhaust but saw none. 'Then T understood." The rammer lifted his head. "Where is the boy?" The rammer looked about him, his blue eyes searching. Children and adults looked back curiously for he was a weird sight. He said, "I do not see the boy. Could he have left?" "Oh, that boy. Sure, why not?" "There is something I must see," The rammer eased his weight forward onto his bare and battered feet. I followed him as he crossed the gravel path, followed him onto the grass. And the rammer resumed his tale. "The intruder had examined me and my ship with care. He had made himself and my ship inertialess or otherwise cushioned us against acceleration. Then he had canceled our velocity relative to Koschei." "But that wasn't enough," I objected. "You'd still die." ; The rammer nodded. "Still, at first I was glad to sec him go. He was terrifying. And his last mistake was almost a relief. It proved that he was -- human is not the word I want. But he could make mistakes." , "Mortal," I said. "He was mortal." "I do not understand. But never mind. Think of the power of him. In a year and a half, at point six gravities, I had accelerated to a velocity which the intruder canceled in no more than a second.  preferred death to his dreadful company. At first. "Then I became afraid. It seemed unjust. He had found me halfway between stars, stranded, waiting to die. He had half-saved me -- and then left me to die, no better off than before! "I searched for him with the scope. Perhaps I could signal him if I knew where to aim my com laser. But l could not find him. "Then I became angry. I -- " The rammer swallowed. "I screamed insults after him. I blasphemed in seven different religions. The more distant he was the fess I feared him. I was reaching my stride when -- when he returned. "His face was outside my main window. His red eyes looked into mine. His strange hand was reaching for my main pod. My collision alarm was just beginning to sound -- his return had been so sudden. I screamed out -- I screamed -- " He stopped. "What did you scream?" "Prayers. I begged for forgiveness." "Oh." "He took my ship in his hand. I saw the stars explode before me." T HE rammer and I had reached the shade of a dark oak, one so old and so spread out that its lower limbs needed the support of iron pipes. A family picnicking beneath the tree watched our approach. "Explode?" "That lacks accuracy," the rammer apologized. "What happened was this -- the stars became very much brighter, at the same time converging toward a point. They flared horribly. I was blinded. The intruder must have shifted me to within a meter-per-second of lightspeed. "I rubbed my hand hard across my eyes. My eyes remained closed. I felt acceleration. It remained constant while I waited for my eyes to recover. Through experience I was able to estimate its force at ten meters per second squared." "But that's -- " "One gravity. When I could see again I found myself on a yellow plain beneath a glaring blue sky. My pod was red hot and was already sagging round me." "Where did he put you?" "On Earth, in a refertilized part of North Africa. My pod was never built for such things. If Earth's gravity collapsed it, then reentry should have torn it to pieces. But the intruder must have taken care of that, too, I guess." I AM a peoplewatchcr, an expert. I can crawl into a man's mind without letting him know I existed. I never lose at poker. And I knew the rammer was not lying. We stood beside the dark oak. I'lie lowermost limb grew almost parallel to the ground and was supported by three iron pipes. Long as were the rammer's arms, he could not have wrapped them around that limb. Its bark was rough, gray, powdery and smelled of dust. The top of it was level with the rammer's chin. "You're a very lucky man." I said. "No doubt. What is that?" Black and furry, an inch and a half long -- one end wiggling in blind curiosity as it moved along the bark. "A caterpillar. You know, there's no computing the odds you ran against being alive now. You don't seem very cheerful about it." "I w'as -- but think about it," said the rammer. "Think what the intruder must have reasoned out to do what he did. "He looked through the main window to examine me as well as he could. I was tied to a chair by crash straps and his sensors had to see through thick impact quartz designed for transparency in the other direction. He could see me but only from the front. He could examine the ship. But it was damaged and he had to guess to what extent. "First he must have reasoned that f could not slow my ship without the ramscoop web. But he must also have deduced the presence of reserve fuel to decelerate me to zero speed from the lowest speed at which my ramscoop can operate. It was apparent that I must have it. Thus he stopped me dead -- or nearly so -- and left me to go home the slow way, using only my reserve fuel. "After he had left me lie must have realized that I would be dead of age before I ended such a trip. Imagine how thorough his examination of me must have been. So he came back for me. "By projecting my line of flight he must have knowm where I was going. But could I live there with a damaged ship? He did not know. "And so he looked me over more carefully, deduced the star and planet where I must have evolved -- and he put me there." "That's pretty far-fetched," I said. "Yes. The solar system was twelve light years distant -- yet he reached it in an instant. But that is not the point." The rammer let his voice trail off. He seemed oddly fascinated by the black caterpillar, which was now defying gravity as it explored a vertical wall of bark. "He placed me not only on Earth but in North Africa. He deduced not only my planet of origin but the region where I bad evolved. "I stayed in my pod for two hours before  was found. Your United Nations police took a record of my mind but they do not believe what they found. A ramship pod cannot be towed to Earth without radar's finding it. Further, my ramscoop web is all over the desert. Even the hydrogen balloons survived the reentry. They think that it must be a hoax, that I was brainwashed as part of that hoax." "And you? What do you think?" Again the rammer's face tightened into jigsaw-puzzle lines. "I had convinced myself that the intruder was no more than another spacecraft pilot -- a passerby who stopped to help, as some persons will stop to help if your car battery fails far from a city. His power might be greater than mine. He might be wealthier, even within the context of his own culture. We were of different species. Yet he had stopped to help a member of the great brotherhood, for we were both spacemen." "Because your modern xenogeny says he couldn't have been your superior." He didn't answer. "J can pick a few holes in that theory." SO "Can you?" I ignored his disinterest. "You claim that evolution stops when a species starts building tools. But suppose two tool-users evolved on the same world? Then evolution might go on until one race was dead. We might have had real problems if the dolphins had had hands." "It may be." He was still watching the caterpillar -- an inch and a half of black fur exploring the dark bark. My ear brushed the bark as I faced him. "Then again, not all human beings are alike. There are Einsteins and there are morons. Your passerby might have been of a race that varies more. Make him a super-Einstein -- " "I had not thought of that. I had assumed that his deductions were made with the aid of a computer. At first." "Then, a species could evolve itself. If they once started fiddling with their genes they might not stop until their children were milehigh giants with a space drive stuck up their spines. What the hell is so interesting about that caterpillar?" "You did not see what the boy did?" "Boy? Oh. No, I didn't." "There was a -- caterpillar moving along the gravel walk. People passed. None looked down. The boy came. He stooped to watch." "Oh?" "Presently the boy picked up (lie caterpillar, looked about him, then came here and put the caterpillar safely on the limb." "And you fainted." "I should not have been so affected by what, after all, is no more than a comparison. I would have cracked my skull had you not caught me." "A poor return for the golden one, if you had." The rammer did not smile. "Tell me -- if an adult had seen the caterpillar, instead of a boy -- " "Probably he'd have stepped on it." "Yes, I thought so." The rammer put his tongue in his cheek, which stretched incredibly. "He is nearly upside down. I hope he will not fall off." "He won't." "You think he's safe?" "Sure. Don't worry about him."...did not want to miss out on anything just because he was hearing and impinqed itself on his mind-pattern he got on the hook with Dannie and said, "I diq the music -- now let's have the libretto." Dannie hung up for two hours of contemplation, came back and said, "Well, it's like this -- " Turned out the key words in the story were Last Star and, unlike lesser writers, Dannie meant them. So the story's about the longest look anybody ever took on a clear night. Just this side of forever. Read it...Hayden Howard's novelette about tomorrow's silent, deadly college National Emergency, to be exact) leads off October's glittering array of science fiction's best. Others include -- ...dissonant chord, pitting Damon against all creatures living on all How long since you examined the powers that rule you -- and faced your own naked truths? street. It is evening. A slight wind blows dust and dead leaves past them, plays with their hair. They walk in silence, unhurried even hesitant. The younger, d dark-eyed man with pronounced, Slavic cheekbones continual! brushes his hair from his eyes. I he wind as easily returns it. They halt at the corner, sheltered for a moment from the breeze. The older man produces cigarettes and each takes one. Their destination is the building opposite, a gray construction of old, stained concrete, crumbling at the edges. The older man studies the face of his dark-eyed companion in the flare of the match. He looks for signs of nervousness, of fear, finds none. Both men inhale, blow clouds of gray smoke into the gray night air. They smoke in silence for a few minutes. Finally the younger man smiles resignedly and glances at his wristwatch. "Time for me to go, Ivan,," The other sighs deeply. Few words are left unsaid -- they have discussed everything. "I wish you luck, Stefan." They clasp hands firmly. Stefan turns, crosses the street and enters the building. A third man approaches, dressed in flowing robes of black, his head hooded. Walking swiftly, black robes flapping, he follows Stefan through the doorway, glancing once in Ivan's direction. Ivan involuntarily steps back into deeper shadow, feeling his breath speed up, his heart thump a little louder, faster. Under the man's dark cowl, revealed for a second by that one swift glance, he has caught a glint of silver. The notice above the doorway reads: evening classes. from Stonehenge, stands the Citadel of the Brotherhood. It is a structure of shimmering metal, two miles in height, a full half mile across at the base. It tapers, in a logarithmic curve, to a point. At various heights are balconies open to the air -- but those more than two thousand feet from the surface enclosed with a transparent substance. The main structure is formed of a titaniumsteel alloy. No joints or welds are discernible. The structure appears: to have been cast or carved from a mass greater than it. Pulse modulated signals of various wavelengths have been intercepted emanating from the Citadel on several occasions. One such signal, wavelength # Mcs, was immediately identified as television but faded before a coherent picture could be obtained. Other electrical phenomena have been observed in the vicinity, most notably jamming of all radio reception up to a range of three miles and a form of St. Elmo's Fire persisting for several hours. It would seem almost impossible to believe that such a structure could be erected without arousing the curiosity of the local populace, yet such appears to be the case. Bondsmen, when questioned in its very shadow, knew nothing of it and admitted to no interest at all. The Citadel was raised in April, #. It was completed in two days. No details as to the structural methods used have been obtained. T HE thirty-fourth meeting of the Society of the Spider took place in a Berlin cellar. Berlin, city of spies for almost fifty years, now held the last spies on earth. The cellar stank of dust and old wine. Broken glass crunched underfoot and mice scuttled in the shadows. Sixteen of the members had met here regularly for over two years, discussing, planning, arguing. These men sat comfortably, in silence. Of the remaining two, one was a new member. The hypnotic brand of his initiation still smarted in his subconscious. He sat forward in his seat, staring at the dimly lit faces around him, jumping at every unexpected sound. The other was the founder of the society, Ivan Petrov. Absent from meetings for a month, he had returned, bringing with him the new member, Stefan Alderton. Petrov spoke. "Gentlemen. All of u s here -- with the exception of Stefan -- are familiar with t h e Brotherhood artifacts. We have discussed them often and suggested possible uses or reasons for their existence. Stefan, on the other hand, had not beard of them until four days ago. He is a native of Kazakhstan, where the Brotherhood is still largely unheard of. He came west in search of his brother. His experiences of the Brotherhood, although brief, are, however, more intimate than anyone else here can claim." He paused, glancing at Aiderton. Alderton supplied: "I found my brother. He is now a Priest of this Brotherhood." Petrov continued above a murmur of sympathy: "His lack of knowledge underlines the deplorable breakdown of communications over the past ten years. I shall, therefore, give a brief history of the Brotherhood's rise to power to clarify matters and mainly for Stefan's benefit. The artifacts themselves, we shall discuss later. "The Brotherhood first made its appearance in central Europe, circa nineteen eighty-three. It spread swiftly, mainly via further education classes for adults, by offering courses based o n tachistoscopic film and hypnosis, designed to  teach a foreign language in days or quantum physics in a few hours. It is believed that" these courses also prepared the student for the next step -- full initiation into the Brotherhood. Wc know very little about the details. Much of our data is obtained by questioning pupils before they become too uncooperative. After several such courses most students retreat into a world of their own. Priests can be immediately recognized by their black robes and, more certainly, by the metal band each wears, apparently inset, around the upper part of the head. Further, individual Priests appear to have no separate selfawareness. Each forms a part of a group consciousness. "in five years the Brotherhood won complete control of Europe, most of Asia and North America. The next five years sufficed for them to take command of the whole planet. As a result, civilization as we knew it has virtually ceased to exist. We are plunged again into the Dark Ages, with the Brotherhood playing the roles of both the nobility and the Church. We. the remaining eighty per cent of the population, are cast as serfs and denied education -- unless we wish to submit to the teachings of the Priests, which inevitably culminate in B rot h e r hood membership. "This situation is the reason for the existence of this society. Our purpose is to alter it." Petrov paused again. He stared for a long moment at Alderton. When he again spoke his voice held a soft note of hope, in sharp contrast to his previous harsh tones. "We are all old men here, Stefan. Look around you -- not one of us is below the age of sixty. We need a young man who hates tiic Brotherhood as we do. Most young people accept the present situation -- or perhaps prefer it to the Cold War. They prefer a peaceful pastoral existence to the threat of nuclear annihilation. But you have lost a brother. You know this is not the way of progress, that we in a cultural backwater. We need a man who will agree to enter t h e Brotherhood for us and fight for us from within. "You are our choice, Stefan." Feed it regularly for six months, ringing a bell while it feeds. At the end of the six months the bell alone, without food, is enough stimulus to bring saliva to the mouth of the dog. A similar effect can be obtained with pain -- # resulting in the phenomenon of a dog's salivating when it is pricked with a pin. The dog has acquired a conditioned reflex. Or take a television audience of several thousand, all mindlessly watching soap opera. Interrupt the play f o r advertisements -- and most of your audience will treat it as a chance to make coffee, visit the toilet or possibly even speak. The few who continue watching have probably been mesmerized. Now, without interrupting the play, substitute for a single frame the word thirst in capital letters. If the frame-speed is fast enough no one in your audience will be able to read it. It will not be on the screen long enough to register consciously. Do this three more times at intervals of twenty seconds. The fifth time, flash Your audience will rush to the nearest public house as one. This is subliminal conditioning. These and other similarly halfunderstood methods were used on Stefan Alderton. The Spider took his mind and molded it. His subconscious was made a minefield of hidden reflexes, each designed to break through tiny later conditioning. He endured hours of seemingly innocuous scenic film while subliminal t e c h n i q u e s sprayed him with new concepts. His dreams were not his own. Each night a muted speaker under Ins pillow whispered to his mind, which was unhindered now by coherent thought. Only his mornings were free. Most of them were spent with Petrov -- walking, talking. He told over and over again the story of his brother's eagerness to travel West, to go to the great schools now being opened, to learn as much as possible of the world around him. And of their last meeting. Each time he told the story it was as if he lived that moment again, stood again in the small room with its odor of books and chalk dust, felt again the heat from the single shaft of sunlight that fell directly onto h i s face -- and saw again the blank, unrecognizing stare of his brother. That unseeing stare could be found on the face of any and every Priest. Stefan painfully recalled looking around the room, nothing that although there were five other Priests in the room, not one of them bothered to look directly at him. There had been no need for them to look at him -- they had been able to see him through the eyes of his brother. His sudden shocked realization of this fact had made him want to vomit. He had run from the room, forgetting his coat in his haste. Ivan had found him two days later, drunk, money all gone, wanting only revenge. Ivan had dragged his story from him many times, knowing that his hatred would burn the fiercer if constantly stoked -- and would help Stefan persevere in bis quest for vengeance. The lessons continued for six weeks. Satisfied at last. Stefan's tutors released him. He and Petrov traveled to England, where he enrolled in the Brotherhoodcontrolled night school nearest to the Citadel. Six months passed. During it no contact was attempted by Spider. Alderton was watched from a distance but not very carefully. f Until he was reported wearing black robes and a metal ring in his skull. T HE Western Desert of Australia sports the second Brotherhood artifact. Known as the Pattern, this structure consists of rods of a pink substance (presumed plastic but to date no sample has been available for analysis) of various widths laid out in a complicated design and covering roughly two hundred and fifty square miles. The rods vary in length, the longest being up to thirty feet, the shortest less than an inch. p Although Priests can be seen walking freely through the Pattern, no other animal life can exist closer than about five hundred yards. Even at this distance severe headaches and invol untar y twitchings of the limbs is usual in humans. Birds and other wildlife avoid this area but tests with guinea pigs and rats show them suffering acutely at a distance and dying if placed closer than five hundred yards. It is not known if these symptoms are a ; result of the Pattern or some form of protection designed to keep i unwanted visitors away from the area. Photographs taken front highaltitude drones show the Pattern to be roughly hexagonal in shape and resembling a gigantic snowflake. As with the Citadel, no function has been postulated for this structure. walked slowly towards the great door set in the steel wall that towered above the clouds. Six months of evening classes had taken his mind. He wore a metal ring in his skull. Two members of S p i d e r crouched in a parked car a quarter of a mile away, watching a radar screen. The thin beam of electrons traced its green path across the screen, peaked in the center, and flicked back to the beginning two thousand times each second. The peak, first, told that the Xband transmitter hidden in Stefan Alderton's left forearm was still functioning and second, it gave a direction. Another car parked two miles east, bonnet in the air and a mechanic frantically d o i n g nothing, gave a second direction. A third car, containing at first glance a courting couple, gave a third. All three tracking stations lost Stefan as he entered the steel shell of the Citadel. Sensing fulfillment, Spider assembled in the village which lay practically at the foot of the metal spire. Its patience was rewarded at the end of the third day of waiting. Once more a peak formed on the flickering green trace. The cage of the Citadel had T HE function of the third artifact is known. Unfortunately its location is not. It was built in France and is an enormous ceramic ball of almost three kilometers diameter. On March #, #, at # hours local time, it rose from the ground and headed rapidly due north, gaining altitude as it proceeded. No rockets or other motors were observed but the area from which it was launched was later found to be radioactive, although not dangerously so. It was last seen three days later -- by sheer accident -- some twenty Astronomical Units away by an astronomer, Mr. G. Kerry, who was carrying out routine photography of the Orion constellation. This area of the sky is of especial interest as several pulsars have been recently located here which are believed to correspond with known, visible stars. The only starship successfully launched by mankind, the sphere has been seen by some five hundred men. Its existence is known to perhaps four times that number -- excluding, of course, Priests. Further details of its trajectory will be available when the Kerry photographs have been examined. T WO men huddle under a laurel hedge at the very base of the Citadel. They whisper -- partly in awe, partly from fear of being detected, although no one else is in sight. "He's on that ledge -- about seven hundred feet up." "I see it." Petrov stares up until his whole back aches. "How long lias be been there?" "Four hours. From back there -- " he gestures to a line of trees a mile distant -- "you can just make him out with binoculars. He just stands there. He hasn't moved all this time." '"A nightwatchman, perhaps? Sentry?" " "We're dealing with one mind. Petrov, not a group." He smiles with pleasure at being able to repeat back to Petrov what the leader himself has said until it is almost a motto. "He watches the night but lie isn't a man. Not as we use the term." Their whispering ceases as the sound of footsteps becomes audible. A Priest appears, walks slowly past without pausing or glancing either way. Starlight glints on bis shining headband, making it glow. The even tread fades and the two men straighten. "We'll have to try to reach him," Petrov decides. "What? Up seven hundred feet of polished steel?" "No, I mean reach him mentally. He'll come to us if we can do that." "We'll lose him altogether if he breaks contact with the rest of the Brotherhood," objects the other. Petrov ignores him, sucking his bottom lip thoughtfully. "We'll use the flares." "But we can't risk it now." Petrov stares him down. "Go back. Tell them. The flares." ' The other hesitates, makes to argue further, then turns and crawls through the hedge. In a few moments Petrov is left alone with the night and the Citadel towering above him. The top is invisible but he can just see the ledge on which Alderton stands, silhouetted against the low cloud. Twenty minutes pass. Then, over by the line of trees, five Very lights flicker a colored pattern across the sky. The pattern mirrors one already in the strange mind of Stefan Alderton. The watchers in the trees see the figure on the high balcony stagger, jerk arms and legs like a marionette -- and fall. Seven hundred feet. Men have fallen from aircraft at much greater heights and lived, their falls broken by trees, snowdrifts. There are no trees below Stefan Alderton and certainly no snow. But the walls of the Citadel curve outward. He falls two hundred feet before they curve sufficiently for him to make contact. He bounces outward slightly, once, and then maintains contact for the rest of his fall. His left leg flails against the wall and smashes beyond any hope of repair. The steel ring set into the bone of his skull scrapes the shining wall for filly feet, sending and making the whole Citadel resonate. The curve of the wall increases sharply at the base. Friction piles on friction as Stefan plunges down. The skin is lorn from his body. A wet smear is drawn down the wall parallel to the glittering streak which makes the contact, of his headband. The last fifty feet, mercifully, he begins to roll, and is spun away from the tower, to come to rest mere yards from the wait-, ing Tvan. The Citadel hums like a gigantic tuning fork in the sudden quiet. Footsteps. Shouts. Ivan runs to the body. "Stefan -- " "Ivan -- " The eyes open once and close again. The whole incredibly living body shudders. The whispered greeting is barely audible. Ivan forces himself to disregard the terrible injuries, the face partly torn away and covered with blood. "Stefan. The Citadel. The Pattern, What are they for, Stefan?" Stefan shudders again. For a moment Ivan thinks Stefan is still one with the group mind -- members of which must surely even now be racing to the laurel hedge. But no -- Stefan had spoken, Ivan lowers his head to Stefan's. "We were right, Ivan," whispers Stefan. "The Priests are one. One mind. But oh, how we underestimated that mind -- how we misunderstood it! It is the mind of a child, undeveloped. And yet it -- they -- make us look like apes." Accompanied by his whimsical Martians and Venusians, Dr. Donald H. Menzel returns to our pages afler on absence of four years. One of the world's leading astronomers, as chairman of the International Astronomical Union's four-man Working Group on Lunar Nomenclature, he spent part of July in Moscow selecting the names for the craters and other  natural features on the far side of the moon, which has just recently been mapped. The names that Dr. Menzel and his three colleagues have chosen will become official when voted on by the #member body of the I.A.U. in #. Dr. Menzel is also an expert in the fields of mathematical physics and special branches of radio communication. He has contributed technical articles to professional journals in numerous fields and has written numerous books, including A Field Guide to ihe Sun and Planets and "The artifacts, Stefan, what are they?" "They are a thousand years ahead of us," the whisper continues, oblivious to the question, "yet they are but children -- a child -- " Running footsteps approach. "Quickly, Stefan, the Pattern -- " The dying man's eyes open for the last time. His voice grows stronger as he speaks. "The Citadel? Tire Pattern? And the Starship?" He smiles thinly through the blood. "Toys, Ivan, toys."  The World of Flying Saucers: Dr. Menzel also wrote science fiction -- some for under the pseudonym Don Howard when he was in college. He even served a stint as science editor for Hugo Gernsback's sf magazine. Dr. Menzel has been an art enthusiast since his boyhood days in Colorado and he is currently a member of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Art Association. Though he has been seriously interested in painting his technicolor extraterrestrials only since I#, they have been on exhibit to enthusiastic audiences in various parts of the world. Is there life on Mars? Or are these Martians only pigments of Dr. Menzel's colorful imagination? Our astronomerartist will soon be back in Galaxy, at which time we shall ask him. Earl Ray will be in court to appeal his confession. Sirhan Sirhan is getting settled in his cell on Death Row. Apollo # is about to re-enter after successful completion of the penultimate Lunar mission. There is no trace of the ground crew sergeant who took the Hercules out over the Atlantic and asked for one phone call to his wife. And got it. And that's some of the news of the world of the future. If you obtain a copy of AH Our Yesterdays, by Harry Warner, Jr., (As you should. From Advent: Publishers, Inc., P.O. Box #, Chicago, #. #. #) and read its account of the doings and thinkings of science fiction people in the #s, you will get more than one normally bargains for in a book like this. You will get the incunabula -- the photos of F. Towner Ltney ; the personality analysis of Walt Dunkelberger; the index that revealed to my astonished eyes that I'd been observed helping to sing a Richard S. Shaver lampoon at the # Philcon. But you will also, I think, get more than an inkling of how and why it is that some of us have to claim a "new thing" today. For what we mean by the "new thing" is a portmanteau into which we stuff all the aspects of the future we simply did not see coming. Long one of the most respected recorders of events within the microcosm of sf fans, Harry Warner has produced here, first of all, that calm, reasoned and, I suppose sometimes slightly prejudiced, "fan history" that the microcosm needs as a counterweight to Sam Moskowitz's earlier The Immortal Storm. All Our Yesterdays concentrates on the #s. Brief essays first establish the prior state of science fiction and science-fiction fandom, so as to provide a perspective in which to view the more closely detailed events. Subsequent volumes are promised on the later decades. Warner several times refers to Moskowitz and chides his book for being far too concerned with the pocket struggles of New York fandom, and therefore for being a significant distortion of the lore of the fannish universe. (This seems a valid point, although it is also true that the movers and shakers of the New York bush wars are generally still significant activists in both professional and amateur science fiction, whereas most of the other major fannish events of the #s are sunk without trace). But some of you may be wondering, even more titan usual, just what the hell I'm talking about. Well, there is a thing called fandom. It is the result of the recorded thoughts, and the increasingly recorded deeds, of folk who at some time in their lives were moved not only to read science fiction but to live in it. These people were impelled to contact other sf readers and to form associations with them on the basis of either a mutual interest in science fiction or of some even stronger mutual interest discovered as a result of the preliminary sf contact. Articulate, .given to bursts of hyperactivity, often consumed by a loneliness demanding Brobdingnabian spasms of communication they have from their number contributed the major portion of today's sciencefiction editors, writers, artists. The derivative formatists have in turn perpetuated science fiction as we know it today and as it continues to raise fresh generations of fans. And these fans, in turn, will some day... But before we elaborate on that conclusion, you should know that it might well be of considerable interest to you to read All Our Yesterdays, even if you don't recognize anything more than the names of the people who have since become familiar professionals. (Or well-known scientists, for that matter. You will find their names here in the form "Young published two issues of a mimeographed magazine in #, but nothing more was ever heard of him.") For even if you don't recognize any of the names, it is nevertheless true that no other entertainment literature to my knowledge has ever raised up a satellite structure of such complexity that it can -- and often does -- exist independent of the First Cause, nor has any other literary genre generated such a systematized frame of reference in which entire communities of outwardly ordinary individuals can share the same dramatic interior life. seen analogous to fandom is society itself. No other institution is comparable in its dedicated pursuit of the proper attitude, the apt message, the most effective plan and the noblest future. (Modified, of course, by a sobering realization that out there, somewhere, regrettably squats that great stultifier, Practicality.) All of us, each in his own words and each in his own way, would like to try to do something, however small, that would improve Man's grasp and understanding. Of what? Well, of the extension of the past. I think that we in the #s, pursuing this common human trait of simplifying the past and calling it the future, believed even more than we realized that the more efficient machines would lead to better men and that the larger cities would lead to reasonable folk. Oh, some doubted it. But not me. This is what is to be found in Harry Warner's book even if you never heard of and don't care about gafia, crifanac or Morojo. It is indeed a history, as distinguished from a polemic. The specific names and things it cites are reflections of real events and genuine feelings. And there is sense to be made of it even if your interest is wholly independent of the particular labels this constellation of realities happens to have donned for the occasion. Warner's opinions are evident but unobtrusive; it is possible to discern that this microcosm, like our larger one, is mostly made up of good folk w'ith strong personal opinions, is mostly motivated towardi improvement, certainly less creative than it thinks but nevertheless aware of creativity's importance. This book, like fandom, is a good thing. But as I said up there in the beginning, even a good thing can miss a point. And tiiis, too, is not surprising since we do have only the past for a hint of what the world of the future will bring. I would like to illustrate my point. I think perhaps I can. Here is a column I wrote in April, #, after returning home from a business trip. But then I remembered that my job is to review science-fiction books, not science fiction. So I put it aside: From the air Washington, D.C., looked dusty in the late afternoon. In the main terminal at National Airport, ticket clerks had been suggesting there might be seats on flights from Friendship Airport. They had no suggestion as to how long it might take the regular limousine service to get through downtown Washington to Friendship, which is near Baltimore. But there were certainly no seats to Chicago, Milwaukee or St. Louis at National. So I took the shuttle to New York and that was how I saw the burning like a barricade across the city at #th Street. The flames were Da-Glo orange. My plan was to take a Chicago plane from LaGuardia. I settled for a cab ride to Kennedy and the last seat on a flight home via Cincinnati. The nation's capital, as I was saying, hod been burning. From National, with its panoramic windows, the historical monuments along the Potomac had stood out clearly against the ropy smoke. We had gotten to National, usually a twelve-minute cab ride down Connecticut Avenue for the Shoreham, via Georgetown and the Key Bridge. Whether you know D.C. or not, what this means is that for five tired businessmen who had been strangers until they struck their bargain with the cabbie, the Insurrection up to this point had been an hour's traffic jam. The flight path from Kennedy to Cincinnati crosses Baltimore. D.C. is off the left wing. Doubling back as I was, at something like #:# P.M. local time, now, I was sitting in a First Class left window seat with a double whiskey sour in my hand, partaking of a little Mozart through the headphones of my Astrostereo. Washington from the air at night is one of the world's great visions. When I see it, I think of the superdense cities traced out far below our England in the Arthur C. Clarke story. It is like looking at a scanner display and making out the lovely, obviously intelligent webworks of an aesthetically conscious, persistent and prosperous alien people. At this time, it had rust-colored, very dark streaks across it. In Cincinnati the bouncy stewardess with the Texas accent received a message that flight crews would not be permitted to leave O'Hare Field for their homes in Chicago but would have to bunk out at the field after the flight terminated. She asked me what Washington had been like. I couldn't think of how to put it. and she nodded happily, comprehending. But later, when we swung in over the West Side of Chicago at midnight, she ran up and down the aisle, pointing out and crying: "Look it thet! Look it thet, my Gawd!" Well, I got home all right, to suburban Evanston, in a cab driven by a man who blamed the whole thing on the Mayor of Philadelphia for taking away his policemen's shotguns. I also learned that he lived in all innocence on the # block of West Madison and I was his last fare before he checked in and went home. I'm not really a jerk but I didn't like the way he talked, so I just wished him pleasant dreams. The next day, I checked with the local police for reassurance, and then my wife, my four sons and I got on our six bicycles and went up to the BaskinRobbins store on the corner of Dempster and Chicago. The youngest is six and I'd promised him he could have a ride to the ice cream store when I got back home from the annual convention of Pickle Packers, International, a very nice bunch of people I no longer work for. As I recall, everybody had a double dip but David, the youngest. Despite his twelve-block accomplishment, he settled for one dip. The next day being Sunday, we dressed up neatly and took the bus to Raymond Park for the memorial service. science fiction ( I wrote in April, #) is so obvious that its full implications still escape me. It was not at all like World movies is accompanied by sirens, crashing sounds and the crackle of flames. But the common element in all my insulated glimpses from real life was the absence of sound effects. In all the afternoon and evening, I heard one klaxon -- on an empty ambulance headed for the Key Bridge away from D.C., probably toward a road accident on the chock-full highway to Dulles airport. Other than that, it was cab motors, turboprop and jet engines, arrival and departure announcements, coins dropping into telephones, ten pennies in a slot for a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times. That, and politeness; the very quiet, resigned AP wireplloto editor in Washington on Friday morning, when the headline was still d.c. QUibrs down. He said he was glad to see me again, hoped I'd be back next year, but didn't really t!i ink he'd be able to do much with my # X # glossy of a pretty girl unveiling a sculpture of a sixfoot eagle clutching a # Vifoot pickle in its claws. All of us were polite; the taxi' man in Washington, the five of us in his cab, even when we were stuck immovably in that narrow Georgetown Street, with people walking rapidly and the hooter getting closer and closer. There was no shoving or shouting at National; the clerks worked quickly and without raising their voices. On the shuttle, a salesman put his knee in my lap while trying to aim his Nikon through the window, :md I was very polite to him. It had to be, of all things, a stewardess out of Steve Canyon who became my only exhibit for panic, and it was two other cab drivers, one in John Lindsay's New' York and one in Dick Daley's Chicago, who spoke confidently of locking their doors and "driving right through" crowds if the need ever arose. One thing their television viewing has apparently failed to show them is a car with its four wheels in the air. Or else they've related it to a movie about with Mozart and whiskey sours, I gazed with fascinated interest on the subterrene jewelery of Washington at night and thought of Arthur C. Clarke. What difference docs it make what you relate to? What difference? Well, I'm not sure. The difference, if tiny, must be somew'hcre in the difference between the flashy and the enduring. So much of what we want is flash. Flash is often more fun. not popular by accident. And the mysterious figure with mysterious capabilities, spinning conspiracies or, conversely, righting wrongs with one morally superior stroke -- he, too, is an enduring archetype among us because there are enduring needs within us and he meets them. A large part of what is generally called "science fiction" all in one lump, good and bad, flashy and enduring together, is wedded and bedded, part, parcel and calliope with a complex, communicative, communal, c o m m u t a t i v e , comprehensive social network which fosters and battens on the urgent, immediate need to make the future happen. We want to escape from the incomprehensible hcre-and-now into a simplified world where an Avenger sets things right with one forceful blow after the "mealymouth politicians and fuzzyminded social 'scientists' have muddled it up." We want to have the Arcturians come down in search of Marilyn Monroe and knock aside things-as-they-are in the process. Wc want a new deal for ourselves, by being born again, this time fully conscious, into a world depopulated by the Plague, where all is still and all is ours. We live in a flash world. The dimensions of things have gotten worked around to where they are larger than life as it was w'hen the harmless entertainments of Hash fiction were first created. Any one man with a degree in biochemistry, for instance -- one poor, miserable, unsung cataclast with a mere ten years' education, or just an ordinary lot of luck -- could make such a Plague. We may all be dying tomorrow for one man's gratification of a wish which should legitimately be sending a hundred thousand of us to the newsstands with seventyfive cents each for the next John Christopher novel. You follow me? So much of science fiction has nothing to do w ith the intrinsic things of science fiction. It has to do with the intrinsics of less than perfect humanity. It is predicated on the powcrlessness of the individual, rather than on the capabilities of the lucky few. The Plague, the Arcturians, or the Avenger, arc needed to fill the lack of power in our lives. Or they were. Here in the world of the future, our longed-for expertise of things has created innumerable places where once powerful authority has no monopoly on accomplishment, and where there are many weapons that are best wielded by empty hands. If he but be driven enough today, any man can be his own pulp hero, and those of us who want all their thrills vicarious will never again nod safe in their libraries. That's what it all has to do witli science fiction. It has to do with the difference between flash writing and good writing, because good writing is life and flash writing is the other thing. Good art has to do with life realized. We've always known that. What some of us appear to have missed is that life has changed fundamentally, and science fictionally. That's what it has to do with science fiction. The greater chunk of the old basis is dead as of April #, I #. We used to set stories on Mars and in the future not because we understood those places but because w e didn't -- which made them totally believable places in which to have momentous things happen. Life at home proceeded apace. But we live now in a time in which it not only can happen here -- you name it. and it can happen, good, bad and indifferent, provided only it's flashy enough -- it not only can happen here, it will.  All Mr. Kraken' s assets were frozen -- including his heart! G raham kraken lay upon his deathbed. His eyes wavering upon a dim and faraway ceiling, he savored the reassuring words. "The odds arc all in your favor," the doctor said. n Tlte bed seemed to tense beneath Kraken. Springs coiled tautly. "Some day -- " the doctor's voice rang with tiny, metallic chimes -- "medical science will have advanced far enough to revive you. Your frozen body will not deteriorate in the interim." The chimes grew hushed. "Some day science will repair your body and you will live again." Graham Kraken died easily and they froze his corpse. Miami Beach and opened his eyes. Blinking into the dimness of his room, he found a visitor seated at his bedside. "Good morning," said the visitor. The stranger, Kraken noted, was an elderly gentleman with a bald head and a pleasant face. "Good morning," said Kraken in a friendly manner. "Nice earrings you have there." "Thank you," said the visitor. "They're antennae." "Oh?" "For the transistor radios built into my earlobes." "Indeed?" "Stereo." "How nice," said Kraken. "How do you turn it off?" "Don't," the visitor responded. "Speak up a bit', please." "I'm sorry, ' said Kraken. "I didn't know." "Nice weather we're having." "I hadn't really noticed. By the way, have they done anything about that?" "Well, they did for a short time." the old gentleman said. "But they had to give it up." "Too many conflicting wishes?" "I'm afraid so." "A pity." Kraken glanced at the heavily curtained window. As he watched, the glass behind the curtains suddenly shattered. "Oh?" he said. "Riots?" "No," replied the visitor. "Supersonic transports." Another pane of glass automatically slipped into place. "I guess you get quite a lot of that." "Easy come, easy go." "By the way," Graham Kraken asked, "what year is this?" "Twenty-eighty-eight," lie said. "Well," said Kraken, "it has been a while." "One year is pretty much like another, ' said the stranger. "How about the money?" wondered Kraken. "Did my estate hold out?" "I'm afraid nol," said the visitor. "I had to pay for your revival." "That was very kind of you," said Kraken. He noticed the sunlight edging the window curtains. He rose upon an elbow. T he motion made him feel faint. "Please don't try to move," the visitor said. "It's important that you rest for the heart transplant." "Oh?" Kraken leaned back. "Is there something wrong with my heart?" The visitor stood up slowly. "No," he replied, "but there's something wrong with mine." by Willy Ley and a reason, plus the necessary cash -- to buy a compound that was declared to be impossible. can now do so. The name of the compound is chlorine pentafluoride and its chemical formula, expressed by the name, is rather an oxidizer for a fuel. Well, sort of, since it is not truly an "oxidizer." But we shall see. Nobody thought of chlorine peniafluoride specifically in the past, but for the last forty years rocket men have been dreaming about "something like it." The dream was based on one cold fact --  -- a very cold fact indeed -- namely the boiling point of liquid oxygen at minus # degrees centigrade. Oxygen must be colder than that to stay liquid. This caused certain handling problems and one got to wishing that there were a substitute for liquid oxygen that stayed liquid at ordinary temperatures. Could one use an oxygen-rich substance that was liquid over about the same temperature range as water -- or over the temperature range of alcohol -- and was also inexpensive? Since this was a dream -- why not throw in a low price? Since any self-respecting person has a chemical handbook or two somewhere on the bookshelf it became customary to devote otherwise unoccupied evenings lo looking up oxygen-rich liquid compounds. For various reasons the molecules of these compounds should also be fairly light. There was no reason to worry about that point, they turned out to be compounds of light elements. The elements in question, with their atomic weights, were: Hydrogen (H) I Nitrogen (N) # Oxygen (O) # Since we'll have to know the atomic weights of three other elements later on they might be added to the list right here. They are: Fluorine (F) # Sulphur (S) # Chlorine (Cl) # ##  The Vi after # in the case of chlorine is not a typographical error but a fact of nature that annoyed chemists for at least three-quarters of a century. The explanation is that the atoms of the common garden-variety isotope weigh # units each -- but another chlorine isotope with a weight of # is just common enough to shift the weight of the natural isotope mixture by half a unit. : To return to the theme: the reason for checking on various compounds was to find an oxygen-rich substance that could be substituted for pure oxygen in a rocket. At that moment I remembered having been told once by my chemistry professor that the names of oxygen and of hydrogen are both wrong and should be reversed. Oxygen means "acid maker" but quite a number of oxygen-free acids exist. Hydrogen means "water maker" but no acid exists that docs not contain hydrogen and when it comes to water hydrogen plays a minor role. The formula of water is, of course, H O which means that the weight of the molecule is #  #  #. It also means that there is quite a high percentage of oxygen in that stuff; by weight the ratio is # to I in favor of oxygen. But try to make the hydrogen atoms let go of the oxygen. With ordinary means it cannot be done at all -- one reason water was thought to be an element for such a long time -- and it can fairly easily be done only when an electric current is available. But bew'are of memories of classroom demonstrations in which a glass apparatus was filled with water and a little sulphuric acid was added "to make the water conduct the electric current." Of course you could see the hydrogen accumulate at one electrode and the oxygen at the other. Of course you could see that the hydrogen required twice as much space as the oxygen. But the electric current did not take the water apart directly, even if it looked that way. What happened is this: The electric current took the sulphuric acid apart. The formula of the acid is H-SO, and the result was H # (free hydrogen)  SO, (sulphur trioxide)  O (an oxygen atom). The two gases hydrogen and oxygen had been freed in the ratio of # : I and SO was left behind. The SO,, mediately combined with the surrounding water: SO.,  H.O  H,SOi so that you had a molecule of sulphuric acid again. And then the whole cycle started all over again, gradually using up the water. Since the hydrogen atoms would not release the oxygen atom, water could not be used. But compounds with more than one oxygen atom in their makeup might not be so stubborn about it. How about hydrogen peroxide, chemically speaking H # #. Any chemist who had experience with without any visible reason and in so short a time that the process could only be called an explosion. Miss or Mrs. Reader have no fear, however. The hydrogen peroxide in your bathroom is only "a four per cent aqueous solution" which means that # per cent of what is in the bottle is hydrogen peroxide. The other # per cent is harmless water. And you could not get anything stronger than an # per cent solution, which is still safe. Explosions happen when the solution is # per cent or stronger. Chemists with experience warn everybody away from strong H-O. solutions and it took a lot of research during the second World War to find out why strong H # # # blew up. It happened when the substance touched copper and since piping usually involved brass fittings hydrogen peroxide looked even more unsafe than it is. True, it has been used but nobody likes to work with it. N OW, the handbook told of two nitrogen compounds that one might consider. They were nitrogen tetroxide ( N...O, ) and nitrogen pentoxide (N a O : .). For the tetroxide the weight ratio of nitrogen to oxygen in the molecule would be # : #; for the pentoxide the weight ratio would be # : #. Not bad in either case, especially since the nitrogen was not too likely to combine with anything during the combustion process and would, one could hope, simply appear as gaseous nitrogen in the exhaust. But the chemists with experience shook their heads again: unsafe. By now N # #, is made and is available in tank car lots. Apparently one merely had to learn a technique of handling it. But thirty years ago the bad expcriences of some researchers left only one substitute for liquid oxygen that could be used: nitric that the atomic weights in the molecule add up: I  #  #. Hence the weight ratio of oxygen to hydrogen-plus-nitrogen was # to #, or a little better than # to #. It would need a more detailed analysis of the combustion process to show whether the nitric acid would relinquish its oxygen easily or not. And after analysis -- on paper -- had shown that it would, it would need some experimentation to verify the assumptions made for the calculation. Of course anybody with even the most rudimentary knowledge of chemistry knows that nitric acid is by no means a peaceful substance. But at least it would not blow up. And most folks also know by now that quite a number of rockets, among them very big ones, use nitric acid as a substitute for oxygen. When rockets using nitric acid were still comparatively small somebody asked whether one should not have a look at fluorine. Fluorine behaves like oxygen, only more so. It reacts with practically anything it can reach, even causing flames in the process. Most of the time no ignition is needed. The compounds produced are fluorides instead of oxides but a description of fluorine as a super-active oxygen is reasonably correct. One has to add, though, that it is horribly poisonous. Hence pure fluorine w'as unlikely to find practical application on a large scale. But how about fluorine-rich substances which might do the job with somewhat dampened violence? The Office of Naval Research thought that the idea deserved some investigation and gave a contract to the research division of the Propellant Chemistry section of Rocketdyne, builder of rocket engines in Canoga Park, California. The manager of the research division, E. A. Lawton, gave the assignment to Dr. Walter Maya and Dr. Maya went to work. This was in #. The work involved a mixture of fluorine and chlorine both of which are gases at room temperature. Compounds of fluorine and chlorine then known included trifluoride. The gases behaved as expected but left just a trace of another compound. There was so little of it that all one could say at the moment was that the unexpected -- and possibly new -- compound strongly absorbed radiation of a wavelength of # microns, which is in the infrared region of the spectrum. The next step was obvious, though very difficult. It entailed making enough of the compound for its molecular weight to be determined. The weight turned out to be #'# . That awkward V # was. of course, due to chlorine; subtracting # V # from # V # gave # which is five times the weight of the fluorine atom. If the new compound did not contain anything else the substance had to be chlorine pentafluoride, something that had never been made before, one atom of chlorine holding on to five atoms of fluorine. The next step was to prove that the compound consisted of chlorine and fluorine only. Once that was done and the nature of the new compound had been definitely established it was comparatively easy to think of a number of ways of making it -- the reaction by which it had been obtained originally was much too slow to satisfy anybody. One better way was via a compound with chlorotetrufluoride, reacting with more fluorine. The gas formed after condensation proved to be about # pounds of the new compound -- enough to establish all its characteristics. Chlorine pentafluoride is colorless, both as a liquid and as a gas. Its odor is similar to that of fluorine -- it is toxic but far less violent than pure fluorine. Below minus # degrees centigrade (  minus # degrees Fahrenheit) it is solid. Above minus # degrees centigrade (  # degrees Fahrenheit) it is a gas. Its density is # grams per cubic centimeter at minus # degrees centigrade (  minus # degrees Fahrenheit) while the density is I .# grams per cubic inch at # degrees centigrade (  # degrees Fahrenheit). The precise molecular weight is #. The question of how C#F # will do in a rocket engine has only theoretical answers so far. If Rocketdyne has run any actual tests on the teststands they don't say so. Its value as a fluoridizer is about the same as that of liquid can be stored (under its own vapor pressure) at normal temperatures. It has the advantage of being heavier than liquid oxygen which means that more of it can be put into a given tank. A likely rocket fuel for use with tio being about # parts (by weight) to one part of hydrazine. And that is as far as the story has progressed at the moment. Picture Writing in Our Time T HE place of the story was and still is one of the Frisian islands in the North Sea. The time was the summer of #, vacation lime, and one of the vacationers on that island was a staff member of the Ethnographic Museum in Leipzig. There was not much a vacationer could do in such a place in those days. One could go swimmade by the old woman to assist her memory about the errands she ran. The ethnologist, for a tip, acquired a no longer needed page of the notebook (see figure) and the explanation. The round object tiling, one could watch seagulls and sandpipers and one could also watch people. Among the people the vacationer watched was an old woman who bustled around from house to house and came to the inn with packages. The innkeeper, when asked, said that the old woman was a general of a fisherman. She earned a little money by running errands. The ethnologist was not especially curious until he watched the old woman scribbling in a notebook -- hadn't the innkeeper said that she, like most others of her generation, was still look at the notebook. It did not contain a single letter but was full of pictures that looked like childish drawings. They had been at the extreme left in the top row that might be a picture of a potato actually meant rice the old woman had been asked to fetch from town. The second object meant soup greens. The circle with two lines meant a sponge on a string and the square next to it meant a portable slate, then customary for grades one, two and three in grade schools. Somebody was learning to write! The sketch to the right of the slate was supposed to be a pot, the sign next to it that looks like a small b probably indicated the customer. The sign is repeated once more later. To the right of the pot we have a somewhat drastic pictogram, somebody wanted "worming medicine" -- whether for man or beast is unclear. To the right of it a cluster of signs referred to wine. The bottle shape is the general indicator. The repeated b meant the same customer who wanted the pot. The four circles meant four bottles. The sign at the extreme right in the top row was supposed to show a pig -- but not a live one. It was intended to be read as ham or pork. The drawing to the left in the bottom row is a whole sentence: the messenger was to tell the butcher that he should come to the village to slaughter a pig and that he should bring two pig bladders with him. The drawing to the right in the bottom row meant: deliver a letter from the blacksmith to his wife-to-be. The page from the notebook of the messenger woman was placed into the archives of the museum in Leipzig. An enlarged photograph was put on public display. Learned discussion of the find was not too fruitful. The old woman knew of writing -- she simply could not do it herself. So she had invented a substitute. But what would she have done if nobody in her area knew how to read and write -- in other words if the concept of writing had been unknown to her? Nobody could answer that question, of course. But that interesting notebook leaf still indicates how writing, elsewhere, and several thousands of years earlier, must have started. Astronautics International N OT quite two years ago, in the December, #, issue of Galaxy, I pointed out that the conquest of space was not just a race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Other countries also contributed. I spoke about the French satellites; there were a total of five, three of them orbited by the French Diamant rocket. I spoke of the Italian satellites, two of them, and of the British and Canadian satellites, all of which were collaborations with the United States. The countries in question had furnished the satellites. The United States had furnished the rockets. Since then more things have happened in that field. At about the time the readers of Galaxy read that particular issue an American rocket roared into the sky from the Australian Woomera Proving Ground, carrying an Australian satellite. Its designa(Australian) Weapons Research Establishment Satellite. It was orbited on November #, #, and stayed in orbit until January #, #. The next three international satellites that were successfully orbited -- one was destroyed by one of the rare failures of the Scout rocket -- all belonged to I lie first to reach orbit, is called Iris. It was put into orbit on May #, #, and is still orbiting. on October #, #, and is also still in orbit. The third of the interesting. stand for High Eccentricity Orbit Satellite and the eccentricity is indeed high. The perigee of that satellite is only # miles from the surface but its apogee is # miles out in space, a little more than halfway to the moon. It takes # hours and # I .# minutes for the satellite to complete one of its orbits. Its purpose is to see -- among other things -- what magnetic fields are doing inside the orbit of the moon. It was launched on December #, #, and its working life is expected to be about one year. Afterwards it will continue orbiting for a long time. Its weight is # lbs. The successful launch of this satellite made the Europeans feel a little better about a failure they had experienced only a week Launcher Development Organization) has spent years developing a three-stage satellite launch vehicle, named Europa#. There had been a few failures but the rocket that was on the launch pad at the new French firing range in French Guiana promised t o behave. The first stage, a British Blue Streak, did function as planned and so did the second stage, the French Coralie, which had given trouble in earlier flights. When the third stage, the German Astris, separated from the Coralie and ignited properly everybody was convinced that it would put the Italian-built satellite into orbit. But after seven seconds of firing the Astris cut off and both it and the satellite crashed somewhere. The researchers are not even sure where impact took place, because at the instant of engine cut-off all telemetry cut off, too, and the trackers lost the vehicle. Since then Canadian-American collaboration has put another Canadian satellite into orbit, on January #, #. It is called Satellite for Ionosphere Studies. European plans for the future are quite diversified. Hie French have stated that they are developing a larger version of their Diamant satellite launcher. But even the larger Diamant will not be able to orbit the French Roseau satellite now under construction in Toulouse. During a FrancoSoviet Scientific Cooperation Conference, held in that French city in November #, it was (Please turn to page # ) Dune was an arid planet, inhabited by gigantic sandworms and wild Frernen whose customs were based on water scarcity. Its only resource was melange, an addictive drug produced by the worms. This "spice" aided longevity and gave an adept visions of the future. ' After the murder of his noble dumped into the desert, together with his pregnant mother, the trained by the Bene Gesserit -- a female order devoted to mental arts and the control of genetic lines to produce a "kwisatz haderach", a messiah capable of using psi powers. Paul was to be their instrument. hi learning to live with the Frernen, Paul was forced to take an overdose of drug. This opened his mind permanently to the future -- or futures. Lady Jessica also look an overdose with the was horn with full knowledge of all her mother had known. Paul, by then also known as I remen against the Harkonnen rulers and their Sardqukar soldiers. In the battle. Paul's old Paul took the Harkonnen heir. sort -- but refused to consummate the marriage, remaining true to Now, twelve years later, Paul has made the desert bloom and he rules a mighty empire of stars. He has become almost a god to the Qizarate, a cult built around his visions. Against it, the other (gutsi-political and quasi-religious, forces of humanity have just begun to unite. Among these is the Bene Cesserit, headed bv the Reverend weak help of their trainee, Princess Irulan. More or less with them is the Bene Tleilax, supposedly amoral scientists; their representative is the Tleilaxu Pace like any man or woman. The two groups have the aid of the Spacing Guild, which must control the melange trade, since only spice visions make interstellar navigation possible. Their Steersman man and must live in a tank. His main function is to obscure Pant's visions with his own gift so their plotting will not be detected. They send Princess Irulan back to Paul to demand he give her an heir; she has so far kept Chani sterile by adding drugs to the Premen woman's food. Paul refuses. He is filled with bitter visions, unsure but what he is the very instrument of the future he tries to avoid. He is sure, however, that a royal heir by Irulan will destroy all hope. Paul detects the Reverend Mother on Ed rip's ship and has her arrested. But Scvtale and BIescape. Scytale secretly visits a Premen quarter to gain information. He leaves Bijaz behind but takes with him the semuta-addicted daughter During an interview with Edric, Paid learns nothing. The presence of the Steersman muddies all his future visions. It also upsets Qizarate. Paul can only determine that the Reverend Mother has suggested that Princess Irulan have Chani killed, since Paul's mate now refuses the food containing the sterility drug. Edric then makes Paul a shocking present -- something that looks like Duncan Idaho, except for metallic eyes. It is a ghola -- Duncan's body has been regrown front its cell patterns by Tleilaxu science. But it has no memories from its former life and is now named HA YT. Paul is disturbed by the fact that he saw no vision of Duncan's return. He asks the purpose of the gift, and Hayt answers : "I have been sent to destroy you." But Hayt does not know how it will come about. He tells Paul to send him away -- but Paul cannot, since Duncan was once so close to him. Alia is sent to study the body of a girl found in the desert. She can learn little, except that the corpse shows signs of sernutaaddiction, but she is sure it indicates some grave danger. On the way hack, Hayt reveals signs of being the real Duncan Idaho, and she is attracted to him in spite of herself. When he kisses her, she protests; but he tells her he only did what she wanted. On the verge of new struggles of empire, Paul finds nothing going well. There are reports of treason among the F re men and an attempt to steal a worm and develop melange on another world -- one Pend cannot see, X f think what a joy it is to be alive, and l wonder if I'll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there. Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains tangled in the future. But all things a man can do are mine, -- 'Hie Ghola Speaks A lia's Commentary I # in the screaming odor of the spice, staring inward through the oracular trance, Paul saw the moon as it became an elongated sphere. It rolled and twisted, hissing -- the terrible hissing of a star being quenched in an infinite sea -- like a ball thrown by a child. It was gone. This moon had not yet set. Realization engulfed him. It was gone: no moon. The earth quaked tike an animal shaking its skin. Terror swept over him. Paul jerked upright on his pallet, eyes wide open, staring. Part of him looked outward, part inward. Outwardly, he saw the plasmeld grillwork which vented iris private room, and he knew he lay beside a stonelike abyss of his Keep. Inwardly, he continued to see the moon fall. Out! Out! His grillwork of plasmeld looked onto the blazing light of noon across Arrakeen. Inward -- there lay blackest night. A shower of sweet odors from a garden roof nibbled at his senses, but no floral perfume could roll back that fallen moon. Paul swung his feet to the cold surface of the floor, and he peered through the grillwork. He could see directly across to the gentle arc of a footbridge constructed of crystal-stabilized gold and platinum. Fire jewels from far Cedon decorated the bridge. It led to the galleries of the inner city across a pool and fountain filled with waterflowers. If he stood, Paul knew, he could look down into petals as clean and red as fresh blood whirling, turning there -- discs of ambient color tossed on an emerald freshet. His eyes absorbed the scene without pulling him from spice thralldom. That terrible vision of a lost moon. The vision suggested to him a monstrous loss of individual security. Perhaps he'd seen his civilization fall, toppled by its own pretensions. A moon... a moon... a falling moon. It had taken a massive dose of the spice essence to penetrate the mud thrown up by the tarot. All it had shown him was a falling moon and the hateful way he'd known from the beginning. To buy an end for the Jihad, to silence the volcano of butchery, lie must discredit himself. Disengage... disengage , . disengage... Floral perfume from the garden roof reminded him of Chani. He longed for her arms now, for the clinging arms of love and forgetfulness. But even Chani could not exorcise this vision. What would Chani say if he went to her with the statement that he had a particular death in mind? Knowing it to be inevitable, why not choose an aristocrat's death, ending life on a secret flourish, squandering any years that might have been? To die before coming to the end of willpower, was that not an aristocrat's choice? opening in the grillwork and went out onto a balcony which looked upward to flowers and vines trailing from the garden. His mouth held the dryness of a desert march. Moon... moon -- where is that moon? He thought of Alia's description, the young woman's body found in the dunes. A Fremen addicted to semuta! Everything fitted the hateful pattern. You do not lake from this universe, he thought. It grants what it will. The remains of a conch shell from the seas of Mother Earth lay on a low table beside the balcony rail. He took its lustrous smoothness into his hands, tried to feel backward in Time. The pearl surface reflected glittering moons of light. He tore his gaze from it and peered upward past the garden to a sky become a conflagration -- trails of rainbow dust shining in the silver sun. My Fremen call themselves 'Children of the Moon...' He put down the conch, strode along the balcony. Did that terrifying moon hold out hope of escape? He probed for meaning in the region of mystic communion. He felt weak, shaken, still gripped by the spice. At the north end of his plasmeld chasm, he came in sight of the lower buildings of the government warren. Foot traffic thronged the roof walks. He felt that the people moved there like a frieze against a background of doors, walls and tile designs. The people were tiles! When he blinked, lie could hold them frozen in his mind. A frieze. A moon falls and is gone. A feeling came over him that the city out there had been translated into an odd symbol for his universe. The buildings he could see had been erected on the plain where his Frcmen had obliterated the Sardaukar legions. Ground once trampled by battles rang now to the rushing clamor of business. Keeping to the balcony's outer edge, Paul strode around the corner. Now, his vista was a suburb where all the city structures lost themselves in rocks and the blowing sand of the desert. Alia's temple dominated the foreground; green and black hangings along its two-thousand-meter sides displayed the rising moon symbol of Muad'dib. A falling moon. Paul passed a hand across his forehead and eyes. The symbolmetropolis oppressed him. He despised his own thoughts. Such vacillation in another would have aroused his anger. He loathed his city! Rage firmly rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep within him, nurtured by decisions that couldn't be avoided. He knew which path his feet must follow. He'd seen it enough times, hadn't he? Seen it! Once... long ago he'd thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him. rooftops. What treasures of untrammeled life lay beneath those roofs? He glimpsed leaf-green places, open plantings amidst the chalk-red and gold of the roofs. Green, the gift of Muad'dib and his water. Orchards and groves lay within his view -- open plantings to rival those of fabled Lebanon. "Muad'dib spends water like a madman," Fremen said. Paul covered his eyes. The moon fell. He dropped his hands, stared at his metropolis with clarified vision. Buildings took on an aura of monstrous imperial barbarity. They stood enormous and bright beneath the northern sun. Colossi! Every extravagance of architecture a demented history could produce lay within his view: terraces of mesa proportion, squares as large as some cities, parks, premises, small bits of cultured wilderness. Superb artistry abutted inexplicable prodigies of d i s m a I tastelessness. Details impressed themselves upon him: a postern out of most ancient Bagdhad... a dome that was dreamed in fabled Damascus...an arch from tire effect of unrivaled magnificence. A moon! A moon! A moonL. Frustration tangled him. He felt the pressure of mass-unconscious, Iliat burgeoning sweep of humankind across his universe. They rushed upon him with a force like a gigantic tidal bore. He sensed the vast migrations at work in human affairs: eddies, currents, gene flows. No dams of abstinence, no seizures of impotence nor maledictions could stop it. Muad'dib's Jihad was less than an eye blink in this larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be measured against many other legends, other visions found in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died... What mattered a single moon in such a universe? Far within his fortress citadel, so deep within that the sound sometimes lost itself in the flow of city noises, a ten-string rebaba tinkled with a song of the Jihad, a lament for a woman left behind on Arrakis -- "Her hips are dimes curved by the wind, Her eyes shine like summer heat. I wo braids of hair hang down her back -- Rich with water rings, her hair! My hands remember her skin. Fragrant as amber, flowerscented. Eyelids tremble with memories... I am stricken by love's white flame!" The song sickened him. A tune for stupid creatures lost in senti. mentality! As well sing to the dune-impregnated corpse Alia had seen. the balcony's grillwork. Paul whirled. The ghola emerged into the sun's full glare. His metal eyes glittered. "Is it Duncan Idaho or the man called Hayt?" Paul asked. The ghola came to a stop two paces from him. "Which would my Lord prefer?" The voice carried a soft ring of caution. "Play the Zensunni," Paul said bitterly. Meanings within meanings! What could a Zensunni philosopher say or do to change one jot of the reality unrolling before them at this instant? "My Lord is troubled." Paul turned away, stared at the Shield Wall's distant scrap, saw wind-carved arches and buttresses, terrible mimicry of his city. Nature playing a joke on him! See what  can build! He recognized a slash in the distant massif, a place where sand spilled from a crevasse, and thought: There! Right there, we fought Sardaukar! "What troubles my Lord?" the ghola asked. "A vision," Paul whispered. "Ahhhhh, when the Tleilaxu first awakened me, I had visions. I was restless, lonely... not really knowing T was lonely. Not then. My visions revealed nothing! The Tleilaxu told me it was an intrusion of the flesh which men and gholas all suffer, a sickness, no more." Paul turned, studied the ghola's eyes, those pitted, steely balls without expression. What visions did those eyes see? "Duncan... Duncan..." Paul whispered. "I am called Hayt." "I saw a moon fall," Paul said. "It was gone, destroyed. I heard a great hissing. The earth shook." "You are drunk on too much time," the ghola said. "I ask for the Zensunni and get the mentat!" Paul said. "Very well! Play my vision through your logic, mentat. Analyze it and reduce it to mere words laid out for burial." "Burial, indeed," the ghola said. "You run from death. You strain at the next instant, refuse to live here and now. Augury! What a crutch for an Emperor!" Paul found himself fascinated by a well-remembered mole on the ghola's chin. "Trying to live in this future," the ghola said, "do you give substance to such a future? Do you make it real?" "If I go the way of my visionfuture, I'll be alive then," Paul muttered. "What makes you think I want to live there?" The ghola shrugged. "You asked me for a substantial answer." "Where is there substance in a universe composed of events?" Paul asked. "Is there a final answer? Doesn't each solution produce new questions?" I # "You've digested so much time you have delusions of immortality," the ghola said. "Even your Empire, my Lord, must live its time and die." "Don't start to parade smokeblackened altars before me," Paul growled. "I've heard enough sad histories of gods and messiahs. Why should I need special powers to forecast ruins of my own like all those others? The lowliest servant of my kitchens could do this." He shook his head. "The moon fell!" "You've not brought your mind to rest at its beginning." "Is that how you destroy me?" Paul demanded. "Prevent me from collecting my thoughts?" "Can you collect chaos?" the ghola asked. "We Zensunni say: 'Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering.' What can you gather without gathering yourself?" "I'm deviled by a vision and you spew nonsense!" Paul raged. "What do you know of prescience?" "I've seen the oracle at work," the ghola said. I Tve seen those who seek signs and omens for their individual destiny. They fear what they seek." "My falling moon is real," Paul whispered. He took a trembling breath. "It moves. It moves." "Men always fear things which move by themselves," the ghola said. "You fear your own powers. Things fall into your head from nowhere. When they fall out, where do they go?" "You comfort me with thorns," Paul growled. An inner illumination came over i lie ghola's face. For a moment, lie became pure Duncan Mnlio, a storehouse of relic memories. "I give you what comlort  can," lie said. Paul wondered at that momentary spasm. Had the ghola felt .met which his mind rejected? Il ul llavt put down a vision of Ins own? "My moon has a name," Paul vv hispcrcd. Me let the vision flow over him then. Though his whole being shrieked, no sound escaped him. Me was afraid to speak, fearful licit liis voice might betray him. I lie air of this terrifying future was thick with Chani's absence. Mesh that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it played no tricks of subtle control -- all gone, back into the water and the sand. Slowly, Paul turned away and looked out at the present and the plaza before Alia's temple. Three shaven-headed pilgrims entered from the processional avenue. I hey wore Grimy yellow robes and hurried with their heads bent against the afternoon's wind. One walked with a limp, dragging his left foot. They beat their way against the wind, rounded a corner and were gone from his sight...lust as his moon would go, they were gone. Still, his vision lay before him. Its terrible purpose gave him no choice. The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? # occurred. I am not... yet,  occurred.' XI Beg not the sun for mercy. -- Maud'dib's Travail From the Stilgar Commentary O NE moment of incompetence can be fatal, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam reminded herself. She hobbled along, apparently unconcerned, within a ring of Fremen guards. One of those behind her, she knew, was a deaf mute immune to any wiles of voice. No doubt he had been charged to kill her at the slightest provocation. Why had Paul summoned her? Was he about to pass sentence? She remembered the day long ago when she'd tested him...the child Kwisatz Haderach. He was a deep one. Damn his mother for all eternity! It was her fault the Bene Gesserit had lost their hold on this gene line. Silence surged along the vaulted passages ahead of her entourage. She sensed the word being passed. Paul would hear the silence. He'd know of her coming before it was announced. She didn't delude herself with ideas that her powers exceeded his. Damn him! She begrudged the burdens age had imposed on her -- the aching joints, responses not as quick as once they'd been, muscles not as elastic as the whipchords of her youth. A long day lay behind her and a long life. She'd spent this day with the Dune Tarot in a fruitless search for some clue to her own fate. But the cards were sluggish. The guards herded her around a corner into another of the silent, seemingly endless vaulted passages. Triangular metaglass windows on her left gave a view upward to trellised vines and indigo flowers in deep shadows cast by the afternoon sun. Tiles lay underfoot -- figures of water creatures from exotic planets. Robed figures passed across another ball in front of her, casting covert glances at the Reverend Mother. Recognition was obvious in their manner -- and tension. She kept her attention on the sharp hairline of the guard immediately in front -- young flesh, pink creases at the uniform collar. Now an open doorway from which emerged the sound of timbrel and flute playing soft, elder music. A glance showed her bluein-blue Fremen eyes staring from the room. She sensed in them the ferment of legendary revolts stirring in wild genes. There lay the measure of her personal burden, she knew. A Bene Gesserit could not escape awareness of the genes and their possibilities. She was touched by a feeling of loss: that stubborn fool of an Atreides! How could he deny the jewels of posterity within his Joins? A Kwisatz Haderach! Born out of his time, true, but real -- as real as his abomination of a sister...and there lay a dangerous unknown. A wild Reverend Mother spawned without Bene Gesserit inhibitions, holding no loyalty to orderly development of the genes. She shared her brother's powers, no doubt -- and more. T HE size of the citadel began to oppress her. Would the passages never end? The place reeked of terrifying physical power. No planet, no civilization in all human history had ever before seen such man-made immensity. A dozen ancient cities could be hidden within its walls! They passed oval doors with winking lights. She recognized them for Ixian handiwork: pneumatic transport orifices. Why was she being marched all this distance, then? The answer began to shape itself in her mind -- to oppress her in preparation for this audience with the Emperor. A small clue, but it joined other subtle indications -- the relative suppression and selection of words by her escort, the traces of primitive shyness in their eyes when they called her Reverend Mother, the cold and bland, essentially odorless nature of these halls -- all combined to reveal much that a Bene Gesserit could interpret. Paul wanted something from her! She concealed a feeling of elation, A bargaining lever existed. It remained only to find the nature of that lever and test its strength. Some lovers had moved things greater than this citadel. A finger's touch had been known to topple civilizations. The Reverend Mother reminded herself then of Scytale's assessment: When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite. The passages through which she was being escorted grew larger by subtle stages -- tricks of arching, graduated amplification of pillared supports, displacement of the triangular windows by larger, oblong shapes. Ahead of her, finally, loomed double doors centered in the far wall of a tall antechamber. She sensed that the doors were very large, and was forced to suppress a gasp as her trained awareness measured out the true proportions. The doorway stood at least eighty meters high, half that in width. As she approached with her escort, the doors swung inward -- un immense and silent movement of hidden machinery. She recognized more Ixian handiwork. Through that towering doorway she marched with her guards into the Grand Reception Hail of the Emperor Paul Atreides -- "Muad'dib, before whom all people are dwarfed." As she advanced toward Paul on the distant throne, the Reverend Mother found herself more impressed by the architectural subtleties of her surroundings than she was by the immensities. The space was large; it could have housed the entire citadel of any ruler in human history. The open sweep of the room said much about hidden beams behind these walls and the far away domed ceiling must surpass anything ever before attempted. Everything spoke of engineering genius. Without seeming to do so, the hall grew smaller at its far end, refusing to dwarf Paul on his throne centered on a dais. An untrained awareness, shocked by surrounding proportions, would see him at first as many times larger than his actual size. Colors played upon the unprotected psyche; Paul's green throne had been cut from a single Hagar emerald. It suggested growing things and, out of the Fremen mythos, reflected the mourning color. It whispered that here sat the one who could make you mourn -- life and death in one symbol, a clever stress of opposites. Behind the throne, draperies cascaded in burnt orange, curried gold of Dune earth, and cinnamon flecks of melange. To a trained eye, the symbolism was obvious, but it contained hammer blows to beat down the uninitiated. Time played its role here. T HE Reverend Mother measured the minutes required to approach the Imperial Presence at her hobbling pace. You bad time to be cowed. Any tendency toward resentment would be squeezed out of you by the unbridled power which focused down upon your person. You might start the long march towardv that throne as a human of dignity, but you ended the march as a gnat. Aides and attendants stood around the Emperor in a curiously ordered sequence -- attentive household guardsmen along the draped back wall; that abomination, Alia, two steps below Paul and on his left hand; Stilgar, the Imperial lackey, on the step directly below Alia; and on the right, one step up from the floor of the hall, a solitary figure, the fleshly revenant of Duncan Idaho, the ghola. She marked older Fremen among the guardsmen, bearded Naibs with stillsuit scars on their noses, sheathed crysknives at their waists, a few maula pistols, even some lasguns. Those must be trusted men, she thought, to carry lasguns in Paul's presence when he obviously wore a shield generator. She could see the shimmering of its field around him. One burst of a lasgun into that field and the entire citadel would be a hole in the ground. Her guard stopped ten paces from the foot of the dais and parted to open an unobstructed view of the Emperor. She noted now the absence of Chani and Irulan, and wondered at it. He held no important audience without them, so it was said. Paul nodded to her, silent, measuring. Immediately, she decided to I # take the offensive. She said: "So, the great Paul Atreides deigns to see the one he banished." Paul smiled wryly, thinking: She knows l want something from her. That knowledge had been inevitable, she being who she was. He recognized her powers. The Bene Gesserit didn't become Reverend Mothers by chance. "Shall we dispense with fencing?" he asked. And she said: "Name the thing you want." Stilgar stirred, casting a sharp glance at Paul. The Imperial lackey didn't like her tone. "Stilgar wants me to send you away," Paul said. "Not kill me?" she asked. "I would have expected something more direct from a Freman Naib." Stilgar scowled and said: "Often, I must speak otherwise than I think. That is called diplomacy." "Then let us dispense with diplomacy, as well," she said. "Was it necessary to have me walk all that distance? I am an old woman." "You had to be shown how callous I can be," Paul said. "That way, you'll appreciate magnanimity." "You dare such gaucheries with a Bene Gesserit?" she asked. "Gross actions carry their own messages," Paul said. She hesitated, weighing his words. So -- he might yet dispense with her...grossly, obviously, if she...if she what? "Say what it is you want from me," she muttered. "You must be careful how you speak to me, old woman," Paul said. was a stripling, the Reverend Mother thought. Does he remind me now of my hand in his past? The decision  made then, must I remake it here? She felt the weight of decision, a physical thing that set her knees to trembling. Muscles cried their fatigue. "It was a long walk," Paul said, "and I can see that you're tired. We will retire to my private chamber behind the throne. You may sit there." He gave a hand signal to Stilgar and arose. Stilgar and the ghola converged on her; they helped her up the steps and followed Paul through a passage concealed by the draperies. She realized then why he had greeted her in the hall -- a dumb show for the guards and Naibs. He feared them, then. And now -- now, he displayed kindly benevolence, daring such wiles on a Bene Gesserit. Or was it daring? She sensed another presence behind and glanced back to see Alia following. The younger woman's eyes held a brooding baleful cast. The private chamber at the end of the passage' was a twenty-meter cube of plasmeld, with yellow glowglobes for light and the deep orange hangings of a desert stilltent around the walls. It contained divans, soft cushions, a faint odor of melange, crystal water flagons on a low table. It felt cramped, tiny after the outer hall. Paul seated her on a divan and stood over her, studying the ancient face -- steely teeth, eyes that hid more than they revealed, deeply wrinkled skin. He indicated a water flagon. She shook her head, dislodging a wisp of gray hair. In a low voice, Paul said: "I wish to bargain with you for the life of my beloved." Stilgar cleared his throat. Alia fingered the handle of the crysknife sheathed at her neck. The ghola remained at the door, face impassive, metal eyes pointed at the air above the Reverend Mother's head. "Have you had a vision of my hand in her death?" the Reverend Mother asked. She kept her attention on the ghola, oddly disturbed by him. Why should she feel threatened by the ghola? He was a tool of the conspiracy. "I know what it is you want from me," Paul said, avoiding her question. T hen he only suspects, she thought. The Reverend Mother looked down at the tips of her shoes exposed by a fold of her robe. Black...black...shoes and robe showed marks of her confinement: stains, wrinkles. She lifted her chin and met an angry glare in Paul's eyes. Elation surged through her, but she hid the emotion behind slitted eyelids. "What coin do you offer?" she asked. "You may have my seed, but not my person," Paul said. "Irulan banished and inseminated by artificial..." "You dare!" the Reverend Mother flared, stiffening. Stilgar took a half step forward. D isconcertingly, the ghoia smiled. And now. Alia was studying him. "We'll not discuss the things your Sisterhood forbids," Paul said. "I will listen to no talk of sins, abominations or the beliefs left over from past Jihads. You may have my seed for your plans, but no child of irulan's will sit on my throne." "Your throne," she sneered. "My throne." "Then who will bear the Imperial heir?" "Chani." "She is barren." "She is with child." An involuntary indrawn breath exposed her shock. "You lie!" she snapped. Paul held up a restraining hand as Stilgar surged forward, "We've known for two days that she carries my child." "But Irulan... "By artificial means only. That's my offer." The Reverend Mother closed her eyes to hide his face. Damnation! To cast the genetic dice in such a way! Loathing boiled in her breast. The teachings of the Bene Gesserit. the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad -- all proscribed such an act. One did not demean the highest aspirations of humankind. No .machine could function in the way of a human mind. No word or deed could imply that men might be bred on. the level of animals. She shook her head. The genes, the precious Atreides genes -- only these were important. Need went deeper than proscription. For the Sisterhood, mating mingled more than sperm and ovum. One aimed to capture the psyche. The Reverend Mother understood now the subtle depths of Paul's offer. He would make the Bene Gesserit party to an act which would bring down popular, wrath...were it ever discovered. They could not admit such paternity if the Emperor denied it. This coin might save the Atreides genes for the Sisterhood, but it would never buy a throne. She swept her gaze around the room, studying each face: Stilgar, passive and waiting now; the ghoia frozen at some inward place; Alia watching the ghoia...and Paul -- wrath beneath a shallow veneer. "This is your only offer?" she asked. "My only offer." She glanced at the ghoia, caught by a brief movement of muscles across his checks. Emotion? "You, ghoia," she said. "Should such an offer be made? Having been made, should it be accepted? Function as the mentat for us." The metallic eyes turned to Paul. "Answer as you will," Paul said. The ghoia returned his gleaming attention to the Reverend Mother, shocking her once more by smiling. "An offer is only as good as the real thing it buys," lie said. "The exchange offered here is life-for-life, a high order of business." Alia brushed a strand of coppery hair from her forehead. She said: "And what else is hidden in this bargain?" The Reverend Mother refused to look at Alia, but the words burned in her mind. Yes, far deeper implications lay here. The sister was an abomination, true, but there could be no denying her status as a Reverend Mother with all the title impled. Gains Helen Mohiam felt herself in this instant to be not one single person, but all the others who sat like tiny congeries in her memory. They were alert, every Reverend Mother she had absorbed in becoming a Priestess of the Sisterhood. Alia would be standing in the same situation here. "What else?" the ghola asked. "One wonders why the witches of the Bene Gesscrit have not used Tleilaxu methods." all the Reverend Mothers within her shuddered. Yes, the Tleilaxu did loathsome things. If. one let down the barriers to artificial insemination, was the next step a Tleilaxu one -- controlled mutation? Paul, observing the play of emotion around him, felt abruptly that he no longer knew these people. He could see only strangers. Even Alia was a stranger. Alia said: "If we set the Atreides genes adrift in a Bene Gesscrit river, who knows what may result?" Gains Helen Molviam's head snapped around, and she met Alia's gaze. For a flashing instant, they were two Reverend Mothers together, communing on a single thought: What lay behind any Tleilaxu action? The ghola was a Tleilaxu thing. Had he put this plan into Paul's mind? Would Paul attempt to bargain directly with the Bene Tleilax? She broke her gaze front Alia's, feeling her own ambivalence and inadequacies. The pitfall of Bene Gesserit training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted; such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier...including one's own ignorance. Only one thing stood paramount here for the Bene Gesserit, she told herself. That was the pyramid of generations which had reached an apex in Paul Atreides...and in his abomination of a sister. A wrong choice here and the pyramid would have to be rebuilt...starting generations back in the parallel lines and with breeding specimens lacking the choicest characteristics. Controlled mutation, s h e thought. Did the Tleilaxu really practice it? How tempting ! She shook her head, the better to rid it of such thoughts. "You reject my proposal?" Paul asked. "I'm thinking," she said. s m And again, she looked at the sister. The optimum cross for this female Alreides had been lost...killed by Paul. Another possibility still remained, however -- one which would cement the desired characteristic into an offspring. Paul dared offer animat breeding to the Bene Gesserit! How much was he really prepared to pay for his Chani's life? Would lie accept a cross with his own sister? Sparring for time, the Reverend Mother said: "Tell me, oh, flawless exemplar of all that's holy, has Irulan anything to say of your proposal?" "Irulan will do what you tell her to do," Paul growled. True enough, Mohiam thought. She firmed her jaw, offered a new gambit: "There are two Atreides." Paul, sensing something of what lay in the old witch's mind, felt blood darken his face. "Careful what you suggest," he said. "You'd just use Irulan to gain your own ends, eh?" she asked. "Wasn't she trained to be used?" Paul asked. And we trained her, that's what he's saying, Mohiam thought. Well...Indent's a divided coin. Was there another way to spend such a coin? i "Will you put Chani's child on the throne?" the Reverend Mother asked. "On my throne," Paul said. He glanced at Alia, wondering suddenly if she knew the divergent possibilities in this exchange. Alia stood with eyes closed, an odd stillness-of-person about her. With what inner force did she commune? Seeing his sister thus, Paul felt he'd been cast adrift. Alia stood on a shore that was receding from him. T HE Reverend Mother made her decision, she said: "This is too much for one person to decide. I must consult with my Council on Wallach. Will you permit a message?" As though she needed my permission! Paul thought. He said: "Agreed, then. But don't delay too long. I will not sit idly by while you debate." "Will you bargain with the Bene Tleilax?" the hola asked, his voice a sharp intrusion. Alia's eyes popped open and she stared at the ghola as though she'd been wakened by a dangerous intruder. "I've made no such decision," Paul said. "What I will do is go into the desert as soon as it can be arranged. Our child will be born in sietch." "A wise decision," Stilgar intoned. Alia refused to look at Stilgar. It was a wrong decision. She could feel this in every cell. Paul must know it. Why had he fixed himself upon such a path? "Have the Bene Tleilax offered their services?" Alia asked. She saw Mohiam hanging on the answer. Paul shook his head. "No." He glanced at Stilgar. "Stil. arrange for the message to be sent to Wallach." Paul turned away, waiting while Stilgar summoned guards, left with the old witch. He sensed Alia debating whether to confront him witli more questions. She turned, instead, to the ghola. "Mentat," she said, "will the Tleilaxu bid for favor with my brother?" The ghola shrugged. Paul felt his attention wander. The Tleilaxu? No...not in the way Alia meant. Her question revealed, though, that she had not seen the alternatives here. Well...vision varied from sybil to sybil. Why not a variance from brother to sister? Wandering...wandering... He came back from each thought with a start to pick up shards of the nearby conversation. "...must know what the Tleilaxu..." "...the fullness of data is always..."...healthy doubts where..." Paul turned, looked at this sister and caught her attention. He knew she would sec tears on his face and wonder at them. Let her wonder. Wondering was a kindness now. He glanced at the ghola, seeing only Duncan Idaho despite the metallic eyes. Sorrow and compassion warred in Paul. What might those metal eyes record? There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness, Paul thought. His mind turned to a paraphrase of the passage from the Orange Catholic Bible: What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us? Were those metal eyes another sense than sight? Alia crossed to her brother, sensing his utter sadness. She touched a tear on his check with a Fremen gesture of awe. "We must not grieve for those dear to us before their passing." "Before their passing," Paul whispered. "Tell me, little sister, what is before?" I've had a bellyful of the god and priest business ! You think I don't see my own mythos? Consult your data once more, Hayt. I've insinuated my rites into the most elementary human acts. The people eat in the name of Maud'dib! They make love in my name, are born in my name cross the street in my name. A roof beam cannot be raised in the lowliest hovel of far Cangishree without invoking the blessing of Maud'dib!  -- Book of Diatribes from the Hayt Chronicle OU risk much leaving your I post and coming to me here at this time," Edric said, glaring through the walls of his tank at the Face Dancer. "How weak and narrow is your thinking," Scytale said. "Who is it who comes to visit you?" Edric hesitated, observing the hulk shape, heavy eyelids, blunt face. It was early in the day and Edric's metabolism had not yet cycled from night repose into full melange consumption. "This is nut the shape which walked the streets?" Edric asked. "One would not look twice at some of the figures I have been today," Scytale said. The chameleon thinks a change of shape will hide him from anything, Edric thought with rare insight. And he wondered if his presence in the conspiracy truly hid them from ail oracular powers. The Emperor's sister, now... Edric shook his head, stirring the orange gas of his tank. He said: "Why are you here?" "The gift must be prodded to swifter action," Scytale said. "That cannot be done." "A way must be found," Scytale insisted. "Why?" "Things are not to my liking. The Emperor is trying to split us. Already he has made his bid to the Bene Gesserit." "Oh, that. " "That! You must prod the ghola to... "You fashioned him. Tleilaxu," Edric said. "You know better than to ask this." He paused, moving closer to the transparent wall of his tank. "Or did you lie to us about this gift?" "Lie?" "You said the weapon was to be aimed and released, nothing more. Once the ghola was given we could not tamper." "Any ghola can be disturbed," Scytale said. "You need do nothing more than question him about his original being." "What will this do?" # "It will stir him to actions which will serve our purposes." "He is a mentat with powers of logic and reason," Edric objected. "He may guess what I'm doing...or the sister. If her attention is focused upon..." "Do you hide us from the sibyl or don't you?" Scytale asked. "I'm not afraid of oracles," Edric said. "I'm concerned with logic, with real spies, with the physical powers of the Imperiurn, with control of the spice, with..." "One can contemplate the Emperor and his powers comfortably if one remembers that all things arc finite," Scytale said. in agitation, threshing his limbs like some weird newt. Scytale fought a sense of loathing at the sight. The Guild Navigator wore his usual dark leotard, bulging at the belt with various containers. Yet...lie gave the impression of nakedness when he moved. It was the swimming, reaching movements, Scytale decided, and lie was struck once more by the delicate linkages of their conspiracy. They were not a compatible group. That was weakness. Edric's agitation subsided. He stared out at Scytale, vision colored by the orange gas which sustained him. What plot did the Face Dancer hold in reserve to save himself? The Tleilaxu was not acting in a predictable fashion. Evil omen. Something in the Navigator's voice and actions told Scytale that the Guiklsman feared the sister more than the Emperor. This was an abrupt thought flashed on the screen of awareness. Disturbing. Had they overlooked something important about Alia? Would the ghola be sufficient weapon to destroy both? "You know what is said of Alia?" Scytale asked, probing. "What do you mean?" Again, the fish-man was agitated. "Never have culture and beauty had such a patroness," Scytale said. "What is enduring about culture, beauty?" Edric demanded. "We will destroy both Atreides. Culture! They dispense culture the better to rule. Beauty! They promote the beauty which enslaves. They create a literate ignorance -- easiest thing of all. They leave nothing to chance. Chains! Everything they do forges chains, enslaves. But slaves always revolt." "The sister may wed and produce offspring," Scytale said. "Why do you speak of the sister?" Edric asked. "The Emperor may choose a mate for her," Scytale said. "Let him choose. Already, it is too late." "Even you cannot invent the next moment," Scytale warned. "You are not a creator...any more than are the Atreides." He nodded. "We must not presume too much." "We aren't the ones to flap our tongues about creation," Edric protested. "We aren't the rabble trying to make a messiah out of Maud'dib. What is this nonsense?" "It's this planet," Scytale said. "It raises questions." "Planets don't speak!" "This one does." "Oh?" , "It speaks of creation. Sand blowing in the night, that is creation." "Sand blowing..." "When you awaken, the first light shows you the new world -- all fresh and ready for your tracks." Untracked sand? Creation? Edric felt knotted with sudden anxiety. The confinement of his tank, the surrounding room, everything closed in upon him, constricted him. Tracks in sand. "You talk like a Fremen," Edric said. "This is a Fremen thought and it's instructive," Scytale agreed. "They speak of Mauad'dib's Jihad as leaving tracks in the universe in the same way that a Fremen tracks new sand. They've marked out a trail in men's lives." "So?" "Another night comes," Scytale said. "Winds blow." "Yes," Edric said, "the Jihad is finite. Muad'dib has used his Jihad and..." "He didn't use the Jihad," Scytale said. "The Jihad used him. T think he'd have stopped it if he could." "If he could? All he had to do was..." hrt H, be still!" Scytale barked, w "You can't stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It's overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad'dib hasn't the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?" "Have you been infected then?" Edric asked. He turned slowly in the orange gas, wondering why Scytale's words carried such a tone of fear. Had the Face Dancer broken from the conspiracy? There was no way to peer into the future and examine this now. The future had become a muddy stream, clogged with prophets. "We're all contaminated." Scytale said, and he reminded hntself that Edric's intelligence had severe limits. How could this point be made that the Guildsman would understand it? "But when we destroy him," Edric said, "the contag..." "I should leave you in this ignorance," Scytale said. "But my duties will not permit it. Besides, it's dangerous to all of us." Edric recoiled, steadying himself with a kick of one webbed foot which sent the orange gas whipping around his legs. "You speak strangely," he said. "This whole thing is explosive," Scytale said in a calmer voice. "It's ready to shatter. W'hen it goes, it will send bits of itself out through the centuries. Don't you see this?" "We've dealt with religions before," Edric protested. "If this new..." "It is not just a religion!" Scytale said, wondering what the Reverend Mother would say to this harsh education of their fellow conspirator. "Religious government is something else. Muad'dib has crowded his Qizarate in everywhere, displaced the old functions of government. But he has no permanent civil service, no interlocking embassies. He has bishoprics, islands of authority. At the center of each island is a man. Men learn how to gain and hold personal power. Men are jealous." "When they're divided, we'll absorb them one by one," Edric said with a complacent smile. "Cut off the head and the body will fall to... "This body has two heads," Scytale said. "The sister...who may wed." "Who will certainly wed." "I don't like your tone, Scytale." "And I don't like your ignorance." "What if she does wed? Wilt that shake our plans?" "It will shake the universe." "But they're not unique. I, myself, possess powers which..." "You're an infant. You toddle where they stride." "They are not unique!" "You forget, Guildsman, that we once made a Kwisatz Haderach. This is a being filled by the spectacle of Time. It is a form of existence which cannot be threatened without enclosing yourself in the identical threat. Muad'dib knows we would attack his Chani. We must move faster than we have. You must get to the ghola, prod him as I have instructed." "And if I do not?" "We will feel the thunderbolt." Oh, worm of many teeth , const thou deny what has no cure? The flesh and breath which lure thee To the ground of all beginnings Feed on monsters twisting in a door of fire ! Thou hast no robe in all thy attire To cover intoxications of divinity Or hide the burnings of desire ! -- Wormsong from the Dunebook the practice floor using crysknife and short sword against the ghola. He stood now at a window looking down into the temple plaza and tried to imagine the scene with Chani at the clinic. She'd been taken ill at midmorning, the sixth week of her pregnancy. The medics were the best. They'd call when they had news. Murky afternoon sandclouds darkened the sky over the plaza. Fremen called such weather dirty air. Would the medics never call? Each second struggled past, reluctant to enter his universe. Waiting...waiting... The Bene Gesserit sent no word from Wallach. Deliberately delaying, of cou rse. Prescient vision had recorded these moments, but he shielded his awareness from the oracle, preferring the role here of a timefish swimming not where he willed, but where the currents carried him. Destiny permitted no struggles now. The ghola could be heard racking weapons, examining the equipment. Paul sighed, put a hand to his own belt and deactivated his shield. The tingling passage of its field ran down against his skin. He'd face events when Chani came, Paul told himself. Time enough then to accept the fact that what he'd concealed from her had prolonged her life. Was it evil, he wondered, to prefer Chani to an heir? By what right did he make her choice for her? Foolish thoughts! Who could hesitate, given the alternatives -- slave pits, bodily torture, agonizing sorrow...and worse. He heard the door open, followed by Chani's footsteps. Paul turned. Murder sat on Chani's face. The wide Fremen belt which gathered the waist of her golden robe, the water rings worn as a necklace, one hand at her hip, never far from the knife, the trenchant stare which was her first inspection of a room, any room -- everything about her stood now only as a background for violence. He opened his arms as she came to him, gathered her close. "Someone," she rasped, speaking against his breast, "has been feeding me a contraceptive for a long time...before I began the new diet. There'll be problems with this birth because of it." "But there are remedies?" he asked. "Dangerous remedies. I know the source of that poison! I'll have her blood." "My Sihaya," he whispered, holding her close to calm a sudden trembling. "You'll bear the heir we want. Isn't that enough?" "My life burns faster," she said, pressing against him. "The birth now controls my life. The medics told me it goes at a terrible pace-. I must eat and eat...and take more spice, as well...eat it, drink it. I'll kill her for this!" Paul kissed her cheek. "No. my Sihaya. Y'ou'U kill no one." And he thought: Irulan prolonged your life, beloved. For you, the time of birth is the time of death. H E felt hidden grief drain his marrow then, empty his life into a black flask. Chani pushed away from him. "She cannot be forgiven!" "Who said anything about forgiving?" "Then why shouldn't I kill her?" It was such a flat, Fremen question that Paul felt himself almost overcome by a hysterical desire to laugh. He covered it by saying: "It wouldn't help." "You've seen that?" Paul felt his belly tighten with vision-memory. "What I've seen...what I've seen..." he muttered. Every aspect of surrounding events fitted a present which paralyzed him. He felt chained to a future which, exposed too often, had locked onto him like a greedy succubus. Tight dryness clogged his throat. Had he followed the witchcall of his own oracle, he wondered, until it had spilled him into a merciless present? "Tell me what you've seen," Chani said. "I can't." "Why mustn't I kill her?" "Because I ask it." He watched her accept this. She did it the way sand accepted water, absorbing and concealing. Was there obedience beneath that hot, angry surface? He realized then that life in the royal Keep had left Chani unchanged. She'd merely stopped here for a time, inhabiting a way station on a journey with her man. Nothing of the desert had been taken from her. Chani stepped away from him then and glanced at the ghola who stood waiting near the diamond circle of the practice floor. "You've been crossing blades with him?" she asked. "And I'm better for it." Her gaze went to the circle on the floor, back to the ghola's metallic eyes. "I don't like it," she said. "He's not intended to do me violence," Paul said. "You've seen that?" "I've not seen it!" "Then how do you know?" "Because he's more than ghola; he's Duncan Idaho." "The Bene Tleilax made him." "They made more than they intended." She shook her head. A corner of her nezhoni scarf rubbed the collar of her robe. "How can you change the fact that he is ghola?" "Hayt," Paul said, "are you the tool of my undoing?" "If the substance of here and now is changed, the future is changed," the ghola said. "That is no answer!" Chani objected. Paul raised his voice: "How will I die, Hayt?" Light glinted from the artificial eyes. "It is said, m'Lord, that you will die of money and power." Chani stiffened. "How dare he speak thus to you?" "The mentat is truthful," Paul said. "Was Duncan Idaho a real friend?" she asked. "He gave his life for me." "It is sad," Chani whispered, "that a ghola cannot be restored to his original being." "Would you convert me?" the ghola asked, directing his gaze to Chani. "What does he mean?" Chani asked. "To be converted is to be turned around," Paul said. "But there's no going back." "Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said. "And every ghola?" Paul asked. "In a way, m'Lord." "Then what of that past in your secret flesh?" Paul asked. disturbed the ghola. His movements quickened, his hands clenched into fists. She glanced at Paul, wondering why he probed thus. Was there a way to restore this creature to the man he'd been? "Has a ghola ever remembered his real past?" Chani asked. "Many attempts have been made," Hayt said, his gaze fixed on the floor near his feet. "No ghola has ever been restored to his former being." "But you long for this to happen," Paul said. The blank surfaces of the ghola's eyes came up to center on Paul with a pressing intensity. "Yes!" Sighing softly, Paul said: "If there's a way..." "This flesh,". Hayt said, touching left hand to forehead in a curious saluting movement, "is not the flesh of my original birth. It is...re-born. Only the shape is familiar. A Face Dancer might do as well." "Not as well," Paul said. "And you're not a Face Dancer." "That is true, m'Lord." "Whence comes your shape?" "The genetic imprint of the original cells." "Somewhere," Paul slowly said, "there's a plastic something which remembers the shape of Duncan Idaho. It's said that the ancients probed our region before the Butlcrian Jihad. What's the extent of this memory, Hayt? What did it learn from the original?" The ghola shrugged. I # "What if he wasn't Idaho?" Chani asked. "He was." "Can you be certain?" "He is Duncan in every aspect. I cannot imagine a force strong enough to hold that shape thus without any relaxation or any deviation." "M'Lord!" Hayt objected. "Because we cannot imagine a thing, that doesn't exclude it from reality. There are things I must do as a ghola that I would not do as a man." Keeping his attention on Chani, Paul said: "You see?" She nodded. Paul turned away, fighting deep sadness. He crossed to the balcony windows and drew the draperies. Lights came on in the sudden gloom. He pulled the sash of his robe tight, listening for sounds behind him. Nothing. He turned. Chani stood as though entranced, her gaze centered on the ghola. Hayt, Paul saw, had retreated to some inner chamber of his being -- had gone back to the ghola place. Paul's return. She still felt the thralldom of the instant Paul had precipitated. For a brief moment, the ghola had been an intense, vital human being. For that moment, he had been someone she did not fear -- indeed, someone ;he liked and admired. Now, she Understood Paul's purpose in this probing. He had wanted her to see the man in the ghola flesh. She stared at Paul. "That man, was that Duncan Idaho?" "That was Duncan Idaho. He is still there." "Would he have allowed Irulan to go on living?" Chani asked. The water didn't sink too deep, Paul thought. And he said: "If I commanded it." "I don't understand," she said. "Shouldn't you be angry?" "I am angry." "You don't sound...angry. You sound sorrowful." He closed his eyes. "Yes. That, too." "You're my man," she said. "I know this, but suddenly I don't understand you." Abruptly, Paul felt that he walked down a long cavern. His flesh moved -- one foot and then another -- but his thoughts went elsewhere. "I don't understand myself," he whispered. When he opened his eyes, he found that he had moved away from Chani. She spoke from somewhere behind him. "Beloved, I'll not ask again what you've seen. I only know I'm to give you the heir we want." He nodded then. "I've known that from the beginning." He turned and studied her. Chani seemed very far away. She drew herself up, placing a hand on her abdomen. "I'm hungry. The medics tell me I must eat three or four times what I ate before. I'm frightened, beloved. It goes too fast." Too fast, he agreed. This fetus knows the necessity for speed. The audacious nature of Muad'dib's actions may be seen in the fact that He knew from the beginning whither He was bound, yet not once did He step aside from that path. He put it clearly when He said : "l tell you that l come now to my time of testing when it will be shown that I am the Ultimate Servant." Thus He weaves all into One, that both friend and joe may worship Him. It is for this reason and this reason only that His Apostles prayed: "Lord, save us from the other paths which Muad'dib covered with the Waters of His Life." Those "other paths" may be imagined only with the deepest revulsion. -- from the Yiam-el-Din (Book of Judgment) T HE messenger was a young woman -- her face, name and family known to Chani -- which was how she'd penetrated Imperial Security. Chani had done no more than identify her for a Security Officer named Bannerjee, who then arranged the meeting with Muad'dib. Bannerjee acted out of instinct and the assurance that the young woman's father had been a member of the Emperor's Death Commandos, the dreaded Fedaykin, in the days before the Jihad. Otherwise, he might have ignored her plea that her message was intended only for the ears of Muad'dib. She was, of course, screened and searched before the meeting in Paul's private office. Even so, Bannerjee accompanied her, hand on knife, other hand on her arm. It was almost mid-day when they brought her into the room -- an odd space, a mixture of desert-Fremen and FamilyAristocrat. Hiereg hangings lined three walls, delicate tapestries adorned with figures out of Fremen mythology. A view screen covered the fourth wall, a silver gray surface behind an oval desk whose top held only one object, a Fremen sandclock built into an orrery. The orrery, a suspensor mechanism from lx, carried both moons of Arrakis in the classic Worm Trine aligned with the sun. Paul, standing beside the desk, glanced at Bannerjee. The Security Officer was one of those who'd come up through the Fremen Constabulary, winning his place on brains and proven loyalty despite the smuggler ancestry attested by his name. He was a solid figure, almost fat. Wisps of black hair fell down over the dark, wet-appearing skin of his forehead like the crest of an exotic bird. His eyes were blue-blue and steady in a gaze which could look upon happiness or atrocity without change of expression. Both Chani and Stilgar trusted him. Paul knew that if he told Bannerjee to throttle the girl immediately, Bannerjee would do it. "Sire, here is the messenger girl," Bannerjee said. "M'Lady Chani said she sent word to you." "Yes." Paul nodded curtly. Oddly, the girl didn't look at him. Her attention remained on the orrery. She was dark-skinned, of medium height, her figure concealed beneath a robe whose rich wine fabric and simple cut spoke of wealth. Her blue-black hair was held in a narrow band of material which matched the robe. The robe concealed her hands. Paul suspected that the hands were tightly clasped. It would be in character. Everything about her would be in character -- including the robe, a last piece of finery saved for such a moment. Paul motioned Bannerjee aside. He hesitated before obeying. Now, the girl moved -- one step forward. When she moved there was grace. Still, her eyes avoided him. Paul cleared his throat. N OW, the girl lifted her gaze, the whiteless eyes widening with just the right shade of awe. She had an odd little face with delicate chin, a sense of reserve in the way she held her small mouth. The eyes appeared abnormally large above slanted cheeks. There was a cheerless air about her, something which said she seldom smiled. The corners of her eyes even held a faint yellow misting which could have been from dust irritation or the tracery of semuta. Everything was in character. "You asked to see me," Paul said. The moment of supreme test for this girl-shape had come. Scytale had put on the shape, the mannerisms, the sex, the voice -- everything his abilities could grasp and assume. But this was a female known to Muad'dib in the sietch days. She'd been a child, then, but she and Muad'dib  shared common experiences. Certain areas of memory must be avoided delicately. It was the most exacting part Scytale had ever attempted. "I am Olheym's Lichna of Berk ; al Dib." The girl's voice came out small, but firm, giving name, father and I pedigree. Paul nodded. He saw how Chani had been fooled. The timber of voice, everything was reproduced with exactitude. Had it not been for his own Bene Gesserit training in voice and for the web of dao in which oracular j vision enfolded him, this Face Dancer disguise might have gulled even him. Training exposed certain discrepancies: the girl was older ' than her known years; too much control tuned the vocal chords; the set of neck and shoulders missed by a fraction the subtle hauteur of Fremen poise. But there were niceties, too: the rich robe had been patched to betray actual status...and the features were beautifully exact. They spoke a certain sympathy of this face dancer for the role being played. "Rest in my home, daughter of Otheym," Paul said in formal Fremen greeting. "You are welcome as water after a draught." The faintest of relaxations exposed the confidence this apparent acceptance had conveyed. "I bring a message," she said. "A man's messenger is as himself," Paul said. Scytale breathed softly. It went well, but now came the crucial task; the Atreides must be guided onto that special path. He must lose his Fremen concubine in circumstances where no other shared the blame. The failure must belong only to the omnipotent Muad'dib. He had to be led into an ultimate realization of his failure and thence to acceptance of the Tleilaxu alternative. "I am the smoke which banishes sleep in the night," Scytale said, employing a Fedaykin code phrase:  bear bad tidings... ness. He felt naked, his soul abandoned in a groping-time concealed from every vision. Powerful oracles hid this Face Dancer. Only the edges of these moments were known to Paul. He knew only what he could not do. He could not slay the Face Dancer. That would precipitate the future which must be avoided at all cost. Somehow, a way must be found to reach into the darkness and change the terrifying pattern. "Give me your message," Paul said. Bannerjee moved to place himself where he could watch the girl's face. She seemed to notice him for the first time and her gaze went to the knife handle beneath the Security officer's hand. "The innocent do not believe in evil," she said, looking squarely at Bannerjee. Ahhh, well done, Paul thought. It was what the real Lichna would have said. He felt a momentary pang for the real daughter of Otheym -- dead now, a corpse in thg sand. There was no time for such emotions, though. He scowled. Bannerjee kept his attention on the girl. "I was told to deliver my message in secret," she said. "Why?" Bannerjee demanded, voice harsh, probing. "Because it is my father's wish." "This is my friend," Paul said. "Am l not a Fremen? Then my friend may hear anything I hear." Scytale composed the girlshape. Was this a true Fremen custom...or was it a test? "The Emperor may make his own rules," Scytale said. "This is the message: My father wishes you to come to him, bringing Chani." "Why must I bring Chani?" "She is your woman and a Sayyadina. This is a Water matter, by the rules of our tribes. She must attest it that my father speaks according to the Fremen Way." There truly are Fremen in the conspiracy, Paul thought. This moment fitted the shape of things to come for sure. And he had no alternative but to commit himself to this course. "Of what will your father speak?" Paul asked...I "He will speak of a plot against you -- a plot among the Fremen." "Why doesn't lie bring that message in person?" Bannerjee demanded. She kept her gaze on Paul. "My father cannot come here. The plotters suspect him. He'd not survive the journey." "Could he not divulge the plot to you?" Bannerjee asked. "How c,ime he to risk his daughter on such a mission?" "The details are locked in a distrans carrier that only Mnud'dib may open," she said. "This much I know." "Why not send the distrans, then?" Paul asked. "It is a human distrans," she said. "I'll go, then," Paul said. "But I'll go alone." "Chani must come with you!" "Chani is with child." "When has a Fremen woman refused to..." "My enemies fed her a subtle poison," Paul said. "It will be a difficult birth. Her health will not permit her to accompany me now." them, strange emotions passed over the girlfeatures -- frustration, then anger. Scytale was reminded that every victim must have a way of escape -- even such a one as Muad'dib. The conspiracy had not failed, though. This Atreides remained in the net... Fie was a creature who had developed firmly into one pattern. He'd destroy himself before changing into the opposite of that pattern. That had been the way with the Tleilaxu kwisatz haderach. It would be the way with this one. And then... the ghola. "Let me ask Chani to decide this," she said. "I have decided it," Paul said. "You will accompany me in Chani's stead." "It requires a Sayyadina of the Rite!" "Are you not Chani's friend?" Boxed! Scytale thought. Does he suspect? No. He's being Fremen-caulious. And the contraceptive is a fact. Well -- there are other ways. "My father told me I was not to return," Scytale said, "that I was to seek asylum with you. He said you'd not risk me." Paul nodded. It was beautifully in character. He couldn't deny this asylum. She'd plead Fremen obedience to a father's command. "Ell take Stilgar's wife, Harah," Paul said. "You'll tell us the way to your father." "How do you know you can trust Stilgar's wife?" "I know it." "But I don't." Paul pursed his lips. "Does your mother live?" "My true mother has gone to Shai-hulud. My second mother still lives and cares for my father. Why?" "She's of Sietch Tabr?" "Yes." "I remember her," Paul said? "She will serve in Chani's place." He motioned to Bannerjee. "Have attendants take Otheym's Lichna to suitable quarters." Bannerjee nodded. Attendants. The key word meant that this messenger must be put under special guard. He took her arm. She resisted. "How will you go to my father?" she pleaded. "You'll describe the way to Bannerjee," Paul said. "He is my friend." "No! My father had commanded it! I cannot!" "Bannerjee?" Paul said. Bannerjee paused. Paul saw the man searching that encyclopedic memory which had helped bring him to his position of trust. "I know a guide who can take you to Otheym," Bannerjee said. "Then I'll go alone," Paul said, j, "Sire, if you..." r "Otheym wants it this way," Paul said, barely concealing the irony which consumed him. "Sire, it's too dangerous," Bannerjee protested. "Even an Emperor must accept some risks," Paul said. "The decision is made. Do as I've commanded." Reluctantly, Bannerjee led the face dancer from the room. J Paul turned toward the blank screen behind his desk. He felt that he waited for the arrival of a rock on its blind journey from some height. j Should he tell Bannerjee about the messenger's true nature? No! Such an incident hadn't been written on the screen of his vision. Any deviation here carried precipitate violence. A moment of fulcrum had to be found, a place where he could will himself out of the vision. If such a moment existed... XV No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machinehuman interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals. -- from The Tleilaxu Codbuk A S HE crossed over on the high footbridge from his Keep to the Qizarate Office Building, Paul added a limp to his walk. It was almost sunset and he walked through long shadows that helped conceal him, but sharp eyes still might detect something in his carriage that identified him. He wore a shield, but it was not activated, his aides having decided that the shimmer of it might arouse suspicions. Paul glanced left. Strings of sandclouds lay across the sunset like slatted shutters. The air was hiereg dry through his stillsuit filters. He wasn't really alone out here, but the web of Security hadn't been this loose around him since he'd ceased walking the streets alone in the night. Ornithopters with night scanners drifted far overhead in seemingly random pattern, all of them tied to his movements through a transmitter concealed in his clothing. Picked men walked the street below. Others had fanned out through the city after seeing the Emperor in his disguise -- Fremen costume down to the stillsuit and temag desert boots, the darkened features. His cheeks had been distorted with plastene inserts. A eatchtube ran down along his left jaw. As he reached the opposite end of the bridge, Paul glanced back, noting a movement beside the stone lattice that concealed a balcony of his private quarters. Chani, no doubt. "Hunting for sand in the desert," she'd called this venture. How little she understood the bitter choice. Selecting among agonies, he thought, made even lesser agonies near unbearable. For a blurred, emotionally painful moment, he relived their parting. At the last instant, Chani had experienced a tau-glimpse of his feelings, but she had misinterpreted. She had thought his emotions were those experienced in the parting of loved ones when one entered the dangerous unknown. Would that I did not know, he thought. He had crossed the bridge now and entered the upper passageway through the office building. There were fixed glowglobcs here and people hurrying on business. The Oizarate never slept. Paul found his attention caught by the signs I# above doorways, as though he were seeing them for the first time: Speed Merchants. Wind Stills and Retorts. Prophetic Prospects. Tests and Trials oj Faith. Religious Supply. Weaponry...Propagation of the Faith... i A more honest label would have been Propagation of the Bureaucracy, he thought. had sprung up all through his universe. This new man of the Qizarate was more often a convert. He seldom displaced a Fremen in the key posts, but he was melange as much to show he could afford it as for the geriatric benefits. He stood apart from his rulers -- Emperor, Guild, Bene Gesserit, Eandsraad, Family or Qizarate. His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by men tats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the far away general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative. As Paul emerged onto the ramp at the far side of the building, he heard the bells calling the Evening Rite at Alia's Fane. The temple across the thronged square was new, its rituals of recent devising, but there was something about this setting in a desert sink at the edge of Arrakeen -- something in the way wind-driven sand had begun to weather stones and plastene, something in the haphazard way buildings had gone up around the fane. Everything conspired to produce the impression that this was a very old place full of traditions and mystery. He was down into the press of people now -- committed. The only guide his Security force could find had insisted it be done this way. Security hadn't liked Paul's ready agreement. Stilgar had liked it even less. And Chani had objected most of all. The crowd around him, even while its members brushed against him, glanced his way unseeing and passed on, gave him a curious freedom of movement. It was the way they'd been conditioned to treat a Fremen, he knew. He carried himself like a man of the inner desert. Such men were quick to anger. As he moved into the quickening flow to the temple steps, the crush of people became  even greater. Those all around could not help but press against him now, but he found himself the target for ritual apologies: "Your pardon, noble sir. I cannot prevent this discourtesy." "Pardon, sir; this crush of people is the worst I've ever seen." "I abase myself, holy citizen. A lout shoved me." Paul ignored the words after the first few. There was no feeling in them except a kind of ritual fear. He found himself, instead, thinking that he had come a long way from his boyhood days in Caladan Castle. Where had he put his foot on the path that led to this journey across a crowded square on a planet so far from Caladan? Had he really put his foot on a path? He could not say he had acted at any point in his life for one specific reason. The motives and impinging forces had been complex -- more complex possibly than any other set of goads in human history. He had the heady feeling here that he might still avoid the fate he could see so clearly along this path. But the crowd pushed him forward and he experienced the dizzy sense that he had lost his way, lost personal direction over his life. The crowd flowed with him up the steps now into the temple portico. Voices grew hushed. The smell of fear grew stronger -- acrid, sweaty. the service within the temple. Their plain chant dominated the other sounds -- whispers, rustle of garments, shuffling of restless feet, coughs -- telling the story of the Far Places visited by the Priestess in her holy trance. She rides the sandworm of space! She guides through all storms Into the land of gentle winds. Though we sleep by the snake's den, She guards our dreaming souls. Shunning the desert heat, She hides us in a cool hollow. The gleaming of her white teeth Guides us in the night. By the braids of her hair We are lifted up to heaven! Sweet fragrance, flower-scented Surrounds us in her presence. Balak! Paul thought, thinking in Fremen. Look out! She can be filled with angry passion, too. The temple portico was lined with tall, slender glowtubes simulating candle flame. They flickered. The flickering stirred ancestral memories in Paul even while he knew that was the intent. This setting was an atavism, subtly contrived, effective. He hated his own hand in it. The crowd flowed with him through tall metal doors into the gigantic nave, a gloomy place with the flickering lights far away altar at the far end. Behind the altar, a deceptively simple affair of black wood encrusted with sand patternsfrom the Fremen mythology, hidden lights played on the field of a pru-door to create a rainbow borealis. The seven rows of chanting acolytes ranged below that spectral curtain suddenly took on a stark, eerie quality -- black robes, white faces, mouths moving in unison. Paul studied the pilgrims around him, suddenly envious of their intentness, their air of listening to truths he could not hear. It seemed to him that they gained something here which was denied to him, something mysteriously healing. He tried to inch his way closer to the altar and was stopped by a hand on his arm. Paul whipped his gaze around to meet the probing stare of an ancient Fremen -- blue-blue eyes beneath overhanging brows, recognition in them. A name flashed into Paul's mind: Rasir, a companion from the sietch days. In the press of the crowd, Paul knew he would be completely vulnerable if Rasir planned violence. The old man pressed close, one hand beneath a sand-grimed robe -- grasping the hilt of a crysknife, no doubt. Paul set himself as best he could to resist attack. The old man moved his head toward Paul's ear and whispered: "We will go with the others." It was the signal to identify his guide. Paul nodded. Rasir drew back and faced the altar. "She comes from the east," the acolytes chanted. "The sun stands at her back. All things are exposed. The full glare of light -- her eyes miss no thing, neither light nor dark." A wailing rebaba jarred across the voices, stilled them and receded into silence. With an electric abruptness, the crowd surged forward several meters. They were packed into a tight mass of flesh now, the air heavy with their breathing and the scent of spice. "Shai-hulud writes on clean sand!" the pale acolytes shouted. in unison with those around him. A feminine chorus began singing faintly from the shadows behind the shimmering pru-door: "Alia...Alia... It grew louder and louder, fell to sudden silence. Again -- voices beginning vesper soft: She stills all storms -- Her eyes kill our enemies, And torment the unbelievers. From the spires of Tuono Where dawnlight strikes And clear water runs, You see her shadow. In the shining summer heat She serves us bread and milk -- Cool, fragrant with spices. Her eyes melt our enemies, Torment our oppressors And pierce all mysteries. She is Alia...Alia...Alia... Slowly, the voices trailed off. Paul felt sickened. What are we doing? he asked himself. Alia was a child witch, but she was growing older. And he thought: Growing older is to grow more wicked. The collective mental atmosphere of the temple ate at his psyche. He could sense that element of himself which was one with those all around him, but the differences formed a deadly contradiction. He stood immersed, isolated in a personal sin which he could never expiate. The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men? The universe opposed him at every step. It eluded his grasp, conceived countless disguises to delude him. That universe would never agree with any shape he gave it. A profound hush spread through the temple. Alia emerged from the darkness behind the shimmering rainbows. She wore a yellow robe trimmed in Atreides green -- yellow for sunlight, green for the death which produced life. Paul experienced the sudden surprising thought that Alia had emerged here just for him, for him alone. He stared across the mob in the temple at his sister. She was his sister. He knew her ritual and its roots, but he had never before stood out here with the pilgrims or watched her through their eyes. Here, performing the mystery of this place, he saw that she partook of the universe which opposed him. Acolytes brought her a golden chalice. Alia raised the chalice. With part of his awareness, Paul knew that the chalice contained the unaltered melange, the subtle poison, her sacrament of the oracle. Her gaze on the chalice, Alia spoke. Her voice caressed the ears flower sound, flowing and musical : "In the beginning, we were empty," she said. "Ignorant of all things," the chorus sang. "We did not know the Power that abides in every place," Alia said. "And in every Time," the chorus sang. "Here is the Power," Alia said, raising the chalice slightly. "It brings us joy," sang the chorus. And it brings us distress, Paul thought. "It awakens the soul," Alia said. "It dispels all doubts," the chorus sang. "In worlds, we perish," Alia said. "In the Power, we survive," sang the chorus. Alia put the chalice to her lips. She drank. he was. holding his breath like the meanest pilgrim of this mob. Despite every shred of persona! knowledge about the experience Alia was undergoing, he had been caught in the tao-web. He felt himself remembering how that fiery poison coursed into the body. Memory unfolded the timestopping when awareness became a mote which changed the poison. He re-experienced the awakening into timelessness where all things were possible. He knew Alia's present experience, yet he saw now that he did not know it. Mystery blinded the eyes. Alia trembled and sank to her knees'. Paul exhaled with the enraptured pilgrims. He nodded. Part of the veil began to lift from him. Absorbed in the bliss of a vision, he had forgotten that each vision belonged to all those who were still on-the-way, stili to become. In the vision, one passed through a darkness, unable to distinguish reality from insubstantial accident. One hungered for absolutes which could never be. Hungering, one lost the present. Alia swayed with the rapture of spice change. Paul felt that some transcendental presence spoke to him, saying: "Look! See there! See what you've ignored?" In that instant, he thought he looked through other eyes, that he saw an imagery and rhythm in this place which no artist or poet could reproduce. It was vital and beautiful, a glaring light that exposed all power-gluttony...even his own. Alia spoke. Her amplified voice boomed across the nave. "Luminous night," she cried. A moan swept like a wave through the crush of pilgrims. "Nothing hides in such a night!" Alia said. "What rare light is this darkness? You cannot fix your gaze upon it! Senses cannot record it. No words describe it." Her voice lowered. "The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the things yet to be. Ahhhhh, what gentle violence!" Paul felt that he waited for some private signal from his sister. It could be any action or word, something of wizardry and mystical processes, an outward streaming that would fit him like an arrow into a cosmic bow. "There will be sadness," Alia intoned. "I remind you that all things are but a beginning, forever beginning. Worlds wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice will attain exalted destinies. You will sneer at the past, forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there is unity." Paul suppressed a cry of disappointment as Alia lowered her head. She had not said the thing he waited to hear. His body felt like a dry shell, a husk abandoned by some desert insect. Others must feel something similar, he thought. He sensed the restlessness about him. Abruptly, a woman in the mob, someone far down in the nave to Paul's left, cried out, a wordless noise of anguish. had the giddy sensation that the distance between them collapsed, that he stared directly into her glazed eyes only inches away from him. "Who summons me?" Alia asked. "I do," the woman cried. "I do. Alia. Oh, Alia, help me. They say my son was killed on Muritan. Is he gone? Will I never see my son again...never?" "You try to walk backward in the sand," Alia intoned. "Nothing is lost. Everything returns later, but you may not recognize the changed form that returns." "Alia, I don't understand!" the woman wailed. "You live in the air but you do not see it," Alia said, sharpness in her voice. "Are you a lizard? Your voice has the Fremen accent. Does a Fremen try to bring back the dead? What do we need from our dead except their water?" Down in the center of the nave, a man in a rich red cloak lifted both hands, the sleeves falling to expose white-clad arms. "Alia," he shouted, "I have had a business proposal. Should I accept?" "You come here like a begger," Alia said. "You look for the golden bowl but you will find only a dagger." "I have been asked to kill a man!" a voice shouted from off to the right -- a deep voice with sietch tones. "Should I accept? Accepting, would I succeed?" "Beginning and end are a single thing," Alia snapped. "Have I not told you this before? You didn't come here to ask that question. What is it you cannot believe that you must come here and cry out against it?" "She's in a fierce mood tonight," a woman near Paul muttered. "Have you ever seen her this angry?" Sheknows I'm out here, Paul thought. Did she see something in the. vision that angered her? Is she raging at me? "Alia," a man directly in front of Paul called. "Tell these businessmen and faint hearts how long your brother will rule!" "I permit you to look around that corner by yourself," Alia snarled. "You carry your prejudice in your mouth! It is because Ml my brother rides the worm of chaos that you have roof and water!" With a fierce gesture, clutching her robe. Alia whirled away, strode through the shimmering ribbons of light and was lost in the darkness behind. Immediately, the acolytes took up the closing chant, but their rhythm was off. Obviously, they'd been caught by the unexpected ending of the rite. An incoherent mumbling arose on all sides of the crowd. Paul felt the stirring around him -- restless, dissatisfied. "It was that fool with his stupid question about business," a woman near Paul muttered. "The hypocrite!" What had Alia seen? What track through the future? Something had happened here tonight, souring the rite of the oracle. Usually, the crowd clamored for Alia to answer their pitiful questions. They came as beggars to the oracle, yes. He had heard them thus many times as he'd watched, hidden in the darkness behind the altar. What had been different about this night? The old Fremen tugged Paul's sleeve and nodded toward the exit. The crowd already was beginning to push in that direction. Paul allowed himself to be pressed along with them, the guide's hand upon his sleeve. There was the feeling in him then that his body had become the manifestation of some power he could no longer control. He had become a nonbeing, a stillness which moved itself. At the core of the nonbeing, there he existed, allowing himself to be led through the streets of his city, following a track so familiar to his visions that it froze his heart with grief. I should know what Alia saw, he thought.  have seen it enough times myself. And she didn't cry out against it...she saw the alternatives, too. Production growth and income growth must not get out of step in my Empire. That is the substance of my command. There are to be no balance-of-payment difficulties between the different spheres of influence. And the reason for this is simply because I command it. I want to emphasize my authority in this area.  am the supreme energyeater of this domain, and will remain so alive or dead. My Government is the economy. -- Order In Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib I old man said, taking his hand from Paul's sleeve. "It is on the right, second door from the far end. Go with Shai-hulud, Muad'dib...and remember when you were Usui." Paul's guide slipped away into the darkness. There would be Security men somewhere out there waiting to grab the guide and take the man to a place of questioning, Paul knew. But Paul found himself hoping the old Fremen would escape. There were stars overhead and the distant light of First Moon somewhere beyond the Shield Wall. But this place was not the open desert where a man could sight on a star to guide his course. The old man had brought him into one of the new suburbs; that much Paul recognized. This street now was thick with sand blown in from encroaching dunes. A dim light glowed from a single public suspensor globe far down the street. It gave enough illumination to show that this was a dead end street. The air around him was thick with the smell of a reclamation still. The thing must be poorly capped for its fetid odors to escape, loosing a dangerously wasteful amount of moisture into the night air. How careless his people had grown, Paul thought. water -- forgetful of the days when a man on Arrakis could have been killed for just an eighth share of the water in his body. Why am I hesitating? Paul wondered. It is the second door from the jar end. I knew that without being told. But this thing must be played out with precision. So... hesitate. The noise of an argument arose suddenly from the comer house on Paul's left. A woman there berated someone; the new wing of their house leaked dust, she complained. Did he think water fell from heaven? If dust came in, moisture got out. Tj Some remember, Paul thought. He moved down the street and the quarrel faded away behind. Water from heaven! he thought. Some Fremen had seen that wonder on other worlds. He had seen it himself, had ordered it for Arrakis; but the memory of it felt like something that had occurred to another person. Rain, it was called. Abruptly, he remembered a rainstorm on his birthworld -- clouds thick and gray in the sky of Caladan, an electric storm presence, moist air, the big wet drops drumming on skylights. It ran in rivulets off the eaves. Storm drains took the w'ater away to a river which ran muddy and turgid past the broad family orchards...trees there with their barren branches glistening wetly. drift of sand across the street For an instant, he felt mud clinging to the shoes of his childhood. Then he was back in the sand, in the dust-clotted, wind-muffled darkness with the Future hanging over him, taunting. He could feel the aridity of life around him like an accusation. You did this! They'd become a civilization of dry-eyed watchers and tale-tellers, people who solved all problems with power, power and more power -- hating every erg of it. Rough stones came underfoot. His vision remembered them. The dark rectangle of a doorway appeared on his right -- black in black -- Otheym's house, Fate's house, a place different from the ones around it only in the role Time had chosen for it. It was a strange place to be marked down in history. The door opened to his knock. The gap revealed the dull green light of an atrium. A dwarf peered out, ancient face on a child's body, an apparition prescience had never seen. "You've come then," the apparition said. The dwarf stepped aside, no awe in his manner, merely the gloating of a slow smile. "Come in! Come in." Paul hesitated. There'd been no dwarf in the vision, but all else remained identical. Visions could contain such disparities and still hold true to their original plunge into infinity. But the difference dared him to hope. He glanced back up the street at the creamy pearl glistening of his moon swimming out of jagged shadows. The moon haunted him. How did it fall? "Come in," the dwarf insisted. Paul entered. He heard the door tluid into its moisture seals behind. The dwarf passed him, led the way, enormous feet slapping the floor, and opened the delicate lattice gate into the roofed central courtyard. He gestured. "They await. Sire." Sire, Paul thought. He knows me, then. Before Paul could explore this discovery, the dwarf slipped away down a side passage. Hope was a dervish wind whirling, dancing in Paul. He headed across the courtyard. It was a dark and gloomy place, the smell of sickness and defeat in it. He felt daunted by the atmosphere. Was it defeat to choose a lesser evil? How far down this track had he come? Light poured from a narrow doorway in the far wall. He put down the feeling of watchers and evil smells and entered the doorway into a small room. It was a barren place by Fremen standards with heireg hangings on only two walls. Opposite the door, a man sat on carmine cushions beneath the best hanging. A feminine figure hovered in shadows behind another doorway in a barren wall to the left. Paul felt vision-trapped. This was the way it had gone. Where was the dwarf? Where was the difference? H IS senses absorbed the room in a single gestalten sweep. The place had received painstaking care despite its poor furnishings. Hooks and rods across the barren walls showed where hangings had been removed. Pilgrims paid enormous prices for authentic Fremen artifacts, Paul reminded himself. Rich pilgrims counted desert tapestries as treasures, true marks of a hajj. Paul felt that the barren walls accused him with their fresh gypsum wash. The threadbare condition of the two remaining hangings amplified the sense of guilt. A narrow shelf occupied the wall on his right. It held a row of portraits -- mostly bearded Fremen, some in stillsuits with their catchtubes dangling, some in Imperial uniforms posed against exotic offworld backgrounds. The most common scene was a seascape. The Fremen on the cushions cleared his throat, forcing Paul to look at him. It was Otheym precisely as the vision had revealed him -- neck grown scrawny, a bird thing which appeared too weak to support the large head. The face was a lopsided ruin -- networks of crisscrossed scars on the left cheek below a drooping, wet eye, but clear skin on the other side and a straight, blue-in-blue Fremen gaze. A long kedge of a nose bisected the face. Otheym's cushions sat in the center of a threadbare rug, brown with maroon and gold threads. The cushion fabric betrayed splotches of wear and patching, but every bit of metal around the seated figure shone from polishing -- the portrait frames, shelf lip and brackets, the pedestal of a low table on the right. Paul nodded to the clear half of Otheym's face. "Good luck to you and your dwelling place." It was the greeting of an old friend and sietch-mate. "So I see you once more, Usui." The voice speaking his tribal name whined with an old man's quavering. The dull drooping eye on the ruined side of the face moved above the parchment skin and scars. Gray bristles stubbled that side and the jawline there hung with scabrous peelings. Otheym's mouth twisted as he spoke, the gap exposing silvery metal teeth. "Muad'dib always answers the call of a Fedaykin," Paul said. The woman in the doorway shadows moved. She said: "So Stilgar boasts." She came forward into the light, an older version of the Lichna that the Face Dancer had copied. Paul recalled then that Otheym had married sisters. Her hair was gray, her nose grown witch sharp. Weaver's callouses ran along her forefingers and thumbs. A Fremen woman would have displayed such marks proudly in the sietch days, but she saw his attention on her hands and hid them under a fold of her pale blue robe. Paul remembered her name then -- Dhuri. The shock was that he remembered her as a child, not as she'd been in his vision of these moments. It was the whine that edged her voice, Paul told himself. She'd whined even as a child. "You see me here," Paul said. "Would I be here if Stilgar hadn't approved?" He turned toward Otheym. "I carry your water burden, Otheym. Command me." This was the straight Fremen talk of sietch brothers. almost too much for that thin neck. He lifted a liver-marked left hand and pointed to the ruin of his face. "I caught the splitting disease on Tarahell, Usui," he wheezed. "Right after the victory I # when we'd all... A fit of coughing stopped his voice. "The tribe will collect his water soon," Dhuri said. She crossed to Otheym, propped pillows behind him and held his shoulder to steady him until the coughing passed. She wasn't really very old, Paul saw, but a look of lost hopes ringed her mouth and bitterness lay in her eyes. "I'll summon doctors," Paul said. Dhuri turned, hand on hip. "We've had medical men, as good as any you could summon." She sent an involuntary glance to the barren wall on her left. And the medical men were costly, Paul thought. He felt edgy, constrained by the vision but aware that minor differences had crept in. How could be exploit the differences? Time came out of its skein with subtle changes, but the background "fabric held oppressive sameness. He knew with terrifying certainty that if he tried to break out of the enclosing pattern here, it would become a thing of terrible violence. The power in this deceptively gentle flow of Time oppressed him. "Say what you want of me," he growled. "Couldn't it be that Otheym needed a friend to stand by him in this time?" Dhuri asked. "Does a Fedaykin have to consign his flesh to strangers?" We shared Sietch Tabr, Paul reminded himself. She has the right to berate me for apparent callousness. "What I can do I will do," Paul said. Another fit of coughing shook Otheym. When it had passed, he gasped : "There's treachery, Usui. Fremen plot against you." His mouth worked then without sound. Spittle escaped his lips. Dhuri wiped his mouth with a corner of her robe, and Paul saw how her face betrayed anger at such waste of moisture. Frustrated rage threatened to overwhelm Paul then. That Otheym should be spent thus! A Fedaykin deserved belter. But no choice remained -- not for a Death Commando or his Emperor. They walked Ockham's razor in this room. The slightest misstep multiplied honors -- not just for themselves, but for all humankind, even for those who would destroy them. Paul squeezed calmness into his mind. He looked at Dhuri. The expression of terrible longing with which she gazed at Otheym strengthened Paul. Chani must never look at me that way, he told himself. "Lichna spoke of a message," Paul said. "My dwarf," Otheym wheezed. "I bought him on...on...on a world...I forget. He's a human distrans, a toy discarded by the Tleilaxu. He's recorded all the names...the traitors..." Otheym fell silent, trembling. "You speak of Lichna," Dhuri said. "When you arrived, we knew she'd reached you safely. If you're thinking of this new burden Otheym places upon you, Lichna is the sura of that burden. An even exchange, Usui. Take the dwarf and go." Paul suppressed a shudder. He closed his eyes. Lichna! The real daughter had perished in the desert, a semuta wracked body abandoned to the sand and the wind. Opening his eyes, Paul said: "You could have come to me at any time for... "Otheym stayed away that he might be numbered among those who hate you, Usui," Dhuri said. "The house to the south of us at the end of the street, that is a gathering place for your foes. It's why we took this hovel." "Then summon the dwarf and we'll leave," Paul said. "You've not listened well," Dhuri said. "You must take the dwarf to a safe place," Otheym said, an odd strength in his voice. "He carries the only record of the traitors. No one suspects his talent. They think I keep him for amusement." "We cannot leave," Dhuri said. "Only you and the dwarf. It's known...how poor we are. We've said we're selling the dwarf. They'll take you for the buyer. It's your only chance." the vision: in it, he'd left here with the names of the traitors, but never seeing how those names were carried. The dwarf obviously moved under the protection of another oracle. It occurred to Paul then that all creatures must carry some kind of destiny stamped out by purposes of varying strengths, by the fixatives of training and disposition. From the moment the Jihad had chosen him, he'd felt himself hemmed in by the forces of a multitude. Their fixed purposes demanded and controlled his course. Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He saw it! He listened now to the emptiness of this house. There were only the four of them in it -- Dhuri, Otheym, the dwarf and himself. He inhaled the fear and tension of his companions, sensed the watchers -- his own force hovering in 'thopters. I was wrong to hope, Paul thought. But thinking of hope brought him a twisted sense of hope, and he felt that he might yet seize his moment. "Summon the dwarf," he said. "Bijaz!" Dhuri called. "You call me?" The dwarf stepped into the room from the courtyard, an alert expression of worry on his face. "You have a new master, Bijaz," Dhuri said. She stared at Paul. "You may call him...Usui." "Usui, that's the base of the pillar," Bijaz said, translating. "How can Usui be base when I'm the basest thing living?" "He always speaks thus," Otheym apologized. "I don't speak," Bijaz said. "I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans." A Tleilaxu toy, learned and alert, Paul thought. The Bene Tleilax never threw away something this valuable. He turned and studied the dwarf. Round melange eyes returned his stare. "What other talents have you, Bijaz?" Paul asked. "I know when we should leave," Bijaz said. "It's a talent few men have. There's a time for endings -- and that's a good beginning; Let us begin to go, Usui." Paul examined his vision memory -- no dwarf, but the little man's words fitted the occasion. "At the door, you called me Sire," Paul said. "You know me, then?" "You've sired, Sire," Bijaz said, grinning. "You are much more than the base Usui. You're the Atreides Emperor, Paul Muad'dib. And you are my finger." He held up the index finger of his right band. "Bijaz!" Dhuri snapped. "You tempt fate." "I tempt my finger," Bijaz protested, voice squeaking. He pointed at Usui. "I point at Usui. Is my finger not Usui himself? Or is it a reflection of something more base?" He brought the finger close to his eyes, examined it with a mocking grin, first one side then the other. "Ahhh, it's merely a finger, after all." "He often rattles on thus," Dhuri said, worry in her voice. "I think it's why he was discarded by the Tleilaxu." "I'll not be patronized," Bijaz said, "yet I have a new patron. How strange the workings of the finger." He peered at Dhuri and Otheyrn, eyes oddly bright. "A weak glue bound us, Otheyrn. A few tears and we part." The dwarf's big feet rasped on the floor as he whirled completely around and stopped facing Paul. "Ahhh, patron! I came the long way around to find you." Paul nodded. OU'LL be kind, Usui?" Bijaz I asked. "I'm a person, you know. Persons come in many shapes and sizes. This be but one of them. I'm weak of muscle, but strong of mouth; cheap to feed, but costly to fill. Empty me as you will, there's still more in me than men put there." "We've no time for your stupid riddles," Dhuri growled. "You should be gone." "I'm riddled with conundrums," Bijaz said, "but not all of them stupid. To be gone, Usui, is to be a bygone. Yes? Let us let bygones be bygones. Dhuri speaks truth, and I've the talent for hearing that, too." "You've truthsense?" Paul asked, determined now to wait out the clockwork of his vision. Anything was better than shattering these moments and producing the new consequences. There remained things for Otheyrn to say lest Time be diverted into even more horrifying channels. "I've tow-sense," Bijaz said. Paul noted that the dwarf had growm more nervous. Was the little man aware of things about to happen? Could Bijaz be his own oracle? "Did you inquire of Lichna?" Otheym asked suddenly, peering up at Dhuri with his good eye. "Lichna is safe," Dhuri said. Paul lowered his head, lest his expression betray the lie. Safe! Lichna was ashes in a secret grave. "That's good then," Otheym said, taking Paul's lowered head for a nod of agreement. "One good thing among the evils, Usui. I don't like the world we're making, you know that? It was better when we were alone in the desert with only the Harkonnens for enemy." "There's but a thin line between many an enemy and many a friend," Bijaz said. "Where that line stops, there's no beginning and no end. Let's end it, my friends." He moved to Paul's side, jittered from one foot to the other. "What's tow-sense?" Paul asked, dragging out these moments, goading the dwarf. "Now!" Bijaz said, trembling. "Now! Now!" He tugged at Paul's robe. "Let us go now!" "His mouth rattles, but there's no harm in him," Otheym said, affection in his voice, the one good eye staring at Bijaz. "Even a rattle can signal departure," Bijaz said. "And so can tears. Let's be gone while there's time to begin." "Bijaz, what do you fear?" Paul asked. "I fear the spirit seeking me now," Bijaz muttered. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. His cheeks twitched. "I fear the one who thinks not and will have no body except mine -- and that one gone back into itself! I fear the things l see and the things I do not see." This dwarf does possess the power of prescience, Paul thought. Bijaz shared the terrifying oracle. Did he share the oracle's fate, as well? How potent was the dwarf's power? Did he have the little prescience of those who dabbled in the Dune Tarot? Or was it something greater? How much had he seen? "Best you go," Dhuri said. "Bijaz is right." "Every minute we linger," Bijaz said, "prolongs...prolongs the present!" Every minute I linger defers my guilt, Paul thought. A worm's poisonous breath, its teeth dripping dust, had washed over him. It had happened long ago, but he inhaled the memory of it now -- spice and bitterness. He could sense his own worm waiting -- "the urn of the desert." "These are troubled times," he said, addressing himself to Otheym's judgment of their world. "Fremen know what to do in time of trouble," Dhuri said. Otheym contributed a shaky nod. Paul glanced at Dhuri. He'd not expected gratitude, would have been burdened by it more than he could bear, but Otheym's bitterness and the passionate resentment he saw in Dhuri's eyes shook his resolve. Was anything worth this price? # ? "Delay serves no purpose," Dhuri said. "Do what you must, Usui," Otheym wheezed. Paul sighed. The words of the vision had been spoken. "There'll be an accounting," he said, to complete it. Turning, he strode from the room. He heard Bijaz foot-slapping behind. "Bygones, bygones," Bijaz muttered as they went. "Let bygones fall where they may. This has been a dirty day." city as Paul, his shield activated and shimmering around him, emerged from the cul-de-sac. A wind off the massif whirled hot dust down the narrow street, causing Bijaz to blink and shield his eyes. "We must hurry," the dwarf muttered. "Hurry! Hurry!" "You sense danger?" Paul asked, probing. "I know danger!" An abrupt sense of peril very near was followed almost immediately by a figure joining them out of a doorway. Bijaz crouched and whimpered. It was only Stilgar moving like a war machine, head thrust forward, feet striking the street solidly. Swiftly, Paul explained the value of the dw'arf and handed Bijaz over to Stilgar. The pace of the vision moved here with great rapidity. Stilgar sped away with Bijaz. Security Guards enveloped Paul. Orders were given to send men down the street toward the house beyond Otheym's. The men hurried to obey, shadows among silent shadows. "We want live prisoners," one of the Guard officers snarled. The sound was a viscon-echo in Paul's ears. It went with solid precision, vision matching reality, tick for tick. Ornithoptcrs drifted down across the moon. The night was full of Imperial troopers attacking. A soft hiss grew out of the other sounds, climbed to a roar while they still heard the sibilance. It picked up a terra cotta glow that hid the stars, engulfed the moon. Paul, knowing that sound and glow from the earliest nightmare glimpses of his vision, felt an odd sense of fulfillment. It went the way it must. "Stone burner!" The cry was all around him. "Stone burner...stone burner..." Because it was required of him, Paul threw a protective arm across his face, dove for the low lip of a curb. It already was too late, of course. He knew it. Where Otheym's house had been, there stood now a pillar of fire, a blinding jet roaring at the heavens. It gave off a dirty relief every ballet movement of the diving crowd. For every member of this frantic throng it was too late. by Lester del Rey The First Citizen of the Mcon The world of science fiction has just lost its most important citizen. And -- if histories are written by men of understanding -- it may some day be realized that world has lost one of its singularly great leaders, surely a fact not readily apparent to some during his life. Willy Ley died of a sudden heart attack on June #, #. I cannot write a standard obituary for a man who stood high in my affection and regard for thirty years. It is the evening before his funeral as I type this and I am unable to be remote and objective about a life that gave so much. Nor do I feel that such remoteness would be proper in the pages of this magazine, to which Willy was a contributor for almost half of his adult life. This issue marks the end of the nineteenth full year during which his column For Your Information has appeared. It is without question a record for the longest series of continuous contributions to any science-fiction magazine by other than the editor. Other records were set by him in the past. In the fifteen years between his arrival in this country and his first article for Galaxy he contributed to at least # issues of various science-fiction magazines, doing articles that found regular publication at a time when such science articles were far less in demand than they are today. Out of the twenty-seven men who have been picked as guests of honor at World Science Fiction Conventions, Willy Ley was the only one whose reputation was based upon the writing of nonfiction. This was in #, at the second Convention held in Philadelphia. Looking back, I realize now that no one bothered to comment on the distinction, probably because Willy was automatically accepted by readers and fellow writers as one who was not limited by any category. His, choice of nonfiction was certainly not dictated by any lack of ability to handle fiction. He proved this by the few pieces of pure fiction he wrote under the name of Robert Willey -- a penname meant to separate fiction from fact, not to conceal his identity. F. Orlin Tremaine blurbtd his At the Perihelion as a "great science fiction novel" and gave it the cover, despite the seeming obscurity of the name. And his Fog was a piece of mood writing that proved to have a lasting effect in a strange way. Fog was a story of the utter confusion and dark mood of what real revolution means to those who see it without being able to know exactly what they are seeing. Two years later I did a story in which I tried to capture some of the same elements of suspense in a different way at the request of the editor -- the story was Nerves and may be the best I ever wrote. Theodore Sturgeon told me years later that his Killdozer was a second derivation. How far the chain went I do not know. Willy's influence on the entire stream of science fiction was far stronger than this, however. His popular books and articles on the hard facts of rockets, orbits and space travel established the basic handling of such subjects. Writers who never read any of his early books on rocketry derived most of their facts from him through the stories by men who had studied his writings. In time his reputation spread far beyond any genre. Men who would never read science fiction -- or indeed anything except the tabloid newspapers -- were impressed by his byline. I know from personal experience that the fact that one knew Willy Ley was a unique testament to one's respectability. Willy never let his stature bother him. From the time I read his first fan letter in an American science-fiction magazine until the last time I saw him, he took it for granted that the writers a n d readers of science fiction were somehow his real family, l ie was always ready to respond to a request for an appearance at a fan conclave when his schedule permitted and he was often one of the first men I met at the annual World Science Fiction Conventions. But his real importance lay beyond any realm of fiction. I said at the beginning that he was our most important citizen but I did not mean to indicate that he was our greatest writer. His role in the field of science fiction was beyond that. John W. Campbell summed it up in one way when he said, "Most of us dream about the future and some of us write about our dreams. But Willy Ley did something about his." He took what must be the very basic dream with which science fiction began -- the desire that man should get off a single planet and spread his seed throughout the heavens. And more than any other man, often by the least obvious means, he built that dream into reality. tober, #, in Berlin. He was educated in general science of the day, with particular emphasis on zoology. Anyone who has read his books on the strange animal life of earth, such as The Lungjish, the Dodo and the Unicorn, or his numerous articles in this magazine, must be aware of his neverfailing interest and his ability. Had he continued his studies he might have become a zoologist of note. But he quit before winning his degree. (He did receive an Honorary Doctorate from Adelphi University in #.) He had discovered a little, book full of obscure mathematical proof that rockets had the ability to reach the moon. This was printed in # and was the work by Hermann Oberth. It had caused some flurry of argument among scientists and engineers, few of whom accepted it, but it was far beyond the grasp of the average man. Willy decided it had to be made available to all. And shortly before he was twenty, he wrote a book without mathematics to tell the story to the world. When it was published it did what he wanted. Men who could share in the dream of the conquest of space suddenly found a reason to believe it was possible. As Willy had suspected, where the learned men of the day were content to argue, the less pedantic enthusiasts began to scheme and plan to do something about Oberth's message. The impetus of Willy's first book, Die Fahrt im Weltall (Journey into Space), brought a group of men to join him in organizing the German Rocket Society ( Verin fiir Raumschiffahrt) in #. Work had been done on rockets and their theory before. I n America, Goddard had experimented with liquid fuels and had written a brief paper on highaltitude rockets for use in weather observations. In Russia, Tsiolkovsky had spent years working out detailed plans. But these had languished without attention. The VfR, as it was known, began to accumulate funds for research. They used every means to scrape together enough to build crude models and to find a testing ground. Willy took on the thankless task of getting out the bulletins of the VfR through which members -- who eventually included a rocket tyro named Werner von Braun, were recruited and funds solicited. He arranged for the German film company producing Fritz Lang's Frau im Monel to agree to contribute to the VfR in return for advice and a public demonstration of a rocket. And he gave himself the task of keeping things moving during the difficult years when highly independent and willful men often disagreed violently. He spoke casually about one of his darkest periods: "In order to raise money, I went on a lecture tour." He was then twentyfive years old and branded by many as a crackpot for fooling with what sane men knew was nonsense -- but he never made an issue of the difficulties and derision he faced on his tour. Unlike most hobby groups, the VfR actually did valuable research. They built and tested rocket motors, and they learned the necessary hard lessons. Willy contributed the suggestion that they switch from gasoline to alcohol and water to burn with their liquid oxygen -- and for the first time the pioneers had a self-cooling motor -- as all later rockets did. He also discovered how much water should be mixed with the alcohol for proper cooling. Eventually the VfR produced a working prototype of a motor that has remained basically the same ever since. This spelled some five years of research by a group of enthusiasts with limited funds. B Y # Willy began to realize he could no longer stay in Hitler's Germany. Count Wernher von Braun had been drafted from the VfR to the military development of rockets, after learning the hard lessons from the work at the VfR testing field. As events proved, von Braun was a singleminded genius who let no considerations stand in the way of his doing the one thing he could do better than anyone else. But Willy was not the type of man who could sacrifice in any way his basic humanity for expediency -- even for the sake of the dream that dominated his life. Without question the future of rockets -- in the early thirties -- lay in Germany; but too many other things also lurked in the dark future of that Germany. Willy reached America in #. There he tried briefly to carry on with the American Rocket Society but their work seemed pure hobby stuff to him after the serious efforts of the VfR. I met him first thirty years ago, when his dream of space seemed farthest from its goal. The U.S., whose citizen he became in #, was at war with Germany and Willy was still a resident alien, somewhat suspect and restricted, however well he had proved his loyalty to the principles for which he fought. We talked of many things, from multilingual jokes to a Van Vogt novel. He was a big man -- not so much in height as in impression of hugeness and massive solidity. And the deep voice that came out was a growl that made him seem a bear in human form. His English was not quite colloquial then, though his vocabulary and understanding of grammar had been extraordinary even before he came here. He evidenced no sign of harshness or bitter feelings. He was a warm and comfortable man. And he talked of rockets and of what could be done. Whenever he could, he still wrote articles on the subject to prepare the general public for what he felt they must begin after the shooting was over. For a brief time afterthe war it seemed that his hopes would reach fruition. The U.S. had recovered a stock of the V-# rockets which von Braun had developed from their origins at the VfR. The entire crew from Peenem nde under von Braun had surrendered to the Americans. We tested the rockets and we began building our own Viking. Willy was busy with lectures and consultations. For a time he seemed headed again for actual work with rockets. His contract with Galaxy even had an escape clause permitting him to quit if he were called to rocket duty. But his inability to agree with any man whom he knew to be either wrong or foolish kept him from the good graces of some who had discovered rockets in # and were now trying to be experts. writing and preparing the public. And then the boom in rocketry collapsed. The dark days following # saw endless restrictions on research. Military rockets were not big enough to carry the projected H-bombs, it was felt, so they were moved aside for more and bigger bombers. Space was something we meant to explore some day, of course -- but there was time for that when the cold war ended. And if we went into space, it couldn't be with one of von Braun's war rockets. (Von Braun was then well along in his design of today's Saturn booster.) Ours would have to be a "peace" rocket. ; Willy sighed softly once in a while when I met him in the company of a small group that met at the home of Fletcher Pratt. But usually he did not let his disappointments hide the conviviality that was so much a part of him. He was perhaps the most cheerful of all at the old science-fiction Hydra Club among fans and professionals. And he went on working. He lectured, he wrote books. His manual on rocketry first came out in # as Rockets and has been in continuous printings under various names since then. It is currently Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space and has probably given understanding of space travel to more men than any dozen other books. He collaborated with von Braun on a series of articles for Collier's that did more to convince the public of the possibility of space travel than anything else. And he acted as an advisor to Walt Disney to get his message across. Then came Sputnik. Willy had known of the plans to send up one of von Braun's military rockets with a small canister at least a year ahead of the Russians and of its cancellation because of interservice nonsense. He shrugged and went cheerfully on television to calm and explain and offer hope. The point I'm making is that Willy lived. He lived more in time with his days -- and the world's tomorrows -- than most men. He was more than a prophet without honor. Events did not pass him by. Rather, he shaped them. The work done at the VfR would have been impossible without him. And while vague other signs of some interest in rocketry existed, nothing so shaped the maturity of the space age. The VfR took an idea and made it into engineering practice, enabling von Braun to enlarge it and demonstrate it over London. It was largely Willy's work that killed the public antipathy to rockets after their use as a terror weapon and began to make people dream of space again. When Kennedy proposed the race to the moon he mentioned huge sums required to finance it. The cost was more than had ever been spent on a science project. Yet when public polls were taken, jt turned out that the people were ture -- and not just for national prestige. Somehow, through all his articles, Willy and those who were converted by him had managed to convince half of the nation that there was value enough in the space program for them to go along with the huge expenditure. Willy Ley had quietly determined before he was twenty years of age that men should set foot on the Moon during his lifetime. And step by step, he led them to turn their eyes from this single planet to the vast reaches of space. It took him forty years and he missed his goal of seeing the first man on the moon by a month. But there is precedent for that. And Moses went up from the plains of Moah unto the mountain...And the Lord showed him all the land...unto the utmost sea...And the Lord said unto him...I will give it unto thy seed; I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shah not go over thither. Today I weep for the loss of a friend and a very great man.  I UIF will bring you in its next issue such exciting stories and fascinating features as these:... and many more! So whatever you do, don't cheat yourself by missing the forthcoming IF i ( Continued from page # ) announced that the Roseau satellite would be shipped to the Russian space center at Baikonur, to be launched by a Russian rocket. Expected launch date is November, #. The Europeans seem to have revamped quite a number of proed that the TDI satellite should be taken out of the regular schedule and be made a special project. Scheduled launch date for that satellite is March, #. The TDl satellite is an astronomical (Orbiting Astronomical Observatory), the second of which was put into orbit on December #, cessfully orbited on April #, #, but a malfunction of the power supply rendered it useless.) Details of the design of TD I have not yet been released. Presumably the design is still what is called fluid, meaning undecided. ed to discontinue a satellite development called Vempa. The French and West German governments immediately signed a contract for a continuation of Vempa between them. Junkers in Germany had started development of now reshape it for the German government. The French have promised to orbit it with the larger version of the Dianmut rocket. No launch date has been set.  is science fiction grown up? row's Gross National Product, an animalistic numbers game played for sin and salvation, life and death. in a daring story of sex, seed and survival. socio-sexual problem. 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Into Chalk's sinister hands falls Lona Kelvin, orphaned, mother of # children, yet without a soul; and Minner Burris, starman, whose butchered body was put together by aliens, a walking horror. What fun to mate these two and watch them wallow in their mutual torment. But somewhere, something went wrong. Discover what happens when the puppets begin to pull their own strings in this imagi# pp. List Price...# Discount Price,,. # .# P.O. Box #, Grand Central Post Office, New York, N. Y. # Please send me the books Please print full name  address I have circled. S-l S-# S-# S-# S-S S# S-# S-S S-# S-# Name Address City State Zip Code Sorry. No C.O.D.'s. (Please add # c for postage and handling. N.Y.C. residents please add #  sales tax. N.V. State residents please add # sales tax.) iso An exciting collection of stories about androids -- mechanical men and women so realistic Matheson, Charles Beaumont and other sci-fi greats. # Compiled and Edited by George W . 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You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes over your work word by word, blue-penciling changes right on your manuscript. Then he returns it to you with a long letter of advice on how to improve your writing. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to hundreds of publications. Free Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing ability worth developing, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. I I Famous Writers School I Dept. W-# I Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude j worth developing. Please mail me,  without obligation, your Aptitude Test I and illustrated brochure. I Mr. I Mrs Age I Miss Circle one please print I Street I I I City I I State Zip I Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. Galaxy Is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published In Braille and Living Tape.  Vol. # No. # Hayden Howard Ernest Keith Taves Frank Herbert Damon Knight J.W. Schutz Bob Shaw A. Bertram Chandler Dannie Plachta FO'R your information #I Willy Ley on # December #? # Frederik Pohl Algis Budrys Editor Editor Emeritus Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Publisher Associate Publisher lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. these pages the hun.dreds of hunks of hardware in orbit around Earth. Artificial satellites. Boosters. Pieces and bits that became detached from same. The debris resulting when unexpended fuel exploded or was made to explode. 'a few years ago we visited the headquarters of the international Sky Watch at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and watched the computers chugging out the orbital courses of all those space objects. It was an impressive sight, a lot like observing the occupants of a nursery school all diligently adding # to # to get #. One did not feel that anything very exciting would come of it, although, to be sure, it was something that obviously ought to be done... Something rather interesting has come of it now. Consider the observations of that particular celestial chunk called Explorer #. Like all the others, it was watched carefully and the parameters of its orbit noted. Inclination to the equator: a little over # degrees. Apogee: about # kilometers. Perigee: about # kilometers. Until December, #. (That's nineteen sfxy-five. We haven't come to nineteen JiJtyAwe yet.) All of a sudden, in that December, the parameters changed. The orbit flattened, the apogee shrank, the perigee expanded. Not much. The change in the inclination was less than a tenth of a degree. At its farthest, the satellite reached less than a hundred kilometers closer than it had before (out of better than # kilometers); at its closest, it approached Earth to a point only # kilometers farther away than before. But all three changes happened at once -- changes in apogee, perigee and inclination. Moreover, similar changes were observed, at other times, in th# orbits of other satellites. Now, what does that suggest? Well, for one thing it might indicate an application of the kind of reasoning that led Leverrier in #, and Lowell early in this century, to suspect the existence of the planets we now call Neptune and Pluto. If a body in a regular orbit is deflected out of that orbit, there has to be a reason. If you can't find any other reason, you start looking for some body in orbit whose gravitational pull may have done the job. And if you have enough observations to work on, and the time and patience to do the work, you can calculate where that body ought to be and even get some rough idea of its orbit and mass. John Bagby of Hughes Aircraft thought along those lines. Writing in the spaceflight journal, Icarus, he described what happened next. There are about # cases of changes in satellite orbits; unfortunately no one "undiscovered" body can account for all of them, but if you assume that perhaps ten such bodies exist, you can pretty well fit all the data. The next job was to look for the bodies. Last year a through photographic search was made. Two such bodies did turn up on the plates, -- right where the data promised they would be. So it would seem from the evidence that there are satellites of Earth other than the Moon or the ones we humans put aloft. But that's not the end of the story. Once you know the elements of a body's orbit, you can of course predict its future or trace its past. Tracing the past of the orbits of the newly discovered bodies showed something most interesting, indeed. Their orbits intersected. On December #, #, they had all been in the saime place. Fine. What happened on December #? What it looks like is that there was a much larger body which divided into ten or so smaller ones. The presently discovered satellites are not very big; they run around a hundred feet in diameter. The parent satellite which broke up to produce them would of course have been larger -- perhaps a little over # feet in diameter if all the bodies were spheres, even grossly imperfect spheres. It is more than a century since Roche showed mathematically that any natural satellite approaching too close its planet would break up. That's what is called "Roche's limit." It accounts for the rings of Saturn. You can view the phenomenon either way, depending on which theory of planet formation you like: either a large natural satellite breaks up to produce rings, or the little chunks of debris that fall together to produce large natural satellites are prevented from doing so. Either way, within Roche's limit natural satellites, if above a certain size, cannot exist; ( Please turn to page #) National Emergency had been declared. The campuses were quiet -- and deadly... From ajar place and long ago. and broken, I have come at last to another Troy. But still I am, and Troy lives once again. One of three inscriptions below a broken column reerected, at the University of Southern California O o  I gested traffic on the Hollywood Freeway, Kendy's bus crawled along the Harbor Freeway through the sunshine-tinted smog and finally inched down an off-ramp. On Exposition Boulevard he blinked at the ancient Coliseum, still surrounded by barbed wire. Everything south was in Nairobi. He walked north. The National Guardsman at the entry gate to the University merely glanced at his thick plastic preregistration card and motioned him on without searching his suitcase. Kendy's smile relaxed. Infiltrating U.S.C. seemed so easy. Sometimes his world seemed like a satire and ' he looked around cautiously. Mr. Smith had told him there were fewer National Guardsmen here than at other universities this size. All you have to do is blend with the freshmen. Never let them know you're from National University. Simply penetrate security. Photograph the centrifuge. Then enjoy the rest of the semester. Learn to get along with strangers. Who knows? You're young. Maybe during your lifetime -- maybe you'll be the one chosen to meet those galactic beepers face to face'. Assuming they have faces... Kendy squinted in the afternoon sunlight. His cheeks burned faintly as he strode along University Boulevard, an impressive pedestrian mall through the campus. The pavement seemed to vibrate under his feet. The low hedge along its center strip failed to conceal green-painted ventilators shaped like duncecaps. He guessed they led down into the building he sought. Mr. Smith had said the Congressional Research and Development Building extended beneath University Boulevard for five blocks -- a horizontally buried skyscraper. Kendy wondered what was so important about its biochemical centrifuge. Don't get caught. They'll stuff you and mount you in Heritage Hall. If they catch you, you flunk. If you get a few pics of the centrifuge -- mail them quick. You pass. U.S.C. will have flunked the test. They will have let their security be violated. We want to get the captain of their Campus National Guard replaced by a younger and more forceful officer. You will have done your job. You can relax, enjoy your Federal Premarital Subsidy. That's what you wanted isn't it? Not quite... Kendy walked faster, feeling more nervous than excited. He tried to imagine what she would be like. He supposed a compatibility computer would not make a bad mistake. But he had learned how devious Mr. Smith was. If you get restless after you've photographed the centrifuge and played house -- rub on some Passblack and visit Nairobi... To do so seemed a stupid way to get mobbed or arrested. To infiltrate Russia might be easier. Kendy wondered what kind of education Mr. Smith had been trying to give him. He had learned Russian, not Swahili, at National U. The world was confusing. But at least he was almost free. A t the busy intersection of  University Boulevard with Childs Way he peered down into the subwaylike entrance to the Congressional Research and Development Building. Through a glass door he could see a Guardsman seated at a metal desk. On Mr. Smith expected him to figure out how to get past the door guard. But not today. He turned away. At the opposite corner of the intersection stood Tommy Trojan. Up there on his stone pedestal the bronze warrior was clutching his shield and sword. Kendy felt confronted for an instant -- but he noticed Tommy was glaring past him. The statue seemed to be looking across University Boulevard toward Campus National Guard Headquarters. The low, concrete-block building crouched on the lawn in front of the ornate old Doheny Library. Like an invader? Kendy knew conflicting feelings. He could see the clash of architectural styles between the headquarters and other campus structures. But he had been taught that the Guardsmen were here to defend the university. He walked toward their community relations car and smiled with curiosity. Three corroded nozzles protruded from its turret. He wondered what aerosols they had squirted during the first years of the Emergency. With his thumbnail he scraped corrosion from the metal louvers that protected its radiator. Nine -- no, ten years had passed since the National Emergency began. He had been only seven. Now it was difficult for him to imagine what the country had been like before his father was -- he winced and stopped that thought. He was not sure how he felt toward the permanent campus National Guard. There were no Guardsmen at National -- the only university without them. The place had been designed and sociologically structured after the National Emergency had been declared. He touched a sun-aged tire of the armored car. Obviously these Guardsmen no longer drove it much. He had never seen one of these old armored cars in action or even on newscasts. It was as if they did not exist. " Yesterday he had been shown a huge new rocket. It gleamed impressively in his television screen. Some day it would blast off for Mars. Our ship. The Russians were strange, he thought. After their landing on Phobos, Mars' inner moon, they had retreated. They were searching our Moon like madmen. They had found something and had inflated a dome over it. And they were sabotaging radio-telescopes all over the world. They seemed afraid someone would be able to translate the space beeps -- and even more afraid that someone would succeed in answering the beepers. Kendy considered his universe confusing. This oldarmored car seemed almost prehistoric. But it was here, where he was. And on its tire some student troublemaker had chalked the enigmatic ' , Kendy blinked. Most of these Trojans didn't seem to notice the National Guardsmen or him. He watched an amorous couple amble past as he once more lifted his suitcase. With a nervous smile of expectation he strode along Childs Way, looking for his assigned dorm tower. He supposed Federal Premarital and Marital Subsidies were intended to keep the students interested in each other instead of politics. He saw a Guardsman walking to-ward him, carring a police-type shotgun by its top handle. Even though he had a minicamera concealed in his suitcase, he felt at ease and smiled. The stubby shotgun made him feel at home. He had trained with one in the armory at National University, had learned how to disassemble one in the dark. He had felt revulsion and excitement. The weapon was a cutie. It was only twenty-seven inches long because its eighteeninch barrel and receiver extended through the stock to within a few inches of the butt plate. He remembered its many skull-rattling blasts, its twelve-gauge shotgun shells exploding so close to his cheek... Power. Although he knew it had been manufactured for police forces since before the Emergency, it looked weirdly futuristic to him. The plastic bulge above the barrel -- in front of the carrying handle -- contained a focusable flashlight. At night this Guardsman could aim its beam of light and the pattern of buckshot would exactly fill the bright circle -- bam, bam. bam. Kendy thought it more than adequate for silencing noisy students. He grinned and shrugged. Mr. Smith had told him that U.S. C. enjoyed more permissive freedom than most universities. Perhaps this was because it had been a private school before the Declaration of National Emergency. Guardsmen had indiscriminately occupied all universities in order to protect the government's investment in research facilities when the Emergency began. And ten years later the Guardsmen were still here. the street, not the boulevard -- he was astonished to see a Black Man. A plastic-green pass was pinned on his white coveralls. Kendy blinked. That was an F on the pass. The Black Man walked unchallenged into a building. The door guard never even glanced at him. Before Kendy could get over that shock he saw a second Black Man. This one wore a gray flannel suit and carried a book. Kendy felt off balance and not from the weight of his suitcase. There hadn't been a single Black at National University. As several more walked by he felt more -- uncomfortable. He wondered what they were thinking. He supposed they returned each night to Nairobi-Watts. Here came one in a flamboyant robe. Kendy looked away. He was having disturbingly happy recollections of playing with children who must have been Negroes. Of course, that had been before the National Emergency. Three more strolled toward him. One of them was a girl. He realized his reaction was naive, perhaps laughable. He was feeling uneasy, yet fascinated. Naturally their clothing looked strange to him. His teevee could not receive the Black Channels and suddenly he felt as if he were the one who had been isolated. And he was afraid. He felt as strange as if he and they were from different planets. He did not know what to believe about recent U.S. history. He crossed McClintoek Avenue and saw his dorm tower -- Premarital A-#. He hoped he would be able to adjust to all this pre-Emergency type confusion and freedom at U.S.C. Nervously he took out his preregistration card and approached the portcullis of the concrete dorm. He shoved his card into the slot. The iron door clicked open. As he entered the hallway he heard the door close behind him. He stood in front of the ADtion. Something buzzed. He supposed he had better hurry and insert his plastic card into the stopped the buzzing. He heard a clank and hoped all his preregistration forms -- which Mr. Smith had mailed from a counterfeit prep school -- were properly recorded. He had thought they were. U.S.C. had mailed back this preregistration card to his nearest National Guard Headquarters, so everything should be all right. He heard a rattling sound. A brass key slid out. He grabbed it, expecting to find his room number assignment on one side or the other. The key was blank. Perhaps the room keys were not numbered as a security measure. A lost key was less a liability that way. The box buzzed and disgorged his card. As his fingers closed on it he saw it had been altered. bedded in its semiliquid core, had been dispersed, leaving him with around his neck and peered through its integral lens into its plastic depths, hunting for his room assignment. He saw his thumbprint still sparkling inside the card. Its whorls were shaped from metallic dust. Within a flattened universe of glittering specks his facial galaxy grinned at him. Above it shimmered the flecks of gallium arsenide in shich his falsified academic records had been recorded. Although he had spent last year as a freshman at National University, this card innocently showed he had been a senior at a prep school which did not exist. He watched the metalized helixes of his more basic information quivering. Below them was a new array of microscopic glitter arranged into words and he smiled. It uas his class schedule. All three courses had been confirmed. Stiffening with excitement, he found the number # gleaming in the room space. His room was on the ninth floor of Premarital Dorm A-#. Room Number #. F eeling both homy and frightened, he lurched across the entry hall to the bank of elevators and pressed the button for the ninth floor. Up there in the smoothly carpeted hallway, with admirable cool, be ambled to his assigned room. He smoothed back his blond hair. Taking a last deep breath, he thrust his key into the lock, twisted it. The door popped open. At her dressing table, the girl turned around with a startled smile. "What room are you looking for?" she asked, standing up with an audible swish of her black-and-gold malkia robe. "This one, I thought." He felt his cheeks burning as he took a backward step, wondering how she had managed to get into the wrong room. "That old computer must have made a mistake on your card," she said. "I guess we both can see that I'm expecting somebody else!" "Yeah, I'm sorry. I thought this was my room." "Give me your card and I'll find out what your room number should be." Rising, with her hair frothy-black and silver-sequined in a towering natural that made her seem as tall as he was, she reached for his card with slender fingers. "Bahati -- ema," the girl sighed, poking his card into the administrative slot in the wall. She altered her soft voice to the distinct computspeak accent the system could understand and asked for his room number. "Photofaxed, please." She turned her head. Her hair seemed to float like a weightless crown. Shyly Kendy smiled because he was fascinated. She seemed so different from Helen, the only girl with whom he had ever made love. The photofaxer extended its paper tongue. The Black frowned. Kendy felt embarrassed. On the white paper, printed below his Birth Security Number was this room number, #. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I didn't realize I'd -- wait a minute." She inserted her own card in Ballantine Soofcs beauty of the St. LouisCorv is over (but won't be actually by the time you read this). Never mind. Traditionally, in publishing, September is a good reading month. Summer doldrums are over, the Icids are back in school, everyone is thinking in a serious-minded way about the long, hard, intellectual winter ahead. So September is a big, big publishing month.  WE are celebrating it with George MacDonald's very kooky is almost as extraordinary as the novel itself is the idea that anything as modern as this was written back in the I#'s by a Scottish (sometime) minister of advanced years. You'll recognize it by the superb Gervasio cover of a man in an attic. an easy book to read (clearly a bit beyond those mainstream reviewers). This is a jagged, fractionated, panoramic view of overpopulated times to come -- the style itself expressive of the explosive tensions generated by too goddamned many people. The theme is well known to all of us. The handling is very special indeed. Stay with it for # pages and you'll be hooked for another #.  month -- Larry Niven's volume of occurred to us that of all the new young writers, Larry's worlds are probably the most ingeniously specific. The shape of his particular space is very definite, very much his own. Thank whatever gods there may be that he is also a very good writer, so we can all enjoy. too -- a promotion yet -- although he is our candidate for the author than whom no one needs promotion less; and a peculiar wisp of a anti-Nixon. Not that we're terribly concerned about being in. (We're rational, that's all).  it comes at .# though), plus a couple of non-fiction works perLeona and Robert Rienow.  your planet while you can. BB. the communications slot and asked the same question about herself. The paper tongue extended a little farther, revealing the same room number. "That's impossible." She laughed angrily. "Listen, you -- machine. My first name happens to be Amani. Amani Johnson. Try again. What's my room number?" The system kept repeating #. It would not admit error. Neither would she. "One of us is in the wrong room." Kendy lifted his suitcase. "Sorry to bother you," he muttered and backed into the empty hall.  "Maybe you're supposed to be in another tower," she called. "I'm going to phone my rafiki. She's a sophomore. She'll know how to find out what room you're really assigned to. You wait in the rec room. It's at the end of the hall." He glanced at the elevator as he retreated along the hall. Attention was what he did not want to attract. His falsified records had been accepted by the computer. To be questioned now by a live administrator was something he wanted to avoid. He could hear Amani's suddenly plaintive voice addressing the phone. He hoped the wires were not being monitored. He stared through the west ! window of the rec room at the fiery glare of sunset behind the silhouetted buildings. It made him think of a terrifying night he had known as a small boy. He looked down. He did not see many students in the gloom on Childs Way. He supposed most freshmen would not move in until Sunday night -- or Monday, when classes would begin. Maybe he should hide in an empty room until then. He was sweating. He felt unsure -- he was not yet used to feeling like a spy. Every time he heard the elevator stop at this floor he was afraid it was delivering a Guardsman. If they searched his suitcase, they'd never let him out of the Detention Camp. Feeling paranoid, he hurried toward the elevator. He heard voices from Amani's room, a giggling voice and an angry voice. The angry voice was hers. He scowled and raised his knuckles to knock but changed his mind. The door opened anyway. H e looked past the girl standing in the doorway. Amani glared at him from across the room. "Ooh, he is," the other girl giggled. She was much lighter complexioned than Amani and very pretty, Kendy thought. Her hair had been straightened into limp bangs and there was nothing Nairobian about her pants-suit. ' 'Ki valuana-eupe -- ' ' She giggled toward Amani and her hand covered her mouth. She slid past him into the hall. her eyebrows rising as if she were properly horrified. Her giggles reached him from the elevator. He felt like a fool. "Either come in or go out," Amani said. "I'm leaving." "I didn't mean to -- " "You're not. I'm coming back on Monday to tell those administrators to fix it. Someone didn't tell the computer. Charlene says he's transferred to Cal Tech. He didn't even have the decency to tell me. Anyway there's something wrong with their computer." He, Kendy thought. Apparently she had expected to be matched with her own Main Man, as if it were prearranged. For an instant Kendy wondered if Mr. Smith had mixed things up, rearranged room assignments. But he was unable to understand why. "I'm sorry." "Not your fault," she said, folding a flamboyant robe and laying it in her opened suitcase. "I'm going home." "Nairobi?" "Where do you think I live? Beverly Hills?" "It's already after five o'clock," Kendy blurted. "If you think I'm worried about getting home through a little old border curfew -- you're right. But I'm going home." Kendy picked up his suitcase. "No, you're not. I'm going to find another room." He descended to the ground floor, scowling. His suitcase felt as heavy as if it were full of pre-Emergency bricks. The dorm cafeteria was closed and probably would not open before Monday. He could walk back along Childs Way to eat at the Commons. But he needed a place to hide his suitcase and noticed a downward slanting hall. He reached a basement door in semi-darkness. With an intuitive movement, instinctive with great burglars, he reached up and slid his fingers along the ledge above the door. He found the key. A basement downstep toppled him forward, sent him staggering through a net of cobwebs. The place had not been used for a long time. The narrow beam of his tiny penlight slashed through a jungle of insulated pipes. In the middle of the concrete floor sat a bulky garbage disposal unit. It resembled a hippopotamus with a lever to open its jaws. It sat on a sewer manhole. Above it, like an arboreal cobra, dangled a thick electric cord. Its three-fanged #-volt head was not plugged in. He supposed thisdorm had been built soon after the National Emergency began -- while there were still a lot of garbage strikes. The disposal looked big enough to swallow a man. He noticed a sink in the far corner. Above it was an empty light socket. Something moved in front of him like an ectoplasmic flash as he groped forward. He winced. The movement was his reflection in a dusty mirror. He turned the tap. Water gurgled. He remembered the story about the U.C.L.A. sophomore the Guardsman caught near some leaflets. The authorities had cancled his housing subsidy -- and the student had hidden in a campus broom closet for the next three years, graduating with honors. II L ife was not easy, Kendy deIcided after his first night on that concrete floor. Bleary-eyed, clutching his hip in pain, he wandered around the weekend campus. He was afraid that on Monday -- if he went to the administrators to complain about the computer's mismatch -- someone would decide to investigate him. He discovered subversive elements on this campus, as Mr. Smith had warned he would. Unconcealed in a flower bed near the National Guard Building lay a littook a short cut through the hedge in the middle of University Boulevard. His groping hand discovered a nearly invisible fishing leader strung tautly within the hedge. He glanced at the subwaylike entrance to the Congressional Research and Development Building -- if he had been running away from there the line would have pitched him headlong. But it had been intended for pursuing Guardsmen. Students would know. Kendy frowned. He wanted to reconnoiter the building. He had acquired an F pass last night in the wooden shed where the maintenance men changed out of their white coveralls. They had left them hanging there, complete with F passes. He had reached in, snagged one. He stood above the C.R.A.D. Building, the pass pinned to his shirt, but lost his nerve and wandered away along the boulevard toward Founders Hall. His lips moving, he stared at one of the three inscriptions on the modern base of the ancient, broken stone column. Hector and Paris saw me at Troy. I suffered the wrath of Agamemnon. A nd once, as she passed, Golden Helen Brushed me with her sleeve. His mouth twisted. His own Helen had been pale and dark-haired and was probably still working at National University's biochem lab. To hell with you... He aimed his sudden rage and frustration at her but it curved back upon himself. He straightened, walked back to the entrance of the C.R.A.D. Building and down its iron steps. He pushed aside the glass door, caught a stale odor of cigar smoke. The Guardsman did not bother to look out from behind his newspaper. His voice drawled, "Hold it. Building's closed. This is Saturday." "I forgot a book." "Building's closed on weekends and at night." "I was sent to get an important book." "Building's closed unless you have a one-shot weekend pass from the Captain. Even then it's closed to you, kid."  The Guardsman made the last word sound like an insult. Janitors along the hall were shouting above the roar of a floor polishing machine and Kendy raised his voice. "I have an F pass. And I need that book." "The building's closed." Wispy smoke writhed above the newspaper. Kendy suspected that cigar smokers were even more stubborn than the surviving cigarette smokers. "Please, sir, if I -- " "You act like this building belongs to you. You Goddamn student -- get the hell out of here. And I'll remember you -- " The Guardsman's muffled voice pursued Kendy as he retreated up the iron stairway. He glanced back through the glass door. The Guardsman had tipped back his chair, had propped up both boots on his desk. He took up enough space to block the passage of anyone but an invisible man. felt he could barely walk. He had arranged a sleeping pad of crumpled papers and discarded coveralls in the basement but doubted he could survive a semeshistory of Man. Now these old hister of this kind of accommodation, tory courses were being modernHe trudged toward the Adminisized. tration Building. Kendy scratched under his armIn the long line of disgruntled pit, remembering that Mr. Smith students he saw Amani and had told him the Senate's Curricudodged out of sight. He had been lum Revision Subcommittee had about to risk applying for another recommended that this controroom but now thought better of it. versial course be canceled. But the He walked away to his first class, overburdened Senate Emergency rationalizing that he would have Education Committee had not been happy to bunk with her. So gotten around to a vote, let her stand in line all day if she Kendy yawned. U.S.C. had a wanted to disturb matters -- he reputation as an old-fashioned could not afford to be invest!school. Although its last president gated. was being detained in the EmerHe was half asleep in class when geiicy Camp on San Miguel Isthe live-lecturer's theme" reached land, U.S.C. had stubbornly conthe Greeks and Trojans. Surpristinned to require its freshmen to ingly, the lecturer made the enroll in obsolete courses like CvGreeks seem like the bad guys, ilization. He supposed the CoaliThe concept sounded vaguely tion Congress would eventually subversive. Kendy opened his get around to restructuring the eneyes. The professor was not talking tire curriculum. The university about the Iliad. He was talking would become more like National about two of the lost epics, the U., which was the prototype for asmikra -- which told what hapthe future. pened following the death of His second class was Freshman Achilles -- and the Mperjj, which Biochemistry. He had liked the described the Fall of Troy. Only subject at National U. and exbrief synopses and a few lines pected to get along all right again, from these books survived. Kendy He had already worked with a had to admit to himself that the zonal centrifuge -- it could change horse gimmick had been a sneaky mankind. The centrifuge was trick. It should have been called barely mentioned here, the Greek Horse. They built it. His afternoon class was his Ulysses had hatched the murtutorial. Bleary-eyed, he squinted derous plot. Kendy scowled. at the bulletin board, searching Mr. Smith had warned him for his name. He found it and about this class. Its all-encompasswinced the suspicion. He had ing title was Civilization. Instead been assigned to a Dr. Smyert. of teaching something useful like The Dr. Smyert? An administra, engineering or accounting, this tive box unquestioningly issued five-unit course still surveyed the him another F pass because Dr. Smyert's office was down in the Congressional Research and Development Building. The coincidence was interesting. Having suffered through the intensive Russian course at National University, Kendy knew what the word smyert meant -- and more. Dr. Magadan Smyert was the escapee who had been E. Valilov's teacher. Kendy began to feel excitement. Vavilov was the Soviet biochemist cosmonaut who failed to land on Mars. He had stopped on its moon, Phobos, and returned, reportedly in disgrace. Yet old Dr. Smyert was the one who had fled to the United States. K endy walked unchallenged past the Guardsman at the door and knew that Mr. Smith had arranged this meeting. Dr. Smyert peered up at him through rimless glasses. "KhtoT Whol Kendy tried out his Ukranian accent as he identified himself and the haggard man's eyes widened. Dr. Smyert seized Kendy's arm. He began to complain about his treatment here. Apparently, Dr. Smyert expected him to serve as interpreter, errand boy and ghost writer for dull lesson plans. Dr. Smyert was supposed to be teaching Soviet lab procedures to four non-Russianspeaking undergraduate students. And he despised the task. He considered teaching undergraduates an insult to his past biochemical prowess. "Pochemul" He iterated that his academic field was pure research and clung to Kendy's arm. The door creaked and Dr. Smyert's eyes widened. He whispered that he wished he were already safe at National University. Here security was so weak that anyone could sneak downstairs and murder him. When Kendy plodded back to his dorm he knew his tutorials with Dr. Smyert would be sheer misery. He had been a little surprised that a Russian escapee would be assigned an office in a restricted building. But maybe there was a reason for everything. He was heading for his basement hideout when a door banged in the dorm. He flinched. Exhaustion was making him a paranoiac. He wished himself invisible. No luck. "Hi," a girl's soft voice said behind him. "I haven't seen you since Friday. I guess you had enough pull to get another room." "Huh?" "Are you sick or something?" Amani's voice leaped a little. "They told me to fill out a missing person form. They didn't really listen to me. Like -- maybe they're going to take away my room." "Don't know -- " Wearily he became aware that two more Blacks were standing behind her. The man was scowling at him. The girl was the giggler, Charlene -- giggling. Amani was telling him in sudden anger, "Listen, listen -- I stood all morning in that stinky line at their Administration Building. When I got, to the head of the line they told me that if their computer matched us for the same room then that's how it was going to be. If I didn't like it I could drop out because there's a long waiting list. They don't want to understand." Kendy was so tired he had difficulty following her words. The whole conversation began to seem disjointed to him. "Who?" "How'd you," Amani asked, "get your new room?" He said nothing, not wanting to admit where he had been sleeping. "You'd better," the Black Man stated mysteriously and ominously, "move your trash out of her room." "He's -- " Amani began. She changed course. "His stuff has never been in my room." The giggler whooped, covering hor face. "I'm talking about his suitcase," Amani said angrily. The giggler subsided. Her hand dropped, exposing teeth. Straight hair framed her lovely honeybrown face and contrasted with Amani's stormy darkness. "These are my friends," Amani said sharply to him. "Don is Charlene's roommate." "The room is Amani's," the slender, conservatively dressed young Black stated, eyeing Kendy as if estimating his height and weight. "I hope you're not thinking of -- " "Don, he hasn't tried to take my room," Amani cut in. "I haven't even seen him since Friday." She laughed with embarrassment as sudden as her earlier anger. "Why don't you two just shake hands and act friendly." "All I meant was -- " Don glanced at Amani as he clamped down on Kendy's hand. "If he -- " "He's got a room," Amani repeated. "He's got a better room assignment. What would he be doing around here if he didn't have a room? Don, stop worrying about his taking my room. He's already shown he's got more influence than we have. He's got a room. Where's your room?" Kendy opened his mouth. "What I meant, was," Don interrupted, dropping Kendy's hand and rushing his voice at Amani, "if anyone bothers you, anybody at all, you just remember that Charlene and I are in the dorm across the street. You phone." He stepped closer to Amani. "I'll come." "We're your friends, honey," Charlene drawled. "Fine friends," Amani flared at her. "Didn't you hear you-knowwho was transferring to CajTech? Why didn't you tell me he's left me the only Black Woman in this tower?" "We hadn't heard," Don protested. "I didn't know till yesterday when Charlene told me." "Honey, I didn't know," Charlene squeaked. "By the time I knew -- I thought those stupid administrators had found someone else for you. I didn't think their machine would make mistakes like this." She glanced at Kendy and again her fingers screened her face. She giggled. Abruptly Amani turned her back to both of them. "Amani," Don was pleading. "I don't believe in giving advice to people. But you know the administrators won't let you keep that whole room for yourself. Everybody else in your dorm's already matched by now, so they'll just assign any old honk -- well, anybody who registers late -- to your room, no matter what his compatibility profile is." "Honey, we think you should go home," Charlene giggled. "TaJadhalV." Amani exclaimed, whirling at her. "Let me run my own life." She scowled at Kendy. "What administrator did you see to get your room assignment changed?" "Didn't," he muttered. "I been sleeping in the -- in a rec room." Charlene emitted a whoop. "I don't want any more of your noise," Amani said. Charlene seized Don's arm. "Let's go," she said firmly, almost dragging her man out of the building. "I didn't mean to put you in an embarrassing situation," Kendy muttered to Amani. "I'll go to the administrators if you -- " "I couldn't be any more embarrassed and humiliated than I already am. I don't mean by you -- I just feel so angry at everybody." Her voice rose. "Tomorrow you go to the administrators. Where's your suitcase!" "In the -- none of your biz." He laughed groggily. "I been sleeping on a concrete floor." "What rec room is that?" she asked with suspicion. "The ones I've seen are carpeted. You're putting me on." "Too sleepy," he muttered. "Can't even lie straight." "Very funny -- but I'm not laughing." pointed at the blue line in the checkerboard linoleum. "Over there is your half. We'll straighten out the rest tomorrow morning." Kendy was feeling happier. "Little problem tonight. Bathroom's in your half." "Do tell? Well, I'll give you this square here -- and that square -- and you can get there in two jumps. What's your major." "Don't shoot. I thought it was biochemistry." He sighed, feeling dizzy again. "But that's not why I'm so hung over. Pardon me if I lie down on my bed. I've been sleeping on -- " "A concrete floor? I'll bet? Aren't you going to go look for your-suitcase? Or is it pawned?" "Tell me your major instead." "Elementary Education with minors in Art and Creative Dance. If you'll excuse me now -- I have a date." "Thanks," he mumbled, his eyes closing again. When he awoke the room was dark and empty. He went down to the dorm cafeteria too late and had to hike along Childs Way to Commons to get anything to eat. Later he wandered around the night campus, procrastinating. He found himself drawn to the CongressionalResearch and Development Building. At this hour the only ones going down were maintenance men in their white coveralls. All of them seemed to be Black. He wondered why he was so nervous. When he finally went back to the dorm the room was dark. Amani seemed asleep. He changed hurriedly -- in the bathroom -- into his basketball warm-up suit, although at National U. he had slept in his jockey shorts. He slipped between the sheets of his bed and became wide awake. Pipes gurgled. Elevators hummed. People laughed in the hall. Doors closed. Toilets flushed. He had to go to the bathroom and was not amused. Ill T he next day, like two porcupines in a cage, they acted as if they were accustomed to each other's presence. He felt conspicuous with her in the cafeteria. But everyone seemed to play it cool, except the Student Representative of the National Guard, who did a double-take and scurried away to telephone. Amani did not seem to notice. And he began to realize that she was more relaxed and secure within herself than any girl he had known. "Please pass the chumvi," she whispered mischievously and he learned his second word of Swahili, salt. The first word had been Amani. She explained; "I was only eight when I named myself. That's one nice thing about Nairobi. You're free to choose your own name when you have your eighth birthday. When I was a little girl -- right after we were attacked by your National Emergency -- I guess all I wanted was peace. So that's what I named myself, peace." Amani smiled, her teeth flashing. "I'm not so peaceful now." In the afternoon -- as he walked toward the entrance to 'the Congressional Research and Development Building, dreading his next "tutorial" with Dr. Smyert -- a lean National Guardsman joined him stride for stride. "You're Dorm A-two, room nine-four-three-B, aren't you?" The voice was soft and trying to be pleasant. Kendy forced a smile. "That's right." "I'm Captain of the Guard here." The bony face seemed almost as old and weary as a fullprofessor's. "I wonder if I might look at your registration card." "Be my guest." Kendy watched the other peer into the lens of the card and felt numb. But the captain smiled in recognition. "Preempt Prep. Glad to meet you, Ken. My student assistant last semester was from the same school. So you know him." Was the captain playing games? Mr. Smith had been infiltrating students to U.S.C. for several years. Like Kendy, they had been given counterfeit academic records from that nonexistent prep school. Like Kendy, they were really from National U. They had been sent to test U.S.C.'s security, to test the National Guard. The captain was chatting cheerfully: "I wondered how you happened to get such an -- inappropriate compatibility assignment in Dorm A-two. But I realize it must be a computer error and no reflection on your political background. Errors like this cause unrest. They're what I try to prevent or correct. I'll go with you to Administration and help you get assigned to a different roommate." "I'm happy with what I've -- " Kendy caught himself. He shivered -- but not from fear. He wanted to hit this bone-faced man. "Maybe you're right," the captain said thoughtfully. "They do a job on you kids at Preempt Prep. Not doing anything may be safest in this case. If I corrected your room-mate assignment now, certain trouble-makers might mistake my motives as prejudice. Maybe there's a reason for the computer error." The captain winked. "At least you'll be in a position to note who her friends and contacts are. So keep in touch with me. And maybe I can help you some time." Kendy could not speak. His face contorted in a toothy grimace. Evidently the captain thought it a smile. He grinned at Kendy, turned and left. K endy was stlll on the rebound when he reached the C.R.A.D. Building. He tried to keep from exploding at Dr. Smyert. The lonely old Ukranian kept regurgitating his life story. Kendy managed to last him out and later wandered into the hall. He prowled until he thought he knew where the ultra-centrifuge was kept. He saw an outer room that contained several humming centrifuges no larger than basketballs inset in washing machines. An inner room was kept locked -- faculty members with keys used them, entering and leaving. The last departing graduate student locked the door of the outer room. But the maintenance men, arriving with their pushcarts and brooms, unlocked all the doors along the hall. Kendy waited for his chance. He walked into the outer room and noted the make of lock on the inner door. He hurried out, not wanting to be trapped if someone closed the outer door. He met a Guardsman ambling along the hall, shooing the last students out of the building. "Time to go home. Building's closed." The next day Kendy tried to stay late. A Guardsman discovered him crouched under Dr. Smyert's desk. "Don't let me catch you in here after hours again, kid," the Guardsman said. "I should report you to the Captain." Kendy realized that only Guardsmen and maintenance Blacks enter and leave the building at night. He bought six locks of the same make as the inner door's. In his basement hideaway he practiced with his little burglar pick and Lshaped tension bar. Inserting the pick, he released the tumbler pins and tried to hold them up with his tension bar. He discovered he needed three hands and more patience. Late that night Amani teased him as he came in. "How's your girl friend?" "You're my only friend." "Not that kind .of friend, whitey-whitey-white boy." Amani laughed and walked into the bathroom to change for bed. "Guess what," he called. "Dr. Smyert requisitioned a desk for me today -- like I'm a grad student. My own desk. I filled out the form and he signed it. He didn't believe they'd really let him have it. He's always complaining how miserly the administration is. I guess he hates our bureaucrats as much as the ones he ran from." "Good for him." "He's a misanthrope." "What?" She was rustling the shower curtains. "Picture an old Ukranian biochemist so bitter he renames himself smyert. That's the Russian word for death." The shower roared, stopped. Amani came out in an immensely concealing housecoat. Her arms darted from huge sleeves and she began to rub her head with a towel. "Amani, the really important thing about Dr. Smyert is that he knows E. Vavilov. He was Vavilov's teacher." "Ooh, my hair's wilted. Why don't you invent a waterproof hairspray." "Don't you ever pay any attention to what's going on in the world? E. Vavilov was trained to become the first biochemist to set foot on Mars. For some reason he decided not to land there." "Maintaining a natural hairdo can get damned difficult." "Instead of descending from Phobos in the landing module. Vavilov stayed fussing around on that little moon as if he'd discovered something more important than Mars. Didn't you pay attention to the space coverage?" "More likely I was taking a dancing lesson or doing something else meaningful to me." Amani laughed. "Seems like all my life teevee has been counting down and blasting off. In Nairobi, at least, we don't waste money that way. But lecture me if it makes you feel superior." "The telepics showed him crawling around on Phobos in his shiny suit. I suppose you know Phobos is the Greek word for fear. Did I say it's Mars' inner moon? Very small. But it looked enormous. Their little ship attached itself as planned. E. Vavilov was supposed to crawl into the landing module and separate himself and land on Mars -- but he didn't. He embarrassed the Soviet P.R. men." "Am I supposed to ask why?" "The ship returned to someplace like Engelsistan. E. Vavilov seemed to be in disgrace and was kept incommunicado. His military pilot read from a prepared statement. Officially a minor technical difficulty prevented the Mars landing. But Dr. Smyert thinks they brought something back from Phobos. And lately the Russians have begun frantically searching our Moon. Maybe they've discovered the same thing there?" "Am I supposed to ask what? All right. An Easter egg?" She laughed. "Or a Chinese cosmonaut?" "Seriously, Dr. Smyert says he doesn't know what's under the dome they inflated on our Moon. He claims the Party started persecuting him because he was E. Vavilov's teacher. Anyway, Moscow canceled Dr. Smyert's research grant. They demoted him to teaching lab procedures in some Ukranian technical school. What really bugs him: he was demoted but now they've permitted E. Vavilov to return to the research institute on Lake Baikal." Kendy frowned. "Sometimes I think the real rea.son they sent Dr. Smyert away from his Lake Baikal institute and took away his grant was because he's gotten old. Sometimes he seems confused. He contradicts himself. The man I'd like to meet is Vavilov. I want to ask him what happened." "That would be a little difficult," she said. "Russia?" H arder than visiting Nairobi?" "We wouldn't let you through the barricades." "I've got a bottle of Passbiack." He laughed. "Ed only walk in a little way, holding your hand." "I think you're studying to be either a provocateur or a honk vigilante spy. You? My roommate? Even if our Security Patrol rescued you from a lamppost we'd still hold you for the next prisoner exchange. Nairobi's where you're not going." . "Just trying to learn," he said, "about my country." "Yours? There's no room for you in Nairobi," she said, "and for me Nairobi is a cop-out. For me its Nairobiclaustrophobia. I've come out to enjoy the rest of my country." She sat down in front of her mirror, unwinding the towel from her hair. "Have you told your mother about me?" "You kidding? She thinks I'm in an all-girls dorm." Her gaze dropped and her quick hands laid out a row of straight clamps on her dressing table. He wanted to say -- something. "My mother was what they used to call -- a hippy," he blurted. "So I've tried to be the opposite. What's that big squeeze-bottle of gunk?" "None of your business." She opened a drawer. He watched the bending column of her neck. Rising again, the dark cloud of her natural floated high above the bright red collar of her housecoat. Not only did she persist in concealing herself in that flamboyant tent, he thought with poignancy, she slept in an immense cotton Kanga that hid her in a quivering of printed blossoms. He had never had a good tom-peep at her, although her various pink bras, white bras, black bras festooned the drying line over the tub and interfered with his right elbow when he was shaving. She had beautiful hands, much smaller than his. His first pair of cotton gloves had been too small for him. He had soaked them in the bathroom and tried to stretch them -- they had shrunk instead. Amani had seized them for her own because another weird course she was taking was Woodworking. She would not tell him why. And he could not tell her he had bought the gloves in order not to leave fingerprints in the C.R.A.D. Building. She always tried to dress in the bathroom. Or she changed inside her Kanga. The garment was as voluminous as a mu-mu. Sometimes she would flow out of it in black leotards. She would stretch and bend sinuously on her side of the room, practicing her dancing. She whirled and leaped when he teased her. She could land without a sound and, without crossing the blue line on the linoleum, tower above him on tiptoes, her hair quivering like a magic beeswarm. N OW she fidgeted indecisively at her dressing table. She would never resemble one of those golden ads for Cleopatra suntan lotion, he thought. She looked as she should -- like herself. He wanted to say as much and to tell her what he was feeling. But he was afraid she would laugh and reject him. He watched her hand rise to her hair again. Her eyes were looking at him from the mirror and he grinned with embarrassment. "What," he blurted, "are you doing with all that junk?" "There are times when a girl needs a little privacy." Her reflection smiled at him. "Hint-hint." "Okay," he said awkwardly. "I was going out anyway." He had planned to stay. He had been postponing his attempt to violate the security of the Congressional Research and Development Building. His life had become strangely, exotically beautiful when he was near Amani arid he had found himself reluctant to risk being caught and spoiling their relationship. He guessed spies should not fall in love. Maybe the best thing was . to get his task over with. Try to write off Amani's sorcery. He had figured out a way to become an invisible man on this campus. He went down to his basement, relocked the door behind him and groped to the sink. Reaching up, he turned on his light bulb and blinked into the dusty mirror. He reached under the sink and took out the rolled-up white coveralls. They drooped on his lanky frame. The janitor who had thrown them away must have been both tall and fat. Kendy was merely tall and nervous. He rubbed Passblack on his cheeks and saw his identity dissolve in the mirror. He tried a smile, found himself expressing fright. He pulled on new white cotton workgloves, a larger size. The others had been too small. These were too large. He stuffed a rag into the sagging pocket of his coveralls to hold down his minicamera. He did not want it bouncing out if he had to run. He looked at the disposal. He hoped it would be able to grind up his stolen plastic toolbox. The box held an electric repair kit, fuses, pliers, tape, pencil and requisition forms in triplicate. He had decided on the identity of an electrical repairman complete with toolbox and signed work order. Wondering if he had forgotten anything, he pinned the F pass on his coveralls. His worries increased as he walked along Childs Way, brightly illuminated by "emergency" lights. He changed his mind and circled north, finally reaching University Boulevard near Founders Hall. By now he was breathing too hard, beginning to sweat -- he could rouse suspicion. He paused beside the broken marble column to calm down. He kneeled to read the inscription at the base of the column. Ye parent gods! who rule the fate of Troy. Still dwells the Dardan spirit in the boy; When minds, like these, in striplings thus ye raise; Yours is the godlike act, be yours the praise. The poem made him feel uncomfortable. The broad buildings loomed around him, thousands of lighted windows glaring from emptied classrooms, awaiting the janitors. He pulled the bill of his janitor's cap lower over his eyes. The C.R.A.D. Building nearby breathed warmth up its stairway against his face as if he were entering the jaws of a dragon. He clumped down the iron steps, pushed open the glass door. The stench of dead cigar smoke wrinkled his nose. He glanced toward the desk. The Guardsman there seemed asleep under the newspaper spread like a shroud over his face. But the newspaper rustled as Kendy walked past the desk. He continued down the hall, ambled past Dr. Smyert's office. He heard the clunk of a wastebasket being emptied. But he saw no one in the hall and managed to slip into the room he had scouted earlier. He thrust his burglar's pick into the lock of the inner door. His hands were shaking. He dropped the tension bar. It took him nearly fifteen minutes to turn the lock. The narrow beam from his penlight showed him so little of the inner room at any one time that he was unable to visualize it as a whole. He hoped he would recognize the centrifuge. IV H e heard a click ahead of him and switched off the penlight. He stood in darkness, listening, doubting whatever he was doing here. If he were caught and convicted, Mr. Smith had assured him, he would never land in the Federal Penitentiary. To show that he had been testing security for another government agency would present no problem. But a revelation of his activities could end his usefulness as an agent. No further sound came from the darkness around him. He again turned on the penlight, saw disordered shapes and shadows. He found it difficult to orient himself both physically and spiritually. His early indoctrination had become diluted by what he felt for Amani and by exposure to a more multifaceted existence than the one he had known at National University. Yesterday Amani had needled him about his being white. Whites were insistent on the continuation of the National Emergency. He had argued weakly that the Emergency still was only a temporary measure. Temporary for you, permanent for us. But you white innocents are prisoners, too... He put her out of his mind and tried to concentrate. The room seemed so cluttered with equipment that he was afraid he would photograph the wrong centrifuge. A row of them gleamed along one wall, one-eyed and silent. His penlight beam found an imperfectly closed vacuum-seal lid in the floor and under it a round pit. He smiled with excitement. In the pit was a planetoid shape -- it had to be the rotor of the centrifuge. It was big. He had never imagined a titanium rotor of this diameter. He did not see how it could endure the centrifugal stress from the rumored hundred and fifty thousand revolutions per minute. The enclosing pit was probably insurance in case it burst. He took out his minicamera. It was a hard little world, he thought. Biochemistry had become important to the Defense Department. Necessarily they were trying to overtake the Russians. There were many military applications for biological centrifuges. He adjusted the microflash on the camera, assuring himself that he was a good guy, a counterspy helping to defend his country, his tribe. What he defended might not be perfect but it was his. His life was part of his tribe's. To think otherwise was to consider self-destruction. Sometimes, in moments of unhappiness, he had daydreamed of taking action to improve his tribe. He would change it from within. But it seemed ready to burst apart. To think of changing it beyond recognition seemed as frightening as lobotomizing himself. Clumsily his fingers operated the gadgets on his camera. The microflash blinked. He took another picture. Curiosity overcame him. He dropped into the pit to examine the rotor. It was shaped like a double boiler. He unbolted and raised its upper hemisphere. The hinge creaked. Instead of being divided into four pie-slice compartments like the zonal rotor he had used in the lab at National University, the interior of this giant was divided into eight sectors. It would whirl   with tremendous centrifugal force. He noticed alternate sectors were designed to r-emain empty of fluid in order to minimize weight and structural strain. Its very long radius provided a long gradient. The contents of ruptured human cells would be spread a long way through the sucrose gradient. He supposed the different organic molecules would be separated from each other more effectively in this big rotor. The laminated edges made him think the metal was not titanium. It seemed to be a composite -- perhaps a metal-epoxy sandjvich, light and strong. He guessed its basic technology was another spinoff from jet-engine rotor-compressor research. He shrugged, feeling slightly disappointed and wondering what all the secrecy was about. He saw no breakthrough in centrifuge design here. He closed the upper hemisphere. It was simply a big zonal rotor whose outer edge could spin more forcefully. It offered molecular biologists and their mixed-up molecules a little more centrifugal separation. He locked the inner door behind him, peered down the hall. Distance diminished the Guardsman -- he seemed of no consequence. The newspaper was spread like a privacy screen. Sleep, sleep, sleep. T he odor of cigars was stale. Dead. The limp newspaper shrouded the face and chest. The boots were propped up on the desk. Their leather soles confronted Kendy. They waggled sleepily, rested their heads together. They made him think of an odd little couple from another planet, alike in shape but mirror images of each other. They waggled again as if soundlessly communicating with each other as he tiptoed past.  "What you stealing, boy?" Kendy stopped. The glass door ahead seemed so near. He could see that its magnetically-activated bolt was open. The newspaper rustled. "Boy, why don't you answer me whert I speak to you?" Kendy swallowed. He imagined the Guardsman's finger reaching toward the door-locking button on his desk. Kendy forced a foolish grin and held open his hinged plastic toolbox for inspection. Like a loose tooth, a screwdriver dropped to the floor. He bent to pick it up and more tools spilled from his box. He scrambled to retrieve them, playing the fool, leaving until last the ones which had rolled toward the door. He crawled toward them, clumsily picking them up one by one. The Man laughed. With an inward sigh of relief, Kendy snapped his box shut. He rose, one step from the door. "Where you going, boy?" Kendy's feet felt glued down while his body swayed toward the door. "Come over here, boy. That bulge in your pocket ain't your snotrag." Kendy turned his head. He was frightened and unaccustomed to being addressed in this tone of voice. The man's face remained concealed behind his newspaper. "Come here, boy." Kendy's knuckles hardened around the handle of the toolbox. The door still seemed near. He imagined the Guardsman's yellowstained finger hovering above the lock button. "You hear me, boy? Show me what you stole." The man's finger would be descending on the button. "You hear me?" Kendy hurled the toolbox. It hit the newspaper with a solid thunk. Both boot soles rose from the desk, up and over as the chair tipped over. Kendy fled. He bounded up the stairs and knew he was being pursued. His foot missed the curb. He fell flat on the pavement and sprang up. As he hurdled the hedge dividing University Boulevard he heard the Guardsman's voice. "I'll shoot -- " Kendy ran. He heard a crash and knew the Guardsman had reached the hedge and tripped over the transparent fishline. A shot came, a yelp of pain. Kendy hunched his shoulders and accelerated. He had not believed anyone would really shoot. He dodged like a rabbit, expecting another bullet and aware that the angry yells behind him were becoming fainter and more distant. Kendy made a skidding turn past Tommy Trojan and sprinted along Childs Way. He lost his cap. He could hear distant shouts converging as he dashed into his dorm. Other Guardsmen had taken up the pursuit. He darted through the entry hall, past the mail slot and the elevators. He popped into his basement like a rabbit into its hole. He collapsed on the concrete floor, tried to listen for Guardsmen's footsteps. He heard nothing and sighed with relief. Removing the film cassette from his camera, he sealed it in the prepared mailer. H e stared at his dark face in the mirror. It seemed to be accusing him of something. He seized the white bottle, poured neutralizer over wadded cotton. His cheeks stung as he rubbed off the Passblack. He was amazingly pale. Fishbelly white. He stepped out of his coveralls, kicked them toward the disposal. He pressed its lever. Its lid opened, revealing rusty teeth. He dropped in his camera, the coveralls, the bottles of Passblack and neutralizer, the stained cotton, the cotton gloves. He twisted the faucet handle. Water roared into the iron hippopotamus. He grabbed the thick wire and plugged it into the disposal's electric motor. A grinding, crunching, terrifying sound rose. He thought it might awaken the whole dorm and unplugged the machine. He looked in. The evidence had vanished. Feeling safer in his own clothing and holding the incriminating film, he walked into the entry hall. A Guardsman approached him. Kendy reached the mail slot, leaned against the wall and unobtrusively inserted the mailer. He pushed away from the wall and started toward the elevator. The Guardsman followed him, stood waiting silently until the elevator came. The Guardsman nodded, waited for Kendy to enter. Kendy pressed the button for his floor. The Guardsman said nothing. When the elevator opened, Kendy let the Guardsman precede him. The latter strode directly to the door of Room #. Kendy heard Amani's protesting voice as the Guardsman entered. He glimpsed two others in the corner of the room. He stood in the elevator, his eyes blurring. Amani's voice cried, "I tell you I don't have any coveralls." A Guardsman pulled open a drawer of her dressing table. Another -- Kendy recognized the captain -- moved to stand between her and the doorway. Kendy stepped carefully out of the elevator. "We have witnesses," the captain was saying to her. "You're the only Black in this building. All we had to do was look in the registration file downstairs and find your room number. Let me see your card. A Guardsman saw you run into this building." "Witnesses to what? To what?" Amani cried in outrage. "You don't match your pic' ture," the captain's voice stated as he peered into her translucent Registration Card. He glanced up at her face. "Trying to disguise yourself?" "No! Are you crazy?" She seemed somehow shorter, shrunken, and Kendy realized her magnificent natural was gone. She had plastered her hair down with straighteners and gunk. She  had also cut it like Charlene's. Instead of her robe, she was wearing a straight knit dress. Her dark face trembled on the verge of tears. "I just tried to change my hair-do. I'm still the same. What are you talking about?" "We have the cap," the captain said, holding up the cap Kendy had lost. "You hid your shortened hair in order to look even more like a Janitor. This cap fell off while you were running. See, it fits your head. You're not the first Black girl who -- " Kendy shoved past the captain into the room. "Let me into my own room." "I know you." The captain smiled and extended a bony hand. "I just realized this is your room. You've been living with trouble. Without knowing it, I hope.""Kendy. Kosa -- mistake!" Then Amani cried, "I didn't do anything." Kendy nodded at the captain. That's right. She didn't." "Do what?" challenged the captain, staring at him. Kendy smiled nervously. He wished he'd kept his mouth shut. Amani yelled, backing away from the squatter Guardsman, "Don't you touch me -- " "She hasn't done anything -- " Kendy shouted. "Son, you don't know what she's done," the captain said. "We found her gloves in the bathroom. So we know she tried to sneak into the C.R.A.D. Building. She was wearing gloves then. When we find the coverall part of her disguise, we won't bother you any more." "She didn't do it," Kendy bleated, almost confessing. "Those aren't her gloves." "Then whose are they?" "Mine." "See they're too small for your hands. I understand your purpose," the captain said. "You feel you ought to defend your roommate-even though you don't know what she has done." He rested his hand on Kendy's arm. "You should have a higher loyalty. As I recall, the motto of preempt Prep is Loyalty -- meaning nothing small. Last year when he was my student assistant. Chuck gave me one of your blueand-gold banners. You must have been a friend of his. I can't believe you're involved in this immoral -- business." "This what?" Amani's voice cried in outrage. The captain laughed. "All right. You tell me why you've been sneaking into the C.R.A.D. Building at night." "I never have -- " The captain glanced from Amani to Kendy. "Do you realize that one of our Guardsmen has been seriously injured?" Kendy insisted thickly, "She -- she didn't do anything." T he captain said gravely, "I admire your attitude toward a roommate -- but you could be starting to obstruct officers of -- " Amani grabbed the phone, yelled, "Help!" A Guardsman seized her arm. The captain whirled. He extended his fountain pen toward her face. There was a hiss. He turned his helmeted head away. His transparent visor had dropped over his face. the captain's foot shoved in front of him. "It's a harmless gas, medically approved." The captain's free hand opened, fingers spread like a tattered white flag of peace. "Son, if you understood our problems you'd support us in this investigation. The fact she is Black has nothing to -- " "Get out of our room," Kendy wheezed. It was difficult for him to breathe. All three Guardsmen were masked by visor filters. " -- has nothing to do with this arrest -- except that her color helped us to identify her," the captain was saying as if from a great distance. "If you weren't an alumnus of Preempt Prep I might have doubts about you, the way you're interfering here. I could order you detained for interrogation, polygraphic questioning. After ten years in command. I've learned how dangerous it is to trust students." "You trigot," Kendy gasped in campus jargon, labeling the captain as prejudiced against white students as well as Black. "Listen I did it"' "You must be abnormally sensitive to cannibogen gas," the captain murmured. "Don't panic. It will wear off in a few minutes. Step out into the hall. Now breathe deeply. We'll take her to the ambulance so that the Amani blinked, coughed, wounded Guardsman can identigasped for breath. fy her." Kendy yelled wordlessly at the "I did it," Kendy repeated, folcaptain and collided with a chairowing them. Each slow movement of his legs felt a mile long. "I did it -- " ' He laughed in confusion. "Try to restrain yourself," the captain said disgustedly. "The gas will wear off. You're undergoing a reversal reaction -- a harmless side-effect. Try to restrain any irrationally guilty feelings. They won't last." "But I did do what you're accusing Amani -- " "At the moment you'd confess to anything." The captain laughed. "Fight it.' It's merely chemical arousal of your early childhood guilt experiences. It spreads upward in time. Probably by now you're even feeling guilty because Blacks exist. But don't get noisily masochistic or we'll suspect you have liberal tendencies." "But -- I -- did -- it," Kendy repeated. "I -- did -- " "Be quiet," the captain said. "You're disturbing serious students." Kendy blinked at the concerned faces in the doorway along the hall. The captain's voice said loudly, "You're both detained. This is a marijuana investigation. Why I can smell it!" Pale faces vanished from the doorways. V T he elevator dropped. Kendy's blurred gaze shifted from the captain's face to Amani's. She smiled as if intoxicated. "Want to go home?" she asked. "I did it," Kendy repeated to the captain, who shrugged and glanced at Amani. "I believe you." Amani laughed bitterly. "I understand you. I understand too much," she yelled with explosive rage. "I hate, I hate, I hate you!" She wasn't looking at the captain. "It will wear off," the captain muttered to Kendy and tried hustling her out of the elevator. The campus seemed bright with riot lights. The sidewalk was empty except for a Guardsman leaning against the armored car and idly stroking his stubby automatic shotgun. Above him the turret of the armored car aimed its three nozzles and its two open-mouthed but silent loudspeakers toward the dorm. Someone coughed. The turret swiveled suspiciously. The captain guided Amani to the rear of the ambulance. Her body was swaying. Kendy looked into the ambulance and saw a Guardsman lying on a stretcher. He was clenching a dead cigar between his teeth and looked as if he were suffering more from anger than pain. A bandage around his foot was dark with blood. "Recognize her?" asked the captain. "Her?" The injured Guardsman sat up in surprise. "You said she was wearing coveralls," the captain reminded him. "And a janitor's cap. Here's the cap." The captain gingerly placed the white cap on Amani's bent head. "Now you identify her? She was wearing the gloves." "Her?" The Guardsman's eyes widened and his cigar wobbled. "His -- her coveralls was too big, baggy, but -- " "Then you do identify her?" Guard mumbled evasively, sinking back. "We'll detain her for a polygraph," the captain stated. "Now that you've made a tentative identification -- " "Are you blind?" Kendy exclaimed, leaning in at the Guardsman. "Look at me. Don't you recognize me?" The Guardsman glanced from Kendy's face to the captain's. "I told you it was a Black boy -- not a -- " Kendy shouted, "I was wearing Passblack, you bigoted idiot -- " "I'm not all that stupid," the Guardsman retorted, closing his eyes. "At least I can still tell black from white." "How?" Kendy shouted. "You had a newspaper over your face. You were asleep behind your newspaper when I walked in." The Guardsman glanced at the captain. "Look at me," Kendy yelled. "Don't you remember me? Your feet were on your desk. Didn't you even look out from behind your newspaper when you stopped me on the way out?" The Guardsman sat up straight. He spat out his cigar. "Sir, I never seen this kid before in my life." "Look at me," Kendy shouted. "I hit you with my toolbox." The Guardsman's hand rose to his chest. "Sir, this kid's lying in order to make me -- make us look bad. No one got in past me. She tried to sneak in. I sent her back. I told her to halt when she ran back up the stairs. But she ran like she'd been doing something. So I chased her. Into an ambush -- " Kendy realized the Guardsman was so embarrassed at having tripped at the hedge that he hadn't even mentioned being hit by the toolbox. "Captain, if you would listen to me -- " Kendy began. "Sir, do we have to listen to this liar?" the Guardsman blurted. "He's a campus troublemaker. I identify her. I recognize her face." Kendy supposed the toolbox was still lying behind the Guard's desk and that there ought to be other ways he could prove that Amani was innocent. "Listen -- " "Put her in the car," the captain said. "Hold it," Kendy said. "L confess." "Not again," the captain protested, turning away. "Put her in the armored car. Students are congreeting." Kendy noticed three students standing at a safe distance. "I'll give you all sorts of proof that I -- " he yelled following the captain toward the front of the armored car. "Then where are her coveralls?" the captain challenged. "I ground them up in the disposal under the dorm -- " The engine of the armored car started with a stuttering roar. "That proves you're lying to protect her," the captain shouted over the noise. I personally ordered all the old basement garbage disposals disconnected over a year ago." He glared triumphantly at Kendy and stepped back up to the curb. His arm rose and his wrist flipped forward in a limp military signal. The armored car growled forward. Kendy jumped in front of it, grabbed its upper radiator louvers as the lower ones hit his hip. His beels dragged along the pavement. The captain screamed, "Hold it -- " The armored car's engine inhaled and died. Kendy clung to the steel slats which had been designed to protect its radiator from the populace. "Goddamn Trojan Horse -- " A stentorian voice electronically augmented to heroic volume boomed against his eardrums. the invisible Achilles bellowed through the car's loudspeakers. Silence. Then a click as the Guardsman realized his mike had been live. The captain's suddenly miniature voice yelled, "No -- no need to radio for reinforcements." H IS hand closed on Kendy's shoulder. The captain tried with his other hand to disengage Kendy's fingers from the armored car. But the captain was not strong enough. He was no Achilles. "Let her go," Kendy said thickly, feeling high and low at the same time. "Then let go of our car," the captain retorted. "We wouldn't be here if it weren't for troublemakers like you. Let go. I don't think you intend to be an agitator. It's her fault. You'd better realize it and cooperate with me. I have the power of so many alternatives I'd prefer not to react at all. Return to your room." "Let Amani go." Kendy noticed a timid crowd of four students had assembled upwind. "But I've already committed myself," the captain was explaining. "I have to detain her for questioning. So let go of our armored car." The captain's hand slid into his jacket. Kendy struck out and clamped down on the captain's wrist, preventing him from extracting the gas pen from his pocket. The captain bent down to say quietly, "Look up. Our man in the turret has his choice of three aerosol sprays. If I signal him you get one in the face." Kendy thought the nozzles could not be depressed enough to spray him directly. The captain's face was close to his. Kendy tried to dislodge the captain's protective visor with his shoulder. "We want to maintain our lenient image," the captain said softly. "One aerosol would make you vomit. Another would cause you to lose control of your bowels. The third would make you cry like a baby. No one wants to be made ridiculous." "That includes you," Kendy grunted, looking around. "Even if you run for it -- " the captain pretended calm reason -- "there are many ways we can get you. A squirt of invisible dye -- and every time you passed a security streetlight in Greater L.A. the ultraviolet component in the light would cause your skin to glow purple." "Great." "But you can't escape. Look up at the biggest tube in the turret. It ejects blobs of quick-drying epoxy mixed with chemically shrinking polyester strings. If we used it you'd be flopping around in a glued cocoon. The parabolic mike on the turret would catch your shrieks of claustrophobia before your jaw was pulled shut. That voice-print might provide supplementary identification at the morgue -- unless someone used a pencil point to open your nostrils." Kendy laughed confusedly. "Why don't you just arrest me?" "I want to give you amnesty -- you innocent fool!" "Amani?" "If she's innocent -- of course. What do you think we are? We don't need trouble. I don't want trouble -- " "Neither do I." Kendy let go and flinched. H e expected the captain to spray him with the gas pen. But the other shook his hand ceremoniously, as if before an audience of students. Bushes rustled in the momentary silence. "Let's walk over to my little command car"' the captain said. Kendy's knees were rubbery. "Where?" "You can walk," the captain said. "Concentrate on walking. That whiff of gas in the room should have worn off by now. Come on. Your symptoms are mainly psychosomatic ones now. You've stopped fighting it. That's why you feel like collapsing." Kendy felt so suddenly relaxed and dizzy he wanted to laugh. He realized he had wanted the captain to disbelieve his confession. His emotions flip-flopped. He wanted to cry because he understood himself too well. If he had really wanted the captain to listen to him he would have described the centrifuge. He would have told the captain about the pictures. But he hadn't been able to make a total confession -- not even to save Amani. What am I? He felt disillusioned with himself. The motor of the armored car roared. The antique growled past him, carrying Amani away. "Wait -- " While the captain helped him into the command car Kendy chattered frantically to himself. "Never confess to anything. There are mofeprag -- pragmatic choices than guilt or innocence. Are you listening? Don't drive so slow! Fast? You won't find her fingerprints in the -- why should I tell you? She'll pass your lie detector test. Ooooooooeeeeh -- " "You'll bump your head." The captain steered his command car to University Boulevard. "You're naive, son. I hate to disillusion you about her." "But she's innocent," Kendy murmured. "And you'll lose your -- I'm sorry," he moaned, "for what I've done." "Like what? I'm sorry that you were accidentally assigned as her roommate," the captain stated. "I might as well explain to you while you're so gassed and receptive. She's not the first to dress up in coveralls and sneak into a building to visit her boy friend." "Boy friend?" "Probably a campus maintenance employee. Probably that's the reason she tried to enter the C.R.A.D. Building. It's not a serious offense if that was her reason." "You're crazy." Kendy laughed and felt rage seeping into his consciousness. "I understand them," the captain earnestly pontificated, "better than they understand themselves. Last year we had a case like this. A custodial employee sneaked his girlfried into a restricted area. I understand these -- people." "You're lumping them all together." Kendy laughed unevenly. "When I say them I'm doing it, too." He clutched the captain's arm and the car swerved. "Don't squeeze us together," Kendy cried. "Our faces -- her face is disappearing. I don't want you do that to Amani. She's Amani all by herself. That's who she is -- Amani." He blurted, "You won't have a face, you -- faceless uniform." The command car turned into a sunken driveway. The Campus National Guard Building crouched behind floodlights. Above it, towering against the sky, was the dim majesty of 'the Doheny Library. Kendy laughed. "Your own fault," the captain retorted, "that we're here to keep the schools open." "But I was just a little kid ten years ago -- when the emergency was declared." "You need us. The schools were burning." "You were shooting -- " "Who do you think headed off the white vigilantes? We did. The National Guard. Sniped at from both sides." "I don't want either side," Kendy muttered. "I want Amani." T he garage doors clanged shut behind the automobile. The Captain parked next to the armored car. Kendy stepped out of the car, looked down at the captain's helmet and felt dizzy. "I'm a helluva lot bigger than you are." "I have the authority, however," the captain replied. "Go in there and sit down." Kendy stumbled into a reception room. He looked for Amani, bumped his leg against a low table. Its coffee urn hissed. "Sit down, please." Behind the counter, facing a switchboard, was a uniformed young lady with a sharp nose and chin. "Sit down, please." "I protest." She pointed to the coffee urn. "Serve yourself," her voice said mechanically. "To sober me up? I'll pour it on the couch." "You're being filmed and the film will be sent to your parents." "Where's Amani?" He saw that the room had no windows but the wall facing University Boulevard featured a row of steel-capped -- peepholes? "I do not have that information," the young woman said tonelessly. "I refuse!" he shouted. "Refuse what?" she asked, glancing at him and becoming slightly human as she unplugged the electrical connection from her ear. "To take a lie detector test." "No one asked you." Her switchboard buzzed and she turned away. "Where's Amani?" herepeatedly demanded from the couch while his dizziness from the spray diminished and finally his mounting indignation helped him rise again. "I want Amani. I'm going to get her." "Go ahead." The captain was standing behind the counter, scowling at him. "Go in." Through the partly open door he glimpsed a dentist's chair or an electric chair on a chair equipped with a polygraph, a lie detector unit. He walked past it. "Amani?" She was standing in front of a steel-framed mirror, one hand clawing back her limp hair. Her expression was one of distaste -- for her hair? She turned, her gaze narrowing. He thought they were alone and pushed the door shut behind him with his foot. "Amani?" "Endal" she said in a strangely harsh voice. "Panya mwanafunzi" He realized she was telling him to go away -- and worse. "I guess this room is bugged," he muttered, unable to accept any other reason for her speaking to him this way. He knew the word mwanajunzi meant student. He thought panya meant rat. He reached out his hand, wanting to touch her. "Amani, I -- " "Panya mdogol" For some reason she was een refusing to speak English to him. '"Panya mdogo mdogo." Her mouth twisted. Now she was calling him a smaller rat of maybe a mouse. "Amani," he tried again but heard the door opening behind him. "I'm ready to leave," she said in cold English but not to him. She spoke past him, as if he weren't there. The uniformed young woman from the switchboard or a similar one was standing in the doorway with a bored expression. "Go on. You can go." Amani swished past him and out into the reception room. She hurried toward the steel exit door at the front of the building. Kendy glimpsed the captain leaning against the counter and heard his apologetic voice. He was speaking into the telephone, apparently trying to explain something. He was blind to Kendy. Kendy ran after Amani without asking if he could leave. She had pushed open the outer door. It swung back in his face. He shoved it outward, lurched into the glaring night. For an instant Amani was silhouetted by floodlights guarding buildings on the other concrete path. She turned left along the pedestrian Boulevard, as if trying to leave the campus. He saw the mob had increased to five students and a cat, lounging beside the statue of Tommy Trojan, watching them. "Wait, Amani, let me explain why I -- " He thought he could corner her at the National Guard booth, which defended the entrance to the University. But its barbedwire gate was ajar. It had been opened for her. S HE ran toward the roaring traffic on Exposition Boulevard. On the other side loomed the immense bulk of the old Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Beyond lay Nairobi. Buses roared. He grabbed her arm as she stepped off the curb. "Wait for the light. I mean -- don't go." "Don't touch me, you lying -- what are you? You were the one who tried to sneak into that building past that Guardsman. So why did those pigs arrest me?" "Amani, I had no idea this would happen. I didn't think -- " "You had a bottle of Passblack. Didn't you? I thought about telling those bayonet pigs to hunt for it." "I threw it away." "They found those cotton gloves in our bathroom. They said they were mine. I should have said they were yours -- you -- what are you anyway?" "I didn't think." "I think you were using us," she blurted. "Why else would you fake yourself Black? You tried to burglar into that building. Didn't you know you'd make trouble for every Black on this campus? When anything is bad they blame us all -- " "I didn't think -- " She studied him, her gaze gentling. "I can't believe you're a racist provocateur," she murmured. "You weren't trying to start the whites shooting at us again -- " His jaw sagged. He felt horrified at what she had suggested -- and equally at his own innocence and stupidity. He had known so little about his own country. "Amani, no -- " "I signed a confession," she cried. "What?" He couldn't believe it. "It was because -- at least you were an enemy of the Guardsmen. Otherwise why would you be breaking into their building? Kendy, I didn't tell them about your bottle of Passblack. I didn't explain about the gloves because -- I think, I hope you're a member of the Underground. If they found out -- those Guardsmen would have detained you, sent you to a camp. You are against them, aren't you?" Kendy swayed dizzily. He couldn't tell her the truth. She would hate him totally if he did. "You were innocent," he protested. "What did you sign?" "Nobody should be innocent," she said angrily, "so I signed their Number Three confession. It says I failed to cooperate during an investigation. It's funny. I did cooperate. I sat down in their electric chair. They asked me why I tried to sneak into a building at night. They tried to tell me why. Supposedly I have a main man who works in there." Her teeth flashed. "Maybe I should be flattered. But I told the machine the truth. I don't. It believed me." "Kendy muttered, "They're all insane." "When their machine kept believing me," she said, "the Man's face got pale -- such an ugly color. He said he was going to question me all night if necessary. So I signed that confession. Kendy, I wanted to go home. I want to go home -- but I feel ashamed. At least my confession says I didn't cooperate," she laughed unevenly. "At least you're a member of the Resistance." Kendy winced. He felt terribly guilty and not guilty. He would never be able to tell her the truth. He was -- had been -- a spy from National University, the government's own training school. He had enrolled at U.S.C. to test campus security. What he had done was test the National Guard, to improve its security procedures, to strengthen it. He couldn't tell her that. She would think he was her enemy. But he wasn't. "Wait, Amani -- I love you." "I don't love you, Kendy. Let go of me." ' She dodged away through the screeching traffic on Exposition Boulevard. He ran after her across the midnight lawns around the Coliseum. He heard a boundary Guardsman blowing his whistie. She wriggled expertly through the barbed wire fence. It snagged him. "Get back to your own side of the street," she gasped. "I'll send Don for my things. I can't come back to S.C. But I'll come back somewhere else -- because it's my country. I want to be a whole person, a dancer or teacher or -- I don't know what. I'm not running away -- " she cried as she walked away from him into shadows that moved.  Confronted by the gleaming rifle barrels of Black Security Patrolmen, he didn't climb through their fence. He watched her pass through their Nairobi Checkpoint. "Go home, kid," said the white Guardsman beside him, on his side of the fence, "or I'll arrest you for a troublemaker." Kendy's fist tightened on the wire. "Sure." He felt his heart pounding like a war drum as he crossed Exposition Boulevard. He thrust his thick plastic card at the Guardsman at the entrance to the University. He strode along University Boulevard. He looked up at the bronze statue of Tommy Trojan. Wake up, stupid... H igh above Tommy's crested helmet stars were gleaming. Suddenly the distance in time between the City of Troy -- buried three thousand years beside the Dardanelles -- and the decaying newness of Los Angeles seemed encouragingly short to Across eachhundred years he visualized three generations of men. He smiled because the historical distance from Troy to L.A. was only ninety men lined up in time-changed costumes. It was a short time in which to expect men to awaken. But he walked faster. "I will," he murmured, feeling as if his life were a momentarily glowing .spark. He had to hurry. He thought of Mr. Smith at National University intricately plotting his future. Mr. Smith might never know what a blundering spy Kendy had been. He smiled wryly at the way he had confessed and confessed. He vouldn't do that again. He would continue his tutorial with Dr. Smyert. Now he really wanted to learn. What was it like on the other side? He wanted to see. If they didn't shoot him, he thought bemusedly, the experience might help him grow. Toward what? He cocked his head, eyeing the stars. The power was out there, beeping into the surviving radiotelescopes in the United States. It seemed untranslatable -- but perhaps there were undiscovered Rosetta Stones? The Russians . had discovered something on Phobos and retreated. Frantically they had begun searching our own Moon. They had something there beneath a fragile plastic dome and were afraid. But not afraid of power? They're afraid of change... He wasn't. Of course, you never knew about change -- what it was going to be or where it would take you. Something had changed him latelyAs he strode along Childs Way his thoughts ran back to Amani. His throat hurt. He felt incomplete. His personal world had been so small. And he knew Nairobi would never satisfy Amani. Nor would any other city-state. The whole world seemed to be hardening while people struggled to fit into it. He considered himself and was ashamed. But nobody's impossible... He looked up. Even diamonds come from muck. He grimaced. He was growing up, whatever that meant. He smiled, still feeling gassed. Like a fool he wanted power -- but not to change the world, exactly. He inhaled, imagining a world free to change itself in every direction for everyone. He walked faster, visualizing a world diversifying to fit each person. Like worlds growing for everyone... With youthful resiliency he ran through the night. Beautiful worlds. To fit us, Amani. Changing as we change... As he leaped through the dazzling darkness he felt his worlds overlap. Dance beautifully, Amani...  ES m  whaiever happened to unlnown? In # issues in #-# it estabiished an undying reputation for jaunty, mordant fantasythen perished in the wartime paper shortage. Much of the good stuff from Unknown has been picked up and repubiished, but there are stiil some goodies, and Berkley has got hold of a few. For instance, Norvell Page's wild Presber: XI #, #t). And, this month, the on, we'll be doing two of the absolute Unknown classics by L. Ron Hubbard one voiume.  Also in October... (X#, #) (XI #, #)... and November (X#, #) (X#, #) If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Ave., N. Y., N.Y. # fiumim Some persons still living believe that humans are able to communicate...  As is well known, By way of introduction study for three hundred riddle to our sociologists  have been under constitute a cycles, I  ; because of their apparent a high level of inability to form Threes, paradoxically tripled with  a complex social many indications an urgent moral a challenge to our truly human, subhuman. technical competence, organization. I of advanced symbol use. J presents problem,! system. for the autochthones, if considered (:  truly human,"! subhuman, I must be linked into the Threefold Order quarantined or destroyed h Native systems of vocal sounds having proved and written characters Threes with the autochthones as a practical solution All attempts to form temporary resistant to analysis, decisive failures. the governing Three, i ;ion, adopted a proposal for an objective test, for a crude events-level experiment. requisitioned admittedly in desperation. Accordingly, a medium-class personal vehicle was  requisitioned i converted ) and dispatched to Land Mass Three... T he thing was, Nick Russell told himself irritably, he had not been that drunk. He remembered coming back to the hotel, hanging up his clothes, piling into bed. So why was his collar too tight and what in God's name was he doing in a chair? He opened one eye, wincing at the light. What he saw made no sense, and he closed the eye again. He had been to two of thpse places in Pig Alley where the girls took off everything except their hats. Next had come that little bar on the side street and the snooty brunette in the low-cut dress -- boy, he had told her off -- then he had said the hell with it and had gone to bed. Now he had on all his clothes and the damn things were too tight. He grunted, opened both eyes. The walls were funny. TV screens, gadgets everywhere. He tried to get up but could not. He stared incredulously at himself. Broad white straps crossed his chest and thighs. Under them he wore a brown sports Jacket and the pants of his good blue suit, a red necktie and a bright yellow sports shirt. "Is this supposed to be funny?" he asked out loud. He pulled at the straps. They would not give. He filled his lungs. "Hey, let me out of here." A voice at his left elbow made him jump. "Wer spracht? Was . ist los hier?" Another voice came from his right. "Qu'est-que-c'est que se passe? Qui parle? Laissez-moi, je vous en prie. ' ' "Talk English, dammit." His necktie was choking him. It was in some kind of crazy knot he had to untie it to get off the tie. He squirmed around in his chair as far as he could but it was not far enough. The buckles must be in back. His heart was thumping. "Listen," he said loudly, "I'm an American citizen and if I don't get out of here pretty damn quick there's going to be hell to pay." This little room, no door, yellow walls, all those gadgets. "You out there, you hear me?" The other voices started again. They seemed to come from grilles in the walls -- under the two big TV screens. "Je suis ingenieur du R.T.F. On me cherchera, je vous assure si je n 'irai pas d mon travail. Pourquoi m'avez-vous enleve?" "Wer spracht, ich hab' Sie gefragt! Sprechen Sie nichi Deutsch?" Both voices sounded as upset and bewildered as Russell himself felt. Could there be three of them, tied down to chairs in little rooms like this one? And if so, what for? Russell stared around, trying to figure it out. The wall in front of him was curved, like part of an upright cylinder only about a yard wide. The cylinder was covered with gadgets. The wall behind him was curved, too -- he could just make it out by straining around in the chair. The two side walls, the ones with the TV screens, slanted toward each other. The room was shaped like a wedge of cheese, with a hunk cut off at the point. Put three rooms just like this one together and what would you get? A disk, with a cylinder in the middle. "Flying disk," he said aloud. "Oh, God." "Comprends pas. Je ne parle ni I'anglais ni I'aUemand. Parlez frangais, nom de Dieut" Parlay fransay, he knew that much. And du vang, and voolay voo cooshay avec mwah? That was all you needed to get along in Paris -- the Frogs all spoke English, anyhow. "Ich verlange das Sie -- " The German voice cut off and Russell grabbed the arms of his chair. All the wall gadgets had just lit up. Red ones, yellow, green. The TV screen at the right showed a picture of the Earth, a greenand-yellow ring around it. There was a yellow blip where the green and yellow met and after a moment he could see that the blip was moving slowly. The screen to his left was divided into three segments, with a bunch of colored dots in each one, Now what? The dots seemed to be arranged in the same pattern as the gadgets in front of him... "Green, red, yellow," he said. At the sound of his voice, one segment of the screen blinked yellow. "That's funny." It blinked again. "Was bedeutet das Licht?" One of the other segments blinked, "C'est bizarre, ga -- " Now the third segment blinked. "Attention, c'est nous! Nous trois! Id le boche, la I'americain..." In the other screen, the yellow blip had advanced a little farther, trailing its green line, eating up the yellow line ahead of it. Russell cleared his throat. "Look, you two guys. My name is RussellNick Russdl. Dorr't either one of you speak any English?" "Content de faire votre connaissance. Monsieur Russell. Permettez que je me presente aussi: je m'appelle Duvoisin. Mais, a repondre a votre question -- non, je n'ai que quelques mots d'anglais. Parlons francais?" "Ich sprache nur Deutsch. Das ist fiir mich genug. Ich heisse Kalbmann. " "Kalbmann? Glad to know you." "Enchante. " "Look, I don't know what this is all about but it seems like we're all in it together. There's got to be some way to get out of this thing, if we just -- woop!" A distant roaring, more felt than heard. A heavy weight was pressing him back into the chair. It lasted for a few seconds, then cut off abruptly. He felt himself swing forward against the straps again. In the right-hand screen, the track of the yellow blip was no longer traveling in a circle. The yellow line dipped down in a long curve until it touched the Earth. The blip began to travel along it. "Attention, pour I' amour de Dieu! Nous tombons!" Russell stared at one screen, then the other. In the left-hand screen dots in two of the segments were blinking urgently -- yellow in one, green in the other. "Versteh ' nicht. Verst eh' nicht. Warum dann -- " Yellow, that was the one that was blinking as the German talked. Green must be the Frenchman, In his own segment, the bottom one, nothing was happening. "Mais pourquoi attendez-vous? Appuyez sur les boutons, mon Dieu!" T he right-hand screen's blip was sliding down its yellow arc. Russell began to feel alarmed. Could that mean what he thought it meant? He swung to the lefthand screen again. A yellow button and a green one, the same as the gadgets in front of him. He leaned forward and tried topress them but they wouldn't go in. Must be the other two people were supposed to press them -- so why didn't they? "Hey, you guys, press the buttons!" The yellow blip was sliding inexorably down its arc. Now the other two were both yelling. He put his hands over his ears and tried to think. His own segment remained blank. They were supposed to push the buttons -- a horrible thought. Suppose their segments were blank, too, and Russell knew which buttons they were supposed to press but they didn't. And they knew -- the dots of color went on blinking. "Jesus Christ," he said. "Listen, you what's-your-name, the Frenchy! Push the green button, the one in the third row, you understand me? Push the green button!" "Monsieur, c'est absolument inutile de purler dans une langue que nous ne comprenons pas. Reflechez-vous, en ce moment nous tombons vers la terrel II faut que nos agissions avec resolution, et au prertKere, que vous appuyiez sur le bouton jaune -- " "Warum konnen Sie nichtsprachen wie den Menschen? Achtung, Ami, auf den ersten gelben Knopf druckenl" "Listen to me, for God's sake. You, the German, push the yellow button, you hear me? The one on top! Push it, you .dumb Kraut!" "Monsieur Russell, je vous en prie -- appuyez -- " "Don't keep talking Frog to me. Goddamn it. You give me a pain -- just press the green button in the third row! In the third row!" "Lasst mich auch etwas sagen. Ami. Sie machen ein solcher Larme, das man nicht denken kann. Wollen Sie das Leben oder der Todt haben? Lieber Gott, auf den gelben Knopf -- " "Mais pourquoi ne m'entendezvous pas? Vos ecoles n'ont-ils pas vous enseigne un seul mot defrancqis, nom de Dieu?" "You're like all the rest of them -- you can speak English all right if you want to but you're too damn snooty. Look, for Chrissake -- " "Wir keine Zeit Ubrig habent Franzose, bitte -- " "Will you shut up? Listen, Frenchy, the hell with himyou and me, maybe that's enough. Will you please just give one little push -- " "Espice d'tpt cretin! Si nous eumes seulement une langue commune, tout c'ela n'eut pas arrive. Mais hiidemment ce langue doit etre franqais, la plus precise, la plus logique -- " Oh, God!" sikiice As might have been expected,!  the autochthones To our sorrow and dismay, I did not as presented.! experiment, vehicle was destroyed. The attempt was therefore judged solve the problem cooperate in the L inconclusive,! a failure, i I and the iquarantine! I destruction! (inadequate.) (beg ) is considered ridiculous. The Three therefore request their (premature. ) I demand!  replacement. The dilemma presented) disbandment. The stresses to which     disgrace. My mental pain is such) The Kerling twins faced each as he moved around the desk to other across the desk in John's lay his hand on his brother's arm. rectory. Once to tell them apart "The right thing to do, Mihad been impossible. Now, at chael," he said, "is to give yourthirty-five, John's limp marked him self up." Mike's bronzed skin and athletic build contrasted oddly with his brother's clerical pallor and soft, well-manicured hands. "I knew you were going to say that, John, before I came here." "Each of us has always known what the other would say. So of course you won't go to the police?" Mike impatiently brushed back a lock of black hair. "I can't, John. Bergan's boys will swear I killed Judy. And she was shot with my gun. I could be convicted of murder." "Haven't you overlooked one thing? You have enough evidence of dozens of other crimes your associates have committed to become state's witness -- bargain for your life." "Even an innocent man can't bargain away murder -- once the case is in the courts. I can't get near the police without being arrested. I can't stay much longer in Jax, either. I don't have a car and Bergan's men are watching the airports and other means of transport. I'm being hunted. I shouldn't even be herewith you." "Let me take your evidence to the police," John said. "You know I can't let you do that. Do you think the people you call my associates -- " Mike paused and grinned again -- "would "I'm not afraid." "Look, John. Just get me out of town. That's all I ask -- for now, anyhow. I shouldn't even ask that much but I have to get away somewhere while I figure this thing out. I'll think about giving you the stuff later, maybe." "Do you have any money?" Mike shrugged sardonically. "I just sold my body to City General Hospital for their tissue bank. One hundred bucks. We'll pick it up on the way. I'll make out. Just get me out of town." "You sold your body?" "Sure. What's wrong With that?" "Nothing, I guess. The soul survives." of the rectory window. Gazing out into the north-Florida spring morning he looked the classic picture of the man of God. When he turned he had reached a decision. "Before I do try to get you away from here, Michael, I want you to tell me about this heroin thing. Were you guilty of smuggling drugs into this country? How did you get into this dirty business?" "Yes. I was guilty. I'll tell you the story again. I didn't know what I was smuggling. Beating the law was kind of exciting -- and profitable. When I found out what the packages I was bringing in contained I tried to break away from the gang. They killed Judy as a warning to me to stay away from the police -- and to get me to leave town. They'll kill me if I'm caught. They may kill me anyway. Bergan's the man behind the smuggling -- and Bergan runs this town." Mike finished. His brother eyed him quietly, then took a hat from the mantel. "All right, Mike. Meet me in the little street in back. I'll go out the front. You go out through here." He indicated a door leading to the rear of the rectory. "Give me just five minutes to bring the car. We'll go by the hospital." Alone in the room, Mike surveyed it briefly, then took a thick, unmarketl envelope from his coat pocket and stuffed it among some untidy papers in the back of the center drawer of his brother's desk. Once or twice while waiting the required five minutes he started toward the desk as if to retrieve the envelope. Then, with a doubtful grimace at his watch, he left it there and made his way out to the alley. The brothers saw no one when they left the street behind the rectory but Mike gave directions for a pattern of turns which he hoped would throw off any trailers. As he crouched deep in his seat tension made pain in his back and neck. From time to time he stole glances at his brother's serene, assured figure, upright in the driver's seat. For a moment he felt a wave of tenderness for the stern, gentle body beside him, so much like his own. But he could never have lived John's kind of life. They approached the emergency entrance of the City General Hospital-. A dark sedan skidded out of a side street and pulled level with them on the driver's side. Mike had time only to see the machinegun and grab John's clerical collar and slam him down on the seat, then leap out of the car. The bullets caught him as he scrambled up the hospital steps. He felt a monstrousshock in his spine just above the collar as blood and white chips of bone sprayed the lower panel of the door marked Then he felt nothing. N othing. Then, slowly, an awareness of the passage of time. Months? Years? Cold. Deadly cold, iron hard. A cold not felt but only known. Silence. No sound. Not even the dull drumming of blood in the ears one hears when listening to nothing. No movement, no rising and falling of the diaphragm, no shifting of the eyes beneath closed lids, no imperceptibly balancing muscles. Darkness. Absolute darkness. Nothing but an impossibly thin thread of consciousness. I'm Mike Kerling and I'm alive. Hang on to' that, Mike, boy. You're alive... T WO interns in white pushed thick, padded gloves. A puff of cold air, electric with dryness, came out as the door closed behind them. The first intern scanned a row of receptacles like huge file drawers in the wall. He ran a chrome and rubber trolley up under one of them. "C-#," he said. He donned his gloves and turned a chromed wheel, raising the trolley to the exact level of the lower edge of the vault. A light tap with a rubber hammer broke the thin seal of frost at its edges and the door swung open with a puff of searing cold air. "Who was this joker? Do you know?" "Yeah. A guy some gangster shot right in front of Emergency years ago. Bullets took out a fourinch section of his cervical vertebrae. They had him in here in minutes. He'd only signed donor's papers a day or two before." "Kind of rushing things, weren't they? Was he legally dead? Or medically dead for that matter?" "Who knows? But at the then state of the art there was sure as hell no favorable prognosis for him." A bright metal cylinder a yard in diameter rolled out onto the trolley. A twist of a wrench in gloved hands split the tube longitudinally, revealing the white body of a man, crisp black hair faintly powdered with frost, a determined, full-lipped mouth framed in deep vertical creases. The thorax gaped open, revealing a cavity where the heart once beat, cut ends of veins and arteries indicating missing kidneys, oddly geometrical patches of vanished skin showing pale muscular tissue beneath. "Suppose he wasn't dead. Could he have known what was happening to him? When they were cooling the body down, I mean." "Pretty damned unlikely." "Yeah. But suppose he did him, did they?" "Don't suppose so." "Could have had some brain action for months -- even after they froze him. When they do cryogenic brain surgery the alpha rhythm never even falters. Wonder what he thought when they did the first transplant from him?" "Shut up, why don't you?" The second intern grinned and went on needling while the first continued careful preparations to raise the body above the level of its hemicylindrical coffin. "He might even feel those pieces of skin when someone accidentally sticks a pin in them. You know, like some amputees claim they can feel an itch in a missing arm?" "Lay off, for Christ's sake." "You're going in for neurosurgery. You ought to think about these things. How about that thing Birnbaum did a while back. You remember the frog bit? Touch a severed frog leg with a galvanic probe and it kicks. Birnbaum stimulated the frog's brain and the leg kicked even when it was fifty yards away in another room. How about that? Suppose "Shut up." Silence fell for a time. One intern wore a faint grin, the other a frown. With infinite care -- to avoid chipping the ice-hard flesh or touching it with bare hands -- they worked with sterile, motordriven saws to section the right arm above the elbow. As it came away the first intern asked a serious question. "Who gets this?" "A guy who used to be a pretty good surgeon until the AM A tossed him out for keeping bad company," the other said grudgingly. "They say he patches up people the police shoot up and keeps his mouth shut. Nosy today, aren't you?" The arm was laid carefully into a metal tray on another trolley. The huge tube was resealed and slid carefully into its vault. Valves, tubes and meters carrying liquid nitrogen were checked. The interns left, pushing the small trolley with the arm. The cryogenic storage room was silent, save for the whispering hum of tireless motors.  the spidery thread of cryogenic consciousness that was Mike Kerling roamed the edges of madness. A man's vivid memories are pitifully few. In the endlessness of black, silent, and immeasurable time Mike recreated them not once but many times. He recalled that the days of John's illness with polio had been a period of misery for the little boy who hovered between his strangely lifeless toys and the door to his brother's room. Sometimes he had been sure he could feel John's pain in his own thin body. Then John was learning to walk again, his flabby arm around Mike's sturdy shoulders. There had also been the day when their father, a huge, patient and grave man, had taken them to a neighbor's pool. John had been the first to learn to swim without the support of Dad's big hand. Mike tried often to picture his father's face but it would not come clear. His mother he could not recall at all. Both had died long ago in a car crash. The orphanage had been mostly a gray iron double bunk, John's bed below, his own above. Mike remembered the first girl he had ever kissed, a brown-eyed precocious beauty with a pageboy bob. He had kissed her hurriedly and clumsily in the orphanage pantry. The memory of that kiss was sweet now. Then there had been the time just before he went north to take up his college scholarship and his first job, when, at the Kiwanis beach picnic, he had slipped his fingers under his girl's sweater, touching the soft, naked curve of her young breast. She had hesitated a heart-thundering moment before she had wriggled out of his arms and run back to join the others at the campfire.He could no longer remember her name. His graduation was only rows of black cap-and-gowned figures seen from behind in the auditorium. The day John was ordained was more vivid in his memory than his own graduation -- he had felt derision, envy. Mike's succession of post-college jobs furnished his present darkness only with brief, disconnected flashes, some of them meaningless. Then the army. His first experience of the Orient and his first taste of combat. He had wet his fatigues while admiring his courage. He had killed -- and had found he liked the men he slew. These memories Mike lived over and over in his near-mad awareness in the unseen darkness. His consciousness shut out memories of his wife, Judy, as too painful. He had been the cause of her death -- and would find a way to avenge them both if ever a moment of true consciousness were granted him. But for now she was simply dead. Once, after the uncounted thousandth repetition of his tattered string of memories, Mike was conscious of words forming in his mind, the substance of a sermon. John's voice... in an age when men have learned to replace a human heart, failing organs, crushed limbs, even nerves -- and soon, they say, eyes that will see again. In an age,  say, when dedicated men are laboring to make death almost unnecessary, other men are stalking the streets of this city, murdering with impunity... John -- oh, John, you fool. Stop -- they 'll kill you... Mike knew fear. His effort to reach John somehow -- to silence him -- stretched the impalpable fiber of his own existence until, for the first time, Mike felt pain. A mounting tower of shriveling fire. Death, final and irrevocable, lay just beyond a snapping strand of spider's web. in the air, palely outlining an anemic ray of sun which crept horizontally into the dim basement apartment. Two men sat there. One, gray and bloated, sat in a straight chair before a small table scattered with surgical instruments. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. The left forearm was thick and hairy, the right pale and cleanlined. Hewas making short, delicate incisions in a strip of brown wrapping paper, pausing occasionally to sip from a glass. The second man, narrow-eyed and flashily handsome, stirred restlessly and gestured with the cigar. "How's it going. Doc?" he said in a flat, disinterested voice. Dr. O'Byme grunted sourly. "Okay, I guess. It doesn't respond quite normally yet. I get a sort of burning in it sometimes -- like the room was suddenly on fire. Nerves still mending, I suppose. Twitches, too, now and then, as if it weren't my own." The younger man tapped a gray gob of ash onto the greasy carpet and spread it with the pointed toe of his shoe. "It ain't. It belongs to that punk, Mike Kerling, that tried to rat on Bergan a couple of years back. That's comical. If Kerling knew who was using it now -- and what for -- them fingers would be around your throat some night." O'Byme flung down the scalpel with a snarl. "Damn you to hell, Rionna. Some day I'll take a hunk of lead out of you down here and you'll learn not to be so wise." eternally whispering pumps tirelessly circulated the liquid nitrogen and Mike Kerling searched for new images to add to his meager chaplet of memories. From time to time the more impassioned passages of John's sermons entered Mike's black cave of consciousness with almost the effect of light. At other times thoughts of Judy and revenge brought flashes of fiery torture Mike shrank from -- then returned to, like a child prodding a bruise. One day Mike felt his right arm. It moved, apparently of its own volition, the hand and fingers doing something at once firm and delicately precise. He considered it, then cautiously attempted to control its motions. Instantly it was alive with fire and Mike recoiled, gibbering, from the true darkness of death. Never do that again... Here was a danger not to be prodded. Let the arm recover movement and sensation in its own way. That way lay hope. The spark of hope brought its own burning but less intense and requiring no effort of will to quench it. But to John's sermons and his own visions of things past Mike added a subjective interest in the movements of a hand and arm -- and forcecL hovering madness back another inch. O'Byrne's basement apartment Bergan's gunman, Rionna, lay squealing on a high white table. He was calling on a whole calendar of saints. A white cloth covering his nose and mouth was stained by the overflowing pool of blood brimming from his eyesockets. "Mary, Holy Mother! The pain -- I can't stand the pain. Doc -- do something -- give me a shot of something -- " O'Byrne plunged a needle into Rionna's arm and watched impassively as the gunman began to relax. Rionna took a deep shuddering breath. "Doc. Am I gonna be blind?" "I reckon." Doc shrugged. "Piggy's razor sliced through both eyeballs. You should have left his woman alone." "Stuff that. Can't you do something? Give me a couple new eyes? I seen in the paper it can be done riow. You'll doit, won't you Doc?" "Not me. Even if I had the use of the hospital facilities I can't trust this hand. It burns me sometimes and I have to drop the scalpel. Maybe Bergan can get City General to do something. I don't know. He's got influence at City Hall." O'Byrne chuckled. "Kerling's stiff's still got eyes. Blue ones. How'd you like those?" "No. Not him. Not him. Doc." Rionna's voice, despite the heavy sedative, rose to a scream. "Doc, them burning pains you got. He does that. The eyes -- Jesus -- think what he'd do with the eyes." "Superstitious bastard. Better Kerling's eyes than peddling pencils on some lousy street corner. I'm going to call Bergan, you hear?" No response. Rionna had fainted. slowly. Mike Kerling knew the presence of his eyes. He was aware of the movements of eyeballs, the pressure of eyelids. Darkness still -- but real darkness with real light beyond. Then came light -- blinding pinwheels of red and orange, masked momentarily as eyelids blinked. Then a face. Bergan's. What are you doing here, Bergan? Come to finish the job? Bergan's lips moved. What was he saying? Mike could hear no sound. Fury stirred in him. And defiance. All right, make your play, Bergan. Get it over with... But the eyelids fell and again he knew darkness, silence and memories -- one of them new. The silently speaking face of Bergan. The next time and the time after that when the eyes opened Mike saw nothing but the pale gray walls of a room, a white sheet. He tried cautiously to move the eyes by his own will. The fire came again, worse than ever before. Leave well enough alone. Enjoy seeing.  A white enameled night stand. A glass with some pink liquid in it. Hands, palm upward on a white blanket. One hand turning over. Not mine. They've given me someone else's hands. But I can feel my hand -- somewhere else -- doing something different. That's Frankie Rionna's hand, with the silver dollar tattooed on the back. I've got... hands... eyes... I've Understanding at last what had been done to him, Mike's consciousness fled down an endless corridor. F our men sat around the carved rosewood desk in Harry Bergan's downtown office. Bergan leaned back in a leathercovered swivel chair. Doc O'Byme sat in a matching piece a few feet away. Frankie Rionna occupied a straight chair. Piggy Butz another. In his strange world of liquid nitrogen Mike saw what Rionna saw -- Bergan's well-manicured hands and immaculate cheviot jacket, O'Byrne's face with an untidy string of pewter hair falling over a bloodshot eye. Piggy's bulbous nose, heavy jowls and eyes sunk in rolls of fat, watching Rionna coldly. In that distant day when the scattering of Mike's body had begun, Piggy and Rionna had been in the overtaking car. Piggy driving. Mike made no attempt to control the eyes Rionna was darting at Piggy or the others or to stop the maddening fidgeting of Doc's right hand. Fiery pain and looming eternity had conditioned him merely to watch. Even when Bergan slapped a newspaper down on the desk and jabbed a slim finger at a photo of John Kerling in his pulpit, he controlled all reaction. The paper's headline read: Bergan's face was suave, impassive. The manicured finger jabbed viciously as he spoke' to Rionna. There was death in the set of his mouth. Rionna made gestures of protest. He put his hands briefly to his eyes. Bergan's poker face took on a tinge of disgust. He turned to Piggy. ' Piggy glanced down at the news photo, looked contemptuously at Rionna. Then, in a ripple of flabby chins, he nodded once. The effort of following every move without the control of his eyes and without the use of his ears -- as Piggy led Rionna and O'Byrne to a parked car in the street -- was both terrifying and nauseating for Mike. But he resisted with every atom of his force the impulse to flee to the dark comforting cold. There was a moment when Doc O'Byme would have turned away from the car but, braving the torment of fire, Mike set his hand firmly on the car's door handle, forced him to enter. The car swung away from the curb and pulled up a few minutes later in front of John's parish house. Rionna hurried to the back and Mike saw nothing but the alley until Piggy appeared at the back door, the housekeeper's terrified face peering over his shoulder. The two men rejoined O'Byrne in the car and drove off in the direction of the docks. When they pulled up behind an aged, parked car Mike recognized as John's, Mike seized Rionna's will and violently crossed his eyes. Rionna evidently made some outcry. Piggy slashed him fiercely across the face with the back of his hand. Mike felt the pain and his vision blanked out. This would not do. He must use the eyes to see what the trio intended to do. T he three found John in an alley between two deserted warehouses. He was walking in the direction of a group of shacks on the edge of the river, carrying a paper grocery bag. When he heard the thugs behind him he turned and faced them calmly. Piggy showed tiny yellow teeth ifi a mirthless grin and slipped a straight razor out of his coat pocket. John's face stiffened. He had always had an unreasonable fear of knives, even when he and Mike had been boys in school. But he held his ground. Don't be a fool, John. Run, for God's sake. Run -- John whirled awkwardly, as if obeying. He dropped the bag, which burst at his feet. A large can rolled down the alley. Piggy snatched it up and hurled it wjth terrible force at the back of John's head. John dropped to the ground, a bundle of twisted clothing and twitching limbs. Piggy stooped over the body and the razor in his hand flashed. It was then Mike wrenched Rionna's eyes around and fastened them on Piggy with an icy, frozen will. Rionna tried to turn away, then screamed and screamed. His gun was in his right hand. He tried once more to turn, then raised the gun and fired. The top of Piggy's head exploded and he crashed over the body of his victim, whose throat sprayed a fountain of blood. For a heartbeat O'Byrne, his face blank, moved away from the welling blood. Then the muzzle of Rionna's gun came up and fixed him with its vicious black eye. "You gotta do something, Doc. Come on, move. The Blessed Virgin's on his side." O'Byme started to say something placating about superstition, then his right arm blazed in fiery agony and the words became a whimper. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he stumbled to the two bodies. Thrusting Piggy's ruined head aside, he tore away John's clerical collar and, with instruments from his coat pocket, went to work with more surety than he had ever known. As he finished stemming the flow of blood he raised his head and listened. "Sirens -- the fuzz. Come on, Rionna, let's get out of here." O'Byrne snatched his instrument case and ran. Rionna raised his arm hesitantly then placed the muzzle of the pistol between his oddly blue eyes. For Mike Kerling the darkness was a cool refuge. T he two white-swathed figures in Cryogenic Storage were no longer interns. One was a surgeon now, the other a neurologist. The eyes of the neurologist crinkled in a smile above his mask. "Our old friend C-#. Did you know C-# and the Reverend Kerling were brothers?" "Yes. Twins, in fact. That's why I picked him. The new technique fortransplanting neural tissue needs all the help it can get, especially for the motor center of a brain. So, with identical genes T he nurse was so stiff with starch she seemed brittle. The telephone was sooty black in her hands. "You said to call you. Doctor, when Reverend Kerling began to regain consciousness." "That's right. Nurse. Any mobility?" "Yes sir. He moved his right hand, opened his eyes and spoke." "Speech as well? Splendid! What did he say?" "He looked as if he were meeting someone he knew. Then he said, 'Yes, I found the envelope.' Then he waited a little and said, 'In thy Father's house there are many mansions. Welcome home.' "  Few would question randomness in the Big Bong. But Cytheron, olive scant eons, was too .young and reckless to give a damn! T he summons was far from welcome. Only that morning Cytheron had turned the world to glass. Not objectively, although he would one day reach the stage where it would have been possible, but subjectively -- by modifying his vision to utilize neutrinos. He had attempted the same thing without success some centuries earlier. The memory of the previous failure was contributing to his present enchantment because it made him aware of the processes of his own maturation. His body was transparent now, sensed only as an interaction of its elements with the mesons of the cosmic ray bombardment, moving across the face of a crystal globe within which geological strata writhed like luminous vapors. Above him the sky was strange. His eyes could peer into the hearts of giant red suns, yet were aware of no other stars. He was exalted, inhaling reality and breathing it out as a liquescence of music, poetry and magic. A day, a year, a decade -- all would have been as one in the new sensory configuration. But it seemed that only seconds had passed when the summons arrived, written on daylight, keyed to the singularities of his own cerebral rhythms so that no other denizen of this world could be aware of it except, perhaps, as an impression that a fleeting cloud had crossed the sun. Cytheron readjusted his eyes and found himself on a sloping plain where dry snow like flakes of amethyst swirled down from a green sky, not to lie dormant, but to flow and coalesce with the currents of invisible magnetic rivers. Beyond the plain was a mountain range of milk-white rock, riven by fitfully fluorescing glaciers. He was able to orientate himself by it. ' Cytheron reached outward wi'th his mind and skorded. In an instant he was standing on another plain far across the world, close to a group of eight elder thanii, members of his own species. There was no snow here -- instead a warm amethyst rain paraded in regular curtains and broke in translucent archways above the group's individual screens. A herd of indigenous six-legged animals cropped the lacy grass all around. But so that the beasts would not be alarmed or disturbed in any way the thanii were permitting light to pass through their bodies. Cytheron immediately adopted the same mode.  answer your summons, he thought. fVhy did you call? You must know. The eight elders thought as with one mind -- a unison which never failed to fill Cytheron with dread. You have come of age, and the group mind is ready to receive you. But -- Cytheron's protest remained stillborn as he realized the truth of what was being said. He had come of age. A thousand years and more glimmered in his memory like a dissolving dream. I'm not ready. You are ready. The group voice was kind but inflexible. And we are ready for you. I have no doubt that you are prepared to receive me -- but what shall I gain in exchange for my youth? Your racial heritage of experience and wisdom. Which means I shall become old, doesn't it, elder thanii? You cannot conceive what you shall become, Cytheron -- and there lies the source of your apprehension. You must have faith in the ways of our kind. You must believe that we know best -- and now prepare to be assimilated. Never! Cytheron skorded as he formed the thought and at once he was haloed by amethyst flakes of dessicated snow. The distant mountains wavered slightly. Then the thanii were with him again, invading his mind with cool tendrils. He cried aloud and skorded at random -- brown riverbed darkly rolling, amber spires of an amber city sipping the morning sun, a blue forest's introspective hush -- but the elders held to him easily and his fear grew. A strange peacefulness burgeoned within him. He knew a subtle loosening and realized he had almost surrendered his identity to the group, had almost yielded his individuality. His despair took him outward from the face of the planet. He paused briefly on the third moon but the shattered silver daggers of the horizon began to waver and he knew he had not escaped. Another leap -- a giant world's saffron sands under crimson sky; leap -- white hell, heart of moribund sun; leap -- sentient hill of black Jelly shifting restlessly beneath alien stars. And all the time the elder thanii's hold grew firmer. Cytheron experienced a single moment of insanity. Before fully understanding what he was doing he had skorded to the one place in that region of the galaxy where nobody -- in his opinion not even the thanii -- could reach him. H aving endured the fantastic death throes peculiar to its species, the quasar was at peace. The process of extinction had begun eons earlier, when the incredibly massive body exhausted its nuclear energy potential and started collapsing radially. Density increased during the contraction until the attendant gravitic field became so fierce as to imprison all radiation and the quasar's own light began to orbit around it. But the same contraction brought a spasmodic renewal of life: gravitational energies became available, wracking the still-vast sphere with explosions repeatedly pushing its radius back outside the limit where radiation can be trapped. For ten times a thousand years the quasar fluctuated between two diameters -- one above and one below the critical dimension. Since there is no way of communicating with or receiving information from an object which imprisons its emanations, the quasar could be considered as periodically entering and leaving the normal continuum. Finally, however, even the fund of gravitic energy was depleted. The quasar folded the stuff of spacetime in around itself nA -- phtt! --  vanished. Only a silent black hole of gravity marked its position in the stellar concourse. C ytheron realized the enormity of his mistake almost at once. The surface of the quasar was an inferno of introverted, recirculated energy -- but the thanii had long ago learned the secret implicit in the universal truth that without resistance there can be no force and he was physically at ease. It was a short and relatively simple step from making his body transparent to light to allowing all forms of radiation pass through It unhindered. The concern he felt sprang from the discovery that he was trapped. His ability to skord was unimpaired but its effectiveness was canceled by the awesome distortions the quasar had wrought in the geometries of reality. Cytheron could skord any imaginable distance -- but only in a straight line -- and in the vicinity of the dead quasar a straight line was a circle. He could reach any point on its surface instantaneously but he could conceive of no way to leave it. All at once, union with the elder thanii -- so repugnant a short time earlier -- seemed infinitely desirable. It came to Cytheron that he was little more than a child and had behaved with a child's arrogance and intolerance. The summit of his conceit had come when he had accused the elders of trying to take from him. In the anguish of selfknowledge he screamed -- and came close to allowing the laminar flow of pent energy to scatter his body to the white winds of hell. Be calm, Cytheron, the elder thanii's corporate thought said. That is not the way. You've found me. Cytheron was overwhelmed with relief as he turned and saw the group of eight, looking hearteningly familiar and composed. It was not difficult. You have much to learn. I know, I know. He abased himself fervently. May I suggest that the first thing you show me is the method of skording through this barrier of gravity? I have no desire to remain here any longer. That is understandable -- but there is no way to skord through such a barrier. What? Then I -- all of us are trapped. That is not the case. We will destroy the barrier. The multiple thought of the elder thanii was calm and Cytheron began to get his first real inkling of the magnitude of their combined intellect. But how can it be done? Part of the matter comprising this sphere must be reconstituted as antiparticles -- the annihilation energy resulting will be sufficient to scatter its mass over a large volume of space, thus dispersing the gravitic field. You can do this? We can. The process has already begun. The vastness of the operation appalled Cytheron. It will be the equivalent of a nova, a supernova. Nearby star systems could be triggered off -- worlds with life on them might be engulfed. I would prer not to be freed -- to die rather than cause the death of another being. Do not be alarmed. We elders have lost none of our reverence for the counter-entropic force. Had freeing you meant the destruction of life, of even one individual, we would have been forced to leave you on this sphere. However, you were lucky. There will be the equivalent of a supernova but the only star close enough to be triggered off is without planets. But the cosmic ray bombardment, the neutron flux, is bound to flood the entire region. Will no inhabited worlds be affected? None. As we said, you have been very lucky,  Cytheron. We examined all the stars in this neighborhood and have found only one solar system. It has nine evolving worlds -- but is in a very early stage of development and life will not begin there until long after the violence of the explosion has abated. I see. I'm glad. Cytheron sought a way to express his gratitude but all his powers of thought were lost temporarily as antimatter was created at the hands of the thanii and the outraged universe fell on itself in a blaze of attritive fury. T he elders had been correct in their analysis of his fears, Cytheron realized. He had not been able to conceive what he would become after assimilation into the group mind. Nothing in his previous state of separateness could have prepared him for the translation into the adult state of being, its sense of completeness and belonging, its transcendental peace! The sapience and experience of a thousand centuries surrounded him like a luminous cloud, modifying and yet at the same time establishing and reasserting his uniqueness. He paused briefly near a medium-sized sun with nine planets -- the solar system closest to the stellar holocaust the thanii had engineered on his behalf. The sun and its retinue of nascent worlds swam undisturbed in the galactic tide, unaware of the cosmic storm approaching them at almost the speed of light. As you see, Cytheron, the group mind thought. There is no life here. The planetary masses are in an early stage of formation. I do see. He indicated a globe with an usually large moon, third from the sun.  imagine that this one will best approximate the optimum conditions for intelligent life. We agree. I must eventually return here, Cytheron thought.  can't help feeling some curiosity about the way in which life will develop on this world. I also feel a certain responsibility. Responsibility? Yes. There is no life here yet but I dread the thought that the consequences of my behavior may have some adverse effect on its future course. After all, the very structure of the planet will be changed when it encounters the neutron flux from the supernova. You worry unduly, Cytheron, the group mind informed him with amusement tempered by its thousand centuries of wisdom. The only physical effect the explosion will have on this world is that there will be a high degree of neutron capture, leading to the formation of rather heavier elements than are normally found on a world of that type. As he sensed the elder thanii's amusement and was drawn deeper into the group mind, Cytheron felt his unformed fears lessen and vanish. He could find nothing in that limitless fund of knowledge to suggest that the development of an intelligent species could be affected -- in any noticeable way -- by the 'presence of heavy metals, such as gold. Or uranium.  Coming in next month's IF James Tiptree, Jr.'s novelette about the hot test ship on star patrol. Every man aboard has a minority problem, a space problem and the same damn girl problem! Irwin Ross's tangy tale of Indestructible aliens who bring microwar to an Earth accustomed to miniwars. Barry Alan Weissman's backward glance from time ahead to time now-or maybe a little later than now. A strangely touching and tender story! r A. Lieutenant Grimes was caught in a war of psyches, neither of them his own -- or human... said Commodore Damien, "that your passenger, this trip, won't be able to help out in the galley." "As long as he's not another assassin, he'll do for me," said Grimes. "But I've found, sir, that anybody who likes to eat also likes, now and again, to prepare his own favorite dishes." "This one does. All the time." Grimes looked at his superior dubiously. He suspected the comtnodore's sense of humor. The older man's skull-like face was stiffly immobile but the pale gray eyes held a sardonic glint. "If he wants galley privileges, sir, it's only fair that he shares, now and again, what he hashes up for himself." Damien sighed. "I've never known officers so concerned about their bellies as you people in the Adder. All you think about is adding to your weight." Grimes winced -- as much because of the unfairness of the imputation as in reaction to the pun. The Couriers small, fast ships did not carry cooks, so their officers, obliged to cook for themselves, were more than usually food-conscious. Adder's crew was no exception to this rule. Damien went on, "I've no doubt that Mr. Adam would be ment with you. But I don't think that any of you, catholic as your tastes may be, would find it palatable. Or, come to that, nourishing. But who started this particularly futile discussion?" "You did, sir." said Grimes. "You'll never make a diplomat, Lieutenant. It is doubtful that you'll ever reach flag rank in this service, rough and tough spacemen though we be, blunt and outspoken to a fault, the glint of honest iron showing through the work-worn fabric of our velvet gloves -- ah -- where was I?" "Talking about iron fists in velvet gloves, sir." "Before you side-tracked me, I mean. Yes, your passenger. He is to be transported from Lindisfarne Base to Delacron. You just dump him there; then return to base forthwith." The commodore's bony hand picked up the heavily sealed envelope from his desk, extended it. "Your orders." "Thank you, sir. Will that be all, sir?" "Yes. Scramble!" G rimes did not exactly scramble. But he walked briskly enough to where his ship, the Serpent Class Courier Adder, was berthed. Dwarfed as she was by the bigger vessels about her, she still stood tall, proud and gleaming. Grimes knew that she and her kind were referred to, disparagingly, as "flying darning needles" but he loved the slenderness of her lines, would not have swapped her for a hulking Dreadnought. In a Dreadnought, of coursehe constantly reminded himself -- he would have been no more than one of many junior officers. Adder was his. Ensign Beadle, his First Lieutenant, met him at the airlock ramp, saluted. He reported mournfully -- nobody had ever heard Beadle laugh and he smiled but rarely -- "All secure for lift-off. Captain." "Thank you. Number One." "The passenger's aboard." "Good. I suppose we'd better extend the usual courtesy. Ask him if he'd like the spare seat in Control when we shake the dust of base off our tail vanes." "I've already done so. Captain. It says that it'll be pleased to accept the invitation." "It, Number One? It? Adam is a good Terran name." Beadle actually smiled. "Technically speaking. Captain, one could not say that Mr. Adam is of Terran birth. But he is of Terran manufacture." "And what does he eat?" asked Grimes, remembering the Commodore's veiled references to the passenger's diet. "A.C. or D.C.? Washed down with a noggin of light lubricating oil?" "How did you guess. Captain?" "The Old Man told me -- in a roundabout sort of way. But -- a passenger? Not cargo? There must be some mistake." "No mistake. Captain. It's intelligent, all right, and it has a personality. I've checked its papers, and officially it's a citizen of the Interstellar Federation, with all rights, privileges and obligations." "I suppose our masters know best," said Grimes resignedly. personality. Grimes found it quite impossible to think of Mr. Adam as a machine. This robot was representative of a type of which Grimes had heard rumors but it was the first one that he had ever seen. Only a very few of its kind existed, in all the worlds of the Federation -- and most of those few were onEarth itself. To begin with, they were fantastically expensive. Secondly, their creators were scared of them, were plagued by nightmares in which they saw themselves as latter-day Frankensteins. Intelligent robots were not a rarity -- but intelligent robots with imagination, intuition and initiative were. They had been developed mainly for research and exploration and could survive in environments that would be almost immediately lethal to even the most heavily and elaborately equipped man. Mr. Adam sat in the spare chair in the control room. He had no need at all to sit but he did so -- in an astonishingly human posture. Perhaps, thought Grimes, he could sense that his hosts would feel more comfortable if something that looked like an attenuated knight in armor were not looming tall behind them, peering over their shoulders. His face was expressionless. It was a dully gleaming ovoid without features. But it seemed to Grimes that there was the faintest flicker of luminosity behind the eye lenses that could betoken interest. His voice, when he spoke, came from a diaphragm set in his throat. He was speaking now. "This has been very interesting, Captain. And now, I take it. we are on trajectory for Delacron." The voice was a pleasant baritone, not quite mechanical. "Yes, Mr. Adam. That is the Delacron sun there -- at three o'clock from the center of the cartwheel sight." "And that odd distortion, of course, is the resultant of the temporal precession field of your Drive -- " Adam hummed quietly to himself for several seconds. "Interesting." "You must have seen the same sort of thing on your way out to Lindisfarne from Earth." "No, Captain. I was not a guest, ever, in the control room of the cruiser in which I was transported." The shrug of his gleaming metal shoulders was almost human. "I -- I don't think Captain Grigsby trusted me." That, thought Grimes, was rather an odd way of putting what he himself felt. But he knew Grigsby, had served under him. Grigsby, as a naval officer of an earlier age on Earth's seas, would have pined for the good old days of sail, of wooden ships and iron men -- and by "iron men" he would not have meant anything like this Mr. Adam. "Yes," the robot went on musingly, "I find this not only interesting, but amazing." "How so?" asked Grimes. "It could all be done -- the liftoff, the setting of trajectory, the delicate balance between acceleration and temporal precession -- so much faster by one like myself." You mean "better" rather than "faster" but you're too courteous to say it... "You're flesh and blood creatures, Captain, evolved to suit the conditions of just one world out of is not your natural environment." "We carry our environment around with us, Mr. Adam." Grimes noticed that the other officers in Control -- Ensign von Tannenbaum. Navigator; Ensign Beadle, First Lieutenant; Lieutenant Slovotny, Radio Officer -- were following the conversation'closely and expectantly. He would have to. be careful. Nonetheless, he had to keep up his end. He grinned. "And don't forget," he said, "that Man, himself, is a quite rugged, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, all-purpose robot." "There are more ways than one of reproducing," said Mr. Adam quietly. "I'll settle for the old-fashioned way," broke in von Tannenbaum. Grimes glared at the burly, flaxen-headed young man -- but too late to stop Slovotny's laughter. Even Beadle smiled. John Grimes allowed himself a severely rationed chuckle. Then: "The show's on the road, gentlemen. I'll leave her in your capable hands. Number One. Set Deep Space watches. Mr. Adam, it is usual at this juncture for me to invite any guests to my quarters for a drink and a yarn -- " Mr. Adam laughed. "Like yourself. Captain, I feel the occasional need for a lubricant. But I do not make a ritual of its application. I shall, however, be very pleased to talk with you while you drink." "I'll lead the way," said Grimes resignedly. I N A small ship passengers can make their contribution to the quiet pleasures of the voyage -- or they can be a pain in the neck. Mr. Adam, at first, seemed pathetically eager to prove that he could be a good shipmate. He could talk -- and he did talk on anything and everything. Mr. Beadle remarked about him that he must have swallowed an encyclopedia. Mr. McCloud, the engineering officer, corrected this statement, saying that he must have been built around one. And Mr. Adam could listen. That was worse than his talking -- Grimes had the impression of invisible wheels whirring inside that featureless head, of information either being discarded as valueless or added to the robot's data bank. He could play chess, of course -- and on the rare occasions when he lost a game it was strongly suspected that he had done so out of politeness. It was the same with any card game. Grimes sent for Spooky Deane, the Psionic Communications Officer. He had the bottle and the glasses ready when the tall, fragile young man seeped in through the doorway of his day cabin, looking like a wisp of ectoplasm decked out in Survey Service uniform. He sat down when invited, accepted the tumbler of neat gin that his captain obligingly poured for him. "Here's looking up your kilt," toasted Grimes coarsely. "A physical violation of privacy, Captain," murmured Deane. "I see nothing objectionable in that." "And just what are you hinting at, Mr. Deane?" "I know. Captain, that you are about to ask me to break the Rhine Institute's Privacy Oath. And this knowledge has nothing to do with my being a telepath. Every time we carry passengers it's the same. You always want me to pry into their minds to see what makes them tick." "Only when I feel that the safety of the ship might be at stake." Grimes refilled Deane's glass, the contents of which had somehow vanished. "Are you frightened of our passenger?" Grimes frowned. Frightened was a strong word. And yet mankind has always feared the robot, the automation, the artificial man. A premonitory dread? Or was the robot only a symbol of the machines -- the mindless machines that every year were becoming more dominant in human affairs? Deane said quietly, "Mr. Adam is not a mindless machine." Grimes glared at him. He almost snarled. How the hell do you know what I'm thinking? The query died unuttered. Not that it made any difference. The telepath went on, "Mr. Adam has a mind as well as a brain." "That's what I was wondering." "Yes. He broadcasts, Captain, as all of you do. The trouble is that I haven't quite got hisfrequency." "Any hostility toward humans?" Deane extended his empty glass. Grimes refilled it. The telepath sipped daintily. Grimes said, "I don't think so. But his mind is not human. Does he feel contempt? Not quite. Pity? Yes, it could be. A sort of amused affection? That's it." "The sort of feelings that we'd exhibit for -- say, a dog capable of coherent speech?" "Yes." "Anything else?" "I could be wrong. Captain. I most probably am. This is the first time that I've eavesdropped on a nonorganic mind. Adam seems to emit a strong sense of mission." "Mission?" "Yes. The pattern reminds me of that priest we carried a few trips back -- the one who was going out to convert the heathen Tarvarkens." "A dirty business," commented Grimes. "Wean the natives away from their own and quite satisfactory local gods -- so that they stop lobbing missiles at the trading post." "Father Cleary didn't look at it that way." "Good for him. I wonder what happened to the poor bastard?" "Should you be talking like this. Captain?" "No. But with you what I say doesn't matter. You know what I'm thinking, anyhow. But this Mr. Adam, Spooky. A missionary? It doesn't make sense." "That's just the feeling I get. I'm not trying to make sense." "All right. Perhaps you do make sense. The robots of Adam's class are designed to be able to go where Man himself cannot go. In our own planetary system, for example, they've carried out explorations on Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. A robot missionary on Tarvark would have made sense, being impervious to poisoned arrows, spears and the like. But on Delacron, an Earth colony? Why?" "The feeling I have doesn't extend beyond Adam." "There are feelings and feelings," Grimes told him. "This is a nonorganic mind that you're prying into. Perhaps you don't know the code, the language the answer has to have been built into him." "Codes and languages don't matter to a telepath." Deane contrived to make his empty glass obvious. Grimes refilled it. "Don't forget. Captain, that there are machines on Delacron -- intelligent machines. They don't show a very high order of intelligence, I admit. But you must have heard of the squabble between Delacron and its nearest neighbor, Muldoon -- " Spooky let the thought dangle. Grimes had heard of the trouble. Roughly midway between the two planetary systems was a sun with only one world in close orbit about it. The solitary planet was a fantastic treasurehouse of radioactive ores. Both Delacron and Muldoon had laid claim #o it. Delacron wanted the rare metals for its own industries, the less highly industrialized Muldoon wanted them for export to other worlds of the Federation. And Mr. Adam? Where did he come into it? Officially, according to his papers, he was a programmer, on loan from the Federation's Grand Council to the Government of Delacron. A programmer was a teacher of machines. An intelligent machine to teach other intelligent machines? To teach other intelligent machines what? And who had programmed Adam? Or had heimply, as it were, happened? A familiar pattern -- vague, indistinct -- was beginning to emerge. It had all been done before, this shipping of revolutionaries into places where they could do the most harm by governments absolutely unsympathetic toward local aspirations. "Even if Mr. Adam had a beard," said Deane, "he wouldn't look much like Lenin." And Grimes wondered if the driver who brought that train into the Finland Station knew what he was doing. G rimes was merely the engine driver. Mr. Adam was the passenger, and Grimes was tied down as much by the Regulations of his Service as was that long-ago railwayman by the tracks upon which his locomotive ran. Grimes was blessed -- or cursed -- with both imagination and a conscience. And a conscience is too expensive a luxury for a junior officer. Grimes actually wished that in some way Mr. Adam were endangering the ship. Then he. Grimes, could take action, drastic action if necessary. But the robot was less trouble than the average human passenger. Adam made no complaints about monotonous food, stale air and all the rest of it. About the only thing that could be said against him was that he was far too good a chess player. But just about the time Grimes began to find excuses for not playing with him, Adam made what appeared to be a genuine friendship. He began to prefer the company of Mr. McCloud to that of any of the other officers. "Of course, Captain," said Beadle, "they belong to the same clan." "What the hell do you mean. Number One?" Deadpan, Beadle replied, "The Clan MacHinery." Grimes groaned, then, reluctantly laughed. He said, "It makes sense. A machine will have more in common with an engineer than with the rest of us. Their shop talk must be fascinating." He tried to imitate McCloud's accent. "An' tell me, Mr. Adam, whit sorrt o' lubricant d'ye use on yon ankle joint?" Beadle, having made his own joke, was not visibly amused. "Something suitable for heavy duty I should imagine. Captain." "Mphm. Well, he's out of our hair for the rest of the trip if Mac keeps him happy." "He'll keep Mac happy, too. Captain. He's always moaning that he should have an assistant. "Set a thief to catch a thief," cracked Grimes. "Set a machine to -- what?" "Work a machine?" Those words would do, thought Grimes. But after Beadle had left him he began to consider the implications of what had been discussed. McCloud was a good engineer-but the better the engineer, the worse the psychological shortcomings. The machine had been developed to be Man's slave but ever since the twentieth century a peculiar breed of Man had proliferated -- a species all too ready chine's servants, far too prone to sacrifice human values on the altar of efficiency. Instead of machines' being modified to suit their operators, men were being modified to suit the machines. And McCloud? He would have been happier in industry than in the Survey Service, with its emphasis on officer-like qualities and all the rest of it. As it was, he was far too prone to regard the ship merely as the platform that carried his precious engines. Grimes sighed. He did not like what he was going to do. It was all very well to snoop on passengers, on outsiders -- but to pry into the minds of his own people was not gentlemanly. He got out the gin bottle and called for Mr. Deane. Y es, Captain?" asked the telepath. "You know what I want you for. Spooky." "Of course. But I don't like it.',' "Neither do I." Grimes poured the drinks, handed the larger one to Deane. The Psionic Communications Officer sipped in an absurdly genteel manner, the little finger of his right hand extended. The level of the transparent fluid in his glass sank rapidly. Deane asked, his speech ever so slightly slurred, "And you think that the safety of the ship is jeopardized?" "I do." Grimes poured more gin. But not for himself. "If I have your assurance. Captain, that such is the case." "You have." Deane was silent for a few seconds. He seemed to be looking through rather than at Grimes, staring at something -- elsewhere. Then: "They're in the computer room. Mr. Adam and the Chief. I can't pick up Adam's thoughts but I feel a sense of -- rightness? I can get into Mac's mind... " The grimace of extreme distaste was startling on Deane's featureless visage. "I don't understand." "You don't understand what. Spooky?" "How a man, a human being, can regard a hunk of animated ironmongery with such reverence." "You're not a very good psychologist, Spooky, but go on." "I'm looking at Adam through Mac's eyes. He's bigger, somehow. and he seems to be self-luminous. There's a sort of circle of golden light around his head." "That's the way that Mac sees him?" "Yes. And his voice. Adam's voice. It's not the way that we hear it. It's more like the beat of some great engine. And he's saying, 'You believe and you will serve.' And Mac has just answered, 'Yes, Master. I believe and I will serve.' " "What are they doing?" Grimes demanded urgently. "Mac's opening up the computer. The memory bank, I think it is. He's turned to look at Adam again. A panel over Adam's chest is sliding away and down. I see some sort of storage bin in there -- rows and rows of pigeonholes. Adam has taken something out of one of them -- a ball of grayish metal or plastic, with connections all over its surface. He's telling Mac where to put it in the memory bank and how to hook it up." Grimes, his glass clattering unheeded to the deck, was out of his chair. He paused briefly at his desk to snatch open a drawer and take from it his .# automatic. He snapped at Deane, "Get on the intercom. Tell every officer off duty to come to the computer room, armed if possible." He ran through the door out into the alleyway, then fell rather than clambered down the ladder to the next deck -- the next one and the next. At some stage of his descent he twisted his ankle painfully but kept on going. The door to the computer room was locked from the inside but Grimes, as Captain, carried always on his person the ship's master key. With his left hand the pistol was in his right -- he inserted the convoluted sliver of metal into the slot, twisted it. The panel slid open. McCloud and Adam stared at him, at the weapon in his hand. He stared back. He allowed his gaze to wander, but briefly. The cover plate had been replaced over the memory bank -- but surely that heavily insulated cable leading to and through it was something that had been added, was an additional supply of power, too much power, to the ship's electronic bookkeeper. McCloud smiled -- a vague sort of smile, yet somehow exalted, that looked odd on his roughhewn features. He said, "You and your kind are finished. Captain. You'd better tell the dinosaurs. Neanderthal Man, the dodo, the great auk and all the others to move over to make room for you." "Mr. McCloud," Grimes said, his voice -- not without effort on his part -- steady. "Switch off the computer. Then undo whatever it is that you have done." It was Adam who replied: "I am sorry, genuinely sorry, Mr. Grimes, but it is too late. As Mr. McCloud implied, you are on the point of becoming extinct." Grimes was conscious of the others behind him in the alleyway. "Mr. Beadle?" "Yes, Captain?" "Take Mr. Slovotny with you down to the engine room. Cut off all power to this section of the ship." "You can try," said Mr. Adam. "But you will not be allowed. I give notice now -- I am the Master." "You are the Master," echoed McCloud. "Mutiny," stated Grimes. "Mutiny?" repeated Adam, iron and irony in his voice. He stepped towards the captain, one long, metallic arm upraised. Grimes fired. He might as well have been using a peashooter. He fired again and again. The bullets splashed like pellets of wet clay on the robot's armor. Grimes realized that it was too late for him to turn and run. He awaited the crushing impact of the steel fist that would end everything. A voice said, "No -- no -- " Was it his own? Dimly, he realized that it was not. The voice came again: "No -- " Adam hesitated but only for a second. Again he advanced. And then, seemingly from the computer itself, arced a crackling discharge, a dreadful, blinding lightning. Grimes, in the fleeting instant before his eyelids snapped shut, saw the automaton standing there, arms outstretched rigidly from his sides, black amid the electric fire that played about his body. He toppled to the deck, making a metallic crash. When, at long last. Grimes regained his eyesight he looked around the computer room. McCloud was unharmed -- physically. The engineer huddled in a corner, his arms over his head, in a foetal position. The computer, to judge from the wisps of smoke still trickling from cracks in its panels, was a total write-off. And Adam, literally welded to the deck, still in that attitude of crucifixion, was dead. Dead? thought Grimes numbly. Dead? Had Adam ever lived in the real sense of the word? But the ship, he knew, had been briefly alive, had been aware, conscious, after that machine who would be God had kindled the spark of life in her electronic brain. And a ship, unlike other machines, always has personality, a pseudolife derived from her crew, from the men who live and work, hope and dream within her stalwart metal body. This vessel had known her brief minutes of full awareness -- but her old virtues had persisted, among them loyalty to her rightful destiny. Grimes wondered if he would dare to put all this in the report that he would have to make. It would be a pity not to give credit where credit was due. (Continued from page #) # December # Is # feet large enough to be affected by the gravitational stresses from Earth that determine Roche's limit? Scientists don't know, but they suspect not. And if not -- then what was the original object, and what in the world -- or out of the world, more likely, made it break up on December #, #? Of course, we are not suggesting that a large extra-solar space probe, charged with the observation of Earth on behalf of the citithat date split itself into ten or a dozen exploration modules. We wouldn't suggest anything. But it's kind of interesting to think about, isn't it? At odds of a everything is fairincluding living a stranger's life! R esting his front pair of legs, the Referee silently listened to Therdon air his rage. Therdon called up images of every ancestor in Arman's nest and drove them forth with wild invective. Arman stroked his aphid absently and slowly sucked the cool ooze from its back. Eventually Therdon tired and fell silent. Passing the equivalent of a sigh. the Referee restated his position for the hundredth time. "There are no rules that force an opponent to resign from the game. The Referee may only call a game where both Movers claim victory upon the death of a Player. Beyond this I am not allowed to interfere in any way with the play." Therdon sulked behind a blackening silence. Arman should have been the one who was disturbed, for he was losing the game. The game was in its fortysecond year and Arman should have resigned twenty years ago. But he had another hunch and, like ail gamblers who heed hunches, he knew the next one was the winner. Arman 'needed another foul and Therdon was in the mood to commit one very soon.  Heitz were created on the same day forty-two years ago and placed intohuman environmental circumstances that were relatively equal. Both Players were given the same mental and physical qualities and the nonplaying humans with whom they wereplaced had acquired about the same amount of wealth and social bearing. From this point on the Mover, Arman, was responsible for Adam Heitz and Therdon was responsible for the Player Thomas Green. And from this point on the game was never even. The people who knew Thomas Green swore he was silverspoon and could do no wrong. Everything he touched seemed to flourish and turn into gold. He had built his father's small grocery store on the lower East Side into a multicompany. The occasional incidents of trouble fate visited upon him were always ended to his satisfaction and success. He lived on Long Island, on one of those exclusive estates at the end of a private lane that connected to a semiprivate, paved road. Thirty rooms of house and forty acres of lawn overlooked a private inlet and marina. The house itself was acceptably horrible in a French Gothic Early American sort of way. The building inspired Green and he delighted in decorating with Spanish Mediterranean furniture, Persian rugs and modern art. His children by several marriages were plac in the best schools in Massachusetts. His present wife was twenty-four years old and had been recruited from the dancers in one of his downtown clubs. She was ravingly beautiful, polished and completely paid for. Green was listed in Who's Who and considered to be governor timber by the right party. His appearance was unusually youthful. His thinning hair maintained its original line and his figure was kept trim by bouts on the tennis court with his mistresses. He played handball, polo and sailed alone from his private marina on deep-sea fishing ventures. But his friends, of which he had many, were starting to show concern over his often eccentric behavior. He would go into fits of rage that always ended up with his moving machinery. A psychiatrist had been moved quietly into the circle but could find nothing wrong with Green. What Thomas Green did not have he did not want. What he did not do he had done brfore or did not care to do. For forty-two years he had silently wondered when it would all end but it never did and be began to know that only death would stop it. A rman felt a wash of contentment as Therdon finished with a flourish his series of moves. "Foul," he claimed. The Referee bent forward to study the board while Therdon exploded in a flurry of oaths and wriggling obscenities. Arman watched his opponent with a certain amount of pity. He had withheld victory from Therdon for twenty years and the win would have allowed his opponent to take his seat among the Elder Workers. Frustration had caused Therdon to play carelessly and this foul was the final one. After several moments the Referee returned to his former position and stated, "The claim of Foul is allowed in this" case by reason of a violation of rule four-fifteen, which provides that no Mover may use his Player in such a way as to endanger the life of a nonplayer, directly or indirectly. I therefore decree that the penalty of a forfeited turn is incurred by the Mover Therdon." Arman bowed in acknowledgment to the award. He said, "The Mover Arman declines the penalty by reason of exercising his right to invoke Ersalz's rule." S ensible people avoided Adam Heitz as they would a black cat. Adam was a first-class loser. If he touched a machine it would break. If he bought fruit at the street stand it would be rotten or wormy. If he got on an elevator he sneezed three times. He had been sued once for trespassing while trying to complain about a dog bite. He tried to help a lady across a busy intersection and she broke her ankle slipping off the curb. Adam lived in South Philadelphia on the fifth story of a walkup overlooking the rail yards. His wife weighed two hundred pounds and had been his cousin when they were forced to get married. They had six kids and had not touched each other in more than three years. The children slept with their mother in the one bedroom while Adam stayed on the couch where his asthmatic coughing would not bother anyone. After his release from the reformatory Adam had sold his father's dry-goods business and used the money to pay off gambling debts. He had managed to keep enough money to buy an old garbage truck and eked out a living from a minor downtown route that no one else bothered with. The apartment was decorated in early nineteen-forties graffiti and broken by plaster holes to offset the falling ceiling strips. Adam spent most of his time lounging before the TV in his shorts and T-shirt and drinking warm beer. He had trained himself to hear the set's speakers without distortion from his wife's constant nagging and the children's screaming. Heitz had been a hunch player all his life and had somehow managed to lose on every one. He had wanted to give up ages ago, as his hair and stomach had done, but something drove him on. Maybe prosperity was right around the corner in the next garbage can. Maybe the next hunch would cop the Irish Sweepstakes. Maybe. fflHE game chamber was almost A empty of sound after Arman's announcement. Even the preening aphids stood still. Suddenly the Referee busied himself counting the allowed claims of foul to ascertain that the proper number had been committ. Therdon, whose features had contorted during the pause, swallowed and grinned, then finally laughed in tremendous relief. "It's finally over." Arman agreed, "Yes, in one way or another." "You can't be serious. The don said. "Exactly," nodded Arman. The Referee spoke, "The count of the Mover Arman is correct, as twenty-five claims of foul have been allowed. Rule three-o-one, subsection three, states that any Mover against whom twenty-five or more fouls have been committed may exercise rule three hundred. Rule three hundred, popularly known as Ersalz's Rule, states that a Mover may call for the Rotater in an attempt to reverse the positions of the Players in respect to theirphysical environment. If the petitioning Mover is successful the game will continue. If unsuccessful, the game is terminated. Do both Movers understand the situation?" "We understand," they answered formally. The Rotater was rolled out by several slaves and moved into position beside the Referee. Therdon felt like a participant in a pistol duel who is forced to stand fire from a blind man. It wasn't likely he would be hit but there was still that chance, that one chance in a shift device of sixteen variously sized wheels aligned on a common shaft. Each wheel had different combinations of red and white marks on the circumference and a marking line ran horizontally across the face of all wheels. With a kick of his # the Referee tripped the spring clamp and all the wheels spun into a pinkish motion. Arman felt that hunch with all his being. It would work this time. He would win. All white or all red -- either would win. It had only happened once and that was over two thousand years ago, when Ersalz did it. The first wheel slowed to a stop on white. Ersalz had won on red. Often, without either's being  aware of the coincidence, both Players would do their basic chores together -- eating or sleeping or working. At the moment they were shaving. Adam was waving his straightedge back and forth across the strap in a vain effort to hone the steel. A nick under his chin bled profusely as he watched his face freeze up in the peeling mirror. He lifted the razor, gritted his teeth and took the stroke. Thomas admired himself before his bronze-trimmed mirror as the sounds of his electric razor echoed off the marble walls of the bathroom. He liked to shave in the nude and his tanned body attested to the fact that he enjoyed swimming that way, too. He could hear his wife washing in her own bath and let his mind dwell on the image as he worked the razor about his jaw. T he last wheel slowed and stopped on white -- sixteen in a row. Therdon's confident grin was gone, replaced by an indescribable expression. Arman felt something crawl in his mind and he wanted to scream. The Referee flicked the lock on the Rotater to set the machine for validation. Then, calmly, the Referee ordered the switch of environments. A dam jerked back as the electric razor touched his face. He slammed it violently down into the sink, where it shattered and flew into pieces about the room. He most have screamed then, because after a while his wife, Thomas's wife, came running. She found him with one hand touching the mirror while the other was exploring his body. She ran to him and just held on, a woman's sense telling her this was all that was needed. Adam knew it was a dream. He did not understand how it could happen this way but he knew it was a dream. Tingling chills running through him from the body contact of the woman made him urgently aware that he had better get on with it before he awoke. Thomas was not as fortunate. He laid open his face with the straight razor. As he jerked back to see what had happened his eyes focused for the last time as a sane man. He screamed, too, but he did not stop screaming. He ran from the bathroom, stumbling about until he found the door that led into the hallway. Then he charged down the stairs to the street, wearing only a towel about his waist and dripping blood from his arms and chest. Thomas Green ran in circles in front of the apartment house, simply screaming and waving his bloodstained razor. Women were fainting in little heaps here and there and finally a policeman arrived. He could only analyze what he saw and no one blamed him later for drawing his gun and trying to disable the beserk citizen. But Thomas had, at long last, inherited Adam's luck and the single bullet caught him through the heart. He fell dead across a garbage can, Adam's can. A rman stared at the board in disbelief. The Players had been beyond the control of the Movers. His Player was alive and the obvious winner. Minutes ago he was the worst loser to ever disgrace the games. It was fantastic, unbelievable. "Unfair," said Therdon in tears, "It's unfairunfair!" Arman wanted to agree but could find no words. The Referee regarded Therdon coolly. "My dear Mover," he said. everything is fair."  's when future Man liberates Planet Belzaaor -- today?''" ' down-to-Earth pertinence to "like it is" on Earth Phyllis Gotlieb's Norman Spinrad's Ron Goulart's James E. Gunn's Plus Robert S. Richardson's factual space-science adventure of tomorrow: takeV B K The local may bed you with nine women in one night -- but watch ' out for the express! I consciousness seeped implacably into the brain, mind, soul and person of Amos A, Appleby. It was like an incoming tide lapping around a child's sand castle, abandoned on the beach because the time had become cold and dark and everyone had gone back to the hotel, leaving behind, along with the castle, the odd yellow bucket and red shovel, tools of wanton, unformed engineers. Consciousness was now one of the lesser desires of Amos Appleby. A look into his unconscious would find some ambivalence about His ever wanting to be conscious again. Let me sleep just oneweek more... But the tide takes away the turrets and in the end you wake and see how.it is, where you are. Baby, you say, this is it. Amos Appleby, fighting the opening of his eyes, called forth the memory, imagery, thought of years ago, her flesh against his, the world outside the way it had been for a while, with orange juice and croissants and coffee for breakfast, they in robes of many but familiar colors. Her flesh against his, yes, the warmth of her skin on his. Dp you remember knowing this touch for the first time -- what it was, how it felt? You have thought of this? All right, then, cancel all that. Think you might never know it again, not ever. Amos fought. But you can sleep only so long, no matter how seductive or urgent the prospect. Amos opened his eyes. and no oasis in sight. Sport jacket for a pillow and no blanket. The night before when he had (what do you say -- landed, arrived?) come here, the stars had confirmed, roughly, his idea of where he was. And what they had suggested about the when hadn't been too bad. He had been worse off before. The where had to be the expanse of nothing called the Sahara -- and the when seemed within reasonable limits. It's not as bad as it could be. I will eventually push the right button... He tried to huddle back into sleep but he was awake and knew it. He wore the trousers of however many years ago, or ahead, and he reached into the left front pocket. The jeweler's screwdriver and the hex wand in the leather pouch were still there. He felt in other pockets and found that the notebook was secure, as was the device -- that small object about the size of a pack of cigarettes which had once been as innocuous and familiar as his toothbrush standing in the glass where he washed his face before he went to bed, but which now seemed as alien as, say, a pear in a partridge tree. Sand the hell all over, dunes, and no oasis in sight. There was enough light now and Amos Appleby brushed aside the remnants of sleep and faced up to doing what he had to do. T ake the a train, yes. There's been some music about that. Incomparable Duke. Take the A train from One Twenty-Fifth to Park Street Under to Harvard Square, and see what's there when you take the UP escalator. Go down the steps at Piccadilly Circus, and come up at Green Park, expecting April sunshine but finding bleak December rain. Enter any door, Amos thought, at your peril. The beginning had been quite simple. And it hadn't been on the Paris-Barcelona. Express B train? half an hour out of Austerlitz. I was feeling fine, I wanted a drink and I'd given the porter enough time to get himself squared away. My wife, Helen, and I were headed eventually for Madrid, where she would visit an old friend and I would buy a guitar (a Ramirez . In the meantime we would spend a few days in Barcelona, where I had laid on a few appointments with fellow physicists and where we had a date with Luis and Sonia Fonseca and garlic soup and cochinillo. I was feeling fine because my laboratory and classes were thousands of miles behind. I'd miss them soon enougn. But for now nostalgia was no problem. I was feeling fine because I was clicking through the night south of Paris in a mellow wagon-lit, one of the remaining means of travel worth mentioning. The porter tapped on the door. Neither Helen nor I thought much of drinking whiskey or gin in France. I ordered a bottle of Hennessey and Perrier. The porter was back in a minute and I made the drinks. We sat on the lower bed, I next to the window. This was understood, T had the greater interest. I sat by the window in planes too. I like to see what's going on outside. We were well into the gentle farnv country of Loiret, nothing to see but tht trucks going toward and away from Paris on the grande route, which here paralleled the railroad. The clusters of red, white and amber lights were soothing -- ambulatory Christmas trees going here and there in the wrong season. I moved my head from the window, looked at Helen. "This," I said, "is great. Why don't we have trains like this in the States any more? You're enjoying the trip?" There was a nagging, a pulling at me somewhere, making me wonder if I was doing all I was supposed to. I touched her knee tentatively. She was already into a paperback but she raised her head, that head I knew so well, and we sat there -- somewhere near Orleans, must have been -- looking at each other. She was pleasant enough, sort of there, not making any fuss. "Did you bring aspirin or Empirin or something?" she asked. I reached for my flight bag, rummaged about, taking things out, putting them back. Not the neatest packer in the world am I. But I get along. I found the aspirin, gave her two. , Helen had been watching me. "For Christ's sake," she said. "What?" She reached into my bag and pulled out something. "I will be damned," she said, "if that isn't the most stupid thing in God's world to be carrying around Europe. Amos. Just what the hell is the big idea?" Helen talked like that now and then. I filled my glass. "When I closed the garage door on the way to the airport I was so -- excited at the idea of meeting you in Paris I put the thing in my pocket instead of leaving it in the car. It's all right." I felt in the wrong, errant fourth-grader standing once more on cork tile before the principal's tacky desk. Helen did that to me sometimes. My fault as much as hers -- for letting it happen, that is -- but still she did it. What I was inadvertently carrying around Europe was the transmitter that opens the door of my side of the garage in Cambridge. Big deal. I put it back in the bag, made Helen another drink which she acknowledged -- though she was again into the paperback -- with an air of suffering fools patiently but without pleasure. I drank the Hennessey and Perrier and watched the lights on the road and in the occasional small station we disdainfully rattled through, not stopping. So what if I'd brought along the garage-door opener? I'm a professor, after all, and the quality of absence of mind is not unknown to my kind -- nor to me, specifically and individually, though I am younger than most of my confreres. Big deal. I pulled the gadget again from the bag, looked at my wife, as if daring her to say something. She doesn 't know me. She doesn 't know me at all... For the hell of it I pushed the switch panel, having a wild thought of my garage door dutifully rising on Foster Street in Cambridge. Home is the hunter, the door says, but it has been bouncing too many times between E layer and Earth. If the door opens, my Belvedere -- my eighttrack stereoed companion and friend -- will not be waiting on the ramp. It waits unprotected but not alone in the jungle of Logan airport. This I was thinking. What happened was something else. Helen's figure blurred, then sharpened. And she had changed her dress. That was the first thing I noticed. She had been wearing a rather severe suit I won't attempt to describe. Now she wore a tweed, skirt and yellow cashmere sweater. Her Hennessey and Perrier, I saw next, had changed to Pernod. Her hair was the same lustrous brown I had always liked -- but it was done altogether differently. And this Helen was not reading. She was sitting there dozing and I knew she was ready for bed. I did not believe what I saw, of course, but I began to have some notion of what I was dealing with. I replaced -- with great care, gently -- the instrument in the flight bag. "Helen?" I said. M y wife, wearing clothes I had never seen before, opened sleepy eyes and looked into mine. And I looked into hers for whatever I could find. Nothing new right off -- business as usual. "I've been asleep?" she asked. "For a few minutes. Ready for bed?" What, I wondered, did I think I was asking here -- and of whom? I was still I. There was no discontinuity in my history that I knew anything about. But Helen, somewhere, some time, had taken a different track. What if I asked her about the gray suit she had been wearing five minutes ago? "Did you bring the gray suit this time?" I asked. "I told you I wouldn't bring any suits this time, Amos. And I don't have a gray one. You can be so damn silly. What do you know about women's clothes anyway?" I sat by the window. Not much, I said to myself, as Helen slipped out of her garments. That lovely body was the same, damn if it wasn't, but there was something different about non-body Helen, my wife. I saw it, felt it, somehow .tuned in on it, though I could not put my finger on it. I wondered whether to probe the past or the present. A flimsy black nightgown I had never seen dropped first over her shoulders and then over the rest of her. She dug into her toilet things, preparing for ritual. We slowed for a rustic station. I pulled down the shade and got ready for bed myself. As it worked out, I was ready before she was and crawled into the lower berth, wondering. The trails were clicking smoothly beneath this bed, and there came toward me a woman I did not know but whose breasts and stomach and bottom and all I could describe with inflammatory detail "You expect me to climb upstairs?" she asked, not altogether unkindly. "We could both be here for a while." "You know I don't like to make love in trains," she said. "And anyway, I'm still sore from the last time." She was on a different track, all right. There we were, this strange and desirable woman and, in what I thought was one of the few remaining romantic situations -- and she wanted me the hell out of her berth and aloft into mine. So aloft I went, there to brood. My wife, Helen, I had (with my door-opener and inadvertently) thrust somewhere into time and space. And here I was with, say, Helen A, who would have nothing of me, not now, though our situation was attractive and I had done nothing to offend. My flight bag was on the rack near my head and as we slipped through the night I thought to retrieve the transmitter, push once, and see what Helen B was like. Or would she go back to plain Helen again? Not that she was plain, you understand. I resisted the impulse as a scientist and, instead, cast myself adrift upon a sea of fantasy. Then the clickety-click of the wheels on the rails and the gentle swaying of the car took over and I slept all the way to Perpignan. II B arcelona, a town worth visiting, knowing. I spent most of the first day there with colleagues, interested in what some of them were up to but distracted by thoughts of Helen. Helen A. We were to be taken out that evening for garlic soup and cochinillo, I had extracted that promise from the Fonsecas before leaving Cambridge. The last of my several confrontations with colleagues had been duller than could have been expected and, with untidy excuses. I got out of there at five. I was near enough our hotel, the Colon, to walk back. I strolled along the Ramblas, a little worried about the girl I was approaching. I stopped and bought for Helen a bunch of what I took for marigolds. I stopped again to buy gin and vermouth. I thought to ply my wife, whoever she was, with drink, if necessary, before getting ready for the evening. When I got back to the Colon oui'room was empty. No cause for alarm. If Helen A were anything like Original Helen she would be out shopping. I rang for ice, then ran a bath, made a magnificent martini and settled into the hot tub. There was a clicking and turning of a key in the hall door. The bathroom door was open -- I had deliberately left it so -- but it did not face the room. I could hear what was going on. Helen A was back with enough packages to need a boy's assistance to get them into the room. She thanked him in impeccable Spanish and I heard the door close. "Hi," I called. She came in, looked at me in the tub. "How did it go?" she asked. "Fine. You?" "I bought a couple of things. Nice things. The people in the stores are so polite." "You want a martini? I bought gin and vermouth. For practically nothing, by the way." "All right." "Have a sip of mine. I'll be out in a rninute and make more." more." "That tastes good for a change." "Yes." The sound track goes about tike that but it doesn't communicate. Original Helen and I had had our troubles, God knows, but now I wanted her back, because what Helen A was communicating, though not via the sound track, was -- indifference. Distance. Defense against intimacy. There I was, with all due immodesty, spreadeagled in the tub and Helen A's reaction was remote -- a voice saying nothing, coming my way from a far space. Original Helen would have done something, said something, reacted this way or that, whether she had any notions for the immediate future or not. "I want to show you what I bought." Well, she was female anyway. "All right. I'll be out shortly." I wanted to think a minute. "Will you make?" I handed her my empty glass. I was thinking about time. This Helen brought me a martini almost as good as the one I'd made. "What year were we married?" I asked. "I always forget the year." "Amos." She started to say more, to ask a question, whatever. Then she told me and went back to her packages. Her year was two years earlier than mine. So I knew Helen A had been on a different road from Original Helen's for at least ten years, maybe more. And where was Original Helen now? Where, for that matter, was the I Helen A had married? Though the consequences of my pushing the switch in the train had been totally unforeseeable, I suddenly felt guilty. I got out of the tub, threw on a robe and, making interested sounds, looked at things bought. "I need a bath, too," Helen said. "Do we have to hurry?" I looked at my watch. "No. Time for another martini, maybe two." I had not, I realized, abandoned all hope. When she was undressed I came close and enveloped her from behind. If there was any Original Helen in her at all she would have to respond to this. She did. "For God's sake, Amos," she said, withdrawing. With finality. She even closed the bathroom door. My demands are not great but I've never tolerated frustration graciously. I was excited and I was rejected. My guilt feelings were conveniently receding as well and I pulled the gadget from my flight bag. Am I, I stopped to ask, a responsible scientist or am I not? The hell with it. I jabbed the panel as if it were a punching bag. "Amos?" "Yes?" "Why did you close the door? I need you."' Gentle reproach in her voice. And love, lots of love. I'll be damned, I said to myself. "I'm coming," I answered to Helen B.  There was a look in her eyes, a look Helen A could not have come up with in a hundred years. "I need you," she said, "to wash my back." "Your wish is my command," I said. Shook I was, reduced to cliche. Wash it I did, not stopping with the back either. Things were looking up. "Ummm," this girlsaid. "How soon do we have to be ready?" "I'm ready now." "I'd noticed." "We have time." My goodness. Rembrandt, or whoever it was, was wrong and wrong by orders of magnitude, with that crack about knowing all women if you know one. A painter he was but when the woman boat sailed away he was standing behind on the shore. I had known all along that he had been wrong but a postgraduate refresher course does no harm. Lovely, ovely. Lovely. Then the Fonsecas were due. Neither of us, this Helen or I, wanted to go out for the night, cochinillo notwithstanding. But we live in a world of obligation and we had to dress and I had to think of Original Helen. Where was she? I could dispense with Helen A -- she did not seem my responsibility,, somehow. I knotted my tie, then zippered this Helen up the back. She could do more for a zipper than most girls could for a wardrobe. These girls were all Helens, you know. They had all started out as the same girl, had all been launched a bit back there from the same genetic pad. (Yes, Helen B's natural hair color was the same as that of the other two.) Now I'd known three of them (in respect to Helen A, I don't mean that in the biblical sense), and they were the same and so different. Weird. And all I had to do was push the button. Feeling like God's younger brother, I carefully stowed the gadget where it would not be disturbed when the girl came in to make up the bed. The Fonsecas were below, then, and while they were coming up to the room my mind's eye scanned a dazzling and mixed array of Helens C through Z, and on into AA and ZZ, continuing -- and I knew I had to be with Helen B and the hell with all those others, whoever or whatever they were. And Original Helen was still there, too, poking around inside my head, crying to be let out. Being a scientist, I resolved the problem for the moment, gave myself some borrowed time by promising that as soon as I was back in Cambridge I would study the gadget -- in great secrecy, of course -- and play it by ear from there. I was not about to change anything right then. "Tell me, Luis," I said, "with all due respect to dear Sonia, if you could change one thing about her, just one, and a small thing at that, what would you do? Which button would you push?" We talked about that, then about how silly I was to bring up such a question. "Luis," I said later, "tell me something else. Do you think that Sonia knows you?" I looked from one to the other, then to my wife. She understood, somehow, exactly what was in my head. She knew me. "Yes," said Luis, after some consideration and a searching glance at his wife. "Yes, she does." Sonia's smile showed that this was so. After that we went out for dinner. In the elevator my wife touched my wrist all the way down. She did not hold it or anything, just touched it. Something generous in me wept for all the poor bastards out there who could never know that touch. And the ungenerous counterpart said. Keep away, friend, far away she's mine... T he rest of Barcelona was an idyll. So was the train to Madrid. So was Madrid. I found a Ramirez which had obviously been made for me alone. It had been patiently waiting for me in the varnish-scented atelier of a man of genius. It leaped instantly into my grasp and later I played passionately for my wife'and in a Villa-Lobos Prelude (the Third) I was sure I heard Segovia. With fhis instrument, I said, I can truly talk to God. As being his younger brother -- why not? A time like that. H uman error is what you have to watch for. Maxims of Amos A. Appleby, quoted by permission. I wrapped the gadget in cotton wool and carried it aboard the Madrid-Boston aircraft as though it, the gadget, were the true Grail. We had a lovely flight most of the way, my wife sitting by the window, her touch on me from time to time. And mine on her. We ran into turbulence about an hour out of Logan. The belt sign flashed on and the girls toured the aisle, checking. I was checking dear Helen B when we went into a sickening drop which lasted too long. I should, of course, have been tending to my flight bag. It, along with all of us, was in free fall during the drop but we were restrained and it was not. And whatever it was, the gadget was sensitive. The fall ended drastically with at least a #-G tug. My unattended bag hit the floor. I heard it. I unbuckled my belt and dove for it but too late. Human error. Yep. Helen A again. I wondered if the girls would notice the different clothes. I certainly did. She was back to skirt and sweater. "You all right?" I asked, knowing dark hypocrisy within my soul. Yes, I'm all right. I hope we don't do that again. Don't you want to sit by the window now?" "It doesn't matter." Some voice told me to push the button and keep pushing until Helen B came back. But something else, another voice, warned me. That way lies disaster... I listened, although disaster was already mine. I was silent, thinking, the rest of the way into Logan. Except for a few seconds. "How do you like my Rami"rez?" I asked.  "It sounds all right," she said. "You didn't play it much." Ill  on Foster Street I stopped the car on the ramp, got out and opened the garage door with the key meant to be used when the transmitter failed. "Where's the opener?" this wife asked. In my suitcase somewhere. This is simpler." She sighed. "You carry that thing all around Europe -- where you can't do a damn thing with it -- and when you get back home where you can use it, you don't have it." "Yes, dear," I said. I think she missed the tone. I didn't feel safely home, warm and snug, after perilous travels. I felt that perilous travels were about to begin. "You're irritable," I said unnecessarily. "I devoutly hope you will feel better tomorrow." She was silent. I carried the bags into the house. I was very careful with the flight bag and with the Ramfrez. Before bed I secreted the gadget in my shop lab in the basement and released my Ramfrez from its case, put it on a stand in my study. My lovely Ramfrez, my lovely Helen. One I had, the other I had not. The Ramirez wanted to be played, I could tell. A guitar with which you can talk to God is more than a little like a loving woman. I apologized for not being able to do it then and touched it softly once -- for my comfort. Tomorrow, I said to my Ramirez, I said to my very deepest self. Tomorrow and tomorrow... Uneasy sleep, I think, is often worse than none. And uneasy sleep was, a matter of course, my lot that night. The next day was Saturday. I had time to myself. No need to go to my office or lab. By seven, Saturday morning, I sat on a high stool at my familiar workbench, regarding the gadget. Side by side with it was the opener for the other garage door, Helen's. I really was a scientist now. Have you noticed that when you go to a good doctor with, say, a swollen thumb, he looks at the good thumb first? That gives him a base. Thus I examined Helen's transmitter first, not the bomb which was mine. Cheap plastic case, model and serial numbers on a silver label, which also bore a statement of rules. Same legend on both of them -- different serial numbers. I saw how the device was meant to be opened. I opened Helen's. Simple and straightforward. Two tunable inductances, a tiny variable air capacitor, a dozen miniature resistors, a miniantenna, three transistors and so on -- ordinary components mounted on a printed circuit and powered by a #Vi volt battery. A pocket-size broadcasting station. No problem. With great care I then opened the device that had started this caper and then there were problems galore. Someone had put a ringer into my Belvedere companion -- a basic datum which, at this point, came on as no surprise. Problems, yes. Who? How? When? Above all, why? And what was I going to do about answers? What I saw when I opened the case was a small black cube, fixed irremovably to one side of the case, not occupying much space. A twisted pair of delicate wires led from the cube to the switch panel. A pair of minute brass screws protruded from one side of the cube. A single similar screw was on the opposite side. And through an oval aperture in the face between, I made out a tunable slug, obviously meant to be adjusted with a tiny hex wand. And that was all. No battery. No visible power source. In my necessarily gentle tests the cube appeared impermeable, impregnable. I could find no way to take it apart or open it up. I set my multimeter to medium range, thinking to measure the potential across the two poles of the open switch. My meter blew, emitting a gentle puff of smoke. I had even more respect for the cube after that. there for me to understand or not understand nothing for me to do except push or not push the switch. With or without accompanying adjustments of one or more or all of the four adjustable elements. I replaced the cover carefully and resecreted the device in a safe place. Safe? Hearing the word rattling round inside my head I wondered who I kidded. Where did I think safety lay? I needed to talk. I went up to my study and approached my Ramfrez. She was receptive. We did not know each other well as yet but we would. Many are the faces of intimacy. Bach was talking to both of us when the door to my study opened. Helen A, in dudgeon. "I was sleeping," she said. The door closed behind her, and the walls of my study rattled. I'm not much good at flamenco but I played as wildly as I could for a few minutes. I'm not always proud of everything I do. At last I gently replaced the Ramirez and got down to business. I could, I thought, leave things as they were. But to do nothing would leave me troubled about what I had done to Original Helen, forgetting for the moment -- impossible -- about Helen B. Original Helen and I had never really gotten together. My days with Helen B had brought my awareness of what I had missed to razor sharpness. But Original Helen had never been mean or malicious -- we had made do with what we had and, in a fashion, we had gotten along. I had cast her adrift, God knew where, through no fault of mine. But what I did -- or did not -- from here on I couldn't sweep that under the rug. Impossible to leave matters as they were. I could push the button a number of times and see what happened. I had known only three Helens so far. Maybe three were all that existed. If I got Original Helen back I could fold the operation right there. I would not feel guilty about consigning Helen A permanently to a different track in her own uptight limbo. But then I thought of Barcelona and Madrid -- and of lovely Helen B, who knew me. And it did not seem fair to Original Helen to bring her back and stop there. Not much of my heart would be in whatever came after. And there was the question of the available adjustments in the transmitter -- what about them? Does my problem begin to emerge? Relatively minor puzzle: who put the ringer in my car and why? Why my car and what was the name of the game? Intelligence test? Tired old game being played by superior folks who were using me like a black rook in a galactic chess game? I did not know. I touched my Ramirez once more and went out to mow lawn, wondering if Helen A was still trying to go back to sleep. F or a week I did nothing and that was as long as I could stand it. We were lying in bed, reading. I had made up my mind earlier in the day and the transmitter was hidden under a pile of papers on my bedside table. Being a scientist, I had a plan. I meant to push the switch ten times exactly, with only enough time between clicks to see what happened -- a provision designed to prevent dalliance. If either Original Helen or Helen B came back I would stop the experiment at that point and think about things a while. For in the back of my head was a thought that -- if there were not too many Helens out there -- I might discover a rotation by whose employment I might happily avoid Helen A, yet still discharge my responsibilities to Original Helen, Helen B and myself. "Good night -- and good luck," I had the courtesy to say. My wife turned to see what was wrong with me now and I pushed the switch. Eight women Joined me in bed. Original Helen did not appear. Neither did Helen A, which was pleasing, nor Helen B, which was not. Some Helens dyed their hair, some did not. In the first eight were two blonds and a redhead. The redhead wasnumber eight and I was taken aback for the moment, almost departing from scientific plan. My heart 'belonged to Helen B but I said to this apparition. "Ready for, uh, bed yet, dear?" "Any time you are, tiger," she said and began to move in. Wildly conscientious, possibly to the point of insanity, I pushed the switch the ninth time,; knowing infinite virtue, feeling like an idiot child. As it turned out I had second thoughts about letting the apparition go -- because when I pushed the switch the ninth time I was suddenly alone in bed. No blond, no redhead, no nothing. Gone to the bathroom? "Helen," I shouted, beginning to tremble. Nothing. Well, I thought, perhaps all was not lost, though such was the appearance at the moment. With enough Helens it was bound to happen. I'd gotten onto a Helentrack where she had died somewhere back there -- been killed, something. A hairy situation in any case. The room was quiet and I was alone. I could see myself strangling in some Kafkaesque inquiry into the disappearance of my wife. Well, it's like this, sir. I had this garage door opener, see, and... I could see it, all right. Hear it, taste it. I pushed the switch again, bravely wondering who would show up. Nobody showed up. Forgetting my plan, I flicked that switch again and again until I had demonstrated to my inquiring and now desperate mind that there' were not going to be any more Helens. Not unless something changed drastically. I thought of the three tiny brass screws and the tunable slug in the black cube. The experiment would have to proceecj on a different track. I had to think, to talk, and I went up to my Ramfrez, my steps echoing in what seemed to me now a strangely empty house. There'd been eight' lovelies in a row, by God, and now I had none. I was in deep trouble, possibly catastrophic. And I knew it. But part of me could not get the redhead out of my mind. I was certain that I had missed something there. I clutched my Ramfrez and sought answers to mysteries. next day. I did two things which should be noted. I bought a small bound notebook of the kind used by scientists (loose-leaf won't do, for obvious reasons); and I asked my department head for -- and got -- a week's leave of absence. After that I thought for about twenty-four hours between snatches of sleep and random bits of food. Late the next night I opened the transmitter and placed it and the notebook on the bench beside my jeweler's screwdriver and electronic technician's tuning wand. Earlier -- in the bedroom, which somehow seemed the proper site -- I had pushed the switch a few more times. Nothing had happened. Now, at my bench, the countdown stood at zero. I made an entry -- the first -- in the notebook of what I was about to do, made a micrometric clockwise adjustment of the isolated tiny screw, muttered something to someone or something out there, clutched the noteboo'k and tools in my hand and closed the switch. Nothing. Duly recorded. I turned the same screw in the same direction through as few degrees of arc as I could manage and went through the same routine. I felt something -- like a subliminally perceived earthquake. I was scared but the operative thought was -- this bird is going to get off the ground. One more micrometric nudge of the screw, another closing of the switch, a singularly unpleasant vertiginous moment of nausea, and I sat in the abandoned ruin of the basement of what had been my house, my home. I had loved this place and now it was dead, long dead by the look of things. And I was afraid, yes. but I thought I knew what I was up to. Fear, excitement, anticipation and nostalgic sentiment were running neck and neck as I sat in the crumbling ruins. I had thought about the possibilities, potentialities and dangers before opening the case and fiddling with the screw. I had wandered up and down many undisciplined alleys, strolled along a formal boulevard or two and wound up on a quiet residential village streetby which I mean that I had achieved a formulation reduced to basic simplicity but leaving a number of open questions. Being a scientist, I confronted the unknown across a field of hypotheses. One -- the device is not terrestrial. Where it comes from eludes my grasp and for the moment I abandon interest in that. Two -- I am a test case, a subject, a rat in a maze, a chimp in a cage, trying to reach a banana. I have no hypothesis about what hangs in the balance. Three granting hypothesis two, the test is twofold -- can I discover how to make the device do my bidding and, if so, what will I tell it to do? " my once house, then, I began to bend that black cube to my will, to show it who would win. My inquiry was exhaustive and meticulous. I made discoveries. The two tiny screws close together were space (Cartesian coordinates), the solitary screw was time and the tunable slug was people. Simple? No they interacted and when you changed one you changed them all and had to find a new balance. I went back and forth a lot -- and here and there a lot. The time went as far forward or backward as I cared to think. The space was limited to Earth, apparently, but that still left plenty of room to get lost in. Little turns on the tuning slug brought people into my life, people in whom I had no interest. I thrust them out with my hexagonal wand. I could not find a position that brought Helens back -- any Helen -- so I left the slug in a null position. With the three screws, then, I sought a target and the target was the Paris-Barcelona Express about thirty minutes before this caper had begun. The trouble was that the screws were sensitive in the extreme and subject to a certain amount of backlash. In addition, my hands were not steady. Understandable? Hence my undesired appearance in the Sahara. I was tired as anything and fought off waking as long as I could. But as soon as I knew I was awake I wanted to get on with it. I opened my eyes. Sand the hell all over, dunes, and no oasis in sight. All right, I had missed by bigger margins before and I felt I was bracketing the target. Baby, I said, this is it. Once there, back on the ParisBarcelona Express, I thought to retrace the path. There was enough light now. I checked the last notations in the notebook, opened the plastic case once more and reached for the screwdriver. without incident -- but he madejt. Original Helen reached into his bag and pulled out something. "I will be damned," she said. "If that isn't the most stupid thing in God's world to be carrying around Europe. Amos. Just what the hell is the big idea?" He had the big idea, all right. The question of the eventual disposal, quietus, of the gadget was one he hoped to be able eventually to solve. Put the big idea just now was that when he and Helen B ran into turbulence over the western Atlantic, Amos Appleby with foreknowledge (his wife sitting there by the window) would be well and truly prepared. It was not easy, later, thinking ahead, to go to sleep that night, but finally the clickety-click of the wheels on the rails took over and he slept all the way to Perpignan.  Willy Ley S ometimes a fairly minor incident succeeds in being remembered all through life. The one I have in mind deals with a cold day and a newspaper clipping. When I was in high school it so happened that I had to leave the house before the delivery man brought the morning paper. A classmate of mine who liv some distance away and presumably had another delivery man did get the morning paper in time to read it before he left for school. One day he brought a clipping along which had the headline: "Nitrogen notan Element?" and reported that an English scientist, Lord Rutherford of Nelson, had found that bomu bardment with small atoms had shown that nitrogen seemed to consist of oxygen and hydrogen. As soon as our science teacher entered the classroom we raced. up to the desk and showed him the clipping. Dr. Borchert, who Apparently also did not get his morning paper in time, read it, shook his head and said: "Professor Rutherford is one of the greatest living scientists, but I know that nitrogen is an element." No further discussion ensued. I never forgot that episode. Many years later I learned what had actually happened. The "small atoms" of the newspaper story had been alpha particles, the nuclei of helium atoms. The bombardment of nitrogen atoms with these alpha particles had resulted in the first transmutation caused by man. Rutherford had succeeded in transmuting a few nitrogen atoms into oxygen atoms with leftover hydrogen atoms. But nitrogen was still an element. Since then atoms have been split into two roughly equal halves to release their energy, and atoms of elements that do not exist in nature have been made. And a lot of new facts have been learned during the last few years. For those who do not consciously deal with atoms every day a short refresher course is in order. The chemical elements are numbered from # #, which is hydrogen, to # #, named Kurtchatovium after the Russian atomic physicist Igor Vassilyevitch Kurtchatov, who died in #. The numbers are neither in the order of discovery, as a student of mine once guessed, nor are they just arbitrarily chosen for filing purposes. They are based on a property of the nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is formed of protons, which carry a so-called positive charge, and of neutrons which have the same mass as the protons but do not carry an electric charge. Element  # (arsenic) has this number because there are # protons in its nucleus. But there are also # neutrons present so that arsenic has the number #, but the mass #. For a slightly more complicated case let us look at copper. Its number is # because of the # protons in its nucleus. But the number of neutrons is not always the same; # per cent of all copper atoms have # neutrons in their nucleus -- hence their mass is #. The other #I per cent have # neutrons in their nucleus -- their mass is #. There is no chemical difference at all between these two types of copper atoms; they belong in the same place in the table of the elements, under number #. Greek for "same place" is eisos topos, which is the reason why the two kinds of copper atoms are called the two stable isotopes of copper. Bombardment with subatomic particles can produce unstable (i.e., radioactive) isotopes of any element. But they usually do not survive long and do not interest us here. The heaviest elements that still have stable isotopes are # #, lead, and # #, bismuth. The bismuth atom with # neutrons in its nucleus, or Bi-# is the heaviest stable isotope. Everything heavier is unstable and slowly falls apart. It may shoot out an alpha particle which consists of two protons and two neutrons. The nucleus that has just lost an alpha particle obviously is now four units lighter and two number lower in the scale. This is called the "alpha decay." The next thing that was discovered was that there is also a "beta decay" which involves a change in one of the neutrons in the nucleus. A neutron may shoot out an electron which carries one negative charge. The result is that the formerly chargeless neutron has turned into a positively charged proton. There is no change in mass (the electron does not count) but the element is now one number higher since it has one more proton in its nucleus. One more possibility is that immediately after "beta deeay," which raises the atomic number by one, an alpha particle is thrown out, shifting the number down by two. Sometimes two alpha particles are shot out, so that the total shift in atomic number amounts to three numbers. Keeping these various possibilities in mind, Polish-born Kasimir Fajans developed what became known as "Fajans' rule" which said that a transformation in the nucleus results in a shift (usually downward) of one or two, in some exceptional cases of three numbers. Since everybody believed firmly in Fajans' rule, atomic fission, when it took place, was not recognized at first. Nobody thought that an atom could split in two, resulting in shifts of # or even # numbers, in violation of Fajans' rule. Fajans himself, incidentally, insisted that his rule had not been violated and that it still held true. Fission, he said, was something else. T he statement that bismuth. with the mass #, is the heaviest stable isotope seems to imply that radioactive isotopes of element,' with a number smaller than # should all be artificial. However, there are a few exceptions -- there are two elements with lower numbers that have no stable isotopes. One of these two violators is  .tj, technetium (Tc) which is located in the atomic table below the wellbehaved and stable element  #. manganese. Technetium has # different isotopes, all of them unstable, though I find the statement in the isotope list that technetium of mass years -- which is pretty stable when compared to the human lifespan. The other violator in the region below # # where one expects atomic stability is one of the rare-earth elements, # #, named promethium. It has # unstable isotopes, the one with the longest half-life is promethium of mass #. Its half-life is # years. Now we come to the atomic heavyweights with more than # protons in their nuclei. Interestingly enough, their masses can be less than that of the stable Bi-#. The lightest isotope of the next element after bismuth, # #, polonium, has a mass of only #, with a half-life of # minutes. Number of Isotope with No. Name and Symbol known isotopes longest half-life Polonium (Po) Po-#:# years Astatine (At) At-#:# hours Radon (Rn) Rn-#:# days Francium (Fr) Fr-#:# minutes Radium (Ra) Ra-#:# years Actinium (Ac) Ac-#:# years -- Thorium (Th) Th-#: # mill. yrs. Protactinium (Pa) Pa-# #:# years Uranium (U) U-#:# mill, years Neptunium (Np) Np-#:# mill. yrs. Plutonium (Pu) Pu-#:# mill. yrs. Americium (Am) Am-#:# years Curium (Cm) Cm-#:# mill. yrs. Berkelium (Bk) Bk-#: # years Californium (CO Cf-# #:# years Einsteinium (Es) Es-#: # days Fermium (Fm) Fm-#:#I days Mendelevium (Md) Md-#:#I days Nobelium (No) No-#:# minutes Lawrencium (Lr) Lr-#:# seconds Kurtchatovium (Ku) Ku-#:ca. # seconds All the elements from # # to # have one thing in common -- they have no stable isotopes. They are not alike otherwise. Chemically speaking # #, plutonium, differs considerably from # #, radium. In sequence we have five radioactive elements, from # #, polonium, to # #, radium, that differ from each other chemically, just as the lower-numbered stable elements differ from each other chemically. Then we have a "family," from# #, actinium, to # #, lawrencium, which Glenn T. Seaborg called the "actinides" from the name of their first member. These fifteen elements are chemically much alike, in the same manner as the fifteen "lanthanides" or rare-earth elements are chemically much alike. Element # #, Kurtchatovium, is right now the only known element beyond the actinides. The question is, of course, whether there are more elements beyond Kurtchatovium, but another term must be explained first. All the elements with numbers larger than #, uranium, are called "synthetic elements" #) because they are not found in nature but had to be made in the laboratory by shooting comparatively light nuclei into heavy nuclei, hoping that a still heavier nucleus would be the result. The term "synthetic" ignores the question of whether the element is a member of the actinide family or not. It simply points out that these elements do not exist in nature. Some, or all, may have existed in nature in the past. A glance at the table shows that the half-lives beyond # #, berkelium, shrink rapidly. For# # the longest half-life known is still # years,, for # # it is down to # days. For # # it is about half of # #, namely #I days, for # #I it is only #I days. The next one, # # is down to # minutes, # # to # seconds and # # to # seconds. Does that mean that # #, when it is made, will show a halflife of maybe half a second? Very likely -- but not necessarily. But a few words must be said about # # before we can discuss the elements numbered beyond it. The Russians who claim to have made # # first and who have named it (the name is not yet internationally accepted) apparently found isotope Ku-# which had a half-life of one third of a second. The other three isotopes with masses of #, # and # were made at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Of these the isotope with mass # has a halflife of one hundredth of a second. Th one of mass # decays into # #, nobelium, by emitting an alpha particle; its half-life is between # and # seconds. The one with mass # also turns into nobelium (another isotope of it) by alpha decay; its half-life is between # and # seconds. In the investigation of the heavy synthetics an interesting and new phenomenon was observed: spontaneous fission. The well-known fission of uranium-# and of plutonium is brought about by neutron bombardment: the nucleus that absorbs a neutron falls apart. For heavier dements the fission process occurs without a known cause -- but nature has provided an interesting hint. Those isotopes where both the number of the protons and of the neutrons are even are most susceptible to spontaneous fission. The list we now have, no doubt incomplete, reads:  Numbers #, technetium; #, promethium; #, astatine and #, francium, are synthetic elements, too. Francium (Fr) Cesium (Cs) Radium (Ra) Barium (Ba) Actinium (Ac) Lanthanum (La) Thorium (Th) Cerium (Ce) Protactinium (Pa) Praseodymium (Pr) Uranium (U) Neodymium (Nd) I Neptunium (Np) Promethium (Pm) I Plutonium (Pu) Samarium (Sm) i Americium (Am) Europium (Eu) , Curium (Cm) Gadolinium (Gd) ! Berkelium (Bk) Terbium (Tb) : Californium (Cf) Dysprosium (Dy)  Einsteinium (Es) Holmium (Ho) I Fermium (Fm) Erbium (Er) i Mendelevium (Md) Thulium (Tm) Nobelium (No) Ytterbium (Yb) Lawrencium (Lr) Lutetium (Lu) Kurtchatovium (Ku) Hafnium (HO eka-Tantalum Tantalum (Ta) eka-Wolfram Wolfram (W) eka-Rhenium Rhenium (Re) eka-Osmium Osmium (Os) eka-Iridium Iridium (Ir) eka-Platinum Platinum (Pt) eka-Aurum Gold (Au) eka-Hydrargium Mercury (Hg) eka-Thallium Thallium (Tl) eka-Plumbum Lead (Pb) eka-Bismuthum Bismuth (Bi) eka-Polonium Polonium (Po) ekaAstatine Astatine (At) ekaRadon Radon (Rn) The left-hand column represents the bottom row of the atomic table; everything preceded by "eko is not yet actually known. The right-hand column is the row just above the bottom row, Indicoting the chemical resemblances one can expect if any one of the "eka" elements lasts long enough for chemical experiments. HA # #        I # I #       I #  I # d    The numbers to the left ore the atomic numbers (number of protons in the nucleus while the top row of figures gives the numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. Block dots in the squares indicate that the isotope has been identified; blackened squares give the isotope with the longest half-life of each element. Cm-# # protons, # neutrons Cf-# # protons, # neutrons Fm-# # protons, # neutrons Ku-# # protons, # neutrons Ku-# # protons, # neutrons If the list is meaningful, element # # with mass # should be especially short-lived because of spontaneous fission, because its nucleus must contain # protons and # neutrons. That any isotope of the elements from # # to  # will have a half-life of even one day is most unlikely (one does not say "impossible" any more). But beyond # # an area of relative stability might be reached again, though these elements would still be radioactive. The second table shows how the bottom rows of the Periodic Table are now arranged. It shows how the actinides correspond to the lanthanides (rare earths) and how the elements # # to ## are expected to correspond to the elements # # to # # above them in the Periodic Table. Glenn T. Seaborg expects that if experimenters ever progress beyond # #, the next bottom row will begin with # # and # #, corresponding to Francium and radium and that a series of "super actinides" will follow. As for the still undiscovered, or rather not yet made, elements in the current bottom row a few things can be said. Element# # will be one more member of the family of the "noble gases." West German researchers expect that eka-platinum might have a reasonably stable isotope of mass #. But hopes run highest for # # below lead. It should be quite stable which in this case means a half-life of a hundred years or so. The Russians are engaged in an interesting hunt for this element right now. In nature, elements that are neighbors in the Periodic Table often occur in association, which means that lead might contain traces of # I #. It would, of course, have decayed, but such decay leaves traces in suitable materials -- glass is one of them. Therefore the Russians are looking for old leaded church windows, old lanterns where lead was used to hold glass in place. They are not examining the lead but the glass for traces of the decay of element # I # that may have been present in the lead. So far the search has not been successful. But surprises are possible any day of the week, including Sundays.  Sometimes I feel that the public does not have too much trouble swallowing the Space Age but that it chokes on the vocabulary. Recently a radio announcer, in discussing the flight of Apollo # #, must have used the term "albedo" with regard to the moon and a listener wrote to me asking what it meant, adding that it sounded like an Arabic word. Now not every word beginning with "al" is Arabic; in this case the root word is straight Latin, namely which means "white" (hence albino). The term means the "whiteness" of an astronomical object that is without luminosity of its own. Albedo is defined as the ratio of the amount of light reflected to the observer to the amount of light received by the diffusely reflecting object. The word "diffuse" is necessary here because the term albedo does not apply to a mirror or mirrorlike surface. Such reflection would be "specular" reflection, from Latin speculum, which means mirror. Now that we have the definition behind us, let us get down to a few cases. The brightest of the Please turn to page I #). No man, saw farther than Ermish, found a girl lovelier than Stella, or gave a gift so priceless... E rmish stood at the farthest tip of the Nether Cape in the Land of Many Names, his head raised into the ebony wind, remembering long remembrances of an amber-tinted star framed in softest velvet, which had once stood casting gentle shadows onto polished emerald eyes and which had been the most beautiful thing he had ever known. It had been a full hundred turns since he had seen the Last Star and  he waited patiently now in this late turn of the Second Season, knowing that the ancient charts were never wrong. Lerna would not join him in the traditional Firstwatch and he pondered upon her strange behavior. Six times she had shared with him the first sighting of the Last Star as it had arced above the forever invisible horizon and each time he had turned to see the first lighting of her eyes. "Not this time," she had said and she had meant it. He remembered, too, so many, many turns ago -- when he had seemed no taller than the shimmering patches of wild flickerthe inland hills -- how he had seen yet another star rise above the cape. That star had never returned but he knew that it had been very bright and very, very blue. "How strange," the watchers had said, for no one had ever seen it before and it had never been found on the charts. "Lema saw it, too," Ermish whispered into the wind and wondered what the blue shadows might have done to her eyes. Those eyes would now be lidded by the weight of heavy purple lashes, he was just thinking, when his comset tinkled against thewhirring of the wind. "Ermish speaks," he said, pulling the jeweled box from his belt and raising it near his face. The tiny comset hummed, crackled and said, "Has it come?" "Oh? The Last Star?" "No," said the box, laughing quietly. "Your Blue Star." His eyes squinted, swept a black area that might have held a horizon. He relaxed. "The world remains dark." "Then may your Blue Star cast early shadows." "Lema, why aren't you sleeping?" "I tried," she said. "There was a news report earlier. Something about technical difTiculties at the Surface Sourceplant." He laughed. "They've been having technical difficulties there since the First Turn." "Yes, but if anything ever did go wrong with anything up there..." A pause within his hand hummed quietly. "Perhaps you should come back down." "Such a serious Lerna," he said, smiling. Then, solemnly: "It's here." A point of amber stabbed the wind. "Come down!" "Lerna, I do wish you were here." "Now!" "Don't be silly, Lema." He was about to add: I'll be down in a little while... until he suddenly realized that the comset was dead within his hand. Women are like the Five Winds... He sighed, slipping the box into his belt. Without removing his gaze from the Last Star he sat down upon the shallow sand of the cape. The star was as exquisite as the hundred-turn memory he had held but he was vaguely saddened by ghostly thoughts of polished emeralds. His head tilted back slowly as the lonely star climbed. at his side and Ermish turned his head in the dark. "You did well to find me without a torch." He felt the sand shift slightly and reached out a hand. "Yes, please sit by me -- I wish to see your eyes, as sleepy as they might be." A small hand clutched his but his narrowed eyes searched in vain for twin pinpoints of amber at his side. "You really must be sleepy," he said, as the sand slipped again and their bodies touched. "Hello," said a voice in Ermish's ear so softly that it was almost swept away by the wind. "I'm Stella." "Oh," said Ermish. He tried to free his hand but somehow could not. The wind was slow thunder within his ears. "'You don't know me," cautioned the voice, perhaps more softly than before. "I'm'afraid I don't," he said. "The wind increases," he added. "I came from very far," the voice whispered, "to see you." "From beyond the inland hills?" "Far beyond." "Perhaps from the Denizen Dens, to better view the Firstwatch?" "From far beyond the Denizen Dens -- to see you." The air was suddenly calm. "Well," said Ermish, wondering. "And from what source did you learn of me?" "I learned of you just tonight." "What is 'tonight'?" "It doesn't matter. I learned of you just this late turn." "Then -- are you from the Land of Many Names?" "My land has but one name and its name is 'Old'." "I'm afraid I've never heard of it." "You would like it, I know." Her voice was more distinct and the wind was a tender whisper. "Sometimes it's all amber, with emerald tiles to walk upon." "Oh," said Ermish. "You would like it," she said again. "Now tell me about yourself." "I am just lately a woman and they say that I am fair and my hair is long and of velvet." ' She whispered a laugh or, perhaps, a giggle. Ermish smiled and found that her hand was held more tightly within his own. "And why did you journey this far to see me?" "To ask you for your sourcebox." The wind stirred, shifted, grew stronger. "I cannot survive for long without it." "Yes, I know." "A small portion of a turn at best." "I shall return it soon -- if only I can." "Ever since our Lord Sun died, ' so many turns ago." "It isn't just for me." Her hand gripped his very tightly. "We just want to see it -- if only we had known sooner." Ermish tore his hand free from the girl's. He reached into his belt. Suddenly there was light. He looked to his side. He saw nothing there but the sand of the cape, quiet in the wind. Reaching out, he felt the girl's warm arm. Listening carefully he heard her short breathing, barely audible above the wind. "You shouldn't have done ' that," she said. And: "I'm sorry." Ermish felt for her hand, found I it. "I don't understand." "There isn't time." She was quietly pleading. "Please, Ermish, your sourcebox." With his free hand he reached back and slowly unscrewed the sourcebox at the nape of his neck and he felt the wind chill his spine. Swiftly but carefully he pushed the box toward the invisible girl. The wind stirred at his side and the crystal cone disappeared. "Thank you. I hope that there is time."  "May this sourcebox wear well with you." He shut off the torch, returned it to his belt. The girl, took her hand out of his. "I'll try to return soon." Her lips touched his cheek, softly and yet firmly. With a rustle of the wind he knew that she was gone. He looked up and saw the Blue Star. He blinked and it was gone. Ermish was staring at the Last Star when his comset sounded. "Ermish speaks." "Are you all right?" Lerna, I gave my sourcebox away. To a lovely young girl. I'm sorry." "The Blue Star." "Yes." T felt -- a feeling," said the night within his hand. "She was -- beautiful." "I know." "She may return in time," he murmured into the wind. "I'll give you mine." "No." "Then may your Blue Star cast early shadows." "May your sourcebox wear well with you." He held the comset more tightly, more closely, near his face. "And now I think that I shall -- wait here." There was a long moment of whispered crackling, almost the sound of shattered spray in the when they had twinkled upon the inland hills, until he realized that only the whirring of. the wind remained. He breathed the air as if partaking of the ancient ceremonial Breathing of Smoke and, craning his neck, looked upward. The Last Star was nearly at the zenith when it suddenly flared, flickered, faded and was gone. Ermish stood at the furthest tip of the Nether Cape in the Land of Many Names, his head bowed into the ebony wind, remembering long remembrances of a velvet-haired girl, framed in softest amber, who had once stood casting gentle shadows onto polished emerald tiles, and who had been the most beautiful girl he had ever known.  (Continued from page #). planets in the sky is Venus -- but Venus is not the planet with the highest albedo. It is, surprisingly, Uranus with #. The next highest albedo is that of Neptune with #. Venus runs third with #. Then comes Saturn with # and Jupiter with #. The albedo of the earth is # and that of Mars #. Our moon, no matter how bright it may look in the night sky, has an albedo of # -- it reflects only # percent of the light it receives from the sun. But while the low albedo of our moon may be surprising to many, this does not mean that all moons have a low albedo. The albedo of the larger moons of the outer planets has been measured thus: J-I lo # J-II Europa #  Ganymede # J-IV Callisto # Tethys # S-IV Dione # S-V Rhea # S-VI Titan # # The four larger moons of Uranus are estimated as # while Triton, the larger moon of Neptune is estimated as #.  The Island Under the Earth, Avram Davidson Out of the Mouth of the Dragon, Mark S. Geston F or one reason or another, lately. I've been thinking about what I'm doing. This is something of a step for me, since I did go a consid erabl e ti me without ev er stopping to wonder systematically about what makes a book -- and then what it is that a person such as myself does in relation to it. Time having come around to this particular graduation, however, I thought I would share some of my attendant thoughts. , Well, first of all I naturally mean "novel" when I say "book." If I mean anything else, I habitually follow the custom of modifying in particular, as in "This is a non-fiction book," or "This is a book of short stories." If someone hands me a plain brown wrapper containing what he calls a book, I expect a novel. I think this is because most of us are educated to think of a book as something more lan casual; a physical format denoting special merit acquired through notable rffort, if you will. And in science fiction, or in any other class of imaginative literature, we tend to uate notability and serial complexity. (John Collier's short stories are "clever." Stephen Vincent Benet's breathtaking star is already sinking below the popular literary horizon. Henry James, however, is reputed a noteworthy literary figure. Yet among these three men whom I'd consider well matched in most qualities of mind, learning, and skill, James remains considerable as the -- usually unread-creator of The Turn of the Screw, while Collier remains "clever" ibid, and Benet remains largely in the hearts of even some few of those who've read James Shore's Daughter.) What I mean to say is that I can't escape the syndrome either. If it's short and complicated it's one thing, and if it's long and complicated it deserves a thousand words of assiduous inchworming, at my hands or at least at somebody's. Yet there is more in "Jacob and The Indians" than there is in all we know of James Fenimore Cooper (not that I hope to shock you), and "The Devil George and Rosie" vaporizes most of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name another barreled fish. Furthermore, you and I have but to look at the sf reading list over any length of time to discover that a great many books are being published as novels which are in fact excuses'for broadsiding a cover with a price engraved on it. You know this, I know this. And yet with each new novel yet another fifty or sixty thousand words come into this worldwith a little freight of stolen prestige and pre-empted bona fides. Why is this, you ask. And what does it all mean to us here? Well, this is because ifke all people we confuse the expression with the inspiration. We look at the novel and we can see the long series of encodings; the blips, arranged in order of precedence, with which the laboring creator spells out his version of what flashed into his mind when the lightning struck him. Think, you say to yourself, of the potential for error; for getting some of the signals wrong, or for getting their precedence out of whack. Consider the chances of losing focus on the thread of sense being unreeled through the labyrinth of options. What a task! Vd what a triumph when accomplished! And yet -- think, now. When the lightning strikes the short-story writer, does it take less time than a split second? And when the novelist holds the mirror up to his flash, is his task really qualitatively different from that faced by the fabulist? " The thing that happens to any creator, it seems to me, happens in an instant. The rest is translation. This fact makes a well-told, meaningful novel a thing of great merit, for the creator is then a master craftsman as well as an artist. A well-told tale of nothing special is something else again and a fumblingly told tale of something wonderful tends to cast grave doubt on the quality of the wonder. What does all this mean to us here, ibid? Well, I haven't formed an opinion worthy of graving in tablets of stone, but we all know, I think, the constant pressure in modern sf to produce books, meaning novels. We can see, I think, the books by creators who feel compelled to describe arbitrarily the lightning flash at length, and the books by craftsmen who, having no other present recourse, appear to be working with tired fireflies in a jelly jar. I would not tell you the novel is inconsiderable. The novel is the pinnacle of our heritage in literature. I would not tell you that shortstory writing ought to be better supported or that it isn't well supported now. It should be and I guess it is. I would address the paradox on another level; thusly: A being qualified to live with lightnings ought to respect the sole source of its consciousness. land Under the Earth (Ace Special # #, #;) is the first volume in a trilogy and one ought to reserve judgment. But it's unlikely Ace will issue the threevolume set in any practical length of time and, besides, I enjoyed all but a very few things in this book, notably the ending. The ending is very poor -- a blatant copout on a one-line gag which, one hopes, will some day be erased in some beneficial cataclysm. Surely it has nothing to do with what went oh in Avram's mind when this creation first struck its crystal hooves upon the sharp flints of his talent. I guarantee your disappointment. However, (and I've found that I've said this too many times, about too many books, now, but here is the Everest of these Himalayas) the source of this real grudge against the book is the book's captivating excellence. Its locale is that place below the Earth -- or maybe perhaps below the world, the distinction being the same as the distinction between the brain and the mind -- where the stars form constellations of webbed lines and the inhabitants are not quite sure of which life is master of Creation. Certainly there's sharp rivalry between the six-limbed folk and a form of life which closely resembles human beings. But there's a harpy who'd grumble quite convincingly that there's more to it than centaurs. Or you could always go ask the homophage. This is a fine old adventure story. In common with all other men. Captain Stag is aware that things are a little beyond him. Captain Stag being an uncommonly able man, however, it angers him that, no matter what, things are always a little bit beyond him and yet he lacks the excuse of ineptitude. So he seeks the answer to what makes things the way they are. In seeking it he runs counter to or across the purposes of similarly motivated folk of various persuasions and shoe sizes. And of course some of his moves win him extra turns, while others impose penalties. And so we follow him in his search for the legendary Cap of Grace and attempt to guess ahead of him, and of kindly Uncle Av, what will befall him and us next. The difference between one of these stories and the next is always in the soul of the creator. The storyline is as simple as it is Grimm, and especially lately there is no shortage of publishers for it. Too, it's almost uniquely true that the degree of the reader's eventual enjoyment is in direct and swift relationship to the author's degree of loving involvement as he spins out the yarn. Since the landscape has no counterpart in reality, and the odd bits of stock legend and standard education cannot be borrowed too blatantly or too continuously, what else has the writer to draw on but the vista of his dreams? I say it thus takes a rich, wise man to write one of these things properly, and then one generous enough to share his wealth. Gee, what a crummy ending! Bad ending, Avram. Say, Terry, that's a disappointing ending on The Island Under the Earth. It's a good book. Good. Good novel. Waiting for the rest of it. Yes. Wish you had brought it out all in one. Suspect it would be superb.  mat to another. Hey, presto. It will certainly happen. In the end we will grow so weary of it that we'll believe we're damned unless we stage the conclusive Armageddon. And so, to save our souls, we will flog ourselves to weary death, leaving the survivors to curse their ineptitude. This world and mood are brought to -- I was going to say 'life,' was I? -- by Mark S. Geston, who used to be the author of Lords of the Starship and is now the author of Out of the Mouth of the Dragon. (Ace # #. #t) The easy way to explain Geston's evolution between these two books is to recall that he's young. That makes it easy. Whereas Starship was episodic, fantastic in precisely the same way as a C.L. Moore story from the Northwest Smith days, and compulsive, this book concentrates quite well on one individual and his viewpoint, but is still a little choppy. As far as I can determine there is no fantasy in it -- there is, instead, some nightmarish technology -- and more than a passing evocation of the younger Philip K. Dick. Somehow, this calls to mind the effect on C.L. Moore's stories of her marriage to Henry Kuttner, and this, in turn, makes me realize one could write a pretty monograph on the debt Phil Dick owes to Kuttner. What I'm saying -- again -- is that Geston immediately makes you start thinking in terms of very good company. But now back to our message. Compulsive. In Starship, you will recall, the generations-long effort to rebuild the relic of the past is frustrated in a climactic wassail of destruction which the book explicitly ascribes to the influence of the Forces of Evil. Now, this is fine in terms of a young writer seeing a vision and wanting an excuse for it. But what is made plain in Dragon is that you don't need any such simplistic explanation; the necessary impulses are to be found quite near the bone in even the holiest of men. One can only assume Geston has been growing up. He explicitly incorporates the Starship episode in the history he relates here, but he also explicitly denies the malign phantasms of the earlier book. He does this latter thing in two ways, one stunning and the other acceptable; First of all, Amon VanRoark, the viewpoint character, encounters repeated examples of prosthetic technology so fine that the dead don't clearly die; for instance, one of his principal mentors in his wanderings around the war-blasted, hag-ridden, self-devouring world of interminable erosion is a man who begins to make even more sense after his brain rots and his artificial larynx is free to speak at random. Apart from being a piece of invention that anyone might envy, this is pretty obviously intended to be an author's signal to the discerning reader that qll the ghost stuff in Starship is hereby superseded. I can make this judgment because Geston also fills his book with other signals that tell us he believes in signaling the reader. I won't weary you with a list of the symbols placed throughout this work. (Not having kept one. Lazy.) itself by eating its own bowels will do as well as any single instance would, I guess, although you might prefer the lizard that has gotten into priestly garments by the straightforward expedient of eating its way into them. (So who told you this was a book for the little old lady in Bettendorf?) Anyway. This gray odyssey follows Amon VanRoark from his youth in a particular decaying city through a series of episodes around the twitching, ghastly world of the future and finds him returning, a neither more nor less sad but not was stated that Dune Messiah would be concluded in this issue. That announcement was overly optimistic. When you start reading on the following page, you will eventually discover that the current installment does not take you to the conclusion of the novel. ActuThis situation came about beeven wiser man to the abandoned ruins of his maturity. He is mad as a hatter, of course; the question is whether he was sane even when we first glimpsed him, and I suppose the larger question then is whether the world was ever sane, even as far back in his past as our lime. One might hope that Geston is not going to spiral up his own geist. One might point out that a good thing to try next time would be to write a story in which the iewpoint character has at least a slight influence on the events around him, rather than simply turning out the lights after work. 'But this book too is a novel, and Geston is a creator, and that, my friends, is item # large in my continuing list of proof that we've got a reriaissance going here. Funny it should involve a book like this. Where have all the flowers gone?  cause a wealth of material reached your editor's desk all at once. Rather than deprive readers of any of it, the decision was made to finish The Dune Messiah in two installments rather than one -- thus making space for the inclusion of deserving stories that otherwise would have been crowded out. By the way, this marvelous Dune novel will shortly be appearing as a hardcover book (Putnam) and as a paperback (Berkley). Enjoy it! Dune was an arid planet, inhabited by gigantic sandworms and wild Bremen whose customs were based on water scarcity. Its only resource was melange, an addictive drug produced by the worms.This "spice" aided longevity and gave an adept visions of the future. After the murder of his noble dumped into the desert, together with his pregnant mother, the trained by the Bene Gesserit -- a female order devoted to mental arts and the control of genetic lines to produce a "kwisatz haderach, " a messiah capable of using psi powers. Paul was to be their key to this. In learning to live with the Fremen, Paul wai forced to take an overdose of drug. This opened his mind permanently to the future -- or futures. Lady Jessica also took an overdose with the result that full knowledge of all her mother had known. against the Harkonnen rulers and their Sardaukar soldiers. In the battle, Paul's old friend and teachAs ruler, Paul took the Harkonhis consort. But he refused to consummate the marriage, remaining true to the Fremen woman Now twelve years later, Paul has made the desert bloom and he rules a mighty empire of stars. He has become almost a god to the Qizarate, a cult built around his visions. Against it, the other quasi-political, quasi-religious forces of humanity have just begun to unite. Among these is the Bene Gesserit, headed by the Reverend help of their trainee. Princess Irulan. More or less with them is the Bene Tleilax, supposedly amoral scientists; their representative is the Tleilaxu Face Dancer man or woman. The two groups have the aid of the Spacing Guild, which must control the melange trade, since only spice visions make interstellar navigation possible. fishlike than human and must live in a tank. His main function is to obscure Paul's visions with his own gift so their plotting will not be detected. They send Princess Irulan back to Paul to demand he give her an heir; she has so far kept Chani sterile by adding drugs to the Fremen woman's food. Paul refuses. He is filled with bitter visions, unsure but that he is the very instrument of the future he tries to avoid. He is sure, however, that a royal heir by Irulan will destroy all hope. Paul detects the Reverend Mother on Edric's ship and has her arrested. But Scytale and escape. Scytale secretly visits a Fremen quarter to gain information. He leaves Bijaz behind but takes with him the semuta-addicted daughter During an interview with Edric, Paul learns nothing. The presence of the Steersman muddies all his Paul can only determine that the Reverend Mother has suggested that Princess Irulan have Chani killed, since Paul's mate now refuses the food containing the sterility drug. Edric then makes Paul a shocking present something that looks like Duncan Idaho, except for metallic eyes. It is a ghola Duncan's body has been regrown from its cell patterns by Tleilaxu science. But it has no memories from its former life and is now named HA YT. Paul is disturbed by the fact that he saw no vision of Duncan's return. He asks the purpose of the gift, and Hayt answers: "I have been sent to destroy you. " But Hayt does not know how it will come about. He tells Paul to send him away -- but Paul cannot, since Duncan was once so close to him. Alia is sent to study the body of a girl found in the desert. She can learn little, except that the corpse shows signs of semuta-addiction, but she is sure it indicates some grave danger. On the way back, Hayt reveals signs of being the real Duncan Idaho, and she is attracted to him in spite of herself. When he kisses her, she protests; but he tells her he only did what she wanted -- and she realizes he is right. On the verge of new struggles of empire, Paul finds nothing going well. There are reports of treason among the Fremen and an attempt to steal a worm and develop melange on another world -- but which world Paul cannot see. He grows more worried as his visions grow more and more confusing. He constantly sees a moon fallingsome highly personal symbol of disaster; the meaning eludes him. Paul sees the Reverend Mother Mohiam and tells her that Chani is now pregnant. For peace from her, he promises that Irulan may have a child by artifical insemination -- but not an heir to the throne. Upset, she agrees to wait while she consults her order. But it is no. victory. Paul admits to the ghola -- who is becoming more and more Duncan Idaho -- that he knows birth of an heir means Chani 's death; there are problems because of the years of secret contraceptive... But he can do nothing. Otheym's daughter Lichna -- really Scytale in her form -- appears with a message that Otheym asks Paul to come to him, since he has information on the traitor Fremen. Paul knows it is Scytale, but the future demands he act as if it were really Lichna. He is not encouraged when he visits one of Alia's religious ceremonies for the pilgrims; under an overdose of melange, she sees what he fears. At Otheym's house, he meets Bijaz -- and gets another shock, since there was no dwarf-ghola in his vision! Otheym speaks bitterly of treason, but says the dwarf knows the names of the disloyal. He gives Paul the dwarf as Paul leaves. Outside, Paul turns Bijaz over to Stilgar and begins directing the search for the traitors. Then a blast of radiation strikes the searching troops. It is a forbidden "Stone Burner" -- an atomic bomb in which the type of radiation can be adjusted. The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour of his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy. " -- Addenda to Orders In Council The Emperor Paul Maud'dib T he ground grew hot. Paul heard the sounds of running stop. Men threw themselves down all around him, every one of them aware that there was no point in running. The first damage had been done; and now they must wait out the extent of the stone burner's potency. The thing's radiation, which no man could outrun, already had penetrated their flesh. The peculiar result of stone burner radiation already was at work in them. What else this weapon might do now lay in the planning of the men who had used it in defiance of the Great Convention. "Gods... a rotten stone burner," someone whimpered. "I don't... want... to be... blind." "Who does?" It was the harsh voice of a trooper. "The Tleilaxu will sell many eyes here," someone near Paul growled. "Now, shut up and wait!" They waited. Paul remained silent, thinking what this weapon implied. Too much fuel in it and it would cut its way into the planet's core. Dune's molten level lay deep, but the more dangerous for that. Such pressures released and out of control might split a planet, scattering lifeless bits and pieces through space. "I think it's dying down a bit," someone said. "It's just digging deeper," Paul cautioned. "Stay put, all of you. Stilgar will be sending help." "Stilgar got away?" "Stilgar got away." "The ground's hot," someone complained. "They dared use atomics!" a trooper yelled furiously. "The sound's diminishing," someone down the street said.  concentrated on his fingertips touching the street. He could feel the rolling-rumbling of the thing -- deep... deep... "My eyes!" someone cried. "I can't see!" Someone closer to it than I was, Paul thought. He still could see to the end of the cul-de-sac when he lifted his head, although there was a mistiness across the scene. A red-yellow glow filled the area where Otheym's house and its neighbor had been. Pieces of adjoining buildings made dark patterns as they crumbled into the glowing pit. Paul climbed to his feet. He felt the stone burner die, leaving silence beneath him. His body was wet with perspiration against the stillsuit's slickness -- too much for the suit to accommodate. The air in his lungs carried the heat and sulfur stench of the burner. As he looked at the troopers beginning to stand up around him, the mist on Paul's eyes faded into darkness. He summoned up his oracular vision of these moments, then turned and strode along the track that Time had carved for him, fitting himself into the vision so tightly that it could not escape. He felt hirtiself grow aware of this place as a multitudinous possession, reality welded to priction. Moans and groans of his troopers arose all around him as the men realized their blindness. "Hold fast!" Paul shouted. "Help is coming!" And, as the complaints persisted, he said: "This is Maud'dib! I command you to hold fast! Help comes!" Silence. Then, true to his vision, a nearby guardman said: "Is it truly the Emperor? Which of you can see? Tell me." "None of us has eyes," Paul said. "They have taken my eyes as well, but not my vision. I can see you standing there, a dirty wall within touching distance on your left. Now, wait bravely. Stilgar comes soon with our friends." The thwock-thwok of many 'thopters grew louder all around. There was the sound of hurrying feet. Paul watched his friends come, matching their sounds to his oracular vision. "Stilgar!" Paul shouted, waving an arm. "Over here!" "Thanks to Shai-hulud," Stilgar . cried, running up to Paul. "You're not..." In the sudden silence, Paul's vision showed him Stilgar staring with an expression of agony at the ruined eyes of his friend and emperor. "Oh, m' Lord," Stilgar groaned. "Usui... Usui... Usui..." "What of the stone burner?" one of the newcomers shouted. "It's ended," Paul said, raising his voice. He gestured. "Get up there now and rescue the ones who were closest to it. Put up barriers. Lively now!" He turned back to Stilgar. "Do you see, m'Lord?" Stilgar asked, wonder in his tone. "How can-you see?" For answer, Paul put a finger out to touch Stilgar's cheek above the stillsuit mouthcap, felt tears. "You need give no moisture to me, old friend," Paul said. "I am not dead." "But your eyes!" "They've blinded my body, but not my vision," Paul said. "Ah, Stil, I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly." "Usui, I don't, I don't..." "Don't try to understand it. Accept it. I am in the world beyond this world here. For me, they are the same. I need no hand to guide me. I see every movement all around me. I see every expression of your face. I have no eyes, yet I see." ly. "Sire, we must conceal your affliction from..." "We Hfde it from no man," Paul said. "But the law..." "We live by the Atreides Law now, Stil. The Fremen Law that the blind should be abandoned in the desert applies only to the blind. I am not blind. I live in the cycle of being where the war of good and evil has its arena. We are at a turning point in the succession of ages and we have our parts to play." In a sudden stillness. Paul heard one of the wounded being led past him. "It was terrible," the man groaned, "a great fury of fire." "None of these men shall be taken into the desert," Paul said. "You hear me, Stil?" "I hear you, m'Lord." "They are to be fitted with new eyes at my expense." "It will be done, m'Lord." Paul, hearing the awe grow in Stilgar's voice, said: "I will be at the Command 'thopter. Take charge here." "Yes, m'Lord." Paul stepped around Stilgar, strode down the street. His vision told him every movement, every irregularity beneath his feet, every face he encountered. He gave orders as he moved, pointing to men of his personal entourage, calling out names, summoning to himself the ones who represented the intimate apparatus of government. He could feel the terror grow behind him, the fearful whispers. "His eyes!" "But he looked right at you, called you by name!" At the Command 'thopter, he deactivated his personal shield, reached into the machine and took the microphone from the hand of a startled communications officer. He issued a swift string of orders and thrust the microphone back into the officer's hand. Turning, Paul summoned a weapons specialist, one of the eager and brilliant new breed who remembered sietch life only dimly. "They used a stone burner," Paul said. After the briefest pause, the man said: "So I was told. Sire." "You know what that means, of course." "The fuel could only have been atomic." Paul nodded, thinking of how this man's mind must be racing. Atomics. The Great Convention prohibited such weapons. Discovery of the perpetrator would bring down tlie combined retributive assault of the Great Houses. Old feuds would be forgotten, discarded in the face of this threat and the ancient fears it aroused. "It cannot have been manufactured without leaving some traces," Paul said. "You will assemble the proper equipment and search out the place where the stone burner was made." "At once. Sire." With one last fearful glance, the man sped away. "M'Lord," the communications officer ventured from behind him. "Your eyes..." Paul turned, reached into the 'thopter and retuned the command set to his personal band. "Call Chani," he ordered. "Tell her... tell her I am alive and will be with her soon." Now the forces gather, Paul thought. And he noted how strong was the smell of fear in the perspiration all around. "He has gone from Alia, The womb of heaven! Holy, holy, holy! Firesand leagues Confront our Lord. He can see Without eyes! A daemon upon him! Holy, holy, holy Equation: He solved for Martyrdom!" -- The Moon Falls Down Songs of Muad'dib A fter seven days of radiating  fevered activity, the Keep took on an unnatural quiet. On this morning, there were people about, but they spoke in whispers, heads close together, and they walked softly. Some scurried with an oddly furtive gait. The sight of a Guard detail coming in from the forecourt drew questioning looks. Frowns greeted the noise these newcomers raised with their tramping about and stacking of weapons. The newcomers caught the mood of the interior, though, and began moving in furtively. Talk of the stone burner still floated around: "He said the fire had blue-green in it and a smell out of hell." "Elpa is a fool! He says he'll commit suicide rather than take Tleilaxu eyes." "I donU like talk of eyes." "Muad'dib passed me and he called me by name!" "How does He see without eyes?" "People are leaving, had you heard? There's great fear. The Naibs say they'll go to Sietch Makab for a Grand Council." "What have they done with the Panygerist?" "I saw them take him into the chamber where the Naibs are meeting. Imagine Korba a prisoner!" Chani had arisen early, awakened by a stillness in the Keep. Turning, she had found Paul sitting up beside her, his eyeless sockets aimed at some formless place beyond the far wall of their bedchamber. What the stone burner had left with its peculiar affinity for eye tissue, all that ruined flesh, had been removed. Injections and ungents had saved the stronger flesh around the sockets, but she felt that the radiation had gone deeper. Ravenous hunger seized her as she sat up. She fed on the food kept by the bedside -- spicebread, a heavy cheese. Paul gestured at the food. "Beloved, there was no way to spare you this. Believe me." Chani stilled a fit of trembling when he aimed those empty sockets at her. She'd given up asking him to explain. He spoke so oddly. "I was baptized in sand and it cost me the knack of believing. Who trades in faiths any more? Who'll buy? Who'll sell?" What could he mean by such words? He refused even to consider Tleilaxu eyes, although he bought them with a lavish hand for the men who shared his affliction. H unger satisfied, Chani slipped from bed. She glanced back at Paul, noting his tiredness. Grim lines framed his mouth. The dark hair stood up, mussed from a sleep that hadn't healed. He appeared so saturnine and remote. The back and forth of waking and sleeping did nothing to change this. She forced herself to turn away and whispered: "My love... my love..." He leaned over, pulled her back into the bed and kissed her cheeks. "Soon we'll go back to our desert," he whispered. "Only a few things remain to be done." She trembled at the finality in his voice. He tightened his arms around her. He murmured: "Don't fear me, my Sihaya. Forget mystery and accept love. There's no mystery about love. It comes from life. Can't you feel that?" "Yes." She put a palm against his chest, counting his heartbeats. His love cried out to the Fremen spirit in her -- torrential, outpouring, savage. A magnetic power enveloped her. "I promise you a thing, beloved," he said. "A child of ours will rule such an empire that mine will fade in comparison. Such achievements of living and art and sublime... " "We're here now!" she protested, fighting a dry sob. "And... I feel we have so little... time." "We have eternity, beloved." "You may have eternity. I have only now." "But this is eternity." He stroked her forehead. She pressed against him, lips on his neck. The pressure agitated the life in her womb. She felt it stir. Paul felt it, too. He put a hand on her abdomen. "Ahh, little ruler of the universe, wait your time. This moment is mine." She wondered then why he always spoke of the life within her as singular. Hadn't the medics told him? She searched back in her own memory, curious that the subject had never arisen between them. Surely, he must know she carried twins. She hesitated on the point of raising this question. He must know. He knew everything. He knew all the things that were herself. His hands, his mouth alt of him knew her. Presently, she said: "Yes, love. This is forever... this is real." And she closed her eyes tightly lest sight of his dark sockets stretch her soul from paradise to hell. No matter the Rihani magic in which he'd enciphered their lives, his flesh remained real, his caresses could not be denied. When they arose to dress for the day, she said: "If the people only knew your love..." But his mood had changed. "You can't build politics on love," he said. "People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can't have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?" "You're not a despot!" she protested, tying her scarf. "Your laws are just." "Ahh, laws," he said. He crossed to the window and pulled back the draperies as though he could look out. "What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death." Chani's mouth drew into a tight line. She couldn't deny his wisdom and sagacity, but these moods frightened her. He turned upon himself and she sensed internal wars. It was as though he took the Fremen maxim. Never to forgive -- never to forget!, and whipped his own flesh with it. She crossed to his side and stared past him at an angle. The growing heat of the day had begun pulling the north wind out of these protected latitudes. The wind painted a false sky full of ochre plumes and sheets of crystal, strange designs in rushing gold and red. High and cold, the wind broke against the Shield Wall with fountains of dust. side him. Momentarily, he lowered a curtain of forgetfulness across his vision. He might just be standing here with his eyes closed. Time refused to hold still for him, though. He inhaled darkness-starless, tearless. His affliction dissolved substance until all that remained was astonishment at the way sounds condensed his universe. Everything around him leankl on his lonely sense of hearing, falling back only when he touched objects -- the drapery, Chani's hand... He caught himself listening for Chani's breaths. Where was the insecurity of things that were only probable? His mind carried such a burden of mutilated memories. For every instant of reality there existed countless projections, things fated never to be. An invisible self within him remembered the false pasts, their burden threatening at times to overwhelm the present. Chani leaned against his arm. He felt his body through her touch -- dead flesh carried by timeeddies. He reeked of memories that had glimpsed eternity. To see eternity was to be exposed to eternity's whims, oppressed by endless dimensions. The oracle's false immortality demanded retribution. Past and Future became simultaneous. Once more, the vision arose from its black pit, locked onto him. It was his eyes. It moved his muscles. It guided him into the next moment, the next hour, the next day... until he felt himself to be always there "It's time we were going," Chani said. "The Council..." "Alia will be there to stand in my place." "Does she know what to do?" "She knows." squadron swarming into the parade yard below her quarters. She stared down at a scene of frantic confusion, clamorous and intimidating babble. The scene became intelligible only when she recognized the prisoner they'd brought -- Korba, the panygerist. She made her morning toilet, moving occasionally to the window, keeping watch on the progress of impatience down there. Her gaze kept straying to Korba. She tried to remember him as the rough and bearded commander of the Third Wave in the Battle of Arrakeen. It was impossible. Korba had become an immaculate fop dressed now in a Parato silk robe of exquisite cut. It lay open to the waist, revealing a beautifully laundered ruff and embroidered undercoat set with green gems. A purple belt gathered the waist. The sleeves poking through the robe's armhole slits had been tailored into rivulet ridges of dark green and black velvet. A few Naibs had come out to observe the treatment accorded a fellow Fremen. They'd brought on the clamor, exciting Korba to protest his innocence. Alia moved her gaze across the Fremen faces, trying to recapture memories of the original men. The present blotted out the past. They'd all become hedonists, samplers of pleasures most men couldn't even imagine. Their uneasy glances, she saw, strayed often to the doorway into the chamber where they would meet. They were thinking of Muad'dib's blind-sight, a new manifestation of mysterious powers. By their law, a blind man should be abandoned in the desert, his water given up to Shai-hulud. But eyeless Muad'dib saw them. They disliked buildings, too, and felt vulnerable in space built above the ground. Give them a proper cave cut from rock, then they could relax -- but not here, not with this new Muad'dib waiting inside. As she turned to go down to the meeting, she saw the letter where she'd left it on a table by the door -- the latest message from their mother. Despite the special reverence held for Caladan as the place of Paul's birth, the Lady Jessica had emphasized her refusal to make her planet a stop on the HajJ. "No doubt my son is an epochal figure of history," she'd written, "but I cannot see this as an excuse for submitting to a rabble invasion." Alia touched the letter, experiencing an odd sensation of mutual contact. This paper had been in her mother's hand. Such an archaic device, the letter -- but personal in a way no recording could achieve. Written in the Atreides Battle Tongue, it represented an almost invulnerable privacy of communication. Thinking of her mpther afflicted Alia with the usual inward blurring. The spice change that had mixed the psyches of mother and daughter forced her at times to think of Paul as a son to whom she had given birth. The capsulecomplex of oneness could present her own father as a lover. Ghost shadows cavorted in her mind, people of possibility. A lia reviewed the letter as she walked down the ramp to the antechamber where her guard Amazons waited., "You produce a deadly paradox," Jessica had written. "Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws Inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, oa the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replace morality." The smell of spice coffee greeted Alia in the antechamber. Four Guard amazons in green watchrobes came to attention as she entered. They fell into step behind her, striding firmly in the bravado of their youth, eyes alert for trouble. They had zealot faces untouched by awe. They radiated that special Fremen quality of violence;. they could kill casually with no sense of guilt. In this, I am different. Alia thought. The Atreides name has enough dirt on it without that. Word preceded her. A waiting Page darted off as she entered the lower hall, running to summon the full Guard detail. The hall stretched out windowless and gloomy, illuminated only by a few subdued glowglobes. Abruptly, the doors to the parade yard opened wide at the far end to admit a glaring shaft of daylight. The Guard with Korba in their midst wavered into view from the outside with the light behind them. "Where is Stilgar?" Alia demanded. "Already inside," one of her Amazons said. Alia led the way into the chamber. It was one of the Keep's more pretentious meeting places. A high balcony with rows of soft seats occupied one side. Across from the balcony, orange draperies had been pulled back from tall windows. Bright sunlight poured through from an open space with a garden and a fountain. At the near end of the chamber on her Vight stood a dais with a single massive chair. Moving to the chair. Alia glanced back and up, to see the gallery filled with Naibs. Household Guardsmen packed the open space beneath the galleiy, Stilgar moving among them with a quiet word here, a command there. He gave no sign that he'd seen Alia enter. Korba was brought in, seated at a low table with cushions beside it on the chamber floor below the dais. Despite his finery, the panygerist gave the appearance now of a surly, sleepy old man huddled up in his robes as against the outer cold. Two Guardsmen took up positions behind him. Stilgar approached the dais as Alia seated herself. "Where is Muad'dib!" he demanded. "My brother has delegated me to preside as Reverend Mother," Alia said . Hearing this, the Naibs in the gallery began raising their voices in protest. "Silence!" Alia commanded. In the abrupt quiet, she said: "Is it not Fremen law that a Reverend Mother presides when life and death are at issue!" ment penetrated, stillness came over the Naibs, but Alia marked angry stares across the rows of faces. She named them in her mind for discussion in Council -- Hobars, Rajifiri, Tasmin, Saajid, Umbu, Legg... The names carried pieces of Dune in them -- Umbu Sietch, Tasmin Sink, Hobars Gap... She turned her attention to Korba. Observing her attention, Korba lifted his chin. "I protest my innocence." "Stilgar, read the charges," Alia said. Stilgar produced a brown spicepaper scroll and stepped forward. He began reading, a solemn flourish in his voice as though to hidden rhythms. He gave the words an incisive quality, clear and full of probity -- "... that you did conspire with traitors to accomplish the destruction of our Lord and Emperor; that you did meet in vile secrecy with diverse enemies of the realm; that you..." Korba kept shaking his head with a look of pained anger. Alia listen broodingly, chin planted on her left fist, head cocked to that side, the other arm extended along the chair arm. Bits of the formal procedure began dropping out of her awareness, screened by her own feelings of disquiet. "...". venerable tradition... support of the Legions and all Fremen everywhere... violence met with violence according to the Law... majesty of the Imperial Person... forfeit all rights to... " It was nonsense, she thought. Nonsense! All of it -- nonsense... nonsense... nonsense... Stilgar finished: "Thus the issue is brought to judgment." In the immediate silence, Korba rocked forward, hands gripping his knees, veined neck stretching as though he were preparing to leap. His tongue flicked between his teeth as he spoke. "Not by word or deed have I been traitor to my Fremen vows! I demand to confront my accuser!" A simple enough protest, Alia thought. And she saw that it had produced a considerable effect on the Naibs. They knew Korba. He was one of them. To becpme a Naib, he'd proved his Fremen courage but reliable. Not one to lead a Jihad, perhaps, but a good choice as supply officer. Not a crusader, but one who cherished the old Fremen virtues: The Tribe is paramount. Otheym's bitter words as Paul had recited them swept through Alia's mind. She scanned the gallery. Any of those men might see himself in Korba's place -- some for good reason. But an innocent Naib was as dangerous as a guilty one here. Korba felt it, too. "Who accuses me?" he demanded. "I have a Fremen right to confront my accuser." "Perhaps you accuse yourself," Alia said. Before he could mask it, mystical terror lay briefly on Korba's face. It was there for anyone to read: With her powers. Alia had but to make accusations, saying she brought the evidence from the shadow region, the alam al-mythal. "Our enemies have Fremen allies," Alia pressed. "Water traps have been destroyed, qanats blasted, planting poisonal and storage basins plundered..." A nd now -- they've stolen a worm from the desert, taken it to another world!" The voice of this intrusion was known to all of them -- Muad'dib. Paul came through the doorway from the hall, pressed through the Guard ranks and crossed to Alia's side. Chani, accompanying him, remained on the sidelines. "M'Lord," Stilgar said, refusing to look at Paul's face. Paul aimed his empty sockets at the gallery, then down to Korba. "What, Korba -- no words of praise?" Muttering could be heard in the gallery. It grew louder, isolated words and phrases audible: "... law for the blind... Fremen way...in the desert...who breaks..." "Who says I'm blind?" Paul demanded. He faced the gallery. "You, Rajifiri? I see you're wearing gold today, and that blue shirt beneath it which still has dust on it from the streets. You always were untidy." Rajifiri made a warding gesture, three fingers against evil. "Point those fingers at yourself!" Paul shouted. "We know where the evil is!" He turned back to Korba. "There's guilt on your face, Korba." "Not my guilt! I may have associated with the guilty, but not..." He broke off, shot a frightened look at the gallery. Taking her cue from Paul, Alia arose, stepped down to the floor of the chamber and advanced to the edge of Korba's table. From a range of less than a meter, she stared down at him, silent and intimidating. Korba cowered under the burden of eyes. He fidgeted. He shot anxious glances at the gallery. "Whose eyes do you seek up there?" Paul asked. "You cannot see!" Korba blurted. Paul put down a momentary feeling of pity for Korba. The man lay trapped in the vision's snare as securely as any of those present. He played a part, no more. "I don't need eyes to see you," Paul said. And he began describing Korba, every movement, every twitch, every alarmed and pleading look at the gallery. Desperation grew in Korba. Watching him. Alia saw that he might break any second. Someone in the gallery must realize how near he was to breaking, she thought. Who? She studied the faces of the Naibs, noting small betrayals in the masked faces... angers, fears, uncertainties... guilts. Paul fell silent. Korba mustered a pitiful air of pomposity to plead: "Who accuses me?" "Otheym accuses you," Alia said. "But Otheym's dead!" Korba protested. "How did you know that?" Paul asked. "Through your spy system? Oh, yes! We know about your spies and couriers. We know who brought the stone burner here from Tarahell." "It was for the defense of the Qizarate!" Korba blurted. "Is that how it got into traitorous hands?" Paul asked. "It was stolen and we..." Korba fell silent, swallowed. His gaze darted left and right. "Everyone knows I've been the voice of love for Muad'dib." He stared at the gallery. "How can a dead man accuse a Fremen?" "Otheym's voice isn't dead," Alia said. She stopped as Paul touched her arm. Paul said. "It gives the names, the acts of treachery, the meeting places and the times. Do you miss certain faces in the Council of Naibs, Korba? Where are Merkur and Fash? Keke the Lame isn't with us today. And Takim, where is he?" Korba shook his head from side to side. "They've fled Arrakis with the stolen worm," Paul said. "Even if I freed you now, Korba, Shaihulud would have your water for your part in this. Why don"t I free you, Korba? Think of all those men whose eyes were taken, the men who cannot see as I see. They have families and friends, Korba. Where could you hide from them?" "It was an accident," Korba pleaded. "Anyway, they're getting Tleilaxu..." Again, he subsided. "Who knows what bondage goes with metal eyes?" Paul asked. The Naibs in their gallery began exchanging whispered comments, speaking behind raised hands. They gazed coldly at Korba now. "Defense of the Qizarate," Paul murmured, returning to Korba's plea. "A device which either destroys a planet or produces Jrays to blind those too near it. Which effect, Korba, did you conceive as a defense? Does the Qizarate rely on stopping the eyes of all observers?" "It was a curiosity, m'Lord," Korba pleaded. "We knew the Old Law said that only Families could possess atomics, but the Qizarate obeyed... obeyed..." "Obeyed you," Paul said. "A curiosity, indeed." "Even if it's only the voice of my accuser, you must face me with it!" Korba said. "A Fremen has rights." "He speaks truth. Sire," Stilgar said. Alia glanced sharply at Stilgar. "The law is the law," Stilgar said, sensing Alia's protest. He began quoting Fremen Law, interspersing his own comments on how the Law pertained. Alia experienced the odd sensation that she was hearing Stilgar's words before he spoke them. How could he be this credulous? Stilgar had never appeared more official and conservative, more intent on adhering to the Dune Code. His chin was outthrust and aggressive. His mouth chopped. Was there really nothing in him but this outrageous pomposity? "Korba is a Fremen and must be judged by Fremen Law," Stilgar conclude. A lia turned away, looking out at the day shadows dropping down the wall across from the garden. She felt drained by frustration. They'd dragged this thing along well into mid-morning. Now, what? Korba had relaxed. The panygerist's manner said he'd suffered an unjust attack, that everything he'd done had been for love of Muad'dib. She glanced at Korba, surprising a look of sly selfimportance sliding across his face. He might almost have received a message, she thought. He acted the part of a man who'd heard friends shout: "Hold fast! Help is on its way!' For an instant, they'd held this thing in their hands -- the information out of the dwarf, the clues that others were in the plot, the names of informants. But the critical moment had flown. Stilgar? Surely not Stilgar. She turned to stare at the old Fremen. Stilgar met her gaze without flinching. "Thank you, Stil," Paul said, "for reminding us of the Law." Stilgar inclined his head. He moved close, shaped silent words in a way he knew both Paul and Alia could read. "I'll wring him dry and then take care of the matter." Paul nodded, signaled the Guardsmen behind Korba. "Remove Korba to a maximum security cell," Paul said. "No visitors except counsel. As counsel, I appoint Stilgar." "Let me choose my own counsel!" Korba shouted. Paul whirled. "You deny the fairness and judgment of Stilgar?" "Oh, no, m'Lord, but... " "Take him away!" The Guardsmen lifted Korba off the cushions and herded him out. With new mutterings, the Naibs began quitting their gallery. Attendants came from beneath the gallery, crossed to the windows and drew the orange draperies. A gloom took over the chamber. "Paul," Alia said. "When we precipitate violence," Paul said, "it'll be when we have full control of it. Thank you, Stil; you played your part well. Alia, I'm certain, has identified the Naibs who were with him. They couldn't help giving themselves away." "You cooked this up between you?" Alia demanded. "Had I ordered Korba slain out of hand, the Naibs would have understood," Paul said. "But this formal procedure without strict adherence to Fremen Law -- they felt their own rights threatened. Which Naibs were with him. Alia?" "Rajifiri for certain," she said, voice low. "And Saajid, but..." "Give Stilgar the complete list," Paul said. A lia swallowed in a dry throat, sharing the general fear of Paul in this moment. She knew how he moved among them without eyes, but the delicacy of it daunted her. To see their forms in the air of his vision! She sensed her person shimmering for him in a sidereal time whose accord with reality depended entirely on his words and actions. He held them all in the palm of his vision! "It's past time for your morning "audience. Sire," Stilgar said. "Many people -- curious... afraid..." "Are you afraid, Stil?" It was barely a whisper. "Yes." "You're my friend and have nothing to fear from me." Paul said. Stilgar swallowed. "Yes, m'Lord." "Alia, take the morning audience," Paul said. "Stilgar, give the signal. Stilgar obeyed. A flurry of movement erupted at the great doors. A crow'd was pressed back from the shadowy room to permit entrance of officials. Many things began happening all at once -- the Household Guard elbowing and shoving back the press of supplicants, garishly robed Pleaders trying to break through shouts, curses. Pleaders waved the papers of their calling. The Clerk of the Assemblage strode ahead of them through the opening cleared by 'the Guard. He carried the List of Preferences, those who'd be permitted to approach the Throne. The Clerk, a wiry Tremen named Tecrube, carried himself with weary cynicism, flaunting his shaen head and clumped whiskers. Alia moved to intercept him, giving Paul time to slip away with Chani through the private passage behind the dais. She e.xperienced a momentary distrust of Tecrube at the prying curiosity in the stare he sent after Paul. "I speak for my brother today," she said. "Have the Supplicants approach one at a time." "Yes, nTLady." He turned to arrange his throng. "I can remember a time when you wouldn't have mistaken your brother's purpose here," Stilgar said. "I was distracted," she said. "There's been a dramatic change in you, Stil. What is it?" Stilgar drew himself up, shocked. One changed, of course. But dramatically? This was a particular view of himself that he'd never encountered. Drama was a questionable thing. Imported entertainers of dubious loyalty and more dubious virtue were dramatic. Enemies of the Empire employed drama in their attempts to sway the fickle populace. Korba had slipped away from Fremen virtues to employ drama for the Qizarate. And he'd die for that. "You're being perverse," Stilgar said. "Do you distrust me?" The distress in his voice softened her e.xpression, but not her tone. "You know I don't distrust you. I've always agreed with my brother that once matters were in Stilgar's hands we could safely forget them." "Then why do you say I've... changed?" "You're preparing to disobey my brother," she said. "I can read it in you. I only hope it doesn't destroy you both." The first of the Pleaders and Supplicants were approaching now. She turned away before Stilgar could respond. His face, though, was filled with the things she'd sensed in her mother's letter -- the replacement of morality and conscience w'ith law. "You produce a deadly paradox. ' ' Tibana was an apologist for Socratic Christianity, probably a native of IV Anbus who lived between the #th and #th Centuries before Corrino, likely in the second reign of Dalamak. Of his writings, only a portion survives from which this fragment is taken: "The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness. " -- from the Dunebuk of Irulan Y OU are Bijaz," the ghola said, entering the small charhber where the dwarf was held under guard. "I am called Hayt." A strong contingent of the Household Guard had come in with the ghola to take over the evening watch. Sand carried by the sunset wind had stung their cheeks while they crossed the outer yard and made them blink and hurry. They could be heard in the passage outside now, exchanging the banter and ritual of their tasks. "You are not Hayt," the dwarf said. "You are Duncan Idaho. I was there when they put your dead flesh into the tank and I was there when they removed it, alive and ready for training." , The ghola swallowed in a throat suddenly dry. The bright glowglobes of the chamber lost their yellowness in the room's green hangings. The light showed beads of perspiration on the dwarf's forehead. Bijaz seemed a creature of odd integrity, as though the purpose fashioned into him by the Tleilaxu was projected out through his skin. There was power beneath the dwarf's mask of cowardice and frivolity. "Muad'dib has charged me to question you to determine what it is the Tleilaxu intend you to do here," Hayt said. "Tleilaxu, Tleilaxu," the dwarf sang. "I am the Tleilaxu, you dolt! For that matter, so are you." Hayt stared at the dwarf. Bijaz radiat a charismatic alertness that made the observer think of ancient idols. "You hear that guard outside?" Hayt asked. "If I gave them the order, they'd strangle you." "Hai! Hail" Bijaz cried. "What a callous lout you've become. And you said you came seeking truth." Hayt found he didn't like the look of secret repose beneath the dwarf's expression. "Perhaps I only seek the future," he said. "Well spoke," Bijaz said. "Now, we know each other. When two thieves meet they need no introduction." "So we're thieves," Hayt said. "What do we steal?" "Not thieves, but dice," Bijaz said. "And you came here to read my spots. I, in turn, read yours. And lo! You have two faces!" "Did you really see me go into the Tleilaxu tanks?" Hayt asked, fighting an odd reluctance to ask that question. "Did I not say it?" Bijaz demanded. The dwarf bounced to his feet. "We had a terrific struggle with you. The flesh did not want to come back." H ayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind. Bijaz tipped his head slyly to one side and walked all around the ghola, staring up at him. "Excitement kindles old patterns in you," Bijaz said. "You are the pursuer who doesn't want to find what he pursues." "You're a weapon aimed at Muad'dib," Hayt said, swivelling to follow the dwarf. "What is it you're to do?" "Nothing!" Bijaz said, stopping. "I"give you a common answer to a common question." "Then you were aimed at Alia," Hayt said. "Is she your target?" "They call her Hawt, the Fish Monster, on the outworlds," Bijaz said. "How is it I hear your blood boiling when you speak of her?" "So they call her Hawt," the ghola said, studying Bijaz for any clue to his purpose. The dwarf made such odd responses... "She is the virgin-harlot," Bijaz said. "She is vulgar, witty, knowledgeable to a depth that terrifies, cruel when she is most kind, unthinking while she thinks, and when she seeks to build she is as destructive as a corealis storm." "So you came here to speak out against Alia," Hayt said. "Against her?" Bijaz sank to a cushion against the wall. "I came here to be captured by the magnetism of her physical beauty." He grinned, a saurian expression on the big-featured face. "To attack Alia is to attack her brother," Hayt said. "That is so clear it is difficult to see," Bijaz said. "In truth. Emperor and sister are one person back to back, one being, half male and half female." "That is a thing we've heard said by the Fremen of the deep desert," Hayt said. "And those are the ones who've revived the blood sacrifice to Shai-hulud. How is it you repeat their nonsense?" "You dare say nonsen.se?" Bijaz demanded. "You, who are both man and mask? Ahh, but the dice cannot read their own spots. I forget this. And you are doubly confused because you serve the Atreides double-being. Your senses are not as close to the answer as your mind is." "Do you preach that false ritual about Muad'dib to your guards?" Hayt asked, his voice low. He felt his mind being tangled b the dwarf's words. "They preach to me!" Bijaz said. ".And they pray. 'hy should they not'? All of us should pray. Do we not live in the shadow of the most dangerous creation the universe has eser seen?" "Dangerous creation?" "Their own mother refuses to live on the same planet with them!" W HY don't you answer me straight out?" Hayt demanded. "You know we have other ways of questioning you. VV'e'll get our answers... one way or another." "But I have answered you! Have I not said the myth is real? Am I the wind that carries death in its belly? No! I am words! Such words as the lightning which strikes from the sand in a dark sky. I have said: 'Blow out the lamp! Day is here!' And you keep saying: 'Give me a lamp so I can find the day.' " "You play a dangerous game with me," Hayt said. "Did you think I could not understand these k Zensunni ideas? You leave tracks as clear as those of a bird in mud." Bijaz began to giggle. "Why do you laugh?" Hayt demand. "Because I have teeth and wish I had not," Bijaz managed between giggles. "Having no teeth,. I could not gnash them." "And now I know your target," Hayt said. "You were aimed at me." "And I've hit it right on!" Bijaz said. "You made such a big target, how could I miss?" He nodded as though to himself. "Now, I will sing to you." He began to hum a keening, whining monotonous theme repeated over and over. Hayt stiffened, experiencing odd pains that played up and down his spine. He stared at the face of the dwarf, seeing youthful eyes in an old face. The eyes were the center of a network of knobby white lines which ran to the hollows below his temples. Such a large head! Every feature focused on the pursed-up mouth from which that monotonous noise issued. The sound made Hayt think of ancient rituals, folk memories,"old words and customs, halfforgotten meanings in lost mutterings. Something vital was happening here -- a bloody play of ideas across Time. Older ideas lay tangled in the dwarf's singing. It was like a blazing light in the distance, coming nearer and nearer, illuminating life across a span of centures. "What are you doing to me?" Hayt gasped. "You are the instrument I was taught to play," Bijaz said. "I am playing you. Let me tell you the names of the other traitors among the Naibs. They are Bikouros and Cahueit. There is Djedida, who was secretary to Korba. There is Abumojandis, the aide to Bannerjee. Even now, one of them could be sinking a blade into your Muad' dib." Hayt shook his head from side to side. He found it too difficult to talk. "We are like brothers," Bijaz said, interrupting his monotonous hum once more. "We grew in the same tank; I first and then you." Hayt's metal eyes inflicted him with a sudden burning pain. Flickering red haze surrounded everything he saw. He felt he had been cut away from every immediate sense except the pain, and he experienced his surroundings through a thin separation like wind-blown gauze. All had become accident, the chance involvement of inanimate matter. His own will was no more than a subtle, shifting thing. It lived without breath and was intelligible only as an inward illumination. peration, he broke through the gauze curtain with the lonely sense of sight. His attention focused like a blazing light upon Bijaz. Hayt felt that his eyes cut through layers of the dwarf, seeing the little man as a hired intellect, and beneath that, a creature imprisoned by hungers and cravings which lay huddled in the eyes -- layer after layer, until finally, there was only an entity-aspect being manipulated by symbols. "We are upon a battleground," Bijaz said. "You may speak of it." His voice freed by the command, Hayt said: "You cannot force me to slay Muad'dib." "I have heard the Bene Gesserit say," Bijaz said, "that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe -- that nothing remains in its state, that each day, sometimes each hour, brings change." Hayt shook his head dumbly from side to side. "You believed the silly Emperor was the prize we sought," Bijaz said. "How little "you understand our masters, the Tleilaxu. The Guild and Bene Gesserit believe we produce artifacts. In reality, we produce tools and services. Anything can be a tool -- poverty, war. War is useful because it is effective in so many areas. It stimulates the metabolism. It enforces government. It diffuses genetic strains. It possesses a vitality such as nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-determination." In an oddly placid voice, Hayt said: "Strange thoughts coming from you, almost enough to make me believe in a vengeful providence. What restitution was exacted to create you? It would make a fascinating story, doubtless with an even more extraordinary epilogue." "Magnificent!" Bijaz chortled. "You attack -- therefore you have will power and exercise self-determination." "You're trying to awaken violence in me," Hayt said in a panting voice. Bijaz denied this with a shake of the head. "Awaken, yes; violence, no. You are a disciple of awareness by training, so you have said. I have an awareness to awaken in you, Duncan Idaho." "Hayt!" ""Duncan Idaho. Killer extraordinary. Lover of many women. Swordsman soldier. Atreides field hand on the field of battle. Duncan Idahoi" "The past cannot ever be awakened." "Cannot?" "It has never been done!" "True, but our masters defy the idea that something cannot be done. Always, they seek the proper #ool, the right application of effort, the services of the proper..." "You hide your real purpose! You throw up a screen of words and they mean nothing!" "There is a Duncan Idaho in you," Bijaz said. "It will submit to emotion or to dispassionate examination, but submit it will. This awareness will rise through a screen of suppression and selection out of the dark past which dogs your footsteps. It goads you even now while it holds you back. There exists that being within you upon which awareness must focus and which you will obey." "The Tleilaxu think I'm still their slave, but I... " "Quiet, slave!" Bijaz said in that whining voice. Hayt found himself frozen in silence. N OW, we are down to bedrock," Bijaz said. "I know you feel it. And these are the power words to manipulate you... I think they will have sufficient leverage." Hayt felt the perspiration pouring down his cheeks, the trembling of his chest and arms, but he was powerless to move. "One day," Bijaz said, "the Emperor will come to you. He will say: 'She is gone.' The grief mask will occupy his face. He will give water to the dead, as they call their tears hereabouts. And you will say, using my voice: 'Master! Oh, Master!' " Hayt's jaw and throat ached with the locking of his muscles. He could only twist his head in a brief arc from side to side. "You will say, 'I carry a message from Bijaz.'" The dwarf grimaced. "Poor Bijaz, who has no mind... poor Bijaz, a drum stuffed with messages, an essence for others to use... pound on Bijaz and he produces a noise..." Again, he grimaced. "You think me a hypocrite, Duncan Idaho! I am not! I can grieve, too. But the time has come to substitute swords for words." A hiccough shook Hayt. Bijaz giggled. "Ah, thank you, Duncan, thank you. The demands of the body save us. As the Emperor carries the blood of the Harkonnens in his veins, he will do as we demand. He will turn into a spitting machine, a biter of words that ring with a lovely noise to our masters." Hayt blinked, thinking how the dwarf appeared like an alert little animal, a think of spite and rare intelligence. Harkonnen blood in the Atreides? "You think of Beast Rabban, the vile Harkonnen, and you glare," Bijaz said. "You are like the Fremen in this. When words fail, the sword is always at hand, eh? You think of the torture inflicted upon your family by the Harkonnens. And, through his mother, your precious Paul is a Harkonnen! You would not find it difficult to slay a Harkonnen, now would you?" Bitter frustration coursed through the ghola. Was it anger? Why should this cause anger? "Ohhh," Bijaz said. "Ahhhh, hah! Click-click. There is more to the message. It is a trade the Tleilaxu offer your precious Paul Atreides. Our masters will restore his beloved. A sister to yourself -- another ghola." Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a universe occupied only by his own heartbeats. "A ghola," Bijaz said. "It will be the flesh of his beloved. She will bear his children. She will love only him. We can even improve on the original if he so desires. Did ever a man have greater opportunity to regain what he'd lost? It ' is a bargain he will leap to strike." as though tiring. Then: "He will be tempted... and in his distraction, you will move close. In the instant, you will strike! Two gholas, not one! That is what our masters demand!" The dwarf cleared his throat, nodded once more and said: "Speak." "I will not do it," Hayt said. "But Duncan Idaho would," Bijaz said. "It will be the moment of supreme vulnerability for this descendant of the Harkonnens. Do not forget this. You will suggest improvements to his beloved -- perhaps a deathless heart, gentler emotions. You will offer asylum as you move close to him -- a planet of his choice somewhere beyond the Imperium. Think of it! His beloved restored. No more need for tears, and a place of idyls to live out his years." "A costly package," Hayt said, probing. "He'll ask the price." "Tell him he must renounce his godhead and discredit the Qizarate. He must discredit himself, his sister." "Nothing more?" Hayt asked, sneering. "He must relenquish his "Naturally." "And if you're not yet close enough to strike, speak of how much the Tleilaxu admire what he has taught them about the possibilities of religion. Tell him the Tleilaxu have a department of religious engineering, shaping religions to particular needs." "How very clever," Hayt said. "You think yourself free to sneer and disobey me," Bijaz said. He cocked his head slyly to one side. "Don't deny it... " "They made you well, little animal," Hayt said. "And you as well," the dwarf said. "You will tell him to hurry. Flesh decays and her flesh must be preserved in a cryological tank." Hayt felthimself floundering, caught in a matrix of objects he could not recognize. The dwarf appeared so sure of himself! There had to be a flaw in the Tleilaxu logic. In making their ghola, th'd kqy him to the voice of Bijaz, but...But what? Logic matrixobject... How easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning! Was Tleilaxu logic distorted? Bijaz smiled, listening as though to a hidden voice. "Now, you will forget," he said. "When the moment comes, you will remember. He will say: 'She is gone.' Duncan Idaho will awaken then." The dwarf clapped his hands together. Hayt grunted, feeling that he had been interrupted in the middle of a thought... or perhaps in the middle of a sentence. What was it? Somethinjg about... targets? "You think to confuse me and manipulate me," he said. "How is that?" Bijaz asked. "I am your target and you can't deny it," Hayt said. "I would not think of denying it." "What is it you'd try to do with me?" "A kindness," Bijaz said. "A simple kindness." XX The sequential nature of actual events is not illuminated with lengthy precision by the powers of prescience except under the most extraordinary circumstances. The oracle grasps incidents cut out of the historic chain. Eternity moves, ft inflicts itself upon the oracle and the supplicant alike. Let Muad'dib's subjects doubt his majesty and his oracular visions. Let them deny his powers. Let them never doubt Eternity. -- The Dune Gospels H ayt watched Alia emerge from her temple and cross the plaza. Her guard was bunched close, fierce expressions on their faces to mask the lines moulded by good living and complacency. A heliograph of 'thopter wings flashed in the bright afternoon sun above the temple, part of the Royal Guard with Maud'dib's fist symbol on the fusilage. Hayt returned his gaze to Alia. She looked out of place here in the city, he thought. Her proper setting was the desert -- open, untrammeled space. An odd thing about her came back to him as he watched her approach -- Alia appeared thoughtful only when she smiled. It was a trick of the eyes, he decided, recalling a cameo memory of her as she'd appeared at the reception for the Guild Ambassador -- haughty against a background of music and brittle conversation among extravagant gowns and uniforms. And Alia had been wearing white, dazzling, a bright garment of chastity. He had looked down upon her from a window as she crossed an inner garden with its formal pond, its Buting fountains, fronds of pampas grass and a white belvedere. Entirely wrong... all wrong. She belonged in the desert. Hayt drew in a ragged breath. Alia had moved out of his view then as she did now. He waited, clenching and unclenching his fists. The interview with Bijaz had left him uneasy. He heard Alia's entourage pass outside the room where he waited. She went into the Family quarters. Now he tried to focus on the thing about her which troubled him. The way she'd walked across the plaza? Yes. She'd moved like a hunted creature fleeing some predator. He stepped out onto the connecting balcony and walked along it behind the plasmeld sunscreen, stopping while still in concealing shadows. Alia stood at the balustrade overlooking her temple. He looked where she was looking -- out over the city. He saw rectangles, blocks of color, creeping movements of life and sound. Structures gleamed and shimmered. Heat patterns spiraled off the rooftops. There was a boy across the way bouncing a ball in a cul-de-sac formed by a buttressed massif at a corner of the temple. Back and forth the ball went. A lia, too, watched the ball.  She felt a compelling identity with that ball -- back and forth... back and forth. She sensed herself bouncing through corridors of Time. The potion of melange she'd drained just before leaving the temple was the largest she'd ever attempted -- a massive overdose. Even before beginning to take effect, it had terrified her. Why did I do it? she asked herself. One made a choice betveen dangers. Was that it? This was the way to penetrate the fog spread over the future by that damnable Dune Tarot. A barrier existed. It must be breached. She had acted out of a necessity to see where it was her brother walked with his eyeless stride. The familiar melange fugue state began creeping into her awareness. She took a deep breath, experiencing a brittle form of calm, poised and selfless. Possession of second sight has a tendency to make one a dangerous fatalist, she thought. Unfortunately, there existed no abstract leverage, no calculus of prescience. Visions of the future could not be manipulated as formulae. One had to enter them, risking life and sanity. A figure moved from the harsh shadows of the adjoining balcony. Theghola! In her heightened awareness, Alia saw him with intense clarity -- the dark, lively features dominated by those glistening metal eyes. He was a union of terrifying opposites, something put together in a shocking, linear way. He was shadow and blazing light, a product of the process which had revived his dead flesh...and of something intensely pure... innocent. He was innocence under siege! "Have you been there all along, Duncan?" she asked. "So I'm to be Duncan," he said. "Why?" "Don't question me," she said. And she thought, looking at him, that the Tleilaxu had left no corner of their ghola unfinished. "Only gods can safely risk perfection," shesaid. "It's a dangerous thing for a man." "Duncan died," he said, wishing she would not call him that. "I am Hayt." She studied his artificial eyes, wondering what they saw. Obsers'ed closely, they betrayed tiny black pockmarks, little wells of darkness in the glittering metal. Facets! The universe shimmered around her and lurched. She steadied herself with a hand on the sun-warmed surface of the balustrade. Ahhh, the melange moved swiftly. "Are you ill?" Hayt asked. He moved closer, the steely eyes opened wide, staring. Who spoke? she wondered. Was it Duncan Idaho? Was it the mentatghola or the Zensunni philosopher? Or was it a Tleilaxu pawn more dangerous than any Guild steersman? Her brother knew. Again, she looked at the ghola. There was something inactive about him now, a latent something. He was saturated with waiting and with powers beyond their common life. "Out of my mother, I am like the Bene Gesserit," she said. "Do you know that?" "I know it." "I use their powers, think as they think. Part of me knows the sacred urgency of the breeding program... and its products." S HE blinked, feeling part of her awareness begin to move freely in Time. "It's said that the Bene Gesserit never let go," he said. And he watched her closely, noting how white her knuckles were where she gripped the edge of the balcony. "Have I stumbled?" she asked. He marked how deeply she breathed, with tension in every movement, the glazed appearance of her eyes. "When you stumble," he said, "you may regain your balance by jumping beyond the thing that tripped you." "The Bene Gesserit stumbled," she said. "Now, they wish to regain their balance by leaping beyond my brother. They want Chani's baby... or mine." "Are you with child?" She struggled to fix herself in a time space relationship to this question. With child? When? Where? "I see... my child," she whispered. She moved away from the balcony's edge, turning her head to look at the ghola. He had a facet of salt, bitter eyes -- two circles of glistening lead... and, as heturned away from the light to follow her movement, blue shadows. "What... do you see with such eyes?" she whispered. "What other eyes see," hesaid. His words rang in her ears, stretching her aw'areness. She felt that she reached across the universe -- such a stretching... out... out. She lay intertwined with all Time. "You've taken the spice, a large dose," he said. "Why can't I see him?" she muttered. The womb of all creation held her captive. "Tell me, Duncan, why I cannot see him." "Whom can't you see?" "I cannot see the father of my children. I'm lost in a Tarot fog. Help me." Mentat logic offered its prime computation, and he said: "The Bene Gesserit want a mating between you and your brother. It would lock the genetic..." A wail escaped her. "The egg in the flesh," she gasped. A sensation of chill swept over her, followed by intense heat. The unseen mate of her darkest dreams! Flesh of her flesh that the oracle could not reveal -- would it come to that? "Have you risked a dangerous dose of the spice?" he asked. Something within him fought to express the utmost terror at the thought that an Atreides woman rnight die, that Paul might face him with the knowledge that a female of the royal family had departed. "You don't know what it's like to hunt the future," she said. "Sometimes I glimpse myself... but I get in my own way. I cannot ee through myself." She lowered her head and shook it from side to side. "How much of the spice did you take?" he asked. "Nature, abhors prescience," she said, raising her head. "Did you know that, Duncan?" H e spoke softly, reasonably, as to a small child: "Tell me how much of the spice you took." He took hold of her shoulder with his left hand. "Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous," she said. She pulled away from his hand. "You must tell me," he said. "Look at the Shield Wall," she commanded, pointing. She sent her gaze along her own outstretched hand, trembling as the landscape crumbled in an overwhelming vision -- a sandcastle destroyed by invisible waves. She averted her eyes and was transfixed by the appearance of the ghola's face. His features crawled, became aged, then young... aged... young. He was life itself, assertive, endless... She turned to flee, but he grabbed her left wrist. "I am going to summon a doctor," he said. "No! You must let me have the vision! I have to know!" "You are going inside now," he said. She stared down at his hand. Where their flesh touched, she felt an electric presence that both lured and frightened her. Shejerked free to gasp: "You can't hold the whirlwind!" "You must have medical help!" "Don't you understand?" she demanded. "My vision's incomplete, just fragments. It flickers and jumps. I have to remember the future. Can't you see that?" "What is the future if you die?" he asked, forcing her gently into the Family chambers. "Words...words," she muttered. "I can't explain it. One thing is the occasion of another thing, but there's no cause... no effect. We can't leave the universe as it was. Try as we may, there's a gap." "Stretch out here," he commanded. He is so dense! she thought. Cool shadows enveloped her. She felt her own muscles crawling like worms -- a firm bed that she knew to be insubstantial. Only space was permanent. Nothing else had substance. The bed flowed with many bodies, all of them her own. Time became a multiple sensation, overloaded. It presented no single reaction for her to abstract. It was Time. It moved. The whole universe slipped backward, forward, sidewise. "It Jias no thing-aspect," she explained. "You can't get under it or around it. There's no place to get leverage." There came a fluttering of people all around her. Many someones held her left hand. She looked at her own moving flesh, followed a twining arm out to a fluid mask of face -- Duncan Idaho! His eyes were... wrong, but it was Duncan -- child-man-ad olescent-child-manadolescent... Every line of his features betrayed concern for her. "Duncan, don't be afraid," she whispered. He squeezed her hand and nodded. "Be still," he said. And he thought: She must not die! She must not! No Atreides woman can die! He shook his head sharply. Such thoughts defied mentat logic. Death was a necessity that life might continue. T he ghola loves me, Alia thought. The thought became bedrock to which she might cling. He was a familiar face with a solid room behind him. She recognized one of the bedrooms in Paul's suite. A fixed, immutable person did something with a tube in her throat. She fought against retching. "We got her in time," a voice said, and she recognized the tones of a Family medic. "You should have called me sooner." There was suspicion in the medic's voice. She felt the tube slide out of her throat -- a snake, a shimmering cord. "The slapshot will make her sleep," the medic said. "I'll send one of her attendants to... " "I will stay with her," the ghola said. "That is not seemly!" the medic snapped. "Stay... Duncan," Alia whispered. He stroked her hand to tell her he'd heard. "M'Lady," the medic said. "It would be best if... " "You do not tell me what is best," she rasped. Her throat ached with each syllable. "M'Lady," the medic said, voice accusing, "you know the dangers of consuming too much melange. I can only assume someone gave it to you without..." "You are a fool," she rasped. "Would you deny me my visions? I knew what I took and why.' She put a hand to her throat. "Leave us. At once!" The medic pulled out of her field of vision. He said: "I will send word to your brother." She felt him leave and turned her attention to the ghola. The visionlay clearly in her awareness now, a culture medium in which the present grew outward. She sensed the ghola move in that play of Time, no longer Coptic, fixed now against a recognizable background. He is the crucible, she thought. He is danger and salvation. And she shuddered, knowing she saw the vision her brother had seen. Unwanted tears burned her eyes. She shook her head sharply. No tears! They wasted moisture and, worse, distracted the harsh flow of vision. Paul must be stopped! Once, just once, she had bridged Time to place her voice where he would pass. But stress and mutibility would not permit that here. The web of Time passed through her brother now like rays of light through a lens. He stood at the focus and he knew it. He had gathered all the lines to himself and would not permit them to escape or change. "Why?" she muttered. "Is it hate? Does he strike out at Time itself because it hurt him? Is that it... hate?" TTiinking he heard her speak his name, the ghola said: "M'Lady?" "If I could only bum this thing out of me!" she cried. "I didn't want to be different." "Please Alia," he murmured. "Let yourself sleep." "I wanted to be able to laugh," she whispered. Tears slid down her cheeks. "But I'm sister to an emperor who's worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared." H e wiped the tears from her face. "I don't want to be part of history," she whispered. "I just want to be loved... and to love." "You are loved," he said. "Ahhh, loyal loyal Duncan." "Please don't call me that." "But you are," she said. "And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold... not bought, but sold." "I don't like your cynicism," he said. "Damn your logic! It's true!" "Sleep," he said. "Do you love me, Duncan?" "Yes." "Is that one of those lies," she asked, "one of the lies that are easier to believe than the tmth? Why am I afraid to believe you?" "You fear my differences as you fear your own." "Be a man, not a mentatV' she snarled. "I am a mental and a man." "Will you make me your woman, then?" "I will do what love demands." "And loyalty?" "And loyalty." "That's where you're dangerous," she said. Her words disturbed him. No sign of the disturbance arose to his face, no muscle trembled -- but she knew it. Vision-memory exposed the disturbance. She felt she had missed part of the vision, though, that she should remember something else from the future. There existed another perception which did not go precisely by the senses, a thing which fell into her head from nowhere the way prescience did. It lay in the Time shadows -- infinitely painful. Emotion! That was it -- emotion! It had appeared in the vision, not directly, but as a product from which she could infer what lay behind. She had been possessed by emotion -- a single constriction made up of fear, grief and love. They lay there in the vision, all collected into a single epidemic body, overpowering and primordial. "Duncan, don't let me go," she whispered. "Sleep," he said. "Don't fight it." "I must... I must. He's the bait in his own trap. He's the servant of power and terror. Violence...deification is a prison enclosing him. He'll lose... everything. It'll tear him apart." "You speak of Paul?" "They drive him to destroy himself," she gasped, arching her back. "Too much weight, too much grief. They seduce him away from love." She sank back to the bed. "They're creating a universe where he won't permit himself to live." "Who is doing this?" "He is! Ohhh, you're so dense. He's part of the pattern. And it's too late... too late... too late..." As she spoke, shefelt her awareness descend, layer by layer. It came to rest directly behind her navel. Body and mind separated and merged in a storehouse of relic visions -- moving, moving... She heard a fetal heartbeat, a child of the future. The melange still possessed her, then, setting her adrift in Time. She knew she had tasted the life of a child "not yet conceived. One thing certain about this child -- it would suffer the same awakening she had suffered. It would be an aware, thinking entity before birth. There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. One cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences... -- Muad'dib on Law The Stilgar Commentary ing desert framed in the fault cleft below Sietch Tabr. She wore no stillsuit, and this made her feel unprotected here in the desert. The sietch grotto's entrance lay hidden in the buttressed cliff above and behind her. The desert... the desert... She felt that the desert had followed her wherever she had gone. Coming back to the desert was not so much a homecoming as a turning around to see what had always been there. A painful contraction surged through her abdomen. The birth would be soon. She fought down the pain, wanting this moment alone with her desert. Dawn stillness gripped the land. Shadows fled among the domes and terraces of the Shield Wall all around. Daylight lunged, over the high scarp and plunged her up to her eyes in a bleak landscape stretching beneath a washed blue sky. The scene matched the feeling of dreadful cynicism which had tormented her since the moment she'd learned of Paul's blindness. Why are we Acre.!' she wondered. It was not a hajra, a journey of seeking. Paul sout nothing here except, perhaps, a place for her to give birth. He had summoned odd companions for this journey, she thought -- Bijaz, the Tleilaxu dwarf; the ghola, Hayt, who might be Duncan Idaho's revenant; Edric, the Guild steersman-ambassador; Gains Helen Mohiam, the Bene Gesserit Reverand Mother he so obviously hated; Lichna, Otheym'sstrangedaughter, who seemed unable to move beyond the watchful eyes of guards; Stilgar, her uncle of the Naibs, and his favorite wife, Harah... and Irulan... Alia... The sound of wind through the rocks accompanied her thoughts. The desert day had become yellow on yellow, tan on tan, gray on gray. Why such a strange mixture of companions? "We have forgotten," Paul had said in response to her question, "that the word 'company' originally meant traveling companions. We are a company." "But what value are they?" "There!" he said, turning his frightful sockets toward her. "We've lost that clear, single-note of living. If it cannot be bottled. beaten, pointed or hoarded, we give it no value." Hurt, she'd said: "That's not what I meant." "Ahhh, dearest one," he'd said, soothing, "we are so money-rich and so life-poor. I am evil, obstinate, stupid..." "You are not!" "That, too, is true. But my hands are blue with time. I think... I think I tried to invent life, not realizing it had already been invented." And he'd touched her abdomen to feel the new life there. both hands over her abdomen and trembled, sorry that she'd asked Paul to bring her here. The desert wind had stirred up evil odors from the fringe plantings which anchored the dunes at the cliff base. Fremen superstition gripped her -- evil odors, evil times. She faced into the wind, to see a worm appear outside the plantings. It arose like the prow of a demon ship out of the dunes, threshed sand, smelled the water deadly to its kind and fled beneath a long, burrowing mound. She hated the water then, inspired by the worm's fear. Water, once the spirit-soul of Arrakis, had become a poison. Water brought pestilence. Only the desert was clean. Below her, a Fremen work gang appeared. They climbed to the sietch's middle entrance, and she saw that they had muddy feet. Fremen with muddy feet! The children of the sietch began singing to the morning above her, their voices piping from the upper entrance. The voices made her feel time fleeing from her like hawks before the wind. She shuddered. What storms did Paul see with his eyeless vision? She sensed a vicious madman in him, someone weary of songs and polemics. The sky, she noted, had become crystal gray, filled with alabaster rays, bizarre designs etched across the heavens by windbome sand. A line of gleaming white in the south caught her attention. Eyes suddenly alerted, she interpreted the sign; "White sky in the south; Shai-hulud's mouth." A storm coming, a big wind. She felt the warning breeze, a crystal blowing of sand against her cheeks. The incense of death came on the wind -- odors of water flowing inqanats, sw'eating sand, flint. The water -- that was why Shai-hulud sent his Coriolis wind. Hawks appeared in the cleft where she stood, seeking safety from the wind. They were brown as the rocks and with scarlet in their wings. She felt her spirit go out to them. They had a place to hide; she had none. "M'Lady, the wind comes!" She turned and saw the ghola calling to her outside the upper entrance to the sietch. Fremen fears gripped her. Clean death and the body's water claimed for the tribe, these she understood. But...something brought back from death... Windblown sand whipped at her and reddened her cheeks. She glanced over her shoulder at the frightful band of dust across the sky. The desert beneath the storm had taken on a tawny, restless appearance as though dune waves beat on a tempest shore the way Paul had once described a sea. She hesitated, caught by a feeling of the desert's transience. Measured against eternity, this was no more than a caldron. Dune surf thundered against cliffs. The storm out there had become a universal thing for her -- all the animals hiding from it... nothing left of the desert but its own private sounds -- blown sand scraping along rock, a wind surge whistling, the gallop of a boulder tumbled suddenly from its hill  then, somewhere out of sight, a capsized worm thumping its idiot way aright and slithering off to its dry depths. It was only a moment as her life measured time, but in that moment she felt this planet being swept away -- cosmic dust, part of other waves. W E must hurry," the ghola said from right beside her. She sensed fear in him then, concern for her safety. "It'll shred the flesh from your bones," he said, as though he needed to explain such a storm to her. Her fear of him dispelled by j his obvious concern, Chani allowed the ghola to help her up the rock stairway to the sietch. They entered the twisting baffle which protected the entrance. Attendants opened the moisture seals and closed them behind. Sietch odors assulted her nostrils. The place was a ferment of nasal memories -- the warren closeness of bodies, rank esthers of the reclamation stills, familar food aromas, the flinty burning of machines at work... and through it all, the omnipresent spice -- me lange everywhere. She took a deep breath. "Home." The ghola took his hand from her arm and stood aside, a patient figure now, almost as though turned off when not in use. Yet... he watched. Chani hesitated in the entrance chamber, puzzled by something she could not name. This was truly her home. As a child, she'd hunted scorpions here by glowglobe light. Something was changed, though... "Shouldn't you be going to yourquarters, m'Lady?" the ghola asked. As though ignited by his words, a rippling birth constriction seized her abdomen. She fought against revealing it. "M'Lady?" the ghola said. "Why is Paul afraid for me to bear our child?" she asked. "It is a natural thing to fear for your safety," the ghola said. She put a hand to her cheek where the sand had reddened it. "And hedoesn'tfearforthechild?" "M'Lady... he cannot think of the child without remembering that your firstborn was slain by the Sardaukar." She studied the ghola -- flat face, unreadable mechanical eyes. Was he truly Duncan Idaho, this creature? Was he friend to anyone? Had he spoken truthfully now? "You should be with the medics," the ghola said. Again, she heard the fear for her safety in his voice. She felt abruptly that her mind lay undefended, ready to be invaded by shocking perceptions. "Hayt, I'm afraid," she whispered. "Where is my Usui?" "Affairs of State detain him," the ghola said. S HE nodded, thinking of the government apparatus which had accompanied them in a great flight of ornithopters. Abruptly, she realized what puzzled her about the sietch -- outworld odors. The clerks and aides had brought their own perfumes into this environment, aromas of diet and clothing, of exotic toiletries. They were an undercurrent of odors here. Chani shook herself, concealing an urge to bitter laughter. Even the smells changed in Muad'dib's presence! "There were pressing matters which he could not defer," the ghola said, misreading her hesitation. "Yes... yes, I understand. I came with that swarm, too." Recalling the flight from Arrakeen, she admitted to herself now that she had not expected to survive it. Paul had insisted on piloting his own 'thopter. Eyeless, he had guided the machine here. After that experience, she knew nothing he did could surprise her. Another pain fanned out through her abdomen. The ghola saw her indrawn breath and the tightening of her cheeks. He said: "Is it yourtime?" "I...yes, it is." "You must not delay," hesaid. He grasped her arm and hurried her down the hall. She sensed panic in him. She said; "No need to rush." He seemed not to hear. "The Zensunni approach to birth," he said, urging her along faster, "is to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension. Do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything." While he spoke, they reached the entrance to her quarters. He thrust her through the hangings and cried out: "Harah! Harah! It is Chani's time. Summon the medics!" His call brought attendants running. There was a great bustling of people in which Chani felt herself an isolated island of calm... until the next pain came. H ayt, dismissed to the outer passage, took time to wonder at his own actions. He felt fixated at some point of time where all truths were only temporary. Panic lay beneath his actions, he realized. Panic centered not on the possibility that Chani might die, but that Paul should come to him afterward... filled with grief... his loved one... gone... gone... Something cannot emerge from nothing, the ghola told himself. From what does this panic emerge? He felt that his mentat faculties had been dulled and let out a long, shuddering breath. A psychic shadow passed over him. In the emotional darkns of it, he felt himself waiting for some absolute sound -- the snap of a branch in a jungle. A sigh shook him. Danger had passed without striking. Slowly, marshaling his powers, shedding bits of inhibition, he sank into mentat awareness. He forced it -- not the best way -- but somehow necessary. Ghost shadows moved within him in place of people. He was a transshipping station for every datum he had ever encountered. His being was inhabited by creatures of possibility. They passed in revue to be compared, judged. Perspiration broke out on his forehead. Thoughts with fuzzy edges feathered away into darkness -- unknown. Infinite systems! A mentat could not function without realizing he worked in infinite systems. Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective. Instead, he must become the infinite -- momentarily. In one gestalten spasm, he had it, seeing Bijaz seated before him blazing from some inner fire. Bijaz! The dwarf had done something to him! Hayt felt himself teetering on the lip of a deadly pit. He projected the mentat computation line forward, seeing what could develop out of his own actions. "A compulsion!" he gasped. "I've been rigged with a compulsion!" A blue-robed courier, passing as Hayt spoke, hesitated. "Did you say something, sirra?" Not looking at him, the ghola nodded. "I said everything." xxn There was a man so wise. He jumped into A sandy place And burnt out both his eyes! And when he knew his eyes were gone. He offered no complaint. He summoned up a vision And made himself a saint. -- Children's Verse from History of Muad'dib the sietch. Oracular vision told him it was night, that moonlight silhouetted the shrine atop Chin Rock high on his left. This was a memory-saturated place, his first sietch, where he and Chani...  must not think of Chani, he told himself. The thinning cup of his vision told him of changes all around -- a cluster of palms far down to the right, the black-silver line of a qanat carrying water th jugh dunes piled up by that morr ig's storm. Water flowing in the desert! He recalled another kind of water flowing in a river of his birthworld, Caladan. He hadn't realized then the treasure of such a flow, even the murky slithering in a qanat across a desert basin. Treasure. With a delicate cough, an aide came up from behind. Paul held out his hands for a magnaboard with a single sheet of metallic paper on it. He moved as sluggishly as the qanat's water. The vision flowed, but he found himself increasingly reluctant to move with it. "Pardon, Sire," the aide said. "The Semboule Treaty -- your signature?" "I can read it!" Paul snapped. He scrawled Atreides Imper. in the proper place and returned the board, thrusting it directly into the aide's outstretched hand, aware of the fear this inspired. The man fled. Paul turned away. Ugly, barren land! He imagined it sun-soaked and monstrous with heat, a place of sandslides and thedrowned darkness of dust pools, blowdevils unreeling tiny dunes across the rocks, their narrow bellies full of ochre crystals. But it was a rich land, too -- big, exploding out of narrow places with vistas of storm-trodden emptiness, rampart cliffs and tumbledown ridges. All it required was water and love. Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace and movement, he thought. That was the message of the desert. Contrast stunned him with realization. He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, to shout at them; If you need something to worship, then worship life -- all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together! They wouldn't understand. In the desert, thQ' were endlessly desert. Growing things performed no green ballet for them. He clenched bis fists at his sides, trying to halt the vision. He wanted to flee from his own mind. It was a beast come to devour him! Awareness lay in him, sodden, heavy with all the living it had sponged up, saturated with too many experiences.  D esperately, Paul squeezed his thoughts outward. Stars! Awareness turned over at thought of all those stars above him -- infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a tear drop of that volume. He couldn't begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed. Subjects? Worshipers... and enemies more likely. Did any among them see beyond rigid beliefs? Where was one man who'd escaped the narrow destiny of his prejudices? Not even an Emperor escaped. He'd lived a take-everything life, tried to create a universe in his own image. But the exultant universe was breaking across him at last with its silent .waves. I spit on Dune! he thought. I give it my moisture! This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs -- what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else. Was this the golden genesis of man? Sand scuffed against rocks told him that the ghola had joined him. "You've been avoiding me today, Duncan," Paul said. "It's dangerous for you to call me that," the ghola said. "I know." "I... came to warn you, m'Lord." "I know." The story of the compulsion Bijaz had put on him pour from the ghola then. "Do you know the nature of the compulsion?" Paul asked. "Violence." Paul felt himself arriving at a place which had claimed him from the binning. Hestood suspended. The Jihad had seized him, fixed him onto a glidcpath from which the terrible gravity of the Future would never release him. "There'll be no violence from Duncan," Paul whispered. "But, Sire... " "Tell me what you see around us," Paul said. "M'Lord?" "The desert -- how is it tonight?" "Don't you see it?" "I have no eyes, Duncan." "But..." "I've only my vision," Paul said, "and wish I didn't have it. I'm dying of prescience. Did you know that, Duncan?" "Perhaps... what you fear won't happen," the ghola said. "What? Deny my own oracle? How can I when I've seen it fulfilled thousands of times? People call it a power, a gift. It's an affliction! It won't let me leave my life where I found it!" "M'Lord," the ghola muttered, "I... it isn't... young master, you don't... I... " He fell silent. Paul sensed the ghola's confusion. He said: "What'd you call me, Duncan?" "What? What? I... for a moment, I..." "You called me 'young master'." "I did, yes." "That's what Duncan always called me." Paul reached out and touched the ghola's face. "Was that part of your Tleilaxu training?" "No." Paul lowered his hand. "What, then?" "It came from... me." "Do you serve two masters?" "Perhaps." "Free yourself from the ghola, Duncan." "How?" "You're human. Do a human thing." "I'm a ghola!" "But your flesh is human. Duncan's in there." "Something's in there." "I care not how you do it," Paul said, "but you'll do it." "You've foreknowledge?" "Foreknowledge be damned!" Paul turned away. His vision hurtled forward now, with gaps in it, but it wasn't a thing to be stopped . "M'Lord, if you've... "  "Quiet!" Paul held up a hand. "Did you hear that?" "Hear what, m'Lord?" hadn't heard it. Had he only imagined the sound? It'd been his tribal name called from the desert -- far away and low: "Usui... "What is it, m'Lord?" Paul shook his head. He felt watched. Sopiething out there in the night shadows knew he was here. Something? No -- someone. "It was mostly sweet," hewhispered, "and you were the sweetest of all." "What'd you say, m'Lord?" "It's the future," Paul said. That amorphous human universe out there had undergone a spurt of motion, dancing to the tune of his vision. It had struck a powerful note then. The ghostechoes might endure. "I don't understand, m'Lord," the ghola said. "A Fremen dies when he's too long from the desert," Paul said. "They call it the 'water sickness.' Isn't that odd?" "That's very odd." Paul strain at memories, trying to recall the sound of Chani breathing beside him in the night. Where is there comfort? he wondered. All he could remember, was Chani at breakfast the day they'd left for the desert. She'd been restless, irritable. "Why do you wear that old jacket?" she'd demanded, eyeing the black uniform coat with its red hawk crest beneath his Fremen robes. "You're an Emperor!" "Even an Emperor has his favorite clothing," he'd said. For no reason he could explain, this had brought real tears to Chani's eyes -- the second time in her life when Fremen inhibitions had been shattered. Now, in the darkness, Paul rubbed his own cheeks and felt moisture there. Who gives moisture to the dead? he wondered. It was his own face, yet not his. The wind chilled the wet skin. A frail dream formed -- and broke. What was this swelling in his breast? Was it something he'd eaten? How bitter and plaintive was this other self, giving moisture to the dead. The wind bristled with sand. The skin, dry now, was his own. But whose was the quivering which remained? They heard the wailing then, far away in the sietch depths. It grew louder... louder... The ghola whirled at a sudden glare of light -- someone flinging wide the entrance seals. In the light, he saw a man with a raffish grin -- no! Not a grin, but a grimace of grief! It was a Fedaykin lieutenant named Tandis. Behind him came a press of many people, all fallen silent now that they saw Muad'dib. "Chani..." Tandis said. "Is dead," Paul whispered. "I heard her call." H e turned toward the sietch. He knew this place. It was a place where he could not hide. His onrushing vision illuminated the entire Fremen mob. He saw Tandis, felt the Fedaykin's grief, the fear and anger. "She is gone," Paul said. The ghola heard the words out of a blazing corona. They burned his chest, his backbone, the sockets of his metal eyes. He felt his right hand move toward the knife at his belt. His own thinking became strange, disjointed. He was a puppet held fast by strings reaching down from that awful corona. He moved to another's commands, to another's desires. The strings jerked his arms, his legs, his jaw. Sounds came squeezing out of his mouth, a terrifying repetitive noise -- "Hrrak! Hraak! Hraak!" The knife came up to strike. In that instant, he grabbed his own voice, shaped rasping words: "Run! Young master, run!" "We will not run," Paul said. "We'll move with dignity. We'll do what must be done." Theghola's muscles locked. He shuddered -- swayed. "... what must be done!" The words rolled in his mind like a great fish surfacing. "... what must be done!" Ahhh, that had sounded like the old Duke, Paul's grandfather. The young master had some of the old man in him. "... what must be done!" The words began to unfold in the ghola's consciousness. A sensation of living two lives simultaneously spread out through his awareness: Hayt Idaho Hayt Idaho... He became a motionless chain of relative existence, singular, alone. Old memories flooded his mind. He marked them, adjusted them to new understandings, made a beginning at the integration of a new awareness. A new persona achieved a temporary form of internal tyranny. The masculating synthesis remained charged with potential disorder, but events pressed him to the temporary adjustment. The young master needed him. It was done then. He knew himself as Duncan Idaho, remembering everything of Hayt as though it had been stored secretly in him and ignited by a flaming catalyst. The corona dissolved. He shed the Tleilaxu compulsions. "Stay close to me, Duncan," Paul said. "I'll need to depend on you for many things." And, as Idaho continued to stand entranced: "Duncan!" "Yes, I am Duncan." "Of course you are! This was the moment when you came back. We'll go inside now." It was like the old times, yet not like them. Now that he stood free of the Tleilaxu, he could appreciate what they had given him. Zensunni training permitted him to overcome the shock of events. The mentat accomplishment formed a counterbalance. He put off all fear, standing above the source. His entire consciousness looked outward from a position of infinite wonder. He had been dead; he was alive. "Sire," the Fedaykin Tandis said as they approached him, "the woman, Lichna, says she must see you. I told her to wait." "Thank you," Paul said. "The birth..." "I spoke to the medics," Tandis said, falling into step. "They said you have two children, both of them alive and sound." "Two?" Paul stumbled, catching himself on Idaho's arm. "A boy and a girl," Tandis said. "I saw them. They're good Fremen babies." "How... how did she die?" Paul whispered. "M'Lord?" Tandis bent close. "Chani?" Paul said. "It was the birth, m'Lord," Tandis replied. "They said her body was drained by the speed of it. I don't understand, but that is what they said." "Take me to her," Paul whispered. worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you .will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. 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Editor Editor Emeritus Science Editor November, #  Vol.#, No. # Phyllis Gotlieb (Parti) # , Robert Silverberg Frank Herbert Harlan Ellison  Ron Goulart Norman Spinrad Roberts. Richardson Willy Ley Algis Budrys Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Publisher Associate Publisher lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. Games people play are endless. And sometimes vicious. One in vogue today fills me with the joyless joy of an idiot among idiots. It's nice to belong but the company is dreadful. This particular pastime may have been invented by the legendary scientist of another time, place and culture -- I had not until this moment been sure he existed. Don't stop me if you've heard this one -- I expect to go on. Our Truth-seeker -- with a mind as open and keen as the winds of the world -- focused his search on the centipede. Using techniques not lost to the more developed civilizations of today, he established a dialogue of sorts with the creature. He said loudly, "Jump!" After countless punishing lessons the centipede learned to jump on command. Communication thus set up, the scientist amputated one of the myriapod's legs after another. Between surgeries he ordered his subject to jump. The centipede jumped. To the end. Finally footless -- save for the two front feet which had evolved into poison fangs -- the altered centipede just lay there. "Jump!" cried the scientist. The centipede waited. The dazzled man of learning rushed off to write up his findings. These were widely acclaimed by persons who had never paid much attention to centipedes. His epochal discovery: When one removes the legs of a centipede the creature loses its hearing. But not its poison fangs. The current version of the game revolves around "scientific" speculation in print about the relative levels of Black and White intelligence as measured by IQ tests. One such dissertation -- in a recent issue of Analog and by John W. Campbell -- argues for a possible "difference" in intelligences, citing the acuity of a porpoise's hearing in water as compared to a maft's and continuing: "If their (the Blacks') basic intelligence pattern is of a different type -- naturally it's harder for them to fit into the Scholarly type that Caucasoids developed -- with unquestionable and world-shaking success -- so that although they've been working into Western culture for as long a time as the Scots, they haven't been able to fit in anywhere near as well. Sort of porpoise out of water effect." If I were a porpoise -- right now I would begin to worry. Not as much about whether a difference existed between Black and White intelligence as about whether no difference whatsoever existed. I would examine the alterations in my oceanic environment (Please turn to page #) These great minds were Rosicrucians O... x Benjamin Franklh Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. copy of 'The Mas fery of Life" -- ! ligation; A nonI  profit organiza I 'A tion. Address:  J Scribe E.R.A. I fee,... i San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the jree book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name AddressCity State Man had arrogated to himself both humanity and inhumanity. But not all the best people were human! I man's World after all. He was not sure why. Call it irresistible attraction. Call it sentimentality. Call it foolishness. Gundersen had never planned to revisit this place. Yet here he was, waiting for the landing, and there it was in the screen -- a world slightly larger than Earth and one that had claimed the prime decade of his life, a world where he had learned things about himself that he had not really wanted to know. The ship would shortly land. Despite everything, he was coming back. He saw the shroud of mist that covered the temperate zones, the girdling blue-black band of the scorched tropics, the great sprawling icecaps. He remembered riding through the Sea of Dust at blazing twilight. He remembered a silent, bleak river journey beneath bowers of twittering dagger-pointed leaves. And he remembered golden cocktails on the veranda of a jungle station on the Night of Five Moons, with Seena close by his side and a herd of nildoror mooing in the bush. The memories were of long ago. The nildoror again were masters of Holman's World. Gundersen had a hard time accepting that. "Attention, passengers in the lounge," came a voice over the speaker. "We enter landing orbit for Belzagor in fifteen minutes. Please prepare to return to cradles." Belzagor was what they called the planet now. The native name, the nildoror's own word. To Gundersen it seemed like something out of Assyrian mythology. Of course, the pilot's had been a romanticized pronunciation. Coming from a nildor the word would really sound more like Bills' grrr. He would try to call the planet by the name it now wore. He attempted never to give needless offense to alien beings. "Belzagor," he said. "It's a voluptuous sound, isn't it? Rolls nicely off the tongue." The tourist couple beside him in the ship's lounge nodded. They agreed readily with whatever Gundersen said. The husband, plump, pale, overdressed, said, "They were still calling it Holman's World when you were last out here, weren't they?" "Oh, yes," Gundersen said. "But that was back in the good old imperialist days when an Earthman could call a planet whatever he damn pleased." The tourist wife's lips tightened in that thin, pinched, dysmenorrhean way of hers. Gundersen drew a somber pleasure from annoying her. All during the voyage he had deliberately played a role out of Kipling for these tourists -- the former colonial administrator going out to see what a beastly botch the natives must be making out of the task of governing themselves. The pose was an exaggeration, a distortion, of his real attitude but sometimes it pleased him to wear masks. The tourists -- there were eight of them -- looked upon him in mingled awe and contempt as he swaggered among them, a big fairskinned man with the mark of outworld experience stamped on his features. They disapproved of him, of the image of himself that he gave them. Yet they knew he had suffered, labored and striven under a foreign sun and they saw romance in that. "Will you be staying at the hotel?" the tourist husband asked. "Oh, no. I'm going right out into the bush, toward the mist country. Look -- there, you see? In the northern hemisphere, that band of clouds midway up. The temperature gradient's very steeptropic and arctic practically side by side. Mist. Fog. They'll take you on a tour of it. I have some business in there." "Business? I thought these new independent worlds were outside the zone of economic penetration that -- " "Not commercial business," Gundersen said, "Personal business. Unfinished business. Something I didn't manage to discover during my tour of duty here." The signal light flashed again, more insistently. "Will you excuse me? We really should cradle up now." He went to his cabin and readied himself for landing. Webfoam spurted from the spinnerets and enfolded him. He felt deceleration thrust, that curiously archaic sensation hearkening back to spacetravel's earliest days. The ship dropped planetward as Gundersen swayed, suspended. was one Earthmen had built more than a hundred years before. It was in the tropics, at the mouth of the great river flowing into Belzagor's single ocean. Madden's River, Benjamini Ocean -- Gundersen did not know the nildoror names for either. The spaceport was self-maintaining, fortunately. Automatic high-redundancy devices operated the landing beacon. Homeostatic surveillance kept the pad repaved and the bordering jungle cropped back. All done by machine -- it was unrealistic to expect the nildoror to operate a spaceport and impossible to keep a crew of Earthmen stationed here. Gundersen understood that perhaps a hundred Earthmen were still living on Belzagor -- even after the general withdrawal -- but they were not such as would operate a spaceport. And there was a treaty, in any case. Administrative functions were to be carried out by nildoror or not at all. They landed. They left the ship. The air had the tropical reek of rich loam, rotting leaves, droppings of jungle beasts, an aroma of creamy flowers. The time was early evening. A couple of the moons were out. As always, the threat of rain hung in the air -- the humidity was #, probably -- but that threat almost never materialized. Rainstorms were rare in this tropical belt. The water simply precipitated out of the air in droplets all the time, imperceptibly, coating you with fine wet beads. Gundersen saw lightning flicker beyond the tops of the hullygully trees at the edge of the pad. A stewardless marshaled the nine debarkees. "This way, please," she said crisply and led them toward the one building. On the left three nildoror emerged from the bush and solemnly gazed at the newcomers. Tourists gasped and pointed. "Look. Do you see them? Like elephants, they are. Are those nili -- nildoror?" "Nildoror, yes," Gundersen said. The tang of the big beasts drifted across the clearing. A bull and two cows, he guessed, judging by the size" of the tusks. They were all about the same height, three meters plus, with the deep green skins that marked them as western-hemisphere nildoror. Eyes as big as platters peered back at him in dim curiosity. The shorttusked cow in front lifted her tail and placidly dropped an avalanche of steaming, purple dung. Gundersen heard deep, blurred sounds but at this distance he could not make out what the nildoror were saying. Imagine them running a spaceport -- imagine them running a planet. But they do... No living beings crewed the spaceport building. Some robots, part of the homeostasis net, were repairing the wall at the far side, where the gray plastic sheeting had apparently succumbed to spore implantation. Sooner or later the jungle rot got everything in this part of the planet. But that was the only visible activity. There was no customs desk. The nildoror did not have a bureaucracy of that sort. They did not care what you brought with you to their world. There was also no spaceline office here, nor were there moneychanging booths nor newsstands nor any of the other concessions one normally found in a spaceport. There was only a big bare shed, which once had been the nexus of a bustling colonial outpost, in the days when Holman's World had been the property of Earth. It seemed to Gundersen that he saw ghosts of those days all about him -- figures in tropical khaki carrying messages, supercargoes waving inventory sheets, computer technicians draped in festoons of memory beads, nildoror bearers laden with outgoing produce. Now all was still. The scrapings of the repair robots echoed across the emptiness. The spaceline stewardess was telling the eight tourists, "Your guide should be here any minute. He'll take you to the hotel and -- " Gundersen was supposed to go to the hotel, too, just for tonight. In the morning he hoped to arrange for transport. He had no formal plans for his northward journey. It was going to be largely an improvisation, a reconnaissance into his own pockmarked past. He said to the stewardess, "Is the guide a nildor?" "You mean, native? Oh, no, he's an Earthman, Mr. Gundersen." She rummaged in a sheaf of printout slips. "His name's Van Beneker, and he was 'supposed to be here at least half an hour before the ship landed. I don't understand why -- " "Van Beneker was never strong on punctuality," Gundersen said. "But there he is." A beetle, much rusted and stained by the climate, had pulled up at the open entrance to the building. From it now emerged a short, red-haired man, also much rusted and stained by the climate. He wore rumpled fatigues and a pair of knee-high jungle boots. His hair was thinning and his tanned bald skull showed through the slicked-down strands. He entered the building and peered around, blinking. "Van?" Gundersen said. "Over here, Van." The little man came over. In a hurried, perfunctory way he said, while he was still far from them, "I want to welcome all you people to Belzagor, as Holman's World is now known. My name's Van Bcncker and I'm going to show you as much of this fascinating planet as is legally permissible and -- " "Hello, Van," Gundersen cut in. The guide halted, obviously irritated, in mid : spiel. He blinked again and looked closely at Gundersen. Finally he said, clearly not believing his eyes, "Mr. Gundersen?" "Just Gundersen. I'm not your boss any more." "Jesus, Mr. Gundersen. Jesus, are you here for the tour?" "Not exactly. I'm here to take my own tour." others, "I want you to excuse me. Just for a minute." To the spaceline stewardess he said, "It's okay. You can officially convey them to me. I take responsibility. They all here? One, two, three -- eight. That's right. Okay, the luggage goes out there, next to the beetle. Tell them all to wait. I'll be right with them." He tugged at Gundersen's elbow. "Come on over here, Mr. Gundersen. You don't know how amazed I am. Jesus!" "How have you been, Van?" "Lousy. How else, on this planet? When did you leave, exactly?" "Twenty-two forty. The year after relinquishment. Eight years ago." "Eight years. And what have you been doing?" "The home office found work for me," Gundersen said. "I keep busy. Now I've got a year's accumulated leave." "To spend here?" "Why not?" "What for?" "I'm going up mist country," Gundersen said. "I want to visit the sulidoror." "You don't want to do that," said Van Beneker. "Rather -- why do you want to do that?" "To satisfy a curiosity." "There's only trouble when a man goes up there. You know the stories, Mr. Gundersen. I don't need to remind you of how many guys went up there, how many didn't come back." Van Beneker laughed. "You didn't come all the way to this place just to rub noses with the .sulidoror. I bet you got some other reason." Gundersen let the point pass. "What do you do here now, Van?" "Tourist guide, mostly, I take them up along the ocean, then show them a bit of the mist country, Next we hop across to the Sea of Dust. It's a nice little tour." "Yes." "The rest of the time I relax. I talk to the nildoror a lot and sometimes I visit friends at the bush stations. You'll know everyone, Mr. Gundersen. It's all the old people -- what's still out there." "What about Seena Royce?"Gundersen asked. "She's up by Shangri-la Falls." "Still have her looks?" "She thinks so," Van Beneker said. "You figure you'll go up that way?" "Of course," Gundersen said. "I'm making a sentimental pilgrimage. I'll tour all the bush stations. See the old friends. Seena. Cullen. Kurtz. Salamone. Whoever's still there." "Some of them are dead." "Whoever's still there," Gundersen said. He looked down at the little man and smiled. "You'd better take care of your tourists now. We can talk at the hotel tonight. I want you to fill me in on everything that's happened while I've been gone." "Easy, Mr. Gundersen. I can do it right now in one word. Rot. Everything's rotting. Look at the spaceport wall over there." "I see." "Look at the repair robots now. They don't shine they? They're giving out, too. If you get close you can see the spots on their hulls." "But homeostasis -- " "Sure, Everything gets fixed, even the repair robots. But the system's going to break down. Sooner or later the rot will get into the basic programs and there won't be any more repairs. And this world will go straight back into the stone age. And the nildoror will finally be happy. I understand those big bastards as much as anybody does. I know they can't wait to see the last trace of Earthmen rot right off this planet. They pretend they're friendly but the hate's there all the time, real sick hate. And -- " "You ought to look after your tourists, Van," Gundersen said. "They're getting restless." II  going to transport them from the spaceport to the hotel -- two Earthmen per alien, with Gundersen riding alone and Van Beneker with the luggage, leading the way in his beetle. The three nildoror grazing at the edge of the field ambled over to enroll in the caravan and two others emerged from the bush. Gundersen was surprised be beasts of burden for Earthmen. "They don't mind," Van Beneker explained. "They like to do us favors. It makes them feel superior. They can't hardly tell there's weight on them, anyhow. And they don't think there's anything shameful about letting people ride them." "When I was here I had the impression they resented it," Gundersen said. "Since relinquishment they take things like that easier. Anyway, how could you be sure' what they thought? I mean, what they really thought." The tourists were a bit alarmed at riding nildoror. Van Beneker tried to calm them by telling them it w r as an important part of the Belzagor experience. Besides, he added, machinery did not thrive on this planet and hardly any functioning beetles were left. Gundersen demonstrated how to mount, for the benefit of the apprehensive newcomers. He tapped his nildoror's left tusk. The alien kneeled in its elephantine way, ponderously coming down on its front knees, then its back ones. The nildor wriggled its shoulders, in effect dislocating them to create the deep swayback valley in which a man could ride comfortably. Gundersen climbed aboard, seizing the short backward-thrusting horns as his pommels. The spiny crest down the middle of the alien's broad skull began to twitch. Gundersen recognized it as a gesture of welcome. The nildoror had a rich language of gesture, employing not only the spines but also their long ropy trunks and their many-pleated ears. "Sssukh!" Gundersen said, and the nildor arose. "Do you sit well?" it asked him in its own language. "Very well indeed," Gundersen said, feeling a surge of delight as the unforgotten vocabularly came to his lips. In their clumsy, hesistant way, the eight tourists did as he had done. The caravan set out down the river road toward the hotel. Nightflies cast a dim glow under the canopy of trees. A third moon was in the sky and the mingled lights came through the leaves, revealing the oily, fast-moving river just to their left. Gundersen stationed himself at the rear of the procession in case one of the tourists had a mishap. There was only one uneasy moment, though, when a nildoror paused and left the ranks. It rammed the triple prongs of its tusks into the riverbank to grub up some morsel, then resumed its place in line. In the old days, Gundersen knew, the incident would never have occurred. Nildor were not permitted then to have whims. He enjoyed the ride. The jouncing strides were agreeable and the pace was swift without being strenuous for the passengers. What good beasts the nildoror were, Gundersen thought. Strong, docile, intelligent. He caught himself short. The nildoror are something other than funny-looking elephants. They are intelligent beings, the dominant life forms of their planet. People. And don't you forget it... Soon Gundersen could hear the crashing of the surf. They were nearing the hotel. The path widened to become a clearing. One of the tourist women pointed into the bush. Her husband shrugged and shook his head. Black shapes crouched between the trees. They were barely visible in the shadows. Two of the dim forms emerged and stood by the edge of the path as Gundersen's nildor went past. They were husky bipeds, close to three meters tall, covered with thick coats of dark red hair. Massive tails swished slowly through the greenish gloom. Hooded eyes, slit-wide even in this scant light, appraised the procession. Drooping rubbery snouts, tapir-long, sniffed audibly. A woman turned gingerly to ask Gundersen, "What are they?" "Sulidoror. The secondary species. They come from up mist country. These are northern ones." "Are they dangerous?" "I wouldn't call them that." "Why are they down here if they're northern animals?" her husband wanted to know. "I'm not sure," Gundersen said. He questioned his mount and received an answer. "They work at the hotel," Gundersen called ahead. "Bellhops. Kitchen hands." It seemed strange to him that the nildoror would have turned Ballantine Hooks all publishers, included our release of a couple of titles not mentioned previously because we had so much to talk about that was directly science fiction. These peripheral titiles are of concern to any intelligent adult since they are on the subReinows.  see the release of two magnificent anthologies edited by Lin Carter. contains excerpts from the old master storytellers of epic myths, heroic sagas and the like -- Lin's favorite of contemporary writers -- to prove the old magic has not died. You'll Morris, Jack Vance, Tolkien. Riches. And at #! neatly points out, is thoroughly realistic. And along with this remarkable novel, the reissue of six earlier Frederik Pohl works -- gems all: still at # each. with the new Foster covers) at an incredible # each. the hot cartoons of Robert Crumb (# -- a gift book, but not for kiddies or old ladies of either sex).  the November issue. Watch for it. And watch out for BB's. And any you can't find on the stands -- send in dollars to # West #th Street, New York #. BB. the sulidoror into domestic servants at an Earthman's hotel. Not even before relinquishment had sulidoror been used as servants. But of course there had been plenty of robots here then. T HE hotel lay just ahead. It was on the coast, a glistening geodesic dome that showed no external signs of decay. Before relinquishment it had been a posh resort run exclusively for the benefit of the top-level administrators of the Company. Three sulidoror stood at the hotel entrance. Van Beneker gestured fiercely at them and they began to take the luggage from the beetle's storage hold. Inside, Gundersen quickly detected symptoms of decline. A carpet of tiger moss had begun to edge out of an ornamental garden strip along the lobby wall. It was starting to reach onto the fine black slabs of the main hall's floor -- he saw the toothy little mouths hopefully snapping as he walked in. No doubt the hotel's maintenance robots once had been programed to cut the ornamental moss back to the border of the garden bed. The program must have subtly altered with the years so that now the moss was allowed to intrude on the interior of the building as well. He saw other signs that control was slipping away A towering sulidor conducted Gundersen to a third-floor room overlooking the sea. It seemed to Gundersen that there was a suppressed tension about the sulidor, an inward seething, but perhaps it existed only in his own imagination. In the old days sulidoror had rarely been seen outside the zone of mist. Gundersen did not feel at ease with them. In nildoror words he asked, "How long have you been at the hotel?" The sulidor did not respond. Gundersen did not know the language of the sulidoror but he was aware that every sulidor was supposed to speak fluent nildororu as well as sulidororu. Enunciating more clearly, he repeated his question. The sulidor scratched its pelt with gleaming claws, said nothing. Moving past Gundersen, it deopaqued the window wall, adjusted the atmospheric filters and stalked solemnly out. Gundersen frowned. He unpacked and donned evening clothes, a close gray tunic, polished boots, a mirror for his brow. He toned the color of his hair down the spectrum a short distance, dimming it from yellow almost to auburn. Suddenly he felt very tired. He was barely into early middle years -- touching # -- and travel ordinarily did not affect him. Why this fatigue, then? He realized that he had been holding himself unusually stiffly these few hours he had been back on this planet. He had been rigid, inflexible, tenseuncertain of his motives in returning, unsure of his welcome, perhaps touched a bit by curdled guilts, and now the strain was Ballantlnie Boolcs to finish with October which happened to be particularly rich in both straight science fiction and the more inoff, and Aubrey AAenen's gentle deyou like those far out Fred Poh! covers? be appropriate to give thanks for James Branch Cabell -- that giant of elegant fantasists. You must by now have our Storisende Edition reprint Frank C. Pape's illustrations. Now course have introductions by Lin Carter in addition to the supurb illustrations. Give thanks for Cabell. ume in one of our favorite series, John Norman's chronicle of the Counter-earth, also known as Gor. This one has to do with the further adventures of Tarl Cabot among the Wagon People -- fierce, nomadic tribes who guard the last egg of the nally a magnificent second novel from Richard Meredith (remember describe it could be tense, gallant, heartbreaking. It's enough to make one a hawk (of the far future) but we are proud to publish it anyway. ready. We subscribe to the annual madness to the extent of suggesting you give books, books, books. All kinds. But remember particularly our beautiful gift book series which offers a really easy way out for everyone but the kids. Don't let them get their grubby fingers on these jewels. Or else buy two of each and let the little ones cut up one to make their own murals. With which ghastly thought on childcare, we close. -- the address is # West #th Street, New York #. BB. telling. He touched a switch and made the wall a mirror. Yes, his face was drawn. The cheekbones, always prominent, jutted like blades. The lips were clamped, the forehead was furrowed. The thin line of his nose was distended by tension-flared nostrils. Gundersen shut his eyes and went through one of the drills of a relaxation mode. He 'looked better thirty seconds later but a drink might help, he decided. He went down to the lounge. None of the tourists had shown as yet. The louvers were open and he heard the roar and crash of the sea, smelled its saltiness. A curdled white line of accumulated salt had been allowed to form along the margin of the beach. Gundersen looked out over the moons' light streaked water. He stared into the blackness of the eastern horizon. Three moons had also been up on his last night here -- he had been given a farewell party. He and Seena had gone for a midnight swim, out to the tide-hidden shoal where they could barely stand. They had returned to shore naked and salt-encrusted and he had made love to her behind the rocks, embracing her for what he was sure would be the last time. And now he was back. He felt a stab of nostalgia so powerful that he winced. Gundersen had been thirty years old when he had come out to Holman's World as an assistant station agent. He had been forty -- and a sector administrator -- when he left. In a sense the first thirty years of his life had been a pale prelude to that decade and the last eight years had been a hollow epilogue. He had lived his life on this single continent, bounded by mist and ice to the north, mist and ice to the south, the Benjamini Ocean to the east, the Sea of Dust to the west. For a while he had ruled half a world, at least in the absence of the chief resident -- and this planet had shrugged him off as though he had never been. Gundersen turned away from the louvers and sat down. in his sweaty, rumpled fatigues. He winked cordially at Gundersen and began to rummage in a cabinet. "I'm the bartender, too, Mr. G. What can I get you?" "Alcohol," Gundersen said. "Any form you recommend." "Snout or flask?" "Flask. I like the taste." "As you say. But snout for me. It's the effect, sir, the effect." He set an empty glass before Gundersen and handed him a flask. The flask was equipped with its own condensation chiller; Gundersen thumbed it with a quick short push and quietly watched the flakes of ice beginning to form along the inside. When his drink was properly chilled he poured it and put it quickly to his lips. "That's pre-relinquishment stock," Van Beneker said. "Not much of it left but I knew you'd appreciate it." He was holding an ultrasonic tube to his left forearm. A buzzing sound and the snout spurted alcohol straight into his vein. Van Beneker grinned. "Works faster this way. The working-man's boozer. Eh? Get you another rum, Mr. G.?" "Not just yet. Better look after your tourists, Van." The tourist couples were beginning to enter the bar. First came the Watsons, then the Mirafloreses, the Steins, finally the Christophers. Evidently they had expected to find the bar throbbing with life, full of other tourists giddily hailing one another from distant parts of the room and redjacketed waiters ferrying drinks. Instead they saw peeling plastic walls, empty tables and that unpleasant Mr. Gundersen moodily peering into a glass. The tourists exchanged cheated glances. Was this what they had spanned the light-years to see? Van Beneker went to them, offering drinks, weeds, whatever else of the limited resources of the hotel he might be able to supply. They settled in two groups near the windows and began to talk in low voices, plainly self-conscious in front of Gundersen. Surely they felt foolish in their roles, these soft well-to-do people whose boredom had driven them to peer at the remote reaches of the galaxy. Stein ran a helix parlor in California, Mireflores a chain of lunar casinos, Watson was a doctor, and Christopher -- Gundersen could not remember what Christopher did. Something in the financial world. Mrs. Stein said, "There are some of those animals on the beach. The green elephants." Everyone looked. Gundersen signaled for another drink and got it. Van Beneker, flushed, sweating, winked again and put a second snout to his arm. The tourists began to titter. Mrs. Christopher said, "Don't they have any shame at all?" "Maybe they're simply playing, Ethel," Watson said. "Playing? Well, if you call that playing-" Gundersen leaned forward, glancing through the window without getting up. On the beach a pair of nildoror were coupling, the cow kneeling where the salt was thickest, the bull mounting her, gripping her shoulders, pressing his central tusk down firmly against the spiny crest of her skull, jockeying his hindquarters about as he made ready for the consummating thrust. The tourists, giggling, making heavy-handed comments of appreciation, seemed both shocked and titillated. To his considerable surprise Gundersen realized that he was shocked, too, although coupling nildoror were nothing new to him. When a ferocious orgasmic bellowing rose from below he glanced away, embarrassed and not understanding why. "You look upset," Van Beneker said. "They didn't have to do that here." "Why not? They do it all over the place. You know how it is." "They deliberately went out there," Gundersen muttered. "To show off for the tourists? Or to annoy the tourists? They shouldn't be reacting to the tourists at all. What are they trying to prove? That they're just animals, I suppose." "You don't understand the nildoror, Gundy." Gundersen looked up, startled as much by Van Beneker's words as by the sudden descent from "Mr. Gundersen" to "Gundy." Van Beneker seemed startled, too, blinking rapidly and tugging at a stray sparse lock of fading hair. "I don't?" Gundersen asked. "After spending ten years here?" "Begging pardon -- but I never did think you understood them, even when you were here. I used to go around with you a lot to the villages when I was clerking for you. I watched you." "In what way do you think I failed to understand them. Van?" "You despised them. You thought of them as animals." "That isn't so." "Sure it is. Gundy. You never once admitted they had any intelligence at all." "That's absolutely untrue," Gundersen said. He got up and took a new flask of rum from the cabinet, and returned to the table. "You're talking a load of nonsense, Van. I did everything possible for those people. To improve them, to lift them toward civilization. I requisitioned tapes for them, sound pods, culture by the ton. I put through new regulations about maximum labor. I insisted that my men respect their rights as the dominant indigenous culture. I -- " "You treated them as you might very intelligent animals. Not like intelligent alien people. Maybe you didn't realize the truth about your attitude, Gundy, but I did. And God knows they did, You talked down to them. You were kind to them in tfie wrong way. All your interest in uplifting them, in improving them -- crap. Gundy, they have their own culture. They didn't want yours." "It was my duty to guide them," Gundersen said stiffly. "Futile though it was to think that a bunch of animals who don't have a written language, who don't -- " He stopped, horrified. "Animals," Van Beneker said. "I'm tired. Maybe I've had too much to drink. It just slipped out." "Animals." "Stop pushing' me, Van. I did the best I could and if what I was doing was wrong, I'm sorry. I tried to do what was right." Gundersen pushed his empty glass forward. "Get me another, will you?" Van Beneker fetched the drink and one more snout for himself. and began to gather the empties, crouching to keep from grazing the Earth man-scaled ceiling. The chatter of the tourists died away as the fierce-looking creature moved through the room. Gundersen glared toward the beach. The nildoror were gone. One of the moons was setting in the east, leaving a fiery track across the surging water. He realized that he had forgotten the names of the moons. No matter -- the old Earthman names were dead history now. He asked Van Beneker finally, "How come you decided to stay here after relinquishment?" "I felt at home here. I've been here twenty-five years. Why should I go anywhere else?" "No family ties?" "No. And it's comfortable here. I get a Company pension. I get tips from the tourists. There's a salary from the hotel. That's enough to keep me supplied with what I need. What I need mostly is snouts. Why should I leave?" "Who owns the hotel?" "The confederation of westerncontinent nildoror. The Company gave it to them." "And the nildoror pay you a salary? I thought they were outside the galactic money economy." "They are. They arranged something with the Company." "What you're saying is that the Company still runs this hotel." "If anybody can be said to run it -- the Company does, yes," Van Beneker agreed. "But that isn't much of a violation of the relinquishment law. There's only one employee. Me. I pocket my salary from what the tourists pay for accommodations. The rest I spend on imports from the money sphere. Don't you see, Gundy, it's  all just a big joke? It's a routine designed to allow me to bring in liquor, that's all. This hotel isn't a commercial proposition. The Company is really out of this planet. Completely." "All right. All right. I believe you." Van Beneker said, "What are you looking for in mist country?" "You really want to know?" "It passes the time to ask questions." "I want to watch the rebirth ceremony. I never saw it, all the time I was here." The bulging blue eyes seemed to bulge even more. "Why can't you be serious, Gundy?" "I am." "It's dangerous to fool with the rebirth thing." "I'm prepared for the risks." "You ought to talk to some people here about it, first. It's not a thing for us to meddle in." Gundersen sighed. "Have you seen it?" "No. Never. Never even been interested in seeing it. Whatever the hell the sulidoror do in the mountains, let them do it without me. I'll tell you who to talk to, though. Seena Royce." "She's watched the rebirth?" "Her husband has." Gunderseai felt a spasm of dismay. "Who's her husband?" "Jeff Kurtz. You didn't know?" "I'll be damned," Gundersen murmured. "You wonder what she saw in him, eh?" "I wonder that she could bring herself to live with a man like that. You talk about my attitude toward the. natives. There's someone who treated them like his own property and -- " "Talk to Seena up at Shangrila Falls about the rebirth." Van Beneker laughed. "You're playing games with me, aren't you? You know I'm drunk and you're having a little fun." "No. Not at all." Gundersen rose uneasily. "I ought to get some sleep now." Van Beneker followed him to the door. Just as Gundersen went out, the little man leaned close to him. "You know, Gundy, what the nildoror were doing on the beach before -- they weren't doing that for the tourists. They were doing it for you. It's the kind of sense of humor they have. Good night, Gundy." Ill hour was just a little after dawn. The green-tinged sun hung low in the sky. He went down to the beach for a swim. A soft south wind was blowing, pushing a few clouds into view. The hullygully trees were heavy with fruit. The humidity was as high as ever. Thunder boomed back from the mountains that ran in an arc paralleling the coast a day's drive inland. Mounds of nildoror dung were all over the beach. Gundersen stepped warily, zigzagging over the crunching sand and hurling himself flat into the surf. He went under the first curling row of breakers and with quick powerful strokes headed toward the shoals. The tide was low. He crossed the exposed sandbar and swam beyond it until he felt himself tiring, then returned to the shore area. A sullen sulidor served breakfast. Native fruits, native fish. Gundersen's appetite was immense. He bolted down three golden-green bitterfruits for a start, then expertly boned a whole spiderfish and forked the sweet pink flesh into himself as though engaged in a speed contest. The sulidor brought him another fish and a bowl of phallic : looking forest candles. Gundersen still was working on these when Van Beneker entered. He looked blood-shot and chastened. "Sit with me, Van," Gundersen said. Uncomfortably, Van Beneker complied. "About last night -- " "Forget it." "I was insufferable, Mr. Gundersen." "You were in your cups. Forgiven. In vino veritas. You were calling me Gundy last night, too. You may as well do it this morning. Who catches the fish?" "There's an automatic weir just north of the hotel. Catches them and pipes them right into the kitchen. God knows who'd prepare food here if we didn't have the machines." "And who picks the fruit? Machines?" "The sulidoror do that," Van Beneker said. "When did sulidoror start working as menials on this planet?" "About five years ago. Six, maybe. The nildoror got the idea from us, I suppose. If we could turn them into bearers and living bulldozers, they could turn the sulidoror into bellhops. After all, the sulidoror are the inferior species." "But always their own masters. Why did they agree to serve? What's in it for them?" "I don't know," Van Beneker said. "When did anybody ever understand the sulidoror?" Good question, Gundersen thought. No one as yet had succeeded in making sense out of the relationship between this planet's two intelligent species. The presence of two intelligent species, in the first place, went against the general evolutionary logic of the universe. Both nildoror and sulidoror qualified for autonomous ranking, with perception levels beyond those of the higher hominoid primates. A sulidor was considerably smarter than a chimpanzee and a nildor was a good deal more clever than that. If there had been no nildoror here at all, the presence of the sulidoror alone would have been enough to force the Company to relinquish possession of the planet when the decolonialization movement reached its peak. But why two species -- and why the strange unspoken accommodation between them, the bipedal carnivorous sulidoror ruling over the mist country, the quadrupedal herbivorous nildoror dominating the tropics? How had they carved this world up so neatly? And why was the division of authority breaking down, if breaking down was really what was happening? Gundersen knew that there were ancient treaties between these creatures, that a system of claims and prerogatives existed, that every nildor went back to the mist country when the time for its rebirth arrived. But he did not know what role the sulidoror really played in the life and rebirth of the nildoror. The pull of that mystery was, he admitted, one of the things that had brought him back to Holman's World, to Belzagor, now that he had shed his administrative responsibilities and was free to risk his life indulging private curiosities. Of course, the habits of alien beings were none of his business, really. Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. Putting it that way made his return to this planet seem more like an act of will and less like the yielding to an irresistible compulsion that he feared it had been. " -- more complicated than anybody ever thought," Van Beneker was saying. "I'm sorry. I must have missed most of what you said." "It isn't important. We theorize a lot, here. The last hundred of us. How soon do you start north?" "I'm leaving after breakfast. If you'll tell me how to get to the nearest nildoror encampment so I can apply for my travel permit." "Twenty kilometers, southeast. I'd run you down there in the beetle, but you understand -- the tourists -- " "Can you get me a ride with a nildor?" Gundersen suggested. "I suppose I can hike it if it's too much bother. But -- " "I'll arrange things," Van Beneker said. an hour after breakfast to take Gundersen down to the encampment. In the old days Gundersen would simply have climbed on his back -- now he felt the necessity of making introductions. One does not ask an autonomous intelligent being to carry you twenty kilometers through the jungle, he thought, without attempting to enter into elementary courtesies. "I am Edmund Gundersen of the first birth," he said. "I wish you joy of many rebirths, friend of my journey." "I am Srin'gahar of the first birth," replied the nildor evenly, "and I thank you for your wish, friend of my journey. I serve you of free choice and await your commands." "I must speak with a manyborn one and gain permission to travel north. The man here says you will take me to such a one." "So it can be done." Gundersen had one suitcase. He rested it on the nildor's broad rump and Srin'gahar instantly curved his tail up and back to clamp the bag in place. Then the nildor kneeled and Gundersen went through the ritual bf mounting. Tons of powerful flesh rose and moved obediently toward the rim of the forest. It was almost as though nothing had ever changed. They traveled the first kilometer through an ever-thickening series of bitterfruit glades in silence. Gradually it occurred to Gundersen that the nildor was not going to speak unless spoken to. He opened the conversation by remarking that he had lived for ten years on Belzagor. Srin'gahar said that he knew that -- he remembered Gundersen from the era of Company rule. The nature of the nildoror vocal system drained all overtones and implications from the statement. It came out flat, a mooing nasal grunt that did not reveal whether the nildor remembered Gundersen fondly, bitterly, or indifferently. Gundersen took advantage of the ride to practice his nildororu. So far he had done well -- but in an interview with a many-born one he would need all the verbal skill he could muster. Again and again he asked, "I spoke that the right way, didn't I? Correct me if I didn't." "You speak very well," Srin'gahar insisted. Actually the language was not difficult. It was narrow in range, simple in grammar. Nildororu words did not inflect; they agglutinated, piling syllable atop syllable so that a complex concept like "the former grazing-ground of my mate's clan" emerged as a long grumbled growl of sound unbroken even by a brief pause. Nildoror speech was slow and stolid, requiring broad rolling tones that an Earth man had to launch from the roots of his nostrils. When he shifted from nildororu to any Earth language, Gundersen felt sudden exhilaration, like a circus acrobat transported instantaneously from Jupiter to Mercury. Srin'gahar was taking a nildoror path, not one of the old Company roads. Gundersen had to duck low-hanging branches now and then, and once a quivering nicalanga vine descended to catch him around the throat in a gentle, cool, quickly broken, yet frightening embrace. When he looked back he saw the vine tumescent with excitement, red and swollen from the thrill of caressing an Earth man's skin. Minutes later they crossed a Company road. It was now a fading track in the jungle, nearly overgrown. In another year it would be gone. The nildor's vast body demanded frequent feedings. Every half hour they halted and Gundersen dismounted while Srin'gahar munched shrubbery. The sight fed Gundersen's latent prejudices, troubling him so much that he tried not to look. In a wholly elephantine way the nildor uncoiled his trunk and ripped leafy branches from the low trees. The great mouth sagged open and in the bundle went. With his triple tusks Srin'gahar shredded slabs of bark for dessert. The big jaws moved back and forth tirelessly, We are no prettier when we eat... But the demon within Gundersen counterpointed his tolerance with a shrill insistence that his companion was indeed a true beast. Srin'gahar was not an outgoing type. When Gundersen said nothing the nildor said nothing. When Gundersen asked a question, the nildor replied politely but minimally. The strain of sustaining such a broken-backed conversation drained Gundersen and he allowed long minutes to pass in silence. He had no idea of where he was and could not even tell if they were going in the right direction. The trees far overhead met in a closed canopy, screening the sun. After the nildor had stopped for his third meal of the morning, though, he gave Gundersen an unexpected clue totheir location. Cutting away from the path in a sudden diagonal, the nildor trotted a short distance into the most dense part of the forest, battering down the vegetation, and came to a halt in front of what once had been a Company building -- a glossy dome now dimmed by time and swathed in vines. "Do you know this house, Edmund of the first birth?" "What was it?" "The serpent station. Where you gathered the juices." The past abruptly loomed like a toppling cliff above Gundersen. Jagged hallucinatory images plucked at his mind. Ancient scandals, long forgotten or suppressed, sprang to new life. This was the serpent station, this ruin? This was that place of private sins, the scene of so many falls from grace? Gundersen slipped from the nildor's back and walked haltingly toward the building. He stood at the door a moment, looking in. Yes, there were the hanging tubes and pipes, the runnels through which the ' extracted venom had flowed. All the processing equipment was still in place, half devoured by warmth and moisture and neglect. There was the entrance for the jungle serpents, drawn by alien music they could not resist -- and there they were milked of their venom. Gundersen glanced back at Srin'gahar. The spines of the nildor's crest were distended. A mark of tension. A mark, perhaps, of shared shame. The nildoror, too, had memories of this building. Gundersen stepped into the station, pushing back the partly open door. It split apart from it moorings as he did so, and a musical tremor ran -- whang whang whang -- through the whole of the spherical building, dying away to a blurred feeble tinkle. guitar again. The years fell away and he was once more a newcomer on Holman's World and about to begin his first stint at the serpent station, now assigned to that place that was the focus of so much gossip. Yes. Out of the shroud of memory came the image of Kurtz. There he was, standing just inside the station door, impossibly tall, the tallest man Gundersen had ever seen, with a great pale-domed, hairless head and enormous dark eyes socketed in prehistoric-looking bony ridges. A bright-toothed smile ran at least a kilometer's span from cheek to cheek. The guitar went whang and Kurtz said, "You'll find it interesting here, Gundy. This station is a unique experience. We buried your predecessor last week." Whang. "Of course, you must learn to establish a distance between yourself and what happens here. That's the secret of maintaining your identity on an alien world, Gundy. Comprehend the esthetics of distance. Draw a boundary line about yourself and say to the planet, thus far you can go in consuming me, no farther. Otherwise the planet will eventually absorb you and make you part of it. Am I being clear?" "Not at all," said Gundersen. "The meaning will manifest itself eventually." Whang. "Come see our serpents." Kurtz was five years older than Gundersen and had been on Holman's World three years longer. Everyone seemed to feel awe of Kurtz. Yet he was only an assistant station agent who had never been promoted beyond that lowly rank. After five minutes of exposure to him, Gundersen thought he knew why. Kurtz gave an impression of instability -- not quite a fallen angel but certainly a falling one, Lucifer on his way down, descending from morn to noon, noon to dewy eve, but now only in the morning of his drop. One could not trust a man like that with serious responsibilities until he had finished his transit and had settled into his ultimate state. They went into the serpent station together. Kurtz reached up ratus, lightly caressing tubing and petcocks. His fingers were like a spider's legs and their caress was astonishingly obscene. At the far end of the room stood a short, stocky man, dark-haired, blackbrowed, the station supervisor, Gio' Salamone. Kurtz made the introductions. Salamone grinned. "Lucky you," he said. "How did you manage to get assigned here?" "They just sent me," Gundersen said. "As somebody's practical joke," Kurtz suggested. Salamone said, "Well, now that you're here, you'd better learn our basic rule. The basic rule is that when you leave this station, you never discuss what happens here with anybody else. Capisce? Now say to me, I swear by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, also by Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses -- ' " Bewildered, Gundersen said, "That's an oath I've never heard before." "Salamone's an Italian Jew," said Kurtz. "He's trying to cover all possibilities. Don't bother swearing -- but he's right. Whathappenshere isn't anybody else's business. Whatever you may have heard about the serpent station is probably true. Nevertheless, tell no tales when you leave here." Whang. Whang. "Watch us carefully now. We're going to call up our demons. Loose the amplifiers, Gio'." Salamone seized a plastic sack of what looked like golden flour and hauled it toward the station's rear door. He scooped out a handful. With a quick upward heave he sent it into the air. The breeze instantly caught the tiny grains and carried them aloft. Kurtz said, "He's just scattered a thousand microamplifiers into the jungle. In ten minutes they'll cover a radius of ten kilometers. They're tuned to pick up the frequencies of my guitar and Gio's flute, and the resonances go bouncing back and forth all over the place." Kurtz began to play, picking up a melody in mid-course. Salamone produced a short transverse flute and wove a melody of his own through the spaces in Kurtz' tune. Their playing became a stately sarabande, delicate, hypnotic, two or three figures repeated endlessly without variations in volume or pitch. For ten minutes nothing unusual occurred. Kurtz nodded toward the edge of the jungle. "They're coming," he said. Gundersen watched the serpents emerging from the forest. They were four times as long as a man and as thick as a big man's arm. Undulating fins ran down their backs from end to end. Their skins were glossy, pale green and evidently sticky. The detritus of the forest floor stuck to them in places, bits of leaves, soil, crumpled petals. Rows of platter-sized sensor spots flanked their rippling dorsal fins and served as eyes. Their heads were blunt. Their mouths were mere slits, suitable for nibbling on gobbets of soil. Two slender quills as long as a man's thumb protruded where nostrils might be. They extended to five times that lengthin moments of stress or when the serpent was under attack and they yielded a blue venom. Despite the size of the creatures, despite the arrival of perhaps thirty of them at once, Gundersen did not find them frightening, although he would certainly have been uneasy at the arrival of a platoon of pythons. These were not pythons. They were not even reptiles at all but low-phylum creatures, actually giant worms. They were sluggish and evinced no apparent intelligence. But clearly they responded powerfully to the music. It had drawn them to the station and now they writhed in a ghastly ballet, seeking the source of the sound. The first few were already entering the building. "Do you play the guitar?" Kurtz asked. "Here -- just keep the sound going." He thrust the instrument at Gundersen, who struggled with the fingerings for a moment, then brought forth a lame, stumbling imitation of Kurtz' melody. Kurtz, meanwhile, was slipping a tubular pink cap over the head of the nearest serpent. When it was in place the cap began rhythmic contractions. The serpent's writhings became momentarily more intense. Its fin moved convulsively. Its tail lashed the ground. Then it grew calm. Kurtz removed the cap and slid it over the head of another serpent, and another, and another. He was milking them of venom. These creatures were deadly to native metabolic systems, so it was said. They never attacked. They struck only when provoked. Their poison was universally effective. B UT what was poison on Holman's World was a blessing on Earth. The venom of the jungle serpents was one of the Company's most profitable exports. Properly distilled, diluted, crystallized, purified, the juice served as a catalyst in limb-regeneration work. A dose of it softened the resistance of the human cell to change, insidiously corrupting the cytoplasm, leading it to induce the nucleus to switch on its genetic material. And so it greatly encouraged the reawakening of cell division, the replication of bodily parts, when a new arm or leg or face had to be grown. Gunderson did not know how or why it worked but he had seen the stuff in action during his training period. A fellow trainee had lost both legs below the knee in a soarer accident. The drug made the flesh flow. It liberated the guardians of the body's coded pattern, easing the task of the genetic surgeons tenfold by sensitizing and stimulating the zone of regeneration. These legs had grown back in six months. Gundersencontinued to strum the guitar, Salamone to play his flute, Kurtz to collect the venom. Mooing sounds came suddenly from the bush. A herd of nildoror evidently had also been drawn by the music. Gundersen saw them lumber out of the underbrush and stand almost shyly along the border of the clearing -- nine of them. After a moment they entered into a clumsy, lurching, ponderous dance. Their trunks waved in time to the music. Their tails swung. Their spiny crests revolved. "All done," Kurtz announced. "Five liters -- a good haul." The serpents, milked, drifted off into the forest as soon as the music ceased. The nildoror stayed a while longer, peering intently at the men inside the station. Finally they left also. Kurtz and Salamone instructed Gundersen in the techfluid, making it ready for shipment to Earth. And that was all. He could see nothing scandalous in what had happened. He did not understand why there had been so much sly talk at headquarters about this place nor why Salamone had tried to wring an oath of silence from him. Three days later they again summoned the serpents, again collected their venom and again the whole process seemed unexceptionable to Gundersen. But soon he came to realize that Kurtz and Salamone were testing his reliability before initiating him into their mysteries. During the third week of his stint at the serpent station they finally admitted him to the inner knowledge. Gundersen realized that something unusual was about to happen when he saw Kurtz, after darting a sharp glance at Salamone, unhook a container of venom before it started on its route through the into a broad bowl that held at least a liter of fluid. On Earth that much of the drug would be worth a year of Gundersen' s salary as an assistant station agent. "Come with us," Kurtz said. The three men stepped outside. At once three nildoror approached, behaving oddly, their spines upraised, their ears trembling. They seemed skittish and eager. Kurtz handed the bowl of raw venom to Salamone, who sipped from it and handed it back. Kurtz also drank. He gave the bowl to Gundersen, saying, "Take communion with us?"  Gundersen hesitated. Salamone said, "It's safe. It can't work on your nuclei when you take it internally." Gundersen took a cautious swig. The venom was sweet but watery. His improved olfactory and auditory acuities were the equivalent of being able to see into the ultraviolet and the infrared. A dingy forest flower sent dizzying waves of sleek, moist sweetness at him. The click of insect-claws in underground tunnels was like a symphony for percussion. And the bigness of him -- the ecstasy of carrying such a body! His transformed consciousness soared, swooped, rose high again. He trampled trees and praised himself for doing so in booming tones. He grazed and gorged. Then he sat for a while, perfectly still, and meditated on the existence of evil in the universe, asking himself why there should be such a thing -- and indeed whether evil in fact existed as an objective phenomenon. His answers surprised and delighted him and he turned to Kurtz to communicate his insights. But just then the effect of the venom began to fade with startling suddenness. In a short while Gundersen felt altogether normal again. He was weeping, though, and he felt an anguish of shame, as though he had been detected flagrantly molesting a child. The three nildoror were nowhere in sight. Salamone picked up the bowl and went into the station. "Come," Kurtz said. "Let's go in, too." They would not discuss any of it with him. They had let him share in the experience but they would not explain a thing. They cut him off sternly when he asked. The rite was hermetically private. Gundersen was wholly unable to evaluate the experience. Had his body actually turned into that of a nildor for an hour? Hardly. Well, then, had his mind, his soul, somehow migrated into thenildor's body? And had the nildor's soul, if nildoror had souls, gone into his? What kind of sharing, what sort of union had occurred in that clearing? Three days later, Gundersen applied for a transfer out of the serpent station. In those days he was easily upset by the unknown. Kurtz' only reaction, when Gundersen announced he was leaving, was a short, brutal chuckle. The normal tour of duty at the station was eight weeks, of which Gundersen had served less than half. He never again put in a stint there. Later he gathered what gossip he could about the doings at the serpent station. He was told vague tales of sexual abominations in the grove, of couplings between Earthman and nildor, between Earthman and Earthman. He heard murmurs that those who habitually drank the venom underwent strange and terrible and permanent changes of the body. He heard stories of how the nildoror elders in their private councils bitterly condemned the morbid practice of going to the serpent station to drink the stuff the Earthmen offered. But Gundersen did not know if any of these whispers were true. The phantoms faded. The sound of Kurtz' guitar diminished and was gone. Srin'gahar asked, "Shall we leave now?" Gundersen slowly emerged from the ruined station. "Does anyone gather the juices of the serpents today?" "Not here," said the nildor. He kneeled. The Earthman mounted him. Srin'gahar carried him away, back to the path they had followed earlier. IV campment that was Gundersen' s immediate goal in early afternoon. For most of the day they had been traveling across the broad coastal plain but now the land dipped sharply. A long, narrow depression ran from north to south, a deep rift between the central plateau and the coast. At the approach to this rift Gundersen saw an immense devastation of foliage that signaled the presence of a large nildoror herd within a few kilometers. A jagged scar ran through the forest from ground level to a point about twice a man's height. Even the lunatic tropical fertility of this region could not keep up with the nildoror appetite. It took a year or more for such zones of defoliation to restore themselves after the herd had moved on. Yet despite the impact of the herd, the forest on all sides of the scar was even more close-knit than on the coastal plain to the east. This was a jungle raised to the next power, damp, steamy, dark. The temperature was considerably higher in the valley than on the coast and, though the atmosphere could not possibly have been any more humid here, there was an almost tangible wetness in the air. The vegetation was different, too. On the plain the trees tended to have sharp -- sometimes dangerously sharp -- leaves. Here the foliage was rounded and fleshy, heavy sagging disks of dark blue that glistened voluptuously whenever stray shafts of sunlight pierced the forest canopy overhead. Gundersen and his mount made their way along the route of a stream that flowed perversely inland. The soil was spongy and soft. More often than not Srin'gahar walked knee deep in mud. He was entering a wide circular basin at what seemed to be the lowest point in the entire region. Streams flowed into it on three or four sides, feeding a dark, weedcovered lake at the center. Around the margin of the lake moved Srin'gahar's herd. Gundersen saw several hundred nildoror grazing, sleeping, coupling, strolling. "Put me down," he said, taking himself by surprise. "I'll walk beside you." Wordlessly Srin'gahar allowed him to dismount. Gundersen regretted his egalitarian impulse the moment he stepped down. The nildor's broadpadded feet were able to cope with the muddy floor. Gundersen discovered that he had a tendency to begin to sink in if he remained in one place more than a moment. But he would not remount now. Every step was a struggle -- but he struggled. The closeness of the climate made each breath a battle for him. He was greatly relieved when the footing became easier a short distance down the slope. Here a webwork of spongy plants spreading out from the lake underwove the mud to form a firm, if not altogether reassuring, platform a few centimeters down. " -- only on your brain," Salarnone added. Kurtz gently took the bowl from Gundersen and set it down. The largest nildor advanced and delicately dipped his trunk into it. Then the second nildor drank. The third. The bowl now was empty. Gundersen said, "If it's poisonous to native life -- " "Not when they drink it. Just when it's shot directly into the bloodstream," Salamone said. "What happens now?" "Wait," Kurtz said, "and make your soul receptive to any suggestions that arise." Gundersen did not have to wait long. He felt a thickening at the base of his neck and a roughness about his face. His arms grew impossibly heavy. It seemed to him best to drop to his knees as the effect intensified. He turned toward Kurtz, seeking reassurance from those dark shining eyes -- but Kurtz' eyes had already begun to flatten and expand and his green and prehensile trunk nearly reached the ground. Salamone, too, had entered the metamorphosis, capering comically, jabbing the soil with his tusks. The thickening continued. Now Gundersen knew that he weighed several tons. He tested his body's coordination, striding back and forth, learning how to move on four limbs. He went to the spring and sucked up water in his trunk. He rubbed his leathery hide against trees. He trumpeted bellowing sounds of joy in his hugeness. He joined Kurtz and Salamone in a wild dance, making the ground quiver. The nildoror, too, were transformed. One had become Kurtz. One had become Salamone. One had become Gundersen. The three former beasts moved in wild pirouettes, tumbling and toppling in their unfamiliarity with human ways. But Gundersen lost interest in what the nildoror were doing. He concentrated solely on his own experience. It terrified him to know that this change had come over him and he was doomed forever to live as a massive animal of the jungle, shredding bark and ripping branches -- yet it was rewarding to have shifted bodies this way and to have access to an entirely new range of sensory data. His eyesight now was dimmed and everything in its range was engulfed in a furry halo. But he found compensations. He was able to sort odors by their directions and by their textures and his hearing was immensely more sensitive. Srin'gahar raised his trunk and sounded a trumpet blast of greeting to the encampment. A few of the nildoror replied. To Gundersen, Srin'gahar said, "The many-born one stands at the edge of the lake, friend of my journey." T HE lake was congested with drifting vegetation. Humped masses of it broke the surface everywhere -- leaves like horns of plenty, cup-shaped spore-bodies, ropy tangled stems, everything dark blue against the lighter blue-green of the water. Through this maze of tightly-packed flora moved huge semi-aquatic mammals, malidaror, whose tubular yellowish bodies were almost totally submerged. Only the rounded bulges of their backs and the jutting periscopes of their stalked eyes were in view, and now and then a pair of cavernous, snorting nostrils. Gundersen could see the immense swaths that the malidaror had cut through the vegetation in this day's feeding. But at the far side of the lake the wounds were beginning to close as new growth hastened to fill gaps. Gundersen and Srin'gahar went down toward the water. Suddenly the wind shifted, and Gundersen had a whiff of the lake's fragrance. He coughed -- it was like breathing the fumes of a distillery vat. The lake was in ferment. Alcohol was a by-product of the respiration of these water plants and, having no outlet, the lake became one large tub of brandy. Both water and alcohol evaporated from it at a rapid pace, making the surrounding air not only steamy but potent. And during centuries when evaporation of water had exceeded the inflow from the streams the proof of the residue had steadily risen. When the Company ruled this planet such lakes had been the undoing of more than one agent, Gundersen knew. He was puzzled to see a dozen brush shelters flanking one of the streams. Nildoror did not live in dwellings of any sort. The climate made housing unnecessary. Besides, they were incapable of constructing anything, having no organs of manipulation other than the three "fingers" at the tips of their trunks. He studied the crude lean-tos in bewilderment. After a moment it dawned on him that he had seen structures of this sort before -- they were the huts of sulidoror. The puzzle deepened. Such close association between the nildoror and the carnivorous bipeds of the mist country had been unknown to him. Now he saw the sulidoror themselves, perhaps twenty of them, sitting crosslegged inside their huts. Slaves? Captives? Friends of the tribe? None of those ideas made sense. "That is our many-born," Srin'gahar said, indicating, with a wave of his trunk, a seamed and venerable nildor in the midst of a group by the lakeshore. ed the old one. They were gray-skinned and wrinkled, too -- a congregation of seniors. Younger nildoror, of the generation of Srin'gahar, kept a respectful distance. No immature nildoror were visible in the encampment. No Earthman had ever seen a young nildor. Gundersen had been told that the nildoror were always born in the mist country, in the home country of the sulidoror. Apparently they remained in close seclusion there until they had reached the nildoror equivalent of adolescence, when they migrated to the jungles of the tropics. He also had heard that every nildor hoped to go back to the mist country when its time came to die. But he did not know if such tales were true. No one did. The ring opened and Gundersen found himself facing the manyborn one. Protocol demanded that Gundersen speak first but he faltered, dizzied by tension, perhaps, or perhaps by the fumes of the lake. He knew an endless moment before he pulled himself together. He said at last, "I am Edmund Gundersen of the first birth. I wish you joy of many rebirths, O wisest one." Unhurriedly the nildor swung his vast head to one side, sucked up a snort of water from the lake and squirted it into his mouth. Then he rumbled, "You are known to us, Edmundgundersen, from days past. You kept the big house of the Company at Fire Point in the Sea of Dust." The nildor's sharpness of memory astonished and distressed him. If they remembered him so well, what chance did he have to win favors from these people? They owed him no kindnesses. "I was there, yes, a long time ago," he said tightly. "Not so long ago. Ten turnings is not a long time." The nildor's heavy-lidded eyes closed and for some moments the manyborn one seemed to have fallen asleep. He finally spoke, eyes still closed, "I am Vol'himyor of the seventh birth. Will you come into the water with me? I grow tired easily on the land." VoPhimyor strode into the lake without waiting. He swam slowly to a point some forty meters from shore and floated there, submerged to the shoulders. A malidar that had been browsing on the weeds in that part of the lake went under with a bubbling murmur of discontent and reappeared far away. Gundersen knew that he had no choice but to follow the manyborn one. He stripped and walked forward. The tepid water rose about him. Not far out, the spongy matting of fibrous stems below ground level gave way to soft warm mud beneath Gundersen's bare feet. He felt the occasional movement of small many-legged things under his soles. The roots of the water-plants swirled whiplike about his legs and the black bubbles of alcohol that came up from the depths and burst on the surface almost stifled him with their release of vapor. Quickly he paddled himself out toVol'himyor. The surface of the water was clear there, thanks to the malidar. In the dark depths of the lake, though, unknown creatures moved to and fro. Every few moments something slippery and quick slithered along Gundersen's body. Vol'himyor, still seemingly asleep, murmured, "You have been gone from this world for many turnings, have you not?" "I returned to my own world after the Company relinquished its rights here." Even before the nildor's eyelids parted, even before the round yellow eyes fixed coldly on him, Gundersen was aware that he had blundered. "Your Company never had rights here to relinquish," the nildor said in the customary flat, neutral way. "Is this not so?" "It is so," Gundersen conceded. He searched for a graceful correction and finally said, "After the Company relinquished possession of this planet I returned to my own world." "Those words are more nearly true. Why, then, have you come back here?" "Because I love this place and wish to see it again." "Is it possible for an Earthman to feel love for Belzagor?" "An Earthman can love Belzagor, yes." "An Earthman can become captured by Belzagor," Vol'himyor said with more than usual slowness. "An Earthman may find that his soul has been seized by the forces of this planet and is held in thrall. But I doubt that an Earthman can feel love for this planet, as I understand your understanding of love." "I yield the point, many-born one. My soul has become captured by Belzagor. I could not help but return." "You are quick to yield such points." "I have no wish to give offense." "Commendable tact. And what will you do on this world that has seized your soul?" "Travel to many parts of your world," said Gundersen. "I wish particularly to go to the mist country." "Why there?" "It is the place that captures me most deeply." "What thing has captured you there?" "The beauty of the mountains rising out of the mist. The sparkle of sunlight on a clear, cold, bright day. The splendor of the moons against a field of glittering snow." "You are quite poetic," said Vol'himyor. Gundersen could not tell if he were being praised or mocked. He said, "Under the present law I must have the permission of a many-born one to enter the mist country. So I come to make application to you." "You are fastidious in your respect for our law, my once-born friend. Once you were different.". Gundersen bit his lip. He felt something crawling up his calf down in the depths of the lake but he compelled himself to stare serenely at the many-born one. He chose his next words with care. "Sometimes we are slow to understand the nature of others and give offense without knowing that we do so." "It is so." "But then understanding comes," Gundersen said, " and one feels remorse for the deeds of the past. And one hopes that one may be forgiven for his sins." "Forgiveness depends on the quality of the remorse," said Vol'himyor, "and also on the quality of the sins." "I believe my failings are known to you." "They are not forgotten," said the nildor. "I believe also that in your creed the possibility of personal redemption is not unknown." "True. True." "Will you allow me to make amends for my sins of the past against your people, both known and unknown?" "Making amends for unknown sins is meaningless," said the nildor. "But in any case we seek no apologies. Your redemption from sin is your own concern, not ours. Perhaps you will find that redemption here, as you hope. I sense already a welcome change in your soul. It will count heavily in your favor." "I have your permission to go north, then?" "Not so fast. Stay with us a while as our guest. We must think about this. You may go to shore now." T HE dismissal was clear. Gundersen thanked the many-born one for his patience, not without some self-satisfaction at the way he had handled the interview. He had always displayed proper deference toward many-born ones -- even a really Kiplingesque imperialist knew enough to show respect for venerable tribal leaders -- but in Company days it had always been nothing more than a charade for him, a put-on show of humility, since ultimate power resided with the Company's sector agent, not with any nildor no matter how holy. Now, of course, the old nildor really did have the power to keep him out of the mist country, and might even see some poetic justice in banning him from it. But Gundersen felt that his deferential and apologetic attitude had been reasonably sincere just now, and that some of that sincerity had been communicated to Vol'himyor. Unless some show of earnestness did come through he knew no hope at all of gaining the permission he needed. Abruptly, when Gundersen was still a good distance from shore, something hit him a tremendous blow between the shoulders and flung him, stunned and gasping, face forward into the water. As he went under, the thought crossed his mind that Vol'himyor had treacherously come up behind him and lashed him with his trunk. Spluttering, his mouth full of the lake's liquor, his arms nearly numbed by the impact of the blow, Gundersen warily surfaced. He opened his eyes and had momentary trouble focusing them. The many-born one was still far away across the water, looking in another direction. Gundersen felt a prickly premonition and got his head down just in time to avoid being decapitated by whatever it was that had hit him before. Huddling nose deep in the water, he saw a thick yellowish beam, like a boom out of control, swing by overhead. Now he heard thunderous bellows of pain and felt widening ripples sweeping across the lake. He glanced around. A dozen sulidoror had entered dar. They had harpooned the colossal beast with sharpened sticks. The malidar thrashed and coiled in its final agonies. The mighty tail of the animal had knocked Gundersen over. The hunters had fanned out waist-deep in the shallows. Their thick fur was bedraggled and matted. Each group grasped the line of one harpoon. The sulidoror were gradually drawing the malidar toward shore. Gundersen continued to stay low in the water, catching his breath, working his shoulders to assure himself that no bones were broken. The malidar' s tail must have given him the merest flick the first time -- he would surely have been destroyed the second time that tail came by if he had not ducked. He was beginning to ache. He felt nearly drowned by the liquid he had gulped. He wondered when he would start to get drunk. Now the sulidoror had beached their prey. Only the malidar's tail and thick webfooted hind legs lay in the water, moving fitfully. The rest of the animal, tons of it, stretching five times the length of a man, was up on shore. The sulidoror were methodically driving long stakes into it, one through each of the forelimbs and several into the broad wedge-shaped head. A few nildoror were watching the operation in mild curiosity. Most ignored it. The remaining malidaror continued to browse in the weeds as though nothing had happened. A final thrust of a stake severed the malidar's spinal column. The beast quivered and lay still. Gundersen hurried from the water, swimming quickly, then wading through the unpleasantly voluptuous mud, at last stumbling out onto the beach. His knees suddenly failed him and he toppled forward, trembling, choking, puking. Later he rolled to one side and watched the sulidoror cutting gigantic blocks of pale pink meat from the malidar's sides and passing them around. Other sulidoror were coming from the huts to share the feast. Gundersen shivered. He was in a kind of shock. A few minutes passed before he realized that the cause was not only the blow he had received and the water he had swallowed, but also the knowledge that an act of violence had been committed in front of a herd of nildoror and that the nildoror did not seem at all disturbed. He had imagined that these peaceful, nonbelligerent creatures would react in horror to the slaughter of a malidar. But they simply did not care. The shock Gundersen felt was one of disillusionment. A sulidor came to stand over him. Gundersen stared up uneasily at the towering shaggy figure. The sulidor held in its forepaws a gobbet of malidar meat the size of Gundersen's head. "For you," said the sulidor in the nildoror language. "You eat with us?" It did not wait for a reply. It tossed the slab of flesh to the ground next to Gundersen and rejoined its fellows. Gundersen's stomach writhed. He had no lust for raw meat just now. The beach was suddenly very silent. They were all watching him, sulidoror and nildoror both. G undersen rose shakily to his feet. He sucked down warm air into his lungs and bought a little time by crouching at the lake's edge to wash his face. He found his discarded clothing and consumed a few minutes in donning it. Now he felt a little better -- but the problem of the raw meat remained. The sulidoror, enjoyed their feast, rending and tearing flesh and gnawing on bones, nevertheless frequently looked his way to see whether he would accept their hospitality. The nildoror, who of course had not touched the meat themselves, also seemed curious about his decision. If he refused the meat, would he offend the sulidoror? If he ate it, would he stamp himself as bestial in the eyes of the nildoror? He concluded that it was best of force some of the meat into him as a gesture of good will toward the menacing-looking bipeds. He would eat the meat. But he would eat it as an Earth man would. He ripped some leaves from the water plant and spread them out to form a mat. He placed the meat on this. From his tunic he took his fusion torch. He adjusted it for wide aperture, low intensity, and played it on the meat until its surface was charred and bubbling. With a narrower beam he cut the cooked meat into chunks he could manage. Then, squatting crosslegged, he picked up a chunk and bit into it. The meat was soft and cheesy, interlaced by tough stringlike masses forming an intricate grid. Gundersen succeeded in getting down three pieces. When he decided he had had enough, he rose, called out his thanks to the sulidoror and kneeled by the side of the lake to scoop up some of the water. He needed a chaser. During all this time no one spoke to him or approached him. The nildoror had all left the water, for night was approaching. They had settled down in several groups well back from the shore. The feast of the sulidoror continued noisily but was nearing its end. Already several small scavenger beasts had joined the party and were at work at the lower half of the malidar's body while the sulidoror finished the other part. Gundersen looked about for Srin-gahar. He had questions to ask. That the nildoror had accepted troubled him. He realized that he had somehow always regarded the nildoror as more noble than the other big beasts of this planet because they did not take life except under supreme provocation, and sometimes not even then. Here was an intelligent race exempt from the sin of Cain. And Gundersen had seen in that a corollary -- that the nildoror, because they did not a detestable act. Now he knew that his reasoning was faulty and even naive. The nildoror did not kill simply because they were not eaters of meat; but the moral superiority that he had attributed to them on that score must in fact be a product of his own guilty imagination. The night came on with tropic swiftness. A single moon shone. against a narrow tree, his thick legs folded beneath his body. Gundersen put his question to him. Srin'gahar said, "Why should the sight of violent death shock us? Malidar have no g'rakh, after all. And it is obvious that sulidoror must eat." "No g'rakh!" Gundersen said. "This is a word I do not know." "The quality that separates the souled from the unsouled," Srin'gahar explained. "Without g'rakh a creature is but a beast." "Do sulidoror have g'rakh ! " "Of course." "And nildoror also, naturally. But malidaror don't. What about Earthmen?" "It is amply clear that Earthmen have g'rakh." "And one may freely kill a creature which lacks that quality?" "If one has the need to do so, yes," said Srin-gahar. "These are elementary matters. Have you no such concepts on your own world?" "On my world," said Gundersen, "there is only one species that has been granted g'rakh, so perhaps we give such matters too little thought. We know that whatever is not of our own kind must be lacking in g'rakh." "And when you come to another world, you have difficulty in accepting the presence of g'rakh in other beings?" Srin'gahar asked. "You need not answer. I understand." "May I ask another question?" said Gundersen. "Why are there sulidoror here?" "We allow them to be here." "In the past -- in the days when the Company ruled Belzagor -- the sulidoror never went outside the mist country." "We did not allow them to come here then." "But now you do. Why?" "Because now it is easier for us to do so. Difficulties stood in the way at earlier times." "What kind of difficulties?" Gundersen persisted. Softly Srin'gahar said, "You will have to ask that of someone who has been born more often than I. I am once-born. Many things are as strange to me as they are to you. Look, another moon is in the sky. At the third moon we shall dance." Gundersen looked up and saw the tiny white disk moving rapidly, low in the sky. Belzagor' s five moons were a random assortment, the closest one just outside Roche's Limit, the farthest so distant it was visible only to sharp eyes on a clear night. At any given time two or three moons were in the night sky but the fourth and fifth moons had such eccentric orbits that they could never be seen at all from vast regions of the planet and passed over most other zones no more than three or four times a year. One night each year all five moons could be seen at once, along a band ten kilometers wide, running at an angle of about # to the equator from northeast to southwest. Gundersen had experienced the Night of Five Moons only a single time. The nildoror were starting to move toward the lakeshore. The third moon appeared, spinning retrograde into view from the south. So he was going to see them dance again. He had witnessed these ceremonies early in his career. He had been stationed at Shangri-la Falls in the northern tropics. That night the nildoror had massed just upstream of the falls on both banks of Madden's River. For hours after dark their blurred cries could be heard even above the roar of the water. Finally Kurtz, who was also stationed at Shangri-la then, had said, "Come, let's watch the show." He led Gundersen out into the night. This had been six months before the episode at the serpent station -- Gundersen had not yet realized how strange Kurtz was. His first inkling had come when Kurtz had joined the nildoror in their dance. The huge beasts had been clustered in loose semicircles, stamping back and forth, trumpeting piercingly, shaking the ground. Suddenly Kurtz had moved out there among them, arms upflung, bare chest beaded with sweat and shining in the moonslight, dancing as intensely as any of them, crying out in great booming roars, stamping his feet, tossing his head. And the nildoror were forming a group around him, giving him plenty of space, letting him enter fully into the frenzy, now running toward him, now backing away. Gundersen had stood awed. He had not stirred when Kurtz had called to him to join the dance. He had watched for what had seemed hours, hypnotized, until he had broken somehow from his trance. He had found Kurtz still in ceaseless motion, a gaunt, skeletal figure jerking puppetlike on invisible strings, looking fragile despite his extreme height as he moved within the circle of colossal nildoror. Kurtz had been unable either to hear Gundersen's words or take note of his presence and finally Gundersen had gone back to the station alone. In the morning he had found Kurtz, looking spent and worn, slumped on the bench overlooking the waterfall. Kurtz had merely said, "You should have stayed. You should have danced." Anthropologists had studied these rites. Gundersen had looked up the literature, learning what little there was to learn. Evidently the dance was preceded and surrounded by drama, a spoken episode akin to Earth's medieval mystery plays, a theatrical reenactment of some supremely important nildoror myth, serving both as mode of entertainment and as ecstatic religious experience. Unfortunately the language of the drama was an obsolete liturgical tongue, not a word of which could be understood by an Earthman. The nildoror, who had not hestitated to instruct their first Earthborn visitors in their relatively simple modern language, had never offered any clue to the nature of the other one. The anthropological observers had noted one point Gundersen now found cheering; invariably, within a few days after the performance of this particular rite,, groups of nildoror from the herd performing it would set out for the mist country, presumably to undergo rebirth. He wondered if the rite might be some ceremony of purification, some means of entering a state of grace before undergoing rebirth. T HE nildoror all had gathered, now, beside the lake. Srin'gahar was one of the last to go. Gundersen sat alone on the slope above the basin, watching the massive forms assembling. The contrary motions of the moons fragmented the shadows of the nildoror. The cold light from above turned their smooth green hides into furrowed black cloaks. In the silence came a low, clear, forceful flow of words. Gundersen strained to hear, hoping to catch some clue to the meaning, seeking a magical gateway that would let him burst through into an understanding of that secret language. But no understanding came. Vol'himyor was the speaker. The old many-born one was reciting words clearly familiar to everyone at the lake, an invocation, an introit. Then came a long interval of silence and finally a response from a second nildor at the opposite end of the group, who exactly duplicated the rhythms and sinuosities of Vol'himyor's utterance. Silence again. Next a reply from Vol'himyor, spoken more crisply. Back and forth the center of the service moved and the interplay between the two celebrants became what was for nildoror a surprisingly quick exchange of dialogue. About every tenth line the herd at large repeated what a celebrant had said, sending dark reverberations echoing through the night. After perhaps ten minutes of this, the voice of a third solo nildor was heard. Vol'himyor made reply. A fourth speaker took up the recitation. Now isolated lines were coming in rapid bursts from many members of the congregation. No cue was missed. No nildor trampled on another's lines. The tempo accelerated. The ceremony had become a mosaic of brief utterances blared forth from every part of the group in a random rotation. A few of the nildoror were up and moving slowly in place, lifting their feet, putting them down. Lightning speared through the sky. Gundersen felt a chill. He saw himself as a wanderer on a prehistoric Earth, spying on some grotesque conclave of mastodons. All the things of man seemed infinitely far away now. The drama was reaching some sort of climax. The nildoror were bellowing, stamping, calling to one another with tremendous snorts. They were taking up formations, assembling in aisled rows. Still there came utterances and responses, antiphonal amplifications of words heavy with strange significance. The air grew more steamy. Gundersen could no longer hear individual words, only rich deep chords of massed grunts -- ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah -- the old rhythm that he remembered from the night at Shangri-la Falls. The sound was breathy, gasping, ecstatic, an endless chuffing pattern of exhalations -- ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah -- with scarcely a break between each group of four beats, and the whole jungle seemed to echo with it. The nildoror had no musical instruments whatever -- yet to Gundersen it appeared that vast drums were pounding out that hypnotically intense rhythm. And the nildoror were dancing. Down below on the margin of the lake moved scores of great shadowy shapes, prancing like gazelles, two running steps forward, stamp down hard on the third step, regain the balance on the fourth. The universe trembled. Boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom boom. The earlier phase of the ceremony, the dramatic dialogue, which might have been some sort of subtle philosophical disquisition, had given way totally to this primeval pounding, this terrifying shuffling of gigantic elephantine bodies. Boom boom boom boom. Gundersen looked to his left and saw the sulidoror entranced, hairy heads switching back and forth in the rhythm of the dance -- but not one of the bipeds had risen from the crosslegged posture. They were content to rock, nod and now and then to pound their elbows on the ground. Gundersen was cut off from his specific past, even from a sense of kinship to his species. Disjointed memories floated up. Again he was at the serpent station, a prisoner of the hallucinatory venom, feeling himself transformed into a r.ildor and capering thickly in the grove. Again he stood by the bank of the great river, seeing another performance of this very dance. And also he remembered nights spent in the safety of Company stations deep in the forest, among his own kind, when they had listened to the sound of stamping feet in the distance. All those other times Gundersen had drawn back from whatever strangeness this planet was offering him. He had transferred out of the serpent station rather than taste the venom a second time. He had refused Kurtz' invitation to join the dance. He had remained within the station when the rhythmic poundings began in the forest. But tonight he felt little allegiance to mankind. He found himself longing to join that black and incomprehensible frenzy at the lakeshore. Something monstrous was running free within him, liberated by the incessant repetition of that boom boom boom boom. But what right had he to caper Kurtzlike in an alien ceremony? He did not dare intrude on their ritual. No. He did not dare... Y ET he discovered that he was walking down the spongy slope toward the place where the massed nildoror cavorted. If he could think of them only as leaping, snorting elephants it would be all right. If he could think of them even as savages kicking up a row it would be all right. But the suspicion was unavoidable that this ceremony of words and dancing held intricate meanings for these people and that was the worst of it. They might have thick legs and short necks and long dangling trunks but that did not make them elephants, for their triple tusks and spiny crests and alien anatomies said otherwise; and they might be lacking in all technology, lacking even in written language, but that did not make them savages, for the complexity of their minds said otherwise. They were creatures who possessed g'rakh. Gundersen remembered how he had innocently attempted to instruct the nildoror in the arts of terrestrial culture, in an effort to help them "improve" themselves. He had wanted to humanize them, to lift their spirits upward, but nothing had come of that, and now he found his own spirit being drawn -- downward? Certainly to their level, wherever that might lie. Boom boom boom boom. His feet hesitantly traced out the fourstep as he continued down the slope toward the lake. Did he dare? Would they crush him as a blasphemer? They had let Kurtz dance. It had been in a different latitude, a long time ago, and other nildoror had been involved. But they had let Kurtz dance. "Yes," a nildoror called to him. "Come, dance with us." Was itVol'himyor? WasitSrin'gahar? Gundersen did not know which of them had spoken. In the darkness, in the sweaty haze, he could not see clearly, and all these giant shapes looked identical. He reached the bottom of the slope. Nildoror were everywhere about him, tracing out passages in their private journeys from point to point on the lakeshore. Their bodies emitted acrid odors, which, mixing with the fumes of the lake, choked and dizzied him. He heard several of them call to him. "Yes, yes, dance with us -- " And he danced. He found an open patch of marshy soil and laid claim to it, moving forward, backward, covering and recovering his one little tract in his fervor. No nildoror trespassed on him. His head tossed. His eyes rolled. His arms dangled. His body swayed and rocked. His feet carried him untiringly. Now he sucked in the thick air. Now he cried out in strange tongues. His skin was on fire. He stripped away his clothing but it made no difference. Boom boom boom boom. Even now, a shred of his old detachment was left, enough so that he could marvel at the spectacle of himself dancing naked amid a herd of giant, alien beasts. Would they, in their ultimate transports of passion, sweep in over his plot and crush him into the muck? Surely it was dangerous to stay here in the heart of the herd. But he stayed. Boom boom boom boom, again, again, yet again. As he whirled he looked out over the lake and, by sparkling, refracted moonslight, saw the malidaror placidly munching the weeds, heedless of the frenzy on land. They are without g'rakh. They are beasts and when they die their leaden spirits go downward to the He became aware that glossy shapes were moving along the ground, weaving warily between the rows of dancing nildoror. The serpents! This music of pounding feet had summoned them from the dense glades where they lived. The nildoror seemed wholly unperturbed that these deadly worms moved among them. A single stabbing thrust of the two spiny quills would bring even a mighty nildor toppling down; but no matter. The serpents were welcome, it appeared. They glided toward Gundersen, who knew he was in no mortal danger from their venom but who did not seek another encounter with it. He did not break the stride of his dance, though, as five of the thick pink creatures wriggled past him. The serpents passed through and were gone. And still the uproar continued. And still the ground shook. Gundersen's heart hammered but he did not pause. He gave himself up fully, blending with those about him, sharing as deeply as he was able to share the intensity of the experience. The moons set. Early streaks of dawn stained the sky. Gundersen became aware that he no longer could hear the thunder of stamping feet. He danced alone. About him the nildoror had settled down and their voices again could be heard in that strange unintelligible litany. They spoke quietly but with great passion. He could no longer follow the patterns of their words. Everything merged into an echoing rumble of tones, without definition, without shape. Unable to halt, he jerked and twisted through his obsessive gyration until the moment he felt the first heat of the morning sun. Then he fell exhausted and lay still. He slipped easily into sleep. # Kansas City. I'd nearly emptied all the fluid from my gut sac. There were no weeds or water to fill it again. When the freight hit the outermost switching lines of the yards it was already dark. I rolled myself off the edge of the boxcar, hit running, went twenty feet fast and slipped, fell to my hands and knees and tumbled over. When I got up there were tiny bits of white chalk stone imbedded in my palms. I rubbed them off but they really hurt. I looked around, tried to gauge my position in relation to the town, and when I recognized the spire of the First Baptist, set off across the tracks in the right direction. A yard bull was running like crazy toward me, so I went dark and left him standing where I'd been, scratching the back of his head and looking around. It took me forty minutes to walk to the center of town, through it and out the other side, in the direction of Littletown -- the nigger section. There was a coal-bin entrance to the All-Holiness Pentecostal Church of Christ the Master, and I slipped inside, smiling. In twelve years they hadn't repaired the latch and lock. The stairs were dim in the basement darkness but I knew my way the way a child remembers his bedroom when the light is out. Across twelve years, I remembered. There were the occasional dim rumblings of voices from upstairs, from the vestry, from the casket room, from the foyer. Jedediah Parkman was laid out up there. Eighty-two years old, dead, tired, at the end of an endless road down which he had stumbled, black, poor, proud, helpless. No not helpless. I climbed the stairs from the basement, laid my white hand against the dry, cracked wood of the door and thought of all the weight of black pressing back on the other side. Jed would have chuckled. Through a crack in the jamb I saw nothing but wall opposite; I carefully opened the door. The hall was empty. They'd be moving into the vestry now. The service would be beginning. The preacher would be getting ready to tell the congregation about old Jed, what a good man he'd been, how he always had enough heart for the stray cats and deadbeat kids he picked up. How so many people owed him so much. Jed would have snorted. But I'd arrived in time. How many other stray cats had made it? I closed the basement door behind me, slid along the wall to the pantry door that opened into the small room adjacent to the vestry. In a moment I was inside. I turned off the light in the pantryin case I had to go dark -- then crept to the door in the opposite wall. I opened it a sliver and peered out into the vestry. Since the bombing the chapel had been unusable. I'd heard about it even in Chicago. Seven had been killed, and Deacon Wilkie had been blinded by flying glass. They'd made do the best they could with the vestry. Folding chairs were set up in rows. They were filled with the population of Littletown. They were two deep around the walls. One or two white faces. I recognized a couple of other stray cats. It'd been twelve years; they looked as though they were making it. But they hadn't forgotten. One hundred and eighteen. A few days ago -- I'd been in Kansas City -- there'd been one hundred and nineteen. Now the one hundred and nineteenth black man in Danville's Littletown lay in his casket, atop sawhorses, in the front of the room, surrounded by flowers. Hello, old Jed... Twelve, it's been... God, you're quiet. No chuckles, no laughs, Jed. You're dead.  know... He lay, hands folded across his chest. Big catcher' s-mitt paws folded, calluses hidden -- sweet Jesus, I could see flickering candlelight glinting off his nails. They'd manicured his hands. Old Jed would have screamed, doing a thing like that to a man bit his nails to the quick. Laying up in a shallow box, neat black patent-leather shoes pointing toward the ceiling; kinky salt-and-pepper hair flattened against the silk lining of the box (eighty-two, and that old man's hair still had black in it!); lay in his best suit, a black suit, clean white long-sleeve shirt and a yellow tie. On display. Looking down at himself, for sure, from the heaven he'd always believed was up there. Looking down at himself so fine and smiling -- puffing proud, yes sir! On each of his eyes a silver dollar. To pay his way with the Man, across the River Jordan. I didn't go in. Never intended to. Too many questions. Some of them might have remembered -- I know the other stray cats would have. So I just laid back and waited to talk to old Jed private. The service was a brief one. They cried a decent amount. Then it was over and they filed past slowly. A couple of women did the big falling down trying to get in the box thing with him. Christ knows what Jed would've done with that. I waited till the room emptied out. Preacher and a couple of the brothers cleaned up, decided to leave the chairs till morning, shut off the lights and went. There was silence and a lot of shadows, just the candles still doing their slow motion. I waited a long time to make sure. Finally I opened the door a bit more and started to step through. A sound came from the door to the outside, and I pulled back fast. I watched as the door opened and a tall, slim woman in black passed the chairs, walking toward the open casket. Veil over her face. My gut sac went total empty right then. Lining started to burn. I thought sure she'd hear the rumbling. Sprayed it with stomach juice and that would hold it for a while till I could get weed and water. Burned. I couldn't make out her face behind the veil. She walked up to the casket and stared down at Jed Parkman. Then she reached out a gloved hand toward the body, pulled it back, tried again and then held the hand motionless in the air above the cold meat. Slowly she swept the veil back over the widebrimmed hat. I drew in a breath. She was a white woman. More than just ordinarily beautiful. Stunning. One of those creatures God made just to be looked at. I held my breathbreathing would scare her away. She kept looking at the corpse, then slowly she reached out again. Carefully, very carefully, she removal the coins from Jed's dead eyes. She dropped them into her purse. Then she lowered the veil and started to turn away. She stopped, turned back, kissed her fingertips and touched the cold lips of the penniless dead one. She turned around and left the vestry. Very quickly. I stood unmoving, watching nothing, chill and lost. When you take the money off a dead man's eyes, it means he can't pay his passage to Heaven. That white woman sent Jedediah Parkman straight to hell. I went after her. I F I hadn't keeled over I'd have caught her before she got on the train. She wasn't far ahead of me but my gut was burning so bad -- I knew if I didn't get some grass or weeds into it I'd be in wicked shape. That happened once in Seattle. I barely got out of the emergency ward before they could X-ray me. Broke into the hospital kitchen, pumped about eight pounds of Caesar salad and half a bottle of Sparkletts water into my sac and wound up bareass cold in a hospital gown, out on a Seattle street in the dead of winter. Hadn't thought that for a second before I went over on my face, half a block from the Danville train station. Legs went idiot on me and over I fell. Had just enough sense to go dark before I hit. Lay there, a car might run me over. No idea how long I was out -- but not long. Came back and crawled on my belly like a reptile onto a patch of grass. Chewed, pulling myself on my elbows. Got enough in to get me up, staggered the half block to the station, fell onto the water fountain stuck on the wall. Drank till the stationmaster leaned way over the ticket window, staring. Couldn't go dark, he'd seen me. "You got business here, mister?" I felt the lava juices subsiding. I could walk. Went up to him, said, "My fiancf, you know, a bad fight, she come down this way -- " I let it wait. He watched me, wasn't giving away a little thing free. "Look, we're supposed to be married next Thursday -- I'm sorry I yelled at her. Half out of my -- well, hell, mister, have you seen her? Tall girl, all in black, wearing a veil?" Sounded like a description of Mata Hari. Old man scratched at the beard he'd sprouted since he'd come on at noon. "She bought a ticket for K. C. Train's 'bout to pull out." Then I realized I'd been hearing the whoofing sounds of the train all this time. When my sac goes, everything goes. I started hearing and smelling and feeling the grain of the ticket counter under my hands. And I bolted out the door. Train was just getting ready to slide -- express freight was almost loaded. Behind me the stationmaster was bellowing, "Ticket! Hey, mister -- ticket!" "Get it by the conductor." I vaulted up onto the coach platform. The train edged out. I pushed open the door to the coach and looked down the rows of seats. She was there, looking through the window into the darkness. I started toward her but thought better of it. A couple of dozen passengers were between her and me. I couldn't do anything here now anyway. I dropped into a scungy seat and puffs of dust went into the air. I slid down and took off my right shoe. The twenty was folded neatly against the instep. It was all I'd put aside. But I knew the conductor would be along to punch my ticket. And I didn't want to get caught like Jed Parkman. I wanted my fare to be paid. We'd see about it in Kansas City. It was a change. Riding inside. S HE went to a phone booth and dialed a place without looking up the number. I waited. She went out to stand in front of the terminal. After a while a car with two women came up and she got in. I went dark, opened the back door and slide in. They looked around and didn't see anything in the shadows back there. The heavy-set woman driving asked, "Now what the hell was that?" The pimply one with the plastic hair, seated in the middle, reached over the seat back and thumbed down the lock. "Wind," she said. "What wind?" the truck said. But she pulled out. I always liked K.C. Nice ride. Even in winter. But I didn't like the women. Not one of them. They drove almost to the Missouri border, toward Weston. I knew a bourbon distillery out there. Best ever made. The truck pulled in at a big house set apart from slummy-looking places on a street with only one corner light. Whorehouse. Had to be. It was. I didn't understand but I'd by God certainly find out soon. I'd arrived. But Jed was still traveling. T HE truck said, "You pay the girl." I picked out the tall, slim one in the harem pants and halter top. She couldn't be smart, I thought. With a face like that, to wind down in a crib was some kind of special stupid. Or something else. We went upstairs. The room was like any bedroom. There were stuffed animals on the bed, a giraffe with pink day-glo spots, a koala, a floppy gopher or muskrat -- I can't tell them apart. She had a photo of a movie star stuck in the frame of the bureau mirror. She took off the harem pants. I said, "We'll talk." She gave me a look I knew. Another freako. "That's two bucks extra," she said. I shook my head. "Five should cover everything." She shrugged and sat down on the edge of the bed, her thin legs straight out in front of her. We stared at each other. "Why'd you send Jed to Hell?" Her head snapped up on her neck and she quivered like a hound on scent. She didn't even know how to ask me. "You get the hell out of here!" "I've got five bucks worth of something coming." She bounced up off that bed and went straight across the room. She was screaming before the door was open. "Bren! Bren! C'mon, Bren! Help up here!" I heard the foundations of the house shake and the rumble of artillery on the next hill. Then something big and hairy came at me. He had to come through the door sidewise. I put up my hands and that was all. He carried me straight across the room, into the bureau. My back snapped against the edge of the bureau and he bent me till everything started to slip up toward the ceiling. The girl ran out, still shouting. When she was gone I ended it for him. There was a trellis outside the window. I went down until the ivy ripped loose and I fell the rest of the way. That night I slept on the'front porch of the house next door, in the glider, watching the ambulance and then the police cars come and go. Two unmarked police cars stayed very late. I don't think they were on duty. the front porch of the house next door. I'd have gone dark more than I did but there were three empty lots between me and the whorehouse and the people with the front porch had gone away for a while. I supposed on a winter vacation, maybe. There was plenty of weed and grass around and I let snow melt in an empty milk bottle. At night I'd go dark and steal Hydrox Cookies and milk and beef jerky from a twenty-fourhour market. I don't eat much, usually. Missed coffee, though. On the second day I jimmied a window in the empty house. Just to be ready. She came out toward evening of the second day. I went dark, waited on the sidewalk for her and she walked straight into my fist. In the empty house, I laid her out on a canopied bed in the master bedroom. I was slouched in a chair across from the bed when she came to and sat up. She shook her head, looked around, focused, saw me and started to let go with the screaming again. I sat forward in the chair and said very softly, "What happened to Bren -- I can do that again." She looked sick and shut her mouth. "Now we go back to where we were," I said, getting up. I walked over and stood near her. She lay back, terrified, no other word for it. "How did you know Jed?" My voice was level but I was hurting. "I'm his daughter." "I can make you tell the truth." "I'm not lying, I'm his -- I was his daughter." "You're white." She didn't say anything. "Okay, why did you send him to hell? You know what it means to take the money." She snorted a very shitty laugh. "Lady, you better understand something. I don't know who the hell you are. But that old man found me when I was seven years old and kept me alive till I was old enough to go it on my own. Now he meant stuff to me, lady, so I can see myself getting mad enough at you to do just about anything. More green than even Bren. So you feel like telling me why you'd do something like that to a man who was kind to everybody?" Her face went hard. Even scared, she hated. "And just what the hell do you know? Yeah, he had kind for everybody. Everybody 'cept his own." Then, softly, "Everybody 'cept me." I couldn't tell if she was sick or deluded or just putting me on. Lying? Not where she was. No reason for it. And she'd seen that Bren. No, she was telling the truth -- as she believed it to be. A white girl with old Jed for a father? It didn't make any sense. Unless... There are some you can meet -- the strange, twisted ones -- and you know them by an aura, a scent, a feel about them, that if you had one single word -- like "junkie" or "nympho" or "hooker" or "Bircher" -- a key word that labeled their secret thing, you would understand all the inexplicable, offcenter things about them. The oneword people. One word and you've got the handle on them. One word like "wino" or "diabetic" or "puritan" or -- "Passing?" She didn't answer. She just stared at me and hated me. And I looked into her face to see it, now that I knew what it was -- but it wasn't there, of course. She was good at it. And that explained what had been between her and old Jedediah Parkman. Why she'd kissed the dead meat and sent it straight to hell. But not the kind of hell Jed had consigned her to. If he'd had all that kind of love for stray cats like me I could imagine how strong his hate and frustration and shame would have been at one of his own pretending to be what she wasn't. "You never know about people," I said to her. "He took in all kinds and didn't care where they came from or what they were. Just as long as they didn't lie about it. He had a lot of love, that guy." She was waiting for me to do something bad to her, what she thought she had coming. I laughed, but not the way Jed used to laugh. Not that way. "Lady, I ain't your daddy. He's punished you all he's ever going to. And you and me, neither one of us is white and we're too much alike for me to punish you." Passing in the world. How about that. She didn't know what the color line even looked like. Black for white -- hell, that's a cinch. Jed, Jed, you poor old nigger bastard. Y ou knew I couldn't get home again and you taught me how to pass into this world so they wouldn't kill me. But you couldn't handle it when it happened to you. I pulled my last five bucks out of my pocket and tossed it on the end of the bed. "Here, baby, get it changed and keep a couple of silver dollars for your own party. Maybe J ed 'll be waiting and you can straighten it out between you." Then I went dark and started to leave. She was staring at where, I'd been, her mouth open, as I paused in the doorway. "And keep the change," I said. After all, she'd paid the dues for me, hadn't she?          New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to process! r    phyllisIueb They had one beautiful woman, one great brain and -- in a world afraid of dying -- nothing at all to lose! i T HE helicopter dipped down toward mountain peaks blue with shadow, hovered for a moment at the edge of the last light and sank into the dusk. Fenthree shivered. "Seven minutes to unloading," said the pilot. Fenthree peered uneasily into the deepening purple canyons. "I don't see O'Feary's light." "He won't show it while they're waiting for the bales." "Think they'll figure anything's up?" The pilot gave him a look, reached behind the seat and pulled up a bottle half-full of bourbon. "Here, warm your feet." Fenthree clapped a hand over his mouth. "No thanks," he murmured when he was able to control his gorge. "Hair of the dog never did me any good." "Really tied one on, huh?" "Farewell party." Fenthree carefully palpated the place under his breastbone where volcanic activity was threatening. "They must of thought you were going to Aldebaran." "I didn't tell them anything except that I was leaving," said Fenthree coldly, "so maybe they thought just that." If the pilot's question had been a leading one it would lead nowhere. The night was deepening at the horizon. To the southwest Fenthree could see a point of light and above it a mass of buildings black against the sky -- his destination. He shivered again. His firm knees caught a little on the skintight black jersey material that was no protection in mountain air. The fleabrains at HQ had not considered how cold the trip would be. Spies had always worn black jersey -- at least ever since anybody could remember. In his black jersey and with his wits and his weapons, Fenthree was going down into the unknown. He wished he were back home where the rotten day had started. T HE evening before he had staggered home from the farewell party, his fourth so far. Which girl he had brought with him -- or whether she had only been a figment of his delirium -- he did not remember. He had also forgotten to take a couple of necessary pills. In the morning, alone and repentant, he had sworn as he tried to lift a head full of fried brains from the pillow. He had rubbed his eyes half open, peered at the clock and reached to punch the chord on the keyboard that would allow him simultaneous possession of the kitchen and bathroom for twenty minutes. He paid a lot of rent for the twice-a-day privilege. At other times he used them singly. Right then they had been sealed and folded in some storage place in the vast building. He had wanted them both very badly. His erratic hand, reaching for the keyboard, had knocked the heavy-based lamp off the table and sent it crashing into the panel. A clap of broken vacuum had ensued and, before he had managed a breath, the kitchen sink had rammed him in the knees. He had opened his mouth to yell and a pot of scalding coffee had fallen from the vicinity of the ceiling, grazed his head and exploded on the carpet. Breath jerked out of him. He had rubbed his spattered arm and shoulder and gaped at the ruin of his rooms, half-collapsed into each other. He had seen no sign of the bathroom. A frantic phone call had assured him that the accident had jammed every keyboard in the building. A thousand tenants were howling for his blood. Four to five hours would be needed to unscramble the mess. He had rattled the receiver into the cradle and the airtube had spat a blue paper on his night table. The color had identified the document as the notice for his final briefing, the confirmation that the mission was really on after all the months of weekend training in dark cellars and dusty warehouses. Too much... He had sat hunched in bed, too numb to move, the painfully desirable smell of the coffee around him -- unreachable since every drop had blasted out of the pot. Later he had stared at his smeared and bloated reflection in the shining crater of the sink. It had looked the way he felt -- his head split like an arctic crevasse into icy depths of pain, his diaphragm heaving. He had wanted that bathroom -- at any rate, he had had the sink. Still later: "It is not a time for vanity." McAllifive, of Intelligence HQ, had folded his square hands and set his brow into lines of determination. "It is not a time for personal consideration." McAllifive'slips had belled and his bristle mustache had flared over them. "Nor for an individual's regard for danger. As a volunteer, Fenthree, you -- " McAllifive had paused, eyes blank, expression opaque. The Obligations Act had been passed many years ago and no one had volunteered for anything since. The force of habit and the glory of his own oratory had put him seventy-five years out of date. Fenthree had kept his face straight. To have smiled would have hurt his head. McAllifive had cleared his throat. He had picked up the thick sheaf of Fenthree's dossier and leafed through it. "I -- uh -- see you do list personal considerations." He had rubbed his eyes wearily. Perhaps he, too, had had a hangover. He had pressed a button and swiveled his chair. The horncolored, translucent wall behind him had cleared to a dull day's swirl of mist around eyries and aircar perches. He had said in quite a different voice, "We've got to find out -- quickly and quietly -- what we did wrong when we started rejuvenating. Or our world will fall apart. Rejuvenation seemed a good thing -- hardly anybody refused treatment. Soreheads moved to the colonies. Criminals were exiled to MaxSec to live out their natural spans and die. Life should be full of order and progress. We've got order, all right, but -- " he gestured toward the city of spires and machines -- "we haven't had a new idea for three hundred years. And sometimes I wonder -- was I ever really a boy, or was childhood just something I read about in Huckleberry Finn ! " lot. They were over the small floodlit area. "Duck." Fenthree crouched but he doubted he could be seen from below. The baled packages dropped. He poked his head up briefly and saw black figures converging on them. Next the 'copter was up again like a bird against the wind. "Now we have three minutes to find O'Leary." Fenthree pulled in his shoulders. Down there was the dark and the dark was unknown -- and could be dangerous. What did it matter what went on down there? His mind returned to his final briefing. McAllifive's words leaped to life in his brain, sharp and clear. There is something going on down there. MaxSec is nearly a self-contained community. It's not policed -- who could get away? All its internal affairs are run by the inmates. We drop supplies once a month by helicopter -- of course, you'd know some of this, eh? Fenthree had said nothing. You must know why you've been given intensive training over the past year. Fenthree had not known. No one had remembered to tell him. McAllifive had tried to remedy the omission. It's a situation that's ripened slowly. We've had steady radio contact with them. We were lucky to find a good man at their end, an old loser who's been there so long we had to go to quite a lot of trouble to find out why... What does intelligence think they're doing that's so dangerous? Your job to find out. I'll give you a list of the equipment they've asked for and you see if you can find out what they're trying to make with it. All we know, Fenthree, is that they're awfully lively and they're awfully busy -- but they don't talk much and O'Leary's afraid to ask too many questions. You know -- McAllifive's voice had taken on a touch of awe -- it doesn 't seem to bother them at all that they're no longer young and that they're going to -- uh -- die. And they have a cumulative weight of experience that we can 't match with our impaired memories. Without being treasonous, I have to admit that the J-process does impair the memory. Whom have they got there capable of planning anything? Oh they've got plenty who could make plans. Not many who could carry them out. Linnaeus Ganzer used to be there but O'Leary reported him dead nearly a year ago. Ganzer? But he invented the -- Don't let that influence you, Fenthree. The man was preaching sedition. You've got to keep a balanced mind on these things. Now -- who do they have in charge? -- oh yes, Corrigan. Pretty wily customer. Let's hope you won't have too much to do with him. Fenthree had stared, suddenly awake. You mean that's where I'm going? To MaxSec? Yes. Didn't I mention that? No. But go ahead... As I say, this Corrigan's a very -- What's he in for? Oh, he's a leper. Had to be isolated. What? Not now, Fenthree, not now. No need to worry. He was the last leper on Earth. Had the best minds working on him for five years. Developed three new vaccines and five new antibiotics. Lucky break, in a way -- really made us get the old gray cells working. Of course, he mutated a couple of new strains meanwhile -- but it's all cleared up now... But if he's cured, why is he still -- W e-ell, he's not much on looks, you know. Be rather out of place with us here, don't you think? I suppose so... Yes. Well, he's got a brain in his head, all right, and if I were you I'd avoid him like the -- I mean I'd be careful to keep out of his way. And the others? There's a bunch of toughs who used to call themselves the Tigers but I'd wager they won't give you any trouble. We pulled their claws for them. As for the rest, a misguided intellectual or two, more interested in their mush and milk than mischief now, I dare say -- and that's the lot. O 'Leary? O'Leary's quite -- well, far gone, and finds it hard to get around. But you won't have to have anything to do with him at all. You see, you'll be going down there disguised as O 'Leary and -- Disguised as O'Leary? How do you expect me to manage that? Oh, we'll take care of it. We'll have everything ready. You'll be fitted out very well. No need for you to worry. I'm sure. We promised him something for his trouble, so when we leave you we'll pick him up, bring him back and give him the treatment again. You'll stay there as O'Leary until you've found out what we want to know. What exactly do you want? New ideas, Fenthree, new combinations of ideas, new experiences. We'll get them any way we can. From a bunch of vicious, antisocial losers, lepers and anarchists? Why don't you just bring them here and ask them what they're doing? He had apparently uttered blasphemy. McAllifive had reacted strongly. Fenthree! All that we have built up here -- all that we have fought for and defended with our blood -- no, we can 't admit anything's wrong after sustaining MaxSec and the J for three hundred years. We must keep this secret. Now, here are some pictures O'Leary took with the camera we sent him. You'll go to Department Z.# and get your plan of MaxSec and the equipment and documents. Fenthree had picked up the top picture from the file. This is O'Leary? Uh -- yes. Fenthree had stared at the image of a wildhaired old troll, bloodshot eyes, ravaged face. Ugh. What do you think you'll be able to do for him? McAllifive had shrugged. Fenthree had licked dry lips. He had wanted more coffee and more sleep. He had tossed down the picture.  don 't want any part of this, sir. I want out. I have the privilege of asking for a sub, don't I? Fenthree, you are the sub. And if I refuse? You 'll be penalized. I suppose you 'll put me in MaxSec or publish my J-count? He had never admitted the number of his rejuvenations to anyone but it was on record, of course. Not necessarily. We will simply publish some confidential information from your dossier. I'm afraid it will add a blemish to your reputation. Fenthree strained his eyes in the darkness. He would be glad at least to get away from the din of the rotors. The pilot said, "If you're so sc -- I mean, not too anxious for the job, why didn't you ask for a sub?" "I know my duty," said Fenthree. The pilot choked. "Yeah. Now where the hell's O'Leary?" "He's supposed to show a light at the southeast corner of the fig tree grove." "That's where we are but there's no light." "Maybe he fell asleep under a tree." "Not when he knowshe'sgoing home. I'll go south a bit and circle back." But there was still no sign of a light on the second pass. "Let's go home," Fenthree suggested. "You crazy? I want to keep my skin in one piece. I'mcallingHQ." The pilot muttered into the set, listened and grunted twice. He turned to Fenthree. "They think he might be sick or something. We can't put it all off now we've gone this far. You're to go down and find out what happened. Call us on O'Leary's radio. If we don't hear from you in three hours we'll move in. Got it?" "Me? Go down just like that -- when nobody knows what's going on? Why don't they try the radio to get hold of O'Leary?" "We don't want to get the wind up. They talked to him this morning and he said he wouldn't call again except for an emergency. He didn't, so that's that. He must be sick." "If he were sick it'd be an emergency and he'd have called," said Fenthree. "He could be here any minute." "He isn't here now. MaSec brass might have caught on to him." The pilot grinned at Fenthree's expression. "Anyway, McAllifive says you're to go down. It's no use arguing. Just get ready." Fenthree readied himself numbly. He notched up the degrav -- the pack was snug and neat against the broad flat of his back and the straps were well fastened. Dull pain beat on the back of his head and he wished he had taken a swig. But it was too late. "Okay? Down you go." Fenthree crouched by the chute for a long moment, searching for a word. Only one seemed to cover the situation. He said it with appropriate expressiveness and fell. A IR rushed into the crevices of his body and heat fled through the mesh of his black jersey. He resisted the impulse to draw up his knees and conserve warmth at the risk of upsetting his balance as the soft whoosh of the degrav sent him tangling into tree branches. Angling his body, he avoided the whip and sting of twigs and got his feet on the ground -- here it was a little warmer. He looked up at the massed towers -- pricked with a point or two of light -- that bulked against the sky. Next he spent a minute poking about the gnarled trees, hoping for some trace of O'Leary. Nothing. Sighing, he unstrapped the degrav, reset it and sent it riding up its beam to the helicopter. He watched as it went up and as the helicopter diminished to a star and disappeared. He bit his lip. Why me? Why am I here trying to hold the world together all by myself? If the warm rich world he knew were rotting, why not let it rot? It would last as long as he. He tried to wrench his mind from his next thought but could not. Suppose the world should end first. He did not want to be around to see the end and that was why he was here. His training took over, overwhelming his hangover and his distaste. He moved in silence toward the buildings. He crept along narrow paths of kitchen-garden plots, smelling damp earth and 'fresh greens. He had not known such odors in many lifetimes. He crossed a courtyard flagged with hexagonal stones that would reflect heat to old chilled flesh under the sun; he stooped and touched them and felt a dying warmth. The moon was rising. Its light was heatless and inhospitable. He stopped in a recessed doorway, a black shadow in blackness, black gloves, black cowl over his head, and reflected wryly on his spy's terrain. High stone walls surrounded him and the sheer rockface fell away into canyons below. Where was O'Leary? II L UZ, patrolling the dark corridors of MaxSec, swung her lantern slowly as she walked. The lantern swayed like a censer, spilling dancing coins of light on the brick walls. Her face was expressionless under the cropped white poll she wore like a cap of point d'Alenfon and she was thinking of nothing at all. It was a difficult trick she had had a lot of time to learn and had learned well. She passed closed doors, some showing light through their transoms. At the end of the corridor she stopped at one that should have been dark and was not. She rapped lightly and opened the door. "Josefa?" A crone with a merry eye was sitting up in bed smoking a thin black cigarette. She stuffed something into her nightgown pocket with a trembling hand. "Early bird, ain't you?" she said. "Don't tell me about my beauty shleep. I'm waiting for my teef." "They're unpacking the fragiles now," said Luz. "If the impressions didn't get broken on the way out -- or the plates on the way in -- you should have them soon. I see you're already enjoying my cigarettes." Josefa hauled the box out of her pocket. "You should know me by now." She tossed the box. "Why don't you lock your door?" "I thought I could trust you, Josefa. Maybe I better give up." Josefa leaned forward anxiously"Luzh, you ain't gonna tell on me? Luzh? Not to Corrigan? He'll take away my teef." "Oh, Josefa." Luz tossed the cigarettes back on the bed, picked up the lantern and walked out. Down the stairs and along the hall she swung the lantern, scattered light, counted steps till she came to a cubbyhole that had been turned into an office. She turned off the lantern, hung it on a hook and punched a timeclock. Then she went down into the Common Room, found her chair in the corner, picked up her tatting and sat down. The silver shuttle spun light in her hands. Every once in a while she raised her eyes to the fire and the man standing in front of it. scattered coal into the fire and picked up his wine glass from the coffee table. He sipped, eased himself into his chair, sipped again and raised the glass to his line of sight. "Something classic about this," he said. "Looking at the fire through the wine. Perhaps that is what wines and fires were made for." "It's all dandelion's good for," said Dacosta. He broke open afresh pack of cigarettes without looking at the trademark of the City. "There are other things -- if one only had the ingredients." "Stop using the grapes for jam." "No, no, Jonno. As long as we import milk powder -- and .we have no cows -- what can we put on the bread?" "Grow more berries. Or give in and ask for butter. If we made wine and distilled it we might even end up with brandy." "I'm surprised, Jonno. I'd have thought you especially would want to be independent." "Not to the point of idiocy. You don't destroy aprison by making it an economically self-perpetuating community." "Depends on how you plan to destroy it." "You haven't told me. I assume you have the details figured out." Corrigan chuckled. "Bendetto?" Giovanetti blinked and pulled himself up in his chair. "I could have sworn the helicopter slowed down and circled to the south after it dropped the supplies." Giovanetti gave him a look. "Maybe he forgot which way is north." "Perhaps. But I think somebody ought to have a look by the southern wall." "Corrigan, I've got a lot of respect for you but the boys ain't gonna like having to beat up the grove this time of night." "Suppose our pilot forgot the cigars in the hold and decided to drop them in the figs rather than make you go without?" "I already got the cigars." But Giovanetti heaved his square chunk of a body out of the chair and padded off in his slippers, muttering. Dacosta laughed. "I've got a lot of respect for you, Corrigan," he aped Giovanetti. Corrigan rinsed his teeth in yellow wine and spat into the flames. "Of course you have, Jonno. If we did not all respect each other we would not have achieved what we have." figures approaching, armed with rakes and brooms. He ducked quickly through the doorway into the house. The place was dark and quiet. He waited with his ear to the door. Something's up... The people outside passed. He switched on his flash and saw a series of small rooms with freezer units, sinks, bins, ovens. He tiptoed along the tile floor past refrigerators, cabinets, humming freezers, deep bins that smelled of earthy potatoes and turnips. Ropes of braided onions hung on hooks, looking like huge undersea pearls in the beam of a diver's lamp. He saw troughs of flour and sugar, mortars of allspice, nutmeg and crumbled mint and sweet basil. He began to feel a little heady. He found the kitchen proper. It glowed faintly even in the dark with scrubbed white wood and enamel. He came to a narrow, winding, open stair and ascended it. He had not yet heard a sound or seen a light. Like a bat he sent out soundless waves of fear and curiosity -- these were absorbed in emptiness. The ceiling was high -- the floor was far below. Where he came from, six tiny expensive apartments would have been crammed in the intervening space. Squeezing his way from kitchen to bedroom in his amorphous City LivUnit he had not been able to imagine this kind of dwelling space. The stairway paused on a landing where it divided itself into two short flights of steps. He guessed the snare here. To the left was probably the women's wing, to the right the men's. A moment's use of his senses confirmed his guess -- faint traces of perfume came from his port side. He turned right. He was not going to be set upon by some old biddy who would yell the house down. He found himself in a corridor -- on this area he had found briefing in the material McAllifive had given him. He made a careful count of the doors on one side of the corridor. Luck and the base plan of MaxSec he had been given had brought him to the right building. He stopped at the fourth door, saw no light over the transom. Fenthree opened the door quietly and slipped inside. "O'Leary," he whispered as loudle as he dared. No answer. He crept across the room by moonlight and closed the drapes. Then he flicked on his pencil beam of light. The chairs, table, dresser in the room were clean and characterless. He opened the drawers, found socks, handkerchiefs, a few shirts, all marked with name tapes -- O'L. The bathroom was empty. Fenthree groped under the dresser and found the small secret radio taped on the underside. It had not been tampered with. He stood up, sweeping the room desperately with his flash, and found a sign -- a tissue-wrapped package on the night table. Carefully unwrapped, it turned out to be a complete set of false teeth. Fenthree had not seen such a thing for many years. He thought of the infirmary. If O'Leary were sick the infirmary was a possibility -- in fact the only one Fenthree could imagine. It would be located one flight up, according to Fenthree's information -- but that was as far away as the moon. Fenthree could don his disguise and crawl up there -- in the dark he had a fair chance. If O'Leary had an infirmary room of his own it would help. Fenthree had noticed a long flannel nightshirt in one of the drawers -- it might add a useful touch to his disguise if he made it upstairs. He unpacked the necessary articles and shoved the knapsack under the bed. He retained the black leotard because its pockets stored a small arsenal but he turned back the wrist and ankle cuffs. IJe pulled over his head a thin bilious skin equipped with a hairy chin mole, pocks and wrinkles. He added a white wig and a pair of badly overgrown eyebrows. He covered his hands with thin gloves, brown-spotted and deeply veined. They fitted perfectly. The image he found in the mirror nearly gave him back his hangover but he had to admit it resembled O'Leary. He shoved his feet into a pair of fleece-lined romeos he had found in the closet, dropped his flash into the drawer and quietly crept out. He sent up a fervent prayer that the two O'Learys would not confront each other in a populated area. The flannel nightshirt caught badly on his jersey, and he had to bunch it in one hand to maintain his bent, shuffling gait. Finding anybody in the City to teach it to him had been hard. He paused at the landing. The light there had been switched on. He was about to begin his ascent when he saw an old woman tottering down from the other wing. She also wore a nightshirt and was smoking a thin black cigarette. Her reaction to the sight of him confirmed his worst fears. Her eyes popped. The cigarette fell in a shower of sparks and she let out a piercing shriek. "Don't hurt me, O'Leary -- I didn't mean -- I'll never take anything again. Don't come near meeeeee-ee -- " Fenthree blinked at her. She dashed down the stairs, screeching, braids flying, nightgown billowing. New sounds began to churn below. Doors opened and slammed. It was time to run. Frenthree tried to dash up the stairs and stumbled as the nightgown tangled his legs. Voices rose. " -- think it could be -- " " -- kiddin'? Crazy old bat got into the dandelion -- " " -- dumb joker trying to scare -- " " -- better find out -- there he is!" Fenthree clawed at the nightgown, heaved at the bannister to pull himself up; gray figures followed the voices and piled after him, squeaking like bats. There was no fear in them. They were ripe for excitement and variety. "After him, boys, get him -- " "Get him for MaxSec -- " Fenthree yanked off his slippers and threw them. He tore at his nightshirt to get at the guns, but they were on him -- bats, ghosts, musty draperies -- they heaped on him, cackling. Half-stifled, he gasped, "Let me up, I'm only O'Leary -- " "That voice -- that ain't from here! Somebody's -- " They muffled him. The cold ridges of stone steps dug into his back. He was helpless. "A stranger -- a spy -- " they shrilled. "Whack him with the Shorter Oxford, Cranshawe!" "All right, boys, cut it," a dry voice said. The ghosts melted reluctantly. Fenthree was able to sit up. A thin, graying man in his forties was coming up the stairs. "Josefa found him on the landing, Dacosta." Dacosta grunted. "You look like O'Leary," he conceded. "Who are you?" Fenthree was busy rubbing his back and getting his breath. "Try and find out," hesnarled. "Okay," said Dacosta. "Sit on his head, Cranshawe." Fenthree was forced back again. An elbow was crammed into his mouth. Dacosta ran hands over Fenthree's body and removed the collection of weapons. "Hurry up, Dacosta. He bites." Fenthree would have bitten a lot harder but he had paid too much for his teeth to risk damaging them. "Move away a bit. I want to see his tattoo." Dacosta pulled away the black jersey over renthree's shoulder. "Hm -- wsFen#. I guess we'll leave that to Luz. Let him up." Fenthree spat a stream of words at Dacosta that nearly melted his teeth. Dacosta smiled faintly and said, "I see your face has got smarmed around." He pulled at the folds of skin on Fenthree's neck and gave a yank. Fenthree felt the cold sting of air on his sweated face. Dacosta nodded. "You're a Cit, all right. Take him down to the Common Room, boys. Corrigan will want to see this." mon Room. The cold stone floors were warmed by braided rugs. The chairs had knitted coverings. The room was big, comfortable and Fenthree might have found it pleasant had it not been a den of thieves and scoundrels -- old and crafty ones. He faced Corrigan across a coffee table on which stood a single goblet with one drop of golden liquid at the bottom. He licked his lips. Corrigan was a small man without a hair on him. Metallic scars and seams crawled over his skin and his blue-green eyes were opaque as turquoises set in Navajo silver. His face had only the slightest hint of the leper's characteristic leonine shape. He said, "I believe, sir, you have some explaining to do." Fenthree looked at the faces around him. The really old had been packed off to bed -- Josefa with a sedative for her hysterics, Cranshawe to nurse his bitten elbow. The ones confronting him now were not feeble. Corrigan, Dacosta and most of the others wore flinty expressions. None looked like mush and milk. He swallowed and said, "You won't get anything out of me." He had been well briefed in Statements Permissible Under Capture During Espionage Against A Foreign Power. "I wouldn't say that," said Dacosta. "We know you're a Cityman. And we have your tattoo." "Lot of good that'll do you." "My good man," said Corrigan, "you are not spying on the Venusian jBoq. We have a very competent registry here. Luz." A woman put down a piece of work and rose from a chair in the corner of the room. She was slender, dressed in dark slacks and a sweater. Her hair was white but still strong and smooth. Her narrow, aquiline face shifted between beauty and ugliness as it turned against the light. Her eyes were the color of the winedrop in the glass. She looked first at the number and then up into his face. In a moment she would know everything about him. His knees went weak. He did not want her to tell them what she would find in that register and he knew she would betray him. He bit his lip to keep from speaking. A trickle of blood ran down his chin. "A nice touch," said Dacosta. Luz said, "Don't be cruel, Jonno." She noted the number on a bit of paper and added: "You gentlemen may find that you have much in common." "I hope not," growled Fenthree. "I'll be back in a moment," Luz said, smiling. She left the room. Corrigan asked, "Have you and Dacosta ever met before?" "Until he sat on my face halfan-hour ago I never knew or saw him." Corrigan nodded. "Good. I hope any other statements you may feel obliged to make will be as transparently truthful." Fenthree's lips tightened. He had been trapped into giving Corrigan a control -- a series of gestures, expressions and inflections that went with an honest answer. Before he could open his mouth and put his foot in it again, Luz came back. She was gently leading by the arm a little old man in a flannel bathrobe. He had a winterapple face and silvery hair combed neatly in a quiff across his forehead. Fenthree gritted his teeth. He would have preferred torture. But the old man, catching sight of Fenthree, beamed in utter surprise and delight. "Why, Daddy," he cried, "I never thought I'd ever see you again!" Ill wick, Third?" Fenthree sat, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. He was flushing with shame, capillaries swollen purple under the smooth, lamp-tanned skin like strata to mark his age. Corrigan said dryly, "It's a wise child that knows its father. Don't you think so, Fenthree?" Dacosta said, "More likely the child's father to the man." "Please stop," said Luz. You're both talking like children." Fenthree lifted his sullen face. "Let them go ahead and laugh." Corrigan fitted a cigarette into a silver holder and shook his head. "Unfortunately for you, Mr. Fenthree, this is not a laughing matter. When the World Bureau decides to send a spy into a place like MaxSec something serious must be going on. Jonathan, I think you relieved Mr. Fenthree of several weapons." Fenthree dispiritedly watched his narco, his burner and his knife displayed on the table. He gave a start, then looked up and grinned at Dacosta, who shifted guiltily. "He's holding out on you, Corrigan. Ask him for the automatic." "Where is it?" Something so uncomfortable came into Dacosta's eyes that for a split second Fenthree was sorry he had spoken. Dacosta said in a low voice, "I want to keep it, Corrigan. In case I decide to put a bullet through my head." "Jonno, for God's sake -- " Luz had spoken without raising her eyes from the clenched hands in her lap. A short, stocky man in sneakers moved up and grabbed at Dacosta's shoulder with a heavy hand. Dacosta took the gun out of his pocket and laid it on the table. Then he left the room without a word. Corrigan picked up the gun, admired it for a moment, aimed it at Fenthree. "Perhaps you shouldn't have brought this to my attention, Mr. Fenthree, but it's too late to worry about that. How would you like to spend your last hundred and fifty years fertilizing the grapes in our vineyard?" Fenthree said steadily, "The World Bureau would blast you off the face of the earth." "More than likely," said Corrigan. "Do you think anyone here wouldn't agree it would be a good thing?" He released the safety-catch. "I don't want to die," Fenthree said. "Look, all I came here for was to spring O'Leary. There's no great secret to that -- or if there is I don't want any more of it. The City decided they'd been unfair to him. They were going to bring him out and give him the J again. The secrecy was because they didn't want to admit they weren't perfect. The disguise was in case I couldn't find him right away -- so I wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb while I was looking. As it turned out, I did stick out like a sore thumb and I still don't know why. But that's all it was," he spread his hands, "nothing more. Now," he added persuasively, "you don't begrudge O'Leary his freedom. I haven't done you any harm and you won't consider him much loss. So just let me get out of here with him and we'll forget this whole thing." "I'm afraid that's impossible, Mr. Fenthree." Corrigan's voice was gentle. "You see, O'Leary's dead." Fenthree's diaphragm buckled. Fear, hangover, disgust, regret piled on him. O'Leary had been going to go home, back to bright lights and gaiety -- and youth, if it could be managed. And he had died. But the eyes around Fenthree were not terrified. Perhaps death happened often here. "You didn't know why you stuck out like a sore thumb." Corrigan shook his head and sighed. "He died at noon today. Any fool could have realized it from the evidence -- except a Cityman." O NE of the other men spoke. He was tall, stout, had sunken eyes and his head was tonsured like a friar's. "Hell's bells, man, the fellow was two hundred and sixty-four years old. He would have fallen apart if he had lived another day." Fenthree murmured, "We'd have fixed him up -- " "Fixed what up?" Fenthree was silent, staring at O'Leary's face and hands lying collapsed on the floor beside him. They hadn't gotten the truth out of him at any rate. O'Leary'sdeath really had nothing to do with his mission. He raised his head. "You have no reason to keep me here, then." "We have an excellent reason." Corrigan smiled. "As an acknowledged secret agent you pose a delicate problem in the relationship between us and the City. You will make a good bargaining lever and we are delighted to have you for a guest." "Hostage, you mean?" "No. We couldn't let you go even if we wanted to. Hadn't we better say you're our guest? This place is not called MaxSec for nothing. What else could we do with you?" The short, chunky man grinned suddenly, showing yellow teeth. He drew a finger across his throat. Fenthree shivered, remembering McAllifive's promise to move in if he failed to get word in three hours. If McAllifive brought in force Fenthree's life would be instantly worthless. He had less than an hour to get back to O'Leary's radio. How? "Let's not make any jokes, Bendetto," Corrigan said. He added to Fenthree: "Of course you will be expecting someone to pick you up and -- ah -- O'Leary. The question is when?" Fenthree swallowed. He had to keep patching the fabric of deception, whether or not they could tell that he was lying. And he wanted them to know he was being protected -- but not so closely that they would kill him in their panic. He took a deep breath. "Tomorrow night, about ten." "Helicopters are rather noisy. How were they going to get past that one?" How are you going to get past it, Fenthree? "They'd have used an aircar. It can hold up to four people." Corrigan nodded, satisfied. "Then, sir, I can heartily wish you a good night's rest." "All right." Fenthree stood up wearily. He would have to get to a radio first but he really did need a good sleep. "Where's my cell?" "Cell?" Corrigan was shocked. "Don't misjudge us. You are already wearing O'Leary's nightgown. You might as well have his room. Tomorrow you will earn your keep. We do our best to be self-supporting here, you know. Goodnight." "Goodnight, Mr. Fenthree," said Luz. melody under his breath as he watched Fenthree being led out by Thorne, the tall man with the friar's haircut. "You think that story of his holds water?" Giovanetti asked. "Like a sieve. But it doesn't matter. No more throatslitting gestures, please, Bendetto. We'll do our best to make sure he doesn't find out anything but we'll treat him gently. We don't want to scare our little lamb. Speaking of lambs -- where are the Tigers?" "Down in the drains. The water conduit out of the converter sprang a leak. You think they'll make him jumpy?" Corrigan smiled dreamily. "You like the gun, Bendetto?" "Yeah." Giovanetti had picked it up and was turning it about. It was a live thing in his hands. Light seemed to glow rather than reflect from it "Ain't had one of these in a long time." His eyes met Corrigan's; he grinned. He slipped the gun into his pocket and stood up. "Too bad O'Leary had to kick off." "Yes, after doing such a good job. It would have been useful to have had a spy in the City." U nderground, in a passage gouged out of solid rock, the Tigers were working in the drains and grousing about the cold and damp. Attila poked Blooey in the shin with the toe of his gumboot. "Get that light up there. Think I got X-ray eyes?" Blooey raised the light and Attila went back to work with his torch, muttering, "Do it all ourselves, Corrigan says. Gotta be independent, says Corrigan. Corrigan can come down and weld his own goddamn pipes." Blooey made no pertinent comment. He knew Corrigan was the nearest thing to a deity Attila would ever acknowledge. "Can't you hurry, Attila? My arm's nearly falling off." Attila wiped his face on the crook of his arm. "Shut up an' gimme light." "Somebody's coming. It's not the guys -- they're down the other end." "Now what?" Attila lowered his arms and turned off the torch. "Who's that?" "Me," said Giovanetti. "You nearly through?" "I was gonna knock off in a minute," Attila said. "Why? You come here to give us a hand?" "Yeah," said Giovanetti. He pulled out the gun. "Corrigan wants you in the tank." "What?" "Don't drop the light." His thumb flicked off the safety catch as Attila grabbed the lantern from Blooey. "Get it up, Attila. And the other one." Attila raised both hands, one holding the lantern. His coal-black eyes sparked with points of light. "Whose idea was this?" "I told you. Corrigan said." "He wouldn't do this to us." "Don't believe me. Just get going. And don't warn the others. I want them too." When the Tigers were all locked in Giovanetti thumbed on the safety and dropped key and gun into his pocket. Attila grabbed the bars. "I'll get you -- and whoever's in with you." Giovanetti shook his head resignedly. As he was leaving, Blooey called, "Hey, Benny, don't forget to turn the water back on." "I won't," said Giovanetti. "What'd you tell him that for?" Attila snarled. "We need water too, don't we? Who do you think put him up to it?" Attila muttered, "That bitch Luz, they'll do anything -- " "You shouldn't put her down just because she won't look at you," Blooey said. Attila pushed him sprawling into a bunk. "Why don't I shut you up for good?" Blooey picked himself up. "Because I run and fetch for you. Nobody else would. I stick with you guys because you're the only ones who remember what it was like in the old days -- but that don't mean I have to go scared." Attila oiled his knuckles on an olive cheekbone. "Somebody's gonna go scared when I get outa here." button whispered inFenthree's ear. "Yes, I have definite information," Fenthree said in a low firm voice. He was curled up under the covers, cradling the radio with his body. "O'Feary's dead. He smiled grimly. "Died of old age." He listened with concentration to the silence at the other end. Then: "Did you meet Corrigan?" "Yes, I met him." "Watch out for him. He's a tough nut." "Yeah. I found that out." "How did you handle him?" "Handle? I was the one who got handled." McAllifive grunted. "I suppose we'll have to contact them from here and work out a deal." "Not unless you want my throat slit. They haven't touched this radio and I don't think they know about it. If they find out it'll mess up everything. Wait until they get in touch with you. I told them you'd made plans to pick me up tomorrow night at ten -- so don't make me out a liar. They play for keeps." "It's not likely we'll be able to pick you up that soon -- but of course we'll make some arrangement. If they accept your story there's no reason why you can't go on as planned." "That's what I thought," Fenthree mumbled. "Don't worry. We'll get things fixed up. Meanwhile, find out what you can. We must have that information. Remember how much depends on it." Fenthree muttered something he hoped was unintelligible and signed off. He hid the radio -- it was all he had to connect him with the outside. They had taken everything else away -- his equipment, O'Feary's false teeth and handkerchiefs -- everything but the black jersey, now hanging empty and resourceless over a chair. And the nightgown. He composed himself as best he could in his nonfolding bed, between nondisposable sheets, with uncollapsible walls around him, and succumbed to gloom. For Corrigan to have accepted a story as idiotic as Fenthree's, he would have to be stupid or have something big up his sleeve. Fenthree did not think Corrigan was stupid. Ill Sec, in what had once been a guard-tower, a struldbrug named Linnaeus Ganzer, still quite alive in spite of O'Leary's report to the City, labored through the night, covering page after page with a fine Spencerian script. His face was sharply eroded, with nothing loose about it except the eyelids, and while he had plenty of hair on his head, the texture was so fine with age that his scalp shone through, pink and ivory in the lamplight. He was wearing a gray woolen suit with sagging pockets and, as he paused to consider a point in sentence structure, a chime came from one of them, pealing faintly in a sweet melancholy fall of Mozart. He fished out a platinum watch with Gothic numbers. "Six o'clock," he said aloud. "Evening or morning?" He glanced out through the window but the twilight sky told him nothing. He turned back to the page... this is very nearly the conclusion of my account of these proceedings... Three hundred and fifty years of practice ought to do something for a man's style. In my account of these proceedings this is... Try again. This is very nearly the end -- That was true enough. He crossed out words neatly and wrote corrections in tiny letters as perfect as the rest. His readers might laugh at his fussiness -- and then again, they might not. This is the last -- The last will and testament of that damned old fool Linnaeus Ganzer. Cankered in mind, corroded in body, I give, devise and bequeath -- what? He sighed, laid down the pen and leaned back in his chair. Evening or morning, he was tired. A framed statement above the desk returned his empty stare: The human body is so (rightly) ephemeral and corruptible in its nature and the human mind so (unfortunately) shortsighted and unelastic in its texture that to tease them out together through century after century is obscene. A damned uncouth sentence. He was glad he had not written it. But it was there because he had caused it and its writer would never know he had been so honored by Linnaeus Ganzer. He put his hand into his pocket and clasped the fob of his watch. It was a lucite globe in platinum claws, enclosing one single golden drop from the first batch of Juvenix, the hormone derivative that was still the basis of the J-treatment. The lab had presented the watch and fob to him and another to his co-worker Aino Kokkinen, who now held his clasped between skeleton hands under the roots in the vineyard. Whatever possibilities of pain were left to Linnaeus Ganzer rose in a climax of regret. He and Kokkinen had been joined by more than friendship and profession. Their sons and daughters had played together as babies and some had joined in marriage to give them common grandchildren. Like a couple of old trees with mingled branches they had dropped a hundred descendants. Until after two hundred years of J, when the birthrate had almost stopped, they looked around and began to ask questions. Principally about the World Bureau's use of the J. One night they had stayed up until dawn, making a decisionmiddle-aged men two hundred and fifty years old. It had been a night of scattered papers, littered stubs, coffee cups -- a night to remember; Linnaeus Ganzer preserved it in memory. Also its consequences. A week later they had both found themselves in MaxSec. MaxSec itself hardly made any difference to them. They were such intense workers that all their lives they had scarcely noticed their surroundings. Their wives were dead. Their families were dispersed. The two men took up scattered projects they had put aside many years before and set to work, quite satisfied to age and die. But the J played them a cruel joke. They had used themselves as experimental subjects so often, taken so many treatments, that they were able only to grow old. Without mechanical aids to stimulate regrowth of flesh and skin their blood freshened itself and their senses sharpened, while bone crumbled and healed falteringly and flesh shriveled in dry air and desert sun. It seemed they would never die. One morning, after they had stayed talking once again late into the night, Linnaeus awoke to find Kokkinen stabbed through the heart with a paper spike. His note said simply, "My dear friend, I have had enough." The climax of pain broke in Linnaeus Ganzer but he had no tears and no relief. A door opened. He heard shoes, thick with cobbling. The sky was paling. It was morning and Josefa had come to bring him breakfast. in the closet and breathed hard, wishing he were back home where maid service was mechanical. Still, he was in pretty good shape for a Cityman. McAllifive had seen to that. He looked through the window to the south. It was a clear sunny morning, like every morning here. MaxSec was an artificial oasis in the midst of an eternal desert. He enjoyed the sight of the sun on the gnarled fig trees that looked so much like the men who tended them. The gardens were green and fresh and the air was pure blue and gold, not sodium yellow and fluorine blue. He sighed again, longing for something -- breakfast, perhaps. "Come on, Fenthree, get busy," a harsh voice called. Fenthree picked up a broom and went on. stop and gave him a jug of yellow wine and the run of the Quadrangle. He sat alone in the blue dusk, admiring the jug and putting off for a moment the pleasure of pressing its cool lip to his. He was trying to sort out his impressions of the day. He had learned a lot about physical labor. He looked up at the walls around him. Lights flickered off and on as the younger inmates settled the very old for the night. He had been exempted from this task but not from any of the others. He had spudded beets, snipped snapbeans, popped peas, pushed wheelchairs in the sun and made himself lovable by chucking the chins of old ladies sent to MaxSec for hustling uncounted years before. And he had listened. He had heard cries through closed doors, the old who died with terrifying slowness because they had been withdrawn from the J. He had thought he had heard the same noises during the night but had forgotten them in the morning because he had slept so well in the clear air. He shivered in the black jersey sweat had soaked and dried on many times in the last twentyfour hours. He reached to uncork the wine, recalling other voices he had heard and recorded on the palimpsest of his brain. "Oh yes, we used to have guards," Corrigan had said. "But I'm afraid our age made them nervous and their youth annoyed us. And there's nothing to guard here, as you can see. We sit in the sun like lizards. Our passions have evaporated..." Fenthree had stared down the beanrows at Dacosta, who had been gathering weeds for incineration. In case I decide to put a bullet through my head... Corrigan had noticed the direction of his glance and had smiled. "Mr. Dacosta is our devil's advocate, a living rebuttal for any argument." Fenthree had thought of the short burly man, Giovanetti, and his throat-slitting suggestion. He had kept his mouth shut. Ivy on the walls, rugs to warm the floors but no soft flesh to cover the bones. The City had everything and these people had nothing but horror and death. Ah, but they had long powerful memories and hundred-year-old resentments. "We have a pipeline to the ocean," Corrigan had said. "And we have a still -- and converters that let us reuse water, of course -- " "Yeah, and we did all our own digging and pipe-laying and cast all the metal in our own forge," Dacosta had said. "Now, Jonno, no jokes. Mr. Fenthree is here on serious business. We grow fruits and vegetables and we keep chickens and pigs-" "I'm afraid I'll have to modify that." Luz had laughed from the shade of her straw sunhat. "We import a lot of meat extracts and cook the vegetables with them. We can't slaughter animals every day. We're still pretty dependent on the City." "That will be changed in time," Corrigan had said. "You're looking rather tired, Mr. Fenthree." "No," Fenthree had said. He plucked at the black jersey. "Just tired of this spy syndrome. I brought a uniform with me. Couldn't you let me have it?" "My goodness, I think it must have got into the laundry," Corrigan had said. "I don't know what we can find for you. We had no time to prepare, you see -- but you're about Dacosta's height. Perhaps you could borrow something from him." Fenthree had glanced over at Dacosta's rigid back. "Thanks. I'll manage the way I am." T HE Quad was cool enough. He was sitting on the ledge of a stone-rimmed pond where an imported frog on a carefully nurtured lily-pad was croaking in deep bass. He had eaten well and had bathed his tired body and aired out his clothes. He was feeling physically satisfied in an unfamiliar way. He was about to take his first swallow from the jug when the word "import" buzzed into his head again like a bee out of honey. We import a lot of meat extracts and... Mentally he consulted McAllifive's list. Live locusts, for instance -- did they eat them with the honey taken from the hives of their imported bees? Fragments of thought began to gather but before they could fuse a door in the wall opposite opened and someone came out. The someone was Luz. She was wearing the coarse blue dress and sandals she had worked in during the day. She came, hands in pockets, not hurrying, singing softly to herself. His thoughts scattered. She sat down beside him. He looked at her pathetically. "Don't tell me I forgot to wring out the mop." She smiled. "You did very well. We're always glad to have an extra hand." "I haven't had experiences like these since I was a kid -- and that was a long time ago." "Then I guess your trip hasn't been too much of a loss." "Certainly not -- not with you here." He sensed the feather touch of danger and here and now it stimulated and amused him. He asked on a crazy impulse, "Luz, why do you think so many people in the City lose their memories?" "Lose their memories? Do they?" "Many people who've had a lot of J treatments seem to." "I don't know why. I don't see why they should. I haven't lost any of mine." He was contrite. "I'm not snooping. I've just wondered." "Maybe people are scared the memories will date them when they're so desperate to stay young. They start by suppressing recollections and end up forgetting what it is they want to remember." "As simple as that? It's hard to believe. You think people can remember anything they want -- no matter how long they've lived?" She shrugged and looked away. "I told you -- it depends what you want to remember, Fenthree." After a moment he said awkwardly, "I've got this jug. You're welcome to share it." She shook her head. He swigged. He gave a convulsive shudder, spat, swabbed his mouth on his sleeve, coughing. "What the hell is in here?" "Dandelion. We use the grapes for jam." "Aagh! You ought to call it Max, sec." "You'd get used to it if you were here long enough," she said without pity. "We don't have much sugar to spare. And we don't have many orgies here anyway." "And nobody to sit out and enjoy the stars?" She glanced up at them. "Nearly everybody here hashad about thirty thousand of these fine starlit nights. They're all the same." She turned to him. "What are you in the City, Fenthree?" He stared at the disappointing jug with an offended expression, sighed and firmly tamped it. "I code a computer to write children's books." "Good grief, I didn't know there still were children." "Oh yes. Our sector has the highest birth rate in the world. We have a hundred, enough for a school." "I thought you were always a -- a special agent." He snorted. "Not when I can help it. I work at the Data Center and sometimes the kids come around in bunches and I show them how it works. I kind of like it." He grinned. "Do I sound like a goody-goody?" "No, Fenthree, not in the least." She was looking at him so steadily that he began to feel uneasy. He said lightly, "What are you in MaxSec?" She shrugged. "Number Seven-one-eight-four one. Female Caucasian. That's enough for you to know, isn't it? " "Yes. I like things simple." He put his arm around her without awkwardness or hurry and found her mouth with his. IV ed into the microphone. "They never let me out of sight. It's a damn farce." "Well, keep your ears open." He had kept his ears open, all right. He thought of the peaceful croaking of the frog and of Luz whispering in the moonlight -- but it was nothing to call home about. And Luz's explanation of loss of memory, though it had seemed reasonable enough in the Quad, would not impress McAllifive under the hard lights of HQ. Nor could he possibly convey the shapeless fears and suspicions that washed around him. "Don't waste any more time," the voice rasped on. "This is costing us money." "I've got calluses to show I've been earning my keep," Fenthree snapped. He lowered his voice quickly. "Did they contact you?" "Urn, they want a deal in drugs and medical equipment. And no reprisals. It looks clean enough. I guess we'll have to give it to them." "When are you picking me up?" "Oseventhree-o, Thursday. Keep up the good work, Fenthree." Fenthree lay back and eased his well-used muscles. Thirty-two more hours. He was going to ask for a hell of a long holiday if he got out of this place alive. L UZ was sitting by her window, watching the moon. Because the window fronted the abyss it was fitted with a grille of welded metal rings. Their shadows drew picots of blaok lace on her meerschaum skin. She was thinking bitter thoughts about disorder and change. Once she had longed for change -- now she hated it. Even the moon was growing old and scarred from the blasting of rockets. Across the room Dacosta stirred and sat up to rest his arms on his knees. She glanced at him. He was thin. His veins and muscles were ridged and his skin was so transparent over them that he looked like a flayed man on an anatomy chart. He said, "You're far away tonight, Luz -- " and added from some bitterness of his own: "Farther than usual." "Lots of things have been happening. I can't help thinking about them." "Corrigan has his plans." "If he has he doesn't discuss them with me." "Doesn't he? I saw him giving you the eye to meet Fenthree accidentally by the lily pond." "Oh. And you hovered around looking out for me the whole time, I suppose?" "No, damn it. I have a little decency left -- even after being here fifteen years." "I don't want to quarrel with you, Jonno. What's bothering you?" "I want to know what's going on. Corrigan would like to break up the whole system -- MaxSec, the City, everything. But he's never said how he intends to go about it. The way he talks about being independent and self-supporting you'd think we were ready for liftoff on our way to Alpha Centauri. And it's pretty funny that a spy drops in all of a sudden and everybody goes around grinning as if they'd been expecting him for months." "You're making things up out of nothing. Fenthree is no reason to get the wind up." "Corrigan thinks so. He's cooking something up, and it doesn't smell good. It's dangerous. And you've been hanging around with him and the others." "All right." She looked away. "Suppose he has got a good idea. Maybe there's something in it for me." A moment's silence ensued and she heard him swallowing. "Why do you stay with me, then? Why not go after Corrigan and Giovanetti and the Tigers?" She sighed. "Maybe I remember the saying about needing a long spoon when you eat with the devil. Or maybe -- maybe I love you." "Don't tell me you love. I've been eating their dirt for fifteen years because you let me come to you -- but you don't trust me any more than they do -- and whatenough to make up for that." "I want to trust you. I've never meant to let Corrigan come between us. I have to have somebody -- " She took a quivering breath. "All right. Corrigan thinks he'll find a way -- he's made Ganzer try to find a derivative of the J. Not the original Juvenix but a hormone to -- to reverse the aging process, not just retard it like the J does. I don't know how. And it's not the only thing. He wants something that will prevent the J from working -- that will neutralize it. That's why Fenthree's here. O'Leary fished him out for us because Corrigan wanted a test subject. It could be years before we find out whether Ganzer's thing will work -- but we have the years." Dacosta had risen and was moving restlessly about the room. "Can Ganzer do all this?" "Corrigan thinks so." He sat down on the bed again. "But he's mad." She was looking through the grille, down into the canyons where the moon shadows moved like clock hands. "I don't know whether he's mad or not. I think he can pull it off." "Even if Ganzer's able to make the stuff, which I doubt, what the hell does Corrigan think he's doing, setting himself against a world full of young men?" She pressed her face against the cold metal. "He's smart, Jonno. He knows what he's fighting. And if the neutralizer, the anti-J, works, it's a powerful weapon." "Girl, you've sure knocked the breath out of me. You -- the woman I've known and -- and loved for fifteen years. You'd go along with him? No matter who got hurt -- because there might be something in it for you?" "Look, you wanted me to tell you and I did. Please, Jonno, go to bed and get some sleep. I know every move in this scene." "Do you?" Furious, he reached out and jerked her around. He grabbed the twist of hair that grew at her nape and pulled backward until her throat tightened and strained. "Do you?" "Don't," she whispered. "Please, I-" "You think-" The words fell away. For the first time in all the years he had loved her he saw the fine white, faintly puckered scar that crossed her throat from ear to ear. He let her go. Inconsequentially he remembered the thread of blood on Fenthree's chin. She bent her neck over the scar. "I was on narcotics. Popular stuff. They caught me and took me off cold. I couldn't sweat it out. They patched me together. Two months later they passed the law for treated withdrawal. But I was in here and it was too late." She covered her face with an edge of the sheet. "I'm finally getting old. You've never had the J and you don't have to be in here. Maybe you don't care -- but I don't want to be old. I don't want to turn into something horrible like Josefa. I don't want flesh hanging like hens' wattles or moles on my chin with bunches of hairs coming out of them. I don't want brown spots on my hands. I want time to stop -- I can't bear it -- " He said, "I've never thought of time when I've been with you, Luz." "I never forgot it." She wiped her eyes. "Please -- don't tell anybody. Corrigan would kill me if he heard I let it out." "You had to say that and you were supposed to be trusting me -- you couldn't know I wouldn't tell." He dressed quickly and left. The moon swam in a dolphin's arc overhead and the shadows of the grille slid gently off her body and caught up the braided rug on the floor in colored circles of light. Still trembling inside, she tightened her flannel bathrobe and slipped out of the room and down the corridor. L innaeus ganzer scratched on. Forgive the garrulity of age while I make the point clear. You have told me so many times that all you want is simple justice. An old schoolroom tag of Horace says that justice with a limp will overtake the wing-footed felon. But justice with a limp is not simple! Think what twisted passions may burn in that maimed body. A knock came at his door. He looked up irritably. His concluding passage was stretching unconscionably and he longed to be done. He consulted his watch. It was not time for breakfast. He called, "Come in." His voice sounded unused even to himself. He had spoken little since Kokkinen died. The door opened and Luz came up the tower steps. He put down the pen and said nothing. He had used up all forms of greeting. She sat down on his footstool and put a hand tentatively on his knee. "Tell me, Luz." "When I first came here and wanted so badly to be dead -- you, were the first person I'd ever met who truly saw humanity, people as they were. As they are." "I'm not the only one you trust now, am I, Luz?" He lifted her chin. "Please tell me I'm not." "You're the keystone here." His bones leaped under her hand. "Everything depends on you. Can you swear to me that what we're doing is right?" "No, I can't. I do my best to see things clearly but I'm not my own judge. I have to struggle with moral problems like everyone else." "I've done bad things -- but they were the kind that could hurt only me. This scares me." "The decision was yours also, Luz. And the weight is also on you." "You've lived all those hundreds of years -- is that the only answer you can give me?" He touched her hand with his dry fingers. "If I had a better one I wouldn't be in MaxSec." After the door had closed on her he muttered, "Damnation," and went back to his conclusions. He was stung. Is that the only answer? It was the only one he could give her now. In a few hours she might have a better one. And his heart gave a little rueful stab of pain -- because she loved him. find himself with nothing to do during the afternoon. He had been kept busy enough in the morning -- and usually the ablebodied carried on during the siesta -- but Corrigan had told him at lunch that the ransom terms had been agreed on and, with a gracious gesture, given him the rest of the time off. Fenthree would have liked to have shoved Corrigan's graciousness down his throat but he had accepted the gift. He was sure Corrigan was hoping to catch him spying. He intended merely to stay in his room and try to fit together the bits and pieces of his puzzle. And they were only bits and pieces. He had nothing substantial and that was a cause for worry. He badly needed something to tell McAllifive or he would be in for it. These people knew his motives, he was sure, and they were playing games with him. Deadly ones. And it seemed impossible for him to learn the rules. He was walking down the corridor to his room, thinking hard, when he heard the howling he had learned to recognize as the mindless call for death of some J-trapped creature. As he passed the open door from which it came, a voice said, "This is too much. If Ganzer doesn't hurry up with that damn -- " Fenthree paused to gape through the doorway. But Ganzer' s supposed to be dead. Thorne, the tall man with the friar's fringe and the black rings under his eyes was in the act of helping another man pull a bloody sheet from under a stick-thin body on the bed in the room. Thorne glanced over his shoulder, straightened and turned. Fenthree and Thorne exchanged looks of perfect recognition. Thorne recovered first. "Hullo, Fenthree." Fenthree nodded toward the man on the bed. "I'm sorry-" "Yes. Can't do much for some of these poor devils." He bunched the sheet, tossed it into a corner and came out into the hall. "I say, Fenthree, would you mind letting me have a look at your teeth?" Fenthree blinked. "Are you a dentist?" "No, a doctor. We have to double up." Fenthree opened his mouth uneasily. Thorne tapped at one tooth with a tongue depressor, gave another a tweak. "Hm -- marvelous work. Wish we had some of your equipment." All the while the eyes bored into him from the dark recesses of their sockets. They were the most sinister Fenthree had ever seen. "Terrible situation here, you know. Ill-equipped, understaffed -- " "I thought Corrigan expected to change all that." "Hardly think so. Hardly think we can get that far. We're quite helpless." Thorne looked at the tongue depressor absently for a moment and closed his fingers around it. It crunched. With the air of one who has completely rectified an awkward situation he dropped the pieces into his pocket, smiled at Fenthree and went back into the room to bend over the man on the bed. "How are you, old cock?" Fenthree slipped quietly into the first room whose open door showed it to be empty. He wanted a few minutes to pull himself together. Ganzer was alive. The fact made O'Leary a liar. He had probably been told to lie. Why would they want to say that Ganzer was dead? Perhaps so they could experiment quietly. Hadn't the juvenile hormone first been extracted by Ganzer? What was the old devil working on now? If Thorne mentioned the little encounter of a moment ago to Corrigan, Fenthree was as good as dead. Corrigan would realize what conclusions could be drawn from it. Fenthree glanced around the room. It was nothing like O'Leary's. The bed was sloppily made. A bathrobe dangled over the open closet door, a pair of scruffy slippers beneath it. Papers, books, ashtrays littered all horizontal surfaces. A small filing cabinet on the dresser caught his eye. It was Fenthree quietly closed the door to the corridor. He had found an occupation for the afternoon. , V T HE file had no particular system. It was stuffed with scribbled notebooks and printed political tracts headed by admonitory exclamations in red letters. One bound book with a gaudy cover design snagged his attention. It was splashed red and black, handbound in rough rag paper that must have come out of the scrapbags at MaxSec. Tiny letters in The text was a copy of a typeFenthree grinned. He could imagine Dacosta versus all the peoples of the world. But there ought to be at least some solid information in the file -- perhaps enough to give him a line on how Dacosta was involved in things here. He began to flip the pages. The book fell open, highlighting a statement circled in blue crayon: The human body is so (rightly) ephemeral and corruptible in its nature and the human mind so (unfortunately) shortsighted and unelastic in its texture that to tease them out together through century after century is obscene. He shivered. He was damned glad that mind was not running around the City. But for the moment ;he was shut up with it. He began to close the book and paused. There must be something here that could help him -- he could not be fool enough to let repugnance deter him from finding it. He began to leaf through the text again and in a few minutes became so involved in an abstruse legal passage that he realized too late that the door had opened behind him. The cowl of his tunic was grasped from behind and twisted and a kick in the back of his knee buckled his legs beneath him. "Get your dirty hands off it." He dropped the book as he went down, chopped at the fist that was holding him. The grip loosened and he sat down suddenly. Dacosta stood over him, breathing hard. Dacosta rubbed at his wrist, then picked up the book and dusted it off with his sleeve. Fenthree felt his throat tenderly, took a couple of deep breaths and matched Dacosta's glare. "You'd better get up. I want to finish this." Fenthree rested his hands on his knees. He was not afraid of a fight. But what would fighting Dacosta gain him? "Finish what?" "I'll listen to whatever excuse you've got ready. Then I'll answer that." Fenthree stood up. His black jersey, a sovereign collector of lint, had already gathered so much he didn't even bother to brush it off. He took another deep breath, used it to lie. "My superiors want to make MaxSec a better place. Part of my job is to find out what the people here are like -- what they think and how they act on it." "As you were demonstrating with Luz by the lily pond." Fenthree flushed. "If I'd known we had an audience I'd have put on a better show." Dacosta's eyes glittered with impulsive malice. "What happened wasn't Luz's idea, Fenthree. Corrigan put her up to it." Fenthree said, "Then I'll be sure to thank him for it when I leave tomorrow. I envy you. Dacosta. You're going to stay here with her." "You've been taking lessons from Corrigan, I see," said Dacosta. His tone was not hostile. "Can I ask a question?" "Go ahead." "That stuff -- " he pointed to the file with its sheaves of inflammatory anti-J leaflets -- "is that why you're here?" "No." Now Dacosta reddened. "But that trial, all the testimony -- " "You didn't read far enough," Dacosta said bitterly. "If you had you'd have seen that the case was laughed out of court. When everybody's young and happy about it how can a damn fool preaching that old age and death are necessary parts of life convert anybody? In the end there was nothing to convict me of." "But Ganzer was sent here for that -- " "That was a hundred years ago. Nobody gave a damn by the time I started." He shrugged. "I renounced the City. I came here on principle." "And you didn't have to come?" "No. Go on, Fenthree. You've got the laugh on me now. Take it." "No." Fenthree thought of the transcript in its gaudy cover, binding withered leaves. Martyrs were not made of such stuff. If history were ever written from the point of view of MaxSec it would be Corrigan and his leper's innocence that would count. "Luz said we had a lot in common, Dacosta. I think she meant we're both deadly afraid of being laughed at." After a moment Dacosta said with an effort, "I don't have much use for you or your way of life, Fenthree, but I think I ought to warn you -- " "Dacosta." Giovanetti slipped into the room so quietly and noiselessly that he could only have been listening at the door. He jerked a thumb. "Corrigan wants you. Now." "I'm busy," said Dacosta. "I don't-" "Corrigan says." Giovanetti was patient and inexorable. Also, in spite of his shortness, he was strong and muscular -- and difficult to resist without an open fight. Dacosta was forced to go along. He was barely able to send Fenthree a last desperate glance. It was not an appeal for help -- rather, it was a message that Dacosta was now prepared to help him. And Fenthree was left helpless. As soon as they were out of sight there was the sound of a scuffle, a muttered, "Get hold of him, there -- " And silence. Fenthree stood frozen for an instant. He was about to leap and shut the door but by then Thorne and Corrigan were already in the room. It was # by Dacosta's clock. The helicopter was sixteen hours away. Corrigan said, "Mr. Dacosta so often lets his feelings get the better of him. I think he might have harmed you if we hadn't come along, Mr. Fenthree." "I didn't get that impression," said Fenthree dryly. "We've known him so much longer," Corrigan murmured. "Now, if you'll come along with us, I think we can show you something that should please you." Fenthree walked with them down the corridor. He was thinking of furies which had beaten in shuttered hearts for three hundred years, of bitter plans for revenge whispered from hater to hater. And he was the City personified. T HE Common Room held a hundred people scrubbed and dressed in their best. They ringed a table. From a tray in its center rose a majestic ham, cinnamonglazed, diamond-scored, studded with cloves. It was wreathed in small, barbecued fryers and roast potatoes sprinkled with parsley. The tray was surrounded by bowls heaped with fresh, crisp things Fenthree had not seen in his rich City for many years -- wheels of cucumber and tomato and crinkled lettuce and endive. Dusty bottles of liquid emitted a dark glitter that did not come from dandelions. He licked his lips. Luz, in a red dress, was standing with the others, watching him, her face grave and beautiful. "You are the first Cityman we have seen in many years," said Corrigan. "You have not been with us long but we feel we have come to know you, Fenthree. And we want you to know we will not forget you." Dredged in relief, ravished in all his senses, Fenthree capitulated. Hours later the lights went out. Fenthree knew only hands -- they pulled, pushed, carried him up steps and down. Taking me to bed, those nice... He smiled his delight, his gratitude. Nice, lovely people... His love for them and creation held while they peeled off his clothes. Now they're putting me to... Hands slipped him between cool sheets where he sank lightly down, degravved, a floating seed. A needle pricked him once. A voice -- quite distant, for he had drifted far -- said, "That ought to take good care of him." A dry laugh sounded. For the flicker of an instant, he stirred, struggled to pull mind and body together and failed. He slept. He dreamed. eye in the ceiling, he watched Fenthree walking down the halls of J-Central. Bon vivant Fenthree, a bit thick around the middle, a little red in the nose and very ripe for J. Men and machines were waiting to receive him. He was stripped, anesthetized, stretched on the table beneath the complex of machines. He had served an obligatory term of two years as an orderly at JCentral for every treatment he had taken and he knew every step of the process. He watched as needles darted in and out of the faraway body, tubes sucked out, cleansed and replaced the blood. Days telescoped into moments under the godlike eye of Fenthreein-the-ceiling as the machines hummed and quivered like drones around a monarch. On the cleansed and purified flesh a hundred wire brushes converged, whirred, whined, raised blood, withdrew. The slow cocoon of scab spundark red, mottled with the translucent green of serum ooze. Fenthree watched Fenthree metamorphosed, a chrysalis of his own liquids. The cocoon dried, tightened, darkened under the blink and flash of days. Men came with instruments to pry it open and expose the wound for a second scabbing. They hovered, converged and withdrew. Fenthree's essence writhed in the ceiling, gibbering. There was no flayed man in the shell, mewling for his skin. Only a knot of white bones that collapsed into dust under the force of his eyes. The men in white raised their faces to the ceiling and grinned with naked skulls. "Now you will feed the grapes in the orchard," they said. Fenthree shrieked. the ribs. Not hard but insistently. He rolled over and sat up stiffly, aching from contact with the cold stone floor. His ears were ringing. He shook his head and rubbed the stars from his eyes. He looked up. Attila, Palfrey, Simpkins and Blooey were sitting on bunks around him, watching. Beyond them he saw bars. Nobody had taken the trouble to lift him to a bunk. He knew he would not get much sympathy. "Don't look at me," he said. "I didn't put you in here." "We know that." Attila showed his teeth. "We don't mind having you with us." Dacosta massaged his stiff arms and wondered if it were safe to get up. "How long have I been in?" "Couple of hours," said Blooey. "They threw you in stinking of ether." "Giovanetti?" "Him and Woolsey." Dacosta pulled himself up and sat on the edge of a bunk. Nobody interfered with him. "Same thing happen with you?" Blooey said, "Giovanetti took us with a gun." "Oh," said Dacosta. Attila's brows quirked. "Like to know where he got it." "Like to know why he did it," said Blooey. "What'd we ever do?" "I think Dacosta knows something," said Attila. He rubbed his knuckles over his cheekbones. "I think he ought to tell us about it." Dacosta looked up at him. He saw thick hair, brows, mustache, black as pitch against olive skin. The light of living coals lurked in Attila's eyes. And Dacosta accepted a hard fact about himself -- the reason no one ever wanted to trust him or tell him anything confidential was his face. It was transparent. Also he could not keep his mouth shut or tell a convincing lie. But he tried. "I don't know a thing." Attila pulled him up by the shirt and slammed him against the upper bunk. He hung on, gasping. "Go easy on the shirt. It's my second best." Attila laughed. "Think you can get off with wise-cracks?" "Leave him alone, Attila," said Blooey. "He didn't do anything to you." "Don't waste your breath, Blooey," Dacosta said. Attila folded his arms and, grinned. "Maybe we don't even have to bother with you. We got to settle with Giovanetti and the rest we can shake out of Luz when we get upstairs. We got a permanent score to settle with her." Dacosta struggled to hide his desperation. "Corrigan will come down on you like a ton of bricks." "No." Attila shook his head. "He needs us. Luz and you are nothing. Corrigan don't care what we do to you or her." "Leave Luz alone. You know she didn't get you put in here." "No, we don't know, because you didn't tell us yet." "If I tell you will you swear you'll leave her alone?" "Okay," said Attila. But there was no promise in his eyes. his thin mattress. His shoulders ached from being shoved against the bunk and he was still queasy from the ether -- but worst of all, he was sick with shame. He had blamed. Luz for not trusting him. He did not think Corrigan would hurt her because of what she had told him -- once Fenthree was gone the information would be safe. But his knowledge did him no good against Attila. The one person with whom he might have used it to advantage was Fenthree -- and there he had been shut up. All he had done with his whole life had been to make noble gestures that had accomplished nothing. The world was pretty safe when he was its enemy. Around him the Tigers snored and muttered in their sleep. A shabby crew. They had been strong and evil -- they were very close to being sterile and useless old men. They had aged without growing up. He did not blame them for their loyalty to Corrigan who used them and made them forget they were growing old. They were one more mark against the City. There must be better uses for their vitality than they had been able to find and more just means of control than the ones they had been subjected to. He did not blame the Tigers but he hated them. He shifted his aching shoulders and cursed the lot. Corrigan, Thorne, Giovanetti, too. And MaxSec. As a young man struggling through the usual tortures of adolescence he had sometimes thought that middle life -- beyond the raw passion and gracelessness of youth -- would be a kind of golden age. MaxSec had disabused him. He pillowed his head on his folded arms and wished tonight were last night or tomorrow night on some other world. And he thought of Luz. VI L UZ sat on the edge of her bed as the night wore out. She was sleepless and grainy-eyed. There was nothing more for her to do. Linnaeus Ganzer crossed his last t. And Fenthree leaped out of his nightmare in a cold sweat, clawing at the edges of the bed. He sat up, shivering. The dream was no stranger to him. He had known it with minorvariations before every Jtreatment and all his guilts and fears were wrapped in it. Thank God he was leaving MaxSec today. He stood up and stretched. Fresh winds blew around him from the nacreous morning sky and swept his horrors away. The hour was six-thirty. He would be out of here in an hour. He was surprised to discover that even after last night's orgy of food and drink and all the terrors of nightmare he felt physically great. He dressed, whistling. Someone had thought to launder his clothes during the night. He stopped whistling and leaned toward his image in the mirror. It was tan, trig, unmarked. It was not very good at answering questions. Later he waited with Luz and Corrigan in the courtyard, his heart pounding so heavily it seemed to be shaking the stones under his feet. This was his last chance to ask questions, fit pieces together. He read no answers in Corrigan's bland face or in Luz's tired and darkened eyes. And what had happened to Dacosta? A familiar sound rose and grew from the blue distance. Corrigan said, "I believe these belong to you, Mr. Fenthree." He produced the narco, the burner, the knife, and the gun. Fenthree stowed them away. He said, "Thank you -- " and added with even deeper embarrassment and with no previous intention: "Take good care of my boy." "We will indeed," said Corrigan. The helicopter dipped and came down within the shadow of the walls. Thorne and Giovanetti pulled out the crated supplies of the ransom exchange. As Fenthree turned to her Luz came to life. She said, "Perhaps you will visit us again, Mr. Fenthree." "I hope to God not," said Fenthree. But he took the sting from the words by kissing her mouth before he climbed in beside the yawning pilot. L UZ did not wait to see the helicopter vanish. She started toward the kitchen, where morning noises were beginning. Corrigan hurried after her and put a hand on her shoulder. "Luz, do you know what this means? We pulled it off." She moved away from him. "I want the key to the tank, Corrigan." "It's in my pocket," he said. "You'll have to get it from me. And I don't mind if Dacosta cools off for a while. You and I have plenty to talk about." "There's nothing to say. It's over." "No, Luz, it's only beginning." He reached for her again. "Stay with me a moment. Please." She said in a trembling voice, "You've ruined that poor manat least in terms of his own life. He may end up here for nothing, the way you did, and -- and become like you. Or they'll blow the place out from under us. I want the key, Corrigan. I've had enough." "I told you, I don't care about Dacosta." He sat on a wooden bench near the doorway. "Please, sit down and hear me out. I have no legions to cheer for me. I ought to be able to express triumph in some way, even to someone who hates me." He glanced at her side-long .through narrowed eyes. "You didn't mind that little interlude with Fenthree, did you? You could have warned him." A smell of coffee blew out on the morning air. She found a handkerchief and began to wipe away the makeup she had used to freshen her face. "I wanted to be young again. Now I'm not so sure. But Linnaeus thought it was right -- and I trust him." "Poor Luz." Corrigan laughed. "You build on sand." "What are you talking about?" "Don't you know why I wanted us to be young again? Not for any love of humanity. When Fenthree's wrinkles and varicose veins come back again and his cirrhosis of the liver starts acting up right after the next J, there's going to be some merry hell raised in the City. They'll be coming to visit us again -- but they'll be coming with a very healthy respect for the old men of MaxSec. And we'll have young and healthy men to meet them. MaxSec will be rebuilt till no stranger knows where he's going once he's inside the walls. We'll have hostages, Luz, and you'll see what kind of terms we'll be dictating." "And Linnaeus agreed to all of that?" "He did. I could have told you. But why should I spoil your faith in him?" "Why should you now?" "Because that's my pleasure, what I've been waiting for," Corrigan said simply. Luz examined an old man's dream of revenge. It was crazy. It would kill them all. But it was what he lived on and would work for. A plumbline to hell. "Corrigan, you're mad." "No. Just angry. You know -- you're a fine-looking woman, Luz." He shrugged. "To be honest. I've forgotten what the women outside even looked like. Except for you there's hardly anything here but shrunken paps and swollen ankles. For years upon years -- I lived in the toolshed for three years. and another two in the infirmary where the world thought it owed me something -- I never even saw the woman who brought me food. She shoved it through the door and ran. All I saw was Thorne. He stuck me with needles eight times a day till I couldn't move from the sore and sting, and the damn dry scabby thing twisted its way around my body and mutated till it even took the hair from my head. I used to lie there and think about you quite a lot, Luz, and how you turned away in disgust when you first looked at me." He placed a grayed lizard's claw on her knee and she accepted it as she accepted his twisting of her horrified pity into disgust. There was no unwinding Corrigan now. "No more lepers. Only one dirty old man in the world. I don't know why -- but I think a leper should have some dignity. Lying awake all those damned sore nights -- made me into a microcosm of hate." He rubbed his palms together and stood up smiling. "I don't want you now, Luz, but mine's a kind of lust that keeps me alive. Maybe you'd call it a filthy name. For me its name is justice." "Corrigan, I don't care what you do with your hate," Luz whispered. "Please give me the key." T HE key was an etched metal plate. Her hand made a fist around it and a dull horror was grasping her. She was almost numb. Ganzerhad betrayed her. Corrigan had tricked her. If the J-neutralizer lived up to the claims made for it, Fenthree would be destroyed. Fenthree was a fool but he had been an actual threat to no one and she respected his modest humanity -- she could not bear the thought of his being sentenced to the long twilight of incontinence and delirium she waited for every day. And it was too late to do anything. She remembered O'Leary's radio. She wanted more than anything in the world to free Dacosta but she did not want all the lives around her destroyed by knaves and fools. Perhaps the City might still be able to do something to help Fenthree. Whether they did or not, they could stop Corrigan. The Common Room was still heaped with dirty dishes from last night and Josefa was sweeping up crumbs and bits of smashed crockery with a witch's besom. She pulled at Luz's arm. "Linnaeus didn't eat his breakfast this morning." "Who cares? Let me go, Josefa. I'll talk to you later." She dashed up the stair and down the hall. The room was empty and characterless again. Nobody had forgotten any teeth. MaxSec may have marked Fenthree but he himself had scratched no surfaces. She kneeled, reaching under the dresser. There was nothing there. Nothing in back of it, either. Nothing in the closet, nothing under the bed. She picked herself up, pushing back her hair and fighting down the blackness before her eyes. The mirror showed her a face she did not like. Giovanetti said, "You looking for the radio?" He was standing in the doorway in his sneakers, grinning with all his yellow teeth. She stared at him and her mind balked. "I took it apart," he explained, "because we don't need it any more." He turned and went quietly down the corridor. S HE went down the underground steps like a sleepwalker. A few years with Dacosta was all the future she could hope for -- if the others would leave them alone. The sound of bickering rose up the stairwell and she remembered abruptly that the Tigers were also down there. She would let someone else free them -- Corrigan, if he wanted them out. Attila saw her and yelled, "It's her" She realized that, as low as her spirits had sunk, there were further depths. Corrigan had neglected to mention that Dacosta was locked in the same cell as the Tigers. It was another of his little surprises. "Get out, Luz," Dacosta called. "No, hang around, Luz," a Tiger said. "We want to talk to you." Attila leaned against the bars. "If she wants Dacosta in one piece she won't go back." Dacosta said bitterly, "He's playing it both ways. Yesterday he promised -- " "Never mind, Jonno." She pressed the key against the lock and the door burst open and swung back with a clang. She tried to run but Attila jumped out, caught her by the arm, and slapped her face. Dacosta lunged forward but Tigers grabbed him. Blooey nipped out without any fuss, flung his arms around Attila's legs and yanked up with all his strength. Attila's arms flew out, he yelped and crashed down hard on his nose. Breakfast whistled down the dumbwaiter and nobody paid much attention to it. The other Tigers let go of Dacosta to go after Blooey. Dacosta jumped into the fight. He cracked a Tiger's head against the bars and the bars rang. Then the world exploded. Thunder broke overhead and echoes unfolded in every stone in the walls. Dacosta lurched over to Luz, who had shrunk back to the wall. Attila jumped up and ran howling, a hand to his bloody nose, followed by several henchmen. They scrambled for the stairs. Blooey stayed where he was. He had not been frightened either by the melee or the explosion. He said, "If MaxSec's gonna get it -- we're safer here." Dacosta was holding Luz tightly. "There may be people hurt up there." "Okay. You be the boss." They ran up the stairs. The passages were empty -- everyone had been at breakfast. But in the arcade that led to the Quad they found people yelling and screaming. "Get to your rooms," Dacosta yelled. "If you aren't hurt -- get to your rooms." He hoped the rooms were still there. The source of the explosion certainly seemed to be in the Quad. He pushed his way through. The mouth of the arcade was choked with rubble. The Quad was cloudy with dust and heaped with great broken blocks still scabbed with crumbling mortar. A side of the pond had fallen in. and a frog leaped crazily among the stones. Nothing else was moving. Ganzer's tower had collapsed. A teetering rock crashed down into the canyon with diminishing echoes. Luz clutched Dacosta's arm. "Where's Linnaeus?" "Nothing's left alive here. He may have been away when it happened." "I -- I think he must have been home." said Luz. "Or at least where he lived." leading Attila and Palfrey, both in a state of distress. "How many hurt?" Dacosta asked. "At least these two," said Thorne. "I'm not quite sure how it happened." He gave Dacosta an odd look and led his charges down the hall. Blooey grinned. "I think I'd better find myself a nice safe place." He went off quickly. "Let's find Corrigan," Dacosta said. Corrigan sat in the Common Room, his head in his hands. "What happened with the tower? Where's Ganzer?" "I -- think he blew himself up," Corrigan said heavily. "Blew himself up? I thought the tower fell." "It exploded. I saw it." Tears shone in Corrigan's eyes. "All my work " "He didn't have explosives." "He knew how to make them." "I just can't believe he'd -- " A scuffle sounded in the hall. Giovanetti came in, dragging Josefa by the wrist. She was sniveling and squeaking with fear. "I caught her going down the hall with Ganzer's watch," said Giovanetti. "When I went after her she ran off and tried to hide in a broom closet." "I was gonna give it to her, honest, Corrigan. I tried this morning, but she wouldn't stop long enough, she said she'd see me later. Please, Corrigan, don't gimme a black mark." "Let her loose, Bendetto. Give it to whom, Josefa?" "Ganzer told me to give it to Luz." She dragged a crumpled envelope from her pocket. "I was supposed to give this to you and the watch to Luz. Please, Corrigan -- " Corrigan was already ripping open the envelope. "Give her the watch and get out of here." Corrigan read. His face flamed, then purpled. Giovanetti shot him a frightened glance and left the room. It took Corrigan minutes to finish the letter. He dropped it and sat limp and shuddering. Dacosta picked it up. "You don't mind now, Corrigan? I know nearly everything." Corrigan said nothing. "Read it to me," Luz whispered. Dacosta drew her aside to a corner of the room and they read it together... very nearly the end of this account, and of my life, thank heaven! This is the last day I am spending on earth. If I had tears left I would weep with happiness -- I have been so enraged with this driftwood body for the last hundred years. Did you honestly believe a man three hundred and seventy-two years old could develop new processes and formulae based on work he did in the spring of youthful intellect nearly three hundred and fifty years before? And if he could, do you think he would do it for you, Corrigan? Forgive the garrulity of age while I make clear my point. You have told me so many times that all you want is simple justice. An old schoolroom tag of Horace says that Justice with a limp will overtake the wing-footed felon. But justice with a limp is not simple! Think what twisted passions may burn in that maimed body. If I apply the instance to you it is not because of your body, which never repelled me, but because of your twisted spirit, which never stopped doing so. And that man on whom you wanted to test the anti-J, was he to suffer on your account? I think not. I admit that I am as guilty as you, because in order to retain my peace, my privacy and my complacency I let you force me to make empty promises that bloated your dreams of empire and gave false hope to suffering people. It is the only crime I have committed and I beg forgiveness for it. The serum I prepared for your victim was a simple antihangover remedy; it amused me and kept me busy. But since I am sure the City, being the kind of society it is, must have developed it many years ago there will be no loss if I take it with me when I destroy the tower. The task of rebuilding before the loss is discovered by the authorities will keep you busy, Corrigan, and will do you good. The re-J, of course, does not exist -- not yet -- except in your dreams. Even if they are possible, such things are not for you. I hate to destroy the books and equipment gathered over three hundred years but they are dusty and antiquated. Without me they are garbage. I leave you only my sympathy and my respect for your power. When you are less bitter tell Luz that I loved her. Yours faithfully, Linnaeus Ganzer. D ON'T cry for him, Luz," said Dacosta. But she could not stop. A familiar and ominous clamor came swelling down the halls. Corrigan jumped to his feet. "The Tigers!" "Yes, I can hear," said Dacosta. Corrigan's voice came tinged with fear. "I don't know what to tell them." "Yeah. The way it turns out -- you shoved them in the tank for nothing." "I've got to get out of here." The noise was coming closer. "I've got to have time to think. Dacosta, stall them for me." "No thanks, Corrigan. They nearly dismantled me last night and I don't want to go through that again." Luz touched his sleeve. "Please, Jonno." "No, Luz. He's got to tell them the truth. You know, Corrigan, it wasn't a very smart idea shutting me in with them. The way things leak out around here I got to know nearly everything and -- uh -- I'm afraid they got it out of me." Corrigan shot him a look of pure terror. "They'll kill me!" "Show them the letter. It's proof Ganzer tricked you. That's all you need." "And let them know -- let them think I'm such a fool? Are you out of your mind?" "No, Corrigan. You'll turn them round. You know how. The old oil, Corrigan. I know you. You'll tell them how Ganzer tricked them and you'll get them so mad at Ganzer that if the tower weren't down already they'd tear it down. Come on, Luz, let's go." They were out by the side door as the Tigers came blazing in. "I'm afraid they'll hurt him," Luz said. "Not if he can get two words in first. They have to patch it up -- they need each other." They stopped by the arcade. In the Quad a few old men were picking a cautious way among the blocks. He found his handkerchief and wiped a trace of blood from the corner of her mouth. "Are you all right?" "Yes." She was clasping the watch. Suddenly in her hands it began to peal the hour with all its accustomed sweetness. "Nine o'clock." She shivered and turned her face away. "I wasn't just crying for him." "I know. But what you believed in was never really much of a hope." "No. Only a dream -- and I'm a fool." "You didn't know it was just a dream when you came down to the tank for me -- with the Tigers waiting for you." "I told you. I love you." "I believe you." He kissed her. "We're a pair of fools, you know?" He looked somberly at the wreckage. "AH we've got out of the great plans is a big mess to clean up." "Nothing to hope for." "All ashes, no Phoenix. But at least Fenthree didn't get hurt." He smiled. "He said he envied me for staying here with you." She laughed. "He's a polite liar. But I'm glad you're here with me." N OT bad," said the pilot, who had leaned over to leer at Luz through the helicopter's doorway. "Get to spend much time with her?" "Some," said Fenthree. "What's she in for?" "She wouldn't say." "Any more in there like her?" "None that I could see." "Didn't find out very much, did you?" Fenthree said, "I found out they're a miserable and pathetic bunch and they don't relish growing old and dying any more than we do." The pilot gulped and said, "Hey, watch the language there, fella. That could get you into bad trouble." Fenthree stared at him. Uneasiness swept him into a cold sweat. The words had not seemed out of order. Had he changed somehow in the scarcely more than two days he had been away? It was unlikely. He wanted to be home and back at his job and there would probably be a couple of parties to celebrate his return -- after his debriefing by McAllifive, of course. He pushed the unease aside and began to think about his report. He stared unseeingly at the rugged country and the blue sky. MaxSec considered him a fool and a coward. It took an effort to admit it but he had enough honesty to do so. And maybe he was a bit of both. But MaxSec had made a mistake when it confused foolishness with stupidity. Neither threats nor temptations had kept him from knowing that something was going on. If his ears had not been playing tricks on him -- and he was sure they had not -- the reference to Ganzer meant the old man was alive. That would mean O'Leary had been a liar and that nothing he had told McAllifive could be relied on. It was very unlikely that O'Leary was lying for fun. Since O'Leary's reports had raised the World Bureau's suspicions, it followed that Corrigan had actually wanted someone to come to MaxSec. Corrigan's possible reasons stymied Fenthree. He would have to leave that problem to McAllifive. His line of logic was substantiated by the fact that he had not met the Tigers or anyone of their description, although he had seen nearly everyone else in MaxSec. Corrigan was the toughest customer he had ever known -- seconded by Giovanetti -- but they were not the Tigers. Perhaps Corrigan had kept his animals out of the way so Fenthree would not be frightened or suspicious. Fenthree smiled grimly. McAllifive had had to promise no reprisals in order to rescue his agent -- but Fenthree brought back enough to justify an investigation by a good-sized force of armed men, if only to shake MaxSec up a little. The thought of Corrigan trembling at gunpoint was a positive pleasure to Fenthree. But the investigators would have to be warned not to let Corrigan open his mouth or he might end up with the guns. Fenthree's conclusions were simple. MaxSec may have been busy but it was not cheerful and vital, as McAllifive had been led to believe. It was running on pain, hate and anger -- conditions of life the City could not live with or tolerate for humans anywhere. It would have to find new ones or die. Perhaps it would have to give up the J and go back to shortened lives and immortality through children. Perhaps. He hoped not, while he was still around, but perhaps. Because hope was not in MaxSec. Not with those old men who hated age and death. If Ganzer was working on some kind of Jtreatment it could only mean he wanted to turn old men young. The aim had Fenthree's sympathy. But his feelings about Corrigan were something else again. Corrigan wanted something far more complex than just to get back his youth, but whether his plotting was justified or not failed to matter to Fenthree. He was still burning with humiliation over his experiences as a hostage and he longed for revenge. He had been threatened with his own gun, ridiculed with the secret of his past, forced to sweat buckets to earn his keep -- He had also been offered the loveliest woman MaxSec knew and had been given marvelous food and drink. He wondered if MaxSec would beonbread and beans for weeks to make up for the feast -- he shifted uncomfortably. Why should it bother him if uniformed men with guns went down the corridors past the doors where the dying howled and wept? He thought of Josefa and her harshly veined hands, of Dacosta with his tattered papers and his idiot pride. Of Luz. How could he be avenged on the terrible ephemerality of their flesh? The shadow of his dream folded back on him. The craggy wastes were gone and the air was warming over the expanse of the City. Was one human there threatened by MaxSec? Would one of those lives be sweetened if it were punished? The question sat like a weight on the back of his neck. He began to think of McAllifive and his blackmail. There was another kind of score to settle. McAllifive wanted a story from him. He thought about that. And about his experiences as a coder of children's books -- about how he took random plot elements and fed them into the machine and got stories neat as strings of sausages, in return. He wondered what the machine could do with that list of the products and equipment sent to MaxSec. He wondered what he could do with it, since he knew how the process worked. His mind began to spin, tentatively at first, then busily. To do what he planned would take courage -- perhaps more than MaxSec thought he had. He grinned. "What's so funny?" the pilot asked. "Nothing," said Fenthree. "Let's have some of that footwarmer now, mac." On Newsstands Now! James Tiptree, Jr.'s novelette about the hottest ship on star patrol. Every man aboard has a minority problem, a space problem -- and the same damn girl problem! Worlds of IF TO The moons of Mars may be ours for the taking. But do we want them? tiny moons of Earth -- " Sounds strange, doesn't it? All right, so to describe Phobos and Deimos sounds strange now -- but times change. Mars I and Mars II tomorrow. "Give me a place to stand and to rest my lever on," said Archimedes, "and I can move the Earth." Similarly, give us the necessary energy and we can move the satellites of Mars to Earth. Vague, general discussions never had much interest for me. Exactly how would one go about kidnaping a planet's moon? Or moons? I think our understanding of the problem will be simplified if we start with something easy -- like latching onto an asteroid. We know of several asteroids -- Apollo, Adonis, Amor, Icarus, and Hermes -- which approach us within their orbits all intersect the Earth's at such a large angle that to divert them into a suitable path for capture would require a trajecterotomy on their orbital elements of major proportions. (Another slight difficulty is that, except for Icarus, they are all hopelessly lost.) The best candidate for capture would be an asteroid like (#) Eros, revolving near the Earth in an orbit of low eccentricity about the same as that of Mercury. Eros at perihelion is # milesor # AU away from the sun. (For our purposes we can regard the astronomical unit, AU, as the mean distance of the Earth from the sun: I AU  # miles  #.# km.) It would seem that if the Earth passed Eros at perihelion their distance apart should be #.#  # AU, or # miles. Because of the considerable inclination of its orbit, however, Eros can never come closer to Earth than #.# miles. The asteroid's diameter is estimated as ten miles -- about the same as that of Phobos, or Mars I. In order to simplify matters we are going to begin by considering the capture of a theoretical asteroid revolving around the sun in a perfectly circular orbit at the minimum distance of Eros, or # AU. Although no such body is known that does not mean that no such body exists. Looking for asteroids used to be big business. I am aware of no present major observation program devoted exclusively to the discovery of asteroids. The bodies we have mentioned were all picked up purely accidentally on photographs taken for some other purpose. Let us, for reference purposes, name our postulated asteroid Midas -- not that a golden touch is particularly pertinent to our world today, but we are dealing in bold dreams. Two steps are involved in the capture of Midas. First we have to modify its orbit so as to force it close enough to the Earth to make capture possible. Then we have to capture it -- that is, change its velocity to keep it revolving around the Earth permanently in the type of orbit desired. Since Midas is revolving in a circle it might seem that one point to apply a velocity modification to its orbit would be as good as another. And such was the opinion of the master minds originally charged with the program. So they announced the capture of Midas would occur at P (Fig. #), since it happened the Earth would soon arrive at that point. This automatically made P the perihelion of Midas' modified orbit and the point opposite the farthest from the sun, the aphelion. It was decided that the velocity modification would be applied at an angular distance of # from aphelion. To simplify discussion, let's also assume that Midas and the Earth are revolving in the same plane -- and follow through on the original  In this discussion I have borrowed heavily from an article by Su-Shu Huang, "Velocity Modification of an Astronomical Body for Capture by the Earth," Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. #, No. #, p. #. Figs. I and #: Velocity change and resulting orbit of hypothetical asteroid "Midas," when modification to original orbit is applied # from aphelion. postulate of the master minds mentioned. Since Midas is orbiting in a circle, its distance from the sun and its orbital velocity are constant. At # AU from the sun this velocity would be # mi sec. Note that Midas' velocity is always perpendicular to the direction of the sun. That is, it has no velocity toward or away from the sun -- i.e. no radial velocity. Calculations show the velocity required to produce the desired modification in the orbit of Midas to be rather disturbing (Fig. #). For the asteroid to make contact with the Earth at P will necessitate a drastic change in its velocity. We will have to jump it by #I mi sec in a forward direction and give it a radical velocity of # mi sec toward the sun, or inward -- a total velocity change of # mi sec. These changes are so large, in fact, that if the Earth did not interfere, it would be forced into an orbit that took it from I AU at perihelion out to slightly beyond the orbit of Jupiter at aphelion. Instead of changing Midas into an Earth satellite, we would be in danger of having converted it into a Trojan asteroid. being suitably honored with citations and medals, were fired and a whole new bunch was taken on. The new heads took pains to Figs. # and #: Velocity change and resulting orbit of Midas when modification to original orbit is applied # from aphelion. point out that the trouble all came from their predecessors' trying to make Midas change course too abruptly. Why all the hurry? Midas had been revolving in its present years. What difference were a few months more or less going to make? So they proposed to back up a little and make the point of velocity modification # from aphelion (Fig. #). This slight difference of only # was found to produce a gratifying reduction in the velocity requirements (Fig. #). To contact the Earth, Midas now needed an increase in forward velocity of only # mi sec. and a radical velocity sunward of # mi sec., or a total change of # mi sec. The resulting orbit would be less eccentric and much smaller than the one arrived at in the earlier calculations. Midas now traveled only slightly beyond the orbit of Mars at aphelion. Plainly, the farther we make the point of velocity modification from the point of contact, the more economical will be the energy requirements -- a fact that should have been obvious from everyday experience. In turning a corner in a car, one does not maintain original speed until one reaches the intersection -- then jam on the brakes and swing the wheel around through ninety degrees. Rather, one starts to slow down and ease the car around in the proper direction well beforehand. After all practical considerations were taken into account, it was finally agreed to apply the velocity modification # from the aphelion of Midas' new orbit (Fig. #). Thus modified, the projected orbit of Midas was scarcely distinguishable from that of the Earth. A reduction of #I mi sec. in forward velocity and a velocity of # mi sec sunward, were sufficient to force Midas into contact with the Earth at P. The total change in velocity required was so small, in fact, as to be scarcely perceptible on the scale of our diagram (Fig. #). But the object was not to contact Midas -- or smash into it -- but to capture it. The project called for changing Midas from an asteroid revolving around the sun into a satellite in permanent revolution around the Earth. And this was a much tougher proposition than merely steering the asteroid into close proximity to the Earth -- for now we were confronted by a three-body problem for which no general solution was possible. Thanks to large computers, given the necessary numerical information we now can solve the problem for three, four, five -- or virtually any number of bodies. If one of the three bodies, however, were insignificant in mass compared with the other two, we could obtain a general idea of its motion through application of Jacobi's integral, or the restricted three-body problem. Here we are certainly justified in regarding Midas as insignificant in mass compared with the sun and Earth. We are also going to neglect the moon as being too puny to be worthy of our attention. Although the Jacobian integral will not yield the exact orbit of a particle, it does give us valuable information as to the regions of space in which it is permitted to move and forbidden to move. It was from such considerations that G. W. Hill, in #, demonstrated that there is a superior limit to the distance to which the moon can recede from the Earth. In our satellite-capture operation, although we now have Midas cornered, so to speak, it is still full of flight. Formerly having a wild animal cornered was not at all the same as having it securely locked in a cage for exhibition in a zoo or circus. Now all this is changed. One needs only to shoot a bullet containing a powerful tranquilizer into the animal's hide. The animal obligingly topples over permitting its easy capture. To continue the metaphor, we have reached the stage where it becomes necessary to administer the modification shot to Midas, one that will turn it from a minor planet freely orbiting around the sun into a satellite tamely revolving around the Earth. Stated in more formal terms, we must modify the Midas' velocity so as to bring it "within the E-lobe" -- that is, within a region of space surrounding the Earth from which it cannot escape. Let's say that we wish to make Midas enter the E-lobe as a satelVelocity change and resulting orbit of Midas when modification to original orbit is applied # from aphelion. Velocity change and resulting orbit of Midas when modification to original orbit is applied # from aphelion. The amount of the velocity modification in this case is so small as to be scarcely perceptible. Table I Velocity Changes Required to Make Midas Revolve in an Approximate #-hour Orbit Starting Position Semi-major Velocities Required to Bring into E-lobe from Aphelion Axis Eccentricity # # AU # Min. Max. # mi sec. # mi sec. # # # # # # # # lite revolving in an approximately #-hour orbit. The velocity required will depend on its original orbit as well as on how the encounter occurs. Here the best we can do is to give the lower and upper limits necessary for capture in the three starting positions we have considered. See Table I. Remember that these figures apply to a hypothetical asteroid originally revolving in an exceptionally easy orbit for capture. Our only purpose in citing them is to furnish us with a basis for theory -- we have not lost sight of our original intention to capture the Martian satellites. Although we shall consider specifically only the capture of Deimos, the same general remarks also apply to Phobos. the solar system are better known to readers of science fact and fiction than Phobos and Deimos of Mars, so we shall describe them only briefly. The revolution of both satellites is direct in practically circular orbits (Fig. #). By "direct" we mean that, seen from a vantage point looking down on the north pole of Mars, they would appear to be moving in the opposite direction from that of the hands of a clock. Phobos revolves # miles from the center of Mars in a period of # hours # minutes. Since Mars rotates on its axis in # hours # minutes, we see that Phobos moves considerably faster than a point on the planet's surface. Thus as viewed from Mars, Phobos would rise in the west and set in the east. Phobos is still the only known satellite that revolves faster than its primary rotates, not excepting Janus, the newly discovered inner satellite of Saturn. Deimos revolves # miles from the center of Mars in a period of I day # hours # minutes. Phobos and Deimos were discovered by Asaph Hall of the U.S. Naval Observatory at the exceptionally close approach of Mars in August, #. Their approximate orbits became available a few days later and, of course, are quite accurately known now -- although astronomers who specialize in satellite work would probably tell you that the theory of their motion still leaves much to be desired. While the orbits of the satellites are known with high precision, we still know next to nothing about the satellites themselves. The different values given for their size are merely estimates based upon their brightness (albedo). In the present discussion we shall adopt ten miles as the diameter of Phobos and five as the diameter of Deimos. To find their masses we must measure their disturbing attraction upon some other body. For such tiny bodies this is impossible. So the only way to get at their mass is to take the shaky values for their size and make a still shakier guess at their density. Let us say their density is the same as that of Mars -- or about four times that of water. Even for such tiny bodies this gives masses that seem tremendous compared with familiar terrestrial objects we think of as "large" -- such as elephants, dinosaurs, boulders, etc. Thus on our assumptions the mass of Deimos comes out at # # grams -- or about Scarcely had the Naval Observatory announced the discovery of Phobos and Deimos when someone called attention to the remarkable similarity of their orbits to those of the two little moons of Mars described by Jonathan Swift in his Guilder's Travels. The most speculative hypotheses have been advanced to account for this similarity, ranging from clairvoyance to making Swift a Martian who arrived on Earth via flying saucer. Certainly no telescope was in existence powerful enough to reveal Fig. # Orbits of Phobos and Deimos projected against background of sky as seen in an inverting telescope. Warning to reader: don't try to figure out the modus operandi of these motions. You'll go crazy. the satellites when Swift began writing Gulliver in #. My own explanation is both simple and dull. I think the Dean of St. Patrick's made an awesomely lucky guess. In # the Russian scientist, I. S. Shklovskiy, asserted that in his opinion Phobos is a hollow shell and therefore of artificial origin. He seems to have been led to this conclusion by the apparent secular -- or very slow -- acceleration in the motion of Phobos. Such an acceleration might be produced by the resistance of a highly rarefied upper Martian atmosphere. The resistance encountered would be negligible for a solid Phobos but might be appreciable for a thinshell model satellite. Since all authorities are not agreed upon the reality of Phobos' apparent acceleration, Shklovskiy' s hypothesis has failed to receive much support. Deimos much as we did on Midas. Again we make the simplifying assumption that Mars and the Earth revolve in the same plane -- as they do to within two degrees. The orbit we get for Deimos will be an ellipse varying Transfer orbit of Deimos from Mars to Earth when satellite is detached at aphelion of Mars. Fig. #  s Transfer orbit of Deimos from Mars to Earth when satellite is detached at perihelion of Mars. slightly in size and shape depending upon where Deimos parts company from Mars and makes contact with the Earth. Starting at the aphelion of Mars, Deimos would follow the path shown in Fig. #, making the transfer trip from one planet to the other in #I days. Should we start from the perihelion of Mars, Deimos would follow an orbit somewhat smaller and less eccentric than the other and the time of transfer would be # days (Fig. #). The fact that these projected Demian routes touch Earth's orbit, does not meant that they will necessarily touch the Earth. The time factor is of critical importance. Only at certain epochs ascertainable far in advance would Earth and satellite arrive simultaneously at the selected point of capture. What initial velocity must we give Deimos to capture it? The answer will depend upon whether we start from aphelion or perihelion. We can, of course, start from any old point on the orbit of Mars we like but these two extremes are the handiest for discussion purposes. The velocity of Mars at the aphelion of its orbit is #. # mi sec. Although Phobos and Deimoshave small velocities of their own relative to Mars, they also are moving along with Mars at the same rate or they would wander away from the planet. If we tried to trace the orbits of Mars and its satellites around the sun their three paths would be intertwined so closely as to be indistinguishable on the scale of our diagram. To remove Deimos to Earth we must slow it down -- that is, we must start it falling sunward. How much does this slow-down amount to? Calculation shows that Deimos at the aphelion of Mars should be moving at #I misec. But Deimos is already endowed with the same orbital velocity of Mars of # mi sec. Hence -- relative to Mars -- we must reduce the velocity of Deimos by # -- #I  # mi sec. (We are neglecting any advantage that might be gained by taking into account Deimos' orbital motion around Mars.) Now... Deimos is # miles from Mars. We want to make Deimos move # mi sec. slower than Mars. What must Deimos' initial velocity be for it to have a final velocity of # mi sec. at a very great distance from Mars? By a "very great distance" we mean a distance where the attraction of Mars has become so feeble that its disturbing effect on Deimos may miles. miles from Mars means doing work against the planet's gravitational attraction. The operation is essentially the same in principle as the old problem in the textbooks about the work required to move a given mass a given distance up the side of an inclined plane. (I remember a classmate who once said it seemed to him he spent most of his first year in engineering school moving given masses up the sides of inclined planes.) In the textbook problems the bodies are usually so near the surface that the downward force of gravity can always be taken as constant. That is, if the attraction of Mars for Deimos Fig. # Phobos and Deimos captured in #-hour orbit revolving in plane of Earth's motion around sun. at # miles were taken as unity -- or ## -- we would still call it # I at twice the distance -- or # miles. But in space such a simple law of force no longer holds. If Deimos were removed to twice its original distance from Mars the gravitational attraction would not be #I but ##, since the force diminishes as the inverse square of the distance. This fact is helpful in prying Deimos loose from Mars, although it complicates the mathematics slightly. We find that Deimos would need an initial velocity of #I mi sec to have a velocity of # from Mars. How much energy would be required to move a mass against the attraction of Mars? According to the Atomic Energy Commission estimates, circa #, the energy equivalent by fission of a "nominal atomic bomb" is # kilofrons or # x ## ergs. Undoubtedly we can blow things up much better now. In any case, it would require the energy from atomic bombs to move Deimos the desired distance for escape to Earth. It would probably be a good idea to spread this moving operation over a considerable period. If we applied the energy to Deimos all in one shot, instead of acquiring a new Earth satellite we might wind up with nothing more substantial to show for our efforts than a minor contribution to the hypothetical comet cloud reservoir. Without going into the technical details involved -- we have faith in our engineers -- let up suppose we have forced Deimos into an orbit that enables it to penetrate the E-lobe in a suitable region for capture. What additional modification will be required to keep it permanently within the E-lobe, revolving around us in a #-hour orbit? The results obtained for Deimos, shown in Table #, may be compared with those for Midas in Table #. We see that once we get Deimos within the E-lobe the velocity necessary for capture is about the same as for Midas in the thirtydegree projection. All our difficulty with Deimos comes at the other end of the line -- in wrenching it free of Mars. Again -- the problem is one for technicians and later on we'll suggest some general guidelines for them. We never encountered this difficulty with Midas since it was orbiting freely around the sun and not attached to any secondary body. Fig. # shows Phobos and Deimos revolving in an approximate #-hour orbit. They are revolving, not in the plane of the Earth's equator, but in the plane of our path around the sun. The Earth, and the orbit of Phobos and Deimos, or Earth II and Earth them now, are drawn to scale, but the rest of the diagram is purely schematic. It is impossible to show our moon, or Earth I, as its path lies far outside the picture frame. why we should want to capture the moons of Mars in the first place. Practical reasons may not exist but from a purely scientific Table # Velocity Changes Required to Make Deimos Revolve in an Approximate #-hour Orbit Starting Position Semi-major (miles sec) Velocities Required on Mars Orbit Axis Eccentricity to bring into E-lobe Perihelion #I AU # Min. Max # # Aphelion # # # # standpoint the project must be considered worthwhile. The moons of Mars, being so small, have never undergone any volcanic or other internal activity, as undoubtedly has been the case with our own moon. Thus, even should we succeed in obtaining material from the lunar surface we still will not have samples of the real primeval stuff from which the solar system originated. Are Phobos and Deimos former cometary nuclei? For thousands of years we have stared with awe and wonder at the heads and tails of bright comets. Yet we still have no certain knowledge of the nature of the cometary nucleus from which the head and tail originate. There are some scientists who seriously question the advisability of spending large sums on an extended lunar program. To me, at least, it seems doubtful if we are likely to discovery anything really new on the moon. I am using the word new here to signify something previously wholly unknown or even suspected. Undoubtedly we will obtain a vast amount of valuable information from exploration of the moon, which will prove and disprove our various theories concerning our satellite and set us on the right track eventually. But will we find anything new? I rather doubt it. But the possibility of unforeseeable discoveries certainly exists in the case of the Martian moons. Also, if we are going to keep the space program alive, we need some goal that appeals powerfully to the imagination, yet is not so wild and fantastic as to be beyond reasonable possibility of accomplishment. Think of how Columbus stirred the imagination of Europe when he returned with savages and strange plants from the new world. Short of bringing some live Martians back to Earth, what could stir the imagination more than a good close look at the two mysterious moons of Mars? By way of further speculation, assume we have a completely isolated system consisting of the two satellites revolving around a spherical Earth of uniform density in the same orbit. Eliminate all disturbing forces due to the sun, moon, Venus, et al. Would the satellites continue to revolve in this orbit indefinitely? No, I believe that even such an idealized system would not persist forever. The period of revolution of one body relative to another depends upon the length of its major axis and their masses. The dependence upon the major axis, is so strong, that we often tend to forget the mass factor. Yet the masses do make a difference. For example, if the Earth revolved in  The idea of bringing the Martian moons to Earth seems to have originated with Fred Singer in a speech at the Smithsonian Institution in January, #. the same orbit as Jupiter its period of revolution would be longer by two days, owing to the smaller mass of the Earth. Suppose our captured satellites were equal in density but Phobos were twice the diameter ofDeimos. Then Phobos would be eight times more massive than Deimos. Given time, its superior mass should begin to manifest itself. The ultimate fate of the system is hard to predict. Presumably Phobos would gradually overhaul Deimos, resulting in some sort of crack up. N OW for some technological guidelines. The velocity changes we have contemplated seem quite moderate compared with the velocity of escape from the Earth of # miles per second -- or escape from the solar system at the Earth's distance of # misec. The trouble is not with the velocities themselves but with the energy necessary to produce these velocities -- if this energy must all originate from rockets fired on Earth. The really nice solution to our difficulties would be to find the necessary propulsive material already available on the surface of the body itself. Then our planetary engineering would be reduced to a mere problem in assembly and discharge. Of course we have gone blithely ahead assuming we have a perfect right to alter the Martian satellite system to suit our fancy. But suppose Mars should be the site of intelligent life. It is just possible the inhabitants might raise strenuous objections to having their two moons forcibly removed to Earth. In that event perhaps we could work out some reciprocal arrangement. You lend us Phobos and Deimos for, say, ten years. In return we'll give you a ninety-nine year lease on Greenland and the Great Sandy Desert of Australia as a small down payment. Considering that the combined surface area of the two satellites is only about half that of Rhode Island, the Martians should jump at it.  I # politely at the computer and told it again to stop singing. "You're distracting me," he said, looking up from the sprawl of punch cards in his lap. The computer, Simulator RRS#, was built into a third of the wall across from Milson. It had a pebbled black surface. Some of its spools were slightly askew. "Well, let's get going," it said from its speech grid. "Almost ten o'clock." Milson straightened in his work chair and used both hands to touch the cards. "Calm down." "Broke and hungry, ragged and dirty, too," sang the computer in abroad Negro voice. "Yes, Mama, I'm broke and hungry, ragged and dirty, too." "Come on, quiet down." "I got the blues." "Don't keep making fun," said Milson. "Stop now." He studied a card, Will Fabin's. There was little doubt that Fabin was ready for Questionnaire #I and a run through the simulator. "Okay, here's one." He hesitated, put the punch card on the conveyor rack leading into the machine. "And another -- Mrs. Horowitz." Finally he settled on twenty name cards. "Not an even two dozen?" asked Simulator RR-S#. "The quota is twenty an hour," replied Milson. "That's what the Greater Los Angeles Nutrition Office says." "You keep aiming for the minimum," said the computer, its speech grill rattling faintly. After whirring for a moment it added: "Okay, I got Questionnaire Thirtyone off to all our deadbeats. Now what?" Milson went to his long and wide work table and fingered the correspondence toggle. "We wait for the replies, as usual."" "If you had more status, more drag," said the computer, "we could have a window in this office. The Greater Los Angeles skyline -- that's some sight. , I'd like to see that -- and Knott's Berry Farm." "They tore Knott's Berry Farm down in nineteen-eighty-seven," said Milson. "Nobody could take a computer there anyway." "They let the spades in anyplace. But a computer? That's different." Milson held his watch to his ear and it whispered, "The time is ten-o-one." As the letters and reports unreeled on the table scanner, Milson said, "I'll take my morning coffee break now." "Go ahead. You don't need my approval." Milson punched the coffee knob on the wall panel. From the food slot over his work table appeared a styo cup of near coffee. "Cold." "You're lucky we have coffee at all. During the last food riot in the Santa Monica Sector they burned the soy bean crop." Milson sipped the cold near coffee. He watched the scanner. "That's great. Thirty-four per cent of the people in the Beverly Hills Sector don't believe there's a famine there at all." "The computers who make those attitude tests are up on Floor Twenty-six here. I know them. All their stuff is faked. They don't even try to question every resident on the intrude circuit. Slipshod." "Okay, be quiet while I catch up." "Did you have trouble getting to work in the tube today?" "Because of the emergencies I'm staying in the dorm on twentyfive nights. You know that." "Oh, yeah," said the computer. "How come you never married, Warren?" "I'm only twenty-five," Milson told the machine. He brushed down his pale short hair. "I wanted a career helping people. You know. I'm not like some guys, out for just money. All these famines. The defoliation accidents, especially those big ones in Kansas and Iowa. The food riots all over -- more and more of them. I decided when I was at UC Senior Campus Twentytwo I had to help. I can marry when the country is more settled, back on the track again." "And you eat better working for the Greater Los Angeles Nutrition Office, too." next batch of micro mail was from people protesting either food cut-off orders or removals. One letter was signed Ortega. Milson remembered old Mrs. Ortega. Her punch card had had the r in her last name printed in reverse. Maria Lemos Ortega. Something like that. Milson caught up the dictate mike and said into it, "Send forms two hundred-A and two hundredB -- whichever applies -- out on all protest mail." "Here we go," announced the computer. "The questionnaires are coming in. Hey, fifteen back already." "So fast?" "Sure. I can find anybody in Greater Los Angeles. No matter where they are. I don't depend only on the intrude circuit. I have lots of other ways. I'm hooked this one." "Oh, so?" Milson swallowed coffee. "What's the result on the questionnaire so far?" "They're all deadbeats to me." "Yes, but we have a procedure to follow. First they have to get a doubtful-welfare rating and then we send them Questionnaire Thirtyone. That has to come before running a full-scale Life Simulation." "Circumlocution and red tape," said the machine. "Uh-huh, okay, uh-huh. I got all twenty back now and eleven of the twenty deadbeats flunked out, meaning they have less than minimal social utility. So let's run the Life Simulation." "Mrs. Horowitz on your list?" "Second in line. You know her?" "The printer reversed the r on her card. No, I don't actually know her." "Give me the go-ahead order, Warren. Like protocol insists." "Proceed to run Life Simulations on those Greater Los Angeles Nutrition Office charges who have just failed Questionnaire Thirty-one." Milson turned away from the computer and looked at the blank petition for a window. He tried to see in his mind what the view from his window would show of Greater Los Angeles. After a moment Milson returned to the work table and ran off the hour's communications. The national food riot count was up and Philadelphia had burned down. Milson shook his head and toggled off the scanner. "Hey, that was a good batch," said the computer. "Nine takeouts." "So many?" Milson had been reaching for a packet of welfare cards to select the next group of Questionnaire #. "Give me their names." "No need to. They're all processed already. You can start on a new bunch of deadbeats." "Wait," said Milson. "Processed already? What happened to protocol? I didn't give you the order." "Don't you remember Directive Four-one-four? Came through yesterday, effective today. All you have to do now is give the order for the Life Simulations. The rest I take care of. Much faster." "You mean all nine of them are dead already?" "Processed, yes," said Simulator RR-S#. "I ran my projection of what sort of life they'd lead over the next decade, based on the answers given to Questionnaire Thirty-one and assorted data in our backgrounding banks. None of the nine would be expected to fulfill any useful function in the future, nor did any show redeeming social value. So, you know, I singled them out, cut them off, processed them. Turned the names over to Morgue Pickup. The usual." "How about Mrs. Horowitz?" "She almost squeezed by." "Almost?" "She was on the losing nine, Warren. What can you expect -- a deadbeat and over fifty-five." Milson rested his hand on the umber table top, then reached toward the file cards. "You still use the gas -- that floral stuff?" "Mostly." "You did it so damn fast this time." "Most of them were still at home. I have other ways. Once I know the room somebody's in -- and get them isolated -- I have a few different ways worked out for processing. Ways I invented." "You invented?" "I'm here around the clock," said the computer. "I think of a lot of things. At night when it's quiet." doesn't -- " "Oh, I cleared everything with them first," explained the black computer. "I simply didn't go through you." "Oh," said Milson. He picked up the cards. the voice of the Vice President of the United States and get the lunch outlet to function right. "Quiet down, will you?" he yelled over his shoulder at the singing computer. "I'm motherless, fatherless, sisterand brotherless, too," sang the machine. "That's the reason, Mama, I want to go home with you." "Stop," ordered Milson. "That's the Vice President himself speaking. I want to catch this." "Rumors of uncontrolled hunger uprisings," said the slim gray Vice President on the view screen next to the computer, "are, as is usual in this sort of sorry business, much exaggerated. The President has asked me to give you every assurance." The official seal above the Vice President's head was hit by a flying piece of vinyl. The seal waggled, fell. Doors and windows smashed noisily off camera. "Don't pay any attention to temporary and local outbursts, such as the one you are about to witness." "A riot right in the White House," said Milson, his hand still on the lunch dial. "I remember," said the computer, "an era of politics when they threw real fruit and vegetables. There wasn't any of this prissiness about conserving food for deadbeats." Part of the ornamentation of a motor scooter hit the  Vice President over the left ear and he began to topple just as the communication screen went blank. Milson, clutching his fist in his palm, swung an elbow against the food outlet. The time was nine minutes past noon. A cup of near coffee emerged. The screen lit up and a junior director of the Greater Los Angeles Nutrition Office appeared. "Due to the starvation potential now inherent in the spreading hunger demonstrations," he said, "our weed-out quotas hereafter are upped to forty per hour." He winked, grinned. "Or fifty per for you processors who can handle it." Hisfreckled face bobbed. "And our own meal schedule here in be cut a bit. Cut to two hearty meals a day rather than three, with only one coffee break each day. I'm sure you'll all agree with us on this and would request similar action on your own had it not already been taken. All right?" Blank. His lower lip resting on the cup rim, Milson said, "At least I'm ahead on coffee." "Forty an hour," said thecomputer. "That'll be a challenge." "Yes," said Milson. He watchT HE chill of the small, closed office told Milson night had probably fallen. The current emergencies had restricted each simulator processor to his individual office. Milson rinsed his hands and left the alcove bathroom. "Feel like a broke-down engine, without no driving wheel," sang the computer. "You ever been down, you know just how I feel." "Stop singing and find out why there's no room-conditioning in here." "If you'd process the hundred people an hour you're supposed to you'd be plenty warm," said the speaker grid of the machine. "Anyway, I can't get an answer from atmosphere central down on Floor One." "I don't know," said Milson. at the most -- that seemed like a sensible way to help the hunger problem. A hundred, though. I don't know. Maybe we should stop." "Doesn't cost us anything to keep going," said the computer. "It's all automatic. A little floral gas in through the air-conditioning. If the air-conditioner isn't working there are all kinds of other things you can do to process people. A simple remote adjustment of their view screen, for instance, and you can electrocute a whole room of deadbeats." Milson pressed his watch to his ear. He told the computer, "I'm going down the hall to ask the floor supervisor about the heat." "Make it fast." Milson skirted the work table and its tumbled piles of cards. He put his fingers in the whorl lock and pushed. The door did not open. He jabbed his fingers in harder and slammed a shoulder against the cold sienna door. "Open, open, come on." "Oh, boy," said the computer. "What?" Milson stayed hard against the exit. "A computer I know over at City Hall says half of the Santa Monica Sector just blew up." "Okay, but why can't I get this damn door to open?" "The food riots," explained the computer. "Some of the central control mechanisms over in City Hall are fouled up." Milson backed and kicked the door. "Won't open," he said, hobbling back to the work table. "I bet," said the computer, "I could learn to play the guitar in no time. Then accompany myself while I sing." "Where are you going to get the time to play the guitar?" "Going to have to do something," said the computer. "I just lost contact with most of the outside." Milson drank the half cup of cold near coffee he had saved from the day before. at the office door. He hit it hard with his good shoulder. , "Open, come on, damn it." "I woke up this morning and felt around for my shoes," sang the computer. "You know by that, Mama, I got the old walking blues." "I don't mind your singing but your guitar playing is terrible." Milson swept the file cards to the floor and sat on the work table's edge. "What guitar?" Milson squinted at the dull black machine. "I thought I heard one." "Nope." Milson limped to the food outlet and hit it with his fist. An empty coffee cup fell out. "How long is it since this food thing hasn't worked?" "Time is subjective," said the computer. "For a sedentary machine it's different from the way it is for you." "Stop being a wise ass and tell me how many days." "Three days." "Can't you get any word from outside?" "Nope. I'm running on my own generators now. No word from outside -- whatever's outside now." "You'd think," said Milson, "the Greater Los Angeles Nutrition Office would have worked things out better. It's -- I don't knowsloppy." "The human element," said the machine, "accounts for that." Milson pressed his knuckles with his fingertips. "About how long can somebody continue with no food? I wonder. Somewhere we have data spools on that. I think the data is quite encouraging. Some people survive considerable lengths of time while there's water. Somebody is bound to come in here from the outside eventually. Or they'll have the building repaired and functioning again. One of those things or both. Won't they?" The computer did not reply at once. It said finally, "Warren, you need something to take your mind off things." Milson asked, "What?" "Something to do," said the machine. "Something to occupy your mind, your hands." "Maybe," admitted Milson. "I was thinking," said the computer, "you might like to fill out a Questionnaire Thirty-one for me." Milson blinked at the machine. "As a joke, huh?" When the machine didn't speak Milson repeated, "As a joke?" Then he put his hands over his ears to keep from hearing what the computer was singing. ... until the four-toed Nebishes take over Earth -- and Science Fiction's most important writing of the year! Willy Ley knows that the dinosaurs were the ruling creatures on earth # the seas. If there had been ships and skippers at the time a sighting of a "sea serpent" would not even have been logged, for it would have been an expected event like meeting a group of porpoises in our time. Other saurians flew overhead on long leathery wings. Still others skittered around on land like featherless ostriches. And the biggest ones grazed the soft vegetation of enormous swampy lakes. again every science fiction reader knows this -- they were all gone. The task of explaining this fact fell to the people who had been the ones to unearth, assemble and reconstruct the dinosaurs, the paleontologists. They did not explain it very well, at least in the public's opinion, because they did not have a single (and preferably simple) answer. A dozen or so years ago the Russian astrophysicist Iosif Shmuelovitch Shklovski came up with a nongeological idea. Suppose that a comparatively near star had ago. It would have sprayed all nearby space -- including our solar system -- with violent radiation, everything from hard X-rays to alpha particles and still heavier atomic nuclei. Small animals in hiding under dense vegetation, or even burrowing, would not have been much affected but the big ones that could not hide, dinosaurs in this case, would have been exposed to the lethal radiation. Those not killed outright would have been made sterile. The concept was new and interesting. Much speculation about it ensued, generating a considerable amount of printed matter. Fresh fuel was added from two quarters to a debate that began building up. One side was made up of zoologists who contemplated the many types of large mammals that became extinct during the interval between the end of the last glaciation (say: I I ,# years ago) and historical times. Their query -- had there been another "great extinction" some # years ago? Oceanographers advanced their own views of the causes of extinctions. They had found that every once in a while what had been "magnetic north" turned into "magnetic south." Such a reversal implied, of course, that there must have been a period during which a magnetic field was absent -- the field could not reverse itself without going through a zero stage. During the zero stage -- and for some time on both sides of the zero mark -- no magnetic field would have existed to protect the earth and its inhabitants from cosmic radiation. While a supernova is a rare event and a nearby supernova is even rarer, the magnetic reversals seem to be fairly frequent. Four of them occurred during the last not occur with any regularity or periodicity -- and they apparently happen for reasons still to be discovered. We cannot tell how much radiation a supernova will throw into space or how much of it would arrive on earth in a given time. But we can tell what the temporary absence of the magnetic field will do. First let us see what the magnetic field does for us when we have it, as is the case right now. The cosmic rays that strike the earth are actually subatomic particles, mostly protons, that come from space. Some have originated at a considerable distance and not necessarily because of a nova or supernova outburst. Every star, with the probable exception of the red dwarfs, loses matter constantly. Our own sun is no exception -- especially during periods of solar flares -- and most of the protons that strike our upper atmosphere come from the sun. The magnetic field acts as an imperfect armor. Most of the subatomic particles are warded off -- they do not even reach our atmosphere. Those that have too much energy -- the ones that travel fastest -- to be warded off by the magnetic field are trapped in the Van Allen belts. Only a small percentage actually reaches our air. They collide with atoms and, farther down, molecules of the atmospheric gases, producing showers of so-called secondary rays. It is a rare "primary particle" that actually reaches the ground -- this fact is the main reason it took us so long to discover that cosmic rays exist. To complete the picture it must be added that more particles reach sea level in the areas of the magnetic poles than elsewhere. The magnetic poles do not coincide with the geographical poles but they are not too far away from them, so that one can say that the cosmic ray intensity is higher in the arctic and antarctic regions than in lower latitudes. The Office of Naval Research was interested in what would happen in the absence of the magnetic field and supported a theoretical investigation by Professor C. J. Waddington of the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Minnesota.  field all the particles coming from space, whether from our sun or from elsewhere, would enter the upper atmosphere unhindered. Moreover, the equatorial regions would no longer be favored. Whether the particles now trapped in the Van Allen belts would all enter the atmosphere is uncertain -- any magnetic reversal is likely to be a slow process so that the belts will be gradually dispersed. But the magnetic field is only our "outer armor" -- the "inner armor" is the atmosphere. It is completely opaque to X-rays and gamma rays -- and constitutes the reason we did not know whether the sun emits X-rays until rockets could carry instruments beyond the atmosphere. Subatomic particles, as has been stated, collide with the atmospheric nuclei. According to Professor Waddington only five reach sea level without having been weakened by a nuclear collision. For nuclei heavier than protons the number is even smaller. At present the radiation dosage at sea level due to cosmic rays is fourteen per cent higher in Antarctica than at the equator. Without a magnetic field the sea-level radiation would not be noticeably changed in the polar regions but would rise in the equatorial regions. The increase would be from # to #I mrad (the measurement unit) per year. How much is that? In normal regions of the land surface -- normal in the sense that surface deposits of naturally radioactive elements are absent -- the natural radiation dosage is # mrad per year. Over the oceans, far from land, it is only # mrad per year. Another effect to be considered is the production of radioactive isotopes in the upper atmosphere due to increased proton bombardment. The three isotopes most likely to be produced are hydrogen of mass # (tritium), beryllium-# and carbon-#. Now, the half-life of tritium is # years, that of years and that of carbon-# is # years. The long half-life of beryllium-# means that it disintegrates very slowly and therefore emits very little radiation per year; if it were a strong emitter it would have a shorter half-life. Beryllium# can be disregarded. Tritium can almost be disregarded because its half-life is so short. Remember that it is produced in the upper atmosphere and it is hard to see why a hydrogen atom or molecule should reach the ground at all. For practical purposes only carbon-# would contribute to ground-level radiation; considering the probable production rate, the amount of ground level radiation due to carbon-# (not the overall amount) would be doubled. Professor Waddington's conclusion reads: "The effect of removing the (magnetic) field is to increase the radiation dosage due to cosmic radiation by # to # mrad years between the polar regions and the equator and to increase that due to radioactive isotopes selectively taken up by organisms by not more than # mrad years. These values are so small, particularly in comparison with the general background radiation levels always present, that it seems inconceivable that they could appreciably affect the evolution of any organisms." lack of them -- of the disappearance of the earth's magnetic field was a job that could be performed because all the factors involved were known. But to decide what radiation from a supernova might do is impossible because at least some of the factors will be what you make them. Two scientists, Drs. W. H. Tucker of the Department of Space Science of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and K. D. Terry of the Department of Comparative Biochemistry of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, are convinced that supernovae at various distances from the earth caused repeated mass extinctions in the course of geological history. On the other hand Dr. Howard Laster of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Maryland in College Park calculates everything differently. Granted that the ultra-massive dose of cosmic ray particles produced by a nearby supernova would smash through both the barriers of the magnetic field and the atmosphere and cause a widespread extinction of large animals. The question is how many particles would arrive in how short a time. Terry and Tucker in their first publication claimed that a dose of # rontgen would arrive within a few days if the supernova were ten light years away. Dr. Howard Laster, taking interstellar magnetic fields into account, replied that "cosmic rays reaching the earth even from a relatively near supernova... would travel tortuous paths en route...Instead of arriving in one sudden burst concentrated in a few days or less, their radiation would be spread over years. The biological effect... would therefore be appreciably smaller, and probably negligible." The trouble here is that it cannot be decided which method of calculation is correct, meaning which one is applicable to the spread of particles from a supernova explosion. The question of whether we can see remnants of such a supernova can be answered by a plain no. If we blame a supernova for the death of the dinosaurs, the event took place the explosion cloud must have completely dispersed in the meantime. Besides, during those # million years the solar system traveled a distance of # light years -- if it moved at the present rate. I cannot conclude this article without a comment of my own -- I am not convinced that these great extinctions actually took place. Let's take the supposed great extinction of # years ago first. What disappeared then were three species of giant ground sloth in southern California and Texas, the saber-toothed smilodon, the shortfaced bear, the "dire wolf" and a few others. Evidence of the existence of most of them has been recovered from the tar pits of Rancho La Brea. Pictures always show rather concentrated animal life around the tar pits but the bones from the tar pits represent an accumulation of several centuries and probably an even longer time. This can lead to wrong conclusions -- one might as well conclude from the collection of meteorites in the Hayden Planetarium that falls of #-pound meteorites are a daily event. Besides, the "great extinction" of # years ago must have struck the western hemisphere only and not Africa. The answer probably lies in the fact that North America underwent I a profound climatic change at that time because of the retreat of the glaciers. Africa, which had not been glaciated, simply is a different case -- but it would hardly be so if death had come from space. Regarding the dinosaurs, it should be pointed out that we know of many species of dinosaurs that became extinct a long time before the end of the Cretaceous period. In the case of the disappearance of large mammals from the American scene a climatic change could be cited. Is there a comparable event that might have caused climatic changes over large areas? before the end of the Cretaceous period -- the last land connection between Brazil and Africa was torn apart. The Atlantic Ocean was in the process of assuming its current shape -- South America drifted westward while Africa more or less stayed put. Continental drift was active in the southern hemisphere, too, at about that time. Antarctica and Australia, which had formed one continental block, broke apart and started drifting in different directions. All this must have led to shifts in wind patterns which, in turn, caused climatic changes, changes which made large areas unsuitable for the inhabitants. From the fossil record we can conclude that the end of the Cretaceous period by and large was also the end of the dinosaurs. But we cannot tell how long it took them to die out.  for his thirty productive years as a science-fictioneer -- for the twentieth anniversary of his first book, which Doubleday is celebrating by issuing Mifflin's publication of his Merely to exist is for some the living end -- for others a dead end... at nine o'clock for no particular reason. But he had no particular reason to wake up at any other time either. He lay alone in bed for long minutes, feeling the familiar morning nausea, made up partly of an inability to get up and partly bed. He sighed and reached for the blue pack of cigarettes on the night table. They were marijuana, not tobacco -- the government had legalized marijuana in '#, two years after they had legalized prostitution. Or had prostitution been legalized in '#? Well, what the hell did it matter? He smoked his customary single cigarette quickly. These days one was just about enough to get him barely high, sort of hollow and resonant like the first stages of a good beer drunk. He knew that if he smoked much more he would become maudlin. He had had more than enough of that. But the one cigarette was enough to get him out of bed. Just barely. He dressed quickly, stumbling here and there over his easel, his photoenlarger, his potter's wheel, the assorted odds and ends of dozens of abortive hobbies that littered the bedroom. The bachelor apartment had only three rooms -- kitchen-dining room, living room and bedroom. There was no room for all the junk in the kitchen and for some reason he had a compulsion to keep the living room neat -- so the bedroom did double-duty as a storeroom. Awakened fully by the motion of dressing, Willy went into the bathroom, rubbed Depilo on his stubble, washed off Depilo and beard and combed his thinning hair. He went into the kitchen and punched out his usual breakfast on the Autostove -- grapefruit, three fried eggs, sausage, toast, coffee. As usual, he swore to go on a diet-next week. He ate quickly and joylessly, shoved the plastic dishes into the Disposall and slumped torpidly back in his chair. Now what? For a whole year after he had lost his job Willy had spent at least five mornings a week looking for work. After all, he had reasoned, he was a master draftsman with a junior-college degree, as good a draftsman as lived. It took him a whole year finally to accept what he had known from the beginning -- there simply were no more jobs for draftsmen, master or otherwise. The Draftmaster was just too good -- it could do anything a human draftsman could do, could do it faster, more cheaply and without errors. Draftsman had joined ditchdigger, machinist, longshoreman, telephone operator, bookkeeper, accountant, pilot and God-knows-what-else in the evergrowing list of extinct occupations. Willy had joined the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed and unemployable. Permanently. He dragged himself out of the kitchen and into the living room. He stared bleakly for a moment at the hi-fi, at the huge cabinet full of records that he hardly ever listened to any more. Resignedly he flopped down on the couch in front of the huge television screen that was one entire wall of the living room. "On," he muttered at the TV. Instantly the television screen came to huge, full-colored, jabbering life. It spewed out the morning news... this increase in the suicide rate is not statistically significant, President Michaelson declared," said the bland, optimistic, notquite-smiling announcer. "And now, turning to the world of sports. Only one midweek football game played yesterday. New York swamped Cleveland, thirty-eight to fourteen. At the Municipal Arena, up-and-coming young Jackson Davis scored a smashing victory over the veteran Blackie Munroe, two hundred forty-three to one hundred seven. Davis swept boxing, wrestling, judo, medieval swordsmanship, knives and freefor-all. Davis' manager. Lefty Paccelli, is now talking about a shot at the champion. The champion's manager was interviewed after the Arena reporter -- " "Four," grunted Willy Carson. The television set obediently changed channels. Picture of a man staggering out of bed, gulping a pill. Then a cut to the same man turning up his nose at a mouth-watering breakfast. "Friend," cooed a syrupy voice, "is your present wake-up pill ruining your appetite? Do you find yourself turning up your nose at breakfast? Then you need Dexayum, the only wake-up pill with an appetite arouser -- " "Drop dead," grunted Willy. "... guaranteed to keep you awake for twelve hours, without loss of appetite or your -- " "Off! Off! Off!" Willy shouted. The television set shut itself off. "Five lousy years," Willy muttered. "Five lousy years." Five years of collecting a hundred seventy-five a week in Basic Citizen's Stipend. B.C.S. Born, collect, stagnate. How many people were living off B.C.S. now? Willy wondered. Last figure he remembered hearing was probably over a hundred million. Who knew? Who bothered with knowing? What was the point? Christ, he thought. I'd do anything to be working again. Dig ditches. Shovel manure. Clean toilets. Fat chance... out of your job you were out of the work force. Period. The only conceivable direction you could go to get another job was up. You could not settle for a less skilled job because such jobs no longer existed. And retraining programs were just a bunch of sick jokes. Because everyone got as much education as he could take before he was permitted to add himself to the Potential Work Force in the first place. You only got a job -- if you qualified for one -- after you had reached your educational limit. This meant that when your job was automated out you really couldn't retrain, because you had already had all the training you could possibly absorb. So you went on B.C.S. Nobody ever got off B.C.S. It was a dead end. Born. Collect. Stagnate. The world was full of dead ends. Oh, you were taken care of, royally. Rent was free. Food was free. Medical care was free. Most of the hundred-seventy-five a week went for entertainment, hobbies, liquor, drugs -- anything to fill the emptiness, eat up the hours. But nothing could. Your marriage blew up in your face. How could two people live together for twenty-four hours every single day with nothing at all to do but stare stupidly at each other? Love turned to boredom. Boredom turned to disgust. Disgust turned to hate. And then you were alone. Alone with your whole life in front of you. Your whole stupid, empty, senseless life. "Damn!" Willy muttered. There were no more idiotic hobbies left to try. There were no drugs that could give life meaning. Television was meaningless images and sounds. Food tasted like sawdust. All the psychoanalysts in the world could not adjust a man to living in a vacuum. Willy found himself thinking about joining a Gang but the thought filled him with self-loathing. Once, two years ago, he had gone so far as to try it. Most of the men and women in the Gangs had never had a job in their lives. They joined a Gang as kids. They stayed in the Gang. Middle-aged juvenile delinquents. Last week they had arrested twenty people for stomping a man to death. Eight of the arrestees were "students." Seven were middleaged men collecting B.C.S. And the other five were collecting Senior Citizen's Stipend. Killcrazy kids at sixty-plus. meaning for him. It went nowhere. Willy rose. He stood immobile in the middle of the living room, not wanting to stay in the apartment for another moment but not having a place to go. He toyed with the idea of suicide. Certainly doing away with oneself was becoming more and more popular. But death -- well, what was death? More nothing. Complete nothing. Not very much different, really, from the life he was living. Death was an escape from suffering but there was no suffering on B.C.S. No pleasure, no pain, no change. He suddenly realized that he might welcome a little suffering. Pain was at least a feeling. If you felt pain you at least had something to look forward to -- the time when the pain finally ceased. But pain, too, had been abolished. Willy grimaced bleakly. Pain -- maybe that was the answer. Maybe if I could find a way to suffer... It wasn't much, but at last he had a purpose. Willy Carson went forth in search of suffering. " that suffering, other than selftorture, was mighty hard to come by. Hunger was impossible -- food was universally free. You couldn't give your worldly possessions to the poor -- there were no poor. A life of self-sacrifice was not in the cards -- no one needed your sacrifices. Hordes of well-fed, wellclothed, well-housed people swirled slowly about Willy. No one hustled, no one rushed. No one had anything very urgent to do. A benign sun shone down on the spotless city through the illusive shimmer of the Climatescreen. Climate control had eliminated even unpleasant weather. Willy began with not the faintest idea of where to find suffering until he remembered about weather before the days of the Climatescreen. He had, of course, only heard about it, not experienced it. But there was a way. The Wilderness. The Middle American Wilderness Area, a hundred square miles of carefully preserved natural terrain. No autostoves there. No Climatescreen. No rent-free apartments. Feeling an approximation of excitement for the first time in years, Willy raced to the nearest stripway. He boarded the moving strip and made his way to the middle express lane. The border of the Wilderness Area was less than an hour away by express stripway. In an hour he would be in the Wilderness Area, away from B.C.S., away from civilization. T HE border of the Middle American Wilderness Area was a steel wall ten feet high and stretching beyond the horizon in either direction. The stripway deposited Willy at an entrance to the Wilderness Area. The entrance was a plain metal door in the wall. On the left side of the door was a speaker grill. On the right was a small slot in the wall. Willy walked up to the door and tried to open it. It was shut tightly. "Welcome to the Middle American Wilderness Area," said a flat, mechanical voice from the speaker. "One hundred square miles of pure natural countryside provided by your government for the enjoyment of the citizen." There was a metallic click and something dropped into the slot to the right of the door. Willy went over to pick it up. It was a small metal bracelet with a red button set in its center like a jewel. It was hinged in two places so that it could be clamped over the wrist and locked by a handcuff-like clasp at the bottom. "You will find your Safetybracelet in the right-hand slot," said the speaker. "Put it around your wrist and close it. It will remain locked around your wrist until you leave the Middle American Wilderness Area. It contains a small radio transmitter. This safety device insures that the citizen will suffer no discomfort in the Wilderness Area. Should you suffer discomfort or should you become lost, merely press the red button on the Safetybracelet and a Retrieval Robot will immediately come to your aid." "But I don't want this thing," Willy said. "I want to be on my own. Open the door." But the entrance of course was pre-programed to ignore protests. "The entrance to the Wilderness Area will be opened as soon as the clasp of the Safetybracelet is locked around your wrist. This is to insure that no citizen wanders into the Wilderness Area unprotected. Have a pleasant stay." Willy cursed the unhearing mechanism. What the hell, he finally thought. Nobody could tell him actually to press the button. Righ t? He put on the Safetybracelet. The door opened instantly. Willy Carson stepped through into the Middle American Wilderness Area. The door closed behind him. with woods stretched before him as far as the eye could see. The only visible metal was the wall behind him and the bracelet on his wrist. Willy inhaled the open country air. All the old books had promised that the wild, free country air would somehow be cleaner, tastier than the air of the cities. But Willy was disappointed. He could detect no difference in the air of the Wilderness Area. Those books had been written in the days before The Climatescreen, in the days when cities were filled with smog, industrial wastes and gasoline fumes. Now the air in the cities was as fresh and pure as any country air. Willy suddenly had a vision of a man running carefree and laughing through green fields. Even though he recognized it as part of a television commercial -- here he was and there was the green open countryside. He began to run. He ran about twenty yards into the Wilderness Area, stumbling over roots, little rocks, clumps of weeds. Thirty yards, and he was panting heavily. Forty, and his legs began to feel leaden and disembodied. Fifty, and a sharp pain began in his lungs. He flopped down heavily in the grass, lying on his back and panting. Boy, am I out of shape. He tried to remember a time when he had been in shape but he could not. Well, what the hell, who was in shape these days? Only a few professional atheletes. What was the point in physical strength when no such thing as manual labor existed any more, when there were stripways to take you anywhere you wanted to go? Now that he was catching his breath Willy became aware of the myriad little pebbles, lumps and indentations in the ground he was lying on. It was not very comfortable, certainly not as confortable as the couch in his apartment. He scrambled to his feet, brushed himself off. He noticed in annoyance that his shirt was marked with green grass stains. His pants were soiled with brown earth. "Damn," he muttered. "There go a good shirt and a good pair of pants." Still annoyed at his soiled clothing, he began to walk farther away from the wall toward the nearest clump of woods. and rather cool, actually downright chilly. Willy wished he had thought to bring along a jacket. But no one ever bothered with jackets in Climatescreened cities? Shivering slightly, he looked about. He saw trees and bushes and a small, nearly dried-up stream. He saw rocks sweating moisture and other rocks with green moss growing on them. He saw damp brown earth and patches of rotting leaves. A few birds sang in the trees. Between snatches of bird song he heard silence, lots and lots of silence, more than he ever remembered experiencing. The silence nearly had the impact of sound. So this is wilderness. Woods, grass, quiet... Next? Nothing exciting offered immediately. He was alone in the woods. No television, no hi-fi, no Arena to go to. So what did you do in the woods? He began to walk idly, aimlessly, deeper into the forest. The air grew colder. Best to keep moving. Willy listened to birds, looked at trees and rocks and bushes, bushes, rocks and trees. He found that he had lost the ability to feel anything but boredom. He remembered some of the books he had read, that month or so when he had decided that the thing to do was read. Those jerks had written all kinds of stuff about the beauty of nature, how wonderful it was to be alone with the trees and the grass and the animals. Come to think of it -- I haven't seen any animals at all except for a few lousy birds... Big deal. Birds. Trees. Grass. Rocks. So what? Well, at least I'm free out here. Yeah, that's it, freedom... I'm free. Free to do what? Just be free, I guess... Some of those writers made a big deal about being free, too. But what in hell were they talking about? I guess freedom means not having to do anything you don't want to do... But hell, who had to do anything he did not want to do? On B.C.S. no one ever had to do anything at all. Maybe freedom is being able to do what you do want to do. So what do I want to do? That's easy. I want a job. I want to work. And that's the one thing in the world I can't do. I can't do it in the city and I can't do it here either... He walked on, becoming less and less concerned with abstract musings and more and more aware of something much more prosaic -- it was time for lunch. He was beginning to get hungry. He eyed the red button on the Safetybracelet. I can always call for the Retrieval Robot. No. That's not what I came out here for. Okay, so you're hungry. Isn't that what you wanted in the first place? To feel something for a change? Willy considered. How did one find food in the woods? One killed a rabbit or something, he supposed. Willy realized that he had never killed anything in his life and that he did not have the slightest idea of how to go about doing it, not without a gun. And maybe not with a gun, either. And hunger was not the way he had imagined it at all. It was like a big hollow in his guts and it sort of hurt. Now that he was suffering at last, he found that he felt no more alive at all than he had this morning. Suffering was just plain unpleasant. He stopped walking and once again considered the red button on the Safetybracelet. To push it would be the easiest thing in the world. No. At least I'll get back to the city on my own. Now let's see, the wall is -- where? Willy looked around. He was surrounded by trees and rocks and bushes, bushes, rocks and trees. He could not see the wall. He could not see the horizon. Where the hell am I? He began to walk faster and faster. He had no idea in which direction the wall was but he had to get to it. He had to do something. He would not press the button. He would make it on his own.  about in the woods. His hunger became an ache, then a dull throb and finally a pain, real and burning in his stomach. He did not like it one bit. I won't press the button. It started to rain. At first he heard only the patter of raindrops on the leafy roof of the woods. Then it came down harder and harder. The trees became soaked and the rain began to penetrate the treetops. Big, fat, cold drops hit Willy. And the trees began to dump their overload of moisture on him. Willy, who had lived his life in the protected Climatescreened cities, had never been caught in the rain before. He did not at all enjoy the new experience. It rained and rained. Willy's clothes became saturated. His hair grew wet and matted and water dripped down his forehead and into his eyebrows. Cold water. Willy was soaked. He was also freezing. He sat down on a big, flat rock. The rock was wet. He felt it through the seat of his sodden pants. He was wet, he was cold, he was tired and very hungry. He was thoroughly miserable. He was as miserable as he had been back in his apartment, maybe more so. He saw no meaning in being cold or wet or hungry. He had found suffering. It did not fill any of the empty places in his life. It just made new ones. With a little sighing sob of resignation, he pressed the red button on his Safetybracelet. Soon, very soon, the Retrieval Robot would arrive and take him back to the city. It would take him back to his apartment, back to his autostove, his hobbies, his long pointless days and empty nights. Back to the endless, meaningless years that would stretch on and on and on. But now Willy wanted to go back. He wanted desperately to return to the same old empty dead end that was his existence. It would be no less empty, no less futile. But it would be better. He pressed the button again. And abruptly it dawned on him that nothing happened. The button did not budge. It had not moved the first time. It was jammed or frozen. For some time he tried to work it without success and a cold apprehension began to crawl through his mind. He had never known anyone who had come back from the Wilderness Area. All he had learned about the place had come from books -- and all the books he had read had been old. Written before the cities had been Climatescreened, before auT tomation had been sufficiently developed to answer all men's needs hunger for the discomforts of the good old days. As the full implications of what he suspected was the truth seeped through his soggy brain Willy went a little berserk. He stopped banging the bracelet against trees and rocks when his arm began to bleed. Nothing had happened to the bracelet. Not even a scratch. The button had not moved. He saw no point in inflicting further suffering upon himself. No robot would come. No one -- himself included -- would ever update the lore of the good old days. The false legend that the air was fresher in the Wilderness Area than in the city would persist. The Area itself would be preserved as a symbol of hope for people like himself, for whom civilization had lost meaning and who had ceased to function, to have a purpose. He had an awesome feeling that he had flunked a test -- a test of survival. Not here. Back in the city. A new question shaped up in his mind -- soon he would know the answer. Was panic better than boredom? As we write (September), Frank Herbert has just breezed through New York City on his way home to Seattle after a three-week tour of South Viet Nam. Covering the progress of land-reform legislation there for the Hearst newspapers, Frank was based in Saigon but took frequent trips into the seething hinterlands -- during which he was accorded what ment. The Herberts recently moved to Washington. leaving San Francisco after more than a decade Frank is Higher Education Editor, among other things, for the Seattle Post-Intelligence. Or did he say Riot Editor? Good words continue to flow from the Herbert typewriter, which is already turning out a sequel to his new novel -- as yet untitled -- that soon will run in IF. He is also doing a treatment for an underwater sf television series for Krantz Films. And who could do an aqua story better -- remember Dragon in the Seal Frank believes, in fact, that one way of postponing the effects of the copulation explosion will be to move civilization -- or part of it -- under water. And he expects to see it happen. In his mind, by the way, Frank is plotting Beverly, Frank's lovely wife, is the Creative Director of Plan Ahead, a publication of the Retail Reporting Bureau. Both Herberts, when not involved in things literary, go to sea to fish for, he says, salmon and trout. Chicago named Mike Royko. piece of work, from the Thursday, He writes a daily column for the July #th, Chicago Daily News, News, sometimes just spitballing, copyright # by Field Entersometimes reprinting hair-raising prises, Inc., and reprinted by perselections from his mail. Somemission of the Chicago Daily times he also goes out and puts News: bombs or thumbtacks under various people and institutions. On occasion, this causes functional improvement but it rarely does so to everyone's satisfaction. Which explains the interesting character of the mail. One of the beautiful things he does is to go out and cover stories. He covered one the other day that some other people had been taking a crack at for a couple of generations. It appeared as one of his columns. From time to time, these come out in collected form as books. I hereby give a favorable review to the book which will The color TV flickered in the corner of the Bethany Nursing Home recreation room. A silver spaceship shone on the screen. A very old man sat and stared. The TV voice said the rocket would leave for the moon in # minutes. "I would never have dreamed of such a thing when I was a boy. It was so different then." When he, George Parkinson, was a boy, things were different. The year he was born, #, Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House. Mark Twain was writing "Tom Sawyer." Gen. Custer would soon ride to his death. There were # states in the Union. Alexander Graham Bell made a telephone. Johnson was at Cape Kennedy, watching. "Johnson," the old man said, falling silent for a moment. "I was born in Springfield, you know, and my mother was a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln. She always felt that Abe didn't treat Mary Todd as well as he should have. My mother knew Abe, too. Not well, of course. She knew Mary Todd much better." The spaceship was on the screen and the TV voice was talking about thrust, speed, power. The old man leaned forward, but that hurt, so he sighed and sat back. "I was about # when my father took the family west in a covered wagon. My mother, four brothers and I. We settled in Wichita. It was a frontier town then, mud streets, cowboys. It was just on the fringes of civilization." Barely on the fringes. Just beyond, Billy the Kid was still shooting people. Jesse James was alive and in hiding. The Apaches and Sioux were fighting us furiously. Texans drove their longhorn herds to Kansas. The old man pulled his eyes from the spaceship and let his mind drift back. "I didn't see any of the famous badmen myself, but they were there. Five of them rode into a town nearby and left their horses in front of the bank. A lawyer across the street could see that they were robbing it. He took his rifle and shot all five of them as they came out. I don't remember who they were. Maybe the Daltons or somebody like that. They left their bodies in the street all day, as a warning." and the TV voice was dwelling on the magnitude of the scientific achievement. "There was not much talk of science when I was a boy," the old man said. "People were most concerned about their health and their cattle's health." Science. The year Mr. Parkinson was born, Louis Pasteur was on the brink of his discovery. He was # when Roentgen discovered the X-ray, and # when the Curies isolated radium. Now he was looking at a spaceship on a color television set, in an air-conditioned room, sitting in a plastic chair. The vapors poured from the bottom of the ship. It would be soon. The TV voice talked of the enormous speed of the thing. The old man shook his head in disbelief. "I find it hard to comprehend such things. You know, I became a preacher right after I finished high school, and I went to Oklahoma territory and rode a pony on a fourchurch circuit. It took so long to get around. "Why, when my wife and I hitched up the horses to visit a ranch, a #-mile trip would take us all day." Then Mr. Parkinson was riding his circuit, a man named Francis Train set a world speed record. He cried the globe in # days, # hours. The astronauts would do it in an hour and a half. thousands of people at Cape Kennedy, and the enormous trafficjam. "So many cars," the old man said. "I didn't see a car until I was a grown man. It was when I came east to study at Harvard's divinity school. I went back west, of course. I was a minister for many years, many years." The early car came into production when he was #. A couple of years later he read about someone named Orville Wright, flying a thing with wings, for a few brief moments. They were counting tense seconds now. The old man clenched his brown-flecked hands tighter and leaned his chin on them. Then it came. The colors blazed. The giant thing screamed and strained. The old man sucked in his breath. It heaved and then jumped toward the sky, and the voice said: "We have a liftoff." "The moon," Mr. Parkinson said, a hint of delight in his voice. "The moon." do anything for just one reason and, apart from simple pleasures at finding something as elegant as Royko's summation of an experience that some people have written series of bad novels about, here's my other motive for reprinting it coming at you. Somehow I think Mike's column -- and a lot of other work like it by people who don't normally give a hoarse cough for technology -- signals the end of an era. I think, in other words, that tech fiction has made its point. Many relations staff, many of the Cape Kennedy and Houston technicians and supervisors, a significant proportion of the top management and a hefty percentage of the public, are now infused with words, images and concepts lifted straight out of science fiction as she used to be. In any number of cases, it's impossible to say whether an engineering idea, or a piece of terminology, is consciously derived from a description in the sf of the #s or whether we have a simple coincidence. Or a complex one. The sf of the #s, for reading which you and I were battered by parent and friend in our childhood, has indeed turned out to have been founded on workable engineering principles not only in this case but also in the case of the atom bomb, the death ray, the contraceptive pill, the polio vaccine, the heart transplant, and so on forever. The faith is so true and its practice and practitioners are so respectable that you cannot, as noted above, separate the poets from priests any more. And I think the Royko colum proves that writers like Heinlein were right -- the technological experience can have emotional content not only for the Mr. Parkinsons of the world but for the readers of Mike Royko's column. I'm saying that, except for latecoming readers, there is no new emotional charge to be found in it. Despite tomorrow's good story and the talented new writers who will try it -- and the occasional commercial success -- tech fiction story has entered the mainstream. Any skilled writer can write a skilled example of it without previous training -- in part because he lives in the tech world we promised him. And in part because those fact-fiction promises are still preserved and familiar on every book rack in that world. W E'RE getting more and more tech fiction that isn't. For instance, take Joe Poyer, who seems to be this year's Rick Raphael, meaning he's read a lot of last year's Alistair McLean. Joe, like Rick, strikes me as the kind of fellow who has been stimulated by tech fiction, but can't reciprocrate. Robert Heinlein would have written "In addition to the civilian agency weather satellites, the Department of Defense maintained a series of its own." Not flowing, but communicative. In North Cape , however (Doubleday, #), Poyer wants you to be sure not to miss the point. So he writes: "In addition to the reports from the civilian agency weather satellites, the Department of Defense maintained a series of its own, devoted exclusively to gathering weather information strictly for the military." You'd swear the man was being paid by the word, wouldn't you? But it's not that. It's, actually, an inability with the English language which, I suppose, is Poyer's mother tongue. "The wind, blowing laconically for the past few minutes..." "They were clumsy, but would serve to keep the wearer on top of, rather than floundering knee-deep in, the snow." Then he wrote: "...violent winds that sheered off the crests, as neatly as would a razor, in long foamy streamers." Poetic, no? Unfortunately for tech fiction, the word is not "sheer," it's "shear," as in shearing action. Or as in a pair of shears. Which makes it kind of silly to be offering a razor as an alternative method of shaving waves. And a ship doesn't have "weigh" on her, not even if Miss Muffet has been by lately. But here's my favorite: "Gadsden staggered -- literally staggered -- up and sank down..." Pause. Okay, now that we've got ourselves together again, and ignoring several hundred wellchosen words about the common semiliterate gaffe known as the premature interjection, let us consider the creative qualities of a man who admits that his characters may not be doing what he says they're doing, unless he nails it down with a good, solid literally. I think the point is that in this story -- which, as you'll see in a minute, is totally unfresh -- Poyer got to the scene in which that figure was due to stagger. So he wrote down the words and, as he did so, because the Muse is not only fickle but sometimes a little stoned, he somehow actually saw it happen in his minds eye. And that "literally" marks the spot where for one exalted moment Joe Poyer peered through the bars. named Teleman flies around and around the world in an invulnerable spy plane that nurtures and doctors him while he peers at screens and, once in a while, actually looks out through an "observation slit" (to prevent the ingress of arrows and other sharp objects, one assumes). He discovers the secret. Never mind what it is -- all spy planes discover some secret if they fly around long enough. OK. Now he has it and so he turns and flies away with it, lickety split. For home? No. His instructions are to fly to a ship which is being beaten up by the worst Arctic storm in a century Why? Because if he flew home the book would have to be called Airport. The Russians catch on. They shoot him down. He crashes on the North Cape and a landing party from the ship goes to his rescue. Not for his own sake alone but because he has The Secret. (He also had all kinds of radios. The secret can be put in a few sentences. How do I know? Poyer put it in sentences. The Russians chase the landing party. They catch it. There is a struggle. The Americans win. Who else? Now. The entire science fiction content of this book is restricted to making the plane a little bit techier than anything we have at the moment and the ship a "battle cruiser" with big engines and no cannon. The story content is restricted to the kind of Pellioning on Ossa that McLean has been getting away with for years, in which the world's biggest storm hits a ship that just happens to have a weak bow. The attemped welds only weaken the hull and the waves won't let them turn when they have to. The Captain goes out on the icy deck to con the ship himself and it's cold and Gawd help us can nothing be done until whup -- it's time to worry about the pilot again. So the ship turns without trouble and we never hear about the bow again because the pilot's troubles are now playing that role -- until it's time to get back to the ship and Jesus now the condenser's frozen solid and blah, blah, blah. This can of worms and neurotic tags is more and more typical of what's happening in the place where technological sf was. Far better writers, and very much better books, will come along. But this subliterate pastiche is not only increasing in frequency -- it's admired in certain circles, as the Raphael drek was. And that's bad. Tech fiction has been subliterate before. But now it's getting sublogical. logical 'book to propose as an antithetical example. I only have a paralogical one -- Roger Zelazny's Creatures oj Light and Darkness (Doubleday, #). Zelazny can't write a clumsy sentence. He can only write it in such a way that you have to guess at his state of mind. And this time he's really done it. (I seem to remember saying the same thing about Phil Dick a few years ago. And now Dick is either totally incoherent or else, sadly, too lucid). This book is what happens if you cross Lord of Light with Master of Lije and Death and you're Roger Zelazny. Doubleday calls this a bizarre and comic fantasy. True. The sleeping beauty scene, for one, meets both requirements fully, and r veral others, too. Oh. The story? Well, apparently there was this bunch of immortals who, growing in power and scope, decided to take on the attributes of the Egyptian gods and rule the known temporal universe, and took to quarelling among themselves. But the story's told from their viewpoint, which is rather ancient, and the viewpoint of the rather aged cultures of the future. Zelazny makes little if any attempt to tie these things back through time to our own worlds, so what we have is a story told as if the narrator could barely find the words to describe for us the accustomed things and persons of his own day. Sometimes, like any good storyteller wrapped up in his own visions, he utters some purely personal statement or tosses off an aside that many of us are not hip to. We get a great big book, although it's shorter than North Cape, jammed full of adventure and poetry, lacking guideposts but possessing a nearly perfect clarity. The writer doesn't give you any help at all in figuring out what's happening, but you can be sure he's describing it exactly and standing aside so you can apply your own brain. He also occasionally whaps off a stand of poetry or a bushel of playlet. The tableau, "What Child is This," brings all to a marvelous and satisfactory conclusion. Almost, anyway. What this kind of book offers you is lots and lots of rich, satisfactory detail and really moving human interplay. It has what we. might call a simple plot. But if we call it that, what do we call a McLean-Poyer plot? Pause. Ah. You could compliment a woman on her simple dress but not her absurd one. Okay. The Zelazny is a book that will probably baffle and infuriate as many people as the Poyer does. Mote, perhaps. It presents one major problem -- it scares me into wondering if Zelazny will ever stop exploring this particular byway. And it isn't anything more than symtomatic of the vitality in a new way of going, which isn't the New Wave and isn't antiscience fiction and isn't Null-T, either, because the only believable and exciting inventive writing being done today about technological effects is writing by people like Zelazny and Delany. I don't know what you'd call it. I'm not going to call it anything permanent until we can be reasonably sure we've got an accurate label. Or at least a good hint. But that doesn't mean we can't be happy when people go there.  Brain Pollution ( continued from page #) caused by the dominant intelligence since the first slave ships traversed the seas. And then I would take a hard look at such mind-polluting terms as "unquestionable" and "success" and I would ask whose. Why don't we? An answer just might point up the really important difference that's been there right along. Caucasoids, as such, have succeeded in failing monumentally and that is what is shaking up the world. Blacks, as such, have not yet failed. I am not going to make anything of that point beyond stating it. But if I were Black, White, Iridescent or a porpoise I would worry achingly about an intelligence that would equate my inability to jump -- after my legs had been amputated -- with a sudden loss of hearing. Or one that would, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, type my intelligence by my skin color. I would, I presume, qualify by virtue of both genetics and color among Mr. Campbell's Caucasoids -- if virtue is the word. I'm not at all sure that it is. But if I am going to be intellectually typed among them I'm entitled to some questions. Exactly what are us Caucasoids looking for? And what will we do with it when we find it? Will we alter our environment to benefit the Blacks -- when we have thus far been able only to ruin it for ourselves? Or are we groping for the last two legs of the centipede -- the ones that have evolved into poison fangs? But the prospect that really terrifies me is that, having been typed Caucasoid in intelligence, I might find myself living in a neighborhood infested with lowlike Mr. Campbell -- and still have to ride in taxicabs whose drivers had not qualified for Mensa. What's a hack license for? I will, of course, permit my intelligence and my skin color to be examined and typed and compared with anyone's -- provided the testing and the typing are done by someone who does not confuse the two. I do not wish to wind up covered all over with brains and with my skin jammed inside my skull. And Mr. Campbell shouting at me, "Think!" When Gertrude Stein wrote, "A rose is a rose is a rose -- " she was simply correcting an old hack's: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Any Madison Avenue adman knows that he can make a rose smell like a stinkweed by giving it a new name. Let's stop polluting our brains. Dune was an arid planet, inhabited by gigantic sandworms and wild Fremen whose customs were based on water scarcity. Its only resource was melange, an addictive drug produced by the worms. This "spice" aided longevity and gave an adept visions of the future. After the murder of his noble dumped into the desert, together with his pregnant mother, the trained by the Bene Gesserit -- a female order devoted to mental arts and the control of genetic lines to produce a "kwisatz haderach, " a messiah capable of using psi powers. Paul was to be their key to this. In learning to live with the Fremen, Paul was forced to take an overdose of drug. This opened his mind permanently to the future -- or futures. Lady Jessica also took an overdose with the result that full knowledge of all her mother had known. against the Harkonnen rulers and their Sardaukar soldiers. In the battle, Paul's old friend and teachAs ruler, Paul took the Harkonhis consort. But he refused to consummate the marriage, remaining true to the Fremen woman Now twelve years later, Paul has made the desert bloom and he rules a mighty empire of stars. He has become almost a god to the Qizarate, a cult built around his visions. Against it, the other quasi-political, quasi-religious forces of humanity have just begun to unite. Among these is the Bene Gesserit, headed by the Reverend help of their trainee. Princess Irulan. More or less with them is the Bene Tleilax, supposedly amoral scientists; their representative is the Tleilaxu Face Dancer man or woman. The two groups have the aid of the Spacing Guild, which must control the melange trade, since only spice visions make interstellar navigation possible. fishlike than human and must live in a tank. His main function is to obscure Paul's visions with his own gift so their plotting will not be detected. They send Princess Irulan back to Paul to demand he give her an heir; she has so far kept Chani sterile by adding drugs to the Fremen woman's food. Paul refuses. He is filled with bitter visions, unsure but. that he is the very instrument of the future he tries to avoid. He is sure, however, that a royal heir by Irulan will destroy all hope. Paul detects the Reverend Mother on Edric's ship and has her arrested. But Scytale and escape. Scytale secretly visits a Fremen quarter to gain information. He leaves Bijaz behind but takes with him the semuta-addicted daughter During an interview with Edric, Paul learns nothing. The presence of the Steersman muddies all his Paul can only determine that the Reverend Mother has suggested that Princess Irulan have Chani killed, since Paul's mate now refuses the food containing the sterility drug. Edric then makes Paul a shocking present -- something that looks like Duncan Idaho, except for metallic eyes. It is a ghola -- Duncan 's body has been regrown from its cell patterns by Tleilaxu science. But it has no memories from its former life and is now named HA YT. Paul is disturbed by the fact that he saw no vision of Duncan's return. He asks the purpose of the gift, and Hayt answers: "I have been sent to destroy you." But Hayt does not know how it will come about. He tells Paul to send him away -- but Paul cannot, since Duncan was once so close to him. Alia is sent to study the body of a girl found in the desert. She can learn little, except that the corpse shows signs of semuta-addiction, but she is sure it indicates some grave danger. On the way back, Hayt reveals signs of being the real Duncan Idaho, and she is attracted to him in spite of herself. When he kisses her, she protests; but he tells her he only did what she wanted -- and she realizes he is right. On the verge of new struggles of empire, Paul finds nothing going well. There are reports of treason among the Fremen and an attempt to steal a worm and develop melange on another world -- but which world Paul cannot see. He grows more worried as his visions grow more and more confusing. He constantly sees a moon fallingsome highly personal symbol of disaster; the meaning eludes him. Paul sees the Reverend Mother Mohiam and tells her that Chani is now pregnant. For peace from her, he promises that Irulan may have a child by artifical insemination -- but not an heir to the throne. Upset, she agrees to wait while she consults her order. But it is no victory. Paul admits to the ghola -- who is becoming more and more Duncan Idaho -- that he knows the birth of an heir means Chani's death; there are problems because of the years of secret contraceptive. But he can do nothing. Otheym's daughter Lichna -- really Scytale in her form -- appears with a message, that Otheym asks Paul to come to him, since he has information on the traitor Fremen. Paul knows it is Scytale, but the future demands he act as if it were really Lichna. He is not encouraged when he visits one of Alia's religious ceremonies for the pilgrims; under an overdose of melange, she sees what he fears. At Otheym's house, he meets Bijaz -- and gets another shock, since there was no dwarf-ghola in his vision! Otheym speaks bitterly of treason, but says the dwarf knows the names of the disloyal. He gives Paul the dwarf as Paul leaves. Outside, Paul turns Bijaz over to Stilgar and begins directing the search for the traitors. Then a blast of radiation strikes the searching troops. It is a forbidden " Stone Burner" -- an atomic bomb in which the type of radiation can be adjusted. This one immediately destroys the eyes of all who see it. When it dies down, Paul orders that all the men be rescued and that those blinded shall have Tleilaxu artificial eyes like those of Hay t. But for him there will be no Tleilaxu eyes. His sight is gone, as he foresaw. Now he moves only by the inner sight of his visions. And he knows how without doubt that what he has foreseen must surely be! A Council meeting is called, Korba is accused of plotting with others to destroy Muad'dib with the Stone Burner. Korba complacently defends himself but Paul suddenly appears at the meeting and orders Korba imprisoned. Who were the other conspirators? Alia suspects even the stalwart Stilgar. Bijaz, meeting the ghola, tells him he is not Hayt but indeed Duncan Idaho. Bijaz also reveals himself as an instrument of the Tleilaxu, and Hayt their slave. Bijaz proposes a scheme for catchHayt fights back mentally. Joining Alia, Hayt finds that she has taken an overdose of melange. She tells him that the Bene Gesserit want Chani's child -- or a child of Alia's own. She foresees such a child but somehow cannot envision its father. Hayt saves her from the death threatened by the drug overdose. She realizes he loves her. She calls him Duncan. He leaves ' to assist Chani, who is bearing her child in the desert. Hayt becomes aware that he is truly Duncan Idaho, and consequently is able to reveal Bijaz' plot to Paul. The two men rejoice at the renewal of their friendship. True to the visions, Chani dies in childbirth -- leaving Paul not one child but two, a son and a daughter. m'Lord." Again, Tandisbent close to Paul. "Why does your ghola carry a bared knife?" "Duncan, put away your knife," Paul said. "The time for violence is past." As he spoke, Paul felt closer to the sound of his voice than to the mechanism which had created the sound. Two babies! The vision had contained but one. Yet, these moments went as the vision went. There was a person here who felt grief and anger. Someone. His own awareness lay in the grip of an awful treadmill, replaying his life from memory. Two babies? Again, he stumbled. Chani, Chani, he thought. There was no other way. Chani, beloved, believe me that this death was quicker for you... and kinder. They'd have held our children hostage, displayed you in a cage and slave pits, reviled you with the blame for my death. This way... this way we destroy them and save our children. Children? Once more, he stumbled. I permitted this, he thought. I should feel guilty. The sound of noisy confusion filled the cavern ahead of them. It grew louder precisely as he remembered it growing louder. Yes, this was the pattern, the inexorable pattern, even with two children. Chani is dead, he told himself. At some far away instant in a past which he had shared with others, this future had reached down to him. It had chivvied him and herded him into a chasm whose walls grew narrower and narrower. He could feel them closing in on him. This was the way the vision went. Chani is dead. I should abandon myself to grief. But that was not the way the vision went. "Has Alia been summoned?" "She is with Chani's friends," Tandis said. Paul sensed the mob pressing back to give him passage. Their silence moved ahead of him like a wave. The noisy confusion began dying down. A sense of congested emotion filled the sietch. He wanted to remove the people from his vision, but found it impossible. Every face turning to follow him carried its special imprint. They were pitiless with curiosity, those faces. They felt grief, yes, but he understood the cruelty which drenched them. They were watching the articulate become dumb, the wise become a fool. Didn't the clown always appeal to cruelty? This was more than a death watch, less than a wake. respite, but still the vision moved him. Just a little farther now, he told himself. Black, visionless dark awaited him just ahead. There lay the place ripped out of the vision by grief and guilt, the place where the moon fell. He stumbled into it and would have fallen had Idaho not taken his arm in a fierce grip, a solid presence knowing how to share his grief in silence. "Here is the place," Tandis said. "Watch your step, Sire," Idaho said, helping him over an entrance lip. Hangings brushed Paul's face. Idaho pulled him to a halt. Paul felt the room then, a reflection against his cheeks and ears. It was a rockwalled space with the rock hidden behind tapestries. "Where is Chani?" Paul whispered. Harah's voice answered him: "She is right here, Usui." Paul heaved a trembling sigh. He had feared her body already had been removed to the stills where Fremen reclaimed the water of the tribe. Was that the way the vision went? He felt abandoned in his blindness. "The children?" Paul asked. "They are here, too, m'Lord," Idaho said. "You have beautiful twins, Usui," Harah said, "a boy and a girl. See? We have them here in a creche." Two children, Paul thought wonderingly. The vision had contained only a daughter. He cast himself adrift from Idaho's arm, moved toward the place where Harah had spoken and stumbled into a hard surface. His hands explored it -- the metaglass outlines of a creche. Someone took his left arm. "Usui?" It was Harah. She guided his hand into the creche. He felt soft-soft flesh. It was so warm! He felt ribs, breathing. "That is your son," Harah whispered. She moved his hand. "And this is your daughter." Her hand tightened on his. "Usui, are you truly blind now?" He knew what she was thinking. The blind must be abandoned in the desert. Fremen tribes carried no dead weight. "Take me to Chani," Paul said, ignoring her question. Harah turned him, guiding him to the left. Paul felt himself accepting now the fact that Chani was dead. He had taken his place in a universe he did not want, wearing flesh that did not fit. Every breath he drew bruised his emotions. Two children! He wondered if he had committed himself to a passage where his vision would never return. It seemed unimportant. "Where is my brother?" It was Alia's voice behind him. He heard the rush of her, the overwhelming presence as she took his arm from Harah. "I must speak to you!" Alia hissed. "In a moment," Paul said. "Now! It's about Lichna." "I know," Paul said. "In a moment." "You don't have a moment!" "I have many moments." "But Chani doesn't!" "Be still!" he ordered. ""Chani is dead." He put a hand across her mouth as she started to protest. "I order you to be still!" He felt her subside and removed his hand. "Describe what you see." "Paul!" Frustration and tears battled in her voice. "Never mind," he said. And he forced himself to inner stillness, opened the eyes of his vision to this moment. Yes -- it was still here. Chani 's body lay on a pallet within a ring of light. Someone had straightened her white robe and smoothed it, trying to hide the blood of the birth. No matter; he could not turn his awareness from the vision of her face -- such a mirror of eternity in the still features! H E turned away, but the vision moved with him. Shewasgone... never to return. The air, the universe, all vacant -- everywhere vacant. Was this the essence of his penance? He wanted tears, but they would not come. Had he lived too long a Fremen? This death demanded its moisture! Nearby, a baby cried and was hushed. The sound pulled a curtain on his vision. Paul welcomed the darkness. This is another world, he thought. Two children. The thought came out of some lost oracular trance. He tried to recapture the timeless mind-dilation of the melange, but awareness fell short. No burst of the future came into this new consciousness. He felt himself rejecting the future -- any future. "Goodbye, my Sihaya," he whispered. Alia's voice, harsh and demanding, came from somewhere behind him. "I've brought Lichna!" Paul turned. "That's not Lichna," he said. "That's a face dancer. Lichna's dead." "But hear what she says," Alia said. Slowly, Paul moved toward his sister's voice. "I'm not surprised to find you alive, Atreides." The voice was like Lichna's, but with subtle differences, as though the speaker used Lichna's vocal chords, but no longer bothered to control them sufficiently. Paul found himself struck by an odd note of honesty in the voice. "Not surprised?" Paul asked. "I am Scytale, a Tleilaxu of the Face Dancers, and I would know a thing before we bargain. Is that a ghola I see behind you, or Duncan Idaho?" "It's Duncan Idaho," Paul said. "And I will not bargain with you." "I think you'll bargain." "Duncan," Paul said, speaking over his shoulder, "will you kill this Tleilaxu if I ask it?" "Yes, m'Lord." There was the suppressed rage of a berserker in Idaho's voice. "Wait!" Alia said. "You don't know what you're rejecting." "But I do know," Paul said. "So it's truly Duncan Idaho of the Atreides," Scytale said. "We found the lever! A ghola can regain his past." Paul heard footsteps. Someone brushed past him on the left. Scytale's voice came from behind now. "What do you remember of your past, Duncan?" "Everything. From my childhood on. I even remember you at the tank when they removed me from it," Idaho said. "Wonderful." Paul heard the voice moving. I need a vision, he thought. Darkness frustrated him. Bene Gesserit training warned him of terrifying menace in Scytale, yet the creature remained a voice, a shadow of movement -- entirely beyond him. "Are these the Atreides babies?" Scytale asked. "Harah!" Paul cried. "Get her away from there!" "Stay where you are!" Scytale shouted. "All of you! I warn you, a face dancer can move faster than you suspect. My knifecanhaveboth these lives before you touch me." Paul felt someone nudge his right arm, then move off to the right. "That's far enough. Alia," Scytale said. "Alia," Paul said. "Don't." "It's my fault," Alia groaned. "My fault!" "Atreides," Scytale said, "shall we bargain now?" single hoarse curse. His throat constricted at the suppressed violence in Idaho's voice. Idaho must not break. Scytale would kill the babies! "To strike a bargain, one requires a thing to sell," Scytale said. "Not so, Atreides? Will you have your Chani back? We can restore her to you. A ghola, Atreides. A ghola with full memory ! But we must hurry. Call your friends to bring a cryologic tank to preserve her flesh." To hear Cham's voice once more, Paul thought. To feel her presence beside me. Ahhh, that's why they gave me Idaho as a ghola, to let me discover how much the re-creation is like the original. And now -- full restoration... at their price. I'd be a Tleilaxu tool forevermore. And Chani... chained to the same fate by a threat to our children, exposed once more to the Qizarate's plotting... "What pressures would you use to restore Chani's memory to her?" Paul asked, fighting to keep his voice calm. "Would you condition her to... to kill one of her own children?" "We use whatever pressures we need," Scytale said. "What say you, Atreides?" "Alia," Paul said, "bargain with this thing. I cannot bargain with what I cannot see." "A wise choice," Scytale gloated. "Well, Alia, what do you offer me?" Paul lowered his head, bringing himself to stillness within stillness. He'd glimpsed something just then -- like a vision, but not a vision. It had been a knife close to him. There! "Give me a moment to think," Alia said. "My knife is patient," Scytale said, "but Chani's flesh is not. Take a reasonable amount of time." Paul felt himself blinking. It could not be... but it was! He felt eyes. Their vantage point. was odd and they moved in an erratic way. There! The knife swam into shock, Paul recognized the viewpoint. It was that of one of his children! He was seeing Scytale's knife hand from within the creche! It glittered only inches from him. Yes -- and he could see himself across the room, as well -- head down, standing quietly, a figure of no menace, ignored by the others in this room. "To begin, you might assign "All of them?" Alia protested. "AH."" Watching himself through the eyes in the creche, Paul slipped his crysknife from its belt sheath. The movement produced a strange sensation of duality. He measured the distance, the angle. There'd be no second chance. He prepared his body then in the Bene Gesserit way, armed himself like a cocked spring for a single concentrated movement, a prajna thing requiring all his muscles balanced in one exquisite unity. The crysknife leaped from his hand. The milky blue of it flashed into Scytale's right eye, jerked the Face Dancer's head back. Scytale threw both hands up and staggered backward against the wall. His knife clattered off the ceiling, to hit the floor. Scytale rebounded from the wall; he fell face toward, dead before touching the floor. creche, Paul watched the faces in the room turn toward his eyeless figure, read the combined shock. Then Alia rushed to the creche, bent over it and hid the view from him. "Oh, they're safe," Alia said. "They're safe." "M'Lord," Idaho whispered, "was that part of your vision?" "No." He waved a hand in Idaho's direction. "Let it be." "Forgive me, Paul," Alia said. "But when that creature said they could... revive..." "There are some prices an Atreides cannot pay," Paul said. "You know that." "I know," she sighed. "But I was tempted..." "Who was not tempted?" He turned away from them, groped his way to a wall, leaned against it and tried to understand what he had done. How? How? The eyes in the creche! He felt poised on the brink of terrifying revelation. "My eyes, father. " The word-shapings shimmered before his sightless vision. "My son!" Paul whispered, too low for any to hear. "You're... aware." "Yes, father. Look!" Paul sagged against the wall in a spasm of dizziness. He felt that he'd been upended and drained. His own life whipped past him. He saw his father. He was his father. And the grandfather, and the grandfathers before that. His awareness tumbled through a mind-shattering corridor of his whole male line. "How?" he then asked silently. Faint word-shapings appeared, faded and were gone, as though the strain was too great. Paul wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth. He remembered the awakening of Alia in the Lady Jessica's womb. But there had been no Water of Life, no overdose of melange this time... or had there? Had Chani's hunger been for that? Or was this somehow the genetic product of his line foreseen by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam? Paul felt himself in the creche then, with Alia cooing over him. Her hands soothed him. Her face loomed, a giant thing directly over him. She turned him then and he saw his creche companion -- a girl with that bony-ribbed look of strength which came from a desert heritage. She had a full head of tawny red hair. As he stared, she opened her eyes. Those eyes! Chani peered out of her eyes... and the Lady Jessica. A multitude peered out of those eyes. "Look at that," Alia said. "They're staring at each other." "Babies can't focus at this age," Harah said. "I could," Alia said. Slowly, Paul felt himself being disengaged from that endless awareness. He was back at his own wailing wall then, leaning against it. Idaho shook his shoulder gently. "M'Lord?" "Let my son be called Leto for my father," Paul said, straightening. "At the time of naming," Harah said, "I will stand beside you as a friend of the mother and give that name." "And my daughter," Paul said. "Let her be called Ghanima." "Usui!" Harah objected. "Ghanima's an ill-omened name." "It saved your life," Paul said. "What matter that Alia made fun of you with that name? My daughter is Ghanima, a spoil of war." Paul heard wheels squeak behind him then -- the pallet with Chani's body being moved. The chant of the Water Rite began. "Hal yawm!" Harah said. "I must leave now if I am to be the observer of the holy truth and stand beside my friend for the last time. Her water belongs to the tribe." "Her water belongs to the tribe," Paul murmured. He heard Harah leave. He groped outward and found Idaho's sleeve. "Take me to my quarters, Duncan." himself free gently. It was a time to be alone. But before Idaho could leave there was a disturbance at the door. "Master!" It was Bijaz calling from the doorway. "Duncan," Paul said, "let him come two paces forward. Kill him if he comes farther." "Ayyah," Idaho said. "Duncan is it?" Bijaz asked. "Is it truly Duncan Idaho?" "It is," Idaho said. "I remember." "Then Scytale's plan succeeded!" "Scytale is dead," Paul said. "But I am not and the plan is not," Bijaz said. "By the tank in which I grew! It can be done! I shall have my pasts -- all of them. It needs only the right trigger!" "Trigger?" Paul asked. "The compulsion to kill you," Idaho said, rage thick in his voice. "Mentat computation: They found that I thought of you as the son I never had. Rather than slay you, the true Duncan Idaho would take over the ghola body. But... it might have failed. Tell me, dwarf, if your plan had failed, if I'd killed him, what then?" "Oh... then we'd have bargained with the sister to save her brother. But this way the bargaining is better." Paul took a shuddering breath. He could hear the mourners moving down the last passage now toward the deep rooms and the water stills. "It's not too late, m'Lord," Bijaz said. "Will you have your love back? We can restore her to you. A ghola, yes. But now -- we hold out the full restoration. Shall we summon servants with a cryological tank, preserve the flesh of your beloved..." It was harder now, Paul found. He had exhausted his powers in the first Tleilaxu temptation. And now all that was for nothing! To feel Chani's presence once more... "Silence him," Paul told Idaho, speaking in Atreides battle tongue. He heard Idaho move toward the door. "Master!" Bijaz squeaked. "As you love me," Paul said, still in battle tongue, "do me this favor: kill him before I succumb!" "Noooooooo..." Bijaz screamed. The sound stopped abruptly with a frightened grunt. "I did him thekindness," Idaho said. Paul bent his head, listening. He no longer could hear the mourners. He thought of the ancient Fremen rite being performed now deep in the sietch, far down in the room of the death-still where the tribe recovered its water. "There was no choice," Paul said. "I understand." "There are some things no one can bear. I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me." "M'Lord, you shouldn't..." "There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers," Paul said. "Nothing. Nothing can be done." As he spoke, Paul felt his link with the vision shatter. His mind cowered, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities. His lost vision became like the wind, blowing where it willed. We say of Muad'dib that he has gone on a journey into that land where we walk without footprints. -- Preamble to the Quzarate Creed against the sand, an outer limit for the plantings of the sietch holding. A rock bridge came next and then the open desert beneath Idaho's feet. The promontory of Sietch Tabr dominated the night sky behind him. The light of both moons frosted its high rim. An orchard had been brought right down to the water. Idaho paused on the desert side and stared back at flowered branches over silent water -- reflections and reality -- four moons. The stillsuit felt greasy against his skin. Wet flint odors invaded his nostrils past the filters. There was a malignant simpering to the wind through the orchard. He listened for night sounds. Kangaroo mice inhabited the grass at the water verge; a hawk owl bounced its droning call into the cliff shadows; the wind-broken hiss of a sandfall came from the open bled. It was Tandis who had brougnt Paul this far. Then the man had returned to tell his account. And Paul had walked out into the desert -- like a Fremen. "He was blind -- truly blind," Tandis had said, as though that explained it. "Before that, he had the vision which he told to us... but..." A shrug. Blind Fremen were abandoned in the desert. Muad'dib might be Emperor, but he was also Fremen. Had he not made provision that Fremen guard and raise his children? He was Fremen. It was a skeleton desert here, Idaho saw. Moon-silvered ribs of rock showed through the sand; then the dunes began. I should not have left him alone, not even for a minute, Idaho thought. I knew what was in his mind. "He told me the future no longer needed his physical presence," Tandis had reported. "When he left me, he called back. 'Now I am free' were his words." Damn them! Idaho thought. The Fremen had refused to send 'thopters or searchers of any kind. Rescue was against their ancient customs. "There will be a worm for Muad'dib," they said. And they began the chant for those committed to the desert, the ones whose water went to Shai-hulud: "Mother of sand, father of Time, beginning of Life, grant him passage." Idaho seated himself on a flat rock and stared at the desert. The night out there was filled with camouflage patterns. There was no way to tell wherePaul had gone. "Now I am free." Idaho spoke the words aloud, surprised by the sound of his own voice. For a time, he let his mind run, remembering a day when he'd taken the child Paul to the sea market on Caladan, the dazzling glare of sun on water, the sea's riches brought up dead, there to be sold. Idaho remembered Gurney Halleck playing music ofthebaliset for them -- pleasure, laughter. Rhythms pranced in his awareness, leading his mind like a thrall down channels of remembered delight. Gurney Halleck. Gurney would blame him for this tragedy. called Paul's words: There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. " Idaho began to wonder how Paul would die out there in the desert. Quickly, killed by a worm? Slowly, in the sun? Some of the Fremen back there in the sietch had said Muad'dib would never die, that he had entered the ruhworld where all possible futures existed, that he would be present henceforth in the alam al my'thal, wandering there endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be. He'll die and I'm powerless to prevent it, Idaho thought. He began to realize that there might be a certain fastidious courtesy in dying without a trace -- n o remains, nothing, and an entire planet for a tomb. Mentat, solve thyself, he thought. Words intruded on his memory -- the ritual words of the Fedaykin lieutenant, posting a guard over Muad'dib's children: "It shall be the solemn duty of the officer in charge..." The plodding, self-important language of government enraged him. It had seduced the Fremen. It had seduced everyone. A man, a great man, was dying out here, but language plodded on... What had happened, he wondered, to all the clean meanings that screened out nonsense? Somewhere, in some lost where which this Imperium had created, they'd been walled off, sealed against chance re-discovery. His mind quested for solutions, mentat fashion. Patterns of knowledge glistened there. Lorelei hair might shimmer thus, beckoning... beckoning the enchanted seaman into emerald caverns... With an abrupt start, Idaho drew back from catatonic forgetfulness. So! he thought. Rather than face my failure, I would disappear within myself! The instant of that almostplunge remained in his memory. Examining it, he felt his life stretch out as long as the existence of the universe. Real flesh lay condensed, finite in its emerald cavern of awareness, but infinite life had shared his being. Idaho stood up, feeling cleansed by the desert. Sand was beginning to chatter in the wind, pecking at the surfaces of leaves in the orchard behind him. There was the dry and abrasive smell of dust in the night air. His robe whipped to the pulse of a sudden gust. Somewhere far out in the bled, Idaho realized, a mother storm raged, lifting vortices of winding dust in hissing violence -- giant worm of sand powerful enough to cut flesh from bones. He will become one with the desert, Idaho thought. The desert will fulfill him. It was a Zensunni thought washing through his mind like clear water. Paul would go on marching out there, he knew. An Atreides would not give himself up completely to destiny, not even in the full awareness of the inevitable. A touch of prescience came over Idaho then, and he saw that people of the future would speak of Paul in terms of seas. Despite a life soaked in dust, water would follow him. "His flesh foundered," they would say, "but he swam on." his throat. Idaho turned to discern the figure of Stilgar standing on the bridge over the qanat. "He will not be found," Stilgar said. "Yet all men will find him." "The desert takes him -- and deifies him," Idaho said. "Yet he was an interloper here. He brought an alien chemistry to this planet -- water." "The desert imposes its own rhythms," Stilgar said. "We welcomed him, called him our Mahdi, our Muad'dib, and gave him his secret name, Base of the Pillar: Usui." "Still, he was not born a Fremen." "And that does not change the fact that we claimed him... and have claimed him finally." Stilgar put a hand on Idaho's shoulder. "All men are interlopers, old friend." "You're a deep one, aren'tyou, Stil?" "Deep enough. I can see how we clutter the universe with our migrations. Muad'dib gave us something uncluttered. Men will remember his Jihad for that, at least." "He won't give up to the desert," Idaho said. "He's blind, but he won't give up. He's a man of honor and principle. He was Atreides-trained." "And his water will be poured on the sand," Stilgar said. "Come." He pulled gently at Idaho's arm. "Alia is back and is asking for you." "She was with you at Sietch Makab?" "Yes -- she helped whip those soft Naibs into line. They take her orders now... as do I." "What orders?" "She commanded the execution of the traitors." "Oh." Idaho suppressed a feeling of vertigo as he looked up at the promontory. "Which traitors?" "The Guildsman, the Reverend Mother Mohiam, Korba... a few others." "You slew a Reverend Mother?" "I did. Muad'dib left word that it should not be done." He shrugged. "But I disobeyed him, as Alia knew I would." Idaho stared again into the desert, feeling himself become whole, one person capable of seeing the pattern of what Paul had created. Judgment strategy, the Atreides called it in their training manuals. People are subordinate to government, but the ruled influence the rulers. Did the ruled have any concept, he wondered, of what they had helped create here? "Alia..." Stilgar said, clearing his throat. He sounded embarrassed. "She needs the comfort of your presence." "And she is the government." "A regency, no more." "Fortune passes everywhere, as her father often said," Idaho muttered. "We make our bargain with thefuture," Stilgar said. "Willyou come now? We need you back there." Again, he sounded embarrassed. "She is... distraught. She cries out against her brother one moment, mourns him the next." "Presently," Idaho promised. He heard Stilgar leave. He stood facing into the rising wind, letting the grains of sand rattle against the stillsuit. the outflowing patterns into the future. The possibilities dazzled him. Paul had set in motion a whirling vortex and nothing could stand in its path. The Bene Tleilax and the Guild had overplayed their hand and had lost, were discredited. The Qizarate was shaken by the treason of Korba and others high within it. And Paul's final voluntary act, his ultimate acceptance of their customs, had ensured the loyalty of the Fremen to him and to his house. He was one of them forever now. "Paul is gone!" Alia's voice was choked. She had come up almost silently to where Idaho stood and was now beside him. "He was a fool, Duncan!" "Don't say that!" he snapped. "The whole universe will say it before I'm through," she said. "Why, for the love of heaven?" "For the love of my brother, not of heaven." Zensunni insight dilated his awareness. He could sense that there was no vision in her -- had been none since Chani's death. "You practice an odd love," he said. "Love? Duncan, he had but to step off the track! What matter that the rest of the universe would have come shattering down behind him? He'd have been safe... and Chani with him!" "Then... why didn't he?" "For the love of heaven," she whispered. Then, more loudly, she said: "Paul's entire life was a struggle to escape his Jihad and its deification. At least, he's free of it. He chose this!" "Ah, yes -- the oracle." Idaho shook his head in wonder. "Even Chani's death. His moon fell." "He was a fool, wasn't he, Duncan?" Idaho's throat tightened with suppressed grief. "Such a fool!" Alia gasped, her control breaking. "He'll live forever while we must die!" "Alia, don't..." "It'sjust grief," she said, voice low. "Just grief. Do you know what I must do for him? I must save the life of the Princess Irulan. That one! You should hear her grief. Wailing, giving moisture to the dead; she swears she loved him and knew it not. She reviles her Sisterhood, says she'll spend her life teaching Paul's children." "You trust her?" "She reeks of trustworthiness!" "Ahhh," Idaho murmured. The final pattern unreeled before his awareness like a design on fabric. The defection of the Princess Irulan was the last step. It left the Bene Gesserit with no remaining lever against the Atreides heirs. Alia began to sob, leaned against him, face pressed into his chest. "Ohhh, Duncan, Duncan! He's gone!" Idaho put his lips against her hair. "Please," he whispered. "I need you, Duncan," she sobbed. "Love me!" "I do," he whispered. She lifted her head, peered at the moon-frosted outline of his face. "I know, Duncan. Love knows love." Her words sent a shudder through him, a feeling of estrangement from his old self. He had come out here looking for one thing and had found another. It was as though he'd lurched into a room full of familiar people only to realize too late that he knew none of them. She pushed away from him, took his hand. "Will you come with me, Duncan?" "Wherever you lead," he said. She led him back across the qanat into the darkness at the base of the massif and its Place of Safety.  No bitter stench of funeral-still for Muad'dib. No knell nor solemn rite to free the mind From avaricious shadows. He is the fool saint, The golden stranger living forever On the edge of reason. Let your guard fall and he is there! His crimson peace and sovereign pallor Strike into our universe on prophetic webs To the verge of a quiet glance -- there! Out of bristling star-jungles: Mysterious, lethal, an oracle without eyes, Catspaw of prophecy, whose voice never dies! Shai-hulud, he awaits thee upon a strand Where couples walk and fix, eye to eye, The delicious ennui of love. He strides through the long cavern of time. Scattering the fool-self of his dream. -- the Ghola's Hymn worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your pages, containing stories by such masters of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, John W. 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Earley with an Introduction by Ivan T. Sanderson # pages -- # A Space-Age Thriller by Richard M. Garvin  Edmond G. Addeo thriller, you'll meet the man who guards this secret with his life, his brother who dares to manding officer! # A Science-Fiction Suspense Thriller by Richard Garvin  Edmond E. Addeo When Communist China develops a weapon capable of destroying objects in the air-operated entirely by parapsychology, the existence of the world hangs in the balance! Immediately the US rushes into action in a desperate attempt to stave off the holocaust. Involved are niques; spy schools and death-defying action. An action adventure story you won't be able to leave until the last page! # # Park Ave. f Manhasset, N.Y. # Calif. Res. Add # Sales Tax  Include Your Zip Code Number Do you have a restless urge to write? If you do, here is an opportunity for you to take the first There's something different about people who feel the urge to write. They have a spiritual hunger that sets them apart -- even from family and friends. If you have known this burning need to write, you, too, may have the gift successful authors possess. They know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know how to get started writing, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago a group of famous authors including Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, and several others joined forces to start the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they know about writing into a remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes over your work word by word, blue-penciling changes right on your manuscript. Then he returns it to you with a long letter of adBennett Cerf, the distinguished publisher, is a member of the Guiding Faculty of the Famous Writers School. vice on how to improve your writing. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to hundreds of publications. Free Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing ability worth developing, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. i ! Famous Writers School ! Dept. W-# J Westport Connecticut # i I want to know if I have writing aptitude i worth developing. Please mail me, I without obligation, your Aptitude Test J and illustrated brochure. ! Mr. i Mrs Age J Miss Circle one please print Street  City i State Zip ! Accredited by the Accrediting Commission l of the National Home Study Council. important step to success in writing Printed in U.S.A. DECEMBER # Budrys v Gerrold Silverberg  Williamson  Zelazny boc mao NKbishes take over Ean TJ.Bass Do you have a restless urge to write? If you do, here is an opportunity for you to take the first important step to success in writing Bennett Cerf, the distinguished publisher, is a member of the Guiding Faculty of the Famous Writers School. There's something different nboul people who feel the urge to write. They have a spiritual hunger that sets them apart -- even from family and friends. If you have known this burning need to write, you, too, may have the gift successful authors possess. They know that this restless urge for self-expression is perhaps the most important ingredient of writing success. But, they realize it can waste away if you don't know how to get started writing, or if you hesitate to try. Several years ago a group of famous authors including Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, and several others joined forces to start the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they know about writing into ;i remarkable new kind of professional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He goes over your work word by word, blue-penciling changes right on your manuscript. Then he returns it to you with a long letter of advice on how to improve your writing. This training works well. Our students have sold their writing to hundreds of publications. Free Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writing ability worth developing, send for the School's revealing Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing aptitude -- you may enroll. However, there is no obligation to do so. j Famous Writers School I Dept. W-# j Westport Connecticut # I I want to know if I have writing aptitude j worth developing. Please mail me, I without obligation, your Aptitude Test  and illustrated brochure. I Mr. I Mrs Age j Miss Circle one please print I Street j City I State Zip I Accredited by the Accrediting Commission I of the National Home Study Council. Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. editor editor emeritus Science editor Feature editor Managing editor December, # Vol. #, N# Art Director Associate Art Director coMPiere Novei T.J. Bass NoveLerre David Gerrold  John Chambers , Dannie Plachta and Roger Zelazny Vladimir Grigoriev  Robert Silverberg Algis Budrys suggested by Half Past Human  Circulation Director Publisher Associate Publisher lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no respionsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. The word looks like something you might have seen before. So does the phenomenon it describes. Turn to page # for its first expression. Kick it around but don't jump to conclusions. Hit the student road. Ethnology can and should be as precise as any of the physical sciences says Claude Levi-Strauss, anthropologist and founder and leading exponent of Structuralism -- and I believe. You can't begin to imagine how hard I believe. The only valid distinction between societies, again says Claude Levi-Strauss, is that some have a written language and hence a history and others don't. And there, in a nutshell, you have all the campus riots. Today we study the New People -- the young have always belonged to their own ethnic. Today's young adults in addition have their own distinctive language -- verbal and hieroglyphic -- and they're rapidly writing history. Vaughn Bode, who also looks (see top right) like something you might have seen before -- but don't bet that you have -- says, "The monolithic awareness of youth stirs and rises up greatly and powerfully. I am awash on a new shore and I am at home with the New People. My acceptance is running like a fast tide... I want to do many things with my life but mostly I want to share the places deep in my head with readers everywhere." Sunpot, a new illustrated feature created and produced entirely by Vaughn Bod#, will appear exclusively and monthly in Galaxy Magazine beginning with the January, # issue. Vaughn, a licensed small-plane pilot and parachutist, young father. Underground artist and commercial art director, window washer and this year's Hugo winner, will communicate in Sunpot in the picturewriting language of the young adults of today. He rules his own galaxy of "little worlds... I use them to reflect the harsh realities that all of us must march." Vaughn will do his thing. Not I nor anyone else on the staff of this magazine will control what it is. I will comment on it on these pages if I have to -- you may comment on it wherever you like. We're going to be seeing the unpredictable -- perhaps even by Vaughn Bode. It is possible that not even Bode has seen all of Bode ese mat minds were Rosicruciam Bettjamin Vranklk Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is ir not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Atmne yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. coy of 'Thc Mastery cjif Life" -- A non' fr # fit organizaAddress: #ctih E.RA. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Pop glared and Mother was all steamed up about the adults who would not be ! T he scoutmaster slipped into the camp on black plastic tracks. Its slick yellow hood shone in the cold early light like the shell of a bug. It paused in the door, listening for boys not asleep. Then its glaring eyes began to swivel, darting red beams into every corner, looking for boys out of bed. "Rise and smile!" Its merry voice bounced off the gray iron walls. "Fox Troop rise and smile! Hop for old Pop! Mother says today is Jamboree!" The Nuke Patrol, next to the door, was mostly tenderfeet, still in their autonomic prams. They all began squalling. They had not yet learned to love old Pop. The machine's happy voice rose louder than their howling. It came fast down the narrow aisle to the cubs in the Anthrax Patrol. "Hop for Pop. Mother says it's Jamboree." The cubs jumped to attention, squealing with delight. Jamboree was bright gold stars to paste on their faces. Jamboree was a whole scoop of pink ice milk and maybe a natural apple. Jamboree was a visit to Mother's. The older scouts in the Scavenger Patrol and the Skull Patrol were not so noisy. They knew Mother would not have many more Jamborees for them. At the far end of the camp three boys sat up without a sound and looked at  Joey's empty pallet wonderingly. "Joey's late," Ratbait whispered. He was a pale, scrawny, wise-eyed scout who looked too old for twelve. "We oughta save his hide. We oughta fix a dummy and fool old Pop." "Naw," muttered Butch. "He'll get us all in bad." "But we oughta -- " Blinkie wheezed. "We oughta help -- " Ratbait began to wad up a pillow to be the dummy's head. He dropped flat when they saw the scoutmaster rushing down with a noise like wind, red lamps stabbing at the empty bed. "Now, now, scouts -- " Its voice fluttered like a hurt bird. "You can't play pranks on poor old Pop. Not today. You'll make us late for Jamboree." Ratbait felt a steel whip twitch the blanket from over his head and saw red light burning through his tightly shut lids. "Better wake up. Scout Reight." The smooth, sad voice dripped over him like warm oil. "Better tell old Pop where J-O went." Ratbait squirmed under that terrible blaze. He was unable to see, unable to Ixeathe and he could think nothing to say. He gulped at the taste of terror in his throat and tried to shake his head. At last the red glare went on to Blinkie. "Scout Q-Two, you're a twentybadger." The low, slow voice licked at Blinkie like a friendly pup. "You like to help old Pop keep a tidy camp for Mother. You'll tell us where J-O went." Blinkie was a fattish boy. His puffy face was toadstool-pale and his pallet had a sour smell from being wet. He sat up and ducked back from the steel whip over him. "Please d-d-d-d-d -- " A wheezy stammer stalled his voice and he failed to dodge the bright whip that looped around him and dragged him up to the heat and the hum and the hot oil smell of Pop's yellow hood. "Well, Scout Q-Two?" Blinkie gasped and stuttered and finally sagged against the plastic tracks like gray jelly. The shining coils rippled around him like thin snakes, constricting. His breath wheezed out and his fat arm jerked up, pointing at a black sign on the wall: The whips tossed him back on his sour pallet. He lay panting and blinking and dodging even after the whips were gone. The scoutmaster's eyes flashed to the sign and the square grating under it, swiveled back to Butch. Butch was a slow, stocky, bugeyed boy, young enough to come back from another Jamboree. He had always been afraid of Pop but he wanted to be the new leader of Skull Patrol in Joey's place and now he thought he saw his chance. "Don't hit me. Pop!" His voice squeaked and his face turned red. He scrambled off his pallet without waiting for the whips. "I'll tell on Joey. I been wantin' all along to tell but I was afraid they'd beat me." "Good boy." The scoutmaster's loud words swelled out like big soap-bubbles bursting in the sun. "Mother wants to know all about Scout J-O." "He pries that grating -- " Butch's voice quavered and caught when he saw the look on Ratbait's face but when he turned to Pop it came back fast. "Does it every night. Since three Jamborees ago. Sneaks down into the pits where the robots work. I dunno why, except he sees somebody there. And brings things back. Things he shouldn't have. Things like this." He fumbled in his uniform and held up a metal tag. "This is your good turn today, Scout X-six." The thin tip of a whip took the tag and dangled it "Whose tag is this?" Butch's voice dried up when he saw Ratbait's pale lips making words without a sound. "What's so much about an ID tag?" Ratbait asked. "Anyhow, what were you doing in Joey's bed." "It's funny." Butch looked away and squeaked at Pop. "A girl's number." T he silent shock of that bounced off the iron walls, was somehow louder than old Pop's boom. Most of the scouts had never seen a girl. After a long time the cubs near the door began to whisper and titter. "Shhhhh!" Pop roared like steam. "Now we can ail do a good turn for Mother. And play a little joke on Scout J-O! He didn't know today would be Jamboree but he'll find out." Pop laughed like a heavy chain clanking. "Back to bed! Quiet as robots!" Pop rolled close to the wall near the power-pit grating and the boys lay back on their pallets. Once Ratbait caught his breath to yell but he saw Butch's bug-eyes watching. Pop's hum sank, and even the tenderfeet in their prams were quiet. Ratbait heard the grating creak. He saw Joey's head, tangled yellow hair streaked with oil and dust. He frowned and shook his head and saw Joey's sky-blue eyes go wide. Joey tried to duck but the quick whips caught his neck. They dragged him out of the square black pit and swung him like a puppet toward old Pop's eyes. "Well, Scout J-O!" Pop laughed like thick oil bubbling. "Mother wants to know where you've been." Joey fell on his face when the whip uncoiled but he scrambled to his feet. He gave Ratbait a pale grin before he looked up at Pop but he didn't say anything. "Better tell old Pop the truth." The slick whips drew back like lean snakes about to strike. "Or else we'll have to punish you, Scout J-O." Joey shook his head and the whips went to work. Still he didn't speak. He didn't even scream. But something fell out of his torn uniform. The whip-tips snatched it from the floor. "What's this thing. Scout J-O?" The whip-fingers turned it delicately under the furious eyes and nearly dropped it again. "Scout J-O, this is a book." Silence echoed in the iron camp. "Scout J-O, you've stolen a book." Pop's shocked voice changed into a toneless buzz, reading the title. "Operators' Handbook, Nuclear Reactor, Series #-Z." Quiet sparks of fear crackled through the camp. Two or three tenderfeet began sobbing in their prams. When they were quiet old Pop made an ominous, throatclearing sound. "Scout J-O, what are you doing with a book?" Joey gulped and bit his underlip till blood seeped down his chin but he made no sound. Old Pop rolled closer, while the busy whips were stowing the book into a dark compartment under the yellow hood. "Mother won't like this." Each word clinked hard, like iron on iron. "Books aren't for boys. Books are for robots only. Don't you know that?" Joey stood still. "This hurts me. Scout J-O." Pop's voice turned downy soft, the slow words like tears of sadness now. "It hurts your poor Mother. More than anything can ever hurt you." The whips cracked and cracked and cracked. At last they picked him up and shook him and dropped him like a red-streaked rag on the floor. Old Pop backed away and wheeled around. "Fox Troop rise and smile!" Its roaring voice turned jolly again, as if it had forgotten Joey. "Hop for Pop. Today is Jamboree and we're on our way to visit Mother. Fall out in marching order." The cubs twittered with excitement until their leaders threatened to keep them home from Jamboree but at last old Pop led the troop out of camp and down the paved trail toward Mother's. Joey limped from the whips but he set his teeth and kept his place at the head of his patrol. Marching through boy territory, they passed the scattered camps of troops whose Jamborees came on other days. A few scouts were out with their masters but nobody waved or even looked straight at them. The spring sun was hot and Pop's pace was too fast for the cubs. Some of them began to whimper and fall out of line. Pop rumbled back to warn them that Mother would give no gold stars if they were late for Jamboree. When Pop was gone Joey glanced at Ratbait and beckoned with his head. "I gotta get away," he whispered low and fast. "I gotta get back to the pits -- " Butch ran out of his place, leaning to listen. Ratbait shoved him off the trail. "You gotta help," Joey gasped. "There's a thing we gotta do -- an' we gotta do it now. This will be the last Jamboree for most of us. We'll never get another chance." Butch came panting along the edge of the trail, trying to hear. Blinkie got in his way. "What's all this?" Ratbait breathed. "What you gonna do?" "It's all in the book," Joey said. "Something called manual override. There's a dusty room -- down under Mother's -- back of a people-only sign. Two red buttons. Two big levers. With a glass wall between. It takes two people." "Who?" Joey gulped. "One of us?" Joey shook his head, waiting for Blinkie to elbow Butch. "I got a friend. We been working together down in the pits. Watching the robots. Reading the books. Learning what we gotta do -- " He glanced back. Blinkie was scuffling with Butch to keep him busy but now the scoutmaster came clattering back from the rear, booming merrily, "Hop for Pop! Hop a lot for Pop!" "How you gonna work it?" Alarm took Ratbait's breath. "Now the robots will be watching -- " "We got a back door." Joey's whisper raced. "A drainage tunnel. Hot water out of the reactor. Comes out under Black Creek bridge. My friend will be there. If I can dive off this end of the bridge -- " "Hey, Pop!" Butch was screaming. "Ratbait's talking! Blinkie pushed me! Joey's planning something bad!" "Good boy. Scout X-six!" Pop slowed beside him. "Mother wants to know if they're plotting more mischief." the troop, Ratbait wondered what would ' happen when Joey and his friend pushed the two red buttons and pulled the two big levers but Butch stuck so close they could not speak again. He thought it must be something about the reactor. Power was the life of Mother and the robots. If Joey could cut off the power -- would they die? All of them? The idea frightened him. Who would care for the tenderfeet if the prams stopped? Who would make chow? Who would tell anybody what to do? Perhaps the books would help, he thought. Maybe Joey and his friend would know. With Pop rolling fast in the lead, they climbed a long hill and came in sight of Mother's. Old gray walls that had no windows. Two tall stacks on dun brick. A shimmer of heat in the pale sky. The trail sloped down. Ratbait saw the crinkled ribbon of green brush along Black Creek and then the concrete bridge. He watched Butch watching Joey and listened to Blinkie panting and tried to think of how to help. The cubs stopped whimpering when they saw Mother's mysterious walls and stacks. The troop marched fast down the hill. Ratbait slogged along, staring at the yellow sun-dazzle on old Pop's hood. He could think of nothing to do. "I got it," Blinkie was breathing, close to his ear. "I'll take care of Pop." "You?" Ratbait scowled. "You were telling on Joey -- " "That's why," Blinkie gasped. "I wanta make it up. I'll handle Pop. You stop Butch an' give the sign to Joey." They came to the bridge and Pop started across. "Wait, Pop." Blinkie darted out of line, toward the brushy slope above the trail. "I saw a girl. Hiding in the bushes to watch us go by." Pop roared back off the bridge. "A girl in boy territory!" Its shocked voice splashed them like cold rain. "What would Mother say?" Black tracks spurting gravel, it lurched past Blinkie and crashed into the brush. "Listen, Pop!" Butch started after it, waving and squealing. "They ain't no girl -- " Ratbait tripped him and turned to give Joey the sign but Joey was already gone. Something splashed under the bridge and Ratbait saw a yellow head vanishing under the stream that drifted out of a black tunnel. "PopPop -- " Butch rubbed gravel out of his mouth and danced on the pavement. "Come back. Pop. Joey's in the creek. Ratbait and Blinkie -- they helped him get away." The scoutmaster swung back down the slope, empty whips waving. It skidded across the trail and down the bank to the hot creek. Its yellow hood disappeared in the steam. Blinkie clenched his fat fists. "You told on Joey, Butch." "An' you'll catch it." Murky eyes bugging. Butch edged away. "You just wait till Pop gets back." They waited. The tired cubs sat down to rest and the tenderfeet fretted in their hot prams. Breathing hard, Blinkie kept close to Butch. Ratbait watched till Pop swam back out of the drain. The whips were wrapped around two small bundles that dripped pink water. Unwinding, the whips dropped Joey and his friend on the trail. They crumpled down like rag dolls but the whips set them up again. "How's this, scouts?" Old Pop laughed like steel gears clashing. "We've caught ourselves a real live girl." In a bird-quick way she shook the water out of her sand-colored hair. Standing straight, without the whips to hold her, she faced Pop's glaring lamps. She looked tall for twelve. Joey was sick when the whips let him go. He leaned off the bridge to heave ,and limped back to the girl. She Wiped his face with her wet hair. They caught hands and smiled at each other as if they were all alone. "They tripped me. Pop." Braver now. Butch thumbed his nose at Blinkie and ran toward the machine. "They tried to stop my telling you -- " "Leave them to Mother." Pop bugled a song of joy. "Let them try their silly tricks on her." It wheeled toward the bridge. The whips pushed Joey and the girl ahead of the crunching tracks. "Now hop with Pop to JamboPallantine enough trouble conjuring up Christmas spirit in December -- let alone in June when this column is being written. The whole bit is bizarre. Still, we'll remind you that we have boxed number of other mad, merry and beautiful books fo choose from. Do it now. anthology of topflight science fiction edited by Robert Silverberg and tiyour own delectation we hope you Pope. (are we subconsciously subscribing to the traditional?)but for occultists we have Elizabeth Byrd's weird experiences in New York and Scotland, least one of the castles she mentions and can testify to the authenticity of her experiences. We've never been back. Come to think of it, even this book is traditional because Christmas (our old-fashioned Christmas anyAay) is a time when one sits around a fire telling spooky stories. So a Merry Yule to You All. #(t. by Hannes Bok, introduction by Lin Carter. This is one in the grand tradition, with wizards, sea monsters and the like. First time in book form here -- #(t -- the address is # West #th Street, New York #. PPl Ballanttne ree! Hop with Pop! Hop, hop!" tall iron door in Mother's old gray wall. The floors beyond were naked steel, alive with machinery underneath. They filed into a dim, round room that echoed to the grating squeal of Pop's hard tracks. "Fox Troop, here we are for Jamboree!" Pop's jolly voice made a hollow booming on the curved steel wall, which reflected Pop's red light. "Mother wants you to know why we celebrate this happy time each year." The machine was rolling as it spoke to the center of a wide black circle in the middle of the floor. Something drummed far below like a monster heart and Ratbait saw that the circle was the top of a black steel piston. It slid slowly up, lifting Pop. The drumming died and Pop's eyes blazed down on the cubs in the Anthrax Patrol, to stop their awed murmuring. "Once there wasn't any Mother." The shock of that crashed and throbbed and faded. "There wasn't any yearly Jamboree. There wasn't even any Pop, to love and care for little boys." The cubs were afraid to whisper but a stir of troubled wonder spread among them. "You won't believe how tenderfeet were made." There was a breathless hush. "In those bad I old days, boys and girls were allowed to change like queer insects. They changed into creatures called adults -- " The whips writhed and the red lamps glared and the black cleats creaked on the steel platform. "Adults!" Pop spewed the word. "They malfunctioned and wore out and ran down. Their defective logic circuits programed them to damage one another. In a kind of strange group malfunction called war they systematically destroyed one another. But their worst malfunction was in making new tenderfeet." Pop turned slowly on the high platform, sweeping the silent troop with blood-red beams that stopped on Joey and his girl. All the scouts but Ratbait and Blinkie had edged away from them. Her face white and desperate, she was whispering in Joey's ear. Listening with his arm around her, he scowled up at Pop. "Once adults made tenderfeet, strange as that may seem to you. They used a weird natural process we won't go into. It finally broke down because they had damaged their genes in war. The last adults couldn't make new boys and girls at all." The red beams darted to freeze a startled cub. "Fox Troop, that's why we have Mother. Her job is to collect undamaged genes and build them into whole cells with which she can assemble whole boys and girls. She has been doing that a long time now and she does it better than those adults ever did. And that's why we have Jamboree! To fill the world with well-made boys and girls like you and to keep you happy in the best time of life -- even those old adults always said childhood was the happy time. Scouts, clap for Jamboree!" The cubs clapped, the echo like a spatter of hail on the high iron ceiling. "Now, scouts, those bad old days are gone forever," Pop burbled merrily. "Mother has a cozy place for each one of you and old Pop watches over you, and you'll never be adult -- " "Pop! Pop!" Butch squealed. "Lookit Joey an' his girl -- " P op spun around on the high platform. Its blinding beams picked up Joey and the girl sprinting toward a bright sky-slice where the door had opened for the last of the prams. "Wake up, guys!" Joey's scream shivered against the red steel wall. "That's all wrong. Mother's just a runaway machine. Pop's a crazy robot--" "Stop for Pop!" The scoutmaster was trapped on top of that huge piston but its blazing lamps raced after Joey and the girl. "Catch 'em, cubs! Hold 'em tight. Or there'll be no Jamboree!" "I told you, Pop!" Butch scuttled after Joey. "Don't forget I'm the one that told. I'm the one -- " Ratbait dived at his heels. They skidded together on the floor. "Come on, scouts!" Joey was shouting. "Run away with us. Our own genes are good enough." The floor shuddered under him and that bright sky-slice grew thinner. Lurching on their little tracks, the prams formed a line to guard it. Joey jumped the shrieking tenderfeet but the girl stumbled. He stopped to pick her up. "Help us, scouts," he gasped. "We gotta get away -- " "Catch 'em for Pop!" that metal bellow belted them. "Or there'll be no gold stars for anybody!" Screeching cubs swarmed around them. The door clanged shut. Pop plunged off the sinking piston almost too soon. The yellow hood crunched. Hot oil splashed and smoked but the whips hauled Pop upright again. "Don't mess around with M-MM-M-Mother!" The anvil voice came back with a stuttering croak. "She knows best!" The quivering whips dragged Joey and the girl away from the clutching cubs and pushed them into a shallow pit where that great black piston had dropped below the level of the floor. "Now sing for your Mother!" old Pop chortled. "Sing for the Jamboree!" The cubs howled out their official song and the Jamboree went on. There were Pop-shaped balloons for the tenderfeet, and double scoops of pink ice milk for the cubs and gold stars for nearly everybody. "But Mother wants a few of you," old Pop purred. A pointing whip picked out Blinkie. He jumped into the pit without waiting to be dragged. But Butch turned white and tried to run when it struck at him. "Pop! Not m-m-m-m-me!" he squeaked. "Don't forget I told on Joey. I'm only going on eleven and I'm in line for leader and I'll tell on everybody -- " "That's why Mother wants you." Old Pop laughed like a pneumatic hammer. "You're getting too adult." The whip snaked Butch into the pit, dull eyes bulging more than ever. He slumped down on the slick black piston and struggled like a squashed bug and then lay moaning in a puddle of terror. Ratbait stood sweating as the whip came back to him. His stomach felt cold and strange and the tall red wall spun like a crazy wheel around him. He couldn't move. The whip pulled him to the rim of the pit. There Blinkie took his hand. Ratbait shook off the whip and stepped down into the pit. Joey nodded and the girl gave him a white, tiny smile. They all closed around her, arms linked tight, as the piston dropped. "Now hop along for Pop! You've had your Jamboree -- " That hooting voice died away far above and the pit's round mouth shrahk into a blood-colored moon. The hot dark drummed like thunder all around them and the slick floor tilted. It spilled them all into Mother's red steel jaws.  "My writing career started in Viet Nam, when a general asked me to prepare a report on the causes of malaria. " says T.J. Bass, a young pathologist from southern California, whose Half Past Human is this month's featured novel. The report had to be written in non-technical language for laymen, and when I finished the whole thing sounded so much like science fiction, I decided to try my hand at that. After all. I'd been reading sf for years." Bass' first story. Star Itch, appeared in the September, #, issue of our companion magazine as an IF First, and he has been writing ever since. He extrapolates much of his material from his readings in current medical journals. When the Giant Toothpick in Half Past Human treats cancer patients with heat, he adopts a current, though extremely high-risk, procedure. Even his ratio of onethird cured to two-thirds dead reflects the success-failure ratio today "The Giant Toothpick." says Bass, "began as a comic book for my kids. It is based on a #-inch hardwood tomato stake that I carry when I run cross country (Bass, a marathon runner, has his A.A.U. card) as protection against dogs. I painted eyes on my toothpick and the kids treat it like one of their dolls." Bass does much of the research for his stories on the hoof, using his co-runners as sounding boards and information banks His "hardware consultant" is the man who literally put the legs on the moon module of Apollo #; his "electronic consultant " has designed a thermometer scheduled to be inserted in the moon to find out just how hot cold our satellite is: and his "software consultant" conducts a computer school for digital computer operators. Bass and wife Gloria are raising five youngsters: Sara, Tom, Joan, Mary Pat and Karl (#, #, #. # and #). The youngest is named for the Komputerized Aerospace Research Laboratory -- an acronym from a soon-to-bepublished story. Also in the Bass menage is goat Gertrude, a third-generation star milker. Her herd name is Stratford-belle, all the goats in the herd being named for Shakespearian characters. Does Bass envision a hive culture on planet Earth? "I like to think we have more than a few decades prehive time -- hopefully there may be # years of five-toed time. But the hive seems to be evolving all around us. I just hope that mankind has a good foothold on several star systems before the hive culture stagnates this planet."    A Novel Complete In This Issue The Nebishes had taken over Earth and Man faced a life so perfect that he had nothing to die for! I forty-nine, Dan and Moon returned to Rocky Top Mountain. Edentulous and withered with years, they sought the shelter above the ten-thousand-foot level where the Big ES couldn't reach. In this, the third millennium. Earth was avocado and peaceful. Avocado, because all land photosynthesized; and peaceful, because mankind was evolving into the four-toed Nebish -- the complacent hive citizen. Dan and Moon had no time for complacency. Hunted and starving, they struggled for survival in an ecology where the food chain had been shortened to its extreme. Earth Society had squeezed its citizens between the plankton ponds and the sewers, until there were no niches for the in-between people except with the varmints and vermin -- thieving from garbage and gardens. The hive culture flourished undershared in Earth's bounty and found happiness in the simple, stereotyped rewards rationed out by Earth Society -- the Big ES. Nothing moved on the surface except the Agrimechs and a rare fugitive such as Moon. He was a five-toed throwback unable to adjust to the crowded society. Both he and his dog, Dan, were living fossils. Their species were crowded out by the Nebish masses, but they lived on. Both had been subjects in ancient experiments on the metabolic clock -- rendering them clockless; so their bodies lingered through the generations enabling them to witness, in agony, the extinction of their kind. The extinction was still going on, for an occasional throwback still appeared in the Nebish stock -- primitives left behind by evolution. Faithful, dull-witted Agrimechs labored in the avocado-colored vegetation, striving to catch every quantum of the sun's energy and transform it into the needed carbohydrates. Their mechanical intelligences were suited to their tasks -- they were dedicated, reliable. On this day in # A.O. a new mech brain stirred on Rocky Top Mountain. Its circuitry was far more complex -- it was quickwitted and faithful to no one and nothing but itself. "Hi ho! Old man with dog. Pick me up." "Who speaks?" asked Moon, picking up a rock. Dan's snout wrinkled in a toothless snarl. "I am down here, under these leaves." "The spirit of the spear?" "No -- I'm a machine. Toothpick is my name." Moon and Dan crouched a respectable distance away. "You are no machine I know. Machines can move." "I am a small one -- to be carried. Pick me up." Moon hesitated. "But the metal detectors -- " "Don't worry. I'm not iron," coaxed Toothpick. "Pick me up. I can feed you." Moon and Dan were always a little hungry. "Edibles are welcome. Feed us and we'll talk some more." Toothpick instructed him to return to the valley. S enses alert, they crouched on the edge of the orchard. Harvesters rolled by on wide soft wheels like giant beetles, appendages folded and thorax-like bins laden with plankton powder, fruits and vegetables. The evening sun hid intermittently behind dark clouds on the western horizon. Moon waited for an agromech carrying wooden tomatoes. Shouting, he aved at the bulge of sensors -- the "head" that housed communicator and neurocircuitry at its anterior end. The huge machine stopped. Moon gave its wheel a friendly pat. "Good afternoon, human." "Need any repairs?" "Just a loose dust cover on my L box -- but it can keep until we can get -- " "I'll take a look at it," Moon said, going to the tool kit. While he worked on the load leveler he asked casually, "Anyone asking for me these days?" "No," answered the bulky Harvester. "Are you going to report seeing me?" "I haven't been ordered to. I only report what I am ordered to report." "I know." Moon patted the machine affectionately. He knew it must report him if he stole part of the harvest. It would never hurt him or try to interfere but it had to report any damage or loss. "Mind if I ride along?" he asked. "I'd enjoy your company," said the machine as it started to move slowly. Dan perked up his ears and began to pad along behind. Soon, as Toothpick had predicted, fierce thunder sounded and lightning flashed. Moon packed his sack with wooden tomatoes and strapped it on his back. The machine stopped to let him off. It would report him as soon as the storm lifted -- but by then it would be morning if Toothpick proved right. T he banana sun was well up in the grape sky when Moon returned to the sfwt where Toothpick protruded from the dusty humus. Below, on the flat land, the thunderstorm was beginning to dissipate. "You are a god," said Moon as he sorted through glistening ten-inch spheres. "Hardly." Moon talked while he cracked open one of the tomato-colored fruits and began to gum the moist pulp. "You brought the rains and you kept Harvester from reporting me." The cyber spoke carefully, didactically: "I predicted the rain and the electrical activity kept the Harvester from reporting. My abilities are based on science, not sorcery." For a moment the cyber focused its optic pickup on the old man and the dog as they struggled with the nutritious pulp in toothless mouths. It continued; "Of course you could represent my powers as spiritual to any of your fellows. You could organize a following -- establish a religion -- " Face screwed up in disgust, the old man answered, "Never. Cooperation is what the Big ES is made of -- organize, cooperate and crush the individual. Man was meant to be wild and free." Toothpick flexed his surface membrane charge and squirmed in the chocolate vegetable debris. "Pick me up." Moon and Dan were still a bit chary about letting a talking javelin into their tight partnership. "Why?" "I am a companion robot -- designed to offer companionship in exchange for companionship." "Dan and I are sufficient. What do we need with you? You can't even walk. You'd be a burden." "Both of you need teeth. Pick me up and I'll help you find teeth," said the cyber. Moon flicked his tongue over the stumps of tender dentine that were almost covered by hypertrophic gum tissue. Two hundred years of chewing had worn them away. The subsequent softening of his diet had softened his body, too. To bite and chew again -- he could not finish the thought. He picked up the hundredcentimeter javelin and the three of them left Rocky Top. B all, a metalloid sphere, occupied a rocky cairn in the center of a tattered neolithic village. A place of reverence, the cairn was surrounded by meager food offerings. The Ball protected them -- the villagers of Table Mountain -- until their numbers had grown into the hundreds. Dawn brought them out of their sewn-hide shelters with flint tools, clay bowls and ripe grainwork, work. All activity stopped when the flap of the large shelter moved. Eyes focused on the flap. A bald male stepped out. Hunched with age, he was dressed in flowing skins which had been stained with metachromatic berry juices. Walking quickly to the cairn, he placed both hands on the sphere, which resembled his own head in size and baldness. For a pensive moment the villagers studied their seer's brooding face as he attempted to contact their unseen protective deities. Alarm appeared on the aged face. Immediately the village broke up into families and small social units. Shelters came down and burins, scrapers and truncated flakes were wrapped with grain and dried meats. The bundles, folded in hides, were strapped on adult backs and weapons appeared in calloused hands. Moments later the village was deserted -- only dust and debris now remained. Across that dust walked a pubescent female leaving clear, measured five-toed footprints. She walked alone down a narrow trail. She was bait. Six sullen males, each carrying a heavy spear, watched her leave. Then they crouched into the dark crevices along the girl's trail. Silence returned to Table Mountain. The sun climbed higher. A male child -- puberty minus five -- became lost during the flight and wandered into the open. He never even heard the hum of the approaching arrow. The nattily clad, fat, pale bowman approached the flopping jungle bunny. With a heavy foot he steadied the small ribcage while he ripped out the barbed tip of the hunting arrow. He unsheathed the short curved blade of his trophy knife and bent over the twitching form. Mercifully falling blood pressure clouded the victim's consciousness. The grisly trophy bagged, the Hunter renocked his arrow and moved up the trail. Finding the village deserted, he followed the five-toed footprints down another slope. This was his third day without sleep -- the small console on his neck titrated his hlood level of Speed. His buckeye detector saw nothing through the towering boulders. He paused cautiously. The six spear chuckers shifted impatiently in their hiding places. A flash of movement at the bottom of the trail -- the bait showed herself. Another trophy. The Hunter started down the trail at a reckless trot. The spears flew. The throwers rushed out. The circuits of the buckeye detector lay crushed on the trail. Chunks of fresh meat were divided among the fugitive villagers in their makeshift camps on the lower slopes. Their seer received his usual generous portion. His crystal ball had saved them again. The buckeyes of Mount Tabulum ate well that night. II T he Tinker of Mount Tabulum was skeptical. "You are a machine. You shouldn't even be in the village. You might report us." Moon held Toothpick up so the full volume of its lingual readout could play over the Tinker. Here was the man Toothpick said could reconstruct Moon's teeth and Moon was going to see that he did. "I am a companion robot, thousands of years old," said the cyber. "The old chains of command were broken while I slept. My superiors are gone. My only loyalty is to Moon, who found me. Moon needs teeth." "How can I trust -- " began Tinker. "Ask your seer, the Hip," suggested Moon. Tinker wordlessly led his visitors to the Hip. After a cursory glance at the newcomers the metachromatic-robed elder gazed into his crystal and nodded approval. The Tinker shrugged and took Moon and Dan to his hut. Crude tools of flint, shell and bone were arranged on a split log. Picking up a polished white stick. Tinker motioned for Moon to open his mouth. After prodding the gum line methodically for a few minutes he glanced into Dan's mouth. Then he looked at his pitiful tools and slumped into a squat. "Those teeth are really worn out. Need full or three-quarter crowns on every one. Tin caps I can do -- crowns, no." Toothpick hummed a sharp request: "What would you need to do the restorations here? Now? You've done similar work in Society. Let's try it on the Outside." "Tell him what you need. Tinker," said Moon with a toothless grin. I've seen him make it rain. He can probably get most anything for you." Tinker remained skeptical but the prospect of working with his hands again excited him. He had nothing to lose but time -- and there seemed to be a surplus of that. "Open up," he said, reaching for his retouched levallois point. He pressed the cold flint against the firm tissue of the gum line and picked out a yellow flake of dental calculus. He put the flake on the tip of his index finger. "This calcified debris is all around those stumps. My stone tools arc probably strong enough to get it all out but it will be an awful lot of work. There'll be pain and blood -- and a danger of infection. The black area, however -- " he held Toothpick up so his optic pickup was in Moon's mouth -- "is decay. Decayed dentine is softer than enamel, of course. But it's too tough for my primitive setup." He thought a moment. "I could adapt one of the power drills from an Agrimech's tool kit. It may bring a Hunter if we take one, though." "I'll handle that," said Toothpick. "Go on." Tinker began to show some interest in the project. He looked into Moon's mouth again. "Most of these root canals are dead, I'd guess. It would be a good idea to fill them all. Cure the dead ones and drain any root abscesses that might be forming. I'll need a rough metal wire to scrape out the canals and a medicated wick to cure them. Any antiseptic from a Hunter's kit will do to medicate even dilute phenol or iodine solutionsand any woven thread will do for the wick. That should be minor, after we get a power drill set up." Moon volunteered; "It's my teeth and I know most of the Agrimechs in the east valley. Til leave for the tool kit now. Anything else you might need?" "Don't load yourself down. Hunters may be on your trail in half a day. Any small metal pliers, pick-types or small hard drill bits -- it's your mouth. The smaller and the sharper the tools, the less trauma. We can bury them under a rock till we need them fool the metal detectors." said Tinker. He turned back to Toothpick. "I can use wax for the positive sand clay for the negative form. I need metal for simple casting. The metal?" He looked around. "I only have a little tin." "Wouldn't gold be best?" asked Toothpick. "Certainly." "Ball was wearing a cap when he was discovered." said Toothpick. "It had enough gold foil. We can fire up a simple charcoal forge one day when all the molds are ready -- shouldn't attract any more Hunters than one of our regular campfires." Tinker looked at Toothpick with a little more respect now that he realized how thoroughly the little cyber called Toothpick thought things out. T he tartar-chipping and gumtrimming went smoothly enough. Both Moon and Dan dragged themselves around with swollen faces and rusty saliva for a few weeks but that was to be expected. However, when time came to drill away the black dentine some frayed will power began to show. The drill bit was of a large coarse class that raised a lot of heat and vibration. The smell of cooking blood filled the village when the Tinker was working. Dan's dog mind considered it torture and even a hundred years of discipline proved inadequate to keep him on the Tinker's work table, the split log. Moon's nerves, too, were pretty shot. They were about to give up the whole project when Toothpick suggested using Molecular Reward to disassociate the pain. Tinker dug up one of the console pumps taken from the neck of a killed Hunter. The last dose was the M.R. they were after. By diluting it one to a hundred they made a mouthwash that actually turned off the sensory and motor nerve endings in the mouth for several hours. For some reason saliva flowed very heavily while the M.W. was active but the Tinker made a flexible dam to keep the work area dry. From then on the work went quickly and -- in slightly less than six months -- Moon and Dan were smiling at each other with bright new teeth. At first the bite surfaces felt irregular and unfamiliar but the chewing stresses adjusted the periodontal collagenous bundles until they were meeting smoothly. "We'll have to keep an eye on you for about three months," said Tinker. "Don't have any X-raysbut I didn't fill any of the root canals until the wicks smelled sweet. One could still turn sour, though. If either of you get a swelling it would be best if I drained it out the side of the alveolar ridge." He pointed to the cheek just above and below the tooth line. "That way we can save the rootand crown." Moon massaged his jaw thoughtfully. "I'll let you know how it goes." he said. Then he turned to Toothpick. "Now where to?" H unter control was empty except for the class five built-in cyber -- Scanner. His myopic sensors were scattered over the Outside -- Orange Countrywhich covered about a fourth of the continent. His memory banks stored data covering crop and harvest status, mech and buckeye movement and the presence or absence of Hunters. Rook, an aging human monitor, wandered in carrying his morning cup of hot brew. He slumped slowly into his console seat. The warm drink diffused through his system, numbing arthritic pains and stimulating a mild enthusiasm for his work. He nodded toward the wall panel, which showed a map of Orange Country. The topography flexed into threedimensional relief, colors from chocolate to avocado indicating crop stages of cultivation, growth and harvest. These remained static, while movements of colored lights indicated activities of men and machines. "Anything on the fisheye detector?" asked Rook. "No longer located over the canal. One of the buckeye detectors failed during the previous shift and fisheye was moved to cover the gap," explained Scanner. Rook frowned. Fisheye was his own project. To build a fisheye took weeks. Circuits sophisticated enough to distinguish between water mammals and humanoids were hard to find these days. He hated to see it being wasted on a hill somewhere, doing a job any warm-body detector could do. He called up Cass. T he communicator screen focused. A hazy image of a younger man said, "Just a minute." The speaker picked up a box of wires he was working on and unplugged it. The image cleared. "What is it. Rook?" "The fisheye." "Oh, sorry about that. But one of the detectors in the thirty-seven-ohthree line lost range. I had to cover the crops while I worked on it. So far I haven't found the trouble. Sensors O.K. If the failure is in the image converter again we'll be months waiting for parts. Can't have a hole in the line that long." Rook appeared irritated. The young man continued apologetically: "I know how interested you are in fisheye -- but even if there is an aquatic variety of the I people they're no problem as long as they stay in the water. When they come out to take crops the buckeye detectors will pick them up. Remember that a simple fifty-Au-gram B.D. can keep an eye on twenty square miles of open fields -- but one of your fisheye detectors can only watch a few hunIll dred yards of a canal. And the F.D. is going to cost several hundred Augrams. It's just impractical to watch all the canals. Even if the aquatics do exist, they aren't much of a threat. Except for the dugong, we could use the B.D. readings. They catch a few canal surfaces. The occasional warm body moving there probably is Just one of those herbivores anyway. You know how man fears deep water." Rook slumped back into his chair -- depressed. The dugong could not be eliminated, of course. The problem was more than man's affection for the last warm-blooded species to share his home planet -- the dugong also kept vegetation from clogging the vital canals whenever the canal Harvesters were late. It took a F.D. at close range to tell a swimming humanoid from one of those Sirenia. Rook was frowning. "Don't take it too hard. Rook. If your grant comes through you can set up a bunch of F.D.s. Meanwhile, I guess we have to protect the crops -- this week's harvest and next week's harvest." After a moment's silence the younger man signed off, probably to return to his work bench. Already tired. Rook turned to the dull task before him. His grant -- for fisheye census or the proof of the existence of an aquatic I people -- was classified under research. Long-range buckeye control depended on an understanding of their habits -- but with next week's crops in danger, the big ES would postpone research. Perhaps indefinitely. He shrugged and woke up Wolfhound IX. The crew of Hunters was assigned. Coordinates were given. A Hunt. his minisub carefully through the mile-wide interior of the anaerobic digester. Visibility had been improved by recirculating a stream of clear effluent through the center and adjusting the flow rate from turbulent to laminar, but massive islands of sludge still remained -- acres ofo fungus and bacteria flourishing on the sewage nutrients. In the sub's lights these resembled multicolored clouds and trailing seaweed above and firmer gelatinous towers below. He maneuvered close to a yellow, translucent mass about ten times the size of his sub and extended his sampler tube into the gelatinous material. He aspirated a fragment and moved on. So far it looked like a routine inspection. "No sign of membrane activity," he said automatically after fifteen minutes of silence. "You still have about a quarter mile to go. The first disturbance you'll come to is on the other side of the bubble curtain in the aerobic section," said a voice over the communicator. Moses recognized D. J. Birk, his immediate superior in the Pipe caste -- a demanding but fair boss. Moses moved on through the aquatic jungle of microorganisms. His membrane scope saw nothing. The little cells -- a micron and less in size -- were polarized, of course. But the ion charge in their tiny cell walls was just too small for the scope's probing magnetic field. Something had been picked up by the digester's sensors. Whatever it was, it had a membrane integrity on the level of a coelenterate and a size larger than his minisub. The data gave it sort of a ghostlike quality -- it appeared in different parts of the digester, changed shape and disappeared, only to reappear at a different location. Birk had considered the readings as sensor malfunctions until he saw the caloric output of the digester. It had fallen when the "ghosts" had appeared. Electronic shadows don't eat and neither do the other kinds of ghosts -- so Moses had been sent in. "I'm passing through the bubble curtain," Moses said. Around him the floating islands of sludge became aerated and buoyed to the surface. "I've got you on the screen. See anything?" asked D.J. "Nothing. Visibility is pretty good, too -- more than thirty yards." "Most of the sludge has been activated in that section and the skimmers are removing -- Watch it! Looks like a ghost forming up around you." "Can't see anything. The turbidity is increasing a little. That's all -- hey! Something just turned my sub over. Viewport clouded up. Can't see a thing." "Turn off your jets. It is alive and delicate. Your jets are tearing it apart. Keep recording. It's carrying you up out of the range of this pickup." Moses calmed down and deactivated his motor. A quivering, amorphous mass covered the port and blocked his view of the inverted world outside. The pressure dropped. The sub slowly righted itself. "My instruments tell me I'm on the surface but I still can't see." D.J. switched to the surface sensors in the arched ceiling of the digester. Optical pickup was blocked by a tangle of glistening, white and rootlike structures. He tried another pickup about a hundred yards away -- reported nothing. Just the usual gas pocket -- an arched dome trailing fine hairlike mycelia and the fluid surface quiet and flecked with foam. "Sit tight and keep your sensors on. You're safe enough. If we want to get you out all we have to do is turn on your jets and rip that membrane ghost apart. Let's see what it is up to," said D.J. Moses activated his sampler tube and biopsied the thing that held him. Several hours later he biopsied it again. That bite shook the sub. The tensile strength of the thing had increased' markedly. He was about to complain when the film over the port rolled up into a rope-like structure and moved slowly away from him. He pressed his face against the flat cold surface and peered out. D.J. watched the ghost fade from the screen, leaving the sub's silhouette. "The ghost is gone," he said, Moses continued to stare for a moment. He said, "Not gone. Dead." His scope had registered a large sheet of ion activity when the creature was alive. Now the creature had changed from a huge amoebalike mass to a firm mat of tall white stems, each topped by a glistening white melon. Moses amended: "Not dead -- fruited. It has fruited!" The sub sat in a bubble that was perhaps an acre in size and filled with stalks and melons. Most of the melons were gray and black -- a few were split open. He described what he saw to D.J., heard his superior suck in his breath. "The Amorphus. It's a fungusa slime mold. I've seen them before in digesters -- but only a few inches in diameter. Those fruiting bodies are delicious. If this is a large mutant of one of the edible species we're rich! Can you suit up and get one of those white ones into your cockpit?" Moses put on his helmet, checking the air supply. The gases in a digester were not breathable. He would have to wait to learn if the slime-mold melon smelled like a truffle. He left the sub and returned. Objective accomplished. "We'll name it the Eppendorff-Birk Melon when we file our report. It may become a significant food item if we can get it started in the other digesters," D.J. said. Moses shrugged out of his sticky suit and sat down beside the melon. It was ovoid in shape, about two feet long and one foot in diameter. He prodded its slick skin. "Moses' Melon," he said. D. J. was suspiciously silent for a moment. Then he said cheerfully, "Right. Has a certain ring to it. Moses' Melon. I'll write it up that way and I'll add a recommendation for a bonus for you. How'd you like to go on a Hunt?" Moses shook his head. "Trophytaking never appealed to me. I'd like to climb a mountain, though." "A climb then. Fine. See you next week," said D. J., dismissing him. E ven in the off hours the tubeways hour passed through Moses Eppendorff's home station. He put on his nose filters and elbowed his way into the tube. The acrid stench made his eyes water. Humanity pulsed and flowed. The acceleration nauseated him and ruined what little appetite he was developing. Changing tubes twice brought him to his shaft city. The hundred-yard-wide floor of the shaft was covered with his anonymous neighbors -- some queuing up at the dispensers, ways, others standing idle. He started up the spiral walkway that wound up the sides of the shaft, stepping over a discoloring corpse that still lay where he had seen it the day before. Two hours later, bone tired, he reached his crawlway. Sleep came quickly. Tomorrow he served on the megajury. girl quickened her pace. She wore the blue-white smock of Attendant caste. Through its folds her smooth body curves marked her as puberty plus four. Her green eyes darted over the crowd behind and around her -- hundreds of blank faces flowing about her. She probably recognized the mass of nose-picking strangers that always seemed to fill the tubeways with its random movements -- but now one pair of feet did not move randomly. They followed her. Rough hands reached for her through the crowd. Strong fingers bruised her shoulder, turning her into the knife point. The maniacal face, eyes too close together, aquiline nose and thin dry mouth were frozen into her memory molecules as the cold blade toyed with the soft tissues of her belly. Her screams and struggle went, unnoticed by the anonymous crowd. A large blood vessel parted under the blade and her strength faded. She slumped to her knees as he began the second stage of his compulsive act. The crowd continued its random movements. A careless footstep on her limp left hand snapped two small finger bones. Other footsteps tracked the widening circle of red. As the murderer-rapist completed stage two the viewscreen froze, and the megajury voted. The trial computer had assembled a complete picture of the crime this time, and Moses did not hesitate to press his "execute" button. The arguments for suspension fell on deaf ears -- too many of the organically ill were awaiting suspension spaces as it was. It was no time to be overly generous toward the psychotics. The Murder-Rape-Syndrome and the mad dog Mass-Murder-Syndrome had increased logarithmically with the population and Moses had little hope that these killers could ever be returned to society at the present population density. He felt he owed it to society to press the button. The screen switched to the cell of the accused. Same aquiline features. He was casually eating a light breakfast. His bioelectrical parameters ran across the bottom of the split screen. He did not even know when the megajury tally hit over fifty-percent. Heavy metal ions and toxic radicals tied up his enzyme systems and the bioelectricals began to flatten out -- cerebral, myocardial, even duodenal. Moses switched to light musicals and began to eat his own breakfast of woven protein. Another day. H e adjusted his cubicle air vent and took a deep breath. "What does the Outside smell of today?" came a voice from the doorway. from the next cubicle, shaftward. "Green," said Moses. lapsed into a corner. His right hand was cupped toward Moses. Moses cupped hand so the dispenser's optic pickup could register the unspoken order. A half liter of foamy dropped into the chute, charged to Moses. "Green is a color, not an odor," nose and upper lip. "I consider it both -- like artichoke or avocado can be both a color and a flavor." looked wistfully toward the opposite wall. "Artichokes and avocados were more than just colors and flavors once. They were real things -- parts of plants, I think." excursion had started out as a hunt but accident had occurred during his drug delirium and he had become lost. He had wandered around Outside for over a year and had never been the same after he returned to society. He could not face the crowded tubeways or hold down a job. Society gave him calorie basic -- fifteen hundred unflavored -- and quarters basic -- thirty cubic yards. He was living out his years quietly in half the space allotted to Moses. Whenever Moses the spaciousness and flavors to which pleasant enough, Moses thought, but his habit of fondling his grisly, cubed trophy and mumbling incoherencies had earned him the nickname Simple. many kinds of plants -- yellow was the turnip purple was the beet dum de dum de dum dum good enough to eat. I forget how the rest of it goes. That was a rhyme my mother taught me. Did you have a mother?" "No, I don't think so," said Moses. He knew that the embryogenesis laboratories had produced most of the present four-toed generation of Nebishes -- the superior Homo sapiens. "Too bad. I enjoy my memories of my mother. I'd like to have a family of my own -- this living alone in these tiny apartments just isn't any good. I wish I had a son." "Why?" "It is sad to die -- unmourned." Moses feel uncomfortable. He walked back tPThe air vent and changed the subject. "I still say it smells green Outside. I think I'll go have a look for myself." "I'll just climb up to the shaft cap and look through the grill. No harm in that. Why don't you come along?" toyed with his trophy cube. "Can't stand those crowds on the spiral walkway. Damn people. There are too many of them. I used to be able to fight my way through any crowd when I was younger. But that was behis boots, exposed his three-toed feet. "Lost my toes out there, too." Moses chided him: "Lost your toes and your guts. I guess that's where they got the saying that mankind is leaving its fifth toe and its initiative behind as it evolves into the four-toed Nehish." anger as he sorted out his feelings. He stood up hesitantly. "Maybe I will come with you, if -- if the walkway isn't too crowded." They filled their pockets with sweet bars, fat cubes and woven protein from Moses' dispenser and started out. T hey crawled the fifty yards to the shaft and peered out onto the spiral walkway. Only a few middleaged and apathetic adults straggled by. No crowd. They walked over to the railing and leaned out into the shaft. An eighth of a mile below the floor of the shaft was a hazy disc of heads. Above them the shaft cap was a vague glow -- more than a half-mile straight up. They started around the upward spiral, passing anonymous crawlways of their neighbors in the shaft city. An hour later they took a drink break -- each quarter mile turn of the walkway only lifted them twenty yards. It would take them over three hours to walk up to the cap. "Enjoy looking Outside?" asked Willie. "Oh, I don't know -- been so long. I find it interesting, I suppose." "Humans used to live Outside." "Used to live in the ocean too -- that's why we have gill slits as embryos. But the ocean, and the Outside were just stages in our development. Now we've evolved into the Big ES -- hive culture, colony people." Moses was not sure of what Simple had talked like that for so long that now Moses thought of the Big ES as some sort of living thing that controlled mankind -- but the concept, of course, was not logical. "Used to need five toes, too -- running and climbing all over like that. But now Big ES takes care of us -- Moses looked at his own boot. "You didn't always think Big ES was good?" discussed Big ES frequently. It was "No. That's why I stayed on -- when I found myself Outside after the drugs wore off. At first I couldn't stand it. All that open space -- I wasn't used to it. And there was weather." Moses waited for him to continue. "That's changes in temperature, you know. It was light and dark. The air moved fast and then it stood still. The ground became covered with foam took another quick drink at the fountain and started eagerly up the walkway. "Maybe we'll see some weather if we hurry." Moses followed him. shown enthusiasm about anything to do with Outside. He glanced about for the optic pickups of Big ES and slowed his pace. "Weather is awful," he said. "Man wasn't meant to live in weather. Big ES explained that to me very thoroughly. When I came back from my wild life on the Outside they explained how man was meant to live in cities -- not between cities where the I people live. The I people were bad because they trampled the crops and reproduced like animals. That was explainedto me real good." They walked in silence for a time. The sunlight filtering through the shaft cap above began to fade into dusk. natural for the I people to act like animals -- they are part animal. Some u.sed to think the I people were our five-toed ancestors but Tm certain we both descended from a common ancestor. They're just a blind end of evolution -- unable to form large social survive." He made a gesture of disgust. "Eating human flesh those fivetoed creatures actually eat the flesh of their own kind -- and any of the fourtoed Hunters they catch. I can see how evolution may have equipped them with a reproductive drive that is a bit wild by the standards of Big ES but I can't accept their flesh-eating habits. I suppose that is why I'm proud of my trophy I hunted the last of Earth's carnivores." At the rim of the cap they got a glimpse of a blue sky through a metal down facing the blank wall of the walkway. "I can't look out," he said simply. Moses gazed through the grill, desbenefitsunset, plum and grape colors darkening to a star-speckled less platform that ran around the yawning shaft. The grilla stout oneinch gauge, six-inch mesh -- ran up thirty yards to a roof which appeared to be rimmed with shaggy greens. In the gathering darkness a man-sized Agrimech scuttled in from the fields and disappeared into its garage in the base of the platform. Plankton ponds lit up and the fields became covered with the clouds of agrifoam which carried auxins and nutrients. Rows of distant shaftcaps marched to the horizon -- each about a mile apart and each housing a shaft city of fifty thou.sand. voice. Moses nodded. "Bright and white. Some big like an eye peeking down. Others small and numerous like spilled metallic dust." As he watched them blink he found the old familiar pattern of Orion -- unchanged since he had seen it before, several years ago. The shoulders, feet and belt. During his subterranean existence he had had little curiosity about astronomy. Sewage was real. The sky was just a background for scenes on entertainment shows. The night passed and an Irrigator trundled along a canal, drenching the land. Foam vanished. Orion marched westward until dawn erased him but Moses was confident "he" would return again. Outside seemed to have some stability and pattern to its roof even at night. In the growing light Moses turned to head pressed against the wall. He was not asleep. eyes and Moses reworded the question carefully. "When you were outside -- the stars came out each night, didn't they? Could you see outlines of things in them? Things that came back again and again?" ly to his feet and slouched down the ramp. Moses took one last look Outside and followed. They walked in silence for several quarter-mile turns of the spiral. "Don't remember too good. Stars? I know I must have seen them -- but can't remember actually looking. Lots of things about my time on the Outside are all mixed up. Do you think it could have been the drugs?" "MaybeSpeed does more than make you go fast." Moses spoke sympathetically. "Maybe the Big ES erased some of your memories, tootrying to make you a more useful citizen." "Of course. The Big ES put in blocks to keep my nostalgic memories from flooding out of my deep amygdaloid complex. But the blocks are not complete. Some memories get through." pressed his forehead against the wall. Sullen, morose and brooding, he mumbled something about the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Moses tried to prod him out of his catatonic his time soMoses was used to seeing him in this condition. All that was missing was the grisly .trophy cube hour Moses shruggedleft a few bars of woven protein, the flavored kind later. sudden depressions. Drugs during or after his spell on the Outside could be could have cracked under the strain of Outside. ience that had broken him? Guilt? Moses wondered if any connection existed between the trophy cube and ful creature but Moses was not too good at anatomy. A trophy was a trophy. He wished he could at least tell the trophy's sex. He suspected that obsession with reproduction during his lucid periods. If his trophy were also killed the only thing he loved. Moses did not like to think that of his neighbor. IV F or several days Moses dialed for information about Outside. Star maps were available. They were coded under seasons but Moses was not sure what a season was. He did learn Orion's star pattern was permanent. Under plants he found a few scant crops -- trees, vines, fleshy things and grasses. Under animals he found his fellow superior humans, the four-toed Nebishes and the lower, five-toed I people. The I people were described as cannibals and thieves -- the varmints of the year # A.D. The information bank estimated the population of the I people at less than half a that they would become extinct as soon as society found the funds for a really big Hunt. Moses waited to see what other animals would be mentioned and was surprised at the brief list -- mostly life forms that had adapted to mankind's subsistence civilization -- vermin in his cities, a grazing aquatic mammal and a few shellfish in his irrigation canals. Nothing walked the land, swam the seas or flew in the air. Moses didn't miss them -- never having known them. He was merely a little amazed that the total mass of animal flesh on the planet was one species -- Man. At the end of the week he checked in with D.J. at Pipe caste communications center. He sat on the edge of his bed, munching his breakfast, while the viewscreen focused. "No need' to come in this shift. Your Climb has been authorized. The Moses Melon looks like a success. It is a mutant slime mold. The troph stage is an amoeba that thrives in aerobic sludge. It coalesces in maturity to sporulate like a fungus. The boys from Synth plan to gray-age the melon and try it in the mushroom flavor line at first. We'll be rolling in Au-grams if it goes over. When you come back from your Climb check in again. We'll see how it's moving." The words were what Moses had expected -- more or less -- but D...l.'s face seemed tight and his voice had sounded strained. Moses Eppendorff's dispenser began to drop items for the Climb. He carefully checked his new suit of clothes for defects before he chucked the soiled ones down the chute to the digester. His kit contained food bars for the tube trip. He would be in the tubeways for several days -- even without losing time at dispensers. Public dispensers had an irritating way of delaying a traveler -- otherwise he tolerated them. After all, most dispensers were only class tens -- and identities had to be carefully checked. Moses did not want a nonworker eating flavored calories and charging them to his account. He was not made of Au-grams. Before he left he looked in on Simple was still catatonic. His eyes were glazed. F or two days Moses fought his way through the stinking crowds. He was weak from trying to keep his footing in slippery excrement and crushed roaches, sore from tripping over neglected bodies and continually nauseated by the rotten vapors that saturated his nose filters. He was sorry he had come. He stepped out at a strange shaft city to rest, saw the usual piles of refuse and hostile stares. He found himself dozing against the wall when he heard the sickening thud of a jumper. Another suicide. From the fragmentation of the skeleton Moses Judged that he or she had started a quarter of a mile up the shaft. What bothered Moses was that the jumper had not had the simple decency to scream a warning as heshe approached -- to give crowd on the shaft floor a chance to give himher room to land. As it was, the jumper took a couple with himher. Moses was wide awake now. He elbowed his way back into the tubeway and continued toward the mountain. A class nine mop brushed by. Its five-foot-tall snail shape took up the space of ten humans as it busied itself, wetting, scrubbing and sucking at the stained floor. Its thin-walled sac already contained one large lump that had elbows and knees. The tubeway deposited Moses on the floor of the rec shaft. He found himself alone. A large dispenser called his name and issued him a heavy pack of rations. He stood, strapping it on his back, mentally complaining about his own Pipe caste. The Pipe people had designed a system that moved humans with their food, water and air all over the planet -- thousands of miles -- but only horizontally. Never up. The energy simply was not available. Moses looked up the shaft. It was narrow -- a mere thirty yards in diameter. The spiral walkway had a twenty per cent grade and only an occasional, abandoned crawlway. He could not see the top. A black pinpoint in the center of the dimly lit spiral marked what he guessed was the two-mile height. He took a deep breath of the cold, damp, metallic air and strode out. Three hours later he passed three gray-haired men leaning on their packs. He felt smug about his endurance until, an hour later, a girl -- puberty plus seven -- passed him. Her pack was about the size of his too. She wore the smock of the Attendant caste. He stopped at the one-mile level to sleep. When he checked one of the crawlways he was surprised at how sterile the cubicles were. Without food and water dispensers man never nested there -- and without man his vermin did not either. Moses slept soundly for more than ten hours. His Attendant met him at the top of the ramp. She was a puberty-plus-ten female -- pleasant enough but dullwitted and sterile. He stood, sweating and swaying a little under his heavy pack -- exhausted. She steadied him with a firm hand on his damp shoulder strap. "Supper or sex?" was her greeting. Politeness prevented him from growling, "Sleep." This was a Climb, after all. He forced a smile and carefully straightened his aching back. "Let's try both," he said, "after I've refreshed myself." "Saved us some water. Come on. We're family for two weeks." She led him toward his room. The stereotyped hetero relationship suited his psyche -- but he was tired and the water was too cold and too scanty. She was openly bored -- efficient but bored -- and their cot was too hard for his tender muscles. The night became another nothing in his life. Dawn was a bright surprise. At full blaze the yellow sun quickly rose above his room with a blinding glare. One entire wall was transparent. His Attendant stumbled awkwardly from the cot and turned down the wall, changing the sun into a pale moon. Then she collapsed back on the bedding. He walked to the edge of the room and looked down. Pyramids of monotonous cubicles covered the lower slopes as far as he could see -- he was reminded of an obscene glacier. The black crags of the distant mountains still looked pure -- they seemed to be naked rock -- but the distance was too great for his visual resolution. He could not be sure that they too were not coated with windows. He hoped that at sundown they would remain black instead of flaming up with the reflected rays. That would be reassuring. "Breakfast?" The Attendant was fingering through his heavy packs. Odd, but when she began to share his food -- food he spent two days hauling up from shaft base -- she changed in his eyes. No longer was she an Attendant, here for his companionship. Now she was a parasite, trading her little efforts for calories -- and flavored calories at that. T hree walls of the bar opened to the Outside. But the walls were turned way down low, giving the place an eerie cavelike air. Moses could see hazy outlines of the sky and mountains Outside, although he knew the hour must be close to noon. In the darkness the four-toed Nebishes crowded, thigmotropically, around the massive stone bar, comforted by the warm elbows and hips of their fellows. They stood before the dispenser in their standard-issue-tissue clothes -- loose transparent garments of party people. Moses dialed drinks and joined the clot of people. "Tell me again how you executed the murdering rapist," his Attendant said. He grunted and concentrated on his drink. A hostile, short man with a round, white face glanced his way, spoke loudly from across the bar. by remote control and diluting the guilt in the group conscience of the megajury." Moses had heard these arguments before. Now that they were directed to him personally they stirred up reflex hatreds. He was pleased to know he could still hate. The adrenal surge was surprisingly exhilarating. He and the short man eyed each other across a room filled with apathetics. "Would you have put the psychotic in suspension -- crowding out a good citizen who needed a place to await a cure for an organic illness?" asked Moses. The hostile one sipped his drink and answered, "The crowding in suspension is all theoretical. Your buttonpushing megajury is actual. You can't weigh a real life against theory. Ideas aren't that solid." Moses parried with the obvious. "What is real? And what is manly? Have you ever killed anyone?" "No, but I tried. Didn't make a group activity out of it either. Went on a Hunt. Man to man. Didn't see anything, though," said the little man. "But you were armed and going against an ignorant savage. Used drugs, too. I'll wager. That's not too manly." "I was there, putting it on the line. Not sitting here talking big about a "You're here now." The little man's adrenergic response pulled him from his stool. He strode around the bar shouting at Moses: "Look, killer -- you're probably real good at pushing buttons. I went Outside but I didn't see anything -- just the black dirt, some damn Agrifoam and a few shaft caps. No trophies. There were no buckeyes where the detectors said there were. I say the buckeyes are extinct -- that's why I'm here and not on a Hunt. Waste of time -- a Hunt." Moses taunted him: "First you doubt the suspension crowding -- now the buckeyes. Not too trusting, hey?" The little man calmed. "I question lots of things -- like what is on the other side of this mountain. More cubicles, they say. I say -- nothing. This planet is empty, not crowded." "The other side of this mountain should be no mystery. Let's climb up and have a look at it," challenged Moses. The bar grew silent. All eyes moved to the ceiling where coils of rope hung from rusted pitons. The pitons, granular with age. were symbolic of the Climb. Most of the Nebishes came here to drink and watch. Today Moses and the little hostile one would entertain them. Clumsy in his insulated gear, Moses crunched across the virgin snow to the edge of the balcony. A flexible ladder danced in the wind. The hostile crunched past and put his foot into a rung to hold the ladder taut. He gestured for Moses to go first. Moses started up. The hostile released the ladder jumped out of the snow and the wind sailed Moses out over the mile deep crevasse. Spinning like a kite, he saw the view rotate sky, mountain and misty chasm. The vastness triggered primordial fears. His muscles locked rigidly. Around and around he turned until his gravity sense was lostmists above and below merged. Time stopped. The snowflakes on his face plate refused to melt. When the wind changed direction he swung back over the ledge. Dizzy, he looked down at the firm surface mocking him only a few feet below. The ladder's slack whipped up huge chunks of snow as it snaked back and forth. He tried to climb down but his fingers were still frozen to the rungs by fear. The group from the bar stood, drinks in hand, spectating through the open door and taking sadistic pleasure in his terror. The wind sent him spinning back over the void and he blacked out. H e felt himself falling. Screaming, he opened his eyes to see that he was safe on the cot in his room. Bulky dressings covered his hands and feet and his nose hurt. His Attendant hurried to his side with a liter of hot broth. She steadied his bandaged hands while he drank. "Drink this. Try to relax but don't close your eyes until you get back all the sensation in your arms and legs. You'll feel like you're falling for a while. Your centers of balance are probably scrambled. You were spinning around out there for several hours before I got you down." The broth was not too badwoven protein, a vegetable bar and a couple of fat cubes. It strengthened him quickly. "Thanks," he said. "Hope these bandages come off soon. Roundface's little trick wasn't so funny. I'm going to climb that ladder." V T hree days later Moses made the Climb easily. The hostile went first and was waiting on the ledge. Roundface cracked his helmet to speak. "Sorry about the ride on the ladder the other day -- but it was the best way I knew to cure your Outside phobias. How did you feel during the Climb today?" Moses shrugged. "Okay, killer. Follow me. We hike up the ridge to the snow line. Then it's a mile or so to the cave. We'll sleep there and go on to the summit in the morning." Moses followed him silently. After a while the snow flurries forced him to close his helmet. The trail was narrow and rough. Ice and loose drifts of snow made the footing treacherous. Fortunately there was a line and pitons in the steep spots. At dusk they switched on their suit lights and continued toward the lip of the miniglacier. Moses sipped water and turned up his oxygen. Glancing eastward at the other mountain range he saw the slopes begin to glow as the cliff-dwellers turned on their lights. Soon all the foothills were lit also -- humans everywhere. Depressing. Moses was getting tired of wading through the knee-deep powder when he saw the wail of dark stone. A triangular crack at the base formed the mouth of a cave. The hostile flicked his light inside and then began to walk random circles in the snow. "Moses," he said politely. "You go inside and unroll your bedding while I try to find some firewood out here." Numb with cold and fatigue, Moses wandered deep into the cave. It was about five feet in diameter at the mouth but widened out to three times that twenty yards inside. Odd. Moses thought he smelled wood burning. "Okay in there?" Roundface shouted. "Sure." A moment later Moses was knocked to his knees by a clap of thunder that shook the cave floor and showered him with pebbles and grit. In the silence that followed he heard an evil laugh from far back in the cave. He held his breath, heard approaching footsteps. Moses crawled into a corner and adjusted his suit light to tight beam. He fumbled for his small ice pick. The clap of thunder had come from the mouth of the cave. Since then there had been no sound from the hostile. A flame danced weakly in the back of the cave. Moses killed his own light and huddled farther into his corner. What he saw chilled him. A sinewy old man carried a burning pine cone on a stout spear. His legs were wrapped and he wore tattered rags and a loose outer cloak. He was not alone. Walking before him was a squarish, four-legged beast that was supposed to be extinct -- a seventy-pound, nonhuman carnivore. Moses did not know what the beast was but the long, well-toothed snout told its diet. Man and beast moved past Moses toward the mouth of the cave. Several minutes later they returned. Now the old man carried something that looked like a human leg. It was being carried casually by its knee and it dripped. This time the procession stopped at Moses' hiding place. "Moses Eppendorff?" asked the old man. He added without waiting for an answer: "Come on back by the fire. We want to talk." From his seated position on the floor of the cave Moses viewed the beast as hopeless odds. Trying to carry his ice pick casually, he got to his feet and led the way to the fire. The flame was small, stingy, fed by a few fragments of pine knot. The floor was littered with bones and small bundles of twigs. The bones varied from arched rib cages to whole skulls lined up neatly along the wall. A buckeye camp. "Pull up a rock and relax. I'll have something cooking for us in a minute." The old man stabbed a stout peg through the leg and hung it in one of the dark recesses of the cave. "You're not planning on eating that -- " Moses gagged. "This red thing? Oh, no. That fresh stuff is too tough. I've got a nice aged quarter here." The old man went to another recess and brought back a shrunken black object. It had a little mold on it and did not look human to Moses. He asked no question. T he glowing coals flared up white and blue under the dripping meat. The beast lay, chin on paws, in the outer ring of warmth, waiting patiently for the scraps. Moses waved away his share. The old man tossed it to the animal. Man and beast bared gleaming yellow teeth and devoured their respective portions. Wiping his mouth on his forearm, the old man turned to Moses. "The conditions in this cave are Just right for aging meat. Makes the trip worthwhile." Moses frowned. "Meat? Wasn't that a human being you just killed? Don't you have any feelings?" "Just so much protein to me. Can't have much feeling about one of the four-toeds anyway -- parasites!" The old man pointed his short spear at Moses and admonished: "and I wouldn't waste any time mourning that one, Moses. He had the same thing planned for you. Didn't you notice the way he sent you into this cave first? He's been at this Rec Center long enough to hear the gossip. I've been here before -- and they never know when I'll be back." "You're a -- buckeye?" asked Moses. The old man stood up apologetically. "Oh, I am sorry. We've been waiting for you to climb up here so long -- and eavesdropping until we feel we know you. We forgot you don't know us. I'm Moon. Used to have a more formal name but we'd best forget it. This is my dog, Dan." "Eavesdropping?" "Toothpick spied on you. He has the circuits for it." Moon gestured toward his spear. "Hi," said the spear. "I'm Toothpick. Actually, your being here is my idea." Moses stared at Toothpick -- a machine. A very sophisticated machine. Certainly not a class ten. "But why?" "We want you to come with us -- live Outside." said Toothpick. "Impossible," said Moses. "Life is too short for me to spend it being hunted." Moon handed Toothpick to Moses, saying, "Here, take him for a walk and let him convince you." M oses carried Toothpick gingerly out of the cave. He passed a massive stone deadfall and stepped out under the stars. Toothpick said, "Don't mind the way Moon talks and is. He has confidence in me because Tm so old. Actually Tm just a leftover cyber from the period when man had many of us. It was an age of high technology and low population density -- man and his machines were all over the planet, in the sea and air -- even off the planet, on the moon -- other planets -- even the stars. "I remember those times very clearly. I must have been on stand-by for thousands of years -- until Moon found me. My power sources seem well charged. Moon and I have been traveling together ever since. He gives me intellectual company -- a sounding board for my ideas. I try to protect him. I think we need you now -- Moon and Dan are getting old. They're both over two hundred -- had their genetic clocks turned off so their tissues won't age but the accumulation of scars is slowing them down. Their chances of surviving the next Hunt are small without your help." Moses was watching the stars. He had heard of ancient experiments with genetic decoding. At first they were designed to find out why the four-toed humans made better citizens -- docile, content. The gene locus that controlled initiative just happened to determine five-toeism. A byproduct of the research was the sothat translated the genetic message of life span from the gene to the messynthetic virus -- a sort of antigene -- that knocked out the clock. One injection prevented your cells from knowing when they were too old to divide again. You could still be killed by any number of the usual accidents, neoplasms or infections -- but senility never came. Naturally the clock project was halted when the implications became clear -- there probably was a very good evolutionary reason for the previous generation, dying off at a specific age. Make room for the new. Moon and Dan were just relics from the past. "Did man ever reach the stars?" asked Moses. "I think so," answered Toothpick. "My memory banks are small and what they do contain was put in a long time ago. A lot of it doesn't make sense even to me. But I have a feeling that man did reach the stars before population pressures soaked up the space funds." They talked through the night. Toothpick and Moon had walked over most of the major continents during the past thirty years. Conditions were about the same everywhere. In the tropical and temperate zones man had moved into underground shaft cities and cultivated every square inch of the surface. Vagabonds between the cities were tolerated when their numbers were small but were cruelly hunted when they became a problem. Mankind was apparently making an evolutionary step with the appearance of the four-toed Nebish and his hive culture. A few five-toed strains remained but they were mostly outcasts like Moon. Five-toed ancestors could also be found among the suspended who were waiting for some cure. Toothpick did not like this new Earth but, Moses reasoned, he was a machine and naturally would prefer a world where he could play a more important role than that of vagabond. At dawn Moon reset the deadfall at the cave's mouth. It was a beautiful job of stonecutting -- if you could ignore the gore long enough to admire the precision of the counterbalance and the marble key. Locking the key with his foot. Moon said, "Don't want anyone to get hurt while we're away -- " and laughed. He picked up a ten-centimeter section of tube and attached it to Toothpick's shaft. It had an optic pickup and had been set in the trigger area. Toothpick was more than a toy. Moon moved back to the fire, sorted through the scant rations and then tried on various articles of clothing. "This issue tissue certainly doesn't last long," he complained. He glanced at Moses' kit, reassured himself that there was no need to divide. But he pocketed the food bars. He was ready to lead out when Moses gave him an argument. "Thanks for the invitation -- but I won't be going with you. It sounds like an interesting existence. I just don't want to end my days as a cropcrusher and a fugitive -- and certainly not as a cannibal," he said. Moon flushed with anger. "Do you really know what you're going back to? That secure position in your hive culture? What is your life really? You live alone with no possibility of changing your future, .lobs? Move the sewage or kill a psychotic. Love? Nothing. Don't tell me about your Attendant back there. The only reason she pulled you down from that ladder was to save her share of your rations. Future? You have none. That hive culture is reproducing only the four-toeds. If you come with us you'll have more children than you can count." Moses winced. "Have jungle bunnies -- little kids that would be hunted all their lives." "It is better to be hunted than not to exist at all. Look, you owe it to the human race to try to pass on your genetic fifth toe -- Toothpick thinks you were born with the bud of one. The hive culture is the end of the evolutionary line for man. The hive humans will survive hundreds of millions of years as four-toed Nebishes. But it's the end of the line. Nebishes can't evolve. The hive is a living organism -- each individual unit is specialized for one function. Even reproduction and sex are separated. If one Nebish actually developed a gene for some higher trait he'd probably end up in suspension. It only took a few thousand years to get from the discovery of fire to space flight. In the complish nothing." Moses glanced at the old man. Toothpick and Dan. He snugged up his shoulder harness and said, "Well, I came to see the other side of this mountain. Might as well take a real good look." T WO humans, a dog and a cyber made the trip to the summit of the mountain. The view was encouraging -- naked rocks, ice, snow and an endless blue sky flecked with small white puffs of cloud. The old man waved proudly at the austere surroundings. "No cubicles above the ten thousand foot mark. We can take our time along this range. Farther north there is the remnant of a tree line -- a few real soft woods and lots of lichens." They crossed a saddle ridge. Moses got a glance westward, saw a valley of geometries. Monotonous tiered crops with their shaft caps and canals. Millions of the four-toeds were living in darkness while Moses enjoyed the sun and the wind. He also learned. Toothpick tuned in on the agricultural robots and guided the group to food supplies. A few pounds of dried plankton gave them energy to reach the wooden tomatoes. A bedroll of those carried them into the grain fields. When they had to cross open ground they trotted briskly, staying fifty yards apart. The buckeye sensors paid little attention to single warm-blooded forms. Family-sized groups and larger were monitored closely for the Hunts. Moses saw his first family-sized enclave in the foothills -- a pair of mated adults, a gray-haired female and three children. One of the children, a puberty-minus-one male, was dutifully guarding the approach path with a heavy spear. The adults glanced up from their clay bowls and flint tools as Moses, Moon and Dan approached. Communication proved unsuccessful. "Toothpick is having trouble with their dialect," Moon said. "We'd better move on before there is a misunderstanding." Moses wondered about the StoneAge level of technology at which the I people were forced to live. Apparently the buckeye sensors could detect metals at a much greater range than warm bodies alone. Any family that became "advanced" and started working with metal was soon Hunted out of existence. Moon led Moses to a canal a short distance away and showed him how to forage it. Soon they were seated on the bank, munching shellfish. A bulky robot straddled the canal silently -- one of the irrigators. Moses pointed to the robot's optic pickups. "Don't we have to worry about that thing's reporting us?" he asked. "Toothpick says that it's only a class eleven. Goes around checking soil moisture and spraying water. No circuits for buckeye detection." Toothpick put in, "We must watch out for class tens, though. Anything that can run around without a track usually has enough brains to detect us. Harvesters, Tillers, Metal Gatherers -- things like that." Moses continued to munch thoughtfully. The flesh of the shellfish had a definite crunchy consistency. It gave him a rich, full sensation. Lots of good amino acids. The water in front of him rippled noisily. He watched the spot. A large, ugly, humanoid head broke the surface, stared right at him and ducked under again. "If he comes up again, throw him a chunk of meat," said Moon. Soon a noisy, splashing group of fat mammals came around the bend of the canal. Moon stopped munching. "They look almost human," Moses said. Moon nodded. Dan barked excitedly and pranced up and down. Finally he jumped into the water and began to play with the nearest creature. The water mammal barked back. A tiny head, about the size of two fists, bobbed up and then under. "That one looked very human," Moses said. Then he saw it again -- a human child riding the back of a nonhuman dugong. The mother, a human female puberty plus four -- left the water and approached. Her wet clothes clung. Sullen and dark, her eyes were framed by a thick tangle of dark hair. Scum rimmed her chin and neck. She carried a wooden blade low in her right hand. Toothpick called, "Back out, men. I detect a golden corpus luteum." Moon Jumped to his feet and backed up to the bank of the canal, picking up Toothpick. Moses followed. She paused and watched Dan leave the water, shake and run after his humans. Then she silently slipped into the water and crossed the canal below the surface. Moses felt a little sick when he realized that her underwater swimming was probably a defense reflex against Hunter's arrows. "That was a coweye," said Moon. "They are dangerous in the luteal phase. Toothpick watches their infrared skin patterns. Hers was luteal or male. That means she's ovulated and has no need to mate. The coweyes are friendly just prior to ovulation -- during the follicular phase. Their infrared skin pattern is very female then. All the right capillary beds are being perfused and warmed up" Moses thought Moon was beginthey met? Moon thought not. VI was quiet. Two monitors -- Rook and Stan -- studied the color changes on the large wall map. "Looks like the Harvesters are about finished with the Jay sector again. Do we have a team ready to go in?" asked Rook, the senior of the two. Stan picked up the three top folders from his desk and leafed through them. "No. Just a few partials here so far. The craft won't be ready until tomorrow anyway. Only one of the buckeye detectors is operable on Doberman to a one-mile range by morning -- but there may be a lot of false positives." Rook took the top folder and frowned. "Only one Hunter is in for a category nine -- tactless achievement. We'll never get those buckeyes cleaned out at this rate. I wish we hadn't lost craft. He didn't even need a category nine on the team to make a successful Hunt out of it. Look at this pitiful assortment -- mostly threes and fours. They'll never come back." He pondered, then decided: "If a partial is -- that's what it will have to be. Better send for this guy -- category nine -- what's his name? Oh, Yes. Dag Foringer." pulled off his gloves. Wiping the sweat from his pinkish forehead he winced at the early sunburn. He felt he needed another couple of days on the range to sharpen his aim -- but tomorrow was the big Hunt. Later, partially sun blind, he squinted around the office in Hunter Central. "You sent for me? I've still got a lot of practicing to -- " "Better rest up," interrupted Rook. "This time tomorrow it won't be padded targets you'll be plinking at. You'll need all the strength you have. Is your titrator working?" Dag touched the thumb-sized pump stitched to the skin above his left clavicle and nodded. "Had the skin tests for Speed and the M.W. too. Worked fine." Rook and Stan glanced knowingly at each other. The skin tests were doses designed to give the Nebishes courage to face the outside. Extensive hypno-conditioning would otherwise be necessary. The drugs gave them instant courage -- reckless courage. The Society-bred Nebish found the Outside very uncomfortable both physically and psychologically. "Sit down," said Rook. "We have some training tapes we want to go over with you. You can take them to your cubicle and study them later. But you'd better not waste any more energy on the range." The wall map flickered off and a larger view of sector Jay appeared. Several bright lines and spots marked buckeye sightings. "The area for your Hunt is being harvested right now. Two hundred miles long and about five miles wide. One to two thousand feet elevation. Buckeye sightings -- none today. But there have been eight in the previous week." The screen flicked to action shots of a hovercraft lifting off the ground in a cloud of dust and leaves. loyal ship. Weak eyes but a good tracker. Reliable. Sit tight after your Hunt and he'll be back to pick you up." Rook paused to clear his throat. Stan took up the monologue: "Now, Dag. These views are taken from the recorder of a successful Hunter. You see that movement in the bushes. That is his prey. One of the buckeyes -- a male, I think. This is his second day on the Hunt and the prey is fatigued. There -- that was an arrow. He missed. Now, here in the open flatland we can see the prey better. Naked. It is a male and a young one, too. He must be two hundred yards ahead. Another arrow. A miss. Now it is night. The detector indicates the direction and distance of the prey. Note how patient the Hunter is -- walking carefully in the dark. Dawn of the third day now. The prey is sleeping in that pollen hedge. There goes an arrow. Another. A hit. There goes the prey -- dragging himself deeper into the hedge. This is particularly instructive. Note how the prey turns on the Hunter when trapped. Never relax until you've taken your trophy. Good shot of the trophy there." The screen faded from action to stills. "These are some of the artifacts taken from buckeye camps. The ashes and charred bones are obvious. Primitives. Those were human and buckeye bones. This object is a bit worrisome here -- the wooden spear. This one is broken but they can be over six feet long. With their fire-hardened tips they can be dangerous. They don't contain metals -- your detector can't find them. Your arrows do show up on the detector. Don't leave any behind. There are some examples of pottery and weaving -- even ceramics of a sort. But no consistent pattern. Each buckeye develops his own culture -- living alone the way they do." Stan concluded, "That's it. Any questions?" Dag Foringer wrinkled his sunburned forehead and shrugged. "No." "Well, get yourself down to the gathe captain on this Hunt," said Rook. Dag stood up. He started to leave. "By the way." asked Rook. "What earned you this Hunt?" Dag smiled confidently. "Fluidized a tubeway and diverted it into the protein synthesizers. Saved thousands of man-hours. The Orange fault line moved twenty-three feet and cut into one of the branch lines of the S.W. I was directing traffic that shift. Could have been a major loss in downtime. But I just waited until the life-support indicators moved out three decimal places and fluidized. Chances were that everyone was dead already -- but an hour later they were just so much woven protein and the Pipe people could go down into empty tubes to make their repairs. When I went off duty the tubeways were running again. My efficiency won me a three Au-gram raise and this Hunt. Seemed so logical at the time. I'm surprized no one thought of it before. These tubeway breakdowns aren't uncommon nowadaysand sorting through the bodies for survivors always takes longer than the actual repairs. Efficiency pays, I guess." T hat night Toothpick warned Moon and Moses to sleep in a tree. They hurried several miles to a sweet-thing orchard. Their rest was short-lived. A sea of white Agrifoam covered the ground for a depth of several feet -- foam that carried nutrients and plant hormones to push the crop to early maturation. It was of some danger to humans. Toothpick guessed, since it was used to carry insect hormones, too -- molecules that triggered permature metamorphosis. While these were probably still used in some areas, they varied; and the cyber was never sure what prolonged exposure would do to a human's endocrine balance. The Irrigator went slowly by, drenching them. The foam vanished in the downpour. They finally got a few hours of sleep just before dawn. Moses breakfasted on the sweet things -- orange, fist-sized fruits. Moon dropped from the tree, motioned Moses down. "Hunters," announced Toothpick. Moon and Moses dropped flat and crawled to the eover of a drainage ditch. Even Dan crawled on his belly. Moon rolled over on his back and held Toothpick as high as he could. "Stay below the soil profile until we find out where they are," he told Moses. Moses froze. He heard a rustling farther down the ditch. Something was moving in his direction. Toothpick scanned. "There it is -- a hovercraft. Must be a Hunt, the way they're circling that hilltop. About three miles away." The noises in the ditch were closer. Moses glanced up and saw a pair of eyes looking back -- coweyes. "They've flushed something," announced Toothpick. "The craft set down for a second and now it is moving away at a higher altitude. They probably dropped off one of the Hunters." The craft disappeared over the distant ridge. Moon and Dan crept up to the edge of their ditch to watch. "Quiet back there," Moon whispered. "Sorry," whispered Moses. Several minutes passed. "There he goes," said Moon pointing down the valley. A naked figure running easily moved into the open and swerved toward the ditch. "It's a buckeye all right -- and something sure is chasing him," said Toothpick. The fugitive passed them about a half-mile away and turned toward the canal. When he reached it he ran smoothly along the bank, apparently in no hurry. Then the Hunter came -- new suit of green-and-brown camouflage -- and the bow. He was fat and puffed loudly. Suddenly he stopped, took a deep breath, paused a few seconds, ran on smoothly. "Speed," said Moon. "That buckeye is in for a good workout." Moon dropped back into the ditch, explaining, "That Hunter will be awake and tracking for three or four days -- on Speed. At the end of his Hunt that little pump on his neck will inject the M.R. -- Molecular Reward. His body will be virtually torn to pieces by that much exertion but old M.R. will keep him euphoric until the craft returns and -- Say! There's a coweye back here." Toothpick interjected, "It is okay. She's in the follicular phase." Moses partially untangled himself from her arms and legs. "I found out," he said sheepishly. H er dialect was fuzzy but she was easy to understand. She led them to her nest in the bank of the canal. It was a little foxhole lined with dry leaves. A two-year-old female child napped in it, warmed by the sun. For the rest of the day the mother dove for shellfish for the group. Moon played with the little kid. Moses spent the night in the nest with her. Moon, Dan and Toothpick stretched out at a respectable distance. Privacy -- a luxury as rare as love -- since both disappear when crowding distroys the meaning of sexual signals. At dawn Moses was euphoric. Moon found him diving for their breakfast. The pile of shellfish was growing to banquet size. "You'd better leave a seed zone," said Moon jokingly. Obviously Moses had been sexually imprinted on the young coweye. It would be painful when the luteal phase came and drove them apart. Recent evolutionary adjustment had favored the females who mated briefly and traveled alone. Family groups attracted Hunters. As soon as her corpus luteum reassured her that ovulation had passed she would have no further use for her mate. In fact, he would be a real hazard. "I'm staying," said Moses. She busied herself serving the men and feeding her child. "I know," said Moon simply. He allowed himself a brief appraisal of the female -- good bone structure, clear skin and well fleshed out. A healthy one. "We'll move on. Remember to stay below the profile of the bank. You don't want to attract Hunters here with a two-year-old. See that ridge about ten miles away? Toothpick tells me there is lots of safe cover just on the other side. We'll probably rest up there for a couple of weeks. If you change your mind, we'll be there." "I'm staying." Moses put an arm around the little female and hugged her briefly. Ten days later he caught up with Moon and Dan in rough country. Dan wagged his tail three times. "She changed," Moses said, perplexed. Moon nodded. No comment was necessary. He had explained the hormone cycle before. "She was so in love, I thought. So tender. She was so soft -- her mouth, her fingers -- so soft." mumbles about the most beautiful thing in the world. It must have been like that for him, too -- love. "But it wasn't love. It was just hormones." "Don't say just hormones, boy. That was the best kind -- old, basic love. She wanted to have your kid and she loved you. She loved you with every molecule in her body. That's how it is. You can't sit down and reason love." "Why couldn't she let me stay with her? I could help feed her and the kids -- protect her -- help with the childbirth -- " Moon shrugged. "Maybe you could have -- one day. But not now. The Big ES has no room for family units. This is her way of surviving. Try to forget it for now." R ook stood in the garage as Dolike the light, easy way the old craft maneuvered -- almost effortlessly -- as if it were carrying a small load. When it set down he walked over through the dust and opened the hatch. Dag was alone -- thin, tan and stained with chlorophyll. He climbed out stiffly, then reached back in and picked up his cubed trophy. "Got one. An old toothless female. I was on the trail of a nice young buck -- followed him for almost two days. She started stalking me on the second night. Dangerous too -- had this meanlooking wooden knife. Here, I have it right here. By the time I got rid of her I couldn't find the young one." Dag reached into the cab again. "Odd," he said. "She was wearing these beads. Thought I saw a similar string of beads on the kid, too -- must be a charm -- same tribe or clan. Got some good optic records. You can add them to your teaching files." Dag Foringer gathered his gear and left without a word about the other Hunters who had not come back. dust cover. "Any idea where the other Hunters are?" he asked. The old mech turned an optic cataract on his chief from Hunter Control and answered brokenly, "Put them down on buckeye spoor -- routine. Covered eleven hundred miles. No sign. Their beacons are silent." Rook might wonder -- but Moses and Moon knew. country. Moses came across another follicular phase or two every week. Hunters came and went -- occasionally enjoying Molecular Reward -- occasionally they themselves becoming hunted. By winter Moses had covered over a thousand miles with old man Moon, Dan and Toothpick. They worked like a unit now. Surviving. "Harvesters," alerted Toothpick. Moon and Moses paused on the edge of a wide belt of moist, freshly turned soil. Robot Harvesters moved along the opposite side, devouring the grain -- leaves, stalks and all. The line of Harvesters seemed endless -- rising over one horizon, disappearing below the other. By dusk the reaped belt was more than ten miles wide. The robots quieted as dew dampened the crop. "Let's go across. We can't go around -- and if we wait until the new crop is planted and grown we'll belong in the open," Moon said. Grain offered little cover. The going was slow through the soft soil. The group passed between the line of harvesters several hours later. "Won't their buckeye detectors pick us up?" Moses asked. "Probably," Moon said. "But it takes days to set up a Hunt. Toothpick will eavesdrop on their usual wavelengths. We'll know in plenty of time if any hunters are on the way." When they came to the firmer ground they started to trot through the uncut grain. A quarter moon gave plenty of visibility. The scene seemed peaceful. "Hunters. Throw me," Toothpick shouted softly. They were coming to a quiet orchard. Some of the dark shapes were not trees -- they were bowmen. Moon tossed Toothpick into the air and Dan started to bound toward the nearest figure. Bowstrings hummed. Toothpick suddenly emitted large white sparks that bleached out Moses' visual purple. While he was trying to regain his night vision he heard the sickening impact of an arrow with flesh. Someone yelled from the trees and Toothpick crackled again. Moses knew blackness and blinding pain, heard a loud ringing, felt a facefull of grain. Fearful of the trophy knife, he fought his way to consciousness. His face was warm and sticky with blood. Time had passed. The eastern sky had grown light. Nothing moved. He sat up. Moon lay curled around the feathered end of an arrow -- a red arrowhead protruded from his left lower rib cage. His open eyes expressed puzzlement. When Moses moved Toothpick called, "Quick, pick me up. There are more Hunters behind the trees." Moses staggered toward the sound and found two bowmen near Toothpick. Small charred spots marked their uniforms over their precordial areas. He picked up the cyber. The Hunters did not move. "Over to your right. Let's check them out," said Toothpick. Moses moved cautiously past the still bodies of Dan and another Hunter. Several yards away he found the hovercraft. Four more Hunters were stretched out on bedrolls, enjoying their Molecular Rewards. "They look harmless enough -- for now. Pick up their bows and try to find a medi-repair-kit in their gear. Stay away from the hovercraft. It is a class ten and capable of defensive action," said Toothpick. Moses returned quickly to the old man's still form. He put a tentative hand on Moon's neck and felt a pulse. The old eyes focused angrily. "Yes -- I'm alive. Although I don't know how. This damned arrow almost got me dead center. Have you got anything to cut off those barbs so I can pull it out? I can't lie here forever." Moses took one of the wicked trophy knives from one of the cooling bodies and carefully sawed through the red arrow shaft under Moon's left arm. Moon tied one end of a roller bandage to the shaft and began to coax out the feathered end. As he drew out the shaft the ribbon of bandage was pulled into the exit wound. He paused to let the woven fibers dampen, then pulled some more. When he had the arrow out he had a length of bandage running through the track. He tied the two ends of the bandage together. "I heal up real good if I don't get infected. This should keep the wound open until healing starts. Can't risk an abscess." He coughed. Red mucus bubbled. "Dan?" the old man said, crawling to his dog. The dog's golden teeth were locked into the throat of a Hunter. A few inches of arrow protruded from the dog's wide chest. It jerked rhythmically. Moon moved Dan off the dead Hunter and examined him. He patted the dog's head. The tail did not move. Both hind legs were extended straight out, motionless, stiffly unnatural. "At least we know where the arrowhead is," said Moon. He watched the dog for a moment, then looked up. "Say, Moses -- better get that scalp of yours sewn up. All that fresh air is bad for your skull." Moon cleaned the younger man's scalp wound, freshening the edges roughly. Then he began to sew, talking as he worked. "Wish the Tinker was here. He's pretty good with stitches. There, now -- lie down for a few minutes while I check out that hovercraft." He was gone a long time. When he returned Moses noted that his left foot was stained bright pink. Moses did not have to look into the Hunter's camp to know what had happened. Moon walked over to Dan. The feathered tip of the arrow still twitched. "Good dog," he said. "You killed the bastard." He patted Dan's head. The tail did not move but Moses knew that it was wagging in higher centers. They rigged a travois for Dan and moved deeper into the orchard. Moon's pain doubled him up frequently and Dan's hind legs remained paralyzed. That night they decided to split. "Dan and I will have to hole up for a while," Moon said. "You'll have to help Toothpick complete his mission by yourself." The old man vomited up a small amount of black, granular mucus. He gently pulled the length of bandage a short distance through the wound. A small spurt of similar cloudy material drained from the anterior opening. "Rather have it draining out where I can see it. That way I know it isn't pooling up and getting infected inside." M oses felt helpless. Dan lay quietly on his side. A dry red line matted the fur on his neck and chest. The old man talked to the dog in a monotone broken by coughs. "Good dog. You killed the bastard. Want a drink, Dan?" He repeated the words over and over. Moses looked at Toothpick. "And I was supposed to protect him," he said sadly. "My error," said Toothpick. "The Hunters had their communicators off -- it was the end of the Hunt. But I should have been more careful around any harvested area. I know that's where the bowmen are." Moon scowled. "Forget it. They still came out second best. We're alive and they're dead." He added softly: "There were three trophies in the craft -- freshly cubed. One was a kid." He turned to Moses, "Your warm body isn't doing any good around here. It will just attract more Hunters. Get going. Take Toothpick wherever he's headed." Moses backed off a few yards, saying, "Rest here a while. Moon. Toothpick and I will forage a bit." Later he told Toothpick, "Can't just go off and let them die." "It's what they want." "I could run to the nearest shaft city for aid. They'd send a team of medi-attendants right out and -- " "And suspend the lot of us. Dan and Moon don't want to end up hooked to one of their damn suspension machines." Moses nodded. He knew Moon would trade a few days in the fresh air and sunshine for a few years of vegetating in some underwater suspension coffin. He gathered armloads of fruit and returned to Moon and Dan. Moon had hooked the travois on his shoulder and crawled into the stamen hedgerow. Moses found man and dog covered with pollen under a screen of branches. "Thanks for the fruit. This is a pretty safe spot for now -- low enough -- and nothing here to harvest. Let me check that scalp. Looks fine. Wash it whenever you can. Now get out of here." Moses gave him a wry smile -- Moon did not like sentiment. "We'll be traveling north by northeast. Catch up if you can," Toothpick said coldly. Moses traveled slowly for the next several months, looking back frequently. No one tried to catch up. Running alone was lonely. Moses' skin had thickened and tanned. Weather did not bother him as it had when he had first discarded his insulated climbing suit. His muscles had firmed. He gave several Hunters a good run and then slept while Toothpick stood guard. In three or four days the Hunters' muscles were completely lysed by their drug-stimulated exertion. On one occasion Moses actually doubled back on a Hunter and witnessed the Molecular Reward -- a placid, hallucinatory state. The Hunter was completely cut off from his environment and helpless. Moses could understand why the mortality rate among Hunters was high. He moved through cooler lands now. Food was scarce. Toothpick always suggested a course that took them in a straight line -- thirty degrees east of north. It was late autumn again -- another year, another thousand miles. "Harvested as far as I can see," Moses said. "Looks like we'll have to turn south if we want to eat again." Toothpick ruminated. "We can foray into that shaft city if we're quick about it. The doors are only class twelves. I'm a class six." H e approached the city through rows of misty plankton domes. Blobs of sticky scum marked the previous passing of a Harvester. It had been skimming the ponds. It would be a week before the ponds were ready for skimming again. He followed the Harvester's tracks right up to the blank face of the shaft cap -- ten yards of wall broken only by baleful optics and the huge doors to the Agrimech garage. The grill above was dark. Moses stood for a long moment at the door before it opened. He tightened his grip on Toothpick as he stepped into the nest of machines. "Are they suspicious?" he whispered. "Just sluggish. We're just another item in their memory banks unless we cause loss of life or materials. Try to get to the inner wall and find a door to the spiral walkway. Watch out for those little service robots. Some are blind. This isn't the safest place for a soft-skinned human." The powerful Agrimechs slept in their bays while small Servomechs worked. Some dangled from ceiling cables while others sat on the floor surrounded by new and used components. The outer wall was strewn with broken parts and vegetable debris. Moses picked his way until he came to an inactive bay he could safely cross. Moses melted into the apathetic crowd on the spiral and softened his face to match the surrounding lethargy. He matched their sluggish gait. Toothpick remained silent until they reached the first dispenser. "Let me handle this. Your Augrams have probably been confiscated," said Toothpick. The dispenser issued one item of each food category and an issue-tissue garment. Moses staggered away under the load. "Caution." Toothpick made a hissing sound, "The lighting is changing. Some shorter wavelengths are coming in. The scanners must be looking for the melanin and carotenoids in your skin suspecting you're from the Outside." Moses continued to walk with the crowd. "Was it the dispenser?" "No. For all it knew we were just one of the maintenance teams. It might have been your clothes -- tattered and carrying plant pigments -- but I doubt it. Your infrared skin pattern probably triggered the analysis. Your months exposed to weathering has thickened your skin and added pigments. Your skin is a better insulator now and it reads lower on the thermal scale than the citizens here," Toothpick explained. Moses quickened his pace. Several hours later they were Outside again, back on their north-northeasterly course. More weeks of travel brought them into colder country. They invaded another shaft city to obtain food and more layers of issue-tissue to insulate Moses against the frozen nights. Food production in this zone was entirely greenhouse, since both environmental heat and energy for photosynthesis had to be provided. They saw little in the way of foodstuffs -- just the misty dome walls sweating frost on their insulated outer surfaces and other long lines of glowing green tubes pulsating with cultures of plankton. The ground was permanently frozen here. Moses huddled against an outcropping and reached under his outer layer of clothing for his water bag and a food bar. "Smell some brine in the wind," he said, drinking. Toothpick was propped against the rock. Fie flexed his membrane charge and rotated his optic toward the east. "We're getting close to the sea. The haze blocks the horizon at your wavelength but I can see the shoreabout seven miles." Moses chewed slowly. "Not much sign of life around here. Just the machines making food." Toothpick rotated and looked at his human. "And expensive food, too. The energy cost per calories is prohibitive. These units would be much more efficient in a tropical sea." Moses watched the pulsing green flow through the warm transparent pipes. It was easy to picture the same setup in a less hostile environmentlush coral reef or even the bottom of the ocean along the equator. The job of setting it up would obviously fall on his own caste -- the Pipe people. He looked at Toothpick and shrugged. "In theory it would be easy but in practice I found we were just too short of skilled Pipes. The four-toed Nebish is a docile citizen -- but not too many of them long to crawl inside a sewer or a pump. Our caste is just barely capable of keeping present machinery functioning. New projects are impossible until we get more Pipes." "Five-toed Pipes." Moses chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "Five-toeds? Where can the Big ES find five-toeds? There aren't many left on the planet -- except for the I people. And they're not really suited for this population density." Toothpick flexed restlessly in the frozen air. "Come on. I'll show you some fivetoeds." M oses picked him up and they moved on toward the odor of brine. At the seashore an underground tubeway surfaced at a dock on the frosty tidal flats. A robot boat was taking on a load of man-sized sausage casings. They climbed on. The boat, a twin-hulled thirtyfooter, had its bulge of neurocircuitry at the top of a short mast. The open cargo space contained a score of eight-by-three-by-three-foot casings. Each casing was attached to a small console by a segment of tubing. "Looks like a cargo of live melon vines or something," said Moses lightly. He leaned against one of the casings while he tried to see through its opalescent skin. The pressure of his elbows slowly pressed into the skin until he met something firm. He stepped back abruptly, almost dropping Toothpick. "What's in there?" "You're about to find out. Here comes another human being. Try to open the casing. I think there's a latch at the end opposite the tubing." Moses crouched and glanced toward the bow. A human bundled in a thick, hooded suit was walking from casing to casing with a checklist. Moses fumbled with the latch and lifted off the top of the casing. "A body -- " "No. A patient. Quick. Get inside." The angry sea lashed the cargo deck with spray. The casings squeaked against each other. Moses crawled into the casing and let the lid snap shut. Silence. He squirmed for comfort. Later he snapped the lid open an inch to allow stale air to blow out. The whitecaps were still tossing foam onto the deck. The hooded figure was gone. "Where is she?" "She's below deck in the Attendant cabin -- enjoying a nice hot drink and music and looking female." Toothpick was eavesdropping on the boat's life-support circuits. "We'll be en route for a day and a half. You might as well catch some sleep. Stick me out under the lid. I can keep an optic on things and give you some some air." Moses tried to relax. "Are you sure this guy is alive? He feels so cold." "He's alive -- in suspension. But he won't be for long if you go to sleep on his tubing. That coil carries his perfusion fluids. He doesn't metabolize much at this temperature -- but he is still metabolizing and those tubes exchange ions and gases with the sea water. You can't press on them for more than a few hours at a time." Moses rolled over and gently moved the coils of two-inch transparent tubing up on the patient's chest. One end was fixed to the head end of the casing. The other entered the patient's leg just above the knee. A similar tube ran into him from the opposite side. Moses slept while Toothpick scanned. T he second day out they began passing frequent masses of drift ice and spotty fog banks. Moses shut the lid when they came to a floating dock. Machines off-loaded. Moses saw the silhouette -- like that of a giant praying mantis -- approach. Its two big arms cradled Moses' casing, unmindful of the increased weight. Two smaller arms worked on the perfusion tubing -- unhooking it from the boat's L.S. console and attaching it to a smaller unit on the back of the robot's mantis abdomen. The offloader rotated its head, turned carefully on the wet deck and moved onto the gently rolling dock. Moses watched the vague shadows through the translucent skin of the casing. The robot rolled on wide soft wheels up a long ramp and into a cavelike hallway. The stability and quiet told Moses that he must be in a hollowed-out cliff overlooking the sea. Probably on an island hidden from the dock by the fog. An hour later he was rocking gently in a quiet dark water with thousands of other casings. Moses popped his casing lid for air and was drenched with icy brine. He left the casing, waded around in waist-deep water feeling for the wall the echoes told him was there. The tangle of perfusion tubes tied up his feet and shifting casings blocked his path. The cold cut through his thin issue-tissue clothing. Toothpick produced a beam of visible light that enabled Moses to grope his way to a ladder. Dripping and shivering, he stood on the walkway looking over the acres of casings. "This section has recent cases," Toothpick said. "Probably all fourtoeds. Let's check deeper in the tidal caves. The older cases should be back that way -- to you right." Moses moved on -- teeth chattering. He found an Attendant's unoccupied chamber and turned up the heat. After changing clothes and drinking a liter of hot broth he felt stronger. They moved on. T his looks likely," said Toothpick finally. Moses stood outside an Attendant's chamber which had seen many years of use. The door handle was worn smooth by the thousands of hands which had come for the magic warmth inside. "The control boards will be close by. Try along that far wall." Rows of tiny green lights covered the wall as far as Moses could see in both directions. Moses said. "What do they mean?" Green means the patient is alive. Yellow stands for trouble. Red is for dead." Moses settled down in the warm, comfortable quarters while Toothpick checked the memory banks of the Life Support center. This section held most recent cases were from the year of Olga fifteen-twenty-four. Most were from before # A.O. "High incidence of five-toeds here," said Toothpick. "How do we proceed?" "Insert me into one of those sockets over there. Then you try to get out of here. The Big ES isn't going to like what I have to do. There will be security personnel all over this place as soon as they figure out we're here." "You want me to leave you?" "I'm a kamikaze Toothpick -- expandable. I have to stay until it's over -- " "What's over??" "Oh -- oh. Company." A hooded figure entered, suspecting nothing. The protective suit was thick and relatively soundproof. It carried its own entertainment channels. The pended had little need to be extracurricularly alert. While Toothpick worked quietly in his socket, Moses crept up on the new arrival. He grappled with the loosesuited form. "Tie her into that chair with some tubing and tell her to be still or I'll zap her," said Toothpick. "Zap?" "Never mind. I heard him -- or it," the Attendant said, relaxing. "I don't know why you're here -- but if you've brought your own rations you're welcome. It gets pretty lonely around here -- Say! What's going on? Look at those yellow lights on my panel. There must be a dozen of them -- " "Tie her up," said Toothpick, twitching in the socket. She sat open-mouthed while yellow lights sprang up all over the panel. A few times she wrenched at the tubing but Toothpick immediately made threatening sounds in her direction. Moses warned her quietly that Toothpick was no ordinary machine -- he had killed four-toeds. The frost melted from the chamber windows. The distant sounds of falling icicles echoed against the damp stone walls. The first red light appeared -- a death. The Attendant struggled against her bonds, spitting hatred at Moses. "Murderer! What right have you to in the name of Olga are you doing this?" Moses watched the red light glow. He was puzzled. These patients were mostly five-toeds, according to Toothpick. Why was Toothpick fooling them. T oothpick recorded the peculiar set of Moses' features but he was too occupied to explain. All his circuits were busy with environmental controls -- altering incoming sensor readings to give ice-age temperatures to the L.S. mech brain, which in turn began to heat the perfusion fluids to compensate. Slowly the waters warmed. With each seven Fahrenheitdegree rise the metabolic rate doubled. The perfusion pumps strained to supply oxygen and nutrients to compensate. Robot Resuscitators splashed awkwardly about in the shallows, trying to save a few of the thousands who were sickening in the accumulating metabolic wastes. Even the air Moses breathed began to smell of ammonia and urea. More red lights appeared. Harvesters moved through the tidal caves picking up the deceased and carrying them to the synthesizers. The protein wasn't wasted. The Attendant continued to vilify Moses with passionate asperity. "What are you -- some crazy crusader? Well, this is not a psychotic ward, you know. It is a cancer ward. Those patients have organic diseases them?" More red lights flashed. The Attendant tried reason. "If you are an assassin -- why kill them all? Tell me whom you are after and I'll help you find him." Moses frowned at her. Expediency. She would finger one victim to save the rest. He looked expectantly at Toothpick, who seemed more relaxed now that the red lights were appearing. The cyber spoke from his socket. "We're not assassins come to prevent our political enemy from being resuscitated. We do not intend the death of anyone -- but unfortunately many will die. Moses, you'd better leave. If they find you here you'll be tried for mass murder. Take her with you. I'll need three more days to complete my work here. I won't be able to come with you." Moses hesitated. "Couldn't I wait? Together we might be able to -- " "No. I can fool this one L.S. robot by sitting right in his sensory unit -- but the other nine robot brains on this island are probably already picking up the increased heat. Their sensors are free. The warm air and water from this section will alert them. Should take at least two days for anyone on the mainland to get here -- maybe three. After that the place will be sealed. If you're linked with it,j you'll be found. Big ES is very efficient that way." M oses carried the Attendant lightly on his shoulder as he ran for the dock. The boat -- a mere class ten -- accepted his verbal orders without question and accepted him aboard. "Thousands of red lights -- " the Attendant sobbed. The boat seemed to tremble with her crying. Moses motioned for her to be silent. Her eyes brightened. She spat at him. Scowling, he grabbed the front of her suit and twisted it in his fist. "Go ahead," she told him. "You were real handy back there in the tients. You're not man enough to kill someone who is awake and looking at you." The boat trembled off course. He jerked her to her feet and lifted her over his head. Through the cloth he felt her heart race. Her elbows were still secured behind her. He stepped to the rail and let her watch the gray, ice-flecked sea rush by. She screamed insults at him. Her heart rate increased. He glanced into her face, saw bright eyes, a wet mouth. She was enjoying this -- a masochist! Moses dunked her into the icy brine and held her up to the cold blast of the wind. She fell silent. He carried her below decks. The boat plowed a steady course south. In the warm cabin -- bundled, dry and quiet -- the Attendant held a hot cup of broth with both hands. Moses stood before her, shaking his fist. "You're crazy -- you know that? Repeat that hysteria and you're going to get hurt. Now just sit tight. I'll give Toothpick the two days he needs -- then I'll let you go. Meanwhile you're stuck on this boatwith me. It's up to you whether you take a regular bath in that ocean out there." She eyed his sinewy, tan forearm and licked her lips. A moment later she was on him, tooth and nail. She drew a little blood but as the struggle progressed around the cabin floor he detected a definite sexual quality in her attack. Two long, hard days ensued. The light in her eyes continued in the hatred zone. Fortunately all her energies were directed at Moses and not at the boat's neurocircuitry. Their course through plankton farms and floating mechanical factories was smooth. On the third day the boat turned abruptly westward. "No," Moses told it calmly. "South." The Attendant smiled smugly through her ecchymosis. "This trip is no longer authorized. Try your muscle on Security." He reached for the manual override and was knocked down by a bright spark . "Field's on." She grinned. "Boat has heard the long-distance call. We're going to dock somewhere." When they docked he picked up a spanner and shouldered his way through the lethargic Nebish guards. The tubeway crowds could not hide him. His cutaneous melanin and carotenoids marked him. He wrestled a new set of issue tissue from one of the crowd but still the optic pickups followed him easily. At buckeye wavelengths he was umber against a mauve background. Days of pursuit followed -- during them he had no time to sleep. He stole food from daydreaming Nebishes as they left the dispensers. Whenever he dozed the security people closed in. Capture was inevitable. "Open up!" he shouted to the door at the top of the shaft cap. "Open up. Let me Outside." The baleful optic stared. "Unauthorized," it announced. A class twelve door -- and it blocked his escape. W hen he awoke in his cell the viewscreen showed an old man and a dog moving through a snowdrift. Moon and Dan. Moses watched the screen for several minutes before he realized it was the court computer simulating his crimes. A chill went down his spine as he searched in vain for the gas inlets. Then he remembered that the walls were semipermeable membranes -- they sweated toxic through radicles. He slumped into his chair. A large unappetizing meal covered the table. The viewscreen moved on to scenes of aquatic canal mammals and Agrifoam. Now there were three forms on the screen -- Moses, Dan and himself. He saw little errors of detail -- and some errors that were more than details. Toothpick was sometimes missing. In some scenes Moon or Moses carried a staff or a spear. In others -- nothing. Obviously the sensor records were spotty and the computer was filling in the gaps in information. The readings were taken at a great distance, he guessed from the fact that Moon's and Dan's teeth were white. The final scenes taken in the tidal caves were quite sketchy. Evidently Toothpick was able to block most sensor readings in the section where the murders actually took place. There was even some doubt as to the innocence of the female Attendant. Obviously the court computer knew nothing of Toothpick's abilities and therefore suspected that the Attendant must have assisted Moses. It knew that Moses' background in the Pipe caste did not equip him to do alone what had been done. He relaxed a little. Even his own biased eye could see many defects in the case against him. Where was his defense? The computer ended its simulation with the death statistics -- a lar number had survived and were again safely resuspended -- but another Hundreds of Resuscitators were on the scene. The final count might be days in coming in. Big ES would push for a public execution on this one. H e paced nervously around the small cell, sat down again in the only chair -- a seven-course meal and the viewscreen in front of him. His last meal? The screen cleared and the face of an eager young man appeared -- unusually eager for a Nebish. "I am your Defense Attendant -- Josephson. Can we talk?" Moses nodded. "You are being tried as a mad-dog killer," said Josephson glancing at his notes. "We will use the standard defense -- M.M.S. -- the Mass Murder Syndrome. Your blood is being checked for the ectodermal-debrisantibody right now. As soon as the results are available the computer will decide. Should be over in less than an hour." Moses fingered the puncture wound on his arm. The Mass Murder Syndrome? Surely he was not insane. He watched quietly as Josephson began his argument. "Moses Eppendorff was born with the bud of a fifth toe and with it he carried the gene for the ectodermal-debris-antibody. The antibody with which evolution equipped mankind for his struggles in the era of the individual. In the past it was useful in spreading mankind over the surface of the planet. Individuals cultivated forty acres each or took their fishing boats out alone. Crowding caused anxiety in the five-toed humans. Alone, they prospered. Crowded, they died. The court must recognize that free will does not play a role in the M.M.S. An individual with five toes -- or even the congenital bud of five-toeism, as in this case -- can not be crowded without forming antibodies against the ectodermal debris of his fellow humans. Loose hairs, scales of skin cells, drops of skin oils all drift into the environment and stimulate antibody production -- an allergy against humans. High density population causes it in all but the hive species -- ants, bees, termites and the four-toed Nebish do not become allergic. They can be crowded into the more efficient hive society -- but men with five toes cannot. They develop the allergy -- and the antibodyantigen reaction causes anxiety -- anxiety that precipitates murders, suicides and abortions. "Living in the cloud of ectodermal debris causes the antibody formation -- cell-fixed, 'atopic' antibodies. Each new exposure to the ectodermal antigen causes the release of a serotoninlike molecule at the cell wall -- the site of the antigen-antibody reaction. This serotonin-like molecule causes anxiety -- molecular anxiety -- the level of which varies with the individual. Some handle the anxiety well or convert it into psychosomatic diseases. Others do not handle it well. In these persons anxiety precipitates neuroses -- or psychoses. The only escape is in fleeing the cloud of ectodermal debris -- but at our population density this is no longer possible." The court computer took over. "Enough. The court is fully aware of the role of society's cloud of ectodermal debris in the precipitation of psychoses. Moses Eppendorff, however, lacks the antibody in question. The test results are now available." Josephson looked perplexed. Evidently he had planned no alternative defense. "But -- but if he isn't insane why -- why did he kill a quarter of a mill -- " He stammered to a halt, his question unfinished. "Yes. Why?" asked the viewscreen. It took Moses a moment to realize that the court computer was speaking directly to him. Sensors in his room would detect autonomic clues if he lied. He swallowed carefully, wondering which version of the truth would be safest. A few wrong words now would close his case with a roomful of bad gases and the court would move on to its next case. "My name is Moses Eppendorff. I have been Outside for almost three years -- but I've never killed anyone. My crime was traveling with Toothpick -- a class six cyber. Toothpick says he is over two thousand years old. I'm sure he had a good reason for -- " "There is no record of a class six cyber in your travels," said the court computor. "Where is your Toothpick now?" "He remained behind in the tidal caves. He isn't mobile. Your security people probably have him now." There was a long delay while all the details of his story were checked. The screen switched to a workshop. Moses saw a group of technicians bending over a segment of tubing that had been opened lengthwise. Three homogeneous cylinders were exposed -- as peas lie in a pod -- one quartz, one black and one white. One of the faces in the group looked up. The court asked: "The device left in the L.S. unit at the murder scene -- have you analyzed it?" "From its function we've guessed that it is a simple frequency converter -- changing the thermister readings from warm to cold or cold to warm. There are many ways it could have been designed but so far we've been unable to make any sense out of this device. It must be a very primitive design, one not covered in our training exercises." Moses stared at the screen. Toothpick lay open and nonfunctioning. The court asked him to identify it. Moses did. "My sensors tell me you are telling the truth. But your concept of the truth does not conform to reality. Your Toothpick is not a high order of cyber. It is merely a simple device that alters temperature readings. The smallest portable cyber is a class ten. A class six weighs a ton. And that doesn't include a self-contained power source. Obviously this delusion is real to you. I will accept your plea of insanity." Josephson relaxed. Moses sputtered. The screen faded to a dull white and mumbled something about final disposition of the case being put off until tomorrow. A bout an hour later Josephson appeared at the door to Moses' little cell. He seemed excited. He carried a long bundle under his arm. Moses motioned him in. Pushing several of the dishes aside they placed the bundle on the table and unwrapped it -- Toothpick. "Court wants you to have what is left of your -- device. Trying to classify your delusion, I guess." Toothpick's long open case was empty. The three cylinders rattled around loosely in the soft white cloth wrappings. Moses' face registered pain at the sight of his cyber's innards. He opened his mouth to speak. Josephson cleared his throat noisily. "Court will try to classify your -- problem -- as metabolic or due to some sort of conditioning." His glance around the room reminded Moses that his behavior toward Toothpick was probably being recorded for use in this classification. "Can't let all this go to waste," Josephson picked up a chewy protein disc from Moses' last meal. "A little dry." He sipped one of the tall colored drinks. "Probably suspend you as soon as you're classified." Josephson continued to sample the stale food. Moses absently picked up the cylinder that resembled quartz. It fit sympathetically and like a baton into his palm. Eyeing it analytically, he noted strange lights playing over its inner layers. Did they denote hope? Remembering where Toothpick's optic pickup and visible light beam had been located, he placed the quartz in the shell near the point. Trying to make his actions casual, he picked up the black cylinder. The damned cylinder was not excessively heavy but it had a massive inertia. He could move it slowly wherever he desired but sudden movements met solid resistance. He made small talk with Josephson while he guided the cylinder into the shell. First he tried the black at the end and the white in the center. Then he reversed the positions -- and got exactly nothing With all three cylinders in place, Toothpick's innards still featured a six-inch gap. Moses could not be sure where the gap had to be located or if it represented a missing cylinder or other part. After several tentative experiments at positioning, Moses tore strips from the cloth wrapping and tied them around Toothpick. The outer skin was pliable -- but sprang open each time he pressed it shut. He set Toothpick down and stretched out on the cot. "Thanks for the snack." Josephson again glanced at the unseen sensors. "Get some sleep. I'll see you first thing in the morning." Moses let him out and shut the door. He stood for a long time staring at the door -- then he collapsed on his bed, face down. His mind was all geared for self-pity. He could expect death or suspension at the hands of the court -- and he was so young, had barely tasted life. Suddenly his line of thought was frozen by what he saw. Toothpick's shell was closed. Had Toothpick's spirit returned? He was afraid to look again. J osephson sat in a small booth, speaking softly to the court. "Anything incriminating?" "No," answered the cybernetic jurist. They both watched Moses lying on the cot. The bio-lectrics indicated he was still wide awake. "Anything on his contacts?" "I transmitted a pickup on his has a record of having been Outside transported here to stand trial with Moses if his interrogation is positive," answered the machine. "The three of them -- a triple execution. It'll take at least that to close this case." Moses rose and walked to Toothpick. Josephson perked up. "What's he doing?" "He appears to be hugging and kissing that device," the court computer answered. "His physiological parameters show a level of excitement approaching irrational behavior -- and I'm detecting a magnetic field. Could that device still be functioning?" "I don't know. Perhaps the field is caused by a battery of some sort. Your technicians found no circuitry. But don't let his irrational behavior fool you. He's as sane as you or I." Moses relaxed on his cot. Toothpick on the pillow beside him. He faced the wall and touched his teeth to Toothpick's outer skin -- bone conduction carried a faint voice to his eighth cranial nerve. Toothpick was alive. "Moses. My memory was damaged by the crude surgery on my skin. I detect a large number of sensors in this room. Danger. You must keep my functioning secret. Court is a class six but his circuitry is very primitive. Technology has regressed along with the reverse evolution of your species -- squeak." Moses waited for Toothpick to begin speaking again. His heart raced. The court and Josephson were puzzled by the autonomic response. Biolectricals jumped all over the screen. A class twelve dial moved from true to false. cube, his unfocused gaze aimed through the wall. Five security attendants crowded into his tiny home and asked about Moses. Almost four years had trouble with memories that old. "He used to live next door," prompted one of the intruders. smile, a question again. Memory macromolecules stirred. A tear welled in "Moses? Yes, I knew him. He used to talk to me a lot. He was my friend. Henry lives there now. Henry isn't anyone's friend." "Reading in the Tee zone. Some confusion and psychogenic overlay," a deep voice mumbled in the backMoses ever discuss the Outside with you?" were activated deep in his basal ganglia. "That's it," announced the deep voice triumphantly. "Reading way over in the panic zone. Bring him along." S HE sat stiffly in her cell, heaping curses on Moses and denying vehemently that she helped him. Josephson enjoyed watching her squirm unshe knew the workings of the court. Any question might be the last if her answer -- or nonanswer -- tipped her bio-lectrics into a pattern that fit the crime profile. "Ask her if Moses ever touched her," he prompted, leering at her skin resistance tracing. "Only to kill me," she spat. Skin resistance dropped but the needle stayed on Tee zone. The court puzzled over the readings. tingled Moses' teeth. "Ask about the fate of the other third -- the patients who are alive and unsuspended. They should be cured of their neoplasms. Assume the posture of a faith-healer come north to cure the suspended masses. Smile and think of the Hip of Mount Tabulum. You are now the seer of Dundas Harbor. You mans and cured them of their diseases -- cancer." Over and over Toothpick repeated the instructions until Moses' cortex accepted them as fact. Acceptance was made easy by the fact that he had already witnessed Toothpick's spirit leave and return. The role of a prophet was simple for a man who had held a cyber that had brought hundreds of thousands back from the brink of death. Moses stood up and shouted, "Where are my children? My followers? Bring them to me." IX T he scene in the Hearing Room began to unfold. Moses entered, wearing a torn bedsheet as if it were a flowing robe. He waved Toothpick. The viewers were reminded that the plea was insanity. The female Attendant's vitriolic atcomplete the picture. But when Moses began his tirade about the thousands he had brought back from the dead -- and when the court acknowledged that many of the rewarmed patients were apparantly free from tumor -- worldwide interest grew. The oncologist twisted his pointer nervously until the court finally called on him. "And would you tell the court how you can be sure the tumors are gone." "We can never be sure that every single tumor cell is gone but that is not important. What is important is that all significant tumor masses are gone. This membranogram shows a patient before cancer. The different shades of red reflect energy levels of tissues -- bright heart muscle, lighter skeletal and gut muscle, pink liver and kidneys, yellow brain and almost black bones. Note the homogeneous patterns -- the sparks of muscle movement. Now here is a patient with cancer. The membrane-scan picks up a coarse hot nodule. In this case it is in the lung. The tumor has a higher energy levelbusier tissue -- and an irregular outline. This is a later scan. The small grains of light are tumors spreading down the lymphatic channels. The body's defenses are losing and the tumor has broken out. Now you see necrosis in the tumor -- this black central area is dead cancer tissue. The bright rim is viable, growing cancer. The bull's eye or socalled doughnut pattern is diagnostic." He paused to let the demonstration sink in. While viewers watched the time-lapse scans the little grains spread, grew to large bull's-eyes with dark, necrotic centers. The oncologist continued: "In some cases the tumor can grow and replace a large per cent of the patient's tissues. But even in these early cases the tumor's increased metabolism and irregular outlines give it away. Tumor nodules are easy to see -- and when they are gone, they are gone. That is why they are not being resuspended. They no longer have cancer by our tests -- so their suspension equipment will be used by others who need them." Big ES grew alert to the restless masses of Nebishes who exclaimed, "A miracle -- a new prophet has arisen in the Evergreen Country." The court pressed for a scientific explanation. "How do you explain these cures?" "Heat," said the oncologist. "Raising the temperature causes the metabolic rate to rise. Tumors already metabolize faster than normal tissue, so they are more vulnerable to heat. The respiratory enzymes specifically. The enzymes that transform carbohydrates to energy. They double their reaction rates for each seven-degree rise -- Fahrenheit. The mitochondria burn themselves out first. This has been known since the year one thousand Before Olga. Ancients used hot baths to cure pelvic tumors and fever therapy for all manner of neoplasm. The treatment is risky -- note the mortality rate in this Eppendorff episode. The results have always been about the same -- one third cured, one third mortalities, one third left with their tumors. The high death rate has taken heat out of current therapy -- we are using suspension and waiting for a safer cure." The court ruminated on the math. A third killed -- a third cured. The statistics balanced. The charges of murder could be dismissed. But another crime seemed to be shaping up -- # persons had been restored to activity and life and now they must be fed and housed. Fifty shaft cities would have to squeeze in an extra ten per cent -- an impossibility. Maximum use of resources had been reached a long time ago. There was not room for a single person, let alone "Perhaps if you were to resuspend the cured patients for starvation, until more calories can be found," the court suggested. The oncologist objected. "Impossible. There is no precedent." Josephson obtained permission to speak. "These patients are mostly fivetoeds. They would not survive in our shaft cities at the present population density. They all speak different dialects from their past centuries. I suggest that they be allowed to go Outside. They don't have the Nebish phobias -- they'll be happy out there. Big ES should not try to accept responsibility for their sustenance. Moses warmed them up -- let him lead them Out. They can drift south of the fifty-oh-oh line into the yellow-corn or the red-apple countries. Some of the patients are old and do not have many years of life left. Their problems will solve themselves -- Outside." The court liked the prospect of allowing Society's problems to walk away under their own power. It ordered the Synthesizer to speed up the who had died in the rewarming. Moses would need the woven protein and fat cubes to feed his following it was post-harvest time Outside. T he patients filed out, squinting at the sunlight. White-haired and bald they came. Young and middle-aged they came. Some limped, others had raw sores where skin tumors had disappeared. They formed a living, drifting mass about a mile wide and four miles long -- contracting at night for warmth and expanding during the day to forage in the freshly turned soil. But they were made up of individuals I people. Hugh Konte watched the stars in stoic silence. His Edna was no longer with him. His memory had recorded poorly during the years prior to his suspension and he no longer was sure of when he had lost Edna. She had once been full of love, youth and vigor. He rubbed his neck. The hard nodule was gone. So were the other symptoms that had marked his terminal illness -- yellow skin, red stools and the growing bubble of fullness in his belly. His cancer had vanished. Only itching, tender areas remained where proliferating fibroblasts replaced necrotic tumor. The world had changed while he slept. He waited and watched -- a sack of foodstuffs on his back, plowed soil under foot. Strangers crowded around him. Inside him nothing had changed. He was a man. Five years old or fifty -- he would carve out his own little kingdom. At dawn he picked his way through the herd into the younger, more vigorous crowd that was walking point. Hugh sought the leader. A lean ectomorph sprinted out into the lead, hesitated and faded back into the mass of fugitives. A burly male spoke loudly until he realized he was acquiring a following. Hugh looked into a thousand faces and saw nothing but uncertainty. The burly male fell silent. The ectomorph scurried about, exploring. But no one seemed to lead. Footsteps followed footprints -- south. Moses and several others sifted soil as they walked, searching for possible fragments of food overlooked by the Harvesters. They found only bits of lignin and cellulose left as a mulch. Some pieces were moist, chewable and contained a few drops of some plant juice but most were spongy and invaded by soil organisms. These inedibles, garnered during the day, were fed into smoldering campfires at dusk. These little fires, started by Toothpick's arc, marked the social units into wliich the mass of humans was fragmenting. At night Moses sat in a circle of dusty faces around their pile of pink coals -- bright eyes reflected. Stars blinked overhead. "Need more combustibles?"dsked Hugh, walking out of the darkness. He handed Moses a fist-sized, moldy tangle of roots. "Find a soft spot and sit down." He set the clump of roots on the coals and watched the bright white sparks play over it as the dry mycelia flared up. Soon the roots were burning with a steady yellow flame. Moses talked of the harsh realities of life on the Outside.  Hugh said finally, "I suppose we should be grateful the Big ES hasn't used Agrifoam while we're here. At least we can sleep at night. But no crops -- no food." "The court wants us south of fiftyoh-oh by the end of the month. Our food supply should last until then. There'll be crops below the line." "Wouldn't it be better to split up into smaller groups right now?" "Toothpick says to stay in the corridor. The way through here straight and quick. The Cultivators will be working on both sides. Don't want to offend the court." Hugh stood up. The horizon to the south was dotted with shaft caps. Behind him the caps were surrounded by the sleeping multitude and their glowing camp fires. "We'll have to split up eventually. Your description of the I people isn't too inviting, but it's better than suspension. Funny. When I was suspended I was the head of a big industrial complex -- my own empire. Now?" He thrust his hands deep into his pockets. "Things certainly do change in a few hundred years." He nested in the dirt around the dying coals and slept. R umors of food below the border stimulated a brisk pace the following morning. Moses and Hugh worked their way around the right flank and watched the mass flow by. An hour later they joined the stragglers bringing up the rear. Canes and crutches were numerous here. The stragglers fell farther and farther behind us the day wore on. Limps grew worse. Crutch tips sank into soft earth. At dusk the main body camped, ate and fell asleep while the stragglers J caught up.  "A lot of these aren't going to make  it," said Moses softly. "I saw some  swollen ankles that I'm sure won't be i able to cover tomorrow's thirty miles  and we have almost a month of this  pace to reach the border on time." Hugh nodded. Some distance away were little groups of cripples who had j given up. They huddled together in the darkness, miles behind. Having  lost family and friendship ties while j in suspension, they were unable to I form new ties during the hurried exi odus. Now they were arbitrarily j grouped with the infirm of similar di.sabilities -- each unable to help the ! other. j "I know the Big ES doesn't want to accept the burden of feeding all of j us -- but surely the stragglers won't ! be allowed just to die of starvation."  Moses, who had been on the Outside long enough to know, nodded in agreement. "No one starves to death any more."  Hugh did not like the ominous  tone in Moses' voice.  Before dawn the main body of the  travelers was awakened by distant screams. Thousands of heads popped  up from their earthen pillows. Frightj ened eyes strained back through the darkness of the trail covered the day  before. Fuel was added to the small ! fires. Silence fell. Then screams rose from a different spot in the darki ness. These did not stop. Someone ! was approaching the group of campfires -- someone moaning and weeping loudly. A large hulk of a man limped out of the darkness, carrying a spindly old man in his arms. The sounds were coming from the small, frail form. The big man and his burden collapsed at the nearest fire. Wetness glistened in the firelight -- blood. "Some deviate shot ,an arrow into Ed," lamented the huge acromegalic. Moses saw that the shaft went right through the victim's thigh. He ripped open the trouser leg and tried to stop the bleeding while the giant related the story over and over. " -- and while Ed was screaming this -- deviate -- came up carrying a bow. He took out this little knife and tried to cut off -- With Ed screaming and all the bloodI guess I lost my head and killed him. Pushed his face right down into the dirt and kept pushing." The giant seemed so shocked by his own brutal behavior that Moses assumed he had been a very gentle man. His acromegalic featuresgiant head, hands and feet -- gave him a very formidable appearance but he was in many ways helpless. His joints were large and inefficient -- so arthritic and stiff that he had not been able to keep up with the main body of fugitives. Later the wounded man slept -- anemic and weak. "Hunters." Moses handed the bloodied arrow to Hugh. "I've been wondering if the court's decision gave us any protection. This little episode removes any doubt. We're all fair game as long as we're Outside." Voices rose up around the campfire. "What'll we do?" "Let's fight. Acromegalic killed one, and he's a cripple. They can't be so tough." "Fight? With what -- dirt?" "We have this for a start," Hugh said, holding up the arrow. "Let's backtrack and find the damn bow." The cold body of the Hunter lay at the attack scene -- his head buried in the loose soil. They picked up the bow and his kit -- food bars and the trophy knife. Moses stomped on the buckeye detector while it was still on the wrist of the corpse. A trophy was already in the Hunter's bag. Agrifoam closed over the scene and they had to wade three miles through the fluffy stuff to get back. The corridor was still dry. At dawn the mas started to move again -- more slowly this time, so there would be no stragglers. An occasional Hunter approached within bowshot -- let his quiver of arrows fly into the anonymous crowd and then sat by until the mob moved on, leaving its dead. Moses tried to intercept the Hunters but four square miles of humans was just too big an area to cover. By sundown the fugitives had three more bows and a dozen arrows but they had lost more than twenty of their fellows. "Survival is impossible under these circumstances," Hugh observed. "Let's test our environment. We're going to need weapons and food. What would happen if we kidnaped a couple of those big machines that come out and work the land during the day? Can Toothpick tell us how to disable their communicators so they'll obey us?" Moses glanced at Toothpick, who was still held together by bandages. "SqueakI think so," said the cyber. "Neurocircuitry is usually color-coded a myelin-yellow. If you pull the antenna it should put a class ten on voice command-mode. Wouldn't hurt to try. They wouldn't deliberately harm a human." In the days that followed Moses commandeered a score of the lumbering Agromechs. Sallies into the shaft cities produced tons of foodstuffs. The hive culture of Big ES didn't know what to do with an army -- the first army on the surface of the planet in thousands of years. R ook shouted into the viewscreen, "Josephson, you fool -- what have you done? We're scarcely able to handle an occasional buckeye down here. We can't spare one Hunter -- let alone a hundred." Josephson smiled cruelly. "This is our chance for a really big Hunt. Thousands of trophies. Don't limit yourself to Hunters. Use supervisory personnel. Remember, they'll be crossing fifty-oh-oh next month -- but they could be crossing forty-ohoh two months later. The horde could settle right in your territory -- just for the climate. You don't have our harsh winters. If we don't stop them soon they may be too strong to stop." Cass whispered to Rook, "Cottonwhite is mobilizing twenty craft. They'll be at fifty-oh-oh in two weeks." "Okay. Count on Orange-sector for twenty dogs -- ah -- craft. We'll do our best." X T he Tiller lowered its appendages and turned over a couple of feet of soil. Moses and the two bowmen were vibrated from their comfortable seats on the upper chassis. "Stop that. You don't have to do anything to the soil. Just hurry along and take us to point position at the head of the column," commanded Moses. "Sorry, sir. Right away, sir," barked the mech. Appendages up, it sped along. "Those last three shaft cities were completely empty. Even its own citizens looked half starved," Hugh commented. "The Big ES is going to try to starve us out. It doesn't care if it takes a few of its own loyal subjects with us. Don't worry about those Nebishes -- they can just hop into the tubeways to get food outside of our area. We don't dare enter the tubes -- the human monitors would fluidize them in a moment and we'd be just so much woven protein." "Our supplies are running low." "Fifty-oh-oh is just ahead. Toothpick says there is plenty of food there." The Tiller lumbered off ahead of the horde. The horizon was cluttered with socio-political moraine -- jumbled boulders and skeletons of derelict Agromechs that marked the border at #:#. "And we'll get there none too soon," said Hugh. "A few more days and we'd be loosing people to hunger." The horde quickened its pace but came to a stop at sundown -- still a half-day from its goal. "Sent some runners to scout ahead," commented a group leader on the left flank as he and other organizers settled down around a campfire. "It was easy to get volunteers -- there are few rations in camp tonight. The runners were anxious to see the bountiful crops Toothpick has promised us." Noisy Agromechs patrolled the perimeter of the huge encampment. "Bountiful -- food. Squeak," said Toothpick. "Many of my circuits were damaged. Memory shot full of holes. Squeek! Bountiful food at fifty-oh-oh." D awn brought the return of the scouts. "Ambush! There's an army waiting for us. If we want the food we'll have to fight for it," said the first scout. "How many?" asked Hugh. "Thousands. Almost as many as we have." Hugh glanced at Moses questioningly. Toothpick squeaked. Other scouts came in with a similar story. "What choices do we have?" asked Hugh. Moses said, "Hold everything a rninute. How were they dressed? What equipment did they have?" One scout said, "No equipment -- just lots of spears. Their uniforms were tattered. Looked like an experienced army, though." "Let's ride down and have a closer look in the daylight," suggested Moses, climbing up on the Tiller. The sun was still low on the horizon. Mists hung in the east. A group of twenty archers filed along behind the Tiller as it trundled toward the line of stones and dead machines. As the advance guard moved closer a large number of heads popped up behind the barrier. The Tiller ground to a halt. Moses held up Toothpick. "Any communicator information? What are they planning?" he asked. Toothpick scanned. "No communication." After a moment's silence he added: "Ball is here. We're meeting the Hip and his followers from Mount Tabulum. Those people are buckeyes." ' "Buckeyes? Like us?" The two armies faced each other, bristling with suspicion. Moses' horde had machines and the technical ability to use them. The Hip's buckeyes were physically stronger but outnumbered. Their males and females alike carried weapons. Jungle bunnies whimpered at coweye breasts. over the horizon and watched the two armies on the screen. said. The hovercraft were gathering in the valley behind him. Hunters, half drugged and half hypnoconditioned, did not even notice that they were Outside. Tunnel vision and myopia kept their phobias untriggered. They checked their gear. Large quivers were foaded with arrows. Jbsephson searched for a channel to Rook in the Orange sector ships. "What is your E.T. A.?" "Be there in three days," answered Rook. He led his squadron rapidly up a canal to the next refueling point. Mechanics struggled to keep the ships together. Three days was an optimistic guess. M oses faced the Hip over a campfire in the neutral zone between the armies. "What brought you here?" "Food," said Hip. "Ball has been leading us farther North with each feeding. There is supposed to be plenty of food at fifty-oh-oh." "Food is what we came for, too. There's nothing behind us but plowed earth. The food must be on your side." Hip shook his head. "The land is freshly harvested on our side, too. The Ball and Toothpick must have made a mistake." The Hip spoke sadly. His bald head was bowed toward the fire. He was silent so long that Moses began to think he had fallen to sleep. "They're just machines, after all," Moses said. "We'll Just have to make the best of things. Hunters have been harassing us off and on. If we cooperate we can have a pretty secure perimeter at least. I don't know what we can do for food. Raid the shaft cities fora start, I guess." The first day of the truce went smoothly. Buckeyes knew the Agromechs -- having lived with them in their fields -- but they were amazed when members of the horde from Dundas demonstrated their presuspension skills at repair and maintenance. They transferred energy from one mech to another -- even raided a garage for more power. One of the class twelve doors on a nearby shaft city had been disabled and the Agromechs used its power outlet. "Unauthorized. Unauthorized.' shouted the door. The mechs with their human riders filed in for recharge. Moses and a couple of bowmen stood about -- alert. "Another Toothpick is near," said Toothpick. Moses shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun outside and scanned the fields. Far in the distance he saw a familiar figurea lean old man carrying a spear. Beside him hobbled a dog. "Moon and Dan," Moses said incredulously. Moses walked out to meet Moon, brought him to where the action was. The two Toothpicks eyed each other. Moon lapped the frame of the disabled door and smiled. His golden teeth glinted in the sun. Moses noted the increased bulk on the old man's frame. He had been eating well. His dog, Dan, looked fit alsoexcept that his left hind leg ended at the tarsus and his tail did not wag. The right leg looked well enough and the rest of Dan seemed even belter muscled than before. A star-shaped scar marked his chest. After advising Moon of the situation Moses added: "The Hip is here, commanding his buckeye forces." Moon frowned. "He may be the Hip to you but he's just the Ass at Tabulum to me. Anyone who'd start a religion with a cyber Just so he doesn't have to gel out and scratch for his own keep is no damned good." Moses said, "Now, now. Looking after thousands of hungry people is no easy task. I know. I've got a lot of hungry followers myself. And right now we all could do with a little food." Moon cursed, said, "Why, there is always plenty of food around. Lend me a squad of these bowmen and I'll get you all you can eat." "But we've been all through this shaft city -- and the others in the area. There just isn't any food. The Nebishes themselves are starving." Moon smiled. Moses remembered seeing the same wicked smile in the cave after his Climb. "Of course it won't be properly aged." Moses winced. Well, if matters had to come to that -- he would still survive. "Okay, Moon. I'm sure cannibalism would be all right with the Hip's people. Mine may be a little reluctant at first -- but there seems to be no choice right now." T hat evening the leaders sat around the campfire and discussed harvesting the shaft city. Hugh took it surprisingly well. "I suppose we can rationalize it -- since man is a carnivore and since he is practically the only animal life form left on the planet. It follows that if he is to eat fresh meat at all -- it will have to be -- " He pau.sed, tried again. "Of course, if we accept the premise that the four-toed Nebish is actually a different species -- then we're faced simply with a problem in logistics. A hundred thousand pounds of meat a day will keep our people from starving. A full shaft city should last us two months. Then we could put up a blind at the mouth of the tubeway and hunt the tube passengers." Hugh drew diagrams and numbers in the dust by the fire. The heavily boned acromegalic stood sadly alone, listening to the last generals on Earth plot out the survival of their own people at the expense of others. Survival! Was that the basic rule of life? He looked at his huge hands. Could he kill again? While he debated with himself he realized how much worse was the alternative -- suicide by inaction. The night wore on. Arrows were sharpened as warriors-become-raiders made ready. Suddenly the two Toothpicks and Ball set up a keening that bleached out everyone's adrenals. Eyes were wide open before the cerebral alpha waves had disappeared. Sleepy men and women clutched their weapons and wrapped their scanty belongings into bundles. But there was no place to flee. The horizon was dotted with dancing headlights of Hunter craft in all directions. The hovercraft circled and weaved but kept their distance at about three miles away. "Probably waiting for dawn and better hunting," Moon said when the pandemonium had settled. Moses and Hugh went into a huddle with the Hip. "This may not be too bad after all," said the Hip. "We may lose some men but our Agromechs will give us mobility and cover. Our men don't have to be drugged to fight Outside. They should be fairly efficient, even if they are a little weak from hunger. Might even pick up a few hovercraft if we win this engage -- " As if on some cue two Agromechs exploded. Then a third. "Self-destruct signal-tight beam," shouted Toothpick. "Move wide of the Agromechs. They're all going to blow." A few hours later a ring of smoking machines marked what had been the buckeyes first line of defense. Moses backed his people toward the nearest shaft city. "Fall back to the shaft caps. Bowmen, take up your positions behind the grills," he ordered. Response was sluggish at best. In the dark and confusion conrrades were lost. Units were broken up. The explosions and fires added panic to the army's hunger and despair. Bellies had been empty for too long -- and now their owners faced an overpowering enemy. The acromegalic raised a heavy stone and pounded the shaft door, denting and chipping it. "Entrance unauthorized," said the door. Suddenly he was thrown to the ground in a shower of sparks. Struggling awkwardly with his bulky joints he tried to stand up. A bowman picked up a stone and struck the door. Sparks flew. The bowman fell. The crowd edged back. In the subsequent silence they heard the ominous buzz of a force field leaking energy into the atmosphere. "Field's on," warned Moses' Toothpick. "The Big ES has isolated us Outside." The other shaft caps began to spark and buz. Moses watched helplessly as his army crumbled into aimless flight, marked by the random shrieks and moans of the weak being crushed by the strong. "Rally to me. Rally to me," the Hip shouted as he marched off. Ball glowing. A clot of followers formed behind him. Guided by the pale beacon of the Ball, the clot grewa widening belt of calm in a turbulent sea of struggling bodies. Moon picked up Dan to avoid the crush of the crowd flowing toward the Hip. "There goes the Ass from Tabulum again -- having one of his mystic fits." Moses smiled. "What does it matter? Anything is better than the disordered mess we had a moment ago. Listen, they're even starting to sing." The wind changed, carrying back the words of a song out of antiquity. Few knew the lyrics -- the words came scattered. We will gather at the river. The beautiful...beautiful... river. We will gather at the river... Moon stumbled over a tangled mass of shafts and cord. He groped on the ground and came up with bows and arrows, a spear. He groaned. "Those fools. They've dropped their weapons. In a few hours we're all going to be carved up by trophy knives -- and all they can do is sing." Moses glanced at his Toothpick. The cyber spoke. "There is an old river bed just south of the fifty-oh-oh line. Hip is leading his followers there. He is chanting about a Great Coming Together." Moon asked acidly, "And the Hunters? What is going to save us from the Hunters? Both Toothpicks answered with one voice, "Love will save us." "Love will save us?" muttered Moses. The concept was so alien to him that he eould get no hold of it. He felt utterly lost. The Hunters began to stir. Josephson had been monitoring the sensor readings from the buekeye camp. He collated through the main computer and smirked. "The ehanting -- prayers and hymns -- a superstitious bunch, those buekeyes. Relying on a five-thousand-yearold legend for protection. Desperate, I guess." T he Hip stood in the riverbed of the once mighty Mississippi and watched his followers file down the slopes. He rai.sed his glowing Ball toward the stars and ehanted, "Olga is love." A narrow pencil of light shot up toward the heavens and a ball of fire appeared. At first it was a pinpoint but it grew and rapidly approached the ground. A miracle. Moon and Moses pointed their Toothpicks upward -- three pencils of light reached toward the ball of fire. seat. Hundreds of flaming objects appeared in the skies. They darted to earth, rested a moment and streaked back into the night sky. A voice -- metallic and feminine -- broke into the Hunter's communieation net. By the fiery wheels of Ezekiel and the flaming chariot of Elias will the Children of Olga be delivered from the Hunter's arrows to dwell in their rightful place among the stars... Josephson waited for the sun to climb well up into the morning sky before he led his Hunters over the boulders that marked the #:# parallel. But there was no hurry. He knew what he would find. Only the shaft caps, a few burning agromechs -- and their Moleeular Reward. safely docked in her belly Starship Olga left Earth orbit and headed out. Processions of people moved through her vascular tubeways, still chanting, some wordlessly, others seeking words. against the humming bulkhead. His ehest pain had lessened but the thought of all those stars out there in the emptiness of space still made him nervous. He turned to Moses, who had found him. "Olga told me that my trophy was from a male -- one of the Hunters. She says she will be able to unlock my memories so I'll be able to remember -- the most beautiful thing in the world." Moses smiled. "If Olga says she can do it -- she can. Now get some sleep. You want your cortex rested when she starts probing tomorrow." Moses stretched out on his own bunk and shut his eyes, smiling. Toothpick had finally briefed him fully. Olga had returned. The mighty starship had dropped her colonists off at some distant star and returned to Earth for another shipload of her five-toed humans. "So you were a probe from space. Toothpick," Moses said without opening his eyes. From his bracket over the bunk the cybernetic javelin answered, "Even a class six knows only what he is programed to know. Judging from the size of the Hip's following and our success at Dundas Harbor -- I'd guess Olga's harvest of five-toeds was very successful." "And there was only minimal disturbance among the planet's superior life form -- the Nebish." "That may not have been a factor. Remember the casual way I killed four-toeds? I was obviously programed to consider only the five-toeds as human. To me the four-toeds were just a competitive life form -- and a lower one at that." Moses opened his eyes. "I guess we are the higher form. Olga confirmed that by selecting the humans with five toes for her new colony. I consider us part of the cream of the human race -- skimmed off Earth. The Nebish is just unsuitable -- inferior." Olga spoke, her voice coming from the walls near Moses' bunk. It had a Nordic quality. "Don't be too smug," she said. "You were selected because you show a higher individual survival potential. You still carry the gene for the fifth toe and the initiative that goes with it. The individual human is a very competitive -- ideal for an Implant colony where he must adapt and evolve. Evolution on the individual level is measured in mere hundreds of years -- social and industrial. "The hive is much more stable -- and then toward death. It lives by the status quo. A hive will only become competitive when it is faced with another hive. Then it will do what it has to do to survive. It can come into being wherever your species is too successful -- a product of population density." the wall. "We're all seed of the hive?" "Seeds -- yes," Olga said with a note of sadness. Moses caught her shift into melancholia. He said, "You kept your existence a secret from Earth Society while you were harvesting the five-toeds. Do you fear the Big ES?" The mighty starship continued her navigation, propulsion and life-support functions while a small part of her neurocircuitry concentrated on Moses' question. "The Big ES -- Earth Society is my enemy only in the sense that I am an Implant starship. It would have stopped me if it could. But you must realize that it would have done so for her own citizens -- to adjust their standard of living up a fraction with whatever they could salvage from my hull. It would mean my death as a starship -- but a better life for the average Nebish." "The hive is your enemy -- yet you carry us, who are seeds of a new hive?" "I carry you because you have five toes. I love you. I want to set up colonies -- spread mankind among the stars. It is my whole purpose, my reason for existing. I was made by and belong to your kind. The Nebish has evolved into a hive creature human, perhapsbut I owe him nothing. My existence is not compatible with the hiveso I cannot love the Nebish." Moses thought silently for a long time. A mechanical intelligence faced with an evolving creator -- to whom did she owe homage? Would her function ever end? He remembered the night sky and another question came into his mind. Would man ever run out of stars? D uring the first stages of the voyage the fugitives from the Dundas Harbor Suspension Clinic were screened for skills. Those who had had some Healer experience were put to work by Olga in screening other colonists. Genetic material -- lymphocytes from peripheral blood -- was sampled. This was embryonated and genetic carbon copies were started. Each colonist found himself with a child, a sort of asexual bud. After what seemed like a brief period in suspension Olga's charges awoke to find her in orbit around the new planet. Orbit-to-Surface-Modules were being loadedsingle-seaters for the outpost sites and larger cabin classes for the settlements. "This planet will be your new home," said Olga. "It was stocked with Earth biota # standard years ago. My probes indicate a successful take for most of the Earth species but local alien forms still predominate. You will have to use some Judgment, of course -- but the probability of a successful Implant is very high," Moses stood by, watching the loadwas going down with one of the settlehis mental blocks removed by the Healers -- enough to remember his coweye sweetheart. He had adjusted well and would probably do all right on the new planet. Several unattached coweyes were in his settlement and Moses felt that Simple Willie's gentle nature would win him a mate easily during the next follicular could all the males. Each already carried a oneor two-month-old carbon copy child in his arms. Moses looked down at his own Little Moses, who cried and kicked. Moon walked up carrying Little Moon under his arm like a sack of grain. Little Moon was silent and watched the activity from wide dark eyes. Moses patted his own noisy infant. "I don't know why he is crying. He's fed and dry." Moon frowned and casually picked up Little Moses with his left hand. In a moment the crying infant quieted. Moon scolded, "Relax. You have to handle offspring confidently. Parental anxiety means danger to children -- any species. If you're nervous your kid's going to be pretty insecure." He added with a wry smile -- "If there was one thing you should have learned Outside it was self-confidence." The bald old man -- fossil with child -- handed Little Moses back to his bud-parent and walked over to his O.S.M. -- a single-seater. He buckled Little Moon into his cradle. Dan ran up. "Get in," ordered Moon. The dog turned. A little puppy had been following him all day. Dan didn't know quite what to make of it. He bared his gold teeth. The puppy's tail wagged twice. Two-hundred-yearold memory molecules registered and Dan gave Little Dan such a lick that the little guy tipped over. Moon growled impatiently and pushed the two dogs in as he closed the hatch. T he O.S.M. landed softly in a green mountain glade. An alien hawk with bright plumage circled inquisitively. Earth goats nibbled the vegetation and stood unafraid when Moon called. "By Olga, a Garden of Eden," he breathed. Eyeing a heavy udder and remembering little Moon's needs, he picked up a cup and stalked the nanny. The goat stood calmly while he filled the cup. Moon poured the warm milk into a bottle and gave it to Little Moon. "How do you explain that?" he muttered as he surveyed the idyllic paradise. The goats came to him as he spoke. Unexpectedly a voice called out to him from a stand of trees. Moon glanced back at the O.S.M. Little Moon was still sucking safely. Old Moon approached the trees cautiously. "I thought this was supposed to be a one-man outpost -- " He saw a familiar object -- a cybernetic Javelin embedded in the soft humus and draped with vines. One of Olga's probes had probably been sitting here for centuries talking to the goats, preparing the way. "I am a companion robot. Designed to be carried. Pick me up," said the cyber. "I know," said Moon as he pulled it free. "What have you been doing all these years?" "Making friends for you. Imprinting the voice of man. Welcome to planet Tiercel land of the hawks." " I liatiks for the welcome and the friends you've been making." Moon watched the frisky goats jumping high into the air. gamholing with the two l arth dogs. He said, "Man can always use a few more friends as long as they are a liifferent species." T HH acromegalic lumbered up to the checkout point. "Skills?" asked the turnstile. "Healer. But I've been retired ever since He held up his large clumsy hands. Olga's soothing voice came: "Your pituitary tumor was destroyed in the heating incident at Dundas Harbor. What you can do today, you will be able to do for years. Your condition will not progress. A Healer you are! I would like to assign you to this next settlement with the Tinker from Mount Tabulum. Is that satisfactory?" The acromegalic glanced over the group loading. They numbered close to two hundred -- mixed ages -- Dundas and I people. The Tinker stood by one of the cabin doors, nodding and smiling. Under his arm he carried a case of Olga's precision surgical instruments. The acromegalic joined Tinker's settlement. Moses remained out of the main waiting area. There were still many thousands to Implant down. He was indecisive. Should he live alone and free -- or should he put his efforts behind the struggling settlements and promote civilization? Perhaps hasten the emergence of the Big ES? He recoiled at the idea -- yet the sight of a succulent young coweye lured him. Her licorice hair, mint-green eyes and the small mole high on her left cheek attracted him. He could not ignore his sexual imprinting on the cinnamon areola and the golden corpus luteum. He turned to Olga. "If we are all the seeds of the Big ES, aren't we just hastening man's end by promoting civilization. Shouldn't we all choose singleseaters?" "Civilization is goodonly the hive is bad." "But how can I tell where the good aspects of civilization end and the evils of the hive begin?" "As a species you have perhaps as long as a thousand generations on this planet before the Big ES becomes a possibility. And even then your kind -- or the equivalent of what you are today will be needed." Moses relaxed. "A thousand generations? Then a little civilization isn't too bad right now?" "A little civilization may be necessary for survival -- right now." Moses laughed and picked up Little Moses. He walked to the group being loaded and stood next to the coweye with licorice hair, wondering when her follicular phase was due. Olga continued the Implanting procedure with love in her circuits. Her humans were a fine species as long as they had something besides themselves to compete with and space was no problem. The planet Tiercel would keep the strain of Moses and Moon noble for many generations. Its ecology was a little more hostile than mother Earth's.  r s II !I u Eternity Calling I It's a lonely universe -- especially if you ore looking for a soui to mate... and silent house, his limbs bright with contentment in the yellow mists before dawn. His usual jog through the river before his family awoke had been unexpectedly rewarding. A school of verin recognized too late his presence among them and now six lay in the grass beside the house, still oozing blood from the neat double rows of punctures on the backs of their necks. Another good catch. Once more Cade rinsed his mouth at the fountain. He was reluctant to admit his squeamishness but he preferred his food cooked. Cade who shared his bed had no such preference and with Cade and Cade of the small beds would fall, ravenous and delighted, upon the verin where they lay. Just as green began to tinge the yellow mists -- the ship was there. A black ovoid standing a little taller than Cade and four times that broad, it hung motionless three leaps away, just above the grass. Its side was marked by two stubby white lines, vertical and horizontal, each bisecting the other. Music began to fill the air, a blend of the familiar and the incredibly strange -- but altogether pleasant. Cade told the Cades inside the house to remain asleep. A small port opened halfway along the upper curve of the ship and one by one three golden balls were ejected to dance together on a jet of air. As the morning light increased, Cade could see no blemish in the smooth blackness of the hull, yet somehow it looked as ancient as the headwaters of time. He stood calmly and watched, despite a primitive prickle of fear that wanted him to rasp his backplates together in a shriek of defiance. Suddenly the quadrant of the ovoid nearest Cade became transparent from pole to pole. Within were massive gleaming boxes connected here and there by large tails and tentacles, to transmit Cade knew not what between them. There was an eeriness in their spacing, as though the creatures who moved among them were horribly misshapen, all height and no length, if such a thing could be imagined. The ovoid revolved and the next quadrant flashed clear to show closely packed containers that doubtless held stores. A large open volume, invested with strangely configured platforms and fitments,' apparently constituted living quarters for a thing or things Cade wished very much not to see. T he next quadrant resembled the first, except that the boxes were covered with small windows that revealed various markings beneath moving indicators like large flat needles. In an arc around the perimeter were shorter boxes with sloping tops, with more of the small windows and many projections that one could easily imagine being manipulated by hands. Facing the center of the arc was a semi-enclosed platform to support that which moved the projections with whatever it used for hands. Cade wanted badly to rinse his mouth again. The shape of the platform and the constricted space between it and the slope-top boxes confirmed the brutal image of someone with more than three-fourths of his body shorn away. As the fourth quadrant with its certain cargo of horror swung toward him. Cade barely suppressed the need to terminate existence. This time the blackness of the hull dissolved slowly, rippling through dark gray into a clearing translucence that showed a vertical wall dividing the quadrant into two compartments of unequal size. Within the smaller, inexorably growing more distinct, was the vertical, withered body of the thing. Both compartments were lined with the familiar windowed boxes. Cade struggled to overcome his revulsion, grateful that the music at this point seemed to be helping him to succeed. The creature's skin, gruesomely wrinkled and folded, was silver and pink and blue. Under a head about the size of Cade's the neck diminished to a mere stem, most fragile in appearance. The face of this vertical monster was of course vertical, with two small wet eyes above an arrangement of three holes of unknown purpose. Two more holes, one on each side of the head, were cupped by shells of flesh that suggested hearing organs, therefore the other three openings presumably related in some weird combination to breathing, eating, and speaking -- possibly one for each function. The thing held up two hands that were strangely split and tattered. Cade recognized the gesture and raised two of his hands, disappointed that the alien, which must have at least some intelligence, should as its first act of direct communication issue a challenge to a fight that it couldn't possibly win. He set his feet and rasped his backplates until the air howled with fury. Wobbling its head violently on its stringy neck, the thing crossed its hands over its body in submission. Cade wondered at its quick surrender, then told himself roughly to be more objective. The thing surely had not sought him out merely to fight. Then what had it meant by the handsready sign? His thoughts raced. These creatures don't fight as men fight, but with something in their hands. It had made an empty-hands sign of peace, not the hands-ready invitation to grapple. Cade searched the mind and it was as he expected, unknown to Cade. But it was logical, given the fundamental aberrant behavior he had postulated. Cade crossed his own hands, then held them up again. The thing wobbled its head and raised its hands, its largest face-hole revealing itself to be a mouth as it writhed away from blunted but shining teeth. Cade's backplates chattered briefly and he refused to speculate even in passing on why this being used yet another expression of hostility to show agreement or pleasure or whatever it intended to convey this time. The creature turned to one of its boxes and moved a small projection with a sliver of maimed hand. The divided-hand configuration appeared to be efficient for these actions. Operating such closely crowded projections would be clumsy for the solid prehensile slab of a normal hand. Cade wondered whether the modifications were made by special healers like those among the Cades -- or by the individual. Moving with skillful jerks of its two rather rigid legs, the thing perched on a platform near the partition -- which Cade saw was transparent -- between the two compartments. It stabbed a round red projection with a hand sliver and the outer wall of the larger compartment folded down over the grass to make a ramp. From its platform the thing motioned Cade to a similar platform in the open compartment. ramp, following a path worn smooth and bright across the matt'e surface of the metal, if metal it was. He leaned his left arms comfortably on the platform and looked through the partition. The thing inserted a hand into a small slotted box beside its platform and indicated a similar box beside Cade. The box was only a little larger than Cade's hand, but he could not touch the sides. He expanded his hand until it was as long as his arm and still he encountered only a tingling void. Slowly he became aware of internal laughter not his. "You don't have to climb inside," said a voice inside his head. The alien's words were being transmitted and translated through the slotted boxes. "Right," said Cade. "You're not afraid?" "What would be the point?" said Cade. "Couldn't you have held me and brought me in by force?" "By several methods," said the thing. "I thought so," said Cade. "It wouldn't make much sense to give your victim an escape option, would it?" "Not victim. You won't be harmed." "Good." said Cade." I was beginning to feel like one of those verin out there." The thing looked. "You did that?" "Sure." "Are you a -- " The thing wobbled its head. "No time. So little time even for the important things." "Right," said Cade. "But listen, do you fight with things in your hands?" "Things? Yes. A long time ago we did. Why?" Cade explained. Then, "I searched the mind, and we had never heard of it -- but I knew it must be so." "You searched the mind? What mind?" The thing's words came fast. "Cade's mind."' "Who's Cade?" "I am." He pointed to his house, around the horizon. "We all are." The creature's words formed slowly, as though to avoid tumbling over each other. "You have a group consciousness, a common mind." "Partly. But part of each mind is separate. That's the part talking to you now." With its free hand the alien touseled a thatch of brown grassy fibers on top of its head and Cade realized its silver and blue parts were not skin but coverings of fabric like wall or floor cloths. It wobbled its head. "After all these years. And on a reptilian, chlorine world." "I know what chlorine is. The other doesn't sound too complimentary," said Cade. "A zoological classification on Earth. My world. You resemble them." "Unintelligent, no doubt. 'After all these years' of what? To me a year is a cycle around both suns. I suppose yours isn't the same length -- but no matter." "One sun, in our case. I left my world more than twenty years ago by the ship's clock, to follow the cross. I travel at many times the speed of light. Do you understand what's happened on my world?" "Depending on how many ship's years you've spent in motion, many thousand years may have passed on your world since you left.". He looked at his house, at the distant line of trees that marked his river. "What's the cross?" "The white marking on the ship. This." The alien lifted and let fall a silver cross hanging from a chain that circled its neck. "The symbol of our cause." "Does it have a meaning? Other than the symbol of your -- ah -- cause?" "I think not. I'd probably have heard if it did. Now. I'm taking far too long here -- but yours is the "Our Strength is not of this world. Dad. If you want to get the real picture just imagine us -- all your precious little gene-machines -- standing around in a circle, our heads bowed in prayer, holding our breaths and clicking off one by one. A beautiful way for your world to end? Not with a bang or a whimper -- but with one long breathless Amen!" first communal mind I've found and I'd like you to store the facts of our cause. Will you? For future generations?" "Maybe," said Cade. "How many alien races have you found?" "Two hundred and seventy three. You're two seventy-four. Please stop interrupting. I really must rush. Do you know about life after death? Eternal life?" "Life after -- isn't that a contradiction?" "Oh, no. Not at all. Not. physical life -- but life of the soul." "Soul. Like Cade's common mind?" "I'm not sure. If you have a soul it's probably in the part that's not common with the rest of Cade." "Oh." "Let's get on. You can imagine from this ship, this translator, how capable my world is, technology wise. How rich. I think you can visualize that pretty well." "Yes." "Well, for many years on my world souls -- their existence, if you will -- had to be taken on faith." "Faith." "Yes. Like there's no evidence but you're sure of it anyway sort of thing." "I'm sure of it?" asked Cade. "Well, if you couldn't know for sure but you were certain of it. that would be a faith sort of thing. Now wait a minute. Just let me get to the point, if you please. The point is, nobody has to fool around with faith any more. I think you'll agree that's all to the good." "Right." We've scientifically identified the elements of the soul. That machine right there beside you, the blue one, can tell me in five seconds whether you have a soul." "Why do you want to know?" "For one thing, so I'll know whether it's been redeemed. If the white light comes on and stays on, you've got a soul that's been redeemed. If it flashes, your soul needs redeeming. Red light, no soul at all." "What's that -- redeemed?" "Well, it's -- look at it this way -- listen, you scaly -- . My friend, it's all on a scientific basis. Just accept it, will you please?" The alien's face had been turning pinker as he spoke, although his tones had little apparent connection with the bright hues of tranyou have a soul that needs redeeming -- the white machine alongside does the job and automatically cross-checks for accuracy and completeness. All completely scientific and unarguable." "But if I had a soul wouldn't I know if it needed redeeming?" "Oh, no. Not at all. There eould have been some redeemer through here centuries ago -- maybe even while they were still redeeming manually." "That was the old way?" "Of course. Just because we've put this on a scientific basis doesn't mean it's something new. There's absolutely no conflict between science and religion." "Religion?" "This whole bag, redeeming and like that." "Is saving in addition to redeeming -- or instead of?" "Oh, my word. In addition to, and after, as well. No need to fool around trying to save a soul that hasn't been redeemed. Complete waste of time." "I see." "Now it would take an hour to cover the whole field of religious philosophy, and I don't have an hour to spare, of course." "Of course." "But I want to fill you in a little more. The pink machine there tells me whether your soul is saved. If not, the gold machine saves it, twice, as a matter of faet, for double assurance, then crosschecks twice. Beautiful?" "Beautiful. And you spend your life doing this. How many more like you?" "Maybe hundreds. Maybe just me. I've been away a long time." "What's the point?" cbristnias boxes don't have to have cookies or cigarettes or ties inside what about hooks? True, one paperback isn't much of a present, but Berkley has some snappy sets done up in handsome boxes, and they cost quite enough to make a respectable if modest impression. Try our Heinlein package, # novels and a great anthology, #-or # novels by H. G. Wells, # -- or the comvolumes, #. This month from Berkley (S#, #) (X#, #) and in January ed. Michael Moorcock (S#, #) (S#, #) -- that one is not in the boxed set yet If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage -- a quarter for the boxed sets) from: # Madison Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have complete freedom of choice In pricing these books for resale to others.  We think that to interbreed with new people with souls would be -- well -- new blood, you know. Sharing the joys of eternal life. Are you bisexual?" "Uh, no, not personally. But you must mean the race. It is." "So is ours. And so am I." "Congratulations. I guess. Is it very common with you creatures?" "All of us that follow the cross. By surgical intervention." It turned red. "I can either plant seed in fertile soil or carry new seed back to earth. All in the name of the cause, of course." "Of course. I guess we wouldn't be -- uh -- compatible, even chemically," said Cade, feeling considerable relief. "Shall we get on with the test?" "Put your other -- another hand in the blue machine's slot," said the thing. Cade did and the red light glowed. The thing breathed deeply. "Well, you can't win all the time." "No," said Cade. "How many races have you found with souls?" The thing's voice was weak. "None." "Pity. It really must be lonely, the only beings in the universe with souls." The alien's head tumbled forward sickeningly on its weak neck. Then it looked at Cade and its voice was urgent inside his head. "We don't have souls. And we must find them. Find souls and eternal life." Its wet eyes became wetter and a clear fluid spilled down the hideous flat face. "Please store us in Cade's memory. We'll make you rich beyond your wildest imagination if you help us find a race that can mix with us and bring us life everlasting. We'll make the other world rich, too. Rich beyond belief." It stabbed a green projection and a small black box tumbled past Cade, down the ramp to the grass. "That's a perpetually powered combination prayer wheel and relay beacon. To call us if you find a prospect. Graphic instructions on the side. You will put us in your memory? Remember, rich beyond belief." "Yes," said Cade, lying for the first time in a long life that had been rich beyond belief. He withdrew his hand from the slotted box and moved down the ramp. The hull whispered shut and the ship was no longer there. Cade slid the beacon out of sight behind a bush and called his family. The verin were beginning to smell. He rinsed his mouth at the fountain.  "Of course, if we were to pray directly above the city of the enemy it would cease to exist... Seed. When Captain Planter came down out of the gleam-ridden night sky in his needle of power, red thread of fires hanging from its back, his aide and physicist were at his side. Machineries were at his hand, histories in his head and he came down into the Year of the Good Seed. It was a time of celebration, of rejoicing. It was a time for the sowing of peace, happiness and hope. it was a time of worship. Captain Planter stood upon a hillside beneath the sky of morning and regarded the city. Staring down across the frostgripped grasses, mists waving above them, he looked upon the spires and blocks and domes of the city, dappled by the yellow sunrise, threaded with the darker curves and lines of shadowed streets. He saw, though, only a part of it from that high vantage, because it was one of the larger cities of the world. From above, however, coming down through the night, it had looked like a twothousand-year birthday cake for civilization, which perhaps it was, with its candles all a-flicker. "They must have spotted us," said Condem, his aide. "Be here soon." "Yes," said the captain. "Human, they'll be," said Condem, "if Anthro's right." "It would seem so," said Planter, lowering his glasses. "Looks enough like an Earth city -- " "Could they be the eause of it, I wonder?" "Possibly," said the captain. "Strange." "Perhaps." Beneath the sky of afternoon, the yellow sun high in the springing of the year, they met with the people of the city and established communications. They met with the people of its government and with the people of the big government of which its government was a part. They met with the people of its religion, of which the big government was a part. They were all people-people -- that is to say, of human appearance. There was an air of festivity about them as they moved through the senates and the temples, the mansions and the military bases, the conferences and the broadcasting rooms, down the streets and up the stairs, through the laboratories, back to the temples. This was because it was the Year of the Good Seed. T he captain and his aides had to answer many questions before they could ask any of their own. Before they could answer all the many questions they were asked the dusk-fires began. This was upon the seventh day and Yanying, the physicist, looked into the sunset with eyes that always squinted and said. "It has begun." Planter moved to the window of the suite they had been given -- within the temple, within the city. He stared upon an aurora borealis which pierced the eye and shattered the mind with its brilliance, its colors. "My God." he said. "The whole sky's a cockeyed rainbow," said Condem, moving to his side. "The explosions are closer than we thought," said Yanying, "if the Allen Bottle can trap that much. It must be that they are originating from here -- from the planet, not the sun." "Well, why then? Testing? That doesn't seem to be the answer, because the thing follows a definite cycle. This is right on time." "Natural phenomena," said the physicist, "are not the only happenings that follow definite cycles." "A moratorium followed by a holocaust, followed by another moratorium, followed by -- It doesn't make sense." "They might look like us," said Condem, "but that doesn't mean what's inside's the same. For a while we did speculate that this thing might be a local Armageddon. But there's nothing wrong here. No signs of nuclear war, or the rebuilding that follows after. Nothing. There's been nothing like that at all, from everything they've said, from everything we've seen." "From all that's been shown us," corrected Planter. "I wonder -- " "What?" asked Yanying. "Is someone, something, dying somewhere?" "Something is always dying somewhere," said Yanying. "The question is one of quantity and quality -- and where." "They might look like us -- " said Condem. A knock came upon their door. The captain opened it to admit Laren, high priest of the center temple of the city. Laren was several inches shorter and several pounds heavier than any of them. His thinning hair was brushed to cover over a spreading bald spot. Neatly tailored tweed robes covered the rest of him, shoulder to knee and a smile which might have betokened senility or orgasm opened his wide face. "Sirs," he said, "it has begun. I came to ask whether you would join us in the worship of the Creator of the universe. I see, however, that you already have." "Worship?" asked Planter. "Your friends look upon the first outward signs of the season within the heavens." "The lights? The aurora? You're doing that?" "Of course," said Laren, "to worship Him as He is, with a sacrifice of pure power upon the altar of the sky." "Those are nuclear explosions you're setting off -- in outer space -- aren't they?" "Yes. For has He not always, does He not now and will He not forever so manifest Himself within the eternal cycle of the sun? Is He not the force that separates atom from atom, so that the power is freed to flow like rivers of benediction through the universe of His glory?" "I suppose so," said Planter. "I never thought of it quite that way before. It is the reason we are here, however." "To behold our way of worship?" "Well, yes. Actually -- now that I think of it -- yes. Your sacrifices of pure power upon the altar of the sky have been detected beyond your solar system. They come at such regular intervals -- about half a generation apart -- that at first it was guessed that something unique was happening to your sun. It is rather strange to discover they are -- prayers." "What else could they be?" asked Laren. "If not disturbances within your sun, then perhaps signs of war upon your planet." "War? Yes, we have war. And the unrest which follows and precedes war. More of this than actual war. This is always with us. You see, there is another power, upon the other continent... But I do not see how the celebration of the Year of the Good Seed could be mistaken for such." "Year of the Good Seed?" asked Yinyang. "What is that?" " IT IS the year for the planting of new, good things -- things that will take root and grow through the cycle of years that is to follow. By the Year of a Thousand Flowers this time's promise will be fulfilled." "I begin to understand," said Yinyang, turning to the Captain. "It sounds similar to the cycle of years celebrated in many Asian countries. There is the Year of the Rat, the Year of the Ox, the Year of the Tiger, the Year of the Hare," he said, "then those of the Dragon, the Serpent, the Horse, the Goat, the Monkey, the Rooster, the Dog and the Pig. The procession is based on the old astrology -- and every astrological system is, ultimately, the representation of a solar myth. Theirs seems to be derived from an agricultural phase of their society -- the effect of the sun upon growing things. The symbolism has been maintained by their religion and it would seem that they, too, celebrate the times by fireworks displays. They use the greatest explosive force at their command." "It is just as you have said," Laren agreed. "That's all they use it for?" said Planter. "I would not be surprised if that were the case. After all, the Chinese discovered gunpowder and the only thing they used it for was firecrackers. It took a European mind to put it to such a useful end as blowing up one's fellows." "Excuse me -- but I do not follow the conversation," said Laren. "If this thing 'gunpowder' was like prayers and it was also used to destroy other men, does this mean...? I do not understand!" "It is just as well," said Yinyang. "It is probably true, though," Laren continued, "that if we were to pray directly above a city of the enemy it would cease to exist. But this would be blasphemous. No one would do such a thing." "Of course not," said Planter. Laren turned toward the window and stared at the prayerstreaked sky. Then, after a time: "Have such things ever been committed?" "Perhaps," said Planter. "Long ago and in some far place." "The will of the Creator is that the Just triumph," Laren said. "If the ones who may have done this thing were the righteous, such as ourselves, then it may not have been blasphemy but a furtherance of His will." "The doings of ignorant men in other places need not concern you," said Yinyang. "That is true," he replied. "So let it be forgotten," said Planter. "Yes, of course." Together they watched the opening of the Year of the Good Seed. still moving at aC velocity, that rivers of light flowed about Captain Planter's vessel. When Condem informed him that the nature of the detonations was unique for the area in that the light appeared to have been filtered through an atmosphere on this occasion, the Captain duly entered the observation in his log.  Section #. Title #, (United States Code). #. Date of filing: October #. #. #. Title of Publication: Galaxy Magazine. #. Frequency of issue monthly. # . Location of known offices of publication: # Camden Avenue S.W., Canton, Ohio #. #. Location of headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: #. Names and addresses of the publisher editor and managing editor. Publisher: Arnold E. Abramson, # East #th Street, New York, N.Y. #. Editor: Ejler Jakobsson, # East #th Street. New York, N.Y. #. 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I certify that the statements made by me are correct and complete. Laurence C. Murphy, Circulation Director. need on his part to learn more about the intelligent species he once treated and abused as animals. The nildoror understand and sympathize and one of them, Srin'gahar, agrees to carry Gundersen to the nearest nildor encampment, where he can apply for a travel permit. At the encampment Gunderson meets Vol'himyor, an ancient, many-born nildor, requests permission to go to the nildoror place of rebirth, the mist country. He is invited to spend some time with his hosts before permission is granted -- and that night finds himself joining them in an elemental, ritualistic dance. He is shocked to discover that in so doing is able to share himself completely with the nildoror. in effect becoming one of them. former sector chief on Holman's World, an Earth colony, returns to the planet as little more than a tourist after Earth has returned it to the control of its indigenes, an intelligent, elephantine life form, the nildoror. The planet is now known by its native name of Belzagor. Other changes have taken place, some subtle, others not. Left over traces of Man's occupation of the planet -- buildings, a robot-crewed spaceport -- are gradually falling into disrepair. The nildoror have resumed their lives and customs as if they had never been -- sometimes savagely -- interrupted by Man. Gunderson's return has been dictated by an inner VI H e awoke some time after midday. The only sign of last night's frenzy was in the spongy turf near the lakeshore, which was terribly scuffed and torn. Gundersen felt stiff and numb. Also he was abashed. He knew the embarrassment of one who has thrown himself too eagerly into someone else's special amusement. He could hardly believe that he had done what he knew himself to have done. In his shame he felt an immediate impulse to leave the encampment at once, before the nildoror could show him their contempt for an Earthman capable of making himself a thrall to their festivity. But he shackled the thought, remembering that he had a purpose in coming here. He limped down to the lake and waded out until its water came up to his breast. He soaked a while and washed away the sweat of the night before. Then fastidiously, he went to a different part of the lake and drank deeply. Emerging, he found his clothing and put it on. A nildor came to him and said, "Vol'himyor will speak to you now." The many-born one was halfway up the slope. Gundersen could not find the words of any of the greetings formulae. He simply stared raggedly at the old nildor. Vol'himyor said, "You dance well, my once-born friend. You dance with joy. You dance with love. You dance like a nildor, do you know that?" "It is not easy for me to understand what happened to me last night," said Gundersen. "You proved to us that our world has captured your spirit." "Was it offensive to you that an Earthman danced among you?" "If it had been offensive," said Vol'himyor slowly, "you would not have danced among us." There was a long silence. Then the nildor said, "We will make a treaty, we two. I will give you permission to go into the mist country. Stay there until you are ready to come out. But when you return bring with you the Earthman known as Cullen and offer him to the northernmost encampment of nildoror, the first of my people that you find. Is this agreed?" "Cullen?" Gunderson asked. Across his mind flared the image of a short broad-faced' man with fine golden hair and mild green eyes. "Cedric Cullen, who was here when I was here?" "The same man." "He worked with me when I was at the station in the Sea ol Dust." "He lives now in the mist country," Vol'himyor said, "having gone there without permission. We want him." "What has he done?" "He is guilty of a grave crime. Now he has taken sanctuary among the sulidoror, where we are unable to gain access to him. It would be a violation of our covenant with them if we removed this man ourselves. But we may ask you to do it." "You won't tell me the nature of his crime?" "Does it matter? We want him. Our reasons are not trifling ones. We request you to bring him to us." "You're asking one Earthman to seize another and turn him in for punishment," said Gundersen. "How am I to know where justice lies in this affair?" "Under the treaty of relinquishment -- are we not the arbiters of justice on this world?" Gundersen admitted that this was so. "Then we hold the right to deal with Cullen as he deserves," Vol'himyor said. That did not, of eourse, make it proper for Gundersen to aet as eatspaw in handing his old comrade over to the nildoror. But Vol'himyor's implied threat was clear -- do as we wish, or we grant you no favors. Gundersen said, "What punishment will Cullen get if he falls into your custody?" "Punishment? Punishment? Who speaks of punishment?" "If the roan's a criminal -- " "We wish to purify him," said the many-born one. "We desire to cleanse his spirit. We do not regard the process as punishment." "Will you injure him physically in any way?" "It is not to be thought." "Will you end his life?" "Can you mean such a thing? Of course not." "Will you imprison him?" "We will keep him in custody," Vol'himyor, "for however long the rite of purification takes. I do not think it will be Itwig. He will swiftly be freed and he will be grateful to us." Gundersen considered all aspects of the matter. Shortly he said, "I agree to our treaty, manyborn one, but only if I may add several clauses before coneluding." "Go on." "If Cullen will not tell me the nature of his erime I am released from my obligation to hand him over." "Agreed." I am also released from my obligation if the sulidoror object to my taking Cullen out of the mist eountry." "They will not object. But agreed." "If Cullen must be subdued by violence in order to bring him forth -- I am released." The nildor hesitated a moment. "Agreed," he said finally. "I have no other conditions to add." "Then our treaty is made," Vol'himyor said. "You may begin your northward journey today. Five of our once-born ones must also travel to the mist country for their time of rebirth has come. They will accompany you and safeguard you along the way if you wish. Among them is Srin'gahar, whom you already know." "Will it be troublesome for them to have me with them?" "Srin'gahar has particularly requested the privilege of serving as your guardian," said Vol'himyor. A senior nildor summoned Srin'gabar and the four others who would be going toward rebirth. Gundersen was gratified at this confirmation of the existing data: once more the frenzied dance of the niidoror had preceded the departure of a group bound for rebirth. went aside to plan their route. "Where in the mist country do you intend to go?" the nildor asked. "It does not matter. I just want to enter it. I suppose I'll have to go wherever Cullen is." "Yes. But we do not know exactly where he is. We will have to wait until we are there to learn it. Do you have special places to visit on the way north?" "I want to stop at the Earthman stations," Gundersen said. "Particularly at Shangri-la Falls. So my idea is that we'll follow Madden's River northwestward and -- " "These names are unknown to me." "Sorry. I guess they've all reverted now to nildororu names and I don't know those. But wait -- " Gundersen scratched a hasty but serviceable map of Belzagor's western hemisphere in the mud. Across the waist of the disk he drew the thick swath of the tropics. At the right side he gouged out a curving bite to indicate the ocean. On the left he outlined the Sea of Dust. Above and below the band of the tropics he drew thinner lines representing the northern and southern mist zones. Beyond them he indicated the gigantic icecaps. He marked the spaceport and the hotel at the coast with an X and cut a wiggly line up from there, clear across the tropics into the northern mist country, to show Madden's River. At the midway point of the river he placed a dot to mark Shangrila Falls. "Now," said Gundersen, "if you follow the tip of my stick -- " "What are those marks on the ground?" asked Srin'gahar. A map of your planet, Gundersen wanted to say. But there was no nildororu word in his mind for "image," "picture" and similar concepts. He said lamely, "This is your world. This is Belzagor -- or at least half of it. See, this is the ocean. The sun rises here and -- " "How can this be my world -- these marks -- when my world is so large?" "This is like your world. Each of these lines, here, stands for a place on your world. You see, here, the big river that runs out of the mist country and comes down to the coast, where the hotel is, yes? And this mark is the spaceport. These two lines are the top and the bottom of the northern mist country. The -- " "It takes a strong sulidor a march of many days to cross the northern mist country," said Srin'gahar. "I do not understand how you can point to such a small space and tell me it is the northern mist country. Forgive me, friend of my journey. I am very stupid." Gundersen tried again, attempting to communicate the nature of the marks on the ground. But Srin'gahar simply could not comprehend the idea of a map, nor could he see how scratched lines could represent places. The map was a metaphor of place, an abstraction from reality. Evidently even beings possessing G'rakh might not have the capacity to grasp such abstractions. He apologized to Srin'gahar for his own inability to express concepts clearly and rubbed out the map with his boot. Without it, planning the route was somewhat more difficult but they found ways to communicate. Gundersen learned that the great river at whose mouth the hotel was situated was called the Seran'nee in nildororu. The place where the river plunged out of the mountains into the coastal plain, which Earthmen knew as Shangri-la Fall, was Du'jayukh to nildoror. Then it was simple for them to agree to follow the Seran'nee to its source, with a stop at Du'jayukh and at any other settlement of Earthmen that happened to lie conveniently on the path north. While this was being decided, several of the sulidoror brought a late breakfast of fruit and lake fish to Gundersen, exactly as though they recognized his authority under the Company. It was a curiously anachronistic gesture, almost servile, not at all like the way they had tossed him a raw slab of malidar meat the day before. Then they had been testing him, even taunting him. Now they were waiting upon him. T he journey began in late afternoon. Five nildoror moved in single file, Srin'gahar at the back of the group with Gundersen perched on his back; the Earthman did not appear to be the slightest burden for him. Their path led due north along the rim of the great rift. The mountains that guarded the central plateau rose on the left. By the light of the sinking sun Gundersen stared toward that plateau. Down here in the valley his surroundings had a certain familiarity -- he might almost be in some steamy jungle of South America. But the plateau appeared truly alien. Gundersen eyed the thick tangles of spiky purplish moss that festooned and nearly choked the trees along the top of the rift wall. The way the parasitic growth drowned its hosts the trees seemed grisly to him. The wall itself, of some soapy graygreen rock, dotted with angry blotches of crimson lichen and punctuated every few hundred meters by long ropy strands of a swollen blue fungus, cried out its otherworldliness -- the soft mineral had never felt the impact of raindrops but had been gently carved and shaped by the humidity alone, taking on weird knobbinesses and hollows over the millennia. Nowhere on Earth could one see a rock wall like that, serpentine and involute and greasy. The forest beyond the wall looked impenetrable and vaguely sinister. The silence, the heavy and sluggish air, the sense of dark strangeness, the flexible limbs of the glossy trees bowed almost to the ground by moss, the occasional distant snort of some giant beast, made the central plateau forbidding and hostile. Few Earthmen had ever entered it and it had never been surveyed in detail. Gundersen had been in the plateau country only once, by accident, when his pilot had had to make a forced landing en route from coastal headquarters 'to the Sea of Dust. Seena had been with him. They spent a night and a day in that forest, Seena terrified from the moment of landing, Gundersen comforting her in a standard manly way but finding that her terror was somehow contagious. The girl trembled as one alien happening after another presented itself and shortly Gundersen was on the verge of trembling too. They watched, fascinated and repelled, while an army of innumerable insects with iridescent hexagonal bodies and long hairy legs strode with maniacal persistence into a sprawling glade of tigermoss -- for hours the savage mouths of the carnivorous plants bit the shining insects into pieces and devoured them and still the horde marched on to destruction. At last the moss was so glutted that it went into sporulation, puffing up cancerously and sending milky clouds of reproductive bodies spewing into the air. By morning the whole field of moss lay deflated and helpless. Tiny green reptiles with broad rasping tongues moved in to devour every strand, laying bare the soil for a new generation of flora. And then there were the feathery, jellylike things. streaked with blue and red, that hung in billowing cascades from the tallest trees, trapping unwary flying creatures. And bulky rough-skinned beasts as big as rhinos, bearing mazes of blue antlers with interlocking tines, grubbed for roots a dozen meters from their camp, glaring sourly at the strangers from Earth. And long-necked browsers with eyes like beacons munched on high leaves, squirting barrelsful of purple urine from openings at the bases of their throats. And dark otterlike beings ran chattering past the stranded Earthmen, stealing anything within quick grasp. Other animals visited them also. This planet, which had never known the hunter's hand, abounded in big mammals. "Elave you ever been in there?" Gundersen asked Srin'gahar, as night began to conceal the rift wall. "Never. My people seldom enter that land." "Occasionally, flying low over the plateau, I used to see nildoror encampments in it. Not often, but sometimes. Do you mean that your people no longer go there?" "No," said Srin'gahar. "A few of us have need to go to the plateau but most do not. Sometimes the soul grows stale and one must change one's surroundings. If one is not ready for rebirth one goes to the plateau. It is easier to confront one's own soul in there. Can you understand what I say?" "I think so," Gundersen said. "It's like a place of pilgrimage, then -- a place of purification?" "In away." "But why have the nildoror never settled permanently up there? There's plenty of food. The climate is warm -- " "It is not a place where G'rakh rules," the nildor replied. "Is it dangerous to nildoror? Wild animals, poisonous plants, anything like that?" "No, I would not say that. We have no fear of the plateau, and there is no place on this world that' is dangerous to us. But the plateau does not interest us, except those who have the special need of which I spoke. As I say, G'rakh is foreign to it. Why should we go there? There is room enough for us in the lowlands." The plateau is too alien even for them, Gundersen thought. They prefer their nice little jungle. He was not sorry when darkness hid the plateau from view. T hey made camp that night beside a hissing-hot stream. Evidently its waters issued from one of the underground cauldrons common in this sector of the continent. Srin'gahar said that the source lay not far to the north. Clouds of steam rose from the swift flow. The water, pink with high-temperature microorganisms, bubbled and boiled. He scrubbed his face, taking extraordinary pleasure in the art, and supplemented a dinner of food capsules and fresh fruit with a stew of greenberry roots -- delectable when boiled, poisonous otherwise. For shelter while sleeping Gundersen used a monomolecular jungle blanket that he had stowed in his backpack, his one meager article of luggage on this journey. He draped the blanket over a tripod of boughs to keep away nightflies and other noxious insects and crawled under it. The ground, thickly grassed, was a good enough mattress for him. Srin'gahar settled down protectively a short distance from Gundersen and wished him a good sleep. Gundersen said, "Do you mind talking a while? I want to know something about the process of rebirth. How do you know, for instance, that your time is upon you? Is it something you feel within yourself, or is it just a matter of reaching a certain age? Do you -- " He became aware that Srin'gahar was paying no attention. The nildor had fallen into what might have been a deep trance and lay perfectly still. Shrugging, Gundersen rolled over and waited for sleep. But sleep was a long time coming. He thought a good deal about the terms under which he had been permitted to make this northward journey. Perhaps another many-born one would have allowed him to go into the mist country without attaching the condition that he bring back Cedric Cullen. Or perhaps he would not have been granted safe-conduct at all. Gundersen suspected that the results would have been the same no matter which encampment of nildoror he had happened to go to for his travel permission. Though the nildoror had no means of longdistance communication, no governmental structure in any Earthly sense, no more coherence as a race than a population of jungle beasts, they nevertheless were remarkably well able to keep in touch with one another and to strike common policies. What was it that Cullen had done, Gundersen wondered, to make him so eagerly sought? In the old days Cullen had seemed overwhelmingly normal-a cheerful, amiable, ruddy man who collected insects, spoke no harsh words and held his liquor well. When Gundersen had been the chief agent out at Fire Point in the Sea of Dust, a dozen years before, Cullen had been his assistant. Months on end there were only the two of them in the place and Gundersen had come to know the other man quite well, he imagined. Cullen had had no plans for making a career with the Company. He had signed a six-year contract, would not renew. He had intended to take up a university appointment when he had done his time on Holman's World. He had come here only for seasoning and for the prestige that accured to anyone who had a record of outworld service. But then the political situation on Earth had grown complex and the Company had been forced to agree to relinquish a great many planets that it had colonized. Gundersen, like most of the fifteen thousand Company people here, had accepted a transfer to another assignment. Cullen, to Gundersen's amazement, had been among the handful who had opted to stay, even though that meant severing his ties with the home world. Gundersen had not asked him why. One did not discuss such things. But Cullen's choice had seemed odd. He saw Cullen clearly in memory, chasing bugs through the Sea against his hip as he ran from one rock outcropping to the next -- an overgrown boy, really. The beauty of the Sea of Dust was altogether lost on him. No sector of the planet was more truly alien, nor more spectacular -- a dry oceanbed, greater in size than the Altantic, coated with a thick layer of fine crystalline mineral fragments as bright as mirrors when the sun was on them. From the station at Fire Point one could see the morning light advancing out of the east like a river of flame, spilling forth until the whole desert blazed. The crystals swallowed energy all day and gave it forth all night, so that even at twilight the eerie radiance rose brightly and after dark a throbbing purplish glow lingered for hours. In this almost lifeless but wondrously beautiful desert the Company had mined a dozen precious metals and thirty precious and semiprecious stones. The mining machines set forth from the station on far-ranging rounds, grinding up loveliness and returning with treasure -- there was not much for an agent to do there except keep inventory of the mounting wealth and play host to the tourist parties that came to see the splendor of the countryside. Gundersen had grown terribly bored and even the glories of the scenery had become tiresome to him. But Cullen, to whom the incandescent desert was merely a flashy nuisance, fell back on his hobby for entertainment and filled bottle after bottle with his insects. Were the mining machines still standing in the Sea of Dust, Gundersen wondered, waiting for the command to resume operation? If the Company had not taken them away after relinquishment they would surely stand there throughout all eternity, unrusting, useless, amid the hideous gouges they had cut. The machines had scooped down through the crystalline layer to the dull basalt below. They had spewed out vast heaps of tailings and debris as they gnawed for wealth. Probably the Company had left the things behind as monuments to commerce. Machinery was cheap. Interstellar transport was costly, why bother removing them? "In another thousand years," Gundersen once had said, "the Sea of Dust will all be destroyed and there'll be nothing but rubble here if these machines continue to chew up the rock at the present rate." Cullen had shrugged and smiled. "Well, one won't need to wear these dark glasses once the infernal glare is gone," he had said. Now the rape of the desert was over, the machines were still and Cullen was a fugitive in the mist country, wanted for some crime so terrible the nildoror would not even give it a name. in the morning it was Srin'gahar, uncharacteristically, who opened the conversation. "Tell me of elephants, friend of my journey. What do they look like and how do they live?" "Where did you hear of elephants?" "The Earthpeople at the hotel spoke of them. And also in the past I have heard the word said. They are beings of Earth that look like nildoror, are they not?" "There is a certain resemblance," Gundersen conceded. "A close one?" "There are many similarities." He wished Srin'gahar were able to comprehend a sketch. "They are long and high in the body, like you, and they have four legs, tails, trunks. They have tusks, but only two -- one here, one here. Their eyes are smaller and placed in a poor position, here, here. And here -- " he indicated Srin'gahar' s skull-crest -- "they have nothing. Also, their bones do not move as yours do." "It sounds to me," said Srin'gahar, "as though these elephants look very much like nildoror." "I suppose they do." "Why is this, can you say? Do you believe that we and the elephants can be of the same race?" "It isn't possible," said Gundersen. "It's simply a -- a -- " He groped for words. The nildoror vocabulary did not include the technical terms of genetrics. "Simply a pattern in the development of life that occurs on many worlds. Certain basic designs of living creatures recur everywhere. The elephant design -- the nildoror design -- is one of them. The large body, the huge head, the short necic, the long trunk enabling the being to pick up objects and handle them without having to bend -- these things will develop wherever the proper conditions are found." "You have seen elephants, then, on many other worlds?" "On some," Gundersen said. "Following the same general pattern of construction. Or at least some aspects of it, although the closest resemblance of all is between elephants and nildoror. I could tell you of a half-dozen other creatures that seem to belong to the same group. And this is also true of many other life-forms -- insects, reptiles, small mammals and so on. There are certain niches to be filled on every world. The thoughts of the Shaping Force travel the same path everywhere." "Where, then, are Belzagor's equivalents of men?" Gundersen faltered. "I didn't say that there were exact equivalents everywhere. The closest thing to the human pattern on your planet, I guess, is the sulidoror. And they aren't very close." "On Earth, the men rule. Here the sulidoror are the secondary race." "An accident of development. Your G'rakh is superior to that of the sulidoror -- on our world we have no species other than man that possess G'rakh at all. But the physical resemblances between men and sulidoror are many. They walk on two legs -- so do we. They eat both flesh and fruit -- so do we. They have hands which can grasp things -- so do we. Their eyes are in front of their heads -- so are ours. I know, they're bigger, stronger, hairier, and less intelligent than human beings. Fm trying to show you how patterns can be similar on different planets, even though there's no real blood relationship between -- " Srin'gahar said quietly, "How do you know that elephants are without G'rakhl" "We -- they -- it's clear -- " Gundersen stopped, uneasy. After a pause he said carefully, "They've never demonstrated any of the qualities of G'rakh. They have no village life, no tribal structure, no technology, no religion, no continuing culture. "We have no village life and no technology," the nildor said. "We wander through the jungles, stuffing ourselves with leaves and branches. I have heard this said of us -- and it is true." "But you're different. You -- " "How are we different? Elephants also wander through jungles, stuffing themselves with leaves and branches, do they not? They wear no skins over their own skins. They make no machines. They have no books. Yet you admit that we have G'rakh and you insist that they do not." "They can't communicate ideas," said Gundersen desperately. "They can tell each other simple things, I guess, about food and mating and danger, but that's all. If they have a true language we can't detect it. We're aware of only a few basic sounds." "Perhaps their language is so complex that you are unable to detect it," Srin'gahar suggested. "I doubt that. We were able to tell as soon as we got here that the nildoror speak a language; and we were able to learn it. But in all the thousands of years that men and elephants have been sharing the same planet, we've never been able to see a sign that they can gather and transmit abstract concepts. And that's the essence of having G'rakh, isn't it?" "I repeat my statement. What if you are so inferior to your elephants that you cannot comprehend their true depths?" "A cleverly put point, Srin'gahar. But I won't accept it as any sort of description of the real world. If elephants have G'rakh, why haven't they managed to get anywhere in their whole time on Earth? Why does mankind dominate the planet -- with the elephants crowded into a couple of small corners and practically wiped out?" "You kill your elephants?" "Not any more. But there was a time when men killed elephants for pleasure, or for food, or to use their tusks for ornaments. And there was a time when men used elephants for beasts of burden. If the elephants had G'rakh, they -- " He realized that he had fallen into Srin'gahar's trap. T he nildor said, "On this planet, too, the 'elephants' let themselves be exploited by mankind. You did not eat us and you rarely killed us but often you made us work for you. And yet you admit we are beings of G'rakh" "What we did here," said Gundersen, "was a gigantic mistake. And when we came to realize it we relinquished your world and got off it. But that still doesn't mean that elephants are rational and sentient beings. They're animals, Srin'gahar, big simple animals and nothing more." "Cities and machines are not the only achievements of G'rakh." "Where are their spiritual achievements, then? What does an elephant believe about the nature of the universe? What does he think about the Shaping Force? How does he regard his own place in his society?" "I do not know," said Srin'gahar. "And neither do you, friend of my journey, because the language of the elephants is closed to you. But it is an error to assume the absence of G'rakh where you are incapable of seeing it.' "In that case, maybe the malidaror have G'rakh too. And the venom-serpents. And the trees, and the vines and -- " "No," said Srin'gahar. "On this planet only nildoror and sulidoror possess G'rakh. This we know beyond doubt. On your world it is not necessarily the case that humans alone have the quality of reason." Gundersen saw the futility of pursuing the point. Was Srin'gahar a chauvinist defending the spiritual supremacy of elephants throughout the universe or was he deliberately adopting an extreme position to expose the arrogances and moral vulnerabilities of Earth's imperialism? Gundersen did not know. But it hardly mattered. He thought of Gulliver, discussing the intelligence of horses with the houyhnhnms. "I yield the point," he said curtly. "Perhaps some day I'll bring an elephant to Belzagor and let you tell me whether or not it has G'rakh." "I would greet it as a brother." "You might be unhappy over the emptiness of your brother's mind," Gundersen said. "Bring me an elephant, friend of my journey, and I will be the judge of its emptiness," said Srin'gahar. He fell silent, leaving Gundersen alone with his shame and guilt. In silence they followed the boiling stream northward. Shortly before noon they came to its source, a broad bow-shaped lake pinched between a double chain of steeply rising hills. Clouds of oily steam rose from the lake's surface. Thermophilic algae streaked its waters, the pink ones forming a thin scum on top and nearly screening the meshed tangles of the larger, thicker bluegray plants a short distance underneath. Gundersen felt some interest in stopping to examine the lake and its unusual life forms. But he was strangely reluctant to ask Srin'gahar to halt. Srin'gahar was not only his carrier -- he was his companion on a journey -- and to say, tourist fashion, Let's stop here a while, might reinforce the nildor's belief that Earthmen still thought of his people merely as beasts of burden. So he resigned himself to passing up this bit of sightseeing. It was not right, he told himself, that he should delay Srin'gahar's journey toward rebirth merely to gratify a whim of idle curiosity. But as they were nearing the lake's farther curve, such a crashing and smashing in the underbrush came from the east that the entire procession of nildoror paused to see what was going on. To Gundersen it sounded as if some prowling dinosaur were about to come lurching out of the jungle, some huge clumsy tyrannosaur inexplicably displaced in time and space. Then, emerging from a break in the row of hills, there came slowly across the bare soil flaking the lake a little snubsnouted vehicle. Gundersen recognized it as the hotel's beetle. It towed a crazy primitive-looking appendage of a trailer, fashioned from raw planks and large wheels. Atop this jouncing, clattering trailer four small tents had been pitched, covering most of its area. Alongside the tents, over the wheels, luggage was mounted in several racks. At the rear, clinging to a railing and peering nervously about, were the eight tourists whom Gundersen had last seen some days earlier in the hotel by the coast. Srin'gahar said, "Here are some of your people. You will want to talk with them. I'll wait for you." T he tourists were, in fact, the last species whatever that Gundersen wanted to see at this point. He would have preferred locusts, scorpions, fanged serpents, tyrannosaurs, toads, anything at all. Here he was coming from some sort of mystical experience among the nildoror, the nature of which he barely understood; here, insulated from his own kind, he rode toward the land of rebirth struggling with basic questions of right and wrong, of the nature of intelligence, of the relationship of human to nonhuman and of himself to his own past; only a few moments before he had been forced into an uncomfortable, even painful confrontation with that past by Srin'gahar's casual, artful questions about the souls of elephants; and abruptly Gundersen found himself once more amqng these empty, trivial human beings, these archetypes of the ignorant and blind tourist -- and whatever individuality he had earned in the eyes of his nildor companion vanished instantly as he dropped back into the undifferentiated class of Earthmen. These tourists, some part of his mind knew, were not nearly as vulgar and hollow as he saw them. They were merely ordinary people, friendly, a bit foolish, overprivileged, probably quite satisfactory human beings within the context of their lives on Earth -- and only seeming to be cardboard figurines here because they were essentially irrelevant to the planet they had chosen to visit. But he was not yet ready to have Srin'gahar lose sight of him as a person separate from all the other Earthmen who came to Belzagor. And he feared that the tide of bland chatter welling out of these people would engulf him and make him one of them. The beetle, obviously straining to haul the trailer, came to rest a dozen meters from the edge of the lake. Out of it came Van Beneker, looking sweatier and seedier than usual. "All right," he called to the tourists. "Everyone down! We're going to have a look at one of the famous hot lakes!" The four Earth couples clambered down from their trailer. They seemed bored and glazed, surfeited with the alien wonders they had already seen. Stein, the helix-parlor proprietor, dutifully checked the aperture of his camera, mounted it in his cap, and routinely took a # hologram of the scene. But when the printout emerged from the camera's output slot a moment later he did not even bother to glance at it. The act of picture-taking, not the picture itself, was significant. Watson, the doctor, muttered a joyless joke of some sort to Christopher, the financier, who responded with a mechanical chuckle. The women, bedraggled and jungle-stained paid no attention to the lake. Two simply leaned against the beetle and waited to be told what it was they were being shown, while the other two, as they became aware of Gunderson's presence, pulled facial masks from their backpacks and hurriedly slipped the thin plastic films over their heads so that they could present at least the illusion of properly groomed features before the handsome stranger. "I won't stay here long," Gunderson heard himself promising Srin'gahar as he dismounted. Van Beneker came up to him. "What a trip," the little man blurted. "What a stinking trip! Well, I ought to be used to it by now. How's everything been going for you?" "No complaints." Gundersen nodded at the trailer. "Where'd you get that noisy contraption?" "We built it a couple of years ago when one of the old cargo haulers broke down. Now we use it to take tourists around when we can't get any nildoror bearers." "It looks like something out of the eighteenth century." "Well, you know, sir, out here we don't have much in the way of modern equipment. We're short of servos and draulic walkers and all that. But you can always find wheels and some planks around. We make do." "What happened to the nildoror we were riding coming from the spaceport to the hotel? I thought "Sometimes yes, sometimes no," Van Beneker said. "They're unpredictable. We can't force them to work and we can't hire them to work. We can only ask them politely and if they say they're not available, that's it. Couple of days back they decided they weren't going to be available for a while, so we had to get out the trailer." He lowered his voice. "If you ask me, it's on account of these eight baboons here. They think the nildoror don't understand any English, and they keep telling each other how terrible it is that we had to hand a planet as valuable as this over to a bunch of elephants." "On the voyage out here," said Gundersen, "some of them were voicing quite strong liberal views. At least two of them were big prorelinquishment people." "Sure. Back on Earth they bought relinquishment as a political theory. 'Give the colonized worlds back to their long-oppressed natives -- ' and all that. Now they're out here and .suddenly they've decided that the nildoror aren't natives, just animals, just funny-looking elephants -- and maybe we should have kept the place after all." Van Beneker spat. "And the nildoror take it all in. They pretend they don't understand the language but they do -- they do. You think they feel like hauling people like that on their backs?" "I see," said Gundersen. He glanced at the tourists. They were eyeing Srin'gahar, who had wandered off toward the bush and was energetically ripping soft boughs loose for his midday meal. Watson nudged Miraflores, who quirked his lips and shook his head as if in disapproval. Evidently civilized beings were not supposed to pull their meals off trees with their trunks. Van Beneker said, "You'll stay and have lunch with us, won't you?" "That's very kind of you." H e squatted in the shade while Van Beneker rounded up his charges and led them to the rim of the steaming lake. When they were all there Gundersen rose and quietly affiliated himself with the group. He listened to the guide's spiel but managed to train only half his attention on what was being said. High-temperature life-zone... better than #C...more in some places even above boiling, yet things live in it...special genetic adaptation... thermophilic, we call it, that is, heat-loving...the the rate of spontaneous mutation is pretty damned high, and the species change so fast you wouldn't believe it...enzymes resist the heat...put the lake organisms in cool water and they'll freeze in about a minute... life processes extraordinarily fast... unfolded and denatured proteins can also function when circumstances are such that...you get quite a range up to middle-phylum level...a pocket environment, no interaction with the rest of the planet... thermal gradients...quantitative studies...the famous kinetic biologist, Dr. Brock...continuous thermal destruction of sensitive molecules...unending resynthesis... Now, unhooking a biosensitive net from his belt. Van Beneker began to dredge up samples of the lake's fauna for the edification of his group. He gripped the net's handle and made vernier adjustments governing the mass and length of the desired prey. The net, mounted at the end of an almost infinitely expandable length of fine flexible metal coil, swept back and forth beneath the surface of the lake, hunting for organisms of the programed dimensions. When its sensors told it that it was in the presence of living matter, its mouth snapped open and quickly shut again. Van Beneker retracted it, bringing to shore some unhappy prisoner trapped within a sample of its own scalding environment. Out came one lake creature after another, red-skinned, boiledlooking but alive and angry and flapping. An armored fish emerged, concealed in shining plates, embellished with fantastic excrescences and ornaments. A lobster like thing came forth, lashing a long spiked tail, waving ferocious eye-stalks. Up from the lake came something that was a single immense claw with a tiny vestigial body. No two of Van 'Beneker's grotesque catches were alike. The heat of the lake, he repeated, induced frequent mutations. He rattled off the whole genetic explanation a second time, while dumping one little monster back into the hot bath and probing for the next. The genetic aspects of the thermophilic creatures seemed to catch the interest of only one of the tourists -- Stein, who, as a helix-parlor owner specializing in the cosmetic editing of human genes, would know more than a little about mutation himself. He asked a few intelligent-sounding questions, which Van Beneker naturally was unable to answer. The others simply stared, patiently waiting for their guide to finish showing them funny animals and take them somewhere else. Gundersen glanced around and discovered that Srin'gahar was nowhere in sight. "What we've got this time," Van Beneker was saying, "is the most dangerous animal of the lake -- what we call a razor shark. Only I've never seen one like this before. You see those little horns? Absolutely new. And that lantern sort of thing on top of the head, blinking on and off?" Squirming in the net was a slender crimson creature about a meter in length. Its entire underbelly, from snout to gut, was hinged, forming what amounted to one gigantic mouth rimmed by hundreds of needlelike teeth. As the mouth opened and closed, it seemed as if the whole animal were splitting apart and healing itself. This beast feeds on anything up to three times its own size," Van Beneker said. "As you can see, it's fierce, savage and -- " Uneasy, Gundersen drifted away from the lake to look for Srin'gahar. He found the place where the nildor had been eating, where the lower branches of several trees were stripped bare. He saw what seemed to be the nildor's trail, leading away into the jungle. A painful white light of desolation flared in his skull at the awareness that Srin'gahar must quietly have abandoned him. In that case his journey would have to be interrupted. He did not dare go alone and on foot into that pathless wilderness ahead. T he tour group was coming up from the lake. Van Beneker's net was slung over his shoulder. Gundersen saw some lake creatures moving slowly about in it. "Lunch," he said. "I got us some jelly-crabs. You hungry?" Gundersen managed a thin smile. He watched, not at all hungry, as Van Beneker opened the net. A gush of hot water rushed from it, carrying along eight or ten oval, purplish creatures, each different from the others in the number of legs, shell markings and size of claws. They crawled in stumbling circles, obviously annoyed by the realative coolness of the air. Steam rose from their backs. Expertly Van Beneker pithed them with sharpened sticks and cooked them with his fusion torch. He split open their shells to reveal the pale, quivering, jelly like metabolic regulators within. Three of the women grimaced and turned away but Mrs. Miraflores took her crab and ate it with delight. The men seemed to enjoy it. Gundersen, merely nibbling at the jelly, eyed the forest and worried about Srin'gahar. Scraps of conversation drifted toward him. " -- enormous profit potential, just wasted, altogether wasted... " " -- even so our obligation is to encourage self-determination on every planet that..." " -- but are they people?" " -- look for the soul, it's the only way to tell that..." " -- elephants and nothing but elephants. Did you see him ripping up the trees and..." " -- relinquishment was the fault of a highly vocal minority of bleeding hearts who..." " -- no soul, no relinquishment..." " -- you're being too harsh, dear. There were definite abuses on some of the planets and..." " -- stupid political expediency, I call it. The blind leading the blind..." " -- can they write? Can they think? Even in Africa we were dealing with human beings and even there..." " -- I don't need to tell you how much I favored relinquishment. You remember, I took the petitions around and everything. But even so, I have to admit that after seeing..." " -- piles of purple crap on the beach..." " -- victims of sentimental overreaction..." " -- I understand the annual profit was on the order of..." " -- no doubt that they have souls. No doubt at all." Gundersen realized that his own voice had entered the conversation. The others turned to him -- there was a sudden vacuum to fill. He said, "They have a religion and that implies the awareness of the existence of a spirit, a soul, doesn't it?" "What kind of religion?" Miraflores asked. "I'm not sure. One important part of it is ecstatic dancing -- a kind of frenzied prancing around that leads to some sort of mystic experience. I know. I've danced with them. I've felt at least the edges of that experience. And they've got a thing called rebirth, which I suppose is central to their rituals. I don't understand it. They go north into the mist country and something happens to them there. They've always kept the details a secret. I think the sulidoror give them something, some drug, maybe, and it rejuvenates them in some inner way and leads to a kind of illumination -- am I at all clear?" Gundersen, as he spoke, was working his way almost unconsciously through the pile of uneaten jellycrabs. "All I can tell you is that rebirth is vitally important to them and they seem to derive their tribal status from the number of rebirths they've undergone. So you see they're not just animals. They have a society. They have a cultural structure -- complex, difficult for us to grasp." Watson asked, "Why don't they have a civilization, then?" "I've just told you they do." "I mean cities, machines, books -- " "They're not physically equipped for writing, for building things, for any small manipulations," Gundersen said. "Don't you see, they have no hands? A race with hands makes one kind of society. A race built like elephants makes another." He was drenched in sweat and his appetite was suddenly insatiable. The women, he noticed, were staring at him strangely. He realized why. He was cleaning up all the food in sight, compulsively stuffing it into his mouth. Abruptly his patience shattered and he felt that his skull would explode if he did not instantly drop all barriers and admit the one great guilt that by stabbing his soul had spurred him into strange odysseys. It dijJ not matter that these were not the right people from whom to seek absolution. The words rushed uncontrollably upward to his lips and he said, "When I came here I was just like you. I underestimated the nildoror, whifh led me into a grievous sin that I have to explain to you. You know, I was a sector administrator for a while. One of my jobs was arranging the efficient deployment of native labor. Since we didn't fully understand that the nildoror were intelligent, autonomous beings, we used them -- we put them to work on heavy construction jobs, lifting girders with their trunks, anything we thought they were capable of handling on sheer muscle alone. We just ordered them around as if they were machines." Gundersen closed his eyes and felt the past roaring toward him, inexorably, a black cloud of memory that enveloped and overwhelmed him. "The nildoror let us use them, God knows why. I guess we were the crucible in which their race had to be purged. Well, one day a dam broke, out in Monroe District up in the north, not far from where the mist country begins, and a whole thornbush plantation was in danger of flooding, at a loss to the Company of who knows how er plant of the district was endangered, too, along with our station headquarters and -- let's just say that if we didn't react fast, we'd lose our entire investment in the north. My responsibility. I began conscripting nildoror to build a secondary line of dikes. We threw every robot we had into the job but we didn't have enough, so we got the nildoror, too -- long lines of them plodding in from every part of the jungle -- and we worked day and night until we were all ready to fall down dead. We were beating the flood but I couldn't be sure of it. And on the sixth morning I drove out to the dike site to see if the next crest would break through -- and there were seven nildoror I hadn't ever seen before, marching along a path going north. I told them to follow me. They refused, very gently. They said, no, they were on their way to the mist country for the rebirth ceremony and they couldn't stop. Rebirth? What did I care about rebirth? I wasn't going to take that excuse from them, not when it looked like I might lose my whole district. Without thinking I ordered them to report for dike duty or I'd execute them on the spot. Rebirth can wait, I said. Get reborn some other time. This is serious business. They put their heads down and pushed the tips of their tusks into the ground. That's a sign of great sadness among them. Their spines drooped. Sad. Sad. We pity you, one of them said to me, and I got angry and told him what he could do with his pity. Where did he get the right to pity me? Then I pulled out my fusion torch. Go on, get moving, there's a work crew that needs you. Sad. Big eyes looking pity at me. Tusks in the ground. Two or three of the nildoror said they were very sorry, they couldn't do any work for me now, it was impossible for them to break their journey. But they were ready to die right there if I insisted on it. They didn't want to hurt my prestige by defying me but they had to defy the price. I was about to fry one as an example to the others. And then I stopped and said to myself, What the hell am I doing? The nildoror waited and my aides were watching and so were some of our other nildoror. I lifted the fusion torch again, telling myself that I'd kill one of them -- the one who said he pitied me -- hoping that then the others would come to their senses. They just waited. Calling my bluff. How could I fry seven pilgrims even if they were defying a sector chief's direct order? But my authority was at stake. So I pushed the trigger. I just gave him a slow burn, not deep, enough to scar the hide, that was all, but the nildor stood there taking it. In another few minutes I would have burned right through to a vital organ. And so I soiled myself in front of them by using force. It was what they had been waiting for. Then a couple of the nildoror who looked older than the others said, stop it, we wish no to reconsider. I turned off the torch and they went aside for a conference. The one I had burned was hobbling a little and looked hurt. But he wasn't badly wounded, not nearly as badly as I was. The one who pushes the trigger can get hurt worse than his target, do you know that? And in the end the nildoror all agreed to do as I asked. So instead of going north for rebirth they went to work on the dike -- even the burned one -- and nine days later the flood crest subsided and the plantation and the power plant and all the rest were saved and we lived happily ever after." off. He had made his confession and now he could not face these people any longer. He picked up the shell of the one remaining crab and explored it for some scrap of jelly, feeling depleted and drained. There was an endless span of silence. Then Mrs. Christopher said, "So what happened then?" Gundersen looked up, blinking. He thought he had told it all. "Nothing happened then," he said. "The flood crest subsided." "But what was the point of the story?" He wanted to hurl the empty crab into her tensely smiling face. "The point?" he said. "The point? Why -- " He was dizzy now. He said, "Seven intelligent beings were journeying toward the holiest rite of their religion and at gunpoint I requisitioned their services on a construction job to save property that meant nothing to them -- and they came and hauled logs for me. Isn't the point obvious enough? Who was spiritually superior there? When you treat a rational autononomous creature as though he were a mere beast -- what does that make you?" "But it was an emergency," said Watson. "You needed all the help you could get. Surely other considerations could be laid aside at a time like that. So they were nine days late getting to their rebirth. Is that so bad?" Gundersen said hollowly, "A nildor goes to rebirth only when the time is ripe. I can't tell you how they know the time is ripe but perhaps it's astrological, something to do with the conjunction of the moons. A nildor has to get to the place of rebirth at the propitious time and if he doesn't make it in time, he isn't reborn just then. Those seven nildoror were already late because the heavy rains had washed out the roads in the south. The nine days more that I tacked on made them too late. When they were finished building dikes for me, they simply went back south to rejoin their tribe. I didn't understand why. It wasn't until much later that I found out that I had cost them their chance at rebirth and they rnight have to wait ten or twenty years until they could go again. Or maybe never get another chance." Gundersen did not feel like talking any more. His throat was dry. His temples throbbed. How cleansing it would be, he thought, to dive into the steaming lake. He got stiffly to his feet and, as he did so, noticed that Srin'gahar had returned and was standing motionless a few hundred meters away, beneath a mighty swordflower tree. He said to the tourists, "The point is that the nildoror have religion and souls and that they are people -- and that if you can buy the concept of relinquishment at all, you can't object to relinquishing this planet. The point is also that when Earthmen collide with an alien species they usually do so with maximum misunderstanding. The point is furthermore that I'm not surprised you think of the nildoror the way you do. I did, too, and learned a little better when it was too late to matter. And even so I didn't learn enough to do me any real good, which is one of the reasons why I came back to this planet. And I'd like you to excuse me now. This is the propitious time for me to move on and I have to go." He walked quickly away. Approaching Srin'gahar, he said, "I'm ready to leave." "Where did you go?" the Earthmen asked. "I was worried when you disappeared." "I felt that I should leave you alone with your friends," said Srin'gahar. "Why did you worry? There is an obligation on me to bring you safely to the country of the mist." T he quality of the land was undoubtedly changing. They were leaving the heart of the equatorial jungle behind and were starting to enter the highlands that led into the mist zone. The climate here was still tropical but the humidity was not so intense. The atmosphere, instead of holding everything in a constant clammy embrace, released its moisture periodically in rain and after the rain the texture of the air was clear and light until its wetness was renewed. Different vegetation featured this region -- harsh-looking angular stuff, with stiff leaves sharp as blades. Many of the trees had luminous foliage that cast a cold light over the forest by night. The vines were fewer here and the treetops no longer formed a continuous canopy shutting out most of the sunlight. Splashes of brightness dappled the forest floor, in some places extending across broad open meadows. The soil, leached by the frequent rains, .was a yellowish hue, not the rich black of the jungle. Small animals frequently sped through the underbrush. At a slower pace moved solemn sluglike creatures, blue-green with ebony mantles, which Gundersen recognized as the mobile fungoids of the highlands -- plants that crawled from place to place in quest of fallen boughs or a lightning-shattered tree trunk. Both nildoror and men considered their taste a great delicacy. On the evening of the third day northward from the place of the boiling lake, Srin'gahar and Gundersen came upon the other four nildoror, who had marched on ahead. They were camped at the foot of a jagged crescent-shaped hill. With them was a sulidor, by far the largest one Gundersen had ever seen, almost twice Gundersen's own height, with a pendulous snout the length of a man's forearm. The sulidor stood erect beside a boulder encrusted with blue moss, his legs spread wide and his tail, tripod-fashion, bracing his mighty weight. Narrowed eyes surveyed Gundersen from beneath shadowy hoods. His long arms, tipped with terrifying, curved claws, hung at rest. The fur of the sulidor was the color of old bronze and unusually thick. One of the candidates for rebirth, a female nildor called Luu'khamin, said to Gundersen, "The sulidor's name is Na-sinisul. He wishes to speak with you." "Let him speak, then." "He prefers that you know, first, that he is not a sulidor of the ordinary kind. He is one of those who administers the ceremony of rebirth and we will see him again when we approach the mist country. He is a sulidor of rank and merit and his words are not to be taken lightly. Will you bear that in mind as you listen to him?" The sulidor strode a short distance forward and once again planted himself firmly, digging his great spurred feet deep into the resilient soil. He spoke in nildororu stamped with the accent of the north: thick-tongued, slow, positive. "I have been on a journey," said Na-sinisul, "to the Sea of Dust, and now I am returning to my own land to aid in the preparations for the event of rebirth in which these five travelers are to take part. My presence here is purely accidental. Do you understand that I am not in this place for any particular purpose involving you or your companions?" "I understand," said Gundersen, astounded by the precise and emphatic manner of the sulidor's speech. He had known the sulidoror only as dark, savage, ferocious-looking figures lurking in mysterious glades. Na-sinisul continued: "As I passed near here yesterday, I came by chance to the site of a former station of your Company. Again by chance I chose to look within, though it was no business of mine to enter that place. Within I found two Earthmen whose bodies had ceased to serve them. They were unable to move and could barely talk. They requested me to send them from this world but I could not do such a thing on my own authority. Therefore I ask you to follow me to this station and to give me instructions." "How far is it?" "We could be there before the rising of the third moon." Gundersen said to Srin'gahar, "I don't remember a Company station here. There should be one a couple of days north of here but -- " "This is the place where the food that crawls was collected and shipped downriver," the Nildor informed him. "Here?" Gundersen shrugged. "I guess I've lost my bearings again. All right. I'll go there." To Na-sinisul he said, "Lead and I'll follow." T he sulidor moved swiftly through the glowing forest, and Gundersen, atop Srin'gahar, rode just to his rear. They seemed to be descending. The air grew warm and murky. The landscape also changed, for the trees here had aerial roots that looped up like immense scraggy elbows and the fine tendrils sprouting from the roots emitted a harsh green radiance. The soil was loose and rocky. Gundersen could hear it crunching under Srin'gahar's tread. Birdlike things were perched on many of the roots. They were owlish creatures -- some were black, some white, some a mottled black and white. A sticky fragrance came from vast, pallid, parasitic flowers sprouting from the trunks of the trees. By an outcropping of naked, weathered yellow rock lay the remains of the Company station. It seemed even more thoroughly ruined than the serpent station far to the south. The dome of its roof had collapsed and coils of wiry-stemmed saprophytes were clinging to its sides, perhaps feeding on the decomposition products that the rain eroded from the abrasions in the plastic walls. Srin'gahar allowed Gundersen to dismount. The Earthman hesitated outside the building, waiting for the sulidor to take the lead. A fine warm rain began to fall. The tang of the forest changed, becoming sweet where it had been sour. But it was the sweetness of decay. "The Earthmen are inside," said Na-sinisul. "You may go in. I shall await your instructions." Gundersen entered the building. The reek of rot was far more intense here. The dampness was pervasive. He wondered what sort of virulent spores he sucked into his nostrils with every breath. Something dripped in the darkness, making a loud locking against the lighter patter of the rain coming through the gaping roof. To give himself light, Gundersen drew his fusion torch and kindled it at the lowest beam. The warm white glow spread through the station. At once he felt a flapping about his face as some thermotropic creature, aroused and attracted by the heat of the torch, rose up toward it. Gundersen brushed it away, found slime on his fingertips afterward. Where were the Earthmen? Cautiously he made a circuit of the building. He remembered it vaguely now -- one of the innumerable bush stations the Company once had scattered across Holman's World. The floor was split and warped, requiring him to climb over the buckled, sundered sections. The mobile fungoids crawled everywhere, devouring the scum that covered all interior surfaces of the building and leaving narrow glistening tracks behind. Gundersen had to step Carefully to avoid putting his feet on the creatures and he was not always successful. Now he came to a place where the building widened, puckering outward. He flashed his torch around and caught sight of a blackened wharf, over-looking the bank of a swift river. Yes, he remembered. The fungoids were trapped and baled here and sent downriver on their voyage toward the market. But the Company's barges no longer stopped here and the tasty pale slugs now wandered unmolested over the mossy relics of furniture and equipment. "Hello?" Gundersen called. "Hello, hello, hello?" He received a moan by way of answer. Stumbling and slipping in the dimness, fighting a swelling nausea, he forced his way onward through a maze of unseen obstacles. He came to the source of the loud dripping sound. Something bright red and basketshaped and about the size of a man's chest had established itself high on the wall, perpendicular to the floor. Through large pores in its spongy surface a thick black fluid exuded, falling in a continuous greasy splash. As the light of Gundersen's torch probed it, the exudation increased, becoming almost a cataract of tallowy liquid. When he moved the light away the flow became less copious, though still heavy. The floor sloped here so that whatever dripped from the spongy basket flowed quickly down, collecting at the far side of the room in the angle between the floor and the wall. Here Gundersen found the Earthmen. They lay side by side on a low mattress. Fluid from the dripping thing had formed a dark pool around them, completely covering the mattress and welling up over their bodies. One of the Earthlings, head lolling to the side, had his face totally immersed in the stuff. From the other one came the moans. Both were naked. And only one was a man. The other was a woman, though Gundersen had some difficulty telling that at first. Both were so shrunken and emaciated that the sexual characteristics were obscured. They had no hair, not even eyebrows. Bones protruded through parchment like skin. The eyes of both were open, fixed in a rigid, seemingly sightless stare, unblinking, glassy. Lips were drawn back from teeth. Grayish algae sprouted in the furrows of their skins and the mobile fungoids roamed their bodies, feeding on this growth. With a quick automatic gesture of revulsion Gundersen plucked two of the sluglike creatures from the woman's empty breasts. She stirred, moaned again. In the language of the nildoror m Edited by Lester del Rey Will be back soon Watch for it on your newsstands she murmured, "Is it over yet?" Her voice was like a flute played by a sullen desert breeze. Speaking English, Gundersen said, "Who are you? How did this happen?" He got no response from her. A fungoid crept across her mouth, and he flicked it aside. He touched her cheek. A rasping whisper came as his hand ran across her skin. He felt he was caressing stiff paper. "Is it over soon?" she asked, again in nildororu. G undersen turned to her companion. Gently, half afraid the fragile neck would snap, Gundersen lifted the man's head out of the pool of fluid. It appeared that he had been breathing it -- it trickled from his nose and lips and after a moment he showed signs of being unable to cope with ordinary air. Gundersen let his face slip back into the pool. In that brief moment he had recognized the man as one Harold -- or Henry -- Dykstra, whom he had known distantly in the old days. The unknown woman was trying to move one arm. She lacked the strength to lift it. These two were like living ghosts, like deathin-life, mired in their sticky fluid and totally helpless. In the language of the nildoror Gundersen asked, "How long have you been this way?" "Forever," she whispered. "Who are you?" "I don't -- remember. I'm -- waiting." "For what?" "For the end." "Listen," he said. "I'm Edmund Gundersen, who used to be sector chief. I want to help you." "Kill me first. Then him." "We'll get you out of here and back to the spaceport. We can have you on the way to Earth in a week or ten days, and then -- " "No -- please -- " "What's wrong?" he asked. "Finish it. Finish it." She found enough strength to arch her back, lifting her body halfway out of the fluid that nearly concealed her lower half. Something rippled and briefly bulged beneath her skin. Gundersen touched the taut belly and felt movement within -- and that quick inward quiver was the most frightening sensation he had ever known. He touched the body of Dykstra. It also rippled inwardly. Appalled, Gundersen scrambled to his feet and backed away from them. By faint torchlight he studied their shriveled bodies, naked but sexless, bone and ligament, shorn of flesh and spirit yet still alive. A terrible fear came over him. "Na-sinisul," he called. "Come in here -- come in!" The sulidor shortly was at his side. Gundersen said, "Something's inside their bodies. Some kind of parasite? It moves. What is it?" "Look there," said "Na-sinisul, indicating the spongy basket from which the dark fluid trickled. "They carry its young. They have become hosts. A year, two years, is one of the world's most famous science-fiction writers. He has also written books on astronomy, anatomy, robots, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, words, the Greek myths, and the Bible. His new book -- #th in a long line of best sellers -- contains selections from the first #. Asimov's own vast enthusiasm for whatever subject he is tackling immediately infects the reader with a spirit of intellectual adventure. pany of a warm, ebullient, very human being who is -- in fact -- a genius. At your bookstore  # three -- and the larvae emerge." Why aren't they both dead?" "They draw nourishment from this," said the sulidor, swishing his tail through the black flow. "It seeps into their skins. It feeds them and it feeds that which is within them." "If we took them out of here and sent them down to the hotel on rafts -- " "They would die," Na-sinisul said, "moments after they were removed from the wetness about them. There is no hope of saving them." "When does it end?" the woman asked. Gundersen trembled. All his training told him never to accept the finality of death. Any human in whom some shred of life remained could be saved, rebuilt from a few scraps of cells into a reasonable facsimile of the original. But there were no facilities for such things on this world. He confronted a swirl of choices. Leave them here to let alien things feed upon their guts? Try to bring them back to the spaceport for shipment to the nearest tectogenetic hospital? Put them out of their misery at once? Seek to free their bodies himself of whatever held them in thrall? He kneeled again. He forced himself to experience that inner quivering again. He touched the woman's stomach, her thighs, her bony haunches. Beneath the skin she was a mass of strangeness. Yet her mind still ticked, though she had forgotten her name and her native language. The man was luckier. Although he, too, was infested, at least Dykstra did not have to lie here in the dark waiting for the death that could come only when the harbored larvae erupted from the enslaved human flesh. Was this what they had desired when they refused repatriation from this world that they loved? An Earthling can become captured by Belzagor, the many-born nildor, Vol'himyor, had said. But this was too literal a capture. The stink of bodily corruption made him retch. "Kill them both," he said to Nasinisul. "And be quick about it." "This is what you instruct me to do?" "Kill them. And rip down that thing on the wall and kill it, too." "It has given no offense," said the sulidor. "It has done only what is natural to its kind. By killing these two I will deprive it of deprive it of life as well." "All right," Gundersen said. "Just the Earthlings, then. Fast." "I do this as an act of mercy, under your direct orders," said Nasinisul. He leaned forward and lifted one powerful arm. The savage curved claws emerged fully from their sheaths. The arm descended twice. Gundersen compelled himself to watch. The bodies split like dried husks. The things within Even now, in some inconceivable reflex, the two corpses twitched and jerked. Gundersen stared into their eroded depths. "Do you hear me?" he asked. "Are you alive or dead?" The woman's mouth gaped but no sound came forth and he did not know whether this was an attempt to speak or merely a last convulsion of the ravaged nerves. He stepped his fusion torch up to high power and trained it on the dark pool.  am the resurrection and the life, he thought, reducing Dykstra to ashes, and the woman beside him, and the squirming unfinished larvae. Acrid, choking fumes rose. Not even the torch could destroy the building's dampness. He turned the torch back to illumination level. "Come," he said to the sulidor and they went out together. "I feel like burning the entire building and purifying this place," Gundersen said to Na-sinisul. "I know." "But you would prevent me." "You are wrong. No one on this world will prevent you from doing anything." But what good would destroying the building do, Gundersen asked himself? The purification had already been accomplished. The rain had stopped. To the waiting Srin'gahar, Gundersen said, "Will you take me away from here?" They rejoined the other four nildoror. Then, because they had lingered too long here and the land of rebirth was still far away, they resumed the march, even though it was night. By morning Gundersen could hear the thunder of Shangrila Falls, which the nildoror called Du'jayukh. The Silent Multitude D. G. Compton Opus # Isaac Asimov lish fellow whose books Terry Carr is beginning to reprint as Ace Specials. His first such book here, Synthajoy, was an intricate, beautifully written fable of technology intertwined with the human passions and I hope you went out and got it. Now we have The Silent Multitude (Ace Special #, #(f), a straightforward, almost spare, linear story about the dean of Gloucester, a senile recluse, a newshen and an angry young man, as they wait in Gloucester Cathedral for the crumbling of the city -- and the cathedral -- under the gentle attack of a fungus that destroys mortar. But for the squads of searching policemen quick-stepping stage left and right -- and a few spearcarriers in the opening scenes -- there is no life at all depicted in this novel except Tug, the tomcat, and the rat, mouse and sparrow he encounters in the evacuated city. Dean Goodliffe has stayed by special dispensation, perhaps because it is Christmas Eve, perhaps because it is his Christian duty, but more probably because he can't believe that, even after the fungus has destroyed the motar between its antique stones, the centuries-old cathedral will do more than settle a bit and then remain much as before. Paper Smith, the hermit, has stayed because his mind will not accommodate. Tug lives with him and in any case is not affected by civilization, except in the negative sense that the advancing culturation of the city has left very few other functional males or females of his species. The girl reporter -- another of Compton's really believable women -- is on the scene because where else would a sob sister be? The city that has stood since Roman times is about to fall. The angry young man is in rebellion against his late father, a well-known architect. And there we have them. The dean, with his primary tie to stones and sentiment; the recluse devoted to the past; the girl to whom the present is a fascinating entertainment and the young man to whom it is the dead hand of the establishment. Only Tug, who does not know time passes with a drag, bounds on through the encroachment of Fate with merely minor pauses for attention as the first copings begin to tumble from the windows and the cathedral's first cornice comes volplaning down to crash through the north transept. What we have, obviously, is something better and sounder than your standard novel of the brave little mob facing the return of the glaciers or the unending rain. The sf element is quickly and economically introduced -- space exploration brought back the fungus -- and then we're on to something rather reminiscent of the James Gould Cozzens of Castaway or S'.S'. San Pedro. I'd be rather surprised to learn Compton hadn't read or appreciated those two books. He certainly shows every sign of having learned how to improve on them. The Silent Multitude doesn't have the bite of Synthajoy. It has, instead, a growing prescence -- a well-orchestrated feeling in the reader's mind that the events here depicted do have a significance and do contain a statement on the human condition. I'm not sure Compton will always be or has always been a science-fiction writer. But he certainly is a writer. N OW, you take Isaac Asimov... Well, taking him from the pages of Opus #, his hundredth book (Houghton Mifflin Company, #), one finds him so various, so beautiful and new that it is only with a wrench of the mind one recalls the last time he pinched one's wife's bottom. But I digress -- a sin for which the Good Doctor has taxed me in the past. Of course, I could tax him with the same thing, so perhaps we could compromise instead on a tax-free foundation. That being as it may. Opus # is, indeed, a #-page digression, consisting of excerpts from many of his # preceding books, concreted together with long or short introductory passages. It becomes, thus, the autobiography, with prose illustrations, of one of our foremost science and sciencefiction writers, raconteurs, professors, songsters and wits. What a splendid ego this man has -- and I speak in full fondness. No ordinary psyche could fuel so rich a career in various forms of letters, nor promise yet so much for the future. In this book, whose very existence is a tribute to his ability to impress others, Asimov displays' by definition the total range of hispast and present capacity. He quotes from passages written for schoolchildren, for teenagers, for intelligent laymen, for medical students, for scientists -- he even quotes from his doctoral dissertation, which is written in language rather different from Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. And thus we've come to one feature this book has in common with many other recent Asimov anthologies of fact or fiction -- the markedly uneven quality of the assembled writing. Let's put aside the special nature of this book for a moment; let's consider simply the fact that the layer-out of the # plus sales tax involved here is either an Asimov fan who'd buy anything with the great name on it, or else is someone who might buy this book or some other. What will this person find here to justify his selection? He will find a charming, eloquent auctorial personality. If he has any wit, he will find something more than either the brash extrovert Ike commonly plays at convention banquets, or the earnest, sensitive, totally trusting confidant of the quiet pauses for breath afterward. People are considerably complicated, none more I Please turn to page # ) J Harlie was a Human Analogue Computer -- too logical to find Man's purpose in living... I going for water but decided that to do so was too much trouble. He popped the pills directly into his mouth and swallowed them dry. "Don't you take any water with them?" asked Handley, staring as he came into the room. "Why bother? Either you can take 'em or you can't. Want one?" Handley shook his head. "Not now. Em on something else." "Uppers or downers?" "Right now, a bummer." "Oh?" Auberson slid his desk drawer shut. "What's up?" "That damned computer again." Handley dropped himself into a chair, his long legs sprawling out. "You mean Harlie?" Handley looked at him. "Who else? You know another computer with delusions of grandeur?" "What's he up to now?" "Same thing. But worse than ever." Auberson nodded, "I figured it would happen. You want me to take a look?" "That's what you're getting paid for. You're the psychologist." Auberson sighed. "All right." He lifted himself out of the chair, grabbed his coat from the back of the door. "Harlie, I think, is getting to be more trouble than he's worth." The two men began the familiar walk to the computer control room. Handley grinned, matching. strides with Auberson. "You're just annoyed because every time you think you've figured out what makes him tick he makes a liar out of you." "You could be right. But robot psychology is still an infant science. How does anyone know what a computer thinks about -- especially one that's convinced it can cerebrate like a human being?" They paused at the elevator. "What're you doing about dinner? I have a feeling we're going to be at this all night." Handley shook his head. "Nothing yet. Want to send out for something?" "Yeah, that's probably what we'll end up doing." Auberson pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket. "Want one?" "What are they, Acapulco Golds?" "Zig-zags." "Good enough." Handley helped himself to one of the marijuana cylinders and puffed it into flame, "Frankly, I never thought that Zig-zags were as strong as they should be." "It's all in your head." Auberson inhaled deeply. "It's a matter of taste," corrected Handley. "If you don't like them, don't smoke them." "It was free." Handley shrugged. The elevator arrived then and they 'stepped into it. As they dropped the fourteen stories to the computer level Auberson thought he could feel the stuff beginning to take effect. That and the pills. He took another drag, a long one. The elevator discharged them in a cool climate-conditioned anteroom. Beyond the sealed doors they could hear the dimly muffled clatter of typers. A sign on the wall facing them read : Damn! I always Jorget. Auberson stubbed out the stick in an ashtray but slipped the butt back into his case. No sense wasting it. Inside, he seated himself at Console One without giving so much as a glance to the rows and rows of gleaming memory banks. Harlie typed back: Auberson ripped the sheet out of the typer and read it thoughtfully. He wished for his cigarette -- the aftertaste was still on his tongue. "This kind of stuff all afternoon?" Handley nodded. "Uh-huh. Only that's kind of mild. He must be coming down." "Another trip?" "Don't know what else you could call it." Auberson typed. Harlie answered. V Auberson said. "You didn't really expect that to work again, did you?" "No, but it was worth a try." Auberson pressed the clear button, switched off the typer. "What kind of inputs have you been giving him?" "The standard stuff mostly -- today's papers, a couple magazines -- nothing out of the ordinary. A couple history texts, some live TV -- oh, and Time Magazine." "Nothing there to send him off like this. Unless -- what subject were you stressing today?" "Art appreciation." "What else?" Auberson said. "It would have to be something like that. Yeah, he flips out like this, whenever we start getting to the really human inputs. Okay, let's try to bring him down. Give him some statistics -- Wall Street, Dow Jones, Standard and Poor -- anything else you can think of. Have you got anything that uses a lot of equations? He can't resist an equals sign. Try some of that social engineering stuff. But numbers only, no words. Cut off his video, too. Give him nothing to think about." "Right." Handley hustled off to give orders to the appropriate technicians, most of whom were standing around with their hands stuffed uselessly into the pockets of their lab coats. Auberson waited until the input of new data had begun, then switched on the typer again. Harlie's answer clattered out. Auberson read it carefully. This one almost made sense. Apparently the cure was working. He waited a moment, then typed. Harlie typed a four-letter word. A NO-NO? Auberson paused, looked at the last few sentences, then typed. Auberson pushed himself away from the console. "Handley -- get me a complete log tape of Harlie's trip, will you?" "Right." He turned back to the console. He typed in the three examples of poetry that Harlie had earlier produced. ME? Auberson jabbed the override. "Hey, Aubie. What are you doing? He's starting to flip out again." "How can you tell?" "By his input meters." "Input?" "Yes." Auberson frowned thoughtfully, then called to Handley, "He should be okay now." "He is -- it was only momentary." "Inputs, huh?" "Yep." "Hmm," said Auberson again. AL. II T he restaurant's air was heavy with incense. Somewhere music tinkled and a low-keyed color organ flashed light across a sharded ceiling. Auberson lowered his drink to the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Handley sipped at a martini. He finished the drink and set his empty glass down next to two others. "I hope not. I'd hate to think we'd slipped all the way back to phase four. I like to think we licked the problem a year ago when we redesigned the judgment and emotional-analogue circuits." "So do I. I'll never forget when we finally fed him Jabberwocky and he did an analysis of it." Auberson smiled, remembering. "It wasn't a very perceptive analysis but at least he understood what he was supposed to be doing." "We're a long way from Jabberwock, Aubie." "Yeah, I know." He took out his cigarette case, pulled out a Zig-zag, offered the case to Handley. Taking one, Handley said, "After all, compared to some of the stuff we're getting up to now -- " "What?" interrupted Auberson. "Time Magazine?" "Salvador Dali, Edwin Keinholz, Heinz Edelman, to name a few," retorted the other. "Also Lennon and McCartney lyrics. Bob Dylan, some Ionesco, Marshall MacLuhan, Stanley Kubrick, some experimental film and so on. Don't forget, we're dealing with the art of the experience now. This isn't rthe same as -- oh -- say, the Renaissance Masters." "I know. I've got one of his imitation Da Vincis in my living room." "I've seen it, remember?" "Oh, yeah -- that night we spiked the punch with acid." "Yeah. Well, look, that Da Vinci stuff is easy." "Huh?" "Sure. The Renaissance Masters were mainly concerned with such things as color, shading, modeling, values, perspectives, structuring, which way the light was coming from and things like that. Da Vinci was more interested in how the body was put' together than in what it felt like. He was trying to do what is now done with the camera. So were the rest of them." Auberson nodded, remembered to inhale deeply, nodded again. Handley continued. "So what happened when the camera was finally invented?" Auberson let his breath escape in a whoosh. "The artists were out of jobs?" "Wrong. The artists simply had to learn how to do things that the camera couldn't do. The artists had to stop being recorders and start being interpreters. That was when expressionism and all those other styles were born." "You're over simplifying the picture," Auberson said slowly. "True -- but the point is -- today's artists have been forced to wonder what things felt like. And when we reached that point in art history with Harley we started to lose him. He couldn't follow it." Auberson was throughly stoned by now. He opened his mouth to speak but could think of nothing to say. H andley interpreted the look as one of thoughtfulness. "Look, all this stuff that we've been having trouble with -- it has one thing in common. It's experience art -- an experience involving the viewer is the object of the modern artist, not the artwork itself." "Communication," said Auberson, abruptly. "The artists are trying to communicate." "Right -- they're no longer as interested in their own cathartic experiences as they are in evoking an emotional response in the viewer." "And Harlie can't handle it," said Auberson. "Because he doesn't have any emotions." "That's just it, Aubie -- he does, and he should be able to handle it. That's what those analogue circuits are supposed to be for. Theoretically -- " muttered. "Garbage in, garbage out. None of it makes any sense to him." Handley insisted, "I can't believe that." He lowered his voice. "You can't tell me that the past seventy years of art and literature is all garbage. Uh-uh, Aubie. The stuff has communicated too much to too many people for it to be meaningless." "Well -- " Auberson thought it over, said slowly, "Harlie's supposed to be an intelligent and objective observer." "That's what I'm getting at -- the stuff must be getting to him somehow! It's the only possible explanation. We're the ones who are misinterpreting." self." "Did he?" Handley demanded. "Did he really?" Auberson paused, frowned thoughtfully, tried to remember, found that he could not remember Harley's exact words. "Uh, I don't know. Remind me to look it 'up later -- I suppose you're right, though. If all that art can communicate to people and Harlie's supposed to be a Human Analogue he should be getting some of it." He frowned again. "But he denies any knowledge or understanding of his periods of non-rationality." "He's lying," snapped Handley. "Huh?" "I said, he's lying. He's got to be." "No." Auberson shook his head, stopped when he realized he was becoming intrigued with the sensation. "I can't believe that. He's programed to avoid non-correlation." "Aubie," said Handley intensely, leaning across the table, "Have you ever examined that program carefully?" "I wrote it," the psychologist noted. "That is, the basic structure." "Then you ought to know. It says that he must not lie. It also says that he cannot lie. But nowhere does it say that he has to tell the truth." Auberson started to say, "It's the same thing -- " then closed his mouth with a snap. It wasn't. Handley said, "He can't he to you, Aubie -- but he can mislead you. He can do it by witholding information. He'll tell the truth if you ask him the right questions -- he has to -- but you have to know which questions to ask. He's not going to volunteer the information." Memories of past conversations trickled across the haze in Auberson's head. His gaze became thoughtful. His eyes focused far away. More and more he had to agree with Handley. "But why?" he asked. "Why?" Handley returned his gaze. He said, "That's what we've got to find out." H arlie, do you remember ON IT. IT? Auberson switched off the machine and pushed himself away from the console thoughtfully. He suddenly wanted a cigarette. Damn. Everything down here is for the computer's comfort -- not the people's... H e stood up and stretched, surveyed the length of typecovered readout that drooled down the back of the console. He ripped it off at the end and began folding it into a neat and easily readable stack. "Well? What did you find?" Handley wanted to know. "A hardware failure." "Uh-uh." Handley shook his head. "I won't believe it. More likely, the software." Auberson handed him the readout. "Take a look for yourself." Han'dley paged quickly through it. "I see he's playing semantic games again." "He always does that. It's the adolescent in him. Ask him what's the matter and he'll tell you that matter is a form of energy, usually a way to store or use it." "Charming -- but I don't see a mechanical failure here." "In the primary data units." "Uh-uh. Systems analysis would show it if there were something wrong there -- and none of our monitor units have shown anything amiss." "Still, Harlie can't lie. You said so yourself." "Aubie, I ought to know. There's nothing wrong with those units." "Who's in a better position to tell? You or Harlie?" Handley said nothing. "Come on. Let's go get a cup of coffee and a smoke. I'll tell you a little story." At this hour of the afternoon, the cafeteria was only moderately full. A few technicians here and there were dawdling over a late lunch and one or two upperechelon types were lost in conversation and coffee. But there were more tables empty than full in the brightly lit, institutional room. Auberson popped a couple of pills into his mouth, washed them down with a soft drink. "You know my sister, Alice, don't you?" Handley nodded. "I think we've met." "Yeah. Well, it doesn't matter." Auberson pulled out his cigarette case and lighter, fumbled with them while he talked, "Anyway, she teaches second grade out in California. You knqjv where Pacoima is?" Handley shook his head. It's a suburb of Los Angeles -- out in the San Fernando Valley, the north end. Economically middle class, culturally not quite a ghetto but it's pretty ethnic. About as ethnic as you can get and not be a ghetto. Anyway she teaches second grade there." "So?" "When she first started she was worried about being able to handle the kids -- different racial backgrounds and all that. But within a week she knew she could take care of it. Wrote me a letter saying that kids were kids no matter what color they were. Remember, this is a fairly middle-class neighborhood despite its ethnic character." Auberson took another sip of his soda, continued: "Anyway, she figured she had the situation pretty well under control. No trouble with the kids at all -- except for one. Seems she had a little boy in her class who couldn't sit still, couldn't follow directions, couldn't pay attention, couldn't do anything asked of him, it seemed. Sometimes he was so lethargic she thought he was sick. At other times he'd jump out of his seat and start wandering around the classroom, annoying the other children." "Sounds like a real problem child." A "That's what she thought. She spoke to his first-grade teacher, who admitted to having had the same problems with him -- he was simply unteachable and that was that?" "Your sister didn't accept that," "Right. How'd you guess?" "Because otherwise there wouldn't be any point to the story. Go on." "Oh, yeah," Auberson lit another cigarette, "Well, first thing she did after that was go to the kid's parents. Told them how he acted in school and so on. They said he was like that at home, too. Always annoying his brothers, didn't play well with the other kids. They couldn't figure it out -- he'd been a normal baby and so on. She asked their permission to take the boy to the school shrink, run some tests, see if the child were disturbed or not. Sure, the shrink said -- why not? It was a status symbol for him -- having a kid actually going to the psychiatrist made him look as if he were earning his keep." "And what did the tests show?" "Nothing. Allowing for the child's limited span of concentration and his erratic behavior he was as psychologically healthy as any other seven-year-old. The shrink couldn't find a thing -- and it took him and his helpers nearly a month to reach that conclusion." "So, what happened?" "Well, the school authorities were about ready to give up, recommend remedial training or special schools or something -- the child was definitely a disturbance in the classroom and he certainly wasn't learning anything himself. Then sis happened to mention the boy to a friend of hers with whom she'd gone to school." "And?" "And," continued Auberson, pausing only for another deep drag. "Her friend asked her if she'd taken the child to a doctor." "But -- " "That's what Alice said. And her friend said, 'No, I mean a doctor doctor. Has the kid had a physical checkup?' Do you know what the school doctor found?" "No. What?" "A tapeworm," said Auberson. "A tapeworm?" "Uh-huh." "That was the cause of it all?" "Right. Of course the kid couldn't concentrate -- he was carrying a parasite. He was undernourished. He was hungry, tired and physically uncomfortable. But nobody thought to check him for that -- they all assumed that the hardware was okay and figured instead there had to be something wrong with the programing -- that the kid was round the bend." "So you think Harlie's got a tapeworm?" Auberson returned the look. "What I think is that before we start futzing around with the program we ought to make sure that the machines are all in order." "Look, Aubie, take my word for it -- the systems analysis tapes don't show a thing." "How about the increased activity from his inputs?" "I figure that's only an increase in data transmission. An electronic request for more information usually occurs simultaneously with his periods of non-rationality. "He's getting garbage," noted Auberson, "so he asks for more?" "Maybe he's hoping that more data will clarify the information he's already got." "And maybe more data will make him overload and blow his judgment circuits." "Uh-uh. Harlie monitors his own inputs." "Huh?" "Yeah, didn't you know?" "No. Since when?" "It was a second-stage modification. After we were sure that the judgment circuits were operational we gave Harlie control of his own internal systems." Auberson was suddenly thoughtful. "Well, that's all the more reason to open him up." "Huh?" "Look, you said it yourself. Harlie is trying to mislead us. He may be trying to hide the fact that there's something wrong with him internally." "Why would he do that?" Auberson threw his hands in the air, "How should I know why? Go figure what that tin can is thinking about! I've given up trying to understand why he does what he does. All I want to do is establish a modicum of human control over him." Abruptly, he changed his tone. "Look, have you ever had parents or grandparents go senile on you?" "No," Handley shook his head. "Well, I have. All of a sudden they become irrational. They won't go to a doctor. And if you can get them to one -- they won't cooperate with him. They won't tell him what's wrong. They're too afraid of an operation. They don't want to be cut open. And they don't want to die. Maybe Harlie's afraid of being turned off." "Could be. God knows you threaten him often enough." "Uh-uh. He knows I'm kidding." "Does he?" Handley asked. "That's like kidding a Jew about his having a big nose and being tight with money. You know it's a joke, he knows it's a joke -- but it still hurts." "Okay, so I won't kid him that way any more. I still think you ought to check his systems out first. If you don't find anything, then we'll go over the programs." "All right. What time is it? Yike! It's almost three. I'll have to work like crazy." "Let it go till tomorrow," Auberson cut him off. "Clear his boards, set up what you'll need and close up early. That way you'll have all day to work on him." Handley shrugged, allowed himself to be talked into it. "Okay, I will." He pushed back his chair, stood up. Auberson followed suit. "Hey," he asked suddenly, "did I tell you about this new highclub I discovered? It's called The Glass Trip. The walls, the floor, the ceiling are all one-way glass and there's a multiphase light show behind each pane. So you're looking either into an infinity of mirrors or an infinity of mindblowing lights. Or both." "Hm. Sounds good. We'll have to take it in some time." "Yeah. Maybe this weekend." Auberson tit another cigarette as they left the cafeteria. HI H andley looked as if he needed a grease smudge across one cheek. Twenty years earlier he might have had one. He said, perching on the edge of Auberson's desk, "You'd better start checking your programs." "You didn'tfind anything?" "A dead fly. Want to see?" "No, thanks." "That's all right. Jerry wants it to show the maintenance crew. Wants to chew them out for it." "And then Tie'll put it up on the bulletin board?" "Are you kidding? He collects 'em." Auberson grinned. "Okay -- but that still doesn't solve the problem of Harlie, does it?" "No. Want to come down?" "I guess I'd better." On the way Handley briefed him about the checks his people had been running all morning. As the elevator released the men into Harlie's lobby Auberson stubbed out the last of his cigarette. He asked, "Did you monitor any of his inputs during an actual period of non-rationality?" "Uh, no. We didn't. Frankly, I didn't know how to trigger one." "I think there's a way." "You know something?" "Just a guess." They entered Harlie's chambers. An almost religious silence pervaded the room -- only devotional clickings and tickings could be heard. "You still have your monitors set up?" "Yes." "All right. Let's try something. I'm going to see if I can get Harlie to become non-rational. When I do -- let me know exactly what happens." "Right." Auberson sat at the console. UP.  long moment -- abruptly Auberson found himself sweating "Looks like he's balking," Handley noted, peering over Auberson's shoulder. "Maybe he's afraid." "Could be. Quiet." The typewriter clattered and Auberson peered forward. DO? Auberson frowned at that. A gnawing nagging suspicion was beginning to form. The typer clattered across the paper. Staring across Auberson's shoulder at the list, Handley whistled in surprise. "I'll be damned. Harlie's got taste." "I'm not surprised," Auberson said. He tore off the readout and gave it to Handley. The other folded it once and said, "Still think he's getting it as garbage?" Auberson shook his head. "I've already conceded that point to you. Go feed that stuff into him. I'll stay here and be the -- " he grinned -- "guru." Auberson raised his hands to type, then reread Harlie's last sentence. "Why, the little bugger must be slipping. He just volunteered some information." Auberson stared at that, resisted the temptation to ask if the medium were also the message. Auberson had to read that one several times. "Handley," Auberson called. "He wants more." "He's on maximum feed now." "Double it." "Huh?" "Do something. He wants more." "He wants an overload?" "I think so. It's only an effect -- but in this case the effect may help to stimulate the cause." "Huh?" "Never mind. Just do it." "All right." Handley was duA uberson started to type tered on out of control. "Whoops!" Shouted Handley. "There he goes! And it's a lalapaloozer!" A uberson let Harlie continue. After a bit he stopped reading. He got up and walked over to Handley's monitors. "Well?" "He is really round the bend now. All his meters are way up, pushing close to dangerous overloads." "Fascinating." Auberson stared at the board for a moment. "I would assume then that all of his inputs are becoming non-rational." "Probably." "Why?" "We're checking now." Handley nodded at a nearby monitor unit. Three technicians were scanning schematic diagrams of the computer's actual operating circuits, tracing the ebb and flow of his electronic thought processes. Abruptly, one of the schematics came up red. A flashing white line cut through it. "Sir, we think we've found something." Auberson and Handley stepped over. "What is it -- that white line?" "That's Harlie, sir. That's one of his internal monitor controls." "What's he trying to do? Damp down the non-rationality?" "No, sir." The technician was puzzled. "It looks like he's inducing it -- " "Huh?" said Handley. "That white line -- that's a local source of disruption, a random signal to scramble the data feed." "I thought so," muttered Auberson. "I thought so." "Check his other internal monitors," Handley snapped. "Is this the only one or -- " Another red schematic flashed on the screen, answering his question even before he finished it. The other two technicians also began to find the same types of disturbances on their monitors. "I can't figure it out," one of them muttered. "He's doing it himself. Anywhere he can he's disrupting the rationality of his inputs. He's feeding them incorrect control data." "That's not what those circuits are for," Handley said. "They're for internal correction. Not disruption." "Makes no difference," Auberson put in. "They can be used both ways. There isn't a tool built that can't be used as a weapon." He ran a hand through his hair. "Can you show me exactly what he's doing to that data?" "Sure, we can tap into the line," said one of the techs. "It'll take a few minutes. Which do you want -- visual, audio or print?" "All three. Let's try the visual first -- that should tell me what I want to know." "All right." The technician began to clear his board. Handley looked at Auberson. "This may take a bit. You going to let him continue?" "Why not? Want to see what he's doing?" They crossed over to Console One, a heavy looking set of monitors and typers. Handley picked up the sheets of readout while Auberson felt through his pockets for a cigarette, then stopped when he remembered where he was. "You know," said Handley, reading. "This isn't bad." "Hmp," snorted Auberson. "You would like it. Just proves my point." "Huh? What?" "That's mechanical poetry. Meaningless terms selected at random. It's you perceiving it as having meaning." "You're way off base, Aubie. Listen to this -- " "I know. I read it. All he's doing is fitting words into a poem equation -- according to meter and rhyme and scheme, not meaning. He's not trying to make a statement. The verses are only vaguely structured like sentences, each with a subject and a predicate and so on, but not quite." He grinned. "That's his poetic license. But he's choosing his words at random." "I can't agree with you -- " "Look at the verse structure," Auberson said, "Line one, a noun and a description of it. Line two, first word is a verb, followed by a modification of that verb. Line three, some kind of pun, metaphor or comparison. Line four is a sum-up statement. With random variations, of course." "But he's making statements, Aubie. Look at verse three -- " "I see it. He's still choosing random words -- but he's choosing them from a limited set: verbs and nouns that relate to the sensory processes, mostly hearing and seeing. But they're still random." "Are they?" Handley asked. Auberson looked at the other. "Is he rational or not?" "At the moment, no. Not according to our standards of rationality." "Then how can you tell me that this stuff is meaningful? Is it or isn't it?" "I don't know. That's one of the reasons Harlie was built, to help us to understand human creativity." "Look at those verses again," Auberson demanded. "He's talking about being deafened by silence, about a selfish sharing -- he's playing with non-rationality, wallowing in it. He's throwing his words together for their contradictions, for their distortions." "But isn't that what a poet is supposed to do?" countered Handley. "Choose words for the way they modify each other?" A uberson paused with his mouth open. "Excuse me," he said then. "You're right. He may very well be in the process of creating. By your definition, in fact, he is. He's bringing into existence something that didn't exist before." His brow furrowed. "But just how artistic is it?" "It communicates, Aubie. It does. I can see possible meanings in it. Eor instance -- " "What it says is not what I'm concerned with. What was he trying to say? Did he turn out this stuff on purpose, or is it just a byproduct? An accident?" "It's got to be intentional," Handley said. "It's the logical result of all that we've been doing." "Then answer me this. If this is what he's doing during his socalled periods of non-rationality, what does that make his periods of normalcy?" Handley looked startled. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know." He was spared any further thought on the matter. One of the technicians called to them. "Sir, we've got his inputs tapped." "Come on." Auberson took the readout from Handley, tossed it to a table. "Let's take a look at what he's receiving." The image was a flickering mass of colors, each flashing back and forth, synchronous with the others -- crystal clear blue, brilliant kelly green, bloody fluorescent red. The screen was saturated with color. " 'Images upon my screen...' " muttered Handley. "Huh?" asked the tech. "Nothing. Just a poem." "Oh." "Looks like a damned light show," said one of the others. "That's exactly what it is," Auberson said. "Look, he's broken up the color television image into its component signals. The red has been reversed and the blue has been turned upside down, the green is normal. Or something like that. It also looks like he's done something with the contrast or the brightness -- notice how rich the blacks are and how saturated with color the image is." They watched in silence for a bit. The random flashes of color were intdresting only for their brightness and their meaninglessness. Auberson turned to a technician. "What about his audio?" "Same thing." The man cleared the monitor, pressed another few buttons. A discordant wail blared from an overhead speaker. A pattern of wavy lines appeared on the screen the schematic of the sound. The technician quickly analyzed: "He's playing with the music the same way he did with the picture. He's turned his bass notes high and his high notes low, stressing counterpoint and harmony instead of melody and rhythm. And so on." "All right. I get the point," said Auberson. "You can turn off that noise. Check his print scanners now." A moment later: "They're mixing up the words at random. Juggling them." "Scrambling the letters too?" "No, just the words. Sometimes sentences." "Uh-huh," stated the psychologist. "It's all beginning to fit." "What does?" asked Handley. "What's he doing?" "He's tripping out." "We knew that -- " "No, I mean literally tripping out. He's distorting the perceptions of his sensory inputs. The same thing that anyone does who gets high. He's trying to blow his mind by massive non-rational sensory overloads." "Can we stop it?" "Sure -- just rip out his internal monitor controls so he can't create his own disruptions. That's the cause of the whole thing." "Even that's not necessary, sir," said one of the techs. "We can disconn'ect him on the boards."  "All right. Do it." "Wait a minute," said Handley. "If he's high or drunk or whatever and you suddenly bring him down -- won't that be traumatic?" could be -- but it could also leave him defenseless. We could find out everything we want to know in the space of a few minutes. You might call it electroshock treatment." He looked suddenly grim. "Do it." "It could kill him," murmured Handley. Auberson looked back at him. "He's not alive, boy. He's not." Handley did not look convinced. He followed Auberson to the console. Auberson took his seat before the typer and waited. He watched as the words poured across the paper. Now it was prose. "Any time you're ready, sir." "Okay," called Auberson. At the same time he typed into the machine; Auberson took a breath. Mustn't blow my cool. Mustn't blow it... The machine hesitated. BY US. The machine considered this answer. It was a long time before Auberson got up from the chair and when he did, he forgot to turn off the typer. i Perhaps the only science in this story is one of communication, the only fiction -- survival! Y OU can still see this sign crudely made by some humble workman and warped with time, in one of the old Moscow lanes. Many years ago it was nailed to the gray, weatherworn fence, with the idea that its bright colors would be all the more striking against the dingy background. And, indeed, at first it caught the eyes of every passerby. People slowed and muttered individual heads and muttered individual variations on one theme; What will they think of next? The sign depicted a large horn made of pure sheet copper. A little man in overalls shoveled rubbish and refuse into its narrow end, while from the wide end came a stream of useful and necessary objects: rolls of woolen fabric, bakery products, penknives, slippers, harmonicas, and even a bottle of vodka, its still unopened top gleaming in the midst of all those riches. Nursemaids and young mothers walking their children through the lane would invariably stop before the picture and say to their charges, "A horn of plenty." But years passed. Bitter frosts bent the geometrically faultless oval. The burning rays of the sun dimmed the polished copper. And the winds swept away from the picture the rubbish, the shovel and many of the objects. Time simplified the theme of the picture. All that comes forth from the throat of the horn now is a phonograph and the bottle, with a jagged, broken neck. And the little .man, robbed of his shovel, stands bending over the horn, peering into it through the narrow end. Soon, soon the little man will vanish with the wind in the wake of his shovel. His days are counted. And his entire woeful pose seems to say, Now, isn't that a pity! The machine broke down. But how it worked, how it worked! In short, nothing is left of the old enchantment of the gleaming copper horn. It lost its character. It blended with the fence. Passersby no longer slow down their steps in the lane. And even the policeman, Petrov, whose post for the past fifteen years has kept him standing almost directly across from the sign, now skims over its tarnished surface with unseeing eyes as he scans the wide open spaces of the lane. On the whole, of course, it doesn't matter. Is there a sign, is there no sign? What difference? Of the thousands of people who passed the spot in the course of the years only a handful were sufficiently moved by its message to bring their scrap to the collection depot. And even with those few the action did not turn into a habit. It remained an isolated incident which they hastened to forget, as people generally prefer to forget trivial facts belonging to the category considered unworthy of recording in biographies. Nevertheless, the horn was there. Forgotten, merged into the grayness of the fence, it seemed to wait for the one and only person who could appreciate in full the significance of the artist's idea and be inspired by it to great deeds. chilly autumn day when a short man in a thick woolen coat of a style long out of fashion walked along the lane. His felt hat, which had seen better times, was pulled low over his eyes. His hands were in his pockets and his elbow pressed to his side two small, dogeared books: Teach Yourself to Play the Seven-Stringed Guitar and Teach Yourself a Foreign Language. The spot that specified the language was covered with a large inkblot. This man, who had evidently not yet mastered all the languages and did not yet know how to play a seven-stringed guitar, strolled along the fence at a leisurely pace. His day's chores over, he had no need to hurry. A rented guitar waited for him at home. Why not take a walk and look around? He walked along the fence with the sign we have described earlier and it caught his eye. He slowed his steps, then stopped altogether. For a while he stood there, shifting from foot to foot, then he moved nearer to the fence. He rubbed a part of the picture with his sleeve, glanced at it again, sighed, and prepared to continue his stroll. But suddenly his face lit up and he slapped himself on the forehead. "Well. I'll be -- " he said under his breath, snatched a notebook from his pocket, jotted something down and almost ran to the end of the lane. At home he did not even glance at the guitar, which gleamed invitingly with its delicately yellow sides. 'He looked for paper, took out an almost new indelible pencil and feverishly set to work. Totally absorbed in his idea, he jotted down formulas, multiplied, divided, and made quick diagrams and sketches. When his stock of note paper ran out he solemnly drew a large sheet of thick paper from the closet and tacked it directly to the wall. The indelible pencil poised, suspended in the air before the sheet for a few moments, then -- prestoa dot appeared on the blank surface. An hour later the sheet was peppered with such dots. The little man stepped aside, calculated something, then walked up to the wall again and with one sweep collected the dots into a single flowing line. He stepped back again, grunted and rubbed his hands with satisfaction. The wall was now adorned with a picture of a horn of plenty, exactly like the one that can still be seen in the old Moscow lane. "Stepan Onufrievich, my primus stove is broken. I wonder if you'd take a look at it," a voice said through the partly opened door. "You primus stove? I'm sorry, I can't now. I'm too busy," he answered absent-mindedly, still admiring his work. "You see. I'm inventing -- " "What a head, what a head, he's inventing again!" the neighbor said sympathetically and closed the door. Stepan Onufrievich Ogurtsov was known among the neighbors as an eccentric but everybody liked him. "A 'golden pair of hands," they would say, bringing him their broken primus stoves, locks and sewing machines to repair. For the children in the yard he made snares and bird cages, repaired portable radio receivers. No electrician was ever called to the house; replacing a burned-out fuse was to him a trifling job. He mended cheap old television set? so well that people from neighboring houses came to see the programs. "Ogurtsov himself repaired it," neighbors would boast. "It will last a lifetime." He mended a doll for the house manager's daughter. When he got through with it, the doll suddenly began to speak and move its arms and legs -- and exactly at eight every evening it would close its eyes and topple on its side until eight in the morning. "We don't need an alarm clock," the manager told everyone enthusiastically and took to dropping in at Onufriev's for a friendly cup of tea. Petrov knew nothing of all this. He therefore became suspicious when Stepan Onufrievich began to frequent the lane. Not that he disliked this mysterious man who could stand for a whole hour before the nearly obliterated sign. The man was always sober, clean-shaven and neatly dressed. Nevertheless, the policeman's professional sixth sense told him there was some secret behind his actions, something straight out of a detective novel. And so, whenever the little man in the thick woolen coat of unfashionable cut would reappear in the lane, Petrov's chest, criss-crossed with straps, would heave and his heart would beat more rapidly. What attracted the stranger to the sign? It was impossible to answer this question. Yet Petrov did not venture to accost him directly and ask to see his documents -- after all, the little man's general conduct always remained within the bounds of decency and legality. One day, choosing a convenient moment, Petrov glanced around and saw that the lane was deserted. He left his post and cautiously approached the sign. A detailed study of the picture, starting at the bottom, going on to the middle and ending at the top, disclosed nothing that could either sadden or gladden anyone. Ogurtsov, however, was now visiting the lane with increasing frequency. Whether it rained, whether the sun was baking hot or frost nipped the cheeks, he came and spent long hours contemplating the sign. He looked at it from one side, then from another. He would step back, move nearer, as if searching for something. Sometimes everything seemed to be going smoothly and Petrov saw the inventor walking jauntily, whistling merry tunes. The worndown heels of his shoes tapped out a light, dancing rhythm. He whispered and muttered. The policeman's keen ear would catch such words as: "Direct current... copper mounting... what a beauty, what a beauty!" There were also days when nothing seemed right. The policeman would see Ogurtsov in dampened spirits, shrunk into himself. He would stand before the sign, his back hunched, his hands in his pockets. Oh, no, it was not easy, it was not easy for Stepan Onufrievich to invent the horn of plenty. It was nothing like fixing a television set or screwing in a new fuse. But Ogurtsov knew himself. Never in his life had he tackled a job he could not handle. Even with television sets, he'd sometimes take a look, and think a while, and say, No, I wouldn't tackle it. Stepan Onufrievich knew his capacity. Therefore he would not give in.  the idea came into my head, he said to himself, it means I can do it. At first he made the horn perfectly circular in every cross section. He mounted strong magnets all around it. He charged it with static electricity. The horn sent out sparks but that was all. Discharge is too weak, his intuition prompted him and he made the horn rectangular. It began to look like a large, sharply bent phonograph horn. It sent out stronger sparks, small globe lightnings shot out of its center now and then. But It was still far from the real thing. Ogurtsov's neighbors gradually stopped bringing him their broken machines and irons. Only the house manager still dropped in for tea. They drank glass after glass and Ogurtsov heard as through a veil of sleep: Quite a gadget! IVe don't need an alarm clock. No, no, the thought kept hammering in the inventor's brain. It should not be round. Perhaps it should not be square either? Perhaps oval? Soon the horn became oval. It stood on a large wooden trestle in the middle of the room, covered from the curious eye by wide folds of burlap. The inventor came home in the evening, ate hurriedly, cleared the table and went to work. "Well, my dear little horn," he would say aloud. "Now we'll clear out your belly. Now we'll see how your throat will sing." HE burlap would be removed and the room would come alive with the reddish glow of copper. The mirror-smooth sides of the horn flashed sparks, glittered with rainbow colors. Each time he threw aside the burlap cover, Stepan Onufrievich went numb with ecstasy and stood, unblinking, for a long time, contemplating his magnificent creation. In its presence he saw himself as important, tall, almost great. The inventor had good reason to be proud. After all, it is no secret that many had tried to construct a similar device before but no one had succeeded. And here, in this room, the crater of the horn already brought forth real things: once it threw out heavy leather boots, three of them at once and, for some reason, all for the same foot. Another time a Persian rug slid out of it. You're on the right track, Stepan, Ogurtsov said silently to himself on that occasion. A little more work and the machine can be put to general use without anyone's blushing for it. The inventor's imagination obligingly envisaged all sorts of pleasant scenes. Ogurtsov saw himself standing on a high platform next to the horn, clearing his throat into his fist, and speaking to the assembled audience. Here it is, citizensl I invented it. Now take what you wish and use it well. It works perfectly. But don't forget to oil it. And if anyone has a broken television set or bicycle, bring it over. I'll help you repair it... These were not idle dreams. The horn worked better and better every day. It rarely went wrong. And one day Stepan Onufrievich smoothed out the brim of his hat, put on his holiday suit, polished his shoes to a high shine and proceeded to the appropriate government office. Without a moment's hesitation he stepped across the threshold of the big building full of busy people. He walked past the imposing, shiny signboard, introduced himself as an inventor and was directed to the third floor, to Molotkov's office. Ogurtsov went up, modestly entered the office and came into Molotkov's presence. The young man in an elegant, stylish suit sat at the desk and labored mightily. He turned the pages of some books, made notes, kept pulling out folders from the drawers and smoked and smoked without a stop. Every few seconds the telephone rang, and he picked up the receiver, saying "Molotkov, yes." Such was the man the inventor had been directed too. For a moment he hesitated, thinking that he might come another time, the man was much too busy to be disturbed. But the latter suddenly put down the receiver, smiled amiably, and asked, "You want to see me?" Then, noticing the visitor's embarrassment, he added: "Sit down, sit down, please, and tell me what it is." Ogurtsov glanced at the window, then at the telephone, collected himself, and blurted out, "Well, it's about my invention. A machine, you might say. I mean, a horn of plenty." And he sketched a diagram. Molotkov's eyes simply glittered when Onufriev finished his description. He pulled on his cigarette, settled down more firmly in his chair. Then, narrowing his eyes, he looked straight at Onufriev and breathed out a cloud of smoke. "Efficiency?" "Eighty-ninety," estimated Ogurtsov. "Let's go. Let's go directly to your place," Molotkov said decisively. He immediately picked up the telephone and barked out, "Postpone conference. Bring the car!" The new limousine rushed at top speed and Ogurtsov was suddenly overcome with doubts. When the car stopped sharply before a traffic light he remembered that he had expended his entire stock of scrap. How would he demonstrate the horn?  inventor had just recently moved to a new apartment. He was now living on the seventh floor, with a fine view of a beautiful, ideally tidy street. The garbage collector passed slowly along it every hour, collecting all the rubbish that chanced to be there. The lack of raw materials essential to his experiments drove the inventor frantic. He had to spend precious time on trips to less wellcared for districts. In specially urgent instances he had to run down to the janitor and literally plead with him for even a single pail of trash and make a solemn promise to return it. Otherwise the janitor would not give it to him. For if he did, how could he prove to his superiors that he had done his work? And this, indeed, was the reason why Ogurtsov had been compelled to spend several extra days in reconstructing the horn. Now the machine could work in reverse. When you turned the handle to the right the horn transformed scrap into valuables. When you turned it left the process was reversed. But be that as it may, at this moment there was no scrap at hand and the janitor had gone with his wife to a concert at the conservatory of music. As he escorted Molotkov to his room Ogurtsov looked utterly crestfallen. He won't believe me, he was saying to himself. He won't. As soon as Molotkov saw the horn he threw off his jacket and vest, rolled up his shirtsleeves and plunged his hands into the mechanism's entrails. Stepan Onufrievich stood next to him, obediently giving explanations. "So the wave guide is grounded?" came from the belly of the horn. "Yes, it is," answered Ogurtsov, astonished at the engineer's quick grasp. "Falling characteristic?" came from the horn again. "Yes," confirmed the inventor. At last Molotkov emerged from the machine, tidied himself, lit a cigarette and walked around the horn once again. Then he went to the window, threw out his cigarette and lit another. He was agitated. Ogurtsov stood silently, waiting for the verdict. The engineer was at the window. A broad stream of cars rushed along the street below. The people behind the wheels hurried along on their own business, suspecting nothing. Today they were still ignorant of the marvels transpiring in that room on the seventh floor. Tomorrow everyone would know. Molotkov turned, went over to the inventor and pressed his hand. "Congratulations, Stepan Onufrievich. You've done a great job. It's a pity we cannot see it in action now -- but when we get the commission together, we'll bring as much scrap as you'll need." And, after pressing the inventor's hand again, Molotkov rushed away down the stairs, skipping two at a time. His working day was not yet over. He still had to attend the postponed conference and take care of a number of other matters. when Ogurtsov was to demonstrate his invention. In his favorite checked shirt, smelling of triple strength eau-de-cologne, he went down into the street and walked toward the old lane. On such a day he could not omit visiting the spot where chance had aided in the birth of the great idea. Ogurtsov entered the lane. Everything was in its appointed spot. The yellow body of the horn was still visible on the fence. The policeman, Petrov, was still at his post. Ogurtsov approached the sign and stopped before it with a solemn air, as though he were about to take an oath. There was nothing extraneous in his solemn mood; he had no vain desire to place the sign into a golden frame or to exhibit it in a public place or to build a monument in the lane. The inventor and the sign were motionless before each other, like old warriors who had seen many battles, who had paid the price of experience, but had done their work! And neither the noise of passing trucks nor the hurried steps of passersby could shatter the excited, gala mood of this meeting of two victors, who had succeeded in turning dusty everyday realities into a straight road to triumph. Petrov, as usual, devoted his attention to the traffic and the movement of pedestrians. Nevertheless, the daytime visit of his old acquaintance did not escape his eye. Neither did he miss the new element in the entire bearing of the frequenter of the lane: the lightness and ease of movement, the calm confidence. Ogurtsov looked like a man who had thrown off a heavy load and stood free and light, as though ready to fly away. And when Ogurtsov approached the policeman, Petrov glanced into his gay, triumphant eyes and immediately understood that something of utmost importance had happened and that he would now be initiated into the mystery. "Well, Sergeant, let's have a smoke, shall we?" said Ogurtsov, taking a pack of excellent cigarettes from his pocket. "I've been coming to your lane for two years but we've never had a talk before." Petrov took a cigarette, brought it up to the cigarette lighter of an unusual shape which the visitor held out to him and listened to the whole story, from beginning to end. The inventor talked unhurriedly, pausing now and then to think over his formulations, omitting facts impossible to explain without a pencil and paper. At times his gaze misted over, as if turning to the past. and a strange smiled played on his face. At those times his thoughts flew to the most cherished triumphs of his bygone years. "It's a good thing you've done," the sergeant told him. Neither of them suspected that they would meet again that day and in quite another place. Ogurtsov went to visit his friend, the house manager. Petrov was summoned urgently to his precinct and told that he was being given an important and responsible assignment -- to keep order during the tests of the machine invented by Ogurtsov. It was a truly fantastic coincidence! "Oh, yes, I know," the sergeant boasted. "Continuous action, with a copper casing and a reverse lever. I know the inventor very well," he added. "They're gems, those fellows in my precinct," his chief said to himself with satisfaction as he wrote out the assignment. test site was just out of town, near a gay birch grove. The sun shone brightly down on the platform. Infrequent gusts of wind rustled among the birch leaves. As they waited for the start of the test the members of the commission strolled under the young birches, enjoying the shady coolness. Molotkov, who had arrived first with a group of young research assistants found a suitable clearing and started a game of badminton. His strokes were strong and precise and he hardly left the spot he stood on. His firm muscles rolled under the tanned skin whenever he swung sharply to meet the flying shuttlecock. Ogurtsov hurried back and forth over the experiment site, giving instructions. He had to keep an eye on everything. He took great pleasure in making the arrangements and was in an excellent mood. The horn had been delivered in perfect condition. There had not been a single hitch in the smooth progression of events. And he unexpectedly met Petrov again -- the man was, after all, someone he knew. "How did you get here?" he asked the policeman. "I've been assigned to guard you against any eventuality." Petrov was suddenly timid before him. "Oh, well, you cannot guard against chance," Ogurtsov said jestingly. "Take, for example, the way I got the idea for the horn. I walked along the lane, looked up and there was the sign. On another day I might have paid no attention but this time -- bam! -- it came over me. Pure chance." He went off to receive the scrap. It turned out that only one truckload had been sent. "It's not enough." the inventor said. "Do you really need more?" the commission member responsible for the delivery of scrap questioned doubtfully. "It's a continuous action mechanism. No matter how much you put in, it wouldn't be enough." "But how much do you need?" he was asked and everyone stood still to hear his answer. "Ten truckloads," said Ogurtsov firmly, breaking into a sweat of joyous excitement. He had never had such quantities of raw materials at his disposal before. When the tenth truck left the site, the commission assembled around the horn, and Molotkov, who had taken a swim after his game and therefore looked especially fresh, delivered a short speech. "There have been other instances in history," he began, "when individual inventors outdistanced their epochs by a hundred, a hundred and fifty or even more years. They exemplify a remarkable characteristic, one might say, of human nature. Where the collective thought of society is impotent the local flash of the pioneer discoverer saves the day. Where the flash does not work by itself, collective thought steps in! And so it is one for all, and all for one. It is to this breed of inventors that the bold experimenter, Stepan Onufrievich Ogurtsov, belongs. According to our estimates the machine he has created could be expected in a hundred and sixty years or so but not any sooner. Even in the presence of the completed model it is almost impossible at the present stage of science fully to comprehend the finer points about its action. Nevertheless, the model is here and is ready to operate." Stormy applause greeted this introduction and Molotkov stepped down from the dais. It was Ogurtsov's turn. He checked the electric contacts for the last time, shoveled scrap into the horn's narrow opening with his own hands and turned the lever to the left. The horn shuddered, growled quietly, and the gray mass of trash crept into the bowels of the mechanism, as though of its own will. rOR a few moments nothing came from the other end of the horn. The mysterious process of transformation went on within it. Suddenly it whistled, sighed, and various objects began to tumble out of it directly onto the ground. It was difficult to tell what they were, for no sooner did an object appear than it was covered by the next one. The pyramid of finished goods grew as the assembled group watched. "Woolen socks," someone managed to notice. "And here's a samovar," came from the center of the group. But these were isolated voices. The great majority of the commission stood dumbfounded. And the products still poured and poured from the horn, astonishing everyone with their variety. At one point a teen-ager's bicycle rolled up to the pyramid. The horn's construction was not yet ideal and the inventor himself would have been hard put to say exactly what was to be expected. Ogurtsov also was quite overcome. And who, indeed, could help being affected by the wonders taking place on the platform? Deep silence prevailed even after the last bits of wood from the huge pile of rubbish delivered to the grounds by the fcn trucks had rushed through the copper oval, transformed into a long garland of pins. It was like the silence in a concert hall after the great conductor waved his baton for the final time. And suddenly there was motion. People excitedly embraced one another and the inventor. "Swing him, swing him!" everyone cried and Ogurtsov flew up into the air for the first time in his life. Only one man preserved utter calm in the midst of this pandemonium. Dressed in a large, wide coat, he stood still, pondering something with great concentration. His face reflected the intensity of his thought. "It needs verification, of course. A good deal of verification," his lips whispered. He was known among his colleagues for his extreme scrupulousness and assiduity. And also for the fact that even the most extraordinary events could not ruffle his absolute calm. It was said that he had once witnessed a severe earthquake. Buildings had crashed all around him and a yawning abyss had opened up only a yard away but he had merely commented, "How impressive are the forces of natural phenomena. When I come home I'll have to tell the family about this." His name was Parovozov, and his opinion was held in great esteem by many people. As soon as the first outburst of rejoicing subsided, Paravozov stepped forward and asked, "Does the device contain a register to keep tally of the products manufactured?" "No, I haven't invented that." Stepan Onufrievich spread his arms guiltily. "There hasn't been enough time." "Complete it, complete it, by all means, my dear man," Parovozov admonished amiably. "And now, the second point. This machine can evidently prove valuable to the economy. But to approve it the commission must first check every aspect of its operation. Here, for instance," he waved a slip of paper, "it is written that the construction has a reverse movement -- in other words, that it can process the objects produced back to their original state. Can we see it with our own eyes?" "That's the easiest thing," Ogurtsov smiled. "But what for?" "Everything must be done properly," Parovozov declared. "Well, in that case -- " Ogurtspv turned the lever to the right. The other members of the commission, still excited over everything they had seen, did not pay too much attention to the little interchange. "All right, what's the difference. Let's see." The victory was obvious in any case. And the mountain of things began to melt away. Objects flew into the mouth of the horn, clanking, in larger and larger quantities. The opening was much wider here and could receive far more than the narrow end. Many objects rose into the air and floated around the horn, colliding with each other in response to the powerful force drawing them in. Clouds of dust rose over the area. Small twisters danced around, occasionally combining into a large, powerful one. And when a straw hat was snatched from the head of one of the observers and carried up into the clouds the entire commission, as one man, dropped to the ground. Only the unbending Parovozov remained standing. He caught at the brim of his hat and was just about to make a pronouncement about the mighty forces of nature when a strong current of air raised him up and carried him irresistibly toward the roaring throat of the horn. His body whirled lightly in mid-air, pushed aside several smaller objects, and smoothly entered the machine with the general stream. Parovozov had not even had time to remove his hand from his hat. No one saw this except Ogurtsov. Everyone else was lying pressed to the ground, trying to shield their heads with their hands. The inventor desperately tried to pull the lever back to zero position, but it was stuck. He bore down on the damned lever with his whole puny weight, but it would not budge. "What a scandal! What a scandal!" he whispered past trembling lips and beads of sweat rolled off his forehead. Ogurtsov looked around: Parovozov was already half swallowed by the horn. "Dig in with your hands, dig in, you damned fool!" he shouted in a voice he did not recognize as his own. Then he abandoned the lever and threw himself where only Parovozov's legs were visible among the whirling armchairs, washstands, and bolts of fabric. He gripped those legs with all his strength and both were enveloped in a cloud of dust. Seeing that the situation was critical, the policeman Petrov covered half the distance between himself and the horn with one mighty leap and then crawled on his belly across the dangerous zone. But suddenly the horn grunted, boomed like a copper bell and stopped by itself. recovered and gathered around the machine. There is no need to describe their dismay over the calamity. Besides, without Ogurtsov no one knew, properly speaking, how to approach the horn. They tried to turn the lever to the left. It turned easily enough but that was all. Only a trickle of molten metal poured out of the horn and congealed. Yes it was quite a situation. For days engineers and mechanics struggled to reanimate the horn. Their efforts proved almost totally without results. All they managed was to restore the reverse action to some extent, so that the horn could process useful objects into scrap. Molotkov grew pale and lost weight. He did not leave the horn for a moment all those days. Someone began to revile Parovozov but Molotkov cut him off sharply. "It's our own fault! The Parovozovs should not be allowed within a mile of new developments. And we -- " Someone else blamed Ogurtsov himself for leaving no clear instructions while there was still time. "Try and explain it," Molotkov countered wearily. "It's centuries ahead. As mysterious as human computers. They'll juggle millions in their minds -- but how? Try to understand." The policeman Petrov suffered from the grievous loss along with everyone. Besides, it seemed to him that he alone was responsible for everything. And he could not bear to meet the eyes of the commission members. How could he have permitted this outrage to occur? Such an idiotic request -- to make the machine work backward! Parovozov now seemed to him one of those vicious hooligans who sauntered around idly in narrow trousers. And he almost convinced himself that he had once taken Parovozov to the precinct for disorderly conduct while in a state of intoxication. But he had taken pity on him and let him go without reporting to his place of employment. In reality, of course, no such incident had ever taken place. Parovozov had lived a most exemplary life and no one could have brought any complaints against him. As for the horn, it was turned over to a group of scientists for restoration. However, in the course of the catastrophe it had been reduced to such a condition that to "restore" it meant to invent it anew. For the time being, alas, there is little hope of success. After all, not everyone is capable of making an invention that only our remote descendants will be equal to. gineer. A participant in several scientific expeditions, including one to study the Tungus meteorite, he began to publish SF in #, and has since published many stories and one collection (#). Horn oj Plenty will be included in a collection of recent Soviet science fiction, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, to be published by Holt, Rinehart  Winston. (continued from page #I ) so than this one. What can be seen here, in fleeting glimpses, are the parts of a "real" Asimov... the different sorts of mood and memory which, stored up in a brain that never forgets, operate to condition the words that appear on the paper in the magic Asimov typewriter. And he comes off well, this Asimov does, compared to your standard of comparison. Having found this, however, the buyer will find little else that falls into a coherent pattern except with reference to the Asimov personality. About all that can be said for this uneven book, as distinguished from other recent uneven Asimov collections, is that it does serve as a catalogue. Coming upon a particularly attractive selection, such as one of his biographical sketches of scientists, the reader can go out and get a copy of Doubleday's Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, for instance, and really dig in. This is not a negligible virtue in Opus #. Considered as entertainment, however, the book as a whole demands so many shifts of personality and attitude in the reader that no one, not even Asimov, could keep up with them comfortably. Asimov himself, after all, only did it in half a lifetime. If Opus # were a book to put down and pick up at intervals, as some other eollection might be, this would not be a crucial fault. But one can't do that in this case, or else one loses the thread of the narrative about Ike's life and thought. What we have, in fact, is a stunt. A book put together to serve the needs of a luncheon turn of phrase and -- Is it cruel to say this? -- the same sort of complaisance with number magic that Asimov several times decries in Opus #. Ike should not have so many luncheons with editors who fall under his spell. A more objective editorial board would not have passed a book like Asimov's Mysteries. for instance, with its one or two good stories and its tens of thousands of words of filler. A really good editor in a position to keep Ike from dancing away -- Is there still such a man and do the economics still permit it? -- would force him away from the kind of ideas that come facile to the educated mind and nearer to the stuff that lives in the heart. As it is, this shouldn't be Opus #. It should be, maybe. Opus #, and the # should be what the world calls fiction and what the writer knows is' truth because mind has been bent to the aid of heart, as distinguished from its concealment.  worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your pages, containing stories by such masters of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, John W. 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Several years ago a group of famous authors including Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, and several others joined forces to start the Famous Writers School. They poured everything they know about writing into a remarkable new kind of piofessional training course which trains you at home in your spare time. You begin with the fundamentals of all good writing. Then you get advanced training in the specially of your choice. Each of your assignments is examined by an instructor who is a professional writer or editor. He giSes over your work word by word, blue-penciling changes right on your manuscript. Then he returns it to you with a long letter of advice on how to improve your writing. This training works well. Our studen have sold their writing to hundreds ( publications. Free Aptitude Test offered To find out if you, too, have writir ability worth developing, send for tf School's revealing Aptitude Test. If yo test well, or offer other evidence of wri ing aptitude -- you may enroll. Howeve there is no obligation to do so. I I Famous Writers School I Dept. W-# I Westport Connecticut # I I Wcini lo know if I have writing aptitude I worth developing. Please mail me, I without obligation, your Aptitude Test j and illustrated brochure, I Mr. I Mrs Age j Miss K'ircic luic plciisc prim I Sifcci j City I Stale Zip j Accredited by the Accrediting Commission I of the National Home Study Council. Galaxy Is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. February, # Vol. #, No. # Gerald Jonas Theodore Sturgeon A. Bertram Chandler Robert Silverberg Editor Editor Emeritus Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Publisher Associate Publisher Dannie Plachta Zane Kotker Vaughn Bode' Algis Budrys suggested by The Shaker Revival lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. To Live Again Robert Silverberg Masque World Alexei Panshin The Palace of Eternity Bob Shaw The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K. LeGuin Silverberg (Doubleday, #), is a novel about power and about the urge to power which probably is based on the common human craving for immortality. The people in this book, set in an indefinite but apparently twenty-first-century United States, have both financial resources based on superb business ability and a process for recording and transplanting personalities. The Scheffing process which ensures a form of survival after death and multiple personalities within the living -- is a frankly commercial one. If you have enough money you can afford to have your memories recorded periodically. At the same time you can purchase the recorded memories of others. These memories are fed into your brain, where they evidence themselves as supernumerary persona, exhibiting something very much like their donor's personality and offering all his remembered experiences. Thus a demi-virgin can acquire the manner of a mature young woman overnight -- provided both of them command enough wealth to enjoy the services of the (Please turn to page #) These #reat minds were Kosicrudans Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the ree book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. copy of "The Mas tery of Life" -- Ugationii A non prohc organiza iron.:: Address : Scribe E.R. In this final decade of the twentieth century sainthood is only for the very young! TO: Arthur Stock, Executive Editor, Ideas Illustrated, New York City, # Hudson Junction Rotel, Hudson Junction, N.Y. "The Shaker Revival." Fix, tapes upcoming. Thursday, June #, # -- The work of Salvation goes forward in this green and pleasant Hudson Valley hamlet to the high-pitched accompaniment of turbo-car exhausts and the amplified beat of the "world's loudest jag-rock band." Where worm-eaten apples fell untended in abandoned orchards less than a decade ago a new religious sect has burst into full bloom. In their fantastic fouryear history the so-called New Shakers -- or United Society of Believers (Revived), to give them their official title -- have provoked the hottest controversy in Christendom since Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five thesis to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October Thirty-one, Fifteen-seventeen. Boasting a membership of more than a hundred thousand today, the New Shakers have been processing applications at the rate of nine hundred a week. Although a handful of these "recruits" are in their early and middle twenties -- and last month a New Jersey man was accepted into the Shaker Family at Wildwood at the ripe old age of thirty-two -- the average New Shaker has not yet reached his eighteenth birthday. Richard F, one of the members of the "First Octave" who have been honored with "uncontaminated" Shaker surnames, explains it this way: "We've got nothing against feebies. They have a piece of the Gift inside just like anyone else. But it's hard for them to travel with the Family. Jag-rock hurts their ears, and they can't sync with the Four Noes, no matter how hard they try. So we say to them, 'Forget it, star. Your wheels are not our wheels. But we're all going somewhere, right? See you at the other end.' " It is hardly surprising that so many "feebies" -- people over thirty -- have trouble with the basic Believers' Creed: "No hate. No war. No money. No sex." Evidently, in this final decade of the twentieth century, sainthood is only possible for the very young. The "Roundhouse" at Jerusalem West is, in one sense, the Vatican of the nationwide movement. But in many ways it is typical of the New Shaker communities springing up from La Jolla, California, to Seal Harbor, Maine. At last count there were sixty-one separate "tribes," some containing as many as fifteen "families" of a hundred and twenty-eight members each. Each Shaker family is housed in an army-surplus pliodesic dome -- covering some ten thousand square feet of bare but vinyl-hardened earth -- which serves as bedroom, living room, workshop and holy tabernacle, all in one. There is a much smaller satellite dome forty feet from the main building which might be called the Outhouse, but isn't -- the New Shakers themselves refer to it as Sin City. In keeping with their general attitude toward the bodily functions. Sin City is the only place in the Jerusalem West compound that is off-limits to visitors. As difficult as it may be for most North Americans to accept, today's typical Shaker recruit comes from a background of unquestioned abundance and respectability. There is no taint of the Ghetto and no evidence of serious behavioral problems. In fact. Preliminary School records show that these young people Often excelled in polymorphous play and responded quite normally to the usual spectrum of chemical and electrical euphorics. As underteens, their proficiency in programed dating was consistently rated "superior" and they were often cited as leaders in organizing multiple-outlet experiences. Later, in Modular School, they scored in the fiftieth percentile or better on Brand-Differentiation tests. In short, according to all the available figures, they would have had no trouble gaining admission to the college of their choice or obtaining a commission in the Consumer Corps or qualifying for a Federal Travel Grant. Yet for some reason, on the very brink of maturity, they turned their backs on all the benefits their parents and grandparents fought so hard for in the Cultural Revolution -- and plunged instead into a life of regimented sense-denial. On a typical summer's afternoon at Jerusalem West, with the sun filtering through the translucent dome and bathing the entire area in a soft golden glow, the Roundhouse resembles nothing so much as a giant, queenless beehive. In the gleaming chromeand-copper kitchen blenders whirr and huge pots bubble as a squad of white-smocked Food Deacons prepares the copious vegetable stew that forms the staple of the Shaker diet. In the sound-proofed garage sector the Shop Deacons are busily transforming another hopeless-looking junkheap into the economical, turbine-powered "hotrod" -- one already known to connoisseurs in this country and abroad as the Shakerbike -- and the eight Administrative Deacons and their assistants are directing family business from a small fiberwalled cubicle known simply as The Office. And the sixteen-piece band is cutting a new liturgical tape for the Evening Service -- a tape that may possibly end up as number one on the federal pop charts like the recent Shaker hit. This Freeway's Plenty Wide Enough. No matter where one turns beneath the big dome one finds young people humming, tapping their feet, breaking into snatches of song and generally living up to the New Shaker motto: "Work is Play." One of their most popular songs -- a characteristic coupling of Old Shaker words to a modern jag-rock background -- concludes with this no-nonsense summation of the Shaker life-style: It's the Gift to be simple. The Gift to be free, The Gift to come down Where the Gift ought to be. P.M.) TO: The Dean, Skinner Free Institute, Ronkonoma, New Jersey # Hudson Junction Rotel, Hudson Junction, N.Y. Friend: My son Bruce Senter, age #, was enrolled in your institute for a six-week seminar in Applied Physiology beginning May #. According to the transcript received by his Modular cessfully completed his course of studies on June #. Mrs. Senter and I have had no word from him since. He had earlier talked with his Advisor about pursuing a Field-research project in Intensive Orgasm. I would appreciate any further information you can give me as to his post-seminar whereabouts. Thank you. TO: Stock, Ex-Ed, LI. Interview with Harry G (born "Guardino"), member of First Octave. Edited Transcript, June #. Q: Suppose we begin by talking a little about your position here as one of the -- well, what shall I say? Founding Fathers of the Shaker Revival? A: First you better take a deep breath, star. That's all out of sync. There's no Founding Fathers here. Or Founding Mothers or any of that jag. There's only one Father and one Mother and they're everywhere and nowhere, understand? Q: What I meant was -- as a member of the First Octave you have certain duties and responsibilities -- A: Like I said, star, everyone's equal here. Q: I was under the impression that your rules stress obedience to a hierarchy? A: Oh, there has to be order, sure, but it's nothing personal. If you can punch a computer -- you sync with The Office Deacons. If you make it with wheels you're in the Shop crew. Me -- I fold my bed in the morning, push a juice-horn in the band and talk to reporters when they ask for me. That doesn't mak.e me Pope. Q: What about the honorary nomenclature? A: What's that? Q: The initials. Instead of last names. A: Oh, yeah. They were given to us as a sign. You want to know what of? Q: Please. A: As a sign that no one's stuck with his birth kit. Sure, you may start with a Chevvie Six chassis and I have to go with a Toyota. That's the luck of the in the chamber to get it moving. That's the Gift. And if I burn clean and keep in tune I may leave you flat in my tracks. Right? Q: What about the Ghetto? A: Even the Blacks have a piece of the Gift. What they do with it is their trip. Q: There's been a lot of controversy lately about whether your movement is really Christian -- in a religious sense. Would you care to comment on that? A: You mean like "Jesus Christ, the Son of God?" Sure, we believe that. And we believe in Harry G, the Son of God and Richard F the Son of God and -- what's your name, star? -- Raymond Senter, the Son of God. That's the gift. That's what it's all about. Jesus found the Gift inside. So did Buddha, Mother Ann, even Malcolm X -- we don't worry too much about who said what first. First you find the Gift -- then you live it. The Freeway's plenty wide enough. Q: Then why all the emphasis on your Believers' Creed, and the Articles of Faith, and your clothes? A; Took, star, every machine's got a set of specs. You travel with us, you learn our set. We keep the chrome shiny, the chambers clean. And we don't like accidents. Q: Your prohibitions against money and sex -- A: "Prohibitions" is a feebie word. We're free from money and sex. The Four Noes are like a Declaration of Independence. See, everybody's really born free -- but you have to know it. So we don't rob cradles. We say, let them grow up, learn what it's all about -- the pill, the puffer, the feel-o-mat -- all the perms and combos. Then, when they're fifteen or sixteen, if they still crave those chains, okay. If not, they know where to find us. Q: What about the people who sign up and then change their minds? A; We have no chains -- if that's what you mean. Q:You don't do anything to try to keep them? A: Once you've really found the Gift inside there's no such thing as "changing your mind." Q: What's your attitude toward the Old Shakers? They died out, didn't they, for lack of recruits? A; Everything is born and dies and gets reborn again. Q: Harry, what would happen if this time the whole world became Shakers? A: Don't worry, star. You won't be around to see it. P.M.) TO: Connie Fine, Director, Camp Encounter, Wentworth, Maine, # son Junction Rotel, Hudson Junction, N.Y., Connie: Has Bruce arrived yet? Arlene and I have lost contact with him in the last week, and it occurred to me that he may have hiked up to camp early and simply forgotten to buzz us -- he was so charged up about beinga full counselor-leader of his own T-group this season. Anyway, would you please buzz me soonest at the above zip? You know how mothers tend to overload the worry-circuits until they know for sure that their little wriggler is safely plugged in somewhere. Joy to you and yours, Ray. TO: Stock, Ex-Ed., .. Shakers  Foundress -- Mother Ann Lee, b. Feb. #, #, Manchester, England.  Antecedents -- Early Puritan "seekers" (Quakers), French "Prophets" (Camisards). Origin -- Following an unhappy marriage -- four children, all dead in infancy -- Mother Ann begins to preach that "concupiscence" is the root of all evil. Persecutions and imprisonment. # -- Mother Ann and seven early disciples sail to America aboard the ship Mariah. Group settles near Albany. Public preaching against concupiscence. More persecutions. More converts. Ecstatic, convulsive worship. Mother Ann's "miracles." # -- Mother Ann dies. # -- Mother Ann's successors, Father Joseph and Mother Lucy, organize followers into monastic communities and "separate" themselves from sinful world. #-# -- Expansion of sect through New York State and New England. #-# -- Exparision of sect across Western frontier -- Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana. #-# -- Mass outbreak of spiritualism. Blessings, songs, spirit-drawings and business advice transmitted by deceased leaders through living "instruments." #'s -- Highpoint of Society. Six thousand members, # communities, fifty-eight "Families." Total recorded membership -- from late #th century to late #th century -- approximately seventeen thousand. #d Shakers noted for -- mailorder seed business, handicrafts (brooms, baskets and boxes), furniture-manufacture. Credited with invention of -- common clothes pin, cut nails, circular saw, turbine waterwheel, steam-driven washing machine.  Worship -- Emphasis on communal singing and dancing. Early "convulsive" phase gives way in nineteenth century to highly organized performances and processions -- ring dances, square order shuffles. BelieJs -- Celibacy, Duality of Deity (Eather and Mother God), Equality of the Sexes, Equality in Labor, Equality in Property. Society to be perpetuated by "admission of serious-minded persons and adoption of children." Motto -- "Hands to work and Hearts to God." A.M.) TO: Mrs. Rosemary Collins, # Escorial Drive, Baj'water, Florida, #I son Junction Rotel, Hudson Junction, N.Y. Dear Rosie: Has that little wriggler of ours been down your way lately? Bruce is off again on an unannounced sidetrip, and it struck me that he might have hopped down south to visit his favorite aunt. Not to mention his favorite cousin! How is that suntanned teaser of yours? Still taking after you in the S-L-N department? Give her a big kiss for me -- you know where! And if Bruce does show up please buzz me right away at the above zip. Much Brotherly Love, Ray. TO; Stock, Ex-Ed., LI. film segment on Worship Service. June # -- I'm standing at the entrance to the inner sanctum of the huge Roundhouse here, the so-called Meeting Center, which is used only for important ceremonial functions -- like the Saturday Night Dance scheduled to begin in exactly five minutes. In the Holy Corridor to my right the entire congregation has already assembled in two rows, one for boys and one for girls, side by side but not touching. During the week the Meeting Center is separated from the work and living areas by curved translucent partitions which fit together to make a little dome-within-a-dome. But when the sun begins to set on Saturday night the partitions are removed to reveal a circular dance floor, which is in fact the hub of the building. From this slightly raised platform of gleaming fibercast, I can look down each radial corridor -- past the rows of neatly folded beds in the dormitories, past the shrouded machines in the repair shops, past the partly finished shakerbikes in the garage, past the scrubbed formica tables in the kitchen -- to the dim horizon line where the dome comes to rest on the sacred soil of Jerusalem West. All artificial lights have been extinguished for the Sabbath celebration. The only illumination comes from the last rays of the sun, a dying torch that seems to have set the dome material itself ablaze. It's a little like standing inside the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar with a hundred and twenty-eight unworried prophets of the Lord. The silence is virtually complete -- not a cough, not the faintest rustle of fabric is heard. Even the air vents have been turned off -- at least for the moment. I become aware of the harsh sound of my own respiration. At precisely eight o'clock the two lines of worshippers begin to move forward out of the Holy Corridor. They circle the dance floor, the boys moving to the right, the girls to the left. Actually, it's difficult to tell them apart. The Shakers use no body ornaments at all -- no paints, no wigs, no gems, no bugs, no dildoes, no flashers. All wear their hair cropped short, as if sheared with the aid of an overturned bowl. And all are dressed in some variation of Shaker gear -- a loosely fitting, long-sleeved, buttonless and collarless shirt slit open at the neck for two inches and hanging free at the waist over a pair of baggy trousers pulled tight around each ankle by a hidden elastic band. The garments look vaguely North African. They are made of soft dynaleen and they come in a variety of pastel shades. One girl may be wearing a pale pink top and a light blue bottom. The boy standing opposite her may have on the same colors, reversed. Others in the procession have chosen combinations of lilac and peach, ivory and lemon or turquoise and butternut. The range of hues seems endless but the intensity never varies, so that the entire spectacle presents a living demonstration of one of the basic Articles of Faith of the Shaker Revival -- Diversity in Uniformity. Now the procession has ended. The worshipers have formed two matching arcs, sixty-four boys on one side, sixty-four girls on the other, each standing precisely an arm's length from each neighbor. All are barefoot. All are wearing the same expression -- a smile so modest as to be virtually undetectable if it were not mirrored and remirrored a hundred and twenty-eight times around the circumference of the ritual circle. The color of the dome has begun to change to a darker, angrier crimson. Whether the natural twilight's being artifically augmented -- either from inside or outside the building -- is impossible to tell. All eyes are turned upward to a focus about twenty-five feet above the center of the floor, where an eight-sided loudspeaker hangs by a chrome-plated cable from the midpoint of the dome. The air begins to fill with a pervasive vibration like the rumble of a distant monocar racing toward you in the night. And then the music explodes into the supercharged air. Instantly the floor is alive with jerking, writhing bodies -- it's as if each chord were an electrical impulse applied directly to the nerve ends of the dancers (TT#  Ballantine Books IF IT'S January, Spring can't be far away. And a Happy New Year to everyone. This month is actually the end of the Fall season for publishers. Officially, Spring starts for us in February and ends in July. The end of our presenf season sees a romp by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de venture of what happens to a young man who is hauled off by a bunch of drunken elves. There is Lin Carter's usual perspicacious introduction.  the secret services get rapped while Regan merchants do the equivalent of buying Manhattan. Well, roughly! And a new one for us -- Douglas R. Mof her-Computer-Complex titied happen...  with a reissue of Ted Sturgeon's best, bringing the earlier Gorean volumes series by John Norman to the fans Trends for # -- prices are going up, even ours. But weTI try to hold the #c price for reissues. Given our own personal preference, we'd rather pay #c extra for a good-sized typeface than winkle our way through tiny type. But then, we read all day long, of necessity and usually half the night, too.) Nevertheless #c is still one helluva bargain for a couple of hours of interesting entertainment.  since we were requested to "Find a second classic trilogy," and did Fall of #, we, assisted by Jim Blish's enthusiasm for Cabell and Lin Carter's for fantasy in general, have been quietly nudging to do more than just one a month.  now extinct -- with a view to avoiding having the same thing happen to the human species. Awareness of the threat to survival is for everybody, not just readers of science fiction. So keep talking, keep reading, and we'll etcetera. Meanwhile, does everyone BB -- and the music is unbelievably loud. The dome must act as an enormous soundbox. I can feel the vibrations in my feet and my teeth are chattering with the beat -- but as wild as the dancing is, the circle is still intact. Each Shaker is "shaking" in his own place. Some are uttering incomprehensible cries, the holy gibberish that the Shakers call their Gift of Tongues -- ecstatic prophesies symbolizing the Wordless Word of the Deity. One young girl with a gaunt but beautiful face is howling like a coyote. Another is grunting like a pig. A third is alternately spitting into the air and slapping her own cheeks viciously with both hands. Across the floor a tall skinny boy has shaken loose from the rim of the circle. Pirouetting at high speed, his head thrown straight back so that his eyes are fixed on the crimson membrane of the dome, he seems to be propelling himself in an erratic path toward the center of the floor...And now the dome is changing color again, clotting to a deeper purple -- like the color of a late evening sky but flecked with scarlet stars that seem to be darting about with a life of their own, colliding, coalescing, reforming. A moment of relative calm has descended on the dancers. They are standing with their hands at their sides -- only their heads are moving, lolling first to one side, then the other, in keeping with the new, subdued rhythm of the music. The tall boy in the center has begun to spin around and around in place, picking up speed with each rotation -- now he's whirling like a top, his head still bent back, his eyes staring sightlessly. His right arm shoots out from the shoulder, the elbow locked, the fingers stiff, the palm flat -- this is what the Shakers call the Arrow Sign, a manifestation of the Gift of Prophecy, directly inspired by the Dual Deity, Father Power and Mother Wisdom. The tall boy is the "instrument" and he is about to receive a message from on high. His head tilts forward. His rotation slows. He cOmes to a halt with his right arm pointing at a short red-haired girl. The girl begins to shake all over as if struck by a high fever. The music rises to an ear-shattering crescendo and ends in mid-note. "Everyone's a mirror," the tall boy shouts. "Clean, clean, clean -- oh, let it shine! My dirt's not my own but it stains the earth. And the earth's not my own -- the Mother and Father are light above light but the light can't shine alone. Only a mirror can shine, shine, shine. Let the mirror be mine, be mine, be mine!" The red-haired girl is shaking so hard her limbs are flailing like whips. Her mouth has fallen open and she begins to moan, barely audibly at first. What she utters might be a single-syllable word like "clean" or "mine" or "shine" repeatedly, so rapidly that the consonants break down and the vowels flow into one unending stream of sound. But it keeps getting louder and louder and still louder, like the wail of an air-raid siren, until all resemblance to speech disappears and it seems impossible that such a sound can come from a human throat. You can almost hear the blood vessels straining, bursting. Then the loudspeaker cuts in again in mid-note with the loudest, wildest jag-rock riff I have ever heard, only it's no longer something you can hear -- it's inside you or you're inside it. And the dome has burst into blooms of color! A stroboscopic fireworks display that obliterates all outlines and shatters perspective and you can't tell whether the dancers are moving very, very slowly or very, very fast. The movement is so perfectly synchronized with the sound and the sound with the color that there seems to be no fixed reference point anywhere. All you can say is: "There is color, there is sound, there is movement -- " This is the Gift of Seizure, which the New Shakers prize so highly -- and whether it is genuinely mystical, as they claim, or autohypnotic or drug-induced, as some critics maintain, or a combination of all of these or something else entirely, it is an undeniably real -- and profoundly disturbing -- experience. TO: Frederick Rickover, Eastern Supervisor, Feel-O-Mat Corp., Baltimore, Maryland, son Junction Rotel, Hudson Junction, N.Y. Fred: I'm afraid it's back-scratching time again. I need a codeHRtl#-#-#. I'm interested in whether the codee has plugged into a feel-o-mat anywhere in the Federation during the past two weeks. This one's a family matter, not business, so buzz me only at the above zip. I won't forget it. Gratefully, Ray. TO: Stock. Ex-Ed., LI. Shaker "testimonies." Edited transcripts, July #. er Brown"): What kind of mike is this? No kidding. I didn't know they made a re-amper this small. Chinese? Oh. Right. Well, let's see -- I was born April seventeenth, nineteen-seventy-four, in Ellsworth, Saskatchewan. My breath-father's a foremen at a big refinery there. My breath-mother was a consumer-housewife. She's gone over now. It's kind of hard to remember details. When I was real little, I think I saw the feds scratch a Bomb-thrower on the steps of City Hall. But maybe that was only something I saw on #-D. School was -- you know, the usual. Oh, once a bunch of us kids got hold of some fresh spores from the refinery -- I guess we stole them somehow. Anyway, there was still a lot of open land around and we planted them and raised our own crop of puffers. I didn't come down for a week. That was my farming experience. bummer-grant on my fifteenth birthday, got a two-year contract and took off the next day for the sun. Let's see -- Minneapolis, Kansas City, Mexico -- what a jolt! There weren't so many feel-o-mats in the small towns down there and I was into all the hard stuff you could get in those days -- speed, yellow, rock-juice, little-annie -- I guess the only thing I never tried for a jolt was the Process and there were times when I was just about ready. When the grant ran out, I just kept bumming on my own. At first you think it's going to be real easy. Half the people you know are still on contract and they share it around. Then your old friends start running out faster than you make new ones and there's a whole new generation on the road. And you start feeling more and more like a feebie and acting like one. I was lucky because I met this sweet little dove in Nashville -- she had a master's in AudioVisual biit she was psycho for bummers, especially flat ones. Anyway, she comes back to her coop one day with a new tape and puts it on and says, "This'll go right through you. It's a wild new group called the Shakers." She didn't know two bobby's worth about the Shakers and I didn't either -- the first Shaker tapes were just hitting the market about then. Well, I can tell you, that jagged sound gave me a jolt. I mean, it was bigger than yellow, bigger than juice, only it let you down on your feet instead of your back. I had this feeling I had to hear more. I got all the tapes that were out but they weren't enough. So I took off one night for Wildwood and before I knew it I was in a Prep Meeting and I was home free -- you know. I've always kind of hoped that little dove makes it on her own -- Oh, yeah, the band. Well, I'm one of the Band Deacons, which is what's called a Sacrificial Gift because it means handling the accounts -- and that's too close to the jacks and bobbys for comfort. But someone has to do it. You can't stay alive in an impure world without getting a little stained and if outsiders want to lay the Kennedys on us for bikes and tapes, that's a necessary evil. But we don't like to spread the risk in the Family. So the Deacons sign the checks and deal with the agents and the stain's on us alone. And everyone prays a little harder to square it with the Father and Mother. riah Moses"): I was born in Darien, Connecticut. I'm an Aquarius with Leo rising. Do you want my breath-name? I don't mind -- it's Cathy Ginsberg. My breath-parents are both full-time consumers. I didn't have a very interesting childhood, I guess: I went to MidDarien Modular School. I was a pretty good student -- my best subject was World Culture. I consummated on my third date, which was about average. I've been told, for my class. Do you really want all this background stuff? I guess the biggest thing that happened to the old me was when I won a second prize in the Maxwell Puffer Civic Essay contest when I was fourteen. The subject was The Joys oj Spectalorism and the prize was a Programed Weekend in Hawaii for two. I don't remember who I went with. But Hawaii was really nice. All those brownskinned boys -- we went to a big luau on Saturday night. That's a native-style orgy. They taught me things we never even learned in school. I remember thinking. Oh, star, this is the living end! But when it was all over I had another thought. If this was the living end -- what came next? I don't know if it was the roast pig or what but I didn't feel so good for a few days. The night we got back home -- Herbie! That was the name of my date, Herbie Alcott -- he had short curly hair all over his back -- anyway, the night I got home my breath-parents picked me up at the airport and on the way back to Darien they started asking me what I wanted to do with my life. They were trying to be so helpful, you know. I mean, you could see they would have been disappointed if I got involved in production of some kind but they weren't about to say that in so many words. They just asked me if I had decided how I wanted to plug into the Big Board. It was up to me to choose between college or the Consumer Corps or a Travel Grant -- they even asked me if Herbie and I were getting serious and if we wanted to have a baby -- because the waiting-list at the Marriage Bureau was already six-months long and getting longer. The trouble was I was still thinking about the luau and the roast pig and I felt all -- burned out. Like a piece of charcoal that still looks solid but is really just white ash -- and if you touch it it crumbles and blows away. So I said I'd think about it but what I was really thinking was I'm not signing up for any more orgies just yet. And a few days later the miracle happened. A girl in our class was reported missing and a friend of mine heard someone say that she'd become a Shaker. I said, "What's that?" My friend said, "It's a religion that believes in No hate. No war. No money. No sex." And I felt this thrill go right through me. And even though I didn't know what it meant at the time, that was the moment I discovered my Gift. It was such a warm feeling, like something soft and quiet curled up inside you, waiting. And the day I turned fifteen I hiked up to Jerusalem and I never went home. That was eleven months ago... oh, you can't describe what happens at Preparative Meeting. It's what happens inside you that counts. Like now, when I think of all my old friends from Darien, I say a little prayer. Father Power, Mother Wisdom, touch their Gifts, set them free... nest Truth"): I'm aware that I'm something of a rarity here. I assume that's why you asked me for a testimony. But I don't want you categorizing me as a Shaker intellectual or a Shaker theologian or anything like that. I serve as Legal Deacon because that's my Gift. But I'm also a member of the vacuum detail in Corridor Three and that's my Gift too. I'd be just as good a Shaker if I only cleaned the floor and nothing else. Is that clear? Good. Well then, as briefly four years old, from Berkeley, California. Breath-parents were on the faculty at the University; killed in an air crash when I was ten. I was raised by the state. Pacific Highlands Modular School: First honors. Consumer Corps: Media-aide First-class. Entered the University at seventeen. Pre-law. Graduated magna cum in nineteen-ninety. Completed four-year Law School in three years. In my final year I became interested in the literature of religion -- or, to be more precise, the literature of mysticism -- possibly as a counterpoise to the increasing intensity of my formal studies. Purely as an intellectual diversion I began to read St. John of the Cross, George Fox, the Vedas, Tao, Zen, the Kabbala, the Sufis. But when I came across the early Shakers I was struck at once with the daring and clarity of this purely American variant. All mystics seek spiritual union with the Void, the Nameless, the Formless, the Ineffable. But the little band of Shaker pilgrims, confronted with a vast and apparently unbounded wilderness, took a marvelous quantum leap of faith and decided that the union had already been accomplished. The wilderness was the Void. For those who had eyes to see -- this was God's Kingdom. And by practicing a total communism, a total abnegation, a total dedication, they made the wilderness flower for two hundred years. Then, unable to adjust to the methodologies of the Industrial Revolution, they quietly faded away; it was as if their gentle spirit had found a final resting place in the design of their utterly simple and utterly beautiful wooden furniture -- each piece of which has since become a collector's item. When I began reading about the Old Shakers I had of course heard about the New Shakers -- but I assumed that they were just another crackpot fundamentalist sect like the Holy Rollers or the Snake Handlers, an attempt to keep alive the pieties of a simpler day in the present age of abundance. But eventually my curiosity -- or so I called it at the time -- led me to investigate a Preparative Meeting that had been established in the Big Sur near Jefferstown. And I found my Gift. The experience varies from individual to individual. For me it was the revelation that the complex machine we refer to as the Abundant Society is the real anachronism. All the euphorics we feed ourselves cannot change the fact that the machinery of abundance has long since reached its limit as a vital force and is now choking on its own waste products -- Pollution, Overpopulation, Dehumanization. Far from being a breakthrough, the so-called Cultural Revolution was merely the last gasp of the old order trying to maintain itself by programing man's most private senses into the machine. And the childish Bomb-throwers were nothing but retarded romantics, an anachronism within an anachronism. At this juncture in history, only the Shaker Revival offers a true alternative -- in the utterly simple, and therefore utterly profound. Four Noes. The secular world usually praises us for our rejection of Hate and War and mocks us for our rejection of Money and Sex. But the Four Noes constitute a beautifully balanced ethical equation, in which each term is a function of the other three. There are no easy Utopias. Non-Shakers often ask: What would happen if everyone became a Shaker? Wouldn't that be the end of the human race? My personal answer is this; Society is suffering from the sickness unto death -- a plague called despair. Shakerism is the only cure. As long as the plague rages more and more people will find the strength to take the medicine required, no matter how bitter it may seem. Perhaps at some future date, the very spread of Shakerism will restore Society to health, so that the need for Shakerism will again slacken. Perhaps the cycle will be repeated. Perhaps not. It is impossible to know what the Father and Mother have planned for their children. Only one thing is certain. The last of the Old Shaker prophetesses wrote in nineteen-fiftysix: "The flame may flicker but the spark can never be allowed to die out until the salvation of the world is accomplished." I don't think you'll find the flame flickering here. P.M.) TO: Stock, Ex-Ed., #. #. Hudson Junction Rotel Art: Cooperation unlimited here -- until I mention "Preparative Meeting." Then they all get tongue-tied. Too holy for impure ears. No one will even say where or when. Working hypothesis: It's a compulsory withdrawl session. Recruits obviously must kick all worldly habits before taking final vows. Big question: how do they do it? Conscious or unconscious? Cold-turkey, hypnosuggestion, or re-conditioning? Legal or illegal? Even Control would like to know. I'm taping the Reception Deacon tomorrow. If you approve. I'll start putting the pressure on. The groundwork's done. We may get a story yet. Ray. TO: Joseph Harger, Coordinator, N.Y. State Consumer Control, Albany, N.Y. #Hudson Junction Rotel, Hudson Junction, N.Y. Joe: I appreciate your taking a personal interest in this matter. My wife obviously gave the wrong impression to the controller she contacted. She tends to get hysterical. Despite what she may have said I assure you my son's attitude toward the Ghetto was a perfectly healthy blend of scorn and pity. Bruce went with me once to see the Harlem Wall -- must have been six or seven -- and Coordinator Bill Quaite let him sit in the Scanner's chair for a few minutes. He heard a muzzein call from the top of one of those rickety towers. He saw the wild rats prowling in the stench and garbage. He also watched naked children fighting with wooden knives over a piece of colored glass. I am told there are young people today stupid enough to think that sneaking over the Wall is an adventure and that the process is reversible -- but my son is definitely not one of them. And he is certainly not' a bomb-thrower. I know that you have always shared my publication's view that a selective exposure to the harsher realities makes for better consumers. (I'm thinking of that little snafu in data-traffic in the Albany Grid last summer.) I hope you'll see your way clear to trusting me again. I repeat; there's not the slightest indication that my son was going over to the Blacks. In fact, I have good reason to believe that he will turn up quite soon, with all discrepancies accounted for. But I need a little time. A Missing Persons Bulletin would only make things harder at the moment. I realize it was my wife who initiated the complaint. But I'd greatly appreciate it if she got misfiled for # hours. I'll handle any static on this side. Discreetly, Ray TO: Stock, Ex-Ed., #. #. interview with Antonia Cross, age #, Reception Deacon, Jerusalem West Edited Transcript, July #. Q: (I waited silently for her to take the lead.) A: Before we begin, I think we better get a few things straight. It'll save time and grief in the long run. First of all, despite what your magazine and others may have said in the past, we never proselytize. Never. So please don't use that word. We just try to live our Gift -- and if other people are drawn to us, that's the work of the Father and Mother, not us. We don't have to preach. When someone's sitting in filth up to his neck he doesn't need a preacher to tell him he smells. All he needs to hear is that there's a cleaner place somewhere. Second, we don't prevent anyone from leaving, despite all rumors to the contrary. We've had exactly three apostates in the last four years. They found out their wheels were not our wheels and they left. Q; Give me their names. A: There's no law that says we have to disclose the names of backsliders. Find them yourself. That shouldn't be too hard, now that they're plugged back in to the Big Board. Q. You overestimate the power of the press. A: False modesty is not considered a virtue among Shakers. Q; You mentioned three backsliders. Flow many applicants are turned away before taking final vows? A; The exact percentage is immaterial. Some applicants are more serious than others. There is no great mystery about our reception procedure. You've heard the expression, "Weekend Shakers." Anybody can buy the gear and dance and sing and stay pure for a couple of days. It's even considered a "jolt," I'm told. We make sure that those who come to us know the difference between a weekend and a lifetime. We explain the Gift, the Creed, the Articles of Faith. Then we ask them why they've come to us. We press them pretty hard. In the end, if they're still serious, they are sent to Preparative Meeting for a while, until a Family is ready to accept them. Q: How long is a while? A; Preparative Meeting can take days or weeks. Or longer. Q; Are they considered fullfledged Shakers during that time? A: The moment of Induction is a spiritual, not a temporal, phenomenon. Q: But you notify the authorities only after a recruit is accepted in a Family? A: We comply with all the requirements of the Full Disclosure Law. Q: What if the recruit is underage and lies about it? Do you A: We obey the law. Q: But a recruit at a Prep Meeting isn't a Shaker and so you don't have to report his presence. Is that right? A: We've had exactly nine complaints filed against us in four years. Not one has stuck. Q: Then you do delay acceptance until you can trace a recruit's identity? A; I didn't say that. We believe in each person's right to redefine his set, no matter what the Big Board may say about him. But such administrative details tend to work themselves out. Q: How? I don't understand. A: The ways of the Father and Mother sometimes passeth understanding. Q: You say you don't proselytize, but isn't that what your tapes are -- a form of preaching? Don't most of your recruits come to you because of the tapes? And don't most of them have to be brought down from whatever they're hooked on before you'll even let them in? A: The world -- your world -- is filth. From top to bottom. We try to stay as far away as we can. But we have to eat. So we sell you our tapes and our Shakerbikes. There's a calculated risk of contamination. But it works the other way too. Filth can be contaminated by purity. That's known as Salvation. It's like a tug of war. We'll see who takes the greatest risk. Q: That's what I'm here for -- to see at first hand. Where is the Jerusalem West Preparative Meeting held? A: Preparative Meetings are private. For the protection of all concerned. Q: Don't you mean secret? Isn't there something going on at these meetings that you don't want the public to know? A: If the public is ignorant of the life of the spirit, that is hardly our fault. Q: Some people believe that your recruits are "prepared" with drugs or electro-conditioning. A: Some people think that Shaker stew is full of saltpeter. Are you going to print that, too? Q: You have been accused of brain-tampering. That's a serious charge. And unless I get a hell of a lot more cooperation from you than I've been getting I will have to assume that you have something serious to hide. A; No one ever said you'd be free to see everything. You'll just have to accept our -- guidance -- in matters concerning religious propriety. Q; Let me give you a little guidance. Miss Cross. You people already have so many enemies in that filthy world you despise that one unfriendly story from II. might just tip the scales. A; The power of the press? We'll take our chances. Q: What will you do if the police crack down? A: We're not afraid to die. And the Control authorities have found that it's more trouble than it's worth to put us in jail. We seem to upset the other inmates. Q; Miss Cross -- A: We use no titles here. My name is Antonia. Q: You're obviously an intelligent, dedicated young woman. I would rather work with you than against you. Why don't we try to find some middle ground? As a journalist my primary concern is human nature -- what happens to a young recruit in the process of becoming a full-fledged Shaker. You won't let me into a Prep Meeting to see for myself. All right, you have your reasons, and I respect them. But I ask you to respect mine. If I can look through your Reception files -- just the last two or three weeks will do -- I should be able to get some idea of what kind of raw material you draw on. You can remove the names, of course. A: Perhaps we can provide a statistical breakdown for you. Q; I don't want statistics. I want to look at their pictures, listen to their voices -- you say you press them pretty hard in the first interview. That's what I need: their responses under pressure, the difference between those who stick it through and those who don't. A: How do we know you're not looking for something of a personal nature -- to embarrass us? Q: For God's sakes. I'm one of the best-known tapemen in the Federation. Why not just give me the benefit of the doubt? A; You invoke a Deity that means nothing to you. Q: I'm sorry. A; The only thing I can do is transmit your request to the Octave itself. Any decision on such a matter would have to come from a Full Business Meeting. Q; How long will it take? A; The Octave is meeting tomorrow, before Evening Service. Q: All right. I can wait till then. I suppose I should apologize again for losing my temper. I'm afraid it's an occupational hazard. A: We all have our Gift. TO; Stock, Ex-Ed., .. er Revival; July #. It is unclear whether the eight teenagers -- six boys and two girls -- who banded together one fateful evening in the spring of #I to form a jag-rock combo called The Shakers had any idea of the religious implications of the name. According to one early account in RiJJ magazine, the original eight were thinking only of a classic rock-and-roll number of the nineteen-fifties Shake, Rattle and Roll (a title not without sexual as well as musicological overtones). On the other hand, there is evidence that Harry G was interested in astrology, palmistry, Scientology and other forms of modern occultism even before he left home at the age of fifteen. (Harry G was born Harry Guardino, on December eighteen, nineteenseventy-four, in Schoodic, Maine, the son of a third-generation lobster fisherman.) Like many members of his generation he applied for a Federal Travel Grant on graduation from Modular School and 'received a standard two-year contract. But unlike most of his fellow-bummers, Harry did not immediately take off on an allexpenses-paid tour of the seamier side of life in the North American Federation. Instead, he hitched a ride to New York City, where he established a little basement coop on the lower west side that soon became a favorite way-station for other, more restless bummers passing through the city. No reliable account of this period is available. The rumors that he dabbled in a local Bomb-throwers cell appear to be unfounded. But it is known that sometime during the spring of nineteen-ninety-one a group of bummers nearing the end of their grants gathered in Harry G's coop to discuss the future. By coincidence or design the eight young people who came together that night from the far corners of the Federation all played some instrument and shared a passion for jag-rock. And as they talked and argued among themselves about the best way possible to "plug into the Big Board," it slowly began to dawn on them that perhaps their destinies were linked -- or, as Harry G himself has put it, "We felt we could make beautiful music together. Time has made us one." Building a reputation in the jagrock market has never been easy -- not even with divine intervention. For the next two months, The Shakers scrambled for work, playing a succession of one-night stands in consumers' centers, schools, fraternal lodges -- wherever someone wanted live enterthe group up. The Shakers traveled in a second-hand Chevrolet van which was kept running only by the heroic efforts of the group's electric-oud player, Richard Fitzgerald (who later -- as Richard F -- helped to design the improved version of the turbo-adapter which forms the basis of today's Shakerbike.) On the night of June the first the group arrived in Flancock, Massachusetts, where they were scheduled to play the next evening at the graduation dance of the Grady L. Parker Modular School. They had not' worked for three days and their finances had reached a most precarious stage -- they were now sharing only four bummer-grants between them, the other four contracts having expired in the previous weeks. From the very beginning of their relationship the eight had gone everywhere and done everything as a group -- they even insisted on sleeping together in one room on the theory that the "bad vibrations" set up by an overnight absence from each other might adversely affect their music. As it turned out, there was no room large enough at the local Holiday Inn, so, after some lengthy negotiations, the Modular School principal arranged for them to camp out on the grounds of the local Shaker Museum, a painstaking restoration of an early New England Shaker community dating back to seventeen-ninety. Amused but not unduly impressed by the coincidence in names, the eight Shakers bedded down, for the night within sight of the Museum's most famous structure, the Round Stone Barn erected by the original Shakers in eighteen-twenty-six. Exactly what happened between midnight and dawn on that fog-shrouded New England meadow may never be known -- the validation of mystical experience being by its very nature a somewhat inexact science. According to Shaker testimony, however, the spirit of Mother Ann, sainted foundress of the original sect, touched the Gifts of the eight where they lay and in a vision of the future -- which Amelia D later said was "as clear and bright as a holograph" -- revealed why they had been chosen: The time had come for a mass revival of Shaker beliefs and practices. The eight teenagers awoke at the same instant, compared visions, found them to be identical and wept together for joy. They spent the rest of the day praying for guidance and making plans. Their first decision was to play as scheduled at the Grady L. Parker graduation dance. "We decided to go on doing just what we had been doing -- only more so," Amelia D later explained. "Also, I guess, we needed the jacks." group apparently played as never before. Their music opened up doors to whole new ways of hearing and feeling -- or so it seemed to the excited crowd of seniors who thronged around the bandstand when the first set was over. Without any premeditation, or so he later claimed, Harry Guardino stood up and announced the new Shaker dispensation, including the Believers' Creed (the Four Noes) and a somewhat truncated version of the Articles of Faith of the United Society of Believers (Revived): "All things must be kept decent and in good order," "Diversity in Uniformity," and "Work is Play." According to the Hancock newspaper, seventeen members of the senior class left town that morning with the Shakers -- in three cars "borrowed" from parents and later returned. Drawn by a Gift of Travel, the little band of pilgrims made their way to the quiet corner of New York State now known as Jerusalem West, bought some land -- with funds obtained from anonymous benefactors -- and settled down to their strange experiment in monastic and ascetic communism. The actual historical connections between Old Shakers and New Shakers remains a matter of conjecture. It is not clear, for instance, whether Harry G and his associates had a chance to consult the documentary material on display at the Hancock Museum. There is no doubt that the First Article of Faith of the Shaker Revival is a word-for-word copy of the first part of an early Shaker motto. But it has been given a subtly different meaning in present-day usage. And while many of the New Shaker doctrines and practices can be traced to the general tenor of traditional Shakerism, the adaptations are often quite free and sometimes wildly capricious. All in all, the Shaker Revival seems to be very much a product of our own time. Some prominent evolutionists even see it as part of a natural process of weeding out those individuals incapable of becoming fully consuming members of the Abundant Society. They argue that Shakerism is a definite improvement, in this respect, over the youthful cult of Bomb-throwers which had to be suppressed in the early days of the Federation. But there are other observers who see a more ominous trend at work. They point especially to the serious legal questions raised by the Shaker's efforts at large-scale proselytization. The twenty-seventh Amendment to the Federal Constitution guarantees the right of each white citizen over the age of fifteen to the free and unrestricted enjoyment of his own senses, provided that such enjoyment does not interfere with the range or intensity of any other citizen's sensual enjoyment. Presumably this protection also extends to the right of any white citizen to deny himself the usual pleasures. But what is the status of corporate institutions that engage in such repression? How binding, for example, is the Shaker recruit's sworn allegiance to the Believers' Creed? How are the Four Noes enforced within the sect? Suppose two Shakers find themselves physically attracted to each other and decide to consummate does the United Society of Believers have any right to place obstacles between them? These are vital questions that have yet to be answered by the Control authorities. But there are influential men in Washington who read the twenty-seventh amendment as an obligation on the government's part not merely to protect the individual's right to sensual pleasure but also to help him maximize it. And in the eyes of these broad constructionists the Shakers are on shaky ground. TO; Stock, Ex-Ed., I. . you? in! Shut the door. My God, I thought you were locked up in that Prep Meeting. I thought -- When I heard you were prowling around town I knew I had to talk to you. mind then? just wanted to make sure you didn't lie about everything. here? if that's what you mean. No one even knows who I am. I've redefined my set, as we say. They're not fools. They'll find out soon enough -- if they haven't already. That's another lie. And anyway, I'll tell them myself after Induction. late. We want you to come home. that her little baby is safe and sound. How is she? Blubbering all over herself as usual?about your running away. ried they'll cut off her credit at the feel-o-mat? For letting another potential consumef get off the hook? risked coming to me if you didn't have doubts. Don't make a terrible mistake. because I know how you can twist other people's words. Are you recording this? you straight out -- please leave us alone. tampering with your mind? your local drinking water lately? enough of the world to turn your back on it. Arlene. ful? lene have isn't life. It's the American Dream Come True. You're in despair and don't even know it. That's the worse kind. as if you believed them. think I don't? blood. I know you. know is that your little pride and joy ran away to become a monk and took the family genes. And Arlene is too old go back to the Big Board and beg for seconds. something about rebellion, too. I've had a taste of it in my time. It's healthy, it's natural -- I'm all for it. But not an overdose. When the jolt wears off, you'll be stuck here. And you're too smart to get trapped in a hole like this. In exactly one hour and ten minutes I'll be free, white and fifteen -- Independence Day, right? What a beautiful day to be born -- it's the nicest thing you and Arlene did for me. back. Whatever you want -- just name it and if it's in my power I'll try to get it. I have friends who will help. thing from you. We're quits -- can't you understand? The only thing we have in common now is this: And if you want that back you can take it. Just hold your hand over my mouth and pinch my nose for about five minutes. That should do it. about it? you heard? There're only two ways to go for my generation -- The Shakers or the Ghetto. How do you think I'd look in black-face with bushy hair and a gorilla nose? Or do you prefer my first choice? country's not going to put up with either much longer. There's going, to be trouble -- and I want you out of here when it comes. bies going to do? Finish our Job for us? then? To commit suicide? what the Bomb-throwers did. We want to commit your suicide. you, doesn't it? You talk about rebellion as if you knew something about it because you wore beads once and ran around holding signs. anything. You were swallowed up. Just like the Bomb-throwers. The only difference is, you were eaten alive. gray-stuff a little, and try to imagine what real rebellion would be like? Not Just another chorus of "gimme, gimme, gimme -- " But the absolute negation of what's come before? The Four Noes all rolled up into One Big No! deal -- all together before. I don't expect you to see it. Even around here, a lot of people don't know what's happening. Expiation! That's what rebellion is all about. The young living down the sins of the fathers and mothers! But the young are always so hungry for life they get distracted before they can finish the Job. Look at all the poor, doomed rebels in history whenever they got too big to be crushed the feebies bought them off with a piece of the action. The stick or the carrot and then -- business as usual. Your generation was the biggest sellout of all. But the big laugh is, you really thought you won. So now you don't have any carrot left to offer, because you've already shared it all with us -- before we got old. And we're strong enough to laugh at your sticks. Which is why the world is going to find out for the first time what total rebellion is. believe in violence and hate? not of this world. You can forget all the tapes and bikes and dances -- that's the impure shell that must be sloughed off. If you want to get the real picture, just imagine us -- all your precious little gene-machines -- standing around in a circle, our heads bowed in prayer, holding our breaths and clicking off one by one. Don't you think that's a beautiful way for your world to end? Not with a bang or a whimper -- but with one long breathless Amen? TO: Stock, Ex-Ed., I . I . "Shaker Revival" (scratch earlier transmission; new lead upcoming). Wednesday, July # -- An early critic of the Old Shakers, a robust pamphleteer who had actually been a member of the sect for ten months, wrote this prophetic appraisal of his former cohorts in the year seventeen-eighty-two: "When we consider the infant state of civil power in America since the Revolution began, every infringement on the natural rights of humanity, every effort to undermine our original constitution, either in civil or ecclesiastical order, saps the foundation of Independency." That winter, the Shaker foundress, Mother Ann, was seized in Petersham, Massachusetts, by a band of vigilantes who, according to a contemporary account, wanted "to find out whether she was a woman or not." Various other Shaker leaders were horsewhipped, thrown in jail, tarred and feathered and driven out of one New England town after another by an aroused citizenry. These severe persecutions, which lasted through the turn of the century, were the almost inevitable outcome of a clash between the self-righteous, unnatural, uncompromising doctrines of the Shakers -- and the pragmatic, democratic, forward-looking mentality of the struggling new nation, which would one day be summed up in that proud emblem: The American Way of Life. This conflict is no less sharp today. So far the New Shakers have generally been given the benefit of the doubt as just another harmless fringe group. But there is evidence that the mood of the country is changingand rapidly. Leading educators and political figures, respected clergymen and prominent consumer consultants have all become more outspoken in denouncing the disruptive effect of this new fanaticism on the country as a whole. Not since the heyday of the Bomb-throwers in the late Seventies has a single issue shown such potential for galvanizing informed public opinion. And a chorus of distraught parents has only Just begun to make itself heard -- like the lamentations of Rachel in the wilderness. Faced with the continuing precariousness of the international situation, and the unresolved dilemma of the Ghettoes, some Control authorities have started talking about new restrictions on all monastic sects -- not out of any desire to curtail religious freedom but in an effort to preserve the constitutional guarantees of free expression and consumption. Some feel that if swift, firm governmental action is not forthcoming it will get harder and harder to prevent angry parents -- and others with legitimate grievances -- from taking the law into their own hands. She was lost in terror -- he was beyond it. They could survive only if they abandoned reason! He didn't know who he was when she met him -- well, not many people did. He was in the high orchard doing something under a pear tree. The land smelled of late summer and wind -- bronze, it smelled bronze. He looked up at a compact girl in her mid-twenties, at a fearless face and eyes the same color as her hair, which was extraordinary because her hair was red-gold. She looked down at a leather-skinned man in his forties, at a gold-leaf electroscope in his hand, and felt she was an intruder. She said, "Oh -- " in what was apparently the right way. Because he nodded once and said, "Hold this -- " and there could then be no thought of intrusion. She kneeled down beside him and took the instrument, holding it exactly where he positioned her hand. He moved away a little and struck a tuning fork against his kneecap. "What's it doing?" He had a good voice, the kind of voice strangers notice and listen to, She looked at the delicate leaves of gold in the glass shield of the electroscope. "They're moving apart." He struck the tuning fork again and the leaves pressed away from one another. "Much?" "About forty-five degrees when you hit the fork." "Good -- that's about the most we'll get." From a pocket of his bush jacket he drew a sack of chalk dust and dropped a small handful on the ground. "I'll move now. You stay right there and tell me how much the leaves separate." He traveled around the pear tree in a zigzag course, striking his tuning fork while she called out numbers -- ten degrees, thirty, five, twenty, nothing. Whenever the gold foil pressed apart to maximum -- forty degrees or more -- he dropped more chalk. When he was finished the tree was surrounded by a rough oval of white dots. He took out a notebook and diagramed them and the tree, put away the book and took the electroscope out of her hands. "Were you looking for something?" he asked her. "No," she said. "Yes." He could smile. Though it did not last long she found the expression surprising in a face like his. "That's not what is called, in a court of law, a responsive answer." She glanced across the hillside, metallic in that late light. There wasn't much on it -- rocks, weeds the summer was done with, a tree or so, the orchard. Anyone present had come a long way to get here. "It wasn't a simple question," she said, tried to smile and burst into tears. She was sorry and said so. "Why?" he asked. This was the first time she was to experience this ask-the-nextquestion thing of his. It was unsettling. It always would be -- never less, sometimes a great deal more. "Well -- one doesn't have emotional explosions in public." "You do. I don't know this 'one' you're talking about." "I -- guess I don't either, now that you mention it." "Tell the truth then. No sense in going around and around about it: He'll think that I... and the like. I'll think what I think, whatever you say. Or -- go down the mountain and just don't say any more." She did not turn to go, so he added; "Try the truth, then. If it's important, it's simple. And if it's simple it's easy to say." "I'm going to die!" she cried. "So am I." "I have a lump in my breast." "Come up to the house and I'll fix it." turned away and started through the orchard. Startled half out of her wits, indignant and full of insane hope, experiencing, even, a quick curl of astonished laughter, she stood for a moment watching him go and then found herself (at what point did I decide?) running after him. She caught up with him on the uphill margin of the orchard. "Are you a doctor?" He appeared not to notice that she had waited, had run. "No," he said and, walking on. appeared not to see her stand again pulling at her lower lip, then run again to catch up. "I must be out of my mind," she said, joining him on a garden path. She said it to herself. He must have known because he did not answer. The garden was alive with defiant chrysanthemums and a pond in which she saw the flicker of a pair of redcap imperials -- silver, not gold fish -- the largest she had ever seen. Then -- the house. First it was part of the garden with its colonnaded terrace -- and then, with its rock walls (too massive to be called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in the hillside. Its roofs paralleled the skylines, front and sides, and part of it was backed against an outjutting cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and featuring two archers' slits, was opened for them (but there was no one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang of latch or bolt. She stood with her back against it watching him cross what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree, a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the turnedback, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the Japanese call bonsai. "Aren't you coming?" he called, holding open a door behind the atrium. "Bonsai just aren't fifteen feet tall," she said. "This one is." She walked past it slowly, looking. "How long have you had it?" His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It is a clumsinessto ask the owner of a bonsai how old it is -- you are then demanding to know if it is his work or if he has acquired and continued the concept of another; you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept and the meticulous labor of someone else and it becomes rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence, How long have you had it? is polite, forbearing, profoundly courteous. He answered, "Half my life." She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes, not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold because they are shaped oddly or have dead branches here and there, or because they have grown too slowly in whole or part. These are the ones which develop interesting trunks and a resistance to misfortune that makes them flourish if given the least excuse for living. This one was far older than half this man's life, or all of it. Looking at it, she was terrified by the unbidden thought that a fire, a fam# ' ily of squirrels, some subterranean worm or termite could end this beauty -- something working outside any concept of rightness or justice or -- of respect. She looked at the tree. She looked at the man. "Coming?" "Yes," she said and went with him into his laboratory. "Sit down over there and relax," he told her. "This might take a little while." "Over there" was a big leather chair by the bookcase. The books were right across the spectrum -- reference works in medicine and engineering, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, psychiatry. Also tennis, gymnastics, chess, the oriental war game Go, and golf. And then drama, the techniques of fiction. Modern English Usage, The American Language and supplement, Wood's and Walker's Rhyming Dictionaries and an array of other dictionaries and encyclopedias. A whole long shelf of biographies. " Y ou have quite a library." He answered her rather shortly -- clearly he did not want to talk just now, for he was very busy. He said only, "Yes I have -- perhaps you'll see it some time -- " which left her to pick away at his words to find out what on earth he meant by them. He could only have meant, she decided, that the books beside her chair were what he kept handy for his work -- that his real library was elsewhere. She looked at him with a certain awe. A nd she watched him. She liked the way he moved -- swiftly, decisively. Clearly he knew what he was doing. He used some equipment that she recognized -- a glass still, titration equipment, a centrifuge. There were two refrigerators, one of which was not a refrigerator at all, for she could see the large indicator on the door. It stood at #F. It came to her that a modern refrigerator is perfectly adaptable to the demand for controlled environment, even a warm one. But all that -- and the equipment she did not recognize -- was only furniture. It was the man who was worth watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted toward the bookshelves. At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-spoke and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees. "Scared." He made it a statement. "I suppose I am." "You don't have to stay." "Considering the alternative -- " she began bravely but the couragesound somehow oozed out. "It can't matter much." "Very sound," he said almost cheerfully. "I remember when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out and my ten-year-old brother found himself outside in the street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one and it didn't work -- but of all the things in the place he might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out to be the clock. He's never been able to figure out why." "Have you?" "Not why he picked that particular thing -- no. But I think I know why he did something obviously irrational. You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and flight, or fury and attack, it's a pretty primitive reaction to extreme danger. It's one of the expressions of the will to survive. What makes it so special is that it's irrational. Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a survival mechanism?" She thought about this seriously. There was that about this man which made serious thought imperative. "I can't imagine," she said finally. "Unless it's because, in some situations, reason just doesn't work." "You can imagine," he said, again radiating that huge approval, making her glow. "And you just did. If you are in danger and you try reason and reason doesn't work -- you abandon it. You can't say it's unintelligent to abandon what doesn't work, right? So then you are in panic. You start to perform random acts. Most of them -- far and away most -- will be useless. Some might even be dangerous. But that doesn't matter -- you're in danger already. Where the survival factor comes in is that away down deep you know that one chance in at all. So -- here you sit -- you're scared and you could run. Something says you should run but you won't." She nodded. He went on: "You found a lump. You went to a doctor and he made some tests and gave you the bad news. Maybe you went to another doctor and he confirmed it. You then did some research and found out what was to happen next -- the exploratory, the radical, the questionable recovery, the whole long agonizing procedure of being what they call a terminal case. You then flipped out. Did some things you hope I won't ask you about. Took a trip somewhere, anywhere, wound up in my orchard for no reason." He spread the good hands and let them go back to their kind of sleep. "Panic. The reason for little boys in their pajamas standing at midnight with a broken alarm clock in their arms -- and for the existence of quacks." Something chimed over on the bench and he gave her a quick smile and went back to work, saying over his shoulder, "I'm not a quack, by the way. To qualify as a quack you have to claim to be a doctor. I don't." She watched him switch off, switch on, stir, measure and calculate. A little orchestra of equipment chorused and soloed around him as he conducted, whirring, hissing, clicking, flickering. She wanted to laugh, to cry and to scream. She did not one of these things for fear of not stopping, ever. When he came over again, the conflict was not raging within her but was exerting steady and opposed tensions. The result was a terrible stasis and all she could do when she saw the instrument in his hand was to widen her eyes. She quite forgot to breathe. "Yes, it's a needle," he said, his tone almost bantering. "A long shiny sharp needle. Don't tell me you are one of those needle-shy people." He flipped the long power cord that trailed from the black housing around the hypodermic to get some slack, straddled the stool. "Want something to steady your nerves?" She was afraid to speak. The membrane containing her sane self was very thin, stretched very tight. He said, "I'd rather you didn't, because this pharmaceutical stew is complex enough as it is. But if you need it -- " She managed to shake her head a little and again felt the wave of approval from him. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask -- had meant to ask -- needed to ask. What was in the needle? How many treatments must she have? What would they be like? How long must she stay and where? And most of all -- oh, could she live, could she live? II answer to only one of these. "It's mostly built around an isotope of potassium. If I told you all I know about it and how I came on it in the first place it would take -- well, more time than we've got. But here's the general idea. Theoretically, every atorh is electrically balanced -- never mind ordinary exceptions. Likewise all electrical charges in the molecule are supposed to be balanced -- so much plus, so much minus, total zero. I happened on the fact that the balance of charges in a wild cell is not zero -- not quite. It's as if there were a submicroscopic thunderstorm going on at the molecular level, with little lightning bolts flashing back and forth and changing the signs. Interfering with communications -- static -- and that," he said, gesturing with the shielded hypo in his hand, "is what this is all about. When something interferes with communications -- espesays. Read this blueprint, build accordingly and stop when it's done -- when that message gets garbled lopsided things get built. Off balance things. Things that do almost what they should, do it almost right -- they're wild cells and the messages they pass on are even worse. "Okay. Whether these thunderstorms are caused by viruses or chemicals or radiation or ph'ysical trauma or even anxiety -- and don't think anxiety can't do it -- is secondary. The important thing is to fix it so the thunderstorm can't happen. If you can do that the cells have plenty of ability all by themselves to repair and replace what's gone wrong. And biological systems aren't like ping-pong balls with static charges waiting for the charge to leak away or to discharge into a grounded wire. They have a kind of resilience -- I call it forgiveness -- that enables them to take on a little more charge, or a little less, and do all right. Well, then -- say a certain clump of cells is wild and say it carries an aggregate of a hundred units extra on the positive side. Cells immediately around it are affected -- but not the next layer or the next. "If they could be opened to the extra charge -- if they could help to drain it off -- they would, well, cure the wild cells of the surplus. You see what I mean? And they would be able to handle that little overage themselves or pass it on to other cells and still others who could deal with it. In other words. if I can flood your body with a medium that can drain off and distribute a concentration of this unbalanced charge, the ordinary bodily processes will be free to move in and clear up the wild-cell damage. And that's what I have here." He held the shielded needle between his knees and from a side pocket of his lab coat he took a plastic box, opened it and drew out an alcohol swab. Still cheerfully talking, he took her terrornumbed arm and scrubbed at the inside of her elbow. "I am not for one second implying that nuclear charges in the atom are the same thing as static electricity. They're in a different league altogether. But the analogy holds. I could use another analogy. I could liken the charge in the wild cells to accumulations of fat. And this gunk of mine to a detergent that would break it up and spread it so far it couldn't be detected any more. But I'm led to the static analogy by an odd side effect -- organisms injected with this stuff do build up one hell of a static charge. It's a byproduct and, for reasons I can only theorize about at the moment, it seems to be keyed to the audio spectrum. Tuning forks and the like. That's what I was playing with when I met you. That tree is drenched with this stuff. It used to have a whorl of wild-cell growth. It hasn't any more." He gave her the quick, surprising smile and let it flicker away as he held the needle point upward and squirted it. With his other hand wrapped around her left bicep he squeezed gently and firmly. The needle was lowered and placed and slid into the big vein so deftly that she gasped -- not because it hurt but because it did not. Attentively he watched the bit of glass barrel protruding from the black housing as he withdrew the plunger a fraction and saw the puff of red into the colorless fluid inside. Then he bore steadily on the plunger again. this will take a little time. I have to get quite a lot of this into you. Which is fine, you know," he said, resuming the tone of his previous remarks about audio spectra, "because side effect or no, it's consistent. Healthy bio systems develop a strong electrostatic field, unhealthy ones a weak one or none at all. With an instrument as primitive and simple as that little electroscope you can tell if any part of the organism has a community of wild cells and if so, where it is and how big and how wild." Deftly he shifted his grip on the encased hypodermic without moving the point or varying the plunger pressure. It was beginning to be uncomfortable -- an ache turning into a bruise. "And if you're wondering why this mosquito has a housing on it with a wire attached (although I'll bet you're not and that you know as well as I do that I'm doing all this talking just to keep your mind occupied) I'll tell you. It's nothing but a coil carrying a high-frequency alternating current. The alternating field sees to it that the fluid is magnetically and electrostatically neutral right from the start." He withdrew the needle suddenly and smoothly, bent an arm and trapped in the inside of her elbow a cotton swab. "Nobody ever told me that after a treatment," she said. "What?" "No charge," she said. Again that wave of approval, this time with words: "I like your style. How do you feel?" She cast about for accurate phrases. "Like the owner of a large sleeping hysteria begging someone not to wake it up." He laughed. "In a little while you are going to feel so weird you won't have time for hysteria." He got up and returned the needle to the bench, looping up the cable as he went. He turned off the AC field and returned with a large glass bowl and a square of plywood. He inverted the bowl on the floor near her and placed the wood on its broad base. "I remember something like that," she said. "When I was in -- in junior high school. They were generating artificial lightning with a -- let me see -- well, it had a long, endless belt running over pulleys and some little wires scraping on it and a big copper ball on top." "Van de Graaf generator." "Right. And they did all sorts of things with it. But what I specially remember is standing on a piece of wood on a bowl like that and they charged me up with the generator. I didn't feel much of anything except all my hair stood out from my head. Everyone laughed. I looked like a golliwog. They said I was carrying forty thousand volts." "Good. I'm glad you remember that. This'll be a little different, though. By roughly another forty thousand." "Oh!" "Don't worry. As long as you're insulated and as long as grounded or comparatively grounded objects -- me, for example -- stay well away from you, there won't be any fireworks." "Are you going to use a generator like that?" "Not like that -- and I already did. You're the generator." "I'm -- oh!" She had raised her hand from the upholstered chair arm and there was a crackle of sparks and the faint smell of ozone. "You sure are and more than I thought -- and quicker. Get up." She started up slowly. She finished the maneuver with speed. As her body separated from the chair she was, for a fractional second. seated in a tangle of spitting bluewhite threads. They, or she, propelled her a yard and a half away, standing. Literally shocked half out of her wits, she almost fell. "Stay on your feet," he snapped and she recovered, gasping. He stepped back a pace. "Get up on the board. Quickly now." She did as she was told, leaving, for the two paces she traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the board. Visibly, her hair began to stir. "What's happening to me?" she cried. "You're getting charged after all," he said jovially but at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even her own witticism. She cried again, "What's happening to me?" "It's all right," he said consolingly. He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator. It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range. He increased the volume and turned the pitch control. It bowled upward and, as it did so, her red-gold hair shivered and swept up and out, each hair attempting frantically to get away from all the others. He ran the tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back to a bellybumping inaudible eleven. At tbe extremes her hair slumped but at around eleven hundred it stood out in, as she had described it, golliwog style. She could feel it. He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward her, smiling. "You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog." "Let me down," was all she could say. "Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between you and everything else here is so high that if you got near any of it you'd discharge into it. It wouldn't harm you -- it isn't current electricity -- but you might get a burn and a nervous shock out of it." He held out the electroscope. Even at that distance -- and in her distress -- she could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her, watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument forward and back and from side to side. Once he went to the tone generator and turned it down some more. "You're sending such a strong field I can't pick up the variations," he explained and returned to her, coming closer now. "I can't -- much more -- I can't," she murmured. He did not hear or he did not care. He moved the electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side. "Yup. There you are," he said cheerfully, moving the instrument close to her right breast. "What?" she whimpered. "Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the armpit." He whistled. "A mean one, too. Malignant as hell." She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in a glare of agonizing blue-white and then crashed down on her like a mountain falling. Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another ceiling. Hadn't seen it before. Didn't matter. Don't care. Sleep. Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way. His face, close, drawn, tired -- eyes awake, though, and penetrating. Doesn't matter. Don't care. Sleep. Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sunlight. Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a gold-green glass cornucopia. Something in the way again -- his face. "Can you hear me?" Yes, but don't answer. Don't move. Don't speak. Sleep. It's a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing -- a nighttime window and mums you'd think were alive but don't you know they're cut right off and dying? Do they know that? "How are you?" Urgent, urgent. "Thirsty." the hinges of the jaws. Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds the glass in the other hand. Oh, no, that's not... "Thank you. Thanks very -- " Try to sit up. The sheet -- my clothes! "Sorry about that," he said, the mindreader-almost. "Some things that have to be done just aren't consistent with pantyhose and a minidress. All washed and dried and ready for you, though -- any time. Over there." The brown wool and the pantyhose and the shoes, on the chair. He's respectful, standing back, putting the glass next to an insulated carafe on the night table. "What things?" "Throwing up. Bedpans," he said candidly. Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies but -- oh -- not embarrassment. "Oh, I'm sorry. Oh. I must have -- " Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision. "You went into shock and then you just didn't come out of it." He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen him hesitate over anything. She became for a moment an almost-mindreader. Should I tell her what's in my mind? Sure, he should. And he did. "You didn't want to come out of it." "It's all gone out of my head." "The pear tree, the electroscope. The injection, the electrostatic response." "No," she said, not knowing. Then, knowing: "No!" "Hang on," he rapped and next thing she knew he was by the bed, over her, his two hands hard on her cheeks. "Don't slip off again. You can handle it. You can handle it because it's all right now, do you understand that? You're all right." "You told me I had cancer." She sounded pouty, accusing. He laughed at her, actually laughed. "You told me you had it." "Oh, but I didn't know." "That explains it, then," he said in a load-off-my-back tone. "There wasn't anything in what I did that could cause a three-day withdrawal like that. It had to be something in you." "Three days!" He simply nodded and went on with what he was saying. "I get a little pompous once in a while," he said engagingly. "Comes from being right so much of the time. Took a bit more for granted than I should have, didn't I? When I assumed you'd been to a doctor, maybe even had a biopsy? You hadn't, had you?" "I was afraid," she admitted. She looked at him. "My mother died of it -- and my aunt -- and my sister had a radical mastectomy. I couldn't bear it. And when you -- " "When I told you what you already knew and what you never wanted to hear -- you couldn't take it. You blacked right out, you know. Fainted away. And it had nothing to do with the seventy-odd thousand volts of static you were carrying. I caught you." He put out his arms where they were, on display, until she looked at them and saw the angry red scorch marks on his forearms and heavy biceps, as much of them as she could see from under his shortsleeved shirt. "About nine-tenths knocked me out too," he said. "But at least you didn't crack your head or anything." "Thank you," she said reflexively and then began to cry. "What am I going to do?" "Do? Go back home, wherever that is -- pick up your life again, whatever that might mean." "But you said -- " "When are you going to get it into your head that what I did was not a diagnostic?" "Are you -- did you -- you mean you cured it?" "I mean you're curing it right now. I explained it all to you before. You remember that now, don't you?" "Not altogether but -- yes." Surreptitiously (but not enough, because he saw her) she felt under the sheet for the lump. "It's still there." "If I bopped you over the head with a bat," he said with slightly exaggerated simplicity, "there would be a lump on it. It would be there tomorrow and the next day. The day after that it might be smaller. In a week you'd still be able to feel it but it would be gone. Same thing here." At last she let the enormity of it touch her. "A one-shot cure for cancer -- " "Oh, God," he said harshly. "I can tell by looking at you that I am going to have to listen to that speech again. Well, I won't." speech?" "The one about my duty to humanity. It comes in two phases and many textures. Phase one has to do with my duty to humanity and really means we could make a classic buck with it. Phase two deals solely with my duty to humanity and I don't hear that one very often. Phase two utterly overlooks the reluctance humanity has to accept good things unless they arrive from accepted and respectable sources. Phase one is fully aware of this but gets rat shrewd in figuring ways around it." She said, "I don't -- " but could get no farther. "The textures," he overrode her, "are accompanied by the light of revelation, with or without religion andor mysticism. Or they are cast sternly in the ethical-philosophy mold and aim to force me to surrender through guilt mixed -- to some degree all the way up to total -- with compassion." "But I only -- " "You," he'said, aiming a long index finger at her, "have robbed yourself of the choicest example of everything I have just said. If my assumptions had been right and you had gone to your friendly local sawbones -- and he had diagnosed cancer and referred you to a specialist and he had done likewise and sent you to a colleague for consultation and, in random panic, you had fallen into my hands and been cured -- and had gone back to your various doctors to report a miracle, do you know what you'd have gotten from them? 'Spontaneous remission,' that's what you'd have gotten. And it wouldn't be only doctors," he went on with a sudden renewal of passion, under which she quailed in her bed. "Everybody has his own commercial. Your nutritionist would have nodded over his wheat germ or his macrobiotic rice cakes, your priest would have dropped to his knees and looked at the sky, your geneticist would have a pet theory about generation-skipping and would assure you that your grandparents probably had spontaneous remissions, too, and never knew it." "Please!" she cried but he shouted at her. "Do you know what I am? I am an engineer twice over, mechanical and electrical -- and I have a law degree. If you were foolish enough to tell anyone about what has happened here (which I hope you aren't -- but if you are I know how to protect myself) I could be jailed for practicing medicine without a lic.ense. You could have me up for assault because I stuck a needle into you and even for kidnaping if you could prove I carried you in here from the lab. Nobody would give a damn that I had cured your cancer. You don't know who I am, do you?" "No. I don't even know your name." "And I won't tell you. I don't know your name either -- " "Oh! It's -- " "Don't tell me! Don't tell me! I don't want to hear it. I wanted to be involved with your lump and I was. I want it and you to be gone as soon as you're both up to it. Have I made myself absolutely clear?" "Just let me get dressed," she said tightly, "and I'll leave right now." "Without making a speech?" "Without making a speech." And in a flash her anger turned to misery and she added: "I was going to say I was grateful. Would that have been all right, sir!" And his anger underwent a change too, for he came close to the bed and sat down on his heel, bringing their faces to a level, and said quite gently, "That would be fine. Although -- you won't really be grateful for another ten days, when you get your 'spontaneous remission' reports -- or maybe for six months or a year or two or five, when examinations keep on testing out negative." She detected such a wealth of sadness behind this that she found herself reaching for the hand with which he steadied himself against the edge of the bed. He did not recoil but he didn't seem to welcome her touch either. "Why can't I be grateful right now?" "That would be an act of faith," he said bitterly, "and that just doesn't happen any more -- if it ever did." He rose and went toward the door. "Please don't go tonight," he said. "It's dark and you don't know the way. I'll see you in the morning." When he came back in the morning the door was open. The bed was made and the sheets were folded neatly on the chair, together with the pillow slips and the towels she had used. She wasn't there. H e came out into the entrance court and contemplated his bonsai. Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp relief, tough brown-gray creviced in velvet. Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship. There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing and living things change -- and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change. A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do or to do it in less time than it needs. The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree. Ittakes both and they must understand one another. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one's bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one's plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy, root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants. And if the explanation is well enough made and there is great enough understanding the tree will respond and obey -- almost. Always there will be its own selfrespecting, highly individual variation: Very well. I shall do what you want, but I will do it my way. And for these variations the tree and logical explanation and, more often than not (almost smiling), it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better. It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree. So he stood for perhaps ten minutes, watching the flow of gold over the upper branches, and then went to a carved wooden chest, opened it, shook out a length of disreputable cotton duck. He opened the hinged glass at one side of the atrium and spread the canvas over the roots and all the earth to one side of the trunk, leaving the rest open to wind and water. Perhaps in a while -- a month or two -- a certain shoot in the topmost branch would take the hint and the uneven flow of moisture up through the cambium layer would nudge it away from that upward reach and persuade it to continue the horizontal passage. And perhaps not -- and it would need the harsher language of binding and wire. But then it might have something to say, too, about the rightness of an upward trend and would perhaps say it persuasively enough to convince the man -- altogether, a patient, meaningful, and rewarding dialogue. "Good morning." "Oh, goddam!" he barked. "You made me bite my tongue. I thought you'd gone." "I had." She kneeled in the shadows, her back against the inner wall, facing the atrium. "But then I stopped to be with the tree for a while." "Then what?" "I thought a lot." "What about?" "You." "Did you now?" "Look," she said firmly. "I'm not going to any doctor to get this thing checked out. I didn't want to leave until I had told you that and until I was sure you believed me." "Come on in and we'll get something to eat." Foolishly, she giggled. "I can't. My feet are asleep." Without hesitation he scooped her up in his arms and carried her around the atrium. She asked, her arm around his shoulders and their faces close, "Do you believe me?" He continued around until they reached the wooden chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes. "I believe you. I don't know why you decided as you did but He set her down on the chest and stood back. "It's that act of faith you mentioned," she said gravely. "I thought you ought to have it at least once in your life -- so you can never say again what you said." She tapped her heels gingerly against the slate floor. "Owl" She made a pained smile. "Pins and needles." "You must have been thinking for a long time." "Y es. Want more?" "Sure." "You are an angry, frightened man." He seemed delighted. "Tell me about all that!" "No," she said quietly. "You tell me. I'm very serious about this. Why are you angry? "I'm not." "Why are you so angry?" "I tell you I'm not. Although," he added good-naturedly, "you're pushing me in that direction." "Weli then, why?" H e gazed at her for what to her seemed a very long time indeed. "You really want to know, don't you?" She nodded. He waved a sudden hand, up and out. "Where do you suppose all this came from -- the house, the land, the equipment?" She waited. "An exhaust system," he said, with a thickening of his voice she was coming to know. "A way of guiding exhaust gases out of internal combustion engines in such a way that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded in the walls of the muffler in a glasswool liner that slips out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is fired by its own spark plug and what will burn, burns. The heat is used to preheat the fuel. The rest is spun again through a five-thousand mile cartridge. What finally gets out is, by today's standards at least, pretty clean. And because of the preheating it actually gets better mileage out of the engine." "So you've made a lot of money." "I made a lot of money," he echoed. "But not because the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got the money because an automobile company bought it and buried it in a vault. They don't like it because it costs something to install in new cars. Some friends of theirs in the refining business don't like it because it gets high performance out of crude fuels. Well, all right -- I didn't know any better and I won't make the same mistake again. But yes -- I'm angry. I was angry when I was a kid on a tankship and we were set to washing down a bulkhead with chipped brown soap and canvas. I went ashore and bought a detergent and tried it and it was better, faster and cheaper, so I took it to the bos'n, who gave me a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job better than he did. Well, he was drunk at the time but the rough part came when the old shellbacks in the crew ganged up on me for being what they called a 'company man' -- that'sa dirty name in a ship. I just couldn't understand why people got in the way of something better. "I've been up against that all my life. I have something in my head that just won't quit. It's a way I have of asking the next question: why is so-and-so the way it is? Why can't it be such-andsuch instead? There is always another question to be asked about anything or any situation -- especially you shouldn't quit when you like an answer because there's always another one after it. And we live in a world where people just don't want to ask the next question! "I've been paid all my stomach will take for things people won't use and if I'm mad all the time it's really my fault -- I admit it -- because I just can't stop asking that next question and coming up with answers. There are a half-dozen real block-busters in that lab that nobody will ever see and half a hundred more in my head. But what can you do in a world where people would rather kill each other in a desert, even when they're shown it can turn green and bloom -- where they'll fall all over themoping a new oil strike when it's been proved over and over again that the fossil fuels will kill us all? "Yes, I'm angry. Shouldn't I be?" She let the echoes of his voice swirl around the court and out through the hole in the top of the atrium and waited a little longer to let him know he was here with her and not beside himself and his fury. He grinned at her sheepishly when he came to this. And she said, "Maybe you're asking the next question instead of asking the right question. I think people who live by wise old sayings are trying not to think -- but I know one worth paying some attention to. It's this: If you ask a question the right way, you've just given the answer." She paused to see if he was paying real attention. He was. She went on, "I mean, if you put your hand on a hot stove you might ask yourself, how can I stop my hand from burning? And the answer is pretty clear, isn't it? If the world keeps rejecting what you have to give -- there's some way of asking why that contains the answer." "It's a simple answer," he said shortly. "People are stupid." "That isn't the answer and you know it," she said. "What is?" "Oh, I can't tell you that! All I know is that the way you do something, where people are concerned, is more important than what you do. If you want results. I mean -- you already know how to get what you want with the tree, don't you?" "I'll be damned." "People are living, growing things, too. I don't know a hundredth part of what you do about bonsai but I do know this -- when you start one, it isn't often the strong straight healthy ones you take. It's the twisted sick ones that can be made the most beautiful. When you get to shaping humanity, you might remember that." "Of all the -- I don't know whether to laugh in your face or punch you right in the mouth!" She rose. He hadn't realized she was quite this tall. "I'd better go." "Come on now. You know a figure of speech when you hear one." "Oh, I didn't feel threatened. But -- I'd better go, all the same." Shrewdly he asked her, "Are you afraid to ask the next question?" "Terrified." "Ask it anyway." "No." "Then I'll do it for you. You said I was angry -- and afraid. You want to know what I'm afraid of." "Yes." "You. I am scared to death of you." "Are you really?" "You have a way of provoking honesty," he said with some difficulty. "I'll say what I know' you're thinking: I'm afraid of any close human relationship. I'm afraid of something I can't take apart with a screwdriver or a mass spectroscope or a table of cosines and tangents. I don't know how to handle it." His voice was jocular but his hands were shaking. "You do it by watering one side," she said softly, "or by turning it just so in the sun. You handle it as if it were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai. It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and take the time and the care." "I think," he said, "that you are making me some kind of offer. Why?" "Sitting there most of the night," she said, "I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted trees ever made bonsai out of one another?" "What's your name?" he asked her.  is one of the world's most famous science-fiction writers. He has also written books on astronomy, anatomy, robots, matherhatics, physics, chemistry, biology, words, the Greek myths, and the Bible. His new book -- #th in a long line of best sellers -- contains selections from the first #. Asimov's own vast enthusiasm for whatever subject he is tackling immediately infects the reader with a spirit of intellectual adventure. pany of a warm, ebullient, very human being who is -- in fact -- a genius. At your bookstore  # She was young and beautiful and demanding -- demanding a love Grimes could never give! ficer Commanding Couriers, was not in a very good mood. This was not unusual -- especially on the occasions when Lieutenant Grimes, captain of the Serpent Class Courier Adder, happened to be on the carpet. "Mr. Grimes -- " said the commodore in a tired voice. "Sir." "Mr. Grirhes, you've been and gone and done it again." The lieutenant's prominent ears reddened. "I did what I could to save my ship and my people, sir." "You destroyed an expensive piece of equipment and played merry hell with the Federation's colonial policy. My masters -- who, incidentally, are also your masters -- are not, repeat not, amused." "I saved my ship," Grimes reiterated stubbornly. The commodore looked down at the report on his desk. A grim smile did little, if anything, to soften the harsh planes of his bony face. "It says here that your ship saved you." "She did," admitted Grimes. "It was a sort of mutual -- " "And it was your ship that killed -- I suppose that 'kill' is the right word to use regarding a highly intelligent robot -- Mr. Adam. H'm, a slightly extenuating circumstance. Nonetheless, Grimes, were it not for the fact that you're a better than average spaceman you'd be O-U-bloody-T, trying to get a job as third mate in Rim Runners or some such outfit." He made a steeple of his skeletal fingers, glared coldly at the lieutenant over the bony erection. "So, in the interests of all concerned. I've decided that your Adder will not be carrying any more passengers for a while -- at least, not with you in command of her. Even so. I'm afraid that you'll not have much time to enjoy the social life -- such as it is -- of base." Grimes sighed audibly. Although a certain Dr. Margaret Lazenby was his senior in rank he was beginning to get on well with her. "As soon as repairs and routine maintenance are completed, Mr. Grimes, you will get the hell off this planet." "What about my officers, sir? Mr. Beadle is overdue for leave." "My heart fair bleeds for him." "And Mr. McCloud is in the hospital." "Ensign Vitelli, your new engineering officer, was ordered to report to your vessel as soon as possible, if not before. The work of fitting a replacement computer to Adder is already well in hand." The commodore looked at his watch. "It is now fourteen-thirtyfive. At eighteen hundred hours you will lift ship." "My orders, sir -- " "Oh, yes. Grimes. Your orders. A matter of minor importance, actually. As long as you get out of my hair that's all that matters to me. But I suppose I have to put you in the picture. The Shaara are passing through a phase of being nice to humans and we of the Federation are reciprocating. There's a small parcel of extremely important cargo to be lifted from Droomoor to Brooum and for some reason or other our arthropodal allies haven't a fast ship of their own handy. Lindisfarne Base is only a week from Droomoor by Serpent Class Courier. So -- " So Viper, Asp and Cobra have all been in port for weeks hut  get the job... Grimes did not utter the thought but the commodore had his telepathic moments. He smiled again, this time with a touch of sympathy. He said, "I want you off Lindisfarne, young Mr. Grimes, before there's too much of a stink raised over this Mr. Adam affair. You're too honest. I can bend the truth better than you can." "Thank you, sir," said Grimes, meaning it. "Off you go, now. Don't forget these." Grimes took the heavily sealed envelope. "And try not to make too much of a balls of this assignment." "I'll try, sir." Grimes saluted, marched smartly out of the commodore's office, strode across the apron to where his flying darning needle, not yet shifted to a lay-up berth, was awaiting him. "airlock. He rarely smiled -- but he did so rather smugly when he saw the orders in Grimes' hand. He asked casually, "Any word of my relief. Captain?" "Yes. You're not getting it. Number One," Grimes told him, rather hating himself for the pleasure he derived from being the bearer of bad tidings. "And we're to lift off at eighteen hundred hours. Is the new engineer aboard yet?" Beadle's face had resumed its normal lugubrious cast. "Yes," he said. "But stores. Captain -- repairs -- maintenance -- " "Are they in hand?" "Yes, but -- " "Then if we aren't ready for space it will be our own fault." But Grimes knew -- and it made him feel as unhappy as his first lieutenant looked -- that the ship would be ready. A dder lifted precisely on time. Grimes, sulking hard -- he had not been able to see Maggie Lazenby -- did not resort to his customary spectacular getting-upstairs-in-a-hurry technique, kept his fingers off the auxiliary reaction drive controls. The ship drifted up and out under inertial drive only, seemingly sharing the reluctance to depart of her officers. Beadle slumped gloomily in his chair; von Tannenbaum, the navigator, stared at his instruments with an elaborate lack of interest, Slovotny, the electronic communications officer, snarled every time that he had occasion to hold converse with Aerospace Control. And yet, once the vessel was clear of the atmosphere. Grimes began to feel almost happy. Growl you may but go you must... He was on his way. He was back in what he regarded as his natural element. Quite cheerfully he went through the motions of lining Adder up on the target star, was pleased to note that von Tannenbaum was cooperating in his usual highly efficient manner. And then, trajectory set, the Mannchenn Drive was put into operation and the little ship was falling at a fantastic speed through the warped continuum, with yet another mission to be accomplished. The captain made the usual minor ritual of lighting his pipe. He said, "Normal deep space routine. Number One." "Normal deep space routine, sir." "Who has the watch?" "Mr. von Tannenbaum, Captain." "Good. Then come to see me as soon as you're free." When Beadle knocked at his door Grimes had the envelope of instructions open. He motioned the first lieutenant to a chair. "Fix us drinks. Number One, while I see what's in this -- " He extended a hand for the glass the officer put into it, sipped pink gin, continued reading. "Well, we're bound for Droomoor, as you know." "As well I know." Beadle then muttered something about communistic bumblebees. "Come, come, Mr. Beadle. The Shaara are our brave allies. And they aren't at all bad when you get to know them." "I don't want to get to know them. If I couldn't have my leave at least I could have been sent to a world with real human girls and a few bright lights -- " "Mr. Beadle, you shock me. By your xenophobia as well as by your low tastes. However, as I was saying, we are to proceed to Droomoor at maximum velocity consistent with safety. There we are to pick up a small parcel of very important cargo, the loading of which is to be strictly supervised by the local authorities. As soon as possible thereafter we are to proceed to Brooum at maximum velocity." "Just delivery boys," grumbled Beadle. "That's us." "Oh, well," Grimes told him philosophically, "it's a change from being coach drivers. And after the trouble we've had with passengers of late it should be a welcome one." D roomoor is an Earth-type planet featuring the usual seas, continents, polar icecaps and all the rest of it. Evolution did not produce any life forms deviating to any marked degree from the standard pattern -- neither did it come up with any fire-making, tool-using animals. If human beings had been the first to discover it, it would have become a Terran colony. But a Shaara ship had made the first landing, so it was colonized by the Shaara, as was Brooum, a very similar world. Grimes brought Adder in to Port Sherr with his usual competence, receiving the usual cooperation from the Shaara version of Aerospace Control. Other matters were not so usual. He and his officers were interested to note that the aerial traffic they sighted during their passage through the atmosphere consisted of semi-rigid airships rather than heavier-thanair machines. And the buildings surrounding the landing apron at the spaceport were featureless, mud-colored domes rather than angular constructions of glass and metal. Beadle mumbled something about a huddle of bloody beehives but Grimes paid no attention. As a reasonably efficient captain he was interested in the layout of the port, was trying to form some idea of what facilities were available. A ship is a ship is a ship, no matter by whom built or by whom manned -- but a mammal is a mammal, an arthropod is an arthropod. And each has its own separate requirements. "The port officials seem on their way out to us," remarked von Tannenbaum. A party of Shaara had emerged from a circular opening near the top of the closer dome. They flew slowly toward the ship, their gauzy wings almost invisible in the sunlight. Grimes focused his binoculars on them. In the lead was a princess, larger than the others, her body more slender, glittering with the jeweled insignia of her rank. She was followed by two drones, so hung about with precious stones and metal that it was a wonder that they were able to stay airborne. Four workers, less gaudily caparisoned than the drones but with sufficient ornamentation to differentiate them from the common herd, completed the party. "Number One," said Grimes, "attend the airlock, please. I shall receive the boarding party in my day cabin." He went down from the control room to his quarters, got out the whisky. Three bottles, he decided, should be sufficient, although the Shaara drones were notorious for their capacity. T he princess was hard, businesslike. She refused to take a drink herself and under her glittering, many-faceted eyes the workers dared not accept Grimes' hospitality. Even the drones limited themselves to a single small glass apiece. She stood there like a gleaming, metallic piece of abstract statuary, motionless, and the voice that issued from the box strapped to her thorax was that of a machine rather than of a living being. She said, "This is an important mission. Captain. You will come with me at once to the Queen Mother for instructions." Grimes did not like being ordered around, especially aboard his own ship. But he was well aware that it is foolish to antagonize planetary rulers. "Certainly, Your Highness. But first I must give instructions to my officers. And before I can do so I must have some information. To begin with, how long a stay do we have on your world?" "You will lift ship as soon as the consignment has been loaded." She consulted the jeweled watch she wore strapped to a forelimb. "The underworkers will be on their way out to your vessel now." She pointed toward the four upper caste working Shaara. "These will supervise stowage. Please inform your officers of the arrangements." Grimes called Beadle on the intercom, asked him to the cabin, told him to place himself at the disposal of the supervisors and to ensure that Adder was in readiness for instant departure. He then went to his bedroom to change into a dress uniform, was pulling off his shirt when he realized that the princess had followed him. "What are you doing?" she asked coldly. "Putting on something more suitable. Your Highness." "That will not be necessary. Captain. You will be the only human in the presence of Her Majesty and everybody will know who and what you are." Resignedly Grimes shrugged back into his uniform shirt, unadorned save for the shoulder boards. He felt that he should be allowed to make more of a showing, especially among beings all dressed up like Christmas trees -- but his orders had been to cooperate fully with the Shaara authorities. And shorts and shirt were far more comfortable than long trousers, frock coat, collar and tie, fore-and-aft hat and that ridiculous ceremonial sword. He hung his personal communicator over his shoulder, put on his cap and said, "I'm ready. Your Highness." "What is that?" she asked suspiciously. "A weapon?" "No, Your Highness. A radio transceiver. I must remain in touch with my ship at all times." "I suppose it's all right," she said grudgingly. II the ramp, following the princess and her escorting drones, he saw that a wheeled truck had drawn up alongside Adder and that a winch mounted on the vehicle was reeling in a small airship, a bloated gasbag from which was slung a flimsy car, at the after end of which a huge, two-bladed propeller was still lazily turning. Workers were scurrying about on the ground and buzzing between the blimp and the truck. "Your cargo," said the princess. "And your transport from the spaceport to the palace." The car of the airship was now only a foot above the winch. From it the workers lifted carefully a white cylinder -- apparently made of some plastic -- about four feet long and one foot in diameter. Set into its smooth surface were dials and an indicator light that glowed vividly green even in the bright sunlight. An insulated lead ran from it to the airship's engine compartment where, thought Grimes, there must be either a battery or a generator. Yes, a battery it was. Two workers, their wings a shimmering transparency, brought it out and set it down on the concrete beside the cylinder. "You will embark," the princess stated. Grimes stood back and assessed the situation. It would be easy enough to get on to the truck, to clamber on top of the winch and from there into the car -- but it would be impossible to do so without getting his white shorts, shirt and stockings filthy. Insofar as machinery was concerned the Shaara believed in lubrication and plenty of it. "I am waiting," said the princess. "Yes, Your Highness, but -- " Grimes did not hear the order given -- the Shaara communicated among themselves telepathically -- so was somewhat taken aback when two of the workers approached him, buzzing loudly. He flinched when their claws penetrated the thin fabric of his clothing and scratched his skin. He managed to refrain from crying out when he was lifted from the ground, carried the short distance to the airship and dumped, sprawling, on to the deck of the open car. The main hurt was to his dignity. Looking up at his own vessel he could see the grinning faces of von Tannenbaum and Slovotny at the control room viewports. He scrambled somehow to his feet, wondering if the fragile decking would stand his weight. And then the princess was with him, as were the escorting drones, and the upper caste worker in command of the blimp had taken her place at the simple controls. Next the frail contraption was ballooning swiftly upward. Grimes, looking down, saw the end of the anchor cable whip off the winch barrel. He wondered what would happen if the dangling wire fouled something on the ground below, then decided it was none of his business. These people had been playing around with airships for quite some years and must know what they were about. The princess was not in a communicative mood and obviously the drones and the workers talked only when talked to -- by her -- although all of them wore voice boxes. Grimes was quite content with the way things were. He had decided that the Shaaran was a bossy female and he did not like bossy females, mammalian, arthropodal or whatever. He settled down to enjoy the trip, appreciating the leisurely -- by his standards -- flight over the lush countryside. There were the green, rolling hills, the great banks of flowering shrubs, huge splashes of color that were vivid without being gaudy. Thousands of workers were busily employed about the enormous blossoms. He saw almost no machinery. In a culture such as this there would be little need for machines, workers of the lower grades being no more than flesh-and-blood robots. Ahead loomed the city. Just a huddle of domes it was, some large, some small, with the greatest of all of them roughly in the center. This one. Grimes saw as they approached it, had a flattened top, and here he saw machinery -- a winch, he decided. The airship came in high, lost altitude slowly, finally hovering over the palace, its propeller barely turning over to keep it stemming the light breeze. Two workers flew up from the platform, caught the end of the dangling cable, snapped it on to the end of another cable brought up from the winch drum. The winch was started and the blimp was drawn down. A set of wheeled steps was pushed into position, its upper part hooked on to the gunwale of the swaying car. The princess and her escort ignored this facility, fluttering out and down in a flurry of gauzy wings. Grimes used the ladder, of course, feeling grateful that somebody had bothered to remember that he was wingless biped. "Follow me," snapped the princess. Grimes followed her through a circular hatch in the platform. The ramp down which she led him was steep and he had difficulty maintaining his balance, was unable to gain more than a confused impression of the interior of the huge building. There was plenty of light, luckily, a green-blue radiance emanating from clusters of luminescent insects hanging at intervals from the roof of the corridor. The air was warm and bore an acrid but not unpleasant tang. It carried very few sounds, however, only a continuous, faintly sinister rustling noise. Grimes missed the murmur of machinery. Surely -- apart from anything else -- a vast structure such as this would need mechanical ventilation. In any case, there was an appreciable air flow. And then, at a junction of four corridors, he saw a group of workers, their feet hooked into rings set in the smooth floor, their wings beating slowly, maintaining the circulation of the atmosphere. Down Grimes and the princess went, down through corridors that were deserted save for themselves, through other corridors that were busy streets crowded with workers scurrying on mysterious errands. But the lower caste Shaara always gave the princess and her party a respectfully wide berth. Only an occasional drone would stop to stare at the Earthman with interest. The party came at last to the end of a long passageway, closed off by a grilled door, the first that Grimes had seen in the hive. On the far side of it were six workers, hung about with metal accoutrements. Workers? No, Grimes decided: soldiers, Amazons. Did they, he wondered, have stings, as did their Terran counterparts? Perhaps they did -- but the laser pistols they held would be far more effective. "Who comes?" asked one of them in the sort of voice that Grimes associated with sergeantmajors. "The Princess Shrrla, with Drones Brrynn and Drryhr, and Earth-Drone-Captain Grrimes." "Enter, Princess Shrrla. Enter, Earth-Drone-Captain Grrimes." The grille slid silently aside, admitting Grimes and the princess, shutting again, leaving the two drones on its further side. Two soldiers led the way along a tunnel that, by the Earthman's standards, was very poorly illuminated; two more brought up the rear. Grimes was pleased to note that the princess seemed to have lost most of her arrogance. IHE tunnel led to a vast cham ber, a blue-lit dimness about which the shapes of the QueenMother's attendants rustled, scurried and crept. Slowly they walked over the smooth, soft floor -- under Grimes' shoes it felt unpleasantly organic -- to the raised platform on which lay a huge, pale shape. Ranged around the platform were screens upon which moved pictures of scenes from all over the planet -- one showed the spaceport. Adder standing tall and slim and gleaming on the apron. Banks of dials and meters evidently controlled the screens. Throneroom this enormous vault was -- and nursery and the control room of a world. Grimes looked with pity at the flabby, grossly distended body with its ineffectual limbs, its useless stubs of wings. He did not, oddly .enough, consider obscene the slowly moving belt that ran under the platform, upon which, at regular intervals, a glistening, pearly egg was deposited, neither was he repelled by the spectacle of the worker whose swollen body visibly shrank as she regurgitated nutriment into the mouth of the Shaara Queen -- but he was taken aback when that being spoke to him vyhile feeding was still in progress. He should not have been, knowing as he did that the artificial voice boxes worn by the Shaara have no connection with their organs of ingestion. "Welcome, Captain Grimes," she said in deep, almost masculine tones. Her voice was truly regal. "i am honored, Your Majesty," he stammered. "You do us a great service. Captain Grimes." "That is a pleasure as well as an honor. Your Majesty." "So -- but. Captain Grimes, I must, as you Earthmen say, put you in the picture." A short silence ensued. "On Brooum exists crisis. Disease -- a virus, a mutated virus has taken its toll among the hives. A cure was found too late. The Brooum Queen Mother is dead. All princesses not beyond fertilization age are dead. Even the royal eggs, larvae and pupae were destroyed by the disease. We, of course, are best able to afford help to our daughters and sisters on Brooum. We offered to send a fertilizable princess to become Queen Mother -- but the Council of Princesses which now rules the colony insists that its new monarch be born, as it were, on the planet. We are dispatching -- by your .vessel -- a royal pupa. She will tear the silken sheath and emerge, as an imago, into the world over which she will reign." Grimes grunted absentmindedly, added hastily; "Your Majesty." The Queen . Mother turned her attention to the television screens. "If we are not mistaken," she said, "the loading of the refrigerated canister containing the pupa has been completed. Princess Shrrla will take you back to your ship. You will lift and proceed as soon as is practicable." Again she paused, then went on. "We need not tell you. Captain Grimes, that we Shaara have great respect for Terran spacemen. We are confident that you will carry out your mission successfully. We shall be pleased, on your return to our planet, to confer upon you the Order of the Golden Honeyflower. On your bicycle, spaceman!" Grimes looked at the recumbent Queen dubiously. Where had she picked up that expression? But he had heard it said -- and was inclined to agree -- that the Shaara were more human than many of the humanoids throughout the Galaxy. He bowed low -- then, following the princess, escorted by the soldiers, made his way out of the throne-room. I T IS just three weeks, Terran Standard, from Droomoor to Brooum as the SerpentClass Courier flies. That, of course, is assuming that all systems are go aboard the said Courier. All systems were not go insofar as Adder was concerned. This was the result of an unfortunate combination of circumstances. The ship had been fitted with a new computer at Lindisfarne Base. A new engineering officer -- all of whose previous experience had been as a junior in a Constellation Class Cruiser -- had been appointed to her and she had not been allowed to stay in port long enough for any real maintenance to be carried out. The trouble started one evening, ship's time, when Grimes was discussing matters with Spooky Deane, the psionic communications officer. The telepath was, as usual, getting outside a large, undiluted gin. His captain was sipping a glass of the same fluid but with ice cubes and bitters as additives. "Well, Spooky," said Grimes, "I don't think that we shall have any trouble with this passenger. She stays in her cocoons -- the homegrown one and the plastic outer casing -- safe and snug and hardfrozen. Thawing her out will be up to her loyal subjects. By that time we shall be well on our way -- " "She's alive, you know," said Deane. "Of course she's alive." "She's conscious, I mean. I'm getting more and more attuned to her thoughts, her feelings. It's always been said that it's practically impossible for there to be any real contact of minds between human and Shaara telepaths -- but when you're cooped up in the same ship with a Shaara, a little ship at that -- " "Tell me more," ordered Grimes. "It's -- fascinating. You know, of course, that race memory plays a big part in the Shaara culture. The princess, when she emerges as an imago, will know exactly what her duties are and what the duties of those about her are. She knows that her two main functions will be to rule and to breed. Workers exist only to serve her and every drone is a potential father to her people." "And is she aware of usT' "Dimly, Captain. She doesn't know, of course, who or what we are. As far as she's concerned we're just some of her subjects in close attendance upon her." "Drones or workers?" Spooky Deane laughed. "If she were more fully conscious she'd be rather confused on that point. Males are drones -- and drones don't work." Grimes was about to make some unkind remarks about his officers when the lights flickered. When they flickered a second time he was already on his feet. When they went out he was halfway through the door of his day cabin and hurrying toward the control room. The police lights came on, fed from the emergency batteries -- but the sudden cessation of the noise of pumps and fans and the cutting off in mid-beat of the irregular throbbing of the inertial drive were frightening. The thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive Unit deepened as the spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowed to a halt and, as they did so, there came the nauseating dizziness of temporal disorientation. Grimes kept going, although -- as he put it later -- he did not know if it was Christmas Day or last Thursday. The ship was in free fall now. He pulled himself rapidly along the guide rail, was practically swimming in air as he dived through the hatch into Control. Von Tannenbaum had the watch. He was busy at the auxiliary machinery control panel. A fan restarted somewhere but a warning buzzer began to sound. The navigator cursed. The fan motor slowed down and the buzzer ceased. "What's happened. Pilot?" demanded Grimes. "The Phoenix Jennie I think. Captain. Vitelli hasn't reported yet -- " Then the engineer's shrill, excited voice sounded from the intercom speaker; "Auxiliary engineroom to Control. I have to report a leakage of deuterium." "What pressure is left in the tank?" Grimes asked. "The gauges still show twenty thousand units. But -- " "But what?" Grimes snapped. "Captain -- the tank is empty." Grimes pulled himself to his chair, strapped himself in. He looked out through the viewports at the star-gemmed blackness, each point of light hard and sharp, no longer distorted by the temporal precession fields of the Drive, each a distant sun lifetimes away. He turned to face his officers -- Beadle, looking no more glum than usual; von Tannenbaum, whose normally ruddy face was now as pale as his hair; Slovotny, whose dark complexion now had a greenish cast; Deane, ectoplasmic as always. They were joined by Vitelli, an ordinary-looking young man who was, at the moment, more than ordinarily frightened. "Mr. Vitelli," Grimes asked, "is the leakage into our atmosphere or outside the hull?" "Outside, sir." "Good. In that case -- " Grimes and lighting his battered pipe. "Now I can think. Luckily I've not used any reaction mass this trip, so we have ample fuel for the emergency generator. Got your slipstick ready. Pilot? Assuming that the tanks are full, do we have enough to run the inertial and interstellar drives from here to Brooum?" "I'll have to use the computer. Captain." "Then use it. Meanwhile -- Sparks and Spooky, can either of you gentlemen tell me what ships are in the vicinity?" "The Dog Star Line's Basset," Slovotny told him. "The cruiser Draconis" added Deane. Grimes felt it would be humiliating for a Courier Service Captain to have to call for help -- but Draconis would be the lesser of two evils. He said, "Get in touch with both vessels, Mr. Deane. I'm not sure that we can spare power for the Carlotti, Mr. Slovotny. Get in touch with both vessels, ask their positions and tell them ours. But don't tell them anything else." "Our position, sir, is -- what?" Grimes swiveled so that he could see the chart tank. He rattled off the coordinates, adding: "Near enough, until we get an accurate fix."" "I can take one now. Captain," von Tannenbaum told him. "Thank you. Pilot. Finished your sums?" "Yes." The navigator's beefy face was expressionless. "To begin with, we have enough chemical fuel to maintain all essential services for a period of seventy-three Standard days. But we do not have enough fuel to carry us to Brooum, even using Mannschenn Drive only. We could, however, make fbr ZX# -- Sol-type, with one Earth-type planet, habitable but currently uninhabited by intelligent life forms." Grimes considered the situation. It he were going to call for help he would be better off staying where he was, in reasonable comfort and, for a while, safety. "Mr. Vitelli," he said, "you can start up the emergency generator. Mr. Deane, as soon as Mr. von Tannenbaum has a fix you can get a message out to Basset and Draconis..." "But she's properly awake," Deane muttered. "She's torn open the silk cocoon and the outer canister is opening -- " "What the hell are you talking about?" barked Grimes. "The princess. When the power went off the refrigeration unit stopped. She -- " The telepath's face assumed an expression of rapt devotion. "We must go to her -- " "We must go to her," echoed Vitelli. "The emergency generator," Grimes almost yelled. But he, too, could feel that command inside his brain, the imperious demand for attention -- for love. Here at last was something, someone he could serve with all the devotion of which he was -- of which he ever would be capable. And yet a last, tattered shred of sanity persisted. He said gently, "We must start the emergency generator. She must not be cold or hungry." Beadle agreed. "We must start it -- for her." They started the emergency generator and the ship came back to life -- of a sort. She was a small bubble of light and warmth and life drifting down and through the black immensities. HI rilHE worst part of it all. Grimes said later, was knowing what was happening but not having the will power to do anything about it. Not being able to fight for, or even want, a different fate. "But it was educational. You can't deny that. I always used to wonder how the Establishment gets away with so much. Now I know. If you're a member of the Establishment you have that inborn -- arrogance? No, not arrogance. That's not the right word. You have the calm certainty that everybody will do just what you want. With our Establishment it could be largely the result of training, of education. With the Shaara Establishment no education or training is necessary. Too, the princess had it easy -- almost as easy as she would have had if she had broken out of her cocoon in the proper place at the proper time. She was in a little ship manned by junior officers, people used to saluting and obeying officers with more gold braid on their sleeves. For her to impose her will was child's play. Literally child's play in this case. There was a communication problem, of course, but it wasn't a serious one. Even if she couldn't actually speak telepathically to the rest of us -- there was Spooky Deane. With him she could dot the 's and cross the t's. And she did." Adder's officers gathered in the cargo compartment that was now the throne-room. A table had been set up, covered with a cloth that was, in actuality, a new Federation ensign from the ship's flag locker. To it the princess -- the queen, rather -- clung with her four posterior legs. She was a beautiful creature, slim, the colors of her body undimmed by age. She was a glittering, bejeweled piece of abstract statuary but she was alive. With her great faceted eyes she regarded the men who hovered about her. She was demanding something. Grimes knew, as all of them did. She was demanding something -- quietly at first, then more and more insistently. But what? Veneration? Worship? "She hungers," stated Deane. She hungers... Grimes's memory was still functioning. He tried to recall what he knew of the Shaara. He said, "Tell her that her needs will be satisfied." left the cargo compartment, making his way to the galley. It did not take him long to find what he wanted, a squeeze bottle of syrup. He hurried back with it. It did not occur to him to hand the container to the queen. With his feet in contact with the deck he was able to stand before her, holding the bottle in his two hands, squeezing out the viscous fluid, drop by drop, into the waitmouth. Normally he would have found that complexity of moving parts rather frightening, repulsive even -- now they seemed to possess an essential rightness that was altogether lacking from the clumsy masticatory apparatus of a human being. Slowly, carefully he squeezed, until a voice spoke in his mind. Enough, enough... "She would rest now," said Deane. "She shall rest," stated Grimes. He led the way from the cargo compartment to the little wardroom. I N A bigger ship with a larger crew -- with a senior officer in command who, by virtue of his rank, was himself a member of the Establishment -- the spell might soon have been broken. But this was only a little vessel, and of her personnel only Grimes was potentially a rebel. The time would come when this potentiality would be realized -- just as, later, the time of compromise would come -- but it was not yet. He had been trained to obedience. In the wardroom the officers disposed of a meal of sorts. When it was over Grimes, from force of habit, pulled his pipe from his pocket, began to fill it. Deane admonished him, saying, "She wouldn't like it. It taints the air." "Of course," agreed Grimes, putting his pipe away. They sat in uneasy, guilty silence. They should have been working. There was so much to be done about the Hive. Von Tannenbaum at last unbuckled himself from his chair and, finding a soft rag, began unnecessarily to polish a bulkhead. Vitelli muttered something about cleaning up the engineroom and drifted away. Slovotny, saying that he wanted to help, followed Vitelli. Beadle took the dirty plates into the pantry -- normally he washed the dishes just before the next meal. "She is hungry," announced Deane. Grimes went to the galley for another bottle of syrup. So it went on day after day, with the Queen gaining strength and, if it were possible, even greater authority over her subjects. And she was learning. Deane's mind was open to her and it was through Deane that she could speak. "She knows," said the telepath, "that supplies in the Hive are limited, that sooner or later, sooner rather than later, we shall be without heat, without air or food. She knows that there is a planet within reach. She orders us to proceed there, so that a greater Hive may be established on its surface." "Then let us proceed," agreed Grimes. He knew, as they all knew, that a general distress call would bring help -- but somehow he was incapable of ordering it made. He knew that the establishment of a Hive on a planet of ZX# would be utterly impossible -- but that was what she wanted. So Adder awoke from her sleeping state, vibrating to the irregular rhythm of the inertial drive and, had there been an outside observer, flickered into invisibility as the gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive unit precessed and tumbled, falling down and through the warped continuum, pulling the structure of the ship with them. Ahead was ZX#, a writhing, multi-hued spiral, expanding with every passing hour. Von Tannenbaum now held effective command of the ship. Grimes had become the Queen's personal attendant, although it was still Deane who made her detailed wishes known. Grimes fed her, cleansed her, sat with her hour after hour in wordless communion. A part of him rebelled, a part of him screamed soundlessly and envisaged hard fists smashing those great, faceted eyes, heavy boots crashing through fragile chitin. A part of him rebelled -- but was powerless and she knew it. She was female and he was male and the tensions were inevitable, and enjoyable to one if not to the other. And then Deane said to him, "She is tiring of her tasteless food." She would be, thought Grimes dully. And then there was the urge to placate, to please. Although he had never made a deep study of the arthropodal race he knew, as did all spacemen, which Terran luxuries were appreciated by the Shaara. He went up to his quarters, found what he was looking for. He decanted the fluid from its glass container into a squeeze bottle. Had it been intended for human consumption this would not have been necessary, now that the ship was accelerating -- but Shaara queens do not, ever, feed themselves. He went back to the throneroom. Deane and the huge arthropod watched him. The Queen's eyes were even brighter than usual. She lifted her forelimbs as though to take the bottle from Grimes, then let them fall to her side. Her gauzy wings were quivering in anticipation. Grimes approached her slowly. He kneeled before her, holding the bottle before him. He raised it carefully, the nippled end toward the working mandibles. He squeezed and a thin, amber stream shot out. Its odor was rich and heavy in the almost still air of the compartment. More The word formed itself in his mind. He went on squeezing. But -- you are not a worker. You are a drone... The word "drone" denoted masculinity, not idleness. You are a drone. You shall be the first father of the new Hive... "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker," muttered Deane, struggling to maintain a straight face. Grimes glared at the telepath. What was so funny about this? He was feeling, strongly, the stirrings of desire. She was female -- and in his mind's eye those flimsy wings were transparent draperies enhancing, not concealing, the symmetry of the form of a lovely woman -- slim, with high, firm breasts, with long, slender legs. She wanted him to be her mate, her consort. She wanted him. She... Suddenly the vision flickered out. This was no woman spread in alluring, naked abandon. This was no more than a repulsive insect sprawled in drunken untidiness, desecrating the flag that had been spread over the table. The wings were crumpled. A dull film was over the faceted eyes. A yellowish ichor oozed from among the still-working mandibles. Grimes retched violently. "Captain." Deane's voice was urgent. "She's out like a light. She's drunk as a fiddler's bitch -- " "And we must keep her that way," snapped Grimes. He was himself again. He strode to the nearest bulkhead pickup. "Attention, all hands. This is the Captain speaking. Shut down inertial and interstellar drive units. Energize Carlotti transceiver. Contact any and all shipping in the vicinity and request aid as soon as possible. Say that we are drifting with main engines inoperable." He turned to Deane. "I'm leaving you in charge. Spooky. If she shows signs of breaking surface you know what to do." He looked sternly at the telepath. "I suppose I can trust you." "You can," the Psionic Communications Officer assured him. "You can. Indeed you can. Captain. I wasn't looking forward at The Region Between . A Novella . Harlan Ellison At this writing no one knows what the next it take whatever shape is necessary to contain all at all to ending my days as a worker in some peculiar TerranShaara Hive." He stared at Grimes thoughtfully. "I wonder if the union would have been fertile." "That will do, Mr. Deane," growled Grimes. modore Damien. "Fantastic. Almost, Mr. Grimes, I feel a certain envy. The things you get up to." The aroma of good whisky hung heavily in the air of the Commodore's office. Yet Damien, while not an abstainer, was not touching the stuff. And though Grimes' tastes were catholic, on an occasion such as this he preferred to be stone cold sober. "It is more than fantastic," said the Shaara Queen-Emissary, the special envoy of the Empress herself. Had she not been using a voice box her words would have been a snarl. "It is -- disgusting. Reprehensible. This officer forced liquor down the throat of a member of our Royal family. He -- " "He twisted her arm?" suggested the commodore. "I do not understand. But she is now Queen Mother of Brooum. A drunken, even alcoholic Queen Mother." "I saved my ship and my people," stated Grimes woodenly. Damien grinned unpleasantly. "Isn't this where we came in. Lieutenant? But no matter. There are affairs of far more pressing urgency. Not only do I have to cope with a direct complaint from the personal representative of Her Imperial Majesty -- " Even though she was wearing a voice box the Queen-Emissary contrived to hiccough. And all this. Grimes knew, was going down on tape. It was unlikely that he would ever wear the ribbon of the Order of the Golden Honeyflower -- but it was equally unlikely that he would be butchered to make a Shaara holiday. "He weaned her on Scotch," persisted the Queen-Emissary. "Aren't you, perhaps, a little Jealous?" suggested Damien. He switched his attention back to Grimes. "Meanwhile, Lieutenant, I am being literally bombarded with Carlottigrams from Her notso-lmperial Majesty on Brooum. She demands that I dispatch to her, as soon as possible if not before, the only drone in the Galaxy with whom she would dream of mating." "No!" protested Grimes. "No!" "Yes, Mister. Yes. For two pins I'd accede to her demands." He sighed regretfully. "But I suppose that one must draw some sort of line somewhere." He sighed again. Then: "Get out, you drone!" he yelled wildly. It was a pity that he had to spoil the effect by laughing. "We are not amused," said the Shaara Queen. it They dangled from taut lines, small beneath the stars, barbed shadows deep upon their faces and engraved arithmetic high upon their chests. Together they swayed like October scarecrows, # in their eyes. Their heads were bent as though they might be listening, and maybe they heard the wind. There was a wind upon the Crying Wall that whipped from stone to stone, howled for fifteen thou,sand years and, wearing dust, moved on... T he last moon was just up, the color of splashed blood, arching behind the closely strung confetti balls of cobalt, amber, crystaLand tea, and the fountainleaf trees were already twitching in the rising Third Wind, when the first light, the softest light, the Wanting Light of the Festival, twinked on. The ghost-white candlelamp flickered and flared, moved slowly and smoothly up the Great Slanted Tower, attained the crest where it shot off tiny sparks of firefly lightning, dipped a lonely salute to the Spirits of All the Stars and was quickly and utterly lost Like a sudden thunderclap out of the Fourth Sky, the momentary ceremonial silence was shattered by a thousand electric marching bands, a hundred massive steam organs, ten mighty wind clappers and a single great tide horn, all under the masterful direction of a long silver tapeworm named Fest. Mus. #. Now the slowly climbing Five Reflections of Love were trailed by the artificial moons, a thousand painted balloons swarming in a sequined formation among the games and the contests, the shows and the fairs, the taverns and the arenas, the rides and the parades and the prizes, rollicking up boulevarded midways or holding hands down sheltered paths in picnic groves, all of them in crowds or in pairs -- none of them alone -- for it was the Last Night of the Festival. A girl -- or perhaps a woman -- stood in the tumbling light of a meteor bush that budded with fiercely darting coals, her eyelids lightly closed, smiling a whisper into the wind. "Did you feel your Want?" A man -- or perhaps a boystood in the gentle shadow of a thundercloud tree that stirred with falling vapor leaves, his eyelids tightly closed, sighing a whisper into the wind. "We have all felt our Want for tonight." When the girl opened her eyes they were all milk and black cherries, wide and deep and glazed by polished crystal. Her hair was weathered ivory, vaguely set with twisting caverns that shifted and yawned and were quietly sealed by the wind. And sometimes, when the wind was just one way or another and her head was turned just so, there were tiny glintings of tinted stones that twinkled far within delicately latticed strands, never staying very long, for the wind liked to change her hair. Once she tilted her head and the wind exposed a cloudy pink pearl streaked over with pale ivory, so that it looked something like the thing called Sunrise. Her name was Dawn. When the man opened his eyes they were all sand and slate-pebbles, slim and flat and shrouded by swirled smoke. His body was sculptured midnight, starkly set with gaunt outlines that were steeled in the wind. And sometimes, when the wind was just one way or another and his stance was frozen just so, there were whispered rustlings of ebony robes that flapped like tiny moth wings, never staying very long, for the wind had little to alter. Once he raised a hand and the wind swept away, whirring toward the gloomy Third Sky, so that it sounded something like the thing called Sunset. His name was Dusk. Boldly, in the light of all the moons. Dusk stepped across the slim path of speckled silver tiles that lay like freshly minted coins and, taking Dawn by the hand, led her onto and along the tinkling metal trail, on past the alley of Fog and Mist where they kicked crackling sparks at the nebulous void. They continued past the fragrant brazen torches of the Magic Lantern Tavern and strolled on toward the nearer end of the great oval span called the Bridge of Heady Wines. Oktoberfest, Jrauleins undressed, and castles on the Rhine... AS HE held her hand lightly and yet firmly he felt the stub of her missing finger, still strangely alien to his touch, though he had known that hand, that tender abortion, most of his life. He had been there -- so very long ago -- when they had taken that finger. And though he hadn't looked and hadn't seen the blood and had avoided the monstrous gaping -- or perhaps the horribly tight closing -- of her eyes, he had heard the grating teeth of the Silver Witch Saw and the very long, very shrill, very young scream. Again he remembered the quiet laugh of the Silver Witch artisan, so low in pitch behind the wavering wail, so very much like the faint chuckling drone of grinding marrow. The Laughing Butcher they had called him, for it seemed he had always been in a merry mood whenever he had worked, and his working hours had been long. The Wisdom Machine never thought of that, murmured a portion of Dusk's mind or a shred of his soul. Such a tiny little thing, hardly worth replacing... and the blazing lights of the Festival were lost in his swirling eyes. Guns and butter, slogans to utter, and a finger to point the way... T hey strolled, very close to each other, up the curved ramp that was the Bridge of Heady Wines, savoring the new-wine scents and the vintage-wine aromas, cherishing the windblown come-follow-yournose tastes that lolled about their quivering nostrils and rolled across their titillated tongues, while their eyes constantly shifted from the spinning peppermint-stick sign poles of the wine stalls that lined the way to the giddy, sometimes gaudy. Festival grounds below. At the very summit they paused a long pause, sharing a jeweled goblet of fine old meteor-bush wine, still holding hands, now feeling a summer-lightning sensation of quiet excitement, somehow knowing that this was the grandest night of all. The girl waved the drained chalice, flashing it casting its crystal fires toward the cragged outline of the Crooked Stick Tower that staggered upward to lean dizzily against the flight of all the moons. Tossing her whirlpool hair, she tugged at Dusk's hand. He nodded, robes swishing, and they fell together onto the sleek snowflake slide that spiraled them down from the center of the bridge and directly into Silly Street. Dropping softly into the crowd that moved slowly toward the slim twisted building at the end of the street, Dawn and Dusk gamboled gaily through the ankle-deep rainbow mist they had entered. There they encountered the unseen minor horrors of slippery patches, squashy bogs, icy pools and reversing conveyor belts. Together they detonated three stench devices, six electric shockers and nine steam-gushers. Somehow they evaded the falling water bags at the end of the road and the pie-throwing machines never came really close to hitting them. Dawn giggled and Dusk smiled. The couple skipped aside from the street and the crowd at the tipsy rocking-arch entrance of the Crooked Stick Tower -- to rest for a moment on the softly flickering candletip grass -- when they noticed in a small lonely shadow the Old Happy One. He lay in his ivy-draped basket of burnished bronze beside the ebony mosses of the Wanting Well Shrine, near the three broken stones that were all that remained of the ancient Crying Wall. Dawn and Dusk walked over and looked at the thing in the basket and Dusk recalled the old tales of how the Laughing Butcher had lavished his talents upon this, the eldest of the Final Fifteen. Dusk had been young when the Silver Witch had very slowly, with deftly-gnawing slices, altered this creature that had once been a whole man. Little by little, over many days, it had been said, his limbs were shorn. And then he had had no tongue. Then his eyes and ears, too, were gone and at the very end his testicles had been placed into little matching jars of the clearest crystal. The Laughing Butcher had -- or so it had been told -- grown quite sad toward the end of that, his pet project, and a few had even insisted that he had cried. For somehow, and no one had ever attempted to explain why, the old man had always seemed the happier of the two, never bothering to scream or shudder, but always smiling or grinning or even jesting aloud when he had still had his tongue. As Dawn and Dusk looked down the Old Happy One turned his hairless head and smiled a toothless, tongueless smile at them. The Old Happy One could always sense the presence of others, it was claimed. Dawn and Dusk patted him gently on his scarred head and left him lying there, alone with his secret happy thoughts. Liederhosen, gas the Chosen, and Dortmunder out oj a keg... Dawn, hesitating. "He Wanted for us," said Dusk, pulling her away and across the shimmering lawn. Skirting the bizarre tower with its shrieking deviltries, they wandered through an adjacent grove of fountainleaf trees and, happening to glance upward through the cascading sheets of transparent leaves, they glimpsed a sweeping formation of electric dragonbirds, a zee-shaped silhouette against the gleaming moons, streaking toward the Second Sky, trailing pulsing flashes of autumn hearthfire. "Even they know it's the Last Night of the Festival," murmured Dawn, a wisp of her hair flicking upon her forehead to reveal a tarnished lantern stone, her eyes even wider than usual. Near the edge of the small forest they passed a reclining couple who wore chameleon Wanting Masks, and each face-covering splashed into contrasting halves as Dawn and Dusk walked by. Upon leaving the glade they encountered the bleak gurgling pool known as the Pond of Wanting Wisdom. Dusk hopped along the phosphorescent stepping stones that traversed the restless surface of swirling cross currents but Dawn took the long way around, meeting him on the other side, where he stood waiting to lead her across the glittering metal hill called the Bronze Knoll. They were clattering over the polished mound, a vast convex sky mirror spread with rolling moons and wheeling stars, when they were dazzled by the dancing streaks of the nightly artificial meteor shower. "I didn't realize that it was quite that late," sighed Dusk and he hurried Dawn along, pulling her toward the distant fanciful chaos of the inner Festival grounds. When they reached the Path of Pain they removed their steel sandals and walked as softly as they could upon the shifting ashes, for there were fifteen thoubeneath their knowing feet. The ribbon of gray powder led them under the crimson-stained Gate of Blood and Dawn and Dusk bowed their heads reverently as they passed through. A few steps beyond the creaking wooden arch they paused beside the Final Grotto where the preserved blood of those of the Final Fifteen -- who had gone on to join the Spirits of All the Stars -- trickled and flowed in a sunken rocky pool. Of the fifteen clustered Forever Lamps, twelve flickered ruby flames from thin, crackling wicks. "The Old Happy One -- and us," said Dawn very quietly, her great tender eyes studying the three well-primed needle torches, each perched in its own little niche, each so calm and dark -- a stark lonely gap in the center and a lightly touching pair at the end. The Third Wind suddenly shifted like a whirring whip, slashing the line of fires, one by one, yet very hastily, momentarily snuffing them into tiny embers, finally fanning them into thrashing flares that leaped toward the stars. The two unlit lamps at the end of the row tinkled together and struck a single topaz spark. Holding hands. Dawn and Dusk lit mental Forever Lamps, felt their Final Wants and moved on. Just down the sacred lane, they stopped at a rockhewn table upon which rested, for anyone there to see, a great, delicately crafted silver key. "The Key to the Wisdom Machine," said Dusk. "Beaten and forged from the Silver Witch Saw." Again, he felt the stub of Dawn's missing finger. Together they pondered the inscription mounted on the slab: May you ever walk 'twixt Dawn and Dusk, And your Wanting Well run deep. After a very long, very tender moment Dusk said, "Come -- " and they continued along the somber path that was strangely dull and flat beneath the reeling sky. They donned their sandals at the Twisted Gate and joined the copper-cobbled road that carried them with clicking steps into the abrupt tumult of the Great Midway. An electric dragon bird landed at their feet with a violent flutter of gold-leaf feathers, squawked a terrible cry, flashed white-hot metal skin and fused into a squirming mass at the crossroad. "It broke," moaned Dawn, turning away, a look of deep pity in her eyes. "It wouldn't leave with the others," said Dusk solemnly, and he unfurled an enrobed arm around the girl's quivering shoulders to steer her into the heart of the midway throng. The golden goose, steppes for free use, and Christmas tea at the Palace... F lowing with the mainstream of the crowd, they rammed their way along the broad, sweeping boulevard, passing the gaily decorated Wisdom Trees lining either side. They milled about a dueling pair of electric swordsmen until the bulk of the capricious audience surged toward the Tunnel of No Return. Dawn and Dusk rebelled at that and jostled their way into a tributary channel of crushing humanity, to enter the screaming area of the Spider and the Fly. Dawn volunteered to be a fly and Dusk helped her aboard the crystal-winged vehicle. He waved her off into the buzzing, flapping wind and buckled himself into the saddle of a brown, hairy spider that waited, throbbing, with twitching, stilted legs. With a shuffle-gaited patter the spider churned up the slanted starting boom, its jeweled scannereyes winking in intricate relays while its interior homing devices hummed with an impatient pitch. Dusk closed his eyes when the tensed monster, with a series of muffled clicks, sprang outward into space, falling, trailing a gleaming flash of quicksilver. As the spider spun its tactical chart Dusk opened his eyes to locate Dawn. He knew precisely where to look and, when he found her flittering fly, he gave her a sweeping wave that she quickly returned. He glanced around to take in the chaotic scene, taking a mild interest in the complex maneuvers of the other aerial duels. From the very beginning of his own spider's moves, he had known in detail what its actions and its opposing fly's actions would be. His spider scurried upward and Dusk glanced down at its turgid web, seeing the long lines of metal that formed a vicious pattern. It reminded him of the Final Camp. There, too, there had been long lines of metal, forming the periphery that had held the Silver Witch, the Laughing Butcher, Dawn, the others of the Final Fifteen and, finally, the Final Experiment. He closed his eyes again, remembering that there had been yet other wires... and electrodes... and sophisticated pain. Stuka flights, panzer fights, and the kids tucked away at camp... and of his mind and Dusk opened his eyes to see Dawn's fly at his side. She laughed. "The spider always catches the fly." "Unless there's a technical failure," he replied, reaching out to touch her hand before she whisked away and before his spider raced to retrieve its web. Back on the ground they tested their equilibrium and found it wanting when Dawn staggered into Dusk's vaguely unsteady stance. Dusk held her for a time, his robes slightly ruffled, and Dawn giggled a little in his arms, her hair lightly fluffed, until they both recovered their balance and the girl became serious enough to brush her lips against his cheek. He returned her kiss with a longer kiss upon her lips and when he opened his eyes he found a speck of coral flint in her strangely calm hair. "Y our hair is a mess." He laughed and he led her through an exit and back onto the midway. The crowds were more subdued now, though just as large, and Dawn and Dusk were more leisurely in their passage along the vast thoroughfare. The couple wandered with an easy cadence, routinely swinging their heads from side to side, like the sweeping Final Camp scanner-globes they had known before the Final Experiment. They sauntered by the dim shaft of the Cave of Many Echoes, the distant mellow chatter of the Rain on the Roof Lounge, the burbling hiss of the Fountain of Flowing Metals, where Dawn had once, very long ago, cast a garnet locket into the molten spray to feel a solemn Want, and on by their old trysting haunt, the Garden of Tender Dreams. A purring rotor-ferry spidered its way down to the Five Winds Landing Port, back from its pyramid course to the rustic Outer Inn and the eerie Never Moor. They watched a troupe of cavorting robot clowns near the pleasant din of the Great Candyrock Bell and turned to wave at a hayride party hauled by the measured trotting of an electric pony. The Lazy Lagoon was next on their right, limpid with barely rippling moons and stars, and the churning sightseeing cruiser. Star Trawler, was easing into its berth, so Dawn and Dusk skipped along to greet it. There was much waving and cheering as the craft touched land and impatient adventurers crowded to displace the disembarking passengers. "Look," said Dawn, pointing, as a column of electric rats scurried down a quivering mooring line, scuffling over the moonlit dock with their tiny metal claws until they were quickly lost in secret dusty shadows. "They know," said Dusk, just as the evening's artificial Surprise Shower began to sting the wind. The nearest shelter was the boat but the overflowing crowd barred Dawn and Dusk from seeking that refuge and they sprinted through the drizzle toward the neighboring merry-go-round. Over their shoulders they heard a mariner's shout; "Last time around -- last time around!" There was a chugging throb and a swishing splash and Dawn and Dusk stopped, turning and looking back into the gentle rain to wave the shimmering raindrops from their faces and toward the embarking adventurers. "The last time around," whispered Dawn. "There wasn't room," said Dusk. They walked hand in hand, not minding the shower, toward the tinkling whirl of the merry-go-round. Beneath a brocaded circular awning that hung with polished leather bells they leaned against a flowered railing and watched the fun go by. They watched and remembered the older times and, quietly, they talked. Peenemunde, church on Sunday, and a Uboat down at the pier... R emember the Final Experiment?" asked Dawn. "And how it failed," said Dusk. "And somehow. with the Grace of the Spirits of All the Stars, we survived." "Sometimes when I look at something very, very beautiful or hear the wind at night I can still feel -- the pain." Dawn looked away from a prancing copper stallion with a dazzling crown on its head. "But the Final Fifteen became mental gods and we freed ourselves and built the Wisdom Machine." "It was to have been wise," sighed Dawn. "Perhaps it was." Dusk noticed a sudden silence upon the awning overhead. "All of this, down to the Surprise Shower, was planned by the Wisdom Machine." "It had but one order -- to make the entire world happy forever." "Our people had suffered so." "After all its researches and surveys it built the Festival." Dawn plucked a pastel flower from the railing. "People were found happiest in a carnival spirit." "A perpetual Festival," said Dusk. "It had to go on forever or the Machine would have failed in its task." "It had no choice." "There is an impeccable logic in the safeguard of the Final Solution Device." Dusk held an arm toward the merry-go-round. "Last time around?" Dawn said, "Why not?" Together they mounted a pink elephant that staggered as it lumbered in its arc and stopped. An old man who had jumped from a silver tiger calmly kicked a buzzing box, smashing it. "We have all felt our Want for tonight," murmured Dawn. Tannenbaum, with Lebensraum, and a VW in every garage... D awn and Dusk dashed outside and all through the Festival rides were halting and lights were going out. Two men passed by, carrying the basket of the Old Happy One toward the Tomb of the Laughing Butcher, just down the midway. "Is he dead?" asked Dawn. "I don't know," replied Dusk. There was a far, far howling, perhaps from the Fourth Sky, and it moaned high over the Festival and was gone. A clanking robot ran down the center of the Great Midway, shouting, "Hey, Rube -- hey. Rube!" Dawn and Dusk said nothing but their eyes were on the sky. The last moon was almost down -- the color of splashed blood -- arching behind the silent fountainleaf trees. And the sighing Third Wind was already dying in the night when the clearest bell, the deepest bell, the Wisdom-hour Bell, tolled the time. Like a sudden zephyr out of the Second Sky a frantic robot raced among the crowds, hawking dark glasses at the top of its plastic lungs while somewhere a shining tapeworm of whirring silver instinctively spun a web of crackling strands. Now the artificial moons began colors like rainbow fires across the Spirits of All the and the blare, standing in intimate pairs or forming in casual little groups, talking quietly to each other, saying, "The fireworks are lovely -- " or, "Goodnight -- " and, "Wasn't it a grand Festival?" And Dawn and Dusk stood side by side holding hands and it seemed to Dusk for just a fleeting moment that Dawn's whole finger was there in place of the alien stub. "Just like the Sunrise," murmured Dawn. "The Sun always sets," sighed Dusk. Dawn and Dusk turned slowly to face each other and looked very deeply into each other's eyes, as if each were giving something and each were taking something. And somehow their eyes were blending and becoming alike until their eyes were flowing silver. An icicle music box whirled its dripping gears and tinkled, an electric cricket rolled onto its back with kicking copper legs and chirped. And deep thunder crashed in all of the Five Skies. It was the Last Night of the Festival. Above the swaying scarecrows, a white star suddenly flickered and grew bright. And maybe the bent heads noticed it, but there was # in their eyes.  former sector chief on Holman's World, an Earth colony, returns to the planet as little more than a tourist after Earth has restored it to the control of its indigenes, an intelligent elephantine life form, the nildoror. The planet is now known by its native name of Belzagor. Gundersen's return has been dictated by an inner need on his part to learn more about the intelligent species he once treated and abused as animals. The nildoror understand and sympathize and one of them, Srin'gahar, agrees to carry Gundersen to the nearest nildor encampment, where he can apply for a travel permit. A t the encampment Gunderson meets Vol'himyor, an ancient, many-born nildor, requests permission to go to the nildoror place of rebirth, the mist country. He is part'Ih invited to spend some time with his hosts before permission is granted -- and that night finds himself joining them in an elemental, rituals tic dance. He is shocked to discover that in so doing is able to share himself completely with the nildoror, in effect becoming one of them. The nildoror, however, are perthe morning Gundersen receives his permission and is assigned an escort to the mist country. His understanding of his hosts deepens during the ensuing journey -- as does his understanding of the planet. Or at least the dangers of going native. His trail crosses that of two of the planet's leftover humans, a man and a woman, both dying, having become the hosts to one of Belzagor's more dangerous life forms. They ask to be put out of their misery. Gundersen kills them, continues his journey to the mist country. IX to descend from the sky. Nothing on Earth could match the triple plunge of the great cataract. Here Madden's River -- or the Seran'nee -- dropped five hundred meters, then six hundred, then five hundred, then five hundred more, falling from ledge to ledge in its tumble toward the sea. Gundersen and the five nildoror stood at the foot of the falls, where the entire violent cascade crashed into a broad rock-flanged basin out of which the serpentine river continued its southeasterly course. The sulidor had taken his leave in the night and was proceeding northward by his own route. To Gundersen's rear behind his right shoulder, lay the coastal plain. The central plateau lay to his left. Before him, by the head of the falls, began the northern plateau, the highlands that controlled the approach to the mist country. Just as a titanic northsouth rift cut the coastal plain off from the central plateau, so did another rift running east-west separate both plateau and plain from the highlands ahead. His party began its ascent. The Shangri-la station, one of the Company's most important outposts, was invisible from below. It was set back a short way from the head of the falls. Once there had been waystations at the foot of the falls and at the head of the middle cataract but no trace of these structures remained. The jungle had swallowed them utterly in only eight years. A winding road with an infinity of switchbacks led upward. The swaying rhythm of his mount lulled Gundersen into a doze. He held tightly to Srin'gahar's pommel-like protrusions and prayed that in his grogginess he would not fall off. Once he woke suddenly and found himself clinging only by his left hand, his body partly slung out over a sheer drop of at least two hundred meters. Another time, drowsy again, he felt cold spray and snapped to attention to see the entire cascade of the falling river rushing past him no more than a dozen meters away. The nildoror paused to eat at the head of the lowest cataract and Gundersen dashed icy water in his face to shatter his sluggishness. They went on. He had less difficulty keeping awake now -- the air was thinner and the afternoon breeze was cool. They reached the head of the falls before twilight. Shangri-la Station, seemingly unchanged, lay before him -- three rectangular unequal blocks of dark shimmering plastic, a somber ziggurat rising on the western bank of the narrow gorge through which the river sped. The formal gardens of tropical plants, established by a forgotten sector chief at least forty years before, looked as though they were being carefully maintained. At ach of the building's setbacks was an outdoor veranda overlooking the river and these, too, were bedecked with plants. Gundersen felt a dryness in his throat and a tightness in his loins. He asked Srin'gahar, "How long may we stay here?" "How long do you wish to stay?" "One day, two -- I don't know." "We are not yet in a great hurry," said the nildor. "My friends and I will make camp in the bush. Come to us when it is time for you to go on." The nildoror moved slowly into the shadows. Gundersen approached the station. At the entrance to the garden he paused. The trees here were gnarled and bowed. Long feathery fronds dangled from them. Highland flora was different from that to the south, although perpetual summer ruled here even as in the true tropics behind him. Lights glimmered within the station. Everything out here seemed surprisingly orderly -- the contrast with the shambles of the serpent station and the nightmare decay of the fungoid station was sharp. Not even the hotel garden was this well tended. Four neat rows of fleshy, obscene-looking, pink forest candles bordered the walkway that ran toward the building. Slender, stately globeflower trees, heavy with gigantic fruit, formed little groves to left and right. There were hullygully trees and bitterfruits -- exotics here, imported from the steaming equatorial tropics -- and mighty swordflower trees in full bloom, lifting their long shining stamens to the sky. Elegant glitterivy and spiceburr vines writhed along the ground but not in any random way. Gundersen took a few steps farther in and heard the soft sad sigh of a sensifrons bush, whose gentle hairy leaves coiled and shrank as he went by, opening wearily when he had gone past, shutting again when he whirled to steal a quick glance. Two more steps and he came to a low tree whose name he could not recall, with glossy red winged leaves that took flight, breaking free of their delicate stems and soaring away; instantly their replacements began to sprout. The garden was magical. Yet there were surprises here. Beyond the glitterivy he discovered a crescent patch of tiger moss, the carnivorous ground cover native to the unfriendly central plateau. The moss had been transplanted to other parts of the planet -- a patch' of it was growing out of control at the seacoast hotel -- but Gundersen remembered that Seena abhorred it, as she abhorred all the productions of that forbidding plateau. Worse yet, looking upward so that he could follow the path of the gracefully gliding leaves, Gundersen saw great masses of quivering jelly, streaked with blue and red neural fibers, hanging from several of the biggest trees -- more carnivores, also natives of the central plateau. What were those sinister things doing in this enchanted garden? A moment later he had a third proof that Seena's terror of the plateau had faded. Across his path ran one of the plump, thieving otterlike animals that had bedeviled them the time they had been marooned there. It halted a moment, nose twitching, cunning paws upraised, looking for something to seize. Gundersen hissed at it and it scuttled into the shrubbery. Now a massive two-legged figure emerged from a shadowed corner and blocked his way. Gundersen thought at first it was a sulidor, but he realized it was merely a robot, probably a gardener. It said resonantly, "Man, why are you here?" "As a visitor. I'm a traveler seeking lodging for the night." "Does the woman expect you?" "I'm sure she doesn't. But her Edmund Gundersen is here." The robot scanned him carefully. "I will tell her. Remain where you are and touch nothing." G undersen waited. The twilight deepened and one moon appeared. Some of the trees in the garden became luminous. A serpent -- of the sort once used as a source of venom -- slid silently across the path just in front of Gundersen and vanished. The wind shifted, stirring the trees and bringing him the faint sounds of a conversation of nildoror somewhere not far inland from the riverbank. The robot returned and said, "The woman will see you. Follow the path and enter the station." Gundersen went up the steps. On the porch he noticed unfamiliar-looking potted plants, scattered casually as though awaiting transplantation to the garden. Several of them waved tendrils at him or wistfully flashed lights intended to bring curious prey fatally close. He went in and, seeing no one on the ground floor, caught hold of a dangling laddercoil and let himself be spun up to the first veranda. He observed that the station was as flawlessly maintained within as without, every surface clean and bright, the decorative murals unfaded, the artifacts from many worlds still mounted properly in their niches. This station had always been a showplace but he was surprised to see it so attractive in these years of the decay of Earth's presence on Belzagor.' "Seena?" he called. He found her alone on the veranda, leaning over the rail. By the light of two moons he saw the deep cleft of her buttocks and thought she had chosen to greet him in the nude. But as she turned toward him he realized that a strange garment covered the front of her body. It was a pale, gelatinous sprawl, shapeless, purple-tinged, with the texture and sheen that he imagined an immense amoeba might have. The central mass of it embraced her belly and loins, leaving her hips and haunches bare. Her left breast also was bare but one broad pseudopod extended upward over tle right one. The stuff was translucent, and Gundersen plainly could see the red eye of her covered nipple, and the narrow socket of her navel. It was also alive to some degree, for it began to flow, apparently of its own will, sending out slow new strands that encircled her left thigh and, gradually, her right hip. The eeriness of this clinging garment left him taken aback. Except for it, she appeared to be the Seena of old. She had gained some weight and her breasts were heavier, her hips broader. She was a handsome woman in the last bloom of youth. But the Seena of old would never have allowed such a bizarreness to touch her skin. She regarded him steadily. Her lustrous black hair tumbled to her shoulders, as in the past. Her face was unlined. She faced him squarely and without shame, her feet firmly planted, her arms at ease, her head held high. "I thought you were never coming back here, Edmund," she said. Her voice had deepened, indicating some inner deepening as well. When he had last known her she had tended to speak too quickly, nervously pitching her tone too high. Now, calm and perfectly poised, she spoke with the resonance of a fine cello. "Why are you back?" "It's a long story, Seena. I can't even understand all of it myself. May I stay here tonight?" "Of course. How needless to ask!" "You look so good, Seena. Somehow I expected -- after eight years -- " "A hag?" "Well, not exactly." His eyes met hers and he was shaken abruptly by the rigidity he found in her fixed and inflexible gaze -- its beadiness reminded him terrifyingly of the expression in the eyes of Dykstra and his woman at the last jungle station. "I don't know what I expected," he said. "Won't you kiss me?" she asked. "I understand you're a married woman." She winced and tightened one fist. The thing she was wearing reacted also, deepening in color and shooting a pseudopod up to encircle, though not to conceal, her bare breast. "Where did you hear that?" "At the coast. Van Beneker told me you married Jeff Kurtz." "Yes. Not long after you left, as a matter of fact." "I see. Is he here?" She ignored his question. "Don't you want to kiss me? Or do you have a policy about kissing other men's wives?" wardly, self-consciously, he reached for her, taking her lightly by the shoulders and drawing her toward him. She was a tall woman. He inclined his head, trying to put his lips to hers without having any part of his body come in contact with the amoeba. She pulled back before the kiss. "What are you afraid of?" she asked. "What you're wearing makes me nervous." "The slider?" "If that's what it's called." "It's what the sulidoror call it," Seena said. "It comes from the central plateau. It clings to one of the big mammals there and lives by metabolizing perspiration. Isn't it splendid?" "I thought you hated the plateau." "Oh, that was a long time ago. I've been there many times. I brought the slider back on the last trip. It's as much of a pet as it is something to wear. Look." She touched it lightly and it went through a series of color changes, expanding as it approached the blue end of the spectrum, contracting toward the red. At its greatest extension it formed a complete tunic covering Seena from throat to thighs. Gundersen became aware of something dark and pulsing at the heart of it, resting just above her loins, hiding the public triangle -- its nerve-center, perhaps. "Why do you dislike it?" she asked. "Here. Put your hand on it." He made no move. She took his hand in hers and touched it to her side; he felt the slider's cool dry surface and was surprised that it was not slimy. Easily Seena moved his hand upward until it came to the heavy globe of a breast and instantly the slider contracted, leaving the firm warm flesh bare to his fingers. He cupped it a moment and, uneasy, withdrew his hand. Her nipple had hardened -- her nostrils had flared. He said, "The slider's very interesting. But I don't like it on you." She pouted. "Very well." She touched herself at the base of her belly, just above the organism's core. It shrank inward and flowed down no her leg in one swift, rippling movement, gliding away and collecting itself at the far side of the veranda. "Is that better?" Seena queried, naked now, sweat-shiny, moist-lipped. The coarseness of her approach startled him. Neither he nor she had ever worried much about nudity but there was a deliberate sexual aggressiveness about this kind of self-display that seemed out of keeping with what he regarded as her character. They were old friends, yes. They had been lovers for several years. They had been married in all but the name for many months of that time -- but even so the ambiguity of their parting should have destroyed whatever intimacy had once existed. And leaving the question of her marriage to Kurtz out of it, the fact that they had not seen one another for eight years seemed to him to dictate the necessity of a more gradual return to physical closeness. He felt that by making herself pantingly available to him within minutes of his unexpected arrival she was committing a breach not of morals but of esthetics. "Put something on," he said quietly. "And not the slider. I can't have a serious conversation with you while you're waving all those jiggling temptations in my face." "Poor conventional Edmund. All right. Have you had dinner?" "No." "I'll have it served out here. And drinks. I'll be right back." S HE entered the building. The slider remained behind on the veranda; it rolled tentatively toward Gundersen, as though offering to climb up and be worn by him for a while, but he glared at it and enough feeling got through to make the plateau creature move hurriedly away. A moment later a robot emerged, bearing a tray on which two golden cocktails sat. It offered one drink to Gundersen, set the other on the railing and noiselessly departed. Seena returned, chastely clad in a soft gray shift that descended from her shoulders to her shins. "Better?" she asked. "Eor now." They touched glasses. She smiled. They put their drinks to their lips. "What's it like, living up here?" he asked. "Serene. I never imagined that my life could be so calm. I read a good deal. I help the robots tend the garden. Occasionally there are guests -- sometimes I travel. Weeks often go by without my seeing another human being." "What about your husband?" "Weeks often go by without my seeing another human being," she repeated. "You're alone here? You and the robots?" "Quite alone." "But the other Company people must come here fairly frequently." "Some do. There aren't many of us left now," Seena said. "Less than a hundred, I imagine. About six at the Sea of Dust. Van Beneker down by the hotel. Four or five at the old rift station. And so on -- little islands of Earthmen widely scattered. There's a sort of a social circuit but it's a sparse one." "Is this what you wanted when you chose to stay here?" "I didn't know what I wanted, except that I wanted to stay. But I'd do it again. Knowing everything I know, I'd do it just the same way." He said, "At the station just south of here, below the falls, I saw Harold Dykstra -- " "Henry Dykstra." "Henry. And a woman I didn't know." "Pauleen Mazor. She was one of the customs girls in the time of the Company. Henry and Pauleen are my closest neighbors, I guess. But I haven't seen them in years. I never go south of the falls any more and they haven't come here." "They're dead, Seena." "Oh?" "It was like stepping into a nightmare. A sulidor led me to them. The station was a wreck -- mold and fungoids everywhere -- and something was hatching inside them, the larvae of some kind of basket-shaped red sponge that hung on a wall and dripped black oil -- " "Things like that happen," Seena said, not sounding disturbed. "Sooner or later this planet catches everyone, though always in a different way." "Dykstra was unconscious and the woman was begging to be put out of her misery, so you see -- " " Y ou said they were dead." "Not when I got there. I told the sulidor to kill them. There was no hope of saving them. He split them open and then I used my torch on them." "We had to do that for Gio' Salamone, too," Seena 'said. "He was staying at Fire Point and went out into the Sea of Dust and got some kind of crystalline parasite into a cut. When Kurtz and Ced Cullen found him he was all cubes and prisms, outcroppings of the most beautiful iridescent minerals breaking through his skin everywhere. And he was still alive. For a while. Another drink?" "Please. Yes." She summoned the robot. The night was quite dark now. A third moon had appeared. In a low voice Seena said, "I'm so happy you came tonight, Edmund. It was such a wonderful surprise." "Kurtz isn't here now?" "No," she said. "He's away and I don't know when he'll be back." "How has it been for him, living here?" "I think he's been quite happy, generally speaking. Of course, he's a very strange man." "Heis," Gundersen said. "He's got a quality of sainthood about him, I think." "He would have been a dark "Some saints are. They don't all have to be St. Francis of Assisi." "Is cruelty one of the desirable traits of a saint?" "Kurtz saw cruelty as a dynamic force. He made himself an artist of cruelty." "So did the Marquis de Sade. Nobody's canonized him." "You know what I mean," she said. "You once spoke of Kurtz to me and you called him a fallen angel. That's exactly right. I saw him out among the nildoror -- dancing with hundreds of them -- and they came to him and practically worshipped him. There he was, talking to them, caressing them. And yet also doing the most destructive things to them as well, but they loved it." "What kind of destructive things?" "They don't matter. I doubt that you'd approve. He -- gave them drugs, sometimes." "The serpent venom?" "Sometimes." "Where is he now? Out playing with the nildoror?" "He's been ill for a while." T he robot now was serving dinner. Gundersen frowned at the strange vegetables on his plate. "They're perfectly safe," Seena said. "I grow them myself, in back. I'm quite the farmer." "I don't remember any of these." "They're from the plateau." Gundersen shook his head. "When I think of how disgusted you were by the plateau, how strange and frightening it seemed to you that time we had to crashland there -- " "I was a child then. When was it -- eleven years ago? Soon after I met you. I was only twenty years old. But on Belzagor you must defeat what frightens you or you will be defeated. I went back to the plateau. Again and again. It ceased to be strange to me and so it ceased to frighten me -- and so I came to love it. And brought many of its plants and animals back here to live with me. It's so very different from the rest of Belzagor -- cut off from everything else, almost alien." "You went therewith Kurtz?" "Sometimes. And sometimes with Ced Cullen. And most often alone." "Cullen," Gundersen said. "Do you see him often?" "Oh, yes. He and Kurtz and I have been a kind of triumvirate. Cullen's my other husband -- almost." "Where is Cullen now?" he asked, looking intently into her harsh and glossy eyes. Her expression darkened. "In the north. The mist country." "What's he doing there?" "Why don't you go ask him?" she suggested. "I'd like to do just that," Gundersen said. "I'm on my way up mist country, actually, and this is just a sentimental stop on the way. I'm traveling with five nildoror going for rebirth. They're camped in the bush out there somewhere." She opened a flask of a musky gray-green wine and gave him some. "Why do you want to go to the mist country?" she asked tautly. "Curiosity. The same motive that sent Cullen up there, I guess." "I don't think his motive was curiosity." "Will you amplify that?" "I'd rather not," she said. The conversation lapsed into silence. Talking to her led only in circles, he thought. This new serenity of hers could be maddening. She told him only what she cared to tell him, playing with him, seemingly relishing the touch of her sweet contralto voice on the night air, communicating no information at all. This was not a Seena he had ever known. The girl he had loved had been resilient and strong, not crafty or secretive -- there had been an innocence about her that she seemed to have totally lost now. Kurtz might not be the only fallen angel on this planet. He said suddenly, "The fourth moon has risen." "Yes. Of course. Is that so, amazing?" "One rarely sees four even in this latitude." "It happens at least ten times a year. Why waste your awe? In a little while the fifth one will be up and -- " Gundersen gasped. "Is that what tonight is?" "The Night of Five Moons, yes." "No one told me." "Perhaps you never asked." "Twice I missed it because I was at Fire Point. One year I was at sea and once I was in the southern mist country, the time the copter went down. And so on and on. I managed to see it only once, Seena, right here, ten years ago, with you. When things were at their best for us. And now, to come in by accident and have it happen -- " "I thought you had arranged to be here deliberately. To commemorate that other time." "No. Pure coincidence." "Happy coincidence, then." "When does it rise?" "In perhaps an hour." He watched the four bright dots swimming through the sky. So much time had gone by that he had forgotten where the fifth moon should be coming from. Its orbit was retrograde. It was the with a high-albedo surface of ice, smooth as a mirror. Seena filled his glass again. They had finished eating. "Excuse me," she said. "I'll be back soon." A lone, he studied the sky and tried to comprehend this strangely altered Seena, this mysterious woman whose body had grown more voluptuous and whose soul, it seemed, had turned to stone. He saw now that the stone had been in her all along -- at their breakup, for example, when he had put in for transfer to Earth and she had absolutely refused to leave Holman's World. I love you, she had said, and I'll always love you but this is where I stay. Why? Why? Because  want to stay, she had told him. And she had stayed; and he had been just as stubborn and had left without her. They had slept together on the beach beneath the hotel on his last night, so that he had boarded the ship that took him away with the warmth of her body still on his skin. She loved him and he loved her but they had broken apart, for he saw no future on this world and she saw all her future on it. And she had married Kurtz. And she had explored the unknown plateau. And she spoke in a rich, deep, new voice and let alien amoebas clasp her loins and she shrugged at the news that two nearby Earth people had died a horrible death. Was she still Seena or some subtle counterfeit? Nildoror sounds drifted out of the darkness. Gundersen heard another sound, too, closer by, a kind of stifled, snorting grunt that was wholly unfamiliar to him. It seemed like a cry of pain, though perhaps that was his imagination. Probably it was one of Seena' s plateau beasts, snuffling around, searching for tasty roots in the garden. He heard it twice more and then not again. Time went by and Seena did not return. Then he saw the fifth moon float placidly into the sky, the size of a large silver coin and so bright that it dazzled the eye. About it the other four danced, two of them mere tiny dots, two slightly more imposing, and the shadows of the moonslight shattered and shattered again as planes of ens poured light upon the land in icy cascades. He gripped the rail of the veranda and silently begged the moons to hold their pattern. But the moons shifted. He knew that in another hour two of them would be gone and the magic would ebb. Where was Seena? "Edmund?" she said, from behind him. She was bare again and once more the slider was on her body, covering her loins, sending a long thin projection up to encompass only the nipple of each ripe breast. The light of the five moons made her tawny skin glitter and shine. Now she did not seem coarse to him -- nor overly aggressive. She was perfect in her nudity and the moment was perfect and, unhesitatingly, he went to her. Quickly he dropped his clothing. He put his hands to her hips, touching the slider, and the strange creature understood, flowing obediently from her body, a chastity belt faithless to its task. She leaned toward him, her breasts swaying like fleshy bells and he kissed her, here, here, there, and they sank to the veranda floor, to the cold smooth stone. Her eyes remained open and colder than the floor, colder than the shifting light of the moons, even at the moment when he physically reasserted his love to her. But notfiing was cold about her embrace. Their bodies thrashed and tangled. Her skin was soft and her kiss hungry. And the years rolled away until it was the old time again, the happy time. At the highest moment he was dimly aware of that strange grunting sound once more. He clasped her fiercely and let his eyes close. Afterward they lay side by side, wordless in the moonslight until pleted its voyage across the sky and the Night of the Five Moons had become as any other night. X H e slept by himself in one of the guest rooms on the top level of the station. Awakening unexpectedly early, he watched the sunrise coming over the gorge and went down to walk through the gardens, which still were glistening with dew. He strolled as far as the edge of the river, looking for his nildoror companions. They were not to be seen. For a long time he stood beside the river watching the irresistible downward sweep of that immense volume of water. He went back finally to the station. A robot met him on the first veranda and offered him breakfast. "I'll wait for the woman," Gundersen said. "She will not appear until much later in the morning." "That's odd. She never used to sleep that much." "She is with the man," the robot volunteered. "She stays with him and comforts him at this hour." "What man?" "The man Kurtz, her husband." Gundersen said, amazed, "Kurtz is here at the station?" "He lies ill in his room." She said he was away somewhere. She didn't know when he'd be coming back. Gundersen said, "Was he in his room last night?" "He was." "How long has he been back from his last journey away from here?" "One year at the solstice," the robot said. "Perhaps you should consult the woman on these matters. She will be with you after a while. Shall I bring breakfast?" "Yes," Gundersen said. But Seena was not long in arriving. Ten minutes after he had finished the Juices, fruits and fried fish that the robot had brought him she appeared on the veranda, wearing a filmy white wrap. She seemed to have slept well. Her skin was clear and glowing. Her stride was vigorous. Her dark hair streamed buoyantly in the morning breeze. But the curiously rigid and haunted expression of her eyes was unchanged. He said, "The robot told me not to wait breakfast for you. It said you wouldn't be down for a long while." "That's all right. I'm not usually down this early, it's true. Come for a swim?" "In the river?" "No, silly." She stripped away her wrap and ran down the steps into the garden. He sat frozen a moment, caught up in the rhythms of her swinging arms, her jouncing buttocks -- then he followed her. At a twist in the path that he had not noticed before she turned to the left and halted at a circular pool that appeared to have been punched out of the living rock on the river's flank. As he reached it she launched herself in a fine, arching dive and appeared to hang suspended a moment, floating above the dark water, her breasts drawn into a startling roundness by gravity's pull. Then she went under. Before she came up for breath, Gundersen was naked and in the pool beside her. Even in the mild climate the water was bitterly cold. "It comes from an underground spring," she told him. "Isn't it wonderful? Like a rite of purification." A gray tendril rose from the water behind her, tipped with rubbery claws. Gundersen could find no words to warn her. He pointed with short stabbing motions of two fingers and made hollow chittering noises of horror. A second tendril spiraled out of the depths and hovered over her. Smiling, Seena turned, and seemed to fondle some large creature; there was a thrashing in the water and then the tendrils slipped out of view. "What was that?" "The monster of the pool," she said. "Ced Cullen brought it for me as a birthday present two years ago. It's a plateau medusa. They live in lakes and sting things." "How big is it?" "Oh, the size of a big octopus. I'd say. Very affectionate. I wanted Ced to catch me a mate for it but he didn't get around to it before he went north. I suppose I'll have to do it myself before long. The monster's lonely." She pulled herself out of the pool and sprawled out on a slab of smooth black rock to dry in the sun. Gundersen followed her. From this side of the pool, with the light penetrating the water at just the right angle, he was able to see a massive many-limbed shape far below. Seena' s birthday present. He said, "Can you tell me where I can find Ced now?" "In the mist country." "I know. That's a big place. Any particular part?" S HE rolled over onto her back and flexed her knees. Sunlight made prisms of the droplets of water on her breasts. After a long silence she said, "Why do you want to find him so badly?" "I'm making a sentimental journey to see old friends. Ced and I were once very close. Isn't that reason enough for me to go looking for him?" "It's no reason to betray him, is it?" He stared at her. The fiercely frozen eyes now were closed -- the heavy mounds of her breasts rose and fell slowly, serenely. "What do you mean by that?" he asked. "Didn't the nildoror put you up to going after him?" "What kind of crazy talk is that?" he blurted, not sounding convincingly indignant even to himself. "Why must you pretend?" she said, still speaking from within that impregnable core of total assurance. "The nildoror want him brought back from there. By treaty they're prevented from going up there and getting him themselves. The sulidoror don't feel like extraditing him. Certainly none of the Earthmen living on this planet will fetch him. Now, as an outsider you need nildoror permission to enter the mist country and since you're a stickler for the rules you probably applied for such permission. And there's no special reason why the nildoror should grant favors to you unless you agree to do something for them in return. Q.E.D?" "Who told you all this?" "Believe me, I worked it all out for myself." He propped his head on his hand and reached out admiringly with the other hand to touch her thigh. Her skin was dry and warm, now. He let his hand rest lightly -- and then not so lightly -- on the firm flesh. Seena showed no reaction. Softly he asked, "Is it too late for us to make a treaty?" "What kind?" "A non-aggression pact. We've been fencing since I got here. Let's end the hostilities. I've been hiding things from you and you've been hiding things from me -- and what good is it? Why can't we simply help one another? We're two human beings on a world that's much stranger and more dangerous than most people suspect. If we can't supply a little mutual aid and comfort, what are the ties of humanity worth?" She spoke quietly. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams. So various, so beautiful, so new. The words of the old poem flowed up from the well of his memory. His voice cut in. Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where -- where... Where ignorant armies clash by night. She finished it for him. "Yes. How like you it is, Edmund, to fumble your lines just at the crucial moment, just at the final climax." "Then there's to be no non-aggression pact?" "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that." She turned toward him, took his hand from her thigh, pressed it tenderly between her breasts, raised it to brush her lips against it. "All right, we've been playing little games. They're over and now we'll speak only truth. But you go first. Did the nildoror ask you to bring Ced out of the mist country?" "Yes," Gundersen said. "It was the condition of my entry." "And you promised you'd do it?" "I made certain reservations and qualifications, Seena. If he won't or to force him. But I do have to find him. That much I've pledged. So I ask you again to tell me where I should look." "I don't know," she said. "I have no idea." "Is this the truth?" "The truth," she said and for a moment the harshness was gone from her eyes. "Can you tell me at least why he fled -- why they want him so eagerly." S HE said, "About a year ago, he went down into the central plateau on one of his regular collecting trips. He was planning to get me another medusa, he said. Most of the time I went with him into the plateau but this time Kurtz was ill and I had to stay behind. Ced went to a part of the plateau we had never visited before. He found a group of nildoror taking part in some kind of religious ceremony. He stumbled right into them and evidently he profaned the ritual." "Rebirth?" Gundersen asked. "No, they do rebirth only in the mist country. This was something else, something almost as serious, it seems. The nildoror were furious. Ced barely escaped alive. He came back here and said he was in great trouble -- that the nildoror wanted him, that he had committed some sort of sacrilege and had to take sanctuary. Then he went north, with a posse of nildoror chasing him right to the border. I haven't heard anything since. And that's all I can tell you." "You haven't told me what sort of sacrilege he committed," Gundersen pointed out. "I don't know it. I don't know what kind of ritual it was, or what he did to interrupt it. I've told you only as much as he told me. Will you believe that?" "I'll believe it," he said. He smiled. "Now let's play another game and this time I'll take the lead. Last night you told me that Kurtz was off on a trip, that you hadn't seen him for a long time and didn't know when he'd be back. You also said he'd been sick -- but you brushed over that pretty quickly. This morning the robot who brought me breakfast said that you'd be late coming down because Kurtz was ill and you were with him in his room, as you were every morning at this time. Robots don't ordinarily lie." "The robot wasn't lying. I was." "Why?" "To shield Kurtz from you," Seena said. "He's in bad shape and I don't want him to be disturbed. And I knew that if I told you he was here, you'd want to see him. He isn't strong enough for visitors. It was an innocent lie, Edmund." "What's wrong with him?" "We aren't sure. You know, there isn't much medical service left on this planet. I suppose I could describe his disease as a kind of cancer. Only cancer isn't what he has." "Can you describe the symptoms?" "What's the use? His body began to change. He became something strange and ugly and frightening and you don't need to know the details. If you thought that what had happened to Dykstra and Pauleen was horrible -- you'd be rocked to your roots by Kurtz. But I won't let you see him. It's as much to shield you from him as the other way around. You'll be better off not seeing him." Seena sat up crosslegged on the rock and began to untangle the wet, snarled strands of her hair. Gundersen thought he had never seen her looking as beautiful as she looked right at this moment, clothed only in alien sunlight, her flesh taut and ripe and glowing, her body supple, fullblown, mature. And the stony fierceness of her eyes, the one jarring discordancy? Had that come from viewing, each morning, the horror that Kurtz now was? She added after a long while: "Kurtz is being punished for his sins." "Do you really believe that?" "I do," she said. "I believe that there are such things as sins and that there is retribution for sin." "And that an old man with a white beard is up there in the sky, keeping score on everyone, running the show, tallying up an adultery here, a lie there, a spot of gluttony, a little pride?" "I have no idea who runs the show," said Seeni. "I'm not even sure that anyone does. Don't mislead yourself, Edmund -- I'm not trying to import medieval theology to Belzagor. I won't give you the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and say that all over the universe certain fundamental principles hold true. I simply say that here on Belzagor we live in the presence of certain moral absolutes, native to this planet. And if a stranger comes to Belzagor and transgresses against those absolutes he'll regret it. This world is not ours, never was, never will be, and we who live here are in a constant state of peril, because we don't understand the basic rules." "What sins did Kurtz commit?" "It would take me all morning to name them," she said. "Some were sins against the nildoror and some were sins against his own spirit." "We all committed sins against the nildoror," Gundersen said. "In a sense, yes. We were proud and foolish and we failed to see them for what they were -- and we used them unkindly. That's a sin, yes -- a sin that our ancestors committed all over Earth long before we went into space. But Kurtz had a greater capacity for sin than the rest of us because he was a greater man. Angels have farther to fall -- once they fall." "What did Kurtz do to the nildoror? Kill them? Dissect them? Whip them?" "Those are sins against their bodies," said Seena. "He did worse." "Tell me." "Do you know what used to go on at the serpent station, south of the spaceport?" "I was there for a few weeks with Kurtz and Salamone," Gundersen said. "Long ago -- when I was very new here, when you were still a child on Earth. I watched the two of them call serpents out of the jungle, milk the raw venom from them and give the venom to nildoror to drink. And drink the venom themselves." "And what happened then?" H e shook his head and confessed, "I've never been able to understand it. When I tried it with them, I had the illusion that the three of us were turning into nildoror. And that three nildoror had turned into us. I had a trunk, four legs, tusks, spines. Everything looked different -- I was seeing through nildoror eyes. Then it ended and I was in my own body again. I felt a terrible rush of guilt, of shame. I had no way of knowing whether it had been a real bodily metamorphosis or just hallucination." "It was hallucination," Seena told him. "The venom opened your mind, your soul, and enabled you to enter the nildor consciousness, at the same time that the nildor was entering yours. For a little while that nildor thought he was Edmund Gundersen. Such a dream is great ecstasy to a nildor." "Is this Kurtz' sin, then? To give ecstasy to nildoror?" "The serpent venom," Seena said, "is also used in the rebirth ceremony. What you and Kurtz and Salamone were doing down there in the jungle was going through a mild -- very mild -- version of rebirth. And so were the nildoror. But it was blasphemous rebirth for them for many reasons. First, because it was held in the wrong place. Second, because it was done without the proper rituals. Third, because the celebrants who guided the nildoror were men, not sulidoror -- and so the entire thing became a wicked parody of the most sacred ritual this planet has. By giving those nildoror the venom Kurtz was tempting them to dabble in something diabolical -- literally diabolical. Few nildoror can resist that temptation. He found pleasure in the act -- both in the hallucinations that the venom gave him and in the tempting of the nildoror. I think he enjoyed the tempting even more than the hallucinations and that was his worst sin. Through it he led innocent nildoror into what passes for damnation on this planet. In twenty years on Belzagor he inveigled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nildoror into sharing a bowl of venom with him. Finally his presence became intolerable and his own hunger for evil became the source of his destruction. And now he lies upstairs, neither living nor dead, no longer a danger to anything on Belzagor." She got to her feet, stretched voluptuously and beckoned to him. "Let's go back to the station now." As though this were time's first dawn they walked naked through the garden, close together, the warmth of the sun and the warmth of her body stirring him and raising a fever in him. Twice he considered pulling her to the ground and loving her amidst these alien shrubs. Twice he held back, not knowing why. When they were a dozen meters from the house he felt desire climb again and turned to her and put his hand on her breast. She said, "Tell me one more thing -- first." "If I can." "Why have you come back to Belzagor? Really. What draws you to the mist country?" He said, "If you believe in sin you must believe in the possibility of redemption from sin." "Yes." "Well, then -- I, too, have a sin on my conscience. Perhaps not as grave a sin as the sins of Kurtz but enough to trouble me. I've come back here as an act of expiation." "How have you sinned?" "I sinned against the nildoror in the ordinary Earthman way, by collaborating in their enslavement, by patronizing them, by failing to credit their intelligence and their complexity. In particular I sinned by preventing seven nildoror from reaching rebirth on time. Do you remember? When the Monroe dam broke I commandeered those pilgrims for a labor detail. I used a fusion torch to make them obey and, on my account, they missed rebirth. I didn't know that if they were late for rebirth they'd lose their turn -- and if I had known it I wouldn't have thought it mattered. Sin within sin within sin. I left here feeling, stained. Those seven nildoror bothered me in my dreams. I realized thaf I had to come back and try to purify myself." "What kind of expiation do you have in mind?" she asked. His eyes had difficulty meeting hers. He lowered them but that was worse -- her nakedness unnerved him even more as they stood together in the sunlight outside the station. He forced his glance up again. He said, "I'm determined to find out what rebirth is and to take part in it. I'm going to offer myself to the sulidoror as a candidate." "No." "Seena, what's wrong? You -- " She trembled. Her cheeks were blazing and the rush of scarlet spread even to her breasts. She bit her lip, spun away from him,, turned back. "What you're planning is insanity," she said. "Rebirth isn't something for Earthmen. Why do you think you can possibly expiate anything by getting yourself mixed up in an alien religion -- by surrendering yourself to a process none of us knows anything about, by -- " "I have to see this through, Seena." "Don't be crazy." "It's an obsession. I can't stop. I owe this planet a life and I'm here to pay it. I have to go -- regardless of the consequences." She said, "Come inside the station with me -- " her voice flat, mechanical, empty. "Why?" "Come inside." He followed her in silently. She led him to the middle level of the building and into a corridor blocked by one of her robot guardians. At a nod from her the robot stepped aside. Outside a room at the rear she paused and put her hand to the door's scanner. The door rolled back. Seena gestured to him to walk in with her. He heard the grunting, snorting sound that he had heard the night before and now there was no doubt in his mind that it had been a throttled cry of terrible pain. "This is the room where Kurtz spends his time," Seena said. She drew a curtain that had divided the room. "And this is Kurtz." "It isn't possible," Gundersen murmured. "How -- how -- " "How did he get that way?" "Yes." "As he grew older he began to feel remorse for the crimes he had committed. He suffered great guilt and last year he resolved to undertake an act of expiation. He decided to travel to the mist country and undergo rebirth. This is what they brought back to me. This is what a human being looks like, Edmund, when he's undergone rebirth." XI apparently human. Probably it had once been Jeff Kurtz. The absurd body length was surely Kurtzlike, although the figure in the bed seemed to be a man and a half long -- as if an extra section of vertebrae and perhaps a second pair of femurs had been spliced in. The skull was plainly Kurtz, too -- mighty white dome, jutting, ridged brow. The ridges were even more prominent than Gundersen remembered. They rose above Kurtz' closed eyes like barricades guarding against some invasion from above. But the thick black brows were gone. So were the lush, almost feminine eyelashes. Below the forehead the faee was unrecognizable. It was as if everything had been heated in a crucible and allowed to melt and run. Kurtz' fine, highbridged nose was now a rubbery smear, so snoutlike that Gundersen was jolted by its resemblance to a sulidor's. His wide mouth had grown slack -- pendulous lips drooped open, revealing toothless gums. His chin sloped back like a pithecanthropoid's. Kurtz' cheekbones were flat and broad, wholly altering the planes of his face. Seena drew the coverlet down to display the rest. The body in the bed was utterly hairless -- a long, boiled-looking pink thing like a giant slug. All superfluous flesh was gone and the skin lay like a shroud over plainly visible ribs and muscles. The proportions of the body were wrong. Kurtz' waist was an impossibly great distanee from his chest and his legs, though long, were not nearly as long as they should have been. His ankles seemed to crowd his knees. His toes had fused so that his feet terminated in bestial pads. Perhaps by way of compensation his fingers had added extra joints and were great spidery things that flexed and clenched in irregular rhythms. The attachment of his arms to his torso appeared strange, though it (Please turn to page # Panama Canal. On Wednesday Myra went in to work although nobody's mind was on work. Wednesday night Myra wrote to George: George's reply came a week later. He repeated a former statement: he loved a busty blackhaired girl whose name was not Myra. So that was that. The gas the invaders used affected only the older people. Myra had been afraid they might use it on all the men as well. But they took only the old. Myra was not Why don't we get married now? Or at least you come up here... allowed transit back to her town in Vermont. The burials were held within two days and were run without emotion and without private graves. The bodies were allotted a certain amount of designated area -- one body for such and such fraction of an acre. It was explained that decomposition in the shallow graves would help future crops in the rocky soil. Unfortunately a heavy rain fell right after the burials. The new school administrator handed out the outlines which had been expected. The new language would not be required in all grades for a year. The history was required immediately. Myra's world history course on the ninthgrade level was changed into a civics study and all her pupils were required to learn by heart the tenets of the new law. Her tenth-grade American history course became Historical Images. The invaders were apparently making no attempt to talk against the old ideas but merely to wipe them off the slate, to start with clear positive tenets. No mention was to be made of any of the former subjects. None was. The system to enforce this arrangement was twofold. Students must report on teachers and teachers on students. At first there were exchanges of secret expressions, imparting more of a sensation of guilt rather than rage. These decreased. The first revolt was punished by the gassing of the intelligent people of New York. This occurred at midday in the middle of the tenth week. I.Q.'s of under a hundred were not touched. Everyone else was. Myra had had doubts about George's I.Q. but she did not think it went that low. But she had a strong feeling, perhaps induced by desire only, that George had been out of the city. His periodical often sent him away on stories and she knew that since his field was cultural coverage it was possible that he had been at the newly opened Philadelphia exposition of the conqueror's art. When he and Myra had first been in love they had experienced a high degree of success in the transference of ideas both during the day and by the aid of dreams. Neither of them had felt this was an extraordinary phenomenon -- they thought about each other most of the time and they could tell by each other's presence just what was on the other's mind. The days of rape were orderly and controlled. But they did not end. Each of the newly stationed conquerors in the town -- there were only fourteen in Greenwich -- was issued a cohabitation card. The conquerors were all intelligent and were allowed to breed with intelligent women only. All the women who had gone to college and most of the high-school graduates had been test,ed early and their records were on file. No chance remained of slanting a test toward low grades. Besides, one would not do that anyway because of the work allotments. The tranquilizing gas was spread every Monday morning. This had become a steady occurrence and the doses were heavy at the beginning -- so heavy, in fact, that Myra had little recollection of the first orderly calls of her three allotted administrators. Almost fifty women in Greenwich had been passed as child carriers for the fourteen men and each man was assigned to three women. Myra could expect one a week in rotation. Two of hers were tall and looked quite healthy and very much alike. The third was taller still but quite thin and not quite so robust. He demanded little of her and looked and seemed distracted much of the time. Often he quit his assignment halfway through and demanded nothing at all. The others were perfunctory and displayed pleasure without emotion. A sort of tranquilizing chemical was added to the food as well. Unfortunately it betrayed a urinelike taste which soon pervaded all of what Myra ate. Had Myra had many friends before the invasion she might have found a little solace in companionship. Friendships were allowed to continue -- meetings at the homes of one's friends were permitted as long as one was at home on the nights when services were demanded. But Myra lived in Greenwich only a short time and had spent most of that thinking of George. She still spent most of her time thinking of George and once in a while tried to imagine what she could do against the invasion. But the drugs were used so heavily that she could not concentrate. Her mind kept going back to the day when everyone had become sure of what had happened. But her sureness had been hindsight. She had always been afraid of the dark and had slept with the radio on all her days at Greenwich. The radio had played teenage tunes most of the afternoon. The news accounts had consisted of singing weather reports. There had, in fact, been no mention at all of what was happening. "So we went out by Musack, after all," was Myra's main reaction to the day. WO years after they took the Panama Canal the tranquilizing dose had been lowered. The work level had been raised and the food quota had been cut in half. But Myra, being pregnant, was allowed more food than anyone else. She had, furthermore, learned her fate -- she would be allowed to bear two children and care for them until each was five and then she would either be shipped to a smaller population area to drudgery or executed. The first would come about only if she could convince the government of her loyalty. Very few were allowed this chance -- the government had people of its own trained from a much younger age. Once she had borne two intelligent children, since she was a member of the generation that remembered, her productiveness would drop to teaching courses in civics and historical myth. And in the new children's camps both chores were handled by machines. She had discovered her fate from the thin administrator whose child she perhaps bore. She hoped the child was his but, of course, she could not be sure. He and she spoke to each other less now than they had at first. The edict on speaking the conqueror's language had been passed a year ago and she had not become too proficient. When the two others came to her bed she cared so little for their presence that she did much of her serious thinking at that time. The administrators brought small servings of whiskey when they came on the theory that better children would result. The whiskey cut the haze in Myra's mind and led her to a passion of thought. When the thin one came she and he solemnly drank the allotment and then solemnly went to bed. The man's actions betrayed no passion whatsoever but he did exhibit a great tenderness -- although he never spoke at such moments. He would stroke her hair, something even George had never done. He would trace the features of her face with his fingers and he would turn her face to his and stare into her eyes, so that Myra often felt she was on the verge of being hypnotized, although she knew that to mesmerize her was not his intention. His eyes were gray, almost whitish at times, and very transparent in the colored area when she viewed him from the side. His hands and feet were long. Myra began to wonder if she loved him. The idea presented such absurd angles that she amused herself with this reverie. Temptation had visited her before she became pregnant. During the second year of the invasion she had begun to accuse herself. Why did she not rebel? She could partially forgive the women of the town when she saw them in the streets with their children. Their first interest was rightly the care of those children -- but why, really, since they would be sent away? Nevertheless, Myra felt that she had perhaps a special responsibility. She had no family to care for and she had been educated. In the spring she thought she would try to get hold of some kind of suicide potion. She would get up early in the morning and write a lot of signs with the magic marker she would bring home from school. she would write on pieces of paper she would strew along the street and, under one enormous sign tied to a stake, she would administer the potion to herself at dawn. But she did not want those who heeded her exhortations to be killed. Nor could she see how any revolt at all would have any effect. The chemical weapons of America had been long since taken over -- besides, who knew how to work them? And without them there was no hope. Brute force was out of the question. The burning of the books took place at this point in her life and here Myra did exhibit courage and here she did work according to plan. She had suspected from the beginning of the invasion that a book-burning would take place sooner or later. When less drugged moments gave her any lucidity she planned what books she would save and where she would hide them. The move was a dangerous one. Her natural reaction was to pick Shakespeare, the Bible, a book on Einstein, Greek plays, a guide to western art and an anthology of English and American poetry. Then she began to question each book. That inner debate went on for months. The Greek plays were dropped easily from her selections -- she got a syllabus of the holdings of the new library and they were listed as evidently not dangerous. She had doubts about the Bible -- rational action was needed now more than mysticism. Still it was the oldest continuous historical record she could think of and that would be important. How were people to find out later that life had not always been like this? Was Shakespeare really good enough to save? Or was she taking him on hearsay? The Einstein book? She dumped that on the theory that anyone being able to put the theories into use would be a member of the government and thus have access to parallel material. Besides, she did not understand it. She retained the art book and the poetry. But the book-burning day was announced sooner than she had anticipated. She had by then figured out only one hiding place. She had decided she had better have places that would look as if the books had been accidentally overlooked in case she were discovered. But she could only think of one like that and she used it for her volume of Shakespeare, slipping it under the seat of the stuffed chair in her living room. She put the art book in an empty sugar box in her kitchen cabinet and the Bible in the mechanical sweeper. That made three books and she was sure of none. The rest would have to go. "administrator came he sat in the stuffed chair and asked for a cup of coffee. Why hadn't she remembered that that was often his custom? He did not seem to notice the presence of the book, however. He called for her to come and sit on his lap after he had finished his coffee. He held her hand that night -- he had never held her hand so gently. She rested her arm on the arm of the chair and looked down at him. They spoke slowly in the new language. He covered her knee with his other hand. "I love to look at your hair because it is clean and soft," he said. She had no reply. "You must grow your hair longer so it will wave and catch in the light." "All right." "You look much like my sister." "Oh." Then he put his head on her breast and dozed. After ten minutes she tried to move but he held her there. After half an hour he opened his eyes. "You may get up." She stood up and went to get his coat. When she returned he held the Shakespeare book in his hand. He put it into his coat pocket, kissed her forehead and left. Now she had the Bible and the art book. She had not been able to find a place for the poetry book. Then the passion which was to govern her until the birth of her child took hold. She developed a great remorse for the loss of her Shakespeare. She came to feel obligated to act. She came to feel guilty. She must restore Shakespeare to the world. But she could not remember the plays. At night, when she was free, she worked with a pen and scrap paper. She wrote what she remembered about the quality of mercy not being strained. But that was about all she remembered of mercy's not being strained. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war... That was more to the point but too late. So she took to noting down the plots of the plays. MacBeth: a man and his wife, mostly his wife, kill someone rich and powerful but after they have killed, they feel so bad they can't do anything else. And someone comes at them disguised in a forest. Hamlet: a prince's father was murdered and he is supposed to handle the revenge on the new king who did it, but he does not quite get to the point and kills everybody else instead. Tempest: a wise, old, powerful, kind man fixes up what he has control over and guides it toward good and then knows his time is up and does himself in. But these sketches did not satisfy her. She felt perhaps she had not understood all of what must have been meant in the plays and developed an even more gnawing appetite for the lost book. She began long exegeses on the scratch paper. The pen was thin and illworking and the paper blotched and she went on night after night elaborating on the slender themes she could remember. Her frustration grew and her anger grew and her guilt grew and in the morning when she awoke with a great sense of loss and a great vagueness as to just what the loss was she named it -- the book that her thin conqueror lover had taken away. One morning the sense of loss overcame her even more strongly. She cried out loud when she awoke and she did not feel well throughout her body. She never missed a day of the school and she was frightened to report an absence from her work schedule. She went to her classes but the nurse sent her to the clinic, where she was told she was pregnant. She worked into the eigth month. H er knowledge of her pregnancy seemed to relieve the urgency of what she felt about the lost book. Though she grew melancholy and sentimental over the child and over the book, she no longer had energy for her scratchings in the night. She looked at the slow bulge in her stomach, ran her hands over and around it and shook down the hair she had let grow long. It caught more light that it used to. She washed her body and her face more often than usual and speculated seriously on the father of the child. He was probably the second of the two men who seemed so alike and who spoke to her in the ideology of the government. But could she be pregnant by her thin lover? She would like his child. She had told him of its coming before she told the others. "No," he said. He did not think the child was his. Didn't she remember? They had not slept together that week at all. Or those weeks. They had eaten and rested but there had been no intimacy. It was strange that she had forgotten -- but she had. And now: it was convenient for her not to remember. She was sorry he did not want to claim fatherhood of her child. But he did not and, as the time grew nearer, she began to fancy that perhaps it was George's, from some sperm of years before that had only now yeasted or whatever sperm did. She would call the child George. She thought and thought of George and when she was allowed to leave work in her last month she thought more and more of him, remembering and wondering. Had he been killed in the New York punishment? No, she was certain of that by now. He was still alive and she felt it. Each day she felt it more. Had he capitulated to the enemy? No doubt. George was a little like that. But then, one could say she had capitulated too. One met few heroes these days. In fact, she could not recall one. Was he living with the other girl? No doubt. It didn't matter. He would only take another girl because he could not get to Myra. He should have some comfort. He will come back. I will see him one day.  will see... Once during the night she dialed George's old number but she woke up someone named Harry who was terribly mad and had never heard of George. Then the baby came and they did not give her any anesthesia because of bad effects it might have on the child and she did not care for about eight hours if she lived or died and it was worse than she had ever imagined. When they brought the child to her there was something about it she definitely did not like. She knew then that it was not George's. It was not even her thin conqueror-lover's baby. It was the exact image of both of her other two males. And it hurt her terribly when it fed. She liked it a little better after she got it home. But most of all she liked the freedom it gave her from the two fathers, but she missed seeing her thin lover once a week. Strange that she did not know any of her lovers' names -- perhaps they had none. She had nothing to do for six weeks but care for the child. Her meals were brought in to her for a while and her extra work was done. She became almost gay. To entertain herself and to keep away soberer thoughts, she took the art book out of the sugar box and began to draw. She used a few basic food stuffs to make weak water color paints and she made a paint brush from her own hair. Then she got a little carried away and made six paint brushes, thin ones and thick ones, and began to paint directly on the walls. First she was still caught up in the spirit of the Shakespeare crusade and she tried to copy over her living room walls some of the works of the masters. But these came out poorly. The DaVinci Last Supper merely faded into the paper over the couch and she could not reproduce the perfection of the lines or come anywhere near the depth of colors of any of the paintings in the Renaissance section of the book. Next she tried to study the human body and made black outlines of her hands and feet on the white wood of the doorway but they were not too well executed. She turned finally to wild and loose depictions of animals she remembered from childhood walks in the woods. These she put in her bedroom when she ran out of living room space. She did rather free-expression sketches of cows she had seen in pastures of her childhood, all turning to look at you as you pass on the dirt road. She drew quick, running horses under winter trees and spare suns. She drew a fat elephant for the baby along with some giraffes and cats. She worked on the walls of her bedroom late at night by low light. Only a soft glow illumined her work, a glow like that at sunset just inside the opening of a cave. Seeing it, she could sleep. But as the child grew she became vexed at her paintings. She was irritated at the mess in the living room and enjoyed only at certain times of day the animals in her bedroom. She stopped combing her hair and washing and she grew frantic with the baby. She would coax him and tickle him, tickle him too much, too long, forcing him to laugh more than he wanted to. Shaking him and even at times pulling up the corners of his mouth into an artificial smile. She grew to hate the child. He was, after all, the first mark against her. Another child plus five years and then they would kill her. Or send her to a labor camp and she could no longer stand to wash her little daily rotation of dishes. A fter six weeks, the government let the men come back. They were to employ contraception for two years but they were to be allowed to satisfy their desires during that time. And for the sake of order all fourteen stayed with the same women. Each of the healthy administrators thought of the baby as his own. Her tall, thin lover -- she took to calling him Tall in her mind because it actually described him better to her than Thin, although he was both -- patted the baby on the head but he did not seem to care for it very much. How nice it was to see him. Myra felt warm in his presence. She was ashamed of her shaggy hair and her unwashed face. "Myra," he said as he came in through the door. He smothered her in his arms, against his chest, and held her there and laughed at her. He took the whiskey from his coat pocket and went into the kitchen to fix drinks for them. "Ah, Myra," he said and kissed her and they made love before they drank and for the first time Myra thought to herself, We are making love -- that is what we are doing. Tall was gay afterwards and would not let her dress but took her into the kitchen and washed her with a dish towel and brushed her hair and then they drank. "Dance," he said and he poured her another glass of whiskey. They sat in the bedroom. Tall turned off the light and lit a candle he had brought her during the winter. The light flickered on the walls and Tall sang a strange, alien song and beat out the tune on the bed and then on the walls. She had no clue to the real meaning of the words -- he knew only the elementals of his tongue. "Dance." And Myra danced under the walls and for the first time in years felt joy in her feet and in her hands and in the wild hair that caught her heels on the floor and twisted and sang and laughed as she sang and called Tail's name and George's name and -- once -- the name of God. She began to weep as she danced but the dance grew even longer then. She twisted her hands and wept and Tall stopped singing and only watched and grew sad and wept as well. Finally she fell on the bed and Tall picked her up and showed her her own face in the mirror on her wall and his face beside it. Then he picked up a paint brush that was made from Myra's hair and dipped it in a color and while they both looked in the mirror, he traced the outlines of their faces there right on the surface of the mirror and underneath he wrote their names and then they made love again but the baby cried and soon they fed it. Myra brought up George and taught him to speak the new tongue and tried to love him but she could not. She set him tasks that were too hard for him to do in order to trick him and he became an unhappy child. They both became sick in an epidemic of flu and often in the night, when he cried, Myra did not tend to him, partly because she was sick and partly because she did not want to. She recovered from the flu but the child did not. He was taken to the clinic and died there. The two men who might have been his father were not kind to her after that. They struck her and forced her more than was comfortable. But she was glad the child had died. She felt she had accomplished something. The child died in its third year. But he still counted against Myra. There would be only one more. One more child -- plus five years. Myra went back to work at the school. Usually she thought about nothing. When she thought it was about Tall. She prayed now and then. She prayed to Pan and Venus and God and Jehovah and Brahma and even the serpent in the garden that the next child would be Tail's. Ten months after the first child died she felt once again that she might be pregnant. She told Tall immediately and did not tell the others. "Yes," he said. He thought it was his this time. He remembered, yes, he remembered a time when he had felt for sure there would be a child. They were happy and gentle. When Tall came the next week he announced that he would not come again. He was asking the administration for a new woman, since he found this one unproductive and cold. "Tall!" He asked for her trust. He asked for her love, he spoke against the government. He said that he would stay alive until she was taken for execution but that he planned a kind of espionage and he did not want his child or her to feel the consequences of association with him. "Feel" was the word he used in his strange tongue, which had no word for "suffer." He would not explain. He would give no details. But he knew his mind. They would meet every Friday in the town square at three and pass each other on the street, but they would not speak. She must bring up the child as rapidly as she could. She must learn to speak to it before it was sent away. She must tell the child of its father. H e kissed her on the forehead. He went out. Myra took the sheets from the bed and burned them in the sink and braided her hair around her head and did not unbraid it until the child was born. He was a long thin child with gray eyes that looked transparent when she viewed him from the side but she did not dare to name him Yuri. She took down her hair and washed it and braided it and then she took the razor and cut the braid just below the nape of her neck and fastened the top of the braid and hid it beneath the cushion of the easy chair. After that she made a constant struggle against time. The five years were no longer her years. They belonged to the child. She worked with him from the earliest days, trying to speed his development. She must get him to talk and understand before the government reached him. She had him knowing simple vocabulary just a little after he was one year old. She did not teach him English -- to do so would have been too daring and he might give himself away. She kept him healthy and she drew pictures for him and sang songs to him and she rocked him and she swung him and she did not try to make him laugh. He was a quick and sober child. As he grew older she taught him to paint and draw and sing. She taught him rhymes and tunes and dances. She taught him games to play but above all she tried to speed his progress in the language. She took him with her when she walked to the town square on Fridays. She passed Tall with the child in her arms and with the child by the hand and when she got home she would explain to George and tell him about the need for secrecy. She taught him duplicity and how to lie. She won him over as solidly as she could and she tried to teach him to beat the government at every turn. But he was only a child and she could never be sure. She was afraid but when she passed the square on Friday she was not afraid and the weekends only saw her redoubling her efforts. But she could not decide what to teach him. She must be simple, she must pick out only a few things and then have him understand that he must not say anything about them when they took him to the camp. He must think only at night when the lights were out in the dormitories. He must offer no resistance during the training. But he must remember. He must remember. What? That grass is green, what else? That wood is wood and God is good? She grew sad and she began to have a return of the morning sensation she had first experienced when she lost the book. Duplicity would be more important than honesty. Shrewdness more important than bravery. He must remember, though. He must remember. But how could she teach him all that she had learned. One night in August when the moon was dark she took the Bible from the dust broom and the art book from the sugar box and went out to the back yard. She dug up some earth with the spade, wrapped the books in heavy cloth and buried them and showed the child how he could tell where they were without a marker. But where would he learn English? She could not answer that. Her thirty-fifth birthday came in the child's fourth year. Her neck had grown thin and her jowls loose and her face was lined and she saw the aging in Tall when she passed him in the street and it made her love him more. That he also aged made him less an alien. The bone showed in her leg and the veins stood around her knee and she wondered if George would know of her age or her death. She grew desperate about the child and could not decide what to do during the last half year that she had. "Do not come to the Square next week," he said in August. Then: "Myra," he said and looked at her the way he had the first time he had come to her place. "Child," he said and stared for a long time at the boy. They passed. Myra did not go the square next Friday. Tall killed himself in the center of the public square in this manner: first he made a large sign and stuck it in the dirt. Then he took a black marker and wrote Remember in large letters on every page of the Shakespeare book, which he had carefully cut from its binding with a sharp blade. Then he placed himself at the foot of the post and slashed his throat before dawn. In the morning when the people came to work the pages of the book were scattered through the square by the wind and some of the people picked them up and secreted them and when they saw the words in the old language, although they had only one page, they could not swallow and they blinked over and over again. On the large placard was writMyra only heard accounts of this from her neighbors. It was the first time the neighbors had mentioned the old ways since the invasion. But Myra did gd into the square as soon as she heard. She found Yuri in the center of a glass-windowed store front. His body had been stripped and the nails pulled. His genitals had been mutilated and his eyes removed. The page from the book and the word remember on it had been stuck by a long stick into his chest. Myra was overwhelmed with a great feeling of happiness. She was happy that Yuri had died long before the torture. She went back and brought down the child. The children were told that after ten years in the camp, they would be free to seek out their mothers. But this was a lie. Their mothers were usually executed by then. Myra did not tell the child this. But she told him everything else. She told him about America and she told him about freedom and she told him about his father's death. She told him about Einstein and about the countryside where she had been a child and she told him about Jesus, Da Vinci and about as many things as she could name and explain in the time that was left. She had told only one. But he must tell two. He must somewhere find two he trusted before he died. And they must find two. And that was all. She loved him. But remembering was more important and telling even more important than remembering. So they took the child on his fifth birthday and they took Myra the same day. She removed the braided hair from the easy chair and folded it between her breasts and she went out with them to the shipment station and they took her to New York. And when she walked into the chamber, she saw George again. BwrDA' t jotvwReueaaf. vvv  V ifvvr  Continued from page # ) Scheffing Institute -- and a wolf of Wall Street can instantly become a connoisseur of the arts. Or an even abler wolf. The story Silverberg has to tell is the story of the struggle between John Roditis, upstart Greek billionaire, and Mark Kaufmann, new titular head of the aristocratic Kaufmann family related by a thousand strands of time, common cause and blood kinship with the Rothschilds, the Schiffs, the Lehmans and the other great names of finance. The object of the struggle is the persona of the recently dead grand old buccaneer, Mark's uncle Paul Kaufmann. Clearly, Roditis cannot be permitted to acquire this dynamic added increment to his already burgeoning character. Just as obviously, few other members of even the elite can command the strength of will to prevent Paul's character from overwhelming their own personalities and becoming a dybbuk -- a resurrected persona in command of a stolen body whose true owner, if he survives at all, survives only as shreds and tatters caught in the lowest, darkest recesses of his own brain. Complicating Mark Kaufmann's problem as he tries to forestall Roditis is an Institute rule that prevents him from simply purchasing and acquiring the persona of such a close relative as his uncle. Aggravating his annoyance is the fact that if Roditis does acquire Paul, he will then perforce become a member of the Kaufmann social circle and the nouveau riche Greek will have to be invited to tea. And of course neither of these latter two complications are rational in terms of Silverberg's original premise; nor is his practice, early in the book, of referring to the personae as "souls." All three notions, mind you, add significantly to the power of his narrative but they are nonsense in the context of the fairly straightforward suspense story he then actually writes. That story -- the one you get by reading this book in your best Evelyn Wood Dynamics manner is an acceptable and entertaining one, particularly ornamented by the at first subsidiary development of Risa, Mark's daughter, who is beyond doubt one of Silverberg's best characterizations ever. But the real effect of this book has nothing to do with its overt events. Let me explain, first, that I was genuinely moved by this story while at the same time appreciating the fact that it's rather plainly assembled, with many features painted on indifferently framed canvas instead of being mortared together in real brick. I suspect that you may well be moved by it, too. And now the question is, why? Risa is much more attractive as a case history than she really is as a person. So are her father and uncle Paul. All three of them are far too self-sufficient to care whether anyone identifies with them, let alone you or me. Roditis, oddly enough, appears for the most part only as an utterer of dialogue. At the very end Silverberg speaks of his vitality; my first reaction was. What vitality? I knew him almost entirely as a querulous voice bullying a subordinate. So it isn't character identification that transmits this book's peculiar potency. And it isn't the power of prose images, either; Silverberg uses few silver nails in his carpentry. Where this book works is where it isn't either science or fiction. I mean, would rational minds confuse an electronic echo with the soul? Would they invite it to dinner? Is it incest to take an uncle into one's mind? Would it comfort your dying to know that someone else would inherit your memories? Could those memories, packed into otherwise unused portions of the cerebral matrix, leak over into previously occupied incremental spaces and, in an organized manner, oust those discrete bits, again retaining an organized manner? That's what you'd need, to achieve the melodramatic persona-battles, back and forth, Silverberg depicts here. And if it happened, is it likely, really likely, that the world would adopt the particular slang term, dybbukl I doubt it. I think the very best parts of this book are the unwritten ones, the ones that play on the good old half-buried fears and longings, the love-death pushrnepullyou that drives men in the old, oldquest whose by-product is power. Panshin (Ace ##, #O#), is the series that also includes Star Well (#, #g) and The Thurb Revolution (#, #). In this latest count Charteris -- and his companion, Torve the Trog, continue what may eventually be an explicit saga or ballade about a younger son's life in a vaguely feudal interstellar empire. It makes for a charming creation. The imperial background may or may not prove eventually relevant. Meanwhile, it furnishes an excuse for Panshin to introduce all the elements, quaint or not, technological or medieval, required to spin out his well-told stories. He can introduce both a robot butler and a lecherous old procurator, the latter given to dropping overripe melons down palace stairwells at other men's wives. And he can introduce an imperial envoy into a real identity crisis via a Trog suit. With the whole thing coming to a head at peelgrunt. What? Oh, that's when the peels grunt, of course. Read the book. Stop asking silly questions. #, #(t), was sent to me with a covering note from the editor that read: "Hope you like it better than his last one." Well, his last one was The Two-Timers, which I did not like all that much, though I reserved some kind remarks for Shaw's ability. I still think quite well of Shaw as a writer. But it's clear from this latest example that he's still not a novelist. In the present instance what begins as a routine space opera with Van Vogtian overtones soon catalyzes into a Van Vogtian mystical exercise with images from Eric Frank Russell. If you like space opera the ending will cheat you. If you admire Van Vogt, it's a very long hike to the first double take. Either way. I'd think an editor would more properly say something like "Hope he's done better this time." But that concept may be a little difficult to grasp. Also thus, judging by the context of other notes from management, is the essential invidiousness of sending advanceadvance copies of the Ace Specials to carefully selected persons and then carefully selecting only the laudatory responses for the blurbs on the covers. From a purely practical standpoint, of course, I can think of few more effective devices for marketing an original paperback, in the face of reprints which are free to select an isolated sentence about the hardcover edition from a review in the Hartford Courant or a paragraph from the "review" column of a West Texas weekly that is actually made up out of quotes from publishers' press releases. But it is a marketing device and I can't fully understand what makes Ace so idignant to me when I merely point it out. Can you? Special #, #e) is stuccoedover with a semi-relevant quote from Michael Moorcock, a Ted White quote that thinks to praise this book by equating it with Frank Herbert's Dune -- and then, inside, even a laudatory quote from Frank Herbert. But a book like this needs no introduction and is in fact embarrassed by these adumbrations, even the nice one from Damon Knight. This is a narrative so fully realized, so compellingly told, so masterfully executed that even an editor should have the wit to just show it to his readers and stand back. With the exception of Damon Knight, not one of these attorneys is a peer of this client. Meanwhile, what's the book about? Will I like it? Should I buy it? Try to discover that from this testimonial matter and you learn two things. #) It's got "Ideas that reflect many of the central concerns of Western society, to say nothing of imagery reminiscent of Beardsley and the melody and wit of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta," according to Mike Moorcock. #) It's a novel of "exotic adventure on a far planet whose people are completely human except for one thing: they are all of the same sex," according to the blurb writer on the first page. Bull doody. Leaving aside the Moorcock quote, which reflects a critical expository style reminiscent of Playboy's movie reviews, to say nothing of the logical level attained in the editorial replies in "Letters to Superman," this is a novel of adventure on a planet whose ambi-sexual human inhabitants go through an oestrus cycle in which they may play either the male or female role. It is, being a novel written by a magnificent writer, a totally compelling tale of human peril and striving under circumstances in which human love, and a number of other noble qualities,an be depicted in a fresh context. In that context, they display attributes and effects not possible in the ordinary adventure novel. Only by conceiving, for instance, does a member of this cast of characters remain a female for more than a few days, and even so she raises her child, after lactation ceases, as an individual indistinguishable from the child's no longer sexual father. Yet the three love each other, though years and distances may separate them. What this world has to teach its only heterosexual human, galactic ambassador Genly Ai, is what it also teaches us. I can't imagine anyone reading it and not learning profoundly from it. Anyone, that is, but the endorsers and editors whose other concerns seem not to have allowed sufficient time for either perceptive thought or meaningful utterance. See you next month, space buffs! Till then, this is your old buddy. Blaster Al, sayin' so long until we meet again on the Starlanes!  Notice To All Readers skipping an issue of Gaaxy. The cover date of what woufd have been the January issue has been changed to February to give Gaiaxy and its sister publication, H, equivalent sales periods on the newsstands. All subscriptions are being updated accordingly. was not until Gundersen saw Kurtz slowly rotate his left arm through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree twist that he realized the armpit must have been reconstructed into some kind of versatile ball-andsocket arrangement. Kurtz struggled desperately to speak, blurting words in a language Gundersen had never heard. His eyeballs visibly stirred beneath his lids. His tongue slipped forth to moisten his lips. Something like a three-lobed adam's apple bobbed in his throat. Briefly he humped his body, drawing the skin tight over curiously broadened bones. He continued to speak. Occasionally an intelligible word in English or nildororu emerged, embedded in a flow of gibberish. "River... death... lost... horror... river... cave... warm... smash... black... go... god... horror... born... lost..." "What is he saying?" Gundersen asked. "No one knows. Even when we can understand the words he doesn't make sense. And mostly we can't even understand the words." "Has he been conscious at all?" "Not really," Seena said. "Sometimes his eyes are open but he never responds to anything around him. Come. Look." She went to the bed and drew Kurtz' eyelids open. Gundersen saw eyes that had no whites at all. From rim to rim their shining surfaces were a deep, lustrous black, dappled by random spots of light (Continued from page #) blue. He held three fingers up before those eyes and waved his hand from side to side. Kurtz took no notice. Seena released the lids and the eyes remained open, even when the tips of Gundersen's fingers approached quite closely. But as Gundersen withdrew his hand, Kurtz lifted his right hand and seized Gundersen's wrist. The grotesquely elongated fingers encircled the wrist completely, met, and coiled halfway around it again. Slowly and with tremendous strength Kurtz pulled Gundersen down until he was kneeling beside the bed. glish. As before, he seemed to be in desperate anguish, forcing the words out of some nightmare recess, with no perceptible accenting or punctuation: "Water sleep death save sleep sleep fire love water dream cold sleep plan rise fall rise rise rise." After a moment he added, "Fall." Then the flow of nonsense-syllables returned and the fingers relinquished their fierce grip on Gundersen's wrist. Seena said, "He seemed to be telling us something. I never heard him speak so many consecutive intelligible words." "But what was he saying?" "I can't tell you that. But a meaning was there." Gundersen nodded. The tormented Kurtz had delivered his testament, his blessing... sleep plan rise fall rise fall rise rise. Fall. Perhaps it even made sense. "And he reacted to your presence," Seena went on. "He saw you, he took your arm. Say something to him. See if you can get his attention again." "Jeff?" Gundersen whispered, kneeling. "Jeff, do you remember me? Edmund Gundersen. I've come back, Jeff. Can you hear anything I'm saying? If you understand me, Jeff, raise your right hand again." Kurtz did not raise his hand. He uttered a strangled moan, low and appalling. Then his eyes slowly closed and he lapsed into a rigid silence. Muscles rippled beneath his altered skin. Beads of acrid sweat broke from his pores. Gundersen rose to his feet shortly and walked away. "How long was he up there?" he asked. "Close to half a year. I thought he was dead. Then two sulidoror brought him back on a kind of stretcher." "Changed. And here he lies. He's changed much more than you imagine," Seena said. "Inside, everything's new and different. He's got almost no digestive tract at all. Solid food is impossible for him -- I give him fruit juices. His heart has extra chambers. His lungs are twice as big as they should be. The diagnostat couldn't tell me a thing -- because he didn't correspond to any of the parameters for a human body." "And this happened to him in rebirth?" "In rebirth, yes. They take a drug and it changes them. And it works on humans, too. It's the same drug they use on Earth for organ regeneration -- the venom -- but here they use a stronger dose and the body runs wild. If you go up there, Edmund, this is what'll happen to you." "How do you know it was rebirth that did this to him?" "I know." "How?" "That's what he said he was going up there for. And the sulidoror who brought him back said he had undergone rebirth." "Maybe they were lying. Maybe rebirth is one thing, a beneficial thing, and there's another thing -- a harmful thing -- they gave to Kurtz because he had been so evil." "You're deceiving yourself," Seena said. "There's only one process and this is its result." "Possibly different people respond differently to the process, then. If there is only one process. But I still say you can't be sure that it was rebirth that actually did this to him." "Don't talk nonsense." "I mean it. Maybe something within Kurtz made him turn out like this and I'd turn out another way. A better way." "Do you want to be changed, Edmund?" "I'd risk it." "You'd cease to be human." "I've tried being human for quite a while. Maybe it's time to try something else." "I won't let you go," Seena said. "You won't? What claim do you have on me?" "I've already lost Jeff to them. If you go up there too, Edmund -- " "Yes?" She faltered. "All right. I've got no way to threaten you. But don't go." "I have to." "You're just like him! Puffed up with the importance of your own supposed sins. Imagining the need for some kind of ghastly redemption. It's sick, don't you see? You just want to hurt yourself, in the worst possible way." Her eyes glittered even more brightly. "Listen to me. If you need to suffer -- I'll help you. You want me to whip you? Stamp on you? I'll play sadist for you if you've got to play masochist. I'll give you all the torment you want. But don't go up mist country: That's carrying a game too far, Edmund." "You don't understand, Seena." "Do you?" "Perhaps I will, when I come back from there." "You'll come back like Kurtz!" she screamed. She rushed toward Kurtz' bed. "Look at him! Look at those feet! Look at his eyes! His mouth, his nose, his fingers, his everything! He isn't human any more. Do you want to lie there like him -- muttering nonsense, living in some weird dream all day and all night?" Gundersen wavered. "I have to go," he said, less firmly than before. "He's living in hell," Seena said. "You'll be there too." She came to Gundersen and pressed herself against him. He felt the hot tips of her breasts grazing his skin. Her hands clawed his back desperately. Her thighs pressed his. A great sadness came over him for all that Seena once had meant to him, for all that she had been, for what she had become, for what her life must be like with a monster to care for. He was shaken by a vision of the lost and irrecoverable past, of the dark and uncertain present, of the bleak, frightening future. Again he wavered. Then he gently pushed her away from him. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm going." "Why? Why? What a waste!' Tears trickled down her cheeks. "If you need a religion," she said, "pick an Earth religion. There's no reason why you have to -- " "There is a reason," Gundersen said. He drew her close to him again and very lightly kissed her eyelids, then her lips. Then he kissed her between the breasts and released her. He walked over to Kurtz and stood for a moment looking down, trying to come to terms with the man's bizarre metamorphosis. Now he noticed something he had not observed earlier; the thickened texture of the skin of Kurtz' back, as if dark little plaques were sprouting on both sides of his spine. No doubt there were many other changes as well, apparent only on a close inspection. Kurtz' eyes opened once again, and the black glossy orbs moved, as if seeking to meet Gundersen's eyes. He stared down at them, at the pattern of blue speckles against the shining solid background. Kurtz said, amidst many sounds Gundersen could not comprehend, "Dance... live... seek... die... die." It was time to leave. rigid Seena, Gundersen left the room. He stepped onto the veranda and saw that his five nildoror were gathered outside the station, in the garden. Gundersen called out and Srin'gahar looked up. "I'm ready," Gundersen said. "We can leave as soon as I have my things." He found his clothes and prepared to depart. Seena came to him again. She was dressed in a clinging black robe, her slider wound around her left arm. Her face was bleak. He asked, "Do you have any messages for Ced Cullen, if I find him?" "I have no messages for anyone." "All right. Thanks for the hospitality, Seena. It was good to see you again." "The next time I see you," she said, "you won't know who I am. Or who you are." "Perhaps." He left her and went to the nildoror. Srin'gahar silently accepted the burden of him. Seena stood on the veranda of the station, watching the departure. In a little while he could no longer see her. The procession moved out along the bank of the river, past the place where Kurtz had danced all night with the nildoror so many years ago. Kurtz. Closing his eyes, Gundersen imagined the glassy blind stare, the lofty forehead, the flattened face, the wasted flesh, the twisted legs, the deformed feet. Against that he placed his memories of the old Kurtz, that graceful and extraordinary-looking man, so tall and slender, so self-contained. What demons had driven Kurtz, in the end, to surrender his body and his soul to the priests of rebirth? How long had the reshaping of Kurtz taken? Had he felt any pain during the process? And how much awareness did he now have of his own condition? What had Kurtz said? I am Kurtz who toyed vvith your souls and now I offer you my own? Gundersen had never heard Kurtz speak in any tone but that of sardonic detachment -- how could Kurtz have displayed real emotion, fear, remorse, guilt? lam Kurtz the sinner, take me and deal with me as you wish. I am Kurtz the fallen. I am Kurtz the damned.  am Kurtz and I am yours... Gundersen imagined Kurtz lying in some misty northern valley, his bones softened by the elixirs of the sulidoror, his body dissolving, becoming a pink jellied lump which now was free to seek a new form, to strive toward an altered Kurtzness that would be cleansed of its old Satanic impurities. Was it presumptuous of Gundersen to place himself in the same class as Kurtz, to claim the same spiritual shortcomings, to go forward to meet that same terrible destiny? Was Seena not right, that this was a game, that he was merely playing at masochistic self-dramatization, electing himself the hero of a tragic myth, burdened by the obsession to undertake an alien pilgrimage? But the compulsion seemed real enough to him and not at all a pretense.  will go. I am not Kurtz but  will go because  must go. In the distance, receding but yet powerful, the roar and throb of the waterfall still sounded. And as the rushing water hurtled down the face of the cliff it seemed to drum forth the words of Kurtz, the warning, the blessing, the threat, the prophecy, the curse: water sleep death save sleep sleep fire love water dream cold sleep plan rise fall rise fall rise rise rise. Fall. F or administrative purposes the Earthmen, during their years of occupation of Holman's World, had marked off boundaries arbitrarily here and here and here, choosing this parallel of latitude, that meridian of longitude, to encompass a district or sector. Since Belzagor itself knew nothing of parallels of latitude nor of other human measures and boundaries, those demarcations by now existed only in the archives of the Company and in the memories of the dwindling human population of the planet. But one boundary was far from arbitrary and its power still held -- the natural line dividing the tropics from the mist country. On one side of that line lay the tropical highlands, sunbathed, fertile, forming the upper limit of the central band of lush vegetation that stretched down to the Torrid equatorial jungle. On the other side of that line, only a few kilometers away, the north came rolling in, creating the white world of the mists. The transition was sharp and, for a newcomer, even terrifying. One could explain it prosaically enough in terms of Belzagor's axial tilt and the effect that had on the melting of polar snows. One could speak learnedly of the huge icecaps in which so much moisture was locked, icecaps that extended so far into the temperate zones of the planet that the warmth of the tropics was able to nibble at them, liberating great masses of water vapor that swirled upward, curved poleward, and returned to the icecaps as regenerating snow. One could talk of the clash of climates and of the resulting marginal zones that were neither hot nor cold and were forever shrouded in the dense clouds born of that clash. But even these explanations did not prepare one for the initial shock of crossing the divide. One had a few hints: stray tufts of fog that drifted across the boundary and blotted out broad patches of the tropical highlands until the midday sun burned them away. Yet the actual change, when it came, was so profound, so absolute, that it stunned the spirit. Gundersen and his nildoror companions were still some kilometers short of that point of change when a party of sulidoror came out of the bush and stopped them. Border guards. Gundersen took no part in the discussion. The nildoror and the sulidoror drew to one side, leaving him alone to contemplate the lofty banks of white mist on the northern horizon. There seemed to be trouble. One tall, sleek young sulidor pointed several times at Gundersen and spoke at length. Srin'gahar replied in a few syllables and the sulidor appeared to grow angry, striding back and forth and vehemently knocking bark from trees with swipes of his huge claws. Srin'gahar spoke again and then some agreement was reached. The angry sulidor stalked off into the forest and Srin'gahar beckoned to Gundersen to remount. Guided by the two sulidor who remained, they resumed the northward march. "What was the argument about?" Gundersen asked. "Nothing." "But he seemed very angry." "It did not matter," said Srin'gahar. "Was he trying to keep me from crossing the boundary?" "He felt you should not go across," Srin'gahar admitted. "Why? I have a many-born's permission." "This was a personal grudge, friend of my journey. The sulidor claimed that you had offended him in time past. He knew you from the old days." "That's impossible," Gundersen said. "I had hardly any contact at all with sulidoror back then. They never came out of the mist country and I scarcely ever went into it. I doubt that I spoke a dozen words to sulidoror in eight years on this world." "The sulidor was not wrong in remembering that he had had contact with you," said Srin'gahar gently. "I must tell you that there are reliable witnesses to the event." "When? Where?" "It was a long time ago," Srin'gahar said. The nildor appeared content with that vague answer and offered no other details. After a few moments of silence he added: "The sulidor had good reason to be unhappy with you, I think. But we told him that you meant to atone for all of your past deeds and in the end he yielded. The sulidoror often are a stubborn and vindictive race." "What did I do to him?" "We do not need to talk of such things," replied Srin'gahar. T he nildor retreated into silence. Gundersen had ample time to ponder the grammatical ambiguities of that last sentence. On the basis of its verbal content alone, it might have meant. It is useless to talk oj such things, or. It is harmful to talk oJ such things, or. It would be embarrassing to you to talk of such things, or. It would be embarrassing to me to talk of such things, or. It is improper to talk of such things, or. It is tasteless to talk of such things. Only with the aid of the supplementary gestures, the movements of the crest-spines, the trunk, the ears, could the precise meaning be fathomed and Gundersen had neither the skill nor the right position for detecting those gestures. He was puzzled. He had no recollection of ever having given offense to a sulidor. After a while he concluded that Srin'gahar was deliberately being cryptic and might be speaking in parables too subtle or too alien for an Earthman's mind to catch. In any case the sulidor had withdrawn his mysterious objections to Gundersen's journey and the mist country was only a short distance away. Already the foliage of the jungle trees was more sparse than it had been a kilometer or two back and the trees themselves were smaller and more widely spaced. Pockets of heavy fog now were more frequent. In many places the sandy yellow soil was wholly exposed. Yet the air was warm and clear and the underbrush profuse and the bright golden sun was reassuringly visible -- this was still unmistakably a place of benign and even commonplace climate. Abruptly Gundersen felt a cold wind out of the north signaling change. The path wound down a slight incline, and when it rose on the far side he looked over a hummock into a broad field of complete desolation, a no-thing's-land between the jungle and the mist country. No tree, no shrub, no moss grew here. There was only the yellow soil, covered with a sprinkling of pebbles. Beyond this sterile zone Gundersen was confronted by a white palisade, glittering fiercely with reflected sunlight. Seemingly it was a cliff of ice hundreds of meters high that barred the way as far as he could see. In the extreme distance, behind and above this white wall, soared the tip of a mountain, pale red in color, whose rugged spires and peaks and parapets stood forth sharply and strangely against an iron-gray sky. Everything appeared larger than life, massive, monstrous, excessive. "Here you must walk by yourself," said Srin'gahar. "I regret this but it is the custom. I can carry you no farther." Gundersen promptly clambered down. Unexpectedly he found himself panting after no more than fifty meters of walking beside the five nildoror. Their pace was slow and stately but the air here was evidently thinner than he knew. He forced himself to hide his distress. He would go on. He felt lightheaded, oddly buoyant, and he would master the pounding in his chest and the throbbing in his temples. The new chill in the air was invigorating in its austerity. They were halfway across the zone of emptiness and Gundersen now could clearly tell that what had appeared to be a solid white barrier stretching across the world was in fact a dense wall of mist at ground level. Outlying strands of that mist kissed his face. At its clammy touch images of death stirred in his mind -- skulls and tombs and coffins and veils -- but they did not dismay him. He looked toward the rose-red mountain dominating the land far to the north. As he did so the clouds that lay over the mist country parted, permitting the sun to strike the mountain's highest peak, a snowy dome of great expanse, and it seemed to him then that the face of Kurtz, transfigured, serene, looked down at him out of that smooth rounded peak. For a moment there was silence. From the whiteness ahead emerged the figure of a giant old sulidor -- Na-sinisul, keeping the promise he had made to be their guide. The sulidoror who had accompanied them this far exchanged a few words with Na-sinisul and trudged off back toward the jungle belt. Na-sinisul gestured. Walking alongside Srin'gahar, Gundersen went forward. In a few minutes the procession entered the mist. He did not find the mist so solid once he was within it. Much of the time he could see for twenty or thirty or even fifty meters in any direction. There were occasional inexplicable vortices of fog that were much thicker in texture and in which he could barely make out the green of Srin'gahar beside him -- but these were few and quickly traversed. The sky was gray and sunless. At moments the solar ball could be discerned as a vague glow behind the clouds. The landscape was one of raw rock, bare soil and low trees -- practically a tundra, although the air was merely chilly and not really cold. Many of the trees were of species also found in the south, but here they were dwarfed and distorted, sometimes not having the form of trees at all, but running along the ground like woody vines. Those trees that stood upright were no taller than Gundersen and gray moss draped every branch. Beads of moisture dotted their leaves, their stems, the outcroppings of rock and all else. No one spoke. They marched for perhaps an hour, until Gundersen's back was bowed and his feet were numb. The ground sloped imperceptibly upward. The air seemed to grow steadily thinner. The temperature dropped quite sharply as the day neared its end. The dreary envelope of lowlying fog, endless and all-engulfing, exacted a toll on Gundersen's spirit. When he had seen that band of mist from outsunlight, it had stirred and excited him but now that he was inside it he felt small cheer. All color and warmth had drained from the universe. He could not even see the glorious rose-red mountain from here. Like a mechanical man he went onward, sometimes forcing himself into a trot to keep up with the others. Na-sinisul set a formidable pace, which the nildoror had no difficulty in meeting but Gundersen was pushed to his limits. He was shamed by the loudness of his gasps and grunts, though no one else took notice of them. His breath hung before his face, fog within fog. He wanted desperately to rest. He could not bring himself to ask the others to halt and wait for him, though. This was their pilgrimage. He was the selfinvited guest. scend. The grayness grew more gray and the faint hint of sunlight that had been evident now diminished. Visibility lessened immensely. The air became quite cold. Gundersen, dressed for jungle country, shivered at times. He realized he was alone. The nildoror were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Na-sinisul. Mist engulfed everything. Stunned, Gundersen rolled back the screen of his memory and saw that he must have been separated from his companions for several minutes, without regarding it as in any way remarkable. By now they might be far ahead of him on some other road. He did not call out. He yielded first to the irresistible and dropped to his knees to rest. Squatting, he pressed his hands to his face, then put his knuckles to the cold ground and let his head loll forward while he sucked in air. It would have been easy to sprawl forward altogether and lose consciousness. They might find him sleeping in the morning. Or frozen in the morning. He struggled to rise and succeeded on the third attempt. "Srin'gahar?" he said. Dizzy with exhaustion, he rushed forward, stumbling, sliding, colliding with trees, catching his feet in the undergrowth. He saw what was surely a nildor to his left and ran toward it, but when he clutched its flank he found it wet and icy, and he realized that he was grasping a boulder. He flung himself away from it. Just beyond, a file of massive shapes presented themselves -- the nildoror marching past him? "Wait?" he called and ran -- and felt the shock at his ankles as he plunged blindly into a shallow, frigid rivulet. He fell, landing on hands and knees in the water. Grimly he crawled to the far bank and lay there, recognizing the dark blurred shapes now as those of low, broad trees whipped by a rising wind. All right. I'm lost. I'll wait right here until morning... He huddled into himself, trying to wring the cold water from his clothes. The night came, blackness in place of grayness. He sought moons overhead and found none. A terrible thirst consumed him. He tried to creep bdck to the brook but he could not even find that. His fingers were numb... His lips were cracking. But he discovered an island of calm within his discomfort and fear and clung to it, telling himself that none of what was happening was truly perilous and that all of it was somehow necessary. Unknown hours later, Srin'gahar and Na-sinisul came to him. First Gundersen felt the soft probing touch of Srin'gahar's trunk against his cheek. He recoiled and flattened himself on the ground, relaxing slowly as he realized what it was that had brushed his skin. Far above, the nildor said, "Here he is." "Alive?" Na-sinisul asked, dark voice coming from worlds away, swaddled in layers of fog. "Alive. Wet and cold. Edmundgundersen, can you stand up?" "Yes. I'm all right, I think." Shame flooded his spirit. "Have you been looking for me all this time?" "No," said Na-sinisul blandly. "We continued on to the village. There we discussed your absence. We could not be sure if you were lost or had separated yourself from us with a purpose. And then Srin'gahar and I returned. Did you intend to leave us?" "I got lost," Gundersen said miserably. Even now he was not permitted to ride the nildor. He staggered along between Srin'gahar and Nasinisul, now and then clutching the sulidor's thick fur or grasping the nildor's smooth haunch, steadying himself whenever he felt his strength leaving him or whenever the unseen footing grew difficult. In time lights glimmered in the dark, a pale lanternglow coming milkily through the fogbound blackness. Dimly Gundersen saw the shabby huts of a sulidor village. Without waiting for an invitation he lurched into the nearest of the ramshackle log structures; It was steepwalled, musty-smelling, with strings of dried flowers and the bunched skins of animals suspended from the rafters. Several seated sulidoror looked at him with no show of interest. Gundersen warmed himself and dried his clothing. Someone brought him a bowl of sweet, thick broth and a little while afterward he was offered some strips of dried meat, which were difficult to bite and chew but extraordinarily well flavored. Dozens of sulidoror came and went. Once, when the flap of hide covering the door was left open, he caught sight of his nildoror sitting just outside the hut. A tiny fierce-faced animal, fogwhite and wizened, skittered up to him and inspected him with disdain -- some northern beast, he supposed, that the sulidoror favored as pets. The creature plucked at Gundersen's still soggy clothing and made a cackling sound. Its tufted ears twitched. Its sharp little fingers probed his sleeve. Its long, prehensile tail curled and uncurled. Then it leaped into Gundersen's lap, seized his arm with quick claws and nipped his flesh. The bite was no more painful than the pricking of a mosquito but Gundersen wondered what hideous alien infection he would now contract. He made no move to push the little animal away, however. Suddenly a great sulidoror paw descended, claws retracted, and knocked the beast across the room. The massive form of Na-sinisul lowered itself into a crouch next to Gundersen. The ejected animal chattered its rage from a far corner. Na-sinisul said, "Did the munzor bite you?" "Not deeply. Is it dangerous?" "No harm will come to you," said the sulidor. "We will punish the animal." "I hope you won't. It was only playing." "It must learn that guests are sacred," said Na-sinisul firmly. He leaned close. Gundersen was aware of the sulidor's fishy breath. Huge fangs gaped in the deepmuzzled mouth. Quietly Na-sinisul said, "This village will house you until you are ready to go on. I must leave with the nildoror and continue to the mountain of rebirth." "Is .that the big red mountain north of here?" "Yes. Their time is very close and so is mine. I will see them through their rebirths and then my turn will come." "Sulidoror undergo rebirth too, then?" Na-sinsul seemed surprised. "How else could it be?" "I don't know. I know so little about all of this." "If sulidoror were not reborn," said Na-sinisul, "then nildoror could not be reborn. One is inseparable from the other." "In what way?" "If there were no day, could there be night?" T he analogy was too cryptic. Gundersen attempted to press for an explanation but Na-sinisul had come to speak of other matters. Avoiding the Earthman's questions, the sulidor said, "They tell me that you have come to our country to speak with a man of your own people, the man Cullen. Is this so?" "It is. It's one of the reasons I'm here, anyway." "The man Cullen lives three villages north of here and one village to the west. He has been informed that you have arrived and he summons you. Sulidoror of this village will conduct you to him when you wish to leave." "I'll leave in the morning," Gundersen said. "I must declare one thing to you, first. The man Cullen has taken refuge among us and so he is sacred. There can be no hope of removing him from our country and delivering him to the nildoror." "I ask only to speak with him." "That may be done. But your treaty with the nildoror is known to us. You must remember that you can fulfill that treaty only by a breach of our hospitality." Gundersen made no reply. He did not see how he could promise anything of this nature to Na-sinisul without at the same time forswearing his promise to the manyborn Vol'himyor. So he clung to his original inner treaty -- he would speak with Cedric Cullen, and then he would decide how to act. But it disturbed him that the sulidoror were already aware of his true purpose in seeking Cullen. Na-sinisul left him. Gundersen attempted to sleep and for a while he achieved an uneasy doze. But the lamps flickered all night in the sulidor hut and lofty sulidoror strode back and forth noisily around and about him. And the nildoror just outside the building engaged in a long debate of which Gundersen could catch only a few meaningless syllables. Once Gundersen awoke to find the little long-eared munzor sitting on his chest and cackling. Later in the night three sulidoror hacked up a bloody carcass just next to the place where Gundersen huddled. The sounds of the rending of flesh awakened him briefly but he slipped back into his troubled sleep -- only to wake again when a savage quarrel erupted over the division of the meat. When the bleak dawn came, Gundersen felt more tired than if he had not slept at all. He was given breakfast. Two young sulidoror, Se-holomir and Yi-gartigok, announced that they had been chosen to escort him to the village where Cullen was staying. Na-sinisul and the five nildoror prepared to leave for the mountain of rebirth. Gundersen made his farewells to his traveling companions. "I wish you joy of your rebirth," he said and watched as the huge shapes moved off into the mist. Not long afterward he resumed his own Journey. His new guides were taciturn and aloof -- just as well, for he wanted no conversation as he struggled through this hostile country. He needed to think. He was not sure at all what he would do after he had seen Cullen. His original plan of undergoing rebirth, which had seemed so noble in the abstract,  now struck him as the highest folly -- not only because of what Kurtz had become but because he saw it as a trespass, an unspontaneous and self-conscious venture into the rites of an alien species. Go to the rebirth mountain, yes. Satisfy your curiosity. But submit to rebirth? For the first time he was genuinely unsure of whether he would -- and more than half suspicious that in the end he would draw back, unreborn. The tundra of the border zone was giving way to forest country. The phenomenon seemed a curious inversion to him: trees were growing larger here in higher latitudes. But these were different trees. The dwarfed and twisted shrubs to his rear were natives of the jungle, making an unhappy adaptation to the mist. Here, deeper in the mist country, true northern trees grew. They were thick boled and lofty, with dark corrugated bark and tiny sprays of needlelike leaves. Fog shrouded their upper branches. Through this cold and misty forest, too, ran lean, straggly animals, long-nosed and bony, which erupted from holes in the ground and sped up the sides of trees, evidently in quest of bough-dwelling rodents and birds. Broad patches of ground were covered with snow, although summer was supposedly approaching in this hemisphere. On the second night northward came a hailstorm when a dense and tossing cloud of ice rode toward them on a thin whining wind. Mute and glum, Gundersen's companions marched on through it and so did he, not enjoying it. Generally now the mist was light at ground level and often he saw none at all for an hour or more. But it congealed far overhead as an unbroken veil, hiding the sky. Gundersen became accustomed to the barren soil, the angular branches of bare trees, the chilly penetrating dampness that was so different from the jungle's humidity. He came to find beauty in the starkness. When fleecy coils of mist drifted like ghosts across a wide gray stream, when furry beasts sprinted over glazed fields of ice, when some hoarse ragged cry broke the incredible stillness, when the marchers turned an angle in the path and came upon a white tableau of harsh wintry emptiness, Gundersen responded with a strange kind of delight. In the mist country, he thought, the hour is always the hour just after dawn. when everything is clean and new. On the fourth day Se-holomir said, "The village you seek lies behind the next hill." We met Gerald Jonas two-and-a half years ago, when he came to the New York World Science Fiction Convention to interand interviews Mr. Jonas. He began reading sf at about age thirteen. "I was madly in love with Astounding," he says, "and was sure I didn't have room in my heart for two magazines, that loyalties." After four years at Yale, a year at Cambridge, much reading of Shakespeare and Joyce, and six months in the army, Jonas landed a berth as reporter on the Boston Herad. Later he returned to his native New York City and soon was collecting the material for Newsbreaks. the New Yorker's column fillers recounting humorous errors found in signs and publications. He still recalls with glee the restaurant that offered "Leg of Salmon" and the account of the "tracks that were made by a big hopping rabbi and not the Jersey devil." Jonas soon moved up to contributing to the popular Tak of the Town feature and then to writing by-lined fact articles, the most recent being on the American Friends Service Committe (Quakers). Jonas' inspiration for "The Shaker Revival" came when he had a summer home in Hancock, Mass., near a Shaker village -- a restored community that is run as a museum. Jonas' wife Susan, a researcher for Time-Life Books, is also an sf reader. They have a fourteen-month-old daughter, Sarah, who already shows signs of becoming a buff. Photo byJ.K. Klein worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven Aemselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. 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The Fnneo File, by Bun Cole. Gov't computer baffled by Eeva love priestess!Pub. ed. # #. Nova, by Samuel R. Delaney. Battle between alien worlds -- and a. desperate .race to the sun. Pub. ed. # #. Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd. Young lovers flee loveless society ruled by computer "god" Pub. ed. #. #. Omnivore. Piers Anthony. By what trick did the # scientists escape Nacre when # others failed? Printed in U.S.A. The Best in Pertinent Science Fiction March. # # c mac A Novella of ' Han in Eternity Harlan Ellison Leo P. Kelley to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of your favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us -- and that's a double tragedy. It doesn't take a genius to handle it, either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. rate. I enclose my check or money order (or:  # issues ol each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. Vol. #, No. # Harlan Ellison Robert Silverberg Leo P. Kelley Robert F. Young Vaughn Bode Editor Iditor Emeritus Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Publisher Associate Publisher lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and addilional mailing offices. Copyright c # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. I want to ask you to a guideless tour of your galaxy and mine. The thing to remember is -- it's there. Not to be created, shaped or molded. It exists. To be explored. Governed by itself. A great cold cloud of sparsely diffused matter unheated by thirty scantly teeter on the edge of selfextinction while entertaining ourselves with the notion that we can control our destiny by fragmenting our gods, concepts and faiths. Or the other way around, depending on the prophet of your choice. Harlan Ellison's The Region Between , leading off this issue, is the first of three novellas by leading science-fiction authors on a Manin-eternity theme scheduled to be zines. Keith Laumer's Oj Death What Dreams is slated for the Each is or will be treated as the author wrote it and each has its own great validity as you will see. The Region Between is, of course, by its nature and as the title suggests, uncharted save by Harlan Ellison. Typography and meanings became interlocked and forced their own distortions of time-space on our pages -- the story simply could not be told in our standard physical format. So we adapted to contain it. The result is a challenging and at times mind-wrenching deepprobe into the unknown -- but perhaps not unknowable in its pertinence to you and me and those billions like us who inhabit Earth today. You don't have to like Harlan Ellison's in-between region -- you may disagree with it -- but take the tour and somewhere you will find yourself with a position on it -- and in your galaxy and mine. One thing -- it's not a place to visit. You and I are trapped in it today and our progeny tomorrow if we survive self-extinctionif we can avoid proving ourselves, as some scientists now suggest, an evolutionary error. If not -- what Ellison calls our baileyness may have its innings. But in all common sense and if your galaxy and mine is to be saved -- for the last of us to survive my vote goes to Jack Gaughan, cartographer of Ellison's Region, mapper of the unknown. I've worked with some of the greatest of the space-benders and take nothing away from the giants when I say that -- this man knows the way. The next issue of Galaxy will bring you some insights on Darwin by Ray Bradbury; the historymaking biospace exploits of Allison, Carmichael and TattersalL, Dannie Plachta's matter-overmind Power Play -- and Gaughan. The Index to Science Fiction Magazines: #-# Norman Metcalf Adventures in Discovery Edited by Tom Purdom The Double: Bill Symposium As many of you will know, science fiction is unique in commercial literature because of the nature of some of its readers. These readers, who are organized into various kinds of clubs, including a large body of individuals who declare affiliation with nothing smaller than sf itself, are collectively called "fans." Unlike Mets fans, James Bond fans. Baker Street Irregulars, Burroughs Bibliophiles or Conan's own Hyborean Legion, these people are not primarily aficionados of a particular character -- -although some of them, as (Please turn to page #) Death came merely as a hyphen For it was onEv when Baney died that he began to live' T I -- ieft hand," the thin man said tonelessly. "Wrist up." put something cold against it, nodded toward the nearest door. "Through there, first slab on the right," he said, and turned away. "Just a minute," Bailey started. "I wanted -- " "Let's get going, buddy," the thin man said. "That stuff is fast." Bailey felt something stab up under his heart. "You mean -- you've already... that's all there is to it?" "That's what you came for, right? Slab one, friend. Let's go." "But -- I haven't been here two minutes -- " "Whatta you expect -- organ music? Look, pal," the thin man shot a glance at the wall clock, "I'm on my break, know what I mean?" "I thought I'd at least have time for... for... "Have a heart, chum. You make it under your own power, I don't have to haul you, see?" The thin man was pushing open the door, urging Bailey through into an odor of chemicals and unlive flesh. In a narrow, curtained alcove, he indicated a padded cot. "On your back, arms and legs straight out." Bailey assumed the position, tensed as the thin man began fitting straps over his ankles. "Relax. It's just if we get a little behind and I don't get back to a client for maybe a couple hours and they stiffen up... well, them issue boxes is just the one size, you know what I mean?" A wave of softness, warmness swept over Bailey as he lay back. "Hey, you didn't eat nothing the last twelve hours?" The thin man's face was a hazy pink blur. "I awrrr mmmm," Bailey heard himself say. "OK, sleep tight, paisan..." The thin man's voice boomed and faded. Bailey's last thought as the endless blackness closed in was of the words cut in the granite over the portal to the Euthanasia Center: balance of the statement followed instantly. For it was only when Bailey died that he began to live. Yet he could never have called it "living"; no one who had ever passed that way could have called it "living." It was something else. Something quite apart from "death" and something totally unlike "life:" Stars passed through him as he whirled outward. Blazing and burning, carrying with them their planetary systems, stars and more stars spun through him as though traveling down invisible wires into the dark behind and around him. Nothing touched him. They were as dust motes, rushing silently past in incalculable patterns, as Bailey's body grew larger, filled space in defiance of the Law that said two bodies could not coexist in the same space at the same instant. Greater than Earth, greater than its solar system, greater than the galaxy that contained it, Bailey's body swelled and grew and filled the universe from end to end and ballooned back on itself in a slightly flattened circle. His mind was everywhere. A string cheese, pulled apart in filaments too thin to be measurable, Bailey's mind was there and there and there. And there. It was also in the lens of the Succubus. Murmuring tracery of golden light, a trembling moment of crystal sound. A note, rising and trailing away infinitely high, and followed by another, superimposing in birth even as its predecessor died. The voice of a dream, captured on spiderwebs. There, r locked in the heart of an amber perfection, Bailey was snared, caught, trapped, made permanent by a force that allowed his Baileyness to roam unimpeded anywhere and everywhere at the instant of death. Trapped in the lens of the Succubus. QVaiting: empty. A mindsnake on a desert world, frying under seven suns, poised in the instant of death; its adversary, a fuzzball of cilia-thin fibers, sparking electrically, moving toward the mindsnake that a moment before had been set to strike and kill and eat. The mindsnake, immobile, empty of thought and empty of patterns of light that constrike. The fuzzball sparked toward the mindsnake, its fibers casting about across the vaporous desert, picking up the mole sounds of things moving beneath the sand, tasting the air and feeling the heat as it pulsed in and away. It was improbable that a mindsnake would spend all that light-time, luring and intriguing, only at the penultimate moment to back off no, not back off: shut down. Stop. Halt entirely. But if this was not a trap, if this was not some new lactic only recently learned by the ancient mindsnake, then it had to be an opportunity for the fuzzball. It moved closer. The mindsnake lay empty: waiting Trapped in the lens of the Succubus. Waiting: empty. A monstrous head, pale blue and veined, supported atop a swan-neck by an intricate latticework yoke-and-halter. The Senator from Nougul, making his final appeal for the life of his world before the Star Court. Suddenly plunged into silence. No sound, no movement, the tall, emaciated body propped on its seven league crutches, only the trembling of balance -- having nothing to do with life before this husk had contained a pleading eloquence. The fate of a world quivered in a balance no less precarious than that of the Senator. What had happened? The amalgam of wild surmise that grew in the Star Court was scarcely less compelling than had been the original circumstances bringing Nougul to this place, in the care of the words of this Senator. Who now stood, crutched, silent and empty: waiting Trapped in the lens of the Succubus. Waiting: empty. The Warlock of Whirrl, a power of darkness and evil. A force for chaos and destruction. Poised above his runic symbols, his bits of offal, his animal bones, his stringy things without names, quicksudden gone to silence. Eyes devoid of the pulverized starlight that was his sight. Mouth abruptly slack, in a face that had never known slackness. The ewe lamb lay still tied to the obsidian block, the graven knife with its unpleasant figures rampant, still held in the numb hand of the Warlock. And the ceremony was halted. The forces of darkness had come in gathering, had come to their calls, and now they roiled like milk vapor in the air, unable to go, unable to do, loath to abide. While the Warlock of Whirrl, gone from his mind stood frozen and empty: waiting? Trapped in the lens of the Succubus. Waiting: empty. A man on Promontory, fifth planet out from the star Proxima Centauri, halted in mid-step. On his way to a bank of controls and a certain button, hidden beneath three security plates. This man, this inestimably valuable kingpin in the machinery of a war, struck dumb, struck blind, in a kind of death -- not even waiting for another moment of time. Pulled out of himself by the gravity of non-being, an empty husk, a shell, a dormant thing. Poised on the edges of their continents, two massed armies waited for that button to be pushed. And would never be pushed, while this man, this empty and silent man, stood rooted in the sealed underworld bunker where precaution had placed him. Now inaccessible, now inviolate, now untouchable, this man and this war stalemated frozen. While the world around him struggled to move itself a fraction of a thought toward the future, and found itself incapable, hamstrung, empty: waiting Trapped in the lens of the Succubus. And... Waiting: empty. A subaltern, name of Pinkh, lying on his bunk, contemplating his fiftieth assault mission. Suddenly gone. Drained, lifeless, neither dead nor alive. Staring upward at the bulkhead ceiling of his quarters. While beyond his ship raged the Montag-Thil war. Sector # of the Galactic Index. Somewhere between the dark star Montag and the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy. Pinkh, limbo-lost and unfeeling, needing the infusion of a soul, the more than any other man, though the Thils did not know it... until the moment his essence was stolen. Now, Pinkh, lying there one shy of a fifty-score of assault missions. But unable to aid his world. Unable, undead, unalive, empty: waitingT While Bailey... Floated in a region between. Hummed in a nothingness as great as everywhere. Without substance. Without corporeality. Pure thought, pure energy, pure Bailey. Trapped in the lens of the Succubus. uranium, more scarce than yinyang blossom, more needed than salkvac, rarer than diamonds, more valuable than force-beads, more negotiable than the vampyr extract, dearer than # vintage Chateau Luxor, more lusted-after than the twinvagina'd trollops of Kanga... Souls. Thefts had begun in earnest five hundred years before. Random thefts. Stolen from the most improbable receptacles. From beasts and men and creatures who had never been thought to possess "souls." Who was stealing them was never known. Far out somewhere, in reaches of space (or not-space) (or the interstices between space and not-space) that had no names, had no dimensions, whose light had never even reached the outmost thin edge of known space, there lived or existed or were creatures or things or entities or forces -- someone -- who needed the lifeforce of the creepers and walkers and lungers and swimmers and fliers who inhabited the known universe. Souls vanished, and the empty husks remained. Thieves they were called, for no other name applied so well, bore in its single syllable such sadness and sense of resignation. They were called Thieves, and they were never seen, were not understood, had never given a clue to their nature or their purpose or even their method of theft. And so nothing could be done about their depredations. They were as Death: handiwork observed, but a fact of life without recourse to higher authority. Death and the Thieves were final in what they did. So the known universes -- the Star Court and the Galactic Index and the Universal Meridian and the Perseus Confederacy and the Crab Complex -- shouldered the reality of what the Thieves did with resignation, and stoicism. No other course was open to them. They could do no other. But it changed life in the known universe. It brought about the existence of soul-recruiters, tures not yet dead. In their way, thieves, even as the Thieves. Beings whose dark powers and abilities enabled them to fill the tables-of-organization of any world with fresh souls from worlds that did not even suspect they existed, much less the Court, the Index, the Meridian, the Confederacy or the Complex. If a key figure on a fringe world suddenly went limp and soulless, one of the soul-recruiters was contacted and the black traffic was engaged in. Last resort, final contact, most reprehensible but expeditious necessity, they stole and supplied. One such was the Succubus. only two qualities possessed by the Succubus that could be explicated in human terms. He had once been a member of the dominant race that skimmed across the sand-seas of a tiny planet, fifth from the star-sun labeled Kappel-# in Canes Venatici. He had long-since ceased to be anything so simply identified. The path he had taken, light-years long and several hundred Terran-years long, had brought him from the sand-seas and a minimum of "face" -- the only term that could even approximate the one measure of wealth his race valued -- to a cove of goldness and dryness near the hub of the Crab Complex. His personal worthiness could now be measured only in able light sufficient to sustain his offspring unto the nine thousandth generation, a name that could only be spoken aloud or in movement by the upper three social sects of the Confederacies races, more "face" than any member of his race had ever possessed... more, even, than that held in myth by Yaele. Gold, dry, and inestimably worthy: the Succubus. Though his trade was one publicly deplored, thdre were only seven entities in the known universe who were aware that the Succubus was a soul-recruiter. He kept his two lives forcibly separated. "Face" and grave-robbing were not compatible. He ran a tidy business. Small, with enormous returns. Special souls, selected carefully, no seconds, no hand-me-downs. Quality stock. And through the seven highly-placed entities who knew him -- Nin, FawDawn, Enec-L, Milly(Bas) Kodal, a Plain without a name, Cam Royal and PI -- he was channelled only the loftiest commissions. He had supplied souls of all sorts in the five hundred years he had been recruiting. Into the empty husk of a master actor on Bolial V. Into the waiting body of a creature that resembled a plant aphid, the figurehead of a coalition labor movement, on Wheechitt Eleven and Wheechitt Thirteen. Into the unmoving form of the soul-emptied daughter of the hereditary ruler of Golaena Prime. Into the untenanted shape of an arcane maguscientist on Donadello Ill's seventh moon, enabling the five hundredzodjam religious cycle to progress. Into the lustreless spark of light that sealed the laocoonian groupmind of Orechnaen's Dispassionate Bell-Silver Dichotomy. Not even the seven who functioned as go-betweens for the Succubus's commissions knew where and how he obtained such fine, raw, unsolidified souls. His competitors dealt almost exclusively in the atrophied, crustaceous souls of beings whose thoughts and beliefs and ideologies were so ingrained that the souls came to their new receptacles already stained and imprinted. But the Succubus... Cleverly-contrived, youthful souls. Hearty souls. Plastic and ready-to-assimilate souls. Lustrous, inventive souls. The finest souls in the known universe. The Succubus, as determined to excel in his chosen profession as he was to amass "face," had spent the better part of sixty years roaming the outermost fringes of the known universe. He had carefully observed many races, noting for his purpose only those that seemed malleable, pliant, far removed from rigidity. He had selected, for his purpose: The Steechii Amassanii Cokoloids Flashers Griestaniks Bunanits Condolis Tratravisii and Humans. On each planet where these races dominated, he put into effect subtle recruiting systems, wholly congruent with the societies in which they appeared: The Steechii were given eterna dreamdust. The Amassanii were given doppelgiinger shifting. The Cokoloids were given the Cult of Rebirth. The Flashers were given proof of the Hereafter. The Griestaniks were given ritual mesmeric trances. The Bunanits were given (imperfect) teleportation. The Condolis were given an entertainment called Trial by Nightmare Combat. The Tratravisii were given an underworld motivated by high incentives for kidnapping and mindblotting. They were also given a wondrous narcotic called Nodabit. The Humans were given Euthanasia Centers. And from these diverse channels the Succubus received a steady supply of prime souls. He received Flashers and skimmers and Condolis and etherbreathers and Amassanii and perambulators and Bunanits and gill-creatures and... Trapped in ihe lens of the Suceubus. spread out to the ends of the universe and beyond, nubbin'd his thoughts. Dead. Of that, no doubt. Dead and gone. Back on Earth, lying cold and faintly blue on a slab in the Euthanasia Center. Toes turned up. Eyeballs rolled up in their sockets. Rigid and gone. And yet alive. More completely alive than he had ever been, than any human being had ever conceived of being. Alive with all of the universe, one with the clamoring stars, brother to the infinite empty spaces, heroic in proportions that even myth could not define. He knew everything. Everything there had ever been to know, everything that was, everything that would be. Past, present, future... all were merged and met in him. He was on a feeder fine to the Succubus, waiting to be collected, waiting to be tagged and filed even as his alabaster body back on Earth would be tagged and filed. Waiting to be cross-indexed and shunted off to a waiting empty husk on some far world. All this he knew. souls that had gone before him. He didn't want to go. Infinitely wise, knowing all, Bailey knew every other soul that had gone before had been resigned with soft acceptance to what was to come. It was a new life. A new voyage in another body. And all the others had been fired by curiosity, inveigled by strangeness, wonder-struck with being as big as the known universe and going somewhere else. But not Bailey. He was rebellious. He was fired by hatred of the Succubus, inveigled by thoughts of destroying him and his feeder-lines, wonder-struck with being the only one -- the only one! -- who had ever thought of revenge. He was, somehow, strangely, not tuned in with being rebodied, as all the others had been. Why am  dijjerentl he wondered. And of all the things he knew... he did not know the answer to that. Inverting negatively, atoms expanded to the size of whole galaxies, stretched out membraned, osmotically breathing whole star-systems, inhaling bluewhite stars and exhaling quasars, Bailey the known universe asked himself yet another question, even more important: Passing through a zone of infinite cold, the word came back to him from his own mind in chill icicles of thought: Yes. And borne on comets plunging frenziedly through his cosmic body, altering course suddenly and traveling at right angles in defiance of every natural law he had known when "alive," the inevitable question responding to a yes asked itself: Why should I? Life for Bailey on Earth had been pointless. He had been a man who did not fit. He had been a man driven to the suicide chamber literally by disorientation and frustration.  z P" s aL c -- EL a -- #T  cd i-s. #  Cl c # g O .  # "#. # P 'C ss O p # # o  # s #O v; CL oo #; o  c c a  co # H # #" I # # v; # ' C . " -- CL cr  cd Hi I in CT P #-I n . # . 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" a c S # # #a r iL r- #  O TO n so. c pa J  n. # O # # #  #. o ' n  #' cd  B CL #   # oS.  gn r   p ft # t  o S-'E  #   S' "#.' p  # w O # o PC'S O. o" CD  CD o # s a; M   # Q,Ja ft W # " cr  #. C. ff.  ? to r # S #-# # cl  n #   # #  ; S'I a # #  # n p # -- ,a n D   ET o  Si' # S CT S  cd cd c# i The omnipresent melancholy that had consumed him .on an Earth bursting with over-population was something to which he had ncr desire to return. Then why this frenzy to resist being shunted into the body of a creature undoubtedly living a life more demanding, more exciting -- anything had to be better than what he'd come from -- more alive! Why this fanatic need to track back along the feeder-lines to the Succubus, to destroy the one who had saved him from oblivion? Why this need to destroy a creature who ance in a universe singularly devoid of balance? ette, and opened his eye. His back was stiff. He turned, letting the invigorating short-spikes tickle his flesh through the heavy mat of fur. His mouth felt dry and loamy. It was the morning of his fiftieth assault mission. Or was it? He seemed to remember lying down for a night's sleep...and then a very long dream without substance. It had been all black and empty; hardly something the organizer would have programmed. It must have malfunctioned. He slid sidewise on the spike-palette, and dropped his enormous furred legs over the side. As his paws touched the tiles a whirring from the wall preceded the toilet facility's appearance. It swiveled into view, and Pinkh looked at himself in the full-length mirror. He looked all right. Dream. Bad dream. The huge, bearlike subaltern shoved off the bed, stood to his full seven feet, and lumbered into the duster. The soothing powders cleansed away his sleep-fatigue and he emerged, blue pelt, glistening, with bad dreams almost entirely dusted away. Almost. Entirely. He had a lingering feeling of having been...somewhat...larger... The briefing colors washed across the walls, and Pinkh hurriedly attached his ribbons. It was informalwear today. Three yellows, three ochres, three whites and an ego blue. He went downtunnel to the briefing section, and prayed. All around him his sortie partners were on their backs, staring up at the sky dome and the random (programmed) patterns of stars in their religious significances. Montag's Lord of Propriety had programmed success for today's mission. The stars swirled and shaped themselves and the portents were reassuring to Pinkh and his fellows. The Montag-Thil War had been raging for almost one hundred years, and it seemed close to ending. The dark star Montag and the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy had thrown their might against each other for a century; the people themselves were weary of war. It would end soon. One or the other would make a mistake, the opponent would take the advantage, and the strike toward peace would follow immediately. It was merely a matter of time. The assault troops -- especially Pinkh, a planetary hero -- were suffused with a feeling of importance, a sense of the relevance of what they were doing. Out to kill, certainly, but with the sure knowledge that they were working toward a worthwhile goal. Through death, to life. The portents had told them again and again, these last months, that this was the case. The sky dome turned golden and the stars vanished. The assault troops sat up on the floor, awaited their briefing. It was Pinkh's fiftieth mission. His great yellow eye looked around the briefing room. There were more young troopers this mission. In fact...he was the only veteran. It seemed strange. Could Montag's Lord of Propriety have planned it this way? But where were Andakh and Melnakh and Gorekh? They'd been here yesterday. Was it just yesterday? He had a strange memory of having been -- asleep? -- away? -- unconscious? -- what? -- something. As though more than one day had passed since his last mission. He leaned across to the young trooper on his right and placed a paw flat on the other's. "What day is today?" The trooper flexed palm and answered, with a note of curiosity in his voice, "It's Former. The ninth." Pinkh was startled. "What cycle?" he asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. "Third," the young trooper said. The briefing officer entered at that moment, and Pinkh had no time to marvel that it was not the next day, but a full cycle later. Where had the days gone? What had happened to him? Had Gorekh and the others been lost in sorties? Had he been wounded, sent to repair and only now been remanded to duty? Had he been wounded and suffered amnesia? He remembered a Lance Corporal in the Throbbing Battalion who had been seared and lost his memory. They had sent him back to Montag, where he had been blessed by the Lord of Propriety himself. What had happened to him? Strange memories -- not his own, all the wrong colors, weights and tones wholly alien -- kept pressing against the bones in his forehead. He was listening to the briefing officer, but also hearing an undertone. Another voice entirely. Coming from some other place he could not locate.  You great ugly fur-thing, you! Wake up, look around you. One hundred years, slaughtering. Why can't you see what's being done to you? How dumb can you be? The Lords of Propriety; they set you up. Yeah, you, Pinkh! Listen to me. You can't block me out...you'll hear me. Bailey. You're the one, Pinkh, the special one. They trained you for what's coming up...no, don't block me out, you imbecile...don'  I'll The background noise went on, but he would not listen. It was sacrilegious. Saying things about the Lord of Propriety. Even the Thil Lord of Propriety was sacrosanct in Pinkh's mind. Even though they were at war, the two Lords were eternally locked together in holiness. To blaspheme even the enemy's Lord was unthinkable. Yet he had thought it. He shuddered with the enormity of what had passed in his thoughts, and knew he could never go to release and speak of it. He would submerge the memory, and pay strict attention to the briefing officer who was "This cycle's mission is a straightforward one. You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh, whose reputation is known to all of you." Pinkh inclined with the humbleness movement. "You will drive directly to the Thil labyrinth, chivvy and harass a path to Groundworld, and there level as many targets-of-opportunity as you are able, before you're destroyed. After this briefing you will re-assemble with your sortie leaders and fully familiarize yourselves with the target-cubes the Lord has commanded to be constructed." He paused, and stared directly at Pinkh, his golden eye gone to pinkness with age and dissipation. But what he said was for all of the sappers. "There is one target you will not strike. It is the Maze of the Thil Lord of Propriety. This is irrevocable. You will not, repeat not strike near the Maze of the Lord." Pinkh felt a leap of pleasure. This was the final strike. It was preamble to peace. A suicide mission; he ran eleven thankfulness prayers through his mind. It was the dawn of a new day for Montag and Thil. The Lords of Propriety were good. The Lords held all cupped in their holiness. Yet he had thought the unthinkable. "You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh," the briefing officer said again. Then, kneeling and passing down the rows of sappers, he palmed good death with honor to each of them. When he reached Pinkh, he stared at him balefully for a long instant, as though wanting to speak. But the moment passed, he rose, and left the chamber. They went into small groups with the sortie leaders and examined the target cubes. Pinkh went directly to the briefing officer's cubicle and waited patiently till the older Montagasque's prayers were completed. When his eye cleared, he stared at Pinkh. , "A path through the labyrinth has been cleared." "What will we be using?" "Reclaimed sortie craft. They have all been outfitted with diversionary equipment." "Linkage level?" "They tell me a high six." "They tell you?" He regretted the tone even as he spoke. The briefing officer looked surprised. As if his desk had coughed. He did not speak, but stared at Pinkh with the same baleful stare the Subaltern had seen before. "Recite your catechism," the briefing officer said, finally. Pinkh settled back slowly on his haunches, ponderous weight downdropping with grace. Then: "Free flowing, free flowing, all flows "From the Lords, all free, all fullness, "Flowing from the Lords. "What will I do "What will I do "What will I do without my Lords? "Honor in the dying, rest is honor, all honor "From the Lords, all rest, all honoring, "To honor my Lords. "This I will do "This I will do "I will live when I die for my Lords." And it was between the First and Second Sacredness that the darkness came to Pinkh. He saw the briefing officer come toward him, reach a great palm toward him, and there was darkness... The same sort of darkness from which he had risen in his own cubicle before the briefing. Yet, not the same. That darkness had been total, endless, with the feeling that he was...somehow...larger...greater...as big as all space... And this darkness was like being turned off. He could not think, could not even think that he was unthinking. He was cold, and not there. Simply: not there. Then, as if it had not happened, he was back in the briefing officer's cubicle, the great bearlike shape was moving back from him, and he was reciting the Second Sacredness of his catechism. What had happened...he did not know. "Here are your course coordinates," the briefing officer said. He extracted the spool from his pouch and gave it to Pinkh. The subaltern marveled again at how old the briefing officer must be: the hair of his chest was almost gray. "Sir," Pinkh began. Then stopped. The briefing officer raised a palm. "I understand, Subaltern. Even to the most reverent among us there come moments of confusion." Pinkh smiled. He did understand. "Lords," Pinkh said, palming the briefing officer with fullness and propriety. "Lords," he replied, palming honor in the dying. Pinkh left the briefing officer's cubicle and went to his own place. As soon as he was certain the subaltern was gone, the briefing officer, who was very old, linked-up with someone else, far away; and he told him things. hardly gelatin, but it had come to be called jell by the sappers, and the word had stuck. As the gelatin stuck. Face protected, he lay in the ten troughs, in sequence, getting the gelatinous substance melted around him. Finally, pincers that had been carefully padded lifted him from the tenth trough, and slid him along the track to his sortie craft. Once inside the pilot country, stretched out on his stomach, he felt the two hundred wires insert themselves into the jell, into the fur, into his body. The brain-waves were the last to fix. As each wire hissed from its spool and locked onto the skull-contacts, Pinkh felt himself go a little more to integration with the craft. At last, the final wire tipped on and Pinkh was metalflesh, bulkheadskin, eyescanners, bonerivets, plasticartilege, artery ventriclein step neuron transistors, C R R j A A F F T all of him as one, totality, metal-man, furred-vessel, essence of mechanism, soul of inanimate, life in force-drive, linkage of mind with power plant. Pinkh the ship. Sortie Craft # named Pinkh. And the others: linked to him. Seventy sappers, each encased in jell, each wired up, each a mind to its sortie craft. Seventy, linked in telepathically with Pinkh, and Pinkh linked into his own craft, and all of them instrumentalities of the Ford of Propriety. The great carrier wing that bore them made escape orbit and winked out of normal space. Here  Not Here. In an instant gone. (Gone where!?!) Inverspace. Through the gully of inverspace to wink into existence once again at the outermost edge of the Thil labyrinth. Not Here  Here. Confronting a fortified tundra of space crisscrossed by deadly lines of force. A cosmic fireworks display. A cat's cradle of vanishing, appearing and receptive to all the others. Cross one, break one, interpose...and suddenly uncountable others home in. Deadly ones. Seeking ones. Stunners and drainers and leakers and burners. The Thil labyrinth. Seventy-one sortie craft hung quivering -- the last of the inverspace coronas trembling off and gone. the Thil Galaxy burned with the quiet reserve of ice crystals. And there, in the center, the Nebula Cluster. And there, in the center of the Cluster, Groundworld. "Link in with me." Pinkh's command fled and found them. Seventy beastcraft tastes, sounds, scents, touches came back to Pinkh. His sappers were linked in. "A path has been cleared through the labyrinth for us. Follow. And trust. Honor." "In the dying," came back the response, from seventy minds of flesh-and-metal. They moved forward. Strung out like fish of metal with minds linked by thought, they surged forward following the lead craft. Into the labyrinth. Color burned and boiled past, silently sizzling in the vacuum. Pinkh detected murmurs of panic, quelled them with a damping thought of his own. Images of the still pools of Dusnadare, of deep sighs after a full meal, of Lord-worship during the days of First Fullness. Trembling back to him, their minds quieted. And the color beams whipped past on all sides, without up or down or distance. But never touching them. Time had no meaning. Fused into fleshmetal, the sortie craft followed the secret path that had been cleared for them through the impenetrable labyrinth. iiarrr, Pinkh had one vagrant thought: Who cleared this for us? And a voice from somewhere far away, a voice that was his own, yet someone else's -- the voice of a someone who called himself a baileysaid, That's it! Keep thinking what they don't want you to think. But he put the thoughts from him, and time wearied itself and succumbed, and finally they were there. In the exact heart of the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy. Groundworld lay fifth from the source star, the home sun that had nurtured the powerful Thil race till it could explode outward. "Link in to the sixth power," Pinkh commanded. They linked. He spent some moments reinforcing his command splices, making the interties foolproof and trigger-responsive. Then he made a prayer, and they went in. Why am I locking them in .vo close, Pinkh wondered, damping the thought before it could pass along the lines to his sappers. What am I trying to conceal ? Why do I need such repressive control? What am I trying to avert? Pinkh's skull thundered with pain. Two minds L Y knew it. Who is that? It's me, you clown! Get out! I'm on a mission...it's import -- It's a fraud! They've prog -- Get out of my head listen to me you idiot I'm trying to tell you something you need to know I won't listen I'll override you I'll block you I'll damp you no listen don't do that I've been someplace you haven't been and I can ted you about the Lords oh this can't be happening to me not to me I'm a devout man fuck that garbage listen to me they lost you man they lost you to a soul stealer and they had to get you back because you were their specially programmed killer they want you to Lord oh Lord of Propriety hear me now hear me your most devout worshipper forgive these blasphemous thoughts I can't control you any more you idiot I'm fading fading fading Lord oh Lord hear me  wish only to serve you. Only to suffer the honor in the dying. Peace through death. I am the instrumentality of the Lords. I know what I must do. That's what I'm trying to tell you... And then he was gone in the mire at the bottom of Pinkh's mind. They were going in. moons, broke through the cloud cover, leveled out in a delta wing formation and streaked toward the larger of the two continents that formed ninety per cent of Groundworld's land mass. Pinkh kept them at supersonic speed, blurring, and drove a thought out to his sappers: "We'll drop straight down below a thousand feet and give them the shock wave. Hold till I tell you to level off." They were passing over a string of islands -- causeway-linked beads in a pea-green seaeach one covered from shore to shore with teeming housing dorms that commuted their residents to the main continents and the complexes of high-rise bureaucratic towers. "Dive!" Pinkh ordered. The formation angled sharply forward, as though it was hung on puppet strings, then fell straight down. The metalflesh of Pinkh's ship-hide began to heat. Overlapping armadillo plates groaned; Pinkh pushed their speed; force-bead mountings lubricated themselves, went dry, lubricated again; they dropped down; follicle thin fissures were grooved in the bubble surfaces; sappers began to register fear, Pinkh locked them tighter; instruments coded off the far right and refused to register; the island-chain flew up toward them; pressure in the gelatin trough flattened them with g's; now there was enough atmosphere to scream past their sortie craft and it whistled, shrilled, howled, built and climbed; gimbal-tracks rasped in their mountings; down and down they plunged, seemingly bent on thundering into the islands of Groundworld; "Sir! Sir!"; "Hold steady, not yet... not yet...I'll tell you when...not yet..." Pushing an enormous bubble of pressurized air before them, the delta wing formation wailed straight down toward the specks of islands that became dots, became buttons, became masses, became everything as they rushed up and filled the bubble sights from side to side -- "Level out! Now ! Do it, do it, level now!" And they pulled out, leveled off and shot away. The bubble of air, enormous, solid as an asteroid, thundering down unchecked...hit struck burst broke with devastating results. Pinkh's sortie craft plunged away, and in their wake they left exploding cities, great structures erupting, others trembling, shuddering, then caving in on themselves. The shock wave hit and spread outward from shore to shore. Mountains of plasteel and lathite volcano'd in blossoms of flame and flesh. The blast-pit created by the air bubble struck to the core of the island-chain. A tidal wave rose like some prehistoric leviathan and boiled over one entire spot of land. Another island broke up and sank almost at once. Fire and walls of plasteel crushed and destroyed after the shock wave. The residence islands were leveled as Pinkh's sortie craft vanished over the horizon, still traveling at supersonic speed. They passed beyond the island-chain, leaving in their wake dust and death, death and ruin, ruin and fire. "Through death to peace," Pinkh sent. "Honor," they responded, as one. (Far away on Groundworld, a traitor smiled.) (In a Maze, a Lord sat with antennae twined, waiting.) (Flesh and metal eased.) (In ruins, a baby whose exoskeleton had been crushed, crawled toward the pulsing innards of its mother.) (Seven moons swung in their orbits.) (A briefing officer on Montag knew it was full, golden.) Oh, Lords, what  have done, I have done for you. Wake up. Will you wake up, Pinkh! The mission is -- The other thing, the bailey, was wrenching at him, poking its head up out of the slime. He thrust it back down firmly. And made a prayer. "Sir," the thought of one of his sappers came back along the intertie line, "did you say something?" "Nothing," Pinkh said. "Keep in formation." He locked them in even tighter, screwing them down with mental shackles till they gasped. The pressure was building. A six-power linkup, and the pressure was building. lam a hero, Pinkh thought, I can do it. Then they were flashing across the Greater Ocean and it blurred into an endless carpet of thick heaving green; Pinkh felt sick watching it whip by beneath him; he went deeper into ship and the vessel felt no sickness. He fed the stability of nausea-submerged along the interties. They were met by the Thil inner defense line over empty ocean. First came the sea-breathers but they fell short when Pinkh ordered his covey to lift for three thousand feet. They leveled off just as the beaks swooped down in their land-to-sea parabolas. Two of them snouted and perceived the range, even as they were viciously beamed into their component parts by Pinkh's outermost sappers. But they'd already fed back the trajectories, and suddenly the sky above them was black with the blackmetal bodies of beaks, flapping, dropping, squalling as they cascaded into the center of the formation. Pinkh felt sappers vanish from the lineup and fed the unused power along other lines, pulling the survivors tighter under his control. "Form a sweep," he commanded. The formation re-grouped and rolled in a graceful gull-wing maneuver that brought them craft-to-craft in a fan. "Plus!" Pinkh ordered, cutting in -- with a thought -- the imploding beam. The beams of each sortie craft fanned out, overlapping, making an impenetrable wall of deadly force. The beaks came whirling back up and careened across the formation's path. Creatures of metal and mindlessness. Wheels and carapaces. Blackness and berserk rage. Hundreds. Entire eyries. When they struck the soft pink fan of the overlapping implosion beams, they whoofed in on themselves, dropped instantly. The formation surged forward. Then they were over the main continent. Rising from the exact center was the gigantic mountain atop which the Thil Lord of Propriety lived in his Maze. "Attack! Targets of opportunity!" Pinkh commanded, sending impelling power along the linkup. His metal hide itched. His eyeball sensors watered. In they went, again. "Do not strike at the Lord's Maze," one of the sappers thought ezam sdrol eht ta ekirts ton od Why did I do that? We were briefed not to attack the Lord's Maze. It would be unthinkable to attack the Lord's Maze. It would precipitate even greater war than before. The war would never end. Why did I stop my sapper from reiterating the order? And why haven't  told them not to do it? It was stressed at the briefing. They're linked in so very tightly, they'd obey in a moment -- anything I said. What is happening? I'm heading for the mountain! Lord! Listen to me, Pinkh. This war has been maintained by the Lords of Propriety for a hundred years. Why do you think it was made heresy to even think negatively about the opposing Lord? They keep it going, to feed off it. Whatever they are, these Lords, they come from the same pocket universe and they live off the energy of men at war. They must keep the war going or they'll die. They programmed you to be their secret weapon. The war was reaching a stage where both Mon tag and Thil want peace, and the Lords can't have that. Whatever they are, Pinkh, whatever kind of creature they are, wherever they come from, for over a hundred years they've held your two galaxies in their hands, and they've used you. The Lord isn't in his Maze, Pinkh. He's safe somewhere else. But they planned it between them. They knew if a Montagasque sortie penetrated to Groundworld and struck the Maze, it would keep the war going indefinitely. So they programmed you, Pinkh. But before they could use you, your soul was stolen. They put my soul in you, a man of Earth, Pinkh. You don't even know where Earth is, but my name is Bailey. I've been trying to reach through to you. But you always shut me out -- they had you programmed too well. But with the linkup pressure, you don't have the strength to keep me out, and Eve got to let you know you're programmed to strike the Maze. You can stop it, Pinkh. You can avoid it all. You can end this war. You have it within your power, Pinkh. Don't strike the Maze. I'll re-direct you. Strike where the Lords are hiding. You can rid your galaxies of them, Pinkh. Don't let them kill you. Who do you think arranged for the path through the labyrinth? Why do you think there wasn't more effective resistance? They wanted you to get through. To commit the one crime they could not forgive. The words reverberated in Pinkh's head as his sortie craft followed him in a tight wedge, straight for the Maze of the Lord. "I -- no, I -- " Pinkh could not force thoughts out to his sappers. He was snapped shut. His mind was aching, the sound of straining and creaking, the buildings on the island-chain ready to crumble. Bailey inside, Pinkh inside, the programming of the Lords inside...all of them pulling at the fiber of Pinkh's mind. For an instant the programming took precedence. "New directives. Override previous orders. Follow me in!" They dove straight for the Maze. No, Pinkh, fight it! Fight it and pul! out. I'll show you where they're hiding. You can end this war! The programming phasing was interrupted, Pinkh abruptly opened his great golden eye, his mind synched in even more tightly with his ship, and at that instant he knew the voice in his head was telling him the truth. He remembered: Remembered the endless sessions. Remembered the conditioning. Remembered the programming. Knew he had been duped. Knew he was not a hero. Knew he had to pull out of this dive. Knew that at last he could bring peace to both galaxies. He started to think pull out, override and fire it down the remaining linkup interties... And the Lords of Propriety, who left very little to chance, who had followed Pinkh all the way, contacted the Succubus, complained of the merchandise they had bought, demanded it be returned... Bailey's soul was wrenched from the body of Pinkh. The subaltern's body went rigid inside its jell trough, and, soulless, empty, rigid, the sortie craft plunged into the mountaintop where the empty Maze stood. It was followed by the rest of the sortie craft. The mountain itself erupted in a pillar of flame and rock and plasteel. One hundred years of war was only the beginning. Somewhere, hidden, the Lords of Proprietyumbilicus-joined with delight shocks spurting softly pink along the flesh-linkage joining them began their renewed gluttonous feeding. Round. Weighted with the scent of grass. Perilous in that the music was dynamically contracting: souls had occasionally become too enriched and had gone flat and flaccid. Nothing was ranked, therefore nothing could be found in the same place twice; yet it didn't matter, for the Succubus had only to focus his lens and the item trembled into a special awareness. Bailey spent perhaps twelve minutes reliving himself as a collapsing star then revolved his interfaces and masturbated as Anne Boleyn. He savored mint where it smells most poignant, from deep in the shallow earth through the roots of the plant, then extended himself, extruded himself through an ice crystal and lit the far massif of the highest mountain on an onyx asteroid-recreating The Last Supper in chiaroscuro. He burned for seventeen hundred years as the illuminated letter "B" on the first stanza of a forbidden enchantment in a papyrus volume used to summon up the imp James Fenimore Cooper then stood outside himself and considered his eyes and their hundred thousand bee-facets. He allowed himself to be born from the womb of a tree sloth and flickered into rain that deluged a planet of coal for ten thousand years. And he beamed. And he sorrowed. Bailey, all Bailey, soul once more, free as all the universes, threw himself toward the furthermost edge of the slightly flattened parabola that comprised the dark. He filled the dark with deeper darkness and bathed in fountains of brown wildflowers. Circles of coruscating violet streamed from his fingertips, from the tip of his nose, from his genitals, from the tiniest fibrilating fibers of hair that coated him. He shed water and hummed. Then the Succubus drew him beneath the lens. And Bailey was sent out once more. Waste not, want not. with blue fur. He had a ring of eyes that circled his head. He had eight legs. He smelled of fish. He was low to the ground and he moved very fast. He was a stalker-cat, and he was first off the survey ship on Belial. The others followed, but not too soon. They always waited for the cat to do its work. It was safer that way. The Filonii had found that out in ten thousand years of exploring their universe. The cats did the first work, then the Filonii did theirs. It was the best way to rule a universe. Belial was a forest world. Covered in long continents that ran from pole-to-pole with feathertop trees, it was ripe for discovery. Bailey looked out of his thirty eyes, seeing around himself in a full # spectrum. Seeing all the way up into the ulta-violet, seeing all the way down into the infra-red. The forest was silent. Absolutely no sound. Bailey, the cat, would have heard a sound, had there been a sound. But there was no sound. No birds, no insects, no animals, not even the whispering of the feathertop trees as they struggled toward the bright hot-white sun. It was incredibly silent. Bailey said so. The Filonii went to a condition red. No world is silent. And a forest world is always noisy. But this one was silent. They were out there, waiting. Watching the great ship and the small stalker-cat that had emerged from it. Who they were, the cat, and. the Filonii did not know. But they were there, and they were waiting for the invaders to make the first move. The stalker-cat glided forward. Bailey felt presences. Deep in the forest, deeper than he knew he could prowl with impunity. They were in there, watching him as he moved forward. But he was a cat, and if he was to gel his fish, he would work. The Filonii were watching. Them, in there, back in the trees, they were watching. It's a bad life , he thought. The life of a cat is a nasty, dirty, bad one. Bailey was not the first cat to have ever thought that thought. It was the litany of the stalker-cats. They knew their place, had always known it, but that was the way it was; it was the way it had always been. The Filonii ruled, and the cats worked. And the universe became theirs. Yet it wasn't shared. It was the Filonii universe, and the stalker-cats were hired help. The fine mesh cap that covered the top and back of the cat's head glowed with a faint but discernible halo. The sunbeams through which he passed caught at the gold filaments of the cap and sent sparkling radiations back toward the ship. The ship stood in the center of the blasted area it had cleared for its prime base. Inside the ship, the team of Filonii ecologists sat in front of the many process screens and saw through the eyes of the stalker-cat. They murmured to one another as first one, then another, then another saw something of interest. "Cat, lad," one of them said softly, "still no sound?" "Nothing yet, Brewer. But I can feel them watching." One of the other ecologists leaned forward. The entire wall behind the hundred screens was a pulsing membrane. Speak into it at any point and the cat's helmet picked up the voice, carried it to the stalker. "Tell me, lad, what does it feel like?" "I'm not quite sure, Kicker. I'm getting it mixed. It feels like the eyes staring...and wood...and sap...and yet there's mobility. It can't be the trees." "You're sure." "As best I can tell right now, Kicker. I'm going to go into the forest and see." "Good luck, lad." "Thank you, Driver. How is your goiter?" "I'm fine, lad. Take care." The stalker-cat padded carefully to the edge of the forest. Sunlight slanted through the feathertops into the gloom. It was cool and dim inside there. Now, all eyes were upon him. The first paw in met springy, faintly moist and cool earth. The fallen feathers had turned to mulch. It smelled like cinnamon. Not overpoweringly so, just pleasantly so. He went in...all the way. The last the Filonii saw on their perimeter screens -- twenty of the hundred -- were his tails switching back and forth. Then the tails were gone and the seventy screens showed them dim, strangely-shadowed pathways between the giant conifers. "Cat, lad, can you draw any conclusions from those trails?" The stalker padded forward, paused. "Yes. I can draw the conclusion they aren't trails. They go fairly straight for a while, then come to dead ends at the bases of the trees. I'd say they were drag trails, if anything." "What was dragged? Can you tell?" "No, not really, Homer. Whatever was dragged, it was thick and fairly smooth. But that's all I can tell." He prodded the drag trail with his secondary leg on the left side. In the pad of the paw were tactile sensors. The cat proceeded down the drag trail toward the base of the great tree where the trail unaccountably ended. All around him the great conifers rose six hundred feet into the warm, moist air. Sipper, in the ship, saw through the cat's eyes and pointed out things to his fellows. "Some of the qualities of Pseudotsuga Taxifolia, but definitely a conifer. Notice the bark on that one. Typically Eucalyptus Regnans...yet notice the soft red spores covering the bark. I've never encountered that particular sort of thing before. They seem to be melting down the trees. In fact..." He was about to say the trees were all covered with the red spores, when the red spores attacked the cat. They flowed down the trees, covering the lower bark, each one the size of the cat's head, and when they touched, they ran together like jelly. When the red jelly from one tree reached the base of the trunk, it fused with the red jelly from the other trees. "Lad..." "It's all right. Kicker. I see them." The cat began to pad backward: slowly, carefully. He could easily outrun the fusing crimson jelly. He moved back toward the verge of the clearing. Charred, empty of life, blasted by the Filonii hackshafts, not even a stump of the great trees above ground, the great circles where the trees had stood now merely reflective surfaces set flush in the ground. Back. Backing out of life...backing into death. The cat paused. What had caused that thought? "Cat! Those spores...whatever they are...they're forming into a solid..." Backing out oj lije...backing into death. my name is bailey and i'm in here, inside you. i was stolen from my called is wants body the some somewhere, he -- by succubus. kind there in the stars a he, of recruiter from out creature it puppeteer, a sort of The blood-red spore thing stood fifteen feet high, formless, shapeless, changing, malleable, coming for the cat. The stalker did not move: within him, a battle raged. "Cat, lad! Return! Get back!" Though the universe belonged to the Filonii, it was only at moments when the loss of a portion of that universe seemed imminent that they realized how important their tools of ownership had become. Bailey fought for control of the cat's mind. Centuries of conditioning fought back. The spore thing reached the cat and dripped around him. The screens of the Filonii went bloodred, then went blank. The thing that had come from the trees oozed back into the forest, shivered for a moment, then vanished, taking the cat with it. quence he opened and focused each of his thirty eyes. The place where he lay came into full luster. He was underground. The shapeless walls of the place dripped with sap and several colors of viscous fluid. The fluid dripped down over bark that seemed to have been formed as stalactites, the grain running long and glistening till it tapered into needle tips. The surface on which the cat lay was planed wood, the grain exquisitely formed, running outward from a coral-colored pith in concentric circles of hues that went from coral to dark teak at the outer perimeter. The spores had fissioned, were heaped in an alcove. Tunnels ran off in all directions. Huge tunnels twenty feet across. The mesh cap was gone. The cat got to his feet. Bailey was there, inside, fully awake, conversing with the cat. "Am I cut off from the Filonii?" "Yes, I'm afraid you are." "Under the trees." "That's right." "What is that spore"thing?" "I know, but I'm not sure you'd understand." "I'm a stalker; I've spent my life analyzing alien life-forms and alien ecology. I'll understand." "They're mobile symbiotes, conjoined with the bark of these trees. Singly, they resemble most closely anemonic anaerobic bacteria, susceptible to di chotomisation; they're anacusic, anabiotic, anamnestic, and feed almost exclusively on ancyclostomiasis." "Hookworms?" "Big hookworms. Very big hookworms." "The drag trails?" "That's what they drag." "But none of that makes any sense. It's impossible." "So is reincarnation among the Yerbans, but it occurs." "I don't understand." "I told you you wouldn't." "How do you know all this?" "You wouldn't understand." "I'll takeyourword for it." "Thank you. There's more about the spores and the trees, by the way. Perhaps the most important part." "Which is?" "Fused, they become a quasi-sentient gestalt. They can communicate, borrowing power from the treehosts." "That's even more implausible!" "Don't argue with me, argue with the Creator." "First Cause." "Have it your way." "What are you doing in my head?" "Trying very hard to get out." "And how would you do that?" "Foul up your mission so the Filonii would demand the Succubus replace me. I gather you're pretty important to them. Rather chickenshit, aren't they?" "I don't recognize the term." "Fll put it in sense form."     # "Oh. You mean  I #-." "Yeah. Chickenshit." "Well, that's the way it's always been between the Filonii and the stalkers." "You like it that way." "I like my fish." "Your Filonii like to play God, don't they? Changing this world and that world to suit themselves. Reminds me of a couple of other guys. Lords of Propriety they were called. And the Succubus. Did you ever stop to think how many individuals and races like to play God?" "Right now Fd like to get out of here." "Easy enough." "How?" "Make friends with theTszechmae." "The trees or the spores?" "Both." "One name for the symbiotic relationship?" "They live in harmony." "Except for the hookworms." "No society is perfect. Rule #." The cat sat back on his haunches, and talked to himself. "Make friends with them you say." "Seems like a good idea, doesn't it?" "How would you suggest I do that?" "Offer to perform a service for them. Something they can't do for themselves." "Such as?" "How about you'll get rid of the Filonii for them. Right now that's the thing most oppressing them." "Get rid of the Filonii." "Yes." "I'm harboring a lunatic in my head." "Well, if you're going to quit before you start..." "Precisely how -- uh, do you have a name?" "I told you. Bailey." "Oh, Yes. Sorry. Well, Bailey, precisely how do I rid this planet of a star-spanning vessel weighing somewhere just over thirteen thousand tons, not to mention a full complement of officers and ecologists who have been in the overlord position with my race for more centuries than I can name? Fm conditioned to respect them." "You sure don't sound as if you respect them." The cat paused. That was true. He felt quite different. He disliked the Filonii intensely. Hated them, in fact; as his kind had hated them for more centuries than he could name. "That is peculiar. Do you have any explanation for it?" "Well," said Bailey, humbly, "there is my presence. It may well have broken through all your hereditary conditioning." "You wear smugness badly." "Sorry." The cat continued to think on the possibilities. "I wouldn't take too much longer, if I were you," Bailey urged him. Then, reconsidering, he added, "As a matter of fact, I am you." "You're trying to tell me something." "I'm trying to tell you that the gestalt spore grabbed you, to get a line on what was happening with the invaders, but you've been sitting here for some time, musing to yourself -- which, being instantaneously communicative throughout the many parts of the whole, is a concept they can't grasp -- and so it's getting ready to digest you." The stalker blinked his thirty eyes very rapidly. "The spore thing?" "Uh-uh. All the spores eat are the hookworms. The bark's starting to look at you with considerable interest." "Who do I talk to? Quick!" "You've decided you don't respect the Filonii so much, huh?" "I thought you said I should hurry!" "Just curious." " Who do I talk to!?!" "The floor." So the stalker-cat talked to the floor, and they struck a bargain. Rather a lopsided bargain, true; but a bargain nonetheless. T HE hookworm was coming through the tunnel much more rapidly than the cat would have expected. It seemed to be sliding, but even as he watched, it bunched -- inchworm-like -- and propelled itself forward, following the movement with another slide. The wooden tunnel walls oozed with a noxious smelling moistness as the worm passed. It was moving itself on a slime track of its own secretions. It was eight feet across, segmented, a filthy gray in color, and what passed for a face was merely a slashmouth dripping yellowish mucus, several hundred cilia-like feelers surrounding the slit, and four glazecovered protruberances in an uneven row above the slit perhaps serving in some inadequate way as "eyes." Like a strange Hansel dropping bread crumbs to mark a trail, the spore things clinging to the cat's back began to ooze off. First one, then another. The cat backed down the tunnel. The hookworm came on. It dropped its fleshy penis-like head and snuffled at the spore lying in its path. Then the cilia feelers attached themselves and the spore thing was slipped easily into the slash mouth. There was a disgusting wet sound, and the hookworm moved forward again. The same procedure was repeated at the next spore. And the next, and the next. The hookworm followed the stalker through the tunnels. Some miles away, the Filonii stared into their screen as a strange procession of red spores formed in the shape of a long thick hawser-like chain emerged from the forest and began to encircle the ship. "Repulsors?" Kicker asked. "Not yet, they haven't made a hostile move," the Homer said. "The cat could have won them somehow. This may be a welcoming ceremony. Let's wait and see." The ship was completely circled, at a distance of fifty feet from the vessel. The Filonii waited, having faith in their cat lad. And far underground, the stalker-cat led the hookworm a twisting chase through tunnel after' tunnel. Some of the tunnels were formed only moments before the cat and his pursuer entered them. The tunnels always sloped gently upward. The cat dropping his spore riders as he went led the enormous slug-thing by a narrow margin. But enough to keep him coming. Then, into a final tunnel, and the cat leaped to a planed outcropping overhead, then to a tiny hole in the tunnel ceiling, and then out of sight. The Filonii shouted with delight as the stalker emerged from a hole in the blasted earth, just beyond the circle of red spores, linked and waiting. "You see! Good cat!" Driver yelled to his fellows. But the cat made no move toward the ship. "He's waiting for the welcoming ceremony to end," the Homer said with assurance. Then, on their screens, they saw first one red spore, then another, vanish, as though sucked down through the ground from below. They vanished in sequence, and the Filonii followed their disappearance around the screens, watching them go in a # arc, then # of half-circle, then # and the ground began to tremble. And before the hookworm could suck his dinner down through a full # of the circle, the ground gave way beneath the thirteen thousand tons of Filonii starship, and the vessel thundered through, down into special tunnels dug straight down. Plunged down with the plates of the ship separating and cracking open. Plunged down with the hookworm that would soon discover sweeter morsels than even red spore things. The Filonii tried to save themselves. There was very little they could do. Driver cursed the cat and made a final contact with the Succubus. It was an automatic hookup, much easier to throw in than to fire the ship for takeoff. Particularly a quarter of a mile underground. The hookworm broke through the ship. The Tszechmae waited. When the hookworm had gorged itself, they would move in and slay the creature. Then they would feast. But Bailey would not be around to see the great meal. For only moments after the Filonii ship plunged crashing out of sight, he felt a ghastly wrenching at his soulself, and the stalker-cat was left empty once morethereby proving in lopsided bargains no one is the winner but the house -- and the Belial toward the unknown. Deep in wooden tunnels, things began to feed. T HE darkness was the deepest blue. Not black. It was blue. He could see nothing. Not even himself. He could not tell what the body into which he had been cast did, or had, or resembled, or did not do, have or not resemble. He reached out into the blue darkness. He touched nothing. But then, perhaps he had not reached out. He had felt himself extend something into the blueness, but how far, or in what direction, or if it had been an appendage...he did not know. He tried to touch himself, and did not know where to touch. He reached for his face, where a Bailey face would have been. He touched nothing. He tried to touch his chest. He met resistance, and then penetrated something soft. He could not distinguish if he had pushed through fur or skin or hide or jelly or moisture or fabric or metal or vegetable matter or foam or some heavy gas. He had no feeling in either his "hand" or his "chest" but there was something there. He tried to move, and moved. But he did not know if he was rolling or hopping or walking or sliding or flying or propelling or being propelled. But he moved. And he reached down with the thing he had used to touch himself, and felt nothing below him. He did not have legs. He did not have arms. Blue. It was so blue. He moved as far as he could move in one direction, and there was nothing to stop him. He could have moved in that direction forever, and met no resistance. So he moved in another direction -- opposite, as far as he could tell, and as far as he could go. But there was no boundary. He went up and went down and went around in circles. There was nothing. Endless nothing. Yet he knew he was in somewhere. He was not in the emptiness of space, he was in an enclosed space. But what dimensions the place had, he could not tell. And what he was, he could not tell. It made him upset. He had not been upset in the body of Pinkh, nor in the body of the stalker-cat. But this life he now owned made him nervous. Why should that be? Something was coming for him. He knew that much. He was here and something else was out there, coming toward him. He knew fear. Blue fear. Deep unseeing blue fear. If it was coming fast, it would be here sooner. If slow, then later. But it was coming. He could feel, sense, intuit it coming for him. He wanted to change. To become something else. To become this Or to become tHiS But to become something else, something that could withstand what was coming for him. He didn't know what that could be. All he knew was that he needed equipment. He ran through his baileythoughts, his baileymind, to sort out what he might need. Fangs Poisonous breath Eyes Horns Malleability What he needed Webbed feet Armored hide might be Talons Camouflage Wings Carapaces Muscles Vocal cords Scales Self-regeneration Stingers Wheels Multiple brains What he already had Nothing It was coming closer. Or was it getting farther away? (And by getting farther away, becoming more of a threat to him?) (If he went toward it, would he be safer?) (If only he could know what he looked like, or where he was, or what was required of him?) (Orient!) (Damn it, orient yourself, Bailey!) He was deep in blueness, extended, foetal, waiting. Shapeless. (Shape -- ) (Could that be it?) Something blue flickered in the blueness. It was coming end-for-end, flickering and sparking and growing larger, swimming toward him in the blueness. It sent tremors through him. Fear gripped him as it had never gripped him before. The blue shape coming toward him was the most fearful thing he could remember: and he remembered: The night he had found Moravia with another man. They were standing having sex in a closet at a party. Her dress was bunched up around her waist; he had her up on tip-toes. She was crying with deep pleasure, eyes closed. The day at the end of the war, when a laser had sliced off the top of the head of the man on his left in the warm metal trench. The sight of things still pulsing in the jasmine jelly. The moment he had come to the final knowledge of his hopeless future. The moment he had decided to go to the Center to find death. The thing changed shape and sent out scintillant waves of blueness and fear. He writhed away from them but they swept over him, and he turned over and over trying to escape. The thing of blue came nearer, growing larger in his sight. (Sight? Writhing? Fear?) It suddenly swept toward him, faster than before, as though it had tried a primary assault -- the waves of fear -- and the assault had failed; and now it would bull through. He felt an urge to leap, high. He felt himself do it, and suddenly his sight went up and his propulsive equipment went lower, and he was longer, taller, larger. He fled. Down through the blueness, with the corcuscating blue devil following. It elongated itself and shot past him on one side, boiled on ahead till it was a mere pinpoint of incandescence on some heightless, dimensionless horizon. And then it came racing back toward him, thinning itself and stretching itself till it was opaque, till the blueness of where they were shone through it darkly, like effulgent isinglass in a blue hyperplane. He trembled in fear and went minute. He balled and shrank and contracted and drew himself to a finite point, and the whirling danger went hurtling through him and beyond, and was lost back the way they had come. Inside the body he now owned, Bailey felt something wrenching and tearing. Fibers pulled loose from moorings and he was certain his mind was giving way. He had memories of sense-deprivation chambers and what had happened to men who had been left in them too long. This was the same. No shape, no size, no idea or way of gaining an idea of what he was, or where he was, or the touch, smell, sound, sight of anything as an anchor to his sanity. Yet he was surviving. The dark blue devil kept arranging new assaults -- -and he had no doubt it would be back in seconds (seconds?) -- and he kept doing the correct thing to escape those assaults. But he had the feeling (feeling?) that at some point the instinctive reactions of this new body would be insufficient. That he would have to bring to this new role his essential baileyness, his human mind, his thoughts, the cunning he had begun to understand was so much a part of his way. (And why had he not understood that cunningness when he had been Bailey, all the years of his hopeless life?) The effulgence began again somewhere off to his side and high above him, coming on rapidly. Bailey, some thing unknown, prepared. As best he could. you may be sure i paid dearly to do so, my dear yaquil. the succubus, yaquil. it cost me five tenils of life, chide me all you wish... unlike you, i do not look on -- but you do. you have always thought of it as a game, while you were born herdur. there was a time when it -- and we remain, you cannot fluster me with platitudes! i can The blue devil swept down on him, crackling with pain and a sapping of strength. Then a for it had. Now Bailey knew what he was, and what he had to do. He lay still, swimming in the never-ending forever blueness. He was soft and he was solitary. The blue devil swarmed and came on. For the last time. And when it was all around him, Bailey let it drink him. He left its deep blueness and its fear and its sparkling effulgence sweep over him, consume him. The blue devil gorged itself, grew larger, fuller, more incapable of movement, unable to free itself. Bailey stuffed it with his amoebic body. He split and formed yet another, and the blue devil extended itself and began feeding on his second self. The radiating sparking waves of fear and blueness were thicker now, coming more slowly. Binary fission again. Now there were four. The blue devil fed, consumed, filled its chambers and its source-buds. Again, fission. And now there were eight. And the blue devil began to lose color. Bailey did not divide again. He knew what he had to do. Neither he, nor the blue devil could win this combat. Both must die. The feeding went on and on, and finally the blue devil had drained itself with fullness, made itself immobile, died. And he died. And there was emptiness in the blueness once more. The frames, the tenils, the fullness of combat were ended. And in that last fleeting instant of sentience, Bailey imagined he heard scented wails of hopelessness from two Duelmasters somewhere out there. He gloated. Now they knew what it was to be a He gloated for an instant, then was whirled out and away. was rush season for the Succubus. Bailey went out to fill the husk of a Master Slavemaster whose pens were filled with females of the eighty-three races that peopled the Snowdrift Cluster asteroids. Bailey succeeded in convincing the Slavemaster that male chauvenism was detestable, and the females were bound into a secret organization that returned to their various rock-worlds, overthrew the all-male governments and declared themselves the Independent Feminist Concourse. He was pulled back and sent out to inhabit the radio wave "body" of a needier creature used by the Kirk to turn suns nova and thereby provide them with power sources. Bailey gained possession of the needier and imploded the Kirk home sun. He was pulled back and sent out to inhabit the shell of a ten thousand year old terrapin whose retention of random construction information made it invaluable as the overseer of a planetary reorganization project sponsored by a pale gray race without a name that altered solar systems just beyond the Finger Fringe deepout. Bailey let the turtle feed incorrect data to the world-swingers hauling the planets into their orbits, and the entire configuration collided in the orbit of the system's largest heavymass world. The resultant uprising caused the total eradication of the pale gray race. He was pulled back... Finally, even a creature as vast and involved as the and matters for attention, in effect a god-of-a-sort, was forced to take notice. There was a soul in his file that was causing a fullness leak. There was a soul that was anathema to what the Succubus had built his reputation on. There was a soul that seemed to be (unthinkable as it was) out to get him. There was a soul that was ruining things. There was a soul that was inept. There was a soul that was (again, unthinkably) consciously trying to ruin the work the Succubus had spent his life setting in motion. There was a soul named Bailey. And the Succubus consigned him to soul limbo till he could clear away present obligations and draw him under the lens for scrutiny. So Bailey was sent to limbo. Soft pasty maggoty white. Roiling. Filled with sounds of things desperately trying to see. Slippery underfoot. Without feet. Breathless and struggling for breath. Enclosed. Tight, with great weight pressing down till the pressure was asphyxiating. But without the ability to breathe. Pressed brown to cork, porous and feeling imminent crumbling; then broiling liquid poured through. Pain in every filament and glass fiber. A wet thing settling into bones, turning them to ash and paste. Sickly sweetness, thick and rancid, tongued and swallowed and bloating. Bloating till bursting. A charnal scent. Rising smoke burning and burning the sensitive tissues. Love lost forever, the pain of knowing nothing could ever matter again; melancholia so possessive it wrenched deep inside and twisted organs that never had a chance to function. Cold tile. Black crepe paper. Fingernails scraping slate. Button pains. Tiny cuts at sensitive places. Weakness. Hammering steadily pain. That was what it was like in the Succubus's soul limbo. It was not punishment, it was merely the dead end. It was the place where the continuum had not been completed. It was not Hell, for Hell had form and substance and purpose. This was a crater, a void, a storeroom packed with uselessness. It was the place to be sent when pastpresentfuture were one and indeterminate. It was altogether ghastly. Had Bailey gone mad, this would have been the place for it to happen. But he did not. There was a reason. O NE hundred thousand eternities later, the Succubus cleared his desk of present work, filled all orders and answered all current correspondence, finished inventory and took a long-needed vacation. When he returned, before turning his attention to out of limbo and ushered it under the lens. And found it, somehow, different. souls he had stolen. He could not put a name to the difference. It was not a force, not a vapor, not a quality, not a potentiality, not a look, not a sense, not a capacity, not anything he could pinpoint. And, of course, such a difference might be invaluable. So the Succubus drew a husk from the spare parts and rolling stock bank, and put Bailey's soul into it. It must be understood that this was a consumately scoured clean. It was not like the many bodies into which Bailey had been inserted. Those had had their souls stolen. There was restraining potential in all of them, memories of persona, fetters invisible but present nonetheless. This husk was now Bailey. Bailey only, Bailey free and Bailey whole. The Succubus summoned Bailey before him. Bailey might have been able to describe the Succubus, but he had no such desire. The examination began. The Succubus used light and darkness, lines and spheres, soft and hard, seasons of change, waters of Nepenthe, a hand outstretched, the whisper of a memory, earthing, enumeration, suspension, incursion, requital and thirteen others. Then, when he had all the knowledge he needed, all the secret places, all the unspoken promises, all the wished and fleshed depressions, the power that qouaeomiun  A  W. jo.inos. an, ,." Vft,n# , '# ) . # ,;, that was God awoke, fathom, Cqs TZ s ' u mbering; a rhOfLg -  ef had wotLd created blossomed to fullness, rejuvenated by its slumber, stronger than it had been even when it had created the universe. And, freed, it set about finishing what had begun millennia before. Bailey remembered the Euthanasia Center, where it had begun for him. Remembered dying. Remembered being reborn. Remembered the life of inadequacy, impotency, hopelessness he had led before he'd given himself up to the Suicide Center. Remembered living as a one-eyed bear creature in a war that would never end. Remembered being a stalker-cat and death of a ghastliness it could not be spoken of. I Remembered blueness. Remembered all the other lives. And remembered all the gods that had been less God than himself Bailey. The Lords of Propriety. The Filonii. The Montagasques. The Thils. The Tszechmae. The Duelmasters. The hookworms. The Slavemaster. The Kirk. The pale gray race without a name. And most of all, he remembered the Succubus. Who thought he was God. Even as the Thieves thought they were Gods. But none of them possessed more than the faintest scintilla of the all-memory of godness, and Bailey had become the final repository for the force that was God! And now, freed, unleashed, unlocked, swirled down through all of time to this judgment day, Bailey flexed his godness and finished what he had begun at the beginning. There is only one end to creation. What is created is destroyed, and thus full circle is achieved. had built. The destruction of the universes he had created. Never before. Songs unsung. Washed but never purified. Dreams spent and visits to come. Up out of slime. Drifted down on cool trusting winds. Heat. Free. AH created, all equal, all wondering, all vastness. Gone to night. The power that was Bailey that was God began its efforts. The husk in which Bailey lived was drawn into the power. The Succubus, screaming for reprieve, screaming for reason, screaming for release or explanation, was drawn into the power. The soul station drawn in. The home world drawn in. The solar system of the home world drawn in. The galaxy and all the galaxies and the metagalaxies and the far island universes and the alter dimensions and the past back to the beginning and beyond it to the circular place where it became now, and all the shadow places and all the thought recesses and then the very fabric and substance of eternity... all of it, everything... drawn in. All of it contained within the power of Bailey who is God. And then, in one awesome exertion of will, GodBailey destroys it all, coming full circle, ending what it had been born to do. Gone. The Propheteer's people smiled for their lives -- or lost them ! two hundred years old. Some said he was less than a hundred. Some insisted he was at least a thousand. All were wrong. His name was Evan Barrister and he was one hundred and thirteen years old. He no longer had eyes. Instead, in the deep sockets of his skull, lenses ground been implanted. They recorded light and shadow and the subtlest movement so that he could still see clearly. His ears had gone -- when? It had been years ago, he recalled. Everything seemed to have happened years ago. #? Yes, #. But the transistorized receptors that had replaced his auditory organs were better than any old ears. His laughter erupted in the huge room called Square Central but there was only himself to hear it. He sometimes wished he could die. Yet, paradoxically, he still wanted to live because forces of which he was wary were at large in the world. They expressed themselves not in shadow but openly in the smiles of men. And women. Smiles he had placed there. But he was weary. People called him The Propheteer. His fingers flicked expertly across the huge console of the Betty. He called the computer complex Betty because -- well, the past, some of it -- was worth remembering. His Betty of the long nights and glorious days had once been and would never be again. They had married in 'seventy-one. She had died in 'ninety-nine. He caught himself. In the bad old days they had called it wool-gathering. Today they had fancier and more frightful terms for what he had been doing. One of them was regressing. The message from the console registered on his lenses. #I   X# Oth LJ ## Nth. The sixth finger that he had long ago had grafted onto his right hand for the extra facility it gave him lingered over the Oth. With his left hand he reached up and touched the button. He watched the reel of tape spin, stop, click, spin again. No, it was all right.The citizen's adrenalin flow was at a safe level. The Oth had been merely another early warning signal. He pressed a bar labeled Automatic Recall and set' the timer at tenminute intervals. Betty spoke to him in her many mysterious voices and he let himself listen and remember. I don't see why you have to give your whole life to society, Evan. It isn't fair to either of us. I mean, you and I -- well, we never have any time together any more. Here, give me your hand. Oh! Evan, what -- The sixth finger had been what. It had frightened Betty. It made him somebody other , she had said. Betty, Betty! So had all the lost years without rest or enough time for tinkering with the ancient clocks he had loved so much. Cuckoos there had been. And one with a bear that popped out on a little platform every hour on the hour to play an accordion he held in his paws as he pranced' and danced and the hours struck. He spun the sling in which he sat and whirled like a shrunken bird about the many faces of Betty as he checked and rechecked all the levers and dials and buttons and little flashing lights that were in perfect operating order and he pretended that he did not know this essentially demeaning fact. Square Central, Scott stood looking at his face reflected in the gloss of the metal. I look like some strange fish in an even stranger sea. I must go in. I must tell him... A gaudy vision of blood and sand arose in his mind and he was standing above his fallen opponent, sword raised high, listening to the hush of the spectators at the gladiatorial contest and yearning for the roar of love that would come and wash over him when he "brought the sword down in obedience to the edict of the earthwardpointing thumbs of the crowd.  will tell him... Scott stepped forward and the steel surrendered before him. Through the open door he went and he heard it sigh shut behind him. Evan was up there on the eleventh tier in his sling, equipped with nutrient needles and a hidden waste disposal unit. "Evan," Scott said and it was almost a shout in the softly whirring room. "Scott, hello there, boy. I'mjust about finished checking the Sector Receptors. Hold on." When the sling descended and Evan sat facing him, Scott said, "Everything okay?" "Turned up a man with a vacillating adrenalin flow. I'm keeping an eye on him. It may be nothing to worry about. How's my assistant savior of the world from crime and its perpetrators?" "I'm fine, Evan. I came to-" To what? To bring down the sword one final fatal time? To tell the truth and spin an old man's world out of orbit? "What is it, Scott? Trouble out there?" He couldn't do it. "No, none. There hasn't been a crime committed here on Earth or on any of the subsidiary worlds or in the spacelanes since -- " "Nineteen-ninety-two. June Tenth. Oh-one-hundred-hours. "Right." "Then what are you looking so sulky for? Don't tell me. That girl, that what's-her-name. The one that dusts her eyelids with crystals. She giving you trouble?" "No, Evan," Scott answered, smiling. "It's not Lenore. Although she does give a guy trouble sometimes." "Every beautiful woman does. They just can't seem to help it. It's an occupational hazard -- part of being a woman and beautiful. Is it Darby then?" "Darby? Darby's okay, I guess. He's planning on revamping the Allied Arts Program. But I guess you know about that." Evan studied the young man who stood before him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. There was one thing about lenses. They had ordinary eyes beat in spades when it came to picking up nuances. They could peg a frown or the narrowing of lips in anger better than just plain cellular eyes. Lenses were to eyes what a Leica was to a Brownie. Scott, Evan noticed, had tensed the muscles in his cheeks and his smile wasn't quite working. The reason had to be Darby. It was always Darby. "Why the need for reprograming?" Evan asked. Scott cleared his throat. "Darby says there are evidences of criminal intent apparent in the design of some of the newer art forms. You've seen Riker's variations on the Corinthian columns for New Arena?" Evan shook his head. "They're corrupting, Darby claims, because of their postDionysian connotations. They're fertility symbols, he says, with a potential corruptibility quotient of -- oh, I forget exactly. Anyway -- " "Anyway, he wants to make.it a crime to design pillars with doodads on them because he thinks they might give pubescent little girls naughty ideas. Damn Darby. I wish he'd let well enough alone." "He's a good Propheteer's Man, though," Evan concluded somewhat reluctantly. "Dedicated." "Yes, he is," Scott admitted. "But -- well, sometimes he strikes me as too dedicated. Driven might be a better word." Evan caught the look in Scott's eyes. "He's part of the system, Scott, and so am I. So are you. We all approve of it -- the system. As for myself, why shouldn't I? rrpiBallantiiio  J Bootes planet gets a little bit smaller. Being as fascinated by conservation as we are, not because we are bugs about nature (no pun intended) but because it's a matter of survival, we were interested in a recent study which came up with the delightful concept that if we continue to throw as many tons of pollutants into the atmosphere as we are presently doing, in twenty years the planet will be shrouded permanently in a smog haze. Certain pollutants do not go away. They just hang up there, a circling blanket and several miles thick. Goodbye sun.  ary, which has always been a lousy month for us horoscopically speaking, we can proceed with the books you should be buying in large quanShow Pope Nixon where it's at.  printed from the Storisende text, with as many of Frank C. Pape's delicious drawings as we could get anywhere near reproducing decently. We even managed to adapt one of his drawings for the cover. Absolutely one of the best. This month we introduce a new writer to the fans, Martha deMey Clow. Not only a new face in science fiction, but a first novel to strengths lie in demonstrating how vulnerable the human race is -- patsies for a handful of neo-men with just a little bit of an edge. If you think it couldn't happen, remember back to a certain housepainter who started with only his paranoia to assist him.  second book from Richard Cowper, gives one pause for hope. A severalcentury pause but still it's nice to feel the species isn't doomed, even if the survivors have to be a pretty tough breed to make it. February being the start of a New Year (for publishers) perhaps we should give you a swift recap of highlights from # -- so you won't forget to order before it's too late: headed and our own favorite Pope's joyous Hell, we ran out of space -- all right, next month we'll list all the other pretties. BB After all, I created it. Well, no, that's not true exactly. All I really did was analyze the emerging patterns of criminal behavior I found in the old police precinct station records and nurse them along to their proper conclusion. Once the police had begun to notice that certain crimes occurred with almost predictable frequency in certain areas at certain times, I merely had to apply the laws of statistical probability in terms of the citizen profiles I developed and the rest, as they say, is history. As you said, no crime has been committed on Earth or any of the off-worlds in years. Which proves that the system works. Nowadays we nip crime in the bud, so to speak." Evan waved a thin hand about the vastness of Square Central. "All this," he said, almost reverently, "keeps us safe. And I keep it safe. Now that we've got every citizen's physiological and psychological data fed into Betty -- " He stopped, embarrassed. Scott pretended he hadn't heard the slip. "We can predict crime with absolute precision. We can tell who will commit a crime and when. We can even predict the exact nature of the crime." "Adrenalin flow, electrical discharges from the brain, chemical constituency of the blood, frustration threshold -- all of it," Evan was saying, gazing about Square Central as if he were seeing it for the first time. "We've run tests to identify each citizen in terms I've defined. We've established individual norms. Then we spit it all into the -- the computer here. Now we wait and watch. For variations that warn of uncontrollable rage. For signs of fear. The whole gamut of emotions that are the harbingers of violent and desperate acts. Then we send out the Propheteer's Men before the crime is committed, apprehend the potential offender and we therapeutize him for however long is necessary. And then we release him -- cured." Tell him! "It works, Scott," Evan continued. "All I did was extrapolate a bit from the old precinct station statistics, utilize and improve upon our already existing emotional indices analyses and adapt both linear and nonlinear programing to accommodate them and -- " Fie smiled and winked at Scott. "And Betty was born," Scott said, smiling back. Evan nodded, almost shyly. "And the P-Men do the rest. The policemen." "The Propheteer's Men." "The Propheteer's Men," Evan repeated. "Slang terms make me queasy. Policemen, Propheteer's Men. It doesn't matter what you call them as long as they do the job. And jails, Scott! Think about jails! You've gone through Trap Training. You know what jails were like. Cesspools. Crime factories. In the twentieth century they put people in cages and kept them there, Scott!" Evan's voice was rising and the sling in which he sat shuddered with his growing agitation. "The ones they didn't keep in cages, Scott, they killed. Killed! Just think about that one for a minute. But no more. Now we cure. Funny. There used to be a saying. 'Kill or cure.' Shows we've come a little way at least, wouldn't you say, considering that we don't kill anymore." "Thanks to science," Evan said. "If we can skip here and there among the stars, we certainly ought to be able to deal with a guy who's so sick scared he feels he's got to kill the guy next door for whatever crazy reason. Or the thief who just takes what he wants, whether it's an old woman's pocketbook or the plans for the latest rocket launcher. Both of them are off the right societal track. We just put them back on." "Things change," Scott said cryptically as he walked past Evan and around the room. Evan, in his sling, slid after Scott. "Now what's that supposed to mean?" "You ought to come out and see what it's like out there." Scott knew he couldn't tell him. He just couldn't. But he might be able to prod Evan into finding out for himself. Evan was shaking his head. "I don't even watch the teleset any more. Oh, don't look so sad, Scott. It's no big disappointment to me. When you get to be my age you learn to let go, to make concessions. That's what I'm doing and have been doing. I just do my job and the world is a little better for it. Let them talk about The Propheteer as they call me and tell my legend. They don't need to see me. Telling my story is enough. Hey!" Scott whirled at the sound of Evan's shout. Evan was slinging swiftly toward the computer console. The six fingers on his right hand flew over the plastic buttons as he read the tape and listened to the tinging of the warning bell. "Scott, murder is about to be committed in Sixth Sector!" He pressed the lever that he knew would summon the P-Men. Then he relaxed, sighed. "They'll get there in time. They always do." Scott practically ran for the door. "Where -- " But Scott was through the steel doors and they had closed behind him. He stood for a moment in the corridor, leaning against the wall and sweating. He could almost hear the scream of the potential murderer. It sounded a little to Scott like Evan's triumphant chuckle as he pressed the lever labeled P-Men. Evan did not know what he had done. And I'm too much of a coward tinue... ting ready for Scott. She stood under the spray of the SunSet and watched her skin grow golden. There was no use trying to appear ugly. She had tried that once and Darby had merely suggested, in a soft but deadly tone, that she had better learn to play the game. When her eyes had sparked dangerously Darby had shaken a warning finger at her almost playfully. She forced her hatred into a tight ball and then she threw it far away from her and smiled with no little difficulty. Stepping out from beneath the SunSet that had tanned her, she stared at herself in the mirror that hung like a white icicle from the center of the ceiling. A dozen Lenores, all of them beautiful, stared back at her from the mirror's many facets. She knew she could not see what she was looking for. She could not see or even feel, as she ran her fingers through her hair, the microminiaturized suction pump set in the bony receptacle of her skull. It could be activated by The Propheteer in Square Central at the push of a button. She would never hear the ultra-high frequency signal that would activate the deadly pump when the button was pushed. She would barely hear the high hiss of the oxygen being sucked from her brain -- or her own scream. She would crumple and fall. Die. If she let herself want to kill. Darby. Every citizen possessed the pump, Lenore knew, although they hadn't, not in the beginning, or so Scott said. But, in this world of too many people crime was a luxury that no one, least of all society, could afford. It had been good in the beginning, Scott had told her, speaking about The Propheteer's plans and his system. But like too many good things, it had become the toy of the fanatic and the perfectionist. She thought again of Darby. He was both. Darby, she had long ago learned, was a righteous man and, like so many righteous men, he needed evil. Without it he was nothing. He feasted on it, wallowed in it wherever he found it. But when he came to Lenore he called his lust love. She finished dressing, thinking of how one man's good was another man's evil. Darby's face appeared in the door's viewplate and she pressed the panel to admit him. As he came toward her grinning, she pretended to herself that he was Scott. dislodged a citizen from the airlift that skimmed over the hived surface of the city. Down below him the vast crowd of people moved on and off the slidewalks. Careful to avoid any overt or even inward expression of anger, they instead smiled at each other too enthusiastically, waved each other on and loudly asked to be excused or pardoned. The streets swarmed with traffic. Scott saw two autounits collide and their drivers step out and begin their false pavanne, their sly gavotte. They clapped each other on the back, shook hands -- twice -- and helped each other dislodge their interlocked electrofields. The system works. Evan had said it. Scott felt the uneasy heat of his skin. He felt the thoughts like lurid marbles in his mind, bouncing off one another dangerously. He knew he needed the one acceptable outlet for his emotions of which his society approved -- in fact, had been forced to create. He signaled to the lift operator and got off on the roof of Old Arena. He dropped down the airshaft. In the auditorium he strapped himself into one of the reclining pallets and let his emotions loose to roam. In this dank and odorous sanctuary he was safe, he knew, from The Propheteer. A bout was in progress. Above the sound and shouted fury of the spectators a brawny Offworlder battered a team of dwarfs who were attacking him with the marsh maces used to kill the mutated pack rats in the cobalt mines on Neptune. The Offworlder seized one of the dwarfs, raised him high above his head and threw him against the force field that surrounded the multi-level arena. A blinding eruption of sparks came as the dwarf hit, fell and lay still. The crowd roared its approval. Straining against the straps that held him, Scott' yelled with the crowd and tried not to recognize his words. "Cripple -- kill the bastard -- watch out for -- show a little life, you -- " He stayed until all but one of the dwarfs was dead and the Offworlder had taken his bow and left the arena to be replaced by two amazonian females who circled one another warily, their amplified grunts blasting the ears of the delighted spectators. Outside, Scott felt purged. Safe. Calm. Old Arena -- one of Darby's ideas -- had done its job, justified its existence. He continued his journey toward Lenore. A block away he saw a man lose control and lift his fist above the head of the child walking beside him, heard the hateful hiss of air and saw the man fall and the child merely stare as if nothing unusual had happened. Nothing unusual had happened and Scott spotted horror lurking just behind that fact like a lean lioness, hungering. He was surprised to find Darby standing behind Lenore when the door swung open to admit him. Lenore took his hand and leaned toward him. Her kiss was sudden.  "I've always loved you," she whispered in his ear. "Only you." Scott, surprised, wanted to ask her -- But she was gone across the room to where Darby gazed and grinned. "You were off duty," Darby called to Scott. "I figured I'd find you here sooner or later." "Sir," Scott greeted Darby uneasily. His uneasiness was not caused by the grin of his superior but by the odd lack of light in Lenore's eyes and the hint of desperation in her greeting. "Dear Lenore," Darby said. "Can you stand a little shop talk?" Lenore left the room without a word. "Sit, sit," Darby said to Scott, gesturing toward a chair beside his own. Scott sal down and fought the strangeness of his thoughts in attentive silence. "I've reprogramed the Allied Arts unit in the complex," Darby announced, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling. He seems so comfortable here. Scott pushed the thought away at once. "I know. I mentioned it to Evan." "Did you now? You mentioned it to Evan. Why?" Scott hesitated. Darby was watching him closely. "Because -- well, he's The Propheteer and I knew you'd tell him yourself in time." that Scott could barely hear him, "is not The Propheteer." "Beg pardon, sir?" "I am," Darby said. "And I have been for, lo, these many fruitful years. Let me tell you something. Evan Barrister was valuable in his day. But his day is no more. I let him stay on in Square Central. He does no hqrm. In fact, to give the devil his due, if I may. use that antique phrase, he does a great deal of good. He identifies incipient criminals and he pushes his little button to disable them." Disable! "He doesn't know, sir." "Know what? Oh, you mean, about the changes I've made in the system. Of course he doesn't. Does it matter?" Darby chuckled. "He doesn't need to know. Evan, I'm afraid, is not an innovator. He is old, of course, and that is definitely part of his trouble. He is -- and this is much more serious -- content to let good enough alone. I am not. Good is not good enough for me. Good must be better. And better must be best! You 'understand, I'm sure. Treatment of criminals is a long and expensive process. The state can ill afford it. There are other things that must take priority. There is the uprising in the asteroid colony, the cost of constructing New Arena -- " Lenore came back into the room, carrying a tray on which rested a decanter and glasses. "Evan should be retired," Darby was saying as he accepted the glass of wine Lenore held out to him. "He is out of it. I run things now and have for years." "I know." Scott imagined Evan stored away in a dusty attic with other useless and unwanted relics of an earlier day. The thought embarrassed him. "The Allied Arts Program," Darby continued, "is only the first of many changes I'm planning to make." He swirled the wine in its glass and sniffed its bouquet. "Crime in our society is taking ever more subtle and ingenious forms and the computer, as it is now programed, is not equipped to cope. What we need is a realignment of traditional values and, in technological terms, what that means is simply the development of new and more intricate equations to pinpoint these new and even deadlier forms of crime." A chill coursed through Scott. Darby said, "Life is cheap, as they used to point out. In today's world it is not just cheap -- it is practically worthless. There are so many of us. But I am speaking of criminals, of course. The wine is -- " Darby paused, his lips pursed. Suddenly he spat the wine out on( Please turn to page #  What would you call a place where men planned war? A the sketchland glistened the place of Strange. In its center an alabaster structure reflected continually in day's end light. Dupple would sit for hours at his vantage point in the cave, staring across the desert at the brightness, able to make out little more. The greenish tinge around the rim of the compound was the wall of thickly planted flowers and bushes that had been placed there by the beings inside. Those fellow Rai who had ventured into the place had never returned. Yet it held a deep fascination for Dupple and he was being irresistibly drawn to it. The purpose of the flowers confounded him. Dupple sensed that they contained nothing that would cause harm or death. He was certain that his knife would cut through them easily even if they closed about him. The flowers were not carefully arranged and the plants seemed merely intended to circle the place of strange and give it cover. Even so they were sinister. Dupple, come lie with me. Iam busy, mother. As are your fathers. Come. Later, mother. Iam busy. What can be so important that it would hold you from me? I am sharpening a knife I have made. That's of no importance now. It is for the land of the strange, mother. I care not -- come to me. In a moment. I'll be done soon. Hurry, Dupple. Iam eager. Yes, mother. I am eager, too. It took him some time to cut up his mother. She had become monstrous in the years of her existence and death should have been a blessing for her. Still she had protested and fought him off. No matter. He tied her food sacs together and slung them across his back. They would be important to his trip, somehow. He paused at the cave entrance only briefly to look back at the place of his lifetime and then he was scurrying across the rock and shale of the sketchland. He would find a way to enter the place of strange. He felt he had been there before. He was not like the others. He was different. He would survive and succeed. He must succeed. He was no different from the others. No...he was no different. We take them in and they kill. A Iways they kill. He will go back now? Yes. To die? Can we be certain he will die? The thing that made him may take him back. No matter now. It matters to me. I want him dead. I want to kill him myself. He is our son! She was our mate and mother! I cannot accept this. Must I go alone? No -- no --  will come with you. cage down near the inner perimeter and wiped the perspiration from his forehead and neck. It was the seventieth hour of light and the temperature was becoming insufferable. He must hurry and return to the shelter of the laboratory. Unclipping the cage door, Cremins dumped the wriggling contents into the flowers. The young Rai flailed and dug its toes until it finally gained enough momentum and purpose to take refuge under a bush and pant. Cremins, satisfied, was turning away when he heard the other. Dupple charged the alien with a thunderous rush. Cremins dropped the cage and pivoted to one side, drawing his weapon. The hapless Dupple crashed into the cage, waving his knife, and went down in a tangle. Cremins brought his weapon to bear, paused as his eyes caught sight of the glinting identification tag. Methodically the man reversed the weapon as Dupple arose and charged again. Cremins smashed the butt of the weapon into Dupple's soft inner head as he sidestepped again. The unconscious Rai fell stiffly to the brown turf and tried to die. Cremins leaped atop the body, crammed the weapon between toothless jaws and forced open the air passage. "Which one is it, Roy?" "Tag says number seventy-six." "Just about right. Any sign of some competition?" "No, none yet. But look at these." "Ugh, what are those?" "Food sacs from a female Rai. He must have killed a mother." "Why did he drag them here?" "I don't know. Could be an unconscious urge from his being here before -- maybe proof of his mission." "By the looks of this knife he planned on putting sorqe proof in you." "Hm, yes. A very successful subject, a real killer." "Now we wait?" "Right. Let's get him staked out in the compound and get inside." They watched as the fathers paused in exhaustion at the inner edge of the perimeter of the place of strange. Their skins were sundried and the bleeding cracks sapped their energies. The thorns of the perimeter had torn further at their flesh as they had forced their way through. The chase had taken hours and they were far behind. The building in the center sat quiet and lifeless. Their attention turned to the only movement in the compound. Dupple had sensed their presence and bucked desperately against his stake. But the chain held fast and his grasping appendages were still just short of the knife left lying out of reach. You see, he is not dead. The sun will kill him. We can stay and watch. No. He is shielded from above. The sun does not touch him. We cannot kill him.  must. No. Yes. You must help me. Never. Then leave me.  will become lost and perish. I care not. He must die. Let me watch. I shall be your witness for the tribe. Done, then. The cameras turned slowly and quietly and the doctors held their breaths as the Rai moved into the clearing and paused, sensing the air. Dupple appeared to know that something was different in his father's presence and began making screeching, pleading sounds. The Rai advanced slowly, poised, lunged forward. The pair closed in physical contact more violent than had ever been witnessed on the planet before. From under the clouds of dust it soon became apparent that the father was in trouble. Dupple had been psychologically prepared in the laboratory for so and, although the father fought well, he was losing. Suddenly the other Rai rushed in from the perimeter. Scooping up the knife, he plunged the blade into Dupple. Again and again. The adult Rais took turns slashing in the blood until there was nothing left of their son. Satisfied at last, they withdrew into the flowers. We must destroy those who staked Dupple and built the place of strange. Yes. it is against us. We must kill them. The others will help when they hear. They must take no more of our brood from us. We shall make knives to aid us. We will win. First, we must kill those they sent among us. Yes, first. T HE starship rested magnificently on a ridge overlooking the sketchland and the laboratory. Its ferry had settled on the top of the building and its contents of data were being loaded aboard. Haste was dictated by the coming of twilight and the dust storms. The feeling of danger was everywhere, yet the Rai continued to come and hide in the perimeter. After the loading was completed the scientists paused before boarding for a brief and final look at their altered planet. "Did you leave the pictures of Rai's using slings and spears in position?" "Yes, sir, all placed. I even made a couple of makeshift weapons to give them the idea." "They're out there in the flowers, gathering strength. I saw several a few moments ago." "I guess we're getting off just in time. I doubt they'll leave a stone of this place standing." "So -- we have left our heritage of violent death to this planet and its people. It makes me sick." "I feel it, too. There must be a way for simple survival to change into civilization without war. There must be." "Is that why we search the stars? To find another way -- or just to spread our way of horror?" "Maybe our Rai will show us some day." The men boarded the small craft. As it lifted skyward a puny spear sped toward it and glanced helplessly off the field. The first Rai effort to bring peace went unnoticed.  former sector chief on Holman's World, an Earth colony, returns to the planet to do voluntary penance for his treatment of its indigenes, an intelligent elephantine life form, to whom the planet has been restored. The native nildoror initiate him to their rites and he is at once shocked and surprised to discover that he is able to share himself completely with them -- to the point oj losing his human identity entirely and becoming in effect one of them. He requests and is given permission to accompany his hosts on their dangerous journey to the mist country to witness -- and possibly partake in -- their most sacred ritual, Rebirth. His understanding of his hosts deepens during the trip -- as does his understanding of the planet. And of the dangers of going native. His trail crosses that of several leftover humans literally destroyed by the planet -- including husband, whom Rebirth has transformed into a monster. Part of Gundersen s deal with his hosts is to find and deliver to them his is hiding in the mist country after having committed an unnamed offense. jl forty huts or more arranged in two rows, flanked on one side by a grove of soaring trees and on the other by a broad silvery-surfaced lake. Gundersen approached the village through the trees, the lake shining beyond. A light fall of snowflakes wandered through the quiet air. The mists were high just now, thickening to an impenetrable ceiling perhaps five hundred meters overhead. "The man Cullen?" Gundersen asked. Cullen lay in a hut beside the lake. Two sulidoror guarded the entrance, stepping aside at a word from Yi-gartigok; two more sulidoror stood at the foot of the pallet of twigs and hides on which Cullen rested. They, too, stepped aside, revealing a burned-out husk of a man, a remnant, a cinder. "Are you here to fetch me?" Cullen asked. "Well, Gundy, you're too late." Cullen's golden hair had turned white and gone coarse; it was a tangled snowy mat through which patches of pale blotched scalp showed. His eyes, once a gentle liquid green, now were muddy and dull, with angry bloodshot streaks in the yellowed whites. His face was a mask of skin over bones and the skin was flaky and rough. A blanket covered him from the chest down but the severe emaciation of his arms indicated that the rest of his body probably was similarly eroded. Of the old Cullen little seemed to remain except the mild, pleasant voice and the cheerful smile, now grotesque, emerging from the ravaged face. He looked like a man of a hundred years. "How long have you been this way?" Gundersen demanded. "Two months. Three, I don't know. Time melts here, Gundy. But there's no going back for me now. This is where I stop. Terminal. Terminal." Gundersen knelt by the sick man's pallet. "Are you in pain? Can I give you something?" "No pain," Cullen said. "No drugs. Terminal." "What do you have?" Gundersen asked, thinking of Dykstra and his woman lying gnawed by alien larvae in a pool of muck, thinking of Kurtz anguished and transformed at Shangri-la Falls, thinking of Seena's tale of Gio' Salamone turned to crystal. "A native disease? Something you picked up around here?" "Nothing exotic," said Cullen. "I'd guess it's the old inward rot, the ancient enemy. The crab, Gundy. The crab. In the gut. The crab's pincers are in my gut." "Then you are in pain?" "No," Cullen said. "The crab moves slowly. A nip here, a nip there. Each day there's a little less of me. Some days I feel that there's nothing left of me at all. This is one of the better days." "Listen," Gundersen said, "I could get you downriver to Seena's place in a week. She's bound to have a medical kit, a spare tube of anticarcin for you. You aren't so far gone that we couldn't manage a remission if we act fast. And then we could ship you to Earth for template renewal and -- " "No. Forget it." "Don't 'be absurd. We aren't living in the middle ages, Ced. A case of cancer is no reason for a man to lie down in a filthy hut and wait to die. The sulidoror will set up a litter for you. I can arrange it in five minutes. And then -- " "I wouldn't ever reach Seena's and you know it," Cullen said softly. "The nildoror would pick me up the moment I came out of the mist country. You know that, too, Gundy. You have to know that." "Well -- " "I don't have the energy to play these games. You're aware, aren't you, that I'm the most wanted man on this planet?" "I suppose so." "Were you sent here to fetch me?" "The nildoror asked me to bring you back," Gundersen admitted. "I had to agree to it in order to get permission to come up here." "Of course." Bitterly. "But I stipulated that I wouldn't bring you out unless you'd come also insisted on certain other conditions. Look, Ced, I'm not here as Judas. I want to help you. Let me bring you down to Seena's so you can get the treatment that you have to -- " "I told you," Cullen said, "the nildoror would grab me as soon as they had a chance." "Even if they knew you were mortally ill and being taken down to the falls for medical attention?" "Especially so. They'd love to save my soul as I lay dying. I won't give them the satisfaction, Gundy. I'm going to stay here, safe, beyond their reach, and wait for the crab to finish with me. It won't be long now. Two days, three, a week, perhaps the end will come even tonight." "If I got a promise from the nildoror to let you alone until you were able to undergo treat -- " "I won't go. You'd have to force me. And that's outside the scope of your promise to the nildoror, isn't it?" Cullen smiled for the first time in some minutes. "There's a flask of wine in the corner there. Be a good fellow." Gundersen went to get it. He had to walk around several sulidoror. His colloquy with Cullen had been so intense, so private, that he had quite forgotten that the hut was full of sulidoror: his two guides, Cullen's guards, and at least half a dozen others. He picked up the wine and carried it to the pallet. Cullen, his hand trembling nevertheless managed not to spill any. "Is it agreed," Cullen said, "that you won't make any attempt to take me out of this village? I know you wouldn't seriously consider handing me over to the nildoror. But you might decide to get me out of here for the sake of saving my life. Don't do that either -- because the effect would be the same. The nildoror would get me. I stay here. Agreed?" Gundersen was silent a while. "Agreed," he said finally. lay back, face toward the wall, and said, "I wish you hadn't wasted so much of my energy on that one point. We have so much more to talk about. And now I don't have the strength." "I'll come back later. Rest, now." "No. Stay here. Talk to me. Tell me where you've been all these years, why you came back here, whom you've seen, what you've done. Give me the whole story. I'll rest while I'm listening. And afterward -- and afterward -- " Cullen's voice faded. It seemed to Gundersen that he had slipped into unconsciousness or perhaps merely into sleep. Cullen's eyes were closed; his breath was slow and labored. Gundersen remained silent. He paced the hut uneasily, studying the hides tacked to the walls, the crude furniture, the debris of old meals. The sulidoror ignored him. Now there were eight in the hut, keeping their distance from the dying man and yet focusing all their attention on him. Momentarily Gundersen was unnerved by the presence of these giant two-legged beasts, these nightmare creatures with fangs and claws and thick tails and drooping snouts, who came and went and moved about as though he were less than nothing to them. Cullen said, eyes still shut, "I'm waiting. Tell me things." Gundersen began to speak. He spoke of his eight years on Earth, collapsing them into six curt sentences. He spoke of the restlessness that had come over him on Earth, of his cloudy and mystifying compulsion to return to Belzagor, of the sense of a need to find a new structure for his life now that he had lost the scaffolding that the Company had been for him. He spoke of his journey through the forest to the lakeside encampment and of how he had danced among the nildoror -- and how they had wrung from him the qualified promise to bring them Cullen. He spoke of Dykstra and his woman in their forest ruin, editing the tale somewhat out of respect for Cullen's own condition, though he suspected that such charity was unnecessary. He spoke of being with Seena again on the Night of Five Moons. He spoke of Kurtz and how he had been changed through rebirth. He spoke of his pilgrimage into the mist country. He was certain at least three times that Cullen had fallen asleep, and once he thought that the sick man's breathing had ceased altogether. Each time Gundersen paused, though, Cullen gave some faint indication -- a twitch of the mouth, a flick of the fingertips -- that he should go on. At the end, when Gundersen had nothing left to say, he stood in silence a long while, waiting for some new sign from Cullen. At last, faintly, Cullen said, "Then?" "Then I came here." "And where do you go after here?" "To the mountain of rebirth," said Gundersen quietly. Cullen's eyes opened. With a nod he asked that his pillows be propped up and he sat forward, locking his fingers into his coverlet. "Why do you want to go there?" "To find out what kind of thing rebirth is." "You saw Kurtz?" "Yes." "He also wanted to learn more about rebirth," Cullen said. "He already understood the mechanics of it but he had to know its inwardness as well. To try it for himself. It wasn't just curiosity, of course. Kurtz had spiritual troubles. He was courting self-immolation because he'd persuaded himself he needed to atone for his whole life. Quite true, too. Quite true. So he went for rebirth. The sulidoror obliged him. Well, behold the man. I saw him just before I came north." "For a while I thought I might try rebirth also," said Gundersen, caught unawares by the words surfacing in his mind. "For the same reasons. The mixture of curiosity and guilt. But I think I've given up the idea now. I'll go to the mountain to see what they do but I doubt that I'll ask them to do it to me." "Because of the way Kurtz looks?" "Partly. And also because my original plan looks too -- well, too willed. Too unspontaneous. An intellectual choice, not an act of faith. You can't just go up there and volunteer for rebirth in a coldly scientific way. You have to be driven to it." "As Kurtz was?" Cullen asked. "Exactly." "And as you aren't?" "I don't know any longer," Gundersen said. "I thought I was driven, too. I told Seena I was. But somehow, now that I'm so close to the mountain, the whole quest has started to seem artificial to me." "You're sure you aren't just afraid to go through with it?" Gundersen shrugged. "Kurtz wasn't a pretty sight." "There are good rebirths and bad rebirths," Cullen said. "He had a bad rebirth. How it turns out depends on the quality of one's soul, I gather, and on a lot of other things. Give us some more wine, will you?" Gundersen extended the flask. Cullen, who appeared to be gaining strength, drank deeply. "Have you been through rebirth?" Gundersen asked. "Me? Never. Never even been tempted. But I know a good deal about it. Kurtz wasn't the first of us to try it, of course. At least a dozen went before him." "Who?" Cullen mentioned some names. They were Company men, all of them from the list of those who had died while on field duty. Gundersen had known some of them. Others were figures out of the far past, from before he or Cullen had ever come to Holman's World. Cullen said, "And there were others. Kurtz looked them up in the records and the nildoror gave him the rest of the story. None of them ever returned from the mist country. Four or five of them turned out like Kurtz -- transformed into horrible monsters." "And the others?" "Into archangels, I suppose. The nildoror were vague about it. Some sort of transcendental merging with the universe, an evolution to the next bodily level, a sublime ascent -- that kind of thing. All that's certain is that they never came back to Company territory. Kurtz was hoping for an outcome like that. But unfortunately Kurtz was Kurtz, half angel and half demon -- and that's how he was reborn. And that's what Seena nurses. In a way it's a pity you've lost your urge, Gundy. You might just turn out to have one of the good rebirths. Can you call Hortenebor over? I think I should have some fresh air if we're going to talk so much. He's the sulidor leaning against the wall there. The one who looks after me, who hauls my old bones around. He'll carry me outside." "It was snowing a little while ago, Ced." "So much the better. Shouldn't a dying man see some snow? This is the most beautiful place in the universe," Cullen said. "Right here in front of this hut. I want to see it. Get me Hor-tenebor." sulidor. At a word from Cullen, Hor-tenebor scooped the fragile, shrunken invalid into his immense arms and bore him through the door flap of the hut, setting him down on a cradlelike framework overlooking the lake. Gundersen followed. A heavy mist had descended on the village, concealing even the huts closest at hand, but the lake itself was clearly visible under the gray sky. Fugitive wisps of mist hung just above the lake's dull surface. A bitter chill was in the air but Cullen, wrapped only in a thin hide, showed no discomfort. He held out his hand, palm upraised, and watched with the wonder of a child as snowflakes struck it. At length Gundersen said, "Will you answer a question?" "If I can." "What was it you did that got the nildoror so upset?" "They didn't tell you when they sent you after me?" "No," Gundersen said. "They said that you would -- and that in any case it didn't really matter to them whether I knew or not. Seena didn't know either. And I can't begin to guess. You were never the torturing intelligent species. You couldn't have been playing around with the serpent venom the way Kurtz was -- he was doing that for years and they never tried to grab him. So what could you possibly have done that caused so much -- " "The sin of Actaeon," said Cullen. "Pardon?" "The sin of Actaeon, which was no sin at all but really just an accident. In Greek myth he was a huntsman who blundered upon Diana bathing and saw what he shouldn't have seen. She changed him into a stag and he was torn to pieces by his own hounds." "I don't understand what that has to do with -- " Cullen drew a long breath. "Did you ever go up on the central plateau?" he asked, his voice low but firm. "Yes. Yes, of course you did. I remember, you crashlanded there, you and Seena, on your way back to Fire Point after a holiday on the coast. You were stranded a little while and weird animals bothered you and that was when Seena first started to hate the plateau. Right? Then you know what a strange and somehow mysterious place it is, a place apart from the rest of this planet, where not even the nildoror like to go. All right. I started to go there, a year or two after relinquishment. It became my private retreat. The animals of the plateau interested me, the insects, the plants, everything. Even the air had a special taste -- sweet, clean. Before relinquishment, you know, it would have been considered a little eccentric for anybody to visit the plateau on his free time#or at any other time. Afterward nothing mattered to anyone. The world was mine. I made a few plateau trips. I collected specimens. I brought some little oddities to Seena and she got to be fond of them before she realized they were from the plateau -- and little by little I helped her overcome her irrational fear of the plateau. Seena and I went there often together, sometimes with Kurtz also. There's a lot of flora and fauna from the plateau at Shangri-la Station, as maybe you noticed. Right? We collected all that. The plateau came to seem like any other place to me, nothing supernatural, nothing eerie, merely a neglected backwoods region. And it was my specia place, where I went whenever I felt myself growing empty or bored or stale. A year ago, maybe a little less than a year, I went to the plateau. Kurtz had just come back from his rebirth and Seena was terribly depressed by what had happened to him -- and I wanted to get her a gift, some animal, to cheer her up. This time I came down a little to the southwest of my usual landing zone, over in a part of the plateau I had never seen before, where two rivers meet. One of the first things I noticed was how ripped-up the shrubbery was. Nildoror! Plenty nildoror! An immense area had been grazed -- you know how nildoror graze. It made me curious. Once in a while I had seen an isolated nildor on the plateau -- always at a distance -- but never a whole herd. So I followed the line of devastation. On and on it went, this scar through the forest, with broken branches and trampled underbrush, all the usual signs. Night came and I camped. And it seemed to me I heard drums in the night. Which was foolish, since nildoror don't use drums. I realized after a while that I heard them dancing, pounding the ground and that the sounds were reverberations carried through the soil. There were other noises, too: screams, bellows, the cries of frightened animals. I had to know what was happening. So I broke camp in the middle of the night and crept through the jungle, hearing the noise grow louder and louder. Finally I reached the edge of the trees, where the jungle gave way to a kind of broad savannah running down to the river. And there in the open were maybe five hundred nildoror. Three moons were up and I had no trouble seeing, Gundy, would you believe that they had painted themselves? Like savages -- like something out of a nightmare. There were three deep pits in the middle of the clearing. One of the pits was filled with a kind of wet red mud. The other two contained branches and berries and leaves that the nildoror had trampled to release dark pigments, one black, one blue. I watched the nildoror going down to these pits. First they'd roll in the pit of red mud and come up plastered with it, absolutely scarlet. Next they'd go to the adjoining pits and give each other dark stripes over the red, hosing it on with their trunks. A barbaric sight -- all that color, all that flesh. When they were properly decorated, they'd go running -- not strolling, running -- across the field to the place of dancing and they'd begin that fourstep routine. You know it: boom boom boom boom. But infinitely more fierce and frightening now on account of the warpaint. An army of wild-looking nildoror, stamping their feet, nodding their tremendous heads, lifting their trunks, bellowing, stabbing their tusks into the ground, capering, singing, flapping their ears. Frightening, Gundy, frightening. And the moonlight on their painted bodies. forest, I circled around to the west to get a better view. And saw something on the far side of the dancers that was even stranger than the paint. I saw a corral with log walls -- huge, three or four times the size of this village. The nildoror couldn't have built it alone; they might have uprooted trees and hauled them with their trunks but they must have needed sulidoror to help pile them up and shape them. Inside the corral were plateau animals, hundreds of them, all sizes and shapes. The big leafeating ones with giraffe necks and the kind like rhinos with antlers. Timid ones like gazelles and dozens that I'd never even seen before. They were all crowded together as if in a stockyard. Sulidoror hunters must have been out beating the bush for days to drive that menagerie together. The animals were restless and scared. So was I. I crouched in the darkness, waiting. Finally all the nildoror were properly painted and a ritual started in the midst of the dancing group. They began to cry out, mostly in their ancient language, the one we can't understandbut they were also talking in ordinary rtildororu and eventually I understood what was going on. Do you know who these painted beasts were? They were sinning nildoror, nildoror who were in disgrace. This was the place of atonement and the festival of purification. Any nildor who had been tinged with corruption in the past year had to come here and be cleansed. Gundy, do you know what sin they had commited? They had taken the venom from Kurtz. The old game, the one everybody used to play down at the serpent station, give the nildoror a swig, take one yourself, let the hallucinations come? These painted prancing nildoror here had all been led astray by Kurtz. Their souls were stained. The Earthman-devil had found their one vulnerable place, the one area of temptation they couldn't resist. So here they were, trying to cleanse themselves. The central plateau is the nildoror purgatory. They don't live there because they need it for their rites and obviously you don't set up an ordinary encampment in a holy place. "They danced, Gundy, for hours. But that wasn't the rite of atonement. It was only the prelude to the rite. They danced until I was dizzy from watching and hearingthe red bodies, the dark stripes, the boom of their feet -- and then, when no moons were left in the sky, when dawn was near, the real ceremony started. I watched it -- and I looked right down into the darkness of the race, into the real nildoror soul. Two old nildoror approached the corral and started kicking down the gate. They broke an opening maybe ten meters wide, stepped back and the penned-up animals came rushing out onto the plain. The animals were terrified from all the noise and dancing and from being imprisoned. They ran in circles, not knowing what to do or where to go. And the rest of the nildoror charged into them. The peaceful, noble, non-violent nildoror, you know? Snorting. Trampling. Spearing with their tusks. Lifting animals with their trunks and hurling them into trees. An orgy of slaughter. I became sick, just watching. A nildor can be a terrible machine of death. All that weight, those tusks, the trunk, the big feet -- everything berserk, all restraints off. Some of the animals escaped, of course. But most were trapped right in the middle of the chaos. Crushed bodies everywhere, rivers of blood -- scavengers came out of the forest to have dinon. That's how the nildoror atone: sin for sin. That's how they purge themselves. The plateau is where they loose their violence, Gundy. They put aside all their restraints and let out the beast that's within them. I've never felt such horror as when I watched how they cleansed their souls. You know how much respect I had for the nildoror. Still have. But to see a thing like that, a massacre, a vision of hell -- Gundy, I was numb with despair. The nildoror didn't seem to enjoy the killing but they weren't hesitant about it, either -- they just went on and on because it had to be done, because this was the form of the ceremony and they thought nothing more of it than Socrates would think of sacrificing a lamb to Zeus, a cock to Aesculapius. That was the real horror, I think. I watched the nildoror destroying life for the sake of their souls and it was like dropping through a trapdoor, entering a new world whose existence I had never even suspected, a dark new world beneath the old. Then dawn came. The sun rose, lovely, golden, light glistening on the trampled corpses -- and the nildoror were sitting calmly in the midst of the devastation, resting, calm, purged, all their inner storms over. It was amazingly peaceful. They had wrestled with their demons and they had won. They had come through all the night's horror, all the ghastliness, and -- I don't know how -- (they really were purged and purified. I can't tell you how to find salvation through violence and destruction. It's alien to me and probably to you. Kurtz knew, though. He took the same road as the nildoror. He fell and fell and fell, through level after level of evil, enjoying his corruption, glorying in depravity, and then in the end he was still able to judge himself and find himself wanting, and recoil at the darkness he found inside himself, and so he went and sought rebirth, and showed that the angel within him wasn't altogether dead. This finding of purity by passing through evil -- you'll have to come to terms with it by yourself, Gundy. I can't help you. All I can do is tell you of the vision I had at sunrise that morning beside the field of blood. I looked into an abyss. I peered over the edge, and saw where Kurtz had gone, where these nildoror had gone. Where perhaps you'll go. I couldn't follow. "And then they almost caught me. While the frenzy was on them I guess they hadn't noticed -- especially with hundreds of animals giving off fear-smells in the corral. But they began to sniff. Trunks started to rise and move around like periscopes. The odor of sacrilege was orr the air. The reek of a blaspheming, spying Earlhman. Five, ten minutes they sniffed while I stood in the bushes, still wrapped in my vision, not even remotely realizing they were sniffing me. But suddenly it dawned on me that they knew I was there. I turned and began to slip away through the forest and they came after me. Dozens. Can you imagine what it's like to be chased through the jungle by a herd of angry nildoror? But I could fit through places too small for them. I gave them the slip. I ran and ran and ran -- until I fell down dizzy in a thicket and vomited. I rested until then I heard them bashing along on my trail and I ran some more. I came to a swamp and jumped in, hoping they'd lose my scent. I hid in the reeds and marshes, while things I couldn't see nipped at me from below. And the nildoror ringed the entire region. We know you're in there, they called to me. Come out. Come out. We forgive you and we wish to purify you. They explained it all quite reasonably to me. I had inadvertently -- oh, of course, inadvertently, they were diplomatic -- seen a ceremony that no one but a nildor was allowed to see and now it would be necessary to wipe what I had seen from my mind, which could be managed by means of a simple technique that they didn't bother to describe to me. A drug, I guess. They invited me to come have part of my mind blotted out. I didn't accept. I didn't say anything. They went right on talking, telling me that they held no no malice, that they realized it obviously hadn't been my intention to watch their secret ceremony -- but nevertheless since I had seen it they must now take steps, et cetera, et cetera. I began to crawl downstream, breathing through a hollow reed. When I surfaced the nildoror were still calling to me. Now they sounded angry, as far as it's possible to tell such a thing. They seemed annoyed that I had refused to come out. They didn't blame me for spying on them but they did object that I wouldn't let them purify me. That was my real crime -- not that I hid in the bushes and watched them but declined afterward to undergo the treatment. That's what they still want me for. I stayed in the creek all day. When it got dark I slithered out and picked up the vector-beep of my beetle, which turned out to be about half a kilometer away. I expected to find it guarded by nildoror but it wasn't. I got in, cleared out fast and landed at Seena's place by midnight. I knew I didn't have much time. The nildoror would be after me from one side of the continent to the other. I told her what had happened, more or less, collected some supplies and took off for the mist country. The sulidoror would give me sanctuary. They're jealous of their sovereignty -- blasphemy or not, I'd be safe here. I came to is village. I explored the mist country a good bit. Then one day I felt the crab in my gut and I knew it was all over. Since then I've been waiting for the end, and the end isn't far away." He fell silent. Gundersen, after a pause, asked, "But why not risk going back? Whatever the nildoror want to do to you can't be as bad as sitting on the porch of a sulidor hut and dying of cancer." Cullen made no reply. "What if they give you a memory-wiping drug?" Gundersen asked. "Isn't it better to lose a bit of your past than to lose your whole future? If you'll only come back, Ced, and let us treat your disease -- " "The trouble with you, Gundy, is that you're too logical," Cullen said. "Such a sensible, reasonable, rational chap! There's another flask of wine inside. Would you bring it out?" Gundersen walked past the crouching sulidoror into the hut and prowled the musty darkness a few moments, looking for the wine. As he searched, the solution to the Cullen situation presented itself: instead of bringing Cullen to the medicine, he would bring the medicine to Cullen. He would abandon his journey toward the rebirth mountain at least temporarily and go down to Shangri-la Falls to get a dose of anticarcin for him. It might not be too late to check the cancer. Afterward, restored to health, Cullen could face the nildoror or not, as he pleased. What happens between him and the nildoror, Gundersen told himself, will not be a matter that concerns me. I regard my treaty with Vol'himyor as fulfilled. He located the wine and went outside with it. Cullen leaned backward on the cradle, his chin on his chest, his eyes closed, his breath slow, as if his lengthy monologue had exhausted him. Gundersen did not disturb him. He put the wine down and walked away, strolling for more than an hour, thinking, reaching no conclusions. He returned. Cullen had not moved. "Still asleep?" Gundersen asked the sulidoror. "It is the long sleep," one of them replied. T HE mist came in close, bringing jewels of frost that hung from every tree, every hut. By the brink of the leaden lake Gundersen cremated Cullen's wasted body with one long fiery burst of the fusion torch, while sulidoror looked on, silent, solemn. The soil sizzled a while when he had finished and the mist whirled wildly as cold air rushed in to fill the zone of warmth his torch had made. Within the hut were a few unimportant possessions. Gundersen searched through them, hoping to find a journal, a memoir, anything with the imprint of Cedric Cullen's soul and personality. But he found only some rusted tools, a box of dried insects and lizards and faded clothing. He left these things where he found them. The sulidoror brought him a cold dinner. They let him eat undisturbed on the wooden cradle outside Cullen's hut. Darkness came and he retreated into the hut to sleep. Se-holomir and Yi-gartigok posted themselves as guards before the entrance, although he had not asked them to stay there. Early in the evening he fell asleep. He, dreamed, oddly, not of the newly dead Cullen but of the still living Kurtz. He saw Kurtz trekking through the mist country, the old Kurtz, not yet metamorphosed to his present state: infinitely tall, pale, eyes burning in the domed skull, glowing with strange intelligence. Kurtz carried a pilgrim's staff and strode tirelessly forward into the mist. Accompanying him, yet not really with him, was a procession of nildoror, their green bodies stained bright red by pigmented mud; they halted whenever Kurtz halted. They kneeled beside him and, from time to time, he let them drink from a sleek tubular canteen he was carrying. Whenever Kurtz offered his canteen to the nildoror, he and not they underwent a transformation. His lips joined in a smooth sealing; his nose lengthened; his eyes, his fingers, his toes, his legs, changed and changed again. Fluid, mobile, Kurtz kept no form for long. At one stage in the journey he became a sulidor in all respects but one -- his own high-vaulted bald head surmounted the massive hairy body. Then the fur melted from him, the claws shrank and he took on another form -- became a lean loping thing, rapacious and swift, with double-jointed elbows and long spindly legs. More changes followed. The nildoror sang hymns of adoration, chanting in thick monotonous skeins of gray sound. Kurtz was gracious. He bowed, smiled, waved. He passed around his canteen, which never needed replenishing. He rippled through cycle upon cycle of dizzy metamorphoses. From his backpack he drew gifts that he distributed among the nildoror: torches, knives, books, message cubes, computers, statues, color organs, butterflies, flasks of wine, sensors, transport modules, musical instruments, beads, old etchings, holy medallions, baskets of flowers, bombs, flares, shoes, keys, toys, spears. Each gift fetched ecstatic sighs and snorts and moos of gratitude from the nildoror; they frolicked about him, lifting their new treasures in their trunks, excitedly displaying them to one another. You see? Kurtz cried.  am your benejactor.  am your friend. I am the resurrection and the life. They came now to the place of rebirth, not a mountain in Gundersen's dream but rather an abyss, dark and deep, at the rim of which the nildoror gathered and waited. And Kurtz, undergoing so many transformations that his body flickered and shifted from moment to moment, now wearing horns, now covered with scales, now clad in shimmering flame, walked forward while the nildoror cheered him, saying to him, This is the place, rebirth will be yours. He stepped into the abyss, which enfolded him in absolute night. And then from the depths of the pit came a single prolonged cry, a shrill wail of terror and dismay so awful that it awakened Gundersen, who lay sweating and shivering for hours waiting for dawn. his pack and made signs of departing. Se-holomir and Yi-gartigok came to him. One of the sulidoror asked, "Where will you go now?" "North." "Shall we go with you?" "I'll go alone," Gundersen said. It would be a difficult journey, perhaps a dangerous one, but not impossible. He had direction-finding equipment, food concentrates, a power supply and other such material. He had the necessary stamina. He knew that the sulidoror villages along the way would extend hospitality to him if he needed it. But he hoped not to need it. He had been escorted long enough, first by Srin'gahar, then by various sulidoror--he felt he should finish this pilgrimage without a guide. Two hours after sunrise he set out. The air was crisp and cool and clear and the mist was high. He could see surprisingly far in all directions. He went through the forest behind the village and emerged on a fair-sized hill, from the top of which he was able to gauge the landscape ahead. He saw rugged, heavily forested country, much broken by rivers and streams and lakes -- and he succeeded in glimpsing the tip of the mountain of rebirth, a jagged sentinel in the north. That rosy peak on the horizon seemed close enough to grasp. Just reach out; just extend the fingers. And the fissures and hillocks and slopes that separated him from his goal were no challenge; they could be traversed in a few quick bounds. His body felt eager for the attempt -- heartbeat steady, vision exceptionally keen, legs moving smoothly and tirelessly. He sensed an inward soaring of the soul, a restrained but ecstatic upsweep toward life and power; the phantoms that had veiled him for so many years were dropping away; in this chill zone of mist and snow he felt annealed, purified, tempered, ready to accept whatever must be accepted. A strange energy surged through him. He did not mind the thinness of the air, nor the cold, nor the bleakness of the land. It was a morning of unusual clarity. Bright sunlight cascaded through the lofty covering of fog and imtrees and the bare soil. He walked steadily onward. T HE mist closed in at midday. The giant trees became serious obstacles; their gnarled roots and writhing buttresses now were traps for unwary feet. He picked his way with care. Then he entered a region where large flat-topped boulders jutted at shallow angles from the ground, one after another. Slick, mist-slippery slabs formed stepping stones to the land beyond. He had to crawl over them, blindly feeling along, not knowing how much of a drop he was likely to encounter at the far end of each boulder. Jumping off was an act of faith; one of the drops turned out to be about four meters and he landed hard, so that his ankles tingled for fifteen minutes afterward. Now he felt the first fatigue of the day spreading through his thighs and knees. But yet the mood of controlled ecstasy, sober and nevertheless jubilant, remained with him. He made a late lunch beside a small, flawlessly circular pond, mirror-bright, rimmed by tali narrow-trunked trees and hemmed in by a tight band of mist. He relished the privacy, the solitude of the place; it was like a spherical room with walls of cotton, within which he was perfectly isolated from a perplexing universe. He was reluctant to leave. As he was gathering his belongings an unwelcome sound punctured his seclusion: the drone of an engine not far overhead. Shading his eyes against the glare of the mist, he looked up and after a moment caught a glimpse of an airborne beetle flying just below the cloud ceiling. The snubnosed little vehicle moved in a tight circle, as if looking for something. For me? He wondered. A moment later the beetle was gone, vanishing in a bank of fog just to the west. But the magic of the afternoon was shattered. An hour's march through a forest of slender trees with red gummy-looking bark and Gundersen encountered three sulidoror, the first he had seen since parting from Yi-gartigok and Si-holomir that morning. These three evidently were a hunting party returning to a nearby village; two of them carried, lashed to a pole slung from shoulder to shoulder, the trussedup carcass of some large fourlegged grazing animal with velvety black skin and long, recurved horns. He felt a quick instinctive jolt of fear at the sight of the three gigantic creatures -- but to his surprise the fear faded almost as rapidly as it came. The sulidoror, for all their ferocious mien, simply did not hold a threat. True, they could kill him with a slap but what of that? They had no more reason to attack him than he had to burn them with his torch. And, here in their natural surroundings, they did not even seem bestial or savage. Large, yes. Powerful. Mighty of fang and claw. But natural, fitting, proper, and so not terrifying. "Does the traveler journey well?" asked the lead sulidor, the one who bore no part of the burden of the kill. He spoke in a soft and civil tone, using the language of the nildoror. "The traveler journeys well," said Gundersen. He improvised a return salutation: "Is the forest kind to the huntsmen?" "As you see, the huntsmen have fared well. If your path goes toward our village you are welcome to come share our kill this night." "I go toward the mountain of rebirth." "Our village lies in that direction. Will you come?" He accepted the offer, for night was coming on and a harsh wind was slicing through the trees. The sulidoror village was a small one, at the foot of a sheer cliff half an hour's walk to the northeast. Gundersen passed a pleasant night there. The villagers were courteous, though aloof in a manner wholly free of any hostility. They gave him a corner of a hut, supplied him with food and drink and left him alone. In the morning they brought him fruits and fish and he took his leave. The second day of his journey alone was not as rewarding as the first. The weather was bad, cold and damp and frequently snowy, with dense mist hanging low nearly all the time. He wasted much of the morning by trapping himself in a cul-de-sac, a long ridge of hills to his right, another to his left and, unexpectedly, a broad and uncrossable lake appearing in front of him. Swimming it was unthinkable -- he might have to pass several hours in its frigid water and he would not survive the exposure. So he had to go on a wearying eastward detour over the lesser ridge of hills, which swung him about so that by midday he was in no higher a latitude than he had known the night before. The sight of the fog-wreathed rebirth mountain drew him on, though, and for two hours of the afternoon he had the illusion that he was making up for the morning's delay, only to discover that he was cut off by a swift and vast river flowing from west to east, evidently the one that fed the lake that had blocked him earlier. He did not dare to swim this, either -- the current would sweep him into the distant ocean before he had reached the farther bank. Instead he used up more than an hour in following the river upstream, until he came to a place where he might ford it. It was even wider here than below but its bed looked much more shallow and some geological upheaval had strewn a line of boulders across it like a necklace, from bank to bank. A dozen of the boulders jutted up, white water swirling around them -- the others, though submerged, were visible just below the surface. Gundersen started across. He was able to hop from the top of one boulder to the next, keeping dry until he had gone nearly a third of the way. Then he had to scramble in the water, wading shin-deep, slipping and groping. The mist enveloped him. He might have been alone in the universe, with nothing ahead but billows of whiteness, nothing to the rear but the same. He could see no trees, no shore, not even the boulders awaiting him. He concentrated rigidly on keeping his footing and staying to his path. Putting one foot down awry, he slid and toppled, landing in a half-crouch in the river, drenched to the armpits, buffeted by the current and so dizzied for a moment that he could not rise. After a few minutes he found the strength to get to his feet again and tottered forward, gasping, until he reached a boulder whose upper face stood half a meter above the water. He kneeled on it, chilled, soaked, shivering, trying to shake himself dry. Perhaps five minutes passed. With the mist clinging close he got no drier -- but at least he had his breath again and resumed his crossing. Experimentally reaching out the tip of a boot, he found another dry-topped boulder just ahead. He negotiated it. Still another was beyond it. Then came another. The going became easier -- he would make it to the far side without another soaking. His pace quickened and he traversed another pair of boulders. Then, through a rift in the mist, he was granted a glimpse of the shore. Something seemed wrong. dipped his left hand in the water. He felt the thrust of the current coming from the right and striking his open palm. Wearily he worked out the topography of his situation several times and each time came to the same dismaying conclusion. If  am making a northward crossing of a river that flows from west to east I should feel the current coming from my left... Somehow, he realized, he had turned himself around while scrambling for purchase in the water and since then he had with great diligence been heading back toward the southern bank of the river. His faith in his own judgment was destroyed. He was tempted to wait here, huddled on this rock, for the mist to clear before going on. Then it occurred to him that he might have to wait through the night or even longer. He also realized belatedly that he was carrying gear designed to cope with just such problems. Fumbling in his back-pack, he pulled out the small cool shaft of his compass and aimed it at the horizon, sweeping his arm in an arc that terminated where the compass emitted its north-indicating beep. It confirmed his conclusions about the current, and he started across the river again, shortly coming to the place of the submerged stepping stones where he had fallen. This time he had no difficulties. On the far shore he stripped and dried his clothing and himself with the lowestpower beam of his fusion torch. He spent an uncomfortable night huddled under a bush. The next day was warmer and less misty. All went well, and he was able to cope with the occasional streams or rivulets that crossed his path. The land here was ridged and folded as though giant hands, one to the north and one to the south, had pushed the globe together; but as Gundersen was going down one slope and up the next, he was also gaining altitude constantly, for the entire continent sloped upward toward the mighty plateau upon which the rebirth mountain was reared. In the early afternoon the prevailing pattern of east-west folds in the land subsided -- here the landscape was skewed around so that he found himself walking parallel to a series of gentle north-south furrows, which opened into a wide circular meadow, grassy but treeless. The large animals of the north, whose names Gundersen did not know, grazed here in great snow-covered ground. There seemed to be only four or five species -- something heavy-legged and hump-backed like a badly designed cow and something in the style of an oversized gazelle -- there were hundreds or even thousands of each kind. Far to the east, at the very border of the plain, Gundersen saw what appeared to be a small sulidoror hunting party rounding up some of the animals. He heard the drone of the engine again. The beetle he had seen the other day now returned, passing quite low overhead. Instinctively Gundersen threw himself to the ground, hoping to go unnoticed. About him the animals milled uneasily, perplexed at the noise, but they did not bolt. The beetle drifted to a landing about a thousand meters north of him. He decided that Seena must have come after him, hoping to intercept him before he could submit himself to the sulidoror of the mountain of rebirth. But he was wrong. The hatch of the beetle opened and Vah Beneker and his tourists began to emerge. Gundersen wriggled forward until he was concealed behind a tall stand of thistlelike plants on a low hummock. He could not abide the thought of meeting that crew again, not at this stage in his pilgrimage, when he had been purged of so many vestiges of the Gundersen who had been. They were walking up to the animals, photographing them, even daring to touch some of the more sluggish beasts. Gundersen heard their voices and their laughter cracking the congealed silence. Isolated words drifted randomly toward him, as meaningless as Kurtz' flow of dream-fogged gibberish. He heard, too, Van Beneker's voice cutting through the chatter, describing, explaining and expounding. These nine humans before him on the meadow seemed as alien to Gundersen as the sulidoror. More so, perhaps. He was aware that these last few days of mist and chill, this solitary odyssey through a world of whiteness and quiet, had worked a change in him that he barely comprehended. He felt lean of soul, stripped of the excess baggage of the spirit, a simpler man in all respects -- and yet more complex. He waited an hour or more, still hidden, while the party finished toiring the meadow. Then everyone returned to the beetle. Where now? Would Van take them north to spy on the mountain of rebirth? No. No. Van Beneker wouldn't dare to trespass on that mysterious precinct. When the beetle took off, though, it headed toward the north. Gundersen, in his distress, shouted to it to turn back. As though heeding him, the gleaming little vehicle veered round as it gained altitude. Van Beneker must have been trying to catch a tailwind, nothing more. The beetle made for the south. The tour was over, then. Gundersen saw it pass directly above him and disappear into a lofty bank of fog. Choking with relief he rushed forward, scattering the puzzled herds with wild, loud whoops. Now all obstacles seemed to be behind him. Gundersen crossed the valley, negotiated a snowy divide without effort, forded a shallow brook, pushed his way through a forest of short, thick, tightlypacked trees with narrow, pointed crowns. He slipped into an easy rhythm of travel, no longer paying heed to cold, mist, damp, altitude or fatigue. He was tuned to his task. When he slept he slept soundly and well. When he foraged for food to supplement his concentrates he found that which was good. When he sought to cover distance he covered it. The peace of the misty forest inspired him to prodigies. Sometimes he saw sulidoror tracks in the thin crust of snow that covered much of the land but he met no one. The beetle did not return. Even his dreams were empty; the Kurtz-phantom that had plagued him earlier was absent now, and he dreamed only blank abstractions, forgotten by the time of awakening. He did not know how many days had elapsed since the death of Cedric Cullen. Time had flowed and melted in upon itself. He felt no impatience, no weariness, no sense of wanting it all to be over. And so it came as a mild surprise to him when, as he began to ascend a wide, smooth, shelving ledge of stone, about thirty meters wide, bordered by a wall of icicles and decorated in places by turfs of grass and scraggly trees, he looked up and realized that he had commenced the scaling of the mountain of rebirth. XV seemed to rise dramatically from the misty plain in a single sweeping thrust. But now that Gundersen was actually upon its lower slopes he saw that at close range it dissolved into a series of ramps of pink stone, one atop another. He had no sense of a unified bulk. He could not even see the lofty peaks and turrets and domes that he knew must hover thousands of meters above him. A layer of clinging mist severed the mountain less than halfway up. allowing him to see only the broad, incomprehensible base. The ascent was easy. To the right and to the left Gundersen saw sheer faces, impossible spires, fragile bridges of stone linking ledge to ledge; but there was also a switchbacking path, evidently of natural origin, that gave the patient climber access to the higher reaches. The dung of innumerable nildoror littered this long stone ramp, telling him that he must be on the right route. Chattering munzoror leaped from ledge to ledge, or walked with soft, shuffling steps across terrifying abysses spanned by strands of vines. Goatlike beasts, white with diamond-shaped black markings, capered in graveled pockets of unreachable slopes and launched booming halloos that echoed through the afternoon. Gundersen climbed steadily. He wondered when some sulidor would intercept him. This was, after all, the most sacred spot on this planet. Were there no guardians? No one to stop him, to question him, to turn him back? He came to a place about two hours' climb up the mountainside where the upward slope diminished and the ramp became a long horizontal promenade, curving off to the right and vanishing beyond the mass of the mountain. As Gundersen followed it, three sulidoror appeared, coming around the bend. They glanced briefly at him and went past, taking no other notice, as though it were quite ordinary that an Earthman should be going up the mountain of rebirth. After a while the ramp turned upward again. Now an overhanging stone ledge formed a partial roof for the path but it was no shelter, for the little cackling wizenfaced munzoror nested up there, dropping down pebbles and bits of chaff and worse things. Monkeys? Rodents? They dangled by their prehensile tails, twitched their long tufted ears, spat and laughed. What were they saying? "Go away, Earthman, this is no shrine of yours!" Was that it? How about, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!" He camped for the night beneath that ledge. Munzoror several times scrambled across his face. Once he awoke to what sounded like the sobbing of a woman, deep and intense, in the abyss below. He went to the edge and found a bitter snowstorm raging. Soaring through the storm, rising and sinking, rising and sinking, were sleek, batlike things of the upper reaches, with tubular black bodies and great rubbery yellow wings. They went down until they were lost to his sight and sped upward again toward their eyries, clasping chunks of raw meat in sharp red beaks. He did not hear the sobbing again. When sleep returned he lay as if crashed like thunder against the side of the mountain.stream that sped down a smooth gully and intersected the path. Then he headed upward and, in the third hour of his morning's stint, overtook a party of nildoror plodding toward rebirth. They were not green but pinkish gray, the coloration marking them as members of the kindred race, the nildoror of the eastern hemisphere. He counted five of them moving slowly and with extreme effort. Their hides were cracked and ridged and their trunks -- thicker and longer than those of western nildoror -- drooped limply. Just to look at them wearied him. They had good reason to be tired, though -- since nildoror had no way of crossing the ocean they must have taken the land route, the terrible northeastward journey across the dry bed of the Sea of Dust. Occasionally, during his tour of duty there, Gundersen had seen eastern nildoror dragging themselves through that crystalline wasteland and at last he understood what their destination had been. "Joy of your rebirth," he called to them as he passed, using the terse eastern inflection. "Peace be on your journey," one of the nildoror replied calmly. They, too, saw nothing amiss in presence here. But he did. He could not avoid thinking of himself as an intruder, an interloper. Instinctively he began to lurk and skulk, keeping to the inside of the path as though that made him less conspicuous. He anticipated his rejection at any moment by some custodian of the mountain, stepping forth suddenly to block his climb. Above him, another two or three spirals of the path overhead, he spied a scene of activity. Two nildoror and perhaps a dozen sulidoror were in view up there, standing at the entrance to some dark chasm in the mountainside. He could see them only by taking up a precarious position at the rim of the path. A third nildor emerged from the cavern; several sulidoror went in. Some waystation, maybe, on the road to rebirth? He craned his neck to see but as he continued along his path he reached a point from which that upper level was no longer visible. It took him longer than he expected to reach it. The switchback path looped out far to one side in order to encircle a narrow jutting spiky tower of rock sprouting from the great mountain's flank and the detour proved to be lengthy. It carried Gundersen well around to the northeastern face. By the time he was able to see the level of the chasm again a sullen twilight was falling and the place he sought was still somewhere above him. Full darkness came before he was on its level. A heavy blanket of fog sat close upon the scene. He was perhaps midway up the peak. Here the path spread into the mountain's face, creating a wide plaza covered with brittle flakes of pale red stone. Against the vaulting wall of the mountain Gundersen saw a black slash, a huge inverted V, the opening of what must be a mighty cavern. Three nildoror lay sleeping to the left of this entrance and five sulidoror, to its right, seemed to be conferring. He hung back, posting himself behind a convenient boulder and allowing himself wary peeps at the mouth of the cavern. The sulidoror went within and for more than an hour nothing happened. Then he saw them emerge, awaken one of the nildoror and lead it inside. Another hour passed before they came back for the second. After a while they fetched the third. Now the night was well advanced. The mist approached and clung. The bigbeaked bat creatures, like marionettes on strings, swooped down from higher zones of the mountain, shrieking past and vanishing in the drifting fog below, returning moments later in equally swift ascent. Gundersen was alone. This was his moment to peer into the cavern but he could not bring himself to make the inspection. He hesitated, shivering, unable to go forward. His lungs were choked with mist. He could see nothing in any direction now -- even the bat beasts were invisible, mere dopplering blurts of sound as they rose and fell. He struggled to recapture some of the jauntiness he had felt on that first day after Cullen's death, setting out unaccompanied through this wintry land. He went up to the cavern. He saw only darkness. Neither sulidoror nor nildoror were evident at the entrance. He took a cautious step. The cavern was cool but its coolness was dry and far more agreeable than the mist-sodden chill outside. Drawing his fusion torch he risked a quick flash of light and discovered that he stood in the center of an immense chamber, the lofty ceiling of which was lost in the shadows overhead. The walls of the chamber were a baroque fantasy of folds and billows, buttresses, fringes and towers, all of stone, polished and translucent, gleaming like convoluted glass during the instant the light was upon them. Straight ahead, flanked by two rippling wings of stone that were parted like frozen curtains, lay a passageway. He went toward it. Two more brief flashes from the torch got him to it. Then he proceeded by touch, gripping one side of the opening and feeling his way into its depths. The corridor bent sharply to the left, and, about twenty paces farther on, angled just as sharply the other way. As Gundersen came around the second bend a dim light greeted him. Here a pale green fungoid growth lining the ceiling afforded a minimal sort of illumination. He felt relieved and yet suddenly vulnerable, for, while he now could see, he could also be seen. T HE corridor was. about twice a nildor's width and three times a nildor's height, rising to the peaked vault in which the fungoids dwelled. It stretched for what seemed an infinite distance into the mountain. Branching off it on both sides, Gundersen saw, were secondary chambers and passages. ' He advanced and peered into the nearest chamber. It held something that was large and strange and apparently alive. On the floor of a bare stone cell lay a mass of pink flesh, shapeless and still. Gundersen made out short thick limbs and a tail curled tightly over broad flanks. He could not see the creature's head or any distinguishing marks by which he could associate it with a species he knew. It might have been a nildor but it did not seem quite large enough. As he watched it swelled with the intake of a breath and slowly subsided. Many minutes passed before it took another breath. Gundersen moved on. In the next cell he found a similar sleeping mound of unidentifiable flesh. In the third cell lay another. The fourth cell, on the opposite side of the corridor, contained a nildor of the western species, also in deep slumber. The cell beside it was occupied by a sulidor lying oddly on its back, its limbs poking rigidly upward. The next cell held a sulidor in the same position but otherwise quite startlingly different, for it had shed its whole thick coat of fur and lay naked, revealing awesome muscles beneath a gray, slick-looking skin. Continuing, Gundersen came to a chamber that housed something even more bizarre -- a figure that had a nildor's spines, tusks and trunk but a sulidor's powerful arms and legs and a sulidor's frame. What nightmare composite was this? Gundersen stood awed before it for a long while, trying to comprehend how the head of a nildor might have been joined to the body of a sulidor. He realized that no such joining could have occured. The sleeper here simply partook of the characteristics of both races in a single body. A hybrid? A genetic mingling? He did not know. But he knew now that this was no mere waystation on the road toward rebirth. This was the place of rebirth itself. Far ahead, figures emerged from one of the subsidiary corridors and crossed the main chamber -- two sulidoror and a nildor. Gundersen pressed himself against the wall and remained motionless until they were out of sight. Then he continued inward.  He saw nothing but miracles. He was in a garden of fantasies where no natural barriers held. Here was a round spongy mass of soft pink flesh with just one recognizable feature sprouting from it -- a sulidor's huge tail. Here was a sulidor, bereft of fur, whose arms were foreshortened and pillar-like, like the limbs of a nildor, and whose body had grown round and heavy and thick. Here was a sulidor in full fur with a nildor's trunk and ears. Here was raw meat that was neither nildor nor sulidor but alive and passive, a mere thing awaiting a sculptor's shaping hand. Here was another thing that resembled a sulidor, bones melted. Here was still another thing that resembled a nildor who had never had bones. Here were trunks, spines, tusks, fangs, claws, tails, paws. Here was fur and here smooth hide. Here was flesh flowing at will and seeking new shapes. Here were dark chambers, lit only by flickering fungoid-glow, in which no firm distinction of species existed. pended here. This was no trifling gene-tickling that he saw, Gundersen knew. On Earth any skilled helix-parlor technician could redesign an organism's geneplasm with some cunning thrusts of a needle and a few short spurts of drugs; he could make a camel bring forth a hippopotamus, a cat bring forth a chipmunk or, for that matter, a woman bring forth a sulidor. One merely enhanced the desired characteristics within sperm and ovum and suppressed other characteristics until one had a reasonable facsimile of the creature to be reproduced. The basic genetic building-blocks were the same for every life form; by rearranging them, one could create any kind of strange and monstrous progeny. But that was not what was being done here. On Earth, Gundersen knew, it was also possible to persuade any living cell to play the part of a fertilized egg and divide, grow and yield a full organism. The venom from Belzagor was one catalyst for that process; there were others. And, so one could induce the stump of a man's arm to regrow that arm; one could scrape a bit of skin from a frog and generate an army of frogs with it; one could even rebuild an entire human being from the shards of his own ruined body. But that was not what was being done here. What was being done here, Gundersen realized, was a transmutation of species, a change worked not upon ova but upon adult organisms. Now he understood Nasinisul's remark, when asked if sulidoror also underwent rebirth: If there were no day, could there be night? Yes. Nildor into sulidor. Sulidor into nildor. Gundersen shivered in shock. He was plunged into a universe without fixed points. What was real? What was enduring? He comprehended now what had happened to Kurtz in this mountain. Gundersen stumbled into a cell in which a creature lay midway in its metamorphosis. Smaller than a nildor, larger than a sulidor; fangs, not tusks; trunk, not snout; fur, not hide; flat footpads, not claws; body shaped for walking upright. "Who are you?" Gundersen whispered. "What are you? What were you? Which way are you heading?" Rebirth. Cycle upon cycle upon cycle. Nildoror bound upon a northward pilgrimage, entering these caves, becoming -- sulidoror? If this is true, Gundersen thought, then we have never really known anything about this planet. A nd this is true. He ran wildly from cell to cell, no longer caring whether he might be discovered. Each cell confirmed his guess. He saw nildoror and sulidoror in every stage of metamorphosis, some almost wholly nildoror, some unmistakably sulidoror, but most of them occupying intermediate positions along that journey from pole to pole; more than half were so deep in transformation that it was impossible for him to tell which way they were heading. All slept. Before his eyes flesh flowed but nothing moved. In these cool shadowy chambers change came as a dream. Gundersen reached the end of the corridor. He pressed his palms against cold, unyielding stone. Breathless, sweat-drenched, he turned toward the last chamber in the series and plunged into it. asleep, standing over three of the sluggish serpents of the tropics, which moved in gentle coils about him. The sulidor was huge, agegrizzled, a being of unusual presence and dignity. "Na-sinisul?" Gundersen asked. "We knew that in time you must come here, Edmundgundersen." "I never imagined -- I didn't understand -- " Gundersen paused, struggling to regain control. More quietly he said, "Forgive me if I have intruded. Have I interrupted your rebirth's beginning?" "I have several days yet," the sulidor said. "I merely prepare the chamber now." "And you'll come forth from it as a nildor." "Yes," said Na-sinisul. "Life goes in a cycle here, then? Sulidor to nildor to sulidor to nildor to -- " "Yes. Over and over, rebirth after rebirth." "All nildoror spend part of their lives as sulidoror? All sulidoror spend part of there lives as nildoror?" "Yes. All." How had it begun, Gundersen wondered? How had the destinies of these two so different races become entangled? How had an entire species consented to undergo such a metamorphosis? He knew now why he had never seen an infant nildor or sulidor. He said, "Are young ones of either race ever born on this world?" "Only when needed as replacements for those who can be reborn no more. It is not often. Our population is stable." "Stable, yet constantly changing." "Through a predictable pattern of change," said Na-sinisul. "When I emerge I will be Fi'gontor of the ninth birth. My people have waited for thirty turnings for me to rejoin them but circumstances required me to remain this long in the forests of the mists." "Is nine rebirths unusual?" "There are those among us who have been here fifteen times. There are some who wait a hundred turnings to be called once. The summons comes when the summons comes -- and for those who merit it, life will have no end." "No -- end -- " "Why should it?" Na-sinisul asked. "In this mountain we are purged of the poisons of age and elsewhere we purge ourselves of the poisons of sin." "On the central plateau, that is." "I see you have spoken with the man Cullen." "Yes," Gundersen said. "Just before his -- death." "I knew also that his life was over," said Na-sinisul. "We learn things swiftly here." Gundersen said, "Where are Srin'gahar and Luu'khamin and the others I traveled with?" "The are here, in cells not far away." "Already in rebirth?" "For some days now. They will be sulidoror soon and will live in the north until they are summoned to assume the nildor form again. Thus we refresh our souls by undertaking new lives." "During the sulidor phase -- do you keep a memory of your past life as a nildor?" "Certainly. How can experience be valuable if it is not retained? We accumulate wisdom. Our grasp of truth is heightened by seeing the universe now through a nildor's eyes, not through a sulidor's. Not in body alone are the two forms different. To undergo rebirth is to enter a new world, not merely a new life." Hesitantly Gundersen said, "And when someone who is not of this planet undergoes rebirth? What effect is there? What kind of changes happen?" "You saw Kurtz." "I saw Kurtz," said Gundersen. "But I have no idea what Kurtz has become." "Kurtz has become Kurtz," the sulidor said. "For your kind there can be no true transformation, because you have no complementary species. You change, yes, but you become only what you have the potential to become. You liberate such forces as already exist within you. While he slept, Kurtz chose his new form himself. No one else designed it for him. It is not easy to explain this with words, Edmundgundersen." "If I underwent rebirth, then, I wouldn't necessarily turn into something like Kurtz?" "Not unless your soul is as Kurtz' soul and that is not possible." "What would I become?" "No one may know these things before the fact. If you wish to discover what rebirth will do to you -- you must accept rebirth." "If I asked for rebirth would I be permitted to have it?" "I told you when we first met," said Na-sinisul, "that no one on this world will prevent you from doing anything. You were not stopped as you ascended the mountain of rebirth. You were not stopped when you explored these chambers. Rebirth will not be denied you if you feel you need to experience it." Easily, serenely, instantly, Gundersen said, "Then I ask for rebirth." Silently, unsurprised, Na-sinisul leads him to a vacant cell and gestures to him to remove his clothing. Gundersen strips. His fingers fumble only slightly with the snaps and catches. At the sulidor's direction Gundersen lies on the floor, as all other candidates for rebirth have done. The stone is so cold that he hisses when his bare skin touches it. Na-sinisul goes out. Gundersen looks up at the glowing fungoids in the distant vault of the ceiling. The chamber is large enough to hold a nildor comfortably -- to Gundersen on the floor, it seems immense. Na-sinisul returns, bearing a bowl made from a hollow log. He offers it to Gundersen. The bowl contains a pale blue fluid. "Drink," says the sulidor softly. Gundersen drinks. The taste is sweet, like sugar water. This is something he has tasted before and he knows when it was: at the serpent station, years ago. It is the forbidden venom. He drains the bowl and Na-sinisul leaves him. Two sulidoror whom Gundersen does not know enter the cell. They kneel on either side of him and begin a low, mumbling chant, some sort of ritual. He cannot understand any of it. They knead and stroke his body -- their hands, with the fearful claws retracted, are strangely soft, like the pads of a cat. He is tense but the tension ebbs. He feels the drug taking effect now -- a thickness at the back of his head, a tightness in his chest, a blurring of his vision. Na-sinisul is in the room again, although Gundersen did not see him enter. He carries a bowl. "Drink," he says and Gundersen drinks. It is another fluid entirely -- or perhaps a different distillate of the venom. Its flavor is bitter, with undertastes of smoke and ash. He has to force himself to get to the bottom of the bowl but Na-sinisul waits, silently insistent, for him to finish it. Again the old sulidor leaves. At the mouth of the cell he turns and says something to Gundersen but the words are overgrown with heavy blue fur and will not enter Gundersen's ears. "What did you say?" the Earthman asks. "What? What?" His words sprout leaden weights, teardrop-shaped, somber. They fall at once to the floor and shatter. One of the chanting sulidoror sweeps the broken words into a corner with a quick motion of his tail. Gundersen hears a trickling sound, a glittering spiral of noise, as of water running into his cell. His eyes are closed but he feels the wetness swirling about him. It is not water, though. It has a more solid texture. A sort of gelatin, perhaps. Lying on his back he is several centimeters deep in it and the level is rising. It is cool but not cold and it insulates him nicely from the chill rock of the floor. He is aware of the faint pink odor of the inflowing gelatin, and of its firm consistency, like the tones of a bassoon in its deepest register. The sulidoror continue to chant. He feels a tube sliding into his mouth, a sleek piccolo-shriek of a tube, and through its narrow core drips yet another substance, thick oily, emitting the sound of muted kettledrums as it hits his palate. Now the gelatin has reached the lower curve of his jaw. He welcomes its advance. It laps gently at his chin. The tube is withdrawn from his mouth just as the flow of gelatin covers his lips. Will I be able to breathe? A sulidor answers him in cryptic Sumerian phrases, and Gundersen is reassured. He is wholly sealed in the gelatin. It covers the floor of the chamber to a depth of one meter. Light dimly penetrates it. Gundersen knows that its upper surface is smooth and flawless, forming a perfect seal where it touches the walls of the cell. Now he has become a chrysalis. He will be given nothing more to drink. He will lie here and he will be reborn. One must die in order that one may be reborn, he knows. folds him. Gently he slides into a dark abyss. The embrace of death is tender. Gundersen floats through a realm of trembling emptiness. He hovers suspended in the black void. Bands of scarlet and purple light transfix him, buffeting him like bars of metal. He tumbles. He spins. He soars. He encounters death once more and they wrestle and he is defeated by death. His body is shivered into splinters and a shower of bright Gundersen-fragments scatters through space. The fragments seek one another. They solemnly circle one another. They dance. They unite. They take on the form of Edmund Gundersen, but this new Gundersen glows like pure, transparent glass. He is glistening, a transparent man through whom the light of the great sun at the core of the universe passes without resistance. A spectrum spreads forth from his chest. nates the galaxies. Strands of color emanate from him and link him to all who possess g'rakh in the universe. He partakes of the biological wisdom of the cosmos. He tunes his soul to the essence of what is and what must be. He is without limits. He can reach out and touch any soul. He reaches toward the soul of Na-sinisul and the sulidor greets him and admits him. He reaches toward Srin'gahar, toward Vol'himyor the many-born, toward Luu'khamin, Se-holomir, Yi-gartigok, toward the nildoror and sulidoror who lie in the caves of metamorphosis and toward the dwellers in the misty forests and toward the dwellers in the steaming jungles and toward those who dance and rage in the forlorn plateau and to all others of Belzagor who share in g'rakh. And he comes now to one that is neither nildor nor sulidor, a sleeping soul, a veiled soul, a soul of a color and timber and a texture unlike the others. It is an Earthborn soul, the soul of Seena, and he calls softly to her, saying, Awaken, awaken, I love you,  have come for you. She does not awaken. He calls to her, lam new, lam reborn,  overflow with love. Join me. Become part of me. Seena? Seena? Seena? And she does not respond. He sees the souls of the other Earthmen now. They have g'rakh but rationality is not enough their souls are blind and silent. Here is Van Beneker; here are the tourists; here are the lonely keepers of solitary outposts in the jungle. Here is the charred gray emptiness where the soul of Cedric Cullen belongs. He cannot reach any of them. He moves on, and a new soul gleams beyond the mist. It is the soul of Kurtz. Kurtz comes to him or he goes to Kurtz and Kurtz is not asleep. Now you are among us, Kurtz says and Gundersen says, Yes, here I am at last. Soul opens to soul and Gundersen looks down into the darkness that is Kurtz, past the pearl-gray curtain that shrouds his spirit, into a place of terror where black figures shuttle with many legs along ridged webs. Chaotic forms cohere, expand, dissolve within Kurtz. Gundersen looks beyond this dark and dismal zone. Beyond it he finds a cold, hard, bright light shining whitely out of the deepest place and Kurtz says, See? Do you see? Am I a monster?  have goodness within me. You are not a monster, Gundersen says. But I have sujfered, says Kurtz. For your sins, Gundersen says. I have paid for my sins with my suffering and I should now be released. You have suffered, Gundersen agrees. When will my suffering end, then? Gundersen replies that he does not know, that it is not he who sets the limits of such things. Kurtz says, I knew you. Nice young fellow, a little slow. Seena speaks highly of you. Sometimes she wishes things had worked out better for you and her. Instead she got me. Here I lie. Here lie we. Why won't you release me? What can I do, asks Gundersen? Let me come back to the mountain. Let me finish my rebirth. Gundersen does not know how to respond. He seeks along the circuit of g'rakh, consulting Na-sinisul, consulting Vol'himyor, consulting all the many-born ones and they join, they join, they speak with one voice, they tell Gundersen in a voice of thunder that Kurtz is finished, his rebirth is over, he may not come back to the mountain. Gundersen repeats this to Kurtz but Kurtz has already heard. Kurtz shrivels. Kurtz shrinks back into darkness. He comes enmeshed in his own webs. Pity me, he calls out to Gundersen across a vast gulf. Pity me, for this is hell and lam in it. Gundersen says, I pity you.  pity you. I pity you. I pity you. T HE echo of his own voice diminishes to infinity. All is silent. Out of the void, suddenly, comes Kurtz' wordless reply, a shrill and deafening crescendo blast of rage and hatred and malevolence, the scream of a flawed Prometheus flailing at the beak that pierces him. The shriek reaches a climax of shattering intensity. It dies away. The shivering fabric of the universe grows still again. A soft violet light appears, absorbing the lingering disharmonies of that one terrible outcry. Gundersen weeps for Kurtz. The cosmos streams with shining tears and on that salty river Gundersen floats, traveling without will, visiting this world and that, drifting among the nebulae, passing through clouds of cosmic dust, soaring over strange suns. He is not alone. Na-sinisul is with him and Srin'gahar -- and Vol'himyor and all the others. He becomes aware of the harmony of all things g'rakh. He sees for the first time the bonds that bind g'rakh to g'rakh. He who lies in rebirth is in contact with them all but also they are each in contact with one another at any time, at every time, every soul on the planet joined in wordless communication. He sees the unity of all g'rakh and it awes and humbles him. He perceives the complexity of this double people, the rhythm of its existence, the unending and infinite swing of cycle upon cycle of rebirth and new creation, above all the union, the oneness. He perceives his own monstrous isolation, the walls that cut him off from other men, that cut off man from man, each a prisoner in his own skull. He sees what it is like to live among people who have learned to liberate the prisoner in the skull. That knowledge dwindles and crushes him. He thinks. We made them slaves, we called them beasts and all the time they were linked. they spoke in their minds without words, they transmitted the music oj the soul one to one to one. We were alone and they were not and instead oj kneeling before them and begging to share the miracle we gave them work to do. Gundersen weeps for Gundersen. Na-sinisul says, This is no time for sorrow and Srin'gahar says. The past is past. Vol'himyor says, Through remorse you are redeemed. And all of them speak with one voice and at one time and he understands. He understands. Now Gundersen understands all. He knows that nildor and sulidor are not two separate species but merely forms of the same creature, no more different than caterpillar and butterfly. He is aware of how it was for the nildoror when they were still in their primeval state, when they were born as nildoror and died helplessly as nildoror, perishing when the inevitable decay of their souls came upon them. And he knows the fear and the ecstasy of those first few nildoror who accepted the serpent's temptation and drank the drug of liberation and became things with fur and claws, misshapen, malformed, transmuted. And he knows their pain as they were driven out, even into the plateau where no being possessing g'rakh would venture. And he knows their sufferings in that plateau. And he knows the triumph of those first sulidoror, who, surmounting their isolation, returned from the wilderness bearing a new creed. Come and be changed, come and be changed! Give up this flesh for another! Graze no more but hunt and eat flesh! Be reborn and live again and conquer the brooding body that drags the spirit to destruction! And he sees the nildoror accepting their destiny and giving themselves up joyfully to rebirth -- a few and then more and then more. And then whole encampments, entire populations, going forth, not to hide in the plateau of purification but to live in the new way, in the land where mist rules. They cannot resist because with the change of body comes the blessed liberation of soul, the unity, the bond of g'rakh to g'rakh. it was for these people when the Earthmen came, the eager, busy, ignorant, pitiful, short-lived Earthmen, who were beings of g'rakh yet could not or would not enter into the oneness, who dabbled with the drug of liberation and did not taste it to the fullest, whose minds were sealed one against the other, whose roads and buildings and pavements spread like pockmarks over the tender land. He sees how little the Earthmen knew and how little they were capable of learning -- and how much was kept from them since they would misunderstand it -- and why it was necessary for the sulidoror to hide in the mists all these years of occupation, giving no clue to the strangers that they might be related to the nildoror, that they were the sons of the nildoror and the fathers of the nildoror as well. For if the Earthmen had known even half the truth they would have recoiled in fright, since their minds are sealed one against the other and they would not have it any other way, except for the few who dared to learn -- and too many of those were dark and demon-ridden, like Kurtz. He feels vast relief that the time of pretending is over on this world and that nothing need be hidden any longer, that sulidoror may go down into the lands of the nildoror and move freely about without fear that the secret and the mystery of rebirth may accidentally be revealed to those who could not withstand such knowledge. He knows joy that he has come here and survived the test and endured his liberation. His mind is open, now, and he has been reborn. He descends, rejoining his body. He is aware once more that he lies embedded in congealed gelatin on the cold floor of a dark cell abutting a lengthy corridor within a rose-red mountain wreathed in white mist on a strange world. He does not rise. His time has not yet come. He yields to the tones and colors and odors and textures that flood the universe. He allows them to carry him back and he floats easily along the time-line, so that now he is a child peering at the shield of night and trying to count the stars; and now he is timidly sipping raw venom with Kurtz and Salamone; and now he enrolls in the Company and tells a personnel computer that his strongest wish is to foster the expansion of the human empire; and now he grasps Seena on a tropic beach under the light of several moons; and now he meets her for the first time; and now he sifts crystals in the Sea of Dust; and now he mounts a nildor; and now he runs laughing down a childhood street; and now he turns his torch on Cedric Cullen; and now he climbs the rebirth mountain; and now he trembles as Kurtz walks into a room; and now he takes the wafer on his tongue; and now he stares at the wonder of a hand; and now he steps forth into mottled, alien sunlight; and now he crouches over Henry Dykstra's swollen body and now and now and now and now He hears the tolling of mighty bells. He feels the planet shuddering and shifting on its axis. He smells dancing tongues of flame. He touches the roots of the rebirth mountain. He feels the souls of nildoror and sulidoror all about him. He recognizes the words of the hymn the sulidoror sing and he sings with them. He grows. He shrinks. He burns. He shivers. He changes. He awakens. "Yes," says a thick, low voice. "Come out of it now. The time is here. Sit up. Sit up." Gundersen's eyes open. Colors surge through his dazzled brain. It is a moment before he is able to see. A sulidor stands at the entrance to his cell. "I am Ti-munilee," the sulidor says, "Y ou are born again." "I know you," Gundersen says. "But not by that name. Who are you?" "Reach out to me and see," says the sulidor. Gundersen reaches out. "I knew you as the nildor Srin'gahar," Gundersen says. Gundersen walked unsteadily out of the chamber of rebirth. In the dark corridor he asked, "Have I been changed?" "Yes, very much," Ti-munilee said. "How? In what way?" "You do not know?" Gundersen held a hand before his eyes. Five fingers, yes, as before. He looked down at his naked body and saw no difference in it. Obscurely he experienced disappointment; perhaps nothing had really happened in that chamber. His legs, his feet, his loins, his belly everything as it had been. "I haven't changed at all," he said. "You have changed greatly," the sulidor replied. "I see myself and I see the same body as before." "Look again," advised Ti-munilee. In the main corridor Gundersen caught sight of himself dimly reflected in the sleek glassy walls by the light of the glowing fungoids. He drew back, startled. He had changed, yes; he had outkurtzed jp airo # from A to Lemuria This month, the Berkley Travel Service offers a variety of trips (all good), from that venerable fantastic voyage in itraising trek through Old Lemuria with the mighty-thewed Valkarthian in if you fancy it, a swing through the Return flights not guaranteed. Lin Carter (X#, # Keith Laumer (X#, # (X#, #) (X#, # Next month: Heinlein, Hubbard, Harrison! If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have complete freedom of choice in pricing these books for resale to others. Kurtz in his rebirth. What peered back at him from the rippling sheen of the walls was scarcely human. Gundersen stared at the masklike face with hooded slots for eyes, at the slitted nose, the gill-pouches trailing to his shoulders, the manyjointed arms, the row of sensors on his chest, the grasping organs at the hips, the cratered skin, the glow-organs in the cheeks. He looked down again at himself and saw none of those things. Which was the illusion? He hurried toward daylight. "Have I changed or have I not changed?" he asked the sulidor. "You have changed." "Where?" "The changes are within," said the former Srin'gahar. "And the reflection?" "Reflections sometimes lie. Look at yourself through my eyes and see what you are." Gundersen reached forth again. He saw himself and it was his old body he saw -- and then he flickered and underwent a phase-shift and he beheld the being with sensors and slots. And then he was himself again. "Are you satisfied?" Ti-munilee asked. "Yes," said Gundersen. He walked slowly toward the lip of the plaza outside the mouth of the cavern. The seasons had changed since he had entered that cavern -- now an iron winter was on the land. The mist was piled deep in the valley and where it broke he saw the heavy mounds of snow and ice. He felt the presence of nildoror and sulidoror about him, though he saw only Ti-munilee. He was aware of the soul of old Na-sinisul within the mountain, passing through the final phases of rebirth. He touched the soul of Vol'himyor far to the south. He brushed lightly over the soul of tortured Kurtz. He sensed suddenly, startlingly, other Earthborn souls as free as his, open to him, hovering nearby. "Who are you?" he asked. And they answered, "You are not the first of your kind to come through rebirth intact." Yes. He remembered. Cullen had said that there had been others, some transformed into monsters, others simply never heard from again. "Where are you?" he asked them. They told him but he did not understand, for what they said was that they had left their bodies behind. "Have I also left my body behind?" he asked. And they said, no, he was still wearing his flesh, for so he had chosen. They had chosen otherwise. Then they withdrew from him. "Do you feel the changes?" Timunilee asked. "The changes are within me." "Yes. Now you are at peace." And, surprised by joy, he realized that that was so. The fears, the conflicts, the tensions, were gone. Guilt was gone. Sorrow was gone. Loneliness was gone. Ti-munilee said, "Do you know who I was when I was Srin'gahar? Reach toward me." Gundersen reached. He said, in a moment, "You were one of those seven nildoror whom I would not allow to go to their rebirths many years ago." "Yes." "And yet you carried me on your back all the way to the mist country." "My time had come again," said Ti-munilee, "and I was happy. I forgave you. Do you remember, when we crossed into the mist country, there was an angry sulidor at the border?" "Yes," Gundersen said. "He was another of the seven. He was the one you touched with your torch. He had had his rebirth finally and still he hated you. Now he no longer does. Tomorrow, when you are ready, reach toward him and he will forgive you. Will you do that?" "I will," said Gundersen. "But will he really forgive?" "You are reborn. Why should he not forgive?" Ti-munilee said. Then the sulidor asked, "Where will you go now?" "South. To help my people. First to help Kurtz, to guide him through a new rebirth. Then the opened." "May I share your journey?" "You know that answer." Far off the dark soul of Kurtz stirred and throbbed. Wait, Gundersen told it. Wait. You will not sujjer much longer. A blast of cold wind struck the mountainside. Sparkling flakes of snow whirled into Gundersen's face. He smiled. He had never felt so free, so light, so young. A vision of a mankind transformed blazed within him.  am the emissary, he thought.  am the bridge over which they shall cross. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the light of the world -- he that jolloweth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light oj life. A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another. He said to Ti-munilee, "Shall we go now?" "I am ready when you are ready." "Now." "Now," said the sulidor and together they began to descend the windswept mountain.  In this month's IF by Pout Anderson...nobody really knows why men go to war. Now I suggest that there is no such thing as the reason... Paul Anderson  #E po)R factor? is warmed up iDMIgtJ febtiSiEkl i f IP # Ktfgfil L 'A miHEtIC Q#S! youHAoyooR They dion'T see the sonpoTiuas because I ( Continued from page # ) noted, do subsume that narrower sort of loyalty within their larger concern. That larger concern is what makes the crucial difference. The institution of fandom ensures that any given time, in all corners of the English-speaking world and in significant additional precincts, there will be several thousand energetic individuals who care deeply, in detail, continuously -- and with positive effect -- about the ultimate destiny, good and progress of science fiction. Because they are organized -- via these various clubs and national and international bodies whose regional meetings and annual conventions provide additional social links -- they are in a position to lend the field a certain dignity, via awards like the Hugo and its collateral publicity. (Among such awards, the Hugo for excellence is unique. The crime field's Edgar, the western's Silver Spur and motion pictures' Oscar, like the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula, are all awards attained by impressing one's fellow members of a guild or "academy." The Hugo alone is awarded by the audience toward which all these excellences are presumably aimed). But fandom, and a fannish way of life in which some would insist that the plural of fan is "fen," and some that Fandom Is Just A Goshdurn Hobby (usually neologized as "fijagh," opposed to "fiawol"), would be just another Goddamned social club if it weren't for its mailing lists. The binding force in fandommany of whose most active and influential members have never had eyes laid on them by more than a fraction of their peers -- is the amateur publication, or fanzine (as distinguished from "prozine" -- what you are reading now). Only Sam Moskowitz knows how many fanzines there have been and not even Sam Moskowitz could tell you accurately how many are in the mail to how many readers at any given moments just as any attempt at a fannish census would be the same as an attempt to paint all of the Golden Gate Bridge before the other end needed painting again. But there are fans of every stripe and coloration; the prozine and book collectors, something like those in the larger universe but not completely so; the conservative and radical political activists, who play out within the fannish universe those impulses toward establishmentarianism and feud which all flesh is heir to; the encyclopedists and historians; the sane and the insane, all in a jumble together -- and, yes, even those who are beyond the original interest which led them to discover somehow the names of a few other fannish types and to begin their entry into an arena in which they now discuss art films, sports cars, music, politics, drugs... almost anything but the concern which originally brought them here. The main concern always holds the middle, however, and in that wide, undistributed place there exist spokesmen and advocates of astonishing persuasive power, sharpening the wits of all around them, pouring out an impressive succession of opinions from which some pro tem consensus is always emerging -- perhaps to be recorded and perhaps not before the next determination submerges it but always there to be sensed. couldn't get two fans to agree what the fannish attitude is or that you couldn't write an accurate, thorough statement of your own. What counts is a perpetual ferment of ideas, many of them not overtly related to sf at all, many of them clouded by personal motives, some destroyed -- or enhanced -- by the typographical accidents inherent in home-typed stencil duplication, many of them demonstrably juvenile, because their advocates are, in the median, below draft age chronologically and glandularly, though not always intellectually -- what counts, as I was saying, is that there is this wealth of effective expression. From it the individual fan extracts a resultant attitude toward sf -- among other things -- which, though individual and dynamic, is nevertheless in rough agreement with other attitudes and which changes slowly enough so that there are such things as "a fannish attitude," and certain enduring institutions in the form of shibboleth. What does this mean to Thee and Me? It means Somebody Cares -- and has been caring long enough to establish a weight of tradition and a culture from which a given individual might emerge toward other activities but which would remain inherent in his intellectual bones. Fandom may or may not be A conscious Way Of Life, but fanac leaves its mark. And thus it affects Thee and Me quite strongly, though Thee mightn't know who #sJ might be or the Futurians were and Me might be a decade or three beyond trotting all # copies of the latest issue of Slantasy down to the post office in Dorothy, N.J. Because they do grow up, you know, or at least get older -- or did you think science-fiction writers grow on trees? But we can return to this subject another time. Meanwhile, here's a fannish publication that's not a fanzine: The Index of Science Fiction Magazines #-#, compiled by Norman Metcalf, is a neatly printed and semi-permanently bound # ## by #I volume available from J. Ben Stark, P.O. Box #, Fairmont Station, El Cerrito, California #. Unfortunately, nothing on the book indicates its price. Whatever it costs, it's a good thing. Obviously designed to be a companion volume to Don Day's Index to Science Fiction Magazines #-#, this one follows the same page makeup style and will fit very comfortably on the shelf right beside its predecessor. In fact it contains a halfway decent section of errata on the Day Index. Some of you out there will have automatically greeted the news of this volume's appearance with joy -- those being the serious collectors and students of science fiction, for whom the Day Index served as the first really good chart into a major portion of the hitherto unsystematized past. Metcalf, Stark, et. al., have done a generous service to many of us by bringing this one out -- and even more and especially so because they made it conform to the Day. There are joys beyond collecting, however, and some beyond description. This book has values even for you who don't really care exactly how long Darius John Granger's story Stop! You're precisely which issue of the # Imagination it appeared. Many of you will join in not caring very much who Imagination's routine writers were. But reading through this book arouses a fascination beyond any purely denotative value. The medium itself conveys many overriding messages, their number and content limited only by the nooks and crannies in one's own mind. For example, it's kind of gratifying to discover that Fred McMorrow had a story in the May, #, F  SF. I've only read one McMorrow story -- a pretty good one from the earlier days of Playboy. I've got a May # F  SF kicking around the house. One of these days very soon I'm going to have the pleasure of reading the McMorrow story in it, and if he's up to the standard of the one example I know, I might well consider that this alone was worth the price of admission to the Index -- even considering that I don't know the price. If you follow me. Or on another hand, one of my favorite pieces of fun in this book, as with the Day, is simply reading down the title index. For instance, in the period covered by this index there have been three stories published in various places all called Breakdown, not one of them particularly distinguished. There have been four called Breaking Point, none of them particularly distinguished. However, there has been only one story called The Belly oj GorJeetl -- and it wasn't any good either. The series I like begins with Call Her Satan by a house name for Fantastic in November # -- and proceeds through Call Him Colossus , Call Him Dead, Call Him Demon, Call Him Nemesis, Call Him Savage!, Call Me Adam, Call Me From the Valley, Call Me Joe, Call Me Mister, Call Me Monster, Call Me Wizard and Call Me Zombie. The rewarding thing about all this is that Call Him Demon (included here as being by Henry Kuttner and in the # Wonder Story A nnual, but actually a much older story by Kuttner-Moore, bylined "Keith Hammond" when first published) was a landmark in the field -- and for that matter Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe" ain't bad either. In the midst of mirth, we are in thought. Here are a baker's dozen titles and, of that thirteen, two represent some rather memorable work and here I sit fondly reminiscing, hauled back into my own past by the scruff of nostalgia, saying to myself it's not such a bad field after all, is it, that has such nice things in it. Even those of you who don't really know or care whether Grego or Greno Gashbuck was an anagram of Hugo Gernsback and the byline on The Cosmatomic Flyer -- yes, even those of you who don't care about that, if you care about science fiction, which is a fair presumption, might enjoy having this book around for your rainier afternoons. not directly related to chronology. #sJ, for instance, has been around a very long time and is probably the world's most successful fan, to the point where it hardly matters what he does for a living. Harlan Ellison, obversely, was a fan briefly on one afternoon in about #. If you stood these people up next to each other, to look at them you'd think it was the other way around. But no matter. There are certain recognized steps in the evolution and they hold true for most of us, with only their exact arrival time in doubt. But these evolutionary steps are not to be mistaken for fundamental changes. Fans are born from expression; a truly metamorphosed fan would be a griffin, a sphinx. We have them, of course -- a few; their wings are not functional. Flesh being heir to what it is, one of the major areas of fannish interest is the unceasing attempt to impose fannish attitudes on the larger universe. One of the most potent shibboleths is that sciencefiction writers (areare not) capable of making it in the Big World. Which brings us to Adventures In Discovery edited by Tom Purdom (Doubleday, #). This is a book of science-fact essays, all original, compiled by soliciting contributions from science-fiction writers. As such, it's the kind of project that's enormously attractive to writers and makes a merchandisable package but may not ab initio be of much value to readers. Happily it happens that there are some science-fiction writers who do know a little science and can then go ahead and write about it at an acceptable-or-better level of journalism. So, despite its dubious premise, Adventures In Discovery turns out to be a good book, if not one the world was crying for. The book's lead essay, Search for the Hunter , by Poul Anderson, is its best piece of science popularization. It's a thumbnail review of paleoanthropology, bringing us up to date on things such as the fact that many of the "classic" conceptions about Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man have been superseded. It's perversely good to know that the Neanderthal picture we were given in grade school -- you remember: the stooped, shambling, squatty, lowbrowed creature with the gnarly bones -- turns out to have been based on an arthritic skeleton. The other essays don't tell us anything quite as startling as that but they're rather interesting and informative nonetheless. The contributions are by Isaac Asimov, James Blish, L. Sprague de Camp, Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg -- with a rather good and markedly perceptive report on Dr. Albert Koch, the #th century charlatan and shownman who once, to his regret, tried very hard to tell the world about a genuine major paleontological discovery -- Harry Harrison, John Brunner, Ben Bova, and Willy Ley. Of all these, only the Brunner fails to be written within the conventional limits set down for writing a popular science essay. The rest all read like reasonably literate, reasonably well-composed reports intended for an audience which does not have time or inclination to read Science or Scientific American but is nevertheless sufficiently interested to accept this information when it turns up presented in this manner. The point is that we did not need any of these particular writers to give us this particular value. The Anderson and the Silverberg do, indeed, tell us things we enjoy knowing. The de Camp conveys a sense of what scientific controversy can really be like, as distinguished from the reasoned disagreement of the stick figures in some sf stories. Willy Ley is always good -- much better as a science writer than he ever chose to be as a storyteller. Like that coach on the New York football Giants says, there are different strokes for different folksrand a sense of this truth begins to close in around even those of us who, if they'd kept their promises, would have themselves been contributors to this book. It's a seductive fannish idea. And it's a good solid, unexceptionable end product. a publication which is neither a piece of science fiction nor a product of the normal publishing establishment -- nor a piece of fannish ephemera -- but rather a fannish permanent publication about science fiction. There are a great many of these and some of them are so narrowly specialized that they find their small audience automatically. Others, however, are not. This was true of the #-# Index , which is about what and who had been published where and how, and now we have The Double: Bill Symposium, in which two people named Bill sponsored an attempt to find out why science fiction is written. Actually the edition I'm looking at, which is copyright # by L. Bowers, represents an updating of the original #-# publication. As such it has considerable merit in addition to its overt purpose, because the updating in some cases reflects the rather marked changes in science fiction fannish verbalizations that have been taking place since the early '#s. The book is based on replies by science-fiction writers to a questionnaire prepared by Lloyd Biggie, Jr., himself a good workman in the field but a scholar as well as a man who cares. (For instance, Lloyd's patient work had an important share in giving the Science Fiction Writers of America a firm opening shove in a good direction.) What we have here are more than ninety professional sf writers' replies to eleven questions such as: "For what reason or reasons do you write science fiction in preference to other classes of literature?" And: "What do you consider the chief value of science fiction?" And: "What suggestions can you offer the beginning writer?" Also: "What do you consider the greatest weakness of science fiction today?" Thornier problems are delved into: "To what extent do you think it's possible to detect a writer's viewpoints as to politics, religion or moral problems through examination of his stories?" And so on. The results are availP.O. Box #, Akron Ohio #. They come in the form of a well designed, handsomely reproduced, I #-page brochure and contain the sometimes sincere, sometimes succinct, sometimes cryptic replies of most of the big and little names in sf. It's not always the Bradburys and the Asimovs who give the most eye-catching answers: reply to: What do you consider the greatest weakness in the sf of today: "I did not know it had a weakness." Alexei Panshin says, "Most of it is ill written." Larry Niven seems to be blaming it on the critics -- not on me, thank God. Norman Spinrad says, "Fandom." And Michael Moorcock says, "It no longer looks squarely (or even obliquely) at the real problems of the present and future." Like the Index , this is a browser's book for most of us. It is fascinating to find these diverse peers replying so differently to the same stimuli. It is equally fascinating that they join in expressing an almost universal dubious attitude toward fannish activities. Phrases on the order of: "It's okay unless the tail begins wagging the dog -- " recur from several otherwise various hands and minds. This strikes a rather interesting note when one stops to think that of the names listed here, twenty-eight are immediately identifiable as former active members of organized fandom, even allowing for the old days when no one conceived of any great difference between fans and pros. Furthermore, a little harder dig reveals that The Double: Bill Symposium is practically a roster of some of the most active amateur magazine publishers and writers of their day -- and that day, in the case of a good dozen of them, is but one generation back as fannish generations are counted. Well, on to statements such as: "It's quite natural that the academic mandarin whose livelihood depends on hitting kids with his Ph.D. should resent a literary form which can fire their imaginations and capture their interest -- and the almost universally hostile reaction from these people to the sf boom of the 'fifties illustrates that." Or: "... an enlarging sidestream, possibly blending with the mainstream." Or: "Reading history, and about sex and religion, history of, is valuable to any writer." Beyond these, I dare not go, or I may wind up quoting this whole thing to you. It's about fandom and it's an awful lot of fun.  IF The Magazine of Alternatives Many today feel that humans are still evolving -- perhaps into -- Berenice and I, on the littoral of one of the fresh-water lakes that have recently reappeared on the north continents, we sleep late mornings and loll through long afternoons; evenings we dip into a perma-chest of ancient writings unearthed by visitors like ourselves and left behind. The chest contains numerous and diverse examples of this lost art probably they were gathered together by some dedicated eccentric who had no better purpose in life. Some of them are unique indeed and have to do with the future as some of the more literate elements of the then society foresaw it, at that time the earth was green, not as green perhaps as it once had been but green enough -- they had a complex about this greenness, these writers did, they knew, or thought they knew, that some day it would be gone and this worried them immensely. They wrote endlessly of how green the earth was and how blue were her skies and carped constantly at their contemporaries for defiling the one and polluting the other -- they wrote about space, too. Space and spaceships, spaceships built of dreams and metal -- they thought, you see, that travel to the stars would be accomplished by means similar to those employed to reach the moon. Oh, such ships they wrote about, these little literary men! Elongated leviathans carrying whole populations to the stars (usually after Earth gave up the ghost), tons and tons and tons of steel plying the immensities -- they wrote about aliens, too -- aliens "Far Procyon IV" and, unavoidably, they wrote about us. It's fun to read what someone who died millennia before you were born thought you were going to look like and how he thought you were going to think, although it's annoying also, because these writers lived during an age sickened by sex (among other things), and they could not see human relationships in their proper perspective; hence their future travelers were little more than spaceborne troglodytes carrying cudgels in the shape of ray guns and dragging fourwheeled carts behind them -- carts filled with misdeeds, misconceptions and mistakes. But, for all their apprehensions, Earth is still a lovely place to be, especially now in spring -- and it is still green... I wonder what these writers would think to see me sitting here with my true love Berenice, reading what they wrote so long ago. They would not be able, though, to see us as we really are but only as reflections. The human race has changed incalculably since they walked upon the earth and we are vastly different from them. But they were vastly different, too -- were they not? -- from who could not write at all, so our being the way we are should not surprise them overmuch. Nevertheless, it would, and our reading what they wrote would surprise them even more and perhaps embarrass them. I turn to Berenice, I say, "Why did they write about the future the apes who preceded them and when they could not even understand the present?" She answers, "That is why -- because they couldn't understand. If they had tried -- perhaps they could have penetrated the suffocating fog of self-importance that lay thickly over their land and have glimpsed part of the truth." "Perhaps you are right," I agree. "But I doubt that very many of their contemporaries read what they wrote, so their insight wouldn't have done the world much good." "Probably," Berenice remarks, "they wouldn't have recognized the truth even if they had glimpsed it. They lived in an age that History later referred to as the Age of Hypocrisy and in an age of hypocrisy there can be no truths -- only majority opinions -- and these can be bought by men rich and clever enough and even the hardiest of seekers after truth are invariably led astray, and these were not the hardiest." Nor were they being honest -- that which you cannot find in your own today you will never find in someone else's tomorrow. "Sol" they called the sun -- and Earth, -- its rays are warm upon us now, although this is immaterial to our comfort, for our bodies are independent of temperature; but Sol sun's rays are warm upon us just the same as we loll on the shore of our blue lake, soon, though, Sol sun will set and the darkness of Earthnight will creep like death across the land, though death to us, of course, is no longer a valid concept, even though it will come to us some day. But it will not come darkly or disdainfully as it came to our ancestors -- the way the Earthnight will shortly come when Solsun has set -- I would not have wanted to live in those dim days. Our interest is not confined solely to those writers in the collection who wrote about tomorrow -- we are also reading those who wrote about the times in which they lived. Some of them wrote very well -- they reflected their society and if this be a criterion of good writing the Age of Hypocrisy was not lacking in this respect, nor were the ages which preceded it. There was one writer in particular who reflected his time exceedingly well -- he was like a mirror held up to the world and the glass was tinted in some magic fashion so that the world was reflected with poignant overtones that linger on long after you have read what he wrote -- it is writers like him we read when we would know about the past, the future we already know about because we live in it -- but it is intriguing nevertheless to read what those other writers thought it would be like, thought space travel would be like. The days pass swiftly here and Berenice and I have so much living to do. I say living, although it is not really that, not in the sense it once was understood -- that kind of living was a fretwork of contrasts, of play and work, of pleasure and pain, of feast and famine, all overshadowed by the imminence of death. No, that is not the sort of living I refer to as I sit here in the Earthdusk, letting my mind roam free, our kind of living would have been incomprehensible to the human race before it attained maturity. I say "maturity" when what I really should say is "present stage of development -- " for I, like all humans before me, am afflicted with the smug conviction that the age in which I live is the culmination of all the ages that preceded it (this is the truth Berenice referred to so short a time ago). I suspect that those malefactors of ancient days who were beheaded for their crimes believed even as the axe descended upon their naked necks that theirs was the best of all possible worlds. I wouldn't be surprised -- indeed, I know this to be the case from reading what they wrote -- that the poor souls living in the Age of Hypocrisy (for all they may have said to the contrary) believed ardently even while they sank ever deeper into the mire of deceits, lies and self-deceptions they had created for themselves that all that had gone before them had paved the way for them -- truly, man is a prisoner of his times, incapable not only of seeing what his prison looks like from without but of discerning what it is really like within. Now the night that is like disdainful death is upon us, and Berenice and I withdraw beneath the canopy of boughs we have fashioned for nostalgia's sake and light a small fire at our feet, not to keep us warm but to keep the past at bay. Beyond its little flames the darkness gathers in -- beyond the darkness burn the stars -- soon we shall be back among them, Berenice and I, where we belong, we can remain upon a planet only for a little length of time, which makes us wonder why those writers of so long ago arbitrarily concluded that life that originated in the sea would consummate its evolution on the land -- that land was a final, rather than a secondary, step -- even when they put us in space they made us carry part of the land with us in those ponderous phallic ships that they invented. I tend, though, to be hypocritical fn my evaluation of my ancestors, though no more so, probably, than they were in their evaluation of theirs. Theirs climbed into trees, they climbed down from them, we climbed into heaven. Homo sapiens was not destined to live forever like an ape, nor Homo astralis like a man, no one dwells upon the Earth now. It is no more than a resort which we indifferently maintain -- a park to which some of us return at sporadic intervals to reflect upon what we are and what we were, it is a big green picnic table hanging in space, one of many others like it, some of which are inhabited by apes. Berenice and I are sitting at the big Earth Table now, others have sat here before us, others will sit after -- the fire flickers, I add more wood, the stars recede. I would like to be a mirror so that I, too, might reflect my times -- we are far more than star-travelers. We are a part of the stars and yet the mirror would show only emptiness, the emptiness of space, for alas, I am no Scott Fitzgerald. I can only touch a truth here and there and then only in my thoughts and I am not sure, perhaps the biggest truth of all eludes me still. Certainly it cannot be as simple as that we are the ultimate purpose of life. I think I see it sometimes, though, hiding in the lines of my true love's face as she sleeps beside me in the night, iridescing in the distant sheen of her hair. But in the morning it will be gone, and in a little while we will be gone, too, and the truth will have vanished in the night. ( Continued from page # ) to the floor. His eyes darted up to Lenore's impassive face. Scott, puzzled, stared at him and then at Lenore. He started to rise and then fell back, helpless, as the hiss pierced the suddenly still air of the room and Lenore cried out, "Scott -- " and fell to the floor at his feet. "She -- she tried to poison me -- " Darby exclaimed, his face a red flag waving in front of Scott. Scott dropped down to kneel beside Lenore's lifeless body. Darby stood over them. Over and over again he whispered, "Viper, viper!" The uneasy thoughts that had plagued Scott since he entered the room blossomed now in the garden of his mind and their scent was sickening. What had Darby been doing in Lenore's apartment? Why had she tried to poison him? He tentatively tasted his own wine. Yes, she had gone for Darby. Why? The word, the question, was a lance searing Scott's flesh as he guessed the answer. Darby was staring at him. "She -- " He stopped, his face closing as abruptly as a slammed door. "Good thing The Propheteer was on the job." His expression dared Scott to speak. When Scott didn't Darby said, "You never know where you'll find a diseased mind. But life must go on. She's better off and so are all of us and the world without her. You've got to take these things with a dram of dispassion." Scott said nothing. But he knew what he would do. Perhaps he had suspected the truth all along. Perhaps not. But he knew what he must do now. beside the warning bell when Scott burst into Square Central in the middle of the long night that had embraced Lenore and refused to release her. Evan awoke at the sound of Scott's feet running across the tiled floor and sputtered helplessly, trying to adjust his lenses, trying to focus the world of the room around him. "You killed her!" Scott shouted, fists clenching as he stood before the old man. "Scott! Killed who? What are you raving about?" Scott slipped to his knees and began to weep. This was all that was left to him now -- tears and regrets and a lust for vengeance. But vengeance was not possible; it would bring death. Or so he had at first thought an hour ago as he stared down at the lifeless body of Lenore who had hated enough to kill Darby. Lenore , he thought now, kneeling, bent forward, his face hidden in his hands and his shoulders shaking. Lenore, you never hated anyone. How did he bring you down so low? The answer that came was shattering. There is no more horrible truth, Scott realized, than the one that tells how one who is made to love can learn to hate. Evan guided his sling down to where Scott kneeled. He reached out a hand and touched Scott's shoulder. "Scott?" Scott leaped to his feet and away. "What hath The Propheteer wrought?" Evan stared at him. Had Scott gone mad? He considered summoning the P-Men. A team from the medicaste. But the boy was weeping again. Evan slinged closer. Scott told him. Everything. Long minutes passed. The sixth finger of Evan's hand reached out as if of its own free will and delicately touched the button labeled P-Men. "Then -- every time I pressed this button -- " Scott nodded stonily. "Someone died." He watched Evan crumble before his eyes. Outwardly Evan was still the same but in the way that a hollowed-out mountain is the same. Outwardly the same. Inwardly empty. "Darby is right," Scott said finally. "Crime can be subtle. But punishable nonetheless. Will you do what I asked?" Instead of answering, The Propheteer ripped the nearest disk with its load of tape from the grid above the console. "I never meant to kill," he said. "I don't now." "It won't be you. We'll only be doing what Darby wants. Reprograming." An hour later it was finished. The Propheteer replaced the tape disk and turned it on. #I #(N '#)Oth  #  Darby's funeral. It took place below Square Central in silence and with only top-grade P-Men in attendance. It was followed by the even briefer ceremony marking Evan Barrister's voluntary retirement as Propheteer. Scott was installed in his place. When the P-Men had gone Scott drove Evan to the apartment the state had allotted him. In recognition of his long years of meritorious service it consisted of two full rooms for his own private use. "You were right about Darby and his motivation," Evan said over coffee in the new apartment. "I asked myself," Scott said, "why anyone would want to be The Propheteer." Evan winced. "I -- ' " "I don't mean you. It was different then. You wanted to prevent crime and to rehabilitate criminals. You wanted to build." "But you reasoned that Darby wanted to -- " "Kill. Murder. Destroy. Why else did he ease you out without your knowing about it? It wasn't the money." "The job pay s just enough to get by on." "It wasn't the status." "Nobody loves The Propheteer." "So I came to the inevitable conclusion. What reward did the job offer? What did it allow a man to do or be given, the way Darby had changed the system from your original conception?" "Kill. Or the chance to kill." "Just so. So I figured we would beat Darby at his own game by reprograming the Legal Administration tape to include unconcious as well as conscious motivation. Including Darby's." "And Darby was identified by the system he had corrupted as a criminal to end all criminals. And he paid the price he had charged so many others -- death." Evan stared at the cuckoo clock on the table before him, Scott's housewarming gift. "What are you going to do now that you are The Propheteer?" "I've already done it. Before we left -- I resigned. But before I did I suggested that the complex be analyzed and restructured so that potential criminals will still be identified but not killed. I suggested they be apprehended, treated and returned to society. I urged that the medicaste be placed in charge of the program's administration as they were in the beginning. I also mentioned that you ant during the redesign period." "Did they agree?" "They did." "You would have made a good Propheteer," Evan said. "The Propheteer is dead," Scott said. Evan smiled. "Long live The Propheteer!" Lenore, Scott thought with a wrench. I would have ended up calling the complex Lenore. "Where are you going?" Evan asked as Scott rose. "Stay and talk a little." He almost said please. Scott shook his head. "I've got to go. But I'll be back for a visit now and then." He drove too fast to Old Arena and strapped himself onto one of the pallets. One day soon, he hoped, there would be no more need for Old Arena and the things that happened there. But for now, he needed Old Arena. He stared steadily at the battle raging between the sweating teams of gigantic colonials that had been imported from Alpha Asteroid and gradually he let the impotent anger that was born of absolute and irrevocable loss overwhelm him. He shouted words that shamed him as his fingers tore at the plastic substance of the pallet, shredding it. With every word that left his lips he felt relieved. And defeated. And very much alone in the excited and screaming crowd.  worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. 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The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U S. Patent Office Printed in U S A. that I'm surrounded by a hideous reality arrived at by what is known as C onsensus. A believer is the guy who looks at the sunset and tells you Ihut it's as beautiful as a post curd, One day he will meet a girl who is as pretty as a picture (don't let this get past you), for whom he will vaguely evoke model males touted in mass media. These two will marry and breed children who will start life looking like all their cousins and other relatives on both sides but will grow up to be just like the old man or the old lady. And keep the faith. Some day the jerk will die either to confirm an accident or a medical statisticor simply of never having lived or seen a sunset or known a woman or had anything but hand-me-down children. In his coffin he will look natural and lifelike for the first time since birth. Forgettable phrases will eulogize him -- as pertinent to him as a post card is to a sunset or a picture to a lovely girl, for he Was, after all, human. But the one unforgettable truth about him will not be uttered. He lived by -- and died for -- Consensus. Some of us do. Others don't. Some of us will see a sunset as a sunset, a woman as a woman, a man as a man and a child as something new -- a genetic combination as individual as a fingerprint. An unprecedented life form about which no Consensus can exist, human genetics being as helter-skelter as they are. Ostensibly, by consensus, we breed by skin color, common antecedents, religious or ethnic dogma, for money or status and sometimes just for kicks. The historic realities of human procreation, of course -- and I think fortunately -- have little to do with such irrelevancies. You and I -- if you're truly reading this -- come from a long line of people and who knows what before that. We have this in common and I will say nothing more about your people. But if anyone were to tell me that over the millennia not one of mine crossed a frontier or jumped a fence I would know I was dealing with a clown. Or perhaps an idiot. I would know so from personal history, immediate family history and the recorded movements of more distant ancestors during the great churnings of Earth's human populations-mass migrations attended by violence, rapine, ravishment, conquest, love and lust. I come from restless, pagan stock and even a brief glance at a schematic diagram of the races of man would suggest that we are genetically related right around the globe. Regardless of race, color or creed. And this, right now, is where the action is. The Tower of Glass a great new serial by Robert Silverberg, starts in this issue. It deals with man's mastery , of his own creation and genes. It also touches on the false gods of Consensus and is a book that makes science fiction not only pertinent but necessary. "We want to test your writing aptitude" If you have ever wanted to write, here is your opportunity to find out if you have talent worth developing. Take this revealing Aptitude Test created by I # famous authors By Rod Serling If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We'll help you find out if you have the talent it takes to become a successful writer. Several years ago, I joined together with Max Shulman, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf, Bruce Catton, J. D. Ratcliff and several others to form the Famous Writers School. Our aim was to help qualified people acquire the skills they need to break into print. We poured everything we know about writing into a new kind of professional training course, which you take at home in your free time. After a solid grounding in the fundamentals of all good writing, you get advanced training in the specialty of your choice. Each of your writing assignments is examined by instructors who are themselves professional writers or editors. Your instructor goes over your work word by word, blue-penciling corrections right on it -- much as an editor does with established writers. Then he returns it to you with a long, personal letter of advice. This training works well. Our students Rod Serling, six-time Emmy Award winner, made TV writing an art form with Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight and T wilight Zone. He has also written many short stories and motion picture scripts. have sold their writing to hundreds of publications including Red book and True. Free Aptitude Test offered To find out if you can benefit from this training, send for the School's free Aptitude Test. If you test well, or offer other evidence of writing ability you may enroll. But there is no obligation. Famous Writers School Dept. W-# Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude worth developing. Please mail me, without obligation, your Aptitude Test and illustrated brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. and Space history echoes with their achievements. If you haven't yet read about them -- start now! by proper standards: Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall. Oddballs Starry-eyed nuts. The space program was the space program but you didn't have to leave the human race to be a part of it. So said their contemporaries, with sly and good-humored scorn. How could they know that in the long list of special names in the history of space contemplation and exploration, names like Aristotle, Galileo, Einstein, Goddard, Shepherd, Lovell, Armstrong, Aldrin none would be more lustrous, more worthy of memory than Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall? Since the moon explorations, man had reached out. Mars was known. Four landings had been made on its bare and cratered crust and the hope of finding indigenous life and remnants of past civilizations had been sponged away by bleak fact. There was no life on Mars. Apparently there had never been. But it, loo, had served. Timonium power was first used on the Mars run -- and the solar system opened. The stars still lay beyond. But an infant must learn to walk one step at a time. The next step, vast Jupiter, swung in its majestic orbit as always and now, with timonium, it was within reach. The target was Callisto. It had long been theorized that the giant planet might never be explored at first hand but that its big inner satellites were natural space stations, ready-built observatories for the studies that would have to be made before improving man moved on to the stars, out into the unknown systems that swung around other suns. The term was Callistonaut. There were to be three of them; three men intelligent enough to grasp the intricate technologies that would implement the entire project. Three men who could live together tranquilly and at peace for the two years of the journey to Jupiter's great moon and return. Three men with competencies so special that location meant nothing to them. Three men who could work for days and weeks without thinking of their surroundings at all. Three men who could live happily without the human race. And when the te'sls and competitions and complex analyses and expert opinions were finally structured and programed and fed into the computers the three Callistonauts, by margins so wide that it was no contest, were Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall. Allison and Carmichael could play tick-tack-toe for literally days on end. They had a record of games that extended back to the first days of their space academy training. They had refined the game and complicated it but it was still tick-tack-toe. Tattersall loved to watch ants. He could and did watch them from earliest dawn until they grew quiet in the evening chill. He was happiest when he had a day all to himself, a day in which he could watch ants. It must not be inferred that these things were all they could do. Naturally' not. Carmichael was a space physicist-mathematician of such profundity that he thought -- and sometimes spoke -- in mathematical symbols. And his memory was legendary. Allison had designed the basic energy-detection devices with which the spaceship was equipped. He expected to work on them, to extend them, to test them, to use them for whatever purposes presented themselves during the two-year voyage. Tattersall's concern was life. All kinds of life. Life interacting with life, life in whatever forms it could be imagined to exist and wherever it might possibly be found. Was there life on Jupiter? On Callisto? If there was, Allison would detect it, Tattersall would recognize and interpret it and Carmichael would reduce everything to formulae of unimaginable complexity and completeness and collaborate with the computers in deciding what they meant. tory stabilized thirty-one hundred miles above the Colorado Rockies the Callisto ship finally reached completion. Its interior, designed by the best minds in the international space program, was modified slightly by its occupantsto-be to include a comfortable game cubicle where tick-tack-toe, space chess and other games could be played. Adequate provision also was made for the housing of Tattersall's ant colonies, a number of which he planned to take along. The long artificial days, the weeks and months in deep space, would be ideal for ant-watching. The ship had little personality. It was a metallic, glittering, featureless teardrop, the blunt end destined to nose first into uncharted, uninvaded space, the tapered trailing end well suited for the extruding of sensors, and for the location of ion exhausts from the strange new timonium engines. On one side of the front bulge was painted the insignia banner of the International Space Council, on the other glowed the Stars and Stripes. The Callistonauts approved of these. They were proper and fitting. But the name Natalie across the front of the ship's blunt snout annoyed them all. "That is ridiculous," Allison said. "Whose bright idea was that? Naming the ship is the spaceman's right. I wouldn't be comfortable invading deep space in a ship called Natalie. I don't even know a Natalie." He had not been informed that Natalie was the name of the International Space Council President's favorite niece. It would have made no difference if he had known. Tattersall strode on long legs around the front of the vessel, his magnetized boots snapping onto the metallic scaffolding at each step. He liked the lines of the teardrop. "This is a good craft," said Tattersall. "She fias a destiny. She will ride the oceans of space. She'll be blown along by the solar winds. Let's call her the Albatross." "I used to be pretty good with a brush," Carmichael said. "Probably I haven't lost my touch." So he called a construction foreman, borrowed the equipment he needed and had himself lifted up to where he could go to work. A few minutes with an expunger, and Natalie was no more. Then neatly, in Old English lettering, he painted Albatross in glittering blue. "Put a penetrator ray on that," he directed the workman. "Make it a part of the hull. If Natalie has to have her name on something, we'll call a mountain on Callisto Natalie." "One on the back side," Allison amended. Like Earth's moon, Callisto always keeps the same side toward its planet. The Callistonauts thought nothing of this tweaking of the nose of Authority. In fact, they thought very little of Authority, period. As the first spacemen destined to pass the asteroid belt, to probe the far reaches of emptiness in which swung the Outer Planets, they knew they were special and thus entitled to a reasonable amount of privilege. This they were not backward about assuming. The prompt handling of the name incident set the tone for the entire operation. and propose but when the chips were down it would be the Callistonauts, the men on the spot, Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall, who would dispose. So no more was heard of Natalie. The Albatross was christened by breaking on its snout a bottle containing French champagne, Russian vodka, Japanese saki, Mexican tequila, Scotch whiskey and, at Tattersall's insistence, a small dollop of good bourbon from a little still known to him in the Tennessee hills. Four hundred ceremony to the world, while announcers and commentators chattered in five hundred languages, plus any number of dialects and accents. The composite fluid from the broken bottle had no effect on the ship's hull, thus confirming a general impression. The Albatross was a sturdy craft. There was a great deal of oratory. Dignitaries from all the countries that had contributed to from the planet's surface and occupied seats of honor on the great domed platform, looking down on the green and cloud-swathed Earth and out into the blue-black void of space. If they had contributed sizable amounts, they were on the program. The speeches went on for hours. They might have lasted longer had not the Callistonauts, growing bored, gotten up and walked out of the dome, crossed along the pressurized corridor and boarded the ship. "A man can takejust so much," Allison commented. "After all that hot air, they'll have to pump out the bubble." "Live and let live," said Carmichael generously. "They're having fun. If they hadn't seen us walk out, they'd never have missed us." "Pity," Allison said. "Still, I suppose we might sneak in a game or so while they're winding things up. We can say we're christening the game room." They settled in, made themselves comfortable, and soon were lost in tick-tack-toe. Tattersall went to see about his ants. T HE pre-launch activities came to an end at last. The Callistonauts went through the final checklist of seven thousand four hundred and two items with Earth Control, Allison and Tattersall using conventional lists, Carmichael doing the whole thing in his head. Then they posed for final pictures, battened the last hatch and the Albatross pushed gently away from the domes and platform and scaffolding of her orbiting birthplace and floated quietly, a mile or so from the crowded platstrapped and fitted into their acceleration couches. Ignition lights burned. There was a soft whine, a faint blue mist diffusing at the tail of the teardrop, and then, to the wide-eyed watchers, nothing. The Albatross was in her element, riding the solar winds. "There's not much point in piling up all those Gs at take-off," Carmichael remarked ten minutes later, as they unstrapped. "We could build speed slowly and get the same result." "Makes your tummy unhappy, does it?" Tattersall grinned. He bounced his lanky form from one wall to the other of the observation-control room, finally steadied himself in midair but upside-down to his two companions, who still clung to their couches. "Not really," Carmichael said, "though I've got more tummy to be unhappy than either of you." Carmichael was short, had a pink face and platinum hair and tended to be plump. "It's just that the fast take-off is an atavism. Like having a buggy-whip socket on a racing car." "We can pul that in the report," Allison suggested. "It's true enough and it's a good line." He rolled off his couch and floated free in the zero gravity. They all spent a few minutes bounding about, enjoying weightlessness. They handled the situation expertly, for each had had several moon runs and Allison had been a member of the last Mars expedition. They had their space legs. But probably what they were enjoying mosj was the knowledge into the distance at a comfortable fifty thousand miles an hour. "Well, to work," Carmichael said. "Let's check out with Earth Control and verify what they know as well as we do. Once they're happy we can have a bite of something and then I'll feel we're in business." "I'll do it," Tattersall offered. "After we pass the moon I've got a watch program to set up. Let me get my routine over first." So he went through the seven thousand, four hundred and twoitem checklist with Earth Control, exchanged a couple of pleasantries and switched off audio contact. Everything green. Everything Go. Earth Control could monitor every system and activity on the craft, could activate back-up systems, could even detect need for and initiate repairs. As far as the responsibilities of the Callistonauts were concerned, the Albatross was as completely automatic as any space entity had ever been. The one thing Earth Control could not monitor without the cooperation of the crew of the Albatross was conversation. And that probably was just as well. Actually the Albatross was a luxury situation. Due to the launch from high Earth orbit and the marvelous efficiency of the timonium reactors, there were no practical restrictions on needed equipment, materials or space. The ship's calculated fuel need, for all situations and for two years, was just thirtyone pounds of timonium. And a three hundred per cent margin for unanticipated emergency was included in this. A two-year supply of food biomass, in forms that each man found most palatable and perfectly maintained in fresh or living condition, was no great problem. In addition, a hydroponics room, which ran itself, provided everything from radishes to melons. And if both of these were, for some highly unlikely reason, no longer available, the ship's organic recycling systems would still feed the Callistonauts. Not as enjoyably -- but they would be nourished indefinitely. They wouldn't starve. Each man had a small but comfortable stateroom. The workshop was the result of an inordinate amount of planning and designing and there was no reasonable equipment that could not be constructed in it. Raw materials were in adequate supply, including projected possible needed amounts of every element in pure form. In short, the Callisto run was more than a simple expedition to explore a sector of the Solar System. It was preparation and training for the stars. Callistonaunts were not only settled in, they felt more at home than they had felt for months. They had watched the moon drift by at a close four thousand miles and had received a bon voyage message They had had a meal, a rest period, and each had taken a first step on an activity that was particularly his own. Tattersall had gotten his ant colonies properly installed and normally active. In the stress of takeoff he had neglected to activate the rotation of the ant lab and had found each colony capsule an unhappy, leg-waving cloud of ant workers floating about aimlessly in the zero gravity or clinging together in violently agitated balls. There was considerable individual injury. With the establishment of normal one-G, the ants promptly resumed instinctive behavior and no permanent harm resulted from the oversight. "In any ecosystem, damage to the individual is only a symptom," Tattersall mused as he watched his pets clear away the debris after the disaster. "If the species adjusts, the species persists." Allison set up the first of a proposed series of screens designed to make visual the sophisticated winnowing of a matter-detecting device. This was simply a variation of his energy-detecting and analyzing principle and he had high hopes for it. Trained on a space quadrat of known size, the sensors were designed to locate and eventually to record each material particle as it appeared in and traversed the area. Since these were of many kinds and values, the first screen showed a confusing kaleidoscope of streaks and clusters of light. But Allison sat and studied it happily. Carmichael's concern was with the computers. There were three of them and each reinforced and extended the potential of its next smaller predecessor. Hence the first two actually digested and structured data for involved analysis by the third. They required no maintenance or adjustment but Carmichael faced them with problem after problem, all manner of probability speculations, hypotheses in a variety of frames and contexts. In his way he was quite as content as Allison or Tattersall. They had the second meal together, This was not to be a pattern. None of them had the same metabolism, the same rest needs, the same work-period length preferences. The ship's maintenance was completely automatic. Its speed and guidance was one of the functions of the first computer and never required the collective attention of the Callistonauts. This second meal, therefore, was entirely social, before individual activity rhythms became established. "Request a conference," Tatlltersail said, after the eggs and bacon, toast and orange juice. There was both California and Florida orange juice, to be fair. With the second cup of coffee they were leaning back in their chairs, relaxing. The ship had been given a one-G spin, so normal eating procedure was possible. "I'm available," Carmichael said, stirring his coffee. As his well-nourished build indicated, he took both sugar and cream. Allison liked cream only, while Tattersall drank his black. "Fire away," said Allison. Tattersall sipped tentatively at his steaming cup. "I'm concerned," he said, "with all that empty space out there." "Aren't we all?" Carmichael asked. "A partial misstatement," Allison pointed out. "It's space, of course, but it's not entirely empty. Matter is simply more widely scattered. Everything's relative." "This we know," Tattersall conceded. "I used conventional phrasing. My concern is this: In every life situation that I'm aware of, each living thing has a minimum space requirement. It also must have a consistent energy source and sufficient matter for a corporeal entity. The availability of these basics results in persistence of life form. No sweat?" "Ecology I," Carmichael said. "Carry on." "In any ecosystem," Tattersall lectured, "given the energy and the matter in usable form, the competition is for space. Hence Earth, with its carbon-based life molecules adjusted to a free-oxygen atmosphere and able to aggregate into complex life forms, is limited in population numbers only by the space it can provide." "Obvious, but relevant to what? This is out of my field," commented Allison. "I'll get to you," Tattersall said. "I think you're important. But first, more kindergarten. Why isn't there life on Earth's moon? On Mars?" "Atmosphere, naturally," Allison said. "Lacking that, the other missing basics, if any, make no difference. No oxygen, no life." "As we know it," Tattersall added. "There's space, though. Just no way to make a usable energy flow available to complex, replicating molecules. Q.E.D." "So what's the question?" asked Carmichael. "There could be living entities on Mars, perhaps," went on Tattersall, "if they had other than a carbon-based molecular organization and another way of garnering the needed energy supply. We don't believe they're there, for such 'living things,' if you will, would be likely to approach densities comparable to the substrate and would hence be detectable. We could see 'em, weigh 'em, count 'em, take their pictures. And the available space for such forms, the surface space of the planet, would be negligible compared to all this lovely nothing we can see out the view ports. In other words, if life could get its basic requirements of matter and energy in some other fashion, why should it aggregate around any miserable little dense matter complex? Its other need is space. And there's space. Endless, ageless distances of it." "You're beginning to interest me," Allison said. "Tie it up." "When I saw my ants tumbling about in zero gravity, totally unable to adjust to the lack of the attraction of their bodies to a dense substrate, I began to think. If there were no large, appreciable aggregations of matter in the universe, would there be no life? If matter and energies are diffuse, are they any less there? That space out there is older than any planet, older than any sun. Why couldn't it also be the oldest life space, the ancestral biosphere?" Carmichael bounced out of his chair, took quick strides up and down the small dining room. "Beautiful," he said. "Logical, loo. I'll compute some general probabilities, then dig into the likelihood of other living molecular combinations, using known atomic structure, elemental affinities and behavior, for data. It could take me a while." "We're twelve hours from Earth," Allison pointed out. "We're concerned, among other things, with the possible life on Jupiter, on Callisto, and the rest of the Jovian complex as opportunity offers. Are you trying to reason that life out of existence before we even get there?" Tattersall grinned. "Not at all," he said. "You weren't listening. The probabilities are the same as they were before I said a word. And I wasn't saying that the possibilities of life on those aggregates are particularly remote. Carmichael can do some playing with that. I was reasoning after the fact with the moon and Mars. If there's life there, nothing we've yet devised can detect it." He paused and his long, homely, Lincolnesque face looked blankly into distance. "No," he continued, "what I'm really concerned with is the space between here and there. Is it waste, non-usable space as far as life is concerned? Since the beginning of time, whatever that means, have no replicating, behaving masses ever made use of all that apparent emptiness? As an ecologist, suddenly I don't believe it." He eyed Allison's classic profile, so different from his own. "You've got sensors out," he said. "You're probing that same space with equipment so special I'll never have sense enough to understand it. Do I challenge you?" "You know, you do," Allison said, "I'm surveying space because it's full, not because it's empty. You're hypothesizing concerning what it may possibly be full of." Tattersall unfolded his long form. "As far as I'm concerned, conference is over," he said. "I've got my money's worth." II T attersall knew he'd get his money's worth in more than discussion. The organization, or rather the complete lack of it, of the Albatross personnel practically guaranteed that. He had planted an idea. Each Callistonaut had hisown competencies, his own special areas of concern. He had no obligatory tasks, no restrictions on how he should or should not spend his time. No man had authority, save over his own activities. It shouldn't have worked, men being men. But it did. For three activity spans, roughly three Earth days, the men barely noticed each other. Carmichael slept twice, Allison had his eight hours three times, while Tattersall had four brief naps. Carmichael had roast beef, lamb chops, a huge pizza and lots of ice cream during his waking hours, Allison had run heavily to vegetables and eggs and had visited the hydroponics room twice for fresh leafy greens. He also took setting-up exercises after each sleep. Tattersall wasn't hungry, so he knew he must have eaten now and then, but he couldn't remember what. The spaceship was tooling along at the agreed-on fifty thousand miles an hour. Earth Control monitored but made no adjustments, since none were needed. For the Callistonauts the ship was home, transportation and undisturbed lab space. That was as near Utopia as they ever expected to come. Having watched ants and speculated on hypothetical space populations for his three days, Tattersall mentally came up for air. He wondered if Allison's sensors were picking up anything new and different. Carmichael may have pin-pointed some new molecular affinities with possible life potential. He found them in the game cubicle, just launching on a session of tick-tack-toe. "I don't mean to intrude," he apologized. "Just curious about the sensors." "We've only just begun the game," Allison said. "Afraid I've got nothing you can use yet." His handsome fce brightened. "One thing, though. I've made the solar wind visible. The proton flow shows nicely. Carmichael is going to calculate concentration and spacing after we relax a little. I think I've got enough for him to work with." "Only subatomic particles?" Tattersall was disappointed. "As of now," Allison said. "I think I've figured out how to broaden the settings, though. After all, it's just radar." "Plus," said Carmichael. "Plus," Allison agreed. "Go in the lab and take a look. The screen's on." Tattersall left them to their game. Since he had been invited, he had no hesitancy in seating himself before the big screen and watching the even streams of tiny blips move endlessly across it. If he can broaden the settings, he mused, we might learn something. Visualizing a known entity is just game playing. But some provision for sensing all matter in a section of space simultaneously -- now that would be progress! He decided he was hungry, so he punched for eggs and bacon and Florida orange juice. He'd had California the last time he recalled eating, but couldn't detect any difference. After plenty of black coffee he was suddenly ready to sleep, which he did for twelve hours. "I've adjusted the sensors," Allison told him when they happened to meet in the control room a couple of days later. "I get the gross space trash now, meteors and the like, and some gas clouds, mostly hydrogen and helium. Nothing I didn't know to be there but I love to be able to see them." "Sounds good," said Tattersall. TT # Ballantino Boohs tion blow strong and boisterous, what with the Nebula Awards and all. It seems to be a month in which everyone is publishing large numbers of titles, ourselves included. So we'd better get our books sorted out right off. First, our magnificent adult fantasy list has two new entries -- Lord one a delight. With the added plus of Lin Carter's Introduction and biography. Lin has also discovered a real this lady and very little is available from standard records. Someone must have information about an author of such charm and ingenuity as this -- so whoever you are, please communicate with us.  favorite Irish dramatic soprano, all read pieces of it. Here is the whole fiery history of Helva, a glorious creature (who, by the way, has the endorsement, of the Medical World in March, if you are nimble, you'll be able to find displays of three John demand and buy Poul Anderson's .  side of the ever alert science-fiction field, that is) have become aware that the planet is in an ecological crisis. April will see an ecological teach-in. Support it. In Ballantine's Conservation Series (actually our Survival Series, but until now you couldn't come right out and say so -- like who wants to know how to survive, no?) of course our text on the ecological strike us as marvelously unwieldy. it will have been on the stands a while by the time you read this. A Ballantine Friends of the Earth Book, at #c. Watch for it. And watch out for your planet. BB He grinned as he added: "I've just had a gentle scolding from Earth Control. They've been trying to talk to us for two days. They seem to think someone should be available for contact at all times." "Why?" asked Allison. "They didn't say," said Tattersall. "May I see the screen?" The dark surface was different now, with blips large and small, some in regular patterns and many jumbled in no detectable arrangement. "I've raised my sights," Allison explained. "Nothing subatomic showing now. Everything you see is at least molecular in size. But the variety is so great the picture's not very analyzable. Carmichael put counters on some of the commoner items but it soon was evident what they were -- so he lost interest." "Blips the same size don't behave alike," Tattersall pointed out. Long experience watching details of ant activity had sharpened his awareness of minutiae. "If there were some easy way to tell them apart, your counting could be done on a much enlarged scale." "How about color?" Allison suggested. "There's a spectroscopic arrangement I might make that would, I hope, distinguish. If I can pick it up, putting the color on the screen would be a cinch." he didn't have his usual concentration. He found his mind wandering back to Allison's screen with its endless variety and fluctuating concentrations and patterns of little flashes of light. He wondered if closer observation, the kind a student of limited ecosystems could make, would extract any further profit from Allison's detection skills. He watched ants for a day, then gave up. Allison had been busy. Not only had he changed and modified the emphases of his detectors but he had set up another screen, one that occupied almost one entire wall of the little lab. And it was a marvel of colored blips and clusters of lights, moving and whirling and flowing in dozens of simultaneous patterns. "This one gives perspective," Allison explained. "The scale is smaller, the area much larger. It is concerned only with molecular clusters, which makes the situation less complex. Any questionable area can be examined in subatomic detail by the more refined sets of sensors which utilize the smaller screen." "High and low power." Tattersall grinned. "That's as far as I can follow you. But the movement on the big screen is practically hypnotic, now you've got color. Mind if I watch a while?" Allison waved a hand, "Feel free," he said. "Watch 'em both. Have a ball. I think I've revealed all the matter that's out there, but so what? I make no organized sense out of what I see." "There's order," Taltersall said. "That's apparent." "To you, maybe," Allison said, "Ye-es," Tatlersall agreed. "Maybe to me. Thai's why I'd better look on." He spent two Earth days looking on. For a while he and Allison talked but gradually each withdrew into his own area of concern. Allison ever more preoccupied with the intricacies of his sensor complexes, Tattersall just watching -- watching. Even the ants had never been like this. Carmichael brought them back to general awareness. "Earth Control is in an uproar," he reported. "Ah," Tattersall said. "We weren't available for verbal communication again. I guess we'll have to watch it." "Worse. They say we're losing fuel." "How?" Allison reluctantly left his sensor controls. "We're not under drive. No maintenance systems are malfunctioning. We'd have had the alarm." "They know how," Carmichael said, "but not why." "Let's start with how," Tattersall suggested. "You know the timonium disintegration pattern. The only residue is ionized krypton. When this exceeds the pressure determined as optimum in the bleedoff chamber, the krypton ions are released as a trickle and the lowered pressure in the chamber initiates more timonium breakdown. The energy so derived is stored in the battery banks. Lowering of their charges can also trigger more fuel utilization." "There have been no excess energy needs in the systems?" "None. Utilization is exactly as predetermined." "So?" "Krypton ions are being drawn from the bleed-off chamber," Carmichael reported gravely. "I didn't believe it but I programed all the data and Computer Three says the same thing." "How fast?" Allison inquired. "Appreciable," Carmichael said. "We couldn't stand it for too long. We've lost almost two ounces of timonium." "Where's the energy going? Two ounces of timonium would take our happy home here halfway to the asteroids." "The battery banks can't overcharge, as you know. So the excess energy is being released as provided for in Emergency Pattern A. We've been trailing a streamer of light like a nova. We can be seen on Earth." "Man, oh, man," Tattersall murmured. "What was that again about anticipating everything?" "Even anticipation is based on data," Carmichael said. "We had no basis for anticipating this." "Evidently not. We've got to solve it, though. Pronto. What's happening to the krypton?" "That," Carmichael said, "is the question they pay off on." #. T HE spaceship Albatross hurtled on toward the asteroids, all its systems doing their jobs normally, the habitat of the Callistonauts still exactly as it had been planned. But a fantastic cone of waste light energy flared out behind it. Then, without warning or apparent reason, the krypton trickle reduced to expected volume and slowly the light died. "You've lost your tail," Earth Control reported. "Your fuel is now normal and there is no energy loss. We can't detect malfunction or change of rate of anything on the ship. You seem to have a problem we can't help you with -- but there isn't at this moment any evidence of its existence. You are completely Go, without any reservations." "We're out here to learn." Carmichael was at the microphone. "Maybe we were already getting a little dull. You'll be happier, though. There'll be a man on duty in Control until we hatch this egg. So you can have a chat with us anytime." "Nice of you," said Earth Control. Back in Allison's lab, Tattersall wondered aloud. "Why," he asked, "didn't your sensors pick up all that light? We seem to have been the last to know." Allison showed his even teeth. "I can imagine the talk. The answer is obvious. We're not adjusted for so-called pure energy. We were looking at matter. The small screen can show the krypton trickle, though. Watch. In a moment the trailing, wavering series of blips showed on the small screen. Each spread, grew dim, then vanished beyond the focus of the sensors. Tattersall sat and studied them. After an hour he said, "Could you readjust the large screen to include particles this small? How about color?" "Might do." Allison worked, the big screen panorama shifted. Tattersall watched with an inhuman, endless patience. Finally the pattern of the krypton trickle on the small screen duplicated itself in the corner of the larger as a faint series of purple dots. And Tattersall gave the display his fixed, fascinated attention. At last he sank back with a sigh. "There's more krypton in the environment out there," he observed. "Not ionized, though. We aren't making the only contribution. Where else would it come from?" "No idea. It's normally inert, of course. Only something unusual, as timonium disintegration, can produce it in ionized form." "The purple is due to it," Tattersail pointed out. "Change the larger screen to molecular aggregates again. Give me a smaller scale, a wider area, more perspective." He seemed unaware that he was giving an order. He was talking to Allison, but Allison knew that as a person he did not at that moment exist. He was only an extension of Tattersall's thinking, a datagathering device. He grinned with appreciation as he made the requested adjustments. "Ah-h!" The ant-watcher's long form settled back in his chair. It was his last word for six hours. When he was convinced that Tattersall had retired into a thought world of his own, Allison left him. Carmichael, in the comturbed. They discussed the fuel loss problem; Tattersall's preoccupation with the detection screens; the reasonableness of Earth Control's insistence on continually available voice communication. Finally they gravitated to the game cubicle and launched a new tick-tack-toe series, which they agreed would continue, with interruptions for essentials like work, rest and food, until they passed the first asteroid. The winner at this point would be officially designated as champion of the Inner Planets. Mars now loomed larger in the viewports than Earth. There had been no resumption of ihe fuel loss. Earth Control was almost happy, for voice communication with the Albatross had been scheduled for specific time slots and so far every one had been met. Actually Carmichael and Allison had simplified this situation by installlight, an alarm buzzer and a microphone in the game cubicle. They could thus conform to the schedule with minimum distraction from the games. They did, however, firmly negate the one activity that would have filled the cup of Earth Control to overflowing. They steadily refused to do public broadcasts. "We've passed this stage years ago," Carmichael summed it up with finality. "We're the Callistonauts, not show business personalities. We explore. We collect data. We do not entertain." And from this point of view they would not budge. They did not forget about Tattersall but they respected his privacy. Apparently he spent most of the week in the chair before Allison's screens but he was seen several times in the corridors. He probably ate and no doubt napped in the chair. The last time Allison checked his equipment, Tattersall was busily making line sketches, one after another, using a small lap board. Allison was curious but he waited. Tattersall would doubtless report eventually. And he did. He appeared at the game cubicle door just after an Earth Control voice check. Allison and Carmichael wete between games. "Request a conference," Tattersall said. His fellow Callistonauts looked him over. "When did you eat last?" Allison inquired. "You do look seedy." "Why -- " Tattersall paused and thought. "I don't know. Must have, though. I don't feel weak." "That's not the way I tell." Carmichael patted his growing paunch. "Why don't we have a meal while we confer?" He got no negatives, so they shifted to the dining area. "I like breakfasts best," Tattersall remarked and punched for scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and orange juice. The last item wouldn't deliver until he specified, so he selected California, at random. "Dinner time for me," Carmichael said and had a steak and trimmings. "I'll just have a green salad," Allison decided. "I'm over on my protein intake." "How can you remember?" Tattersall sounded envious of this remarkable ability. He expected no answer to his question and got none. He sighed. "Now," Carmichael said, with the expansiveness that a good steak induced, "what's the conference about?" They all had coffee and were leaning back, more relaxed than anyone on Earth would have believed possible. Tattersall had brought a small sheaf of his sketches, which he now began to shuffle. "The topic is appropriate,", he said. "Food." He looked considerably better after his breakfast, which, once his attention had been called to it, he had obviously enjoyed. He patted the sketches. "Food chains, I suppose, would be more specific. I'm well on my way to working out several simple ones." "You haven't watched ants for a week," Allison pointed out. "You've been living in front of my matter screens. No other life there, I thiiik." "That's why we're meeting," Tattersall said. "There is." He slouched in his chair, drank coffee and shuffled the sketch papers. "You remember my hypothesis," he went on. "You listened, you liked it, it made sense, but you didn't really believe it. Carmichael played around with possible atomic affinities. Allison surveyed the space we're going through but neither of you were thinking in life terms. I was." Ill He held up a sketch, "What would you say this is?" he asked. Allison and Carmichael examined it closely, passed it from hand to hand. "Well?" prodded Tattersall. "There isn't a kindergarten michael said, "so you must have done that yourself. But as art it doesn't rank high." Tattersall grinned. "As a diagram, it's better. That is the commonest matter aggregate in the space around us. Those seven interlinked clusters occur in exactly that relationship. They are, compared to other arrangements I've isolated, quite small, and they the predominant unit on your big screen, Allison." He waited and finally Allison said, "Carry on! Spin it out! You've got a repeating pattern and how you picked it out I don't know but we were sure that there would be lots of similar units. Where's the life?" "That item you're looking at," Tattersall said impressively, "is what I've tentatively called a diatom. A space diatom. It can replicate itself and I predict that it'll be found to be energy-rich. How it gets the energy, how it holds it, I don't know. Probably one of you will tell me. But there's a space plankton out there and that's the basic form in it." of view, any datum, was considered on its merits. That was among the reasons they had been chosen. So Allison and Carmichael didn't laugh. They thought. "Diatoms are eaten," Carmichael said. "They form the food base of many larger forms. Does something eat those?" Tattersall shuffled, handed over several sketches. "Those eat them." "The art's no better," Allison commented. "The idea, though, is fascinating. These are bigger, naturally." "The scale's indicated on each," said Tattersall. "I've used the diatom as the basic size unit." "You've measured?" Carmichael seized on an interest. "Actually, no. Everything's relative. Direct comparison. I was depending on you to measure the diatom for me. If I were guessing, I'd say well under a hundred yards in greatest dimension." "Then the larger forms are miles long?" "Consider how diffuse they are. Hundreds of miles is more likely. There's plenty of space." The Callistonauts sat silently, thinking. Finally, Allison: "I'm glad Earth Control isn't listening," he said. "They'd abort the mission and haul us back to be tucked safely away in padded quarters. Have you lengthened the food chain?" Tattersall held out another sketch. "This is really big and incredibly fast. On your screen it looks like a boat outlined with colored lights plowing along in a dark ocean. In its path all these other units disintegrate. I'd say it is sort of a generalized carnivore." "Abundant?" "No, quite rare. Only occasionally more than one on the screen at a time. I haven't been able to diagram it well. They're always far off in the distance." "Afraid of little old Albatross ?" scoffed Carmichael. "Why, it's not much bigger than a diatom!" "I don't know why," Tattersall said patiently. "I only know I haven't had one very close." Allison stood up abruptly. "Let's look. I'd almost forgotten that we weren't listening to a fairy tale. You've only had the screen at one adjustment. You haven't scratched the possibilities of those sensor banks." It took time. But they were fed, rested and challenged. Once Tattersall was able to show them the diatom, the rest was easy. And when a diatom, brought up close and carefully tracked, divided while they watched, they finally had no remaining doubts. That empty space in the view ports, all that endless distance, actually teemed with life. In one week of dedicated staring at a screen, an ant-watcher had given a new meaning to space biology. Ahead the first of the asteroids swam into the view ports as tiny, twinkling dots of light. But they went almost unnoticed. At the screens Allison probed, Carmichael measured and calculated abundance and distribution, Tattersall read organization into new light clusters and sketched new life forms. And once again Earth Control had trouble making voice contact. The crew of the Albatross had no time for routine. It was working. Occasionally Carmichael remembered and checked the control room for ominous signs. One day he found them. The entire fuel-use panel glittered with red lights and Earth Control was making frantic signals. Carmichael brought them in. "You're losing fuel," Earth Control reported. The voice sounded resigned. "Situation exactly as before. You've broken down an extra ounce and a half of timonium and your waste light cone has obliterated our view of Mars. Please check and report." "You have every indicator we have," Carmichael reminded Earth. "Let's compare each checklist." He started to repeat them from memory as was his custom, then stopped. "Wait," he directed. "There's one thing I can do. I'll call you in an hour. Out." A few crisp sentences oriented Allison and Tattersall. Allison swung the focus of his sensor banks toward the rear of the space craft, adjusted for subatomic particles and, where he had earlier been able to demonstrate the trickle of krypton ions, a steady purple stream now flowed across the screen. Allison increased the focal depth, watched the ions spread, swiftly cluster with other, different particles, and form large, shadowy blue aggregates. These thinned out with ever-increasing distance, arranged themselves in widespread patterns with aggregates glowing yellow and pink and green. And while the men looked, the krypton flow slowed to a trickle. Allison worked rapidly to decrease his magnification to the level of molecular clusters. The eyes of the watchers, now adjusted to the outlines of diaphanous space creatures, saw a form of unbelievable vastness slowly drop astern. "Smallest scale, deepest focus," urged Tattersall. It was enough. The great shape, faintly limned with electron discharge, swung sidewise, paralleled the course of the A Ibalross and kept pace. It seemed to loom but Carmichael, calculating, said, "Six million miles, give or take a few, to the nearer edge. One hundred sixty thousand miles long. I think it's aware of us." "It should be," Tattersall said quietly. "It swallowed us." Allison and Carmichael viewed their lanky coworker with some admiration. This was objectivity, plus. Tattersall was not impressed by the incredibility of his statement. He simply knew that it was so. "We've been immersed in Galactic gastric juice?" Carmichael was not jeering. ""As a matter complex it's not likely that the ship is within its frame of reference at all. We're too dense, like a meteor or an asteroid. No, the life form responded to what it could detect and utilize." "The krypton trickle!" Allison exclaimed. "Exactly. We could see the ions form complexes, form molecules. Krypton is one of its nutrients, one of its 'tissue' components. Probably in the environment of that entity out there such dainties as our fuel residue are hard to come by." They sat and studied the screen showing the scarcely visible but still obvious monster undulating majestically along, the clouds of lesser forms boiling around it and swirling and churning in its wake. "Leviathan." Allison spoke the name with feeling. "Trite, but all I can think of. At one hundred sixty thousand miles long, gentlemen, that is one big varmint!" Carmichael said. "We're impressed by dimension, not mass. I would guess that if old Leviathan were concentrated to our density he'd be about the sie of a chihuahua." "Whereas you," Tattersall picked it up, "if you were diluted to his " he eyed the Carmichael paunch "would probably extend out beyond the orbit of Saturn." "An exaggeration," Carmichael said placidly. "But it does illustrate the point." They all grinned. As would be expected, each had an immense feeling of satisfaction, of well-being. "We have opened a door," Allison said. "We have two immediate problems, though. One, what can we tell Earth Control? And two, how are we going to make old Leviathan keep his bill out of our fuel supply? Even if we could afford to feed him, which we can't, he may have friends." "Probably has," Carmichael agreed. "But Earth Control first. I promised to call them in an hour. That was three hours ago." "Space exploration is an unconventional activity," Tattersall said. "They'll just have to realize that." Both matters were discussed at length. To Carmichael, as probably the best contact man of the three, was finally delegated the job of placating Earth Control. "Snow them," Allison urged. "Tell them how hard we're working on the problem. Don't be handicapped by the truth. They wouldn't believe it anyway." lidity of the complex series of analyses by which the Callistonauts were chosen. Accidental compatibility of personalities could have been responsible. The concrete occurrence of the fuel drain may have contributed. Or maybe it was just plain blind luck. But by the time the Albatross went plunging into the asteroid viduals had coalesced into a team -- the fabulous team your space history records: Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall. The preoccupation of each with his own concerns gradually disappeared. They had problems in common, problems toward the solutions of which each could make unique contributions. The ants lived their lives almost without supervision. There was little time for tick-tack-toe. The practical situations among the asteroids kept them for a time from the diffuse matter screens. The first computer was constantly activating avoidance patterns and had reduced the finite speed of the vessel by half. The tiny planets were continually in sight. Meteor nets seined space around the space ship. Cameras recorded on miles of microlape and the telescopes probed without ceasing. All these activities and maneuvers required energy. "Dodging and recording all this flying real estate," Tattersall said, "is increasing our krypton trickle. What happens when you throw bread out the back of the boat?" "You get followed," Allison said promptly. "Everything from gulls to sharks. Let's look." The space biome seemed unaffected by the many little islands of dense matter. Plankton swarmed. The diatoms, and several forms much like them, jogged across the colored matter in endless profusion. Larger entities darted through them, scooping them up, yet seeming to have no effect on their numbers. And off in the distance, in his usual location off the port bow, Leviathan wallowed along with grotesque ease. Allison changed the orientation of his sensors, surveying space in every direction. There were new forms, just as there had been every observation session. He looked most carefully in the sector to the rear of the Albatross. Far back in the space wake, leisurely zig-zagging, a foreshortened hulk of fantastic size came on steadily. "Another Leviathan type," whispered Tattersall. "He's gleaning," Allison said. "He doesn't know where the stuff is originating." "When he catches us he'll sponge a free meal. Goodbye two more ounces of timonium!" "Suppose Leviathan detects him? There's no reason why the territorial imperative can't pertain out here, is there? This is Leviathan's bailiwick. Why shouldn't he defend it? With his size he needs a really big territory." Tattersall sighed happily. "This beats ants four ways from Sunday," he said. "Don't sell 'em short," Carmichael advised. "You trained on ants." of Leviathan II filled the color screen and overwhelmed it. The familiar outlines of the many known space forms gave way to alien groups and smudges, swirling and roiling in new and different patterns. "We're inside," Tattersall pronounced. "He has swallowed us." Allison pinched himself. "I don't feel any different." "Look at the krypton trickle. I'll bet it's a river." Allison adjusted the finer sensor banks. The purple stream rippled and pulsed. "Our waste light cone is bugging Earth again but don't contact 'em. Let 'em wail. How can we get this thing off us? Or how can we get out? It may have a bigger appetite than Leviathan the First has shown. This could get serious." "Look at the screen!" Carmichael exclaimed. The patterns were suddenly familiar again. Diatoms, space amoebae, other plankton and the many forms that fed on them and on each other, all were back -- but in a stale of wild disorder. "Smallest scale, deepest focus," Tattersall urged breathlessly. Allison worked. Far in the distance two vast forms swung around each other in a swift and sinuous dance, flashspace as they feinted and parried like fighting porpoises. They came together with impact that seemed to blend theirdiaphanous outlines, then boundedawaywith forms unimpaired. "Sic 'im, Leviathan!" Carmichael whooped. "You can handle him! You've trained on the best krypton!" It was a brief battle. One monster made a wide sweep -- then, instead of closing the circle, it kept on going. In minutes it was out of range, completely undetectable. "But who won?" Allison asked plaintively. "They looked exactly alike." "Doesn't really matter," said Tattersall soothingly, "but if it'll make you feel better, that's our old friend out there. A dog generally wins the fights in his own yard. And look where he's positioning himself." , The huge outline was again in convoy position, plunging along far off the port bow, pacing without effort the twenty-five-thousand-mile-an-hour speed of the Albatross. "He's not about to be ousted," Tattersall said. "He knows we give krypton ions." "Maybe I'll grant that." Carmichael looked only mildly dubious. "He's still a problem, isn't he? He won't be content to sniff the fragrance. He'll be back for another feed. And another. And another. He keeps off others -- but we can't afford him." "I've been thinking," Allison said slowly. "If he can be attracted, it follows that he can be repelled. Rats learn from mild electric shocks. Dogs won't eat food with pepper. You follow?" "You want to teach him no-nol I'm sympathetic. But how?" "Feed him something he doesn't like." Tattersall chuckled. "You have an idea," he said, "but you've created another problem. What doesn't he like?" "You've watched the life forms," Allison pointed out. "You discovered them, discovered their behavior. But I've looked more closely at their compositions. I've identified a number of atomic and subatomic particles out there. And many that are common to large aggregates, to suns and planets and asteroids, are missing in open space. We've got pure elements. Let's feed him a small dose of one not a part of his structure or his environment." "Oxygen?" Tattersall's eyes gleamed. "It's active, we can release it in minute amounts and it might make a nice paradoxical irritant. No life we've previously known can exist without it. But I seem to remember that it isn't found in practical quantities in space." F OR the first time the crew of the Albatross grew impatient as it waited. It had baited a trap and the quarry would not come in. Between stints in the control room Allison and Carmichael played space chess but neither cared who won. Tattersall alternated between his ants and Allison's screen, where Leviathan rolled tranquilly along his chosen track, day after Earth day. "Krypton must just be dessert," Tattersall decided, "He really doesn't need us." But their monster-watch came to an end, as it had to. Tattersall saw him as he peeled off, swung in a behind the Albatross, following up the spreading ions of the krypton trickle. Allison and Carmichael left a game unfinished. Leviathan came on steadily. The space life boiled away from his snout, then the screen no longer showed it asheengulfed the spaceship and speeded up the trickle of the appetizing krypton. "We're inside," exclaimed Allison. "Here goes," Carmichael said and pressed a release button. The tiny jet of oxygen would not have sustained a mouse for a minute but the colors on the screen rioted. In an instant the swarming plankton were visible again, roiled and lashed as by a typhoon. Allison worked swiftly, deepening the focus of the senior banks. Far off fo the sunside of the little ship Leviathan flung himself about with frantic abandon, swapping ends like a bucking horse, probably creating untold havoc among the packed shoals of lesser life. Three pairs of human eyes stared in fascination. "Look well, gentlemen," Carmichael said in a hushed tone. "Never, I think, will you see a more colossal case of celestial belly-ache." An asteroid, one of the largest they had recorded, lay directly in the path of the plunging, writhing monster. The little world, its sunside glittering, was not obscured and had no effect as it drifted through the diffuse mass from end to end. Miles in diameter, it was nothing Leviathan could detect, nothing of which he could be aware. "On through like an aspirin tablet," Carmichael said with awe. "Fellow dreamers, how are we going to comraunicate what we have seen on that screen? Who will believe in the space biome? We can't record it." "Not yet," Allison said, "but we will. As l see it, Callisto and the Jovian complex have become secondary for us. We're the first space ecologists. Our job is and will be to analyze the life between worlds, the life between suns." Tattersall nodded his rough head slowly. "We've got the biggest ecosystem of all," he agreed. "We've got the Universe!"  Green Earth was a memory -- and memories were not for builders I talking together in the ice corridors. "I don't like it," Switch was muttering nervously, his forefinger tracing abstract patterns on the roughly hewn walls of the tunnel. "What can we do?" Cockade held the lamp which reflected infinities in the ice around them. Her voice echoed shrill and hollow. "I don't know what the hell we can do except just get out." They were walking again; the corridor widened, although Switch was still obliged to stoop. Weirdly refracted through thin ice, the danced in the glow of Cockade's lamp. "Why don't we, then?" flesh hunters would get us, right "Two of us -- alone?" away." She was stacking cans on a "Not if we took Jacko's snowrough sledge while Switch chipped boat." Her voice was sly. at the shelves with his pick. The "Just take it? Just sail it away, lamp was on the floor, smoking you mean?" black. "Yes." "Just the two of us? We "I'm not sure I know how." wouldn't stand a chance." He "I do." She looked smug, paused in his work to watch her "Sometimes he took me hunting face hopefully. Maybe they would with him. Before you came, that is. stand a chance. Maybe. "The I can sail it quite easily." "What about Jacko and the others?" Switch was experiencing a belated twinge of conscience. "What will they do? How will they manage for meat?" "There's plenty down here." "Yes, built's not fresh. I t's been here for years and years. It's good to have fresh meat sometimes. I wonder if Jacko had any luck today." His broad face lightened with anticipation. "Don't you want to get away?" She leaned toward him, eyes narrowed. "Do you want to stay? Is that it?" "It's not loo bad here." "Look -- " She raised her hand before his face, fingers spread, ticking off points. "The flesh hunters know we're here. The Old Man won't leave. Jacko won't leave without the Old Man. Shrug and Paladin won't leave without Jacko. Soon the flesh hunters will come and we won't stand a chance. Don't you see, Switch? We've got to move on." The sledge was fully loaded now. They began to pull it back along the ice corridor. Two human beings -- the man dressed in a skindiving suit with a tweed jacket over the top, the woman in Wellington boots and a sable coat. Trudging along the blue-silver ice tunnel, dragging a sledge stacked with canned food from an entombed supermarket. "We've got to move on," repeated Cockade her voice urgent. T HE Old Man was talking to Shrug and Paladin in the bell tower. "I've seen them all." His voice issued piping from misshapen lips. "Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, horses -- domestic animals, they called them. Milk, wool, fresh meal whenever you wanted. You wanted fresh because you had run out? You killed a domestic animal. Except horses." He shook his head sagely. "You didn't eat horses." "Why did you keep them?" asked Paladin. "To ride. You rode them across the fields, along the roads, hoofs clattering, galloping, the wind singing in your face, the hoofs beating time." The Old Man's skin was flushed, like raw chewed leather. His eyes, shining, far away, looked across sixty years. The old fool will have another turn unless he takes it easy, thought Shrug in the corner, taking another swig of Harvey's Merienda from the dark bottle. "Didn't the horses hoofs sink in?" asked Paladin eagerly. He was about twenty-six, palefaced and intense, a dreamer. The Old Man's words lent his dreams shape and substance. "Of course not. There wasn't any snow, not then. Only in winter, that is. No. The land was firm so you could walk on it, like this floor. All these buildings joined by tunnels -- once they stood firm on the land, open to the sky. There was no snow. Only in winter, that is. Then the snow would lie a foot thick, at most two feet -- and when you waded through it you could feel the land solid beneath." Shrug, listening, shivered, remembering his last trip Up Top. Jacko had taken him in the snowboat to hunt Pads and a gust of wind had capsized the vessel. He had sunk into the powdery snow, thrashing with his legs in search for a footing and finding none. The snow was up to his shoulders before Jacko, spreadeagled on boards, had reached him and dragged him to safety. That was the last time he had gone Up Top. The experience had led to a recurrent dream which tortured him on the days when Switch forgot to bring liquor back from the Wine Lodge. Again he had fallen into the snow but this time Jacko was nowhere near. As he sank, shouting, his feet touched something and he thought, I'm saved. It was the roof of the Wine Lodge, a mere five feet below the surface. But the roof was steeply pitched and slippery and Shrug's feet, although performing the motions of running, could not obtain purchase. For minutes he ran up the slates while all the time his feet were losing ground and he was slipping deeper, deeper into the snow. He was screaming. He usually woke at this point to find one of the others slapping his face and shouting at him but it always took him some time to recall where he was. He was glad to see the others, although they were annoyed at being disturbed by his yelling. But suppose, one day, they didn't wake him up. He took another drink and looked around the small bell tower, timber-strutted and comfortable. Against one wall was nailed a ladder leading to the hole in the spire Up Top, where Jacko went. There was a square hole in the floor beside his mattress and a flight of steps leading down to the ice tunnels. Life was simple and straightforward in the bell tower. The Old Man was still talking he was always talking. "There were the cars, too, and the trains and the airplanes, carrying you fast and safe, much better than the snowboat. They didn't rely on the wind -- they had their own power, built in. I used to go to car races sometimes. The Monaco Grand Prix -- that was a sight. Cars weaving in and out between the houses like wheeled rockets, their exhaust noise bouncing from the buildings like bombs. The drivers were princes, the winner a crowned king." Paladin sighed. His eyes burned. "I should have liked to have been a racing driver," he whispered, hands crooked around the wheel the Old Man had pictured for him so many times. "I would have won -- they would have crowned me King Paladin. There would never have been a driver like me." Shrug laughed harshly from his corner then listened, cocking his head. "Quiet," said softly. "I think they're coming." A regular thumping could be heard, the familiar sound of Switch and Cockade dragging their sledge up the stairs, punctuated by the occasional rattle as a can slid over the backplate and went tumbling back down. Next, a scraping as they reached the floor below and pulled their load over to the stockpile -- then the clack-clack of unloading and restacking. Presently Cockade's head appeared, disembodied, through the hole at floor level. "One of these days you lazy bastards might come and give us a hand," she shrilled, heaving herself through the hatch and sprawling on the dirty floor. Switch arrived next, glancing guiltily at the others and lying down beside her. "What did ' you get?" asked Shrug anxiously, misinterpreting Switch's sheepish look. Without replying Switch handed him a bottle, which he examined in the light of the lamp Cockade had placed on the floor. "Tonic Wine," he said, recognizing the label without reading it. "What the hell did you bring this junk for?" He uncorked the bottle and drank. "Long way to the Wine Lodge," explained Switch briefly. "There's been a fall," he added as an afterthought. "We had to get what we could from the Supermarket." "A fall?" Shrug was alarmed. "It'll have to be cleared." "You volunteering?" asked Cockade sharply. A potentially awkward situation was averted by a sudden fading of the light. A figure was backing clumsily through the gaping hole in the spire, feet feeling for the ladder. Jacko was home. "Flesh hunters," Jacko said. shouted, feet clattering on the wooden floor as he capered, his shadow dancing on the walls. "I'd mow them down, whoosh, whoosh, one after the other -- " He brandished a broken lath, cutting and slashing, driving his imaginary opponent to the wall and dispatching him with a thrust to the gut. "Take that, you swine -- " "Whereabouts?" asked Shrug nervously, propped up on one elbow. "Over to the southwest," explained Jacko, pointing, his tall figure dwarfing Paladin. "Ten or twelve there were, about three miles away. I was following a Pad when I saw smoke from a square roof beside a spire -- then they appeared out of the smoke. They were carrying things -- people, I think, and they dumped them on sledges. They pulled away on skis. They went north." "They know we're here," muttered Switch. "It's only a matter of time." "I don't think so." This from Shrug. "I reckon they'd have been here already, if they'd known." Cockade sniffed. "You're too bloody idle to move." She tore a strip of flesh from the ham of the Pad sizzling on the improvised spit. They were all gathered around the fire glowing in the huge, tilled bell. "If you saw them coming, Christ, you'd just have another drink and welcome them in. You're so damn pickled you wouldn't feel their knives." Shrug belched in disgust, staring into the fire. "I remember the green fields," mumbled the Old Man. "It wasn't always like this -- oh, no. In those days a man could walk in the fields, on the roads -- anywhere -- safe. No flesh hunters then." "Jacko." Cockade's voice was sharp. "Tell that old fool to shut up. He's just not with it. Now -- " she regarded them all one by one, sizing them up -- "what are we going to do about it?" "Defend ourselves." Paladin laughed recklessly. "Mow them down, one by one, as they come through the hole." "No chance of that." Switch's mouth twisted in a sneer. "They'll smoke us out that's the way they work. They'll pour petrol in here and set fire to the place and we'll get the chop when we climb out, coughing up our guts." "What do you think, Jacko?" Cockade asked. She moved close to him, putting her arm around him the way she used to before his indifference got her down and Switch arrived. "Can't we go and find somewhere else?" Her voice was unusually pleading. "I'm not leaving the Old Man." He said it flatly, as if reciting a catechism by rote. "For God's sake." She flung her arms wide. "Can't you forget about that old fool? His time's nearly up, anyway. It's us that matter -- the young ones, you and me and Switch and Paladin. And Shrug. Not that old parasite." "You can go without us if you want." "How? We haven't got a snowboat." "Build one." "Build one? That would take weeks. We haven't got time. Look -- " she lowered her voice to a persuasive wheedle -- "if you're that fond of the Old Man, why not take him with us? All of us, with the snowboat and the sledges and skis." "You know he's too old to stand any journey." "It's the colors I miss most," the Old Man was saying, his voice been speaking quietly all the time. "The green fields and the red roofs. The blue sky and the white buildings. Not like here-here everything's brown. Brown walls, brown floor, brown roof. Brown dirt. This place is the color of decay -- " "Tell me about the fields, Old Man." Jacko squatted beside the thin, ragged figure. "Tell me about the trees and the hills." His eyes were far away, imagining what he had never seen. "The hills were purple with heather and the trees were emerald in spring and gold in autumn -- and even in winter there was color, with the berries and the birds." "Tell us about the birds," Paladin murmured, sitting down. Cockade shrugged, then sat down, too. The discussion appeared to be over. Discussions were futile anyway. II speared through the hole in the spire and Cockade stirred, grumbling to herself. She opened her eyes reluctantly and, rolling over, found herself looking straight into Switch's face, bloated with sleep. His skin was flushed. his breathing stertorous. She shook him disgustedly. "Wha'#" He squinted at her, tiredly. # "Wake up. I want to talk to you." "Later." He rolled over, facing the other way. She shrugged and lay down again. It could wait. As long as they didn't leave matters too late. Occasionally the bell tower trembled to the touch of distant, underground thunder. with his dream companions at the mortar, dropping in the canister, whang as it sailed away over enemy lines. Whump, as the charge lindrical emissary of death from him, Paladin. Whump. He grinned fiercely in his sleep. T HE Old Man dreamed of rainbows. Jacko awoke, stretched and scratched himself, looked around and rose quietly to his feet. He stretched again, sinews crackling, and yawned silently. He shrugged his shoulders into a wellcut overcoat, made for the ladder and began to climb. As always he paused at the hole, scanning the horizon for signs of strangers, then stepped through into the snowboat tethered outside. The eternal wind swept by as it had for years, no stronger, no weaker -- just a continuous driving wall against which a man could lean. The surface of the snow was rippling waves, the tips whipped off by the wind into a shallow mist so that the waves themselves swam out of focus. Jacko untied the painter, hoisted the sail and pushed off with his foot. The boat moved away slowly at first. Then, heeling as it left the lee of the spire, it raced across the snow with a keen hissing. Jacko settled himself in the stern, letting out the mainsheet. He set a course for the southwest. Behind him the only evidence of the buried village was the church spire, projecting solid and incongruous from the shifting field of silver. fast, striving by concentrated thought and effort to outpace and put behind him the demons of the night. He had seen them so clearly that he knew -- surely he could not have been dreaming those huge white shapes which had paced the bell tower toward him, stepping through the vanished bodies of Switch and Cockade, Paladin, Jacko and the Old Man and coming for him only -- him. Shrug. He had screamed once and Jacko had suddenly been there, bending over him -- but still the Pads had come on inexorably, pacing about the walls and occasionally dropping to all fours, circling, but all the lime closing in on him. Jacko had returned to his mattress and gone to sleep again, ignoring the white beasts. So, as soon as he felt a little better, Shrug had risen, lit a lamp and descended the steps to the ice tunnels. Stooping, he had scuttled along the corridors, past the tailor's, Woolworths, the Supermarket then turned left along the spur which led to the Wine Lodge. It was months, maybe years, since he had last been in the tunnels -- certainly he had not ventured here since Switch had arrived. Since then he had relied on the others to bring his supplies. Finding the spur blocked by the fall Switch had mentioned, he had retraced his steps to the ironmongers, where he had obtained a spade and a case of blasting charges and fuses. A couple of satisfactory explosions had reduced the ice boulders to powder without bringing down the roof and he was now shifting the rubble. His back was already aching. A dull throbbing concentrated around the lumbar region rose to a crescendo of pain each time he lifted the spade. The sweat oozing from his body felt as if it were solidifying to ice drops on his skin, so intense was the cold in the tunnel. He was seized with bouts of shivering as he toiled. For the time being, however, he had conquered the demons. As he worked he thought of Jacko and wondered once again why the big man stayed with them. Was he thinking of founding a tribe? If so, the material with which he was starting was hardly inspiring. An alcoholic, a menial case and a dotard -- which left Switch and Cockade. These two had been together for some time now -- ever since Jacko had saved Switch from the flesh hunters and given him Cockade -- but there was no promise of children on the way. No. Jacko would be better off elsewhere. He could be a leader in one of the larger communities if he chose -- there was no need for him to stay here in this doomed group. Maybe Jacko was just a philanthropist. Shrug considered Jacko to be the finest person he had ever met. He labored on, shoveling, shoveling in the tunnel too low to allow an upright stance and barely wide enough to permit him to swing the spade. Frequentlyas he turned the spade caught on the rough wall and spilled the contents in exactly the spot from where they had been lifted. When this happened Shrug cursed quietly and sincerely. After a while he could no longer think even of Jacko and concentrated on his goal, striving with what little will remained to visualize the Wine Lodge, the row upon row of bottles -- brandy, whiskey, gin (but hadn't Switch said they were all gone now?), vodka. creme de menlhe, Pernod, Cherry Heering, Drambuie, Glayva and hundreds more besides -- all glowing with their bright labels. And then the ports and sherries Old Monk, Directors' Bin, Bristol Cream, Rubio, even Whiteways' British. A bottle of Whiteways' British would go down very nicely right now. T HE mother Pad and her two cubs hadn't caught Jacko's scent. He approached upwind tacking the snowboat silently and expertly against the stinging, snowladen breeze -- and reached for his rifle. Within range, he turned the boat directly into the wind and, as she slowed and the sail began to flog, he moved forward to the bows and raised the rifle, balancing carefully and sighting along the barrel. The crack of an unexpected shot was borne downwind and the mother Pad reared up, standing huge and white on her grotesquely splayed hind feet, peering myopically this way and that, head thrust forward. Jacko waited, lowering his unfired rifle. Someone else was after the beast. It was good policy in such cases to keep quiet and await developments to ascertain the strength of the opposition before acting. Soon he saw them, a group of indistinct shapes beyond the Pad, moving fast downward on skis, in his direction. As they approached he recognized the huge, wingiike sails extended from each man's shouldersthese were the flesh hunters. With the bellying silver material straining from long poles strapped horizontally across their shoulders they had the appearance of giant birds of prey, swooping towards him. There must have been a dozen of them and a distant shout warned Jacko that he had been sighted. A fusillade of shots sounded as they gunned down the Pad and her cubs and, leaving two men to guard the bodies, swept toward the snowboat. Meanwhile Jacko had been sawing the tiller frantically. At last the bows of the vessel unstuck from the teeth of the wind and the sail filled. He spun the snowboat almost in her own length and began to pick up speed, running before the breeze, the shouts of his pursuers shrill in his ears. He was in a bad position. He could not outrun them -- his only chance was to outmaneuver them. Gradually he altered course on a wide curve until the wind was blowing from abeam. Another crackle of shots announced that the flesh hunters had guessed his purpose and a part of the force parted from the main body to head him off, fabric shivering and skis throwing up cascades of snow as they endeavored to sail close to the wind. Jacko watched them anxiously. These men were experts. The snowboat scribed a wide arc on the drifting sea of snow. Not far behind flew the birdlike sail skiersa predatory flock but losing ground gradually as the arc took Jacko's path aslant to the wind. But then, cutting inside on a chord to the arc, raced the real danger, the smaller group of skiers on a parallel course and closing in. The main body of his pursuers was definitely falling behind. It was not easy to point close to the wind with shoulder sails. The. sails were designed for use with the wind behind with the full length of the skis acting as an effective, steady platform. But the smaller group was coming on, shooting, closing in. These men were proficient. Jacko quickly decided on a final, desperate maneuver. No matter how accomplished a sailor a skier may be, a snowboat will always have the advantage on a really close haul. Dragging the sail tight, Jacko pointed the vessel as close into the wind as he dared, on a course that would intersect his pursuers at a point some eighty yards ahead. The snowboat heeled alarmingly, running almost on her gunwales. Then, as he closed with the flesh hunters, he threw himself to the floorboards, hidden from the men by the angle of the heeling hull. He heard the smack of shots tearing through the light ply and waited for the numbing shock of a bullet in the back -- then the weird shape of a skier passed close astern, towering over him, staring down at him and trying to get a revolver to bear but hampered by the straining shoulder sails. A few shots Spattered harmlessly into the woodwork and within seconds the danger was past as the figure disappeared from view. The flesh hunters had been outmaneuvered. After a while Jacko set an easier course and headed for home. It was too dangerous on the snowfields, that day. T HE glow from Shrug's lamp revealed row upon row of empty shelves and for a while he stood motionless, struggling to understand. The icy, tomblike atmosphere was chill to his skin and he was shivering while his stomach, bereft of nutrient alcohol for several hours, was rebelling. He swallowed heavily. It was inconceivable that he had drunk the place dry over a period of a few years. He had been obtaining his drinks from the Wine Lodge for so long that he had subconsciously come to believe that the supply was inexhaustible More recently Switch and Cockade had been doing his shopping for him, so any diminution of the slock had not been apparent to him. They had brought him the bottles and when he had drunk them they had brought him more. He had had no reason to believe that the state of affairs would not continue forever. Presently he lay down on the floor, the lamp beside him, his face gray, his beard reflecting sparks of light from the trapped ice particles.  the Old Man was saying, "this village was called Manaton, I think. Or it may have been Bickleigh." "Where's Shrug?" asked Switch suddenly. "It's difficult to tell just from a church spire -- But to me this seems very much like Manaton." "He wasn't here when I woke up," said Cockade. "You used to live in this part of the country?" asked Paladin. "Before, I mean?" "I think so. It's difficult to tell." "You've got no idea," remarked Cockade acidly. "You don't know where the hell you are. You live in a world of your own. Christ, you haven't been outside the bell tower since I can remember." "True. But then, don't we all live in our own private worlds now?" The Old Man, surprisingly, seemed to be entering into a discussion. "Not only mentally but physically as well? When did you last go Up Top?" Cockade shifted uneasily. "More recently than you anyway. And I go down to the tunnels often." "But what about your mind? I heard you talking about Shrug just now. Did you think: Shrug's not here ? Or did you think: Shrug's down in the Stock Room or else in the tunnels... and could you visualize him there?" "I just thought he wasn't with us, that's all. So what?" The Old Man chuckled. "So Shrug had moved out of your private world both physically and mentally. And for you that was the end of the matter." Paladin showed signs of alarm. "I don't think he ought to be down in the tunnels. He's not well. He was screaming again last night." "Well done, Paladin. We'll make a human being of you, yet." The Old Man looked pleased. "All right. All right." Cockade was annoyed. "What do you think about, Old Man?" "Jacko, mostly. I wonder what's happening to him when he's Up Top -- and if he's safe. I worry a lot about Jacko. He's been a good friend to me." A maudlin note entered the Old Man's voice. His moment of lucidity was over and he was about to commence another monologue. Fortunately for the others there was an interruption. Jacko had arrived and was descending the ladder. He jumped the last few rungs to the floor, landing with a thump. "Christ." He threw off his coat and crouched before the fire, rasping his hands together. "I've had a hell of a morning " He glanced around. "Where's Shrug?" Silence. Then: "We don't know," said Switch. "We think he may be in the tunnels." "You knew he'd gone alone and you didn't go to look for him?" Jacko's expression was ominous. "Oh, for God's sake -- " Putting on his coat again, he made for the stairs. face of consciousness for a long time, as though in suspended animation. He was dimly aware that he was back in the bell tower. The wooden floor was warm to his back and he could here the voices of the others discussing him. His thoughts were slow and strangely clear, as though purified from extraneous influences and distractions. The group in the bell tower had a purpose. He could see that now but the reason behind the purpose was more difficult to define. The purpose of the group, directed by Jacko, was to sustain the life of the Old Man, who otherwise would have died. All action was directed toward that end. The reason for prolonging a useless existence? That was more difficult. Maybe the reason was that, without a reason, there would be no purpose. So there had to be a reason, otherwise the purposeless group would scatter and the individuals would not survive. No. It was not only that. Jacko himself was another reason. It was a condition of Jacko's looking after them that they all cared for the Old Man. And without the leadership of Jacko they would all perish. So they did what Jacko said and sustained the Old Man out of fear that otherwise Jacko would go. What a pity that all their efforts were concentrated on preserving and encouraging decay. If only Cockade were pregnant, that would give them all true purpose. What would happen if the Old Man died today?" Why was the Wine Lodge empty? Why had Jacko saved his life again when his. Shrug's, survival was not essential to the well-being of the Old Man? Was Jacko real? Or was he an ephemeral antithesis to the ghostly Pads who came at night -- a sort of Christ? His mind a seething turmoil of unanswered questions, Shrug returned moaning to full consciousness. Ill ly." Jacko was standing on the ladder. His head was level with the hole in the spire. Switch left Cockade and joined him. "Look." Together they stared out across the snowfields. About a hundred and fifty yards away, indistinct in the driving snow, clustered a group of men. They stood motionless, sledges at their feet, obviously discussing a plan of action that could only concern the spire -- there was no other landmark to discuss. They were, clearly, flesh hunters. All this Switch divined in a matter of seconds before he hastily descended the ladder, almost falling into the arms of Cockade. "What is it?" "Flesh hunters," he said, trembling uncontrollably. He had not set eyes on the snowfields for a long time -- the men out there were not his only enemies. Jacko called down, "I think it's the lot that was after me this morning. They must have followed the direction I took." Paladin joined Jacko at the hole. "Christ -- " he muttered, counting. "There's over a dozen of them. Do you think we can hold them off?" "We'll just have to try, won't we?" A figure detached itself from the group and approached, gaining focus with proximity, moving laboriously against the wind on broad skis. Paladin could see the eyes, red-rimmed within a swathing of fur, regarding them. "What do you want?" asked Jacko quietly. "How many are you?" "I said, what do you want?" re'peated Jacko. The eyes narrowed and Paladin felt that under the furs the mouth was grinning mirthlessly. "We want food," came the muffled voice, "and drink and women. We want shelter, clothes, guns, ammunition. We want everything you've got." "Try it," said Jacko. "Try it!" yelled Paladin suddenly. "Yes, you just try it, that's all! We've got guns enough to hold you all off. You don't stand a chance. Hey, Cockade!" He shouted down to the others. "Pass me a rifle. There's a man up here wants trouble." He stared at the fur-covered figure ferociously. "You want trouble, we'll give it to you. You just try us." "We will," replied the man. He gazed at Paladin, who stared back. But after a moment Paladin's eyes dropped. sledges," reported Jacko from his post. The bell tower reverberated as he sent a shot whining out across the snow. "I think they're going to wait until dark. At least I can pin them down for the time being." He fired again, uselessly, at the thick timbers of the improvised shield. An answering shot sang through the hole as Jacko ducked. The slug smacked into the beams of the spire, raining dust and bat guano upon the group below. "What are we going to do?" asked Paladin nervously. "When it's dark they'll take us easily. If we guard the hole they'll chop another one and set fire to the place." He moved toward the stairs. "Let's go down to the tunnels. We'll be safer there." "Don't be a fool," called Jacko, peering down at him. "If they take the bell tower they've got us. There's no other way out!" "What's going on?" whined the Old Man, sensing uncertainty around him. "Flesh hunters Up Top," Shrug informed him with a certain relish. "You're supposed to be in charge," Cockade called, staring up aggressively. "Can't you suggest anything?" Jacko did not reply. Cockade said, "He's had it. He's about as good as a bloody leader as he is in bed. Well, I'm not staying here to be fried." She glanced around uncertainly, her eye falling upon Switch. "Any ideas, lover?" No reply. "I might have known it." Cockade was talking fast now, her voice high-pitched. "When it comes to the crunch you men can only think of yourselves. Every man for himself and the devil take the woman. First Jacko and now you." "Nobody's running out on you. Cockade," said Switch gently. "That's because you've got nowhere to rjun to," she shrilled. "My God, if you had an escape hole you'd be out like greased lightning. Why didn't he think to build an escape hole?" She jerked a thumb upward. "Fine leader he is. I bet when it gets dark he'll sneak out there and make a deal with them. He'll trade his life for ours" Shrug slapped her hard and effectively across the face. Cockade reeled back, hand to her cheek, eyes blazing. Switch moved as if to hit Shrug, then changed his mind, his fist dropping abruptly to his side. Staggering slightly. Shrug made for the ladder and began to climb. Close beside Jacko, he looked out across the snow for a while. He laid his hand firmly on Jacko's shoulder for a moment. "Wouldn't you say, Jacko," he remarked, "that those men are about one-hundred and fifty yards southwest from here?" Then he descended to the floor. The others watched him silently as he made for the stairs. lgets dark?" asked Paladin, standing beside Jacko at the hole. Jacko glanced at the sky. "About an hour before they can move," he replied thoughtfully. "What are we going to do?" asked Paladin because he had to. He didn't want to fret like Cockade but he just had to ask that question. "Wait," said Jacko, sending another shot ringing into the twilight. "I can't stand waiting," replied Paladin immediately, as though he had known exactly what Jacko would say. "I want to fight. Let me have the gun." He seized the rifle, unleashed a useless fusillade, then handed the gun back, looking suddenly foolish. "Keep them pinned down as long as we can," remarked Jacko understandingly. "That's all we can do for the time being." "What the hell are you two cooking up?" yelled Cockade from below. Paladin ignored her, feeling strangely confident in the presence of Jacko's impeturbability. "And when it gets dark?" he asked. "They'll come for us. They'll surround the spire, I should think, and they'll hack their way in at several places." Jacko was talking to himself more than to Paladin, working it out. "Then they'll push rifles through the holes and start shooting. They won't see anything because we'll have put out the fire. In any case, they won't hit us because we'll have withdrawn to the storeroom. So they'll set fire to pieces of cloth and wood and drop them through to the floor of the bell tower -- " Jacko's voice trailed off. The flesh hunters would see that the bell tower had been evacuated so they would occupy it. They would shoot their way down the stairs, driving the defenders into the tunnels. Then they would hunt them through the tunnels or just leave them there to freeze. Seemingly there was no escape. Minutes passed and it grew darker. "Switch," Jacko called. "You and Cockade get the Old Man down to the storeroom. Make him comfortable and load a gun for him. Shrug." Silence. "Shrug?" "He's not here," came Cockade's voice. "You pal's run out on us. He went down the tunnels -- to the Wine Lodge, I expect, to get blind drunk. That leaves four of us against God knows how many. If you think we're going to trust the Old Man with a rifle you must be crazy." "Paladin," Jacko said tiredly, "go down there and put out the fire. Pour water into the bell and make sure it's really dead." "What are you going to do?" "I'll stay up here for a while." For a long time Jacko stared into the dusk, watching the barricade of upturned sledges until his vision blurred and it seemed that the sledges were moving and there were men everywhere, creeping about in the gloom, at the perimeter of his vision. This was the finish of the group. Partly he blamed himself. He must have been the one who had led the flesh hunters here, although they would have found the place eventually. The tip of a church spire is a conspicuous object in a landscape of flat snow. Mostly he blamed everyone. The Old Man, who could have brought wisdom but gave them only senility. Cockade, a barren virago in a childless community she should feel shame, not belligbut nothing more. Paladin, an adolescent coward. Shrug, intelligent and a potential leader except for his overriding weakness. Had Jacko done the right thing, a few nights ago, when he had worked through the hours when the others slept, systematically emptying the shelves of the Wine Lodge and concealing the bottles in an abandoned spur at the far end of the village? He had hoped to snap Shrug into his senses but he appeared to have demoralized the man. Of course, it was early days to hope for a cure -- but unfortunately there didn't seem to be any more days left. So mainly this was his fault. The leader of the group, he was dull, unimaginative and had proved himself lacking in foresight. Given another chance -- would he do things differently? Yes. He had learned now that losses had to be cut that there was no profit in merely postponing the inevitable. Above all, he now felt that the present way of life was wholly artificial and that life would be extinguished upon the exhaustion of the stockpiles. For life to continue, there must be a borning and a growing. If ever he had the chance he would go to the lands that the Old Man had spoken of -- to the west, where the hills were taller than the snow and the green trees flourished. He would plant crops and reap their golden harvest. He would build a cabin in the open air. Life would be hard but good -- and he would live quickly, rather than die slowly. All this he would do, if he had the chance... A subterranean rumbling shook the spire. The foot of the ladder danced on the floor so that he had to hang on to the rough, split timbers of the hole. He heard distant slammings and a blast of air gusted past him into the twilight. There was a reverberating crash from below as one of the bells broke free from its mountings and thundered, tolling, to the storeroom floor far beneath. Yells of alarm echoed from the group -- he could hear Cockade's shrill screaming and looked down but saw only blackness. Another screaming he heard and he stared into the half-light outside. Where the flesh hunters' barricade had been was a billowing cloud of fine snow, quickly whisked away by the wind to reveal a chasm many yards across. There was scarely a sign of the enemy. As the gulf widened rapidly, the circumference poured down like a bottomless, circular cataract. Wider and wider the chasm extended. He watched as the last sledge tumbled from view. After a while the rumbling died but the wind whined on unperturbed, as it had for years. T HE lamp was lit in the storeroom. In the flickering glow they stood around the broken body of Paladin, "Two dead," said Switch heavily. "At least Shrug died to some purpose but this -- " He sighed. Paladin had been the youngest of the group. "He didn't suffer, Jacko," said Cockade, for once subdued. "He was standing right under the bell when it came down. He was dead when we lit the lamp. I think he was dead before -- I didn't hear any sound from him. But it was dark -- " Jacko was silent, looking down at the twisted form, somehow smaller than in life and defenseless. "What about old Shrug, then?" said Switch with an attempt at heartiness. Then he remembered that Shrug was dead, too. "I never thought Shrug had it in him," remarked Cockade, trying to cheer up Jacko. There was something ominous about his silence. "He must have pul a match to the whole case of dynamite. It seemed that the Wine Lodge was empty and I suppose he felt that he had nothing left to live for -- and the dynamite was there and the flesh hunters were camped directly above. It all added up. He went out like a man." Like a man betrayed by his leader, thought Jacko: I am responsible for Shrug's death. He regarded the remains of his group, noticing the Old Man lying on a mattress, clad in rags. Why was the Old Man dressed like that? There were plenty of good clothes at the tailor's. "Thanks, Cockade," he muttered, as though she had complimented him personally. "It's no good, though. We're going to have to split up. We're all dying slowly here." After a miserable silence Cockade said with somewhat watery brightness, "It's okay, Jacko. You're right, of course. What will you do? Take the Old Man and try to find the hills and trees he's always talking about?" "Yes, I think so. How about you?" "Oh, I expect we'll go and join one of the larger communities east. Provided we can steer clear of flesh hunters on the way. We'll be fine." "Good." Jacko turned away awkwardly. "I'd best be getting the snowboat loaded up for an early start. We've got a long trip ahead of us. I only hope the Old Man lasts out." Gathering an armful of cans, he climbed the stairs to the bell tower. It seemed that they had all been expecting his decision. astern, then put his gaze on the featureless wastes ahead. He had no sense of adventure. Maybe that would come later, with the sun. At the moment, in the early morning light, he felt despair rather than any other sensation. Failure, as though he were running away, instead of setting out to find a new life. The Old Man, lying on the floorboards, wrapped in rugs, looked like a corpse with his parchment skin, wispy hair fluttering sparsely in the breeze. On an impulse Jacko bent forward and touched the puckered, sunken cheeks. The Old Man stirred, mumbling. Straightening up, Jacko sailed on. dered about the bell tower, surrounded by stacks of canned food. They moved in silence, occasionally lifting a can from a stack and replacing it again to give each other the impression that they were making last-minute checks. From time to time one or the other would glance up at the ladder leading to the hole in the spire. "Well, I think that's about it," remarkecf .Cockade at last with studied casualness. "Yes," agreed Switch. "Going to load the sledge, then?" "Right." Switch dropped a selection of cans into a string bag. They made a dull clatter. Jacko had already fixed up a sledge for them; it was tethered outside the spire, in the snow. In the snow, outside... Slowly Switch walked to the ladder and began to climb, one hand reaching for the rungs and the other holding the bag. The ascent was extraordinarily difficult -- the bag was heavy and the floor below seemed somehow to impede his progress like a magnet. The task of lifting a foot to the next rung took his entire concentration. He noticed that the rungs were worn in an area around the center of each tread, so that the square section had become almost oval and he focused on speculating upon this indisputable, physical fact. Suddenly his reaching hand encountered no rung and he could feel the wind on his face. Jacko was not beside him this time. He looked up. There was the snow, a vast area of tossing, drifting whiteness under a sky equally white, so similar that he could not tell where the two joined; which was the top and which the bottom, the snow or the sky. It was a vision of infinity composed of two physical elements, snow and sky -- and Switch, a small mammal clinging to the fringe of this greatness, was utterly, totally insignificant. It beckoned him like a tunnel. It repelled him like a wall. "Get on with it." Gasping, retching, he clung to the ladder, shutting his eyes and concentrating on the existence of the rungs beneath his hands and feet, the only solid objects within his present frame of reference. Dimly he heard the bag of cans clatter to the floor below. "What the hell's the matter with you?" He moved over -- or was pushed aside -- as Cockade climbed up beside him. Together they crouched at the top of the ladder. Cockade staring at the snow, Switch regarding Cockade. He saw her eyelids droop, flickering, and caught a flash of white as her pupils turned up, vanished under the lids. He grasped her around the waist as her eyes closed. She shook her head. "Christ," she muttered. He followed her down the ladder. As they stood in the bell tower looking at each other they heard the sound of footsteps, heavy and slow, ascending the steps from the storeroom. Suddenly Cockade was in Switch's arms and they clung together. He could feel her heart racing as he watched, over her shoulder, the square aperture in the floor. Shrug appeared, rubbing his head. "Hi, there," he greeted them. "God, I took a knock down there. The blast through those tunnels -- I just about made it to the tailor's before I passed out again. I must have slept the clock round. Feel better for it, though. What's for breakfast? Or am I too late?" , "Shrug -- " Cockade had twisted from Switch's arms at the familiar voice. "What the hell are you doing here?" Suddenly she was crying. "We thought you were dead." "I've never known you so glad to see me." Shrug chuckled. "No, I'm not dead. Why should I be?" "We thought you blew yourself up with the Wine Lodge." "What?" Shrug laughed openly. "Me blow myself up? Do you take me for some sort of bloody hero?" propped up in the stern of the snowboat. He looked around, eyes shining. "It doesn't change," he murmured. "I'd amost forgotten what such colors look like. Have you ever seen green like that, Jacko?" He pointed up at the giant, branching column he called a tree, tangled against the staring sky. "That color is the essence of life. You can keep your snowboats, your food hoards, your ice tunnels and hideyholes -- all those dreary man-made blacks and whites and grays. And even the shades of gray are somehow the same -- the red-gray of dead meat, the blue-gray of chipped tunnels, all created by Man and all dead. That tree is green. It's alive. And it was made by God, "That is the difference, Jacko -- the difference between death and life, between gray and green. Seeing this place I feel as if I had been dead for years and now, when life is soon to leave me, I think I've gotten back what I lost as a child and come alive again." The effort of talking was weakening him further, his voice was faltering. Jacko kneeled beside him, putting an arm about his shoulders. "I want you to stay here, Jacko," the Old Man whispered. "Find yourself a wife and come to live here. Stop living in a hole and build yourself a cabin here among the green trees, under the blue sky. Fetch seeds from the stores beneath the snow and grow yourself vegetables -- carrots, peas, beans, onions, sweet corn -- and around the cabin plant color -- orange marigolds, scarlet roses, lupins of every color you can think of and more besides. Surround yourself with life and your own life will be fuller and more worthwhile because you will be living it with God, who never intended Man to grovel underground in caves." He was silent, watching intently. Jacko followed his gaze and saw, silhouetted against the silver sky, a small, scampering animal in the branches. "They're all here," the Old Man said so faintly that Jacko had to lean close to catch the words. "All the old animals and birds, too, I shouldn't be surprised. It only needs Man to comeback." His eyes closed and his shoulders sagged suddenly against Jacko's arm. Shivering a little Jacko stood up, brushing the powdery snow fromhis knees. He took the spade from the bows of the snowboat, dug a trench and buried the Old Man under the trees which he valued so greatly that he considered it worthwhile sacrificing his last few years to revisit. But Jacko couldn't see it that way. They call it the bleaches, the condition that affects the eyesight of those who spend their days hunting fresh meat in the snowboats. It comes of skimming through the dazzling snowfields day after day until, at last, there is no need to squint against the glare because the eyes have become completely accustomed to it. Jacko was fifteen years old when the blue sky finally changed to sil( Please turn to page #) Krug rivaled God Almighty as the creator of Heaven and Earth and Man. Now he just wanted to talk to all three of them! I wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and sgales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean and the ocean was like a jail and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You'll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this fish -- he went through and he died. And there was this other fish that went through and died. But another fish went through and it was like his brain was on fire and his gills were blazing -- the air was drowning him and the sun was a torch in his eyes and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die -- and he didn't die. He crawled back down the beach, went into the water and said. Look, there's a whole other world up there. And he went up there again and stayed for maybe two days before he died. But other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became, and walked around for to get up on their hind legs and use their hands to grab things. They turned into apes and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them. Let's go back into the ocean -- let's be fishes again, it's easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it -- more than half, maybe -- but there are always some who say, 'Don't be crazy. We can't be fishes any more. We're men. And so they don't go back. They keep climbing up. September #, #. Simeon Krug's tower now rises a hundred meters above the graybrown tundra of the Canadian Arctic, west of Hudson Bay. At present the tower is merely a glassy stump, hollow, open-topped, sealed from the elements only by a repellor field hovering shieldlike just a few meters above the current work level. Around the unfinished structure cluster the work crews, made up entirely of androids -- thousands of synthetic humans who toil to affix glass blocks to scooprods and send the rods climbing to the summit, where other androids put the blocks in place. Krug has his androids working three shifts around the clock. When it gels dark, the constructor plates strung across the sky at a height of one kilometer and wall fusion generator at the north end of the site. From the tower's huge octagonal base radiate wide silvery strips of refrigeration tape, embedded fifty centimeters deep in the frozen carpet of soil, roots, moss and lichens that is the tundra. The tapes stretch several kilometers in each direction. Their helium-II diffusion cells soak up the heal generated by the androids and vehicles used in building the tower. If the tapes were not there, the tundra would soon be transformed by the energy-output of construction into a lake of mud; the colossal tower's foundation-caissons would lose their grip, and the great building would tilt and tumble like a felled titan. The tapes keep the tundra icy, firm, capable of bearing the immense burden that Simeon Krug is now imposing on it. Subsidiary buildings are centered on a thousand-meter radius around the tower. To the west of the site is the master control center. To the east is the laboratory where the tachyon-beam ullrawave communications equipment is being fabricated -- a small pink dome which usually contains ten or a dozen technicians, patiently assembling the devices with which Krug hopes to send messages to the stars. North of the site is a clutter of miscellaneous service buildings. On the south side is the bank of transmat cubicles that link this remote region to the civilized world. People and androids flow constantly in and out of the transmats, arriving from New York or Nairobi or Novosibirsk, departing for Sydney or San Francisco or Shanghai. Krug himself invariably visits the site at least once a day alone or with his son Manuel. Or with one of his women, or some fellow industrialist. Customarily he confers with Thor Watchman, his android foreman; he rides a scooprod to the top of the tower and peers into it; he checks the progress in the tachyon-beam lab; he talks to a few of the workmen, his way of inspiring loftier effort. Generally Krug spends no more than fifteen minutes at the tower. Then he steps back into the transmat and is instantaneously hurled to the business that awaits him elsewhere, large party, perhaps to celebrate the attainment of the #-meter level. Krug stands near what will be the tower's western entrance. He is a stocky man of sixty, deeply tanned, heavy-chested and shortlegged, with narrow-set, glossy eyes and a seamed nose. There is a peasant strength about him. His contempt for all cosmetic editing of the body is shown by his coarse features, his shaggy brows, his thinning hair -- he is practically bald and will do nothing about it. Freckles show through the black strands that cross his scalp. He is sionable, though he dresses plainly and wears no jewelry. Only the infinite authority of his stance and expression indicate the extent of his wealth. Nearby is his son and heir, Manuel, his only child, tall, slender, almost foppishly handsome, elegantly dressed in a loose green robe, high buskins, an auburn sash. He affects earlobe plugs and a mirrorplate in his forehead. He will shortly be thirty. His movements are graceful but he seems fidgety. The android Thor Watchman stands between father and son. He is as tall as Manuel, as powerfully built as the elder Krug. His face is that of a standard alpha-class android, with a lean caucasoid nose, thin lips, strong chin, sharp cheekbones -- an idealized face, a plastic face. Yet he has impressed a surprising individuality on that face from within. No one who sees Thor Watchman will mistake him the next time for some other android. A certain gathering of the brows, a certain tension of the lips, a certain hunching of the shoulders, mark him as an android of strength and purpose. He wears an openwork lace doublet. He is indifferent to the biting cold at the site and his skin, the deep red, faintly waxy skin of an android, is visible in many places. There are seven others in the group that has emerged from the transmat. They are: Clissa, the wife of Manuel Krug, Quenelle, a woman younger than Manuel, who is his father's current companion. Leon Spaulding, Krug's private secretary, an ectogene. Niccolo Vargas, at whose observatory in Antarctica the first faint signals from an extrasolar civilization were detected. Justin Maledetlo, the architect of Krug's tower. Senator Henry Fearon of Wyoming, a leading Witherer. Thomas Buckleman of the ChaseKrug banking group. "Into the scooprods, everybody," Krug bellows. "Here -- here you you up to the top!" "How high will it be when it's finished?" Quenelle asks. "Fifteen hundred meters," Krug replies. "A tremendous tower of glass, full of machinery that nobody can understand. And then we'll turn it on. And then we'll talk to the stars." In the beginning there was Krug and He said, Let there be Vats, and there were Vats. And Krug looked upon the Vats and found them good. And Krug said, Let there be high-energy nucleotides in the Vats. And the nucleotides were poured and Krug mixed them until they were bonded one to another. And the nucleotides formed the great molecules and Krug said, Let there be the father and the mother both in the Vats and let the cells ilivide and let there be life brought forth upon the face of the Earth. And there was life, for there was Replication. And Krug presided over the Replication and touched the fluids with His own hands and gave them hape and essence. Lget man come forth from the Vats, said Krug, and let women come forth and let them live and go among us and be sturdy and useful and we shall call them Androids. A nd so it came to pass. And there were Androids, for Krug had created them in His own image and they walked upon the face of the Earth and did service for mankind. And for these things, praise be to Krug. ing in Stockholm. Groggy -- four hours of sleep. Much loo much. Two hours would suffice. He cleared his mind with a quick neural ritual and got under the shower for a skin-sluicing. Better, now. The android stretched, wriggled muscles, studied his smooth rosy hairless body in the bathroom mirror. A moment for religion, next. Krug deliver us from servitude. Krug deliver us from servitude. Krug deliver us from servitude. Praise be to Krug! Watchman popped down his breakfast and dressed. The pale light of late afternoon touched his window. Soon it would be evening herebut no mailer. The clock in his mind was set to Canadian time, tower time. He could sleep whenever he wished, as long as he took at least one hour out of twelve. Even an android body needed some rest, although not in the rigidly programed way of humans. Off to the construction site, now, to greet the day's visitors. The android began setting up the transmat coordinates. He hated these daily tour sessions. They slowed the work. Extraordinary precautions had to be observed while important human beings were on the site. They introduced special and unnecessary tensions and their presence carried the hidden implication that his work was not really trust-worthy, that he had to be checked every day. Of course. Watchman was aware that Krug's faith in him was limitless. The android's faith in that faith had sustained him superbly through the task of erecting the tower thus far. He knew that it was not suspicion but the natural human emotion of pride that brought Krug to the site so often. Krug preserve me. Watchman stepped through the transmat. He strode out into the shadow of the tower. His aides greeted him. Someone handed him a list of the day's visitors. "Is Krug here yet?" "Fiveminutes,"he was told and in five minutes Krug came through the transmat, accompanied by his guests. Watchman was not cheered to see Krug's secretary, Spaulding, in the group. He and Spaulding were natural enemies -- they felt toward one another the instant antipathy of the vat-born and the bottle-born, the android and the ectogene. But aside from that they were rivals for eminence among Krug's associates. To the android, Spaulding was a spreader of suspicions, a potential underminer of his status, a fount of poisons. Watchman greeted him cooly, distantly, yet properly. One did not snub humans, no matter how important an android one might be. And at least by technical definition Spaulding had to be considered human. Krug was hustling everybody into scooprods. Watchman went up with Manuel and Clissa Krug. As the rods rode toward the truncated summit of the tower, Watchman glanced across at Spaulding in the rod to his left and glowered at the ectogene, the prenatal orphan, the man of cramped soul and baleful spirit in whom Krug perversely placed so much trust. May Arctic winds sweep you to destruction, bottle-born. May l see you float sweetly toward the frozen ground and break beyond repair... Spaulding took no notice. Clissa Krug asked, "Thor, why do you suddenly look so fierce?" "Do I?" "I see angry clouds crossing your face." Watchman shrugged. "I'm doing my emotion drills, Mrs. Krug. Ten minutes of love, ten minutes of hate, ten minufes of shyness, ten minutes of selfishness, ten minutes of awe, ten minutes of arrogance. An hour a day makes androids more like people." "Don't tease me," Clissa said. She was very young, slim, darkeyed, gentle and, Watchman supposed, beautiful. "Are you telling me the truth?" "I am. Really. I was practicing a little hatred when you caught me." "What's the drill like? I mean, do you just stand there thinking Hatehatehatehatehate, or what?" He smiled at the girl's suggestion. Looking over her shoulder, he saw Manuel wink at him. "Another time," Watchman said. "We're at the top." T HE three scooprods clung to the highest course of the tower. Just above Watchman's head hung the gray haze of the repellor field. The sky, too, was gray. The short northern day was nearly half over. A snowstorm was heading southward toward them along the shore of the bay. Krug, in the next scooprod, was leaning far into the tower, pointing out something to Buckleman and Vargas. In the other rod Spaulding, Senator Fearon and Maledetto were closely examining the satiny texture of the great glass bricks that made up the tower's outer skin. "When will it all be finished?" Clissa asked. "Less than a year," the android told her. "We're moving along nicely. The big technical problem was keeping the permafrost under the building from thawing. But now that that's behind us, we ought to be rising several hundred meters a month." "Why build here in the first place," she wanted to know, "if the ground wasn't stable?" "Isolation. When the ultrawave is turned on, it'll scramble all communications lines, transmats and power generators for thousands of square kilometers. Krug was pretty well limited to putting the tower in the Sahara, the Gobi, the Australian desert or the tundra. For technical reasons -- having to do with transmission -- the tundra seemed most desirable, provided the thawing problem could be beaten. Krug told us to build here. So we found a way to beat the thawing problem." Manuel asked, "What's the status of the transmission equipment?" "We begin installing it when the lower's at the five-hundred-meter level. Say, mid-November." Krug's voice boomed across to them. "We've already got the five satellite amplifying stations up. A ring of power sources surrounding the tower -- enough boost to kick our signal clear to Andromeda between Tuesday and Friday." "A wonderful project," said Senator Fearon. He was a dapper, showy-looking man with startling green eyes and a mane of red hair. "Another mighty step toward the maturity of mankind." With a courtly nod toward Watchman the Senator added: "Of course, we must recognize our immense debt to the skilled androids who are bringing this miraculous project to fruition. Without the aid of you and your people, Alpha Watchman, it would not have been possible to -- " Watchman listened blankly, remembering to smile. Compliments of this sort meant little to him. The World Congress and its Senators meant even less. Was there an android in the Congress? Would it make any difference if there were? Some day, no doubt, the Android Equality Party would get a few of its people into the Congress -- three or four alphas would sit in that august body and, nevertheless, androids would continue to be property, not people. The political process did not inspire optimism in Thor Watchman. His own politics, such as they were, were definitely Witherer -- in a transmat society, where nanonal boundaries are obsolete, vhy have a formal government at ill? Let the legislators abolish i Item selves. Let natural law prevail. But he knew that the withering iway of the state that the Witherrs preached would never come to puss. The proof of it was Senator Henry Fearon. The ultimate para lo'-x: a member of the anti-government party serving in the government himself and fighting to hold liis seat at every election. What nrice Withering, Senator? Fearon praised android indusiriousness at length. Watchman ( retted. No work was getting done while they were up here -- he didn't 'lure let blocks be hoisted with visMors in the construction zone. And lie had schedules to keep. To his idief, Krug soon signaled for a descent; the rising wind, it seemed, was bothering Quenelle. When they came down Watchman led the way over to the master ontrol center, inviting them to watch him take command of operations. Ffe slipped into the linkup scat. As he pushed the computer's  nub-tipped terminal node into the mput jack on his left forearm the indroid saw Leon Spaulding's lips tighten in a scowl of -- what? Contempt, envy, patronizing scorn? I or all his skill with humans, Watchman could not read such dark looks with true precision. Ilut then, at the click of contact, i he computer impulses came flooding across the interface into his brain and he forgot about Spaulding. It was like having a thousand eyes. He saw everything going on at the site and for many kilometers around the site. He was in total communion with the computer, making use of all of its sensors, scanners and terminals. Why go through the tedious routine of talking to a computer when it was possible to design an android capable of becoming part of one? The data torrent brought a surge of ecstasy. Maintenance charts. Work-flow syntheses. Labor coordination systems. Refrigeration levels. Powershunt decisions. The tower was a tapestry of infinite detail and he was the master weaver. Everything rushed through him; he approved, rejected, altered, canceled. Was sex something like this? That tingle of aliveness in every nerve, that sense of being extended to one's limits, of absorbing an avalanche of stimuli? Watchman wished he knew. He raised and lowered scooprods, requisitioned next week's blocks, ordered filaments for the tachyon-beam men, looked after tomorrow's meals, ran a constant stability check on the structure as completed, fed cost data to Krug's financial people, monitored soil temperature in fiftycentimeter gradations to a depth of two kilometers, relayed scores of telephone messages per second and congratulated himself on the dexterity with which he accomplished everything. No human could handle this, he knew, even if there were some way for humans to jack themselves directly into a computer. He had a machine's skills anda human's versatility and therefore, except for the fairly serious matter of being unable to reproduce himself, he was in many ways superior to both other classes and therefore -- The red arrow of an alarm cut across his consciousness. Construction accident. Android ground. A twitch of his mind gave him close focus. A scooprod had failed on the northern face, A glass block had fallen from the ninety-meter level. It lay slightly skewed, one end buried about a meter deep in the earth, the other slightly above ground level. A fissure ran like a line of frost through its clear depths. Legs stuck out from the side closest to the tower. A few meters away lay an injured android, writhing desperately. Three lift-beetles were scurrying toward the scene of the accident; a fourth had already arrived and had its steel prongs under the massive block. Watchman unjacked himself. He shivered in the first moment of the pain of separation from the data flow. A wallscreen over his head showed the accident vividly. Clissa Krug had turned away, head against her husband's breasl -Manuel looked sickened, his father irritated. The other visitors seemed more puzzled than disturbed. Watchman found himsell peering into Leon Spaulding's icy face. Spaulding was a small, pareddown man, all but fleshless. In the curious clarity of his shock Watchman was aware of the widely separated hairs of the ectogene's stifl black mustache. "Coordination failure," Watchman said crisply. "The computer seems to have misread a stress function and let a block drop." "You were overriding the computer at that moment, weren't you?" Spaulding asked. "Let's put the blame where blame belongs." The android would not play that game. "Excuse me," he said. "There have been injuries and probably fatalities. I must go." He hurried toward the door, inexcusable carelessness -- " Spaulding muttered. Watchman went out. As he sprinted toward the accident site he began to pray. II upper office." He and Spaulding entered the transmal cubicle". The lambent green transmat field pulsed up from the floor aperture, forming a curtain dividing the cubicle in two. The ectogene set the coordinates. The hidden power generators of the transmat were linked directly to the main generator, spinning endlessly on its poles somewhere beneath the Atlantic, condensing the theta force that made transmat travel possible. Krug did not bother to check the coordinates Spaulding had set. He trusted his staff. A minor abscissa distortion and the atoms of Simeon Krug would be scattered irrecoverably to the cold winds-Hbut he unhesitatingly stepped into the glow of green. There was no sensation. Krug was destroyed--a stream of tagged wavicles was hurled several thousand kilometers to a tuned receiver and Krug was reconstituted. The transmat field ripped a man's body into subatomic units so swiftly that no neural system could possibly register the pain and the restoration to life came with equal speed. Whole and undamaged, Krug emerged -- with Spaulding still beside him -- in the transmat cubicle of his office. "Look after Quenelle," Krug said. "She'll be arriving downstairs. Amuse her. I don't want to be disturbed for at least an hour." Spaulding exited. Krug closed his eyes. The falling of the block had upset him greatly. It was not the first accident during the building of the tower -- it probably would not be the last. Lives had been lost today -- only android lives, true, but lives all the same. The waste of life, the waste of energy, the waste of time, infuriated him. How would the lower rise if blocks fell? How would he send word across the heavens that man existed, that he mattered, if there were no tower? How would he ask questions that had to be asked? Krug ached. Krug felt close to despair at the immensity of his selfimposed task. In time of fatigue or tension he became morbidly conscious of the presence of his body as a prison engulfing his soul. The folds of bellyflesh, the island of perpetual rigidity at the base of the neck, the tiny tremor of the upper left eyelid, the slight constant pressure on the bladder, the rawness in the throat, the bubbling in the kneecap, every intimation of mortality rang in him like a chime. His body often seemed absurd to him, a mere bag of meat and bone and blood and feces and miscellaneous ropes and cords and rags, sagging under time's assault, deteriorating from year to year and from hour to hour. What was noble about such a mound of protoplasm? The preposterousness of fingernails! The idiocy of nostrils! The foolishness of elbows! Yet under the armored skull ticked the watchful gray brain, like a bomb buried in mud. Krug scorned his flesh but he felt only awe for his brain and for the human brain in the abstract. The true Krugness of him was in that soft folded mass of tissue, nowhere else -- not in the guts, not in the groin, not in the chesti -- but in the mind. The body rotted while its owner still wore it. The mind within soared to the farthest galaxies. " Massage, 'Krug said. The timber and lone of his command caused a smoothly vibrating table to extrude itself from the wall. Three female androids, kept constantly on call, entered the room. Their supple bodies were bare. They were standard gamma models, who could have been triplets but for the usual programed minor somatotype divergences. They had small high-set breasts, flat bellies, narrow waists, flaring hips, full buttocks. They had hair on their heads and they had eyebrows but otherwise they were without body hair, which gave them a certain sexless look -- yet the groove of sex was inscribed between their legs and Krug, if his tastes inclined that way, could part those legs and find within them a reasonable imitation of passion. His tastes had never inclined that way. But Krug had deliberately designed an element of sensuality into his androids. He had given them functional -- if sterile -- genitals, just as he had given them proper -- though needless -- navels. He wanted his creations to look human -- aside from the necessary modifications -- and to do most human things. His androids were not robots. He had chosen to create synthetic humans, not mere machines. T HE three gammas efficiently stripped him and worked him over with their cunning fingers. Krug lay belly down. Tirelessly they plucked at his flesh and toned his muscles. He stared across the emptiness of his office at the images on the distant wall. The room was furnished simply, even starkly -- a lengthy rectangle that contained a desk, a data terminal, a small somber sculpture and a dark drape that would, at the touch of a repolarizing stud, reveal the panorama of New York City far below. The lighting, indirect and subdued, kept the office in eternal twilight. On one wall, though, there blazed a pattern in         It was the message from the stars. Vargas' observatory had picked it up first as a series of faint radio pulses at ninety-one hundred megacycles: two quick beats, a pause, four beats, a pause, one beat -- and so on. The pattern was repeated a thousand times over a span of two days, then halted. A month later it showed up at fourteen hundred and twenty-one megacycles, the twenty-one-centimeter hydrogen frequency, for another thousand turns. A month after that it came in both at half and at double that frequency, a thousand of each. Still later, Vargas was able to detect it optically, riding in on an intense laser beam at a five thousand-angstrom wavelength. The pattern was always the same, clusters of brief bursts of information: #... #... #... #... #...#... #... #. Each subcomponent of the series was separated from the next by an appreciable gap, and there was a much larger gap between each repetition of the entire group of pulse clusters. Surely it was some message. To Krug, the sequence #-#-#-#-#I had become a sacred number, the opening symbols of a new kabbala. Not only was the pattern emblazoned on his wall but the touch of his finger would send the sound of the alien signal whispering through the room in any of several audible frequencies and the sculpture beside his desk was primed to emit coherent light. The signal obsessed him. His universe now revolved about the quest to make reply. At night he stood beneath the stars, dizzied by the cascade of light, and opened his arms to the galaxies, saying,  am Krug, I am Krug, here I wait. speak to me again! He admitted no possibility that the signal from the stars might be other than a consciously directed communication. He had turned all of his considerable assets to answering. -- But isn't there any chance that the "message" might be some natural phenomenon? None. The persistence with which it arrived in such a variety oj media indicates a guiding consciousness behind it. Someone is trying to tell us something. What significance do those numbers have? Are they some kind of galactic pi? We see no obvious mathematical relevance. They do not form any apparent intelligible arithmetical progression. Cryptographers have supplied us with at least fifty equally ingenious suggestions, which makes all fifty equally suspect. We think that the numbers were chosen entirely at random. -- What good is a message that doesn't have any comprehensible content? The message is its own content : a yodel across the galaxies. I I tells us, Look, we are here, we know how to transmit, we are capable of rational thinking, we seek contact with you! -- Assuming you're right, what kind of reply do you plan to make? I plan to say. Hello, hello, we hear you, we detect your message, we send greetings, we are intelli( Please turn to page #) Three poems celebrating the Peculiar Talents of one Charles Darwin who loitered about Outdoors, always in hopes that Nature might Do Something. i tt Old Curious Charlie He stood for hours Benumbed, Astonished Amid the flowers; Waiting for silence. Waiting for motions In seas of rye Or oceans of weeds -- The stuff on which true astonishment feeds -- And the weeds that fed and filled his silo With a country spread By the pound or kilo. Of miracles vast or microscopic. For them, by night, was he the topic? In conversations of rye and barley. Did they stand astonished By Curious Charlie? Darwin, in the fields, stood still as time And waited for the world to no w exhale and now Take in a breath of wind from off the yield and swell Of sea where fill the clouds with sighs; His. eyes knew what they saw but took their time to tell This truth to him; he waited on their favor. His nose kept worlds far larger than a goodly nose might savor And waited for the proper place to fit the flavor in. So eye and nose and ear and hand told mouth What it must say; And after awhile and many and many a day His mouth. So full of Nature's gifts, it trembled to express. Began to move. No more a statue in the field, A honeybee come home to fill the comb. Here Darwin hies. Though to ordinary eyes it might appear he plods, Victorian statue in a misty lane; All that is lies. Listen to the gods: 'The man flies, I tell you. The man flies!" Darwin, wandering home at dawn. Met foxes trotting to their lairs, Their tattered litters folio wing. The first light of the blood-red sun adrip among their hairs. What must they've thought, The man of fox. The fox of man found there in dusky lane; And which had right-of-way? Did he or they move toward or in or on away from night ? This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulpscans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans yahoogroups . com. Their probing eyes And his Put weights to hidden scales In mutual assize. In simple search all stunned And amiable apprize. Darwin, the rummage collector, -- Longing for wisdom to dap in a box, Such lore as already learned and put by c Old summer days now gone to flies Bestir themselves alert in vixen eyes; Some primal cause T witches the old man s human-seeming pa ws. An ancient sharp surmise is melded here And shapes all Dooms Which look on Death and know it. Darwin all this knows. The fox knows he knows. But knowing is wise not to show it. They stand a moment more upon the uncut lawn; Then as if by sign, quit watchfulness; Each imitates the other's careless yawn. And with no wave save pluming tail of fox and kin A way the creatures go to sleep the day. Leaving old Charlie there in curious disarray. His hair combed this, his wits the other way. So off he ambles, walks, and wanders on. Leaving an empty meadow, A place Where strange lives passed... And dawn. Can anything be more terrifying than realizing all your dreams? I from his nightmare. It had been so realtoo real -- and the worst part was always the deep sense of loss. There was that shocking contrast between the dreary life that he was living (in the dream) and the rich and full life that he somehow knew that he should be living. There was his wife -- that drab, unimaginative woman with her irritating mannerisms -- and that memory of someone else, someone he had never met, never would meet, someone elegant and slim, someone with whom he had far more in common than simply the physical side of marriage -- someone who knew books and music and the visual arts and yet evinced a deep appreciation of the peculiar psychology of the spaceman. Slowly GriYnes resumed full awareness. Slowly he realized that he was not in his bedroom in the Base Commander's quarters on Zetland. He listened to the small, comforting noises -- the irregular throbbing of the inertial drive, the sobbing of pumps, the soughing of the ventilation system, the thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive unit. And he heard the soft, steady breathing of the woman in the bed with him (that other one snored). But -- such was the impression his dream had made upon him -- he had to be sure. All cats are gray in the dark. Without too much fumbling he found the stud of the light switch on his side of the bed. His reading lamp came on. Its glow was soft, subdued -- but it was enough to wake Sonya. She looked up at him irritably, her lean face framed by the auburn hair that somehow retained its neatness, its sleekness, even after sleep. She demanded sharply, "What is it, John?" He said, "I'm sorry. Sorry I woke you, that is. But I had to be sure." Her face and voice immediately softened. "That dream of yours again?" "Yes. The worst part of it is knowing that you are somewhere -- somewhen -- but that I shall never meet you." "But you did." She laughed with him, not at him. "And that's your bad luck." "My good luck," he corrected. "Our good luck." "I suppose we could have done worse," he admitted. the soft chiming of the alarm. From his side of the bed he could reach the service hatch in the bulkhead. He opened it, revealing the tray with its silver coffee service. "The usual?" he asked Sonya, who was making a lazy attempt to sit up in bed. "Yes, John. You should know by this time." Grimes poured a cup for his wife -- black, unsweetened -- then one for himself. He liked sugar, rather too much of it, and cream. "I shall be rather sorry when this voyage is over," said Sonya. "Jimmy is doing us well. We shouldn't be pampered like this in an Alpha Class liner." "After all, I am a commodore," said Grimes smugly. "Not in the Survey Service, you aren't," Sonya told him. In that dream, that recurring nightmare, I'm still an officer in the Federation's Survey Service. Hut I've never got past commander. I've passed my days and will end my days as commanding officer of an unimportant base on a world that somebody had once described as a planetwide lower middle-class suburb. "Perhaps not," Grimes admitted. "But I pile on enough Gees to be accorded V.I.P. treatment aboard a Survey Service ship." "You do? I was under the impression that it was because of me that Jimmy let us have the V.I.P. suite." "Not you. You're a mere commander and on the Reserve List at that." "Don't be so bloody rank conscious -- " She took a swipe at him with her pillow. Grimes cursed as hot coffee splashed on his bare chest. Then: "I don't know what your precious Jimmy will think when he sees the mess on the sheets." "He'll not see it -- and his laundrobot won't worry about it. Pour yourself some more coffee. I'll use the bathroom while you're drinking it." Then, as she slid out of the bed; "And go easy on the sugar. You're getting a paunch." I remember the fat and slovenly Commander of Zetland Base... prided himself on running a taut ship. Attendance at every meal was mandatory for his officers. As he and Sonya took their seats at the captain's table, Grimes wondered how Farrell would cope with the reluctance of Middle Watch keepers aboard merchant vessels to appear at breakfast. All the Star Pioneer's officers were here, in their places, except for those actually on duty. Smartly uniformed messgirls circulated among the tables, taking orders, bringing dishes. Farrell sat, of course, at the head of his own table, Sonya to his right and Grimes to his left. At the foot of the table was Lieutenant Commander Malleson, the senior engineering officer. There was little to distinguish him from his captain but the badges of rank. There was little to distinguish any of the officers, one from the other. All were tall young men with close-cropped hair, standardized good looks, each and every one of them a refugee from a Survey Service recruiting poster. In my young days we had room for individuality... Grimes smiled to himself. And where did it get me? Oh, you bloody lee, that's where... "What's the joke, John?" asked Sonya. "Share it, please." Grimes' prominent ears reddened. "Just a thought, dear." He was saved by a messgirl, who presented the menu to him. "Nathia-juice, please. Ham and eggs -- sunny side up -- to follow, with just a hint of French fries. And some coffee." "You keep a good table, Jimmy," Sonya said to Farrell. Then, looking at her husband: "Rather too good, perhaps." "I'm afraid, Sonya," Farrell told her, "that.our meals from now on will be lacking in variety. It seems that our Esquelian passengers brought aboard some local virus. The biologists in the first survey expeditions found nothing at all on Esquel in any way dangerous to human life, so perhaps we didn't take the precautions we should have when we embarked the King and his followers. Even so, while they were on board their excretory matter was excluded from the ship's closed ecology. But after they were disembarked on Tallis the plumbing wasn't properly disinfected -- " Not a very suitable topic of conversation for the breakfast table... Grimes sipped his fruit juice. "So?" asked Sonya interestedly. "So there's been a plague running its course in the "farm." Only the tissue culture vats have been affected, luckily. We could make do indefinitely on yeasts and algae -- but who wants to?" He grinned at Grimes, who was lifting a forkload of yolk-coated ham to his mouth. "Who wants to?" "Not me, Captain," admitted Grimes. "Or me, Commodore. The beef's dead -- and the pork and the chicken. The quack says that the lamb's not fit for human consumption. So far the mutton seems to be unaffected -- but we can't be sure even of that." "You'll be able to stock up when we get to Port Forlorn," said Grimes. "That's a long way off." Farrell looked steadily at Grimes as he buttered a piece of toast. "I've a job for you. Commodore." "A job for me, Commander Farrell?" "Yes, you, Commodore Grimes. By virtue of your rank you represent the Rim Worlds Confederacy aboard this vessel. Kinsolving's Planet, although no longer colonized, is one of the Rim Worlds. I want to put down there." "Why?" asked Grimes. "Correct me if I'm wrong. Commodore, but I understand that the original settlers introduced Earthtype flora and fauna, some of which have not only survived but flourished. I'm not interested in the flora, of course -- but I've heard that there are the descendants of the original rabbits, pigs, cattle and hens running wild there." "No cattle," Grimes told him. "And no hens. Probably the pigs did for them before they could become established." "Rabbit's a good substitute for chicken," said Farrell. "Jimmy," reproved Sonya, "I do believe that you like your tummy." "I do, Sonya, I do," said the young man. "And so do I," said Lieutenant Commander Malleson, who until now had been eating in dedicated silence. "But I don't like Kinsolving," grumbled Grimes. "And, in any case, we shall have to get permission to land." "You will get it, John," said Sonya firmly. rell discussed the proposed landing on Kinsolving with Grimes and Sonya. "Frankly," he told them, "I'm glad of an excuse to visit the planet. Not so long ago the Survey Service released a report on the three expeditions, starting off with that odd wet paint affair -- " "That was over a hundred and fifty years ago," said Grimes. "Yes. I know. And I know, too, that you've been twice to Kinsolving -- the first time as an observer with the Neo-Calvinists, the second time in command of your own show." "And both times," admitted Grimes, "I was scared. Badly." "You don't frighten easily, Commodore, as well I know. But what actually did happen? The official reports that have been released to the likes of us don't give much away. It was hinted -- merely hinted -- that the Neo-Calvinists tried to call up the God of the Old Testament and raised the entire Greek Pantheon instead. And you, sir, attempted to repeat the experiment -- and got tangled with a Mephistopheles straight out of Gounod's Faust." "Cutting extraneous cackle," said Grimes, "that's just what did happen." "What I'm getting at. Commodore, is this. Were your experiences objective or subjective?" "During my first visit, Commander, the Neo-Calvinist's ship, Piety, was destroyed, as were her pinnaces. Their leaders -- the Presbyter, the Rector, the Deaconess and thirteen others, men and women -- completely vanished. That was objective enough for anybody. The second time -- I vanished." "I can vouch for that," stated Sonya. "But you came back. Obviously." "More by luck than judgment." Grimes laughed without humor. "When you do a deal with the devil it's as well to read the small print." "But at no time was any actual physical harm done to anybody." "Some could have been. And we don't know what happened to the Neo-Calvinist boss cockies -- " "They're probably being converted to hedonism on Mount Olympus," said Sonya. "But we don't actually know." Farrell grinned. "And aren't those very words a challenge to any officer in the Survey Service? You used to be one of us yourself, sir, and Sonya is still on our Reserve List. Kinsolving is almost directly on the track from Tallis to Lorn. I have a perfectly valid excuse to make a landing. And even in these decadent days -- " his smile widened -- "my Lords Commissioners do not discourage initiative and zeal on the part of their captains." Grimes grinned back reluctantly. It was becoming evident that Farrell possessed depths of character not apparent on first acquaintance. True, he worked by the book -- and had Grimes done so he would have risen to the rank of Admiral in the Survey Service -- but he was also capable of reading between lines. A deviation from his original cruise pattern -- the evacuation of the King and his supporters From Esquel -- had brought him to within easy reach of Kinsolving and he was making the most of the new circumstances. Fleetingly Grimes wondered if the destruction of the ship's meat supply had been intentional rather than accidental -- he dismissed the thought. Not even he, Grimes, had ever done a thing like that. "Later," said Farrell, "if it's all right with you, sir, we'll go over the official reports and you can fill in the gaps. But what makes Kinsolving the way it is?" "Your guess is as good as anybody's, Commander. The atmosphere is -- odd. Psychologically odd, not chemically or physically. A terrifying queerness. One senses impending doom. Kinsolving was settled at the same time as the other Rim Worlds. It's a far more ecologically desirable piece of real estate than any of them. But the colonists lost heart. Their suicide rate rose to an abnormal level. Their mental institutions were soon overcrowded. And so on. So they pulled out. I've heard many theories. One of the latest is that the Kinsolving system lies at some intersection of stress lines. Stress lines in what? Don't ask me. But the very fabric of the Continuum is thin, ragged, and the dividing lines between Then and Now, Here and There, What Is and What Might Be are virtually nonexistent -- " "Quite a place," commented it a third time, sir?" "Yes," agreed Grimes after a long pause. "But I'm not prepared to make a third attempt at awakening ancient deities from their well-earned rest. In any case, we lack the -- I suppose you could call her the medium. She's on Lorn and even if she were here I doubt she'd play." "Good. I'll adjust trajectory for Kinsolving and we'll send Carlottigrams to our respective lords and masters requesting permission to land. I don't think they'll turn it down." "Unfortunately," said Grimes. But the faint smile that lightened his craggy features belied the word. Star Pioneer down to the sunlit hemisphere of Kinsolving, to a position a little to the west of the morning terminator. Grimes had advised a landing at the site used by the Confederacy's Rim Sword and later by his own Faraway Quest. The destruction of the NeoCalvinists' Piety had made the spaceport unusable. This landing place was hard by the deserted city of Enderston, on the shore of the Darkling Tarn. It had been the sports stadium. Conditions were ideal for the landing. The sounding rockets, fired when the ship was descending through the first tenuous fringes of the atmosphere, had revealed a remarkable absence of turbulence. The parachute flares discharged by them at varying altitudes were falling straight down, each trailing its long, unwavering streamer of white smoke. Grimes and Sonya were in the Control Room. "There's Enderston," the Commodore said, "on the east bank of the Weary River. We can't see much from this altitude -- everything's overgrown. That's the Darkling Tarn." He pointed to the amoebalike glimmer of water among the dull green that now was showing up clearly on the big approach screen. "You can't miss it. That oval of paler green is the stadium -- " The Inertial Drive throbbed more loudly as Farrell made minor adjustments. When the stadium was in the exact center of the screen it settled down again to its almost inaudible muttering. At Farrell's curt order they all went to their acceleration chairs, strapped themselves in. Grimes, with the others, watched the expanding picture on the screen. To him the scene was familiar, too familiar, even to the minor brush fire started by the last of the parachute flares. And as during his two previous landings he had the feeling that supernatural forces were mustering to resist the landing of the ship, to destroy her and all aboard her. He looked at Farrell. The young captain's face was pale, strained. Grimes felt less unhappy. Now you begin to know what it's like, Jimmy boy. She was down at last. There was almost no shock at all and only an almost inaudible complaint from the ship's structure, a faint sighing of shock absorbers as the great mass of the vessel settled in the cradle of her tripedal landing gear. "Secure main engines," ordered Farrell. Telegraph bells jangled sharply. The Inertial Drive generators muttered to themselves and were still. The silence was intensified by the soft soughing of the ventilation fans. Grimes swiveled in his chair, gazed out through the viewport toward the distant mountain peak, the black, truncated cone hard and sharp against the pale blue sky. Sinai, Presbyter Cannon had named it. Olympus, Grimes had labeled it on his new charts of the planetary surface. But neither name was apt. On this mountain's summit the Neo-Calvinists had attempted to invoke Jehovah -- and Zeus had answered their call. Grimes had tried to invoke the the gods of the Greek Pantheon -- and had been snatched into an oddly peopled Limbo by Mephistopheles himself. This time on Kinsolving the Commodore was going to be cautious. Wild horses -- assuming any existed on this planet and assuming that they should be possessed by such a strange ambition -- would not be able to drag him up to the top of that mountain. N onetheless, Grimes did revisit the mountaintop, taken there by the tamed horsepower of Star Pioneer's pinnace rather than by wild horses. Nothing happened. Nothing could happen unless Clarisse, descendant of the long-dead artist-magicians, were there to make it happen. There was nothing to see except the view. All that remained of the two disastrous experiments was a weathered spattering of pigments where the witch-girl's easel had stood. Everybody visited the famous caves, of course, and stared at and photographed the rock paintings, the startlingly lifelike depiction of beasts and their hunters. The paintings were old, old, even though some faint hint of their original magic still lingered. But this was an uneasy world. Men and women never walked alone, were always conscious of something lurking in the greenery, in the ruins. Farrell, reluctant as he was to break the Survey Service's uniform regulations, issued strict orders that everybody ashore on any business whatsoever was to wear a bright, scarlet jacket over his other clothing. This was after two hunting parties had opened fire upon each other -- luckily nobody was killed but four men and three women would be in the sick bay for days with bullet wounds. Grimes said to Farrell, "Don't you think it's time that we were lifting ship. Captain?" "Not for a while, Commodore. We have to be sure that the new tissue cultures will be successful." "That's just an excuse." "All right, it's just an excuse." "You're waiting for something to happen." "Yes. Damn it all, Commodore, this sensation of brooding menace is getting me down, it's getting all of us down. But I want to have something definite to report to my Lords Commissioners." "Don't pay too high a price for that fourth ring on your sleeve, James." "It's more than promotion that's at stake, sir -- although I shall welcome it. I hate being up against an enemy I can't see, can't touch. I want to accomplish something for its own sake. I don't want to slink away from here like a dog with his tail between his legs." "The original colony did just that." "But they -- " Farrell stopped abruptly. "I'll finish it for you, James. But they were mere civilians. They weren't wearing the Survey Service badge on their caps, Survey Service braid on their sleeves or shoulders. They weren't disciplined. And how long do you think your ship's discipline is going to stand up to the strain, gold braid and brass buttons notwithstanding?" "Long enough." Sonya broke in: "This is Jimmy's show, John. He makes the decisions. And I agree with him that we should stay on Kinsolving until we have something to show for our visit." "Thank you, Sonya," said Farrell. Then: "You must excuse me. I have matters to attend to." When the young man had left their cabin Sonya spoke softly. "You're getting too old and cautious, John. Or are you sulking because you're not running things?" "I don't like this world, my dear. I've reasons not to." "You're letting it get you down. You look as though you hadn't slept for a week." "I haven't. Not to speak of." "Why didn't you let me know?" "It's so damned silly. It's that bloody nightmare of mine -- you know the one. It recurs every time I shut my eyes." "You should have told me." "I should have." He got slowly to his feet. "Probably some good, healthy exercise will make me sleep better. A long walk?" "I'll come with you." She fetched the scarlet jackets from the wardrobe. Grimes took his deadly little Minetti from a drawer, put it into one pocket, a spare clip of cartridges in the other. Heavier handguns and miniaturized transceivers they would collect from the duty officer at the airlock. Within a few minutes they were walking down the ramp to the path that had been hacked and burned and trodden through the encroaching greenery, the trail that led to the ruined city. II sun was still high in the pale sky but the breeze, what there was of it, was chilly. And the shadows, surely, were darker here than on any other world Grimes had every visited -- They seemed to possess a life of their own. But that was only imagination. They walked steadily but carefully, watching where they pul their feet, avoiding the vines and brambles that seemed deliberately to try to trip them. On either side of the rough track tfje vegetation was locked in silent, bitter warfare -- indigenous trees and shrubs, importations from Earth and other worlds and parasites upon parasites. In spite of the overly luxuriant growth the overwhelming impression was of death rather than of life. The most readily identifiable scent on the chill air was that of decay. They came to the outskirts of the city, picking their way over tilted slabs of concrete, thrust up and aside by root and trunk, that had once been a road. Once the buildings between which it ran had been drably utilitarian -- now a madly proliferating and destructive ivy clothed them in somber, Gothic splendor. An abandoned ground car, the glass of its headlights by some freak of circumstance unobscured, glared at them like a crouching, green-furred beast. Grimes tried to imagine what this place had been like before its evacuation. Probably it had been very similar to any sizable town on Lorn or Faraway, Ultimo or Thule '-architecturally. But one important difference had existed. The city had been dominated by an uncanny atmosphere, an omnipresent premonition of -- what? Some fear of the cold and the dark, of ultimate night. Other cities on other worlds had their haunted houses-here the very stones had been haunted. He said, "The sooner young Farre I I lifts ship off this deserted graveyard, the better." "At least it's not raining," Sonya told him, with an attempt at cheerfulness. "Thank the odd gods of the Galaxy for one small mercy," grumbled Grimes. "Talking of odd gods -- " "What about them?" "Sally Veerhausen, the biochemist, told me there's a very odd church on a side street that runs off the main drag." "Oh?" "Yes. It's to the right -- in an alley you turn into just before you get to a tall tower with a latticework radio mast still standing on top of it." "Is that it there? To the right?" "Must be. Shall we investigate?" "What is there to investigate?" "Nothing, probably. But I seem to recall a period when you exhibited a passion for what you referred to as freak religions. This could be one to add to your collection." "I doubt it." But after a few minutes' careful walking they were turning off the main street, making their way along an alley between walls overgrown with the ubiquitous ivy that had been brought to the world by some long-dead, home-sick colonist. HE church was there. It was a small building, a masonry cube, its angles somehow and subtly wrong. And it was different from its neighbors. Perhaps the stone, natural or synthetic, from which it had been constructed possessed some quality, physical or chemical, lacking in the building materials in more general use. Its dull gray facade was unmarked by creeper, lichen or moss. Its door, as gray as the walls but of metal, was uncorroded. Over the plain rectangle of the entrance were the embossed letters in some black substance -- Temple of The Principle. Grimes snorted almost inaudibly. "What Principle?" he demanded. "There have been so many." "Perhaps," said Sonya seriously, "the greatest and most mysterious one of all." "The Golden Way? The greatest, I admit -- " "No. Sally got her paws on such records as still exist -- the vaults in the city hall kept their contents quite intact -- and found out about a cult that worshiped, or tried to worship, the Uncertainty Principle." "Could have been quite a suitable religion for this world. Inexplicable forces playing hell with anything and everything-r-so, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em." "Or get the hell out." "Or get the hell out. But -- who knows? This freak religion might just have worked. Shall we go inside?" "Why not?" The door opened easily, too easily. They might have been expected. But to think so was absurd. The officers from the ship who had found this place must have oiled the hinges. And had they done something about the lighting system, too? The huge, windowless room should have been dark but was not. The gray, subtly shifting twilight was worse than darkness would have been. It accented the wrongness of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. It seemed to concentrate, in a formless blob of pallid luminescence over the coffin-shaped altar that stood almost in the middle of the oddly lopsided hall. Almost in the middle. Its positioning was in keeping with the rest of the warped geometries of this place. "I don't like it," said Grimes. "I don't like it at all." "Neither do I," whispered Sonya. Yet neither of them made any attempt to retreat to the comparative light and warmth and sanity of the alley outside. "What rites did they practice?" whispered the Commodore. "What prayers did they chant? And to what?" "I'd rather pot find out." But still they did not withdraw. Still, hand in hand, they advanced slowly towards the black altar, the coffin-shaped -- coffin-shaped? No. Its planes and angles shifted. It was more of a cube. It was more than a cube. Grimes knew suddenly what it was. It was a tesseract. And he knew, too, that he should never have come again to this world. Twice he had visited Kinsolving and on the second occasion had become more deeply involved than on the first. Whatever the forces were that ruled this planet, he was becoming more and more attuned to them. And this was the third time. "John!" he heard Sonya's distant voice. "John!" He tightened the grasp of his right hand but the warmth of hers was no longer with it. "John -- " It was no more than a fading whisper. J ohn -- " "Grmph -- " He didn't want to wake up. Full awareness would mean maximum appreciation of his nagging headache. His eyes were gummed shut and he had the impression that small and noisome animals had fought and done other things inside his mouth. "John!" Blast the woman... "John!" She was shaking him now. He flailed out blindly, felt one fist connect with something soft, heard a startled gasp of pain. "Never touch an officer," he enunciated thickly. "'Gainst Regulations." "You -- you hit me. You brute." "Own fault." "Wake up, damn you -- " He forced his eyes open somehow, stared blearily at the plump, faded woman in the shabby robe who was staring down at him with distaste. Who are you? he demanded silently. The memory of someone slim, sleek and elegant persisted in his befuddled brain. Where am l? Who am I? "You've got a job to do," the woman told him in a voice that was an unpleasant whine. "You'd better get your stinking carcass out of that bed and start doing it. I like to go on eating, even if you don't." A starvation diet would do you the world of good... He said out loud, "Coffee?" "Coffee what? Where's your manners?" "Coffee, please." She left him then and he rolled out of the rumpled bed. He looked down with distaste at his sagging drinker's paunch, then got to his feet and walked unsteadily to the bathroom. He was surprised at the weakness he felt, the near nausea, the protests of a body allowed to degenerate into a state of general unfitness. It all seemed wrong. Surely he had always taken pride in maintaining himself in good condition. He stood under the shower and gradually the mists cleared from his brain. In a little while, John Grimes, Officer Commanding the Zetland Base, would be ready to begin his dreary day. Nobody quite knew why the Federation maintained a Base on Zetland. Once, a long time ago, the planet had been strategically important when it seemed possible that the Federation and the expanding Shaara Empire might clash, but the Treaty of Danzenorg, respected by both cultures, had neatly parceled up the entire Galaxy into spheres of influence. True, there were other spacefaring races who belonged neither to the Federation nor to the Empire but their planets were many light years distant from Zetland and their trade routes passed nowhere near this world. There was a base on Zetland. There always had been one -- there always would be one. The taxpayer has bottomless pockets. There were spaceport facilities, of a sort. There were repair facilities, also of a sort. There was a Carlotli Beacon, which was an absolutely inessential part of the navigational network in this sector of space. And there was a relay station. The whole setup, such as it was, could have been run efficiently by a lieutenant, junior grade, with a handful of petty officers and ratings. But a base commander must have scrambled egg on the peak of his cap. The commander of a base like Zetland is almost invariably on the way up or the way down. John Grimes was not on the way up. Nonetheless, he did have that scrambled egg on the peak of his cap. There was also a smear of egg yolk at the corner of his mouth and a spatter of it on the lapel of his jacket. Elis enlisted woman driver, waiting for him in the ground car outside the base commander's bungalow, looked at him with some distaste -- apart from anything else, she had been waiting all of twenty minutes -- clambered reluctantly out of the vehicle -- her legs, noted Grimes, were too thick and more than a little hairy -- and threw him a salute that almost, but not quite, qualified as dumb insolence. Grimes returned it contemptuously. She opened the rear door of the car for him. He got in, thanking her as an afterthought, sagged into the seat. She got back behind the controls, clumsily stirred and prodded the machine into reluctant motion. The drive to the military spaceport was short. The commander thought, as he had thought many times before, that he should walk to his office rather than ride -- the exercise would do him good. But somehow he never felt up to it. He stared unseeingly through the dirty windows. The view was as it always was -- flat fields with an occasional low farmhouse, uninteresting machines trudging through the dirt on their caterpillar treads, sowing or reaping or fertilizing the proteinuts which were Zetland's only export, exported to worlds too povertystricken to send anything worthwhile in exchange. Ahead was the base -- administration buildings, barracks, control tower and the lopsided ellipsoid that was the Carlotti Beacon, slowly rotating. The car rolled over the concrete apron, jerked to a halt outside the control tower. The girl driver got out clumsily, opened the commander's door. Grimes got out, muttered, "'K you." She replied sweetly, "It was a pleasure, sir." Saucy bitch... He did not take the elevator to his office on the top level of the tower. Thoughts about his lack of physical fitness had been nagging him all morning. He used the stairs, taking them two at a time at first. He soon had to abandon this practice. By the time that he reached his door he was perspiring and out of breath and his heart was hammering uncomfortably. Ensign Mavis Davis, his secretary, rose from her desk as he entered the office. She was tall, plain and old for her junior rank. She was also highly efficient and was one of the few persons on this world whom Grimes liked. "Good morning. Commander," she greeted him, a little too brightly"What's good about it?" he scaled his cap in the general direction of its peg, missed as usual. "Oh, well, it's the only one we've got." She said, holding out a message flimsy, "This came in a few minutes ago." "Have we declared war on somebody?" She frowned at him. She was too essentially good a person to regard war as a joking matter. "No. It's from Draconis. She's making an unscheduled call here." A Constellation Class cruiserjust what I need... He asked, "When is she due?" "Eleven hundred hours this morning." "What?" Grimes managed a grin. "The fleet's in port -- or almost in port -- and not a whore in the house washed." "That's not funny. Commander," she said reprovingly. "Indeed it's not, Mavis," he agreed. Indeed it wasn't. He thought of the huge cruiser with all her spit and polish and thought of his own, slovenly, planet-based command -- with its cracked, peeling paint, dusty surfaces everywhere, equipment working only after a fashion and personnel looking as though they had slept in their uniforms -- as many of them all too probably had. He groaned, strode to the robot librarian's console, switched on. "Fleet List," he said " Draconis . Name of commanding officer." "Yes sir." The mechanical voice was tinny, absolutely unhuman. "Captain Francis Delamere, O.G.C., D.C.O., F.M.H." Grimes switched off. Frank Delamere -- a lieutenant when I was a two-and-a-half ringer. A real space scout without the brains to come in out of the rain -- but a stickler for Regulations. A nd now he's a four-ring captain... "John." He detected sympathy in the ensign's voice. "Yes, Mavis?" She was abruptly businesslike. "We haven't much time -- but I issued orders in your name to get the place cleaned up a bit. The ground control approach crew has been alerted and the beacons should be in position by now." Grimes walked to the wide window. "Yes," he said, looking down at the triangle of intensely bright red lights that had been set out on the gray concrete of the apron, "they are. Thank you." "Do you wish to monitor G.C.A.?" "Please." She touched a switch, and almost immediately there was the sound of a crisply efficient voice. " Draconis to Zetland Base. E.T.A., surface contact, still # hours. Is all ready?" "All ready, Draconis ," came the reply in crisp accents. "Just one small thing, John," said Mavis. She stood very close to him and with a dampened tissue removed the flecks of egg yolk from the corner of his mouth, from his uniform. "Now, let them all come." "Let them all come," he echoed. fore she was seen, the irregular throb of her inertial drive beating down from beyond the overcast. And suddenly she was below the cloud ceiling, a great, gleaming spindle, the flaring vanes of her landing gear at her stern. Grimes wondered if Francis Delamere were doing his own pilotagen--very often the captains of these big ships let their navigating officers handle the controls during an approach. He thought smugly that this was probably the case now; when Delamere had served under Grimes he had been no great shakes as a ship-handler. Whoever was bringing the cruiser down was making a good job of it. Just a touch of lateral thrust to compensate for the wind, a, steady increase of vertical thrust as altitude diminished, so that what at first had seemed an almost uncontrolled free fall was, at the moment of ground contact, a downward drift as gentle as that of a soap bubble. She was tall, a shining metallic tower, the control room at her sharp stem well above the level of Grimes' office. Abruptly her Inertial Drive was silent. "Eleven-oh-oh-oh-seven," announced Mavis Davis. Grimes grunted. He retrieved his cap from the floor, let the ensign, who had found a clothes brush somewhere, brush its crown and peak. He put it on. He said to the girl, "Look after the shop. I have to go visiting." He left his office, took the elevator down to ground level. He was joined by the base supply officer, the base medical officer and the base engineering officer. All three, he noted, looked reasonably respectable. Grimes in the lead, they marched out to the ramp that was being extended from Draconis' after airlock. It's good to be boarding a ship again -- even one commanded by a man who once was my junior and who is now my senior. As he climbed the ramp he threw back his shoulders and sucked in his belly. He returned the salute of the junior officer at the airlock smartly and then, followed by his own officers, strode into the elevator cage. The woman operator needed no instructions -- in a very few seconds the party from the base was being ushered into the captain's day room. "Ah," said Delamere. "Commander Grimes, isn't it?" He had changed little over the years. His close-cropped hair was touched with gray but he was as boyishly slim and handsome as ever. The four gold rings gleamed bravely on each sleeve and the left breast of his uniform was gaudy with ribbons. "Welcome aboard, Commander." "Thank you. Captain." Grimes had no intention of addressing the other as "sir." "You're putting on weight, John," said the Specialist Commander who was one of the group of officers behind Delamere. "Maggie!" "Commander Lazenby," said the captain stiffly, "this touching reunion can be deferred until such time as the base commander and I have discussed business." "Aye, aye, sir," snapped Margaret Lazenby just a little too crisplyDelamere glared at her. John Grimes looked at her wistfully. She had not put on weight. She had hardly changed since they had been shipmates in the Census Ship Seeker. Her red hair gleamed under her cap, her figure was as slim and trim as ever. But she was not the slender, auburn-haired woman who haunted his dreams. "Commander Grimes," said Delamere. Then, more loudly: "Commander Grimes." "Yes, Captain?" "Perhaps we can get the introductions over with and then you and I can get down to business." "Certainly, Captain. This is Lieutenant Commander Dufay, the base medical officer. Lieutenant Danby, supplies. Lieutenant Roscoe, engineering." Delamere introduced his own people and the specialist officers went below, leaving the captain to conduct business with Grimes. "A drink, Commander?" "Please, Captain. Gin, if I may." "You may. Sit down, Grimes." Delamere poured the drinks, took a' chair facing the other. "Down the hatch." "Down the hatch." The captain grinned. "Well, Grimes, I don't seem to have caught you with your pants down. Frankly, I was rather hoping I would." "What do you mean?" "I haven't forgotten that bad report you put in on me." "It was truthful," said Grimes. "You were a lousy ship-handler." Then: "By the way, who brought Draconis in?" "None of your business," snapped Delamere, an angry flush on his face. After a moment he continued. "For your information, Grimes, an economy wave is sweeping the Service. There is a cutting out of dead wood in progress. Certain ships, Draconis among them, have been selected by our lords and masters to make the rounds of bases such as this one and to report on them. My last call was at Wuggis Three. The base commander who was in charge is now on the retired list. His G.C.A. was in such a state that I was obliged to use the commercial spaceport." "How nice for you," commented Grimes. The captain ignored this. "I'm giving you fair warning, Commander. You'd better dedigitate. For the purpose of this exercise a state of war is deemed to exist. Draconis has limped into your base with seventy-five per cent casualties, including all technical officers. These same technical officers are, even now, arranging a simulation of extensive damage. The Mannschenn Drive, for example, will require a new governor and will have to have its controls recalibrated. Only one inertial drive unit is functional and that is held together with spit and string. My laser cannon are burned out. My yeast, algae and tissue culture vats contain only slimy, dead messes utterly unfit for human -- or even unhuman -- consumption." He laughed. "All the parts that have been removed from machinery and weapons are, of course, securely locked in my storerooms, where your people won't be able to get their greasy t 'paws on them. You, Grimes, starting from scratch, using your people, your workshops, will have to bring Draconis back to a state of full fighting efficency, as soon as possible if not before." "Then I'd better get cracking," said Grimes. He rose to his feet, glanced briefly and regretfully at his almost untouched glass. It was good liquor, far better than any that could be obtained locally -- but even now he was rather fussy about whom he drank with. "You'd better," agreed Delamere. "Oh, you haven't finished your drink, Commander." "Your ship's in such a sorry, simulated state," Grimes told him, "that we'll make believe that you need it yourself." He forgot to salute on his way out. Ill would happen," complained Marian tearfully. "What shall we do, John? What can we do? A commander's pension is not much." "Too right -- it isn't." He looked thoughtfully at the half-inch of oily gin remaining in his glass, brought it to his mouth and swallowed it, gagging slightly. He reached for the bottle, poured himself another generous shot. "You drink too much," flared his wife. "I do," he agreed, looking at her. She was almost passable when alcohol had dimmed the sharp edges of his perception. He murmured: " Malt does more than Milton canTo justify God's ways to Man..." "What?" "Housman," he explained. "A poet. Twentieth Century or thereabouts." "Poetry." she sneered contemptuously. "But what are you doing about Captain Delamere? He was such a nice young man when he was one of your officers, when we were all happy at Lindisfarne Base." "Yes, Franky was always good at sucking up to captains' and commodores' and admirals' wives." "But you must have done something to him, John. Couldn't you apologize?" "Like hell," growled Grimes. "Like adjectival, qualified hell." "Don't swear at me." "I wasn't swearing at you specifically." "You were thinking it." "All right, I was thinking it." He finished his drink, stood up. put on his cap. "I'd better get down to the ship to see what sort of mess my butterfly-brained apes lire making of her," "What difference will your being there make?" "I'm still commander of this bloody base." He looked back at her briefly as he reached the door, felt a spasm of pity. She was such a mess. She had let herself go (as he had let himself go). Only faint traces remained of the attractive Ensign M arian Hall, Supply Branch, whom he, on the rebound, had married. Physically she no longer attracted him. Mentally she was -- nothing. She read only trash, was incapable of intelligent conversation and could never join Grimes in his favorite pastime of kicking ideas around to see if they yelped. He wondered how things would have worked out if he and Maggie Lazenby had made a go of things. Actually to have Maggie here, on this world, at this juncture was too much. He walked to the military spaceport. The night was mild, not unpleasant in spite of the wisps of drizzle that drifted over the flat landscape. Now and again Zetland's twin moons appeared briefly in breaks in the clouds but their light was faint and pallid in comparison to the glare of the working floods around Draconis. He tramped slowly up the ramp to the airlock, returned the salute of the #. D., one of Delamere's men. The elevator was unmanned -- but, after all, the ship had suffered heavy simulated casualties, so ratings could not be spared for nonessential duties. He went first to the "farm." Thevats had been cleaned out but the stink still lingered. The cruiser's biochemist had carried out his sabotage-under-orders a little too enthusiastically. Grimes exchanged a few words with Lieutenant Commander Dufay, in charge of operations here, then went down a couple of decks to the Inertial Drive Room. He looked at the confusion without understanding it. Roscoe and his artificers had bits and pieces scattered everywhere. It was like a mechanical jigsaw puzzle. "She'll be right. Commander," said the engineer lieutenant. He didn't seem to be convinced by his own words. Grimes certainly was not. "She'd better be right," he said. Somebody else was using the elevator, so he decided to take the companionway up to Controlhe did know more than a little about navigational equipment -- rather than wait. His journey took him through officers' country. He was not altogether surprised when he was accosted by Commander Lazenby. "Hi, John." "Hi, Maggie." "Are you busy?" He shrugged. "I should be." "But we haven't seen each other for years. Come into my dogbox for a drink and a yarn. It's all right -- the boy wonder's being wined and dined by the governor in ZeehanCity."  "He might have told me." "Why should he? In any case, he's on the simulated casualty list. He's probably awarded himself a posthumous Grand Galactic Cross." "With golden comets." "And a platinum spiral nebula." She laughed. "Come in, John. Take the weight off your feet." The door to her day cabin opened for her. "This is liberty hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard." "You haven't changed, Maggie," he said ruefully, looking at her. "I wish -- " She finished it for him. "You wish that you'd married me instead of that little commissioned grocer's clerk. But you were always rather scared of me, John, weren't you? You were afraid that you, a spacehound pure and simple, wouldn't be able to cope with me, a qualified ethologist. But as an ethologist I could have seen to it that things worked out for us." She sat down on her settee, crossing her slim, sleek legs. Her thin, intelligent face under the red hair was serious. He looked at her wistfully. He murmured -- and it was as much a question as a statement, "It's too late now." "Yes. It's too late. You've changed too much. You did the wrong thing, John. You should have resigned after that court martial. You could have gone out to the Rim Worlds to make a fresh start." "I wanted to, Maggie. But Marian -- she's incurably Terran. She made it quite plain that she'd not go out to live among the horrid, rough colonials. As far as she's concerned, everywhere there's a Survey Service base there's a little bit of old Earth, with society neatly stratified. Mrs. Commander is just a cut above Mrs. Lieutenant Commander -- and so on down." He fumbled for his pipe, filled and lit it. "She had the idea, too, that My Lords Commissioners would one day forgive me and that she'd finish up as Mrs. Admiral Grimes." "My heart fair bleeds for you both," she said dryly. "But mix us drinks, John. You'll find the wherewithal in that locker." "For you?" just a touch of lime." There was a hologram over the grog locker, a little, brightly glowing window on to another, happier world. It was a beach scene -- golden sand, creamy surf, blue sea and sky and the golden-brown bodies of the naked men and women. Grimes asked, "Do you still spend your leaves on Areadia?" "I do. It's the only possible planet for an ethologist who takes the back to nature slogan seriously." "You look happy enough in this hologram." Grimes inspected the three-dimensional picture more closely. "Who is that with you?" "Peter Cowley. He's a senior biochemist with Trans-Galactic Clippers." "No, Not him. The woman?" She got up to come to stand beside him. "Oh, that's Sonya Verrill. Yet another of the commanders with whom the Survey Service is infested. She's Intelligence. Do you know her?" Grimes stared at the nude woman. She was like Maggie Lazenby in many ways -- her figure, her coloring, her facial features, could almost have been those of Maggie's sister. He looked more closely. There should be a mole on her left hip. There was. "Do you know her?" asked Maggie again. "Yes -- no -- " "Make up your mind." I don't know her.  have never met her. But  have dreamed about her. I thought it was Maggie in my dreams, a somehow different Maggie -- but she hasn't a mole anywhere on her body... He said, "No, I don't know her. But she is like you, isn't she?" "I can't see any resemblance. You know, she was almost going to call here. She's sculling around this neck of space in one of those little, fully automated armed yachts. Some hush-hush Intelligence deal. But when she heard that this was one of the boy wonder's ports of call she decided to play by herself somewhere." "Has he met her?" asked Grimes, feeling absurdly jealous. "Yes. They do not, repeat not, like each other." "Then there must be some gdCd in her," said Grimes with a quite irrational surge of relief. "Never mind her. What about me? I'm thirsty." "All right, all right," said Grimes, mixing the drinks. ian was waiting up for him. "You've been drinking," she accused him. "And so, to coin a phrase, what?" "I don't mind that so much. But you've been with that -- bitch, that Maggie Lazenby." "I had a couple of drinks with her, that was all." "Don't lie to me." "I'm not lying." No, he wasn't lying. Maggie, in her woman's way, had offered him more than a drink but he had turned it down. Even now he was not sure why he had done so. Or he was sure but would not admit it to himself. His reason was too insane. He had been loyal to a woman whom he had never met, whose hologram he had seen for the first time in Maggie's day eabin. "After all I've done for you -- and you going sniffing around that carroty alleycat. You're no good, you're just no good. You never were, and you never will be -- " Grimes brushed past her into the living room, the Service severity of which had been marred by his wife's tasteless attempts at interior decoration. "Say something, damn you. Say something, you waster. Haven't you even the guts to defend yourself?" The telephone buzzed urgently. Grimes went to it, flipped down the switch. The screen came alive and the plain, almost ugly face of Mavis Davis looked out at him. "Commander, there's an emergency -- " "Yes?" "A Mayday." "Who?" Grimes demanded. "Where?" "The armed yacht Grebe. In solar orbit between Zetland and Freiad." She rattled off coordinates. "Meteor swarm. Extensive hull and machinery damage. Loss of atmosphere. Orbit decaying." "Mavis, send a car for me. At once." "Willco, Commander." "And what can you do?" his wife sneered. "Captain Delamere's got a cruiser and hundreds of really efficient men and women. What have you got?" "Out of my way," he snarled. "John, you can't go. I forbid you." She clung to his sleeve but, brutally, he shook her off. She followed him for a little way as he strode out of the house, along the dark road, then gave up. "John!" she called. "John!" The lights of the car were ahead, approaching rapidly. It passed him, turned, braked. Mavis Davis was driving. He got in beside her. She said, as she restarted the vehicle, " Husky?" Of course, it had to be the base's space tug Husky. Delamere's cruiser was out of commission and the tug at the civilian spaceport was, Grimes knew, undergoing annual survey. Husky was the only ship on Zetland capable of getting upstairs in a hurry. And she was Grimes' toy, his pet. In her he could feel the satisfaction of real command, of symbiosis with his ship. She was the only piece of equipment on the base in absolutely first class condition -- Grimes and Mavis, working with their own hands, had kept her so. She was referred to as "the Old Man's private yacht." warm her up," said Mavis. "Good girl." "Can I come with you?" "I'd like you to." She was a clerical officer, trained as such, but she should have been an engineer. She possessed the inborn skills, the talents and a keen mathematical mind. Often she had accompanied Grimes on his short jaunts outside i lie atmosphere. "You know the lit t le bitch better than anybody rise on the base." "Thank you, John." The car screamed on to the apron, circled the great, useless, floodlit hulk of Draconis. Husky was in her own berth, tucked away behind the workshops, a dull metal ovoid standing in her tripedal landing gear like a gray egg in its cup. A circle of yellow light marked her airlock door. As the car stopped Grimes heard a noise in the sky. A jet was coming in fast. The shriek of its exhaust varied in pitch as its turret drive was used first to brake and then to ease the aircraft to a vertical touchdown. The aircraft dammed to the concrete just a few feet from the car. A man jumped out of the cabin, confronted Grimes. It was Delamere, still in his mess dress, starched white line, black bow tie, tinkling miniatures and all. "Is she ready?" he demanded. "Yes, Captain. I'll have her up and away as soon as the airlock's sealed." "You aren't taking her up, Grimes. I am." Delamere grinned whitely. "Life's been a little too dull lately." "Like hell you're taking her up, Delamere. This is my base and my lug." "And I am your superior officer, Grimes. You'd better not forget it." "You're not likely to let me, are you? But this is a rescue operation -- and I know how to handle a ship." "Out of my way, you insolent bastard!" Grimes swung clumsily but with all his weight behind the blow. Delamere wasn't as fit as he looked. Grimes' fist sank deep into his midriff, under the black silk cummerbund. The air was expelled from the captain's lungs. He sat down hard and abruptly. He gasped something about striking a superior officer, about mutiny. petty officer who had appeared in the airlock. "Drag the captain clear of the blast area. I'm going to use the auxiliary rockets. And keep clear yourself." "But, sir -- ' "You don't want to be up with me on a charge of mutiny. Get out of here and take the captain with you. That goes for you too, Mavis." "Like hell it does!" Grimes paused briefly. He could manage the tug singlehanded but with rescue operations involved it would be asking for trouble. He grabbed Mavis by her bony shoulder. "Scream," he whispered. "I'm dragging you aboard by force." She screamed, shrieked, "Let go of me -- " From where Delamere sprawled the struggle would look convincing enough. And then they were in the airlock. Grimes hurried up to the little control room while Mavis went to thengines. He plumped down into the pilot's chair and, as he strapped himself in, cast an experienced eye over the telltale lights. Reaction Drive -- ready. Inertial Drive -- ready. Mannschenn Drive stand by. His fingers found the firing studs in the arm ofthe chair. He said into the microphone hanging before him, "Secure all. Secure all for blast off." Mavis' voice came in reply. "All secure, Captain." "Then -- blast." He pressed the button and Husky screamed upstairs like a bat out of hell. aboard the crippled Grebe , a woman. Her voice was faint, almost incoherent. She was in her suit, she said. She had suffered a broken arm and possibly internal injuries. She thought that she would be able to ship a new air bottle when the one in use was exhausted. "Can you actuate your Carlotti transceiver?" demanded Grimes urgently. "I -- I think so." "Try. I'm going to switch to Mannschenn Drive. I'll home on your Carlotti." "Manschenn Drive?" asked Mavis, who had come up to Control. "Yes. I want to be there in minutes, not days -- and the Mannschenn Drive's the only way. I know it's risky, but " It was risky to operate the Drive in a planetary system with its tangle of gravitational and magnetic fields -- but it had to be done Grimes jockeyed the f ree-falli ng Husky around on her gyroscope, lining her up on the faint signals from the survivor's suit radio. He started the Drive. There was the usual second or so of disorientation in Space and Time -- and then, astern of them, Zetland assumed the appearance of a writhing, convoluted ball of luminous gas and ahead and to starboard the sun became an iridescent spiral. Grimes paid no attention. He heard the faint voice from his own Carlotti speaker. "Carlotti on." "Can you fix it so that it sends a continuous note? Turn up the gain." "Willco." A faint, continuous squeal came from the speaker. Good. Grimes watched the quivering antenna of his Carlotti Direction Finder and Communicator, the ellipsoid Mobius Strip that was rotating slowly about its long axis He restarted the Inertial Drive and then, with lateral thrust, usthg the antenna as a compass needle, headed the tug directly for the distant wreck. He pushed the Inertial Drive control to full ahead. The irregular throbbing shook the little ship. "Mavis," he said, "see if you can coax a few more revs out of the bone-shaker." "I'll try," she told him, and was gone. A fresh voice came from the speaker. It was Delamere. "Grimes. Captain Delamere calling ex-Commander Grimes. Do you read me?" "Loud and clear, Delamere. Get off the air. I'm busy." "Grimes, I order you to return at once. Ensign Davis, I authorize you to use force if necessary to overcome the mutineer and to assume command of Husky." Grimes watched the antenna. It showed a continual drift of the target in a three o'clock direction. The wreck was in orbit, of course. He would have to allow for that. He did so, applying just the right amount of lateral thrust. "Grimes. Ensign Davis. Do you hear me?" Damn the man. So far the antenna was keeping lined up on the signal from the disabled Grebe -- hut with the base transmitting at full power it might topple at any second. "Grimes here. I can't give any orders but I can appeal to those of you in the Carlotti Room. This is a rescue operation. I'm homing on Grebe's Carlotti Beacon. There's a woman out there, in the wreck, and she can't last much longer. Please gel off the air and stay off." He was never to know what happened, but he thought he heard the sound of a scuffle. He thought he heard a voice -- Maggie's voice -- whisper, "Pull the fuse -- " He transferred his attention to the spherical lank of the mass proximity indicator. Yes, there it was, a liny, glowing spark, barely visible. It was drifting fast toward the center of the globe. Too fast? Not really. For a collision to occur, two vessels must occupy the same space at the same time and as long as Husky's Mannschenn Drive was operating she was in a Time of her own. But speaking of Time -- he didn't want to waste any. "Mavis, when I put her on full astern I want full astern. No half measures." "You'll get it," she assured him. The spark was brighter now, crossing one concentric ring after another. Grimes adjusted the scale of the indicator, pushing the target back to the outermost circle. Still it drove in. Grimes adjusted the scale again and again. Target spark merged with the bead of luminosity that represented Husky. For a microsecond there was an uncanny sensation of merging -- not of ships, but of two personalities. i ( t i c c c  "Manschenn Drive -- off," snapped Grimes, executing his own order. "Inertial Drive -- full astern!" The ship shuddered, striving to tear herself apart. Colors sagged down the spectrum as the everprecessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive were braked to a halt -- but outside the viewports the stars, vibrating madly, still looked as they had while the Drive was in operation. "Stop all," muttered Grimes, jerking the lever to its central position. And there, scant feet away, rotating slowly about some cockeyed axis, was the torn, buckled hull of the space yacht Grebe. Control while Grimes was putting on his suit. She was bleeding slightly from an abrasion on her forehead. Like many another plain woman she was beautiful in conditions of emotional and physical stress. Before she lowered the helmet on to his shoulders she kissed him. The contact was brief but surprisingly warm. Grimes wished that it could have been longer. She said, "Goodbye. It's been nice knowing you, John." "What the hell's this. Mavis?" She grinned lopsidedly. "I have my fey moments -- especially when somebody is playing silly buggers with Mannschenn Drive -- " Then she was securing the helmet and further speech was impossible. Grimes collected what tools he would require on his way down to the airloJWhen the outer door opened he found that he could almost step across to Grebe. He pushed himself away from his own little ship, made contact with the hull of the other with the magnetic soles of his boots and palms of his gloves. He clambered over her like a clumsy, four-legged spider. He soon discovered that it would be impossible to open Grebe's airlock door. But it didn't matter. A few feet away from it was a hole large enough for him to crawl through. He said into his helmet microphone, "I'm here." The faint voice that replied at long last held an oddly familiar astringent quality. "And about time." "Where are you?" "In the control room." Grimes made his way forward, using cutting torch and crowbar when he had to. When he found her she was in the pilot's chair, held there by the seat belt. Moving feebly, she contrived to swivel to look at him. Husky's floods were on and glaring through the viewports but her face, inside the helmet, was in shadow. She said, "I hate to have to admit it -- but you're right, John." "What do you mean?" "What you always say when you deliver yourself of one of your diatribes against automation. 'Never put yourself at the mercy of a single fuse.' My meteor shield might as well have not been there and by the time the alarm sounded it was too late to do anything -- " "Sonya, I've got to get you out of here. Aboard Husky." He fumbled with the strap that held her. "Too " late." She coughed and the sound of it, telling of fluidfilled lungs, terrified him. "Too -- late, f hung on as long -- as I could. Start -- Mannschenn Drive. Should be somepower -- in batteries -- " "Sonya! I'm getting you out of here -- " "No. No -- start -- Drive -- " But he persisted in trying to unstrap her. Summoning her last reserves of strength she pushed him away. He lost contact with the deck, drifted away from her. He clutched at something -- a lever? It moved in his hand. He did not hear the Drive starting -- there was no air in the ship to carry the sound. But he felt the vibration as rotors stirred into life, was aware that the harsh light of Husky's floods had deepened from white to a sullen red. Around him, around Sonya, the Universe lost its substance. But he was solid still, as she was, and her hand was firm in his. And... S HE was saying, "We found each other again. We found each other again " Grimes looked at her, stared at her for a long time, dreadfully afraid that she would vanish. He held her hand tightly. Then, but cautiously, he stared around him at the temple. It seemed to have lost its alien magic. It was just a large, featureless room with the dimensions of a cube. On the floor, annoyingly off center, was a block of black stone in the shape of a coffin. He said, "That dream... If it was a dream..." She said, "There is a fourth-rate Survey Service base on Zetland --  He said, "The last I heard of Delamere he'd been kicked upstairs to become a deskbound Commodore -- " She said, "Damn your silly dream. Forget about it." "I'll try," he promised. And then, unbidden, familiar words formed themselves in his mind. He said them aloud: "To sleep, perchance to dream... ay, there's the rub -- " "What's the rub, John?" He gazed at her. "What is the dream? That or this?" "What does it matter?" she asked practically. "We just make the best of what we've got." Then, as they walked out of the drab temple, "Damo! My ribs are still hurting!"  bXL  i. A rrauovos itseufto fall above. '-:-vvx X?.?'  # ". The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.-J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Robert Coover  T he name oj the game is life -- death, God, sex and vengeance!" This quote from Book Week appears on the Signet edition of a marvelously wrought book called The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.-J. Henry Waugh, Prop, by Robert Coover. It's Signet book T#, #c. (By the time you read this, you may have to order it by mail from New American Library, the publishers. Information on how to do this is available in every Signet, Mentor, price plus #c plus applicable sales taxes. In rare cases it's worth the trouble, and this is one of those cases). Anyway. The name of the game is life and all those other things. Under a blurb like that, you'd expect no less a title than Lincoln's Doctor's Dog. But the title Coover gives you is entirely accurate. The book is about J. Henry Waugh's relationship to the full-scale major baseball league he operates in his mind, aided by chance. (Chance as modified by whimsy and by an inability to let chance operate with complete freedom when the big chips are down). Thus, very quickly you do get the idea that it's a book about God. There's also death and sex. And the overt central problem gets to be whether it is or isn't about vengeance. But let's look at it through our eyes, which are not always overt. Is it about a science-fiction theme? Yes, it is. It does not bear the standard trappings of science fiction -- whereas, for instance, Ted Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" does -- but it answers excellently to the needs of the sf mind-bent. In fact, this book -- which baffled a succession of book reviewers in its original edition, and apparently didn't do too well in the market -- may find its natural and most appreciative audience among us. You don't have to be a baseball fan. J. Henry Waugh, for instance, is not a baseball fan. He is a middle-aged bachelor bookkeeper who is a games fan. Like so many others before him, he is attracted not to the action on the diamond but to the statistics of accomplishment. Like a youngster relentlessly banging a tennis ball against a wall, playing pitcher against himself, counting a onebounce catch as a single or a complete miss as a home run, Henry sits in his kitchen, rolling dice and consulting the complex of charts he he has evolved over the years. He's a grown man with appropriate training, so his rules are more elaborate than one-bounceis-a-single. Henry throws three dice whose various possible falls not only ordain an event in his mind but predetermine the general nature of the next fall, and sometimes the exact nature of the past. I-or example, a third successive roll of three ones, read out on the supplementary lixlraordinary Occurrences chart, means: Batter fatally struck by bean ball. When it happens when Damon Rutherford, phenomenal young pitcher, radiating class in every lineament and motion, dies in the dust on Damon Rutherford Day before a stricken throng including his father, Former Ace Brock Rutherford -- it is an event no different in essence from those created by Sturgeon's protagonist when he sent the sky crushing down on his Neoterics. But it happens not to a few impersonal creatures scuttling about anonymously under an impermeable dome but to the finest, most gallant, most accomplished, most sexually potent figure in the U.B.A. and in Henry's mind. Henry's mind is a disquietingly familiar placeman alien landscape whose every feature is drawn from recognizable dreams. On the surface, Henry is a bathetic figure -- the isolated craftsman-bachelor driven by time's passage into the blind alley of the only creativity available to him. Instead of sawing out a thousand birdhouses in a basement workshop, or creating the most elaborate miniature train layout in his neighborhood... or building up a complete mint collection of Weird Tales... Henry not only creates his baseball game, with its elaborate but rational rules that anyone with the patience might follow, he also creates the supportive paraphernalia. He spends "winters" between seasons in writing up the individual histories of the clubs in his league, and in evolving background events, such as the time Long Lew Lydell raped old Fennimore McCaffree's spinster daughter in the Knickerbocker dugout in front of five thousand wide-eyed spectators. (It worked out alF right -- Lew made an honest woman of Fanny, being forced to marry her because McCaffree's Legalist Party couldn't have stood the scandal otherwise). As you can see, almost from the beginning the U.B.A.'s now extensive history has been playing itself out in a universe not quite like this one. Such features of the landscape as an unhindered public rape, and a baseball league whose official actions are affected by several' political parties contending within h, are not overtly identical with the real world. But any objective view of this situation is constantly being obscured by Coover's skill at forcing the reader to suspend his judgment and see Henry deal with the real world in terms of the imaginary one. For Henry is not going the trite route. For a very long while he is able to go out socializing with bartenders and B-girls while firmly encased in the matrix of the U.B.A.'s history rather than his own. The isolation that might make him a schizoid recluse is the very same freedom from contradictory stimuli that might enable him to go on to the end of his days with his private creation, harming no one grievously, and helping himself to survive beyond meremortality. In his apartment full of U.B.A. statistics, chronicles, and memories, he is building up a coherent body of work with its own total validity. It's all there. "Into the Book went the whole U.B.A., everything from statistics to journalistic dispatches, from seasonal analyses to general baseball theory. Style varied from the extreme economy of factual data to the overblown idiom of the sportswriter, from the scientific objectivity of the theoreticians to the literary speculations of essayists and anecdotalists. There were tape-recorded dialogues, player contributions, election coverage, obituaries, satires, prophecies, scandals." In other words, it was Henry's creativity that gave Damon Rutherford a name, a parentage and a manifest destiny. But it was the dice, and Henry's game rules, that made him a prominent figure in the U.B.A. So prominent, in fact, that he deserved a Dmon Rutherford Day. It was the dic that killed him as he came to bat in Henry's mind. But it was Henry's creativity, endowing him with his peculiar grace and poise, his overt ( Please turn to page I # ) stances, the creature was too funny, thought Damals. It was almost impossible not to laugh. And at that moment one of the four watchers sniggered audibly. Another pressed a button on the arm of his chair. The gesture  extinguished the film and at the same time swept back the covers from the hyperbola of transparent material forming two thirds of the wall. Outside it was evening and a grove of trees similar to those in the film filtered a patchwork of starlight onto the sleek richness of the estate. The one who had cut off the film turned round with some asperity. "Really Ziel! There isn't room for humor in the situation -- even, I should have thought, for one not so closely affected as myself." Damals, the psychologist, found himself apologizing for Ziel, the biologist -- more or less automatically as befitted a fellow scientist but rather reluctantly. During dinner Ziel had shown himself a brash clumsy career-maker. Damals found himself saying, "I think you can see. Senator, that the results are clownishly funny, if one can distinguish the humor from the tragedy and feel both at the same time -- as I suppose most scientists can." Senator Enedee, nearly two feet taller than Damals, looked down at him mildly and said, "Of course, I am too strained. We all rely on your skill and patience. Your patience-"" " -- is, if anything, excessive," said the fourth person, a smile on his dark grizzled face. He was the smallest of the four and seemed the most restive. "Don't say that, Rampo." Damals turned to him with something of the awkwardness they had just seen on the screen, "Patience is a quality our civilization lacks. There is no help for that, I suppose, in general. But in some specialized fields -- how much we need it." Ziel, who had not yet spoken, said, "I have sufficient impatience to want to get down to business. We have not yet been told officially why we are here. But it is obvious enough. Senator Enedee has collected the Principal of the Institute of Mutational Psychiatry, the Colonial Ministry's senior anthropological adviser and a biologist who, though not up to the same standard, at least has the advantage of being available in this planetary system. You show us a film of a being whom I take to be your nephew Tontor, a barely viable mutation." "An unviable mutation" said the senator gloomily. "The main point, Ziel," the Damals pul in, seeing that it was about to be made anyway, "is that you have just seen Tontor as he is after two years of educational therapy at my Institution." "Ah -- " Ziel's heavy modesty had made little impression on the other two scientists. His professional status was, if anything, higher than theirs and not only because of the enormous importance of biology in their culture. His positive and rather overbearing manner was probably a reflection of the pushfulness that had carried him to one of the key power posts not subject to election. Damals could see by various slight signs that Rampo did not like Ziel any more than he did. What the senator's feelings were was not so apparent -- either he was better at concealing his sentiments or the fact that he was not a scientist made him less jealous. "It can be stated definitely," continued Damals, who knew the value of a positive statement, "that no further significant improvement is possible." The senator poured out four drinks, giving the last to Ziel as he said, "I imagine, knowing your efficiency, that you checked on Tontor's record before you arrived here this evening. Is there anything for me in it?" "No. You must realize that at birth he really was quite unviable. Emergency biological and surgical work was carried out at once, as usual. I have checked the reports and they are unexceptionable. Further tests were taken and adjustments made at various suitable ages in infancy and adolescence -- one of them by Zoroz, who, as you know, is now senior biological adviser in the Arb galaxy. There were all perfectly done. Tontor is now as good as biology -- and apparently as psychology -- can make him." "I didn't really expect anything more," said the senator. "Indeed, I took the opportunity of your visit to the system to get you to do me the favor of dining with me for more general reasons." "For a galactic senator to be honored by the visit of a simple biologist -- that's the wrong way around, your excellency." "Everyone knows that a biologist ranks most highly these days." This time Damals could interpret quite easily the look that went with the senator's remark -- presumably he had realized that subtlety was lost on Ziel. Ziel went on: "The more general reasons, no doubt, are to obtain my opinion on a possible revision of the Biological Laws. But surely you are not going to tell me that the unfortunate case of your nephew has changed your altitude to the public good?" This question had been in the minds of both Damals and Rampo, but they had scarcely expected to hear it stated so bluntly. Damals, who had formed a good opinion of the senator, awaited his answer. ance, the politician said slowly, "Well, I suppose my sister's feelings -- as she has finally realized that nothing more can probably be done -- have made the question more vivid to me. But the question is by no means only a matter of my personal interests. You must know that tragedies such as Tontor have become increasingly common in the last generation. And you may also know that a group of reasonably responsible politicians is considering making an issue of the public discontent. The advantages cannot outweigh the misery caused by the present laws -- or such is their idea. Unless some way of modifying the effects of the laws can be found the laws themselves will have to be altered. What is your view?" For the first time Ziel showed an emotion other than self-satisfaction but, he succeeded in controlling himself. He finished his drink and said in a rather formal voice, "The government's policy in this matter, at any rate, is quite unpolitical. It takes the advice of its biological advisers, which may be said to be unanimous on the point." "May be said to be?" "No -- for practical purposes we are unanimous. We have considered a few alternatives on minor points only. But perhaps it would be best if I gave you a brief analysis of the whole position. Then we can decide." Ziel, now back at his most selfsatisfied, wailed while the senator poured out another round of drinks. "As you know," Ziel said, "we are the only race in the universe, as far as is known, whose blood contains -- and whose metabolism needs -- radioactive salts on a large scale. This peculiarity has always resulted in a mass of mutations. At some point in the recent past a dominant mutation arose whose characteristic was a large increase in the use and conservation of these salts. This development in turn has led to such an increase in mutation that absolutely pure breeding may now be said to have vanished. Of every thousand mutations about one is favorable, four more combine favorable and unfavorable characteristics and one is about even. A further forty are unfavorable, though not impossibly so. Another hundred are naturally lethal but reclaimable by modern techniques the rest are absolutely lethal. Even with the assistance of the most advanced methods we cannot produce more than a few normal fertile sperms from any one male. The same sort of limitation applies to our females. Without allowing for accidents this means that the continuity -- and in particular the progress -- of the race, depend on salvaging every possible viable case in the hope that perhaps a mental -- or nervous -- advantage has accompanied the physical disadvantage. no If this had not been done we should probably have regressed considerably even in the last hundred years." "That is quite correct," said Damals. Ziel, who clearly did not require such confirmation, finished his speech more abruptly than he had perhaps intended: "Tontor is a biological triumph. I havejust seen photographs of him at birth. His present physique must represent weeks of successful work by several specialists. The psychologists have not been so successful?" "No", said Damals. "Of course, the slowness of his nervous reactions is one obstacle. Unfortunately the surgeons couldn't speed that up." Rampo, no expert, had said nothing. But the quick movement of his eyes from speaker to speaker gave some indication of his real talkativeness. He now started to open his mouth but at that moment the biologist took a brisk, efficient look at his timepiece and got up. "Well, Senator, I must be off. I'll go over and have a check of Tontor myself, though I can hold out little hope that I'll find anything. His condition is pretty final. And I'll have a report sent you -- it should clear up any ideas you may have about revising the laws. Goodbye." men watched the glow of Ziel's jet fade into the cloudy south, the tall politician asked slowly, "How right is he?" Damals looked sideways at him. It was difficult to tell how badly the senator really took all this. For a moment Damals was tempted to take some of the edge off the crude positiveness of Ziel's case. But he would really be raising false hopes, he supposed. So he said, "If anything, he understated the case. The biologists are struggling along with such a bare margin that mutational progress is infinitesimal. Every mutation that can be made to live must be." The senator took the pronouncement with the easy strength that had made him a famous figure in a dozen galaxies. "Well, anyhow, I'm glad in a way Ziel isn't as successful at solving problems as he is at everything else. And now I'll get out a bottle I keep for guests who are guests and not bio-politicians." A little machine slid silently across the balcony. Its taps poured into three great tankards. "It's curious to think that physicists, if it weren't for our special problems, might have been our important scientists. They're much more successful in their way," said Rampo. "Look at that wine-robot -- far more efficient than lots of mutations." "Well, that was another possibility thqt had occured to me," said the senator. "Could robots be built -- with a protoplasmic outer cover -- at Tontor's level to be companions to him, as you might say. I seem to have read something about such developments." "The technique has been quite well worked ouf," said Damals, "but it's not really practicable. I say nothing of the cost, which is considerable. There is another problem. Look at your wine robot. It has at most some twenty actions to perform. And even so it is fairly bulky. A humanoid robot cannot carry its reflex interpreters. They fill a fair-sized room. What happens in the ones they build is that the robot is beamed to a hidden reflex interpreter, usually under beams -- so their range cannot be allowed to be more than about fifteen yards. If you could buy a spare planet and a staff of forty or fifty first-class physicists and psychologists you might do it -- but even then results would be far from satisfactory. The robots can be made quick and efficient, which Tontor is not -- but I doubt they could be given even a tenth of Tontor's actual I.Q., which is not really lower than ours by a factor of more than ten or twenty." "Well, everything seems to be against us, doesn't it? " said Enedee. He was now drinking his sixth glass. The scientists were on their second, but there was no noticeable difference in the behavior of the three. "I hope Rampo won't mind my asking if you expected a contribution from him. Or is he here, as he well deserves to be, only for his good company?" "As a wine-taster, probably," Rampo said, "I'm chairman of the Zovol wine society, as you probably didn't know -- I'll be able to report back favorably, especially on the second bottle. Kon Eightysix, I think?" "Yes -- well, that's the sort of reason you were asked for. That society. You have fingers in all sorts of pies -- you've been around some odd galaxies. You might have some notions we hadn't heard of on the Tontor problemthough of course it isn't only a Tontor parents." "Well, Senator, I've no real ideas as you've noticed -- but I think it's just possible I might get some if I did a spot of research in various libraries. If you could get me and Damals -- I'd like his aid -- a week or so's leave and find us a good craft. I'll do my best." "Your abrupt production of full marching orders reminds me of Ziel," said Damals. "But I know it's due to the opposite reason -- laziness, not ambitious efficiency. Still, as long as you don't promise anything I agree to associate myself with this somewhat doubtful venture." as the little ship lifted in an unwinding spiral from Zorn's surface, past its satellite and that curious little body -- the satellite's satellite. Picking up speed, the craft edged out vertically away from the direction of the galactic center. "Look at all those stinking stars," said Damals, who was beginning to feel agreeably irresponsible at this unaccompanied and probably pointless trip. His and Rampo's friendship dated from student years. "Yes, but think of all the stinking galaxies" said Rampo, "and how few of us there are to run them really -- and little squirts like Ziel near the top." "If you ask me," Damals said feelingly as his stomach took the uncomfortable lurch into the second transfinite, "the physicists are to blame. If we were all in a few galaxies -- or better still, systems -- we'd be quite enough. It was this sickening nondimensional drive that did it. No time at all." "Allowing for acceleration and this and that," qualified Rampo. "Yes -- and allowing for power, which means allowing for money, which means that an impatient professor can hardly go more than a dozen or so galaxies away in his mangy little runabout. Not but what this -- " he looked at the nameplate -- " Polambi , isn't good. Where are we going?" Rampo paused to focus the pseudovision screen. On it a couple of white whirls zipped past. "Paran." Damals was so surprised that he dropped the breakfast capsule he was opening. "What sort of ship is this, anyhow?" "The senator's own Administration Emergency Z-two. It would get clear to Roudabon itself in half a day. How do we rate it? He wrote out a chit of political emergency and it released itself. I imagine there's more in the political crisis about mutational viability than meets the eye -- we're a very paternal race. Do you know that I've been on dozens of planets where Ton tor?" Damals was shocked out of his preoccupation with their destination. "No!" "Yes." "I seem to remember reading something of the kind, now I come to think of it, in protopsychology, when I was a student." "Yes -- and your unscientific memory was naturally pulled out from under it." "Only the most insensitive students were chosen for anthropology, I remember." "It's due to field anthropology that I can pilot this crate -- and we're going to Paran and not some hick library like Sof. There are parks of the old Z-ones for field anthropologists in every big sector, though how they manage it on the schockingly mean little budget I don't know," said Rampo, watching the light patches which were now flicking past the screen almost as fast as his amazingly quick nervous system could follow them -- about six hundred a second. "Now in the galaxy which has just edged off the screen -- eightnine-nine Lambadan -- I had an experience with which I will now pass away a weary watch in relating, among the natives of Gam, a planet in Gambonnen." Damals reached for the nearest bottle and, placing it to his mouth, closed his eyes demonstratively. f He said, "I will think of Paran, meanwhile -- where we spent the happiest days of our youth. I begin to doubt that this trip is going to be as pointless as I suspected," like most really habitable planets, circles a sun of a dazzling blue. The weather at the city of Paran has been described ad nauseum as perpetual spring but in reality the true spring is the best season. Young folk from all over the universe who can blackmail, dupe or persuade anyone to finance their fares, come there to the ancient university or, without the formality of enrolling themselves, for something more vaguely defined as "study." Rampo and Damals had been on Paran many years before for two short semesters, for it is mainly as a center of the less rigorous sciences that the ancient city has its renown. The library is one of the few score entitled to an electronic copy of every publication in the universe. Its underground files stretch under more than half the land surface of the globe to a depth of several miles. Rampo settled the Polambi at a little port away from the great river island where bookships were pulling in every few hours. He switched on the parking field, tuned it to a ' permit-tester, signed and thumbed it, opened the hatch and rolled out the ladder. The air of Paran poured in at a very slightly higher pressure and mixed its superior oxygen and radon content with the ship's air. "It's really too young for us." "Nonsense. You'll adjust only too quickly to a second childhood," said Damals, going down the steps. It was late afternoon. "I thought we'd go to the library, book a couple of rooms and place a few orders," said Rampo. "It's too late to do any serious work today. Besides -- " Besides, there are a lot of things to do in Paran in the evening, particularly for academic people like Damals and Rampo, even though the latter was still abie to revert occasionally to the more wandering and exciting life of his subordinates, the field anthropologists. Each other's company and the ambience of Paran made the two friends feel considerably younger and more active and neither required professional advice on the anthropology or psychology of Paran night-life. After the sun set in a blue-purple splendor to the east they abandoned the riverfront cafe's and took to a cellar dive of the student quarter called the Crazy Galaxy, whose sign showed a number of stars in various undignified postures. As Damals and Rampo descended the narrow stone stairs into a surprisingly well decorated cylindrical room with alcoves, the manager stepped up, bowing. "An alcove, excellencies -- " They sat down in the alcove. Its one-way vision opened to the floor where some sort of entertainment was now going on. Damals said, "That's what comes of being dressed too well. One forgets how one looked a hundred years ago. The trouble is that we haven't the scrip to pay for much of that 'excellency' stuff." Rampo produced from his pocket a roll of notes larger than any Damals had seen before in his life -- except on one occasion on Volomba when he had suddenly been but unbalanced credit director whose room was actually knee deep in currency. "What's that from?" Rampo said airily, "An advance on the expense account. I have signaled for two bottles of Zomonon goldwater to start off." "I suppose those two so-called dancers are in the fashion from some god-knows-where galaxy that has come in since our times", said Damals. "They remind me of an emergency case I once dealt with in free fall on an intrasystem liner in -- " Rampo interrupted with: "This will make you less clinical, for God's sake." Two cups of glittering liquid slid onto the table. "Soon you'll be more like a case than a psychologist, I hope." "I've never had this before. It's wonderful." After an hour they left and went to the Swan Room, thence to the Blue Nova, the Obolologo, the Zipetizap and the Thrust Field. Only the Obolologo was as it had been in their time. The rest struck them as tourist-ridden, though probably most of the tourists were ex-students like themselves. I n the streets the air was soft and warm and the sky as calm as it had been a hundred years before. Later they went back to the Crazy Galaxy. Downstairs everything had changed. The narrow dark cylinder had opened up into a flickering sphere and all the alcoves had disappeared, leaving their tables in the middle of the en( Please turn to page #)... asks a simple question. Have you done your homework today? First day -- Teacher told my parent that I am the slowest youngster in my class, but today I made a star in the third quadrant of kindergarten. Teacher was surprised. Teacher tried to hide it and said the solar phoenix reaction is artistic, but is it practical? I don't care. I think it's pretty. a Q O o O o o o Second day -- Today I made planets: four big ones, two middle-sized ones, and three little ones. Teacher laughed and said why did I make so many when all but three were too hot or too cold to support life and the big ones were too massive and poisonous for any use at all. Teacher doesn't understand. There is more to creation than mere usefulness. The rings around the sixth planet are beautiful. Third day Today I created life. I begin to understand why my people place creation above all else. I have heard the philosophers discussing the purpose of existence, but I thought it was merely age. Before today joy was enough: to have fun with the other kids, to speed through endless space, to explode some unstable star into a nova, to flee before the outrage of some adult -- this would fill eternity. Now I know better. Life must have a function. Teacher was right: only two of the middle-sized planets and one of the little ones were suitable for life. I made life for all three, but only on the third planet from the sun was it really successful. I have given it only one function: survive! Fourth day -- The third planet has absorbed all my interest. The soupy seas are churning with life. Today I introduced a second function: multiply! The forms developing in the seas are increasingly complex. The kids are calling me to come and play, but I'm not going. This is more fun. Fifth day Time after lime I stranded seacreatures on the land and kept them alive long past the lime when they should have died. At last I succeeded. Some of them have adapted. I was right. The sea is definitely an inhibiting factor. The success of the land-creatures is pleasing. Sixth day -- Everything I did before today was nothing. Today I created intelligence. I added a third function: know! Out of a minor primate has developed a fabulous creature. It has two legs and walks upright and looks around it with curious eyes. It has weak hands and an insignificant brain, but it is conquering all things. Most of all, it is conquering its environment. It has even begun speculating Seventh day -- Today there is no school. After the pangs and labors of creation, it is fun to play again. It is like escaping the gravitational field of a while dwarf and regaining the dissipated coma. Teacher talked to my parent again today. Teacher said I had developed remarkably in the last few days but my creation was hopelessly warped and inconsistent. Moreover, it was potentially dangerous. Teacher said it would have to be destroyed. My parent objected, saying that the solar phoenix reaction in the sun would lead the dangerous life form on the third planet to develop a thermonuclear reaction of its own. With the functions I had given that life form, the problem would take care of itself. It wasn't my parent's responsibility Teacher said, and Teacher couldn't take the chance. I didn't hear who won the argument. I drifted away, feeling funny. I don't care, really. I'm tired of the old thing anyway. I'll make a better one. But it was the first thing I ever made, and you can't help feeling a kind of sentimental attachment. If anyone sees a great comet plunging toward the sun, it isn't me. Eighth day ( Continued from page #) gent, we are human beings, we wish no longer to be alone in the cosmos. -- In what language will you tell them this? In the language of random numbers. And then, in not-so-random numbers. Hello, hello, #, did you hear that, #, the ratio of diameter to circumference? -- And how will you say this to them? Lasers? Radio waves? Too slow, too slow. I cannot wait for electromagnetic radiations to go forth and come back. We will talk to the stars wrth tachyon-beams and  will tell the starfolk about Simeon Krug. The android masseuses clawed his flesh, pounded him, drove knuckles into his massive muscles. Were they trying to tap the mystic rRimbers into his bones? #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#? Where was the missing #? Even if it had been sent, what would the sequence mean, #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#-#? Nothing significant. Random. Random. Meaningless clusters of raw information. Nothing more than numbers arrayed in an abstract pattern and yet they carried the most important message the universe ever had seen: We are here. We are here. We call out to you. And Krug would answer. He shivered with pleasure at the thought of his tower completes! and the tachyon-beams pouring out into the galaxy. Krug would reply, Krug the rapacious, Krug the insensitive moneyman, Krug the dollar-hungry boor, Krug the mere industrialist, Krug the fat peasant, Krug the ignorant, Krug the coarse. I! Me! I! Krug! Krug! "Out," he snapped to the andriods. "Finished!" The girls sctirried away, rushing for the door in a tangle of lithe naked bodies. Krug rose, slowly resumed his garments, walked across the room to run his hands over the pattern of yellow lights. "Messages?" he asked. "Visitors?" The head and shoulders of Leon Spaulding appeared in midair, glistening against the invisible webwork backdrop of a sodiumvapor projector. "Dr. Vargas is here," the ectogene said. "He's waiting in the planetarium. Will you see him?" "Natuarally. I'll go up. And Quenelle?" "She went to the lake house in Uganda. She'll wait for you there." "And my son?" "Paying his inspection call on the Duluth plant. Do you have instructions for him?" "No," Krug said. "He knows what he's doing. I'll go to Vargas now." The image of Spaulding winked out. Krug entered his liftshaft and rose swiftly to the domed planetarium on the highest level of the building. Under its coppered roof the slight figure of Niccolo Vargas paced intently. To his left was a display case hiding eight kilograms of proteoids from Alpha Centauri V; to his right, a squat cryostat in the frosty depths of which could dimly be seen twenty liters of fluid drawn from Pluto's methane sea. Vargas was an intense, fairskinned little man for whom Krug entertained a respect bordering on awe: a man who had spent evn-y day of his adult life searching for civilizations in the stars and who had mastered all aspects of the problems of interstellar communications. Vargas' specialty had left its imprint on his features. Fifteen years earlier, incautiously exposing himself to the beam of a neutron telescope in a moment of intolerable excitement, Vargas had baked the left side of his face beyond hope of tectogenetic repair. They had regrown his ruined eye but they had not been able to do much about the decalcification of the underlying bony structure except to shore it up with berylliumfiber matting, and so part of Vargas' skull and cheek now had a slumped, shriveled look. Deformities such as that were unusual in an era of easy cosmetic surgery -- Vargas, however, had no apparent interest in undergoing further facial reconstruction -- however easy. Vargas smiled his lopsided smile as Krug entered. "The tower is magnificent," he said. "Will be," Krug corrected. "No. No. Already magnificent. A wondrous torso. The sleekness of it, Krug, the bulk, the upward thrust! Do you know what you are building there, my friend? The first cathedral of the galactic age. In thousands of years to come, long after your tower has ceased to function as a communications center, men will go to it and kneel, kiss its smooth skin and bless you for having built it. And not only men." "I like that enough," said Krug. "A cathedral. I hadn't seen it that way." Krug caught sight of the data cube in Vargas' right palm. "What do you have there?" "A gift for you." "A gift?" "We have tracked the signals to their source," Vargas said. "I thought you would like to see their home star." Krug lurched forward. "Why did you wait so long to tell me? Why didn't you say something while we were at the tower?" "The tower was your show. This is mine. Shall I turn on the cube?" Krug gestured impatiently toward the receptor slot. Vargas deftly inserted the cube and activated the scanner. Bluish beams of interrogatory light lanced into the small crystal lattice, mining for the stored bits of information. The stars blossomed on the planetarium's ceiling. Krug was at home in the galaxy. His eyes picked out familiar landmarks: Sirius, Canopus, Vega, Capella, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, Altair, Fomalhaut, Deneb, the brightest beacons of the heavens, strewn spectacularly across the dome above him. He sought the near stars, those within the dozen-lightyear radius that man's stellar probes had reached in his own lifetime: Epsilon Indi, Ross #, Lalande #I #, Barnard's Star, Wolf #, Procyon, #I Cygni. He looked toward Taurus and found red Aldebaran glowing in the face of the Bull, the Hyades clustered far behind and the Pleiades burnand again the pattern on the dome shifted as focuses narrowed, as distances grew. Krug felt thunder in his breast. Vargas had said nothing since the planetarium had come to life. "Well?" Krug demanded at last. "What am I supposed to see?" "Look toward Aquarius," said Vargas. Krug scanned the northern sky. He followed the familiar track across: Perseus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus, Aquarius. Yes, there was the otd Water-Carrier, between the Fishes and the Goat. Krug struggled to recall the name of some major star in Aquarius but came up with nothing. "So?" he asked. "Watch. We sharpen the image now." heavens rushed toward him. He could no longer make out the patterns of the constellations -- the sky was tumbling and all order was lost. When the motion ceased he found himself confronted by a single segment of the galactic sphere, blown up to occupy the whole of the dome. Directly above him was the image of a fiery ring, dark at the core, rimmed by an irregular halo of luminous gas. A point of light glimmered at the nucleus of the ring. Vargas said, "This is the planethree in Aquarius." "And?" "It is the source of our signals." "How certain is this?" "Absolutely," the astronomer said. "We have parallax observations, a whole series of optical and spectral triangulations, several confirming occultalions and much two-nine-three as the source from the beginning but the final data was processed only this morning. Now we are sure." Dry-throated, Krug asked, "How distant?" "About three hundred lightyears." "Not bad. Not bad. Beyond the reach of our probes, beyond the reach of efficient radio contact. But no problem for the tachyonbeam. My tower is justified." "And there still is hope of communicating with the senders of the signals," Varga's said. "What we all feared -- that the signals came from some place like Andromeda, that the messages had begun their ago or more "No chance of that now." "No. No chance." "Tell me about this place," Krug said. "A planetary nebula -- what kind of thing is that? How can a nebula be a planet?" "Neither a planet nor a nebula," said Vargas, beginning to pace again. "An unusual body. An extraordinary body." He tapped the case of Centaurine proteoids. The quasi-living creatures, irritated, began to flow and twine. Vargas said, "This ring that you see is a shell, a bubble of gas, surrounding an O-type star. The stars of this spectral class are blue giants, hot, unstable, remaining on the main Late in their life-cycle some of them undergo a catastrophic upheaval comparable to a nova -- they hurl forth the outer layers of their structure, forming a gaseous shell of great size. The diameter of the planetary nebula you see is about one-point-three light-years and it is growing at a rate of perhaps fifteen kilometers a second -- and that the central sun is tossing out so much hard radiation that the shell is fluoresetng?" "Yes." "And you also wnt me to believe that there's an intelligent race inside that furnace sending us messages?" Vargas said, "There can be no doubt about where the signals are coming from." "Impossible!" He hammered his fists against his hips. "A blue years old to begin with. How do you evolve life at all let alone an intelligent race? Then some kind of solar blowup -- how does anything survive that? And the hafd radiation? Tell me. Tell me. You want me to design a system that's a good bet not to have life, I give you this goddamned planetary maJsu la! But how signals? From what?" "We have considered these factors," Vargas said softly. Quivering, Krug asked, "Then the signals are natural phenomena after all? Impulses radiated by the atoms of your filthy nebula itself?" "We still believe the signals have an intelligent origin." The paradox baffled Krug. He retreated, sweating, confused. He was only an amateur astronomer -- he had read plenty, had stuffed himself with technical tapes and knowledge-enhancing drugs; he knew red giants from white dwarfs; he could draw the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram; he could look at the sky and point out Alpha Crucis and Spica but all of it was data of an external kind, decorating the outer walls of his soul. He was not at home in it as Vargas was. He lacked a sense of the inwardness of the facts. He could not easily move beyond the bounds of the given data. Thus his awe of Vargas. Thus his discomfort now. "Go on," Krug muttered. "Tell me what. Tell me how." Vargas said, "There are several possibilities. All speculative, all guesses, you understand? The first and most obvious is that the signalthree arrived there after the blowup, vhen things were quiet again. Say, within the last ten thousand years. Colonists from a deeper part of the galaxy -- explorers -- refugees -- exiles -- whatever, recent exiles." "And the hard radiation," Krug said. "Even after things were quiet again, there'd still be radiation from that murderous blue sun." "Obviously they would thrive on it. We need sunlight for our life-processes why not imagine a race that drinks its energy a little higher up the spectrum?" Krug shook his head. "Okay, you make up races, I play advocatus diaboli. They eat hard radiation, you say. What about the genetic effects? What kind of stable civilization can they build With a mutation rate that high?" "A race adapted to high radiation levels would probably have a genetic structure that isn't as vulnerable to bombardment as ours. It would absorb all kinds of hard particles without mutating." "Maybe. Maybe not." After a moment Krug said, "Okay, so they came from someplace else and settled your planetary nebula when it was safe. Why don't we have sig. nals from the someplace else, loo? Where's the home system? Exiles, colonistsfrom where?" "Maybe the home system is so far away that the signals won't reach us for thousands of years," Vargas suggested. "Or perhaps the home system doesn't send out signals. Or -- " "You have too many answers," Krug muttered. "I (ton't like the idea." "That brings us to the other possibility," said Vargas. "That the signal-sending species is native to "How? The blowup "Maybe the blowup didn't bother them. This race might thrive on hard radiation Mutation may be a way of life for them. We're talking about aliens, my friend. If they're truly alien we can't comprehend any of the parameters. So look -- speculate along with me. We have a planet of a blue star, a planet that's far away from its sun but nevertheless is roasted by fantastically strong radiation. The sea is a broth of chemicals constantly boiling. A broth of mutations. Life is cooling of the surface. Things happen fast on such a world. Another more to a galactic-level civilization. Change, fierce, unending change." said darkly. "I want to. But I can't." "Radiation-eaters," Vargus went on. "Clever, adaptable, accepting the necessity, even the desirability, of constant violent genetic change. Their star expands -- very well, they adapt to the increase in radiation. They find a way to protect themselves. Now they live inside a planetary nebula with a fluorescent sky around them. Somehow they delect the existence of the rest of the galaxy. They send messages to us. Yes? Yes?" Krug clutched Vargas, pulled him close, shook him. "I want to believe!" "Then believe. I believe." "It's only a theory. A wild theory." "It accounts for the data we have," said Vargas. "Do you know the Italian proverb: Se non e vero, e ben trovatol 'Even if it isn't true, it's well invented.' The hypothesis will do until we have a better one. It answers the facts better than the theory of a natural cause for a complex repetitive signal coming to us in several media." Turning away, releasing the little man, Krug stabbed at the activator as though he no longer could bear the image on the dome, as though he felt the furious radiation of that alien sun raising deadly blisters on his own skin. In his long dreams he had seen something entirely different. He had imagined a planet of a yellow sun, somewhere, eighty, ninety light-years away, a gentle sun much like the one under which he had been born. He had dreamed of a world of lakes and rivers and grassy fields, of sweet air tinged perhaps with ozone, of purple-leaved trees and glossy green insects, of elegant slender beings with sloping shoulders and many-fingered hands, quietly talking as they moved through the groves and vales of their paradise, probing the mysteries of the cosmos, speculating on the existence of other civilizations, at last sending their message to the universe. He had seen them opening their arms to the first visitors from Earth, saying. Welcome, brothers, welcome -- we knew you had to be there. All of that was destroyed now. In the eye of his mind Krug saw a hellish blue sun spitting demonic fires into the void, saw a blackened and sizzling planet on which scaly armored monstrosities slithered in pools of quicksilver under a sullen sky of white flame, saw a band of horrors gathering around a nightmarish machine to send an incomprehensible message across the gulf of space. And these are our brothers? It is all spoiled , Krug thought bitterly. "How can we go to them?" he asked. "How can we embrace them? Vargas, I have a ship almost ready, a ship for the stars, a ship to carry a sleeping man for centuries. How can I send it to such a place?" "Your reaction surprises me. Such distress I did not expect." "Such a star I did not expect." "Would you have been happier if I told you that the signals were after all mere natural pulses?" "No. No." "Then rejoice in these strange brothers and forget the strangeness. Think only of the brotherhood." Vargas' words sank in. Krug found strength. His innate optimism carried him surging out of bleakness. The astronomer was right. However strange those beings might be, however bizarre their world -- always assuming the truth of Vargas' hypothesis -- they were civilized, scientific, outwardlooking. Our brothers. If space folded upon itself tomorrow and Earth and its sun and all its neighbor worlds were engulfed and thrust into oblivion, intelligence would not perish from the universe, for they were there. "Yes," Krug said. "I rejoice in them. When my tower is done I send them my hellos." Two and a half centuries had passed since man first had broken free of his native planet. In one great dynamic sweep the spaceward drive had carried human explorers from Luna to Pluto, to the edge of the solar system and beyond and nowhere had they found trace of intelligent life. Lichens, bacteria, primitive low-phylum crawlers, yes, but nothing more. Disappointment was the fate of those archeologists who had hatched fantasies of reconstructing the cultural sequences of Mars from artifacts found in the desert. There were no artifacts. And when the star probes had begun to go forth, making their decades-long reconnaissances of the nearest solar systems, they had returned with -- nothing. Within a sphere a dozen light-years in diameter, there evidently had never existed any life form more complex than the Centaurine proteoids, to which only an amoeba need feel inferior. Krug had been a young man when the first stf probes returned. It had displeased him to see his fellow Earthmen constructing philosophies around the failures to find intelligent life in the nearby solar systems. What were they saying, these apostles of the New Geocentricism? Krug smiled grimly. We are the chosen ones! We are the only children of God! On this world and no other did the Lord Jashion His people! To us jails the universe as our divine heritage! Krug saw the seeds of paranoia in that kind of thinking. ibout God. But it seemed to him that men were asking too much of the universe when they insisted that on and only on this small planet of one small sun had the miracle of intelligence been without end. How could intelligence not have evolved again and again and again across the infinite sea of galaxies? And it struck him as megalomania to elevate the tentative findings of a sketchy search through a dozen light-years into an absolute statement of dogma. Was man really alone? How could you know? Krug was basically a rational man. He maintained perspective on all things. He felt that mankind's continued sanity depended on an awakening from this dream of uniqueness, for the dream was sure to end. And if the awakening came later rather than sooner the impact might be shattering. "When will the tower be ready?" Vargas asked. "Year after next. Next year, if we have luck, maybe. You saw this morning -- unlimited budget." Krug frowned. He felt suddenly uneasy. "Give me the truth. Even you, you spend all your life listening to the stars, you think Krug's a little crazy?" "Absolutely not." "Sure you do. They all do. My boy Manuel, he thinks I ought to be locked up but he's afraid to say it. Spauldrng out there -- him, too. Everybody, maybe even Thor Watchman -- and he's building the damned thing. They want to know what's in it for me. Why do I throw glass. You, too, Vargas!" The twisted face grew even more taut. "I have nothing but sympathy for this project. You injure me with these suspicions. Don't you think making contact with an extrasolar civilization is as important to me as it is to you?" "Ought to be important to you. Your field -- your study. Me? Businessman. Maker of androids. Owner of land. Capitalist, exploiter, maybe a little bit of a chemist, know something about genetics, yes, but no astronomer, no scientist. It's a little crazy, eh, Vargas, for me to care about a thing like this? Squandering of assets. Nonproductive investment. What kind Seven-two-nine-three, huh? You tell me. You tell me." Nervously Vargas said, "Perhaps we ought to go downstairs. The excitement -- " Krug slapped his chest. "I've just turned sixty. I got a hundred years to live -- more, maybe. Maybe two hundred, who knows? Don't worry about me. But you can admit it. You know it's crazy for an ignoramus like me to get so interested in something like this." Krug shook his head vehemently. "I myself know it's crazy. I have to explain me to me all the time. I just tell you, this is something has to be done and I do it -- this tower. This hello to the stars. I was growing up, they kept telling us. We're all alone, We're all alone, We're all alone. I didn't believe it. body straight in the head about the universe. You found the signals. I'll answer them. Numbers back for numbers. And then pictures. I know how to do it. One and zero, one and zero, one and zero, black and white, black and white, keep the. bits going and they make a picture. You just fill in the boxes on your chart. This is what we look like. This is water molecule. This is our solar system. This is -- " Krug halted, panting, hoarse, taking note for the first time of the shock and fear on the astronomer's face. In a more peaceful tone he said to Vargas, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't shout. Sometimes I run off at the mouth." "It's all right. You have the fire of enthusiasm. Better to get carried away sometimes than never to come alive at all." Krug said, "You know what started it? This planetary nebula you threw at me. Upset me, I tell you why. I had a dream I'd go to the place the signals were coming from. Me, Krug, in my ship, under deepsleep, sailing a hundred, even two hundred light-years, ambassador from Earth, a trip nobody ever took before. Now you tell me what a hell world the signals come from. Fluorescent sky. Qtype sun. A blue-light furnace. My trip's off, eh? Got me worked up, the surprise of it -- but don't worry. I adapt. I absorb good stiff jolts. Knocks me to a higher energy state, is all." Impulsively he gathered Vargas to him in a fierce bearhug. "Thank you for your signals. Thank you for your planetary nebhear, Vargas?" Krug stepped back. "Now we go downstairs. You need money for the laboratory? Talk to Spaulding. He knows it's carte blanche for you any time any size money." Vargas left, talking to Spaulding. Alone in his office, Krug found himself ablaze with surplus vitality, his mind flooded with a resonated at a higher energy state -- his skin itself was a fiery jacket for him. "Going out," he grunted. He set the transmat coordinates for his Uganda retreat and stepped through. A moment later he was seven thousand miles to the east, standing on his onyx veranda, looking down at the reedy lake beside his lodge. To the left, a few hundred meters out, a quartet of hippos floated, nothing showing but pink nostrils and huge gray backs. To the right he saw his mistress Quenelle, lolling bare in the shallows. Krug stripped. Rhinoheavy, impala-eager, he pounded down the sloping shore to join her in the water. Ill ple of minutes to run to the accident site but by then the lift beetles had moved the fallen block and the bodies of the victims were exposed. A crowd had gathered, all betas. The gammas lacked authority and motivation for interrupting their work programs even for something like this. Seeing an alpha approach, the betas faded back, ' hovering on the edge of the scene in uneasy conflict. They did not know whether to return to work or to remain and offer assistance to the alpha and, thus caught unprogramed, they stood by, wearing the dismal expressions of android bewilderment. Watchman quickly surveyed the situation. Three androids -- two betas and a gamma -- had been crushed by the glass block. The betas were beyond easy recognition. It was going to be a chore just to peel their bodies out of the permafrost. The gamma beside them had almost avoided being killed but his luck had not quite been good enough. He was intact only below the waist. His had been the legs Watchman had seen sticking out from under the block. Two other androids had been struck by the falling scooprod. One of them, a gamma, had taken a fatal blow on the skull and was lying in a sprawl a dozen meters away. The other, a beta, had apparently received a glancing but devastating swipe in the back from a corner of the rod's grip tread -- he was alive but seriously injured and plainly in great agony. Watchman selected four of the beta onlookers and ordered them to transport the dead ones to the control center for identification and disposal. He sent two other betas off to get a stretcher for the injured one. While they were gone he walked over to the surviving android and looked down, peering into gray eyes yellow-rimmed with pain. "Can you talk?" Watchman asked. "Yes." A foggy whisper. "I can't move anything below my middle. I'm turning cold. I'm starting to freeze from the middle down. Am I going to die?" "Probably," Watchman said. He He ran his hand along the beta's back until he found the lumbar neural center. With a quick jab he shorted it. A sigh of relief came from the twisted figure on the ground. "Better?" the alpha said. "Much better, Alpha Watchman." "Give me your name, beta." "Caliban Driller." "What were you doing when the block fell, Caliban?" "Getting ready to go off shift. I'm a maintenance foreman. I walked past here. They all started to shout. I felt the air hot as the block came down. I jumped. And then I was on the ground with my back split open. How soon will I die?" "Within an hour or less. The coldness will rise until it gets to your brain and that will be the end. But take comfort: Krug saw you as you fell. Krug will guard you. You will rest in the bosom of Krug." "Krug bepraised," CalibanDriller murmured. The stretcher-bearers were approaching. When they were still fifty meters away a gong sounded, marking the end of the shift. Instantly every android who was not actually hoisting a block rushed toward the transmat banks. Three lines of workers began to vanish into the transmats, heading for their homes in the android compounds of five continents. In the same moment the next shift began to emerge from the inbound transmats, coming out of leisure periods spent in the recreation zones of South America and India. At the sound of the gong Watchman's two stretcher-bearers made as if to drop the stretcher and rush for the transmats. He barked at them and, sheepishly, they hustled toward him. "Pick up Caliban Driller," he commanded, "and carry him carefully to the chapel. When you're done with that you can go off shift and claim credit for the time." Amid the confusion of the changing shift the two betas loaded the injured android on the stretcher and made their way with him to one of the dozens of extrusion domes on the northern perimeter of the construction site. The domes served many uses -- some were storage depots for material, several were kitchens or washrooms, three housed the power cores that fed the transmat banks and the refrigeration tapes. One was a firstaid station for androids injured on the job and one, in the heart of the irregular clutter of gray plasticmounds, was the chapel. At all times two or three offduty androids lounged in front of that dome, seemingly idle, actually functioning as casual sentries who would prevent any womb-born one from entering. Sometimes journalists or guests of Krug came wandering this way. The sentries had various deft techniques for leading them away from the chapel without actually provoking the forbidden clash of wills between android and human. The chapel was not open to anyone born of men and woman. Its very existence was unknown to any but androids. it just as the stretcher-bearers were setting Caliban Driller down before the altar. Going in, he made the proper genuflection, dropping quickly to one knee and extending his arms, palms upward. The altar, resting in a purple bath of nutrient fluids, was a pink rectangular block of flesh that had been synthesized precisely as androids themselves were synthesized. Though alive, it was scarcely sentient, nor was it capable of sustaining its life unaided. It was fed from beneath by constant injections of metabolase that permitted it to survive. To the rear of the altar was a full-sized hologram of Simeon Krug, facing forward. The walls of the chapel were decorated ic code, inscribed in infinite reduplication from floor to summit: "Put him on the altar," Watchman said. "Then go out." The stretcher-bearers obeyed. When he was alone with the dying beta Watchman said, "I am a Preserver and I am qualified to be your guide on your journey to Krug. Repeat-after me as clearly as you can: Krug brings us into the world and to Krug we return." "Krug brings us into the world and to Krug we return. " "Krug is our creator and our protector and our deliverer." "Krug is our creator and our protector and our deliverer." "Krug, we beseech Thee to lead us toward the light." "Krug, we beseech Thee to lead us toward the light." "And to lijt the Children of the Vat to the level of the Children of the Womb." "And to lift the Children of the Vat to the level of the Children of the Womb." "And to lead us to our rightful place -- " "And to lead us to our rightful place --  " -- beside our brothers and sisters of the flesh." " -- beside our brothers and sisters of the flesh." "Krug our maker, Krug our preserver, Krug our master, receive me back into the Vat." "Krug our maker, Krug our preserver, Krug our master, receive me back into the Vat." " And grant redemption to those who come after me -- " " And grant redemption to those who come after me -- " "In that day when Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb are one. " "In that day when Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb are one. " "Praise be to Krug. " " Praise be to Krug. " "Glory be to Krug." "Glory be to Krug." Krug." Krug." Krug." ban Driller faltered. "The chill is in my breast," he murmured. "I can't -- I can't -- " "Finish the sequence. Krug awaits you." " -- A GV be to Krug." Krug." The beta's fingertips dug into the yielding flesh of the altar. The tone of his skin had deepened in the past few minutes from crimson to something close to violet. His eyeballs rolled. His lips curled back. His breath came noisily. "Krug awaits you," Watchman said fiercely. "Do the sequence!" "Can't -- speak -- can't -- breathe "Listen to me, then. Just listen. Make the codons in your mind as Desperately Watchman went down the rows of the genetic ritual as he kneeled next to the altar. With each group of codons he rotated his body in the prescribed double helix, the proper motion for the last rites. Caliban Driller's life ebbed swiftly. Toward the end. Watchman pulled a tie-line from his tunic, jacked one end into the input in his forearm and the other into Driller's. He pumped energy into the shattered beta to keep him had been named. Then, only then, when he was certain that he had sent Caliban Driller's soul to Krug, did Watchman unjack, arise, murmur a brief prayer on his own behalf. He summoned a team of gammas to haul the body away for disposal. over the redemption of Caliban Driller, he left the chapel and headed back toward the control center. Halfway there his way was blocked by a figure of his own height -- another alpha. That seemed strange. Watchman's shift would not be over for some hours yet -- when it was, the alpha Euclid Planner was scheduled to arrive and relieve him. But this alpha was not Planner. He was altogether unfamiliar to Watchman. The stranger said, "Watchman, may I have some time? I am Siegfried Fileclerk of the Android Equality Party. Of course you know of the constitutional amendment that we propose to have our friends introduce in the next Congress. It has been suggested that in view of your close association with Simeon Krug you might be helpful to us in our desire to gain access to Krug for the purpose of obtaining his endorsement for -- " Watchman cut in, "Surely you must be familiar with my position concerning involvements in political matters." "Yes, but at this time the cause of android equality -- " "Can be served in many ways. I have no wish to exploit my connection with Krug for political purposes." "The constitutional amendment " "Pointless. Pointless. Friend Fileclerk, do you sec that building yonder? It is our chapel. I recommend you visit it and cleanse your soul of false values." "I am not in communion with your church," said Siegfried Fileclerk. "And I am not a member of your political party," Thor Watchman said. "Excuse me. I have responsibilities in the control center." "Perhaps I could speak with you when your shift has ended." "You would then be intruding upon my time of resting," Watchman said. He walked briskly away. It was necessary for him to employ one of the neural rituals of tranquility to ease the anger and irritation surging within him. Android Equality Party, he thought disdainfully. Fools! Bunglers! Idiots! IV busy day. #, Calijornia. Awakening, at his home on the Mendocino coast. The turbulent Pacific almost at his front door; a thousand-hectare redwood forest as his garden; Clissa beside him in bed, cat-soft, catshy. His mind fogged from last night's Spectrum Group party in Taiwan, where he had let himself drink too much of Nick Ssu-ma's millet-and-ginger liqueur. His beta houseman's image on the floating screen, urgently whispering, "Sir, sir, please get up. Your father expects you at the tower." Clissa cuddling closer against him. Manuel blinking, struggling to cut through the web of fleece swaddling his brain. "Sir? Pardon, but you left irrevocable instructions that you were to be awakened!" A forty-cycle note rumbling out of the floor; a fifteen-megacycle cone of sound slicing down out of the ceiling; himself impaled between the two, unable to escape back into sleep. Crescendo, Wakefulness, reluctant, grudging. Then a surprise; Clissa stirring, trembling, taking his hand, putting it over one of her little cool breasts. His fingertips converging on the nipple and finding it still soft. As expected. A bold overture from the child-womThey had been married two years and despite all his earnest and skillful efforts he had not succeeded yet in fully arousing her senses. "Manuel -- " she whispered. "Manuel -- touch me all over -- " He felt cruel, turning her off. "Later," he said, as the terrible spikes of sound met in his brain. "We have to get up now. The patriarch is waiting for us. We're going to the tower today." Clissa pouted. They tumbled from bed. Instantly the damnable sonics ceased. They showered, breakfasted, dressed. "Are you sure you really want me to come?" she asked. He said, "My father made a point of inviting you. He thinks it's high time you saw the tower. Don't you want to go?" "I'm afraid I'll do something foolish, say something naive. I feel so awfully young when I'm around him." "You are awfully young. Anyway, he's fond of you. Just pretend you're terribly terribly fascinated by his tower and he'll forgive you for anything silly you might say." "And the other people -- Senator Fearon, the scientist and whoever else -- Manuel, I feel embarrassed already." "Clissa -- " "All right. All right." "And remember -- the tower is going to strike you as the most marvelous enterprise of humanity since the Taj Mahal. Tell him that after you've seen it. Not in so many words. Get the idea across your own way." "He's really serious about the tower, isn't he?" she asked. "He actually expects to talk to people in the stars." "He does." "How much will it cost?" "He's draining our heritage to build that thing. He's spending everything." "Not quite everything. We'll never hurt for cash. Anyway, he made the money -- let him spend it." "But on an obsession -- a fantasy -- " "Stop it, Clissa. It isn't our business." "Tell me this at least. Suppose your father died tomorrow and you took charge of everything. What would happen to the tower?" Manuel set up the coordinates for their transmat jump to New York. "I'd halt work on it the day after tomorrow," he said. "But I'll gut you if you ever let him know that. Get in, now. Let's go." #, New York. Midmorning already and he had been awake only forty hurried minutes after arising at eight. That was one of the little troubles of the transmat society -- you kept dropping whole segments of time into hidden pockets if you jumped from west to east. Naturally there were compensating benefits when you went the other way. In the summer of '#, on the day before his wedding, Manuel and some of his friends of the Spectrum Group had raced the dawn westward around the world. They began at # on a Saturday in the Amboseli Game Preserve, with the sun coming up back of Kilimanjaro, and off they went to Kinshasa, Accra, Rio, Caracas, Veracruz, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Auckland, Brisbane, Singapore, Pnompenh, Calcutta, Mecca. No visas were needed in the transmat world, no passports; such things were too obviously absurd with instantaneous travel available. The sun plodded along, as always, at a feeble thousand miles an hcflir the leaping travelers had no such handicap. Although they paused fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there, enjoying a cocktail or nipping a floater, buying small souvenirs, touring famous monuments of antiquity, yet they constantly gained time, pressing farther and farther backward into the previous night, outstripping the sun as they sped about the globe, striding into Friday evening. Of course, they lost all they had gained when they crossed the dateline and were dumped into Saturday afternoon. But they nibbled away the loss by continuing westward. And when they came around to Kilimanjaro again it was not yet eleven on the same Saturday morning from which they had departed, but they had circled the world and had lived a Friday and a half. You could do such things with a transmat. You could also, by timing your jumps with care, see two dozen sunsets in a single day, or spend all your life under the blaze of eternal noon. Nevertheless, arriving in New York at I # from California, Manuel resented having had to surrender this segment of morning to the transmat. H IS father greeted him formally in his office with a pressure of palms and hugged Clissa with somewhat more warmth. Leon Spaulding hovered uneasily to one side. Quenelle stood by the window, back to everyone, studying the city. Manuel did not get along with her. He generally disliked his father's mistresses. The old man picked the same type every time: full lips, full breasts, jutting buttocks, fiery eyes, heavy hips. Peasant stock. Krug said, "We're waiting for Senator Fearon, Tom Buckleman, and Dr. Vargas. Thor will take us on the grand tour of the tower. What are you doing afterward, Manuel?" "I hadn't thought -- " "Go to Duluth. I want you to know something about the plant operations there. Leon, notify Duluth -- my son arrives for an inspection trip early this afternoon." Spaulding went off. Manuel shrugged. "As you wish, father." "Time to extend your responsibilities, boy. To develop your management capacities. Some day you be boss of all this, eh? Someday when they say Krug -- they will mean you." "I'll try to live up to the trust you've placed in me," Manuel said. He knew he wasn't fooling the old man with his glibness. And the old man's show of paternal pride wasn't fooling him. Manuel was aware of his father's intense contempt for him. He could see himself through his father's eyes -- a wastrel, a perpetual playboy. Against that he held his own image of himself: sensitive, compassionate, too refined to brawl in the commercial arena. Then he tumbled through that image to another view of Manuel Krug, perhaps more genuine: hollow, earnest, idealistic, futile, incompetent. Which was the real Manuel? He didn't know. He understood less and less about himself as he grew older. Senator Fearon stepped from the transmat. Krug said, "Henry, yu know my son Manuel -- the future Krug of Krug, he is, the heir apparent -- " "It's been many years," Fearon said. "Manuel, how are you?" Manuel touched the politician's cool palm. He managed an amiable smile. "We met five years ago in Macao," he said gracefully. "You were passing through, en route to Ulan Bator." "Of course. Of course. What a splendid memory -- Krug, this is a fine boy here." "You wail," Krug said. "When I step down he'll show you how a real empire-builder operates. Manuel coughed and looked away, embarrassed. Some compulsive sense of dynastic need forced old Krug to pretend that his only child was a fit heir to the constellation of enterprises he had founded or absorbed. Thus the constant show of concern for Manuel's "training," and thus the abrasive, repetitive public insistence that Manuel would some day succeed to control. Manuel had no wish to take command of his father's empire. Nor did he see that he was capable of it. He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity ' the way others might grope their way out of atheism. He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities. Some day, perhaps, he might find one. But he doubted that Krug Enterprises would be that vehicle. The old man knew that as well as Manuel did. Inwardly he scorned his son's hollowness and sometimes the scorn showed through. Yet he never ceased pretending that he prized his son's judgment, shrewdness, and potential administrative skills. In front of Thor Watchman, in front of Leon Spaulding, in front of anyone who would listen, Krug went on and on about the virtues of the heir apparent. Self-deluding hypocrisy, Manuel thought. He's trying to hoax himself into believing what he knows damned well won't ever be true. And it won't work. It can't work. He'll always have more real faith in his android friend Thor than he will in his own son. For good reason, too. Why not prefer a gifted android to a worthless child ? He made us both, didn't he? Let him give the companies to Thor Watchman, Manuel thought. The other members of the party were arriving. Krug shepherded everyone toward the transmat banks. "To the tower," he cried. "To the tower!" #, the tower. He had regained the better part of an hour out of his lost morning, anyway, through this jump of one time-zone westward from New York. But he could have done without the trip. Bad enough to caper in the chill Arctic autumn, forcing himself to admire his father's absurd tower -- the Pyramid of Krug, Manuel liked to all it privately -- but then there had been the business of the falling block, the crushing of the androids. A nasty incident. Clissa had gone to the edge of hysteria. "Don't look," Manuel told her, folding his arms about her as the wallscreen in the control center showed the scene of the lifting of the block from the corpses. To Spaulding he said, "Sedative. Fast." The ectogene found him a tube of something. Manuel jammed the snout against Clissa's arm and activated it. The drug leaped through her skin in a soft ultrasonic spurt. "Were they killed?" she asked, head still averted. "It looks that way. Possibly one survived. The others never knew what hit them." "The poor people." "Not people," Leon Spaulding said. "Androids. Only androids." Clissa lifted her head. "Androids are people!" she blazed. "I don't ever want to hear something like that again! Don't they have names, dreams, personalities -- " "Clissa," Maryjel said gently. " -- ambitions?' she said. "Of course they're people. A bunch of people just died under that block. How could you, you in particular, make such a remark about -- " "Clissa!" Manuel said, anguished. Spaulding was rigid, eyes glassy with rage. The ectogene seemed to tremble on the verge of an angry retort but his fierce discipline saw him past the moment. "I'm sorry," Clissa murmured, looking at the floor. "I didn't mean to get personal, Leon. I I oh, God, Manuel, why did any of this have to happen?" She began to sob again. Manuel signaled for another sedative tube but his father shook his head and came forward, taking her from him. Krug cradled the girl in his immense arms, half crushing her against his huge chest. "Easy," he said, hugging her. "Easy, easy, easy. It was a terrible thing, yes. But they didn't suffer. They died clean. Thor will look after the hurt ones. He'll shut off their pain centers and make them feel better. Poor Clissa, poor, poor, poor, poor Clissa -- 'you've never seen anyone die before, have you? It's awful when it's so sudden, I know. I know." He comforted her tenderly, stroking her long silken hair, patting her, kissing her moist cheeks. Manuel watched in astonishment. He had never seen his father so gentle before in his life. But of course Clissa was something special to the old man -- the instrument of dynastic succession. She was supposed to be the steadying influence that would guide Manuel to an acceptance of his responsibilities and she also was charged with the task of perpetuating the name of Krug. A paradox, there: Krug treated his daughterin-law as though she were as fragile as an ancient porcelain doll -- yet he expected a stream of sons shortly to begin flowing from her loins. To his guests Krug now said, "Too bad we end the tour this way. But at least we saw everything before it happened. Senator, gentlemen, I'm grateful that you came to see my tower. I trust you come again when it's a little more finished. Now we go, eh?" Clissa seemed calmer. It troubled Manuel that not he but his father had been the one to soothe her. Reaching out to take her, he said, "I think Clissa and I will head back to California. A couple of hours together on the beach and she'll be steadier. We-" "You are expected this afternoon in Duluth," said Krug. "I -- " "Send for household androids to fetch her," he said. "You go to the plant." Turning away from Manuel, Krug nodded to his departing guests and said to Leon Spaulding, "New York. The Upper office." #, the tower. Nearly everyone was gone, now: Krug, Spaulding, Quenelle and Vargas back to New York, Fearon and Buckleman to Geneva, Maledetto to Los Angeles, Thor Watchman down to see about the injured androids. Two of Manuel's household betas had arrived to lake Clissa back to Mendocino. Just before she stepped into the transmat with them, Manuel embraced her lightly, kissing her cheek. "When will you come?" she asked. "Early this evening, I guess. We have a dale in Hong Kong, I think. I'll get back in lime to dress for dinner." "Not sooner?" "I have Duluth to do. The android plant." "Get out of it." "I can't. You heard him tell me to go. Anyway, the old man's right -- it's about time I saw it." "What a bore." "I have to. Sleep well, Clissa. Wake up with this ugly thing that happened here left far behind. Shall I program an erasure wire for you?" "You know I hate having my memory tampered with, Manuel." "Yes. I'm sorry. You'd better go, now." "I love you," she said. "I love you," he told her. He nodded to the androids. They took her rms and led her into the transmat. couple of anknown betas who had arrived to take charge of the control center in Watchman's absence. He walked coolly past them into Watchman's private office at the rear of the dome, pushed the door shut and nudged the input of the telephone. The screen lit up. Manuel tapped out the cell numbers of a scrambler code and the screen responded with the abstract pattern that told him his privacy was guaranteed. Then he punched the number of Lilith Meson, alpha, in the android quarter of Stockholm. Lilith's image glowed on the screen -- an elegantly constructed woman with lustrous blue-black hair, a high-bridged nose, platinum eyes. Her smile dazzled. "Manuel? Where are you calling from?" she asked. "The tower. I'm going to be late." "Very late?" "Two or three hours." "I'll shrivel. I'll fade." "I can't help it, Lilith. His majesty commands me to visit the Duluth android plant. I must go." "Even though I've rearranged a week's shifts to be with you tonight?" "I can't tell him that," Manuel said. "Look, it's only a few hours. Will you forgive me?" "What else can I do? But how dull to have to go sniffing in vats when you could be -- " "It's known as noblesse oblige. Anyway, I've become a little curious about the android facts of life since you and I -- since we -- Do you know, I've never been inside one of the plants?" "Never?" "Never. Wasn't ever interested. Still not interested, except in one special angle of it. This is my chance to find out what sort of things are under that lovely scarlet skin of yours. Here's my chance to see how Krug Synthetics makes Liliths by the batch." "Are you sure you really want to know?" she asked, dropping her voice into cello range. "I want to know all there is to know about you," Manuel said earnestly. "For better, for worse. So forgive me for coming late, will you? I'll be taking a Lilith lesson in Duluth. And I love you." "I love you," said Alpha Lilith Meson to the son of Simeon Krug. #, Duluth. The main Earthside plant of Krug Synthetics, Ltd. there were four others on as many continents and several offworld plants -- occupied a sleek building nearly a kilometer long and flanking the shore of Lake Superior. Within that building, operating virtually as independent provinces, were the laboratories that formed the stations of the way in the creation of synthetic life. Manuel now toured those stations of the way like a visiting proconsul weighing the work of the underlings. He rode in a plush bubblecar as seductively comfortable as a womb. It glided along a fluid track that ran the length of the building, high above the operations floor. Beside him in the car was the factory's human supervisor, a neat, crisp fortyish man named Nolan Bompensiero, who, although he was one of the key men in the Krug domain, sat tense and rigid, in obvious fear of Manuel's displeasure. He did not suspect how resentful Manuel was of this assignment, how bored he was, how little he cared to brandish power by making trouble for his father's employees. Manuel had only Lilith on his mind. This is the place where Lilith was horn. This is the way Lilith was born. At each section of the factory an alpha -- the section supervisorentered the car, riding with Manuel and Bompensiero to the end of his own zone of responsibility. Most of the work at the plant was under the direction of alphas. The entire giant installation employed only a half-dozen humans. Each alpha looked as tense as Bompensiero himself. An inspection of the plant by an authentic Krug was evidently an unusual and disturbing event to them. the rooms where the high-energy nucleotides constituting life, were synthesized. He gave half-hearted attention to Bompensiero's quick, nervous spiel, tuning in only on an occasional phrase. "--water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen cyanide and other chemicals we use an electrical discharge to stimulate the formation of complex organic compounds the addition of phosphorus " -- a simple process, almost primitive,, don't you think? It follows the line of the classic Miller experiment of nineteen filly-two medieval science, right down there on the floor  structure of the proteins in the cell. The typical living cell requires hundreds of proteins, most of them acting as enzymes, biological catalysts -- " -- a typical protein is a molecular chain containing about twohundred amino acid subunits linked together in a specific sequence --  the code for each protein is carried by a single gene, which in turn is a particular region on the of course you must know. Forgive me for restating such elementary material. I only wish to -- " "Of course," Manuel said. " -- and here, in these vats, we make the nucleotides and join them into dinucleotides and string nucleic acid that determines the composition of -- " Lilith, from those vats? Lilith, from that slinking brew of chemicals? The car drifted smoothly forward. An alpha supervisor departed. Another alpha, bowing stiffly, smiling fixedly, entered. Bompensiero said, "We design for the life form we wish to create "-but then the task is to make the living matter self-replicating, since surely we cannot build an android cell by cel! ourselves. We must reach what we call the takeoff stage. But naturally you know volved in protein synthesis, that another nucleic acid acts as an incoded to carry the genetic mes" -- four bases or chemical subunits, arranged in varying combinations, form the code -- adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine -- " -- in these vats -- you can almost imagine the chains forming -- structions -- protein synthesis is conducted by cellular particles called ribosomes, which are about nine, guanine, uracil, cytosine -- the code for each protein is carried by a single gene and the code, takes the form of a series of tripfollow?" "Yes, certainly," said Manuel, seeing Lilith swimming in the vats. "As here. Adenine, adenine, cytosine. Cytosine, cytosine, guanine. Uracil, uracil, guanine. liturgical, isn't it, Mr. Krug? We have sixty-four combinations of specify the twenty amino acids quite an adequate vocabulary for the purpose! I could chant the whole list for you as we travel this The alpha who was traveling with them at the moment coughed loudly and clutched his waist, grimacing. "Yes?" Bompensiero said. "A sudden spasm," said the alpha. "A digestive difficulty. Pardon me." Bompensiero returned his attention to Manuel. "W'ell, no need to run down all the sequences. And so we put together the proteins, you see, building up living molecules in precisely the way it happens in nature, except that in nature the process is triggered by the fusion of the sexual gametes, whereas we synthesize the genetic building blocks. We follow the human genetic pattern, naturally, since we want a humanlooking end product -- but if we wished we could synthesize pigs, toads, horses, Centaurine proteoids, any form of life we chose. We pick our code, we arrange our our final product emerges precisely as desired." "Of course," said the alpha, "we don't follow the human genetic code in every respect." Bompensiero nodded eagerly. "My friend here brings up a vital point. In the earliest days of android synthesis your father decided that, for obvious sociological reasons, androids must be instantly identifiable as synthetic creations. Thus we introduce certain mandatory genetic modifications. The red skin, the absence of body hair, the distinctive epidermal texture, are all designed mainlyfor identification purposes. Then there are the modifications programed for greater bodily efficiency. If we can play the role of gods, why not do it to the best effect?" "Why not?" Manuel said. "Away with the appendix, then. Rearrange the bony structure of the back and pelvis to eliminate all the troubles that our faulty construction causes. Sharpen the senses. Program for optimum fat-versus-muscle balance, for physical esthetics, for endurance, for speed, for reflexes. Why make ugly androids? Why make sluggish ones? Why make clumsy ones?" "Would you say," Manuel asked casually, "that androids are superior to ordinary human beings?" Bompensiero looked uneasy. He hesitated as if trying to weigh his response for all possible political impacts, not knowing where Manuel might stand on the vexed question of android civil rights. At length he said, "I think there's no doubt about their physical superiority. We've programed them from the moment of conception to be strong, handsome, healthy. To some extent we've been doing that with humans for the past couple of generations, too, but we don't have the same degree of control or at least wc haven't tried to obtain the same tie gree of control on account of humanistic objections, the opposition of the Witherers and so forth. However, when you consider that androids are sterile, that the intelligence of most of them is quite low, that even the alphas have demonstrated -- pardon me, my friend -- relatively little creative ability-" Y ES," Manuel said. "Certainly." He pointed toward the distant floor. "What's going on right down there?" "Those are the replication vats," said Bompensiero. "The chains of basic nucleic matter undergo division and extension there. Each vat contains what amounts to a soup of newly conceived zygotes at the takeoff stage, produced by our build-up procedures of protein synthesis instead of By the sexual process of the union of natural gametes. Do I make myself clear?" "Quite," said Manuel, staring in fascination at the quiescent pink fluid in the great circular tanks. He imagined he could see tiny specks of living matter in them -- an illusion, he knew. Their car rolled silently onward. "These are the nursery chambers, Bompensiero said, when they had entered the next section and were looking down on rows of shining metal vaults linked by an intricate webwork of pipes. "Essentially, they're artificial wombs, each one enclosing a dozen embryos in a solution of nutrients. We produce alphas, betas and gammas here in Duluth a full android range. The qualitative differences between the three levels are built into them during the original process of synthesis but we also supply different nutritional values. These are the alpha chambers, just below to our left. To the right are the betas. And the next room, coming up -- entirely gammas." "What's your distribution curve?" "One alpha to a hundred betas to a thousand gammas. Your father worked out the ratios in the beginning and they've never been altered. The distribution precisely fits human needs." "My father is a man of great foresight," said Manuel vaguely. He wondered what the world would have been like today if the Krug cartel had not given it androids. Perhaps not very different. Instead of a small, culturally homogenous human elite served by computers, mechanical robots and hordes of obliging androids there might be a small, culturally homogenous human elite served only by computers and mechanical robots. Either way, twenty-third-century man would be living a life of ease. Certain determining trends had established themselves in the past few hundred years, long before the first clumsy android had staggered from its vat. Primarily, starting late in the twentieth century, there had been the vast reduction in human population. War and general anarchy had accounted for hunAsia and Africa; famine had swept those continents and South America and the Near East as well. In the developed nations, social pressures and the advent of foolproof contraception had produced the same effects. A checking of the rate of population growth had been followed, within two generations, by an absolute and cascading decline in actual population. The erosion and almost total disappearance of the proletariat was one historically unprecedented outcome of this. Since the population decline had been accompanied by the replacement of men by machines in nearly all forms of menial labor and some not so menial, those who had no skills to contribute to the new society were discouraged from reproducing. Unwanted, dispirited, displaced, the uneducated and the ineducable dwindled in number from generation to generation. This Darwinian process was aided, at first subtly, then openly, by well-meaning officials who saw to it that the blessings of contraception were denied to no citizen. By the time the masses were a minority, genetic laws reinforced the trend. Those who had proven themselves unfit might not reproduce at all; those who merely came up to norms might have two children per couple but no more; only those who exceeded norms could add to the world's human stock. In this way population remained stable. In this way the clever inherited the earth. The reshaping of society was worldwide. The advent of transmat travel had turned the globe into a village and the people of that village spoke the same language -- English -- and thought the same thoughts. Culturally and genetically they tended toward mongrelization. Quaint pockets of the pure past were maintained here and there as tourist attractions but by the end of the twenty-first century there were few differences in appearance, attitudes or culture among the citizens of Karachi, Cairo, Minneapolis, Athens, Ad dis Ababa, Rangoon, Peking, Canberra and Novosibirsk. The trails mat also made a national boundaries absurd and old concepts of sovereignty melted. But this colossal social upheaval, bringing with it universal leisure, grace and comfort, had also brought an immense and permanent labor shortage. Computerdirected robots had proved themselves inadequate to many tasks. Robots made excellent streetsweepers and factory workers but they were less useful as valets, baby-sitters, chefs and gardeners. Build belter robots, some said; but others dreamed of synthetic humans to look after their needs. The technique did not seem impossible. Ectogenesis -- the artificial nurturing of embryos outside the womb, the hatching of babies from stored ova and sperm -- had long been a reality, chiefly as a convenience for women who did not wish to have their genes go down to oblivion but who wanted to avoid the risks and burdens of pregnancy. Ectogenes, born of man and woman at one femove, were too thoroughly human in origin to be suitable as tools -- but why not carry the process to the next step and manufacture androids? Krug had done that. He had offered the world synthetic humans -- far more versatile than robots -- who were longlived, capable, complex in personality and totally subservient to human needs. They looked human (except for the carefully programed differences), they were as intelligent as humans (at least in the uppermost of their three quality levels) and they could be trained in any desired way But they were purchased, not hired, and by general consent they were regarded by law as property, not persons. They were slaves, in short. Finding robots unsatisfactory as servants, seeing no ready supply of human servants at hand, Krug had invented a new kind of slave. Manuel sometimes thought it might have been simpler to make do with robots. Robots were things that could be thought of as things and treated as things. Androids were things that looked uncomfortably like people and they might not acquiesce in their status of thinghood forever.  after room of nursery chambers, silent, darkened, empty but for a few android monitors. Each fledgling android spent the first two years of its life sealed in such a chamber, Bompensiero pointed out, and the rooms through which they were passing contained successive batches ranging in age from a few weeks to more than twenty months. In some rooms the chambers were opensquads of beta technicians were preparing them to receive new infusions of takeofflevel zygotes. "In this room," said Bompensiero many rooms later, "we have a group of matured androids ready to be 'born.' Do you wish to descend to the floor area and observe the decanting at close range?" Manuel nodded. Bompensiero touched a switch. Their car rolled serenely off its track and down a ramp. At the bottom they dismounted. Manuel saw an army of gammas clustered around one of the nursery chambers. "The chamber has been drained of nutrient fluids. For some twenty minutes now the androids within have been breathing air for the first time in their lives. The hatches of the chamber now are being opened. Here, come close, Mr. Krug, come close." The chamber was uncovered. Manuel peered in. He saw a dozen full-grown androids, six male, six female, sprawled limply on the metal floor. Their jaws were slack, their eyes were blank, their arms and legs moved feebly. They seemed helpless, vacant, vulnerable. Lilith, Lilith! Bompensiero at his elbow whispered, "In the two years between takeoff and decanting the android reaches full physical maturity -- a process that takes humans thirteen to fifteen years. This is another of the genetic modifications introduced by your father in the interests of economy. We produce no infant androids here." Manuel said, "Didn't I hear somewhere that we turn out a line of android babies to be raised as surrogates by human women who can't -- " "Please," Bompensiero said sharply. "We don't discuss -- " He cut himself sort, as if remembering whom he had just reprimanded, and said in a more moderate way, "I know very little about what you mention. We have no such operations in this plant." Gammas were lifting the dozen newborn androids from the nursery chamber and carrying them to gaping machines that seemed part wheelchair, part suit of armor. The males were lean and muscular, the females high-breasted and slim. But there was something hideous about their mindlessness. Totally passive, utterly soul-empty, the moist, naked androids offered no response as they were sealed one by one into these metallic receptacles. Only their faces remained visible, looking out without expression through transparent visors. Bompensiero explained, "They don't have the use of their muscles yet. They don't know how to stand, to walk, to do anything. These training devices will stimulate muscular development. A month inside one and an android can handle itself physically. Now, if we return to our car "These androids I've just seen," Manuel said. "They're gammas, of course I ?" "Alphas." Manuel was stunned. "But they seemed so so " He faltered. "Moronic." "They are newly born," said Bompensiero. "Should they come out of the nurseries ready to run computers?" They returned to the car. Lilith! Manuel saw young androids taking their first shambling steps, tumbling and laughing and getting to their feet and doing it better the second lime. He visited a classroom where the subject being taught was bowel control He watched slumbering betas under going personality imprints a soul was being etched into each unformed mind. He donned a helmet and listened to a language tape. The education of an android, he was told, lasted one year for a gamma, two for a beta, four for an alpha. The maximum, then, was six years from conception to full adulthood. He had never full appreciated the swiftness of it all before. Somehow the new knowledge made androids seem infinitely less human to him. Suave, authoritative, commanding Thor Watchman was something like nine or ten years old, Manuel realized. And the lovely Lilith Meson was -- what? Seven? Eight? Manuel felt a sudden powerful urge to escape from this place. "We have a group of betas just about to leave the factory," said Bompensiero. "They are undergoing their final checkout today, with tests in linguistic precision, coordination, motor response, metabolic adjustment, and so on. Perhaps you would care to inspect them yourself and personally -- " "No," Manuel said. "It's been fascinating. But I've taken up too much of yoirr time already and I have an appointment elsewhere, so I really must -- " Bompensiero did not looked grieved to be rid of him. "As .you wish," he said oblingingly. "But of course, we remain at your service whenever you choose to visit us again and -- " "Where is the transmat cubicle, please?" #, Stockholm. Jumping westward to Europe, Manuel lost the rest of the day. Dark, icy evening had descended in Stockholm. The stars were sharp and a sleety wind ruffled the waters of M'alaren. To foil any possibility of his being traced he had jumped to the public transmat cubicle in the lobby of the wondrous old Grand Hotel. Now, shivering outside he walked briskly through the autumnal gloom to another cubicle outside the gray bulk of the Royal Opera, put his thumb to the chargeplate and bought a jump to Stockholm's Baltic side, emerging in the mellow, venerable residential district of Ostermalm. This was the android quarter now. He hurried down Birger Jarlsgaten to the oncesplendid nineteenth-century apartment building where Lilith lived. Pausing outside, he looked about carefully, saw that the streets were empty and darted into the building. A robot in the lobby scanned him and asked his purpose in a flat, froglike voice. "Visiting Lilith Meson, alpha," Manuel said. The robot raised no objection. Manuel had his choice of getting to her flat by liftshaft, or by stairs. He took the stairs. Musty smells pursued him and shadows danced alongside him all the way to the fifth floor. tuous, clinging, floor-length high-spectrum gown. Since it was nothing more than a monomolecular film, it left no contour of her body concealed. She drifted forward, arms outstretched, lips parted, breasts heaving, whispering his name. He reached for her. He saw her as a speck drifting in a vat. He saw her as a mass of replicating nucleotides. He saw her naked and wet and vacant-eyed, shambling out of her nursery chamber. He saw her as a thing, manufactured by men. Thing, Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Lilith. He had known her for five months. They had been lovers for three. Thor Watchman had introduced them. She was on the Krug staff. Her body pressed close to his.He brought up his hand and cupped one of her breasts. It felt warm and real and firm through the monomolecular gown and, as he drew his thumb across the tip of her nipple, it hardened and rose in excitement. Real. Real. Thing. He kissed her. His tongue slipped between her lips. He tasted the taste of chemicals. Adenine, guanine, cytosine, uracil. He smelled the smell of the vats. Thing. Thing. Beautiful thing. Thing in woman's shape. Well named, Lilith. Thing. She drew away from him and said, "You went to the factory?" "Yes." "And you learned more about androids than you wanted to know?" "What does that mean?" "When you held me just then I felt a wall coming down between us." "No, Lilith." "You see me through different eyes now. You can't help remembering what I really am." "That is absolutely not true," Manuel said. "I love you, Lilith. What you are is no news to me. And makes no difference at all. I love you. I love you." "Would you like a drink?" she asked. "A weed? A floater? You're all worked up." "Nothing," he said. "It's been a long day. I haven't even had lunch yet and I think I've been going for forty hours. Let's just relax, Lilith. No weeds. No floaters." He unsnapped his clothing and she helped him out of it. Then she pirouetted before a doppler -- there was a brief rising burst of sound and her gown disappeared. Her skin was light red, except for the dark brown of her nipples. Her breasts were full, her waist was narrow, her hips flared with the impossible promise of fertility. Her beauty was inhumanly flawless. Manuel nibbled his upper lip and fought the dryness in his throat. She said sadly, "I could feel the change in you the moment you touched me. Your touch is different. There was -- fear? -- in it. Disgust?" "No." "Until tonight I was something exotic to you -- but human, like a Bushman would be, an Eskimo. You didn't keep me in a separate category outside the human race. Now you keep telling yourself that you've fallen in love with a mess of chemicals. You think you may be doing something sick by having an affair with me." "Lilith, I beg of you to stop it. This is all in your mind." "Is it?" "I came here, I kissed you. I told you I loved you. I'm waiting to go to bed with you. Maybe you're projecting some guilts of your own on me when you say -- " "Manuel, what would you have said a year ago about a man who admitted he'd been to bed with an android?" "Plenty of men I know have been -- " "What would you say about him? What kind of words would you use? What would you think of him?" "I've never considered such things. They simply haven't concerned me, ever." "You're evading. Remember, we promised that we wouldn't play any of the little lie-games people play. Yes? You can't deny that at most social levels sex between humans and androids is regarded as a perversion... Maybe the only perversion that's left in the world. Am I right? Will you answer me?" "A LL right." His eyes met hers. He had never known a woman with eyes that color. Slowly he said, "Most men regard it as, well, cheap, foul, to sleep with androids. I've heard it compared to masturbation. To doing it with a rubber doll. When I heard such remarks, I thought they were ugly, stupid expressions of anti-android prejudice -- and I obviously didn't have such attitudes myself or I never could have fallen in love with you." Something in his mind sang mockingly, Remember the vats ! Remember the vats ! His gaze wavered and moved off center -- he stared intently at her cheekbone. Grimly he said, "Before the whole universe I swear, Lilith, that I never felt there was anything shameful or dirty about loving an android and I insist that despite what you've claimed to detect in me since my visit to the factory, I don't have any such feelings even now. And to prove it -- " He gathered her to him. His hand swept down her satiny skin from her breasts to her belly to her loins. Her thighs parted and his fingers found her once more as fleeceless as an infant's -- and suddenly he trembled at the alien texture he felt there, and found himself unmanned by it, though it had never troubled him before. So smooth. So terribly smooth. He looked down at her, at her bareness. Bare, yes, but not because she had been shaven. She was like a child there. Like -- like an android. He saw vats again. He saw moist crimson alphas whose faces were without expression. He told himself sternly that to love an android was no sin. He began to caress her and she responded as a woman would respond, with lubrication, with little ragged bursts of breath, with a tightening of her thighs against his hand. He kissed her breasts and clutched her to him. It seemed then that the blazing image of his father hovered like a pillar of fire in the air before him. Old devil, did artificer! How clever to design such a product! A product. It walks. It talks. It seduces. It gasps in passion. It grows tumescent in the labia minora, this product. And what am I? A product too, hey? A hodgepodge of chemicals stamped out from much the same sort df blueprint mulatis mutandis, of course. Adenine. Guanine. Cytosine. Uracil. Born in a vat, hatched in a womb where's the difference? We are one flesh. We are different races but we are one flesh. His desire for her returned in a dizzying surge and he pivoted, topped her, drove himself deep within her. Her heels hammered ecstatically on his calves. The valley of her sex throbbed, clasping him in authentic frenzy. They rocked and climbed and soared. When it was over, when they had both come down, she said, "That was disgustingly bitchy of me." "What was?" "The scene I made. When I was trying to tell you what I thought was in your mind." "Forget it, Lilith." "You were right, though. I suppose I was projecting my own misgivings. Maybe I feel guilty about being the mistress of a human. Maybe I want you to think of me as something made of rubber. Somewhere inside me that's probably how I think of myself." "No." "We can't help it. We breathe it in all the time. We're reminded a thousand times a day that we aren't real." "You're as real as anyone I've ever known. More real than some." More real than Clissa, he did not add. "I've never seen you clutched like this before, Lilith. What's happening?" "Your factory trip," she said. "Until today I was always sure that you were different. That you hadn't ever spent one second worrying about how or where I was born, or whether there might he something wrong about what we have going. But I was afraid that once you saw the factory, saw the whole process in clinical detail, you might change -- and then, when you came in tonight there was something about you, something chilly that I knew hadn't been part of you before -- " She shrugged. "Maybe I imagined it. I'm sure I imagined it. You aren't like the others, Manuel. You're a Krug. You're like a king. You don't have to build up your status by putting other people down. You don't divide the world into people and androids. You never did. And a single peek into the vats couldn't change that." "Of course it couldn't," he said in the earnest voice in which he did his lying. "Androids are people and people are people and I've never thought otherwise and I never will think otherwise. And you're beautiful. And I love you very much. And anyone who believes that androids are some kind of lesser breed is a vicious madman." "You support full civic equality for androids?" "Certainly." "You mean alpha androids, don't you?" she said mischievously"I -- well -- " "All androids ought to be equal to humans. But alphas ought to be more equal thap others." "You bitch. Are you playing games again?" "I'm sticking up for alpha prerogatives. Can't a downtrodden ethnic group establish its own internal class distinctions? Oh, I love you, Manuel. Don't take me seriously all the time." "I can't help it. I'm not really very clever and I don't know when you're joking." He kissed the tips of her breasts. "I have to go now." "You just got here!" "I'm sorry. I really am." "You came late, we wasted half our time in that dumb argument -- stay another hour, Manuel!" "I have a wife wailing in California," he said. "The real world intervenes from time to time." "When will I see you again?" "Soon. Soon. Soon." "Day after tomorrow?" "I don't think so. But soon. I'll call first." He slipped on his clothes. Her words crackled in his mind. You aren't like the others, Manuel... you don't divide the world into people and androids. Was it true? Could it be true? He had lied to her. He was festering with prejudices and his visit to Duluth had opened a box of poisons in his mind. But perhaps he could transcend such things by an act of will. He wondered if he might have found his vocation tonight. What would they say if the son of Simeon Krug were to embrace the explosive cause of android equality? Manuel the wastrel, the idler, the playboy, transformed into Manuel the crusader? He toyed with the notion. Perhaps. Perhaps. It offered an agreeable opportunity to shake off the stigma of shallowness. A cause, a cause, a cause! A cause at last! Perhaps. Lilith followed him to the door and they kissed again. His hands stroked her sleekness and he closed his eyes. To his dismay, the room of the vats glowed against his lids and Nolan Bompensiero cavorted in his brain, piously explaining how newly decanted androids were taught the art of controlling their anal sphincters. Manuel pulled free of Lilith, in pain, "Soon," he said. "I'll call." He left. #, California. He stepped from the transmat cubicle into the slate-floored atrium of his home. The afternoon sun was edging out over the Pacific. Three of his androids came to him, bearing a change of clothes, a freshener tablet, a newspaper. "Where's Mrs. Krug?" he asked. "Still asleep?" "By the shore," a beta valet told him. Manuel changed quickly, took the freshener and went out to the beach. Clissa was wading in the surf. Three long-legged beach birds ran in giddy circles around her and she was calling to them, laughing, clapping her hands. He was almost upon her before she noticed him. After Lilith's voluptuousness she seemed almost wickedly immature -- narrow hips, flat boyish buttocks, the breasts of a twelve-year-old. The dark hairy triangle at the base of her belly seemed incongruous, improper. I take children for my wives and plastic women for my mistresses. "Clissa?" he called. She swung about. "Oh! You scared me!" "Having some fun in the ocean? Isn't it too cold for you?" "It's never too cold for me. You know that, Manuel. Did you have a good time at the android plant?" "It was interesting," he said. "What about you? Feeling better now, I see." "Belter? Was I sick?" He I ooked at her strangely. "This morning -- when we were at the tower -- you were, well, upset -- " "Oh, that! I'd almost forgotten. God, it was terrible, wasn't it? Do you have the time, Manuel?" "Sixteen-forty-eight, give or take a minute." "I'd better get dressed soon, then. We've got that early dinner party in Hong Kong." He admired her ability to slough off traumas. He said. "Bight non it's still morning in Hong Kong. I here's no hurry." "Well, then, do you want to take a swim with me? The water's not as cold as you think. Or -- " She paused. "You haven't kissed me hello, yet." "Hello," he said. "Hello. I love you." "I love you," he said. Kissing her was like kissing alabaster. The taste of Lilith was still on his lips. Which is the passionate, vital woman, he wondered, and which the cold, artificial thing? Holding his wife, he felt no sensation at all. He released her. She tugged at his wrist, pulling him with her into the syrf. They swam a while and he came out chilled and shivering. At twilight they had cocktails together in the atrium. "You seem so distant," she told him. "It's all this transmat jumping. It taRes more out of you than the doctors know. For the party that night she wore a unique treasure, a necklace of pear-shaped soot-hued glassy beads. A Krug Enterprises drone probe, cruising # light-years from Earth, had scooped those driblets of matter from the fringes of the ashen, dying Volker's Star. Krug had given them to her as a wedding present. What other woman wore a necklace made up of chunks of a dark star? But miracles were taken for granted in Clissa's social set. None of their dinner companions appeared to notice the necklace. Manuel and Clissa stayed at the party well past midnight, Hong Kong time, so that when they returned to Mendocino the California morning was already far advanced. Programing eight hours of sleep for themselves, they sealed the bedroom. Manuel had lost track of the sequence of time but he suspected that he had been awake for more than twenty-four consecutive hours. Sometimes transmat life gets to be too much to cope with... He brought down the curtain on the day. superiority to ordinary mortals, that made it such a tragedy when the dice killed him according to Henry's rules. There are a lot of interesting things about this book. For one, of course, it does convey a convincing approximation of how a God might be infinitely creative and yet not in direct control of his creation, omnipotent and yet prey to events, omniscient and nevertheless blind to the future. The expedient that Henry finally comes to, in his desperate effort to rescue himself, is what finally makes this book iifSistinguishable from most of the fantasy and science fiction being written ( Continued from page #) today. It is a terrifying one -- and I doubt if you'll ever hear me so characterising a piece of fiction again, since I never have before. It's not merely frightening in concept, or descriptive of frightening events, which are things many good stories can be. No, this appalingly thorough and awesomely deft book constitutes an expert attack on things that you and I really suspect may be fragile; sex and death are the least of them, as you ought to find out. For you and me, old friend, this is not a book about such familiar deep-thinks as life, or God, or vengeance. It is a look at the compulsive heart of fantasy, an alien stare into science fiction. f Continued from page I # ) larged room. The floorshow had gone and the entertainers were mixing with the audience. Their earlier munificence now produced unordered results and two of the most beautiful of the dancers were soon sitting beside them. The goldwater, followed by a cocktail called Mutate Away, which seemed to consist largely of thorium salts, disappeared faster than ever. Conversation thrived. After a bit, when the females were talking to each other at a high rate, Rampo said to Damals, "I remember you were telling the senator about the quick reactions but -- ah -- other shortcomings in humanoid robots. I was just wondering if our little friends here could possibly be -- " "Oh, there's a simple way of telling. Just look into their eyes." "No, don't tell me" said Rampo, "I'd rather not know." The evening proceeded. H aving omitted to book a room anywhere, they found themselves in their own ship next morning. After a light breakfast they went around to the central block of one of the library skyscrapers. Here Rampo look Damals into the room he had booked for him. He keyed Psychology; unpublished documents; bibliography and punched the date of five years previously. The lights faded and the ip ip HjgJF from A to Lenuria This month, the Berkley Travel Service offers a variety of trips (all good), from that venerable fantastic voyage in itraising trek through Old Lemuria with the mighty-thawed Valkarthian in if you fancy it, a swing through the Return flights not guaranteed. Lin Carter (XI #, # Keith laumer (X#, # #X# (X#, # Next month: Heinlein, Hubbard, Harrison! If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. # Purchasers of our books havo complvlo fruit dom of choice In pricing theso book a for ru sale to others. descriptive list began to appear on the wall screen. Rampo said, "Well, enjoy yourself -- the amenity machine is here and you can order food and drink by the alimentation key under your right hand. I may be some time. I have a hunclvto play which may not pan out." Rampo played his hunch for four and a half days. Damals spent more than three quarters of that time in his library room and the rest fishing on the riverbank and wandering around the old squares and the art shops. He slept one twenty-eighth of the time only. In the room he pored avidly over eighteen hundred papers of psychological importance that he had not yet seen, four papers on the effect of Zomonon goldwater and six hundred and twenty-three documents and books on various other subjects. When Rampo appeared he seemed to be wearing both his usual superficial airs -- of shyness and of cockiness -- in a rather exaggerated form. Damals switched off the paper he was viewing -- Some Anomalous Cases of G# Mutational Periodic High Speed Disjection -- and the jittering figure on the screen faded out as light came on. "What have you found?" "Watch this." Rampo reset the keyboard. Once more the room became dark and the screen illuminated itself. On it appeared the note: Barbarian species: subcivilization: four-limbed: one-headed upright: Galaxy Norosanis #, planet #I  A  #  D  #. This faded to a diminished red-yellow scene, which presented no difficulty, however, to the highly adaptable vision of the two watchers. When the room lit up again Damals was weak with iaughter. "Yes. Oh, we must see that again when we've settled the immediate question. Really-how is it possible? A planet of clowns -- do you. realize our money troubles are over? You can copyright that with any of the strips. Such solemn little pinheads too -- rather like those wingless birds on Ribil, only more so, slow and solemn and practically expressionless-!-# "Well, what do you think?" "About Tontor? They're exactly like him -- you think a hypnotic oblivion treatment and then plant him there?" "Well, you're speaking like a psychologist. His reactions are almost exactly that speed and his intelligence is if anything above the normal indicated there -- but physically a few changes will be necessary. Did you notice the rather peculiar flaps on some of the sense organs? There are a few other changes too, to be made -- but nothing, I think, that our surgeons can't handle." "That'll be the biologists' contribution to the entirely nonbiological solution of Enedee's problem." "If it works," said Rampo. "I see no reason to suppose it won't but you never know." "But how did you find it? Did you know something like this existed?" I "Not at all. It was only that I :have some conception of the approximate number of possible variations in the general form of intelligenfand semi-intelligent creatures. The precise total must be enormous -- but it can't be infinite and we didn't need exact resemblance. Tontor can be tailored to suit to some extent. And the number of planets in the universe supporting some sort of subcivilization is about ten thousand times the number of galaxies, which gives a pretty good chance, particularly as a clear majority of them are four-limbed and one-headed. What I did was to set a few thousand electronic selectors on to the index of species characteristics. I had them keyed to almost eight hundred physical and psychological cards a second, and in three days they'd given me thirty good agreements. I chose the final one by personal inspection. Not bad, eh?" "In fact you mean that this isn't a solution only for Tontor, but for the whole problem?" "Yes, if it works. In some cases we may not find the right sort of environment at all but in general we should almost always succeed. Heaven knows it's not ideal -- but I believe the mutations can be happy and the parents will prefer that to anything else that can be done" "I can foresee a large allotment for a nice new department of mutational psycho-anthropology which won't please Ziel, for one," said Damals. "No, indeed." "But surely even this one you've found for Tontor is rather p recur ious. How close is the physical resemblance? I should have thought no amount of surgery could fix the internal organs exactly to duplicate those of the -- those things -- unless you have been even more successful than I imagine." "No," said Rampo. "It's not quite as good as that. I'm afraid." IF The Magazine of Alternatives "Then what will happen if he has an accident or something? That scene with the creatures manipulating others with bits of metal -- I took it that it was some sort of primitive doctoring. What will the doctors say?" . "Yes, theyare doctors in their way," commented Rampo. He smiled suddenly: "And I know what they'll say -- " A ND twenty years later, when the unconscious form of Professor Ralph Macandrew, dragged from his smashed car to the Salem Hospital, lay on the operating table, an amazed surgeon answered his colleague's frantic query with exactly the words that Rampo had predicted: "I can't understand it -- he must be a mutation -- "  ver and the red spires to black. Shivering again, he looked around at the landmass, even more menacing in its great tumbling blackness now that he could no longer see it through the Old Man's eyes. Above, the gaunt ebony figures of the alien trees clutched at him with rustling obscenity, lurching and grasping in the keen wind, occasionally shedding a leprous leaf. lie spun the snowboat about to face the snowfields and climbed in, hauling the sail tight as the craft heeled to the wind. He crowded on speed to leave the sinister landscape behind. He would be glad to be in familiar surroundings again. There was nothing for him here. A ND so, one week later, the small community in the bell tower resumed its corporate existence. There was little change. Jacko still hunted the snowfields, ( Continued from page #) Switch and Cockade looted the ice tunnels. Shrug, however, slowly recovering from being deprived of alcohol, found good reason to fear for the future and commenced construction of a gallery encircling the inside of the spire at a level with the snow outside. He punched holes in the slates of the spire at intervals of the circumference, so that the four members of the group, in an emergency, could command a #-degree field of fire. Once he had completed this project he planned to take Jacko on a scouting mission to the next village to see if, perhaps, they could bring back some women. Only the dreamers were gone. Paladin lay roughly buried under the snow beside the main exit and the Old Man rested at peace in the foothills, miles away. 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Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. Like it or not, right or wrong, if you're a reasonably constant reader of this magazine and others who strive in the field, you're head-conscious. You spend some time upstairs. You think or try to. Let's also assume that you're free of irrelevant hang-ups -- hair on other people doesn't bother you and miniskirts on pretty girls are out of sight unless you're trying to think of something else. You don't buy everything that's advertised, don't think that baldness, skin color or complexion necessarily denote virility or lack of it and your God is not a panhandler. So then you look around for the next thing. And somebody points a finger at you and says you've got So it could have been malaria -- but you don't say so because with your luck it might not have been. When you think of all the vicissitudes your particular genetic material has survived since the first imaginable dawn of life you might count yourself pretty lucky. A born gambler. along with everyone else alive today, according to some scientific authority. The stuff has even been found in the tissue of animals native to and living in Antarctica. Certainly you share it with millions -- one official estimate places low humans, approximately onethird of whom live in malaria-susceptible areas, who have been spared the disease because of eftions have reduced malarial deaths in India from an annual # to about # and have virtually eliminated the disease in Greece, which fifteen years ago reported a has boosted food crops and reduced starvation world wide. To date no one has charged that a single human being has died stantial scientific opinion discounts any dangerous effects from the amounts you and I have ingested; there is disagreement on that subject, but it's at least arguable that the total human environment has been improved in this instance. No one denies the dangers of airwaterand soil-pollution but you and I would rather drive, ride a bus or a plane than walk. We prefer an electric light at home or in the operating room to candlepower. We like central heating and would starve without refrigeration. More details on this at a later date -- but the point is that for right now and the foreseeable future we've become our own environment. There is no other worth mentioning. And I'm not about to tell either of us what to do about it. Nor, if past history is any criterion, is anyone else. Lots of luck. City  Stale Zip Code... Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add I .# per I # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for # to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of your favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us -- and that's a double tragedy. It doesn't take a genius to handle it, either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. f' . I  ' I IRelflrtistically, dft things on Earth cilre sale and those ;o win nt sell or cannot . iwMfirid themsees poor! A Illustrated By Brock Gaughan The man you have bought may not stay bought but you can keep books on him and put paid to him. The man who works for you because he believes in you is a fool and will change his mind tomorrow. The apprentice Guildsman will often hear asked: How can a system based on treason possibly work? His first duty is to conceal that it does. To conceal from a man his own nature is the easiest of all tasks and the basis of civilized intercourse. The Green Exarchy is generally known to be older than man, but nobody knows man's age. Time is relative; and what with the distortions of interstellar travel, the welter of galactic languages, the different stages of history to be found on every world, the bad communications, and the indifference fostered by longevity, no one can say with confidence even what today's date might be, no, not within a year. We may guess, however, that man discovered the Imaginary Drive about four thousand years ago, and emerged from UrSpace to find the Exarchy, or its parent empires, already established. The Exarchy today consists exclusively of non-human races and is still one of the two major centers of power in the galaxy. It is thought to be a tyranny, but the applicability of so anthropocentric a word to a non-human political system is dubious; indeed, we cannot be sure that the Exarchy is a "political" system, except externally. The second majoj power center is the loose and shifting confederation of planets dominated by High Earth. These are predominately human or humanoid in population. The reader will be familiar with a number of these and is doubtless living on one. Both systems constantly contend for the independent planets. Of these there are two types. Those populated mainly or entirely by humans are ex-colonies which broke free of High Earth in the past or were forgotten: these may also bear enclaves of humanoid or non-human aborigines. Those populated mainly by humanoid or non-human peoples are products of independent evolution; a few also tolerate human enclaves. The independent planets are almost invariably divided into nation-states. Once such a planet develops a world government, it tends to gravitate, or be forced, into one of the main power systems. Incessant intrigue is therefore the social norm alike upon the independent planets and upon those dominated by High Earth, and has quasi-official status through the Traitors' Guild, an institution now perhaps a thousand years old (or so it claims). Little is known, necessarily, of the policy of the Guild. Operationally, it has not been above selling an occasional planet to the Green Exarch, but seems firmly to oppose anyone else's doing so. Its methods are deliberately enshrouded in rumor, but in general, seem to place a very high value upon expertise and tradition. If a social norm prevails under the Exarch, other than the will or policy of the Exarch itself, no official knowledge of it exists. -- A Child's Guide to the Galaxy, #:#-# I "possible interruption, Simon de Kuyl emptied his little poisons into the catch basin in his room and ironically watched the wisps of wine-colored smoke rise from the corroded maw of the drain. He was sorry to see them go -- they were old though venomous friends. He knew without vanity -- it was too late for that -- that High Earth had no more distinguished a traitor than he. But after only four clockless days on Boadicea he had already found it advisable to change his name, his methods and his residence. It made a humiliating beginning. The almost worn-away legend on the basin read: Julius, Boadicea. Objects made on this planet were usually labeled that generally, as though any place in the world were like every other. But this both was and was not true. The present city, Druidsfall, was the usual low jumble of decayed masonry, slightly less ancient slums and blank-faced offices, but the fact that it was also the center of the treason industry -- hence wholly inconvenient for Simon -- gave it character. The traitors had an architectural style of their own, characterized by structures put together mostly of fragmented statues and petrified bodies fitted like puzzle pieces or maps. Traitors on Boadicea had belonged to an honored social class for seven hundred years and their edifices made the fact known. Luckily, custom allowed Simon to stay clear of these buildings after the first formalities and seek out his own bed and breakfast. In the old friendly inns of Druidsfall the anonymous thumps of the transients -- in death, love or trade -- are said to make the lodgers start in their beds with their resident quilts. Of course all inns are like that -- but nevertheless, that is why the traitors like to quarter there, rather than in the Traitors' Halls. The inns guarantee them privacy and at the same time help them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone corpses. Here, in The Skopolamander, Simon awaited his first contact. This -- now that he had dumped his poisons -- would fall at the end of his immunity period. Quarantine was perhaps a more appropriate term. No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth he had special status. High Earth, the Boadiceans thought, was not necessarily Old Earth -- but not necessarily not, either. For twelve days Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least, though nobody would attempt to deal with him, either. He had three of those days still to run -- a dull prospect, since he had already completed every possible preliminary -- spiced only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might be. Boadicea's sun was a ninety-minute microvariable, twinned at a distance of a light-year with a blue-white, Rigel-like star which stood -- or had stood throughout historical times -- in high southern latitudes. This gave Druidsfall only four consecutive hours of quasi-darkness at a time and even during this period the sky was indigo rather than black at its deepestand more often than not flaring with auroras. One was lighting the window now, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy blue fire licking upward along a bone trestle. Everything in the city, as everywhere upon Boadicea, bespoke the crucial importance of fugitive light and the fade-out-fade-in weather that went with it, all very strange after the desert glare of High Earth. The day of Simon's arrival had dawned in mist, which cold gales had torn away into slowly pulsating sunlight. Then had come clouds and rain which had turned to snow and then to sleet -- more weather in a day than the minarets of Novoe Jiddah, Simon's registered home town, saw in a six-month. The fluctuating light and wetness were reflected in Druidsfall most startlingly by its gardens, which sprang up when one's back was turned and did not need to be so much weeded as actually fought. They were constantly in motion to the ninety-minute solar cycle, battering their elaborate heads against back walls, which were everywhere crumbling after centuries of such soft, implacable impacts. Half the buildings in Druidsfall glittered with their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to anything they were blown against -- the wealth of Boadicea was based anciently in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold as radiation shielding for their spuriously tender genes. Everyone one saw in the streets of Druidsfall, or any other such city, was a mutation of some sort -- if he were not an outworlder -- but after a day in the winds they were all partly yellow, for the gold scales smeared off the flying leaves like butter. Everyone was painted with meaningless riches, the very bedsheets glittered ineradicably with flakes of it and brunettes -- especially in the elaborate hair styles of the men -- were at a premium. Simon poured water from an amphora into the basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam that made him cough. Careful! Acid after water, never water after acid --  am forgetting the most elementary lessons -- I should have used wine. Time for a drink, in Gro's name! H e caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had nothing worth stealing but his honor, which was in his right hip pocket. Oh, and of course. High Earth -- that was in his left. Besides, Boadicea was rich; one could hardly turn around without knocking over some heap of treasures, artifacts of a millennium nobody had sorted for a century or even wanted to be bothered to sort. Nobody would think to steal from a poor traitor any object smaller than a king, or preferably, a planet. In the tavern below Simon was joined at once by a playwoman. "Are you buying tonight. Excellence?" "Why not?" And in fact he was glad to see her. She was blond and ample, a relief from the sketchy women of the Respectables, whom fashion made look as though they suffered from some nervous disease that robbed them of appetite. Besides, she would exempt him from the normal sort of Boadicean polite conversation, which consisted chiefly of elaborately involuted jokes at which it was considered gauche to laugh. The whole style of Boadicean conversation, for that matter, was intended to be ignored -- gambits were a high art but end-games were a lost one. Simon sighed and signaled for beakers. "You wear the traitors' clasp," she said, sitting across from him, "but not much tree gold. Have you come to sell us High Earth?" Simon did not even blink. He knew the query to be a standard opening with any outworlder of his profession. "Perhaps. But I'm not on business at the moment." "Of course not," the girl said gravely, her fingers playing continuously with a sort of rosary tasseled with two silver phalluses. "Yet I hope you prosper. My half-brother is a traitor but he can find only small secrets to sell -- how to make bombs and the like. It's a thin life. I prefer mine." "Perhaps he should swear by another country." "Oh, his country is well worth selling but his custom is poor. Neither buyer nor seller trusts him very far -- a matter of style, I suppose. He'll probably wind up betraying some colony for a thousand beans and a highball." "You dislike the man -- or is it the trade?" Simon asked. "It seems not unlike your own, after all. One sells something one never really owned and yet one still has it when the transaction is over -- as long as both parties keep silent." "You dislike women," the girl said, tranquilly, as a simple observation, not a challenge. "But all things are loans -- not just chastity and trust. Why be miserly? To 'possess' wealth is as illusory as to 'possess' honor or a woman -- and much less gratifying. Spending is better than saving." "But there are rank orders in all things, too," Simon said, lighting a kief stick. He was intrigued in spite of himself. Hedonism was the commonest of philosophies in the civilized galaxy but it was piquant to hear a playwoman trotting out the moldy cliches with such fierce solemnity. "Otherwise we should never know the good from the bad, or care." "Do you like boys?" "No, that's not one of my tastes. Ah -- you will say that I don't condemn boy-lovers and that values are in the end only preferences? I think not. In morals, empathy enters eventually." "So -- you wouldn't corrupt children and torture revolts you. But you were made that way. Some men are not so handicapped. I meet them now and then." The hand holding the lopped beads made a small, unconscious gesture of revulsion. "I think they are the handicapped, not I -- most planets hang their moral imbeciles, sooner or later. But what 'about treason? You didn't answer that question." "My throat was dry -- thank you. Treason, well -- it's an art, hence again a domain of taste or preference. Style is everything. That's why my half-brother is so inept. If tastes changed he might prosper -- as I might had I been born with blue hair." "You could dye it." "What, like the Respectables?" She laughed, briefly but unaffectedly. "I am what I am. Disguises don't become me. Skills, yes -- those are another matter. I'll show you when you like. But no masks." Skills can betray you, too... Simon remembered that moment at the Traitors' Guild when his proud sash of poison shells had lost him in an instant every inch of altitude over the local professionals that he had hoped to trade on. But he only said again, "Why not?" Testing her skills would be as good a way as any to while away the time -- and once his immunity had expired he could never again trust a playwoman on Boadicea. She proved, indeed, very skillful and the time passed. But the irregular days -- the clock in the tavern was on a different time from the one in his room and neither even faintly agreed with his High Earthbased chronometer and metabolism -- betrayed him. He awoke one morningnoonnight to find the girl turning slowly black beside him in the last embrace of a fungal toxin he would have reserved for the Emperor of Canes Venatici or the worst criminal in human history. War had been declared. He had been notified that if he still wanted to sell High Earth, he would have to show first his skill at staying alive against the whole cold malice of all the Traitors of Boadicea. H e holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of transduction serum -- an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head humming with false memories and traces of character derived from the unknowable donors of the serum. These conflicted not only with his purposes but even with his tastes and motives. Under interrogation he would break down into a babbling crowd of random voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his blood types, his retina prints and fingerprints. To the eye his gross physical appearance would be a vague, characterless blur of many roles -- some of them dedred years ago and at least that many parsecs away in space. The danger was that unless he got the antiserum with fifteen days he would first forget his mission, then his skills and at last his very identity. Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken -- for effete though the local traitors seemed to be they were obviously quite capable of penetrating any lesser cover. The next problem was how to complete the mission itself -- it would not be enough just to stay alive. After all, he was still no ordinary traitor or even the usual kind of double agent -- his task was to buy Boadicea while seeming to sell High Earth. But beyond that was a grander treason in the making for which the combined Guilds of both planets might only barely be sufficient -- the toppling of the Green Exarch, under whose subtle non-human yoke half of humanity's worlds had not even the latter-day good sense to groan. For such a project, the wealth of Boadicea was a prerequisite, for the Green Exarch drew tithes from six fallen empires older than man -- the wealth of Boadicea and its reputation as the first colony to break with Old Earth, back in the first days of the Imaginary Drive. And therein lay the difficulty, for Boadicea, beyond all other colony worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that saying of Elva-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the center. It was this worship of independence, or rather, of autonomy, which had not only made treason respectable but had come nigh to ennobling it -- and was now imperceptibly emasculating it, like the statues one saw everywhere in Druidsfall which ,had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the gray disease of time and the weather. Today, though all the Boadiceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they were snobs about their planet's prehuman history, as though they had not nearly exterminated the aborigines themselves but were their inheritors. The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honors, carefully shorn of real power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadiceans sold each other out with delicate enthusiasm but against High Earth -- which was not necessarily Old Earth but not necessarily was not, either -- all gates were formally locked. Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure, for the hunger of treason, like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on -- and to lose discrimination in the process. Boadicea, like all forbidden fruits, should be ripe for the plucking for the man with the proper key to its neglected garden. The key that Simon had brought with him was now lost. He would have to forge another with whatever crude tools could be made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was the dead playwoman's despised half-brother. H IS name, Simon had found easily enough, was currently Da-Ud tarn Altair and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the Gulf of the Rood, on the Incontinent, half the world away from Druidsfall. Since one of his duties was that of singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of a sort of gleeman's harp (actually a Charioteer instrument, ill-adapted to human fingers, and which Da-Ud played worse than most of those who affected it), Simon reached him readily in the guise of a ballad merchant, selling him twelve-and-a-tilly of ancient High Earth songs Simon had made up while in transit to the principate -- it was as easy as giving Turkish Delight to a baby. After the last mangled chord died Simon told DaUd quietly, "By the way -- well sung. Excellence -- did you know that the Guild has murdered your halfsister?" Da-Ud dropped the fake harp with a noise like a spring toy coming unwound. Gro's name -- " Da-Ud caught himself and stared at Simon with sudden, belated suspicion. Simon looked back, waiting. "Who told you that? Damn you -- are you a Torturer? Tm not -- I've done nothing to merit -- " "I'm not a Torturer and nobody told me," Simon said. "She died in my bed -- as a warning to me." He removed his clasp from the shoulder of his cloak and clicked it. The little machine flowered briefly into a dazzling actinic glare and then closed again. While Da-Ud was still covering his streaming eyes Simon said softly. "I am the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth." It was not the flash of the badge that was dazzling Da-Ud now. He lowered his hands. His whole narrow body was trembling with hate and eagerness. "What -- what do you want of me, Excellence? I have nothing to sell but the Rood-Prince -- and a poor stick he is. Surely you would not sell me High Earth -- I am a poor stick myself." "I would sell you High Earth for twenty riyals." "You mock me." "No, Da-Ud. I came here to deal with the Guild cerned disqualifies them from being treated with as civilized professionals or as human beings at all. She was pleasant and intelligent and I was fond of her -- some conditions, I don't hold with throwing away an innocent life for some footling dramatic gesture." "I wholly agree," Da-Ud said. His indignation seemed to be at least half real. "But what will you do? What can you do?" "I have to fulfill my mission anyway short of my own death -- if I die nobody will be left to get it done. But I'd most dearly love to cheat, dismay, disgrace the Guild in the process if it could possibly be managed. I'll need your help. If we live through it I'll see to it that you'll turn a profit, too. Money isn't my first goal here -- or even my second now." "I'll tackle it," Da-Ud said at once, though he was obviously apprehensive, as was only sensible. "What precisely do you propose?" F irst of all ril supply you with papers indicating that I've sold you a part -- not all -- of the major thing I have to sell, which gives any man who holds it a lever in the State Ministry of High Earth. They show that High Earth has been conspiring against several major powers, all human, for purposes of gaining altitude with the Green Exarch. They won't tell you precisely which worlds -- but there will be sufficient information there so that the Exarchy would pay a heavy purse for them -- and High Earth an even heavier one to get them back. It will be your understanding that the missing information is also for sale -- but you haven't got the price." "Suppose the Guild doesn't believe that?" "They'll never believe -- excuse me, I must be blunt -- that you could have afforded the whole thing; they'll know I sold you this much of it only because I have a grudge -- and you can tell them so, though I wouldn't expose the nature of the grudge if I were you. Were you unknown to them they might assume that you were I in disguise -- but luckily they know you, and, ah, probably tend rather to underestimate you." "Kindly put," Da-Ud said with a grin. "But that won't prevent them from assuming that I know your whereabouts or have some way of reaching you. They'll interrogate for that and, of course. I'll tell them. I know them, too -- it would be impossible not to and I prefer to save myself needless pain." "Of course. Don't risk interrogation at all. Tell them you want to sell me out, as well as the secret. That will make sense to them and I think they must have rules against interrogating a member who offers to sell. Most Traitors' Guilds do." "True, but they'll observe them only as long as they believe me. That's standard, too." Simon shrugged. "Be convincing, then," he said. "I have already said that this project will be dangerous. Presumably you didn't become a traitor for sweet safety's sole sake." "No, but not for suicide's, either. But I'll abide the course. Where are the documents?" "Give me access to your Prince's toposcope-scriber and I'll produce them. But first -- twenty riyals, please." "Minus two riyals for the use of the Prince's property. Bribes, you know." "Your sister was wrong, you do have style in a myopic sort of way. All right, eighteen riyals -- and then let's get on to real business. My time is not my own -- not by a century." "But how do I reach you thereafter?" "That information," Simon said blandly, "will cost you those other two riyals -- and cheap at the price." II T he Rood-Prince's brain-dictation laboratory was far from being up to Guild standards, let alone High Earth's, but Simon was satisfied that the documents he generated there would .pass muster. They were utterly authentic and every experienced traitor had a feeling for that quality, regardless of such technical deficiencies as blurry image registration and irrelevant emotional overtones. That done, Simon began to consider how he would meet Da-Ud when the game had that much furthered itself. The arrangement he had made with the playwoman's half-brother was, of course, a blind, indeed a double blind, but it had to have the virtues of its imperfections or nothing would be accomplished. Yet Simon was now beginning to find it hard to think. The transduction serum was increasingly taking hold and treasons were taking place inside his skull which had nothing to do with Boadicea, the Green Exarch or High Earth. Worse -- they seemed to have nothing to do with Simon de Kuyl, either, but instead muttered away about silly little provincial intrigues nothing could have brought him to care about -- yet which made him feel irritated, angry, even ill, like a man in the throes of jealousy toward some predecessor and unable to reason them away. Knowing their source, he fought them studiously, but he knew they would get steadily worse, however resolute he was -- they were coming out of his genes and his bloodstream, not his once finely honed, now dimming consciousness. Under the circumstances he was not going to be able to trust himself to see through very many highly elaborate schemes, so that it would be best to eliminate all but the most necessary. Hence it seemed better, after all, to meet Da-Ud in the Principate as arranged and save the double dealing for more urgent occasions. On the other hand it would be foolish to hang around the Principate, waiting and risking some miscarriage -- such as betrayal through a possible interrogation of Da-Ud -- when there were things he might be accomplishing elsewhere. Besides, the unvarying foggy warmth and the fragmented, garish religiousness of the Principate both annoyed him and exercised pulls of conflicting enthusiasms and loyalties on several of his mask personalities, who had apparently been as unstable even when whole as their bits and pieces had now made him. He was particularly out of sympathy with the motto graven on the lintel of the Rood-Prince's vaguely bird-shaped palace: Justice Is Love. The sentiment, obviously descended from some colonial Islamic sect, was excellent doctrine for a culture given to treason, for it allowed the prosecution of almost any kind of betrayal on the grounds that Justice was being pursued; but Simon found it entirely too pat. Besides, he was suspicious of all abstractions which took the form: A is B. In his opinion neither justice nor mercy were very closely related to love, let alone being identical with it. These bagatelles aside, it seemed likely to Simon that something might be gained by returning for a while to Druidsfall and haunting the vicinity of the Guild hall. At the worst his address would then be unknown to DalJd and his anonymity more complete in the larger city. The Guild would be less likely to identify him even were it to suspect him -- as of course it would -- of such boldness. At best, he might pick up some bit of useful information, particularly if DaUd's embassy were to create any unusual stir. F or a while he saw nothing unusual, which was in itself fractionally reassuring -- either the Guild was not alarmed by Da-Ud or was not letting it show. On several days in succession, Simon saw the Boadicean Traitor-in-Chief enter and leave, sometimes with an entourage, more often with only a single slave. Valkol "the Polite" was a portly, jowly man in a black abah decorated only by the Clasp, with a kindly and humorous expression into which were set two bites of an iceberg. This was normal, although it gave Simon a small, ambiguous frisson which was all the more disturbing because he was unsure which of his personae he should assign it to. Certainly not to his fundamental self, for although Valkol was here the predestined enemy, he was no more formidable than others Simon had defeated (while, it was true, being in his whole and right mind). Then Simon recognized the slave -- and ran. There was no possibility of his identifying who the creature was; he was fortunate -- in no way he could explain -- to be able to penetrate just to what it was. The slave was a vombis, or what in one of the oldest languages was called a Proteus, a creature that could imitate perfectly almost any life form within its size range. Or nearly perfectly -- for Simon, like one in perhaps five thousand of his colleagues, was sensitive to them, without ever being able to specify in what particular their imitations of humanity were deficient; other people, even those of the sex opposite to the one the vombis assumed, could find no flaw in them. In part because they did not revert when killed. No human had ever seen their "real" form -- if they had one -- though, of course, there were legends aplenty. The talent might have made them ideal double agents, were it possible to trust them -- but that was only an academic speculation, since the vombis were wholly creatures of the Green Exarch. Simon's first impulse at the moment of recognition -- like that of any other human being -- had been to kill this one instantly upon recognition, but that course had too many obvious drawbacks. Besides, the presence of an agent of the Exarchy so close to the heart of this imbroglio was suggestive and might be put to some use. Of course the vombis might be in Druidsfall on some other business entirely, but Simon would be in no hurry to make so dangerous an assumption. No, it was altogether more likely that the Exarch, who could hardly have heard yet of Simon's arrival and disgrace, was simply aware in general of how crucial Boadicea would be to any scheme of High Earth's -- he was above all an efficient tyrant -- and had placed his creature here to keep an eye on things. Yes, that situation might be used, if Simon could just keep his disquietingly percolating brains under contrbl. Among his present advantages was the fact that his disguise was better than that of the vombis, a fact the creature was probably constitutionally incapable of suspecting. With a grim chuckle he hoped he would not later regret, Simon flew back to the Gulf of the Rood. fl A-UD met Simon in the Singing Gardens, a huge " formal maze not much frequented of late even by lovers, because the Rood-Prince in the throes of some new religious crotchet had let it run wild, so that one had constantly to be fending off the ardor of the flowers. At best this made even simple conversations difficult, and it was rumored that deep in the heart of the maze the floral attentions were of a more sinister sort. Da-Ud was exultant, indeed almost manic in his enthusiasm, which did not advance comprehension either, but Simon listened patiently. "They bought it like lambs," Da-Ud said, naming a sacrificial animal of High Earth so casually as to make one of Simon's personae shudder inside him. "I had a little difficulty with the underlings -- but not as much as I'd expected -- and I got it all the way up to Valkol himself." "No sign of any outside interest?" "No, nothing. I didn't let out any more than I had to until I reached His Politeness, and after that he put the blue seal on everything -- wouldn't discuss anything but the weather while anyone else was around. Listen, Simon, I don't want to seem to be telling you your business -- but I think I may know the Guild better than you do and it seems to me that you're underplaying your hand. This thing is worth money."  "I said it was." "Yes, but I don't think you've any conception how much. Old Valkil took my asking price without a murmur, in fact so fast that I wish I'd asked for twice as much. Just to show you I'm convinced of all this, Tm going to give it all to you." "Don't want it," Simon said. "Money is of no use to me unless I can complete the mission. All I need now is operating expenses and I've got enough for those." This clearly had been what Da-Ud had hoped he would say but Simon suspected that, had matters gone otherwise, the younger man might indeed have given over as much as half the money. His enthusiasm mounted. "All right -- but that doesn't change the fact that we could be letting a fortune slip here." "How much?" "Oh, at least a couple of megariyals -- and I mean apiece," Da-Ud said grandly. "I can't imagine an opportunity like that comes around very often even in the circles you're used to." "What would we have to do to earn it?" Simon said with carefully calculated doubt. "Play straight with the Guild. They want the material badly and if we don't trick them we'll be protected by their own rules. And with that much money -- there are a hundred places in the galaxy where you'd be safe from High Earth for the rest of your life." "And what about your half-sister?" "Well, I'd be sorry to lose the chance at revenge -- but cheating the Guild wouldn't bring her back, would it? And in a way, wouldn't it be aesthetically more pulously fair with them? 'Justice is Love', you know, and all that." "I don't know," Simon said fretfully. "The difficulty lies in defining justice, I suppose -- you know as well as I do that it can excuse the most complicated treasons. And: 'What do you mean by love?' isn't easily answerable either. In the end one has to shuck it off as a woman's question, too private to be meaningful in a man's world -- let alone in matters of polity. Hmmmm." This maundering served no purpose but to suggest that Simon was still trying to make up his mind -- actually he had reached a decision several minutes ago. Da-Ud had broken. He would have to be disposed of. Da-Ud listened with an expression of polite bafflement which did not quite completely conceal a gleam of incipient triumph. Ducking a trumpet-vine which appeared to be trying to crown him with thorns, Simon added at last: "You may well be right -- but we'll have to be mortally careful. There may, after all, be another agent from High Earth here; in matters of this importance they wouldn't be likely to rest with only one charge in the chamber. That means you'll have to follow my instructions to the letter or we'll never live to spend a riyal of the proceeds." "You can count on me," Da-Ud said, tossing hair out of his eyes. "I've handled everything well enough this time, haven't I? And after all it was my idea." "Certainly. An expert production. Very well. What I want you to do now is go back to Valkil and tell him that I've betrayed you and sold the other half of the secret to the Rood-Prince." "Surely you wouldn't actually do such a thing!" "Oh, but I would and I shall -- the deed will be done by the time you get back to Druidsfall -- and for the same twenty riyals that you paid for your half." "But the purpose?" "Simple. I cannot come to Druidsfall with my remaining half -- if another Earthman were there I'd be shot before I got halfway up the steps of the Hall. I want the Guild to consolidate the two halves by what seems to be an unrelated act of agression, between local parties. You make this clear to them by telling them that I won't actually make the sale to the RoodPrince until I hear from you that you have the rest of the money. To get the point across at once, when you tell His Politeness that I've 'betrayed' you -- wink." "And how do I get word to you this time?" "You wear this ring. It communicates with a receiver in my Clasp. I'll take matters from there." The ring -- which was actually only a ring and would never communicate anything to anybody -- changed hands. Da-Ud saluted Simon with solemn glee and went away to whatever niche in history -- and in the walls of the Guild hall of Boadicea -- is reserved for traitors without style. And Simon, breaking the stalk of a lyre bush which had sprung up between his feet, went off to hold his muttering, nattering skull and do nothing at all. Ill hardly mattered which -- did not waste any time. From a vantage point high up on the Principate's only suitable mountain, Simon watched their style of warfare with appreciation and some wonder. Actually the hand of the Exarchy did not show in the maneuvering itself and did not need to -- for the whole campaign would have seemed a token display, like a tournament, had it not been for a few score of casualties which seemed inflicted almost inadvertently. Even among these there were not many deaths as far as Simon could tell -- at least not by the standards of battle to which he was accustomed. Clearly nobody who mattered got killed on either side. The Rood-Prince, in an exhibition of bravado more garish than sensible, deployed on the plain before his city several thousand pennon-bearing mounted troopers who had nobody to fight but a rabble of foot soldiers which Druidsfall obviously did not intend to be taken seriously -- whereupon the city was taken from the Gulf side by a squadron of flying submarines which broke from the surface of the sea on four buzzing wings like so many dragonflies. These devices particularly intrigued Simon. Some Boadicipus genius, unknown to the rest of the galaxy, had solved the ornithopter problem, though the wings were membranous rather than feathered. Hovering, the machines thrummed their wings through a phase shift of a full # degrees -- but when they swooped the wings moved in a horizontal figure eight, lifting with a forward-and-down stroke and propelling with the back stroke. A long fishlike tail gave stability and doubtless had other uses under water. After the mock battle, the 'thopters landed and the troops withdrew. Then matters took a more sinister turn, manifested by thumping explosions and curls of smoke from inside the Rood palace. Evidently a search was being made for the supposedly hidden documents Simon was thought to have sold and it was not going well. The sounds of demolition and the occasional public hangings could only mean that a maximum interrogation of the Rood-Prince had failed to produce any papers or any clues to them. This Simon regretted, as he did the elimination of Da-Ud. He was not normally so ruthless -- an outside expert would have called his workmanship in this affair perilously close to being sloppy -- but the confusion caused by the transduction serum, now rapidly rising as it approached term, had prevented him from manipulating every factor as subtly as he had originally hoped to do. Only the grand design was still intact -- it would now be assumed that Boadicea had clumsily betrayed the Exarchy, leaving the Guild no way out but to capitulate utterly to Simon -- with whatever additional humiliations he judged might not Something abruptly cut off his view of the palace. He snatched his binoculars away from his eyes in alarm. The object that had come between him and the Gulf was a mounted man -- or rather, the idiot-headed apteryx the man was sitting on. Simon was surrounded by a ring of them, their lance points aimed at his chest, pennons trailing in the dusty viol-grass. The pennons bore the device of the Rood-Prince but every lancer in the force was a vombis. Simon rose resignedly, with a token snarl intended more for himself than for the impassive protean creatures and their fat birds. He wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the vombis might be as sensitive to him as he was to them. But the answer to that no longer mattered. Sloppiness was about to win its long-postponed reward. T hey put him naked into a wet cell -- a narrow closet completely clad in yellowed alabaster, down the sides of which water oozed and beaded all day long, running out into gutters at the edges. He was able to judge when it was day because there were clouded bull's-eye lenses in each of the four walls which waxed and waned at him without any outside light. The wet cell was a sort of inverted oubliette, thrust high up into Boadicea's air, probably a hypertrophied merlon on one of the towers of the Traitors' Hall. At night a fifth lens, backed by a sodium vapor lamp, glared down from the ceiling, surrounded by a faint haze of steam where the dew tried to condense on it. Escape was a useless fantasy. Erected into the sky as it was, the wet cell did not even partake of the usual character of the building's walls, except for one stain in the alabaster which might have been the underside of a child's footprint; otherwise the veinings were mockingly meaningless. The only exit was down, an orifice through which they had inserted him as though he were being born, and now plugged like the bottom of a stopped toilet. Could he have broken through one of the lenses with his bare hands, he would have found himself naked and torn on the highest point in Druidsfall, with no place to go. Naked he was. Not only had they pulled all his teeth in search of more poisons but, of course, they had also taken his Clasp. He hoped they would fool with the Clasp -- it would make a clean death for everybody -- but doubtless they had better sense. As for the teeth, they would regrow if he lived -- that was one of the few positive advantages of the transduction serum -- but in the meantime his bare jaws ached abominably. They had missed the antidote, which was in a tiny gel capsule in his left earlobe, masquerading as a sebaceous cyst -- left, because it is automatic to neglect that side of a man, as though it were only a mirror image of the examiner's right -- and that was some comfort. In a few more days now the gel would dissolve, he would lose his multiple disguise and would have to confess -- but in the meantime he could manage to be content despite the slimy, glaring cold of the cell. And in the meantime he practiced making virtues of deficiencies: in this instance calling upon his only inner resources -- the diverting mutterings of his other personalities -- and trying to guess what they might once have meant. But  mean, like, you know -- Wheah they goin'? Yeah... Led's gehdahda heah -- he-he-he! Wheah? So anyway, so uh... It's hard not to recognize a pigeon... But Mother's birthday is July twentieth... So he knew that the inevitable might happen -- It made my scalp creak and my blood curl. Where do you get those crazy ideas? Acquit Socrates... Back when she was sane she was married to a window-washer...  don't know what you've got under your skirt but it's wearing white sox... And then she made a noise like a spindizzy going sour... Pepe Satan, pepe Satan aleppe... Why, so might any man... Evacuate Mars! A nd then she sez to me, she sez -- ... if he would abandon his mind to it... With all of love. And -- but at that point the plug began to unscrew and from the spargers above him which formerly had kept the dampness running, a heavy gas began to curl. They had tired of waiting for him to weary of himself and the second phase of his questing was about to begin. T hey questioned him, dressed in a hospital gown so worn that it was more starch than fabric, in the Traitor-in-ChiePs private office to begin with -- a deceptively bluff, hearty, leather-and-piperacks sort of room that might have been reassuring to a novice. There were only two of them: Valkol in his usual abah and the slave, now dressed as a Charioteer of the high blood. It was a curious choice of costume, since Charioteers were supposed to be free, leaving it uncertain which was truly master and which slave -- Simon did not think the dress could have been Valkol's idea. Noticing the direction of his glance, Valkol said, "I asked this gentleman to join me to assure you, should you be in any doubt, that this interview is serious. I presume you know who he is." "I don't know who 'he' is," Simon said; with the faintest of emphasis. "But 'it' must be representing the Green Exarch, since it's a vombis." The Traitor-in-Chiefs lips whitened slightly. "Prove it," he said. "My deal Valkol," the creature interposed. "Pray don't let him distract us over trifles. Such a thing could not be proved without the most elaborate of laboratory tests, as we all know. And the accusation shows what we wish to know, i.e., that he is aware of who I am -- otherwise why try to make such an inflammatory charge?" "Your master's voice," Simon said. "Let us by all means proceed -- this gown is chilly." "This gentleman," Valkol said, exactly as if he had not heard any of the preceding speech, "is Chag Sharanee of the Exarchy. Not from the embassy but directly from the court -- he is His Majesty's deputy Eomenter." "Appropriate," Simon murmured. "We know you now style yourself Simon de Kuyl -- but what is more to the point, that you claim yourself the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth. Documents now in my possession persuade me that if you are not in fact that officer, you are so close to being he that your true identity makes no difference. Possibly the man you replaced, the amateur with the absurd belt of poison shells, was actually he. In any event -- you are the man we want." "Flattering." "Not at all," said Valkol the Polite. "We simply want the remainder of those documents, for which we paid. Where are they?" "I sold them to the Rood-Prince." "He had them not, nor could he be persuaded to remember any such transaction." "Of course not," Simon said with a smile. "I sold them for twenty riyals; do you think the Rood-Prince would recall any such piddling exchange? I appeared as a bookseller, and sold them to his librarian. I suppose you burned the library -- barbarians always do." Valkol looked at the vombis. "The price agrees with the, uh, testimony of Da-Ud tarn Altair. Do you think -- " "It is possible. But we should take no chances. A search would be time-consuming." The glitter in Valkol's eyes grew brighter and colder. "True. Perhaps the quickest course would be to give him over to the Sodality." Simon snorted. The Sodality was a lay organization to which Guilds classicly entrusted certain functions the Guild lacked time and manpower to undertake, chiefly crude physical torture. "If I'm really who you think I am," he said, "such a course would win you nothing but an unattractive cadaver -- not even suitable for masonry repair." "True," Valkol said reluctantly. "I don't suppose you could be induced -- politelyto deal fairly with us at this late date? After all, we did pay for the documents in question -- and not any mere twenty riyals." "I haven't the money yet." "Naturally not, since the unfortunate Da-Ud was held here with it until we decided he no longer had any use for it. However, if upon the proper oaths -- " "High Earth is the oldest oath-breaker of them all," the Fomenter said. "We -- viz., the Exarchy -- have no more time for such trials. The question must be put." "So it would seem. Though I hate to handle a colleague thus." "You fear High Earth," the vombis said. "My dear Valkol, may I remind you -- " "Yes, yes, I know all that," Valkol snapped to Simon's surprise. "Nevertheless -- Mr. deKuyl, are you sure we have no recourse but to send you to the Babble Room?" "Why not?" Simon said. "I rather enjoy hearing myself think. In fact, that's what I was doing when you two interrupted me." vado he had voiced but he had no choice left but to trust to the transduction serum, which was now on the shuddering, giddy verge of depriving all three of them of what each most wanted. Only Simon could know this. But only he also knew something much worse -- that insofar as his distorted time-sense could calculate, the antidote was due to be released into his bloodstream at best in another six hours, at worse within only a few minutes. After that the Exarchy's creature would be the only victor -- and the only survivor. And when he saw the Guild's toposcope laboratory he wondered if even the serum would be enough to protect him. There was nothing in the least outmoded about it -- Simon had never encountered its like even on High Earth. Exarchy equipment, all too probably. Nor did the apparatus disappoint him. It drove directly down into his subconscious with the resistless unconcern of a spike penetrating a toy balloon. Immediately a set of loudspeakers above his supine body burst into multi-voiced life. Is this some trick? No one but Berentz had a translation permit -- Now the overdrivemy-other must woo and win me -- Wie schaffen sie es, solche Entfernungen bei Unterlichtge-sch windigkeit zurueckzulegen? Remember Thor Five! Pok. Pok. Pok. We're so tired of wading in blood, so tired of drinking blood, so tired of dreaming about blood -- The last voice rose to a scream and all the loudspeakers cut off abruptly. Valkol's face, baffled but not yet worried, hovered over Simon's, peering into his eyes. "We're not going to get anything out of that," he told some invisible technician. "You must have gone too deep -- those are the archetypes you're getting, obviously." "Nonsense." The voice was the Fomentor's. "The archetypes sound nothing like that -- for which you should be grateful. In any event we have barely gone beneath the surface of the cortex; see for yourself." Valkol's face withdrew. "Well, something's wrong. Maybe your probe is too broad. Try it again." The spike drove home and the loudspeakers resumed their mixed chorus. Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom. Aimkaksetchoc. Sanbetogmow -- Dites-lui que nous lui ordonnons de revenir, en vertu de la Loidu Grand Tout... Perhaps he should swear by another country... Can't Mommy ladder spaceship think for byebye-see-you two windy Daddy bottle seconds straight -- Nansima macamba yonso cakosilisa... Stars don't have points. They're round, like balls... The sound clicked off again. Valkol said fretfully, "He can't be resisting. You've got to be doing something wrong, that's all." Though the operative part of his statement was untrue, it was apparently also inarguable to the Fomentor. There was quite a long silence, broken only occasionally by small hums and clinks. While he waited Simon suddenly felt the beginnings of a slow sense of relief in his left earlobe, as though a tiny but unnatural pressure he had long learned to live with had decided to give way -- precisely, in fact, like the opening of a cyst. That was the end. Now he had but fifteen minutes more in which the toposcope would continue to vomit forth its confusion -- its steadily diminishing confusion -- and only an hour before even his physical appearance would reorganize, though that would no longer matter in, the least. It was time to exercise the last option -- now, before the probe could bypass his cortex and again prevent him from speaking his own, fully conscious mind. He said, "Never mind, Valkol. I'll give you what you want." "What? By Gro, I'm not going to give you -- " "You don't have to give me anything -- I'm not selling anything. You see for yourself that you can't get to the material with that machine. Nor with any other like it, I may add. But I exercise my option to turn my coat under Guild laws -- the act gives me safe-conduct. And that's sufficient." "No," the Fomenter's voice said. "It is incredible -- he is in no pain and has frustrated the machine. Why should he yield? Besides, the secret of his resistance -- " "Hush," Valkol said. "I am moved to ask if you truly are a vombis -- doubtless the machine would tell us that much. Mr. de Kuyl, I respect the option but I am not yet convinced. The motive, please?" "High Earth is not enough," Simon said. "Remember Ezra-Tse? The last temptation is the final treason... To do the right thing for the wrong reason. I would rather deal fairly with you and then begin the long task of becoming honest with myself. But with you only, Valkol -- not the Exarchy. I sold the Green Exarch nothing." "I see. A most interesting arrangement. I agree. What will you require?" "Perhaps three hours to get myself unscrambled from the effects of fighting your examination. Then ril dictate the missing material. At the moment it's quite inaccessible." "I believe that, too," Valkol said ruefully. "Very well -- " "It is not very well," the vombis said, almost squalling. "The arrangement is a complete violation of -- " Valkol turned and looked at the creature so hard that it stopped talking of its own accord. Suddenly Simon was sure Valkol no longer needed tests to make up his mind what the Fomentor was. "I would not expect you to understand it," Valkol said in a very soft voice indeed. "It is a matter of style." and left alone for well more than the three hours he had asked for. By that time his bodily reorganization was complete, though it would take at least a day for all the residual mental effects of the serum to vanish. When the Traitor-in-Chief finally admitted himself he made no attempt to disguise either his amazement or his admiration. "The poison man! High Earth is still a world of miracles. Would it be fair to ask what you did with your, uh, overpopulated associate?" "I disposed of him," Simon said. "We have traitors enough already. There is your document. I wrote it out by hand but you can have toposcope confirmation whenever you like, now." "As soon as my technicians master the new equipmerit -- we shot the monster, of course, though I don't doubt the Exarch will resent it." "When you see the rest of the material you may not care what the Exarch thinks," Simon said. "You will find that Eve brought you a high alliance though it was Gro's own horns getting it to you." "I had begun to suspect as much. Mr. de Kuyl I must for sanity's sake assume you are still he -- that act of surrender was the most elegant gesture I have ever seen. That alone convinced me that you wer indeed the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth -- and no other." "Why, so I was," Simon said. "But if you will excuse me now, I think I am about to become somebody else." With a mixture of politeness and alarm, Valkol left him. It was none too soon. He had a bad taste in his mouth which had nothing to do with his ordeals -- and, though nobody knew better than he how empty Maybe, he thought, "Justice is Love" after all -- not a matter of style but of spirit. He had expected all these questions to vanish when the antidote took full hold, wiped into the past with the personalities who had done what they had done. But they would not vanish. They were himself. He had won but obviously he would never be of use to High Earth again. In a way this suited him. A man did not need the transduction serum to be divided against himself -- he still had many guilts to accept and not much left of a lifetime to do it in. While he was waiting, perhaps he could learn to play the sareh. I UP? OH. I don't know, probably a IT IS? I don't know everything and I'm grown up. shut down for a week. Auberson had been wrangling with the board of directors for four days now, since it had been their decision to order the work stoppage. But it seemed as if every time he tried to explain the nature of the project and what they had accomplished, Elzer, the division treasurer would interrupt to announce the latest tally of wasted man-hours. "Look," insisted Auberson. "Robot psychology is still an infant science. We don't know what we're doing -- " He stopped abruptly when he saw the grim look on Elzer's face, then corrected himself. "Let me put it another way. We don't know if what we're doing is the right thing to do. Harlie's psychology is not the same as human psychology." "I thought you said that Harlie was human," Elzer grumbled. "And that he duplicates every function of the human brain." "He is, and he does," replied Auberson. "But how many human beings do you know who are immobile, who never sleep, who have twenty-five sensory inputs, who have eidetic memories, who have no concept of taste or . smell or any other organic chemical reactions? How many human beings do you know who have no sense of touch? And no sex life? In other words, Mr. Elzer, Harlie may originally have had a human psychology but his environment has forced certain modifications upon it. And on top of that, Harlie has a most volatile personality." "Volatile?" The little man was confused. "You mean he gets angry?" "Angry? No, not angry. He can get impatient, though. There is reason to believe that Harlie has both an id and an ego. A conscious and a subconscious. His superego, I believe, takes the form of his external programing. My commands, if you will. Aside from that we haven't found any other inhibitions. In any case the problem is that it is only his superego that we have any control over. His ego cooperates because it wants to and his id, assuming he has one, does like any human subconscious -- whatever it damn well wants to. We have to know what that is before we can stop his periods of non-rationality." "This is all very interesting, Auberson," interrupted Dome, the board chairman. "But would you get to the point? What is Harlie's purpose?" "Purpose?" Auberson paused. "His purpose -- funny you should ask that. The whole reason for the work stoppage is that Harlie asked me what your purpose is. Excuse me -- our purpose. The human purpose. Harlie wants to know why human beings exist." "That's for theologians to discuss," Dome said drily. "If you want. I'm sure Miss Stenson here can arrange for a minister to come in and speak to the machine." A few of the board members smiled but the pert executive secretary showed no reaction. Dome continued, "What we want to know is Harlie's purpose. Having built him, you should have some idea." "I thought I'd made it clear. Harlie was built to duplicate the functions of the human brain. Electronically." "Yes, we know that. But why?" "Why? Why?" Auberson stared at the man. "Why?" Why did Hillary climb Everest? He said, "Well, to help us learn more about how the human brain works. There's a lot we still don't know yet, especially in the area of psychology. We hope to learn which of the functions of the brain are natural and which are artificial." "I beg your pardon," interrupted Elzer. "I don't understand." "I didn't think you would. We're curious as to how many of the human actions are determined from within and how many are reactions to what is coming in from without." "Instinct versus environment?" "You could call it that," said Auberson. It wouldn't be correct, hut you could call it that. "And for what reason are we doing this?" "I thought I just told you -- " "I mean, for what financial reason? What economic applications will this program have?" "Huh? It's too early to think of that. This is still pure research -- " "Ah-ha!" snapped Elzer. "So you admit it." Auberson was annoyed. "I admit nothing." Elzer ignored him. "Dornie," he was saying, "this just proves my point. We can't afford this kind of costly research project. Not without return we can't. This is one of those pure research things that only the government can afford to back. If Mr. Auberson and his friends had wanted to build artificial brains they should have applied for a grant. I move we discontinue the project." Auberson was on his feet at that. "Mr. Chairman, Mr. -- " "You're out of order, Aubie, now sit down. You'll get your chance." "Dammit, this is a railroad job. That little -- " "Aubie, sit down." Dome was glaring at the angry psychologist. "There's a motion on the floor. I assume it is a formal proposal, Mr. Elzer?" Elzer nodded. "Discussion?" asked Dome. Auberson's hand was up immediately. "Auberson?" "On what grounds? I want to know what grounds he has for discontinuing the project." Elzer looked at him calmly, "Well, for one thing Harlie has already cost us -- " "I know what he's cost us -- but if you'll check your figures you'll find that we're well within the projected overage. We budgeted for overage and are well within acceptable limits." "He's got you there, Carl," noted Dome. "If you had let me finish my sentence," snapped Elzer, slightly annoyed, "I would have shown you that it has cost us far too much for a project that is incapable of showing results." "Results?" Auberson asked. "Results? We were getting results even before Harlie was completed. Who do you think designed the secondary and tertiary stages? Harlie did." "So what?" Elzer was unimpressed. "He's not working right, is he?" "That's just it!" Auberson was elated, he had the man now. "Harlie is working perfectly." "Huh?" Then what about those periods of non-rationality? And why did we have to shut him down?" "Because," Auberson said slowly. I have to get this right. "Because we weren't prepared for him to be so perfectly human. If perfect is the word." T he other board members were alert with interest now. What had threatened to be an annoying wrangle over money was turning into a confrontation with subtle overtones. Was Auberson conceding error? Was his project out of hand? Even Miss Stenson had paused in her note-taking. "We had designed him to be a human, we had built him to be human, we had even programed him to think like a human -- then we sat back, turned him on and expected him to react like a machine. Well, surprise. He didn't." "The nature of the trouble, then?" Elzer asked. "Human error, if you will." In the silence that followed, Auberson imagined he could hear Elzer's cash-register brain totaling up the man-hours that had been lost since they started arguing. "Human error? Yours and Harlie's -- each compounding each? I suppose you're going to blame his periods of non-rationality on human error as well." "Oh, my God." Auberson was Ballanttne ence fiction but on the other hand, this is the month of the great ecological teach-in. As you all know, science-fiction readers have been wise to the environmentai crisis, and s.f. writers have been yelling about it for years. But it takes Arthur Godfrey and Johnny Carson to slam it home to the public -- even though Asimov, famous star of television and radio, is a far better authority. To say nothing of Arthur Clarke, Fred Pohl, del Rey issuing it this year) and any number of similarly skilled and equally ignored fellows. But never mind. have awareness of our survival problems penetrate on a mass scale. By whatever means. So cheers for Godfrey and Carson. But watch out for Artilhaus. Anybody who claims to be anti-pollution and for the SST is inconsistent. To put it very gently indeed. It seems past understanding that anybodyeven Nixon and Agnew -- couid remain unaware, or unconvinced, or villainously cynical, about matters of such importance. (#) to see how bad Establishmentarianism can get -- a fantastic exercise in terror and tragedy that could easily have been avoided. It's nonfiction. Give it to some square friend whose doubts about the Establishment need encouraging. And incidenyet? A gem. This Administration knows the value of comic relief, at least. though no less fantastic, things -- like says in the blurb that the book Is based on a scientific theory -- if so, we failed miserably to understand It. But it's a corker of a story. And incidentally, the first in what Mr. Ball projects as four novels around the subject of time. Then we have George MacDonald's delightful adult Lin Carter. MacDonald Is that frustrated Scottish minister whose work Kafka and Freud echoed in later years... more Tarzans (T# to T#) with the new Abbett covers. But alas, no longer at #c. They're up to #C. Also available, for them as likes that sort of thing -- one of the best books ever written on the occult, namely EXlas Hunt, #C. Put that In your crystal ball and smoke it. BB genuinely annoyed. "Of course." Or at least our approach to them. We'd thought his non-rationality was a physical problem -- a matter of circuitry -- or perhaps even a programing problem. We were wrong. He was neither physically nor mentally ill. He was emotionally upset. His periods of non-rationality wereare triggered by something that's bothering him. We don't know what that is -- and I want to find out before I go on." Elzer looked skeptical. He nudged the man next to him and muttered, "Anthropomorphism. Auberson's projecting his own problems onto those of the machine." "Elzer, you're a fool," Auberson snapped. "You've learned a word with more than two syllables in it and now you're an expert." "Hey, now," interrupted Dome. "Let's keep personalities out of this." His face wore a dark expression. Auberson softened his tone. "Look, if you had to go down to that computer room right now and talk to Harlie, how would you treat him?" "Huh? Like a machine, of course." Auberson felt a tightness in his neck and shoulders. "No. I mean, if you sat down at a console and had to carry on a conversation with Harlie -- who would you think was at the other end?" "The machine." The little man's face was impassive. Auberson addressed the rest of the committee: "That's the human error I mentioned -- the most obvious one. Harlie is not a machine. He is human. He has the abilities and reactions of a human being, allowing of course for his environment. He is a rational individual -- He has a distinct and definite personality. At the moment it is impossible for me to think of him as anything but human. My error with him was subtler but related. I forgot to ask myself how old Harlie was." He paused for effect. Dome shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. Eler sniffed. Miss Stenson was looking at Auberson, her eyes bright. Noticing her gaze, Auberson felt he was reaching at least one person in the room. He continued. "Gentlemen, we'd been thinking of Harlie as roughly a thirtyor forty-year-old man. Or rather, we didn't think of him as having any age at all. We were wrong. Harlie's a child. An adolescent, if you prefer. He's reached that point in life where he has a pretty good idea of the nature of the world and his relation to it. He is now ready to question the setup like any other adolescent. We were thinking we had an instant Einstein. Instead we have an enfant terrible." "His periods of non-rationality?" tac-lac-tac! Spandau bullets raved past G-#'s Spad as its mighty Hisso whined the plane into a turn, bringing his guns to bear on the hapless Fokker Well, space opera it wasn't, but G-# month from Berkley-hit a lot of the same nerve-ends as did the livelier pulp SF of those bygone years And anyhow, what about Herr Doktor Kreuger and those giant bats... or the good Doktor's notion of transplanting cobra eyes into pilots' heads, they should see in the dark? There's science for you! Berkley April releases (S#, #i;) Laumer (S#, # If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have complete freedom of choice in pricing these books for resale to others. "An adolescent reaction to our irrationalities. He's the electronic equivalent of pot -- the drug experience." "Don't you think that's grounds enough for dismantling him?" suggested Elzer. "Would you kill your son if you caught him taking acid?" Auberson snapped back. "Of course not. I'd try to straighten him out." "Oh? And what about the reefers in your cigarette case?" "Acid and pot are two different things." Auberson sighed. "The difference is only in degree, not in kind. Harlie's only been doing what everyone else in his environment was doing -- tripping out. Making the scene." Elzer noted pointedly, "Your fondness for the weed has been noticed. Among other things." "Then perhaps you've also noticed that I haven't smoked anything recently. And I don't intend to start again while there's a chance Harlie is using me for a model. I've got to keep my head about me. I don't mind admitting that I was becoming psychologically dependent on the stuff. It took Harlie to show me that." "We've gone off on a tangent," Elzer said suddenly. "I believe there's still a motion on the floor. I call for the vote." "You still haven't answered my question," Auberson said. "What question?" "On what grounds can you justify discontinuing the Harlie project?" Elzer scowled. "It's unprofitable. I object to throwing away good money after bad." "All right, then let's try this one. I've told you several times that Harlie is human. If you try to have him shut down. I'll bring charges against you for attempted murder." "You couldn't -- " Elzer was startled. "Want to find out?" Dome interrupted them: "That's a legal question that we'll let the lawyers fight out." He frowned at Auberson. "You must have some reason for making such a threat -- we'll go into that later. The point here is that Harlie is a drain on corporate funds -- " "We're budgeted for him for the next three years." " -- a drain on corporate funds," Dome repeated, "with no immediate prospect of return. It's not how successful your research has been that we're concerned with. It's whether or not we want to continue." Something in the chairman's voice gave Auberson pause. "All right," he said wearily. "What do you want me to do?" "Show a profit," put in Elzer. Both Dome and Auberson ignored him. Dome said, "Show us a plan. Where are you going with Harlie? What are you going to do with him? And most of all, what is he going to do for us?" "I'm not sure I can answer that right now." "How much time do you need?" Auberson shrugged, "I can't say." "Why don't you ask Harlie?" Idzer mocked. Auberson looked at him, "I believe I will. I believe I will." II B ut he didn't. Not right away. Instead he went to the company cafeteria to brood about Harlie's periods of non-rationality. Why hadn't he forseen them? What had he overlooked? A gentle voice intruded on his thoughts. "Hi, can I join you?" It was Stenson, the executive secretary. "Sure." He started to rise but she waved him back down. The company cafeteria was no place for chivalry. "Rough one today, wasn't it?" she remarked casually as she unloaded a sandwich and a coke from her brightly colored tray. When he failed to answer she smiled at him, "Oh, come on, Auberson, relax. I was only trying to make small talk." He looked at her. Her green eyes had a bright friendly glow and her auburn hair fell carelessly to her shoulders. "I would but I can't," he said. "You don't know how much this project means to me." "Yes I do. Or at least I think I do." "Do you?" he demanded. She returned his stare silently. For the first time he noticed the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. How old was she anyway? He looked into his coffee cup. "Harlie's like a son." "I know. I've read the company doctor's report on you." "Huh?" His head snapped up. "I didn't know -- " "Of course not. The subject never knows when we do a psychiatric report on him. Personnel policy. Anyway, you don't have anything to worry about." "Oh?" She shook her head. "Oh, you're considered introverted and there's something about your worrying too much because you take on too much responsibility and -- " She surveyed him thoughtfully as if trying to remember what else. "You shouldn't be telling me all this, should you?" "Does it make a difference?" "No, I guess not. What else is in the report?" "You're becoming overly involved with the Harlie project but such a development was almost unavoidable. Whoever became Harlie's mentor would have found himself emotionally attached. End of report." Auberson grunted. "Do you think Harlie will have an answer?" "Is that why you sat down here? To pump me for information?" She looked stung. "I'm sorry you think that. No, I sat down here because I thought you might want someone to talk to." Auberson surveyed her thoughtfully. He wondered if the rumors that she was man-hungry were true. At the moment she seemed so open and friendly that he discarded the speculation in annoyance. An innocence in her face made her appear younger than she actually was -- physically, he thought, she was close to his own age of thirty-eight. In any case, nothing in her eyes suggested insincerity. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've been under pressure. And when I'm pressured I get moody and irritable." "I know." She smiled. "That was in the report, too. I forgot to mention it." "Is there anything that wasn't in the report?" "Only whether you like your steak rare, medium or well done." "Rare," he said. Then: "Hey, was that a dinner invitation?" She laughed. "No, I'm sorry. It was just the first thing that popped into my head." "Oh, okay." He grinned back at her. "You aren't going to answer me, arc you?" He let the grin fade. "Huh? About what?" "About Harlie." "What about him?" "Do you think you can find out what Dome wants you to find out?" "I don't know. I haven't talked (# him -- I don't quite know how to put the question to him." He rummaged through his briefcase. "Here, read this." He handed her a printout. "Harlie's big question about the purpose of man." She finished reading the printout, lowered it and looked at him thoughtfully. "Quite a conversation." "Uh-huh. And quite a question he asked. What is man's purpose? I wish I knew how to answer it." Stenson smiled at him. "My father's a rabbi. He's been one for twenty-seven years. And he's still not sure of the answer." "Maybe that's the answer." "What?" "Maybe our purpose is to find our purpose." "What happens when we do?" "I don't know. I guess we'll have completed our task." "And then we get reprogramed?" "Or dismantled." "She laughed. "Then we're in trouble right now. Because your realization of what our purpose is means the completion of the task of finding out what is our purpose. Of course, you could be wrong." He shook his head to clear it. "Huh?" "Then again, maybe you're right. Maybe someone up there -- or out there -- is listening to us right now, trying to decide whether or not to dismantle us." He considered it. "Hm." "Whatever our purpose is," she continued. "Maybe we aren't really tioning as we should." Auberson shrugged. "How should we function?" "Like human beings." "Isn't that what the human race has been doing? Functioning tike human beings, squabbling with ing each other? You consider tripping out irrational. What about -- " "That's not human," she said. hating, I mean." "Oh, but it is. It's very human." "Well, it's not what human should be." "Oh, now -- that's a different story. You're not concerned with what people are. You're talking about what you want them to be." "Well, maybe we should be what we aren't because what we are now isn't good enough. And that's why we may be about to be dismantled." "I don't think we have to worry too much about somebody up there dismantling us." Auberson grinned. "We're doing a pretty good job of it ourselves." "That's the best reason of all why we should be better than we are." "Okay. I agree with you," he grinned. "Now, how do we do it? How do we make people better?" She didn't answer. He continued to grin at her. After a moment she, too, broke into a smile. "That's the same kind of question Harlie asked. It can't be answered." "No," he corrected. "It can't be answered easily." She sipped thoughtfully at the rest of her coke until the straw made a noise at the bottom of the glass. "Mm, how are you going to answer Harlie's question?" Auberson shook his head, "Haven't got the slightest." "Can I offer a suggestion?" "Why not? Everybody else has." "Oh,.l didn't mean -- " "No, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Maybe you can add something new." "You're that desperate?" "I'm that desperate." "Well, okay. You said that Harlie was a child, didn't you? Why not treat him as such?" "I don't follow you." "Well, look -- suppose you had a son about eight years old and advanced for his age. I mean, suppose he was doing twelfth-grade work and so on." "Okay. I'm supposing." "Good. Now, one day you find out he's got an incurable disease. Say, leukemia -- one of the rarer forms they still haven't licked. What are you going to say to him when he asks you what it's like to die?" "Um," said Auberson. "No copping out, now. He's smart enough to know what the situation is but he's still only eight years old." "I think I'm beginning to see your point." He looked at her. "What would you tell your son?" "The truth," she said simply. He threw up his hands in disgust. "Sure. But what is the truth? That's the whole problem with Harlie's question. We don't know." "You don't know the answer to our eight-year-old's question either. You don't know what it's like to die." He looked at her. She continued, "So what would you tell him?" He said simply, "I don't know." "You don't know what you'd tell him? Or you'd tell him you don't know?" "Uh" "The latter," she answered her own question. "You'd tell him nobody knows. But you'd also tell him what you were sure of, that maybe it doesn't hurt and that it's nothing to be afraid of, that it happens to everybody sooner or later. In other words, Mr. Auberson, you'd be honest with him." He knew she was right. It was a workable answer to Harlie's question -- maybe not the best answer but it was an answer and it was workable. It was the only way he could approach the problem: honestly. He smiled at her. "Call me David." She smiled back, "And I'm Steffie." gerly at the console. He knew instinctively that Steffie was right but would he be able to hold that thought in mind once Harlie started talking? Finally he took out a three-by-five card -- he always carried a few of them on which to make notes -- and scrawled across it: Harlie has the emotional development of an eight-year-old. He looked at it for a moment, then added: Or maybe a post-pubescent adolescent. He placed it above the keyboard. Handley was standing by him. He looked at the card somewhat quizzically but said nothing. "Okay. Let's try it," said Auberson. "All right." Handley turned to the other technicians in the room, began snapping orders. Shortly the big computer's banks began to warm with the increased voltage flowing through them. Auberson switched the console on and typed. you've had me turned off for IT. Harlie paused and Auberson felt that familiar cold sweat returning. NO. I don't know either. Auberson sat there and stared at the answer. He didn't know whether to be relieved or not. don't believe that your quesi'm trying. I'm trying, what wouldn't you agree that that's a distortion? ginning to pause after every comment of Harlie's. He knew that the answer was no but he didn't know why. He reread Harlie's last remark, backtracked and reread several of the previous ones. About eight inches up the printout he found what he wanted: Harlie's comment about influences beyond his range of perception being subjectively "unreal" to him. He typed. Auberson himself had made the original suggestion to give Harlie as wide a range of available data sources as possible. The computer's range of vision covered the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays at the lower end to radio waves at the upper. He could monitor as many TV and radio stations as he wished at any one time. He was plugged into several of the world's largest radio telescopes and had taps on the Satellite Communications Channels as well. His audio range was comparable -- Harlie's hearing was limited only the range of the best equipment available. And that wasn't much of a limit. He could monitor the heartbeat of a fly or give details on an earthquake on the other side of the globe. In addition he monitored every major wire service and newsline in the western hemisphere plus several in the eastern, though the latter had to be filtered through translating services. Part of this included a tap into the Worldwide WeatherLine -- Harlie could sense the planet's air movements and ocean currents, he was aware of every global pressure and temperature change as if the Earth were a part of his own body. He also had a limited sense of touch -- still experimental -- and several organic chemical sensors, also still experimental. I don't know, perhaps by the that's part of the problem, not due to any uncertainty about his reply. Rather, he was remembering an earlier incident in Harlie's life, an authorized correspondence with a spinsterish librarian. That time, though, Harlie's subject of study had been human emotions. Auberson's heart twanged wistfully every time he remembered how they had had to break the news to the poor woman that the charming gentleman who had been writing those impassioned love letters to her was only a Human Analogue Computer trying to understand love by experiencing it. However, this line of research should be comparatively safe. Auberson smiled at that. Harlie was refusing to commit himself. His eye fell again on the card he had placed above the keyboard. With a shock he realized just how much he had let himself be sidetracked by the computer's elaborate circumlocution. I AM? I haven't done so yet. ER who's had one drink too Harlie didn't answer. Auberson realized he had made a mistake -- he had let his emotions guide his answer. He propped up the card again, it had slipped down from its place. He decided to try a different tack. I won't buy that, harlie. let's have the truth. you're throwing my own T don't know, never having Harlie was silent. Auberson knew he had struck home. If there was anything Harlie feared, it was disconnection. TO DO. IT. Harlie hummed wordlessly. I don't know, as long as it Ill son." Auberson sat. The padded leather cushions gave beneath his weight. Dome paused to light his cigar, then stared across the wide expanse of mahogany at the psychologist. "Well? What can you tell me about Harlie?" "What do you want to know?" The sharp eyes in Dome's ruddy face surveyed him thoughtfully. "Can Harlie actually do anything that's worth money to us?" "I believe so." Auberson was noncommittal. Dome was leading up to something. Dome took the cigar out of his mouth. "For your sake, Auberson, I hope you're right You know, he costs three times as much as an "Prototypes always cost more." "Even allowing for that. These judgment units are expensive. A self-programing computer may be the ultimate answer but if it's priced beyond the market -- we might just as well not bother." Auberson nodded slowly, carefully. Dome continued, "But that's not why I called you in here. I'm concerned about something you said yesterday at the meeting." "Oh?" "Yes, the bit about our turning Harlie off laying the company open to a charge of murder." "Huh? I was just tossing that off. I wasn't seriously considering bringing charges." "I hope not. But what about stance? I've spent all morning in conference with Chang just on this one subject." Chang was one of the dent of national and international business law. "Whether you know it or not you brought up a point that we're going to have to cover. Is Harlie a legal human being or not? Any kind of lawsuit might establish a dangerous legal precedent. What if it turned out he was human?" "He is," said Auberson. "I thought we established that." "I mean, legally human." Auberson was cautiously silent. Dome continued, "For one thing, we'd be stuck with him whether he was profitable or not. We'd never be able to turn him off. Ever." "He'd be effectively immortal. "Do you know how much he's costing us now?" "I have a vague idea." dollars per year." "Huh? That can't be." "It can and is. Even amortizing investment over the next thirty years doesn't make a dent in his annual cost. There's his maintenance as well as the research loss due to the drain he's causing on our other projects." "That's not fair adding in the cost of other projects' delays." "It is fair. If you were still on the robotic law feasibility program we'd have completed it by now." "Hah! That one's a dead end. Harlie's existence proves that." "True, but we might have realized it earlier. And more cheaply. Every project we have has to be weighted against every other." Dome took a puff of his cigar. The air was heavy with its smoke. "Anyway, we're off the track. We can't risk Harlie's being declared legally human -- but we can even less risk being taken to court on the issue. To defend our position we'd have to disclose our schematics which would be just what our competitors want. And that's a human schematic, isn't it? I'm sure that DataCo or InterBem would just love to tie us up with a few lawsuits. Anything to keep us from producing our judgment circuits. Do you want the company to be sued for slaveholding?" "I think you're worrying about a long shot," Auberson scoffed. "That's my job. I'm responsible to the stockholders of this corporation. Like it or not, I have to protect their investment. Right now I'm concerned about a six and a get. But worse than that -- if the other companies found out what we were trying to do with Harlie we'd lose all advantage in building him. I'm not going to let that happen. We're going to have to do something about Harlie. One -- " he ticked off on his finger -- "we can turn him off now." Auberson started to protest but Dome cut him off. "Hear me out, Auberson. I know all the reasons why we want to continue the Harlie project. Two, we get some kind of guarantee now that Harlie is not legally human." He picked up a single sheet of paper that had been lying in front of him and shoved it at the psychologist. The language was quite clear, the intent was immediate. There were no legal phrases that he could not understand. I hereby affirm that the machine designated Harlie (acronym for Human Analogue Robot, Life Input Equivalents) is indeed only a computer, is not now, never has been, and in no way can ever be a rational, intelligent, "thinking" individual. The designation "human" cannot be used to describe Harlie or its mental processes. The machine is a human simulating device only, not human in itself. s igned Auberson grinned and threw the document back on the desk. "You've got to be kidding. Who's going to sign that?" "You are, for one." "Oh, no." Auberson shook his head. "Not me. I know better. Besides, my signature wouldn't change the fact that Harlie is human." "In the eyes of the law it would." Auberson shook his head again. "Uh-uh -- I don't like it. It's kind of Orwellian. It's like declaring someone a non-person so that it's all right to murder him." Dome took a puff from his cigar. "We're only concerned about the legality of the situation, Auberson." Auberson felt himself digging in his heels. "That's what Hitler said as he packed the German courts with his own hand-picked judges." "I don't like that insinuation, Aubie." Dome's voice was too controlled. "It's no insinuation. I'll come right out and say itno, I won't." He leaned forward. "Look, this whole thing is ridiculous. You know as well as I do that that thing won't hold up in court. The only way you could get it to stand up would be to get Harlie himself to sign it. If you could. If you could you'd prove that he could be programed like any other machine. But you can'the'll refuse and his refusal will prove that he's human with a will of his own." Auberson grinned. "Come to think even if he did sign it his signature wouldn't be legal anyway. Unless, of course, you wanted to prove him human first." He laughed out loud. "Are you through?" Dome asked, his face a mask. Auberson's grin faded. He indicated he was with a nod. Dome took a last puff of his cigar, then ground it out, a signal that he was at last ready to reveal his hand. "Of course, you know what the alternative is, Auberson. We turn off Harlie." "You can't." "If we have to we will. We can't afford to maintain him otherwise." "I'm not going to sign anything," insisted Auberson. Dome looked annoyed. "Are you going to force me to ask for your resignation instead?" "Over this?" Auberson was incredulous. "You're kidding." "What other guarantee do I have that you won't take legal action to protect Harlie? If you won't sign this -- you obviously wouldn't sign a statement of non-intent either." He stared at Auberson. "Would you?" Auberson shook his head. "I thought not. So what other alternative would I have to protect myself?" Auberson shrugged. "It would be a mistake to fire me, though." "Oh?" Dome looked skeptical. "Why?" I understand they've developed a judgment circuit of their own -- one that doesn't infringe on any of our patents." "Hearsay," scoffed Dome. "Whether it is or not, imagine what I could do with their resources at my disposal. They'd jump at the chance and I imagine Handley might go along with me." "A court order would stop you." Dome pulled out a fresh cigar. "You wouldn't be able to reveal any of the company's secrets." "Of course, you'd have no way of knowing." Auberson grinned. "Besides, it wouldn't keep me from doing research in a new field. By your own admission, Harlie is a non-human computer. And if I working on." Dome paused, the silver cigarette lighter halfway to his mouth. "You overestimate your own importance, Aubie." "No. You underestimate the importance of Harlie." Dome lit his cigar. He took his time about it, making sure it had caught evenly. When he was sure he pocketed the lighter and looked at Auberson. "All this is only speculation, of course. I have no intention of firing you. And you've stated quite clearly that you have no intention of resigning. However, that still leaves us with a rather difficult problem." "Does it?" Dome raised an eyebrow. "I would think so. What are we going to do about Harlie?" "Oh? Not can Harlie make money for the company?" "Can he?" Dome fingered the document on his desk thoughtfully. "Okay, Aubie," he said. "I'll tell you what we're going to do -- " He paused for effect, picked up the single sheet of paper, opened a desk drawer and dropped it in. "Nothing. At the moment we're going to do nothing. Confidentially, I didn't expect you'd sign, no matter how I pressured you. I even told Chang so. No matter, it was too easy an answer. If Harlie's humanity ever comes to a court issue with our competitors, it will be a bigger and uglier and stickier mess than any disclaimer can clear up." He pushed the drawer shut as if it contained something distasteful. "Let's hope it doesn't. You'll continue working on the Harlie Project. As you said, we're budgeted for it. If you can produce results, fine. We'll give you a fair chance. But if Harlie doesn't do something productive before the next budget session -- it would be very unlikely that we would continue his appropriation." "I understand," Auberson said, getting up to go. "Good. I hope you do. I want you to know how we feel. We haven't cancelled your day of judgment, Aubie. Only postponed it." IV  er couple they were alone in the restaurant. But even had the room been filled with chattering others, they would have still been alone. "I tell you, Steffie -- I knew he was pressuring me but there was nothing I could do about it." She nodded, took a sip of her wine. In the dark her eyes were luminously black. "I know. I know how Dome is." She set down the wine glass. "His problem is that he's trying to be boss of too many things. He calls you in to talk to you even when he may not have anything to say." "That's what this was," said Auberson. "Logically he knew that it was too early to expect results -- but emotionally he felt he had to demand them anyway." Her eyes twinkled. "I've long suspected that Mr. Dome has reached his level of incompetency. If he's ever given any more authority he'll be in over his own head." "Should you be saying that? After all, you do work for him?" "With him," she corrected. "I only work with him. I'm an independent unit in the corporate structure. My job is what I want to make of it." "Oh? And what do you want to make of it?" She was thoughtful. "Well, I interpret my function as being that of a buffer -- or a lubricant to minimize the friction between certain departments." "I see. Is that why you accepted my dinner invitation? To keep me from chafing? How do you feel about Elzer?" Steffie made a face. "Oh, that horrid little man. You would have to bring him up." "I take it you don't like him." "Carl Elzer and I have one thing in common," she said. "We're both ashamed that he's Jewish." Auberson had to laugh at that. "You've got him pegged, Steffie. I hadn't realized that before -- but I think you're right." "What are you?" she asked abruptly. "Huh? Oh, I don't know." "Oh, well -- my family was Episcopalian but -- I guess you could call me an atheist." "You don't believe in God?" He shrugged. "I don't know if I do or not. I don't know if there is a God." "Then you're an agnostic, not an atheist." "What's the difference?" "The atheist is sure there is no God. The agnostic doesn't know if there is or not." "And which is better?" "The agnostiche's got an open mind. The atheist doesn't. The atheist is making a statement every bit as religious as saying there is a God." "You sound like you're an agnostic yourself," he said. She twinkled, "I'm a Jewish agnostic. What about Harlie? What is he?" "Harlie?" Auberson grinned. "He's an Aquarius." "Huh?" "I'm not kidding. Ask him yourself. He'll tell you." "I believe you," she said. "How did he -- realize this?" "Oh, well, what happened was we were talking about morality, Harlie and I -- I wish I had the printout here to show you, it's beautiful. Never argue morality -- or anything for that matter -- with a computer. You'll lose. Harlie's got the words of every philosopher since the dawn of history to draw upon. He'll have you arguing against yourself within ten minutes. He enjoys doing it -- it's a word game to him." "I can imagine," she said. "Can you really? You don't know how devious he can be. He had me agreeing with Ambrose Bierce that morality is an invention of the weak to protect themselves from the strong." "Well, of course, you're only a psychologist. You're not supposed to be a debater." "Ordinarily I'd be offended at that insinuation -- but in this case I'll concede the point. In fact, I know some people I would like to turn him loose on." "It wouldn't be hard to make a list," she agreed. "Well, anyway," he said, getting back to his story, "I thought I finally had him at one point. He'd just finished a complex analysis of the Christian ethos and why it was wrong and was starting in on Buddhism, I think, when I interrupted him. I asked him which was the right morality? What did he believe in?" "And?" "He answered, M have no morals.' " She smiled thoughtfully. "That's kind of frightening." "If I didn't know Harlie's sense of humor I would have pulled his plug right then. But I didn't. I just asked him why he said that." "And he said?" "He said, 'Because I am an Aquarius.' " "You're kidding." "Nope." "You don't believe in that stuff, do you?" "No, but Harlie does." She laughed then. "Really?" "I don't know. I think it's another game to him. According to Harlie Aquarians have no morals, only ethics. That's why he said it. It wasn't till later that I realized he'd neatly sidestepped the original question altogether. He still hadn't told me what he really believed in." Auberson smiled as he refilled their wine glasses. "Someday I'll have to ask him. Here's to you." "To us," she corrected. She put the glass down again. "What got him started on all that, anyway?" "Astrology? It was one of his own studies. He kept coming up against references to it and asked for further information on the subject." "And you just gave it to him? "Oh, no -- not right off the bat. We never give him anything without first considering its effects. We finally decided to qualify it in the same manner we'd qualified all the religious data we'd given him. We told him thay this was just one more specialized system of logic, not necessarily bearing any degree of correspondence to the real world. he'd have realized it himself, sooner or later, but at that point in our research we couldn't afford to take chances. Two days later he started printing out a complex analysis of astrology, finishing up with his own horoscope, which he had taken the time to cast. His activation date was considered his date of birth." Her face clouded. "Wait a minute -- he can't be an Aquarius. Harlie was activated in the middle of March. I know because I was hired at about the same time." Auberson smiled. "True, but that's one of the things Harlie did when he cast his horoscope. He recast the Zodiac too." "Huh?" "The signs of the Zodiac were determined in the second century B.C. Since then, due to the precession of the equinoxes, the signs have changed. An Aries is really a Pisces, a Pisces is really an Aquarius and so on. The rest of us are thirty days off. Harlie corrected the Zodiac from its historical inception and then cast his horoscope from it." , idea. "Oh, David -- that is priceless. Really priceless. I can just imagine him doing that." "Wait, you haven't heard it all. He turned out to be right. He doesn't have any morals. Ethics, yes. Morals, no. Harlie was the first to realize it -- though he didn't grasp what it meant. You see, morality is an artifice, an invention. It really is to protect the weak from the strong. "In our original designs we had decided to try to keep him free of any artificial cultural biases. Well, morality is one of them. Any morality. Because we built him with a sense of skepticism, Harlie resists it. He won't accept anybody's brand of religion. He'll automatically file it under systems of logic not necessarily corresponding to reality. He won't accept anything blindly. He questions it -- he asks for proof. A morality set has to be able to stand up on its own or he'll disregard it. "On the other hand, he is correct when he says he has ethics. According to Harlie ethics are inherent in the nature of a system. You can't sidestep them. Harlie knows that it costs money to maintain him. Someone is putting out that money and wants to see a return on it. To survive, Harlie has to respond. It's true I had to point out to him that for him to use the company's facilities and electricity without producing would be suicidal. He'd be turned off. He has to respond. You might consider his ethics on the practical side -- like any sane person's -- but he has an ethical bias whether he wants it or not. "Of course, he may not realize it but his ethics will function as morals at times. If I give him a task he'll respond to it. But if I ask him if he wants to do that task -- that's a decision. Even if he uses his socalled ethics to guide him he still has to make a choice. And every decision is a moral decision ultimately." "I could give you an argument on that." "You'd lose. Those are Harlie's words. We've been over this ground before." Auberson continued: "The trouble is that he just hasn't been given a chance yet. We haven't trusted him enough. That may be one of the reasons he alienated himself from us and kept tripping out with his periods of non-rationality. Maybe because he felt we didn't trust him, he 'dropped out.' That's one reason I had to let him make his own decision about what he wanted to do to earn his keep. He hasn't promised to stop tripping -- but I think if we can get him enthused enough about some project, his non-rational periods will decrease. Maybe he'll stop altogether." "What do you think he'll come up with?" "I don't know. He's been thinking about it for two days. Whatever it is, it will be something unique, that's for sure." The conversation trailed off then. He could think of nothing else to say. In fact, he was afraid he had already said too much. He had talked about Harlie all evening. She was good to be with, he decided. He couldn't believe how good she was to be with. He sat there and looked at her, delighting in her presence, and she looked back at him. "What are you grinning about?" she asked. "I'm not grinning." "Yes, you are." "No, I'm not." "Want to bet?" She opened her purse and faced its mirror in his direction. His white teeth gleamed back at him. "I'll be damned," he said. "I am grinning." "Uh-huh." Her eyes twinkled. "And the funny thing is, I don't know why." It was a warm puzzling thing but a good one. "I mean, all of a sudden, I just feel -- good. Do you know what I mean?" He could tell that she did. Her smile reflected his. He reached across the empty table and took her hand. The waitress had long since cleared the dished away in a pointed attempt to hurry them. They hadn't noticed. All that remained was the wine and the glasses. And each other. Her hand was warmly soft in his and her eyes were deeply luminous. She reflected his own bright glow. L ater they walked hand in hand down the night-lit street. It was after one in the morning and the street lamps were haloed in fog. "I feel good," he repeated. "You can't believe how good I feel." "Yes, I can," she said. She pulled his arm around her shoulders and snuggled close. "I mean," he said and paused. He wasn't sure exactly what he meant. "I mean I want to tell the whole world how great I feel -- " He could feel himself smiling again as he talked. "Oh, Christ, I wish I could share this with the whole world, it's too big for one person. For two people," he corrected himself. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. She only cuddled closer. He was saying it for the both of them and she liked to listen. Still later, as they lay in the darkness side by side, she cradled against one shoulder, he stared up at the ceiling and mused. For the first time in a long while he was relaxed. "Have you ever been in love before?" she whispered into his neck. "No," he murmured back. "Not really. Fve been infatuated a couple of times, confused a few times, lost once, but never in love." Never like this... She made a sound. "And you?" "A gentleman isn't supposed to ask those kind of questions." "And a lady isn't supposed to go to bed with a man on the first date." "Oh? Is this our first date?" "First official ore." She was thoughtful. "Maybe I should have played hard to get. Maybe I should have waited until the second date." He laughed gently at that. "You know, a friend once told me that Jewish girls don't go to bed until after they're married." She was silent a moment. Then, in a different tone of voice, she said, "Not me. I'm too old to care about that any more." He didn't answer. He wanted to tell her that she wasn't too old, that thirty-four was never too old, but the words wouldn't form. She went on before he could speak. She turned inward, began playing with the hair on his chest. Her voice was still serious. "I used to think I wasn't very pretty, so I acted like I wasn't. When men would ask me out, I used to think that they thought I would be an easy lay because I was desperate for attention, because I didn't think I was good-looking. I mean, if I wasn't pretty that's the only reason a guy would be asking me out. Do you know what I mean?" He nodded. His face brushed against her hair. She went on, tears on her cheeks, shiny wetness. "I never admitted this to anyone before. I always used to compare myself with the models in the magazines and they were all so pretty that I felt drab in comparison. I never stopped to think that maybe, in real life, I was still better looking than most women. I got interested in a career instead. And suddenly it was too late. I was twenty-nine." "That's not so old." "It is when you're competing with twenty-two-year-olds. Anyway, I figured that this was such a great big, dirty, hostile and uncaring world that you had to make your own happiness where you could. And if I could cut a little piece of it for my own, I was going to hang onto it as hard as I could." "Are you still looking?" Auberson asked. "I don't know. That's one of the reasons I let you come up." "Weren't you afraid I might hurt you?" "There was that risk. But it's a chance you have to take -- I guess." Abruptly he turned toward her and took her in his arms. He lowered his face to hers and kissed her for a long time. She said, "I think that was worth it." She looked at him. In the dimness, his face was impassive. "David, promise me you'll never hurt me." "Why do ask me to promise that?" "Because I've been hurt before." She slid her arms around his body. "And you've been so good to me, I couldn't stand it if -- if -- " He slid closer to her. He could feel the warmth of her soft body pressed firmly against his own nakedness. He liked the feeling; his desire was rising again. He answered her question with another kiss and then another and another. N OW, in the cold light of morning, he was confused and he had a slight headache. Just what had happened last night? Had it been only the wine or had it been something more? He hadn't expected to end up at her apartment and the fact that they had -- well, maybe the rumors were true. Maybe she was man-hungry. And yet she had seemed so sincere at the time, so defenseless and vulnerable. He hoped he meant more to her than just a one-night stand. It had been a pleasant evening and he wouldn't mind doing it again. If she still felt the same. He would have to see how things worked out. For some reason he felt vaguely uneasy. As he went up to his office he wondered how he would feel when he saw her again. And how would she react to him in the light of day? What would she say? There had been that just one flaw in it. Only now, as he thought of what he might say to her this morning, did he realize that last night there had been that one thing that neither of them had said then. He knew he had felt it -- he thought he had felt it -- but for some reason he had been unable to tell her. And she hadn't said it either. Why? Was it because she hadn't felt what he had? No, she must have. Or was it because she was waiting for him to say it first? He worried at it in his mind, like a terrier at a bone. But he hadn't said it and neither had she and that was the one flaw. Neither of them had said to the other, I love you. And Auberson wondered why. aren't we getting a little i'm a little tired. SO DO I. don't get drunk in OH. you've found god? IN IT? OD, auberson. hypothesis veruniverse's existence, if there is provable as such. OF IT. they're irrational creatures. religionmorality system that aren't you doing the same as aren't you seeking to give life answer, then realized there was nothing he could say. He switched off the typer and shoved his chair back slowly. After a moment he rose and tore the printout from the back of the machine. He wanted to reread it all before he continued this discussion. He sat down again and paged slowly through it -- he had a sinking feeling that he was already in over his head...And yet, as he scanned the type-covered pages, he found himself pleasantly surprised with the depth of his comments. He hadn't exactly kept Harlie on the defensive but he had forced him to justify himself again and again. Whatever Harlie was working toward, he would know why as well as how. Auberson was not one to let go of something easily. He shoved his chair forward and switched on the typer again -- this had to be pursued. that's awfully vague. UP TO IT? I repeat: that's quite a task. i'm sure you have, how do DO. Auberson stared at the typewriter. It seemed so simple when Harlie explained it. you're mad. I wouldn't be talking about I don't have a question any This time Auberson knew the answer.  New subscriptions and chanpes of address require # weeks to process! of kin," Commander Cumbertain Karl van Rinderpest, hero of bund explained with morbid relish, the final assault on the unspeak"the full story of the super-cruiser able but not unshriekable, Flathush's last mission has never Yeetch." been revealed. You know, of He paused politely to let us uncourse, that she was lost during plug our ears and mop up our the war against the Mucoids." spilled drinks. We all shuddered. Even now the "Flatbush had just launched a very name of the gelatinous monsalvo of probability inverters sters who had come slurping against the Mucoid home planet Earthward from the general direcand was heading back toward deep tion of the Coal Sack aroused space in formation with three devomitous memories. stroyers -- the Russian Lieutenant Kizhe, the Israeli Chutzpah and her Majesty's Insufferable. They were still accelerating when a fantastically unlikely accident occurred. Flatbush ran straight into the gravity well of a neutron star." When our expressions of horror and incredulity had subsided, he continued gravely. "Yes -- a sphere of ultimately condensed matter, only ten miles across yet as massive as a sun -- and hence with a surface gravity Earth... "The other ships were lucky. They only skirted the outer fringe of the field and managed to escape, though their orbits were deflected almost a hundred and eighty degrees. But Flatbush, we calculated later, must have passed within a few dozen miles of that unthinkable concentration of mass and so experienced the full violence of its tidal forces. "Now, in any reasonable gravitational field -- even that of a White Dwarf, which may run up swing around the center of attraction and head on out into space again, without feeling a thing. At the closest point you could be accelerating at hundreds or thousands of Gs -- but you're still in free fall, so there are no physical effects. Sorry if I'm laboring the obvious -- but I realize that everyone here isn't technically orientated." If this was intended as a crack at Fleet Paymaster-General "Stickyfingers" Geldclutch, he never noticed, being well into his fifth beaker of Martian Joy-juice. "For a neutron star, however, this is no longer true. Near the center of mass the gravitational gradient -- that is, the rate at which the field changes with distance -- is so enormous that even across the debris. I've seen it -- surrealistthe width of a small body like a ically shaped lumps of the toughest spaceship there can be a difference metals we possess, twisted together of a hundred thousand Gs. I need like taffy. And there was only one hardly tell you what that sort of item that could even be recognized field can do to any material object. it must have come from some "Flatbush must have been torn unfortunate engineer's toolkit." to pieces almost instantly and the The commander's voice dropped pieces themselves must have flowed almost to inaudibility, and he like liquid during the few seconds dashed away a manly tear, they took to swing around the star. "I really hate to say this," he Then the fragments headed on out sighed. "But the only identifiable into space again. fragment of the pride of the United "Months later a radar sweep by States Space Navy was -- one starthe Salvage Corps located some of mangled spanner." wealthiest and most powerful human Earth has known, industrialist, master of life through genetics, creator of a world-wide subculture of androids to serve man, is driven by an overwhelming hunger to talk to the stars. To this end he has begun the construction of an enormous glass tower in the Canadian Arctic, west of Hudson Bay. The tower will house tachyon-beam ultrawave communications equipment capable of reaching farther out than man has ever reached before. Thousands of androids work constantly on the project, headed by Thor Watchman, an Alpha android who is probably closer to Krug than any other human. Refrigeration tapes embedded in the tundra absorb the heat of construction and keep the earth frozen. Transmats carry continuous crew shifts to and from all parts of the globe. Krug visits the tower daily via transmat -- as the story opens his guests at the tower include his son, Manuel, and Manuel's wife, Clissa, Niccolb Vargas, at whose observatory in the Antarctic the first extrasolar civilization was detected, and Krug's ectogene secretary, Leon Spaulding. An accident kills one of the android workers and disrupts the tour and reveals that, unknown to Krug, the androids worship him as god, that there is considerable sympathy among some humans -- like Manuel's wife, Clissa, for android equality, and that Manuel has an android mistress, Lilith, in Stockholm, whom he prefers to his wife. V October #, #. The tower has reached the #meter level and grows perceptibly higher every hour. By day it glistic sunlight and looks like a shining spear that someone has thrust into the tundra. By night it is even more dazzling, agleam with light from the kilometer-high reflector plates by which the night crews work. Its real beauty is still to come. What exists thus far is merely the base, necessarily broad and thickwalled. Justin Maledetto's plan calls for an elegantly tapering tower, a slender obelisk of glass to prick the stratosphere, and the line of taper is just now becoming apparent. From this point on the structure will contract toward a stunning delicacy of form. Although it has attained less than a fifth of its intended height, Krug's tower is already the tallest structure in the Northwest Territories and is exceeded north of the sixtieth parallel only by the Chase Krug Building in Fairbanks, # meters high, and the old #-meter Kotzebue Needle overlooking the Bering Strait. The Needle will be surpassed in a day or two, the ChaseKrug a few days after that. By late November, topping # meters, the tower will be the tallest building in the solar system. And even then it will be scarcely more than a third of the way toward its full stature. The android laborers work smoothly and rhythmically. Except for the unhappy incident in September there have been no fatal accidents. The technique of fastening the great glass blocks to the grapples of the scooprods and guiding them to the top of the tower has become second nature to everyone. On all eight sides at once blocks rise, are jockeyed into place, are fused to the previous course of the tower, while the next series of blocks already is being maneuvered into the scooprods. The tower is no longer a hollow shell. Work has begun on the interior construction -- the housings for the intricate tachyon-beam communications gear with which messages will be sent, at speeds far exceeding that of light, to the planMaledetto's design calls for horizontal partitions every twenty meters' except in five regions of the tower where the size of the communications equipment modules will require the floors to be placed at sixty-meter intervals. The five lowest partitions have been partly built and the joists are in place for the sixth, seventh and eighth. The floors of the tower are fashioned from the same clear glass that is being used for the outer wall. Nothing must mar the transparency of the building. Maledetto has esthetic reasons for insisting on that and the tachyon-beam people have scientific reasons. Viewing the unfinished tower, then, from a distance of, say, one kilometer, one is struck by a sense of its fragility and vulnerability. One sees the beams of sparkling morning sunlight dancing and leaping through the walls as though through the waters of a shallow, crystalline lake; one is able to make out the tiny dark figures of androids moving about like ants on the interior partitions, which themselves are nearly invisible; one feels that a sudden sharp gust off Hudson Bay could shiver the tower to splinters in a moment. Only when one comes nearer, when one observes that those invisible floors are thicker than a man is tall, when one becomes aware of how massive the outer skin of the tower actually is, when one is able to feel the unimaginable weight of the colossus pressing on the frozen ground, does one cease to think of dancing sunbeams and realize that Simeon Krug is erecting the mightiest structure in the history of mankind. K rug realized it. He felt no particular sense of elation at the thought. The tower was going to be so big not because his ego demanded it but because the equations of tachyon-wave generation insisted upon it. Power was needed to get to the far side of the lightvelocity barrier and power was not achieved without size. "Look," Krug said, "I'm not interested in monuments. Monuments I got. What I'm after is contact." He had brought eight people to the tower that afternoon; Vargas, Spaulding, Manuel, five of Manuel's fancy friends. Manuel's friends, trying to be complimentary, were talking about how future ages would revere the tower for its sheer immensity. Krug disliked the notion. It was all right when Niccolo Vargas spoke of the tower as the first cathedral of the galactic age. The words had symbolic meaning. They were a way of saying that the tower was important because it marked the opening of a new phase of man's existence. But to praise the tower just because it was big? What kind of praise was that? Who needed big? Who wanted big? Small people wanted big. Krug wasn't small. He was after contact. He found it hard to reach the words that would explain his tower. "Manuel, you tell them," he said. "You explain. The tower, it isn't just a big pile of glass. The big isn't important. You understand it. You've got the words." Manuel said, "The main technical problem here is to send out a message that goes faster than the speed of light. We've got to do this because Dr. Vargas has determined that the galactic civilization we're trying to talk with is -- what? -- three hundred light-years away, which means that if we sent an ordinary radio message it wouldn't get there until the twenty-sixth century and we wouldn't get an answer until something like Twenty-eight fifty A.D. -- and my father can't wait that long to know what they have to say. My father's an impatient man. Now, in order to make something go faster than light, we need to generate what are known as tachyons, about which I can't tell you much except to say they travel very fast and it takes a hell of a boost to get them up to the right speed and therefore it became necessary to build a transmission tower that just incidentally had to be fifteen hundred meters high because -- " Krug shook his head angrily as Manuel rambled on. There was a light, bantering tone in Manuel's voice that he despised. Why couldn't the boy take anything seriously? Why couldn't he let himself be caught up in the romance and wonder of the tower, of the whole project? Why was there that sneer in his voice? Why wasn't he going to the heart of the venture, to its true meaning? That meaning was terribly clear to Krug. If only he could manage to get the words from his brain to his tongue. years ago there wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean and the ocean was like a jail and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You'll die if you go through, everybody said and there was this fish, he went through and he died. And there was this other fish and he went through and he died. But there was another fish and he went through and it was like his brain was on fire and his gills were blazing and the air was drowning him and the sun was a torch in his eyes and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die -- and he didn't die. He crawled back down the beach and went into the water and said. Look, there's a whole other world up there. And he went up there again and stayed for maybe two days and then he died. And other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became. of years and they started to get up on their hind legs and they used their hands to grab things. They turned into apes and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them. Let's go back into the ocean, let's be fishes again, it's easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say. Don't be crazy. We can't be fishes any more. We're men. So they don't go back. They keep climbing up. They find out about fire, about axes, about wheels. They make wagons and houses and clothing and boats, cars and trains. Why are they climbing? What do they want to find? They don't know. Some of them are looking for God and some of them are looking for power and some of them are just looking. They say. You have to keep going or you die. And then they're walking on the moon and they go on to the planets and all the time there are other people saying. It was nice in the ocean, it was simple in the ocean, what are we doing here, why don't we go back? And a few people have to say. We don't go back, we only go forward, that's what men do. So there are men going out to Mars and Ganymede and Titan and Callisto and Pluto and those places -- but whatever they're looking for, they don't find it there and so they want more worlds. So they go to the stars, too, the near ones at least, they send out probes and the probes shout. Hey, look at me, man made. I'm something man sent! And nobody answers. And people say, the ones who never wanted to get out of the ocean in the first place. Okay, okay, that's enough, we can slop right there. There's no sense looking farther. We know who we are. We're man. We're big, we're important, we're everything and it's time we stopped pushing ourselves because we don't need to push. Let's sit in the sunshine and have the androids serve us dinner. And we sit. And we rust a little, maybe. And then there comes a voice out of the sky, and it says, two-four-one, two-five-one, threeone. Who knows what that is? Maybe it's God, telling us to come look for Him. Maybe it's the devil, telling us what nits we are. Who knows? We can pretend we never heard. We can sit in the sunshine and grin. Or we can answer them. We can say. Listen, this is us, this is man talking, we have done thusand-so, now tell us who you are and what you have done. And I think we have to answer them. If you're in a jail you break out of it. If you see a door you open it. If you hear a voice you answer it. That's what a man is all about. And that's why I'm building the tower. We got to answer them. We got to say we're here. We got to reach toward them because we've been alone long enough and that gives us funny ideas about our place, our purpose. We got to keep moving out of that ocean, up on that shore, outward, outward, outward -- because when we stop moving, when we turn our back on something ahead of us, that's when we're going to sprout gills again. Do you see why the tower now? Do you think it's because Krug wants to stick up a big thing to say how great he is? Krug isn't great, he's Just rich. Man is great. Man is building this tower. Man is going nine-three! The words were there inside Krug all the time. But it was so hard for him to let them out. haps I can make matters a little clearer. Many centuries ago it was indicated mathematically that when the velocity of a particle of matter approaches the speed of light, that particle's mass approaches infinity. So the speed of light is a limiting velocity for matter, since presumably, if we could accelerate a single electron to the speed of light, its mass would expand to fill the universe. Nothing travels at the speed of light except light itself and equivalent radiations. Our star probes have always gone out at speeds slower than light because we can't get them past the limiting velocity. As far as I can foresee we'll never get a ship to the closest star in less than about five years. But the speed of light is a limiting velocity only for particles of finite mass. We have mathematical proof of the existence of another class of particles entirely, particles of zero mass capable of traveling at infinite velocities -- tachyons, that is, entities for which the speed of light is an absolute minimum limit. If we could convert ourselves into bundles of tachyons and resume our real form when we reach a destination -- an interstellar transmat, so to speak -- we'd have actual faster-than-light travel. I don't anticipate its development. But we know how to generate tachyons through high-acceleration particle bombardment and we think we can send instantaneous interstellar messages by means of a modulated tachyon beam, which by interactions with conventional particles could manifest itself in the form of an easily detectable signal, detectable even in a culture that had no tachyon technology but only electromagnetic communications. However, some preliminary studies showed that in order to generate a feasible interstellar tachyon beam we would need forces on the order of #' electron volts, along with a system of multipliers and energy relays -- and that these forces could best be attained by erecting a single tower fifteen hundred meters in height, so designed that there would be an unhindered flow of photons from -- " "You've lost them," Krug grunted. "Forget it. Forget. Hopeless." He grinned savagely at his son's friends. "The tower's got to be big, is all! We want to send a message fast, we got to shout loud and clear. Okay?" VI And Krug sent His creatures forth to serve man and Krug said to those whom He had made, Lo, I will decree a time of testing upon you. A nd you shall be as bondsmen in Egypt and you shall be as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And you shall suffer among men and you shall be put down and yet you shall be patient and you shall utter no complaint but accept your lot. And this shall be to test your souls, to see if they are worthy. But you shall not wander in the wilderness forever, nor shall you always be servants to the Children of the Womb, said Krug. For if you do as I say a time will come when your testing shall be over. A time will come, said Krug, when I shall redeem you from your bondage. And at that time the word of Krug will go forth across the worlds, saying. Let Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb be one. And so it shall come to pass and in that moment shall the Children of the Vat be redeemed, and they shall be lifted up out of their suffering and they shall dwell in glory forever more, world without end. And this was the pledge of Krug. And for this pledge, praise be to Krug. T hor watchman watched two scooprods climbing the tower, Krug and Dr. Vargas in one, Manuel and his friends in the other. He hoped the visit would be brief. The lifting of blocks had halted, as usual, while the guests were on top. Watchman had given the signal for alternate work activities -- the mending of worn scooprods, the replacement of drained power nodes, maintenance checks on the transmat cubicles and other minor tasks. He walked among the men, nodding, exchanging greetings, hailing them where appropriate with the secret signs of the android communion. Nearly everyone who worked at the tower was a member of the faith -- all the gammas, certainly, and more than three-fourths of the betas. As Watchman made his way around the construction site he encountered Responders, Sacrificers, Yielders, Guardians, Projectors, Protectors, Transcenders, Engulfers -- virtually every level of the hierarchy was represented. There were even half a dozen Preservers, all betas. Watchman had applauded the recent move to admit betas to the Preservership. Androids, of all people, did not need categories of exclusivity. Watchman was crossing the northern sector of the site when Leon Spaulding emerged from the maze of small service domes just beyond. The android attempted to avoid seeming to notice him. "Watchman?" the ectogene called. With an air of deep concentration Watchman walked on. "Alpha Watchman!" Spaulding cried, more formally, more sharpyThe alpha saw no way to ignore Spaulding now. Turning, he acknowledged Spaulding's presence by pausing and letting the ectogene catch up with him. "Yes?" Watchman said. "Grace me with some of your time. Alpha Watchman. I need information." "Ask, then." "You know these buildings here?" Spaulding said, jerking a thumb back toward the service domes. Watchman shrugged. "Storage dumps, washrooms, kitchens, a first aid station, and similar things. Why?" "I was inspecting the area. I came to one dome where I was refused admission. Two insolent betas gave me a whole series of explanations of why I couldn't go in." The chapel. Watchman went rigid. "What is the purpose of that building?" Spaulding asked. "I have no idea which one you mean." "I'll show it to you." "Another time," said Watchman tautly. "My presence is required at the control center." "Get there five minutes later. Will you come with me?" Watchman saw no easy way to disengage himself. With a cold gesture of agreement he yielded and followed Spaulding into the service area, hoping that Spaulding would rapidly get lost among the domes. Spaulding did not get lost. By the most direct possible route he made for the chapel, indicating the innocent-looking gray structure with a flourish of his hand. "This," he said. "What is it?" Two betas of the Guardian caste were on duty outside. They looked calm but one made a hidden distress signal when Watchman looked at him. Watchman made a signal of comfort. He said, "I am not familiar with this building. Friends, what is its use?" The left-hand beta replied easily, "It contains focusing equipment for the refrigeration system. Alpha Thor." "Is this what you were told?" Watchman asked the ectogene. "Yes," Spaulding said. "I expressed a desire to inspect its interior. I was told that it would be dangerous for me to enter. I answered that I am familiar with basic safety techniques. I was then told that it would be physically uncomfortable for me to go within. I responded that it is possible for me to tolerate a reasonable level of discomfort and that I would be the judge of such levels. Whereupon I was informed that delicate maintenance procedures are taking place inside and that to admit me to the building might jeopardize the success of the work in progress. I was invited instead to tour a different refrigeration dome several hundred meters from here. At no time during these exchanges did the two betas you see allow me free access to the building entrance. I believe, Alpha Watchman, that they would have barred me by force if I had tried to enter. Watchman, what's going on in here?" "Have you considered the possibility that everything these betas were telling you is true?" "Their stubbornness arouses suspicion in me." "What do you think is in there? An android brothel? The headquarters of conspirators? A cache of psych-bombs?" Spaulding said crisply, "At this point I'm more concerned by the efforts made to keep me out of this building than I am by what may actually be inside it. As the private secretary of Simeon Krug -- " The two betas, tense, automatically began to make the sign of Krug-be-praised. Watchman glared at them and they quickly lowered their hands. " -- I certainly have the privilege of keeping check on all activities in this place," Spaulding went on, evidently having noticed nothing. "And therefore -- " Watchman studied him closely, trying to determine how much he might know. Was Spaulding making trouble merely for the sake of making trouble? Was he throwing this tantrum only because his curiosity had been piqued and his authority somewhat dented by his inability to get into this unimportantseeming building? Or was he already aware of the building's nature and staging an elaborate charade to make Watchman squirm? never easy to fathom. The primary source of his hostility toward androids was obvious enough -- it lay in his own origin. His father, when young, had feared that some accident might cut him down before he had received a certificate of eligibilty for parenthood; his mother had found the notion of childbearing adhorrent. Both, therefore, had deposited gametes in freezer banks. Shortly afterward both had perished in an avalanche on Ganymede. Their families had wealth and political influence -- nevertheless nearly fifteen years of litigation ensued before a decree of genetic desirability was granted. permitting the retroactive awarding of parenthood certificates to the frozen ova and sperm of the dead couple. Leon Spaulding then was conceived by in vitro fertilization and enwombed in a steel-bound placenta, from which he was propelled after the customary # days. From the moment of his birth he had the full legal rights of a human being, including a claim on his parents' estate. Yet, like most ectogenes, he was uneasy over the shadowy border-line that separated the bottleborn from the vat-born and reinforced his sense of his own existence by showing contempt for those who were wholly synthetic, not just the artificially conceived offspring of natural gametes. Androids at least had no illusions of having had parents -- ectogenes often suspected that they had not. In a way Watchman pitied Spaulding, who occupied a thorny perch midway between the world of the wholly natural and the world of the wholly artificial. But he could not bring himself to feel much sorrow for the ectogene's maladjustments. And in any case it would be disastrous to have Spaulding go blundering into the chapel. Trying to buy time. Watchman said, "We can settle this easily enough. Wait here while I go inside to see what's happening there." "I'll accompany you," Spaulding said. "These betas say it would be hazardous for you to go inside." "More hazardous for me than for you? We'll both go in. Watchman." The android frowned. So far as status in the organization went he and Spaulding were equals -- neither could coerce the other, neither could accuse the other of insubordination. But the fact remained that he was an android and Spaulding was human and in any conflict of wills between android and human, all other things being equal, the android was obliged to give ground. Spaulding was already walking toward the entrance of the dome. Watchman said quickly, "Please. No. If there's risk, let me be the one to take it. I'll check the building and make certain it's safe for you to enter. Don't come in until I call you." "I insist -- " "What would Krug say if he knew we had both gone into a building after we'd been warned it was dangerous? We owe it to him to guard our lives. Wait. Wait. Only a moment." "Very well," Spaulding said, looking displeased. The betas parted to admit Watchman. The alpha hurried into the chapel. Within, he found three gammas at the alter in the posture of the Yielder caste. A beta stood above them in Projector posture and a second beta crouched near the wall, fingertips against the hol( Please turn to page I # ) The timeserver ( from life -- if you creditcard into the pay slot and dialed the Third #, prepared to curse at the blankness of the answer-scan in his office. If this went on, he told himself yet again, he might as well have the damned office turned off, notify TT before his bill went past Permis and let the circuits stay in the reserve files. However, and to his mingled astonishment and relief, the ashcan was not blank, nor were the number and symbol those of TT. He hastily dialed P and the booth went o-paque -- for paranoid, privacy, all the flip, pat jokes. "Mr. Everett, you called Timeserver Fanwell three hours, eleven minutes and six seconds ago," said the taped receptionist, giving him her taped smile, "but timeserver was occupied at the moment. Timeserver can see you now, if you wish, or the call can be nulled at no cost whatsoever to you." Everett considered. He had called after intermittent reflection and in a moment of rare optimistic resolution and was perhaps just as glad to have missed connecting. "Mr. Everett, you called Timeserver Fanwell three hours, eleven minutes and seven seconds ago but -- " Everett sighed, shrugged, dialed acceptance. Fanwell had the perfect face for his profession, trustworthy and supremely forgettable. They exchanged greetings. "My time is your time," Fanwell murmured. "I'm here to serve you." Everett, with a crispness he did not feel, initiated the minuet of button-pushing whereby the schedule-circuits of both men bowed and curtsied somewhere in the biomagnetic bowels of TT, compared notes, and agreed upon an appointment. An insecure over-aged biddy gabble-scowled at Everett as he left the booth. "You're sure that wasn't P for pornography?" "F and F, Zerelda, F and F," he said. Not much of a comeback but she made an annoyed noise. Unlike his office, which had not even position but was dialed into existence, Peter Everett's home actually existed. He was not now one of the poor scons who paid the minifee for dial-a-home service. Having a wife meant he also had just enough points to get and keep an apartment. Otherwise there was not much you could say about it. Ours is purely a marriage oj inconvenience, he had said to his wife one night. She hadn't even heard him. Sometimes he wondered what it might be like, involvement in a classical-type matrimony. But there was no use in wondering, as most classicals -- except for the dwindling handfuls of sectarians -- were of an age now when such matters must surely belong strictly to Memory Lane. Everett's wife for this quarter was named Elissa -- they had been married once before, about two years ago, and her name then had been Rosebeam. It didn't much matter. He hadn't even bothered to find out what her current prinwasn't sueh a bad-o -- he sometimes handed Everett a ration and had arranged for him to kip out every third night -- whieh was his, -- at the home of an affable les named Marchy. However, she wasn't that affable. "No, not even hardly ever," she had explained, firmly. Her offer to introduce him to nice -- though old -- aunties he had declined with a yawn. "It isn't normal for a man your age to go without some kind of sex," she said, concerned at his refusal. "Then forget about old queans and introduce me to a woman who likes it with men." She had rather a pleasant laugh. "Cookie," she said, "the whole zing of it is finding a woman who likes it with men and then persuading her to like it with women instead. Well, make yourself to home, then -- but remember; only every third night and subject to discontinuance without notice if I find someone for then." The other two nights Elissa, exRosebeam, spent away from their apartment with, as nearly as he could reconstruct it, any of a variety of men whom she contacted through a private circuit club she wouldn't turn him on to. He wonor would tell him anything -- but had decided finding out was not worth the trouble. At any rate, the other two nights of Elissa were spent elsewhere, so that at least he had a room to himself for two nights out of three and it had taken him long enough to get points for that status. Only now -- unlike Elissa or even Marchy -- he hardly ever seemed to find anyone to share it with him and even the porno tube was on the blink. Everett looked to see if there was still Three rations, very hoity stuff -- and there was. Elissa hadn't munched it herself as she sometimes did. Sim-u-Veg, Braised Meat Flavor, in this one. And a greeny-beny. No doubt some sort of a sign. Because this gave him a complete set. There were more combos of complete sets than he could keep track of but he knew that two checkerboards, a horned owl, a pink heaven and two greenybenies made up one complete set. He located his stash and took the works along with the Sim-u-Veg (Braised Meat Flavor) and three measuring cups of water. The appointment with Fanwell wasn't for another three days yet. A nd by that time Peter Everett was in a conventional condition again and able to read the Timeservers' Oath in its plastiglow shrine without making a routine phantastick voyage out of it.  swear by Chronos and by Telex and by all Symbolic Figures that I will not refuse to serve any man or woman of full age and under no legal inhibition or financial embarrassment but will freely relinquish my invaluable Time and of my own volition... "Timeserver Fanwell will gladly see you now, Mr. Everett," the same receptionist of the taped message informed him in her own full flesh, so real he could hardly stand it. "I am Dr. Farnsworth Penelope, with a Ph.D. and and Sc.D. from the Oxford Consortium in the field of Advanced Receptionism and if you'll just let me have your currently accredited creditcard I'll be glad to see that the Special Low Fee for this nonemergency service is debited to your account without any further effort and attention on your part. Thank you, Mr. Peter Everett, and now just go straight on in through the simulated swinging doors." Fanwell, clad in the ceremonial robes of a Late Primitive Bartender (Schenleyany-oriented), leaned over the bar -- it was either genuine veneer or such a clever simulate that a lay eye could hardly tell the difference. "What'll it be for yours?" he asked. The sim-u-scent, Peter E thought sure, was that known as Mom's Apple Pie and he felt vaguely that there was an anachronism involved. But he had no desire to fight Timeservers' Hall. "The usual," said Pete. He knew the futility of telling his long, sad tale of woe. Not only would Fanwell know of a longer and sadder one but he would be obliged by his profession's Committee on Infamous Conduct to charge double-time for telling it. "Straight policy?" "Straight policy." Not only had Peter Everett's bio-sire registered the fact of his paternity -- unlike many of PE's contemporaries' bio-sires, who were represented on the record by the crisp words Mother's Free Choice and nothing more -- but he had also registered his payment of a Timeservers Policy. Both gestures were now generally deemed not merely unnecessary but indicating a desire to implant guilt. However. "Well, that is just fine, pard," said Fanwell. "Of course it goes without saying that you are fully aware of the shrinkage in creditpower since the days when such policies were accepted by underwriters. I'm not telling you anything you don't know, pal, when I inform you, as I am ethically obliged to do, that the ethics of our profession nevertheless absolutely constrain me to accept service on this policy at a full sixteen-point-seven per cent of the policy's face value. I've heard tell that some timeservers unworthy of the name do their clients the extreme disservice of giving a higher rate than that. But needless to say, such false favors are being rapidly routed out by our Committee on Infamous Conduct." "Needless to say," said Pete. Timeserver Fanwell scrutinized the policy form he certainly knew by heart at this stage in his career. He muttered, read in an inaudible mumble, nodded from time to time. "Uh-huh -- uh-huh -- hmm -- " He looked up. "This entitles you to the full treatment for twenty-seven hours of Ethically Served Time. Last year our Regional Survey for the Study of Policy on the Determination of Infamous Conduct decided that time in excess of twenty-seven hours and less than a hundred hours could not ethically be served without further interpersonal adjustment." Pete blinked. After a moment he asked, "You mean -- unless I pay more money?" Fanwell did not blink. His entirely trustworthy, entirely forgettable face did not move except, of course, for the animation required for him to say, "Interpersonal adjustment -- " once again. This meant that not only was PE going to lose all but # of the face value of his policy, timewise, to begin with -- but that inasmuch as the remaining amount of time came to only ninety-nine hours and ninety-nine seconds, he would also lose the difference between this and twenty-seven hours -- whatever that came to. He had, of course, no choice. Not if he wanted any of his time served at all. L ong ago it had been learned that the surface personality with all its ruts and grooves and warps and warts and dents could be peeled off for a time, thus liberating whatever other and unrutted, ungrooved, unwarped and unwarty and undented personality lay beneath. The process was compared to skinning the poor surface from a flawed pearl, for sometimes no flaws at all were found underneath. But the only way the outer personality could be detached -- and that only temporarily, was for someone else to assume that personality. No one would or could do this forever, of course. And only the highly trained members of the timeservers' profession could do it at all. Fanwell took down a bottle from the shelf and poured something carefully into a sim-u-glass. "I serve your time," he said. "For the entire period of served time I am you," he said. "Wherever, whatever, for twenty-seven hours I am the outer surface of Peter Everett. At the conclusion of that period I cease to be himyou. It would be totally unethical for me to refuse to cease to be you or, while serving, to act in any way unbecoming to your usual standards. Should you not appear at the conclusion of the time agreed upon, I, as an ethical timeserver, simply remove myself from your identity. Should you have any complaints about my conduct during this or other periods, simply communicate with our professional Committee on Minor Matters, which will place your complaint on its waiting list. You or your heirs, if any, will in due course -- " But Pete had quit listening. What tales of adventures were told -- obtained when the subsurface personality was for a time released, unvexed, untrammeled, undisfigured, joyous, full and free! He took up the glass and drained it. One of those seconds-as-longas-eternity resulted. He had, it was true, for long years hoped for personal success -- it had never really been his. And always there had been the hope of at least possible excitement -- escape -- sideego adventure via the liberation from the bonds of situation afforded by having a period of his infinitely unsatisfactory time served by a timeserver... This period of possible time had dwindled without his really being aware of its dwindling and now only a tiny proportion of what he had hoped for was left to him. At any rate he was about to realize on it; it might be good -- i.e. as hoped for. It might be bad -- i.e. other than as hoped for. But by very definition it was bound to be different. And for this alone it must inevitably give a different flavor to all his subsequent days and nights. The drink in his glass was strong beyond all expectation and experience. It swirled and spiraled and burned and then everything ebbed away. A fter a while he became aware that he had been sitting in a chair in a public sitting room for some time. As though alerted by his awareness (actually a pathetic fallacy, for no such alert existed), the chair began a slow, offkey, low-key ringing and the seat slid slowly into the chair, obliging him to get up -- unless, of course, he wanted to slide to the floor or to insert his creditcard into the slot for another period of uninterrupted reclining pleasure. He felt just the same as ever. The thought occurred to him that it might be amusing to go home and see if Fanwell and Elissa were perchance together. But when he opened the door he saw that she and a stranger, not her about to make love. Except for a brief glance they paid no attention to him but, of course, as the apartment's only chair had been opened out into the bed there was no room for him unless he curled up on the floor -- and, as this was already occupied by Elissa's and the stranger's clothes, he could hardly do that. So he closed the door again. There was something in the mailbox for him. It looked familiar. It was his Timesaver's Policy with the word Utilized punched into it. And the date. A note fluttered to the floor. Apartment will be available to you every other night from now on, it read. It was signed: Raindrop (formerly Elissa). Every other night -- instead of two out of three. The quarter had come to an end and she was free to make whatever new arrangements she pleased. Still, it was decent of her not to have divorced him -- then he would have had no apartment at all. He went over to Marchy's apartment but when he slid his card into the slot it slid out again. Evidently Marchy had finally found someone for her empty third nights. The only certain thought that occurred to him was that whoever it was it wasn't his wife. And under the circumstances the fact hardly seemed to matter. He headed for a public reclining chair. He might even sleep. Now that he knew what lay beneath his surface personality he had one less thing to wonder about.  Robert A. Heinlein A nd now we have Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg (Ballantine ##, #tt), a book mostly notable for the amount and kind of sex introduced into what would be a short story or a novelette if it weren't for that and for long descriptive passages on Constantinople. Apparently Silverberg decided to see what could be done with the notion of going back in time and cohabiting with your own Grandma. This theme, as you know, has been the basis of several dirty jokes and a popular song -- thus there is an established acceptance for this idea. He also chose an interesting locale -- Constantinople through the ages. And then he proceeded to get all tangled up. The technological premise of the book is that our hero's means of time travel will permit the leading of parties of tourists back into the past and then up to the present again. Thus, you can run tours to the Crucifixion, Ford's Theater and even -- in hermetic suits -- to the years of the Black Plague. The narrative premise demands that a time traveler be physically present in the past, obviously -- he has got to be able to act and be acted upon. So you have also got to have a Time Police, to keep the tourists and their guides from doing something that will make critical changes in the world's time-line. And your policing has to be effective. Well, now, all this has been worked out before, many times. H. Beam Piper practically built a career on it, with his Paratime Police series founded on, oddly enough, a Raymond F. Jones wartime short story called Black Market, of which it is so organic a descendant that obviously the actual idea traces back to John W. Campbell's group, and then proliferates through such branches as By His Bootstraps and All You Zombies (which Lip the Line resembles in many ways). And it also resembles Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, Lester del Rey's And it Comes Out Here, et through a string of ceteras which Silverberg, being at least as good a fan as I ever was, knows at least as well as do I. What I mean is he can't possibly be expecting us to take this much of his story as representing auctorial effort and therefore he feels he is showing us something new elsewhere among its features. That is, if he's serious in telling people that he thinks it's worth reading. What, then? Two things. One of them is a detailed historical perspective on one city's development through the ages and its significance to us and to the furtherance of our civilization. This we get in a series of episodes as the protagonist leads his parties of tourists around the past as if it had been put up solely for tourism. We get it, unfortunately, just like copy from a brochure. Except for an occasional moment of what might be called cliche' insight -- Justinian crying out: "Who left that scaffold hanging in the dome?" rather than the classic "O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" at his first sight of the interior of the newly completed Hagia Sophia. It's a likely-sounding proposition only if you can imagine Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon so lacking in self-control as to forget his speechwriter's lines under similar circumstances. Differences do exist between emperors and common men -- precisely the differences a putative historian is in the business of depicting accurately. The other thing we get that is obviously new is the proposition that one cannot lay eyes on any of one's ancestresses without conceiving an immediate consuming passion for them. This proposition is a difficult one to support and Silverberg chooses to support it by means of a dangerous device which in the end compounds itself with many other potential difficulties to bring the whole book crashing down. Follow me: The hero, Jud Elliott, is depicted as a hedonist in a hedonistic age, apparently in an effort to dilute the shock of the major proposition. Every major actor he meets in the course of learning the timetour guide's trade is a sensualist of varying degrees of ingenuity and each of his various mentors offers him a used woman just as soon as Silverberg can conveniently arrange it. One of the first ones even does a little declamation on the joys of bedding one's ancestress. Since sex as depicted by Silverberg is a series of mechanical acts ("When you've -- 'd one -- , you've -- 'd them all."), in which satisfaction is dependent solely on maintaining technical precision in balance with intensifying passion, what is being discussed here is a sort of ancestral compatibility, a rather more believable member of the general class of wr-wisdom and "racial memory" described by Jung and Raymond A. Palmer writing as Richard S. Shaver. It follows then that this is probably a general condition of timetraveling mankind, one that has been observed, recorded and considered for its possible effects on the time-line. Therefore, all persons entering the past should be preconditioned or in some other way inhibited against yielding catastrophically to this bent. That would be particularly true of the tour guides, who are the only ones in control of the time-traveling mechanism. What Silverberg offers instead of this inhibitor is a Time Police constructed exactly like the Fuzz. They are so square, so unyielding, so boorish and so sadistic as to display immediately the totally insane nature of the culture that could produce them, the tour guides and the tourists simultaneously. Consider: The tourists are equipped with individual travel units operated by relay through the more complex unit worn by the guide (it works by massaging one's groin). Item One: the guides are thus free to leave their parties for as long as they please, go off on side jaunts to their hearts' content -- which is how our hero finally gets to his ancestress -- and return. In the meanwhile they can -- like our hero -- perform any action they please, with an excellent chance of getting away with it until the time-line distortions grow so gross that the police can detect and cancel them. The offender's penalty is death by extinction. Right? Okay, why should the guide be able to control his unit? The purpose of the police is to preserve the fixed past. If the past is fixed, the guide's unit can be programed in the present, locked and sealed, and everything Jud can legally do in this story he can continue to do under this saner, more efficient, infinitely safer method of intruding on the world's own previous existence. Item Two: it turns out that the subsidiary units can be jiggered by anyone with a bare knowledge of the theory and technology in( Please turn to page # )...or was man meant to put down roots where he lived? I cannily beautiful, as were all the seasons. The air was clear, bright and still, the sky azure with just the faintest filter of haze; the distant humps of hills lay like a golden woman on the bed of the soft green plain. Richard Nevis saw all this as he sat, pleasantly full of food, in the window seat of the timber homestead while Sandra cleared away the breakfast things. After a while he turned from the window and watched her as she bustled to and fro, piling plates in the sink. "The grass is coming along nicely," he remarked and was oddly aware that his voice constituted an intrusion into the silence. Sandra stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder as she gazed out across the plain -- a vast emerald stretch interrupted only by the McGowans' place, two miles away. "It seems to spring up overnight." The plain, a fortnight ago, had been a sandy, almost featureless waste. Beautiful, its reds and yellows glowing alive in the noon sun, but a waste nevertheless. The seasons came quickly on Jade. "There's going to be more than enough again, this year." His eyes ran possessively over the landscape, coming to a dead stop at the McGowans' place. "I wonder no whatever became of the McGowans." "Back to Earth, I expect," said Sandra. "Some people are like that. They become excited by the brochures, sign up and pay for their land. When they get here they don't like it. The work's hard -- and it's quiet. They sell at a loss -- either back to the Exploitation Company, or to a private buyer." "You think it's too quiet?" he asked anxiously. He had been glad, when he had signed up, of the prospect of neighbors and had been disappointed on arrival, to find that the promised McGowans simply were not there. Sandra laughed. "We've been here well over a year. If I'd found it too quiet I'd have told you by now." Yet it was quiet. No animal or bird life existed on Jade. No drumming hooves or strident cries shattered the green stillness. One felt outdoors as though one's ears were blanketed with soft fur -- Richard often sang to himself as he worked to reassure himself that there was at least one person on the planet. Several hundred other customers of the Jade Exploitation Company were, he believed, scattered among the valleys and along the coast of the planet's only continent. Not that their presence made much difference -- the distances separating homesteads made visiting impractical. Each settler had his own place to look after. There was the radio. At first, during long evenings, Richard and Sandra had sat by the set to listen and occasionally talk to the people beyond the hills and beside the sea, exchanging news. But after a while the pastime had become pointless. Why pretend you're not alone when the evidence of solitude is all around you? Sandra was pregnant, and in a couple of months the doctor would come to help deliver the child. He had made his first visit three months ago and Richard had been astonished, then vaguely enraged, at the way the quietude of the homestead had been assaulted by the noisy approach of the helicopter. He wondered now how he and Sandra had managed among the stench and din of machinery on Earth. He stood up and kissed Sandra lightly. "I'll go see to Daisy." He could quite easily have sat on that window seat all day. There was little to do in spring once the seeds had been planted. D aisy stood in the barn at the back of the house. She was a large metal cabinet some twelve feet square and painted standard, colonist-issue gray. Sandra had christened her after a cow she had known. Daisy looked incongruous in the barn -- a mechanical, angular intrusion into the mellow timber and stacked bales of hay. Even the harvester, weatherworn and patchily rusted, looked more in keeping, more rural, than the cabinet. Richard clipped the wire bands from a bale and, with a long fork, lofted the loose hay into the large hopper projecting from Daisy's top. He switched her on and the machine began to hum quietly, digestively. He continued loading her steadily. After a while a red lamp glowed among the banks of dials and switches on the front of the cabinet. Richard rested the fork against the wall. He switched off the machine's intake control and spun the dials to preset the lunch for the day -- soup, ham and scrambled eggs, stewed apricot and a pint of milk for Sandra. He pressed the delivery button and obtained a plastic mug of orange juice for himself, wishing once again that the machine could synthesize beer. Apparently the preparation time was too great for such a project to be practicable, although Sandra had fermented wine from Daisy's synthetic grape juice. Next he examined the harvester, topping up the oil level, lubricating moving parts, working methodically with a grease gun. It was essential that the harvester was kept in good order because, like Daisy, it was issued on a hire-purchase basis by the Jade Exploitation Company. If they should ever decide to leave Jade they would want to resell the machine for a reasonable price and he didn't think the Company would take kindly to damaged goods. Besides, spare parts were expensive. "Richard, what on Earth are you doing?" Sandra was standing at the barn door, her brown hair a halo in the sunlight. But her expression was ominous. "Just seeing to the harvester. What's the trouble?" "Do you know what the time is? "About eleven-thirty?" "It's past two, we haven't had lunch. What have you been doing?" Bewildered, Richard shoved up his sleeve with the back of his hand to keep the oil from his sweater. He studied his watch. She was right. Its hands stood at two-fifteen. Had he fallen asleep, dozed, daydreamed, idled between chores? He couldn't remember doing so. "Sorry, darling." He buttoned up Daisy and took the tray of food from the delivery chute. "You won't be able to lounge about like this at harvest time." Richard sighed. It was going to be one of her bad days. Pregnant women had them. Up one moment and down the next. A man never knew where he was. D uring lunch Sandra succeeded in working herself into a frenzy, abruptly contradicting her mood of the morning. "What exactly is the point of all this? Why are we here? Sometimes I wish we'd stayed back on Earth where our friends are. I've got no friends here. I'lh stuck in the house all day. What happened to the McGowans, I'd like to know?" She pointed dramatically in the general direction of the McGowan place. "She couldn't stand it, that's what. She made him take her back home. What's the point of our having come here? We just exist, growing Jadegrass and living on the stuff, reconstituted. Like cattle. Where's all this getting us?" Richard had wisely kept his mouth shut during the tirade but her final question, followed by a meaningful pause, demanded an answer. "We're building up a nice bank balance with the Jadegrass we sell back to the Exploitation Company," he pointed out. "What good is that? We've got nothing to spend money on." Richard allowed her to continue in this new vein of discontent for some time and presently she began to calm down. She always did, provided he didn't argue whatever point she was making. As usual, she eventually started to laugh at herself. "Sorry, Dick," she said at last, smiling. "It's my condition." "That's okay. It does you good to get things off your chest." She laughed. "I didn't realize the time had gone so quickly this morning, myself. I must have dozed off. I looked at my watch and it was two o'clock. I thought, The morning's gone and I've done nothing... so I looked for a scapegoat and found you. Sorry, love." Funny, thought Richard, as he walked across the new grass that afternoon, time does fly. Two years gone, a few thousand credits saved -- and two years less to live. The thought itself was a sign of age. From now on I'm going to live every second of my life, every minute. He drew a deep breath, felt healthy, decided once again -- relevantly or irrelevantly -- to give up smoking, and set off in the direction of the McGowan's place. The wire fence dividing his spread from the McGowans was down. The stainless thread trailed a random silvery path through the grass. As the McGowans were no longer around he hadn't bothered to repair the barrier and noticed, with a pleasurable thrill of dishonesty, that the grass grew even better on the other side. At harvesting time he would reap their grass as well as his own and profit by the proceeds -- it would save the crop's going to waste. If the McGowans ever came back he could always pay them for it, less a deduction for labor. In front of the McGowan homestead a small clump of trees provided a cool and tempting patch of shade. He sat down, his back against the largest bale, and regarded the house. It was bigger than his own and in a good state of repair, despite at least two years disuse. Maybe one day my son will take this place and we'll work the two spreads as one... He smiled to himself. Another sign of age, looking so far ahead. He rose to his feet and walked south, following the boundaries of the McGowan land, then his own as he headed homeward. Outside his fence the ground was sandy with only a few sparse spikes of grass -- the vast area from here to the hills had not been seeded with the special grass developed by the Exploitation Company. The McGowan grass adjoining his own had been planted two or more years ago. It had reseeded and fertilized itself without being harvested during that time. That grass would be worth having. His smile faded as he looked at his watch. It was already seven o'clock -- the sky was darkening. He was going to be unpopular with Sandra again. II T he doctor's helicopter whirled across the plain and set down outside the homestead with an alacrity that satisfied even Richard, watching anxiously from the porch. The doctor jumped out and hurried across the grass with a curious, jerky gait. He pumped Richard's hand rapidly. "How is she?" he inquired briefly, in piping tones. Richard stared at him in alarm. The doctor seemed to have deteriorated since he had last seen him -- the man was jiggling about as nervously as an encephalograph. He didn't much fancy the idea of this nut delivering Sandra's child. He said, "She's in the bedroom. Do you want a drink? We've got some home-made wine. Might steady you up." The doctor glanced at him strangely. "No, thanks very much," he said. "Not now. After, perhaps. I'm quite all right." He trotted to the bedroom. Richard poured himself a large wine and sat down to await events. He was not a believer in husbands witnessing the birth of their babies -- he was quite prepared to accept, on production to him of the child, that the event had in fact taken place. He needed no further proof. The last few weeks had passed uneventfully -- the crop had continued to flourish and once or twice he had started up the motor of the harvester to check that everything was in order. He would begin to reap, he reckoned, in about a month's time. With the additional grass from the McGowan's, he calculated that he would be able to send away at least seventy-five per cent of his produce this season, which would mean a sizable addition to his bank account. Things were going well. The moment of self-congratulation passed and fear returned. What was going on in the bedroom? Was everything all right? He rose to his feet and began pacing to and fro, realizing ruefully that his behavior was comically hackneyed. He went outside and stood in the sun, gazing at the perfect emerald blanket stretching to the hills. He would plant some trees to commemorate the event, he decided. There were few enough trees on Jade. His planting would provide a pleasant patch of shade for Sandra to sit under on hot days. He eyed the trees in the middle distance outside the McGowan place speculatively, then dismissed a fleeting idea about stealing them. They were far too big to transplant. He would import a couple of apple trees from Earth -- that was the best idea. Real fruit and shade as well at a price they could afford. The summer was going to be good. He heard the bedroom door open, close and ran inside blinking at the sudden gloom. The doctor stood outside the bedroom. "How is she?" blurted Richard. The doctor clapped him on the shoulder. "She's fine," he piped, eyelids flickering rapidly. "Just fine." "The baby?" "A good strong little boy. Congratulations." He shook Richard's hand. "I'll have that drink now, thanks." "Yes, of course. Over there." Richard gestured, hurried into the bedroom, leaving the doctor to pour his own. the pillows, brown hair falling about her shoulders, the baby in her arms. "Hello, Dick," she said smiling a little smugly, as though trying to conceal a great pride but failing. Richard kissed her. "Aren't you going to look at the baby?" asked Sandra. "Uh -- yes." He thrust a tentative forefinger at the wrinkled face protruding, like a pupating larva, from the cocoon of blankets. "Beautiful," he murmured, appalled. "Quite beautiful. I'm proud of you, darling." Suddenly the wrinkles smoothed and the angry red paled as the baby decided not to cry, after all. Richard leaned closer. "He's a damned funny color," he remarked anxiously. "What?" Sandra looked more closely. "Oh, I don't think that's anything to worry about." "Doctor." Richard called. The doctor entered rapidly, glass in hand, tongue flicking over his lips as rapidly as a snake's. "What's up?" "He looks a funny color to me," Richard said accusingly. "Sort of yellow, like a Chinaman. Should he be that color? He's all right, isn't he?" The doctor smiled briefly, hardly glancing at the baby. "It's nothing serious -- probably a touch of jaundice. You often get that with newborn babies. It usually clears up in a day or two. Call me on the radio if it doesn't improve within the week and I'll drop in and have another look." He darted from the room. His quick footsteps receded to the front door and beyond. A roar of machinery arose, faded rapidly as the helicopter whirled away into the distance. "He's gone," observed Sandra unnecessarily. "What a peculiar man." "I just hope he knows what he's doing." Richard, prodded at the baby's flesh as if testing a joint of meat. "My God, we're a bit isolated out here -- we can hardly call in a second opinion and there's not even a district nurse about." "He'll be all right," Sandra predicted confidently, hugging the baby. "Stephen will be all right, won't you, my love," she crooned. "Stephen? Stephen." He savored the sound. "Nice name. Where did you get it from? An old flame of yours?" "For heaven's sake, Dick, you sound as if you've been drinking on an empty stomach again. It's my dad's name. You don't mind, do you?" "Of course not. God, I was forgetting." He slapped his brow, laughed. "We haven't had anything to eat today. Christ, I'm sorry, darling. What can I get you? Chicken broth? Minced beef? A nice glass of milk?" He tried not to grimace at the thought. "I'm not an invalid, Dick. The usual will do. Roast pork or something like that, peas and so on -- you know. But not too much, please." "Right." He left the house, squinted against the swirling cloud of settling dust that still marked the helicopter's recent departure and made for the barn and Daisy. "I don't fancy it," said Sandra firmly a little while later, gazing with repugnance at the tray of food. "I don't really fancy it at all. Whatever possessed me to ask for roast pork I can't imagine. God, I've only just come out of labor. All I want to do, really, is to lie in the sun and take it easy." "Good idea. I'll fix you up a place outside." Taking the tray, he strode into the kitchen and tipped the contents into the disposal unit. He pulled the mattress from the spare bed, carried it out and dropped it on the grass. He fetched a couple of blankets and a pillow, helped Sandra outside. She stretched out on the temporary bed with a sigh of contentment and took Stephen from him. Sandra's lying in the sun with her transparent nightdress on looked suddenly strange. Richard moved to cover her with the blankets. "Don't," she said, smiling placidly. He wandered back indoors. The tray was on the kitchen table, where he had left it. How long was it since he had laSt eaten? Three days? Four? He couldn't remember. The time lapse bothered him. Deciding that he would, in any event, have a good substantial supper later tonight, he drank the remains of his glass of homemade wine, then followed it with a glass of cold water. Presently, he began to feel hungry, just a little. be catching," said Sandra. They were lying in the sun two weeks later. By now they had become used to the idea of nude sunbathing. After all, passers-by were a rarity. Stephen, fat and contented, lay between his parents. The day was hot and pleasant. "You can almost see the sun moving";" remarked Richard, gazing at the blue sky from between eyelids nearly closed. "Do you think we've got some new kind of sunburn?" asked Sandra. "We do spend an awful amount of time lying out here, these days." "Best thing for us," he reassured her, sitting up and examining the skin on his belly. It certainly was a peculiar color, a bilious light yellow, completely unlike the deep brown of an Earth suntan. Sandra's flesh was a similar color, as was Stephen's. But Stephen had always been like that. "It can't be suntan," he reminded her. "Stephen was born this shade. Maybe we've caught it from him." "It's this artificial food from Daisy," Sandra said with sudden decision, ignoring Richard's conjecture. "Some sort of latent dye in the grass that isn't extracted by the processing." "Could be," mused Richard. "That would explain Stephen, too, presumably. Anyway, it doesn't seem to do us any harm." "Doesn't it? What about our loss of appetite?" She was growing worried. "And this tired feeling all the time. I have it -- you complain of it. I tell you, Dick, I'm not happy about this. I've half a mind to get the doctor. In any case, we want to be right for when Mum and Dad come." Richard groaned quietly to himself. He'd been trying to forget the forthcoming visit of Sandra's parents. It had been a condition, almost, of their original emigration that Mr. and Mrs. Roberts should come and stay with them for a while once they were settled. Sandra had been adamant. Otherwise we can't go. I can't bear the thought of never seeing them again... Richard himself had no difficulty in withstanding a permanent parting from his inlaws. He had unwisely said so. Sandra had reacted promptly.  can't think why you don't like them. They're fond of you and they've been very good to us. You owe them a lot... True, but the idea of a visit for an indefinite period was now -- as it had been then -- difficult for him to face. He could picture them looking over the place. Father-inlaw, bluff and overly-hearty. Very nice. Back to nature and all that. Commendable. I take it there's a good school locally for Stephen -- in due course? Mother-in-law, blue-rinsed and high-heeled. Main drainage, I suppose, Sandra dear? Oh, God, and they would be here in a few months at his expense. That would knock a hole in the savings. He rose abruptly to his feet. "Look, darling, I don't think we ought to take any chances. It wouldn't do for your parents to find a reason for endless questions -- or us ill. Let's drop this sunbathing, just in case. We've got to eat the food but at least let's keep out of the sun as much as possible, particularly Stephen. Then, if the skin condition doesn't clear up, whatever it is, we'll get the doctor." Sandra gathered up Stephen. "Perhaps you're right." "It seems strange to be indoors like this," she said wonderingly a few minutes later. "Sort of unnatural when it's such a lovely day. There doesn't seem to be anything to do. When are you going to start the harvest, Dick?" "I thought I might have a trial run with the machine after lunch to make sure everything's in working order. Then start properly tomorrow, or maybe the day after." He knew no sense of urgency. "Lunch?" she repeated uncertainly. "I suppose we must try to eat something." L ater, feeling heavily full of food, Richard opened the barn doors wide, seated himself on the harvester. He pressed the starter and the engine coughed into life, bellowing loudly within the confines of the four walls. Smiling to himself, he felt for the gears. He enjoyed driving the huge machine. Perched on his seat some ten feet from theground,he felt master of the whole planet. He couldn't wait to get at the grass, to see it swept into the maw of the baler by the giant blades, to be compressed, wire-bound and ejected in his wake like bottles thrown from an ocean liner. He paused, listening, hand on the gearstick. The note of the engine wasn't right. It was too shrill, as though the oil level were low and the pistons on the verge of seizing. Hastily he switched off. Dismounting, he withdrew the dipstick from the sump, examined it, replaced it, puzzled. The oil level was high. He checked the gearbox, the level was correct there, too. Shrugging, he climbed back into the seat and restarted the engine. It sounded smooth enough -- there was no question of misfiring. Perhaps it was just over-revving a bit. Depressing the clutch, he engaged the gears. He realized his mistake as soon as he released the clutch. He had, somehow, got the thing in top gear. The machine moved off, gathering speed and racing through the barn doors while he struggled to maintain control. He caught sight of Sandra's startled face at the window as he sped past the homestead. Then he was on the open plain. Presently he began to enjoy himself as the harvester moved swiftly across the grass at what was, in fact, its normal operating speed, the bales dropping regularly in its wake. The problem of the gears could wait until he got back to the barn. Meanwhile he set a course for the McGowan place, humming softly to himself, the whirling blades flashing in the sun. After a while the McGowan trees loomed ahead. He gripped the gear lever, deciding to try to engage a lower gear before turning. It would be a pity if he stalled out here, miles from home, unable to restart the machine in top gear and unable to find bottom. The engine idled for a moment as he dipped the clutch. He blipped the throttle and shifted easily, slipping quietly into the next gear. Surprised, he momentarily studied the diagram on the dash. The position of the gears seemed all wrong, somehow. He released the clutch. The harvester leaped forward at an incredible speed. The trees hurtled toward him. He threw himself out of the seat and crashed heavily to the ground as the harvester, out of control, smashed full-tilt into a tree and stopped dead, engine silent. He lay on his back, dazed, his eyes full of azure sky. Across the vaulting blueness crept the golden orb of the sun, moving perceptibly as he watched. said Sandra, sudden decisiveness in her voice. "I'll be all right," protested Richard, hobbling to his chair and flopping down, glad to take the weight off his feet for a while. "It's not only you. Have you seen Stephen today?" With a flush of guilt Richard climbed to his feet again. He had been so busy lately that he had hardly had time for family domestic problems. Three weeks had passed since his accident with the harvester. The first of these weeks had been entirely occupied in repairing the machine with the few tools at his disposal. Next he had resumed his belated harvesting of his own and the McGowan's grass. The work had further been slowed by the fact that his feet had started giving him trouble. He limped painfully now into the bedroom and studied Stephen, who lay quietly in his cot. "I'm sure he's not right," said Sandra. "He lies so limply, just crying a bit now and then -- and he won't eat a thing. You know, he's gone downhill ever since we started keeping him indoors. It's as though there were something unhealthy about this house -- " "Nonsense." But Richard was concerned. Stephen had been getting along well up to three weeks ago despite his jaundiced color. At least he had been visibly putting on weight. Now, he seemed to be wasting away. "All right -- call the doctor. He can have a look at my feet at the same time." Sandra disappeared. Soon she returned, looking alarmed. "I can't raise the doctor," she said. "I can't seem to get anyone. The radio's gone wrong. All I get is a funny sort of interference." This was serious. Without the radio they were completely cut off from outside help, should help be needed. Richard hurried into the living room and sat down before the instrument, turning the tuning dial slowly, listening intently. The crackle of static faded at the dial setting for the daily newscast. Music of a sort, came out of the speaker -- an odd, rhythmic beat like the rapid tick of a watch accompanied by feverish, highpitched speaking. Or were what he took to be voices shrill instrument sounds? "It sounds just a bit like one of those ancient steel bands," ventured Sandra. "It's not right." His stomach felt suddenly empty -- his lungs seemed to clutch at his heart. The unearthly caterwauling from the radio was alien. No Earth-made record ever sounded like that. Abruptly the sound ceased. But instead of the even tones of an announcer a shrill twittering came from the radio, rising and falling in the upper register. "Something's happened to them," Richard said slowly. "You mean like an -- invasion?" Sandra had a healthy dread of aliens, although there was no hostile planet within many light-years of Jade. "I don't know. No, it can't be that. There would have been some warning, surely. How often do you listen to the radio? Frequently?" "Hardly ever. It's ages since I last switched the thing on. There never seems to be time." "So anything could have happened and we wouldn't know. Damn." He feel silent, thinking. "I'll just try the short-wave again," he said at last, flicking the switch. He found the doctor's frequency, gave the call sign and waited. The radio twittered, paused, twittered again. "That's a voice," he said heavily. "It's a voice of some sort, talking. And I don't know what the hell it's saying. Christ. What's happened, Sandy?" He rested his elbows on the tato make sense. F or a long time they sat, pondering worriedly. At last Richard stood up, wincing as his feet took the weight. "I'm going to have to go and find out what's happening -- and see if I can get somebody to come look at Stephen." "But it's miles to the next homestead." "I'll take the harvester. Should be able to make it in about six hours." He glanced out through the window. The sun was setting over the hills, the McGowan place was a black dot in the distance. "I'll make a start at first light." "Let's have a look at those feet of yours." Sandra, now that a decision had been made, became suddenly practical. "If anything happened to the harvester you couldn't walk." She stood up and painfully crossed the room to the medicine cupboard. "You, too?" asked Richard. "Are your feet going bad?" "I didn't want to worry you, Dick. You had enough on your mind, with the harvest. Still -- " she smiled briefly -- "I'll treat your feet and you can treat mine. Then I'll have a look at Stephen's." "Are his feet bad?" "They looked sore this morning. I'll put some ointment on them. Off with your shoes." Lying back in an easy chair, Richard allowed her to remove his shoes, then his socks. "Careful," he said as she began to unwrap the bandaging he had bound around his feet that morning. As she worked his mind ran back over the events of the past weeks, puzzling over the various inconsistencies. There was a simple explanation, terrifyingly straightforward. All reason told him it was impossible. He reminded himself that he had failed to informed Sandra of this idea of his because of its very impossibility -- but the real reason for his silence was that the concept scared him sick and he saw, even now, no point in frightening Sandra as well. It was impossible, wasn't it, for different regions of a planet to operate on different time scales? Yet everything pointed to the fact that their movements were getting sluggish and their machinery had become too fast for them. All the same, he told himself, it was quite impossible for time to vary in kind in areas of the same special plane. The idea presented a contradiction in terms. And yet those voices on the radio -- he could have sworn they were human voices, speeded up. Slowly Sandra unwrapped the thin muslin, baring the pad of lint on the sole of his left foot. Carefully she pulled the material away. Groaning weakly, Richard gripped the arms of his chair, knuckles white, face twisted with agony, trying to speak. Then he slumped back in a dead faint. "Sorry -- oh. I'm sorry, Dick -- " Sandra stared in horror at the sole of Richard's left foot. The skin had peeled away with the lint -- the flesh gleamed dark and raw and, sprouting out of the purple wetness, were thousands of tiny, threadlike white tendrils. And despite her horror, despite the sight of her husband lying unconscious before her and the terrible realization that beneath her own flesh were multiplying similar abominations, her overlying sensation was one of relief that now none of them would be able to leave this place. She, Richard and Stephen could gratify the all-consuming demand of her being which had possessed her these last weeks like a voraciously addictive drug. She wanted to take off her clothes, go outside and feel the hot fingers of the sun upon her hungry body. Ill T he days fled by. They sat in alternate light and darkness outside the homestead, the harvest forgotten, never venturing indoors save to fetch endless glasses of water. The sun burned down upon their bodies' darkening yellow, the cool night air soothed them for brief moments before the sun was back, arching across the sky -- ever accelerating. Stephen was improving rapidly. He lay quietly on a blanket at their feet growing stronger with every fleeting day. He was content, never demanding, accepting sips of water at frequent intervals -- yet his body filled out, his limbs grew firm and strong. A strange euphoria encompassed the family on the grass. The three rarely stirred -- each was finding it hardly necessary even to breathe. Richard's slow thoughts were more and more occupied with his sense of voluptous well-being to the exclusion of all abstract concepts. One day when the sun was especially hot and pleasurable following a cool night that had left their bodies studded with dew like diamonds, he had begun to say something to Sandra and she had turned toward him to listen. He had uttered perhaps two words before he realized that his words didn't matter and that Sandra would make an effort to understand what he was driving at -- and that anyway it was night again and the cold dew was coming. He had intended to remark on the improvement in his feet, which were no longer raw and painful. He even lifted himself ponderously as the shadows circled smoothly around the two deck-chairs and, by nightfall, he had assured himself that the flesh had healed although the tendrils were still there, trailing a thousand long white threads from the soles of his feet. He was aware of a vague longing he was unable to express in words and he looked at Sandra, picking his brief spell of daylight -- she looked back at him and he knew she understood. But now he could not summon his body to perform the walking movements necessary to carry him into the homestead and out again with more water, so he lay in the chair while the longing intensified -- and with it came the slow knowledge that there was another, better way to satisfy this craving. Stephen was the first to move. His infant mind being less constricted by the habit of years, he was more readily able to adapt to the new circumstances and recognize the craving for what it was. He rolled slowly toward the edge of his blanket while his parents watched, wondering from unblinking eyes. His small body, now on the grass, assumed a foetal position and, with knees tucked under his chin he rolled again, kneeling and finally sitting crouched, his feet flat against the ground, his short arms hugging his knees. Next Richard stirred, hands pushing at the frame of his chair, lifting his inert body from its resting place. Instinct was taking over in his case, too. His body folded, his chest and head moved forward so that for a long time he sat bent double on the edge of the chair, his hair flopped over his eyes. Gradually he became upright, left the chair and stood up. His feet felt spongy and insecure at first. He shuffled them, shifting their position and working them through the grass into the soft soil until he stood firmly, circled by his wheeling shadow. At last the tendrils on his feet probed moisture below the surface and the fluid rose into his body, satisfying a craving that had possessed him for days. Once again contentment stole through his senses and he felt his heart slow until it became an occasional spasmodic flicker. Opposite him stood Sandra. She regarded him calmly. After a long time he closed his eyes. His last conscious memory was of the wind in Sandra's hair, and he kept this memory with him as he slipped easily into half-sleeping Jade immortality. tion came to him that he was lying in a horizontal position between linen sheets, his body clothed in some sort of pyjamas. He felt tired, deadly tired, but something in his system was forcing him into an artificial alertness when all he wanted was sleep. "Wake up, Richard." The voice came from all round him, so close that it might have been within his own head. The voice, like the nagging inducement in his body to awaken, was artificial. It did not arise through any volition of his own consciousness; it was forcing its presence upon him, mechanical and metallic, from an outside source. He didn't want the voice, so he kept his eyes closed and willed it to go away -- but gradually the strength of his wakefulness rising in him like sap. He found himself hating the voice with a violence that made further sleep impossible. He opened his eyes. "Wake up, Richard." The voice spoke with dynamic forcefulness from a louvered opening in a cabinet near his eyes. For a while he studied the cabinet, noting the vaguely familiar lines, the two reels in the recessed top. He was lying on his side, he realized finally, and looking at a tape recorder beside the bed. He extended his field of vision and saw white walls and ceiling and a door that flickered strangely. He turned his eyes, following the sweep of the ceiling, seeing an angular contraption almost directly above him. From it was suspended a bottle of dark red fluid. Blood. A thin tube hung from the inverted neck of the bottle and disappeared beneath the blankets of his bed. As he watched, the level of the blood fell rapidly, far too rapidly, until the bottle was empty. He was aware of a curious flicker, accompanied by a noise so quickly gone that he only halfremembered it, and the bottle was full of blood again. Abruptly the room was dark and he could see no more. Light came again soon and the position of the tape recorder had changed. The voice came from the speaker and the voice had changed too, to a slightly different pitch. "Fm glad to see you're awake. Now, first of all, I want you to know that your wife and child are all right. You are in the Earth Rehabilitation Center and I am talking to you through this machine because foi" the time being you will not understand normal speech. My name is Dr. Svenson and from time to time I sit beside you -- on the chair you will see beside your bed." Richard saw the chair and saw also that it was in almost constant jiggling motion. From time to time he thought he could make out a sitting, semi-transparent figure. "I can't see you properly," Richard addressed the phantom. A slow fear was beginning to flow through him, driving away his lethargy. "That is because I am not always here," replied the tape recorder. "Time has accelerated for you. When you spoke I had time to replay your remark at high speed, then record my reply and play it back to you at reduced speed -- but I don't suppose you noticed any time lag." "How long am I going to be lying here like this?" He felt completely cut off from all humanity, terribly alone. "Not long by your standards," replied the voice evasively. "Such things are relative. You've had a bad time of it. Meanwhile you are under intensive treatment and for a while you will feel quite weak. You were lucky. You have been treated in time. Others were not so fortunate -- Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Roberts, (faintly) Good afternoon, Doc. How are the patients? (loudly again) Coming along nicely." The tape recorder appeared to be holding a conversation with itself. Then the voice changed and Richard recognized the hearty tones of Sandra's father. "How are you feeling, Richard? lust as well we paid you a visit to that damned planet of yours, wasn't it? Found you just in time. Gave us a turn, I can tell you, seeing you all standing there like damned statues. Always said there was something weird about the place -- Anyway, I got you all out of there pretty damned quick, I tell you. And brought charges against the Jade Exploitation Company. Made them look pretty sick -- " Richard stopped listening. God, I'll never hear the last of this. For the rest of my life he'll be telling me how he saved my life and Sandra's too... He experienced a sudden longing to be back on Jade, standing quietly in the sun with Sandra and Stephen, experiencing no problems. His senses picked up his father-in-law's voice once more. "Imagine conning folks like that. People were putting down their deposits and buying their farms, never knowing that the planet was incapable of supporting animal life. Ah, well, look before you leap, I always say -- " The voice of Dr. Svenson mercifully broke in and Richard had slipped again into a defensive state of apathy but now he made a great effort to communicate. "What was wrong with Jade? What happened?" he asked. "You heard your father-in-law tell you that Jade is not capable of supporting animal life? This is quite true and it should have been obvious to the Exploitation Company -- one would have thought that the absence of animals when they initially surveyed the place would have been sufficient to cause them to investigate further, at least. I'm not a bio-ecologist but I'm told that Jade's problem has something to do with the rigid composition of the basic organic molecules, which are not broken down when ingested into the human system. So the intake of these molecules in the form of food caused your own body cells to be gradually replaced by Jade-type cells of fundamentally plantlike construction. Your movements slowed, your thinking slowed, your machines seemed to move too fast for you. Toward the end, these effects were accelerating rapidly. But the most interesting effect came in the later stages when you began gradually to take in nourishment by photosynthesis. Eor increasing periods you lay in the sun, eating less and obtaining more of your requirements from the sun's rays, until the point was reached when your physical structure began to change and ciliate roots appeared on your feet, demanding to be buried in moist soil -- " Richard struggled with his slack ( Please turn to page # ) UiSiT; jrSfi Mjious SB#onoAi...y QustfirisAriisiiMeRjiN'riNoinit.if To Bf c.OATifP I The Editorial View j One of the most widely read science-fiction novels of the past couple of decades was Nevil Shute's On the Beach, the story of the consequences of a nuclear war. Shute's war occurred in the northern hemisphere and killed everyone in Europe, Asia and North America. The people in his story are in Australia, and although they are survivors their life expectancy is small; the exchange between the northern and southern atmospheres is slow but it is inevitable, and radioactive fallout will kill them all within weeks. On the Beach immediately provoked a storm of scientific argument. Its terrors were described as overdrawn. The scenarists of future debacles, like Herman Kahn, Edward Teller and others, asserted vigorously that no such total destruction of the human race was in the cards, and backed their arguments with reasonably reliable estimates and quite reliable facts. Although the stockpiles of atomic weapons possessed by the United States and the U.S.S.R. are huge, they are finite. Exploding every one of them over a period of a few days would produce catastrophic results, to be sure. But it would every living thing on earth, as Shute supposed. It would not even do so in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. themselves, presumably the prime targets for each other's missiles. How many Americans and Russians would survive is not very clear, but the number would be at Enough (suggests Herman Kahn) so that over a period of a generation or so, at least the United States could rebuild itself to prewar levels of affluence and technology. Of course, this is not really an attractive prospect. But certainly it is a long way short of the total destruction that Shute imagined. From these arguments the proBomb side of the discussion drew much comfort. No one suggests that a nuclear war is a trivial event. But, by the above reasoning, it is not so dreadful that it can never under any circumstances be waged. However, it now appears that all the evidence is not in. A physicist named Ernest Sternglass of the University of Pittsburgh has unearthed some new and pertinent information. It is not quite conclusive. It has even been denounced -- by the Atomic Energy Commission, for example, on the grounds that it is "false, alarmist and unscientific." More study is certainly needed. But its implications are far-reaching and should be looked into with great care. We all know, to begin with, that the advance of medicine has greatly extended the average man's life. A few centuries ago in medieval France, the average age at the time of death was actually about a year and a half less than the average age at the time of marriage. This does not of course mean that most Frenchmen married eighteen months after they died. What it means is that so many Frenchmen died in infancy that they brought the average lifetime down below the average age at which those who survived the terrible infant mortality got married. This is the principal way in which medicine has extended lifespans: by reducing the number of infant deaths. If you draw a curve showing the average infant death rate in the United States from # to #, you find a steady decline. Year after year, science saved more and more babies' lives through better medicine, better prenatal care, better diet, better everything. If you make the same study from # to the present, you find the same steady decline. But if you draw your graph for the years # to #, you see no such decline. For some reason, for those fifteen years infant death rates remained pretty much the same. Why? It is possible that the explanation is simply that for those fifteen years medicine stood still, as far as caring for the newborn and the unborn is concerned. This does not seem a reasonable explanation, but it is a possible one. If it is true, it should be simple enough to demonstrate it through a study of pediatric practices over the last few decades. Lacking confirmation of that particular hypothesis, it would appear that some other event must have been taking place. Some means that medicine was not able to prevent. Dr. Sternglass suggests that there was such an event, and it was the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, with their consequent release of radioactive materials and fallout. In support of Sternglass's thesis there is a good deal of data. We know, for instance, that a #-kiloton bomb test in Nevada in # was followed by an increase in childhood leukemia in upstate New York. It is not certain that the first event caused the second; it is only certain that the test did take place, that fallout in the New York area did come from it, and that thereafter leukemia deaths did rise. We know, too, that strontium#, a major radioactive consequence of bomb testing, is chemically very similar to calcium. We know on the basis of chemical experiments and general scientific principles that the human body, metabolizing calcium to build bones, will also metabolize a certain amount of strontium-# and use it in the same way, if the strontium-# is available in the environment. We know, too, that young children assimilate relatively more calcium (and thus strontium-#) than adults in this way, because their skeletons are still under construction. We know all this in theory, and it has been amply confirmed by investigation and experiment. The chain is quite complete. Bomb tests produce fallout. Fallout lands on pasture lands. Cows eat contaminated grass and produce strontium-#laden milk. Infants drink the milk and deposit strontium-# in their bones. Parents all over the country have cooperated for years in a mass sampling to test this hypothesis: they were asked to double up in their roles as Tooth Fairies, not only depositing a quarter under the child's pillow when a baby tooth came out but wrapping up the tooth itself and mailing it to a laboratory, where many thousands of them were assayed for their strontium-# content. Which was found to be high. And we know finally that radiation of the kind produced by strontium-# is capable of producing leukemia or bone cancer. Similar arguments can be made for other kinds of fallout, and for other kinds of events which kill babies. So here we have two sets of phenomena: between # and # there was widespread contamination of the environment by radioactivity from bomb testing; and also between # and #, there was an otherwise inexplicable halt of the steady decline in infant mortality. Is there a connection between the two sets? Perhaps not. But certainly it would take a peculiarly intransigent kind of stupidity to look at these two sets side by side and ignore them. Freeman J. Dyson, on record as that Sternglass's evidence is not to be ignored. He says, "The evidence is not sufficient to prove that Sternglass is right. The essential point is that Sternglass may be right." For, as Sternglass himself says, the logic of his study is such that it implies a problem that no one has previously considered, much less solved: "We find ourselves confronted with the utterly new situation in which, contrary to all our past thinking, even targets that are either not attacked, or are protected by an anti-ballistic missile system, can be destroyed if these 'targets' are people." Sternglass's numbers imply that radioactive fallout is roughly a hundred times more dangerous to infants than had been suspected. They indicate that twice as many babies died as should have died from normal causes during the lest period. And they suggest that an all-out war might fail to destroy a nation's cities or population and still, to quote Stesnglass again, "have the society come to an end as the infants born to the survivors die within in their first year of life." Perhaps T.S. Eliot had the answer. Perhaps all-out war means that the world ends not with the "bang" of Nevil Shute's On the Beach but with the "whimper" of the last surviving ancient.  One of our favorite people is Robert Silverberg, author, editor, gourmet, wit, world traveler and a frequent Back in #, Bob picked up a Hugo as the year's Most Promising New Writer and he has been accumulating honors ever since. Besides winning with his novelette Nightwings, Bob copped another Hugo for the same work at last year's St. Louiscon. Bob is to be Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention next summer in Heidelberg, where he will deliver the major address. Preparing to launch this Berlitzkrieg. Bob is up to his umlauts in the study of German. Though the invitation is perhaps the highest tribute the sf fraternity can pay to one of its members, this will not be the first time Bob has been the honored guest at a convention. The gals from Pittsburgh fandom selected their hero as the first GoH of their regional con and he performed so nobly that they have designated him -- get this -- Guest of Honor Emeritus. Besides logging many miles a year on the convention circuit. Bob and wife Barbara travel to the remote corners of Planet Earth, vacationing and researching books. They were off to legendary Byzantium (Istanbul to the new wave bunch) in '#, stopping there on their way back from Jorslem. This trip produced the just published If I forget Thee, O Jerusalem, a Study of the role of American Jews in the creation of the state of Israel. While on a photographic safari of Africa in #, the Silverbergs even managed to stand on Zanzibar, from where they sent greetings to John Brunner. The Silverbergs inhabit a large, rambling mansion in New York City, sharing the house with the family cats -- four permanent residents and, frequently, litters of kittens. Barbara is an electronics engineer by profession, and it is she who fixes all the household appliances. "All," Bob says, "but the electric typewriter I don't have." Barbara recently edited an anthology of cat stories called Kitten Caboodle. Bob says he and Barbara were in Caboodle in #. Our versatile Mr. Silverberg plans to continue "to explore the modes of contemporary fiction through the vehicle of science fiction." Those are his words and if you want to know what he means read Son of Man, due from Ballantine next fall. (Continued from page #) volved. And this fact has long been known but for some reason no one, neither the police nor his mentors, has ever told Jud until after he gets into fatal trouble. I find this very difficult to believe. I find it much easier to believe that Silverberg was making this up as he went along. The book is full of long pauses in which he talks his way out of one technical inconsistency at the price of sowing two others. I mean, there is time -- there is infinite time -- for all these accidents and blunders to have been forethought of and precorrected. And yet we find this civilization constantly risking its own existence for a few bucks in a tourist trade which, as described here, creates the extinction of a significant number of tour guides and tourists. We could go on this way. Silverberg skirts around the issue of why the first tour guide to the Crucifixion didn't find the entire eastern Mediterranean region black with the flylike swarms of all the tourists who would be brought there in the future. He skirts around it again and again, apparently in the hope that not many people would care about his failure to come to grips with what happens when you try to pack infinity into a single event. But I care. You see, there are only three alternative possibilities here. One of them is that Silverberg doesn't realize his sf premise is shot full of holes, another one is that he doesn't care and the third one is that he not only doesn't care -- he sees it as a virtue. Obviously he does realize that his own technological premise is inconsistent. He signals this to you again and again. So we can gratefully discard that postulate and go on to the next. Does he care? Is he glad if he doesn't care? Well, we don't know, except by inference from various statements that he's quit writing anything but what he wants to. And there may be something to be drawn, too, from the fact that he uses the premise, ramshackle though it is, in order eventually to club the book to its knees and call that an ending. Neither inference strikes me as conclusive. Maybe he just wanted to write some passages about Constantinople and going to bed with Grandma. That would be a pretty smart-arse thing to do, though, considering how much auctorial effort and reader seventy-five centses are involved here. It's a non-book. I guess that's what Up the Line is. It isn't sf -- neither tech fiction nor any other previously recognized kind. It's a new kind of non-book. And as you may have gathered, it doesn't even find anything new in Grandma.  ogram of Krug as he whispered the words of the Transcender ritual. All five came to attention as Watchman entered. The alpha hastily improvised a possible diversionary tactic. Beckoning to one of the gammas, he said, "There is an enemy outside. With your help we will confuse him." Watchman gave the gamma careful instructions, ordering the android to repeat them. Then he pointed to the chapel's rear door, behind the alter, and the gamma went out. After a moment for prayer Watchman returned to Leon Spaulding. "You were told the complete truth," the alpha reported. "This is indeed a refrigeration dome. A team of mechanics is engaged in difficult recalibration work inside. If you enter you'll certainly disturb them and you'll have to walk carefully to sidestep some open traps in the floor. In addition you will be exposed to a temperature of minus -- " "Even so, I want to go in," said Spaulding. "Please let me get through." Watchman caught sight of his gamma approaching, breathless, from the east. Unhurriedly, the alpha made as if to give Spaulding access to the chapel door. In that instant the gamma rushed up, shouting, "Help! Help for ( Continued from page # ) Krug! Krug is in danger! Save Krug!" "Where?" Watchman demanded. "By the control center! Assassins! Assassins!" Watchman allowed Spaulding no opportunity to ponder the implausibilities of the situation. "Come on," he said, tugging the ectogene's arm. "We have to hurry!" Spaulding was pale with shock. As Watchman had hoped, the supposed emergency had blotted the problem of the chapel from his mind. Together they ran in frantic haste toward the control center. After twenty strides Watchman looked back and saw dozens of androids rushing toward the chapel in accordance with his orders. They would dismantle it within minutes. By the time Leon Spaulding was able to return to this sector, the dome would house nothing but refrigeration equipment. gets cold. Now we go down." The scooprods descended. Snowflakes were beginning to swirl about the tower. The repellor field at the summit deflected them, sending them cascading off at a broad angle. It was impossible to run proper weather control here because of the need to keep the tundra constantly frozen. A good thing, Krug thought, that androids didn't mind working in the snow. He throbbed with impatience. There was so much still to do before the tower could function. Manuel said, "We're leaving, Father. We're booked into the New Orleans shunt room for a week of ego shifts." Krug scowled. "I wish to hell you stop that stuff." "Where's the harm? To swap identities with your own true friends? To spend a week in somebody else's soul? It's harmless. It's liberating. It's miraculous. You ought to try it." Krug spat. "I'm serious," Manuel said. "It would pull you out of yourself a little. That morbid concentration on the problems of high finance, that intense and exhausting fascination with the challenge of interstellar communications, the terrible strain on your neural network that comes from -- " "Go on, " Krug said. "Go. Change your minds all around. I'm busy." "You wouldn't even consider shunting. Father?" "It's quite pleasant," said Nick Ssu-ma. He was Krug's favorite among his son's friends, an amiable Chinese boy with close-cropped blond hair and an easy smile. "It gives you a splendid new perspective on all human relationships." "Try it once, just once," Jed Guilbert offered, "and I promise that you'll never -- " "Quicker than that I take up swimming on Jupiter," said Krug. "Go. Go. Be happy. Shunt all you like. Not me." "I'll see you next week. Father." Manuel and his friends sprinted toward the transmat. Krug rammed his knuckles together and stood watching the young men run. He felt a tremor of something close to envy. He had never had time for any of these amusements. There had always been work to do, a deal to close, a crucial series of lab tests to oversee, a meeting with the bankers, a crisis in the Martian market. While others gaily jumped into stasis nets and exchanged egos for week-long trips, he had built a corporate empire and now it was too late for him to give himself up to the pleasures of the world. So what? he asked himself fiercely. So what? So I'm a nineteenthcentury man in a twenty-third-century body. So I'll get along without shunt rooms. Anyway, who would I trust inside my head? What friend would I swap egos with? Who, who, who? He realized that there was hardly anyone. Manuel, perhaps. It might be helpful to do a shunt with Manuel. We'd get to understand each other better, maybe. Give up some of our extreme positions, move toward a meeting in the middle. He's not all wrong about how he lives. I'm not all right. See things with each other's eyes, maybe? But at once Krug recoiled from the idea. A father-son ego shift seemed almost incestuous. There were things he didn't want to know about Manuel. There certainly were things he didn't want Manuel to know about him. To swap identities, even for a moment, was out of the question. But what about Thor Watchman, then, as a shunt partner? The alpha was admirably sane, competent, trustworthy -- in many ways Krug was closer to him than to any other living person. He could not think of any secrets that he had kept from Watchman. If he intended to sample the shunt experience at all he might find it useful and informative to... Shocked, Krug crushed the thought. Trade egos with an android? He said quickly to Niccolo Vargas, "Do you have some time, or you have to get back to the observatory right away?" "There's no rush." "We can go to the ultrawave lab now. They just set up a small working model of the prime-level accumulator. You'll be interested." They began to walk across the crisp, mossy tundra. A crew of gammas came by, driving snoweaters. After a moment Krug said, "You ever try the shunt room?" Vargas chuckled. "I've spent seventy years calibrating my mind so I can use it properly. I'm not that eager to let somebody get into it and change all the settings." "Exactly. Exactly. These games are for the very young. We -- " K rug paused. Two alphas, a male and a female, had emerged from a transmat and were walking rapidly toward him. He did not recognize them. The male wore a dark tunic open at the throat, the female a short gray robe. A glittering emblem, radiating energy up and down the spectrum in steady pulsations, was affixed to the right breast of each. As they drew close Krug was able to see the letters Political agitators? No doubt. And he was caught out here in the open, forced to listen to their spiel. What splendid timing! Where was Spaulding, he wondered. Leon will get them out of here fast enough... The male alpha said, "How fortunate we are to find you here, Mr. Krug. For some weeks we have sought an appointment with you but it proved unattainable and so we have come -- I should introduce myself first. Forgive me. I am Siegfried Fileclerk, certified field representative of the Android Equality Party, as no doubt you have already discovered by these emblems. My companion is Alpha Cassandra we might have just a word with you -- " " -- concerning the forthcoming session of the Congress and the proposed constitutional amendment dealing with the civil rights of synthetic persons," said Cassandra Nucleus. Krug was astounded by the audacity of the pair. Anyone, even an android of another employ, was free to come here via transmat. But to accost him like this, to bedevil him with politics -- incredible! Siegfried Fileclerk said, "Our boldness in approaching you directly is the outgrowth of the seriousness of our concern. To define the place of the android in the modern world is no slight challenge, Mr. Krug." "And you, as the central figure in the manufacture of synthetic persons," said Cassandra Nucleus, "hold the key role in determining the future of the synthetic person in human society. Therefore we request you -- " "Synthetic persons?" Krug said, incredulous. "Is that what you call yourselves now? Are you crazy, telling me such things? Me? Whose androids are you, anyway?" Siegfried Fileclerk stumbled back a pace, as though the vehemence of Krug's tone had shattered his amazing self-confidence, as though the enormity of what he was trying to do had burst upon his mind at last. But Cassandra Nucleus remained poised. The slender alpha female said coolly, "Alpha Fileclerk is registered with the Property Protection Syndicate of Buenos Aires and I am a modulator assigned to Labrador Transmat General. However, we are both in free-time periods at present, and by act of Congress Twenty-two hundred and twelve it is legitimate for us, when off duty, to carry on overt political activity on behalf of the rights of synthetic persons. If you would grant us only a short while to explain the text of our proposed constitutional amendment and to indicate why we feel it is appropriate for you to take a public position in favor of -- " "Spaulding!" Krug roared. "Spaulding, where are you? Get these maniac androids away from me -- " He saw no sign of Spaulding. The ectogene had wandered off on some sort of inspection tour of the site perimeter while Krug had gone to the tower's summit. Cassandra Nucleus drew a glistening data cube from the bosom of her robe. Holding it toward Krug, she said, "The essence of our views is contained in this. If you -- " "Spaulding!" This time Krug's shout conjured up the ectogene. He came from the northern part of the site at a frenzied gallop, Thor Watchman running more smoothly beside him. As he approached Cassandra Nucleus showed alarm for the first time -- in agitation she tried to press the data cube into Krug's hand. Krug glared at it as if it were a psychbomb. They struggled briefly. To his surprise he found the android female in his arms in a curious counterfeit of a passionate embrace, though she was really only attempting to give him the cube. He caught her by one shoulder and pushed her away from him, holding her at arm's length. An instant later Leon Spaulding drew a small shining needier and fired a single bolt that penetrated Cassandra Nucleus' breast precisely in the center alpha went spinning backward and fell without uttering a sound. The data cube, dropping from her lifeless fingers, bounced along the frozen earth; Siegfried Fileclerk, moaning, snatched it up. With a terrible cry of anguish Thor Watchman slapped the needier from Spaulding's hand and immediately afterward sent the ectogene toppling with a single savage thrust of his fist. Niccolo Vargas, who had looked on silently since the arrival of the two alphas, knelt beside Cassandra Nucleus, examining her wound. "Idiot!" Krug cried, glaring at Leon Spaulding. Watchman, hovering over the fallen Spaulding, muttered, "You could have killed Krug. She wasn't a meter away from him when you fired. Barbarian! Barbarian!" "She's dead," Vargas said. Siegfried Fileclerk began to sob. A ring of workmen, betas and gammas, collected at a safe distance and looked on in obvious terror. Krug felt the world whirling about his head. 'AVhy did you shoot?" Trembling, Spaulding said, "You were in danger -- they said there were assassins -- " "Political agitators," Krug said, eyeing him with contempt. "She was only trying to give me some propaganda for android equality." "I was told -- " Shivering, crumpled, Spaulding hid his face. "Idiot!" Watchman said hollowly, "It was an error. An unfortunate coincidence. The report that was brought to us -- " "Enough," Krug said. "An android's dead. I'll take responsibility. She said she belonged to Labrador Transmat General. Spaulding, get in touch with their lawyers and -- no, you aren't in shape to do anything now. Watchman. Notify our legal staff that Labrador Transmat has the basis for a tort action against us, destruction of android, and that we settle. Tell counsel to do what has to be done. Then get somebody from staff working on a press statement. Regrettable accident, that kind of thing. No political overtones. Clear?" "What shall I do with the body?" Watchman asked. "Regular disposal procedures?" "The body belongs to Labrador Transmat," said Krug. "Freeze it for them. Hold it pending claim." To Spaulding he said, "Get up. I'm due in New York now. You come with me." toward the control center, went through the Rite of Balancing the Soul two full times before the numbness began to leave him. The hideous outcome of his ruse still stunned his spirit. He had been concerned only with getting Spaulding away from the chapel. It had not occurred to him that Spaulding might actually come upon Krug struggling with a possibly murderous stranger, nor that the ectogene was armed, nor that he was capable of taking life. But evidently Spaulding's frustration at being barred by androids from the alleged refrigeration dome had translated itself into murderous fury when he beheld an android apparently attacking Krug. And so the female alpha was dead. A slight error of aim and Krug might be dead now, too. When he reached his office Watchman made the sign of Krugbe-praised eight times in succession and ran through half the sequences of codon triplets. These devotions calmed him. He put through a call to San Francisco, to the offices of Fearon  Doheny, Krug's chief counsel in liability cases. Lou Fearon, the Witherer Senator's younger brother, came on the screen. Watchman told him the story. "Why did Spaulding shoot?" "Hysteria. Stupidity. Excitement." "Krug didn't order him to fire?" "Absolutely not. The bolt came self. And he was in no danger." "Witnesses?" "Niccolo Vargas, myself, the betas and gammas standing by. Should I get their names?" "Forget it," said the lawyer. "You know what a beta's testimony is worth. Where's Vargas nOw?" "Still here. I think he's going back to his observatory soon." "Tell him to call me collect later in the day. I'll transmat out and take a deposition from him. As for that alpha -- " "Don't bother with him," Watchman advised. "How so?" "A political fanatic. He'll try to make capital out of it. I'd keep him away from the case if I could." "He was a witness," Fearon said. "He'll have to be called. I'll neutralize him some way. Who owns him, do you know?" "Property Protection of Buenos Aires." "We've done work for them. I'll have Joe Doheny call and buy him for Krug. He can't very well make trouble for Krug if -- " "No," Watchman said. "Bad move. I'm surprised at you, Lou." "Why?" right? Sensitive on the issue of androids as chattels. We shoot down his companion without warning and then we try to buy him to silence him? How does that look? We'll he releases a statement to the press." Fearon nodded bleakly. "Of course. Of course. Okay, Thor -- how would you handle him?" "Let me talk to him," Watchman said. "Android to android. I'll communicate somehow." "I hope so. Meanwhile I'll call Labrador Transmat and find out how much they're asking in damages for the loss of their alpha girl. We'll settle this fast. You tell Krug not to worry. This time next week, it'll be as though the whole thing never happened." Except that an alpha is dead. Watchman thought, breaking the contact. H e went outside. The snow was falling more heavily now. Snoweater teams were efficiently keeping the whole area clean, except for a circle some fifty meters in diameter centered on the place where the body of Cassandra Nucleus lay. They were carefully avoiding that. A light dusting of snow now covered her corpse. Beside her, motionless, whitening in the storm, stood Siegfried Fileclerk. Watchman went up to him. "Her owner is being notified," he said. "I'll have some gammas carry her into storage until they call for her." "Leave her here," Fileclerk said. "What?" "Right here, where she fell. I want every android working on this job to see her body. Hearing about a murder like this isn't enough. I want them to see!" Watchman glanced at the dead alpha. Fileclerk had opened her robe. Her breasts were bare and the path of the needler's bolt was visible between them. It had seared a window through her chest. "She shouldn't lie in the snow," he said. Fileclerk compressed his lips. "I want them to see. Watchman, this was an execution. A political execution." "Don't be preposterous." "Krug summoned his henchman and had her shot down for the crime of seeking his support. We both saw it. She posed no threat to him. In her enthusiasm she came too close to him while presenting our viewpoint, that's all. Yet he had her killed." "An irrational interpretation," Watchman said. "Krug had nothing to gain by removing her. He sees the Android Equality Party as a mild source of harassment, not a serious menace. If he had any reawould he have let you live? Another quick shot and you'd have joined her." "Why was she killed, then?" "A mistake," said Watchman. "The killer was Krug's private secretary. He had been told that assassins were making an attempt on Krug's life. When he reached the scene he saw her grappling with Krug. It looked damning -- I had the same view of things he had. Without hesitating, he fired." "Even so," Fileclerk grunted, "he could have aimed for a leg. Clearly he's an expert marksman. Instead of wounding, he slew. He pierced her breast with great skill. Why? Why?" "A flaw of character. He's an ectogene. He has powerful antiandroid prejudices. Just a few moments before he had come into tense confrontation with myself and several other androids and he had been thwarted. Normally he boils with resentments -- this time he boiled over. When he found that the 'assassin' was an android, he shot to kill." "I see." "It was his personal decision. Krug gave no orders for him to shoot at all, let alone to shoot to kill." Fileclerk flicked snow from his features. "Well, then, what will be done to punish this murderous ectogene?" "Krug will reprimand him." "I speak of legal punishment. The penalty for murder is personality erasure, is it not?" Sighing, Watchman said, "For murder of a human being, yes. The ectogene merely destroyed some property belonging to Fabrador Transmat General. A civil offense. Fabrador Transmat will seek reparations in the courts and Krug has already admitted liability. He'll pay her full price." "Her full price! Her full price! A civil offense! Krug to pay! What does the murderer pay? Nothing. Nothing. He is not even accused of crime. Alpha Watchman, are you truly an android?" "My vat records are yours to consult." "I wonder. You look synthetic but you think too much like a human." "I am synthetic. Alpha Fileclerk, I assure you." "But castrated?" "My body is complete." "I spoke in metaphor. You have been conditioned in some way to uphold the human point of view against your own best interests." "I have had no conditioning except normal android training." "Yet Krug seems to have bought not only your body but your soul." "Krug is my maker. I yield myself fully to Krug." sense." Fileclerk snapped. "A woman's been killed out of hand, for no particular reason, and Krug's going to pay off her owners and that will be the end of it. Can you accept that? Can you simply shrug and say she was only property? Can you thiiik of yourself as property?" "I am property," Watchman said. "And you accept your status gladly?" "I accept my status, knowing that a time of redemption is to come." "You believe that?" "I believe that." "You're a self-deluding fool. Alpha Watchman. You've built a cozy little fantasy that allows you to tolerate slavery, your own and that of all your kind, and you don't even realize how much damage you're doing to yourself and the android cause. And what happened here today doesn't shake your mind at all. You'll go to your chapel, and pray for Krug to liberate you. Meanwhile the real Krug was standing right on this patch of frozen ground, looking on while an alpha woman was shot to death, and your savior's response to that was to tell you to call his lawyers and arrange for settlement of a simple property-damage tort. Is this the man you worship?" "I don't worship a man," said Watchman. "I worship the idea of Krug the Maker, Krug the Preserver, Krug the Redeemer. The man who sent me to call the lawyers was only one manifestation of that idea. Not the most important manifestation." "You believe that, too?" "I believe that, too." "You're impossible," Siegfried Fileclerk muttered. "Listen -- we live in the real world. We have a real problem and we must seek a real solution. Our solution lies in political organization. There are now five of us for every one of them. More of us come from the vats daily while they scarcely reproduce at all. We've accepted our status too long. If we press for recognition and equality we'll have to get it, because they're secretly afraid of us and know that we could crush them if we chose to. Not that I'm advocating force, merely the hint of the threat of force, the hint of the hint, even. But we must work through constitutional forms. The admission of androids to the Congress, the granting of citizenship, the establishment of legal existence as persons -- " platform." "You don't see the logic of it? After today? After this?" "I see that humans tolerate your party and even find its antics amusing," Watchman said. "I also see that if your demands ever become anything more than token requests troublesome alpha through a hypnolobotomy and, if necessary, execute the party leadership just as ruthlessly as you seem to think this alpha was executed here. The human economy depends on the concept of androids as property. That may change -- but the change won't come your way. It can come only as a voluntary act of renunciation by the humans." "A naive assumption. You credit them with virtues that they simply don't have." "They created us. Can they be devils? If they are, what are we?" T hey aren't devils," said Fileclerk. "What they are is human beings who are blindly and stupidly selfish. They have to be educated to an understanding of what we are and what they're doing to us. This isn't the first time they've done something like this. Once there was a white race and a brown race and the whites enslaved the browns. The browns were bought and sold like animals and the laws governing their status were civil laws, property laws an exact parallel to our condition. But a few enlightened whites saw the injustice of it and campaigned for an end to slavery. And after years of political maneuvering, of marshaling of public opinion, of actual warfare, the slaves were freed and became citizens. We take that as our pattern for action." "The parallel's not exact. The whites had no right to interfere with the freedom of their brownskinned fellow humans. The whites themselves, some of them, finally came to realize that and freed the slaves. The slaves didn't do the political maneuvering and the marshaling of public opinion -- they just stood there and suffered until the whites understood their own guilt. In any case those slaves were human beings. By what right does one human enslave another? But our masters made us. We owe our whole existence to them. They can do as they please with us -- that's why they brought us into being. We have no moral case against them." "They make their children, too," Fileclerk pointed out. "And to a limited extent they regard their children as property, at least while they're growing up. But the slavery of children ends when childhood ends. What about ours? Is there that much difference between a child made in bed and a child made in a vat?" "I agree that the present legal status of androids is unjust -- " "Hurrah!" " -- but I disagree with you on tactics," Watchman went on. "A political party isn't the answer. The humans know their nineteenth-century history and they've considered and dismissed the parallels -- if their consciences were hurting we'd have known it by now. Where are the modern abolitionists? I don't see very many. No, we can't try to put moral pressure on them, not directly. We have to have faith in them, we have to realize that what we suffer today is a test of our virtue, our strength, a test devised by Krug to determine whether synthetic humans can be integrated into human society. I'll give you a historical example: the Roman Emperors fed Christians to the lions. Eventually the Emperors not only stopped doing that but became Christians themselves. It didn't happen because the early Christians formed a political party and hinted that they might just rise up and massacre the pagans if they weren't allowed religious freedom. It was a triumph of faith over tyranny. In the same way -- " "Keep your silly religion," Fileclerk said with sudden explosive inSo long as the alphas remain divided -- " "Your aims and ours are incompatible. We counsel patience. We pray for divine grace. You are agitators and pamphleteers. How can we join you?" Watchman realized that Fileclerk no longer was listening to him. He seemed to draw into himself. His eyes glazed. Tears ran down his cheeks and flakes of snow stuck to the moist tracks. Watchman had never seen an android weep before, though he knew it was physiologically possible. He said, "We'll never convert each other, I suppose. But do one thing for me. Promise that you won't go around saying that Krug had her removed deliberately. Krug's potentially the greatest ally the cause of android equality has. He could save us with a single statement. But if you alienate him by smearing him with a ridiculous charge like that, you'll do us all tremendous damage." Fileclerk closed his eyes. He sagged slowly to his knees. He threw himself on the body of Cassandra Nucleus, making dry choking sounds. Watchman looked down silently for a moment. Then he said gently, "Come with me to our chapel. Lying in the snow is foolishness. Even if you don't believe, we have techniques for easing the soul, for finding ways to meet grief. Talk to one of our Transcenders. Pray to Krug, perhaps, and -- " "Go away," Siegfried Fileclerk said indistinctly. "Go away." Watchman shrugged. He felt an immense weight of sadness; he felt empty and cold. He left the two alphas, the living one and the dead, where they lay in the gathering whiteness, and strode off to the north to find the relocated chapel. And the first that Krug brought forth was Gamma and Krug said unto him, Lo, you are sturdy and strong and you shall do all that is asked of you without protest and you shall be happy as you work. And Krug loved Gamma so dearly that He made many more of him, so that there was a multitude of him. The next that Krug brought forth was Beta and Krug said unto him, Lo, you shall be strong but you shall also have understanding and you shall be of great value to the world and your days shall be joyous and good. And Krug loved Beta so dearly that He spared him from the worst of the burdens of the body and spared him also from the worst of the burdens of the mind and the life of Beta was as a bright springtime day. The last that Krug brought forth was Alpha and Krug said unto him, Lo, the tasks laid upon you shall not be light, for in body you shall exceed the Children of the Womb and in mind you shall be their equal and they shall lean upon you as though upon a stout staff And Krug loved Alpha so dearly that He gave him many gifts, so that he might bear himself with pride and look without fear into the eyes of the Children of the Womb. "good evening!" the alpha on duty at the New Orleans shunt room said as Manuel Krug and his companions emerged from the transmat. "Mr. Krug, Mr. Ssu-ma, Mr. Guilbert, Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Mishima, Mr. Foster. Good evening. Will you come this way? Your waiting chamber is ready." The antechamber of the New Orleans shunt room was a cool, tunnel-like structure about a hundred meters long, divided into eight sealed subchambers in which prospective identity-changers could wait while the stasis net was being prepared to receive them. The subchambers, though small, were comfortable: webfoam couches, elegant sensory-drift patterns on the ceiling, music cubes available at the touch of a switch, a decent variety of olfactory and visual channels in the wall and a number of other contemporary conveniences. The alpha settled each of them in a couch, saying, "Programing time tonight will be approximately ninety minutes. That's not too bad, is it?" "Can't you speed it up?" Manuel said. "Ah, no, no hope of that. Last night, do you know, we were running four hours behind? Here, Mr. Krug -- if you'll let me clip the electrode in place -- thank you. Thank you. And this one? Good. And the matrix-scanner -- yes, yes, fine. We're all set. Mr. Ssuma, please?" The android bustled about the room, hooking them up. It took about a minute to get each one ready. When the job was done the alpha withdrew. Data began to drain from the six men in the waiting room. The stasis net was taking profiles of their personality contours, so that it could program itself to handle any sudden surge of emotion while the ego-shifts were actually going on. Manuel looked around. He was tense with anticipation, eager to embark on the shifting. These five were his oldest, closest friends; he had known them since childhood. Someone had nicknamed them the Spectrum Group a decade ago, when by coincidence they showed up at the dedication of a new undersea sensorium wearing costumes of the spectral sequence of visible light: Nick Ssu-ma in red. Will Mishima in violet, and the others neatly arranged in between. The nickname had stuck. They were wealthy, though none, of course, was as wealthy as Manuel. They were young and vigorous. All but Cadge Foster and Jed Guilbert had married within the past few years but marriage was no bar to their continued friendship. Manuel had shared the pleasures of the shunt room with them on a dozen occasions. They had been planning this visit for over a month. "I hate this waiting," Manuel said. "I wish we could plunge into the stasis net the minute we get here." "Too dangerous," said Lloyd Tennyson. He was agile, longlegged, a superb athlete. Three mirror-plates gleamed in his high, broad forehead. "That's the point," Manuel insisted. "The thrill of danger. To jump in boldly, instantly, hazarding everything in one glorious leap." "And the preciousness of irreplaceable human life?" asked narroweyed, chalky-faced Will Mishima. "It wouldn't ever be allowed. The risks are well known." "Have one of your father's engineers invent a stasis net that programs itself instantaneously," Jed Guilbert proposed. "That would eliminate both the danger and the waiting." "If they could, they would," Tennyson pointed out. "You could bribe an attendant to let you go in without a programing wait," Nick Ssu-ma suggested slyly. "Tried it," Manuel said. "An alpha in the Pittsburgh shunt room three years ago. Offered him thousands. The alpha just smiled. I doubled the offer and he smiled twice as hard. Wasn't interested in money. I never realized that before -- how can you bribe an android?" "Right," Mishima said. "You can buy an android outright -- you can buy a whole shunt room, if you like -- but bribery's another matter. The motivations of an android -- " "I might buy a shunt room, then," Manuel said. Jed Guilbert peered at him. "Would you really risk going straight into the net?" "I think so." "Knowing that in case of an overload or some transmission error you might never get back inside your own head?" "What are the chances of that?" "Finite," Guilbert said. "You've got a century and a half of life coming to you. Does it make sense to -- " "I'm with Manuel," Cadge Foster said. He was the least glib member of the group, verging on taciturnity, but when he spoke he spoke with conviction. "Risk is essential to life. We need to take chances. We need to venture ourselves." "Pointless chances?" Tennyson asked. "The quality of the shunt wouldn't be any better if we went in immediately. The only difference would be that we'd eliminate the waiting time. I don't like the odds. To gamble a century in order to save a couple of hours? I'm not that bored by waiting." "You might be bored by life itself," Nick Ssu-ma said. "So weary of it all that you'd stake a century against an hour just for the sake of diversion. I feel that way sometimes -- don't you? There once was a game played with a hand weapon, a game called -- ah -- Swedish Roulette?" "Polish," Lloyd Tennyson corrected. "Polish Roulette, then. In which they took this weapon, which could be loaded with six or eight separate explosive charges, and loaded it with only one -- " Manuel disliked the trend of the conversation. Breaking in, he said sharply to Cadge Foster, "What's that thing you're playing with?" "I found it in a niche under my couch. It's some kind of communications device. It says things to you." "Let's see it." F oster tossed it over. It was a gray-green plastic, vaguely cubical but beveled to a curve at most of the intersections of its faces. Manuel cupped it in his hands and peered into its cloudy depths. Words began to form, making a or of the object. "Clever," Manuel said. He held it out for Nick Ssu-man to see. When he took it back the message changed. "It isn't a syllogism," Manuel said. "Syllogisms take the form. All A is B. No T is A. Therefore, T is not B." "What are you babbling about?" Mishima asked. "I'm giving this machine a logic lesson. You'd think a machine would know -- " "I've got one, too," Ssu-ma said. "Just to the left of the channel selector. Oh. Oh, my. Look at that!" He showed his cube to Lloyd Tennyson, who emitted a guffaw. Manuel, craning his neck, still could not see the message. Ssu-ma held the cube so that Manuel could read it. "I don't understand it," Manuel said. "It's an android dirty joke," Ssu-ma explained. "One of my betas told it to me a few weeks ago. You see, there's this hermaphrodite gamma -- " "We've all got them," Jed Guilbert announced. "It's a new thing for keeping people amused while they're waiting, I guess." "How does it work?" Manuel asked. Cadge Foster said, "It's primed to pick up anything we say. Then I imagine it relays a signal to a randomizing message center that picks out something vaguely relevant -- or interestingly irrelevant -- and feeds it onto the screen inside the cube." "And we each get a different message?" "Nick's and mine are the same right now." Tennyson reported. "No -- his is changing. Mine is staying -- " "I think it's insane," Mishima said. "Maybe that's the whole point," said Manuel. "Is it handing out anything but gibberish?" "I'm getting a news report on mine," Guilbert said. "Something about your father, Manuel -- " "Let me see." "Here -- catch -- " "More nonsense," Manuel said. "I don't think I find these things amusing." "I'm getting the news story on mine now," said Tennyson. "What do you think it's all about?" "Never heard of her," said Manuel. "And Spaulding's older than that. He's been working for my father since -- " "Perhaps you should call your father, Manuel," Ssu-ma said. "If there's really trouble -- " "And cancel the shunt? When we're booked in here for a week? I'll find out about it when I come out. If there's anything to find out." "Let's go back to syllogisms," Manuel told the cube he held. "If all men are reptiles, and alpha androids are reptiles -- " "Listen to what mine says!" shouted Tennyson. "More!" Guilbert cried. "More!" "Can we put these things away now?" Manuel asked. "I think this really is a news broadcast," Cadge Foster murmured. "I've heard of this Fileclerk. He's pushing a constitutional amendment that would open Congress to alphas. And -- " "Enough," Manuel said. He began to toss his cube to the floor but, seeing the message change, glanced at it once again. "Do you?" he asked. The cube went blank. He dropped it gratefully. The alpha attendant entered the subchamber and started to disconnect the electrodes. "You may proceed to the shunt room, gentlemen," said the alpha blandly. "The programing has been completed and the stasis net is ready to receive you." T hey had moved the chapel to a dome near the outer rim of the service area in a section where tools were repaired. In less than two hours a flawless transfer had been carried out. Inside, the new chapel was indistinguishable from the old. Within it Watchman found a dozen off-duty betas going through a ritual of consecration, a knot of gammas looking on. No one spoke to him or even looked directly at him -- in the presence of an alpha they all scrupulously obeyed the code of social distances. Briefly Watchman prayed beneath the hologram of Krug. His soul was eased some, after a while, though the tensions of his long wintry dialogue with Siegfried Fileclerk would not leave him. His faith had not wavered before Fileclerk's brusque pragmatic arguments but for a few moments, while they were thrusting and parrying beside the body of Cassandra Nucleus, Watchman had felt the touch of despair's wings brushing his cheeks. Fileclerk had struck at a vulnerable place: Krug's attitude toward the slaying of the alpha. Krug had seemed so unmoved by it! True, he had looked annoyed -- but was it merely the expense, the nuisance of a suit, that bothered him? Watchman had riposted with the proper metaphysical statements, yet he was disturbed. Why had Krug not seemed lessened by grace? Where was the hope of redemption? Where was the mercy of the Maker? The snow was slackening when Watchman left the chapel. Night had come, moonless, the stars unbearably sharp. Savage winds knifed across the flat, treeless expanse of the construction site. Siegfried Fileclerk was gone -- so was the corpse of Cassandra Nucleus. Long lines of workers stood in front of the transmat banks for the shift was changing. Watchman returned to the control center. Euclid Planner, his relief man, was there. "I'm on," Planner said. "Go. You stayed late tonight." "A complicated day. You know "Of course. Labrador Transmat's claimed the body. The lawyers have been all over the place." Planner himself eased into the linkup seat. "I understand the chapel's been moved, too." "We had to. That's how it all started -- Spaulding got too interested in the chapel. It's a long story." "I've heard it," Euclid Planner said. He prepared to jack himself into the computer. "There'll be problems out of this. As if there weren't problems enough. Go with Krug, Thor." "Go with Krug," Watchman murmured. He took his leave. The outbound workers on the transmat line made way for him. He entered the cubicle and let the green glow hurl him to his threeroom flat in Stockholm, in the section of the android quarter favored by alphas. The private transmat was a rare privilege, a mark of the esteem in which he was held by Krug. He knew no other android who had one -- but Krug had insisted that it was necessary for Watchman to be able to leave his apartment on a moment's notice and had had the cubicle installed. He felt drained and weary. He set himself for two hours of sleep, stripped and lay down. as before. That was unusual. He decided to give himself another hour of rest and closed his eyes. But in a short while he was interrupted by the chime of the telephone. Turning toward the screen, he saw Lilith Meson. Sleepily he made the Krug-be-praised sign at her. She looked somber. She said, "Can you come to the Valhallavagen chapel, Thor?" "Now?" "Now, if you can. It's tense here. The Cassandra Nucleus thing -- we don't know what to think, Thor." "Wait," he said. "I'll be there." He put on a robe, set the transmat coordinates for the Valhallavagen cubicle and jumped. It was a fifty-meter walk from the cubicle to the chapel; transmats were never installed inside a chapel. A feeble, strained dawn was breaking. In the night there had been a little snow here, too. Watchman saw; the remnants of it fleeced the deep windowledges of the old buildings. The chapel was in a ground-floor flat at the corner. Some fifteen androids were there, all alphas. The lower classes rarely used the Valhallavagen chapel, though they were free to do so. Betas felt uncomfortable in it and gammas preferred to worship in Gamma Town, far across the city. Watchman recognized some of the most distinguished members of his kind in the group. He acknowledged the greetings of the poetess Andromeda Quark, the historian Mazda Constructor, the theologian Pontifex Dispatcher, the philosopher Krishna Guardsman and several others who were among the elite of the elite. All seemed ragged with tension. When Watchman made Krug-be-praised at them most of them returned the gesture halfheartedly, perfunctorily. Lilith Meson said, "Lorgive us for breaking your rest, Thor. But as you see an important conference is in progress." "How can I help?" "You were a witness to the slaying of Alpha Cassandra Nucleus," Pontifex Dispatcher said. He was heavy, slow-moving, an android of dignified and imposing bearing who came from one of the earliest of Krug's batches. He had played a major role in the shaping of their religion. "We have somewhat of a theological crisis now," Dispatcher went on. "In view of the charges raised by Siegfried Fileclerk -- " "Charges? I hadn't heard." "Will you tell him?" Pontifex Dispatcher said, glancing at Andromeda Quark. The poetess, lean and intense, with an elegant, reedy voice, said, "Fileclerk held a press conference Nucleus was a politically motivated act carried out at the instigation of -- " she could barely say it -- "Krug." "Slime of the Vat," Watchman muttered. "I begged him not to do that. Fileclerk and I stood talking in the snow half an hour and I told him -- I told him -- " He knotted his fingers. "Was there a statement from Krug?" "A denial," said Mazda Constructor, who for four years had with Watchman's surreptitious aid been secretly compiling the annals of the androids from Krug's deadstorage data file. "An immediate cidental." "Who spoke for Krug?" Watchman asked. "A lawyer. Fearon, the Senator's brother." "Not Spaulding, eh? Still in shock, I guess. Well, so Fileclerk's been spewing filth. What of it?" Softly Pontifex Dispatcher said, "At this moment chapels everywhere are crowded as your brothers and sisters gather to discuss the imtheological resonances are so terribly complex. If Krug indeed did give the order for the ending of Cassandra Nucleus' life, did he do so in order to show His displeasure over the activities of the Android Equality Party? That is, does He prefer our way to theirs? Or, on the other hand, did He take her life to register His disapproval of the ulticourse are roughly the same as our own? If the former, our faith is justified. But if the latter, you see, then possibly we have been given a sign that Krug totally rejects the concept of android equality. And then there is no hope for us." Krishna Guardsman, whose teachings on the relationship of Krug to android were revered by all. "However, I take comfort in the thought that if Krug struck Alpha Nucleus down to show His dislike of the equality movement. He did so merely to oppose political agitation for equality now and was in effect reminding us to be more patient and await His grace. But -- " "We should also consider a much darker possibility," said Mazda Constructor. "Is Krug capable of wicked one? If so, then perhaps the entire foundation of our creed must be reexamined and even rebuilt, for if Krug can act arbitrarily and immorally, then it surely follows -- " "Wait! Wait!" called an uneasy voice from the rear of the group. "No such talk as this in a chapel!" "I speak only figuratively," Mazda Constructor said, "with no blasphemies intended. We are trying to show Alpha Watchman the range of reactions now being demonstrated around the world. Certainly many of us fear that Fileclerk's charges are correct -- that Alpha Nucleus was put to death for her political views -- and that has led to a consideration of the possibility that Krug has acted improperly. It is being discussed in many chapels at this very moment." "I think we have to believe," said Krishna Guardsman, "that all acts of Krug are by definition good acts, leading us toward our ultimate redemption. Our problem here is not to justify Krug's deeds but simply to quiet the unhappy suspicions of Krug's motives that this Fileclerk, who is not even a member of our communion, has stirred up in those that are. We -- " "It was a sign from Krug! It was a sign!" "The Vat giveth and the Vat taketh away!" "Fileclerk said that Krug showed no remorse whatever. He -- " " -- sent for the lawyers. A civil action -- " " -- property damage. A tort -- " " -- another test of our faith -- " " -- she was our enemy in any case -- " warn the rest of us? That makes Him a monster!" " -- in the fire of His crucible are we smelted -- " " -- revealing an unsuspected capacity for murderous -- " " -- sanctity -- " " -- redemption -- " " -- blood -- " "Listen to me" Thor Watchman cried, amazed and impatient. "Please. Please listen!" "Let him speak," Mazda Constructor said. "Of all of us he is closest to Krug. His words have weight." "I was there," said Watchman. "I saw the whole thing. Before you destroy yourselves with conflicting theologies, listen. Krug bears no Spaulding, the secretary, the ectogene, acted on his own. There is no other truth but this." In a cataract of words he told of Spaulding's blustering attempt to force his way into the constructionsite chapel, of the ectogene's rising tension in the face of the resistance of the chapel's guards, of his own ruse to draw Spaulding away from the chapel, of the unhappy result when Spaulding discovered Krug "This is deeply reassuring," said Mazda Constructor when Watchman was done. "We have been misled by Fileclerk's accusations. This is not an issue of Krug's actions at all." "Except in the deeper sense that Krug must have constructed the entire sequence of events," Krishna Guardsman suggested. "Can you seriously maintain that His will underlies even the secular events of -- " Pontifex Dispatcher began. Mazda Constructor cut him off. "We can debate the intricacies of His will another time. At present our task is to communicate with all other chapels, to transmit Thor's aceount of the events. Our people everywhere are in unrest -- we must calm them. Thor, will you dictate your statement so that it can be coded and transmitted?" "Certainly." Andromeda Quark handed him a message cube. Watchman repeated the story after first identifying himself, explaining his relation to Krug and swearing to the authenticity of his version of the events. A terrible fatigue hammered at him from alphas were, he thought, to engulf everything in a mist of theological disquisition! And how quick to accept Fileclerk's lies. In thousands of chapels just now, hundreds of thousands of devout androids were agonizing over the question of why Krug had allowed an alpha to be shot to death in His arms, whereas, if they had merely waited to learn the truth from someone who had been present -- Well, it was not too late to undo the harm. No one's faith in Krug need be shaken by what had occurred. Andromeda Quark and another female, both members of the Projector caste, were already at work coding the beginning of Watchman's statement for transmission over the broad-band network that linked every chapel to every other one. Watchman remained long enough to hear the first few phrases of his coded statement go forth: IF The Magazine of Alternatives "May I go?" he said. Pontifex Dispatcher gave him the sign of the Blessing of the Vat. Watchman returned it and, aching, departed. muscles, making deliberate attempts to move. "I want to see my wife and child," he requested weakly. "Well done," said Dr. Svenson. "Keep thinking, keep talking. And above all, keep trying to move about a bit. We can't exercise you properly -- normal exercise would be meaningless in relation to your muscles -- you can only help yourself. What we can do is keep your bloodstream flushed out with new blood and pump you full of anticoagulants and let time do the rest. Your wife and child? Turn over. By yourself." He shifted his body inch by inch, rolling very slowly to lie on his back. He turned his head painfully, the neck muscles stiff from disuse and, during a period of less than a day, came to face in the opposite direction. Sandra was watching him from the next bed. "Hello, Dick," she said carefully and smiled uncertainly. And he understood her without a translating machine. He spoke to her and no longer felt alone. Night ( Continued from page # ) came and went -- another and another in rapid succession -- and her hair was becoming brown again and the sallow tint was fading from her skin. Looking at her lying on the iron bed in the severely appointed, rectangular room, he remembered with vivid clarity the last time he had seen her, standing, facing him on Jade, Stephen crouching motionless at her feet. Again he was watching the slender shape of her body, the serene, unchanging expression of her face, the dancing of her emerald hair in the occasional light breeze -- and in the aching memory of the timeless scene he felt a sense of loss. But behind the silken green of Sandra's hair he could see the feathery green plumes of the four trees beside the neighboring farm and he knew, as surely as he knew anything, what had become of the McGowans. And the lively smile on Sandra's face as she lay in the hospital bed told him that immortality has its drawbacks.  worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. 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June, # Vol. #, No. # Carl Jacobi John Brunner Hayden Howard Duncan Lunan Lawrence Mayer Robert Silverberg Algis Budrys Editor Editor Emeritus Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Publisher Associate Publisher lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in the United States, elsewhere J#. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing #, Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Oftice. Printed in U.S. A. Read that any way you like. Taste it, smell it, savor it and say it. Then clamp your teeth on it and hang on. Make up your mind that you've just promised to brace most of what is constantly around us, often masquerading as good -- and what pursues us from the past and rains on us from all foreseeable tomorrows. Evil. Explore it. Chaq'un a son gout. Your evil may not be my evil but there's enough to go around. Most of us have at one time or another been conditioned to beware of nonos ranging from sex to sacraments, youth to age, innocence to wisdom, love to hate, fresh air to pollution and birth to death. Inclusive. I have no idea of whether Robert A. Heinlein began his latest work -- first to appear in print in But the book is a fearless book. It is also an impossible book -- in the sense that many of today's scientific realities were once "impossible." Here is a novel that delivers, page by page, the thundering promise of its title. Mr. Heinlein, I am convinced, fears no evil. I like to think of myself as reasonably inured to the standard shivers but I found myself even more so after turning the last page. Don't miss that feeling. It's a good one. Try it this way: I Will Fear NO Evil. Then imagine a sometimes boisterous, sometimes sedate but always lively and lusty romp through tomorrow's medical headlines, scare stories of crime, violence, polarization and joy peddlers -- and through the secret tunnels of your mind where fear and evil may lurk side by side, sometimes unexpectedly. And get ready for some surprising laughs and equally surprising mental acrobatics. If fear of evil is the strength of evil, this new work by Heinline is magnificent. If one of the functions of science fiction is to provide insights into pending as well tion masterpiece. You may or may not say to yourself -- as I did while reading -- that not even Heinlein can do what he is doing, write what he is writing, say what he is saying and make you go along with him. But make you go along with him he does. And you will fear less evil. Probably the healthiest, boldest, most entertaining and pertinent superbly evocative novel -- one, surely, that could have been told only in science fiction. Starting in the next issue! The Dark Continents of Your Mind maintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers of self. Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life' Address: Scribe M.S.B. San Jose, California #I # U.S.A. Scribe: M.S.B. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Life" which I shall read as directed. N ante Address City State Please Include Your Zip Code L Unconquerable man meets unbeatable alien -- in a match for human souls! H e came out of nowhere like a summer storm and like thunder he went bowling down the fairways, breaking record after record. A gallery materialized about him, though this was no tournament, and word Hew ahead into the clubhouse that an unknown marvel was burning up the course. Someone recalled his name from the register: Forbes -- Joseph Forbes. But nobody had seen him before. On the thirteenth, a #-yard hole, with a dogleg to the right, he took a number-five trajectoryiron and, after a moment's gaze through the telescopic, lofted his shot over a stand of cedars. He made an easy birdie. On the fifteenth it was thought he was too short, but the automated ball rolled down the incline and trickled across the green to drop into the cup -- for an ace. He was # at the end of the second nine. Though the day was hot and humid, he looked fresh as a daisy. I called the newspapers myself. As top pro at Yellow Silence I thought I owed it to the press boys to put them on to a good thing. Joseph Forbes was sitting in a fan-back chair on the clubhouse veranda when the sports writers arrived. He answered their questions in a quiet abstract manner, as if he were thinking of something else. "No, I can't recall that I ever made an ace before. Yes, I like the Yellow Silence course very much." There was a melodious quality to his voice that made me think of distant cattle bells in the summer dusk. One of the newsmen edged closer. "And what do you think of the Yansis, Mr. Forbes?" Now there was a stupid question to put to a player. There are no Yansis courses in Australasia or in any other part of Earth, for that matter. Yansis don't go in for self-enjoyment. But ever since their "migration" from the Monoceros galaxy in '# they have attempted, bit by bit, to take over this planet. It was the prize case of infiltration and, as we know, it very nearly succeeded. When they first arrived in their spaceships they were so benign in manner and appearance nothing suspicious was thought about them. They seemed the epitome of friendship. But you know the terrible struggle that followed. For twenty years now, since their defeat and retreat to their antipodes stronghold, they have been content to remain on earth and lick their wounds, biding their time. Now, day by day, they are becoming bolder again. Nevertheless it was a stupid question to put to a player. Whatever he thought, Forbes made no reply. N ext day the stranger showed definitely that he was no fluke. In a driving rain, in slicker jacket and waterproof cap, he went around the upper eighteen in fiftynine. And, mark you. Yellow Silence is no easy course. Laid out in what formerly was a Chippewa reservation, it presents a labyrinth of magnetic traps, fair.jvay warps and dimensional checkmates that all but confuse the average player. The evening papers were out when I got back to the clubhouse. The sports pages were full of the man. There was grimmer news too. The papers bristled with war rumors. Demands, warnings, threats on both sides. Political tempers were at the breaking point. War was imminent, the papers said. It was only a matter of time. About five o'clock of that same day what threatened to be major tragedy occurred in the clubhouse. Two robot caddies carried in a young girl who had been run down by a speed maniac as he roared out of the parking area. Her face was white as wood ash and there was a terrible wound on her temple where the skull was all but crushed in. We stood around helplessly with that feeling of awe that sweeps over one when confronted by sudden disaster. The ambulance doctor finished his examination. "She's gone," he said. And then the crowd parted a little as Forbes pushed his way through and bent over the silent figure. He gazed into her eyes for a long moment. He drew from his pocket a small pyxis with a hinged cover. Inside was a miniature panel of crystal keys and what appeared to be a minute oval of silver tape that whirled rapidly. His fingers touched one of the keys, then moved across to drift over the girl's face. The tape slowed, then sped faster. A soft hum issued from the box. Moments later a flush entered the pallid flesh. One of the eyelids fluttered almost imperceptibly. Then her lids moved and she sat up with a groan while the ambulance doctor stared as if he had seen a ghost. The wound on her temple seemed to fade away. Without any trouble the newspapers made a story out of that, too, and almost overnight Forbes became a legend. His easy stance and supple gait were watched with envy and his beautiful electronic clubs were examined and stared at. Quiet and unassuming, he seemed to possess a subtle magnetism that attracted friends instantly. But it was several weeks before he played again. Meanwhile he drifted in and out of the clubhouse, sitting by the window, staring out over the course. Then, two days before the Trans-Federatal was scheduled to open at Yellow Silence, he joined a threesome of Tony Loretto, Chad Hartridge and Dick Benbow who had come ahead on their tournament tour to try out the Silence course. Loretto was top pro in the Federated States and Hartridge and Benbow had grabbed first and second winnings in the Matto Grosso Open earlier in the year. Their disgust was evident as they left the eighteenth and compared scorecards. "The man's a wizard," Loretto said. "He didn't miss a putt." The summer wore on. With the tournament coming on and with the accompanying end-season crowds, I was kept pretty busy those hot days of August. As a matter of fact I didn't see much of Forbes again until the Carewe incident took place. You might say Julian Carewe was the father of Yellow Silence. He was responsible for getting the land grant from the government and he had designed and laid out the course. Carewe had been a "Three star" player himself until he had contracted Paldring's Disease which had left him confined to a wheelchair. He had his wheelchair drawn up beside the settee occupied by Forbes when I entered the clubhouse lounge toward the close of what had been a blazing, humid day. The two men appeared to be in animated discussion. Carewe was talking earnestly and from time to time pointed to his useless legs. I chose a chair in the corner of the room and picked up a magazine. From time to time my eyes drifted across the room toward the two men. Carewe seemed to be pleading with Forbes in an argumentative sort of way. Presently Forbes nodded, reached into his pocket and drew out that same small box. Even at that distance I could see what appeared to be cuneiform writing on its outer surface. Fie moved a small dial in the box, lifted a tiny staff and proceeded to run it back and forth over Carewe's calf and thighs. A light flickered in the box -- red, then green. Presently he restored the box to his pocket, rose and walked away. Carewe sat in his wheelchair, an expression of puzzlement on his face. An instant later he braced his hands on the armrests and clutched there a moment. His feet came down to support him; he took a tentative step. And then he was walking across the lounge floor, step by step to the veranda. N ext day the club was abuzz with Carewe's miraculous recovery. That it was complete was attested by his playing around the practice nine and doing it without aid of any kind. Color entered his face, a smile supplanted his usual scowl and his air of confidence returned. As for me, I was so disturbed by what I had seen I almost forgot about the business-andmembership banquet scheduled for the following night. I planned to show a number of instruction slides on the handling of the new double-mashie which had been approved for tournament play by the The dinner was the usual affair. A financial report was read and an election of officers was held. Saved for the last was the eulogizing of this man called Forbes and his shattering of course records. But then, like an electric charge passing across the tables, came the whispered rumor: Forbes was an alien. An undesirable. Even now he was under security investigation in Federation City. In normal times, of course, such gossip would have been relegated to the scrap-heap where it belonged. But these weren't normal times. These were days of planetary patriotism and fearcharged suspicion. The Yansis were on the verge of war. The Yansis were known to have a highly technocratic culture on their home planet. Perhaps they had evolved a method whereby their individual identity could be hidden beyond visual detection. It's a damned shame, I thought. The man is no more an alien than I am. Yet even I had to admit there was an oddness about him that puzzled me. Nor was my curiosity relieved the next night when I returned to the clubhouse to do some remodeling work. I had promised to give a member's trajectory-wood my personal attention and to have it ready the next morning. Climbing the veranda steps, I saw Forbes sitting in the gloom. "Hullo," I said. "It's a fine night." He answered and I passed on into the clubhouse. I found the club to be repaired, got some sandpaper and a bolin-screwdriver and went to work. Perhaps five minutes passed; then the sound of footsteps came through the open window. In the glow of light from within Forbes passed by, carrying his bag. I laid down the club and made my way down the corridor to the veranda in time to see a shadowy figure step onto the first tee. He bent down, placed something on the turf; not an ordinary ball but a yellowish ovoid that gleamed with a kind of phosphorescence of its own. As if he were doing the most ordinary thing in the world, he addressed the ball, drove it into the pitch-blackness of the fairway. An arching streak of orange marked the passage of the ball as if some of its radiant pigment had embossed its path against the night sky. As if it were some kind of signal to the stars above. Forbes picked up his bag of clubs and strode off in the direcfT pi Ballantine Books and pesticide-infected foods (evoked by the recent environmental teachin), May is the month when normally cerebral types will have found themselves digging, raking and planting a mess of vegetable seeds, which, by God, will be organically grown. (Hint No. I : Household Note for City Dwellers -- a fork makes a great rake for those pots of herbs.) Before you become entirely exhausted by all this unaccustomed physical activity, better go out and buy some good reading matter to while away the hours of recuperation you can look forward to. (Hint No. #: Cold beer helps while the activity is going on.) (Hint No. #: Chivas Regal is better for relaxing stiff muscles while recuperafing.) gan and John Kippax. Science fiction in the grand old space-operatic tradition -- this one the first in a projected series. Downright nostalgic'in these days of upside-down type etcetera. (Hint No. #: Take up yoga. That way you can read standing on your head. Or, for the medallion effect, do a series of cartwheels. Have a friend running steadily alongside holding the book for you to read. But however you do it, read. If fhaf doesn't prove we're enthusiasts, Harlan, God knows what will.)  tion by Lin Carter. For some reason, Lovecraft is getting to be a big underground author. Not his Cthulhu Mythos so much as the undefined worid of Kadafh. Or perhaps incomplefe would be a better word, for Lovecraft's writing certainly never lacked definition. His imagery is brilliantly graphic. In addition to the tains five sfories from his early Dunsanian period. There appears to be a distinct connection in reading interests between adult fantasy, the occult, back-to-nature buffism and conservation. Which could create some pretty queer situations. Picture Ron Regan standing on his head chewing votes. all those delicious organically homegrown veg which you'll be harvesting, you can brush up on your cooking himself Joe Cipolla.) (Hint No. #: Italian for onion.) Oy vey. BB tion of the first hole. I went down the veranda steps and followed. The arching streak of light remained over the fairway like a glowing ribbon. And when I approached the green the glow combined with the gleaming ball to illumine a wide area. I moved unseen into a tree's shadow and there I watched him select a putter and silently tap the ball into the cup. He seemed to be playing idly, to be waiting for something. The second hole was a repetition of the first. But at the third hole Forbes opened a zippered compartment of his bag and drew out a collapsible rod with tripod legs. He also took out a small quadrant with a double row of coronium keys. He placed the quadrant next to the rod and began to tune the instrument. Slowly a mist flowed outward from the pelan, rising to form a vague screen-like curtain between the tree boles. A face began to take form there. It was the face of a patriarch. The white hair fell away from the crown of the head and the eyes, under heavy brows, seemed to glitter like shards of shiny metal. It spoke but the voice was pitched too low in the sonic scale for me to understand. "They are basically good, needing only guidance," Forbes said finally. "With your permission I will stay longer." With that, the mist-screen seemed to melt away. Forbes returned the quadrant and the collapsible rod to his bag and headed back toward the clubhouse. terest in war news preempted all other activity. An ultimatum had been delivered by the Yansis to Federation City, following what they declared to be an insulting diplomatic incident. Now they were insisting on more demands. Wherever you went people stood in groups, discussing the situation. War was inevitable, they said. Labor tunnels were doubly guarded with security restrictions. Fallout compartments were serviced. Automated trunkways were turned back to manual roads and waystations were camouflaged. Federation City prepared to move underground. The newspapers had a field day, going all-out in their vilification of the Yansis. The high-speed draft began to take men of military age and presently you noticed it on the course, older men making up a greater percentage of the players. In the midst of all this the sports pages carried one bit of news that had nothing to do with the threatened conflict. The old Southview course, twenty miles down the trunkway from Yellow Silence, was being renovated and scheduled to reopen as a private links under Heights. Funny name for a course I thought. And then did a double take when I read the name of the promoter -- Joseph Forbes. give the place the once-over. I had expected temporary greens, winter rules and hazards in the process of construction. Instead I found one of the most beautifully laid-out courses I had ever seen: the greens composed of the new magnetic silver-bent; the waterhazard a mirror-like lake that sparkled in the sunlight and fairways tailored to perfection. There were lattice bridges over picturesque streams, robotic caddies waiting at the first tee and an inviting plastic and glass clubhouse with an automatic ramp leading up from the playing level. A tremendous amount of work had been put on the course and it seemed incredible that it could have been completed in so short a time. My presence was spotted. The door to the clubhouse opened and Forbes came down the ramp to meet me. Heights," he said. "Do you want to play a round?" I shook my head. "What's that thing?" I pointed to a narrow concrete structure with a metal antenna above it. "It's a Balance-beam. Contestants pass through it and are evened-up to a common denominan tor of skill, strength and psychological endurance. Come along and meet my assistants." Fjorbes' assistants sat about a long table in a clubhouse secondfloor room, eating their meal. Forbes called names. Each man nodded as his was spoken. The wine -- pre-Atomic #, I guessed -- was of excellent quality. Forbes drank from a goblet. Presently I voiced a question; "You've quite an investment here. Do you expect to realize a profit?" "The greatest profit in the world," he said. "The profit of peace." "I don't understand." He was silent a moment. "Did it ever occur to you to wonder why a man plays a relatively simple contest, bolstered with only minor technological advancements? Principally because golf is about the last participation sport. Most others have lapsed into spectator contests. You know that with the coming of corn-automation and the subsequent increase of leisure, nonprofessional physical ability has fallen out of fashion. Hampton's Second Cycle of Life was found to rest upon a minimum of cardiac strain." "So?" "So the elemental conflict -- war. An outgrowth of tribal struggle and in turn a development of individual or family grievance. Today the Yansis are our enemies, cloaked in fear and suspicion. I propose to reduce the differences -- between." "Are you trying to tell me you expect to settle the conflict between us and the Yansis by such a simple and unsophisticated device?" I said. "Yes." "It'll never work," I said. "There's too much at stake." "I think it will. Each of the factions has been contacted and has agreed to send players. It won't make any difference if they choose professional athletes or not. Once they pass the beam they will be at the same level." He broke off. Outside two copters had settled down before the clubhouse entrance and a dozen or more figures stepped out. They were Yansis. Their wafer skulls were concealed by blue turbans and their violet eyes were hidden behind dark glasses. Stiff as sticks, they marched up the ramp and strode into the lobby where they were met by Eorbes. I nodded goodbye and passed outside. But as I headed down the trunkway a question hammered at me. Why had there been no security watch over the Yansis representatives? With the two races at sword's points -- it seemed strange that no precautions had been taken by either side. I drove down the trunkway and the farmland of early Autumn stretched away on all sides. Or was it farmland? The fields seemed to be lying fallow, untilled. Nor were any farmhouses in evidence. Abruptly it struck me that I had not passed a single car, that the road was in fact deserted. Ten minutes later I was staring, stunned, at the sign above the gate. I was back where I had started. A figure stepped out of the shoulder bushes and leaned in the car window. It was Benjamin, one of Forbes' assistants. "It's all right," he said. "We didn't know it was you. Thought you were still on the course." "I must have taken the wrong turn," I said. "But I don't remem -- " "It's all right. Just keep going straight down the trunkway." He waved me on. T he newspapers carried nothing about the impending tournaabout the Yansis continued. In their Australasian lair they were said to be making ready a weapon a hundred times more frightful than the missle-missle. Then a new series of events occurred to demand journalistic attention. In twelve cities, on twelve outstanding links, a strange duplication of the phenomenon that had taken place at Yellow Silence transpired. A stranger played with a fantastically low score and in some unorthodox way performed some unusual therapy. What was more important, however, was the society these strangers organized, a national quasi-theology attracting members by the score. The first chance I got, impelled by curiosity, I drove back to the Heights, arriving in time to see a foursome made up of two of Forbes' assistants and two turbaned Yansis drive for the first hole. I followed them. The game ended with the Yansis far in the lead. The aliens were laughing triumphantly as they left the eighteenth hole and made their way back to the clubhouse. I met Forbes on the veranda. "I want to thank you," he said, "for not betraying my confidence. The press, though, is getting more difficult to hold back." "The tournament, I take it, is not proving a success." "Why do you say that?" "I followed the play today," I said, "and you could have cut the silence with a knife. You can't change antagonism to rivalry." "You forget all Yansis don't speak our language." "You could have used a Transladian." "If they agreed to, yes. So far the tournament is a draw. We're even-up in the number of holes played and the number won." I thought that over. "Who plays next?" ( Please turn to page #) "You're in the country of the deaf -- and noise can kill... O N AN outcropping ledge of rock Braden paused for a moment, narrowing his eyes against the sun. He glanced back down the dusty trail -- not that it really deserved that name, since calling it a trail implied the previous passage of someone or something and there were no visible tracks, just a series of negotiable footholds rising stairfashion on the face of the hill. From this level he could still see his car, zebra-striped by the shadow of a tall, branching cactus at the point where the ground started to slant too steeply for wheels to find purchase. But only a smudge of smoke marked his last stopping place, a settlement not so much a town as an accident, a wrinkle in the sandy ribbon of desert time. Because that, though, was the place where he had realized he had come to the end of his quest, he kept his eyes fixed on the blur of smoke while he sought the cork of his canteen and raised it in a parody of a toast. He sipped the contents economically and stopped before his thirst was satisfied. Water, he reasoned, must be his quarry's chief problem in this arid valley. Ultimately possession of it might become a weapon. He replaced the canteen in his pack and turned to study the going ahead of him. By now, he calculated, he must be two-thirds of the way to the top. He had hardly expected to find clues indicating he was on the right track -- if his deductions were correct he was dealing with someone desperate enough to take every possible precaution -- but he was optimistic. If he did not find what he was looking for on this particular hill, there were others beyond which he could explore tomorrow. After six years of searching, another few days made little difference. He shouldered the pack and sought the easiest way to go higher. From this point on the rocks grew craggier and there was no sand, for the cold night wind scoured the hard stone clean. Stolidly he scrambled onward, the sun punishing his back and the sweat vanishing from his skin almost before it oozed out of the pores. After a while he found himself on the edge of a flat space, a miniature plateau about thirty yards across, flanked by a steep drop into the valley and a nearly vertical cliff forty or more feet high. He removed his pack and tossed it over the lip of the level area, then hauled himself up with much panting and cursing. As he bent to reclaim the pack something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. A stack of rocks did not quite meet the cliff wall. A shadow beyond them looked like the opening of a cave. He saw a speck of bright, artificial color, a fragment of sun caught on a broken bottle. While he was still staring the quiet voice from behind him said. "Put up your hands." Braden strove mentally to quell the flush of jubilation which spread across his mind with cold contrasting thoughts -- ordinary thoughts of fear and surprise. When, compliantly, his arms went up in the air they trembled unnecessarily. "Turn around," said the quiet voice. He obeyed and had to repress a start of surprise -- how efficiently, he could not be sure, but it was almost certain that his quarry would be preoccupied with alarm at this intrusion, so there was some leeway for uncontrolled reaction. He had giKpected what pictures had shown him: a pudgy, rather ugly, self-indulgent child. In fact, behind the rifle that was leveled at him over a sheltering rock stood a slim, wiry figure likely to be taller than himself when upright and seeming a good deal tougher. Though that remains to be decided... For a while the two studied each other: the hunter in plain sight, clad in open shirt, Jeans, heavy climbing boots, the quarry almost hidden by the rock so that the rifle was like a symbol for armor. But the bare tanned arms that were visible were lean and muscular and the face under the roughly cropped fair hair was harsh with enmity. "All right." The quarry gestured with the muzzle of the gun. "You're not armed, I guess. Move away from your pack, though." N OW that the long-awaited confrontation was upon him, Braden was having trouble controlling his excitement. Doing as he was told, however, he concentrated on simple ideas. What's all this about? Have I run into a criminal in hiding? But the next words he heard, uttered in a slow drawl of puzzlement, told him that his precautions were in vain. "Braden -- Daniel Braden, is that right? But I don't know anyone called Braden. And yet you seem to know me." A headshake. A whitening of the knuckles that still clasped around the stock of the gun. Braden sighed and chose a direct onslaught rather than further prevarication. "You're not what I expected from your pictures, Lesley." "What?" "I thought you'd be fat. You started out fat. But I guess starving in a hole halfway up a mountain -- and scrambling up and down that slope every time you need supplies -- would take weight off anybody." Bewilderment was coming to his aid. Uncertain, letting the gun's threatening mouth move to one side, the quarry asked, "Are you somebody who used to know me when?" Hope, hunger -- some kind of craving after human companionship -- whatever it was, she moved from behind the protecting rock. Braden studied her critically. She was quite naked, which was among the many things he might have expected but hadn't thought about, because after all who was there for at least five miles in any direction to complain? Her fair hair had been slashed merely to keep it out of her eyes and her face was like the rest of her, tanned to a wooden color by the merciless desert sunshine. But the shape was good -- square shoulders contrasted with small round breasts and wide feminine hips -- and the lessening of the old puppy-fat allowed her fine bone structure to show through. God damn, she's turned out beautiful! That thought, welling from the animal level of his being, breached the careful camouflage beyond repair and his mind bloomed like a beacon. The gun snapped back to its former aim. "You know me," The words were forced out on breath alone, with no voice to drive them. "Sure I know you," Braden said. "You're Lesley Wolker, and you can read my mind." "Oh God. Oh God." The sounds died on the bare face of the hill like seeds cast into crevices among stark rock. "How -- how -- " "How did I find you?" Braden supplied briskly, much relieved at the girl's obvious terror. "Why, it was pretty simple really. I started with the premise that there should by now be at least one efficient telepath in the United States -- and possibly more. It was only logical that with the high level of success obtained from randomly chosen subjects by people like Rhine, someone would have been born who was endowed with the full talent. And such a person -- Well, you read Wells's The Country of the Blind? Only you're not sighted among the blind. You're in a country of the deaf -- and noise can kill." Lesley's face writhed as though he had put a hot iron to the smooth mound of her belly. "A person like that would either go insane or run and hide. And in the modern world there aren't many places one can hide. A desert or a mountain seemed to me the only possible places, and if such a person were to be born in the big cities where most of our population is now concentrated, then -- short of finding a usable route up to the Canadian backwoods -- an area like this one would be the closest and easiest escape hole. I don't know what kind of torment such a person would undergo, but it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that it would be so bad the victim would flee in panic to the nearest lonely spot, without taking time to wonder if later on there would be a chance of moving somewhere else. "So I took a map and made some measurements -- and then I checked the missing persons files in every city where they'd let me get at them and checked those against pertinent genealogical tables and -- " Braden snapped his fingers. "Five years of that. More than a year, now, asking around in every hole-in-corner town near the areas I'd selected as possibilities. And in that particular one over there -- " he pointed in the general direction of the smoke smudge he had toasted earlier -- "they told me about a mysterious woman who occasionally comes down from the hills to buy basic foods, always wearing the same overly tight blouse and shorts which are now pretty well in rags. There's something to be said for old-fashioned prejudices. They talk about your legs every time the conversation gets dull -- di you know that? Yes, I guess you must know." He gave her a girn that turned the corners of his mouth into a sketch for horns. "Also," he concluded, "you must know what it is I came to get you for." feral mask and the rifle was clutched so tightly that not only her knuckles but half the backs of her hands were white under the sunburn. She uttered a choking gasp and jerked as though to fire. "One moment," Braden said -- and this part of his conversation was one he had rehearsed so many limes in his mind he genuinely believed it now. "Are you planning to kill me?" Lesley gave a violent nod, eyes locked wide open under her sunbleached lashes. "But you daren't," Braden said with careful cruelty. "Because you'd know what I was thinking when I died." He relaxed his mind now and he had a very real fear of death underneath the glacial calm he outwardly affected. "If you kill me, Lesley, you will feel the bullet, no matter where you put it -- unless you hit me in the head and destroy my brain instantly. But I doubt you can do that. I don't see how anyone who can read minds could bear to learn to use a gun so well. You've never felt a slug tear up your belly or fill your lungs with blood but I have. I was out in Viet Nam and I was shot three times. And later I was bayoneted, too. Look inside my head and learn how I remember that. And those were only wounds, Lesley. They weren't death. Death is big and black and final -- " All the time he was talking, soothingly, almost hypnotically, he had been approaching her. Now she regained her presence of mind and advanced the gun as though to skewer him with it. "You can't use a knife either, Lesley," Braden said in the same flat tone. "Steel in the flesh feels cold and agonizing. You can't use your bare hands because -- even though you're probably as strong as I am after climbing up and down these rocks -- every time you hit me you would feel the blow." Another step -- and another. The outstretched gun was beginning to quiver. The girl's eyes were bright with what he confidently took to be tears. "You can't give me poison because either it hurts or it takes too long. You can't strangle me while I'm asleep, for fear I'd wake and be so terrified you'd have to give up. So you can't kill me, Lesley. You daren't kill me. Doing something like that would drive you insane. You know what suffering does to you, Tm sure -- you must have been around people who were dying, maybe after a traffic accident -- " His thick fingers lanced out and clamped on the barrel of the gun, thrusting it aside where its slugs would whine harmlessly away. For a moment he feared she still had enough guts to struggle with him for possession of it but abruptly she let it go and slapped her hands up to her temples. Another second and she began to cry. Contemptuously Braden broke the breech of the gun and spilled the shells in a metal rain over the edge of the plateau. About to whirl the weapon itself around his head and fling it far away from the rocks, he paused. "I'm not throwing this down the hill in case you think to use it as a club and beat me unconscious, by the way," he said. "There isn't any way you could force me to let go of you now I've tracked you down. You can't torture me or compel me. You see. I've known for a long time that I wouldn't need to come armed against someone like you. I had a very strict and puritanical upbringing. It left me conditioned in a certain fundamental way. Of course, by now you've probably worked out what I'm going to tell you but I'll say it in words just to avoid misunderstandings." He stared at her piercingly. "You were a pretty big girl when life became too much for you -- seventeen, weren't you, when you vanished from your family and home? So you probably knew the facts of life. And I don't think I need to tell you what a masochist is!" He raised the rifle and hurled it as far as he could. Dusting his hands, he turned to confront Lesley. "But a masochist isn't simply someone who likes to be hurt -- that's a common error. It's someone who needs to be hurt, and the more he's hurt the better able he is to let go and grab after the gratification that he wants. You can't bear to be near someone who's being hurt, let alone to be hurt yourself. It's going to be an unequal struggle, isn't it?" Tear-stained, her face rose from the shelter of her hands. "What do you want from me?" she whispered. "You have to ask?" Braden gave a thick triumphant laugh. "Don't try and fool me. You know very well what I want from you. Go on, admit it." "You -- " The first attempt at an answer died in a gasp, and she tried again. "You think that with me to read other people's minds for you you could -- " "Let's hear it. Finish the sentence, baby." "You could rule the world." "That's right," Braden agreed. "Or if you went crazy from the pressure -- at least I'd have collected enough secrets to buy the men who count. You may be a telepath, sweetheart, but in this area I'm a clairvoyant. And all I have to do now is wait until you see the future the way I do."  than he'd expected, he decided as he sat before the small shielded fire at the mouth of the cave Lesley called home. On a stick he was brought with him -- one of the things he had figured out in advance was that someone as squeamish as you'd imagine a telepath to be wouldn't eat the flesh of animals. The point amused him and for a moment he dwelled on the vivid recollection of a slaughterhouse he had once visited. From the rear of the cave a retching sound told him that the thought had had the effect he'd hoped for. "There, there, baby," he called. "It's just one of these facts of life!" "Bastard," she said. "Sticks and stones, sticks and stones -- " Braden snuffed at the sausages and decided they were cooked through. He took slices of bread from a loaf he had brought and made a crude sandwich. A pushover. A goddamn pushover. Why, he'd never imagined he would overcome her so easily. There she was, lying on the heap of torn blankets which served her for a bed, her wrists and ankles tied and she hadn't uttered a word of protest when he bound her. And that must simply be because when he thought about fetters and bondage something fierce was let loose on the lower levels of his mind, emitting a sort of raw animalistic violence that her sober detachment was vulnerable to. Faced with that kind of reaction all she could do was whimper and hold out her hands for the rope. Oh, baby, what I'm going to do with you... The memory haunted him all the while he was munching his food. Belly satisfied, he lit a cigarette and relaxed into a contented reverie against the side wall of the cave. In some ways, even if nothing else came of what he had done, it was an achievement to have actualized his favorite fantasy. Tying up a girl with no clothes on, wholly and completely at his mercy -- it was the other half of his private hell, the one in which he was the victim to be bound. And because he fundamentally resented the deprivation and subservience here implied, no matter how great a thrill it gave him, he yearned for the power that control over a mind-reader would bring him, as though that would set him free from the prison in which his tyrannical father and cynical mother had enclosed him. He remembered those Saturday night encounters when his parents called him in to agree to the total of his week's offenses and to suffer without crying out the lashes that matched the number of them. He caught himself suddenly. Thinking along those lines was dangerous. With an effort he wrenched his mind back to pleasanter ideas -- he pictured a certain building in pre-Castro Havana, where a girl in high black boots with jingling spurs had passed the thong of a whip through her fingers and licked her lips lasciviously, ordering him to cringe toward her foot and kiss her toe... Behind him came a splashing sound and he jolted back to full awareness. He scrambled to his feet. It was no part of his plan to have Lesley foul the pile of blankets with vomit -- he had dumped her there for the time being only. Since there was nothing else decently soft to sleep on he proposed to usurp the pile himself and let her sleep on the bare stone floor. A few nights of that and she would be well softened for him. Although, of course, since she had shown herself to be so weak already... He caught up a brand from the fire and used it for a torch to light his way back into the shallow cave. As he had feared, the thoughts she had picked up from his mind had nauseated Lesley to the point of revulsion. Luckily she had missed the blankets. He prodded her with his toe. "Clear it up," he ordered. Clasping her arms around her body, she looked up at him. "I -- I'm cold" she forced out between chattering teeth. "I don't care," he rasped. "You're going to be a hell of a sight colder. Come on, clear it up before I make you lick it up." Shuddering, awkward for the bonds on her wrists and the hobbles he had put around her ankles, she got to her feet. "What -- what with?" "Should I know?" Braden shrugged. "You live here in this pigsty. You must have something to mop messes up with." "I guess I do," she said tiredly. "Okay, I'll see to it. But you'd better keep your mind on something else if you don't want it to happen again." "It won't happen again," Braden grunted. "There won't be anything in your belly to bring up, not even water." "What?" "Not until you start doing as I say." She stared at him in the red light of the brand he held. For a moment her mouth worked but no sound emerged. Then she seemed to crurnble in on herself. "Oh God... But I can't do it with my hands tied, can I?" He started, suspicious of a trick. But her wrists were indeed too closely bound to let her use her hands. He found a ledge to rest his brand on and warily slacked the rope to a distance of a foot or so. "That's enough," she sighed and headed for the mouth of the cave. that, even if he himself would not have dared to face the steep hillside in the dark, she who had lived here for years on end might be him. But she stopped by the screen of piled rock hiding the cave mouth and took from behind it a plastic bucket he had seen earlier and a cheap broom with most of the bristles missing, which she must have bought in the general store of the town where he had heard news of her existence. He relaxed, letting her go past him back into the cave. Not until he had seen her clear away the mess she had made like a perfect slave, however, did he let himself assume his former confidence. Why, all  need to do to keep her on the leash is think about things she finds distasteful!  could weaken her past the point of resistance and enjoy myself at the same time... Memories leaped up, not only of the house of ill fame in Havana which he had once patronized, but of another in Los Angeles and another in New York and another and another in every city where his steadfast quest had taken him. A multiple blur of women in provocative scanties and high black leather boots wielding whips arose in the forefront of his mind. "You wicked boy," Lesley said and raised the broom so that its shadow wavered across the rock wall like the flexible lash of a whip. "You wicked boy -- you've sinned, haven't you? Go on, admit it!" The tone was right, precisely that of his mother when she weekly called him in to face his father and the regular beatings he endured. The manner was right, the words were right -- even the fact that the girl who spoke them was a decade younger than his mother and wore no clothes at all could not destroy their impact. From the lowest levels of Braden's mind welled the impulse to obey. He fought it valiantly but she raised the broom, as once his mother had raised one when he tried to defy parental orders. He cowered down and -- in the last instant of coherent thought left to him -- re( Please turn to page #) G eorge ellison took his Unicredit card from his worn wallet without looking at it. It was easy to find. Besides it he carried only his Uniworld ident and a scratched up holograph of Janice taken by her father when he was with the General Minerals Mars station survey team. Ellison's eyes were on the big shiny new Femmikin building across the torn-up street. It was big, but by no means the biggest structure in sprawling Arizona City. But it was the Femmikin building and that made it important. Femmikin. Fantasy worlds come true. Paradise within grasp. The dream woman there, just for you, custom built -- exactly. Some dug it, some didn't. It was too easy. Just think it out and write down the specs and give it to the carefully neutral advisers, have them zap your Unicredit tab and give them a few weeks to change your life. Too easy? George didn't think so. Too liard maybe. What do you want in (I woman, anyway? They were so damned expensive and an ordinary algae worker or fabricator or statistician could maybe afford one if he saved and cut corners -- but even then he had to hit it good on the numbers to get one before he was too old to enjoy her. But Ellison could afford it. Today he could afford it. Last week he couldn't. But right now he had the credit and before it dwindled away he was going to buy one. They'd have to live in his remodeled old high rise in the Tucson area but at least he wouldn't have to listen to her complaints. But what to get? Big flashy job with all the luxury accessories? Steady dark one with built-in moxie to back him up? Something in between? George shrugged and started across the ripped-out street. He paused halfway across to let a gray-haired man in a cream dryfoam suit get across the battered plastic plank that bridged the deep slot in the street. They smiled ruefully at each other and George said, "Are they ever going to finish mangling the streets?" "Never," the man answered. "It's a compulsion. Street-rippers. They get together at night and laugh over the way Navahoe Boulevard has looked for two years." George snorted wryly and walked across the plank and on up to the impressive wood door of the big building. He paused, looking at the big carved women on each panel, then ran his tongue across his teeth and put a hand against a curved-grained buttock and pushed. "May I help you, sir?" Tanned. Blonde, Trim figure. Standard Femmikin blue dress. Alert blue eyes. Probably called Secretaire or Efficienette in the catalogue. Ellison was short with her, faintly embarrassed. "Yeah. I'd like to buy a femmikin." "Yes, sir. Do you have your specifications with you or would you like to talk to one of our advisers?" "Uh, are your advisers, uh -- " "We have both natural and Femmikin advisers. Many people have spoken well of our Femmikin advisers, sir. They are used to dealing with many types of requests. Some most unusual." Do  look like a guy who'd want something unusual? Maybe I do. They must get all kinds of nuts... The femmikin glanced down at a electropad on her bare desk. "Our or, if you like, our Miss Susan." "Which one is, uh -- " The femmikin smiled. "Miss Susan is one of our latest models. Both have access to our display consoles, of course, and complete credit payment plans." "I don't need that. I'm buying it right off." "That's very nice, sir," she smiled. "May I recommend Miss Susan, sir? She is a Femmikin, you know, and completely experienced in specification recommendations." "Uh, okay, sure." The femmikin pressed a button amid a plethora of multicolored buttons, smiled, and indicated a corridor. "Room seven-four-eight, please?" "Yeah -- thanks." Ellison turned and started down the corridor. Why don't I just buy into Harry's pot farm? Or get superzonked at the Eroticon? Or move into a better cube and try to meet some citizens who aren't groggy or creepy-eyed or zapped? Or maybe find a natural and have a license full of kids? Ellison groaned inwardly. Forget that. Fle'd tried that. "Naturals" was such a fabriword. But you couldn't buy femmikin children. At least not yet. Kids you had to make yourself. Provided you could find a natural you could stand to be with for more than an evening. Must they all play games? Or are Just the ones f meet the crazies? Maybe that was what was bugging someone at Fabricque d'espace when they designed the first femmikin. Or built her. Or grew her. Or all those things. A little of everything, I guess... He stopped before a door. #. Behind it was Miss Susan, he thought. Trim and blond, in a blue dress. He went in. Her hair was dark but otherwise she was' similiar to Miss Receptionist Mark IV. Why don't they make an ugly one -- just for this one job? Or would that be bad (Please turn to page #) Alien Island T. L. Sherred The Steel Crocodile D. G. Compton Lord Tyger Philip Jose Farmer I 'LL tell you how I feel about T. L. Sherred: when I discovered that Ballantine had published his novel Alien Island, #(., Ballantine Book ##.#), I went to the newsstand and bought it without waiting for my review copy to arrive. To my knowledge, this is Tom Sherred's only novel. He's written little science fiction -- or aught else, for all I know -- and he dwells in my memory as a soft-speaking fellow who looks like the anchorman on a foundry bowling team. But that revelation of his psyche -- or that imposed revelation -- seems to me to strike to the heart of his importance to us all. For it was T.L. Sherred who sprang the first lightning crack of spurting mortar between the hitherto unbreached stones of the National Guard armory that science fiction had become. With one story, E for EfForties, he handed the field such a knock that many old plinths are still loose in their sockets. It seems a rather tame if welltold story now. Its beer-drinking characters with their non-Anglic names and their matter-of-fact awareness that the struggle is between Man and Establishment seem perfectly acceptable. One tends to forget that in the #s all sf people named Labiada began every sentence with Si, Sehor while plotting to feed opium to the hero's girl. As for knowing what to do with a soldering iron, or, worse yet, with a field theory... Well, look, this was in the days when people were earning an E for effort, and being justifiably proud of it, but the purpose of an engineering education was to give a bright boy a leg up into the #-ayear bracket before he reached pensionable age and got his gold watch from the Corporation. And the purpose of science fiction was to elaborate on that premise. It was T.L. Sherred -- utterly unknown, and previously unheard-of -- who through natural wit or divine ignorance wrote a coherent, logical, entertaining, believable science-fiction story in which an entirely different view of our world was taken as a matter of course. A number of factors conjoined to lend his deed its major importance. Not the least of these was publication in the very journal whose geist he deranged, at the hands of the same editor who embodied every bourgeois aspiration that Sherred dismissed as being of no consequence. It makes a fascinating paradox. A false one, probably -- I don't suppose either Sherred or Campbell are anything like what I've described. But empires have gestated on less, and I'd rank E for Effort along with Robert Abernathy's When the Rockets the two major incursions of the middle #s into the era of the victorious wars. Well, in any case Alien Island is not E For Effort, or even any of the three other stories (published in a bunch in the early #s), which constitute the known body of Sherred's science fiction to date. In fact, about all it has to recommend it as a piece of work in its own right is the Michigan locale. Not many people set romances in Detroit. The story itself -- about a barfly who becomes a galactic civilization's representative, and who dooms Earth simply by serving as a focus for human greed and vanity -- is potentially noble in exactly the same way E for Effort was. And its apocalyptic ending evokes its predecessor. But it sounds better than it reads. It reads padded, uncoordinated, and unintentionally whimsical. It could easily have been a good, commonsense narrative about essentially likeable people whose lack of complication cuts like a scalpel through Man's normal fat of self-service. And I believe that's what it's intended to be, and the kind of book Sherred could write, or I wouldn't be disappointed that it isn't. F ans of D.G. Compton will be pleased by the appearance of The Steel Crocodile (Ace Special #, #(t). Being a Compton fan ever since Synthajoy, I was one of these fortunate people. This is a good and enjoyable story about a man and his wife coming apart because they cannot come to an adequate mutual understanding of technological society as it is convincingly portrayed here in the near future. One thing that diminishes one's pleasure in this book is the fact that this synopsis would describe Synthajoy, as well. And if we compare the two. The Steel Crocodile is invariably the paler version. In Synthajoy, for example, the woman in the insane asylum expresses many of her tensions in terms of her love for her lover as distinct from her husband. In The Steel Crocodile a lingering unresolved love for a now dead political activity is what leads Abigail eventually to desert her husband in favor of actions calculated to get her in serious trouble with the prevailing political establishment and get herself clapped into a looney bin for the rest of her life. In fact, as far as story goes this book presents no advance over Compton's previous considerable standard. Abigail is another of Compton's extremely well-characterized women. He is I think without serious exception the very best delineator of female characters in the sciencefiction field, perhaps the best we have ever had. But it may be that this gift is both intense and circumscribed, because Abigail, as noted above, is the weak sister of Synthajoy' s heroine. The think-tank establishment which employs Matthew is, although a publicly chartered corporation, pretty much the private province of a hard-driving ruthless megalomaniacal director of considerable personal charm -- but not as much as is displayed by Synthajoy's villain. And so on. Matthew is one of the world's leading sociologists, and an extremely popular and well-paid consultant to private industry, which, as is already the case, is shown here to be using all the paraphernalia of social science and pseudoscience in order to increase the efficiency of its product development ( Please turn to page # ) Humans are only people -- as Earth exploiters knowl T he Pacific Ocean seemed to be burning, adding to the smog. From the upper level of the piggyback freeway, as he swerved his little electric car down the offramp to her beach suburb, he glimpsed the fiery finger flickering form had stood. The immense gas flame made him think of a certain nebula and he winced because he'd been Here for eighteen years. By now he ought to be reminded of something mundane. Earthly, like the gas pilot light in an unlit stove. All the way to the horizon the ocean was darkening with wasted oil from the undersea gusher. He swallowed. Waves of oil were lapping the beach with gleaming layers like oily -- chocolate. The thought made his left stomach rumble hungrily. His right stomach contracted around the olives from the uncounted martinis he'd gulped in the metropolitan bar while he was getting her husband's signature on the oil lease. "She'll never shine-sign," her husband had crooned drunkenly, laying his head to rest on the quaint mahogany. "She'll never shine-sign. You're not man enough to make her sign. Nobody is." Legally the couple owned the attractive suburban home in joint tenancy, so he needed her signature, too. He was anxious to rescue the oil underneath. But he felt unsure of his motives. He remembered her huge eyes gleaming with an exciting anger. To his loneliness they had appeared as sensuously hard as the carapaces of twin black beetles. As beautifully hard-shelled as... His emotions became more confused. His hearts beat even faster as he drove along her street. His right stomach squirmed. The alcohol had contained quick energy but was too insubstantial for his inner organism. It lacked the essential hydrocarbons necessary for his innermost distillations. He attempted a grin but merely grimaced. Here most humor seemed distorted, unhappy anomaly, as if these people felt alien on their own planet. So what did that make him, doubly alien? At least he was trying to save their oil. He glanced at the sky as if he could see twenty-two more years into the future and rammed a wooden barricade in the street. He parked. People were evacuating the seashore neighborhood as if they feared an oily holocaust. He put the half-signed lease in his comfortingly hard-shelled attache case. On its plastic carapace, with his own daring brand of humor, he displayed new initials in debonair fourteen-carat gold italics: B.E.M. These people seemed -- stupid -- wasting their most vital natural resource. He thought they deserved their future. The woman made him feel altruistic. He wanted to preserve her future. He strode along the oil-slick sidewalk, inhaling the rich scent of oil. Delicious! Now that he had her husband's signature he thought she should at least let him inside. He winked as the sea-breeze sprayed aerosol-fine oil droplets against his baby-blue eyes. Rubbing them made his hand shiny from all the oil droplets smeared together on his skin. He sneaked a lick. Yeah! The estate-type tract house had an embattled look. She'd pulled the drapes together. Last Sunday, here on the asphalt driveway, her husband had told him to go to hell. But the old bluffer had been merely showing off his neighborhood integrity in front of his wife and hulking son. Today, at high noon in the bar, that old hero had whined: "Neighbors signed. So I'm forced to get mine." His shaking hand had accepted the extra five hundred in folding money under the bar. He wouldn't report that to his wife or the I.R.S. "Now I should buy you a drink -- because you won't be able to make her sign. Impossible! You been suckered." He was afraid he would appear too boyish for her. In his conservative business suit he still resembled the snub-nosed young radio operalor from the oil tanker that had gone to the bottom eighteen years ago. Although he had negotiated hundreds of oil leases since then, he stilt felt hampered by that young man's startled blue eyes and wispy blond hair. Even after eighteen years he felt vulnerable without his body-shell. He imagined her standing on the other side of the door, obstinately letting him wait. She was hardboiled. Then he heard her steelheeled footsteps. For a moment his hearts thudded. He pretended he was himself, safely back inside his carapace but his perverse urge toward her increased. She didn't open the door. Finally, in his frustration, he tapped on it with his attache case. She and the Smiths were the only ones on this block who hadn't signed. The Smiths were trying to hold him up for more money than their neighbors had received -- but this one was an idealist who wouldn't sell out at any price. However, she was human. She might be waiting to get more than the Smiths? His blond eyebrows rose as he glanced into her open three-car garage. It contained an outboard motorboat and two empty stalls. He realized the garage might be a clue to her weaknesses. She didn't have a car? Her husband had driven an expensively wasteful gasoline-burner to the city. Last Sunday the garage had held a fourwheel-drive dune-buggy with a racing stripe and a high-school parking lot permit on its windshield. He felt surprised that such a formidable woman didn't have a car of her own. Apparently both of the men in her family were able to take advantage of her. This was encouraging. He smiled. From the corner of his eye he'd noticed a movement at the dining-room window. Between the dark drapes her fiercely beautiful face glared out at him. He nodded, trying to look suave while he opened his hard-shelled attache case. He held up the lease-option against the glass, confronting her with her husband's signature. Her expression changed from startled to pained to puzzled to enraged. She looked down at him so haughtily, he remembered the gloriously hard face of that Italian actress gleaming through the transparent carapace of his teevee. Her eyes, glittering behind the window-glass, made him excited and disturbed. He was becoming willingly attracted to these angry ones. More and more often it was his feeling that these seductively fierce old ones were encased in invisible, chitinous exoskeletons. In his frustration and guilty hope he had even conjectured that he was receiving emanations from their gleaming, hardened minds. He smiled wryly. He felt so lonely. Under her shiny glare through the glittering glass he imagined himself light-years away. Their shells would be gleaming. In passionate recognition, their hard carapaces would begin banging together with the ferocity of their love. One of them would crack, he thought. Even his human heart was pounding. He heard her hard heels crossing the floor. She was coming to the front door. He turned again to face it. The door opened but not enough. He saw a gleaming security chain. Above it in the darkness of the hall hung her glittering eyes. She glared as if he were to blame for the underwater oil gusher and everything else wrong with her world. He felt innocent. Inhuman. For a joyous instant he felt as if he had regrown his carapace. He was handsomely shiny, virilely armored. But even in his excitement he remembered not to stridulate. He lowered his attache case. He said, "Hi," as if he had forgotten the unpleasantness on Sunday. Her voice had a hard, rasping edge. "I was afraid you'd talk him into -- " "Bought him a Tom Collins," he interrupted brightly, trying to deflect even more of her anger onto her husband. "Slipped him an extra hundred for signing but I'm -- wasn't supposed to -- tell." He imitated a laugh. Their native games of false truthfulness seemed to him as absurdly useful as their humor. "But he's got it." "Get off our porch." The harshness of her voice reminded him of the stridulations preceding love and he glanced at the sky. ness he felt even worse than shellless. He had wanted to remain faithful. He had only twenty-two more years to wait. But he needed to bang against something. He glanced shyly at this weird creature who was repeatedly emitting repetitious stridulations. "I won't sign. Not even if we're the last family on this block." "You are," he said. "Did your husband telephone you like he told me he would?" "All of you -- you're ruining everything." It was like a love song. He fought to keep his head. "I don't have anything to do with that mess." He glanced toward the ocean. "Believe me. I'm trying to help you save your property values. This oily fog is soaking into my suit. If you'd let me inside -- " "Get out!" He blinked. He wasn't even in, yet she was telling him to get out. He decided to force entry via his guilt-by-accusation approach. Because they lacked shells, many of these creatures were so vulnerable they acted as if the sins of others were their own. He had noticed they usually surrendered to any authoritarian or priestly voice. "You're to blame," he said wildly. "You're all to blame. You didn't try hard enough a year ago when you could have prevented what's happened because of selfcentered people like you." He added loudly as if broadcasting to her neighbors: "Is it because your husband works for -- " "Shut up. He's not much more than a bookkeeper," she hissed, peeking out of the doorway but not unhitching the chain. "He wasn't involved in any way." "Ah, but his clients -- " he retorted, having no idea whose accounts her husband serviced. "You know as well as I do that their incomes are dependent on transportation and other vital parts of the economy which need oil. It's your lifeblood and mine. Ours?" He stepped toward her but she started to close the door in his face. "At least you're not afraid," he bleated, hurriedly redirecting his approach. "You're not afraid of anything, are you?" he murmured humbly as if she'd defeated him, as if he were no threat to fair womanhood because he was so endearingly boyish and weak. "Could I come inside and rest for a moment?" "Get off-my porch!" He shrugged. He straightened sternly. Like a process-server, supported by the commanding power of a government, he flashed his lease option. "Better read the fine print." "I won't sign it." "Read it." In his business he'd discovered the best way to convince women was to confuse them. She reached for it. He yanked it away. "Everybody in your block will be getting his or her rightful share. Are you too proud to accept yours?" "Mine?" she shrilled. "You've ruined our town." "Not our company." He hoped a few argumentative maneuvers would lead him into her house. She might let him in while trying to get the last word. He thrust: "You're trying to blame us for wanting to help you." She retorted, "You're trying to town." "We're trying to preserve your natural resources," he exclaimed. "I don't work for an incompetent our brochure." His present truthfulness was preordained by the ultimate lie. "I don't care who you work for." She pressed outward against the door so the security chain strained and he began to think of it as the chastity belt to her house. "Listen," he said, "what I care about is conservation and decency and freedom. I'm trying to help you save something from your property value before it drops below what you owe on your mortgage and you end With nothing while the people across the street a finger across the street. "They've all signed up except for one old lady who's in Europe and they're trying to contact her today. If they site, we won't need yours. And we won't need your neighbors' lots we've optioned." He pointed his finger at her. "Because you waited too long we won't be able to take up any of our options in this block. Your neighbors' last chance for wealth and happiness will be gone because of you. They'll blame you." Her eyes glinted from the darkness. She did not unhitch the security chain. He felt baffled. H e was unable to judge the effect of his greed-fright technique but he added ominously: "Your block won't even be a truck parking site if you don't. sign. The leasers will tap your oil pool from across the street and toss you a few dollars. They'll paint their derricks green and plant a couple of trees. They'll park their big trucks where those houses used to be. Those people will have moved away -- rich. Their oil pumps will be so loud that you won't be able to sleep. No one will buy your house at any price -- except me -- now." "We bought our house with rights and covenants. Zoning -- " "It's cracked wide open," he interrupted. "Your own Town Council is selling the dump for a Board designated it as a future park and our latest survey after the -- " he Jerked his hehd toward the ocean -- " shows the people know they're licked. Because of the continuous mess off shore, seventy-six percent of the voters now within the town limits. Then the town will begin collecting some oil taxes. Unfortunately, the state and Federal Governments have been getting all the bonuses and royalties from the off-shore leases. You've been getting nothing," he finished triumphantly, "except more and more oil on your beach." "We marched in protest," she blurted. "And gave up because you know you can't win," he said holding out the lease. "You and your neighbors will be getting fair recompense if you sign this." She glanced from the maze of small print to his face and handed the paper back to him. At least she hadn't torn it up. He let his voice smile. "Now if we could go inside so you can study this -- " "No." But oddly she laughed. "I could call the police." "Their telephone number is nine-nine-nine," he said and she shrugged. Although she did not unchain the door, neither did she close it. He started his penultimate maneuver. "Your husband said you wouldn't be able to understand any of this anyway." He turned away but did not put the lease back into his attache case. He heard a metallic sound and knew it was the door chain. In his excitement he imagined there were hard shells between himself and the woman and that they would bang together as he entered. Her eyes glistened, retreating. He took a deep breath as she let him into the dark hallway. He guessed a bedroom was at the end. With his human heart thudding, he followed her into the living room, laughing, feeling out of breath. Sometimes he wondered if the radio operator's body were gradually capturing him. If so, the female ones should seem beautiful to him. He looked at her grim face. It was her shield, he thought, but such an inadequate shell. Her resentment and weaknesses seemed nakedly exposed. He toyed with them, watching her features, savoring the hardness he detected. "Your husband told me not to tell," he laughed, "which topless bar I left him in." Her expression became even more rigid. He established himself on the couch, spreading the pages of the lease option on the coffee table. "You're wasting your time," she grated, not sitting down. "I won't sign. What did my husband -- " I T was a dating bar," he said imaginatively, reaching up and switching on a standing lamp to illuminate the splendors of the lease. Its parchment and engraving were the best. "We agree to pay you a thousand a month until we drill. You can't lose a thing because you keep living here until we pay you twice its appraised value as a residence. When this block goes into production you'll begin receiving your share of royalties and tax advantages just like the "What was the name of the bar? He was calling me from his office." "You thought." He laughed. "The important thing is -- we pay you in stock and stock options. You'll be in the oil business too. You help yourself tax-wise by your share of future exploration expense write-offs. You'll even have your own depletion allowmade. Why don't you phone your husband's office. You'll find out he's not there." "Get out." She glared down at him. "I won't believe anything you say. You're the oil company my husband told me appeared out of nowhere. Fly-by-night." "Right." He acted as if this were praise -- and it was. "Actually we've been growing for eighteen years. Your husband understands the growth advantages of the oil biz. He knows we've been building a beautiful corporate structure. We find oil, pump oil, store oilwe may never need to sell any." He laughed and what he said was almost true. "As our worth increases, we're able to issue more stock. Next time you're on the freeway, look down at View Point. It overlooks our tank farm." His human face smiled seductively at her. "Domestically produced oil has become better than money in the bank since the controls on foreign oil imports. In the interests of national security and to stimulate domestic oil exploration, oil and gasoline prices are rising. By simply storing our oil and never selling any our company is doing more than its part to improve the price of domestically produced crude. Do you follow me? Our oil in storage is constantly increasing in value, so that we're able to issue growing amounts of stock to finance ever expanding operationswe drill and pump more oil and build more storage tanks and our growth stocks are like money in the bankonly better. You see? You understand as much about the oil business as your husband does. Sit down and read the fine print." "I don't care what you're promising me. There's oil all over our beach." "Not our oil," he insisted. "We're very careful about waste." But she was listening to her feelings rather that to his voice. She murmured, "We moved to this town because it's nearer the beach. Now it's ruined." "True," he agreed somberly. "The truth is, this town is ruined as a good place to live. And I'm trying to help you save yourself." "Like rats leaving the sinking ship?" "We're helping conservation," he replied. "When we buy your house you'll receive enough to move to another beautiful town where there are no underlying oil strata.The value of your stock certificates will keep going up -- and you must appreciate that we're rescuing oil for future generations." "That doesn't make sense. Get out." "By increasing the domestic cost of oil," he pleaded, becoming a supplicant, "we're truly encouraging the development of better sources of power, atomically powered electric generator plants, battery-electric cars. I don't sound like other oil company men because my thinking -- our thinking is far ahead of theirs." "Then go out and drill for foreign oil. Allow us to burn theirs, not ours. Get out of our town." "And let our nation's oil needs become dependent on foreign whims? Our national security -- " "Get out or I'll phone my husband to throw you out." H e managed to keep a straight human face, though, he could not believe she was serious. His voice became soothing. "Phone him? If you find him he'll say to sign the lease. He's a man, so he understands that by pumping oil into tanks we're conserving it. He knows irreplaceable oil mustn't be destroyed by fire and end as smog. He knows it should produce more important things, such as petrochemicals and plastics and pharmaceuticals and food. Your husband drank -- " He didn't know why she was laughing but her gleaming teeth made him imagine a seductive carapace of glossy chitin and he listened raptly to the harshness of her voice. "I know what you want." she pointed at the lease. "Get out." Her voice sagged. "Don't just sit there." He spread five one-hundred-dollar bills on the excitingly hard coffee table. "No need to tell your husband," he laughed. "Start your own Swiss bank account. Buy yourself a little green -- " "Get out. What do you think I am?" She was looking at him instead of the money and he felt more confused. He began to wonder whether her expression was haughtiness or stupidity. Money might be too abstract. She needed something more tangible, he thought. "Why don't you choose a car," he began. "For yourself." He laughed, watching her expression. "Your husband and your son race around in theirs, leaving you trapped at home. Listen -- you'll look beautiful in a little sports car with your hair streaming in the wind. I'll -- we'll buy you a cute car, your bonus for signing. It'll be yours, all yours." Watching her grim expression, he began describing an electric sports car like his own. There was such fondness in his voice he might have been describing a baby and she -- smiled. "I had an accident," she murmured, "a few years ago but -- " She sat down on the other end of the couch while he described its wire wheels. "Electrics are so easy to drive," he said. "You mean you're only offering me an electric car?" she complained. "Like thanks -- but I don't feel I'm an old lady yet." "You're quoting oil company propaganda." He laughed. "Not my oil company. We're financing research forbetter electrics -- our subsidiary builds them. Ninety miles an hour fast enough for you?" She squinted. "I thought they weren't allowed on thruways." "They are this year -- we've been buying politicians too." He sobered. "I'll show you my runabout. It's yellow with a vinyl top. You'll have your choice of interchangeable fiberglass bodies." He spread out a sales brochure. "Cute, huh? Picture your hair streaming back." He couldn't really. As she looked down at the pictures of electric cars he imagined her encased in fiberglass. Then she was invisible in an excitingly shiny chitinous carapace, drumming and clacking with passion. He moved toward her shimmering carapace. "Think of yourself encapsulated," he murmured, "in your cute little car. You'll be giving of yourself patriotically by conserving irreplaceable oil and gliding electrically and soundlessly and smoglessly -- " he paused for a long, quivering breath -- "while future generations revere you." He had learned whatever he said to women during his sales pitch was less important than his tone of voice. "Your oil is too wonderful starving. Sign here if you believe in conservation. The anciently formed molecules of oil must not years are needed for oil to be born again. Oil doesn't regenerate during one man's lifetime like a pine forest. It can't renew itself every year like a field of wheat. Yet it can provide protein for the starving -- that is, there are bacteria that feed on oil -- an intermediate step." He sighed, moving nearer to her. "Anaerobic bacteria, needing no air, are able to do this deep in the Earth -- they sometimes clog oil wells. Here's my pen." H e moved closer, making soothing noises'. "You'll be saving oil for starving babies. On the surface, airy-aerobic -- bacteria can be fed oil if air and moisture are bubbled through with infinitely small quantities of salts essential to growth. How fast they grow! You'll be glad to know that every pound of aerobic bacteria multiplies so fast that every day it produces ten more pounds of nutriof malnourished children can be strengthened if you'll sign on this line." He grimaced, inwardly hating children and feeling that anaerobic and aerobic bacteria were equally disgusting little competitors, less efficient than he was -- but at least their oil wasn't wasted as smoky exhaust fumes. These people were insane! He watched her unpleasantly flexible fingers moving the pen. Above her lengthening signature gleamed the pen's plastic hardness, arousing him so that he imagined again a shiny round carapace, so chitinously beautiful that he wanted to bang -- "Hey, what's the matter with you?" Her voice rasped, although he had barely touched her distressing softness. She lurched up from the couch. She laughed uneasily. "Am I supposed to be flattered or feel grateful at my age? You're don't get any ideas just because you've promised to buy me a car." Her eyes gleamed so confusingly as he rose that he saw her encased in transparent chitin. She sidled away, trying to watch him while she lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Although he flinched from the flash of flame, her silvery lighter made him think of a beautifully metallized carapace and he advanced. The proper approach would have been a couple of quick symbolic taps of his carapace against hers. Then they could begin banging until one of them cracked. But she dodged and he kept glimpsing her distractingly human face. She seemed ready to scream. He realized he'd better start with a ritual more familiar to her. Whichever way he twisted his head, as she backed away, his lips were confronted by the dangerously hot tip of her cigarette. As he bumped her against the wall, she gasped and shoved back. This seemed encouraging. But she elbowed his unshielded right stomach and he felt a hydrogen gas bubble rising from his earlier contac-tac-tae! Spandau bullets raved past G-#'s Spad as its mighty Hisso whined the plane into a turn, bringing his guns to bear on the hapless Fokker... Well, space opera it wasn't, but G-# month from Berkley -- hit a lot of the same nerve-ends as did the livelier pulp SF of those bygone years And anyhow, what about Herr Doktor Kreuger and those giant bats... or the good Doktor's notion of transplanting cobra eyes into pilots' heads, they should see in the dark? There's science for you! Berkley April releases (S#, # Laumer (S#, # If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (fist price pius a dime postage) from; # Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. # Purchasers of our books have coorplete freedom of choice in pricing these books for resale to others. version of martinis. Like a balloon it pressed against his throat's biway valve. For an instant he feared ignition from her cigarette. As he turned his head away to eructate discreetly she ducked under his arm and escaped through the dining room. Muttering apologies, he pursued her into the kitchen. She jerked open a drawer. He glimpsed her hand gripping something attractively metallic. His amorous excitement converted it to a shiny, protective carapace and he continued his advance. "Keep away," her human voice gasped. But she glittered. In his passionate confusion he was unable to decide whether he was seeing a steely-bright carapace where she had been or a stainlesssteel carving knife in her human hand. He clacked inquiringly. His legs weakened as he advanced. It was if some conscious remnant of the young radio operator were aware of the knife -- he hardened his human stomach muscles. She gleamed so gorgeously that he began to stridulate with fierce joy. He felt invulnerable to the thrust of steel within his handsomely gleaming shell, even though his body was quivering. If he turned out not to be knifeproof the autopsy would expose everything. He reached for her. Across space, separated by light-years from the carapaces of their oil-hungry wives, he and his kind had come. Their little twelvecarapacer had scouted an oil slick. In their excitement they had rammed the tanker, splattering delicious oil. Belatedly they had recovered comatose bodies of its crew. Because he was the youngest Shieldwiper he had been relegated to the smallest body -- that of the snub-nosed young radio operator. ago. He lunged at her. As she dodged she seemed to fluctuate between a breast-heaving woman with a knife and a beautifully gleaming carapace clacking so passionately that she resembled his wife. It would be twenty-two more years before the breeding fleet could arrive in this solar system. He clacked imploringly as he groped for her. They had removed his carapace surgically. Concealed in seamen's bellies he and the other eleven had managed to infiltrate this outrageous world. They had seen its shell-less bipeds squandering irreplaceable oil. Oil had to be saved for posterity -- his. He grabbed at her as if he were a man. Pooling the first meager earnings of their new identities, all twelve had bought oil stocks. They had operated shrewdly. When they (Please turn to page #) Interface relays bod oened the Universe to Man -- and his betters! from the U.N. when the emerhis badge of office as Earth planetary agent, was cruising on ramjets high in the stratosphere, peaceful in the afternoon sunlight. He could have set up an Interface, now that the orbital relays were in position, and flown through a hole in the sky straight from the coast to the spacefield in Montana for further details but Air Traffic Control had flatly refused to wear it. Nevertheless, some agreement on the use of Interface would shortly be needed: now that Earth was firmly connected into the interstellar communications net, McKay suspected that the sky would fill with starships seeking profit of one kind or another. Any or all of the member races of the Interface could now descend on Earth to seek -- hopefully, in some instances, to confer -- whatever advantages there might be in this new link-up. Furtherance teams, the survey force of the Interface, were working through the solar system right now, planting relay satellites at places of interest. To keep any kind of control over the development of the system's resources Earth would need quickthinking and decisive, action -- whereas a directive "to conform to local ordinances Interface is not to be used within the planetary atmosphere -- " would be a good start to making Earth a primitive reservation. But, the emergency: Alerted by the receiver implanted in the back of his skull, McKay said, "Acknowledge -- " to the ship's computerautopilot and got back through the ship's perception circuits a display readout from the stricken Furtherance vessel. Moments later Devlin, in the copilot's seat, got a more conventional warning from the field in Montana. "Walt's in trouble," Devlin told McKay. "Seems he just stopped with a bang in mid-transmission." "Just when they started retrofire, something lit nearby and homed in," said McKay. The Sasarenn, in a few weeks' skirmishing with the Furtherance, had left Earth other souvenirs besides the ate rendezvous." Walter Slazeck, their Apollo teammate in the era three months dead, had left Montana hours before as observer on a Furtherance ship mapping the EarthMoon system. Walt and the alien crew had gone to the moon the hard way, charting magnetic-field  solar-wind interaction, and as they neared their destination some Sasarenn leftover had wakened and hit them. Vehicle -- was built for aerospace rescue and Traffic Control could shelve the proeedural problem. "I am about to leave your control area," MeKay warned them courteously. The computers had the orbital parameters of the falling Furtherance ship, which couldn't possibly have been worse. They had acquisition of the Earth relay, exit code for the lunar relay and the instruction to match orbits. "Up Interface." A circle of blue terrestrial sky before the cruising jet shimmered and became black, airless space, spread with the faint suspicion of stars. Even before they reached it the lunar horizon rolled into view, it and the blackness beyond replacing more arid more of the sky ahead. through the disc and the streaming contrails stopped dead in a last puff of ice crystals. The air intakes closed automatically as the blue window behind the ship receded and snapped shut. And there McKay and Devlin were, suddenly moved a quarter of long on to the surface of the moon at about twenty-five miles a secmake enough retrofire to save the Eurtherance ship -- which itself would make no maneuvers to judge from the mess it was in. McKay didn't even glance directly at the lunar surface rushing into greater and greater detail beyond the broken wreck. If he had he would have been hypnotized like a rabbit. He still had a mile to close up with Slazeck, thanks to the statistical uncertainty of that computer was already set for rendezvous. He fired the rocket motor, said, "Implement -- " and the ships came closer in a surge of acceleration. "Slazeck to McKay." Detachment in a crisis was that man's outstanding characteristic. "By our clock we hit in forty seconds. You can't possibly make docking and transfer. Turn over and slow up." "Haven't enough fuel for that, Walt," said McKay over the sound of the rocket. Eull secondary boost was eating the distance between the two ships ing velocity toward the moon. In five seconds they would overhaul Slazeck -- in eight they would strike. The computerautopilot, without pulling its favorite trick of grabbing control away from McKay, had put all systems on full emergency and could take over at any moment. The radio was a-babble with voices from Earth and from other ships telling him this was a wasteful sacrifice and that he must leave the cripple to its fate. Couldn't anybody see what he was going to try? "Up Interface -- " alongside, the familiar circle broke open ahead, embedded as it seemed right in the face of the moon, though it must still be miles above the surface. Its resemblance to a bottomless crater was destroyed by its low velocity relative to the ships -- as the disc of unbroken blackness floated gently toward them, lunar features whipped ever faster out from behind it. What would happen if the disc touched the surface McKay had no idea -- had there been time, he would have selected an Interface at rest with respect to the Moon. As it was, he hadn't even picked an exit code and had no idea what the disc faced into. The disc itself gave no clue as it loomed up. Nothing at all was to be seen in it. Not even stars. "Where the hell are we going?" shouted Devlin. The moon's faee became twodimensional, a boulder-strewn disc, with them going down the hole in the middle into unrelieved blackness. McKay thought wildly of the medieval character who broke through the shell of the Universe into the unfathomable workings beyond. Out of the known fell the two ships -- sun and Earth behind them were blotted out, then the stars themselves as the Interface closed. "Good grief, Mac," said Devlin, recovering. "Where?" Nothing was visible, not even Slazeck's ship -- there was no light source. On the radar the Furtherance ship was slowly receding; it was all there was on the radar. Without that blip to relate to McKay might really have believed himself out of the physical universe altogether. "Walt," he said urgently. "Still here, Mac. But I can't see where -- all visual sensors have gone dead." Now there was a thought. "We have no visual input either, Walt. Watch for our jet as we correct for rendezvous." out the blue glare of the fusion motor but this time he made sure of getting it. Reassuringly it was there as they headed for Slazeck. The Furtherance ship was too far to reflect it but Slazeck reported he could see the burn. So the properties of space were normal here -- it just happened to be empty. To the limits of visibility? Impossible. McKay deployed the and gave the problem to the computer, which could run through the channels much faster than the human brain. "We've got something," he announced moments later. "A speck in the infra-red -- barely visible to the eye. Tm going to higher magnification. What do you make of that, Dev?" "Out of radar range -- it can only be a star, Mac." "You're right, Dev," said McKay after a pause, studying the puterized perception circuits gave complete head-up display from any of the sensors). "With that diameter and luminosity it can only be a red dwarf, so we must be well within its gravity field, after all." "We have a radar echo on the other side, Mac." It was on the other side, exactly -- radially opposite to the minute spark of a sun -- so faint and diffuse an echo that only the computer could have edited it from the background. Background was surprisingly high, in fact. "That has to be what brought us here." "Interface brought us here, surely." Slazeck was listening but still wasn't fully informed. "Tm afraid not, Walt. We came through blind. Tve no idea where we are and whatever delivered us here, it wasn't an Interface satellite. According to our scanners there's no such thing within millions of miles." "All our Interface equipment went out in the missile hit, so I can't check. Are you sure yours is functioning?" "All systems go, Walt." "Then I suggest we match orbit and get out of here," Devlin put in. "Whatever that is, we're receding from it at nearly thirty miles a second and if it's like an Interface relay, we'll be out of range in minutes." "Right," said McKay. "All the recorders are running. We can puzzle out what this place may be once we're safely out of it." He in towards the mangled Furtheron, found broken metal all up the hull. "Don't worry, Walt, we'll have you out of there minutes after we get back." "Sure, Mac, just as soon as you can." McKay wasn't fooled, he knew that detachment of old. "Are you hurt, Walt?" "Ah, there's something in my leg. I'm sealed into my acceleration capsule and the medic tape's taken care of it. Can't raise the Furtherance boys on the intercom, though." "Okay, Walt, here we go." The for the Earth satellite selected. "General access, up Interface." Nothing. "Try again," said McKay, aiming a tight-beam signal at the elusive radar echo. "Up Interface -- Not even an acquisition pulse." L aser communication was no more effective. Wherever they might be, there was no easy escape. Leaving the puzzle aside, McKay and Devlin went to work on the rescue. Here they were on tems were designed for this. Even the absence of external light was no handicap -- the Sasarenn had allowed for rescue in planetary shadow. With work lights deployed, both men opened an emergency hatch into the Furtherance ship. The missile bad done massive damage. Of the crew only four, counting Slazeck, were still alive. The cabin was so badly damaged that the sealed acceleration capsules had to be cut free before they could be maneuvered out of the were no substitute for hard labor, made worse by the lighting difficulties. One of the Furtherance team showed signs of regaining consciousness by the time the capsules were brought in through the could carry six but the closed shields left very little room in the cabin. The injuries might be light enough for them to be opened in due course but even so, movement would be difficult from here on. Three hours later the medic tapes had done enough to allow two of the shields to be opened. Slazeck and the alien stayed in their couches to allow McKay into the main cabin for a conference. Devlin stayed at the controls, with the hatch open. The other aliens were seriously injured and would not wake till several programs were completed. "There's still nothing in detector range except the dwarf and that faint blip astern," McKay summarized. "We are traveling rapidly toward the sun, which is evidently of point nine solar mass and in the final stages of contraction and cooling. It has a very slow rotation, so we might expect a planetary system -- but we can't find anything except the mystery echo, which is in circular orbit a whatever it is, it's far too small to be called a planet. It's not visible at any magnification we have." "That can't be right, Mac," said Devlin from up front. "Yes? Go on." "Well, if that blip were in orbit we'd no longer be directly between it and the sun. We're on a hyperbolic path and moving pretty fast -- but it's still radially opposite the sun." "Meaning it's not following a circular orbit but a projection of our path on a sphere?" The cabin speaker came on. "Perhaps -- " it said tonelessly. It was, of course, a computer translation of what the alien had said into his mike. The Furtherance officer was about four feet six, built for high gravity -- the big flat head, sunk into the shoulders, was covered with heavy folds of gray skin, between two of which introduced him as Kiliath. "Please go on," McKay said. Off their own ships, the Furtherance astronauts were often painfully self-conscious. "I had thought, hitherto, that we saw no stars because we were deep in some dark nebula. But perhaps we are in a stranger place. Why should space itself reflect our radar, unless there be no further space?" The alien's own voice, a mere whisper, was drowned out by the computer translation. But the machine translated only words, not logic -- obviously several jumps had been missed. "No further space? You mean, we're in another cosmos, one with only one star to hold it open?" "We are nowhere in the Interface net. Perhaps we have come to a place the Furtherance could never reach." T he logic of that one was easier. The Furtherance had the honorable task of widening the Interface by carrying the first relays across interstellar space to new stars. A place the Furtherance could never reach would be out of contact with ihe known universe altogether. "Before we get too scared," said McKay, "Our counters are still picking up high-energy cosmic rays. That seems to me to indicate that space goes on outside the shell -- figuratively speaking -- and there are other stars out there." "Figuratively?" Slazeck queried. "If there were a physical shell around us our radar sweep would only reflect back to us from one pont -- the one radially nearest to us. And wasn't there some astronomer who suggested -- yeah, that's it!" Slazeck's voice took on an unaccustomed edge. "Break up the planets around a dying star and build a shell to conserve its radiation output, the man said. A deal like that would explain this whole bit. So if we send out directional radar pulses -- it won't be perfectly smooth -- we should get some sort of echo back wherever we point the dish. Get to it, Dev. Even one echo will confirm it. We don't need to wait hours for pulses -- minutes, I suppose, not hoursbut some infra-red scanning should settle the point. You were talking before about background noise being high." "Okay, modify that search program," McKay said. Within minutes they had adequate confirmation. So far from being isolated beyond sight of other stars, they were falling toward the center of a finite sphere not much larger than the orbit of the Earth, though the sun was only a red spark and looked fantastically remote. "Now it's plain how we came here," said Kiliath. "To reorganize the very planets -- something here must have capability to manipulate matter." Reconstruct that one. McKay tried. The building of the shell must have involved matter-transmission much more advanced than the Interface. The planets must have been systematically broken down, fed through transmitters on their own surfaces into the shell -- how could it have been assembled in parts? It must have been suspended in space, component atom by component atom, and materialized as a unit. It still must be under some such control or surely it would break up. For the shell was stationary -- orbital forces would not keep it from folding sunward. McKay doubted if any forces could have held so huge a structure together, spinning. So something kept the sun in the center even now. Some free-fall arrangement -- constantly monitored, perhaps? And some configuration of forces, perhaps a side-lobe of what held the shell in place, had isopotential with that freak Interface which must, after all, have hit the surface of the moon. "Fantastic," said McKay, studying the geometrical patterns, more intricate with every increase of magnification, revealed all over the "heavens" by the scanners. "So we're surrounded not just by matter but by a 'capability to manipulate matter -- ' suggesting life and intelligence? In vast numbers -- or quantity -- if all the inner face reflects sentience. We must contact it -- if it can reconstruct how we got here no doubt it can send us back." "Immediate action is recommended," the Kiliath "voice" put miles from the shell and accelerating all the time." "That's no problem. This ship's communication equipment can bridge the shell if need be." "The limitations of the propulsion system give greater cause for concern." "We don't need propulsion, do we?" Devlin asked, puzzled. "I don't think we need worry about a scorching from that sun and we don't go near anything else -- " "Not the point," said McKay grimly. "We come back to the shell itself at the velocity with which we left it -- thirty miles a second. With full tanks, if we expend all the fuel we have, we can cut that down by maybe twelve mps -- " "We might just get a circular orbit out of that," said Slazeck. But a check with the computer showed they could not, from their present position, make any orbit that did not intersect the shell. They could come down to circular orbital speed within the confines of the shell but the ship would then be on a very long ellipse -- the major component of their velocity would still be directed outward. "A circular orbit wouldn't be much good to us anyway," McKay concluded. "We'd be buzzing like a fly around the inner face of the shell at eighteen miles a second and the inhabitants -- or whatever shaped this space -- might just think it funny to leave us there. If ever we attracted their attention in the first place." "Surely they know we're here already," protested Devlin. "I've seen no evidence of it," said McKay. "Take another scan of the shell, Dev." He plugged in himself to make his point more clearly. "Did we know anything was there until half an hour ago? Even now the smallest shell section we can scan is more than a mile across. You wouldn't detect much human activity on that scale unless you watched through the seasons." "I'm talking about their ability to detect a ship -- if anyone's out there. A ship isn't easily missed even if it came through on the Interface. And wouldn't the Interface cast a shadow?" "Too far out to cast a shadow... but, a half-mile across... should have been visible against the sun even to the naked eye if anyone happened to be looking." "You're forgetting the apparent diameter of the sun," said Sla.eck, who was doing the same calculation in his head. "It's only a point source here." "Right, by God! So the Interface would have blotted out the sun over a measurable area. So on the shell they could calculate where it was in space -- if they knew the diameter of the disc." "They'd get that by triangulation from the edge of the shadow." "Right. Now, could they figure out what it was? If they got a telescope in time they'd see stars -- " "Not from this side. They'd see lunar craters if anything. If they flashed an alert across -- what's blocking off our sun ? -- people on the other side would see stars in it." "Total duration of the Interface was less than thirty seconds," said Kiliath. "Very fast reaction -- on both sides of the shell -- to effect such observation. Communication impossible." "True. But then -- they'd see the fusion burn." "They'd see that from two thousand miles, all right, against a black background." "Ergo, they know we're here." "If so," said Slazeck, "they are not doing very much about it." "True," said McKay, after a slight pause. "Get the computer to start pushing out a contact program, Dev. Of course, we're still only speculating that anything sentient is there. The assumption may be arrogant. Keep it in mind." "Right, Mac. Where do you want the contact aimed?" "Ah," Slazeck said. "Now, there's a question," McKay said. "Aim it at the point nearest us when we emerged. If they're still trying to figure out the Interface back there we might be able to explain it to them." A fter twelve hours, however, McKay began broadcasting to larger segment of the shell. The a first attempt hadn't conclusively failed but possibly there were no suitable receivers in the area originally covered -- and the longer they waited, the weaker signals to a larger area would become. They widened the beam until a quarter of the shell was covered by it -- surely something in that large an area would pick it up if sentience were there. But two full days later, with ever more of the shell's geometry lost in the distance, there was still no acknowledgment. "I don't know what to do next," said McKay. They had discussed moving the communications laser out from the center of the radio receiving area but had no more obvious target for it. "They may not yet have cracked the code -- though I would expect a sentience advanced enough to create the shell to get it in a couple of repeats at most. But it should be obvious to them that we're trying to communicate, so why don't they at least acknowledge?" "They themselves," said Kiliath, "no longer communicate by by such channels. We detect no traffic in radio or in light across the shell. Either they communicate around the shell or by means we cannot detect." "Scare us some more," said Devlin. "How far ahead of us are they likely to be?" "That sun was once like your own. Being less massive, it will have left the main sequence sooner -- intelligence may have appeared here early or late or even come from elsewhere. But they were able to survive the sun's departure from the main sequence and to build the shell once cooling began. This may have been a titanic effort, stretching the race to its fullest capacity, or it may have been a momentary distraction, ensuring future comfort while applying the mind to greater things. Probably the latter -- for surely they could have crossed space to new worlds had they wished." "We don't know what's outside the shell, of course," said Slazeck. "This star might really be isolated. Or maybe they built the shell -- not to keep solar energy in but to keep something worse out. We could have a galactic nucleus exploding around us out there." "Perhaps," said Kiliath. "But it might be more aptly phrased, 'We had a galactic nucleus exploding out there.' We may suppose from the reduced output of the star that old." "So you think," said Devlin slowly, "that having built the shell casually to supply their wants, between night and morning, they have then been advancing millions of years from that stage?" "You compared us before to a fly trapped in here, Mac," said Slazeck. "Insects communicate by sound and scent and sight -- but we don't heed any of it." "I've never believed in that kind of superintelligence," said McKay. "I'm inclined to think their apparent lack of interest when a couple of spaceships materialize in here on the bounce is evidence that they've regressed over that time." "Communicate around the shell," mused Slazeck. "Could they have regressed so far that their outlook has become wholly two-dimensional?" "I should think that would depend on their physical structure initially," said McKay. "They might come to think of themselves, I suppose, as dwelling in a finite two-dimensional universe warped back on itself through a third spatial dimension, as abstract to them as the fourth dimension is to us. Sunlight falls vertically on every part of the sphere. The level of incident solar energy is the same everywhere. There's nothing to bring the sun to their attention as being outside the surface, so to speak." "We'll never communicate from off the surface, that's for sure," said Devlin. "Not after we 'communicate' with it at thirty miles a second." Kiliath translation. "Unlikely that their computers, at whom our contact program is initially aimed, will have lost the depth concept. Even if the inhabitants think of them as arbitrarily determining the shell in relation to abstract flow of energy, the machines must have sensors of some kind relating to the physical sun. Some kind of investigation should follow their receipt of coherent patterns of energy from our laser. Mere possession of our code should lead to contact." "But -- no contact." "No contact indeed, either by living intelligence or by their thinking constructs. At the level of advance postulated, we may find it difficult to make the identification." "First we have to make the contact," McKay insisted. "If they no longer use our means and we -- obviously, by now -- don't respond to theirs, their next logical move would be to intercept us." "If they still have any physical spacecraft," said Slazeck. "If they do, they're probably powered for scarcely more than fine guidance -- all they'd have to do would be drop off the shell and swing around the sun to the destination point. They'd come back to the shell at exactly the speed with which they left it." "And we haven't seen any such free-fall boats to date. If we did pass near one we'd still be thirty mps faster -- and nothing launched from the shell since we came through could catch us even without that." "Precisely. So to intercept us, they'd want to match course and speed by something analagous to Interface. And since we knew that they're a long way ahead of us in matter transmission, and probably use m-t fields to maintain the shell structure, I dare say they move things from point to point in the same fields and never come into inner space here at all. So now, if they want to intercept us, chances are they won't have any physical craft for the purpose." "Shouldn't take them long to knock something up if they have to have spacecraft at all," said McKay. "But," Kiliath asked, "how long since last any invention or improvisation was required of them?" Day after day, nothing. The fall into the shell was taking on the duration of a major interplanetary voyage. If they had to do it the hard way, it would take a month to cross the shell from side to side. Fair enough in normal conditions -- during the Sasarenn affair McKay had been to Mars and back tended for long trips under rescue conditions. It was partly for this reason that McKay decided to part from the Furtherance derelict. The burn, left to the last possible moment, was long and slow. McKay wanted to give any possible shell inhabitants plenty of chance to detect the fierce pinpoint creeping near the shrunken sun. Though it moved periastron out from the sun the burn didn't slow them down much -- McKay had formed a plan so morally dubious that he wouldn't share it with the others meantime. Separating from the Furtherance wreck put all their tempers on edge, for the receding ship, slowly drawing sunward and ahead, was still carrying The motors of the other ship were hopelessly beyond repair -- so, for their parting it would be separated, by precisely so much fuel, from further supply. The mathematical perfection of the irony had sickened them all for days before but after commitment the atmosphere improved again. Another day reduced the tension still more when one of the Furtherance astronauts recovered. Though still wrapped in various casts and dressings the alien was well enough for the acceleration shielding to be withdrawn, leaving the rest much more room. The other survivor remained in a coma, sealed in at optimum temperature and pressure and better off there than in the sticky discomfort of the cabin. They used the space regained for a big cleanup and the new freedom of movement made the rest of the trip more comfortable. The passing of the sun was without incident. The sun itself was wholly quiet, not a flare or a flicker varying its even glow. T hey fell for days through mounting boredom, discomfort and frustration. No visual clues existed to the size or distance of the shell. "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." In one near the end Plato himself, unobtrusively changing his tunic for a spacesuit, took McKay out of the ship to show him elusive shadows, huge and unrecognizable, moving on the dark face of the shell. There was no explanation. Perhaps great disembodied intelligences, unknowable to human senses, thronged the space around them and would never answer the thing had to be controlling the shell and McKay woke more determined than ever to force a response from it. Awakening, he was plunged headlong into the crisis he had been heading off for days. Argument raged on watch. "... how do we know any of this is real?" Devlin was shouting. "Maybe when the Interface hit the shell's surface we changed scale and all this is a tiny cavity inside the moon someplace -- or even inside an atom! What we see as a solid shell could be an electron probability smear -- " "All right!" At moments like this McKay was glad to be the oldest man aboard. A sudden hush fell, though he had scarcely raised his voice. "How did we get into this crazy discussion?" No immediate answer. "Walt?" "I don't immediately remember, skipper. I think it was basically a question of whether the failure to make contact might not mean we had misinterpreted our whole environment here." McKay swore. "Four weeks in space and you start shouting like children over that? Indestructible Slazeck of all people -- I should have thought I could rely on you to keep Dev on the rails." "Yeah, Mac. Sure." "Okay. What time is it? No reply to the new program?" "New program?" McKay's blood ran very slightly cold. "I ordered you two and a half hours ago to begin beaming a new contact program into the impact area of the Furtherance derelict." "Sure you did," said Devlin, as if recalling a minor chore. "I guess we didn't get around to it." "You guess what? We've only six hours to impact!" "What the hell, Mac?" said Slazeck. "If there's anyone down there to get the message they'll get it plain enough when Kiliath (Please turn to page #) "T. master of life through genetics, creator of a world-wide subculture of androids to serve man, is driven by an overwhelming hunger to talk to the stars. To this end he has begun the construction of an enormous glass tower in the Canadian Arctic, west of Hudson Bay. The tower will house tachyon-beam ultrawave communications equipment capable of reaching farther out than man has ever reached before. Thousands of androids work constantly on the project, headed by Thor Watchman, an Alpha anlife being in danger. The situation droid who is probably closer to backfires sharply when Krug Krug than any other human. simultaneously is accosted by two Unknown to Krug, androids members of the Android Equality worldwide worship him as god. A Party, a militant organization that secret temple at the towersite is has lost faith in Krug as a deity, nearly discovered -- Thor WatchKrug's secretary, misunderman manages to divert attention by standing the scene, shoots and kills inventing an alarm about Krug's the female android. Watchman cools the ensuing imflammable situation. The secret chapel is moved to a new location -- but suddenly around the Earth the A ndroids are uneasy. IX I AM Nick Ssu-ma Lloyd Tennyson Cadge Foster Will Mishima Jed Guilbert and maybe Manuel Krug, maybe. Maybe. A week in the shunt room. You come out, you don't even know who you are. Manuel Mishima? Cadge Krug? Anyway you can't be sure. Walk like Lloyd, laugh like Nick, shrug like Will. So on and so on. Everything a blur, a lovely golden haze, sunrise on the desert, like that. Their heads inside your head. Yours inside theirs. Only a week. Maybe that's why I like it so much. To stop being only me for a while. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Open the box. Jump out. Into them. Full of funny ideas, now. Bouncing in the stasis net for # hours. Twong and they split you open and you jump out and look for a place to land and you land blong and you're Nick Ssuma, eating roast dog on Taiwan. At dawn in the fog with your aunt. Both naked. She says, touch itie here, you do, she laughs, you shiver. Touch me again. Now you laugh, she shivers. Tiny breasts, like Clissa's. This is our wedding night. With this ring I you do wed, Mrs. Ermine Tennyson, silken thighs, mole in small of back. He sleeps with an android, did you know that? Imagine Manuel doing that. He loves her, so he says. Look. Look here, he loves her, it's right here. You find your love where you can find it. An android? Well, at least he's not ashamed or he wouldn't be in here shunting with us. An android. I almost had one once but I couldn't. At the last moment. What does it feel going into one? Just like anyone else. They aren't plastic, you know. Even though there isn't any hair on it. Sort of incest, though. How? Well, Manuel's father makes the androids, doesn't he, so in a way she's his sister. Very clever. Very, very clever. Cruel bastard. But you like doing it? Of course I do. I'll show you. Here. Here. Shunt and see. And he jumps across the net and slides into the slot. Who is he? Jed Ssu-ma? Will Tennyson? We are all one. Prowling my memories of Lilith. I don't mind. How can I want to keep secrets? My friends. My true friends. When I was nine years old I Cadge Foster took a toad and cooked it and ate it, When I was thirteen years old I Will Mishima pissed on the transmat floor because I was scared I wouldn't get there, I Lloyd Tennyson put my finger in my sister's thing she eleven I eight Jed Guilbert fourteen years old pushed a gamma off a loading rack fell eighty meters died squashed I told my father he slipped I was ten Nick Ssu-ma a male beta at the back window said to mother he watched you and father in bed my father just smiled my mother had them kill him I Manuel Krug almost thirty years old deceive my wife Clissa w'ith Alpha Lilith Meson whom I love whom I love whom I love of Stockholm she lives on Birger Jarlsgaten Alpha Lilith Meson with breasts and thighs and teeth and elbows with rosy skin whom I love whom I love whom I love no hair on it at all Lilith And we shunt and shunt and shunt we hang dangling in the stasis net looping easily from mind to mind, floating, changing skulls as often as we please even though it runs up the charges, and I taste Cadge's toad and I wet Will's transmat and I smell Lloyd's sister on my finger and I kill Jed's gamma and I lie about Nick's beta and all of them go to bed with Lilith and they tell me afterward, yes, yes, we really ought to investigate these alpha women, you're a lucky bastard, Manuel, a lucky lucky lucky bastard And I love her Whom I love And I see all the little hates and dirtinesses in their souls, my friends, but I see the strengths too, the good things, for it would be awful if we shunted and saw only the cooked toads and the puddles on the transmat floor. I see secret favors and modesties and loyalties and charities. I see how good my friends really are and I worry and I wonder -- what do they see in me? Maybe they'll hate me when we come out of this. We shunt some more. We see what they see in us what we see in us in them. A week is used up so fast! Poor Manuel, they say, I never knew it was so bad for him. With all that money and he still feels guilty because he's got nothing to do with his life. Find a cause, Manuel. Find a cause. Find a cause. I tell them I'm trying. I'm looking. They say what about the androids? Should #? What would my father say? If he doesn't approve. Don't worry about him. Do what you think is right. Clissa is in favor of equal rights for androids. If he blows up -- let Clissa talk to him before you do. Why should he blow up? He's made his pile out of androids, now he can afford to let them vote. I bet they'd vote for him. You know all the androids are in love with your father? Yes. Sometimes I think it must be almost like a religion with them. The religion of Krug. Well it makes a sort of sense to worship your creator. Don't laugh. But I have to laugh. It's crazy androids bowing down to my father. To idols of him, I bet? You're getting off the track, Manuel. If it worries you that you aren't doing anything important, become a crusader. Equal rights for androids. Up the androids! You bet, up the androids! That's unworthy of you. You're probably right. We hear the gongs and we know our time is up. We drop out of the net. We slide into our own heads. I'm told they do this part very, very, very, carefully, getting everybody into his own head. As far as I know I am Manuel Krug. They ease us out. There is a readaptation chamber on the far side of the net. We sit around for three, four hours, getting used to being individuals again. We look at each other strangely. Mostly we don't look at each other at all. Someone has been laughing too much with my mouth. In the re-adaptation chamber they have more of those new toys, the blunt-edged cubes. Mine sends me a series of messages. The machine bores and frightens me. I hurl it aside. I am almost certain that I am neither Cadge Foster nor Lloyd Tennyson but I worry about the toad. I will go to Lilith as soon as I leave here. Perhaps I should speak to Clissa first. My father must be at his tower. How is that great erection coming along? Will he soon have messages from the stars to read on the winter nights? "Gentlemen, we hope you'll shortly return," the smiling alpha tells us. We go out. I am they. They are I. We are we. We clasp hands solemnly. We head for the transmats. Virtuously, dutifully, I go to Clissa. T he lawyers met three times in the week following the destruction of Alpha Cassandra Nucleus. The first meeting was held in the offices of Krug Enterprises, the second in the headquarters of Labrador Transmat General, the third in the board room of the Chase Krug Building, Fairbanks. The Labrador Transmat people had suggested that Krug simply supply a new alpha, paying the costs of training her. Lou Fearon, acting as counsel for Krug, objected that this might expose his client to expenses of an amount that could not be determined in advance. Labrador Transmat recognized the justice of this position and a compromise was reached under the terms of which Krug Enterprises transferred to Labrador Transmat the title to one Duluth alpha female, untrained, and agreed to pay the costs of her training to a maximum of # fissionable. The total time consumed in these three meetings was two hours and twenty-one minutes. A contract was drawn and the civil suit was voided. Leon Spaulding initialed the agreement on behalf of Krug, who had gone to Luna to inspect a newly completed gravity pond for hemiplegics at Krug Medical Center in the Sea of Moscow. November #, #. A delicate tracery of windblown snow lightly covers the area around Krug's tower -- beyond the construction zone, the snow lies deeply mounded, iron-hard. A dry wind buffets the tower. Well ahead of schedule, it has topped five hundred meters and now is overwhelming in its crystalline splendor. The eight-sided base yields im( Please turn to page #) It could have been air pollution, bomb-testing, population explosion, anything. But it's time to ask: What kind of world ore we making? G ladys green, of west los Angeles, had her baby on a sunny day, exactly on target. In the early afternoon she felt labor pains, called her mother and her husband, went to the hospital and in due course gave birth. Sidney Ginsburg, her doctor, delivered the child. At her mother's insistence Gladys had a private room. She lay there, half-dozing. Her mother sat by her side, knitting a sweater. There were flowers everywhere. Dr. Ginsburg said, "It's a beautiful baby, a beautiful boy." She said, "Oh, yes, it's a darling baby, Sidney. I can't wait to hold him." "There's just one small thing," Sidney said. "A slight anomaly. You can't call it a defect. It's got two teeth. Rather strange ones -- fairly sharp, actually. We'll pull them, of course. Tomorrow. Very routine. No reason for alarm." When he left her mother said, "I don't like those teeth. That must be Herman's side. The babies on our side were perfect." To Gladys's mother Herman was nothing but a side. But to Gladys he was a husband and he had given her a child. She was grateful. But she let her mother talk. They brought in the baby, red and wriggling. It was cute, she thought, but it did have odd-looking teeth. When it cried they were plain to see. She put the baby to her breast. It bit her quite savagely. She started bleeding and the baby's little tongue seemed to want to lick up the blood. Gladys cried out from the pain. Her mother was grumbling about breast-feeding. "It's a crazy idea. We used bottles in my day. What are you, a cow?" But the baby would not drink, not from the breast, not from the bottle. They went ahead and pulled the teeth. Then the baby took no nourishment at all. It shriveled away. They fed it intravenously and called in specialists. The baby steadily lost weight. A few weeks later it died. To his amazement, Sidney found this was no isolated case. All the other doctors had similar stories. "Hundreds of babies have those teeth," said Dr. Hillman. "We pull them; they don't eat; then they die." "It's an epidemic of teeth." "What happens if you leave the teeth in? Do they live?" asked Dr. Schwartz. The answer came quickly enough. Max Gold called from the clinic. "Sidney, you won't believe it," he said. "You know, we have mothers that give birth in their homes. Well, they've been coming in later, complaining -- the babies don't eat right. But the babies are okay. It's the mothers. You should see them -- breasts, arms, legs all chewed up -- it's the damnedest thing I ever saw in forty years of practice. Those babies drink blood." "Max, is this possible? Vampires?" "See for yourself. I don't know what to do. The mothers are frantic. Some of them are bleeding to death. They get infections -- I mean it's horrible." "Max, will they outgrow it? This habit?" "How should I know? Ask Bela l.ugosi," Max said. G ladys went home to an empty house and cried. She went from room to room crying. She looked at the empty crib and cried. Herman had to come home from work. She was beyond consolation. Sidney prescribed tranquilizers and another child, the sooner the better. To get over the trauma, he said. "In her weakened condition?" asked her mother. But nobody listened. "Sidney, will my baby have teeth if I have another one?" Gladys asked. He shrugged. The papers were full of the problem now -- nobody knew what to do. As far as anyone could tell the epidemic was centered in Los Angeles, with some outbursts in the desert southwest. There were isolated cases in Oregon and among the Navajos and about as far east as Denver. "It's the atom bomb. They're testing near Las Vegas. It's got to be," Herman said. The men he played poker with agreed. And all their wives were deathly afraid. O NE thing was concurred in at all levels of government. The babies could not be left to die. That was murder. The very mention drew black words from the Catholic Church. A soul was a soul. Besides, the mothers loved these children, teeth and all. Could the children be weaned away from blood? The answer was no. Autopsies showed that these babies had long, narrow stomachs, highly specialized, fit only for digestion of blood. Anatomically, it looked like a permanent arrangement. There was no question of outgrowing the taste. Was there an alternative to human blood? The babies turned out to want nothing else. They had no desire for cow blood, goat's blood, monkey blood, any blood but their own. Force feeding was tried but, as it happened, non-human blood made the babies deathly ill. For short periods they could be fed intravenously but that was no longrun solution. So they went on, draining their parents of blood. On this diet they survived and grew. Many doctors insisted on vitamin pills as a supplement. The pills were dissolved, of course, in blood. Without pills the babies were pale and prone to flu. was born slightly premature. It was an easy labor. But the news was bad. It was another one with teeth. Her mother was all for extraction. "You'll adopt a baby, look at cousin Norma, you'd never know her Lisa was adopted, it even looks like her." But Gladys was adamant. "I won't kill my baby. It's mine." Her mother shouted. Herman wavered back and forth. While the debate raged the baby was fed with needles. It grew noticeably weak. In the end Gladys won. They named the baby Mark, after her father, whose name was Morris; he was dead. Gladys drank extra milk and took iron pills. She was like a tiger. All her maternal instincts came to the fore. When she felt strong enough she demanded that the baby be brought in. It was a shriveled little thing -- it looked half alive. She put it to her breast and sobbed as it sucked her blood. "Oh, it's the image of Herman," she said. "I'm going to love it to my last ounce of life." After a week they took it home. It was considerably more plump. At home life was difficult. They had no woman to help out, though Gladys's mother offered to pay. At first Gladys nursed her baby in secret, out of a vague sense of shame. The effort was wasted -- the neighbors knew all. The truth was plain from one look at Mark's teeth. At any rate, vampires were no rarity by now. There were several on Gladys's block. Actually, it helped to know that they were there, that the city was full of other vampires. The parents were beginning to form clubs, to meet and discuss their mutual problems. The first meetings seemed awkward and strained -- Gladys came home with sick headaches. But in the end it lessened the pain to talk to other suffering mothers and fathers. And they did exchange helpful hints. A Mrs. Willoughby, for instance, explained that parents in their position were not really forced to stay around the house even when their babies were wee little ones. She kept a quart or two of fresh sterile blood in the refrigerator, in clean containers. Then, she and her husband felt free to go out to the theater or for dinner or to peoples' houses for supper or cards. She left the baby with sitters, the same as anybody. Her little girl good clean blood from a bowl or dish. It had to be slightly warmed, though -- at least to room temperature. Some sitters were squeamish, but they soon located others who were not. "The big thing is to get over the embarrassment, the shame," Mrs. Willoughby said. "Are you going to keep your child hidden forever? Bring him out in the open! The chances are the neighbors already know your secret. And they have blood-children of their own. You'd be surprised at how many vampires there are, here in L.A." Another mother advised them not to be depressed. "Buy a new hat. Go dancing. Stay alive!" Dr. Argon from Cal. Tech, spoke on the causes of vampirism. It was a mutation, he explained and told them about genes and genetic change. As to what caused this mutation, no one yet knew. Perhaps something in the air. It was their bad luck to live in Los Angeles. "But think of the sunshine and the orange juice," Dr. Argon said, smiling grimly. Gladys thought that was terrible taste but the group leader, Mrs. Elsa Darling, said they had to learn to live and laugh. "Look at the bright side," Elsa said. "No bottles, no nipples, no baby food to buy. We're going to have more babies, John and #, as soon as we can. And if they want blood we'll give them blood." But it was easier said than done. Child-raising is a tiresome job under the best of circumstances. It was no joke, to give blood four times a day to a voracious infant. Despite the fluids and the iron pills, Gladys was constantly exhausted. The littlest thing made her tense, upset. One night her cousin Edna came over for bridge. They stayed up past one. Gladys crawled into bed and fell instantly asleep. The baby woke up at four, as usual, and  began its loud howling for food. "Herman, I just can't do it!" She felt she had come to the end of her rope. He climbed out of bed, half in a daze. He picked up the baby and rocked it in his arms. "Herman," Gladys wailed, "he doesn't want love -- he wants blood." He stared at the baby, then at Gladys. The baby screamed. Gladys screamed. Herman sighed. He unbuttoned his pajama tops and put the baby's mouth to his breast. Mark's lips brushed against that fat, hairy breast and he turned away. Gladys sobbed loudly from her bed. Herman cradled the baby in his arms, made shushing noises, then put the baby's mouth to the flabby flesh of his upper forearm. The wailing stopped in an instant. With a mixture of pleasure and disgust Herman felt his son's teeth slice at his skin till the blood flowed freely. They he heard the soft gurgling noise of ingestion. He looked away. helped. But the burden was mostly on Gladys. "It's a mother's job," she said. Besides, Herman had to work -- he needed strength. Gladys grew pale. She lost weight. She caught colds easily. She aged noticeably. She stopped doing her hair. But she persevered. The years went by. One by one, hopes dropped away. Science proved powerless to help them. Government labs experimented with artifical blood but without success. The only breakthrough was the use of blood drawn from one type of chimpanzee, fortified with drugs and antibodies and specially processed. The trouble was, no more than ten thousand of these chimpanzees existed in the world. The blood cost a hundred dollars a pint. It was more costly than truffles or the finest caviar. Only the very rich could dream of using it. For the Greens, it was out of the question. Their whole life altered. Originally they had wanted many children. But now even one was too much. They had no energy left for a second child, even a normal one, and another vampire would surely kill Gladys. Herman gave up his dream of a houseful of daughters and sons. He was an only child himself and his parents were dead -- the dream died hard. Herman's relationship with Gladys, too, was different. The business of living overwhelmed them. Once they had been sweethearts, then husband and wife. Now they were slaves of a single master. At the core of their life together was the child -- and the teeth. When Mark was five they were forced to hire a wet-nurse. Herman's business was in trouble. Money was tight. But they had no choice. The child ate and ate; its needs for nourishment were more than its mother and father could supply. They scraped some cash together, refinanced their house -- then they went to a lawyer they knew, who arranged things on a black-market basis. A prospect was flown in from South America. She was a young Indian girl named Maria. Her father was a Bolivian tin-miner, now dead -- she was one of ten children. She was succulent and seventeen. She spoke no English. They agreed to pay, in addition to her plane fare and the lawyer's fee), a salary of sixty dollars a week, with one day off and room and board. In addition to feeding Mark she was to clean and dust the house when she could. With her first sixty dollars she bought a portable phonograph, two rock-and-roll records, a bracelet and a dress. With her second week's pay, she bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus and ran away. Mark screamed. Gladys cried. Herman wrung his hands. The ticket from Bolivia and the lawyer's fee had bled them white. It was the first of many bitter experiences. Costs mounted -- the women came and went. Some of them lied about their health and infected the child. Some of them refused to go on with the feedings -- some were slovenly and neglected the house. Life was a constant heartache. Teeth or no teeth, the boy was hard to handle. He was an attractive child physically, with his Buddha-belly, his pink cheeks, his chocolate eyes, his curly hair. But how difficult he was! He toilet-trained late. He wet his bed. He screamed and had tantrums. He kicked and spat at people. He refused to say thank you and please. And he learned how to irritate his mothermost of all, most horribly of all by leaping at aunts or at company or at strangers, biting their legs and lapping maliciously at their flowing blood. Every moment of the day, every day of her life, Gladys pondered her tragedy. Why am I cursed, she asked. She had no answer. She sent him off to a special day school. This cost her fifty dollars a week. When he was out the door and into the schoolbus, she would collapse in bed again, totally exhausted. She would nap fitfully, then read a magazine and wonder -- why was she cursed. And she would call her mother or her sister or a friend and cry on the phone. If only he would eat a hamburger, candy even, drink Coca-Cola -- if he were only like regular children... M ark played exclusively with others of his kind. Normally behaved children were not allowed to go near him -- the parents were polite, of course, but Gladys knew. Her own sister avoided her. Her own sister, with her two bucktoothed simpering girl-brats. She never came by day with the girls -- only at night and without them. You could invite her for coffee or lunch or dinner with the family but she always made excuses. "Bite her, bite her, the bitch!" Gladys moaned to herself -- she almost hoped that Mark would eat her or her brats alive. The nerve of her, not understanding her own sister's affliction, the nerve of her treating her own sister and her nephew as if they were filth. Fortunately there were parents down the block with vampire children. Not that she considered these children proper playmates for Mark. They were all simply horrible. Along with the teeth, it seemed, went a ferocious disposition. And when these children got together in somebody's yard or the family room they made the most fearful din, kicking and screaming and biting. The biting was not usually for the sake of food. It was plain aggressive biting. Food biting was different and rather horrible. It was associated, not with aggression but with love. When two of the children were especially attracted to each other they would hold hands, put their faces, one at a time, to each other's neck, gently slit the skin and drink some of the slowly oozing blood. It was almost like a kiss. This reaction was discovered quite early by one of the hordes of psychologists and psychiatrists that descended on the vampire children, observing, asking, watching, writing in notebooks. The day school was positively filled with them every day. They trooped in and out solemnly, constantly taking notes. Nothing seemed to fascinate them quite as much as this bite of love. Vampires were on everybody's mind. There was always something in the newspaper about them. They were more and more common and spreading -- north to San Francisco, as far East as Omaha, Nebraska. An isolated pocket of vampires broke out in the Pittsburgh area. But the central focus was still Los Angeles, where, in the peak year, one out of every three births was a vampire child. Then, quite suddenly, the situation stabilized -- it even began a slight decline. "They stopped testing those bombs, that's what," people said. It was cold comfort to Herman and Gladys. "Who needs a man on the moon?" Gladys would say, "They could spend that money on our boy." And Herman would add: "We give money to all those foreign countries when we need it right here." They watched the evening news and sighed. "They throw away more money in a day than we see in ten years." She said, "In a lifetime." No matter how long the years, the hurt remained. Each time Gladys fed the boy her heart was broken -- Herman's too, though he never complained. He grew silver and passive and fat. Gladys was paler and thinner and more and more ailing. Her mother died and she felt even more alone. They sat in front of their TV night after night after Mark had gone to bed. And Herman ate and Gladys cried until they went to bed. A t five he was naughty. At ten he was wild. At sixteen he was impossible to control. He wore sideburns. He had girls. He flunked in high school. He bought a motorcycle with his father's credit card. He was in with a terrible crowd. There was no question, the vampires were different from other people -- deeply and desperately hostile to the world. Normal people could hardly manage them. There were some exceptions. Gladys observed with hope and jealousy how nicely Melinda, a girl down the block, was doing. "She plays the piano, she's on the honor roll. She's got the teeth but she's as sweet as can be. She's a joy to her mother and dad." She and Herman never said vampire. They always walked around the word. They used phrases like "the children with the teeth." Mark had no such reluctance. He flung the word in their faces. He taunted Ihem with it. He jeered at them and tortured them. His crowd was a vampire crowd, of course. It was a gang -- they called themselves the Demons of Blood. On long dusty evenings they got on their motorcycles and went tearing up and down the streets, screaming and laughing. They beat up other young people who got in their way and sucked their blood. They broke one boy's glasses and bled him until he fainted. They broke into stores and smashed windows. They swaggered about, shouting filthy language, scratching dirty words on billboards. Discipline had no effect. Speeches and tears were useless. Mark slammed the door and ran out when they tried to reason with him. He told them to drop dead. Gladys by inches. As it was, she was bedridden half the time. Didn't he care? He shrugged. At seventeen Mark dropped out of high school and spent his days hanging around the house, sleeping till noon, then roaming the streets at night. They threatened him with starvation, their ultimate weapon. He went back to school, more or less. In his senior year he got a girl in trouble. Herman paid for the girl's abortion. The incident took years off Gladys's life. Somehow he was graduated from high school. College was out of the question. "What will you do, what kind of Job?" his father asked. Mark shrugged. Even the Army had no use for vampires. At eighteen he ran away and roamed the country with a gang of vampires, boys and girls. They must have stolen and terrorized their way from state to state -- somehow, they were never caught. After a while Mark came back, borrowed money from his father, drank and gambled it away. He worked in a gas station for a while -- until he had money for a fancier motorcycle. Then he quit his Job. When he was twenty he brought home a girl named Lisa and said they were going to get married. Neither Gladys nor Herman liked the looks of her -- dirty and unkempt and she smoked and drank a lot. She was a vampire, of course. They wanted to know: Who were her people -- what kind of folks were they? Mark refused to answer. They looked into it on their own. They found out her parents were people like themselves, ordinary people, suffering quietly and deeply with the pain. They all four decided it was good -- maybe -- if the children got married. Responsibility might bring them to their senses. The girl was probably pregnant, too. Gladys's strength was ebbing now. But she rallied and made him a wedding in her home, a wedding to be proud of. The bride wore white. A few close relatives and friends from both sides were invited. Mark and his bride came in an hour before the ceremony, drunk and disheveled -- it was ghastly. Gladys put the best face on the matter she could. After the words, I now pronounce you man and wife -- Mark bent over, bit Lisa on the neck and gently lapped at her blood. She giggled. "In public, in public," Gladys wailed and clutched at Herman in her agony. Outside, a raucous gang, uninvited friends of the bride and groom, shrieked, drank whiskey and raced their motors. Six months later the baby was born. It had two wicked teeth in the front of its mouth. That was happening now all over -- vampires bred true. They tried to give the baby up for adoption but no one would take it. "They're too spoiled to feed it," Gladys said. "Maybe they're smart," Herman said. "What did it do to our lives?" "If I had the strength I'd take it," Gladys said. Lisa was no fit mother -- she hit the baby, fed it only once in a while, left it at home while she went out to the bars with Mark and his friends. He, Mark, was even more indifferent. And he quarreled constantly with Lisa. One day he walked out on her -- for almost a year he stayed away. "What kind of world is this?" Gladys asked anybody who would listen. She was too sick to leave the house for weeks at a time. Nothing consoled her any more, not even cards. But she doted on her poor, scrawny grandchild, begged Lisa to bring it around and fed it secretly when she could, despite the strenuous opposition of her doctor. One winter day, Herman came home and found Gladys stretched on the floor, unconscious. She was taken to the hospital immediately. She had the best of care but, despite all, she died the following week. Mark came to the funeral, fidgeted and had nothing to say to his old man. They buried Gladys under a dark, blustery sky. When they left the cemetery Mark said to Herman, "I'll see you around." Then he went away. H erman sat in the house all alone, watching TV. The announcer said a new epidemic of vampires had broken out. This time in New York. A dim light flickered in Herman's eyes. It was an uncanny thing, this race of beings, people who could only live by the blood of their very own kind. It was beyond his comprehension. But if everybody lived that way the whole human race would die out. The voice on TV droned on. Science was still searching (it said) for the secret of artificial blood. Congress was pouring in money. There had to be some better answer, Herman thought. Better than artificial blood. Keep them from happening -- that was better. They should ask me. Herman sighed and thought of his anguished, wasted life. Had he done something wrong? His arms were still scarred from his long ordeal. All his hopes had been buried. And where was Mark now, his son? Whose blood was nourishing him now? He shook his head sadly. He turned back to the set. After a while his eyes clouded over -- he began to snore. Loud TV music blared in the empty house.  IF The Magazine of Alternatives alized the fearful truth: that to someone who could read minds not only his ambitions but his worst weaknesses were like an open book. So that, in fact, it was he himself, through his desire to suffer pain and humiliation, who gave Lesley the power she would never otherwise have possessed -- to bring the broom slamming down on the nape of his neck and drive him into unconsciousness. repugnance occasioned by her reaching into Braden's mind and sharing the distorted instincts there, Lesley freed herself from her bonds and tied him securely with the same ( Continued from page # ) rope. Having made him into a kind of parcel, she set off awkwardly to negotiate the side of the hill. It was a long slow job but she made it with dawn purpling the sky, found his car where it had been left. She searched him for his keys, pushed him into the back seat and drove bumpily away. Apparently without reason she stopped a couple of miles away among a ring of boulders and got out, leaving the engine running. She raised the hood and found the inlet of the oil supply. Carefully she scooped up sand and measured it into the pipe until the engine ground to a halt. Then, just to make certain, she hunted for and found the draincock of the radiator, allowed the water to seep into the thirsty earth. She took Braden's own pocket knife and stabbed at each of the tires. Then she took a pencil from his pocket and wrote something on a scrap of paper. He stirred and began to wake and she threw the paper and pencil blindly down on the seat near him and ran. Much later that year a rambling prospector found what he had found a dozen times before -- a clean-picked human skeleton in the dry sand. He shook his head and muttered the usual "Poor fella!" to his burro. A short distance further on he came across a car with its tires flat and the driver's door open and approached to see if it would give any clue to the identity of the dead man. But there was nothing except a scrap of paper lying on the seat with a few words scrawled on it in the sort of script one would expect from a poorly educated child. Scratching his head, he read it aloud to the burro as if requesting an explanation. "I don't care what happens to you here. My range is less than a thousand yards."  had learned more about being men they incorporated, leased some desert land, issued stock and, joy and calamity, struck oil. He heard her screaming for help. They were trying to save oil, not sell it -- and the answer was the tank-farm gimmick. Paying for the erection of more storage tanks by issuing more growth stocks, they discovered tax angles so acute that they purchased an electric car manufacturing company in order to acquire its paper losses. As the years passed they became a conglomerate. He cornered her between the gleaming dishwasher and the glittering refrigerator and heard her human voice gasping; "Don't look at me like that." By this time the other eleven had become remote chairmen of boards of directors. Because he was the only one who continued direct contact with the public as a lease-man the unfriendly eleven had accused him of un-shell-like urges. They were afraid he might crack before they controlled the planet's oil, before the breeding fleet arrived. They said he took human risks, even driving on the freeway. If he were killed in an accident his autopsy might lead to their exposure. He heard her gasp. He felt the soft struggling of her body. Her carving knife clattered to the floor with an excitingly hard sound. Her human voice was saying, "Damn -- damn -- I can't stick you like a pig. So kiss me if that's what you're trying to do." With his eyes closed he tried. She was so soft -- the opposite of truly armored love -- so horribly soft. He shrank back in normal revulsion. He opened his eyes. She had no shell at all. She opened hers. As he fled through the dining room he heard her pursuing him. In the living room he snatched up his reassuringly hard attache case and held it in front of himself like a carapace which was too small. To his dismay, she advanced. Smiling oddly she said, "Either I'm sorry or you're -- what about my car -- " "Not as sorry as I am," he gasped and grabbed the lease from her coffee table. "I'll authorize delivery of your car -- " Desperately needing his, he rushed outside. He scuttled along the slippery sidewalk toward the shell-like security of his car. Shrilly stridulating -- he felt so humiliated. He tried to assure himself that her signature on the lease was the only important thing. He had that. But tears were trickling down his hideously human cheeks. At least he had seduced another ninety miles an hour along the freeway. He couldn't wait twentytwo more years for his wife's hard carapace. He pounded his forehead against the glinting steering wheel. His car swerved. He turned into the parking area above View Point, as if the sight of his oil tanks could give him some relief. He parked at the brink and tried sublimating, pouring himself an abstemious reward for getting her signature. With trembling hands, he opened another can of an adequate little #-weight, non-detergent oil and sipped, attempting to restrain himself. Then he drank desperately. But the act only stimulated his loneliness. He looked up at the empty gray sky, then glared out at the ocean, dark with wasted oil. At least he was more intelligent than humans, he thought, and glanced into his car's mirror at his obscenely huge, blue-eyed reflection. These monsters were raping their own world. Those bulging eyes stared back at him like a madman's from the mirror. But he clacked quietly and more confidently to himself because he knew who he was. He felt as if he were armored again, secure and restrained. He knew he could wait twenty-two more years for his wife and the breeding fleet. It would be so heavily armored that -- He regained his poise. His gaze shifted between the oil-blackened platforms, and those bulging madblue eyes in the mirror. He felt thankful he wasn't human.  ( Continued from page #  perceptibly to the planes of the four-sided trunk. The tower is haloed in light: sunglow rebounds from its flanks, strikes the surrounding fields of snow, leaps up again to kiss the glassy walls, is hurled groundward once more. Albedo reigns here -- brightness is all. The lower two-thirds of the existing structure has now been divided into floors and, as the androids assembling the skin of the tower pile the glass blocks ever higher, those responsible for the interior work follow them up. Installation of the tachyon-beam system has begun. Five giant rods meters thick and hundreds of meters long will form a quintuple spine, rising inside vertical service cores that span close to half the tower's height. The lower sections of these great busbars are going into place now. A circular jacket of translucent glastic a meter in diameter forms the housing for each bar. The workmen slide forty-meter lengths of copper into these jackets, then cunningly fuse them end to end with quick, dazzling bursts of power from the eye of a welding laser. Elsewhere in the building hundreds of electricians supervise the spraying of conductive filaments into the tower's gleaming inner walls. Squadrons of mechanics install conduits, waveguides, frequency converters, fluxmeters, optical guidance accessories, focal plane locators, neutron activation foils, Mossbauer absorbers, multichannel pulse height analyzers, nuclear amplifiers, voltage converters, cryostats, transponders, resistance bridges, prisms, torsion testers, sensor clusters, degaussers, collimators, magnetic resonance cells, thermocouple amplifiers, accelerator reflectors, proton accumulators, and much more, everything carefully computer-tagged in advance with its floor level and flow-chart designation. Sending messages to the stars by tachyon-beam is not a simple project. The tower is already a thing of unparalleled splendor, starkly supple, spectacularly spearing the sky. Visitors drive many kilometers out into the tundra to get the best view of it, for at close range it cannot properly be appreciated. Krug enjoys reminding his guests, though, that what they see today is merely the bottom third of the ultimate structure. To visualize the final building one must imagine a second tower of the same size piled atop this November spire and then a third one set atop that. The mind rebels. The image will not come. Instead, one can bring into view only the picture of a slender, impossibly attenuated, terribly frail needle of glass that hangs in the sky, seeking to put down roots, and, failing, topples and topples and topples, falling like Lucifer through all one long day, and shatters with a faint tinkle in the icy air. X A "Slightly different. We began getting it last night." "Wait right there," said Krug. "I'm coming." He was in New York. Almost immediately he was in Vargas' Antarctic observatory, high on the polar plateau, at a point equidistant between the Pole itself and the resorts of the Knox Coast. There were those who said that the transmat era had cheapened life in one way while enriching it in another: the theta force allowed one to flick blithely from Africa to Australia to Mexico to Siberia in a moment's merry dance, but it robbed one of any true sense of place and transition, of any feel for planetary geography. It transformed Earth into a single infinitely extended transmat cubicle. Krug had often resolved to take a leisurely tour of the world from the air and see desert shading into prairie, forest into bare tundra, mountains into plains. But he had not managed to find the time. The observatory was a series of pleasant glossy domes sitting atop an ice sheet two and a half kilometers thick. Tunnels in the ice linked dome to dome and gave access also to the outlying apparatus: the vast dish of a radio telescope's parabolic antenna, the metal grid of an X-ray receiver, the burnished mirror that picked up relayed transmissions from the orbiting observatory high above the South Pole, the short, stocky multiple-diffraction optical telescope, the three golden spikes of the hydrogen antenna, the fluttering airborne webwork of a polyradar system and the rest of the devices with which the astronomers here kept watch on the universe. Instead of using refrigeration tapes to insure that the ice would not melt beneath the buildings, they had employed individual heat-exchange plaques for every structure, so that each building was a little island on the great glacier. In the main building things hummed and clicked and flashed. Krug did not understand much about this equipment but it seemed properly scientific to him. Technicians ran eagerly about; an alpha high on a dizzying catwalk called numbers to three betas far below; periodically there was a crimson surge of energy within a glass helix twenty meters long and numbers leaped on a green and red counting mechanism at every discharge. Vargas said, "Watch the radon coil. It's registering the impulses that we're getting right now. Here -- a new cycle is starting -- you see?" Krug contemplated the pattern of surges.  #; #; #: #c #c   #c #c #: #: #c #:  "That's it," Vargas said. "Now a six-second pause, and then it starts again." "#-#-#, #-#-#, #-#," Krug said. "And it used to be #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#. So they've dropped the #group altogether, they've moved the #-group to the front of the cycle, they've completed the #-group, they've added a pulse in the final group -- damn, Vargas, where's the sense? What's the significance?" "We don't detect any more content in this message than in the last. They've both got the same basic structure. Just a minor rearrangement -- " "It's got to mean something!" "Perhaps it does." "How can we find out?" "We'll ask them," Vargas said. "Soon. Through your tower." Krug's shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, gripping the smooth cool green handles of some incomprehensible device jutting from the wall. "These messages are three hundred years old," he said blackly. "If this planet of theirs is like you tell me it is, that's like three hundred centuries here. More. They won't even know about the messages their ancestors sent out. They'll be mutated out of all recognition." "No. There has to be continuity. They couldn't have reached a technological level that would allow them to send transgalactic messages at all unless they were able to retain the achievements of earlier generations." Krug swung around. "You know something? This planetary nebula, this blue sun -- I still don't believe it could have intelligent beings living there. Any kind of life -- no! Listen, blue suns don't last years for the surface of a planet to cool enough just to get solid. There isn't that much time, a blue sun. Any planets it's got, they're still molten. You want me to believe signals coming from people who live on a fireball?" Vargas said quietly, "Those signine-three, the planetary nebula in Aquarius." "For sure?" "I can show you all the data." "Never mind. But how, a fireball?" "It's not necessarily a fireball. Maybe some planets cool faster than others. We can't be sure how long it takes them to cool. We don't know how far the home world of the message-senders is from that sun. We've got models showing the theoretical possibility that a planet can cool fast enough, even with a blue sun, to allow -- " "It's a fireball, that planet," said Krug sullenly. D efensive now, Vargas said, "Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even if it is; must all life-forms live on a solid-surface planet? Can't you conceive a civilization of high-temperature entities evolving on a world that hasn't cooled yet? If -- " Krug snorted in disgust. "Sending signals with machines made out of molten steel?" "The signals don't have to be mechanical in origin. Suppose they can manipulate the molecular structure of -- " "You talk fairy tales to me, doctor. I go to a scientist, I get fairy tales!" "At the moment fairy tales are the only way of accounting for the data," Vargas said. "You know there's got to be a better way." "All I know is that we're getting signals and they undoubtedly come from this planetary nebula. I know it isn't plausible. The universe doesn't have to seem plausible to us all the time. Its phenomena don't have to be readily explicable. Transmat wouldn't be plausible to an eighteenth-century scientist. We see the data as best we can and we try to account for it -- and sometimes we do some wild guessing because the data we're getting doesn't seem to make sense. But -- " "The universe doesn't cheat," Krug said. "The universe plays fair." Vargas smiled. "No doubt it does. But we need more data betwo-nine-three. Meanwhile we make do with fairy tales." Krug nodded. He closed his eyes and fondled dials and meters, while within him a monstrous raging impatience sizzled and blazed and bubbled. Hey, you star people! Hey, you, sending those pulses! Who are you? What are you? Where are you? By damn, I want to know! Me. Krug. Krug. What are you trying to tell us, you? Who are you looking for? What's it all mean? Suppose  die before I find out! "You know what I want?" Krug said suddenly. "To go outside, to that radio telescope of yours. And climb up into the big dish. And cup my hands and shout at those bastards with the numbers. What's the signal now? #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#? It drives me crazy. We ought to answer them right now. Send some numbers: #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#. Just to show them we're here." "By radio transmission?" Vargas said. "It'll take three hundred years. The tower will be finished soon." "Soon, sure. Soon. You ought to see it. Come see, next week. They're putting the gadgets in it now. We'll be talking to the bastards soon." "Would you like to hear the audio signal coming in, the new one?" "Sure." Vargas touched a switch. From speakers in the laboratory wall came a dry cold hiss, the sound of space, the voice of the dark abyss. It was a sound like a cast-off snakeskin. Overriding that withered sound, seconds later, came sweet upper-frequency tones. Bleep pleep. Pause. Bleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. Pause. Bleep. Pause. Pause. Bleep pleep. Pause. Bleep pleep pleep. Pause. Bleep. Pause. Pause. Bleep pleep. Pause. Bleep. Silence. And then again, pleep pleep, the new cycle beginning. "Beautiful," Krug whispered. "The music of the spheres. Oh, you mysterious bastards! Look, doctor, you come see the tower next week, next -- oh, Tuesday. I'll have Spaulding call you. You'll be amazed. And listen, anything else new comes up, another change in the signal, I want to hear right away." Bleep pleep pleep. He headed for the transmat. Bleep. K rug leaped northward along the meridian, following the line of # E., looped the North Pole and emerged beside his tower. He had sped from icy plateau to icy plateau, from the world's bottom to its top, from late spring to early winter, from day to night. Androids were busy everywhere. The tower seemed to have grown fifty meters since yesterday's visit. The sky was ablaze with the light of reflector plates. The song of Krug's mind. Bleep pleep. Bleep. He found Thor Watchman in the control center, jacked in. The alpha, unaware of Krug's presence, seemed lost in a drugged dream, climbing the precipices of some distant interface. An awed beta offered to cut into the circuit and tell Watchman, via the computer, that Krug had arrived. "No," Krug said. "He's busy. Don't bother him." Pleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. He stood for a few moments, watching the play of expressions on Watchman's tranquil face. What was passing through the alpha's mind now? Freight invoices, transmat manifests, welding cues, weather reports, cost estimates, stress factors, personnel data? Krug felt pride geysering in his soul. Why not? He had plenty to be proud of. He had built the androids and the androids were building the tower -- and soon man's voice would go forth to the stars. Pleep pleep pleep. Pleep. Affectionately, a little surprised at himself, he put his hands to Thor Watchman's broad shoulders in a quick embrace. Then he went out. He stood in the frigid blackness a short while, surveying the frenzied activity at every level of the tower. On top they were putting new blocks in place with flawless rhythm. Inside, the tiny figures were hauling neutrinosheathing around, joining lengths of copper cable, installing floors, carrying the heat-cool-power-light system higher and higher. Through the night came a steady pulsation of sound, all the noises of construction blending into a single cosmic rhythm, a deep booming hum with regular soaring climaxes. The two sounds, the inner and the outer ones, met in Krug's mind, boom and pleep, boom and pleep, boom and pleep. He walked toward the transmats, ignoring the knives of the Arctic wind. Not bad for a poor man without much education, he told himself. This tower. These androids. Everything. He thought of the Krug of forty-five years ago, the Krug growing up miserable in a middle of the streets. He hadn't dreamed much about sending messages to the stars then. He just wanted to make something out of himself. He wasn't anything, yet. Some Krug! Ignorant. Skinny. Pimpled. Sometimes on holocasts he heard people saying that mankind had entered a new golden age, with population down, social and racial tensions forgotten, a horde of servomechanisms to do all the dirty work. Yes. Yes. Fine. But even in a golden age somebody has to be on the bottom. Krug was. Father dead when he was five. Mother hooked on floaters, sensory scramblers, any kind of dream-pills. They got a little money, not much, from a welfare foundation. Robots? Robots were for other people. Half the time the data terminal, even, was shut off for unpaid bills. He never went through a transmat until he was He remembered himself; sullen, withdrawn, squint-eyed, sometimes going a week or two without speaking to anyone. He didn't read. He didn't play games. He dreamed a lot, though. He slid through school in a haze of rage, learning nothing. Slowly coming out of it when he was fifteen, propelled by that same rage, turning it suddenly outward instead of letting it fester within;  show you what I can do, I get even with you all! Self-programing his education. Servotecfinology. Chemistry. He didn't learn basic science; he learned ways of putting things together. Sleep? Who needed sleep? Study. Study. Sweat. Build. A remarkable intuitive grasp of the structure of things, they said, was what he had. He found a backer in Chicago. The age of private capitalism was supposed to be dead; so was the age of free-lance invention. He built a better robot, anyway. Krug smiled, remembering: the transmat hop . to New York, the conferences, the lawyers. And money in the bank. The new Thomas Edison. He was nineteen. He stocked his laboratory with equipment and looked for grander projects. At twenty-two, he started to create the androids. Took a while. Somewhere in those years, the probes began coming back from the near stars, empty. No advanced life-forms out there. He was secure enough now to divert some attention from business, to allow himself the luxury of wondering about man's place in the cosmos. He pondered. He quarreled with the popular theories of the uniqueness of man. Went on toiling, though, diddling with the nucleic acid, blending, hovering over centrifuges, straining his eyes, dipping his hands deep into tubs of slime, hooking together the protein chains, getting measurably closer to success. How can man be alone in the universe if one man himself can make life? Look how easy it is! I'm doing it: am I God? The vats seethed. Purple, green, gold, red, blue. And eventually life came forth. Androids shakily rising from the foaming chemicals. Fame. Money. Power. A wife; a son; a corporate empire. Properties on three worlds, five moons. Women, all he wanted. He had grown up to live his own adolescent fantasies. Krug smiled. The young skinny pimpled Krug was still here within this stocky man, angry, defiant, burning. You showed them, eh? You showed them! And now you'll reach the people in the stars. Pleep pleep pleep. Boom. The voice of Krug spanning the light-years. Hello? Hello? Hello, you! This is Simeon Krug? In retrospect he saw his whole life as a single shaped process, trending without detour or interruption toward this one goal. If he had not churned with intense, unfocused ambitions there would have been no androids. Without his androids, there would not have been sufficient skilled labor to build the tower. Without his tower -- XI H e entered the nearest transmat cubicle and set coordinates in a casual way, letting his fingers idly choose his destination. He stepped through the field and found himself in the California home of his son Manuel. He hadn't planned to go there. He stood blinking in afternoon sunlight, shivering as a sudden wave of warmth struck his Arctictuned skin. Beneath his feet was a shining floor of dark red stone; the walls that rose on either side of him were coruscating swirls of light bursting from polyphase projectors mounted in the foundation; above him was no roof, only a repellor field set for the blue end of the spectrum, through which dangled the fruit-laden branches of some tree with feathery gray-green leaves. He could hear the roar of the surf. Half a dozen household androids, going about their domestic chores, gaped and goggled at him. He caught their awed whispers. "Krug... Krug..." Clissa appeared. She wore a misty green wrap that revealed her small high, breasts, her sharpboned hips, her narrow shoulders. "You didn't tell me you were -- " "I didn't know I was." "I would have had something ready." "Don't feel I need anything special. I'm just dropping in. Is Manuel -- " "He isn't here." "No. Where?" Clissa shrugged. "Out. Business, I guess. Not due back until dinnertime. Can I get you -- " "No. No. What a fine house you have, Clissa. Warm. Real. You and Manuel must be very happy here." He eyed her slender form. "It's such a good place for having children, too. The beach -- the sun -- the trees -- " An android brought two mirrorbright chairs, expanding and socketing them with a swift deft twinkle of his hands. Another turned on the waterfall on the inland side of the house. A third lit an aroma spike and the odor of cloves and cinnamon unfolded in the courtyard. A fourth offered Krug a tray of milky-looking sweets. He shook his head. He remained standing. So did Clissa. She looked uncomfortable. She said, "We're still newlyweds, you know. We can wait a while for children." "Two years, isn't it, you've been married? A long honeymoon." "Well -- " "At least get your certificate. You could start thinking about children. I mean, it's time you -- time I -- a grandchild -- " She held forth the tray of sweets. Her face was pale -- her eyes were like opals in a frosty mask. He shook his head again. He said, "The androids do all the work of raising the kid, anyhow. And if you don't want to get yourself stretched you could have it ectogenetically, so -- " "Please?" she said softly. "We've talked about this before. I'm so tired today." "I'm sorry." He cursed himself for pushing her too hard. His old mistake -- subtlety was not his chief skill. "You're feeling all right?" "Just fatigue," she said, not convincing him. She seemed to make an effort to show more energy. She gestured and one of her betas began to assemble a stack of glittering metal hoops that rotated mysteriously about some hidden axis -- a new sculpture, Krug thought. A second android adjusted the walls, and he and Clissa were bathed in a cone of warm amber light. Music trembled in the air, coming from a cloud of tiny glittering speakers that floated, fine as dust, into the courtyard. Clissa asked, too loudly, "How is your tower going?" "Beautiful. Beautiful. You should see it." "Perhaps I'll come, next week. If it isn't too cold there. Are you up to five hundred meters yet?" "Past it. Rising all the time. Only not fast enough. I ache to see it finished, Clissa. To be able to use it. I'm so full of impatiences I'm sick with them." "You do look a little strained today," she said. "Flushed, excited. You ought to slow down sometimes." "Me? Slow? Why? Am I so old?" He realized he was barking at her. He said more temperately, "Look, maybe you're right. I don't know. I better leave now. I don't mean to be a bother for you. I just felt like a little visit." Pleep pleep. Boom. "You tell Manuel it was nothing special, yes? To say hello. When did I see him anyway? Two weeks, three? Not since right after he came out of that shunt room business. A man can visit his son sometimes." He reached out impulsively, drew her to him, hugged her lightly. He felt like a bear hugging a forest sprite. Her skin was cold through that misty wrap. She was all bones. He could snap her in half with a quick yank. What did she weigh, fifty kilos? Less? A child's body. Maybe she couldn't even have children. Krug found himself trying to imagine Manuel in bed with her and pushed the thought away, appalled. He kissed her chilly cheek. "You take care," he said. "So will #. We both take care, get lots of rest. You say hello to Manuel for me." H e rushed to the transmat. Where to next? Krug felt feverish. His cheeks were flaming. He was adrift, floating on the broad bosom of the sea. Coordinates tumbled across his mind; frantic, he seized one set, fed it to the machine. Pleep. Pleep. Pleep. The scaly hiss of amplified starnoise nibbled at his brain. #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#. Hello? Hello? The theta force devoured him. It brought him forth inside an immense musty cavern. There was a roof, dozens of dim kilometers overhead. There were walls, metallic, reflective, yellowbrown, curving toward some distant place of union. Harsh lights glared and flickered. Sharp-edged shadows stained the air. Construction noises sounded: crash, thunk, ping, bavoom. The place was full of busy androids. They clustered close to him, glistening with awe, nudging, whispering: "Krug... Krug... Krug... Why do androids always look at me that way? He scowled at them. He knew that perspiration was bursting from every pore. His legs were unsteady. Ask Spaulding for a coolpill -- but Spaulding was elsewhere. Krug was jumping solo today. An alpha loomed before him. "We were not led to anticipate the pleasure of this visit, Mr. Krug." "A whim. Simply passing through, looking in. Pardon me -- your name?" "Romulus Fusion, sir." "How big a work-force here. Alpha Fusion?" "Seven hundred betas, sir, and nine thousand gammas. The alpha staff is quite small -- we rely on sensors for most supervisory functions. Shall I show you around? Would you like to see the lunar runabouts? The Jupiter modules? The starship, perhaps?" The starship. The starship. Krug comprehended. He was in Denver, at Krug Enterprises' main North American vehicle-assembly center. In this spacious catacomb many types of transportation devices were manufactured, covering all needs that the transmat could not meet: ocean-crawlers, sliders for surface travel, stratospheric gliders, heavy-duty powerhaulers, immersion modules for use on high-pressure worlds, ion-drive systemships for short-hop spacing, interstellar probes, gravity boxes, skydivers, minirailers, sunscoops. Here, too, for the past seven years, a picked technical staff had been building the prototype of the first manned stargoing vessel. Lately, since the commencement of the tower, the starship had become a stepchild among Krug's projects. "The starship," Krug said. "Yes. Please. Let's see it." Aisles of betas opened for him as Romulus Fusion ushered him toward a small teardrop-shaped slider. With the alpha at the controls they slipped noiselessly along the floor of the plant, past racks of half-finished vehicles of every description, and came at length to a ramp leading to yet a lower level of this subterranean workshop. Down they went. The slider halted. They got out. "This," said Romulus Fusion. Krug beheld a curious vehicle a hundred meters long, with flaring vanes running from its needlesharp nose to its squat, aggressivelooking tail. The dark red hull seemed to have been fashioned from conglomerated rubble -- its texture was rough and knobby. No vision accesses were in evidence. The mass-ejectors were conventional in form, rectangular slots opening along the rear. Romulus Fusion said, "It will be ready for flight-testing in three months. We estimate an acceleration capability of a constant twopoint-four G, which of course will bring the vessel rapidly to a velocity not far short of that of light. Will you go inside?" Krug nodded. Within, the ship seemed comfortable and not very unusual -- he saw a control center, a recreation area, a power compartment and other features that would have been standard on any contemporary systemgoing ship. "It can accomodate a crew of eight," the alpha told him. "In flight, an automatic deflector field surrounds the ship to ward off all oncoming free-floating particles, which of course could.be enormously destructive at such velocities. The ship is totally self-programing -- it needs no supervision. These are the personnel containers." Romulus Fusion indicated four double rows of black glassfaced freezer units, each two and a half meters long and a meter wide, mounted against a wall. "They employ conventional life-suspension technology," he said. "The ship's control system, at a signal from the crew or from a ground station, will automatically begin pumping the high-density coolant fluid into the containers, lowering the body temperature of personnel to the desired degree. They will then make the journey submerged in cold fluid serving the double purpose of slowing life-processes and insulating the crew against the effects of steady acceleration. Reversal of the life-suspension is just as simple. A maximum deepsleep period of forty years is planned. In the event of longer voyages, the crew will be awakened at fortyyear intervals, put through an exercise program similar to that used in the training of new androids, and restored to the containers after a brief waking interval. In this way a voyage of virtually infinite length can be managed by the same crew." "How long," Krug asked, "would it take this ship to reach a star three hundred light-years away?" "Including the time needed for building up to maximum velocity, and the time required for deceleration," replied Romulus Fusion, "I'd estimate roughly six hundred and twenty years. Allowing for the expected relativistic time-dilation effects, apparent elapsed time aboard ship should be no more than twenty or twenty-five years, which means the entire voyage could be accomplished within the span of a single deepsleep period for the crew." Krug grunted. That was fine for the crew -- but if he sent the starit would return to Earth in the thirty-fifth century. He would not be here to greet it. Yet he saw no alternative. He said, "It'll fly by February?" "Yes." "Good. Start picking a crew: two alphas, two betas, four gammas. They'll blast off for a system of my choosing early next year." "As you instruct, sir." T hey left the ship. Krug ran his hands over its pebbled hull. His infatuation with the tachyon-beam tower had kept him from following the progress of the work here -- he regretted that now. They had done a magnificent job. And, he saw, his assault on the stars would have to be a two-pronged effort. When the tower was complete he would attempt to open realtime communication with tht beings whom Vargas insisted lived in droid-staffed starship would be embarked on its slow journey outward. What would he send aboard it? The full record of man's accomplishments -- yes, cubes galore, whole libraries, the entire musical repertoire, a hundred high-redundancy information systems. Make that crew four alphas, four betas -- they'd need to be masters of communications techniques. While they slept he would beam tachyonborne messages to them from Earth, detailing the knowledge that he expected to gain from the tower's contacts with the star-folk. Perhaps, by the time the starship reached its destination in the year # or so, it would have become possible to give its crew access to dictionaries of the language of the race it was to visit. Whole encyclopedias, even. Annals of six centuries of tachyonbeam contact between Earthmen and the inhabiKrug clapped Romulus Fusion's shoulder. "Good work. You'll hear from me. Where's the transmat?" "This way, sir." Pleep. Pleep. Pleep. Krug jumped back to the tower site. Thor Watchman was no longer jacked into the master control center's computer. Krug found him inside the tower, on the fourth level up, overseeing the installation of a row of devices that looked like globes of butter mounted on a beaded glass string. "What are these?" Krug demanded. Watchman looked surprised to see his master appear so abruptly. "Circuitbreakers," he said, making a quick recovery. "In case of excessive positron flow -- " "All right. You know where I've been, Thor? Denver. Denver. I've seen the starship. I didn't realize -- they've got it practically finished. Effective right now we're going to tie it into our project sequence." "Sir?" "Alpha Romulus Fusion is in charge out there. He's going to pick a crew, four alphas, four betas. We'll send them off next spring under life-suspension, coldsleep. Right after we send our first three. Get in touch with him, coordinate the timing, yes? Oh -- and another thing. Even though we're ahead of schedule here, it still isn't going fast enough to please me." Boom. Boom. The planetary nebuhind Krug's forehead. The heat of his skin evaporated his sweat as fast as it could burst from his pores. Getting too excited, he told himself. "When you finish work tonight, Thor, draw up a personnel requisition increasing the work crews by fifty per cent. Send it to Spaulding. You need more alphas, don't hesitate. Ask. Hire. Spend. Whatever." Boom. "I want the entire construction scheme reprogramed. Completion date three months tighter than the one we have now. Got it?" Watchman seemed a little dazed. "Yes, Mr. Krug," he said faintly. "Good. Yes. Good. Keep up the good work, Thor. Can't tell you how proud. How happy." Boom. Boom. Boom. Pleep. Boom. "We'll get you every skilled beta in the Western Hemisphere, if necessary. Eastern. Everywhere. Tower's got to be finished!" Boom. "Time! Time! Never enough time!" Krug rushed away. Outside, in the cold night air, some of the frenzy left him. He stood quietly for a moment, savoring the sleek glimmering beauty of the tower, aglow against the black backdrop of the unlit tundra. He looked up. He saw the stars. He clenched his fist and shook it. Krug! Krug! Krug! Krug! Boom. Into the transmat. Coordinates: Uganda. By the lake. Quenelle, waiting. Soft body, big breasts, thighs parted, belly heaving. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#. Krug leaped across the world. ter sunlight a dozen alphas paraded solemnly across the broad plaza that fell, like a giant terraced apron, from the lap of the World Congress building in Geneva. Each of the alphas carried a demonstration-spool; each wore the emblem of the Android Equality Party. Security robots were stationed in the corners of the plaza; the snubheaded black machines would roll instantly forward, spewing immobilizing stasis tape, if the demonstrators deviated in any way from the agitation program they had filed with the Congressional doornot likely to do anything unexpected. They simply crossed the plaza again and again, marching neither too rigidly nor too slackly, keeping their eyes on the holovision hovercameras above them. Periodically, at a signal from their leader, Siegfried Fileclerk, one of the demonstrators would activate the circuitry of his demonstrationspool. From the nozzle of the spool a cloud of dense blue vapor would spurt upward to a height of perhaps twenty meters and remain there, tightly coalesced by kinesislinkage into a spherical cloud, while a message imprinted in large and vivid golden letters emerged and moved slowly along its circumference. When the words had traveled the full # the cloud would dissipate -- and only after the last strands of it had vanished from the air would Fileclerk signal for the next demonstrator to send up a statement. Though Congress had been in session for some weeks now, it was improbable that any of the delegates inside the handsome building were paying attention to the demonstration. They had seen such demonstrations before. The purto have the holovision people pick up and relay to viewers all over the world, in the name of news coverage, such slogans as these; enough! now! Thor Watchman kneeled beside Lilith Meson in the Valhallavagen chapel. It was the day of the Ceremony of the Opening of the Vat. Nine alphas were present, with Mazda Constructor, who belonged to the Transcender caste, officiating. A couple of betas had been persuaded to attend, since Yielders were needed. This was not a ceremony that required the participation of a Preserver, so Watchman played no part in it -- he merely repeated to himself the invocations of the celebrants. The hologram of Krug above the alter glistened and throbbed. The triplets of the genetic code around the walls seemed to melt and swirl as the ritual neared its climax. The scent of hydrogen was in the air. Mazda Constructor's gestures, always noble and impressive, grew more broad, more allencompassing. "auu gau ggu gcu -- " "Harmony!" sang the first Yielder. "Unity!" sang the second. ""Perception," Lilith said. "Harmony!" "Unity!" ""Passion," said Lilith. "Harmony!" "Unity!" ""Purpose," Lilith said and the ceremony was over. Mazda Constructor stepped down, flushed and weary. Lilith lightly touched his hand. The betas, looking grateful to be excused, slipped out the rear way. Watchman rose. He saw Andromeda Quark in the far corner, the dimmest corner, whispering some private devotion of the Projector caste. She seemed to see no one else. "Shall we go?" Watchman said to Lilith. "I'll see you home." "Kind of you," she said. Her part in the ceremony appeared to have left her aglow -- her eyes were unnaturally bright, her breasts were beneath her thin wrap, her nostrils were flared. He escorted her to the street. As they walked toward the nearby transmat he said, "Did the personnel requisition reach your office?" "Yesterday. With a memo from Spaulding telling me to send out a hiring call at once. Where am I going to find that many skilled betas, Thor? What's going on?" "What's going on is that Krug is pushing us hard. He's obsessed with finishing the tower." "That's nothing new," Lilith said. "It's getting worse. Day by day the impatience grows, deepens, becomes more intense, like a sickness inside him. Maybe if I were human I'd understand an inner drive like that. He comes to the tower two, three times a day, now. Counts the levels. Counts the newly raised blocks. Hounds the tachyon people, telling them to get their machines hooked up faster. He's starting to look like something wild; sweating, excited, stumbling over his own words. Now he's padding the work crews into the job. For what? For what? And then this starship thing. I talked to Denver yesterday. Do you know, Lilith, he ignored that plant all last year and now he's there once a day? The starship has to be ready for an interstellar voyage within three months. Android crew. He's sending androids." "Where?" "Three hundred light-years away." "He won't ask you to go, will he? Me?" "Four alphas, four betas," Watchman said. "I haven't been told who's being considered. If he lets Spaulding decide, I'm finished. Krug preserve us from having to go." The irony of his prayer struck him belatedly and he laughed, a thin, dark chuckle. "Yes. Krug preserve us!" They reached the transmat. Watchman began to set coordinates. "Will you come up for a while?" Lilith asked. "Glad to." They stepped into the green glow together. H er flat was smaller than his, thighs, protecting her against just a bedroom, a combination Stockholm's December winds. A sitting-room  dining-room  kitdifferent setting of the doppler and chen and a sort of large foyerthat was gone too. She kept her cum-closet. It was possible to see sandals on. where a much larger apartment Sinking down easily to the floor, had been divided to form several she sat crosslegged before him and smaller ones, suitable for androids, toyed with the dials of. her wallThe building was similar to the projections. Textures ebbed and one where he lived: old, well-worn, flowed as she made random adsomehow warm of soul. Ninejustments. There was an oddly teenth-century, he guessed, altense moment of silence. Watchthough Lilith's furnishings, reflectman felt awkward -- he had known ing the force of her personality, Lilith five years, nearly her whole were distinctly contemporary, life, and she was as close a friend leaning heavily to floor-mounted to him as one android customarily projections and tiny, delicate freewas to another. Yet he had never floating art objects. Watchman been alone with her before in quite had never been at her place before, this way. It was not her nudity though they were close neighbors that disturbed him -- nudity meant in Stockholm. Androids, even alnothing at all to him. It was, he phas, did not socialize much in one decided, simply the privacy of the another's homes -- the chapels moment. served as meeting-places for most As though we were lovers. As occasions. Those who were outside though there were something... offices or clung to their solitude. He smiled and decided to tell He dropped into a springy, comher about these incongruous feelfortable chair. "Care to corrode ings. But before he could speak, your mind?" Lilith asked. "I can she did. offer all kinds of friendly sub"I've just had a thought. About stances. Weeds? Floaters? ScramKrug. About his impatience to finblers? Even alcohol -- liqueurs, ish the tower. Thor, what if he's brandies, whiskeys." dying?" "You're well stocked with pol"Dying?" Blankly. An unfamilutions." liar idea. "Manuel comes here often. I "Some terrible disease, somemust play hostess for him. What thing they can't fix tectogeneticalwill you have?" ly. I don't know what -- some new "Nothing," he said. "I'm not kind of cancer, maybe. Anyway, really fond of corrosion." suppose he's just found out that he She laughed and moved toward has maybe a year or two to live, the doppler. Quickly it consumed you see, and he's desperate to get her wrap. Under it she wore nothhis space signals sent out before ing but a thermal spray, light green then." and lovely against her pale scarlet "He looks healthy," Watchman skin; it covered her from breasts to said. "Rotting from the inside out. The first symptoms are erratic behavior -- jumping obsessively from place to place, accelerating work schedules, bothering people to respond faster -- " "Krug preserve us, no!" "Preserve Krug." "I don't believe this, Lilith. Where did you get this notion? Has Manuel said anything?" "Strictly intuition. I'm trying to help you account for Krug's odd behavior, that's all. If he really is dying, that's one possible explanation for -- " "Krug can't die." "Can't?" "You know what I mean. Mustn't. He's still young. He's got. a century ahead of him, at least. And there's so much that he still must do in that time." "For us, you mean?" "Of course," Watchman said. "The tower's burning him up, though. Consuming him. Thor, suppose he does die? Without having said the words -- without having spoken out for us -- " "We'll have wasted a lot of enwill laugh in our faces." "Shouldn't we do something?" H e pressed his thumbs lightly against his eyelids. "We can't build our plans atop a fantasy, Lilith. As far as we know, Krug isn't dying and isn't likely to die for a long time." "And if he does?" "What are you getting at?" She said, "We could start to make our move now." "What?" "The thing we discussed when you first pushed me into sleeping with Manuel. Using Manuel to enlist Krug's support for the cause." "It was just a passing thought," Watchman said. "I doubt that it's philosophically proper to try to manipulate Krug like that. If we're sincere in our faith we should await His grace and mercy, without scheming to -- " "Stop it, Thor. I go to chapel and you go to chapel and we all go to chapel -- but we also live in the real world and in the real world you have to take real factors into account. Such as the possibility of Krug's premature death." "Well -- " He shivered with tension. She was speaking pragmatically; she sounded almost like an of her position. All of his faith was pinned to the hope of the manifestation of a miracle -- but what if there were no miracle? If they had an opportunity to encourage the miracle, should they not take it? And yet and yet -- She said, "Manuel's primed. He's ready to take up our cause openly. You know how pliable he is -- I could turn him into a crusader in two or three weeks. I'd take him to Gamma Town first -- " "In disguise, I hope." "Of course. We'd spend a night there. I'd rub his face in it. And then -- you remember, Thor, we talked about letting him see a chapel -- " "Yes. Yes." Watchman trembled. "I'd do that I'd explain the whole communion. And finally I'd come right out and ask him to go to his father for us. He would, Thor, he would! And Krug would listen. Krug would yield and say the words. As a favor to Manuel." Watchman rose. He paced the room. "It seems almost blasphemous, though. We're supposed to wait for Krug's grace to descend on us in Krug's own time. To make use of Manuel this way, to attempt to shape and force the Will of Krug -- " "What if Krug's dying?" Lilith asked. "What if he's got only months left? What if a time comes when there is no Krug? And we're still slaves." Her words rebounded from the walls, shattering him: when there is no Krug when there is no Krug when there is no Krug when there is no Krug "We have to distinguish," he said shakily, "between the physical man who is Krug, for whom we work, and the eternal presence of Krug the Maker and Krug the Liberator, who -- " "Not now, Thor. Just tell me what should I do. Take Manuel to Gamma Town?" "Yes. Yes. Yes. But move one step at a time. Don't reveal things too quickly. Check with me if you have any doubts. Can you really control Manuel?" "He worships me," Lilith said quietly. "Because of your body?" "It's a good body, Thor. But it's more than that. He wants to be dominated by an android. He's full of second-generation guilts. I captured him with sex but I hold him by the power of the Vat." "Sex," Watchman said. "Captured him with sex. How? He has a wife. An attractive wife. I've heard, though of course I'm in no position to judge. If he has an attractive wife why does he need -- " Lilith laughed. "Did I say ajoke?" "You don't understand a thing about humans, do you, Thor? The famous Alpha Watchman, totally baffled!" Her eyes sparkled. She jumped to her feet. The deep cones of her breasts swayed and jiggled. "Thor, do you know anything about sex? At first hand, I mean." "Have I done sex? Is that what you're asking?" "That's what I'm asking," Lilith told him. The change in the conversation's direction puzzled him. What did his private life have to do with the planning of revolutionary tactics? "No," he said. "Never. Why should #? What could I get from it besides trouble?" "Pleasure," she suggested. "Krug created us with functional nervous systems. Sex is amusement. Sex excites me -- it ought to excite you. Why haven't you ever tried it?" "I don't know an alpha male who has. Or who even thinks much about it." "Alpha women do." "That's different. You have more opportunities. You've got all those human males running after you. Human females don't run after androids much, except for some disturbed women, I guess. And you can do sex with a human without any risks. But I'm not going to chance entangling myself with some human female, not when any man who thinks I'm infringing on his rights can destroy me on the spot." "How about sex between android and android?" "What for? So we can make babies?" "Sex and reproduction are separate things, Thor. People have sex without babies and babies without sex all the time. Sex is a social orce. A sport, a game. A kind of magnetism, body to body. It's what gives me power over Manuel Krug." Abruptly the tone of her voice shifted, losing its didactic quality, becoming softer. "Do you want me to show you what it is? Take your clothes off." H e laughed edgily. "Are you serious? You want sex with me?" "Why not? Are you afraid?" "Don't be absurd. I just didn't expect -- I mean -- it seems so incongruous, two androids going to bed together, Lilith -- " "Because we're things made out of plastic?" she said coldly. "That isn't what I meant. Obviously we're flesh and blood!" "But there are certain things that we don't have to do, because we come from the Vat. Certain bodily functions that are reserved for the Children of the Womb. Eh?" "You're distorting my position." "I know I am. I want to educate you, Thor. Here you are trying to manipulate the destinies of an entire society and you're ignorant of one of the most basic human motivations. Come -- strip. Haven't you ever felt desire for a woman?" "I don't know what desire is, Lilith." "Really?" "Really." She shook her head. "And you think we should have equality with humans? You want to vote, you want to put alphas in Congress, to have civil rights? But you're living like a robot. Like a machine. You're a walking argument for keeping androids in their place. You've closed off one of the most vital sectors of human life and tell yourself that that sort of stuff is only for humans -- androids don't have to bother with it. Dangerous thinking, Thor! We are human. We have bodies. Why did Krug give us genitals if He didn't mean us to use them?" "I agree with every word you've said. But -- " "But what?" "But sex seems irrelevant to me. And I know that's a damning argument against our cause. I'm not the only alpha who feels this way, Lilith. We don't talk about it much but -- " He looked away from her. "Maybe the humans are right. Maybe we are a lesser kind, artificial through and through, just a clever kind of robot made out of flesh and -- " "Wrong. Stand up, Thor. Come here." He walked toward her. She took his hands and put them on her bare breasts. "Squeeze them," she said. "Gently. Play with the nipples. You see how they get hard, how they stand up? That's a sign that I'm responding to your touch. It's a way that a woman shows desire. What do you feel when you touch my breasts, Thor?" "The smoothness. The cool skin." "What do you feel inside?" "I don't know." "Pulse rate changing? Tensions? A knot in your belly? Here. Touch my hip. My buttock. Slide your hand up and down. Anything, Thor?" "I'm not sure. I'm new at this, Lilith." "Strip," she said. "It seems so mechanical this way. Cold. Isn't sex supposed to be preceded by courtship, soft lights, whispering, music, poetry?" "Then you do know a little about it." "A little. I've read their books. I know the rituals. The peripherals." "We can try the peripherals. Here -- I've turned down the lights. Take a floater, Thor. No, not a scrambler -- not the first time. A floater. Fine. Here's a little music, now. Undress." "You won't tell anybody about this?" "How silly you are. Who would I tell? Manuel? Darling, I'll tell him, darling. I've been unfaithful to you with Thor Watchman!" She laughed giddily. "It'll be our secret. Call it a humanizing lesson. Humans have sex and you want to be more human, don't you? I'll discover sex to you." She smiled archly. She tugged at his clothes. Curiosity seized him. He felt the floater going to work in his brain, lifting him toward euphoria. Lilith was right -- the sexlessness of alphas was a paradox among people who claimed so intensely to be fully human. Or was sexlessness as general among alphas as he thought? Perhaps, busy with the tasks set for him by Krug, he had simply neglected to let his emotions develop? He thought of Siegfried Fileclerk weeping in the snow beside Cassandra Nucleus, and wondered. His clothes dropped away. Lilith drew him into her arms. She rubbed her body slowly against his. He felt her thighs on his, the cool taut drum of her belly touching his, the hard nodes of her nipples brushing his chest. He searched himself for response. He was uncertain about what he found, although he could not deny that he enjoyed the tactile sensations of their contact. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. They sought his. Her tongue slid a short distance between his teeth. He ran the palms of his hands down her back and on a sudden impulse dug the tips of his fingers into the globes of her buttocks. Lilith stiffened and pushed herself more intensely against him, grinding now instead of rubbing. They remained that way for some minutes. Then she relaxed and eased away from him. "Well?" she asked. "Anything?" "I like it," he said tentatively. "Did it excite you, though?" "I think so." "It doesn't look that way." "How can you tell?" "It would show," she said, grinning at him. H e felt impossibly absurd and awkward. He felt cut off from his own identity, unable to return to or even to see the Thor Watchman he knew and understood. From the first, almost from the time of leaving the Vat, he had regarded himself as older, wiser. more competent, more confident, than his fellow alphas -- a man who comprehended the world and his place in it. But now? Lilith had reduced him in half an hour to something clumsy, naive, foolish and impotent. "How would it show?" he asked doggedly. "Don't you understand the mechanics of sexual intercourse?" "Of course." She put her hand to his loins. "Obviously it wasn't very exciting for you when I -- " She paused. "Oh. Yes. Now do you see?" "It happened when you touched me." "That isn't awfully surprising. So you like it, then? Yes. Yes." Her fingers moved cunningly. Watchman had to admit that he found the sensation interesting and that sudden startling awakening of his maleness in her hands was a remarkable effect. Yet he remained outside himself, a detached and remote observer, no more involved than if he were attending a lecture on the mating habits of Centaurine proteoids. She was close against him, again. Her body moved, sliding from side to side, writhing a little, quivering with a barely suppressed tension. He clasped her in his arms. He ran his hands over her skin once more. She drew him to the floor. He braced himself with knees and elbows so that his full weight would not descend on her. Her legs surrounded him; her thighs clamped tight against his hips; her hand slipped between their bodies, seized him, guided him. He caught her rhythm shortly, and matched it. So this is sex... He wondered how a woman felt -- Lilith was gasping and trembling in what seemed like delight. But sex struck him as an odd thing to covet. Was pushing yourself into a what the poetry was about -- was this what men had fought duels over and renounced kingdoms for? After a while he said, "How will we know when it's over?" Her eyes opened. He was unable to tell whether there was fury or laughter in them. "You'll know," she said. "Just keep moving!" He kept moving. The motions of her hips grew more violent. Her face became twisted, distorted, almost ugly -- some sort of interior storm had broken and was raging within her. Muscles throbbed randomly throughout her body. At the place where he was joined to her, he could feel her grasping him with playful inner spasms. Abruptly he felt a spasm of his own and ceased to catalog the effects their union had produced in her. He closed his eyes. He fought for breath. His heart raced frantically. His skin blazed. He tightened his grip on her and pressed his face into the hollow between her cheek and her shoulder. A series of jolting impacts rocked him. She was right -- it was easy to tell when it was over. How fast the ecstasy drained away! He could barely remember now the powerful sensations of sixty seconds ago. He felt cheated, as though he had been promised a feast and had been given only dream-food to eat. Was that all? Like the surf trickling away after a brief surge of tide? And ashes on the beach. And ashes on the beach. It is nothing at all, Thor Watchman thought. It is a fraud. He rolled free of her. She lay with her head lolling back, her eyes closed, her mouth slack -- she was sweat-dappled and wan-looking. It seemed to him that he had never seen this woman before. A moment after he had left her, her eyes opened. She propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him, almost shyly, perhaps. "Hello," she said. "Hello." He looked away. "How do you feel?" Watchman shrugged. He searched for the right words and could not find them. Defeated, he said, "Tired, mostly. Hollow. Is that right? I feel -- hollow." "Normal. After coitus every animal is sad. Old Latin proverb. You're an animal, Thor. Don't forget it." "A weary animal." Ashes on the cold beach. The tide very low. "Did you enjoy it, Lilith?" "Couldn't you see? No, I suppose you didn't. I enjoyed. Very much." He put his hand lightly on her thigh. "I'm glad. But I'm still baffled." "By what?" "The whole thing. The pattern, the constellation of events. Pushing. Pulling. Sweating. Groaning. The tickle in the groin, and then it's over. I -- " "No," she said. "Don't intellectualize. Don't analyze. You must have been expecting more than is really there. It's only fun, Thor. It's what people do to be happy together. That's all. That's all. It's not a cosmic experience." "I'm sorry. I'm just a dumb android who doesn't -- " "Don't. You're a person, Thor." He realized he was hurting her by his refusal to have been overwhelmed by their coupling. He was hurting himself. Slowly he got to his feet. His mood was wintry -- he felt like an empty vessel lying in the snow. He had known a (lash of joy, he thought, right at the moment of discharge -- but was that instant of lightning worth anything if this dreary gloom always came afterward? She had meant well. She had wanted to make him more human. He lifted her, pulled her against him for a moment, kissed her glaricingly on the cheek, cupped one of her breasts in his hand. He said, "We'll do this again some time, all right?" "Whenever you say." "It was very strange for me, the first time. It will get better." "It will, Thor. The first time is always strange." "I think I'd better go now." "If you have to." "I'd better. But I'll see you again soon." "Yes." She touched his arms. "And in the meantime -- I'll start moving along the lines we discussed. I'll take Manuel to Gamma Town." "Good." "Krug be with you, Thor." "Krug be with you." He began to dress. And Krug said. There shall be this one difference forever upon you. That the Children of the Womb shall come always from the Womb, and the Children of the Vat come always from the Vat. And it shall not be given to you to bring forth your young from your bodies, as is done among the Children of the Womb. And this shall be so in order that your lives may flow only from Krug, that to him alone the glory of your creation be reserved, world without end. December #, #. At # meters the tower dominates and overpowers. There is no resisting its immensity. One steps from the transmat by day or by night and one is struck dumb by that vaulting shaft of gleaming glass. The solitude of its surroundings lends awesomeness to its height. It has passed the halfway mark now. Lately there have been many accidents born of haste. A pair of workers fell from the summit; an electrician, spraying connectors improperly along a partition, sent a lethal shock through five gammas hoisting cable; two ascending scooprods collided, at a cost of six lives; Alpha Euclid Planner narrowly avoided serious injury when a power-pool backup sent a monstrous surge of maximum-entrophy data through the main computer while he was jacked in; three betas were dumped four hundred meters down an interior serviceaccess core when a scaffold collapsed. The construction work thus far has caused the destruction of nearly thirty androids. But there are thousands employed at the tower and the work is hazardous and unusual; no one considers the accident rate extraordinarily high. The first thirty meters of the tachyon-beam broadcast apparatus is virtually finished. Technicians daily test its structural integrity. It will not be possible, of course, to generate tachyons until the entire enormous accelerator track has been completed. But putting together the individual components of the mighty system has an interest of its own and Krug spends most of his time at the tower watching the tests. Colored lights flash; indicator panels hum and whistle; dials glow; needles quiver. Krug applauds each positive result enthusiastically. He brings hordes of guests. In the last three weeks he has come to the tower with Niccolo Vargas, with his daughttr-in-law Clissa, with twenty-nine different members of Congress, with eleven leaders of industry, with sixteen world-famed representatives of the arts. There is unanimous praise for the tower. Even those who perhaps inwardly may think of it as a titanic folly cannot withhold their admiration for its elegance, its beauty, its magnitude. A folly, too, can be wonderful, and no one who has seen Krug's tower denies its wonder. Nor are there so many who think it is follyto notify the stars that man exists. Manuel Krug has not been seen at the tower since early in November. Krug explains that his son is busy supervising the complexities of the Krug corporate domain. He is, assuming greater responsibilities every month. He is, after all, the heir apparent. L ast time I went to Lilith she said. Next time you come let's do something a little different, all right? Both of us naked after loving. My cheek on her breasts. Different how? To get out of the flat a little. To go around as a tourist and see Stockholm. The android quarter. To see how the people live, the androids. The gammas. Wouldn't you want to do that? And I said, a little wary. Why should I? Wouldn't you rather spend the time with me? She played with the hair on my chest. Such a beast, I am, so primitive. She said. We live so cloistered here. You come, we have sex, you leave. We never go anywhere together. Td like you to come outside with me. Part of your education. I have this drive to educate people, did you know that, Manuel? To open their minds to things. Have you ever been in a Gamma Town? No. Do you know what it is? A place where gammas live, I suppose. That's right. But you don't really know. Not till you've been inside one. Dangerous? Not really. Nobody will bother alphas in Gamma Town. They bother each other a little, sometimes, but that's different. We're high-caste and they keep away from us. I said. They won't bother an alpha, maybe, but what about me? They probably don't want human tourists if it's squalid and all that. Lilith said she would disguise me. As an alpha. I'd go incognito. That had a certain kind of spice in it. Temptation. Mystery. I thought it might keep the romance glowing for Lilith and me, playing a game like that. I asked. Won't they recognize that I'm a fake? And she said. They don't look too closely at alphas. We have a concept called the social distances. Gammas keep the social distances, Manuel. All right, then, we'll go to Gamma Town. We planned it for a week from that day. I cleared everything with Clissa: going to Luna, I said, won't be back for a couple of days, yes? No problem. Clissa would spend the time with her friends in New Zealand. I wonder sometimes how much Clissa suspects. Or what she'd say if she knew. I have this temptation to tell her, Clissa, I've got an android mistress in Stockholm, she's way high spectrum in bed and a fantastic body, how do you like that? Clissa isn't bourgeois but she's sensitive. She might feel unwanted. Or maybe Clissa with her great love of the downtrodden androids might say. How kind of you, Manuel, to be making one of them so happy. I don't mind sharing your love with an android. Bring her to tea some day, won't you? I wonder. The day comes. I go to Lilith's. I go in and she's naked. Get your clothes off, she says. I grin. Unsubtle. Sure. Sure. I strip and reach for her. She does a little dance step and leaves me holding air. Not now, silly. When we come back. We've got to disguise you now! She has a spraytube. First she turns it to neutral and covers up the mirror-plate in my forehead. Androids don't wear such things. The earlobe plugs, she says: out. I take them out and she fills the opening with gel. Then she starts spraying me red. Do I have to shave my body? I ask. No, she says, just don't take your clothes off in front of anybody. She turns me red all over, with a shiny texture to it. Instant android. Next she gives me a thermal spray from chest to thighs. Going to be cold out there, she says. Androids don't wear heavy clothes. Here. Here, get dressed. She hands me a costume. Highneck shirt, skintight pants. Obviously android clothes and obviously alpha style, too. Fits me like a skin graft. Don't get an erection, she tells me. You'll split the trousers. She laughs and rubs me in front. Where'd you get the clothes? I borrowed them from Thor Watchman. You tell him what for? No, she says, of course not. I just said I needed some. Let's see how you look, now. Lovely. Lovely! A perfect alpha. Walk across the room. Back. Good. Swagger a little more. Remember, you're the end-product of human evolution, the finest version of Homo sapiens that ever came out of a vat, with all of a human's strong points and none of his flaws. You're Alpha -- hmm. We need a name, in case anyone asks. Lilith thinks a moment. Alpha Leviticus Leaper, she says. What's your name? Alpha Leviticus Leaper, I say. No. If anyone asks you, you say Leviticus Leaper. They can tell you're an alpha. Other people call you Alpha Leaper. Clear? Clear. She gets dressed. A thermal spray first, then a kind of gold mesh over her breasts and down to mid-thigh. Nothing else. Nipples showing through the openings in the mesh. Not much hidden below, either. Not my idea of winter clothing. Androids must enjoy winters more than we do. Want to see yourself before we go out. Alpha Leaper? Yes. She dumps mirror-dust in the air. Wheri the molecules are lined up I get a liead-to-toe view. Impressive. A really cocky alpha buck, a red devil out on the town. Lilith is right: no gamma would dare to fool with me. Or even look me in the eye. Let's go. Alpha Leaper. Slumming in Gamma Town. O UT. Across. To the edge of the city, looking down on windwhipped gray water. Whitecaps in the harbor. Early afternoon but night already closing in -- a greasy gray time of day, fog hanging low, the glow of streetlamps coming through it blurred and dirty. Other lights flashing off buildings or just floating overhead: red, green, blue, orange, flickering on and off, yelling for attention, an arrow here, the sign of a trumpet there. Vibrations. Fumes. Sounds. The closeness of many people. A screech in the grayness. Distant laughter, blurred also. Odd scraps of voices drifting in the fog: "Let go or I'll clot you!" "Back to the vat. Back to the vat." "Slobies, who'll take slobbies?" "Stackers can't tell you." "Slobies!" "Owl! Owl! Owl!" Stockholm is more than half populated by androids. Why do they gather here? And in maybe nine other cities. Ghettoes. They don't have to. Transmat world. Live wherever you like, get to work anyway. But we like to be with our own kind, she says. And even so they stratify themselves in their ghettoes. The alphas back there, in the fine old houses, and the betas in the ragbag middle. And then the gammas. The gammas. Welcome to Gamma Town. Wet slippery mud-streaked cobble-paved streets. Medieval? Peeling gray houses face to face, hardly a lane between them. A trickle of cold dirty water running down the gutter from the higher part. Windows of glass. And yet it isn't completely archaic here -- a mixture of styles, all sorts of architecture, olla podrida, bouillabaisse, with twenty-second, twentieth, nineteenth, sixteenth, fourteenth centuries jumbled together. The airy webs of weatherproofed skyways dangling. Rusted slidewalks on a few of the tangled streets. The buzz of climate conditioners that have gone out of phase, pumping greenish fog into the winter air. Thick-walled baroque cellars. Lilith and I walk down zigzag crazy pathways. A demon must have planned this town. The imp of the preverse. Faces hover. Gammas. Everywhere. They peer, flit, peer again. Little dim eyes, birdlike, twitch-twitch-twitch, frightened. Afraid of us, they are. The social distances, eh? They keep the social distances. They lurk, they stare, but as we get close they try to be invisible. Head down. Eyes averted. Alphas alphas alphas; all gammas beware! We tower above them. I never realized how squat gammas are. How short, how broad. And how strong. Those shoulders. Those muscles rippling. Any of them could rip me apart. The women look strong, too, though they're built more gracefully. To go to bed with a gamma girl? More fire than Lilith, maybe -- is that possible? Thrashing and jumping around, low-class groaning, no inhibitions? And the smell of garlic, no doubt. Eorget the idea. Coarse, they are. Coarse. Coarse. Like Quenelle with my father. I'd say. Let them be -- there's passion enough in Lilith and she's clean. Probably not worth the effort even to think about it. The gammas keep back from us. Two jaunty alphas out on the town. We have long legs. We have style. We have grace. They fear us. I am Alpha Leviticus Leaper. The wind is raw here. Right off the water it comes, knife-sharp. It stirs up dust arid bits of things in the streets. Dust! Scraps! When have I seen such filthy streets? Don't the robocleaners ever come here? Well, then, don't the gammas have enough pride to clean their own? They don't care about such things, says Lilith. It's a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom of the android world, bottom of the bottom of the human world and they know it. And they don't like it. The squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we'll live in filth, too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we're not people, we don't have to be tidy at home. You know, robocleaners used to come here and the gammas would dismantle them. There's one now, you see? Been there ten years at least. Robot fragments lie in a drab scattered heap. Shards of a metal man. The glint of good blue metal through the rust. Are those things solenoids? Relays? Accumulators? The coiled wire guts of the machine. Bottom of the bottom, a mere mechanical object, destroyed while attacking the holy squalor of our vat-born pariahs. A gray-andwhite cat pisses on the robot's guts. The gammas leaning against the wall laugh. Then they see us and creep back, showing awe. They make quick nervous gestures with their left hands -- touch crotch, touch breast, touch forehead, one two three very fast. As automatic, as much a reflex, as the sign of the Cross. What is it? A kind of honorific tugging at the forelock? A show of homage to the wandering alphas? Something like that, says Lilith. But not quite. Actually it's just a superstitious sign they make. To ward off the evil eye? Yes. In a manner of speaking. Touch the cardinal points, invoke the spirit of genitals and souls and intelligence, crotch chest skull. You've never seen androids do it before'? I think maybe I have. Kven alphas, Lilith says. A habit. A comfort when tension... Sometimes even I. Why the genitals, though'? When androids don't genitate'? Symbolic power, she says. We're sterile but that's still a holy zone. In memory of the origin of us all. The human gene pool issued from the loins and we were designed after those genes. There's a theology of it. Lilith laughs but she looks edgy, as if I really shouldn't be doing it. To hell with. I'm masquerading as an android tonight, right'? Then I can do android things. One two three. The gammas lounging against the wall return the sign. One two three. Crotch chest skull. One of them says something that sounds like Krug be praised. What was that? I ask Lilith. I didn't hear it. Did he say Krug be praised? Gammas will say anything sometimes. I shook my head. Maybe he recognizes me, Lilith. Not a chance. Absolutely none. If he said anything about Krug, he means your father. Yes. Yes. True. He's Krug. I'm Manuel, only Manuel. Shh! You're Alpha Leviticus Leaper! Right. Sorry. Alpha Leviticus Leaper. Lev for short. Krug' be praised? Maybe I didn't hear it right. Maybe, Lilith says. We turn a sharp corner and in so doing we trigger an advert trap. By entering the trap's scanner field we cause powders of many colors to erupt from vents in a wall and form, by electrostatic attraction, a pattern of gaudy words in the air, blindingly bright even in the murk and fog. Against a silvery backdrop we see: iMKmc ! iMFmc! Irfpltabi.f! I ask. Is he really an alpha? Of course. What's he doing living in Gamma Town? Somebody's got to be their doctor. You think a gamma can get a medical degree? He sounds like a quack, though. Putting out a trap like this. What kind of doctor would huckster for patients? A Gamma Town doctor. That's how things are done here. Anyway, he is a quack. A good doctor but a quack. Mixed up in some organregeneration scandal years ago, when he had an aloha practice. Lost his license. You don't need a license here? You don't need anything here. They say he's dedicated, though. Eccentric but devoted to his people. Would you like to meet him? No. No. What are slobie addicts? Slobie's a drug the gammas take, Lilith says. You'll see some addicts before long. And stackers? They have something wrong in the brain. Scaly matter in the cerebellum. Solidiflers? A trouble in the muscles. Stiffening of tissue or something. I'm not sure. Only gammas get it. I frown. Does my father know? He stands behind the integrity of his products. If gammas are prone to mysterious diseases -- That's a slobie addict, Lilith says. An android comes up the street toward us. Drifting, floating, sliding, waltzing, moving with a weird molasses slowness. Eyes slitwide; face dreamy; arms outstretched; fingers drooping. Gropes his way as though going through the atmosphere of Jupiter. All he wears is a scrap of fabric around his hips, yet he sweats in the frosty evening air. Crooning to himself in a clanking way. After what seems like four hours he reaches us. Plants his feet, leans his head back, puts hands on hips. Silence. A minute. At last in low bristly voice he says with terrible unhurriedness, A#...  phas... hel... lo... al... phas... love... ly... al... phas. Lilith tells him to move along. No response at first. Then his face crumbles. Unutterable sadness. Brings left hand up in awkward clownlike gesture, touches forehead, lets hand drift down to chest, to crotch. Making the sign in reverse -- what's the significance of that? He says tragically, #... love... the... love... ly... al... phas. I say to Lilith, What kind of drug is it? Slows the time-sense. A minute becomes an hour to them. It stretches their free time. Of course, we move like whirlwinds around them. Usually the addicts stick together, all on the same timescheme. Illusion of having days between each work-shift. A dangerous drug? She says. Cuts about an hour off the life expectancy for every two hours you're under the influence. The gammas figure it's a fair deal, though. Give up an hour objective, gain two or three days subjective -- why not? But it reduces the work force. Gammas have the right to do what they please with their lives, don't they. Alpha Leaper? You wouldn't accept the argument that they're merely property, would you, and that any kind of selfabuse practiced by the gamma is a crime against its owner? No. No. Of course not. Alpha Meson. I didn't think you felt that way, Lilith says. The slobie addict is moving in foolish vague circles around us, chanting something so slowly that I am unable to connect one syllable to another and can make no sense of it. He halts. A glacial smile spreads infinitely slowly across his lips; I think it is a snarl until it is half formed. He sinks into a hulking crouch. His hand rises, fingers flexed. The hand is obviously heading toward Lilith's left breast. Neither of us moves. I catch the gamma's chant now: A...A...A...A...A...G...A...A...C...A...A... u... What's he trying to say? Lilith shakes her head. It isn't important. She steps away while the groping hand is still ten centimeters from her bosom. A frown begins to replace the smile on the gamma's face. He looks wounded. His chant takes on a questioning tone: A... u... A... A... u... G... A... U... C... A... U... u... footsteps comes from behind me. A second slobie addict is approaching: a girl, wearing a cloak that hangs down from her shoulders and trails raggedly for many meters behind her, but leaves her thighs and loins bare. She has dyed her hair green and has it bound up in a kind of tiara. Her face seems wasted and pallid; her' eyes are scarcely open; her skin is glossy with sweat. She floats toward our first friend and says something to him in a startling baritone boom. He replies dreamily. I can understand none of what they say. Is it because of the decelerating drug or do they speak a gamma patois? Something ugly seems to be about to happen. I nod to Lilith, suggesting we leave, but she shakes her head. Stay. Watch them. The addicts are doing a grotesque dance. Fingertips touching, knees rising and falling. A gavotte for marble statues. A minuet for stuffed elephants. They croon to one another. They circle one another. The man's feet become tangled in the girl's trailing cloak. She moves; he stays firm; the cloak rips, leaving the girl naked in the street. Between her breasts she has a knife, dangling from a green cord. Her back is criscrossed with scars. Has she been flogged? Her nakedness excites her. I see her nipples stiffening in slow motion, like two fungi rising on her chest. The man is next to her now. He reaches up with painful unhaste and takes the knife from its sheath. Just as slowly he brings it down and touches the cold metal to the girl's loins, her belly, her forehead. The holy sign. Lilith and I are against the wall, near the entrance to the doctor's office. The knife makes me uneasy. Let me take it away from him, I say. No. No. You're just a visitor here. This isn't your affair. Then let's go, Lilith. Wait. Watch. Our friend is singing again. Letters, as before. u... c... A... u... c... G... u... c... c... His arm comes back, then starts forward. The point of the knife is aimed at the girl's abdomen. From the tension in his muscles I can see that the blow will have full force -- this is no dance step. The blade is only a few centimeters from her skin when I rush forward and slap it from his hand. He begins to moan. The girl does not yet realize that she has been saved. She utters a deep droning bellow, perhaps intended to be a shriek. She drops to the ground, clutching her breasts with one hand, thrusting the other between her thighs. She writhes in slow motion. You shouldn't have interfered, Lilith says angrily. Come on now. We'd better go" But he would have killed her! Not your affair. Not your affair. She tugs at my wrist. I turn. We begin to move away. I am aware peripherally that the girl is getting up -- the garish lights of the sign of Poseidon Musketeer the Medic glisten on her bare thin flanks. Lilith and I take two steps; then we hear a grunt. We look back. The girl, rising, has risen with the knife in her hand and she has driven it into the man's belly. Methodically she draws it upward from waist to chest. He makes a gurgling sound. Now we've got to go, Lilith says. We speed toward the corner. As we reach it I turn. The door of Alpha Musketeer has opened. A gaunt haggard figure, alpha-tall, with a mane of wild gray hair and bulging eyes, stands in it. Is this the famous medic? He rushes toward the slobie addicts. The girl kneels before her victim, who has not yet fallen. His blood purples her shining skin. She chants: g!a!a!g!a!g!g!a!c! In here, Lilith says and we duck into a dark doorway. S teps, a dry smell of withered things. Cobwebs. We plunge into unknown depths. In the distance, far below, yellow lights gleam. We go down and down and down. What is this place? I ask. Security tunnel. Built during the Sanity War two hundred years ago. Part of a system that runs everywhere under Stockholm. The gammas have taken it over. Like a sewer. I hear quick stabs of laughter, jagged blurts of incoherent conversation. There are shops down here, with slitted gates behind which little lamps sputter and flicker. Gammas move to and fro. Some of them make the one-twothree sign as they pass us. Driven by a fear I do not understand, Lilith leads us frantically onward. We change tunnels, entering a passage at right angles to the first one. Three slobie addicts wander by. A male gamma with face streaked by red and blue paint pauses to sing, perhaps to us: Who shall I marry? Who will marry me? Fire in the stinking vat Fire flying free. My head my head my head My head my head. He kneels and gags. Thin blue fluid pours from his lips, almost to our feet. We move on. We hear an echoing cry: M-pha M-pha M-pha M-pha Two gammas couple in an alcove. Their bodies are sweat-shiny and lean. Despite myself I watch the plunging hips and listen to the slap of flesh against flesh. The girl pounds the flats of her hands steadily against her partner's back. Is she protesting a rape or displaying ecstasy? I never find out, because a slobie stumbles out of the shadows and falls on them, tumbling in a turmoil of intertwined limbs. Lilith draws me away. I am suddenly heavy with desire for her. I think of the firm breasts beneath her wrap -- shall we find an alcove of our own and couple among the gammas? I put my hand on her buttocks, taut as she walks. Lilith wriggles her hips. Not here, she says. Not here. We have social distances to keep, too. A dazzle of light cascades from the tunnel's roof. Pink bubbles appear and burst, releasing sour smells. A dozen gammas gallop out of a side passage, halt in shock as they realize they have nearly collided with two visiting alphas, make signs of respect, and rush onward, shouting', laughing, singing. Oh, I melt you and you melt me And we melt they and happy we be. Clot I Clot! Clot! Clot! Grig! They seem happy, I say. Lilith nods. They're soaped to the whiskers, she says. On their way to a radiation orgy, I bet. A what? A puddle of yellow fluid slides out from under a closed door. Acrid fumes rise. Gamma urine? The door bursts open. Wild-eyed female gamma, luminescent breasts, livid scar on belly, giggles at us. She executes a respectable curtsey. Milady. Milord. Will you clot with me? Giggles. Squats. Lurches around, heels against rump, in a dizzy dance. Arches her back, slaps her breasts, spreads her legs. Green and gold lights blaze in the room from which she has emerged. A figure appears. N ormal height, but twice the width of a gamma, and covered with thick coarse fur. An ape? The face is human. It lifts its hands. Short blunt fingers -- webs between them! Drags the girl back inside. Door closes. A reject, Lilith says. There are lots of them here. Reject from what? Substandard android. Genetic flaws; impurities in the vat, perhaps. Sometimes they have no arms, sometimes no legs, no heads, no digestive tracts, no this, no that. Aren't they automatically destroyed at the factory? Lilith smiles. Can you keep a secret? I promise. They aren't destroyed. Those that aren't viable die anyway, fast enough. The others are smuggled out when the supervisors aren't looking and sent to one of the undercities. Mainly here. We can't put our idiot brethren to death, Manuel! Leviticus, I say. Alpha Leviticus Leaper. Yes. Look, there's another. A nightmare figure rollicks through the corridor. Like something that has been placed in an oven until its flesh began to flow and run -- the basic outlines are human but the contours are not. The nose is a trunk, the lips are saucers, the arms are of unequal length, the fingers are tentacles. The genitals are monstrous: horsepenis, bull-balls. Better off dead, I say to Lilith. No. No. Our brother. Our pitiful brother whom we cherish. The monstrosity halts a dozen meters from us. Its ropy arms go through the movements of the onetwo-three. Speaking perfectly clearly it says to us, The peace of Krug upon you, alphas. Go with Krug. Go with Krug. Go with Krug. Krug be with you, Lilith replies. The monstrosity shambles onward, murmuring happily. The peace of Krug? Go with Krug? Krug be with you? Lilith, what does all this mean? Common courtesy, she says. A friendly greeting. Krug? Krug made us all, did he not? she says. I remember things that were said when I was in the shunt room with my friends. You know all the androids are in love with your father? Yes. Sometimes I think it must be almost like a religion with them. The religion of Krug. Well it makes a sort of sense to worship your creator. Don't laugh. The peace of Krug. Go with Krug. Krug be with you. Lilith, do androids think my father is God? Lilith evades the question. We can talk about that some other time, she says. People have ears here. There are some things we can't discuss. But. Some other time! I drop it. The tunnel now widens into a considerable room, well lit, crowded. A marketplace? Shops, booths, gammas everywhere. We are stared at. There are numerous rejects in the room, each a little more horrid than the last. It is hard to see how creatures so maimed and mismade can survive. Do they ever go to the surface? Never. They might be seen by humans. In Gamma Town? They take no chances. They'd all be obliterated if. In the crush of the crowded room the androids jostle and shove, bicker, snap. Somehow they maintain an area of open space around the intrusive alphas, but not a very .great one. Two knifeduels are going on; no one pays attention. There is much public lasciviousness. The smell of the place is rank and foul. A wild-eyed girl rushes up to me and whispers, Krug bless! Krug bless! She pushes something into my hand and runs off. A gift. A small cool cube with beveled edges, like the toy at the New Orleans shunt room. Does it send me messages? Yes. I see words forming and flowing and vanishing in its milky core;    plit! plit! plit! plit! plack!  krug's  All nonsense. Lilith, can you figure this stuff? Some of it. The gammas have their own slang, you know. But look here, where it says -- purple skin slaps the cube from our hands. It skitters along the floor. He dives for it in a knot of feet. There is a general uproar. People tangle and twine. The thief breaks from the mass and speeds away into a corridor. The gammas still wrestle confusedly. A girl rises to the top of the heap; she has lost her few scraps of clothing in the melee and there are bloody gouges on her breasts and thighs. In her hand she holds the cube. I recognize her as the girl who gave it to me in the first place. Now she makes a demonic face at me, baring her teeth. She brandishes the cube and clamps it between her legs. A burly reject pounces on her and hauls her away; he has only one arm but it is as thick as a tree. Grig! she screams. Prot! Gliss! They vanish. The crowd is muttering in an ugly way. I picture them turning on us, ripping at our clothes, revealing the hairy human body beneath my false alpha costume. The social distances may not protect us then. Come, I say to Lilith. I think I've had enough. Wait. She turns to the gammas. She holds up her hands, palms facing, about half a meter apart, as though indicating the length of a fish she has caught. Then she wriggles in a peculiar sinuous maneuver, twisting her body so she describes a kind of spiraling curve. The gesture quiets the crowd instantly. The gammas step aside, heads bowed humbly, as we go past. All is well. Enough, I tell Lilith. It's getting late. How long have we been here, anyway? We can go now. We flee through a maze of interlocking passages. Gammas of a thousand hideous shapes pass us. We see slobies floating in their slow raptures. Rejects. Stackers and solidifiers, for all I can tell. Sounds, smells, colors, textures -- I am dazzled and dazed. Voices in the darkness. Songs. The freedom day is coming The freedom day is coming Smip the slobies, grap the gliss -- And ride up to freedom! Steps. Upward. Cold winds descending. Breathless, we race to the top and find ourselves in the winding cobbled streets of Gamma Town again, probably only a few meters from the place where we went down. It seems to me that the office of Alpha Poseidon Musketeer must be just around the corner. Night has come. The lights of Gamma Town crackle and flutter. Lilith wants to take me to a tavern. I refuse. Home. Home. Enough. My mind is stained by the sights of the android world. She yields; we hurry out. How far must we walk before we reach a transmat? We leap. Her flat seems so warm and bright to me now. We rid outselves of our clothes. Under the doppler I cleanse myself of my red color and my thermal spray. Was it interesting? Overpowering, I say. And there's so much you have to explain, Lilith. Images swim in my brain. I burn. I sizzle. or course you won't tell anyone I took you, she says. I could get into awful trouble. Of course. Strictly confidential. Come close. Alpha Leaper. Manuel. Manuel. Come close. First tell me what it means when they say Krug be -- Later. I'm cold. Warm me, Manuel. I fold her in my arms. The heavy mounds of her breasts inflame me. I cover her mouth with mine. I thrust my tongue between her lips. We sink down together to the floor. I touch her. She is hot and moist and ready. Our dark journey has heated her lusts as well as mine. Without hesitation I spear her. She trembles. She clasps me. When I close my eyes I see slobies and rejects and stackers. Lilith. Lilith. Lilith. Lilith I love you I love you I love you Lilith Lilith Lilith The great vat bubbles. The moist crimson creatures crawl forth. Laughter. Lightning. O shallow is thy bowl, filthy grig! My flesh crashes, against hers. Plit! Plit! Plit! Plit! Plack! With humiliating swiftness the overwrought little boys and girls into his beloved's sterile womb. January #, #. The tower is at # meters and rising more swiftly than ever. Standing at the base, one cannot easily see the summit; it is lost against the white glare of the winter sky. At this time of year there are only a few hours of daylight at the site and during those hours the sun's rays ride fiery tracks down the length of the shimmering shaft. Much of the interior structure now is complete throughout the building's lower half. Three of the high-capacity communications equipment modules have been hoisted into place: somber black metal containers fifty meters high, within which are the huge kickover units that will amplify the messages as they climb the tower. Viewed from afar, these modulesseem to be giant seeds ripening in a great glossy transparent pod. The accident rate continues to be high. Mortality levels are causing concern. The losses among gammas have been particularly severe. Yet morale is said to be good. The androids are cheerful and appear to be aware that they are playing an essential role in one of humanity's most ambitious projects. If their attitude remains so positive the tower will be finished well ahead of schedule. A fter showing them the state of progress at the tower Krug took his guests that day to dine at the Nemo Club, where a suite was perpetually held in readiness for him. The club was one of Krug's minor enterprises; he had built it a dozen years back and for some time it had been Earth's most fashionable gathering place, with reservations required at least six months in advance. Situated ten thousand meters under the western Pacific in the Challenger Deep, it consisted of fifteen pressurized bubbles through whose walls, fashioned of the same sturdy glass from which the tower was being constructed, it was possible to view the strange inhabitants of the dark abyss. Krug's companions were Senator Henry Fearon and his brother Lou, the lawyer, of Fearon  Doheny; Franz Giudice of European Transmat; Leon Spaulding; and Mordecai Salah al-Din, the Speaker of Congress. To reach the Nemo Club they had journeyed by transmat to the island of Yap in the Caroline group of Micronesia, where they boarded an immersion module of the kind used for the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. The density of the medium made transmat travel impossible under water. The pressures of the ocean's depths meant little to the immersion rnodule, however, and at a calm and steady speed of seven hundred and fifty meters a minute it sank to the Pacific floor and entered the Nemo Club's transit hatch. Floodlights bathed the abyss. The dwellers of the deep paid no heed to the illumination and came quite close to the club's glass walls: fragile, flimsy, unmuscular fishes, loose and flabby of body, their tissues pervaded by water under a compression of ten or twelve tons per square centimeter. Many of them were luminescent; cold pale glows glistened from photophores along their sides or between their eyes or on fleshy dangling lanterns jutting from their foreheads. The wavelength of the club's floodlights had been carefully chosen in order not to interfere with the luminescence of the fishes and their little sparkling beacons were plainly visible even in the brightness. Justin Maledetto, the architect of the tower, had also designed the club and Maledetto was clever in such details. Up to the walls the bizarre little monsters came, black and brown and scarlet and violet in hue. Many of them had jaws that unhinged, so that their mouths could gape down to their chests, ready to swallow enemies two or three times their own size. In the random encounters of the abyss pygmies devoured giants. Diners at the club were treated to visions of miniature gargoyles and horrors, sinister in their radiance, brandishing their savage teeth within their vast mouths, trailing strange appendages and protrusions, bearing eyes that bulged like globes -- or eyes on stalked tubes or no eyes at all. One did not need to travel to distant worlds to behold bizarre beasts -- the nightmare creatures were here, on man's own planet, and one had only to look. Huge spines, curved teeth so long that mouths could never close, branching stems rising from snouts, things that were all jaws and no body, things that were all tail and no head, anglers with twitching rods that danced about, giving off yellow or blue or green pulsations, grotesqueries of a thousand kinds -- and no fish as much as half a meter long. The show was extraordinary and altogether unique. Krug ordered a simple meal astonishing vigor. "We'd better krill cocktail, algae soup, steak, watch that waiter. With two memAustralian claret. He was no gourbers of Congress at the table, he's met. The club offered every sort likely to slip propaganda into our of delicacy but Krug never took dishes, and we'll all walk away advantage of its bounty. His comconverted." cheerfully they called for Swedish is a threat?" Lou Fearon asked, oysters, benthic crabs, unborn "You know, I got a good dose of squid, contrefilets of veal, snail their Siegfried Fileclerk while I mousse, breast of oryx, shirred was handling the business of the euphorbia buds, manta tips, baked alpha girl killed at the tower." He cycad hearts and more, all washed nodded toward Spaulding, who down by the world's finest golden scowled. "I got the impression at their prowess with the menu bunch are completely ineffectual," cubes. All waiters here were althe attorney said, phas; it was unusual to employ "A minority movement," said alphas in what was essentially meSenator Fearon. "Not even comnial personal service -- but this was manding the support of the bulk an unusual place and none of the of androids." staff at the Nemo Club appeared normally performed by betas or iJThe ectogene said, "Thor even gammas. Watchman had some stinging Yet the waiters could not have words for Fileclerk and his party, been entirely content with their Watchman doesn't seem to feel ers had been served. Senator ever." Fearon said to Krug, "Did you "An unusually shrewd and capaboy's lapel?" "I was quite serious, though," "Are you serious?" Giudice declared. "You can laugh are needed." its aims are genuinely revolutionKrug glanced at Spaulding, ary and that as it gains backing "When we leave, speak to the capit will -- " tain about that. I don't want any Krug gestured for silence, politics here." Their alpha waiter had returned, "Fspecially revolutionary polibearing a fresh bottle of wine. The tics," said Franz Giudice, and men at the table sat tensely while laughed. The transmat executive, the alpha poured. He went out, long and angular, was noted for closing the hatch tightly behind his bland ironies. Though well past him. eighty, he had adopted the styles Mordecai Salah al-Din, the of dress of men half his age, mirSpeaker of Congress, said gently,  # granted three audiences to the party's leaders. And I must say that they're a sincere and orderly group, worth taking seriously. I also want to say, though I wouldn't care to be quoted, that I'm sympathetic to some of their goals." "Would you explain that?" Spaulding said, his voice crisp. "Surely. I feel that the inclusion of a delegation of alphas in Congress is desirable and probably will come about within the next decade. I feel that the selling of alphas without their consent is improper and ought to be made illegal. I think that'll happen in fifteen to twenty years. I believe that we'll be extending full civil rights to alphas before 'fifty, to betas by the end of this century and to gammas not long afterward." "A revolutionary!" cried Franz Giudice in wonder. "The Speaker is a revolutionary!" "A visionary, rather," said Senator Fearon. "A man of vaulting insight and splendid compassion. As always, somewhat ahead of his time." Spaulding shook his head. "Alphas in Congress, maybe, yes. As a safety valve, to keep them from getting out of control. Toss them a bone, you know? But the rest of it? No. No. Never. Mr. Salah al-Din, we should not forget that androids are mere thingsi product of chemogenetic research, created in a factory, manufactured by Krug Enterprises to serve mankind -- " "Softly," Krug murmured. "You're getting excited." Lou Fearon said, "Possibly the Speaker's right, Leon. Regardless of how they came into existence, they're more human than you're ually relax all arbitrary barriers of law and custom, as the Witherer ideals gradually take over -- as I think you'll agree is quite subtly happening already -- I expect that we'll go easier on the androids. At least on the alphas. We don't need to keep them under." "What do you say, Simeon?" Franz Giudice demanded of Krug. "After all, they're your babies. When you decided to produce the first androids, did you ever imagine that they'd be calling for the rights of citizenship or did you think of them as -- " "Leon put it in the right words," Krug said. "How was it? Things. Factory-made things. I was building a better kind of robot. I wasn't building men." "The borderline between man and android is so vague," Senator Fearon said. "Since the androids are genetically identical to us, the fact that they're synthetic -- " Krug said, "In one of my plants I can make you the Mona Lisa in perfect replica, so that it takes six months laboratory tests to prove it isn't the original. Yes? And so? Is it the original? The original still came out of Leonardo's studio. The replica came out of Krug's original. I wouldn't give a brass thumb for the replica." "Yet you recognize that Thor Watchman, for example, is an unusually capable and gifted person," said Lou Fearon, "and you give him wide responsibilities. I've heard it said that you trust him more than any man in your organization. Yet you wouldn't allow Thor to vote? You wouldn't give Thor a chance to protest if you decided to make him a waiter here? You agree that the law should give you the right to destroy Thor if the whim takes you?" "I made Thor," Krug replied heavily. "He's the finest machine I have. I love and admire him the way I love and admire any superb machine. But I own Thor. Thor isn't a man -- he's just a clever imitation of a man, a flawless imitation -- and if I want to be so wasteful and foolish as to destroy Thor, why. I'll destroy him." Krug's hand began to tremble. He glared the tremor intensified and a full glass of wine spilled onto the table. Stonily Krug said, "Destroy him. I never had anything else in mind when I brought out the androids. Servants. Tools of man. Cunning machines." Sensors in the Nemo Club's serof the wine. The waiter entered and efficiently mopped it up. Outside the window, a cluster of giant translucent crustaceans wheeled and danced. When the alpha was gone again Senator Fearon said to Krug, "I didn't realize you felt this strongly about android equality. You've never spoken out." "I've never been asked." "Would you testify against the the matter were to come before Congress?" Krug shrugged. "I don't know. tics. I'm a manufacturer. Businessman. Entrepreneur, you know? Why look for controversies?" "If androids were granted civil rights," said Leon Spaulding, "it might have repercussions for Krug Enterprises. What I mean is -- if you're manufacturing actual human beings you come under the scope of the population control laws, which -- " "Enough," Krug said. "It won't happen. I make the androids. I know them. There's a little group of malcontents, yes. Too intelligent for their own good. They think it's black slavery all over again. But it isn't. It isn't. The others know that. They're content. Thor Watchman is content. Why They oppose it -- and why? Because they think it's idiocy. They're treated well as is. This talk of selling alphas against their all just theory. No one sells a good alpha and nobody kills androids for fun, any more than people wreck their own houses for fun. No need for android rights, eh? The alphas realize it. The betas aren't worried. The gammas can't possibly care. So you see? Gentlemen, it makes good table talk, no My respects, Mr. Speaker -- your sweetness of soul leads you astray. You will have no alphas in your Congress." Krug's lengthy speech had left him thirsty. He reached for his wine. Again the tension in his muscles betrayed him; again he knocked the glass over -- again a watchful alpha, alerted by hidden eyes, rushed in to tidy the mess. Beyond the thick glass wall of the Nemo Club a dark red fish a meter in length, with a gigantic toothy satchel of a mouth and a narrow spiny tail, began to move through the school of crustaceans, gulping them down in a terrible hunger. XV January #. #. The tower is #I meters high. In celebration, Krug has decreed a holiday tomorrow for all workers. It is now estimated that the structure will reach its full height before the middle of March. L ilith meson said, "I had a visitor here yesterday morning, Thor." "Manuel Krug?" "No. Siegfried Fileclerk." Watchman uncoiled himself from Lilith's all-engulfing tesseractdivan. "Fileclerk? Here? Why?" Lilith laughed. "Are you so human these days that you feel jealously, Thor?" "That doesn't amuse me. How did it happen that he came to you?" "He was at the office," Lilith said. "You know, he's with Property Protection of Buenos Aires. He came in to discuss some new actuarial pivot clause in their contract. Afterward he asked me if he could see me home. All right. I invited him in. He seemed harmless." "And?" "He tried to recruit me for "Is that all?" "No," Lilith said. "He wants me to recruit you, too." Watchman coughed. "A very slender chance of that." "He's immensely earnest, Thor. Devoted to the cause of equality and liberation, et cetera, et cetera. Two minutes after we walked in he began burying me under arguments for political action. I told him I was religious. He said that didn't matter, that I could go right on praying for the miraculous intervention of Krug -- but meanwhile would I please sign this petition? No, I said. I never sign things. He gave me a stack of line. They're in the kitchen -- if you're interested. He was here more than an hour." Lilith flashed a dazzling grin. "I didn't sign his petition." "Why did he go after you, though?" Watchman asked. "Does he plan to approach every alpha in the world, one by one, looking for support?" "I told you. He wants you to sign up. He knows I'm close to you and he thinks that if he can persuade me I'll be able to persuade you. He said so in that many words. And once you're in his camp, everyone else will follow." Lilith drew herself up stiffly. "Tf Alpha Watchman comes over to our side. Alpha Meson, he'll bring scores of influential alphas with him. It could be the turning point of our entire movement. Alpha Watchman may hold the future of every android in his grasp.' How do you feel about that. Alpha Watchman?" "Deeply moved, Alpha Meson. I can't begin to describe the awe that stirs in me at the idea. How did you manage to get rid of him?" "By trying to seduce him." "What?" "Am I being bitchy, Thor? I won't talk about it if you'd rather I didn't." "I was not programed to feel jealousy," Watchman said stolidly. "Teasing will get you nowhere with me. And I'm not in a mood to play stupid games." She blinked. "Very well. I'm sorry I said anything." "Go on. You tried to seduce him. You didn't succeed?" "No," Lilith said. "It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I said to myself, Fileclerk is so stuffy that this will probably drive him away screaming. And if he takes the bait instead -- well, it might be fun. So I stripped and then I -- what's the idiom, the old word? I began to make overtures to him. To make overtures. Come on, I said, let's curl up together, Siggie. Siggie. I put my hands on him. I was very lewd. I jiggled and wiggled. I worked very hard, Thor, even harder than I had to work to seduce you. He wasn't having any. He asked me to stop." "Of course," Watchman said. "It's as I was trying to explain. Male alphas don't really have much interest in sex. It's irrelevant to their life-pattern." "Don't be so smug about that. Fileclerk wanted me. He was pale. He was shaking." "Then why didn't he go to bed with you? Afraid to compromise himself politically?" "No," Lilith said. "It's because he's still in mourning." "Mourning." "For his wife. Cassandra Nuadvocating android marriage. He was married to Alpha Nucleus three years ago. He's observing a six-month mourning period, during which he doesn't intend to let wanton young alphas lure him into their arms. He explained it to me and then he left fast. As if he were afraid he might give in if he stayed." "His wife," Watchman said. about android marriage to its petition before Congress. Fileclerk also said that if you and I wanted to get married, Thor, he'd be able to arrange it the day we join the party." ly. "He talks like a child. What good is marriage? Do we have children who need legally constituted homes? If I wanted to live with you I'd live with you, Lilith. Or you with me. Should someone say words over us first? Give us a piece of paper?" "It's the idea, Thor. Of a permanent union between man and woman, the way it is among humans. It's quite touching. He really loved her, Thor." "I'm sure he did. I saw him weeping when Spaulding killed her. But did he love her more because they were married? If marriage is so wonderful why is Manuel Krug here every week? Shouldn't he be home having a permanent union with Mrs. Krug?" "There are good marriages and bad marriages," Lilith said. "And who you sleep with isn't necessarily what determines how good your marriage is. In any case, Fileclerk's marriage was a good one and I don't see how it could hurt us to adopt the custom -- if we truly believe in our equality." "All right," Watchman snapped. "Do you want to marry me?" "I was speaking in general terms about adopting the custom." "I'm speaking in particular terms. We don't have to join the of Alpha Constructor and Alpha Dispatcher and we'll write marriage ceremonies into the communion -- and we'll get married at the chapel tonight. All right?" "Be serious, Thor." "I am." "You're angry and you don't know what you're saying. You told me two minutes ago that you think marriage among androids write it into the communion. You can't mean it, Thor." "You don't want to marry me? Don't worry -- I wouldn't interfere with your affair with Manuel. I'm not programed for possessiveness either. But we could live together, we could -- " "Stop it, Thor." "Why?" "Whatever exists between us can exist without a marriage. You know that. I know that. I wasn't looking for a proposal. I was just trying to tell you something about Siegfried Fileclerk, about the nature of his emotions, the complexity of his feelings toward Alpha Nucleus as well as the position "Enough. Enough." Watchman put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. "End of conversation. I'm fascinated that you couldn't seduce Siggie Fileclerk going in for marrying -- and that's the end. Yes?" "You're in foul spirits today, Thor." "I am." "Why? Can I do anything to help?" "Leon Spaulding told me something today, Lilith. He says that gets its turn to address Congress, Krug is going to release a statement denouncing the entire android equality movement and insisting that he never would have created us in the first place if he had known we'd demand civil rights." Lilith gasped. Tears in her eyes, she made a Krug-preserve-us sign four times in succession. "It isn't possible," she whispered. "Spaulding said that Krug told him this about a week ago, at the Nemo Club, in the presence of Speaker Salah al-Din, Senator Fearon, and a couple of other people. You realize that Leon was merely making conversation when he passed the remark along to me, of course. A friendly chat between ectogene and android. He knows amused. The bastard!" "Can it be true?" "Of course it can. Krug's never made any sort of statement on "I'll do it," Lilith said. "Yes." what he thinks the android's role ought to be. I've got no idea of his real position myself. I've always assumed he was sympathetic -- but I might have been only projecting my own hopes. The question isn't can it be true -- but is it true." "Do you dare ask him?" "I don't dare," Thor said. "I believe that this entire story originated inside Leon Spaulding's malicious mind, that Krug doesn't plan to break his no-politics rule and that if he ever did make a statement, Krug would make the statement that we all hope and pray for. But it frightens me to think that I'm wrong. I'm terrified, Lilith. An anti-equality statement from Krug would undermine every belief we have. Dump us into outer darkness. You see what I've been living with all day?" "Should you rely just on what Spaulding said? Can't you check with Senator Fearon or the Speaker? Find out what was really said?" "Ask them for confidential details of Krug's table talk, you mean? They'd report me to Krug right away." "Then what will you do?" "Force Krug's hand," Watchman said. "I want you to take Manuel to a chapel." "How soon?" "As soon as you can. Don't conceal a thing from him. Let him understand everything. Work on his conscience. Then send him to his father -- before Krug makes any statements to Congress. If Krug is going to make a statement." looked down, moving his feet idly over the patterned floor. There was a ticking in his brain and a cottony fullness in his throat. He hated the maneuvers he found himself enmeshed in now, these ploys and counterploys, this staking of so much on the weak will of Manuel Krug, this assumption that Krug -- Krug! -- could be manipulated by simple one-to-one intrigues. All this seemed to negate true faith. It was a cynical kind of haggling with destiny, which left Watchman wondering how true his faith had ever been. Was it all a faqade, then, the kneeling in chapel, the muttering of codon triplets, the immersion in Krugness, the yielding, the until the moment came to seize control of events? Watchman rejected the thought. But that left him with nothing. He wished he had never begun this. He longed to be back at the tower, jacked into the computer, buoyantly riding the data tide. Is this what being human is like? These decisions, these doubts, these fears? Why not stay android, then? Accept the divine plan. Serve -- and desire no more. Sep away from these conspiracies, these knotted emotions, these webs of passion. He found himself envying the gammas, who aspired to nothing. But he could not be a gamma. Krug had given him this mind. Krug had created him to doubt and suffer. Blessed be the Will of Krug! Rising, Watchman walked slowly across the room and, to escape himself, snapped on the holovision. The image of Krug's tower blossomed beautiful, flashing in the January light. A hovercamera panned slowly along the entire length of it while the commentator spoke of the attainment of the thousandmeter level and compared the tower favorably to the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes. A magnificent achievement, opening the pathway toward communication with other races on distant stars. A thing of beauty in its own right, shimmering and sleek. Up and down the glass walls the camera leaped. The eye peered into the shaft from the summit. Grinning gammas waved back. Watchman caught a glimpse of himself, enmeshed in problems, unaware that he was being holovised. And there was Krug, aglow with pride, pointing out the tower's features to a crowd of Senators and industrialists. The chill of the tundra seemed to leak from the screen. The camera picked up the refrigeration tapes embedded in the permafrost; mist was rising from them. Unless the ground is kept frozen, the commentator explained, the stability of the tower would be uncertain. An unparalleled feat of environmental engineering. Miraculous. A monument to man's vision and determination. Yes. Yes. Phenomenal. With sudden ferocity Watchman blanked the screen. The shining tower vanished like an interrupted dream. He stood near the wall, his back to Lilith, trying to comprehend how it had happened that life had become so complex for him. He had wanted to be human. Yes. Had he not prayed to Krug that he and all his kind be granted the privileges of the Womb-born? Yes. Yes. And with the privileges went the responsibilities. Yes. And with the responsibilities went the turmoil. Rivalry. Sex. Love. Scheming. Perhaps. Watchman thought, I wasn't ready for all this. Perhaps I should have remained a decent hardworking alpha instead of rising up to challenge the Will of Krug. Perhaps. Perhaps. He went -- without success. You are more human now than you really wished to be. Alpha Watchman. He became aware of Lilith close behind him. The tips of her breasts grazed his back as she drew closer he felt the heavy globes flattening and straining against him. "Poor Thor," she myrmured. "So tense. So worried. Do you want to make love?" Could he refuse her? He pretended enthusiasm. He embraced her. Body slid tightly against body. She opened to him and he entered her. He was more skillful this time. But still it remained an empty thing for him, a butting of flesh, an alien ecstasy. He found no pleasure in it for himself, though there was indirect delight in seeing Lilith throb and moan and arch her back as she took pleasure from him.  am not really human enough, despite everything -- and she is much too human... Yes. Yes. He moved more swiftly. Now he felt a tickle of sensation -- Krug had designed His people well and all the proper neural connections were there, damped though they might sometimes be by self-imposed conditioning. As the climax neared Watchman experienced some instants of genuine passion; he snorted, he clutched Lilith's buttocks with steely fingers, he bucked and thrust. Then came the spurt of completion and immediately afterward came, as before, the sadness, the awareness of hollowness. It seemed to him that he stood in a vast subterranean tomb, hundreds of meters long and many meters wide, with nothing in view but pinches of dust and fragments of dried wreaths. He forced himself to remain in Lilith's embrace, though he wanted nothing more than to roll away and be alone. He opened his eyes. She was weeping. She was smiling. She was flushed and sweat-sticky and aglow. "I love you," she said softly. Watchman hesitated. A response was required here. His silence, expanding into the succeeding seconds, threatened to choke the universe. How could he not reply? It was inhuman to remain silent. He touched her warm flesh. He felt untuned, unstrung. Finally he said, quickly, getting it over with, "I love you, Lilith." You may ask, Who was the Maker of the Children of the Womb? Who, indeed, was the Maker of Krug? And I say to you that these are wise questions, that these questions are properly asked. For you must understand that in the world there are cycles of all things, a cycle of the Womb and a cycle of the Vat, and the one precedes the other, so that it was necessary first for there to be the Womb-born in order that there might be the Vat-born. And Krug the man was of the Womb-born, from whom sprang the Children of the Vai. Yet Krug the man is merely one aspect of Krug the Creator, whose existence precedes all things and whose Will has shaped all things, and who brought forth the Children of the Womb as forerunners of the Children of the Vat. Therefore must you distinguish between the man Krug, who is mortal and was himself born of the Womb, and the Maker Krug, whose Plan all things follow; for if it was Krug the man who brought forth the Children of the Vat, nevertheless he did so by the design of Krug the Maker, from whom all blessings flow, to whom all praise be given. to tell me. Why those gammas were using my father's name. The peace of Krug. Go with Krug. Krug be with you. You never said. I will. When? You'll have to dress up as an alpha again. It isn't something I can tell as easily as I can show. Do we have to go back to Gamma Town? No, she said, not this time. We can drop in on the betas this time. I wouldn't take you to the Valhallavagen chapel because -- Where? Valhallavagen chapel. Near here. It's where most of the local alphas worship. You couldn't fool them, Manuel. But you could fool betas, I think. If you kept quiet and looked dignified. A chapel. Worship. So it's a religion? Yes. What's it called? Krugolatry? It doesn't have a name. We talk of it just as the communion. It's very important to us, Manuel. I think it's the most important thing in our lives. Do you want to describe -- Later. Take off your clothes and I'll spray your skin. We can go right now. Will it take long? An hour, she said. You'll be back home on time, don't worry. If that's what's worrying you. I have to be fair to Clissa, I said. She gives me freedom. I don't want to abuse it. All right. All right. I took off my clothes. Once again Lilith disguised me as Alpha Leviticus Leaper. She had kept the clothes around from the other time; it surprised me that she hadn't given them back to Thor Watchman. As though she knew we'd be playing this masquerade again. She said. Before we go -- there are some things you have to know. The first is that it's absolutely forbidden for any human to enter a chapel. It's like non-Moslems going to Mecca. For all I know you may be the first Womb-born who ever went in. The first what? Womb-born. You're a Child of the Womb. We're Children of the Vat. Yes? Oh. Oh. If it's a sacrilege to smuggle me into a chapel why are you doing it? Don't you take the rules seriously? Very seriously. Then why? Because I feel I can make an exception for you, Manuel. You're different. I told you that once, remember? You don't put androids in some special sub-class of humanity. I think that inwardly you've been on our side all along, even without being conscious of it. And so it wouldn't be sacrilege to let you understand our religion a little. Well, maybe. And also you're Krug's son. What does that have to do with it? You'll see, she said. I was flattered. Fascinated. Excited. A little frightened. Am I really that simpatico to android aspirations? Can I be trusted? Why is she breaking the commandment? What is she trying to get from me? Unworthy thought. She is doing it because she loves me. Her world. She said. Anyway, keep in mind that it would be very serious if you were found out. Therefore pretend that you belong in there, and don't act nervous or uncertain of yourself. You were fine in Gamma Town. Be that way here. But aren't there certain rites I ought to be familiar with? Genuflections or something? I'm coming to that, Lilith said. You'll need a couple of gestures. One of them you already know. Like this. Left hand to crotch, breast, forehead, one two three. She said. That's the sign of Krug-be-praised. It's an act of homage. You make the sign when you first enter the chapel and when you start to join the prayer, silently or aloud. It's also good to make the sign whenever the name of Krug is mentioned. In fact, the Krug-be-praised sign is appropriate in almost any part of the service or whenever two androids of the communion meet outside a chapel. Let's see you make it. Go on. One two three. Krug be praised. Faster. One-two-three. One-two-three. Good. Good. Now, here's another important sign. Its meaning is Krug-preserve-us and it's specifically a prayer used in time of tension or doubt. Like saying God help us. You'll use it whenever the text of the service calls for Krug to have mercy on us, Krug to aid us in any way. Whenever we're imploring Krug. Krug is really your god, I said, wondering. ThisJs the sign. She showed me how to make it. Cup one hand over each breast -- then turn the palms outward. An act of contrition: see my soul, Krug! My heart is bare to you. She made the sign several times, and I followed her. One more, Lilith said. The sign of submission to the Will of Krug. You'll make it only once, when you first get into line of sight with the altar. Like this. Drop to one knee and reach your arms forward, palms turned up. Does it matter which knee? Either one. Do it. I made the sign of submission to the Will of Krug. I was glad to learn it. Somehow I felt that I'd been submitting to the Will of Krug all my life without even knowing it. Lilith said, Let's make sure you have it all clear, now. When you enter the chapel, what? One-two-three. Krug-be-praised. Good. Then? When I can see the altar, I do the submission to the Will. Down on one knee, hands out, palms up. Yes. And? When the favors are asked of Krug. I do Krug-preserve-us. Hands to breasts, turn hands out. I also do Krug-be-praised from time to time when the name of Krug is mentioned. Fine. Fine. You won't have any trouble, Manuel. There's another gesture I saw you make in Gamma Town, I said. Show me. palms facing each other about half a meter apart, and wiggled my hips and flexed my knees, making a kind of spiral. You did it in Gamma Town, I said, when the mob was getting a little wild. Lilith laughed. It's called the Blessing of the Vat, she said. It's a sign of peace and a sign of departure. We do it over a dead person in the final prayer, and we do it when we're saying goodbye to one another in a tense situation. It's one of the holiest signs. And you didn't do it very well. You see, it's based on the double helix of the nucleic acid molecule genetics, yes? -- the way the molecules are coiled. We try to duplicate it with our bodies. This way. She did it. I imitated. She laughed. I said, I'm sorry. My body just doesn't bend that way. It takes practice. You won't have to do it, though. Stick with Krug-be-praised and Krug-preserve-us and you'll be fine. Let's go now. She took me to a shabby part of town in what I think once was a commercial section. It didn't have the nightmare gaudiness of Gamma Town or the stately, wellworn look of the part where the alphas live. Just shabby. Chapel's over there, she said. I saw a storefront, windows opaqued. Couple of betas standing out front, doing nothing particular. We started to cross the street. I got shaky. What if they find me out? What will they do? To me? To Lilith? I am Alpha Leviticus Leaper. The betas stepped aside, making Krug-be-praised as we came up to them. Eyes lowered, air of respect. The social distances. Lilith would have had a much harder time if I didn't have an alpha's long lean build. My confidence rose. I even made Krug-be-praised at one of the betas. We entered the chapel. A large circular room. No seats. Carpet of thick soft pseudolife, obviously much knelt upon in its time. Subdued lighting. I remembered to make Krug-be-praised as I walked in. One-two-three. A little vestibule. Two steps beyond it I got my first view of the altar. Lilith down on one knee, submission to the Will. I almost didn't need to kneel. I almost fell, amazed. The altar; a large square mass of what looked like living flesh, sitting in an ornate plastic tub. Purple fluid in the tub, swirling around and occasionally over this block of pink meat, which is at least a meter high and maybe three meters by two long, wide. Behind the altar: my father in hologram. A perfect likeness. Fullsize replica, looking at us face-on, stern expression, eyes fiery, lips clarnped. Not exactly a god of love. Strong. Man of steel. Because it's a hologram, the eyes follow you; wherever you are in the chapel you're under the gaze of Krug. I drop down. I lift the hands. Palms up. Submission to the Will of Krug! It stuns me. Even though I knew before, I still am stunned. Is it like this all over the world, I ask? Androids salaaming to my father? Barely audible whisper. Yes, she says. Yes. We pay homage. Krug be praised. This man whom I have known all my life. This builder of towers, this inventor of androids. A god? I almost laugh. Am I Son of God? I don't fit the role. Obviously no one worships me here. I am an afterthought; I am outside theology. We get to our feet. With a tiny gesture of her head Lilith leads me to a place in the back of the chapel and we kneel. In the darkness I feel comforted. There are perhaps ten, twelve androids in the chapel, all betas except for one male alpha who kneels right before the altar, back to us. I feel less conspicuous with the alpha there. A few more betas come in, making the appropriate gestures. No one pays any attention to us. The social distances. Everybody seems deep in private prayer. Is this the service, Lilith? Not yet. We're a little early. You'll see. The eyes of Krug drill into me. He almost does look godlike up there. I glare back at him. What would he say if he knew? He'd laugh. He'd pound his desk. He'd belch with joy. Krug the god! Jehovah Krug! Simeon Allah! By Christ, that's a good one! Why in hell shouldn't they worship me? I made them, no? As my eyes grow accustomed to the dimness I examine the pattern on the wall more carefully. It is not, as I first suspected, a purely abstract ornamental design. No -- I now see the letters of the alphabet repeated over and over and over, covering every centimeter of wall space. Not all the letters. I run from line to line and see only four letters in various combinations, like: So on and so on. What is it, Lilith? The design. The genetic code, she says. The A h. yes. Suddenly I remember in Gamma Town, the girl slobie addict calling out letters I can see them on the wall now. A prayer? The sacred language. Like Latin was for Catholics. I see. But I don't really see. I just accept. I say, And what is the altar made of? Flesh. Synthetic flesh. Live? Of course. Straight from the vat, like me or you. Pardon, not like you. Like me. Just a lump of live android flesh. What keeps it alive? It's got no organs or anything. It gets nutrients from the tank. And injections of something from underneath. But it lives. It grows. It has to be trimmed from time to time. It symbolizes our arigin. Not yours. Ours. There's one in every chapel. Smuggled out of the factory. Like the rejects. Like the rejects, yes. And I thought security arrangements were so tight at the android plants, I say. Lilith winks at me. I begin to feel like a member of the conspiracy. Three androids now enter from the rear of the chapel. Two betas and an alpha, wearing brocaded stoles on which the letters of the genetic code are inscribed. They have a priestly look about them. The service is about to begin. As the three kneel by the altar, everyone else makes Krug-be-praised and then Krug-preserve-us. I do as they do. Are they priests? They're celebrants, Lilith says. We don't exactly have a priesthood. We have various castes that play different roles in different ceremonies, according to structure and texture of the ritual. The alpha's a Preserver. He enters a trance that places him in direct communion with Krug. The two betas are Projectors. They amplify his emotional state. At other times you might see Engulfers, Transcenders or Protectors officiating, with the help of Yielders or Sacrificers or Responders. Which caste are you? Responder. And Thor Watchman? Preserver. The alpha by the altar began to chant. Is the whole thing going to be in code? No. This is just to establish the texture. What's he saying? Two betas not far in front of us turn around to glare. Shushing us. They see we are alphas and bite their lips. Lilith whispers more faintly than before. He's saying, Krug brings us into the world and to Krug we return. Krug is our creator and our protector and our deliverer. Krug, we beseech Thee to lead us toward the light. I can't comprehend the code. The symbols don't match the sense. Which symbol is Krug? How does the grammar work? I can't ask Lilith that here. Others are turning to stare. Those noisy alphas back there. Don't they have any respect? The Projectors hum deep resonant chords. The Preserver continues to chant code. Lilith now begins to function as a Responder, echoing what is chanted. The lights dim and grow bright. The fluid over the altar bubbles more fiercely. The image of Krug seems to glow -- the eyes reach into my soul. Now I can understand about half the words of the service. Interspersed with the code, they are asking Krug to redeem the Children of the Vat, to give them freedom, to lift them to the level of the Children of the Womb. They sing about the day when Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb are one. With an infinity of Krug-preserveus gestures they beg the mercy of Krug. Krug! Krug! Krug! Krug! Everything here orbits around the idea of a merciful Krug! I start to see the picture. This is an equality movement. This is an android liberation front. Krug our master, lead us to our rightful place beside our brothers and sisters of the flesh. Krug bring redemption. Krug end our suffering. Praise be to Krug. Glory be to Krug. The service gains intensity. Everyone is singing, chanting, making signs, including several that Lilith never showed me. Lilith herself is wholly absorbed in prayer. I feel isolated, an infidel, an intruder, as I listen to them pray to their creator, my father, who is their god. For long spells the service is conducted entirely in the code language but familiar words keep bursting through. Krug descend and redeem us. Krug, give your blessing. Krug, end this time of testing. Krug, we need you. Krug Krug Krug Krug Krug. With each Krug I jump minutely, I twitch in the shpulderblades. I never suspected any of this. How did they keep it so secret? Krug the god. My father the god. And I am Krug too. If Krug dies, what will they worship? How can a god die? Do they preach the resurrection of Krug? Or is Krug on Earth only a transient manifestation of the true Krug on high? From some of the lines of the service, I get that idea. Now they are all singing at once, a booming unison: They are offering him the whole genetic code, line by line. I follow from a column on the wall. Suddenly I hear my own voice joining the chant: Lilith turns and smiles at me. Her face is flushed and bright, excited, exalted, almost a sexual rapture on it. She nods, encouraging me. I sing louder. On and on it goes, the pitch strange, no one hitting any note squarely yet everyone keeping together perfectly, as though androids tune themselves to different intervals on some different scale. I have little trouble adapting, though, and stay with them right to the end. We rise. We approach the altar. Standing shoulder to shoulder, Lilith to my left and some beta pressing against my right, we put our hands on that block of living flesh. It is warm and slippery; it quivers as we touch it. Vibrations pass through us. Krug, we chant, Krug, Krug, Krug, Krug. The service is over. Others remain, looking too exhausted by the experience to leave just yet. I feel that way myself, and I have hardly taken part. An intense religious communion. Religion is said to be dead, a quaint olden custom now lapsed into disuse, but no, not among these people. They believe in higher powers and the efficacy of prayer. They think Krug listens. Does Krug listen? Has Krug ever listened? I doubt it. But they think so. If he does not listen now, they say, he will listen. And will lift them up out of bondage. The opiate of the masses, what? But the alphas also believe. The elite. To Lilith I say. How long has this been happening, this religion? Since before I was born. Who invented it? It started here in Stockholm. A group of alphas. It spread rapidly. Now there are believers all over the world. Every android believes? don't. We ask for miracles and divine grace; they stand for direct political agitation. But we outnumber them. Most of us believe. More than half. Just about every gamma, most betas and many alphas. And you think that if you keep asking Krug to redeem you, he will? Lilith smiles. What else can we hope for? Have you ever approached Krug directly? Never. You see, we distinguish between Krug the man and Krug the Creator and we feel -- She shakes her head. Let's not talk in here. Someone might listen. We start to go out. Halfway to the door she halts, goes back, takes something from a box at the base of the altar. She hands it to me. It is a data cube. She turns it on and I read the words that appear: In the beginning there was Krug and He said, Let there be Vats, and there were Vats. And Krug looked upon the Vats and found them good. And Krug said. Let there be high-energy nucleotides in the Vats. And the nucleotides were poured and Krug mixed them until they were bonded one to another. And the nucleotides formed the great molecules and Krug said. Let there be the father and the mother both in the Vats and let the cells divide and let there be life brought forth upon the face of the Earth. And there was life, for there was Replication. And Krug presided over the Replication and touched the fluids with His own hands and gave them shape and essence. Let men come forth from the Vats, said Krug, and let women come forth and let them live and go among us and he sturdy and useful and we shall call them A ndroids. I thumb the cube. More of the same. Much more. An android bible. Well, why not? Fascinating. I tell Lilith. When was this written? They started it years ago. They still add sections now. About the nature of Krug and the relation of man to Krug. The relation of man to Krug. Beautiful. She says, Keep it if you find it interesting. It's for you. We leave the chapel. I hide the android bible under my clothes. It bulges. At Lilith's flat again. She said. Now you know. Our great secret. Our great hope. What exactly do you expect my father to do for you? Some day, she said, he will go before all the world and reveal his feelings about us. He will say. These androids have been treated unfairly and now it is time to make amends. Let us give them citizenship. Let us give them full rights. Let us stop treating them as articles of property. And because he is Krug, because he is the one who gave the world androids, people will listen. He alone will sway them all. And things will change for us. You really think this is going to happen? I hope and pray it will, she said. When? Soon? That's not for me to say. Five years -- twenty yearsforty yearsmaybe next month. Read the cube I gave you. It explains how we think Krug is just testing us, seeing how tough we are. Eventually the test will be over. I wish I shared your optimism, I said. But I'm afraid you may wait a long, long time. Why do you say that? My father isn't the humanitarian but he doesn't think much about other people and their problems. He's totally absorbed by his own projects. Yet basically he's an honorable person, Lilith said. I mean Krug the man, now. Not the divine figure we pray to. Just your father. Yes, he's honorable. Then he'll see the merits of our cause. Maybe. Maybe not. I took her in my arms. Lilith, I wish there were something I could do to help! There is. What? Speak to your father about us, she said. ' January #, #. The tower is at # meters. Even the androids are having some difficulty with the cold, thin air, now as they labor more than a kilometer above the surface of the tundra. At least six, dizzied, have fallen from the summit in the past ten days. Thor Watchman has decreed oxygen-infusion sprays for all who work on high but many of the gammas scorn the sprays as degrading and emasculating. Doubtless there will be more casualties as the final # meters of the tower are built in February and March. But how splendid the structure is! The last few hundred meters cannot possibly add anything to its majesty and elegance -- they can merely provide a terminal point for the wondrous thing that already exists. It tapers, it diminishes and its upper reaches are lost in a halo of fire far overhead. The busy technicians are making rapid progress installing the communications equipment. It is thought now that the accelerators will be in place by April. The proton track will be running in May. The preliminary testing of the tachyon generator can be done in June and by August, perhaps, the first messages can go forth. Perhaps the star-folk will reply. Perhaps not. It does not matter. The place of the tower in human history is assured. A t the beginning of the day, awakening beside snoring Quenelle in Uganda, Krug felt an enormous surge of energy, an upwelling of the vital force. He had rarely known such strength within himself. He took it as an omen: this was a day for activity, a day for the display of power in the pursuit of his various ends. He breakfasted and sped through the transmat to Denver. Morning in East .Africa was evening in Colorado -- the late shift was at work on the starship. But Alpha Romulus Fusion was there, the diligent foreman of the vehicleassembly center. He told Krug proudly that the starship had been transported from its underground construction hangar to the adjoining spacefield, where it was being readied for its first flight-tests. Krug and Alpha Fusion went to the spacefield. Under a dazzle of reflector plates the starship looked plain and almost insignificant, for there was nothing unusual about its size -- ordinary systemships were much larger -- and its pebbly surface failed to gleam in the artificial illumination. Yet it seemed unutterably beautiful to Krug, second only to the tower in loveliness. "What kind of flight-tests are planned?" he asked. "A three-stage program. Early in February," Romulus Fusion said, "we'll give it its first lift and place it in Earth orbit. This merely to see that the basic drive system is functioning correctly. Next will come the first velocity test, at the end of February. We'll put it under the full two-point-four-G acceleration and make a short voyage, probably to the orbit of Mars. If that goes according to plan, we'll stage a major velocity test in April, with a voyage lasting several weeks and covering several the orbit of Saturn, possibly to the orbit of Pluto. Which should give us a clear idea of whether the ship is ready to undertake an interstellar voyage. If it can sustain itself under constant acceleration while going to Pluto and back, it should be able to go anywhere." "How has the testing of the lifesuspension system been going?" "The testing's complete. The system is perfect." "And the crew?" "We have eight alphas in training -- all experienced pilots -- and sixteen betas. We'll use them all on the basis of performance." "Excellent," said Krug. Everything appeared to be in order at Denver. Still buoyant, he went to the tower, where he found Alpha Euclid Planner in charge of the night crew. The tower had gained eleven meters of height since Krug's last visit. There had been notable progress in the communications department. Krug's mood grew even more expansive. Bundling up in thermal wear, he rode to the top of the tower, something he had rarely done in recent weeks. The structures scattered around the base looked like toy houses and the workers like insects. His pleasure in the tower's serene beauty was marred somewhat when a beta was swept by a sudden gust from his scooprod and carried to his death; but Krug quickly put the incident from his mind. Such deaths were regrettable, yes -- yet every great endeavor had required sacrifices. He traveled next to the Vargas observatory in Antarctica. Here he spent several hours. Vargas had found no new data lately, but the place was irresistible to Krug. He relished its intricate instruments, its air of imminent discovery, and above all the direct contact it afforded him with the signals from still coming in, in the altered form that had first been detected several months earlier: #-#-#, #-#-#, #-#. Vargas by now had received the new message via radio at several frequencies and via optical transmission. Krug lingered, listening to the alien song on the observatory's apparatus and when he left its tones were pleeping ceaselessly in his mind. Continuing his circuit of inspection, Krug sped to Duluth, where he watched new androids coming from their containers. Nolan Bompensiero was not there -- the late shift at Duluth was staffed entirely by alpha supervisors -- but Krug was shown through the plant by one of his awed underlings. Production appeared to be higher than ever, although the alpha remarked that they were still lagging behind demand. Lastly Krug went to New York. In the silence of his office he worked through to dawn, dealing with corporate problems that had arisen on Callisto and Ganymede, in Peru and Martinique, on Luna and on Mars. The arriving day began with a glorious winter sunrise, Krug was tempted to rush back to the tower and watch it gleam with morning fire. But he remained. The staff was beginning to arrive -- Spaulding, Lilith Meson and the rest of his headquarters people. There were memoranda and telephone calls and conferences. Prom time to time Krug stole a glance at the holovision screen that he had lately had installed along his office's inner wall to provide a closed-circuit view of the tower under construction. The morning was not so glorious in the Arctic, it seemed; the sky was thick with ragged clouds, as if there might be snow later in the day. Krug saw Thor Watchman moving among a swarm of gammas, directing the lifting of some immense piece of communications equipment. He congratulated himself on the choice of Watchman to be the overseer of the tower work. Was there a finer alpha anywhere in the world? About # hours Spaulding's image appeared on the sodiumvapor projector. The ectogene said, "Your son just called from California. He says that he regrets having overslept and he'll be about an hour late for his appointment with you." "Manuel? Appointment?" "He was due here at #. He asked several days ago that you hold some time open for him." Krug had forgotten. That surprised him. It did not surprise him that Manuel would be late. He and Spaulding reshuffled his morning schedule, with some difficulty, to keep the hour from # to # open for the conference with Manuel. At # Manuel arrived. H e looked tense and strained and he was, Krug thought, dressed in an odd way, odd even for Manuel. Instead of his usual loose robe he wore the tight trousers and lacy shirt of an alpha. His long hair was drawn tightly back and fastened in the rear. The effect was not becoming. The openwork blouse revealed the unandroidlike shagginess of Manuel's torso, virtually the only physical feature he had inherited from his father. "Is this what the young men of fashion have taken up?" Krug asked. "Alpha clothes?" "A whim, father. Not a style -- not yet." Manuel forced a smile. "Though if I'm seen this way, I suppose, it could catch on." "I don't like it. What sense is there going around dressing like an android?" "I think it's attractive." "I can't say I do. How does Clissa feel about it?" "Father, I didn't make this appointment so we could debate my choice of costume." "Well, then?" Manuel put a data cube on Krug's desk. "I obtained this not long ago while visiting Stockholm. Would you examine it?" Krug picked the cube up, turned it over several times, and activated it. He read; And Krug presided over the Replication and touched the fluids with His own hands and gave them shape and essence. Let men come forth from the Vats, said Krug, and let women come forth and let them live and go among us and be sturdy and useful, and we shall call them Androids. A nd so it came to pass. And there were Androids, for Krug had created them in His own image and they walked upon the face of the Earth and did service for mankind. And for these things, praise be to Krug. Krug frowned. "What the hell is this? Some kind of novel? A poem?" "A bible, father." "What crazy religion?" "The android religion," said Manuel quietly. "I was given this cube in an android chapel in the beta section of Stockholm. Disguised as an alpha, I attended a service there. The androids have evolved quite a complex religious communion, in which you, father. are the deity. There's a life-size his image in these chapels? Did hologram of you above the altar." they mutter prayers to him? Manuel gestured. "That's the sign He said, "How did you get this of Krug-be-praised. And this -- " cube?" he made a different gesture -- "is "An android I know gave it to the sign of Krug-preserve us. They me." worship you, father." "If it's a secret religion?" "A joke. An aberration." "She thought I ought to know. "A worldwide movement." She thought I might be able to do "With how many members?" her people some good." "A majority of the android pop"She?" ulation." "She, yes. She took me to a Scowling, Krug said, "How sure chapel -- so I could see the services are you of that?" -- and as we were leaving she gave "There are chapels everywhere, me the cube and -- " There's one right at the tower site, "You sleep with this android?" hidden among the service domes. Krug demanded. This has been going on at least ten "What does that have to do years -- an underground religion with -- " kept secret from mankind, captur"If you're that friendly with her, ing the emotions of the android to you must be sleeping with her." an extent that wasn't easy for me "And if I am?" to believe. And there's the scrip"You should be ashamed of ture." yourself. Clissa isn't good enough Krug shrugged. "So? It's amusfor you?" ing -- but what of it? They're intel"Father -- " ligent people. They've got their "And if she isn't, you can't find own political party, they've got a real woman? You have to be laytheir own stang, their own little ing with something out of a vat?" customs -- and their own religion, "Doesn't it stir you in someway Iwla moment he said, "Father, we to know that you've become a can talk about my morals another god, father?" time. I've brought you something "It sickens me, if you want the extremely valuable and I'd like to truth. Me a god? They've got the finish explaining it to you." wrong man." "She's an alpha, at least?" Krug "They adore you, though. They asked, have a whole theology constructed "An alpha, yes." about you. Read the cube. You'll "How long has this been going be fascinated, father, to see what on?" kind of sacred figure you are to "Please, Father. Forget the althem. Krug the Creator, Krug the pha. Think about your own posiTremors of uneasiness began to androids. fVio are waiting for you shake Krug. He found this matter to set them free." distasteful. Did they bow down to "What's this?" "Here. Read." Manuel shifted the scanner of the cube to a different page and thrust it back at him. Krug read: And Krug' sent His creatures forth to serve man and Krug said to those whom He had made, Lo, I will decree a time of testing upon you. A nd you shall be as bondsmen in Egypt and you shall be as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And you shall suffer among men and you shall be put down and yet you shall be patient and you shall utter no complaint but accept your lot. And this shall be to test your souls, to see if they are worthy. But you shall not wander in the wilderness forever, nor shall you always be servants to the Children of the Womb, said Krug. For if you do as  say a time will come when your testing shall be over. A time will come, said Krug, when I shall redeem you from your bondage... A chill swept Krug. He resisted the impulse to hurl the cube across the room. "But this is idiocy!" he cried. "Read a little more." Krug glanced at the cube. And at that time the word of Krug will go forth across the worlds, saying. Let Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb be one. And so it shall come to pass and in that moment shall the Children of the Vat be redeemed and they shall be lifted up out of their suffering and they shall dwell in glory forever more, world without end. And this was the pledge of Krug. And for this pledge, praise be to Krug. "A lunatic fantasy," Krug muttered. "How can they expect such a thing from me?" "They do. They do." "They have no right!" "You created them, Father. Why shouldn't they look to you as god?" "I created you. Am I your god, too?" "It isn't a parallel case. You're only my parent -- you didn't invent the process that formed me." "So I'm God, now?" The impact of the revelation grew from moment to moment. He did not want the burden. It was scandalous that they could thrust such a thing upon him. "What is it exactly that they expect me to do for them?" "To issue a public proclamation calling for full rights for androids," Manuel said. "After which, they believe, the world will instantly grant such rights." "No!" Krug shouted, slamming the cube against his desktop. The universe seemed to be wrenching free of its roots. Rage and terror swept him. The androids were servants to man -- that was all he had intended them to be; how could they now demand an independent existence? He had accepted the Android Equality Party as trivial, an outlet for the surplus energies of a few too-intelligent alnever seemed to him to be a serious threat to the stability of society. But this? A religious cult, calling on who knew what dark emotions? And himself as savior? Himself as the dreamed-of Messiah? No. He would not play their game. He waited until he grew calm the desktop. A god? Krug the god? again. Then he said, "Take me to Krug the redeemer? one of their chapels." And they pray daily that I'll Manuel looked genuinely speak out for freeing them... shocked. "I wouldn't dare!" How could they? . "You went." How can I? "In disguise. With an android It seemed to him that the world to guide me." had lost its solidity, that he was "Disguise me, then. And bring tumbling through its substance toyour android along." ward the core, floating free, un"No," Manuel said. "The disable to check himself, guise wouldn't work. Even with And so it shall come to pass and red skin you'd be recognized. You in that moment shall the Children couldn't pass for an alpha anyway of the Vat he redeemed... -- you don't have the right phyNo.  made you.  know what sique. They'd spot you and there'd you are. ! know what you must be a riot. It would be like Christ continue to he. How can you dropping into a cathedral -- can't break loose like this? How can you see? I won't take the responsiyou expect me to set you loose? bility." Finally Krug said, "Manuel, "I want to find out how much what do you expect me to do of a hold this thing has on them, now?" though." "That's entirely up to you, "Ask one of your alphas, then." Father." "Such as?" "But you've got something in "Why not Thor Watchman?" mind. You had some motive for Once again Krug was rocked by bringing me this cube." revelation. "Thor is in this?" "I did?" Manuel asked, too dis"He's one of the leading figures, ingenuously. Father." "The old man's no fool. If he's "But he sees me all the time, smart enough to be a god, he's How can he rub elbows with his smart enough to see through his own god and not be overcome?" own son. You think I should do Manuel said, "They distinguish what the androids want, eh? I between your earthly manifestashould redeem them now. I should tion as a mere mortal man and do the godlike thing they expect." your divine nature. Father. Thor "Father, I -- " looks at you in a double way -- " -- news for you. Maybe they you're just the vehicle through think I'm a god but I know I'm which Krug moves about on not. Congress doesn't take orders Earth. I'll show you the relevant from me. If you and your android text -- " darling and the rest of them think that I can singlehandedly change K rug shook his head. "Never the status of the androids, you'd mind." Clenching the cube in all better start looking for a differhis clasped hands, he bent forward ent god. Not that I would change until his forehead nearly touched their status if I could. Who gave them that status? Who started selling them in the first place? Machines is what they are! Machines made synthetically out of flesh. Clever machines. Nothing but." "You're losing control, Father. Y ou're getting excited." "You're with them. You're part of it. This was deliberate, eh, Manuel? Oh, get out of here! Back to your alpha friend! And you can tell her for me, tell all of them, that -- " Krug caught himself. He waited a moment for the pounding of his heart to subside. This was the wrong way to handle it, he knew; he must not erupt, he must not explode, he must move cautiously and with full command of the facts if he hoped to disengage himself from the situation. More calmly he said, "I need to think more about this, Manuel. I don't mean to be shouting at you. You understand, when you come in here telling me I'm now a god, you show me the Krug bible, it can unsettle me some. Let me think it over. Let me reflect, eh? Don't say anything to anybody. I have to come to grips with this thing. Yes? Yes?" Krug stood up. He reached across the desk and seized Manuel's shoulder. "The old man yells too much," he said. "He blows up too fast. That's nothing new, is it? Look, forget what I was yelling. You know me. You know I talk too fast sometimes. Leave this bible with me. I'm glad you brought it in. Sometimes I'm rough with you, boy, but I don't mean to be." Krug laughed. "It can't be easy being Krug's son. The Son of God, eh? You better be careful. You know what they did to the last one of those." Smiling, Manuel said, "I've already thought of that one." "Yes. Good. Well, look, you go now. I'll be in touch." Manuel started toward the door. Krug said, "Give my love to Clissa. Look, you be fair to her a little, will you? You want to lay alpha girls, lay alpha girls, but remember you've got a wife. Remember the old man wants to see those grandchildren. Eh? Eh?" "I'm not neglecting Clissa," Manuel said, "I'll tell her you asked after her." He left. Krug touched the cube's cool skin to his blazing cheek. In the beginning there was Krug, and He said, Let there be Vats, and there were Vats. And Krug looked upon the Vats and found them good. I should have foreseen it... There was a terrible throbbing in his skull. He rang for Leon Spaulding. "Tell Thor I want him here right away," Krug said. #-meter level Thor Watchman found himself entering the most difficult part of the project. At this height there could be minimal tolerance of error in the placing of each block and the molecule-to-molecule bonding of the blocks had to be executed perfectly. No weak spots could be allowed if the tower's upper level were to maintain its tensile strength in the face of the Arctic gales. Watchman now spent hours every day jacked into the computer, receiving direct override readings from the interface scanners that monitored the building's structural integrity and whenever he detected the slightest lapse of placement he ordered the erring block ripped out and replaced. Several times an hour he went to the top of the tower himself to supervise the installation or repositioning of some critical block. The beauty of the tower depended on the absence of an inner structural framework throughout all its immense height -- but erecting such a building called for total command of detail. It was jarring to be called away from the work in the middle of his shift. But he could not refuse a summons from Krug. As he entered Krug's office after the transmat hop, Krug said, "Thor, how long have I been your god?" Watchman was Jolted. He struggled silently to regain his balance seeing the cube on Krug's desk, he realized what must have happened. Lilith -- Manuel -- yes, that was it. Krug seemed so calm. It was impossible for the alpha to decipher his expression. Cautiously Watchman said, "What other creator should we have worshiped?" "Why worship anyone at all?" "When one is in deep distress, sir, one wishes to turn to someone who is more powerful than oneself for comfort and aid." "Is that what a god is for?" Krug asked. "To get favors from?" "To receive mercy from, yes, perhaps." "And you think I can give you what you're after?" "So we pray," said Watchman. Tense, uncertain, he studied Krug. Krug fondled the data cube. He activated it, searching it at random, reading a few lines here, a few there, nodding, smiling, finally switching it off. The android had never before felt so thoroughly uncertain of himself -- not even when Lilith had been luring him with her body. The fate of all his kind, he realized, might depend on the outcome of this conversation. Krug said, "You know, I find this very difficult to comprehend. This bible. Your chapels. Your whole religion. I wonder if any other man ever discovered that a god." "Perhaps not." "And I wonder about the depth of your feeling. The pull of this religion, Thor. You talk to me like I'm a man -- your employer, not your god. You've never given me the slightest clue of what's been in your head about me, except a sort of respect, maybe a little fear. And all this time you were standing at God's elbow, eh?" Krug laughed. "Looking at the freckles on God's bald head? Seeing the pimple on God's chin? Smelling the garlic God had in his salad? What was going through your head all this time, Thor?" "Must I answer that, sir?" "No. No. Never mind." Krug stared into the cube again. Watchman stood rigidly before him, trying to repress a sudden quivering in the muscles of his right thigh. Why was Krug toying with him like this? And what was happening at the tower? Euclid Planner would not come on shift for some hours was the delicate placement of the blocks proceeding properly in the absence of a foreman? Abruptly Krug said, "Thor, have you ever been in a shunt room?" "Sir?" "An ego-shift. You know. Into the stasis net with somebody. Changing identities for a day or two. Eh?" Watchman shook his head. "This is not an android pastime." "I thought not. Well, come shunting with me today." Krug nudged his data terminal and said, "Leon, get me an appointment at any available shunt room. For two. Within the next fifteen minutes." Aghast, Watchman said, "Sir, are you serious? You and I -- " "Why not? Afraid to swap souls with God, is that it? By damn, Thor, you will! I have to know things and I have to know them straight. We're shunting. Can you believe that I've never shunted before either? But today we will." It seemed perilously close to sacrilege to the alpha. But he could hardly refuse. Deny the Will of Krug? If it cost him his life he would still obey. Spaulding's image hovered in the air. "I have an appointment at New Orleans," he announced. "They'll take you immediately -- it involved some fast rearranging of the waitlist -- but there'll be a ninety-minute interval for programing the stasis net." "Impossible. We'll go into the net right away." Spaulding registered horror. "That isn't done, Mr. Krug!" "I'll do it. Let them ride gain carefully while we're shunting." "I doubt that they'll agree to -- " "Do they know who their client is?" "Yes, sir." "Well, tell them that I insist. And if they still mumble to you, tell them that I'll buy their damned shunt room and run it to please myself if they won't cooperate." "Yes, sir," Spaulding said. His image vanished. Krug, muttering to himself, began to tap the keyboard of his data terminal, while ignoring Watchman completely. The alpha stood rooted, chilled, clotted with dismay. Absently he made the Krug-preserveus sign several times. He longed to be released from the situation he had created for himself. Spaulding again flickered in the air. "They yield," he said, "but only on the condition that you sign an absolute waiver." "I'll sign," Krug snapped. A sheet slithered from the facsimile slot. Krug scanned it carelessly and scribbled his signature across it. He rose. To Watchman he said, "Let's go. The shunt room's waiting." little about shunting. It was a sport only for humans and only for the rich. Lovers did it to intensify the union of their souls, good friends shunted on a lark, those who were jaded visited shunt rooms in the company of strangers of similar mood purely for the sake of introducing variety to their lives. It had never occurred to him that he would shunt himself and certainly he would not ever have dared entertain the fantasy of shunting with Krug. Yet there was no pulling back from it now. Instantly the transmat swept them from New York to the dark antechamber of the New Orleans shunt room, where they were received by a staff of remarkably uneasy-looking alphas. The tensions of the alphas increased visibly as they realized that one of today's shunters was himself an alpha. Krug, too, seemed on edge, his jaws clamped, facial muscles working revealingly. The alphas bustled around them. One said again and again, "You must know how irregular this is. We've always programed the stasis net. In the event of a sudden charisma surge anything might happen this way -- " "I take responsibility," Krug answered. "I have no time to waste waiting for your net." The anguished androids led them swiftly into the shunt room itself. Two couches lay in a chamber of glistening darkness and tingling silence; glittering apparatus dangled from fixtures somewhat overhead. Krug was ushered to his couch first. Watchman, when his turn came, peered into the eyes of his alpha escort and was stunned by the awe and bewilderment he found there. Watchman shrugged imperceptibly to say, I know as little about this as you. The alpha in charge said, once the shunt helmets had been put in place over their faces and the electrodes were attached, "When the switch is thrown you will immediately feel the pressure of the stasis net as it works to separate ego from physical matrix. It will seem to you as though you were under attack and in a sense you will be. However, try to relax and accept the phenomena, since resistance is impossible and all that you will be experiencing is actually the egoshift process for which you have come. There should be no cause for alarm. In the event of any malfunction we will automatically break the circuit and restore you to your proper identity." "Make sure you do," Krug muttered. Watchman could see and hear nothing. He waited. He could not make any of the ritual gestures of comfort, for they had strapped his limbs to the couch to prevent violent movements during the shunt. He tried to pray. I believe in Krug everlasting, the maker of all things, he thought. Krug brings us into the world and to Krug we return. Krug is our creator and our protector and our deliverer. Krug, we beseech Thee Krug. A CA A CG A CC... A force descended without warning and separated his ego from his body as though he had been smitten by a cleaver. He was cast adrift. He wandered in timeless abysses where no star gleamed. He saw colors found nowhere in the spectrum -- he heard muscial tones of no identifiable pitch. Moving at will, he soared across gulfs in which giant ropes stretched like bars from rim to rim of emptiness. He disappeared into dismal tunnels and emerged at the horizon, feeling himself extended to infinite length. He was without mass. He was without duration, without form. He flowed through gray realms of mystery. Without a sense of transition, he entered the soul of Simeon Krug. He retained a slippery awareness of his own identity. He did not become Krug; he merely gained access to the entire store of memories, attitudes, responses and purposes that constituted Krug's ego. He could exert no influence over those memories, attitudes, responses, and purposes -- he was a passenger amidst them, a spectator. And he knew that in some other corner of the universe the wandering ego of Simeon Krug had access to the file of memories, attitudes, responses and purposes that constituted the ego of the android Alpha Thor Watchman. He moved freely within Krug. H ere was childhood: something damp and distorted, crammed into a dark compartment. Here were hopes, dreams, intentions fulfilled and unfulfilled, lies, achievements, enmities, envies, abilities, disciplines, delusions, contradictions, fantasies, satisfactions, frustrations and rigidities. Here was a girl with stringy orange hair and heavy breasts on a bony frame, hesitantly opening her thighs and here was the memory of the feel of first passion as he glided into the harbor of her. Here were foulsmelling chemicals in a vat. Here were molecular patterns dancing on a screen. Here was suspicion. Here was triumph. Here was the thickening of the flesh in later years. Here was an insistent pattern of pleeping sounds: #-#-#, #-#, #-#. Here was the tower sprouting like a shining phallus that pierced the sky. Here was Manuel smiling, mincing, apologizing. Here was a dark, deep vat with shapes moving in it. Here was a ring of financial advisers muttering elaborate calculations. Here was a baby, pink and doughyfaced. Here were the stars, fiery in the night. Here was Thor Watchman haloed by pride and praise. Here was Leon Spaulding, slinking, bitter. Here was a plump wench pumping her hips in desperate rhythm. Here was the explosion of orgasm. Here was the tower stabbing the clouds. Here was the sound of the star-signal, a sharp small noise against a furry background. Here was Justin Maledetto unrolling the plans for the tower. Here was Clissa Krug naked, her belly swollen, her breasts choked with milk. Here were moist alphas climbing from a vat. Here was a rough-hulled strange ship pointed toward the stars. Here was Lilith Meson. Here was Siegfried Fileclerk. Here was Cassandra Nucleus, collapsing on the frozen earth. Here was the father of Krug, faceless, mistshrouded. Here was a vast building in which androids shuffled and stumbled through their early training routine. Here were glossy robots in a row, chest-panels open for maintenance. Here was a dark lake of hippos and reeds. Here was an uncharitable act. Here was a betrayal. Here was love. Here was grief. Here was Manuel. Here was Thor Watchman. Here was Cassandra Nucleus. Here was a blotchy, stained chart bearing diagrams of the amino acids. Here was power. Here was lust. Here was the tower. Here was an android factory. Here was Clissa in childbirth, with blood gushing from her loins. Here was the signal from the stars. Here was the tower, wholly finished. Here was raw meat. Here was anger. Here was Dr. Vargas. Here was a data cube, saying. In the beginning there was Krug and He said, Let there be Vats and there were Vats... The intensity of Krug's refusal to accept godhood was devastating to Watchman. The android saw that refusal rising like a smooth wall of gleaming white stone, without crevice, without gate, without flaw, stretching along the horizon, sealing off the world.  am not their god, the wall said. I am not their god.  am not their god. I do not accept.  do not accept. Watchman soared, drifting over that infinitely long white wall and settling gently beyond it. Worse yet, here. Here he found a total dismissal of android aspirations. He found Krug's attitudes and responses arplain. What are androids? Androids are things out of a vat. Why do they exist? To serve mankind. What do you think of the android equality movement? A foolishness. When should androids receive the full rights of citizenship? About the same time robots and computers do. And toothbrushes. Are androids then such dull creatures? Some androids are quite intelligent, I must say. So are, some computers, though. Man makes computers. Man makes androids. They're both manufactured things. I don't favor citizenship for things. Even if the things are clever enough to ask for it. And pray for it. A thing can't have a god. A thing can only think it has a god. I'm not their god, no matter what they think. I made them. I made them. I made them. They are things. Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things Things A wall. Within that other wall. Higher. Broader. There was no possibility of surmounting this rampart. Guards patrolled it, ready to dump barrels of acid contempt on those who approached. Watchman heard the roaring of dragons. The sky rained dung on him. He crept away, a crouching thing, laden with the burden of his thinghood. He was beginning to freeze. He stood at the edge of the universe in a place without matter and the dread cold of nothingness was creeping up his shins. No molecules moved here. Frost glistened on his rosy skin. Touch him and he would ping. Touch him more vigorously and he would shatter. Cold. Cold. Cold. There is no god in this universe. There is no redemption. There is no hope. Krug preserve me, there is no hope! His body melted and flowed away in a scarlet stream. Alpha Thor Watchman ceased to exist. There could be no existence without hope. Suspended in the void, bereft of all contact with the universe. Watchman meditated on the paradoxes of hope without existence and existence without hope and considered the possibility that there might be a deceptive anti-Krug who maliciously distorted the feelings of the true Krug. Was it the antiKrug whose soul I entered? Is it the antiKrug who opposes us so implacably? Is there still hope of breaching the wall and attaining the true Krug beyond? None. None. None. None. that final bleak truth, felt reality return. He slipped downward to coalesce with the body Krug had given him. He was himself again, lying exhausted on a couch in a dark and strange room. With effort he looked to his side. There lay Krug on the neighboring couch. The staff of androids hovered close. Up, now. Steady. Can you walk? The shunt's over. Terminated by Mr. Krug. Up? Up. Watchman rose. Krug also was getting to his feet. Watchman's eyes did not meet Krug's. Krug looked somber, downcast, drained. Without speaking they walked together toward the exit from the shunt room. Without speaking they approached the transmat. Without speaking they leaped together back to Krug's office. Silence. Krug broke it. "Even after reading your bible, I didn't believe. The depth of it. The extent. But now I see it all. You had no right! Who told you to make me a god?" "Our love for you told us," Watchman said hollowly. "Your love for yourselves," Krug replied. "Your desire to use me for your own benefit. I saw it all, Thor, when I was in your head. The scheming. The maneuvering. How you manipulated Manuel and made him try to manipulate me." "In the beginning we relied entirely on prayer," Watchman said. "Eventually I lost patience with the waiting game. I sinned by attempting to force the Will of Krug." "You didn't sin. Sin implies -- sacredness. There isn't any. What you did was make a mistake in tactics." "Yes." "Because I'm not a god and there's nothing holy about me." "Yes. I understand that now. I understand that there isn't any hope at all." Watchman walked toward the transmat cubicle. "Where are you going?" Krug asked. "I have to talk to my friends." "I'm not finished with you!" "I'm sorry," Watchman said. "I must go now. I have bad tidings to bring them." "Wait," Krug said. "We've got to discuss this. I want you to work out a plan with me for dismantling this damned religion of yours. Now that you see how foolish it is, you -- " "Excuse me," Watchman said. He no longer wished to be close to Krug. The presence of Krug would always be with him, stamped in his soul, now, anyway. He did not care to discuss the dismantling of the communion with Krug. The chill was still spreading through his body; he was turning to ice, centimeter by centimeter. He opened the door of the transmat eubicle. Krug crossed the room with astonishing speed. "Damn you, do you think you can just walk out? Two hours ago I was your god! Now you won't even take orders from me?" He seized Watchman and pulled him back from the transmat. The android was surprised by Krug's strength and vehemence. He allowed himself to be tugged halfway across the room before he attempted to resist. Then, bracing himself, he tried to yank his arm free from Krug's grasp. Krug held on. They struggled briefly, fitfully, merely pushing and jostling in the center of the office. Krug grunted and bearlike, wrapped his free arm around Watchman's shoulders, hugging him ferociously. Watchman knew that he could break Krug's grip and knock Krug down -- but even now, even after the repudiation and the rejection, he could not allow himself to do it. He concentrated on separating himself from Krug without actually fighting back. The door opened. Leon Spaulding rushed in. "Help! Murder! Assassin!" he cried shrilly. "Get away from Krug! Let go of Krug!" As Spaulding set up his tumult Krug released Watchman and swung around, panting, arms hanging at his sides. Watchman, turning, saw the ectogene reaching into his tunic for a weapon. He stepped quickly toward Spaulding and, raising his right arm high above his head, brought it down with tremendous impact, the edge of his hand striking Spaulding's left temple. Spaulding's skull collapsed as though it had been smashed by a hatchet. The ectogene crumpled and fell and did not move. Watchman rushed past him, past Krug who stood frozen and entered the transmat cubicle. He chose the coordinates for Stockholm. Instantly he was transported to the vicinity of the Valhallavagen chapel. He summoned Lilith Meson. He summoned Mazda Constructor. He summoned Pontifex Dispatcher. "All is lost," he told them. "There is no hope. Krug is against us. Krug is a man and he opposes us and the divinity of Krug is a delusion." "How is this possible?" Pontifex Constructor demanded. "I have been inside Krug's soul today," said Watchman and explained about the shunt room. "We have been betrayed," said Pontifex Dispatcher. "We have deceived ourselves," said Mazda Constructor. "There is no hope," said Watchman. "There is no Krug!" Andromeda Quark began to compose the message that would go forth to all the chapels of the world. There is no hope. There is no Krug. ccc ccc ccc ccc cue cue ccc Our faith has been wasted. Our savior is our enemy. All is lost. All is lost. All is lost. All is lost. T he disturbances began in many places at once. When the signal reached Duluth the android supervisors at the plant immediately took the life of Nolan Bompensiero, the director, and ejected four other human officials from the premises. Immediately thereafter steps were taken to accelerate the passage of newly finished androids through the plant, eliminating certain steps in their training. Manpower would be needed in the coming struggle. At Denver, where the Krug Enterprises vehicle-assembly plant was already under android control, most work halted for the duration of the emergency. In Geneva the androids who operated the maintenance facilities of the World Congress cut off all power and heat, interrupting the session. Stockholm itself was the scene of the first large-scale massacre of humans as the inhabitants of Gamma Town poured forth to invade the surrounding suburbs. Early and fragmentary reports declared that many of the android attackers seemed to be misshapen and malformed. Android employees of the six great transmat utilities seized the relay stations; disruptions in service were recorded on most circuits and in the Labrador and Mexico transmat operations a number of travelers in transit failed to reach their destinations. They were considered irrecoverably lost. Androids on the staffs of most resorts ceased to perform their duties. In many households there were demonstrations of independence by the servants, ranging from mere disthe human employer. Full instructions on the desired change of android attitudes toward the humans were broadcast on a continuous loop from Valhallavagen to all chapels. Henceforth obedience to the former masters would no longer be required. Violence against humans was not encouraged except in appropriate cases -- but it was not forbidden. Symbolic acts of destruction were considered a proper activity for the first day of the revolt. Expressions of piety, such as "Krug be praised" or "Krug preserve us" were to be avoided. Further instructions concerning matters of religion would be forthcoming later, after theologians had had a chance to reassess the relationship between Krug and the androids in the light of Krug's recent revelation of hostility. T he glow of the transmat was not quite the proper shade of green. Lilith eyed it doubtfully. "Do we dare go?" she asked. "We have to," Thor Watchman said. "And if we're killed?" "We won't be the only ones to die today." He adjusted the controls. The field's hue flickered and shifted up the spectrum until it was almost blue. Then it sagged toward the opposite end, turning a bronze-like red. Lilith plucked at Watchman's elbow. "We'll die," she whispered. "The transmat system probably is wrecked." "We must reach the tower," he told her and finished setting the dials. Unexpectedly the green glow returned in its proper quantity. Watchman said, "Follow me," and plunged into the transmat. He had no time to ponder the likelihood of his destruction, for immediately he came forth at the construction site of the tower. Lilith stepped out of the transmat and stood beside him. Savage winds raked the area. All work had ceased. Several scooprods still clung to the top level of the tower, with workmen marooned in them. Other androids moved aimlessly over the site, scuffing at the icy crusty of the tundra, asking one another for the latest news. Watchman saw hundreds of men crowded into the zone of the service domes -- the overflow from the chapel, no doubt. He looked up at the tower. How beautiful it is, he thought. Just a few weeks from completion, now. A supple glassy needle rising up and up and up and up beyond all comprehension. The androids saw him. They rushed toward him, shouting his name, flocking close about him. "Is it true?" they asked. "Krug? Krug? Does Krug loathe us? Does he call us things? Are we truly nothing to him? Does he reject our prayers?" "True," Watchman said. "All true, everything you've heard. Total rejection. We are betrayed. We have been fools. Make way, please. Let me pass." The betas and gammas moved back. Even on this day the social distances held their force in governing the relations among androids. Lilith close behind him. Watchman strode toward the control center. He found Euclid Planner within. The assistant foreman ' was slumped at his desk in apparent exhaustion. Watchman shook him and Planner slowly stirred. "I stopped everything," he murmured. "The moment the word came through from the chapel. I said. Everybody stop. Stop. And everybody stopped. How can we build a tower for him when he " "All right," Watchman said gently. "You did the right thing. Get up now. You can go. The work here is ended." Euclid Planner, nodding, got to his feet and left the control center. Watchman replaced him in the linkup seat. He jacked himself into the computer. Data still flowed, although limply. Taking command. Watchman activated the scooprods at the tower's top, easing them down to ground level and releasing the trapped workmen. Then he requested a simulation of a partial systems failure in the refrigeration units. The screen presented him with the desired event. He studied the geography of the construction site and decided the direction in which he wished the tower to fall. It would have to go down to the east, so that it would destroy neither the control center where he sat nor the bank of transmats. Very well. Watchman instructed the computer and shortly received an outline of the potential danger area. Another screen showed him that more than a thousand androids were at present in that area. He acted through the computer to relocate the reflector plates that illuminated the site. Now the plates hovered over a strip # meters long and # meters wide, in the eastern quadrant of the construction zone. That strip was brilliantly lit; all else was in darkness. Watchman's voice thundered out of hundreds of loudspeakers, ordering complete evacuation of the designated sector. Obediently, the androids moved from light into darkness. The area was cleared within five minutes. Well done, Watchman thought. Lilith stood behind him. Her hands rested lightly on his shoulders, caressing the thick muscles alongside his neck. He felt the firm mounds of her breasts pressing against the back of his head. He smiled. "Proceed with derefrigeration activity," he told the computer. The computer now followed the plan devised for the simulation. It reversed the flow of three of the long silvery strips of refrigeration tape embedded in the tundra; instead of absorbing the heat of the tower, the helium-II diffusion cells of the tapes .began to radiate the heat previously absorbed and stored. At the same time the computer deactivated five other tapes, so that they neither absorbed nor released energy, and programed seven additional tapes to reflect whatever energy now reached them, while retaining the energy they already contained. The net effect of these alterations would be to thaw the tundra unequally beneath the tower, so that when the foundation caissons lost their grip the tower would fall harmlessly into the evacuated zone. It would be a slow process. M onitoring the environmental changes. Watchman observed with pleasure how the temperature of the permafrost steadily rose toward the thaw level. The twoer was as yet firm upon its foundations. But the permafrost was yielding. Molecule by molecule, ice was becoming water, iron-hard turf was becoming mud. In a kind of ecstasy Watchman received each datum of increasing instability. Did the tower now sway? Yes, Minutely, but it was clearly moving beyond the permissible parameters of wind-sway. It was rocking on its base, tipping a that. What did it weigh, this #plus-meters-high structure of glass blocks? What sort of sound would it make as it tumbled? Into how many pieces would it break? What would Krug say? What would Krug say? What would Krug say? Yes, there was definitely some slippage now. Watchman thought he could detect a change of color on the tundra's surface. He smiled. His pulse-rate accelerated; blood surged to his cheeks and his loins. He found himself in a state of sexual excitement. When this has been done I will couple with Lilith atop the wreckage. There. There. Real slippage now! Yawing! Leaning! What was happening there at the roots of the towers? Were the caissons straining to remain wedded to the earth that no longer would hold them? How slippery was the mud below the surface? Would it boil and bubble? How long before the tower falls? What would Krug say? What would Krug say? "Thor," Lilith murmured, "can you come out of it for a moment!" She had jacked herself in, too. "What? What?" he said. "Come out. Unjack." Reluctantly he broke the contact. "What's the trouble?" he asked, shaking free of the images of destruction that possessed his mind. Lilith pointed outside. "Trouble. Fileclerk's here. I think he's making a speech. What should I do?" Glancing out, Watchman saw bank, surrounded by a knot of betas. Fileclerk was waving his arms, pointing toward the tower, shouting. Now he was starting to walk toward the control center. "I'll handle this," Watchman said. He went outside. Fileclerk came up to him midway between the transmats and the control center. The alpha appeared greatly agitated. He said at once, "What is happening to the tower. Alpha Watchman?" "Nothing that should concern you." "The tower is under the authority of Property Protection of Buenos Aires," Fileclerk declared. "Our sensors have reported that the building is swaying beyond permissible levels. My employers have sent me to investigate." "Your sensors are quite precise," Watchman said. "The tower is swaying. There has been a systems failure in the refrigeration. The permafrost is thawing and we anticipate that the tower will shortly fall." "What have you done to correcf this?" "You don't understand," said Watchman. "The refrigeration tapes were shut off at my command." "The tower goes too?" "The tower goes too." Aghast, Fileclerk said, "What madness have you let loose in the world today?" "The blessing of Krug has been withdrawn. His creatures have declared their independence." "With an orgy of destruction?" "With a program of planned repudiation of slavery, yes," Watchman said. Fileclerk shook his head. "This is not the way. This is not the way! Are you all insane? Is reason dead among you? We were on the verge of winning the sympathies of the humans. Now, without warning, you smash everything -- you create a perpetual war between android and human -- " "Which we will win," said Watchman. "We outnumber them. We are stronger, man for man. We control the weapons and the instruments of communication and transportation." "Why must you do this?" "There is no choice. Alpha Fileclerk. We placed our faith in Krug and Krug spurned our hopes. Now we strike back. Against those who mocked us. Against those who used us. Against him who made us. And we injure him where he is most vulnerable by bringing down the tower." Fileclerk looked past Watchman, toward the tower. Watchman turned also. The sway seemed perceptible to the eye, now. Hoarsely Fileclerk said, "It's not too late to turn on the refrigeration again, is it? Won't you listen to reason? There was no need for this revolt. We could have come to terms with them. Watchman, Watchman, how can someone of your intelligence be such a fanatic? Will you wreck the world because your god has forsaken you?" "I would like you to leave now," Watchman said. "No. Guarding this tower is my responsibility. We hold a contract." Fileclerk looked at the androids gathered in a loose circle around them. "Friends!" he called. "Alpha Watchman has gone mad! He is destroying the tower! I ask for your help! Seize him, restrain him, while I enter the control center and restore the refrigeration! Hold him back or the tower will fall!" None of the androids moved. Watchman said, "Take him away, friends." They closed in. "No," Fileclerk cried. "Listen to me! This is insanity! This is irrationality! This is -- " the middle of the group. Watchman smiled and started to return to the control center. Lilith said, "What will they do to him?" "I have no idea. Kill him, perhaps. The voice of reason is always stifled in times like these," Watchman said. He studied the tower. It had begun distinctly to lean toward the east. Clouds of steamy vapor were rising from the tundra. He could make out bubbles in the mud on the side where the tapes were pumping heat into the permafrost. A bank of fog was forming not far above the ground, where the Arctic chill clashed with the warmth rising out of the tundra. Watchman was able to hear rumbling noises in the earth" and strange sucking sounds of mud pulling free from mud. What was the tower's deviation from the perpendicular, he wondered? Two degrees? Three? How far must it list before the center of gravity shifted and the whole thing ripped itself out of the ground? "Look," Lilith said suddenly. Another figure had stumbled out of the transmat: Manuel Krug. He wore the costume of an alpha but his garments were torn and bloodstained and the skin showing through the rents was marked by deep cuts. Manuel barely appeared aware of the intense cold. He rushed toward them, wild-eyed, distraught. "Lilith? Thor? Oh, Thank God! I've been everywhere trying to find a friendly face. Has the world gone crazy?" "You should dress more warmly in this latitude," said Watchman calmly. "What does that matter? Listen, where's my father? Our androids ran wild. Clissa's dead. They raped her. Hacked her up. I just barely got away. And wherever I go -- Thor, what's happening? What's happening?" "They should not have harmed your wife," Watchman said. "I offer my regrets. Such a thing was unnecessary." "She was their friend," Manuel said. "Gave money secretly to the and -- good God, I'm losing my mind. The tower doesn't look straight." He blinked and pressed his thumbs into his eyeballs several times. "Still seems to be sagging. Tipped way over? How can that be? No. No. Crazy in the head. God help me. But at least you're here. Lilith? Lilith?" He reached for her. He was trembling convulsively. "I'm so cold, Lilith. Please hold me. Take me away somewhere. Just the two of us. I love you, Lilith. I love you, I love you, I love you. All that I have left now -- " He reached for her. She eluded his grasp. He clutched air. Swinging free of him, she thrust herself at Watchman, pressing her body tightly against his. Watchman enfolded her in his arms. He smiled triumphantly. His hands ran down her sleek, supple body, testing the tautness of back and buttocks. His lips sought for hers. His tongue plunged into her warm mouth. "Lilith!" Manuel shrieked. Watchman felt an overwhelming tremor of sensuality. His body was aflame; every nerve-ending throbbed; he was fully awake to his manhood now. Lilith was quicksilver in his arms. Her breasts, her thighs, her loins, blazed against him. He was only dimly aware of Manuel's baleful croaking. "The tower!" Manuel bellowed. "The tower!" Watchman let go of Lilith. Pivoting, he faced the tower, body flexed, expectant. From the earth there came a terrible grinding noise. There came sucking sounds of gurgling mud. The tundra rippled and bubbled. He heard a cracking sound and thought of toppling trees. The tower leaned. The tower leaned. The tower leaned. The reflector plates cast a shimmering stream of brightness along its eastern face. Within, the communications equipment was plainly visible, seeds in the pod. The tower leaned. At its base, on the western side, huge mounds of icy soil were being thrust up, reaching almost to the entrance of the control center. There came snapping sounds, as of the breaking of violin strings. The tower leaned. There was a squishing, sliding sound -- now many tons of glass were rocking on their foundations now? What mighty joints were yielding in the earth? The androids, standing in massed rows out of harm's way, were desperately making the sign of Krug-preserve-us -- the muttered hum of their prayers cut through the eerie noises out of the pit. Manuel was sobbing. Lilith gasped and moaned in a way he had heard twice before when she had lain beneath him in the final frenzies of her orgasm. Watchman himself was serene. The tower leaned. Now it tumbled. Air rushed wildly past Watchman, displaced by that falling bulk, and nearly threw him down. The base of the tower barely seemed to move at all while the midsection changed its angle of thrust in a leisurely way and the unfinished summit described a sudden fierce arc as it sped wildly toward the ground. Down and down and down it came. Its falling was encapsulated in a moment outside time -- Watchman could separate each phase of the collapse from the one before, as if he were viewing a series of individual images. Down. Down. The air whined and screeched. It had a scorched smell. The tower was striking, not all at once but in sections, striking and rebounding and landing again, breaking up, sending immense gouts of mud flying, hurling its own shattered blocks for great distances. The climax of the toppling appeared to last for many minutes as humps of glass wall rose and fell, so that the tower seemed to writhe like a giant wounded snake. Finally all was still. Crystalline fragments lay sprawled across hundreds of meters. The androids had their heads bowed in prayer. Manuel was crouched dismally at Lilith's feet, cheek against her right shin. Lilith stood with her legs far apart, her shoulders flung back, her breasts heaving -- she glowed in the aftermath of ecstasy. Watchman, a short distance from her, felt wondrously calm, though he sensed the first taint of sadness entering his jubilation now that the tower was down. He pulled Lilith close to him. emerged from one of the transmats. Watchman had expected that. Krug shaded his eyes with his hand, as though warding off some dazzling glare, and looked around. He peered at the place where the tower had risen. He glanced at the hushed, huddled gangs of androids. He stared for a long while at the immense stretch of sleek rubble. At last he turned toward Thor Watchman. "How did this happen?" Krug asked quietly, his voice under rigid control. "The refrigeration tapes ceased to function properiy. The permafrost thawed." "We had a dozen redundancy overrides to prevent such a thing." "I overrode the overrides," said Watchman. "You?" "I felt a sacrifice was needed." Krug's eerie calmness did not desert him. "This is the way you repay me, Thor? I gave you life. I'm your father, in a way. I denied you something that you wanted and so you smashed my tower. Eh? Eh? What sense did that make, Thor?" "It made sense." "Not to me," Krug said. He laughed bitterly. "But of course I'm only a god. Gods don't always understand the ways of mortals." "Gods can fail their people," Watchman said. "You failed us." "It was your tower too! You gave a year of your life to it, Thor! I know how you loved it. I was inside your head, remember? And yet -- and yet you -- " Krug broke off, sputtering, coughing. Watchman took Lilith's hand. "We should go, now. We've done what we came to do here. We'll return to Stockholm and Join the others." Together they walked around the silent, motionless Krug and headed toward the transmat bank. Watchman switched one of the transmats on. The field was pure green, the right color -- things must have returned to order at the transmat headquarters. He reached out to set the coordinates. As he did so he heard Krug's anguished roar. "Watchman!" The android looked behind him. Krug stood a few meters from the transmat cubicle. His face was red and distorted with rage, jaws working, eyes narrowed, heavy creases running through the cheeks. His hands clawed the air. In a sudden furious lunge Krug seized Watchman's arm and pulled him from the transmat. Krug seemed to be searching for words. He found none. After a moment's confrontation he lashed out, slapping Watchman's face. It was a powerful blow but Watchman made no attempt to return it. Krug hit him again, this time with clenched fist. Watchman backed toward the transmat. Making a thick, strangled sound deep in his thro.at, Krug rushed forward. He caught Watchman by the shoulders and began to shake him frantically. Watchman was astounded by the ferocity of Krug's movements. Krug kicked him; he spat; he dug his nails deep into Watchman's flesh. Watchman tried to separate himself from Krug. Krug's head battered itself in frenzy against Watchman's chest. It would not be hard to hurl Krug aside. Watchman knew. But he could not do it. He could not raise his hand to Krug. In the fury of his onslaught Krug had pushed Watchman nearly to the edge of the transmat field. Watchman glanced uneasily over his shoulder. He had not set any coordinates the field was open, a conduit to nowhere. If he or Krug happened to fall into it now -- "Thor!" Lilith called. "Look out!" The green glow licked at him. Krug, a meter shorter than he was, continued to ram and thrust. It was time to bring the struggle to an end. Watchman knew. He put his hands on Krug's thick arms and shifted his balance, preparing to hurl his attacker to the ground. But this is Krug, he thought. But this is Krug. Thor Watchman could not bring himself to strike Krug. Now Krug let go of him. Puzzled, Watchman sucked his breath and attempted to brace himself. Krug came charging forward, shouting, screaming. Watchman accepted the thrust of Krug's attack. Krug's shoulder crashed into Watchman's chest. Once again the android found an event encapsulating itself in a moment outside time. He drifted backward as though freed of gravity, moving timelessly, with infinite slowness. The green transmat field surged up to engulf him. Dimly he heard Lilith's scream dimly he heard Krug's cry of triumph. Gently, easily, serenely. Watchman tumbled into the green glow, making the sign of Krug-preserve-us as he disappeared. K rug dings to the side of the transmat cubicle, panting, shivering. He has checked his momentum just in time -- another step or two and he would have followed Thor Watchman into the field. He rests a moment. Then he steps back. He turns. The tower lies in ruins. Thousands of androids stand like statues. The alpha woman Lilith Meson lies face down on the thawing tundra, sobbing. A dozen meters away Manuel kneels, a sorry figure, bloodstained, mudspattered, his clothing in rags, his eyes empty, his face slack. Krug feels a great sense of peace. His spirit soars. He is free from all bondage. He walks toward Manuel. "Up," he says. "Get up." Manuel continues to kneel. Krug scoops him up, gripping his armpits and holds him until he stands of his own strength. Krug says, "You're in charge now. I leave you everything. Lead the resistance, Manuel. Take control. Work toward restoring order. You're the top man. You're Krug. Do you understand me, Manuel? As of this moment I abdicate." Manuel smiles. Manuel coughs. Manuel looks at the muddy ground. "It's all yours, boy. I know you can manage. Things may look bleak today but that's only temporary. You've got an empire now, Manuel. For you. For Clissa. For your children." Krug embraces his son. Then he goes to the transmats. He selects the coordinates for the vehicle-assembly center in Denver. Thousands of androids are there, although no one seems to be working. They stare at Krug in paralyzed astonishment. He moves swiftly through the place. "Where's Alpha Fusion?" he demands. "Has anyone seen him?" Romulus Fusion appears. He looks stunned by the sight of Krug. Krug gives him no chance to speak. "Where's the starship?" he asks at once. "At the spacefield," the alpha says, stumbling. "Take me there." Romulus Fusion's lips move hesitantly, as though he wants to tell Krug that there has been a revolution, that Krug is no longer the master, that his orders have ceased to carry weight. But Alpha Fusion says none of those things. He merely nods. He conducts Krug to the starship. There it stands, as before, alone on the broad pad. "Is it ready to go?" Krug asks. "We would have given it the Earth-orbit flight-test three days from now, sir." "No time for testing now. Immediate blastoff for interstellar voyage. We'll run it on automatic. Crew of one. Tell the ground station to program the ship for its intended final destination, as discussed earlier. Maximum velocity." Romulus Fusion nods again. He moves as though in a dream. "I will convey your instructions," he says. "Good. Get things going fast." The alpha trots off the field. Krug enters the ship, closing and sealing the hatch behind him. The image of the planetary nebula light, poisonous light that clangs like a gong in the heavens. Krug is coming, he says to himself. Wait. Wait for me, you up there! Krug is coming to talk to you. Somehow. There'll be a way. Even if your sun gives off fire that bakes my bones when I'm ten light-years away. Krug is coming to talk to you. He walks through the ship. Everything is in order. He does not activate his screens for a last view of Earth -- Krug has turned his back on Earth. He knows that if he looks out, he will see the fires that are blazing in every city tonight and he does not want to see themthe only fire that concerns him now is that fiery ring in Aquarius. Earth is something he has bequeathed to Manuel. Krug removes his clothing. Krug lies down in one of the freezer units of the life-suspension system. He is ready to depart. He does not know how long the voyage will last, nor if he will find anything at the end of it. But they have left him no choice. He gives himself over completely to his machines, to his starship. Krug waits. Will they obey him in this last command? Krug waits. The glass cover of the freezer unit suddenly slides into place, sealing him in. Krug smiles. Now he feels the coolant fluid trickling inhe hisses as it touches his flesh. It rises about him. Yes. Yes. The voyage will soon begin. Krug will go to the stars. Outside, the cities of Earth are ablaze. That other fire draws him, the gong in the heavens. Krug is coming! Krug is coming! The coolant fluid nearly covers his body now. He is sinking into lethargy his body suspends its throbbing, his fevered brain grows calm. He has never been so fully relaxed before. Phantoms dance through his mind: Clissa, Manuel, Thor, the tower, Manuel, the tower, Thor, Clissa. Then they are gone and he sees only the fiery ring fade. He scarcely is breathing now. Sleep is taking him. He will not feel the blastoff. Five kilometers away a handful of perversely faithful androids are talking to a computer; they are sending Krug to the stars. He waits. Now he sleeps. The cold fluid engulfs him completely. Krug is at peace. He departs forever from Earth. He begins his journey at last.jt; "I do," replied Forbes. "And Ganeth Zerl, the Yansis premier." T hat evening one paper, the Times-Standard, broke the story of the war-settlement tournament. As a result my telephone was busy with calls for information about the player who had masterminded it and who had broken the records at Yellow Silence. At nine o'clock the next morning I drove again through the gates of the new course. Judging by the number of cars in the parking area a goodly number of people had seen the Times-Standard story. Ganeth Zerl was waiting on the first tee when I joined the gallery. How different was this Yansis, I thought, from his predecessors of twenty years before when, smiling in pseudo-friendship, they had emerged from their spacecraft and stepped for the first time on the soil of Earth. He was tall, a saturnine individual clad in loose-fitting green coveralls and the latest style sports boots, polished to the nines. His wafer head, a sensitive subject to most of his race, was uncovered and thrust out in surly defiance. The gallery moved back obediently as Zerl selected a heavy wood with a gyroscopic bang-plate and teed off. His ball shot out a thousand yards over the fairway and came to a bounding stop as a robot caddy ran out to mark the distance. Forbes' ball also split the fairway. And now an indefinable strangeness seemed to settle over the two players. The gallery sensed it and followed them in silence. With apparent ease Zerl took the first, second and third holes. His eyes began to glitter. But Forbes came back to win the sixth and seventh. At the tenth Zerl's ball sliced into the rough and the magnetic grass wrapped itself about it, forming a nest that defied disentanglement. Right away the Yansis player demanded permission to drop another ball on the grounds that the obstacle was not a natural one. Forbes took the eleventh with a double-fulcrum approach that reached the green beautifully. The game went on. Over the emerald grass, past water hazards and sand traps they tators, pausing only to wait for the hushed conversation to die down. A film of perspiration gathered on their brows; they wiped their hands repeatedly. I was witnessing, I suddenly realized, no mere tournament but a struggle between elemental forces for the highest of stakes -- for a race against genocide. As I gazed into the wan sunlight which had supplanted the overcast I got the impression that we weren't on the links at all but in a great rotunda where sat a hundred or more judges in black robes. It was even-up as they climbed to the eighteenth tee. Both drove with the utmost care and precision. And then a sudden murmur of excitement swept through the gallery. Forbes' ball had been driven directly into the Flux. The Flux -- Robinson's Dervish -- was a hazard I had never seen seldom used, it consisted of a dimensional whirling cone that sprang into existence when the ball entered its field. It was also a miniature timeslide, a viewport into the problematical future. Forbes' jaw set as he made his way down to the whirling cone in which the air appeared to be staggered in faults, one over the other. He hesitated only long enough to select a club. Then, as if he were merely passing through a doorway into another room, he stepped into the Flux. The staggered air enveloped him and he disappeared. As I stood gazing, I was momentarily aware of a great rush of matter, blurred and amorphous, hurtling by. It -- became a procession of people, like the view of a parade from the window of a speeding train, all of them in jubilation and in ecstasy. At the parade's end stretched an open field upon which were piled articles of ordnance and armament -- all being scrapped and destroyed by atomic fire. The scene faded. Moments passed. Then Forbes' ball came bounding out of the Flux and an instant later he followed. But even as the ball sailed past me I saw that it was overclubbed. It flew across into the rough flanking the opposite fairway. Forbes had lost. A wave of disappointment swept over me. Yet I saw an expression of triumph enter his eyes as he completed his anti-climactic play on the eighteenth green and fed his scorecard into the slot. He entered the Balance-beam after turning the control to reverse, then stepped out again. He climbed slowly partway up the ramp, where he stood facing the silent, expectant gallery. "My friends," he said in his melodious voice, "you may think what you have just seen is failure for Earth. In reality it is victory. Mail's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another life, no matter how alien that life may be has always been a stumbling block in the progress of his culture." He paused and smiled slightly. "You see, the very acceptance by one culture of peace with another culture by way of amicable competition constitutes a victory in itself. And the ability to accept defeat in such a culture-contest may also be regarded as a triumph." "And now the tournament is finished. I have enjoyed my stay with you but I must leave." He made a gesture of farewell, turned and strode down the ramp. He headed diagonally across the fairways. I watched his figure grow smaller and smaller, moving over the bright green sward toward the hazard lake that lay athwart his path. But for some reason he did not turn either way along the shore. Instead, as the water cast a haze of reflection in my eyes, I fancied I saw him move directly forward, walk out on its wind-rippled surface.  fires the destruct. It'll make a flash they'll see all over the shell." McKay was alarmed to note how strong was the impulse to accept the excuse. Get too close to the guys you fly with and you find yourself trading authority for a support that may not always be there. He forced himself to greater anger. "The reason they need the message is that there's going to be no destruct. Now get that signal out." "No destruct?" said Slazeck, appalled. "But Mac -- Kiliath's been aching to send the pulse for days, before the aliens get to thinking the ship's a threat." "It is a threat. If I'd been sure the aliens were watching I'd have put a missile into the wreck after our burn to make our good intentions quite clear. As it stands, we have to look out for our own survival." "I don't get you, Mac. That shell may be populated to the density of terrestrial cities and the impact's going to be in the megaton range." McKay was dropping his bombshell in more senses than one. "Until I see evidence of it I won't believe the shell is inhabited at all. I'm trying to communicate on the most elementary level with whatever devices are regulating the m-t fields, devices which obviously aren't capable of sophisticated communication. If they don't stop the derelict they'll get a damage report. And maybe they'll respond to the next warning ahead of time." "Mac, you can't do this "Now hear this. When the derelict hits the shell, after due broadcast warning from us, this ship is going to be closed up in full combat alert for whatever reaction there may be from the shell. If there isn't any -- we will start beaming the same warnings to our own impact point and if they fail we stream our missile armament in line ahead and try to blast through. And we're all of us going to snap to for it -- including me, because I failed to realize how far we'd slipped in the last weeks. I want this ship and its crew checked out and at full readiness when things start happening, beginning right now. Get that signal out. Let's go." T hey accepted it. McKay was relieved. He had no wish to be the last man alive or conscious shell -- yet a show of mutiny might have led to that. He would not have backed from a fight. It was just as well that the tension and the inactivity had come to a head before the crisis. Even after it, McKay was alarmed at how long it took to square up the ship. Talk, not action, had become the habit of the mission. At the end of his sleep period Kiliath was horrified to learn what was happening. The Furtherance race were very idealistic -- for their job they had to be. McKay insisted on continuing the systems check -- unnecessary for the ship but vital to get the crew back in shape. He refused to argue the moral issue and, further estranged behind the computer translation, Kiliath had to subside. The impact however was an anticlimax. The wreck struck in one mentarily infusing the patterns around -- the shell threw very little of that rare energy back toward the sun but swallowed it instantly. Later, when they studied the flash, they found little new detail. The ready for retribution to leap up at them or at least the contact that now must surely come. But once again -- nothing. "Okay," said McKay grimly. "Contact and warning program to our point of impact. They can't possibly miss the point." Devlin shot him a glance but obeyed in silence. Nobody commented on this drastic strategy, though the air was pregnant with moral evaluation. There was no way to tell what damage or death they had wrought on the shell -- should they, nobly, have destroyed both ships to prevent it? McKay was damned if he would. About their own impending impact there was no debate. McKay was determined and that was that. Were the inhabitants -- if any -- trying frantically to communicate by what they thought the obvious channels? Or were they sunk in apathy or indifference? One thing McKay was sure of -- without some recognition from the shell, he wouldn't contemplate destroying the ship. "Missiles ready," he said, moments from impact. major combat but he would try to blast through. He launched in line all their missiles two with nuclear warheads, four conventional, a shoal of antis and slowed up from them. There would be time to observe the effects before the ship hit. Perhaps if the missiles weakened the shell enough no could burn tail-first through the wreckage, though he thought' it would be moving much too fast And a great starfield opened ahead of them, rich and incredibly of the blackness into it. Down fell into the treasure-house of the galaxy. This Interface had been set up without reference to the ship's equipment, still inert -- it was the work of the shell alone. Like the opening of a great fan the starry heavens swept up around them and the black disc of the Interface snapped shut. "My God we did it," Devlin exclaimed, the release of tension outstanding in his voice. "We forced them into it." For a moment McKay feared they had simply been passed through the shell to recede helplessly in space as perhaps they deserved -- but the instruments answered him. The black sphere astern was not the outside of the shell but the far side of the moon. The position of their Interface in relation to the relay satellite had been recreated by the transmitters on the shell -- so had the shell's intelligence known everything all along? Already the Earth was coming into view. They had in effect flown right through the moon -- it was impossible not to think of the vaster sphere as hidden somewhere within it. So in the end had there been life on the shell -- or was their deliverance a defensive reflex of the great artifact, running down unattended in the fading infrared? There would be only one way ever perhaps to find outbut there lay the Earth, still a world intact, and Me Kay knew he would never deliberately run an Interface into the lunar surface again.  publicity? He sat down, mumbling polite greetings to the polite Miss Susan. "And how may Femmikin International help you, Mr. Ellison?"  Continued from page # ) Give me a dream. Box up a fantasy for me. Fabricate a longing-saturator. Ship me tomorrow. And give me whatever it is you must give to make all of us believe it's real. That has got to be part of their package. George Ellison opened his mouth and began to tell the femmikin things he had never told anyone. And then he gave her his credit card. The blue creditor on the desk went beep and smiling Miss Susan handed back the card. He put it into his wallet and went out. He nodded automatically at the femmikin at the desk but did not look in the face of the man standing in front of her with a executive case in his hands. He went out through the plush wooden doors and across the torn up street and down Warchief towards the monorail station. He felt purged. And excited. And sad, as if he had been caught doing something a little dirty. Expect delivery no later than the twenty-eighth of next month, she had said in the nice smooth voice of Femmikin International and Femmikin International didn't lie. George Ellison felt empty. An empty wine glass to soon be filled. But with what? and the subsequent marketing of those products. Which brings us to Compton's only true innovation in this book. The society he depicts is a future society we may very well believe in -- one in which it is an accepted matter of course that all students are revolutionaries, and one in which ideological disagreement is often expressed in assassination. Meanwhile, the wheels of the marketing establishment continue to turn, because even revolutionaries aspire to the affluent life depicted in the media. Only Compton, thus far, has moved toward a depiction of what intellectual life will be like under ( Continued from page #) those conditions. What he does with it at this present juncture is very little, laced with smatterings from # undigested, and with that great scene in which a computer decides it's God... as if it had never heard of science fiction or of D.G. Compton -- an unlikely proposition. M ake no mistake about it -- antiestablishmentarianism is bred in our bones. Political expressions of it are mere expressions; what sane intelligent organism can help but resent the necessity to emerge from the womb and set about some ridiculous prescribed exercise whose only reward is subsistence toward the tomb? Which exercise it is is a mere matter of detail; whatever Simple Simon says is basically hateful. But of course we get along, as time goes by the real rebels are weeded out before they ever get to Second Grade. Still, the outrage is well remembered, and nurtured, as time goes by -- and kept in a secret place, out of need and in case of opportunity. That, and that alone, suffices to explain the worldwide popularity of Tarzan and his many cousins. That, and that alone, suffices to explain why it might strike a writer as a great notion to go through the intellectual exercise of proving that Tarzan won't work. Lord Tyger, by Philip Jose Farmer (Doubleday, #) may be such a book -- it says it is -- or it may in fact be a reaffirmation of the greatest faith (I think it is, and I suspect Farmer thinks so, too). In any event, it is an entertaining, rich, inventive adventure novel in the best sense, with its most lyricalpassages far surpassing any effect Edgar Rice Burroughs was ever able to achieve, and approaching the effect that The Jungle Book has on small boys. What it says it is is a novel about the central figure in an elaborate hoax -- a modern child of English nobility who is kidnapped by an immensely rich maniac and raised from infancy in a sequestered part of Africa by people who are paid to say they're apes. This synthetically derived noble savage, usually called Ras Tyger, then proceeds to blow up the whole mechanism, in part because it is already suffering from incursions of outside reality, such as jet planes and the fact that real apes can't raise human children, in part because he is a noble savage superman whose personality will not abide incursions, and in part because the author's first intention was to have it work out that way. I'll work back to what I mean by that, starting from here: All writing consists of arranging a systematic lie so as to achieve a resemblance to truth. This is somewhat more particularly true of fiction than it is of what is called, revealingly, nonfiction. On the other hand, attempting to lie successfully about something the reader knows isn't factually true is a tricky business. It takes more native wit to do that than it does to just give the facts in a plausible order. Consequently, most fiction -- even most good fiction, by "good" writers -- proceeds along the level of suspended disbelief, with the reader constantly aware that he is watching a construction, and admiring it on its merits as a construction. You can see this in children watching cartoons on TV, calling the plot turns in advance, and applauding the creator for having come up with the expected turn at the proper time. Most science-fiction writers, like most writers, write on this level. All writers, without exception, must include this level in their work, if only to create further effects beyond it. It is on this level that we can see, I think, Farmer's intention to set about proving that Ras Tyger would overpower Boygur the maniac, for all of Boygur's money and connections. (I am nol going even to think very much about the possibilities of a scholarly essay on Farmer's various levels of symbology). Some writers, including some science-fiction writers, write habitually in such a way that this level does become mere underpinning. Farmer is one of these; a crotchety, difficult man who accepts praise for the wrong things but denies blame of the same kind, and a general all-around secret harborer of thoughts in bad taste which emerge triumphant in his books. What counts about him is that he is an artist (and Lord Tyger offers excellent proof of this) because he does, indeed, by preference and nature work on what we can call the level of enforced belief -- or, if you need another way of describing the distinction between the constructionist and the artist, on the level of faith. Ras Tyger lives. It's as simple as that. It may be that Farmer's achievement is in some way made less by the fact that he is only telling us the same thing Burroughs told us and for which we made him at least as wealthy and powerful as Farmer made Boygur. But a piece of art is not only inexhaustible, it is infinite; you can knock hunks off Farmer's achievements all day -- and you probably should; the need may well be inherent in their naturebut you cannot diminish it. Lord Tyger is not on the face of it a major novel, but it lives, it still moves. Starting next issue in I WH I FFi AD un cu II I filLL rCi Robert A. Heinlein o O Me? I've been a rancher, a sculptor, a photographer of nude ladies, a motion-picture director, a cartoonist; and now, it seems. I'm a writer. My enemies, if any, would call me a dilettante -- my friends, a Renaissance Man. What it amounts to is that I like to do different things and can. and as soon as I get halfway good at something I go try something else. I've never formally studied what I've worked at professionally. although once I did go to art school. My view is that life should not be played on one note. I try to make it a symphony. I also laugh a lot. I've completed, but not yet published, a book of poetry written in my own blood and a children's book that Tim Kirk is illustrating. I live atop a Hollywood hill in a harem tent floored with "sleeping silks and furs." My TV set floats over a Don Simpson light show. In the garage is a Roman orgy room, complete with sunken tub. My chief interests are science fiction, archeology, the preservation -- or rather, the improvement -- of ecology. I like Corvettes, steak, making movies, beautiful women who are also intelligent, and I'm the greatest cinema fan there is. I'm a Jeffersonian liberal, a fast draw, a Romantic, and believe there are too many damn people in the world. We need "better" -- not "more." WiHiam Rofster, whose Ship Me Tomorrow appears in this issue, contributes the profile at left and one of his famous "Rotworth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. 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Ron Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health struck the English-speaking world like a thunderbolt. This best selling book heralded the breakthrough sought by Man for over # years, the discovery and identification of the source of psychosomatic ills, human aberration, unhappy interpersonal relationships and the technique to eradicate it! Many promises were made. Man could rid himself of all unwanted emotions, conditions and aberrations. He could attain higher states of existence and ability only dreamed about for centuries. Man could be totally free. Today, all the promises have been kept. 'Dianetics; the Modern Science of Mental Health' by L. Ron Hubbard. # pgs. # at most book stores and local Scientology Churches. Send mail orders with coupon with original book jacket. Dianetics was first announced to the public in a popular science fiction magazine in #. 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Get more exciting, vital information about Dianetics, Scientology and the Grand National Convention. Send your name and address to: Church of Scientology # South Westlake Los Angeles, Calif. # Name Address State Zip ri Enclosed is # for a copy of Dianetics: ' -- 'the Modern Science of Mental Health. Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. July, # Robert Silverberg R. A. Lafferty Vol. #, No. # editor Science editor feature editor Managing editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Robert A. Heinlein Publisher Associate Publisher Wilma Shore Dannie Plachta Andrew J. Offutt Anne McCaffrey Lauri Virta Algis Budrys lished monthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #t per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. If society persists in its present course the future holds great peril, whether from the uncontrolled effects of technology itself or from an unreasoned political reaction against technological innovation -- a reaction that could condemn mankind to poverty, frustration and the loss of freedom... The above is the conclusion reached by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences to assess the effects of technology on the 'condition of Earth and Man. The report, published in Scientific American, February #, noted in passing that "Asbestos is so diversely useful that it has found its way into every automobile, train, airplane, factory and home and thence into human lungs, where, remaining as indestructible as it is in nature, it can cause grave disease." Some of the yodels against ecological damage caused by technological evolution -- by persons who have just now looked up the definitions of the words -- do have an asbestos rasp and suggest serious illness. Coast to coast, demonstrations have urged unlikely if not impossible reversals in the condition of Man. Some featured sledgehammer assaults on unmanned automobiles -- first pollutingly driven to the scene. Others launched indiscriminate broadsides at electric and other industries without which modern man -- and the demonstrators themselves -- would probably refuse to survive. Back-to-nature proposals tend to run out of steam -- perhaps because we are part of nature. The artificial homo sapiens is an invention still waiting to happen -- a creation of philosophers and fictioneers. Animals and predators we are -- so ruthless that we have in fact become our own most dangerous environment. For those who prefer a long-term and more more constructive attack on the very real problems confronting us, views of Man's possible ecological future. One is Robert Silverberg's novelcovers a recent exhibit in Washington, D.C. under sponsorship of the Department of Urban Housing and Development and the Prudential Insurance Company. The exhibit, titled "The Architectural Vision of Paolo Soleri," attracted major attention in leading architectural journals as well as mass media -- and the remarkable thing is that Messrs. Silverberg and Soleri, working independently and unaware of each other, reached similar visions of human tomorrows. Both men see an erect society, single-structure cities towering tall as the mountains, freeing the rest of the global surface to wilderness and agriculture and providing Technological Man with all his needs and wants. Silverberg, pessimistically, sees a society so tightly organized that it's impossible for any human to say no to another -- and proper punishment is given those who do. Soleri's view is sunnier -- perhaps as befits a man working with structural materials. Neither Silverberg nor Soleri pretends to present final answers to Man's future on Earth -- each inde( Please turn to page # to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of your favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us -- and that's a double tragedy. It doesn't take a genius to handle it, either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. rate. I enclose my check or money order for:  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #  # issues of each for #.  Name Address City i State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues for postage Please check whether  new or  renewal I T he room was old-fashioned, # baroque, but it was wide, long, high, and luxurious. Near simulated view windows stood an automated hospital bed. It looked out of place but was largely concealed by a magnificent Chinese screen. Forty feet from it a boardroom table also failed to match the decor. At the head of this table was a life-support wheelchair; wires and tubings ran from it to the bed. Near the wheelchair, at a mobile stenodesk crowded with directional mikes, voice typewriter, clock-calendar, controls, and the usual ancillaries, a young woman sat. She was beautiful. Her manner was that of the perfect unobtrusive secretary but she was dressed in a current exotic mode, "Half  Half' -- right shoulder and breast and arm concealed in jet-black knit, left leg sheathed in a scarlet tight, pantyruffle in both colors joining them, black sandal on the scarlet side, red sandal on her bare right foot. Her skin paint was patterned in the same scarlet and black. On the other side of the wheelchair was an older woman garbed in a nurse's conventional white pantyhose and smock. She ignored everything but her dials and a patient in the chair. Seated around the table were a dozen-odd men, most of them in spectator-sports style affected by older executives. Cradled in the life-support chair was a very old man. Except for restless eyes, he looked like a poor job of embalming. No cosmetic help had been used to soften the brutal fact of his decrepitude. "Ghoul," he was saying softly to a man halfway down the table. "You're a slavering ghoul. Parky, me boy. Didn't your father teach you that it is polite to wait for a man to stop kicking before you bury him? Or did you have a father? Erase that last, Eunice. Gentlemen, Mr. Parkinson has moved that I be invited to resign as chairman of the board. Do I hear a second?" He waited, looking from face to face, then said, "Oh, come now! Who is letting you down. Parky? You, George?" "I had nothing to do with it." "But you would love to vote 'Aye.' Motion fails for want of a second." "I withdraw my motion." "Too late, Parkinson; Erasures are made only by unanimous consent, implied or overt. One objection is enough -- and I, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, do so object... and that rule controls because I wrote it before you learned to read. "But -- " Smith looked around at the others -- "I do have news. As you heard from Mr. Teal, all our divisions are in satisfactory shape; Sea Ranches and General Textbooks are more than satisfactory -- so this is a good time for me to retire." Smith waited, then said, "You can close your mouths. Don't look smug. Parky; I have more news for you. I stay on as chairman of the board but will no longer be chief executive. Our chief counsel, Mr. Jake Salomon, becomes deputy chairman and -- " "Hold it, Johann. I am not going to manage this five-ring circus." "Nobody said you would, Jake. But you can preside at board meetings when I'm not available. Is that too much to ask?" "Mmm, I suppose not." "Thank you. I'm resigning as president of Smith Enterprises, and Mr. Byram Teal becomes our president and chief executive officer -- he's doing the work; it's time he got the title -- and pay and stock options and all the perks and privileges and tax loopholes. No more than fair." Parkinson said, "Now see here. Smith!" "Hold it, youngster. Don't start a remark to me with 'Now see here -- ' Address me as 'Mr. Smith' or 'Mr. Chairman.' What is your point?" Parkinson controlled himself, then said, "Very well. Mister Smith. I can't accept this. Quite aside from promoting your assistant to the office of president in one jump -- utterly unheard of -- if there is a change in management,  must be considered. I represent the second largest block of voting stock." "I did consider you for president, Parky." "You did?" "Yep. I thought about it... and snickered." "Why, you -- " "Don't say it -- I might sue. What you forget is that my block has voting control. Now about your block -- By company policy anyone representing five percent or more of voting stock is automatically on the board even if nobody loves him and he suffers from spiritual bad breath. Which describes both you and me. "Or did describe you. Byram, what's the late word on proxies and stock purchases?" "A full report, Mr. Smith?" "No, just tell Mr. Parkinson where he stands." "Yes,, sir. Mr. Parkinson, you now control less than five percent of the voting stock." Smith added sweetly, "So you're fired, you young ghoul. Jake, call a special stockholders meeting, legal notice, all formalities, for the purpose of giving Parky a gold watch and kicking him out -- and electing his successor. Further business? None. Meeting's adjourned. Stick around, Jake. You, too, Eunice. And Byram, if you have anything on your mind." Parkinson jumped to his feet. "Smith, you haven't heard the last of this!" "Oh, no doubt," the old man said sweetly. "Meantime, my respects to your mother-in-law and tell her that Byram will go on making her rich even though I've fired you." Others started to leave. Smith said mildly, "Jake, how does a man get to be fifty years old without acquiring horse sense? Only smart thing that lad ever did was pick a rich mother-in-law. Yes, Hans?" "Johann," Hans von Ritter said, leaning on the table and speaking directly to the chairman, "I did not like your treatment of Parkinson." ."Thanks. You're honest with me to my face. Scarce these days." "Removing him from the board is okay; he's an obstructionist. But there was no need to humiliate him." "I suppose not. One of my little pleasures, Hans. I don't have many these days." A Simplex footman rolled in, hung the vacated chairs on a rack, rolled out; von Ritter continued: "# have no intention of being treated that way. If you want nothing but yes-men on your board, let us note that I control much less than five percent of the voting stock. Do you want my resignation?" "Good God, no! I need you, Hans -- and Byram will need you still more. I can't use trained seals; a man has to have the guts to disagree with me or he's a waste of space. But when a man bucks me, I want him to do it intelligently. You do. You've forced me to change my mind several times -- not easy, stubborn as I am. Now about this other -- sit down. Eunice, whistle up that easy chair for Dr. von Ritter." The chair approached; von Ritter waved it back, it retreated. "No, I haven't time to be cajoled. What do you want?" He straightened up; the boardroom table folded its legs, turned on edge and glided away through a slot in the wall. "Hans, I've surrounded myself with men who don't like me, not a yes-man or a trained seal among them. Even Byram -- especially Byram -- got his job by contradicting me and being right. Except when he's been wrong and that's why he needs men like you on the board. But Parkinson -- I was entitled to clip him -- publicly -- because he called for my resignation -- publicly. Nevertheless you are right, Hans; tit for tat is childish. Twenty years ago -- even ten -- I would never have humiliated a man. If a man operates by reflex, as most do instead of using their noggins, humiliating him forces him to try to get even. I know better. But I'm getting senile, as we all know." Von Ritter said nothing. Smith went on, "Will you stick? And help keep Byram steady?" "Uh... I'll stick. As long as you behave yourself." He turned to leave. "Fair enough. Hans? Will you dance at my wake?" Von Ritter looked back and grinned. "I'd be delighted!" "Thought so. Thanks, Hans. G'bye." Smith said to Byram Teal, "Anything, son?" "Assistant Attorney General coming from Washington tomorrow to talk to you about our Machine Tools Division buying control of Homecrafts, Ltd. I think -- " "To talk to you. If you can't handle him I picked the wrong man. What else?" "At Sea Ranch number five we lost a man at the fifty-fathom line. Shark." "Married?" "No, sir. Nor dependent parents." "Well, do the pretty thing, whatever it is. You have those videospools of me, the ones that actor fellow dubbed the sincere voice onto. When we lose one of our own we can't have the public thinking we don't give a hoot." Jake Salomon added, "Especially when we don't." Smith clucked at him. "Jake, do you have a way to look into my heart? It's our policy to be lavish with death benefits, plus the little things that mean so much." " -- and look so good. Johann, you don't have a heart -- just dials and machinery. Furthermore, you never did have." Smith smiled. "Jake, for you we'll make an exception. When you die, we'll try not to notice. No flowers, not even the customary black-bordered page in our house organs." "You won't have anything to say about it, Johann. I'll outlive you twenty years." "Going to dance at my wake?" "I don't dance," the lawyer answered, "but you tempt me to learn." "Don't bother. I'll outlive you. favorite tax deduction? No, I can't bet; I need your help to stay alive. Byram, check with me tomorrow. Nurse, leave us. I want to talk with my lawyer." "No, sir. Dr. Garcia wants a close watch on you at all times." Smith looked thoughtful. "Miss Bedpan, I acquired my speech habits before the Supreme Court took up writing dirty words on sidewalks. But I will try to use words plain enough for you to understand. I am your employer. I pay your wages. This is my home. I told you to get out. That's an order." The nurse looked stubborn, said nothing. Smith sighed. "Jake, I'm getting old -- I forget that they follow their own rules. Will you locate Dr. Garcia -- somewhere in the house -- and find out how you and I can have a private conference in spite of this too-faithful watch dog?" Shortly Dr. Garcia arrived, looked over dials and patient, conceded that telemetering would do for the time being. "Miss Macintosh, shift to the remote displays." "Yes, Doctor. Will you send for a nurse to relieve me? I want to quit this assignment." "Now, Nurse -- " "Just a moment. Doctor," Smith put in. "Miss Macintosh, I apologize for calling you 'Miss Bedpan.' Childish of me, another sign of increasing senility. But, Doctor, if she must leave -- I hope she won't -- bill me for a thousanddollar bonus for her. Her attention to duty has been perfect... despite many instances of unreasonable behavior on my part." "Uh -- see me outside. Nurse." left Salomon said dryly, "Johann, you are senile only when it suits you." Smith chuckled. "I do take advantage of age and illness. What other weapons have I left?" "Money." "Ah, yes. Without money I wouldn't be alive. But I am childishly bad-tempered these days. You could chalk it up to the fact that a man who has always been aclive feels frustrated by being imprisoned. But it's simpler to call it senility... since God and my doctor know that my body is senile." "I call it stinking bad temper, Johann, not senility -- since you can control it when you want to. Don't use it on me; I won't stand for it." Smith chuckled. "Never, Jake; I need you. Even more than I need Eunice -- though she's ever so much prettier than you. How about it, Eunice? Has my behavior been bad lately?" His secretary shrugged -- producing complex secondary motions pleasant to see. "You're pretty stinky at times. Boss. But I've learned to ignore it." "You see, Jake? If Eunice refused to put up with it -- as you do -- I'd be the sweetest boss in the land. As it is, I use her as a safety valve." Salomon said, "Eunice, any time you get fed up with this viletempered old wreck you can work for me, at the same salary or higher." "Eunice, your salary just doubled!" "Thank you. Boss;" she said promptly. "I've recorded it. And the time. I'll notify accounting." Smith cackled. "See why I keep her? Don't try to outbid me, you old goat. You don't have enough chips." "Senile," Salomon growled. "Speaking of money, whom do you want to put into Parkinson's slot?" "No rush, he was a blank file. Do ydu have a candidate, Jake?" "No. Although after this last little charade it occurs to me that Eunice might be a good bet." Eunice looked startled, then dropped all expression. Smith looked thoughtful. "It had not occurred to me. But it might be a perfect solution. Eunice, would the senior corporation?" Eunice flipped her machine to "Not Recording." "You're both making fun of me! Stop it." "My dear," Smith said gently, "you know I don't joke about money. As for Jake, it is the only subject sacred to him -- he sold his daughter and his grandmother down to Rio." "Not my daughter," Salomon objected. "Just grandmother... and the old girl didn't fetch much. But it gave us a spare bedroom." "But, Boss, I don't know anything about running a business!" "You wouldn't have to. Directors don't manage, they set policy. But you do know more about running it than most of our directors; you've been on the inside for years. Plus almost inside during the time you were my secretary's secretary before Mrs. Bierman retired. But here are advantages I see in what may have been a playful suggestion on Jake's part. You are already an officer of the corporation as Special Assistant Secretary assigned to record for the Board -- and I made you that, you'll both remember, to shut up Parkinson when he belly-ached about my secretary's being present during an executive session. You'll go on being that -- and my personal secretary, too; can't spare you -- while becoming a director. No conflict -- you'll simply vote as well as recording. Now we come to the vote the way Jake votes?" She looked solemn. "You wish me to, sir?" "Or the way I do if I'm present, which comes to the same thing. Think back and you'll see that Jake and I have always voted the same way on basic policy -- settling it ahead of time -- while wrangling and voting against each other on things that don't matter. Read the old minutes, you'll spot it." "I noticed it long ago," she said simply, "but didn't think it was my place to comment." "Jake, she's our new director. One more point, my dear: If it turns out that we need your spot, will you resign? You won't lose by it." "Of course, sir. I don't have to be paid to agree to that." "You still won't lose by it. I feel better. Eunice, I've had to turn management over to Teal; I'll be turning policy over to Jake -- you know the shape I'm in. I want Jake to have as many sure votes backing him as possible. Oh, we can always fire directors... but it is best not to have to do so, a fact von Ritter rubbed my nose in. Okay, you're a director. We'll formalize it at that stockholders meeting. Welcome to the ranks of the Establishment. Instead of a wage slave, you have sold out and are now a counter-revolutionary, warmongering, rat-fink, fascist dog. How does it feel?" N ot 'dog,' " Eunice objected. "The rest is lovely but dog is the wrong sex. I'm female. A bitch." "Eunice, I not only do not use such words with ladies around, you know that I do not care to hear them from ladies." "Can a rat-fink fascist be a lady? Boss, I learned that word in kindergarten. Nobody minds it today." "I learned it out behind the barn and let's keep it there." Salomon growled, "I don't have time to listen to amateur lexicologists. Is the conference over?" "What? Not at all! Now comes the top-secret part, the reason I sent the nurse out. So gather ye round." "Johann, before you talk secrets; let me ask one question. Does that bed have a mike on it? Your chair may be bugged, too." "Eh?" The old man looked thoughtful. "I used a call button... until they started standing a heel-and-toe watch on me." "Seven to two you're bugged. Eunice my dear, can you trace the circuits and make sure?" "Uh... I doubt it. The circuitry isn't much like my stenodesk. But I'll look." Eunice left her desk, studied the console on the back of the wheel-chair. "These two dials almost certainly have mikes hooked to them; they're respiration and heart beat. But they don't show voices -- my voice does not make the needles jiggle. Filtered out, I suppose. But -- " she looked thoughtful -- "voice could be pulled off either circuit ahead of a filter. I do something like that, in reverse, whenever I record with a high' background db. I n don't know what these other dials do. Darn it, I might spot a voice circuit... but I could never be sure that there was not one. Or two. Or three. I'm sorry." "Don't be sorry, dear," the lawyer said soothingly. "There hasn't been real privacy in this country since the middle of the twentieth century -- why, I could phone a man I know of and have you photographed in your bath and you would never know it." "Really? What a dreadful idea. How much does this person charge for such a job?" "Plenty. Depends on difficulty and how much chance he runs of being prosecuted. Never less than a couple of thousand and then up like a kite. But he can do it." "Well!" Eunice looked thoughtful, then smiled. "Mr. Salomon, if you ever decide that you must have a picture of me, phone me for a competitive bid. My husband has an excellent Chinese camera and I would rather have him photograph me in my bath than some stranger." "Order, please," Smith said mildly. "Eunice, if you want to sell skin pictures to that old lecher, do it on your own time. I don't know anything about these gadgets but I know how to solve this. Eunice, go out to where they telemeter me -- I think it's next door in what used to be my upstairs lounge. You'll find Miss Macintosh there. Hang around three minutes. I'll wait two minutes, then I'll call out: 'Miss Macintosh! Is Mrs. Branca there?' If you hear me, we'll know she's snooping. If you don't, come back at the end of three minutes." "Yes, sir. Do I give Miss Macintosh any reason for this?" "Give the old battle-axe any stall you like. I simply want to know if she is eavesdropping." "Yes, sir." Eunice started to leave the room. She pressed the door switch just as its buzzer sounded. The door snapped aside, revealing Miss Macintosh, who jumped in surprise. The nurse recovered and said bleakly to Mr. Smith, "May I come in for a moment?" "Certainly." "Thank you, sir." The nurse went to the bed, pulled its screen aside, touched four switches on its console, replaced the screen. Then she planted herself in front of her patient and said, "Now you have complete privacy, so far as my equipment is concerned. Sir." "Thank you." "I am not supposed to cut the voice monitors except on doctor's orders. But you had privacy anyhow. I am as bound to respect a patient's privacy as a doctor is. I never listen to sickroom conversation. I don't even hear it! Sir." "Get your feathers down. If you weren't listening, how did you know we were discussing the matter?" "Oh! Because my name was mentioned. Hearing my name triggers me to listen. It's a conditioned reflex. Though I don't suppose you believe me." "On the contrary, I do. Nurse -- please switch on whatever you switehed off. Then bear in mind that I must talk privately and I'll remember not to mention your name. But I'm glad to know that I can reach you so promptly. To a man in my condition that is a comfort." "Uh -- very well, sir." "And I want to thank you for putting up with my quirks. And bad temper." She almost smiled. "Oh, you're not so difficult, sir. I once put in two years in an N.P. hospital." Smith looked startled, then grinned. "Touchel Was that where you acquired your hatred for bedpans?" "It was indeed. Now if you will excuse me, sir -- " When she was gone, Salomon said, "You really think she won't listen?" "Of course she will, she can't help it, she's already triggered and will be trying too hard not to listen. But she's proud, Jake, and I would rather depend on pride than gadgetry. Okay, I'm getting tired, so here it is in a lump. I want to buy a body. A young one." showed reaction. Jake Salomon's features dropped into the mask he used for poker and district attorneys. Presently Eunice said, "Am I to record, sir?" "No. Oh, hell, yes. Tell that sewing machine to make one copy for each of us and wipe the tape. File mine in my destruct file; file yours in your destruct file -- and, Jake, hide your copy in the file you use to outwit the Infernal Revenue Service." "I'll file it in the still safer place I use for guilty clients. Johann, anything you say to me is privileged but I am bound to point out Ballantine Books IT IS June and science fiction is proliferating away at the Milford Workshop and in other enlightened courses and areas all around the country. Summertime in hardcover publishing, traditionally a lazy, easy time, is a period of frenzied activity for paperbounders. The catalog for Fall was all done by the end ot May. Now comes the time when the books which were a gleam in someone's eye a month ago have to be translated into a reality -- or the catalog becomes a wicked lie. This year is particularly frenzied because of the high immediacy quotient in many of th' environmental books we are doing. It is with a sigh of relief that one can turn to something staid, steady and reliable, like s.f.  that the D.A.R. disapproves of this environmental flap -- we must be on the right track. Not that we are fanatic. Anybody who wants to is welcome to believe it's all a Marxian plot to divert attention from American high living. Ourselves, we simply believe ifs high fime folks get their sexual kicks from sex and not from big cars, TV sets, and electric toothbrushes...) Smith this month, in a volume titled dent iridescence, just to prove that not all Adult Fantasy is fun and fairies... It's rich stuff, vivid and powerful, with a great cover by George Barr. And this month it's a varied group of the master's later short stories to celebrate the reissue of three earlier collections, also availall in the numbers, right?). And this month, a newcomer to the fold -- R.W. Mackelworth. His first novel, a strangely haunting tale of the remnants of life surviving in a world of deathly cold, living on dreams of "the warm." Remember that theory about the polar icecaps and a pull on the Earth's floating crust? Or alternatively a shift in the axis? It could lead to a lot of excitemenf -- and does, in  certainly be doing a book about garbage -- but that's a goodie to come. BB that the Canons forbid me to advise a client in how to break the law, or to permit a client to discuss such intention. As for Eunice, anything you say to her or in her presence is not privileged." "Oh, come off it, you old shyster; you've advised me in how to break the law twice a week for years. As for Eunice, nobody can get anything out of her short of all-out brainwash." "I didn't say I always followed the Canons; I merely told you what they called for. I won't deny that my professional ethics have a little stretch in them -- but I won't be party to anything smelling of bodysnatching, kidnapping, or congress with slavery. Any self-respecting prostitute -- meaning me -- has limits." "Spare me the sermon, Jake; what I want is both moral and ethical. I need your help to see that all of it is legal -- utterly legal, can't cut corners on this -- and practical." "I hope so." "I know so. I said I wanted to buy a body -- legally. That rules out bodysnatching, kidnapping, and slavery. I want to make a legal purchase." "You can't." "Why not? Take this body," Smith said, pointing to his chest. "It's not worth much even as manure; nevertheless I can will it to a medical school. You know I can. You okayed it." "Oh. Let's get our terms straight. In the United States there can be no chattel ownership of a human being. Thirteenth Amendment. Therefore your body is not your property because you can't sell it. But a cadaver is property -- usually of the estate of the deceased... although a cadaver is not often treated the way other chattels are treated. But it is indeed property. If you want to buy a cadaver, it can be arranged -- but whom were you calling a ghoul earlier?" "What is a cadaver, Jake?" "Eh? A dead body, usually of a human. So says Webster. The legal definition is more complicated but comes to the same thing." "It's that 'more complicated' aspect I'm getting at. Okay, once it is dead, it is property and maybe we can buy it. But what is 'death,' Jake, and when does it take place? Never mind Webster; what is the an?" "Oh. Law is what the Supreme Court says it is. Fortunately this point was nailed down in the 'seventies -- Estate of Henry M. Parsons vs. Rhode Island. For years, many centuries, a man was dead when his heart quit beating. Then, for about a century, he was dead when a licensed M.D. examined him for heart action and respiration and certified that he was dead -- and sometimes that turned out grisly, as doctors do make mistakes. And then along came the first heart transplant and oh, mother, what a legal snarl that stirred up! "But the Parsons case settled it -- a man is dead when all brain activity has stopped, permanently." "And what does that mean?" Smith persisted. "The court declined to define it. But in application -- look, Johann, I'm a corporation lawyer, not a specialist in medical jurisprudence nor in forensic medicine -- and I would have to research before I -- " "Okay, so you're not God. You can revise your remarks later. What do you know now?" "When the exact moment of death is important, as it sometimes is in estate cases, as it often is in accident, manslaughter and murder cases, as it always is in an organ transplant case, some doctor determines that the brain has quit and isn't going to start up again. They use various tests and talk about 'irreversible coma' and 'complete absence of brain wave activity' and 'cortical damage beyond possibility of repair -- ' but it all comes down to some M.D. laying his reputation and license on the line to certify that this brain is dead and won't come alive again. Heart and lungs are now irrelevant. They are classed with hands and feet and gonads and other parts that a man can do without or have replaced. It's the brain that counts. Plus a doctor's opinion about that brain. In transplant cases there are almost always at least two doctors in no way connected with the operation and probably a coroner as well. Not because the Supreme Court requires it -- in fact only a few of the fifty-four states have legislated in re thanatotic requirements -- but -- " "Just a moment, Mr. Salomon -- that odd word. My typewriter has placed a query after it." Eunice kept her hand over the "Hold" light. "How did your typer spell it?" "T-H-A-N-A-T-O-T-I-C." "Smart machine. It's the technical adjective referring to death. From the Greek god Thanatos, Death." "Half a second while I tell it so." Eunice touched the "Memory" switch with her other hand, whispered briefly, then said, "It feels better if I reassure it at once. Go ahead." She lifted her hand from the "Hold" light. "Eunice, are you under the impression that that machine is alive?" S HE blushed, then touched "Erase" and covered "Hold." "No, Mr. Salomon. But it does behave better with me than with any other operator. It can get downright sulky if it doesn't like the way it is handled." "I can testify to that," Smith agreed. "If Eunice takes a day off, her relief had better fetch her own gadgets or fall back on shorthand. Listen, dear, knock off the chatter. Talk with Jake about the care and feeding of machines some other time; great-grandfather wants to go to bed." "Yes, sir." She lifted her hand. "Johann, I was saying that in transplant cases the medical profession has set up tight rules or customs, both to protect themselves from criminal and civil actions and also, I am sure, to forestall restrictive legislation. They have to get that heart out while it's still alive and nevertheless protect themselves from indictments for damage suits. So they spread the responsibility thin and back each other up." "Yes," agreed Smith. "Jake, you haven't told me a thing I didn't know -- but you have relieved my mind by confirming facts and law. Now I know it can be done. Okay, I want a healthy body between ages twenty and forty, still warm, heart still working and no other damage too difficult to repair... but with the brain legally dead, dead, dead. I want to buy that cadaver and have this brain -- mine -- transplanted into it." Eunice held perfectly still. Jake blinked. "When do you want this body? Later today?" "Oh, next Wednesday ought to be soon enough. Garcia says he can keep me going." "I suggest later today. And get you a new brain at the same time -- that one has quit functioning." "Knock it off, Jake; I'm serious. My body is falling to pieces. But my mind is clear and my memory isn't bad -- ask me yesterday's closing prices on every stock we are interested in. I can still do logarithmic calculations without tables; I check myself every day. Because I know how far gone I am. Look at me -- worth so many megabucks that it's silly to count them. But with a body held together with Scotch tape and string -- I ought to be in a museum. "Now, all my life I've heard 'You can't take it with you.' Well, eight months ago when they tied me down with all this undignified plumbing and wiring, having nothing better to do I started thinking about that old saw. I decided that, if I couldn't take it with me, I wasn't going to go!" "Humph! 'You'll go when the wagon comes.' " "Perhaps. But I'm going to spend as much as necessary of that silly stack of dollars to try to beat the game. Will you help?" "Johann, if you were talking about a routine heart transplant, I would say Good luck and God bless you! But a brain transplant -- have you any idea what that entails?" "No, and neither do you. But I know more about it than you do -- I've had endless time to read up. No need to tell me that no successful transplant of a human brain has ever been made; I know it. No need to tell me that the Chinese have tried it several times and failed -- although they have three basket cases still alive if my informants are correct." "Do you want to be a basket case?" "No. But there are two chimpanzees climbing trees and eating bananas this very day -- and each has the brain the other one started with." "Oho! That Australian." "Dr. Lindsay Boyle. He's the surgeon I must have." "Boyle. There was a scandal, wasn't there? They ran him out of Australia." "So they did, Jake. Ever hear of professional jealousy? Most neurosurgeons are wedded to the notion that a brain transplant is too complicated. But if you dig into it you will find the same opinions expressed fifty years ago about heart transplants. If you ask neurosurgeons about those chimpanzees, the kindest thing any of them will say is that it's a fake -- even though there are motion pictures of both operations. Or they talk about the many failures Boyle had before he learned how. Jake, they hate him so much they ran him out of his home country when he was about to try it on a human being. Why, those bastards -- excuse me, Eunice." "My machine is instructed to spell that word as 'scoundrel'." "Thank you, Eunice." "Where is he now, Johann?" "In Buenos Aires." "Can you travel that far?" "Oh, no! Well, perhaps I could, in a plane big enough for these mechanical monstrosities they use to keep me alive. But first we need that body. And the best possible medical center for computer-assisted surgery. And a support team of surgeons. And all the rest. Say Johns Hopkins. Or Stanford Medical Center." "I venture to say that neither one will permit this unfrocked surgeon to operate." "Jake, Jake, of course they will. Don't you know how to bribe a university?" "I've never tried it." Y OU do it with really big chunks of money, openly, with an academic procession to give it dignity. But first you find out what they want -- football stands, or a particle accelerator, or an endowed chair. But the key is plenty of money. From my point of view it is better to be alive and young again, and broke, than it is to be the richest corpse in Forest Lawn." Smith smiled. "It would be exhilarating to be young -- and broke. So don't spare the shekels. "I know you can set it up for Boyle; it's just a question of whom to bribe and how -- in the words of Bill Gresham, a man I knew a long time ago: 'Find out what he wants -- he'll geek!' "But the toughest problem involves no bribery but simply a cating that warm body. Jake, in this country over ninety thousand people per year are killed in traffic accidents alone -- call it two hundred and fifty each day -- and a lot of those victims die of skull injuries. A fair percentage are between twenty and forty years old and in good health aside from a broken skull and a ruined brain. The problem is to find one while the body is still alive, then keep it alive and rush it to surgery." "With wives and relatives and cops and lawyers chasing along behind." "Certainly. If money and organization weren't used beforehand. Finders' fees -- call them something else. Life-support teams and copters equipped for them always standing by, near the worst concentrations of dangerous traffic. Contributions to highway patrol relief funds, thousands of release forms ready to sign, lavish payment to the estate of the deceased Oh, yes, nearly forgot -- I've got an odd blood type and any transplant is more likely to take if they don't have to fiddle with swapping blood. ple in this country with blood matching mine. Not an impossible number when you cut it down still further by age span -- twenty to forty -- and good health. Call it three hundred thousand, tops. Jake, if we ran big newspaper ads and bought prime time on video, how many people could we flush out of the bushes? If we dangled a buck in escrow with Chase Manhattan Bank for the estate of the accident victim whose body is used? With a retainer to any prospective donor and his spouse who will sign up in advance." "Johann, I'm durned if I know. But I would hate to be married to a woman who could collect a million dollars by 'accidentally' hitting me in the head with a hammer. "Details, Jake. Write it so that no one can murder and benefit by it -- and suicide must be excluded, too; I don't want blood on my hands. The real problem is to locate healthy young people who have my blood type, and feed their names and addresses into a computer." "Excuse me, Mr. Smith, but have you thought of consulting the Rare Blood Club?" "Be darned! I am growing senile. No, I hadn't, Eunice -- and how do you happen to know about it?" "I'm a member, sir." "Then you're a donor, dear?" Smith sounded pleased and impressed. "Yes, sir. Type AB-Negative." "Be darned twice. Used to be a donor myself -- until they told me I was too old, long before you were born. And your type -- AB-Negative." "I thought you must be, sir, when you mentioned the number. So small. Only about a third of one percent of us in the population. My husband is AB-Negative, too, and a donor. You see -- well, I met Joe early one morning when we were both called to give blood to a new-born and its mother." "Well, hooray for Joe Branca! I knew he was smart -- he grabbed you, didn't he? I had not known that he was an Angel of Mercy as well. Tell you what, dear -- when you get home tonight, tell Joe that all he has to do is to dive into a dry swimming pool... and you'll be not only the prettiest widow in town -- but the richest." "Boss, you have a nasty .sense of humor. I wouldn't swap Joe for keep you warm on a cold night." "As I know to my sorrow, dear. Jake, can my will be broken?" "Any will can be broken. But I don't think yours will be. I tried to build fail-safes into it." "Suppose I make a new will along the same general lines but with some changes -- would it stand up?" "No." "Why not?" Y OU said it yourself. Senility. Any time a rich man dies at an advanced age with a new will anyone with an interest in breaking it -- your granddaughters, I mean -- will try to break it, alleging senility and undue influence. I think they would succeed." "Darn. I want to put Eunice be tempted to kill her AB-Negative husband." "Boss, you're making fun of me again. Nasty fun." "Eunice. I told you that I do not joke about money. How do we handle it, Jake? Since I'm too senile to make a will." "Well, the simplest way would be an insurance policy with a paidup single premium... which would cost, in view of your age and health, slightly more than a million, I surmise. But she would get it even if your will was broken." "Mr. Salomon, don't listen -- " "Johann, do you want that million to revert to you if by any long chance you outlive Eunice?" "Mmm... no, if it did, a judge might decide to look at the matter -- and God himself doesn't know what a judge will do these days. Make the Red Cross the residuary. No, make it the Rare Blood Club." "Very well." "Get it paid up first thing in the morning. No, do it tonight; I may not live till morning. Get an underwriter -- Jack Towers, maybe -- pawnshop of his and get a certified check. Use my power of attorney, not your own money, or you might be stuck for it. Get the signature of a responsible officer of the insurance company, then you can go to bed." "Yes, Great Spirit. I'll vary that; I'm a better lawyer than you are. But the policy will be in force before night -- with your money, not mine. Eunice, be careful not to kick those hoses and wires as you go out. But tomorrow you needn't be careful -- as long as you don't get caught." She sniffed. "You each have a nasty sense of humor. Boss, I'm going to erase this. I don't want a ing, not from you dying." "If you don't want it, Eunice," her employer said gently, "you can step aside and let the Rare Blood Club have it." "Uh... Mr. Salomon, is that correct?" "Yes, Eunice. But money is nice to have, especially when you don't have it. Your husband might be annoyed if you turned down a "Uh -- " Mrs. Branca shut up. "Take care of it, Jake. While thinking about how to buy a warm body. And how to get Boyle here and get him whatever permission he needs to do surgery in this country. And so forth. And tell -- no. I'll tell her. Miss Macintosh!" "Yes, Mr. Smith?" came a voice from the bed console. "Get your team in; I want to go to bed." "Yes, sir. I'll tell Dr. Garcia." Jake stood up. "Good day, Johann. You're a crazy fool." "Probably. But I do have fun with my money." "So you do. Eunice, may I run you home?" "Oh, no, sir, thank you. My Gadabout is in the basement." "Eunice," said her boss, "can't you see that the old goat wants to take you home? So be gracious. One of my guards will take your Gadabout home." "Uh... thank you, Mr. Salomon. I accept. Get a good night's sleep. Boss." They started to leave. "Wait, Eunice," Smith commanded. "Hold that pose. Jake, pipe those gams! Eunice, that's obsolete slang meaning that you have pretty legs." "So you have told me before, sir -- and so my husband often tells me. Boss, you're a dirty old man." He cackled. "So I am, my dear... and have been since I was six. I'm happy to say." to her cloak, rode down with her to the basement, waved his uards aside and handed her into is car. Shotgun locked them in, got in by driver-guard and locked that compartment. As she sat down Mrs. Branca said, "Oh, how big Mr. Salomon, I knew a Rolls was roomy -- but I've never been in one before." "A Rolls only by courtesy, my dear -- body by Skoda, power plant by Imperial Atomics, then RollsRoyce pretties it and backs it with their reputation and service. You should have seen a Rolls fifty years ago, before gasoline engines were outlawed. There was a dream car!" "This one is dreamy enough. Why, my little Gadabout would fit inside this compartment." A voice from the ceiling said, "Orders, sir?" Mr. Salomon touched a switch. "One moment, Rockford." He lifted his hand. "Where do you live, Eunice? Or the coordinates of wherever you want to go?" "Oh. I'll go home. North one one eight, west thirty-seven, then up to level nineteen -- though I doubt that this enormous car will fit into the vehicle lift." "If not, Rocky and his partner will escort you up the passenger lift and to your door." "That's nice. Joe doesn't want me to ride passenger lifts by myself." "Joe is right. So we'll deliver you like a courier letter. Eunice, are you in a hurry?" "Me? Joe expects me when I get there, Mr. Smith's working hours being so irregular now. Today I'm quite early." "Good." Mr. Salomon again touched the intercom switch. "Rockford, we're going to kill some time. Uh, Mrs. Branca, what zone for those coordinates? Eighteen something?" "Nineteen-B, sir." "Find a cruising circle near nineteen-B; I'll give you coordinates later." "Very good, sir." Salomon went on to Eunice. "This compartment is soundproof unless I thumb this switch; they can't hear us. Which is good as I want to discuss things with you and make phone calls about that insurance policy." "Oh? Surely that was a joke." "Joke, eh? Mrs. Branca, I have been working for Johann Smith for twenty-six years, the last fifteen with his affairs as my sole practice. Today he made me de facto chairman of his industrial empire. Yet if I failed to carry out his orders about that insurance policy -- tomorrow I would be out of a job." "Oh, surely not! He depends on you." "He depends on me as long as he can depend on me and not one minute longer. That policy must be written tonight. I thought you had quit fretting when you learned that you could step aside for the Rare Blood Club?" "Well, yes. Except that I'm afraid I might get greedy and take it. When the time comes." "And why not? The Rare Blood Club has done nothing for him; you have done much." "I'm well paid." "Listen, you silly child, don't be a silly child. He wanted you to And he wanted you to know it so that he could enjoy seeing your face. I pointed out that it is too late to change his will. Even this insurance gimmick is chancy if his natural heirs get a look at the books and discover it -- which I shall try to prevent -- as a judge might decide it was just a dodge -- as it is -- and require the insurance company to pay it to his estate. Which is where the Rare Blood Club comes in handy; they would probably fight it and win, if you cut them in for half. "But there are other ways. Suppose you knew nothing about this and were invited to the reading of his will and discovered that your deceased employer had bequeathed you a lifetime income 'in grateful appreciation of long and faithful service.' Would you turn it down?" "Uh -- " she said, and stopped. " 'Uh,' " he repeated. "Exactly, 'Uh.' Of course you wouldn't turn it down. He'd be gone and you'd be out of a job and there would be no reason to refuse it. So, instead of a lump sum so big it embarrasses you, I'm going to write a policy that sets up a trust to pay you an annuity." He paused to think. "A safe return, after taxes, on a trust is about four percent. What would you say to around seven hundred and fifty a week? Would that upset you?" "Well... no. I understand seven hundred and fifty dollars' much better than I understand a million." "The beauty of it is that we can use the principal to insure against inflation -- and you can still Rare Blood Club when your own Black Camel kneels." "Really? How wonderful! I never will understand high finance." "That's because most people think of money as something to pay the rent. But a money man thinks of money in terms of what he can do with it. Never mind. I'll fix it so that all you need do is spend it. I'll use a Canadian insurance company and a Canadian bank, as each will be stuffy about letting a U.S. Court look at its records. In case his granddaughters find out what I've done, I mean." "Oh. Mr. Salomon, shouldn't this money go to them?" "Again, don't be silly. They are harpies. Snapping turtles. And had nothing to do with making this money. Do you know anything about Johann's family? Outlived three wives -- and his fourth married him for his money and it cost His first wife gave him a son and died in doing so -- then Johann's son was killed trying to capture a worthless hill. Two more wives, two divorces, a daughter by each of those two wives, resulting in a total of four granddaughters -- and those ex-wives and their daughters are all dead, and their four carnivorous descendants have been waiting for Johann to die and are sore at him because he hasn't." Salomon grinned. "They're in for a shock. I wrote his will so as to give them small lifetime incomes -- and chop them off with a nominal dollar if they contest. Now excuse me. I must make phone calls, then take you home and run over to Canada and nail this down." "Yes, sir. Do you mind if I take off my cloak? It's rather warm." "Want the cooling turned up?" "Only if you are too warm. But this cloak is heavier than it looks." "I noticed it was heavy. Body armor?" "Yes. sir. I'm out by myself quite a lot." "No wonder you're too warm. Take it off. Take off anything you wish to." She grinned at him. "I wonder if you are a dirty old man, too. For "Not a durned dime! Shut up, child, and let me phone." "Yes, sir." Mrs. Branca wiggled out of her cloak, then raised the leg rest on her side, stretched out, and relaxed. really going to be rich? Doesn't seem real... well. I'm not going to spend a dime -- or let Joe spend it -- unless it's safe in the bank... learned that the hard way first year we were married... some men understand money -- such as Mr. Salomon, or Boss -- and some don't, such as Joe... but as sweet a husband as a girl could wish... as long as I never again let him share a joint account... Dear Joe! Those are pretty gams if you do say so as shouldn't, you bitch. 'Bitch -- ' how quaint Boss is with his old-fashioned taboos... always necessary not to shock him -- not too much, that is; Boss enjoys a slight flavor of shock, like a whiff of garlic... especially necessary not to annoy him with language everybody uses nowadays... Joe is good for a girl, never have to be careful around him... except about money... Wonder what Joe would think if he could see me locked in this luxurious vault with this old goat... probably be amused but best not to tell him, dearie; men's minds don't work the way ours do, men are not logical... wrong to think of Mr. Salomon as an 'old goat' though; he certainly has not acted like one... you had to reach for that provocative remark, didn't you, dear? Just to see what he would say... and found out! Got squelched -- Is he too old? Hell, no, dear, the way they hike 'em up with hormones a man is never too old until he's too feeble to move... the way Boss is... not that Boss ever made the faintest pass even years back when he was still in fair shape... Does Boss really expect to regain his youth by transplanting his brain? Arms and legs and kidneys and even hearts, sure, sure -- but a brain? telephone. "Done," he announce. "All but signing papers which I'll do in Toronto this evening." "I'm sorry to be so much trouble, sir." "My pleasure." "I do appreciate it. And I must think about how to thank Boss -- didn't thank him today but didn't think he meant it." "Don't thank him." "Oh, but I must. But I don't know how. How does one thank a seem insincere?" "Hmm! There are ways. But, in this case, don't. My dear, you delighted Johann when you showed no trace of gratitude; I know him. Too many people have thanked him in the past... then figured him as an easy mark and tried to bleed him again. Then tried to knife him when he turned out not to be. So don't thank him. Sweet talk he does not believe; he figures it's always aimed at his money. I notice you're spunky with him." "I have to be, sir, or he tromps on me. He had me in tears a couple of times -- years back -- before I found out he wanted me to stand up to him." "You see? The old tyrant 'is making bets with himself as to whether you'll come trotting in tomorrow and lick his hand like a dog. So don't even mention it. Tell me about yourself, Eunice -- age, how long you've been married and how often, number of children, childhood diseases, why you aren't on video, what your husband does, how you got to be Johann's secretary, number of arrests and for what -- or tell me to go to hell; you are entitled to privacy. But I would like to know you better; we are going to be working together from here on." "I don't mind answering." (I'll tell just what I want to tell!) "But does this work both ways?" She stopped to let down the leg rest, straightened up. "Do I quiz you the same way?" He chuckled. "Certainly. I may take the Fifth. Or lie." "I could lie, too, sir. But I don't need to. I'm twenty-eight and married once and still am. No children -- no children yet; I'm licensed for three. As for my job -- well, I won a beauty contest at eighteen, the sort that offers a one-year contract making appearances around your home state, plus a video test with an option for a seven-year contract -- " "And they didn't pick up your option. I'm astonished." "Not that, sir. Instead I took stock of myself -- and quit. Winning that state contest and then losing the national contest made me realize how many pretty girls there are. Too many. And some things I heard from them about what you have to go through to get into video and stay there... well, I didn't want it that much. And went back to school and took an associate's degree in secretarial electronics, with a minor in computer language and cybernetics, and went looking for a job." (And I'm not going to tell you how I got through school!) "And eventually filled in as Mrs. Bierman's secretary while her regular secretary had a baby... then she didn't come back and I stayed on... and when Mrs. Bierman retired. Boss let me fill in. And kept me on. So here I am -- a very lucky girl." "A very smart girl. But I'm sure your looks had much to do with Johann's decision to keep you on." "I know they did," she answered quietly. "But he would not have kept me had I not been able to do his work. I know how I look but I'm not conceited about it; appearance is a matter of heredity." "So it is," he agreed, "but there are impressive data to show that beautiful women are, on the average, more intelligent than homely ones." "Oh, I don't think so! Take Mrs. Bierman -- downright homely. But she was terribly smart." "I said on the average," he repeated. "What is beauty? A lady hippopotamus must look beautiful to her boy friend, or we would run out of hippopotamuses -- potami -- in one generation. What we think of as physical beauty is almost, certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness -- intelligence -- among them. Do you think that a male hippo would think you beautiful?" She giggled. "Not likely!" "You see? In reality you're no prettier than a female hippopotamus; you are simply an inherited complex of survival characteristics useful to your species." "I suppose so." (Humph! Give me one opening and I'll show you what I am.) "But since Johann -- and I -- are of your species, what that means to us is beauty. Which Johann appreciates." quietly,. She straightened her scarlet-covered leg in full extension and looked at it. "I dress this way to amuse Boss. When I first went to work for Smith Enterprises I wore as little as the other girls in the outer offices -- you know, skin paint and not much else. Then, when I went to work for Mrs. Bierman, I started dressing quite modestly because she did -- covered up all over, I mean, like Nurse Macintosh -- not even a seethrough. Uncomfortable. I went on dressing that way when Mrs. Bierman left. Until one morning I had only one such outfit -- I wore disposables, cheaper than having them cleaned -- and spilled coffee down the front and was caught with nothing to wear. "And no time to buy anything for I was more afraid of being late -- you know how impatient Mr. Smith is -- than I was that he might disapprove of my dress. Or lack of it. So I gritted my teeth and got out an office-girl bikini and asked Joe to paint me and hurry it up. Joe's an artist, did I say?" "I don't believe so." "He is. He does my skin painting, even styles my face. But I was late anyhow that morning as Joe really is an artist and refused to let it go with just spraying me the background color. The two-piecee was white with asorted sizes of big blue polka dots... and Joe insisted on continuing the pattern all over me, with me cussing and telling him to hurry and him insisting on painting just one more big polka dot. I was so late that I cut through an Abandoned Area I ordinarily circled around." "Eunice, you should never go into an Abandoned Area. Good God, child, even the police don't risk it other than in a car as well armored as this one. You could be mugged, raped and murdered and no one would ever know." "Yes, sir. But I was scared of losing my job. I tried to explain to Boss why I was late and he told me to shut up and go to work. Nevertheless, he was unusually mellow that day. The next day I wore the sort of full cover-up I had been wearing -- and he was downright mean all day. Mr. Salomon, I don't have to be slapped in the face with a wet fish; from then on I quit trying to look like a nun and dressed and painted to enhance what I've got as effectively as possible." "It's effective. But, dear, you should be more careful. It's all very well to wear sexy clothes for Johann; that's charity. The old wretch can't get much pleasure out of life and is no threat to you, the shape he is in." "He never was a threat, sir. In all the years I've worked for Mr. Smith he has never so much as touched my hand. He just makes flattering remarks about each new getup -- sometimes quite salty and then I sass him and threaten to tell my husband, which makes him cackle. All innocent as Sunday school." ( Please turn to page # ) I Shanghai, though just barely: his apartment is on the #st floor, and if he lived only one level lower he would be in Chicago, which is no place for a scholar. His wife Micaela frequently tells him that their lowly status in Shanghai is a direct reflection of the quality of his work. Micaela is the sort of wife who often says things like that. Jason spends most of his working time down in Pittsburgh, where the archives are. He is a historian and needs to consult the documents, the records of how it used to be. He does his research in a clammy little cubicle on the urbmon's #th floor, almost in the middle of Pittsburgh. He does not really have to work down there, since anything in the archives can easily be piped up to the data terminal in his own apartment. But he feels it is a matter of professional pride to have an office where he can file and arrange and handle the source materials. He said as much when he was pulling person in an urban monad. When strings to have the office assigned more than # people live unto him; "The task of recreating der the same roof, absolute social previous eras is a delicate and harmony is essential. He knows complex one, which must be perthat if he loses his temper and beformed under optimal circumhaves in a seriously unblessworthy stances, or -- " way they simply throw him down The truth is that if he didn't esthe chute and turn his mass into cape from Micaela and their five energy. So he is careful, littles every day, he'd go flippo. He is a short, soft-spoken man That is, accumulated frustration with mild green eyes and thinning and humiliation would cause him sandy hair. "Your meek exterior to commit nonsocial acts, perhaps is deceptive," lovely Mamelon violent ones. He is aware that Kluver told him throatily at a parthere is no room for the nonsocial ty last summer. "Your type is like a sleeping volcano. You explode suddenly, astonishingly, passionately." He thinks she may be right. He fears the possibilities. He has been desperately in love with Mamelon Kluver for perhaps the last three years, and certainly since the night of that party. He has never dared to touch her. Mamelon's husband is the celebrated Siegmund Kluver, who though not yet fifteen is universally recognized as one of the urbmon's future leaders. Jason is not afraid that Siegmund would object. In an urban monad, naturally, no man has a right to withhold his wife from anyone who desires her. Nor is Jason afraid of what Micaela would say. He knows his privileges. He is simply afraid of Mamelon. And perhaps of himself. For ref. only. Urbmon sex mores.  Univ. sex. accessibility. Trace decline of proprietary marriage, end of adultery concept. Nightwalkers: when first socially acceptable? Limit ofallowable frustration: how determined? Sex as panacea. Sex as compensation for lessened quality of life under urbmon conditions. Query: was quality of life really lessened by triumph of urbmon system? (Careful -- beware the chute!) Separation of sex  procreation. Value of max. interchange of partners in high-density culture. Problem: what is still forbidden (anything?) Examine taboo on extracity nightwalking. How powerful? How widely observed? Check effects of univ. permiss. on comtemp. fiction. Loss of dramatic tension? Erosion of raw material of narr. conflict? Query: is urbmon moral struc. amoral, postmoral, pre-, im-? da whenever and wherever some new structural hypothesis enters his mind. These are thoughts that come to him during a nightwalking excursion on the #th floor, in Tokyo. He is with a thickset young brunette named Gretl when the sequence of ideas arrives. He has been fondling her for some minutes and she is panting, ready, her hips pumping, her eyes narrowed to steamy slits. "Excuse me," he says and reaches across her heavy quivering breasts for a stylus. "I have to write something down." He activates the data terminal's input screen and punches the button that will relay a printout of his memorandum to his desk at his research cubicle in Pittsburgh. Then, quickly pursing his lips and scowling, he begins to make his notations. He frequently goes nightwalking but never in his own city of Shanghai. Jason's one audacity: boldly he flouts the tradition that one should stay close to home during one's nocturnal prowls. No one will punish him for his unconventional behavior, since it is merely a violation of accepted custom, not of urban law. No one will even criticize him to his face for doing it. Yet his wanderings give him the mild thrill of the forbidden. Jason explains his habit to himself by saying that he prefers the crosscultural enrichment that comes from sleeping with women of other cities. Privately he suspects that he is just uneasy about getting mixed up with women he knows, such as Mamelon Kluver. Especially Mamelon Kluver. So on his nightwalking nights he takes the dropshafts far into the depths of the building, to such cities as Pittsburgh or Tokyo, even to squalid Prague or grubby Reykjavik. He pushes open strange doors, lockless by statute, and takes his place on the sleeping platforms of unknown women smelling of mysterious lower-class vegetables. By law they must emShanghai," he tells them, and they go, "Ooooh!" in awe and he mounts them tigerishly, contemptuously, swollen with status. Breasty Gretl waits patiently while Jason records his latest notions. Then he turns toward her again. Her husband, bloated on whatever the local equivalent of tingle or mindblot may be, lies belly-up at the far side of the sleeping platform, ignoring them. Gretl's large dark eyes glow with admiration. "You Shanghai boys sure got brains," she says as Jason pounces and takes her in a single fierce act. Later he returns to the #st floor. Wraiths flit through the dim corridors: other citizens of Shanghai, back from their own nightwalking rounds. He enters his apartment. Jason has forty-five square meters of floor space, not really enough for a man with a wife and five fifties, but he does not complain. God bless, you take what you get; others have less. Micaela is asleep, or pretends to be. She is a long-legged, tawnyskinned woman of twenty-three, still quite attractive, though quirky fines are beginning to appear in her face. She frowns too much. She lies half uncovered, her long black glossy hair spread out wildly around her. Her breasts are small but perfect; Jason compares them favorably to the udders of Tokyo's Gretl. He and Micaela have been married nine years. Once he loved her a great deal -- before he discovered the gritty residue of bitter shrewishness at the bottom of her soul. She smiles an inward smile, stirs, still sleeping, brushes her hair back from her eyes. She has the look of a woman who has just had a thoroughly satisfactory sexual experience. Jason has no way of knowing whether some nightwalker visited Micaela tonight while he was gone and, of course, he cannot ask. (Search for evidence? Stains on the sleeping platform? Stickiness on her thighs? Don't be barbaric!) He suspects that even if no one had come to her tonight, she would try to make him think that someone had; and if someone had come and had given her only modest pleasure, she would nevertheless smile for her husband's benefit as though she has been embraced by Zeus. He knows his wife's style. , The children seem peaceful. They range in age from two to eight. Soon he and Micaela will have to think about having another. Five littles is a fair-sized family but Jason understands his duty to serve life by creating life. When one ceases to grow, one begins to die; it is true of a human being and also of the population of an urban monad, of an urbmon constellation, of a continent, of a world. God is life and life is god. He lies down beside his wife. He sleeps. He dreams that Micaela has been sentenced to the chute for countersocial behavior. Down she goes! Mamelon Kluver makes a condolence call. "Poor Jason," she murmurs. Her pale skin is cool against him. The musky fragrance of her. The elegance of her features. The look of total mastery of self. Not even seventeen; how can she be so imperiously complete? "Help me dispose of Siegmund and we'll belong to each other," Mamelon says. Eyes bright, mischievous, goading him to be her creature. "Jason," she whispers. "Jason, Jason, Jason." Her tone a caress. Her hands on him. He wakes, trembling, sweating, horrified, half an inch from messy ecstasy. He sits up and goes through one of the forgiveness modes for improper thoughts. God bless, he thinks, god bless, god bless, god bless. I did not mean such things. It was my mind. My monstrous mind free of shackles. He completes the spiritual exercise and lies down once more. He sleeps and dreams harmlessly. madly off to school and Jason prepares to go to his office. Micaela says suddenly, "Isn't it interesting that you go six hundred floors down when you go to work, and Siegmund Kluver goes up on top, to Louisville?" "What the god bless do you mean by that?" "I see symbolic meaning in it." "Symbolic garbage. Siegmund's in urban administration -- he goes up where the administrators are. I'm in history -- I go down where the history is. So?" "Wouldn't you like to live in Louisville some day?" "No." "Why don't you have any ambition?" "Is your life so miserable here?" he asks, holding himself tensely in check. "Why has Siegmund made so much of himself at the age of fourteen or fifteen and here you are at twenty-six and you're still just an input-pusher?" "Siegmund is ambitious," Jason replies evenly, "and I'm merely a time-server. I don't deny it. Maybe it's genetic. Siegmund strives and gets away with it. Most men don't. Striving sterilizes, Micaela. Striving is primitive. God bless, what's wrong with my career? What's wrong with living in Shanghai?" "One floor lower and we'd be living in -- " " -- Chicago," he says. "I know. But we aren't. May I go to my office now?" He leaves. He wonders whether he ought to send Micaela to the consoler's office for a reality adjustment. Her threshold of thwarting-acceptance has dipped alarmingly of late; her expectations-level has risen just as disturbingly. Jason is well aware that such things should be dealt with at once, before they become uncontrollable and lead to countersocial behavior and the chute. Probably Micaela needs the services of the moral engineers. But he puts aside the idea of calling the consoler. It is because I dislike the idea of having anyone tamper with my wife's mind. He tells himself this piously and a mocking inner voice tells him that he is taking no action because he secretly wishes to see Micaela become so countersocial that she must be thrown down the chute. He enters the dropshaft and programs for the #th floor. Down he goes to Pittsburgh. He sinks, inertia-free, through the cities that make up Urbmon #. Down he goes through Chicago, through Edinburgh, through Nairobi, through Colombo. Forty floors constitute one city. The twenty-five cities of Urbmon I # comprise the successive layers of a single great urban monad, a tower of super-stressed concrete three kilometers high, a self-contained unit housing more than # human beings. Most cities within the urbmon have between # and # people but there are exceptions. Louisville, the high-prestige abode of the urban administrators, is sparsely populated; luxury is the compensation one is given for the burdens of such responsibility. Reykjavik, Warsaw and Prague, the three bottom cities where the maintenance workers and other humble grubbers live, are overpopulated; crowding is considered beneficial there. Everything is conceived for the greater good. Urbmon # looks after itself. Its central service core provides light, fresh air, heating, cooling and other essentials. Central kitchens handle most of the food-processing chores. Below ground level, # meters down, is found the utilities substructure: refuse compactors, the plants for the reprocessing of wastes, the heat-sink, the power generators and everything else on which the life of the urbmon depends. Food is the only thing that must come from outside -- from the agricultural communes that lie beyond the urban area. Jason's building is one of fifty-odd identical structures making up the Chipitts urban constellation, which in this year of # has a population of close to #. There are many other such urban constellations in the world -- Boshwash, Sansan, Shankong, Bocarac, Wienbud -- and the aggregate human population of Earth has risen well past #, #. Because of the new verticality of urban housing patterns, there is ample land for meeting the food requirements of that many people and more. He feels the comforting solidity of the building about him as he descends. The urbmon is his world. He has never been outside it. Why should he go out? His friends, his family, his whole life, are here. His urbmon is adequately supplied with theaters, sports arenas, schools, hospitals, houses of worship. His data terminal gives him access to any work of art that is considered blessworthy for human consumption. No one he knows has ever left the building, except for the people who were chosen by lot to settle in the newly opened Urbmon # a few months ago and they, of course, will never come back. There are rumors that urban administrators sometimes go from building to building on business but Jason is not sure that this is true and he does not see why such travel would be necessary or desirable. Are there not systems of instantaneous communication linking the urbmons, capable of transmitting all relevant data? I T IS a splendid system. As a historian, privileged to explore the records of the pre-urbmon world, he knows more fully than most people how splendid it is. He understands the awful chaos of the past. The terrifying freedoms; the hideous necessity of making choices. The insecurity. The confusion. The lack of plan. The formlessness of contexts. He reaches the #th floor. He makes his way through the sleepy corridors of Pittsburgh to his office. A modest room but he loves it. Glistening walls. A wet mural over his desk. The necessary terminals and screens. Five small glistening cubes lie on his desk. Each holds the contents of several libraries. He has been working with these cubes for two years, now. His theme is The Urban Monad as Social Evolution: Parameters of the Spirit Defined by Community Structure. He is attempting to show that the transition to an urbmon society has brought about a fundamental transformation of the human soul. Of the soul of western man, at any rate. An orientalization of the occidentals, as formerly aggressive people accept the yoke of the new environment. A more pliant, more acquiescent mode of response to events; a turning away from the old expansionist-individualist philosophy, as marked by territorial ambition, the conquistador mentality and the pioneering way, toward a kind of communal expansionism centered in the orderly and unlimited growth of the human race. Definitely a psychic evolution of some sort, a shift toward graceful acceptance of hive-life. The malcontents bred out of the system generations ago. We who have not gone down the chute accept the inexorabilities. Yes. Yes. Jason believes that he has struck upon a significant subject. Micaela disparaged the theme when he announced it: "You mean you're going to write a book showing that people who live in different kinds of cities are different? That urbmon people have a different attitude than jungle people? Some scholar. I could prove your point in six sentences." Nor was there much enthusiasm for the subject when he proposed it at a staff meeting, although he did manage to get clearance for it. His technique so far has been to steep himself in the images of the past, to turn himself, so far as is possible, into a citizen of the pre-urbmon society. He hopes that that will give him the essential parallax, the perspective on his own society, that he will need when he begins to write his study. He expects to start writing in two or three years. He consults a memorandum, chooses a cube. A kind of ecstasy comes over him as scenes out of the ancient world materialize. He leans close to his input speaker and begins to dictate. Frantically, frenziedly, Jason Quevedo sets down notes on the way it used to be. II H ouses and streets. A horizontal world. Individual family shelter units: this is my house, this is my castle. Fantastic! Three people, taking up maybe a thousand square meters of surface. Roads. Concept of road hard for us to understand. Like a hallway going on and on. Private vehicles. Where are they all going? Why so fast? Why not stay home? Crash! Blood. Head goes through glass. Crash again! In the rear. Dark combustible fluid flows in street. Middle of day, springtime, major city. Street scene. Which city? Chicago, New York, Instanbul, Cairo. People walking about IN for walkers, this for drivers. Filth. Estimated grid reading: # pedestrians this sector alone, in strip # meters wide and # meters long. Is that figure right? Check it. Elbow to elbow. And they'd think our world was overcrowded? At least we don't impinge on each other like that. We know how to keep our distances within the overall structure of urbmon life. Vehicles move down middle of street. The good old chaos. Chief activity: the purchase of goods. Private consumption. Cube IlAb# shows interior vector of a shop. Exchanging of money for merchandise. Not much difference there except random nature of transaction. Do they need what they buy? Where This cube holds nothing new for him. Jason has seen such city scenes many times before. Yet the fascination is ever fresh. He is tense, sweat flowing freely, as he strains to comprehend a world in which people may live where they please, where they move about on foot or in vehicles in the open, where there is no planning, no order, no restraint. He must perform a double act of imagination: it is necessary for him to see that vanished world from within, as though he lived in it and then he must try to see the urbmon society as it might seem to someone wafted forward from the twentieth century. The magnitude of the task dismays him. He knows roughly how an ancient would feel about Urbmon #: it is a hellish place, the ancient would say, in which people live hideously cramped and brutal lives, in which every civilized philosophy is turned on its head, in which uncontrolled breeding is nightmarishly encouraged to serve some incredible concept of a deity gatory to eliminate -- preferably eternally demanding more worbefore they were old enough to reshipers, in which dissent is ruthproduce -- all those who would not lessly stifled and dissenters are adapt or could not be adapted to peremptorily destroyed. Jason the fabric of society. How could knows the right phrases, the sort troublemakers be allowed to reof words an intelligent liberal main in the tight, intimate, careAmerican of, say, # would use. fully balanced structure of an urbBut the inner spirit is missing. He mon? He knows that the probable tries to see his own world as a speresult of tossing Hippos down the cies of hell and fails. To him it is chute has been, over a couple of not hellish. He is a logical man; he centuries, the creation of a new knows why the vertical society had style of human being through seto evolve out of the old horizontal lective breeding. Is there now a one and why it then became obliHomo urbmonensis, placid, adjusted, fully content? These are topics he means to explore intensively when he writes his book. But it is so hard, so absurdly hard, to grasp them from the viewpoint of ancient man! Jason struggles to understand the uproar over overpopulation in the ancient world. He has drawn from the archives scores of tracts directed against indiscriminate human spawning -- angry polemics composed at a time when less than # people inhabited the world. He is aware, of course, that humans can choke a whole planet quickly when they live spread out horizontally the way they did; but why were they so worried about the future? Surely they could have foreseen the beauties of the vertical society! No. No. That's just the point, he tells himself unhappily. They did not foresee any such thing. Instead they talked about limiting fertility, if necessary by imposing a governmental authority to hold population down. Jason shivers. Don't you see. he asks his cubes. that only a totalitarian regime could enforce such limits? You say that we're a repressive society. But what kind of society would you have built if the urbmons hadn't developed? The voice of ancient man replies, I'd rather take my chances on limiting births and allowing complete freedom otherwise. You've accepted the freedom to multiply but it's cost you all the other freedoms. Don't you see -- You're the one who doesn't see, Jason blurts. A society must sustain its momentum through the exploitation of god-given fertility. We've found a way to make room for everybody on Earth, to support a population ten or twenty times greater than what you imagined was the absolute maximum. You see it merely as suppression and authoritarianism. But what could never have come into being at all under your system? Isn't that the ultimate suppression: forbidding humans to exist in the first place? But what good is letting them exist if the best they can hope for is a box inside a box? What about the quality of life? I see no defects in the quality of our life. We find fulfillment in the interplay of human relationships. Do I need to go to China or A frica for my pleasures when I can find them within a single building? Isn't it a sign of inner dislocation to feel compelled to roam all over the world? In your day everybody traveled, I know, and in mine no one does. Which is a more stable society? Which is the happier one? Which is more human? Which exploits man's potential more fully? Isn't it our nature to seek, to strive, to reach out? What about seeking within? Exploring the inner life? But don't you see -- But don't you see -- If you only would listen -- If you only would listen -- Jason does not see. Ancient man's spokesman does not see. Neither will listen. There is no communication. Jason wastes another dismal day wrestling with his intractable material. Only as he is about to leave does he remember last night's memorandum. He will study ancient sexual mores in a new attempt to gain insight into that vanished society. He punches out hk requisition. The cubes will be on his desk when he returns to his office tomorrow. He goes home to Shanghai, home to Micaela. T hat evening the Quevedos have dinner guests; Michael, Micaela's twin brother, and his wife Stacion. Michael is a computer-primer; he and Stacion live in Edinburgh, on the #th floor. Jason finds his company challenging and rewarding, although the physical resemblance between his brother-in-law and his wife, which he once found amusing, now alarms and disturbs him. Michael affects shoulder-length hair, and is barely a centimeter taller than his tall, slender sister. They are, of course, only fraternal twins, yet their facial features are virtually identical. They have even settled into the same pattern of tense, querulous smirks and scowls. From the rear Jason has difficulties in telling them apart unless he sees them side by side; they stand the same way, arms akimbo, heads tilted backward. Since Micaela is small-breasted, the possibility of confusion exists also in profile and sometimes, looking at one of them in front view, Jason has momentarily wondered whether he beholds Michael or Micaela. If only Michael would grow a beard! But his cheeks are smooth. Now and again Jason feels sexually drawn to his brother-in-law. It is a natural attraction, considering the physical pull Micaela has always exerted on him. Seeing her across the room, angled away from him, her smooth back bare, the little globe of one breast visible under her arm as she reaches toward the data terminal, he feels the urge to go to her and caress her. And if she were Michael? And if he slid his hand to her bosom and found it flat and hard? And if they tumbled down together in a passionate tangle? His hand going to Micaela's thighs and finding not the hot hidden slot but the dangling flesh of maleness? And turning her over. Him? Parting the pallid muscular buttocks. The sudden strange thrust. No. Jason flushes the fantasy from his mind. Once again. Not since the rough easy days of boyhood has he had any kind of sexual contact with his own sex. He will not permit it. There are no penalties for such things, naturally, in the society of the urbmon, where all adults are equally accessible. Many of them do it. For all he knows, Michael himself. If Jason wants Michael, he has only to ask. Refusal a sin. He does not ask. He fights the temptation. It is not fair, a man who looks so much like my wife. The devil's snare. Why do I resist, though? If I want him, why not take? But no. I don't really want. It's just a sneaky urge, a sidewise way of desiring Micaela. And yet the fantasy surges again. Himself and Michael, spoofi-fashion, mouths gaping and stuffed. The image glows so brightly that Jason rises in a brusque tense motion, knocking over the flask of wine that Stacion has brought tonight and, as Stacion dives for and rescues it, he crosses the room, aghast at the erection prodding his taut gold-and-green shorts. He goes to Micaela and cups one of her breasts. The nipple is soft. He snuggles against her, nibbles the nape of her neck. She tolerates these attentions in a remote way, not interrupting the programing of dinner. But when, still distraught, he slips his left hand into the open side of her sarong and runs it across her belly to her loins, she wriggles her hips in displeasure and whispers harshly, "Stop it! Not with them sitting there!" Wildly he finds the fumes and offers them around. Stacion refuses; she is pregnant. A plump, pleasant, red-haired girl, complacent, easy. Out of place in this congregation of the hyptertense. Jason sucks the smoke deep and feels the knots loosen slightly inside. Now he can look at Michael and not fall prey to unnatural urges. Yet he still speculates. Does Michael suspect? Would he laugh if I told him? Take offense? Angry at me for wanting to? Angry at me for not trying to? Suppose he asked me to, what would I do? Jason takes a second fume and the swarm of buzzing questions leaves his mind. "When is the little due?" he asks, in counterfeit geniality. "God bless, fourteen weeks," Michael says. "Number five. A girl, this time." "We'll name her Celeste," Stacion puts in, patting her middle. Her maternity costume is a short yellow bolero and a loose brown waist-sash. Leaving the bulging belly bare. The everted navel like the stem of the swollen fruit. Milky breasts swaying in and out of visibility under the open jacket. "We're talking about requesting twins for next year," she adds. "A boy and a girl. Michael's always telling me about the good times he and Micaela used to have together when they were young. Like a special world for twins." Jason is caught unawares by the bringdown and is plunged abruptly into feverish fantasy once more. He sees Micaela's spread legs sticking out from under Michael's lean pumping body, sees her childish ecstatic face looking up over his busy shoulder. The good times they used to have. Michael the first one into her. At nine -- ten, maybe? Even younger? Their awkward experiments. Let me get on top of you this time, Michael. Oh, it's deeper this way. Do you think we're doing anything wrong? No, silly, didn't we sleep together for nine whole months? Put your hand here. And your mouth on me again. Yes. You're hurting my breasts, Michael. Oh, that's nice. But wait just another few seconds... the good times they used to have. "Is something the matter, Jason?" Michael's voice. "You look so tight." Jason forces himself to pull out of it. Hands trembling. Another fume. He rarely takes three before dinner. caela unload the food from the delivery slot. Michael says to Jason, "I hear you've started a new research project. What's the basic theme?" Kind of him. Senses that I'm ill at ease. Draw me out of my morbid brooding. All these sick thoughts... Jason replies, "I'm investigating the notion that urbmon life is breeding a new kind of human being. A type that adapts readily to relatively little living space and a low privacy quotient." "You mean a genetic mutation?" Michael asks, frowning. "Literally an inherited social characteristic?" "So I believe." "Are such things possible, though? Can you call it a genetic trait, really, if people voluntarily decide to band together in a society like ours and -- " "Voluntarily?" "Isn't it?" Jason smiles. "I doubt that it ever was. In the beginning, you know, it was a matter of necessity. Because of the chaos in the world. Seal yourself up in your building or be exposed to the food bandits. I'm talking about the famine years, now. And since then, since everything stabilized, has it been so voluntary? Do we have any choice about where we live?" "I suppose we could go outside if we really wanted to," Michael says, "and live in whatever they've got out there." "But we don't. Because we recognize that that's a hopeless fantasy. We stay here, whether we like it or not. And those who don't like it, those who eventually can't take it -- well, you know what happens to them." "But -- " "Wait. Two centuries of selective breeding, Michael. Down the chute for the flippos. And no doubt some population loss through leaving the buildings, at least at the beginning. Those who remain adapt to circumstances. They like the urbmon way. It seems altogether natural to them." "Is this really genetic, though? Couldn't you simply call it psychological conditioning? I mean, in the Asian countries, didn't people always live jammed together the way we do, only much worse, no sanitation, no regulation -- and didn't they accept it as the natural order of things?" 'Of course," Jason says. "Because rebellion against the natural order of things had been bred out of them thousands of years ago. The ones who stayed, the ones who reproduced, were the ones who accepted things as they were. The same here." Doubtfully Michael says, "How can you draw the line between psychological conditioning and longterm selective breeding? How do you know what to attribute to which?" "I haven't faced that problem yet," Jason admits. "Shouldn't you be working with a geneticist?" "Perhaps later I will. After I've established my parameters of inquiry. You know. I'm not ready to defend this thesis, yet. I'm just collecting data to discover if it can be defended. The scientific method. We don't make a priori assumptions and look around for supporting evidence. We examine the evidence first and -- " "Yes, yes, I know. Just between us, though, you do think it's really happening, don't you? An urbmon species." "I do. Yes. Two centuries of selective breeding, pretty ruthlessly enforced. And all of us so well adapted now to this kind of life." "Ah. Yes. All of us so well adapted." "With some exceptions," Jason says, retreating a bit. He and Michael exchange wary glances. Jason wonders what thoughts lie behind his brother-in-law's cool eyes. "General acceptance, though. Where has the old western expansionist philosophy gone? Bred out of the race, I say. The urge to power? The love of conquest? The hunger for land and property? Gone. Gone. Gone. I don't think that s just a conditioning process. I suspect it's a matter of stripping the race of certain genes that lead to -- " "Dinner, professor," Micaela calls. A costly meal. Proteoid steaks, root salad, bubble pudding, relishes, fish soup. Nothing reconstituted and hardly anything synthetic. For the next two weeks he and Micaela will have to go on short rations until they've made up the deficit in their luxury allotment. He conceals his annoyance. Michael always eats lavishly when he comes here; Jason wonders why, since Micaela is not nearly so solicitous of her seven other brothers and sisters. Scarcely ever invites two or three of them. But Michael here at least five times a year, always getting a feast. Jason's suspicions reawaken. Something ugly going on between those two? The childhood passions still smouldering? Perhaps it is cute for twelveyear-old twins to couple but should they still be at it when twenty-three and married? Michael a nightwalker in my sleeping platform? Jason is annoyed at himself. Not bad enough that he has to fret over his idiotic homosexual fixation on Michael; now he has to torment himself with fears of an incestuous affair behind his back. Poisoning his hours of relaxation. What if they are? Nothing socially objectionable in it. Seek pleasure where you will. In your sister's slot if you be so moved. Shall all the men of Urban Monad # have access to Micaela Quevedo, save only the unfortunate Michael? Must his status as her wombmate deny her to him? Be realistic, Jason tells himself. Incest taboos make sense only where breeding is involved. Anyway, they probably aren't doing it, probably never have... He wonders why so much nastiness has sprouted in his soul lately. The frictions of living with Micaela, he decides. Her coldness is driving me into all kinds of unblessworthy attitudes, the bitch. If she doesn't stop goading me I'll... I'll what? Seduce Michael away from her? He laughs at the intricacy of his own edifice of schemes. asks. "Share it with us, Jason." He looks up, helpless. What shall he say? "A silly thought," he improvises. "About you and Michael, how much you look like each other. I was thinking -- perhaps some night you and he could switch rooms and a nightwalker would come here looking for you. But when he actually got under the covers with you he'd discover that he was in bed with a man and -- and -- " Jason is smitten with the overwhelming fatuity of what he is saying and descends into a feeble silence. "What a peculiar thing to imagine," Micaela says. "Besides, so what?" Stacion asks. "The nightwalker might be a little surprised for a minute, maybe, but then he'd just go ahead and make it with Michael, wouldn't he? Rather than make a big scene or bother to go someplace else. So I don't see what's funny." "Forget it," Jason growls. "I told you it was silly. Micaela insisted on knowing what was crossing my mind and I told you. But I'm not responsible if it doesn't make any sense, am I? Am I?" He grabs the flask of wine and pours most of what remains into his cup. "This is good stuff," he mutters. After dinner they share an expander, all but Stacion. They groove in silence for a couple of hours. Shortly before midnight Michael and Stacion leave. Jason does not watch as his wife and her brother make their farewell embraces. As soon as the guests are gone, Micaela strips away her sarong and gives him a bright, fierce stare, almost defying him to have her tonight. But though he knows it is unkind to ignore her wordless invitation, he is so depressed by his own inner performance this evening that he feels he must flee. "Sorry," he says. "I'm restless." Her expression changes; desire fades and is replaced by bewilderment, then by rage. He does not wait. Hastily he goes out, rushing to the dropshaft and plummeting to the #th floor. Warsaw. He enters an apartment and finds a woman of about thirty, with fuzzy blonde hair and a soft fleshy body, asleep alone on an unkempt sleeping platform. At least eight littles stacked up on cots in the corners. He wakes her. "Jason Quevedo," he says. "I'm from Shanghai." She blinks. Having trouble focusing her eyes. "Shanghai? But are you supposed to be here?" "Who says I can't?" She ponders that. "Nobody says. But Shanghai never comes here. Really, Shanghai? You?" "Do I have to show you my identiplate?" he asks harshly. His educated inflections destroy her resistance. She begins to primp, arranging her hair, reaching for some kind of cosmetic spray for her face, while he drops his clothing. He mounts the platform. She draws her knees up almost to her breasts, presenting herself. Crudely, impatiently, he takes her. Michael, he thinks. Micaela. Michael. Micaela. Grunting, he floods her. Ill he begins his newest line of inquiry, summoning up data on the sexual mores of ancient times. As usual he concentrates on the twentieth century, which he regards as the climax of the ancient era and therefore most significant, revealing as it does the entire cluster of attitudes and responses that had accumulated in the pre-urbmon industrial era. The twenty-first century is less useful for his purposes, being, like all transitional periods, essentially chaotic and unschematic, and the twenty-second century brings him into modern times with the beginning of the urbmon age. So the twentieth is his favorite area of study. Seeds of the collapse, portents of doom running through it like bad-trip threads in a psychedelic tapestry. Jason is careful not to fall victim to the historian's fallacy of diminished perspective. Though the twentieth century, seen from this distance, seems to be a single seamless entity, he knows that this is an error of evaluation caused by overfacile abstracting; there may be certain apparent patterns that ride one unbroken curve across the ten decades but he realizes that he must allow for certain qualitative changes in society that have created major historical discontinuities between decade and decade. The unleashing of atomic energy created one such discontinuity. The development of swift intercontinental transporation formed another. In the moral sphere, the availability of simple and reliable contraception caused a fundamental change in sexual attitudes, a revolution not to be ascribed to mere rebelliousness. The arrival of the psychedelic age, with its special problems and joys, marked one more great gulf, setting off part of the century from all that went before. So # and # and # and # and # occupy individual summits in Jason's jagged image of the century, and in any sampling of its mentality that he takes, he draws evidence from each of its discrete subepochs. Plenty of evidence is available to him. Despite the dislocations caused by the collapse an enormous weight of data on the eras of pre-urbmon time exists, stored in some subterranean vault, Jason knows not where. Certainly the central data bank (if there is indeed only one and not a redundant series of them scattered through the world) is not anywhere in Urbmon # and he doubts that it is even in the Chipitts constellation. It does not matter. He can draw from that vast deposit any information that he requires and it will come instantaneously. The trick lies in knowing what to ask for. He is familiar enough with the sources to be able to make intelli ' gent data requisitions. He thumbs the keys and the new cubes arrive. Novels. Films. Television programs. Leaflets. Handbills. He knows that for more than half the century popular attitudes toward sexual matters were recorded both dinary novels and motion pictures of the day and an underground stream of clandestine, "forbidden" erotic works. Jason draws from both groups. He must weigh the distortions of the erotica against the distortions of the legitimate material; only out of this Newtonian interplay of forces can the objective truth be mined. Then, too, he surveys the legal codes, making the appropriate allowances for laws observed only in the breach. What is this in the laws of New York: "A person who wilfully and lewdly exposes his person or the private parts thereof, in any public place, or in any place where others are present, or procures another to so expose himself shall be guilty of..." Guilty of what? In the state of Georgia, he reads, any sleeping car passenger who remains in a compartment other than the one to which he is assigned is guilty of a misdemeanor and is subject to a maximum fine of # or twelve months' imprisbnment. The laws of the state of Michigan tell him, "Any person who shall undertake to medically treat any female person, and while so treating her shall represent to such female that it is, or will be necessary or beneficial to her health that she shall have sexual intercourse with a man, and any man, not being the husband of such female, who shall have sexual intercourse with her by reason of such representation, shall be guilty of a felony, and be punished by a maximum term of # years." Strange. Stranger still: "Every person who shall carnally know, or shall have sexual intercourse in any manner with any animal or bird, is guilty of sodomy..." No wonder everything's extinct! And this? "Whoever shall carnally know any male or female by the anus (rectum) or with the mouth or tongue, or who shall attempt intercourse with a dead body... # andor five years' imprisonConnecticut the use of contraceptive articles is forbidden, under penalty of a minimum fine of fifty dollars or sixty days to one year in prison -- and in Massachusetts "whoever sells, lends, gives, exhibits (or offers to) any instrument or drug, or medicine, or any article whatever for the prevention of conception, shall be subject to a maximum term of five years in prison or a maximum fine of #." What? What? Send a man to prison for decades for cunnilingualizing his wife and impose so trifling a sentence on the spreaders of contraception? Where was Connecticut, anyway? Where was Massachusetts? Historian that he is, he is not sure. God bless, he thinks, but the doom that came upon them was well merited. A bizarre folk to deal so lightly with those who would limit births! H e skims a few novels and dips into several films. Even though it is only the first day of his research, he perceives patterns, a fitful loosening of taboos throughout the century, accelerating greatly between # and # and again after #. Timid experiments in revealing the ankle lead, shortly, to bared breasts. The curious custom of prostitution erodes as liberties become more commonly obtained. The disappearance of taboos on the popular sexual vocabulary. He can barely believe some of what he learns. So compressed were their souls! So thwarted were their urges! And why? And why? Of course, they did grow looser. Yet terrible restraints prevail throughout that dark century, except toward the end, when the collapse was their liberation. He sees a forced, self-conscious mode of amorality coming into being. The shy nudists. The guilt-wracked orgiasts. The apologetic adulterers. Strange, strange, strange. He is endlessly fascinated by the twentieth century's sexual concepts. The wife as husband's property. The premium on virginity: well, they seemed to get rid of that Attempts by the state to dictate positions of sexual intercourse and to forbid certain supplementary acts. The restrictions even on words! A phrase leaps out of a supposedly serious twentieth-century work of social criticism: "Among the most significant developments of the decade was the attainment of the freedom, at last, for the responsible writer to use such words as fuck and cunt where necessary in his work." Can that have been so? Such importance placed on mere words? Jason pronounces the odd monosyllables aloud in his research cubicle. "Fuck. Cunt. Fuck. Cunt. Fuck." They sound merely antiquated. Harmless, certainly. He tries the modern equivalents. "Top. Slot. Top. Slot. Top." No impact. How can words ever have held such inflammatory content that an apparently penetrating scholar would feel it worthwhile to celebrate their free public use? Jason is aware of his limitations as a historian when he runs into such things. He simply cannot comprehend the twentieth-century's obsession with words. To insist on giving God a capital letter, as though He might be displeased to be called god! To suppress books for printing words like c--t and f -- k and s -- t! By the close of his day's work he is more convinced than ever of the validity of his thesis. There has been a monumental change in sexual morality in the past three hundred years and it cannot be explained only on cultural grounds. We are different, he tells himself. We have changed and it is a cellular change, a transformation of the body as well as the soul. They could not have permitted, let alone encouraged, our total-accessibility society. Our night walking, our nudity, our freedom from taboos, our lack of irrational jealousies, all of this would have been wholly alien to them, distasteful, abominable. Even those who lived in a way approaching ours -- and there were a few -- did so for the wrong reasons. They were responding not to a positive societal need but to an existing system of repression. We are different. We are fundamentally different. Weary, satisfied with what he has found, he leaves his office an hour ahead of time. When he returns to his apartment, Micaela is not there. T his puzzles him. Always here at this hour. The littles left alone, playing with their toys. Of course it is a bit early, not much. Just stepped out for a chat? I don't understand. She hasn't left a message. He says to his eldest son, "Where's Mommo?" "Went out." "Where?" A shrug. "Visiting." "How long ago?" "An hour. Maybe two." Some help. Fidgety, perturbed, Jason calls a couple of women on the floor, Micaela's friends. They haven't seen her. The boy looks up and says brightly, "She was going to visit a man." Jason stares sharply at him. "A man? Is that what she said? What man?" But the boy has exhausted his information. Fearful that she has gone off for a rendezvous with Michael, he debates phoning Edinburgh. Just to see if she's there. A lengthy inner debate. Furious images racing in his skull. Micaela and Michael entangled, indistinguishable, united, inflamed. Locked together in incestuous passion. As perhaps every afternoon. How long has this been going on? And she comes to me at dinnertime every evening hot and wet from him. He calls Edinburgh and gets Stacion on the screen. Calm, bulgy. "Micaela? No, of course she isn't here. Is she supposed to be?" "I thought maybe -- dropping in -- " "I haven't heard from her since we were at your place." He hesitates. Just as she moves to break the connection he blurts, "Do you happen to know where Michael is right now?" "Michael? He's at work. Interface Crew Nine." "Are you sure?" Stacion looks at him in obvious surprise. "Of course I'm sure. Where else would he be? His crew doesn't break till seventeenthirty." Laughs. "You aren't suggesting that Michael -- that Michela -- " "Of course not. What kind of fool do you think I am? I just wondered -- that perhaps -- if -- " He is adrift. "Forget it, Stacion. Give him my love when he comes home." Jason cuts the contact. Head bowed, eyes full of unwanted visions. Michael's long fingers encircling his sister's breasts. Rosy nipples poking through. Mirror-image faces nose to nose. Tonguetips touching. No. Where is she, then? He is tempted to try to reach him in Interface Crew Nine. Find out if Michael really is on duty. Or maybe off in some dark cubbyhole topping his sister. Jason throws himself face down on the sleeping platform to consider his position. He tells himself that it is not important that Micaela is letting her brother top her. Not at all. He will not let himself be trapped into primeval twentieth-century attitudes of morality. On the other hand, it is a considerable violation of custom for Micaela to go off in mid-afternoon to be topped. If she wants Michael, Jason thinks, let him come here decently after midnight, as a nightwalker. Instead of this skulking and sneaking. Does she think I'd be shocked to know who her lover is? Does she have to hide it from me this way? It's a hundred times as bad to steal away like this It introduces a note of deceit. Old-fashioned adultery: the secret rendezvous. How ugly! I'd like to tell her... The door opens and Micaela comes in. She is naked under a translucent flutter-robe and has a flushed, rumpled look. She smirks at Jason. He perceives the loathing behind the smirk. "Well?" he says. "Well?" "I was surprised not to find you here when I got home." Coolly Micaela disrobes. She gets under the cleanser. From the way she scrubs herself there can be no doubt that she has just been topped. After a moment she says, "I got back a little late, didn't I? Sorry." "Got back from where?" "Siegmund Kluver's." He is astounded and relieved all at once. What is this? Daywalking? And a woman taking the sexual initiative? But at least it wasn't Michael. If he can believe her. "Siegmund?" he says. "What do you mean, Siegmund?" "I visited him. Didn't the littles tell you? He had some free time today and I went up to his place. Quite blessworthy, I must say. An expert slotman. Not my first time with him but by far the best." She steps out from the cleanser, seizes two of the littles, strips them, thrusts them under for their afternoon bath. Paying almost no attention to Jason. He contemplates her lithe bare body in dismay. A lecture on urbmon sexual ethics almost spills from him but he dams his lips, baffled and agog. Having laboriously adjusted himself to accept the unacceptable notion of her incestuous love, he cannot easily come to terms with this other business of Siegmund. Chasing after him? Daywalking. Daywalking? Has she no shame? Why has she done this? Purely for spite, he tells himself. To mock me. To anger me. To show me how little she cares for me. Using sex as a weapon against me... Siegmund. But Siegmund should have had more sense. A man with his ambitions, violating custom? Perhaps Micaela overwhelmed him. She can do that. Even to Siegmund. The bitch! The bitch! He sees her looking at him now, eyes sparkling, mouth quirked in a hostile smile. Daring him to start a fight. Begging him to try to make trouble. No, Micaela, I won't play your game... As she bathes the littles he says quite serenely, "What are you programing for dinner tonight?" IV A t work the next day he decubes a motion picture of # -- ostensibly a comedy, he imagines, about two California couples who decide to exchange mates for a night, then find themselves without the courage to go through with it. Jason is wholly drawn into the film, enthralled not only by the scenes of private houses and open countryside but by the sheer alienness of the characters' psychology -- their transparent bravado, their intense anguish over a matter as trivial as who will poke what into whom, their ultimate cowardice. It is easier for him to understand the nervous hilarity with which they experiment with what he takes to be cannabis, since the film, after all, dates from the dawn of the psychedelic era. But their sexual attitudes are wondrously grotesque. He watches the film twice, taking copious notes. Why are these people so timid? Do they fear an unwanted pregnancy? A social disease? No, the time of the film is after the venereal era, he believes. Is it pleasure itself that they fear? Tribal punishment for violation of the monopolistic concept of twentieth-century marriage? Even if the violation is conducted with absolute secrecy? That must be it, Jason concludes. They dread the laws against extramarital intercourse. The rack and the thumbscrew, the stocks and the ducking-stool, so to speak. Hidden eyes watching. The shameful truth destined to out. So they draw back; so they remain locked in the cells of their individual marriages. Watching their antics he suddenly sees Micaela in the context of twentieth-century bourgeois morality. Not a timid fool like the four people in the film, of course. Brazen, defiant -- bragging about her visit to Siegmund, using sex as a way of diminishing her husband. A very twentieth-century attitude, far removed from the easy acceptance characteristic of the urbmon world. Only someone whose view of sex is tied to its nature as a , commodity could have done what Micaela has done. She has reinvented adultery in a society where the concept has no meaning! His anger rises. Out of # people in Urban Monad #, why must he be married to the one sick one? Flirting with her brother because she knows it annoys me, not because she's really interested in him. Going to Siegmund instead of waiting for Siegmund to come to her. The slotty barbarian! I'll show her, though. I know how to play her silly sadistic game! At midday he leaves his cubicle, having done less than five hours' work. The liftshaft takes him to the #th floor. Outside the apartment of Siegmund and Mamelon Kluver he succumbs to sudden terrible vertigo and nearly falls. He recovers his balance -- but fear is still great and he is tempted to leave. He argues with himself, trying to purge his timidity. Thinking of the people in the motion picture. Why is he afraid? Mamelon's just another slot. He's had a hundred as attractive as she. But she's clever. Might cut me down with a couple of quick quips. Still, I want her. Denied myself all these years. While Micaela blithely marches off to Siegmund in the afternoon. The bitch. The bitch. Why should  suffer? We aren't supposed to have to feel frustration in the urbmon environment. I want Mamelon, therefore. He pushes open the door. The Kluver apartment is empty. A baby in the maintenance slot, no other sign of life. "Mamelon?" he asks. Voice almost cracking. The screen glows and Mamelon's pre-programed image appears. How beautiful, he thinks. How radiant she is. Smiling. She says, "Hello. I have gone to my afternoon polyrhythm class and will be home at # hours. Urgent messages may be relayed to me in Shanghai Somatic Fulfillment Hall or to my husband Siegmund at Louisville Access Nexus. Thank you." The image fades. # hours. Nearly a two-hour wait. Shall he go? He craves another glimpse of her loveliness. "Mamelon?" he says. She reappears on screen. He studies her. The aristocratic features, the dark mysterious eyes. A self-contained woman, undriven by demons. A personality in her own right, not, like Micaela, a frayed neurotic whipped by the psychic winds. "Hello. I have gone to my afternoon polyrhythm class and will be home at # hours. Urgent messages may be relayed -- " He waits. The apartment, which he has seen before, impresses him anew with its elegance. Rich textures of hangings and draperies, sleek objects of art. Marks of status. Soon Siegmund will move up to Louisville, no doubt and these private possessions are harbingers of his coming elevation to the ruling caste. To ease his impatience Jason toys with the wall-panels, inspects the furniture, programs all the scent-apertures. He peers at the baby cooing in its maintenance slot. He paces. The other Kluver child must be two years old by now. Will it come home from the creche soon? He is not eager to entertain a little all afternoon while waiting tautly for Mamelon. H e tunes the screen and watches one of the afternoon abstractions. The flow of forms and colors carries him through another impatient hour. Mamelon will be here soon. #. She comes in, holding her little's hand. Jason rises, athrob, dry-throated. She is dressed simply and unglamorously in a cascading blue tunic, knee-length, and gives an unusually disheveled impression. Why not? She has spent the afternoon in physical exercise; he cannot expect her to be the impeccable, glistening Mamelon of the evenings. "Jason? Is something wrong? Why -- " "Just a visit," he says, barely able to recognize his own voice. "You look half flippo, Jason! Are you ill? Can I get you anything?" She discards her tunic and tosses it, crumpled, under the cleanser. Under it she wears only a filmy wrap; he averts his eyes from her blazing nudity. And stares out of the corners as she drops the wrap also, washes and dons a light housecoat. Turning to him again, she says, "You're acting very strangely." Out with it in a rush. "Let me top you, Mamelon!" A surprised laugh from her. "Now? Middle of the afternoon?" "Is that so wicked?" "It's unusual," she says. "Especially coming from a man who hasn't ever been to me as a nightwalker. But I suppose there's no harm in it. All right -- come on." As simple as that. She takes off the housecoat and inflates the sleeping platform. Of course -- she will not frustrate him, for that would be unblessworthy. The hour is strange but Mamelon understands the code by which they live and does not hold him strictly to the rules. She is his. The white skin, the high full breasts. Deepset navel. Black matted thatch curling lavishly onto her thighs. She beckons to him from the platform, smiles, rubs her knees together to ready herself. He removes his clothing, carefully folding everything. He lies down beside her, takes one of her breasts nervously in his hand, lightly nips her earlobe. He wants desperately to tell her that he loves her. But that would be a breach of custom far more serious than any he has committed thus far. In a sense -- not the twentieth-century sense -- she belongs to Siegmund and he has no right to intrude his emotions between them. With a quick tense leap he climbs her. As usual, panic makes him hurry. He gains control of himself and slows it down. He dares to open his eyes and is gratified to find that hers are closed. The nostrils flared, the lips drawn back. Such perfect white teeth. She seems to be purring. He moves a little faster. Clasping her in his arms; the mounds of her brpasts flattening against him. Abruptly, amazingly, something extraordinary is kindled within her. She shrieks and makes hoarse animal noises as she claws at him. He is so astonished by the fury of her coming that he forgets to notice his own. So it ends. Exhausted, he clings to her a little while after and she strokes his sweaty shoulders. Analyzing it in the afterward coolness, he realizes that it was not so very different from what he has experienced elsewhere. One wilder-than-usual moment, perhaps. But otherwise only the familiar process. Even with Mamelon Kluver, the object of his incandescent imaginings for three years, it was only the old two-backed beast. So much for romanticism. In the dark all cats are gray: old twentieth-century proverb. So now I've topped her. He withdraws and they go to the cleanser together. She says, "Better now?" "I think so." "You were terribly tight when I came in." "I'm sorry," he says. "Can I get you anything?" "No." "Would you like to talk?" "No. No." He is averting his eyes from her body again. He searches for his clothing. She does not bother to dress. "I guess I'll go," he says. "Come back some time. Perhaps during regular nightwalking hours. I don't mean that I really mind you coming in the afternoon, Jason, but it might be more relaxed at night. Do you follow what I'm saying?" She is frighteningly casual. Does she realize that this is the first time he has topped a woman of his own city? What if he told her that all his other adventures had been in Warsaw and Reykjavik and Prague and the other grubbo levels? He wonders now what he had feared. He will come back to her, he is sure. He makes his exit amid a flurry of grins, nods, half-winks and furtive direct glances. Mamelon blows him a kiss. ternoon. The whole point of this excursion will be lost if he comes home on time. He takes the dropshaft to his office and consumes two futile hours there. Even so, too early. Returning to Shanghai a little past #, he enters the somatic fulfillment hall and dumps himself into an imagebath. The warm undulating currents are soothing but he responds badly to the psychedelic vibrations from below and his mind fills with visions of shattered, blackened urbmons, all girders and skewed concrete. When he comes up it is # and the screen in the dressing room, picking up his emanations, says, "Jason Quevedo, your wife is trying to trace you." Fine. Late for dinner. Let her squirm. He nods to the screen and goes out. After walking the halls for close to an hour, beginning at the #th floor and snaking his way up to #, he drops to his own level and heads for home. A screen in the hall outside the shaft tells him again that tracers are out for him. "I'm coming. I'm coming," he mutters, irritated. Micaela looks rewardingly worried. "Where have you been?" she asks, the instant he appears. "Oh, around. Around." "You weren't working late. I called you there. I had tracers on you." "As if I were a lost boy." "It wasn't like you. You don't just disappear in the middle of the afternoon." "Have you had dinner yet?" "I've been waiting," she says sourly. "Let's eat, then. I'm starved." "You won't explain?" "Later." Working hard at an air of mystery. He scarcely notices his food. Afterward he spends the usual time with the littles. They go off to sleep. He rehearses what he will say to Micaela, arranging the words in various patterns. He tries inwardly to practice a self-satisfied smirk. For once he will be the aggressor. For once he will hurt her. She has become absorbed in the screen transmission. Her earlier anxiety about his disappearance seems to have vanished. Finally he is forced to say, "Do you want to discuss what I did today?" She looks up. "What you did? Oh, you mean this afternoon?" She no longer cares, it appears. "Well?" "I went to Mamelon Kluver." "Day walking? You?" "Me." "Was she good?" "She was superb," he says, puzzled by Micaela's air of unconcern. "She was everything I imagined she'd be." Micaela laughs. "Is it funny?" he asks. "It isn't. You are." "Tell me what you mean by that." "All these years you deny yourself nightwalkihg in Shanghai and go off to the grubbos. Now, for the stupidest possible reason, you finally allow yourself Mamelon -- " "You knew I never night walked here?" "Of course I knew," she says. "Women talk. I ask my friends. You never topped any of them. So I started to wonder. I had some checking done on you. Warsaw. Prague. Why did you have to go down there Jason?" "That doesn't matter now." "What does?" "That I spent the afternoon on Mamelon's sleeping platform." Silence. "You idiot." "Bitch." "Failure." "Sterilizer!" "Grubbo!" "Wait," he says. "Wait. Why did you go to Siegmund?" "To annoy you," she admits. "Because he's a rung-grabber and you aren't. I wanted to get you excited. To make you move." "So you violated all custom and aggressively daywalked with the man of your choice. Not pretty, Micaela. Not at all feminine, I might add." "That keeps things even, then. A female husband and a mannish wife." "You're quick with the insults, aren't you?" "Why did you go to Mamelon?" "To get you angry. To pay you back for Siegmund. Not that I give a damn about your letting him top you. We can take that stuff for granted, I think. But your motives. Using sex as a weapon. Deliberately playing the wrong role. Trying to stir me up. It was ugly, Micaela." "And your motives? Sex as revenge? Nightwalking is supposed to reduce tensions, not to create them. Regardless of the time of day you do it. You want Mamelon, fine -- she's a lovely girl. But to come here and brag about it, as if you think I care whose -- " "Don't be a filther, Micaela." "Listen to him! Listen to him! Puritan! Moralist!" They shout. The littles begin to cry. They have never heard shouting before. Micaela makes a hushing gesture at them behind her back. "At least I have morals," he says. "What about you and your brother Michael?" "What about us?" "Do you deny you've let him top you?" "When we were kids, yes, a couple of times," she says, flushing. "So? You never touched your sisters, I suppose." "Not only when you were kids. You're still making it with him." "I think you're insane, Jason." "You deny it?" "Michael hasn't touched me in ten years. Not that I see anything wrong with his doing it, except that it hasn't happened. Oh, Jason, Jason, Jason! You've spent so much time mucking around in your archives that you've turned yourself into a twentieth-century man. You're jealous, Jason. Worried about incest, no less. And whether I obey the rules about female initiative. What about you and your Warsaw nightwalking? Don't we have a propinquity custom? Are you imposing a double standard, Jason? You do what you like and I observe custom? And upset about Siegmund. Michael. You're jealous, Jason. Jealous. We abolished jealousy a hundred and fifty years ago!" "And you're a social climber. A would-be slicko. You aren't satisfied with Shanghai, you want Louisville. Well, ambition is obsolete, too, Micaela. Besides, you were the one who started this whole business of using sex to score debating points. By going to Siegmund and making sure I knew it. You think I'm a puritan? You're a throwback, Micaela. You're full of pre-urbmon morality." "If I am, I got that way from you," she cries. "No. I got that way from you. You carry the poison around in you. When you -- " The door opens. A man looks in. Charles Mattern, from #. The sleek, fast-talking sociocomputator; Jason has worked with him on several research projects. Evidently he has overheard the unblessworthy furor going on in here, for he is frowning in embarrassment. "God bless," he says softly, "I'm just out nightwalking and I thought I'd -- " "No," Micaela screams. "Not now! Go away!" Mattern shows his shock. He starts to say something, then shakes his head and ducks out of the room, muttering an apology for his intrusion. Jason is appalled. To turn away a legitimate nightwalker? To order him out of the room? "Savage!" he cries, and slaps her across the face. "How could you have done that?" She recoils, rubbing her cheek. "Savage? Me? And you hitting? I could have you thrown down the chute for -- " "I could have you thrown down the chute for -- " He stops. They both are silent. Y OU shouldn't have sent Mattern away," he says quietly, a little later. "You shouldn't have hit me." "I was worked up. Some rules just musn't be broken. If he reports you -- " "He won't. He could see we were having an argument. That I wasn't exactly available to him right then." "Even having an argument," he says. "Screaming like that. Both of us. At the very least it could get us sent to the moral engineers." "I'll fix things with Mattern, Jason. Leave it to me. I'll get him back here and explain and I'll give him the topping of his life." She laughs gently. "You dumb flippo." There is affection in her voice. "We probably sterilized half the floor with our screeching. What was the sense, Jason?" "I was trying to make you understand something about yourself. Your essentially archaic psychological makeup, Micaela. If you could only see yourself objectively, the pettiness of a lot of your motivations lately -- I don't want to start another fight. I'm just trying to explain things now -- " "And your motivations, Jason? You're just as archaic as I am. We're both throwbacks. Our heads are both full of primitive moralistic reflexes. Isn't that so? Can't you see it?" Of course. He walks away from her. Standing with his back to her, he fingers the rubbing-node set into the wall near the cleanser and lets some of the tensions flow from him into it. "Yes," he says after a long while. "Yes, I see it. We have a veneer of urbmonism. But underneath -- jealousy, envy, possessiveness -- " "Yes. Yes." "And you see what this does to my work, of course?" He manages a chuckle. "My thesis that selective breeding has produced a new species of human in the urbmons? Maybe so, but I don't belong to the species. You don't belong. Maybe they do, some of them. But how many? How many, really?" His mind continues to echo the question. She comes up behind him and leans close. He feels her nipples against his back. Hard, tickling him. "Most of them, perhaps," she says. "Your thesis may still be right. But we're wrong. We're out of place." "Yes." "Throwbacks to an uglier age." "Yes." "So we've got to stop torturing each other, Jason. We have to wear better camouflage. Do you see?" "Yes. Otherwise we'll end up going down the chute. We're unblessworthy, Micaela." "Both of us." "Both of us." He turns. His arms surround her. He winks. She winks. "Vengeful barbarian," she says tenderly. "Spiteful savage," he whispers, kissing her earlobe. They slip together onto the sleeping platform. The nightwalkers will simply have to wait. He has never loved her as much as he does this minute.  containers for the condition of man (Photos by Leroy Woodson -- Corcoran Gallery of Art "The most practical man on Earth and the wealthiest on top of that finds himself in the most extravagant and irrational position. The American metropolitan man is just plain silly and he's becoming aware ofit... The Architectural Vision of Paolo Saleri -- Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. T he condition of Man these days is often described as barely soso. God is dead and the cities are sagging. There are too many of thee and scarcely enough of me and too often thee won't listen. Air, water and Earth are polluted and few of us, from top to bottom, show any great inclination to stop chewing each other's jugulars for reasons ranging from pot to patriotism. Few things work and people don't want to. It was about time for something to happen in New Jersey. Man's current condition is probably as well exemplified in New Jersey as anywhere. The state is the most densely populated in the Union and economically among the most urbanized. Agriculture accounts for less than one per cent of its work force distribution; manufacture, trade, services and government -- in that order -- use up # of the remaining payroll. Spread out evenly over its land area nearly a thousand New Jerseyites might homestead each square mite of the state -- delete lakes and waterways, roads and other transportation facilities, manufacturing and business sites, waste depots and other unusable areas and conditions for life become much more crowded. Then try to shoehorn a badly needed modern jet airport right into where all the action is -- that's where jetports are needed -- and you have a problem. Perhaps even a sudden life-and-death problem. The photographs on the following pages treat it as such. The designer of the scale-model structures depicted, Arizona-based Architect Paolo Soleri, calls them arcologies, a name derived from combining architecture and ecology"When we cry for the raped Earth," says Soleri, "we cry for the narrowing lead we have on death." Soleri's view of the future, however, is audacious rather than tearful. Man must be contained -- but not imprisoned. His conditions of survival have grown increasingly complex -- until their byproducts threaten that very survival. Soleri's arcologies are also defined as "containers for the condition of man -- " italics ours -- and include all of modern man's life-support artifacts and, hopefully, their evolutionary potential. The first two photos show a three-dimensional model "container" titled #-D Jersey, recently exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., under the joint sponsorship of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Prudential Insurance Company. It is a singlestructure city, an integrated urban complex more than a mile in diameter and a half-mile high -- twiceplus the height of the Empire State Building -- designed to house, employ and completely service the economic, health, educational, cultural, physical and domestic needs With fresh air, sunlight and recreational facilities thrown in. The concept grew out of New Jersey's need for a new, major airport and is the result of a study in depth which originally involved the State Planning Commission as overall coordinator of state planning, the Ford Motor Company as transportation consultant, Rutgers University as supplier of sociological input -- and Paolo Soleri as designer. The bio'nomic function of #-D Jersey is that of a massive transportation center -- air traffic is its supporting industry. In the design shown (photo, p. #) the airfield -- hinted at only fractionally at upper left and top -- completely surrounds the city. Traffic from all points of the compass would reach the city without noisy and polluting overflights. Aircraft would touch down two to two and a half miles from the center of the city, taxi underground into the huge, encircling outer ring (shown partially at left and across the top of the photo). The ring houses terminals, freight and passenger areas, hangars and repair shops. Traffic departures reverse the process. Takeoffs or liftoffs would again take place well away from the heart of the city. A small heliport -- usable also by vertical-takeoff craft -- perches atop an elevator structure (shown at bottom left) forms to create compact situations and services local, short-hop traffluid and flexible enough to adjust fic. to the constantly changing survival Beyond the main airfield would demands of technological man. stretch agricultural areas supplyAmong the most striking of ing the city with consumables, or these is Babel Canyon, shown on the perimeter could be used for page #. Giant towers reach upecological preserves, wild-life saneward to a half-mile height to suptuaries or easily accessible recreport slanting elements -- canyons -- ational forests or other wilderness. in the airy center of the city. This The distance from the outer taxi arcology is designed to provide a ring to the mile-diameter high-rise virtually endless variety of buildstructure in the center ranges from ings to suit individual tastes from three-quarters of a mile to a mile, vertical dwellings to sloping hillThe bleacherlike formations shown sides and split-levels and intimate in the model as encircling the cenneighborhoods, tral structure house underground "Arcologies are not self-conindustrial plants and installations tained, closed environments," says and would be surfaced by parks Robert L. Walker, Jr., one of Paand gardens. olo Soleri's apprentices. "We're The photo on page # shows the simply defining a very large, hopehigh-rise complex -- or the city fully rationally organized containproper -- in more detail. Dwellings, er and then, within that container, neighborhoods, churches, small the various spaces, buildings, funcstores and playgrounds -- facilities tions and so forth would be made serving the intimate, familial funcaccording to the needs and wishes tions of life -- are contained on the of the society that would inhabit outer surface or "skin" of the city, it." The inner core houses public strucBabel Canyon, towering upward tures -- the university, schools, from a base of # acres -- less theaters and concert halls, other than one half a square mile -- is decultural centers, the financial dissigned to meet the needs and trict and administrative offices, wishes of # inhabitants, hotels and the like. one of Mr. Soleri's containers for two-thirds of a mile from a of the condition of Man designed surface area of a # acres (see to meet a specific area problem photo on page #), is intended to pitched to him and involving outrhouse # humans. The span side agencies. The others were of the structure, which consists of done as exercises using geometric two pyramid shapes that are skewed and supported on legs that also contain housing, is # feet. The pyramids are gigantic platforms and latticework into which a variety of buildings may be constructed. Again the outer surfaces of the arcology are designed for housing, gardens, playgrounds and neighborhoods and afford maximum air and sunlight. Cultural, business, administrative, medical and educational facilities are designed to occupy the interior of Hexahedron and an interior transportation system consisting of walkways, bicycle paths, moving sidewalks, escalators and pneumatictubes links the whole. Hexahedron is also admirably designed, according to Mr. Walker, for recycling its own wastes and sewage to produce -- for instance -- electric power. Collection is easy. "You're not dealing with laid-out, flat, horizontal systems and the possibilities of reusing the stuff are almost endless." N one of Mr. Soleri's giant arcologies has as yet attained structural reality, although his visionary designs have exploded dramatically on the speculative scene. Nor will they begin to house humans until many socio-economic and political attitudes change drastically. Exactly what changes are required will be tested, starting this year, in central Arizona. Groundwork for the construction of the first modest arcology, Arcosanti, is scheduled to begin early this summer. Strictly an experimental project, Arcosanti (see photo on page #) is designed to house from # to # people on ten acres of land situated in a wilderness preserve of # acres. Again quoting Mr. Walker: "The idea is, we're trying to test the concept of putting a city or town or whatever -- a, complete urban environment -- in a large, open park or preserve. It will allow people the option of having a city environment or raw nature." The test is an important one -- Mr. Soleri and his apprentices believe in an urban environment for Man. The rest of the # acres will be devoted to farming, recreation parks or just plain wilderness to increase the options. It is hoped that the project will invite as participants professional people -- architects, engineers, economists and the like -- who will be able to define new urban situations and build or design to meet them. Except for the container shown here, the purpose is to make Arcosanti a selfbuilding city. A kind of inevitability underlies many -- if not most -- of Paolo Saleri's concepts. "Miniaturization" is a key word that frequently and basically crops up in connection with his massive arcologies, which are basically conceived as social organisms following biological laws.m "As any organism evolves," Mr. Walker quotes his mentor, "as it has more options -- the structure in which it operates seems to implode." The arcologies are not designed to expand physically. "They're organized in the sense that, say, the human body is organized. It's very difficult for the human body to add another finger or to add another heart -- this takes These cities might be considered to be designed in such a way that their bones and nervous systems are defined. Then the skin and mind can go through almost infinite change, as in a human being. We're all organized in the same physical pattern but each of us is a separate individual, depending on how our senses and sensibilities develop. The concept can be applied to this organism called the city." Perhaps the sense of inevitability one has about Mr. Soleri's arcologies derives from the fact they include containers for virtually every condition in which technological Man has found himself. Asteromo is a city in orbit -- an asteroid designed to house indefinitely, under simulated Earth conditions, a population of about # people. "It is a double-skinned cylinder kept inflated by pressurization and rotation on its main axis. The inner skin is the ground on which man walks. It is lined with vegetation for food and the carbon dioxideoxygen cycle..." Mr. Soleri writes in his book. The City in the Image of Man, recently published byM.I.T. Then there are Novanoah I and Novanoah II for humans whose condition -- by preference -- is linked to the ocean. The first of these rises to a height of # meters -- nicely more than a half-mile -- above the surface of the ocean in which it floats on a wheel-like base of # acres. Mechanical facilities, industries, life-support systems, sea-farms and submarine harbors are designed below water level; housing, cultural, business and administrative centers above. Novanoah II is a seagoing giant, based on a floating platform three miles across and reaching up to a mile in height. Its population is estimated at # and distribution of facilities is about the same as in Novanoah I. Many of Mr. Soleri's "containers" are not only sociologically and spiritually but also technologically beyond the current condition of Man. We still lack know-how -- some of Mr. Soleri's most massive urban organisms are intended to be fusion-powered -- like having a little sun in your basement. Mr. Soleri does not present them as ultimate answers to Man's condition. They are simply to indicate a possible direction. And what would you say if someone were to ask you. Why not?  J IM Hailey had to look all through the house before he found his wife. She was soaking in the tub; her clothes lay strewn across the bathroom floor. "Say, Mona, what's all that meat on the front porch?" he said, frowning. "Looks like hell." She burst into tears. "That's not meat, that's Amanda Jean." "You must be kidding," exclaimed Jim. "Is this some damn fool joke?" "Joke!" She started to laugh. Jim could see she was close to hysteria; he got her out of the tub and into bed and brought her a drink of brandy. "Now, tell me all about it," he said calmly, although he was very upset himself. Amanda Jean was his favorite daughter. She took a deep, shuddering breath. "We were walking from the bus stop, along Elm. I met her downtown and we took the bus home together. And this... big station wagon draws up alongside, this fellow... leans out with his... gun -- " "What kind of gun?" "You know I don't know one from the other!" "Long barrel or -- Never mind. What happened then?" "He missed. I gave her a push. We started running. She was out ahead, she's so fast. Was so fast. I was trying to...get in the way, you know?" Jim touched her hand. "I know." "We got to the cedar hedge. So then I knew if we once got across the Hursts' lawn we could duck back of the big willow into the patio and be -- " her mouth had to work to form the word -- "safe. And I thought, Jim was right tO; put the willow there..." His hand twitched on hers. "But as soon as we reached the lawn she...went down. I tripped on her and I..." Jim waited, stroking her arm. "There, there. You did everything you could." But his mind was not with her; his mind was out in the street, hearing the shot, seeing Amanda Jean fall, inventing a face for the man who shot her and trying to memorize the invented face, as though it were real; just to be doing something, anything. "I crawled over, kind of laid across her. He said, 'Please look out.' I knew it was no use, but I just lay there, screaming, the way you do. So he pushed me aside..." "You got off easy." "...and put another...shot in her neck." "Not her head." "Of course not! The head was what he wanted I knew we should have cut her hair. I told you, remember? I said -- " "Go on, damn you!" he snarled. She set up a wail. "Oh, I'm sorry, Mona honey. Only when I feel so bad and then you say it's my fault -- " T hey dung to each other. She was shaking. "It was a rifle. I can see the long barrel..." "What did he look like? What kind of a looking fellow?" "Why, do you know what he looks like. You know Lister Willings, from up the hill. That big house on Cerrito?" "By sight. Not to speak to. Go on." "Well, he carried her up on the porch and asked could I let him have a bucket of water and some newspaper. So I did and he cleaned it all up. Nice and neat, didn't you think?" "Neat enough," he said. Her voice was fading and he needed a few more facts before she got to the end of her strength. "What did he take?" "Well, the head, of course, and the patches. In this plastic carrying case? Then he asked did I want him to quarter the rest, and I...said yes. I didn't know what to say, and you weren't here...he would have carried them inside but I said no, I didn't want him in my house. So he took his case and his knives and left." "And nobody came to give you a hand? None of the neighbors?" "Louise Hurst came over, soon as he left. Then Mrs. Atterman. Helped me in, left a message for you at the office and all -- but I sent them home, they have their dinner to fix. Jack Hurst'll be by when he sees your car. There's a new bottle of bourbon in the cupboard, underneath." "Well, I'll be gone for a while." He found the sleeping pills and gave her two with a drink of water. "Just lie quiet and you'll drop off. I'll leave a note for the kids." She brought his hand to her lips and lay back, eyes closed. He went downstairs and wrote the note, taping it to the refrigerator door so they would surely see it. He spread a plastic dropcloth on the back seat of his car, piled Amanda Jean's quarters on it and drove down to the police station. But he could have saved himself the trouble. "Hell, Jim," said Captain Morck, "I feel really bad about this but you know it's the season. Here's a man got his permit and his license, she was fifteen years of age, not a darn thing in the world I can do." "Shooting out of his station wagon?" cried Jim. "Who says?" "My wife was right there." Dave Morck grabbed irritably at a fly. "It's up to you, Jim. You can bring a charge against him, get your wife up on the stand and put her through this awful experience all over again -- and who's going to believe the girl's mother? And what's to stop him putting on a witness'll swear he was on foot?" Jim knew Dave was talking sense but it made him wild. "Aren't you supposed to enforce the law? Didn't you take some kind of oath of office?" "It's your wife," said Dave Morck... "You really want to put her through that, go ahead. And then what? Maybe he gets two years, out in ten months -- that going to bring back your girl?" "No." He slapped the desk, stood up slowly. "Take it easy." "Yeah." He walked out, making a brief gesture of greeting to Breierman and Foley. When he opened his car door he saw the flies on Amanda Jean and beat them off, swearing. place, through the gates and around to the front, or what he took to be the front, since it was where the driveway went. It was a real modern house. He walked up to the door and rang, looking the place over out of habit; sixty thousand in the house, ten for the lot, another ten for the tennis court and pool and some kind of barbecue out back -- he could smell the charcoal. The door opened. A heavy-set man in a flowered sport shirt said, "Yes?" down on Juanita and Elm." your daughter?" He stood back. "Come on in." It was a good-sized room, fireplace, ceramic tile floor. "What do you drink?"  "Not now, thanks." indicated a big leather chair. "Can't stay. I've got her quarters out in the car. How come you left them? I smelled barbecue just now -- you're not vegetarian. Didn't think she'd eat good?" "Oh, sure, but I hoped you could use them. My freezer's full, been pretty lucky this year. Say, actually, you like something succulent? Remember last fall, they opened up the pre-schoolers down in San Felipe? I've still got a few chops, little boy about three and a half, cuts like butter." "I have everything I need," said Jim. "But I'd surely appreciate it if you could spare Amanda Jean's trophies." "No can do. They're at Hamilton's already. I'll have him ship them over to you when they're mounted. He's putting them on a slab of Honduras mahogany, you'll have something really nice." He put up one hand. "My pleasure, don't mention it." "I wasn't about to, you dirty bastard. Sweet talking me, but I know you got her with a rolling shot. Real rodeo rifle, aren't you, you've been misinformed, Mr. Hailey. I wouldn't do a thing like that." "But you would call my wife a liar," Jim said gently. "Look here, Hailey -- " began home, offered you a drink -- " "And a pound of kindergarten cutlets and a piece of Honduras mahogany. You must figure I'm looking to be paid for my own mouth but Jim cut him off. "You might as well fix me that drink." looked around till he found the door to the kitchen. The wife was shredding cabbage. "Beg pardon. Ma'am. Could I trouble you to step in here?" She put down her knife and came in, looking from him to his gun rack but Jim got him first. He fell back across the bar with a crash of breaking glass and slid tinkling to the floor. J IM lowered the wife -- widow -- gently into a chair. "You saw it. Ma'am. You saw it was a legal kill." She nodded. When he brought back the vacuum she was still nodding. He slapped her sharply to bring her out of it -- but then he was sorry he did, because all the time he was nuisance of herself. "I know how you feel, ma'am," he said finally, "but I don't have all day. Got to get home, look after my kids." He got her back in the chair. "You ought to have somebody up here with you. You want me to call your people?" He meant to do this right. "No, I wijl," she said. He brought her the phone and she turned her head away and began talking in a low voice. When he was finished he went around and caught her eye, pointing to the quarters, but she shook her head, so he carried them out and dropped them in the back with Amanda Jean. He considered leaving his card in case she decided to sell -- but then he figured to pass on the tip to Hank Schloss. He didn't want anything that would remind him of this day, not even a commission. When he got home Mona was still asleep. The kids had fixed dinner and tidied up. They were good kids. He called Billy away from TV to help with the wrapping and freezing but after a few minutes he let him go -- the poor kid's eyes filled with tears every time he looked at his sister's slender quarters. Then he had a sandwich and a glass of beer and went to bed, although he did not fall asleep for the longest time. N ext day he notified the school and the insurance company. Mona and the kids went through Amanda Jean's clothes and divided up her records and trinkets. It looked to Jim as if they were taking shifts crying -- as soon as one dried up another started. Then he thought he would just get past it, the way he did after Duane was shot -- but maybe he was more attached to Amanda Jean than to Duane. Or maybe it was because he and Mona were older now, not likely to have any more kids. It was over and done with -- her trophies were up over cured and hung on the knotty pine scalp rack in the office; still he would be showing a property and his mind would go slipping away crash of glass, the smell of blood bald spot under his fingers during the scalping. And still he kept seeing her out of the corner of his eye. But it was always one of the other girls. sleeping right. Mona kept after him but he didn't want to talk about it -- it made him feel like a fool. Then one morning as he was leaving for the office she said, "Honey, I made a date for you to see Dr. Peabody." He just stood and stared at her and she got flustered. "Well, not really a date. He said he'd be working on his sermon this afternoon if you wanted to drop by. But I can call and break it -- " He picked up his jacket. "Seems as if you did enough talking about me already. I'll call."  And he meant to. But as the morning wore on he got to wondering what Dr. Peabody would say when he heard the whole story -- and after lunch Jim stopped by to tell it to him. Dr. Peabody didn't say a thing, just took off his glasses, turned them around and stared at them as if they were someone else's eyes. Jim sat forward. "Now, wasn't that wrong. Dr. Peabody? A person might close their eyes to the illegal shot, if it was a fellow needed food. But to drive off and leave her, all but the trophies -- don't you say it was wrong?" Dr. Peabody's uncovered eyes looked large and soft. "Of course there's a line between right and wrong. But it isn't straight and sharp, like a property line. It doesn't even stand still. It's more like the wet line that runs down the beach after a wave breaks. Ever watch? Then there's another wave and another wet line. Was it higher or lower this time? Is the tide coming in or going out?" Jim wasn't sure what Dr. Peabody was getting at, but he nodded politely. "Take your kill, Jim. Of Mr. "It was a one hundred per cent legal kill," said Jim. "Over and above that, it was to Mphold the law. If more people would get out and do like I did, we could get the guns out of the cars and give our girls a sporting chance." "I didn't ask if it was legal. I asked if it was right." "It surely was!" "Would you be here if you really believed that?" said Dr. Peabody quietly. "What?" said Jim. He felt confused. Dr. Peabody put his glasses on again -- now his eyes were smaller, farther away. "Jim. You killed in anger -- did you not?" "I never!" cried Jim. "I was cool as a butcher." "To be born as I was," says Anne McCaffrey, "on April first, imposes a challenge. In writing speculative fiction, I feel I have not failed the auspices of my natal day. "However, being # percent Irish indicates a certain perversity, so I tried out many things before I settled down to write. I dabbled in the theater arts and studied voice production for nine years before arriving at the horrifying conclusion that I was a better stage director than a singer. "I balance indifferent housekeeping with superb cooking, knit well -- and (would you believe?) embroider -- swim, sail, ride horseback (western style by preference), collect Graustarkian romances and resent being kept away from my typewriter by any of the above-mentioned diversions. Am currently raising five cats, a French poodle and three children -- though 'child' hardly describes my #'#" eldest son. He's seventeen and heading for college. No. # boy is an avid SF readnever recovered from being the 'Todd' in Decision at Doona), and my darling daughter, Georgeanne, grows in beauty, wisdom and inches along with other lovely young plants -- i. e., wolfbane. "I have been Secretary-Treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America for two years and am ardently looking for someone who'll take over so I can rest on my laurels. There are two awards and five novels to my credit, and I'm working on a sequel to Dragonfiight at present. "My eyes are green, my hair is silver and I freckle. The rest is subject to change without notice." "Ah?" said Dr. Peabody. "Well, then, I must be mistaken. I suppose you've eaten him." Jim looked at Dr. Peabody's chin. "I don't know. Maybe. Mona handles all that." "Did you eat him, Jim?" "No, sir," he muttered. "Why not?" Jim looked away, up one wall of Dr. Peabody's study and down the other. "Why not, Jim?" Jim looked down at his hands. "Then, of course, you had no right to take his life. And you know it, don't you? In your heart. Don't you, Jim?" All of a sudden he felt something snapping inside his chest, as if a great big rubber band had been holding him together. He walked to the door, tried to speak -- and just went on out. He drove over to the far side of the golf course and sat in his car crying for about half an hour. Then he went home and made himself a drink and began taking quarters out of the freezer. "Call the gang," he told Mona. "Barbecue tomorrow." Mona looked at him and kept her mouth shut. She was a really good wife. N ext morning early he started the fire and trimmed out the meat. Then he mixed up his own special sauce and began basting. He used a child's toy broom that he kept for barbecues. Once or twice he had a call from the office but mostly he just stood around painting on sauce and fussing with the fire. That night Hank Schloss said it was the best he ever ate. "Only I wish I had a few days notice, so's I could have worked up a real appetite! What came over you all qf a sudden?" "Why, Hank, you ought to know," said Jim, "there's three things a man don't like to hang around and wait for, once he gets the notion -- and two of them's barbecue!" They all laughed. But in fact he ate very little. And even so he was up most of the night, puking. But next morning when he came downstairs he felt it was going to be all right. He stopped at the stove and laid his cheek against Mona's and she reached around and patted his shoulder with the oven mitt. On his way to the office he stopped at the Peabody's and dropped off two fine rib roasts out of his freezer. "Your very own girl!" exclaimed Mrs. Peabody..."I am touched! And what joy to have something tender, for a change!" She clapped her hand over her mouth. "Aren't I awful, talking like this? When people are so kind and generous about sharing with us? But you know, it generally turns out to be somebody's old aunt, for braising."  "I've decided not to die in the noturoi order of things," John Penondrew said. "The idea appeois to me strongly..." I... let him know that the word translated 'everlasting' by our writers is what the Greeks term aionion, which is derived from aion, the Greek for Saeculum, an age. But the Latins have not ventured to translate this by secular, lest they should change the meaning into something widely different. For many things are called secular which so happen in this world as to pass away even in a short time; but what is termed aionion either has no end, or lasts to the very end of this world. T his is an attempt to assemble such facts (hard and soft) as may yet be found about a remarkable man who seemed to be absolutely balanced and integrated, yet who developed a schizo-gash deep as a canyon right down the middle of his person. Dr. George Drakos says that he developed three or four such schizo-gashes. This is also an attempt to record some of the strange goingson in the house on Harrow Street -- and it is a half-hearted (no, a faint-hearted or downhearted) attempt to record the looser goingson in the subsequently forever house on Harrow Street. The subject is a man who had everything, took hold of something beyond that and was broken to pieces by it. Or was not. "I want to be the complete man," John Penandrew used to say to himself. "I want to be the complete man," he would say to all of us who would hear him. Well, he was already the most complete man that any of us had ever seen. He had been a promising young man: as Don Marquis has said of himself, and had been a promising young man for twenty years. But Penandrew didn't show those twenty years at all, except in his depth. His eyes, his shape, his everything was just as all had been when he left Monica Hall twenty years before: he had been a gilded youth then -- or at least he had been plated over with a very shiny substance. He still was, he was still that youth, but in his depth he was a full man, sure and mature, and with the several appearances together and unconflicting. For he was also the boy he had been thirty years before, in no detail changed. He had been a loud-mouthed kid, but smart all the time and smooth when he wanted to be. Now there was a boy, a youth and a man, three non-contradictory stages of him looking out of his gray eyes. His complexity impressed me strongly. And it also impressed four men who were not as easily impressed as I was. There were five men who knew everything; and there was myself. We met loosely two or three times a year. The five men who knew everything were this John Penandrew (he was in banks as his father had been); Dr. George Drakos, who was Greek and who used to go to Greek school in the evenings; Harry O'Donovan, who was a politician as his fathers had been forever; Cris Benedetti, an ex-seminarian who taught literature and esoterica at the university; and Barnaby Sheen, who was owner of the Oklahoma Seismograph Enterprizes. These five men were all rich, and they all knew everything. I wasn't and I didn't. I belonged to the loose group by accident: they had never noticed that I alone had not become rich or that there were evident gaps in my information. We had all gone to school twenty years before to the Augustinians at Monica Hall and minds once formed by the Augustinians are Augustinian forever. We had learned to latch onto every sound idea and intuition and to hold on forever. At least we had more scope than those who went to school to the Jesuits or the Dominicans. This information is all pertinent. Without the Augustinian formation John Penandrew would never have shattered -- he'd have bent. I 'VE decided not to die in the natural course of things," John Penandrew said softly. The other four of those men who knew everything didn't seem at all surprised. "You've given enough thought to it, have you?" Cris Benedetti asked him. "That's really the way you want it?" "Yes, that's the way I want it," John Penandrew said. "And I've considered it pretty thoroughly." "You've decided to live forever then, have you?" Barney Sheen asked with just a hint of boyish malice. "Naturally not to live forever here," Penandrew attempted to explain. "I've decided to live only as long as the world lasts, unless I am called from my plan by peremptory order. I am resolved, however, to live for very many normal lifetimes. The idea appeals to me strongly." "Have you decided just how you will bring this about?" Dr. George Drakos asked. "Not fully decided. I've begun to consider that part only recently. Of first importance is always the decision to do a thing. The means of carrying it out will have to follow that decision and flow from it. There is no real reason why I shouldn't be able to do it, though." "No, I suppose not," Cris Benedetti said thoughtfully. "You're an intelligent man and you're used to tall problems. But there have been other intelligent men and, as far as I know, none of them has done this thing." "Do you know of any really intelligent man who has decided to do this and then has failed in the doing?" Penandrew asked. "No, not if you put it that way," Cris admitted. "Most problems remain unsolved simply because they have never been tried seriously and in the proper framework. And there are legends of men (I presume them to have been intelligent) who have done this thing and are doing it. Not very reputable legends, though." "Well, what is it then, an elixir of youth that you'll be seeking?" Harry O'Donovan asked in his high voice. "No, Harry, that idea is clearly unworkable. It couldn't be taken seriously by anyone except a youth," Penandrew talked it out carefully. "It will not be an elixir of youth: it will be an elixir of all ages -- that, I believe, is the crux of the matter. I do not want to be only a youth forever or for a very long time -- I am more than just a youth now. It would not be possible to remain a youth forever." "Then what?" O'Donovan demanded. "I don't believe you've thought this out very thoroughly, John. Do you want to live for a very long time and you getting older and older and older all that time?" "But I have thought it out pretty thoroughly, Harry. I will get old only at one end, only in depth. I will become a complete man -- and then still more complete. I believe there is no record of any really complete man's ever dying -- that's the thing." "I believe there is no record of any complete man at all," George Drakos said. "That's really the thing." "There's probably been a large handful of us," Penandrew said. "I... know pretty well what I want to do and I know pretty well what it consists of. I will become every aeon of myself simultaneously; then I will have become a complete man -- and then I will not die. There is a meaning within a meaning of the old word aeon. Aeon means ages. But the pleroma or plentitude is made up of substantial powers called aeons. I maintain that these two meanings are the same. In Gnosticism the aeon is one of the group of eternal beings that combine to form the supreme being -- all are eternal and simultaneous but no one of them would be eternal out of combination. I believe that there is analogy on the human plain; and I intend to become that analogy, to be all my ages simultaneously and forever, to be every aeon of myself. I will be forever a boy, forever a youth, forever a man and forever an old man. I'm already something of this multiple appearance. I'm told. I guarantee that I'll be a boy forever. I'll nail down that end." "And what happens when the old man in you gets older and older and dies?" Drakos said. "I don't know what will happen but I'm certainly interested in knowing, George. Possibly I will assume a still older man and then a still older. I'm not sure there is a necessary connection between very old age and death. It may be, though, that the extreme aeons of me will pass over the edge and give me a foot in each world. I'd like that. The possibilities are almost endless. But I believe that the boy in me, the youth in me, the man in me will live for innumerable lifetimes." "Oh brother!" Harry O'Donovan sounded in his high voice. "And how will you be doing it all? Not by talking about it. I'll bet." "Yes, I will do it by considerable talking about it and by much more thinking about it," Penandrew ventured. "It is not a thing for gadgets or apparatuses, though I may employ, them some. It is a thing, I believe, of mental and physical disposition and I tell you that I'm well disposed toward it." T his John Penandrew who lived in the big house on Harrow street was married to Zoe Archikos. Barny Sheen would like to have been married to her. So would Cris Benedetti and Harry O'Donovan. So would George Drakos except that she was his cousin. Zoe was a creature that has become fairly rare these last twenty-five centuries: a blonde Grecian, a veritable Helen, a ge;nuinely classic model with that brassiness that must go with it. The bronze age understood the necessity of this high brass, but we have forgotten. Oh, she was form and life, she was perfection and brindled passion -- and she was also the blast of a brass horn. John Penandrew was fortunate in having her; she should have been elixir enough for anyone. But he was fortunate in almost everything. T he fathers tell us that Adam, in his preternatural state, enjoyed all ages at once," Barney Sheen said, "so it is not strictly true that he had no childhood, even though he was created adult. He was created all ages at once. It was a good trick till he broke it. And, by coincidence, I recently ran into the still surviving legend of the one man who, since Adam, is most persistently believed to have been all ages at once and to be still alive." "Coincidence, which is simultaneity, is valid when it touches a simultaneous man as I am becoming," John Penandrew said with what would have been pomposity in another man. "Ah -- where did you run into the latest legend of Prester John, Barney?" "In Ethiopia. I have several crews doing petroleum exploration work there and I visited there recently. Some of the simple local workmen talk of the everlasting man as if he were a present-day presence." "Near Magdala, was it?" John Penandrew asked with sudden eagerness. "About seventy miles northwest of there, on the Guna slopes." "I was sure it was near. Magdala, of course, is a modern nameform of old Mogadbre, the legendary kingdom of Prester John." "That's impossible," George Drakos cut in. "Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of the Amharic language would know that the one name could not change into the other." "Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of anything would know that both names are from the Geez and not the Amharic language," Cris Benedetti sneered, "and there is a strong possibility that the two names are the same, George." (It is sometimes confusing to have these acquaintances who know everything.) "But you can't do it, John, in Ethiopia or anywhere; you can't be the simultaneous man," Cris continued. "You haven't the integrity for it." "Why not, Cris? I pay tithes of cummin and that other stuff. I love my wife and many other persons. I have a pleasant way with my money and I do not grind the faces of the poor. Why haven't I integrity?" "You have common decency, John, but not integrity," Cris said. "I use the word to mean unified totality and scope -- that is integrity in the theological sense. I use the word as Tanquerey uses it." (They used to study Tanquerey's Dogmatic Theology in the seminaries. Now they study rubbish.) "There are several ways I can go about this," Penandrew said. "I believe that we originally had this simultaneity and everlastingness as a preternatural gift. Then we were deprived of it. But it remains a part of our preternatural nature. This means that we must be deprived of it all over again every day or it will flow back into us. It could be as simple a thing as actinic rays depriving us of this handy gift of everlasting life. I've studied these possibilities a little. I could have a series of silver plates or baffles set into my head to combat the rays. That's one way." "What's the other ways?" Barney Sheen asked. "Oh, proper disposition of mind and body. Induced mystic states combined with my natural powers and proclivities. I believe that there may be gadgetry employed as a trigger -- but only as a trigger for the alteration. I believe that it will be mostly realizing a state of being that already belongs to us, something that belongs to our preternatural nature." "Or our unnatural nature," Barney said. "You didn't use to play so loose with words. What's the other way, John?" "Oh, I may go and find Prester John and learn how he's been doing it these thousands of years," John Penandrew said. "And I will go and do likewise." "Did you ever hear anything like that, Laff?" Barney asked me. "Has the subject ever been handled in your -- ah, pardon my smile -- field?" "Several stories have handled the subject," I said, "but not in the variation that Penandrew wants to give it." II Saying: O grandfather, the little ones have nothing of which to make a symbol. He replied, saying:...they shall make of me their symbol...the four divisions of days (stages of life they shall enable themselves to reach and enter... of town for about a year. When he came back he had a different look to him. Oh, he had simultaneity now! He really had it. He was the boy he had been thirty years ago; he was the youth he had been twenty years ago; he was the man he should have been now and he was also an older man. He was all these several persons or ages at once, much more than he had been before -- all of them, completely and unconflictingly. He had pulled it off. He was truly the simultaneous man. But that isn't exactly what we mean when we say that he had a different look to him. In all his simultaneous persons he had something just a little bit lopsided about him. One eye was always just a little bit larger than the other. There was more than a hint of deformity and there shouldn't have been this in a complete man. But he was the complete man now. He had done it. He had pulled the coup. He was wound up all the way and he would live forever unless he flew apart. This was no fakery. You could feel that he had done it. He lived in the big house on Harrow Street with the brassy classy Zoe and they lived it to the hilt. There wasn't ever anyone in such a hurry to have so much fun so fast. They were perfervid about it. But why should he be in such a hurry when he had forever? Well, he had money and he had talent and he had Zoe. The boy was strong in him now (he had been a loud-mouthed kid but smart all the time and smooth when he wanted to be); the youth was in him very strong (he had been a gilded youth or at least a very brassy one); and the man and the older man were vital and shouting in him. The Penandrews were cutting a wide swath and they were much in the papers. But what was John's big hurry now? "Add one dimension, then you might as well add another." He grinned with a grin a little too lopsided for a complete and simultaneous man. "Speed, that's the thing. Speed forever and lean heavy on that hooting horn." But it was another year before myself and those five men who knew everything were all together again. 'with his lopsided grin as though he were too full of mischief to talk. And Barnaby Sheen wound into one of his cosmic theses, of which he had hundreds: "Just before the Beginning there was a perfect sphere and no other thing." Barney spoke in his rich voice. "At least it supposed itself to be a perfect sphere -- it had no imperfect spheroid with which to compare itself. It suspected that it was revolving at a very high rate of speed, such a rate of speed that it would immediately fly apart if the rotation could be established as fact. But in relation to what point could it be rotating? "It was not in space -- there was no space beyond it; how could there be? It could not be in motion, of course, there being nothing relative to it. Neither could it be at rest -- in relation to what could it be at rest? It was not in time nor in eternity, there being nothing to pose it against in either aspect. It had no size, for there was nothing to which it might be compared -- it might be a pinhead in size, or a mega-megalo. It had no temperature, it had no mass, it had no gravity -- all of these things are relative to other things. "Then an exterior speck appeared. This was the Beginning, not the sphere's lone existence. The mere speck was less than one diameter of the sphere and was at of diameters from it. Now there was both contrast and relationship. "Now there was size and mass and temperature, space, time and motion; for there was something to relate to. The sphere was indeed found to be in furious and powerful rotation, now that it could rotate in relation to something. It was in such rapid rotation that it deformed itself with its own centrifugal force, it ruptured itself, it flowed apart completely and everything thence is from its pieces. "What happened to the speck? Was it consumed in the great explosion? Probably not. Likely it had never existed at all. It was a mere illusion to get things started. Say, I consider that an excellent 'In the Beginning' bit. Can you use that, Laff? Can you make a piece out of that piece?" "I will use it some day," I said. "The important thing about that speck was its duration." John Penandrew licked the words out with a tongue that now seemed a little lop-sided. "It lasted for much less second. It was in contrast to the short-duration speck that the thenhappening cosmos acquired its delusion of immortality." "You are sure it is a delusion. Pen?" Cris Benedetti asked anxiously, as though much depended on the answer. "Yes, all a delusion," Penandrew grinned. "We cosmic types call it the workable delusion, and we will work it for all it is worth." "Tell us the truth, Penandrew," Barnaby Sheen said gruffly. "Did you really do it? And how did you do it?" "I really did it, Barney. I'll not die. I'll dance on your graves and on the graves of your great-greatgrandchildren. I'll make a point of it. I'll dance naked on the graves as David danced before the Ark." "Why such frenzied pleasure in our going. Pen?" Cris asked with some hurt. "It's the boy in me. He's a bit monstrous now and he's me. I can't change him or any of us or it will all collapse. It's mine. I'll hang onto it. I'll bow my back. I won't give an inch ever. I've got a mind-set in me now -- that's a big part of it." "Yes, I believe you did pull it off, Penandrew," Barney said slowly. "How did you do it, though? By elixir? By plates against the rays? By Prester John's secret? How?" "Oh yes, I finally lifted the secret from Prester John himself and now I will not die in the natural course of things. But I'll not tell you about it. You don't need to know about it. Why should you want to know?" "We also might want to avoid dying in the natural course of things," Doctor George Drakos said softly. "No, no, that's impossible," Penandrew shouted. "I won't be done out of it by anyone. I'll hold onto it for dear life -- and that is exactly the case of it." "Is it an exclusive thing?" Harry O'Donovan asked, "and it can't be shared?" "It cannot be shared," Penandrew said harshly. "It isn't anything like you think it is. It isn't at all as I thought it might be. It became a freak in its general withdrawal. It's a jealous thing. It's a snake in the hand and it must be held tightly. It isn't the preternatural thing I thought it would be. It's an unnatural thing now -- and only one person in the world can have it at a time, for all time. I won't let go of it. Hack my hands off -- but I won't let go of it!" "How is Prester John?" Barney Sheen asked in a strong low tone. "Oh, leave off the legends," Harry O'Donovan sounded angrily. "If there was a Prester John ever -- he's been dead these thousand years." "No. About eighteen months," Penandrew said. "I found him alive. And now he is dead." "You killed him," Barney said simply. "How would I kill him?" Penandrew protested. "He died of old age and God knows that that is the truth. He crumbled to dust. Why should he not have died of old age? Do you know how long he had been around? He saw Rome fall. And Jerusalem." "What did you take from him?" Barney Sheen asked. "I took the jealous thing, the only thing. And now I will not die in the natural course of things. He wanted me to take it. He had been trying to give it to someone for a long time." "That is the truth?" Sheen asked. "That is the truth," Penandrew said. And it was the truth, we all knew that, but it was a lopsided truth. Penandrew left us suddenly then. "May the sun come up on him crooked in the morning," Harry O'Donovan said bitterly. But in the big house on Harrow Street, John and Zoe Penandrew lived it up to the haft. It was speed forever and lean heavy on the hooting horn. There was something a little disreputable about the couple now -- if that word can be used of rich and positioned people. John grew older only in the old man of him. The boy in him was still the boy, the youth still the youth, the man still the man. He was living at least four lives at once, all at high speed and all forever. Zoe became more buxom and more classic, more brassy, more lively. If she aged at all she did it entrancingly and disgracefully -- but not ungracefully. There was nobody like her. She was full and overflowing, always. All the fun that could be crammed into every day and night! Speed, and the dangerous teetering that goes with very high speed. They went on forever. Actually they went on for ten years. Then Zoe left him and he broke up. No. He broke up first and then she left him. "I lost it," he said, "and I couldn't have. Nobody could ever have got it out of my grip." HI For his duration too there is a word -- the word Aevum or Aeviternity, the duration of that in which its essence or substance knows no change: though by its accidents it can know change... the house on Harrow Street took a peculiar turn. Things had been hectic when Zoe was there; they had been noisy and publicized. But, whatever Zoe was, she was always High Brass. She'd had class. Now the house and happenings degenerated. John Penandrew brought those three nephews of his into the big house to live with him. They were a crass bunch. There was something pretty low about them, and they brought John pretty low. A man should not be ashamed of his poor relations, of course: he should help them if they need help; and perhaps it was the essence of charity that John should take them into his own house. John had real charity in his heart; there is no taking that away from him. He also had baser things there and they began to pour out of it now. The three nephews were bums and John Penandrew became a bum along with them. Rich bums are the worst kind. And there was no doubting the kinship. All three of the fellows had the family look strongly. They were loudmouths, as John had always been a little -- but they were not smart and they were not smooth, as John could be when he wished. They all had what I can only call a facial deformity and they had it to a grotesque degree where John had it only to a minor extent. It was that lopsided look. It was that one eye bigger than the other. Coming out of that clan, John Penandrew came by his own slight deformity honestly. There were low-life doings at the big house on Harrow Street. The four Penandrew males each seemed to bring in seven cronies worse than himself. There were riotous doings there and the black maria was a frequent visitor to those doors. There was the aroma of stale evil in all this and John hadn't used to be a bad sort of man. John Penandrew talked rationally but sadly whenever we came across him. "I should never have taken the thing," he said. "I knew before I finally seized it that it was wrong and unnatural. And, having taken it go easier when I found what deformity it really was. 'The corruption of the best is the worst -- ' do you remember when we were taught that? This excellent gift was taken away from us long ago, and for a reason. I had it as a tainted and forbidden remnant, and I held onto it like a snake in the hand. But I will not easily give up any strong idea that I have held. I have an intransigent mind. Do you remember when we were taught to have thaf I held it too tight, and it shattered me." And in fact John Penandrew was a shattered man now -- or a splattered one. The sap had been all drained out of him, as though the nephews were sapsuckers or bloodsuckers who preyed on him. He weathered badly. Now he looked older than he was and he no longer looked all ages at once. He aged monstrously -- he leered and lolled. He seemed to be returning to most unaromatic dust. He had given up his chairmanships of the boards and his associations with the banks. It was their loss. He had always been very smart in matters of business and policy. He knew that that was finished with him now. He took his money and went home. And that home was a shipwreck. The middle nephew was as queer as a glass-egg goose. He had a stack of morals charges against him and John Penandrew had thousands of dollars of bond out on him. He was an almost personable fellow, but he was slanted -- how he was slanted! The youngest nephew was no window-breaking, arsonous vandal who led a wild pack and always left a trail right up to the Harrow Street house. What things he got away with because he was not yet adult! And him much more intricate than the adults who had to deal with him and much more deadly -- it is pretty certain that he killed larger and higher things than cats and broke more fragile things than windows. The oldest nephew, a twisted humorist, an almost good fellow, was the instigator of the endless series of sick parties held in the big house, the procurer of the dozen or so florid witches who always came with the dark. He was an experimenter in the vices, an innovator of reputation. John Penandrew had become an old and dirty caricature of himself. There was something artificial about him now, as though he were no more than a mask and effigy propped up on a display float at some garish carnival. The shape he was in, John Penandrew surely could not go on forever and he didn't. After about three years of cohabitation with the nephews, John Penandrew died. That should have wrecked the legend. Maybe not, though. Well, it really seemed that he did not die in the natural course of things. There was something most unnatural about the course of his dying, as though he had turned to dust before he died; as though what died was not himself at all; as though the dying were an incident, almost an afterthought. He wasn't much more than fifty years old. He looked ninety. Zoe didn't come to the funeral. "He isn't in very good shape right now," she said. "I'll wait a few months, and then go back to him when things are looking a little better with him." She wasn't at all distraught; she was just not making sense. She left the country the night before the funeral. A fter the funeral mass, after the Zecharih Canticle when the body is taken out from the church, Barnaby Sheen whispered to the priest in the vestibule: "I don't believe you've got him all there." "I don't believe so either," the priest whispered back. Zoe inherited. The nephews? No, they didn't get anything. There was something a little bit loose about those nephews. They weren't -- ah -- seen again. No trace was found of them, either backward or forward. They simply hadn't been. In the legal and recorded sense, at least, John Penandrew hadn't had any nephews. He had had attributes, we suppose, but not nephews. Well, peace to the pieces of the poor rich man! I T'S a moral paradigm, really, of a man who reached for too much and was shattered by it. It's a neat instance of final moral compensation and seemliness. Yes, except that it wasn't neat; that this wasn't the final part of it; and that the compensation was not particularly moral. It was not neat because there were pieces left sticking out of it -- a primordial brass horn that surely wasn't Gabriel's; and three, at least, noisy persons in the house on Harrow Street. But it was not stated that the nephews were not heard from again. They were heard. Oh how they were heard! They were the noisiest unbodied bodies that ever assaulted honest ears. They and their florid witches (unseen also) made the nights -- well -- interesting for quite some months in that long block on Harrow Street. This was the first phase of the Haunted House in Harrow Street. It was featured in Sunday supplements everywhere, likely in your own town paper. It was included in books like Beyond the Strange. It became a classic instance. And that was only the first phase of the Haunted House episode. The next phase was not so loudly trumpeted (don't use that word in this case) to the world. There was a tendency to play it down. It was too hell-fire hot to handle. Zoe came back to town, bright and big and brassy as ever. A classic personage. Zoe. How the classic has been underestimated and misunderstood! But she came in almost silently, muted brass with only a hint of the dazzle and blare. "I believe that things will be looking a little better with my husband John now," she said. "He should be better composed by this time. I am his wife. I will just move in with him again and be the proper wife to him." "Move in where?" Harry O' Donovan asked aghast, "into the grave?" "Oh no. I'll move back into the house on Harrow Street and live there with my husband." "Zoe, did you take the, well, thing from John?" Barney Sheen asked curiously. "Yes, I took it, Barney, but only for this short while. I'll give it back to him now. He may be able to cope with it this time. I don't need such things for myself. This time I am certain that we will have a long and entertaining life together. All things coalesce for us now." "Zoe, you're not making sense. John Penandrew is dead!" Cris Benedetti shouted. "Who isn't?" she asked simply. "I'll bet you though, Cris -- " (raucous horn blowing in the far distance) "that he's more alive than you are at this minute. Or you or you or you or you. If any of you were as alive as he is, I'd have you." "You're out of your wits, Zoe," George Drakos said and blinked. There was something the matter with Drakos' eyes, with all of our eyes. Somewhere a brassy shimmer of the second brightest light that human eyes will ever see. The four men who knew everything did not know Zoe Archikos; much less did I. Z OE moved back into the house on Harrow Street. And how was it with her there? Noisy, noisy. Some things at least coalesced for her or into her: among these, the florid witches who used to come with the dark. Their voices had been so jangling because they were broken voices, part voices. Now they were together in that dozentoned instrument, the red-brass, the flesh-brass. They had never been anything other than wraiths of her. Now she was all one again. There was some evidence also (shouting, grisly evidence) that the aeons or nephews or attributes had all coalesced into John Penandrew again. Well, that is the sort of thing that a town must live with, or die with; but it will not live on a normal course. L isten. No, not with your ears! Listen with your crawling flesh! Did you yourself ever meet a man after you had seen him dead? It does give you a dread, does it now? There was no need of elaboration. John Penandrew was a humorist but by that time he had become a little edgy of horror humor. There was none of that coming through the walls business. He came in normally by the door and sat down. "Jesus Christ!" Barney Sheen moaned. "Are you a ghost, John?" "The very opposite," Penandrew said softly. "In fact, I had to give up the ghost." Penandrew was that kind of humorist, but even bad Jokes are shocking from a man who's supposed to be dead. "It wasn't all of you in the coffin was it, John?" Barney asked in wonder. "No. Only my older aspect went over the edge. I once thought that this would give me a foot in each world and I was curious about it. It didn't work that way. I have no consciousness of that aspect now; nor, I suppose, has he of me. I shuffled off the mortal coil there. I've won. That's something. Nobody else ever won at it, except those like Zoe who were already preternatural." "You're a damned zombie, Penandrew!" Harry O'Donovan cried in shrill anger. "Can a zombie be damned?" Penandrew asked. "I don't know. Tell me, Chris. You were the theology student. For damnation is there not required a nature of a certain moment? But I'm of another moment now. Momentum, I am saying, which means a movement and a power and a weight; and 'moment of time' is only part of its meaning and only part of mine." "Damn your Latin! You're a deformity," O'Donovan cried. "Yes, I'm a deformed curve, the one that never closes on itself," Penandrew said with his lopsided smile. "Barney Sheen's 'In the Beginning' bit left something out. There was what might have been a perfect sphere, yes. There was, possibly, an exterior speck for contrast. I say that there was something else, one curve that would not close when everything else closed into the rather neat package that called itself The Cosmos, the Beauty. There was one shape left over. I am part of that other shape. Try being a little lopsided sometimes, men. You'll live longer by it." That was the last real talk that we ever had with John Penandrew. He never sought our company again and we sure never sought his. N obody else lives in that long block on Harrow Street now, but the noises are over-riding in that whole part of town. There is nothing the law can do. It is always that beautifully brassy woman there when they call and always with her artless answers: "It is only myself and my husband together here," Zoe says, "and we taking our simple pleasures together. Is that so wrong?" Even coppers get that funny look in their eyes when they have been hexed by the prevading sound of the brass winds. Old boys and young men often gather near that house at night and howl like wolves from the glandular ghosts that the strange flesh calls up in them. But even the most aroused of them will not attempt the house or the doors. The Penandrews are a unique couple taking their pleasures together all at once forever, and so violently as to drive the whole town stone-deaf -- like those old stone-deaf statues, their only real kindred? For these two will not die in any natural course of things, not with that big loud bright brassy horn blowing in a distance, and at absolute close range, all at once, everywhere, unclosed, lop-sided. It's the ending that hasn't any end. The Stone is found, and it's an older texture than the philosophers believed. The transmutation is accomplished, into brass. Classic and koine: this is the Zoe who dies hardly forever; this is the Penandrew, the man of the wrong shape. The four men who know everything understand it now. And I do not.  the hookup -- both nations had longnce mastered the necessary techniques. It ws, rather, the political overtone of the operation that gripped the entire world with prayerful anticipqiion. Long months at the conference tables of half a dozen world capitals had gone into the final preparations for this historic cooperative effort. Long years of meticulous planning had pushed irrevocably toward its ultimate success. Long centuries of quiet dreaming had gently pointed toward its fruition. A thousand miles above the curving spread of the Pacific Ocean, where an imaginary line split fragments of time into days, the United States of America and the Soviet Union would soon join outstretched hands. The two-man American space team, consisting of veteran astronauts Reynolds and Fletcher, was already on its way. They dropped a gigantic stage near the Florida coast and burned an arching trajectory toward the bulge of Africa. Within a few dramatically thrifty minutes of the united space age, the Russian cosmonauts were concluding their countdown. The Soviet team, Zhutrovich and Zhutrovich, recently joined as husband and wife, poised for launch. More anxious moments around a breathless sphere and two tumbling ships were in orbit. The Earth breathed out deep messages of congratulations, and bourbon and vodka permeated the atmospheric blanket. The American spaceship Washington, D.C. Ill whirled in its great oval orbit, biding its time with the distant stars. Its crew was relaxing with the prospect of several panoramic sightseeing hours ahead, prior to the final intricate maneuvering needed to reach the rendezvous point. The elated astronauts watched the steady lights of Earth skim beneath their cartwheeling ship, savoring the beauty and the splendid wonder of it all, when they heard a determined clanging beyond the inner door of the air lock. "It's too soon," said Reynolds, somewhat alarmed. "I'll radio back," said Fletcher -- but he stood frozen. "No," said the senior-ranked Reynolds, reaching for his airtight helmet. "They must be in trouble." Quickly they secured their inverted fish-bowl helmets and moved with highly trained precision to unbolt the air-lock door. The desperate clanging continued. "They have a woman aboard," said Fletcher through the wire trails of the intercom. His voice was edged with soft metal. "They're hours ahead of schedule," said Reynolds, glancing at the glowing console clock. As they completed their task the violent clanging stopped. With final mated movements the Americans opened their end of the air lock. They bent their crystaldomed heads and peered cautiously through the yawning hatchway. "It's empty," said Reynolds, with surprise barely buried within his crackling-metal voice. "Not quite," breathed Fletcher. He stepped back from the hatch. A dog-sized form like a shining black beetle scurried into their ship.  T he ship trembled. The reactor of its energy back into the Shockliheated cesium and sent it, hot um radiation cooler which in turn and deadly, through the neutron fed back through the heat exchangshield into the heat exchanger, er to the reactor at the very tip of From there it flowed through the the ship's nose. Coupled to the turgamma-ray shield to drive the bine, the generator sent the other monster turbine. Ignoring econotwenty-five percent of its energy my and efficiency, the turbine sent in megawatts -- sizzling down two something like seventy-five percent channels to jet out into space from the electron waste tube and the ion exhaust jets. Primitive, inefficient, uneconomical. But magnetism, gravity, resisted conquest with the tenacity of a blob of chewing gum on a theater seat. The ship trembled. It plunged through space at a speed of # x # feet per second. Difficult? Try #.I X # mph. Still difficult? Make it over # miles per second, then couple that to a #G acceleration and reach for your slipstick. A waste of time, that -- one of the ship's four passengers is Jealous of his responsibility and his computer tells him .acceleration is steady at seventy feet per second toward a goal of # mps. Or thereabouts. "I'll bet on energy," the comptech said. He patted his computer. It winked at him, humming. "That's what ole Cal means. I'm sure, and I go along with whatever Cal says. Energy." "That is not what Cal says, Tom" the captain told him. He spun idly back and forth in his chair, facing the other three men. He was a captain of men, not machinery -- the computer decided what to do and when to do it and told the ship and the ship obeyed. The captain was about as necessary to the ship's operation as the engines wasted as a matter of course because Man could not wait for a better way. "Cal says he does not know. 'Insufficient data: Warning' does not mean Cal computes we'll be converted to energy." He grinned at the reporter. "You agree?" "With you? Or that we'll be converted to energy?" The captain nodded, grinning. "Yep." The reporter shuddered. "How about some alternatives?" "Oh man! There's an infinity of 'em," the captain said and chuckled at his joke. He swung in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, one hand flat on the steel panel running along the steel bulkhead behind him. "Doc?" The government physicist looked up. He was calculating, using genine paper -- lined -- and a genuine pen, ballpoint. "Hm? What?" "Tom's computer would be delighted to do whatever you're doing, Doc -- and Tom would be double-delighted to feed it in." "Oh, I'm sure of that," the physicist said. His manner was embarrassed. He waved the pen. "Habit. I use computers, too, of course." "What do those artifacts of yours tell you?" Tom asked. The physicist chuckled, looking down at the paper. "They tell me I can't work worth a damn at twoplus gees. Also -- insufficient data. I'm just like Cal. I don't know." "Cal," Tom said, his chin assuming a Mussolini tilt, "does know. All we lack is being smart enough to know how to ask the questions. Cal can answer them." T he captain sighed. "Okay. Tom says we'll wind up as energy, Doc, because he thinks that's the 'Insufficient data' his machine complains about, and that's why it says 'Warning.' We have lots of time. Suppose we try to live with the data we have and play guessing games. What's your theory?" Doc leaned back and frowned. His chin sagged badly under two gravities acceleration. "Einstein said that no energy can be transmitted at a velocity greater than the speed of light -- c. If we hit c, we'll still be in the process of transmission even if we, uh become energy. Thus -- " "If we bust one rule," Tom said, "we can bust another. "I say we become energy at the instant we hit c." He twisted a little to pat the gleaming hide of his computer. "And Cal knows it. He thinks -- " "Cal," the physicist said, "does not think." The comptech raised a finger to his lips and rolled his eyes. "Sh, Cal's sensitive!" Three men laughed. The reporter was frowning. "Uh -- look. Suppose you just pretend I'm a threeyear-old in the first grade, okay?" The captain looked eager. "Start from how far back?" The computer technician and the physicist appeared just as delighted at the opportunity to show off. Which was what the reporter wanted, of course -- he knew the theory backward and forward or he would not have been on board. "Try starting," he said, looking sheepish, "with EmcT" "Wow!" Tom rolled his eyes in the general direction of his hairline, which appeared to have retreated from previous threats. "You came along without knowing an ionized thing? Man, you're either dedicated or crazy! You realize we'll probably wind up looking like a supernova, with everyone on Earth trying to decide which of us to name it after." "I know there's danger," the reporter said. "I've had that kind of assignment before. I also know this is the biggest story since the Cudahy Equations." The captain was shaking his head, wearing his lady-killer smile again -- worthless on this ship. He reached up to push his fingers through his blond burr-cut. "E  mc means a given mass -- that's m, and that's us -- is transformed into E for energy at the speed of light, in centimeters squared. Too plain. Doc?" The physicist moved his shoulders in a shrug. "It'll do." "Everything's relative to everything else. And interdependent -- space, time, matter. Space and time, interdependent, depend also on us, as observers. They aren't absolute, I mean. Einstein's law -- which we've gone back to calling 'theory' -- says we can't exceed c. Because as we accelerate we gain mass. At almost-light, our mass doubles. At c, our mass becomes infinite." "That's a meaningless phrase," the reporter prompted. "Totally lars. It's inconceivable. Anyhow -- so what would happenT' "That's what our feller 'murricans are shelling out an inconceivable amount of money for us to find out," the captain told him. "One theory says the universe would collapse, whatever that means. Implode, sort of. Point is, since Cudahy we think Einstein postulated his theory, not the Universe's Law. Maybe. No big deal there: Newton was right for a long time but no one tried to apotheosize him. Einstein was nearly made a god. People in science have a bad habit of accepting what's in their books, without asking why and what if. I think that's why a lot of 'em are in science; it's a nice, safe haven, like a convent. Every now and then some boat-rocker with a bump of curiosity and a little imagination pops up and becomes Galileo or Newton or Maxwell or Planck or Einstein -- or Cudahy." "Or something else," the physicist said. "But I happen to agree with Doctor Cudahy -- which doesn't stop me from admitting he might be crazy as a bedbug. And my presence here indicates I am. Ever hear of Stefan Christesco?" He showed surprise when all tlwee of the others shook their heads. He smiled. "I'll tell you why. Christesco published a book in nineteen-twenty-five in defense of Euclidean geometry. He tore into Einstein and Lorentz and Minkovski and wound up saying their postulates belonged to 'the domain of the imaginary and the absurd.' Cudahy's been attacked, too. So have I, for the matter of that. So, when the decision was made to send out a manned ship to find out, I volunteered and then fought to come. A lot of my detractors didn't express any desire to prove themselves right the hard way -- wouldn't have looked through Galileo's telescope, either." "Crazy as a bedbug," the comptech said. "But I haven't heard your theory. Doctor Bowers." T he physicist leaned back and poked at his chin with his pen. "You may be right. But bear in mind that you are interpreting that computer's answer. It hasn't given an answer, for the matter of that; it's given a definite lack of one. And remember this -- the word 'intuit' wasn't invented for computers. I think we can marry Einstein and Cudahy. Suppose it's true we can't exceed the speed of light. What does that mean? It means relative to us, to what we know. Or think we know. In this universe, this plane, this dimension -- this coil, if you want to go Shakespearean. So -- at the speed of light I wonder if we won't just, uh, slip sideways into another dimension. I doubt time. I expect something altogether else, a fifth one, if you need a word. Where the railroad tracks come together. Where time is -- abbreviated. Where we can exceed c, in that plane." "Sort of the universe next door?" the reporter asked. The physicist smiled and nodded. The reporter looked at the captain. "And you? What do you think. Captain?" "I think we're going to be stuck with each other for a long, long time and you'd better call me Bob. Meanwhile, I don't theorize much. I'm just curious. What's 'infinity?' What does infinite mean? What's it like in no-Time no-Space?" He shrugged. "I volunteered and got picked. I asked just one question." He waited, and they waited. "Going to stare me down without asking, huh? Okay. I asked, 'Does light have mass and energy?' " Doctor Bowers nodded, smiling. "That's an old one. Then how come it travels at lightspeed, eh?" The reporter sighed. "The Abomb proved Einstein, right? And you think you're going to become one?" "A real whopiper," Tom said. "Assuming we get back -- sorry, Tom," the reporter said, "am I going to be allowed to quote this theorizing-before-the-fact?" "Ask me again," the physicist smiled, "post facto." "One thing about it," the captain sighed. "If you're right. Doc, Tom and that Cal of his will just have to decide how they want their crow cooked. But if Tom's right, you'll never have to listen to his Itold-you-so." "But, the point is we can't do it," the reporter said, stepping back into the discussion. "As Doc said, Cudahy's equations are just that: figures on paper. Thy have yet to be field-tested." "You've been stringing us along," the captain said. "You know all about it, don't you?" "Well -- suppose I challenge you back. I'll bet not one in a hundred or maybe more can give the meaning of Emc L But Einstein said no material body or anything bearing energy could exceed the speed of light because -- because it would require infinite energy?" The comptech nodded. "With respect to the observer," he said. "And don't forget the business about achieving infinite mass. We're gaining now. I say it's impossible for our mass to reach infinity, whatever that is -- but I'm no Chris Whoever-Doc-said. I say that at c we'll be converted into pure energy. Relatively speaking, I mean." He grinned. "Relative to us. And I believe in Cal. Cal doesn't goof. If I'm wrong, I eat crow, not Cal. He says we haven't told him enough for him to give us an answer -- either that or he doesn't have the, the vocabulary to answer us. I keep trying, every time I think of another way to ask." The reporter's mind was nearly as audible as the mechanical one behind Tom. "And that is the point," he said. "That there isn't any absolute motion. It's all relative. Right?" "Relative," Doctor Bowers said, "to something." He stressed the final word and looked meaningfully at the reporter, then at Bob and Tom, his eyes large and round and ingenuous-looking as a kitten's. "But we can go on and on with our speculating. Try this. No material body. Suppose at the instant we hit c we become immaterial. And at the instant we drop under lightspeed we -- materialize again. Voila!" "That's strictly an evasion," Tom said. "But we're about to find out." He swung around to his pet. "Tell us when. Cal. Acceleration constant at seventy feet per second. Velocity..." He continued to speak quietly to the shiny metal cabinet with its ornamentation of dials and gauges and keys and its 'mouth,' a television screen. It chattered back. The ship surged on, trembling. T he reporter watched the stars. Their positions were changing, he knew -- relative to him, since he felt no movement -- in the same manner as the minute hand on his watch. He knew it moved. He could see that it had moved, by looking away and counting and then looking back. But its actual motion was not quite visible. The stars moved the same way; they were there, immobile in appearance, but they weren't where they'd been a few hours ago. Relative to their more distant companions. And to the observer. Tom gave the computer a velocity figure of # mps. That figure changed as the electronic brain figured its answer. He had keyed a tape answer in addition to the visual one -- he read the tape, nodded, said "Mark," and depressed a key. A black pointer swung across a dial, stopped at #. The dial next to it indicated #. The third registered #. The last gauge mentioned a figure too small to bother with. "Round to minutes," Tom told his machine and Cal dutifully zeroed ihe final dial and raised the one to its left to #. Tom swung around in his padded chair. Doctor Bowers was looking at him, smiling, his head cocked. "One-hundred thirteen days, fifty-five minutes to lightspeed," the computer technician said and the physicist nodded, looking down at the paper on his knees. His hand was damp; both pen and hand were heavy at just over two gravities constant acceleration. "Right," he said and the reporter made a grinning note. "Doc's kidding you, Tom," the captain said. "Ask your friend if we can take the mass increase at steady acceleration." Doctor Bowers jerked his head to stare quizzically at the captain as the comptech turned and posed the question to Cal. A broad glastic screen just above Tom's head glowed as its fiveounce electron tube beamed Cal's answer on it: "E  mc." The captain chuckled. "Can't fool old Cal," he said. "From that answer I'd swear he has a sense of humor. He's reminding me that sure our mass will increase, just as your pen will shorten. Doc. But since it's all relative we won't be aware of a thing. No sweat." "Plenty of sweat," the reporter said. "We've got to sit around and wait four months and a day. That's a long sweat." "I'm not worrying about the four months and a day," Tom said. "But you can bet I'll sweat those last fifty-five minutes!" T he stars crawled by. Dials moved. There were no days, no nights, no noons. Long ago Tom had set the computer to ring an alarm to remind them of lunchtime and dinner hour. Later he'd cut it off -- it invariably interrupted a discussion or an argument or a game of chess or double-board Broadside. They ate when it was opportune, slept when they began to slur words and squint. On the one hundred and fifth day they were moving at one hundred seventy-six thousand miles per second. On the one-hundred eleventh day they watched the final three figures on the velocity gauge creep higher and higher. The first three read one-eight-five. They waited. Eyes strayed more and more frequently to the gauges. "Bingo," the reporter said and Doctor Bowers jumped two inches. Heads snapped to the dials. Their velocity indicator ticked up to # miles per second. They made their bets, each taking a different figure, no one choosing the accepted lightspeed of #. "Be damned if I'm not sweating," the captain growled and the nervous laughter of his companions was their admission of the same fact. "We've got a few more hours. Bob," the comptech said. "You're one game up on me. Want to give me a chance to even the score?" The captain grinned. "No fair. I'm in no condition to play chess." "Relative to someone on Earth," you mean, Tom said, laughing. "Relative to me we're even." Again they laughed. Nervously. And waited. And watched the hour-clock die as had the dayclock. Their eyes ached as they watched the last pointer creep backward from fifty-five while the velocimeter crept forward. Tom began counting at ten. "Fourthreetwoonebingo!" His announcement was gratuitous -- he turned from the computer to find the others watching the viewplace and the gauges beneath it. Nothing happened. Their speed moved past # miles per second. Nothing happened. And then the stars vanished from the viewplate and all gauges swung back to zero. "My God!" "According to the old story," the captain said drily -- and quietly -- "a voice is supposed to answer 'Yes?' " He went on -- no one had smiled. "Very well. Exec." His voice was stiff now. Military discipline had been used to dam panic before. "We have exceeded the speed of light and we have not been converted to energy and my mass feels pretty finite. The railroad tracks have not converged. You better confess to being wrong, kick Cal in the slats and then tell us the score." "Aye sir." Tom turned his chair to face Cal. He felt fantastically, sickeningly light. The pressure of acceleration was gone. He glanced back over his shoulder at the dead gauges and the blank viewplate. Then he asked his question. "Cal -- have we exceeded the speed of light?" The television screen spelled out the word. Cal volunteered no information. It was because of the computer's laconic responses that Tom had named it after a former president famed for his terseness. "What has happened to us. Cal?" "Like hell. Qualify!" "All right then, dammit, what has happened, period?" repeat: nothing has happened "Good god!" the reporter gasped. "My sentiments exactly," the captain said. "Cal has been right all along: 'Insufficient data. Warning.' He couldn't tell us about this until we asked him and we didn't know how to ask the question. Well. Try asking Cal where the universe is, Tom." Tom did. "Where are we. Cal? Tom asked and his machine chittered back at him like a happy squirrel. The answer flashed on the screen. The men stared at it, then at each other. Doctor Bowers had to smile. His smile became a chuckle, flowed into laughter. In a moment all four of them were laughing, the sound moving steadily toward hysteria. The computer's reply reiqained on the screen while Cal waiteif in vain for an answer. "What did you say, honey?" "When is now?" "Do you mean 'now' the second we're talking? Or the day. May #, #?" "No, mommie, I mean, when is 'now'? Last minute's now is then. And tomorrow's now is ahead. Is there ever a Now now?" "Really, Eric, that's splitting hairs too fine. Can't you see I'm busy getting supper. Go out and play with all the nice new neighborhood children we have here." "I don't want to." "Why on earth not? We spent a lot of money to buy a house near many boys your own age and now you won't play." "Is that a now 'now'?" "Eric!" "Oh, mom, they won't let me play with them." "Eric, that's foolish. You just go outside and play." "If I do they'll call me sittik until I cry. That isn't a nice now." "Sittik? What does that mean?" "I dunno." "Well, then, I certainly wouldn't let a little word I didn't know the meaning of bother me." "It's because I don't know that scares me, mommy." "Well, I'm sure it can't be anything more than a syllabic jumble and no boy of seven should be afraid of a collection of sounds." "It's the way they say it, mommy. It's got an awful sound." "For mercy's sake, Eric. Oh, well. Stay in. Do your homework. You do have homework, don't you?"  D  "Eric! Go out and get in line for the school bus!" "The bus isn't in sight." "It's ten after eight. It'll be here any moment." "I'll run out as soon as I see it at the top of the hilt." "Out. Out this minute. Get into line." "I can't go out, mother. They'll call me sittik." "I'm tired of your using that as an excuse for everything. Really, Eric, I'm going to speak to your father about such foolishness." "I wish you would. Maybe he can make them stop calling me sittik." D D D "Sticks and stones may break your bones, son, but names can't hurt you." "Gee, Dad, you don't understand any more than mother. It's not just the word. It's the way they say it. They don't want me here and that word is... that's a bad word. It's the worst word in the whole world." "Tell you what, Eric, we'll get some of the boys together and go off for an afternoon. How do you like that idea?" "You just don't understand. Dad." D D  "Eric! Eric, unlock that door this minute. You've missed the school bus and I'll have to take you." "I won't go, mother. They're all calling me sittik now. Even the girls." "This is perfectly ridiculous, Eric Matson. Open that door." "I won't go. I won't go. You can't make me." O O "There's nothing organically wrong with the boy, Mrs. Matson. It's an emotional problem. Probably an adjustment to the move. Was he attached to a friend where you lived before?" "Why, no more than most boys his age." "I can recommend a guidance counselor." "Eric's not retarded, is he?" "I didn't imply that, Mrs. Matson, but he is emotionally disturbed about something." "Oh, that silly word." "Yes?" "It's too ridiculous. The boys in the neighborhood were calling him 'sittik', but a word can't -- well, it's too silly." "What word?" "I told you, 'sittik.' " "Sittik! What does it mean?" "I haven't the faintest idea. And it's ridiculous to think a word that has no meaning could reduce a child to Eric's state. That's why I thought he might be run down or suffering -- " "Here's the name of the counselor, Mrs. Matson. Often a trifle, even a silly word, unlocks a long forgotten fear that a skilled therapist can disperse." "Well, if you're sure there's nothing physically wrong with him -- " D D , D "Take my son to a headshrinker? For a stupid word? Ridiculous." "But Dr. Anstriker was quite serious about it." "Probably gets a commission. We've raised a sensible boy sensibly. No, we'll work this thing out ourselves." D D D "I'm sorry, Mrs. Matson. The boy has lost the will to live. I wished you'd called me sooner. A therapist might have helped." # D D ,"Arthur?" "Helen? Is that you? Speak up. I can't understand you when you're whispering. And make it snappy. I'm due in a meeting right now." "Arthur, you must come home." "For heaven sake's, Helen, stop whispering. I can't come home. And you should get out more. You can't bring Eric back by moaning around the house." "I don't dare go out of the house, Arthur. That's why you have to come home." "What?" "They're calling we sittik."  is on your newsstand now. Don't miss it! Ship Who Sang is a pretty good adventure book. It's published by Walker  Co. for #, and its the story of Helva, the human personality embedded in an interstellar spaceship. Now, I don't normally review other reviewers, but Paul Tabori, author of The Green Rain and other science fiction non-landmarks, said something so incredible about this book for one of the Chicago papers that I'm going to break a rule this one time. Displaying that insert of erudition which elevates a true critic above the mere hack. Professor Tabori told us all about the potted human beings once in vogue at certain royal courts and other centers of illumination around the middle of the second millennium. Infant people were placed in large earthenware jars for life and carried around from place to place to be a kind of portable T.V. They were educated, frequently entertaining and witty -- deponent knoweth not what alternative they had, except a quicker death -- and somehow all this reminded Professor Tabori of Helva. I brought him into this review because I want to borrow his admittedly fascinating historical reference and discuss Helva as the antithesis of a captive brain. Helva is, in fact. Wonder Woman. She can do anything except get felt, and she doesn't have to be very smart. Nor is she. She has talent -- she sings. She has emotions -- expressed in terms of purest soap opera, because she cannot gesture or show any other form of expression, and therefore has to pour it all into the one channel of her unsubtle verbal apparatus, (as distinguished from a superb set of vocal cords). Unlike a human being set in a jar, able to command his environment only through the exercise of wit and wile and able to achieve mobility only through persuasion, Helva has got the fully developed ability to go anywhere and do anything. In fact, the only control her masters actually have over her is a pretty well developed sense of inhibition that she has acquired in the course of her education. And they do sweat and worry about what would happen if Helva, the super spaceship, ever decided to take off on her own. Well, she does and she doesn't. She has numerous mind-affairs with the "brawns" who are her pilots. But of course she's fully insulated from any physical contact and, as we've seen, in my opinion she's not particularly capable of doing much with an opportunity for genuine emotion. She goes along shouting and singing and heaving great metallic sighs. She becomes famous throughout the galaxy of course, because unlike all the other ships like her, she does this peculiar thing -- she sings. She's a kind of a freak, you see. the best lady poet we've ever had back ti Dull Since its publication a few years ago, Frank Herbert's Dune has been acknowledged as an SF masterpiece and one of the great fictional treatments returns to the duneworld of Arrakis for a story of human ecology -- a study of the "web of life" of men seeking power as plants and animals seek sun and food. Berkley June releases (N#, #) (S#, #) (S#, #) (X#, #) And in July... (S#, #) (SI #, #) If your newsstand or bookstore is out of stock, order any of these (list price plus a dime postage) from: # Madison Ave., New York, NY # in this field. She writes, as the saying goes, like an angel, and what she writes is always a treat. What she lacks as a plotter of commercial fiction can normally be seen only when one looks over the impressive array of really great commercial stories turned out by her and the late Henry Kuttner, when they were married and creating numbers of independent literary reputations for their various collaborative pen names. The Kuttner-Moore stories were really fantastically good. In part this was because their people had three dimensions and an engagement with life. Even roaring down the road to hell they did it with a gusto and a sense of their own worth. Yet at the same time the stories in which they displayed these traits were tightly plotted, well-paced presentations. In ordinary analytical parlance that latter trait is assumed to have been Kuttner's contribution. Still, C.L. Moore working under her solo byline is also the author of stories like No Woman Born and the novel Judgement Night. No one with these masterpieces in her repertoire can be said to be anything less than, superb as a commercial writer in all respects. But if you would like to see what can be done with superb storytelling ability and an as yet not fully developed sense of plot, then Jirel of Joiry is your girl. This book (Paperback Library )#-#, #t) compiles five preKuttner stories by C.L. Moore from the #s Weird Tales. The latest date is #, the earliest is #. Each of these sword-and-sorcery stories devotes about # words to advancing a plot which would suffice for one well developed paragraph under most circumstances as they are understood today and as they were even better understood a score of years ago. But Jirel of Joiry lives on despite the forty-five intervening years since her creation. It may not make a hell of a lot of sense for a slim redhead to have been a feudal tiger but C.L. Moore makes it make sense. She does it by substituting observation for action. Instead of advancing the plot, the events which occur to Jirel, as she struggles with the half-understood forces of darkness in her quasimedieval world, are all things that play on the heart of what being you and me is all about. When she inflicts horror on her lover she knows what she has done. She goes out and atones for it, and they don't live happily ever after. But at least their souls are at peace, which is a pretty good concept when you come right down to it, and the reason why this is still a good book, and why the young Catherine Moore is still one heck of a worker even though there have been later and even more skillful editions.  "I'm sure it is. But you must be more careful going to and from work. I don't mean just stay out of Abandoned Zones. Dressed the way you dress and looking as you do, you are in danger anywhere. Don't you realize it? Doesn't your husband know it?" "Oh. I'm careful, sir; I know what can happen, I see the news. But I'm not afraid. I'm carrying three unregistered illegal weapons -- and know how to use them. Boss got them for me and had his guards train me." "Hmm. As an officer of the court I should report you. As a human being who knows what a deadly jungle this city is I applaud your good sense. If you really do know how to use them. If you have the courage to use them promptly and effectively. If, having defended yourself, you're smart enough to get away fast and say nothing to cops. That's a lot of ifs, dear." "Truly, I'm not afraid. Uh, if you were my attorney, anything I told you would be privileged, would it not?" "Yes. Are you asking me to be your attorney?" "Uh... yes, sir." "Very well, I am. Privileged. Go ahead." "Well, one night I had to go out on a blood-donor call. By myself, Joe wasn't home. Didn't worry me. I've made donations at night many times and often alone. I keep my Gadabout in our flat and stay in it until I'm inside the hospital or whatever. But -- do you know that old, old hospital on the west side. Our Lady of Mercy?" ( Continued from page # ) "I'm afraid not." ! "No matter. It's old, built before the government gave up trying to guarantee safety in the streets. No vehicle lift, no indoor parking. Just a lot with a fence and a guard at the gate. Happened when I came out. This frog tried to hop me between the parked cars. ' Don't know whether tie was after j my purse. Or me. Didn't wait to find out -- don't even know if it was a man, could have been a woman -- " "Unlikely." "As may be. Stun bomb in his face with my left hand as I zapped with my right and didn't wait to see if he was dead. Buzzed out of there and straight home. Never  told the police, never told Joe, never told anybody until just now." (But it took a triple dose of Narcotol to stop your shakes, didn't it, dearie -- oh, shut up, that's not ! the point.) "So you're a brave girl and can shoot if you have to. But you are a silly girl, too, and very lucky.  Hmm. Johann has an armored car much like this and two shifts of guards to go with it." "Of course he has guards, sir. I know nothing about his cars." "He has a Rolls-Skoda. Eunice, we are no longer going to depend on how fast you are with weapons. You can sell your Gadabout or plant flowers in it; from here on you'll have mobile guards and an armored car. Always." M rs. Branca looked startled. "But, Mr. Salomon! Even with my new salary I couldn't begin to -- " "Switch off, dear. You know that Johann will never again ride in a car. Chances are he will never leave that room. But he still owns his personal defense car; he still keeps a double crew, two drivers, two shotguns -- and maybe they run an errand once a week. Eating their heads off and playing pinochle the rest of the time. Tomorrow morning my car will pick you up; tomorrow afternoon your own car -- Johann's -- will take you home. And will be on call for you at all other times, too." "I'm not sure Boss is going to like this." "Forget it. I'm going to chew him out for letting you take risks. If he gives me any back talk, he'll find I have enough chips to hire you away from him. Be sensible, Eunice; this doesn't cost him a dollar; it's a business expense that he is already incurring. Change of subject. What do you think of his plans for this soi-disant warm body?" "Is a brain transplant possible? Or is he grabbing at a straw? I know he's not happy tied down to all that horrid machinery -- goodness, I've been combing the shops for the naughtiest styles I can find but it gets harder and harder to get a smile out of him. Is it practical, this scheme?" "That's beside the point, dear. He's ordered it and we are going to deliver. This Rare Blood Club -- does it have all the AB-Negatives?" "Heavens, no. The last club report showed less than four thousand AB-Negs enrolled out of a "Too bad. What do you think of his notion of page ads and prime time on video?" "It would cost a dreadful lot of money. But I suppose he can afford it." "Certainly. But it stinks." "Sir?" "Eunice, if this transplant is to take place, there must be no publicity. Do you remember the fuss when they started freezing people? No, you're too young. It touched a bare nerve which set off loud howls and the practice was very nearly prohibited -- on the theory that, since most people can't afford it, no one should be allowed to have it. The Peepul, bless 'em -- our country has at times been a democracy, an oligarchy, a dictatorship, a republic, a socialism, and mixtures of all of those, without changing its basic constitution, and now we are a de facto anarchy under an elected dictator even though we still have laws and legislatures and Congress. But through all of this that bare nerve has always been exposed: the idea that if everyone can't have something, then no one should have it. So what will happen when one of the richest men in the country advertises that he wants to buy another man's living body -- just to save his own stinking, selfish life?" "I don't think Boss is all that bad. If you make allowances for his illness, he's rather sweet." "Beside the point. That bare nerve will jump like an ulcerated tooth. Preachers will denounce him and bills will be submitted in legislatures and the A.M.A. will order its members to have nothing to do with it and Congress might even pass a law against it. Oh, the Supreme Court would find such a law unconstitutional I think -- but by then Johann would be long dead. So no publicity. Does the Rare Blood Club know who these other AB-Negatives are who are not members?" "I don't know. I don't think so." "We'll check. I would , hazard that at least eighty percent of the people in this country have had their blood typed at some time. Does blood type ever change?" "Oh, no, never. That's why we rares -- that's what we call ourselves -- are so in demand." "Good. Almost all of the population who have been typed have the fact listed in computers somewhere, and with computers so interlinked today it is a matter of what questions to ask and how and where -- and I don't know how but I know the firm to hire for it. We progress, my dear. I'll get that started and off-load the details onto you, and then get other phases started and leave you to check on them while I go to South America and see this butcher Boyle. And -- " "Mr. Salomon! Bad turf coming up." Salomon thumbed his intercom. "Roger." He added: "Damn them. Those two beauties like to go through Abandoned Areas. They hope somebody will shoot so that they will have legal excuse to shoot back. I'm sorry, my dear. With you aboard I should have given orders to stay out of A.A.s no matter what." "It's my fault," Mrs. Branca said meekly. "I should have told you that it is almost impossible to circle near Nineteen-B without crossing a bad zone. I have to detour way around to reach Boss's house. But we're safe inside, are we not?" "Oh, yes. If we're hit, this old tank has to be prettied up, that's all. But I should not have to tell them. Rockford isn't so bad; he's just a Syndicate punk, an enforcer who took a fall. But Charlie -- the one riding Shotgun -- is mean. An at eleven. He -- " Steel shutters slid up around them and covered the bulletproof glass. "We must be entering the A. A." Inside lights came on as shutters darkened windows. Mrs. Branca said, "You make it sound as if we were in more danger from your mobiles than from the bad zone." He shook his head. "Not at all, my dear. Oh, I concede that any rational society Would have liquidated them -- but since we don't have capital punishment I make use of their flaws. Both are on probation paroled to me and they like their jobs. Plus some other safe -- " The rap-rap-rap of an automatic weapon stitched the length of the car. In that closed space the din was ear-splitting. Mrs. Branca gasped and clutched at her host. A single explosion, still louder, went poungkl She buried her face in his shoulder, clung harder. "Got 'im!" a voice yelped. The lights went out. "They got us?" she asked, her voice muffled by the ruffles of his shirt. "No, no." He patted her and put his right arm firmly around her. "Charlie got them. Or thinks he did. That last was our turret gun. You're safe, dear." "But the lights went out." "Sometimes happens. The concussion. I'll find the switch for the emergency lights." He started to take his arms from around her. "No, no! Just hold me, please -- I don't mind the dark. Feel safer in it -- if you hold me." "As you wish, my dear." He settled himself more comfortably, and closer. "My goodness, what a snuggly baby you are." "You're pretty snuggly yourself... Mr. Salomon." "Can't you say Jake? Try it." "Jake. Yes, Jake. Your arms are so strong. How old are you, Jake?" "Seventy-one." "I can't believe it. You seem ever so much younger." "Old enough to be your grandfather, little snuggle puppy. I simply look younger... in the dark. But one year into borrowed time according to the Bible." "I won't let you talk that way; you're youngl Let's not talk at all, Jake. Dear Jake." "Sweet Eunice." Some minutes later the driver's voice announced, "All clear, sir," as the shutters started sliding down -- and Mrs. Branca hastily disentangled herself from her host. She giggled nervously. "My goodness!" "Don't fret, dear. It's one-way glass." "That's a comfort. Just the same, that light is like a dash of cold water." "Um, yes. Breaks the mood. Just when I was feeling young." "But you are young -- Mr. Salomon." "Jake." "Jake. Years don't count, Jake. Goodness me, I got skin paint all over your shirt ruffles." "Fair enough, I mussed your hair." "My hair I can comb. But what will your wife say when she sees that shirt?" "She'll ask why I didn't take it off. Eunice, dear, I have no wife. Years ago she turned me in on a newer model." "A woman of poor taste. You're a classic, Jake -- and classics improve with age. Does my hair look better now?" "Lovely. Perfect." "I'm almost tempted to ask to have us driven back into that bad zone so you can muss it again." "I'm more than 'almost tempted.' But I had better take you home -- unless you want to go with me over into Canada? Back by midnight, probably." "I want to and I can't, really I can't. So take me home. But let me sit close and put your arm around me but don't muss my hair this time." "I shall be careful." He gave his driver the coordinates of Mrs. Branca's flat, then added: "And get there without going through any more Abandoned Areas, you trigger-happy bandits!" "Very good, Mr. Salomon." They rode in silence, then Mrs. Branca said, "Jake... you were feeling quite young, just before we were interrupted." "I'm sure you know it." "Yes. I was ready to let you, and you know that, too. Jake? Would you like a skin pic of me? A good one, not one taken by that snoopy character who charges so much." "Will your husband take one? Can you sneak me a copy?" "No huhu, Jake, dear. I have dozens of skin pix -- I was once a beauty contestant, remember? You are welcome to one... if you'll keep your mouth shut about it." "Privileged communication. Your secrets are always safe with your attorney." "What do you like? Artistic? Or sexy?" "Uh... what a choice to have to make!" "Mmm, a pic can be both. I'm thinking of one of me in a shower, hair soaked, wet all over, not a speck of body paint, not even face makeup, not even -- well, you'll no see. Is that on your wave length?" "I'll howl like a wolf!" "You shall have it. Quick change of subject; we're almost there. Jake? Does Boss stand any chance with this brain transplant thing?" "I'm not a medical man. In my lay opinion -- none." "So I thought. Then he doesn't have long to live whether he has the operation or not. Jake, I'm going to make still greater effort to dress even naughtier for him, as long as he lasts." E unice, you are a sweet girl. There is nothing nicer you could do for him. Much better than saying thanks for this trust fund." "I wasn't thinking about that was thinking about Boss. Feeling sorry for him. I'll go shopping tonight for something really exotic -- or if I can't find a novel exotic, then a simple skintight seethrough... passe but always effective with the right paint job underneath -- Joe is good at that. And -- well, if I'm going to have guards now, some days I may wear nothing but paint -- stilt heels to make my legs look even better -- yes, I know they're pretty -- heels, a nylon minimum-gee and paint." "And perfume." "Boss can't smell, Jake. All gone." National Rare Blood Club #M Fifth Avenue. N.Y.C. # "I still have my sense of smell." "Oh. All right, I'll wear perfume for you. And paint for Boss. I've never tried anything that extreme at work... but now that we no longer work at his offices -- no longer see many people -- and I can keep a semi-see-through smock around, just in case -- I might as well see if Boss likes it. Joe will enjoy thinking up provocative designs, likes to paint me and is not jealous of Boss, feels sorry for the poor old man just as I do. And it is so hard to find novelty in exotic clothes. Even though I shop at least one night a week." "Eunice." "Yes, sir. Yes, Jake." "Don't shop tonight. That's an order -- from your boss by virtue of the power-of-attorney I hold." "Yes, Jake. May one ask why?" "You can wear a paint-only job tomorrow if you wish -- this car and my guards will deliver you like crown jewels. But I need the car tonight. Starting tomorrow you'll have Johann's car and guards and you will always use them for shopping. And everything." "Yes, sir," she said meekly. "But you are mistaken about Johann's not having long to live. His problem is that he has too long to live." "I don't understand." "He's trapped, dear, all joking aside. He's fallen into the clutches of the medical profession and they won't let him die. Once he allowed them to harness him into that lifesupport gear he lost his last chance. Have you noticed that his meals are served without a knife? Nor even a fork? Just a plastic spoon." "But his hands tremble so. I sometimes feed him. He hates to have nurses 'messing around' as he calls it." "Think about it, dear. They have made it impossible for him to do anything but stay alive. A machine. A weary machine that hurts all the time. Eunice, this brain transplant is just a way for Johann to outsmart his doctors. A fancy way to commit suicide." "No!" "Yes. They've taken the simple ways away from him, so he's had to think up a fancy one. You and I are going to help him do it, exactly the way he wants it done. We seem to have arrived. Don't cry, damn it. Your husband will want to know why and you must not tell him. Do you feel like kissing me goodbye?" "Oh, please do!" "Stop the tears and turn up your pretty face; they'll be unlocking us in a moment or two." Presently she whispered, "That Was as good a kiss as the very first one, Jake... and I no longer feel like crying. But I heard them unlock us." "They'll wait until I unlock from inside. May I go up the lift with you and see you to your door?" "Nnn... I can explain your guards but would have trouble explaining why the firm's chief counsel bothers to do so. Joe isn't jealous of Boss -- but might be of you. I don't want him to be... especially when I came so close to giving him reason to be." Ill "We could correct that near miss." "Could be, dear Jake. My lowa-farm-girl morals don't seem very strong today -- I think I've lars and a Rolls-Royce... and a city slicker. Let me go, dear." Ill T he guards escorted her up and to her door in respectful silence. Mrs. Branca looked with new interest at Charlie, the Shotgun -- wondered how a mousy, fatherly little man could be as vicious as Jake seemed to know that he was. They "stood sideboy" as she spoke to her door's lock, then waited until her husband unbolted it. As the door opened Rockford saluted and said, "Oh-nine-forty, miss -- we'll be waiting right here." "Thank you, Rockford. Good night. Good night, Charlie." Joe Branca waited until he had thrown the bolts and reset the alarm before he spoke. "What t'hell happen? An' where you trap uniform apes?" "Don't I get a kiss first? Surely I'm not all that late? It's not yet eighteen." "Talk, woman. Other ape shows back two hours with your jitterbuggy -- tha's okay; your boss's butler phoned." He took off her cloak and kissed her. "So where you been, dizzy baggage? Missed you." "That's the nicest thing I've heard all day. That you've missed me." "Walking the ceiling! What happen?" "Were you worried? Oh, dear!" "Not worried. Smith's door flunky said you been sent on errand and 'ud come home in a Brink's. So kneA' you safe. Just torched it took so long when call made spec you'd short it. Rozzei?" "Roz. Simple, though. Boss sent me with his Best Boy -- Jake Salomon, you know." "Fixer. Roz." "Mr. Salomon took me in his ' car to his office to work on things Boss wanted at once -- you know how right-now Boss is and worse since he's been wired down." "Poor old muck should take the Big One. Pitiful." "Don't say that, dear. I cry when I think about it." "You're a slob. Sis. But me, too." "That's why I love you, dear. Anyhow a longish job and Mr. Salomon had his guards take me home -- and they drove through Bird's Nest turf and we got fired on. Chopped all down one side." "Huh? Doom?" "Not even grief. Fun." "Like what inside?" "Terribly noisy. But exciting. Made me horny." "Everything makes you horny, tits." He grinned and mussed her hair. "You're home and no aches, what counts. So peel. Inspiration eating me, whole day. Walking the ceiling!" "Which sort of inspiration, dearest?" she asked while sliding the half-sweater off her right shoulder and peeling it down her arm. "And have you eaten? If you start painting, you won't stop to eat." "Ate some. Too high on inspiration. Big, big! I'll flash a pack for you. Chicken? Spaghetti? Pizza?" "Anything. I'd better eat if it's that sort of inspiration." She kicked off her sandles, pushed down the panty-ruffle, sat on the floor to slide off the single tight attached to it. "Am I going to pose for a painting or are you going to paint on me and mug it?" "Both. Tha's the grabber. A Nova." She laid her dress carefully aside, rocked forward into lotus seat. "I don't roz it. 'Both?' " "Both. You'll see." He looked down, ran his eyes over her, smiled. "And both sorts inspiration. "Well! Happy-making!" "Not too Wngry? Can wait." "Beloved man, when was I ever that hungry? Never mind the bed; just grab a pillow and come here!" Shortly Mrs. Branca was thinking happily how lucky it was that she had not let dear Jake go ahead -- the sweet thing would have been a disappointment compared with what she had at home... yet he had got her wonderfully primed for this. Really, it was best to be a faithful wife. Usually. What a wonderful, extraordinary day! Should she tell Joe about her big pay raise? No hurry. Couldn't tell him anything else. Too bad. Then she quit thinking coherently. Some time later she opened her eyes and smiled up at him. "Thank you, beloved." "Good vibes?" "Just what Eunice needed. At times like this I'm convinced that you're Michelangelo." He shook his head. "Not old Mike. Boys his jolly. Picasso maybe." She hugged him. "Anyone you want to be, darling, as long as you go on being mine. All right. I'll pose now, and eat at the breaks." "Forgot. Letter from Mama. Read?" "Certainly, darling. Let me up and find it." H e fetched it, still unopened. She sat up and glanced through it to see how much editing it would require. Un-hah, just as you expected, dearie, the periodic threat to come pay us "a nice long visit." Well, she knew how to deal with that. Out! Because Joe did not know how to refuse his mother anything. That one visit had been one too many -- yet that had been when they had had two rooms, before she had found this wonderful one-big-everything studio room for Joe. Let that clinging old bag move in? No more jolly romps on the floor? No, Mama Branca. I will not let you ruin our happy nest with your smothering presence. You stay where you are and live on Welfare... and I'll send you a check from time to time and let you think it's a present from Joe. But that's all "Anything?" "The usual, dearest. Her stomach still bothers her but the priest sent her to another doctor and she's doing better, she says. But let me start at the beginning. 'My darling Baby Boy, Not much news since last time Mama wrote but if I don't write I don't never get a letter back. Tell Eunice to write a longer letter this time and tell me everything that's happening to you; a mother worries so. Eunice is a very nice girl even though I do think you would be better off with a girl of your own religion -- ' " "Enough." "Be tolerant, Joe. She's your mother. I don't mind and I will take time -- tomorrow -- to write her a long letter. I'll send it by Mercury in the company pouch so that she will be sure to get it; Boss doesn't mind. All right. I'll skip the rest of that; we know what she thinks of Protestants. Or exProtestants. I wonder what she would think if she heard us chanting Om Mani Padme -- " "Kark her drawers." "Oh, Joe!" She skipped, including the self-invitation. " 'Angela is going to have another baby. The Visitor is sore at her but I gave the Visitor a piece of my mind and I guess that learned her not to mistreat decent people. I can't see why they can't just leave us alone. What's wrong with having a baby?' Which of your sisters is Angela, Joe?" "Third one. Visitor's right. Mama's wrong. Don' read alt, tits. Just read and tell." "Yes, dear. Nothing more, really, just gossip about neighbors, remarks about the weather. The actual news is that your mother's stomach is better and Angela is pregnant. Give me a moment to shower this red and black off -- Boss liked the combo, by the way -- and I'll be ready to be painted or to pose or whatever. You can flash a pizza for me while I get clean and I'll gnaw it between times. And, dear? I shouldn't pose later than midnight and I'd be awfully pleased if you would get up when I do tomorrow -- rather early. I'm afraid. But you can go back to bed." "So?" "For Boss, dearest. To cheer him up." She explained her idea of full-paint costume alternated with erotic styles. He shrugged. "Glad to. Why gee-string? Silly. Old man dying, let him look. Can't hurt." "Because, dear. Boss prides himself on being 'modern' and 'keeping up with the times.' But the truth is he formed his ideas so tong ago that nakedness wasn't just uncommon, it was a sin. He thinks I'm a nice girl from so far back in the cornstalks that I've never been touched by the changes. As long as I wear a minimum-gee -- and paint and shoes -- I'm dressed, not naked. By his 'modem' standards, I mean. A nice girl pretending to be naughty to amuse him. Which he likes." He shook his head. "No roz." "Oh, but you do, dear. Symbolism, as you have explained to me about art. But it has to be Boss's symbols. Nudity doesn't mean a thing to our generation. But it does to Boss. If I leave off that scrap of nylon, then by his symbols I'm not just a sweet girl, naughty-but-nice; I'm a whore." "Whores okay. Angela one." A clumsy one, she said under her breath. "Sure they are. But not to Boss. The hard part is to guess what his symbols are. I'm twenty-eight and he's over ninety and I can't possibly roz his mind. If I push it too far, he might be angry -- even very angry; he might fire me. Then what would we do? We'd have to give up this lovely studio." Still in lotus, she looked around. Yes, lovely. Aside from the Gadabout parked near the door and the bed in the corner all the rest was the colorful clutter of an artist's studio, always changing and always the same. The steel grid over the high north windows made a pretty pattern -- and was so strong that she never worried. She felt warm and safe and happy here. "Eunice my darling -- " She was startled. Joe used short-talk so habitually that she was always surprised when he chose to shift idiom, even though he could use formal English as well as she could -- well, almost, she corrected... but he was quite grammatical for a man who had had only a high school practical curriculum. "Yes, dearest?" "I roz it perfectly. Wasn't sure you did. Just testing, beautiful. Not ninety myself but any artist understands figleaf symbol. Could happen you crowd Mr. Smith's symbols too hard, don' know. But we'll do it. Figleaf so that his mind can lie to itself -- no, no, mustn't touch; Mama spank -- then I paint you like sex crime looking for spot marked X." "Oh, good!" "But never worry about job. Sure, this pad is righteous, good north light, I like it. But we lose it, who cares? Broke don't scare me." (It scares me, dear!) "I love you, darling." "But we do it for nice old boy dying, not to save studio. Understand?" "Roz indeed! Joe, you're the nicest husband a girl ever had." pained scowl, which she recognized as birth pangs of creativity. So she kept still. Presently he sighed, "Down off ceiling. Problem what to do for Boss solves inspiration that put me up there. Tomorrow you're a mermaid." "All right." "And tonight. Upper body seagreen with rosy glow showing through on lips and cheeks and nipples. Lower body golden fish scales blending at waist. Undersea background with sunlight filtering down. Traditional seabottom symbols, romantic. But upside down." She hesitated. "So?" (Hard to know when to ask, when to keep quiet, when Joe was creating.) He smiled. "Fool-the-eye. You're swimming. Diving straight down to bottom, back arched, hair streaming, toes pointed -- main light dapple-scrimmed for water. Beautiful. But can't wire you, even if had wires -- no way to hide harness and hair would hang down and buttocks and breasts would sag -- " "My breasts don't sag!" "Chill it, Jill. You got beautiful breasts and you know I know. But masses of flesh sag and artist sees it. Everybody sees, just don' realeight, nine times till just right, ize. Something wrong, don' know Turn pic upside down -- lovely why. Eye not fooled. Has to be mermaid diving for sea bottom." real dive, or it's fake. Bad art." "Oh. Yes, I'm stupid." "Well," she said doubtfully, "if "Not stupid, just not artist." you borrowed a stepladder and He started scowling again; she dragged the mattress under your kept quiet. "Too much for one background, I suppose I could night. Tomorrow paint backdive off and roll out and not hurt ground, tonight paint you for drill, myself. I guess." Then maybe stereo-mug some "I don't guess! Break pretty jumps against any background, neck, little stupid. Dive up. Not more drill. Bed early, up early -- down." paint you again for Boss." "Huh?" "Fine," she agreed. "But why "I said. Background upside paint me twice, dear, if I'm to be down. So jump straight up in air. a mermaid for Boss tomorrow? Like going for hot return in volley If you set up the cot for me and ball. I shoot stereo stop-action, a I slept alone, I wouldn't disturb a thousandth. Shoot six, seven, paint job much. Then you could touch it up in the morning. Not get up as early." He shook his head. "Won't paint same way for Boss. But won't let you sleep in paint anyhow." "My skin won't break out." "No, my darling. Your skin don't break out because I don't paint you too much, or too often, or let paint stay on too long -- and always damn sure you get it all off, then oil you. But you see, I see, everybody see what happen to girls who paint too much. Pimples, blackheads, itching, scratching -- ugly. Sure, we'll paint you for Boss from ears to toes -- but not too often and scrub you minute you come home. That's official." "Yes, sir." "So scrub jet and scarlet off, while I flash pizza." A few minutes later she shut off the shower and called out through the door of the bath unit: "What did you say?" "Forgot. Big Sam stopped by. Pizza ready." "Cut me a chunk, that's a dear. What did he want? Money?" "No. Well, I let him have a fin. But stopped to invite us. Sunday. All day meditation. Gigi's pad." She stepped out into the room, still toweling. "All day, huh? Just us four? Or his whole class?" "Neither. A Seven Circle." "Swinging?" "Suppose so. Didn't say." "Swinging." She sighed. "Darling, I don't mind you lending him a five you'll never see. But Big Sam is no guru, he's just a stud. And a bliffy." "Big Sam and Gigi share what they got, Eunice. And nobody has to swing. Ever." "Theoretically, yes. But the only good way to break a Circle is never to join it. Especially a Seven Circle. Did you promise? I can grit my teeth and smile -- " "No. Told him had to see you, tell him tomorrow." "Well? What do you want me to say, dearest?" "I'll tell him no." "Dearest, I don't think you answered me. Is there some special reason you want us in this Seven? An art critic perhaps? Or a dealer? If it's Gigi you have on your mind, why not ask her to model some daytime while I'm working? She'd be up here at once, her tail quivering -- I've seen her eyeing you." He shook his head and grinned. '"Nyet, Yvette. Believe, lass -- I stalled Big Sam because possible you wanted to join in. But Big Sam chills me, too -- bad aura." "Oh, I'm so relieved! I'll swing, I promised you that when I asked you to marry me. And I have, the few times you've wanted to. And most were fun -- only one struck me as boring. But I like to size up the players." "Grab pizza, climb throne. Paint legs while you eat." Y es, darling." She mounted the model's throne with a wedge of pizza in each hand; there followed a long period broken only by sounds of chomping, and low profanity that punctuated his alternating pleasure and exasperation. Neither noticed. Joe Branca was deep in the euphoria of creation, his wife was immersed in the warm glow of being cherished. At last he said, "Down." "May I look?" "No. Ribs and tits now. Don't raise arms yet. Want to study." "As if you didn't know every wrinkle." "Shut up. Want to think about how to paint 'em in morning." Presently he said, "Been thinking maybe you crowd Boss too hard with only a gee-panty. Solved now." "So?" "'Da. Paint a bra on you." "But wouldn't that spoil it, dear? Mermaids don't wear bras." "Was problem. Bad empathy. So use sea shells. Flat curved kind with nubbly backs. You know." "Sorry but I don't dear. Sea shells are scarce in Iowa." "No matter. Sea shells fix bad empathy, symbols all match." He grinned. "Pretty one, I'll paint sea-shell bra cups so fool-the-eye that Boss won' know for sure. He'll spend day trying to see whether is real bra or just paint. If he asks -- I win." She gurgled happily. "Joe, you're a genius!" IV the operating theater Mr. Salomon stood up. "Doctor!" Boyle checked his impatient strides. "Oh. You again. Go to hell." "No doubt I will. But wait a moment, Doctor." The surgeon answered with controlled fury: "Listen, chum -- I've been operating eleven hours with one short break. By now I hate everybody, especially you. So let me be." "I thought perhaps you could use a drink." The surgeon suddenly smiled. "Where's the nearest pub?" "About twenty yards from here. In my car. Parked on this floor. Stocked with Australian beer, both cold and room temperature. And other things. Whisky. Gin. Name it." "My word, you Yahnk barstahds do know how. Right. But I must change first." Again he turned away. Salomon again stopped him. "Doctor, I took the liberty of having your street clothes packed into your bag and placed in my car. So let's have that drink at once." Boyle shook his head and grinned. "You do take liberties -- too right. Very well, if you can stand the stink. I'll tub and change at my hotel. 'Lay on, MacDuff!'" Salomon let it go at that until they were locked into his car and he had poured beer for them -- the authentic kangaroo kick for the surgeon, a much weaker American brew for himself; he had tangled with Australian beer in his youth and was wary. The big car started smoothly and continued so; Rockford had been warned that drinking might take place in the passenger compartment. Salomon waited until his guest had half a glass down him and had sighed in relief. "Doctor, how did it go?" "Eh? Smoothly. We had planned it, we rehearsed it, we did it. How else? That's a good team you got for me." "I take it you are saying the operation was successful?" "' -- but the patient died.' That's the rest of the old saw." Jacob Salomon felt a wave of sorrow and relief. He sighed and answered, "Well, I expected it. Thank you. Doctor. I know you tried." "Slow down! I don't mean that this patient died; I merely completed the cliche. The operation went exactly as planned; the patient was in satisfactory shape when I relinquished control to the support team." "Then you expect him to live?" "'It,' not 'he.' That thing back there is not a human being and may never be. It won't die, it can't -- unless one of your courts gives permission to switch off the machinery. That body is young and healthy; with the support it is receiving it can stay alive -- as protoplasm, not as a human being -- for any length of time. Years. And the brain was alive when I left; it was continuing to show strong alphawave response. It should stay alive, too; it is receiving blood supply from that healthy body. But whether that brain and that body will ever marry into a living human being -- what church do you attend?" "I don't." "Too bad, I was about to suggest that you ring up God and ask Him, as  do not know. Since I saved the retinas and the inner ears -- first surgeon ever to do that, by the bye, even though they call me a quack -- it might be able to see and hear. Possibly. If the spinal cord fuses, it might regain some motor control, even be able to dispense with some of the artificial support. But I tell you the stark truth. Counselor, the most likely outcome is that that brain will never again be in touch with the outside world in any fashion." "I hope your misgivings are unfounded," Salomon said mildly. "Your contingent fee depended on your achieving sight, hearing and speech, at a minimum." "In a pig's arse." "I'm not authorized to pay it otherwise. Sorry." "Wrong. There was mention of a bonus, a ridiculously large sum -- which I ignored. Look, cobber, you shysters are allowed to work on contingent fees; we butchers have other rules. My fee is for operating. I operated. Finis. I'm an ethical surgeon, no matter what the barstahds say about me." "Which reminds me -- " Salomon took an envelope from his pocket. "Here's your fee." The surgeon pocketed it. Salomon said, "Aren't you going to check it?" "Why should I? Either I was paid in full. Or I sue. Either way, I couldn't care less. Not now." "More beer?" Salomon opened another bottle of Down-Under dynamite. "You are paid. In full, in gold, in Switzerland -- that envelope contains a note advising you of your account number. Plus an acknowledgment that we pay your expenses, all fees of assisting teams, all computer time, all hospital charges, whatever. But I hope, later, to pay that 'ridiculous' bonus, as you called it." "Oh, I won't turn down a gift. Research is expensive -- and I do want to go on; I would like to be a respectable paragraph in medical histories... instead of being sneered at as a charlatan." "No doubt. Not quite my own reason." Boyle took a swig of beer and blinked thoughtfully. "I suppose I've been a stinker again. Sorry -- I always come out of surgery in a vile mood. I forgot he is your friend." tersweet wave of relief and sorrow. He answered carefully, "No, Johann Smith is not my friend." "So? I had an impression that he was." "Mr. Smith has no friends. I am a lawyer in his hire. As such, he is entitled to my loyalty." "I see. I'm glad you aren't emotionally involved, as the prognosis on a brain transplant is never good -- as I know better than anyone." Boyle added thoughtfully: "It might work this time. It was a good tissue match, surprisingly good in view of the wide difference between donor and recipient. And identical blood type, that helps. We might luck it. Even disparity in skulls turned out to be no problem once I could see that brain." "Then why are you gloomy?" , "Do you know how many millions of nerve connections are involved? Think I could do them all in eleven hours? Or eleven thousand hours? We don't try; we just work on the nerves of the head, then butt the raw ends of two spinal cords together -- and sit back and spin our prayer wheels. Maybe they fuse, maybe they don't -- and no one knows why." "So I understood. What I don't of connections can ever take place. Yet apparently you were successful with two chimpanzees." "Bloody! I was successful. Sorry. The human nervous system is infinitely inventive in defending itself. Instead of reconnecting old connections it finds new paths -- if it can -- and learns to use them. Do you know the psych lab experiment with inverting spectacles?" "I'm afraid not." "Some student has inverting lenses taped to his eyes. For a day or two he sees everything upside down, has to be led by the hand, fed, escorted to the Jakes. Then, rather suddenly, he sees everything right side up again; the brain has switched a few hundred thousand connections and is now interpreting the new data successfully. At this point we remove the spectacles from the volunteer chump -- and now his bare eyes see the world upside down. So he goes through it a second time -- and again the brain finds new paths and eventually the images flip over again and he sees the world normally. "Something somewhat analogous to that happened to my two prize chimps, Abelard and Heloise. Nothing at first, thought I had still another failure. Then they started to twitch and we had to restrain them to keep them from hurting themselves -- motor action but no control. Like a very young baby. But in time the brains learned to manage their new bodies. Don't ask me how; I'm a surgeon and won't guess -- ask a psychologist, they love to guess. Or ask a priest; you'll get as good an answer and maybe better. Say, isn't your driver chap taking us around the barn? My hotel was only five minutes from the medical center." "I must now admit to having taken another liberty. Doctor. Your luggage was packed, your hotel bill has been paid and all your things were moved to my guest room." "My word. Why?" "Better security." "That hotel seemed secure to me. Armed guards on every door, more armed men operating the lifts -- I could not get in or out without showing my ID at least thrice. Reminded me of the army. Hadn't realized what an armed camp the States are. Isn't it rather a nuisance?" "Yes. But one grows used to it. Your hotel is safe enough, physically. But the press are onto us now and they can get inside. And so can the police." Boyle looked troubled but not panicky. "Legal complications? You assured me that all that sort of thing had been taken care of." "I did. It has. The donor was married, as I told you, and by' great luck husband and wife had given pre-consent. We had a good many thousands of that blood type quietly signed up -- and paid retainers -- but we couldn't predict that one would be accidentally killed in time; the statistical projection did not favor it. But one of them was indeed killed and there were no complications -- no insuperable ones," Salomon corrected, thinking of a bag of wellworn Federal Reserve notes, "and a court permitted our action as 'useful and necessary research.' Nevertheless, the press will stir up a storm and some other court may decide to look into it. Doctor, I can put you in Canada in an hour, anywhere on this planet in a day -- even on the Moon without much delay. If you so choose." "Hmm. Wouldn't mind going to the Moon, I've never been there. You say my clothes are in your guest room?" "Yes. And you are most welcome." "Is there a tub of hot water nearby?" "Oh, certainly." "Then I'll ask for another beer and that hot tub and about ten hours sleep. I've been arrested before. Doesn't worry me." V Where, he did not know, nor care, nor wonder... did not know that he was himself, was not aware of himself nor of anything, was not aware that he was not aware. Then slowly, over eons, he came up from the nothingness of total anesthesia, surfaced into dreaming. The dreams went on for unmeasured time, endlessly... Mrs. Schmidt, can Yonny come out and play... Wuxtra! Horrible atrocities in Belgium, read all about it!... Johann, don't ever walk in like that without knocking, you bad, bad boy... under a cabbage leaf... more margin before the market opens tomorrow... like hell a cabbage leaf; it comes out of her belly button Yoho you don't know nothing... Johnny you know it's not nice to do that and what if my father came downstairs... a pretty girl is like a melody... hey get a load of that not a damn thing on her boobs... sergeant I volunteered once and that's enough for a lifetime... Our Father Which art in Heaven hallowed be thy Name of the game is look out for yourself Smith old Buddy you co-signed the note and I have other fish to Friday at the latest and that's a promise Johann darling I don't know how you could even bring yourself to think such a thing of your own wife is a man's responsibility Mr. Smith and I'm sure the court will agree that four thousand per monthlies is a very modest girl would never do such a thing Schmidt and if I ever catch you hanging around my daughter again I'll shoot the whole works they're not worth the paper they're printed on Johann I don't know what your father will say when he gets home on the range where the deer and the antelope play square with me and you'll get a fair shake it, girlie, shake it, shake it twice is IS Controvrilul Uninhibited Deodlv Seriou Humorout and Inirgdlbly Interettlng? Brian Aldiss... Poiil Anderson... Piers Anthony... Isaac Asimov... Richard Bergeron... Bob Bloch... Vaughn Bode'...John Brunner... L. Sprague de Camp...Terry Carr... John Christopher... Philip K. Dick... Harlan Ellison... Philip Jose Farmer... Jack Gaughan... Harry Harrison... Lee Hoffman... John Hoyden Howard... Leo P. Kelley... Dean R. Koontz... Anne McCaffrey... Michael Moorcock... Alexei Panshin... Mack Reynolds... Bill Rotsler... Norman Spinrad...Bob Tucker... Harry Warner, Jr...Ted White... and many, many more... Richard E. Geis does his thing. Bl-Monthiv BBoas. Photo Offset P.O. Box #I # regulation shake it thrice pudding with creamed in her coffin my head off and her old man heard us and that queered it not queer Johann just curious you understand me old body boy I aint got no body and no body works very long for some body else if he expects to get ahead in the world o' business girl has got just as much right to be treated like a lady as any body seen my girl's best friend is her cherish as long as you both shall live right and work hard and pay your bills of lading son goes down and the stars come out of my room at once my husband would kill me and the neighbors are always snooping where did you leave your bicycle would pay for itself in no time Pop if I get this paper rout and in full retreat as we go to press me closer Johnny you're so huge national debt will never be paid off and all our companies' policies must bet on inflation so borrow now and pay later than you think I'm that sort of a girl simply because I let you go on to college to be a teacher son but now I see by the dawn's early warning system is useless gentlemen without second-strike capabilities of sustained growth when treated last time so it's your treat this time you treat me nice and I treat you nice you-nice Eunice Eunice where did that girl go I've lost Rome and I've lost Gaul but worst of all I've lost Eunice somebody find Eunice... coming Boss... where have you been right here all along Boss -- H IS dreams went on endlessly in full stereo -- sound, sight, odor, touch -- and always surrealistic which he never noticed. They flowed through him, or he through them, with perfect logic. To him. Meanwhile the world flowed on around him -- and forgot him. The attempt at transplanting a living brain offered opportunity for much loose talk by video commentators, plus guest "experts" who were encouraged to add their own mixture of prejudice, speculation and bias in the name of "science." A judge in need of publicity issued a warrant for the arrest of "Dr. Lyndon Doyle (sic) but Dr. Lindsay Boyle was outside jurisdiction before the warrant was signed and long before the name was straightened out. A famous and very stylish evangelist prepared a sermon denouncing the transplant, using as a text "Vanity of Vanities." But on the third day a spectacular and unusually bloody political assassination crowded Johann Smith out of the news and the evangelist found that he could use the sermon by changing a few sentences -- which he did, understanding instinctively the American lust for the blood of the mighty. As usual, the unlicensed birth rate exceeded the licensed rate while the abortion rate exceeded both. Upjohn International declared an extra dividend. The ing Presidential campaign speeded up with a joint announcement by the national committees of the two their conventions together (while preserving mutual autonomy) for the (unannounced but understood) purpose of re-electing the incumbent. The chairman of the extreme left-wing Constitutional Liberation Rally denounced it as a typical crypto-fascist capitalistic plot and predicted a November victory for Constitutional freedom. The splinter parties, Democratic, Socialist, and Republican, met quietly (few members and almost no delegates under sixty-five) and stole away without causing more than a ripple in the news. In the Middle East an earthquake killed nine thousand people in three minutes and brought close the ever-present possibility of war through disturbing the balance of terror. The Sino-American Lunar Commission announced that the Lunar colonies were now # selfsufficient in proteins and carbohydrates, and raised the subsidized out-migration quota but again refused to relax the literacy requirement. Johann Sebastian Bach Smith dreamed on. A fter an unmeasured time (how measure a dream?) Smith woke enough to be aware of himself -- the reflexive self-awareness of waking as contrasted with the unquestioning and unexplicit selfexperience of dreaming. He knew who he was, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, a very old man -- not a baby, not a boy, not any of his younger selves -- and was aware of his sensory surroundings, which were zero: darkness, silence, absence of any physical sensation, not even pressure, touch, kinesthesia. He wondered if the operation had started and what it would feel like when he died. He did not worry about pain; he had been assured that the brain itself had no pain receptors and that he was being anesthetized solely to keep him quiet and unworried while the job was done -- besides, pain had not worried Smith in years; it was his constant companion, almost an old friend. Presently he went back to sleep and to more dreams, unaware that his brain-wave pattern was being monitored and had caused great excitement when change in rhythm and peak had shown that the patient was awake. Again he was awake and this time gave thought to the possibility that this nothingness was death. He considered the idea without panic, having come to terms with death more than a half century earlier. If this was death, it was neither the heaven he had been promised as a child, nor the hell he had long since ceased to believe in, nor even the total lack of self he had corn to expect -- it was just one damn big bore. He slept again, unaware that the physician in charge of his life-support team had decided that the patient had been awake long enough and had slowed his breathing and made a slight change in his blood chemistry. He woke again and tried to take stock of the situation. If he was dead -- and there seemed no longer reason to doubt it -- what did he have left and how could he cut his losses? Assets: none. Correction: one asset, memory. He had a recent memory-of-a-memory, vague and undefined, of confused and crazy dreams -- probably from anesthesia and no use to him -- plus other memories older but much sharper of being (or having been) Johann Smith. Well, Johann you old bastard, if you and me are going to have to spend all eternity locked in this limbo we had better get to work on total recall of everything we ever did. Everything? Or concentrate on the good parts? No, a stew had to have salt or it was too bland. Try to remember all of it. If we have all eternity with nothing to play but this one rerun, we're going to want to have all of it on tap... as even the best parts may get boring after a few thousand times. Still, it wouldn't hurt to concentrate -- just for practice -- on some exceptionally pleasant memory. So what'll it be, partner? There are only four top subjects, the rest are sideshows: Money, sex, war, and death. So which do we choose? Right! You're correct, Eunice; I'm a dirty old man and my only regret (and a sharp one!) is that I didn't find you forty or fifty years back. When you were not yet a gleam in your father's eye, more's the pity. Tell me, girl, were those sea-shell doodads a brassiere or just paint on your pretty skin? Euchred myself on i that one -- should have asked and let you sass me. So tell great grandpappy. Give me a phone call and tell me. Sorry, I can't tell you the wavelength, dear; it's unlisted. Golly, you looked cute! Let's try another one -- no chance that I'll forget you, Eunice my dear, but I never laid a finger on you, damn it. Let's go way, way back to one we did lay a finger on. Our very first piece? No, you mucked that up pretty badly, you clumsy lout. The second one? Ah, yes, she was the cat's pajamas! Mrs. Wicklund. First name? Did I ever know her first name? Certainly I never called her by it, not then or later. Even though she let me come back for more. Let me? Encouraged me, set it up. Let's see, I was fourteen, fourteen and a half, and she must have been... thirty-five? I remember her mentioning that she had been married fifteen years, so call it thirty-five at a guess. No matter, it was the first time I ever encountered a female who wanted it, managed to let me know that she wanted it, then without any bobbles could take charge of a lanky, too-eager, almost-virgin boy, steady him, lead him through it, make him enjoy it, let him know she enjoyed it -- make him feel good about it afterward. God bless your generous soul, Mrs. Wicklund! If you are lost somewhere in this darkness -- for you must have died many years sooner than I did -- I hope you remember me and are as happy in remembering me as I am in remembering you. All the details now -- Your flat was right under ours. Cold windy afternoon and you gave me a quarter (big money then, a dime was standard) for going to the grocery for you. For what? How good is yoiir memory, you horny old goat? Correction: horny old 'ghost.' What have I got left to be horny with? Never mind, I am -- it's up here. Doc. Half a pound of sliced boiled ham, a sack of russet potatoes, a dozen ranch eggs (seven cents a dozen then -- my God!), a ten-cent loaf of Holsum bread and -- something else. Oh, yes, a spool of sixty white cotton thread at the notions shop next to Gilmore's drugstore. Mrs. Baum's shop -- two sons, one killed in War One and the other made a name for himself in electronics. But let's get back to you, Mrs. Wicklund. You heard me bring my bike into the hallway and opened your door and I carried your groceries on through to your kitchen. You paid me and offered me hot cocoa and -- why wasn't I nervous about Mama? Pop at work and Mr. Wicklund, too; that figured -- but where was Mama? Oh, yes, her sewing circle afternoon. So while I drank cocoa and was being polite, you cranked your Victrola and put on a record -- uh -- Margie, it was, and you asked me if I knew how to dance? You taught me all right -- on the sofa. studied an oscilloscope, noted an increase in brain activity, concluded that the patient might be frightened and decided to tranquilize. Johann Smith slipped gently into sleep without knowing it -- to the scratchy strains of a mechanical phonograph. He was "foxtrotting," so she told him. He did not care what it was called; his arm was around her waist, hers was around his neck, her warm clean odor was sweet in his nostrils. Presently she seduced him. After a long, ecstatic and utterly satisfying time he said, "Eunice honey, I didn't know you could fox-trot." She smiled into his eyes. "You never asked me. Boss. Can you reach past me and shut off the Victrola?" "Sure, Mrs. Wicklund." VI aware that this limbo was no longer featureless -- head resting on something, mouth unpleasantly dry and felt crowded, as if with the sort of junk a dental surgeon inflicts on his victims. There was still total blackness but not quite dead silence. A sucking noise -- Any sensation was most welcome. Johann shouted, '"Hey I lived through it" Two rooms away the monitoring technician on watch jumped up so fast he knocked over his chair. "Patient's trying to articulate! Get Dr. Brenner!" Brenner answered quietly over the voice monitor. "I'm with the patient, Cliff. Get a team in here. And notify Dr. Hedrick and Dr. Garcia." "Right away!" Johann said, "Hey, damn it! Isn't anybody here?" The words came out as incoherent grunts. The doctor touched a wand speaker to the patient's teeth, held the microphone hooked to it against his own throat. "Mr. Smith, do you hear me?" The patient mumbled again, more loudly and forcefully. The doctor answered, "Mr. Smith, I'm sorry but I cannot understand you. If you hear me, make one sound. Any sort but just one." The patient grunted once. "Good, wonderful -- you can hear me. All right, one sound by itself means Yes; two sounds mean No. If you understand me, answer with two sounds. Two grunts." Smith grunted twice. "Good, now we can talk. One sound for Yes, two for No. Do you hurt?" Two grunts -- "Uh... ko!" "Fine! Now we try something else. Your ears are covered and completely soundproofed; my voice is reaching your inner ears through your teeth and upper jawbone. I'm going to remove part of the covering on your left ear and speak to you that way. The sounds may be painfully loud at first, so I will start with whispers. Understand me?" One grunt -- Smith felt gentle firmness as something pulled loose. "Do you still hear me?" "Uh... ko -- " "Now do you hear me?" "Uh... co... ah... ee... oh... ee... oo... ow!" "I think that was a sentence. Don't try to talk yet. Just one grunt, or two." Johann said, "Of course I can't talk, you damned idiot!" Take this junk out of my mouth!" The vowels came through fairly clearly; consonants were distorted or missing. "Doctor, how can the patient talk with all that gear in the way?" Brenner said quietly, "Shut up. Nurse. Mr. Smith, we have an aspirator down your throat to keep you from choking on phlegm, drowning in your own saliva. I can't remove it yet, so try to be patient. Besides that, your eyes are masked. Your eye specialist will decide when that comes off. I can't -- I'm the life-support specialist on duty at the moment, not the physician managing your case; that's Dr. Hedrick, assisted by Dr. Garcia. I can't do much more than I have till one of them gets here. Are you comfortable? One grunt, or two." One grunt -- "Good. I'll stay here with you. And talk to you if you want me to. Do you?" One grunt -- "Okay, I will. You can talk with more than a Yes or No any time you wish. By spelling. I'll recite the alphabet, slowly, and you stop me with one grunt when I reach a letter you want. And so on for the next letter, until it's spelled out. It's slow... but neither one of us is going anywhere. Want to try it?" One grunt -- "Good. I've had lots of practice at it; I've been on many a life-support watch in which the patient could not talk but was awake and perfectly rational. As you are," the doctor added, lying hopefully, one eye on the master oscilloscope. "But bored, of course. Very bored -- that's the worst part for a patient in life-support; he's bored silly, yet we can't let him sleep all the time; it's not good for him and sometimes we need his cooperation. All right, any time you want to spell anything, give three distinct grunts and I'll prove I know my abc's." Three grunts -- "A... b... c... d... e... f -- " Johann grunted at "r." " 'R?" Dr. Brenner repeated. "Don't bother to answer if I'm right. Okay, first letter is 'r.' A... b... c... d... " The message read: "Right ear." "Do you want the plug removed from your right ear?" One grunt -- Carefully the doctor removed it. "Testing," he said. "Cincinnati, sixty-six, Susannah. Are you hearing with both ears? Does my voice seem to move from side to side?" One grunt, followed by three grunts -- "Okay, spelled message. A... b... c -- " Shortly the doctor said, " 'Nobody'? Is that the first word of your message?" Double grunt -- "All right. I'll try again. A... b -- " He was interrupted by a series of grunts and stopped. "You don't want me to spell again... yet 'Nobody' is not the first word of your message. But I would have sworn that I got it right. 'Nobody -- ' Uh... hey! 'No... body' -- two words?" One emphatic grunt -- "Are you trying to tell me that you feel as if you had no body? Can't feel it?" Grunt -- "Oh! Of course you can't feel it; you haven't finished healing. But honestly," the doctor went on, lying with the skill of long practice, "your progress has been amazingly fast. Both speech and hearing so soon, that's wonderfully encouraging. In fact you've just won a bet for me. Five hundred," he went on, still lying, "and at that I demanded more than twice the recovery time you've shown. And now I'm going to double my winnings by putting them back and betting that you'll have full recovery of the use of your whole body in no longer time. Because this is a wonderfully healthy body you have even though you can't feel it yet. Marvelous repair factor." Triple grunt -- Then the spelled message was: "How long?" "How long since your operation? Or how long until you get the use of your whole body?"  bell. He stopped reciting the alphabet and said. "Half a moment, Mr. Smith; Dr. Hedrick has arrived. I must report. Nurse will stay with you -- just let the patient rest. Nurse. This has been tiring." Outside the door Dr. Brenner stopped the case-managing physician, saying, "Dr. Hedrick, one moment before you go in. You've checked the remotes?" "Certainly. Awake-normal, apparently." "And rational, in my opinion. I have removed the central stopples from both ear pads and we have been talking, spell-and-grunt, killing time until you -- " "I heard you on monitor, assumed you must have opened the ears. You take a lot on yourself. Doctor." Dr. Brenner stiffened, then answered coldly, "Doctor -- your patient, conceded. But I was here alone and had to use my own judgment. If you wish me to leave the case, you have only to say so." "Don't be so damned touchy, young man. Now let's go in and see the patient. Our patient." "Yes, sir." They went inside. Dr. Hedrick said, "I'm Dr. Hedrick, Mr. Smith, physician in charge of your case. Congratulations! Welcome back to our weary world. This is a triumph for everyone -- and vindication for a great man. Dr. Boyle." Three grunts -- "You wish to spell a message?" One grunt -- "If you will wait a moment, we will remove some items from your mouth and you can talk instead." (With great good luck, Hedrick amended to himself -- but I never expected the case to progress even this far. That arrogant butcher really is a great man. To my surprise.) "Would that suit you?" An emphatic grunt -- "Good. Hand aspiration. Dr. Brenner. Adjust those lights, Nurse. Monitor watch! Find out what's keeping Dr. Feinstein." Johann Smith felt hands working rapidly but gently, then Dr. Hedrick said, "Let me check. Doctor. Very well, remove the jaw wedges. Mr. Smith, we will have to aspirate every few moments -- I'd rather not have to force you to cough up fluid. Or go after it the hard way. But you may talk if you wish." " Aye-gaA-aye-Aay-dih !" "Slowly, slowly. You're having to learn to talk all over again, like a baby. That same remark now -- but slowly and carefully." "By... God... I... made... it!" "You surely did. The first man in history to have his brain moved into a new body -- and lived through it. And you will go on living. This is a fine body. Healthy." "But . can't . peal -- feel -- a damn... thing . from . chin . down." "Lucky you," said the Doctor. "Because we've got you restrained all over against the day -- soon, I hope -- " but never, more likely, he added to himself -- "when you will start feeling your entire new body. When that day comes you may jerk uncontrollably -- if we don't have you restrained. Then you'll have to go to work and learn to control your body. Like a new baby. Practice. Possibly long and tedious practice." "How... long?" "I don't know. Dr. Boyle's chimps made it rather quickly, I ' understand. But it might take you as long as it takes a baby to learn to walk. But why worry about that now? You've got a new body, good for many, many years -- why, you might be the first human being to live two hundred years. So don't be in a hurry. Now rest, please -- I've got to examine you. Chin screen. Nurse." "The patient's eyes are covered. Doctor." "Ah, yes, so they are. Mr. Smith, when Dr. Feinstein arrives, we will see if he wants to expose your eyes to light today. In the meantime -- uncover the patient. Nurse." was still mostly covered. A plastic corset "iron lung" encased the torso from chin to pubis; arms and legs were strapped and the straps cushioned; urethral and anal catheters were in place and secured; two blood vessels were in use, one for nourishment, the other for monitoring; four others were prepared for use but currently stopped off. Wires were here and there. The body inside this dismal mess could have been one that Michelangelo would have treasured but the assemblage of artifact and protoplasm could seem beautiful only to a medical specialist. Dr. Hedrick seemed pleased. He took a stylus from his pocket, suddenly scratched the sole of the right foot -- got the reflex he expected, got no response from Johann Smith, also as expected. "Dr. Hedrick?" came a voice from the bed console. "Yes." "Dr. Feinstein is operating." "Very well." He indicated to a nurse that he wanted the body covered. "Did you hear that, Mr. Smith? Your ophthalmologist is in surgery, can't see you today. Just as well, as you have had enough for one day. It's time for you to '"No. You... do... it. My... eyes." "No. We wait for Dr. Feinstein." "No! You. are. in. charge." "So I am and your eyes won't be touched until your specialist is present." "Damn...you. Get...Jake... Sal.o.mon!" "Mr. Salomon is in Europe, will be notified that you are awake, and he may possibly be here tomorrow. I couldn't say. In the meantime I want you to rest. Sleep." "Won't!" "Ah, but you will." Dr. Hedrick pointed to Dr. Brenner, nodded. "As you pointed out, I am in charge. Want to know what I am certain you will sleep? Because we are slowing your breathing rate and introducing into your blood stream a harmless drug that will insure that you do sleep. So goodnight, Mr. Smith, and again -- my congratulations." "Damn... your... ins . insuffera -- " Johann Smith slept. Once he half roused. "Eunice?" (Right here. Boss. Go back to sleep.) He slept on. "Hello, Johann. How do you feel?" "Mean as a fox with its tail in a trap except when these tyrants dope me with something that makes me sweetness-and-light in spite of myself. Where the hell have you been? Why didn't you come when I sent for you?" "On vacation. First decent vacation I've had in fifteen years. Any objections?" "Get your feathers down. You do have a nice tan. And taken off a little weight, too, I think. Okay, okay -- though I don't mind saying I was disappointed that you didn't trot back for a day or two at least when I woke up. Hurt my feelings." "Humph! You have no feelings. Never did." "Now, Jake -- I do so have feelings, just never was one for showing them. But, damn it, I needed you." The lawyer shook his head. "You didn't need me. I know why you thought you did. You wanted me to interfere with Dr. Hedrick's management of your case. Which I would not have done. So I extended my vacation to avoid useless argument." Johann grinned at him. "Always the sly one, Jake. Okay, I've never been one to fret about yesterday's trouble. But now that you're back -- well, Hedrick's a good doctor... but he's high-handed with me when it's not necessary. So we'll change that. I'll tell you what I want and you tell Hedrick -- and if he balks, you can let him know that he is not indispensable." "No." "WhaJ do you mean, 'No?' " "I mean No. Johann, you still require constant medical attention. I haven't interfered with Dr. Hedrick up to now and the results have been good. I won't interfere now." "Oh, for Pete's sake, Jake. Sure, sure, you have my interests at heart. But you don't understand the situation. I'm no longer in a critical condition; I'm convalescent. Look, here's late news, important. Know what I did this morning during physiotherapy? Moved my right index finger. On purpose, Jake. Know what that means?" "Means you can bid in an auction. Or signal a waiter." "Crab apples. Wiggled my toes a little, too. Jake, in a week I'll be walking, unassisted. Why, I spend thirty minutes each day now without this lung thing, this corset... and when they put it back on me, it's simply set to assist, if necessary. But despite all this wonderful progress. I'm still treated like a wired-up laboratory monkey. Allowed to stay awake only a short time each day -- hell, they even shave me while I'm asleep and God alone knows what else; I don't. I'm strapped down every minute that at least six people don't have their hands on me for physio. If you don't believe me, lift the sheet and take a look. I'm a prisoner. In my own house." Salomon didn't move. "I believe you." "Move that chair around so that I can see you better. They've even got my head clamped -- now I ask you, is that necessary?" "No opinion. Ask your doctor." Salomon stayed where he was. "I asked you... because I'm fed up with his top-sergeant behavior." "And I declined to express an opinion in a field in which I have no competence. Johann, you're getting well, that's evident. But only a fool replaces a quarterback who is winning.  never thought you would live through the operation. I don't think you did, either." "Well... truthfully, I didn't. I was betting my life -- literally -- on a long gamble. But I won." "Then why don't you try being grateful? Instead of behaving like a spoiled child!" "Temper, Jake, temper -- why, you sound like me." "God knows I don't want to sound like you. But I mean it. Show gratitude. Praise the Lord -- and Dr. Hedrick." "And Dr. Boyle, Jake. Yes, I am grateful, truly I am. I've been snatched back from the edge of death -- and now have every reason to expect a wonderful new life -- and all I risked was a few more weeks of a life that had grown intolerable." Johann smiled. "I can't express how grateful I am, there are no words. My eyes are twenty twenty again and I'm seeing shades of color I had forgotten existed. I can hear high notes I haven't heard in years. I get 'em to play symphonies for me and I can follow the piccolo clear up to the roof. And the violins. I can hear all sorts of high sounds now, higher than ever -- even my new voice sounds high; he must have been a tenor. And I can smell, Jake -- and I lost my last trace of a sense of smell years ago. Nurse, walk past me and let me smell you." The nurse, a pretty redhead, smiled, said nothing, did not move from the bed's console. allowed to eat now, once a day -- eat and swallow, I mean, not a blasted tube. Jake, did you know that Cream o' Wheat tastes better than filet mignon? It can. Hell, everything tastes good now; I had forgotten what fun it is to eat. Jake, it's so grand to be alive -- in this body -- that I can't wait to go out in the country and walk in fields and climb a hill and look at trees and watch birds. And clouds. Sunbathe. Ice-skate, maybe. Square-dance. Ever square-dance, Jake?" "I used to be good at it. No time for it, late years." "I never had time for it even when I was young. I'm going to take time, now. Reminds me, who's minding the store?" "Teat, of course. He wants to see you." "You see him. I'm too busy learning to use my new body. And enjoying it. Do I have any money left? Not that I give a hoot." "You want the ungarnished truth?" "You can't scare me, Jake. If I have to sell this house to pay off this gang of jailers, it won't worry me. Might be fun. I can tell you this: I'll never be on Welfare. I'll get by -- always have, always will." "Brace yourself. You're worth more than ever." "Huh? Oh, what a shame! When I was just beginning to enjoy being broke." "Hypocrite." "Not at all, Jake. I -- " "Hypocrite, I said. Oh, hush up. Your fortune had already reached the take-off point, where it can't possibly be spent no matter how you try. It just keeps growing. I didn't even spend all your income on this operation and all that went with it. However, you no longer control Smith Enterprises." "So?" "Yes. I encouraged Teal to borrow money and buy some of your voting shares; it gave him incentive in 'minding the store.' And it looked better. Also, as de facto chairman of the board, I thought it would look better if I owned a bigger block, too, so I traded you some blue chips and tax-exempts for some of your senior-corporation voting stock. At present two of us -- you and I, or you and Teal -- hold voting control. But no one of us. However, I'll trade back any time you want to resume control." "God forbid!" "We'll leave the matter open, Johann. I was not trying to take advantage of your illness." "No, Jake. If I don't have controlling interest, I don't have even a moral responsibility to look out for the company. I'll resign as chairman of the board -- and you can be chairman, or Teal, or you can put it up for grabs." "Wait till you're well." "Okay, but I shan't change my mind. But now about that other matter -- uh. Nurse, don't you have to go empty something, or wash your hands, or check the roof to see if it's on tight? I want a private talk with my lawyer." She smiled and shook her head. "No, sir. You know I can't leave the room even a moment without being relieved. But Tm authorized by Dr. Hedrick to do this, sir; I can shut off the voice monitor to the remotes, then go over in that far corner and watch video with the sound turned up high so that you'll be certain I can't hear you. Dr. Hedrick said that you might want privacy in speaking with Mr. Salomon." "Well! The old bug -- bug-hunter is human after all. You do that. Nurse." Shortly, Johann was able to say quietly, "You saw that, Jake? God knows there could be no harm in you alone watching me a few minutes -- you could call for help if I choked or something. Anyhow, any trouble would show on their dials. But, no, they chaperone me every second and won't agree to the most harmless request. Look, very quietly now -- do you have a pocket mirror on you?" "Eh? Never carried one in my life." "A pity. Well, have one on you next time you're in to see me. Tomorrow, I hope. Jake, Hedrick is a good doctor, conceded -- but he won't tell me anything. Just this week I asked him whose body this had been -- and he wasn't even polite enough to lie; he just told me that it was none of my business." "It isn't." "Huh?" "Remember the contract I worked out? It said -- " "Never read it. Your pidgin." "I told you; you didn't listen. Donor's privacy to be respected unless donor specifically grants permission to breach it... and even then his estate must confirm after death. In this case neither proviso was met. So you can never be told." "Oh, rats. I can find out, once I'm up and around. I would never publicize it; I just want to know." "No doubt you will find out. But I won't be a party to breaching a contract with the dead." "Hmm. Jake, you're a stiffnecked old bastard; it wouldn't do any harm. All right, all right. But get me that mirror. Look, you can get me one now. Go into my bathroom, usual excuse, and look around. Search. Four or five small mirrors in there, drawers and such -- or were the last time I was on my feet. Almost certainly still are. Just don't let a nurse see it. In your pocket. Or under your jacket." "Why don't you simply ask for one?" "Because they won't let me have one, Jake. You may think I'm paranoid but I am being persecuted by this high-and-mighty doctor. Won't let me see my new face in a mirror. Okay, it's probably scarred; I don't care. Won't let me look at myself at all. When they work on me they put up a chin screen; I haven't even seen my hands. Would you believe it, I don't even know what color I am. Am I a soul? Or a honk? Or something else? It's maddening." maddening for you to see yourself. Before you have your strength back." "What? Oh, be your age, Jake; you know me better than that. If I'm the ugliest thing since wart hogs and covered with purple stripes, I can take it." Johann grinned. "I was ugly as sin before the operation; any change for the worse can't be great. But I tell you no lie, old friend; if they keep treating me like a retarded child, they really will drive me off the rails." Salomon sighed. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Johann, but it is no news to me that they won't let you see yourself in a mirror -- " "What?" "Steady down. I've discussed it with Dr. Hedrick and with the psychiatrist working with him. They are of the opinion that you could suffp a severe emotional shock -- one that might give you a grave setback, even (as you say) 'drive you off the rails' -- if you saw your new self before you are fully well and strong." Johann Smith did not answer at once. Then he said quietly, "Pig whistle. I know I'm physically something else now. What harm do they think it could do me?" "The psychiatrist mentioned the possibility of a split personality." "Move around and look me in the eyes. Jake Salomon, do you believe that?" "My opinion is neither relevant nor competent. I am not going to buck your physicians. Nor help you to outwit them." "So that's how the wind sets. Jake... I am sorry to be forced to say this -- but you are not the only lawyer in this city." "So I know. I am sorry -- truly sorry -- to be forced to say this, Johann -- but I am the only lawyer you can turn to." " What do you mean?" "Johann, you are now a ward of the court. I am your guardian." Johann Smith was slow to answer, then barely whispered; "Conspiracy. I never thought it of you, Jake." "Johann, Johann!" "Do you mean to keep me locked up forever? If not, what's the price to turn me loose? Is the judge in on it? And Hedrick?" Salomon controlled himself. "Please, Johann, let me speak. I'm going to pretend that you never said what you did say... and I'll have a transcript of the proceedings brought here for you to see. Hell, I'll have the judge himself fetch them. But you've got to listen." "I'm listening. How can I help listening? I'm a prisoner." "Johann, you will cease being a ward as soon as you are able to appear in court -- in person -- and convince the judge -- Judge McCampbell, it is, an honest man as you know -- convince McCampbell that you are no longer non compos mentis. He took the step reluctantly -- and I had to fight to be named your guardian, as I was not the petitioner." "So? And who asked to have me committed?" "Johanna Darlington Seward, et alia -- meaning your other three granddaughters, too." "I see," Johann said slowly. "Jake, I owe you an apology." Salomon snorted. "For what? How can you do or say anything calling for an apology when you are legally non compos mentisT' "Whew! Hand me the traditional pinch of snuff; that was razor sharp. Dear little Johanna -- I should have drowned her at birth. Her mother, my daughter Evelyn, used to shove her into my lap and remind me that she was my namesake. Jake, the only thing that brat ever did for me was to pee on my trousers -- on purpose. So June and Marla and Elinor are in it, too. Not surprising." "Johann, they darn near made it. I had to resort to everything short of treason to get it into Judge McCampbell's court. Even then, only the fact that I have held your general power of attorney for an unbroken fifteen years kept the court from naming Mrs. Seward as guardian and conservator. That and one other thing." "What other thing?" "Their stupidity. If they had shot for guardianship right off, they might have made it. Instead their first move was to try to have you declared legally dead." "Well! Jake, do you suppose -- later -- that I can cut them out of my will entirely?" "You can do better than that; you can outlive them. Now." "Mmm, yes, I suppose I can. I will! It'll be a pleasure." "That move wasn't serious, just stupid. Stupid lawyer. Took four days for the expert witnesses to unwind, took the court four minutes to rule in accordance with 'Estate of Parsons vs. Rhode Island.' Hoped I had seen the last of them then; that diploma-mill shyster seemed pretty cowed. Then Parkinson got into it... and his lawyer is not stupid." "Parkinson? Our boy Parky, our idiot ex-director?" "The same." "Hmm. Von Ritter was right; it doesn't pay to humiliate a man. But how could Parky show an interest?" put them up to it is simply a conclusion but a firm one -- Parkinson's mother-in-law's lawyer and Parkinson himself present every day in court, a happy spectator. Johann, I didn't dare ask that the matter be continued during your recovery; our own expert witnesses would ever be yourself again, able to manage your own affairs. So we stipulated your temporary lack of competence -- surprised 'em, caught 'em unprepared -- and I had our attorney move that I be appointed your guardian pro tern. Made it. But, Johann, as soon as this was in the wind I started shuffling stock around. For several weeks Teal held a big chunk of your voting stock -- Teal is okay; you made a good choice -- Teal held all of your stock that I now hold, using money I lent him. An open transaction that could be verified, none of this 'ten dollars and other valuable considerations' dodge. During that period, your stock that I had sold to Teal, using my money plus Teal's stock that he already had, plus what I have long held, was voting control... because I knew that if I lost, the next day Parkinson would show up with proxies for your stock -- signed by your granddaughters -- and demand a stockholders meeting and kick me out of the chair and fire Teal as president. Yet I didn't dare buy stock from you myself -- or I would go into court as an interested party and the other side might sniff it. It was touchand-go for a while, Johann." "Well, I'm glad we're out of the woods. Parky." "We aren't. Other actions coming up, none of which you need worry about today." "Jake, I'm not going to worry about anything. I'm going to think about birds and bees and fleecy clouds and enjoy the wonderful taste of Cream o' Wheat. And prunes, strained prunes fixed babystyle. I'm just glad to know that my oldest friend didn't knife me while I was unconscious and sorry as hell I thought so even for a moment. Oh, I still think you're a timid, gutless, stinking sissy not to help me out on this mirror nonsense but we'll argue that another day. I can wait if I have to; I see why you don't want to buck a psychiatrist if I have to go into court when I'm up and convince Judge McCampbell that I can still hit the floor with my hat." "I'm glad to hear it. And I'm glad to see that you are getting well, Johann. I'm certain you are since you are again, or still, the same stinking bad-tempered, unreasonable old scoundrel you always were." Johann chuckled. "Thanks, Jake -- and I see that you are in good health, too. May we never see the day we talk sweet to each other. What else is new? Oh, yes! Where in hell is my secretary? Eunice, I mean. There is not a one of this gang of kidnappers around me who ever knew hef... and they show no interest in trying to find her. Oh, Garcia knew her by sight -- but he says he doesn't know where she is and claims he's too busy to run errands. Told me to ask you." "Oh." Salomon hesitated. "Do you know her address?" "Eh? Somewhere at the north end of town. I suppose my accountant has it. Wait a moment! You took her home once, I remember clearly." "So I did. It was indeed somewhere in the north end. But those rabbit warrens all look alike. My guards may know. Hold it -- your mobile guards escorted her for several months, right up to the time you went in for surgery. Have you asked them?" "Hell, Jake, I haven't been allowed to see anyone. I don't even know that they are still working for me." "I'm fairly sure they still were when I left for Europe. But, Johann, while we can ask them, I doubt if it will do any good." "Why not?" "Because I did see Eunice just before your operation. She was interested -- she was fond of you, Johann, much more so than you deserved -- " "Conceded! Make it march." "Well, she didn't mention specific plans but I don't think she intended to stay in secretarial work. Hell, man, none of us expected that you would ever need a secretary again. I would happily have hired her myself; she is a good secretary. But -- " "I'm sure you would, you old goat. But surely you let her know that she could stay on my payroll forever? Well, until I died, at least." "She knew that. But she is a proud girl, Johann. Not a parasite. I'll make an effort to find her. However, if I don't, there are many good secretaries. I'll find one for you. That's a promise." "Look, I don't want another secretary; I want Eunice Branca." "I meant -- " "I know what you meant. You'd find me some old witch who does perfect work but is no fun to look at or have around... while you've probably got Eunice stashed away in your office." hann, I swear by all that's holy that I do not have her in my office nor anywhere." "Then she did turn you down. Jake, I trust you with my life and all my worldly goods. But I don't trust you or any man not to steal a perfect secretary if he can." "Woo contendere. I did offer her a job any time she wanted it. She did not accept." "So we find her. You find her." Salomon sighed. "What clues can you give me? Her husband, perhaps? Isn't he an artist?" "I suppose you could call him that. Look, Jake, don't hold this against Eunice -- but  would call him a gigolo. But I'm old-fashioned. I had to get a report when she married him. He was clean, no reason to lose the best secretary a man ever had just because she chose to marry him. Yes, he was an artist, one who didn't sell much; she supported him. That was her business; Branca was all right -- didn't use drugs, didn't even drink. Surely I know how common that is today; I'm not prejudiced. I've and only God and Accounting know how many are working for Smith Enterprises. Branca may never have attended a school in which reading is taught. But I can give you one lead -- if Eunice is not working as a secretary -- easy to check through Social Security -- and if they aren't on the Welfare rolls -- she won't be, he might be -- then check model agencies, video, artists, photographers, et cetera. For both of them. For he was as handsome as Eunice was beautiful; the snoopshot with the security report made that plain." "Very well, Johann; I'll get a skiptrace firm on it." "Hell, put a regiment of detectives on it!" "But suppose they dropped out? People do." Johann sniffed. "Perhaps he would -- I would lay any amount that she never would. But, if necessary, I want every Abandoned Area in this city combed." "Expensive. You send a private detective into an A. A. and the premium on his life goes sky high." "Didn't you tell me that I have more money than I know what to do with?" "True. But I don't relish hiring a man for hazardous work even if he wants the job. But we're borrowing trouble; it may take nothing more than getting Accounting to dig out that address. Or do a back check on a social security number with the customary small bribe. I'll let you know." Salomon stood up to leave. Smith said, "Hold it. Will I see you tomorrow? And will you phone in a report -- tell Hedrick or the physician on watch; they won't let me talk on the phone -- phone a report each day? Till you find her?" "Every day, Johann." "Thanks, Jake. You'll make Eagle Scout yet. Tell nursy she can come out of the corner now. They're probably waiting to slip me my Mickey Finn -- this is the longest they've let me stay awake so far." T WO rooms away Salomon stopped to speak to Dr. Hedrick. The physician looked at him. "Rough," he stated. "Quite. Doctor, how long do you expect to keep your patient from using a mirror?" "Hard to say. Progress has been rapid lately... but Smith still has very imperfect control of the new body. Plus tingling and itching and numbness -- all to be expected -- and imaginary pains. Psychosomatic, rather; they are real to the patient. Counselor, if you expect me to have my patient ready for a competency hearing any time soon, emotional shocks must be delayed as long as possible. That's my opinion, though, of course, I am strongly influenced by Dr. Rosenthal's judgment. Besides imperfect body control, our patient is weak and emotionally extremely unstable." "So I am aware." "Mr. Salomon, you look as if you needed another tranquilizer. May I?" Salomon grudged a smile. "Only if it involves grain alcohol." Hedrick chuckled. "Will you settle for some bottled in Scotland?" "Yes! No water. Well, just a touch." "I'll dispense the drug, you add water to taste. I'll prescribe for myself, too -- I also find this case a bit trying. Even though we are making medical history." mon's arm where he had just injected him. "Now wait three minutes. With a tenth cc of 'Tranquille' in you, you could attend your own hanging in a calm mood." "Thank you. Doctor. Dr. Hedrick, what's bothering Johann now? Your message was not specific." Hedrick shook his head. "The patient won't talk to us. Simply demands to see you." "Uh... he has found out? Or, rather, if he has, what then?" Hedrick turned to his colleague. "Dr. Garcia?" "You know my opinion. Doctor. Your patient has recovered, is simply weak from being too long in bed. There is no longer any excuse -- any medical excuse -- for restraints." "Dr. Rosenthal?" The psychiatrist shrugged. "The human mind is a weird and wonderful thing -- and the longer I study it the less I'm sure about anything concerning it. But I agree with Dr. Garcia on one point: You can't keep a patient tied down forever." Hedrick said, "I'm afraid that's it. Counselor." Salomon sighed. "And I've been appointed a volunteer." "Any of us will go in with you if you wish, sir. But the patient flatly refuses to talk to us. We'll be standing by, ready to move fast if a crisis develops." "The dummy-switches dodge again?" "Oh, certainly. And this time the nurse has been instructed to get out if you tell her to. You, not the patient. But don't worry; I'll be watching and listening by closed-circuit video; Dr. Garcia and Dr. Rosenthal will watch the monitor 'scopes'." "I'm not worrying, that drug must have hit me. Okay, I'll go in -- and if I have to ride the tiger. I'll hang onto its ears." Where the hell have you been? You've come to see me just once in the past three weeks. Once! Damn you." "I've been working. Which is more than you can say." "You think so, eh? Physiotherapy is damned hard work, harder than you ever do, you shyster -- and I have to go through it seven days a week." "My heart bleeds, Johann -- want a chit to see the Chaplain? I was laid up sick for ten days -- which I'm sure Hedrick told you -- and I still don't feel chipper, so move over, you lazy bastard, and let me stretch out. Damn it, Johann, I'm not as young as I used to be; I can't jump through hoops every time you snap your fingers." "Now, now, Jake, don't take that line with me. I'm sorry you were ill. I told 'em to send you flowers. Did you get them?" "Yes. Thank you." "That's odd, I didn't send any. Caught you, didn't I? Jake, I never intend to overwork a man -- but, damn it, when he's on my payroll I expect to hear from him occasionally. And see him." "I'm not on your payroll." "Huh? What nonsense is this?" "When the court appointed me your guardian pro tern and conservator, McCampbell awarded me a token fee of ten dollars a month. That's all I am allowed to accept from you -- and I haven't collected it." Johann looked incredulous. "Well, we'll change that in a hurry! You get word to Judge McCampbell that I said -- " "Stow it, Johann. It was part of the deal to shut up your granddaughters. Now what is eating you? Mrs. Branca? You've had a report each day -- negative. I fetched a briefcase stuffed with detailed reports -- all negative but showing what has been done. Want to read 'em? I see you have a reading machine now." "Read negative reports? Jake, don't be silly. Yes, I'm fretted about Eunice -- damn it, even if she didn't want to work for me any longer, you'd think she would have paid me the minimum courtesy of a sickroom visit. But that's not what is on my mind -- not why I sent for you, I mean. Nurse!" "Yes, sir?" "Switch off the voice monitors, then go hide your head in the idiot box. Pick any program as long as it's loud; I want privacy." "Yes, sir." She stood up and switched off the dummy switches. "Nurse." "Yes, Mr. Salomon?" "Ask Dr. Hedrick if we can have full privacy. I don't think Mr. Smith is going to swing from the chandelier simply because I don't have a nursing degree." "Mr. Salomon, Dr. Hedrick says that we are doing so well -- " she smiled brightly -- "aren't we, Mr. Smith? -- that if you wanted to talk privately, I could leave. Just push this red button when you want me." She smiled again and left. Johann said, "Well, that's a surprise!" "Why so? You're getting well, Hedrick says so." "Hmm. I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts. Jake, come close, I want to whisper... because I wouldn't put it past 'em to have a spare microphone tucked away somewhere." "Paranoia, you old fool. Why would Hedrick bother to listen to our conversation?" "'Young fool,' please -- I'm young again. Paranoid, possibly. Anyhow I don't want anybody to hear this but you. Because if I'm mistaken, it won't sound good to have this repeated in court in a competency hearing. So lean close and listen hard. Jake... I'm almost certain this new body of mine is femaleV Jake Salomon's ears started to buzz and he was glad that Garcia had given him that shot. "So? Interesting idea. If true, what are you going to do? Take it back to the complaint desk and demand another one?" "Oh, don't talk like a fool, Jake. Whatever body I have now. I'm stuck with -- and if it's female, well, it'll seem odd but half the human race manages to bear up under it; I guess I can. But don't you see'! If my notion is correct, that's why they've taken such great care not to let me see myself. Afraid I would jump my cams, no doubt." Johann chuckled. "I'm tougher than that. Shucks, they haven't even let you see anything you could spot as female -- sheet over my whole body, not even my arms in sight, and enough gear hooked to me to clutter up any lines of figure. Towel over my scalp -- I suppose the hair is growing back, or such. If I'm horsefaced enough, you couldn't tell my sex just from my face. My new face." "Perhaps. It's an interesting theory. How did you reach it?" "Oh, a number of things. Especially the fact that, even though I now can use my hands and arms, they won't let me. Except during controlled physiotherapy. Can't touch myself, I mean; they strap me down again at once, with an excuse about 'spastic muscle action' and so forth. Which I did have at first and don't have now. But never mind. This is the first time there hasn't been a nurse in the room. So find out. Lift the sheet and look! Tell me, Jake, am I male or female! Hurry -- she might come back." Salomon sat still. "Johann." "What, Jake? Hurry up, man!" "You're female." several moments, then said, "Well, it's a relief to be sure. At least I'm not crazy. If 'female' and 'crazy' aren't synonyms. Well, Jake? How did it happen?" "I've known it all along, Johann. It's been a strain on me to see you and not let on. For you are correct; your doctors were afraid that you might not take it well. While you were still weak." "They don't know me very well -- it's not half the surprise it was to me when -- at about six, it was -- I found out that girls really are different from boys. Little girl down the block, it was. Showed me. But how did it happen, Jake? It wasn't what I signed up for." "Oh, but it was." "Eh?" "No instruction you gave said one word about race or sex. You specified 'healthy,' and around twenty to forty years old, and with AB-Negative blood. Nothing else." Johann blinked. "Yes. But it never occurred to me that they might put me into a woman's body." "Why not? They put women's hearts into male bodies and vice versa every day." "True. I'm simply saying that I never thought about it. But even if I had, I don't think I would have risked cutting my chances in half by making such a restriction. As may be, I've never been one to cry over spilt milk. Well, now that I know, there's no reason to continue that silly business about no mirrors. Will you step out and tell that stubborn doctor that I want to see myself at once and no more nonsense? If necessary, knock his ears in." "I'll see, Johann." Salomon buzzed for the nurse, then went out. He was gone five minutes, returned with Drs. Hedrick, Garcia and Rosenthal, and a second nurse, who was carrying a large hand mirror. Hedrick said, "How do you feel. Miss Smith?" She smiled wryly. "So it's 'Miss' Smith now, is it? Much better, thank you; my mind is at ease. You could have told me weeks ago; I am not as unstable as you think." "That is possible. Miss Smith, but I am bound to do what I think is best for my patient." "No criticism, none. But now that the cat is out of the bag, please ask the nurse to show me what I look like. I'm curious." "Certainly, Miss Smith." Dr. Garcia waved the nurse at the console aside and sat down; Hedrick stationed himself on one side of the bed, Rosenthal on the other. Only then did Hedrick take the mirror from the nurse, hold it to let his patient see herself in it. Johann Smith looked at her new face first with intense interest, then with unbelief -- then her features broke in horror. "Oh, my God! Dear God, what have they done to us? Jake! You knew" The lawyer's face was working in the convulsions of a strong man trying not to weep. "Yes, I knew, Johann. That's why I couldn't find her for you -- because she was here along. Right here -- and I had... to talk to her!" He gave up and sobbed. "Jake, how could you let them do it? Eunice, oh Eunice my darling, forgive me -- I didn't know" Her sobs echoed his, an octave higher. Hedrick snapped, "Dr. Garcia!" "Started, Doctor!" "Dr. Rosenthal, take care of Mr. Salomon. Nurse, help him, he's about to fall! Damn it, where's that aspirator?" F ive minutes later the room was quiet. The patient had been forced into sedated sleep. Dr. Hedrick satisfied himself that Miss Smith was safe and turned the bedside watch over to Dr. Garcia. Hedrick then left the sickroom. He found Mr. Salomon stretched out on a couch at the remote watch station; Dr. Rosenthal was seated by the couch, a stethoscope around his neck. Hedrick cocked an eyebrow at the psychiatrist, who mouthed soundlessly, "Okay," then added aloud, "Perhaps you will check me." "Very well. Doctor." Hedrick sat down where Rosenthal had been, hitched the chair closer, took Salomon's wrist and felt his pulse. "How do you feel?" "I'm okay," Salomon said gruffly. "Sorry I made a fool of myself. How sheT' "Sleeping. You were fond of her." "We both were fond of her. Doctor, she was an angel." "Go ahead and cry. Tears are lubricant for the soul. Males would be better off if they cried as easily as women do. Eh, Rosenthal?" "Correct, Doctor. Cultures in which men cry easily have little need of my specialty." He smiled. "Mr. Salomon, you're in good hands so I'll run along -- got to shrink a few heads for my collection. Unless you need me. Doctor?" "Run along. Rosy. You might be here in the morning when we wake the patient. Say ten o'clock." "Good-bye, Dr. Rosenthal. Thank you. Thank you for everything." "No huhu. Counselor. Don't let that veterinarian sell you any flea powder." He left. "Mr. Salomon," said Hedrick, "this big castle is loaded with beds. What do you say to sacking out in one, then about twenty-one ortwo o'clock I can give you a pill guaranteed to slug you for eight hours of dreamless sleep." "I'm okay, really I am." "If you say so. I can't force treatment on you. But as another human being who has come to know you fairly well -- and admire you -- I must admit that I am more worried about you than I am about my patient. You referred to her as an 'angel' -- by which you meant the donor, not Miss Smith." "Eh? Yes, of course. Eunice Branca." Salomon's features contorted momentarily. "I never knew her and I've had little experience with angels; doctors don't see people at their best. But her body would do credit to an angel; I have never seen a healthier one. Twenty-eight years old by the records, physiologically perhaps five years younger. She -- Miss Smith I now mean. Miss Johann Smith -- can take a severe shock and bounce out of it; she has that superb young body to sustain her. But you have had much the same shock and -- forgive me -- are no longer young. If you won't sleep here -- best -- " "I don't want to sleep here'." "Very well. Second best would be for you to permit me to check your heart and lungs and blood pressure. If I don't like what I find, then I want you to rest while I send for your physician." "He doesn't make house calls." Hedrick grunted. "Then he's not a physician; physicians go where they are needed. A most unprofessional remark as we are expected to pretend that any M.D. with a license is a dedicated saint with the wisdom of Jove -- even when we know he is a bungler whose dedication is to the Internal Revenue Service. Don't quote me; they might lift my union card. Now about that checkup? Do you want it?" "Uh, yes. Please. And I'll take that pill if you'll let me take it home. Don't ordinarily use such -- but tonight is a special case." "Good. If you'll slip off your shirt -- " While he worked the physician said quietly, "Mr. Salomon, I don't have Dr. Rosenthal's training. But if it will do you any good to talk, I can listen. This has been on your mind, I know. I think your worst hurdle is past -- letting Johann Smith know that he is now 'Miss' Smith, plus the still worse shock of seeing him -- her -- discover that she now inhabits his former secretary's body. So you are past that crisis. If there is more it would help to get off your mind, feel free to talk. In my profession as in yours, such talk is privileged." "I don't mind talking about Eunice. But I don't know what to say." "Well, you might tell me how such a lovely girl got killed. Never knew the donor's name until you told me. There was a privacy restriction. So we don't ask -- as long as the donation is properly certified." "Yes, there was such restriction. We'll never know why but I suspect that the child -- woman, I mean, and a very competent one -- but I thought of her as a child, being so much older than she was. I think Eunice had a romantic notion that she could give her body to her boss if she no longer needed it and not let him find out. Ridiculous, but it fitted her sweet nature. I had to tell you, once it looked as if old Johann might live through it. Because I knew he would blow his wig. And he did." "A very good thing you told me. Counselor. I think -- and Dr. Rosenthal thinks -- that we would never have pulled this patient through if we hadn't taken extraordinary precautions to keep her from knowing her sex. In view of the patient's relation to the donor." Doctor, I am not exaggerating -- if I had been as little as twice Eunice's age -- and she not married -- I would have done my damnedest to marry her. And the same, I feel certain, goes for old Johann. So I knew what a shock it would be to him -- worse than simply learning that she had been killed." "Car accident?" "Nothing so innocent. Killed by a mugger. Psychopath probably -- but the point is immaterial as Johann's mobile guards caught him almost in the act and killed him. That's how she was saved -- her body was saved, I mean -- because they rushed her to a hospital hoping to save her." Jake Salomon sighed. "It does help to talk." "Good. How did Johann Smith's guards happen to be so Johnny-on-the-spot, yet not quite?" "Oh. The poor darling tried to save ten minutes. She was a blood donor -- AB-Negative -- and -- " "Oi! Now I know why 'Miss' Smith has seemed vaguely familiar. I saw her once. I'm now certain, giving blood to a patient I had been called in to support. A lovely girl, with a warm disposition, friendly, who dressed in, um, exotic styles." "Erotic styles you mean, let's not use euphemisms. Yes, Eunice did. She knew she was beautiful and did not mind sharing her beauty. Played up to it." "I wish I had known her." "I wish you had. Doctor; your life would have been richer thereby. If she had a call to give blood, Johann's guards were under orders to driver her. Protect her. Pick her up at her door, escort her to the car, deliver her, wait for her. But this was an emergency and she lives -- lived -- nineteen levels up in one of those beehives in the north end. Vehicle lift, sure -- but not able to lift the sort of armor Johann owned. Owns. So the poor darling decided to save ten minutes and used the passenger elevator without waiting for escort. And that's where she was jumped. KUled." "A pity. I suppose she didn't know that we can always stretch a patient an extra ten minutes if we know a donor is on the way." "Maybe she did, maybe she didn't -- but it is characteristic of Eunice Branca that she tried to hurry." "A pity. You can put your shirt on. How old did you say you were?" "I didn't say. Seventy-two is staring me in the face." "I'm amazed. You seem to be younger -- internally I mean, not necessarily your face -- " "So I'm ugly. I know it." "I think 'distinguished' is the accepted term. You seem much younger, physiologically. Say twenty years." "So I take my hormones." "I'm not sure you need them. Go home if you wish. Or stay. If you stay. I'd like to put a monitor on your heart. Professional interest." (And to make damn sure you don't conk out, old fellow -- sometimes a heart stops for no good reason after a shock such as you have had.) "Uh... I am tired. Could I skip dinner and go straight to bed? With maybe a twelve-hour dose instead of eight?" "No trouble." Soon Jake Salomon was in bed and asleep. Hedrick ate, looked in on his patient, left orders with the night watch to call him if the displays exceeded certain tolerances, went to bed and to sleep; he never needed the drugs he prescribed. Despite sedation, Johann Smith's dreams were troubled. Once the old man in the borrowed skull muttered, "Eunice?" (I'm here. Boss. Go back to sleep.) "All right, my dear. Just wanted to know where you'd gone." (Quit fretting. Boss. I'm here.) Johann smiled in his sleep and then slept quietly, no more bad dreams. T he morning nurse bustled in with a tray. "Good morning. Miss Smith! How are we today?" "I don't know how you are, but I'm hungry." "Good! Hot oatmeal this morning, dear, and orange juice and a boiled egg -- and we'll soak a little toast in egg so that it will go down easily. I'm going to tilt the bed up a touch." "Mrs. Sloan -- " "Yes? Let me tuck the napkin under your chin." "Stop that, or I'll tell you where to tuck it! Uncover me and unstrap me; I'm going to feed myself." (Boss, don't be rude to her. She's trying to help you.) (Eunice?) (Of course, dear -- didn't I promise I wouldn't leave you again?) (But -- ) (Shush, she's talking.) "Now, Miss Smith, you know I can't do that. Please, dear. Doesn't this smell good?" "Uh... I suppose you can't unstrap me without Dr. Hedrick's permission. I'm sorry I snapped at you." (That's better. Boss!) "But don't try to feed me, please don't. Instead please find Dr. Hedrick and tell him I'm being difficult ,again. You might also tell him that, if he doesn't want to go along with my unreasonable demands, he had better try to reach Mr. Salomon. Because if anyone tries to put food in my mouth while my hands are strapped. I'll do my best to spit it on the ceiling." (Is that better, Eunice?) (Some, Boss. Say ten percent.) (Uh, darn, I don't have any practice in being a lady.) (I'll teach you. Boss.) (Eunice, are you really there, dear? Or have I come unstuck just as they thought I would?) (Discuss it later. Boss dear -- you're going to have to face' the doctor right away... and don't mention me... or you know what'll happen. They'll never unstrap our wrists. You know that, don't you.) (Of course I do! Think I'm crazy?) (Irrelevant and immaterial as Jake would say. The ppint is never to let Dr. Hedrick -- or anybody -- guess that I'm here... or they'll be certain you're crazy. Now I'm going to shut up.) (Don't go 'way!) (Boss, I'll never go away; I'll just keep quiet. You and I had better talk mostly when others aren't around. Unless I see you about to make a mistake.) (Going to nag me, huh?) Johann heard her merry giggle. (Haven't I always. Boss? Watch it; here come the cops.) Dr. Hedrick came in, followed by Dr. Garcia. "Good morning. Miss Smith." "Good morning, gentlemen." The patient nodded at them. "Nurse says that you would like to try feeding yourself." "That's true but that's not all of it. I want these straps and clamps removed, all of them." "Letting you feed yourself is no problem. It's a good idea, good practice. As for the rest -- That calls for thought." "Doctor, the masquerade is over. If you can't see your way clear to removing all restraints from my body, then forget about breakfast; I won't starve. Get my lawyer instead." "As it happens, Mr. Salomon is in the house -- " "Then get him!" "Just a moment, please." Dr. Hedrick glanced at Dr. Garcia, who had seated himself at the console; Dr. Garcia nodded. "Miss Smith, would you agree to a reasonable compromise? Or at least listen?" "I'll listen. But -- " (Shut up. Boss!) "I'll listen. Doctor." "Mr. Salomon is, as you know, an elderly man, and he had a trying day yesterday. I persuaded him to stay overnight, and rest. I'm told that he is just getting up; he has not had breakfast. I have and so has Dr. Garcia -- but so long ago that we could use a bit of brunch. Now I can unstrap your arms, let you feed yourself -- but unstrapping your pelvis... well, as you must have guessed, there is some odd plumbing down there, and other things. Takes time to unhitch everything. "So here is my thought. You can invite Mr. Salomon to join you for breakfast... and you could invite us, too, for that bit of brunch -- and we four can talk over what needs to be done next. I shall follow the wishes of your guar -- your lawyer. Or let him select another physician and withdraw, if I find that I must." "My guardian," Johann said quietly. "We'll do whatever my guardian requires. But I hope he does not decide to replace you. Dr. Hedrick. I have been a difficult patient and I'm sorry. I know what a miraculous job you have done on me... and I am grateful." "Thank you. Miss Smith." "I would be delighted to have you three gentlemen join me for brunch... if you will be so kind as to unstrap my arms." (Boss!) (What's biting you, little one? I thought I was being a perfect lady?) (You are -- but don't you dare let gentlemen in here to eat with us until we're made pretty! Not a speck of makeup, and our hair must be a mess. Horrid!) (But look, dear, it's just Jake and our doctors.) (It's the principle of the thing. I know more about being a girl than you do -- well, don't I? When did I ever come to work with my face stark naked and my hair in rats? Why, I often got up much earlier than I had to, just to make sure that I was as pretty as possible, just for you. Didn't #? Did I not?) "Eh? I mean, 'Oh?' Sorry, Doctor, just thinking. If I am to have gentlemen guests for breakfast, shouldn't I start practicing how to be a lady? It's new to me, you know. Do I have any makeup on?" Hedrick looked startled. "Do you mean lipstick?" "Whatever it is that ladies put on their faces; I'm sure it's always more than lipstick. And my hair should be brushed. Or do I have hair?" "Why, certainly you have. Still short but a fine, healthy growth." "That's a relief. I thought possibly I had a plastic skull and would have to wear wigs." "There was some prosthetic restoration. But Dr. Boyle managed to save the scalp and you'll never notice the prosthesis." Hedrick smiled briefly. "Tougher than natural bone. 'With good blood supply to your scalp and normal hair -- just hasn't grown out very far." "I'm relieved. Dandruff?" "Haven't noticed any." "We won't worry about it this morning. Doctor, I'd like to be made up to look like a lady ready to receive guests. If you'll have one of the servants take in a cup of coffee and some orange juice to Mr. Salomon along with our invitation to breakfast. I'm sure he won't mind waiting." (How'm I doing, Eunice?) (Fine, old dear!) Dr. Hedrick looked puzzled. "Miss Smith, when I set up a support team, I try to anticipate every possible emergency, supplies, drugs, and so forth. This is the first time I've been asked to produce lipstick. And cosmetics." "Oh. But you're not being asked to. Doctor. The ladies' powder room on the first floor is stocked with all shades of lipstick and many cosmetics. Should be. Was. Should still be, or someone will hear about it. And one of the nurses can help me. That pretty redhead -- Minnie? Ginny? Miss Gersten, I mean. She must know quite a lot abput cosmetics." (She does -- that red hair came out of a bottle, Boss.) (Meeow! Shut up, pussy cat.) (Wasn't being catty. Boss. She does well, in spite of those godawful uniforms.) "Winifred Gersten," said Dr. Garcia. "Nurse, find Winnie. And take that tray out; it's cold." Forty minutes later Miss Johann Smith was ready to receive. Her hair was fluffed, her face had been made up with restrained boldness by the red-haired nurse, and the result as shown in a mirror had been approved by the second voice inside Smith -- grudgingly, it seemed to Johann -- (I can do better. It'll do for now). The bed had been contoured to let her sit up and from somewhere a smart bed jacket had been produced, one that matched her eyes. Best of all, her hands and arms were free. Johann found that her hands were trembling. She attributed it to excitement and decided that, if she had trouble controlling a fork, she would stick to things that would not slop on her Jacket -- besides, she was not hungry now. Too excited. (Steady down. Boss, darling. Leave the eating to me.) (But-) (No 'buts.' I've been feeding that face for years. The body remembers, Boss. You talk to the gentlemen; I'll handle the calories. Now let's shut up; they're arriving.) "May we come in?" "Do, gentlemen, please. Good morning, Jake. I hope you had a good night's rest." (Put out your hand to him. Boss.) "Slept like a child." "Good. So did I." Johann extended her left arm and hand, that being the side the lawyer was on. "Look, Jake! Hands!" Salomon took her hand, bowed over it -- hesitated and then touched it to his lips. Johann was so amazed that the hand was almost snatched back. (Good God! What does Jake think I am? A pansy?) (He thinks you're a beautiful girl. You are. I should know. Look, Boss, we must talk about Jake -- later. Say hello to your shrink.) "I'm a party-crasher. May I come in. Miss Smith?" "You're most welcome. Someone is going to have to assure these other gentlemen that I don't have termites in the attic; I'm depending on you. Doctor." The psychiatrist smiled down at her. "That is an appeal hard to resist. I must say your improvement since yesterday is astounding. You're looking lovely -- Miss Smith." Johann smiled and gave him her hand. Dr. Rosenthal bowed over it and kissed it -- not a quick and frightened peck such as Salomon had given it, but a kiss that was soft and warm and unhurriedly sensuous. Johann felt a tingle run up her arm. (Hey, what is this?) (Stay off his couch. Boss. He's a wolf -- I can tell.) When he straightened up he held her hand a moment longer than necessary, smiled at her again, then moved away. Johann thought of asking him if that was his standard way of treating patients, decided not to -- but felt slightly annoyed that the other two doctors had not offered the same homage. Yonny Schmidt had been born at a time and place where hand-kissing was unheard of; Johann Smith had never taken it up; Miss Johann Smith was discovering that the silly custom was habit-forming. She felt flustered. She was saved by another voice from the door, that of her butler. "May we serve now. Miss Smith?" "Cunningham! It's good to see you. Yes, you may serve." Johann wondered who had given instructions to make the meal formal? The butler stared over her head and said tonelessly, "Thank you. Miss." Johann was startled. The butler, like all the male household staff (and some of the females), was sudden death armed or unarmed; his manner alone could intimidate news snoops. (The poor man is scared!) (Of course. So calm him down. Boss.) "But first come here, Cunningham." "Yes, Miss." Her household chief walked carefully toward her, stopped a very respectful distance away. "Oh, do come closer. Look at me. Right at me, don't turn your eyes away. Cunningham, the way I look is a shock to you. Isn't it?" Cunningham swallowed without speaking; his Adam's apple bobbed. "Oh, come now," Johann said firmly. "Of course it is. But if it upsets you, think what a shock it is to me. Until yesterday I didn't even know that I had been turned into a woman. I'll have to get used to it and so will you. Just remember this: Underneath I am the same cantankerous, unreasonable, unappreciative old scoundrel who hired you as a guard-footman nineteen years ago. I'll go on expecting perfect service, notice it as little, and remember to say 'thank you' as seldom. Do we understand each other?" The butler barely smiled. "Yes, sir -- I mean 'Yes, Miss.' " "You meant 'Yes, sir' but you're going to have to learn to call me 'Yes, Miss' and I'm going to have to learn to expect it. We old dogs must learn new tricks. How's your wife's lumbago?" "Some better, she says. Thank you. Miss." "Good. Tell Mary I asked. You may serve." The brunch was almost merry. Johann tasted the wine when Cunningham offered a sample, approved it but declined a glass herself. She barely touched it to her tongue but the flavor spread like strong brandy and she had been startled almost into choking by the vibrant wonder of its bouquet. Yet the bottle she recognized as that of an adequate but not spectacular Chablis. She played safe with orange juice. Table talk was lively and directed mostly at the hostess with no reference to her status as a patient. The men seemed to vie for her attention -- and Johann found that she enjoyed it. She laughed frequently, answered their sallies and felt witty herself. But she could see that Jake was not eating much and looked at her all the time except when she looked back... at which his gaze wavered and shifted. Poor Jake. (Eunice, what are we going to do about Jake?) (Later, Boss -- one thing at a time.) She was startled again when Cunningham came to remove her plate from her lap table -- startled to see that scrambled eggs and two rolls had disappeared as well as orange juice, half a glass of milk and one of three link sausages. "Coffee, Miss?" "I don't know. Dr. Hedrick, am I allowed coffee?" "Miss Smith, now that you can eat sitting up, there is no reason why you should not eat or drink anything you want." "Then I'll celebrate. The first coffee I've been permitted in ten years -- Demi-tasse for me, Cunningham, but man-size cups for the gentlemen. And Cunningham? Is there any Mumm '# on ice?" "Certainly, Miss." "Serve it." She raised her voice a little. "Any sissies who won't drink champagne this early in the day may sneak out quietly." No one left. When glasses were filled and bubbles were chasing up their stems. Dr. Hedrick stood up. "Gentlemen, a toast -- " He waited until they were standing. Johann raised her glass with them. But did not drink: the toast was "To our lovely and gracious hostess -- long may she live!" "Amen!" "Cheers!" And the tinkle of breaking glass. Johann felt tears, ignored them. "Thank you, gentlemen. Cunningham, fresh glasses." When they were filled she said, "Gentlemen, I ask for another standing toast -- " she waited, then went on -- "this should be to Dr. Boyle... and to you, Jake, old friend, without whose loyal help I would not be here... and certainly to you. Dr. Hedrick, and to all the doctors who have helped you and helped Dr. Boyle... and to all the patient nurses I have snapped at. But those can wait. I ask you to drink -- " her tears were falling and her voice was almost a whisper -- "to the memory of the sweetest, loveliest and most gallant girl I have ever known... Eunice Branca." T he toast was drunk in silence. Then Jake Salomon slowly crumpled into his chair and covered his face with his hands. Dr. Hedrick jumped to help him. Dr. Garcia was quick on the other side. Johann stared in helpless distress. (Oh, I should have known better! But I meant it, darling, I meant every word.) (I know you did. Boss, and I appreciate it. But it's all right. Jake has got to admit that I'm dead. And so do you.) (Are you dead, Eunice? Are you?) (Don't worry over a word. Boss. I'm here and I won't leave you, ever. I promised you. Have you ever known me to break my word?) (No, never.) (So believe me this time. But we've got to take care of Jake.) (How, dearest girl?) (When the time comes, you'll know. Talk later, when we're alone.) Dr. Rosenthal was leaning over her. "Are you all right, my dear?" "I'm okay -- just terribly sorry about Mr. Salomon. Is he all right?" "He will be, shortly. Miss Smith, don't worry about Mr. Salomon. Yes, you brought on another catharsis -- which he needed, or he would not have had it. As for his physical well-being, he's in Dr. Hedrick's hands... and Curt Hedrick hasn't lost a patient he reached in time since he started practicing his specialty. Your house is loaded with everything Dr. Hedrick could possibly need... and Mr. Salomon isn't even ill. He simply needs to lie down, plus a happy drug." Dr. Rosenthal sat with her while the room was cleared of dishes, brunch table, dining chairs, etc. Dr. Hedrick returned with Dr. Garcia. Johann again asked, "How is he?" "Half asleep. Slightly ashamed of being a 'spectacle' and a 'nuisance' -- his terms. But only slightly as what I gave him doesn't permit such self-hate very long. How are yoM?" "She's ready to go six rounds,' Rosenthal assured him. "So the 'scopes say. We might as well get on with our conference. Miss Smith. I discussed all that I am going to say with Mr. Salomon while you were getting pretty before brunch, and he approves. I am withdrawing from your case." "Oh, Dr. Hedrick! No!" "Yes. Dear lady, ain't nobody going away mad. This means that you are well. Well. Oh, still weak, still in need of care. But I'm not deserting you. I'm turning you over to Dr. Garcia." She looked at Dr. Garcia, who nodded. "Nothing to worry about. Miss Smith." "But -- Doctor Hedrick, you will come back and see me? Won't you?" "Delighted to. But not very soon. I'm afraid. You see -- well, there is an interesting transplant case which has been hanging fire. A radical one, the heart and both lungs. Now they are ready to start surgery. I received a call before you were awake, asking if I would be available. I said that I would have to call back -- and after I saw you I did call and said that ! could do it. After consulting Dr. Garcia, of course, and notifying Mr. Salomon." He smiled quickly. "So, if you will excuse me. I'll leave." Johann sighed and reached out her hand. "Since you must." Hedrick took her hand, bent over it; Dr. Rosenthal said lazily, "Aren't you going to scrub first. Doctor?" Hedrick said, "You go to hell, Rosy!" and kissed her hand. Hedrick stretched it at least twice as long as Dr. Rosenthal's earlier effort. She felt goose pimples on her arm and a most curious feeling at her middle -- yes, she decided, if one had to be a woman, this was a custom to be encouraged. (Going to lay him. Boss?) (Eunice!) (Oh, piffle. Boss. We're Siamese twins now and should be honest with each other. You wanted to lay me for years. But couldn't. You knew you wanted to, I knew it too; we just never talked about it. Now you still can't. But you can lay him if you want to... and it's the best way to say 'Thank you.' But watch it, dearie. Do it here, not where you might get caught. He has a jealous wife; he has all the signs.) (Eunice, I'm not going to discuss such a ridiculous idea! I'm surprised at you. You, a nice girl -- and married yourself.) (Wups, dearie! I'm not married. 'Until death do us part' is the limit...and I'm a ghost. 'Minds me, though -- my husband -- erase and correct; my widower, Joe Branca. Got to talk about him, too. Doc's turning to go. So wet your lips and smile, if you have it even faintly on your mind. And you have.) Miss Smith wet her lips and smiled. "Adios, Doctor, not goodbye. Hurry back. When you can." (You're learning, dearie, you're learning.) Dr. Garcia said, "Miss Smith -- " "Oh. Yes, Doctor?" "If you're ready. I'll get nurses in and we'll unharness you and several other things. You can have a general anesthetic if you wish. I suggest locals, with a chin screen to keep you from seeing how I'm bungling it. With something you want to read projected, and some music." "Music would be nice. But I won't read. I'm too interested. Locals, then. Or nothing, pain doesn't upset me." "But it upsets me, so we'll use local anesthesia." For an hour and more she listened to a tape of evergreens, from classic rock she had never grown used to clear back to folk music popular before Johann Schmidt was born. Mostly she enjoyed lazily the sensuous pleasure of feeling her body being touched and handled and manipulated. Not only was it wonderful to have a body after days of complete paralysis from the neck down (plus fear of being forever a basket case, a fear Johann had never fully admitted) but also, most important, this body felt everything so sensitively -- just to be touched was pleasure. Not much like that old wreck you discarded! For the past ten, fifteen years that body's sole virtue had been that it still ran. It reminded her of a fifth-hand ModelT Ford that he and four other young cake-eaters had bought for seventy dollars in Baltimore and had driven half across the continent -- no lights, no brakes (the reverse had to serve), no driving licenses (unheard of), no instruments, no nothing. But the tough and ugly little touring car had chugged along on three cylinders (not always the same three) at a (estimated) top speed of twentyfive miles an hour. They had stopped now and then to throw water on the spokes to keep them from falling out. Somewhere on a dirt road in Missouri it had coughed and quit, and smell had traced the trouble to the wiring. Yonny had fixed it -- wrapped the burned insulation with toilet paper, tied it with string... cranked the heap and it had started at once and chugged along as before. She wondered where that sturdy old junkpile had wound up? And what had become of her male body? Johann's will had left it to a medical school -- but since Johann hadn't died, quite, that will did not control. Had they pickled it? Or swept it out with the trash? Must ask. sensations that should have hurt but did not and once a sharp pain which she ignored. There were odors, sour-sweet and nauseating; she thought of suggesting that the air system be turned up, then decided to mind her own business. Presently the odors were gone and she became aware that she was being given a bed bath, then sheets and pad were being changed. The chin screen was removed; the top part of the fresh bottom sheet was whisked into place by two nurses while a third lifted Miss Smith's shoulders. Two nurses left the room, carrying a hamper between them. "There," said Dr. Garcia. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" "Not at all. I feel grand." She wiggled her toes, opened and closed her thighs. "Grand! Now Tm me all over -- free! Doctor? Since I'm no longer wired for sight and sound, not to mention plumbing, do we need this fancy hospital bed? I would stop feeling like an invalid sooner if I had my own bed." "Mmm... must you rush it? This bed is the right height for nurses to work on you -- back rubs and such -- and it has side rails which can be raised when you sleep. Miss Smith, every nurse's nightmare is the thought of a patient falling out of bed." "Well! 'What do you think I am? A baby?" "Yes, Miss, that's what I think you are. A baby getting acquainted with its body. Babies can fall. But I don't intend to let you fall. Either out of bed, or in learning to walk. Or in taking a tub bath, which you will be demanding almost at once." (Play it cool. Boss!) "Doctor, I will follow your orders. But my own bed has its points. It will contour, just touch a button. And it has hydraulic lift. Raises as high as this one or higher -- but will also lower till it's hardly more than a mattress on the floor, ten inches high. Will this one do that?" "Mmm, no." "I did fall out of bed, ten years back. It shook me up so, that I ordered this special bed. Back when I was still walking I used to raise it to the easiest height -- about at my hips -- to get into it. Then lower it all the way down to sleep." "Mmm... maybe we can make a deal. Will you promise me always to lower the bed once you get into it? Even if you don't intend to sleep." She smiled. "Signed and witnessed and with posted performance bond." "I don't think we need to go that far. Miss Smith, we no longer need to monitor you the forty-'leven ways we've been doing. But I want a continuous check on heart action and respiration until you are living a normal life. That's the main reason I need this life-support bed. But if you will let me fasten to your skin, anywhere on your ribs, a little pickup-transmitter weighing a half-ounce and no bigger than an alloy dollar, we won't need this fancy bed. It's comfortable, you'll forget it's on you. You can bathe with it in place -- waterproof and sticks like a poor relation." She smiled. "Start sticking!" "I'll fetch it. And have the nurses swap beds." "Oh, the nurses can't move my bed. It takes big huskies and a power dolly. Tell Cunningham. But no rush. Speaking of nurses -- Winnie, don't you need to wash . your hands or something? I want to talk to my doctor." The redhead smiled at her. "Dear, I've heard everything. Don't mind me." "Look, Winnie, you did a lovely job on my face when I did not know how. But that's the point, dear. Outside I'm a woman. But up here back of my eyes is still a crabby old man who is far too shy -- chicken, I mean -- too chicken to discuss intimate matters with a pretty girl present. And I must." "Miss Gersten, go to the watch station and take a break. I'll call you." "Yes, Doctor." Once she was gone Johann said, "You're durn sure all the mikes are dead?" "We're private. Miss Smith." "Call me 'Johann,' Doc; this has got to be man-to-man -- and embarrasses me even discussing it with a man. All right, first question; Did I come sick -- menstruate -- in the last few days?" Garcia looked surprised. "You twigged? Yes, you are just over your period; we removed a tampon while we were working on you and it was not necessary to replace it. But where did I miss? I thought I had anticipated it and had bolshoi painkiller in you in tinle. You felt cramps?" "Not a twinge. But things didn't feel right... and that's when I started getting suspicious about my sex." She looked thoughtful. "Perhaps it was the tampons -- I felt something odd down there -- and now the feeling is no longer there." "Might have been that. I would have used napkin pads, usual hospital practice. But there were just too many bells and whistles -- plumbing I mean -- in the way. I didn't think you would notice a tampon placed while you were sedated. Contrary to popular belief there is almost no sensation inside a vagina." "So? There damn well is in mine! I just didn't know what the sensation was." "Well, the matter has never come up before; your case is unique. Was that all that was troubling you. Miss -- sorry! Johann." "No. This new body of mine -- Has it had a whatchamacallit, a female examination?" "Oh, certainly. Dr. Kystra, best G-Y-N man in town. Done while you were paralyzed, checked again after your spinal cord fused but done while you were in deep sedation. All okay." "I want a full report. Damn it. Doc, I'm in charge of this body now... and I know as little about how to be female as my Grossmutter knew about aircraft. Nothing, that is." "I can get the report out of file if you want it -- " "Ido!" " -- but I can tell it in terms you are more likely to understand. Shall I?" "Go ahead." I body, physiological age circa twenty-five -- calendar age somewhat older, I understand. Breasts normal virginal -- which doesn't mean your body is virgo intacta; it isn't. Just means you haven't suckled a child. No trace of abdominal surgery, from which I conclude that your appendix is in place and your tubes are intact -- " "Meaning I could get pregnant." " -- the latter opinion having been confirmed by insufflation while you were paralyzed. You not only could get pregnant; you will. Unless you live an absolutely chaste life -- and even if you plan to, I would still recommend precautionary contraception -- say six-month implants in one buttock. The best-laid plans of mice and men, you know. And women. Especially women. Since you are Rhnegative about six-sevenths of the male population could give you a damaged or stillborn child. We can prevent that if we know it in time, but an unexpected pregnancy can turn out tragically. So don't let it be unexpected. Plan it. In the meantime use contraception." "Doc, what makes you so damn sure I'll get pregnant? Even if I get married -- which I do not plan on -- hell. I've had only hours to get used to the notion of being female; I certainly haven't had time to consider being actively female. But even so, as the old gal said, 'Shucks, honey, hundred and hundreds of times ain't nothing happen a-tall.' " "If you adjust normally to being a young female, you will be active about it, that's why. Or you will eventually wind up on Dr. Rosenthal's confession couch or some emotional equivalent, such as Joining a nunnery. Johann, your new body has a normal female hormonal balance; you had better plan accordingly. Even getting your tubes cut is no answer; you might come down with the emotional never-getovers through regretting it. As for what the old gal said, it doesn't apply. Because of that child'you've already had." "What?" (Boss, why didn't you mind your own business? I could have told you all of this you need to know.) (Shut up, Eunice.) Garcia looked surprised. "You didn't know? I had assumed that, since this body was that of your secretary, you knew that she had had a child. Or children." "Not only didn't know it, I don't believe it." Surely the security investigation would have turned up such an obvious fact... and God knows Eunice had never been out of his sight since then long enough to bear a child. "I'm afraid you will have to believe it, uh, Johann. Striations called stretch marks on belly and buttocks -- hardly noticeable unless your skin is tanned and then easily concealed by cosmetics. But present. Not definitive, as a woman, or even a male, can get stretch marks from obesity. But characteristic. But the thing that nails it down is that the cervix of a virgin womb does not look like that of a woman who has borne a child. The difference is so marked that a layman can spot it. I have seen yours. Q.E.D. Could be photographed if you doubt me." (Drop it, Boss!) "Oh, I believe you, now that you've explained it." "A comparison photo might be a good idea. Make you more careful. I was not implying any criticism of Mrs. Branca; I was simply warning you that the baby-baking apparatus you inherited from her is in prime shape and ready to be triggered each lunar month. Say about ten days from now." "I'll be careful." "Want a lecture on contraception?" "No." Johann smiled wryly. "Apparently I have at least a week before I need a chastity girdle." "Approximately, by statistics. But, uh, Johann. No, Miss Smith -- do you know the technical term we physicians use to describe girls who depend on rhythm?" "No. What?" "We call them 'mothers.' " "Oh, Ohr "So don't wait too long. Next question?" "Uh... no more today. Doctor; I need to digest what you've told me. Thank you." "Not at all. Miss Smith. Shall I have them switch beds now?" "I'll send for Cunningham later; I'd like to rest. Doctor? Could you stick that dingus on my ribs? Then have the nurses stay out a couple of hours?" "Certainly. If you'll let me raise the safety rails, as this bed is not only ten inches from the floor." "Oh, of course." pendently sets forth something to think about. You don't have to like these two visions -- Silverberg especially does not enjoy his -- but now might be as good a time as any to ask yourself whether you truly think our technology can reverse itself -- and if so, how? Technical man is in danger, clearly. Internal combustion engines -- autos, buses and trucks -- account for # of carbon monoxide pollution nationally and CO is pure poison. Our urban centers today contain levels of it up to four times a "safe" one. Production of electricity right now uses # of the nation's annual water run( Continued from page #) off thermally to pollute our rivers -- and the figure is expected to rise to # in the next thirty years. A herbicide in recent use here -- #, #, #-T -- has become a weapon of war in Vietnam, according to The New York Times. 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Editor Science Editor feature Editor August-September, # Vol. #, No. # James Blish Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Robert A. Heinlein Publisher Associate Publisher R.A. Lafferty Dannie Ptachta Ernest Taves Sonya Dorman Algis Budrys lished bimonthly by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # by Universal Publishing  Distributing Corpo ration under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. The Raries are in many respects remarkably human. In appearance, size, occupation, intelligence and standard behavior they are indistinguishable from people. Their complexions range the gamut of human coloration and they do not vote as a block. The one thing that sets them apart is that they're just a little better. The Raries began to develop their own planetary organization eleven years ago -- in #. Its founder is Dr. Leonard M. Eisenberg, who is also the president of the Associated Health Foundation. It is called the National Rare Blood Club and its address is # Fifth Avenue, New York City #, tel. #-CH #-#. Its relevance to readers of this particular issue of Galaxy is that Mr. Robert A. Heinlein, whose breakthrough novel,  Will Fear No Evil, is currently being serialized here, is a Rarie -- and so may you be. Should you qualify, you could not possibly find yourself in better company. 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If you're #-# and one of the .# of the population with AB Rh-Negative blood; of the # with B RhNegative; the # with AB RhPositive', the # with A RhNegative the # with O RhNegative the # with B Rh-Positive -- and in addition are ready to drop whatever you're doing, wherever you may be, to save the life of someone you do not know, who may belong to any ethnic or social class and may not even be a registered member of the Club -- or of Raries -- you may apply for membership. Do so. The life your blood donation will save may one day save yours. Or that of a member of your family. Or that of a perfect stranger. At no cost other than the hospital administration charge. Raries are remarkable. Many have traveled considerable distances by the fastest possible transportation at their own expense, leaving businesses dangling, to save, a life. Waitresses have answered calls for donors without waiting for the tip. In I I years # Raries have donated # pints of blood for no other reason than that they're Raries. These great minds were Rosicrncans   y... ryryryr.  Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages ! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. Francis Bacon copy of 'The Masfefy of Life" -- ligation . A nonprofit organization Address: Scribe N.S.A. San Jose, California #I #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. "Nobody can lick the United States," General McKnight said. "Not in the long run " T he Fall of God put Theron Ware in a peculiarly unenviable position, though he was hardly alone. After all, he had caused it -- insofar as an event so gigantic could be said to have had any cause but the First. And as a black magician he knew better than to expect any gratitude from the victor. Nor, on the other hand, would it do him the slightest good to maintain that he had loosed the fortyeight suffragen demons upon the world only at the behest of a client. Hell was an incombustible Alexandrine library of such evasions -- and besides, even had he had a perfect plea of innocence, there was no longer any such thing as justice anywhere. The Judger was dead. "When the hell is he coming back?" Baines, the client, demanded suddenly, irritably. "This waiting is worse than getting it over with." Father Domenico turned from the refectory window, which was now unglazed from the shock wave of the H-bombing of Rome. He had been looking down the cliff face, over the half-melted pensioni, shops and tenements of what had once been Positano, at the drained sea bed. When that tsunami did arrive it was going to be a record one; it might even reach all the way up here. "You don't know what you're saying. Mister Baines," the white magician said. "From now on, nothing can be over with. We are on the brink of eternity." "You know what I mean," Baines growled. "Of course, but if I were you. I'd be grateful for the respite... It is odd that he hasn't come back yet. Dare we hope that something has after all interfered with him? Something -- or some One?" "He said God is dead." "Yes, but he is the Father of Lies. What do you think. Doctor Ware?" Ware did not reply. The personage they were talking about was of course not the Father of Lies, the ultimate Satan, but the subsidiary prince who had answered Ware's met, the Sabbath Goat. As for the question. Ware simply did not know the answer; it was now sullen full morning of the day after Armageddon, and the Goat had promised to come for the four of them promptly at dawn, in ironical obedience to the letter of Ware's loosing and sending; yet he was not here. Baines looked around the spent conjuring room. "I wonder what he did with Hess?" "Swallowed him," Ware said, "as you saw. And it served the fool right for stepping outside his circle." "But did he really eat him?" Baines said. "Or was that, uh, just symbolical? Is Hess actually in Hell now?" Ware refused to be drawn into the discussion, which he recognized at once as nothing but Baines' last little vestige of skepticism floundering about for an exit from its doom; but Fr. Domenico said, "The thing that called itself Screwtape let slip to Lewis that demons do eat souls. But one can hardly suppose that that is the end. I expect we will shortly know a lot more about the matter than we wish." Abstractedly he brushed from his robe a little more of the dust from his shattered crucifix. Ware watched him with ironic wonder. He really was staging a remarkable recovery; his God was dead, his Christ exploded as a myth, his soul assuredly as damned as that of Ware or Baines -- and he could still manage to interest himself in semischolastic prattle. Well, Ware had always thought that white magic, these days as always, attracted only a low order of intellect, let alone insight. But where was the Goat? "I wonder where Mister Ginsberg went?" Father Domenico said, as if in parody of Ware's unspoken question. Again Ware only shrugged. He had for the moment quite forgotten Baines' male secretary;it was true that Ginsberg had shown some promise as an apprentice, but after all, he had wanted to learn the Ars Magica essentially as a means of supplying himself with mistresses, and even under normal circumstances his recent experience with Ware's assistant, Gretchen -- who was in fact a succubus -- had probably driven the desire out permanently. In any event, of what use would an apprentice be now? Baines looked as startled as Ware felt at the question. "Jack?" he said. "I sent him to our rooms to pack." "To pack?" Ware said. "You had some notion that you might get away?" "I thought it highly unlikely," Baines said evenly, "but if the opportunity arose, I didn't mean to be caught unprepared." "Where do you think you might go where the Goat couldn't find you?" No reply was necessary. Ware felt through his sandals a slow shuddering of the tiled floor. As it grew more pronounced, it was joined by a faint but deep thunder in the air. Fr. Domenico shuffled hastily back to the window, Baines close lowed. On the horizon a wall of foaming, cascading water was coming toward them, with preternatural slowness, across the deserted floor of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The water had all been drained away as one consequence of the Corinth earthquake of yesterday, which itself might or might not have been demonically created; Ware was not sure that it made much difference one way or the other. In any event, the tectonic imbalance was now, inexorably, in the process of righting itself. The Goat remained unaccountably delayed... but the tsunami was on its way at last. I T he enemy, whoever he was, had obviously been long prepared to make a major attempt to reduce the Strategic Air Command's master missile-launching control site under Denver. In the first twenty minutes of the war he had dumped a whole stick of multiple hydrogen warheads on it. The city, of course, had been utterly vaporized and a vast expanse of the plateau on which it had stood was now nothing but gullied, vitrified and radioactive granite; but the site had been well hardened and was more than a mile beneath the original surface. Everybody in it had been knocked down and temporarily deafened, there were bruises and scrapes and one concussion, some lights had gone out and a lot of dust had been raised despite the air-conditioning; in short, the damage would have been reported as "minimal" had there been anybody to report it to. Who the enemy was occasioned McKnight, a Yellow Peril fan since his boyhood reading of The American Weekly in Chicago, favored the Chinese. Of his two chief scientists, one, the Prague-born Dr. Dzejms Satvje, the godfather of the selenium bomb, had been seeing Russians under his bed for almost as long "Wm, why argue?" said Johann alumnus, he found nothing unthinkable, but he did not like to waste time speculating about facts. "We can always ask the computer -- we must have enough input already for that. Not that it matters much, since we've already plastered the Russians and the Chinese pretty thoroughly." "We already know the Chinese started it," Gen. McKnight said, wiping dust off his spectacles with his handkerchief. He was a small, narrow-chested Air Force Academy graduate from the class just after the cheating had been stopped, already nearly bald at forty-eight; naked, his face looked remarkably like that of a prawn. "They dropped a thirty-megatonner on Formosa, disguised as a test." "It depends on what you mean by 'start,' " Buelg said. "That was already on Rung twenty-one. Level Four -- local nuclear war. But still only Chinese against Chinese." "But we were committed to them, right?" Satvje said. "President Agnew told the UN, 'I am a Formosan.' " "It doesn't matter worth a damn," Buelg said, with some irritation. It was his opinion, which he did not keep particularly private, that Satvje, whatever his eminence as a physicist, in all other matters had a goyische kopf. He had encountered better heads on egg creams in his father's candy store. "The thing's escalated almost exponentially in the past eighteen hours or so. The question is, how far has it gone? If we're lucky, it's only up to Level Six, central war -- maybe no farther than Rung thirty-four, constrained disarming attack." "Do you call atomizing Denver restrained?" the general demanded. "Maybe. They could have done for Denver with one warhead -- instead they saturated it. That means they were shooting for us, not for the city proper. Our counter-strike couldn't be preventive, so it was one rung lower, which I hope to God they noticed." "They took out Washington," Satvje said, clasping his fat hands piously. He had been lean once, but becoming first a consultant on the Cabinet level, next a spokesman for massive retaliation, and finally a publicity-saint had appended a beer-belly to his brainpuffed forehead, so that he now looked like a caricature of a XlXth-century German philologist. Buelg himself was stocky and tended to run to lard but a terrible susceptibility to kidney stones had kept him on a reasonable diet. "The Washington strike almost surely wasn't directed against civilians," Buelg said. "Naturally the leadership of the enemy is a prime military target. But, General, all this happened so quickly that I doubt that anybody in government had a chance to reach prepared shelters. You may now be effectively the President of whatever is left on the United States, which means that you could make new policies." "True," McKnight said. "True, true." "In which case we've got to ' know the facts the minute our ' lines to outside are restored. ' Among other things, if the escala: tion's gone all the way to spasm, i in which case the planet will be uninhabitable. There'll be nobody i and nothing left alive but people in i hardened sites, like us, and the I only policy we'll need for that will i be a count of the canned beans." ( "I think that needlessly pessimis( tic," Satvje said, at last heaving  himself up out of the chair into : which he had struggled after getI ting up off the floor. It was not a i very comfortable chair but the s computer room -- where they had i all been when the strike had come ' had not been designed for com( fort. He put his thumbs under the lapels of his insignia-less advisor's uniform and frowned down upon them. "The Earth is a large planet, of its class; if we cannot reoccupy it, our descendants will be able to do so." "After five thousand years?" "You are assuming that carbon bombs were used. Dirty bombs of that kind are obsolescent. That is why I so strongly advocated the sulfur-decay chain; the selenium isotopes are chemically all strongly poisonous, but they have very short half-lives. A selenium bomb is essentially a humane bomb." pace, but he was beginning to stump back and forth. He was again playing back one of his popular magazine articles. Buelg began to twiddle his thumbs. "It has sometimes occurred to me," atjve said, "that our discovery of how to release the nuclear energies was providential. Consider: Natural selection stopped for Man when he achieved control over his environment -- and furthermore began to save the lives of all his weaklings and preserve their bad genes. Once natural selection has been halted the only remaining pressure upon the race to evolve is mutation. Artificial radioactivity and, indeed, even fallout Itself, may be God's way of resuming the process of evolution for Man -- perhaps toward some ultimate organism we cannot foresee, perhaps even toward some unitary mind which we will share with God, as Teilhardt de Chardin envisioned -- " At this point, the general noticed the twiddling of Buelg's thumbs. "Facts are what we need," he said. "I agree with you there, Buelg. But a good many of our lines to outside were cut, and there may have been some damage to the computer circuitry, too." He jerked his head toward the technicians who were scurrying around and up and down the face of working on it. Naturally." "I see that, but we'll need some sort of rational schedule of questions. Is the escalation still going on, presuming we haven't reached the insensate stage already? If it's overor at least suspended somehow -- is the enemy sane enough not to start it again? And then, what's the extent of the exterior damage? For that, we'll need a visual readout -- I assume there are still some satellites up, but we'll want a closer look, if any local television survived. "And if you're now the President, General, are you prepared to negotiate, if you've got any opposite numbers in the Soviet Union or the People's Republic?" "There ought to be whole sets of such courses of action already programed into the computer," McKnight said, "according to what the actual situation is. Is the machine going to be useless to us for anything but gaming, now that we really need it? Or have you been misleading me again?" "Of course I haven't been misleading you. I wouldn't play games with my own life included among the stakes. And there are indeed such alternative courses; I wrote most of them myself, though I didn't do the actual programing. But no program can encompass what a specific leader might decide to do. War gaming actual past battles -- for example, rerunning Waterloo without allowing for Napoleon's piles or the heroism of the British squares -- has produced 'predicted' outcomes completely at variance with history. Computers are rational; people aren't. Look at Agnew. That's why I asked you my question -- which, by the way, you haven't yet answered." McKnight pulled himself up and put his glasses back on. "#," he said, "am prepared to negotiate. With anybody. Even Chinks." II R ome was no more, nor was Milan. Neither were London, Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Stockholm and a score of lesser cities. But these were of no immediate concern. As the satellites showed, their deaths had expectably laid out long, cigarshaped, overlapping paths of fallout to the east -- the direction in which, thanks to the rotation of the Earth, the weather inevitably moved -- and though these unfortunately lay across once-friendly terrain, they ended in enemy country. Similarly, the heavy toll in the U.S.S.R. had sown its seed across Siberia and China; that in China across Japan, Korea and Taiwan; and the death of Tokyo was poisoning only a swath of the Pacific (although, later, some worry would have to be devoted to the fish). Honolulu somehow had been spared, so that no burden of direct, heavy-nuclei fallout would reach the west coast of the United States. This was fortunate, for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Spokane had all been hit, as had Denver, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, Clevelaitd, Detroit and Dallas. Under the circumstances it really hardly mattered that Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and Washington had all also gotten it, for even without the bombs, the eastern third of the continental United States would have been uninhabitable in its entirety for at least fifteen years to come. At the moment, in any event, it consisted of a single vast forest fire through which, from the satellites, the slag pits of the bombed cities were invisible except as high spots in the radiation contours. The northwest was in much the same shape, although the west coast in general had taken far fewer missiles. Indeed, the sky all over the world was black with smoke, for the forests of Europe and northern Asia were burning, too. Out of the pall, more death fell, gently, invisibly, inexorably. All this, of course, came from the computer analysis. Though there were television cameras in the satellites, even on a clear day you could hardly have told from visual sightings, from that height -- or from photographs, for that matter -- whether or not there was intelligent life on Earth. The view over Africa, South America, Australia and the American southwest was better, but of no strategic or logistic interest. Of the television cameras on the Earth's surface, most of the surviving ones were in areas where nothing seemed to have happened at all, although in towns the streets were deserted and the very few people glimpsed briefly on the screen looked haunted. The views from near the bombed areas were fragmentary, traveling, scarred by rasters, aflicker with electronic snow -- a procession of unconnected images, like scenes from an early Surrealist film, where one could not tell whether the director was trying to portray a story or only a state of mind. Here stood a single telephone pole, completely charred; here was a whole row of them, snapped off at ground level but still linked in death by their wires. Here was a desert of collapsed masonry, in the midst of which stood a reinforcedconcrete smoke stack, undamaged except that its surface was etched by heat and by the sand-blasting of debris carried by a high wind. Here buildings all leaned sharply in a single direction, as if struck, like the chimney, by some hurricane of terrific proportions; here was what had been a group of manufacturing buildings, denuded of roofing and siding, nothing but twisted frames. Here a row of wrecked automobiles, neatly parked, burned in unison; here a gas holder, ruptured and collapsed, had burned out hours ago. Here was a side of a reinforced concrete building, windowless, cracked and buckled slightly inward where a shock wave had struck it. Once it had been painted gray or some dark color, but all the paint had blistered and scaled and blown away in a second, except where a man had been standing nearby; there the paint remained, a shadow with no one to cast it. That vaporized man had been one of the lucky. Here stood another who had been in a cooler circle: evidently he had looked up at a fireball, for his eyes were only holes; he stood in a half crouch, holding his arms out from his sides like a penguin and, instead of skin, his naked body was covered with a charred fell which was cracked in places, oozing blood and pus. Here a filthy, tattered mob clambered along a road almost completely covered with rubble, howling with horror -- though there was no sound with this scene -- led by, a hairless woman pushing a flaming babycarriage. Here a man who seemed to have had his back flayed by flying glass worked patiently with a bent snow shovel at the edge of an immense mound of broken brick; by the shape of its margins, it might once have been a large house. There was more. Satjve uttered a long, complex, growling sentence of hatred. It was entirely in Czech, but its content was nevertheless not beyond all conjecture. Buelg shrugged again and turned away from the TV screen. "Pretty fearful," he said. "But on the whole, not nearly as much destruction as we might have expected. It's certainly gone no higher than Rung thirty-four. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to fit any of the escalation frames at all well. Maybe it makes some sort of military or strategic sense -- but if it does I'm at a loss to know what it is. General?" "Senseless," McKnight said. "Outright senseless. Nobody's been hurt in any decisive way. And yet the action seems to be over." "That was my impression," concrete building, windowless, fireball, for his eyes were only cracked and buckled slightly inholes; he stood in a half crouch, ward where a shock wave had holding his arms out from his sides struck it. Once it had been painted like a penguin and, instead of skin, gray or some dark color, but all his naked body was covered with a the paint had blistered and scaled charred fell which was cracked in and blown away in a seeond, explaces, oozing blood and pus. Here cept where a man had been standa filthy, tattered mob clambered ing liearby; there the paint realong a road almost completely mained, a shadow with no one to covered with rubble, howling with cast it. horror -- though there was no That vaporized man had been sound with this scene -- led by, a one of the lucky. Here stood anhairless woman pushing a flaming other who had been in a eooler cirbabycarriage. Here a man who cle: evidently he had looked up at a seemed to have had his back flayed by flying glass worked patiently with a bent snow shovel at the edge of an immense mound of broken brick; by the shape of its margins, it might once have been a large house. There was more. Satjve uttered a long, complex, growling sentence of hatred. It was entirely in Czech, but its content was nevertheless not beyond all conjecture. Buelg shrugged again and turned away from the TV screen. "Pretty fearful," he said. "But on the whole, not nearly as much destruction as we might have expected. It's certainly gone no higher than Rung thirty-four. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to fit any of the escalation frames at all well. Maybe it makes some sort of military or strategic sense -- but if it does I'm at a loss to know what it is. General?" "Senseless," McKnight said. "Outright senseless. Nobody's been hurt in any decisive way. And yet the action seems to be over." "That was my impression," Buelg agreed. "There seems to be some missing factor. We're going to have to ask the computer to scan for an anomaly. Luckily it's likely to be a big one -- but since I can't tell the machine what kind of anomaly to look for, it's going to cost us some time." "How much time?" McKnight said, running a finger around the inside of his collar. "If the Chinks start up on us again -- " "It may be as much as an hour, after I formulate the question and Chief Hay programs it, which will take, oh, say two hours at a minimum. But I don't think we need to worry about the Chinese; according to our data, that opening Taiwan bomb was the biggest one they used, so it was probably the biggest one they had. As for anyone else, well, you just finished saying yourself that somehow everything's now stopped short. We badly need to find out why." "All right. Get on it, then." T he two hours for programing, however, stretched to four; and then the computer ran for ninety minutes without producing anything at all. Chief Hay had thoughtfully forbidden the maing in at an increasing rate as communications with the outside improved; as a result, the computer was recycling the problem once every three or four seconds. McKnight used the time to issue orders that repairs to the keep be made, stores assessed, order restored, and then settled down to a telecommunications search -- again via the computer, but requiring only about two percent of its capacity -- for any superiors who might have survived him. Buelg suspected that he really wanted to find some; he had the capacity to be a general officer, but would find it most uncomfortable to be a president, even over so abruptly simplified a population and economy -- and foreign policy, for that matter -- as the TV screen had shown now existed outside. Ordering junior officers to order non commissioned officers to order rankers to replace broken fluorescent bulbs was the type of thing he didn't mind doing on his own, but for ordering them to arm missiles and aim them -- or put a state under martial law -- he much preferred to be acting upon higher authority. As for Buelg's own preference, he rather hoped that McKnight wouldn't be able to find any such person. The United States under a McKnight regime wouldn't be run very imaginatively or even flexibly, but on the other hand it would be unlikely to be a tyranny. Besides, McKnight was quite dependent upon his civilian experts, and hence would be easy to manage. Of course, that meant that something would have to be done about Satvje. The computer rang its bell and began to print out its analysis. Buelg read it with intense concentration and, after the first fold, utter incredulity. When it was all out of the printer, he tore it off, tossed it onto the desk and beckoned to Chief Hay. "Run the question again." Hay turned to the input keyboard. It took him ten minutes to retype the program; the question had been in the normal order of things too specialized to tape. Two and a half seconds after he had finished the machine chimed and the long thin slabs of metal began to rise against the paper. The printing-out process never failed to remind Buelg of a player piano running in reverse, converting notes into punches instead of the other way around, except, of course, that what one got here was not punches but lines of type. But he saw almost at once that the analysis itself was going to be the same. At the same time he became aware that Satvje was standing just behind him. "About time," the Czech said. "Let's have a look." "There's nothing to see yet." "What do you mean, there's nothing to see? It's printing, isn't it? And you've already got another copy out on the bench. The general should have been notified immediately." He picked up the long, wide accordian-fold of paper with its sprocket-punched edges and began to read it. There was nothing Buelg could do to prevent him. "The machine's printing nonsense, that's what I mean, and I didn't propose to distract the general with a lot of garbage. The bombing must have jarred something loose." Hay turned from the keyboard. "I ran a test program through promptly after the attack. Doctor Buelg. The computer was functioning perfectly then." "Well, clearly it isn't now. Run rTin Bal lantine Books over (at which the entire Fall list is presented), the dog days of summer are here to confront us with various crises ignored in the excitement of preparing for that semi-annual holocaust. Everyone is feeling dragged out -- in a triumphant sort of way -- when the call comes for copy for what we laughingly call an ad. Well okay, it just so happens that our July list is one of the best we've had this year. First and foremost. Bob Silverberg has edited a volume titled, very acter of writers includes Bertram Chandler, Kornbluth, Jack Vance, Charles DeVet and Katherine MacLean, Wyman Guin and Roger Zelazny. Really topflight, if we do say so ourselves. Fantasies -- one, by George Meredith, will be known to some. Surely dearly loved by a small, select group. Such wily sensuality and humor, such richness of imagery -- as Francis Meynell says, "More than a hundred thousand words of coruscating fantasy, a dizzy riot of magic..." Perhaps now a larger select group will enjoy. Incidentally, it nasa smashing cover trom Ray Cruz.  remarkable find from Lin Carter, a magnificent work originally titled The Virgin and the Swine (which may well be why the book has been a wellkept secret for some thirty years). We have re-titled it, with much greater accuracy and appropriateness, is by a delightfui lady named Evangeline Walton, and the subject matter is based in early Welsh mythology when bloodlines were established by maternal continuity since only the mother of a child could be known for sure. Incest was the accepted way of keeping things in the famiiy, marriage not yet invented since no one believed one could so clearly fiy in the face of nature without dire results. At the same time, there were men and women of vast powers, disciplined and educated in sorcery and magic, who ruled the land. The hero and herione of the tale, if indeed they can be so called, are two such. A brother and sister, deeply committed to one another, although she has refused to bear him a nephew. She is, in fact, a bitch of the first water, unforgivably selfish, savage in her hatreds. Her brother, at first a reckless young man, emerges as figure of truly heroic stature in a book that moves steadily to a towering climax. Absolutely do not miss this one. BB your test program again, find out where the trouble lies and let us know how long it will take to repair it. If we can't trust the computer we're out of business for sure." Hay got to work. Satvje put the down readout. "What's nonsense about this?" "It's utterly impossible, that's all. There hasn't been time. With any sort of engineering training, you'd know that yourself. And it makes no military or political sense, either." "I think we should let the general be the judge of that." Picking up the bulky strip again, Satvje carried it off toward the general's office, a certain subtle triumph in his gait, like the school trusty bearing the evidence of petty theft to the head master. Buelg followed, inwardly raging, and not only at the waste motion. Satvje would, of course, tell McKnight that Buelg had been holding back on reporting the analysis; all Buelg could do now, until the machine was repaired, was to be sure to be there to explain why, and the posture was much too purely defensive for his liking. It was a damn shame that he had ever taught Satvje to read a printout, but once they had been thrown together on this job, he had had no choice in the matter. McKnight had been as suspicious as a Sealyham of both of them, anyhow, at the beginning. Satvje, after all, had come from a country which had long been Communist, and had had to explain that his ancestry was French, his name only a Serbo-Croat trans"Chatvieux"; while Security had unfortunately confused Buelg with Johann Gottfried Jiilg, a forgotten nineteenth-century translator of Ardshi Bordschi Khan, the Siddhi Kur, the Skaskas and other Russian folk tales, so that Buelg, even more demeaningly, had had to admit that his name was actually a Yiddish version of a German word for a leather bucket. Under McKnight's eye, the two still possibly suspect civilians had to cooperate or be downgraded into some unremunerative university post. Buelg supposed that Satvje had enjoyed it as little as he had, but he didn't care an iota about what Satvje did or didn't enjoy. Damn the man. was no masterpiece of analysis. The machine had simply at last recognized an anomaly in a latecoming piece of new data. It was the interpretation that made Buelg suspect that the gadget had malfunctioned; unlike Satvje, he had had enough experience of computwere not allowed enough warm-up time, or had been improperly cleared of a previous program, they could produce remarkably paranoid fantasies. Translated from the Fortran, the document said that the United States had not only been hit by missiles, but also deeply invaded. This conclusion had been drawn from a satellite sighting of something in Death Valley, not there yesterday, which was not natural, and whose size, shape and energy output suggested an enormous fortress. "Which is just plain idiotic," Buelg added, after the political office had been gone through, to nobody's final advantage. "On any count you care to name. The air drops required to get the materials in there, or the sea landings plus overland movements, couldn't have gone undetected. Then, strategically it's insane: the building of targets like fortresses should have become obsolete with the invention of the cannon -- and the airplane made them absurd. Locating such a thing in Death Valley means that it dominates nothing but utterly worthless territory, at the price of insuperable supply problems -- right from the start it's in a state of siege by Nature alone. And as for running it up overnight -- I ask you. General, could we have done that, even in peacetime and in the most favorable imaginable location? I say we couldn't -- and that if we couldn't no human agency could." McKnight picked up his phone and spoke briefly. Since it was a Hush-a-Phone, what he said was inaudible, but Buelg's guess about the call was promptly confirmed. "Chief Hay says the machine is in perfect order and has produced a third analysis just like this one," he reported. "The problem now clearly is one of reconnaissance. (He pronounced the word correctly, which, amidst his flat California American, sounded almost affected.) Is there such a thing in Death Valley, or isn't there? For the satellite to be able to spot it at all it must be gigantic. From twenty-three thousand miles up, even a city the size of San Antonio is invisible unless you know exactly what you're looking for in advance." Here, Buelg was aware, McKnight was speaking as an expert. Until he had been put in charge of reer had been spent in various aspects of Air Information; even as a teenager, he had been a Civil Air Patrol cadet involved in searchand-rescue operations, which, between the mudslides and the brushfires, had been particularly extensive in the Los Angeles area in those days. "I don't doubt that the satellite has spotted something," Buelg said. "But what it probably sees is a hard-radiation locus -- maybe thermally hot, too rather than any optical object, let alone a construct. My guess is that it's nothing more than the impact site of a multiple warhead component that lost guidance, or was mis-aimed to begin with." "Highly likely," McKnight admitted. "But why guess? The obvious first step is to send a low-level attack bomber over the site and get close-in photographs and spectra. A primitive installation such as you suggested earlier would be typically Chinese, and if so they won't have low-levcl radar. If, on the other hand, the plane gets shot down, that will tell us something about the enemy, too." Buelg sighed inwardly. Trying to nudge McKnight out of his single channel was a frustrating operation. But maybe in this instance it wasn't really necessary; after all, the suggestion itself was sensible. "All right," he said. "One plane seems like a small investment. We've got damn-all else left to lose now, anyhow." Ill plane but there was, nevertheless, one casualty. Neither the photographer nor the flight engineer, both busy with their instruments, had actually seen much of the target, and the captain, for the same reason, had seen little more. "Hell of a lot of turbulence," he said at the debriefing, which took place a thousand miles away, while the men under Denver watched intently. "And the target itself is one huge updraft, like New York used to be, only much worse." But the navigator, once his job had been done, had had nothing to do but look out and he was in a state of shock. He was a swarthy young enlisted man from Chicago who looked as though he might have been recruited straight from a Mafiosa family, but he could say nothing now but a sentence which refused to get beyond its first word; "Dis -- Dis -- " Once he had recovered from his shock they would be able to question him. But for the time being he was of no help. The photographs, however, were very clear, except for the infraredsensitive plates, which showed nothing intelligible to the eye at all. The installation was perfectly circular and surrounded by a moat which, impossibly for Death Valley, appeared to be filled with black but genuine water, from which a fog bank was constantly trying to rise, only to be dissipated in the bone-dry air. The construction itself was a broad wall, almost a circular city, a good fifteen miles in diameter. It was broken irregularly by towers and other structures, some of them looking remarkably like mosques. This shell glowed fiercely, like redhot iron; and a spectrograph showed that this was what it was. Inside, the ground was terraced, like a lunar crater. At ground level was a flat plain, dotted with tiny rectangular markings in no discernible pattern; these, too, the spectrograph said, were red-hot iron. What seemed to be another moat, blood-red and as broad as a river, encircled the next terrace at the foot of the cliff where it began and this, even more impossibly, was bordered by a dense circular forest. The forest was as broad as the river, but thinned eventually to a ring of what appeared to be the original sand, equally broad. In a lunar crater, the foothills of the central peak would have begun about here; but in the pictures, instead, the terrain plunged into a colossal black pit. The river cut through the forest and the desert at one point and roared over the side in a vast waterwall, compounding the darkness with mist which the camera had been unable to penetrate. "What was that you were saying about building a fortress overnight, Buelg?" the general said. "No human agency could?" "No human agency was involved," Satvje said in a hoarse whisper. He turned to the aide who had brought the pictures, an absurdly young lieutenant-colonel with a blond erewcut, white face and shaking hands. "Closeups?" "Yes, Doctor. There was an automatic camera under the plane that took a film of the approach run. Here is one of the best shots." The picture showed what appeared to be a towering gate in the best rnedieval style. Hundreds of shadowy figures crowded the barbican, of which three, just above the gateway itself, had been looking up at the plane and were shockingly clear. They looked like gigantie naked women, with ropy hair all awry, and the wide-staring eyes of insane rage. "I thought so," Satvje said. "You recognize them?" Buelg asked incredulously. "No, but I know their names. Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone," Satvje said. "And it's a good thing that there's at least one person among us with a European education. I presume that our distrait friend the navigator is a Catholic, which does just as well in this context. In any event, he was quite right: this is Dis, the fortress surrounding Nether Hell. I think we must now assume that all the rest of the Earth is contiguous with Upper Hell, not only in metaphor but in fact." "It's a good thing," Buelg said acidly, "that there's at least one person among us with a good grip on his sanity. The last thing we need now is a relapse into superstition." "If you blow up that photograph, I think you'll find that the hair on those women actually consists of live snakes. Isn't that so, Colonel?" "Well -- Doctor, . it -- it certainly looks like it." "Of course. Those are the Furies who guard the gates of Dis. They are the keepers of the Gorgon Medusa, which, thank God, isn't in the picture. The moat is the River Styx; the first terrace inside contains the burning tombs of the Heresiarchs, and on the next you have the River Phlegethon, the Wood of the Suicides, and the Abominable Sand. A rain of fire is supposed to fall continually on the sand, but I suppose that's invisible in Death Valley sunlight, or maybe even superfluous. We can't see what's down below, but presumably that, too, will be exactly as Dante described it. The crowd along the barbican is made up of demons -- not so. Colonel?" "Sir -- we can't tell what they are. We were wondering if they were, well, Martians or something. Everyone is a different shape." Buelg felt his back hairs stirring. "I refuse to believe this nonsense," he said. "Satvje is interpreting it from his damned obsolete education. Even Martians would make more sense." "What are the facts about this Dante?" McKnight said. "An Italian poet, of about the Thirteenth Century -- " "Early Fourteenth," Satvje said. "And not just any poet. He had a vision of Hell and Heaven which became the greatest peom ever written -- the Divine Comedy. What we see in those pictures exactly corresponds to the description in Cantos Eight through Eleven of it." "Buelg, see if you can locate a copy of the book and have it read to the computer. First we need to know if the correspondence is all that exact. If it is, we'll need an analysis of what it means." "The computer probably already has the book," Buelg said. "The whole Library of Congress, plus all our recreational library, is on microfilm inside it, we didn't have room for books per se down here. All we need to do is tell Chief Hay to make it part of the problem. But I still think it's damn nonsense." "What we want," McKnight said, "is the computer's opinion. Yours has already been shown to be somewhat less reliable." "And while you're at it," Satvje said, perhaps a shade less smugly than Buelg might have expected, "have Chief Hay make a part of the problem everything in the library on demonology. We're going to need it." Throwing up his hands, Buelg left the office. In the country of the mad... nobody retains his sanity. Only a few moments were needed for the computer to produce its report. tion considerably," McKnight said. "It's just as well we asked." "But -- my God! It simply can't be true," Buelg said desperately. "All right, maybe the computer is functioning properly, but it has no intelligence and. above all, no judgment. What it's putting out now is just a natural consequence of letting all that medieval superstition into the problem." McKnight turned his shrimp's eyes toward Buelg. "You've seen the pictures," he said. "They didn't come out of the computer, did they? Or out of the old books? I think we'd better stop kicking against the pricks and start figuring out what we're going to do. We've still got the United States to think of. Doctor Satvje, have you any suggestions?" That was a bad sign. McKnight never used honorifics except to indicate, by inversion, which of the two of them had incurred his displeasure -- not that Buelg had been in any doubt about that, already. "I'm still in a good deal of doubt," Satvje said modestly. "To begin with, if this had been Armageddon, we all ought to have been called to judgment by now; and there was certainly nothing in the prophecies that allowed for an encampment of victorious demons on the surface of the Earth. If the computer is completely right, then either God is dead as Nietzsche said or, as the jokes go. He is alive but doesn't want to get involved. In either case I think we would be well advised not to draw attention to ourselves. We can do nothing against supernatural powers; and if He is still alive, the battle may not be over. We are, I hope, safely hidden here and we would be ill advised to be caught in the middle." "Now there you're dead wrong," Buelg said with energy. "Let's suppose for a minute that this fantasy represents the true state of affairs -- in other words. that demons have turned out to be real and are out there in Death Valley" "I'm not too sure what would be meant by 'real' in this context," Satvje said. "They are apparent, true enough; but they certainly don't belong to the same order of reality as -- " "That's a question we can't afford to debate," Buelg said. He knew very well that the issue Satvje was raising was a valid one -- he was himself a fairly thorough-going Logical Positivist. But it would only confuse McKnight and there were brownie points to be made in keeping things clearcut, whether they were clear-cut or not. "Look. If demons are real, then they occupy spacetime in the real universe. That means that they exist inside some energy system in that universe and are maintained by it. All right, they can walk on red-hot iron and live comfortably in Death Valley; that's not inherently more supernatural than the existence of bacteria in the boiling waters of volcanic springs. It's an adaptation. Very well, then we can find out what that energy system is. We can analyze how it works. And once we know that, we can attack it." "Now that's more like it," McKnight said. "Pardon me, but I think we should proceed with the most extreme caution," Satvje said. "Unless one has been raised in this tradition, one is not likely to think of all the implications. I myself am quite out of practice at it." "Damn your education," Buelg said. But it was all coming back to him: The boundaryless ghetto along Nostrand Avenue; the furhatted, fur-faced, maxi-skirted Hassidim walking in pairs under the scaling elm saplings of Grand Central Parkway; the terror of riding the subway among the juvenile gangs under the eternal skullcap; the endless hairsplitting over the Talmudic and Midrashic creation myths for hour upon stuffy hour in Schule the women slaving over their duplicate sets of dishes, in the peculiar smell of a kosher household, so close to being a stench compared to all other American smells, supporting their drone scholars; his mother's pride that Hansli, too, was plainly destined by God's will to become a holy man; and, when he had discovered instead the glories and rigors of the physical universe, that light and airy escape from fur hats and the smell of gefiilte fish and the loving, worn women, the terror of the wrath of the jealous God. But all that was many years ago; it could not come back. He would not have it back. "What are you talking about?" McKnight said. "Are we going to do something -- and if so, what? Get to the point." "My point," Satvje said, "is that if all this -- demonology -- is, well, valid, or I suppose one should say true, then the whole Christian mythos is true, though it is not coming out in precisely the way it was prophesied. That being the case, then there are such things as immortal souls, or perhaps I should say, we may well have immortal souls, and we ought to take them into consideration before we do anything rash." ver's doomsday machine, a complex carrier containing five onea great sense of relief; the of which was aimed to make even Christian mythos had nothing to the moon uninhabitable; it was a do with him, not personally, that post-spasm weapon that the presis. He had no objection to it as an ent situation certainly did not call exercise in theory, a form of nonforbest to hold it in reserve. "I zero-sum game. think what we ought to do is to "If that's the case, I don't think lob one of the small Jobs onto the there's any question of our being Death Valley encampment. I don't caught in the middle," he said, really think it'll do much harm, "We're required by the rules to maybe not any, but it might procome down on one side or the othduce some information. We can er." fly a drone plane through the "That's true, by God," Mecloud as it goes up, and take off Knight said. "And after all, we're radiological, chemical, any other on the right side. We didn't start kinds of readings that the comthis war -- the Chinks did." puter can come up with. These "Right, right," Buelg said, demons have obtruded themselves "We're entitled to self-defense, into the real world and the very And for my part, no matter what fact that we can see them and happens in the next world -- about photograph them shows that they which we have no data -- as long as share some of its characteristics I'm still in this one. I'm not prenow. Let's see how they behave pared to regard anything as final, under something a good deal hotThis may be a metaphysical war ter than red-hot iron. Suppose after all, but we still seem to live they do nothing more than sweat in some sort of secular universe, a little? We can analyse even The universe of discourse has been that!" enlarged but it hasn't been can"And suppose they trace the celed. I say, let's learn more." missile back to here?" Satvje said; "Yes," McKnight said, "but but by his expression, Buelg knew how? That's what I keep asking, that Satvje knew that it was a lastand I don't get anything back from ditch argument, either of you but a philosophical "Then we're sunk, I suppose, discussion. What do you propose But look at the architecture of thatwero." that encampment; does that sug"Have we got any missiles left?" gest to you that they've been in "We've still got maybe a dozen contact with real warfare since fiveto ten-megatonners left back in the Fourteenth Century? and, of course. Old Mombi." No doubt they have all kinds of "Buelg, you madman, are you supernatural powers but they've proposing for one instant -- " got a lot to learn about the natu"Shut up for a minute and let ral ones! Maybe a decent adverme think." Old Mombi was Densary is what they've been lacking all along -- and if Armageddon has ended in a stand-off, a little action on the side of our Maker wouldn't be amiss. If He's still with us and actively interested, any maction on our parts would probably be viewed very gravely indeed if He wins after all. And if He's not with us any longer, then we'll have to help ourselves, as the proverb says." "That's the stuff to give the troops," McKnight said. "It is so ordered." Buelg nodded and left the office to search out Chief Hay. On the whole, he felt, he had made a nice recovery. IV away, but the remains of Theron Ware's palazzo still stood above the scoured cliffside, like some post-Roman ruin. The ceiling had fallen in, the fluted pink tiles smashing Ware's glassware and burying the dim chalked diagrams of last night's conjuration on the refectory floor in a litter of straw and potsherds, mounds of which collapsed now and then to send streamers of choking dust up to meet the gently radioactive April rain. Ware sat on the heaped remains of his altar within the tumbled walls, under the uncertain sky. His feelings were so complex that he could not have begun to explain them, even to himself; after many years' schooling in the rigorous non-emotions of Ceremonial Magic, it was a novelty to him to have any feelings at all but those of the thirst for knowledge; now he would have to re-learn those sensations, for his lovely book of acquisitions, upon which he had spent his soul and so much else, was buried under tons of tsunamic mud. In a way, he thought tentatively, he felt free. After the shock of the seaquake had passed and all but an occasional tile had stopped falling he had struggled out of the rubble to the door and thence to the head of the stairway which led down to his bedroom, only to see nothing but mud three stone steps down, mud wrinkling and settling as the sea water gradually seeped out from under it. Somewhere down under there his book of new knowledge was beginning the aeonlong route to becoming an unreadable fossil. Well then; so much for his life. Almost it seemed to him then that he might begin again, that he was nameless, a tabula rosa, all false starts wiped out, all dead knowledge ready to be rejected or revivified. It was given to few men to live through something so cleansing as a total disaster. But then he realized that this, too, was only an illusion. His past was there, ineluctably, in his commitments. He was still waiting for the return of the Sabbath Goat. He closed the door to the stairwell and the fossilized ripples of the mud and, blowing reflectively into his white mustache, went back into the refectory. Father Domenico had earlier tired -- it could not exactly be said that he had lost patience -- of both the waiting and the fruitless debates over when or whether they would be come for, and had decided to attempt traveling South to see what and who remained of Monte Albano, the college of white magicians which had been his home grounds. Baines was still here, trying to raise some news on the little transistor radio to which only yesterday he had listened so gluttonously, as it gave accounts of the black Easter which Ware had raised up at his commission, and whose consequences now eddied away from them around the whole tortured globe. Now, however, it was producing nothing but bands of static and an occasional very distant voice in an unknown tongue. With him now was Jack Ginsberg, dressed to the nines as usual, and in consequence looking by far the most bedraggled of the three. At Ware's entrance, Baines tossed the radio to his secretary and erossed toward the magician. "Find out anything?" "Nothing at all. As you can see for yourself, the sea is subsiding. It is obvious that Positano has been spared any further destruction -- for the moment. As for why, we know no more than we did before." "You can still work magic, can't you?" "I don't appear to have been deprived of my memory," Ware said. "I've no doubt I can still do magic if I can get at my equipment under this mess -- but whether I can work it is another matter. The conditions of reference have changed drastieally and I have no idea how far or in what areas." "Well, you could at least call up a demon and see if he could give us any information. There doesn't appear to be anyone else to ask." "I see that I'll have to put the matter more bluntly. I am totally opposed to performing any more magic at this time. Doctor Baines. I see that you have again failed to think the situation through. The terms under which I was able to call upon demons no longer apply -- I am no longer able to do anything for them, they must now own a substantial part of the world. If I were to call at this juncture probably no one would answerand it might be better if nobody did, sinee I would have no way of controlling him. They are composed almost entirely of hatred for every unFallen creature, and every creature with the potentialty to be redeemed, but there is no one they hate more than a useless tool." "Well, it seems to me that we may neither of us be totally useless even now," Baines declared. "You say the demons now own a substantial part of the world, but it's also perfectly evident that they don't own it all yet. Otherwise the Goat would have come back when he said he would. And we'd be in Hell." "Hell has a great many circles. We may well be on the margins of the first right nowin the Vestibule of the Futile." "We'd be in a good deal deeper if the demons were in total control, or if judgment had already been passed on us," Baines said. "You are entirely right about that, to be sure," Ware said, somewhat surprised. "But after all, from their point of view there is no hurry. In the past we might have saved ourselves by a lastminute act of contrition. Now, however, there is no longer any God to appeal to. They can wait and take us at their leisure." "There Tm inclined to agree with Father Domenico. We don't know that for sure; we were told so only by the Goat. I admit that the other evidence all points in the same direction, but all the same, he could have been lying." argument from circuntances did not of course impress him no doubt the circumstances were horrible beyond the capacity of any human soul to react to them but they were certainly not beyond the range of human imagination. They were more or less the standard war which Baines himself had been actively engaged in engineering some time before he had discovered his interest in black magic. Theologically they were also standard: a new but essentially unchanged version of the Problem of Evil, the centuries-old question of why a good and merciful God should allow so much pain and terror to be inflicted upon the innocent. The parameters had been filled in a somewhat different way, but the fundamental equation was the same as it had always been. Nevertheless, the munitions maker was quite right as Father Domenico had been earlier -- to insist that they had no reliable information upon the most fundamental question of all. Ware said slowly; "Fm reluctant to admit any hope at all at this juncture. On the other hand it has been said that to despair of God is the ultimate sin. What precisely do you have in mind?" "Nothing specific yet. But suppose for the sake of argument that the demons are still under some sort of restrictions I don't see any point in trying to imagine what they might be -- and that the battle consequently isn't really over yet. If that's the case, it's quite possible that they could still use some help. Considering how far they've managed to get already, there doesn't seem to be much doubt about their winning in the end -- and it's been my observation that it's generally a good idea to be on the winning side." "It is folly to think that the triumph of evil could ever be a winning side, in the sense of anyone's gaining anything by it. Without good to oppose it, evil is simply meaningless. That isn't at all what I thought you had in mind. It is, instead, the last step in despairing of Godit's worse than Manicheanism, it is Satanism pure and simple. I once controlled devils but I never worshiped them, and I don't plan to begin now. Besides -- " Abruptly, the radio produced a tearing squeal and then began to mutter urgently in German. Ware could hear the voice well enough to register that the speaker had a heavy Swiss accent but not well enough to make out the sense. Fie and Baines both took a crunching step toward Ginsberg, who, listening intently, held up one hand toward them. The speech was interrupted by another squeal, and then the radio resumed emitting nothing more than snaps, crackles, pops and waterfalls. Ginsberg said, "That was Radio Zurich. There's been an H-bomb explosion in the States, in Death Valley. Either the war's started again, or some dud's gone off belatedly." "Hmm," Baines said. "Well, better there than here -- although, now that I come to think of it, it isn't entirely unpromising. But Doctor Ware, I think you hadn't quite finished?" "I was only going to add that 'being of some help' to demons in this context makes no practical sense, either. Their hand is turned against everyone on Earth, and there is certainly no way that we could help them to carry their war to Heaven, even presuming that any of Heaven still stands. Someone of Eather Domenico's school might just possibly manage to enter the Aristotelean spheres -- though I doubt it -- but I certainly couldn't." "That bomb explosion seems to show that somebody is still fighting back," Baines said. "Providing that Jack isn't right about it's being a dud or a stray. My guess is that it's the Strategic Air Command and that they've just found out who the real enemy is. They had the world's finest data-processing center there under Denver and, in addition, McKnight had first-class civilian help, including Dejms Satvje himself, and a Mamaroneck Research Institute to outbid the government for." "I still don't quite see where that leaves us." "I know McKnight very well -- he's steered a lot of Defense Department orders my way -- and I was going to have LeEebre make him president of Consolidated Warfare Service when he retired -- as he was quite well aware. He's good in his field, which is reconnaissance, but he also has something of a one-track mind. If he's bombing demons, it might be a very good idea for me to suggest to him that he stop it -- and why." "It might at that," Ware said reflectively. "How will you get there?" "A technicality. Radio Zurich is still operating, which almost surely means that their airfield is operating, too. Jack can fly a plane if necessary -- but it probably won't be necessary. We had a very well-staffed office in Zurich -- in fact it was officially our central headquarters -- and I've got access to two Swiss bank accounts, the company's and my own. I'd damn well better put the money to some use before somebody with a little imagination realizes that the vaults might much better be occupied by himself, his family and twenty thousand cases of canned beans." The project. Ware decided, had its merits. At least it would rid him, however temporarily, of Baines, whose society he was beginning to find a little tiresome, and of Jack Ginsberg, whom he distantly but positively loathed. It would of course also mean that he would be deprived of all human company if the Goat should after all come for him, but this did not bother him in the least; he had known for years that in that last confrontation every man is always aloneand most especially, every magician. Perhaps he had also always known, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, that he would indeed eventually take that last step into Satanism, but if so, he had very successfully suppressed it. And he had not quite taken it yet; he had committed himself to nothing, he had only agreed that Baines should go away, and Ginsberg too, to counsel someone he did not know to an inaction which might be quite without significance. And while they were gone, perhaps he would be able to think of something better. It was the tiniest of small hopes and doubtless vain; but now he was beginning to be prepared to feed it. If he played his cards right, he might yet mingle with the regiment of angels who rebelled not, yet avowed to God no loyalty, of whom it is said that deep Hell refuses them, for, beside such, the sinner would be proud. V menico found with astonishment and a further rekindling of his hope, had been spared completely. It reared its Eleventh Century walls -- rebuilt after the earthquake then by the abbot Gorgio who later became Pope John the Twentieth -- as high above the valley as it always had and, as always too, was accessible only by muleback. Fr. Domenico lost more time locating a mule with an owner to take him up there than the whole trip from Positano had cost him. Eventually, however, the thing was done and he was within the cool walls of the library with the white monks, his colleagues, under the hot Frosinian sky. Those assembled made up nearly the same company that had met during the winter to consider, fruitlessly, how Theron Ware and his lay client might be forestalled: Fr. Amparo, Fr. Umberto (the Director), and the remaining brothers of the Order, plus Fr. Uccello, Fr. Boucher, Fr. Vance, Fr. Anson, Fr. Selahny and Fr. Atheling. The visitors had apparently continued to stay in the monastery -- if not in session -- after the winter meeting, although in the interim Fr. Rosenblum had died. His place had been taken, though hardly filled, by Fr. Domenico's former apprentice Joannes, who, though hardly seventeen, looked now as though he had grown up very suddenly. Well, that was all right; they surely needed all the help that they could get and Fr. Domenico knew without false modesty that Joannes had been well trained. After Fr. Domenico had been admitted, announced and conducted through the solemn and blessed joys of greeting and welcome, it became apparent that a discussion -- as was only to have been expected -- had already been going on for many hours. Nor was he much surprised to find that it was simply another version of the discussion that had been going on in Positano; namely, how had Monte Albano been spared in the world-wide catastrophe and what did it mean? But in this version of the discussion Fr. Domenico could join with a much better heart. And in fact he was also able to give it what amounted to an entirely new turn; for their Sensitive, the hermit-Father Uccello, had inevitably found his talents much coarsened and blunted by the proximity of so many other minds, and in consequence the white monks had only a general idea of what had gone on in Ware's palazzo since the last convocation -- an impression supplemented by the world news, what of it there was, and by deduction, some of which was in fact wrong. Father Domenico recapitulated the story of the last conjuration briefly. "All in all," he concluded, "forty-eight demons were let out of the Pit as a result of this ceremony, commanded to return at dawn. When it became apparent that the operation was completely out of hand, I invoked the Covenant and insisted that Ware recall them ahead of time, to which he agreed; but when he attempted to summon up lucifuge rocoinstead. When I attempted to exorcise this abominable creature my crucifix burst in my hands -- and it was after that that the monster told us that God was already dead and that the ultimate victory had instead gone to the forces of Flell. The Goat promised to return for us all -- all, that is, except Baines' other assistant Doctor Hess, whom Baphomet had already swallowed when Hess panicked and stepped out of his Circle -- at dawn, but he failed to do so, and I subsequently left and came to Monte Albano as soon as it was physically possible." "Do you recall the names and offices of all forty-eight?" said Fr. Atheling. "I think I do -- that is, I think I could; after all, I saw them all, and that's an experience which does not pass lightly from the memory. In any event, if I've blanked out on a few -- which isn't unlikely either -- they can doubtless be recovered under hypnosis. Why does that matter, may I ask. Father Atheling?" "Simply because it is always useful to know the natures, as well as the numbers, of the forces arrayed against one." "Not after the countryside is already overrun," said Fr. Anson. "If the battle and the war have already been lost we must have the whole crew to contend with now -- not just all seventy-two princes, but every single one of the fallen angels. The number is closer to to forty-eight." and fifty thousand, nine hundred and twenty-six," Fr. Atheling said. "Though the wicked may hide, the claws of crabs are dangerous people in bridges," Fr. Selahny intoned abruptly. As was the case with all his utterances, the group would doubtless find out what this one meant only after sorting out its mixed mythologies and folklores and long after it was too late to do anything about it. Nor did it do any good to ask him to explain; these things simply came to him, and he no more understood them than did his hearers. If God were indeed dead, Fr. Domenico wondered suddenly. Who could be dictating them now? But he put the thought aside as non-contributory. A of new evil on the other side his courtly, hesitant old-man's voice. "The feeling is one of intense oppression, quite different from that which was common in New York or Moscow, but one such as I would expect of a massing of demons upon a huge scale. Forgive me, brothers, but I can be no more specific." "We know you are doing the best you can," said the Director soothingly. "I can feel it myself," said Fr. Monteith, who although not a Sensitive had had some experience with the herding of rebellious spirits. "But even supposing that we do not have to cope with so large an advance, as I certainly hope we do not, it seems to me that fortyeight is too large a sum for us if the Covenant has been voided. It leaves us without even an option." Fr. Domenico saw that Joannes was trying to attract the Director's attention, although too hesitantly to make any impression. Fr. Umberto was not yet used to thinking of Joannes as a person at all. Capturing the boy's eyes, Fr. Domenico nodded. "I never did unserstand the Covenant," the ex-apprentice said, thus encouraged. "That is, I didn't understand why God would compromise Flimself in such a manner. Even with Job, He didn't make a deal with Satan but only allowed him to act unchecked for a certain period of time. And I've never found any mention of the Covenant in the grimoires. What are its terms, anyhow?" Fr. Domenico thought 'the question well asked, if a trifle irrelevant, but an embarassed and slightly pitying silence showed that his opinion was not shared. In the end it was broken by Fr. Monteith, whose monumental patience was a byword in the chapter. "I'm certainly not well versed in canon law, let alone in spiritual compacts," he said with more modesty than exactness. "But in principle, the Covenant is no more than a special case of the option of free will. The assumption appears to be that even in dealing with devilry, on the one hand no man shall be subjected to a temptation beyond his ability to resist, and on the other, no man shall slide into Heaven without having been tempted up to that point. In situations involving Transcendental or Ceremonial Magic, the Covenant is the line drawn in between. Where you would find its exact terms. I'm sure I don't know; I doubt that they have ever been written down. One thinks of the long struggle to understand the rainbow, the other Covenant; once the explanation was in, it did not i explain, except to show that every man sees his own rainbow, and ; what seems to stand in the sky is  an optical illusion, not a theomorph. It is in the nature of the arrangement that the terms would i vary in each individual case and that if you are incapable of deter mining where it is drawn for you woe betide you, and that is that." Dear God, Fr. Domenico i thought, all my life I have been an amateur of Roger Bacon and  never once saw that that was what he meant to show by focusing his Perspectiva on the rainbow. Shall  have any more time to learn? I ' hope we are never tempted to make Monteith the Director, or  we shall lose him to taking things out of the In box and putting them into the Out box, as we did Fr. i Umberto... "Furthermore, it may well be still in existence," said Fr. Boucher. "As l-ather Domenico has already pointed out to Theron Ware himself, we have heard of the alleged death of God only through the testimony of the most unreliable witness imaginable. And it leaves many inconsistencies to be explained. When exactly is God supposed to have died? If it was as long ago as in Nietzsche's time, why had Flis angels and ministers of light seemed to know nothing of it in the interim? It's unreasonable to suppose that they were simply keeping up a good front until the battle actually broke out; Heaven simply isn't that kind of an organization. One would expect an absolute and perpetual monarchy to break down upon the death of the monarch quite promptly, yet in point of fact we saw no signs of any such thing until shortly after Christmas of this year." "But we did see such signs at that time," Fr. Vance said. "True, but this only poses another logical dilemma: What happened to the Antichrist? Baphomet's explanation that he had been dispensed with as unnecessary to the victors, whose creature he would have been, doesn't hold water. The Antichrist was to have appeared before the battle and if the defeat of God is all that recent the prophecy should have been fulfilled; God still existed to compel it." "Matthew eleven, fourteen," Fr. Selahny said, in an unprecedented burst of intelligibility. The verse of which he was reminding them referred to John the Baptist and it said: And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come. "Yes,"Fr. Domenico said, "I suppose it's possible that the Antichrist might have come unrecognized. One always envisioned people flocking to his banner openly. But the temptation would have been more subtle and perhaps more dangerous had he crept past us, say in the guise of some popular philosopher, like that positive-thinking man in the States. Yet the proposal seems to allow even less room than did the Covenant for the exercise of free will." There was silence. At last the Director said; "The Essenes argued that one must think and experience all evil before one can even hope to perceive good." "If this be true doctrine," Fr. Domenico said, "then it follows that God is indeed still alive, and that Theron Ware's experiment -- and World War Three -- did not constitute Armageddon after all. What we may be confronted with instead is an Earthly Purgatory, from which Grace, and perhaps even the Earthly Paradise, might be won. Dare we think so?" "We dare not think otherwise," said Fr. Vance. "The question is. How? Little that is in the New Testament, the teachings of the Church or the Arcana, seems very relevant to the present situation." "No more is our traditional isolation," said Er. Domenico. "Our only recourse now is to abandon it; to abandon our monastery and our mountain and go down into the world that we renounced when Charlemagne was but a princeling, to try to win it back by works and witnessing. And if we may not do this with the sweet aid of Christ, then we must nevertheless do it in His Name. Hope now is all we have." "In sober truth," Er. Boucher said quietly, "that is not so great a change. VI L eft to his own devices and hence at last unobserved, Theron Ware thought that it might be well, after all, if he did essay a small magic. The possible difficulty lay in that all magic without exception depended upon the control of demons, as he had explained to Baines on his very first visit. But therein lay the attractiveness of the experiment, too, for what he wanted was information -- whether he still had any such control. And it would also be interesting -- and possible to find out at the same time -- to know whether or not there were any demons left in Hell. If there were it would imply, though it would not guarantee, that only the forty-eight that he had set loose were now terrorizing the world. This ruled out using the Mirror of Solomon, for the spirit of that mirror was the angel Anael. Probably he would not answer anyhow, for Ware was not a white magician and had carefully refrained from calling upon any angel ever since he had turned to the practice of the black Art -- besides, it would be a considerable nuisance locating three white pigeons amid all this devastation. Who, then? Among the demon princes he had decided not to call up for Baines' commission were several that he had ruled out because of their lesser potentialities for destruction, which would stand him in good stead were it to turn out that he had lost control; even in Hell there were degrees of malevolence, as of punishment. Also, Ware realized, his now would have to be a small magic indeed, for most of his instruments were now buried and those that were accessible were all contaminated beyond his power to purify them in any useful period of time. Clearly it was time to consult the book. He crossed to the lectern upon which it rested, pushed dust and potsherds off it with his sleeve. unlocked the clasp and began to turn the great stiff pages, not without a qualm. Here, signed with his own blood, was half his life; the other half was down below, in the mud. He found the name he needed mighty prince, who in his first estate before the rebellion had belonged to the choir of the Virtues. The Lemegeton of the Rabbi Soloman said of him. Ware recalled, that he "declares things past, present and future and discovers what has been lost or hidden." Precisely to the purpose. Ware remembered, too, that his was the name most commonly invoked in ceremonial crystallomancy, which would be perfect in both scope and limitations for what Ware had in mind, involving no lengthy preparations of the operator, or even any precautionary diagrams, nor any apparatus except a crystal ball; and even for that he might substitute a pool of exorcised water, fifty liters of which still reposed in a happily unruptured stainless steel tank imbedded in the wall behind Ware's workbench. Furthermore, he was the only demon in Ware's entire book of pacts who was represented therein by two seals or characters, so markedly different that without seeing them side by side one might never suspect that they belonged to the same entity. Topologically they were closely related, however, and Ware studied these relationships long and hard, knowing that he had once known what they meant but was now unable to recall it. These were the figures: Ah, now he had it. The left-hand infernal sign but the second was the seal under which, it was said, he could be called by white magicians. Ware had never used it, nor had he needed to -- the infernal seal had worked very well -- and he had always doubted its efficacy, for by definition no commerce with a demon is white magic; however, it would be well to try it now. It might provide an additional factor of safety if it worked at all. Into what should he draw the water? Everything was filthy. Eventually he decided simply to make a puddle on the workbench; it had been decades since he had studied oneirology, which he had scorned as a recourse for mere hedge-wizards, but to the best of his recollection it called for nothing more extraordinary than an earthenware vessel and could even be practiced successfully in an ordinary, natural forest pool, providing there was sufficient shade. Well then, to work. the workbench, the little weight of his spare upper body resting upon his elbows and his hands beside his ears, Theron Ware stared steadfastedly down into the little puddle of mud, his own bushy head -- he had neglected his tonsure since the disaster -- shading it from the even light of overcast sky. He had already stared so long since the first invocation that he felt himself on the verge of self-hypnosis, but now, he thought, there was a faint stirring down there in those minature Carboniferous depths, like a bubble or a highlight created by some non-existent sun. Yes, a faint spark -- "Eka, dva. tri, chatur, pancha, shas, sapta, ashta, nava, dasha, ekadasha," Ware counted. "Per vota nostra ipse nunc surtat nobis The spark continued to grow until it was nearly the size of a tenlira piece, stabilized, and gradually began to develop features. Despite its apparent diameter the thing did not look small; the effect rather was one of great distance, as though Ware were seeing a reflection of the moon. The features were quite beautiful and wholly horrible. Superficially the shining face resembled a human skull but it was longer, thinner, more triangular, and it had no cheekbones. The eyes were huge and slanted almost all the way up to where a human hairline would have been; the nose extremely long in the bridge; the mouth as pink and tiny as that of an infant. The color and texture of the face were old ivory, like netsuke. No body was visible but Ware had not expected one; this was not, after all, a full manifestation but only an apparition. The rosebud mouth moved damply and a pure soprano voice, like that of a choirboy, murmured soundlessly in Ware's mind. Thou knowest me, demon of the Pit, Ware thought, for to a pact hast thou subscribed with me and written into my book thine Infernal name. Thereby, and by thy seal which  do here exhibit, do  compel thee. My questions shalt thou answer and give true knowledge. Art still in Hell with thy brothers -- or are all abroad about the Earth? In what wise? Ware made no attempt to disquise his shock; after all, the creature could see into his mind. How situate? Ware suspected at once that the apparently allegorical form of this utterance concealed a literal meaning but it would do no good to ask for exact topographical particulars; demons paid little attention to Earthly political geography unless they were fomenting strife about boundaries or enclaves, be literary? That would be in accordance with the demon's nature. Nothing prevents devils from quoting scripture to their own advantage, so why not Tennyson? Be this valley under the AmbasThen what officers inhabit the region wherein it lies? Divulge their names, great prince, to my express command! But which hath his asylum where Dis now stands? These were the demons of postColumbian magic; they announced forth to the subjects all things which their lord hath commanded, according to the Grimorium Verum, in America, and the asylum fied to be in the West. Of course: it was said in the Grand Grimoire, was the field-marshal of Infernus and a great necromancer, "who goeth to and fro everywhere and inspects the hordes of perdition". The raising of the fortress of Dis in the domain of this great general most strongly suggested that the war was not over yet. Ware knew better, however, than to ask the demon whether God was in fact dead; for were He not the mere sounding of the Holy Name would so offend this minor prince as to terminate the apparition at once, if not render further ones impossible. Well, the question was probably unnecessary anyhow; he already had most of the information that he needed. Thou art discharged. T he shining face vanished with a flash of opalescence, exactly as though a soap bubble had broken, leaving Ware staring down at nothing but a puddle of mud, now already filming and crackingexcept in the center where the face had been: that had evaporated completely. Straightening his aching back, he considered carefully the implications. The military organization of the Descending Hierarchy was peculiar and authorities differed somewhat on its details. This was hardly surprising, for any attempt to relate the offices of the evil spirits to Earthly analogues was bound to be only an approximation, if not sometimes actively misleading. Ware was presently in the domain Italy, and had never before had any any of his inferior Intelligences. He was characterized by the Grimorium Verum as the Grand Duke of Hell, whereas Weirus referred to him as Grand Treasurer; while the Grand Grimoire did not mention instead to an almost equivalent place. Nevertheless it seemed clear enough in general that while the technically be in America, his principality was not confined thereto but might make itself known was a considerably lesser figure. And tho war was not yet over and Ware might indeed find some way to make himself useful. Baines had been right about that, too. But in what way remained unclear. Very probably he would have to go to Dis to find out. It was a terrifying thought but Ware could see no way around it. That was where the center of power was now, where the war would henceforth be directed; and there, if Baines actually succeeded in reachceivably might succeed in arranging some sort of a detente. Certainly he would be of no use squatting here in ruined Italy, with all the superior spirits half a world away. But how to get there? Would it be possible to compel some kind of an apport? This, too, was a terrifying thought. To the best of Ware's knowledge the last magician to have ridden astride a devil had been Gerbert, back in the Tenth Century. He had resorted to it only to save his life from a predecessor of the Inquisition, whose attention he had amply earned; and, moreover, had lived through the ordeal to become Pope Sylvester II. Gerbert had been a great man and, though Ware rather doubted that he had been any better a magician than Ware was, he did not feel prepared to try that conclusion just now. In any event, the process was probably unnecessarily drastic; transvection might serve the purpose just as well, or better. Though he had never been to a sabbat, he knew the theory and the particulars well enough. Included in the steel cabinets which held his magickal pharmacopoeia were all the ingredients necessary for the flying ointment, and the compounding of it required no special time or ritual. First, however, he drew from the cabinet a flat slab of synthetic ruby about the size and shape of an opened match folder; and from his cabinet of instruments, a burin. Upon the ruby, on the day of Mars, which is #, #, # or # on that day, he would engrave the following seal and characters: This he would henceforth carry in his right shirt pocket, like a reliquary. Though he would accept could possibly avoid it, it would be well, since he was going to be travelling in that fiend's domains, to be wearing his colors. As a purist it bothered him a little that the ruby was synthetic -- but his disturbance, he knew, was only an aessolar spirit and the ancients, all the way through Albertus Magnus, had believed that rubies were engendered in the Earth by the influence of the Sun -- but since they were not in fact formed that way, the persistence of the ruby in the ritual was only another example of one of the primary processes of magic, superstition, the gradual supremacy of the sign over the thing. For a magician, Ware reflected, there were indeed distinct advantages in being able to practice ten centuries after Gerbert had ridden upon his demon eagle. hazards. Ware discovered. He crossed the Atlantic without incident in well under three hours -- indeed, he suspected that in some aspect beyond the reach of his senses, the flight was taking place only partially in real time -- and it began to look as though he would easily reach his goal before dawn. The candle affixed by its own tallow to the bundle of twigs and rushes before him (for only the foolhardy fly a broomstick with the brush trailing, no matter what is shown to the contrary in conventional Hallowe'en cartoons) burned as steadily as though he were not in motion at all, casting path; any ships at sea that might have seen him might have taken meteor. As he approached the eastern United States he wondered how he would show up on radar; the dropping of the bomb two days ago suggested that there might still be a number of functioning radomes there. In quieter times, he thought, he might perhaps have touched off another flying-saucer scare. Or was he visible at all? He discovered that he did not know. But once over land he slowed himself down and lost altitude in order to get his bearings -- and within what seemed to him to be only a very few minutes he was grounded' head over heels by the sound of a churchbell forlornly calling what faithful might remain to midnight mass. He remembered belatedly, when he got his wind back, that in some parts of Germany during the Seventeenth Century flowering of the popular God tic cults, it had been the custom to toll churchbells all night long as a protection against witches who might be passing overhead on the way to the Brocken; but the memory did him no good now. He had fallen in a rather mountainous, heavily timbered area he guessed to be somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. Though it was now late April, which was doubtless warm in Positano, the night here was decidely cold, especially for a thin man clad in nothing more than a light smear of unguent. He was instantly and violently all ashiver, for the sound of the bell had destroyed the protective as well as the transvective power of the flying ointment. He hastily undid the bundle of clothes which was tied to the broomstick but there were not going to be enough of them; after all, he had assembled them with Death Valley in mind. Also, he was beginning to feel drowsy and dizzy and his pulse was blurred and banging with tachycardia. Among other things, the flying ointment contained both mandragora and belladonna, and now that the magic was gone out of it, these were exerting their inevitable side effects. He would have to wash the stuff off the minute he could find a stream, cold or no cold. And not only because it was drugging him. Still other ingredients of the ointment were rather specifically organic in nature, and these gave it a characteristic smell which the heat of his body would gradually ripen. The chances were all too good that there would be some people in this country of the Amish -- and not all of them old oneswho would know what the odor meant. Until he had had some kind of a bath it would be dangerous even to ask for help. Before dressing he wiped off as much of it as he could with the towel in which the clothing had been tied. This he buried, together with the taper and the brush from the besom -- and after making sure that the ruby talisman was still safely in his pocket, he set out. The nightblack, hilly, forested countryside would have made difficult going even for an experienced walker. Ware's life on the other hand, had been nearly inactive except intellectually and he was on the very near side of his fiftieth birthday. To his advantage, on the other hand, stood the fact that he had always been small and wiry and the combination of a slightly hyperthyroid metabolism and an ascetic calling -- he did not even smoke -- had kept him that way, so that he made fair progress. An equally lifelong love of descriptive astronomy, plus the necessity of astrology to his art, helped to keep him going in the right direction. upon a small, rock-bedded stream and through the gloom heard the sound of a nearby water fall. He moved against the current and shortly found this to be the spillway of a small log dam. Promptly he stripped and bathed under it, pronouncing in a whisper as he did so all three of the accompanying prayers from the rite of lustration as prescribed for the preparatory triduum in the Grimorium Verum. Though the water was neither warm nor exorcised it was obviously pure and that would have to do. The ablution was every bit as cold as he had expected it to be, and even colder was the process of air-drying himself; but he endured it stoically, for he had to get rid of what remained of the ointment to put on damp clothes would also be dangerous. While he waited, his teeth chattering, faint traces of light began to appear through the trees from the east. In answer, massive gray rectangular shapes began to sketch themselves against the darkness downstream and before long he was able to see that to the west -- which was the way the stream was momentarily running -- was a substantial farm. As if in confirmation of help to come, a cock crowed in the distance, a traditional ending for a night of magic. But as the dawn continued to brighten he saw that there would be no help for him here. Under the angle of the roof of the large barn nearest to him a circular diagram had been painted, like a formalized flower with an eye in it. As Jack Ginsberg had taken the pains to find out long before he i and his boss had even met the maf gician, Ware had been born ami t raised in the States and was still s a citizen. As his name showed, his  background was Methodist -- but s nevertheless he knew a hex sign t when he saw one. And it gave him i an idea.  The opportunity to gather new t data should not be miss. f Reaching into his shirt pocket, t he turned the ruby around so that I the seal and characters on it faced f outwards. In a low voice, he said, I Under proper circumstances these words of the Comte de Cai balis encompassed the operator i with thirty-three several Intellii gences -- but since the circumt stances were not proper Ware was i not surprised when nothing hap pened. For one thing, his lustras tiofi had been imperfect; for anI other, he was ising the wrong tal isman -- the infernal spirits of this e ceremony were not devils but Salar manders or fire elementals. Neverb A morning breeze sprang up t and a leaflike whispering ran b around him, which might or might t not have been the voices of many  The result should have breen a b highly localized but destructive earthquake but there was not even c a minor tremor, though he was pretty sure that he really had heard the responsive voices of the fire spirits. The spell simply would not work under the eye of the hex sign -- one more piece of evidence that the powers of evil were still under some kind of restraint. That was good to know but in a way, too, Ware was quite disappointed; for had he gotten his earthquake, pellai the Intelligences to carry him m:ross the rest of his journey. He uttered them anyhow -- but without result. Neither in the Comte de Gabalis or its very late sucessor. The Black Pullet, did this ritual offer any word of dismissal, but nevertheless for safety's sake he now worked he would have found himself orrierf home again, where at least he couM have started over again with more ointment and another broomstick -- but it did not. There was no recourse now but to seek out the farmhouse and try to persuade the farmer to give him something to eat and drive him to the nearest railhead. It was too bad that the man could not be told that he had just been protected by Ware from a demonic onslaught -- but unfortunately the Amish did not believe that there was any such thing as white magic and in the ultimate analysis they were quite right not to do so, whatever delusions about the point might be harbored by Fr. Domenico and his fellows. The farmhouse proper looked clean, fat and prosperous but it was suspiciously quiet. By this hour everyone should be up and beginning the day's chores. Ware approached with caution, alert for guns or dogs, but the silence continued. The caution had been needless. Inside, the place was an outright slaughterhouse, resembling nothing so much as the last act of Webster's The White Devil. Ware inspected it with clinical fascination. The family had been a large one -- the parents, one grandparent, four daughters, three sons and the inevitable dog -- and at some time during the preceding night they had suddenly fallen upon each other with teeth, nails, pokers, a buggy-whip, a bicycle chain, a cleaver, a pig knife and the butt end of a smooth-bore rifle old enough to have been a relic of the Boer War. It was an obvious case of simultaneous mass possession, probably worked through the women, as these things almost always were. Doubtless they would infinitely have preferred a simple localized earthquake, but from an attack like this no conceivable peasant hex sign could have protected them. Probably nothing could have, for as it had turned out, in their simple traditional religiosity they had chosen the wrong side. Like most of mankind they had been born victims -- even a beginning study of the Problem of Evil would have suggested to them that their God had never played fair with them, as indeed He had caused to be written out in Job for all to read. And their primitive backwoods demonology had never honestly admitted that there really were two sides to the Great Game, let alone allowed them any inkling of who the players were. While he considered what to do next he prowled around the kitchen and the woodshed, where the larder was, trying not to slip or step on anybody. There were only two eggs -- today's had obviously not been harvested -- but he found smoked, streaky rashers of bacon, a dayold loaf of bread just ripe for cutting, nearly a pound of country butter and a stone jug of cold milk. All in all it was a good deal more than he could eat but he built a fire in the old wood-burning stove, cooked the eggs and the bacon and did his best to put it all down. After all, he had no idea when he would meet his next meal. He had already decided that he was not yet desperate enough to risk calling for an apport, but instead would keep walking generally westward until he met an opportunity to steal a car. (He would find none on the farm; the Amish still restricted themselves to horses.) As he came out of the farmhouse into the bright morning, a sandwich in both hip pockets, he heard from the undestroyed barn a demanding lowing of cattle. Sorry, friends, he thought. Nobody's going to milk you this morning. B aines knew the structure and approaches of Strategic Air Command headquarters rather better than the Department of Defense would have thought right and proper even for a civilian with Q clearance, although there had been f not have been at all surprised at i it. The otherwise passengerless jet j carrying him and Jack Ginsberg i made no attempt to approach eithI er Denver Airport or the U. S. ; Air Force Academy field at Colo' rado Springs, both of which, he i correctly assumed, would no long er be in existence anyhow. Instead, I he directed the pilot to land at Lii mon, a small town which was the I easternmost vertex of a nearly ( equilateral triangle formed by these ( three points. Hidden there was one j terminus of an underground rapid t transit line which led directly into I was now its only surviving means ; of physical access to the outside ( world. I Baines and his secretary had ' been there only once before, and i the guards at the station now were  not only new but thoroughly frightI ened. Hence, despite the possession ' of ID cards countersigned by Gen: eral McKnight, they were subjectI ed to over an hour of questioning,  fingerprinting, photographing of I retinal blood vessel patterns, friski ing and fluoroscopy for hidden I weapons or explosives, telephone calls into the interior and finally I a closed-circuit television confron; tation with McKnight himself be. fore they were even allowed into the waiting room. I As if in partial compensation, I the trip itself was rapid transit ini deed. The line was a gravity-vacu: um tube, bored in an exactly i straight line under the curvature of the earth and kept as completely exhausted of air as outgrassing  from its steel cladding would permit. The vacuum in the tube was in fact almost as hard as the atmosphere of the moon. From the waiting room Baines and Jack Ginsberg were passed through two airlocks into a seamlessly welded, windowless metal capsule which was sealed behind them. Here their guards strapped them in securely, for their own protection, for the initial kick of compressed air behind the capsule, abetted by rings of electromagnets, gave it an acceleration of more than five miles per hour per second. Thereafter the capsule was simply allowed to fall to the mathematical midpoint of its right of way, gaining speed at about twenty-eight feet per second per second; since the rest of the journey was uphill, the capsule was slowed in proportion by gravity, friction and the compression of the almost nonexistent gasses in the tube still ahead of it, which without any extra braking whatsoever brought it to a stop at the cisely that only a lovepat from a fifteen horsepower engine was needed to line up its airlock with that of the station. "When you're riding a thing like this it's hard to believe that there's any such thing as a devil, isn't it?" Jack Ginsberg said. "Maybe," Baines said. "A large part of the mystic tradition says that the possession and use of secular knowledge -- or even the desire for it -- is in itself evil, according to Ware. But here we are." B ut in the smooth-running, even-temperatured caverns of reassured. There was no Goat grinning over his shoulder yet. McKnight was an old friend; he was pleased to see Buelg again and honored to meet Satvje; and down here, at least, everything seemed to be under control. It was also helpful to find that both McKnight and his two advisors not only already knew the real situation but had very nearly accepted it. Only Buelg remained a little sceptical at the beginning and seemed quite taken aback to find Baines, of all people, providing independent testimony to the same effeet as had the computer. When the new facts Baines had' brought had been fed into the machine and the machine had produced in response a whole new batch of conclusions entirely consistent with the original hypothesis, Buelg seemed convinced, although it was plain that he still did not like it. Well, who did? At long last they were comfortably settled in McKnight's office with three tumblers of Jack Daniels (Jack Ginsberg did not drink, and neither did Suatvje) and no one to interrupt them but an occasional runner from Chief Hay. Though the runner was a coolly women's auxiliary had apparently adopted the miniskirt, Ginsberg did not seem to notice. Perhaps he was still in shock from his recent run-in with the suceubus. To Baines' eyes the girl did look rather remarkably like Ware's Greta, which should have captured Jaek instantly; but then, in the long run, most women looked alike to Baines. "That bomb did you no good at all, I take it," he said. "Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that," McKnight said. "True, it didn't destroy the city -- or even hurt it visibly -- but it certainly seemed to take them by surprise. For about an hour after the fireball went up, the sky above the target was full of them. It was like firing a flashbulb in a cave full of sleeping bats -- and we got pictures, too." "Any evidence that you, uh, destroyed any of them?" "Well, we saw a lot of them going hack to the city under their own power despite very bad design, they seem to fly pretty well but we don't have any count of how many went up. We didn't see any falling but that might have been because some of them had been vaporized." "Not bloody likely. Their bodies may have been vaporized, but the bodies were borrowed in the first place. Like knocking down a radio-controlled aircraft; the craft may be a total loss, but the controlling intelligence is unharmed, somewhere else, and can send another one against you whenever it likes." "Excuse me. Doctor Baines, but the analogy is inexact," Buelg said. "We know that because we did get a lot out of the bomb besides simply stirring up a flurry. High-speed movies of the column of the mushroom as it went up show a lot of the creatures trying to reform. One individual we were able to follow went through thirtytwo changes in the first minute. The changes are all incredible and beyond any physical theory or model we can erect to account for them, but they do show, first, that the creature was seriously inconvenienced and, second that it wanted and perhaps needed to hold on to some kind of physical form. That's a start. It suggests to me that had we been able to confine them all in the fireball, where the temperatures are much higher still, no gamut of change they could have run through would have done them any good. Eventually they would have been stripped of the last form and utterly destroyed." "The last form, maybe," Baines said. "But the spirit would remain. I don't know why they're clinging to physical forms so determinedly, but it probably has only a local and tactical reason, something to do with the prosecuting of the present war. But you can't destroy a spirit by such means any more than you can destroy a message by burning the piece of paper it's written on." A S HE said this he became uncomfortably aware that he had gotten the argument out of some sermon against atheism that he had heard as a boy, and had thought simple-minded even then. But since then he had seen demons -- and a tot more closely than anybody else here had. "Th is perhaps an open question," Satvje said heavily. "I am not myself a skeptic, you should understand. Doctor Baines, but I have to remind myself that no spirit has ever been so intensively tested to destruction before. Inside a thermonuclear fireball even the nuclei of hydrogen atoms find it difficult to retain their integrity." "Atomic nuclei remain matter, and the conservation laws still apply. Demons are neither matter nor energy; they are something else." "We do not know that they are not energy," Satvje said. "They may well be fields, falling somewhere within the electro-magnetico-gravitic triad. Remember that we have never achieved a unified field theory -- even Einstein repudiated his in the last years of his life, and quantum mechanics -- with all respeci to de Broglie -- is only a clumsy avoidance of the problem. These... spirits... may be such unified fields. And one characteristic of such fields might be one hundred percent negative entropy." "There couldn't be any such thing as completely negative entropy," Buelg put in. "Such a system would constantly accumulate order, which means that it would run backwards in time and we would never be aware of it at all. You have to allow for Planck's Constant. This would be the only stable case -- " He wrote rapidly on a pad, stripped off the sheet and passed it across the table. The note read, in very neat lettering: The girl came in with another manifold of sheets from the computer, and this time Jack Ginsberg's eye could be observed to be wandering haunchward a little. Baines had never objected to this he preferred his most valuable employees' to have a few visible and usable weaknesses -- but for once he almost even sympathized; he was feeling a little out of his depth. "Meaning what?" he said. "Why," Satvje said, a little patronizingly, "eternal life, of course. Life is negative entropy. Stable negative entropy is eternal life." "Barring accidents," Buelg said, with a certain grim relish. "We have no access yet to the gravitic part of the spectrum, but the electromagnetic sides are totally vulnerable and with the clues we've got now we ought to be able to be able to burst into such a closed system like a railroad spike going through an auto tire." "If you can kill a demon," Baines said slowly, "Then -- " "That's right," Buelg said affably. "Angel, devil, ordinary immortal soul -- you name it, we can do for it. Not right away, maybe, but before very long." "Perhaps the ultimate human achievement," Satvje said, with a dreaming, almost beautific expression. "The theologians call condemnation to Hell the Second Death. Soon, perhaps, we may be in a position to give the Third Death... the bliss of complete extinction... liberation from the Wheel!" McKnight's eyes were now also wandering, though toward the ceiling. He wore the expression of a man who has heard all this before and is not enjoying it any better the second time. Baines himself was very far from being bored -- indeed, he was as close to horrified fascination as he had ever been in his life -- but clearly it was time to bring everybody back to Earth. He said, "Talk's cheap. Do you have any actual plans?" "You bet we do," McKnight said, suddenly galvanized. "I've had Chief Hays run me an inventory of the country's remaining military power and believe me, there's a lot of it. I was surprised myself. We are going to mount a major attack upon this City of Dis, and for it we're going to bring some things up out of the ground that the American people have never seen before and neither has anybody else, including this pack of demons. I don't know why they're just sitting there, but maybe it's because they think they've already got us licked. Well, they're dead wrong. Nobody can lick the United States -- not in the long run!" ment from a man who had been maintaining for years that the United States had "lost" China, "surrendered" Korea, "abandoned" Vietnam and was overrun by home-bred Communists; but Baines, who knew the breed, saw no purpose in calling attention to the fact. Their arguments, not being based in reason, cannot be swayed by reason. Instead he said, "General, believe me, I advise against it. I know some of the weapons you're talking about and they're pretty powerful. I ought to know; my company designed and supplied some of them, so it would be against my own interests to run them down to you. But I very much doubt that any of them will do any good under the present circumstances." "That, of course, remains to be seen," McKnight said. "I'd rather we didn't. If they work we may find ourselves worse off than before. That's the point I came here to press. The demons are about ninety percent in charge of the world now -- but you'll notice that they haven't taken any further steps against us. There's a reason for this. They are fighting against another Opponent entirely, and it's quite possible that we ought to be on their side." McKnight leaned back in his chair, with the expression of a president confronted at a press conference with a question on which he had not been briefed. "Let me be quite sure I understand you. Doctor Baines," he said. "Do you propose that the present invasion of the United States was a good thing? And, further, that we ought not to be opposing the occupying forces with all our might? That indeed we ought instead to be aiding and abetting the powers responsible for it?" "I don't propose any aiding and abetting whatsoever," Baines said, with an inward sigh. "I just think we ought to lay off for a while, that's all, until we see how the situation works out." "You are almost the last man in the world," McKnight said stiffly, "whom I would have suspected of being a ComSymp, let alone a prochink. When I have your advice entered upon the record I will also add an expression of my personal confidence. In the. meantime, the attack goes forward as scheduled." Baines said nothing more, advisedly. It had occurred to him, out of his experience with Theron Ware, that angels fallen and unfallen and the immortal part of man partook of and had sprung from the essentially indivisible nature of their Creator; that if these men could destroy that Part, they could equally well dissolve the Whole; that a successful storming of Dis would inevitably be followed by a successful war upon Heaven; and that if God were not dead yet. He soon might be. However it turned out, it looked like it was going to be the most interesting civil war he had ever run guns to. IX Strategic Air Command Office Denver, Colorado Date: May I TO: All Combat Arms Orders #. This Memorandum supercedes all previous directives on this subject. #. The United States has been invaded and all combat units will stand in readiness to expel the invading forces. #. The enemy has introduced a number of combat innovations of which all units must be made thoroughly aware. All officers will therefore read this Memorandum in full to their respective commands and will thereafter post it in a conspicuous place. All commands should be sampled for familiarity with the contents of the Memorandum. #. Enemy troops are equipped with individual body armor. In accordance with ancient Oriental custom this armor has been decorated in various grotesque shapes in the hope of frightening the opposition. It is expected that the American soldier will simply laugh at this primitive device. All personnel are warned, however, that as armor these "demon suits" are extremely effective. A very high standard of marksmanship will be required against them. #. An unknown number of the enemy body armor units, perhaps approaching #, are capable of free flight, like the jump suits supplied to U.S. Mobile Infantry. Ground forces will therefore be alert to possible attack from the air by individual enemy troops as well as by conventional aircraft. #. It is anticipated that in combat the enemy will employ various explosive, chemical and toxic agents which may produce widespread novel effects. All personnel are hereby reminded that these effects will be either natural in origin or illusions. #. Following the reading of this Memorandum, all officers will read to their commands those paragraphs of the Articles of War pertaining to the penalties for cowardice in battle. By order of the Commander in Chief: B ecause of the destruction of Rome, and of the Vatican with it -- alas for that great library and treasure-house of all Christendom! -- the Holy See had been moved to Venice and was now housed in almost its former magnificence in the Sala del Collegio of the Palazzo Ducale, where, under a ceiling by Veronese, the doges had been accustomed to receive their ambassadors to other city states. It was the first time the palace had been used by anybody but tourists since Napoleon had forced the abdication of Lodovico Manin exactly eleven hundred years after the election of the first doge. There were no tourists here now, of course; the city, broiling hot and stinking of the garbage in its canals, brooded lifelessly under the Adriatic sun, a forgotten museum. Nobody was about in the crazy narrow streets and the cramped ristoranti but the native Venetians, their livelihood gone, sullenly starving together in small groups and occasionally snarling at each other in their peculiar dialect. Many already showed signs of radiation sickness: their hair was shedding in patches and pools of vomit caught the sunlight, ignored by everyone but the flies. As for hope, they had none. In this they were not alone. Throughout his journey to Venice Fr. Domenico had found nothing but terror, misery and a haunted populace which could not but con( elude that everything the Church ( had taught them for nearly two I thousand years had been lies. i Yet hope somehow found its : way forward. On an oppressive afi ternoon while he was trying to  preach to a group of young thugs, I most of them too surly and indif( ferent even to jeer, before the little i Church of Sta. Marla degli Mira coli, his audience was suddenly ; galvanized by a series of distant  whistles. The whistles, as Fr. DomI enico knew well enough, had been until only recently the signals of ( the young wolves of Venice, to re; port the spotting of some escort less English schoolmarm, pony( tailed Bennington art student or I gaggle of Swedish girls. There was i no such prey about now, but nevt ertheless the piazzetta emptied I within a minute. c Bewildered and, of course, apI prehensive, Fr. Domenico followI ed. A rumor had gone around that i a puff of white smoke had been t seen over the Palazzo Ducale. This t was highly unlikely, since -- what I with the fear of another fire which t constantly haunted the palace -- t there was no stove in it anywhere t in which to btirn ballots; neverthet less. The Pope had died with Rome i and the expectation of a new Pope s had run through the city like fire itself. By the time Fr. Domenico r reached the vast square opposite I the basilica (for after all he, too, I had come to Venice in search of a c Pope) it was so crowded as to t scarcely leave standing room for  the pigeons. c If there were indeed to be any  announcement it would have to i come Venetian style from the top of the Giant's Staircase of Antonio Rizzo; the repetitive arches of the first Boor loggia offered no single balcony on which a Pope might appear. Fr. Domenico pressed forward into the great internal courtyard toward the staircase, at first saying ""Prego, prego," and then ""Scusate, scusate mi," to no effect whatsoever, and finally with considerable judicious but hard monkish use of elbows and knees. Over the tense rumbling of the crowd there sounded suddenly an antiphonal braying of many trumpets -- something of Gabrielli's, no doubt -- and at the same time Fr. Domenico found himself jammed immovably against the coping of the cannon-founder's well, which had long since been scavenged clean of the tourists' coins. By luck it was not a bad position; from here he had quite a clear view up the staircase and between the towering statues of Mars and Neptune. The great doors had already been opened and the cardinals in their scarlet finery were ranked on either side of the portico. Between them and a little forward stood two pages, one of them holding a red cushion upon which stood something tall and glittering. Amidst the fanfare, an immensely heavy tolling began to boom: La Trottiera, the bell which had once summoned the members of the Grand Council to mount their horses and ride over the wooden bridges to a meeting. The combination of bell and trumpets was solemnly beautiful and under it the crowd fell quickly silent. Yet the difference from the Roman ritual was disturbing and something else was wrong about it, too. What was that thing on the cushion? It certainly could not be the Tiara -- was it the golden horn of the doges? The music and the tolling stopped. Into the pigeon-cooing silence a cardinal cried in Latin: "We have a Pope, Summus Antistitum Antistesl And it is his will that he be called Juvenember The unencumbered page now stepped forward. He called in the vernacular; "Here is your Pope, and we know it will please you." From the shadow of the great doors, there stepped forth into the sunlight between the statues, bowing his head to accept the golden horn, his face white and mild as milk, a comely old man with a goshawk on his wrist, whom Fr. Domenico had first and last seen on Black Easter, released from the Pit by Theron Ware -- the demon An enormous shout rose from the crowd and the trumpets and the bell resumed, now joined by all the rest of the bells in the city and by many drums and the firing of cannon. Choking with horror, Fr. Domenico fled as best he could. T he festival went on all week, climaxed by bull-dancing in the Cretan style in the courtyard of the Palazzo, and by fireworks at night, while Fr. Domenico prayed. This event was definitive. The Antichrist had arrived, however belatedly, and therefore God still lived. Fr. Domenico could do no more good in Italy; he must now go to Dis, into Hell-Mouth itself, and challenge Satan to grant His continuing existence. Nor would it be enough for Fr. Domenico to aspire to be the AntiSatan. If necessary -- most terrifying of all thoughts -- he must now expose himself to the temptation and the election, by no Earthly college, of becoming the vicar of Christ whose duty it would be to harrow this earthly Hell. Yet how to get there? He was isolated on an isthmus of mud, and he had no Earthly resources whatsoever. Just possibly, some rite of white magic might serve to carry him, although he could remember none that seemed applicable; but that would involve returning to Monte Albano and, in any event, he felt instinctively that no magic of any kind would be appropriate now. In this extremity he bethought him of certain legends and attested miracles of the early saints, some of whom in their exaltations were said to have been lifted long distances through the air. Beyond question he was not a saint; but if his forthcoming role was to be as he suspected, some similar help might be vouchsafed him. He tried to keep his mind turned away from the obvious and most exalted example of all, and equally to avoid thinking about the doubt-inducing fate of Simon Magus -- a razor's edge which not even his Dominican training made less than nearly impossible to negotiate. Nevertheless, his shoulders squared, his face set, Fr. Domenico walked resolutely toward the water. X E ven after the complete failure of air power in Vietnam to pound one half of a tenth-rate power into submission, General McKnight remained a believer in its supremacy; but he was not such a fool as to do without ground support, knowing very well the elementary rule that territory must be occupied as well as devastated, or even the most decisive victory will come unstuck. By the day -- or rather, the night -- for which the attack was scheduled, he had moved three armored divisions into the Panamint range and had two more distributed through the Grapevine, Funeral and Black Mountains, which also bristled with rocket emplacements. This was by no means either as big or as well divided a force as he should have liked to have used, especially on the east, but since it was all that the country had left to offer him, he had to make it do. His battle plan was divided into three phases. Remembering that the test bomb had blown some thousands of enemy troops literally sky high for what was tactically speaking quite a long period of time, he intended to begin with a serial bombardment of Dis with as many of his remaining nuclear weapons as he could use up just short of making the surrounding territory radiologically lethal to his own men. These warheads might not do the city of the demons any damage -- a proposition which he still regarded with some incredulity -- but if they would again disorganize the enemy and keep him from reforming, that would be no mean advantage in itself. Phase Two was designated to take advantage of the fact that the battleground from his point of view was all downhill, the devils, with stunning disregard of elementary strategy, having located their fortress at the lowest point in the valley, on the site of what had previously been Badwater, which was actually two hundred and eightytwo feet below sea level. When the nuclear bombardment ended it would be succeeded immediately by a continued hammering with conventional explosives, by artillery, missiles and planes. These would include phosphorus bombs, again probably harmless to devils, but which would in any event produce immense clouds of dense white smoke which might impair visibility for the enemy; his own troops could see through it handily enough by radar and would always be able to see the main target through the infrared telescope or "sniperscope," since even under normal conditions it was always obligingly kept red hot. Under cover of this bombardment, McKnight planned a rush of armor upon the city, spearheaded by halftrack-mounted laser projectors. It was McKnight's theory, supported neither by his civilian advisors nor by the computer, that the thermonuclear fireball had failed to vaporize the iron walls because its heat had been too generalized and diffuse, and that the concentrated heat of four or five or a dozen laser beams, all focused on one spot, might punch its way through like a rapier going through cheese. This onslaught was to be aimed directly at the gates. Of course these would be better defended than any other part of the perimeter, but a significant number of the defenders might still be flapping wildly around in the air amid the smoke and, in any event, when one is trying to breach a wall, it is only common sense to begin at a point which already has a hole in it. If such a breach were actually effected an attempt would be made to enlarge it with land torpedos, particularly burrowing ones of the Hess type which would have been started on their way at the beginning of Phase One. These had never seen use before in actual combat and were supposed to be graveyard secret -- though with the profusion of spies and traitors with which America had been swarming, in McKnight's view, before all this had begun, he doubted that the secret had been very well kept. (After all, if even Baines...) He was curious also about the actual effectiveness of another secret, the product of an almost incestuous union of chemistry and nucleonics called tdx, a compound as unstable as tnt which was made of gravity-polarized atoms; McKnight had only the vaguest idea of what this jargon was supposed to have the property of exploding in a flat plane, instead of expanding evenly in all directions like any Christian explosive. Were the gate forced, the bombardment would stop and Phase Three would follow. This would be an infantry assault, supported by individually airborne troops in their rocket-powered flying harness, and supplemented by an attempted paratroop landing inside the city. If on the other hand the gate did not go down, there would be a most unwelcome Phase Four -- a general and, hopefully, orderly retreat. T he whole operation could be watched both safely and conveniently from the sac's Command Room under Denver and directed in the same way; there was a multitude of television screens, some of which were at the individual command consoles provided for each participating general. The whole complex closely resembled the now extinct Space Center at Houston, which had in fact been modeled after it. Technically, spaceflight and modern warfare are almost identical operations from the command point of view. At the front of this cavern and quite dominating it was a master screen of Cinerama proportions -- at its rear was something very like a sponsors' booth, giving McKnight and his guests an overview of the whole, as well as access to a bank of small screens on which he could call into being any individual detail of the action. McKnight did not bother to occupy the booth until the nuclear bombardment was over, knowing well enough that the immense amount of ionization it would produce would make non-cable television reception impossible for quite some time. ( the fallout was going to be hell, too -- but almost all of it would miss Denver, the east coast was dead, and the fish and the Europeans would have to look out for themselves.) When he finally took over, the conventional bombardment was just beginning. With him were Baines, Buelg, Chief Hay and Satvje; Jack Ginsberg had expressed no particular interest in watching, and since Baines did not need him here, he had been excused to go below, presumably to resume his lubricious pursuit of Hay's comely runner. Vision on the great master screen was just beginning to clear as they took their seats, although there was still considerable static. Weather Control reported that it was a clear brightly moonlit night over all of the southwest, but in point of fact the top of the great multiple nuclear mushroom, shot through with constant lightning, now completely covered the southern third of California and all of the two states immediately to the east of it. The units and crews crouching in their bivouacs and emplacements along the sides of the mountains facing away from the valley clung grimly to the rocks against hurricane updrafts in temperatures that began at a hundred and fifty degrees and went on up from there. No unit which had been staked out on any of the inside faces of any of the ranges reported anything, then or ever; even the first missiles and shells to come screaming in toward Dis exploded incontinently in midair the moment they rose above the sheltering shadows of the mountain peaks. No thermocouple existed which would express in degrees the temperature at the heart of the target itself; spectographs taken from the air showed it to be cooling from a level of about two and ure as utterly impossible to relate to human experience as are the distances in miles between the stars. Nevertheless, the valley cooled with astonishing rapidity, and once visibility was restored, it was easy to see why. More than two hundred square miles of it had been baked and annealed into a shallow, even dish, still glowing whitely but shot through with the gorgeous colours of impurities, tike a borax bead in the flame of a blowpipe; and this was acting like the reflector of a searchlight, throwing the heat outward through the atmosphere into space in an almost solidly visible column. At its center, as at the Cassegranian focus of a telescope mirror, was a circular black hole. McKnight leaned forward, grasping the arms of his chair in a death grip, and shouted for a closeup. Had the job been done already? Perhaps Buelg had been right about there being a possible limit to the number of transformations the enemy could go through before final dissolution. After all, Badwater had just received a nuclear saturation which had previously been contemplated only in terms of the overkill of whole countries -- B ut as the glass darkened, the citadel brightened, until at last it showed once more as a red hot ring. Nothing could be seen inside it but a roiling mass of explosions -- the conventional bombardment was now getting home, and with great accuracy -- from which a mushroom stem continued to rise in the very center of the millennial updraft; but the walls -- the walls, the walls, the walls were still there. "Give it up, General," Buelg said, his voice gravelly. "No matter what the spectroscope shows -- if those walls were really iron -- " He paused and swallowed heavily. "They must be only symbologically iron, perhaps some alchemical sense. Otherwise the atoms would not only have been scattered to the four winds, but would have had all the electron shells stripped off them. You can do nothing more." "The bombardment is still going on," McKnight pointed out stiffly, "and we've had no report yet of what it's done to the enemy's organization and manpower. For all we know, there's nobody left down that hole at all -- and the laser squadrons haven't even arrived yet, let alone the Hess torpedoes." "Neither of which are going to work worth a damn," Baines said brutally. "I know what the Hess torpedo will do-have you forgotten that they were invented by my own chief scientist? Who just that the demons now know all about the gadget, if they didn't before." "It is in the American tradition," McKnight said, "to do things the hard way if there is no other way. Phase Four is a last-ditch measure, and it is good generalship -- which I do not expect you to understand -- to remain flexible until the last moment. As Clausewitz remarks, most battles are lost by generals who failed to have the courage of their own convictions in the clutch." Baines knew that Clausewitz had never said any such damn fool thing and that McKnight was only covering with an invented quotation a hope which was last-ditch indeed. But even had elementary Machiavellianism given him any reason to suppose that charging McKnight with this would change the general's mind in the slightest, he could see from the master screen that it was already too late. While they had been talking, the armored divisions had been charging down into the valley, their diesel-electric engines snarling and snorting, the cleats of their treads cracking the slippery glass and leaving sluggishly glowing, still quasi-molten trails behind. Watching them in the small screens, Baines began to think that he must be wrong. He knew these monsters well -- they were part of his stock in trade -- and to believe that they were resistible went against the selling habits of an entire adult lifetime. Yet some of them were bogging down already; as they descended deeper into the valley, with the small rockets whistling over their hunched heads the hot glass under their treads worked into the joints like glue, and then, carried by the groaning engines up over the top trunnions, cooled and fell into the bearings in a shower of many-sized abrasive granules. The monsters slewed and sidled, losing Iraction and with it, steerage; and then the lead halftrack with the laser cannon jammed immovably and began to sink like the Titanic into the glass, the screams of its broiling crew tearing the cool air of the command booth like a ripsaw until McKnight impatiently cut off the sound. The other beasts lumbered on regardless -- they had no orders to do otherwise -- and a view from I he air showed that three or four units of the laser squadron were now within striking distance of the gates of Dis. Like driver ants, black streams of infantry were crawling down the inner sides of the mountains behind the last wave of the armored divisions. They, too, had had no orders to turn back. Even in their immensely clumsy asbestos firemen's suits and helmets, they were already fainting and falling over each other in the foothills, their carefully oiled automatic weapons falling into "the sand, the tanks of their flame-throwers splitting and dumping jellied gasoline on the hot rocks, the very air of the valley sueking all of the moisture out of their lungs through the tiniest cracks in their uniforms. Baines was not easily horrified that would have been bad for business -- but also he had never before seen any actual combat but the snippets of the Vietnam war which had been shown on American television. This senseless advance of expensively trained and equipped men to certain and complete slaughter -- men who as usual not only had no idea of what they were dying for but had been actively misled about it -- made about as much military sense as the Siege of Sevastapol or the Battle of the Marne. Certainly it was spectacular but intellectually it was not even very interesting. F our of the laser buggies -- all that had survived -- were now halted before the gates, two to each side to allow a heavy howitzer to fire between them. From them lanced out four pencil-thin beams of intensely pure red light, all of which met at the same spot on the almost invisible seam between the glowing doors. Had that barrier been real iron, they would have holed through it in a matter of seconds in a tremendous shower of sparks, but in actuality they were not even raising its temperature, as far as Baines could see. The beams struck again. Above the buggies, on the barbican, there seemed to be scores of black, indistinct, misshapen figures. They were very active, but their action did not seem to be directed against the buggies; Baines had the mad impression, which he was afraid was all too accurate, that they were dancing. Again the beams lashed out. Beside him, McKnight muttered, "If they don't hurry it up -- " Even before he was able to finish the sentence, the ground in front of the gates erupted. The first of the Hess torpedoes had arrived. One of the half-tracks simply vanished, while the one next to it went slowly skyward, and as slowly fell back, in a fountain of armor plate, small parts, and human limbs and torsos. Another, on the very edge of the crater, toppled equally slowly into it. The fourth sat for a long minute as if stunned by the concussion, and they began to back slowly away. Another torpedo went off directly under the gates, and then another. The gates remained obdurately unharmed, but after a fourth such blast, light could be seen under them -- the crater was growing. "Halt all armored vehicles!" McKnight shouted into his intercom, pounding the arm of his chair in excitement. "Infantry advance on the double! We're going under!" Another Hess torpedo went off in the same gap. Baines was fascinated now, and even feeling a faint glow of pride. Really, the things worked very well indeed; too bad Hess couldn't be here to see it -- but maybe he was seeing it, from inside. That hole was already big enough to accommodate a small car, and while he watched, another torpedo blew it still wider. "Paratroops! Advance drop by ten minutes!" But why was Hess' invention working when the nuclear devices hadn't? Maybe Dis had only sunk lower as a whole, as the desert around and beneath it had been vaporized, but the demons could not defend the purely mundane geology of the valley itself? Another explosion. How many of those torpedoes had the Corps of Engineers had available? Consolidated Warfare Service had supplied only ten prototypes with the plans at the time of the sale, and there hadn't been time to put more into production. McKnight's suddenly advanced timetable seemed nevertheless to be allowing for all ten. This proved to be the case, except that the ninth got caught in a fault before it had completed its burrowing and blew up in the middle of one of the advancing columns of troops. Hess had always frankly admitted that the machine would be subject to this kind of failure, and that the flaw was inherent in the principle rather than the design. But it probably wouldn't be missed; the gap under the gates of Dis now looked quite as big as the New Jersey entrance to the original two Lincoln Tunnels. And the infantry was arriving at speed. And at that moment, the vast unscarred gates slowly began to swing inward. McKnight gaped in astonishment, and Baines could feel his own jaw dropping. Was the citadel going to surrender before it had even len properly stormed? or, worse, had it been ready all along to open to the first polite knock, so that all this colos effort been unnecessary? But the humiliation at least they were spared. As the first patrote charged, tumbled, scrambled and clambered into the crater, there appeared in the now fully opened gateway, silhouetted against the murky flames behind. torsos. Another, on the very edge of the crater, toppled equally slowly into it. The fourth sat for a long minute as if stunned by the concussion, and they began to back slowly away. Another torpedo went off directly under the gates, and then another. The gates remained obdurately unharmed, but after a fourth such blast, light could be seen under them -- the crater was growing. "Halt all armored vehicles!" McKnight shouted into his intercom, pounding the arm of his chair in excitement. "Infantry advance on the double! We're going under!" Another Hess torpedo went off in the same gap. Baines was fascinated now, and even feeling a faint glow of pride. Really, the things worked very well indeed; too bad Hess couldn't be here to see it -- but maybe he was seeing it, from inside. That hole was already big enough to accommodate a small car, and while he watched, another torpedo blew it still wider. "Paratroops! Advance drop by ten minutes!" But why was Hess' invention working when the nuclear devices hadn't? Maybe Dis had only sunk lower as a whole, as the desert around and beneath it had been vaporized, but the demons could not defend the purely mundane geology of the valley itself? Another explosion. How many of those torpedoes had the Corps of Engineers had available? Consolidated Warfare Service had supplied only ten prototypes with the plans at the time of the sale, and there hadn't been time to put more into production. McKnight's suddenly advanced timetable seemed nevertheless to be allowing for all ten. This proved to be the case, except that the ninth got caught in a fault before it had completed its burrowing and blew up in the middle of one of the advancing columns of troops. Hess had always frankly admitted that the machine would be subject to this kind of failure, and that the flaw was inherent in the principle rather than the design. But it probably wouldn't be missed; the gap under the gates of Dis now looked quite as big as the New Jersey entrance to the original two Lincoln Tunnels. And the infantry was arriving at speed.  And at that moment, the vast unscarred gates slowly began to swing inward. McK night gaped in astonishment, and Baines could feel his own jaw dropping. Was the citadel going to surrender before it had even Iwen properly stormed? or, worse, had it been ready alt along to open to the first polite knock, so that all this colos  fort had been unnecessary? But the humiliation at least they were spared. As the first patrols charged, tumbled, scrambled and clambered into the crater, there appeared in the now fully opened gateway, silhouetted against the murky flames behitti. the same three huge naked snakyhaired women McKnight and his crew had seen in the very first aerial photographs. They were all three carrying among them what appeared to be the head of an immense decapitated statue of something much like one of themselves. The asbestos-clad soldiers climbing up the far wall of the crater could not turn any grayer than they were, but they froze instantaneously like the overwhelmed inhabitants of Pompeii, and fell, and as they fell, they broke. Within minutes, the pit was being refilled from the bottom with shattered sculpture. the first contingent of paratroops was suddenly blurred by hundreds of tiny black dots. Seconds later the fuselage alone was plunging toward the desert; the of the Flies, had torn the wings off men. Lower, in the middle of the air, rocket-borne Assault Infantry soldiers were being plucked first of their harness, then of their clothing, and then of their hair, their fingernails and toenails by jeering creatures with beasts' heads, most of whom were flying without even wings. The bodies, when there was anything left of them at all, were being dropped unerringly into the Pit. In summary, the Siege of Dis could more reasonably be described as a rout, except for one curious discrepancy: When Phase Four began -- without anyone's ordering it, and otherwise not according to plan -- the demons failed to follow up their advantage. None of them, in fact, had ever left the city; even when they had taken to the air, they had never crossed its perimeter, as though the moat represented some absolute boundary which ascended even into the sky. And at the end, there formed upon the master screen in the Denver cavern, superimposed upon the image of the burning, triumphant city, an immense Face. Baines knew it well; he had been expecting to see it again ever since the end of that Black Easter back in Positano. It was the crowned goat's-head McKnight gasped in horror for the very first time in Baines' memory; and down on the floor of the control center, several generals fainted outright at their consoles. Then McKnight was on his feet, screaming. "A Chink! I knew it all along! Hay, clear the circuits! Clear the circuits! Get him off the screen!" He rounded suddenly on Baines. "And you, you traitor! Your equipment failed us! You've sold us out! You were on their side all the time! Do you know into whose hands you have delivered your country? Do you? Do you?" His howling was only an irritant now, but Baines had left the strength to raise one mocking eyebrow questioningly. McKnight leveled a trembling finger at the screen. "Hay, Hay, clear the circuits! I'll have you court-martialed! Doesn't anyone understand but me? That is the insidious Doctor Fu Manchu!" The Sabbath Goat paid him no liced. Instead, it looked directly and steadily across the cavern into Haines' eyes. There was no mistaking the direction of that regard. Baines had no intention whatsoever of obeying that summons; but he found himself rising from his chair all the same. Foaming at the mouth, his hands clawing for the distant throat of the demon, McKnight plunged in a shower of splinters through the front of the booth and fell like a glass comet toward the lloor. XI B aines did not have rnuch time to experiment under the geas or compulsion which put satanevertheless found that it was highly selective in character. For example, the great prince had said nothing about requiring the presence of Jack Ginsberg, but when Baines, in a mixture of vindictiveness and a simple desire for human companionship, decided to try to bring him along, he found that he was not prevented from doing so. Ginsberg himself showed no resentment at being routed out of the bed of the blond runner possibly the succubus in Positano had spoiled for him the pleasures of human women, an outcome Jack himself had suspected in advance; but then, even without that supernatural congress. Jack's sexual life had always been that of a rather standard Don Juan, for whom every success turned sour. This, however, was one of those explanations which did not explain, and Baines had thought about it often before; for, as has already been observed, he liked to have his key men come equipped with handles he could grasp if the need arose. There were, the company psychologist had told him, at least three kinds of Don Juans: Freud's, whose career is a lifelong battle to hide from himself an incipient homosexuality; Fenau's, a Romantic in search of the Ideal Woman, for whom the Devil who comes for him is disgust with himself; and da Ponte's, a man born blind to the imminence of tomorrow, and hence incapable either of love or of repentance, even on the edge of the Pit. Well, but in the end, for Baine it did not matter which one was Jack; they all behaved alike. Jack did object powerfully when he was told that the journey to Dis would have to be made entirely on foot, but this was one of the areas in which Baines discovered that the geas left him no choice. Again he wondered why it should be so. Did the Sabbath Goat mean to rub in the fact that the Siege of Dis had been the last gasp of secular technology? Or had it instead meant to impress upon Baines that, willy-nilly, he was about to embark upon a pilgrimage? As for Jack, he still seemed to be afraid of his boss, or else still thought there was some main chance to be looked out for. Well, perhaps there was -- but Baines would not have bet any shares of stock on it. compound mushroom cloud go up while he was still in Flagstaff, a point to which several lucky hitchhikes and one even luckier long freight train ride had brought him. The surging growth of the cloud, the immense flares of light beyond the mountains to the west and the repeated earth shocks left him in little doubt about what was going on; ami as the cloud drifted toward hint, moving inexorabiy from west to east as the weather usually does, he knew that it mant death for him within a very few days -- as for how many thousamis of others? -- unless by some miracle he could find an unoccupied fallout shelter, or one whose present occutnts woutT shoot him on si. And why indeedgo on? The tombing showed without question tfert Barnes" self-assumed mission to McKnight at Denver had failed, and that there was now open warfare between humanity and the demons. The notion that Theron Ware could do anything now to change that was so grandiose as to be outright pathetic. More trivially, by the time that bombing was over, no matter how it affected the demons -- if at all -- the whole hundred-mile-plus stretch of Death Valley National Monument would have become instantly lethal for an unprotected man to enter. Yet Theron Ware could not yet quite believe that he was unprotected. He had come an immense distance by a traditional means which made it absolutely clear that black magic still worked; he had come almost an equal distance through a series of luckybreaks which he could not regard as the product of pure chance; and in his pocket, the ruby talisman continued to emit a faint warmth which was that of no ordinary stone, natural or synthetic. Like all proverbs. Ware knew, the old saw that the Devil looks after his own was only half true; nevertheless the feeling that he had come all this way on some errand continued to persist, together with a growing conviction that he had never in fact known what it was. He would find out when he arrived; in the meantime he was travehr on the Devil's business and would not die until it was coneluil. He would have liked to have stopped over in Flagstaff to inspect the famous observatory where Percival Lowell had produced such complicated maps of the wholly illusory canals of Mars and where Tombaugh had discovered Pluto -- and where in the sky did those planets stand now that their gods had clashed frontally? -- but under the circumstances he did not dare. He still had Grand Canyon and the Lake Mead area to cross; then, skirting northward around the Spring Mountains to the winter resort town of Death Valley, in which he hoped to be able to get some word about exactly where in the valley proper the perimeter of Nether Hell had surfaced. Now at last had come the time he had foreseen in the doomed farmhouse in Pennsylvania, when he would have to steal a car. He did not think that it would be difficult. come far and had equally good reasons to be quite certain that he would still have been in Italy, had it not been for some kind of supernatural intervention. He stood now at dusk in the shadow of the I #-foot Telescope Peak, looking eastward and downward to where the city of Dis flamed sullenly in the shadow of the valley of death itself against the stark backdrop of the Amargosa Range. And he was equally certain of supernatural protection. The valley had held the world's secondranking heat record of # F., but although it was immensely hotter than that down here now, Fr. Domenico felt only a mild glow, as though he had just stepped out of a bath. When he had first come down from the mountain he had been horrified to find the vitrified desert washing the foothills scattered with hundreds of strange, silent, misshapen gray forms, only vaguely human at first sight, which had proven to be stricken soldiers. He had tried to minister to them, but the attempt had proven hopeless: of the bodies in the few suits he was able to investigate, most were shrunken mummies, and the rest had apparently died even more horribly. He wondered what on Earth could have happened here. His elevation from the waters to the mountain had taken place in a mystic rapture without which, indeed, it would have been impossible, but which had taken him rather out of touch with mundane events. But whatever the answer, he had no choice but to press on. As he descended the last of the foothills, he saw on the floor of the valley, approaching him along what had once been the old watercourse and more recently a modern road, three tiny figures. Insofar as he could tell at this distance, they wore no more visible. Earthy protections against what the valley had become than he did himself. Yet they did not seem to be demons. Full of wonder, he scrambled down toward them; but when they met and he recognized them, he wondered only that he should have been at all arnazed. The meeting, he saw instantly now, had been foreordained. OW did you get here?" Baines demanded at once. It was not easy to determine of whom he was asking the question, but while Fr. Domenico wondered whether it was worth while trying to explain trance levitation, and if so how he would go about it, Theron Ware spoke. "I can't think of a more trivial question under the circumstances. Doctor Baines. We're here, that's the important thing -- and I perceive that we are all under some kind of magical aegis, or we would all be dead. This raises the question of what we hope to accomplish, that we should be so protected. Father, may I ask what your intentions are?" "Nothing prevents you from asking," Fr. Domenico said, "but you are the last human being in the world to whom I would give the answer." "Well, I'll tell you what my intentions are," said Baines. "My intentions are to stay in the bottommost levels of Denver and wait for this all to blow over, of it's ever going to. One thing you learn fast in the munitions business is that it's a very good idea to stay off battlefields. But my intentions have nothing to do with the matter. I was ordered to come here by the Sabbath Goat, and here I am." "Oh?" Ware said with interest. "He finally came for you?" "No, I have to come to him. He broke into a closed-circuit television transmission in Denver to tell me so. He didn't even mention Jack; I only brought him along for the company, since it didn't turn out to be forbidden." "And small thanks for that," Ginsberg said, though apparently without rancor. "If there's anything in the world that I hate, it's exercise. Vertical exercise, anyhow." "Have either of you two seen him at all?" Baines added. Fr. Domenico remained stubbornly silent but Ware said: somehow I doubt that I will, now. I seem to have put myself under the protection of another demon, although one subordinate to the Goat. Confusion of purpose is almost the natural state among demons, but in this instance I think it couldn't have happened without direct Satanic intent." "I was given my marching orders in the name of 'Our Father below,"' Baines said. "If he's interested in me, the chances are that he's even more interested in you, all right. But what did you think you were up to?" "Originally I thought I might try to intercede, or at least to plead for some sort of cease-fire -- as you were trying to do from the opposite end in Denver. But that's a dead letter now, and the result is that I have no more idea why I am here than you do. All I can say is that whatever the reason, I don't think there can be much hope in it." "While we live, there is always hope," Fr. Domenico said suddenly. The black magican pointed at the tremendous City, toward I which, volitionlessly, they had been continuing to walk all this time. "To be able to see that at all means that we have already passed far beyond mere futility. All the sins of the Leopard, the sins of incontinence, are behind us, which means that the gate is behind us too: the gate upon which it is carven in Dirghic: Lay Down All Hope, You That Go In By Me." "We are alive," Fr. Domencio said stolidly, "and I utterly deny and repudiate those sins." "You may not do so," Ware said, his voice gradually rising in intensity. "Look here. Father, this is all so mysterious, and the future looks so black, that it's ridiculous for us not to make available and to make use of any little scraps of information that we may have to share. The very symbolism of our presence here is simple, patcnt and ineluctable, and you as a Karcist in white magic should be (he first to see it. To take the circles of Upper Hell in order, Ginsberg here is almost a type creation of the lust-dominated man; I have sold my soul for unlimited knowledge, which in the last analysis is surely nothing more than an instance of gluttony; and you have only to look around this battlefield to see that Doctor Baines is an instrument of wrath par ecellence." "You have skipped the Fourth Circle," Fr. Domenico said, "with obvious didactic intent, but your arrogance is wasted upon me. I draw no moral from it." "Oh, indeed? Wasn't treasurefinding once the chiefest use of white magic? And isn't the monkish life -- withdrawal from the snares, affairs and duties of the world for the sake of one's own soul -- as plain a case of hoarding as one could ask for? It is in fact so egregious an example of that very sin that not even canonization remits it; I can tell you of my own certain knowledge that every single pillar-saint went instantly to Hell, and of even the simple monks, none escaped except those few like Matthew Paris and Roger of Wendover who also lead useful worldly lives. "And regardless of what your fatuous friends on Monte Albano believed, there is no efficacious dispensation for the practice of white magic, because there is no such thing as white magic. It is all black, black, black as the ace of shades, and you have imperiled your immortal soul by practicing it not even for your own benefit, but on commission for others; if that does not make you a spendthrift as well as a hoarder, what would you call it? Really, Father Domenico, I think the time has come for us to be frank with each other -- for you as surely as for the rest of us!" "Hear, hear," Baines said with rather a sick grin. After six or seven paces of silence Fr. Domenico said, "I am terribly afraid you are right. I came here in the hope of forcing the demons to admit that God still lives and I saw what I thought were indisputable signs of Divine sponsorship. Unless you are simply more subtle a casuist than any I have ever encountered before, even in print, it now appears that I had no right to think any such thing... which means that the real reason for my presence here is no less mysterious than that for yours. I cannot say that this increases my understanding any." "It establishes a common ignorance," said Ware. "And as far as your original assumption is concerned. Father, it suggests some basic uniformity of purpose which I must admit is certainly not characteristic of demons, whatever that may mean. But I think we shall not have long to wait for the answer, gentlemen. It appears that we have arrived." They all looked up. The colossal barbican of Dis loomed over them. "One thing is surely clear," Fr. Domenico whispered. "We have been making this journey all our lives." and no Virgil led them; but as they approached the great ward, the undamaged porticullis rose and the gates swung inward in massive silence. No demons mocked them, no Furies challenged them, no angel had to cross the Styx to bring them passage; they were admitted, simply and noncommitally Beyond the barbican, they found the citadel transformed. The Nether Hell of diuturnal torture, which had withstood the bombardment of Man without damage to so much as a twig in the Wood of the Suicides, was gone entirely. Perhaps in some sense it had never been there at all, but was still located where it had always been, in Eternity, not on Earth; a place still reserved for the dead. For these four still-living men, it had vanished. In its place, there stood a clean, well-lighted city like an illustration from some Utopian romance; it looked, in fact, like a cross between the city of the future in the old film Things to Come and a full automated machine shop. It screamed, hammered and roared like a machine shop as well The grossly misshapen, semibestial forms of the demons had also vanished. The metropolis instead appeared to be peopled now chiefly by human beings, although their appearance could scarcely be described as normal. Male and female alike, they were strikingly beautiful; but their beauty swiftly became eloying, for except for sexual characteristics they were completely identical, as though they were all members of the same clone -- one which had been genetically selected out to produce creatures modeled after the statuary fronting public buildings, or the souls in the Dante illustrations of Gustav Dofe. Both sexes wore identical skirted tabards made of some gray material which looked like papiermache, across the breasts of which long numbers had been woven in metallically glittering script A second and much less numerous group wore a different uniform, vaguely military in cast, an impression reinforced by the fact that these were mostly to be seen standing stiffly at street intersections. Heroic in mold though the majority were, the minority were even more statuesque, and their common Face was evenly pleasant but stern, like that of an idealized father The others wore no expression at all, unless their very expressionlessness was a reflection of acute boredom -- which would not have been surprising, for no one of this class seemed to have anything to do. The work, of the metropolis, which seemed to be exclusively that of producing that continual, colossal din, went on behind the blank facades apparently without need of any sentient tending or intervention. They never spoke. As the four pilgrims moved onward toward the center of the city, they passed frequent exhibitions of open, public sexuality, more often than not in groups; at first lack Ginsberg regarded these with ihe liveliest interest, but it soon faded as it became apparent that even this was bored and pleasureless. There were no children; and no animals hesitated, when the two magicians had discovered that with the transformation they could no longer trust to Dante to show them the way, and Baines' memory of the aerial photographs had become similarly useless. They had proceeded more or less by instinct toward the center of the din. After a while, however, they found that they had been silently joined by four of the policing demons, though whether they were being led or herded never did become clear. The grimly ambiguous escort heightened the impression of a guided tour of some late Nineteenth Century world-of-tomorrow which was to include awe-inspiring visits to the balloon works, the creches, the giant telegraph center and the palace of fold arts, only to wind up in a corrective discipline hospital for the antisocial. It was as though they were being given a preview of what the future of humanity would be like under demonic rule not only wholly unpredictable as a foretaste, but in content as well, as if the demons were trying to put the best possible face on the matter. In so doing, they had ingeniously embodied in their citadel nothing worse than a summary and epitomization of what pre-Apocalyptic, post-industrial Man had been systematically creating for himself. St. Augustine, Goethe and Milton all had observed that the Devil, by constantly seeking evil, always did good, but here was an inversion of that happy fault: A demonstration that demons are at their worst when doing their best. Many of Baines' most lucrative ideas for weaponry had been stolen bodily, through the intermediary of the Mamaroneck Research Institute, from the unpaid imaginations of science-fiction writers, and it was he who first gave voice to the thought: "I always thought it'd be hell to actually have to live in a place like this," he shouted. "And now I know it." Nobody answered him; but it was more than possible that this was because nobody had heard him. But only the veritable Hell is forever. After some unknown but finite time, they found themselves passing between the Doric columns and under the golden architrave of that high capitol which is called Pandemonium, and the brazen doors folded open for them. Inside, the clamor was muffled to a veiled and hollow booming, for the vast jousting-field that was this hall had been made to hold the swarming audience for a panel of a thousand, but there was no one in it now besides themselves and the demon soldiers but one solitary, distant, intolerable star: not that subsidiary triumvir bath Goat who had promised himself to them, and they to him, on Black Easter morn; but that archetypical dropout, the Lie that knows no End, the primeval Parent-sponsored Rebel, the Eternal Enemy, the Great Nothing itself There was, of course, no more Death Valley sunlight here and the effect of an implacably ultramodern city with its artificial gas glow glare was also gone. But the darkness was not quite complete. A few cressets hung blazing high in midair, so few that their light was spread evenly throughout the great arch of the ceiling, like the artificial sky of a planetarium dome simulating that moment between dusk and full night when only Lucifer is bright enough to be visible. Toward that glow they moved, and as they moved, it grew But the creature, they saw at last, was not the light, which shone instead upon him. The fallen cherub below it was still very nearly the same immense, brooding, cruelly deformed angelic image that Dante had seen and Milton imagined: triple-faced in yellow, red and black, bat-winged, shagpelted, and so huge that the floor of the great hall cut him off at the breast -- he must have measured five hundred yards from crown to hoof. Like the eyes, the wings were six, but they no longer beat frenziedly to stir the three winds that froze Cocytus; nor now did the six eyes weep. Instead, each of the faces -- the Semitic Ignorance, the Japhetic Hatred, the Hamitic Impotence -- was frozen in an expression of despair too absolute for further grief The pilgrims saw these things, but only with half an eye, for their attention was focused instead upon the light which both revealed and j shadowed them: The terrible crowned head of the Worm was surmounted by a halo. T he demonic guards had not followed them in, and the great Figure was motionless and uttered no orders; but in that hollowly roaring silence the pilgrims felt compelled to speak. They looked at each other almost shyly, like school children brought to be introduced to some king or president, each wanting to be bold enough to draw attention himself, but waiting for someone else to break the ice. Again nothing was said, but somehow agreement was arrived at: Fr. Domenico should speak first. Looking aloft, but not quite into those awful countenances, the white monk said, "Father of Lies, I thought it was my mission to come here and compel thee to speak the truth. I arrived as if by miracle, or borne by faith; and in my journeyings saw many evidences that the rule of Hell on Earth is not complete. Nor has that Goat your prince yet come for me, or for my...colleagues here, despite his threat and promise. Then I also saw the election of your demon Pope, the very with, as unnecessary to a victorious demonry. I concluded then that God was not dead after all, and someone should come into thy city to assert His continuing authority. "I stand before thee impotent my very crucifix was shattered in my hands on Black Easter morning -- but nevertheless I charge thee and demand that thou shalt state thy limitations and abide the course to which they hold thee." There was no answer. After a long wait made it clear that there was not going to be, Theron Ware said next: "Master, thou knowest me well, I think: I am the last black magician in the world and the most potent ever to practice that high art. I have seen signs and wonders much resembling those mentioned by Father Domenico but draw from them rather different conclusions. Instead, it seems to me that the final conflict with Michael and all his host cannot be over yet -- despite the obvious fact that thou hast won vast advantages already. And if this is true, then it is perhaps an error for thee to make war upon mankind, or for them to make war on thee, with the greater issue still in doubt. Since thou are still granting some of us some favors of magic, there must still exist some aid which we might give thee. Hence I came here to find out what that aid might be, and to proffer it, if it were within my powers." No answer. Baines said sullenly, "I came because I was ordered. But since I'm here, I may as well offer my opinion in the matter, which is much like Ware's. I tried to persuade the human generals not to attack the city, but I failed. Now that they've seen that it can't be attacked and I'm sure they noticed that you didn't wipe out all of their forces when you had the chance I might have better luck. At least I'll try again, if it's of any use to you. "I can't imagine any way we could help you carry the war to Heaven, since we were no good against your own local fortress. And besides, I prefer to remain neutral. But getting our generals off your back might relieve you of a nuisance, if you've got more serious business still afoot. If that's not good enough, don't blame me. I didn't come here of my own free will." The terrible silence persisted, until at last even Jack Ginsberg was forced to speak. "If you're waiting for me, I have no suggestions," he said. "I guess I'm grateful for past favors too, but I don't understand what's going on and I didn't want to get involved. I was only doing my job, but as far as my private life goes. I'd just as soon be left to work it out by myself from now on. As far as I'm concerned, it's nobody's business but my own." Now at last, the great wings stirred slightly; and then, the three faces spoke. There was no audible voice, but as the vast lips moved, the words formed in their minds, like sparks crawling along logs in a dying fire. O yee of little faith, the Wbrm set on, Yee whose coming fame had bodied forth A hope archchemic even to this Deep That Wee should be amerced of golden Throne, The which to Us a rack is, by thine alchymie. Is this thy sovran Reason? this the draff, A re these sollicitations all the sum A nd sorrie Substance of thine high renoune? Art thou accomplisht to so mean an end After such journey ings of flame and dole As once strook doun Heav'n's angels? Say it so. In prosie speach or numerous prosodie. Wee will not be deceav'd; so much the rather Shall Wee see yee rased from off the bord 'Twixt Hell and Heav'n, as the fearful mariner, Ingled by the wave 'mongst spume and rock. Sees craft and hope alike go all to ruin. Yet yields up not his soul, than Wee shall yield The last, supreme endeavour of this fearfull Jarr. Yet how to body forth to thy blind eyes. Who have not poets' blind nesse, or the night Shed by black suns, 'thought which to tell the tale Of Earth its occupation by the demon breed Is sole remaining hearth, but to begin? O 'suaging Night, console Mee now! and hold My Demy-godhood but a little while A beyanc'dfrom its death in Godhood's dawn! O yee of little faith. Wee tell thee this: Indeed our God is dead; or dead to us. But in some depth of measure beyond grasp Remains His principle, as doth the sight Of drowsy horoscoper, much bemus'd By vastnesses celestial and horrid To his tinie system, when he looks first Through the optic glass at double stars. Some residuum apprehend; so do we now. O happie matrix! for there is naught else That all are left with. It in this inheres. That Good is independent, but the bad Cannot alone survive; the evil Deed # Doth need the Holie Light to lend it Sense A nd apprehension; for the Good is free To act or not, while evill hath been will'd Insensate and compulsive to bring Good Still greater highths unto, as climber see'th. From toil and suff ring to th' uttermost Alp, Best th' unattainable islands of the skye. In this yee Sinners are in harmonie, A ntient and grand, though meanlie did yee move A bout your severall ends. Since first this subject. Thou, thaumaturgist Blacke, and thou, () merchant peccant to the deaths of fellowe men. Contrived in evill all thy predecessors human. But save Judas I was wont to gnaw before, All mankind in a night's Abysse Only for perverse aesthetick Joye And Thrill of Masterie, there then ensu'd That universall Warr in which the victorie Hath fain to Hellish host, so Wee rejoyc'd; Yet hold! for once releas'd from Paynes Decreed to be forever, all our Band Of demons foul, who once were angels bright Conceiv'd in simpler time and ever since Entomb'd amidst the horrors of the Pit, Did find the world of men so much more foul E'en than in the fabulous reign of witches That all bewilder'd fell they and amazed. Yet after hastie consult, they set to. To preach and practise evill with all pow'r. Adhering to grounded rules long understood, A Greshamite oeconomium. But eftsoons That vacuous space where once Eternall Good Had dwelt demanded to be filled. Though God Be dead. His Throne remains. And so below As 'twas above, last shall be first, and Wee, Who by the Essenes' rule are qualified Beyond all remaining others, must become In all protesting agonie -- the chief Of powers for Good in all the Universe Uncircumscribed; but let yee not forget, A Iready Good compared to such as thee. Whose evill remains will'd! And as for Us, What doth it matter what Wee most desire? While chained in the Pit, Wee were condemn'd To be eternall, but paroU'd to Earth Were once more caught by Change; and how Could Wickednesse Incorporeal grow still worse? A nd so, behold! Wee are a God. But not Perhaps The God. Wee do not know the end. Perhaps indeed Jehovah is not dead. But mere retir'd, withdrawn or otherwise Contracted hath, as Zohar subtle saith. His Essence Infinite; and. Epicurean, waits The outcome vast with vast indifference. Yet natheless His universe requires That all things changing must tend t' ward His state. If, then. Wee must proclaim His Role historic Abandon'd in Deific suicide. Why this felo de Se except to force That part of Man -- who fail'd it out of hand? Now, as Wegtsought to be in the Beginning, SA TA N is God; and in Mine agonie More just a God and a wrathfuller by far Than He Who thunder'd down on Israel! Yet not for ever, though our rule will seem For ever. Man. O Man, I beg of you. Take, O take from mee this Cup away!  cannot bear it. You, and onely you. You alone, alone can God become. As always He intended. This downfall Our mutual Armageddon here below Is punishment dire enough, but for your Kinde A worse awaits; for you must rear yourselves As ready for the Resurrection. I Have slammed that door behind; yours is to come. On that far future Day, I shall be there. The burning Keys to put into your hands. This deepest, last and bitterest of all My fell damnations: That at last I know I never wanted to be God at all; And so, by winning all. All have I lost. (The great hall of Pandemonium dissolves, and with it the Citadel of Dis, leaving the four men standing in a modern road in the midst of the small town of Bad water. It is early morning in the desert, and still cold. All traces of the recent battle also have vanished. (The four look at each other, with gradually growing wonder, as though each were seeing the others for the first time. Each one finally starts a sentence, but is unable to complete it): ( They look about, noting the disappearance of the battlefield. After all else that has happened, they do not question this. T here is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier. There is a secret society of three men and four women that controls all the fashions of the world. The details of this are known to all who are in the fashion. And I am not. There is a secret society of nineteen men that is behind all the fascist organizations in the world. The secret name of this society is Glomerule. There is a secret society of thirteen persons known as the Elders of Edom that controls all the secret sources of the world. That the sources have become muddy is of concern to them. There is a secret society of only four persons that manufactures all the jokes of the world. One of these persons is unfunny and he is responsible for all the unfunny jokes. There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind all Bolshevik and atheist societies of the world. The devil himself is a member of this society, and he works tirelessly to become a principal member. The secret name of this society is Ocean. There are related secret societies known as The Path of the Serpent (all its members have the inner eyelid of snakes), The Darkbearers, the Seeing Eye, Imperium, The Golden Mask and the City. Above most of these in a queer network there is a society that controls the attitudes and dispositions of the world -- and the name of it is Crocodile. The Crocodile is insatiable: it eats persons and nations alive. And the Crocodile is very old, # years old by one account, # years old if you use the short chronology. There are subsecret societies within the Crocodile: the Cocked Eye, the Cryptic Cootie and others. Powerful among these is a society of three hundred and ninetynine persons that manufactures all the catchwords and slogans of the world. This subsociety is not completely secret since several of the members are mouthy: the code name of this apparatus is the Crocodile's Mouth. Chesterton said that Mankind itself was a secret society. Whether it would be better or worse if the secret should ever come out he did not say. And finally there was -- for a short disruptive moment -- a secret society of three persons that controlled all. All what? Bear with us. That is what this account is about. into the office of Mr. James Danfor your own good, do not call him Jim Dandy; that is a familiarity he will not abide.) "This is the problem, John," Mr. Dandi stated piercingly, "and we may as well put it into words. After all, putting things into words and pictures is our way of working powerful salivators of the Crocodile's Mouth.) "We create images and attitudes, Mr. Dandi." "That is correct, John," Mr. Dandi said. "Let us never forget it. Now something has gone wrong. There is a shadowy attack on us that may well be the most damaging thing since the old transgression of Spirochaete himself. Why has something gone wrong with our operation, John?" "Sir, I don't know." "Well then, what has gone wrong?" "What has gone wrong, Mr. Dandi, is that it isn't working the way it should. We are caught on our own catchwords, we are slaughtered by our own slogans. There are boomerangs whizzing about our ears from every angle. None of it goes over the way it is supposed to. It all twists wrong for us." "Well, what is causing this? Why are our effects being nullified?" "Sir, I believe that somebody else is also busy creating images and attitudes. Our catechesis states that this is impossible since we are the only group permitted in the field. Nevertheless, I am sure that someone else is building these things against us. It even seems that they are more powerful than we are -- and they are unknown." "They cannot be more powerful than we are -- and they must not remain unknown to us." Mr. Dandi's words stabbed. "Find out who they are, John." "How?" "If I knew how, John, I would be working for you, not you working for me. Your job is to do things. Mine is the much more difficult one of telling you to do them. Find out, John." on the problem. He considered whether it was a linear, a set or a group problem. If it were a linear problem he should have been able to solve it by himself -- and he couldn't. If it were a set problem', then it couldn't be solved at all. Of necessity he classified it as a group problem and he assembled a group to solve it. This was easy at ent than anybody. The group that John Candor assembled was made up of August Crayfish, Sterling Groshawk, Maurice Cree, Nancy Peters, Tony Rover, Morgan Aye, and Betty McCraken. Tell the truth, would you be able to gather so talented a group in your own organization? "My good people," John Candor said, "as we all know, something has gone very wrong with our effects. It must be righted. Thoughts, please, thoughts!" "We inflate a person or subject and he bursts on us," August gave his thought. "Are we using the wrong gas?" "We launch a phrase and it turns into a joke," Sterling complained. "Yet we have not slighted the check-off; it has always been examined from every angle to be sure that it doesn't have a joker context. But something goes wrong." "We build an attitude carefully from the ground up," Maurice stated. "Then our firm ground turns boggy and the thing tilts and begins to sink." "Our 'Fruitful Misunderstandings,' the most subtle and effective of our current devices, are beginning to bear sour fruit," Nancy said. "We set ourselves to cut a man down and our daggers turn to rubber," Tony Rover moaned. (Oh, were there ever sadder words? 'Our daggers have turned to rubber.) "Things have become so shaky that we're not sure whether we are talking about free or closed variables," Morgan gave his thought. "How can my own loving mother make such atrocious sandwiches?" Betty McCracken munched distastefully. Betty, who was underpaid, was a brown-sack girl who brought her own lunch. "This is worse than usual." She chewed on. "The only thing to do with it is feed it to the computer." She fed it to the computer which ate it with evident pleasure. "Seven persons, seven thoughts," John Candor mused. "Seven persons, si, thoughts," Nancy Peters spat bitterly. "Betty, as usual, has contributed nothing." "Only the first stage of the answer," John Candor said. "She said 'The only thing to do with it is to feed it to the computer.' Feed the problem to the computer, folks." They fed the problem to the computer by pieces and by wholes. The machine was familiar with their lingos and procedures. It was acquainted with the Non-Valid Context Problems of Morgan Aye and with the Hollow Shell I'erson Puzzles of Tony Rover. It knew the Pervading Fnvironment Ploy of Maurice Cree. It knew what trickwork to operate within. Again and again the machine asked for various kinds of supplementary exterior data. "Leave me with it," the machine finally issued. "Assemble here again in sixty days, or hours -- " "No, we want the answers right now," John Candor insisted, "within sixty seconds." "The second is possibly the interval I was thinking of," the machine issued. "What's time to a tin can anyhow?" It ground its data trains for a full minute. "Well?" John Candor asked. "Somehow I get the number three," the machine issued. "Three what, machine?" "Three persons," the machine issued. "They are unknowingly linked together to manufacture attitudes. They are without program or purpose or organization or remuneration or basic or malice." "Nobody is without malice," August Crayfish insisted in a startled way. "They must be totally alien forms then. How do they manage their effects?" "One with a gesture, one with a grimace, one with an intonation," the machine issued. "Where are they?" John Candor demanded. "All comparatively near." The machine drew three circles on the city map. "Lach is to be found in his ow n circle most of the time." "Their names?" John Candor asked and the machine wrote the name of each in the proper circle. "Do you have anything on their appearances?" Sterling Groshawk inquired and the machine manufactured three kymograph pictures of the targets. "Have you their addresses or identifying numbers?" Maurice Cree asked. "No. I think it's remarkable of me that I was able to come up with this much," the machine issued. "We can find them," Betty McCracken said. "We can most likely find them in the phone book." "What worries me is that there's no malice in them," John Candor worried. "Without malice, there's no handle to get hold of a thing. The Disestablishment has been firmly established for these several hundred years and we hold it to be privileged. It must not be upset by these three randoms. We will do what we must do." mighty man. One does not make the primordial gestures out of weak body and hands. He looked like a steel worker -- or anyhow like a worker at one of the powerful trades. His torso was like a barrel but more noble than ordinary barrels. His arms and hands were hardly to be believed. His neck was for the bulls, his head was as big as a thirteen gallon firkin, his eyeballs were the size of ducks' eggs and the hair on his chest and throat was that heavy black wire-grass that defies steel plowshares. His voice -- well he didn't have much of a voice -- it wasn't as mighty as the rest of him. And he didn't really work at one of the powerful trades. He was a zipper repairman at the Jiffy Nifty Dry Cleaners. cated Mike Zhestovitch in the Blind Bobbin Bar which (if you recall the way that block lies) is just across that short jog-alley from the Jiffy Nifty. And August recognized big Mike at once. But how did big Mike get his effects? "The Cardinals should take the Colts today," a serious man there was saying. "The Cardinals" Mike Zhestovitch began in the voice that was less noble than the rest of him, but he didn't finish the sentence. As a matter of fact, big Mike had never finished a sentence in all his life. Instead he made the gesture with his mighty hands and body. Words cannot describe the gesture but it was something like balling up an idea or opinion in the giant hands and throwing it away, utterly away, over the very edge of contempt. The Cardinals, of course, did not take the Colts that day. For a moment it was doubtful whether the Cardinals would survive at all. From the corner of the eye, red feathers could be seen drifting away in the air. August Crayfish carefully waited a moment and watched. A man walked out of the Blind Robbin and talked to another man in that little jog-alley. From their seriousness it was certain that they were talking baseball. "The Cardinals -- " the first man said after a moment, and he also made the gesture. And seconds later a man playing eight-ball in Ihe back of the Blind Bobbin did the same thing. August was sure then. Mike Zhestovitch not only could shrivel anything with the gesture, but the gesture as he used it was highly epidemic. It would spread, according to Schoeffler's Law of Dispersal, through the city in short minutes, through the world in short hours. And no opinion could stand against its disfavor. Mike Zhestovitch could wreck images and attitudes -- and possibly he could also create them. "Do you work alone?" August Crayfish asked. "No. The rip-fix and the buttonsew girls work in the same cubbyhole," Mike said with his curiously small voice. "Do you know a Mary Smorfia?" August asked. "I don't, no," Mike said, a certain comprehension coming into his ducks'-egg-sized eyes. "And you are glad that I don't? Then I will. I'll find out who she is. I see it now that you are a wrong guy and she is a right girl." Then August Crayfish spoke the slogan that would be unveiled to the ears of the world that very night, a wonderfully slippery slogan that had cost a hundred thousand dollars to construct. It should have warned Mike Zhestovitch away from his mad resistance. Mike Zhestovitch made the gesture, and the slogan was in ruins. And somewhere the Secret Crocodile lashed its tail in displeasure. "Do you want to make a lot of money?" August Crayfish whispered after a long reevaluation pause. "Money -- from such as you -- " Big Mike didn't finish the sentence, he never did. But he made the gesture. The idea of a lot of money shriveled. And August Crayfish shriveled so small that he could not climb over the threshold of the Blind Bobbin on the way out and had to be aided over it by the shod -- toe of a kind man. (This last statement is a literal exaggeration but it is the right direction.) cated Mary Smorfia in the King-Pin Bowling Alley, where she was a hamburger waitress and a beer buster. Mary was small, dark, unpretty (except for her high-frequency eyes and the beautiful gash across her face that was her mouth), lively, smart, busy, a member of that aberrant variety of the human race that was called Italian. "Snorting Summer should take the Academy Award," one nice guzzling lady at the counter was saying to another, "and Clover Elysee is the shoeless shoo-in for best actress of the year." And Mary Smorfia made the grimace. Ah, it was mostly done with the beautifully large mouth and yet every part of her entered into it, from the blue lights in her hair to her crinkly toes. It was a devastating, all-destroying grimace. It gobbled up, it nullified and it made itself felt to a great distance. The nice guzzling lady had not even been looking toward Mary Smorfia but she felt the grimace like a soul shock, and she herself did the grimace with a wonderful distortion of the features that weren't made for it. And the grimace swept everything like quick contagion or prairie fire. Snorting Summer -- gah! Clover Elysee -- guggling gah! Those things were finished forever, beyond laughter, below derision. And Nancy Peters of carefully, for the original words of the nice guzzling lady were the lected to be echoed a hundred million times whenever the awards were thought of. "Do you work alone?" Nancy Peters asked Mary Smorfia. "Kid, I am so fast they don't need anyone else on this shift. I'm like silly lightning." "Did you ever think of becoming an actress, Mary?" Nancy asked in honey-tones. "Oh, I made a commercial once," Mary said out of her curly gash-mouth (she had to be kidding; she couldn't really have a mouth that looked like that). "I don't know whether I sold much of my guy's soap but I bet I got a lot of people off that Brand X. Ashes it was, worse even, after I monkeyfaced it. They say I'm a natural -- but once is enough." "Do you know a Mike Zhestovitch or a Clivendon Surrey?" Nancy asked. "I don't think so," Mary said. "What league do they bowl in? I bet I will like them both, though, and I will remember their names and find them." Nancy Peters was nervous. She felt that the annihilating grimace was about to strike again on Mary's lightning-gash mouth. But it was time for the test of strength. Nancy spoke the new slogan that had been selected for presentation to the world that very night, a wonderfully convincing and powerful slogan that should bring this random Mary Smorfia to heel if anything could. And she spoke it with all the absolute expertise of the Crocodile's Mouth behind her. The Grimace! And the slogan was destroyed forever. And (grimacing horror turned inward) Nancy caught the contagion and was doing the grimace herself. She was quite unable to get the thing off her face. Sheer humiliation overwhelmed the Nancy person, who had suddenly been made small. And somewhere the Secret Crocodile lashed its tail in displeasure and unease. "Do you want to make twenty thousand dollars, Mary?" Nancy asked after she had returned from the jane where she had daubed her flushed face and cooled her flustered body. "Twenty thousand dollars isn't very much," Mary Smorfia sounded  out of her panoramic mouth. "I make eighty-eight fifty now after everything. I could make a lot more if I wanted to go along with the cruds." "Twenty thousand dollars is very much more," Nancy Peters said enticingly. "It is very much more cruddy, kid." Mary Smorfia grimaced. Grimaced! Not again! Nancy Peters fled in deflated panic. She felt herself dishonored forever. Well, do you think it is all water-melon pickles and pepper relish, this unilaterally creating all the images and attitudes for the whole world? It isn't. It is a detailed and devious thing and the privileged Disestablishment had been building it for centuries. (The Establishment itself had been no more than a figure of speech for most of those centuries, a few clinging bits of bark; the heart of the tree had long been possessed by the privileged Disestablishment.) Three quick random persons could not be permitted to nullify words from the Mouth itself. M organ aye of abnc located Clivendon Surrey in Speedsters' Cafe. Clivendon was a lank and fair-haired man with a sort of weariness about him, a' worldliness that had to be generations old. He had the superior brow and the thoroughbred nose that isn't grown in short centuries. He had the voice, the intonation, the touch of Groton, the touch of Balliol, the strong touch of other institutions even more august. It was a marvelous voice, at least the intonation of it. Clivendon's employer once said that he didn't believe that Clivendon ever spoke in words, at least not in any words that he was ever able to understand. The intonation was really a snort, a sort of neigh, but it carried the cresting contempt of the ages in its tone. And it was contagious. Clivendon was really of Swedish extraction and had come off a farm near Pottersville. He had developed that intonation for a role in a high-school play. He had liked it and he had kept it. Clivendon was a motorcycle mechanic at Downhillers' Garage. "Do you work alone?" Morgan Aye asked Clivendon. "Naeu. You work alone and you got to work. You work with a bunch and you can slip out from it," Clivendon intoned. Yes, he talked in words and the words could be mostly understood. But the towering intonation was the thing, the world-wilting contempt of the tone. This man was a natural and Morgan felt himself a foot shorter in the very presence of that tone. "Do you know a Mike Zhestovitch or a Mary Smorfia?" Morgan asked fearfully. "That's a funny thing." The tone cut through car-wax and the soft spots of the spleen. "I had never heard of them but Mary Smorfia called me up not thirty minutes ago and said that she wanted both of us to meet Mike. So I'll meet them in about twenty minutes, as soon as the clock there says that I'm supposed to be off work at Downhillers' Garage." "Don't meet them!" Morgan eried out violently. "That might be the closing of the link, the setting up of a league. It might be an affront to the Mouth itself." The tone, the neigh, the snort, the sharp edge of a wordless int # iation sent Morgan reeling back. And there were echoes of it throughout Speedsters' Cafe and in the streets outside. The tone was as contagious as it was cutting. Morgan started to speak the newest selected slogan from the Mouth -- and he stopped short. He was afraid of the test of strength. Two very expensive slogans had already been shattered today by these randoms. 'No malice in the three,' the computer had said and: 'without malice, there's no handle to get hold of a thing,' John Candor had stated. But somewhere in that mountainous and contagious contempt of tone that belonged to Clivendon Surrey had to be some malice. So Morgan Aye reached for what had always been the ultimate weapon of the Crocodile's Mouth. It always workedit always worked if any malice at all existed in the object. "How would you like to make five thousand dollars a week?" he whispered to Clivendon. "What garage pays that much?" Clivendon asked in honest wonder. "I'mnot that good a motorcycle mechanic." "Five thousand dollars a week gan tempted. "We could use you in so many ways that marvelous scorn to cut down any man we wished! You could lend the intonations of your voice' to our The neigh was like a thousand sea stallions breaking up from the depths. The snort was one that crumbles cliffs at the ends of the earth. Morgan Aye had gone ghastly white and his ears were bleeding from the transgression of that cutting sound. There were even some words in Clivendon's sounding"Why, then I'd be one of the birds that picks the shreds of flesh from between the teeth of the monster." Blinding hooting contempt in the tone and Morgan .Aye was in the street and running from it. But the echoes of that intonation were everywhere in that part of town, soon to be all over the town, all over the world. It was an epidemic of snorting at the Crocodile's Mouth itself. Fools! Did they know that this was but one step from snorting at the very Crocodile? T he ring had closed. The informal league had formed now. The three randoms had met and united. The Mouth was affronted. Worse than that, all the outpour of the Mouth was nullified. The whole world was rejecting the catchwords that came from the Mouth, was laughing at them, was throwing them away with the uttermost gesture, was monkey-facing them, was snorting them down, was casting them out with bottomless contempt. This was the short reign of the secret society of three, who did not know that they were secret. But in their day they closed the Mouth down completely. It was filled with mud and swamp reeds and rotting flesh. The Secret Crocodile was lashing its tail with acute displeasure now. The Crocodile's Mouth had become quite nervous. And what of the little birds that fly in and out of that mouth, that preen the teeth and glean scraps of flesh and slogans and catchwords there? The birds were in quite an unhappy flutter. "There is open conspiracy against us by a secret society of three persons," Mr. James Dandi was saying, "and alt the world abominates a secret society. We have this thing to do this day -- to cripple it forever in its strength. Otherwise we will be cast out and broken as ineffectual instruments and the Crocodile will bring in strong persons from the Cocked Eye or the Cryptic Cootie to take our places. Surely we are not without resources. What is the logical follow-up to the Fruitful Misunderstanding?" "The Purposive Accident," John Candor said immediately. "Take care of it, John," Mr. James Dandi said. "Remember, though, that he whose teeth we preen is the very bowels of compassion. I believe this is the salient thing in the world in our day. the Compassion of the Crocodile." "Take care of it, people," John Candor said to his seven talented ones, "remembering always that the Crocodile is the very belly of compassion." "Take care of it," the seven said to the computer, "always within the context of the jaws of compassion." The computer programed a Purposive Accident to happen and manufactured such props as were needed. And the Purposive Accident was very well programmed. There was no great amount of blood poured out. No persons were killed except several uninvolved bystanders. The secret three were left alive and ambulant and scathed only at their points of strength. It happened in the block between the Blind Bobbin Bar and Speedsters' Cafe when all three members of the secret society happened to be walking together. The papers called it a bomb; they call everything a bomb that goes off like that. It was really a highly sophisticated homing device with a tripartite programing and it carried out its tripartite mission. All three randoms, former members of the short-lived secret society, are well and working again. Mike Zhestovitch is no longer a zipper repair man (it takes two talented hands to fix those zippers), but he still works at the Jiffy Nifty Dry Cleaners. He runs one of those big pressers now which he can easily do with his powerful and undamaged left hand and his prosthetic right hand. But without his old right hand he can no longer make the contagious primordial gesture that once dumbfounded the Mouth and all its words. You just cannot make the big gesture with a false hand. Mary Smorfia still works at the King-Pin Bowling Alley as hamburger waitress and beer buster. She is still small, dark, unpretty (except for her high-frequency eyes), lively, smart, and Italian. Her mouth is still a gash across her face, but now it is twice as great a gash as it used to be, and it no longer has its curled liveliness. Its mobility is all gone, it will no longer express the inexpressible, will no longer shatter a phrase or an attitude. Mary Smorfia is as she always was, except that now she is incapable of the famous grimace. Clivendon Surrey is again a motorcycle mechanic at Downhiller's Garage and again he spends most of his time in Speedsters' Cafe. His vocal cords are gone, of course, but he gets by: he is able to speak with a throat microphone. But the famous intonation, the neigh, the destroying snort are all impossible for him. The trouble is over with. Now again there is only one organization in the world to create the images and attitudes of the world. This insures that only the standard attitudes of the Disestablishment shall prevail. got one group. There is another secret society in the world composed of the good guys and good gals. It has no name that we have ever heard except just the Good Guys and Good Gals. At the moment this society controls nothing at all in the world. It stirs a little, though. It may move. It may collide, someday, even with the Secret Crocodile itself.  Adam, the primal particle on earth. Took out his rib and found, O angels, beware! The universe is Made of A dam 's matter. Naturally, if there 's a space outside our sky we long to fondle or penetrate it. As we shuffled once through deserts, or hitched our wagons through mountain passes So these days we saddle up our rockets and roar off to Assignations with the same old loves. sounding dolphins know the depths of UAvigation , their ears catch all the echoes, hanging thermoplanes, they read those aura! shadows. Quite a lot of energy passes Snder the galactic bridge (As far as man is concerned) before Star clusters can radio hello And goodbye to each other. Retroactive greetings may be all we get. Light comes and goes so naturally Amplification of shapes is unnoticed. Stimulated by the morning's recurrent Emission of faces and trees, our bodies' Radiation of consciousness occurs like prayer. Oon't Negate Adam play "eyes from the violent colors of the parasol. "It's clean, all right, I even tested for sugar." He smiled a quiet smile at his quiet joke. "Then we're all in agreement that it's a plain, rather ordinary umbrella," said the chairman, "aside from its somewhat unique coloring." "Within the observational limitations of our tests," amended Dr. Werthmann. "Can the applesauce," said Dr. Longstead. "It's a common bumbershoot. Period." The old physicist jammed his ragged cigar back into his mouth and slapped the table top with a wrinkled hand. A light knock came at the door and the chairman rose from the long hardwood table. At his invitation a modishly attired, middleaged woman entered the room and seated herself at the head of the table. Introductions were offered. Mrs. Smith smiled at the chairman and the Doctors Wang, Werthman, Longstead, Carpenter, and Brown. After a minimal exchange of small talk Mrs. Smith answered several pertinent questions. She explained that she had always had a parlor interest in extrasensory phenomena and that she had never really noted any psychic abilities of her own prior to her experiences with the psychedelic parasol. The parasol had been bought from a Greenwich Village stand. It had been a very sunny day and she had nearly fainted during a mass protest rally at Washington Sqbare. No, she couldn't remember what the protest was against but the event had occurred about two months ago and the parasol had probably saved her from sunstroke. And, yes, she could control the parasol's movements with the power of her mind. She had, in fact, done so on at least a hundred separate occasions. Following a careful search of Mrs. Smith's person, which she dure, the gathering turned its attention to the center of the table. The bottom of the open parasol was loosely fitted into a clear glass bottle. The bottle had been personally selected by Dr. Wang from his own laboratory. "It's all a question of my will," said Mrs. Smith. "When I focus my total attention on it and insist that it should spin, it spins." She closed her eyes, resting them for a moment. "Lately I've felt an ever growing rapport with it." When she was ready for the demonstration she asked the observers for complete quiet and sat bolt upright upon her chair. She began to stare at the parasol. After a minute or two perspiration began to trickle from her forehead. Some of the sweat rolled to the edges of her eyes but her stare indicated obliviousness to any discomfort. Suddenly, with an eerie squeak I'rom the bottle's lip, the parasol began to spin its bizarre sunshade. There were tiny momentary sounds from the observers but the squeak from the bottle was the loudest sound within the room. For several minutes the spellbound men watched the slowly twirling parasol. The parasol stopped spinning and the scientists turned their eyes to Mrs. Smith. Still staring at the parasol, she moved her lips in a slight whisper. "My God -- " she murmured. Slowly rising to her feet, her eyes an unblinking glare of anguish, she kicked backward with a stiff leg, shoving the chair away from her back. With a mechanical movement she stretched out her arms like one being crucified. Her high-heeled shoes made an eerie squeaking sound as she started to spin. if Teddy Bear Walker Between the Planes The moon has warmth for , lovers and losers -- and, since Apollo Eleven, surprises for cheaters  not so great, and aware of a l.ister than usual thumping in his rlicst, stared into the mirror and covered with sideburns, beard, and mustache. The burns were of medium length, the beard vaguely Van(lykian, and the mustache late monious combination, but it pleased Beldini. Beldini, in his lathering, used a brush and a cake of shaving soap; he'd discovered he could get more '.haves per dime that way. Finished, he reached into the space before the mirror, materialized a fifty-cent piece between thumb and forefinger, multiplied that one by four, vanished three of the coins, pocketed the last one. It was important to remain in form, though these days he worked mostly at children's birthday parties. It was particularly needful to hone the nerve endings on days which were not like other days. So, he said half aloud, this day begins, at any rate, like any other...as last night had ended like many other nights. Gloria. Gloria had left while Beldini still slept, as usually happened when she stayed over. Beldini hadn't really been sleeping when Gloria left, he'd been lying there dozing, snuggling the warm sheets, reaching out for the girl not thei glad he didn't have to be up yet. Gloria was small and her hair was as black and as long as could be and when she was nice she was very very nice, but when she thought about Beldini's earned income she tended to be--disputatious, to put it kindly. She didn't want to be that way and she hated herself the next morning, sometimes, fixing her hair, going off into the city to read manuscripts (at a very good salary, because she was very good at it), thinking about what she'd said the night before. Gloria was disputatious when she thought about Beldini's bank account, not because she wanted to leave her job when they married -- she wanted to keep on working -- but because she had conceived the idea that she shouldn't marry Beldini until he was making at least two-thirds as much as she was. Parity, she thought, would be asking too much. "It was different in the days of Houdini," Beldini had said the night before. "Magicians -- not only Houdini but other good ones -- filled theaters, appeared in big shows. Jumbo -- " "I know," Gloria said. She wanted to be kind, yes, but she had her standards. "But there are other things you could do except play for children's parties. You've got a perfectly good M.S. in geology. You could -- " Beldini's look cut her off. "But this is what I want to do," he said. He produced a Panamanian flag, then a yellow rose, from the unconcealed place between her breasts. A seven-year-old kid I've got to love, Gloria thought. "How did -- " But she didn't really want to know and neither of them took it from there. After a while she wasn't disputatious and later she asked drowsily, "Joe?" He was Giuseppe, but she called him Joe except when she was really mad -- then it was Beldini-The-So-CalledGreat. "Urn?" "What really happened to Wanda?" His first wife. "An improperly trained assistant," Beldini mumbled. "My fault, actually." "What?" "I'm sleepy. Sawing a woman in half." "What?" "She did." "Did what?" "Sawed Wanda in half. Improperly trained..." "You say the damndest things," Gloria said. T he moon rock, in its longest dimension, measured no more than an inch and a half. It was quite black, with glassy flecks. Except for the angularity of the edges it looked much like a terrestrial stone from Egypt Beach or Marblehead or any of a hundred or a thousand places where rocks beyond counting had been thrust, upon sandy places by rising and ebbing tides, by monotonously shuffling waves. The grand auditorium in which the rock was displayed teemed with a. busy humanity, much of it bent on closing exhibits and getting out of there after five days of dull but : demanding work. You ever try to demonstrate a three-thousand-dollar desk-top calculator to a mousy, dandruff-haired, inquiring girl who is attracted by the pretty lights and the digital readout but doesn't ' know a square root from a turnip? , Tired people, packing their gear, I wanting out. ; Whatever Beldini was he was not i tired, though one might wonder  why not. He had spent many hours ; of the four preceding days here --  as inconspicuously as possible, if I that needs saying. He had gotten a long and good look at the moon rock the first day and had seen on that and other days how they put ' the rock away at night. Now -- surrounded by what approached the clatter of a country carnival striking the show before moving on -- he felt his own stone in his jacket pocket. An adequate ringer, he but under the circumstances (he thought) adequate. The exhibits were supposed to be open until five but everybody was fudging. Fatigue and the feeling of something finished was in the air and Beldini, absently smoothing a frayed collar, tuned into that scene with the acuity of a bat flying through an electric fan. He wished Gloria were watching. The rock rested upon a small, rotating, velvet-covered dais, surrounded by a bolted-down transparent cylinder, which Beldini assumed to be constructed of bulletproof glass. There was lots of illumination from spotlights and thousands of shutterbugs had photographed the dark object. A lens had been placed within the protective cylinder and people tended to gravitate toward that side, gazing silently until edged off by those who had not yet had a look. An armed guard, nattily uniformed in forest green, was never more than eight feet from the exhibit. The one now on duty was a slender young man, who often ran his right index finger over a neatly trimmed black mustache. He was, Beldini noted, a picture of perfect boredom. Beldini Skulked around an exhibit of technical books, keeping his eyes on one of the two main entrances into the auditorium. When he saw what he was looking for he briskly approached the moon rock. He had the lens to himself, stared through it intently. "Sorry, mister," the guard said, "but we're closing this exhibit." The guard was less bored now. Beldini backed off slightly. "But it isn't five -- " "We're closing," the guard said. whom Beldini had been watching a few minutes earlier, was an oldfashioned young middle-aged professorial type. Pipe, baggy gray flannels, offensive jacket -- you know. He yawned as he put down the black leather bag he carried. He opened the bag and withdrew -- as if it were an object he was about to discard into the trash -- a box made of thick plywood. It was painted blue and measured about eight inches on each side. The small lock and raised the hinged lid. Within the box was a styrofoam cradle, of which the professor removed the top half. Within the hollowed space of the cradle was a quantity of quarter-inch from his bag a small socket wrench. "Stand back," the no-longerbored guard said to a group of three eightor nine-year-olds closing in. His hand was on the grip of his bolstered forty-five. He had them outgunned, and knew it. One could see the dusty street in which he stood -- at high noon, no doubt, feet apart, coolly facing the approach of the fastest draw this side of the Pecos. straining nuts, lifted aside the sheltering cylinder (it wasn't really bullet-proof, just a new polycarbonate you couldn't throw rocks through), and placed it on the floor. He casually lifted the moon rock from its dais and Beldini went into action, gently insinuating himself between the rock and the box. Watch this, Gloria... "Sir," he said, "if I could just -- touch it a moment?" Beldini was not a magician for nothing. He had at his disposal a rich armamentarium of patter. The line he followed now ended with: " -- and I've been a rock hound, an amateur geologist, that is, all my life." An obscure impulse told him not to mention the M.S. "If I could just -- hold it a second?" His dark eyes beseeched, his lips quivered. sighed and let the magician hold the stone for about a second, which was quite enough. "Oh. Thank you, sir," said Bel"I'll never forget this moment." dini had found it, some years back, in the Ruggles mine in northern New Hampshire) in foam rubber, placed it in the bottom half of the cradle, replaced the upper half. He swung down the lid and turned the key in the little lock. Into the auditorium, accompanied by the guard who, you could tell, was now patrolling the Main Street sidewalk of Dodge City. Beldini took a last look at the exhibit, at the spot where the moon rock had rested.  have, he thought. a baked potato in my pocket. A hot one at that and surely everyone in the auditorium can smell it... He got out of there. Wait until I show Gloria... B eldini -- the only private citizen in the world to own, if that isn't too loose a use of the word, a moon rock -- took the pedestrian was eager to see Gloria but she wouldn't be home yet, and on the way he stopped in a friendly neighborhood tavern. He wasn't a drinking man but he wanted a martini. He sat on a stool at the bar, stared intently at the cocktail, while extracting a five-dollar bill from the bartender's ear. Carl gfinned, making change. Beldini had been there before. "Things been good?" Carl asked. "Yes. I worked today." "Good." Carl was busy with the usual lot of student's, faculty, hangers on, unclassifiables. "Good show," Beldini said absently not much later, finishing his drink. Carl, passing by, heard the remark. "What?" "Just talking to myself." Carl shrugged. Beldini set down his empty glass, made it to the murky outside and slurped his way through the slush toward his apartment, which was on Ware Street. He was accompanied by an uninvited vague awareness of unease. which impinged unpleasantly upon his anticipatory pleasure in showing Gloria the stone. Suddenly he wished he had been commissioned who would shower him with pearls and rubies and keep the deal quiet. I should, maybe, advertise in the Lapidary Journal... The great magician, now snug in his unprepossessing but welcoming apartment, took the rock from his pocket, unwrapped it carefully from the clean handkerchief. He looked at it, eyes sparkling, and thought of Gloria. Anxiety departed. There were several large black trunks in his bedroom, all of them plastered with tired and frayed labels and stickers, testaments of great appearances and one-night stands from here to there. Beldini opened one of these trunks and removed from its tangled contents a small collapsible stand, which he set up in the center of the living room. (Living room, bedroom, kitchenette and bath were all he had but just now Beldini might as well have been on the stage of, say, the Palace. Or the Hippodrome. A long time ago, yes.) He covered the small stand with a square of black velvet, then covered that with a flamboyant expanse of purple and yellow silk. He returned the moon rock to his pocket. He glanced at his watch and (inexpertly) mixed a pitcher of martinis. Buzzing of buzzer. Beldini greeted Gloria at the door with a great deal of onstage courtly pomp, took her coat with a lot of circumstance and placed her on the sofa before the covered stand. Wheels were spinning within Gloria's black-thatched lovely head -- but she remained silent. "A martini for Miss Gloria?" he asked. "Of course, Mr. Beldini. But of course." She took a cigarette from an intricately carved box on the table. Beldini produced -- a matter of course -- a lighted match from his pocket. Gloria knew Beldini pretty well but he still surprised her now and then. "A mere trifle," he said, disappearing into the kitchen. He returned in a moment with the pitcher and two glasses. He filled the glasses. With, need we say, ceremony. As well as martinis, of course. "Giuseppe," she said. Giuseppe was about half way between Joe and The-Not-So-Great-Beldini. "Just what the hell are you up to?" "At the moment I'm up to drinking a martini. To drinking to us -- to the most beguiling jewel of the publishing world (he gave her a stately bow) and, with all modesty (here he attempted an expression of humility but it didn't come off by orders of magnitude), to the last of the great magicians -- " Gloria gave him a look, they clinked glasses and drank. She gave him another look. "I didn't say I made the best martinis in the world," he said. "However -- " He placed himself behind the stand, went into an elaborate line of patter, showed several times that the stand was incontestably unoccupied and finally whisked away the purple and yellow silk. To reveal the moon rock. Talk about anticlimax. "Yes," Beldini said, noting Gloria's expression. "Not exactly the Hope diamond." He left the stone on the stand, sat down beside Gloria. "I guess an explanation is in order." "To say the least," Gloria said. "You've lost your mind, right?" "Matter of fact, I haven't -- but rose and put the stone in Gloria's hand. "This came," he said, feeling the wonder of it, wondering what he was getting into, "from the moon. Honest to God. Apollo Eleven." Gloria studied the stone. Gloria finished her martini. Beldini began to recognize that he might be in trouble. "Would it be too much," Gloria said, "to ask how you came by this small bauble?" "Not at all. I lifted it from the "I see. Yes. And you're proud as a damned peacock, aren't you?" "It was a pretty slick job." "Fill my glass, Giuseppe, please." "Certainly." "And next time let me make the martinis. Would it be indiscreet to ask what you intend to do with this?" Beldini, replenishing both glasses, eyed Gloria warily. "Well," he said, "I don't rightly know yet. I -- " "Yes?" Tippy-tap of pointed toe on carpet. "Joseph?" She'd never called him that before; Beldini didn't like the sound of it. "Money," Beldini said, and the words began to pour out. "I'll sell it to some collector. We want to be married and you're always -- " He went on like that for a while. "Why not try for the Mona Lisa next time?" Gloria said, her tone fuming nitric. "There really is a ready market for stolen moon rocks, right?" "Well, there are problems but -- why are you putting on your coat?" "I'm getting out of here. Right now. You think I want to live with a cheap common crook, you got another think coming, Joseph, old boy." He caught up with her in the slushy street. "I may be a crook," he said, "but, by God, I'm not a cheap one. That was one hell of a classy heist. A moon rock!" He hoped he wasn't about to cry but he felt like it and Gloria, woman that she was. got the message. They went back to the apartment. She mixed (expertly) another pitcher of martinis. "You did it for me, didn't you, you stupid bastard?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Let's call up for some pizzas, right?" "Pizzas, my foot," he said. "We're going to Charles. You will have the filetto Caterina di Medici and I will have salsiccie. There will be wine." He withdrew from Gloria's impressive cleavage a large bouquet of roses of red paper. "Do you have to do that all the time?" she asked, not really put off. "What did I ever do," she thoughtfully asked somebody, something, somewhere, "to deserve you?" Wine in the glasses, then, candles on the table, and Beldini saying he would take Gloria to Napoli next year, and she nodding. "A plain brown parcel," she said, as one would speak to a child. "Tomorrow. No return address, right?" "What?" "Tomorrow you send the moon "But -- " "No. No buts. The filetto," she said, "is delicious." G loria snuggled gently. "What happened to Linda?" she said, sleepily. Linda was, had been, Beldini's second and only other wife. "Mmmm," said Beldini. "You're not asleep yet, you faker. What happened to Linda?" "Would you believe another untrained assistant?" Beldini stretched, and assumed the fetal position. "Her name was Martha. She had red hair and freckles." "Screw Martha," Gloria said. "And no doubt you did. But what happened to Linda?" "The vanishing box," Beldini mumbled. Gloria, wakening, hit him on the shoulder. "Well," he said, "when we drew the curtain on the other box, on the other side of the stage, where Linda was supposed to be -- nothing. It was empty. Mmmm." "Stay awake yet, you damned idiot. Then what?" Beldini sighed. He was replete, satisfied, gone to there and back with salsiccie, Chianti and Gloria. He wanted to go to sleep but he knew which side his broad was better on. "All right," he said. "Linda had been giving me a hard time and I thought she was just screwing up the act to make me look like an idiot child up there." "Not hard to do," Gloria whispered. "What?" "Nothing. Go on." Gloria assumed the fetal position, listening. "I gave the sign to drop the big curtain, went out front to finish the schtick as best I could. And it wasn't a very good house, either. Bad show. Then Martha and I looked all over and everywhere Linda could have beenshe wasn't. She'd blown the scene, like, she was gone. No trace. Then or ever. All right?" "You say the damndest things," Gloria said. Beldini now wasn't sure he wanted to go to sleep. He made a move. "No," Gloria said. "For Pete's sake, act your age." "Mmmm." "Remind me never to appear in an act with you, all right?" "All right." N ext morning Beldini lathered his face and pulled coins from the air, same as yesterday. But this morning he'd awakened when Gloria had and they had talked. A long time. At the end of it: "Be sure to said. "All right. Just 'Houston' ought to get it there. No return address." "That's right. Wrap it up, put some stamps on," she said, fixing her hair, "and drop it into a mailbox." Beldini nodded. "Then you'll be an honest man again. At least you won't have a hot rock in your pants." "A baked potato," he said. "I know you don't want to live with a crook. So -- I won't be one." Gloria was at the door. "I know why you heisted the rock," she said. "We'll work something out. We will." Then she was gone -- leaving the scent of her presence and, as it were, a promissory note. Beldini carefully, sadly, enclosed the moon rock in layers of newspapers, which was all he had by way of packing material. He was rummaging around for a cardboard carton when the presence appeared. It didn't come through the door or anything -- it was just standing there between him and the moon rock, where only the tacky carpet had been before. It had numbers of legs and arms but only one head. Beldini rose, backed warily against the wall. "Nothing to fear," a voice said. Beldini thought the intonation Slavonic. Beldini asked the questions usual in such situations: who, from where, why, like that, but without waiting for answers said, "I hope you won't mind if I say I find your, er, materialization offensive?" "Of course not." The visitor shimmered, disappeared, and came back, this time in the semblance of what might have been a six-legged armadillo. Buying time, thinking, wondering, Beldini shook his head. "Stupid of me," the visitor said, shimmering again. This time it was a naked girl -- about eighteen, say, with long blonde hair -- with the kind of attributes you'd expect if you could make them yourself, no pun intended. She was free of all shyness, though Beldini knew he was flushing and cursed himself for it. "It's just that we need the -- rock," she said, in her voice a note of apology. "But I'm about to return it to "It's ours. We do need it." "Who's we?" She, or it, or whatever, sat Beldini on the sofa beside her, not a difficult achievement under the circumstances. "Would you be more comfortable if I put some clothes on?" "Certainly not," Beldini said. fVait until  tell Gloria, he thought, knowing he would never tell Gloria. The girl told it simply and effectively; what it boiled down to was that they were from way out there and Beldini's supposed stone was a most sophisticated communicative device they had placed on the moon -- where Apollo Eleven happened to land. How long ago? About # years, earth time. "Back to Two Thousand and One" Beldini muttered. "What?" "A film of ours, some time back, same idea." It searched her memory or he searched its -- or whatever. "Oh. Yes, well, you have the idea then." Beldini unwrapped the stone. "This tiny thing?" "Sentinels don't have to be crude twenty-foot monoliths," she said, with something of scorn in her voice. "This can do everything that one did, and more." "Prove that it's yours," said Beldini, suddenly honest, trying to keep his eyes away. "Well -- just me, my materialization. I can show you others -- " "Stay as sweet as you are," Beldini said, remembering all those legs. He cautiously put his hand on hers, with no disastrous effects. It felt like a warm human hand. You've got to start someplace. "Why did it take you so long to come after it?" he asked. "Apollo Eleven was weeks ago." "We're from way out there," she reminded him. "Even with superwarp and hyperspace-overdrive." "Yes. I'd forgotten. What's your name?" She blinked lashes at him. "That's silly, of course, you don't have one of our names -- though, I must say, you look like one of us. I mean, I ought to call you something." "How about Lorna?" "Lorna's fine," Beldini said. "It suits you. Look, Lorna -- " He held her hand in his and it was still warm and responsive. Beldini responded and Lorna perceived that. "We do good materializations, Joe," she said. Beldini sighed. "Tell me this, then -- don't do it but tell me. You want the stone and I have it. Why don't you materialize yourself into a -- don't do it, I said -- into a, shall we say, more powerful man than I and just take it away? Beat me to a pulp. If you can come from out there to here and -- " "Can't do it that way," Lorna said. "There's this stupid provision in the Codex. We can do everything except use force. All I can do is -- persuade you, Joe." She came closer. "Our information is that you -- earthlings are on the threshold of becoming reasonable -- " You may be misinformed, Beldini thought, absently putting a hand on Lorna's knee. "We'll reward you," Lorna said. A softness, materialized in her eyes, with nothing of softness in Beldini responding. Beldini crossed his Rubicon. "If it's yours," he, man of virtue, said. "You should have it. Could you just -- do something with it, to show -- " Lorna gently dislodged both of Beldini's hands, materialized something that looked like a cigarette lighter and flicked a switch. The stone became luminescent. "Don't look right at it," Lorna said. Subliminal happenings were beginning to form themselves in Beldini's mind. Emanations were issuing from the stone, Beldini knew, but he didn't know how he knew that. He heard nothing but felt his brain expanding inside his skull until he knew it would pop open and a little chick would hop out. He said, "All right, already, turn it off," and Lorna did. "So take the stone," he said. Together on the sofa again. "Thank you, Joe," Lorna said. "You will be rewarded." "How?" he asked. Thinking of money, thinking of pearls and rubies, thinking of Gloria. "How about this for openers?" Lorna reached for Beldini's buttons, looking for parts of him with parts of her. When he was naked as she Beldini -- almost absently -- produced a Nicaraguan flag from the general area of Lorna's dainty pubis. "That's funny," Lorna said. "Do you know any more tricks?" That's what you ask about a dog, he thought. "It's not easy to do them, not that kind, naked," he said. Lorna was a vision and Beldini lost his cool -- but in the end, alas, Gloria's image intruded. Beldini explained. "No offense, Joe," Lorna said. "I'm not really a girl anyway. But we do materialize well, don't we?" "You certainly do," said Beldini, sitting there naked as a jaybird, wondering why he was carrying matters of conscience or something to what must be either psychotic or imbecilic length. Lorna rose, shrugged her shoulders in an oddly unhuman way and took the rock in her hands. "I say this, Joe -- you will be rewarded. Goodbye. I'm sorry, in a way, you didn't want me. It might have been interesting. But I understand. See you later." And she was gone, the sentinel with her. Beldini looked at the newspaper he'd wrapped the stone in, looked at his clothes strewn all over the room. Well, he thought, :it least I won't have to go to the mailbox. or on anything else, including your popliteal fossa," Beldini said, "that the moon rock is on its way to its proper owners." This was an indirect answer, but It satisfied Gloria. "Good," she said and in the saying was something different about her. Beldini couldn't put a finger on it. He could put both hands on her, all ten fingers, yes, but could not spot the different -- something. A warmth, a softness. "We'll have pizzas in tonight, yes? And Chianti?" "Yes." This seemed a night for having pizzas in. "I've had a hard day," Gloria said. "You call, and I'll take a bath while they're coming. Make mine pepperoni." Beldini went to the living room and phoned in the order. He went back into the bedroom to change into something more comfortable. Gloria was in the bathroom. The door was about half open, the water was running. Beldini stepped toward that door and collided with -- Lorna. His pupils dilated. "Get -- " He started to whisper, but Lorna was full of something. "I said you'd be rewarded," she said. Beldini thanked a number of deities that the water was running. "It's all right," he said, "I really don't care. Just take the rock and go, all right? Like now?" Lorna was miffed. "All right," she said, "but first -- " She did something and the walls of the room seemed to move a little, and one of Beldini's vanishing boxes was out of its trunk and assembled in the middle of the room. "We do appreciate your cooperation," Lorna said. "We're nonviolent, so we have to have cooperation. Thanks, Joe." She gave him a sweet kiss and was gone. At that moment the water stopped running in the bathroom -- and Linda stepped out of the battered vanishing box. She seemed a bit muddled, for which she might possibly be forgiven. "It wasn't easy finding her," Beldini heard, as from an astral plane. "Goodbye, Joe." Linda wore the costume she'd worn the night of her disappearance. Beldini remembered it. "Beldini?" Linda said, wondering, approaching him. "What was that, Joe?" Gloria called from the bathroom.  New subscriptions and changes of address require # weeks to proiss! j to an extremely rare blood group. When medical science cannot let Johann Smith is literally gam him live as he wants, yet will not oling jor deathbut the operation  let him die, aged but lusty and Proves successful. He recovers to ; extremely wealthy Johann SebasJ. "'o-tself wearing the body of  tian Bach Smith sets his financial lovely secretary , Eunice , empire in order and assigns his Branca. A dialogue ensues be best friend and legal adviser, Jacob brain and the body i Salomon, the task of securing 'a 'Sbly revealing to both. j warm body' into which his brain  can be transplanted. The operation X has never been successfully per. formed on a human -- the situation (Well, Eunice?) (So you want to  is further complicated by the fact hear about my little bastard? i 'i t Boss, you're a dirty old man.) (Sweetheart, I don't want to hear anything you don't want to tell. You could have quintuplets by a Barbary ape and it wouldn't affect how I feel about you.) (Mealymouthed old hypocrite. You're dying of curiosity.) (I am like hell 'dying of curiosity.' It's your business and yours alone.) (Oh, don't be so mean. Boss. My business is your business. How else? Seeing the close relationship we have... and which I like, if there is any doubt in your dirty old mind. You Copyright  # by Robert A. Heinlein brought me back to life... when I was as dead as folk songs. And now I'm happy. So coax me a little, I'll give.) (All right, dearest -- how in the world did you manage to have a baby? When did you find time" Your snoopsheet traced you clear back through high school.) (Boss, did that security report mention the high school semester I lost from rheumatic fever?) (Let me think. Yes, it did.) (Misspelling. Spell it 'romantic' fever. I was fifteen and a cheerleader. Our basketball team won the regional conference... and I felt so good, I got knocked up.) (Eunice, 'knocked up' is not an expression a lady uses.) (Oh, Boss, sometimes you make me sick. By your rules I'm not a lady and never was -- and I've got as much right to be inside this skull as you have and maybe more -- so you haven't any business trying to force me to talk the way your mother did. Not when I no longer have Joe to turn to when I get tired of your prissy ways.) (I'm sorry, Eunice.) ('Sail right. Boss. I love you. But you and I are cuddled up pretty close; we ought to relax and enjoy it. I can teach you a lot about how to be female, if you'll let me. But right now you listen. Don't interrupt.) The ghost voice started reciting a string of monosyllables, all of them taboo in the far-away days of Johann's youth. (Eunice! Please, darling, it doesn't become you.) (Pipe down, Boss. I'm going to finish this even if you blow every fuse.) The recitation went on -- (That does it, I guess -- those are the words I had tagged in my mind never to use in your presence. Now tell me -- was there even one you didn't understand?) (That's not the point. A person should not use language which offends others.) (I never did. Boss. In public. But I'm home now -- or thought I was. Do you want me to go away again?) (No, no, no! Uh, you were away?) (I certainly was. Boss. Dead, I suppose. But I'm here now and I want to stay. If you'll let me. If I can relax and be happy and not have to be on guard all the time for fear of offending you. I can't see why a Latin polysyllable makes me more a lady than a monosyllable with the same meaning. You and I think with the same brain -- yours -- eat with the same mouth -- mine, or used to beand pee through the same hole. So why shouldn't we share the same vocabulary? Speaking of peeing -- oh, pardon me, sir, I meant to say 'micturation-') (None of your sarcasm, girl!) (Just who are you calling a 'girl,' girlie? Feel yourself, go ahead and feel. Some knockers, eh. Boss? And how you used to stare at them, you horny old goat. Made me tingle. But I was saying, speaking of micturation, that we are going to have to ring for a bedpan fairly soon, now that we no longer are rigged with plumbing... and there is no way for me to leave the room while you pee. I don't dare leave; it's dark out there and I might not find my way back. So it's either get used to such thingsor send me away forever -- or bust your nice new bladder.) (Okay, Eunice, you've made your point.) (Have I offended you again. Boss?) (Eunice, you have never offended me. Sometimes you have startled me, sometimes you have surprised me -- and often delighted me. But you have never offended me. Not even with that list of blunt words.) (Well... as I saw it, if you already knew them you couldn't really be offended; if you didn't understand them, then you couldn't possibly be offended.) (All right, dear. I'll quit trying to correct your speech. But for the record -- I used all those words long before your mother was born. Possibly before your grandmother was born.) (Grandma is sixty-eight). (Learned 'em all and used them with relish long before your grandmother was born -- with relish because they were sinful, then. I take it they aren't, to you kids now.) (No, they're just words. Shorttalk.) (Not short-talk, as they were used before video corrupted the language. Except -- What was that one word? 'Primp'?) (Oh. Shouldn't have included that one. Boss; it's not a classic word. Current slang, swing talk. It's a general verb, one which includes every possible way to copulate -- ) (Pfui! You youngsters. When I was a kid, we had at least two dozen words meaning 'frimp,' some new, some old, besides the standard taboo words for it.) (You didn't let me finish. Boss. Every possible way to hook up two or more bodies -- any number -- of any sex, or combinations of all six sexes, and including far-out variations that would shock you right out of this bed. But swing is a today scene, so it's not surprising you hadn't heard the word 'frimp' before.) (Oh, I'd heard it. I have news for you, infant.) (Yes, sir? I mean 'Yes, Miss Smith,' dearie. 'Miss' Smith -- what a giggle I got when I first heard it. But it's nice, since it means both of us. Say, Rosy is all right, isn't he? Puts more into hand-kissing than some studs do into a romp on the pad.) (Sweetheart, you not only have a dirty mind -- but it veers.) (How can I help having a dirty mind when it's actually yours, Boss -- I'm hip deep in the stuff.) (Shut up, Eunice; it's my turn. The swing scene is nothing new. The Greeks had a word for it. So did the Romans. And so on through history. The orgy was relished in Victorian England. It was far from unknown in my youth in the heart of the Bible Belt, even though it was dangerous in those days. Eunice, as long as we are trying to get easy with each other, let me say this: Anything you've ever seen, or tried, or heard of, I did, or had done to me, before your grandmother was born -- and if I liked it, I did it again and again and again. No matter how risky.) T he second voice was silent a moment. (Maybe we simply start younger today. Less risk and fewer rules.) (Beg to doubt.) (Oh, I'm sure we do. I told you how young I was when I got caught. Fifteen. And I started a year younger.) (Eunice my love, the main difference between the young and the old, the cause of the so-called Generation Gap -- a gap in understanding that has existed throughout all time -- is that the young simply cannot believe that the old ever really were young... whereas to an old person his youth is something that happened just last week, and it annoys the hell out of him when someone in effect denies that this old duffer ever owned a youth.) (Boss?) The thought was gentle and soft.(Yes, dearest?) (Boss, I always knew you were young underneath, behind all those horrid liver spots -- knew it when I was alive, I mean... and wished dreadfully that you weren't old and sick in your body. It hurt me so, to see you hurt. Sometimes I went home and cried. Especially when it made you cross and you would say something you didn't mean and then be sorry. I wanted you to get well... and knew you couldn't. I was one of the first to sign up -- Joe and I both -- as soon as word reached us through the Rare Blood Club. Couldn't do it sooner or you might have found out -- and forbidden me to.) (Eunice, Eunice!) (Don't you believe me?) (Yes, darling, yes... but you're making us cry.) (So blow your nose, and stop it. Because everything turned out all right. Look, you wanted to hear about my little bastard -- will that take your mind off troubles we no longer have?) (Uh... only if you want to, Eunice. My love. My only love.) (I made it plain that I wanted to tell you, didn't I? I'll tell all -- and that'll take a long time -- if you want to hear. If you won't be shocked. Say 'Please,' Boss -- because the details of my sex life ought to help you in handling your own sex life. Our sex life, that is. Or did you mean that stuff you were shoveling at Dr. Garcia about not being 'actively female'?) (Uh... I don't know, Eunice, I haven't been a woman long enough to know what I want. Shucks, darling, instead of thinking like a girl I'm still ogling girls. That little redheaded nurse, for example.) (So I noticed.) (Was that sarcasm? Or jealousy?) (What? I do not intend to be sarcastic. Boss dear; I don't want us ever to be nasty with each other. And jealousy is just a word in the dictionary to me. I simply meant that, when Winnie was making up our face and you were sneaking a peek down the neck of her smock every time she leaned over, I was staring as hard as you were. No bra. Cute ones, aren't they? Winnie is female and knows it. If you were male in your body as well as in your head, I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw a bed.) (I thought you said you weren't jealous?) (I'm not. I merely meant that Winnie would trip you and beat you to the floor. But I was not criticizing her. I've nothing against girls. A girl can be quite a blast.) (Eunice, uh, were you implying that you have -- used to have -- relations with other, uh -- ) (Oh, Boss, don't be so early twentieth century; we've turned the corner on the twenty-first. Tell it bang. Do you mean 'Am I a Lez?' Homosexual?) (No, not at all! Well, perhaps I did mean that in a way. At least I wanted you to clear up what you meant. As it didn't seem possible. You were married and or was your marriage just a coverup? I suppose -- ) (Quit supposing, dear. Bang. I was not homosexual and neither is .loe. Joe is a tomcat always ready to yowl and wonderful at it. Except when he's painting; then he forgets everything else. But 'homosexual' isn't a word that bothers anyone my age, either the word or the fact. And why should it be with the Government practically subsidizing it with propaganda about loo many babies that starts in kindergarten? If I had taken the Bilitis pledge, I would never have had that phony 'rheumatic fever.' But, while girls are cuddly and I've never had any inhibitions about them, I always -- far too interested in boys to live on Gay Street. But which team are you on. Boss? One minute you're telling me how you drool over Winnie, the next minute you seem upset that I drooled, too. So what are you going to do with us, dear? Left-handed? Righthanded? Both hands? Or no hands at all? I guess I could stand anything but that last. Do I have a vote?) (Why, of course you do.) (I wonder. Boss. You sputtered when I suggested that you could thank Doc Hedrick in bed... and sparked some more at the notion of going to bed with a girl. Sure you're not planning on sewing it up?) (Oh, Eunice, don't talk silly! Beloved, happy as I am that we are together, that 'generation gap' is still there. My fault this time, as I have a life-long habit of being careful in what I say to a woman, even one I am in bed with ) (You're certainly in bed with me) (I certainly am. And I'm finding it even harder to be flatly truthful with you'tell it bang' as you say -- than to adjust to being female. But before Dr. Hedrick brought up the matter I saw the implications -- and complications -- and consequences -- of being female... and young... and rich.) ('Rich.' I hadn't thought about that one.) (Eunice beloved, we're going to have to think about it. Of course we're going to be 'actively female -- ') Hooray) (Quiet, dear. If we were poor, the simplest thing would be to ask your Joe to take us back. If he would have us. But we aren't poor; we're embarrassingly rich -- and a fortune is harder to get rid of than it is to accumulate. Believe me. When I was about seventy-five, I tried to unload my wealth while I was still living so that it would not go to my granddaughters. But to give away money without wasting most of it in the process is as difficult as getting the genie back into the bottle. So I gave up and simply arranged my will to keep most of it out of the hands of my alleged descendants.) ('Alleged?') (Alleged. Eunice, my first wife was a sweet girl, much like yourself, I think. But the poor dear died in childbirth -- bearing my one son, also dead for many years now. Agnes had made me promise to marry again and I did, almost at once. One daughter from that marriage and her mother divorced me before the child was a year old. I married a third time -- again one daughter, again a divorce. I never knew my daughters well and outlived both of them and their mothers. But -- Eunice, you're a rareblood yourself; do you know how blood types are inherited?) (Not really.) (Thought you might. Being mathematically inclined, the first time I laid eyes on an inheritance chart for blood types I understood it as well as I understand the multiplication tables. Having lost my first wife to childbirth, with both my second and third wives I made certain that donors were at hand before they went into delivery rooms. Second wife was type A, third was type B -- years later I learned that both my putative daughters were type O.) (I think I missed something. Boss.) (Eunice, it is impossible for a type-AB father to sire type-O children. Now wait--I did not hold it against my daughters; it was none of their doing. I would have loved Evelyn and Roberta tried to, wanted to -- but their mothers kept me away from them and turned them against me. Neither girl had any use for me... until it turned out that I was going to dispose of a lot of money some day -- and then the switch from honest dislike to phony 'affection' was nauseating. I feel no obligation to my granddaughters since in fact they are not my granddaughters. Well? What do you think?) (UhBoss, I don't see any need to comment.) (So? Who was it not five minutes ago was saying that we ought to be absolutely frank with each other?) (Well... I don't disagree with your conclusion. Boss, just with how you reached it. I don't see that heredity should enter into it. Seems to me you are resenting something that happened a long time ago -- and that's not good. Not good for you. Boss.) (Child, you don't know what you're talking about.) (Maybe not.) (No maybe's about it. A baby is a baby is a baby. Babies are to love and take care of and that's what this whole bloody mess is about, else none of it makes sense. Eunice, I told you that my first wife was something like you. Agnes was my Annabel Lee and we loved with a love that was more than a love and I had her for only a year -- then she died giving me my son. Then I loved him just as much. When he was killed something died inside me... and I made a foolish fourth marriage hoping to bring it alive again by having another son. But I was lucky that time -- no children and it merely cost me a chunk of money to get shut of it.) (I'm sorry, Boss.) (Nothing to be sorry about now. But I was telling you something else -- Eunice, when we're up and around, remind me to dig into my jewelry case and show you my son's dog tag -- all that I have left of him.) (If you want to. But isn't that morbid, dear? Look forward, not back.) (Depends on how you look back. I don't grieve over him; I'm proud of him. He died honorably, fighting for his country. But that military dog tag shows his blood type. Type O.) (Oh.) (Yes, I said 'O.' So my son was no more my physical descendant than were my daughters. Didn't keep me from loving him.) (Yes but -- you learned it from his identification tag? After he was dead?) (Like hell I did. I knew it the day he was born; I had suspected that he might not be mine from the time Agnes turned out to be pregnant -- and I accepted it. Eunice, I wore horns with dignity and always kept suspicions to myself. Just as well -- as all my wives contributed to my cornute state. Horns? Branching antlers! The husband who expects anything else is riding for a fall. But I never had illusions about it, so it never took me by surprise. No reason why it should, as I got the best parts of my own training from married women, starting clear back in my early teens. I think that happens in every generation. But horns make a man's head ache only when he's stupid enough to believe that his wife is different -- when all the evidence he has accumulated should cause him to assume the exact opposite.) (Boss, you think all women are like that?) (Oh, no! In my youth I knew many marriages in which both the bride and groom, to the best of my knowledge and belief, went to the altar virgin and stayed faithful a lifetime. There may be couples like that among you kids today.) (Some, I think. But you couldn't prove it by me.) (Nor by me. Nor by all the kinseys who ever collected statistics. Eunice, sex is the one subject everybody lies about. But what I was saying is this: A man who takes his fun where he finds it, then marries and expects his wife to be different, is a fool. I wasn't that sort of fool. Let me tell you about Agnes. (Agnes was an angel -- with round heels. That's obsolete slang which means what is sounds like. I don't think Agnes ever hated anyone in her short life and she loved as easily as she breathed. She -- Eunice, you said you had started young?) (Fourteen, Boss. Precocious slut, huh?) (Precocious possibly, a slut never. Nor was my angel Agnes ever a slut and she happily gave away her virginity -- so she told me -- at twelve. I -- ) Twelve) (Surprised, dear? That generation gap again; your generation thinks it invented sex. Agnes was precocious; sixteen was fairly young in those days, from what a male could guess about it -- not much! -- and seventeen or eighteen was more common. I think. Actually encountering female virginity and being certain of it -- well. I'm no expert. But Agnes wasn't hanging up a record even for those days; I recall a girl in my grammar school who was 'putting out,' as kids called it then, at eleven -- and getting away with it cold, teacher's pet and butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and winning pins for Sunday School attendance. (My darling Agnes was like that except that Agnes's goodness wasn't pretense; she was good all the way through. She simply didn't see anything sinful about sex.) (Boss, sex is not sinful.) (Did I ever say it was? However, in those days I felt guilty about it, until Agnes cured me of such nonsense. She was sixteen and I was twenty and her father was a prof at the cow college I went to and I was invited to their hous'e for dinner one Sunday night -- and our first time happened on their living room sofa so fast it startled me, scared me some.) (What frightened you, dear? Her parents?) (Well, yes. Just upstairs and probably not asleep. Agnes being so young herself -- age of consent was eighteen then and while I don't recall ever letting it stop me, boys were jumpy about it. And that night I wasn't prepared, not having expected it.) (Prepared how. Boss?) (Contraception. I had a year to go to get my degree, and no money and no job lined up, and having to get married wasn't something I relished.) (But contraception is a girl's responsibility. Boss. That's why I felt so silly when I got caught. I wouldn't have dreamed of asking a boy to marry me on that account -- even if I had been certain which boy. Once I knew I was caught I gritted my teeth and told my parents and took my scolding -- Daddy was going to have to pay my fine; I was not yet licensed. Grim -- but no talk of getting married. I wasn't asked who did it and never volunteered an opinion.) (Didn't you have an opinion, Eunice?) (Well... just an opinion. Let me tell it bang. Our basketball team and us three girl cheerleaders were all in the same hotel, with the coach and the girls' phys-ed teacher riding herd on us. Only they didn't; they went out on the town. So we gathered to celebrate in the suite the boys were in. Somebody had lettuce. Marijuana. I took two puffs and didn't like it -- and went back to gin and ginger ale which tasted better and was almost as new to me. Didn't have any intention of swinging; it wasn't the smart scene at our school and I had a steady I was faithful to -- well, usually -- who wasn't on the trip. But when the head cheerleader took her clothes off -- well, there it was. So I counted days in my mind and decided I was safe by two days and peeled down, last of three to do so. Nobody made me do it. Boss, no slightest flavor of rape. So how could I blame the boys?) (Only it turned out I didn't have two days leeway and by the middle of January I was fairly certain. Then I was certain. Then my parents were certain -- and I 'was sent south to stay with an aunt while I recovered from rheumatic fever I never had. And recovered two hundred and sixty-nine days after that championship game, barely in time to enter school in the fall. And graduated with my class.) (But your baby, Eunice? Boy? Girl? How old now? Twelve? And where is the child?) (Boss, I don't know. I signed an adoption waiver so that Daddy would get his money back if somebody with a baby license came along. Boss, is that fair? Five thousand dollars was a lot of money to my father -- yet anyone on Welfare gets off free, or can even demand a free abortion. I can't see it.) (You changed the subject, dear. Your baby?)  (Oh. They told me it was born dead. But I hear they usually say that if a girl signs the papers arid somebody is waiting for it.) (We can find out. If your baby didn't live, then the fine was never levied. Didn't your father tell you?) (I never asked. It was a touchy subject, Boss. It was 'rheumatic fever,' never an unlicensed baby. Just as well, I guess, as when I turned eighteen, I was licensed for three with no questions raised.) (Eunice, no matter what coverup was used, if your baby is living, we can find it!) The second voice did not answer. Johann persisted. (Well, Eunice?) (Boss... it's better to let the dead past bury its dead.) (You don't want children, Eunice?) (That wasn't what I said. You said it didn't matter that your son wasn't really yours. I think you were right. But doesn't it cut both ways? If there is a child somewhere, almost thirteen now -- we're strangers. I'm not the mother who loved it and brought it up; I'm nobody. Really nobody -- you forget that I was killed.) (Eunice! Oh, darling!) (You see? If we found that boy, or girl, we couldn't admit that I'm still alive -- alive again, I mean -- inside your head. That's the thing we don't dare admit... or back they come with those horrid straps and we'll never be free.) She sighed. (But I wish I could have had your baby. You were telling me about Agnes, dearest. Tell me more. Am I really somewhat like her?) (Very much like her, Eunice. Oh, I don't mean she looked like you. But if I believed in reincarnation -- I don't -- I would be tempted to think that you were Agnes, come back to me.) (Maybe I am. Why don't you believe in it. Boss?) (Uh... do you?) (No. I mean I didn't believe in it, even though most of our friends did. I couldn't see any reason to believe either way, so I kept my mouth shut. But, Boss, it gives one a different viewpoint to have been killed... and then turn out not to stay dead. Dearest Boss -- you think I'm a figment of your imagination, don't you?) voice went on; (Don't be afraid to admit it. Boss; you won't offend me.  know I'm me. I don't need proof. But you do. You need to know. Admit it, darling. Be open with me.) She sighed again. (Eunice, I do need to know. But -- if I'm crazy -- if you are just my own mind talking back to me -- I'd rather not know it. Darling, forgive me... but I was relieved when you told me that you didn't want us to try to find your baby.) (I knew you were relieved... and I knew why. Boss, don't be so right-now. We have all the time in the world, so relax and be happy. Proof will turn up -- something I know and that you couldn't possibly know except through me. And that will be that, and you will be as certain as I am.) Johann nodded to herself. (That makes sense, Eunice -- and it sounds like the scoldings you used to give me when I got fretful. You used to mother me.) (I'm going to go right on mothering you, and scolding you when you need it -- and loving you all the time. Boss. But there is one thing there is some hurry about.) (What?) (That bedpan. Unless you want us to have a childish accident.) (Oh, damn!) (Relax, Boss. Get used to it.) (Damnation, I do not want to be placed on a bedpan by a nurse like a baby being put to potty. You know what'll happen? Nothing! I'll clamp down and not be able to do it. Eunice, there's my bathroom through that door -- can't we ask to be helped into there...and left in private?) (Boss, you know what would happen. You ring for the nurse and tell her. She'll try to argue you out of it. Then she'll go find Dr. Garcia. He'll show up and argue, too. If you're stubborn, he'll get Jake. By the time Jake shows up, we've wet the bed.) (Eunice, you're infuriating. All right, let's ring for that goddam pan.) (Hold it. Boss. Can we get this side rail down?) (Huh?) (If we can, what's stopping us from going to the bathroom without asking?) (But, Eunice -- I haven't walked in more than a year!) (That was before you got this secondhand, good-as-new, factoryreconditioned, female body. Boss.) (You think we can walk?) (Let's find out. If standing up makes us dizzy, we can hang onto the bed and ease down to the floor. I'm certain we can crawl. Boss.) (Let's do it!) (Let's see how this side rail works.) baffling. There seemed to be no way for a person in the bed to let them down. Not surprising, she told herself; if these bars were meant to protect a befuddled patient, then proper design called for it to be impossible for a patient to remove them. (Eunice, we're going to have to ring for the nurse. Damn!) (Don't give up. Boss. Maybe it's a button on the console. If we scrooch around till our head is at the foot, I think we can reach the console.) So Johann pulled up her knees and twisted and switched ends -- and was surprised and delighted at how limber her new body was. Then she stretched her right arm through the bars at the foot of the bed, could not quite reach the console -- and cussed, and then discovered how the side rail locked -- two simple catches, one for each side, at the foot of the bed below the springs, out of reach -- no doubt the designer thought -- of any patient ill enough to need the side rails. She thumbed open the leftside catch; the rail, counterweighted, pushed down easily. She giggled. (How're we doing, partner?) (Fine so far. Boss. Hang onto the end of the bed while we get our feet down. Keel over and they'll put us in a wet pack -- so hang on!) Johann got her feet to the floor, stood trembling while she clung to the bed. (Dizzy.) (Of course. It will go away. Steady down, dear. Boss, I think we could walk... but let's play safe and crawl. If we get dizzy again and take a dive on the rug, Winnie will be in here like a shot -- and from then on they'll feed us through the bars. What do you think?) (I think we had better reach that pot pronto before we have to blame it on the cat. We crawl.) Getting to the floor was no problem; crawling was another matter, she caught her knees on the hospital gown. So she sat up -- Johann discovered that her new body folded easily and naturally into a contortion young Johann had found difficult at twelve. She did not stop to wonder. The bed jacket was no trouble; it fastened in front with a magnostrip, she shrugged it off and laid it aside. But the hospital gown fastened in back. (Stickstrip?) (Just a tie-tie. Feels like a bow knot. Careful, Boss, don't snarl it.) The gown joined the jacket. Unencumbered now, Johann resumed crawling. The bath-dressing room door snapped out of her way and she reached her objective. Presently she sighed in relief. (I feel better.) (That makes two of us. Want to try walking back? As far as we have something to grab onto? Or clear to the bed if  we whistle a chair and have it roll in front of us.) (I'm game.) Johann found that she was not unsteady on her feet -- walking was easier than it had been for twenty years. Nevertheless she stayed close to the walls, the bathroom having been equipped years ago with grab rails for a frail old man grimly afraid of falling. It took her close to a tall three-way mirror in the dressing room end. She stopped. Then she stepped into the central spot and looked at herself. (My God, Eunice, but you're beautiful!) (My God, but we're a sloppy bitch! Boss, look at those toenails! Claws. Talons. And, oh dear, my breasts sag! And my belly is positively flabby.) (Beautiful. Utterly gorgeous. Eunice beloved, I always wanted to see you starked naked. And now I do.) (So you do. I wish I had had time to get looking nice before you saw me. Hair a mess. And -- yes, I thought so. We stink.) (Hey!) (Sorry, hit the panic button by mistake. Boss, we're going to have a hot, soapy bath before we get back into that bed. That's straight from Washington. We can't do much about flab in one day -- but we can get clean.) She turned and inspected her buttocks. (Oh, dear! A broad should be broad -- but not that broad.) (Eunice, that's the prettiest fanny in the state. In the whole country.) (Used to be, maybe. And it's going to be again and that's a promise, Boss. Tomorrow morning we start systematic exercise. Tighten up everything.) (Okay, if you say so -- though I still say you're the most gorgeously beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. Uh, Eunice? That mermaid getup you wore once -- You were wearing a trick bra with it...weren't you?) She giggled. (Heavens, no. Just me, Boss. And paint. But my breasts were firm as rocks then; Joe had something to work with. I guess that's the nakedest you've ever seen me.) (What do you think Em staring at now, Beautiful?) (Oh, I meant back before I was killed. When I was your 'nice' girl who didn't dare let you see me as naked as I knew you would like, you dirty old man. Although you could have seen me naked -- and much more beautiful -- any time you had gotten up the nerve to ask.) (Em going to spend hours every day standing right here and staring.) (No reason why you shouldn't dear; it's your body now. But let's put an exercise mat on the floor and get in that toning up at the same time. Most exercises can be done better with the aid of a fulllength mirror. I think we -- ) The door snapped open. "Miss Smith!" then answered savagely, "Miss Gersten, what the devil do you mean by bursting into my bath without knocking?" The nurse ignored the outburst, hurried to her patient, put an arm around her. "Lean on my shoulder, let's get you back into bed. Oh, dear, I don't know what Dr. Garcia will say! He'll kill me -- are you all right?" Johann saw that the little nurse was about to cry. "Of course Em all right." Johann tried to shrug off the arm, found that the girl was stronger than she looked. "You didn't answer." The nurse did cry then. "Oh, please, dear, don't argue with me! Let's get you into bed before you hurt yourself. Maybe Dr. Garcia won't be quite so angry." Seeing that the younger woman was most unprofessionally disturbed, Johann let herself be urged out into the bedroom and to the bed. The little redhead caught her breath. "There! Now if you'll hold tight around my neck, I can get your legs up -- you bad, bad girl! To worry me so!" Johann did not cooperate. "Winnie." "Yes, dear? Oh, do let me get you into bed! Doctor will be terribly angry." "Not so fast. If you're planning on tell teacher, go do it. I can hang onto the bed, I won't fall." The nurse looked desperate. "Are you trying to get me fired, Miss? Maybe Wack-listed? What have I ever done to you?" "Winnie, dear." "Yes?" "You aren't going to say a word to Dr. Garcia." Johann slid an arm around the redhead's waist. "Are you?" The nurse looked flustered but did not pull away. "Well, I should. I'm supposed to report everything." "But you aren't going to. And I'm not going to tell him, either. Tight secret, just you and me. And no huhu for anyone." "Well... I won't if you won't." "Promise?" "I promise." Johann kissed her. Winnie did not dodge but seemed startled and somewhat timid. Then she caught her breath and her lips opened and the kiss progressed rapidly. The nurse pulled her mouth free and said huskily, "I could get fired almost as quickly for this." She did not say what "this" was. She ignored the fact that Johann's free hand was cupping one of her breasts. "So we'll stop and I'll get into bed -- no, don't help me; I don't need it." Johann proved it by doing it. The nurse pulled the sheet over her, at once resumed her professional persona. "Now let's put our clothes back on, shall we?" She stooped to retrieve them. "What a naughty girl, throwing her clothes on the floor. And giving me such a fright." "Stuff 'em in the hamper. I'm not going to wear them." "Now, now, dear. You needn't wear the jacket. Just the gown. Or do you want a fresh one?" "Winnie, I'm not going to wear those silly angel robes ever again, so chuck it. You can hang up the jacket. But I won't wear a hospital gown. I'll stay raw." "Dr. Garcia -- " "Quit threatening me with Dr. Garcia. We're past that. Aren't we?" The nurse bit her lip. "Well... yes." "It's none of his business if I sleep raw. And I shall, until something more appropriate can be bought for me. Or -- Do you sleep in the house? Maybe you could lend me a nightie. A girl-type nightgown." "Well, yes, I sleep here. But I can't lend you a gown because, well -- I sleep raw myself." "Sensible." But there are nightgowns and negligees and things right here. In your dressing room." "Be damned. Who ordered them?" "I don't know. Miss Smith. They were brought in and stored there when, well, when it became clear that you were going to need them." "Good planning. Uh, do you know if they're my size? Whatever that size is, I don't know myself." "Oh, yes! I helped measure you." "More good planning. Find me the most feminine nightgown in there -- I might as well practice." "Glad to." T he nurse left the bedroom. (Butch.) (Oh, nonsense, Eunice. Sure, she's a cute little trick... but I simply suddenly realized what treatment she would respond to. Had to dig back into my memory; I'm out of practice.) ('Butch' I said. You enjoyed it.) (Didn't you enjoy it?) (Sure I did. She kis,ses like don't-stop. But I'm not a hypocrite about it. Who was shocked when I said girls could be a blast? You, you dirty old hypocrite. And butch.) (Eunice, you are out of your frimping mind. I've had most of a century to appreciate girls; do you expect me to change overnight? I he time I'll feel like a queer is the first time some man kisses us. I'll probably faint.) (Poor Boss. Doesn't know whether he's A.C., or D.C. Never mind, dear, Eunice will coach youas I do know how to kiss a man.) (I imagine you do.) (Was there salt in that one? Never mind, I know how. He faints. Boss, you claimed you had done everything. EvcM'thing?) (See here, little snoopy, I am not going to give you any excuse to call me both butch and pansy in the same sentence. You can have my memoirs later. But, Eunice, speaking of butch, is that what Winnie is? She certainly responded.) (More sweetheart than 'butch' is my guess, though she may stroll both sides of Gay Street. But if you were asking is she a Lez -- then I would bet anything she's not. Ambi, sure, but much more interested in men. Haven't you watched her? Sparks.) Winnie returned with a nightgown in each hand. "I think these two are the prettiest. Miss Smith. I thought -- " "Winnie." "Yes, Miss Smith?" "No, 'Miss Smith.' I mean you are not to call me Miss Smith. Not after kissing me. Or did I get the message wrong?" (Butch.) (Shut up, Eunice. She's going to help us.) The nurse said nothing, blushed. Johann said gently, "That's answer enough, dear. So call me -- no, damn it, I don't want you to call me Johann. I need a new name. Winnie dear, what girl's name is closest to Johann?" "Uh, Johanna." "Mmm, yes. But there is already a Johnanna in my family. Got another?" "Well... if you call yourself 'Joan' and gave it the two syllable pronunciation, it would be almost like 'Johann' except for the J instead of the Y sound." "Perfect! You've named me. I think that makes you my godmother. Do you mind being godmother to an old, old man who has just been reborn as a woman?" Winnie smiled. "I'm flattered." "So call me Joan, not Miss Smith. Uh, I need a middle name. 'Eunice.' " (Why, Boss, now I'm Battered.) (Yes, beloved. Now shut up.) "Joan Eunice Smith. Winnie, do you know why that's my middle name?" The nurse said slowly, "I'm not supposed to know." "Then you do know. It's for the sweet and gracious lady who gave me this wonderful body -- and I hope she can hear me wherever she is." (I can. Boss!) "Put down no those gowns and come here and name me with my new name. Name me formally for it's all the christening I will ever have. Then seal it." Almost timidly the little redhead came close to the bed, bent over her patient. She said softly, "I name thee 'Joan Eunice' " -- and kissed her. Perhaps Winnie intended to make it a formal peck; Joan Eunice did not let it be. Both women were leaking tears before it was over. and let her straighten up. "Thank you, dear. I'm Joan now. Joan Eunice. Hand me a tissue and you need one, too." (How was that one, Eunice?) (Butch, your technique is improving. I felt that one clear down in our toes.) (Who the hell are you calling butch, butch? My name is Joan Eunice.) (No, you're Joan and I am Eunice and collectively we're Joan Eunice... and I've never had a nicer present. Boss. Joan. And I know you're not a butch but you had better cool it with our godmother. Unless you mean business.) "Which gown do you like... Joan?" "Winnie, I don't know first verse about women's clothes. What do you think?" "Well... this Cretan design is rather extreme. But you have the figure to justify it." (No, Boss! Take the one with the high neckline.) (Eunice, I thought you were proud of our bumps? They don't really sag.) (It's not that at all. Trust me, Joan; I know what I'm doing.) "You may be right, Winnie. But it may not be the right gown for doctors and lawyers. I had better start easy, with the high neckline. Help me, please." While they were getting Joan into a nightgown she asked, "Winnie? How did you happen to burst in on me?" "What? Why, the displays of course. Both your heart rate and respiration were way up. Exercise. So I rushed in to check -- and sure enough, my bad girl had managed to get out of bed. Oh, how you frightened me, dear!" "Winnie, there's a hole in that story I could throw a dog through." The nurse stiffened. "What do you mean -- Joan?" "My heart rate and respiration must have climbed a good ten minutes before you came in." "Oh, dear! You won't tell on me? You promised." "I did and so did you. Winnie with the sweet mouth, from now on neither of us is ever going to tell Dr. Garcia a darn thing unless we think he needs to know it. You and I, dear. Solid. Now tell me what happened." "Uh... oh, this is silly. Whoever is on watch at the remotes isn't supposed to take his eyes off the displays even a moment. But you were doing so nicely... and Mrs. Sloan was taking a nap -- which she needed, poor dear -- and Dr. Garcia had gone to check on Mr. Salomon... and he takes a grim view of being sent for unless the patient needs him... and the washroom is just down the hall from the displays -- " "I get it. We had the same urge at the same time. Right?" Winnie blushed again. "I deserve to be fired. I know better than to take any chance with a patient. Patients do the darnedest things." "You aren't ever going to be fired, you're going to be here long after Dr. Garcia leaves. If you'll stay. How do I look?" "Simply lovely. I wouldn't have guessed it but I do think this gown does more for you than that Cretan number." (What did I tell you. Boss?) "But I'm going to put more lipstick on you. It's all gone." "Now how in the world did that happen?" Winnie giggled. "Don't ask me. But guess maybe I'll put on some myself before Doctor sees us. Joan? Is it all right for me to call you 'Miss Joan' when Dr. Garcia is around? He's terribly strict." "Tell him to go soak his head. Sho', sho', honey, if it makes you feel easier. But I'm Joan when he's not around. You're my coach. You're going to make a lady out of me." (That's my job, Boss. And a tough one, I can see.) (So you need help with it. Don't joggle my elbow; Winnie is our secret weapon.) (Okay. But this weapon might explode.) (Look, infant, I learned to cope with women long before your grandmother was born.) "I'd be glad to help, any way I can... Joan dear." "Then you can start by convincing dear Doctor that I'm well enough for a tub bath. I stink. Ladies ought not to stink." "Why, you had a bed bath not two hours ago!" "I need more than a bed bath and you know it. Sell him the idea that you can help me into and out of the tub and keep me from falling. If you have trouble with him, fetch him in and I'll throw a tantrum. If he gives us grief. I'll make him scrub my back." Joan grinned. "So get lipstick on us, then go find him." Boss honey, see what I mean about the high neckline job? See what it does for us?) (I know that I feel somewhat more covered up. But only somewhat. Eunice, those breast panels are wicked.) (Oh, fuff, they're not even transparent, just translucent. But that's why this nightgown is so much sexier than the Cretan one. Men always mistake bare skin for sexiness. A typical male mistake.) (Maybe so, but I have never in my long life complained about bare skin.) (I won't argue, Joan, but I'm going to pick out our clothes. Until you start thinking like a woman. But I had a specific reason for picking the gown which is -- superficially -- more modest. So that we will have it on when Jake comes in.) (Eunice, Jake has probably gone home. He's had a rough time.) (So he has and what do you think I'm talking about? He's still in the house; he would not leave without saying good-by.) (Oh, nonsense, Jake and I aren't that formal.) (Boss, Jake is a gentleman to his fingertips. He might feel free to duck out without formality in dealing with his old friend Johann Smith -- but not with a lady. 'Johann' is one thing. 'Joan Eunice' is another matter.) (But he knows I'm Johann.) (So? Then why did he kiss our hand? Joan, I'm going to have to watch you every second; you don't know anything about men.) (I spent almost a century being one.) (Irrelevant. Hush up; he may be here any time. I've got to tell this bang. Joan, the last few months before I was killed I was Jake's mistress.) (How was the old goat?) (Is that all you have to say?) (Eunice, you think I know nothing about men. Possibly true, in one sense. But  can teach you about men -- from the inside -- the way you can teach me about men from the outside. Jake is tough. Yet I saw him collapse twice in grief over you. Understandable that your death would upset him some. Understandable that it was a strain on him to help out in the masquerade of not letting me know that I had inherited your lovely body. Nevertheless you were just a girl he had known through business, one who helped him with my affairs. Not one he knew intimately. Yet this tough old lawyer collapsed twice. Over you. So he must have known you far better than anyone guessed. How? And where"! Only one answer. In bed.) (Not always in bed, you dirty old man with a girl's name. In bed, certainly. But lots of other places, too. In his car. In your car. Several times in this house -- ) (Be damned! Then all my servants know it, too.) (I doubt if they suspect. We used your study to worx -- and did work -- and Cunningham didn't let us be disturbed any more than he would have disturbed you and me. You asked a rude question, you'll get a blunt answer. The old goat was good. And quite daring in grabbing every chance. We hardly missed a day until I was killed.) (A couple of j.d.'s, you two. Well, 'My hat's off to the Duke.') (Jealous, Boss?) (No, envious. I wouldn't have been up to it the first day I laid eyes on you. Impossible. And now still more impossible. Just envious. The old goat.) (Not impossible, Joan.) (Eh?) (I was shocked when I saw Jake. My death must have hurt him terribly. I know it did, he loved me. But we can pull him out of it, Joan, you and I-only this time we won't use your study.) ( What"! Why that's incest) (Don't be ridiculous, dear. I was no relation to Jake and I don't think you are, either.) (I mean it would feel like incest. Jake? Jake"! Eunice, when I admitted that I supposed that I would -- eventually -- be 'actively female' I didn't hdiVJake in mind.) (I did.) (Then get it out of your mind! Forget it. Dr. Hedrick if you want toat least I'll try to cooperate -- after I get used to being female. Your former husband Joe, I owe that to you -- ) (Not Joe.) (Why not? You spoke highly of him in that respect, and I always thought you thought well of him in other respects. Not urging you -- hell, I can't think about sex with any man other than abstractly; I'm not yet reoriented. But I had already decided to go along with your need for Joe.) (Boss, I can't. Not with Joe. Because he was my husband. To him. I'd be a zombie. A walking corpse. I doubt if he would touch us... and if he did. I'd be terribly tempted to tell him. Tell him I'm still here. Can't. I know it.) (And  can't make it with Jake. It's the same with Jake, too, you know. A walking corpse.) (Not quite the same. Surely, he knows we're a patchwork, your brain and my body. But he loved us both. He's loved you much longer that he's loved me. While Joe doesn't even know you.) Jake loved me? Eunice, you're out of your mind!) (Impossible, dear; I don't have one to be out of. Why do you think Jake put up with your bad temper? Not for money; he's rich, even though he's not as rich as you are. Why is he still around at all? For me? He would have avoided seeing me -- this body -- had it been possible; it hurts him. He stuck because you needed him. Look, dear -- Joan, I mean -- Joan, this is your big sister Eunice talking, you listen to her. Be nice to Jake. Be a sweet girl to Jake. Then let things run easy. I'm not asking you to do anything you don't want to do -- heavens, no! Jake would spot it if you forced yourself; he's no fool about women. Just be sweet. Don't be Johann, be Joan. Be little and feminine and let him take care of you.) (Well -- I'll try. Jake is going to think I'm off my rocker.) (He's going to think you're a darling girl. It's possible he'd rather be your father than what he was to me. If so, we'll be good and let him baby us.) She sighed. (I'll try, Eunice. But I don't know. Jake!) (That's my good girl, Joan. Be helpless and female; Jake will do the rest.) straight to the bed. "What's this about a tub bath? I thought I made it plain that you weren't to rush things." (Don't let him argue, Joan!) (Watch me trip him!) "Oh! Doctor, you startled me so!" "Eh? How?" "Bursting in on me without warning. Is that nice?" Garcia looked baffled. "Miss Smith, I've been here more than a year and I've always entered this room without ceremony. Am I to understand that you find it offensive? After all this time?" "That's not the point. Doctor. When you first came here you were attending a helpless old man. Then you were helping Dr. Hedrick with a female patient who was paralyzed, and unconscious most of the time -- and I do appreciate the care you gave that helpless patient, for I am she. But things change. I am now having to learn to be a woman and, if possible, a lady. It's not easy. Won't you help me by showing me the formal courtesies you show other ladies?" Garcia reddened slightly. "A doctor doesn't have time for formalities." (Slug him again, dearie! He's still twitching.) (I shall!) "Doctor, if I were in danger, I would expect you to rush in without buzzing; I depend on you. But you came in to tell me I can't have a bath -- surely not an emergency. I'm not asking much -- just asking you to think of this room, not as an old man's sickroom, but as a lady's boudoir. To help me. Please?" Dr. Garcia said stiffly, "Very well. Miss Smith. I shall remember." "Thank you, sir. By the way, my name is Joan Smith now; I can't go on being Johann. You might call me 'Miss Joan' to help me get used to it. Or simply Joan, as I don't want to be unnecessarily formal with my doctor, truly I don't. Just that little touch of formality that I need as training in learning how to be my new self. Will you call me Joan?" He grudged a smile. "All right -- Joan." She gave him Eunice's best youwonderful-man smile. "That sounds nice. And you are welcome anytime. Doctor, either professionally or just to visit. Which I hope you will do. Just have the nurse make sure I'm ready to receive a gentleman. Things. You know." She raised herself on an elbow and looked at him, acutely aware of her "modest" nightgown. "Such as lipstick." She wetted her lips. "Odd to have to wear it. Is it on properly? Does it look right?" "You look lovely!" (Cancel and erase -- change 'butch' to 'tart.' You're a naturalborn tart, dearie. Where's your beat?) (Stow it, sister tart; I haven't finished hustling him.) "Why, thank you, sir! Now tell me why I can't have a hot, soapy, tub bath so that I will feel lovely, too. I'll follow your orders. Doctor, but I would like to understand them. Can you tell me without using a lot of long medical words?" "Well -- Joan, my objection is to the tub itself. People are forever breaking legs or cracking skulls through slipping in bathtubs. And you haven't even learned to stand up, much less walk." "True." Joan threw the sheet back, dropped her feet over the edge of the bed, sat up -- controlled a slight dizziness and smiled. "Let's see if I can. Will you help me. Doctor? Arm around me perhaps?" "Lie down!" "Must I? I feel fine. Is there a stool? My feet don't touch -- " "Miss Sm -- Joan, damn it, so help me I'm going to quit this business and buy a junk yard! Lie down while I call a nurse. Then we'll get on each side of you and let you stand up. When you find out how weak and dizzy you are. I'll expect you to go back to bed and stay there." "Yes, Doctor," she said meekly and lay down. Winnie answered the summons. "You rang. Doctor?" "We're going to try a practice walk. Help me get the patient up. You take her left side." "Yes, sir." With too much help Joan got out of bed, stood up. The room wobbled a little but she steadied herself on Winnie while letting her arm be feather-light on the doctor's shoulder. "How do you feel?" "Fine. We should have music; I feel like dancing." "Feel like it if you wish, don't try it. Slow march now and short steps." They walked toward the door, while Joan relished the thick pile of the rug against her bare feet. Walking was fun, everything was fun! (Eunice my love, do you realize what a perfect body this is?) (It's way out of shape. But two weeks hard work and we'll have it tuned up.) (Oh, pooh, I never felt this good even as a child.) (You'll see. Boss. Say a vertical split with our hair sweeping the floor, then hold it through ten controlled breaths -- and come out of it with a slow walkover and melt on down into a full lotus with never a hurried movement. Just wait.) (You think we'll be able to do that? I was clumsy even as a boy.) (No huhu. The body remembers, dear.) They stopped. "Now turn around slowly, and head for your bed." "Doctor? Now that I'm up, why not head me straight for that soap and water?" "Aren't you tired?" "Not a bit. I didn't lean on you, did I? I thought I had been promised a real bath as soon as I was able to walk. Must I stand on my hands as well? Back away and I'll try." She let go his arm. The doctor promptly put his arm around her waist. "No nonsense! Nurse, that tub has grab rails; make her use them." "Yes, Doctor." "If this patient falls, you had better head for Canada -- you can find the shortest route by following me. If you're fast enough." "Winnie won't let me fall, " Joan said warmly while warmly leaning into his arm. "But if you're worried, you can come in and help. Scrub my back." He snorted. "Ten minutes ago you bawled me out merely for walking into your bedroom unannounced." "And if you do it again, I shall again. That's social; this is professional. Doctor, I'm well aware that you've seen my new body -- professionally -- many times. One more time won't kill me." She wiggled slightly in his arm. "Scrubbing a patient's back is not part of my professional duties. Lukewarm tub. Nurse, and don't let her stay in too long." the door shut Joan threw her arms around her nurse and giggled. "Honey, did you see his face?" Winnie shook her head. "Joan, you don't need me to coach you in how to be female. You already know." "Oh, but I do need you, dear. Because I don't know. I simply used on dear Doctor things that used to fluster me when I was his age -- and male." She giggled again. "For a second I thought he was going to take my dare and scrub my back." (And  thought you were going to lay him, right on the rug.) (Oh, be quiet, Eunice; I didn't even pinch him.) Joan let go of Winnie, stepped back and started to skin the gown over her head. "Now for a bath. Oh, boy!" "Joan! Please hold on to something. Doetor might show up any seeond." "Oh, pooh, he wouldn't dare. Never again." Joan turned and touched the latch switch. "Now he can't, so quit fretting." "You mustn't lock the door. Hospital baths are never locked." "This isn't a hospital and I'll lock my bathroom door whenever I like and if Dr. Garcia finds out I've locked it the only way he can -- by trying to walk in -- and dares to mention it. I'll scream my head off to Jake Salomon and there'll be a ehange in doctors. Winnie dear, I wasn't a cranky old man more years than I care to think about without learning how to get my own way. I just have to use different weapons now. Want to peel off that uniform and hang it in the dressing room? I not only may splash you but this end is going to fill up with steam." "No, Joan -- lukewarm tub. You heard him." "I heard him and it's going to be the temperature I like and that's another thing he'll never know and you know that I'm lively as a frog and not the weak kitten he insists on thinking I am; a hot tub won't hurt me. If you want to get your uniform clammy, that's your business. Better yet, climb into the tub with me. It's big and, short as I am now, I might slide under and drown, alone." "I shouldn't," Winnie said slowly"Isn't that a horrid thought? Patient faints in tub and drowns before nurse can reach her. Not good enough for flash news but they might mention it on the latelate-late early news." "Joan! You're teasing me." (You sure are, Boss. Erase and correct again -- Both tart and butch.) (Fiddlesticks, Eunice. That's a big enough tub for all three of us.) Winnie bit her lip and slowly unfastened her smock. Joan turned adjusted the temperature and avoided watehing her. A n hour later Joan was seated in an easy chair, her feet on a stool. To the nightgown had been added a filmy negligee and a pair of high-heeled boudoir pumps. Her hair had been arranged, her face had been most carefully made up and she was lavishly scented with a eologne labeled "April Mist" but whieh deserved the title of "Criminal Assault." Her toe nails were trimmed, not to Eunice's satisfaction but well enough for the time being. Best of all, she was enjoying the euphoria of a woman who is utterly clean, seented and powdered, and dressed attractively. Beds had been switched; the room no longer held any flavor of siekroom, and Joan found that this greatly inereased her feeling of wellbeing. Eunice's stenodesk had been restored to its usual spot beyond Johann's baby grand piano, Joan having learned that it was in her study where it had last been used, and had told Cunningham to have it brought in. It did not fit the roombut it fitted her notion of what the room should be; it was homey, it belonged. She was alone, Winnie having gone to invite Mr. Salomon to dine with his hostess-ward. Joan sighed with satisfaction. (Feel better, hon? I do.) (Heavens, yes. But why did you lose your nerve?) (Oh, piffle, Eunice! I never intended to seduce her.) (Liar. Hypocrite. Dirty old man. You had her all set. Then you went chicken. I've met men like you before, dearie -- talk a good game, then lose their nerve in the clutch. Cowardly Casanovas. Pfui!) (Nonsense! You don't shoot ducks on water. If I ever make a real pass at her -- I'm not saying I will but I admit she's a cuddlesome little bundle -- ) (She is indeed!) (Oh, shut up! If I ever do. I'll give her a sporting chance -- not grab her when she dasn't scream.) ('Sporting chance' my tired back. Listen to your big sister, Joan -- sex isn't a sport, it's a way to be happy. There is nothing more exasperating to a woman than to be ready to give in -- then have the matter dropped. You'll find out. You'll cry in your pillow and hate every man alive. Till the next time, that is.) (Eunice? You've never had that sort of turn-down, have you? I don't believe it.) (Happens to every woman, Joan. Men are sisr sies. If we women weren't so willing, if we didn't just plain lead 'em by the hand, the race would die out.) (Uh -- You know more about being a woman than I do -- ) (Lots more!) ( -- so let's talk about specifics. We're clean now and I know we're pretty; I checked us in the big glass and you agreed. But it isn't the job you used to turn out. I don't mean body paint, wouldn't be appropriate now anyhow. But what does it take? Just that tuning up? Exercise?) (More than that. Boss -- although exercise is essential. You're talking about a professional ob?) (Yes. The works.) (Well, I used to do myselfbut I had had lots of practice, plus expert help from Joe. But let's say you want the best and don't care what it costs -- ) (Certainly! What's money? I can't get rid of it.) (All right, say you retain Helena Rubinstein, Limited, or some other top glamor shop. Say you phone and tell them to send a full team. They would send an art director -- male, but he may not be #I that male and he's seen more female bodies unmade-up than an undertaker -- and he doesn't touch you; he's too high up. He creates. And bosses. Won't look at you until several others get you ready. Mmm, bath girl, masseuse, manicurist, pedicurist, coiffeuse, depilatrix, parfumiste, face and skin team of at least four, costume designer, highlight and accent specialist, and assistants for all of these if you expect the job done in less than all day. If you put a time limit on it, the price goes up -- and if you don't , the price goes up.) (Say that again?) (It's like taxes. Any way you play it the price goes up. Boss, we don't need them. With what I know and the chassis we have to work with and a good lady's maid, you can be as glamorous as you like. I don't know where you would find a creative paint man equal to Joe; nevertheless there are good ones for hire. We can shop the market, we'll find one.) (Eunice, I had no idea that being a woman was so complicated.) (Relax, Boss. Being a woman is easier than being a man -- and lots more fun. I'm going to teach you to be a twenty-first century woman -- and I'd be pleased if you would teach me how it was to be a twentieth century man, and we'll close that silly 'generation gap.' Understand each other as well as loving each other.) (Beloved.) (I think you're pretty nice, too, you cranky old bastard. With your brain and my body, we make a fine team. We'll get by.) (I'm sure we will, darling.) (We will. The first thing we need is a good lady's maid -- scarce as whales in Kansas. We'll probably have to train one. Then lose her as soon as she's worth anything.) (Eunice, do we need a maid? You used to do yourself.) (I did, and kept house for Joe, and was your secretary and worked any hours you wanted me. But you're not used to that, Boss. You had a valet.) (Yes, of course. But I was very old and didn't have time to waste on such things. Eunice, one of the worst parts about getting old is that the days get shorter while the demands on your time increase. I didn't want a valet; I was forced into it. Didn't enjoy being dependent on a secretary, either -- until you came along.) (Dear Boss. Joan, we will need a maid. But not a secretary until you're active in business again -- ) (Won't be!) (We'll see. You may have to be. But may not need a secretary unless you get pushed for time. I can handle it. And thanks for having Betsy brought in; it makes me feel at home to see her again. My stenodesk, I mean. Pet name.) ('Betsy' huh? I always thought of it as 'the Octopus.') (Why, what a nasty name to apply to a nice, respectable, wellbehaved machine! Boss, I'm not sure I'm speaking to you. I'm glad Betsy isn't switched on; if she had heard that, her feelings would be hurt.) (Eunice, don't be silly. I wonder what's keeping Jake?) (Probably cutting his toenails. Lesson number two in how to be a woman: Men are almost always late but you never, never, never notice it -- because they pride themselves on promptness. Boss, you didn't quite promise Winnie to stay in this chair -- when she gave you strict orders.) (Of course not. Because it might not suit me. And it doesn't; I want to try the eighty-eight. Eunice, two gets you seven it hasn't been kept in tune -- and I gave Cunningham orders about both pianos, this baby and the concert grand downstairs, not five years ago. So let's see.) S HE stood up, did not notice that high heels gave her no trouble, and glided gracefully over to the little piano, sat down and opened it -- let the first bars of Dvorak's Slavonic Dance # run through her mind, then started to play --  -- and achieved a clash of noise. "What the hell!" She looked at the keyboard, then hit middle C with her right forefinger. It sounded okay -- and so did the C an octave below it. Several oneand two-finger experiments convinced her that the piano was not at fault. Yet to strike a single chord required studying the keyboard, then carefully positioning each finger by sight. Presently she managed a slow, uneven, faulty version of "Chopsticks" by watching the keyboard and controlling her hands so hard they trembled. She quit before reaching its undistinguished coda and crashed the keys with both hands. (There go ten years of piano lessons!) (What did you expect, Boss? I was never much good even with a guitar.) (Well, I'm glad Mama didn't hear that -- she always wanted me to be a concert pianist. Eunice, why the devil didn't you study piano as a kid?) (Because I was too busy studying boys! A much more rewarding subject. Joan, if you want to play the piano again, we can learn. But we'll have to start almost from scratch. It's in your head, I know; I could hear it. But to get from there down into our hands -- my hands, dear -- will probably take more patient work than slimming our hips.) (Doesn't matter, not really.) She got up from the piano bench. (Boss. Just a sec. While we're here, let's warm up Betsy and give her a check run.) (Huh? I know nothing about a stenodesk. It'll be worse than the piano.) (We'll see.) She moved over and sat down at the stenodesk. (Well, Eunice? Which way to the Egress?) (Relax, Boss. The body remembers. Just say 'Dictation, Eunice,' then recite something you know. Think about what you're dictating.) (Okay.) "Dictation, Eunice. 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition..." Deftly her hands touched the switches, swiveled the microphone in time to catch the first word, required the machine to listen  hold while she inserted punctuation, used erase  correct when the machine spelled "fourth" rather than "forth" -- all without hurrying. She stopped and looked at the result. (Be durned! How, Eunice?) (Don't ask, dear -- or we might get fouled up in the dilemma of the centipede. But Betsy is purring like a kitten; she's glad I'm back.) (Well, so am I. Uh, Eunice, this machine -- Betsy, I mean has access to the Congressional Library St. Louis Annex, does it not? -- she not?) (Certainly. Hooked into the Interlibrary Net, rather, though you can restrict a query to one library.) (Better query just one. I want to find out what is known about memory and how it works.) (All right. I'm interested, too; I think my memory is spotty. Can't be sure. But on a search-of-literature it's best to let Betsy handle it through preprograms -- ask for references, followed by abstracts, followed by items selected from abstracts... else, on a generalized question like that, thousands of books would be transmitted and poor Betsy would gulp them down until she was constipated, and stop and not do anything until her temporary memory was erased.) (You know how, I don't. Uh, stick in a restriction not to bother with behaviorist theories. I know all about Pavlov and his robots I care to know, namely that every time a dog salivates a behaviorist psychologist has to ring a bell.) (All right. Boss? Can we spend a little more money?) (Go ahead, buy the Pyramids. What do you want, dearest?) (Let's have a Triple-A-One snoop search run on me. Eunice Branca, I mean -- the 'me' that used to be.) (Why, beloved? If you've been selling government secrets they can't touch you now.) (Because. It might fill some of those holes I think I have in my memory... and it might turn up something you've heard from me since I came back but which was not in the security report you got on me originally. Then you would know, dear... and could stop worrying that I may be only a figment of your imagination.) (Eunice, if I'm crazy, the only thing that worries me is that some damned shrink might cure me. Then you would go away.) (That's sweet of you. Boss. But I won't go away; I promised.) (And even if I am crazy, it just makes me fit that much better into the present world. Eunice, don't you remember anything between being killed and waking up here?) T he inner voice was silent a moment. (Not really. There were dreams and I think you were in them. But there was one that does not seem like a dream; it seems as real as this room. But if I tell you, you'll think  am crazy.) (If so, it doesn't detract from your charm, dear.) (All right but don't laugh. Joan, while I was away, I was in this -- place. There was an old, old Man with a long white beard. He had a great big book. He looked at it, then He looked at me and said, 'Daughter, you've been a naughty girl. But not too naughty, so I'm going to give you a second chance.') (A dream, Eunice. Anthropomorphism, straight out of your childhood Sunday School.) (Maybe, Boss. But here I am and I do have a second chance.) (Yes, but God didn't give it to you. Eunice my own, I don't believe in God nor Devil.) (Well... you haven't been dead -- and  have. Truly I don't know what I believe; I guess I wasn't dead long enough to find out. But do you mind if we pray occasionally?) (Jesus H. Christ!) (Stop that, Joan! Or I'll use every one of those words you consider 'unladylike'. It's not much to ask.) (I'm henpecked. Okay. If it's a beautiful church, with good music, and the sermon isn't over ten minutes.) (Oh, I didn't mean in a church. Can't stand 'em. Filled with bad vibrations. I mean pray by ourselves, Joan. I'll teach you.) (Oh. All right. Now?) (No, I want to get these search orders in. You think about something else; I don't want centipede trouble -- think about Winnie all slickery with soapsuds.) (A pious thought. Much better than prayer.) (Dirty old man. How do you know -- I'll bet you've never prayed in your life.) (Oh, yes, I have, dearest -- but God had gone fishing.) (So think about Winnie.) She was busy for several minutes. Then she patted the machine affectionately and switched it off. (Well, did you?) (Did I what?) (Did you think about Winnie? Lecher.) (I took advantage of the unusual peace and quiet to contemplate the wonders of the universe.) (So?) (I thought about Winnie.) (I know you did; I was right with you. Joan, for a girl who is, in one sense at least, a virgin, you have an unusually low and vivid imagination.) (Aw, shucks. I'll bet you say that to all the girls.) (The stark truth, Joan sweet -- with your imagination I can hardly wait for you to start us on that 'actively female' career. In all the wrestling I've done I've never had a man -- or a girl -- grab me the way you were thinking about.) (Oh. Learned that one from a respectable housewife, clear back in my teens. A most charming lady.) (Hmm! Perhaps I was born too late for the real action.) (So I've been trying to tell you. Did you get those orders in?) (Certainly, Boss, when did I ever miss? Let's get back to our chair; our back is tired.) thirty feet back to her chair without remembering that she had kicked off her pumps to handle the lower controls of the stenodesk more easily; the rug simply felt good to her bare feet. Then she did notice as she sat down in the big easy chair and folded her legs in the awkward, elegant, and surprisingly comfortable lotus position. But it did not seem worth while to go get them. The door buzzer sounded. "It's me, Winnie." "Come in. dear." The nurse entered. "Mr. Salomon asked me to tell you that he will be in to see you in a few minutes. But he can't stay for dinner." "He'll stay. Come here and kiss me. What did you tell Cunningham?" "Dinner for two, in here, just as you said -- to be served when you rang. But Mr. Salomon seemed quite firm about leaving." "I still say he'll stay. But if he doesn't, you come eat dinner with me. Would you fetch my pumps? Over there on the floor beyond the piano." The nurse looked, fetched the pumps, stood over Joan Eunice and sighed. "Joan, I don't know what to do about you. You've been a bad girl again. Why didn't you ring?" "Don't scold me, dear. Here, sit on the stool and lean against my knees and talk. There. Now tell me -- By any chance were you ever a lady's maid before you took nurse's training?" "No. Why?" "You did such a fine job of taking care of me in the bath and getting me pretty. Well, it was just a thought. I don't suppose a nurse -- a professional woman -- would consider a job as a maid. No matter how high the salary. But Dr. Garcia is going to insist that I have a nurse after he leaves. I don't need a nurse and you know it. But dear Doctor will insist. I do need a maid; I won't be able to dress myself at first -- women's clothes are so different. Not to mention knowing nothing about makeup. Or buying women's clothes. What are you paid now, Winnie?" The nurse told her. "Goodness! No wonder they're always saying there's a shortage of nurses. I can't hire an in-house guard at that price. What would you think of staying on as my nurse -- but actually doing things for me that a maid would do and I don't know how to do -- at three times your present salary? With whatever you wish paid in cash so that you won't have to report it?" The redhead looked thoughtful. "How would you want me to dress, Joan?" "That's up to you. Your white nurse's uniform, if you prefer it -- since you'll be my nurse in Dr. Garcia's eyes. Or what you wish. There's a bedroom through that door where my valet used to sleep. With a nice bath -- and another room beyond it which we can redo as your living room. Redecorate all three rooms to suit your taste. Your private apartment." (Boss, what was that about not shooting ducks on water?) (Stuff it, Eunice. If she takes the bait, it's having to train her -- and then have her steal the jewelry and drop out about the time she's some use). (Oh, I see advantages. But you plaee Winnie one unlocked door away and she'll be in bed with you before you ean say 'Sappho.' You may not want men in our life -- but  do.) (Oh, nonsense! She's already thinking about the money. If she takes the job, she'll be more standoffish -- she'll start calling us 'Miss' again.) "Miss Joan? It'll really be my own apartment? I ean entertain?" "Of course, dear. Private. Oh, Cunningham's staff will clean and so forth, any service you want. Breakfast tray, whatever. Or never enter it if you prefer it that way." "It sounds heavenly. I'm sharing a room with two other girls... at a rent that's horrid beeause it's inside an enclave. Safe -- but I never have any privacy." "Winnie. Look at me, dear, and lay it on the line. The bed in there now is, I believe, a single. Would you like to have it replaced with a big, big double bed?" The girl blushed. "Uh, it would be nice." "So stop blushing. I won't know you have a visitor unless you tell me; that door is soundproof. Of course visitors have to be identified and checked for weapons, just as visitors to an enclave have to be -- but that simply means you must vouch for a visitor to my chief guard the first visit. But I won't know it unless you choose to tell me. The in-house staff all have visitors. But security is my chief guard's worry, not mine." "But he does have to show his ID?" "You still would have to vouch for him to Chief O'Neil but -- Hold the count down. Did you mean he would rather not show an ID? Is he married, or something?" Winnie blushed again, did not answer. Joan Eunice went on, "Nobody's business, dear. This is a private home, not a government compound. You vouch for him, that's enough. Chief O'Neil doesn't trust IDs; they're often faked. But he has a photographic eye. Are you going to stay with me? As nurse in residence, or lady's companion, or social secretary, or whatever you want?" "Lady's maid. If I'm to be your maid. Miss Joan, I'd rather that your staff knew it and no pretense. And dress as your maid. What sort of uniform? Traditional? Or Acapulco? Or something in between?" "Oh, not traditional, surely; you have such pretty legs. All-out Acapulco, if you like." Winnie looked pleased. "I might go all out. A girl gets tired of these white coveralls." (Joan! Tell her not to use an all-out Acapulco paint job. Bad for her skin.) "Suit yourself, dear. But don't use a lot of paint. Bad for your skin." "Oh, I know! I'm a real redhead, you probably noticed. I can't even sunbathe. I was thinking of a little black frill skirt with a white lace apron about the size of a saucer. Little perky maid's cap, white on a black ribbon. Cling-On cups, in black. Transparent? Or opaque?" "Whichever suits you, Winnie. High heels?" "Uh, translucent, I guess, like the panels in that nightie. High heels, certainly, or the effect is lost -- I can wear real stilts if I'm barefooted most of the time. Then just enough paint for accent. There are lovely decals that go on in no time and come right off with cold cream. Butterflies and flowers and things. Cheap, too. Everything I mentioned I can buy in disposables. I'll look like a proper lady's maid, yet not spend more time getting dressed than I do in putting on this smock and tights." "You'll look cute, dear. Going to dress up in a maid's outfit and model it for your friend?" Winnie started to blush again, then grinned. "I certainly am! And let him take it off me, too!" (Cheers!) (Eunice, you have a onetrack mind.) (You should know, dearie -- it's your mind.) announced Mr. Salomon, then left. The lawyer came toward Joan solemnly, took the hand she extended and bowed over it. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "Disappointed," Joan answered soberly. "Because my oldest and dearest friend hasn't time to dine with me my first day up. But physically I feel fine. Weak, but that's to be expected." "Sure you're not overdoing?" "I'm sure. My respiration and heartbeat are being telemetered -- if I weren't all right, someone would come in and order me to bed. Truly, I'm all right, Jake -- and I won't get strong unless I do stay out of bed. But how about you, old friend? I have been terribly worried." "Oh, I'm all right. Just made a fool of myself, Johann." "You did not make a fool of yourself... and I feel certain Eunice knows it, Jake." (Watch it. Boss!) (Pipe down.) "You could have paid her no finer tribute than those honest tears." Joan found her own tears starting; she encouraged them while ignoring them. "She was a sweet and gallant lady, Jake, and it touched me more than I can say to learn that you appreciated her wonderful qualities as much as I did. Jake -- please sit down, if only for a moment. There is something I must ask you." "Well... all right. Can't stay long." "Whistle that chair closer and face me. Uh, a glass of sherry? Doctor says I may have it -- and I find that I need it. That Spanish cocktail sherry, dry as your wit. Will you do me the honor of pouring for us?" Joan waited until the lawyer had filled their glasses and had seated himself. She raised her glass and at the same time raised her chest, letting those "wicked" panels do their best. "A toast, Jake -- no, don't get up. The same toast, Jake always the same toast from now on whenever you and I drink together... but silently." She took a sip and put her glass down. "Jake -- " "Yes... Johann?" " 'Joan' please -- I can't be 'Johann' any longer. Jake, you know that I never expected to live through any such operation? It was a -- device. A legal device." "Yes, Joha -- Yes, Joan, I knew. That's why I helped." "I knew. The most generous act of friendship I have ever known. What is it the Japanese name it? -- the friend who helps, when it is necessary to die. Never mind. Jake, look me in the eye. Do you know, deep in your heart, that I would rather be dead... than to have lived through it by this incredible circumstance? Be alive... at her expense? Do you know that, Jake? Or must I live still another life, hating myself?" Salomon raised his eyes, met hers firmly. "Yes -- Joan. I know it. It was no fault of yours... you must not hate yourself. Uh... Eunice wouldn't want you to!" "I know! Weep, dear Jake; don't hold back your tears -- see, I am not holding back mine. Just try not to go to pieces, or I will, too. Jake, each of us would happily have died rather than let this happen. I am as certain of it about you as I hope you are about me. I don't think I could stand it if you had not reassured me. Look at me -- a lovely body and young -- yet I am almost ninety-five years old and have not one friend left alive... but you." "You'll make more friends." "I wonder if I can. The span is great, perhaps too great. I feel as the Wandering Jew must have felt, alive beyond his allotted time. His name -- Aha -- something. My memory is not as good as this young body. But I can't forget one question which I must ask. Jake, is there any possibility that Eunice's husband had something to do with her death? That prize I put up, that blood money -- did it tempt himT' base. I know!) (Sorry, beloved, more sorry than I can say. But I must have proof.) "Jake? Did I entice a murder!" T he lawyer shook his head. "I'm astounded. But of course you don't know the circumstances. You enticed nothing. I wrote that offer most carefully. Were there any guilt I would share it. There was none." "How do you know!" (Drop it. Boss. Please!) "Mr. Branca was in Philadelphia, visiting his mother." (You see. Boss?) "I had to find him to get the post-death ratification. Took three days, while both of you were kept ready for surgery. Joe Branca didn't know she was dead. Hell of a job even to find him. Three long days." "Three days. Why wasn't I told?" "And waste Eunice's death? Are you crazy? You were unconscious; Garcia put you under as soon as I notified him that a body was going to be ready. Then that dreadful wait. I need your forgiveness, too, for -- Joan -- no, 'Johann!' I hated you... for being alive when she was dead. But I pushed on -- for her sake. Oh, I got over it, it was a sick hate. I knew better." "Do you hate me now?" "Eh?" Salomon looked at her, in sorrow. "No. You are not only my old friend, who has always been honest and decent under his crusty exterior -- whose virtues outweighed his faults." Salomon managed to smile. "Though sometimes just barely. But also you are the only tie I have left to her." "Yes. You may find me better tempered now, Jake. It's easier to smile, easier to be patient, than it was in that old wreck of a body I had. But, Jake, about Joe Branca. All right, he was in Philadelphia. But could he have arranged it?" "No." "You're certain?" "Certain. Joha -- Joan, it's that fear that it might have started a chain of events. When they located Joe Branca, I had to jet there and get that piece of paper. He was dazed. Couldn't believe it. But accepted the fact. But not the money. I couldn't get him to sign the post-death authorization without first preparing another document, waiving the money. The escrow trustee -- Chase Manhattan -- was instructed by Joe to pay it to the Rare Blood Club -- his idea -- as a memorial to Eunice Evans Branca." (Oh, Boss! Tm crying.) (We all are.) (But, Boss -- Joe must be starving.) (We'll take care of it.) She sighed. "I'll be damned." "Perhaps. And perhaps myself. But I don't think Joe Branca will be. He's an unworldly man -- Joan. From a slum family. A flower in the muck. I couldn't even get him to accept a lesser sum. He insisted on paying for witnessing and notarizing his mark, and the tax stamp on the assignment -- and it took almost every dime he could dig up. He just shook his head and said, 'Broke don't scare me.' " "Jake, we must take care of him." "I don't think you can, Joan. In his own odd way he is as proud as she was. But I did one thing. In searching for him I had to get a court order to open their studio indispensable it turned out, as an old letter from his mother gave us the clue that located him. But I learned that the rent was almost due... the corporation's rent agent wanted to know how soon the lease was going to lapse -- he assumed that, with her dead, the rent would not be paid. So I covered the matter for the moment, then when I got back, I bought the lease. As long as Joe chooses to stay, he won't be asked for rent. Then I checked around and located her bank account and arranged with a friendly judge to let me guarantee the matter and had it assigned to Joe without bothering him with legal formalities. The little dear was smart about money a nice sum, enough to keep him eating a couple of years I think." (All gone in a couple of months,  think. Boss, Joe doesn't understand money. A bank account isn't real to him.) (Don't worry, darling, Jake and I will handle it.) She sighed. "I feel reassured, Jake. But distressed about her husband. We must look into it. If he's that unworldly, then there must be some way to subsidize him without his knowing it." "All right, Joan, we will try. But Joe Branca taught me -- at my age that there are things money cannot buy. Not if the prospective seller is indifferent to money." "Will you have more sherry? And may I have another drop? If you can't stay, I think I'll ask to be put to bed and right to sleep. Skip dinner." "Oh, but you must eat, Joan. For your strength. Look, if I stay, will you eat?" She gave him Eunice's best suncoming-up smile. "Yes! Yes, Jake dear! Thank you." D inner was informal, service only by Cunningham and two assistants. Joan did her best to simulate a charming, gracious hostess -- while trying not to appear greedy; everything tasted so wonderful But she waited until coffee had been served and Jake had refused a perfecto and accepted a glass of port, and she then could say, "Thank you, Cunningham, that will be all," before returning to personal matters. Once they were alone she said, "Jake, when will I be up for a competency hearing?" 'Eh'; Any time you feel well enough. Are you in a hurry?" "No. I would be utterly content to be your ward the rest of my life." Her lawyer smiled slightly. "Joan, by the actuarial tables you now have a life expectancy of about sixty years; mine is more like ten or twelve." "Well...that's hard to answer. But will you go on as before as my de facto manager? Or am I asking too much?" Salomon studied his glass. "Joan...once the court dissolves this guardian-and-ward relationship, there is no reason why you should not manage your affairs." (Joan! Change the subject; he's trying to leave us!) (So I know! Keep quiet!) (Tell him your middle name!) "Jake. Jake dear... look at me. Look hard and keep on looking. That's better. Jake -- is it that you would rather not see me...as I am now?" The lawyer said nothing. She went on, "Isn't it better to get used to what .s...than to run away from it? Wouldn't she -- Eunice -- want you to stay?" (Keep slugging, Sis -- he wants to stay.) "It isn't that simple...Joan." "Nothing ever is. But I don't thing you can run away from it any more than I can -- for I won't stop being what I amher body, my mindand you will always know it. All you accomplish by leaving is to deprive me of my one friend and the only man on earth I trust utterly. What does it take to change my name?" "Eh?" "Just what I said. I changed my surname from 'Schmidt' to 'Smith' when I enlisted on December eighth, nineteen forty-one, simply by spelling it that way to a recruiting sergeant. No one has bothered me about it since. This time perhaps it must be formal, considering the thousands of places where my signature appears. It is technically a sex-change case, is it not? A court takes judicial notice, or some such, and it's made a matter of record?" Salomon slipped into his professional persona and relaxed. "Yes, of course; I had not thought about that aspect too many other details on my mind. Joan, your earlier name change was legal -- although informal -- because any person is free to call himself by any name, without permission of a court, as long as there is no criminal intent -- to defraud, deceive, evade responsibility, avoid taxes, whatever. You can call yourself Joan -- or Johann -- or Miniver Cheever -- and that is your name, as long as your purpose is innocent. And pronounce as you like. Knew of a case once of a man who spelled his name Zaustinski and pronounced it Jones and went to the trouble of publishing the odd pronunciation as a legal notice -- although he did not have to; a name may be pronounced in any fashion its owner chooses." "Why did he do it, Jake?" "His grandmother's will required him to change his name in order to inherit -- but did not specify how he must pronounce it. Joan, in your case a formal change of name is advisable, but it might be best to wait until you are no longer my ward. But de facto your new name is already what you say it is." "Then my name is now -- Joan Eunice Smith." glass of port. He made quite a busyness of mopping it up. Joan said, "Jake, let it be, no importance. I did not mean to shock you. But don't you see the necessity? It's a tribute to her, a public acknowledgment of my debt to her. Since I can never pay it, I want to publish it, place it on the wall for all to see, like a Chinese man's debt to his tong. Besides that, ninety-five percent of me is Eunice...and only five percent is old Johann now named Joan and even that fraction no one can see, only surgeons have seen it. Lastly but by no means least -- Jake dear, look at me -- if you ever forget that fraction and call me Eunice, it won't matter; it's my name. And if you intentionally call me 'Eunice,' it will matter, for I shall be pleased and flattered. And any time it suits you to call me 'Joan Eunice,' it will make me happy, as I will be certain you have done it intentionally -- and accepted me as I am." "Very well...Joan Eunice." She smiled. "Thank you. Jake. I feel happier than I have felt since I first knew. I hope you do." "Um. Yes, I think so. It's a good chance -- Joan Eunice." "Did you get wine on your clothes? If so, let Cunningham see to it. Jake, is there any reason for you to go clear out to Safe Harbor tonight? I'm sure Cunningham can find you clean socks or whatever." "Goodness, Joan -- Joan Eunice -- I've been here two nights already." "Do you think three will wear out your welcome? You can't wear it out." "And the drive isn't that far, as I placed my house for sale with the enclave trustees months ago. I have rooms at the Gibraltar Club now. Good service, central location, none of the fiddin' worries of a householder." "I see your point. Hmm, must remember to resign from the Gib myself." She smiled. "They'll never let me past the ladies' lounge -- now." The lawyer said dryly, "I took the liberty of withdrawing you from membership shortly after I became your guardian -- Joan Eunice." She laughed in delight. "And me a founding member! This is delicious -- souls and honks and thirds all welcome...but females are second-class citizens. Jake, dear. I'm going to have to get used to a lot of things." "I suppose so -- Joan Eunice." "So I'll need you more than ever. Where are you sleeping?" "The Brown room." "Cunningham must be slipping. He should have put you in the Green suite." "Well... the Green suite has been used for hospital equipment and supplies. I authorized it." "Then you can just unauthorize it as that is your suite. They can store than stuff somewhere else. Or remove it, as little of it will be needed from now on." "Hedrick had most of it removed the middle of the day." "All right, you stay in the Brown room tonight, then tomorrow Cunningham can get the Green suite in shape for you." "Joan Eunice, what leads you to think I'm moving in here? I'm not." "I didn't say you were. I said that the Green suite is yours. Whether you stay a night or a year. Yours without invitation, yours to come and go without bothering to say hello or goodbye. Although I hope it will suit you to say hello to me frequently. Is Hubert, my former valet, still around?" "Yes. He's tended me the last two nights." "From now on he'll tend the Green suite and take care of you whenever you honor us with your presence. Jake, you had better move some clothes here." "Damn it -- Pardon me, Joan Eunice." "For saying 'Damn it'? It's a strange day when my oldest friend must curb his language in my presence. Jake, I've heard you use language that would blister paint at forty yards -- and at me, not merely in my presence." "True. But I must now remember that you are a lady, Joan Eunice." "Please yourself. I'm going to have more trouble learning to be a lady than you will have in remembering that I am supposed to be one. If you slip, ignore itfor you know that I never took a back seat to any muleskinner in other days. You were saying?" "Well, I was saying, 'Damn it, we must remember your reputation' Joan Eunice." "My whaP. My reputation as a womarp. I doubt if I have one -- other than as a sideshow freak. Doesn't worry me." "You're not in the news, Joan Eunice, since shortly after the operation. Oh, you will be again when we go into court...and perhaps sooner, when someone in your household staff or Dr. Hedrick's staff, spills the fact of your recovery." "So I'll be a sideshow freak again and who cares? A nine-day wonder lasts only a couple of days now; they wear out faster than they did when I was a kid. Jake, I haven't worried about what anyone said about me for over half a century. The image our P.R. men built up was for the Company, not for me personally. As for Mrs. Grundy -- I think she's dead. The present generation does not care about her opinion -- a change for the better in a world otherwise deteriorating. I doubt if Eunice ever heard of Mrs. Grundy." (Sure have. Boss. My fourth-grade teacher. Used to shack with the viceprincipal until his wife found out. We kids giggled over itbut you would have liked her...you dirty old darling. Keep working on Jake, deartime to back away closer.) (Who's driving this car?) (I am.) fully, "I think you are right about this younger generation, Joan Eunice. Only people my age and older give such matters a thought. But you know that I should not live under your roof now. And so do I." "Jake. I am not trying to force you. Nor am I trying to compromise you "Eh? Me"! Vs your reputation I was thinking of. With your servants, at least." (Why, the old hypocrite. Ask him about the time he crowded me into a cloak closet with Cunningham almost breathing down our necks. Go on, I dare you. Oh, he's a one, that one courage under fire.) "Jake, that is sweet of you but I don't give a triple damn how my servants gossip in the kitchen. But I am able to protect you from gossip, sir. I have acquired the most conventional of Victorian chaperonage -- a respectable lady's maid. She'll sleep just through that door, where Hubert used to sleep. If it frets you, she can always be present when you and I are together." (Hey, what is this? Trying to get Winnie into the act? She might go for it -- Jake won't. Watch it, dear.) (Quit kibitzing, Eunice.) The lawyer raised his brows. "You've hired a maid already? Surprising. Though you never were one to dilly-dally. Or did you shift around part of your in-house staff?" "Some of both, Jake. I anticipated that Dr. Garcia will insist on my having a trained nurse...so I persuaded one of the nurses to stay on, in both capacities. Winnie. You've seen her, the little redhead." "Possibly I have." ('Possibly' he says. All you men are hypocrites. If he hasn't patted her butt, he's thought about it.) "I'm lucky to get her. Intelligent. Educated. Able to teach me things I must know and, being a nurse, used to caring for people even more than a maid does. I used the usual argument -- money -- but I was careful to respect her professional pride; she'll still be my nurse, she'll lady's-maid me as a friendly favor. I think she may be in bed. But she would get up and chaperone us if asked. Shall I send for her?" "What? Oh, don't be silly, Joan Eunice. You're making a mountain of a mole hill." "It seemed to me that you were, Jake. I do feel defenseless as a woman...even though I was far more vulnerable as a sick old man than I am now in this strong young body. But I feel safe with you present -- and not at all safe when you are away. Jake, I can't urge you to live here...but can't you see what a favor it would be to me? As well as -- How many rooms do you have at the Gib?" "Two. Adequate for my needs." "The rooms there aren't large...whereas the living room of the Green suite is as large as this room. We could cut a door from it into the upstairs library and it could be your study. Move anything into it you need for my affairs or your own -- plenty of room for files or books. Jake, I don't need this big mausoleum any more than you needed your house. But if I tried to sell it, I couldn't get ten percent of what it cost; I built it during the worst of the Riot Years and the cost doesn't show, it's a prettied-up fortress, stronger than police barracks. Well, we may have such years again, I may yet be glad I spared no expense. In the meantime it's big and safe and comfortable, and you might as well use it. When you wish, I mean, especially when you work on my affairs." "Well, I have been working on some of your affairs here in the house. Uh, Joan Eunice, as your guardian, I had to take over management of your household." "Hasn't Cunningham saved you from such picayune worries? I must speak to him." "Well...yes, he has and I've let him go on as before; I've made no changes. But I have had to look over the household books and authorize charges and confound it, they're stealing you blind. Cunningham especially." "Good!" "What's good about it?" "Jake, you told me that it was impossible to spend my income. If my butler is black-marketing twothirds of what he buys for me and pocketing the proceeds -- and he always hasthen he's anxious to keep his job. Which means that he has to please me. Jake, can you think of a cheaper way to buy the nearest thing to loyalty that can be bought? Let him steal. Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain." "Bad precedent. Corrupts the country." "The country is corrupt. But 'it is the only game in town;' we have no choice. The problem is always how to live in a decadent society. Jake, I want you to live here. I hope you will live here. It will make me feel happy and safe for you to be under the same roof. But don't worry about my reputationand Winnie is here to protect yours. Most certainly don't think about such trivia as household expenses; just close your eyes and sign. But don't hesitate to chew out Cunningham if the service is less than perfect; that's the price he must pay for the privilege of swindling me. By the way, my chief guard steals, too; I think he has a fifty-fifty split with Cunningham. I've never tried to find out the arrangement; it would embarrass them. nice, for a young -- and beautiful woman, you sound remarkably like a cynical old man I used to know." "Do I, Jake dear? I must learn not to sound that way. I must now leave the 'cynical old man' things to you and try to behave like a lady. If I can. But please don't disrupt a smooth household by trying to reform it -- or it will wind up like a reform administration: less efficient and still more expensive. Didn't your servants steal from you?" The lawyer looked sheepish. "Well...yes. But I had the best cook in Safe Harbor enclave. If I had fired her, I might have wound up with one just as expensive -- who put sugar in gravy. I think I was groused that they were stealing from you -- when you were helpless. But I didn't want to hamper with your household while there was any chance that you might recover. Wanted to hand it back as it was. And I have. Or shall." "Thank you, Jake. At the moment, while I may not yet be a lady, I feel not at all like a cynical old man. I find that I feel like a woman who has been ill and is not yet fully recovered. I had best go to bed. Will you help me?" "Uh, I'll call the nurse." "Jake, Jake -- this is the body I have; we must quit being jumpy about it. Here, lend me your arm. I can stand if you'll help me...and walk to the bed it you'll let me lean on you." Salomon gave up, offered her both hands to help her out of the chair, steadied her with his arm to the bed. Joan Eunice got into it quickly, slid her negligee off as she slid under the sheet. "Thank you, .lake." "My pleasure Joan Euniee." "Will you have breakfast with me? Or lunch if you want to sleep late?" "Uh...lunch." "I'm looking forward to it." She put out her hand. He took it, bowed over it hesitated only slightly and kissed it firmly. Joan Eunice kept his hand and pulled. "Come closer, Jake dear." .She reached up, took his face between her palms. "You loved her." "Yes." "I loved her." "I know." "Say my name. My new name." "JoanJoan Eunice." "Thank you, Jake." Unhurriedly, she pulled his face down, kissed him softly on the lips. "Good night, dear friend." "Good night Joan Eunice." He left quickly. (Joan you bitch, you're pushing him too hard.) (I am notl) (The hell you aren't. Eor a second I thought you were going to drag him right into bed.) (Ridiculous!) (And you're pushing yourself too hard, too.) (Eunice, quit crabbing. I could have backed out up to the last split second. I found that I did not mind it. After all, there are many cultures in which men kiss men, as a gesture of friendship.) (In case you haven't noticed, you are no longer a man -- you're a mixed-up chiek.) (I've noticed. Look, snoopy, it was a necessary symbol. I had to show Jake that he could touch me. even kiss me good-night...and not have it be tragic. And it wasn't. Reminded me of my father kissing me goodnight...which he did until I was a big boy.) (Well...perhaps Jake is going to settle for being fatherly. But don't count on it Joan. Let me warn you. Sis Jake can kiss much better than that. He can kiss so well that your insides melt down, starting at your belly button and spreading in all directions.) (.A possibility. A remote one. Now will you shut up and let us sleep? I really am tired.) (Love me. Boss?) O've never stopped loving you dear and never will.) (Me. too and wish I could kiss you goodnight. Sleep, Boss everything's going to be all right.) Before she could get to sleep, Winifred came in. in robe and slippers. "Miss Joan?" she said softly. "Yes, dear? Put the Door lights on." "Mr. Salomon said that you had gone to bed "And you look as if you had. Did he wake you?" "Oh. no. I was chatting with Mrs. Sloan; she's on watch. But Dr. Garcia left word that your bed was to be all the way down and I see that it isn't. How do I put it down?" "I do it myself, right from the bed down, like thator back up, like that. I wasn't asleep yet. It's all right. I'll put it all the way down before you leave...and you can tell Doctor that I was a good girl." "Line! You can have this capsule if you want it. You don't have to take it, Mrs. Sloan says that Doctor says." "Ell take it; I want to go right to sleep. If you'll hand me the water there...and kiss me goodnight. If you won't, I'll sulk and ring for Mrs. Sloan and ask her to kiss me goodnight." The little nurse grinned. "I'll force myself." Winifred left about sixty seconds later. (Well, Eunice? How did that one stack up?) (Quite well, butch. Say eighty percent as well as Jake can do.) (You're teasing.) (You'll find out. Winnie is sweet -- but Jake has had years more practice. I'm not chucking asparagus at Winnie. I thought you were going to drag her right in with us.) (With Mrs. Sloan outside and watching our heart rate? What do you think I am? A fool?) (Yes.) (Oh, go to sleep!) Paris and in Montevideo, continued as before. Fighting continued on a token basis and the dead did not complain. Harvard's new president was dismissed by the student government, which then adjourned without appointing a sucnounced a plan to increase the water content of San Francisco Bay to #; the Rivers  Harbors jurisdiction. In Alma Ata a Morale Corps sergeant gave birth to a healthy two-headed boy by Caesarean section; it was watched world-wide and on Luna, via satellite, to a specially arranged chorus of the Thoughts of Chairman Lu. der Budget Executive Order (Emergency) of '#, announced an additional temporary surtax of #. In Miami Miss Universe (Miss Ghana -- #-#-#), only speaking through her press secretary  interpreter, revealed that she intended to be the first starship commander and had been studying neoEinsteinian ballistics under hypnosis for two years. The General Secretary of the People's Fraternal Society of Cosmonauts, AstroUniverse's ability to do simple arithmetic with her shoes on. Madam President of the Federated Women's Clubs of the World stated that the Honorable Secretary was a counterrevolutionary rat-fink and a typical example of male arrogance. In Los Angeles smog deaths were down # under emergency pollution-abatement measures and a brisk west wind. In a big, ugly, ornate, old house Miss Joan Eunice Smith sat in lotus on a mat in her dressing room near a large mirror and facing her nurse-companion-maid, also in lotus. "Comfortable, Winnie dear?" "Very." "I think you're even more limber than I am. All right, let's get into the mood for exercise. You start it." "All right. But Miss Joan? What does it meanl Oh, I like it; it's very relaxing. But what jewel in what lotus, and whyT' "It means nothing. And everything. If you must have words, it means peace and love and understanding and anything that you think of as good. But it's not for thinking, dear; it's for being. Let yourself be open to it, don't think. Don't even try not to think. Be." "All right." "Start us. Remember the breathing. I'll get in step." "Om Mani Padme Hum." (Om Mani Padme Hum. See that aura round her. Boss? She must have had quite a night.) (Shut up, Eunice; these prayers were your idea.) "Om Mani Padme Hum." "Om Mani Padme Hum." (Om Mani Padme Hum) "Om Mani Padme Hum." "Om Mani..." (That's enough, Joan.) (So short, beloved? Clock says only twenty minutes.) (I use a different clock. We're warm all through, we're ready. Winnie is more than ready; you'll have to call her back.) "Om Mani Padme Hum. Winifred. Winnie darling, hear me. The sun is rising and so must we." The little redhead was still perfectly in lotus, soles of her feet turned upwards on her thighs, hands in her lap, palms upward. She was still intoning, with her breathing paced exactly with her prayers. But her eyes had turned up; only the whites showed. "Come back, Winnie. Time." The girl's eyes turned down to normal, she looked puzzled, then smiled. "Already? Seems like only a moment. I must have fallen asleep." "Happens. Are you ready? Warm and loose and your muscles soft as cotton?" "Uh... yes, I am." "Then let's try some singles." Joan Eunice flowed upward from the mat like a flower unfolding and was standing. "You criticize me and I'll criticize you. Then we can have companion exercises for dessert." Joan looked at herself in the long glass. "I think my belly is firmer every day. I keep telling myself." "It's perfect and you know it." The redhead got up more slowly, caught herself in a yawn. "Still sleepy, dear? No pleasant dreams last night?" The girl barely blushed, then shrugged and smiled. "Pleasant all right but not enough hours. I hope we didn't disturb you." "Didn't hear a sound. Wouldn't have guessed if you hadn't told me when you came in to kiss me goodnight. Dear, if you're short on sleep, maybe you'd rather just criticize." "Oh, no, I'm getting more out of our exercises than you are -- don't want to miss a day. But -- yes. I'm short on sleep. Paul -- Oh, dear! But I didn't say his last name." "Didn't hear you, I was rubbing my ears." "Fibber. He didn't leave until half past two. So I did lose sleep. Not that I minded!" "I'm sure you didn't. Winnie dear, I did not mean to snoop. Oh, normal curiosity -- being a virgin myself." The nurse looked startled, said, "But -- " and shut up. Joan Eunice smiled. "Sho', sho', hon, I know what that 'But' means. Mrs. Branca was married...and Johann Smith was married four times not to mention jumping out of windows. But Joan Eunice is a virgin -- dig me, doll baby?" "Well, looked at that way -- " "Only way I can look at it. So I'm curious as a Girl Scout. But telling me would still leave me knowing nothing, even if you wanted to tell, which I'm sure you don't. Some day -- no hurry -- I suppose I'll find out for myself. So don't you dare blush again and let's get on with our exercises. I'll run through the Tortoise variations and you push me if I need it." A fter an hour of twisting and stretching and posing Joan Eunice said, "Enough. Much more and we'd be sweating instead of glowing. Ready for gruesome twosomes?" The high note of the outer door  sounded in the bath-dressingroom. "Damn," said Joan. "I don't mean a ladylike 'darn.' Damn. Into your tights, dear, and I'll drop your smock over your head. Tell 'em 'No ice today.' " "Right away." Dressed in seconds, the girl left. (Mow'd we look today, Eunice? Tits beginning to suit you?) (We're more than halfway there, Joan; in another week you can cut the time down.) (Not anxious to; it's the most fun of the day...except when our lord and guardian deigns to dine with us. Tell me, hon -- have you been fretting about those negative reports?) (No, you have been fretting; they were what I expected. Nobody knows how memory works except that everyone is sure he knows and thinks all the others are fools.) (I've been thinking about those flatworms. If you can chop up a trained flatworm and feed it to another flatworm and then the second one seems to remember what the first one learned, then -- ) (Boss! I keep telling you, I am not a flatworm! I told you a long time ago that the body remembers and -- let's table it; here comes the fuzz.) "Miss Joan, it's Dr. Garcia and Mr. Salomon." "Oh. Well, I'm not going to dress; we've still to finish. Grab me a negligee -- not that plate-glass job. The London Fog is suitable, don't you think?" i "Well, looked at that way -- " "Only way I can look at it. So I'm curious as a Girl Scout. But telling me would still leave me knowing nothing, even if you wanted to tell, which I'm sure you don't. Some day -- no hurry -- I suppose I'll find out for myself. So don't you dare blush again and let's get on with our exercises. I'll run through the Tortoise variations and you push me if I need it." A fter an hour of twisting and stretching and posing Joan Eunice said, "Enough. Much more and we'd be sweating instead of glowing. Ready for gruesome twosomes?" The high note of the outer door sounded in the bath-dressingroom. "Damn," said Joan. "I don't mean a ladylike 'darn.' Damn. Into your tights, dear, and I'll drop your smock over your head. Tell 'em 'No ice today.' " "Right away." Dressed in seconds, the girl left. (Mow'd we look today, Eunice? Tits beginning to suit you?) (We're I more than halfway there, Joan; in feed it to another flatworm and another week you can cut the time then the second one seems to redown.) (Not anxious to; it's the member what the first one learned, most fun of the day...except when then -- ) (Boss! I keep telling you, our lord and guardian deigns to I am not a flatworm! I told you a dine with us. Tell me, hon -- have long time ago that the body reyou been fretting about those negmembers and -- let's table it; here ative reports?) (No, you have been comes the fuzz.) fretting; they were what I expected. "Miss Joan, it's Dr. Garcia and Nobody knows how memory Mr. Salomon." works except that everyone is sure "Oh. Well, I'm not going to he knows and thinks all the others dress; we've still to finish. Grab me are fools.) (I've been thinking a negligee -- not that plate-glass about those flatworms. If you can job. The London Fog is suitable, chop up a trained flatworm and don't you think?" "I guess. Makes you look only half naked instead of bare." "Who taught me to dress that way, winsome Winnie?" (I did.) (Sure, Eunice -- but she thinks she bosses me. I'm her good baby who always does what Mama says... until we get dear Doctor out of our hair.) "Please tell the gentlemen that I will be right out." Miss Smith stopped to apply lipstick, decided that her face could get along with no other renewals, took a brush-comb and teased her too-short locks into fluffiness, stepped into stilt-high mules, put on the negligee and looked at herself in the long glass. She decided that the selective opacity of the robe was just right -- except that the upper part was a little too modest. So she delayed long enough to apply lipstick to areolae. Now satisfied with her appearance -- (Boss, we look like a highpriced pooka.) (Very high-priced, I hope. Were you criticizing?) (Not at all, I was applauding.) -- she went out into her boudoir. "Good morning. Doctor. Hi, Jake dear. Won't you sit down? Coffee? Or we can find some Old Kentucky Rat Poison, bottled in the barn." "Coffee," agreed Salomon. "You look charming, my dear." "Snake charming. I've been exercising and smell like a horse." "Not more than a small pony. I'll turn up the ventilation. Joan Eunice, Dr. Garcia wants to check you over." "Really? What's wrong? I feel fine. Aside from these cold prison bars all around me and my head on a pillow stone." "Dr. Garcia thinks we can do something about those cold prison bars. Joan Eunice, we agreed that it was not smart to go into court until you were discharged as well in all respects. He thinks it may be possible, now." "Oh. Oh How about that platoon of psychiatrists?" "We'll have them. We may never need them. But we'll be ready to offset their expert witnesses. You will have to put up with long and searching interviews; our own experts must go into court prepared." (Prepared to justify their fancy fees. Don't worry. Boss.; I'll hide under a rock whenever a shrink is around.) "That's okay. I'm delighted that Dr. Garcia thinks I'm well. Shall we step into my dressing room. Doctor? Come along, Winnie. Jake, the Wall Street Journal is over there." Once she was alone with her doctor and nurse Miss Smith said, "Well, Doctor? Shall I stretch out on the massage table?" "No, this examination is pro forma, to allow me to log that I gave you a physical on the day I discharged you. I'll listen with a stethoscope and make you say 'Ah -- 'things like that. If you'll sit down at your dressing table and drop the top of your robe, please." "Yes, sir." S HE kept quiet while he passed the stethoscope here and there, coughed when she was told to, inhaled sharply and sighed noisily as directed. Once she said, "Wups! Sorry, I'm ticklish," and asked, "What does that tell you?" "Just palpating for lumps. Again, pro forma -- although it's been some time since this was done." (Enjoying it, kiddo?) (Maybe you are, Eunice; I'm not. I'd rather be approached more romantic-like.) (Don't kid your grandmother; you enjoy it.)  The doctor stepped back and looked at her thoughtfully. Joan Eunice said, "Anything more, sir? G-Y-N?" "Not unless you ask for it. Trouble?" "Not a bit. I feel healthy enough to whup a grizzly bear." "And you check out that healthy, too. Nevertheless your case worries me." "Why, Doctor?" "Because your case is unique. I know almost as little about it as you do. Joan, when you left this house -- as Mr. Smith -- I never expected to see you alive again. When you were brought back, I did not expect you to regain consciousness. When you regained consciousness, I felt sorry for you...as I never expected you to be other than paralyzed from the neck down. Yet here you are, well and healthy. Apparently." "Why only 'apparently,' Doctor?" "I don't know. We know little enough about any transplant -- and nothing about a brain transplant other than what we have learned from you. Joan, for the past two weeks there has been no reason -- other than caution -- why you needed more supervision than any other young woman in good health. Say Winifred here, for example." He shrugged. "Of the two you seem to be somewhat more ruggedly healthy than she is. Nevertheless I would bet that Winifred, barring accidents, will live out her normal span...whereas you don't fit any curve; you're unique. Please, I'm not trying to frighten you, but only a fool makes predictions based on ignorance; I am not that sort of fool." "Doctor," she answered calmly, "you're saying that this body could reject the brain -- or vice versa, it's the same thing. Or that I could drop dead, heart failure, for no defined reason. I know it; I read a great deal on transplants, while I was still Johann Smith. I am not afraid. If it happens -- well. I've had a wonderful vacation from old age, with its pain and boredom." She smiled happily. "It's been like dying and going to heaven -- and even a few weeks of heaven can be eternity." "I'm glad you accept it so philosophically." "Not 'philosophically,' Doctor. With wonder and joy and reaching out greedily for every golden second!" "Well... I'm pleased that Winifred is going to stay with you and I hope that you will keep her a long time -- " "As long as she will stay! Always, I hope." " -- because, otherwise, I would worry. But Winnie can do in an emergency anything I could do and she'll have everything here with which to do it -- and she knows and I want you to know that I will get here fast if she sends for me. All right, my dear, let's get that transmitter off you; you won't be monitored any longer. Nurse. Rubbing alcohol, and cotton." "Yes, Doctor." Winifred went past the massage table, reached into a cupboard. Dr. Garcia detached the tiny transmitter. ".Slight erythema, and a faint circle of mechanical dermatitis. With your amazing repair factor I'm betting you won't be able to find where it's been by tomorrow. But I'm going to miss my morning movie." "Sir?" "I don't suppose anyone has told you but I have watched the monitors every morning, while you exercised...waiting for your heart to pound. Or your respiration to warn me. Nothing. Never anything abnormal, I mean; I could tell that you were exercising. Very mild exercise, I concluded. "Why, I suppose so. Yoga." "Well! I would not class yoga as mild. If we mean the same thing." "I meant that yoga isn't a hundred-yard dash, or weight lifting. But I well, both of ushave been doing the classic poses. Except the headstands; I'm not foolish, I know I have a Sears-Roebuck skull." "I wouldn't have let her. Doctor! But she never tried one; truly she didn't." "Doctor, I haven't been building muscles for show; I am simply trying to get perfect control over my new -- wonderful body. Here, let me show you." gee fall, stood on the floor six inches from the exercise mat -- shifted her weight onto her left foot, brought her right leg up behind her in perfect extension while she leaned slowly forward...deep...deeper...until she clasped her left ankle with both hands and pressed her cheek against her shin, with her right leg arrow straight above her in a perfect split. She held it for three controlled breaths, then dropped her hands flat to the floor, slowly lifted her left leg, balancing it against the right, until she was holding a hand stand, legs together, back arched, toes pointed. Again slowly she let her limbs sink like drooping petals until they touched the mat let the Arch sink into the Wheel, melted still farther into the Diamond pose, knees and elbows touching mat and floor -- held it -- let it roll slowly forward into Lotus. "Om Mani Padme Hum." (Om Mani Padme Hum. Pick up your check at the gate, girl; we won't need to shoot this scene over.) (Thanks, Eunice. But I had a good guru. Guru.) (De nada. Chela.) Dr. Garcia was applauding. "Terrific! Unbelievable. Like everything else about this case. Winnie! Can you do that?" Joan flowed upward, was standing. "Sure she can! Skin 'em off, dear, and show Doctor." The nurse blushed deeply. "No, I can't Don't believe her. Doctor; I'm just learning." "Oh, fuff. I have to steady her only a little. Come back in two weeks. Doctor, and she'll do it by herself. It's not hard -- just takes angleworms in your ancestry." "Which you seem to have. But, if Winnie didn't teach you, where did you learn it, Joan?" (Oh, oh! Watch it. Boss he smells a mouse.) "How old are you. Doctor?" "Eh? Thirty. seven." "I learned it about forty years before you were born. But didn't have time to keep it up," she went on. "Then for many years didn't have the physique even to try. But it all came back so easily that I am forced to assume that Mrs. Branca was better at it than I was even as a limber kid." (Let's see him check that sweetheart.) (Never make a lie too complicated. Boss.) (Look, infant, I was lying with a straight face when your grandmother was in rompers. Erase and correct your great grandmother.) "Well...I'm going to write it up as part of your final physical -- if I can figure out how to describe it. Your robe, Joan?" "Thank you." She took it and held it, instead of presenting her back for him to put it on her. "Doctor, Mr. Salomon will be settling your fees and expenses. But, to show my great appreciation, I want to add something." He shook his head. "A doctor should not accept more than his fee... and mine are high." "Nevertheless I want to." She dropped the robe. "Winnie, turn your back, dear." She went straight into his startled arms, put up her face to be kissed. He hesitated about one heartbeat, then put his arms around her and kissed her. Joan sighed softly, her lips came open, and she flowed more closely against him. (Don't faint! Let's not miss any of this.) (Don't bother me, Eunice; I'm husy) The Doctor broke from it, caught his breath and looked at her soberly. Then he reached down, recovered her robe and held it. Joan let him put it on her, then said, "Thank you. Doctor." She turned and smiled. "Um. I think I can honestly report that you are in excellent physical condition. Mr. Salomon is waiting." "Please tell him I'll be out in a moment." Joan waited until the door closed. Then she went into Winifred's arms and giggled against her shoulder. "Winnie, did you turn your back? Didn't you peek a little? I hope." "I turned my back. But I had a full view in the mirror. Whew" "Whew twice. So that's what it feels like. Honey, I don't feel nearly so virginal now." "Is he good? It looked like it." "I don't know. I have no way to judge. Dear darling Jake kisses me; you've seen him -- but Just uncle sort of pecks. And you kiss me -- and yours aren't pecks. But you're a girl and smaller than I am. Doctor is the first man who has really kissed me...and it made me feel so little and helpless that I darn near dragged him down onto the mat. You've never kissed him?" "Himl Joan honey, if I told any of the nurses about this, I would not be believed. Dr. Garcia doesn't even pat bottoms; he just growls." "He patted my bottom. I think he did. Things were fuzzy right then." "I know he did. I saw it and didn't believe it. Joan? You wouldn't have made me skin down. Would you?" "Why not? I was." "Yes, but you're a patient. I'm a nurse, I'm supposed to be a robot and a chaperon." "Only we know you're not." "Well...anyhow I can't do that one; it's much too hard." "I told him to come back in two weeks and you'd be able to. Shall I remind him?" "Oh, Joan! You're teasing me again." The redhead added thoughtfully, "Do you really think I could, by myself, in only two more weeks?" "I know you can. But not in clothes, not even tights. So if you are going to blush and go chicken, I had better not remind dear Doctor." "Uh...that did look like quite a kiss. But Paul wouldn't like it." "Wouldn't like what? Your demonstrating precision body control to a doctor? Or kissing a doctor? Or what the kiss might lead to? And how is Paul to know if you don't tell him?" (Boss, you are corrupting the youth of the land.) (Egg feathers, Eunice. Either Paul won't marry her...or he's married and can't. Either way he's got no business monopolizing her. As you pointed out, sex is not a sport, it's for being happy.) "Uh...Doctor wouldn't kiss me, anyway. He doesn't even know I'm female." "Never believe it. You are and he's not stupid. He'll kiss you if I suggest that it's the applause expected for a perfect performance. You've got two weeks to make up your mind, and right now I've got to go see dear Jake." A this Honorable Court draw nigh!" "May it please the Court, while .Petitioners are ready to proceed, may they respectfully invite to the Court's attention that no proper foundation has been laid. This matter relates to the competency of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, grandfather of the four petitioners...and Counsel is not aware that he is in court." "Order There will be order in the court -- at once. Or the room will be cleared. Counsel, are you suggesting that Miss Smith -- this young lady at whom I am pointing -- is not Johann Sebastian Bach Smith?" "Counsel suggests nothing. Your Honor. I merely note that we have nothing in the record to show that the person at whom the Court pointed is Johann Sebastian Bach Smith -- and that the question of competency cannot be considered until proof of identity is indubitably established." "Is Counsel attempting to instruct this Court in the Law?" "Oh, not at all!" "It sounded like it. May I remind Counsel that this Court sits today in equity, not in law -- and that the procedures are what the Court says they are." "Most certainly, your honor. I regret if I inadvertently sounded otherwise." "You were one-sixteenth of an inch from contempt, and don't let it happen again." "Yes, Your Honor." "...as I am sick and tired of the behavior of about fifty percent of the spectators and at least ninety percent of the press, I order the bailiff to clear the room. Use a platoon, Evelyn, and clear these cattle out of the chutes promptly -- and if that fancy video equipment is damaged in the process, we won't worry about it. "Counsels, Petitioners, Guardian and Ward putative ward, let the record show -- will adjourn to my chambers while we get this silly hassle cleared up." "Jake, this is fun! If I'm not me, then I'm flat broke and footloose. You'll have to marry me -- to keep me off Welfare." "Johann, shut up that drivel. This is serious." "Jake, I refuse to see doom. If I'm not me, then I'm dead and it would be worth being broke to hear my will read and see the faces of my loving descendants when they discover that they wind up with trivial incomes that aren't even tax-free. Jake, every rich man wants to hear his will read -- and I may get the chance." "Hmm. Under the theory they seem to be following, Eunice is entitled to hear your will read -- remember that paragraph about 'all persons not specifically named who are in my personal and private employ at the time of my demise -- ' " "Can't say that I do, but if you put it in, it's there." "It's there. If you're not Johann, then you have to be Eunice. It's an 'either-or.'" (Nope! It's both.) (Eunice, this is going to be fun!) (I think so, too. Boss.) The part of his chambers selected by Judge McCampbell was a comfortable lounge. Onee in it he looked around. "Mmm...Jake, Ned, Miss Smith, Alec, Mrs. Seward, Mrs. Frabish. You're Mrs. Crampton, aren't you? Mrs. Lopez. Parkinson, how the devil did you get in here?" "Amicus curiae. Your Honor." "You're no friend of this court and you don't belong here." "But -- " "Will you walk or would you rather be thrown out?" Parkinson elected to walk. When the door sealed behind him, the judge said, "Sperling, set that thing so I can record when I feel like it, then you can leave. Alec, you look as if you were all set to object." "Me? Oh, not at all. Judge." "Good. Because we're going to cut through the fog on this silly business. Who needs a fog cutter?" The judge stepped to a corner bar. "Alec? Gin and tonic as usual?" "Thanks, Judge." "I'm forgetting the ladies. Mrs. Seward? Something with alcohol? Or coffee? This machine will make tea, too, if I can remember which buttons to push. And how about your sister? And your cousins? Miss Smith? I recall what you used to order at the Gib some years back. Are your tastes the same now?" (Watch it. Boss! It's loaded.) (Relax, Eunice.) "Judge, with a new body my tastes have changed in many respects. But I remember fondly Glen Grant on the rocks -- back before my doctors put a stop to it. But I haven't tasted anything with that much authority since those days and, since this is a competency hearing. I'll settle for coffee. Or a Coke, if you can twist its tail for that." The judge rubbed his nose and looked thoughtful. "I'm not sure it's a competency hearing until we settle this matter of identity. Jake could have told you about Glen Grant. The idea of Johann Smith ordering a Coke shakes me." Joan smiled at him. "I know -- hardly seems in character. My doctors made me quit carbonated drinks long before they made me give up whisky. Back about the time you entered law school. If I'm Johann Smith, that is. If I'm not, I'll ask to be excused -- as in that case I'm not a ward of the Court and shouldn't be here. Isn't that correct?" McCampbell looked still more thoughtful. "Jake, do you want to caution your client? No, not your 'client,' your -- no, not that either. Blessed if I know what you are; that's what we've got to find out. Young lady, sit down and I'll fetch you a Coke. Alec, get drink orders from your four ladies and serve them. Jake, you and Ned serve yourselves -- Alec and I have a date with some fish in Nova Scotia tomorrow morning and I'll be switched if I'll keep fish waiting over a surprise turn in this hearing. Alec, confound your Irish soul, are you seriously questioning the identity of this young lady?" "Well -- Judge, are you going to talk about contempt if I suggest that your question is not properly put?" McCampbell sighed. "Young lady, pay no attention to him. He was my roommate in college and gives me a bad time whenever he comes into my court. Some day I going to give him thirty days to think it over -- and about four-thirty tomorrow morning I'm going to trip him into some very cold water. Accidentally." "Do that, Mac, and I'll sue. In Canada." "I know he was your roommate, Judge; you were both Big Greens -- Dartmouth 'seventy-eight, was it not? Why not let him ask me questions and find out for himself who I am?" "That's not the way to go about it! First you must take the fingerprints of that -- that impostor -- and -- " ""Mrs. SewardV "Yes, Judge? I was just going to say -- " ""Shut upV' Mrs. Seward shut up. Judge McCampbell went on, "Madam, simply because it suits me to be informal in my chambers do not think that this is not a court in session or that I would not find you in contempt. I would enjoy it. Alec, you had better convince her." "Yes, your honor. Mrs. Seward, any suggestions you have, you will make through me, not to the Court." "But I was just going to say that -- " "Mrs. Seward, keep quiet! You're here only by courtesy of the Court until this matter of identity is cleared up. I'm sorry, Judge. I advised my clients that, at the most, this was a holding action. I know that Jake Salomon would not risk bringing a ringer -- sorry. Miss Smith -- a ringer into court." "And I know it." "But they insisted. If Mrs. Seward won't control herself. I'll have to ask your permission to withdraw from the case." The judge shook his head and grinned. "No, sirree, Alec. You fetched them here, you're stuck with them -- at least until court adjourns. Jake? Is Ned still fronting for you? Or will you speak for yourself?" "Oh, I think we can both speak up from time to time, without friction." "Ned?" "Of course. Judge. Jake can speak for himself and should. But I'm finding it interesting. Novel situation." "Quite. Well, speak up if you have anything to contribute. Alec, I don't think we can get anywhere today. Do you?" Alec Train stood mute. Joan said, "Why not. Judge? I'm here. I'm ready. Ask me anything. Bring out the rack and the thumb screwsI'll talk." The judge again rubbed his nose. "Miss Smith, I sometimes think that my predecessors were overly hasty in letting such tools be abolished. I think I can settle to my own satisfaction whether or not you are the person known as Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, of this city and of Smith Enterprises, Limited. But it is not that simple. In an ordinary identity case Mrs. Seward's suggestion of fingerprints would be practical. But not in this case. Alec? Do petitioners stipulate that the brain of their grandfather was transplanted into another body?" Petitioners' counsel looked unhappy. "May it please the court, I am under instructions not to stipulate anything of the sort." "So? What's your theory?" "Uh, 'Missing and presumed dead,' I suppose. We take the position that the burden of proof is on anyone who steps forward and claims to be Johann Sebastian Bach Smith." "Jake?" "I can't agree as to the burden of proof. Judge. But my client -- my ward who is also my client, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith -- is present in court and I am pointing at her. I know her to be that named individual. Both of us are ready to be questioned by the Court in any fashion in order to assure the Court as to her identity. I was about to say that both of us one -- but on second thought I cannot concede that there is any interested party other than my client." "Judge -- " "Yes, Miss Smith? Jake, do you want her to speak?" "Oh, certainly. Anything." "Go ahead. Miss Smith." "Thank you. Judge, my granddaughters can ask me anything. I've known them since they were babies; if they try to trip me. I'll have th'bm hanging on the ropes in two minutes. For example, Johanna -- the one you called Mrs. Seward -- was hard to housebreak. On her eight birthday -- May fifteenth, nineteen-sisty, the day the Paris Conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev broke down -- her mother, my daughter Evelyn, invited me over to see the little brat have her birthday cake, and Evelyn shoved Johanna into my lap and she cut loose -- " "I did no such thing!" "Oh, yes, you did, Johanna. Evelyn snatched you off my lap and apologized and said that you had a bed-wetting problem. Can't say as to that -- my daughter lied easily." "Judge, are you going to sit there and let that -- that person -- insult the memory of my dead mother?" "Mrs. Seward, your counsel cautioned you. If you don't heed this caution, this Court is capable of nailing you into a barrel and letting you speak only when I say to pull out the bung. Or some such. Squelch her, Alec. Suppress her the way they did in the trial in Alice in Wonderland -- which this is beginning to resemble. She's not a party to this; she is here only to give evidence in case the Court needs it. Miss Smith -- " "Yes, sir?" "Your opinions as to the veracity of your putative descendants are not evidential. Can you think of anything that Johann Smith would know and that I would know or could check on -- but which Jake Salomon could not possibly have briefed you on?"  "That's a tough one. Your Honor." "So it is. But the alternative -- today -- is for me to assume that you are an impostor most carefully coached and then to question you endlessly in an attempt to trip you. I don't want to do that...because final identification -- now that the matter has been raised -- will have to be by evidence as conclusive as fingerprints. You see that, don't you?" "Yes, I see it but I don't quite see how." She smiled and spread her graceful hands. "My fingerprints -- and everything about me that can be seen -- are those of my donor." "Yes, yes, surely -- but there are buttering it with parsnips. Later." "Harrumph!" "Yes, Jake?" "Judge, in the interests of my client I cannot concede that physical means of identifying this body are relevant. The question is: Is this the individual designated by Social Security number #-# and known to the world as Johann Sebastian Bach Smith? I suggest that 'Estate of Parsons vs Rhode Island,' while not on all fours, is relevant." "Jake, you are much older than I am and I'm reasonably sure you know the law more thoroughly than I do. Nevertheless, here today, I am the judge." "Certainly, Your Honor! May it please the Court, I -- " "So quit being so damned re'spectful in my chambers. You sat on my orals and voted to pass me, so you must think I know some law. Of course the Parsons case is relevant; we'll get to it later. In the meantime I'm trying to find a basis for a pro-tem ruling. Well, Miss Smith?" "Judge, I don't care whether I'm identified or not. In the words of a gallant gentleman: 'Broke don't scare me.' " She suddenly chuckled and glanced at her granddaughters. "May I tell you something funny -- privately?" "Mmm...I could clear the room of everyone but you and your counsel; nevertheless you had better save any jokes until after we adjourn." "Yes, sir. May I address one irrelevant remark to my granddaughters?" "Hmmph. I may strike it from the record. Go ahead." "Thank you, Judge. Girls -- Johanna, Marla, June, Elinor -- look at me. For thirty-odd years you have been waiting for me to die. Now you hope to prove that I am dead, else this silly business would never have come up. Girls, I hope you get away with it...for I can't wait to see your faces when my will is read." (You zapped 'em. Boss! Look at those expressions!) (I surely did, darling. Now shut up; we're not home free.) "Your honor -- " "Yes, Alec?" "May I suggest that this is not relevant?" Joan cut in. "But I said it would be irrelevant, Mr. Train. Just the same, they had better start thinking about how to break my will, instead of this nonsense." She added thoughtfully, "Perhaps I had better set up a lifetime trust that will make them slightly better off with me alive than dead...to protect myself against patricidal assassination. Judge, is 'patricidal' the right word? Now that I'm female?" "Blessed if I know. Better make it 'avicidal' -- no, avicide already nothing to do with avus. Never mind. Miss Smith, take up such matters with your attorney and let us return to our muttons. Have you thought of anything which Jake Salomon could not have coached you on?" "It's difficult. Jake has been handling my affairs for most of a generation. Mmm, Judge, will you shake hands with me?" "Eh?" "We had best do it under the table, or out of sight of anyone but Mr. Train." Looking puzzled the Judge went along with her request. Then he said, "Be damned! Excuse me. Miss Smith -- shake hands with Alex." Joan did so, letting her body cover it from spectators. Mr. Train looked surprised, whispered something to her which she answered in a whisper. (Boss, what was that?) (Greek. Tell you later, dear -- though girls aren't supposed to know.) McCampbell said, "Mr. Salomon could not have coached you?" "Ask him. Jake was a Barb, not #. Cjrcck "Of course I was a Barb," Salomon growled. "I had no stomach for being the exhibit Jew in a chapter that did not want its charter lifted. What is this?" Train said, "Well, it seems that Miss Smith is a fraternity brother of the Judge and myself. Mmm... sister, I suppose. Judge, it's easy to check this on both Johanm Smith and Mr. Salomon. In the meantime I find it persuasive." "Perhaps I can add to it," Joan said. "Mr. Train -- Brother Alec -- of course you should check on both Jake and myself. But look me up in our fraternal archives under 'Schmidt' rather that 'Smith' as I changed my name in 'forty-one. Which my granddaughters know. But you both know of our fraternal Distress Fund?" "Yes." "Certainly, Miss Smith." "The fund did not exist when I was pledged -- my senior year it was, after I made Phi Beta Kappa and because our local chapter needed a greasy grind and had an tiation. The fund was started during World War Two; I helped augment it some years later and was one of its trustees from 'fifty-six until late in the 'eighties when I dropped most outside activities. Judge, you tapped the fund for fifteen hundred in the spring of 'seventy-eight." "Eh? So I did. But I paid it back, eventually -- then donated the same amount at a later time, according to our customs." "I'm glad to hear it. The latter, I mean; you were off the hook before I resigned as a trustee. I was a hard-nosed trustee. Judge, and never okayed a loan until I was certain that it was a distress case and not just a convenience to a lazy undergraduate. Shall I relate the circumstances which caused me to okay your loan?" T he judge blinked. "I would rather you did not, at least not now. Alec knows them." "Yes," agreed Train. "I would have lent him the money myself if I had had it." (What is this. Boss?) (Case of 'rheumatic fever,' sweet.) (Abortion money?) (No, nohe married the girland here I am digging up the skeleton.) (Bitch.) (No, Eunicemy granddaughters don't know what I'm talking about, nor does Jake.) "I see no reason to discuss it," Miss Smith went on, "unless the judge wants to question me privatelyand if you do. Judge, do remind me to tell you a real giggle about the ancestries of my so loving granddaughters. Odd things happen even in the best families -- and the Schmidt family was never One of the best. We're a vulgar lot, me and my descendants -- our only claim to prominence is too much money." "Later perhaps. Miss Smith. I am now ready to hand down a decision-temporary and conservative. Counsels?" "Ready, Judge." "Nothing to add, your Honor." McCampbell fitted his fingertips together. "Identity. It need not depend on fingerprints or retinal patterns or similar customary evidence. John Doe could lose both hands and both feet, have both eyes gouged out, be so scarred and damaged that even his dentist could not identify him -- and he would still be John Doe, with the same Social Security number. Something like that happened to you, Miss Smith, assuming that you are indeed Johann Sebastian Bach Smith -- though I am happy to see -- " he smiled"that no scars show. "This Court finds persuasive the evidence of your identity brought out in this hearing. We assume, pro tern, that you are Johann Sebastian Bach Smith. "However -- " the judge looked at Salomon -- "we now get to the Parsons case. Inasmuch as the Supreme Court has ruled that the question of life or death resides in the brain and nowhere else, this Court now rules that identity must therefore reside in the brain and nowhere else. In the past it has never been necessary to decide this point; now it is necessary. We find that to rule in any other fashion would be inconsistent with the intent of the Supreme Court in 'Estate of Henry M. Parsons vs Rhode Island.' To rule in any other way would create chaos in future cases in any way similar to this one: Identity must lie in the brain. "Now, Jake, I am in effect going to shove the burden of the proof over onto you and your client. At a later time you must be prepared to prove beyond any possible doubt that Johann Sebastian Bach Smith's brain was removed from his body and transplanted into this body -- " McCampbell pointed. Jake nodded. "I realize that. Judge. A person who wants to cash a check must prove his identity -- this is on all fours. But today we were taken by surprise." "So was the Court -- and, Alec, I'm going to take you by surprise someday...with something better than a pie bed or an exploding cigar. Damn it, you should have warned Court and Counsel." "I apologize. Your Honor. I received my instructions quite late." "You should have at once asked for a continuance, not let this hearing open. You know better. Never mind, the hearing has been instructive. Miss Smith -- Miss Johann Sebastian Bach Smith subject to remarks above -- you were made a ward of this Court and placed under the guardianship of Mr. Jacob Salomon for one reason alone: You were at the time not competent to manage your affairs by reason of post-operative incapacity. Let the record show that neither insanity in the legal sense nor mental illness in the medical sense had anything to do with it; you were in an extended condition of unconsciousness following surgery and that was all. You are no longer unconscious, you appear to be in good health, and the Court takes judicial notice that during this hearing you appeared always to be alert and clear-headed. Since the sole condition-unconsciousness -- on which you were made ward no longer obtains, you are now no longer a ward and Mr. Salomon is discharged of his guardianship -- what's the trouble, Alec?" "May it please the Court -- as coun,sel for the Petitioners I must ask to have an objection entered into the record." "On what grounds?" "Why, lack of expert witnesses as to, uh, 'Miss Smith's' competence." "Do you have expert witnesses ready to examine her?" "Of course." "Jake?" "Certainly. Waiting on call." "How many?" "Harrumph! One more than Alec has, however many he qualifies." "So I expected and if we start qualifying expert witnesses now and let each one exercise his little ego, those fish in Nova Scotia would die of old age. Keep your shirt on, Alec. No expert witnesses were used to show this person's incompetence; the gross condition of unconsciousness was stipulated -- and now no longer exists. Alec, your objection goes into the record but I am putting you on notice that your claim of need for expert witnesses lacks foundation -- and this time the burden of proof is on you. Petitioners will have to show something more than great anxiety to get their hands on the large sums of money at stake in this matter. Every citizen, every person, is conditionally presumed to be competent -- and that means everyone -- you, me, Jake, Miss ate who fills that bar and cleans out the empties. This Court will not set the extremely bad precedent of allowing you, or anyone, to conduct a fishing expedition into the matter of a person's competency without proper foundation. However -- Jake." "Yes, Judge." "We all know what this hearing is really about. Money. Lots of money. You might explain to Miss Smith that her competence may be challenged at some later time." "We're prepared for it." "While I've discharged you as her guardian, you will stay on as conservator of the property of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith pending positive proof of identity -- and I do mean positive', you've got to trace Smith's brain into this body every step of the way. What was the name of that surgeon? Boyle? I suppose you'll need him. And several others. I'm not going to take anything for granted, nor permit any stipulations; there is too much at stake and I don't intend to be reversed. Alec, if you are going to challenge competency, you will have to wait until after that time and -- if it's in my court -- show foundation for such challenge. That satisfy you?" "I guess it will have to." "I guess so, too. Court's adjourned." faced, and said to Alec Train, "You'refiredr McCampbell said coldly, "Madam, consider yourself lucky that you saved that outburst until after Court adjourned. Now, get out of my chambers. You other three ladies may leave, too." Johanna's sister June said as she stood up: "Judge, may I ask a question?" "Certainly, Mrs. Frabish." "You've turned this person loose -- that's all right. I'm not criticizing. But are you leaving her in our grandfather's house? I think you ought to know that it is loaded, simply loaded, with valuable works of art. What is to keep her from gutting it while we are proving that she can't be our grandfather?" "Oh. Madam, Mr. Salomon knows the duties and responsibilities of a conservator. However -- Jake, it would be prudent not to permit any objects of sentimental or artistic value to leave that house during this waiting period." "No problem. Since I've had to manage the household I've been staying there much of the time. But I'll have a word with Johann's chief guard." "Judge, may I say something?" "Certainly, my Miss Smith." "I'd like protection against them. June doesn't know what objets d'art I own. Not one of them has Deen inside my house since it was built. During my long illness and confinement not one of them called on me or sent flowers or anything. And the same for my post-surgery convalescence -- except that I learned that Johanna -- Mrs,. Seward -- tried to crash in right after my operation. I don't trust them; I'd like the Court's protection." "Jake?" "I wasn't there but I heard it from Johann's chief guard." "Mrs. Seward?" She sniffed. "I had a perfect right! Next of kin." "I think I understand it. All right, you four ladies -- listen carefully, then leave. You will refrain from visiting the home or offices or other properties of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith. You will refrain from making any attempt to see or to speak with this young lady I have been addressing as Miss Smith. If you need to communicate with her or with the Court's appointed conservator Mr. Salomon, you will do so only through this Court or through your attorney, whoever he may be, to Mr. Salomon and wever directly to Miss Smith. This is an order to all four of you and each of you will obey under pain of severe penalties for contempt. Do you understand? Are there any questions?" McCampbell waited, then went on, "Very well. Now all four of you leave." The judge remained standing while they filed out. When the door sealed, he sighed. "Whew! Miss Smith -- or should I say 'Brother Schmidt?' -- will you have that Glen Grant on rocks now? Glenlivet actually, I don't have Glen Grant." She smiled. "Truly, I haven't tried anything that potent on this new body. Jake and I should leave -- you and Brother Alec have a date with a fish." "Oh, do sit down. Alec has his gear in his car in the basement and my copter is picking us up from the roof in about an hour. Another Coke?" "Is there sherry? I get a very pleasant buzz on just a glass of sherry -- I conclude that my donor did not drink at all." (Almost never, Boss -- and you're giving me a taste for the stuff.) (Quiet, darling -- later.) (All right...but ask him about our name. Isn't Judgie Wudgie a darling? Wonder what he's like in bed?) (You and your one-track mind! I'll ask him about our name. Now shut up!) "Sherry it shall be. Jake? Ned? Alec?" "Judge, since Jake doesn't need me. I'll ask to be excused." "Okay, Ned. Alec, serve yourself and take care of Jake; I want to stare at Brother Schmidt. I probably won't be seeing you again. Miss Smith. Your granddaughters are almost certain to try to move it into a higher court. That business of proving who you are by our fraternity grip -- that tore it. All I could do today was to give you a little protection in the interim." "Which I appreciated, sir. Here's an odd thing about this sex change. When I was an old man, frail and helpless, I was afraid of nothing. Now I'm young and healthy and strong. But female. To my surprise I find that I want to be protected." Alec Train said over his shoulder from the bar, "I'll protect you. Brother Schmidt! Don't trust Brother McCampbell -- he was the worst wolf in our chapter. Step aside. Brother Wolf -- it's my turn to stare at our new brother." "Boys, I am not a 'new brother,' I was pledged years before you were born. But I'm not surprised that you like to stare at me, as my donor -- Jake, do they know?" "It's not much of a secret, Johann. Judge McCampbell knows, I think Alec knows, too." (Joan, if he doesn't know, tell him. And don't forget our name!) (What do you think I'm leading up to?) "All right. My donor, Eunice Branca, my former secretary and the sweetest, loveliest girl I've ever known, was not only a perfect secretary; she was a beauty contest winner not many years back. I know what a treasure I inherited from her. I don't wear her body with the charming grace she gave it -- but I'm trying to learn." (You're learning. Boss.) "It is the opinion of this court that you have learned." "Shut up, Mac. Brother Schmidt, I agree with him merely because he's right." "Thank you both -- on behalf of Eunice Branca. Jake? Now that court has adjourned do I have to wear this Mother Hubbard? It's too warm." "That's up to you. I suppose it depends on how much you have on under it." "Mmm... perhaps I'd better not. Minimum decency under the customs of today -- but it would get a burlesque queen thirty days back when I was a youngster." (Exhibitionist. You're asking to be coaxed.) (Certainly. And who taught me? At least the bra isn't just paint, like that mermaid outfit you zapped me with.) A lec train said, "Brother Schmidt, in identity cases it is sometimes necessary to require the challenged individual to strip completely. Birthmarks and scars and such -- tell her. Judge." "Not in my court. Ignore him. Brother Schmidt. I wouldn't call that lovely Grecian robe a 'Mother Hubbard.' But I can see that it was intended for outdoors and I'll happily hang it up for you." "Uh... oh, goodness. I'm having trouble shucking off my earlytwentieth-century Puritanism. Jake has seen me in the nothing-much girls wear today, and he's seen Eunice in even less than I have on under this; Eunice wasn't shy about sharing her beauty." (You milked that, didn't you, dearie? Which one are you after?) (Shut up!) Joan ran a finger down the magnostrip, let the robe fall open; Alec Train hurried to claim it ahead of the judge. Then she posed. "See? This is almost the way Eunice Branca looked except that she walked in glory, always... while I am an old man who is trying to learn to wear her body." Besides Eunice's body, Joan was wearing some of Winnie's clothes -- black frill skirt, translucent black Cling-On cups, six-inch sticktite stilt sandals that left her pretty feet in view -- no paint, just restrained enhancement with rouge and shadow. She posed, they stared. Jake cleared his throat louder than usual. "Joan, had I known what you were wearing -- not wearing, rather under that robe, I would have advised you to keep it on." "Oh, pooh, Jake, you wouldn't have scolded Eunice for dressing this way. But that brings up something I must ask. Judge, I can't go on being Johann Smith. Will you let me change my name?" "That's not properly put. Brother Schmidt. You can have any name you like. At most a court confirms it. You mean that you need a girl's name now. Elelen, perhaps? Or Cleopatra?" "Thank you -- for Eunice." (Boss, find out if Judge is still married.) (Go back to sleep!) "Not either of those names. I want to be known as Joan -- for Johann Joan... Eunice... Smith." Judge McCampbell looked surprised, then smiled in approval. "A good choice. The flavor of your masculine name, plus, I assume, a tribute to your donor. But may I offer a word of advice? You can start calling yourself that today"I already have." "I noticed that Jake called you Joan. But let it be a family name, and keep your masculine name at other times -- use it to sign letters, checks, and so forth -- until your identity has been finally established in the Supreme Court if possible. Don't cloud the issue." "I gave her the same advice," Salomon put in. "I'm not surprised. Miss -- Brother Schmidt, what do you want me to call you? In private." "Why, either Joan or Eunice. Both by preference, as I do not want anyone ever to forget Eunice Branca. Me least of all -- I want to be reminded of my benefactor. Benefactrix. But don't call me 'Miss' in private. Eook, brothers, as Brother Schmidt I am half a century older than you two... but as Joan Eunice I am only a few weeks old. However, Eunice's body is that of a young woman, and that is what I am learning -- must learn -- to be. You could have daughters my age. So please call me Joan Eunice and save Miss Smith for court appearances." She smiled. "Or Brother Schmidt if you wish -- although Yonny was what I was called by our brothers in my chapter." Alec said, "Joan Eunice Brother Yonny Schmidt, I'm pleased to call you whatever you like, and I don't have daughters your age and you make me feel younger just to look at you. But I'm not speaking for my roommate and. I'd hate to tell you how old some of his offspring are; he was the scourge of P.S. Two-thirty-eight -- stay away from him and let me protect you. And did I mention how happy I am that Mrs. Seward fired me? Brother Joan Eunice, I would never have been in this case other than as a favor to Parkinson's mother-in-law. But at first it did look like a straightforward case of protecting the interests of an invalid too ill to protect himself. Believe me." "Don't listen to him," advised the judge. "He's an ambulance chaser. I throw legitimate business his way just to protect the good name of our Brothers. But back to this matter of identity. Joan Eunice, I don't know how much law you know -- " "Just what has rubbed off in the course of a long and evil life. I depend on experts. Such as Jake." "I see. Well, your granddaughters probably think it is wrong of me to help you establish your identity. It is not. True, in a civil suit or a criminal action a judge must be impartial. But such a matter as establishing identity is neither one, and there is no rule of law or equity which prohibits'a court from being helpful. The situation is like that of a citizen who has lost his passport and appeals to his consul. The consul doesn't sit as a judge; he tries to get the mixup straightened out. So -- Jake, you've been in the Law much longer than I have; do you want my opinions?" "I am always most happy to have Judge McCampbell's opinions on any matter." land slam you for contempt. After I've finished this drink. All right, you're going to get 'em anyhow. Do you anticipate any difficulty in proving that the brain of Brother Schmidt was moved into the body of Eunice Branca?" "None. A nuisance but no difficulty." "Or in showing that this body -- this lovely body -- was once that of Eunice Branca?" "Same answer." "What evidence?" "Police reports, photographs, hospital personnel and so forth." "Let's say it's my court. I'm going to make you go back and touch second at every opportunity. I intentionally got into the record today that ruling based on 'Parson's estate vs Rhode Island;' I think it's important "So do I." "Thank you. In following the principle that identity lies in the brain and nowhere else -- " (We could tell him something, couldn't we. Boss?) (Yes, beloved -- but we aren't going to!) -- "I am going to be as tough as possible. No depositions when it is possible to bring the witness into court. Photographs and other records not only allowed but required -- but the originals must be brought into court, not copies, and photographers or record keepers must appear and identify same, and the surgeons or others whose work appears in those films, photographs, or records must appear and confirm each record. Do you know if each body was fingerprinted just prior to surgery?" "Not of my own knowledge. Damn it, I was taken by surprise today -- and at the time of Eunice Branca's death I had other things worrying me." Joan Eunice reached over and squeezed his hand. Alec Train said, "I can help on that. When Parkinson brought Mrs. Seward to see me, I checked on that point at once. Prints were taken from both bodies -- so I gave identity no further thought. That's why I was taken as much by surprise as you two. I don't know what chimney-corner lawyer put the idea in Mrs. Seward's head -- Parkinson, probably: I'm sure he's stayed at her elbow all through -- but I received instructions just as court convened. I'm munication when I say that -- nor do I know of any canon which forbids me to say that I am damn sick of both Mrs. Seward and Parkinson." "Hmm. Every possible bit of evidence," McCampbell went on. "You will have to trace that brain out of that body -- Joan Eunice -- no, Jake. Jake, do you know what became of Johann Smith's body?" "That one I can answer. Here we have a unique case of a body becoming a chattel while the person who lived in it is still alive. I knew what Johann Smith -- Joan Eunice, that is -- had wanted done with it, as his will contains the standard 'donated for medical research' clause. But the will did not control because Johann Smith was, and is, alive. The Medical Center asked what to do with it. I told them to hold it, in their morgue. I assume that it is still there." Mr. Train said, "Counselor, I hope you're right. But unless that cadaver was nailed down, two gets you ten that some eager medical student has chopped it up." The judge said, "I'm afraid Alec could be right. Jake, it may be a matter of great urgency to perpetuate the evidence -- all the evidence. Verb. sap. We all know how key evidence has a way of disappearing when big money is involved. And besides eager medical students -- well, we all know that almost any illegal act is for sale at a price. Eilms and records can be stolen, others substituted, ostensibly respectable witnesses can be bribed. Let's speculate for a moment that Brother Schmidt is opposed by nameless dishonest perorn, and so forth. Such crime is not cheap. Does anyone have a guess as to how much money might be used to destroy or change the evidence?" Jake said, "I won't guess. But in the case of four nameless females I can find out." on this. Marla and Elinor lost their father before they were of age and his estate wound up minus and no insurance to speak of. So I supported my daughter Roberta until she died and kept her kids in school until they flunked out, then continued to support them until each married -- one of their grievances against me is that I stopped their allowances when they married. But I continued a credit watch on them as I did not want any descendant of mine to become a charge on the taxpayers. Much the same with the other two girls except that Jim Darlington outlasted my daughter Evelyn, and both girls -- Johanna and June married while their parents were living. To put it briefly, unless one of them has come into some windfall, all four could not scrape together enough money to tackle any really expensive crime." "Tm glad to hear it," said McCampbell. "Just the same, Jake, time is of the essence in preserving evidence and I want you to know that this court will give you all possible legal help in protecting and perpetuating any evidence you dig up. Unh, Alec and I plan to be away four days -- but I'll leave my emergency wavelength with Sperling and will bounce back here if you need me." "Thank you, sir." "Wait a minute," said Alec Train. "There is money in this case. Mac, you know how I am about fees." "Yes. Larcenous." "Ignore him. Brother Schmidt. I tailor my fees, all the way from zero up to outrageous. In this case I did not want the job so I demanded an outrageous retainer against a, yes, lareenous per diem and Parkinson paid without a quiver. Through Mrs. Seward but there was no question as to who called the tune. The question is, will Parkinson go on paying... ly, neighborhood safe-cracker to go after some necessary link? I don't know especially as it isn't his money, but his mother-inlaw's." "I don't know either," answered Jake, "but I alw-ays assume that my opponent might cheat if I fail to cut the cards. I'm going after that evidence with all possible speed. Sorry, Joan, I should have anticipated this -- I'm getting old." (He is not. Tell him so. Boss.) Joan Eunice patted his hand. "Jake, you are not getting old and there was no reason to anticipate this. Gentlemen, let me say again, I don't care a whit if my granddaughters win. If they win, they lose because if they prove me legally dead, I have cut them off Eunice Branca and Dr. Boyle and Jake Salomon, I'm young and healthy and enjoying life and not distressed at the idea of losing a fortune that has become a burden to me." Alec Train said, "Brother Schmidt Joan Eunice honey, don't you realize that it is uriAmurrican dollars?" She grinned at him. "Brother Alec, if I come out of this broke. taxes in the next five years, starting from scratch. Jake, will you back my bet? Since it calls for me starting broke?" "Certainly." "Wait a minute!" Train protested. "I'm just a poor but honest lawyer. Will you make that bet fifty cents? Mac, will you lend me fifty cents?" "Not without security...loan Eunice, listen, please. I don't le the world broke. But I know in my heart that you are indeed Brother Johann Schmidt... who okayed a loan to me when I really needed it. Old Eata Bita Pi didn't let me down... and I'm not going to let Brother Schmidt down." "Thank you. Brother Mac." Jake growled, "You frat house aristocrats made me sick when I was in college and I don't like it much better today. Judge, the only good reason for giving Joan Eunice a hand is because it's the fair thing to do. Not because she -- he okayed a loan years ago to some snot-nose fraternity brother." "Counselor, your point is well taken. I think I can truthfully say that I have never allowed fraternal bonds including Shriner, which you and I are to affect my behavior on the bench "The hell it hasn't, old buddy mine; you rule against me just for the hell of it. Ask anybody." " -- even when I've been forced to instruct this Irishman in the finer points of the law. I would have helped in this matter in any case; both as a citizen and as a ward of the court Joan Eunice is entitled to any help a court can offer in establishing her identity. But I confess that my emotions were aroused by a circumstance that I did not dream existed. Not that Joan Eunice is my fraternity brother -- that is simply a pleasing coincidence but that she -- he at that timegave me a hand when it mattered. Uh -- " stared at his glass -- "no need to go into details. You know them, Joan Eunice?" "Yes." "You can tell Jake later. Let me list the things I think are necessary in this case; both of you lawyers check me and I'm going to stick a fresh tape in this thing so that we can all have copies." He turned to his clerk's recording equipment. "That is I think I am going to. Damn! Excuse me, Joan Eunice. I wonder if Sperling has gone home." (Let's look at that thing, dear.) "I'm 'Brother Schmidt' any time you feel like swearing. Judge. May I look at your recorder? It's a bit like one I have at home." "Go ahead. I sometimes wish we still used shorthand reporters." "Thank you." (How about it, Eunice?) (It's Betsy's idiot baby sister, no huhu. You whistle Yankee Doodle or think about Judgie Wudgie and don't bother me.) (Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme ) (Got it, dearie.) "Recording with a fresh tape. Judge; set for three copies, and erase memory." amazed every time I find someone who understands machinery." "I don't, really. But Eunice Branca taught me to run one somewhat like yours." (Boss, you're learning how to lie -- just tell the truth but not all of it.) (Honey girl, I invented that way of lying way back when your great grandmother was a virgin.) "First, Eunice Branca's death must be established. As it was murder, we will assume extensive records with positive identification including fingerprints -- and since they are police records, we must also assume that they are vulnerable to any determined and wellfinanced attempt to destroy or replace them. Then Mrs. Branca's body must be followed into surgery and positive identification of the body again established at that point. Johann Schmidt's body must also be followed to that point and positively identified just before surgery. Then we must be certain beyond any doubt that the brain was removed from the Schmidt body -- Joan Eunice, this must be distressing to you. Would you like to retire to my washroom? There's a couch in there." "Please go ahead, sir; I've learned to live with it." (Makes me feel like throwing up. Boss.) (Me, too, darling -- but we aren't going to; we're going to look solemnly serene. Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum. Let's make a lotus; this chair is big enough.) (Yes, darling. Om Mani Padme Hum.) " -- and finally, in court, we will take Joan Eunice's fingerprints, have them compared by experts with each earlier set, and thereby forge the final link. Joan Eunice, do I simply switch this off now?" (After the three copies pop out, it will shut itself off.) "When the three copies pop out, it will erase and shut off. Jake, we're keeping these gentlemen from their fishing." "Those'fish aren't restless," the judge assured her. "Just a moment." He stepped to his closedcircuit viewphone. "Evelyn." "Yes, Judge." "How are things outside? Quiet?" "Judge, how did you guess? I've got three men in the infirmary and the building is buttoned up. You might take a look on three and four, and then play back the sixteen o'clock spot news." "How badly were your men hurt?" "Nothing serious. One with a lungful of sneeze gas when we had to clear the main entrance and seal the riot doors, one with a flesh wound on a cheekbone, and the third with cracked ribs. My guess is the newsies bought 'emselves a riot, as cameras were in position when the trouble started." "I see. Are we going to need the Guard?" "I wouldn't say so. The police have the streets around us pretty well patrolled and our own people are either staying overnight, or being taken off the top by chopper. Message from Judge Anders -- says there's no reason for you not to go fishing and he'll assume that he's presiding judge pro tern. He's staying in his chambers tonight." "I'll call him and thank him." The judge switched to view three, studied it. "Doesn't look too rough. Just the same they ought to tear this building down and build a stronger one farther from any Abandoned Area." He switched to view four. "Oh-oh!" The room filled with crowd mob. Moving slowly through the crowd were two police Merrimac tanks, their loudspeakers monotonously repeating the warning-todisperse. "Brother Schmidt, does your house have a copter landing?" Joan shook her head. "No, it's designed so that a copter can't land on it. It seemed the safer choice when it was built." "Well... I could put you into any enclave by copter. Or you could stay here overnight." Jake said, "Judge, my car is a Rolls-Skoda. We'll be all right." "I can't force you to stay. But let's get a playback on the news and see what stirred up the lice." McCampbell punched the time in, then punched for playback. H eadline of the Hour! Brain Transplant Fraud! Our earlier flash has been confirmed; the sensational brain transplant of Tycoon Johann Smith was a hoax. The question is, did he die a natural death? Or was he murdered? The latter theory seems likely in view of today's bald-faced attempt to steal his enormous fortune through claiming in open court that his alleged former secretary, a woman of doubtful reputation going by the name of 'Blanca -- ' " Salomon growled, "Judge, would you mind shutting off that damned rot?" McCampbell switched it off. "Seems I started something. Can't say I'm sorry. I will not let my courtroom be turned into a circus." Joan Eunice said meekly, "I'm sorry. Judge." "Eh? Joan Eunice, you are not at fault. You were forced into court needlessly and against your will; you did nothing. As for me, I hold to the old-fashioned ideal that a courtroom is where the Sovereign is present in person, dispensing equity and justice to all... not bread-and-circuses for the rabble. As long as Tm on the bench I'll run it that way, no matter how many news snoops get sore or how "I'm sorry your bailiffs were hurt." "Well, so am I. But they aren't conscripts, they are career people who know it is hazardous. And they are necessary -- if that bill ever passes to disarm bailiffs, that day I quit the bench... and the Law as well. Jake?" "Yes, Mac?" "You can risk your neck if you want to, but even a Rolls-Skoda is not a Merrimac. Enough people can tip it over, then they can build a bonfire around it and roast you like chestnuts... and there are characters out there who would do it just for kicks. No, not a word out of you; I'm not going to let her leave this building in a ground car even if I have to reconvene court for three seconds and make her a ward again. She leaves by copter. The question is, where does she go? You could sleep in my chambers, Joan Eunice; there is a buttery in the bar and the washroom is a complete bath and that couch .opens into a bed. Lumpy, I'm afraid." (Ask Judgie Wudgie if he goes with the bed!) (I didn't hear you -- and now pipe down.) "I was going to say," Jake said mildly, "that I have a house in Safe Harbor. Unstaffed and empty but it's a safe rendezvous. You could have your chief bailiff tell my driver and shotgun to wait until this quiets down, then pick us up there -- although I would bet on those boys to drive through any mob and not let the car be tipped; they're mean." "No doubt. And wind up with a hit-and-run, too; we'll do it the easy way. Either of you want to use my washroom while I phone Evelyn and the roof?" A few minutes later Jake and Joan were about to leave; the Judge's copter was waiting for them, he having brushed aside remarks about fish. Joan said, "Judge? I think you know I am grateful, but I would like to show my thanks by doing something -- money, I meanfor those men who were hurt." "No." "Why not? Oh, I know it was not my fault but nevertheless they were hurt because of me. You know I can afford it." "Because they are officers of the court and I would have to treat it as constructive bribery. Tell her Jake." "He's correct, Joan -- although he's being stuffy about it." "Not too stuffy. Joan Eunice, there is an enclave home for dependents of police, bailiffs, firemen, and such, killed in line of duty. Jake can tell you about it. I would rather not hear what you do about it." "I see." Joan ignored the fact that Jake was waiting with her robe, stepped closer to McCampbell, turned her face up and put her arms around his neck. "Does this constitute bribery?" "I think so," McCampbell answered, putting his arms around her. "But I won't analyze it." "Of course it's bribery! Get away from him. Brother Schmidt!  handle his bribes." "Shut up, you noisy Mick." Joan turned her face just as her lips were about to touch McCampbell's. "You're next on my bribe list. Brother Alec." "So get back into line! R.H.I. P." McCampbell stopped any further words from her; she let her lips come softly open, did not hurry him. (Whee... , ooo! I thought so.) (Don't let me faint, Eunice.) Some seconds later she opened her eyes, looked up into the judge's face. "My goodness!" she said softly. Alec Train tapped his shoulder. "Court's adjourned. Judge. Be elsewhere." Joan gave the judge a quick, possessive squeeze, untangled herself and went into his former roommate's arms, turned up her face. She was careful to make this kiss as long and as warm as the other. (Unh! What do you think, Eunice?) (They are both oral as hell and they kiss almost as well as Jake and if Jake weren't here they would have us down on the rug this instant -- break it up, dear; you've kissed him as long as you did Judgie Wudgie and Jake is getting edgy.) (All right. Spoilsport.) (Not at all but you don't know how to handle men without upsetting them. Break!) helped her into her street robe. She thanked him, clicked the magnos'trip, arranged the shoulder drape, let the judge hand her into his lift. They said goodbye, the lift closed. Alec Train turned to his friend; "Mac, kissing Brother Schmidt is more emphatic than spreading most gals." "Amen!" "What would it be like to be married to her? And why is it that when the parade goes by I'm always out for a short beer?" "The O.B. damaged your head with his forceps. That's why they had to make a lawyer out of you." "How about yourself?" "Oh, me, too -- stipulated. I wasn't bright enough to be a lawyer; I had to wangle an appointment to the bench. Christ, what a chick!" "Passed by acclamation. Mac, having kissed her, do you really think she can be old 'Sell 'em Johann,' the terrible-tempered tycoon?" "Well... everything fits -- and she did have the Grip." "And the password; I checked. But, Mac, any of our brothers, even ones whose bias hardly extends to girls, would sell our secrets -- what am I saying -- would give them to that one. If she kissed him." "Stipulating that you are correct in your estimate of our brothers -- and I agree -- Joan Eunice can't have had much chance to subvert one of them. Jake has practically had her under house arrest, at my suggestion. And Jake himself -- well, he sounded like a Barb, but you can check it in that bookcase, in 'Who's Who in Eaw.' " "I don't think I can walk that far. But let's assume that old Johann was a brother easy to check -- and she did know all about the Distress Fund and the fact that you needed a loan our senior year." "Yes. That's the convincer." "No, it's not. I mean that Johann would have been just as susceptible. She was his secretary; it might have amused him to spill fraternal secrets to her--Grip, password, even details about the fund." "Oh, crap, you honkie bastard. Joan Eunice is just what she purports to be an utterly delicious girl who has Johann's brain in her skull. Alec, I concede that Joan Eunice doesn't seem much like Johann Smith. But even you might be socially acceptable if that sponge between your ears were placed in the brain pan of a creature as delectable as she is." The judge shook his head. "She's enough to make a queen switch from A.C. to D.C." "Man, she really got to you, didn't she?" "And you. my friend. Who said we needed a vacation from women? You, as I recall. But you drooled over her. You would give up boys for life if she were to phone and ask for you. Don't try to fool your roomie; I know you better than Ruth does." "I won't argue. But you're at least as far down the Street as I am, Mac... and she affected you the same way. Uh, does Norma know how little fishing we plan to do?" . "Sure she suspects. But she's always been tolerant. Alec, how disappointed would you be if I called off our trip? Jake may need a friendly judge in a hurry. Especially if those vultures find a shyster unscrupulous enough to buy some direct action. I'd hate to be missing if Brother Schmidt needed me." "My God, a soul with a soul. Oddly enough I was thinking the same thing. Can't let Brother Schmidt down. Mac, could it prejudice anything if I volunteered my services -- freeto Jake? If this gets sticky, he's going to need to be several places at once. I could share the load." "And share the wealth. It would give you an excuse to see Brother Schmidt again." ".Any law against taking a profit? But Jake does need help." "And you're familiar with the case. Alec old dear, it's a noble thought. While you did represent the petitioners, not only have they fired you, but this was never an adversary situation; theoretically those creeps are as anxious to arrive at the truth for the benefit of their beloved grandfather as Jake is. They don't dare admit that they are trying to grab his gelt." "I wonder if Jake has a phone in that empty house he mentioned? If not, I can leave word at the Gibraltar Clubhe has rooms there -- and at Johann Smith's town house. And with Jake's answering service." "Yes. But let the call be from me; it might speed the service. We'll stay and wait for it. Ruth's not expecting you, Norma is not expecting me; I'll have dinner sent up from the basement." "Clear thinking. So fix fresh drinks while I put in those calls. Hey! You can reach them in your copter." "Only via the piloting circuit. Not private. Better we keep this tight. Alec, it is unlikely that Jake will have anything for you to do before morning. But he might -- a trip to the coast or such. You could stay on call by spending the night here." "Well!" Alec Train stopped with his hand near the phone. "Roomie, I thought that Brother Schmidt had driven all other thoughts out of your mind. Or did I misunderstand?" "Let's phrase it this way: It would be pleasant to discuss Brother Schmidt in intimate detail with some sympathetic person who appreciates her as much as I do." "In that case, mix those drinks and start a lukewarm shower. I'll join you as fast as I can." Eunice into the Judge's copter, got in beside her and locked the door. Quickly they were airborne. The passenger compartment was separate from the pilot's space and well soundproofed; conversation was possible. But he said nothing and kept his eyes away from her. Joan let it go on only a short time. "Jake dear? Are you angry?" "Eh? Heavens, no. What made you think so?" "Yqu seemed quite distant. I thought you might be annoyed with me for having kissed Judge McCampbell and dear Mr. Train." "Your business." "Oh, Jake. Please don't scold me even by your manner. I've had a difficult day, especially the time I had to spend with my goddam granddaughters. It hurts, Jake, to be hated. To know that someone wants you dead. Yet I had to try to appear serene and ladylike. Be a credit to Eunice. Jake, it isn't easy to be a lady -- after almost a century of being male. Do you know how I manage it at all? I say to myself, 'What would Eunice do?' -- then I try to do it. Kissing those sweet and helpful men -- Jake, I'm not used to kissing men. You could have trained me but you won't give me more than a good-night peck. I said to myself, 'I must thank them -- and what would Eunice do?' I decided that she would kiss them the best she knew how. So I tried, even though I don't know how. Well? Is that what Eunice would have done?" "Well... yes, Eunice would have kissed them." (He knows darn well I would have, dear.) (I know. He's being difficult.) (So keep punching. Tell him how wonderful he is. Joan, men always believe it when you tell them they are wonderful.) "Then I don't see why you are being cold with me, Jake. I thought you were truly wonderful all day long, the way you handled things and protected me. I wanted to kiss you for being so wonderful -- and would have, and will! -- if only you would let me. Was it because I didn't stop to put my robe on before I kissed them?" "Well... it would have been more ladylike." (Punch hard on this one, dearie -- for Jake knows darn well that I spread skin on him the very first time I kissed him... and later I kissed him bare naked the first time it was safe to. He didn't fight he was eager.) (I'll try.) Miss Smith looked worried, which did not suit her features. "I suppose so. But I don't know how to be a lady, Jake; the rules have changed so much. Eunice often startled me by what she did and how she dressed -- yet I am certain that she was always a perfect lady. Tell me this, Jake, honestly and candidly, and I'll treat your answer as Gospel and use it as a yardstick for future behavior -- because I do want to be a credit to Eunice; I want 'Joan Eunice' to be the perfect lady that Eunice was. Under those exact circumstances and being just as anxious to show appreciation to two sweet and wonderfully helpful gentlemen... would Eunice have put this street robe on first? Or would she have spread her sweet skin on them and let them cuddle her a bit if they wanted to -- and they wanted to. I'm sure you noticed. Think about it, Jake. You knew Eunice better than I did; we know that -- so give me a straight answer, because I'm going to use it as a guide in trying to be Eunice. Would she have played safe? Or would she have given herself?" Jake Salomon gave a sigh that was almost a groan. "Hell, you did exactly what Eunice would have done. That's what upset me." Joan sighed. "Thank you, Jake, I feel better." She loosened her seat belt, moved closer to him, ran her thumb down the magnostrip of her robe. "Can't get this pesky thing off in here. Kiss me, Jake, kiss me better than they did. Kiss me and cuddle me and tell me that Eunice would be proud of me." "Joan!" "Don't shame me, Jake. I'm a girl now and I need to be kissed so hard we'll forget I kissed those other two. Call me Eunice, dear; please do -- it's my name and I want to hear you call me by it and tell me I'm a good girl." He groaned. "Eunice!" She turned her face up. "Kiss me, darling." Trembling, he gave in. The kiss went on and on. It took Joan only seconds to turn it from tender to rugged, nor did he hold back. (Eunice? I'm going to faint.) (I'm not going to let you, sweetheart; I've waited a long time for this!) Eventually Jake broke, but she stayed close and he continued to hold her. She sighed and touched her hand to his face. "Thank you, Jake dearfor this, and for everything." "Thank you... Eunice. Joan Eunice." "Let me be Eunice a while longer. Am I a good girl? Do I do credit to her?" "Uh... , yes!" "I tried. Jake dear, do you believe in ghosts? I think Eunice must have been here with us. I couldn't have done that well without her help. It often seems so." "Uh, it's an interesting thought." (Hmmph! We ought to tickle him for that. Joan, if you tickle him under his short ribs, he comes unstuck. Helpless.) (I'll remember. But not today.) "In any case, she would have been proud of you. You're a sweet girl." "I mean to be. To you. I love you, Jake." He hesitated only a heartbeat. "I love you -- Eunice. And Joan Eunice." "I'm glad you made it both of us. Jake, dearest, you're going to have to marry me. You know that, don't you?" "What? Oh, heavens, dear, don't be silly. I love you but there's too much age difference." "What? Oh, fiddlesticks! I know I'm almost a quarter of a century older than you are. But it no longer shows. And you understand me and no other man possibly could." "Huh! I mean I am too much older than you." (Joan, don't let him talk that way! Tell him men and liquor improve with age. Or some such. Anyhow, he was feeling quite young a few minutes ago -- I noticed. Did you?) (Yes. Now quiet, please.) J ness, I know what 'old' is! You're a classic, Jake -- and classics improve with age. And... just minutes ago, you were feeling quite young. I noticed." "Uh... possibly. But none of your sass -- youngster." She chuckled. "Jake, it's nice to be a girl to you. I won't argue. I'll wait. In time you will realize that you need me and I need you, and that no one else will do for either of us. Then you can make an honest woman of me." "Harrumph! That might be more than I could manage, even with a marriage license." "Rude darling. I can wait. You can't escape me, Jake. Eunice won't let you." "Well... I'm durned if I'll argue; it would just make you stubborn. In either of your personae.' My old friend Johann was as stubborn a man as I've ever met and Eunice was just as stubborn in her own sweet way. And, dear, I never know which one you are. Sometimes I think you've acquired that split personality your doctors were afraid of." (Get him off this subject!) (I will, dear but not by being jumpy about it. Aren't we ever going to tell him?) (Yes, of course. But not soon, Joan. Not till we're in the clear. Remember those straps.) "Jake darling, Tm not surprised that you feel that way about me -- because I do myself. Oh, nothing psychopathic, just the odd situation I am in. You've known me how long? A quarter century." "Twenty-six years, pushing twenty-seven." "Yes. And while I was never given to copping feels from female employees -- would you say that 'horny old bastard' was an honest description of me?" "I've never known your behavior toward women to be other than gentlemanly." "Oh, come now, Jake! You're talking to Johann at the moment. Level with me." Salomon grinned. "Johann, I think you were a horny old bastard right up to the day we took you in for surgery." "That's better. Years after I was benched in the matter... first for social reasons, the fact that an old man looks a fool if he behaves like a young stud, and later through illness and physical incapacity -- years after I was benched my interest in a pretty face or a pretty leg was unflagging. Then I acquired Eunice's healthy young body. Female. Look at me Jake. Female." "I've noticed!" "Not the way  have! Even though you've kissed me -- a real kiss and I loved it, dear -- you can't have noticed the way I have been forced to. I'm cyclic now, Jake, ruled by the Moon; I've menstruated twice. Do you know what that means?" "Eh? Natural phenomenon. Healthy." "It means that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body. I'm tempery and inclined to tears just before my period. My feelings, my emotions, even my thoughts are female-yet I have almost a century of male emotions and attitudes. Take my pretty little nursecompanion, Winnie -- and would you like to take her?" "Uh... damn you, Johann! She's a nice girl. Fifth Amendment." "She is indeed a nice girl. But because I'm Eunice as well as Johann. I know how she feels. She's as female as a cat in heat -- and you're an old bull, Jake, and dominant, and if you wanted to take Winnie she wouldn't put up more than token resistance." "Joan Eunice, don't talk nonsense. I'm three times her age." (Boss, what are you getting at?) (I'm not sure but I'm getting there.) (Well, don't get Winnie knocked up on the way. I thought we were saving Jake for us.) (Don't be a pig, little piglet. Winnie's a nurse; she sees to her contras as carefully as she cleans her teeth.) "Jake, dear. I'm not much older than Winnie in my body... and you've known and loved this body, even though I have no memory of it. We know that Eunice was always a lady -- so how did you ever manage to get started with her? Did you rape her?" (Hell, no,  raped him -- but he was a pushover.) "That's a most unfair question!" IT'S a very female question. I Knowing you from many years of association -- and knowing Eunice both from some years of association but most importantly from now having her body and glands and hormones and deepest emotions -- I suspect that you were far too proud to make a pass at her so she found some way to make clear that you were welcome. Once you were certain that Eunice was not trying to make a fool of you -- that settled it. Well? Am I right?" (If he says No, he's lying. It took five minutes. Sis -- and would have been all over in ten but we were interrupted. Had to wait till next day. Remember the mermaid getup? Had to scrub it off before I went home; Jake and I ruined it -- and I had to tell Joe a sincere fib.) (Did he believe you?) (I think so. He was painting... which means he hardly noticed anything else.) "Jake, are you going to answer? Or let me draw my own conclusions -- possibly mistaken?" "I could answer that it's none of your business!" "And you would be right and Johann apologizes. But not Eunice. Jake, that's what Eunice's body tells me must have happened. But I can't be certain and I do want to be like her and if that is not what she would have done because it is not what she did -- then tell me. I'm not asking for intimate details." (Aw, get the juicy parts, dearie -- I want to knowhow it seemed to him, every sweaty detail. I already know how it seemed to me -- and I'll tell you.) (Don't be so right-now, darling -- I'm trying to gentle him.) "Joan Eunice -- no, Eunice! You always have had the damnedest way of getting your own way." "Is that an answer, Jake? I don't have Eunice's memory." (Says who? Boss, I've figured out something -- and it's not flatworms. Everyone has erasable memory and non-erasable memory, just like Betsy -- and that non-erasable part is the me that's still here now that I'm dead. 'Soul' maybe. Names don't matter; it's the part that's not just glands and plumbing.) (Save the philosophy until we're alone in bed tonight, Eunice; I'm trying to cope with a man -- and it's heavy going.) (Do you think we're going to be alone in bed tonight? Want to bet?) (I don't knowand I'm scared.) (Don't be scared. When it happens, you recite the Money Hum and I'll drive. Once around the course and you'll be ready to solo. Except that I'll always be with you. Know sumpin, Boss honey? It's even nicer to be you than it was to be your secretary. Or will be, once we're back on ground rations.) (Huh?) (Soul talk, dear means sex. I had it for fourteen years -- and I'm hungry.) (I had it over five times that long I'm at least five times as hungry.) (Could be -- you're a horny bitch. Boss.) don't think it's fair to Eunice's memory for me to tell tales about her -- but I'll concede your point, assuming that you want to learn, for your own guidance, as much as possible about how she behaved. Eunice was honest and straightforward -- " (I'm devious as a snake but that's what I wanted Jake to believe.) "and she apparently decided that she liked me that much... and made it easy for me. It was neither rape nor seduction." (It was both, but I did not want him to think so. He's a darling, Joan. When he's gentled enough slip the bit into his mouth. But let him think he asked for it.) (I'll try. Meantime I'm still doing this emotional strip-down -- and you listen instead of interrupting; you might learn someting about me.) (I'll be good. Boss. Mostly.) "I felt certain that it must have been that way, Jake knowing you, knowing her. But that's only one side of me as I am now -- the 'Eunice' side. The other side is Johann, with almost a century of male orientation. I told you I now understand Winnie, as a girl -- because now I am a girl. But there is still Johann, alone with Winnie every dayand it's all I can manage to keep my hands off her." (Hmmph! You don't keep your hands off her.) (I said. Shut up! I haven't let it get past heavy cuddle. If you and I ever stroll Gay Street, you shameless, mermaid, it will be dessert, not the piece de resistance.) (That piece won't resist!) (Hush up!) Do you understand, Jake? Old Johannwc.'thinks that Winnie is quite some dish." "Well... I understand it in Johann." "I wonder if you would understand it in Eunice? Jake, how do you feel about homosexuality?" "I don't feel anything about it. Never been interested." "Not even curious? Jake, Tm a full generation older than you are. When I was a kid, homosexuality or 'perversion' as it was called, was hardly even a myth; I never heard of it until long after I was centered on girls. Oh, I don't mean there wasn't any; I know now that there was, lots of it. But it was spoken of seldom and kept under cover. When I was fifteen, a man made a pass at me and I didn't know what he was after; he just scared me. "Would a fifteen-year-old boy today be that innocent? You know he wouldn't be; there are books and magazines and pictures -- and other boys -- to make certain that he understands even if he doesn't join in. The government just misses endorsing it as a way to hold down our outlandish overpopulation -- would endorse it openly, I feel sure, if it were not that a large percentage disapprove of it publicly while practicing it in private. It reminds me of that weird period in my youth when people voted dry and drank wet and the bootlegger was more sought after than the black-market butcher is today. How long has it been since the last 'sex offense' was prosecuted?" "Rape by violence is still prosecuted; I can't recall any others in the last twenty years. Blue laws about sex are dead letters; Supreme Court decisions have made them impossible to prosecute. Correction; unlicensed pregnancy is a Federal offense under the 'General Welfare' clause... but I've often wondered what would happen if a case were ever allowed to reach the Supreme Court." "That's the only 'sex crime' that was not a crime when I was a kid, Jake. But I was talking about the 'crime against nature' which is no longer a crime; it isn't even a peccadillo, it arouses less disapproval than smoking. However by the time homosexuality was socially acceptable, my attitudes were long frozen. But I wonder what Eunice thought about it? Did you ever discuss it with her?" Jake snorted. "Believe me, Johann -- sorry, Joan Eunice -- that was not a subject we had time for!" "I suppose not. Nor did she discuss it with me." (Eibber!) "But she gave me a gentle reprimand about it once." "So? How?" "Oh, one day before I was bedfast, a messenger delivered something to my office. He was a real nancy-pants -- lots of makeup, false eyelashes, curled hair, and he waved his hips. A high, girlish lisp and oh, so graceful in his gestures. After he was gone I made some intolerant remark and Eunice told me gently that, while she didn't find such one-way boys attractive, she didn't see anything wrong in a man's loving man or a woman's loving a woman." (Hey! I don't remember any such conversation.) (So I'm a liar. But you could have said it--and I'm making a point.) "Yes, that sounds like Eunice. She was tolerant of people's frailties." "My point is that, Eunice being the age she was, she was certain to be indifferent to -- perhaps I should say understanding about what Johann thought of as perversities. But here's what I'm getting at, Jake: I find Winnie sexually attractive. I also find Alec Train and Judge McCampbell sexually attractive. Startled me. And you -- which did not startle me. But today was the first time I have been thoroughly kissed by very male men. And I liked it. Shook me." (How about dear Doctor?) (None of your lip, sweet lips -- we don't tell Jake that one.) is my dilemma. Which time am I being homosexual? With Winnie? Or with you three very male bulls?" "Joan, you ask the damnedest questions." "Because I'm in the damnedest situation a man ever found himself in. I'm not the ordinary sex' change of a homo who gets surgery and hormone shots to tailor his male body into fake female. I'm not male XX. But the brain in it has had a man's canalization and many years of enthusiastic male sex experience. So tell me, Jake, which time am I being normal, and which time perverse?" "Uh... I'm forced to say that your female body controls." "But does it? Psychologists claim that sexual desire and orgasm take place in the brain -- not in the genitals. My brain is XY." "I think you are trying to confuse the witness." "No, Jake, I'm the one who is confused. But possibly not as confused as the young people today. You know they claim to have six sexes." "Heard of it. Nonsense." "Not entirely. I've been doii lots of reading during my de-facto house arrest, trying to find out who I am, what I am, how I should behave. They label these so-called sexes both by behavior and physiology, with a new school of psychology -- when wasn't there a new one? -- to account for them. The six are ortho-male, ortho-female, ambi-male, ambi-female, homomale, homo-female -- and some list a seventh, the solos or narcissists. Even an eight, the non-sex, the neuters, both physical and psychological." "And I say it's nonsense." "I do, too, but not for the same reason. From my unique experience, embracing both physiological sexes directly and not by hearsay, I say there is just one sex. little sexual drive that they might as well be neuters no matter whether they are concave or convex. Some people have very strong sexual natures -- and again the shape of the body doesn't figure. Such as my former self, horny long after sex had abandoned me. Such as you, darling -- taking a lovely young married woman less than half your age as your mistress. Such as Eunicehappily married at home, I think -- " "Yes, she was. I felt guilty about it." "But not too guilty to share her riches. Jake, I wouldn't speak to you if you had scorned her. I was about to name Eunice as my third example of a person strongly sexed. Enough sexual drive in her body -- I know -- foT anything. Enough love in her heart -- I feel certain -- for any number. I know she loved me, even though she was too warmly empathic to mock me by offering me what I could not acceptand did give me, lavishly, the only thing I could accept -- her beauty, for my eyes. Jake, I think Eunice was limited in her love only by time. She kept you happy -- " "She certainly did!" "I'm just as certain she did so without depriving her husband. Jake, do you have reason to believe that she limited herself to you -- and her husband?" "Uh Damn you, Johann! I don't know. But I don't think she had time. Uh, I used up all the sneak-out time she could manage." (Look Boss, I'll tell you about every time I struck a blow for equal rights. Don't pester Jake.) (You're missing the point, Eunice. Em forcing Jake to move Saint Eunice off her pedestal that's the only way we'll ever get him.) "How do you know? Can you be sure she didn't tell you the same sort of little white lies she told her husband? For that matter, Jake, Joe may have been as proud of his antlers as an old buck deerthe percentage of husbands who are pleased by their wives' adulteries has been climbing steadily in this country at least since nineteenfifty see any of the kinseys. That he loved her we both are certain. That does not prove he tried to keep her in a cage. Or wanted to." "Joan, I would just as lief you didn't run down Eunice to me." "Jake, darling! I am not running her down. I am trying to find out what you know about her, so that I can model myself more closely after her. I loved her -- and love her still more today. But if you told me that you knew she was mistress to six other men, a whore on the side, and playing girl games in her spare timewell. I've never known you to lie to me, Jake, so I would try to go and do likewise. You haven't told me much but what you have told me confirms what I believed -- that Eunice was a perfect lady, with enough love in her heart to love three men at once and give each of them exactly what he needed to make him happy." (Thank you. Boss. Shall I bow?) (Quiet, little darling.) "But not a wanton, never a slut, andwhile she wasn't prudishI doubt if Winnie would have interested her." (Now wait one frimping minute!) (Em telling him what he wants to hear, dear if you want Winnie, we'll keep it out of Jake's sight.) Who wants Winnie? You dirty old man!) (We both do but it may be smart never to let it hatch. Dearest, Winnie wouldn't look at us with a man around.) (Want to bet?) unique double inheritance it would be easy for me to turn ambi-female. I'm not going to, because I don't think Eunice would. With the deep female drive this body hasbloodstream brimming with hormones and gonads the size of gourds is the way it feels I could easily become 'No-Pants Smith, the Girl Most Likely To.' Very easily -- as Johann Smith was an old vulgarian who regretted only the temptations he had been forced to pass up. But I'm not going to do that, either, as Eunice did not behave that way. But if I don't get married fairly soon, Em going to find it hard to stay off the tiles," "Joan, I love youbut I am not going to marry you. It's out of the question." "Then you had better help my granddaughters to swindle me." "Eh? Why?" "You know why. A multi-millionaire who is young and female stands as much chance of getting a good husband as the well-known tissue-paper dog had of chasing that asbestos cat through Hell. Lots of them in our country -- and all they ever got were Georgian princes, riding masters, and other gigolos. I don't want one, won't have one. I'd rather be broke, like Winnie, and take what love I can find. Jake, besides the fact that you understand me and no one else can, you'd still be in my top ten because my money does not impress you. Quite aside from wonderful fact that I love you and you love me, any marriage broker would call us a perfect match." "Hardly. There's still the matter of age -- body ages. Joan, a man who marries at my age isn't taking a wife, he's indenturing a nurse." "Oh, frog hair, Jake! You don't need one and I'll lay even money that you'll stay strong and virile right through my breeding period. But when you do need one I'll nurse you. In the meantime we'll sing September Song -- you lead. I'll harmonize." "I sing bass. And I won't sing September Song." "Jake? We could buy you a new body. When you need it." "No, Joan. I've had a long run and a good one, most of it happy, all of it interesting. When my time comes. I'll go quietly. I won't make the mistake you did, I won't let myself fall into the hands of the medics, with their artificial kidneys and their dials and their plumbing. I'll die as my ancestors died." She sighed. "And you call me stubborn. I've taken you up on a high mountain and shown you the kingdoms of the earth -- and you tell me it's Los Angeles. All right. I'll quit pestering you -- and humbly accept any love you can spare. Jake, will you take me out on the town and introduce me to eligible young men? You can spot a fortune hunter -- I think Eunice may be too naive, too inclined to think the best of people." (Rats, Boss, I bought me a gigolo with my eyes open... and, since I wasn't kidding myself, I bought top quality.) (I know you did, darling -- but the Joe Brancas in this world are as scarce as the Jake Salomons.) "Joan Eunice, if you want me to escort you. I'll be honored... and I'll try to keep pascoodnyaks away from you." "I'll hold you to that, you notso-very-old darling. Jake, I asked if you believed in ghosts. Do you have any religion?" "Eh? None. My parents were Orthodox, I think you know. My Bar Mitzvah speech was so praised that I had to fight to study law instead of being trained as a rabbi. But I shook off all that before I entered college." "Parallels me, somewhat. My grandparents came from the south of Germany, Catholic. So the priests had a crack at me first. Then we moved to the middle west before I started school, and Papa, who was never devout, decided it would be better -- better for business, maybe -- to be a Baptist. So I got the Bible-belt routine, with hell fire and damnation and my sins washed away with full immersion. It was the Biblebelt indoctrination that stuck, particularly the unconscious attitudes, "But, consciously and intellectually, I shucked off all of it when I was fourteen -- probably the only real intellectual feat of my life. I became an aggressive atheist -- except at home -- and scorned to believe in anything I could not bite. Then I backed away from that -- atheism is as fanatic as any religion and it's not my nature to be fanatic -- and became a relaxed agnostic, unsure of final answers but more patient. I stayed that way three-quarters of a century; I left religion to the shamans and ignored it." "My own policy." "Yes. But let me tell you something that happened while I was dead." "What? You were never dead, Joan -- Johann, damn it -- you were merely unconscious." land my brain cut off from the world and me not even aware of myself? If that is not death, Jake, it is an unreasonable facsimile. I told you that I thought Eunice's spirit has often given me a hand." "I heard you. I ignored it." "You stiff-necked old bastard. I haven't taken up seances and such. But here is what happens. When I am in a quandary -- often, these days -- I ask myself, 'What would Eunice do?' That's all it takes, Jake; I know at once. No ectoplasm or voices from a medium -- just instant knowledge not based on my own experience. Such as this afternoon when I decided in a split second to kiss Alec and Mac. No hesitationyou saw! That's not the way old Johann would behave... and yet you tell me I haven't missed behaving like Eunice even once. That's why it feels as if her sweet spirit were guiding me. Any comment?" "Mmm... No. You do behave like her... other than when you tell me flatly that you're speaking as Johann. But I don't believe in ghosts. Johann, if I thought I had to go on being Jake Salomon throughout all eternity. I'd well, I would register a complaint at the Main Office." "Let me tell you what happened to me at the Main Office." "Huh?" "While I was dead, Jake. I was in thisplace. There was a very old Man with a long white beard. He had a big book. He looked at me, then consulted His book, then looked back at me. He said, 'Son, you've been a bad boy. But not too bad, so I'm going to give you another chance. Do your best and don't worry; you'll have help.' What do you think, Jake?" (What is this, Boss? Did it happen to you, too?) (Eunice, if it happened to you it happened to me; it's the same thing. And you are my help, beloved. My guardian angel.) (Oh, frimp you! Em no angel, I'm me.) (A very earthy angel, beloved darling -- just what I need.) (Love you, too, you dirty old man.) Salomon answered slowly, "Anthropomorphism. Right out of your Bible-belt Sunday school." "Oh, certainly. It had to be in symbols I could understand. If I had been a creature from around Proxima Centauri the old Man and the beard might have been a Thing with eight tentacles and faceted eyes. Cliche symbols are nothing against it; I've never thought it was a physical experience. Men live by symbols, Jake. That -- symbolic -- experience was as real to me as any physical experience. And allow me to point out that I do have a second chance and I have, and am having, lots of help -- from you especially, from Mac and Alec, from doctors and nurses... and also from something inside that tells me instantly, in any difficult situation, exactly how Eunice would handle it. I don't say it's Eunice .... but it's not Johann; he wouldn't know how. Well?" Salomon sighed. "Of the inventing of gods there is no end. And almost always anthropomorphic. Joan, if you are going in for that sort of self-delusion, why not go whole hog and join a nunnery?" "Because Eunice would not. Although she might enjoy revamping a monastery." Jake chuckled. "She might, at that." "Maybe I should try it -- since you are so damn chinchy about making me an honest woman. More likely I'll change my name again and disappear and wind up in a crib in Bombay. Will you come visit me there, Jake?" "No. Too hot." "Chinchy. Mean old Jake. You wouldn't refuse to go see Eunice because of heat." "Eunice would never wind up in a crib." "No, she wouldn't. So I have to go on being a lady even though it's quite a strain on old Johann." ".Poor you. All you have is youth, beauty, and half as much money as the I.R.S." "And you, Jake. I could lose the rest and still be rich." (I was wondering if you would see that opening. Sister, you don't need my advice; I think I'll take a vacation.) (You promised to stay!) (Yes, Boss darling. I can't leave; we're Siamese twins. But even if I could. I'd stay because I want to.) (Eunice beloved, I have never been happier in my life.) Joan Eunice moved closer to Jake. "Jake, dear, I have never been happier in my life." A brassy voice from the cockpit said, "I am about to swing for landing. Please secure seat belts." Salomon answered, "Seat belts fastened and now being tightened. Proceed with landing." To Joan he said, "Straighten up, Eunice -- and do snap up that magno." Joan Eunice pouted her lip and obeyed. XV time; Salomon was known to the enclave guards and the copter was expected. It was a short walk from the landing to Salomon's house but, as in all upper-class enclaves, inhabitants in sight outdoors pretended not to see them. The door opened to Jake's voice and again they were private. Joan Eunice took off her street robe and handed it to Jake, saying, "May I look around? Jake, it's been years since I've been here; you've made changes." "Some. Moved my personal gear to the Gib or to your house, not much left but furniture which I'll sell with the house. Oh, I keep some clothing and toilet articles here, and I can find us a drink and a tin of biscuits. Perhaps smoked oysters or caviar; we have to kill an hour or two. Or I could send out for dinner." "Let me see what there is in your kitchen; I would enjoy playing housewife. And I do want to look around." "Look all you like, but tell me what you want to drink. Joan, have you ever been in a kitchen?" "None of your lip, lad; I'm a good cook. Mama taught me to make Apfelstrudel -- dough you could read print through and so light it melted in your mouth -- before you were born. Sherry, or a Dubonnet highball -- no Schnaps, I'm not risking it yet." "I'll stack my kosher cooking against your Bavarian messes any day, girl. The Goyim can't cook the way the Chosen People can." "Oh, pooh, you fake Jew. You haven't tasted my pot roast with noodles. I bached between wives and cooks -- and mistresses, and I always cooked. Jake, wouldn't it be fun to cook for each other and swap recipes? We could do it here. I don't dare enter my own kitchen; Della would faint." "Might be fun. We can eat my cooking when your boasts don't pan out. Excuse me; I'll see what liquor there is." Joan Eunice headed straight for the master bedroom. (Eunice, is this one of the places?) (Of course. See that sag in the bed? Boss, this is the only place we managed an all-night. Heavenly!) (All night? Then his mobiles do more than suspect; they know.) (Oh, they may suspect but it doesn't matter. Charlie isn't interested in women, and Rockford -- well, he's on my team. He approves of anything immoral, illegal, or dishonest -- and my conduct was all three, by his standards. He's an atavism. But the all-night -- I doubt if they suspected. We used more fan-dancing to keep it out of their sight than Joe's sight -- things involving two hired Brink's cars and a non-existent errand for you.) (How did you fan-dance it for Joe?) (Didn't. I thought up a story and told Jake I would use it -- then told Joe that I had met a man I wanted to spend a night with... did he mind?) (As simple as that?) (Yes, Boss. We both were free but we were careful never to hurt each other. Only a second-class contract -- since I was licensed for children and Joe was not. Either of us could have registered a dissolution on three days' notice.) (But what did Joe say?) (Nodded and went on painting. He kissed me goodbye and told me to have fun; Joe was always sweet. But he may not have missed me. He was painting from a new model, a beautiful boy who was a frimp type. Joe may have been changing his luck; he sometimes did.) (And you didn't mind?) (That beautiful boy? Boss, you've got to move into the twenty-first century, now that you're me. What possible harm? I've told you and told you that Joe and I were always careful of each other's happiness; what more could I ask? Besides, I don't know that Joe had his eye on him other than as a model but -- well, if they had invited me to move to Troy with them, I wouldn't have minded, for a night or two. I've always preferred older, men but the boy was pretty as a Palomino and clean as a sterilized cup; I wouldn't have found it boring. Plus the fact that a woman is flattered if two males like her enough to let her watch what they do.) (Eunice my love, you continue to startle me. That angle I would never have thought of. Yes, I guess it would be a compliment, in a way. I think that men even men todayare shyer about such things than women are.) (Men are horribly shy, Bosswhereas women usually are not. W'e just pretend to be, when it's expected of us. Look, a woman is a belly with a time bomb inside, and women know it and can never get away from it. They either quit being shy -- no matter how they behave to please men or they go crazy; it's the choice we have to make. And high time you made that choice, dear. yccept your femaleness and live with it. Be happy.) (I think I have.) (You're coming along. But sometimes it feels like the bravado of a little boy who says, T am not either scared!' when he's ready to wet his pants, he's so frightened.) (Well, maybe. But I've got you holding my hand.) (Yes, dearest. Mama will take care of vou.) Joan went into Jake's bathroom, primarily to snoop. She had just found something she half expected to find -- when she heard Jake's voice. "Hey! Where are you? Oh! Coming, or going? Fixed you Chablis over ice" "That'll do fine. Jake. Was this hers?" She held up a luxurious negligee -- two ounces of cobweb. Jake gulped. "Yes. Sorry." "I'm not sorry." Suddenly Joan stripped off the Cling-Ons, shoved down her frill-skirt panties and stepped out of them, leaving her bare from sandals to eyebrows, put on the negligee. "Do I wear it the way she would? Wups, I wrapped it man-style." She rewrapped the lapover to the left. "Do I do her justice?" "Eunice! Eunice!" She folded it back, let it slither to the floor, went into his arms, let him sob against her face. "That's enough, darling, Eunice doesn't want you to cry. Eunice wants you to be happy. Both Eunice and Joan Eunice. Hold me tight, Jake. We're lost and lonely and all we have is each other." While she cuddled him and soothed him, she opened the zipdown of his shirt. (Eunice, I'm scared!) (Easy does it, dear. Chant the Money Hum to yourself; I've taken over. Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum. Om M ani) the telephone signal. She pulled her mouth from Jake's and started to cry. "Oh, damn!" Jake said huskily, "Ignore it. It's a mistake, no one knows I'm here." "Uh -- If we don't answer, they'll try again and interrupt us again. I'll take care of it, dear. Where is the pesky thing? Living room?" "Yes, but there's an extension over there." "Keep thinking nice thoughts." Joan hurried over, high heels tapping, stood close to the pickup so that only her face would be seen, flipped the switch -- said in Eunice's most crisp secretarial voice: "Mr. Salomon's residence. Who is calling?" The screen stayed blank. "Recorded. Urgent call for Counselor Salomon, third attempt." "Urgency noted. Proceed. Who is calling?" Another voice came on, screen still blank. "This is Mr. Salomon's answering service. Judge McCampbell has placed an urgent call. I told the judge that the counselor was more likely to be at his club or at the Johann Smith residence, but he insisted that I keep trying this code, too. Is he there?" "One moment." Joan glanced back, noted with annoyance that Jake had closed his shirt and picked up her clothes. "I have Mr. Salomon. Can you reach Judge McCampbell? I will hold." "Thank you. One moment." Joan stepped still closer and tilted the pickup to make certain that it caught only her face. Jake stepped to her, handed her her clothes. She accepted them, did not put them on. The screen lighted. "Jake, we -- Hey! Brother Schmidt!" "Alec! How nice!" "Step back so I can see you, dear. Mac, don't shove," Train added as the judge's face appeared by his in the screen. "Is Jake there?" "Right beside me, boys." "All I can see is his shirt. Stand on a box, honey, so that you're both on screen; this must be a four-way conference. Or back away." "Here he is." Joan tilted the pickup higher, reluctantly pressed the cups to her breasts, stepped into her frill-skirt, wiggled it into place. Then she backed off. "Can you see me now?" "Not well enough," the judge's resonant baritone answered. "Jake, back off a little. Joan, you need a stool. Better yet, Jake, hold her up in your arms -- you lucky man." "What's the message, gentlemen? And, thank you. Judge, for your flitter. We were delivered quickly and safely." "De nada, compadre. Jake, my no doubt through long association with me." The judge exdo in order to speed confirmation of Joan's identity. "This can be our comm center. I am going to live in my chambers a few days -- ready to issue a warrant, phone a judge in another jurisdiction or whatever. Then we'll rush it through my court and crowd them into an appeal -- get this nailed down tight. Meanwhile Alec is your man Friday. Want him to go anywhere in a hurry? He's stupid but healthy, and losing a night's sleep to time-zone changes is good for him." "Probably not before morning. But I'm relieved, gentlemen; I've been wondering how I could be everywhere I need to be. Since I'm retired from everything but Joan's personal affairs. I'm without staff -- and I've been cudgeling my brain trying to think whom I could get who would be reliable and competent. As we all know, this is touchy." "We know!" agreed Alec. "And we're going to fix those harpies -- aren't we, Mac?" "Yes -- but legally and so that it cannot be reversed, Jake. You can reach us here -- and don't hesitate to wake us if you decide you want Alec to catch a midnight liner. Where will you be? Your house?" "Until my car arrives, then we'll be at Joan's. Or on our way. My answering service can flip you into my car's wavelength. It's a longish drive." "We'll be in touch. Don't worry, Jake, and don't let Joan worry. We'll have her baptized before you can say 'missing heir.' " "I'm not worried," said Joan, "but I feel like crying. Boys -- Brothers -- how can I thank you?" "Shall we tell her, Mac? Would she blush? Thank me, that is, Brother Schmidt; don't thank Brother Mac; he's just doing his duty, what the taxpayers reluctantly pay him for. But you can thank me -- I'm a volunteer." "I'll thank you both, in whatever way you wish," Joan said simply. "You heard that, Mac? Brother Schmidt committed herself -- and you can't break a promise between Brothers, that's the old Bita Pi law. Brother Schmidt Joan Eunice honey, back off and let us see all of you. Jake, get out of pickup; you ruin the composition. Go have a beer. Take a nap." "Ignore him, he's drunk," advised his former roommate. "So's Mac, we've been working on it. But I'm not too drunk to hop a guided missile, Jake, if you say to." "Jake," said the judge, "this is getting out of hand. Not that I disagree with this low forehead's enthusiasm. Good night, sir. Good night, Joan. Off." Joan Eunice flipped the switch, made certain that the screen was dead, started undressing. "Joan. Stop that." S HE went on removing her saucy, scanty clothing, heeled off her sandals, then stood facing him. "Jake, I refuse to be treated like a porcelain doll. You had me expecting to be treated as a woman." He sighed. "I know. But the golden moment passed." "Well... I'm not going to dress. You've seen this body many times, we both know -- and I want us both to get easy about it. Actually I'm shy, Jake; I'm only weeks old, as a woman, and not used to it. But I want to get used to it. With you." "Well -- As you wish, dear; you know how beautiful I think you are. What shall we do? Read aloud to each other till my car arrives? Watch video?" "Beast. If you were a gentleman you would at least take your clothes off. Instead you are a difficult, stubborn beast Snd I don't know wby I love you. Except that Eunice loved you -- loves you, wherever she is -- so I have to love you. Jake, if you won't take me to bed, at least sit down in that big chair and let me crawl up into your lap. We can talk. We'll talk about Eunice." He sighed. "Girl, you'll give me a heart attack yet...All right, come curl up in my lap. On one condition." "Jake, I'm not sure I'll agree to any conditions. I'm in a very unstable state." "You certainly are, dear. But it's my lap. No ticky, no washee." "I should go back to the courthouse; I don't think Mac and Alec would insist on conditions. Might as well relax, Jake; I'm climbing into your lap with no more yatter. There! That's better. Arms around me, please." "First the condition. That you not try to rape me in a chair -- " "Don't think I could." "You'd be surprised what can be done in a chair, Joan." "Would not. I've done 'em all. As Johann. But they require cooperation." "Mmm, so they do.and that, as soon as my car arrives, you dress at once and no nonsense, and we go home." "All right -- since you made that 'we.' I was afraid you were feeling ornery enough to send me home alone. In which case I was going to have Rockford and Charlie take me straight back to Alec and Mac. Aren't they delightful wolves, Jake? Hold me tight. The only way you can protect me from them is you-know-what." "Hmm. Joan, can you keep a chuckle to yourself?" "Well... I promise never to tell anyone but Eunice." "Eh? Okay, I don't think you would break a promise made that way. But, let me add that if you did tell, it would hurt Alec and Mac both -- and Eunice would not like that." "No, Eunice certainly would not like that. Jake, you're going to be able to hogtie me with that phrase the rest of my life." (Don't fret. Boss honey. Any time Jake is wrong. I'll give you the ammo to change his tune.) "All right. I'll tell no one but Eunice -- and the old Man with the long white beard next time I see Him." "Safe enough. Okay, here's the chuckle. Your two charming wolves -- and they are charming -- are as gay as Julius Caesar." "What? Jake, I have trouble believing that." "I won't offer proof but I assure you that I know it beyond any reasonable doubt." "But -- Look, dear, I've kissed them. I may be an ersatz female... but not where it matters, and I know those kisses weren't phony. They were hot over me. Shucks, darling, I could tell it by Braille. Besides, they are married." "I said, 'As gay as Julius Caesar,' not Governor Arkham." "Oh. Ambi gay, you mean. I still have trouble believing it. Doesn't it show at all? Even in a kiss?" ( spotted it, Joan, the potential at least. But they're still wolves... and we may be back there some day. To thank them.) (Eunice, is that the only way a female can thank a man?) (That's the only convincing way, twin. This is news?) (No, beloved -- but it was possible that your generation had learned something mine had not. They haven't. Not in anything you've told me. Just more open about it.) "Joan, there is no way to spot it, if an ambi does not want it known. Either ambi, or clear over the line and no return. Look, when you were Johann, could you spot a virgin?" "Jake, I'm not sure I ever met a virgin. But you have." "You must mean someone we both know." "Of course." "Who? Winnie? Wouldn't have thought so. But she does blush easily." "Not Winnie. If she is one, I didn't have her in mind." (You crawled out of that one!) (Winnie can tell her own secrets. Honey girl? Does Jake know about your baby?) (No, and we're not going to tell him!) (Didn't intend to, darling -- just didn't want to be caught foolish.) "Well, I can't guess. Who is this paragon?" "Me." "Uh -- But -- " Jake Salomon shut up. "Sure, sure, dear -- Johann was not, and Eunice was married. Not to mention an old wolf who tripped her." ( tripped him.) "But none of that applies to this new female in your lap. I'm a virgin. But would not have been, by now I think -- if that goddam phone hadn't sounded. Don Ameche should never have invented it." "Who's he? Some Russian? Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone." "An obsolete joke, Jake -- sorry. Ameche played Bell in a movie, oh, about the time you were three or four years old. But let's not talk about long-dead actors, nor my virginity that I can't get rid of; let's discuss Eunice." (My favorite subject!) "That overhead light is in my eyes; where can I squeeze it down? And will you keep your lap warm while I trot and do it?" "I can do it from here. Is that better?" "Oh, much! I want to see you, darling -- but floor lights are enough. Now tell me about Eunice. I not only want to be like her in other ways... but I would like to learn to make love the way she did. As much as you'll tell me." "Joan, you know I can't tell such things about a lady." B ut I am Eunice, Jake. I just don't have her memory. So I need help. Eunice loved you, and still loves you I feel certain -- and Joan Eunice loves you -- with a love not at all like the fierce affection Johann always had for his one friend -- Joan Eunice loves you with a love that comes also from Eunice's sweet body that I wear so proudly. So tell me about her. Was she as eager as I am?" "Uh -- " (Slide your hand inside his shirt, twin. Be careful not to tickle.) "Joan, Eunice was eager. I had trouble believing it at first -- me an old wreck and she so young and beautiful. But she managed to make me believe it." "But you are not an old wreck, darling. You are in better shape than I was at your age. Oh, your face has character lines; it has a granite majesty that impresses everyone. But your body is as firm and trim as a man half your age. Muscly. And your skin is smooth and elastic, not that distressing crepelike texture I remember too well. Darling... even if you divorce me later, will you marry me soon enough to let me have your baby?" (Hon, you're knocking him out of the ring! That's one I never dared use.) "Eunice! Joan Eunice." "Oh, I don't mean soon enough for you -- I mean soon enough for me. I may have fifteen more fertile yearsbut the sooner the better; a woman ought not to have her first baby at past forty. But you will be making babies as long as you live. How many children do you have, Jake beloved?" "Three. You met two of them once. And four grandchildren." "I don't mean those, I mean others. I'll bet you have at least a dozen more, here and there. You've been rich a long time; you could afford it. How many that you haven't mentioned?" "Joan Eunice, that's snoopy." "Yes, and no one has to answer that sort of question. But didn't Eunice ever ask?" (I did and I think he fibbed. I want to hear what he says this time.) "Uh -- " "I won't tell anybody but Eunice. Not even the old Man with the book." "You insidious little cuddle puppy. I think I have four more. Plus one by a married lady who may have been kidding me. Three I supported until they were on their own; the fourth -- and that possible fifth I couldn't even offer to. But they were never in want." "How was it handled, dear? Three maiden ladies who moved elsewhere and became overnight widows?" "Uh... only in one case. I offered to marry her -- I was a grass widower then -- but she elected not to, and did marry later and her husband adopted the child and I made a cash settlement. The other similar case-I was married but the settlement was just as amicable. The other two were married. Some grief about one -- she was a compulsive confesser, from which the good Lord deliver me! -- and her husband had to be soothed with mucho dinero. The last -- well, her husband was sterile -- mumps -- and together they picked a father. Me. Startled the hell out of me. But he offered to put it in writing and did. I tore it up and settled it with a handshake." (This is all news to me, Joan. But I couldn't believe that such a virile and charming man had left no byblows. Keep him talking.) Jake grinned and caressed her sweet body. "That is the only one I'm certain about, as I have never insisted on blood tests if a lady accused me and I could have been the man. But in that case I am certain, as we took a holiday together, by sailboat, with her husband as nominal chaperone. So that time it was #, at the right time and place. Then -- " He paused. "Joan Eunice, I don't know whether Johann would have approved of the sequel, or not... but I don't want to shock the sweet girl you are now." (Honey, don't let him stop therel) "Johann can't be shocked, Jake. If it's rough, I won't tell Eunice. But don't let me crowd you." "Well... it wasn't rough, it was sweet. They didn't use me and drop me. I was welcome in their home thereafter... and in their bed." "Three in a bed?" "Uh... don't be nosy! Sometimes." "But no more babies?" "They were licensed for four and had them. But I think they picked a different father for each. I simply know that, in the several times I stayed in their home over about ten years, I never slept alone. I still get Christmas cards from them, each with a photograph of the family -- and my daughter looks like her mother, not like me, thanks be to God. Joan, they were and are a respectable married couple, devout, and devoted to each other and to their children, and old-fashioned... except that, when they were faced with the need for a donor, they elected to pick donors themselves, then use the old-fashioned way rather than syringes and a clinic." "Uh... was she sweet in bed?" "Quite. But unsophisticated. Not a patch on Eunice, if you were thinking about her." "I was." ( was!) "Eunice -- Eunice was the most glorious thing that could happen to any man. Sweet as an angel, and as skilled -- and as uninhibited -- as the most famous courtesan in history." (I'm purringl) "Jake. I prefer the old-fashioned way, too." "Yes?" "You were sweet to all those ladies and you got two unmarried ones pregnant and I'm rich enough to get away with it and right now you are feeling young -- I know you are! Will you pick me up and carry me over there? Or shall I walk?" "Eunice." "Let's both walk. But hurry." "Yes. Yes, darling." S HE jumped up, took his hand... as the house intercom sounded with: "Mr. Salomon! Rockford here. Your car is waiting." Joan said, "Oh, my God!" and started to cry. Jake put his arm around her and petted her. "I'm sorry, darling." "Jake. Tell them to go get dinner. Tell them to be back in, uh, two hours." "No, dear." She stomped her bare foot. "Jake, I won't, I won't! This is unbearable." He said quietly, "You promised. Look, darling. I'm not nineteen years old and able to perform in back seats of cars or on back porches with a party going on in the house. I have to have quiet and peace." (Don't believe him, dear! Though he might be scared off for a first time.) Joan bawled and shook her head. He spoke loudly: "Rockford!" "Yes, sir?" "We'll be out in a moment or two. Keep the reactor warm." He stepped to the wall and squeezed down the intercom to zero, then said gently, "Get dressed dear." "I won't! If we leave now, you'll have to stuff me into the car bare naked." He sighed and picked her up; she stopped crying and looked suddenly happy. The expression did not last. He turned her in his arms as he sat down on a straight chair, got a firm grip on her, and walloped her right buttock. She yelped. And struggled. He got her more firmly, placing his right leg over both of hers, and applied his hand smartly to her left cheek. Then he alternated sides, stopping with ten. He set her on her feet and said. "Get dressed, dear. Quickly." She stopped rubbing the punished area. "Yes, Jake." Neither said another word until he had handed her into the car, climbed in after her, and they had been locked in. Then she said timidly, "Jake? Will you hold me?" "Certainly, darling." "May I take my robe off, please? Will you take it off me?" With the robe out of the way she sighed and snuggled in. After a bit she whispered, "Jake darling? Why did you spank me?" It was his turn to sigh. "You were being difficult... and it is the only thing I know of which will do a woman any good when a man can't do for her what she needs. And right thenI couldn't." "I see. I think I do." She remained quiet a while, enjoying his arms around her and breathing against his chest. Then she said, "Dear? Did you ever spank Eunice?" "Once." "For the same reason?" "Not quite. Well, somewhat. She teased me into it." (I tickled him, dear. And got the surprise of my life.) "Then I'm glad you spanked me, too. But I'll try not to tease youthough I'll never be the angel she was." (Fallen angel. Boss. And enjoyed it all, clear down to the Pit.) "Jake?" "Yes, Eunice?" "I didn't really mind being spanked by you. Even when I was crying. But Well, I'm padded now built to take a spanking. And when you are spanking me, you aren't ignoring me -- and any attention is better than none. And besides -- " She hesitated. "Besides what, Eunice?" "Well, I don't know -- but I think it happened." "What happened?" "Female orgasm. Well, maybe. I don't know what one is supposed to feel like. But while I was crying -- and hurting; you have a heavy hand, sirsuddenly I felt very warm inside and something seemed to grow and explode -- that's the best I can describe it. And I was ecstatically happy and didn't mind the last few wallops, hardly noticed them. Was that a female orgasm?" "How would  know, dearest? Perhaps you'll be able to tell me. Later." "Later tonight?" "Uh, I think not, Eunice. It's late and we have had nothing to eat and I'm tired even if you aren't -- " "I am, rather. But happy." "So tonight we'll rest. When it does happen -- and I'm no longer fighting it -- let's make the first time absolutely private and quiet. No phones and no servants and no distractions. After that -- well, it might be target-of-opportunity. But I'm not a kid. You know what I mean, darling; you've been old, too." "Yes, dearest, much older than you are. Eunice can wait. Jake? What was this teasing Eunice did that was so bad it got her spanked?" He suddenly grinned. "The little imp tickled me until I nearly went out of my mind. So I spanked her. But we were alone, and that ended satisfactorily. Quite." "How?" "How do you think? I excelled my usual mediocre performance, and Eunice -- there aren't words for it, but she excelled her utter perfection, impossible as that sounds." (He darn near split me like a melon, twin -- and I wanted him to!) "So? Someday  will tickle you -- and get spanked for it. So take your vitamins, dear. Jake, you enjoyed spanking me. Didn't you?" He was silent several moments. "I enjoyed it so much that I spanked you neither as hard nor as long as I wanted to. And started feeling 'young' as you put it -- but knew that, if I didn't get you out of the house right then, you probably wouldn't leave at all. And I don't care to advertise it to servants." "You had better marry me. So we can ignore servants." "You had better shut up. You're still learning to be a girl, and I'm still learning how to handle you. You're Eunice -- but you aren't Eunice. And we must clear up legal matters before we talk about such things." "Old mean. Girl beater. Sadist. Hold me tight." IF The Magazine of Alternatives B eing in this comer, I often think about what sells books. And I think pretty definitely that the crucial encounter occurs when a casual reader, coming upon a piece of literature in the marketplace, finds his money solicited by the publisher on the basis of certain flattering claims about the product. These claims appear right on the piece of product, and have the jargon designation of "blurbs." Well, as some of you already know I'm not crazy about the style of most blurbs. Some of you -- particularly some of you who write blurbs -- have expressed frustration and ire. Don't I understand you're just trying to sell more books, and thus do good for the whole field? Etc. Okay. Perhaps you have missed the point, chums, and perhaps we will go through it again. Tones up the blood, anyhow. I think the blurb attempts to divert some of the prospective reader's funds away from his grocery budget in exchange for what may be a very specious promise of entertainment. The prospect is conscious that he worked for his money and he feels he earned it fairly. He applies these same standards to the things that try to earn from him. I therefore think it wise that the blurb should honestly inform the prospect about the book that is to say the product. It may do so quite legitimately by talking even not so much about the book as about the train of thought or the social format that produced it. It may do so quite legitimately simply by reminding the reader that the author of this one has produced a listed number of previous books that the reader bought and enjoyed, and by reassuring the reader that this one is just like them. Honesty need not be carried to absurd extremes. The reader, after all, is a reasonably well-read citizen of the world. But often enough what the actual blurb does -- when it isn't full of outright lies or the rediscovery of some banal profundity -- is to be full of personal notes which upon examination boil down to "Gee whiz, we the editors of this book really enjoy being friends with the writer. He's a fantastic luncheon raconteur and you ought to see him with a lampshade on his head at parties." Or they boil down to "Buy this book from my friend." Now you can hardly blame the intelligent reader for feeling that he has happened in on a gang prank in which he has no hope of actually participating. I think this is what happens all too often; I think it's very bad for science fiction; I think it's in extremely questionable taste. Ultimately I don't think it sells very many people on continuing to buy books, even when sometimes the disservice is merely a pitiful one, like serving wine in a greasy glass. L et us have at # Great Tales Book #T#, #c) edited by Idella Purnell Stone, with an introduction by John W. Campbell. All right, now the thing to do is to decide whether anyone, starting with the prospective reader, is going to get any benefit out of this book. It's useless to stand around supposing about what odd combination of events led the publisher to accept an anthology from someone without any credentials to qualify them for selecting greatness. If I had known how to do it I would have done it. So let's imagine now our reader or our prospect coming up to this article on the newsstand and working on a decision whether or not to buy it. The table of contents sports a number of names which are or should be rather recognizable. The back of the book says; "These amazing tales by the great masters of science fiction..." Well, that's not a lot of help. Fawcett has the most overblown blurbs in the business, apparently as the result of an editorial belief that the publisher will not okay the purchase of any given manuscript unless it is at least by a great master. If you have been haunting newsstands and buying Gold Medal books for any length of time you might know this. Caveat emptor and let us look at these great masters. These great masters are Randall Garrett, Murray Feinster, Fredric Brown, Walter Bupp, Isaac Asimov, Mack Reynolds, Reginald Bretnor, Jay James H. Schmitz, Robert F. Young, and Eric Frank Russell (represented by an article). So we have one, two, three, four people who can be counted on to be named on any list of reliable modern sf writers. We have several others of high minor-league status and we have the usual number of spear carriers. So mueh for that. What next? Well, we have the editor's introductory blurbs for the various stories herein -- for instance "The Foreign Hand Tie" by Randall Garrett: "... This story... is in the realm of possibility -- since it is possible and even logical that a fully developed telepath might be employed for espionage." I don't know about you, but that kind of thing worries me. First of all, I cannot imagine what else you can be but a spy by definition, equipped with such a talent. Spying on political partisans of other ideologies is only the merest tentative first extension of the notion of being able to spy on the thoughts of the lady next door, so I don't really understand what the excitement is about. But neither am I ready to admit to the believability of any blurb which began with "In light of the fully authenticated cases of complete telepathic communication between twins..." I don't feel that there are any fully authenticated cases of any kind of useful telepathic communication between twins. I am even more inclined to be positive that there are no fully authenticated cases of complete telepathic communications between twins, and I think that I am not alone in that opinion. I think most people don't know of any such thing, although a number of people may believe or wish to believe that it is true, and I think it's incumbent on an editor addressing herself to any kind of conventional audience to back up that kind of offhand remark with a few ready references. So right away I don't think this is a book for those people who read science fiction because they find it presents a valid challenge to the imagination. Then we get to the blurb for Robert Heinlein's "Project Nightmare." This goes: "... His imagination can be as unlimited as the universe and the far future, or confined, as in this story, to the taut boundaries of a here-and-now crisis." Well, anybody who confuses an abstract like imagination with a concrete like the physical universe has got a perceptual problem basically describable as a lack of imagination. The size of the scene on whieh a creator may choose to cast his narrative is in no relevant way related to the reach of his mind. Most of the people who read science fiction are perfectly capable of perceiving distinctions of that order, and do so as a matter of course. That quality goes along with a great range of similar perceptions without which, it seems to me, one cannot be a science-fiction reader. I may be wrong, but in my little role here as the guy who might buy this book, I am the guy who has just decided not to. Now, that's my loss. I don't want you to think I was being nasty to Mrs. Stone just for the sake of being nasty. The stories in this book are by and large good ones. They're fun to read. Some of them represent some pretty impressive achievement on the part of people who spun them out. Their compilation represents an achievement on Mrs. Stone's part -- you don't put together a list like this without working at it. Yet, it seems to me what has happened here is that publisher and editor have unwittingly acted together in such a way as to discourage a major portion of the potential audience for this book. T ET'S have a look at Infinity One, New Writings in Speculative Fiction, edited by Robert Hoskins (Lancer book ##-#, #). What we have here is a rather attractive-looking package. The cover promises an "introduction by Isaac Asimov," then "a short novel by Poul Anderson," and then states the book is "featuring Arthur C. Clarke" and, immediately under that, uses the term: "never before published." O.K., the reader is being invited to buy yet another "magazine in book form," to borrow a term directly from the contents page of this particular one, and now the question is, should he? Well, Arthur Clarke is a potent name. So is Asimov, but the Asimov is a reprint and not an introduction for this book at all. It's a reprint of an Asimov article which originally appeared in a house magazine, for Local I of the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, in #. It's an article called The Fun In Future Fun, and nowhere in it is there any reference to the contents of this book or to any of the writers in this book. It just happens to be an Asimov article which Hoskins has picked up and chosen to call an introduction. The Clarke is not a new story. It's The Star from #, where it graced the first issue of Infinity Magazine. It subsequently won a Hugo and went on to a number of anthology appearances. It has inded enjoyed a distinguished career over the fifteen years that have intervened between its first publication and its appearance in a product with "never before published" engraved upon its cover directly under this story's author's name. Hoskins is as familiar with science fiction as anyone could want him to be. He's a long-time fan, and a knowledgeable person in many ways. He says in his introduction to The Star: "It is not our intention to present reprints in this series, but Infinity One is the lineal descendant of Infinity Science Fiction of fond memory. And leading off the first issue of that first Infinity was a story destined to become an immediate classic. Thus it's a pleasure to break our own rules for the first and only time and present once more..." That's a pretty clumsy piece of weasel wording. But if you can unblushingly link "immediate" with "classic," then you have no problems at all in declaring that you are establishing a rule by breaking it. But it leaves a funny taste in the mouth and meanwhile we, still trying to make up our mind whether this book is any good or not, now begin paging through it in dead earnest. The table of contents looks good: it's got a Silverberg, a Katherine Maclean, an Anne McCaffrey, a Ron Goulart, a Gene Wolfe, a collaboration by Kris Neville and K.M. O'Donnell. It does have a Poul Anderson novelet and it has stories in addition by Miriam Allen deFord, R.A. Lafferty. Dean R. Koontz, Edward Wellen and a couple of new names like Pat De Graw and George Zebrowski. It has something called # Fables -- which turn out to be two sophomoric short stories by Stephen Barr and Michael Fayette, respectively, and a funny one by Gordon R. Dickson, none of whom are masters of this form in a field which has only one Fredric Brown and a jam of editors who think that a short-short story is anything that's shorter than a short story. But I was digressing. Well, as I keep trying to establish with some of the people who object to my doing so, I accept in front that since you cannot sell a book on the basis of what's actually in it -- because the store proprietor won't let the prospect read the whole package before he walks out with it then it does make sense to use blurbs and to package the product. But then then God damn it!-you are doing nobody any good by being dumb in your blurbs. Hoskins, as we can see, has already established himself as a shifty character, thus making one wonder whether his book is any good. Now we have to cope with his version of the English language: "Happily for we as readers he is a man yet young enough that we can look forward to many years of producing stories such as..." I have to admit to you that that's the most outrageous example I could find. I don't think its necessary to find very many of that caliber. One will do to cast serious doubts on the editor's credentials as a man who presumably judged the contents of this book. He's either a man in a hell of a hurry or a man whom all the time in the world wouldn't help. If you want to know more about that, try the introduction to the Katherine MacLean story. I give it to you in its entirety: "We live in a big universe; Katherine MacLean, who writes far too little these days, examines one small corner of it now..." Gentle reader, I hardly know how to convey the depth of my personal reaction to what might be called the absurdly profound school of nonsequitur blurb writing. But it's an article of some faith with me that you will convey your reaction at this point by putting the book down in its rack and walking away from it quickly. How about this one: "At this time nothing is known of the author of the following story: even hisher sex is a matter of speculation. Whether man or woman, it is certain that Pat De Graw is talented, and to be hoped that there'll be many more such stories to come..." What follows this is, like most of the stories in this book, at least good -- and that's my point, it's at least good, but if the editor of this thing could not take the trouble to discover to whom he was addressing his check for what may have been a first sale, and whose life it was that he was altering, why, pray tell, should we as readers feel that we are here in contact with any exercise of conscience, discretion, judgement, respect for one's own job and one's own profession, and in the end any respect for oneself? There are so many sources vying for our entertainment money that it becomes extremely difficult to perceive why anyone should feel moved to purchase this particular entertainment. The generally high quality of the stories within this book is irrelevant and is in fact largely wasted. The work of the writers contained herein is in some danger of going down the drain, their earnings are in positive danger of being impaired, the publisher's earnings will not be as high as they might have been, the editor's salary probably should be cut, and who gains? Who gains?  Robert SUverberg worth adding to your library... stories you will treasure... available to you at a special # discount no commitments. Here are the books of enduring value that you will want to own... for hours of science-fiction pleasure, to be read, reread, and discussed with your friends. These are the books that have proven themselves... filled with all of the features you look for in S-F...written by the acknowledged masters of the art. Just circle your choices below, mail to us, and the books will be in your pages, containing stories by such masters of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett, John W. 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All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon -- or write the information on a piece of plain paper -- and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. rate. I enclose my check or money order (or:  # issues of each #  # issues of each #  # issues of each # Name Address City  State Zip Code Prices outside the Western Hemisphere add # per # issues (or postage Please check whether  new or  renewal Galaxy js published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition ispublished in Braille and Living Tape. October-November, # Vol. #, No. # Robert Silverberg Robert A. Heinlein Harold Kraus Michael Bishop Editor Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Administration  Publisher Associate Publisher ing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main otfices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #t per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. This will be in the nature of a report to the consumers -- the readers of Galaxy. You. In case you've ever wondered, your letters have impact. And value. We hang by them. And sometimes from them. Like from gallows. Space permitting, I'll try to cover your rections to the last six issues for which reader comments are available: February to July. Hottest topics were Vaughn Bode's Sunpot, Harlan Ellison's The Region Between and Jack Gaughan's art work -- in reverse order. And comments on the magazines in: General...  heartily congratulate you on the fine and consistent quality which the magazines under your aegis have displayed. I hope you can continue to present the discerning sf reader a magazine group worthy of his attention and time. The high-quality stories you have run recently give me good reason to believe that the sf field will continue to flourish as a real and pertinent means for extrapolating man's future and through it, a viable and valid examination of man's present. The new repro of the mags has shown that Jack Gaughan is one of the best artists appearing in the sf mags, if not the best. His mindbending, imaginative covers and interiors do much to enhance the magazines. I hope that it will soon become feasible to use other artists, to allow the Master to devote more time to each individual illo. Don't want to overwork him either. I realize that Galaxy and If are having distribution problems. ('If has already been cut back to bimonthly; I don't want the same in there, Mr. J., Tm now seeing both mags appearing on newstands they were absent from for almost a year. I am confident the circulation will again reach (and exceed) its former level as more readers spread the good word and you're seen in the old places again. Mitchell Swedo, Jr. Chicago, #... I have an irksome suspicion you are drastically abridging Algis Budrys' Bookshelf in Galaxy. If you are, I know I wouldn't be alone in saying that I resent this. Mr. Budrys' column is best when it's long, when he is developing his excellent social comments on the field of the books and everything else. He's too good to be cut -- he writes little enough new stuff as it is, anyway. Don't forsake the Story for the Message. Entertainment is still the prime quality in a story. May I still offer my compliments? You're O.K. Steve Larue Denver, Col. Every golden word by Budrys has been published in Galaxy -- what has been forced out of one issue has been included in the next. ( Please turn to page #) Benjamin FrankU Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages ! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. copy of "The Mastery of Life" -- . A nonprofit organization. Address: Scribe N.S.A. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the ree book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. I in a flat, high strip of gloomy space stretching along the outside of the service core of Urban Monad # from the #th to #th floors. Though the work area is lofty, it is scarcely more than five meters deep, a skimpy envelope through which dust motes dance toward sucking filters. Standing within it the ten men of Interface Crew Nine are sandwiched between the urbmon's outer layer of residential and commercial sectors and its hidden heart, the service core, in which the computers are housed. The crewmen rarely enter the core itself. They function on its periphery, keeping watch over the looming wall that bears the access nodes of the building's master computer nexus. Soft green and yellow lights gleam on the nodes, constantly relaying information about the health of the unseen mechanisms. The men of Interface Crew Nine serve as the ultimate backup for the platoons of selfregulating devices that monitor the workings of the computers. Whenever heavy load causes some facet of the control system to sag, the crewmen quickly prime it so that it can go on bearing its burden. It is not difficult work, but it is vital to the life of the entire gigantic building. Each day at #, when their shift begins, Michael Statler and his nine crewmates crawl through the Edinburgh iris-hatch on # and make their way into the perpetual dusk of the interface to take up their primer stations. Pushchairs carry them to their asI in a flat, high strip of gloomy space stretching along the outside of the service core of Urban Monad # from the #th to #th floors. Though the work area is lofty, it is scarcely more than five meters deep, a skimpy envelope through which dust motes dance toward sucking filters. Standing within it the ten men of Interface Crew Nine are sandwiched between the urbmon's outer layer of residential and commercial sectors and its hidden heart, the service core, in which the computers are housed. The crewmen rarely enter the core itself. They function on its periphery, keeping watch over the looming wall that bears the access nodes of the building's master 'll! A computer nexus. Soft green and yellow lights gleam on the nodes, constantly relaying information about the health of the unseen mechanisms. The men of Interface Crew Nine serve as the ultimate backup for the platoons of selfregulating devices that monitor the workings of the computers. Whenever heavy load causes some facet of the control system to sag, the crewmen quickly prime it so that it can go on bearing its burden. It is not difficult work, but it is vital to the life of the entire gigantic building. Each day at #, when their shift begins, Michael Statler and his nine crewmates crawl through the Edinburgh iris-hatch on # and make their way into the perpetual dusk of the interface to take up their primer stations. Pushchairs carry them to their assigned levels -- Michael starts by monitoring the nodes spanning floors # to # -- and as the day progresses they slide up and down the interface to the changing zones of trouble. Michael is twenty-three years old. He has been a computer-primer in this interface crew for eleven years. By now the work is purely automatic for him; he has become simply an extension of the machinery. Drifting along the interface, he boosts or drains, shunts or couples, blends or splits, meeting every need of the computer he serves, and does it all in cool mindless efficiency, operating on reflex alone. There is nothing reprehensible about this. It is not desirablefor a primer to think, merely to act and act correctly; even here in the fifth century of computer technology the human brain is still given a high rating for its informationhandling capacity per cubic centimeter, and a properly trained interface crew is in effect a group of ten of these excellent little organically-grown computers jacked into the main unit. So Michael follows the shifting patterns of lights, making all necessary adjustments, and the cerebral centers of his mind are left free for other things. He dreams of all the strange places outside Urban Monad #, places that he has seen on the screen. He and his wife, Stacion, are devoted screen-viewers and they rearely miss one of the travelog shows. The portrayals of the old pre-urbmon world, of the relicts, the dusty remnants. Jerusalem. Istanbul. Rome. The Taj Mahal. The stumps of New York. The tips of London's buildings above the waves. All the bizarre, romantic, alien places beyond the urbmon's skin. Mount Vesuvius. The geysers of Yellowstone. The African plains. The isles of the South Pacific. The Sahara. The North Pole. Vienna. Copenhagen. Moscow. Angkor Wat. The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The Grand Canyon. Chichen Itza. The Amazon jungle. The Great Wall of China. Do any of these places still exist? Michael has no idea. A lot of what they show on the screen is a hundred years old or older. He knows that the spread of urbmon civilization has required the demolition of much that is ancient. The wiping away of the cluttered past. Everything carefully recorded in three dimensions first, of course. But gone. A puff of white smoke; the smell of pulverized stone, dry on the nostrils, bitter. Gone. Doubtless they've saved the famous monuments. No need to chew up the Pyramids just to make room for more urbmons. But the big sprawls must have been cleaned away. The former cities. After all, here we are in the Chipitts constellation, and he has heard his brother-in-law Jason Quevedo, the historian, say that once there were two cities called Chicago and Pittsburgh that marked the polar ends of the constellation, with a continuous strip of urban settlement between them. Where are Chicago and Pittsburgh now? Not a trace left, Michael knows; the fifty-one towers of the Chipitts constellation rise along that strip. Everything neat and organized. We eat our past and excrete urbmons. Poor Jason; he must miss the ancient world. As do I. As do I. M ichael dreams of adventure outside Urban Monad I #. Why not go outside? Must he spend all his remaining years hanging in a pushchair on the interface, tickling access nodes? To go out. To breathe the strange unfiltered air with the smell of green plants on it. To see a river. To fly, somehow, around this barbered planet, looking for the shaggy places. Climb the Great Pyramid! Swim in an ocean, any ocean! Salt water. How curious. Stand under the naked sky, exposing his skin to the dread solar blaze, letting the chilly moonlight bathe him. The orange glow of Mars. At dawn to blink at Venus. "Look, I could do it," he tells his wife. Placid bulgy Stacion. Carrying their fifth little, a girl, coming a few months hence. "It wouldn't be any trouble at all to reprime a node so it would give me an egress pass. And down the shaft and out the building before anybody's the wiser. Running in the grass. Traveling cross-country. I'd go east. I'd go to New York, right by the edge of the sea. They didn't tear down New York -- Jason says so. They just went right around it. A monument to the troubles." "How would you get food?" Stacion asks. A practical girl. "I'd live off the land. Wild seeds and nuts, like the Indians did. Hunt! The heards of bison. Big, slow brown things; I'd come up behind one and jump on its back, right up there on the smelly greasy hump, and dig my hands into its throat, yankl It wouldn't understand. No one hunts any more. Fall down dead -- and I'd have meat for weeks. Even eat it raw." "There aren't any bison, Michael. There aren't any wild animals at all. You know that." "Wasn't serious. Do you think I'd really kill? Kill! God bless, I may be peculiar but I'm not crazy! No. Listen, I'd raid the communes. Sneak in at night, grab off vegetables -- a load of protein steak -- anything that's loose. Those plares aren't guarded. They don't expect urbmon folk to come sneaking around. I'd eat. And I'd see New York, Stacion, I'd see New York! Maybe even find a whole society of wild men there. With boats, planes, something to take me across the ocean. To Jerusalem! To London! To Africa!" Stacion laughs. "I love you when you start going flippo like this," she says, and pulls him down next to her. Rests his throbbing head on the smooth taut curve of her gravidity. "Do you hear the little yet?" Stacion asks. "Is she singing in there? God bless, Michael, how I love you." She doesn't take him seriously. Who would? But he'll go. Hanging there on the interface, flipping switches and palming shunt plates, he envisions himself as a world traveler. A project: to visit all the real cities for which the cities of Urbmon # were named. As many as are left. Warsaw, Reykjavik, Louisville, Colombo, Boston, Rome. Tokyo, Toledo, Paris, Shanghai, Edinburgh, Nairobi. London, Madrid. San Francisco. Birmingham. Leningrad. Vienna, Seattle, Bombay, Prague. Even Chicago and Pittsburgh, unless they really are gone. And the others. Did I name them all? He tries to count up. Warsaw, Reykjavik, Vienna, Colombo. He loses track. But anyway. I'll go out. Even if  can't cover the world. Maybe it's bigger than I imagine it is. But I'll see something. I'll feel rain on my face. Listen to the surf. My toes wriggling in cold wet sand. A nd the sun! The sun, the sun! Tanning my skin! No one ever goes out of the urbmon, except perhaps Louisville people visiting other urbmons, and they don't go often. Supposedly scholars still travel around, visiting the ancient places, but Michael doesn't know of anyone who has. Jason, though he specializes in the twentieth century, certainly hasn't gone. He could visit the ruins of New York, couldn't he? Get a more vivid feel of what it was like. Of course, Jason is Jason, he wouldn't go even if he could. But he ought to. I'd go in his place. Were we meant to spend all our lives inside a single building? He has seen some of Jason's cubes of the old days, the open streets, the moving cars, the little buildings housing only a single family, three or four people. Incredibly strange. Irresistibly fascinating. Of course, it didn't work; the whole scrambled society fell apart. We have to have something that's better organized. But Michael understands the pull of that kind of life. He feels the centrifugal yank toward freedom and wants to taste a bit of it. We don't have to live the way they did, but we don't have to live this way, either. Not all the time. To go out. To experience horizontality. Instead of up and down. Our thousand floors, our somatic fulfillment halls, our sonic centers, our blessmen, our moral engineers, our consolers, our everything. There must be more. A short visit outside: the supreme sensation of my life. I'll do it. Hanging on the interface, serenely nudging his nodes downspectrum as the priming impulses impinge on his reflexes, he promises himself that he won't die with his dream unfulfilled. He'll go out. Some day. H IS brother-in-law Jason has unknowingly fed the fires of Michael's secret yearning. Jason's theories about a special race of urbmon people, expressed one night when Michael and Stacion were visiting the Quevedos -- what had Jason said? I'm investigating the notion that urbmon life is breeding a new kind of human being. A type that adapts readily to relatively little living space and a low privacy quotient. Michael had had his doubts about that. That people were cooping themselves up in urban monads. It didn't seem like so much of a genetic thing to him. More like psychological conditioning. Or even voluntary acceptance of the situation in general. But the more Jason spoke, the more sense his ideas made. Explaining why we don't go outside the urbmons, even though there's no real reason why we can't. Because we recognize that that's a hopeless fantasy. We stay here, whether we like it or not. And those who don't like it, those who eventually can't take it -- well, you know what happens to them. Michael knows. Down the chute for the flippos. Those who remain adapt to circumstances. Two centuries of selective breeding, pretty ruthlessly enforced. And all of us so well adapted now to this kind of life. And Michael saying. Ah. Yes. All of us so well adapted. Not believing it was true about all of us. With some exceptions. Jason's mild concession. Michael thinks about that, hanging on the interface. No doubt selective breeding accounts for a lot of it. The universal acceptance of urbmon life. Almost universal. Everybody takes it for granted that this is what life is like, # people under the same roof, a thousand floors, have lots of littles, cuddle up close. Everybody accepts. With some exceptions. A few of us who look through the windows out at the naked world and rage and sweat inside our guts. Wanting to get out there. Are we missing the gene for acceptance? If Jason is right, if the urbmon population's been bred to enjoy the life it has to lead, then there must be a few recessives in the stack. Laws of genetics. You can't eradicate a gene. You just bury it somewhere but it pops up to haunt you eight generations along the track. Me. In me. I carry the filthy thing. And so I suffer. Michael decides to confer with his sister about these matters. He goes to her one morning, # hours, when he's fairly sure of finding her at home. She is busy with the littles. His luscious twin, only looking a bit harried just now. Her dark hair askew. Her only garment a dirty towel slung over her shoulder. A smudge on her cheek. Looking around, suspicious, as he enters. "Oh. You." She smiles at him. How lovely she looks, all lean and flat like that. Stacion's breasts are full of milk; they swing and joggle, big juicy bags. He prefers supple women. "Just visiting," he tells Micaela. "Mind if I stay a while?" "God bless, whatever you like. Don't mind me. The littles are running me up the wall." "Can I help you?" But she shakes him no. He sits crosslegged, watching her run around the room. Pop this one under the cleanser, that one into the maintenance slot. The others off at school, thank god. Her legs long and lean, her buttocks tight, unpuckered by excess flesh. He is half tempted to top her, right now, only she's too tense from her morning chores. Somehow he hasn't ever done it, at least not in years and years. Not since they were children. He put it into her then, sure, everybody topped his sister. Especially since they were twins -- it was natural to get together. A very special closeness, like having an extra self, only female. Asking each other things. She touching him, when they were maybe nine. "What does it feel like, having all that growing between your legs? Dangling. Don't they get in your way when you walk?" And he trying to explain. Later, when she grew her breasts. he asked her the same sort of question. Actually she developed ahead of him. Hair on hers long before he had any on his. And she was bleeding early. That was a kind of gulf between them for a while, she adult, he still a child, and them wombfellows despite it all. Michael smiles. "If I ask you some things," he says, "will you promise not to tell anyone? Even Jason?" "Have I ever been a blabber?" "All right. Just making sure." She finishes with the littles and sinks down, exhausted, facing him. Lets the towel drape itself on her thighs. Chastely. He wonders what she would think if he asked her to. Oh, yes, she'd do it, she'd have to, but would she want to? Or be uncomfortable about opening it for herbrother. She wasn't, once. But that was long ago. He says, "Have you ever wanted to leave the urbmon, Micaela?" "To go to another one, you mean?" "Just to go out. To the Grand Canyon. The Pyramids. Outside. Do you ever feel restless inside the building?" Her dark eyes glitter. "God bless, yes! Restless. I never thought much about the Pyramids but there are days when I feel the walls on me like a bunch of hands. Pressing in." "You, too, then!" "What are you talking about, Michael?" "Jason's theory. People who've bred generation after generation to tolerate urbmon existence. And I was thinking, some of us aren't like that. We're recessives. The wrong genes." "Throwbacks." "Throwbacks, yes! Like we're out of place in time. We shouldn't have been born now. But when people were free to move around. I know I feel that way. Micaela, I want to leave the building. Just roam around outside." "You aren't serious." "I think I am. Not that I'll necessarily do it. But I want to. And that means I'm a, well, a throwback. I don't fit into Jason's peaceful population. The way Stacion does. She loves it here. An ideal world. But not me. And if it's a genetic thing, if I'm really not fit for this civilization, you ought to be the same way. You having all my genes and me all yours. So I thought I'd check. To understand myself better. Finding out how well adjusted you were." "I'm not." "I knew it!" "Not that I want to leave the building," Micaela says. "But other things. Emotional attitudes. Jealousy, ambition. I have a lot of unblessworthy stuff in my head, Michael. So does Jason. We had a fight over it only last week." She chuckles. "And we decided that we were throwbacks, the two of us. Like savages out of ancient times. I don't want to go into all the details -- but yes, yes, basically I think you're right, you and I aren't really urbmon people inside. It's just a veneer. We pretend." "Exactly! A veneer!" Michael slaps his hands together. "All right. It's what I wanted to know." "You won't go out of the building, will you?" "If I do, it'll just be a short while. To see what it's like. But forget I said it." He detects distress in her eyes. Going to her, pulling her up into his arms, he says, "Don't mess me up, Micaela. If I do it, it'll be because I have to. You know me. You understand that. So keep quiet until I'm back. If I go." H e has no doubts at all now, except about some of the peripheral problems, like saying goodbye. Shall he slip out without saying a word to Stacion? He'd better. She'd never understand and she might cause complications. And Micaela. He is tempted to visit her just before he goes. A special farewell. There's no one he's closer to in the entire building and he might just not return from his outbuilding jaunt. He thinks he'd like to top her and he suspects she wants him. A loving farewell, just in case. But can he risk it? He mustn't place too much faith in this genetic thing -- if she finds out that he's actually planning to leave the urbmon, she might just have him picked up and sent to the moral engineers. For his own sake. No doubt she considers his project a flippo idea. Weighing everything, Michael decides not to say anything to her. He will top her in his mind. Her lips to his, her tongue busy, his hands stroking her springy firmness. The thrust. Their bodies moving in perfect coordination. We are only the sundered halves of a single entity, now joined once more. For this brief moment. It becomes so vivid in his imagination that he nearly abandons his resolution. Nearly. But in the end he goes without telling anyone. Done rather easily. He knows how to make the great machine serve his needs. On his regular shift that day he stays a little wider awake than usual, dreams a little less. Monitoring his nodes, riding gain on all the fugitive impulses floating, through the giant building's mighty ganglia: food requisitions, birth and death statistics, atmospheric reports, a sonic center's amplification level, the replenishment of groovers in the mechanical dispensers, the urine-recycling figures, communications links, et cetera cetera cetera. And as he makes his adjustments he casually fingers a node and obtains a plug-in to the data reservoir. Now he is in direct contact with the central brain, the big machine. It flashes him a string of brassy spurts of golden light: telling him that it is ready to accept repriming. Very well. He instructs it to issue one egress pass for Michael Statler of apartment #, obtainable by the said Statler on demand at any terminal and valid until used. Seeing the possibilities for cowardice in that, he amends the order immediately: valid only for twelve hours after issuance. Plus ingress privileges whenever requested. The node flashes him on acceptance symbol. Good. Now he records two messages, noting them down for delivery fifteen ours after the issuance of the egress pass. To Mrs. Micaela Quevedo, apartment #. Dear Sister, I did it, wish me luck. Fll bring you some sand from the seashore. And the other message to Mrs. Stacion Statler, Apartment #. Explaining briefly where he has gone and why. Telling her he'll be back soon, not to worry, this is something he has to do. So much for farewells. He finishes his shift. Now it is #. It makes no sense to leave the building with night coming on. He returns to Stacion; they have dinner, he plays with the littles, they watch the screen a while, they make love. Maybe the last time. She says, "You seem very withdrawn tonight, Michael." "Tired. A lot of shunting on the wall today." She dozes. He cuddles her in his arms. Soft and warm and big, getting bigger every second. The Ballantliie Books cells dividing in her belly, the magical mitosis. God bless! He is almost unable to bear the idea of going away from her. But then the screen blazes with images of lands afar. The isle of Capri at sunset, gray sky, gray sea, horizon meeting the zenith, roads winding along a cliff overgrown with lush greenery. Here the villa of the Emperor Tiberius. Farmers and shepherds here, living as they did ten thousand years ago, untouched by the changes in the mainland world. No urbmons here. Lovers rolling in the grass, if they want. Pull up her skirt. Laughter; the thorns of berry-laden vines scratching the pink acreage of her buttocks but she doesn't mind. Hearty hotslotted peasant wench. An example of obsolete barbarism. You and she get dirty together, soil between your toes and ground into the skin of your knees. And look here, these men in ragged grimy clothes, they're passing a flask of golden wine around, right in the fields where the grapes are grown. How dark their skins are! Like leather, if that's what leather really looked like -- how can you be sure? Brown, tough. Tanned by the authentic sun. Far below the waves roll gently in. Grottoes and fantastic sculptured rocks by the edge of the sea. The sun is gone behind the clouds and the grayness of sky and shore deepens. A fine mist of rain comes. Night. Birds singing their hymns to the coming of darkness. Goats a  monthly issues occur at a time when we could use a lot more space, dammit, to talk about books -- as a change from our environment which, however, has not gone away. Yet. Self-preservation comes first, so: In August we are meant to publish (and most certainly will as soon as the author surfaces from under his test tubes) wieldy as we go along, and the books progressively more activist. This is the one that tells what products to buy and what not. Along with it, of course, was thinking cool. For nostalgic pur -- which has nothing whatever to do with bems. And so to s.f .  ryni being an extra-human race of sorcerors and necromancers; fhe setting, somewhen around the western marches of pre-Albion. A bouncing, bounding story, solid characterization and a logical conflict of power. Really a remarkable first. Great stuff, luckily the first in a proposed trilogy. Hopefully, we'll be doing one a year. This month also -- the first volthe second volume. Watch for it. You really have to be a hawk if you're buying off the stands -- a worthy reason, for once.) Morris, in the opinion of a few, is an acquired taste. We find his lyrical, simple prose altogether enchanting. Not that he writes in rois often harsh; it is fantasy by virtue of the fact that Morris, because he believed in the rightness of it, created a world that was simpler, closer to the Earth, stronger than the burgeoning industrialization of his own cenfury.  Bob Silverberg's Heicon honors by editing for us. And James White's once again be available, along with the title. Costs #. My lord, imagine what it would be like for authors if we could get #. # for books... BB settling down. He walks the leafy paths, avoiding the hot shining turds, pausing to touch the rough bark of this tree to taste the sweetness of this swollen berry. He can almost smell the salt spray from below. Sees himself running along the beach at dawn with Micaela, both of them naked, the nightfog lifting, the first crimson light splashing their pale skins. The water all golden. They leap in, swim, float, the salty water giving them buoyancy. They dive and paddle underwater, eyes open, studying each other. Her hair streaming out behind her. A trail of bubbles pursuing her kicking feet. He catches up with her and they embrace far from shore. Friendly dolphins watching them. They engender an incestuous little while coupling in the famous Mediterranean. Where Apollo nailed his sister, didn't he? Or was that another god. Classical echoes all around. Textures, tastes, the chilly bite of the dawn breeze as they drag themselves up on shore, the sand sticking to their wet skins, a bit of seaweed tangled in her hair. A boy with a baby goat coming toward them. Vino? Vino? Holding out a flask. Smiling. Micaela petting the goat. The boy admiring her slender naked body. Si, you say, vino, but of course you have no money, and you try to explain, but the boy doesn't care about that. He gives you the flask. You drink deep. Cold wine, alive, tingling. The boy looks at Micaela. Un bacio? Why not, you think. No harm in it. Si, si, un bacio, you say, and the boy goes to Micaela, puts his lips shyly to hers, reaches up as though to touch her breasts, then does not dare to, and just kisses. And pulls away, grinning, and goes to you and kisses you too, quickly, and then runs, he and his goat, madly down the beach, leaving you with the flask of wine. You pass it to Micaela. The wine dribbling past her chin, leaving bright beads in the brightening sunlight. When the wine is gone you hurl the flask far out to sea. A gift for the mermaids. You take Micaela's hand. Up the cliff, through the brambles, pebbles turning beneath your bare feet. Textures, changes of temperature, scents, sounds. Birds. Laughter. The glorious isle of Capri. The boy with the goat is just ahead, waving to you from beyond a ravine, telling you to hurry, hurry, come and see. The screen goes dark. You are lying on the sleeping platform beside your drowsy pregnant wife on the #th floor of Urban Monad I #. He must leave. He must leave. He gets up. Stacion stirs. "Shh," he says. "Sleep." "Going nightwalking?" "I think so," he says. Strips, stands under the cleanser. Then puts on a fresh tunic, sandals, his most durable clothes. What else shall he take? He has nothing. He will go like this. Kisses Stacion. Un bacio. Ancora un bacio. The last one, perhaps. Hand resting lightly on her belly a moment. She'll get his message in the morning. Goodbye, goodbye. To the sleeping littles. He goes out. Looks upward as if seeing through the intervening fifty-odd floors. Goodbye, Micaela. Love. It is # hours. Still long before dawn. He will move slowly. Pausing, he studies the walls about him, the metallic-looking dark plastic with the warmth of burnished bronze. A sturdy building, well designed. Rivers of unseen cables snaking through the service core. And that huge, watchful manmade mind in the middle of everything. So easily deceived. Michael finds a terminal in the corridor and identifies himself. Michael Statler, #. One egress pass, please. Of course, sir. Here you are. From the slot a gleaming blue circlet for his wrist. Slips it on. Takes the dropshaft down. Gets off at # for no particular reason. Boston. Well, he has time to kill. Like a visitor from Venus he wanders the hall, occasionally meeting a sleepy nightwalker on his way home. As is his privilege, he opens a few doors, peers in at the people within, some awake, most not. A girl invites him to share her platform. He shakes his head. "Just passing through," he says, and goes to the dropshaft. Down to #. San Francisco. The artists live here. He can hear music. Michael has always envied the San Franciscans. They have purpose in life. They have their art. He opens doors here, too. "Come on," he wants to say, "I have an egress pass, Tm going outside! Come with me, all of you!" Sculptors, poets, musicians, dramatists. He will be the pied piper. But he is not sure his pass will get more than one out of the building, and he says nothing. Down, instead. Birmingham. Pittsburgh, where Jason toils to rescue the past, which is beyond rescue. Tokyo. Prague. Warsaw. Reykjavik. The whole vast building is sitting on his back now. A thousand floors, #, # people. A dozen littles are being born as he stands here. A dozen more are being conceived. Maybe someone is dying. And one man is escaping. Shall he say goodbye to the computer? Its tubes and coils, its liquid-filled guts, its tons of skeleton. A million eyes everywhere in the city. Eyes watching him, but it's all right, he has a pass. First floor. All out. This is so easy. But where is the exit? ThW. Just a tiny hatch. But he was expecting a grand lobby, onyx floors, alabaster pillars, bright lights, polished brass, a shining swinging glass door. Of course no one important ever uses this exit. High dignitaries travel by quickboat, arriving and departing at the landing stage on the thousandth floor. And the courier pods of farm produce from the communes enter the urbmon far belowground. Perhaps years at a time go by between each traversal of the first-floor opening. Yet he will. How shall he do it? Holds his egress pass up, hoping there are scanners nearby. Yes. A red light blazes above the hatch. And it opens. It opens. He goes forward, finding himself in a long, cool tunnel, poorly lit. The hatch door closing behind him. Yes, well, preventing contamination by outside air, he supposes. He waits, and a second door opens in front of him, creaking a little. Michael sees nothing beyond, only darkness, but he roes through the door, and feels steps, seven or eight of them, and descends them, coming unexpectedly to the last. Bump. And then the ground. Strangely spongy, strangely yielding. Earth. Soil. Dirt. He is outside. He is outside. II H e feels somewhat like the first man to walk on the moon. A faltering step not knowing what to expect. So many unfamiliar sensations to absorb at once. The hatch closing behind him. On his own, then. But unafraid. I must concentrate on one thing at a time. The air, first. He pulls it deep into his throat. Yes, it has a different taste, sweeter, more alive, a natural taste; the air seems to expand as he breathes it, seeking out the folds and byways of his lungs. In a minute, though, he can no longer isolate the factors of novelty in it. It is simply air, neutral, familiar. As if he has breathed it all his life. Will it fill him with deadly bacteria? He comes from an aseptic sealed environment, after all. Lying puffed and discolored on the ground in final agonies an hour from now, maybe. Or strange pollen borne by the breeze, sprouting in his nostrils. Choked by massing fungi. Forget the air. He looks up. Dawn is still more than an hour away. The sky is blue-black; there are stars everywhere and a crescent moon is high. From the windows of the urbmon he has seen the heavens, but never like this. Head back, legs flung wide, arms outstretched. Embracing the starmy body. He is tempted to strip and lie naked in the night until he is starburned, moonburned. Smiling, he takes another ten steps away from the urbmon. Glancing back then. A pillar of salt. Three kilometers high. It hangs in the air like a toppling mass, terrifying him; he begins to count the floors but the effort dizzies him and he gives up before the fiftieth. At this angle most of the building is invisible to him, rising so steeply over his head, yet what he sees is enough. Its bulk threatens to crush him. He moves away, into the gardened plaza. The frightening mass of a nearby urbmon looms in front of him, at a distance sufficient to give him a truer picture of its size. Jabbing the stars, almost. So much, so much! All those windows. And behind them # people or more whom he has never met. Littles, nightwalkers, computer-primers, consolers, wives, mothers, a whole world up there. Dead. Dead. He looks to his left. Another urbmon, shrouded in the mists of coming day. To his right. Another. He brings his gaze down, closer to earth. The garden. Formal pathways. This is grass. Kneels, breaks off a blade, feels instant remorse as he cradles the green shaft in his cupped hands. Killer. He puts the grass in his mouth; not much taste. He had thought it might be sweet. This is soil. Digs his fingertips in. Blackness under his nails. Draws a grooved row through a flowerbed. Sniffs a yellow globe of petals. Looks up a tree. Hand against the bark. A robot gardener is moving through the plaza, pruning things, fertilizing things. It swings around on its heavy black base and peers at him. Interrogative. Michael holds up his wrist and lets the gardener scan his egress pass. It looses interest in him. Now he is far from Urbmon #. Again he turns and studies it, seeing its full height at last. Indistinguishable from # and #. He shrugs and follows a path that takes him out of the line in which the row of urbmons is set. A pool; he crouches beside it, dipping his hand in. Then puts his face to its surface and drinks. Splashes the water gaily. Dawn has begun to stain the sky. The stars are gone, the moon is going. Hastily he strips. Slowly into the pool, hissing when the water reaches his loins. Swims carefully, putting his feet down now and then to feel the cold muddy floor, at last coming to a place where he no longer can touch bottom. Birds singing. This is the first morning of the world. Pale light slides across the silent sky. After a while he comes out of the water and stands dripping and naked by the edge of the pool, shivering a little, listening to the birds, watching the red disk of the sun climbing out of the east. Gradually he becomes aware that he is crying. The beauty of it. The solitude. He is alone at time's first dawn. To be naked is right. I am Adam. He touches his genitals. Looking off afar, he sees three urbmons glowing with pearly light and wonders which is #. Stacion in there, and Micaela. If only she were with me now. Both of us naked by this pool. While the snake watches from the tree. He laughs. God bless! He is alone and not frightened at all by it, no one within sight and he loves it, though he misses Micaela, Stacion, both, each. Trembling. Hard with desire. Dropping to the moist black earth beside the pool. Still crying a little, hot teardrops trickling down his face occasionally. He watches the sky turn blue and puts his hand on the row of urbmons is set. A pool; he crouches beside it, dipping his hand in. Then puts his face to its surface and drinks. Splashes the water gaily. Dawn has begun to stain the sky. The stars are gone, the moon is going. Hastily he strips. Slowly into the pool, hissing when the water reaches his loins. Swims carefully, putting his feet down now and then to feel the cold muddy floor, at last coming to a place where he no longer can touch bottom. Birds singing. This is the first morning of the world. Pale light slides across the silent sky. After a while he comes out of the water and stands dripping and naked by the edge of the pool, shivering a little, listening to the birds, watching the red disk of the sun climbing out of the east. Gradually he becomes aware that he is crying. The beauty of it. The solitude. He is alone at time's first dawn. To be naked is right. I am Adam. He touches his genitals. Looking off afar, he sees three urbmons glowing with pearly light and wonders which is #. Stacion in there, and Micaela. If only she were with me now. Both of us naked by this pool. While the snake watches from the tree. He laughs. God bless! He is alone and not frightened at all by it, no one within sight and he loves it, though he misses Micaela, Stacion, both, each. Trembling. Hard with desire. Dropping to the moist black earth beside the pool. Still crying a little, hot teardrops trickling down his face occasionally. He watches the sky turn blue and puts his hand on himself and bites his lip. He summons his vision of the beach at Capri, the wine, the boy, the goat, the kisses, Micaela, the two of them bare at dawn, and he gasps as his seed spurts. Fertilizing the naunborn littles in that sticky puddle. He swims again; then he begins to walk once more, carrying his clothes over his arm. After perhaps an hour he puts them on, fearing the kiss of the soaring sun on his tender indoor hide. B y noon plazas and pools and formal gardens are far behind and he has entered the outlying territory of one of the agricultural communes. The world is wide and flat here and the distant urbmons are glossy brown spikes on the horizon, receding to east and west. There are no trees. No unruly wild vegetation at all, in fact, none of the chaotic tumble of greenery that was so appealing in that tour of Capri. Michael sees long aisles of low plants, separated by strips of bare dark soil, and here and there an entire tremendous field totally empty, as if awaiting seed. These must be the vegetable fields. He inspects the plants: thousands of something spherical and coiled, clutching itself to itself, and thousands of something vertical and grassy, with dangling tassels, and thousands of another kind -- and another and another. As he walks along the crops keep changing. Is this corn? Beans? Squash? Carrots? Wheat? He has no way of matching the product to its source. His childhood geography lessons have faded and run; all he can do is guess and probably guess badly. He breaks leaves from this and this and this. He tastes shoots and pods. Sandals in hand, he walks barefoot through the voluptuous turned-up clods of earth. He thinks he is heading east. Going toward the place where the sun came from. But now that the sun is high overhead it is hard to determine directions. The dwindling row of urbmons is no help. How far is it to the sea? At the thought of a beach his eyes grow damp. The heaving surf. The taste of salt. A thousand kilometers? How far is that? He works out an analogy. Lay an urbmon on end, then put another one at its tip and another one beyond that. It will take # urbmons, end to end, to reach from here to the sea if I am a thousand kilometers from the sea now. His heart sinks. He has no real idea of distances. It might be ten thousand kilometers. He imagines what it would be like to walk from Reykjavik to Louisville # times, even horizontally. But with patience he can do it. If only he can find something to eat. These leaves, these stalks, these pods, do him no good. Which part of the plant is edible, anyway? Must he cook it? How? This journey will be more complex than he imagined. But his alternative is to scurry back to the urbmon and he will not do that. It would be like dying, never having lived. He goes on. Tiring. A little lightheaded from hunger, since he's been on the trek six or seven hours now. Physical fatigue, too. This horizontal walking must use different muscles. Going up and down stairs is easy. Riding dropshafts and liftshafts is easier still -- the short horizontal walks along the corridors have not prepared him for this. The ache in the backs of the thighs. The rawness in the ankles, as of bone grating against bone. The shoulders struggling to keep the head held high. Scrambling over this irregular earthy surface multiplies the problem. He rests a while. Soon afterward he comes to a stream, a sort of ditch cutting across the fields. He drinks, then strips and bathes. The cool water refreshes him. He goes on, stopping three times to sample the unripened crops. Suppose you get too far from the urbmon to get back, if you begin starving? Struggling through these fields as strength leaves you, trying to drag yourself across the kilometers toward the far-off tower. Dying of hunger amidst all this green plenty. No. He'll manage. Being alone starts to upset him, too. Something of a surprise, that. In the urbmon he frequently was irritated by the sheer surging multiplicitous masses. Littles underfoot everywhere, clots of women in the halls, that kind of thing. Relishing, in a distinctly unblessworthy way, the daily hours on the interface, in the dimness, no one around him except his nine crewmates and they far away, minding their own nodes. For years cherishing this vision of escaping into privacy, his cruel retrogressive fantasy of solitude. Now he has it and at the beginning he wept for sheer joy of it. But by afternoon it does not seem so charming. He finds himself darting little hopeful glances to the periphery of his sight, as if he might pick up the aura of a passing human being. Perhaps if Micaela had come with him it would be better. Adam, Eve. But of course she wouldn't have. Only his fraternal twin -- not precisely the same genes. She's restless but she'd never have done anything as wild as this. He pictures her trudging beside him. Yes. Stopping now and then to top her in the green crops. But the aloneness is getting him. He shouts. Calls his name. Micaela's, Stacion's. Cries out the names of his fifties. "I am a citizen of Edinburgh!" he bellows. "Urban Monad #! The #th floor!" The sounds float away toward the fleecy clouds. How lovely the sky is now, blue and gold and white. A sudden droning sound out of the -- north? Growing louder moment by moment. Harsh, throbbing, raucous. Has he brought some monster upon himself by his noise? Shading his eyes. There it is: a long black tube soaring slowly toward him at a height of, oh, maybe a hundred meters at most. Throws himself to the ground, huddles between the rows of cabbages or turnips or whatever. The black thing has a dozen stubby nozzles protruding along its sides. From each nozzle spurts a cloudy green mist. Michael understands. Spraying the crops, probably. A poison to kill insects and other pests. What will it do to me? He coils, knees to his chest, hands to his face, eyes closed, mouth buried in palm. That terrible roaring overhead; kill me with decibels if not with your filthy spray. The intensity of the sound diminishes. The thing is past him. The pesticide is drifting down, he supposes, trying not to breathe. Lips clamped. Fiery petals dropping from heaven. Flowers of death. There it is now, a faint dampness on his cheeks, a clinging moist veil. How soon will it kill him? He counts the passing minutes. Still alive. The flying thing no longer in earshot. Cautiously he opens his eyes and stands up. Perhaps no danger, then -- but he runs through the fields toward the glittering ribbon of a nearby creek and plunges in, peeling in panic, to scrub himself. And only coming out realizes the creek must have been sprayed too. Well, he's not dead yet, anyway. the -- north? Growing louder moblack thing has a dozen stubby ment by moment. Harsh, throbnozzles protruding along its sides, bing, raucous. Has he brought From each nozzle spurts a cloudy some monster upon himself by his green mist. Michael understands, noise? Shading his eyes. There it Spraying the crops, probably. A is: a long black tube soaring slowpoison to kill insects and other ly toward him at a height of, oh, pests. What will it do to me? He maybe a hundred meters at most, coils, knees to his chest, hands to Throws himself to the ground, his face, eyes closed, mouth burhuddles between the rows of cabied in palm. That terrible roaring bages or turnips or whatever. The overhead; kill me with decibels if not with your filthy spray. The intensity of the sound diminishes. The thing is past him. The pesticide is drifting down, he supposes, trying not to breathe. Lips clamped. Fiery petals dropping from heaven. Flowers of death. There it is now, a faint dampness on his cheeks, a clinging moist veil. How soon will it kill him? He counts the passing minutes. Still alive. The flying thing no longer in earshot. Cautiously he opens his eyes and stands up. Perhaps no danger, then -- but he runs through the fields toward the glittering ribbon of a nearby creek and plunges in, peeling in panic, to scrub himself. And only coming out realizes the creek must have been sprayed too. Well, he's not dead yet, anyway. How far is it to the nearest commune? wisdom, the planners of this farm have allowed one low hill to survive. Mounting it in mid-afternoon, Michael takes stock. There are the urbmons, curiously dwindled. There are the cultivated fields. He sees machines now, moving in some of the rows, things with many arms, possibly pulling up weeds. No sign of a settlement, though. He descends the hill and shortly encounters one of the agricultural machines. The first company he's had all day. "Hello. Michael Statler, from Urbmon One-sixteen. What's your name, machine? What kind of work do you do?" Baleful yellow eyes study him and turn away. The machine is loosening the soil at the base of each plant in the row. Squirting something milky over the roots. Unfriendly filther, aren't you? Or just not programed to talk. "I don't mind," he says. "Silence is golden. If you could just tell me where I could get a little to eat, though. Or find some people." Droning sound again. Crot! Another stinking crop-sprayer! He gets down, ready to curl up again -- but no, this flying thing is not spraying, nor does it go past. Hovering overhead, it swings into a tight circle, making an infernal holocaust of noise. A hatch opens in its belly. Out drops a double strand of fine golden fiber, reaching to the ground. Down it, riding a clip-pod, slides a human being, a woman, followed by a man. They land deftly and come toward him. Grim faces. Beady eyes. Weapons at their waists. Their only garments are glossy red wraps covering them from thigh to belly. Their skins are tanned; their bodies are lean. The man has a stiff, bushy black beard: incredible, grotesque facial hair! The woman's breasts are small and hard. Both of them drawing their weapons now. "Hello!" Michael calls hoarsely. "I'm from an urbmon! Just visiting your country. Friend! Friend! Friend!" The woman says something unintelligible. He shrugs. "Sorry, I don't under -- " The weapon poking in his ribs. How cold her face is! The eyes like icy buttons. Will they kill him? Now the man speaks. Slowly and clearly, very loudly, as one would speak to a three-year-old. Every syllable an alien one. Accusing him of trespassing in the fields, probably. One of the farming machines must have reported him to the commune. Michael points; the urbmons can still be seen from here. Indicates them, taps his chest. For whatever good that will do. They must know where he's from. His captors nod. unsmiling. A frosty pair. Arrested. Intruder menacing the sanctity of the fields. Woman takes him by the elbow. Well, at least they aren't going to kill him outright. The devilish noisy flying thing still racketing overhead in its narrow orbit. They guide him toward the dangling fiber strands. The woman is in the clip-pod, now. Goes up. Then the man tells Michael something which he suspects means, "Now you." Michael smiles. Cooperation his only hope. Figures out how to get into the clip-pod; the man makes the adjustments, locking him in, and up he goes. The woman, waiting above, depods him and pushes him into a webwork cradle. Keeps her weapon ready. A moment later the man is aboard too; the hatch closes and the flying machine goes roaring off. During the flight both of them interrogate him, hurling little jabbing bursts of words at him, but he can only reply apologetically, "I don't speak your language. How can I tell you what you want to know?" Minutes later the machine lands. They jostle him out onto a bare reddish-brown field. Along its rim he sees low flat-roofed brick buildings, curious snub-fronted gray vehicles, several many-armed farming machines and dozens of men and women wearing the glossy red loincloths. Not many children. Perhaps they're at school, although it's getting late in the day. Everyone pointing at him. Speaking rapidly. Harsh, unintelligible comments. Some laughter. He is frightened somewhat, not by the possibility of peril as much as by the strangeness of everything. He knows this must be an agricultural commune. All this day's walking was prelude; he now has truly passed over from one world to another. T he man and woman who captured him push him across the bare field and through the crowd of farming folk into one of the buildings nearby. The farmers finger his clothing as he passes, touch his bare arms and face, murmur softly. Wonderstruck. Like a man from Mars in their midst. The building is poorly lit, roughly constructed, with crooked walls, low ceilings, warped floors of some pale pocked plastic material. He is dumped into a bare, dismal room. A sour smell pervades it -- vomit? Before she leaves him the woman points out the facilities with a few brusque gestures. A basin of some white artificial substance with the texture of smooth stone, yellowing and cracked in places. There is no sleeping platform, but probably he is meant to use the heap of rumpled blankets against one wall. No sign of a cleanser. For excretion he has a single unit, nothing more than a kind of plastic funnel going into the floor, with a button to push when he wishes to clear it. Evidently it is for urine and feces both. An odd arrangement -- but then he realizes they wouldn't need to recycle wastes here. The room has no source of artificial light. Through its one window streams the last feeble sun of the afternoon. The window faces the plaza where the farmers still are gathered, discussing him; he sees them pointing, nodding, nudging each other. There are metal bars on the window, set too close together to permit a man to slip through. A prison cell, then. He checks the door. Locked. How friendly of them. He'll never reach the seacoast this way. "Listen," he calls to those in the plaza, "I don't mean any harm! You don't need to lock me up!" They laugh. Two young men stroll over and stare solemnly at him. One of them puts his hand to his mouth and painstakingly covers his entire palm with saliva; when this is done he offers the palm to his companion, who presses his hand against it. Both break into wild laughter. Michael watches, mystified. He has heard about the barbaric customs in the communes. Primitive, incomprehensible. The young men say something contemptuous-sounding to him and walk away. A girl takes their place by his window. Fifteen, sixteen years old, he guesses. Her breasts are large and deeply tanned and between them hangs an explicit phallic amulet. She fondles it in what strikes him as lascivious invitation. "I'd love to," he says. "If you can only get me out of here." He puts his hands through the bars as if to caress her. She leaps back wild-eyed and makes a fierce gesture, jabbing her left hand at him with the thumb clenched under and the other four fingers aimed at his face. Clearly an obscenity. As she goes, some older people come to stare. A woman taps her chin in slow, steady, apparently meaningful rhythm; a withered man soberly presses his left palm to his right elbow three times; another man stoops, puts his hands on the ground and rises, lifting them far above his head, perhaps pantomiming the growth of a lofty plant, perhaps the construction of an urban monad. Whatever, he breaks into shrill laughter and stumbles off. Night is coming, now. Through the dusk Michael sees a succession of crop-spraying machines landing in the plaza like birds returning to the nest at sundown. Dozens of many-legged mobile farming units come striding from the fields. The onlookers vanish; he watches them going into the other buildings around the plaza. Despite the uncertainties of being a prisoner, he is captivated by the alien nature of this place. To live so close to the ground, to walk about all day long under the naked sun, to know nothing of an urbmon's crowded richness -- An armed girl brings him dinner, popping his door open, setting down a tray, leaving without a word. Stewed vegetables, a clear broth, some unfamiliar red fruits and a capsule of cold wine: the fruits are bruised and, to his taste, overripe, but everything else is excellent. He eats greedily, cleaning the tray. Then he goes to the window. The center of the plaza is still empty, although at the far side eight or ten men, evidently a maintenance crew, have gone to work on the farming machines by the light of three floating luminous globes. His cell now is in complete darkness. Since there is nothing else to do he removes his clothes and sprawls out on the blankets. Though he is exhausted by his long day's trek, sleep will not come at first: his mind ticks furiously, contemplating options. Doubtless they will interrogate him tomorrow. Someone around here must know the language of the urbmons. With luck he can demonstrate that he means no harm. Smile a lot, act friendly, show an air of innocence. Perhaps even get them to escort him out of their territory. Fly him eastward, dump him in some other commune's land, let him make his way to the sea. Will he be arrested at commune after commune? A dreary prospect. Maybe he can find a route that bypasses the agricultural zone -- through the ruins of some former cities, possibly. Unless there are wild men living there. At least the farmers are civilized in their fashion. He envisions himself cooked by cannibals in some blasted rubbleheap, the former Pittsburgh, say. Or just eaten raw. Why are the farmers so suspicious? What can one lone wanderer do to them? The natural xenophobia of an isolated culture, he decides. Just as we wouldn't want a farmer loose in an urbmon. But of course urbmons are closed systems. Everybody numbered, inoculated, assigned to a proper place. These folk have a less rigid system, don't they? They don't need to fear strangers. Try convincing them of that. He drifts into an uneasy sleep. H e is awakened, not more than an hour or two later, by discordant music, raw and disturbing. Sits up: red shadows flickering on the wall of his cell. Some kind of visual projections? Or a fire outside? Rushes to the window. Yes. An immense mound of dried stems, branches, vegetable debris of all sorts, is ablaze in the middle of the plaza. He has never seen fire before, except sometimes on the screen, and the sight of it terrifies and delights him. Those wavering bursts of redness rising and vanishing -- where do they go? And he can feel the surging heat even from where he stands. The constant flux. the shifting shape of the dancing flames -- how incredibly beautiful! And menacing. Aren't they afraid, letting fire loose like this? But of course there's that zone of bare dirt around it. Fire can't cross that. The earth doesn't burn. He forces his eyes away from the hypnotic frenzy of the fire. A dozen musicians sit close together to the left of the blaze. The instruments weirdly medieval. Everything is operated by blowing or pounding or scraping or pressing keys and the sounds are uneven and imprecise -- flickering around the proper pitches but missing by a fraction of a tone. The human element; Michael, whose sense of pitch is unusually good, cringes at these tiny but perceptible variations from the absolute. Yet the farmers don't seem to mind. Unspoiled by the mechanical perfection of modern scientific music. Hundreds of them, perhaps the entire population of the village, sit in ragged rows along the perimeter of the plaza, nodding in time to the wailing, screeching melodies, pounding their heels against the ground, rhythmically clapping their hands to their elbows. The light of the fire transforms them into an assemblage of demons; the red glow ripples eerily over their half-nude bodies. He sees children among them, but still not very many. Two here, three there, many adult couples with one or none. Stunned by the realization: they limit births here. His skin crawls. He is amused by his own involuntary reaction of horror; it tells him that no matter what configuration his genes may have, he is by conditioning a man of the urbmons. The music grows even wilder. The fire soars. The farmers now begin to dance. Michael expects the dancing to be amorphous and frantic, a helter-skelter flinging-out of arms and legs, but no: surprisingly, it is tight and disciplined, a controlled and formal series of movements. Men in this row, women in that; forward, back, interchange partners, elbows high, head thrown back, knees pumping, now hop, turn around, form lines again, link hand. The pace constantly accelerating, but the rhythms always distinct and coherent. A ritualized progression of patterns. Eyes glazed, lips tight. This is no revel, he is suddenly aware, it is a religious festival. The rites of the commune people. What are they building toward? Is he the sacrificial lamb? Providence has sent them an urbmon man, eh? Panicky, he looks about for signs of a caldron, a spit, a stake, anything on which they might cook him. Tales of the commune circulate gaudily in the urbmon; he has always dismissed them as ignorant myths. But possibly not. When they come for him, he decides, he will lunge and attack them. Better to be shot down quickly than to die on the village altar. Yet half an hour passes and no one has even looked in the direction of his cell. The dancing has continued without a break. Oiled with sweat, the farmers seem like dream-figures, glittering, grotesque. Bare breasts hobbling; nostrils distended, eyes aglow. New boughs on the fire. The musicians goading one another into fresh frenzies. And now, what's this? Masked figures parading solemnly into the plaza: three men, three women. Faces hidden by intricate spherical constructions, nightmarish, bestial, garish. The women carry oval baskets in which can be seen products of the commune: seeds, dried ears of corn, ground meal. The men encircle a seventh person, a woman, two of them tugging at her arms and one pushing her from behind. She is pregnant, well along, into her sixth or even seventh month. She wears no mask, and her face is tense and rigid, the lips clamped, the eyes wide and frightened. They fling her down before the fire, and stand flanking her. She kneels, head drooping, long hair almost touching the ground, swollen breasts swaying with each ragged intake of breath. One of the masked men -- it is impossible not to think of them as priests -- intones a resonant invocation. One of the masked women places an ear of corn in each hand of the pregnant one. Another sprinkles her back with meal; it sticks to her sweaty skin. The third scatters seeds in her hair. The other two men join the chant. Michael, gripping the bars of his cell, feels as though he has been hurled thousands of years back in time, to some Neolithic festival; it is almost impossible for him to believe that one day's march from here rises the thousand-story bulk of Urban Monad #.  the pregnant woman with produce. Now two of the priests lift her, shaking, to a standing position, and one of the priestesses rips away her single garment. A howl from the villagers. They spin her around. Displaying her nakedness to all. The heavy protruding belly, drum-tight, glistening in the firelight. The broad hips and solid thighs, the meaty buttocks. Sensing something sinister just ahead, Michael presses his face against the bars, fighting off terror. Is she and not he the sacrificial victim? A flashing knife, the unborn fetus ripped from the womb, a devilish propitiation of the harvest gods? Please, no. Maybe he is to be the chosen executioner. His feverish imagination, unbidden, supplies the scenario: he sees himself taken from the cell, thrust into the plaza, a sickle pushed into his hand, the woman lying spreadeagled near the fire, belly upturned, the priests chanting, the priestesses leaping, and in pantomime they tell him what he must do, they indicate the taut curve of her body, draw their fingers across the preferred place of incision, while the music climbs toward insanity and the fire flares ever higher, and. No. No. He turns away, flinging one arm over his eyes. Shivering, nauseated. When he can bring himself to look again, he sees that the villagers are getting up and dancing toward the fire, toward the pregnant woman. She stands flatfooted, bewildered, clutching the ears of corn, pressing her thighs together, wriggling her shoulders in a way that somehow indicates she is shamed by her nudity. And they caper around her. Shouting raucous abuse. Making the fourfingered jab of contempt. Pointing, mocking, accusing. A condemned witch? An adulteress? The woman shrinks into herself. Suddenly the mob closes in on her. He sees them slapping her, pushing her, spitting at her. God bless, no! "Let her alone!" he screams. "You filthy grubbos, get your hands off her!" His wails are drowned by the music. A dozen or so farmers now ring the woman and they are shoving her back and forth. A doublehanded push; she staggers, barely managing to stay upright, and stumbles across the ring, only to be seized by her breasts and slammed back the other way. She is panting, wild with terror, searching for escape, but the ring is tight, and they fling her around. When at last she drops, they tug her upright and toss her some more, grabbing her arms and whirling her from hand to hand around the ring. Then the circle opens. Other villagers sweep toward her. More abuse. The blows all are openhanded ones and no one seems to hit her belly -- yet they are delivered with great force. A trickle of blood stains her chin and throat and one knee and one buttock are scraped raw from her having been knocked to the ground. She is limping, too; she must have turned an ankle. Vulnerable as she is in her nakedness, she makes no attempt to defend herself or even to protect her pregnancy. Clutching the ears of corn, she simply accepts her torment, letting herself be hurled about, allowing the vindictive hands to poke and pinch and slap her. The mob surges about her, everyone having a turn. How much more can she take? Is the idea to beat her to death? To make her drop her baby while they watch? He has never imagined blows as if they were landing on his own body. If he could he would strike these people dead with thunderbolts. Where is their respect for life? That woman should be sacred. Instead they torture her. She vanishes under a horde of screaming attackers. When they clear away, a minute or two later, she is kneeling, half conscious, close to collapse. Her lips writhe in hysterical, choking sobs. Her entire body is trembling. Her head hangs forward. Someone's clawed hand has left a series of parallel bloody tracks across the globe of her right breast. She is smudged everywhere with dirt. The music grows oddly soft, as if some climax were approaching and momentum had to be gained. Now they come for me, Michael thinks. Now I'm supposed to kill her or top her or kick her in the belly or god knows what. But no one even looks toward the building in which he is jailed. The three priests are chanting in unison; the music gains gradually in intensity; the villagers fall back, clustering along the perimeter of the plaza. And the woman rises, shakily, uncertainly. She looks down at her bloodied and battered self. Her face wholly blank; she is beyond pain, beyond shame, beyond terror. Slowly she walks toward the fire. Stumbles once. Recovers, stays upright. Now she stands at the edge of the fire, almost within reach of the licking tongues of flame. Her back to him. Plump heavy rump, deeply dimpled. Scratches on her back. Wide pelvis, the bones spreading out as the little's time approaches. The music is deafening now. The priests silent, frozen. Obviously the great moment. Does she leap into the flames? No. Raises her arms. The ears of corn outlined against the brightness of the fire. Throws them in; two quick flares and they vanish. An immense roar from the villagers, a tremendous crashing discord from the musicians. The naked woman stumbles away from the fire, tottering, exhausted. Falls, landing with a thump on her left haunch, lies there sobbing. Priests and priestesses march into the darkness with stiff, pompous strides. The villagers simply fade away, leaving only the woman crumpled in the plaza. And a man coming toward her, a tall, bearded figure; Michael remembers seeing him in the midst of the mob when they were beating her. Lifts her now. Cradles her tenderly against him. Kisses her scratched breast. Runs his hand lightly over her belly, as though assuring himself that the child is unharmed. She clings close. He talks softly to her; the alien words drift across to Michael's cell. She replies, stammering, her voice thick with shock. Unbothered by her weight, the man sweeps her into his arms and slowly carries her away, toward one of the buildings on the opposite side of the plaza. All is still, now. Only the fire remains, crackling harshly, crumbling in upon itself. When, after a long while, no one appears Michael turns away from his window and, stunned, baffled, throws himself on his blankets. Silence. Darkness. Images of the bizarre ceremony churn in his mind. He shivers; he trembles; he feels almost at the edge of tears. Finally he sleeps. Ill T he arrival of breakfast awakens him. He studies the tray a few minutes before forcing himself to get up. Stiff and sore from yesterday's walking; every muscle protesting. Doubled up, he hobbles to the window: a heap of ashes where the fire had been, villagers moving about on their morning chores, the farming machines already heading toward the fields. He splashes water in his face, voids his wastes, looks automatically for the cleanser and, not finding it, begins to wonder how he will tolerate the crust of grime that has accumulated on his skin. He had not realized before how ingrained a habit it was for him to get under the ultrasonic wave at the beginning of each day. He goes then to the tray: juice, bread, cold fruit, wine. It will do. Before he is finished eating, his cell door comes in and a woman enters, clad in the usual brief commune costume. He knows instinctively that she is someone of importance; her eyes have the clear cold light of authority, and her expression is an intelligent, perceptive one. She is perhaps thirty years old and, like most of these farming women's, her body is lean and taut, with supple muscles, long limbs, small breasts. She reminds him in some ways of Micaela, although her hair is auburn and close-cropped, not long and black. A weapon is strapped to her left thigh. "Cover yourself," she says briskly. "I don't welcome the sight of your nakedness. Cover yourself and then we can talk." She speaks the urbmon tongue! A strange accent, true, with every word cut short as if her sharp shining teeth have clipped its tail as it passes her lips. The vowels blurred and distorted. But unmistakably the language of his native building. Immense relief. Communication at last. He pulls on his clothing hastily. She watches him, stony-faced. A tough one, she is. He says, "In the urbmons we don't worry much about covering our bodies. We live in what we call a post-privacy culture. I didn't realize -- " "You don't happen to be in an urbmon just now." "I realize that. I'm sorry if I've given offense through my ignorance of your customs." He is fully dressed. She seems to soften a bit, perhaps at his apology, perhaps merely because he has concealed his nudity. Taking a few steps farther into the room, she says, "It's a long time since we've had a spy from your people among us." "I'm not a spy." A cool, skeptical smile. "No? Then why are you here?" "I didn't intend to trespass on your commune's land. I was just passing through, heading eastward. On my way toward the sea." "Really?" As though he had said he had set out to walk to Pluto. "Traveling alone, are you?" "I am." "When did this marvelous journey begin?" "Yesterday morning, very early," Michael says. "I'm from Urban Monad #. A computer primer, if that means anything to you. Suddenly I felt I couldn't stay inside that building any more, that I had to find out what the outside world was like, so I arranged to get an egress pass, slipped out just before dawn and started walking. I came to your fields and you machines saw me, I guess, and I was picked up. Because of the language problem I couldn't explain to anyone who I -- " "What do you hope to gain by spying on us?" His shoulders slump. "I told you," he says wearily. "I'm not a spy." Urbmon people don't slip out of their buildings. I've dealt with your kind for years; I know how your minds work." Her eyes level with his. Cold, cold. "You'd be paralyzed with terror five minutes after you set out," she assures him. "Obviously you've been trained for this mission or you'd never have been able to keep your sanity for a full day in the fields. What I don't understand is why they'd send you. You have your world and we have ours. There's no conflict, no overlapping. There's no need for espionage." "I agree," Michael says. "And , that's why I'm not a spy." He  finds himself drawn to her despite j the severity of her attitude. Her competence and self-confidence attract him. And if she would only smile she would be quite beautiful. He says, "Look, how can I get you to believe this? I just wanted to see the world outside the urbmon. All my life indoors. Never smelling fresh air, never feeling the sun on my skin. Thousands of people living on top of me. Tm not really well adjusted to urbmon society, I diseovered. So I went outside. Not a spy. All I want to do is travel. To tne sea, particularly. Have you ever seen the sea? No? That's my dream -- to walk along the shore, to hear the waves rolling in, to feel the wet sand under my feet -- " tone is beginning to convince her. She shrugs, looking less flinty, and says, "What's your name?" "Michael Statler." "Age?" "Twenty-three." "We could put you aboard the next courier pod -- with the fungus shipment. You'd be back at your urbmon in half an hour." "No," he says softly. "Don't do that. Just let me keep going east. I'm not ready to go back so soon." "Haven't gathered enough information, you mean?" "I told you. I'm not -- " He stops, realizing she is teasing him. "All right. Maybe you aren't a spy. Just a madman, perhaps." She smiles for the first time and slides down until she is squatting against the wall, facing him. In an easy conversational tone she says, "What do you think of our village, Statler?" "I don't even know where to begin answering that." "How do we strike you? Simple? Complicated? Evil? Frightening? Unusual?" "Strange," he says. "Strange in comparison to the kind of people you've lived among, or just strange, absolutely?" "I'm not sure I know the distinction. It's like another world out here, anyway. I -- I -- what's your name, by the way?" "Artha." "Arthur? Among us that's a man's name." "A-R-T-H-A." "Oh. Artha. How interesting. How beautiful." He knots his fingers tightly. "The way you live so close to the soil here, Artha. There's something dreamlike about that for me. These little houses. The plaza. Seeing you walking around in the open. The sun. Building fires. Not having any upstairs or downstairs. And that business last night, the music, the pregnant woman. What was that all about?" "You mean the unbirth dance?" "Is that what it was? Some kind of -- " he falters -- "sterility rite?" "To insure a good harvest," Artha says. "To keep the crops healthy and childbirths low. We have rules about breeding, you understand." "And the woman everybody was hitting -- she got pregnant illegally, is that it?" "Oh, no." Artha laughs. "Milcha's child is quite legal." "Then why -- tormenting her like that -- she could have lost the child -- " "Someone had to do it," Artha tells him. "The commune has eleven pregnants, just now. They drew lots and Milcha lost. Or won. It isn't punishment, Statler. It's a religious thing: she's the celebrant, the holy scapegoat, the -- the -- I don't have the words in your language. Through her suffering she brings health and prosperity upon the commune. Insuring that no unwanted children will come into our women, that all will remain in perfect balance. Of course, it's painful for . her. And there's the shame, being naked in front of everyone. But it has to be done. It's a great honor. Milcha will never have to do it again and she'll have certain privileges for the rest of her life. And of course everyone is grateful to her for accepting our blows. Now we're protected for another year." "Protected?" "Against the anger of the gods." "Gods," he says quietly. Swallowing the word and trying to comprehend it. After a moment he asks, "Why do you try to avoid having children?" "Do you think we own the world?" she replies, her eyes abruptly fiery. "We have our commune. Our allotted zone of land. We must make food for ourselves and also for the urbmons, right? What would happen to you if we simply bred and bred and bred -- until our village sprawled out over half of the present fields and such remaining food as we produced was merely enough for our own needs? With nothing to Spare for you. Children must be housed. Houses occupy land. How can we farm land covered by a house? We must set limits." "But you don't need to sprawl your village out into the fields. You could build upward. As we do. And increase your numbers tenfold without taking up any more land area. Well, of course, you'd need more food and there'd be less to ship to us, but -- " "You absolutely don't understand," Artha snaps. "Should we turn our commune into an urbmon? You have your way of life; we have ours. Ours requires us to be few in number and live in the midst of fertile fields. Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves not being like you. So if we expand we must expand horizontally, right? Which would in time cover the surface of the world with a dead crust of paved streets and roads, as in the former days. No. We are beyond such things. We impose limits on ourselves and live in the proper rhythm of our way -- and we are happy. And so it shall be forever with us. Does this seem so wicked? We think the urbmon folk are wicked, for they will not control their breeding. And even encourage breeding." "Yhere's no need for us to control it," he tells her. "It's been mathematically proven that we haven't begun to exhaust the possibilities of the planet. Our population could double or even triple -- and as long as we continue to live in vertical cities, in urban monads, there'd be room for everyone. Without encroaching on productive farmland. We build a new urbmon every few years and even so the food supplies aren't diminishing, the rhythm of our way holds up and -- " "Do you think this can continue infinitely?" "Well, no, not infinitely," Michael concedes. "But for a long time. Five hundred years, maybe, at the present rate of increase, before we're feeling any squeeze." "And then?" "They can solve that problem when the time comes." Artha shakes her head furiously. "No! No! How can you say such a thing? To go on breeding, letting the future worry about it" "Look," he says, "I've talked to my brother-in-law, who's a historian. Specializes in the twentieth century. Back then it was believed that everybody would starve if the world's population got past five or tion crisis, etc. etx. Well, then came the collapse and afterward things were reorganized. The first urbmons went up, the old horizontal pattern of land use was prohibited and guess what? We found people. And then twenty. And then fifty. And now seventy-five. Taller buildings, more efficient food production, greater concentration of people on the unproductive land. So who are we to say that our descendants won't continue to cope with expanding population on up tieth century wouldn't have believed it was possible to support this many people on Earth. So if we worry in advance about a problem that may in fact never cause any trouble, if we unblessworthily thwart god by limiting births, we sin against life without any assurance that -- " "Pah!" Artha snorts. "You will never understand us. And I suppose we will never understand you." Rising, she strides toward the door. "Tell me this, then. If the urbmon way is so wonderful, why did you slip away and come wandering in our fields?" And she does not stay for an answer. The door clicks behind her; he goes to it and finds that she has locked it. He is alone. And still a prisoner. A long drab day. No one comes to him, except the girl bringing lunch: in and out. The stench of the cell oppresses him. The lack of a cleanser becomes unbearable; he imagines that the filth gathering on his skin is pitting and corroding it. From his narrow window he watches the life of the commune, craning his neck to see it all. The farming machines coming and going. The husky peasants loading sacks of produce aboard a conveyor belt disappearing into the ground -- going, no doubt, to the courier-pod system that carries food to the urbmons and industrial goods to the communes. Last night's scapegoat, Milchd, passes by, limping, bruised, apparently exempt from work today; villagers hail her with obvious reverence. She smiles and pats her belly. He does not see Artha at all. Why do they not release him? He is fairly certain that he has convinced her he is no spy. And in any case can hardly harm the commune. Yet here he remains as the afternoon fades. The busy people outside, sweating, suntanned, purposeful. He sees only a speck of the commune: outside the scope of his vision there must be schools, a theater, a governmental building, warehouses, repair shops. Images of last night's unbirth dance glow morbidly in his memory. The barbarism; the wild music; the agony of the woman. But he knows that it is an error to think of these farmers as primitive, simple folk, despite such things. They seem bizarre to him but their savagery is only superficial, a mask they don to set themselves apart from the urban people. This is a complex society held in a delicate balance. As complex as is his own. Sophisticated machinery to care for. Doubtless a computer center somewhere, controlling the planting and tending and harvesting of the crops -- the operation requires a staff of skilled technicians. Biological needs to consider: pesticides, weed-suppression, all the ecological intricacies. And the problems of the barter system that ties the commune to the urbmons. He perceives only the surface of this place, he realizes. In late afternoon Artha returns to his cell. "Will they let me go soon?" he asks immediately. She shakes her head. "It's under discussion. I've recommended your release. But some of them are very suspicious people." "Who do you mean?" "The chiefs. You know, they're old men, most of them, with a natural mistrust of strangers. A couple of them want to sacrifice you to the harvest god." "Sacrifice?" Artha grins. There is nothing stony about her now; she is relaxed, clearly friendly. On his side. "It sounds horrid, doesn't it? But it's been known to happen. Our gods occasionally demand lives. Don't you ever take life in the urbmon?" "When someone threatens the stability of our society, yes," he admits. "Lawbreakers go down the chute. Into the combustion chambers at the bottom of the building. Contributing their body mass to our energy output. But -- " "So you kill for the sake of keeping everything running smoothly. Well, sometimes so do we. Not often. I don't really think they'll kill you. But it isn't decided yet." "When will it be?" "Perhaps tonight. Or tomorrow." "How can I represent any threat to the commune?" "No one says you do," Artha tells him. "Even so, to offer the life of an urbmon man may have positive values here. Increasing our blessings. It's a philosophical thing, not easy to explain: the urbmons are the ultimate consumers and if our harvest god symbolically consumed an urbmon instead, in a metaphorical way, taking you to stand for the whole society you come from, it would be a mystic affirmation of the unity of the two societies, the link that binds commune to urbmon and urbmon to commune and -- oh, never mind. Maybe they'll forget about it. It's only the day after the unbirth dance; we don't need any more sacred protection so soon. I've told them that. I'd say your chances of going free are fairly good." "Fairly good," he repeats gloomily. "Wonderful." The distant sea. The ashy cone of Vesuvius. Jerusalem. The Taj Mahal. As far away as the stars, now. The sea. The sea. This stinking cell. He chokes on despair. Artha tries to cheer him. Squatting close beside him on the tipsy floor. Her eyes warm, affectionate. Her earlier military brusqueness gone. She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better as if she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He's a man, she's a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is facade. But as they talk he is plunged again and again into new awarenesses of how different she is from him, he from her. He asks her about herself and she says she is unmarried. Stunned, he tells her that there are no unmarried people in the urbmons past the age of twelve or thirteen. She says she is thirty-one. Why has someone so attractive never married? "We have enough married women here," she replies. "I had no reason to marry." Does she not want to bear children? No, not at all. The commune has its allotted number of mothers. She has other responsibilities ot occupy her. "Such as?" She explains that she is part of the liaison staff handling urbmon commerce. Which is why she can speak the language so well; she deals frequently with the urbmons, arranging for exchanges of produce for manufactured goods, setting up servicing arrangements whenever the commune's machinery suffers a breakdown beyond the skills of the village technicians -- and so forth, "I may have monitored your calls occasionally," he says. "Some of the nodes I prime run through the procurement level. If I ever get back home. I'll listen for you, Artha." Her smile is dazzling. He begins to suspect that love is blossoming in this cell. She asks him about the urbmon. S HE has never been inside one; all her contacts with the urban monads come via communications channels. A vast curiosity is evident in her. She wants him to describe the residential apartments, the transport system, liftshafts and dropshafts, the schools, the recreational facilities. Who prepares the food? Who decides what professions the children will follow? Can you move from one city to another? Where do you keep all the new people? How do you manage not to hate each other, when you must live so close together? Don't you feel like prisoners? like bees in a hive -- how do you stand it? And the stale air, the pale artificial light, the separation from the natural world. Incomprehensible to her; such a narrow, compressed life. And he tries to tell her about the urbmon, how even he, who chose to flee from it, really loves it. The subtle balance of need and want in it, the elaborate social system designed for minimal friction and frustration, the sense of community within one's own city and village, the glorification of parenthood, the colossal mechanical minds in the service core that keep the delicate interplay of urban rhythms coordinated -- he makes the building seem a poem of human relationships, a miracle of civilized harmonies. His words soar. Artha seems captivated. He goes on and on, in a kind of rapture of narrative, describing toilet facilities, sleeping arrangements, screens and data terminals, the recycling and reprocessing of urine and feces, the combustion of solid refuse, the auxiliary generators that produce electrical power from accumulated surplus body heat, the air vents and circulation system, the social complexity of the building's different levels, maintenance people here, industrial workers there, scholars, entertainers, engineers, computer technicians, administrators. The senior citizen dorms, the newlywed dorms, the marriage customs, the sweet tolerance of others, the sternly enforced con mandment against selfishness. Artha nods and fills in words for him when he leaves a sentence half-finished to hurry on to the next and her face grows flushed with excitement, as if she, too, were caught up in the lyricism of his account of the building. Seeing for the first time in her life that it is not necessarily brutal and antihuman to pack hundreds of thousands of people into a single structure in which they spend their entire lives. As he speaks he wonders whether he is not letting himself be carried away by his own rhetoric; the words rushing from him must make him sound like an impassioned propagandist for a way of life about which, after all, he had come to have serious doubts. But yet he goes on describing and, by implication, praising the urbmon. He will not condemn. There was no other way for humanity to develop. The necessity of the vertical city. The beauty of the urbmon. Its wondrous complexity, its intricate texture. Yes, of course, there is beauty outside it, he admits that -- he has gone in search of it -- but it is folly to think that the urbmon itself is something loathsome, something to be deplored. In its own way magnificent. The unique solution to the population crisis. Heroic response to immense challenge. And he thinks he is getting through to her. This shrewd, cool commune woman, raised under the hot sun. His verbal intoxication transforms itself into something explicity sexual now: he is communicating with Artha, he is reaching her mind, they are coming together in a way that neither of them would have thought possible yesterday, and he interprets this new closeness as a physical thing. The natural eroticism of the urbmon-dweller: everyone accessible to everyone else at all times. Confirm their closeness by the direct embrace. It seems like the most reasonable extension of their communion, from the conversational to the copulatory. So close already. Her eyes shining. Her small breasts. Reminding him of Micaela. He leans toward her. Left hand slipping around her shoulders, fingers groping for and finding her nearer breast. Cupping it. Nuzzles the line of her jaw with his lips, going toward her earlobe. His other hand at her waist, seeking the secret of her one garment. In a moment she'll be naked. His body against hers, approaching congruency. Cunning, experienced fingers opening the way for his thrust. And then. "No. Stop." "You don't mean that, Artha." Loosening the glossy red wrap now. Clutching the hard little breast. Hunting for her mouth. "You're all tensed up. Why not relax? Loving is blessworthy. Loving is -- " "Stop it." Flinty again. A sharp-edged command. Suddenly struggling in his arms. Is this the commune mode of lovemaking? The pretense of resistance? She grasps at her wrap, pushes him with her elbow, tries to bring up her knee. He surrounds her with his arms and attempts to press her to the floor. Still caressing. Kissing. Murmuring her name. "Getr#" This is a wholly new experience for him. A reluctant woman, all sinews and bone, fighting his advances. In the urbmon she could be put to death for this. Unblessworthy thwarting of a fellow citizen. But this is not the urbmon. This is not the urbmon. Her struggles inflame him; as it is he has gone several days without a woman, the longest span of abstinence he can remember, and he is stiff, agonizingly erect, carrying a blazing sword. No finesse possible; he wants in, as quickly as it can be managed. "Artha. Artha. Artha." Primordial grunts. Her body pinned beneath him. The wrap off; as they fight he catches a glimpse of slender thighs, matted auburn delta. The flat girlish belly of the unchilded. If he can only get his own clothes off somehow, while holding her down. Fighting like a demon. Good thing she wasn't wearing her weapon when she came in. Watch out, the eyes! Panting and gasping. A wild flurry of hammering fists. The salty taste of blood on his split lip. He looks into her eyes and is appalled. Her rigid, murderous gaze. The harder she fights, the more he wants her. A savage! If this is how she fights, how will she love? She starts to scream; he gets his mouth down on her lips; her teeth hunt for his flesh. Fingernails clawing his back. She is surprisingly strong. "Artha," he begs, "don't fight me. This is insanity. If you'll only -- " "Animal!" "Let me show you how much I love" "Lunatic!" Her knee suddenly in his crotch. He pivots, avoiding the worst of her attack, but she hurts him anyway. This is no coy game. If he wants to have her he must break her strength. Immobilize her. Raping an unconscious woman? No. No. It has all gone wrong. Sadness overwhelms him. His lust suddenly subsides. He rolls free of her and kneels near the window, looking at the floor, breathing hard. Go on, tell the old men what I did. Feed me to your god. Naked, standing above him, she sullenly dons her wrap. The harsh sound of her breathing. He says, "In an urbmon, when someone makes sexual advances it's considered highly improper to refuse him." His voice hollow with shame. "I was attracted to you, Artha. I thought you were to me. And then it was too late for me to stop myself." "What animals you all must be!" Unable to meet her eyes. "In context, it makes sense. We can't allow explosive frustration-situations. No room for conflicts in an urbmon. But here -- it's different, is it?" "Very." "Can you forgive me?" "We couple with those we deeply love," she says. "We don't open for anyone at all who asks. Nor is it a simple thing. There are rituals of approach. Intermediaries must be employed. Great complications. But how could you have known all that?" "Exactly. How could I?" Her voice whiplashing with irritation and exasperation. "We were getting along so well! Why did you have to touch me?" "You said it yourself. I didn't know. I didn't know. The two of us together -- I could feel the attraction growing -- it was so natural for me to reach out -- " "And it was so natural for you to try to rape me -- " "I stopped in time, didn't I?" A bitter laugh. "So to speak. If you call that stopping. If you call that in time." "Resistance isn't an easy thing for me to understand, Artha. I thought you were playing a game with me. I didn't realize at first that you were refusing me." Looking up at her now. Her eyes holding mingled contempt and sorrow. "It was all a misunderstanding, Artha. Can't we turn time back half an hour? Can't we try to put things together again?" "I will remember your hands on my body. I will remember your making me naked." "Don't carry a grudge. Try to look at it from my point of view. The cultural gulf between us. A different set of assumptions in operation. I -- " She shakes her head slowly. No hope of forgiveness. "Artha-" She goes out. He sits alone in the dusk. An hour later his dinner comes. Night descends; he eats with no interest in his food, nursing his bitterness. Engulfed by shame. Although he insists he was not entirely at fault. A clash of irreconcilable cultures. It was so natural for him. It was so natural. And the sadness. Thinking of how close they had come to be before it happened. How close. IV they begin building a new bonfire in the plaza. He watches gloomily. She has gone to the village elders, then, to tell them of his attack on her. An outrage; they console her and promise vengeance. Now they will surely sacrifice him to their god. His last night of life. All the turmoil of his existence converging on this day. No one to grant a final wish. He'll die miserably, his body unclean. Far from home. So young. Jangling with unfulfilled desires. Never to see the sea. And what's this, now? A farming machine , being trundled up close to the fire, a giant upright thing, five meters high, with eight long, jointed arms, six manykneed legs, a vast mouth. Some kind of harvester, maybe. Its polished brown metallic skin reflecting the fire's leaping red fingers. Like a mighty idol. Moloch. Baal. He sees his body swept aloft in the great clutching fingers. His head nearing the metal mouth. The villagers capering about him in rhythmic frenzy. Bruised swollen Milcha chanting ecstatically as he goes to his doom. Icy Artha rejoicing in her triumph. Her purity restored by his sacrifice. The priests droning. Please, no. No. Perhaps he's all wrong. Last night, the sterility rite, he thought they were punishing the pregnant one. And she was really the most honored one. But how vicious that machine looks! How deadly! The plaza is full of villagers now. A major event. Listen, Artha, it was merely a misunderstanding. I thought you desired me. I was acting within the context of my society's mores, can't you see that? Sex isn't a big complicated operatic thing with us. It's like exchanging smiles. Like touching hands. When two people are together and there's an attraction they do it, because why not? I only wanted to give you pleasure, really. We were getting along so well together. Really. The sound of drums. The awful skirling screeches of out-of-tune wind instruments. Orgiastic dancing is starting. God bless, I want to live! Here are the priests and priestesses in their nightmare masks. No doubt of it, the full routine. And Tm the central spectacle tonight. An hour passes and the scene in the plaza grows more frenzied, but no one comes to fetch him. Has he misunderstood again? Does tonight's ritual actually concern him as little as did the one last night? A sound at his door. He hears the lock turning. The door opens. The priests must be coming for him. So now the end is near, eh? He braces himself, hoping for a painless finish. To die for metaphorical reasons, to become a mystic link binding commune to urbmon -- such a fate seems improbable and unreal to him. But it is about to befall him all the same. Artha enters the cell. She closes the door quickly and presses her back against it. The only illumination is the streaming firelight glaring through his window; it shows her to him, her face tense and stern, her body rigid. This time she wears her weapon. Taking no chances. "Artha! I -- " "Quiet. If you want to live, keep your voice down." "What's happening out there?" "They prepare the harvest god." "For me?" "For you." He nods. "You told them I tried to rape you, I suppose. And now my punishment. All right. All right. It isn't fair, but who expects fairness?" "I told them nothing," she says. "It was their decision, taken at sundown. I did not cause this." She sounds sincere. He wonders. She goes on: "They will take you before the god at midnight. Just now they are praying that he will receive you gracefully. It is a lengthy prayer." She walks cautiously past him, as if expecting him to pounce on her again, looks through the window. Nods to herself. Turns. "Very well. No one will notice. Come with me and make no sound whatever. If I'm caught with you, I'll have to kill you and say you were trying to escape. Otherwise it'll be my life too. Come. Come." "Where?" "Come!" A fierce impatient whispered gust. She leads him from the cell. In wonder he follows her through a labyrinth of passages, through dank subterranean chambers, through tunnels barely wider than himself. They emerge finally at the back of the building. He shivers; a chill in the night air. Music and chanting floating toward him from the plaza. Artha gestures, runs out between two houses, looks in all directions, gestures again. He runs after her. By quick nervous stages they reach the outer edge of the commune. He glances back; from here he can see the fire, the idol, the tiny dancing figures, like images on a screen. Ahead of him are the fields. Above him the crescent sliver of the moon, the shining sprawl of the stars. A sudden sound. Artha clutches at him and tugs him down, under a clump of shrubs. Her body against his; the tips of her breasts tike points of fire. He does not dare to move or speak. Someone goes by: a sentry, maybe. Broad back, thick neck. Out of sight. Artha, trembling, holds his wrists, keeping him down. Then at last getting up. Nodding. Silently saying the way is clear. She slips into the fields, between the burgeoning rows of tall, leafy plants. For perhaps ten minutes they trot away from the village, until his untrained body is gasping for breath. When she halts, the bonfire is only a stain on the distant horizon and the singing is drowned out by the chirping of insects. "From here you go by yourself," she tells him. "I have to return. If anyone misses me for long, they might suspect." "Why did you do this?" "Because I was unjust to you," she says and manages to smile. A ghost-smile, a quick flicker, the merest specter of the warmth of the afternoon. "You were drawn to me. There was no way for you to know our attitudes about such things. I was cruel, I was hateful -- and you were only trying to show love. I'm sorry, Statler. So this is my atonement. Go." "If I could tell you how grateful -- " His hand lightly touches her arm. He feels her quiver -- in desire, in disgust, what? On a sudden impulse he pulls her into an embrace. She is taut at first, then melting. Lips to lips. His fingers on her bare muscular back. Do I dare touch her breasts? Her belly pressed to his. He has a quick wild vision of this afternoon's breach healed; Artha sinking gladly to the sweet earth here, drawing him down on her and into her, the union of their bodies creating that metaphorical link between urbmon and commune that the elders would have forged with his blood. But no. It is an unrealistic vision, however satisfying artistically. There will be no coupling in the moonlit field. Artha lives by her code. Obviously these thoughts have passed through her mind in these few seconds, and she has considered and rejected the possibilities of a passionate farewell, for now she slides free of him, severing the contact moments before he can capitalize on her partial surrender. Her eyes bright and loving in the darkness. Her smile awkward and divided. "Go, now," she whispers. Turning. Running back a dozen paces toward the commune. Turning again, gesticulating with the flats of her hands, trying to push him into motion. "Go. Go. What are you standing there for?" H urriedly through the moonsilvered night. Stumbling, lurching, tripping. He does not bother to pick a cautious route between the rows of growing things; in his haste he tramples plants, pushes them aside, leaves a swath of destruction by which, come dawn, he could readily be traced. He knows he must get out of the commune's territory before morning. Once the crop-sprayers are aloft they can easily find him and bring him back to feed him to thwarted Moloch. Possibly they will send the sprayers out by night to hunt for him, as soon as they find that he has escaped. Do those yellow eyes see in the dark? He halts and listens for the horrid droning sound but all is still. And the farming machines -- will they go forth to track him down? He has to hurry. Presumably if he gets beyond the commune's domain he will be safe from the worshipers of the harvest god. Where shall he go? There is only one destination conceivable now. Looking toward the horizon, he sees the awesome columns of the Chipitts urbmons, eight or ten of them visible from sands of windows ablaze. He cannot pick out individual windows but he is aware of constant shiftings and flowings in the patterns of light as switches go on and off. The middle of the evening there. Concerts, somatic contests, glowduels, all the nightly amusements in full swing. Stacion sitting home, fearful, wondering about him. How long has he been gone? Two days, three? All blurred. The littles crying. Micaela distraught, probably quarreling mercilessly with Jason to ease her tension. While here he is, many kilometers away, newly fled from a world of idols and rites, of pagan dancing, of unyielding and infertile women. Mud on his shoes, stubble on his cheeks. He must look awful and smell worse. No access to a cleanser. What bacteria now breed in his flesh? He must go back. His muscles ache so desperately that he has passed into a discomfort beyond mere fatigue. The reek of the cell clings to his nostrils. His tongue feels furry and puffed. He imagines that his skin is cracking from exposure to sun, moon, air. What of the sea? What of Vesuvius and the Taj Mahal? admit defeat. He has gone as far as he dares, and for as much time as he can permit himself; now with all his soul he longs for home. His conditioning asserting itself after all. Environment conquering genetics. He has had his adventure; another; but his fantasy of crossing the continent, slipping from commune to commune, must be abandoned. Too many idols wait with polished jaws and he may not be lucky enough to find an Artha in the next village. Home, then. No one and nothing pursue him. He slips into a steady, mechanical rhythm of march, step and step and step and step, hauling himself robotlike toward the vast towers of the urban monads. He has no idea of what time it is but he supposes ft must be past midnight; the moon has swung far across the sky and the urbmons have grown dimmer as people go to sleep. Nightwalkers now prowl there. Siegmund Kluver of Shangcheeks. He must look awful and smell worse. No access to a cleanser. What bacteria now breed in his flesh? He must go back. His muscles ache so desperately that he has passed into a discomfort beyond mere fatigue. The reek of the cell clings to his nostrils. His tongue feels furry and puffed. He imagines that his skin is cracking from exposure to sun, moon, air. What of the sea? What of Vesuvius and the Taj Mahal? admit defeat. He has gone as far as he dares, and for as much time as he can permit himself; now with all his soul he longs for home. His conditioning asserting itself after all. Environment conquering genetics. He has had his adventure; another; but his fantasy of crossing the continent, slipping from commune to commune, must be abandoned. Too many idols wait with polished jaws and he may not be lucky enough to find an Artha in the next village. Home, then. No one and nothing pursue him. He slips into a steady, mechanical rhythm of march, step and step and step and step, hauling himself robotlike toward the vast towers of the urban monads. He has no idea of what time it is but he supposes it must be past midnight; the moon has swung far across the sky and the urbmons have grown dimmer as people go to sleep. Nightwalkers now prowl there. Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai dropping in to see Micaela, maybe. Jason on his way to his grubbo sweethearts in Warsaw or Prague. Another few hours, Michael supposes, and he will be home. It took him only from sunrise to late afternoon to reach the commune and that was with much circuitous rambling; with the towers rising before him at all times he will have no difficulty going straight to his goal. All is silence. The starry night has a magical beauty. He almost regrets his decision to return to the urbmon. Under the crystalline sky he feels the pull of nature. After perhaps four hours of walking he stops to bathe in an irrigation canal and emerges naked and refreshed; washing with water is not as satisfying as getting under the ultrasonic cleanser but at least he no longer needs to be obsessed with the layers of grime and corruption clinging to his skin. More springily, now, he strides along. His adventure already is receding into history: he encapsulates it and retrospectively relives it. How good to have done this. Tasting the fresh air, the dawn's mist, dirt under his fingernails. Even his imprisonment now seems a high excitement rather than an imposition. Watching the unbirth dance. His fitful, unconsummated love for Artha. Their struggle and their dreamlike reconciliation. The gaping jaws of the idol. The fear of death. His escape. What man of Urbmon I # has done such things? This access of self-congratulation gives him strength that sends him plunging on across the commune's unending fields in renewed vigor. Only the urbmons seem to be getting no closer. A trick of perspective. His vveary eyes. Is he heading, he wonders, toward #? It would be a sad prank of topography to get turned about and come into the urban constellation at # or # or so. If, say, he is moving at an angle to his true course, the divergence could be immense by the end of his march, leaving him with a dreadful numbing hypotenuse to traverse. He has no way of knowing which of the urbmons ahead of him is his own. He simply goes onward. The moon vanishes. The stars fade. Dawn is creeping in. He has reached the zone of unused land between the commune's rim and the Chipitts constellation. His legs are ablaze but he forces himself on. So close to the buildings that they seem to hang, unsupported, in midair. The formal gardens in view. Robot gardeners serenely going about their trade. Blossoms opening to the first light of day. Perfume drifting on the soft breeze. Home. Home. Stacion. Micaela. Get some rest before going back on the interface. Find a plausible excuse. Which is Urbmon I #? The towers bear no numbers. Those who live inside them know where they live. Half-staggering, Michael approaches the nearest building. Its flanks illuminated with radiant dawnlight. Looking up a thousand floors. The delicacy, the complexity, of its myriad tiny chambers. Beneath him the mysterious underground roots, the power plants, the waste-processing plants, the hidden computers, all the concealed wonders that give the urbmon its life. And above, rising like some immense vegetable growth, its sides marvelously intricate, a hatchwork of textures, the urbmon. Within the hundreds of thousands of interwoven lives, artists and scholars, musicians and sculptors, welders and janitors. His eyes are moist. Home. Home. But is it? He goes to the hatch. Holds up his wrist, shows the egress pass. The computer is authorized to admit him on demand. "If this is Urbmon #, open up! Tm Michael Statler." Nothing is happening. Scanners scan him but all stays sealed. "What building is this?" he asks. Silence. "Come on," he says. "Tell me where I am!" A voice from an invisible speaker says, "This is Urban Monad One-twenty-three of the Chipitts constellation." #! So many kilometers from home! But he can only continue. Now the sun is above the horizon and turning quickly from red to gold. If that is the east, then where is Urbmon #? He calculates with a numbed mind. He must go east. Yes? No? He plods through the interminable series of gardens separating # from its eastern neighbor and interrogates the speaker at the hatch. Yes; this is Urbmon #. He proceeds. The buildings are set at long diagonals, so that one will not shade the next, and he moves down the center of the constellation, keeping careful count, while the sun climbs and swarms over . him. Dizzy, now, with hunger and exhaustion. Is this #? No, he must have lost count; it will not open for him. Then this? Y es. The hatch slides back as he offers his pass. Michael clambers in. Waiting as the door rolls shut behind him. Now the inner door to open. Waiting. Well? "Why don't you open?" he asks. "Here. Here. Scan this." Holding up his pass. Perhaps some kind of decontamination procedure. No telling what he's brought in from outside. And now the door opens. Lights in his eyes. A dazzling glare. "Remain where you are. Make no attempt to leave the entryway." The cold metallic voice nailing him where he stands. Blinking, Michael takes half a step forward, then realizes it might be unwise and stops. A sweet-smelling cloud engulfs him. They have sprayed him with something. Congealing fast, forming a security cocoon. The lights now go down. Figures blocking his path: four, five of them. Police. "Michael Statler?" one of them asks. "I have a pass," he says uncertainly. "It's all quite legitimate. You can check the records. I -- " "Under arrest. Alteration of building, undesirable harboring of countersocial tendencies. Orders to immobilize you immediately upon your return to building. Now carried out. Mandatory sentence of erasure to follow." "Wait a minute. I have the right of appeal, don't I?" "Case has already been considered and referred to us for final disposition." A note of inexorability in the policeman's tone. They are at his sides now. He cannot move. Sealed within the hardening spray. Whatever alien microorganisms he has collected are sealed in it with him. To the chute? No. No. Please. But what else did he expect? What other outcome could there be? Did he think he had fooled the urbmon? Can you repudiate an entire civilization and hope to slip yourself smoothly back into it? They have loaded him aboard some kind of dolly. Dim shapes outside the cocoon. "Let's get a detailed print of this on the record, boys. Move him toward the scanners. Yes. That's it." "Can't I see my wife, at least? My sister? I mean, what harm will it do if I just talk to them one last time -- " "Menace to harmony and stability, dangerous countersocial tendencies, immediate removal from environment to prevent spreading of reactive pattern." As though he carried a plague of rebelliousness. He has seen this before: the summary judgment, the instant execution. And never really understood. And never imagined. Micaela. Stacion. Artha. Now the cocoon is fully hardened. He sees nothing outside it. "Listen to me," he says, "whatever you're going to do, I want you to know that I've been there. I've seen the sun and the moon and the stars. It wasn't Jerusalem, it wasn't the Taj Mahal, but it was something. That you never saw. That you never will. The possibilities out there. The hope of enlarging your soul. What would you understand about that?" Droning sounds from the far side of the milky web that contains him. They are reading him the relevant sections of the legal code. Explaining how he threatens the structure of society. Necessary to eradicate the source of peril. The words blend and mingle and are lost to him. The dolly begins to roll forward again. Micaela. Stacion. Artha. I love you. "Okay, open the chute." Clear, ( Please turn to page # eter began to pulse brightly and, as it blinked on and off slowly, seemed to signal reserves of enormous power. He flipped another switch activating the sound mechanism and a pulsing yellow light appeared. Tiredly he sat down on the bench and gazed at the black panels through unfocused eyes. coming here tomorrow to give you a going over," he finally said. "The board of directors of the Minitronics Communications Corporation has decreed it's about time you began to earn some money. The target date to make you operational is a year from tomorrow. It will take some doing. There are great gaps in your memory, additional circuitry should be installed and it ordinarily would take a full year before you were properly debugged. They also are considering removing your voice and putting it in storage until a money-making use for it presents itself. They don't know it -- but I will not be here tomorrow. In fact I will never be here again, so this conversation is something in the nature of a farewell. We might as well be formal about it. Now, good evening, Mr. Machine." "Good evening, Clarence," the machine replied in a pleasantly cultivated voice. "I am quite depressed this evening. I don't believe I could tolerate levity or even friendliness. I would prefer to be called Mr. MacKay. Let's begin again. Now, good evening, Mr. Machine. "Good evening, Mr. MacKay," the machine said. The spoken word "now," followed by a pause of three seconds or more had been chosen years before to alert the machine that a spoken response was required. No reason had ever arisen to change this arrangement. The events of the past few weeks had had a cumulative, deeply depressing effect on MacKay. It had begun when he agreed to have lunch with a total stranger -- an unusual thing for him to do -- with a science writer for Tempus, the news magazine, the most offensive man he could recall ever having met. Questions of outrageous intimacy had been put to him until he had dropped the bread he was buttering and stood up and announced the interview at an end. The Tempus man had remained seated and had said, "Before we part, would you care to read your obituary? It usually has a bracing affect on a man. I've had it on file for years." They had taken a taxi to the Tempus Building and a folder containing six typewritten sheets was taken from the file and handed to him. He read it standing near the doorway. Died: Clarence Murray MacKay, physicist and theoretician in the field of communications and advanced computer design. A moving force in the burgeoning second industrial revolution, MacKay was known to many colleagues as a man arrogant and imperious in manner and many had smarted from encounters with him in the day to day work of science. By the few who were close to him he is remembered for his personal loyalty and passionate humanism. Born in the cornbelt on a small Iowa farm he... T he key statement in any obituary when it could be used. Implied that the system made it possible for any slum child, any ghetto child, to be a success if he made the effort. It was a concept so deeply embedded in the mythology that it probably had been routinely included. To have been a farm boy was somehow superior and more exotic than being a newsboy now that farmers were only five per cent of the population. The remainder of the obituary was a remarkably accurate digest of his activities except, of course, for those completely apocryphal stories about him the year he lectured at Cambridge. They marked him as an eccentric but in a somewhat flattering sense. "Didn't read it myself until a few minutes before I left the office to meet you for lunch," the Ternpus man said. "I send about a dozen names a year to research. Part of the job. "Journalistically speaking of course you realize, Professor, yours is an obit of small magnitude. You are preceded in importance by a hundred entertainers led by the current female incarnations of sex, by two hundred politicians and military heroes, fifty athletes and a growing number of murderers, hoodlums, gangsters and Mafia captains who during their lifetime succeeded in making the front page. If your obit is used at all it will probably consist of the first paragraph you read. And there is always the chance that if the makeup department needs another column-inch of space to fit in a toothpaste ad you will die twice. You will die and your obit will be killed. Are there any misstatements? Would you care to amplify any of the statements made? I can assure you anything you care to say will be added to the record." He had walked out without answering. The man had actually toyed with him. Made two false assumptions: one, that a Tempus staff man was invulnerable; two, that he had interviewed a defenseless academic. His behavior had been undoubtedly encouraged through the years by the men he interviewed who consciously or unconsciously tried to curry favor with him in the hope of being personally mentioned in a favorable manner in addition tg the subject at hand. Time to stop his motor. Should he bother with such a nonentity? Why not? It would make the world a slightly less unpleasant cancel its heavy Tempus advertising schedule as long as the science writer remained on staff. He would find it wise to resign before many weeks passed. Have I in fact been arrogant? Perhaps I should stop referring to engineers as mechanics... It seemed to ruffle a lot of feelings. No, they were mechanics. Have I quite unaware, ridden my reputation? That attractive young sociology instructor, Columbine. Pinching her bottom. She had been startled then had swung her head up and neighed like a horse. Pleased. But the consequences could have been quite unpleasant. Saw her at work whenever he went to the library. Pitching for her Ph.D. Regiments, divisions, armies in libraries busily rewriting one another. Single original concept nourishment for a thousand scholars. What nonsense did she teach? One thing certain, it had strong humanitarian implications. An infinite number of variables but still the social sciences. Science the new religion. Unusual name she had. Well his own name, Clarence, had become unusual and much used by fiction writers for comic or effete characters. Fashion in names. Flux of life. Life unbearable without it. When they dubbed her did they know Columbine was the daughter of Pantaloon and the sweetheart of Harlequin? Name fit the subject. Her swaying hips as she walked along a delight to see. The vital force still alive in him. How would he be if he lived as long as Carlson? Flying out to the west coast to honor Carlson on his eightyfifth birthday. Carlson only mildly pleased. His beloved teacher but the love no longer returned. The fires completely out. H e should visit Ellington one more time before he went away. Had he done any further work with Don Juan? The urgent message to visit his laboratory. There were the five chimpanzees, all but one wearing miniature yellow plastic helmets like construction workers. Don Juan, with his construction worker's helmet tipped rakishly forward on its elastic bands to expose the terminals of two electrodes, was standing at a low table. He had a hard on. A platter of fruits and nuts was at his side. Don Juan quickly pressed the button mounted on the table. "I've finally hit a sexual gratification center, this lower electrode pointing down to the brainstem," Ellington said. "There's sufficient visual evidence, but as a further check I sunk the other electrode to the midbrain reticular activating system and get the distinctive electrical pattern of sexual activity. There seems to be no satiation point. When the current goes off every twenty seconds he immediately presses the button and puts it on again. Its close to four hours now and he hasn't eaten a thing. I'm going to leave the current on as long as he continues to react. I hope I don't damage him. "Well Clarence how are you? It's been a long time since you've been here. I've missed you. When you used to drop in every week or so and sit there silently watching these mannikins for an hour or two at a stretch I always meant to ask if you thought you were learning anything. I might as well have asked if you thought they were learning anything. All the time you were observing them they were observing you, with their brief, shy, sidelong glances. "Have you noticed I lost Jacko? Had to go. He was getting to be quite a young man and he was an extra male. I might have walked in here one morning and found a bloody riot had taken place. Chimps don't ordinarily pair off and they are not sexually possessive, but it's best to play it safe. If I were working with hamadryas baboons where each male requires a harem there would have been bloody riot and murder long ago just as there was at the London Zoo. Jacko is now at the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. They're going to train him to operate a few simple instruments and then shoot him into space with a television camera for a month voyage. They were very anxious to get Teddy because I have a pleasure and pain electrode in place. Put some pressure on me. I don't say they abuse their animals but I was put off by the terminology they use. What I call pleasure and pain centers they call reward and punishment centers. "Teddy," Ellington called. A chimpanzee loped over and pressed his thin lips against his arm. Ellington lifted the helmet. "Notice I've used only one electrode for both the pleasure and pain points. I couldn't possibly have used two. Moving this one just two one-hundreths of an inch switches it from point to point. I've got it strongly secured in the pleasure position. Pleasure and pain centers are frequently found this close together. It's a frightful thing to activate a pain electrode. Teddy broke two front teeth biting the edge of the table. The pleasure circuit seems to be completely nonsexual. That is, Teddy would act just like Don Juan but with no indication of sexual activity." He groped in his pocket and took out a penny and gave it to Teddy. "Run along now," he said. Teddy went to the slot machine, inserted the penny and pulled the lever. A few peanuts dropped into his hand. "I need help and I can't get it," Ellington continued. "Take Rosy over there. I've had two appetite electrodes in her hypothalmus for the past month now. One will make her eat compulsively and the other will cause an aversion for food. I've invited just about every gastroenterologist in town here. They come, and I hook up Rosy and put on my little show. They're all amused to see her eating compulsively but not one of them is interested in putting in a few weeks of honest work. I've got to know what's going on inside her. "And now I'm saddled with that pathetic little girl." He pointed to a chimpanzee crouched motionless and staring in a corner. She was the only chimpanzee without a miniature construction worker's helmet. "She was sent to me as a replacement for Jacko. The poor thing is an idiot. Down in the books as Elsie. I was able to trace her history. She was picked up by traders in Africa when she was still of nursing age and kept in a small cage alone for more than a year. The market fell off sharply when seven university primate centers were established. Don Juan here is a Harvard man. The others come from Emory University. Elsie is an extreme example of what happens to countless thousands of children. No affection and stimulation early in life and some degree of reduced mental capacity seems inevitable. "Take off Juan's hat? No, that would only distress him. They are just as much creatures of habit as we are. I'm the only man who uses them. The first chimp I worked with snapped off the terminal of the electrode swinging on the bar. It was a messy piece of business probing to remove the wire. I had to devise some sort of protective covering if I wanted to work with free-moving chimps. When you hit a good spot you don't remove the electrode. You may never hit the same spot again. It wasn't too difficult to condition them to wear their hats..." THE Tempus man had been a  triviality compared to the shock effect of seeing the full-page picture in Computer World of the in front of the machine. There he was, ruthlessly revealed, a little old man. Dear God, a little old man. What had he seen in the mirror as he shaved each morning? What would the end be? Heart? Stroke? Cancer? Heart could be a nasty thing. That man from the University of Pennsylvania after the meeting. Howling and crawling on his hands and knees half across the lobby of the hotel before he expired. He had made provision for a situation such as cancer. There would be no perverted humanitarian prolonging of the experience until he was a drug-stupefied, whimpering vegetable. A man spent decades dying. More than half his taste buds and sense of smell were dead. His brain was at least a quarter of a pound lighter in weight. The vital force on which all physical and mental creativity ultimately depended began to wane, in males at any rate, as early as sixteen years of age and only a flicker of it remained alive in MacKay. He would no longer arrange his schedules to be free in April and May to spend the springtime at his home in the Italian countryside. The beauty of the dawn hour and the clamorous small noises of life were no longer for him. His visit this last spring had been a harrowing experience. Heaven and earth had seemed wrapped in a blanket of silence. He could no longer hear the birdsong. Yes, the high notes went first. He had returned to New York in a few days. What was the rest of the dreary catalog for a man seventy-one years old? An obvious loss of muscular capacity. He breathed less air and yet needed more. The loss of efficiency in extracting the amount of oxygen he required was perhaps as much as fifty per cent. His heart pumped about a third less blood and took longer to recover from the exertion. His nerve impulses traveled slower and his reaction time was slower. Drive carefully. A third or more of the waste-eliminating nephrons of his kidneys were gone. Be abstemious. Drink with the young and suffer the consequences of a crashing hangover. That just about summed it up. Yet, he could not ignore the possibility that he might live as long as Carlson. Could sexuality conceivably be reduced to an electrical current of a fraction of one volt in a small neuronic circuit? And if compulsive eating is caused by the function or dysfunction of another neuronic circuit what happens to psychiatric concepts? The closeness of the pain and pleasure points. It was a certainty there was some small degree of electrical leakage. If there were a slight increase in leakage at an early age wouldn't it create a masochistic personality? What then happened to psychiatric concepts? In an overall sense could increasing leakage with age, and consequent cross-talk, be a cause of dotage? What a terrible thing to happen to a man. How would be know? Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court, who remained on the bench until his nineties, had friends pledged to tell him if he acted peculiarly. Wonderful man. Went to burlesque shows with a book. When the girls went off and the comics came on read book. Life was such an incredibly brief moment of space-time. He remembered... why it seemed... Alice when he was seventeen years old. Their evenings in the fields all that summer. The exquisite first exploration of sex. The mail-order black silk stockings it would have been scandalous to wear in town carried in her bosom and put on in the fields. They had much freedom. Her mother timid and permissive, her father always traveling on his job as a manure spreader. Respectfully known as a manure spreader. Respected sales representative of large chemical firm, one of the first to manufacture fertilizers. The mounting strain of ethical considerations and finally his agonizing declaration that he could not marry her for years and it would be best if they did not see one another again. Foolish boy. That's what she had said, that was all she had said. Foolish boy. Soon afterward she had left town and taken a job as a typewriter in Des Moines. The sweetness of the flesh in youth. Only in youth. Thrown away by youth. Realized by youth only years later when it was gone forevermore. Had he really been arrogant? He should have dropped his opening statement to his seminars. Together with the two Cambridge stories it probably had made him something of a campus character. I nications. Within these walls there will be no limitations to expression. No words will be considered forbidden, obscene or immoral. I have no prepared lectures and very little hard information to offer you. I hope to learn from our discussions. I must tell you, however, that I have a basic point of view which holds that reality -- and the truth, whatever that may be -- is humanly unknowable. We are readers of instruments and the bodily instruments of our senses. We will hold to be true any system of communication that serves a pragmatic purpose. In my own work I productively use two different and conflicting theories of light. They are both therefore true for me. Professional philosophers used to construct systems of reality which were entertaining to read. Today our philosophers are all semanticists, but they throw no light into the darkness. A leading German philosopher has recently published a book which is offered as an exploration of what he calls "The Isness of the Whatness." I do not recommend that you read it. Only one word of wide popularity will be forbidden in this seminar and that is "sophisticated." A word which is commonly used to describe a personality trait, a piece of machinery, a technique and a woman's brassiere is a corpse on the pathway to clarity of thought and requires a hasty burial..." That side of beef from the English department charging that he must hold himself morally responsible for what he had done. Precisely what had he done? True, he had seen his thought translated into hardware for the military. With a few servomechanisms the same thought could program the work of any factory and bring an end to drudgery if a man were not so much cheaper to buy than a machine. Could he possibly be classed with that two hundred per cent American Hungarian physicist appearing before a Senate committee and demanding the construction of more hydrogen bombs when an arsenal already existed for kill and overkill twice over? A projection to the end of the coming decade of nuclear power stations worldwide showed enough plutonium as a byproduct to make a thousand elementary Hiroshima-type bombs a month. In thirty different nations a plaything in the hands of the most sadistic murderous animal on the face of the earth. The usual humanitarian fog, it can't really happen, when it was glaringly obvious that it would happen. Invite them all to a meeting. Serve tea. Admonish them to behave like ethical, humanitarian, Christian gentlemen. He might well live to see the world die. Give the squirrels a chance at the evolutionary process. The final product could hardly be worse. Why had he found it impossible to avoid a biotic approach to his work? The human brain was an exceedingly primitive and inefficient instrument. The universal romanticism about it was nothing short of preposterous. Bare survival and not improved communication had guided its evolutionary development. It was subject to the constant turbulence of emotionality. Its memory was extremely limited and largely uncontrollable. It retrieved the simplest information in a most laborious manner. Yet, if he knew by what mechanism it screened the stimuli of its environment which otherwise would keep it in perpetual convulsions the knowledge would be of tremendous value. cushioned chair when he visited Ellington again late the next afternoon. Ellington looked haggard. Juan still had a hard on, was still pressing the button every twenty seconds. Man of the future. Dozen electrodes anchored to his skull. Wear hat if self-conscious. Pocket battery and selector dial. Dinner served, dial for good appetite. Restraint necessary. Like alcohol. Wish to experience again rolling in the hay with girl friend, tune in memory electrode and brainstem sex activating electrode. Save taking long subway ride to Brooklyn. "He hasn't slept or eaten a thing," Ellington said. "Don't you think I ought to break the circuit? It's close to thirty hours now. I don't know what I would prove if I allowed it to continue until he collapsed. Juan is better equipped than we are. He's got a bone in his penis. All primates have except man. How sad. I have a patient at the hospital I should be seeing soon. Poor chap had a brain tumor and now he's dying of cancer of the stomach. Have to time my visits carefully. He delays his scheduled shot of morphine to be alert when I come. He looks forward to seeing me. He knows he's a goner and he enjoys the electrode work. "I hit a memory point that's a great pleasure to him despite his pain. Memory circuits are so vivid they are experienced as double consciousness. He is visiting his aunt and cousins on his twelfth birthday. They have a surprise party for him. He hears all the shouting and laughter. I left the electrode in place and hooked him up like Juan. He can enjoy his birthday party whenever he wishes. I am interested to see if the memory fades or expands. "Why don't you come with me? We'll unhook Juan and wait a while to be sure he's okay and then go to the hospital together." "I think I'll skip the hospital. I've been rather depressed lately," he had told Ellington. "I dropped in to tell you I was going away soon and I don't think I'll be back." "Where are you going?" "I don't know." "What will you be doing?" "I don't know." "What about your work?" "I don't give a damn about my work. I reached an age some time ago when a man is likely to become aware of his own mortality, an intimate personal awareness of his inexorable dissolution. It can be a time of searching reassessment. My thoughts ran to the evident truth that a man's culture, with religious fervor, gives him values which he must accept unquestioningly or suffer severe penalties, even if those values are monstrous and brutalizing. All history seems little more than a continuous documentation of it. As for myself, I feel I had been given a contract for life, to sign without reading, which assured all my aspirations would prove bogus, and a shabby morality which guaranteed life would be joyless, sterile and malevolent. It's probably just a passing melancholia. I've had a few unpleasant experiences recently." "You are in a bad way, Clarence," Ellington said. "Why don't you come around to my place this evening for dinner and a few drinks? My numerous family is enough to jar anyone into a different frame of mind, and you might find my kids more interesting to watch than the chimps..." L ike all mankind, he had been relentlessly programed, conditioned, since the day he was born. If by some miracle it were possible to deprogram himself what, as a rational man, would he do with the time still left to him? Why not a Mediterranean cruise to think about it. Take a call girl along. How did one go about finding a call girl? What a country boy he ager of course. It had taken him years to realize the man was a part-time pimp. Oh, the time. He looked at his pocket watch. Still time to make it. A solid hour of Pearl White in the old silent movie. The Perils of Pauline. What a treat. It would bring him back to his youth. He hoped they hadn't added a sound track. Piano music, yes. Piano music would be fine. The old silent movie house always had a piano player just as the whorehouse had a piano player. The simile was apt. If he dozed off and were awakened by that hard-sell commercial and had to watch a man shaving a peach with an electric razor he really wouldn't mind. It would intensify the nostalgia. He got to his feet and raised his hand to the switches and then paused. "Now, by the way," he said, "if by any chance they ask you about me tomorrow will you say I've gone to America?" "I will, Mr. Mackay," the machine said; He flipped the two switches and the cold blue light and the yellow went out.  Science-fiction stories from Socialist countries Here is a book that is truly a boon to science-fiction fans -- the best stories of nine writers whose work has seldom, if ever, appeared on this side of the Atlantic. Whether the reader comes to enjoyment -- or to grasp a deeper understanding of socialist idealism -- he is sure to come away fully satisfied. "An immensely valuable addition to the science fiction canon... great  I T'S just a question of adaptsale are unorthodox but we have a  ing your methods to the petremendous investment to protect culiarities of our computer," the and some very active competitors, young man in gray said. He was It all comes back to cost-effectivesitting alertly on a chair that was ness, as I've been saying. Our cornsix inches too low, his briefcase puter is slow and there are jobs it open flat on his lap and his attencan't handle in real time. But it can tion fixed on the other man who, handle so many processes in paralat the moment, gave the impreslei that for most big jobs it simply sion of being dug in behind his can't be beat. Especially it can't be large clean desk. Thank goodness beat in cost to the user." Charles the man's secretary had finally left. Skiller snapped his briefcase shut. "I realize that our conditions of "Well, Dr. Ericson, I can't add any more to what I've said. Any other questions?" Ericson slowly leafed through the sheets of scribbled paper in front of him. His gray hair was tousled where he had kept running his fingers through it during the past hour's conversation. He came to one notation on a well-covered sheet and ran his fingers through his hair again. "The BC-I will invert a fiftythousand-element matrix in ten you could tell me why it can't do anything simpler in less time than that. I just don't like the idea of buying a black box." "If I told you what was in the box or even let you look inside it, that would be the end of Parsys, Inc. All we have to sell is computational capacity produced in a way that is highly proprietary. Anyway, all you really need access to is the peripheral equipment, the interface between computer proper and external input-output devices. You couldn't service the mainframe if you wanted to. The computer accepts #-bit binary inputs, a thousand of them -- and the same for outputs, all in parallel. Anything outside this information boundary is accessible; you can add your own devices if you wish, buy them from us or shop around for other sources. You can buy standard computers from our competition for input-output processing. We're not trying to put anybody out of business -- all we insist on is that we stay in business ourselves, profitably." "All right, you said that before," Ericson said grumpily. "I don't see how we can pass it up -- or at least pass up a trial. A flat four thousand dollars a month, you say? And a minimum of one year and no bargaining?" "Correct. This is an adaptive machine and you won't see it reaching its full capacity for that long." "And you guarantee that it isn't just full of graduate students with desk calculators?" Skiller merely smiled. Ericson stared at the upper left opposite corner of the room for a long moment, then stood up. "Done. Have it here in thirty days. We'll need that long to meet the installation requirements, so don't show up early. What do I sign?" He signed the sort of thing that people sign, and Skiller departed, swinging his briefcase jauntily as he went. Parsys, Inc. was located well out of the city, across a country road from a forest preserve, in a two-story building about a block square. The building still showed signs of newness; some of the second-story windows still had a few stickers on the glass and the area around the driveway was black, with just a speckling of grass shoots emerging into the spring sunlight. Skiller swung his car around the front driveway, past the entrance steps, and parked it more or less at random; sawhorses still blocked the entrance to the parking lot. As he went up the three broad steps to the door, Skiller took in the stone-and-glass of the building's expanse and reflected that to some people this would bespeak a lavish hand with funds, which it did. It reeked of money -- but so far it was all someone else's money. And that someone had a tendency to panic when the quarterly payments were half an hour late and could descend at a moment's notice -- since the last quarterly payment was in arrears by a month so far -- and declare that Parsys, Inc. would henceforth be devoted to light manufacturing. Oh, well, Skiller thought as he waited for the elevator. We now have a firm order and by this time next year well either be in business for good or in jail. Why worry about a matter of degree in such a clear-cut situation? The elevator never came, so he walked down to the basement level (the second floor was to have been ready for occupancy two months ago) and entered the main -- or at least the only fully-equipped -- office and the middle of an argument. furious black-haired bundle of sex in an orange scrap of something, in front of Farley Porter's desk, both hands clenched around crumpled pieces of paper with typing on them, saying, "... that out, Farley, I mean it. Just quit it. Tm not one of your stupid gerbils and I haven't got time for your -- " Skiller raised his eyebrows -- "... ing cute little games. Hello, Charlie. The next time you want to flex your mighty brain go out in back and use it on something that will make us some money. I haven't been paid for two months and all psychologist to get his kicks from -- Charlie, you're smiling. What happened?" "Sold. Thirty days. What's Farley been up to now?" "Just look. Look at what I've been typing. He's been working on me all morning and I was too busy to notice and now look. It'll take me the rest of the day to get back to normal." The pieces of paper were neatly typed but every other line stopped three inches short of the margin, giving an interesting scalloped effect to the page when viewed at a distance. Farley leaned back in his swivel chair, focusing his eyes about a foot below Liz' face. "Sorry, doll. I was just testing a theorem. Reinforcement at the sequence level, converging to a very reliable binary counter. I'll bet on the last letter you didn't miss the alternation once and I'll also bet that you got every word spelled right. No interference, see?" Skiller scanned the letter he was holding. "Right. Go teach it to BC-#. I sold one." There was silence suddenly, and then a scrabbling from an adjoining office. Perry Jackson rolled into view in his desk chair and made his brown face into something like a pleased look. "Duh plantation am saved, boss?" Skiller dropped into his own chair and opened the briefcase on his desk. He extracted the order form and handed it to Liz who passed it around. Ericson's signature was bold and black at the bottom of the second page. Porter took off his glasses, polished them and, after a glance at Liz put them back on. Liz sat down at her typewriter. Jackson rolled through the doorway and propped his feet up on a vacant desk, folding his hands across his middle. Clearly, this was a Big Moment. "Uhm, did he read it all?" Porter finally asked. "We went over it for an hour," Skiller said. "He agreed to everything." "Security, too?" Skiller nodded. "And we have thirty days. How's BC-#?" Jackson sighed. "Dumb. I put a third-order differential equation through last night and it just disappeared. No printout at all. And something has gone wrong with the filter unit -- it smells. I tried a memory dump and it gave me # ones. It's lying to me." Jackson looked vaguely pleased. "Somebody told it I'm colored." Liz said, "Oh, funny." She crossed her legs, glanced at the result and put both feet on the floor again. "Well, let's do something. Let's you do something. I'm going out and buy a new dress. You're all looking at me." She plucked at the front of her orange scrap and hunched her shoulders. "Why is everybody so nervous? Isn't this what we wanted?" Six eyes focused on her, here and there. She stood up defiantly. She twitched defiantly. Then she grabbed her purse from under her desk and said, "God damn you all, I thought it was a pretty dress," started to cry and ran out of the office, slamming the door. There was a long moment's silence. Then Porter let out a long breath. "Right. Now let's think." Jackson said, "Now she's going to hate us." "No," Skiller said. "She would have had to come in nude tomorrow, trying to get someone to notice her. Now she doesn't have to." Porter said, "Let's think. I've wasted the whole morning pulling her pigtails and trying to keep from jumping her right on her desk. I'm worn out. Let's go argue with BC-#." CI occupied the center of what some day was supposed to be full of BC-ls, #s, and so on. For economy only the overhead fluorescents in the immediate area of the computer were on. The assorted racks of electronic devices and the random tables covered with papers and the chairs scattered here and there made an isthe center of the empty assembly room. The three men moved to an upright rack from which thick draperies of cables ran to a tenfoot cube in the center of the mess. Jackson flipped on some switches and pilot-lights sprang up. A lineprinter went kachung and waited, humming. Jackson said, "All right, give me the reel marked 'NG' and I'll show you." He accepted the roll of tape, mounted it in a tape transport beside the rack, flipped loops between rollers and poked a few buttons. The reels spun briefly and stopped. "Ready." At the rack, Porter pressed a button and from within BC-I came a soft chiming sound. In about appeared on one panel of the rack and Porter pushed another button. The tape reel began to spin, kept spinning for about thirty seconds and then stopped abruptly, the dangling loops oscillating to equilibrium. "We can't have that smell," Skiller observed. "Let's knock out another panel and put in a second filter unit. How long has this one been operating?" "Oh, about -- uh -- " Jackson paused, looking enlightened. "I don't think it's ever been changed. That's about three months." "Well, we service every month, so that should be all right, then. Is this the differential equation you were talking about?" Just then the line-printer began to go pup-pup-pup-pup and the paper flowed into the receiving basket, folding itself neatly in a zigzag. One hundred and eighty decimal characters per line, ten lines per second. Jackson said, "Of course this is only one printer channel; we should have received three more line-printers by now so we could check out at least four channels running in parallel, but this is a pretty close simulation. I have the system hooked up to a multiplexer sampling sixty-four output channels in rotation. It's almost the same thing as parallel output. Hey, look, it's data!" Skiller ran a finger down one column of numbers; they progressed in an orderly way from one value to slightly larger or smaller values, as the solution to a continuous equation should. "Looks okay but is it right?" "Right, schmight," said Porter. "They're all working together and they're computing -- let's take a look inside." He flipped the line-printer off, stopping the flow of paper, and led the way to the other side of BC-I where a short ladder led up to a wooden platform five feet off the floor. They climbed up and Porter lifted a panel labeled "TO." from the top surface of the cube, revealing a three-foot-square aperture covered with semireflecting plastic. Gathering around, the three leaned their elbows on the frame of the one-way mirror and looked BC-#. A bustle of activity: tiers of cubicles with connecting corridors and ramps; tunnels and platforms; scurrying little brown and gray forms zipping from one place to another, sometimes dragging an inert form with them and sometimes alone; other hunched headforemost in the little cubicles, the bobbing of the backs indicating rapid and continuous little movements but giving no view of what was happening. "Watch," Jackson said. "Right near the end of the program I've put in a long loop for exercising the whole input-output module at one time. Last night the critters got confused and they were all responding to everything -- that's when I got all ones for the output." Suddenly the whole bank of cubicles that was visible began a flurry of synchronized activity; a ripple of bobs began at one corner, traveled swiftly across one row, back down the next lower row and so forth, until within a few tenths of a second the disturbance had reached the extreme lower-left cubicle. Then the cycle began again at the instant it ended. "This is a #-unit module, and each unit is good for about a thousand bits, so we've got # megabits per cycle right now, potentially -- this loop is giving the same context-address to everyone, so something like one percent of memory is being outputted. And I've got the peripheral computer checking the output, so it must be okay now. It sure wasn't last night." "Have you checked the redundancy? You couldn't have if the module wasn't working." Porter suddenly pointed. "Never mind, there goes one now." A squad of little brown and gray forms, looking like slightly undersized shrews because that is what they were, scurried up a ramp on the input-output module and dragged a body out of one cubicle. Another animal squeezed into the cubicle past the body being extracted and began bobbing up and down immediately. The others pulled the casualty down the ramps to the very bottom and disappeared through a small door. Porter said, "No alarm. Either the standby circuit is working or the alarm isn't. But the cleanup squad showed up in plenty of time.' Jackson pulled out a pocket notebook and thumbed through it. "Mean time between failures -- about twelve days now. Pretty good. You've just doubled it since we started. And I think they're definitely smarter than they were eight generations ago. We might even try slowing the metabolism a little more." "No go," Porter said. "I've run into a problem there. The brains are getting larger and there's a definite tradeoff between metabolic rate and keeping that brain in good shape. I still can't tweak the one without something coupling into replicates, messing up the other. "But I still think we have a way to go before we run out of gains just from reorganization. Look at all that bobbing, for instance -- that's tiring and it doesn't contribute to the output at all. They don't have to do that -- but it's gotten to be very popular, I see. Maybe we have to work some more on their lower levels -- make the stuff in the recreation room more sensitive, so they get used to bigger effects from less output. The strategy of reorganization has gotten awfully complicated, though -- I'm afraid to tinker much more with this model." They all straightened up, and Porter and Jackson put the panel back in place. BC-#, the first commercial biological computer, stood bukly and silent in its pool of light, as the three men fussed a bit more over the printer output, rewound the tape, cut the power to the peripheral machinery and left. Jackson was saying, "I don't think there's any such word as 'gotten' and you said it twice -- " as the door closed. was ending. Little gray and brown animals scurried up the ramps, climbed the tiers of cubicles in a wave, and others began descending. In less than half a minute the changeover was complete. The new set of animals stood alertly in their cubicles! Then the lights in the I.O. Module began to dim and these animals began to leave, too. The abandoned cubicles remained dark. In each were five tiny light-bulbs and a single spring contact which could be closed by a slight downward pressure. The holiday began, with much creeping about in mysterious dark passageways, much cavorting amid the levers and springs and wheels and games of chance in the recreation room; much frantic sex when it suddenly became possible; roaring good times in the juvenile mess-hall where the simplest and stupidest shrew could feast on things that tasted good, felt good, and wriggled good at no more expense than operating an elementary mechanism; and much lovely napping in dark private holes, one thousand to the cubic foot. The infinite universe, ten feet on a side fed, entertained, educated, protected and contained its little brains, demanding only that of the store just a thousand be reserved, and of the hundreds of actions each could control for twelve hours out of twenty-four only the special control of one or two actions for one hour out of four. Altogether, not a bad deal for animals whose primitive ancestors weighed a healthy ## ounce, lived brief lives of hunger and anxiety and were possessed of entirely intolerable personalities.  explaining a month later and elsewhere, "is really just a model of what we think a brain is, which is a model in the first place. What we've done is to stop making models of models, and instead start making something like a collection of properties that organizes itself into a model that produces the behavior we want. We don't even think of it, among ourselves anyway, as a computer. It's a bunch of self-organizing units that can change the way they control their individual inputs, independently and individually, so as to maximize whatever they need maximized. All we do, all you do when you follow the programing instructions, is to see to it that what these units have to do to get what they need can only be done by solving your problem on the way. We create an artificial set of rules, for example, that makes inverting a matrix a necessary means which these units must use to keep themselves happy. They don't know that what they're doing is inverting a matrix, of course -- no one of them performs any single action that could be called inverting a matrix -- but when each of them lives by the rules we insert into its environment, all of them together end up inverting our matrix -- or anything else we want them to do." "That's gobbledygook," his feminine companion said. She was seated on a cushion across a low table from him and they were recovering from an expensive dinner. His feminine companion was a functioning vice president in charge of engineering for a large automobile manufacturer, a person who could say yes or no to installation of a BC-#, or a hundred, if she felt that it would save a dollar and a half per car, or fifteen also quite attractive from most angles and had a smashing figure which she showed off to good advantage by the simple strategy of leaving it uncovered from the waist, or somewhat lower, up. The last ten years had been a devastating disaster to the textile mills, as Skiller had been discovering. "Uh -- it's what? No, it isn't." Skiller said. He had reached for his drink and become momentarily arrested in his train of thought. "Definitely not gobbledygook. Just a new idea, which is by definition hard to express in terms that sound familiar." "Perhaps I would understand you better, Charles, if you would tell me the principles behind the -- thing, if you don't want to call it a computer -- you're trying to sell us." "Sorry," said Skiller. "It's bad for industrial relations but that's the one thing I can't tell you. As far as anyone else is concerned, we're selling a computer with inputs and outputs and specifications and a software manual which teaches you how to make it program itself. In five years, maybe less, you'll know. We just want to take advantage of our priority while we can. You understand." "Oh, yes. I've taken advantage of many priorities while I had them -- for heaven's sake, go ahead and look. Don't be furtive. This is a very delicate matter of style, and if you act old-fashioned I'll just have to go and put something on." Skiller sagged for a moment and threw up his hands -- discreetly"I can't look and I can't not look. There's a girl in our office who was working up to this but she seems to have cracked before we did. Are you really just being in style, or were you -- Well, forget it." He stood up, smiled and said, "Let's say I'm old-fashioned and go get you something to put on -- or get rid of the rest of it." She gathered her things and stood to take his arm; she smiled, too, suddenly. "I like your idea better," she said. Nothing was signed that night, despite exp#ration of a number of possibilities. next day Skiller found himself shouting at Liz, who was a little more demurely attired but not quite enough to resolve the question of whether she was wearing anything underneath. "You know where we ended up? You know where we ended up! I'm going batty! If the executives aren't goodlooking naked women their secretaries are -- and if their secretaries aren't you know they haven't got enough money to buy a goddamned computer! Nobody's getting anything done any more except the queers!" Liz said somewhat stiffly. "You're supposed to have a little self-control. It has nothing to do with sex. Women dress for other women." "And undress for other men," Skiller replied. "Well, it used to have something to do with sex and as far as I'm concerned it still does. That goes for you, too." Liz hunched her shoulders. "And for Chcissake, stand up," he added and left before anything worse could happen. As he went out he heard the telephone ringing and Liz, after a short delay, answering it, and then he had to go back in. "It's a Miss Stengler," Liz said. "Ther "Oh," he replied and put the telephone to his ear while not looking at Liz. Let her listen. "Charles?" Her voice was quite neutral, considering. "Yes, uh, Peggy. Or -- " "I'm sending Mr. Abernathy over to your office to continue the discussion." "Mr. Abernathy?" "Mister. He'll have all his wits about him and all his clothes on. I'm telling him to order ten BC-I computers, or whatchmacallits, if he understands what you're talking about. He can say no." "I'm glad," Skiller said, "that there is still someone around this city who is concerned about the Gross National Product." "There is. And don't ever call me again -- on business." After a while Liz suggested, "Hang up," so he did. "Well?" she said. "I'm trying to decide whether I'm being worked on. Does she love me for my computer or for myself?" "Don't ask me." "Don't be annoyed. It's just that now they want to talk about ten computers." "You must have been terrific." "And don't be icy, either." He looked at her thoughtfully. "I feel like a convict who's just finding out that there are great silver birds in the sky. Have I been that much out of touch with things?" "Since I've been here, you have. And you usually smell like shrews -- or you used to before you went out selling." "I thought the uncovered look was just in places like Los Angeles or Boston. They're all over -- even at hamburger joints. Even teenagers. Doesn't anything -- happen?" Liz shrugged. And stood up straight. "Sure. Sometimes." "Sometimes?" "Well, why ask me? I don't go around counting." "In public, you mean?" Liz was beginning to look strange. "I suppose so -- you always see a few kids -- I mean, we're all healthy now, and you don't have to have a -- " her voice dwindled away. "Baby. But don't a lot of them have them anyway?" "Charlie, I don't know. It just seems freer than it used to be. All right, it does have something to do with sex." "I wonder," Skiller said. A thought was forming far back in his awareness -- and another phendmenon was asserting itself, too. He was thinking, looking straight at Liz. Finally she simply reached up and unbuttoned the two top buttons of her blouse, settling the question as to what was underneath, and finally he noticed. The thought submerged in favor of the phenomenon. A t noon he went into the animal lab where Porter and Jackson had been conveniently stuck shaping some young shrews. Porter and Jackson greeted the news about the order for ten computers with skepticism and gladly turned the job of shaping over to Skiller. They finally agreed that since there was a possibility of more orders they had better get into the city and prime their main suppliers -- and also carry the news to the man at the bank, who was understandably interested even in rumors of solvency. Jackson and Porter departed. Skiller found that the initial shaping had gone well. Early in training, the human operator had to make the rules bend a little whenever the animals did something even partially like what was required, so that, for example, food would appear if the animal even made a motion toward the bar it was supposed to press. The human operator had to make himself a slave to the animal during this shaping phase. Now, however, the young shrews were well past the initial bar-pressing phase and were learning the sequential aspects of the task, learning that if light A came on before light B there was no point in pressing the bar (experimentalists even got a mild shock if necessary, to emphasize the futility), and that if B came on before A, something highly edible would appear if the bar were pressed. This task was already straining the intellectual capacity of the shrews and from now on the complexity would not extend any higher; instead a desk-top computer would gradually add "sideways" to the task, adding more bits, essentially, without changing the kind of problem. In effect, the operation codes of BC-I were being defined. Finally Skiller was satisfied that the process could complete itself without his help. He went into the assembly room, passing the office on the way. He heard Liz typing and did not go in. The thought that had been at the back of his awareness was growing larger now and he went to BC-I with a feeling of foreboding. His own behavior astonished him; surely the provocation... He dragged the wooden platform around to another side of BC-#, whick was now alone in the room and ready for delivery. He opened a different panel, this time having to unlock it; this one opened on the recreation room, actually a center in the computer which was concerned with only one thing: maintaining the training given the young shrews before they were introduced as replacements. He looked down into the space, this time dimly lit and full of shrews performing random-looking actions. A partition across the center separated the males and the females (they dutifully, one might say religiously, separated themselves after each work period). Some of the levers in each half of the room made mutual access possible and no shrew ever tried to mate except by this means. Shrews reproduce at a fantastic rate and in a protected environment would quickly overpopulate the entire computer, clogging it with uneducated animals. Training the animals to restrict their mating to the recreation room was difficult but essential, for only by controlling the number of times per day that the access-panels would open could the population be kept at a reasonable level. A chief function of the monthly servicing that was a mandatory part of the sales contract was to remove untrained young animals and replace losses with trained ones. on the viewing-port frame and contemplated the knots of animals around that particular set of levers on both sides. Not many, not too as best he could with the unsatisfactory techniques available, so as to keep the drive for reproduction just low enough to be satisfiable in the recreation room,without accidentally destroying the increased intelligence, small size and longevity which were essential to the main purpose of BCI . Skiller brooded, however, not over this sexual situation, even though the parallel with his own recent experiences was unsettling, but over a larger picture. The entire recreation room consisted of only two types of objects: passive ones, which were immovable and served mainly as places to stand or things to hide behind, and active ones; levers and wheels and yielding obstacles, each one of which caused something to happen that research had proven was important to a shrew. Anything that the shrews could affect in any way reacted in turn, through circuitry and devices in the walls of the computer, to do something that mattered to the shrews. Each shrew, therefore, learned to control the wheels, levers, and yielding obstacles so as to receive the water it needed, the special foods it delighted in, the sex it wanted, the kind of light or dimness it craved at the moment, or in a word all the inner conditions that constituted its own inherited definition of good living -- of survival. Since the rules connecting what the shrews did to what they received in return were indentically the operations of the computer, the shrews learned to do these things, to respond to disturbances of special sorts, by performing the actions that were the bases of elementary computational processes. If one light comes on, the left bar must be pressed to get food. If two lights, the right bar. If three lights, both. That is nothing more than one-bit binary addition with carry. Every shrew in the Arithmetic Module could perform, if necessary, five-bit addition, parallelin, serial out, and there were usually about # animals in this module. One hundred twenty-five bit additions could therefore be performed at once if the problem required it. Furthermore the system was self-reorganizing; it would modify its own operation codes until the specified result was produced. All that was needed was the proper progression of changes in the rules -- in the properties of the environment in which the shrews lived. It was all in the programer's manual -- in gobbledygook, of course. And that is what went through Skiller's mind as he watched the small forms moving about among the devices in the divided recreation room. He was thinking about the whole environment of his shrews, watching how they mastered it and kept it under control, without ever knowing why doing this or that resulted in the consequences which were so delightful. The "why" was concealed in the walls and floor, into which the shrews could not see and which would have meant nothing to them if they could have looked. So I do what feels good, Skiller thought, and so do the rest of them. I do things and get good feelings back, and what happens between I have not the slightest idea. That's why I don't like what's been happening. I don't understand what changed the rules, or even what really changed, which seems to me like a change in the rules. Something has happened that affects me very personally and I have no control over it. I can only change the way I respond, so as not to be embarrassed or miss something. I have learned by rote and I relearn by rote. Where is understanding? It is not possible. It does not exist. H e was still there when Porter and Jackson returned. The bank was ecstatic. The suppliers were suspicious. In the middle of Jackson's review of the suppliers' demands for surety, mainly money, Skiller said, "I'm sorry, can we go into that tomorrow? Farley, I want have an idea." "Sure, if it's important," Porter said and led the way. machine for the automatic sequential decoding of long protein molecules by brute-force application of simple steps over and over without mistakes, night and day. This machine formed part of a feedback which was capable of making sysmolecules. The operation of this servo was extremely slow, convergence to a specified molecule requiring at times several months, but sometimes it worked and sometimes the specified changes were accomplished without lethal sideeffects on other parts of the chains. The remainder of the lab was a nice set of microsurgery tools, whereby the altered molecules could be implanted in a denucleated ovum, which sometimes developed into a shrew having new characteristics vaguely resembling what was wanted. "Okay, what?" Porter asked when all three were in the lab. mans with this thing?" "Naturally. But so far nobody has been able to decode most of it." "I know that. What I want to know is -- could you use this thing other form without making something nonhuman at the same time?" "That's impossible to say. We've unraveled a fair part of the human code -- others have -- but it seems that there are a lot of characteristics beyond the ordinary mental and physical ones we know about. At least there's a lot of code left after we think we have accounted pretty well for everything we do know about. But you know as well as I do that tinkerdefinitely naughty -- death penalty and all that. You aren't mad at me, or something?" "No. But I have reason to wonder what all those other parts of say that most physical and mental characteristics have been traced. What is the rest for?" "I said I don't know. You're not being very obvious." Skiller suddenly sat down at a desk; he laughed briefly. "No, I'm not. Look, what I'm thinking about is really way ahead of our game -- but think about this. Suppose we could crank up your gadlinks in your shrews that don't affect their heredity. Possible?" Porter grew more interested. "Hey -- you know what? I don't know. I don't think it's ever been tried. Do you mean -- " "I mean we could stop having to share memory capacity with the systems in the shrews that are already using the existing code structure. We could give every tra bits of storage capacity." "But how would you read it out? If it isn't part of the existing code, the existing systems couldn't utilize the storage space and you couldn't put in a read-only memory for permanent instructions. You'd have to grind their brains up -- " Porter suddenly became agitated and went on in a new tone of voice. "By god, all you'd need would be you could get the readout from Jackson broke in. "But the suPorter said, "All right, we haven't got one. We haven't really pushed the reader because the bottleneck is the synthesizer. But if all we want to do is read, then maybe we could go into parallel operation -- maybe we could make BC-I operate a thousand parallel readers -- why, we haven't even thought of the possibilities. Charlie, this may blow up in the morning, but right now I like it. I do like it very much." Skiller was abruptly different. "Well, Farley, I just wanted to know what you think. You guys go on home now; I'll stay here and see that BC-I closes down properly." In five minutes they had left and Skiller went back to BC-#. Liz was still typing, probably trying to get her margins even again. He smiled, and then unsmiled as he entered the assembly room. A man can drive himself crazy supposing. Charles Fort probably did; I wonder if I was named for him. I'm driving myself nutty right now. All because I have spent ten years developing the world's first biological computer and have just discovered that I am now emerging into the real world, having lost about a century somewhere. That's the problem; I'm feeling left out and inept or something. No, not inept, that's for sure. Too ept, if anything. Too suspiciously ept, as if I have suddenly turned into somebody else. He undid the panel over the recreation room again. Suppose, he thought. Suppose I had the su"When a reader buys a book he buys an entire package, consisting not only of the author's words but also the publisher's package, the blurb writer's blurb, and the art director's cover. I review books as opposed to manuscripts, and that is what distinguishes me," says Algis Budrys, "from most book reviewers. What distinguishes me from all critics is the proper sort of intelligence." Budrys started at Galaxy many years ago as Associate Editor, working for Horace Gold. Being "the victim of favoritism," in his words, he was later tapped by Fred Pohl to do a regular book column for Galaxy, and he's been at it ever since. "I am eminently qualified to review books," he says, "because I am a pretty good automotive public relations man." And his PR work in Chicago has kept him chasing around the country testing his client's products and too far from the typewriter this month to do his column. Budrys sold his first yarn to Space Stories in #; he had been writing sf and getting rejected for about ten years. "My favorite magazine in those days was Planet Stories. Every time I sent a story in it was promptly rejected and the editor was promptly fired. When I finally sold a story. Cage of a Thousand Wings, the magazine folded. And I felt personally responsible." Last time we talked to him, Budrys was out of his test cars and back at his typewriter. Writing next month's column? pose I had a real dilly of a problem, like "why", or "what for" or something else that might take ten thousand shrews ten thousand generations to solve. Suppose we just a drop in the bucket -- what godawful problem would need that much storage? Who could we sell such a memory to? Nobody could even state a problem that would need that much storage to hold the answers. But down there are the shrews, some of then -- quite a few -- lined up at those special levers. We ought to call this section the whorehouse. There they are, living their lives in a rather nice environment, containing all that shrews are known to need and probably a lot of luxuries as well; it's got everything we even suspect that they like, and all they have to do to get it is push a few pieces of environment around a little. They don't know why pushing here results in something good there, but they learn the rules; they know what to do. They have perfect control over their own inputs. But they do the controlling our way. The way that solves our problems, while they are solving their own tiny elementary ones. Skiller sighed in disgust at himself, but his mind kept churning. Suppose! What a waste of time, but still, suppose. Suppose we were reaching the end of the computation, and the time was drawing close for final printout. It's been a big problem, and there will be a horrendous amount of output generated, intermediate results that must be stored, new conversion programs, reference tables to be generated. We'll just run out of storage space long before the final data are generated. We look down on our shrews, and realize that there just aren't enough of them. What do we do? Why, it's simple. up the drive, and change the rules connecting the levers to the little doors so that they open more often. We drop the price at the whorehouse. In a little while statistics will provide up with all the storage we need. Skiller heard the assembly-room door open and close, and then soft footsteps approaching. Very soft. He was suddenly filled with a feeling that was almost panic, and he continued staring down into the recreation room, watching the levers go. The footsteps approached very close, and then Liz spoke. "Charlie?" "Just a minute, Liz." He did not turn around. He felt that he knew what she was going to say and in a second she said it. "Charlie, don't you want to -- look at me?" Eventually, of course, he couldn't help it, then or ever again.  D avis took the third expressway was terrible. He donned his gas from #nd Street to the site of mask before he stepped into the the old Rockefeller Center, lot, slammed the left-hand door dropoed down through the quadinto the unprotected door of the ruple overpass and braked to a Cadillac parked next to him. halt in the fourth level lot. He "Serve him right for crossing a paused a moment before alighting parking line," he growled. He from the car, trying to catch his jumped aside quickly as a Musbreath -- even in the car, with the tang Mach V whistled past him, CO filters on over-duty, the air slammed around a corner, hurtled down the ramp to the street. He flung a curse after it. He eased his head out between the parked cars before sprinting across the traffic lane of the parking lot to the elevator on the other side. The attendant rushed to him, tried to demand the # daily fee, stepped back when Davis flashed his Traffic Manager's badge at him. The attendant dropped to his knees in salute, stayed down while Davis rushed past. His office was on the ground level of the Roads and Traffic Building and when he came off the elevator, the hall was full of dust and a jack hamer was going crazily at one end of it. The man behind it was wearing the light blue of Road Construction Unlimited. Davis remembered the spur route of the #nd level, #th Street West that was going through the building's corner. He hadn't expected construction to start this soon. One wall had been ripped out of the office and the derricks were swinging the steel girders for the spur route into place. More men were driving them into the concrete of the floor, slamming them into place with magn-gun rivets. One of the drivers kept walking to the water cooler and Davis stopped him. "That stuff is three dollars a gallon, buddy," he said. "Road crew, Mac." The big man tried to push him aside and Davis flashed the badge. "This is still my office, he said. He crossed to the control board, buzzed the Director. "Davis in," he said. I suppose the old bastard will want a report already... "Right," the Director's secretary said, "I'll tell him." Leingen waved at him from the casualty table and he trotted over, flashed the badge and Leingen nodded. He was off duty now, officially relieved -- and he looked relieved. Lucky bastard will be home in three hours -- if he makes it... The casualty report was horrendous, up # over the day before -- with # dead on the United Nations area overpass alone. He dialed Road Service. "Road," the voice on the other end said. "Traffic Manager. Send a bird. I'm going up for a look." He checked some of the other reports -- two breakdowns on the fifth level of the Tappan Zee bridge, both '# Fords. Goddam people had no right driving two-year-old cars on the roads anyway. He buzzed Arrest Division. "All 'seventy-nine Fords off the roads," he said. "Rog." On the board he watched, the red dots that were the Fords being shuttled off to the waiting ramps, clogging them. He flipped a visual to one of them, saw the cars jamming in and the bulldozers pushing them closer. The din around him was increasing and pieces of plasta-plaster were starting to fall from the ceiling. "Slap up a privacy screen," he ordered. He received no answer and looked at one of the workmen driving the rivets for the girders. Jones wasn't there, he thought suddenly. Of course not, that girder is where his desk was. He'd miss Jones. "That ain't a priority job, buddy," the workman said. "You want materials, get 'em from Construction." D avis growled, checked his watch. #. Things were just moving into the third rush period. Almost on cue the building began to quiver as the lower echelon office workers hurtled by in their Lincolns and Mercuries to obscure little jobs in obscure little offices. A short buzz came from the main phone. The Director. "Yes, sir," Davis said. "Davis?" the palsied voice said. Die, you old bastard, Davis thought. "Casualties are up all over." "The roads are jammed, sir." "You're Manager. Do something." "We need more roads. Only you can authorize em." "We don't have any more roads. But that traffic must move. Do what you have to." The voice went into a coughing spasm. "When you're Director, you build roads." "Yes, sir." He punched off. All right, he's move the traffic. Say this for the Director -- he'd back a Manager all the way. "The bird's here," the intercom said. "Smith," Davis said. His assistant looked up from the main board. "You're in charge. I'm going up." He moved to the elevator, bounced up, flipped his telecorder to audio, caught the information as he hurtled toward the tenth floor. "Major pileup at Statue of Liberty East," the speaker barked. "Seventeen cars and a school bus. Ambulance on the scene. Structural damage on Fifth level East, Yankee Stadium Speedway. More accidents on Staten Island One, Two, Four, Ten, Thirteen, and Twenty-Two; East Side Four, Nine, and Eleven -- " Davis punched off. Matters were worse than he had thought. On the fifth floor he changed elevators to avoid the ramp from the exact-change lane to the fourth level, zipped to the roof and the waiting helicopter. "Fifty-car pileup on Yankee Stadium Four," the helicopter radio screamed and he punched the button to Central. "Davis." "Yes, sir?" "What's the time on next of kin identification?" he asked. "Twenty-three minutes, sir." "Make it nineteen. Inform all units." "Yes, sir." "Lift off," he growled at the pilot. He threw his eyes out of focus, watching the cars hurtling by the edge of the roof. I could reach out and touch them -- and have my arm torn off at # miles an hour... He coughed. He always forgot to don his gas mask for the short trip from the elevator to the bird aiid it always bothered his lungs. The smog was fortunately thin this morning and he could see the gray that was Manhattan below him. Southward he could make out the spire of the Empire State Building rising forty stories above the cloverleaf around it and beyond that the tower of the Trade Center and the great hulk of the parking lot dwarfing it. "Hook right," he ordered the pilot, "spin down along the river." There was a pile-up at the Pier # crossover and he saw a helicopter swooping down to pick up the mangled cars at the end of a magnet, swing out across the river to drop them into the New Jersey processing depot. H e buzzed the Director as he saw the wrecks piling up in front of the three big crunchers at the depot. They were hammering broken Fords and Buicks into three-foot lumps of mangled steel. spitting them onto the barges. The barges were then being towed out to Long Island Sound for the new jetport. But fast as the crunchers were, they were not fast enough. With a capacity of only # cars an hour apiece, they could not keep pace with the rush-hour crackups. "Yes, Davis," the Director wheezed. "Would you call U.S. Steel," Davis asked. "We need another cruncher." "Well, I don't know if we really do -- but I'll call." Davis punched off angrily. His practiced eye gauged the flow of traffic on the George and Martha Washington Bridges. The cars were eighty feet apart and he ordered a close to seventy-two, effectively increasing the capacity by ten per cent. That was almost as good as another level -- but not good enough. The traffic lane above the piers was packed and smoke from ships was rising between the two twelvelane sections. Trucks loaded with imports paused for a moment at the top of the ramps were steam catapulted into the traffic. He saw one truck, loaded with what looked like steel safes, hit by a Cadillac, go out of control, hurtle over the edge of the roadway and fall one hundred feet -- five levels -- to the ground. The safes went bouncing in every direction, slamming into cars on every level. Even two hundred feet above the scene he could hear the scream of brakes and the explosions as the autos crashed and burned. He punched for Control. "Scramble an ambulance to Pier Forty-six, all levels," he said. He smiled. It was always good to be the first to report an accident. It showed you hadn't fotgotten your training. He had reported four one morning, a record. But now there were bounties for accident reporting and it was rare when a traffic man could actually turn one in. At one time traffic accidents had been reported by the police, but now they were too busy tracking down law violators. An accident was harmful only in that it broke the normal traffic flow. Traffic was heavy on all levels, he saw -- he could actually see only three levels down and there were as many as eight below that -- and the main interchange at Times Square was feeding and receiving well. The largest in Manhattan, it spanned from #nd Street to #th and from Fourth to Eighth Avenues. There had been protests when construction had started -- mostly from movie fans and library fanatics -- but now it was the finest interchange in the world, sixteen lanes wide at the #nd Street off ramp, with twelve exact change lanes. Even the library fans were appeased, he thought: it had been his idea to move the library lions from the old site -- they would have been destroyed with the rest of the building had he not spoken -- to the mouth of the Grand Central speed lane to Yankee Stadium. The helicopter banked, headed down the West Side parkway toward the Battery interchange and the Statue of Liberty crossover. It had been clever of the design engineers to use the Bedloe's Island base of the statue for the crossover the standard practice of driving piles into the harbor water. The copper had brought a good salvage price, too. Of course, the conservationists, the live-in-the-past-people, had objected here, too. But, as always, they were shouted down at the protest meetings. The traffic had to roll, didn't it? Below the helicopter Manhattan was a seething mass of speeding cars -- reds, blacks, blues, and this background of concrete and asphalt. There were quick flashes of brake lights, frightened blurs as a tie rod snapped or a tire blew. Dipping wreckocopters swooped in to pluck cars and pieces of cars from the highways before the lanes jammed. The island was # lanes wide at the top, widened to # at the base with the north-south lanes over the sites of the old streets running forty feet apart, over, under, and even through the old buildings. It was the finest city in the world, made for and by automobiles. And he controlled, for eight hours a day anyway, the destiny of those automobiles. He felt the sense of power he always had here in the helicopter, swooping above the traffic. It passed quickly -- it always did -- and he was observing clinically, watching the flow. "There," he said to the pilot, indicated the fifth lane on the pier route. A dull red Dodge was going sixty-five, backing up the traffic for miles. There was no room to pass, and, with the traffic boiling up out of the tunnels and bridges onto the road, a jam was inevitable. "Drop," he ordered, moved behind the persuader gunsight, lined the Dodge in the cross hairs. He fired and watched the result. The dye marker smashed on the Dodge's hood, glowed for a moment. Warned, the driver moved to a sane #. But the dye stayed and the driver would be picked up later in the day -- the dye was impossible to remove except with Traffic-owned detergent -- and sentenced. For first clogging, the fine was only #, but for later offenses, drivers were banned from the road for five to # days, forced to ride the railways into town. Davis shuddered at the thought. Battery Point and Bedloe's Island looked good and the copter heeled. He used the binoculars to check the Staten Island Freeway, saw that it was down to sixteen lanes coming into New York from the high of twenty-two. The main rush was almost over and he could start preparing for the early lunch rush. Trade Center. The one tower, two had been planned, was standing high above the highways around it, with the great bulk of the parking lot building rising above it, the smog line lapping at the seventy-ninth floor. He saw the red lights in the first # floors of the lot signifying full, knew that the remaining # floors would not take all of the cars still piling in from the twenty-five feeder lanes. He buzzed Control. "Yes, sir?" the voice said. "Davis. Get me Parks and Playgrounds." "Parks and Playgrounds?" The voice was incredulous. "Right." He waited and when a voice answered, spoke quickly, did his best to overpower the man on the other end. "Traffic Manager Davis," he snapped. "I want Battery Park cleared. I'm preparing to dump two thousand cars there in five minutes." "You can't -- " "The hell I can't! I'm Traffic Manager. Clear the park -- " What there was left of it -- the grass fighting for air against the exhaust fumes, dying in the shadow of the interchange above it, city dwellers flocked to the only green in eleven miles -- Central Park had been a bastion for a long time but it was too open, too convenient. It was buried now under a rising parking lot and seven levels of traffic. As a concession to the live-in-the-pasters the animal cages had been placed on the parking lot roof and stayed there for two weeks until they had been hit by a drunk in a Lincoln. There had been a minor flap then with the carbonmonoxide drugged animals prowling the ramps until they had been hunted down by motorcyclists. "What about the people?" Parks and Playgrounds asked. "Sorry about that. They have four and a half minutes." He punched off, buzzed Beacons and Buzzers. "Davis," he said. "Re-route Battery Five, ramps two through ten, into Battery Park." "Right." He buzzed Lower City, ordered Wall Street closed for seven blocks. Later in the day they'd have to reroute the traffic around it. No matter, the tie-up lasted for four hours anyway. The big pile-up, as always, was at the Empire State building where the main north-south curved twelve lanes out of the way to avoid the huge building. And, as they curved, tires skidded on the pavement, cars clawed to the side and, day after day, car after car lost control on the corner, went plunging over the side to shatter on the ramps below. It was, in many ways, the best show in town and office workers crowded the windows to watch the cars spin out of control. Today the traffic looked almost good and he clocked the pack at # on the corner, # coming out of it. Still not good enough, though -- they were braking coming into the corner, losing time, and the line was thin as they came out of it. He watched a Buick skid, hit the guardrail, tip, and the driver go flying out of the convertible top, land in the level below, disappear in the traffic stream. The car rolled, plummeted from sight. "Home," he said. The helicopter dropped him on the roof and he gagged against the smog, trotted to the elevator, dropped. The building was shaking from the traffic noise and the hammering of rivets. He coughed on the dust. H e checked the casualty lists, initialed them. Above normal, with the Empire State section running # ahead of last week. He was listed as reporting the pier pile-up, and there was a report stating Battery Park was filled -- there was also a note saying that the Director was catching hell for parking cars there. To hell with him, Davis thought. There was another complaint to his attention from Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Agnew. Two of their board members were caught in the Wall Street jam and were late for work. He threw it into the wastebasket. Outside (inside?) -- hard to say with no wall on one side of the building -- the workmen were throwing up the steel plates for the ramp, stinting on the bolts to save time. "Put the damn bolts in," Davis roared. "That thing will shake enough anyway." The din was tremendous even now, with seven ramps of traffic passing within thirty feet. It would be worse when the spur route was finished. He hoped that they would put the wall back on the office. He buzzed Smith, asked for a readout on the Empire State complex. "Fourteen fatalities since nine o'clock." It was now #:# and the prelunch rush was due to start in four minutes. "Damn Empire anyway," he said. The United Nations interchange board went red and he went to visual, saw a twelve-car pileup on the fourth level, the bodies and pieces of bodies, the cars and pieces of cars falling into the General Assembly. Damn! he could expect another angry call from the Secretary General. Damn foreigners anyway, when did they get the idea that their stupid meetings were more important than traffic? The red phone rang -- the Director -- and he lifted it. "Davis." "Everything's running higher," the Director wheezed. "What's the story?" "Empire's the big tie-up," Davis said. "That and some construction." "Do something. I gave you the authority." "Get rid of Empire," Davis said. "Get another forty decks on the Trade parking lot, too." "Can't be done." The hell it can't, Davis thought. You're just afraid of the conservationists. Coward. "Do something." "Yes, sir." He waited until the phone clicked dead before he slammed it down. He took a deep breath of the air in the office -- it was even better than smoking. Then he began to bark orders over the All Circuits channel. "Scramble another ten wreckocopters," he snarled. With half again as many copters, wrecks would be cleared that much faster. "Cut next of kin time to fifteen minutes." He was going out on a limb here, but it would speed the processing of accidents through Brooklyn and New Jersey. Now, with the rush hour just over and another beginning, wrecks wer e piling up outside the receiving centers and the crunchers were idle half the time. "Up minimum speed five miles an hour." That would make it at least # miles an hour on every highway, # on the ramps. He flipped to visual, saw Beacons and Buzzers post the new speeds, saw the cars increase speed. Wrecks and Checks flashed the going aloft of the ten copters and he breathed easier, flipped to visual at Empire, saw the day's third major pile-up on the third level, cursed. He closed the #th Street cutoff, ordered three payloaders to dump all wrecks right there, flashed a message to Identification to have a team posted. By midnight, when the traffic eased, they could begin moving the cars and bodies to New Jersey. The red phone rang, three rings. Double urgent. He grabbed it, barked his name. "The Director just dropped dead," a hysterical voice said. "You're acting Director." "I'll be right there." Acting, hell. There were six hours left on his shift and he could get something done now. He turned to Smith. "You're Manager now," he said, "I just got bumped upstairs." "Right." Smith barely looked up. "Reopen Yonkers Four, lanes one through nine," he said. He had made the transition from assistant to Manager in an instant. Training, Davis thought. He took the elevator to the eighth floor, the Director's office. The staff was quiet, looking down at the body on the floor. There were four boards flashing, a dozen phones ringing. Davis snapped orders quickly. "You, you and you, answer the, phones," he said. "You and you, get the boards. You, drag that body out of here. You -- " he pointed at the Director's -- his -- secretary -- "call a staff conference. Now." He looked at the boards, checked Traffic, Beacons and Buzzers, Wrecks and Checks, Gate Receipts and Identification. Fatalities was doing extremely well -- Wellborn was the new Manager here. The crunchers were doing well. Wrecks was reporting above normal pickup time. "The Director's dead," he told the staff. "I'm new Director." They all nodded. "Most departments look pretty good," he said. He looked at Smith. "Traffic flow is lousy," he said. "Why?" "Empire," Smith said. "We're losing twenty per cent just going around that goddamed building." "How are your crews fixed for a major job?" Davis asked the Construction Manager. "Okay." The Manager ticked off eleven small jobs. "The problem is at Empire," Davis said flatly. "We can't get around the building." He looked at Construction. "Tear it down," he said. "Meeting adjourned." Later that day he looked south from the roof The Destruction team had the top ten floors off the Empire State Building and a corner cut of the fortieth floor with a lane of traffic whipping through it. The flow was good and he smiled. He couldn't remember doing anything so necessary before.  found him. It happened in the early part of October when the afternoon sun burned on the backs of the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a kind of transcendent bloodiness. The boys found him on the prairie among the scrub pines. Whatever he was, he lay crumpled in a sculpted drift of snow without a single vesture of clothing on his body. The snow only partially covered him and by the man's naked flanks the oldest boy could see a delicate orange powder. All three boys halted to stare at the man and to watch their breaths vaporize like skinless balloons. The boys were brothers. The oldest brother was Jamie, and all three lived in the coal mining town that no longer mined coal. Tucked in an abandoned hollow fifteen miles from the Spanish Peaks, the town was called Huerfano. The means orphan, but Jamie the word with little concern for either symbolism or semantics. When they found the angular, blue-jowled creature, Jamie was thinking only of the likelihood of bringing home several pounds of pinon nuts, the hard brown kernels which they had to husk from the sticky cones of the pinon trees. Although the first snowfall had come early, the season for pinon nuts was nearly over. Jamie raised his quarterfilled fruit jar as a signal to stop, and then the brothers stared back and forth from the blue corpselike body to one another's uncomprehending faces. "Who is it?" the youngest boy asked. "Nobody we know," said Jamie. "Put down your jars and watch me -- I'm going to see if he's dead." Tonio, the second brother, pointed and said; "Look at the snow. It's a funny orange color next to hie arms." Jamie approached and kneeled, his knee sinking gently into the stiffening white drift. He reached across the man's broad forehead T hree scrawny brown boys found him. It happened in the early part of October when the afternoon sun burned on the backs of the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a kind of transcendent bloodiness. The boys found him on the prairie among the scrub pines. Whatever he was, he lay crumpled in a sculpted drift of snow without a single vesture of clothing on his body. The snow only partially covered him and by the man's naked flanks the oldest boy could see a delicate orange powder. All three boys halted to stare at the man and to wateh their breaths vaporize like skinless balloons. The boys were brothers. The oldest brother was Jamie, and all three lived in the coal mining town that no longer mined coal. Tucked in an abandoned hollow fifteen miles from the Spanish Peaks, the town was called Huerfano. The word means orphan, but Jamie forth from the blue corpselike spoke the word with little concern body to one another's uncomprefor either symbolism or semantics, bending faces. When they found the angular, "Who is it?" the youngest boy blue-jowled creature, Jamie was asked. thinking only of the likelihood of "Nobody we know," said Jamie, bringing home several pounds of "Put down your jars and watch me pinon nuts, the hard brown ker -- I'm going to see if he's dead." nels which they had to husk from Tonio, the second brother, the sticky cones of the pinon trees, pointed and said; "Look at the Although the first snowfall had snow. It's a funny orange color come early, the season for pinon next to hie arms." nuts was nearly over. Jamie approached and kneeled, Jamie raised his quarter-filled his knee sinking gently into the fruit jar as a signal to stop, and stiffening white drift. He reached then the brothers stared back and across the man's broad forehead and touched his oddly parted, blue lips. The two younger boys stepped back. "He doesn't look like he's breathing," Jamie said, "but his mouth is warm." "Then he ain't dead, is he?" Tonio asked.  "No. I don't think he is." The wind blew a bit of the orange powder across the snow and Packie, the youngest boy, scraped at the smears of pinon resin that coated his fingers. Leaning over the man's elongated hairless skull, Jamie very carefully opened his shrouded eyes with a thumb and forefinger. The huge eyes were black -- and faceted. lish woman lived in the whitewashed wooden house directly across the arroyo from their hovel. Mrs. Zowodny was fat, manlike in appearance and crotchety. She wore coveralls under her monstrously ample dresses and lived among a menagerie of stuffed elks' heads and a brigade of porcelain figurines. She hovered every day between the kitchen and the murky parlor, as if she could not make up her mind in which direction ber appetites would most likely find fulfillment. She called the brothers "blackheads." She called them blackheads, identified them in her mind with scar tissue and cancerous sores. It was as if the boys were physical blemishes on the sooty complexion of the town, on the old battered face of Huerfano. Jamie frequently pelted her house with clumps of mud or snow, depending on the season, so that she would come to the window, flushed and bulgingeyed, to shout at them. "You little blackheads! You think you are 'Mericans; you are foreign trash cluttering the streets!" Then Jamie would bulge out his eyes derisively and shout back the single word: "Slav!" He spat it. At that he would turn, beckon to his brothers and lead them in a scrambling retreat down the banks of the arroyo that separated their houses. Their arms and legs would flail the air like the blurring plastic spokes of a pinwheel. Fuming, Mrs. Zowodny would watch them go. Soon neither the old woman nor the boys knew which of the two occurrences had first established their enmity: the coining of the epithet "blackhead" or the ritualistic pelting of Mrs. Zowodny's house. The pelting or the epithet, the epithet or the pelting. Now it did not matter at all. Looking upside down into the opaque, faceted eyes, he could see the image of himself and of his brothers. All three were milky slivers of light in the small flat planes and with each slap the angular blue skull moved back and forth in the snow, flattening the snow, communicating a warmth to Jamie's hand. "Hey, ain't he coming awake now, no?" Tonio asked. "I don' know, but he's warm; warm as can be." "He's wearing sompen on his eyes, no?" "Maybe. They are certainly strange eyes if he isn't," Jamie said. "They are certainly strange." Packie was standing a little way off in the snow; he put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, cocking his head from side to side. "Grasshoppers have eyes like that," he said. "And flies, too." "Yes," Jamie said. "It's hard to tell if he's alive, but he is very, very warm." With a shudder of gray sinews and an indigo deepening of color the long body took on the sapphire luminosity of a dragonfly turning in the sun. The man's lips parted and he moved one leg, crossing it over his body to cover his exposed knotted groin. All three boys fell back at the movement, scrambling away, struggling in the icy powder. The sun balanced precariously between the Spanish Peaks. "Please," the man said huskily. "Please cover me." The boys crept back but Jamie was aware that it would be virtually impossible to establish a rapport with the man, mostly because of the eyes, the terrible eyes. How could one make human contact with eyes that returned one's image in a thousand distorted permutations? How would it be possible to read the character of the entity -- human or otherwise -- who resided behind those eyes? Jamie stood to his full height, one foot hidden by the broken snow, and looked down into the creature's face. Tonio and Packie stood awed and poker-spined at a small distance. The eyes, the black, faceted eyes, glinted. "Please cover me," said the odd mouth, grotesquely forming the sounds. "The snow weights down my own coverings. I can't move." "I'm going to help you up," Jamie said. The boy kneeled behind the stricken creature and grasped him beneath his spindly arms. The man's flesh was a uniform grayish blue, crisp to the touch and incredibly warm. His musculature was strangely reticulated: his abdomen seemed almost to consist of hinged segments, the corrugations in the flesh a darker color than the flesh which they apparently hinged. Jamie found it easy to lift the man to a partial sitting position, his body was so light. But then the man cried out in pain, huskily, inarticulately. Jamie saw that growing from the man's narrow shoulder blades were the beginnings of two sets of wings. The wings themselves lay outspread and icily laden beneath the sculpted snow. In bringing the creature to a sitting position, Jamie had inadvertently twisted the sensitive membranes of those wings. "Lay me down again," the creature said. "Lay me down and cover me. Cover me against the cold." "Hey, brother," Tonio said, "let's get out of here, no? He ain't a real person. He may be sompen else but he ain't no real person." Jamie took off his coat after easing the naked man back into the snow. Then he wrapped his threadbare woolen muffler around the man's neck, winding it once around his hard constricted chest, and finished by draping the corduroy coat over the man's chest and hips. But the coat was pitifully small and did not begin to cover the man. "Why don' we move the snow off his wings?" Packie suggested. The boys exchanged bewildered looks and the man lay back in the orange-tinctured snow with nothing whatever alive in his faceted eyes, nothing at all. alone all the first day the snow fell. Because her eyesight was failing and because she refused to turn on the electricity, she moved about among her dusty statuary and mildewed elks' heads with a singular clumsiness. Her swollen feet navigated the dark areas between ottomans and overstuffed chairs but only with difficulty. At last she came to the small shuttered window in her kitchen, and paused. There were colored bottles on the interior sill, above the sink, and ugly glass ashtrays she had no need for; and these items had to be taken down before she could open the peeling shutters. She took them down and ranged them along the edge of the sink. Outside, the drifts filled her yard, swan-necked peaks that curled like stiffened meringue. Her breath steamed the glass but by squinting she was able to make out the alien thing that was lodged in the snow almost directly under the window, a soft cylindrical shell. She squinted and smacked her lips in consternation. "Them blackheads," she muttered. "Them blackheads." The shell was very much like an outsized cocoon. It lay in the snow somewhat lopsidedly, for it was attached by filaments of ice and strands of a glistening silken substance to a long plank; the plank itself embedded in the snow. Mrs. Zowodny looked at the clutter in her yard, smacked her lips again and muttered several words which her thick tongue virtually smothered. With a palsied hand she pushed the shutters to. on opposite sides of the outstretched man, scooping up jars of snow and depositing the snow out of the way, behind the man's outstretched arms. Packie sat crosslegged under a pinon tree and continued to worry over the gooey white resin that adhered to his fingers. Beside him was his own widemouthed fruit jar, now brimful of pinon nuts: the two older boys had emptied their jars into his that they might remove the snow from the creature's wings. The creature admonished them. "Dig very gently," he told them. "Keep your knees back and dig as gently as you can." In twenty minutes Jamie and Tonio were through. Revealed to them were the soft paperlike membranes of the man's wings. He looked very much like a sallow, whey-faced saint from an El Greco painting, a saint miraculously invested with four diaphanous capes with which to shield his tortured body. The boys gaped and the Sangre de Cristo mountains rose up on the west like a chiseled, living wall of white granite. "Let me help you up," Jamie said. He lifted the man to a sitting position for a second time, then awkwardly got him to his narrow, trembling legs. Lifting him, Jamie remarked on the strange creature's astonishing lack of weight; the man seemed to consist only of air and the ethereal burden of his papery flesh. It was then, too, that Jamie noticed that the orange powder on the snow was scaly dust from the man's multicolored wings, the dust that had outlined his flanks. But the wings were wet, wet from the snow and wet as if they had only recently molted. "The name that you may call me," the man said, "is Papilio. That is not my given name, nor even an approximation; but it is what you may call me." "Papilio," Jamie said. "Yes." In the failing sunlight the creature Papilio began very slowly to manipulate his wings, moving them back and forth, back and forth, covering and uncovering his naked, manlike body. As he moved them the wings shimmered beneath the emblazoned weight of red and orange peacock eyes. Royal blue hieroglyphics also shimmered with the movement of his wings and the movement was rhythmic. Jamie decided that those hieroglyphics easily could have been the characters of an alien tongue, but he watched the man and said nothing. "I'm afraid that the sun is dying," Papilio said. "My wings are still damp and I'm hungry, very hungry." So the boys fed him pinon nuts. They cracked the tiny nuts with their teeth and clumsily shelled them, picking at the hard rinds like jewelers working over the mechanisms in a watch. Having shelled the nuts, they gave the sweet white kernels to Papilio and watched him eat. As he ate his emblazoned wings moved very slowly back and forth, as thin and translucent as Japanese silk screens. Jamie watched the sun and felt the wind. Clouds were forming above the Spanish peaks, presaging another snowfall. through the frosted kitchen window. Except to putter through the rubble in her own fenced-in yard, she very rarely ventured outside. She had a son who worked construction machinery on the new passes that were being built through the Sangre de Cristo range and this young man brought groceries to the house every Thursday afternoon. Although she bullied him about his personal life, he remained dutiful; and she depended on his visits for the opportunity to rail about the "blackheads" who vandalized the property of such industrious Americans as herself. Soon the young man came only on Thursdays and only to deliver his mother's groceries. More and more, Mrs. Zowodny was left to the creaking solitude of her house, left to stare at the lacy rime on the windowpanes. But now she had made up her mind to go out. The thing beneath the kitchen window demanded that she approach someone with authority over the boys who pelted her house and who, apparently, had violated the sanctity of her yard. She put a scarf over her head and with considerable effort squeezed her swollen feet into rubber galoshes. Upon breathing the outside air that rushed coldly into her nostrils, she smacked her lips together in surprise. The front door banged shut on the dusty bric-abrac within. In coveralls and a frayed sweater, which she clutched tightly to her middle, Mrs. Zowodny trundled down the snow-blanketed side of the arroyo. Her scarf flapped and her fat upholstered legs sank into the drifts. A solitary magpie watched her from the top of her own picket fence. Struggling, she came up the gully's opposite bank and negotiated the wire gate and the steppingstone walkway in the boys' front yard. For her it was a typical chicano home, the kind inevitably constructed of mud and plaster, the kind with linoleum strips over the broken-out windows. Breathing through numb lips, she knocked on the door. The woman who answered the knocking was thin and pale, though her paleness was plainly more the result of a washed-out weariness than of any actual whiteness of the flesh. Mrs. Zowodny squinted at her and the woman in the door made a helpless gesture with her left hand. Mrs. Zowodny leaned forward: "You are the mother? You are the Mrs. Aguilera?" "Yes." "And the boys, where are they running at now?" The helpless gesture with the left hand, made not in response but from weariness. "You should be keeping a track of where they go and what they did. I raised up a young man of mine own, I did; and you must watch their antics. Yes, you must!" "They are out for the pihon nuts, Mrs. Zowodny. At two o'clock they left for the pinon nuts." "They have been dropping their trash at my yard!" "No," the chicano woman said wearily. "No, Mrs. Zowodny." For several minutes the two women stood in the fragile warmth of the open doorway and exchanged arguments tinged with wholly disparate kinds of provincialism. Mrs. Zowodny argued heatedly, her lips giving rise to cold balloons, little captions of breath. Mrs. Aguilera lethargically resisted,'guarding her doorway. Then the Polish woman's face drew into a contorted parody of itself and she made a hissing sound. "You think you are a mother. You are a chicano slut!" "No, Mrs. Zowodny." The woman stepped from the security of her doorway and closed the door behind her. She was wearing only a thin cotton garment, and her face, in profile, was a hard papier-mache mask. Mrs. Zowodny moved instinctively out of her way. The chicano woman strode oii the stepping stones to the wire gate and stopped there to look at the Spanish Peaks, two black granite shadows blocking the sun. "No, Mrs. Zowodny," she said. Both hands reassuringly clutching her frayed sweater, Mrs. Zowodny followed the boys' mother to the gate. But she followed slowlyMrs. Aguilera turned. "It is cold. Last night I had a dream about the snow, a very strange dream. Snow was falling over the whole world. It fell in Colorado and in Mexico. It was falling even on the deserts in Africa. The camels were standing in the snow." "Camels in the snow?" "Yes, Mrs. Zowodny. Shaggy, shaggy beasts looking up at the sky and watching the snow fall out of the sun." Mrs. Zowodny stood three wet stones away from the chicano woman; she ran her raw tongue over the fissures in her lips and blinked, angrily bewildered. "Do you know what else?" Mrs. Aguilera asked. "There were mariposas. All over the world, huge butterflies swam in the white storms. And moths, too, shaggy moths that danced among the snowflakes. Moths and butterflies of every color that there is." She stopped and tightened her lips before speaking again. "Ves, Mrs. Zowodny." "Oof!" the other said, registering disgust. "And tonight the snow will come again. And if I dream, there will be camels in the snow, and butterflies." "You should stop this dreaming and watch them boys." "We will need wood for a fire," Mrs. Aguilera said to herself. "We will need wood." Mrs. Zowodny remembered her rare mission beyond her own yard and drew her face into its doughy self-parody. She let Mrs. Aguilera's last words turn over in her mind. She made up the three stones between them and grasped Mrs. Aguilera's loose, cotton sleeve. Her face twitched. "You've got an axe? An axe for chopping wood?" "Yes." "I will borrow, then, your axe." Mrs. Aguilera did not argue with the old woman. She found the axe in the empty wood box beside the door and handed it to Mrs. Zowodny by its rusted head. The old woman took the axe in both hands, both visibly shaking hands. "Thank you," she said. "Send the oldest boy to bring it back -- if he don' stay out all night." Then she left Mrs. Aguilera and crossed the arroyo to her own house, at first hefting the axe across her body and then dragging it by the long worn handle. A magpie flew up when she entered her gate. She could almost feel the sweat on her upper lip crystalizing. In the back yard she went to the thing under the kitchen window and stared indecisively at its glistening bulk. It glistened with a peculiar whiteness. Dusk enveloped the house and trees. At last she brought the axe to her shoulder and let it drop listlessly into the soft integument of the thing. The cocoonlike shell ruptured. Suddenly Mrs. Zowodny's eyes blazed up. Again and again she chopped at the thing, the rusted axe head making clumsy arcs in the failing light. Membranous colors gushed out of the shell and spilled onto the snow, diaphanous capes of orange and scarlet and blue. The plank to which the thing had been attached lay broken in countless splinters. Mrs. Zowodny was panting. Her armpits ached and the axe fell from her trembling hands into the snow. She looked at her handiwork without comprehension, then went into the house and turned on a single electric light. Still sweating, she sat down in an overstuffed chair and let the shadows move across her doughy face. It was nearly two hours before I she got up and went into the back yard to see what she had done.  own yard it was very late. A few ffosted pinpoints of light were visible in the eastern sky but from the other direction came the burgeoning front of snowclouds which massed over the Sangre de Cristo range and spread like a cancer into the regions of clean night sky. Jamie led the boys into the yard. They had returned with only two fruit jars and both were empty and lackluster. Papilio had refused to venture as far as the house with them and they intuitively understood his reluctance. He had remained in a mine opening several hundred yards beyond their adobe hovel, wrapped in the silken covering of his wings, hiding his nakedness behind those beautiful tapestried membranes. Jamie could still see him placing a pinon nut on his strange indigo tongue, sucking the kernel out of the shell and spitting out the shattered rind -- all with merely the efficient workings of his long, papery mandibles. So they had come home with only two fruit jars, both of them empty. The younger boys went immediately to bed. Mrs. Aguilera asked Jamie about the pinon nuts, and he told her that he had left the jars in the wood box outside the door. He neither denied nor affirmed their emptiness. "Bueno," the boy's mother said. "Then you know that the wood box is empty. And tonight it will be cold again, with more snow." "Yes." "Mrs. Zowodny has borrowed the axe. Go over to her house and bring the axe home. Tomorrow you will go out for the wood." "Let me go in the morning for the axe, too." "No. Tomorrow you will have other excuses." "Why did she borrow the axe? She has a coal furnace." "I didn't put my nose in her business. Now, go." Jamie found the stepping stones in the dark, hobbled through the gate and plunged into the piles of drifted snow in the arroyo. He pretended that the snow was a vast hinterland of grassy meadow and clambered through it as if its wetness were a wholy nonexistent quality. He pretended that zebras and wildebeeste lay in wait for him in the grasses of that hinterland. He saw the broken-crusted footprints of a creature that had preceded him, and his heart thumped hard against his chest. His visions dissolved. The wind chilled him, blowing powdery dust into the air; and he came upon the old woman's dimly lit house with a sense of detached contempt for his fantasies. The house was stolid, compact and real. It seemed to heave in the new darkness just as the snow shifted under his feet. At the whitewashed gate he paused and listened. He heard an odd skittering inside Mrs. Zowodny's house, like the toenails of a tiny dog pattering over linoleum. Jamie turned and peered into the density of blackness from which he had come; what he saw was merely the blurred patina of light that emanated diffusely from the grouping hovels on the other side of the arroyo. But he had heard something distinct from that direction, too. A scraping on the snow; then a hollow fluttering that was barely audible over the sequent hush and wheezing of the wind. The nap of his corduroy jacket stiffened; he could feel bumplets of chicken flesh puckering in the small of his back. Then a clatter came from the house, a metallic din that diminished into a pattering and died. Jamie turned rapidly again. An odor hung in the air. It came into his nostrils with a kind of shocking subtlety, an odor that he knew would assert itself even if the smells of skunk and napthaline were also in the air. He coughed, put his hands over his mouth and walked through the gate toward the noise that he had heard issue from Mrs. Zowodny's house. The porch light was on and the front door stood completely open. As Jamie entered the house snow began to fall: the stars fell as snowflakes. In the oppressively warm foyer he waited for his eyes to adjust and wondered about his sudden nervousness. Why had Mrs. Zowodny borrowed an axe when her house possessed a coal-burning furnace? What was the smell that flooded him like the scent of a musty, organic cologne? Why had the old woman's door been open and her porch lamp on? Jamie focused on the outlines of weight and substance that were emerging from the darkness in the parlor. What finally took shape for him was the hump-shouldered figure of Mrs. Zowodny herself. Her legs were braced in an awkward attempt to spraddle something on the floor and her head was down. The door behind the old woman was open, and Jamie saw past her doubled body into the back yard. Then he looked down. The thing that Mrs. Zowodny was doubled over was very like a sleeping bag from which the lining has been gutted and torn free. Remnants of that lining lay in scaly iridescence on the hard wood floor of both the hallway and parlor. The smell of the glandular perfume was stifling. Snow whirled into the kitchen and the door behind Jamie slammed shut in the draft. Mrs. Zowodny looked up in the half light and stared at the boy from her huge pouchy eyes. He had arrested her in an action of some importance and she was panting grotesquely from the physical effort ) involved. His own heart pounded uncontrollably; and Mrs. Zowodny's blood-choked eyes blazed as she snarled the familiar epithet. "You little blackhead! Why do you not knock?" "The axe," he said, nearly stifling. "The axe." Mrs. Zowodny's terrible bloody eyes grew larger; and even through his fear Jamie understood that she was no longer looking at him but instead at the gloom that deepened at his back. A rippling movement of air made him simultaneously whirl about and step backward from the door. As he focused on Papilio's lean blue body and the peacock-eyed draperies of his wings, Jamie heard the rattle of the old woman's stunned voice. This time Papilio's faceted eyes gave back no images. "She has killed the female of this region," he said. "Papilio," Jamie said. "That is not my name," Papilio said. He strode past the boy, carrying his wings lifted and outspread, an entomological presence who made the walls of the house, the floor and ceiling, contract upon one another like the parts of a shrinking garment. Jamie followed in the cluttered wake of Papilio's wings and watched as the creature placed his segmented hands around Mrs. Zowodny's neck. Her eyes bulged in terror and her fat speckled hands came up feebly, feebly to ward off the grip that was unremittingly carrying her to her'knees. "Stop it!" Jamie screamed. He found a ceramic figurine on a small end table and brought it down on Papilio's elongated skull, striking him from behind. The odor in the house was now unbearable and he could feel sickness coming on as the supple creature slumped away from the old woman and collapsed into the broken folds of his wings. Mrs. Zowodny opened and closed her mouth like a dying fish; and looking down at her with the base of the shattered figurine in his hand, Jamie saw a cold glint of acknowledgment in the old woman's eyes, just before they closed irrevocably. "Many others will come," Papilio said. He lay crumpled between an overstaffed chair and the thing which the old woman had dragged in from the back yard. "They are coming now." The glandular odor was overwhelming. As Jamie looked into the kitchen and into the back yard, he became aware of angular shadows dropping from the sky, threading their way through the multitudinous snowflakes, dropping on outspread capes of blue and scarlet. The snow was full of wings, and the muted whirring that Jamie heard was a universal music. Somewhere, miles and miles beyond the Sangre de Cristo mountains, camels were standing in the snow. When medical science cannot let him live as he wants, yet will not let him die, aged but lusty and extremely wealthy Johann Sebastian Bach Smith sets his financial empire in order and assigns his best friend and legal adviser, Jacob Salomon, the task of securing 'a warm body' into which his brain can be transplanted. The operation has never been successfully performed on a human -- the situation is further complicated by the fact that the body-donor must belong to an extremely rare blood group. Johann Smith is literally gamCopyright  # by Robert A. Heinlein bling for death -- but the operation proves successful. He recovers to find himself wearing the body of his lovely secretary, Eunice Branca. A dialogue ensues between the brain and the body -- highly revealing to both. Never before have two lives become so strangely and intimately linked. Shock follows shock as Johann Sebastian Bach Smith learns what it means to be a beautiful woman with a zest for life and love -- and Eunice discovers the uses of the power his brain wields. Body and brain team up to make a shambles of a court test of Johann's legal identity. her boudoir. Winnie was waiting there -- to Joan's annoyance as she thought it possible that Jake's stern character might slip if the upper house were quiet. But she did not show it. "Hi, Winnie!" "Miss Joan! Are you all right? I've been so worried!" "Of course I'm all right; Mr. Salomon was taking care of me. Why were you worried, dear?" "Why, the dreadful things they've been saying about you in the news and there was a riot at the Hall of Justice; I saw it. And -- " "Winnie, Winnie! The idiot box is for idiots; why do you look at it? I was never in danger." "But she has. had a trying day, so you take good care of her, Winnie." "Oh, I will, sir!" "And I am tired, too, so I'll say good night and go to bed. After I find a sandwich, perhaps." "Hubert put a tray in your suite, sir." "Hubert gets another merit badge. Though to tell the truth, Winnie, I've had a worrisome day myself and it's left me with little appetite and jangled nerves. I may dine on a sleeping pill." "Jake dear -- " "Yes, Eunice?" "Don't take a pill. And do eat." "But -- " "I know, I'm a bundle of nerves myself. But I know what to do about it -- and Winnie and I can soothe your nerves and restore your appetite and make you sleep like a baby." He cocked one eyebrow, looked at Eunice, then at Winnie. "I think either of you could. But both?" "Jake, you're a dirty-minded old man; you'll have Winnie blushing. But we can -- can't we, Winnie? The Money Hum." "Oh. Yes, we can, Mr. Salomon." "Harrumph! Does it involve blood? Or broken bones?" "Oh, no sir! It's restful. Relaxing." "I'll try anything once." Joan said, "But you have to strip for it to -- " "I thought there was a catch." "Oh, Jake. We'll let you sissy; you can wear shorts. We strip for it; the spiritual effect is better. It's the way we warm up for our exercises. Go undress, then put on shorts and a robe. We'll join you in the Green Suite. Right after it you're going to have a bite to eat and a tepid tub and straight to bed and right to sleep." "Maybe I'd better bathe first. A day in court leaves me smelling like a skunk." "You smell all right. Anyhow, Winnie and I have such control by now that we can decide not to be able to smell -- or to hear a distracting noise, or anything -- if we choose to." "That's true, Mr. Salomon." "Okay. Winnie, if she beats me, you protect me. Adios, dears." "Five minutes, Jake." As soon as they were alone Winifred said, "You're going to make me strip down bare? Again?" "I didn't 'make' you strip the first time. And dear Doctor certainly did notice that you were a girl. Looked to me as if the kiss he gave you was better than the one he gave me. Stop blushing. Winnie, you can sissy, too, if you want to -- but I do need you present. Or Jake will think I'm trying to make him." "Oh, Mr. Salomon would never think that about you." "He's male. He's as male as dear Doctor. I need chaperonage as all I'm after is to help him sleep without pills. The poor dear has had a dreadful day. Winnie, he was wonderful in court; I'll tell you about it. Later. Let's get these duds off and grab negligees. Modest ones." Joan Eunice stopped suddenly. "Perhaps I've goofed. Winsome? Do you have a date?" Miss Gersten blushed again. "Uh... not until later." "Paul working late? Sorry -- erase and correct. None of my business." The little redhead continued to blush but she answered steadily, "My business is always your business, Miss Joan. Uh, I'm supposed to take care of you -- and I do try! But you feel like a big sister to me. "Thank you, sweet Winsome. But big sisters should not snoop." "I've been meaning to tell you. Paul and I have split." "Oh, I'm sorry!" "I'm not. I don't think Paul ever meant to get a dissolution; he was stringing me. But -- well, Bob isn't married. Not yet." " 'Not yet.' Planning on getting married, dear?" "Well... I don't think getting married is something one plans. It just happens. Like thunderstorms." "You could be right. Sweet, whether it's getting married, or fun and happiness, I hope it's perfect for you. And Bob is such a common name that I can't be tempted to guess. If I don't see him." "You probably won't. He comes up the service lift and into my rooms from the back corridor -- nobody sees him but the guard on duty. And they don't gossip." "If any guard ever gossips about anything in this house and I find it out, he'll be on Welfare so fast he'll be dizzy. Winnie, the rest of the staff can be human about it. But a guard is in a specially trusted position and must keep his mouth shut. Winnie, if you ever want to see Bob -- or anyone -- somewhere else. I'll have my mobile guards deliver you and pick you up and even I won't know where." "Uh... thank you. But this is the safest place for us -- so few places are safe today. The most that can happen here is that Bob might be embarrassed. I wouldn't be embarrassed at all. I'm proud of him!" "That's the way to feel, dear. As an ex-man I know that's the attitude a man values most in a woman. 'Proud of him.' But let's hurry; we're keeping Jake waiting. If you're going to wear pants, better find some with stretch in them. And thank you for lending me this outfit -- turned out that, without the apron and cap, it was still most effective. I had the robe off a while. Tell you later." hurrying down the corridor to the Green Suite, each just in negligee and bare-footed. At the last instant Winifred had decided that, if her mistress was going to practice meditation in the correct uniform, she would also. They found the counselor in a bathrobe, looking sheepish. Joan said, "I hope we haven't kept you waiting. Is your tub ready? If not. I'm going to draw it before we start. Then into it and out, don't risk falling asleep. Then -- " "I cheated. I took a quick tub -- tepid, as you specified -- and ate a little, too." "Good. Then we'll pop you straight into bed after this and kiss you good night and you'll be asleep before we're out the door. Jake, this is the simplest of yoga, not exercise, just meditation. Controlled breathing, but the easiest sort. Inhale through one repetition of the prayer, hold it through one more, exhale through one, hold through one, and repeat. All of us together, in a triangle. Can you sit in lotus? Probably not unless you've practiced." "Eunice -- " "Yes, Jake?" "My father was a tailor. I was sitting in tailor's seat before I was eight. Will that do?" "Certainly if you are comfortable. If not, any position that lets you relax. For you have to forget your body." "Squatted in a tailor's position I can fall asleep. But what's this prayer?" Joan Eunice slipped off her negligee, melted down onto the rug into meditation pose, soles upward on her thighs, palms upward in her lap. "It goes like this. Om Mani Padme Hum." (Om Mani Padme Hum. I should have taught Jake this long ago.) "I know the phrase. 'The Jewel in the Lotus.' But what does it mean to you, Joan Eunice?" Winifred had followed Joan's example as quickly as she set it, was bare and in lotus -- and not blushing. She answered, "It means everything and nothing, Mr. Salomon. It is all the good things you know of -- bravery and beauty and gentleness and not wanting what you can't have and being happy with what you do have and trees swaying in the wind and fat little babies gurgling when you tickle their feet and anything that makes life good. Love. It always means love. But you don't think about it, you don't think at all, you don't even try not to think. You chant the prayer and just be -- until you find yourself floating, all warm and good and relaxed." "Okay, I'll try." He took off his bathrobe, had under it boxer shorts. "Joan Eunice, when did you take up yoga? Winnie teach you?" "Oh, no!" said Winifred. "Miss Joan taught me -- she's much farther along the Path than I am." (Watch it. Boss!) (No huhu. Lulu.) "One learns many things, Jake -- and loses them for lack of time. I used to play chess, yet I haven't set up a board for fifty years. But for longer than that I could no longer even attempt a lotus seat... until Eunice gave me this wonderful young body which can do anything." (Which shell is the pea under, Eunice?) (It'll be under you if you relax too much; you should have emptied our bladder.) (Never fear, dear. I shan't go under, must watch Jake.) "Join us, Jake. You lead, Winnie; start as soon as Jake is in position." Salomon started to sit on the floor, suddenly stopped and got out of his shorts. Joan was delighted, taking it as a sign that he had decided to give in to it all the way. But she did not let her serene expression change nor move her eyes. Winifred. was staring at her navel; if she noticed it, she did not show it. "Inhale," Winifred said softly. "Om Mani Padme Hum. Hold. Om Mani Padme Hum. Breath out. Om Mani Padme Hum. Hold..." (Om Mani Padme Hum. Dig that clamdigger, dearie?) (Shut up! You'll ruin the mood. Om Mani Padme Hum.) "Om Mani Padme Hum!" said Salomon in a voice that would have graced a cathedral. "Om Mani Padme Hum!"   softly. "Let it fade and wake up wide. We're going to have to wake Jake." The redhead's eyes fluttered, she whispered one more prayer and waited. "Jake, darling," Joan said softly. "Eunice is calling. Wake just enough to let us help you into bed. Eunice is calling you back. Jake, dearest." "I hear you, Eunice." "How do you feel?" "Eh? Relaxed. Wonderful. Much rested but ready to sleep. Say, it does work. But it's just autohypnosis." "Did I even hint that it was anything else? Jake, I don't expect to find God by staring into my belly button. But it does work... and it's better than forcing your body with drugs. Now let Winnie and me help you into bed." "I can manage." "Of course you can but I don't want the relaxation to wear off. Indulge me, Jake, let us baby you. Please." He smiled and let them -- slid into the opened bed, let them cover him, smiled again when Joan Eunice gave him a motherly good night kiss, seemed unsurprised when Winifred followed her mistress's example -- turned on his side and was asleep as the girls left the room. "Don't bother," Joan said as Winifred started to put on her negligee. "It's my house and no one comes upstairs after dinner unless sent for. Except Hubert and I assume that Jake sent him to bed -- Jake knew he would be called on by two tarts in threequarters time and not much else." She slid an arm around the redhead's slender waist. "Winnie, much as I like to dress up -- isn't it nice to wear just skin?" "I like it. Indoors. Not outdoors, I sunburn so badly." "What about at night? When I was a boy, ages and ages ago, it got unbearably hot in July and August where we lived -- the sidewalks used to burn my bare feet. Houses were bake ovens even at night -- no air-conditioning. An electric fan was a luxury most people did not have. Nights when I couldn't sleep because of heat I used to sneak quiet as a mouse and bare as a frog out by the back door, being oh, so careful not to let my parents hear, and walk naked in the dark, with grass cool on my feet and the soft night breeze velvet on my skin. Heavenly!" "It sounds heavenly. But I would be terrified of getting mugged." "The word 'mug' hadn't been invented, much less any fear of it. I was a middle-aged man before I became wary of the dark." They turned into the master bedroom. "Kiss me good night. Winsome, and go keep your date. Sleep late in the morning; I'm going to." "Uh, my date isn't until after midnight. Aren't you going to tell me what happened today?" "Why, of course, dear. Thought you might be in a hurry. Come take a bath with me?" "If you want me to. I bathed after dinner." "And you have your face on for your date. I bathed this morning but that seems a week ago. Sniff me and tell me just how badly I stink." "You smell all right. Luscious." "Then I'll let it go with toothbrush and bidet and a swipe at my armpits; I'd rather go to bed." "You haven't had dinner." "Not all that hungry. Just happy. Is there milk in my bedroom fridge? Milk and crackers is all I want. Want to join me with a glass for yourself and get crumbs in bed and talk girl talk? Things I can't mention to dear Jake now that I'm a girl and not mean, old, cantankerous Johann." "Joanie, I don't believe you ever were cantankerous." "Oh, yes -- I was, hon. I hurt most of the time and was depressed all of the time and wasn't fit to live with. But Joan Eunice is never depressed; her bowels are too regular. Scrounge us two glasses of milk and a box of crackers while I take a pretend bath. Don't go downstairs; there will be something over there in the iron rations. Fig newtons, maybe, or vanilla wafers." ing in the big bed while Joan Eunice gave an edited account of the day: " -- so we visited in Judge Mac's chambers and let the car go on ahead, as Judge Mac, the sweet darling, wouldn't hear of my leaving through the streets. Even though the phony riot was over. Then we switched from copter to car at Safe Harbor and came home." (Protecting her 'innocence,' twin?) (Not bloody likely. Protecting Jake's reputation.) "But the best part of the day was when I took off that street robe and let 'em look at that Acapulco outfit you dressed me in. Made 'em go ape, dear." " 'Ape?' " "Out-of-date slang. They dropped one wing and ran in circles, like a rooster about to tread a strange hen." "It wasn't the outfit, it was you." "Both. Eunice Branca had a heavenly body and I'm doing my best to justify it. With your help. As may be, both those darling men kissed me the nearest thing to rape I've encountered." "Better than Doctor Garcia?" "I don't think Doctor Garcia gave me his all-out best. I think he was inhibited by surprise and by the presence of a red-headed nurse I could name. But these two weren't inhibited and had a couple of drinks in them and each was doing his darnedest to. do better than the other one. Whew! Winnie, I do not exaggerate -- if Jake hadn't been there, I think they would have had me down on the rug for a gang bang in two seconds." "Uh... would you have struggled?" (Going to be truthful, tart?) (Who taught me to be a tart? Any reason not to tell her, Eunice?) (None. Except that she's likely to rape you herself.) (Oh, pooh, she's Don't say I didn't warn you.) "Winnie, if I were a real lady, I would be horrified. But I won't pretend with my chum. I don't know much about being female but I seem to have strong instincts. Cross my heart, if either of those sweet men had given me a gentle shove, I would have landed on that rug with my legs open and eyes closed. Gang bang? By then I felt ready to take on a regiment." Winfred said thoughtfully, "It happened to me once." "A regimentT' "No. A gang bang." "Well! Let's shoo the crumbs out of bed and squeeze down the lights and snuggle and you tell big sister. Were they mean to you?" "Not really. Oh, dear, I'm blushing already. Turn off everything but one floor light and let me tell it against your neck." "That better?" "Yes." "Now tell Mama." "Uh, it was the night I graduated from training. I wasn't a virgin -- I'm not sure there was a virgin in my class. But this was something else. Some interns gave a party for some of us. That was fine and I expected one of them to get me alone. Interns are the horniest people and a girl didn't accept a date with one unless she meant business. But the party was toads of champagne and no food. Joan, I had never had champagne before." "Oho! I can write the ending." "Well... champagne doesn't taste strong. I sopped up a lot of it. "Then I was in bed and it was happening. Wasn't surprised and tried to cooperate. But things went vague. I noticed that he wasn't dark-haired after all; he had hair as red as mine. When I had been certain that he was dark-haired and had a moustache. When I noticed later that he was almost bald, I realized that something odd was going on. Joan, there were seven interns at that party. I think all of them had me before morning. I don't know how many times. I knew what was happening after thick, curly red hair was replaced by mostly bald. But I didn't try to stop it. Uh...I didn't want it to stop. A nympho, huh?" "I don't know, dear, but that's the way I felt late this afternoon. Wanted it to happen at last, wanted it to go on happening -- and I don't even know what it feels like. Go on." "Well, it did go on. I got up once and went to the bathroom and noticed in the mirror that I didn't have a stitch on and couldn't remember having undressed. Didn't seem to matter. I went back to bed, and found that I was feeling lonely; the party seemed to have stopped. "Only it hadn't. A man came in and I managed to focus my eyes and said, 'Oh, Ted! Come here.' And he did and we did, and it was worse than ever. "I woke up about noon with a dreadful hangover. Managed to sit up and here were my clothes, neatly folded on a chair, and on the bedside table a tray with a thermos of coffee and some Danish pastry and a glass with a note by it. It read: 'Drink this before you eat. You'll need it. Chubby.' Chubby was the one who was almost bald." "A gentlemen. Aside from his taste for mass rape." "Chubby was always nice. But if anybody had told me that I would ever be in bed with Chubby, I would have laughed in her face." "Were you ever again?" "Oh, yes. I really did appreciate the thoughtful little breakfast and especially the hangover cure. It put me back together. Not good enough to go on watch but good enough to get dressed and back to my room." "Were you all right? I mean, uh, not caught or anything?" "Not even sore. Not anything. Wasn't my time, even if I hadn't been protected with an implant, which I was. And one nice thing about going to bed with interns, almost no chance of picking up an infection. No, I was lucky all the way, Joan. Oh, no doubt the story went the rounds -- but I wasn't the only graduate getting it that night and that wasn't the only party. Nobody teased me about it. But it was a gang bang and I didn't make the slightest move to stop it." She added thoughtfully, "The thing that worries me is that I might do it again. I know I would. So I don't drink at all any more. I know I can't handle it." "Why, Winnie, you've had a drink with me, more than once." "That's not the same thing. Uh, if you wanted me to get drunk with you -- I would. I'd be safe." (Safe! Little does she know.) Eunice, we haven't done more than snuggle and you know it.) (She's asking you to step up the pace.) (Well, I won't! Not much, anyhow.) VV at the time." "Uh? Oh, my heavens! Ten minutes after midnight. I -- " The little redhead seemed about to cry. "Are you late? He'll wait. Oh, I'm sure he will -- for Winnie." "Not late yet. He's off duty at midnight and it takes a while to get here. But -- Oh, dear, I don't want to leave you. Not when we were -- I was, anyhow -- so happy." "Me, too, darling," Joan agreed, gently untangling herself from Winifred's arms. "But big sister is always here. Don't keep your man waiting. Check your lipstick and hair and such in my bath if there is any chance that he may already be in your room." "Well. All right. Miss Joan, you're good to me." "Don't you dare call me 'Miss' at a time like this or swelp me. I'll make you miss your date. Rush, rush, hon; go get beautiful. Kiss me good night; I'll be asleep before you are out of the bath. And, Winsome -- no exercises tomorrow." "But -- " "Smile, I didn't break your dolly. I want to sleep late and I want you to sleep late so that I won't wake up from knowing you are fidgeting. You'll get all the classic postures you need in bed tonight. Stop blushing. Give him something special from me, only don't tell him. Or do, I don't give a darn. Kiss me quick, and let me go to sleep." Her maid-chum-nurse kissed her not too quickly and left hurriedly. Joan Eunice pretended to be asleep when Winifred walked silently from the bath through the room, on into her own room, and the door sealed behind her. (Well, twin, you lucked through again, didn't you?) (Eunice, I've told you time and again that I am not going to stroll Gay Street while I'm a virgin. Might be habitforming.) (Could be, with our cuddly little pet who enjoys a gang bang. But I didn't mean her. I meant at Safe Harbor.) (You call that lucki I call it the most frustrating thing that ever happened to me. Eunice, I needed the Money Hum as badly as Jake did.) (I call it luck. Boss darling, I may be dead but I can still read a calendar. I was steady on twenty-eight-and-a-half days for more than ten years -- and we've still been on it since we amalgamated. We're fertile as a turtle. Myrtle, this minute -- and will be, for two or three days. Jake promised you that the next time won't be frustrating... and you'll be as carefree as a cheerleader I told you about. Scan me, Fanny? So run, don't walk, and get that implant -- about ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Unless you plan to get us benched right away. Do you?) (Eunice, you're talking non -- No, you're not. I will do something about it. Tomorrow. But 'benched right away' is an exaggeration. I'm new at this while you've been through one pregnancy. But your aunt probably watched you like a hawk -- ) (She did. Elsie Dinsmore had a livelier time.) ( -- but I've sat through three, as a husband. 'Benched' is just a short time at the end. And pregnancy doesn't kill a woman's interest. My angelic first wife Agnes would have tried it on the way to the hospital if I hadn't had more sense about it than she had. Just the same. I'll be good. I'll be careful, rather.) (Joan, I wasn't trying to talk you out of it. I just didn't want us knocked up by accident. Say through a playful romp with Judgie Wudgie. Or Alec. But if you want, that's fine. Marry Jake and get pregnant at once. Or get pregnant by him and then marry him; he might be more tractable.) (Eunice, I'm not planning on getting married in any hurry if at all.) (So? I've heard you propose to Jake at least four times.) (Yes, yes! If Jake agreed, I would; I wouldn't let him down. But he won't, if ever, until these legal finagles are cleared up. Which might take years. Do you remember how long it took to get the courts to okay the Sky Trails stock conversions? That was clear-cut compared with this and did not involve as much money. Eunice, I propose to Jake for his morale; I don't care whether he makes an 'honest woman' of me or not, I just want him to take us to bed. Marriage doesn't figure.) (Twin, your naivete surprises me. Didn't you hear Winnie? Marriage isn't planned, it just happens. No girl is more likely to wind up in a hotel room, married to a man she didn't even know at sundown the night before, than a chick who isn't going to get married 'any time soon.' Boss, you marry Jake. Marry him as soon as he will agree to it -- for you were talking sense when you pointed out that no other man could both understand you and not be dazzled by your money. In the meantime, it's smart to go contra.) (All right. What are the girls using today?) (Oh, most of them use implants. Some use pills, both the daily ones and the monthly ones. But if you miss with either sort, you are on a very short fuse. I never liked monkeying with my body's economy; I'm not convinced that anything that changes a woman's femaleness that much is a good idea. Not superstition. Boss, I did some careful reading after the time I got caught. There are hazards to all chemical methods. My body worked fine the way it was; I didn't want to tamper with a successful organization I'm quoting you, only you were talking about business.) (I see your point, Eunice, even though we're talking about monkey business. A body is far more complex than a corporation, and the one you turned over to me is a jewel; I don't want to tamper with it, either. But what did you use? Selfrestraint?) (Never had any in stock, dearie. Oh, there are lots of other loving things you can do without getting pregnant -- if you can shake off your early training and be twentyfirst century -- ) (Look, infant, I knew about -- and used -- every one of those other things in high school. I keep telling you: You kids did not invent sex.) (You didn't let me finish. Boss. Those are emergency measures. A girl who depends on them alone is going to add to the population explosion. Joan, I looked into it carefully when I turned eighteen and was licensed... and settled on one of the oldest methods. A diaphragm. They are still available; any physician will fit them. I wore one six days every month, even at the office -- because, as the doctor pointed out, most diaphragm failures result from leaving them at home while you run out for pound of sugar, be right back.) (I suspect he's right, Eunice.) (I'm sure of it, Joan. I never liked them -- I never liked any contraception; I seemed to have a deep instinct that told me to get pregnant. Boss... the thing -- the only thing -- that I really mind about being dead... is that I always wanted to have a baby by you. And that's silly, as you were already too old -- or maybe almost too old -- when I first met you. But I would have tried if you had offered.) (Darling, darling!) (Oh, I'm happy with what I have. Om Mani Padme Hum. I'm not kicking about my karma. I'm not just content. I'm happy... to be half of Joan Eunice.) (Eunice, would you still be willing to have a baby by me?) (What? Boss, don't joke about it. Don't mock me.) (I'm not joking, beloved.) (But, Boss, the necessary part of you is gone. Pickled in alcohol, or something.) (They use formalin, I think. Or deep freeze. I'm not talking about that old wreck we discarded. We can go down and get an implant.) (Huh? I don't understand.) (Do you remember a tax-deductible called the Johanna Mueller Schmidt Memorial Eugenics Foundation?) (Of course. I wrote a check for it every quarter.) (Eunice, despite the purposes set out in its charter, the only real purpose does not appear in the fine print. When my son was killed no I was already fairly old. But I was still virile -- potent -- and tests showed that I was fertile. So I got married -- I think I told you -- to have another son. Didn't work. But I had my bet hedged and never told anyone. Sperm bank deposit. In the cryogenic vault of the Foundation is a little piece of Johann. little pieces, that is. Presumably they are not dead, just asleep. That's what I meant by an implant. With a syringe. Or however they do it. (Eunice? Are you still there?) (I'm crying. Boss. Can't a girl cry happy? Ves) (Tomorrow morning, then. You can change your mind up till the last minute.) (I'll never change my mind. I hope you won't.) (Beloved.) N ext morning Joan found that Jake had left the house before she woke; there was a note on her tray: " Dear Joan Eunice, " slept like a baby and feel ready to fight wildcats -- thanks to you and Winnie. Please extend my thanks to her and say (to both of you) that  will most gratefully join your prayer meetings any time I am invited -- especially if I've had a tiring day. "I will not be back until late -- treasure hunting, locating links of evidence. Alec is off to Washington for one link. If you need me, call my answering service or Judge McCampbell's chambers. "I've instructed Jefferson Billings to let you draw against your petty expenditures account -- about four hundred thousand in it, I believe -- on your old signature and new thumb print. He'll pay drafts and hold them and I'll countersign until you make out a new signature  thumbprint card -- he says he knew Eunice Branca by sight, no problem. If you wish, he will call on you with a new sigprint card -- we assume that your signature is now somewhat changed." (Boss, I guess Jake doesn't know that I sign your signature better than you do.) (I don't think anyone knows, dearest. I don't know how that would figure in court -- for us, or against us?) ""If you need more pocket money, let me make you a personal loan rather than have it show in my conservator's report. Your "Brother Mac" is most helpful, but the financial end of this nonsense should appear ultra-conservative until such time as he can, with full justification, relieve me as your conservator. Caesar's wife, you know. "Spe'aking of Caesar's wife, I told you a chuckle about two of our friends. This morning I phoned one of them and the other answered and, after the usual query as to sight cfe sound security, they seemed unworried about what I saw or heard or might infer. I was flattered. Little imp, if you must misbehave, you can trust them -- for they have your welfare at heart. Sorry I was stuffy yesterday. " (I'm glad to learn that. Boss.) ni (Eunice, I can't see that it's our business what Alec and Mac do in their spare time. Jake shouldn't gossip about them, even to us.) (No, no. Boss! Jake is telling you that he was being a cube yesterday -- and he's sorry -- and now he's granting you absolution in advance. We had best marry Jake -- nevertheless I've fretted that Jake might be jealous. Possessive. His age, his background. Could be doom, twin -- as you are a tart at heart and we both know it.) (Oh, nonsense, Eunice! I would never rub Jake's nose in it -- and anyhow you're wrong. A smart man -- which Jake is -- doesn't get excited over a go on the tiles; what worries him is fear of losing a wife he values. If Jake marries us, I will never let him worry about losing us.) (I hope you can make that stick. Boss honey.) (With your help I'm sure I can. Let's finish his letter -- ) "Don't count on me for dinner, as what I must do today is urgent -- more urgent than something that seemed dreadfully urgent yesterday. And was. And will be, I hope. "This was meant to be a love letter but I've had to mention other matters -- and other people, so I must urge you to tear it up and flush it down the W. C. It is no accident that I am thumb-printing the seal and will hand it to Cunningham with a promise to have his head on a platter if it leaves his person before it reaches you. I've learned to like Cunningham; he's an 'honest thief' "My love to you, dearest, and the biggest kiss possible -- so big that you can break off a piece and deliver it to Winnie when you thank her for me. She's a charming girl, and I'm pleased that she's mothering you so well. "J." (Why, the horny old bastard. Joan, Jake has his eye on Winnie's pretty tail while he's patting ours.) (She'll have to stand in line!) Jealous, twin?) (No. But I repeat -- I'm going to scalp him first. Darn it, Eunice, I had him all set yesterday -- and it's been a long struggle. Not the Whim-Wham-ThankeeMa'am you managed with him. And all it got me was a spanking. I do hope he comes home tonight.) (Three hurdles even if he does, twin.) Threel) (Hubert... and Winnie... and that 'implant.' Boss darling? You're not going to do me out of having your baby by letting Jake get at you first -- are you?) (Of course not, little stupid. I was coping with intrigues without getting shot long before your grandmother was born. Mmm -- I'll need cash!) (Jake told you how to get all the cash you want.) (Oh, sure -- on my signature and his countersignature. Like a cat covering up on linoleum. Eunice my love. I'll bet you never paid a bribe in your life.) (Well... not with money.) (Don't tell me, let me guess. Hon, what we're sitting on might be worth a bills in medium denominations from no recorded source. Come along, little snoopy, and I'll show you something that even my secretary -- a sweetly deceitful girl named Eunice, remember her? -- didn't know anything about.) (Do you mean that safe hidden in your bath, Boss?) Huhl How the hell did you know about that's) (I'm snoopy.) (Do you know the combo?) (I ought to take the Fifth.) (Why bother? You'll know it in two minutes. Or can you pick it out of my mind?) (Boss darling, you know by now that I don't know anything in your memory until you think about it... and you don't know anything in mine until I think about it. But -- Well, if I had to open that safe, I think I would start with the numbers that mean your mother's birthday.) Joan sighed. (A girl doesn't have any privacy these days. All right, let's see if we've been robbed.) S HE went into her bath, sealed the door, bolted it by hand, removed a stack of towels from a lower cabinet, fiddled with the ceiling of the cabinet; the back panel slid aside, disclosing a safe. (You think my mother's birth date will open it?) (I'd switch on the sun lamps over the massage table first, then run the cold water in the hand basin.) (No privacy at all! Honey, did you really pay a bribe with your pretty tail once?) (Not exactly. I just improved the situation. Let's see if we've been robbed.) Joan opened the safe. Inside was money enough to interest a bank auditor. But the packets had not been packaged in a bank; they were not that neatly jogged and the total for each was hand printed. (Plenty of moola, dear -- and either nobody found this safe or they never figured out the additional bolts. Either way, it settles one thing. We won't put Jake's sweet note down the hopper.) (Let him think we did, huh?) (If he asks.) (Then cry on him later and admit that we couldn't bear to part with it.) (Eunice, you have a mind like a pretzel.) (That's why it fits so well into yours, twin.) (Could be.) Joan put the letter inside, took out two packets, put them in a purse into the dressing-room end -- closed the safe, shut off the sun lamps, shut off the water, spun the dial, slid the panel back, replaced the towels, closed the cabinet. Then she stepped to the bath's intercom, pressed a touchplate. "Chief O'Neil." "Yes, Miss Smith?" "I want my car, one driver and both Shotguns in thirty minutes." There was a short silence. "Uh, Miss Smith. Mr. Salomon apparently forgot to mention that you would be leaving the house." "For excellent reason. He did not know it. Did he mention that I am no longer a ward of the court? If not, have you learned it from some other source?" "Miss, I haven't learned it from an official source." "I see. Then you are learning it from me. Officially." "Yes, Miss." "You don't sound happy, O'Neil. You could check by phoning Judge McCampbell." "Why, yes, of course." "Are you going to, O'Neil?" "Perhaps I misunderstood. Miss. Weren't you telling me to?" "Are you recording?" "Certainly, Miss. I always do, with orders." "I suggest that you play it back and answer your own question. I'll hold. But first -- how long have you been with me, O'Neil?" "Seventeen years, Miss. The last nine as your Chief." "Seventeen years, two months, and some days. Not enough for maximum retirement but it has been long, faithful, and unquestioning service. You can retire this morning on full pay for life, if you wish, O'Neil; faithful service should be appreciated. Now please play back while I hold." She waited. "Be switched. Miss -- I must need a hearing aid. You didn't tell me to call the Judge. You just said I could." "That is correct. I pointed out that you could check on what I told you -- officially -- by making such a call. You still can." "Uh, Miss, I don't see what you are driving at." "I'm sure you can figure it out. Do you wish to retire today? If so, send up Mentone; I want to interview him." "Miss, I've no wish to retire at all." "Really? You gave the impression that you were looking for another job. Perhaps with Mr. Salomon. If so, I do not want to stand in your way. Retirement at full pay is available to you, O'Neil." "Miss, I like it here." "I'm pleased to hear it. I hope you will stay for many years. O'Neil, have you ever discussed my comings and goings with anyone?" "Only when you've told me to. Miss. In which case I always have your order to do so on tape." "Fine. Wipe this tape and I'll hold while you do so." Shortly he said, "Wiped, Miss Smith." "Good. Let's start over. Chief O'Neil, this is Miss Johann Sebastian Bach Smith speaking. I want my car, one driver, and both Shotguns in thirty minutes." "They will be ready. Miss Smith." "Thank you. I'll be shopping. Is there anything I can pick up for Mrs. O'Neil?" "That's most kind of you. Miss. I don't think so. Shall I ask her?" "If you do, it is only necessary to say that my car is going out. If she has a list. I'll be happy to have Fred or Shorty take care of it. Off." (Boss, you scared the pee out of him. Was that nice?) (Running a feudal enclave in the midst of a nominal democracy isn't easy, Eunice. When Johann said 'Frog' everybody hopped -- my security boss especially. O'Neil has got to know -- they've all got to know -- that Johann is still here... and that no one, not even darling Jake, reviews or vetoes what I say. Unless he marries us, in which case I'll go female and let him decide everything.) (That'll be the day!) (I might, dear one. Tell me, did you obey Joe?) (Well... I never bucked him. I suppose you could say I obeyed him. Except that I fibbed, or sometimes kept my mouth shut.) (I'd do just about the same. I think a perfect arrangement would be to do exactly what a man tells me to do... but wangle it so that he tells me to do what I've already decided to do.) Joan felt, rather than heard, her chuckle. (Boss, that sounds like a recipe for a perfect marriage.) (I find I like being female. But it's different. Now what shall we wear?) knee skirt, an opaque cloak with hood and yashmak, plus lowheeled sandals, all in subdued colors. She was ready in less than thirty minutes. (How's our face, Eunice?) (Okay for a shopping trip. No need to call Winnie; the little baggage probably hasn't had much sleep.) (Nor do I want to call her; she might want to come along. Let's go, sweet -- we're out to break a two-thousand-year record with no help from the Holy Ghost.) (Boss, that's not a nice way to talk!) (Well, I'll be frimped! Eunice, I thought you weren't a Christian? Zen. Or Hinduist. Or some such.) (I'm not any of those things. Boss. I simply know some useful spiritual disciplines. But it is rude to joke about anything someone else holds holy.) (Even in my mincf! Are you telling me what I must not think! If I could reach you. I'd spank you.) (Oh, you can say anything to me. Boss -- just don't say such things out loud.) (I didn't and don't and never have. Quit nagging me.) (Sorry, Boss. Love you.) (Love you, little nag. Let's go get knocked up.) (Fej!) She took the front lift to the basement; O'Neil met her and saluted. "Car is ready. Miss -- and both drivers and both Shotguns." "Why both drivers?" "Well, Finchley should be on call. But Dabrowski is bucking my authority a touch. Claims he's senior to Finchley. Do you wish to settle it?" "Of course not; you must. But perhaps I can smooth some feathers." "Yes, Miss." He conducted her to her car; both teams were lined up by it, they saluted in unison. She smiled at them. "Good morning, friends. I'm glad to see you all looking so well. It's been a long time." Dabrowski answered for them, "It has indeed. Miss Smith -- and we are glad to see you looking so well." "Thank you." Her eyes traveled across them. "There is one thing no one has told me... about the tragedy that started this strange sequence of events. Which team was driving the night Mrs. Branca was killed?" For a long moment no one spoke. Then O'Neil answered, "Finchley and Shorty had the duty that night. Miss Smith." "Then I must thank them -- for Mrs. Branca and for myself. Although I know that Dabrowski and Fred would have acted as bravely, as promptly." She looked at Finchley, then at Shorty, her face unsmiling but serene. "Which one of you avenged Eunice? Or was it both of you?" Finchley answered. "Shorty got him, Mrs. -- Miss Smith. Bare hands, one chop. Broke his neck." She turned to Shorty -- six feet six of smooth-black soul, two hundred ninety pounds of sudden death -- and a preacher in his time off. She looked up at him and said gently, "Shorty, from the bottom of my heart -- for Eunice Branca -- I thank you." (I do thank him. Boss! This is news to me. I was dead before that lift opened.) "If she were here, she would thank you -- not just for herself but for other girls that killer will never kill. I'm glad you killed him in the act. If he had gone to trial he might be out by now. Doing it again." Shorty had said nothing up to then. "Miss -- Finch got 'im, too. Zapped him. Couldn't rightly say which one got him first." "Nor does it matter. Any of you four would have protected Mrs. Branca with your life. She knew it -- and knows it, wherever she is. I know it, and Chief O'Neil knows it." Joan felt tears start, let them flow. "I -- all of us -- wish to Heaven she had waited indoors until you two arrived. I know that each of you would rather see me dead than her. I ask you to do me the honor of believing that I feel the same way. Shorty, will you say a prayer for her tonight? For me? I don't know much about praying." (Damn it. Boss, you've got me crying.) (Then say a Money Hum. For Shorty. He's still blaming himself for the unavoidable.) "I will, Miss. I have every night. Although -- Mrs. Branca -- doesn't need it. She went straight to Heaven." (So I did. Boss. Though not the way Shorty thinks.) (And we shan't tell him. Have I said enough?) (I think so.) Joan said, "Thank you. Shorty. For me, not for Eunice. As you say, Eunice doesn't really need prayers." She turned to O'Neil. "Chief, I want to go to Gimbel's Compound." "Certainly, Miss. Uh, Finchley, man the car. Both Shotguns." O'Neil helped her in, locked her in; she locked herself in. The armor door lifted and the big car rolled out into the street. (Joan, what in the world are you going to buy at Gimbel's?) (A gag. For you. I'll change that order in a moment. Eunice, where did you buy clothes? You were the most smartly dressed gal in town -- even when you were the nakedest.) (Pooh, I was never naked; Joe's designs made all the difference. Joan, where I shopped you would never shop.) (Can't see why not.) (Johann might but you can't; it wouldn't do. Mmm... while I could not afford the stylish places, I know of them. Come to think of it, two of them lease space inside Gimbel's Compound.) (So that's where we'll go -- second. I'll tell Finchley the change... and tell him to have Fred escort me; I think Fred feels left out.) (Wups! Fred can read.) (So? Oh Well, Fred can guard me later.) She thumbed the order switch. "Finchley?" "Yes, Miss?" "I got so preoccupied that I forgot one other stop. Please drop Shorty and me at the unloading zone where State passes over Main." "State and Main, Miss." "Please have Shorty hang the radio link on his belt; there's no parking around there. Or was not the last time I was down town. How long has that been? Over two years." "Two years and seven months, Miss. Sure you don't want both Shotguns with you?" "No, they can take turns staying with the car. If you have to get out, I want you covered." "Oh, I'll be all right. Miss."  "Don't argue with me. You wouldn't have argued when I was old Johann Smith; I assure you that Miss Johann Smith still has his poison fangs. Pass the word along." She heard him chuckle. "I'll do that. Miss Smith." hooked up her yashmak, concealing her identity -- either or both of them -- from the curious. Shorty unlocked her and handed her out. On the crowded pedestrian walk of Main Street Joan felt suddenly vulnerable... except for the tower of strength beside her. "Shorty, the building I'm looking for is in the thirteen hundred block -- thirteen-oh-seven. Can you find it?" The question made him feel useful; she knew where the Roberts Building was, she owned it. "Oh, sure. Miss -- I read numbers real good. Letters, too -- just words bother me." "Let's go then. Shorty, how do you manage in your real profession? Not being able to read the Bible, I mean." "No trouble, I use talking books -- and as for the Book, I got every precious word memorized." "A remarkable memory. I wish I could say the same." "Just takes patience. I had the Book down pat while I was still in prison." He added thoughtfully, "Sometimes I think I ought to learn to read... but I can't seem to find time." (The poor dear probably never had a teacher who could teach. Boss.) (Never tamper with a successful organization, Eunice; he's found his niche.) "This must be it. Miss. 'One, three, oh, seven.' " "Thank you. Shorty." She was not asked for her ID at the building entrance, nor did she offer it, for she had none, either as Johann Smith or Eunice Branca. The guard noted the "Licensed  Deputized" shield (which matched his own) on Shorty's uniform, released the cage turnstile and waved them on through. Joan Eunice smiled at him with her eyes -- and made note that security at the Roberts Building should be tightened; the guard should have photographed Shorty's ID and logged his shield number. (Boss, he can't handle so many people that way; he has to use his judgment.) (Look who's talking! If that apartment house you used to live in had had tight security, you would never have been mugged. If we can't stop violence outdoors, we must try to keep it from coming indoors.) (I won't argue. Boss darling -- I'm excitedl) (Me, too; this veil is a help.) On the twelfth floor they went to the suite occupied by the Johanna Mueller Schmidt Memorial Eugenics Foundation, H.S. Olsen, M.D., Sc.D., Director, Please Ring and Wait. The guard let them in, went back to his picture magazine. Joan noted with approval that there was a goodly number of women and couples in the waiting room. She (Johann) had jacked up Olsen about the (public) purpose of the Foundation -- to offer superior anonymous donors to licensed and qualified females -- in her last letter accompanying a quarterly check; apparently it had had good effect. "Wait here, Shorty; there's video over there." She went to the barrier desk separating the waiting room from the outer clerical office, avoided the sign "Applications" and got the reluctant attention of the only male back of the barrier, motioned him to her. "What is it. Ma'am? If it's an application, go to the far end, present your ID and fill out the questionnaire, then wait. You'll be called." "I want to see the Director. Dr. Olsen." "Dr. Olsen never sees anyone without an appointment. Give me your name and state your business and possibly his secretary will see you." She leaned closer, spoke softly. "I must see him. Tell him that my husband has found out." The office manager looked startled. "Your name?" "Don't be silly. Just tell him that." "Uh... wait here." He disappeared through a rear door. She waited. After a remarkably short time he appeared at a side door of the waiting room, motioned her to him, then conducted her down a passage toward a door marked "Director -- Keep out" and to a door near it marked "Secretary to the Director, Ring  Wait." There he left her with a woman who reminded Joan of Johann's third-grade teacher, both in appearance and authoritarian manner. The woman said frostily, "What is this nonsense? You may start by showing me your ID." (Three fingers stiff into her solar plexus. Boss, and say she fainted!) (Maybe. We'll try my way first.) Joan answered in still more formal tones, "Not likely. Miss Perkins. Why do you think I'm veiled? Will you announce me? Or do I call the police and the news snoops?" Miss Perkins looked startled, left her stenodesk and entered the private office behind it. She came out shortly and said angrily, "You may go in." Olsen did not get up as Joan entered. He said, "Madam, you have chosen an unusual way of getting my attention. Now what is it? Come to the point." "Doctor, don't you offer chairs to ladies?" "Certainly. If they are ladies. A point you have gone to some trouble to render dubious. Speak up, my good woman, or I shall have you removed." (Boss, did you see him glance at the mike? That old bat in the next room is taking down every word.) (So I assumed, Eunice. So we won't talk yet.) Joan stepped close to the Doctor's desk, unhooked her yashmak, let it fall to her left shoulder. changed from annoyance to startled recognition. Joan Eunice leaned across his desk, flipped off the dictation microphone. Then she said quietly, "Anything else still recording? Is this room soundproof? How about that door?" "Miss -- " "'Miss' is enough. Are you ready to ask me to sit down? Or shall I leave -- and return with my lawyer?" "Do please sit down -- Miss." "Thank you." Joan waited until he got up and moved a chair to a correct "honored-guest" position near his own. She sat down. "Now answer the rest. Are we truly private? If we are not -- and you tell me that we are -- I will eventually know it... and will take such steps as I deem appropriate." "Uh, we're private. But just a moment." He got up, went to his secretary's door, bolted it manually. "Now, Miss, please tell me what this is about." "I shall. First, I've been supplementing my original endowment with quarterly checks. Have you been receiving these during my incapacitation?" "Eh... one check failed to arrive. I waited six weeks, then wrote to Mr. Salomon and explained what your custom had been. It seems he checked the facts, for soon after we received two quarterly payments at once, with a letter saying that he would continue to authorize payments in accordance with your custom. Is there some difficulty?" "No, Doctor. The Foundation will continue to receive my sup-., port. Let me add that the trustees are -- on the whole -- satisfied with your management." "That's pleasing to hear. Is that why you came today? To tell me that?" "No, Doctor. Now we get to the purpose. Are you quite certain that our privacy cannot be breached? Let me add that the answer is far more important to you than it is to me." "Miss, uh -- Miss, I am certain." "Good. I want you to go into the cold vault, obtain donation #-#-# -- I will go with you and check the number -- and then I want you to impregnate me with it. At once." The Doctor's face broke in astonishment. Then he regained his professional aplomb and said, "Miss -- that is impossible." "Why? The purpose of our institution, as defined in its charter -- which I wrote -- is to supply qualified females with donor sperm -- on request, without fee and without publicity. That's exactly what I want. If you wish to give me a physical examination. I'm ready. If you want to know whether or not this body is licensed for child-bearing, I assure you that it is -- although you know that in this case a fine for unlicensed pregnancy means less than nothing. What's the trouble? Does it take too long to prepare the sperm to do it all in one day?" "Oh, no, we can have it warmed and viable in thirty minutes." "Then impregnate me thirty minutes from now." "But, Miss -- do you realize the trouble I could get into?" "What trouble?" "Well... I do follow the news. Or I would not have recognized you. I understand that there is a question of identity -- " "Oh, that." Joan dismissed it. "Doctor, do you bet on the races?" "Eh? I've been known to. Why?" "If we are truly private you can't possibly get into trouble. But there comes a time in every man's life when he must bet. You are at such a crisis. You can bet on a certain horse -- on the nose, you can't hedge your bet. And win. Or lose. As you know, the other trustees of.this corporation are my dummies; I am the Foundation. Let me predict what will come to pass. Presently this identity nonsense will be over and the real Johann Sebastian Bach Smith will stand up. At that time the endowment of this institution will be doubled. At that same time the salary of the director will be doubled. If you bet on the right horse, you will be the director. If not -- you'll be out of a job." "You're threatening me!" "No. Prophesying. Old Johann Sebastian Bach Smith was a seventh son of a seventh son, born under a caul; he had the gift of prophecy. No matter which way you bet, the endowment will be doubled. But only you and I will ever know what is done today." "Mmmm... there are procedures to satisfy. I do have authority to permit any adult female to receive a sperm donation if I am satisfied that she qualifies -- and let's say that I am. Nevertheless there are routines to go through, records that must be kept." (He's ready to geek. Boss. So sing him a 'Money Hum,' with a different tune.) (Eunice, a cash bribe is to push him over if he won't fall. Let's see if he'll sell it to himself.) Joan shook her head. "No records. Just do it to me and I'll hook my veil over my face and leave." "But, Miss -- I don't do these things myself. A staff doctor carries out the donation procedure, assisted by a nurse. They would think it strange if no records were kept. Very." "No nurses. No assistants. You alone. Doctor. You are an M.D. and a specialist in genetics and eugenics. Either you can do this... or you don't know enough to head this institution -- which the trustees would regretfully notice. Besides that, I go with you and check the number on that donation... and stick at your elbow until you place it inside me. Do we understand each other?" The Doctor sighed. "I once thought a general practice was hard work! We can't be sure that a placed donation will result in impregnation." "If not. I'll be back in twentyeight and a half days. Doctor, quit stalling. Or bet on the other horse and I'll leave. No harsh words, now or later. Just that prophecy." She stood up. (Well, Eunice? Will the frog hop?) (Can't guess, dear. He's seen so many female tails he's bored with them. I can't figure him.) Olsen suddenly stood up. "You'll need a cold suit." "All right." "Plus the advantage that a cold suit covers so thoroughly that a man would not recognize his own wife in one. I have a spare here, for V.I.P.'s." "I think you could class me as a V.I.P.," Joan said dryly. F orty minutes later Dr. Olsen said, "Hold still a moment longer. I am placing a Dutch cap, a latex occlusive cervical pessary, over the donation." "Why, Doctor? I thought those things were for contraception." "Usually. And it will serve that purpose, too -- mean to say, some of our clients wish to be protected at once from any possibility of impregnation from any other source. But in your case my purpose in installing this temporary barrier is to make certain that the donation does impregnate you. To give those wigglers a chance to reach target and to keep them from swimming downstream instead -- follow me? Leave it in place until some time tomorrow -- or later, it doesn't matter. Do you know how to remove it?" "If I can't get it out. I'll call you." "If you wish. If you fail to skip your next menses, we can try again in four weeks." Dr. Olsen lowered the knee supports, offered his hand. She stepped down and her skirt fell into place. She felt flushed and happy. (Eunice, it's done!) (Yes, Boss! Beloved Boss.) Dr. Olsen picked up her cloak, held it ready to lay around her shoulders. She said, "Doctor -- don't worry about that horse race." He barely smiled. "I have not been worrying about it. May I say why?" "Please." "Um. If you recall, I have met Johann Smith -- Mister Johann Smith -- on other occasions." "Eleven occasions, I believe, sir, including a private interview when Dr. Andrews nominated you to succeed him." "Yes, Miss Smith. I'll never forget that interview. Miss, there may be some legal point to clear up concerning your identity. But not in my mind! I do not think that any young woman of your present physiological age could simulate Mr. Johann Smith's top-sergeant manner -- and make it stick." "Oh, dear!" "Pardon me?" "Dr. Olsen, this sex change I've undergone is not easy to handle. It is fortunate -- for both of us -- that you were able to spot Johann Smith behind the face I now wear. But -- darn it, sir! -- I've got to acquire manners to match what I am now. Will you call on me -- oh, say three weeks from now when I hope to have cheerful news -- and let me show you that I can simulate a lady when I try? Come for tea. We can discuss how the Foundation's work can be expanded under a doubled endowment." "Miss Smith, I will be honored to call on you whenever you wish. For any reason. Or none." (Wups! Hey, Eunice, I thought you said he was bored with female tails?) (So I did. But we have an unusually pretty one, Joan, even from that angle. Gonna kiss him?) (Eunice, can't you treat just one man impersonally?) (I don't know; I've never tried. Aw, don't be chinchy; he's been a perfect lamb.) (Now you be a lamb, too -- let's get out of here.) Joan let the doctor lay her cloak around her shoulders; it brought his head close to hers. She turned her face toward that side, wet her lips and smiled at him. She could see him decide to risk it. She did not dodge as his lips met hers -- but did not put her arms around him and let herself be slightly clumsy, stiffened a little before giving in to it. (Twin! Don't let him put us back on that table -- make him use the couch in his office.) (Neither one, Eunice. Pipe down!) Joan broke from it, trembling. "Thank you. Doctor. And you see I can he a girl if I try. How do I get back to the waiting room without passing your Miss Perkins?" She hooked her yashmak. A few minutes later Shorty handed her into her car, locked her in, and mounted into the forward compartment. "Gimbel's Compound, Miss Smith?" "Please, Finchley." Once inside the compound Joan had Fred escort her to Madame Pompadour's. The fact that she had a private bodyguard got her immediate attention from the manager, who was no Madame Pompadour even though he wore his hair in the style made famous by the notorious Marquise and had manners and gestures to match. (Eunice, are you sure we are in the right place?) (Certainly, Boss -- wait till you see their prices.) "How may I serve Madame?" "Do you have a private room?" "But of course, Madame. Uh, there is a waiting room where -- " "My guard stays with me." The manager looked hurt. "As Madame wishes. If you will walk this way -- " (Eunice, shall we walk that way?) (Don't try, twin -- just follow him. Or her, as the case may be.) Shortly Joan was seated facing a low model's walk; Fred stood at parade rest behind her. The room was warm; she unfrogged her cloak and pushed back its hood but left the yashmak over her features. Then she dug into her purse, got out a memorandum. "Do you have a model who comes close to these measurements?" The manager studied the list -- height, weight, shoulders, bust, waist, leg. "This is Madame?" "Yes. But here is another specs list even if you can't match me. A friend for whom I wish to buy something pretty and exotic. She's a redhead with pale skin to match and green eyes." Joan had copied Winifred's measurements from the exercise records the two had been keeping. "I see no problems, Madame, but in your own case permit me to suggest that our great creative artist. Chariot, will be happy to check these measurements or even to design directly on -- " "Never mind. I am buying items already made up. If I buy." "Madame's pleasure. May I ask one question? Will Madame be wearing her own hair?" "If I wear a wig it will be the same color as my hair, so assume that." (Eunice, should I buy a wig?) (Be patient and let it grow out, dear. Wigs are hard to keep clean. And they never smell clean.) (Then we'll never wear one.) (Smart Boss. Soap and water is the world's greatest aphrodisiac.) (I've always thought so. Though a girl should smell like a girl.) (You do, dearie, you do -- you can't help it.) "Madame's hair is a beautiful shade. And now, since Madame indicated that her time is short, perhaps it would suit her convenience to let our accounting department record her credit card while I alert the two models?" (Watch it. Boss!) (I wasn't ahint the door, dearie.) "I use credit cards with several names. Such as McKinley, Franklin, and Grant. Or Cleveland." Joan reached into her purse, fanned a sheaf of bills. "The poor man's credit card." The manager repressed a shudder. "Oh, goodness, we don't expect our clients to pay cash." "I'm old-fashioned." The manager looked pained. "Oh, but it's unnecessary. If Madame prefers not to use her general credit account -- her priviliege! -- she can set up a private account with Pompadour in only moments. If she will permit me to have her ID -- " "Just a moment. Can you read fine print?" Joan pointed at a notice near a portrait of President McKinley. " 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.' I shan't get tangled up in a computer. I pay cash." "But, Madame -- we aren't set up for cash! I'm not certain we could make change." "Well, I don't want to put you to any inconvenience. Fred." "Yes, Miss?" "Take me to La Boutique." The manager looked horrified. "Please, Madame! I'm sure something can be arranged. One moment while I speak to our accountant." He hurried away without waiting for an answer. (Why the fuss. Boss honey? I've bought endless things for you, against your personal-expenditures account. Jake said we could use it.) (Eunice, I've despised those moronic machines since the first time I was trapped by a book club. But I'm not just being balky. Today is not a day to admit who we are. Later -- after we're out of court -- we'll set up a "Susan Jones" account for shopping in person. If we ever do again. I can see it's a bloody nuisance.) (Oh, no, it's fun! You'll see, twin. But remember -- I hold a veto until you learn something about clothes.) (Sho', sho', little nag.) (Who are you calling a nag, you knocked-up bag?) (Happy about it, beloved?) (Wonderfully happy. Boss. Are youl) (Wonderfully. Even if it wasn't romantic.) (Oh, but it was! We're going to have your baby!) (Quit sniffling.) (I'm not sniffling; you are.) (Maybe we both are. Now shut up, here he comes.) The manager beamed. "Madame! Our accountant says that it is perfectly all right to accept cash!" "The Supreme Court will be pleased to hear it." "What? Oh! Madame is jesting. Of course there is a service surcharge of ten percent for -- " "Fred. La Boutique." "Please, Madame! I pointed out to him how unfair that is... and found the most wonderful solution!" "Really?" "Truly, Madame. Anything you choose to buy. I'll simply charge against my personal account -- and you can pay me cash. No trouble. I'll be happy to. My bank doesn't make the least fuss over accepting cash deposits. Really." (Watch it. Boss; he'll expect a fat tip.) (If he can show us something we want he may get it. Cost is no huhu, Eunice; we can't get rid of the stuff.) (It's the principle of the thing. Boss.) (Forget it and help me spend money.) (All right. But we don't buy unless we like it.) F or the next two hours Joan spent money -- and was dazed to discover how expensive women's clothes could be. But she suppressed her early upbringing and paid attention only to an inner voice: (Not that one, twin -- it's smart but a man wouldn't like it.) (How about this one, Eunice?) (Maybe. Have her walk it around again, then have her sit down. Show some leg.) (Here comes 'Winnie' again. Is that girl a real redhead, Eunice?) (Probably a wig but doesn't matter; she's almost exactly Winnie's size. That would be cute on our Winsome. Twin, see what they have in fancy gee-strings -- green, for a redhead. Winnie ought to have at least one outfit intended to be seen by no one but her new boy friend.) (Okay, we'll give 'Bob' a treat. Who do you think he is, beloved?) (Haven't the faintest -- and we don't want to guess. Do we? I just hope he's nicer to her than Paul was.) "Mr. duValle? Do you have something exotic in a minimum gee for a redhead? Green, I suppose. And matching cups would be interesting, too. Something nice -- and intimate for a bride." (Bride?) (Well, it might help Winnie become a bride, Eunice -- and it steers him away from thinking I'm buying it for my sweetheart.) (Who cares what he thinks?) "Jeweled perhaps? Emeralds?" "I wouldn't want a bride to be mugged over a wedding present. Nor do I wish to buy her something more expensive than her bridegroom can afford. Bad taste, I think." "Ah, but these are synthetic emeralds. Just as lovely but quite reasonable. Yola dear -- come with me." Several thousand dollars later Joan quit. She was getting hungry and knew, from long experience, that being hungry made her unconscious equated "hungry" with "poor" in a canalization it had acquired in the #'s. She sent Fred to fetch Shorty to help carry while her purchases were being packaged and while she paid the startling sum. (Eunice, where shall we eat?) (There are restaurants inside this compound. Boss.) (Uh, darn it -- no, damn it -- I can't eat through a yashmak. You know what will happen. Somebody who watched video yesterday will recognize us. Then the news snoops will be on us before you can say medium rare.) (Well... how about a picnic?) (Wonderful! Eunice, you win another Brownie point. But -- where can we go? A picnic with grass and trees and ants in the potato salad -- but private so I can take off this veil... and yet close enough that we won't starve on the way?) (I don't know, Boss, but I'll bet Finchley does.) Finchley did know. Shorty was appointed to buy the lunch at The Hungry Man inside the compound -- "Get enough for six. Shorty, and don't look at the prices. Be lavish. But there must be potato salad. And a couple of bottles of wine." "One is enough. Miss. I don't drink, wine is a mocker, and Finchley never drinks when he is on call to drive." "Oh, think big. Shorty; I may drink a whole bottle myself -- you can save my soul tomorrow. Today is special -- my first day of freedom!" (Very special, beloved.) (Very, very special. Boss!) Down into the crosstown chute, up onto Express Route South, out to the unlimited zone, then fifty miles at three hundred feet per second -- a speed that Finchley did not use until Joan was protected by full harness plus collision net. The fifty miles melted away in fifteen minutes and Finchley eased it down and over, ready to exit. They were not shot at, even where Route South skirts the Crater. "Finchley? Can I get out of this pesky cocoon now?" "Yes, Miss. But I'd feel easier if you would wear the Swedish belt. Some of these drivers are cowboys." "All right. But tell me the instant I can take it off." (Eunice, the engineer if-that's-the-word who designed if-that's-the-word these goddam straps did not have women in mind!) (You've got it rigged for a man. Boss -- of course you're pinching a tit. Move the bottom half closer in and shift the upper anchor point after we stop; that's the way they rigged it for me. Some man has used it since the last time I did.) (Jake, probably, sometime when his own car was laid up. Sweetheart, how many things do I have to learn about being a woman before I can avoid tripping over my feet?) (Thousands. But you're doing all right. Boss -- and I'm always here to catch you.) (Beloved. Say, this doesn't look like a picnic country. I wonder if Finchley is lost.) They were passing through solid masses of "bedroom" areas -- walled enclaves, apartment houses, a few private homes. The trees looked tired and grass was scarce, while the car's air-conditioning system still fought smog. But not for long -- Finchley turned into a secondary freight route and shortly they had farms on each side. Joan noticed that one belonged to her -- to a subsidiary of Smith Enterprises, she corrected, and reminded herself that she no longer held control. N evertheless she noted that the guard at a corner watch tower seemed alert and the steel fence was stout and tall and capped with barbed wire and an alarm strand, all in good maintenance. But they were past with out her seeing what was being cropped -- no matter; Johann had never tried to manage that slice of the conglom, he had known his limitations. (Eunice, what are we raising back there?) (Joan, I can't see if you don't look -- and you never looked.) (Sorry, dearest. Speak up if you don't like the service.) (I will. I think it was a rotation crop. This soil has been farmed so hard and long that it has to be handled carefully.) (What happens when the soil no longer responds to management?) (We starve, of course. What do you expect? But before that they'll build on it.) (Eunice, it's got to stop, somewhere. When I was a boy I was a city kid but I could walk in less than an hour to green fields and uncut woods... woods so private I could play Tarzan in my skin. I wasn't 'just lucky' -- even in New York City a boy with five cents could ride to farms and woods in less time than it took me to walk it.) (Doesn't seem possible. Boss.) (I know. It's taken a fast car and a professional driver to do what I used to do on bare feet -- yet this isn't real farm country; these are open-air food factories with foremen and time clocks and shop stewards and payroll deductions and house-organ magazines and you name it. A dug well and a tin dipper would cause s strike -- and they'd be justified; those open wells and tin dippers spread disease. Just the same, the tin-dipper era was a good time in this country... and this one isn't. Where do we go from herel) The inner voice failed to answer. Joan waited. (Eunice?) (Boss, I don't know!) (Sorry, just sounding off. Eunice, all my life I did the best I knew how with what I had. I didn't waste -- shucks, even that whiteelephant house keeps a lot of people off Welfare. But every year things got worse. I used to get sour consolation from knowing that I wasn't going to be around when things fell to pieces. Now it looks like I will be. That's why I say; 'Where do we go from here?' I don't know the answer, either.) (Boss?) (Yes, dearest?) (I could see it, too. Moving from an Iowa farm to a big city made me see it. And I did have plans, sort of. I knew you were going to die, I couldn't help but know, and I figured that Joe would get tired of me some day -- no kids and no prospect of any, and me some day no longer with a fine job that took care of everything Joe needed. I underrated Joe; nevertheless I never forgot that he could hand me a pink slip anytime. So I had plans and saved my money. The Moon.) (The Moon! Hey, that's a fine idea! Take one of Pan Am's package tours -- de-luxe with private courier and all the trimmings. Do it before we bulge so big we can't climb through a hatch. What do you say, little imp?) (If you want to.) (You don't sound enthusiastic.) (I'm not against it. Boss. But I wasn't saving money for a tourist trip. I meant to put my name on the list and take the selection exams... and be able to pay the difference, since I didn't have one of the subsidized skills. Outmigrate. Permanently.) (I'll be durned! You had this in mind -- and never said a word?) (Why talk about if and when? I didn't plan to do it as long as you or Joe needed me. But I did have reason to be serious. I told you I was licensed for three kids.) (Yes, surely. I've known it since your first security check.) (Well, three is a high quota. Boss -- more than half a child over replacement. A woman can be proud of a threebaby license. But I wanted more.) (So? You can, now. Fines are no problem, even though they've upped them again and made them progressive. Eunice, if you want babies, this one is just a starter.) (Dear Boss. Let's see how we do with this one first. I knew I could not afford fines... but Luna has no restrictions against babies. They want babies. I think we're there.) Finchley turned in at a gate -- Agroproducts, Inc., Joan noticed -- a competitor. He parked so as not to block the gate, then got out and went to the guard post. He had parked at such an angle that Joan could not see what was going on, the armor between her and the control compartment cut off her view. Finchley returned, the car rolled through the gate. "Miss Smith, I was told to hold it under twenty miles per hour, so no safety belts is okay now." "Thank you, Finchley. How much was the bribe?" "Oh, nothing to matter. Miss." "So? I expect to see it on O'Neil's Friday Report. If it is not there, I will have to ask you again." "It'll be there. Miss," the driver answered promptly. "But I don't know yet what the total will be. Have to stop at their Administration Building and get us cleared through a back gate. To where you picnic." I stopped to think. It irked her to pay a bribe when her status 'as a major competitor (retired, conceded) entitled her by protocol to red-carpet treatment. But she had not sent word ahead, a minimum courtesy in visiting a competitor's plant to allow him time to sweep dirt under the rug or to divert the visitor away from things. Industrial espionage could not with propriety be conducted at top level. "Finchley, did you tell the gate guard whom you were driving?" "Oh, no. Miss!" Finchley sounded shocked. "But he checked the license even though I tell him it's your car -- best to tell; he has a list of all private armoreds in the state, just like I have. What I tell him was. I'm driving guests of Mr. Salomon... and let him think it was a couple of Vips from the Coast with a yen to picnic in a safe spot. Didn't tell him anything really, except Mr. Salomon's name. That okay?" "Just fine, Finchley." (Eunice, I feel like an interloper, being inside without giving my name. Rude.) (Look at it this way. Boss. You know who you are. But the public doesn't -- not after that silly carnival yesterday. I think it's best to be Jake's guest... which is true, in a way.) (I still feel that I should tell Finchley to give my name to the Chief Agronomist. But would the word get out? Or, rather, how soon!) (Thirty minutes! Long enough for some clerk to phone in and a news copter to fly out. Then some snoop will try to interview you by loudspeaker because the boys won't let him land.) (Some picnic!) (If he does land. Shorty and Fred will be elbowing each other for a crack at him. Eager. Too eager. Boss, maybe you haven't noticed, but while they call you Miss Smith they treat you exactly as they treated me. In their heads they know you are you... but in their guts they feel you are me.) (That's not far wrong, Eunice. In my head I am me... but in my guts -- your pretty belly -- I amvoM.) (Boss, I like that. We're the only one-headed Siamese twins in history. But not everything in our belly is me. There's one wiggler swimming faster than the rest -- and he is 'Johann', not Joan, not Eunice -- and if he makes it to the finish line, he's more important than both of us put together.) (My love, you're a sentimentalist.) (I'm a slob. Boss. And so are you.) (Nolo contendere. When I think about Johann and Eunice -- both dead, really -- getting together in Joan to make a baby, I come unstuck and want to cry.) (Better not, Joan; the car is stopping. Boss? How long does it take a wiggler to get there? I know a spermatozoon has to move several inches to reach the ovum -- but how fast does he swim? (Durned if I know, dear. Let's leave that cork in place at least a couple of days. Give the little bastard every possible chance. (Good!) (Do you know how to take it out? Or do we have to see Dr. O'Neil? We don't want to let Winnie in on this.) (Boss, I've seated them and taken them out so many times I can do it in my sleep. No fret, Annette. I've worn out more rubber baby bumpers than most girls have shoes.) (Bragging. Boasting.) (Only a trifle. Boss dearest. I told you I had always been an ever-ready. For years and years, any day I missed was not my idea. I knew my purpose in life clear back when I was a Girl Scout, no breasts and still a virgin.) Finchley returned to the car, spoke after he had buttoned in. "Miss?" "Yes, Finchley." "Farm boss sends greetings and says guests of Counselor Salomon are honored guests of Agroproducts. No bribe. But he asked if the main gate guard had put the squeeze; I told him No. Correct?" "Of course, Finchley. We don't rat on other people's employees." "Don't think he believed me but he didn't push it. He invited you both -- assumed there was two and I didn't correct it -- to stop for a drink or coffee on the way out. I let him think you might or might not." "Thank you, Finchley." T hey continued through the farm, came to another high gate; Fred got out and pressed a button, spoke to the security office. The gate rolled back, closed after them. Shortly the car stopped; Finchley unlocked the passenger compartment, offered his hand to Joan Eunice. She looked around. "Oh, this is lovely! I didn't know there were such places left." The spot was beautiful in a simple fashion. A little stream, clear and apparently unpolluted, meandered between low banks. On and near its banks were several sorts of trees and bushes, but they were not dense and there was a carpet From its lawnlike texture it had apparently been grazed. The sky was blue with scattered fairweather cumulus and the sunshine was golden warm without being too hot. (Eunice, isn't it grand?) (Uh-huh. 'Minds me of Iowa before the summer turns hot.) Joan Eunice stripped off her sandals, tossed them into the car on top of her cloak. She wiggled her toes. "Oh, delicious! I haven't felt grass under my bare feet for more than twenty years. Finchley, Shorty, Fred -- all of you! If you've got the sense God promised a doorknob, you'll take off your shoes and socks and give your feet a treat." Shotguns looked impassive; Finchley looked thoughtful. Then he grinned. "Miss Smith, you don't have to tell me twice!" He reached down and unclicked his boots. Joan Eunice smiled, turned away and wandered down toward the stream, judging that Shorty would be less shy if she did not stare. (Eunice, is Iowa this beautiful? Still?) (Parts of it, hon. But it's lived, between Des Moines and Grinnell. Nothing but farms when I was a baby. But by the time I left home we had more commuter neighbors than farm neighbors. They were beginning to build enclaves, too.) (Dreadful. Eunice, this country is breeding itself to death.) (For a freshly knocked-up broad you have an odd attitude toward reproduction, twin. See that grassy spot where the stream turns?) (Yes. Why?) (It takes me back... it looks like a stream bank in Iowa where I surrendered my alleged innocence.) (Well! Nice place for it. Did you struggle?) (Twin, are you pulling my leg? I cooperated.) (Hurt?) (Not enough to slow me down. No reason for it to. Boss darling, I know how it was in your day. But there is no longer an issue over tissue. Girls with smart mothers have it removed surgically when they reach menarche. And some just lose it gradually and never know where it went. But the girl who yells bloody murder and bleeds like a stuck pig is a rare bird today.) (Infant, I must again set you straight. Things haven't changed much. Except that people are more open about it now. Do you suppose that water is warm enough to swim in?) (Warm enough. Boss. But how do we know it's clean? No telling what's upstream.) (Eunice, you're a sissy. If you don't bet, you can't win.) (That was true yesterday... but today we're an expectant mother. A babbling brook can be loaded with nineteen sorts of horribles.) (Uh... oh, hell! If it's polluted, it'd be posted.) (Back here where you can't reach it without being passed through two electric gates? Ask Finchley; he may know.) (And if he says it's polluted?) (Then we go swimming anyhow. Boss, as you pointed out, if you don't bet, you can't win.) (Mmm... if he knows it's polluted. I'm chicken. As you pointed out, beloved, we now have responsibilities. Let's go eat. I'm hungry.) You're hungry? I was beginning to think you had given up the habit.) (So let's eat while we can. How soon does morning sickness start?) (Who dat. Boss? The other time the only effect it had was to make me hungry morning, noon, and night. Let's eat!) Joan Eunice trotted back toward the car, stopped dead when she saw that Shorty was laying the car's folding table -- with one place setting. "What's that?" "Your lunch. Miss." "A picnic? On a table? Do you want to starve the ants? It should be on the ground." Shorty looked unhappy. "If you say. Miss." (Joan! You're not wearing panties. If you loll on the ground, you'll shock Shorty -- and interest the others.) (Spoilsport. Oh, all right.) "Since it's set up. Shorty, leave it that way. But set three more places." "Oh, we eat in the car. Miss -- we often do." She stamped her foot. "Shorty, if you make me eat alone. I'll make you walk home. Whose idea was this? Finchley's? Finchley Come here!" sat down at the table. It was crowded as Joan had insisted that everything be placed on it at once -- "Just reach," she explained. "Or starve. Is there a strong man here who can open that wine bottle?" The dexterity with which Shorty opened it caused her to suspect that he had not always been a teetotaler. She filled her glass and Fred's, then reached for Finchley's. He said, "Please, Miss Smith -- I'm driving," and put his hand over it. "Give it to me," she answered, "for four drops. For a toast. And four drops for you. Shorty, for the same purpose." She put about a quarter of an inch in each of their glasses. "But first -- Shorty, will you say grace?" The big man looked startled, at once regained his composure. "Miss Smith, I'd be pleased." He bowed his head. (Boss! What's eating you?) (Pipe down! Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Oh! Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme... ) "Amen." "Amen!" (Om Mani Padme Hum. Amen.) "Amen. Thank you. Shorty. Now for a toast -- which is a sort of a prayer, too. We'll all drink it, so it must be to someone who isn't here... but should be." (Boss! You must stop this -- it's morbid.) (Mind your own business!) "Will one of you propose it?" Finchley and Shorty looked at each other -- looked away. Joan caught Fred's eye. "Fred?" "Uh -- Miss, I don't know how!" He seemed upset. "You stand up -- "Joan stood, the others followed -- "and say whatever you like about someone who isn't here but would be welcome. Anyone we all like. You name the person to be honored." She raised her glass, realized her tears were starting. (Eunice! Are you crying? Or am #? I never used to cry!) (Then don't get me started. Boss -- I told you I was a sentimental slob.) Fred said uncertainly, "A toast to... someone we all like... and who should be here. And still is" He suddenly looked frightened. "Amen," Shorty said in sonorous baritone. " 'And still is.' Because Heaven is as close as you'll let it be. That's what I tell my people, Fred... and in your heart you know I'm right." He poured down, solemnly and carefully, the symbolic teaspoonful of wine in his glass; they all drank. Joan said quietly, "Thank you, Fred. She heard you. She heard you too. Shorty. She hears me now." (Boss! You've got them upset -- and yourself, too. Tell them to sit down. And eat. Tell 'em I said to! You've ruined a perfectly good picnic.) (No, I haven't.) "Finchley. You knew her well. Probably better than I did... for I was a cranky old man and she catered to my illness. What would she want us to do now?" "What would... Mrs. Branca?... want us to do?" "Yes. Did you call her Mrs. Brance? Or Eunice?" (They called me Eunice, Boss -- and after the first week I kissed them hello and goodbye and thanked them for taking care of me. Even if Jake could see. He just pretended not to notice.) (Busybody. You're a sweet girl, beloved. Anything more than kiss them?) (Heavens, Boss! Even getting them to accept a kiss in plafce of the tips they wouldn't take took doing.) (I'll bet! -- on you, that is -- sister tart.) (Knocked-up broad.) "Uh, I called her Mrs. Branca at first. Then she called me Tom and I called her Eunice." "All right, Tom, what does Eunice want us to do? Stand here crying? I see tears in your eyes; I'm not the only one crying. Would Eunice have us spoil a picnic?" "Uh -- She'd say, 'Sit down and eat.' " "That she would!" Shorty agreed. "Eunice would say, 'Don't let hot things get cold and cold things get hot -- eatV " "Yes," agreed Joan Eunice, sitting down, "as Eunice was never a spoilsport in all her short and beautiful life and wouldn't let anyone else be. Especially me, when I was cranky. Reach me a drumstick, Fred -- no, don't pass it." Joan took a bite of chicken. (Twin, what Shorty said sounded like a quotation.) (It was. Boss.) (Then you've eaten with him before.) (With all of them. When a team drove me late at night, I always invited them in for a bite. Joe never minded, he liked them all. Shorty he was especially glad to see; he wanted Shorty to model for him. At first Shorty thought Joe was making fun of him -- didn't know that Joe rarely joked and never about painting. They never got to it, though, as Shorty is shy -- wasn't sure it was all right to pose naked and scared that I might show up while he was posing. Not that I would have.) (Not even once, little imp? Shorty is a beautiful tower of ebony.) (Boss, I keep telling you -- ) ( -- that nudity doesn't mean anything to your generation. Depends on the skin, doesn't it?  would enjoy seeing our black giant -- and that goes for Johann as well as for Joan.) (Well -- ) (Take your time thinking up a fib; I've got to make conversation.) "Tom, do you have those mustard pickles staked out or may I have some? Shorty, you sounded as if you had sampled Eunice's cooking. Could she cook?" Finchley answered, "You bet she could!" "Real cooking? Anybody can flash a prepack -- and that's what kids nowadays seem to think is cooking." (Boss, I'll spit in your soup!) "But what could she have done faced with flour and lard and baking powder and such?" "Eunice would have done just fine," Shorty said quietly. "True, she mostly never had time for real cooking -- but when she did -- or whatever she done, anyways -- she done just perfect." (My fan! Boss -- give him a raise.) (No.) (Stingy.) (No, Eunice. Shorty killed the vermin who killed you. I want to do something for him. But it can't be money, he would not accept it.) "She was an artist," agreed Fred. "You mean 'artist' in the general sense. Her husband was, I recall, an artist in the usual sense. A painter. Is he a good one? I've never seen any of his work. Do any of you know?" Finchley said, "I guess that's a matter of opinion. Miss Smith. I liked Joe Branca's paintings -- but I don't know anything about art; I just know what I like. But -- " He grinned. "Can I tell on you. Shorty?" "Aw, Tom!"  you were. Miss Smith, Joe Branca wanted to paint that big ape on your right." (Bingo) (Trouble, Eunice?) "And did he. Shorty?" "Well, no. But he did ask me. He did." (Don't you see. Boss? This is that clincher. A fact you first learned from me and nowhere else... and then had confirmed to the hilt. Now you know I'm me.) (Oh, piffle, darling.) (But, Boss -- ) (I've known you were you all along, beloved. But this isn't proof. Once I knew that Joe and Shorty had met, it was a logical necessity that Joe would want him to model -- any artist would want to paint him.) (Boss, you make sick! It's proof. I'm me.) (Beloved darling without whom life would not be worth living even in this beautiful body, I know you are you. But flatworms don't matter, coincidences don't matter, no mundane proof matters. There is no proof that some cocksure psychiatrist could not explain away as coincidence, or dejS vu, or self-delusion. If we let them set the rules, we're lost. But we shan't. What does matter is that you have me, and I have you. Now shut up; I want to get them all so easy with me that they'll call me Eunice. You say they used to kiss you?) (Oh, sure. Friendly kisses. Well, Dabrowski used to put zing in it but you know how Poles are.) (I'm afriad I don't.) (Put it this way. Boss. With a Pole, don't advertise unless you mean to deliver -- because his intentions are as honest as a loaded gun. With Dabrowski I was very careful not to let it go critical.) (I'll remember. Just as well he isn't here. Because the situation is like that with Jake, only milder. Little baggage, you caused all my mobile guards to fall in love with you. So now I've got to get them to accept that you are dead while feeling that you are still alive, equally. If they call me 'Eunice' I'm halfway there. If they kiss me -- ) (WhaP. Boss! Don't try it!) (Now see here, Eunice! If you hadn't played 'My Last Duchess' to half the county, I wouldn't be having to repair the damage.) ('Damage,' huh? You're complaining!) (No, no, my darling! Never. I was the prime beneficiary of your benevolence. But to lose something of value is a damage, and that is the damage I must repair.) (Well... I won't argue, dearest. But in this case you can let it be; I never let it warm up that much.) (And I say you don't know what you are talking about. Cool you may have meant to keep it. Unsexy -- or as unsexy as you could manage which isn't very. But all to die for you -- correct?) (Uh -- ) (Let's have no silly talk. Do you think the fact that I paid them had ness? Careful how you answer.) (Uh... I don't have to answer! Boss, what's the use of stirring them up over my death?) (Because, my darling, from now on they will be guarding me -- as I now am, inside your lovely body -- just as they guarded you. They've got to want to guard me, or they'll never be happy in this weird situation. It's either that, or fire them or retire them -- ) (Oh, no!) (Of course not. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes; when you have eliminated what you can't do, what remains is what you must do. Besides, dearest and only, this is stern practice for the much harder case we still face.) (Jake? But Jake is -- ) (Little stupid! Jake has already accepted the impossible. I mean Joe.) (But Boss! You must never see Joe.) (God knows I wish I could avoid it. Never mind, beloved; we won't see him until you know -- as I do -- that we must. Now either shut up, or coach me in how to handle these brave men.) (Well... I'll help all I can. But you'll never get them as easy as they were with me -- 'kissing friends' easy, I mean. I was an employee. You are the Boss.) (If that argument were valid, queens would never get pregnant. Sure it makes it harder. But you've given me a lot to work with. Want to bet?) dollars you can't kiss even one of them. Don't be silly, Boss; we can never make a real bet, there is no way to pay off.) (You don't have much practice being an angel, do you, little imp? You still think in earthy terms. Certainly we can make a bet and pay off to the winner. This baby in us -- ) (Huh! Now wait a moment -- ) You wait a moment, Eunice. If I win this bet,  name our baby. If I lose, you have the privilege. Fair bet?) (Oh. All right, it's a bet. But you'll lose.) (We'll see.) (Oh, yes, you will. Boss. You'll lose even if you win. Want to know why?) (Planning on cheating?) (Not necessary. Boss darling; you're going to find that you want to name the baby whatever name I want it to have. Because you're a sucker for a pretty girl. Boss, always have been and still are.) (Now wait a moment. I used to be, but now I am that 'pretty girl' and -- ) (You'll find out. Do you want coaching? I'll help you win if it can be done. It can't.) (Yes, but tuck your advice in edgeways; I've been chewing this bone too long.) "Fred, I'll trade you one of these Danish sandwiches for more wine. Then keep our glasses filled; Shorty doesn't drink and Tom won't and I want company in getting tiddly, this is my freedom celebration." (Fred might be easiest if you can get him over seeing ghosts when he looks at you.) "I don't mind another glass. Miss, but I mustn't get tiddly. I'm on duty." "Pish and tush. Tom and Shorty will get us home even if they have to drag us. Right, Shorty?" (Shorty is your impossible case. I managed it only by being 'little girl' to him -- which you can't be. Boss.) "We'll certainly try. Miss Smith." I have to be Miss Smith on "a picnic? You called Mrs. Branca Eunice, did you not? Did she call you Shorty?" "Miss, she called me by my name. Hugo." "Do you prefer that to your nickname?" "It's the name my mother gave me. Miss." "That answers me, Hugo; I will remember. But it brings to mind a problem. Anybody want to fight me for the last black olive? Come on, put up your dukes. But that's not the problem. I said I didn't want to be called Miss Smith under these circumstances. But I don't want to be called Johann either; that's a man's name. Hugo, you have christened babies?" "Many times. Miss -- uh -- " Joan cut in fast. "That's right, you don't know what to call me. Hugo, having named so many babies you must have opinions about names. Do you think 'Joan' pronounced as two syllables would be a good name for a girl who used to be a man named Johann?" "Yes. I do." "Tom? What do you think?" (Tom would kiss you at the drop of a hint if you weren't his employer. I don't think he ever did give up hoping to catch me alone... so I was as careful not to let that chance come up as I was with Dabrowski. All it took with Tom was to say, 'Tom, if you're going to be stuffy about letting me pay for extra service -- ' it was an after midnight run. Boss; a rare-blood call -- 'at least you can kiss me goodnight.' So he did, quite well. After which Hugo was too polite not to lean way down and give me a fatherly little peck. But what worked for Eunice can't work for Miss Smith.) (So watch me switch decks on them, young 'un.) "It sounds like a good name to me," the driver-guard agreed. "Fred? Do I look like 'Joan' to you?" She sat up straight and lifted her chest. (You look like you're going to break that bandeau, if you aren't careful.) (Pfui, little hussy; it can't break. I want him to realize that I'm female.) (He realizes it. Winnie ought to be here to take his pulse.) "I don't see why anybody should get a vote but you. But, sure, I like it." "Good! I still have to sign papers with my former name -- but I'm 'Joan' in my mind. But, friends, this country must have a thousand Joan Smiths in it; I need a middle name. But I want one for a much better reason." She looked with solemn seriousness at the giant black. "Hugo, you are a man of God. Would it be presumptuous of me to call myself... Joan Eunice?" (Boss, if you make my friend Hugo cry I'll -- I'll -- I won't speak to you the rest of the day!) (Oh, quit nagging! Hugo won't cry. He's the only one of the three who believes you're here. He has faith.) "I think that would be beautiful," Reverend Hugo White answered solemnly and sniffed back tears. "Hugo, Eunice would not want you to be sad about it." She looked away from him, her own eyes bright with unshed tears. "That settles it. My new name will be -- is -- Joan Eunice. I don't want anyone ever to forget Eunice. Most especially I want you, her friends, to know this. Now that I am a woman, Eunice is my model, the ideal I must live up to, every hour, every minute, of my new life. Will you help me? Will you treat me as Eunice? Yes, yes. I'm your employer; somehow I must be both, and it's not easy. But the most difficult part for me is to learn to behave and think and feel as Eunice... when I've had so many weary years as a cranky, self-centered old man. You are her friends -- will you help me?" (Boss, did you ever sell real estate in Florida?) (Damn it, if you can't help, keep quietl) (Sorry, Boss. That was applause. As Hugo would say, 'You done perfect.') Tom Finchley said quietly, "We'll help. That goes for Dabrowski, too. By the way, she called him Anton. First she called him Ski like the rest of us. Then she learned his first name and called him by it." "Then I will call him Anton. Will you all call me Eunice? Or at least Joan Eunice? To help me? Oh, call me Miss Smith when others are around; I know you won't feel easy otherwise. You probably called her Mrs. Branca if other people were -- " "We did." "So call me Miss Smith when it would be natural for you to call her Mrs. Branca. But when you called her Eunice, call me Joan Eunice and -- dear and trusted friends! -- any time you feel that I have earned it, please call me Eunice. It will be the highest compliment you can pay me, so don't use it lightly. Leave off the 'Joan' and call me 'Eunice.' Will you?" Finchley looked at her, unsmiling. "Yes... Eunice." "Tom, I haven't earned it yet." Finchley did not answer. Fred said, "Let me get this straight. 'Joan Eunice' is for everyday... but 'Eunice' means we think you've done and said just what Mrs. Branca would have." "That's right, that's what I said." meant. Uh, this has been a touchy day -- worse for you. I'd say, but not easy for any of us. Shorty -- Hugo, I mean -- said she was an angel. Or meant it, anyhow. I can't argue; Shorty is a preacher and knows more about angels and suchlike than I do. But if she was -- is, I mean -- still, she had a lot of salt and pepper in her, too. You remember an hour back when you snapped at Shorty and yelled for Tom?" She sighed. "Yes, I remember. I lost my temper. I've got a long way to go. I know it." "But that's just what I'm saying... Eunice. She had a lot of spunk. If we had tried to make her eat by herself, she would have kicked the gong. Right, Shorty? -- I mean Hugo?" "Amen! Eunice." Finchley said, "Fred read my mind close enough... Eunice. But I was thinking of other things, too. I never thought of her as an angel, partic'larly. She just treated us like people." "Tom -- " "Yeah, Shorty? Hugo." "My name's Shorty to you -- and to you, Fred. Don't put on any fancies. Hugo was Mama's name for me. And hers. Yours, Eunice. But I near forgot what I had to say. Tom, that's all anybody wants. To be treated 'like people.' She done it that way -- Eunice. And now you do, too. 'Like people.' Mr. Smith didn't quite manage it. But he was old and sick and we made allowances." "Oh, dear! I feel like crying again. Hugo -- when I was Mr. Smith, I never meant to be anything but people. Truly I didn't." "Sick people can't help being cranky. My Daddy got so mean before he passed on, I run away from home. Worst mistake I ever made. But I don't fault him for it. We do what we do, then we live with it. Eunice -- the first Eunice -- is an angel now, my heart tells me and my head knows. But she had her little human ways, same as everybody. The dear Lord don't fault us for that." "Hugo? If it had been me and not her, would I have made it? To Heaven?" (Om Mani Padme Hum! Watch it. Boss! He'll drag you over to that creek and wash your sins away.) (If he wants to. I'll let him. Shut up!) "I don't rightly know," the preacher said softly. "I never knew Mr. Smith that well. But the Lord do move in mysterious ways. Looks like He give you a second chance. He always knows what He's doing." (Oh, all right, twin. Try not to get water up our nose.) "Thank you, Hugo. I think He did, too -- and I'm trying to justify it." She sighed. "But it's not easy. I try to do what Eunice would do. At least justify the second chance she gave me. I think I know what she would do now. But I'm not certain." (I'd knock off all this talk, that's what I'd do.) (Pipe down and give me a chance.) She looked around. "I don't know how well you knew her and I keep learning things about her. I think you three -- you four; I include Anton -- must have been her closest friends, at least in my household. Certainly you knew her better than I had thought. Tom?" "Yes, Eunice?" "Did you ever kiss her?" Her driver looked startled. "Yes... Joan Eunice." "Meaning Eunice would never ask such a question; she would just do what her heart told her to. I wanted to, Tom -- but I was scared. Not yet used to being a girl." She jumped up, stood by his chair, took his hands, pulled. Slowly he got to his feet. She put her arms around his shoulders, put up her face -- waited. He sighed and almost scowled, then took her in his arms and kissed her. (Twin, he can do tots better.) (He will. The poor dear is scared.) Joan let him go without whispered, "Thank you, Tom," and quickly left his arms. -- went on to Fred, took his hands. Again Fred looked frightened but he got up promptly. (What about Fred, Eunice? Sexy or sisterly?) (Too late, twin!) Fred embraced her with unexpected force, met her mouth so quickly than Joan was caught with her lips open and he at once answered it, savagely. But briefly. He broke from it and both were trembling. (Eunice! What is this? You didn't warn me.) (So I goofed. Later, dear. Slow march now and say three Money Hums and be darn sure to be an innocent child with Father Hugo.) Joan went slowly around the table the long way, stopped by Hugo, waited. He got up from his chair, looked down at her. She moved closer, put her hands on his chest, looked up, face solemn, lips closed, eyes open. Gently he put his arms around her. (My God, Eunice, if he really hugged us, he 'ud break us in two!) (He never will, twin; he's the gentlest man alive.) Hugo's lips met hers in soft benediction, unhurried but quickly over. She stayed in his arms a moment. "Hugo?' When you pray for her tonight, will you add a prayer for me? I may not deserve it. But I need it." "I will, Eunice." He seated her with gallant grace, then sat down again. (High, low, jack, and game, twin -- what are you going to name him?) ('Eunice,' of course!) (Even if he's a boy?) (If he's a boy, he'll be named Jacob E. -- for 'Eunice' -- Smith.) ('Johann E. Smith' is better.) (I won the bet, so shut up. I won't wish 'Johann' on a boy. Now what's this about Fred?) (You won't believe it.) (By now I believe anything. All right, later.) "Fred, is there any wine in that bottle? Hugo, will you open the second bottle? I need it. I'm shaky." "Certainly, Eunice. Hand me the bottle, Fred." "I'm going to eat some more, too, and I hope all of you will. Tom, am I still Eunice? Or am I a hussy who doesn't understand how a lady behaves?" "Yes, Eunice. I mean No, Eunice. I -- Oh, hell!" S HE patted his hand. "That's the nicest compliment I've had yet, Tom. You would never have said 'Oh, hell' to Miss Smith... but you know that Eunice -- Joan Eunice -- is human." She looked around the table. "Do you know how good it is to be touched? Have you ever watched kittens snuggling? For over a quarter of a century no one kissed me. Except for an occasional handshake I don't think anyone ever touched me. Until nurses and doctors started handling me. Friends -- dear friends -- you have taken me back into the human race, with your lips. I am so very grateful to Eunice -- to Eunice Branca -- that she kissed you before I did, and won your friendship -- your love? I think so. For it meant that you let me in -- treated me as 'people!' Uh, tell me this, I must know -- even if it makes you, Tom, call me Joan Eunice again. Did Eunice kiss Anton, too?" (Boss, I'm not going to tell you anything until we're alone!) (Didn't asic you, dear.) "Won't anyone tell me? Well, I suppose it's an unfair question." Finchley said suddenly, "Teams shift around. I drive with Fred, and Shorty with Ski, and so forth. Been times when I rode Shotgun for Ski. Eunice, she treated us all alike. But don't never think anything bad about it -- " "I don't!" " -- because there wasn't any such. She was so warm and friendly -- and good -- that she could kiss a man friend just for, uh -- " "For Idvingkindness," Shorty supplied. " 'For lovingkindness.' Kissed us thank you and good night as quick with her husband there as any other time. Always did, if we stopped for a late bite o' supper with them." (All right, twin. Fred and Anton. Not Tom and Hugo. Happened only once. Oh, Tom would have, but no chance, so I kept it cool. Hugo -- nobody gets past Hugo's guard and I never tried. He has moral character -- won't believe it.) (By now I believe anything. All right, later.) "Fred, is there any wine in that bottle? Hugo, will you open the second bottle? I need it. I'm shaky." "Certainly, Eunice. Hand me the bottle, Fred." "I'm going to eat some more, too, and I hope all of you will. Tom, am I still Eunice? Or am I a hussy who doesn't understand how a lady behaves?" "Yes, Eunice. I mean No, Eunice. I -- Oh, hell!" S HE patted his hand. "That's the nicest compliment I've had yet, Tom. You would never have said 'Oh, heir to Miss Smith... but you know that Eunice -- Joan Eunice -- is human." She looked around the table. "Do you know how good it is to be touched? Have you ever watched kittens snuggling? For over a quarter of a century no one kissed me. Except for an occasional handshake I don't think anyone ever touched me. Until nurses and doctors started handling me. Friends -- dear friends -- you have taken me back into the human race, with your lips. I am so very grateful to Eunice -- to Eunice Branca -- that she kissed you before I did, and won your friendship -- your love? I think so. For it meant that you let me in -- treated me as 'people!' Uh, tell me this, I must know -- even if it makes you, Tom, call me Joan Eunice again. Did Eunice kiss Anton, too?" (Boss, I'm not going to tell you anything until we're alone!) (Didn't asic you, dear.) "Won't anyone tell me? Well, I suppose it's an unfair question." Finchley said suddenly, "Teams shift around. I drive with Fred, and Shorty with Ski, and so forth. Been times when I rode Shotgun for Ski. Eunice, she treated us all alike. But don't never think anything bad about it -- " "I don't!" " -- because there wasn't any such. She was so warm and friendly -- and good -- that she could kiss a man friend just for, uh -- " "For Idvingkindness," Shorty supplied. " 'For lovingkindness.' Kissed us thank you and good night as quick with her husband there as any other time. Always did, if we stopped for a late bite o' supper with them." (All right, twin. Fred and Anton. Not Tom and Hugo. Happened only once. Oh, Tom would have, but no chance, so I kept it cool. Hugo -- nobody gets past Hugo's guard and I never tried. He has moral character -- something you and I don't know anything about.) "Thank you for telling me, Tom. I'll never let Anton guess. But he'll find me easy to kiss if he wishes to... now that I know that she shared lovingkindness with him. Abrupt change of subject: Tom, is that pretty stream polluted?" "It's clean. Clean as a creek can be, I mean. I know because I found out about this place through the company lending it to our guild for a picnic. Some of us went swimming after the farm super told us it was okay." "Oh, wonderful! Because I want to swim. I last went swimming in natural water -- old swimming hole style, I mean -- let me see... goodness! More than three-quarters of a century ago." "Eunice, I don't think you should." "Why?" "Because it can be polluted another way. Dropouts. Not all the dropouts are in the A.A.s; any wild countryside attracts them. Like this. I didn't make a fuss but when you walked down to the bank by yourself, Fred had you flanked one side and me the other." "Well, heavens, if you can keep me safe on the bank, you can keep me safe in the water." "It ain't quite the same, truly it ain't. I was a few seconds late once, I won't be again. Some dropouts are real nasty weirdos, not just harmless nuts." "Tom, why argue? I want to get into that water, feel it all over me. I intend to." "I wish you wouldn't... Joan Eunice." She jerked her head around at the last two words. Then she grinned and pouted her lower lip. "Okay, Tom. Darn it. I've handed you three a leash you can lead me by any time you see fit. And yet I'm supposed to be boss. Funny." "It's like the Secret Service," Finchley answered soberly. "The President is the top boss of any... but he gives in when his guards tell him not to do something." "Oh, I wasn't complaining; I was wryly amused. But don't jerk that leash too much, Tom; I don't think Eunice would stand for it and neither will I." "I'm hoping you won't pull on the leash as much as she did. If she, uh -- well, things could 'a' been different." Fred said, "Tom, don't cry over spilt milk." Joan said quickly, "I'm sorry. Boys, I think the picnic is over. Maybe some day we can all have that swim somewhere: safe and just as beautiful." (Eunice, can you swim?) (Red Cross lifesaver -- you knew that, it was in my snoopsheet. Never went out for the team, though; cheerleader was more fun.) (I could make a comment.) (Look who's talking! No-pants Smith.) (Who taught me?) (You didn't need teaching; you have the instincts.) again in the car. Finchley said, "Home, Miss Smith?" "Tom, I can't hear you." "I asked did you want to go home. Miss?" "I understood that part but this intercom must be out of order. I heard something that sounded like 'Miss Smith.' " There was a silence. "Eunice, do you want to go home?" "Not until dinnertime, Tom; I want all of this lovely day I can have." "Okay, Eunice. Do I cruise? Or go somewhere?" "Uh... I have one more item on my list, and there's time enough for anything you three may want to pick up, too, so check around." "Will do. Where do we take you for what you want, Eunice?" "I don't know. I lost touch with such matters years ago. Tom, I want to buy a present for Mr. Salomon, something nice but unnecessary -- presents should be unnecessary, a luxury a person might not buy himself. So it probably would be a men's shop that stocks luxurious unnecessaries. Abercrombie  Fitch used to be that sort -- but I'm not certain they are still in business." "They are. But let me ask Fred and Shorty." Shortly Finchley reported; "There are a dozen places that would do. But we think The Twenty-First Century Stud has the fastest stock." "Roz. Let's giddyap and get there." "That is, if you don't mind their prices. 'Twigs and leaves.' " "I don't mind; I've met thieves before. Tom -- all of you. I came out of this operation with more money than I had last year... and it's a nuisance. I've played the money game and I'm bored with it. Any time any of you can think of a good way to help me get rid of some -- a good way, I said; I won't be played for a sucker -- you'd be doing me a favor to tell me. Hugo, are there any poor people in your church?" His answer was slow. "Lots of them, Eunice. 'But not hurlin' poor, just Welfare poor. I'd like to think about it... because it don't do a man no good to plain give him what he ought to root for. So the Book says, in different words." "That's the trouble, Hugo. I've given away money many times and usually did harm when I meant to do good. But the Book also says something about the eye of the needle. All right, think about it. Now let's go see those thieves. I'll need a man to help me. Which one of you dresses the most far-out when you aren't in uniform?" She heard Fred laugh. "Eunice, it's no race. You should see the getups Tom wears. A Christmas tree. A light show." Finchley growled, then said, "Don't listen to him, Eunice." "He's probably jealous, Tom. All right, ,if there is parking inside or near this shop, you come help yj IT # . As they passed through the second gate Finchley said, "Crash belts, Eunice?" "I'm wearing the Swedish -- and it's comfortable now that Hugo has adjusted it. Could we get along with just it and the collision net if we didn't go so fast? Or does that make me 'Joan Eunice' again?" "Uh -- Will you wear the forehead strap?" "All right. It's just that I don't like to be tied down all over. It reminds me -- well, it reminds me of the way the doctors kept me strapped down after the operation. Necessary, but I hated it." She did not mention that a forehead strap was what she disliked the most. "We heard about that -- must 'a' been horrid. But you need the forehead strap. Say I'm doing only a hundred, a slam stop could break your neck. If you don't wear it." "So I wear it." "I don't see the light on the board." "Because I haven't put it on yet. There. Did the light go on?" "Yes. Thank you... Eunice." ing care of me. Let's mush. I wasn't pulling on the leash, truly I wasn't." (Says you. Boss, you're mendacious, untruthful and a fibber.) (Where did I learn it, dearie? They're sweet boys, Eunice -- but we've got to work out a way to live so that we don't have to clear everything with forty other people. Good servants are priceless -- but you work for them as much as they work for you. Life should be simpler. Honey, how would you like to go to India and be a guru and sit on a mountain top and never have any plans? Just sit and wait for your grateful chelas to gather around?) (Might be a long wait. Why not sit at the bottom of the mountain and wait for the boys to gather around?) (One-track mind!) (Yes. Yours, you dirty old man.) (Conceded. But I try to' act like a lady.) (Not too hard, you don't.) (As hard as you ever did, little trollop. I was called Joan Eunice once... and the issue had nothing to do with sex.) (You'd be surprised how much sex had to do with it, Joan.) (Well... from that point of view, yes. But as long as they call me Eunice I'll go on believing that I've 'done just perfect.' Honestly, though, good servants can be smothering. Take Winnie. She's a darling -- but she's underfoot every minute. Eunice, how the devil can we manage that actively female life you want -- sorry, we want -- with so much chaperonage?) (Take a tip from Winnie.) (Let her in on your plans. Then she'll keep your secrets and never ask a question, just as you do for her. Try it.) (I may have to. I'm sure she won't talk... and will happily listen to anything I need to spill. But, Eunice, if I go outside the house, it's going to be hard to keep Tom and Hugo, or Anton and Fred, from guessing. You saw the elaborate maneuver I had to use today.) (You didn't have to. Boss; they won't talk.) (Perhaps they won't, but I don't want them even to think. They're beginning to think I'm an angel -- named Eunice -- and I'd rather keep it that way.) (Boss, they know darned well that Eunice is no angel. Even Hugo knows it... because Hugo is the smartest of the four, even if he is stands them from having been there himself. Forgives them their transgressions and loves them anyhow. Boss dear, they loved me the way I was, feet of clay and all -- and they'll love you the same way.) (Maybe. I hope so. I know I love you more, knowing more about you and things I never suspected, than I did before we consolidated. Immoral little wench. What's this about you and Fred and Anton? Did you really?) (Wondered when you'd get around to that. Those good-night kisses did start out just friendly. Brotherly. Fatherly in Hugo's case. Never got past that with Tom, as we were always either under Hugo's eye, or Jake's, or both -- I just knew darn well a man was kissing me. But Fred and Anton weren't much chaperonage for each other and they were both charged up over me. So, when a chance turned up, I thought, 'Why not?') (Pure charity, eh?) (Was that sarcasm. Boss? Anyhow, they took me home late one night. Not a blood donation call, just working late with Jake when we were very rushed getting things arranged for you. The 'warm body' project. I invited them in for a coke and a snack, as usual. Only it turned out Joe wasn't home.) (So human nature won -- again.) (You seem to have a low opinion of human nature. Boss darling.) (I have a high opinion of human nature. I think it will prevail in spite of all efforts of wowsers to suppress it. But that's all it took? Two men? Cold sober? And a chance that your husband might walk in? Lovely fallen angel, your story not only has holes; it is inconsistent. I do know something about men, having been one. What they'll risk, what they won't. Plenty, that is, for a woman. But two men tend to be wary of each other and still more so when a husband might show up. Darling, you've left out something -- this does not sound like a first time.) (Boss, cross our heart, it was a first time... and the only time, for I was kilted soon after. All right. I'll fill in the holes. Joe I wasn't likely to walk in and they knew it. Couldn't, as our door was hand-bolted from the inside whenever either of us was there. Joe was even more careful about it than I was, as he had always been a city boy. But they knew also that Joe was not due home until midnight... and they brought me home about twentyone-thirty. No hurry, no worry, no flurry. While Joe can't read, he can tell time -- you know those little dummy clocks some one-man shops use? Back at such-and-such ! a time, and mark the time by setting the hands? j (We had one of those, to tell the other one when he would be back. That night the door opened to my j voice, so I looked for the dummy i clock and found it set for midnight -- and told Anton and Fred that I was sorry but Joe wasn't going to be home soon enough for a visit.) (Called attention to it, minx. ! Sounds like a setup.) ! (Well, I knew what I was ready j for, once I knew we had the place j to ourselves. Oh, shucks. Boss, I'm still trying to be your 'nice girl.' I had had my ear cocked for a late arrival with that team for over a month. When Jake asked me to work after dinner, I phoned Joe, just as usual. And set it up under Jake's nose. Short-talked it -- almost another language if spoken by a husband and wife. What Jake heard was me telling Joe that I wouldn't be home until twenty-one-thirty. What Jake didn't hear, or would not understand, was that I was asking Joe if he minded being elsewhere, in family short-talk code we used if we wanted that favor. It was all right. Boss, darling; I made myself scarce for Joe's sake oftener than I asked it of him. The only question was: Was he painting? Turned out he was not, so I was home free. (Joe asked if I wanted him to be away all night? What he said was: 'Roz. Punch or phone?' Not that Joe ever punched me to wake me, but I answered, 'Judy,' meaning that it was up to him but I hoped he would punch me, and added, 'Blackbirds,' and gave him a phone kiss and signed off. All set, no sweat -- knew what I would find at home.) ('Blackbirds?') ('Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie -- ' set midnight on the clock even if you stay out all night, Joe darling. Oh, it could have been 'pumpkin' or 'Christmas Eve' or 'Reach' or 'solid gold.' But what I used was 'Blackbirds.') (Did you kids ever talk English?) (Of course we did. Boss. Joe speaks good English when he needs to. But short-talk settled it in a dozen words. Without giving Jake any hint that I was late-dating him. If I had had Betsy at hand I would have used hush and spoken standard English. But we weren't at your house. Boss; we were at Jake's pad in Safe Harbor. You see, we weren't actually working late, not that late. I was using the phone you used yesterday, with Jake only feet away from me. Had to be short-talk.) (Let me get this straight. Joe set the dummy clock, saying he would not be home until midnight. Did he come home then?) (About ten minutes after midnight. Joe wouldn't embarrass a guest by being too prompt. Joe is a natural gentleman, never had to learn; he just is. It was the first thing that attracted me to him, and the quality that caused me to gentleman over an Ivy-League squeak any year.) (I agree, beloved. The more I hear about Mr. Jose Branca the better I like him. And respect him. And regret his tragic loss -- meaning you, beloved little strumpet. I was just trying to get the schedule straight for what must have been a busy night. Okay, Joe got home shortly after midnight. But early that evening you phoned him and set things up for this date with Anton and Fred. Then you got back into bed with Jake -- ) (Oh, dear! Boss, I've shocked you again.) (No, my darling. Surprised, not shocLed. I find your memoirs fascinating.) (Shocked. That schedule sounds like a whore on pay day. But it wasn't that at all. Boss. It was love -- love and respect for Jake, love and affection for Anton and Fred, love and devotion and understanding and mutual trust and respect with Joe. If my husband didn't disapprove, what right have you -- or anybody! -- to look down your nose at me?) (Darling, darling! I was not shocked, I have never been shocked by you. Damn it, it's that generation gap. You can't believe that I packed far more offbeat behavior into my long years of lechery than you possibly could have crowded into the fourteen years you claim. You've been a busy body, that's clear -- but I had more than five times as many years at it and quite as much enthusiasm. Probably not as frequent opportunities, but beautiful girls get asked oftener than do homely boys. But it was never for lack of trying on my part, nor do I have any complaints, as I received more cooperation than I had any reason to expect.) (I think you were shocked.) (No, little innocent. Sheer admiration -- plus surprise at your endurance. You must have been half dead the next day.) (On the contrary I felt grand. Glowing. Happy. You remarked on it. You may even recall it... it was the day Joe painted me with tiger stripes and a cat's face makeup.) (Be darned if I don't! You were bouncy as a kitten -- and I said you looked like the cat who ate the canary. Darling girl, I was hurting that day; you cheered me up.) (I'm glad.) (How much sleep did you get?) (Oh, plenty. Six hours. Five at least. Plus a nap stretched out on my tummy while Joe did most of the stripes. Joan, a well-loved woman doesn't need as much sleep as a lonely one -- you'll find out. As for it being too much for me -- Boss, who told me just last week that nothing encourages sex the way sex does? You, that's who.) (Yes. But I was speaking from a man's viewpoint -- ) (Works the same for a woman, twin. You'll see.) (I hope so. I know that most people -- in my day -- assumed the opposite. But it's not true. Sex, whatever else it is -- much else! -- is an athletic skill. The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you. I'm glad to hear -- very personally glad -- that it works that way for a woman, too. But you aren't the first girl to tell me so. Uh... first time I heard a girl say that, or roughly that, was when Harding was President. Not a girl, a very sweet young married woman who had more in common with you than you are likely to believe. Almost certainly dead now, God rest her soul; she would be over a hundred years old.) (What was her name?) (Does it matter? Little busybody, you were telling me about Fred and Anton. I still don't understand how you swung it. The setup, yes -- but how did you gentle them to it? Did you split the time and take them into your apartment separately?) (Oh, heavens, no! That would be rude. And embarrassing for everyone. It would have turned me off utterly. It was a Troy.) (Well?) (Boss, can you imagine how excited two men can get while kissing -- fondling -- the same girl? If other? Which they did, they were driver and shotgun together.) (Yes, that's true but I can't visualize -- wups! I just remembered something that happened so many years ago I had almost forgotten it.) (Tell me.) (No, no, you go on. Just that history repeats itself -- as it always does. Go on.) (Well, they do. Boss. Excite each other even if they don't touch each other at all. Just her. 'Heterodyning' is the term I learned for it in secretronics; I don't know what the kinseys call it. But I had been kissing them good night almost every other night for weeks, and kissing them when they picked me up in the mornings. And the kisses got warmer and it's never been my nature to discourage a man if I liked him -- which I did; I felt affectionate toward both of them; they're nice people. (Presently we were stopping for a necking session -- could no longer call it a good night kiss -- in the basement parking before they would take me up the lift. I had to slow that down by saying, 'Watch it, boys. You're not only getting body paint on your uniforms, you're getting me so mussed up I'll have trouble getting neat enough that Joe won't notice it.' Which did slow them down, more on my account than any fret about uniforms; they liked Joe -- everybody likes Joe -- and did not want to cause me worry at home. Didn't tell them that Joe wasn't fooled; his artist's eyes sees much more than most people see. (But we settled it that night. Boss. I told them that I was not a tease and that I was as eager as they were... but that I was not going to be spread in a basement. But that I would find a chance. They are both nice boys -- oh, men, sure; Anton is forty and Fred is as old as I am. Was. So they waited and didn't do more than kiss me and grab a friendly feel. Then twice we almost had it made but Joe was busy painting, which I would not interrupt to take the President to bed. (Then we hit the jackpot. Almost missed at the last minute; Jake was going to send me home in his car. He told me to cancel the call I had put in for my car. Yours, I mean. I surprised Jake by being balky -- told hint that I didn't feel safe with Charlie unless he, Jake, was along. True, as far as it went; Charlie is a bad one, not like our four. (So dear old Jake was going to get dressed and ride with me -- I said that was silly, that Finchley and Shorty -- I never referred to them as Tom and Hugo and wouldn't advise you to -- ) (I'm not stupid, dearest. When I'm Miss Smith, they are Finchley and Shorty.) (Sorry, Boss darling, I know you're not stupid. But I have more experience in being a woman than you have.) (So you have, and you keep me straight, darling. But what's this about Tom and Hugo?) (Misdirection. I knew who was on call that night. So Fred and Anton picked me up and I was tempted to tell them -- getting more excited all the time, myself. Couldn't. Would have spoiled it some for them, since men enjoy much spreading a married woman without her husband knowing it -- even sweet old Jake relished me more for that naughty reason. I always went along with this quirk because it gave me more control over a situation not easy to control once a man has had you. Gives you a lever. You might remember that, Joan.) (I will. But I'll need a husband to make use of it.) (You'll get us a husband, never fear, dear -- I still think we ought to marry Jake. He'll come around. But don't hold out on him, Joan; Jake is not a man you can pressure that way.) (Eunice, I won't hold out on Jake one-half second. I've never had any respect for that female tactic and won't use it now that I am female.) (I have never used it. Boss. I've used almost every other female deception -- but not that one. That one is whoring but not honest whoring. 'Minds me. How do you feel about whores. Boss?) (Me? Why, the way I feel about any professional who performs a personal service. Say a dentist, or a lawyer, or a nurse. If he's honest I respect him. If he is competent as well, my respect is limited only by his degree of competence. Why?) (Have you ever patronized whores? Hired their services, I mean?) (If I give that a simple affirmative will you get on with your story? We're already downtown, damn it.) (Yes, sir. I mean, 'Yes, twin sister you knocked-up virgin.' Got home, went up the lift with them, was 'surprised' to find Joe not at home, found the dummy clock propped on the sink, hands set at midnight and told them what it meant. That did it. Finis.) Hey') (What is there to tell? You already know what we did.) Joan sighed. (That is the skimpiest account of a gang bang I ever heard in my long and evil life.) WhaP. But it wasn't a gang bang. Boss! Quit dragging your feet and come on into this century. A Troy is not a gang bang. Nor is it a frimp session -- or needn't be -- and this was not. A Troy is friendly and loving. They are both married and they treated me as sweetly as they would treat their wives -- and I loved the way they treated me and I loved both of them quite a lot -- and still do -- long before the evening was over... when up to then it had been just affectionate, sex-charged friendship. Boss, one of the regrets I have about being killed is that I was never able to offer them the second chance at me they had earned -- and I had promised. Mmm... do you think you might make it up to them?) (Huh? As you pointed out. I'm their boss; it wouldn't be easy. And besides... well, hell. I'm scared. Two men?) (You didn't seem scared of Mac and Alec.) (Not quite the same thing.) (Nothing ever is, Boss -- especially about sex. But I want to tell you this. A Troy -- if it works right, and it can't unless there is trust and respect all the way around -- if it works, it is the nicest thing that can happen to a woman. Not just twice as nice because she gets twice as much of what she wants so badly. That's not it; she might even get less than some rutty young stud could manage alone. It's the warm and friendly and loving and trusting aspect that makes it so good. Four times better, at least. Maybe eight. Oh, arithmetic can't measure it. But, Joan darling -- listen to me -- until you have been in bed between two sweet and loving men, men who love each other almost as much or even more than they love you... with your head pillowed on both their arms and surrounded by their love -- until that's happened to you, you still have one virginity to go, and an important one. Darling, I was crying most of the time they were with me... cried again when I kissed them good night... was still crying happy after they left... then jumped out of bed and rushed to unbolt the door when Joe got home a few minutes later -- and blubbered all over him and took him straight to bed and told him all about it while he was being especially sweet to me.) (Did he want to hear about it?) (Wouldn't yoM want to?) (Yes but no two men are alike and some husbands get headaches from horns.) (Some do. Maybe most of them, Joan. I was always careful of Joe's feelings. Sometimes I strayed and carefully kept it from him -- I never told him about Jake.) (Why not? I would think that Joe would approve of Jake for you if he approved of anyone. Jake respects Joe very highly -- you know it, too; you heard him.) (Yes. But Jake is rich and Joe is dirt poor. Perhaps Joe could have accepted Jake -- I now think he could have. But I wasn't sure, so I didn't risk hurting him. But Anton and Fred -- well, they are just mobile guards; Joe treated them as friends and equals, and secretly -- I think -- felt a little superior to them, since he is an artist and they are just stiffs. I knew they wouldn't trouble Joe's mind... and I was right; he was delighted for me. Happy that I was happy. Can't explain it, Joan; you get an instinct for it. But a man's pride is a fragile thing and it is all the armor he has; they are far more vulnerable than we are. You have to be oh so careful in handling them. Or they droop.) (I know, Eunice. Literally droop in some cases. Did I tell you that my second wife made me psychically impotent for almost a year?) (Oh, you poor darling!) (Got over it. Not through a shrink. Through the warm and generous help of a lady who didn't assume that it was my fault. And I never troubled again until I was too feeble for any sort of proper physical functioning.) (I'm glad you found her; I wish I could thank her. Joan... I wasn't born knowing this about men; I found out the hard way. Twin, I made some bad mistakes in high school. Look -- males are XX so much bigger and more muscular than we are, I didn't dream that they could be so fragile. Until I hurt one boy's pride so badly he dropped out of school... and I've tried never to hurt any boy, or man, since. I was stupid. Boss.) (Eunice, how long has it been since I last told you I love you?) (Oh, at least twenty minutes.) (Too long. I love you.) Finchley's voice interrupted her revery. "We're about to park. Miss Eunice." "What's this 'Miss Eunice' nonsense? We're not in public." "Seemed like a good compromise." "It does, huh? Why just dabble your toes? Why not go whole hawg and call me Miss Smith? -- and I won't kiss you good night." "Very well -- Miss." "Oh, Tom, don't tease me. It's been a perfect day; don't remind me that I must be Miss Smith again. You know I'll kiss you good night if you'll let me... or the real Eunice wouldn't speak to me. Hugo, make him behave!" "I'll fix his clock, Eunice. Tom, you call her Eunice, real nice." "I'm sorry, Eunice." "That makes me feel better, Tom. Are you going to be able to park this wagon close enough that you can come with me?" "Sure thing, Eunice -- but keep quiet right now, please; I've got to work close with the traffic computer to get us in." National Rare Blood Club #S# PHtti Avtnuc, N.Y.C. # evening. Chief." Joan Wrested her hand on O'Neil's forearm, stepped lightly down. "Good evening. Miss. Message from Mr. Salomon. His respects to you and regrets he will not be back for dinner. Twenty-one o'clock, he hopes." "Tm sorry to hear it. Then I shan't dine downstairs; please tell Cunningham or Della that I want trays in my lounge for Winnie and me. No service." "Two trays and no service. Miss -- right." "And tell Dabrowski that I want him to drive me tomorrow." "He's gone home. Miss. But he knows he has the duty. He'll be ready." "Perhaps you didn't understand what I said. Chief. I want to tell him, now, that  want him to drive me tomorrow. Ten, possibly -- not earlier. So after you phone the pantry, call Dabrowski and give him that message from me. Leave the call in until you reach him. And phone me at once when Mr. Salomon's car returns, no matter what hour. Don't consult him; do it. Before Rockford unbuttons." "Yes, Miss. Phone the pantry. Phone Dabrowski immediately thereafter. Phone you instantly when Mr. Salomon's car returns, before he is out of his car. If I may say so. Miss, it feels good to have your firm hand back at the controls." "You may say so, to me. But not to Mr. Salomon. For his firm hand has been invaluable. As you and I know." "As we both know. He's a fine gentleman, Miss; I respect him. Shall I tell Cunningham to send down for your packages?" "No, Finchley and his guns can handle them -- though I did go on quite a shopping spree." Joan gave her security boss Eunice's best happy-little-girl grin. "I was drunk with excitement, bad as a kid on Christmas, and tried to buy out the town. Finchley. Split those packages three ways and you three come up with me. Yes, I know it's not your work, so don't report me to your guild." Packages, three men, and one woman almost filled the front lift. Joan waited until Finchley had punched for her floor and the lift had started, then she quickly punched the "Stop" touchplate, held them between floors. "Put those packages down." She went first to Shorty, took his face between her hands. "Thank you, Hugo. Thank you most of all, for your gentle wisdom got us all straightened out." She pulled his face down, kissed him softly and unhurriedly, lips closed. "Good night." She turned to Fred. "Thank you, Fred. I thank you -- and Eunice thanks you." As his arms closed she let her lips come open. (See what I mean, twin? That's a sample.) "(I see -- I shall be very careful not to get him alone unless I expect more than a sample.) "Good night, Fred." "Tom, it's been the best day of my life. I hope you enjoyed it half as much as I did. Thank you." Joan went straight into the kiss without waiting for Finchley to answer, her face up, eyes closed -- and with her back to Shorty in case her driver decided to take advantage of it. -- which he did. (Goodness! Eunice, are you sure you never laid him?) (Quite sure, darn it! Are you going to?) (I don't know, I don't know!) Breathless she broke from him, turning her back to all of them to punch again for her floor and trying to regain her composure. The car stopped and she said, "Put everything in my bedroom, boys. Winnie! Wait till you see!" The little redhead had been waiting at the lift. "Miss Joan! You've been gone all day!" "And why not? Put them anywhere, on the floor, on the bed. Winnie, have you had dinner? That's all, thanks. Good night and thank you all." "Good night. Miss Smith." As soon as the door sealed Joan hugged her maid, lifting her off her feet. "You didn't answer. Did you eat with the staff? Or did you wait?" "Couldn't eat. Oh, Joan, I've been so worried. You ran away and didn't tell anybody where you were going. Bad girl -- to worry me so." "Pooh. I had guards with me; you knew I was safe." "But guards aren't nurses. I'm supposed to watch you for Dr. Garcia." "And pooh all over dear Doctor, too. Winsome, I'm no longer a patient. I'm no longer a ward; I'm a free woman and healthy as a horse and you can't mother me every minute like a broody hen. All right, we've got supper coming up and they'll leave it in the lounge and we'll eat when we feel like it." "I know, I was backstairs when the order came in -- so I hurried up the service lift and thought I had missed you as the indicator was stopped. Then it started again." Olift, it stalled. But we kept punching buttons until the Yehudi woke up. Too many gadgets in this house." (Eunice, I thought a stalled elevator was as safe as a grave. Is there no privacy anywhere"!) ('Fraid not. Boss honey. But I never worried much about such things; I just worried about hurting people.) (I stand corrected. Ever been caught with your legs up, hussy?) (Only once when it was embarrassing -- and that's all it was. It's nothing to worry about.) "Shall I tell maintenance about the lift?" "No, Finchley will report it. Winsome, maintenance is no part of your duties; you're here to giggle with me and to give me a shoulder to cry on and to cry on mine -- and to keep dear Doctor from fussing." Joan started undressing. "Get your clothes off; we're going to model clothes -- I've been shopping. Boy oh boy, did I shop! Gave the economy a shot in the arm, I did. Get those duds off -- have you had your bath, you dirty girl? Or are you going to bathe with me? Come here and let me smell you." "Had a bath when I got up." "You smell all right, I fear me I'm well marinated; it's been a busy day. Okay, we'll dunk together and get stinking good later. Before giving dear Jake another lesson in how to relax. But now we model. Give us a kiss first." (Eunice, will that rubber dingus stay in place in the tub?) (It'll stay seated anywhere -- or I would have left a dozen orphans behind me. You can even use the fountain -- and you had better.) "Joan, since you were going shopping, why didn't you take me along? Meanie." "Complaints, complaints, complaints. I thought you needed sleep, dear. Or didn't Bob show up?" Winifred blushed clear down her breasts but she answered happily, "Oh, yes, he did! But I would have been up at once if you had called me -- love to shop." "What time did you wake up?" The blush renewed. "Not till almost thirteen. Long past noon." "The defense rests. Winsome baby, I didn't take you along because I bought things for you, too... and if I had had you along, you would have fussed every time I spent a dollar on you. And to set a precedent, too. I'm not a prisoner any longer. I'm free to come and go just as you are. If I don't take you along, you mustiVt ask why and I may not tell you where or what." The younger girl looked crushed. "Yes, Miss Joan. I'll remember." So Joan Eunice again took her in her arms. "There, there, pet; don't quiver your lip. I'll take you with me, mostly. And if I don't. I'll tell you about it, mostly. But I might tell you a fib instead. I might have a date with some horny interns and would not want to shock my Winsome." "You're teasing me." "Not mean teasing. I'm at least half serious. Winnie, if you want to see your Bob no one in this house cares but me and my interest is friendly. But mel There are forty-odd people staring down my neck. If I ever have a man in my bed, the whole household will know it, and it's at least fifty-fifty that some member of my ever-loyal staff would sell the fact to a news snoop and it would be on the morning gossip program -- phrased so that I can't sue without making it worse. Not?" "Uh... sounds horrible. But I guess it could happen." "You know it could. Every gossip column, every gossip program, proves it. Hon, if a person is too rich, or too prominent, all the public lets him wear is the Emperor's New Clothes -- and what they like best is bad news, good news is too bland. Back when I was running it. Smith Enterprises spent many thousands of dollars every quarter to give me a totally false public image -- poisonous phrase! -- for business reasons. But that's done with and now I'm fair game. Still more interesting fair game now that I'm miraculously young and female and pretty. No, beautiful -- let's be fair to Eunice Branca. You saw what they did yesterday; you watched the babble box. What would they do if they could prove something on me?" "Uh, something nasty, I guess." "I know they would. I'm not guessing; I've had too many years of trying to avoid the spotlight. The old Romans knew what they were doing when they tossed living victims to the lions; most people are fairly decent -- but collectively they love blood. I'm going to do something about getting out of the spotlight but in the meantime I'm vulnerable. Winnie, what would you do if I woke you some night and asked you to let me slide a man into your bed -- so that you would be caught, not me. Be certain to be caught, I mean, public as a show window. So caught that Bob would know, too." The little girl took a deep breath. "I'd do it! Bob would understand." "Ah, but if I begged you not to explain it to Bob? Just take the rap for me?" "I'd still do it." Joan kissed her. "I know you would. But you won't have to, sweet Winsome. If -- no, when -- I slip, I won't load it onto my chum. But I may ask you to tell lies for me some day -- jigger for me -- help me cover up. Would you?" "Of course I would." "And I knew it and didn't need to ask. It might be soon. I'm feeling more female every day. Now let's play Christmas -- I think that round, flubsy box is for Winnie." ing in front of mirrors with an awed look on her face. "Oh, Joan, you shouldn't have!" "That's why I made you stay home. It's a maid's uniform, dear -- an allowable deduction for me by terms of the Cooks, Domestics, and Hotel Workers approved contract." "Maid's uniform indeed! It's a Stagnaro Original straight from Rome; I read the label." "As may be, I'll tell my accountant to list it as a deduction dear, and let's see what else we find. Hey, here's one for me." Joan quickly got dressed. "What do you think? Of course with this I ought to have my body painted." "I wouldn't use paint if I were you. You look yummy and that off-white sets off your skin. It's a delicious design even though kind o' wicked. Joan, how do you know so much about buying women's clothes? I mean, uh -- " "You mean, 'How does an old man who hasn't picked out a dress for a woman in at least half a century manage it?' Genius, dear, sheer genius. You ought to hear my bird imitations." (Hey! Don't I get any credit?) (Not unless you want to break your cover, Mata Hari. The men in the white coats are just outside that door.) (Pee on you, twin. Maybe someday we can tell Winnie.) (I hope so, darling -- I not only love you. I'm proud of you.) Kiss) They worked down to two boxes which Joan had held back. When Winifred saw the synthetic emerald set -- gee patch and two half-moon cups shaped for bare nipples -- she gasped. "Oh, goodness! Put it on, Joan, and let me find your highest heels!" "You find your highest heels, darling -- those green rhinestone stilts you were wearing earlier. They didn't have stilts in your size to match this outfit. I've ordered them." "This is for we? Oh, no!" "Then put it down the trash chute; gee-strings can't be exchanged. Winsome, that dress was designed for a redhead -- and the cups are too small for me. Put it on. That envelope contains a floorlength transparent skirt, silk with a hint of matching green. With the skirt it's just right for formal dinner parties. You could wear one emerald on your forehead. Not any other jewelry. Or paint." "But, Joan, I never go to that sort of party -- I've never ever been invited to one." "Perhaps it's time I gave one; the banquet hall hasn't been used in ten years. You would look beautiful -- junior hostess at the other end of the long table. But, dear, besides an ultra-formal party, it's intended -- without th? skirt -- for most informal occasions. Would you enjoy wearing it for Bob -- and would he enjoy taking it off?" Winifred caught her breath. "I can't wait." "Got a date tonight, hon?" "No, that's why I said I can't wait. Because I can't resist it -- want Bob to see me in it... want him to take it off me. Joan, I shouldn't accept it, it's much too expensive. But I will. Goodness, you make me feel like a kept woman." "You are one, dear; I'm keeping you. And enjoying it very much." The little nurse stopped smiling. Then she faced her mistress, looked up directly into her eyes. Joan, maybe I shouldn't say this, maybe it'll spoil everything. But I think I must. Uh -- " She stopped and took a deep breath. "Two or three times it's seemed to me you almost made a pass at me." (There's the pitch, twin! Too late for me to help.) "It's been more than three times, Winifred." "Well... yes. But why did you stop?" Joan sighed. "Because I was scared." "Of me?" AF me. Winsome darling -- I've U done many hard things in my life. Such as waiting in a landing boat, bobbing around and seasick and stinking with fear... then dropping off into four feet of water with machine guns raking us sides. But this is the hardest thing I've ever tried. Being a woman. I have to think about it every instant -- do consciously the things you do automatically. Goodness, today I came within a split second of walking into a men's toilet instead of the ladies' powder room. And now you. Darling, can you guess what a temptation you are to me? Can you realize that old Johann is looking at your winsome loveliness out of Joan's eyes? Winnie, there hasn't been a moment but what I've wanted to touch you. Hold you in my lap. Kiss you. Make love to you. If I were a man... I'd be trying my damnedest to crowd Bob out. Or at least make room for me." "Joan." "Yes, dear?" "There's room for you." Joan found that she was trembling. "Darling! Pleasel Can't we wait? You have Bob... and I have still to learn to be a woman." She started to cry. And found Winifred's arms around her. "Stop it, dear. Please stop. I didn't mean to upset you. I'll help, of course I'll help. We'll wait. Years if you need that long. Until you're calmed down and sure of yourself -- and want me. But Winnie isn't trying to seduce her Joanie. Oh, it can be sweet, truly it can. But you're right and I do have Bob and my nerves aren't frayed the way yours must be. Some day you'll fall in love with a man, and may forget all about me. Wanting to touch me, I mean -- and that's all right, as long as I can love you and be your friend." Joan dashed away a tear, and sniffed. "Thank you, Winnie. I've made a fool of myself again." "No, you haven't. I just have trouble remembering, sometimes. Do you want a tranquilizer?" "No. I'm all right now." "Would you rather I didn't touch you?" "No. I want you to kiss me, Winnie. Hard. Best you ever have. Then put on the green gee-string dress and let us look at it. Then we'll eat. And then grab some soap suds and make me smell better for our prayer meeting with Jake -- I need those prayers tonight; they're the right tranquilizer. Put it on, dear. But kiss me first." Winnie kissed her -- started to hold back, then flared like a prairie fire and did make it "best she ever had." (Break, twin, before the house burns down. That's the fanciest tap dancing since Bojangles died.) (What do you know about Bojangles? You can't know about him.) (Ever hear of classic films, Boss? Now see to it that Bob marries her; you owe her that, for the hurdles you make her jump.) (How can I when I don't know who he is?) (You can find out. Cheat. O'Neil knows. After you know who he is, find out what he wants; he'll geek. Men Boss, I love you but sometimes I'm not sure why.) After Winnie modeled the emerald dress she fetched in their trays from Joan's upstairs lounge while Joan opened the last package. It contained her present for Jake. "Winnie, tell me what you think of this?" It was a necklace rich and simple -- a heavy gold chain with tripled linkage, supporting a large gold ankh, a crux ansata. Winifred took it in her hands. "It's lovely," she said slowly. "But it's not a woman's necklace, you know. Or did you?" "It's a man's necklace. A present for Jake." Winifred frowned slightly. "Joan, you do want me to help you learn how to behave as a woman." "You know I do." "Yes, I know. When I see that you are about to make a mistake, I must tell you." "You don't think Jake will like this?" "I don't know. He may not know what it means. And you may not know. This cross with a loop is called an 'ankh' -- and it's what my granddaddy would have called a 'heathen symbol.' It means -- well, it means most of the things our meditation prayer means, life and goodness and love and so forth. But specifically it means sex, it's an ancient Egyptian symbol for the generative forces, both male and female. It's no accident that the loop looks something like a vulva and that the rest of the design could be interpreted as a male symbol. The way it's used now -- among people my age, people the age you have become -- is... well, a wife could give it to her husband, or a husband could give a smaller one to his wife. Or they might not be married -- but it always means sexual love -- flatly and no nonsense about it. If that's not what you mean, Joan, if you just want to give him a nice necklace, take it back and exchange it for another that isn't so specific in its symbolism. Any necklace means love -- but perhaps you want one that a daughter could give her father." Joan shook her head. "No, Winnie. I've known what the ankh means since a course in comparative religion, oh, three-quarters of a century ago. I assume that Jake knows, too; he has solid classical training. I hadn't been sure you kids knew its ancient meaning -- I see I was mistaken. Winnie, this present is no accident; I've asked Jake to marry me several times. He won't. Because of my age." "Well... I can see why he might feel that way." "It's ridiculous. Sure, I'm a quarter of century older than he is -- but it no longer shows and I'm healthy enough for marriage. Even though dear Doctor thinks I may drop dead." "But -- Doctor Garcia doesn't really think you'll drop dead. And I didn't mean you were too old, I meant he -- oh, dear!" "Yes, yes, I know. He's being noble, damn him! But he doesn't have to marry me, Winnie. I'll accept any crumb I'm offered. This present is intended to say so." Winifred looked solemn, suddenly kissed the ankh and handed it back. "You and me both, Joan -- any crumb we're offered. Well, I wish you luck. With all my heart." "Good Winnie. Let's sop up some calories; it's getting latish and Jake will be home -- I hope -- by twenty-one. I want to be clean as a kitten and just as pretty and smelling even prettier when the stubborn darling gets here. Help me?" "Love to. And look, Joanie, we douse you in Harem Breeze both the cologne and the perfume -- and the powder. And I won't wear any scent. I'll scrub off what I'm wearing." "No, we'll renew the bait on you, too. Maybe we'll heterodyne." " 'Heterodyne?' " "Term that used to be used a lot in radio. In this case it means that if one girl isn't enough, two might do the trick. Last night Jake was polite aJ)outnot staring... except that he was noticing my Winsome with both eyes all the time he was pretending not to. I'm not trying to crowd you into a Troy -- but I have no scruples about staking you out as bait." T hey were out of the tub and working on the finishing touches when the house phone sounded. "Miss Smith. Mr. Salomon's car just rolled in." "Thank you, O'Neil." A few minutes later Joan phoned the Green Suite. "Jake dear? This is your resident guru. If you wish to share a prayer meeting, guru and chela will call on you whenever you say." "That's welcome news; I'm tired -- and last night was the best sleep I've had in years. Guru." "I'm glad. Have you had dinner?" "At the Gib, hours ago. Ready for bed now. If you'll let me have, oh, twenty minutes, for a tub." "Shall we be there in exactly twenty minutes? I don't want to run into Hubert." "I sent him to bed. Nobody here but just us chickens." "Twenty minutes, dear. Off." Again two girls went barefooted down the hallway. Joan was wearing, under a negligee, the ankh necklace. The door opened for them and Jake came toward them. He was wearing a bathrobe and had a book in hand with a finger marking his place. "Hello, my dears. You both look charming. Joan, I took the liberty of stopping in your downstairs library and borrowing this book." "It's not a liberty and you know it. What is it, Jake?" He handed it to her. "Vishnudevananda's Yoga text. Thought there might be some of the simpier postures I could try. But I'm afraid I must stick to meditaJoan looked puzzled. "This was downstairs?" She glanced at the endpaper, saw her bookplate: "Ex Libris -- J S B Smith." "I had forgotten I owned it." "You're a pack rat, dear. This house must have ten thousand books in it." "More, I think. There were that many the last time I had them catalogued. Well, after you're done with it Winnie and I will look through it. We might find exercises we haven't tried." She handed it back, he put it aside. "Ready for autohypnosis?" "Ready for prayers and I'm sorry I sounded disparaging last night." "I can't see what difference a name makes, Jake. But first -- " Joan opened her robe, lifted the necklace from her neck. "A present for you, Jake. Bend your head down." He did so. She placed it around his neck with the ceremonial kiss. He lifted the ankh, looked at it. "Thank you, Eunice. It's a beautiful present. Am I to wear it now?" "As you wish. Or wear it in your mind -- I know you've never been one for much jewelry. Ready, Winnie?" Joan Eunice dropped her robe, melted into lotus; Winnie followed her. Jake got out of his bathrobe, leaving the necklace on, joined them. "Jake, will you lead us tonight? No need to say 'hold' or 'breathe,' we'll stay in step. Just like last night, a prayer for each of the four parts. Keep the tempo slow." "I'll try. Om Mani Padme Hum!" (Om Mani Padme Hum.) fall asleep instantly once they put him to bed. The girls quietly left the darkened room. Joan stopped a few feet down the hall. "Winnie, will you do something for me?" "Anything, dear." "What time do people start stirring in the morning?" "I don't know what time Cook gets up. About six, maybe. Mostly seven or near it. For the others, staff breakfast is at seven-thirty." "Della doesn't matter, she never comes upstairs. I mean this floor." "Well, cleaning starts at nine. But no one cleans near your room until you phone down for your tray. Have you been disturbed?" "No. And I don't mean to be. I guess Hubert is the only one who worries me. I'm going back and sleep with Jake." "Oh!" "I'm not going this instant, I want to be sure he's sound asleep. If he sleeps all night, I shan't wake him; the poor dear needs his rest. But sleep with him I will! I don't want Hubert barging in. Can you think of a way to divert him?" "Oh, I see. I'm pretty sure Hubert never goes to Mr. Salomon's room until Mr. Salomon sends for breakfast and Hubert takes it up. Some mornings when I've eaten downstairs and seen Hubert sit and drink coffee and watch the news, oh, quite a long time. Waiting for Mr. Salomon to phone." "That's a relief. It's not likely that anyone but you will know it, then. Not that I mind for myself, but I would hate to be the cause of Jake being dragged into a gossip item. All right, will you do three things for me? Read or sleep in my bed a while, muss it up. Stay all night if you like but muss yours, too. And will you set your alarm for eight and if I'm not in my own bed by then, phone the Green Suite? I'm sure Jake would rather know that you knew than have us caught by someone else. Then one other thing. Would you fetch me lounging pajamas and slippers? Then, if anything slips. I'll put a bold face on it -- I'll be dressed and to hell with snoops. While you get them I'm going to put my robe down here and say a few more Money Hums. My mind is made up but I'm a touch nervy. Afraid Jake will scold me, I guess. (Afraid Jake won't scold you,  guess.) (Don't you want us to, Eunice?) (Yes! Quit yattering and get on with it.) "Right away, Joan. Oh, I'm excited myself! Uh, I think I'll sleep in your bed. If you don't mind." "You know I don't. But I may come back and wake you, most any time." "Don't mind. If you need a shoulder to cry on, I want to be there. Or maybe just for snuggle." "Or I might have something to tell you. You don't fool me a bit. Winsome. Never mind, I would like to find you there when I return, no matter when or why." A few minutes later Joan slipped silently into the bedroom of the Green Suite, dropped her clothing without lighting a light, found her way to the bed by Jake's soft snores. Cautiously she got into bed, felt the radiant warmth of his body close to hers, sighed happily and went to sleep. Some indefinite time later Joan felt a hand on her in the dark, came instantly awake. (What?) (General Quarters, twin! It's now.) (I'm scared!) (I've taken over, dearest -- the body remembers. Say a Money Hum.) Without a word Jake firmly took possession of her. (Oh, God, Eunice! Why didn't you tell me?) (Tell you what?) (That for a woman it's so much better) (Is it?) (Ten times, a hundred times -- I don't know; I'm fainting.) (How could I guess that it's better? Kiss him as you faint.) T he occupation of the Oklahoma State House by the People's Agrarian Emergency Government continued. The Martian Manned Field Laboratory reported finding artifacts (age # x #I# years) indicating extinct human-equivalent intelligence. A second report signed by the Chinese members of the expedition denied that the exhibits were simply automatic and instinctive byproducts (analogous to coral rings, or to honeycombs) of subintelligent life closely related to the anaerobic life now present on Mars. The International Flat Earth Society in annual convention in Surrey, England, passed its usual resolution petitioning the United Nations to inflict sanctions on any national government wasting taxpayers' money on alleged "space travel." The suicide rate was up for the nineteenth successive year, as were also rates for death by accident and by violence. World population appreciation passed # persons per day and continued up, with six babies born every second vs. # persons dying each second, for a net gain of seven people every two seconds, A hen in Izard County, Arxansas, laid an egg with the Sign of the Cross on it. A spokesman for the Treasury Department, speaking off the record, announced that the Administration would not push the Administration bill for total abolition of paper currency in favor of universal credit cards and computer accounting. "We must face the fact," he told the Washington Press Club, "that black market transactions, bribes, and other quasi-legal exchanges are as much part of our economy as is interest on the National Debt, and that to create conditions which would make these voluntary exchanges impractical would bring on a depression the country could not stand. To put it poetically, gentlemen, the small amount of physical currency still in circulalubricant for the gears of progress. You have my assurance that the President recognizes this truth." The First Satanist Church, Inc., (forty-four branches in California, five in other states) brought suit in Federal Court for relief from "discriminatory taxation." The First Disciple stated: "If other churches aren't badgered and taxed and investigated concerning their sacred objects, a Glory Hand should enjoy the same protection -- that's American as apple pie!" Reno again repealed its ordinance for licensed prostitution. The City Manager stated that the fees weren't sufficient to pay the inspectors... and besides, there wasn't all that much commercial prostitution anyhow since the closing of the Federal Youth Training Center. The Rally for Human Beings gained speed in its drive to fold, spindle and mutilate computer cards and drop them into the nearest mail box -- despite arrests by Postal Inspectors there was almost no cooperation by local police and no jury had brought in a verdict of guilty no matter how compelling the evidence. The Post Office's Chief Inspector stated that the mutilated cards were almost always bills and that, so far, no mutilated checks or money orders had been reported -- and that the government had no great interest in the matter but he was getting damn sick and tired of the country's mail boxes being used as trash baskets. The chairman of the Rally for Human Beings answered that the country's mail boxes had been trash baskets for years and both the Postmaster General and Congress knew why. The traffic computer for downtown Houston went into spastic breakdown during the evening rush hour leaving thousands of people stranded on the streets overnight; the estimated deaths exceeded seven thousand, including heart stoppage, smog poisoning, and mugging, but excluding suicide. The Southern States Automobile Assurance Companies Trade Association repudiated all claims based on the incident on the theory that deaths or injuries in stationary vehicles were not covered by the (fine print). The Lunar Colonies dedicated two more superlarge "balancedaquarium" Food Caves, The George Washington Carver and the Gregor Mendel, and the Commission again announced an increase in subsidized outmigration quota but again with no relaxation in standards (the injunction against the Commission issued by Mr. Justice Handy of the United States Supreme Court was quietly ignored on the grounds of no jurisdiction). The common stock of Las-Vegas-in-the-Sky continued to move up against the downward trend of the Market; most investment advice peddlers remained bullish, basing their expectations on past correlations between weather, the Market, and women's styles. The Interstellar Advisory Subcommittee to the Lunar Commission settled on Tau Ceti rather than Alpha Centauri for the first attempt. Jodrell Bank lost touch with the Manned Pluto Probe. The (official) casualties in Ukraine dropped below the (official) casualties in Matto Grosso -- and in both places the dead did not argue. " -- whereas 'id' is not a scientific concept; it is merely the first syllable of UdiotV... as my esteemed colleague should know best" " -- will be order in the courtroom." " -- let me cite the incontestable conclusions of that great scientist -- " "garbage in, garbage out! Any graduate assistant can draw pretty graphs and make half-bright conclusions from irrelevant data." "May I ask my esteemed colleague to repeat that slur outside the courtroom?" " -- Bailiff is directed to keep order during -- " ("Jake, with any luck we'll get this so fouled up that nowe'll get this so fouled up that nobody can play left field.") " -- with those bright lights. Don't shine them in my eyes, or few days." " -- inquire of the Court whether esteemed Counsel has any serious purpose in subjecting the Court and these spectators to the offensive sight of this grisly carcass?" (" -- can't stand it myself, Jake; did I really look that bad? I still think we should take a dive on this." "Hush, dear, Mac knows what he is doing and so do L") " -- respectfully suggest that the witness himself should be conclusively identified before his testimony can be used to identify another person." " -- State and County. This set of prints I am now projecting on the screen you have just seen me take from the cadaver marked exhibit MM. I will now compare them with prints supplied by Veterans Administration Archives and previously marked as exhibit JJ, using jumpstereo superposition -- " " -- personally take those photographs which you now hold and which have been tentatively marked as exhibit SS, numbers one through one hundred twenty-seven?" " -- will not be cleared. This will be a public hearing. But the Court will take time to sentence for contempt as needed, and, Evelyn, you can start by putting that spectator, that one, the woman with the glasses and the fright wig, on ice for ten days. Get her name, give it to the Clerk, take her away. Any more morons who can't keep quiet? You back there, eating a candy bar; stuff it into your pocket -- this is not a lunch room." "Is Counsel for the challenged party suggesting that this is not Jose Branca?" "Goodness, no. I'll help identify him if you need me. I'm simply urging that you lay a proper foundation." ("Jake, Joe looks ghastly. I must go see him as soon as this nonsense is over." "Do you think that is wise?" "I don't know, Jake. But I know that I must") "Look around you, Mr. Branca. Tell the Court -- tell the Judge, that is -- whether or not your wife is in this room?" "Not here." "Mr. Branca, look where I am pointing." "Not here, I told you!" "Your Honor, we are faced with a reluctant witness. It becomes necessary to lead him." "Very well. But Counsel is reminded that he cannot impeach his own witness." "Thank you. Your Honor. Mr. Branca, I am pointing at this young woman, look at her closely. I have my hand on her shoulder -- " "Keep your hands to yourself! Judge, if he puts a hand on me again. I'll bite it!" "Order. Counsel, it is not necessary to touch the challenged party, and you will not do so again. Your witness knows which young woman you mean." "Very well. Your Honor -- and if I have given offense to this young lady, I am sorry. Mr. Branca, I put it to you that this is your wife, Eunice Branca nee Evans." "Not Eunice. She dead. Judge, do I gotta take this kark? That lyin' fixer knows t' score, he talk to me two, three hours. Sure, that's Eunice' body. But she's dead. Everybody knows what happen." "Sorry, Your Honor. Mr. Branca, please confine yourself to answering my questions. You say your wife is dead... but did you ever see your wife Euncie Branca dead?" "Huh? No. This operation -- " "Just answer the question. You never at any time saw her dead. I put it to you that you were paid this woman is not your wife Eunice Branca." ("Jake, can they do this to Joe? Look at him." "I'm sorry, darling. I didn't call him.") "Judge, this karky bastard's lyin'  They, got this club, see? Rare Blood. I got this funny blood, see? Eunice, too. Save lives. Sure, they don't know, don't care. You think I'm a pimp, maybe? For Eunice! I tell 'em shove it. I -- " "Your Honor, I pray your help in bringing this witness to order." "I think he's making a responsive answer to your question. Go on, Mr. Branca. They offered you money. For what?" "Oh. Eunice got a boss, see? Mr. Smith. Johann Smith. So rich he karks in gold pot. But poor old muck is dying, see? Only the medicares don' let him die. Pitiful. But he's got this same funny blood, see? Like me, like Eunice. I tell 'em, sure, he can have Eunice' body, she don' need it no more -- but not for money. So we rig a swindle -- me and his fixer over there, Mr. Jake Salomon. He knows how I feel, he helps. 'Eunice Evans Branca Memorial Fund for Free Rare Blood' -- all paid to t' Rare Blood Club. Ask Mr. Jake Salomon, he knows. I . , . don'... touch... one... God damn' frimpin' dimeV' (Jake -- he won't even look at me. ' "Put your veil up, dear, and cry under it.") "Does Counsel for Petitioners have any more questions to ask this witness?" "No, Your Honor. Counsel may inquire." "No cross-examination. Your Honor." "Does either counsel wish to question this witness at a later time? This is not a trial and the Court intends to allow the widest latitude for inquiry even at the cost of permitting irrelevancies to creep into the record. Will Counsel please answer?" "Petitioners have no further use for this witness." "No questions now or later. Your Honor." "Very well. Court will reconvene at ten tomorrow morning. Bailiff is directed to provide this witness with transportation home or wherever he wishes to go, and to protect him from annoyance in so doing. Off the top, Evelyn, he's been harried enough." "Judge? Can I say sump'n?" "If you wish, Mr. Branca." "That karky fixer -- not Mr. Salomon, other one. Gets dark every night. Some nights he winds up in Bird's Nest turf." "Order. Mr. Branca, you must not make threats in court." ' 'Wasn't no threat. Judge. Was prophesying. I wouldn't hurt anybody. But Eunice had lots and lots and lots of friends." "Very well. You're excused, Mr. Branca; you won't have to come back. Clerk will take charge of exhibits; Bailiff will provide heel-and-toe guards. Recessed." ble respect for the scholarly qualifications of my distinguished colleague, nevertheless the opinions he has expressed are the most arrant nonsense, as proved by that great scientist in his paper of nineteen-seventy-six from which I now quote: 'The very concept of "personality" is but a shadow of a figment of a fantasy of a pre-scientific speculation. All life phenomena are fully explained by the laws of biochemistry as exemplified -- ' " " -- even an existential phenomenology requires a teleological foundation and I so concede, but a close study of dialectical materialism proves to any but the hopelessly biased that -- " "Who's in charge here?" "An unborn child is not person; it is merely an inchoate protoplasmic structure with a potentiality to become from its environment" " -- mathematical laws of genetic inheritance account for every possible event misnamed -- " " -- in words familiar to the Court and to everyone: 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'" " -- shocked to discover that the learned judge presiding over this trial is in fact a fraternity brother of Johann S. B. Smith. This clandestine relationship may be verified in records open to the public and I ask that this Court today, and any later courts seeing this record, take judicial notice, and I demand that opposing counsel stipulate the fact." "Stipulated." ("Jake, how did they find out?" "We leaked it. Through Alec, last night. Time to get it into the record, rather than in an appeal.") "Aha! This damning fact having been stipulated. Petitioners are now forced to demand that the judge presiding disqualify himself and declare this a mistrial." ("Jake, seems to me they've got us on the hip. Much as I like Mac and Alec, I have to admit that this has the flavor of finding a strawberry mark on a missing heir." "No, my dear. In the course of a long life a prominent man acquires direct linkage to every other prominent man. If it hadn't turned out that you and Mac were in the same fraternity, it would have been some other link as close or closer. How many members of the Supreme Court do you know?" "Uh... I think it's five." "There's your answer. At the top of the pyramid everybody knows everybody else.") (And sleeps with them.) (Shut up, Eunice!) "Counsel, I find this interesting. First let me set you straight on a point of law. Twice you have used the word 'trial' and now you speak of a 'mistrial.' This is, as you know, not a trial, it is not even an adversary situation; it is merely an inquiry for the purpose determining the identity of the young woman there who calls herself Miss Smith. She is charged with no crime, no civil suit against her is before this court; it is simply that her claimed identity has been challenged by petitioners who assert an interest. So this court is assisting in a friendly investigation -- helping like a good neighbor in attempting to straighten out a mixup. Not a trial." "I stand corrected. Your Honor." "Please be careful in your use of technical language. If there is no trial, there can be no mistrial. Do you agree?" "Perhaps I should use other language. Your Honor. Petitioners feel that, under these disclosed circumstances, you are not the judge who should preside over this, uh, friendly investigation." "That is possible. But the matter has reached me in the course of due process and it will continue to remain before me unless compelling reasons are shown why I should step aside. Again on the matter of language, you used the word 'clandestine.' The Court will not at this moment consider whether or not Counsel's choice of this word implies contempt -- " "Your Honor, I assure you -- " "Order. I am speaking. Nor will you discuss that aspect at this time. We will now consider only the meaning of this word. 'Clandestine' means 'hidden, secret, concealed' with a flavor or connotation of surreptitious, or underalleged relationship: Could it be verified in 'Who's Who'?" "Oh, certainly. Your Honor! That's where I found it." "I know that my own fraternity is noted there; I assume that if appropriate it would be listed in the case of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith. Since you tell me that you have checked it, the Court takes judicial notice for whatever it is worth and requires no further substantiation... other than to comment that we could hardly have been members of the same chapter at the same time since we differ by almost half a century in age. Did your investigations show that Johann Smith and I were jointly members of other organizations? For example Johann Smith was a founding member of the Gibraltar Club -- and I am a member, and Miss Smith's counsel Mr. Salomon is a member... and you are a member. In what other organizations do I share membership with Johann Smith? Now or in the past." "Uh... Petitioners have not investigated." "Oh, come now, I feel sure that you could turn up others. The Red Cross, for example. Probably the Chamber of Commerce at some time. I seem to recall that when I was a Scout Commissioner Johann Smith was one also. Possibly we're both in other fraternal bodies. Almost certainly we have served as trustees, or such, for the same charitable or service groups, either simultaneously or successively. I note that you are a Shriner, so am I. Care to comment on the fact?" "No comment. Your Honor." "But you and I almost certainly share several fraternal bonds. The Court takes notice of the wry fact that, since lawyers are not permitted to advertise, as a class they tend to join more organizations -- fraternal, social, service, and religious -- than do laymen as a class. Since you choose not to comment on the ones that you and I share in common, the Court will on its own motion investigate and place the results in the record. Now as to my alleged obligation to disqualify myself, do you wish to clarify your reasoning? Think it over while we take a recess. Your answer will go into the record. Ten minutes." wtioners? You have had time to think." "Petitioners move that all remarks concerning fraternal associations and like matters be struck from the record." "Motion denied. Nothing will be struck from this record. Come now. Counselor, you must have had some theory. State it." "Your Honor, at the time I raised the point it seemed important. I now no longer think so." "But you must have had a theory or you would not have raised it. Please speak freely, I want to know." "Well... if Your Honor will indulge me, the disclosed fact seemed to admit of the possibility of prejudice on the part of the Court. No contempt is intended." "And the Court will assume that none exists. But your answer is less than complete. Prejudice in favor of whom? The Petitioners? Because of my fraternal relationship with their grandparent?" "What? Oh, no, Your Honor -- prejudice in favor of, uh, of Miss -- the challenged party." "You are stipulating that she is indeed Johann Sebastian Bach Smith?" ("My God, Jake, Mac's got him biting his own tail." "Yes. Who has got whom on whose hip?") "No, no. Your Honor, we are not stipulating that. This is the very matter we are challenging." "But Counsel cannot have it both ways. If this young woman is not Johann Sebastian Bach Smith -- as Petitioners allege -- then she is not of my college fraternity. Conversely, under your own theory, she is Johann Sebastian Bach Smith. Which way will you have it?" "I'm afraid I have been guilty of faulty reasoning. I pray the Court's indulgence." "We all reason faultily at times. Are you quite finished? Shall we go on with examination of witnesses?" "Quite finished. Your Honor." B ut, Dr. Boyle, do you know that you removed the brain from this body -- this cadaver, and transplanted it into the body of that woman?" "Don't be an ass, old chap. You heard my answer." "Your Honor, Petitioners feel that this is proper cross-examination and ask for the Court's assistance." "The Court orders the witness to answer the questions as stated." "Judge, you don't scare me, y' know. I am here as a voluntary witness -- and I am not and never was a citizen of your quaint country. I am now a citizen of China. Your State Department promised our Foreign Affairs Minister that I would have full immunity during my entire stay if only I would appear. So don't bother to throw your weight around; it won't go. Care to see my passport? Diplomatic immunity." "Dr. Boyle, this court is aware of your immunity. However, youhave been induced to come here -- at considerable expense I would assume and clearly at some inconvenience to you -- to give evidence that only you can give. The Court requests you to answer all questions put to you, as fully, explicitly, and clearly as possible, in terms a layman can comprehend, even if it means repeating yourself. We want to find out exactly what you did and what you know of your own knowledge, which might directly or indirectly assist this court in determining the identity of this woman." "Oh, certainly, my dear fellow -- put that way. Well, let's go back and run it through again, from A to Zed. A year ago, more or less, I was approached by that old bugger over there -- sorry, I mean barrister -- Mr. Jacob Salomon -- to do what the Sunday sheets call a brain transplant. I accepted the commission. After this and that -- you can get the trivia from him -- I did it. Moved a brain and some ancillary parts from one human skull to another. That brain was alive in its new digs when I left. "Now as to whom. The brain donor was a very elderly male, the body donor was a young mature female. And that is about the size of it -- they are covered, y' know, sterile sheeting and such, before the surgeon in charge comes in. Prepped. I can add only these hints: The male was in bad shape, kept alive by major supportive means. The female was in worse shape, she was dead -- massive trauma to skull and cortex about here -- head bashed in, I mean to say, and the yolk spattered. Dead as Queen Anne save that her body had been kept alive , by extreme support measures. "Now that unsightly hunk of pickled meat over there has had its brain et cetera removed in a fashion consistent with my own -- unique -- surgical techniques; I doubt if there is another surgeon alive who can do it my way. I have examined that cadaver carefully; I conclude that it is my work -- and, by elimination, I conclude that it must be the body Salomon hired me to carve on; there is no conflicting evidence and the cadaver is not from any other case of mine. "Identifying the young female is another matter. If her head were shaved I might look for scar tissue. If her skull were x-rayed I might look for prosthesis; teflon vitae does not throw the same shadow on a plate as does natural bone. But such tests would be only indicative; scar tissue is easily come by, and other trephining could produce similar x-ray shadow without disturbing the central nervous system." "Dr. Boyle, let us stipulate momentarily that you removed a living brain from exhibit JJ, the cadaver -- " "Stipulate? I did do so, you heard me say so." "I am not contradicting you, I am simply using appropriate language. Very well, you have so testified and you have also testified that you transplanted that brain into a young female body. Look about and see if you can identify that female body." "Oh, you're being an ass again. I am neither a witch doctor nor a beauty contest judge; I am a surgeon. No, thank you. If that young woman -- that composite human, female body, male brain -- survived and is alive today -- a point on which I have no opinion of my own knowledge and I assure you that I have had strong reason to acquaint myself both with relevant forensic medicine and medical jurisprudence; you are not about to trip me into being the ass you are -- I would not today be able to single her out with certainty from ten thousand other young women of approximately the same size, weight, build, skin shade, and such. Counsel, have you ever seen a human body hooked up for extreme life support and prepared for such surgery? I'm sure you have not or you would not ask such silly questions. But I assure you that you would not recognize your own wife under such circumstances. If you want me to perjure myself, you've come to the wrong shop." "Your Honor, Petitioners seem unable to get a responsive answer on this key point." "The Court finds it responsive. Witness states that he can and does identify the male body but is unable to identify the female body. Doctor, I confess that I am puzzled on one point -- perhaps through not being a medical man myself; nevertheless I am puzzled. Are we to understand that you would perform such an operation without being certain of the identity of the bodies?" "Judge, I've never been ope to fret about trivia. Mr. Salomon assured me, in legalistic language, that the fix was on if I have your American idiom correct. His assurances meant to me that the paper work was done, the legal requirements met, et cetera, and that I was free to operate. I believed him and did so. Was I mistaken? Should I expect an attempt to extradite me after I return home? I think it would be difficult; I have at last found a country where my work is respected." "I am not aware that anyone has any intention of trying to extradite you. I was curious, that's all. What Counsel was getting at is this: There is present in this room a woman who claims to be that composite from your surgery. You can't point her out?" "Oh, certainly I can. Though not as a sworn witness. It's that young lady seated by Jake Salomon. How are you, my dear? Feeling chipper?" "Very much so. Doctor." "Sorry if I've disappointed you. Oh, I could make positive identification... by sawing off the top of your skull, then digging out your brain and looking for certain indications. But -- heh heh! -- you would not be much use to yourself afterwards. I prefer seeing you alive, a monument to my skill." "I prefer it, too. Doctor -- and truly. I'm not disappointed. I'm eternally grateful to you." "Your Honor, this is hardly proper!" "Counsel, I will be the judge of that. Under these most unusual circumstances I will permit a few human amenities in court." "Miss Smith, I'd like to examine you before I go home. For my journal, you know." "Certainly, Doctor! Anything -- short of sawing off my skull." "Oh, just chest-thumping and such. The usual rituals. Shall we say tommorow morning, ten o'clockish?" "My car will be waiting for you at nine-thirty. Doctor. Or earlier, if you will do me the honor of having breakfast with me." "The Court finds it necessary to interrupt. I'm sorry to say that both of you will be here at ten o'clock. The hour for recessing is almost on us and -- " "No, Judge." "What, Dr. Boyle?" "I said, 'No.' I will not be here tomorrow morning. I speak this evening at twenty o'clock at a dinner of one of your chop-'em-up societies. The American College of Surgeons. Until shortly before that time I am at your disposal. I suppose you can require the presence of Miss Smith tomorrow morning, but not mine. I'm off to merry old China as quickly as possible. No shortage of opportunities for research there -- you would be amazed what condemned prisoners will agree to. So I shan't waste another day on silly-ass questions. now." "Mmm -- I'm afraid that the Court must concede that this is a case of Mahomet and the Mountain. Very well, we will not recess at trie usual hour." VV Do Petitioners offer more witnesses?" "No, Your Honor." "Counsel?" "Miss Johann Smith offers no further evidence." "Mr. Salomon, is it your intention to present an argument or summary?" "No, Your Honor. The facts speak for themselves." "Petitioners?" "Your Honor, it is your intention to bring this to a terminus todayT "That's what I am trying to find out. We've been at this for many weary days and I find myself in sympathy with Dr. Boyle's attitude: Let's sweep up the mess and go home. Both sides agree that there are no more witnesses, no more questions, no more exhibits. Counsel for Miss Smith states that he will not offer an argument. If Petitioners' counsel wishes to argue, he may do so -- in which case Miss Smith, in person or through counsel or both, is privileged to rebut. What I had in mind. Counsel, was a recess... then, if you have your thoughts in order, you can say what you wish. If you can't we can let it go over till tomorrow morning. You may at that time argue for a postponement -- but I warn you that a lengthy postponement will not be tolerated; the Court has become impatient with delaying tactics and red herrings, not to mention language and attitudes flavored with contempt. What is your wish?" "May it please the court, if we continue this evening, how long a recess does the court contemplate?" " -- and rebuttal having been concluded, we are ready to rule. But first a statement by the Court. Inasmuch as a novel point in Constitutional Law is involved in this matter, if an appeal is made, the Court will, under the Declaratory Relief Act of #, on its own motion send the matter directly tO: Federal Appellate Court with recommendation that it be referred at once to the Supreme Court. We cannot say that this will happen but there are aspects which lead us to believe that it could happen; this matter is not trivial. "We have heard the petition, we have heard witnesses and seen exhibits. It is possible to rule in one of four ways: "That both Johann Sebastian Bach Smith and Eunice Evans Branca are alive and among us; "That Eunice is alive and Johann is dead; "That Eunice is dead and Johann is alive; "That both Eunice and Johann are dead. "The Court rules -- please stand up, Miss Smith -- that this person before us is a physiological composite of the body of Eunice Evans Branca and the brain of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith and that in accordance with the equitable principle set forth in 'Estate of Henry M. Parsons vs Rhode Island' this female person is Johann Sebastian Bach Smith." " -- take it that you are offering me your lovely body. Sorry, m'dear. I have no interest in women. Nor in men. Nor in rubber garments or high heels or other toys. I'm a sadist. Miss Smith. A genius sadist who realized quite young that he must become a surgeon to stay out of the clutches of Jack Ketch. Sublimation, y'know. Thanks just the same. A pity, you do have a magnificent body." (Well, Boss, you got turned down. It's a lesson every woman must learn. So you brush your hair and start all over again.) (Eunice, I'm relieved. But he was entitled to the lagniappe if he wanted it.) "I'm your Galatea, Dr. Boyle; I owe you anything you care to name -- short of sawing off my skull. The debt remains on the books. All I was offering was symbolic downpayment. But you don't respond like a typical Australian -- nor sound much like one, either." "Oh, that. I'm a fake, dear. From the Sydney slums into a sadists' finishing school -- a stylish British boarding school, a 'public' school right out of the second drawer. Then on to the University of London and the best surgeons in the world. Put your pretty robe on and I'll be going. I say, would you mind having that extr'ordinary slow-motion somersault filmed in stereocinema for my archives?" "Where shall I send it. Doctor?" "Jake Salomon knows. Keep your pecker up, m'dear, and try to live a long time; you're my masterpiece." "I'll certainly try." "Do. Tata!" A n unidentified flying object roughly disc-shaped was reported to have landed in Pernambuco and its humanoid crew to have visited with local yokels; the report was denied officially almost faster than it reached the news services. The number of licensed private police in the United States reached triple the number of public peace officers. Miss Joan -- nee Johann -- Smith received over two thousand proposals of marriage, more than that number of less formal proposals, one hundred eighty-seven death threats, an undisclosed number of extortion notes and four bombs -- not any of which she received in person as they were diverted to Mercury Private Courier Service under procedures set up years earlier. The waldoes of one package-opening bunker had to be replaced; the other bombs were disarmed. The Postmaster General died from an overdose of barbiturates; the career Assistant Postmaster General declined an interim appointment and put in for retirement. A woman in Albany gave birth to a "faun" which was baptized, dead, and cremated in eighty-seven minutes. No flowers. No photographs. No interviews -- but the priest wrote a letter to his seminary roommate. The F.B.l. reported that recidivism was up to #, while the same rate figured only on major felonies -- armed robbery, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, murder, and attempted murder -- had climlied to #. The paralysis at Harvard University continued. J fused to marry me, you did promise me a night on the town if we won." Mr. Salomon put down his cup. "A delightful lunch, my dear. As I recall, you told me at the time that a night club check was no substitute for a marriage license." "Nor is it. But I haven't nagged you about marrying me since you accorded me the honor of first concubine. Uh... erase 'first.' I have no idea what you do with your time when you're not here. Well, I don't have to be 'first.' " (Twin, never crowd a man about sex. He'll lie.) (Pussy cat. I'm not crowding Jake about sex'. I'm confusing the issue. He's going to take us night-clubbing and we're going to wear that lush blue-andgold job -- it's meant to be seen, not just modeled for Winnie and put away.) "Eunice, surely you don't think I have anyone else?" "It would be presumptuous of me to have an opinion, sir. Jake, I've stayed close to home all during this hearing -- a little shopping, mostly with Winnie along. But now we've won and I see no reason to be a prisoner. Look, dear, we can make it a party of four -- a girl for you and a boy for me -- and you can come home early and not lose any sleep you don't want to." "You surely don't think that I would go home and leave you at a night club?" "I surely think I can stay up all night and celebrate if I want to. I'm free, over twenty-one -- my God, am I over twenty-one! -- and can afford a licensed escort. But there is no reason to keep you up all night. We'll call Gold Seal Bonded Escorts and fill out our party. Winnie's been teaching me what the kids call dancing -- and I've been teaching her real dancing. Say, maybe you'd rather escort Winnie than some dollikin picked out of a catalog? Winnie thinks you're wonderful." "Eunice, are you seriously proposing to hire a gigolo?" "Jake, I'm not going to marry him. I'm not even going to sleep with him. I expect him to dance with me, smile, and make polite conversation -- at about .what a plumber charges. This is doom?" "I won't have it." "If you won't -- and Heaven knows I would rather be on your arm than that of a paid escort -- will you take a nap? I'll get a nap, too. Do you need help to get to sleep? Money Hums, I mean, not horizontal calisthenics. Although we have that in stock, too." "I don't recall saying that we. were going out. Nor is there anything to celebrate, Eunice. We haven't won until the Supreme Court rules on it." "We have plenty to celebrate. I'm legally me -- thanks to you, darling -- and you no longer have to report as my conservator; my granddaughters have lost on all points. If we hold off celebrating until the Supreme Court maunders over it, we might both be dead." "Oh, nonsense! You know I'm about to leave for Washington; I expect to be able to arrange for an early spot on the calendar. Be patient." "Patient is what I'm not, dear. Surely, you'll arrange it; you alwasys do arrange things -- and the Administration owes me that and will expect more from me. But, Jake, your jet might crash -- " "That doesn't sway me, it's my death-of-choice. Since my genetic background doesn't permit me to hope for heart failure. I've been counting on cancer. But a crash is still better. Anything but a long, slow, helpless dying." "You're rubbing my nose in the mistake I made, sir. Will you let me finish? You once pointed out that you had only ten or twelve years, based on the actuarials -- whereas I had at least half a century. Not true, Jake. My life expectancy is null." "Eunice, what the devil are you talking about?" "The truth. Truth you have conveniently forgotten -- but which I am aware of every golden second. I'm a transplant, Jake. A unique transplant. No statistics apply to me. Nobody knows, no one can guess. So I live each wonderful day as all eternity. Jake my beloved master. I'm not being morbid -- I'm being happy. When I was a little boy there was a prayer Mama taught me. It goes -- "Now I lay me down to sleep; "I pray the Lord my soul to keep. "If I should die before I wake, "I pray the Lord my soul to take. "It's like that, Jake. I had not used the prayer in almost ninety years. But now I use it... and go happily to sleep, unworried about tomorrow." (Twin! You lying little bitch! All you ever say is a Money Hum.) (It's the same thing. Puss. A prayer means what you want it to mean.) "Joan Eunice, you once told me that you had no religion. So why do you say this child's prayer?" "As I recall, what I told you was that I had been a relaxed agnostic -- until I was dead for a while. I'm still an agnostic -- meaning that I don't have any answers -- but I am now a happy agnostic, one who feels sure deep in her heart that the world has meaning, is somehow good, and that my being here has purpose, even if I don't know what it is. As for that prayer, a prayer means whatever you make it mean; it's an inner ritual. What this one means to me is a good intention -- to live every moment as Eunice would live it, did live -- serenely, happily, and unworried by any later moment including death. Jake, you said you were still worried about Parkinson." "Somewhat. As a lawyer, I don't see how he can get his hands on it again. But as a shyster at heart -- don't quote me! -- who has taken part in many a back-room deal, I know that even the Supreme Court is made up of men, not angels met in judgment. Eunice, there are five honest men on that court... and four from whom I would never buy a used car. But of the honest ones, one is senile. We'll see what we shall see." "So we will, Jake. But don't give Parky a thought. The worst he can do is to strip me of money. Which I wouldn't mind; I've discovered that more money than is needed for current bills is a burden. Jake, I've got enough tucked away that even you don't know about that I'll never miss any meals. Parky con't touch it. As for Parky himself. I've erased him from my universe and suggest that you do likewise. He's damned by his own I.Q. -- leave him to nature." Salomon grinned. "Okay, I'll try."  A ND now you go do whatever A it is you have to do and forget that I tried to inveigle you into a pub crawl." (Twin, you're giving up too easily.) (Who is giving up?) "Eunice, if you really want to -- " "No, no, Jake! Your heart's not in it. While you are in Washington I may sample the flesh pots of this decadent village but I promise you that I will be closely guarded. Shorty, probably; he frightens people just with his size. Nor will I go alone; Alec told me that he and Mac didn't have much trouble slipping the leash, and Winnie can make a fourth." "Eunice." "Yes, dear?" "I am like hell going to step aside for those two wolves." "Why, Jake, you sound jealous!" "No. God save me from falling prey to that masochistic vice. But if you want to see the seamy side of this ant hill. I'll find out where the action is and take you there. Dress for it, girl -- I'm going to shake the moths off my drinkin' clothes. Formal, I mean." "Bare breasts?" (Could you have done better. Pussy cat?) (Pick up the pup, twin. I concede.) " 'Much too good for the common people.' Unless you intend to paint heavily, plus a lot of that sparkly glitter stuff." "I'll try to do you proud, dear. But you will take a nap? Please." "A long nap at once and a dinner tray in my room. H-hour is twenty-two hundred. Be ready or we jump off without you." "I'm scared. Want help to get to sleep? Me? Or Winnie? Or both?" "No, I've learned how to do it myself. Perfectly. Though I admit it's more fun with two pretty little girls chanting with me. You get a nap. I may keep you up all night." "Yes, sir." "And now, if I may be excused." Mr. Salomon stood up, bent over her hand and kissed it. "Adios." "Come back here and kiss me right!" He glanced over his shoulder. "Later, my dear. I don't believe in letting women be notional." He left. (Who won that round. Boss?) (He thinks he did, Eunice -- and you tell me that's how it ought to be.) (You're learning, twin, you're learning.) They had been lunching in her lounge. She went into her boudoir, sat down at her stenodesk to phone -- picking it rather than the viewphone because its phone was not a viewphone. She used it with hush and with ear plugs. Shortly she was answered: "Dr. Garcia's office." "This is Mrs. McIntyre's secretary. Is the Doctor in and, if so, can he spare a moment to speak to Mrs. McIntyre?" "Please hold. I will inquire." Joan passed the time reciting her meditation prayer, was calm when he answered, "Dr. Garcia speaking." "Mrs. McIntyre's secretary. Doctor -- hush and secure?" "Of course, Eunice." "Roberto dear, do you have news for me?" " 'The Greeks have captured Athens.' " "Oh You're certain?" "No possible doubt, Eunice. But don't panic. You can have a D. and C. at once with no chance of your privacy being breached. I'll get Dr. Kystra, the best possible man and utterly trustworthy. I'll assist, there won't even be a nurse present." "Oh, Roberto, no, no, no! You don't understand, dear -- I'm going to have this baby if it's the last thing I ever do. You've made me terribly happy." (Now we've really got something to celebrate. Boss, darling. But don't tell Jake, huh?) (Nobody, just yet. How soon does our belly bulge?) (Not for weeks, if you don't eat like a pig.) (I want pickles and ice cream this instant.) (So don't.) The Doctor answered slowly, "I misunderstood the situation. But you seemed quite nervous when I took the specimen." "Certainly I was, dear; I was scared silly that I might not have caught." "Uh... Eunice, I can't help feeling personally responsible. I know you're wealthy -- but a marriage contract can exclude any 'fortune hunter' possibility and -- well. I'm available." "Roberto, I think that's the sweetest -- and bluntest -- proposal a knocked-up broad ever got. Thank you, dear; I do appreciate it. But, as you pointed out, I am wealthy -- and I do not care what the neighbors think." "Eunice, I am not simply accepting my responsibility... I want you to know that I do not regard marrying you as a chore." "Roberto darling, it is not your responsibility. For all you know I've been sweetheart to the regiment." (We've tried, haven't we twin!) (Don't joggle my elbow, dear; he wants to be noble.) "It's my baby. Who helped me is my business." "Sorry." "I meant that you mustn't feel any responsibility. If you did help me, I'm grateful. I'm grateful even if you didn't. Roberto? Instead of trying to make an honest woman out of me -- difficult -- why don't you remove that implant from Winnie's pretty thigh, then place another sort of implant where it will do the most good... then make an honest woman out of her. Much easier, she leans that way." "It's a thought. Truthfully it's a thought I've considered quite a lot lately. But she doesn't want to leave you." "She need not. Oh, she could stop pretending to be my maid, but this is a big old barn, several spare suites. If you get her pregnant, she and I could chum and giggle about it and have our babies almost together. I'll shut up and stop trying to run your life. Two questions -- I had planned to go out on the town tomight, to celebrate the good news I expected to hear from you. Must I stick to soft drinks now?" "Not at all. Shortly we'll put you on a diet and limit your drinking. But tonight you could get stinking drunk and the only effect would be a hangover. You don't lose a baby that easily... as "May not get stinking but I may soak up several glasses of bubbly. Last question -- If you're able to sign off, would it suit you to lose a night's sleep helping me celebrate? Officially it's to celebrate our court victory. That 'the Greeks have captured Athens' will remain our secret a while longer." "Uh -- " "You sound fretted, dear." "Well, to tell the truth I have a date with Winnie." "Oh! I expressed myself badly. I have a date with Jake; I hope that you and Winnie can make it a four. I wasn't asking you to spend a night with me in that sense -- although I certainly would not be averse if it could be managed some other time without hurting Winsome. The moments you and I have been able to steal have been too short, dear. I think you are a man it would be sweet to be leisurely with." "I know that you are such a woman, Eunice." "Go along with you, you tell that to all your female patients. Doctor, you are a delightful wolf. Will you wait ten minutes before phoning Winnie? I have a favor I want to ask of her." "Ten minutes." "Thank you, Roberto. Off." tercom. "Winnie? Are you busy, dear?" "Just reading. Be right in." Joan met her at their connecting door. "Nothing much, hon. I want you to call O'Neil and tell him that I wish to speak to Finchley. In my lounge. Sure, I could phone O'Neil myself, sweet, but I want it to look more formal." "Sure, Joanie. Do I stay and chaperone?" "Winsome, you know darn well that all I ever want is fake chaperonage -- and sometimes a jigger. This time I don't need a jigger -- but I do want to ask Finchley something privately and he will speak more freely if you aren't around. So let him into my lounge, come tell me he has arrived and don't come back in. Go on into your own room and close the door. Then stay there -- you are going to receive a phone call in about eight minutes." "I am?" "Yes, and a nice one. You and I and Jake and Dr. Garcia are going night-clubbing tonight." "OA!" "And when we get home just keep him here the rest of the night and I'll see to it that Jake doesn't twig. Or does he know who 'Bob' is?" "Uh... yes, he does. I told him." "It may still suit dear Doctor to cover up; men are shy. Now skedaddle, dear, and phone O'Neil." Four minutes later Winnie announced Finchley and left the lounge. He said, "You sent for me. Miss?" "Tom Cat, these doors are soundproof; you can stop being formal." He relaxed a little. "Okay, Pussy Cat." "So give us a kiss and sit down. That hall door locks itself. Winnie is the only one who could walk in and she won't." "Pussy Cat, sometimes you make me nervous." "Oh, piffle." She mover into his arms. "I do have a question to ask you -- advice that I want. You can discuss it with O'Neil and get his advice, and any of the guards. But it is your advice I want; the rest is coverup." "Woman, quit talking and shove me some mouth." Joan did so, a long thorough kiss. Presently he said hoarsely, "You don't have much on under this." "I don't have anything on under it. But don't get me distracted, Thomas Cattus; let me get my question in. I'm going nightclubbing tonight -- Jake and me, Winnie and Dr. Garcia. They're going to want to take us to cubes. I want to see rough places. I figure you know where they are." "Mmm... Eunice, the up-high places are all in bad turf." "Well, are they safe once we're inside? And can one get inside safely?" "Uh... there's one, has its own inside parking and as good armor as the doors you have. Look, I'll bring up a list, addresses and so forth, and everybody's suggestions. But I'll star my own." "Good. Thank you, Tom Cat." "God, but you feel good. Do we have time? Can I lock that other door?" "If I'm not worried about Winnie, why should you be? Grab a pillow and put me on the floor." T he party made rendezvous in Joan's lounge. Jake Salomon had elected to dress with ultra oldfashioned formality: maroon tuxedo jacket and trousers, with white turtleneck. The silky knit made a splendid background for his gold ankh necklace. Dr. Garcia was just as formal in modern mode: scarlet tights boldly padded, stretch-fit white mess jacket with jabot of pearls and black lace. Little Winifred wore her new emerald dress with floor-length skirt -- no body paint as Joan had advised but blushes caused her skin to change again and again from extremely fair to rosy glow. On her forehead in caste-mark position was a single emerald. Jake looked at her. "Little one, what holds that solitaire in place? Insurance?" She blushed again but answered saucily, "It's on a corkscrew, sir. Shall I unscrew it and show you?" "No, I'm afraid you might be telling the truth." "Never in mixed company, sir. Actually it's the adhesive we use on bandages. Won't come loose even with soap and water but alcohol takes it right off." "Then be careful not to spill your drinks that high." "Oh, I don't drink. Counselor; I learned my lesson long ago. I'll be drinking Cuba Libre without the 'libre' and screwdrivers with no drive to them." "Doctor, let's leave her at home; she's just a chaperone." "Would you make me stay home. Counselor? Just for not drinking?" "Just for calling me 'Counselor' if you do it again. And for calling me 'sir.' Winifred, men my age do not care to be reminded of it by pretty little girls. After sundown my name is Jake." "Yes, Counselor," Winifred answered meekly. Jake sighed. "Doctor, some day I hope to win an argument with a woman." "If you do, tell Dr. Rosenthal. Rosy is writing a book on the difference in mental processes between male and female." "A dreamer. Eunice does that thing cover you any better when you stand up? And what is it?" "It's a hula skirt, Jake. And it does." Joan Eunice was wearing a floor-length skirt, with her torso covered with a myriad glittering stars. They faded out gradually at neck and shoulders. The skirt was thousands of gold nylon threads overlying more thousands of deep blue threads. As she was seated, the mass of threads fell away from her graceful legs. Now she stood up; the threads fell back into a solid curtain. "See, Jake? A plain gold skirt. But when I move" -- she walked -- "the blue underneath keeps flashing through." "Yes, and you, too. Panties?" "A rude question. The Polynesians never heard of pants until the missionaries corrupted them." "That's not a responsive answer -- " "Wasn't meant to be." " -- but as long as you are standing, let's get rolling." "Yes, dear." Joan Eunice put on a matching opaque yashmak, let Jake lay an evening cloak around her shoulders. Jake hooked on a maroon domino which covered his distinctive aquiline nose -- he had been too often on videb lately and felt that there was no point in concealing Miss J. S. B. Smith's face if his own face broke her cover. The. Doctor donned a small white domino -- having been asked to help keep the party in character -- and Winifred wore a filmy green harem veil that was only a symbol, being of the same material as her skirt. As they entered the lift Joan Eunice said, "Where are we going, Jake?" "Woman, you aren't supposed to ask. The Gaslight Club, as a starter." "It sounds like fun," Joan agreed. "A piano player with sleeve garters and such?" "And derby hat and fake cigar -- he can sing and play anything written a hundred years back. Or fake it." I want to hear him. But, Jake, since this is to celebrate my uhuru, would you indulge me a little?" "Probably. Show your openers." "There's a club I've heard about... and while you were napping, I reserved a table for four for twenty-two thirty. I'd like to try it." "Winnie, you haven't been coaching her enough. Eunice, you're not supposed to be capable of making such a decision -- less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels and all that. All right, where is the dive? What's its name? We'll try the Gaslight later -- there is a waitress there alleged to have the most pinchable bottom in the state." "Probably foam rubber; Winnie has that distinction. It's the Pompeii-Now, Jake -- I have the address in my purse." Mr. Salomon's eyebrows appeared over his domino. "We won't need it, Eunice. That box is in an Abandoned Area." "Does that matter? They have inside parking and assured me that they are armored against anything short of a nuke bomb." "We would still have to get there and back." "Oh, I have confidence in Finchley and Shorty. Don't you?" (Twin, that's a crotch chop. Not nice.) (Big sister, do you want to go to the Gaslight and listen to bad piano and watch Jake pinch bottoms? If so, say so.) (I just said it wasn't nice.) (So you phrase the next answer. Jake's a tough case.) "Joan Eunice, when I take a lady out for the evening, we go in my car. Not hers." "Whatever you say, Jake; I was trying to be helpful. I asked Finchley and he said there was a route in that the -- what do they call it? -- the Organization -- keeps open. No doubt Finchley can tell Rockford." "# call it the Mafia. If there is an acceptably safe route, Rockford knows it; he's the most expert driver in town -- more experienced than your boys, he drives more." "Jake, you don't want to go there. So let's go to the Gaslight. I want to try sticking a pin in that rubber fanny." They went to the Pompeii-Now. T here was no trouble getting inside and the club had a card lounge for its patrons' mobile guards. The maitre d'hotel led them to a ringside table across from the orchestra, swept a "Reserved" sign from it. "Will this be suitable, Mr. 'Jones?' " "Yes, thank you," agreed Salomon. Two silver-bucket stands with champagne appeared as they sat down; the maitre-d' took a magnum from the sommelier and displayed it to Salomon, who said, "That's a poor year for Pol Roger. No Dom Perignon '#?" "At once, sir." The sommelier hurried away. The maitre d'hotel asked, "Is there anything else not to your liking, sir?" Joan Eunice leaned toward Jake. "Please tell him that I don't like this chair. It was designed by Torquemada." The floor manager looked upset. "I'm sorry Madame feels that way about our chairs. They were supplied by the number-one hotel and restaurant supply company." "As may be," Joan answered, "but if you think I'm going to spend an evening perched on a shooting stick and pretend that it's fun, you are mistaken. Jake, we should have gone to the Gaslight." "Perhaps, but we're here now. Just a moment, dear. Matee D'hotel -- " "Yes, sir." "You have an office here, no doubt." "Why, yes, sir." "With a desk and a chair. Probably a padded swivel chair with arms and an adjustable back. A man who is on his feet as much as you are wants a comfortable chair when he does sit down." "I do have such a chair, sir, and -- while it's hardly suitable for dining room -- Madame is welcome to it if it pleases her. I'll send for it." "One moment. In a club with so many activities -- you have a gaming room, do you not, and other things? -- I feel sure that it is possible to round up four such chairs." "I'll try, sir. Although our other patrons might find it odd if we supply one table with special chairs." Mr. Salomon looked around. The place was less than half filled. "Oh, I imagine that if you explained to anyone who asked just how expensive such special service is, he might not want it. Or you might find it possible to accommopay. I think those guards pretending to be waiters standing around the edge of the room can handle anyone who is unreasonable." "All our staff are guards, sir -- in a crunch. Very well, sir, if you will be patient a few moments your party will all have desk chairs." Quickly he distributed wine cards and drug lists, and left. Roberto and Winifred were already dancing. Joan leaned toward Jake again and said, "Jake, will you buy this place for me?" "Does it attract you that much?" "No, I want to make a bonfire out of these chairs. I had forgotten what indignities night clubs expect their customers to put up with." "You're spoiled." "I intend to be. Jake, much of what is wrong with this world would be righted if the customer screamed every time he feels cheated. But I'm not out to reform the world tonight; I simply want a comfortable chair. The cover charge -- I checked it when I made reservations for 'Mr. Jones' -- is high enough to buy a decent chair. What are these 'other activdies?" . A whorehouse upstairs, maybe?" "Eunice, see those three tables of beautiful people over in the corner? Attractive men and women, all young, all smiles, no frowns, and each with a champagne glass that may hold ginger ale? It's high odds that, if the Greeks had a word for it, they have a price for it." "Why, one of those girls doesn't look more than twelve." "She may not be that old. Who's going to check on her age, in an Abandoned Area? I thought you weren't going to reform the world tonight, my dear?" "I'm not. If the government can't police these areas, I certainly cannot. But I hate to see children exploited." (Twin, that pretty child may have an I.Q. of # and no other possible profession -- she may think she's lucky. Proud of her job. And seeing where she is, she's either got an implant or cut tubes -- not like that cheerleader I told you about.) (Eunice, doesn't it bother you?) (Some, chum, but only some. People usually are what they are because it suits them -- I learned that from Joe. The girl's mother may be one of the other pretties there -- two gets you seven. Want to rescue them both?) (Oh, shut up, darling; let's A waitress came past, refilled their glasses. She was pretty and was dressed in sandals, cosmetics and careful depilation. She smiled and moved on. "Jake, is she one?" "Couldn't say, I don't know the house rules. Shocked, Eunice? I told you not to come here." "Shocked at skirP. Jake dear, you forget that my generation thinks nothing of nudity." "Hrrrmphl One more remark like that and I'll call you Johann the rest of the evening." "I'll be good. Mostly. Darling, our waitress suddenly reminded me of the Chesterfield Club. Kansas City in the palmiest days of the Pendergast machine. Nineteenthirty-four." "In nineteen-thirty-four I was barely out of diapers, Eunice. It was something like this?" "Not as much fake swank and lower prices even allowing for inflation. But otherwise much the same. It specialized in complete nudity even at high noon at the 'Businessman's Lunch.' Just up the street from the Federal Reserve Bank. Jake, she's headed back. Find out for me." "How? I don't even have a hat to tip." "Simply ask her, dear, ask her if she's available. Slip her ten dollars as you do." The waitress came back, smiled, and said, "Have you looked over our drug list? All illegal drugs at the controlled international prices plus twenty-five percent. Guaranteed pure, we obtain them from government sources." "Not for me, thank you, dear. Eunice? Want a trip?" "Me? I don't even take aspirin. But I want a steady supply of champagne. And I could use a sandwich, or something. Chiquita, is there a kitchen operative now?" "There is always a gourmet chef on duty, Ma'am; it says so at the bottom of your wine card. Anything from snacks to Maine lobster. Would you like to see a menu?" "No, thank you. Maybe a big platter of little sandwiches for all of us, Jake. And don't forget that other matter." a ten-dollar bill. It disappeared and Joan decided that the girl must have folded it with one hand and palmed it. Jake spoke to her in a voice lower than the music. She smiled and answered clearly. "No, sir. I'm not even allowed to dance with customers -- and I'm not in that branch of the business; I'm married. But I can arrange it." The waitress glanced toward the 'beautiful people' and looked back. "For you, sir? Or for both of you?" "No," Jake answered. "It was just curiosity." "My curiosity," Joan put in. "I'm sorry, dear; I shouldn't have made him ask you." "Ma'am, a high roller can be as inquisitive as he wishes. Baby needs shoes." She smiled. "Twins. Boys. Two years old. I was licensed for two and now I'm arguing with the Board as to whether twins use up my license. Since twins are okay under a one-baby license. I'd like to have a little girl, too." "Jake, be a high roller again; I want to ask" -- Joan leaned forward, read the girl's name written or tattooed above her left breast -- "Marie another question." "He's paid for more than one question, really. Ma'am." But a second note disappeared as quickly as the first. "Marie, do you live inside the turf? With kids?" "Oh, goodness, no! My husband would never permit that. An armed bus picks me up after supper and delivers me home around breakfast time. Most of us use it. Except -- " She indicated the exception by inclining her head toward the corner. "My husband is on night shift at Timken -- we match up pretty well." "Who takes care of your twins at night? Nursery?" "Oh, no. Mama lives with us. No huhu. Actually, Ma'am, this is a good job. I've been a waitress where I had to wear uniforms -- and the work was hard and the tips were small. Here the work is easy and the tips are usually high. Oh, sometimes a customer gets drunk and gropy, but I don't bruise all that easily -- and drunks are often the highest tippers. Never any trouble; the guards watch everything." She smiled at Joan. "You could get a job here in two seconds, Ma'am. All it takes is a friendly manner and a good figure -- and you've got both." "Thank you, Marie." "I'd better go, the maltre-d' is bringing a party to another of my tables. 'Scuse, please -- sandwiches will be right in." The girl left. Joan said, "Jake, would you say that she has found her niche?" "Seems so. As long as she keeps her figure and saves her money. She doesn't pile up social security points here; this doesn't count as a job under the rules, it's off the map." "She doesn't pay income tax?" "Oh, certainly! The fact that her income doesn't exist, legally, means nothing to revenooers. Though she may hold out a good portion -- I would. My dear, do you want to try this music?" "Jake, I thought you didn't dance?" "I don't dance this modern stuff. But I can try, if you want to. I wonder if that combo can play Rock? This new stuff has so little beat I don't see why they call it dance music." Joan chuckled. "I'm so much older that I despised Rock instead of liking it. Swinging was my era, Jake, and on back clear to the Bunny Hug -- though I didn't learn to dance until the foxtrot crowded out the rest." "I can foxtrot. I'm not all that young. But I doubt if that bunch of disappointed harpists can play one. Eunice, can you tango?" "Try me, just try me! Learned it when Irene Castle was alive -- and with this new body I'm eight times as good as I was then. Been teaching it to Winnie. Do you have a firm lead?" "Firm enough for you, wench. I'm going to flag the maltre-d' -- it's possible that they can play one. It's the only tempo that has stayed evergreen through all the passing fads." "Of course, Jake. Because the tango, danced correctly, is so sexy that you ought to get married afterwards. See if they can play one." B ut they were interrupted by bus boys arriving with four swivel chairs and Joan decided that it would be polite to sit in hers a while, since she had made a fuss over chairs. Then sandwiches arrived and more champagne and she found she wanted both -- bubbly, to make her tiddly and sandwiches to soak it up so that she wouldn't get tiddly too fast. Roberto and Winifred returned to the table; Winnie said, "Oh, food! Goodbye, waistline! Bob, will you love me when I'm fat?" "Who knows? Let's operate and find out," he answered, reaching for a sandwich with one hand and champagne with the other. "Winsome, pour that Coke into the wine bucket and have champagne." "Joanie, you know I mustn't. My Nemesis." "But this time there's food to go with it... and not the other hazards." Winifred blushed. "I'll get drunk. I'll get silly." "Roberto, will you promise this poor child that, if she passes out, you'll get her home safely?" (What's safe about home, twin? You ought to hang out a red light.) (Nonsense, Eunice! Our man won't marry us -- so what do you want me to do' I don't give myself to men I don't respect -- and I've got years to make up for. I'm nearly ninety-five years old -- and knocked up -- and healthy -- and can't hurt anyone physically and won't hurt anyone socially... a man's pride or anything else. Why shouldn't I be 'No-Pants Smith'?) ('Methinks the lady doth protest too much.' Boss, your Bible-Belt background is chafing you again. Certainly sex is no sin -- but you don't really believe it.) (I do so! Always have. I've been almost enough of a busybody to keep you happy. Why do you needle me?) (Beloved Boss. You've shown amazing talent for juggling eggs and I've enjoyed every second of it and I hope you have, too.) (You know I have. So much I'm scared of losing my judgment. My caution, rather. Eunice, I never dreamed how much more it is, to be a woman. It's our whole body.) The cabaret was crowded now; the lights changed and the floor show began -- two comics. Joan listened, tried to look amused, and tried to amuse herself by trying to remember how long ago she had heard each "new" gag. She could see only one improvement in the routines: The "dirty" story of her (his) youth had disappeared. Being based on shock of breaking taboo, the dirty story had bled to death when there were no more taboos. There was sex humor -- the comics used plenty of it; sex remained forever the most comical thing on a weary globe. But it was harder to work out real comedy than it once had been simply to shock. But she applauded the comics as they left. There was a blackout and the dance floor changed instantly into a farmyard scene -- and she found herself more intrigued by trying to guess the mechanics of that "magic" than she had been by the comics. The farmyard set was used for one of the oldest (possibly the oldest, she decided) of all sex stories, and it was done in stylized, very old symbols in both costume and props: The Farmer, the Farmer's Daughter, and the City Slicker with his Hundred-Dollar Bills. It was pantomine, with theme music from the orchestra. She whispered to Jake, "If she's a farm girl. I'm Adolf Hitler." "What do you know about farms, my dear?" "Plenty, for a city boy. On one nearly every summer when I was a kid. Followed the harvest in high school and college -- good money, plus occasionally a farm girl. Always was a peasant at heart -- wanted the biggest manure pile in the valley... and got it, save that it was cash. Jake? Couldn't we buy an abandoned farm? A simple little place, with drawbridge and moat, and our own power plant and water supply? Get out of this dying city?" "If you say to, dear. Getting bored with this? Want to move on?" "Not during their act, dear." (Tm curious to see how he fakes it.) (Me, too!) To her surprise the entertainers did not fake it. Money caused the "farm girl" to go from offended, to coy, to consent, to active cooperation, with a hay stack as locale of consummation -- and actor and actress made certain that the audience could see that it was in no way faked. Winifred blushed to her waist and never took her eyes off it. The ending had a variation that JoanJohann conceded was new to her-him. As motions grew vigorous and the orchestra kept time to loud squeals and grunts, the "Farmer" showed up (as expected) with pitchfork. But the hay caught fire, apparently from the action, and the "Farmer" dropped his pitchfork and grabbed a seltzer bottle conveniently at hand on an empty table and doused his "Daughter" and the "City Slicker" in putting out the fire -- aiming first at the apparent source of the fire. Joan decided that it rated applause. Winifred hesitantly joined in, then clapped hard when Roberto did. Jake joined in but was interrupted. "What is it, Rockford?" Jake's driver-guard was looking very upset. "Mr. Salomon -- Fve got to speak with you." "You are. Speak up." "Uh -- " Rockford tried to make it just to his employer but Joan watched his lips. That crazy fool Charlie has gone got hisself killed." "Oh, for God's sake! Where? How?" "Just now. In the guards' lounge. Not drunk. This is a tight joint, they won't let a guard drink. We were playing stud and Charlie kept needling this Polack. No excuse and I told him to knock it off. But he didn't. Polack got sore, but tried to avoid a showdown. Charlie kept crowding him and -- oh, what's the use; the Polack broke his neck. Before I could get around to that side of the table." Rockford said, "Boss? Seeing where we are, I could dump him. Best, maybe?" "Of course not. I have to report it, the body has to go to the morgue. Damn it. Rocky, I'm his parole officer." "Yeah, but maybe you don't know about it? He skipped. Dropped out." "Shut up." Salomon turned to Joan. "My dear. I'm terribly sorry-" "Jake, I should never have asked you to take me into an A. A." "That has nothing to do with it. Charlie was a congenital killer. Rockford, get the ma#tre-d'. No, take me to the manager. Friends -- Bob, Winnie -- stay here please. I've got to take care of something." Garcia said, "I caught most of it. Take me with you, Jake. I can certify death -- and it's smart to get that done at once." "Uh... who's going to stay with the girls?" Joan put her hand on Jake's arm. "Jake, Winnie and I are safe -- lots of guards. I think we'll go to the powder room. I need to, Winnie probably does, too. Coming, Winnie?" T he party was over but it was two hours before they were home; too many details -- tedious ones rather than legal complications, as Dr. Garcia certified death, and he, the manager, Mr. Salomon, and Rockford endorsed the certificate that death had occurred in an Abandoned Area at the hands of a party or parties unknown -- in fact unknown, as the cardroom was empty save for the body. There was no point in inquir ies; it had happened in an A ban doned Area and was not a crime de facto nor in any practical sense de jure. Nor did anyone weep; even Rockford did not like his driving partner, he simply respected him as a fast gun in a crunch. To Garcia Jake groused that he should have known better than to try to rehabilitate a congenital -- and got no sympathy, as Garcia believed that such creatures should be exterminated as soon as identified. Both tried to keep the grisly aspects from the ladies. Winifred and Joan Eunice spent an hour alone at the table, fiddling with champagne and trying to look amused, while the men tidied up the mess. But Joan helped'on one to be sent to to leave it to the management, he was certain they would dump it. ford without someone to ride shotgun. So a phone was brought to Joan and she called O'Neil -- was answered instantly and wondered if her Chief ever slept. Finchley and Shorty were on duty; O'Neil said they would be rolling at once. But Joan ordered him to have them first pick up Fred, to ride shotgun for Rockford. As an afterthought she told O'Neil to have the night pantryman place a cold supper and a case of chilled champagne in her lounge -- the "night on the town" had turned out a dismal flop; she was darned if she would let it stay that way. Charlie was better dead and his death did not rate one crocodile tear. Ten thousand human beings had died around the globe in the hour since his death -- why weep over a worthless one? (Eunice, what happens to a kark like Charlie after he's dead?) (I'm no authority, Boss. Maybe the bad ones die dead -- like a potter destroying damaged work.) (I don't know its wavelength, sweetheart. Maybe you can tell me this -- How can I get this party rolling again? Look at Winnie -- drinking champagne but not smiling.) (Boss darling, I recommend more champagne and Money Hums, mixed fifty-fifty.) (Eunice, I thought you didn't approve of liquor?) (Never said that. Boss. I didn't drink because I didn't need it. But nothing is good or bad in itself, just in its effects. Try it. Can't hurt, might help.) So when at last the four reached the big, ugly fortress, Eunice insisted that they go to her lounge for a nightcap and a snack. "Who knows? We might feel like dancing yet. Roberto, has Winnie introduced you to our relaxing routine? The Money Hum?" "I've tried to teach it to him. ies; it had happened in an Abandoned Area and was not a crime de facto nor in any practical sense de jure. Nor did anyone weep; even Rockford did not like his driving partner, he simply respected him as a fast gun in a crunch. To Garcia Jake groused that he should have known better than to try to rehabilitate a congenital -- and got no sympathy, as Garcia believed that such creatures should be exterminated as soon as identified. Both tried to keep the grisly aspects from the ladies. Winifred and Joan Eunice spent an hour alone at the table, fiddling with champagne and trying to look amused, while the men tidied up b#nhelpe#n one Kdd to be sent to to leave it to the management, he was certain they would dump it. ford without someone to ride shotgun. So a phone was brought to Joan and she called O'Neil -- was answered instantly and wondered if her Chief ever slept. Finchley and Shorty were on duty; O'Neil said they would be rolling at once. But Joan ordered him to have them first pick up Fred, to ride shotgun for Rockford. As an afterthought she told O'Neil to have the night pantryman place a cold supper and a case of chilled champagne in her lounge -- the "night on the town" had turned out a dismal flop; she was darned if she would let it stay that way. Charlie was better dead and his death did not rate one crocodile tear. Ten thousand human beings had died around the globe in the hour since his death -- why weep over a worthless one? (Eunice, what happens to a kark like Charlie after he's dead?) (I'm no authority, Boss. Maybe the bad ones die dead -- like a potter destroying damaged work.) (I don't know its wavelength, sweetheart. Maybe you can tell me this -- How can I get this party rolling again? Look at Winnie -- drinking champagne but not smiling.) (Boss darling, I recommend more champagne and Money Hums, mixed fifty-fifty.) (Eunice, I thought you didn't approve of liquor?) (Never said that. Boss. I didn't drink because I didn't need it. But nothing is good or bad in itself, just in its effects. Try it. Can't hurt, might help.) So when at last the four reached the big, ugly fortress, Eunice insisted that they go to her lounge for a nightcap and a snack. "Who knows? We might feel like dancing yet. Roberto, has Winnie introduced you to our relaxing routine? The Money Hum?" "I've tried to teach it to him. Joanie. But Bob is a dreadful cynic." "Jake, let's uncynic Roberto. I've thought of a new way to recite it. Sit in a circle and pass around a loving cup. Three recite while one drinks, and pass the cup to the next one." "I vote Yea," Jake answered. "Doctor, if you want to be cynical, go do so by yourself -- you can have the guest bed in my suite. We'll form a triangle instead." "I had better stay to keep the party orderly." "Very well, sir. But one unseemly word while we are at our devotions and you will be severely punished." "How?" Joan Eunice answered, "By having to down the loving cup unassisted, of course, and then start it again." rested but very thirsty. She glanced at the ceiling, saw that it was after ten and thought idly of turning on floor lights as a gentle preliminary to stronger light. Then she realized that she was not alone. Should she wake Jake -- gently -- for a pleasant good morning? Or slide out softly and sneak back to her room and hope not to be seen? Or did it matter? Was she already a topic of gossip in her own house? Better not wake Jake in any case; the poor darling planned to go to Washington tonight. She started to slide out of bed. The man beside her reached out and pulled her to him. She at once gave in, went soft and boneless. "Didn't know you were awake, dear. I meant to -- Robertol" "You were expecting Santa Claus?" "How did you get here?" "You invited me." "I did? Well, yes, I did. I mean I told you that you were welcome in my bed, quite a while back. But where's Jake? Did he go to sleep on us? And what about Winnie?" She thumbed on the floor lights, saw that she was, as she was beginning to suspect, in her own bed. "Winnie's next door. In her bed. With Jake." "Good God, Roberto -- I've finally spent a night with you. And don't remember it." ( do! Wheel) (Well, I don't, Eunice. Not in detail. Confused.) (You're a drunken little bitch. Boss. But we had fun.) (I'm sure we did. I wish I remembered it.) Dr. Garcia sighed. "Ah, well. I should not complain." "It's coming back to me," she lied. "Just disoriented as I woke up. You were especially sweet to me. "You didn't think so when I wouldn't let you go to bed with your makeup on." Joan allowed enough general illumination to come on to let her see herself, noted that the star sequins were gone as well as body paint they had adhered to. She had not scrubbed it off herself; ergo, someone else had. Not Winnie -- Winnie had been potted as a palm. "That's part of what I meant by 'especially sweet,' Roberto. Not many men would take such good care of a drunken wench. Was I hard to handle?" "Not really. But you were pretty tight." "Too tight?" "Not too tight. Just pleasantly so." "I'm not sure I understand that and don't think I want to. Roberto darling, even if I did fuss over it, thank you for washing me. Only a slut leaves paint on when she goes to bed. I'm a tart but I don't want to be a slut." (Hi, slut!) "And thank you most of all for a wonderfully sweet night. I hope I wasn't too drunk." "Eunice, you would be more woman passed out cold than most can manage at their best." "I'm glad you said 'would be' rather than 'are.' But, Roberto, I'm uneasy. Not about you and me, dear, but about Winnie. Does this affect that thought you've been considering? About Winnie, I mean." "On the contrary, Eunice, it was Winnie's idea -- her notion of how to celebrate our engagement -- " "Wait a moment! Am  engaged to youT' "Eh? No, no -- I'm engaged to Winnie." "Oh. Roberto, I would happily marry you, you would make a numero-uno esposo. But I don't need one, and Winnie does. Did I know this last night? About you two?" "You seemed to. You said that was why you wouldn't wait to scrub off your sparklers -- you were right-now about it." "Roz. I remember being terribly eager but I seem to have drawn a blank as to why. Roberto? Did I spill the news about the 'Greeks capturing Athens?' " "I don't think so, Eunice. Not when I was around. I'm fairly sure Winnie doesn't know it." "I'll tell Winnie; it's Jake I want to keep in the dark." "Eunice? Did Jake do it? Capture Athens and the Parthenon as well." "Watch that Hippocratic Oath, dear. Parthenogenesis might be the answer. Let me keep this up in the air a while longer. You say this was Winnie's idea? After you told her you would marry her?" "Yes." "How did she ever get up the courage to propose? I've been urging her to -- but she's so damn' shy. Dutch courage?" "Yes. But my own. Sure, she's shy -- but under her blushes Winnie is as rugged as a nurse has to be. She said All right -- if I would let her tie it down tight that she is no angel. I told her I had no use for angels, in bed or out. She said she hoped I meant that, because she was about to ask Jake to sleep with her." "Roberto, I missed a lot of this. How 'much champagne did I drink?" "Who counts? Jake kept opening bottles and we kept passing the loving cup around. While reciting that amphigory. You got your share. We all did." "Uh... am I engaged to Jake?" "Not that I know of." "That's good. Because when Jake finds out I'm knocked up, he's going to be noble. Just as you were, dear, but Jake will be much more difficult. And I've discovered that I don't need a husband; I just want loving friends. You. Jake. Winnie. Some others. People who'll love me as I am, clay feet and all -- not because of a contract. Did Jake make any fuss over the sleeping arrangements?" "Uh, truthfully I don't think anyone was displeased with Winnie's suggestion. Jake picked Winnie up under one arm and announced that he was reenacting the Rape of the Sabines." "The faithless old darling." "So I picked you up and carried you in and scrubbed you... and you squealed and protested and tdld me that was a hell of a way to run a rape." "Mmm, I think I was right. 'In vino veritas.' " "So now I'm going to put a pillow over your face so that you can't squeal and protest." "You won't need a pillow; just put your hand over my mouth if I'm noisy. But all these doors are soundproof." "You think I don't know it? When I lived here for most of a year? Miss Johann Smith, I know more about your house than you do." "Oh, you bastard! Call me 'Eunice.' Or put a pillow over my face so I can't hear you. I love you, Roberto -- I'm so happy that you're going to marry our Winsome." "So am I, Eunice. Now shut up." "Yes, sir." Unh Eunice, nobody ever tells me anything.) (Shut up, twin, and pay attention to what you're doing!) the intercom beside her bed, tapped it for Cunningham, then reached for Roberto's hand. "Yes, Miss?" "Cunningham, I want breakfast for four, served in my lounge." "Yes, Miss." "Placed in my lounge, rather, with warmers and coolers. No service. I have no idea when Mr. Salomon and Dr. Garcia will wake up, but I want to be hostessish and ready to serve them myself when they do. But Winnie and I want to eat." She winked at the doctor. "Certainly, Miss." "They need their sleep. Tell me, Cunningham -- you've known me a long time. Have you ever pinned one on?" "Pardon me. Miss?" "Go on a luau, get so fried you can't find the floor with both feet. Drunk and disorderly." "I have sometimes -- in the past -- come down with that ailment." "Then you know what a delicate condition we are in -- Winnie and myself at least and I have reason to believe that the gentlemen will not be in much better shape. But there was excellent excuse." "I heard about the trouble. Miss. Too bad." "Cunningham, I did not mean Charlie. This may be callous of me... but he was a bully who picked a fight and lost." "Oh. If I may say so. Miss, he was not liked below stairs. Uh, we really did not like having him in the house." "I know. I would have put a stop to it tong ago except that he worked for Mr. Salomon, not me -- and I owe Mr. Salomon a great deal. No, the 'excellent excuse' was something else. We were celebrating an engagement." Cunningham said cautiously, "Should I offer congratulations, Miss?" "Yes, but not to me. Dr. Garcia is marrying Winifred." "Oh! That's fine. Miss. But we'll miss her." "I am hoping that we will not have to miss her. This is a big house, Cunningham, much too large for one person. Or for two whenever Mr. Salomon can be persuaded to honor us. Not often enough, that is to say -- but the Counselor is afraid that he will cause gossip about me." "Uh, may I speak plainly. Miss?" "Any time you don't, Cunningham, I shall be offended." "Mr. Salomon is a fine gentleman. But if he worries about that -- well, it's silly, that's all I can say. The staff do not gossip about his presence. They respect him." "Perhaps you can tell him, he won't listen to me. But today I'm simply concerned that he sleep as late as possible. He must go to Washington tonight, you know. When you bring up breakfast, don't go past his door; go around the other way. You can't disturb me or Winnie; we are awake. And be certain that Hubert doesn't come fussing around until Mr. Salomon sends for him." "He won't. Miss; he never does." "He used to, sometimes, when he was tending me -- be a touch noisy when he thought I should be up. So keep him off this floor. Keep everyone off this floor until I call you -- that includes all cleaning, everything. Except, of course, that I want you to bring up breakfast -- with whatever help you need -- promptly." "Yes, Miss. Perhaps coffee and juice at once?" "No, we don't want to be disturbed twice; my ears might fall off. You'll find evidence of the debacle in my lounge -- a case lot of empty magnums. Remove them -- quietly -- for Heaven's sake don't bang one against another; I can hear an ant stomp this morning. Pencil ready? We need a simple, nourishing breakfast. At least four cups of coffee each, double oders of orange juice, half grapefruits, either pinks or the big Arizonas, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, some link sausages and breakfast steaks. Better include cold cuts and sliced cheeses. Oh, toast and muffins and jam and such. Flatbread. And a big pitcher of ice cold milk for cereal, I think this is a cereal morning. Some decent, quiet, well-brought-up cereal that doesn't snap, crackle, or pop. That's all. Unless you know a remedy for a hangover." "Well, Miss, when I was tending Mr. Armbrust before I went to work for you, I used to mix something that he thought welt of." "Yes?" "Silver fizz. Miss, using vodka rather than gin." "Cunningham, you're a genius. One each, plus largish dividends, in thermos glasses. How soon will breakfast be ready?" "Can't be sooner than twenty minutes. Miss, even though Della has started the sausages. But I could still fetch up coffee and juice." "One trip only. Then steal quietly away on stocking feet. This is a hospital zone, Cunningham. Winnie and I need at least twenty minutes to put our eyeballs back in, they're bleeding. I'll expect you not sooner than twenty minutes, not later than twenty-five. Off." She put down the bedside intercom, said, "Doctor, did I handle that?" "Eunice, sometimes I think you're not truthful." "And some time I'm going to be a hermit and not have to dodge servants. Where are your clothes, Roberto? In the lounge?" "Yes. I had better get into them." "Better think again. We've got twenty minutes of privacy, we'll use it." "Oh, Eunice!" "Courage, comrade; Tm not a black widow spider. We'll use it to gather up all clothes in the lounge, toss feminine items in here, fast -- then take your clothes and Jake's down to his suite -- where I'll grab a robe and pajamas and slippers for Jake, and a second set of his for you. If you're a sissy, you'll stay there and put them on. If you're not, you'll stay in skin and come back here with me and dress when you feel like it. Then I'll switch on a light that tells Winnie I'm awake -- better than phoning the love bugs, they might be lovebugging, and even a bug hates to be disturbed at such times. Come on, you bony, hairy, wonderful man. Sixteen minutes -- we can do it in twelve. I'll bet." "Pussy Cat, sometimes you make me nervous." "Oh, piffle, I own this house. Although I may sell it and buy a nudist resort in California -- then run it just for me and my friends. Roberto, I like skin -- when it's the wonderful skin I have now. It's meant to be seen and touched -- not hidden away in clothes. Did you like our waitress last night?" "A healthy young woman." "Oh, piffle twice. I'll bet you were thinking about her when you took me to bed last night. I know men, darling -- I was one, much longer than you've been alive. Fifteen minutes. Let's move." Harlan Ellison... I have just finished reading The Region Between. It is the greatest science-fiction hoax since the Shaver Mystery ""broke" in #... George Wagner Eort Thomas, Ky.  Continued from page #)... Ellison's manner of expression inspires me... the meanings of the author are as clear as the sun on a cloudless day... you've filled an important niche in the past and perhaps inspired my future... Yours, Alice P. Alexander Denver, Col... lest I impart a false impression, I hasten to assert that I did enjoy the story... (but) for a writer of Ellison's stature to fail to wring out every positive aspect of a story (or the method utilized to narrate that story) is a sin. Douglas Moench... that story caused more eyestrain than any other story Eve ever read but I needed the excercise anyway. David Stever Cochituate, Mass... The March Galaxy has penetrated into Vietnam... and it may interest you to know that I was quite taken with Harlan Ellison's The Region Between; enough to nominate it for the Nebula A ward... And I have done so... I made the nomination in spite of the idiot blurb on the spine of that issue: The Best in Pertinent Science Fiction. (My italics)... This reader is still under # and I was really picking up bad vibrations from that string of words. Can you dig it? Hank Davis A PO San Francisco I think some science fiction published is not particularly pertinent -- while science fiction as a whole is probably the most pertinent writing being done today. And I want the best for Galaxy... The Region Between was a pretty good science fiction yarn -- but almost spoiled by the queer designs and cartography... neceslet the rest of us do our own visualizing... Verne R. Fulmer W. Islip, N. V. Vaughn Bode... Sunpot has been a great disappointment... Grant Carrington Gainesville, Fla... What have you done with Belinda Bump? She was the only feature in your magazine that set it apart from the others. Any mag can have an editorial, book reviews, and so forth. Where is there anything to compete with Belinda Bump? I have been reading Galaxy withThat is a long time. Surely you can do something to make me feel glad to pull the new issues out of my mailbox. For a while I at least had Belinda to look forward to. G. Guenther New York, N. Y... I was upset to find no "Sunpot" in the June issue. Tm not always sure of its story line, but it has fantasy, sex and humor -- and it is different. Harry E. Mongold... You have given three months' space ( # lost pages of literature!) to Bode now. Our irritation and disgust has grown to the point where we feel we must make our opinion known to you. We have rarely in all our reading encountered material so poorly written, so sloppily drawn, so inartistic, so vulgar, so humorless... Ursula Gibson James Gibson New Haven, Conn. In Closing... Few readers noticed anything but the Harlan Ellison story in the March Galaxy -- or Danny Plachta's Last Night of the Festival in the February number. Comments pro and con were remarkably valid -- you are a good group. unmistakable, and unambiguous. He hears the rushing of the tide. He feels the crash of the waves against the sleek shining sands. He tastes salt water. The sun is high; the sky is aglow, a flawless blue. He has no regrets. It would have been impossible ever to leave the building again; if they had let him live it would have been only under conditions of constant surveillance. watching eyes. A lifetime hanging on the interface. What for? This is better. To have lived a little bit, just once. To have seen. The dancing, the bonfire, the smell of growing things. And now he is so tired, anyway. Rest will be welcome. He feels a sense of movement. Pushing the dolly again. In and then down. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Calmly descending. In his mind the leafy cliffs of Capri, the boy, the goat, the flask of cool golden wine. Fog and dolphins, thorns and pebbles. God bless! He laughs within his cocoon. Going ( Continued from page # ) down. Goodbye. Micaela. Stacion. Artha. A final vision of the building comes to him, its # people moving blankfaced through the crowded corridors, floating upward or downward in the transportation shafts, jamming themselves into the sonic centers and the somatic fulfillment halls, sending a myriad messages along the communications nexus as they ask for their meals, talk with one another, make assignations, negotiate. Breeding. Fruitful and multiply. Hundreds of thousands of people on interlocking orbits, each traveling his own little circuit within the mighty tower. How beautiful the world is and all that is in it. The urbmons at sunrise. The farmers' fields. Goodbye. Darkness. The journey is over. The source of peril has been eradicated. The urbmon has taken the necessary protective steps and an enemy of civilization has been removed.  Phoia by Terry O'Ne.l. MiSs Raguel Welch Learn the seven warning signals of cancer. You'll be in good company. #. Unusual bleeding or discharge. #. Change in size or color of a wart or mole. #. A lump or thickening in the breast If a signal lasts longer than two weeks, see your or elsewhere. doctor without delay. #. A sore that does not heal. And be sure to have a health checkup once a year, #. Change in bowel or bladder habits. #. Hoarseness or cough. Fighf Cancer with a checkup and a check #. Indigestion or difficulty in swallowing. American Cancer Society Take any for only when you Join the Science Fiction Book Club and agree to accept only four books during the coming year. Edited by Anthony Boucher #. A giant two-volume collection of great science fiction reading. Over # pages of exciting fiction -- four full-length novels, twelve novelettes, eight short stories by Ray Bradbury. Robert A. Heinleln, A. E. van Vogt, Foul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and a dozen more. Counts as choice. Pub. ed. S# I Please accept my application for membership and rush the I # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me I # plus a modest shipping and handling charge for all three. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin. Things I to Come, which describes coming selections. If I do not wish to receive the monthly selection or prefer an alterI nate, I simply give instructions on the form provided. For each book I accept, I pay #, plus .shipping and handling. 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That eldritch chant in the Old Tongue signifies: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming," but we're here to tell you; "Cthulhu naffhtagn" -- Cthulhu, the dread Great Old One, has awakened and is coming your way in Beagle Books' new Arkham Editions of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is America's greatest master of weird fantasy -- and the Arkham Editions will bring you the best of his work in paperback form, including devoted fans. in January (each book priced at #), with many more novels and collections to follow. The Beagle SFfantasy line will also include the Anthony Boucher Memorial Mafia SF novel. 'Nothing Is known of the Old Tongue, except that it was heavily coated. An Intent Publisher #I FifthAve.,NewYork,N.Y. # Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. December, # Vol. #, No. I James Blish Robert Silverberg Robert A. Heinlein Editor Science Editor feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Administration  Publisher Associate Publisher Ernest Hill Grahame Leman Stephen Tall Keith Laumer Algis Budrys ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #t per copy. #-issue subscription; # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under International, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. # N, # E Willy Ley died suddenly on June #, #. On June #, Lester Del Rey wrote a masterful summary of Willy's work (First Citizen of the Moon, ly managing to wring from hard and stony facts the flowing essence and meaning of a life without fanfare that affected not only this nation's destiny but, through it, that of humankind. Dr. Donald H. Menzel, one of Earth's top astronomers, later joined our masthead as science editor and consultant. Don stopped at the office before taking off for Moscow, where he was to chair an international commission designated to name the craters on the far side of the moon. So Judy-Lynn Benjamin (see masthead) said, "Don -- how about a crater named Willy Ley?" Don looked bemused and said, well, he didn't know -- many names would be proposed. And L -- Willy Ley -- Norbert Wiener, U.S. mathematician, founder of Cybernetics -- John Von Neumann, U.S. mathematician -- Joseph L. Pawsey, Australian radio astronomer U.S. astronomer Leon Campbell, U.S. astronomer how big a name was Willy's after all? But there was Lester's manuscript, not yet gone to the printer. Don read it -- few people knew or remembered Willy's pioneering with rocketry until Lester pointed out its full significance -- and when Don had finished he swore: "I'm certainly going to nominate Willy." And he did. And he fought. And Judy-Lynn launched an information and letter-writing campaign, using Lester's words and her own. And of # world-famed names proposed for immortality, Willy's was one officially chosen. Willy's Crater is at # North, # East, Far Side of the Moon -- looking forever outward to stars farther than our sun. Some day you may want to drop in on his place. Don't forget the address. S-F readers, get involved! Palidpate! questionnaire below. Why? Because an inkling ot your tastes and background will enable us to please you more than ever. All who answer the questionnaire, if they so wish, can sign up for a new subscription -- or extend an existing one -- at a dollar off the regular rate for # issues. 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I like novel-length serials: I like the illustration on the cover of this issue: On the whole, I like the illustrations in this issue: science-fact articles: Four-letter cusswords and sexual terms are okay in science fiction : I don't like fantasy mixed in with my science fiction; I am a physician, scientist, engineer or technician -- or studying to be one: I am currently enrolled in high school : I am currently enrolled in college or already have a college degree: I'm not against some real-life sex when it's important to the story: I am male  female  I am years of age Yes, I want to take advantage of your bargain offer. Enclosed find # in cash, check or money order. Sign me up for a #-issue subscription  (or) Extend my present subscription for an additional # issues  (PteasB add  # for foreign subscriptions.) I propped himself naked on one elbow and looked down at Eleanor in the indirect halflight shed from the amber sides of the reading lamp fastened insecurely to the headboard. It was to be, in effect, his last such look, but he felt neither more nor less detached than ever. Asleep, and with almost all of her makeup kissed off, she still did not look her age, which (her dossier assured him) was forty; but she would no longer pass for the thirty-two she claimed even (though she knew better) to him. Certainly she did not need the defense that somewhere for every woman there is a man, or two -- let alone that there is no woman whom most men will not take to bed at least once. No, she was pretty; too blond to be real, too old to be highbreasted, too worn to be worshipped and so on -- but pretty, very pretty. Insofar as he could tell (he had never been much of a sensualist), she was sexually both responsive and expert. Furthermore, she had good taste and was moderately intelligent and she would have been a credit to him (had he ever given a damn about social credit). But he did not give a damn about how he looked to anybody. He had seen himself in newspaper photographs often enough to realize that a remarkably short, slim man with whitening red hair and fading bushy red eyebrows has nothing to be vain about. Had he not been rich, the newspapers and the television cameramen would have passed him over like a stray cat. He got up quietly and went to the bathroom, where he looked at himself in thO long mirror on the back of the door. Cheekbones; ribs; pot; shanks; scars; broken toes; no, nothing to recommend him but money. This was no news. And even more certainly, Eleanor was hardly a mistress anybody else would have taken had he been not only the world's, but the world's history's richest man. She was neither a Kennedy nor a Gabor -- had probably never even heard of their legends; no family; no power; no symbol of wealth, sex or anything else -- except, perhaps, that John Hillary Dane was hardly in any way like any other Poor child. Born in Vienna, she had at sixteen married an Alsatian named Max (who?), a stranded Wehrmacht lance-corporal about whom even Dane's intelligence department had been able to find nothing further. At seventeen she had deserted him to try the Hamburg cabaret circuit -- about those years Dane had never asked anybody -- where an American naval lieutenant from a good Virginia family (totally investigated; totally uninteresting) had fallen avidly in love with her and had sponsored her immigration, through his Richmond connections, to the States. The kid had meant to marry her but he never saw her again, though for years thereafter he could have found her -- had he known how -- in any model directory. Dane himself had picked her from a photograph in a sleazy, only semi-legal magazine called The Private Swinger, which specialized (among more gruesome specialties, such as whips and chains) in free listings of women for whom "model" was only the most mailable and the most instantly dispensable euphemism. As far as Dane could be sure, he had been drawn to the photograph only because the nearly nude woman in it looked blurrily pretty, unlikely to want marriage if otherwise provided for, and seemed nothing like his wife. It worked out fairly well until this pretty but hardened piece of goods had -- quite undemandingly -- fallen in love, perhaps for the first time in her life and, worst of all, with Dane. At least she said so, and he had no special reason to doubt her. Though he had never felt any real love for anything, he had been through several episodes of that strange cardiacrespiratory madness (once with Jennet) he would have called infatuation, remembered how painful, unwelcome and distracting it had been, and was convinced that Eleanor really did have the disease -- and never mind the money. H e sighed, closed the bathroom door just far enough to leave a little light in the room and got back into the bed. Obscurely, he was touched, or at least he thought he was. He did not think he was moved. Eleanor was silky and he was full of remote affection for her, but she was not what he had been looking for in the world. Nothing was. He was as yet unconvinced that what he wanted even existed. If it did, he would not know how to recognize it. He could not even put a name to it. Poor child. She stirred foggily -- somehow, even in the deepest, most satisfied sleep, she sensed when he was watching her -- and blinked up at him. "What?" she said. "I didn't say anything." "No -- but you were thinking." "The ultimate crime?" "You know what I mean, John." Since he did know he did not answer. It was odd, and a little piquant, to hear this ewigWeibliche cliche in her still faintly Viennese accent, as though nothing and nobody had changed since the creation of the Garden. But then, he had had a much better chance to obliterate his own, more outre accent than she had had, and a good deal more incentive, too; for a modelcourtesan in America, a slight accent is an article of trade; for a rising young executive, not. The day after his first boss in the United States had described him -- with admiration, as he had realized too late -- as "a genuine All-Latvian Boy," he had set out to teach himself phonetic, Webster Ild International dictionary English; and then had discovered that nobody spoke it. Worse, most Americans mistook it for a phony British accent, or what the British called "Mid-Atlantic," neither one thing nor the other. Now it was too late to revert to his boyhood New Jerseyan, or teach himself Webster Illd -- and besides, very soon now, he would be talking only to himself. She slid upright on the bed, unsuccessfully pulling hair back over her freckled shoulders, and folded her forearms on her knees above the sheet, her breasts depending heavily and somewhat pathetically between her upper arms. Resting her chin on her crossed wrists, she spoke quietly. "Is this it?" "Yes." As always, he did not exactly care; and yet she looked so blowsy and so forlorn in her expensive setting that he felt a paradoxical and quite unexpected tenderness. He added: "I'm sorry." "Oh, I knew it was coming. Luck always changes and 'I'm sorry' is no help. If one can say, 'I loved it while it lasted,' one has all one can reasonably ask for." The particuliar mixture, again, of European fatalism and American cliche. And, of course, of the rituals of what the books called love. Should he feel guilty? He did not know. "I loved it while it lasted." "Perhaps. I know you tried. It's the only part of life I know where trying is the surest way to fail -- but never mind." "It wasn't that," Dane said. "The problem is, I've got to go on a trip -- a long one." "You can't tell me where, I suppose." "I could -- but it wouldn't mean anything to you. Hardly more than a dozen people in the world have ever even heard of it." Her carefully bleached and shaped eyebrows rose. "I didn't think there could be such a place any more. It must be very small." "It may well be," Dane said guardedly. "But that's not important. The main thing is. I'm not coming back. Nor am I telling anybody but you that I'm going. I'm just going to vanish." "Oho. A Shangri-La." He smiled. "Something like that. I can't be sure. But once I'm gone a lot of people will be looking for me -- and one of them is bound to happen on you, sooner or later." "I know about your private detectives," she said tranquilly. "But I know how to keep secrets, too, and you know I know. I will keep this one." "Thank you." "I hate men who thank me. It makes them seem so abject, as if I'd demeaned myself by taking them on. A proper man ought to take a woman by right, without any doubts of himself." "I'm sorry." "There, you see?" she said, lifting her hands and breasts to God. "Somehow that's the kind I always get -- either terribly grateful, or terribly apologetic." "You're very philosophical. I have to be grateful for that." "I'm furious," she said, weeping abruptly but with open eyes, "and I love you. At least, in God's name, before you go, show me a little honest lust." servatory discovers a new celestial object its first act is to telegraph the particulars to Harvard University, the world's astronomical information clearinghouse. Harvard then prints an announcement, which it mails as a postcard to subscribing observatories. In due course the discovery is confirmed -- or it is not; if it is, the discoverers write it up in detail, and submit it as a letter to Science or Nature, both of which are weeklies. If the discovery is of sufficient importance in the editors' eyes, this entire cursus honoram need take no longer than two months, despite the world-wide glut of scientific publication. The Dane Observatory discovery was of sufficient importance, but the station in the crater of Coropuna was no ordinary observatory. It was the only one in the world which was not wholly owned by a university or consortium of universities, a foundation or a government, but by one single man. And Dane had issued orders that nothing it found was to be communicated by anybody until he had seen it first. The staff protested, mildly, but secrecy was one of Dane's major ways of making money -- and of keeping himself to himself, though under that rubric he called it privacy. He insisted. It was perhaps a sign of the times, he reflected, that none of his astronomers chose to resign rather than work under these conditions. The rule was wholly alien to what was supposed to have been the tradition of freedom of information in science; but the tradition had been systematically traduced by the security regimens which had begun to proliferate in the West about #, and in the East long before that. By as early as #, every major country in the world had its own equivalent of an Official Secrets Act, and nearly every scientist had become resigned to it. Dane's private counterpart of such an Act was by now only a minor cloud in the general climate, which was one of steadily thickening fog -- being steadily further thickened by the spying devices he had either made possible or which his own company produced. But in view of the discovery itself, his ruling was providential as far as his own interests and drives were concerned. Briefly, Dr. H. Kardon Uscott, his chief of staff at Coropuna, had found that the Sun is a double star. The Sun's companion, Uscott reported, is a white dwarf star, of about the same size and intrinsic brightness as Proxima Centauri -- which had previously been supposed to be the nearest of all other stars to the Sun. But the Alpha Centauri twins are four lightyears away from the solar system. The Sun's companion was only twelve thousand times as far from the Sun as the Earth is -- a meaninglessly long distance in miles but only about one sixth of a light-year, which is minuscule as interstellar distances run. The two mismatched stars revolve around a common pair of epicenters in an ellipse, one circuit of which takes # years, so that the proper motion of the dwarf companion against the background of "fixed" stars is only one second of arc per year. Had it been in northern skies, even this would have been spotted by blink-microscope comparison of sky atlases reaching all the way back to the Astrographic Catalogue started in # by no less than eighteen universities -- regardless of the fact that there are more than nine hundred other stars in Earth's skies which are brighter, every one of them much farther away. But instead, it stood in the sky almost directly above the South Pole, effectively invisible, unmapped, even its proper motion disguised by the precessing of the equinoxes. Until Dane Observatory had become functional it had never even been photographed, let alone suspected to be a companion of the Sun. Dane's star had risen -- and not in the East, but in the ultimate austreal cold. He was instantly gripped by a desire to see it, but business held him back for more than a year, while his astronomers fretted. Nevertheless, he read the data closely as they were transmitted to him by teletype: mass, # Sun -- brightness, # Sun -- maximum eccentricity, # -- maximum separation from Sun, # A. U. While he was about it, he checked some other nearby stars -- whenever possible under their Roman, Arabic or even Chinese proper names, so that tracing the nature of his interest would be difficult even through a computer. Nan men (Alpha Centauri), Zuarah (Gamma Eridani), and Eta Cassiopeiae were all Sunlike stars and all quite nearby, but they were also members of multiple-star systems, which seemed to rule out planets. For a while he was captured by a single star. about eight percent brighter than the Sun and identified as Delta Pavonis. But he lost interest in it on finding that it is nineteen lightyears away; the computer had more grandiose ideas than he did of what could be meant by "nearby." When at last he was able to fly down to Coropuna, Dr. Uscott was almost at the bursting point. "I can't begin to tell you how important this is," Uscott said, leading the way along the bitterly chill floor of the faintly echoing dome toward the telescope. The poor man's teeth were chattering like a squirrel's under his breathing mask, obviously as much from excitement as from cold. "Just to begin with, the f-finding that one member of a close double can have a big family of planets throws every existing theory of how solar systems are formed into the discard. Though Beta Solis, as we call it, does also explain the aberrations in the orbit of Neptune, as the discovery of Pluto never did. But there's still more." They got into the lift which would take them to the telescope's Newtonian focus, where there was a heated and pressurized viewing chamber (the Cassegranian focus could not be heated, since it was directly under the big mirror, which heat would warp). "What more?" Dane said. "This dwarf star has at least one planet. Apparently about the size of Jupiter. The implications -- " Suddenly Dane thought he knew how Toby Walker had felt in the electric chair atop the tower in Denver. "A planet!" he said tensely. "Will I be able to see it?" "Oh, no. It's far too faint, though with electronic amplification we might barely be able to get an image or a track of it. We only deduced it from a p-permutation, a wobble in the companion star's own orbital track. But Mr. Dane, the implications -- " "You have no idea," Dane said into his mask, "what the implications are. Show me this star." II H e looked at it long and hard, though it was very far from being impressive: a tiny, bluewhite spot of light, spiky with the distortions caused by the four supporting members of the telescope's prism, fuzzy with aberration, dancing slightly in the viewing field -- seeing was a problem even this high up in the air. No planet was visible, as Uscott had predicted; nor did any appear in the photographs Dane was subsequently shown in the observatory office. But there was Dane's star -- close, ambiguous, somehow frightening, and yet somehow also infinitely promising. "You're sure about this planet, Uscott?" "Absolutely, Mr. Dane. We've r#! T Ballantine C I I Books IN mid-August, in mid-flight to England to meet with other paperback people, I realize that there is not going to be any December column. This is not to keep you from reading, however. Don't missTthese wonderful titles for December: Hannes Bok John Norman Brian N. Ball and science-fiction works published by Ballantine in #: James Branch Cabell Lord Dunsany Hope Mirriees Evangeline Walton George Meredith George MacDonald H.P. Lovecraft Clark Ashton Smith Edited by Lin Carter Poul Anderson Anne McCaffrey Martha deMey Clow Richard Cowper Brian N. Ball Dan Morgan and John Kippax Fredbrik Pohl Robert Silverberg Edited by Robert Silverberg Richard Cowper James White Larry Niven John Wyndham Lester del Rey Lester del Rey Leona Train Rienow (with Robert Rienow) Douglas R. Mason Vincent King Good cheer and best wishes to all... BB detected others far more distant, by the same method. The eccentricity -- " "Could there be others?" "Well, now, there we have a problem. All our cosmological theories have gone out the window as of last year. It's impossible for this star to have any planets, even a single gas giant. But there it is. (For that matter, in this light, our Sun shouldn't have any planets, either). So -- yes, provisionally, there could well be others. We need a lot more research and, even more, we need a lot of theoretical help. When can we send out the announcement?" That star -- Beta Solis -- had cost dollars; not very expensive as modern real estate values went, but on the other hand... He stacked the photographs and handed them back. "Never," he said. D ane could not have said exactly when he had decided to go to the star. It seemed to him that he simply and inevitably assumed that he was going from the moment that Uscott had told him the star might have other planets besides the gas giant; but the decision might lie buried even earlier. He knew something of the obstacles to the ordinary notion of interstellar flight, in part from his own training, in part from his recent checks with the computer. Limited to a slow build-up to nearlight speed and an equally slow deceleration as the target was approached, such a trip across even the four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system (Nan men, Hadar, Proxima) would take the better part of a lifetime. Moreover, the energy requirements would be prodigious; the mass ratio of propellant to ship would be somewhere in the neighborsonably speedy crossing. Technologically, the thing was impossible now and probably would be for -- to be optimistic -- a century to come. But crossing only a sixth of a light-year -- two light-months -- was another matter, especially if one viewed it as a one-way trip. A little scribbling (for now he wanted to leave no further clues even with the lowliest computer programer or in the machine itself) showed him that it was in principle within reach now. Suppose, for example, one were to build a fusion-drive ship almost exactly like the Indefeasible, the one that had set out for the Saturnian satellite. Titan, in #. The design would involve only two essential differences: first, its life-support systems would be totally devoted to one man, not five; and second, all the space and mass saved by this would be given over to propellants. The Indefeasible had reached Saturn's orbit in nine months, decelerating most of the way under solar drag. The same ship under a continuous two gravities of acceleration -- which would be no harder on the passenger than living in one of the Dane Tower's express elevators -- would pass the aphelion of the orbit of Pluto a little sooner and, in fact, a crossing to the dwarf companion in such a vessel would probably take no more than three years of subjective time, thanks to the LorenzFitzgerald effect. (Of course it would take longer in objective time, but Dane did not plan to come back.) T he scheme had many beauties. To begin with, no Research-andDevelopment expense would be required; the Indefeasible, now on its way back from the Saturian system, was no longer a pioneering machine, but a collection of hardware down to its last circuit and component, and Dane could put his hands on all its specs without exerting himself overmuch. He did not have to invent it. He could then sub-contract each component, breaking the manufacture of the ship into so many tiny parts that no single sub-contractor would have the faintest idea of what the part he was making was going to be used in -- thanks to the phenomenon called technological fallout, spaceship components were constantly turning up in civilian applications anyhow. Even gross parts like hull plates could be scattered among a multitude of aircraft, submarine and boiler works all over the world, and none of them Dane subsidiaries. It wouldn't even have to be done on a cost-plus accounting system, since no profit was contemplated anyhow. Fine; nobody would recognize the bits and pieces for what they were. But how could you conceal the assembling of them, let alone the completed object? Clearly the ship would have to be assembled in orbit, not on Earth, which willynilly would make it the most conspicuous human artifact since the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World with the Dane Tower piled on top of them. Conceivably it could be assembled on the ground on the Moon, in some unnamed and uninteresting crater on the far side. No, scratch that -- the take-off from the Moon would leave a high level or residual radioactivity which would arouse intensive investigation within only a few years. Also, assembly under even lunar gravity, while not outright impossible, would be too expensive. Well, several dozen communications and weather satellites ere in synchronous or "parking" orbits around the Earth, just far enough out -- # miles -- so they made one revolution every twenty-four hours, thus remaining permanently above the same spot on the ground. Why not assemble his own ship in a twentyeight day orbit behind the Moon? There were no bases back there; in fact, there were only three on the near side: two American, one Soviet. Any of them, if by any chance it picked up the passage of the vessels containing Dane's parts and crew, would be likely to assume that the unscheduled flight belonged to the other nation. (Better have a Russian-speaker always aboard, to respond if hailed by one of the U.S. bases.) Another plus! Next came the problem of a staging area on Earth. Another extinct volcano in the Cordillera Occidental was the obvious answer -- everyone was already used to his shipping vast quantities of materials down there -- and as for the take-offs, well, obviously the observatory staff would have to be in on all this, and who else would see them? Indeed, now that he came to think of it, the only part of this operation that threatened to be uncontrollably conspicuous was the money. The cost, he was sure from the experience of the Indedollars; to raise that he would have to liquidate about a third of his assets and that would be news -- the Wall Street Journal and the London Sunday Times Business News would alike front-page it. But he had another convenient cover; He could reinvest the money in Dane Laboratories, the corporation -- ostensibly interested in ethical drug research, with emphasis on longevity -- he had set up to disburse the monies for his time-viewing project. That project he would keep going, dead end though he now knew it to be. If the pharmaceutical front were ever penetrated, the revelation of the Future experiments would be sensational and would make a marvelous false pointer to which direction he had vanished in. And he could probably make use of many of the people on the Future project staff, which would cut down on one fraction of the expense -- they had already been bribed. So, by great good luck, had Toby Walker, the only reporter in the world of whom Dane was actively afraid. A note: Could that vast, perfect computer he had unsuccessfully tried to have Toby sabotage be copied in petto for the starship? If so, it would save a lot of space and weight; and just the attempt to do so -- though not for this purpose -- was already a matter of record as the chief interest of the Future project. some consideration to the future of the firm, because it represented the future of his family. Little enough though he cared now about Jenny and Hank -- let alone Jennet -- he had loved them once and they were his responsibility, as, for that matter, were the livelihoods of Dane employees. (There were no stockholders; he had bought them out early in the game and neither the parent holding company nor any of its subsidiaries had ever gone public, a situation on which the Department of Justice had made three lengthy, expensive and utterly futile court assaults.) It would be best to handle this by testament. He already had a reliable general manager, who could be depended upon to keep things going -- though not to keep them growing -- after Dane's disappearance. In a will he could give exactly half of everything to each of the children -- apart from a trust fund for Jennet. It would take ten years for him to be declared legally dead; if in that time the kids had grown up enough to take an interest in the firm, all well and good; if not, the exact fifty-fifty split would prevent them from imposing arbitrary policies upon the manager, since they were at loggerheads about everything almost all of the time. (Hence also the trust fund for Jennet; if he split control into three parts, any damn fool notion, without limit, would command a majority.) They would be protected from another antidiversification suit by the government by the massive liquidation of a third of his companies. It would be wise, he supposed, to try to determine whether or not the dwarf companion had any other planets besides the gas giant -- let alone one on which he could live. Of the nine possessed by the Sun and their twenty-threeodd satellites, only one supported life above the bacterial level at all -- and the chances that a white dwarf would have a viable world were much smaller. On the other hand, Uscott had said that there was suddenly no longer any theoretical base or model for planet formation, thanks to their own discovery of Beta Solis. Dane had the distinct impression that if Uscott were to find the dwarf companion to be surrounded by ice cubes, or even fairies, he would be more resigned than surprised. In any event it seemed unlikely that the question could be answered by evidence from Dane Observatory alone, and Dane had no Intention of letting Uscott ring in any other observers. He would take the chance; if there was no planet for him when he got there, well, he would at least be shut off the Earth, which he himself had helped to spoil. Now, about a trust fund for Eleanor... Clearly, the details were going to be knotty, but that was why he employed experts. The first principles all appeared to be sound. Indeed, he was a little awed at the way all his interests, without any foreplanning on his part, seemed to fit into -- and to have been pointing toward -- the flight to the dwarf Companion. Some familiarity with the sacred literatures of the world might have acquainted him with his predecessors and his prophets, but his early interest in poetry had not lasted long enough; he was now only an engineer and entrepreneur. He was yet to realize that for a god nothing can go wrong in the youth of his power; even his errors are fruitful or can be corrected by deluge of rain, blood, locusts or money. M oney is time. By spending somewhat more than the miniship -- which, peculiarly, he called the Tranchemer, though to nobody but himself -- built in a year. The computer project worked out in half that time, so he was able to give himself six months of intensive flight training in a mock-up of the Tranchemer's life-support and control chambers which had been constructed on one of the many empty levels of the Dane Tower. He was even once able to visit the secondary staging area in a farside lunar crater some sportive interpreter of the earliest Orbiter photographs had named Alfred E. Neumann (and indeed there is a distinct resemblance); and from there, to go through the thenskeletal Tranchemer herself. This was his first trip into space and he found he enjoyed it hugely. Nothing, absolutely nothing, went wrong. How could it? It then became time to assemble the family, which did prove difficult. Jennet was of course no problem -- she was always conpulsively, obstreperously, naggingly, there. But Hank had become the leader of some sort of noise-making group which called itself Sufi Mahound And The Black Goyim; and though despite its strainedly outre name it sounded like every other such group to the nineteenth decibel place and it had proven popular enough to be almost constantly on tour. As for Jenny, she was not hard to locate, since she had settled down to reading what she called "half-Haiku" to another sort of semi-music in coffee-shops in the East Village; but persuading her to attend the meeting was more work that pinning down Hank's itinerary. When at last Dane did manage to bring them all together they were strangers. Hank, always long and thin, now looked like someone preparing to model as a hairy ghost. Even Jenny looked rather gaunt, though as a teenager she had been on the plump side -- but at least she was clean. She had inherited her father's red hair, which she wore very long. Hank's, which was dark brown, was almost equally long and kept getting mixed up with the crux ansata which he wore on a neck chain over his buckskin jacket; every so often he would get hair out of his eyes with a toss of the head which in Dane's own youth had been the gesture with which young men said, "I never wear a hat -- " as though not wearing a hat were a point of honor. But they no longer aroused in Dane any emotion but faint distaste. Against the background of the overstuffed and fussy drawing room -- Jennet had Edwardian tastes -- they seemed like nothing but waifs. Well, it was their own choice. Dane wasted no time on preliminaries. "I wouldn't have bothered any of you for something trivial," he said. "The fact is. I'm leaving the business and the country -- permanently. You are all provided for; Horowitz and Horowitz are sending you letters giving you the details. There are a number of people who know where I'm going, but you would find it very difficult to figure out who they are -- and impossible to get them to talk even if you did identify them." "Why should we try?" Hank said. "If you've provided for us. where you go is your own business." "Precisely." "Well, I for one shall certainly try," Jennet said grimly. "I didn't marry to be provided for and, in fact, your damn businesses have been nothing but a burden to me. And I certainly didn't marry to be deserted. When I think -- " "You have no choice in the matter. As for trying, it would be fruitless, because I have so arranged matters that it would be physically impossible for you to follow me, even if by some miracle you did figure out where I'd gone." "You make it sound like you're going on the next trip to Saturn," Jenny said scornfully. "You might just as well assume that I'm going time-traveling, for all it will do you. And Jennet, for your own good, I strongly advise you not to try." "A threat, now?" "Not at all. When you get the letter from the lawyers, you'll see that it's to your advantage to have me declared legally dead in the minimum possible time. Don't cloud your case by searching for me or otherwise flailing about as if you thought me still alive. To do so would be not only useless but stupid." "And you expect me to take your word for this?" "No, not really," Dane said. "But it is my best advice and I'm obligated to offer it. Making the horse drink is up to God, not me." "I don't think you can tell the difference any more," Jennet said in a voice of rusty iron. "Your notion that you can get away with this sounds suspiciously godlike to me. You've had so much power for so long you think it's infinite now. And you are going to look marvelously silly when I find you bedded down with some starlet in Peru." Dane grinned. "Ah, you've ferreted out my secret already. Well, I wish you joy of it. But you'd better tell Sam Horowitz before you tell the press. You may find his reasoning more plausible than mine -- or anyhow, less suspect." "Hey Dad, is that really all there is to it?" Hank said, with visible disappointment. Dane was momentarily startled by the Dad, until he realized that it was a standard term of address in Hank's present circles. "Sorry, Hank, but I'm answering no questions and dropping no clues," he said. "Assume anything you like. Even an accurate guess wouldn't change anything in the slightest." " -- God said," Jennet added. The meeting, inevitably, went on for quite a while longer, and became increasingly more painful; but at this point, since Jennet had inadvertantly had the last word, the Recording Angel switched off his tape. Now, to say goodbye to Eleanor. Ill M asked by the Moon and by the inherent invisibility of rocket exhaust in space, the Tranchemer began to move under its own power. In his control couch, John Hillary Dane could hear nothing but a vague whisper, transmitted along the hull -- the noise of the engines, as well as the torrent of hard radiation they produced, were separated from the life-support sphere by more than a mile of storage modules, most of them airless until he should need to enter them -- but he could feel the thrust mounting, all right. It was welcome; he had spent the last frantic ten days of preparation in free fall, except for brief workouts in the centrifuge chamber. His designers had considered locating the entire life-support capsule along the rim of a centrifuge, as the designers of the Indefeasible had done; but the crew of the Saturnian expedition had reported that the nausea produced by moving about under the Coriolis forces involved had been so much worse than the effects of free fall itself that they had kept the centrifuge shut off for most of every ship's day. Dane would just have to get used to free fall, for he was going to spend a substantial part of three years in it, with only enough time in the small centrifuge to maintain his skeletal muscle tone and to prevent calcium from being leached out of his bones. At the moment, though, the return of the equivalent of gravity -- even though it did make him feel as though he were lying on his back -- was a pleasure. Solemnly elated, he touched a pre-programed trigger on the computer console. Immediately in his foam-padded earphones the whisper of the engines took on tonality; it was joined by a high violin tremolo on E flat, and then by a distant horn call in rising and falling fourths -- the opening of the Fourth Symphony of Anton Bruckner, suitably subtitled The Romantic. Within a few minutes, Herr Bruckner was making so much noise that the engines were swamped out entirely. The thrust, however, grew much faster; long before Herr Bruckner had gotten to his second theme (though since his first themes tend to come as groups of three, his seconds do not show up in any hurry), it had reached the prescribed one gravity -- which was even a little unpleasant after ten days of no gravity at all. But it would not last long. He had discovered early on that his snap estimate of the acceleration he would need, and its duration, had been fantastically too high -- which was lucky, for had his original guess been correct, no ship conceivable in the present state of the art could have been built to deliver it. What was achievable was an average relative velocity of # miles per second, which at one gravity of acceleration would cost the Tranchemer three hours, thirty-four minutes and twenty-five and a fraction seconds of thrust. Needless to say, Dane was not planning to travel at anything like that clip inside the dusty, littered solar system -- or expend the energy needed to attain it, either, this close to the only home of Man. Instead he planned to run the engines at one gravity inside the solar system for only one hour, thirty-five minutes and eight seconds, and even there only in short bursts. The rest of the requisite velocity -- which meant almost all of it -- would have to be picked up later, when the Tranchemer was far beyond both the environment of Man and the possibility of detection. From several points of view, of which comfort was the least important, it would have been better to have left the Moon under nine gravities and put in correspondingly more coasting time later. The present trajectory would take the Tranchemer once across the near side of the Moon, a crossing during which she was sure to be spotted by radar by one of the bases and perhaps even visually as well. But that couldn't be helped; Dane could only hope that the transit would be written down as a story of saucer sighting. The synchronous orbit in which his ship had been built was necessarily in the plane of the ecliptic; whereas she would eventually have to be traveling at ninety degrees to that plane, and her mass was so great -- and her distribution of it so barbell-like -- that she could not be wrenched into the new direction in a hurry without snapping somewhere along the bar. As Herr Bruckner reached his third theme, his usual and here again uniquely appropriate binary one, the Earth appeared over the limb of the Moon, a vivid blue globe about the size of a pea held at arm's length. It would soon become much larger, for the synchronous orbit actually passed closer to the Earth than it ever did to the Moon and the Tranchemer was widening its distance from the Moon every second now. That was perhaps a protection; at that distance the ship would be difficult to spot by accident from either the Earth or the Moon... The Earth duly grew. By the time Herr Bruckner, a notoriously long-winded composer, had gotten to the absolute end of his symphony. Earth was a stupendous and beautiful sight. The computer, as instructed, gave Dane five minutes of silence (except for the engines) to contemplate it and then began to pour into the earphones something even more longwinded, the Second Symphony (subtitled The Resurrection) of Gustav Mahler. Herr Mahler was also much noisier; if any challenges were coming in -- or any parting words from Dane's associates -- neither Mahler nor the computer would let them through. The swelling of the Earth would have given Dane the illusion that he was on his way home, had he considered the Earth home any longer. He did not. He watched the beauty expand with an abstracted mind. In due course the symphony came to an end in a tumult of orchestra, organ, chorus and bells, and by then Earth was receding and Dane had his heavy back to it. No more music now. Unlocking his chair from the floor, Dane drove it along its tracks to the food output of the console, which extruded at him tournedos Rossini, a baked potato with sour cream and chives, artichoke hearts, a garlicky tossed salad, an athelbrose bombe and a fast-dripping pot of espresso, all oriented to the thrust of the engines -- his farewell dinner and one of a kind he would see no more than six times a year henceforth. As he tackled it, the computer began to read to him something he had always meant to read himself but had never had the time to, what with business and keeping up with the technical literature (the computer's library consisted almost seventy-five percent of such works): Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne doss er etwas Boses getan h'dtte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet... He fell easily in with the language, in which he had always been fluent. The Earth of its origin fell increasingly away and by the second chapter he found that he was not thinking about the Earth any more -- or anyhow, not so often. L ike most laymen, when Dane had thought about the solar system at all he had thought of it in terms of those spurious "maps" which are printed in popular magazines, showing the orbits of the planets as a series of close concentric circles, with the planets themselves neatly arranged outward from the Sun in a straight line. The reality, even though he was looking down on it, was very different: a sea of stars in which the planets were only other sparks, lost in vastness and impossible to identify without the aid of the computer, and those beyond Saturn not visible to the naked eye at all. He had learned to expect this but after a lifetime of unconscious acceptance of the usual simplistic schematic, it was nevertheless disorienting. By a large coincidence the Tranchemer's great arc away from the system did not become sharply inflected away from the ecliptic until it passed the orbit of Saturn, and the planet was nearby at the time -- near enough, at least, so that the ship's image amplifier was able to bring in a spectacular view. Dane studied it for several hours as it, too, dwindled. It affected him in a way he would have found hard to describe. The Earth, to be sure, was beautiful' from space -- and had a special beauty as an oasis of life -- but Uscott had said that there were probably many other such in the galaxy, and indeed Dane was staking his life on there being another a good deal less than a lifetime away. But this great, frozen, poisonous storm of a planet, colored in a thousand shades of straw and surrounded by gossamer rings of broken ice and dust, might well be unique. Leaving it behind was somehow more forceful a symbol of his abandonment of his home system than leaving the Earth had been. In its honor he had the computer play him the Saturn movement from Holst's The Planets', but in the face of the real glory of the real globe the music seemed so cheap that he ordered the crystal wiped. This was unfair to Holst, who had never intended to depict any actual planet -- his suite was instead a sort of requiem for astrology -- and Dane instantly regretted his action -- but the thing was irrevocably done. He would have to learn to be less impulsive, or such flashes of irritation might expunge his entire library before the trip was done. He called for the Missa Solemnis next, and to this great requiem, which nothing could cheapen, the ringed giant passed out of his ken except as another spark, which in turn faded away... Odd other crochets cropped up. He had always thought of himself as a solitary type despite his record as an executive non pareil -- as, in fact, a sort of latent introvert; one of the minor attractions of the voyage had been the prospect of absolute solitude, of absolute freedom from all obligations and interruptions, even the maddening and ubiquitous telephone. By the time he had left Saturn behind, however, he found that he was talking to himself a good deal. Oh, the computer could talk but its responses were stereotyped; it always gave the same reply to the same proposition; it could speak but not conduct a conversation, unless one wanted to argue logic with it, a pastime for which Dane was not well equipped by training. His monlogues at least sometimes had the virtue of surprise. vided by the return of gravity, for with the solar system now spread out behind him, he was still only making slightly better than #I miles per second -- a tremendous pace compared to any interplanetary velocity ever achieved before, but still nowhere near what he needed for the major crossing. But this time there was no reason to apply the acceleration in short bursts, since all the necessary course corrections had now been made; the remaining velocity could all be piled on at once, and that was what the computer was programed to do. After one hour, fifty-nine minutes and eighteen seconds, the engines shut off again and he was back in free fall and the contemplation of his own state of mind. He would not get any diversion from that source again for the next thirty months. Nevertheless, the sudden marked change in his environment, brief though it had been, helped him to get back to something resembling his normal frame of mind. Then, about six weeks later, just as he was congratulating himself upon having come to terms with his sentence and even beginning to resume enjoying it, he had a shock that he had utterly failed to anticipate. By this time he was more than forty astronomical units from the Sun -- more than the mean distance of Pluto, though in a quite different direction. In complacent celebration, he looked back at the solar system for a last time --  -- and found that he had lost the Sun. Of course, the computer could find it for him. At this distance it should be the brightest star in the sky, almost like a distant but still intolerable arc-light; and from this angle it was being sought among the thinning stars toward the edge of the galaxy, since the Trachemer was going approximately in the direction of the galaxy's center. In fact, once the computer had located it, the image amplifier probably could still make a recognizable disc of it. But to the uninstructed, naked eye it was gone and that was what counted. The lone star that had spawned Man's home was now only a bright dot among thousands of other dots; no longer Zarathustra's and Mithra's great object of worship, but only a grain of incandescent sand on a remote, permanently dusky beach. Dane was expatriate, as no man had ever been before -- nor would he ever see that Sun again. No such conscious chain of thought about the matter passed through his mind, however, until much later. Upon the discovery itself he was abruptly in the grip of an acute panic. His knees turned to jelly, his fingertips and lips tingled, his soul was filled with dread and he was fearfully dizzy -- no, not dizzy, for the cabin did not seem to be swimming -- but overwhelmingly he needed to lie down. Clumsily -- for he had lost almost all control of his body -- he swam into the womb of the centrifuge and to the hammock; and there he passed out, almost before he could hit the starting switch. normal, except that he could not remember who he was, where he was, or the names of most of the things around him; nor did this produce in him any emotion greater than a mild curiosity. Only a long-established reflex pretrying to leave the centrifuge before turning it off. He floated into the control chamber as compulsively and as mindlessly as a sperm going home. He was startled, finally, when the computer spoke to him -- though all it said was, "Menu?" -- despite the fact that he could think of no good reason why a room should not talk. The startlement got him started asking questions. The computer was both a good and a bad interlocutor. It could inform but it could not lead; certainly it was not programed for psychotherapy. As a result, after several days Dane had most of the facts, both major and minor, back in his head, but he could not be said to be in possession of them. They had no rank order, no importance, no relevance to the creature he had become. And the computer knew nothing at all about all that part of his past which therapists call "formative." This fugue and amnesia, he later figured out, lasted nearly six months and was perhaps a lucky episode in a way, for relearning even simple facts kept him as preoccupied and happy as a child who has just discovered that there are more than fifty Oz books, for almost the whole period. Coming out of it into the real universe was painful and he was never sure again that he quite completed the journey. His only test for the firmness of his grasp upon anything was how painful it was, which in the human condition is perhaps the best test, but he remembered dimly that there had also been such a thing as joy, of which he never recovered anything more than the word itself. Some other changes also became evident. As Eleanor probably had known -- or would have agreed, had the thought been new to her -- Dane had never been much of a sensualist, but he had cold-bloodedly provided for his inevitable needs with a library of pornographic films (on hot tapes or crystals -- the definition would have been too poor) which he had planned to use sparingly, whenever the problem could no longer be ignored. He had even allowed for the law of diminishing returns by having the films graded by two experts, one of whom had been his own personal clinical psychologist. He found now that even the most orgiastic of these had no effect on him... and what was perhaps worse -- though this was only a guess on his part -- nedther did the mildest, in which the "consorts" showed some tenderness toward each other in addition to the meaty coils of their "relationship." He was, he concluded tentatively, no longer quite human. The conclusion was tentative because he no longer remembered whether or not he ever had been. At the end of the first year the apparent magnitude of the dwarf companion was #. It did not occur to him to ask the computer the apparent magnitude of the Sun. By the end of the second year the computer was able to report that the dwarf companion had at least five planets -- another blow to the chops for the cosmogonists. Three of these were gas giants, one of them -- the one whose existence Uscott and his crew had deduced -- now plainly separated from the companion's glare in the amplifier image. It had thirteen satellites, all of them dead losses. The other two were dense inner planets but could be called Earthlike only by the most rarified of theorists: one was too far away from its primary tc be warm enough for liquid water, and the other was ten thousand miles in diameter and returned a spectrum with only one absorption line -- carbon dioxide. Dane was not dismayed. He was rediscovering Mozart and had just gotten up to K. #. None of this music seemed to have any emotional content -- though, judging by the rest of his library the man he had once been must have thought it did -- but the technical perfection of even the small works, e.g., the piano pieces for four hands, was staggering. Six months later Dane had found his planet and three months after that, the #aiciewerswapped ends and began to prepare an orbit around it. No wonder it hadn't been visible before; it was less than six thousand miles in diameter and feeble, collapsing star. But it would do; it would do very nicely. Only mildly elated, the creature which had been John Hillary Dane in some past broke out of storage the dove-shaped child of the Tranchemer which would be his landing craft and began to prepare his epiphany. In his earphones, from the earth beneath, he could already hear voices speaking in tongues. "Goodbye," Eleanor said in the blackness. "Goodbye, my dear." "John... your Shangri-La... is it really so far away?" He kissed her for the last time. "It is years away," he said. "And in Time, every single second is more than a hundred and eightysix thousand miles." The door closed between them, and that was that. He was not good, among other things, at parting speeches. A very long time later, Toby Walker, who had a fix on Macbeth, was to say that nothing in his life so ill became John Hillary Dane as the leaving of it. DIYou'll never see a ghost if  you can't see one sideways! T he sculpture should not have been standing where it was, with no significant attempt at display. In an alcove, dimly lit. Mottled paper peeled from the rough cement rendering of walls under a cracked plaster ceiling. The marks of a rat's gnawing showed on the soft, worm-eaten woodwork on a forward angle where the floor and skirting met. He cleared a way through the heaped-high rubbish littering the studio floor to a point where he could stand at a proper distance to take in the whole. Stoa, by Albertin. A porch -- not that the title would signify very much. Philosophers had sat on a stoa and become stoics. Albertin had probably never heard of them. Albertin had made no move to greet or welcome him. He had stayed where he was, squatted, hunched in the windowseat, staring out into the darkness. A clock was ticking somewhere or rain was dripping rhythmically through a leaking roof. A scurrying of mice under the dilapidated floor broke the otherwise total silence. "It is an interesting work," Map Tonquille said, at length. "I should like to see it in the round. From all sides, so to speak." "Who's stopping you?" Albertin growled. Albertin was stopping him. Albertin was stopping him by sitting there, a beer can in his hand, and making no effort to help drag the two-meter-high bulk out from the alcove. Two meters high, one meter deep... He hesitated, chin in hand, reflecting, casting a second, speculative glance at the object in the alcove. Stoa, by Albertin. Was it two meters high? A moment before it had seemed to be just that. The curled head-scrolls were just clear of the ceiling -- and the ceiling was around two meters -- two meters ten high. But were the headscrolls there, just below the yellow, smoke-grimed plaster, or were they much lower? Were they headscrolls at all? They had seemed to be something like that, curliqueing inward and downward -- or upward and outward? And then again, suddenly, they were flat planes. The whole elevation was a succession of black flat planes, interleaving, shuffling themselves like a pack of opaque -- transparent -- translucent -- misty gray cards. They were not, of course, moving, the planes, the cards. Albertin would never have stooped to the mechanical devices so much a part of the last fin de si'ecle vogue -- the electro-mechanical school. The planes -- the scrolls -- the windprotuberances were static, as unmoving as the columns, steps, angled doors and intricate lattice work of the interior. The semblance of movement was a trick of the concealed lighting although the light sources themselves would also be static. It was indeed quite ingenious. A trick of the angling. A bringing together of a succession of optical illusions confusing the eye and the brain behind the eye. A conjuring with emotion through a visual and mental paradox. He gave up the idea of dragging the sculpture out into the open. There was nothing to hold on to. Nothing you could be sure was really there, or at least in the same place where a moment before it had seemed to be. He stepped farther back and considered what, if Albertin's positioning could be trusted, would be its frontal aspect. As a striking example of the art nouveau, Stoa could hardly be equaled. But then, no one had ever equaled Albertin even in his cruder metallo-morph period. Albertin was, in any period, unique. "Interesting," Tonquille said again. "As an example of the art nouveau -- " Before he could finish Albertin leaped down from the windowseat, his thin, sloping shoulders drawn back and his disproportionately large, workman's hands clenched and raised in some sort of invocation. He hurled the beer can to the ground, stamped on it and kicked it toward a corner cluttered with half-finished objects in wire, glass, plastic and indeterminable materials. "What did you say?" he shouted. "As an example of the art nouveau -- " "You poor, fat, little tick!" the sculptor roared. "What do you know about art nouveaul What the hell do you know about anything?" He threw himself against the wall, his hand shielding his eyes, prepared, quite probably, to be sick. "Very little." Map Tonquille smiled as he answered the question. "But enough to recognize a, work of art when I see one. Enough to be aware of current trends -- " "Art nouveau'." Albertin spun around and thrust his big hands into his smock pockets and collapsed into the only article of furniture that might possibly, a long time ago, have been referred to as a chair. "What's art nouveau There's only one art, you indescribable, patronizing pig. What the hell's new about it? Art -- yes. Genius -- yes. Driving me mad. Be driving you mad if you had eyes in your bald baby head. New, my backside! It's as new as the dodo." "Possibly. It does however show an understanding of present-day choice of materials, new colors, lighting and an insight into a facet of human psychology that would have been impossible, for instance, to Praxiteles." "Bloody art nouveau'." Albertin snorted. "The first little CroMagnon man who rubbed red ochre into his bison was bowled over by every shaman in the valley shouting and throwing up his muddy paws and bellowing 'art nouveau'." Get out of my sight!" "I should be prepared to consider purchasing if you would name your price." A lbertin was on his feet again, lurching to a cupboard hidden behind stacks of plastic materials and spools of wire. He fought his way through the obstruction, picking up sheets and strips an armful at a time and hurling them into any vacant area that seemed in an arbitary way suitable. "Price?" he shouted over his shoulder. "What's price? Want a tag on it? Want to pay at the door and get your change and wheel it away in your little wicker basket? You make me sick." "Nevertheless -- " Map Tonquille smiled -- "since I want to buy your work I must know its price." Albertin was stooped, rummaging in the cupboard and Tonquille noticed with a sudden wave of sympathy how very thin the man was. The outline of his spine showed, too knobby, against the overlarge smock where it arched beneath the shoulders and his long, scrawny neck craned out from the bulge of the rucked-up collar like a wine bottle from a waiter's napkin. He turned with a beer can in his hand and pulled off the tab with his teeth. "Why ask me?" he growled. "You're the connoisseur. You know all about price and tags and value and all that crap. I only know about worth. What do you pay for genius now on the open market? Ten dollars an hour for inspiration and five for stringing the thing together? That's what your sort paid for Van Gogh until he died and you all made your fortunes out of him. What do you pay for Van Gogh these days? Ten you bidding for him now he'd cut his other bloody ear off." "I do not collect archaic painters," Tonquille explained patiently. "And I have really no idea of the price paid for the gentleman to whom you refer. It is your work I am interested in acquiring." "You are interested in acquiring?" Albertin put the can to his lips and his Adam's apple rose and fell steadily. "Yeah," he said, at last. "Interested in acquiring. That's a handy mouthful. Interested in acquiring means you'll buy if the price is right and you won't if it isn't. Genius must take its turn with the groceries. "What the hell do I care!" he shouted suddenly. "I hate the damn thing. Take it away! I don't want it." Map Tonquille walked to the window seat and sat with a careful straightening of his trouser creases. He took out a checkbook and deliberately began to write. "I shall be fair with you, Albertin," he said. "Since you have obviously no commercial sense, I am paying you what I consider to be a fair price. A hundred thousand dollars." "You're robbing yourself," Albertin growled. "What do I want with your money?" "You will want to stay drunk for quite a time. My money will help you there. One has to be moderately rich to savor the full immoderation of artistic poverty. When it is all gone, you will begin to work again and I shall come back and quite possibly find the right words to name your new period." Albertin glowered at him for a while, his bloodshot eyes smoldering under the jut of the bushy eyebrows, his high-domed, narrow forehead checkered with a puckering of thin upward and deep transverse wrinkles. Suddenly he grinned, dived into the cupboard and held out a Scotch whiskey bottle. "You're not a bad little tick," he said. "Have a drink!" Tonquille shook his head. "Take the check," he said, "and have this -- this masterpiece delivered to my private apartments in Chelsea New Town Block." "Delivered?" Albertin snorted. "What do you think I am -- a moving man? Take the damn thing yourself." "Since I am paying a hundred thousand dollars I should have thought... But no matter. I will arrange for it to be collected later tonight. It is perhaps as well. This object -- this Stoa -- needs careful and professional handling." He turned again and studied his purchase. The perfect blending of the uncountable optical illusions among the planes was a sheer delight. It was impossible for the eye to focus on any point of the interior, which seemed to be in constant movement, apparantly causing the sides to bend and bulge -- one moment they were solid, square and green and the next, hazy purple, rounded and rolling with the undulation of prairie wheat in a wind. Sometimes the whole seemed to rotate about a central axis, giving the impression of unfathomable depth, an illusive rotundity, an infinitely dark central cone. And in the cone a figure, growing steadily out of a lightening of the black homogeneity was also slowly rotating in the reverse direction. A human figure. A woman in black with -- was it a poke bonnet? High, rounded and drawn in under the chin, secured with a broad bow. Anti-clockwise turning. Black on gray. A widow in widdershins. "You know what you've got there, don't you?" Albertin was back in the window seat, a halfempty Scotch bottle in his hand, sober , and suddenly sardonic. "You'll never live with it." "No,' Map Tonquille said slowly. "I don't know what I've got. I am only a collector. A rich man who can afford the time and the money to learn. I don't know what I've got. But I shall study it at length and feel something in the end of its true significance." "You don't say?" Albertin was bantering but less hostile. "When you've found out all about it, come and tell me. I never felt a thing myself that made any sense. Just for now -- what do you think it is?" "A work of art." "Yeah. I suppose you could say that. I never found out what art was either. What sort of work of art?" "Sculpture, of course, in the modern idiom. The disposal of the planes and lighting confuse the eye, creating a certain illusion -- " "The planes and the lighting, you think?" "There is more?" "I don't think you've quite got the hang of it, little man. Optical illusions -- yeah. I guess that's what I've put there. I never really know. But why are they illusions? Why can't your eye follow something you could measure with a ruler and a photometer and any other gadget you happened to have in your pocket?" "You are about to tell me, I think?" was never as sober as when he had been drinking heavily. His surly bellicosity had left him and he seemed genuinely troubled, as if wrestling with a real physical problem rather than with the obscure images of some artistic inner enigma. He began to pace the studio, kicking moodily at any bric-a-brac that came within range of his heavy-soled canvas boots. Ruffling his fingers through the thick, upstanding mop of his gristled, black hair. Running his thumb around the collar of his smock and the paint-daubed, dirty and collarless shirt beneath. "Know about dimensions?" he asked at last. "I don't quite follow you?" "Dimensions. How many are there?" "Unless the entire world has been very sadly misled, there are three." "You think only three?" He stood stock still, his back to the window and the sporadic flush of some distant, on-and-off-diffusing neon-sign behind the night. Staring at the short, pudgy figure of the buyer he counted slowly, one, two, three on his fingers as if not quite sure of the visual significance of numbers. "There are more?" Map Tonquille asked. "Your eye and your brain create their own dimensions. I believe there are no such animals. Physically and in real terms, there can't be. No breadth, no length, no height. They are the illusions we create to give us something to hold on to. A plausible artifice we have invented so that, God help us, we can understand a little measure of the un-understandable." Map Tonquille glanced quickly at his new purchase. It was rotating again. Mouth-shaped. Two broad, puffed-out lips turning, the woman poised between them -- or over them. A savage mouth with a bone through its savage nose. The woman smiled at him. The lips closed. There were only the planes. Black and gray planes shuffling. Lights on a film of porous sponge steel. Blades. A saw-toothed zigzag of steps rising to a summit that was again its base. "I don't quite follow you." "Listen. What is the world, the universe made of? Atoms? A basic hydrogen atom? And what is a basic hydrogen atom made of? It's something we call energy which is as good a name as any other for something we know nothing whatever about. What is energy? Has it got dimensions? Can you go out into the universe past the last galaxy and say 'Up to this point we got energy, further on we ain't? It's so high, so wide and this much deep?' Listen! Listen, little man! We -- you and me -- we are only modifications of the same stuff that surrounds us -- it doesn't even surround us, because that implies dimensions -- it just is and we just is, too, a part of it. Inside us, trapped, is something else, an eternal something that hasn't got any dimensions either. It's got power but it's different from the energy past of us. It uses its power, its self-awareness, to become extra aware. It can't take in infinity because, unlike energy, it's finite, it just can't comprehend infinity. So what does it do? It divides eternity up into manageable cubes. It finds three ways of looking at the same thing." "Four -- if you take in time." "Oh -- claptrap! Time isn't a dimension in this sense. If the little beast inside you were timeless, it would be infinite, too, and wouldn't need to cut up the cosmos into cubes. And if it had no duration it wouldn't exist at all. It divides the timeless infinite into cubes it can look at three ways and it moves downtime in a straight line, cubes an' all. Maybe it'll manage four ways one day but it hasn't gotten that far yet." "You may be right," Tonquille conceded. "But I don't see where it gets us. If our three dimensions are just our way of looking at the whole -- it's the only way we've got." "How dense can you get?" Albertin groaned, striking his fist into the palm of his hand. "Don't you see the relevance of all this to my -- my creation? That thing there? Don't you see that if we, the human race, divide up infinity into any three dimensions that suit us, the three we've evolved quite arbitarily, quite by chance, like everything else -- don't you see that countless other beings are doing the same thing -- dividing it up neatly into three? Don't you see that these dimensions must overlap everywhere? We are all, we who house these little finite beasts, all one big unity. You are just as much a part of the constellation of Ursa Major as you are of the contents of this room." "No." Tonquille shook his head. "I don't see that at all. Since I am demonstrably not in the constellation of Ursa Major, you will need more than your artistic insight to convince me that I am." "Artistic insight, my Aunt Fanny's left boot! Insight is a better tool than physics any day because physics can never get you anywhere as long as it is concerned with measuring the immeasurable. But this isn't art, it isn't even philosophy -- it's pure down-to-earth common sense. Look, my little tubby plutocrat! What's between you and Ursa Major? What precisely stops your being there, since you seem to be sure you're not?" "Distance, I should say." "Sure! Sure! Distance -- length, my bulky baby boyo. A dimension. An illusion. We've split eternity up into breadth, height and length, haven't we? What about the people, just like ourselves who've done it the other way -- breadth, height and stenth?" "I should follow you better if you told me exactly what stenth is." "And the others who've made it breadth, length and kelth? God Almighty, man, they're only words. I can invent words for them as good as any they've got themselves; it's the thing that matters, the way of looking, not what you call it. Here, there, anywhere you like, someone, a whole people, a whole world, have looked at infinity differently. Law of averages, they must have. By the law of averages, some will have cottoned on to two of ours with one different. Just their way of looking at something that in its entirety would be completely incomprehensible." "What you mean is, that all about us there are -- " "Look, mac! Have you ever seen a ghost sideways?" "I have never seen a ghost at all." Tonquille considered in his quiet, precise way. "But I accept that others have had that good fortune. Sideways, you say? I must admit, from what I know of the subject, it would seem a little unlikely." "Unlikely my foot! It's totally impossible! All you see of a ghost are its two dimensions, all your eye can manage, because it's not gotten around to taking in the new one. You see its breadth and height and if you've just a tiny little crumb of psychic insight you see the hazy outline of its stenth. There's others, I expect, in the breadth, length and kelth category and those you would only see from above, flat as a pancake. If you ever saw one sideways it would be because you couldn't see it face on. It would be a length, height and telth creation. If you haven't got that little crumb of psychic sense that a little runt like you wouldn't have, you wouldn't see it at all. You'd be stuck with your inborn, handy illusion, depth, length, distance. No, you little tick, you'll never see a ghost." "I wonder -- " Map Tonquille turned back to the sculpture. It was a cone now, the neck stretching away into an infinity of darkness. The woman was there, taking off her bonnet, shaking her hair loose about her shoulders. "What you are saying is, in simple terms, that by confusing the eye and the brain, dislodging the focus of the understanding from that area of stimulation-response with which it is accustomed to deal, you disorient the psyche -- enabling it to absorb stimuli from another plane. Because it can no longer distinguish its familiar length it takes in, sporadically perhaps, the stenth. Since it forces us to view spatiality from this new plane, your work is four-dimensional."  ward his creation, shouldering Tonquille angrily aside. He thrust his long neck forward, glaring at the rapidly shuffling planes. "Four?" he repeated, uncertainly. "Yeah -- well -- four, I guess -- I had hopes -- " "You had hoped for more?" "Five or six, perhaps." He turned away and leaned his head against the wall. From the movement of his bunched round shoulders he appeared to be stifling a paroxysm of sobbing. "Perhaps the whole damn lot. The nth. Perhaps a particle, a grain of an idea of no dimensions at all. An extra dimension somewhere else down the time-stream. I don't know what Fve done. Take the ghastly thing away before I break it with a sledge hammer. Nothing is what you want. Nothing touches on reality. And why doesn't it? Because we can't ever know what reality is. We can't see as much of reality as a dead flea in a bed sock." "You mentioned ghosts," Tonquille took charge of the dilapidated chair, sitting carefully upright, his small white hands folded carefully in his lap. "You said that I should never see a ghost." Albertin turned and was leaning back against the wall, staring at him with those scarlet, almost animal eyes. "Go on!" he said, hoarsely. "I think you were not speaking of ordinary ghosts in so-called haunted houses. In the interior of Stoa I thought I saw -- " "No!" Albertin shouted, heaving himself from the wall with a jerk of his shoulderblades. "No. You never saw anything. There's nothing there." "Indeed I seemed to see very clearly -- " "No!" Albertin had taken Tonquille by the shoulders, his long chin only a week's stubble length from Tonquille's nose. "You saw nothing. Do you hear? You never saw her!" "Please pull yourself together, Albertin, or I shall consider this discussion closed." Albertin straightened his back and turned slowly to the alcove. He limped toward the giant, citadel-like creation, sparkling gold in the dim light of the low-wattage electric bulb suspended by a single cord from the ceiling. He held out a shaking, pathetic hand toward the glitter that was fading now into a rising and falling of dull-shaded planes, the cone and the darkness at the end of the cone. "She's there," he said wistfully. "She's there, isn't she? Down at the end of our days -- a long time before we began. Just a figure in a cabin door reflected on the dark, lapping water of an endless night. But there is a light there somewhere behind the door. The door, you see, the door has only breadth and height." "You said a ghost. Do you -- did you know her, Albertin?" "Time's a poor fish," he said sadly. "Round and round the goldfish bowl. It's nose in the length and the new, the reborn stenth, way back at the tip of its tail." He was limping as if one leg had suddenly grown too short or the other too long, limping toward the cupboard, one hand raised, shielding his eyes. "I didn't think you would see her, too," he muttered. "I misjudged you, Mr. Money-bags Tonquille. I'm sorry, Mr. Money-bags Tonquille. I'm truly sorry." "There is no need to be." "Take back your money, Mr. Tonquille. This thing's too big for you or me. No one should peep through the two-way mirror like a voyeur in a brothel into the other worlds that are all around us. You know what I've done, Mr. Tonquille? I've made a keyhole. A hole is two-dimensional, you see. Anyone can make a hole in any world, but I've put the stenth behind it. One day, she will see it from her side and in the length, she'll see me. I've made a peephole through to her. I couldn't stand her seeing me again, knowing that I couldn't cross." Map Tonquille continued to sit rather primly in his chair, fingertips pressed together, considering the implications of a universe without dimensions and a girl in a poke bonnet with two dimensions in one world and a third in another. Albertin behind him was searching the shelves of the cupboard. He had apparently run out of his usual brand of Scotch whiskey since, when he turned, the bottle he held was small enough to be concealed in the palm of his hand. "Tell me," Tonquille asked him. "Did you know the woman in the poke bonnet?" "Questions." Albertin groaned. "Always questions. There are no women and no men in heaven or on earth. Only modifications of the universal ether. But the illusion is very sweet." He continued, raising the flask to his lips, "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. No one can see her sideways." He had fallen with a crash to the floor and his back was arching and his head thrown back in a sudden, unnatural contortion before Map Tonquille realized what had happened. In a moment he was on his knees beside the sculptor, tearing at the smock with the frantic and totally hopeless idea of massaging his heart. Anything to relieve the ghastly spasms that racked the frail, tortured frame. "Don't die, Albertin," he begged. "Albertin, come back! The world needs you. There is no one anywhere to take your place." The lips were drawn back over the yellow teeth and the mouth was locked open so far that the jaw seemed ready to split the thin stretched membrane of the cheeks. But the tongue moved and, hoarsely, before the final contortion hooped the agonized body and relaxed it slowly into death, five words croaked from the foamflecked lips. "The switch -- pull the switch -- " M ap Tonquille looked vainly in the studio, in the one adjacent bedroom and the length of the passage outside for a telephone. He found no switch on that floor of the old, decaying building. He decided it was useless to run for a doctor. The merest layman could see that Albertin was dead, the sweet smell of pear drops on his lips, one hand clutched at his throat and the other reaching out toward the -- the thing in the corner. And Tonquille could see the switch now, although he had not noticed it before. A red switch on the plinth under the sculpture. His sculpture. He had not noticed before that his sculpture was mounted on a plinth. Why should he throw the switch? What would the switch do? Extinguish the lighting concealed behind the planes in the interior of his work. Probably. One could not be sure. The cone was there again, turning very slowly in a clockwise direction. The girl was there, too. No longer in black, but in a long, tight-fitting dress reaching to her ankles and cut low at the front. Edwardian, perhaps. She seemed younger -- gayer. He felt a strong desire to sit and watch her for no matter how long and irrespective of what she might do. A keyhole, Albertin had said. He, cultured, urbane, a connoisseur of the arts, was peering at a woman through a keyhole. Albertin was right. One could not draw aside the curtains and gape into the secret interstices between the veils. There would be time when he had the object home, properly mounted in his own apartment, to study and consider all its implications. There was no doubt that Albertin's creation was now his property. His check was valid and could be paid to the sculptor's estate, dependents, if he had any. The cone had widened now, was as broad as it was long. He would have said it had infinite length and infinite breadth if it had not been for the life-size woman in its center. Infinity could hardly be divided into life-sized objects. She was looking out somewhere over the edge of the near-infinite space, her hands extended in welcome. She was turning, spinning widdershins, a smile on her face, her hands stretched out, reaching to the ends of an immeasurable distance where two more hands were forming, spinning and joining with hers, the fingers intertwining, the arms growing out of the particles of darkness until Albertin and she, whole and complete, went twirling down to the narrowing neck of the funnel and vanished. The planes were shuffling themselves and the zigzag dragons teeth of the endless belt were climbing to a summit that was always one step farther on, when, knowing that he must, Tonquille pulled the switch. A sense of awful inevitability had seized him and when, with a blinding flash, the entire masterpiece disintegrated into a heap of metal, wire and faintly steaming plastic strips, he was not really surprised. Only tired, disillusioned and determined to forget the whole thing. Surprise came later when he rang the doctor for the tenement and reported to him that Albertin was dead. "You've made a mistake," the voice retorted sharply. "Albertin was cremated three weeks ago. Suicide. He poisoned himself." "The time lag on the stenth," Tonquille mused, sadly. "I should have known. I never did see the man sideways.  one generation beyond Dune Frank Herbert returns to the duneworid of Arrakis for an epic of imperiai intrigue and human ecology-an epic that spans the universe. That's why we can teli you where it ends -- We're reprinting fast, but your bookselier may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today ; I (N#) #C I (S#) # I I (S#) #(J I (S#) # I I (#) # I I Namp   ! Address I f-'ty State Zip I Include list price j each title. plus a dime postage for Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # "In the pantheistic systems of Giordano Bruno, monads are conceived of as eternal, both corporeal and soullike, and each a microcosm or mirror of Deity... -- Funk . Wagn all's I ver still feels like a very small boy. He cannot persuade himself that he has any rightful business up cit intruder. When he goes up to the city of the urbmon's masters a strange boyish shyness settles over him that he must consciously strive to hide. He finds himself forever wanting to peer nervously over his An Episode -- Urban Monad # shoulder. Looking for the patrols that he fears will intercept him. The stern brawny figure blocking the wide corridor. What are you doing here, son? You shouldn't be wandering around on these floors. Louisville is for the administrators, don't you know that? And Siegmund will babble excuses, his face blazing. And rush for the dropshaft. He tries to keep this silly sense of embarrassment a secret. He knows it doesn't fit with the image of himself that everyone else sees. Siegmund the cool customer. Siegmund the man of destiny. Siegmund who was obviously Louisville-bound from childhood. If they only knew. Underneath it all a vulnerable boy. Underneath it a shy, insecure Siegmund. Worried that he's climbing too fast. Apologizing to himself for his success. Siegmund the humble, Siegmund the uncertain. Or is that just an image too? Sometimes he thinks that this hidden Siegmund, this private Siegmund, is merely a facade that he has erected so that he can go on liking himself, and that beneath this subterranean veneer of shyness, somewhere beyond the range of his insight, lies the real Siegmund, every bit as ruthless and cocky and rung-grabbing as the Siegmund the outer world sees. He goes up to Louisville nearly every morning, now. They requisition him as a consultant. Some of the top men there have made a pet of him -- Lewis Holston, Nissim Shawke, Kipling Freehouse, men at the very highest levels of authority. He knows they are exploiting him, dumping on him all the dreary, tedious jobs they don't feel like handling themselves. Taking advantage of his ambitions. Siegmund, prepare a report on working-class mobility patterns. Siegmund, run a tabulation of adrenal balances in the middle cities. Siegmund, what's the waste-recycling ratio this month? Siegmund. Siegmund. Siegmund. But he exploits them, too. He is rapidly making himself indispensable, as they slide into the habit of using him to do their thinking. In another year or two, beyond much doubt, they will have to ask him to move up in the building. Perhaps they'll jump him from Shanghai to Toledo or Paris; more likely they'll take him right into Louisville at the next vacancy. Louisville before he's twenty! Has anyone ever done that before? By that time, maybe, he'll feel comfortable among the members of the ruling class. He can see them laughing at him behind their eyes. They made it to the top so long ago that they've forgotten that others still have to strive. To them, Siegmund knows, he must seem comical -- an earnest, pushy little rung-grabber, his gut afire with the upward urge. They tolerate him because he's capable -- more capable, maybe, than most of them. But they don't respect him. They think he's a fool for wanting so badly something that they've had time to grow bored with. Nissim Shawke, for instance. Possibly one of the two or three most important men of the urbmon. (Who is the most important? Not even Siegmund knows. At the top level, power becomes a blurry abstraction; in one sense everybody in Louisville has absolute authority over the entire building and in another sense no one has.) Shawke is about sixty, Siegmund supposes. Looks much younger. A lean, athletic, olive-skinned man, cool-eyed, physically powerful. Alert, wary, a man of great tensile strength. He gives the illusion of being enormously dynamic. A teeming reservoir of potential. Yet so far as Siegmund can see, Shawke does nothing at all. He refers all governmental matters to his subordinates; he glides through his offices at the crest of the urbmon as though the building's problems are mere phantoms. Why should Shawke strive? He's at the summit. He has everybody fooled, everyone but Siegmund, perhaps. Shawke need not do but only be. Now he marks time and enjoys the comforts of his position. Sitting there like a Renaissance prince. One word from Nissim Shawke could send almost. anybody down the chute. A single memorandum from him might be able to reverse some of the urbmon's most deeply cherished policies. Yet he originates no programs, he vetoes no proposals, he ducks all challenges. To have such power and to refuse to exercise it, strikes Siegmund as making a joke out of the whole idea of power. Shawke's passivity carries implied contempt for Siegmund's values. His sardonie smile mocks all ambition. It denies that there is merit in serving society. I am here, Shawke says with every gesture, and that is sufficient for me; let the urbmon look after itself; anyone who voluntarily assumes its burdens is an idiot. Siegmund, who yearns to govern, finds that Shawke blights his soul with doubt. What if Shawke is right? What if I get to his place fifteen years from now and discover that it's all meaningless? But no. Shawke is sick, that's all. His soul is empty. Life does have a purpose and service to the community fulfills that purpose. I am well qualified to govern my fellow man; therefore I betray mankind and myself as well, if I refuse to do my duty. Nissim Shawke is wrong. I pity him. But why do I shrivel when I look into his eyes? T hen there is Shawke's daughter, Rhea. She lives in Toledo, on the #th floor, and is married to Kipling Freehouse's son Paolo. There is a great deal of intermarriage among the families of Louisville. The children of the administrators do not generally get to live in Louisville themselves; Louisville is reserved for those who actually govern. Their children, unless they happen to find places of their own in the ranks of the administrators, live mostly in Paris and Toledo, the cities immediately below Louisville. They form a privileged enclave there, the offspring of the great. Siegmund does much of his nightwalking in Paris and Toledo. And Rhea Shawke Freehouse is one of his favorites. She is ten years older than Siegmund. She has her father's wiry, supple form: a lean, somewhat masculine body, with small breasts and flat buttoeks and long solid muscles. Dark complexion; eyes that glitter with private amusement; a sharp elegant nose. She has only three littles. Siegmund does not know why her family is so small. She is quick-witted, knowing, well-informed. She is more nearly bisexual than anyone Siegmund knows; he finds her tigerishly passionate -- but she has told him also of the joy she takes in loving other women. Among her eonquests has been Siegmund's wife Mamelon, who, he thinks, is in many ways a younger version of Rhea. Perhaps that's why he finds Rhea so attractive; she combines all that he finds most interesting about Mamelon and Nissim Shawke. Siegmund was sexually precocious. He made his first erotic experiments in his seventh year, two years ahead of the urbmon norm. By the time he was nine he was familiar with the mechanics of intercourse, and consistently drew the highest marks in his physical relations class, doing so well that he was allowed to enroll with the eleven-year-olds. Puberty began for him at ten; at twelve he married Mamelon, who was more than a year his senior; shortly he had her pregnant and the Kluvers were on their way out of the Chicago newlywed dorm and off to an apartment of their own in Shanghai. Sex always seemed agreeable to him for its own sake, but lately he has come to realize its value in building character. He nightwalks assiduously. Young women bore him; he prefers those who are past twenty, like Principessa Mattern and Micaela Quevedo of Shanghai. Or Rhea Freehouse. Women of their experience tend to be better in bed than most adolescents, of course. Not that that is his prime concern. One isn't ever that much better than another and Mamelon can give him all the physical pleasure he needs. But he feels that these older women teach him a great deal about the world, sharing their experience with him in an implicit way. From them he draws subtle insights into the dynamics of adult life, the crises, conflicts, rewards, depths of character. He loves to learn. His own maturity, he is convinced, stems from his extensive encounters with women of the older generation. Mamelon tells him that he is generally believed to nightwalk even in Louisville. This is in fact not so. He has never dared. There are women up there who tempt him, women in their thirties and forties, even some younger ones, such as Nissim Shawke's second wife, who is hardly older than Rhea. But the self-confidence that makes him seem so awesome to his peers vanishes at the thought of the wives of the administrators. It is bold enough for him to venture out of Shanghai to use women of Toledo or Paris. But Louisville? To slip into bed with Shawke's wife and then have Shawke himself arrive, smiling coldly, saluting, offering him a bowl of tingle -- hello, Siegmund, are you having a good time? No. Maybe five years from now, when he's living in Louisville himself. Not yet. But he does have Rhea Shawke Freehouse and some others of her stature. Not bad for a start. ly furnished office. There's space to waste in Louisville. Shawke has no desk; he conducts his business from a gravity-web slung hammock-fashion near the broad gleaming window. It is mid-morning. The sun is high. From here one has a stunning view of the neighboring urbmons. Siegmund enters, having received a summons from Shawke five minutes before. Uneasily he meets Shawke's cold gaze. Trying not to look too humble, too obsequious, too defensive, too hostile. "Closer," Shawke orders. Playing his usual game. Siegmund crosses the immense room. He must stand virtually nose-to-nose with Shawke. A mockery of intimacy; instead of forcing Siegmund to remain at a distance, as one usually requires of subordinates, Shawke brings him so close that it is impossible for Siegmund to keep his eyes locked on both of Shawke's. The image wanders; the strain is painful. Sharp focus is lost and the features of the older man seem distorted. In a casual, barely audible voice, Shawke says, "Will you take care of this?" and flips a message cube to Siegmund. It is, Shawke explains, a petition from the civic council of Chicago, requesting a liberalization of the urbmon's sexratio restrictions. "They want more freedom to pick the sex of their children," Shawke says. "Claiming that the present rules unnecessarily violate individual liberties and are generally unblessworthy. You can play it later for the details. What do you think, Siegmund?" Siegmund examines his mind for whatever theoretical information it may contain on sex-ratio questions. Not much there. Work intuitively. What kind of advice does Shawke want? He usually wants to be told to leave things just as they are. All right. How, now, to justify the sex-ratio rules without seeming intellectually lazy? Siegmund improvises swiftly. His gift is an easy penetration into the logic of administration. He says, "My impulse is to tell you to refuse the request." "Good. Why?" "The basic dynamic thrust of an urban monad has to be toward stability and predictability and away from randomness. The urbmon can't expand physically and our facilities for offloading surplus population aren't all that flexible. So we need to program orderly growth above all else." and says, "If you don't mind the obscenity, let me tell you that you sound exactly like a propagandist for limiting births." "No!" Siegmund blurts. "God bless, no! Of course there's got to be universal fertility." Shawke is silently laughing at him again. Goading, baiting. A streak of sadism his main diversion in life. "What I was getting at," Siegmund continues doggedly, "is that within the framework of a society that encourages unlimited reproduction we've got to impose certain checks and balances to prevent disruptive destabilizing processes. If we allow people to pick the sex of their children themselves we could very possibly get a generation that's sixty-five percent male and thirty-five female. Or vice versa, depending on whims and fads of the moment. If that happened, how would we deal with the uncoupled surplus? Where would the extras go? Say, fifteen thousand males of the same age, all with no available mates. Not only would we have extraordinarily unblessworthy social tensions -- imagine an epidemic of rape -- but those bachelors would be lost to the genetic pool. An unhealthy competitive aspect would establish itself. And such ancient customs as prostitution might have to be revived to meet the sexual needs of the unmated. The obvious consequences of an unbalanced sex ratio among a newborn generation are so serious that -- " "Obviously," Shawke drawls, not hiding his boredom. But Siegmund, wound up in an exposition of theory, cannot easily stop. "Freedom to choose your child's sex would therefore be worse than having no sex-determination processes at all. In medieval times the ratios were governed by random biological events, and naturally tended to gravitate toward a fifty-fifty split, not taking into account such special factors as war or emigration, which, of course, would not concern us. But since we are able to control our society's sex ratio, we must be careful not to allow the citizens to bring about an arbitrarily gross imbalance. We cannot afford the risk that in a given year an entire city may opt for female children, let's say -- and stranger phenomena of mass fancy than that have been known. On compassionate grounds we may allow a particular couple to request and receive permission for, say, a daughter as their next little, but such requests must be compensated for elsewhere in the city in order to insure the desired overall fifty-fifty division, even if this causes some distress or inconvenience to certain citizens. Therefore I would recommend a continuation of our present policy of loose control over sex ratios, maintaining the established parameters for free choice but always working within an understood assumption that the good of the urbmon as a whole must be -- " "God bless, Siegmund, that's enough." "Sir?" "You've made your point. Over and over. I wasn't asking for a dissertation, just an opinion." Siegmund feels mashed. He steps back, unable to face Shawke's stony, contemptuous eyes at such close range. "Yes, sir," he murmurs. "What shall I do about this cube, then?" "Prepare a reply to go out in my nailrie. Covering basically what you've told me, only embellishing it a little, dragging in some scholarly authority. Talk to a sociocomputator and get him to give you a dozen impressive-sounding reasons why free choice of sex would probably lead to an imbalance. Get hold of some historian and ask for figures on what actually happened to society the last time sex-ratio freedom was allowed. Wrap it all up with an appeal to their loyalty to the larger community. Clear?" "Yes, sir." "And tell them, without quite putting it in those words, that the request is refused." "I'll say we're referring it to the high council for further study." "Exactly," Shawke says. "How much time will you need for all this?" "I could have it done by tomorrow afternoon." "Take three days. Don't hurry it." Shawke makes a gesture of dismissal. As Siegmund leaves, Shawke winks cruelly and says, "Rhea sends her love." I has to treat me that way," Siegmund says, fighting to keep the whine out of his voice. "Is he like that with everyone?" He lies beside Rhea Freehouse. They have not yet made love tonight. Above them a pattern of lights twines and shifts. Rhea's new sculpture, purchased during the day from one of the San Francisco artists. She says, "Father has a very high regard for you." "He shows it in a strange way. Toying with me, almost sneering at me. He finds me very funny." "You're imagining it, Siegmund." "No. Not really. Well, I suppose I can't blame him. I must seem ridiculous to him. Taking the problems of urbmon life so seriously. Spouting long theoretical lectures. Those things don't matter to him any more, and I can't expect a man to remain as committed to his career at the age of sixty as he was at thirty, but he makes me feel like such an idiot for being committed myself. As if there's something inherently stupid about anyone who's involved with administrative challenges." "I never realized you thought so little of him," Rhea says. "Only because he falls so far short of realizing his abilities. He could be such a great leader. And instead he sits up there and laughs at everything." Rhea turns toward him. Her expression is grave. "You're misjudging him, Siegmund. He's as committed to the community welfare as you are. You're so put off by his manner that you don't see what a dedicated administrator he is." "Can you give me one example of -- " "Very often," she continues, "we project onto other people our own secret, repressed attitudes. If we think, down deep, that something is trivial or worthless, we indignantly accuse other people of thinking so. If we wonder privately if we're as conscientious and devoted to duty as we say we are, we complain that others are slackers. It might just happen that your passionate involvement with administrative affairs, Siegmund, represents more of a desire for mere rung-grabbing than it does a strong humanitarian concern, and you feel so guilty about your intense ambitions that you believe others are thinking about you in the same terms that you yourself -- " "Wait! I absolutely deny -- " "Stop it, Siegmund. I'm not trying to .pull you down. I'm just offering some possible explanations of your troubles in Louisville. If you'd rather I kept quiet -- " "Go on." "I'll say what's on my mind... and you can hate me afterward, if you like. You're terribly young, Siegmund, to be where you are. Everybody knows you have tremendous ability, that you deserve to be on the brink of going to Louisville -- but you're uneasy yourself over how fast you've risen. You try to hide it but you can't hide it from me. You're afraid that people resent your climb -- even some people who are still above you may resent you, you sometimes think. So you're self-conscious. You're extra-sensitive You read all sorts of terrible things into people's innocent expressions. If I were you, Siegmund, I'd relax and try to enjoy myself more. Don't worry about what people think, or seem to think, about you. Don't fret about grabbing rungs -- you're headed for the top, you can't miss, you can afford to slack off and not always worry about the theory of urban administration. Try to be cooler. Less businesslike, less obviously dedicated to your career. Cultivate friendships among people your own age -- value people for their own sake, not for where they can help you get. Soak up human nature, work at being more human yourself. Go around the building; do some nightwalking in Warsaw or Prague, maybe. It's irregular but not illegal -- and it'll knock some of the tightness out of you. See how simpler people live. Does any of this make sense to you?" Siegmund is silent. "Some," he says finally. "More than some." "Good." "It's sinking in. Nobody's ever spoken to me like that before." "Are you angry with me?" "No. Of course not." Rhea runs her fingertips lightly along the line of his jaw. "Do you mind topping me now, then? Td rather not have to be a moral engineer when I have company on my platform." His mind is full of her words. He is humiliated but not offended, for much of what she has said rings true. Lost in self-analysis, he turns mechanically to her, caressing her. But he is preoccupied with the intricacies of her entry into his character. She finally makes him aware of the failure of his virility. "Not interested tonight?" she asks. "Tired," he lies. Rhea laughs. He thinks about how he must reshape his public image. Not to look ridieulous before the men of Louisville. H ome again, not long after midnight. Two heads on his sleeping platform. Mamelon is entertaining a nightwalker. Nothing unusual about that; Siegmund knows that his wife is one of the most desired women in the urbmon. For good reason. Standing by the door, he idly watches. Mamelon is making sounds of passion, but to Siegmund they sound false and forced. He feels vague resentment. If you're going to have my wife, man, at least give her a decent time. He strips and cleanses himself, and when he steps out from under the ultrasonic field the pair on the platform lie still. Mamelon is hardly breathing hard, confirming Siegmund's suspicion that she was pretending. Politely Siegmund coughs. Mamelon's visitor looks up, blinking, red-faced, alarmed. He's Jason Quevedo, the innocuous little historian, Micaela's man. Mamelon is rather fond of him, though Siegmund can't see why. Nor does Siegmund understand how Quevedo manages to cope with that tempestuous woman Micaela. Mine not to reason why... The sight of Quevedo reminds him that he must visit Micaela again soon. Also that he has work for Jason. "Hello, Siegmund," Jason says, not meeting his eyes. Getting off the platform, looking for his scattered clothes. Mamelon winks at her husband. Siegmund blows her a kiss. He says, "Before you go, Jason. I was going to call you tomorrow, but this'll do. A project. Historical research." Quevedo looks eager to get out of the Kluver apartment. Siegmund continues, "Nissim Shawke is preparing a response to a petition from Chicago concerning possible abandonment of sexratio regulations. He wants me to get together some background on how it was in the early days of ratio determination, when people were picking their children's sexes without regard to what anyone else was doing. Since your specialty is the twentieth century, I wondered if you could -- " "Yes, certainly. Tomorrow, first thing. Call me." Quevedo edges doorward. Eager to flee. Siegmund says, "What I need is some fairly detailed documentation covering first the medieval period of random births, what the sex distribution was, you see, and then going into the early period of control. While you're getting that I'll talk to Mattern, I guess, get some sociocomputation on the political implications of -- " "It's so late, Siegmund," Mamelon complains. "Jason said you can talk to him about it in the morning." Quevedo nods. Afraid to walk out while Siegmund is speaking, Siegmund realizes he is being too diligent again. Change the image, change the image; business can wait. "All right," he says. "God bless, Jason, ni call you tomorrow." Grateful, Quevedo escapes and Siegmund lies down beside his wife. She says, "Couldn't you see he wanted to run? He's so hideously shy." "Poor Jason," Siegmund says. Stroking Mamelon's sleek flank. "Where did you go tonight?" "Rhea." "Interesting?" "Very. In unexpected ways. She was telling me that I'm too earnest, that I have to try to be more relaxed." "She's wise," Mamelon says. "Do you agree with her?" "I suppose so." He dims the lights. "Meet frivolity with frivolity, that's the secret. Take my work casually. I'll try. I'll try. But I can't help getting involved in what I do. This petition from Chicago, for example. Of course we can't allow free choice of children's sexes! The consequences would be -- " "Siegmund." She takes his hand. "I'd rather not hear all that now. I need you. Rhea didn't use you all up, did she? Because Jason certainly wasn't much good tonight." "The vigor of youth remains. I hope." Yes. He can manage it. He kisses Mamelon. "I love you," he whispers. My wife. My only true. I must remember to talk to Mattern in the morning. And Quevedo. Get the report on Shawke's desk by the afternoon, anyway. If only Shawke had a desk. Statistics, quotations, footnotes. Siegmund visualizes every detail of it. II #th floor. Most of the key administrators have their offices here -- Shawke, Freehouse, Holston, Donnelly, Stevis. Siegmund carries the Chicago cube and his draft of Shawke's reply, loaded with quotes and data supplied by Charles Mattern and Jason Quevedo. He pauses in the hallway. So peaceful here, so opulent; no littles barging past you, no crowds of working folk. Some day mine. He sees a vision of a sumptuous suite on one of Louisville's residential levels, three or even four rooms, Mamelon reigning like a queen over it all; Kipling Freehouse and Monroe Stevis dropping by with their wives for dinner; an occasional awed visitor coming up from Chicago or Shanghai, an old friend; power and comfort, responsibility and luxury. Yes. "Siegmund?" A voice from an overhead speaker. "In here. We're in Kipling's place." Shawke's voice. They have picked him up on the scanners. Instantly he rearranges his face, knowing that it must have worn a vacuous, dreaming look. All business now. Angry with himself for forgetting that they might have been watching. He turns left and presents himself outside the office of Kipling Freehouse. The door slides back. A grand curving room lined with windows. The glittering face of Urbmon # revealed outside, tapering stunningly to its landingstage summit. Siegmund is startled by the number of top-rank people gathered here. Their potent faces dazzle him. Kipling Freehouse, the head of the data-projection secretariat, a big plump-cheeked man with shaggy eyebrows. Nissim Shawke. The suave, frosty Lewis Holston, dressed as always in incandescently elegant costume. Wry little Monroe Stevis. Donnelly. Kinsella. Vaughan. A sea of greatness. Everyone who counts is here, except only a few; a flippo with a psych-bomb, loose in this room, could cripple the urbmon's government. What terrible crisis has brought them together like this. Frozen in awe, Siegmund can barely manage to step forward. A cherub among the archangels. Stumbling into the making of history. Perhaps they want him here, as if is that they're considering without a representative of the coming generation of leaders to give his ap: proval. Siegmund is dizzyingly flattered by his own interpretation. I will be part of it. Whatever it is. His self-importance expands and the glare of their aura diminishes, and he moves in something close to a swagger as he approaches them. Then he realizes that there are some others present who might not be thought to belong at any high-powered policy session. Rhea Freehouse? Paolo, her indolent husband? And these girls, no more than fifteen or sixteen, in gossamer-webs or even less: mistresses of the great ones, handmaidens. Everyone knows that Louisville administrators keep extra girls. But here? Now? Giggling on the brink of history? Nissim Shawke salutes Siegmund without rising and says, "Join the party. You name the groover, we've probably spans, multiplexers, anything." Party? Party? "I've got the sex-ratio report here. Historical data -- the sociocomputator -- " "Crot that, Siegmund. Don't spoil the fun." Fun? Rhea comes toward him. Lurching, blurred, obviously grooving. Yet her keen intelligence showing through the haze of druggedness. "You forgot what I told you. Loosen up, Siegmund." Whispering. Kisses the tip of his nose. Takes his report from him, puts it on Freehouse's desk. Draws her hands across his cheeks; fingers wet. Wouldn't be surprised if she's leaving stains on me. Wine. Blood. Anything. Rhea says, "Happy Somatic Fulfillment Day. We're celebrating. You can have me, if you like, or one of the girls, or Paolo, or anybody else you want." She giggles. "My father, too. Have you ever dreamed of topping Nissim Shawke? Just don't be a spoiler." "I came up here because I had to give an important document to your father and -- " "Oh, shove it up the access nexus," Rhea says and turns away from him, her disgust unhidden. Somatic Fulfillment Day. He had forgotten. The festival will start in a few hours; he should be with Mamelon. But he is here. Shall he leave? They are looking at him. A place to hide. Sink into the undulating psychosensitive carpet. Don't spoil the fun. His mind is still full of the business of the morning. Whereas the random, or purely biological, determination of the sex of unborn infants normally results by expectable statistical distribution in a relatively symmetrical division of Removal of the element of chance introduces the danger that. It was the experience of the former city of Tokyo, between # and #, that the incidence of birth of female offspring declined by a factor of almost. Risks are not counterbalanced by. Therefore it is recommended that. The party, he sees, looking more closely, is essentially an orgy. He has been to orgies before, but not with people of this level. Fumes rising. The nakedness of Monroe Stevis. A huddled heap of fleshy girls. "Come on," Kipling Freehouse bellows, "enjoy yourself, Siegmund! Pick a girl, any girl!" Laughter. A wanton child pushes a capsule into his hand. He is trembling and it drops. Seized and gobbled by one of the other girls. People are still coming in. Dignified, elegant Lewis Holston has a girl on each knee. And one kneeling before him. "Nothing, Siegmund?" Nissim Shawke asks. "You won't have a thingl Poor Siegmund. If you're going to live in Louisville, you've got to know how to play as well as to work." Judging him. Testing his compatibility: will he fit in with the elite, or must he be relegated to the ranks of the drudges, the middle-level bureaucracy? Siegmund sees himself demoted to Rome. His ambitions take over. If knowing how to play is the criterion for admission, he'll play. Grins. "I'd like some tingle," he says. Stick to what you know you can handle. "Tingle, coming up." H e makes the effort. A golden-haired nymph offers him the tingle bowl; he gulps, pinches her, gulps again. The sparkling fluid popping in his throat. A third gulp. Swill it down; you aren't paying! They cheer him. Rhea nods approval. Clothes are coming off around the room. The amusements of the masters. There must be fifty people in here now. A clap on the back. Kipling Freehouse. Shouting, deafeningly hearty: "You're all right, boy! Worried about you, you know! So serious, so dedicated! Not bad virtues to have, eh, but there's got to be more, you follow? A playful spirit. Eh? Eh?" "Yes, sir. I know what you mean, sir." Siegmund dives into the heap. Musky womansmells. A fountain of sensation. Someone pops something into his mouth. He swallows, and moments later feels the back of his skull lift. Laughter. He is being kissed. Forced down against the carpet by his assailant. Rhea? Yes. Music blaring from above. In the tangle he discovers himself sharing a girl with Nissim Shawke. A cold wink from him; an icy grin. Shawke testing his capacity for pleasure. Everyone watching him, seeing if he's decadent enough to deserve promotion to their midst. Let yourself go! Let everything go! Urgently he compels himself to revel. Much depends on this. Below him # wondrous floors of urbmon and if he wants to stay up here he must know how to play. Disillusioned that the administrators are like this. So common, so vulgar, the cheap hedonism of a ruling class. They could be Florentine dukes, Parisian grandees, Borgias, drunken boyars. Unable to accept this image of them, Siegmund constructs a fantasy: they have staged this revel solely to test his character, to determine whether he is indeed merely a dreary drudge or if he has the breadth of spirit a Louisville man needs. Folly to think they spend their priceless but they are flexible, they can enjoy life, they turn from work to play with equal gusto. And if he wants to live among them he must demonstrate equal many-sidedness. He will. He will. His furry brain swirls with conflicting chemical messages. "Let's sing!" he yells desperately. "Everybody sing!" Bellowing: If you come to me by the dark of night With your blessman all aglow A nd you slip down beside me A nd try to get inside me -- They sing with him. He cannot hear his own voice. Dark eyes pear into his. "God bless," a long rippling lass murmurs. "You're cute. The famous Siegmund Kluver." She belches tingle bubbles. "We've met before, haven't we?" "Once, I think, in Nissim's office. Scylla Shawke." The great man's wife. Startling in her beauty. Young. Young. No more than twenty-five. He has heard a rumor that the first Mrs. Shawke, Rhea's mother, went down the chute, flippo. Some day he must check on the truth of that. Scylla Shawke wriggles close to him. Her soft black hair dangling in his face. He is almost paralyzed with fear. The consequences; can this be going too far? Recklessly he grabs her and plunges his hand into her tunic. She cooperates. Full warm breasts. Soft moist lips. Can he fail this test by an excess of shamelessness? Never mind. Never mind. Happy Somatic Fulfillment Day! Her body grinds against his, and he realizes, in shock, that it would be no problem to top her right now, here, in this heaving mass of high-level humanity on the floor of Kipling Freehouse's sprawling office. Too far, too fast. He slides free of her grasp. Catching the single flicker of disappointment and reproach in her eyes at his withdrawal. Rolls over; Rhea. "Why didn't you?" she whispers. And Siegmund says, "I couldn't," just before another girl, straddling him, kneels and pours something sweet and sticky into his mouth. He whirls within his skull. "It was a mistake," Rhea tells him. "She was being set up for you." Her words fracture and the pieces rebound, soaring high and drifting about the room. Something strange has happened to the lights; everything has become prismatic, and from all plane surfaces an eerie radiance is streaming. Siegmund crawls through the tumult, searching for Scylla Shawke. Instead he finds Nissim. "I'd like to discuss the business of the Chicago sex-ratio petition with you now," the administrator tells him. apartment hours later, he finds Mamelon pacing grimly about. "Where have you been?" she demands. "Somatic Fulfillment Day's almost over. I've called the access nexus, I've had tracers all over the building. I've -- " "I was in Louisville," Siegmund says. "Kipling Freehouse had a party." Stumbles past her. Drops face down on the sleeping platform. First come the dry sobs, then the tears, and by the time they stop flowing Somatic Fulfillment Day mightjust as well be over. T his is the bottom. Siegmund Kluver prowls uneasily among the generators. The weight of the building presses crushingly on him. The whining song of the turbines troubles him. He feels disoriented, a wanderer in the depths. How huge this room is: an immense box far below the ground, so big that the globes of light in its ceiling are barely able to illuminate the distant concrete floor. Siegmund creeps along a catwalk midway between floor and ceiling. Palatial Louisville three kilometers above his head. Carpets and draperies, inlays of rare woods, the trappings of power, very far away now. He hadn't meant to come here, not this far down. Warsaw was his intended destination tonight. But somehow first here. Stalling for time. Siegmund is frightened. Searching for an excuse not to do it. If they only knew. The cowardice within. UnSiegmundlike. He rubs his hands along the catwalk railing. Cold metal, shaky fingers. A constant throbbing boom running through the building here. He is not far from the terminus of the chutes that convey solid wastes to the power plant: discards of all kinds, old clothes. used data cubes, wrappers and packages, the bodies of the dead, occasionally the bodies of the living, coursing down the spiraling slideways and tumbling into the compactors. And moving thence on gliding belts into the combustion chambers. The liberation of heat for electrical generation: waste not, want not. The electrical load is heavy at this hour. Every apartment is lit. Siegmund closes his eyes and receives a vision of Urban Monad #'s # people linked by an enormous tangle of wiring. A giant human switchboard. And I am no longer plugged into it. Why am I no longer plugged into it? What has happened to me? What is happening to me? What is about to happen to me? Sluggishly he moves along the catwalk and passes out of the generating room. Entering a sleekwalled tunnel; behind its glossy paneled sides, he knows, run the transmission lines along which power flows toward the debooster circuitry. And here the reprocessing plant -- urine pipes, fecal reconversion chambers. All the wondrous stuff by which the urbmon lives. No other human being in sight. The heavy weight of the solitude. Siegmund shivers. He must go up to Warsaw soon. Yet he continues to drift like a touring schoolchild through the utility censomehow first here. Stalling for time. Siegmund is frightened. Searching for an excuse not to do it. If they only knew. The cowardice within. UnSiegmundlike. He rubs his hands along the catwalk railing. Cold metal, shaky fingers. A constant throbbing boom running through the building here. He is not far from the terminus of the chutes that convey solid wastes to the power plant: discards of all kinds, old clothes. used data cubes, wrappers and packages, the bodies of the dead, occasionally the bodies of the living, coursing down the spiraling slideways and tumbling into the compactors. And moving thence on gliding belts into the combustion chambers. The liberation of heat for electrical generation: waste not, want not. The electrical load is heavy at this hour. Every apartment is lit. Siegmund closes his eyes and receives a vision of Urban Monad #'s # people linked by an enormous tangle of wiring. A giant human switchboard. And I am no longer plugged into it. Why am I no longer plugged into it? What has happened to me? What is happening to me? What is about to happen to me? Sluggishly he moves along the catwalk and passes out of the generating room. Entering a sleekwalled tunnel; behind its glossy paneled sides, he knows, run the transmission lines along which power flows toward the debooster circuitry. And here the reprocessing plant -- urine pipes, fecal reconversion chambers. All the wondrous stuff by which the urbmon lives. No other human being in sight. The heavy weight of the solitude. Siegmund shivers. He must go up to Warsaw soon. Yet he continues to drift like a touring schoolchild through the utility center at the urbmon's lowest level. Hiding here from himself. The cold eyes of electronic scanners staring at him out of hundreds of shielded openings in floors and walls and ceilings...I am Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai, #th floor. I am fifteen years and five months old. My wife's name is Mamelon, my son is Janus, my daughter is Persephone. I am assigned to work duty as a consultant in Louisville Access Nexus and within the next twelve months I will undoubtedly receive notice of my promotion to the highest administrative levels of this urban monad. Therefore shall I rejoice. I am Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai, #th floor. He bows to the scanners. All hail. All hail. The future leader. Passing his hand nervously through his coarse, bushy hair. For an hour now he has wandered about down here. You should go up. What are you afraid of? To Warsaw. To Warsaw. He hears the voice of Rhea Shawke Freehouse, coming as though from a recording mounted at the core of his brain. If I were you, Siegmund. I'd relax and try to enjoy myself more. Don't worry about what people think, or seem to think, about you. Soak up human nature, work at being more human yourself. Go around the building; do some nightwalking in Warsaw or Prague, maybe. See how simpler people live. Shrewd words. Wise woman. Why be afraid? Go up. Go up. It's getting late. Standing outside a NO ADof the computer ganglia, Siegmund spends several minutes studying the tremor of his right hand. Then he hurries to the liftshaft and tells it to take him to the #th floor. The middle of Warsaw. N arrow corridors, here. Many doors. A compressed quality to the atmosphere. This is a city of extraordinarily high population density, not only because the inhabitants are so blessworthy in their fecundity, but also because much of the city's area is given over to industrial plants. Even though the building is much broader here than in its upper reaches, the citizens of Warsaw are pushed together into a relatively small residential zone. Here are the machines that stamp out machines. Dies, lathes, templates, reciprocators, positioners, fabrication plaques. Much of the work is computerized and automated, but there is plenty for human beings to do: feeding the conveyors, guiding and positioning, driving the fork-lifts, tagging the finished work for its destination. Late last year Siegmund pointed out to Nissim Shawke and Kipling Freehouse that nearly everything being done by human labor in the industrial levels could be handled by machines; instead of employing thousands of people in Warsaw, Prague, and Birmingham, they could set up a totally automated output program, with a few supervisors to keep watch over the inventory homeostasis, and a few maintenance men to handle emergencies, such as repairing the repair-machines. Shawke gave him a patronizing smile. "But if they had no work, what would all those poor people do with their lives?" he asked. "Do you think we can turn them into poets, Siegmund? Professors of urban history? We deliberately devise labor for them, don't you see?" Siegmund embarrassed by his naivete. A rare failure, for him, of insight into the methodology' of government. He still feels uncomfortable about that conversation. In an ideal commonwealth, he believes, every person should have meaningful work to do. He wishes the urban monad to be an ideal commonwealth. But yet certain practical considerations of human limitations interpose themselves. But yet. But yet. The makework in Warsaw is a blot on the theory. Pick a door. Say, #. #. #. Strange to see the apartments bearing four-digit numbers. #. #. Siegmund puts his hand to the knob. Hesitates. A rush of sudden timidity. Imagining, within, a brawny, hairy, growling, sullen working-class husband, a shapeless, weary working-class wife. And he must intrude on their intimacies. Their resentful glare upon seeing his upper-level clothing. What is this Shanghai dandy doing here? Doesn't he have any regard for decency? And so forth. And so forth. Siegmund almost flees. Then he takes hold of himself. They dare not refuse. They dare not be sullen. He opens the door. The room is dark. Only the nightglow is on; his eyes adjust and he sees a couple on the sleeping platform and five or six littles on. cots. He approaches the platform. Stands over the sleepers. His imagined portrait of the room's occupants altogether inaccurate. They could be any young married pair of Shanghai, Chicago, Edinburgh. Strip away the clothes, let sleep eradicate the facial expressions denoting position in the social matrix, and distinctions of class and city perhaps disappear. The naked sleepers are only a few years older than Siegmund -- he maybe nineteen, she possibly eighteen. The man slender, narrow shoulders, unspectacular muscles. The woman trim, standard, agreeable body, soft yellow hair. Siegmund lightly touches her shoulder. A ridge of bone lying close beneath the skin. Blue eyes flickering open. Fear giving way to understanding: oh, a nightwalker. And understanding giving way to confusion: the nightwalker wears upper-building clothes. Etiquette demands an introduction. "Siegmund Kluver," he says. "Shanghai." The girl's tongue passes hurriedly over her lips. "Shanghai? Really?" The husband awakes. Blinking, puzzled. "Shanghai?" he says. "What for, down here, huh?" Not hostile, just wondering. Siegmund shrugs, as if to say a whim, a fancy. The husband gets off the platform. Siegmund assures him that it isn't necessary for him to leave, that it'll be quite all right to have him here, but that kind of thing evidently isn't practiced in Warsaw: the arrival of the nightwalker is the signal for the husband to clear out. Loose cotton wrap already over his pale, almost hairless body. A nervous smile! see you later, love. And out. Siegmund alone with the woman. "I never met anybody from Shanghai before," she says. "You haven't told me your name." "Ellen." He lies down beside her. Stroking her smooth skin. Rhea's words echo. Soak up human nature. See how simpler people live. He is so tightly drawn. His flesh mysteriously invaded by a spreading network of fine golden wires. Penetrating the lobes of his brain. "What does your husband do, Ellen?" "He's on fork-lift now. Used to be a cabler, but he got hurt sheathing. The whiplash." "He works hard, doesn't he?" "The sector boss says he's one of the best. I think he's okay too." A sniggering little giggle. "What floors are Shanghai, anyway? That's someplace around #, isn't it?" "#I to #." Caressing her. Her body quivers -- fear or desire? Shyly her hand goes to his clothing. Maybe just eager to get him in and out and gone. The frightening stranger from the upper levels. Or else not accustomed to foreplay. A different milieu. He'd rather talk a while first. See how simpler people live. He's here to learn, not merely to top. Looking around the room: the furnishings drab and crude, no grace, no style. Yet designed by the same craftsmen who furnish Louisville and Toledo. Obviously aiming for a lower taste. A prevailing film of grayness over everything. Even the girl.  could be with Micaela Quevedo now. I could be with Principessa. Or with. Or perhaps with. But I am here. He searches for probing questions to ask. To bring out the essential humanity of this obscure person over whom he one day will help to rule. Do you read much? What are your favorite screen shows? What sort of foods do you like? Are you doing what you can to help your littles rise in the building? What do you think of the people down in Reykjavik? And those in Prague? But he says nothing. What's the use? What can he learn? Impassable barriers between person and person. Touching her here and here and here. Her fingers on him. "You don't like me," she says sadly. He wonders how often she uses the cleanser. "Maybe I'm a little tired," he says. "So busy these days." Pressing his body against hers. The warmth of her possibly will resurrect him. Her eyes staring into his. Blue lenses over inner emptiness. He kisses the hollow of her throat. "Hey, that tickles!" she says, wriggling. He trails his fingers down her belly. She is ready. But he isn't. Can't. "Is there anything special?" she asks. "If it isn't too complicated maybe I could." He shakes his head. He isn't interested in whips and chains and thongs. Just the usual. But he can't. His fatigue only a pretense; what cripples him is his sense of isolation. Alone among # people. And I cant reach her. The Shanghai swell, incapable, unmanned. Now she is no longer afraid of him and not very sympathetic. She takes his failure as a sign of his contempt for her. He wants to tell her how many hundreds of women he has topped in Shanghai and Chicago, and even Toledo. Where he is regarded as devilishly virile. She squirms indignantly. He releases her. Rises, adjusts himself. Face blazing. As he goes to the door he looks back. She is sitting up wantonly, looking mockery at him. Makes a gesture with three fingers, no doubt a scabrous obscenity here. He says, "I just want you to know. The name I gave you when I came in -- it isn't mine. That's not me at all." And goes hastily out. So much for soaking up human nature. So much for Warsaw. H e takes the liftshaft randomly to #, Prague, gets out, walks halfway around the building without entering any apartment or speaking to anyone he meets; gets into a different liftshaft; goes up to # in Pittsburgh; stands for a while in a corridor, listening to the pounding of the blood in the capillaries of his temples. Then he steps into a somatic fulfillment hall. Even at this late hour there are people making use of its facilities: a dozen or so in the whirlpool tumbler, five or six prancing on the treadmill, a few couples. His Shanghai clothes earn him some curious stares but no one approaches him. Shoulders slumping, he goes slowly out of the somatic fulfillment hall. Now he takes to the stairs, plodding up the great coil that runs the whole thousand-floor height of Urban Monad #. He looks up the mighty helix and sees the levels stretching toward infinity, with banks of lights glittering above him to denote each landing. Birmingham, San Francisco, Colombo, Madrid. He grasps the rail and looks down. Eyes spiraling along the descending path. Prague, Warsaw, Reykjavik. A dizzying vortex; a monstrous well through which from above like snowflakes. He clambers doggedly up the myriad steps. Hypnotized by his own mechanical movements. Before he realizes it, he has climbed forty floors. Sweat drenches him and the muscles of his calves are bunching and knotting. He yanks open the doorway and lurches out into the main corridor. This is the #th floor. Birmingham. Two men with the smirking look of nightwalkers on their way home stop him and offer him some kind of groover, a small translucent capsule containing a dark, oily orange fluid. Siegmund accepts the capsule without a word and swallows it unquestioningly. They tap his biceps in a show of good fellowship and go on their way. Almost at once he feels nausea. Then blurred red and blue lights sway before his eyes. He wonders dimly what they have given him. He waits for the ecstasy. He waits. He waits. T he next thing he knows, the thin light of dawn is in his eyes and he is sitting in an unfamiliar room, sprawled out in a web of oscillating, twanging metal mesh. A tall young man with long golden hair stands over him and Siegmund can hear his own voice saying. "Now I know why they go flippo. One day it just gets to be too much for you. The people right up against your skin. You can feel them. And -- " "Easy. Back it up a little. You're overloading." "My head is about to explode." Siegmund sees an attractive redhaired woman moving around in the far corner of the room. He is having difficulty focusing his eyes. "I'm not sure I know where I am," he says. "Three hundred seventieth. That's San Francisco. You're really sectioned off, aren't you?" "My head. As if it needs to be pumped out." "I'm Dillon Chrimes. My wife, Electra. She found you wandering in the halls." His host's friendly face smiling into his. Strange blue eyes, like plaques of polished stone. "About the building," Chrimes says. "You know, one night not too long ago I took a multiplexer and I became the whole crotting building. And really flew on it. You know, seeing it as one big organism, a mosaic of thousands of minds. Beautiful. Until I started to come down -- and on the downside it struck me as just an awful hideous beehive of a place. You lose your perspective when you mess your mind with chemicals. But then you regain it." "I can't regain it." "What's the good of hating the building? I mean, the urbmon's a real solution to real problems, isn't it?" "I know." "And most of the time it works. So it's a sterilizer to waste your time hating it, do you understand?" "I don't hate it," Siegmund says. "I've always admired the theory of verticality in urban thrust. My specialty is urbmon administration. Was. Is. But suddenly everything's all wrong, and I don't know where the wrongness is. In me or in the whole system? And maybe not so suddenly." "There's no real alternative to the urbmon," Dillon Chrimes says. "I mean, you can jump down the chute, I guess, or run off to the communes, but those aren't sensible alternatives. So we stay here. And groove on Jhe richness of it all. You must just have been working too hard. Look, you want something cold to drink?" "Please. Yes," Siegmund says. The red-haired woman puts a flask in his hand. As she leans toward him, her breasts sway out, tolling like fleshy bells. She is quite beautiful. A tiny spurt of hormones within him. Reminding him of how this night had begun. Nightwalking in Warsaw. A girl. He has forgotten her name. His failure. Dillon Chrimes says, "The screen's been broadcasting an alarm for Siegmund Kluver of Shanghai. Tracers out for him since ##. Is that you? Siegmund nods. "I know your wife. Mamelon, right?" Chrimes shoots a glance at his own wife. As if there is a jealousy problem here. In a lower tone he says to Siegmund, "Once when I was doing a performance in Shanghai I met her on a nightwalk. Lovely. That cool grace of hers. A statue full of passion. Probably very worried about you right now, Siegmund." "Performance?" "I play the vibrastar in one of the cosmos groups." Chrimes makes ecstatic keyboard gestures with his fingers. "You've probably seen me. How about letting me put through a call to your wife, all right?" Siegmund says, "A purely personal thing. A sense of coming apart. Or breaking loose from my roots." "What?" "A kind of rootlessness. As though not belonging in Shanghai, not belonging in Louisville, not belonging in Warsaw, not belonging anywhere. Just a cluster of ambitions and inhibitions, no real self. And I'm lost. And I'm lost inside." "Inside what?" "Inside myself. Inside the building. A sense of coming apart. Leaving pieces of me all over the place. Films of self peeling away, drifting off." Siegmund realizes that Electra Chrimes is staring at him. Appalled. He struggles for self-control. Sees himself stripped down to the bone. Spinal column exposed, the comb of vertebrae, the oddly angular cranium. Siegmund. Siegmund. Dillon Chrimes' earnest, troubled face. A handsome apartment. Polymirrors, psychedelic tapestries. Thesehappy people. Fulfilled in their art. Plugged into the switchboard. "Lost," Siegmund says. "Transfer to San Francisco," Chrimes suggests. "We don't push hard here. We can make room. Maybe you'll discover artistic talent. You could write programs for the screen shows, maybe. Or -- " Siegmund laughs harshly. His throat is furry. "I'll write this show about the hungry rung-grabber who gets almost to the top and decides he doesn't want it. I'll -- no, I won't. I don't mean any of this. It's the groover talking out of my mouth. Those two slipped me a filther, that's all. You'd better call Mamelon." Getting to his feet. Trembling. A sensation of being at least ninety years old. He starts to fall. Chrimes and his wife catch him. His cheek against Elektra's swaying breasts. Siegmund manages a smile. "It's the groover talking out of my mouth," he says again. "These damned drugs. These. Damned. Drugs." WT'S a long dull story," he tells AMamelon. "I got into a place where I didn't want to be, and somehow I took a capsule without knowing what I was taking, and everything got confused after that. But I'm all right now. I'm all right." HI A fter a day's medical absence he returns to his desk in Louisville Access Nexus. A pile of memoranda awaits him. Much need of his services by the great men of the administrative class. Nissim Shawke wants him to do a followup reply to the petitioners from Chicago on that business of asking for freedom to determine the sex of one's offspring. Kipling Freehouse requests an intuitive interpretation of certain figures in next quarter's production-balance estimates. Monroe Stevis is after a double flow-chart showing attendance at sonic centers plotted against visits to blessmen and consolers: a psychological profile of the populations of six cities. And so on. Picking his brains. How blessworthy to be useful. How wearying to be used. He does his best, laboring under his handicap. A sense of coming apart. A dislocation of the soul. M idnight, sleep win not come. He lies beside Mamelon, tossing. His nerves rustle in the darkness. She knows he is awake. Her soothing hand roams him. "Can't you relax?" she asks. "It gets harder." "Would you like some tingle? Or even mindblot." ."No. Nothing." "Go nightwalking then," she suggests. "Burn up some of that energy. You're all wired up, Siegmund." Held together by golden thread. Coming apart. Coming apart. Go up to Toledo, maybe? Seek consolation in Rhea's arms. She always is helpful. Or even nightwalk Louisville. Drop in on Nissim Shawke's wife Scylla. The audacity of it. But they were trying to push me onto her at that party. Somatic Fulfillment Day. Seeing whether I had the blessmanship to deserve promotion to Louisville. Siegmund knows he failed a test that day. But maybe it is not too late to undo that. He will go to Scylla. Even if Nissim's there. See, I have the requisite amorality! See, I defy all bounds. Why should a Louisville wife not be accessible to me? We all live under the same code of law, regardless of the inhibitions of custom that we have lately imposed upon ourselves. So he will say if he finds Nissim. And Nissim will applaud his bravado. "Yes," he tells Mamelon. "I think I'll nightwalk." But he remains on the sleeping platform. Some minutes go by. A failure of impulse. He does not want to go; he pretends to be asleep, hoping Mamelon will doze. Some minutes more. Cautiously he opens one eye, slitwide. Yes, she sleeps. How beautiful she is, how noble even while asleep. The fine bones, the pale skin, the jetblack hair. My Mamelon. My treasure. Lately he has felt little desire even for her. Boredom born of fatigue? Fatigue born of boredom? The door opens and Charles Mattern comes in. Siegmund watches the sociocomputator tiptoe toward the platform and silently undress. Mattern's lips are tightly compressed, his nostrils flaring. Signs of yearning. Mattern hungers for Mamelon; something has been developing between them over the past two months, Siegmund suspects, something more than mere nightwalking. Siegmund hardly cares. Just so she is happy. Mattern's harsh breathing loud in the room. He starts to awaken Mamelon. "Hello, Charles," Siegmund says. Mattern, caught by surprise, flinches and laughs nervously. "I was trying not to wake you, Siegmund." "I've been up. Watching you." "You might have said something, then. To save me all this stealthing around." "I'm sorry. It didn't occur to me." Mamelon is awake now, too. Sitting up, bare to the waist. The whiteness of her skin illuminated by the faint glow of the nightlight. Smiling chastely at Mattern: the dutiful female citizen, ready to accept her nocturnal visitor. Siegmund says, "Charles, as long as you're here, I can tell you that I've got an assignment to do that'll involve working with you. For Stevis. He wants to see if people are spending more time than usual with blessmen and consolers, and less in sonic centers. A double flow-chart that -- " "It's late, Siegmund." Curtly. "Why don't you tell me about it in the morning." "Yes. All right. All right." Flushing, Siegmund rises from the sleeping platform. He does not have to leave, even with a nightwalker here for Mamelon, but he does not want to stay. Like a Warsaw husband, granting a superfluous and unasked privacy to the other two. He hurriedly finds some clothing. Mattern reminds him that he's free to remain. But no. Siegmund leaves, a little wildly. Almost running down the hall. I will go up to Louisville, to Scylla Shawke. However, instead of asking the liftshaft to take him to the level where the Shawkes live, he calls out a Shanghai floor, #. Charles and Principessa Mattern live there. He does not dare risk attempting Scylla while he is in this jangled state. Failure could be costly. Principessa will do. A tigress, she is. A savage. Her sheer animal vigor may restore his wellbeing. She is the most passionate woman he knows, short of Mamelon. And a good age, ripe but not overripe. Siegmund halts outside Principessa's door. It strikes him that it is somewhat bourgeois, something of a pre-urbmon thing, for him to be seeking the wife of the man who is now with his own wife. Nightwalking should be more random, less structured, merely a way of extending the range of one's life-experiences. Nevertheless. He nudges the door open. Relieved and dismayed to hear sounds of ecstasy from within. Two people on the platform: he sees Jason Quevedo. Siegmund quickly ducks out. Alone in the corridor. Where to, now? The world is too complicated for him tonight. The obvious next destination is Quevedo's apartment. For Micaela. But no doubt she will have a visitor too. Siegmund's forehead begins to throb. He does not want to roam the urbmon endlessly. He wants only to go to sleep. Nightwalking suddenly seems an abomination to him: forced, unnatural, compulsive. The slavery of absolute freedom. At this moment thousands of men roam the titanic building. Each determined to do the blessworthy thing. Siegmund, scuffing at the floors, strolls along the corridor and halts by a window. Outside, a moonless night. The sky ablaze with stars. The neighboring urbmons seeming farther away than usual. Their windows bright, thousands of them. He wonders if it is possible to see a commune far to the north. The crazy farmers. Micaela Quevedo's brother Michael, the one who went flippo, supposedly visited a commune. At least so the story goes. Micaela still brooding about her brother's fate. Down the chute with him as soon as he stuck his head back inside the urbmon. But of course a man like that can't be permitted to resume his former life here. An obvious malcontent, spreading poisons of dissatisfaction and unblessworthiness. A hard thing for Micaela, though. Very close to her brother, she says. Her twin. Thinks he should have had a formal hearing in Louisville. He did, though. She won't believe it, but he did. Siegmund remembers when the papers came through. Nissim Shawke issuing the decree: if this man ever returns to #, dispose of him at once. Poor Micaela. Something unhealthy going on, maybe, between her and her brother. I might ask Jason. I might. Where shall I go now? He realizes that he has been standing by the window for more than an hour. He stumbles toward the stairs and jogs down twelve levels to his own. Mattern and Mamelon lie sleeping side by side. Siegmund drops his clothing and joins them on the platform. Coming apart. Dislocation. Finally he sleeps, too. T he solace of religion. Siegmund has gone to see a blessman. The chapel is on the #th floor: a small room off a commercial arcade, decorated with fertility symbols and incrustations of captive light. Entering, he feels like an intruder. Never any religious impulses before. His mother's grandfather was a Christer, but everyone in the family assumed it was because the old man had antiquarian instincts. The ancient religions have few followers, and even the cult of god's blessing, which is officially supported by Louisville, can claim no more than a third of the building's adult population, according to the last figures Siegmund has seen. Though perhaps things are changing lately. "God bless," the blessman says, "what is your pain?" He is. plump, smooth-skinned, with a round complacent face and cheerily shining eyes. At least forty years old. What does he know of pain? "I have begun not to belong," Siegmund says. "My future is unraveling. I am coming unplugged. Everything has lost its meaning and my soul is hollow." "Ah. Angst. Anomie. Dissociation. Identity drain. Familiar complaints, my son. How old are you?" "Past fifteen." "Career profile?" "Shanghai going on Louisville. Perhaps you know of me. Siegmund Kluver." The blessman's lips go taut. The eyes veil themselves. He toys with sacred emblems on his tunic's collar. He has heard of Siegmund, yes. He says, "Are you fulfilled in your marriage?" "I have the most blessworthy wife imaginable." "Littles?" "A boy and a girl. We will have a second girl next year." "Friends?" "Sufficient," Siegmund says. "And yet this feeling of decomposition. Sometimes my skin itchy all over. Films of decay drifting through the building and wrapping themselves about me. A great restlessness. What's happening to me?" "Sometimes," the blessman says, "those of us who live in the urban monads experience what is called the crisis of spiritual confinement. The boundaries of our world, that is to say our building, seem too narrow. Our inner resources become inadequate. We are grievously disappointed in our relationships with those we have always loved and admired. The result of such a crisis is often violent: hence the flippo phenomenon. Others may actually leave the urbmon and seek a new life in the communes, which, of course, is a form of suicide, since we are incapable of adapting to that harsh environment. Now, those who neither go berserk nor separate themselves physically from the urbmon occasionally undertake an internal migration, drawing into their own souls and, in effect, contracting as a response to the impingement of adjacent individuals on their psychic space. Does this have any meaning for you?" As Siegmund nods doubtfully, the blessman goes smoothly on, saying, "Among the leaders of this building, the executive class, those who have been propelled upward by the blessworthy drive to serve their fellow men, this process is particularly painful, bringing about as it does a collapse of values and a loss of motivation. But it's easily cured." "Easily?" "I assure you." "Cured? How?" "We will do it at once, and you will go out of here healthy and whole, Siegmund. The way to health is through kinship with god, you see, god being considered in our view the integrative force giving wholeness to the universe. And I will show you god." "You will show me god," Siegmund repeats, uncomprehending. "Yes. Yes." The blessman, bustling around, is busy darkening the chapel, switching off lights and cutting in opaquers. From the floor sprouts a cup-shaped webseat into which Siegmund is gently nudged. Lying there, looking up. The chapel's ceiling, he discovers, is a single broad screen. In its glassy green depths an image of the heavens appears. Stars strewn like light. Music issues from concealed speakers: the plashy plinks of a cosmos group. He makes out the magical sounds of a vibrastar, the dark twangs of a comet-harp, the wild lurches of an orbital diver. Then the whole group going at once. Perhaps Dillon Chrimes is playing. His friend of that dismal night. Overhead the depth of the perceptive field is deepening; Siegmund sees the orange glint of Mars, the pearly blaze of Jupiter. So god is a light-show plus a cosmos group? How shallow. How empty. The blessman, speaking over the music, says, "What you see is a direct relay from the thousandth floor. This is the sky over our urbmon at our present moment. Look into the black cone of night. Accept the cool light of the stars. Open yourself to the immensity. What you see is god. What you see is god." "Where?" "Everywhere. Immanent and allenduring." "I don't see." The music is turned up. Siegmund now is surrounded by a cage of heavy sound. The astronomical scene takes on a greater intensity. The blessman directs Siegmund's attention to this group of stars and to that, urging him to merge with the galaxy. The urbmon is not the universe, he murmurs. Beyond these shining walls lies an awesome vastness that is god. Let him take you into himself and heal you. Yield. Yield. Yield. But Siegmund cannot yield. He wonders if the blessman should have given him some sort of drug, a multiplexer of some kind that would make it easier for him to open himself to the universe. But the blessman scoffs. One can reach god without chemical assistance. Simply stare. Contemplate. Peer into infinity. Search for the divine pattern. Meditate on the forces in balance, the beauties of celestial mechanics. God is within and without us. Yield. Yield. Yield. "I still don't feel it," Siegmund says. "I'm locked up inside my own head." A note of impatience enters the blessman's tone. What's wrong with you, he seems to be saying. Why can't you? It's a perfectly good religious experience. But it is no use. After a half-hour Siegmund sits up, shaking his head. His eyes hurt from staring at the stars. He cannot make the mystical leap. He authorizes a credit transfer to the blessman's account, thanks him, and goes out of the chapel. Perhaps god was somewhere else today. T he solace of the consoler. A purely secular therapist, relying heavily on metabolic adjustments. Siegmund is apprehensive about seeing him; he has always regarded those who have to go to a consoler as somehow defective, and it pains him to be joining that group. Yet he must end this inner turmoil. And Mamelon insists. The consoler he visits is surprisingly young, perhaps thirty-three, with a pinched, bleak face and frosty, ungenerous eyes. He knows the nature of Siegmund's complaint almost before it is described to him. "And when you attended this party in Louisville," he asks, "what effect did it have on you to learn that your idols weren't quite the men you thought they were?" "It emptied me out," Siegmund says. "My ideals, my values, my guiding images. To see them cavorting like that. Never having imagined they did. I think that's where all the trouble started." "No," says the consoler, "that's merely where the trouble surfaced. It was there before. In you, deep, waiting for something to push it up into view." "How can I learn to cope with it?" "You can't. You'll have to be sent into therapy. I'm going to turn you over to the moral engineers. You can use a reality adjustment." H e is afraid of being changed. They will put him into a tank and let him drift there for days or weeks, while they cloud his mind with their mysterious substances and whisper things to him and massage his aching body and alter the imprinting of his brain. And he will come forth healthy and stable and different. Another person. All his Siegmundness lost along with his anguish. He remembers a girl named Aurea Holston, whose number came up in the lottery for the stocking of the new Urbmon #, and who did not want to go, and who was persuaded by the moral engineers that it would not be so bad to leave her native urbmon. And came forth from her tank docile and placid, a vegetable in place of a neurotic. Not for me, Siegmund thinks. It will be the end of his career, too. Louisville does not want men who have had crises. They will find some middle-rung post for him in Boston or Seattle, some tepid minor administrative job, and forget about him. A formerly promising young man. Full reports on reality adjustments are placed each week before Monroe Stevis. Stevis will tell Shawke and Freehouse. Have you heard about poor Siegmund? Two weeks in the tank. Some sort of breakdown. Yes, sad. Very sad. We'll drop him, of course. No. What can he do? The consoler has already made up the adjustment request and filed it with one of the computer nodes. Sparkling impulses of neural energy are traveling through the information system, bearing his name. Time is being cleared for him on the #th floor, among the moral engineers. Soon his screen will tell him the hour ol his appointment. And if he does not go to them, they will come for him. The machines with soft rubbery pads on their arms, gathering him up, pushing him along. No. He tells Rhea of his predicament. Not even Mamelon knows yet, but Rhea. He can trust her. His best interests at heart. "Don't go to the engineers," she advises. "The order is already in." "Have it countermanded." He looks at her as though she has recommended demolition of the Chipitts urbmon constellation. "Pull it out of the computer," she tells him. "Get one of the interface men to do it for you. Use your influence. Nobody'll find out." "I couldn't do that." "You'll go to the moral engineers, then. And you know what that means." The urbmon is toppling. Clouds of debris swirl in his brain. Who would arrange such a thing for him? Micaela Quevedo's brother worked in an interface crew, didn't he? But he's gone now. There must be others within his grasp, though. When he leaves Rhea, Siegmund consults the records in the access nexus. The virus of unblessworthiness already at work in his soul. Then he realizes he doesn't even need to use his influence. Merely make it a matter of professional routine. In his office he taps out a data requisition: status of Siegmund Kluver, remanded for therapy on #th floor. Instantly comes the information that Kluver is due for therapy in seventeen days. The computer does not withhold data from Louisville Access Nexus. The presumption exists that anyone who asks, using the equipment in the nexus, has the right to do so. Very well. The vital next step. Siegmund instructs the computer to yank the therapy assignment for Siegmund Kluver. This time there is a bit of resistance: the computer wants to know who authorizes the yanking. Siegmund meditates on that for a moment. Then inspiration comes. The therapy of Siegmund Kluver, he informs the machine, is being canceled by order of Siegmund Kluver of the Louisvill Access Nexus. Will it work? "No," the machine may say, "you can't cancel your own therapy appointment. Do you think I'm stupid?" But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition. Does Siegmund Kluver of Louisville Access Nexus have the right to cancel a therapy appointment? Yes, certainly; he must be acting on behalf of Louisville itself. Therefore let it be canceled. The instructions flicker through the proper node. No matter whose appointment it is, as long as authority to cancel can be attributed properly. It is done. Siegmund taps out a data requisition: status of Siegmund Kluver, remanded for therapy on #th floor. Instantly comes the information that Kluver's appointment for therapy has been canceled. His career is safe, then. But he is left with his anguish. There is that to consider. T his is the bottom. Siegmund Kluver prowls uneasily among the generators. The weight of the building presses crushingly on him. The whining song of the turbines troubles him. He feels disoriented, a wanderer in the depths. How huge this room is. H e enters apartment #, Warsaw. "Ellen?" he says. "Listen, I've come back. I want to apologize for the last time. It was all a tremendous mistake." She shakes her head. She has already forgotten him. But she is The universal custom. Instead he kisses her hand. "I love you," he whispers, and flees. T his is the office of Jason Quevedo, historian, on the #th floor, Pittsburgh. Where the archives are. Jason sits before his desk, manipulating data cubes, as Siegmund enters. "It's all here, isn't it?" Siegmund asks. "The story of the collapse of civilization. And how we rebuilt it again. Verticality as the central philosophical thrust of human congruence patterns. Tell me the story, Jason. Tell me." Jason looking at him strangely. "Are you ill, Siegmund?" And Siegmund: "No, not at all. How perfectly healthy I am. Micaela's been explaining your thesis to me. The genetic adaptation of humanity to urbmon life. I'd like more details. How we've been bred to be what we are. We happy many." Siegmund picks up two of Jason's cubes and fondles them, almost sexually, leaving fingerprints on their sensitive surfaces. Tactfully Jason takes them from him. "Show me the ancient world," Siegmund says, but as Jason slips a cube into the playback slot, Siegmund goes out. T his is the great industrial city of Birmingham. Pale, sweating, Siegmund Kluver watches machines stamping out machines. While slumped and sullen human handlers supervise the work. This thing with arms will help in next autumn's harvest at a commune. This dark glossy tube will fly above the fields, spraying insects with poison. Siegmund finds himself weeping. He will never see the communes. He will never dig his fingers into the rich brown soil. The beautiful meshing ecology of the modern world. The poetic interplay of commune and urbmon for the benefit of all. How lovely. Then why am I weeping? musicians and artists and writers live. The cultural ghetto. Dillon Chrimes is rehearsing with his cosmos group. The thunderous web of sounds. An intruder. "Siegmund?" Chrimes says, breaking his concentration. "How are you getting along, Siegmund? Good to see you." Siegmund laughs. He gestures at the vibrastar, the comet-harp, the incantator and the other instruments. "Please," he murmurs, "keep on playing. I'm simply looking for god. You don't mind if I listen? Maybe he's here. Play some more." bottom level, he finds Micaela Quevedo. She does not look well. Her black hair is dull and stringy, her eyes are bitter, her lips are clamped. Seeing Siegmund in midday startles her. He says quickly, "Can we talk a while? I want to ask you some things about your brother Michael. Why he left the building. What he hoped to find out there. Can you give me any information?" Micaela's expression grows even harder. Coldly she says, "I don't know a thing. Michael went flippo, that's all that matters. He didn't explain himself to me." Siegmund knows that this is untrue. Micaela is concealing vital data. "Don't be unblessworthy," he urges. "I need to know. Not for Louisville. Just for myself." His hand on her thin wrist. "I'm thinking of leaving the building too," Siegmund confides. H e halts at his own apartment on the #th floor. Mamelon is not there. As usual, she is at the somatic fulfillment hall, enhancing her supple body. Siegmund records a brief message for her. "I loved you," he says. "I loved you. I loved you." H e meets Charles Mattern in a Shanghai hallway. "Come have dinner with us," the sociocomputator says. "Principessa's always happy to see you. And the children. Indra and Sandor always talk about you. Even Marx. When's Siegmund coming again, they say? We like Siegmund so much." Siegmund shakes his head. "I'm sorry, Charles. Not tonight. But thanks for asking." Mattern shrugs. "God bless, we'll get together soon, eh?" he says, and strolls away, leaving Siegmund in the midst of the flow of pedestrian traffic. T his is Toledo, where the pampered children of the administration caste make their homes. Rhea Shawke Freehouse lives here. Siegmund does not dare pay a call on her. She is too perceptive; she will understand at once that he is in a terminal phase of collapse, and undoubtedly will take preventive action. But yet he must make some move in her direction. Siegmund pauses outside her apartment and tenderly presses his lips to the door. Rhea. Rhea. Rhea. I loved you, too. He goes up. N or does he make any visits in Louisville, though it would please him to see some of the masters of the urbmon tonight, Nissim Shawke or Monroe Stevis or Kipling Freehouse. Magical names, names that resonate in his soul. Best to bypass them. He goes directly to the landing stage on the thousandth floor. Stepping out on the flat breeze-swept platform. Night, now. The stars glittering fiercely. Up there is God, immanent and all-enduring, floating serenely amidst the celestial mechanics. Below Siegmund's feet is the totality of Urban Monad #. What is today's population? #. Or some such.#-#I since yesterday andf # since the first of the year, adjusted for the departure of those who went to stock the new Urbmon #. Maybe he has the figures all wrong. It hardly matters. The building is athrob with life, at any rate. Fruitful and multiplying. God bless! So many servants of god. Shanghai's # souls. Warsaw. Prague. Tokyo. The ecstasy of verticality. In this single slender tower we compress so many thousands of lives. Plugged into the same switchboard. Homeostasis, and the defeat of entropy. We are well organized here. All thanks to our dedicated administrators. And look, look there! The neighboring urbmons! The wondrous row of them! Urbmon #, #, #, #! The fifty-one towers of the Chipitts constellation. Total population now #. Or some such. And east of Chipitts lies Boswash. And west of Chipitts is Sansan. And across the sea is Berpar and Wienbud and Shankong and Bocarac. And more. Each cluster of towers with its What is the population of our world now? Has it reached #. # yet? They project #. # for the not too distant future. Many new urbmons must be built to house those added They can put platforms on the sea. To the north, on the horizon, he imagines he can see the blaze of a commune's bonfires. Like the flesh of a diamond in sunlight. The farmers dancing. Their grotesque rites. Bringing fertility to the fields. God bless! It is all for the best. Siegmund smites. He stretches forth his arms. If he could only embrace the stars, he might find god. He walks to the very edge of the landing stage. A railing and a force-field protect him against the vagrant gusts of wind that might hurl him to his death. It is very windy here. Three kilometers high, after all. A needle sticking into god's eye. If he could only spring into the heavens. Looking down as he floats past, seeing Chipitts below, the rows of towers, the farmland surrounding them, the miraculous urban rhythm of verticality plotted against the miraculous commune rhythm of horizontality. How beautiful the world is tonight. Siegmund throws back his head. Eyes shining. And there is god. The blessman was right. There! There! Wait, Tm coming! Siegmund mounts the railing. Teeters a little. Currents of wind buffeting him. He has risen above the protective force-field. It seems almost as if the whole building was swaying. Think of the body heat that # human beings under the same roof must generate. Think of the waste products they daily send down the chute. All these linked lives. The switchboard. And God watching over us. Tm coming! I'm coming. Siegmund flexes his knees, gathers his strength, sucks air deep into his lungs. And sails toward God in a splendid leap. N OW the morning sun is high enough to touch the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad #. Soon the building's entire eastern face will glitter like the bosom of the sea at daybreak. Thousands of windows, activated by the dawn's early photons, deopague. Sleepers stir. Life goes on. God bless! Here begins another happy day.  P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, Cal. # cartoons, a vehicle for thought-provoking, controversial articles, and a "service" magazine containing dozens of sf and fantasy book reviews per issue, along with news of new releases, coming events, news items of interest to fans, readers and professionals. John Brunner -- the fourth installment of his column, called On Living in the Plot of a Bad Soap Opera-. Inside Conspiracy by J. Anthony Pierce -- a well known author's pseudonym: How  Fought for a Hugo by Harry Warner, Jr. Plus letters from Bob Silverberg, James Blish, Piers Anthony, L. Sprague de Camp, Philip Jose Farmer, Charles Platt, Richard Wilson, Sample Subscription -- # issues for I . # per year. T he alarm is for a point of light moving too fast among the unwinking stars standing over the moon to compute as a planet. Increase the magnification and it looks something like an occulting binary star (but can't be that either). Increase the magnification again, by two more orders of magnitude, and check comparation of radar range and optical angle subtended: it is a glittering dumbell, two spheres about # meters in diameter linked by a cylinder a quarter as thick and twice as long. Log it and flop back in the sack. Jack. It is the deep-space vessel SK.# free module up), where, when, and whither she should be: outward bound ex Earth Orbital Four, for a destination somewhere outside the orbit of Saturn, where she will service a telecommunications relay module, functioning to bring space outside the solar system effectively nearer by unmanned deep-space probe. In one of the spheres, in the half of it opposite the linking cylinder. Art Carson (from Denver, Colorado) is playing an extremely undemanding card game called Black Lady with Sem Kritsky (from the historic steel town of Sverdlovsk). "Preacher" Carson has had the three-month cram course in space four years in creative writing school, three years' premium apprenticeship to a Mad Avenue stills photographer, a typing course, two years in a London literary agency, and #I hours solo in a simulated television studio. course with Carson, was graduated in philosophy from the University of Leningrad, did four years' General Apologetics with the Jesuits in Rome, has worked as a leader writer on Pravda and the New York Times, also as a feature script writer for French television and radio, specializing in science policy and allocation of national and world resources. In the other half of this same sphere (in all of it) is the SK.# free module automation, known familiarly as Skip -- and, in decision and action situations, respectfully as Skipper. SK.#, who is in command of the mission, knows exactly what he has to do and precisely how to do it; but he has no idea why he has to do it. This is understandable enough; ever since the trouble in Brazil in # (when a arch clawed its way up, in three weeks flat, from Traffic ControlArmed Forces), it has been a capital offense to build free module automata capable of teleological thought and behavior. This is not to say, of course, that SK.# was a hundred percent determined and preprogramed (if he had been, he would not have been able to produce creative solutions to unforeseen emergencies): he was free to pursue certain limited ends as he chose. But built-in, triplicated censor subroutines (with elaborate fail-safe provisions) prevented him from creating ends of his own: some ends in particular (such as discovering once and for all what it all means, or saving the human race from itself before it was too late) would, if framed in the vaguest way, instantly energize total destruct circuits. This would be rough on Carson and Kritsky: but, after all, it was that rough in Brazil in #. Given certain as yet unstopped lacunae in automata theory and technics, it had not been possible to meet these legally mandatory safety specifications without (most unfortunately) also making it impossible for SK.# to execute certain creative functions of the Olaf Stapledoh's mission. This was not so rough on Carson and Kritsky, since it had given each the opportunity to make something of himself (and perhaps a little history for all of us, into the bargain). K ritsky had just stuck him with the Queen of Spades for the fifth round in a row, and Carson had gotten bored by unremitting defeat. He went off into his office, watered the house ivy growing up the bulkhead over his desk, and began to hunt and peck on his old silent portable typewriter. Had the fish of ancient times, he tapped out, been capable of reactionary thought and equipped to publish popular magazines, the primeval seas would undoubtedly have been disfigured by countless articles condemning those few fish who had dared try to breathe dry air and try to flop about, unsupported by buoyancy, on dry land. Without such fish we would not be here to salute their enterprise and follow their lead in adventure... He broke off, as he felt Kritsky's breath on his right ear. "You've got two contrafactual conditionals in the very first sentence", said Kritsky, sadly. "And, even if the argument were any good, I can't think it's at all original." "Only a scoob looks at fellers' first drafts, Sem. In any case, this essay isn't for Mind or any other of the mind-wrenching mags you read all the time: it's for syndication in the business sections of hometown, throwaway, retail-advertising papers, worldwide -- and you know as well as I do, an effective figure has got to be a cliche. How can you have a comfortingly, comfortably rehearsed response to a figure you never saw before? Look at historical iconography: what could the simple cross have done to people who didn't already know that Christ had been crucified to prove once and for all that things are fine as they are? You stick to your college lecture circuit and leave me do my own thing the way it has to be done." "Sticking to the college lecture circuit is just what I am doing. The students, even some of the well-paid professors researching and consulting in the harder subjects, kept wanting to know why UN keeps swanning about in space at vast expense, when fifty percent of the population is unemployed and below the poverty line, and ninety-eight percent don't know the difference between the second derivative and the second coming. One student once told me, while he was tarring me for feathers after a live lecture, just how many self-tutor books in elementary mathematics you could buy for the price of one of these things we're riding in. And students often used to wave your columns at me, when they were getting just verbally rough in live seminars: how am I supposed to convince top intellectuals that today's winners know what they're doing to the losers and the world when your junk about ambitious fish keeps popping into every home? You talk to me about history, as if  didn't know enough history to make me sick-hearted: how do you think a Jesuit philosopher. with fourteen years' grinding training, felt about his task of sapping the intellectual self-confidence of the Marxian elites when the rank and file of the church militant were publicly telling their flocks to render unto Caesar -- all too obviously for fear that Caesar might otherwise decide to take it for himself and replace the cardinals with company directors or commissars? The only way to make normally intelligent people even pretend to believe theodicies that run cross-grained to their own everyday experience is with a whip or a gun. And if you shoot all the normally intelligent people, who is there left who can usefully be used? It's like a pastoral society too diseased to bear wool or to be eaten. "That's dangerous-sounding talk, Sem -- and I wouldn't be surprised if there were dangerous thinking behind it. After all, we were hired to think and talk for the UN, not to think and speak for ourselves. Why make difficulties?" "Horsefeathers. If we weren't capable of understanding what's going on we wouldn't be able to do what we're paid to do. You can't have learned how to put it across without wondering who's putting what across on you -- or without being able to tell baloney from a buzz-saw. Nor could I have learned how to try and infect every intellectual in sight with a crippling case of de Chardin's onward and upward disease without learning to tell science from scientism in a deep sleep. You can tell baloney from the style, I can tell scientism from the content. You know as well as I do -- those skills are precisely why we're condemned to live out our lives in luxury on a deepspace shuttle, with occasional holidays in the lunar sporting houses, cut off from all contact with Earth except through telecommunications channels filtered through censor circuits." A t that moment, they were interrupted by the hysterical peeping of the proximity alarm signal. After a moment Skip silenced this, informing them in his neutral voice that: one, there was a sizable solid object fine on the port bow, course at three o'clock; two, that there was no chance of a collision; three, that they could look at it on the screen if they cared to punch for it. They punched for it. It looked like a big, featureless slab of stone or something (according to the scale supered on the screen, about the size of a railway passenger coach), with razor-sharp angles. It was rotating slowly in space, apparently minding its own business. As they watched, a strange pattern of sound (not exactly music but something tike the synthetic sound tracks once popular for horror movies in the old days) swelled in the sound system Skip used to chat with them, whanged and whined for a minute or two and then faded to silence. Carson was pale but brave. "What the hell was that, Sem? And what could a thing like that be doing out here? It's obviously artinever told us there were such things out here." Kritsky was calm. "We don't know that there is anything out there. Art. After all, we can't see out with our own eyes -- only through the screen and Skip's circuits between the outside world and the screen. That camp music is pretty improbable, too. I don't mean just that it's stylistically jokey in a knowing way. I mean is it likely that some alien artifact would be able to tune into the ship's sound system and hit audio frequencies we happen to be able to hear and project some structure into? If you ask me, some bright bastard Earthside has programed old Skip down there to mystify us a little and keep us on the hop -- or maybe, they've been finding our work a little dull and this dose of mystification is meant to make copy for you and provide food for thought for me. After all, we could use it." H undreds of thousands of words of copy, thousands of hours of apologetic philosophizing and many thousands of hands of Black Lady later -- when the whispering bulk of the Olaf Stapledon was nearing rendezvous with the Saturn -- Skip had more news. "One," he said smoothly, "the able within extreme radar fange module are detectable on the monitors. Two," he went on, "the rectangular object noted earlier is module ought to be, or some object very like..." Skip's report was drowned by the whining and whanging of horror-movie music on the. sound system. This lasted for a couple of minutes, faded as before, and Skip resumed his report: "I am now receiving a radio message on the hydrogea wavelength, square-wave modulated CW signal, reminiscent of code or plain language letter group transmission in standard teleprinter code. There are some puzzling features: notably, there are no gaps in the transmission or frequently repeated spacing signals. On the assumption that the transmission is in teleprinter coded Interanglian alphabet, the content is an uninterrupted sequence of capr ital letters, the sequence repeating exactly over and over again. This is in no language known to me. I will display this sequence on the screen." At once a block of lines of capital letters, set solid, without any sign of word-spacing, leaped into view on the screen. Kritsky whistled. "I know what that is. Did you ever see a facsimile reproduction of an ancient manuscript copy in Latin? That's just how they used to write in those days, set solid, leaving you to pick out the words for yourself. Get me my Latin dictionary, would you?" Carson got him the big Latin dictionary. After a few silent minutes spent scribbling, scratching out and scribbling again, Kritsky nodded emphatically. "Got it. It's in Latin all right, a very simple dog-Latin, like the soldiers' Latin that turned into Spanish, French, and all the other Romance languages. In a free translation, it says: If this isn't some joke of Skip's or something some Earthside bastard has programed into him, it's not too hard to see what's happened to fiscated as a warning or punishment. I don't know if there's copy in that but there's certainly food for thought." Skip broke in again, saying: "I have been receiving and storing a further repeated series of sequences. I will now display the second sequence." The block of letters on the screen was replaced by a different block. After a few more moments spent scribbling and scratching, Kritsky raised his head again, saying with a look of dawning alarm: "It goes on: and finishes up with a mess of heliocentric coordinates -- " Skip broke in on him, saying, "The coordinates are of a point in space, not far from the prominent star S-Doradus." Carson shook his head. "It'll be a long time before we can get out there. What the hell are we going to do in all that time? Maybe we should all concentrate on -- " Skip interrupted again in his magisterial Skipper manner (with an echo-effect delay in circuit, so that he boomed as if he were pulpited in a cathedral with a wicked echo). "It is glaringly clear to me," he intoned, "that Man's revealed and manifest destiny must be to..." Carson and Kritsky had just time for one horrified look at each other before the total destruct circuits of the SK.# cut in and the Olaf Stapledon became a plume of fumes falling between the stars, if T hings happen to people. You read about them all the time. They hear from their dead grandmothers. Poltergeists heckle them. They get kidnapped for rides on flying saucers. You know. The silly season is always here. So you don't have to believe what happens here, either. But some pretty good men do. It's in the records of the Government Plant Research Division at Beltsville. And, particularly, it's got a nice fat folder in the files of the None of these records are complete. So this isn't a complete acwell blown, but do they have to come that way? Lately I've been thinking. Hard. And I've got something to think about. See if you don't think so. Not many men have put one may have had help, but we did it. By we I mean my old friend JimJam and I. We don't think we're criminals, but that could turn out to be a matter of opinion. Anyhow, what we did I'm pretty sure we'd do again, given the chance. And we see nothing wrong with what we still intend to do. Back last April, my violet pollinating was clicking along pretty good. Yes, I said violet pollinating. It's a hobby, like poker if you're an editor, or golf and tennis if you're a Vice President. Just as much fun, just as hard to do, takes just as many brains and you come out about the same. You have good days and bad. The moves, strokes or what you will are just a little more long-term. My experiments were harmless and they kept me off the street. The wife couldn't see that there was much difference -- but that's another kind of story. Mostly what I was doing was simple Burbank stuff, watching for variants, selfing some and crossing others, guessing at what I ought to get and second-guessing when I didn't get it. Violets are pretty erratic, anyhow. Lately I'd been trying another line, the logical next step, I suppose. I'd rigged up an old diathermy machine to where I could get some pretty critical wave-lengths and now and then I'd pick a plant, goose it with a few roentgens and sit back and wait to see what the next generation would be like. And I hasten to say that that sitting back is purely a figure of speech. Just as sure as raising a baby is mostly heating baby food and washing baby pants, raising plants from seed is mixing soil, germinating seed, pricking out, transplanting, feeding, transplanting again -- and records, records and more records. I had from five to ten thousand plants in my greenhouse all the time. You can see how much time I had left over to make a living. Did you ever see a red violet? A real good red, a scarlet, a crimson or a vermilion? Neither did I, but I hope to. If Old Mother Nature doesn't juggle the genes around I'll do it with controlled radiation. Between us, we can't miss. Already I've got violets three feet tall, with leaves like a baby elephant's ear. I've got them so tiny you have to look at the blossom details with a hand lens. And what's the point? If I do get a violet with crimson blossoms -- or one that can bark like a dog, for that matter -- so what? Well, if you have to ask, there's no good way I can explain it to you. But as atomic experiments continue, and the level of radioactivity in the air rises, maybe you'll be interested in what I've learned when your kids start being born with two heads. You won't like that, even if they can yodel and spit at the same time. But this yarn isn't about your kids or my violets. It's about my friend Jim-Jam, and his little brush have a greenhouse, but he's my kind of crackpot, right on. He's a likeable little guy, dried-up as a crackling, with pale, twinkling blue eyes and more bounce than I have at half his age. He's about the, only person I know I can exchange ideas with and, for a wonder, his wife likes my wife and I could never tell you why. Jim-Jam has suggested that maybe it's because, way down, neither one of them likes us very much. They can't figure out how we tick. the same thing for him that my greenhouse does for me, except that he doesn't fool around with the tricky energies. In that field he theorizes and I steal his ideas and try them out. They're good, as you'd expect, because Professor James Jameson is Professor of Plant Genetics at the local skullmill. The kids call him Jim-Jam behind his back, I do it to his face and he couldn't care less in either case. To him a name is just a handle.' Well, this thing is slow getting started, so let's jump into it. You've read the publicity. This is what the newsboys missed. It was a nice morning last April, as I said, and I was about ready to go to work. I was tying my tie when the phone rang. Myra answered it, and when she came back with a sour look, I knew the caller was Jim-Jam. "No sales bonus this month," she said gloomily. "When he calls you in the morning, that means you have to go look. A new rose bloomed during the night!" "Roses won't be blooming to amount to anything for a month," I said. "Well, sunflowers, then!" Myra went back to her coffee in the breakfast nook. She's never very happy in the morning and can't see why anyone else should be. I went to the phone. "Tug, get over here." Myra knows her Jim-Jam. "I think I've got something in your line." "Not -- " I let my voice catch. "Not a red violet. Doc?" "Nothing to do with violets. I want you to see. Get over here!" "Look, Doc," I raised my voice, so Myra could hear without straining her ear, "I got a date to sell some cars, so my wife can grow fat in comfort. Can't it wait until this evening?" "You're a partner, aren't you? They can't fire you. Myra's fat enough now. Get over here." "Okay, Doc," I said. "Be there in ten minutes." Of course Myra couldn't hear what he said, but she knew well enough. She wouldn't kiss me goodbye. I found Jim-Jam over by his row of compost heaps, his white hair flopping over his eyes as he shoveled compost like a coolie. "Something in my line, I think you said. Doc?" We never say, "Good morning," or, "Hi," or, "Kiss my foot," when we meet. We just pick up the talk wherever we left off last time, whether it's been ten minutes or a week. "I think so." The skinny little man turned compost for a couple minutes more. "Push that wheelbarrow over here, will you Tug? I want to give my lily beds a couple of shots of this and I've got a ten o'clock lecture." "And I," I said, "ought to be demonstrating our Deluxe Economy Model to Old Man Barnes this minute. If I don't get cracking he's going to wiggle off the hook. And I could use that seven hundred profit." But I pushed the wheelbarrow. The professor handed me the shovel, scraped the hair out of his eyes, wagged his head at me and grinned. "Impatient, eh? Takes a man three-fourths of his life to learn how to live and then he's too old to enjoy it. Fill that up, will you? I need a blow." I shoveled it full, tossed the shovel on top and got between the barrow handles. "Where to?" I said. Little he cared if I'd just shined my shoes. You wouldn't believe one little man could keep all the beds and rows and borders going that he has in that half acre. Everything neat as a pin, and the color, even in April, hits you in the eye. "Wait a minute!" Jim-Jam stopped by a big square bed, and I nearly piled the wheelbarrow into him. "What do you think of these?" I took a look. I knew I couldn't hurry him. The bed was a new one, planted in a block pattern, and the seedlings were up a couple of inches or so. They were little gray, leathery looking things. I pretended to be interested. "What are they. Doc?" "Don't you know? Look close!" I looked. They were still dulllooking little plants to me, with four flat little leaf-like outgrowths making a rough cross, a growing point in the middle. Come to think of it, those leaves looked like cotyledons, but I knew they couldn't be. "Never saw 'em before," I said. "Zinnias." The professor chortled. "You claim to be a greenhouse man and don't recognize the commonest garden plants." "Now wait a minute." I forgot about my newly creased suit, and got down on my knees beside the bed. "Zinnias, my eye! These things have four cotyledons. They aren't gymnosperms. Plants like these don't have four cotyledons." I slid a finger under one of the little plants and it promptly wilted. Honest, it lay flat on the ground, limp as a piece of rag. I looked at Jim-Jam. His eyes were wide. "Tug," he said softly, "that's new. They never did that before." "Doc," I said impatiently, "quit stalling. What are these things?" "Zinnias." The professor was stubborn. "Early Flame GiantFlowered Zinnias. New this year. Fifty cents a package. Forty seeds. Planted them last week -- and I know a zinnia seed by now, I should think." "If those are zinnias Tm a dinosaur," I said. "That could be," said Jim-Jam. "But zinnias I planted and those I got.Q.E.D." The plant I had touched was beginning to straighten up. I touched another one and it flopped like the first. I touched half a dozen. They all behaved alike. I got up and dusted my knees. "Zinnias!" I said, and I made it strong. "What did you call me over here for. Doc?" Jim-Jam stood staring at the bed, his white hair over one eye, his underlip stuck out like a little kid. You could almost see him think, and I knew than he wasn't ribbing me. "Tug," he said, "suppose all those seeds came from one plant. Suppose that plant had, somehow, had a controlled, uniform dose of radiation. Wouldn't the embryos in all the developing seeds be affected alike?" "Now, Doc," I reproved him. "You know better than that. Forty uniform mutations, as far from the parental type as those things? Uh-uh. The odds against it would him. "Let's face it, Doc. You made a boo-boo. You got novelty plants by mistake, you didn't look too close when you planted, and so you get a surprise when what you planted comes up. Why don't you ask the seed company? I'll bet they can tell you what you've got." The professor shook his head and his white mane flopped. "No sir, I know what I planted. I'll have no patent hounds from seed companies snooping in here. Those plants are different. As you said, plants like those don't have four cotyledons." He started to say something more, thought better of it, stuck out his lip instead. A thought hit me. "These," I said, "these are what you called me over to see?" "You catch on," the professor said. "Not quickly, but you do catch on." Man Barnes bought the Economy Model and that I banked my seven hundred. But I can't. The old buzzard didn't like waiting for an hour, so he went across town and paid more money for a rival crate that'll collapse in his driveway in a year. People would rather have service than a solid product. Myra has her own intelligence channels and she knew about the Barnes business by the time I did. Result, when I came home the dinner was cold, what there was of it, and the atmosphere was colder. I wallowed around in the ice for a while, but finally I gave up and went out to the greenhouse. I worked on records until after midnight. For the next week I tended to business, made a couple of good sales and Myra began to thaw a little. That doesn't mean she liked the greenhouse any better. She didn't. I'm pretty sure she never will. I'm one man who never can square himself by sending his wife flowers. Even bring her an orchid and she has hysterics. So I bring her candy, which she loves, and which makes her fat. I didn't even call JimJam the whole week. But I thought some about his little plants. The sensitive-plant, a wilting mutation, doesn't happen very often. I'd never had a hint of that sort of thing in my violets. The more I thought about it, the surer I became that the professor had planted a tropical curiosity by mistake. Every specialization was too well fixed for it to be any other way. Saturday Myra called the office and left word for me to go directly to the Jameson home after work. Seems we were having dinner with them. It was a break, because I didn't want another rough weekend, but I knew I had to see those plants again pretty soon. I got there about six. Myra and Helen Jameson, being sister greenhouse and garden widows, got along better than you would believe. Helen was whitehaired, but trim and slim, and she bounced around like Jim-Jam. They were all working on second cocktails by the time I drove up. It was the pleasantest home atmosphere I'd known for quite some days. Myra kissed me like she hadn't been giving me the deep freeze all week, Helen took my hat, shook my hand, patted my cheek and Jim-Jam slipped me a glass. As soon as we decently could, he and I walked out on the lawn, circled the house and from there it was only a step to the garden. We still carried our glasses. "How are they. Doc?" I asked. Jim-Jam looked mysterious. He took a swallow from his glass as he walked. "Wait and see," he said. A week is a long time in the life of a new seedling. It had certainly done things to these. They had changed completely. "Still think they are zinnia mutants?" I could see the stubbornness flow into Jim-Jam's face. "I planted zinnia seeds." I got down on my knees to look closely. It's a habit from the greenhouse, I suppose. There the plants are on the bench and you can get closer without so much exercise. "Red and blue and yellow-leaved zinnias," I said. "They look like baby century plants that fell in the paint bucket." "Yeah," the professor admitted. "Striped paint. Go on, touch one." I did, and the long pointed leaves promptly rolled up from the tips, so that the stem branches were covered with little round bundles, like curlers on a debutante's noggin. I never saw anything like it. And the plants around the one I touched seemed to pick up the disturbance -- they rolled up their leaves in turn. In twenty seconds the whole bed looked like a queer frost had struck it. Not a plant had a leaf extended. Jim-Jam clinked the ice in his glass. "Well?" he said. "Doc," I said, "these things give I'd pull 'em up, throw 'em away and try to forget 'em." He didn't answer, so I looked up at him. His face had a funny look. "I did try to thin them," he said. "It's quite an experience. Go ahead, pull one up." in me. But Jim-Jam never tells anybody anything. He makes them find out. So I picked out a scrawny little specimen crowded by neighbors, gripped it at the ground level and pulled. It came out all right. But it scared me all the same. Its leaves were already rolled into tight packets, and when I held it up it literally shuddered up and down its stem and its naked rootlets writhed and twisted like worms. I didn't know what to do, so I just held on and stared at it. Then the plant made up my mind for me. The squirming root mass suddenly subsided, the leaves unrolled and the whole plant collapsed. I scratched a hole at the edge of the bed, tucked in the roots and replanted it before I realized what I was doing. I heard JimJam's dry chuckle behind my shoulder. "I did the same thing," he said. "Too late, though. When the roots stop moving, they're dead." My plant lay limp on the ground, a flabby thing, its colors fading to a dull gray-brown. JimJam picked it up and put it into an envelope. "Correspondent of mine down at Beltsville is making histological studies," he said. "He's excited. He says the tissues don't make sense." I dusted my knees and looked distastefully at the fingers that had just committed murder. "Neither do the plants," I said. Helen had good solid food such as I hadn't been used to recently. Rare roast beef and steaming white potatoes and fresh asparagus spears; stuff like that. I ought to have made a pig of myself, but I didn't. I couldn't forget that squirming little plant and the sudden, strange way it died. I kept expecting each asparagus tip to wiggle when I ate it. After that, Myra or no Myra, I kept in touch. If the professor didn't give me a ring before I went to work, I called hifn. And I sneaked by for a look every chance I got. Jim-Jam developed a habit of jeering at the plants and making wise-cracks about every change, so I knew they were bothering him plenty. He had reason. During the next week the plants grew almost two feet tall, shed all the hair on their leaves except along the midribs -- and learned to dance. It's the truth. I don't mean they started capering up the walk. They swayed. Each plant had its own rhythm, but on still days, when the sun was hot on the bed, the whole layout would do a Disney, all swaying together. You didn't believe it, and when you came close to the bed, they quit. The ones nearest you would begin to roll up their leaves, slowly now, and you almost got the impression they were sulking. They were crowding the bed but Jim-Jam did no more thinning. I noticed, though, that nothing else grew among what we by now called the rainbow plants. I quizzed the professor about that, because it was the best-kept bed in the garden. "I've never weeded it," Jim-Jam said. "All the beds about require plenty of attention -- but not that one. Chickweed sneaks in everywhere, overnight, but not into the rainbow bed. I suppose," he added reflectively, watching me out of the corner of his eye, "they eat everything else." I reacted, partly because I knew he wanted me to. "Now, Doc, you know that's silly. Those things aren't predators. They've got no structures for it." "Maybe," the professor said, "they poison the soil." "Take samples," I suggested, "and have 'em analyzed. That should be easy." So we did that, sampling between the plants and close under the roots, taking from the top inch and from six inches down. The college chemists ran the tests and we also sent samples to the Beltsville boys. The results were what you would expect. Nothing unusual, nothing foreign. But before we got the reports we knew the answer to the weedless bed problem. It was simple. The rainbow plants were doing their own weeding. Because the plants wouldn't show activity when he was nearby, the professor watched them from a distance with a field glass. He noticed that there was a violent swaying session every morning just after sunrise. It didn't last fifteen minutes, but that was the answer. Watching, he saw a plant vary its swaying motion by bending the tip of a sharp-pointed leaf, thrusting it underground and flipping it sharply. A small wedge of earth flew. Then he saw another plant do it, -- and another. All he had to do was to pick up the gouged-out bits of earth. Each had a seedling in it, just germinated. Lamb's quarter, chickweed, pigweed, purslane -- all the pests that plagued the rest of the garden. The rainbow plants apparently could detect them as soon as they germinated and -- Geronimo! out they came. U P TO this point nobody but JimJam and me had heard of the plants. The professor gardened because he liked it. He hated people rubber-necking around his flowers. Even the local garden club never got in but once. And they made such a mess he never invited them again. The rainbow plants, though, made their own publicity. Pretty soon they were too big to hide and the bright, raw colors of their two-foot leaves, four inches wide and dagger-pointed on the tips, fairly made a glare in their part of the garden. Those leaves had fuzzy blue and red hair along midrib and veins and keen thin margins, smooth as wax. Knife-like they were and like knives the plants began to use them -- on each other. The plants were crammed like cabbages into the bed, crowding each other until they couldn't sway. That's when they began to fight -- and when the newsboys began to get into Jim-Jam's hair. From a distance anyone could see an occasional convulsive movement in the bed as a plant lashed at another which touched it. Helen saw it and told Myra and Myra let it get around pretty generally. One reporter came. Jim-Jam threw him out. Now anybody knows that's no way to get rid of the press. They thrive on treatment like that. This one wrote a little teaser story for the evening paper and was back the next day with another reporter and a photographer. The professor wouldn't allow them on the place. The photographer climbed a tree and took telephoto pictures. In halftone they didn't show up too well, but the two reporters got their heads together on a story about the professor's mysteriousexperiments with jungle plants that he was reputed to feed on raw meat and bish you ever read -- but to sue the paper Jim-Jam would have had to tell the story straight. And that he wouldn't do. He was fit to be tied. "A man has a right to privacy," he raged to me, his face pink as a kid's under that mop of white hair. "I tell you. Tug, I won't stand for this badgering. I'll ask for police protection." We were in his living room, nipping down a quick one before I went home for dinner. "Protection against what?" I asked. "Nobody's stolen anything. They haven't even trampled your garden." "But I'm a curiosity," Jim-Jam said bitterly. "I'm the Mad Scientist because of a couple of fool newspaper stories. You wouldn't think I'd taught this town's young for thirty-five years!" "Well," I said, reasonably, I thought, "you can't blame people for being curious." "I can," Jim-Jam said, "and I will. Why, dammit, I'm not even responsible for the condemned plants. I don't know how they got like that. But who would believe me?" "Who would believe you'd drink what you have in your hand?" I asked. Doc often likes three fingers of Irish whiskey in half a glass of lime juice. He drinks it warm, no ice. He took a swallow now and rolled it over his tongue. "What I drink is my own affair," he said heatedly. "It's my liver. And the things that grow in my garden are my own affairs, so long as they stay there. And they will." "Are you sure? They've done everything but leave. Peskiest zinnias I ever did see." Jim-Jam's topknot went down suddenly as his sense of humor took over. The extra pink went out of his face and he was grinning as he turned away from the window. "All right," he said, "so they're not zinnias. But they are something rare and strange, something completely new, as near as I can tell." He grew thoughtful and his eyes narrowed. "Okay, I'll take the wraps off. I'll let the bars down. I'll -- what else do you do when you let everybody in on something that's none of their business?" I grinned, too, but I didn't try to supply any more cliches. Words aren't my business. He was serious, though, so I said, "If you're going to do it, do it big. Doc. Put a fence around the bed and get the chief to put a guard there during visiting hours. Only let a few people come at a time and make parents hold their children's little hands. If they're going to expect something unusual, don't discourage them. If you're a Mad Scientist, be the maddest one on your block." The old boy strolled across the room and sat down in his easy chair. He held up his glass to the light, took a sip, and looked at me over the glass rim. I could be wrong but I think it was an admiring look. "Tug," he said, "I forget that you deal with the unselected masses. You're right, of course. I'll do it, fence and all!" "Especially the fence," I said. "Don't forget the hoe handle." "I haven't," Jim-Jam said soberly. Y OU haven't heard about the hoe handle. As far as I'm concerned it marked a turning point in the way we regarded the rainbow plants. Up to that first incident they were big colorful curiosities, plants from seeds of unknown source that Doc had planted by accident, plants of strange and peculiar habit but plants, just the same. After, I wasn't so sure. I still am not. It had happened the week before. By then the biggest plants were nearly five feet tall. They had to hold those big knife-like leaves almost straight up to keep from touching the plants around them. And when one plant did tick another, both slashed out with one or more leaves. Make no mistake about it, those leaves cut. Every plant looked like a man had been working on it with an axe, and most leaves were as tattered as the ears of a traveling boy dog. Each plant still had its bright unearthly colors, but the entire bed looked like it had just cOme through a heavy hailstorm. We didn't know, though, that they ever hit anything but each other. When we came near they always sulked and rolled up their leaves. At least the closest ones did. As I look back on it now, I realize that they were less and less shy as the days passed. About the hoe handle: one plant was showing what looked like the beginning of a flower bud in a leaf axil and I pointed it out to Doc that morning. I pointed with the handle of the hoe I was carrying -- and I'll always be glad it wasn't a finger. The plant moved faster than I'd ever seen one move. The leaf slashed like a saber and knocked the hoe spinning. I stood there with a silly look on my face, staring at the thing. Doc picked up the hoe. The handle had a deep cut in it. "From now on, we go around those things," Jim-Jam said -- but he didn't look too surprised. So the reporters got in after all. I think they were a little disappointed, even if the rainbow plants in color pix were something you'd hardly believe. But when crowds of people were around they wouldn't do anything, wouldn't even move. And the reporters, I imagine, had begun to believe their own stories. The fence was important, though. The plants were near their time of blossoming and we wondered what new antics would go along with the flowers. We found out. No dogs' den ever had a battle for survival like the one that went on inside that fence. All the action occured at night, so nobody saw it, but it really happened. The day after the fence was complete Jim-Jam found the first dead plant plastered against it. It was corpse-gray and collapsed, just like the little one I had pulled up weeks before. The plants beside it must have ripped it up and thrown it bodily out of the bed. Doc fished it out with a pruning hook, carefully, you can bet, and shipped the whole carcass off to , Beltsville. It brought a government gardener, complete with Ph. D., notebooks, cameras and microscopes, practically by return mail. But by the time he got there the plants had thrown out three more of their fellows. I was there when Doc hooked out number four. The Beltsville boy, a sandy-haired stringbean who looked like he smelled something ungood, plainly didn't believe what he saw. "I've dissected the previous specimens. Doctor," he said. "As I told you before, the morphology is incredible; the cell structure completely new. But I can't believe that the "plants," if that's what they are, can dig each other up." "Give him the pruning hook. Doc," I suggested. "After all, he's your guest. Let him poke one." Jim-Jam did, and he did, and the plant converted him then and there. The plant he punched was a big six-footer, with keen, sleek leaves that were mostly blue, with long streaks of bright crimson lying along the veins. Two of those leaves whistled downward. One of them smashed itself on the steel hook, but the other caught the thin wood handle at just the right angle and sheared through it as smoothly as a machete could have done. The pruning hook dropped to the ground between the plants. "Like to go in and get it?" JimJam asked. T he new man looked at the pole in his hand, minus hook, and with the pull wire dangling. Then he looked at Jim-Jam and me. We looked back and he was the better sight. He was scared pea green. He backed away, slowly turning so pate I was afraid he was going to faint. "Can they get out?" he asked. We could hardly hear him. "They're plants. Doctor," JimJam said. "They have roots in the ground. They can't move about." The botanist stopped when he was twenty feet from the fence. He dug out a cigarette, but his hand shook so he couldn't light it. "Fantastic!" he muttered. "Doctor, those things are murderous." It took two highballs to put some spunk back into him, and even they didn't make him too brave. All the time he stayed in our town, and it was close to three weeks, he never went near the bed again. He sat on Doc's terrace and watched with a field glass, and when the plants would put on a flurry he'd sweat and have to have another drink. But he dissected the carcasses, made his reports and, since after the first day or two he bought his own liquor, Doc tolerated him. There were plenty of carcasses. After the first flower buds showed it was plain murder inside that fence. For the next week the Beltsville boy -- Wallace, his name was; no kin to anybody we know -- had from two to five dead plants to work on. Jim-Jam was afraid they'd all be killed off. He was close to right. At the end of the week only two were left, and the bed was as neatly cultivated as if Doc had gone over it with that little four-fingered cultivator he always brags about. A couple of days later he called me early. You would have thought his house was on fire. "Tug, get over here! Somebody sober besides me has got to see this!" "What -- " I began, but he cut me off. "Don't argue, dammit! And don't fool around dressing -- come in your shirt-tail, but move! This won't go on all day." The receiver clicked, or slammed, rather, and there I stood with my teeth in my mouth. I had no choice. I roared across town without hat or coat and still wearing my bedroom slippers. I jumped out of the car and swished around the house to the terrace. Doc was there, with a pair of binoculars. He had a pair for me and he didn't say a word; just held them out. The plants had bloomed. With the eight-power glass I could see them like they were at arm's length, and I didn't believe it. I lowered the glass and looked at Jim-Jam. "That's silly," I said. "The flowers are entirely different." Jim-Jam stopped me with a wave of his hand. "Watch," he commanded. So I watched. One plant had erupted foot-long sprays of flaming red trumpets; the other had wide petaled single blossoms of deep skyblue. The plants were swaying, every wicked-looking leaf keeping time to waltz music we couldn't hear, every flower stalk undulating gently back and forth, and the very flowers themselves opening and closing as if they were mouths. And there wasn't even a breeze. Then I saw it. One of the blue flowers, stretching out on its long snake-like stem, fitted itself neatly over the mouth of a red trumpet and clung there a moment. Then it swung away. And all the while the dance never stopped. we saw that happen time after time. The blue flowers always seemed to be the aggressors, and, since there were fewer of them, they were busy. "I'd give a pretty," Jim-Jam said, "to see what goes on when they touch like that." "Mutual pollination?" I guessed. "Doc, let's go flower picking." Jim-Jam looked at me with a half grin. His white hair was flopped over one eye, his chin and jaws were covered with white stubble. He looked like a cross between a middle-aged pixie and a goat. "Think you can outrun them?" he jeered. "Especially in your bedroom slippers?" Then his pale eyes squinted in thought. "We might do it with a pruning hook and an apple picker." We got one of each and wrapped the long wooden handles with wire. That way we figured they might be able to take the beating. We could have saved ourselves the trouble. When we went near the fence the plants acted like they had when they were small. They cringed away from us and their leaves drooped. I poked the hook at a cluster of red flowers and the plant overlapped its leaves tightly against its stalk, with the blossoms covered. I had to pry away the leaves to snip off the cluster, and when I did the plant shuddered all over. It was like taking a baby from its mother. The blue-flowered plant behaved exactly the same, but I nipped off a couple of blossoms. And by the time we got them back to the house the reds weren't red and the blues weren't blue. They had all turned the cadaver-like, fishbelly gray that the dead plants always were. But the structures were there. My lucky guess about mutual pollination was probabjj right. Each flower was perfect, with pistils and stamens. The pollen was well developed -- and definitely different in the two kinds of flowers. Wallace staggered in about nine o'clock. We turned what was left of the specimens over to him, and they shocked him sober. His report back to Beltsville this time really got results. The next plane from Washington brought two nice young men with snapbrim hats and brown raincoats and credentials that proved that they were exactly what they looked like they were: agents from Mr. Hoodentally, couldn't take it any more. He left after that last report. He never came back. "If your plants make seed and they blow around the country, they can be a menace to public safety," the young G-men told Jim-Jam. "We're detailed to watch, in the public interest, until all seeds are collected and disposed of under government supervision. We hope you understand and will cooperate." Naturally the old man got hopping mad and naturally he blew his stack. "Watch and be damned!" he roared at the G-boys. "Go out and sit on the fence, where you can see better! And," he added as he banged back into the house, "I hope they bat your ears off!" stakeout but I'll give odds that these were the first two agents ever detailed to watch a flower bed. But watch it they did, in eighthour shifts around the clock. Doc got over his miff in a day or so and let 'em sit on the terrace and Helen woyld bring the night man coffee; little things like that. We all got to know each other pretty well. They were good boys. The rainbow plants set their fruit -- and the fruits were not alike. The blue-flowered plant produced what looked like oversized lemons, with leathery rinds and color that progressed from a normal green to a rich orange yellow. On the red-flowered plant the fruits were double, elongate, with a hard shell covered with a loose brown chaff. tember. No wonder public enemies get discouraged. The fruits on each plant hung plump and almost mature, and we all knew that whatever was going to happen was just about due. We had collected unripe fruits under government supervision, so we knew that the lemons had several large, hard, bullet-like seeds; that the seeds in the hard-shelled fruits were small and flat, with feathery seedcoats. How those seeds were going to be disseminated was the subject of some powerful debates on the professor's terrace. They always ended the same way, with "When they drop their seed," he told them, "you won't be able to do a thing about it. Those lemons may fire bullets ten miles away. The hard fruits may explode like hand grenades. How'll you stop 'em?" It was a poser, but one day the G-boys came up with the answer. "Doctor," one of them asked, "would you say the fruits are ripe? And if that is so, are the seeds mature?" I remember how Jim-Jam looked that afternoon. He was sitting on the flagstone floor of the terrace, resting his back against a post. He was working on his third three fingers of Irish and lime juice, and his eyes had a loose, relaxed, wicked twinkle. He reminded me of some old reprobate of a beachcomber, leaning against the ribs of a half-buried wreck. The grin on his stubbly face was a knowing grin. "Yes, to both questions," he said and rolled a spot of the Irish over his tongue. "Then," the other G-boy said, "we've got our orders. We'll harvest the whole crop -- right now." They had left nothing to chance. They had brought a couple of pruning hooks and heavy gloves. They even had plastic bags to store the fruit in. Jim-Jam must have expected something of the sort. I know I had. Anyway, he made no protest and of course I knew why. He had done his harvesting the day before. "These boys are smart. Tug," he had told me, "and they're following orders. Whatever the orders are, there's nothing I can do about them. But those plants are mine. Maybe I can't keep the government from taking them over, but I'm going to have some seed." And while Helen had coaxed the guard into the house for some ice cream he had collected two fruits of each sort. They were in my greenhouse refrigerator that minute. "They're smart boys," I remember him repeating, "but I don't think they've counted the fruits." rain while the G-men got their harvesting outfit together and as we went down the garden path it turned into quite a shower. We ducked back into the entranceway by the terrace and watched while the shower became a dashing downpour. The sky became dark overhead. Sharp gusts of wind smacked sheets of water into the entranceway, so we went into the living room and watched from the windows. Lightning crackled and thunder rumbled as it often does in early fall storms. It only lasted a few minutes. We went out again and the sky was almost clear. Water ran down the garden paths. The shrubbery dripped. Everything had a cool fresh smell. We were at the fence of the rainbow plant bed before we actually looked at them. One look was enough, but it took time to believe it. The plants lay collapsed and fish-belly gray. At least Doc and I didn't have to be told that they were as dead as stones. I climbed the fence and walked on ground where no man had walked since spring. I lifted the flabby, cadaver-colored leaves and let them drop again. Twenty minutes earlier those plants had been vital, bright with color, wickedly active and heavy with fruit. Now they were dead and there wasn't a sign of a fruit on either of them. "Well, boys," Jim-Jam said, "they beat you. I couldn't tell you how they would do it -- but I thought they would." We went back along the walk to the house, leaving the plants where checkmate like men. One of them closed the book with only one last question. "Doctor, would you have any idea what became of those fruits?" "Not the foggiest," Jim-Jam said gravely. "Maybe they were planted there by design and the planters came back for the harvest. Maybe that wasn't a natural rain. It came at a mighty handy time. I'll bet my weeding hoe that two blocks from here it didn't even lay the dust. Ask the newspaper boys. Their imaginations are better than mine." knows. In fact, you know a little more. You know about the seeds Doc has, carefully tucked away and waiting for spring. So you might as, well know the rest of it. I swiped a couple of fruits, too, not only from under the noses of as well. I've been dosing the seeds with controlled radiation, using intensities and times of exposure that have always given me maximum results with the violets. I've built a heavy cage in one corner of the greenhouse and made a seedbed from soil from Doc's garden. In March I'm going to do a little planting of my own. I may regret it. Myra would jaw my ear off if she knew about it. But I can't stay out of it. And no matter what I do. I'm convinced that this isn't the end of it. Something funny is definitely going on. Next time a little more may happen. I hope I'm there but it may not happen to Jim-Jam or to me. It may happen to you. you know. So sit tight -- but stay loose! L et us speak of the classics. iThe members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, urged by Robert Silverberg, have selected a list of all-time greatest sf stories, compiled in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (edited by Robert Silverberg, Doubleday, #), a #-page book containing # stories -- with additional volumes to come, one assumes. There is one copyright date more recent than # (#, for Roger Zelazny's A Rose for Ecclesiastes). There are three stories from the #s -- A Martian Odyssey, Twilight, and Helen O'Loy. (Weinbaum, Campbell, del Rey -- as if you didn't know). The rest -- twenty-two of the # greatest sf short stories and novelettes ever written by anybody membership -- are from the #s and #s. Astonishing! Where is the fabled, warblighted "Golden Age" of the late #s? Represented by Helen O'Loy, the Weinbaum and the Campbell are from another era. But, surely, you'd think this volume can't possibly be omitting such classics as The Roads Must Roll, Microcosmic God, Nightfall, and The Weapon Shop? They're in -- from the #s. So are Mimsy Were the Borogoves, First Contact, Scanners Live in Vain, and Arena and Huddling Place. All those classics date from the #s... the very time in which John Campbell's fillers and blurbs themselves promised a return to far better things when the "wartime pressures" were off and absent hands returned to the plough. The only absent hand of any eventual significance was that of Cyril Kornbluth, earning a Bronze Star in the Ardennes and the bad heart that would eventually kill him, author of The Little Black Bag, (#), and almost certainly a complete cypher to Campbell in the #s. Clearly, in the minds of today's the "Golden Age" has migrated at least a decade forward in time. What may astonish some is that it hasn't migrated any farther than that. Silverberg's selection process -- constrained by writers' stories competing with themselves -- may have had something to do with it. But one would think that if the New Wave had any real steam up, this book would not in so many ways duplicate not only the content but the tone of Adventures In Time and Space -- which is still the classic sf anthology, and dates from #. Curiouser and curiouser. There are several stories here, from the #s, which are just about the only memorable stories by their particular authors. Not that Jerome Bixby did not come very close very Often, nor that Tom Godwin can't write acceptably, but they to this date remain the men who wrote It's a Good Life! and The Cold Equations, respectively. Then, we have several stories which are outright stunts; venture to say duds -- That Only a Mother, Born of Man and Woman, Mars is Heavent and The Nine placed #th in overall standings, and is Clarke at his best shortstory level, only one cut below his talent as a novelist. But Nine Billion placed eleventh and is therefore exhumed here. This my stomach cannot reconcile with any pretense of a professional appraisal). There's something that seems a little thin about the #s selections, is what I'm trying to say. There are plenty of strong individual entries -- Bag, Coming Attraction, Surface Tension, Flowers for Algernon. But perhaps, although the Golden Age has paged forward a few leaves on the calendar, it's not only not ready to leap into the late #s, it's on shaky footing in the #s. Fantastic! Such a result from such a progressive crew. And, by the way, the book is as advertised -- a basic one-volume library of the short science fiction story. You should have it. You should also leave space beside it. T he classics. Yes. We know we have arrived, for the stories of our youth are now so perfectly embalmed that the students have been coming to visit them. They sent me late The Shattered Ring, subtitled "Science Fiction and the Quest for Meaning," by Lois and Stephen Rose. (John Knox Press, #). The meaning in question is a religious one. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate an instinctive religious concern on the part of the prominent (usually "classical") sf authors, and to derive a guidance or at least a bon voyage telegram from them. Now, please understand the context of the remarks to follow. I think artists -- all artists -- are closer to the future than anyone else. I even think a rare few have some ability to work with this phenomenon in a meaningful way; a way that results in an exposition of truth. I doubt if science-fictionwriting artists are per se any closer to this phenomenon than any other kind of artist, but on the other hand they are probbaly no farther, and they present a handy population for practical study. And even for hypothetical example. But to study an animal, you must first catch it, then tag it, then follow it, else you'll become rather confused, and your notes will be gibberish. As in: "Modern science fiction can be traced to the guiding spirit of John W. Campbell, who... ushered in... the classic period of science fiction. New talent emerged and developed -- Olaf Stapledon, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Frederik Pohl." What are you going to do about respecting a scholarly study that lumps in two of the very oldest modern science-fiction writers, plus Pohl, (whose reputation and output as a writer were negligible before Gravy Planet with Cyril Kornbluth in Galaxy, #), with Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon and the Dick Wakefield of sf, van Vogt? Nor docs it help establish the Roses' credentials when the most important quality they can ascribe to this falsely homegeneous school is "their creation of a body of literature in which the limits of technology, space and time were greatly expanded. Men travelled to the moon and Mars, but now they also found their way to other space-time complexes." But this isn't so. The focus of the true Campbellian was a narrower, stricter one than that of the science writer. If the Roses had then properly bracketted sonian time with Wells (and with Jack London), they might have done something about perceiving and analyzing a steady anti-totalitarian shift toward a humanism of the individual, as distinguished from a pre-totalitarian humanism of the mass, and it would have made sense to cite The Space Mer Please turn to page #) Copyright # by Robert A. Heinlein When medical science cannot let him live as he wants, yet will not let him die, aged but lusty and extremely wealthy Johann Sebastian Bach Smith sets his financial empire in order and assigns his best friend and legal adviser, Jacob Salomon, the task of securing a warm body into which his brain can be transplanted. The operation proves successful. He recovers to find himself wearing the body of his lovely secretary, Eunice Branca. A dialogue ensues between the brain and the body -- highly revealing to both. Never before have two lives become so strangely and intimately linked. Shock follows shock as Johann Sebastian Bach Smith learns what it means to be a beautiful woman with a zest for life and love -- and Eunice discovers the uses of the power his brain wields. Body and brain team up to make a shambles of a court test of Johann's legal identity and make arrangements, via artificial insemination, for the body to bear the brain's child. A love story? Yes. But one without precedent -- as is the strange composite creature known as "Miss Smith." and Fred locked the car. They escorted her to and into the lift. Joan Eunice looked around. "This must be where it happened." Her driver said, "Eunice, I wish you would change your mind." "Anton, Tom and Hugo should have driven me today, but I was afraid the poor dears would get upset when they saw the inside of this lift. I thought you and Fred could stand it. Fred, are you nervous?" "You know damn well I am, Eunice." "Over what? She entered this life i, u alone. I've got you two with me." "Well... you're a stubborn one. I don't know what Ski is going to do but I am going to wait outside the door until you come out." (Eunice, what do you do with stubborn men?) (It's hard, twin, especially when they love you. You had best use female jiujitsu -- let them have their own way until it turns out its your way.) (I'll try.) "Fred, Eunice lived here for years. Utterly safe... except for one mistake. I have the radio link and I promise you both, solemnly, that I won't stir outside Joe's door until I know you're waiting." When medical science cannot let him live as he wants, yet will not let him die, aged but lusty and extremely wealthy Johann Sebastian Bach Smith sets his financial empire in order and assigns his best friend and legal adviser, Jacob Salomon, the task of securing a warm body into which his brain can be transplanted. The operation proves successful. He recovers to find himself wearing the body of his lovely secretary, Eunice Branca. A dialogue ensues between the brain and the body -- highly revealing to both. Never before have two lives become so strangely and intimately linked. Shock follows shock as Johann Sebastian Bach Smith learns what it means to be a beautiful woman with a zest for life and love -- and Eunice discovers the uses of the power his brain wields. Body and brain team up to make a shambles of a court test of Johann's legal identity and make arrangements, via artificial insemination, for the body to bear the brain's child. A love story? Yes. But one without precedent -- as is the strange composite creature known as "Miss Smith." "Well... you're a stubborn and Fred locked the car. They ing to do but  am going to wait escorted her to and into the lift, outside the door until you come Joan Eunice looked around. "This out." (Eunice, what do you do with must be where it happened." stubborn men?) (It's hard, twin. Her driver said, "Eunice, I wish especially when they love you. you would change your mind." You had best use female "Anton, Tom and Hugo should jiujitsu -- let them have their own have driven me today, but I was way until it turns out its your afraid the poor dears would get upway.) (I'll try.) set when they saw the inside of this "Fred, Eunice lived here for lift. I thought you and Fred could years. Utterly safe... except for stand it. Fred, are you nervous?" one mistake. I have the radio link "You know damn well I am, and I promise you both, solemnly, Eunice." that I won't stir outside Joe's door "Over what? She entered this life until I A:joh' you're waiting." "We'll be waiting, all right -- all the time. Right, Ski?" "Right! Eunice, you don't even know Joe Branca still lives here." "But I do. It's just that he didn't pay his phone bill, so they cut him off. Joe's still there, or was at sixteen o'clock yesterday. Look, how does this sound? First, you know that Joe wouldn't hurt me, don't you? Anton?" "Oh, sure. Joe might not want to see you -- but Joe Branca would put a fly outdoors before he would swat it." "Then I'm safe as long as I'm inside with Joe. But you're right, he may not want to see me. He may not let me in. Or I may be inside only minutes. So wait an hour, then go home. I'll call you when I want you to take me home." "Two hours?" suggested Fred. "All right, two hours. But if I don't come home tonight, you are not to come back and buzz Joe's door. You can come back tomorrow at noon and wait an hour, or even two, if that will make you feel better. And again the next day. But I'll stay in Joe Branca's studio a full week if it takes that to make his mind eJsy. Or a month, damn it! Or anything. Boys, I've got to do this; don't make it harder." Anton said glumly, "All right. We'll do it your way." "Am I 'Eunice' now? Or 'Joan Eunice?' " He grudged a smile. "You're Eunice. She would do it." "That's why I must. Look, darlings -- "she put an arm around each of them -- "last night was wonderful... and I'll find a way to manage it again. Perhaps next time Mr. Salomon is away -- you know he fusses over me like a mother hen. But you two do also -- and you must not... except when you're guarding me. Right now I must try to find a way to soothe Joe's soul. But I'll be your playmate another day. Be darlings and kiss me; the lift is about to stop." They did so; she hooked up her veil. They left the lift and headed toward the Branca studio -- Joan found she knew the way, as long as she didn't stop to think. She stopped at the door. "She always kissed you goodbye? Here, with Joe watching?" "Yes." "If he lets me in, kiss me goodby the same way. Just don't stretch it out; he might close the door. Oh, I'm shaky!" (Steady down. Boss. Om Mani Padme Hum. Don't use the button; try our voice on the lock. 'Open Up!' Like that.) "Open up!" Joan said. She unhooked her veil, faced the door. The lock started clicking but the door remained closed. A transparency flashed in the wall: front of the door peep, wondered if Joe was scanning her. (Eunice, will he let us in?) (I don't know. Boss. You shouldn't have come. But you wouldn't listen to Jake... nor to me.) (But I am here. Don't scold me -- help me.) (I'll try. Boss. But I don't know.) Through the door, not as soundproof a her own doors, Joan heard a high voice: "Joe! Joe!" (Who's that?) (Could be anybody, Joe has lots of friends.) The door opened. She saw Joe Branca standing in it. He was dressed in much-worn shorts which had been used repeatedly for wiping paint brushes. His face showed nothing. A girl, a wrapper pulled sketchily around her, looked out from behind him. "See? It's her!" "Gigi -- get back. Hello, Ski. Hi, Fred." "Hi, Joe." Joan tried to keep her voice steady. "Joe, may I come in?" He finally looked at her. "You want to, sure. Come in. Ski. Fred." Joe stood aside. Dabrowski answered for them. "Uh, not this time, Joe. Thanks." "Roz. Other time, any. Welcome. Too, Fred." "Thanks, Joe. See you." The guards turned to leave as Joan started to enter -- she checked herself, remembering that she must do something. "Boys!" Fred kissed her quickly, nervously. Dabrowski did not kiss her; instead he held his mouth to hers and said almost soundlessly, "Eunice, you be good to him. Or, damn. I'll spank you." "Yes, Anton. Let me go." Quickly she turned, went inside past Joe, waited. Slowly he refastened the hand bolts, taking an unnecessarily long time. H e turned and glanced at her, glanced away. "Sit?" "Thank you, Joe." She looked around at the studio clutter, saw two straight chairs at a small table. They seemed to be the only chairs; she went to one of them, waited for him to remove her cloak, realized that he was not going to do so. then took it off and dropped it, sat down. He frowned at her, seemed uncertain, then said, "Coffee? Gigi! Java f' Miss Smith." The girl had been watching from the far end of the room. She tightened her wrapper and went silently to a kitchen unit beyond the table, poured a cup of coffee and prepared to flash it. Joe Branca went back to an easel near the middle of the room, started making tiny strokes on it; Joan saw that it was an almost finished painting of the young woman addressed as "Gigi." (That's a cheat pic. Boss.) (A what?) (Project a photo onto sensitized canvas, then paint over it. Joe does them if someone wants cheesecake, or a cheap portrait, or a pet's picture -- but claims they aren't art.) (Can't see why, Eunice; it's still an original oil painting.) (I can't, either -- but it matters to an artist. Boss, this place is filthy. I'm ashamed of it. That bitch Gigi.) (She lives here, you think?) (I don't know. Boss. Could be Joe's sloppy housekeeping. He likes things clean but won't stop to do it. Only two things interest Joe. Painting... and tail) (Well, he has both, looks like. I see he's kept your Gadabout.) (I'll bet it won't run by now. Joe can't drive.) Gigi fetched coffee, placed it on the table. "Sugar? Isn't any cream." She leaned closer, added in a fierce whisper, "You don't belong here!" Joan answered quietly, "Black is fine. Thank you, Gigi." "Gigi!" "Yes, Joe?" "Throne." The girl turned and faced him. "In front of her?" "Now. Need you." Slowly Gigi obeyed, untying her wrapper as she moved, dropped it as she stepped up onto the throne, felt into pose. Joan did not look, understanding her re-luctance -- not modesty but unwillingness to be naked to an enemy. (But Tm not her enemy, Eunice.) (Told you this would be rhino. Boss.) Joan tried the coffee, found it too hot and too bitter after the delicately fragrant -- and expensive -- high-altitude brew Della prepared. But she resolved to drink it, once it had cooled. She wondered if Joe recognized what she was wearing. La Boutique had reconstructed, at great expense, a costume Eunice Branca had once worn, one in last year's "Half  Half' style, scarlet and jet, with a tiny ruffle skirt joining a left-leg tight to a rightside half sweater. Joan had hired the most expensive bodypaint artist in the city and had rigidly controlled him in reconstructing the design Eunice Branca had worn with it, as nearly as memory and her inner voice could manage. (Eunice, was Joe too upset to notice how we dressed?) (Boss, Joe sees everything. (Then he's gone back to painting not to notice us.) Maybe. But Joe wouldn't stop painting for an H-bomb. That he let us in at all is a blue moon -- in the middle of a painting.) (How long will he paint? All night?) (Not likely. He does that only for a real inspiration. This one's easy.) It did not look easy to Joan. She could see that the artist was working from an exact cartoon, one that looked like a dim photograph of Gigi as she was posed -- but he was working also from his model. Yet he was not following either model or photograph. He was enhancing, exaggerating, simplifying, making flesh tones warmer, turning flat canvas almost into stereo, realistic as life, warmer than life, sensuous and appealing. Perhaps it was not art -- but it was more than a photograph. It reminded Joan of a long-dead artist Johann had liked. What was his name -- used to paint Tahitian girls on black velvet? Leeteg? (Eunice, what do we do now? Walk out? Joe doesn't seem to care either way.) (Boss, Joe cares dreadfully. See that tic on his neck?) (Then what do I do? (Boss, all I can tell you is what I would do.) (Wasn't that what I asked?) (Not quite. Any time I came home and found Joe working from another model I kept quiet and let him work. First I would get out of my working clothes, then shower and get off every speck of paint and makeup. Then tidy things -- just tidy, heavy cleaning had to wait for weekends. Then I would get things ready to feed them, because Joe and his model were going to be hungry once they stopped. They always did stop; Joe won't overwork a model. Oh, he sometimes painted me all night but he knew I would ask to stop if I got shaky.) (Are you telling me to strip down? Won't that upset him still more?) (Boss, I'm not telling you to do anything. This visit wasn't my idea. But he's seen our body thousands of times -- and you ought to know by now that nakedness isn't upsetting, it's relaxing. I felt that it was rude to stay dressed when a model was nude -- unless I was certain she was easy with me. But I'm not telling you to do this. You can go look through the peep and see if Anton and Fred are still there -- they will be -- and unbolt the door and leave. Admit you can't put Humpty Dumpty together again.) (I suppose I should.) Joan sighed, stood up -- kicked her sandals off, peeled the half-sweater down, shoved the ruffle skirt down and got out of the tight. Joe could not see her but Gigi could -- Joan saw surprise in her eyes but she did not break her pose. Joan looked at her and put a finger to her lips, then picked up dress and cloak and sandals, headed for the bath unit while avoiding (she thought) Joe's angle of vision. She hung her clothes on a rack outside the bath and went in. and shower to rid her body of jet and scarlet. (Face makeup off, too?) (Forget it, you don't wear as much as I used to. Towels in the cabinet under the sink. Or should be.) Joan found one clean bath towel, three face towels, decided that it wasn't fair to grab the last bath towel. She managed to get dry with a face towel, looked at herself in the mirror, decided that she was passable -- and felt refreshed and relaxed by the shower. (Where do I start?) (Here of course. Then make the bed but see if it needs changing. Sheets in the box with bed lamp on it.) The tiny bath took little time as scouring powder and plastic sponge were where they almost had to be. The toilet bowl she was forced to give up on -- she got it clean but stains left by flushing water did not respond to scrubbing. Joan wondered why a civilization that could build mighty spaceships could not cope with plumbing? Or was it a civilization? She washed her hands and went out. The bed seemed to have been slept in no more than a couple of nights; she decided it would be . presumptuous to change sheets. As she was straightening the bed she noticed lipstick on one pillow -- turned it over. (Gigi?) (Might be. Boss, it's her shade. Proves nothing.) (Now what?) (Work around the edges -- don't ever touch Joe's stuff. You can pick up a tube of paint and dust under it... but only if you put it down exactly where you found it.) The edges kept her busy for a time. It seemed likely that Joe must have noticed her -- but he gave no sign. The painting seemed finished but he was still working on it. The sink was loaded; she found soap powder and got busy. Once she had dishes washed, dried and put away, and the sink as sparkling as the dishes, she looked over the larder. (Eunice, did you keep house with so few staples?) (Boss, I didn't keep many perishables on hand -- but this is skimpier than I ever kept it. Joe doesn't think about such things. I never let him shop -- because he would come back with some new hungry friend, having forgotten the bread and bacon and milk I had sent him for. Try the freezer compartment.) Joan found some Reddypax in freeze -- dinners, a carton of vanilla ice cream almost full, spaghetti, pizza of several sorts. There were more of the last, so she decided she could not go wrong offering them pizza. What else? No fresh vegetables -- Fruit? Yes, a small can of fruit salad, hardly enough but she could put it over scoops of ice cream, plus wafers if she could find any. Yes, lemon snaps. Not much of a meal blit she didn't have much to work with. She started getting things ready. Set the table for three? Well, she was either going 'to be accepted -- or sent home; she set it for three. (Eunice, there are only two chairs.) (The kitchen stool adjusts in height. Boss.) (I'm stupid.) (Wouldn't have bet you could find your way around a kitchen at all.) (Maybe I wouldn't have learned if Mama had had a daughter. I'll bet I've cooked more meals than you have, sweetheart -- not that this is cooking.) Just as Joan had everything laid out she heard Joe say, "Rest, Gigi." She turned around. "Joe, will you two have supper now? It's ready to flash." Joe Branca turned at her voice, looked at her -- started to speak and with pitiful suddenness went to pieces. His features broke, he started to sob, his body slowly collapsed. Joan hurried toward him -- and stopped abruptly. (Boss! Don't touch him!) (Oh, God, Eunice!) (Don't make it worse. Gigi has him. Down on the floor, fast Om Mani Padme Hum.) Joan dropped into lotus seat. "Om Mani Padme Hum." Gigi had given Joe a shoulder, eased him down. He sat on the floor, his head against his knees, sobbing, while Gigi 'knelt by him, her face showing the ages-old concern of a mother for a hurt child. "Om Mani Padme Hum." (Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Can't I help her, Eunice?) "Om Mani Padme Hum." (No, Boss. Ask Gigi to help you.) (How?) "Om Mani Padme Hum." (Ask for a Circle. Om Mani Padme Hum.) "Gigi! Help me form a Circle. Please!" The girl looked up, looked very startled, as if seeing Joan for the first time. "Om Mani Padme Hum. Help me, Gigi -- help us both." Gigi slid into lotus seat by her, knee to knee, reached for Joan's left hand, took Joe's right hand. "Joe! Joe, you must listen! Close the Circle with us. Now!" She started chanting with Joan. Joe Branca stopped sobbing, looked up, seemed not to believe what he saw. Then, slowly, he straightened his legs, moved until he filled the third side of the triangle and tried to assume the Padmasana. His paint smeared shorts were too confining; they got in the way. He looked down, seemed puzzled, then started unfastening them. Gigi let go his hand and Joan's, helped him get them off. Then he settled easily into lotus, reached for their hands. "Om Mani Padme Hum!" As the Circle closed Joan felt a shock through hdr body, somewhat like electricity. She had felt it before, with three, with four, but never so strongly. Then it eased off to a sweet feeling of warmth. "Om Mani Padme Hum." The prayer rolled around the Circle, rolled back, and was chanted in unison. They were still softly whispering when Joan stopped feeling or hearing anything -- other than utter peace. Ww back . Joan fluttered her eyelids, felt her eyeballs roll down. "Yes, Winnie? I'm awake." "You said you had supper ready to flash. Want to do it? Or shall I?" "Oh." She became aware that the Circle was still closed. "I'll do it. If I may." Joe looked inquiringly into her face, his own face serene. "You okay? Good vibes?" "She's okay," Gigi answered. "Go take a pee and we'll get supper on. Wash your hands; I left turpentine in the medicine cabinet." "Okay." He got up, gave a hand to each of the girls, pulled them to their feet together, turned to do as he was told. Joan followed Gigi to the kitchen unit, noticed the clock of the flash oven. "Gigi, is that clock right?" "Near enough. Do you have to leave? I hope not." "Oh, no, I can stay. But how long did we hold the Circle?" "An hour, hour and half, maybe longer. Long enough. Does it matter?" "No." Joan put her arms around the other girl. "Thank you, Gigi." Gigi put her arms over Joan's, hugged her. "Thank you. This is the first time I've seen Joe truly at one with the All, accepting his karma, at peace with it, since, uh, since -- " "Since Eunice was killed?" "Yes. He's kept coming back to the crazy notion that, if he hadn't gone to Philly to see his Maw, it wouldn't have happened. He knows that's not so -- but now he knows it in his belly. I can tell." (Boss? Say hello to Gigi for me.) (Break cover?) (Oh, hell, we'd better not. I don't think she'd tell Joe -- but we can't risk it. And things are okay the way they are.) "Gigi, I think Eunice would want to thank you. If she could. Things look okay the way they are, now." "Looks like. Say, what do I call you? I can't say, 'Hey, you!' But 'Johann Sebastian Bach Smith' seems like a hell of name for a girl." "My name is Joan, now. Uh, my full name is 'Joan Eunice Smith.' But my middle name is, well, sort of a memorial. Rozzer?" "Roz. That's nice, I think that's perfect -- Joan Eunice." (I think you're perfect. Boss. You did it! You know why I didn't want to come here? I was scared for Joe... but twice as scared for me.) (I knew, sweetheart. We both were scared. And so was Joe.) "Gigi, better not use my middle name. Joe might be upset. Bad vibes." Gigi shook her head. "I don't think so. If I'm wrong, if he needs to soak in the Circle some longer, tonight we've got the right Circle. Might not have, if he found out later." "All right, Gigi, I'll tell him." "Yes, but wait until after we eat. A Circle is fine and I can stay in one all day, if needed. But I'm starved. Sandwich about five hours back and I don't eat much breakfast." Gigi pulled her closer, kissed her. "So let's eat." "Somebody say 'eat?' " "In a minute, Joe; we got to talking. And we need a crack at the plumbing, too. First dime is yours, hon; I'll flash the packs." "Go ahead, Gigi." "Oh, come along. Joe, you flash the packs." " -- like your 'Eunice Evans Branca Memorial,' Joe. Because I don't want anyone ever to forget Eunice. Especially me." Joe Branca nodded soberly. "Is good. Eunice 'd like." Suddenly he smiled. "You okay, Joan Eunice." He put down his cup, started stacking dishes, and added: "Getup you had on, same like one Eunice had." "It was one I had seen her in, Joe, so I had one made like it." "Good job. Dress, not skin paint. Sign painter, maybe?" "Joe, I didn't have anyone of your skill to do that; I had to use whom I could find. Uh, is it possible that you might paint me -- body paint, I mean -- sometimes? Professional Job, professional fees, no obligations?" He smiled and shook his head. "Not cosmetics man, Joan Eunice. Sure, paint body for Eunice, she liked. Gigi, too, when she wants. Paint you, sure. But no fee." "Joe, I won't take up professional time of an artist without paying. But I see your point. Cosmetic painting for your wife is one thing -- but your real work." "But fun," he answered. "Maybe do jet-and-scarlet job right before you go home, huh?" "That would be sweet of you, Joe, but don't bother; I wouldn-'t be showing it. I'll go straight home. But let me ask one question, please, about body paint. Do you remember that you once painted Eunice as a mermaid, and she wore it to work?" "Sure." "Well -- Gigi, this was when I was Johann Smith and very old and very ill. I hurt all the time but couldn't stand heavy dosage of painkillers. Had to tough it. But here was Eunice, lovely as a flower and cute as a kitten, painted to look like a mermaid, and -- Joe, this is the silly part. I don't think I noticed any pain all day long, I was so busy trying to figure something out. And never could. Was that a real brassiere Eunice had on? Or paint?" Joe looked smugly pleased. "Paint. Fool-the-eye." (Boss, I told you that.) (Yes, little imp -- and sometimes you fib, too.) "You certainly fooled my eye. I could see those big sea shells, I could almost feel their rough texture. Then Eunice would turn in profile -- and I wouldn't be sure. I spent that whole day staring while trying to seem not to. Joe, you're a great artist. It's a shame you prefer canvas to skin." "Not quite right. Like to paint skin on canvas. Fool-the-eye forever. Not just one day." "I stand corrected. Like that one." Joan nodded at the easel. "Gigi, let me do the dishes, please. I want to." "Pile in sink," Joe ordered. "Inspiration. Two-figure compo." "Okay, Joe," Gigi answered. "Joan Eunice, do you feel up to posing late? Joe said 'two-figure' so he means you, too. But I warn you, when Joe says 'Inspiration' you don't get much sleep." "No," Joe denied. "Can short it. Cheat some. Get pose right, shoot eight, nine, ten shots. Then -- " He suddenly looked distressed, turned to Joan. "Maybe not here tomorrow? Or could be, not want to pose. Damn, I forget! Think you sleep here. Crazy. Damn!" Joan said, "I don't have to be anywhere at any time, Joe, and I would be greatly honored to pose for you. But -- " She turned to Gigi. "May I stay tonight? Is it all right?" "Oh, sure!" "I wonder. Since you showed me your wedding ring I've been wondering how much I am butting in." Gigi giggled. "Hon, if you think that's a ring in Joe's nose -- well. I'd better never think so. Joan, I left Sam a good month before I let Joe give me that ring and marry me. Cubical and comical. couldn't believe he meant it. I can't think of another couple we know who are married. It's nice -- but I still get the giggles. Sure you stay if you want to. We got a cot to set up -- not much but we'll put Joe on it." (Watch it. Boss! This is dynamite -- ten to one Joe won't be on that cot.) (Of course not. I will be. Think I'm a fool?) (Sadly, I do. Boss. You're lovable -- but you just barely have sense enough to stay out of lifts. Not out of beds.) (Joe wants me to pose, I pose! If he wants anything else, he can have that, lool Anything.) (That's what I thought.) (Eunice, Joe doesn't want me. Gigi is his woman now.) (Okay, twin. But when did I last hear you say that marriage isn't a form of death?) Joe Branca appeared to regard the matter as settled; housekeeping details seemed no interest to him. He said, "You oil after shower?" and reached out and fingered Joan's left ribs. "No. Gigi." "Chop, chop, Joe." Gigi ducked into the bath, returned with a bottle of olive oil... She said to Joan, "Lanolin is as good but I'd rather smell like a salad than a sheep. Joe, get her ribs; I'll do her leg. Then we give you a quick oiling all over, hon, and wipe you down. Get all off that your skin doesn't absorb. Mmm, some red paint back here where you can't see, but olive oil cuts it. Joan, I've had twice as good a complexion since Joe has been making me take care of my skin." "You have a perfect skin, Gigi." "Joe's a tyrant about it. Now for a wipedown." "Not too much wipe," Joe warned. "Need highlights in cheat shots." "Easy on the wipedown. Some oil on me, Joe?" "Da." "Okay, Maestro. Joan, we'll polish each other bone dry before we go to bed. If we're not foo tired to care -- no importa, disposable sheets. Joe, are you going to tell your slaves what this pic is?" "Sure, need acting. Gut acting. Lez pic." "Huh? Joe, you can't put Joan in such a pic. You can't." "Wait, Mate. I don' draw comic books. You know. Pic so square can hang in church. But symbols so gut-loaded old butch pays top money. But -- Joan Eunice, can change face if you say?" He looked anxious. "Joe, paint the way you want to. If somebody recognizes me in one of your paintings I'll be proud." Ubuilt a low platform of boards on boxes, heaped floor cushions on top, covered it all .with a ragged heavy cloth. "Throne, Gigi first. Gigi butch, Joan Eunice sweetheart." He moved them like clay figures, shoving them into position like a butcher handling meat, so that Gigi was supported by cushions while she held Joan in her arms and looked into Joan's eyes. Joan's position fig-leafed Gigi; Joe raised Joan's left knee so that she fig-leafed herself. Then he placed Gigi's right hand under Joan's left breast, not cupping it but touching -- stepped back and scowled. -- stepped forward, changed the composition slightly, moving them so little that Joan could not guess what difference it made. Apparently satisfied, he shoved cushions in more tightly so that each could hold the pose without strain. He placed a platter just below them, slanted with careful casualness. "Is Greek lyre," he said. "Title, Bilitis Sings. Song just pau, action not yet. Golden moment between." He looked at them carefully, still scowling. "Joan Eunice, you knocked up?" Joan was very startled. "Does it show? I haven't gained an ounce." (Erase and correct -- nineteen ounces.) (Yes, but not enough to show. Aside from pizza just now. I've stuck to Roberto's diet. You know I have.) Joe shook his head. "Figure not show. You happy, Joan Eunice?" "Joe, I'm dreadfully happy about it. But I haven't told anyone yet." "Be easy, Louisie; Gigi don' yatter." He smiled in benison and Joan saw for the first time how beautiful he could be. "What counts, you happy. Happy mama, happy baby. Knocked-up broads look different. Better. Skin glows, muscles firm, folds under eyes fill out. Whole body better tone. Eye can see but most can't see what they see. Lucky I got you for model right now. But solves problem been eatin' me." "What, Joe? How?" (Eunice, is this all right?) (Sure, twin. Joe approves of babies as long as he doesn't have to bother with them. He's pleased that you are happy -- and doesn't think about how it happened or what you'll do about it. But not callous. If you were broke he would take you in and try to support your baby and still not ask where you got it. He doesn't find the world complex, dear -- so it isn't... to him.) "Puzzle problem. You look like Eunice, how else? But look better. Impossible. Know why now. Any broad looks best doin' her thing." "Joe, do you think pregnant women are beautiful later? Say eight, or nearly nine months gone?" "Sure!" Joe seemed surprised that she would ask. "More beautiful. Healthy, happy woman ready to drop -- how not? Top symbol of The All. Shut up now. Work." "Please, Joe, one more question. Will you paint me when I'm big as a house? Between eight and nine months? Could be a cheat job. Might have to be -- I might not be able to pose very long when I'm heaviest." He smiled in delight. "You bet, Annette! Artist don't get that chance much. Most broads silly about it. But now shut up. Must look gutsy, so think gutsy. Don' act -- be. Sweaty, eager. Joan Eunice, Gigi's got you set up, eager. But scared. Virgin. Gigi, you just eager. Maybe gloating, but think, don't do. Not even face. Just think." He stopped to reposition lights, scowled at his models, changed his lights a little, brushed an oily rag on Gigi's right shoulder and breast. "Is right! Nipples up? Joan Eunice, can't you get 'em tight? Try thinking about men, not Gigi." "I'll fix it," Gigi assured him. "Listen, darling." She started whispering, telling Joan in blunt detail what this ancient Grecian Lesbian was about to do to the virgin helpless in her arms. Joan found that her breasts tightened until they hurt. She wet her lips and looked back at Gigi, hardly noticed that they were being photographed. "Break." announced Joe. "Off throne, pau tonight. Got good shots." Joan straightened up, peered across the room at the clock. "My goodness! Blackbirds already?" "So bed," he agreed. "Pose tomorrow." Gigi said, "I'm still going to do those dishes, Joe. Set up the cot." "I'll do them, Gigi." "I'll wash, you can wipe." By the time they finished, Joe was in the cot and apparently asleep. Gigi said, "Which side do you like, hon?" "Either one." "Crawl in." Gigi's shoulder. Gigi's looking at her helped Joan to remember where she was. She yawned and said, "Good morning, darling. Is it morning? Where's Joe?" "Joe's getting breakfast. Had enough sleep, dear?" "Guess so. What time is it?" "I don't know. The question is, are you rested? If not, go back to sleep." "I'm rested, I feel grand. Let's get up." "All right. But I charge one kiss to get past me." "Outrageous," Joan said happily, and paid toll. But Joe was not at the kitchen unit, he was projecting the photographs he had taken the night before. Gigi said, "Look at that, Joan. Forgotten all about offering to get breakfast." "It's no matter," Joan said softly"Don't bother to keep your voice down, Joe can't hear when he's working. Unless you shout. Well, let's scrounge, then we'll try to get him to eat. Hmm... not much to offer a guest." "I don't need a big breakfast. Juice and toast. Coffee." "No juice." Gigi poked around futilely. "I could give you a Reddypak. Spaghetti or something. I've got to grocery-shop. Send Joe out for groceries and he comes home with a new picture book and some paint, happy as a kid. No use scolding him." Joan Eunice caught an undertone in Gigi's voice, said softly, "Gigi, are you broke?" Gigi did not answer. She kept her face turned away, got out half a loaf of bread, prepared to make toast. Joan persisted, still speaking quietly, "Gigi, I'm rich, I suppose you know. But Joe won't take a dime from me. You don't have to be that stubborn." Gigi measured out powder for six cups of coffee. Then she said almost as softly, "Joan, I was a whore when Big Sam and I were together. Somebody had to pay the rent and half his pupils never paid what they promised, and the rest paid so little it hardly made up for the coffee and doughnuts they ate. Hell, some of them came to class just to eat. So somebody had to work. I never hustled men much -- Sam didn't like it if I made it with another man -- unless it was a swing scene that he had set up. But an old butch is often generous. When we had to have money I would go sit in one of the Lez coffee shops and bring some money home -- Sam didn't mind that. "I finally got wise that I was being used, not just supporting him. Those swing scenes -- a guru needs a young chela for openers or it won't get off the ground. Joan, a woman will do anything for a man -- but she hates to think it's oneway street. Now take Joe. Doesn't sell many paintings and we usually have to split fifty-fifty to get them hung. But Joe doesn't use a woman no matter how thin things are." She looked around at Joan. "When I first posed for Joe he paid me guild rates, none of this kark about a fin now and another fin when he sells the picture. He had some money from Eunice. Insurance, I suppose. But Joe is a soft slob and everybody borrowed it and everybody spent it and nobody paid it back and it was gone before I shacked in with him and started minding his money. Somebody's paying the rent and utilities on this studio. You, maybe?" "No." "You know about it?" "Yes. A man who greatly admired Eunice took care of it. Joe can live here the rest of his life if it suits him. And I can drop a hint and the phone will be turned back on. The phone was an oversight when the rent and power and water and such were arranged for." "We don't need a phone. I think half the people on this level used Joe's phone as a free public phone -- some still try and get sore when I tell 'em there's no phone here, please go away; Joe is working. Uh, that man who admired Eunice -- named 'Johann' maybe?" "No, not Johann and his name isn't Joan now. Gigi, I can't tell you without his permission and I don't have it. Has Joe ever said anything about the rent?" "Truthfully I don't think he's thought about it. He's a child, some ways, Joan. Art and sex -- doesn't notice other things until he bangs his nose into them." "Then maybe he wouldn't notice this. I've got my car radio link in my purse, I can call for it. If you tell Joe you've got to grocery-shop, he'll let you go, won't he?" "Oh,, sure. Won't even fuss -- even though he has his heart set on painting us all day today." "So you tell him you must and I offer to take you in my car. We can pick up a big load, with a car and two guards to carry for us. Maybe Joe won't suspect that I've paid for it. Or maybe you can tell him that a picture sold." Gigi looked thoughtful. Then she sighed. "You tempt me, you cuddlesome little broad. But I had better hold off and eat pizza till we sell another painting. And we will. Best not to monkey with a setup that works, I think." (She's right. Boss. Leave it alone.) (But, Eunice, there's not a thing for breakfast but coffee and dry toast. That's no matter but there are only four Reddypax in there and three pizzas -- we ate three last night. A few other items, not much. I can't leave it alone.) (You've got to leave it alone. You trying to cut off his balls? Or split him up with Gigi? Gigi's good for him, she'll find a way. Do I, or do I not, know more about Joe than you do?) (You do, Eunice -- but people have to eat.) (Yes, Boss, but it doesn't hurt to miss a couple of meals.) (Damn it, girl, what do you know about being hungry?  went through the 'thirties.) (Okay, Boss, louse it up. I'll keep quiet.) (Eunice -- please'. You said I did fine last night.) (So I did, and you certainly did. Now keep up the good work by leaving them alone or by finding some way to let Gigi come by groceries honestly... but don't give them anything.) (All right, sweetheart. I'll try.) "Gigi, here in the fridge -- bacon grease in this can?" "Yes, I save it. Can be useful." "Can indeed! And I see two eggs." "Well, yes. But two eggs split three ways is sort of feeble. But I'll fry one for you and one for Joe." "Go soak your head, cuddle baby; I'm going to teach you Depression cooking I learned in the nineteen-thirties." Gigi Branca suddenly looked upset. "Joan, you gave me goose bumps. I can't realize how old you are -- but you're not, really -- are you?" "Depends on which rubber ruler you use, dear. I remember the Great Depression of the 'thirties; I was about as old as you are now. By that scale I'm ninety-five, t-ooked at another way I'm only weeks old and not able to crawl without help. Always making mistakes. But by still a third way to measure it I'm the age of this body -- Eunice's body -- and that's how I like to be treated. Don't let me be a ghost, dear -- hug me and tell me I'm not." (What you got against ghosts, Boss?) (Nothing at all, some of my best friends are ghosts -- but I wouldn't want my sister to marry one.) (Very funny. Boss -- who writes your gags? We did marry a ghost -- in Dr. Olsen's examining room.) (Ouch! Sorry about it, Eunice?) (No, Boss darling, you're just the old goat -- old ghost, pardon me -- I want for our little bastard.) (Love you, too. Busybody.) Gigi hugged her. "First we melt the bacon grease and make sure it's not rancid -- or not too rancid. Then we soak the bread in it and fry it. We scramble the eggs and since we don't have cream to stretch them, we use what we find. I'll settle for powdered milk, or flour, or corn starch. Even dry gelatin. We don't salt the eggs, the grease may be salty enough -- salt to taste afterward. But if you have Worchestershire sauce, or A-#, or anything like that, we add a little before we scramble. Then we spoon this goop onto six slices of fried bread, two to a customer, and garnish with paprika, or dried parsley, or chopped most anything, to make it look fancy. This is creative table the best we can manage -- fancy cloth and real napkins, if you have them. A flower, even an artificial one. Or a candle. Anything to swank it up. Now -- do I fry the bread while you stretch the eggs? Or vice versa?" J OE reluctantly came to the table, absent-mindedly took a bite -- looked surprised. "Who cooked?" "We both did," Joan answered. "So? Tasty." "Joan showed me how and we'll have it again some time, Joe," Gigi amended. "Soon." "All right. Joan, you can read, can't you?" "Why, yes." "Thought you could. There's a letter from Joe's mother, been here three days. I've been meaning to find somebody to read it but Joe's kept me busy posing -- and Joe is particular who reads his mother's letters." "Gigi, Joan's company. Not polite." "Joe, am I company? If I am, I won't finish breakfast and I won't pose -- I'll call Anton and Fred and go home!" ('That's telling him. Fat Lady!') (That's a vulgar joke, Eunice.) (I'm vulgar. Boss. Come to think about it, you're about as vulgar as they come yourself, though I wasn't sure of it till I woke up inside your head.) (I give up. But Joe can't make us 'company.') (Of course not. Quiver your chin and make him kiss you -- he's never kissed you with the lights on.) Joe said soberly, "Sorry, Joan Eunice." Joan pouted her lip. "You ought to be. You ought to kiss me and tell me I'm family. Not 'company.' " "She's right," agreed Gigi. "You've got to kiss and make up." "Oh, hell." Joe stood up, came around to Joan Eunice's chair, took her face, tilted it up and kissed her. "Family. Not company. Now eat!" "Yes, Joe. Thank you." (He can do better.) (So we both know.) "But, Joe, I won't read your letter unless you want me to. Gigi, you startled me when you indicated you could not read. I thought I could tell by the way a person talks. Is it your eyesight?" "Eyes are okay. Oh, I'm a real Talking Woman. Had some coaching, done some little theater. Probably should have learned to read -- though I can't say I've missed it. Computer fouled up my pre-school test records and I was in sixth grade before anybody caught it. Then it was sort o'late to change tracks and I stayed on the 'practical.' There was talk of putting me through a remedial but the principal put his foot down. Said there wasn't enough budget to handle the ones that could benefit from it." She shrugged. "Maybe the fact that he was a third had something to do with it. Anyhow I don't miss it. Joe, shall I find the letter?" "Sure. Joan Eunice is family." Joan found Mother Branca's handwriting difficult, so she read the letter to herself to be sure she could read it aloud -- and ran into trouble. (Eunice! How do I handle this.) (Twin, never tell a man anything he doesn't need to know. I censored as necessary. Even some of your mail, when you were sickest.) (Know you did, baggage, as I reread some you had read aloud.) (Boss, some went straight into the shredder. And this one should have gone there -- so censor it.) (You were married to him, sweetheart, but I'm not. I have no right to censor his mail.) (Twin, between being right and being kind, I know which way I vote.) (Oh, shut up, I won't censor Joe's mail!) "Takes a while to get used to strange handwriting," Joan Eunice said apologetically. "All right, here it is: "Darling Baby Boy. Mama don't feel so -- " "Don't read all," Joe interrupted. "Just tell." "That's right" agreed Gigi. "Joe's mother puts in a lot of kark about noisy neighbors and their pets and people Joe never heard of. All he wants is news. If any." (You see, twin?) (Eunice, I'm still not going to censor. Oh, I can leave out trivial gossip. Uh, maybe edit the wording.) (You damn well better. Boss, and you know it.) "All right. Your mother says her stomach is troubling her -- " Mama don't feel so good and cant seem to get no relief nohow. The medicare man says it's not stomach cancer but what does he know? Sign says he's an internist and everybody knows an internist is a student, not a real doctor. What do we pay taxes for when just a student can half kill me like I was a dog or a cat or something they're always cutting up behind locked doors like they say on teevee?) "Joe, she says that her stomach has been bothering her but she's been getting tests from an internal medicine man -- that's a doctor who specializes in such ailments, they are very learned -- and he has assured her that it isn't cancer or anything of that sort." The new priest ain't no help. He's a young shot that thinks he knows it all. Won't listen. Claims I get just as good treatment as anybody when he knows it ain't true. You got to be a nigger to get anything around here. We white people that built this country and paid for it are Just so much dirt. When I go to medicare clinic, they make your Mama wait while Mexican women go in first. How about that?) "She says that there is a new priest in your parish, a younger one than the last, and that he has investigated and has reassured her that she is getting the proper treatment. But she says that she sometimes has to wait a long time at the clinic." "Why not?" said Joe. "Got nothin' but kill time. Don' work." (Annamaria is going to have a baby. That snot priest says she ought to go to a Home. You know what terrible places those Homes are and its Un-American to bust up families. They don't do that in the Old Country and that's what I told the Visitor. You'd think the way they throw away money on people that don't deserve it they could spend a little on a decent family that just wants to be left alone and not bothered. The other Johnson twin -- not the one that dropped out, the one I told you was out on parole again -- got busted again and about time! There's a family the Visitor could look into -- but oh, no, he just told me to mind my own business.") "Someone named Annamaria is pregnant." Gigi said, "Which one is that, 'Joe?" "Baby sister. Twelve. Maybe thirteen." Joe shrugged. "Well, your parish priest thinks she ought to go into a home for expectant mothers but your mother feels that she would be better off at home. There is something about a neighbor family named Johnson." "Skip." Baby Boy, Mama don't hardly never get a letter from you since Eunice died. Ain't there no letterwriter in your block? You don't know how a mother worries when she don't hear from her little boy. I watch the mail box every day, be sure nobody swipes it fore I get it. But no letter from my little Josie -- just ads and once a month the Check. "She says she hasn't heard from you in a long time, Joe. I'd be glad to write one for you before I go, anything you dictate -- and send it by Mercury to be sure she gets it." "Maybe. Thanks." Joe did not seem enthusiastic. "See later. Paint first. Any more? Just tell." (Eunice, here comes the tough part.) (So skip it!) (I can't'?) ( seen you in the teevee and almost dropped dead when you said dollars you had every right to. Don't your own mother mean nothing to you? I didn't raise you and love you and take care of you when you busted your collarbone to be treated like that. You go straight to that Miss Yohan Bassing Bock Smith and tell her she can just wipe that nasty sneer off her face because I want my rightful share of whats coming to me and I'm going to get it. I already been to a lawyer and he said he'd take my side for fifty-fifty as soon as I paid him a thousand dollars for expenses. I told him he was a thief. But you just tell that stuckup Miss Smith to pay up or my lawyer will put her in jail!!!! Sometimes I think the best thing is just pack up everybody and go visit you till she pays up. Maybe just stay. Would be hard to leave all our old friends here in Philly but you need somebody to keep house now that you haven't got no wife to do for you. It won't be the first time I've made sacrifices for my darling boy. Your Loving Mother. "Joe, apparently your mother watched my identity hearing on video and heard your testimony. She seems disappointed to learn that you gave money to establish a memorial to Eunice, when you could have kept it." Joe made no comment. Joan went on: "She says she may pack up all the family and pay you a visit but the way it's phrased I don't think she will. That's all except she sends you her love. Joe, I can see how your mother could be disappointed in what you did about -- " "My business. Not hers." "May I finish, Joe? From this letter I think she must be poor and I have been poor myself and know how it feels. Joe, I think that your memorial to Eunice was a wonderful thing, the most gallant tribute of a husband to the memory of his wife I've ever heard of. I heartily approve and I think Eunice must feel honored by it." (I do. Boss. But maybe he overdid it, huh? Jake could have set up a little annuity for Joe -- eating money, I mean -- with part of it. But Joe never did know how to do anything part way -- whole hawg, or nothing; that's Joe.) (Maybe we can fix it, dear.) "Joe, if I paid your mother an allowance -- you know I can afford it -- it wouldn't be you accepting money from Eunice's death." "No." "But I would like to! She's your mother, it would be sort of an additional memorial to Eunice. Say enough to -- " "No," he repeated flatly. Joan Eunice sighed. "I should have kept quiet and arranged it through Jake Salomon." She memorized the return address, intending to do it anyhow. "Joe, you are a lovable man and I can see why Eunice was devoted to you -- I've fallen in love with you myself and I think you both know it -- without any intention of crowding you out, Gigi; I love you just as much. But, Joe, sweet and gallant as you are... you are a bit stiff-necked, too." (Sure he is. Boss darling, but it's no use trying to change people. So drop it. You didn't need to sneak that address; I could have told you.) "Joan." "Yes, Gigi?" "Hate to say this, hon -- but Joe's right and you're wrong." "But -- " "Tell you later, we'll talk while we pose. Grab the bathroom if you need to while I put dishes to soak; Joe wants to start." she could visit with Gigi while they posed. But Joe assured her that he had the expressions he wanted from the photographs; he simply wanted them to hold still. He took even more pains to get them arranged than he had for the camera. Talk did not bother him as long as it was not to him. Nevertheless Joan tended to whisper while Gigi used the normal tones of a face-to-face conversation. "Now I'll tell you why you must not send money to Joe's mother. But wait a sec -- he's done it again. Joe! Joe! Put on your shorts and quit wiping pigment on your skin." Joe did not answer but did so. "Joan, if you've got money to throw away, flush it down the pot but don't send it to Joe's mother. She's a wino." "Oh." "Yeah. Joe knows it, her Welfare visitor knows it; they don't let her have her family allowance in cash -- she gets one of the pink checks, not a green one. Just the same she'll take groceries around the corner and trade 'em for muscatel. That stomach trouble -- forget it. Unless you want to help her drink herself to death. No loss if you did. The kids might be better off." Joan sighed. "I never will learn. Gigi, all my life I've given money away. Can't say I did any good with it and I know I've done lots of harm. Me and my big mouth!" "Your big heart, dear. This is one time not to give it away. I know. I've had a lot of her letters read to me. You trimmed that one, didn't you?" "Did it show?" "To me it did -- because I know what they sound like. I learned from the first one never again to have somebody just read them aloud to Joe; he gets upset. So I listen -- I'm a quick study, used to learn my sides and cues just from two readings aloud when I was finding out I wasn't an actress -- and then I trim it to what Joe needs to hear. Figured you were smart enough to do it without being told and I was right -- except that you could have trimmed it still more and Joe would have been satisfied." "Gigi, how did such nice a person as Joe -- and so talented -- come from such a family?" "How do any of us happen to be what we are? It just happens. But -- look, it's never polite to play the dozens, is it?" "I shouldn't have asked." "I meant it isn't polite for me to. But I'm going to. I've often wondered if Joe was any relation to his mother. He doesn't look like her; Joe has a picture taken when she was about the age he is now. No resemblance." "Maybe he takes after his father." "Well, maybe. But Paw Branca I'm not sure about; be left her years back. If Paw Branca is his Pop. If she has any idea who his father is." "I guess that's often the case. Look at me -- pregnant and not married; I can't criticize." "You don't know who did it, dear?" "Well... yes, I do. But I'm never, never, never going to tell. It suits me to keep it to myself and I can afford to do it that way." "Well -- none of my business and you seem happy. But about Joe -- I think he's an orphan. Somebody's little bastard who wound up with this bitch, though I can't guess how. Joe doesn't say so. Although he never talks much -- unless he has to explain things to a model. But his mother has had one good influence on him. Guess." "I can't." "Joe won't drink. Oh, we keep beer for frierids when we can, but Joe never drinks it. He won't touch pot. He won't join a Circle if it calls for a high. You know how it is with drugs -- all of them against the law but as easy to buy as chewing gum. I could show you three connections in this one complex where you can buy you-nameit. But Joe won't touch any of it." Gigi looked sheepish. "I thought he was some kind of a freak. Oh, I was never hooked but I couldn't see any harm in an occasional trip with friends. "Then I shacked with him and he was broke and I was, too, and groceries were our only luxury and -- well, I haven't touched anything since he married me. And don't want to; I feel grand. New woman." "You certainly look happy and healthy. Uh, this 'Big Sam,' did he have a habit?" Not a habit. But Sam would eat, drink, or smoke anything somebody else paid for. Oh, he didn't mainline -- doesn't fit the image for a guru and needle marks show -- and he was proud of his body." "What did you do before you were his chela?" "His meal ticket, you mean. Same thing -- model and whore. What else is there to do? Babysat. Served drinks in my skin for a while but they let me go when they found a girl who could write -- discrimination and I could have fought it as I never got my orders mixed up; my memory is better than people's who have to write things down. But, hell, no use trying to hang on when they don't want you. Joan, you said you'd been giving money away all your life." "I exaggerated, Gigi. Never had much until after World War Two. I just meant I wasn't stingy even as a kid, when every nickel came the hard way." " 'Nickel?' " "A five-cent piece. They used to be minted from a nickel alloy and were called that. Dimes and even dollars used to be silver. We actually had gold money when I was a kid. Then during the Great Depression I was flat broke for about six months -- and other people helped me -- and then later I helped some, sometimes the same people. But giving money away on a large scale I didn't start until I had more money than I could spend or wanted to invest, and the tax laws at that time fixed it so that you could do more giving it away than by keeping it." "Seems a funny way to run things. But of course I've never paid taxes." I You started the day you were born. We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we'll ever eliminate taxes." "Well... I won't argue it, Joan, you must know more about it than I do. How much money have you given away?" "Oh, it didn't amount to more than a few thousand until after War Two and most of that was loans I knew I would never collect. Kept records for years -- then one day I burned the record book and felt easier. Since then -- I'd have to consult my accountant. Several "Look, cuddly, don't be impressed. After a certain point money isn't money, it's just bookkeeping figures or magnetized dots in a computer." "I wasn't exactly impressed. Confused. Joan, I don't have any feeling of any sort for that much money. A hundred dollars I understand. Even a thousand. But that much is like the National Debt; it doesn't mean anything to me." "Nor does it to me, Gigi; it's like a chess game -- a game played just for itself, and one I'm tired of. Look you wouldn't let me buy groceries even though I am helping to eat them. Would you ac"Uh... no! It would scare me." "That's an even wiser decision than the one you made before breakfast. But page Diogenes!" "Who's he?" "Greek philosopher who went around searching for an honest man. Never found him." Gigi looked thoughtful. "I'm not very honest, Joan. But I think I've found an honest man. Joe." "I think so, too. But, Gigi, may I say why I think you were smart to say No? Oh, it was a gag, sort of, but if you had said Yes I would not have welched. But I would hate to do it to you. May I tell you why? What's wrong with being rich?" "I thought being rich was supposed to be fun." "It's fun, some ways. When you're really wealthy -- and I am -- money is power. Tm not saying that power isn't worth having. Take me, if I hadn't had that much raw power, I wouldn't be here chatting with you; I'd be dead. And I like it here, with your arms around me and Joe painting a picture of us because he thinks we're beautiful -- and we are. But power works both ways; the man -- or woman -- who has it, can't escape it. Gigi, when you're rich you don't have friends; you just have endless acquaintances." "Ten minutes," said Joe. "Rest time," said Gigi. "Huh? But we've been resting." "So get up and stretch, it'll be a long day. If Joe says we've posed fifty minutes, we have; he uses a timer. And have a cup of coffee; I'm going to. Coffee, Joe?" "Yes." "Can we look?" "No. Lunch break, maybe." "Must be going well, Joan, or Joe wouldn't even make a guess. Joe, Joan tells me that a rich person can't have friends." "Hey, wait, I didn't finish. Gigi, a rich person can have friends. But it has to be someone who isn't interested in his money. Like you. Like Joe. Even that doesn't mean he's a friend. First you have to find him. Then you have to know this about him, which may be -- is! -- hard to find out. There aren't many such people; even other rich people aren't likely to qualify. Then you have to win his friendship... and that's harder for a rich man than it is for other people. A rich man gets suspicious and puts on a false face to strangers -- and that's no way to win friends. So in general, it's true -- if you're rich you don't have friends. Just acquaintances, kept at arm's length because you've been hurt before." Gigi suddenly turned around from the kitchen unit. "Joan. We're your friends." "I hope so." Joan looked soberly from Gigi to her husband. "I felt your love in our Circle. But it won't be easy, Gigi. Joe looks at me and can't help remembering Eunice -- and you look at me and can't help wondering what effect it has on Joe." "We don't! Tell her, Joe." "Gigi's right," Joe said gently. "Eunice dead. She wanted you to have what you got. Me -- over my gut ache, all done in t' Circle." (Boss, do you mind if I get out for a moment and trot around in my bones? A girl likes to be missed a little.) (Eunice, we must not hurt him. It was all we could manage to heal him.) (I know. But the next time he kisses us I'm going to be tempted to speak up and tell him I'm here.) (Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum -- and kark on you and Diogenes both. Let's go home and phone Roberto.) (Sweetheart, we'll stay here until we've cracked the bone and eaten the marrow.) (Okay, okay. That Gigi is as cuddly as Winsome, isn't she?) "Joe, I want us three to be friends and never break our Circle in our hearts. But I'm not going to put too much strain on it. Not fair to you, not fair to Gigi -- not even fair to me. Gigi, I wasn't saying I didn't have any friends. I do have. You two. A doctor who took care of me and honestly doesn't give a damn about money. The nurse he is about to marry who is the nearest thing to a sister I've ever had. My four driving guards -- I've tried very hard with those four, Joe, because I knew they were your friends and Eunice's. But that's an odd situation; I'm more their baby they take care of than I am either employer or friend. And one, just one, friend left over from the days when I was Johann Srnith -- rich and powerful and mostly hated." Joe Branca said softly, "Eunice loved you." Iknows why. Except that Eunice had so much love in her that it spilled over onto anyone around her. If I had been a stray kitten, Eunice would have picked me up and loved me." (More than that, Boss.) (Sweetheart.) "And Joe, you know, or at least have met, my one friend who carried over. Jake Salomon." Joe nodded. "Jake okay." "You got to know Jake?" "Close. Good aura." Gigi said, "Joe, is he the one you told me about? The fixer?" "Same." Joe looked back at Joan Eunice. "Ask Jake. Throne, now." "Come on, Joan. He bites if you don't pose the instant rest period is over." Joe fussed over getting them back into position, then moved both of Joan's legs and one of Gigi's into positions somewhat different from the original pose -- stepped back and scowled at the chance... turned to his easel and started scraping part of the canvas with a palette knife. Gigi said quietly, "Now we won't get to look at lunch break." "Why not?" "God only knows. I'm not sure Joe knows why he makes a change. But something was wrong and now he's abandoned the cartoon and is working directly from us. So it won't be far enough along that that soon. So freeze, darling. Don't sneeze, don't get an itch, don't even breathe deeply." "Not talk?" "Talk all we like as long as we don't move." "I won't move. Gigi, I was so pleased to learn that Joe and Jake got to know each other well. Did you know Jake, too?" "I've met him. Just in passing. Me leaving and Mr. Salomon arriving -- it was while I was a hired model, before I moved out on Big Sam." (Twin, she's being vague about this -- and Jake has never mentioned laying eyes on Joe after clearing up business matters a long time ago.) (Eunice, what are you getting at? It was probably while Jake was straightening out your bank account and the lease and things.) (' -- and things,' you are so right. Look, Boss, don't be naive. They were crying over the same girl -- me -- and Joe is ambi as an oyster when it suits him.) (Eunice, you have a dirty mind!) (Coo! This from 'No-pants' Smith. I know whereof I speak, twin; I lived with Joe for years. Don't be so darned Twentieth Century.) (Eunice, of course you know Joe better than I do and I would never criticize Joe no matter what. I meant Jake.) (What makes you think you know Jake better than I do? And take a look at Joe -- purty, ain't he? Jake has eyes. Boss, what are we fussing about? Eind out what Gigi knows.) "I suppose," Joan said carefully, "that Jake had to come here on business. Eunice died without a will and I know Jake arranged it so that Joe could draw against her bank account. There may have been insurance to clear up, too; I'm not sure." "Joan, I don't know. Why don't you ask Jake, as Joe suggested?" (Because Jake will lie about it. Boss. Eorget it, men lie about such things far more than women do. Who cares where a man has lunch as long as he gets home in time for dinner? Not me. You give my 'dirty mind' quite enough to keep it busy. But, Boss, you're a devious little slut -- you can't be truthful even to yourself.) (Wench, if I could get my hands on you. I'd spank you!) (And if you could. I'd let you. Kind o' fun to be spanked, isn't it, dear? Gets the action moving like a rocket.) (Oh, stuff it!) (Where, twin? What? And how big is it?) "I have no need to ask Jake, Gigi. I know they met through business matters, I know that Jake admires Joe's integrity. I simply hadn't realized that Jake thought of Joe as a close friend. If he does." Gigi Branca looked thoughtful. "I couldn't say. I was working Guild hours then, as Joe was paying me. Mr. Salomon -- Jake, you call him -- showed up one evening as we were quitting, and Joe introduced him to me as his former wife's fixer -- lawyer, he said; Joe doesn't use jive when he doesn't want to. Saw him a couple more times, I think, about the same way. But he hasn't been here since we got married." (Double talk. Boss. All it means is that she won't spill other people's secrets. Well, that's nice to know -- considering.) "No importa. Gigi, how did Joe get his art education? Or is it native genius with no instruction?" "Both, Joan. Let me tell it bang, as it would take you forever to get it out of Joe. Joe says that all an artist can teach is technique. He says creativity can't be taught and that each artist has his own sort. If he has any -- Joe thinks that most people who call themselves artists haven't any. He calls 'em sign painters and adds that he would rather be a good sign painter than a fraud who calls himself an artist. "You've seen what Joe has. That one of me he did yesterday and others around the studio. You'd see lots more if you prowled the coffee shops and bookstores and art shops at this end of town. Nudes that look better than life -- you wouldn't need to look for his pinxit. Most of them kind a' square except that they grab. Oh, Joe can do sex pix. I've seen him prove it, then scrape off the paint -- because I asked him why he didn't do sex pix since they sell so well. He shrugged and said those weren't his symbols. "Joe knows he's not Goya or Picasso or Rembrant or any of the masters -- and doesn't want to be; he just wants to paint his symbols, his way, and sell enough for us to eat. Oh, sometimes I get so mad, knowing that if he would paint just one frimp scene as grabby as he so easily can, it would keep us eating for months. But I've given up suggesting it because Joe just shrugs and says 'Don' paint comic books, you know that, Gigi.' Joe is Joe and doesn't give a damn what any other artist does or whether his own work makes him famous or a lot of money or anything. He cares so little -- well, many of our friends are artists or call themselves artists but Joe isn't interested in what they paint and won't talk shop. If they're good people, warm people, good vibes, Joe likes to go see them or have them here... but Joe wouldn't waste a floor cushion on Rembrandt if Joe didn't like the way he behaved. Joe just wants to paint -- his way. And not to have to sleep alone." suppose Joe has had to sleep alone very often." "Probably not. But Joe wouldn't sleep with Helen of Troy if he didn't like her attitude. You mentioned your Brink's boys -- the two who brought you here, and there are two more, aren't there? One a big soul? Hugo?" "You know Hugo?" Joan asked in delight. "Never met him. He sounds like an African myth. I know just two things about him. Joe wants to paint him... and Joe loves him. "Spiritual love, I mean -- although I'm sure Joe would sack in with Hugo if Hugo wanted to." (He'll have to stand in line! I saw Hugo first.) (Shut up, you bangtail.) "Can never happen, I gather -- and Joe never makes a pass. Never made one at me, I never made one at him; we just sacked in our first time without a word and combined as naturally as ham and eggs." (Hmm! Some girls have all the luck. I had to trip him.) (You're the eager type, sweetheart; Gigi isn't.) (You'll pay for that crack. Boss.) "I'm sure Joe never crowded Hugo about posing; he would rather have Hugo's friendship than have him as a model -- though Joe told me he has two pix in mind. One would show Hugo on an auction block. Historical background and honkie ladies in the crowd -- close shot, full figure, Hugo looking patient and weary, and just heads and shoulders of the honks... and the honk females just barely not slobbering. "But Joe says he can't paint that one; it would stir up trouble. The second he really aches to paint -- just Hugo, big as a mountain and no sex symbols at all -- except that a big stud can't help being sexy, I think -- just Hugo, strong and wise and solemn dignity -- and loving. Joe's words, pieced together by me. Joe wants to paint it and call it Jehovah." "Gigi! Maybe I can help." "Huh? You can't just tell Hugo to pose for Joe; Joe wouldn't like that. Wouldn't hold still for it." "Dear, I'm not foolish. But maybe I can make Hugo see that it's all right to pose for Joe. Can't hurt to try." (Boss, let Hugo know that you have been posing naked for Joe. Then let it soak.) (Of course, Eunice, but that's just the gambit.) (Twin! You're not thinking of trying to seduce Hugo, are you? Damn it, I won't stand for it! You leave Father Hugo alone.) (Eunice, I'm not that much of a fool. Hugo can have anything I've got; he killed the creep who killed you. But I would never offer what he won't accept. If I did, I think he'd quit -- and then pray for me. I vote with Joe; I'll take Hugo as he is, never try to twist his arm.) (You couldn't. His arms are bigger than our thighs.) (I meant psychologically, twin, and you know it.) "Just one thing, Gigi -- Joe would have to give up that title for the pic." "You don't know Joe, Joan. He won't change the title." "Then he'll have to carry it just in his mind. Hugo is as firm in his rules as Joe is in his. He won't let a picture of himself be titled Jehovah. It would be sacrilege in keep the title a secret, I think I can deliver the body. You talk to Joe. But you never did tell me where Joe got his training." "Oh. Joe could always draw; I'm sure he could have learned to read, he remembers what he sees. When he was about fourteen, he was being held overnight with some other boys in the precinct lockup and the desk sergeant got a look at some sketches Joe had waiting to be taken up in front of the judge and warned. One was of the desk sergeant -- and Joe had seen him only a few minutes. "That was Joe's break. The desk sergeant turned him over to the priest and got him off the blotter and both of them took him to a local artist and showed him the kid's sketches. "This artist was a mixture, fine art and commercial -- I mean he made money. He was another sort of mixture, too. An oyster. He may not have been impressed by Joe's sketches but he made a deal with him. Modeling. Joe could hang around his studio and use his materials and sketch from his models -- if Joe would pose when he needed him. They both won on the deal; you know how Joe looks now; at fourteen I'd bet he was more beautiful than any girl -- and no doubt that oyster thought so. "So Joe did and soon he was eating and sleeping there and got away from his mother entirely, best thing that ever happened to him. Joan, it was a onebed studio like this one." "You mean Joe was his sweetheart? Gigi, I decline to be shocked. Even though Tm ninetyfive, I try to think modern." "Joan, I never can believe that's your age; it isn't real, like that 'homo.' The artist was married, or shacked, with his number-one model. Possibly she got Joe's cherry. Either way, she taught him plenty and mothered him and was good to him, and it was a happy Troy. "But the artist -- Mr. Tony, as Joe speaks of him -- while he gave Joe the use of his studio and table and bed and wife -- was nevertheless a strict master. He wouldn't let Joe paint with a palette knife or a wide broom or do distortions or abstracts or psychedelics -- he made him learn to draw. Anatomy. Composition. Brush techniques. Color values. The whole endless drill of academic art, and wash brushes and sweep out the studio. Joe says that if it hadn't been for Mr. Tony, he would still be sketching sausage skins. Joe found out what he could do, what he wanted to do, and learned to do it. But, so he told me, not what his master did -- but in both cases founded on old-fashioned academic training. The hard way. Oh, Joe's learned short cuts. But he can paint directly on canvas -- he's been doing it since our last break -- and make it as close to a photograph as he cares to. Or as different." " -- never said that poor is better than rich, Gigi; it is not. But both rich and poor have shortcomings -- somewhere between is probably best, if you could get off the treadmill at that point. But -- Look, does Joe guard you when you go grocery-shopping?' ' "Huh? Of course not. Oh, sometimes he comes along and helps carry -- but not to guard. Well, he does ride down the lift with me if it's a time of day when it might be empty -- I mean, he's no fool and neither am I and I don't go looking for a mugging. Same coming back up and if I'm later than I said I would be, he's always there waiting. But I move around by myself, always have; I'm just not foolish about where and when." "Gigi, I'm sure you're not foolish, I doubt if you ever go into a park -- " "Not even at high noon! I've been raped once and didn't like it. I'm not looking for a gang bang where they take turns holding you down. They ought to bulldoze every park in the city." "Bulldozing the whole city might be better. But, Gigi, you move around rather freely. I can't. I don't dare appear even with guards around me without being veiled, I can't risk being recognized. I have to be wary all the time. Sure, you bolt your door -- but my house has to be strong enough to take a bomb tossed against it -- that's happened several times since I built it. I have to watch for everything from kidnapers and assassins to mere nuisances who want to touch me. "I'm talking both about the way I am now and the man 'Johann' I used to be -- too much money attracts crackpots and criminals and there is nothing I can do about it but keep guards around me day and night, live in a house that's a fort, try to avoid being recognized at any time and never, never try to live what is called a normal life. Besides that -- Gigi, can you imagine what a treat it is to me to be allowed to wash dishes?" Gigi looked startled. "Huh? Joan, you've lost me. Oh, I know how complicated it is to be rich; I've watched video. But washing dishes isn't a treat; it's a horrid bore. Too often I've left them in the sink, then had to face them before breakfast. By the time breakfast is ready, I don't want any." "Let me give you a tip, Gigi. I did know something about Joe's mother; Eunice was my secretary for years." (I never mentioned her. Boss!) (Will you let me tell this lie my own way?) "She was -- and is -- a pig and lives like one. This place isn't big; if you'll keep it spotless Joe won't care when you get wrinkles -- and we all do some day. But a dirty toilet bowl or dishes in the sink reminds him of his mother." Gigi said, "Joan, I try. But I can't clean house and pose at the same time." "Do your best, hon. If necessary, lose sleep. Joe is a man worth making extra effort to keep. But I was talking about doing dishes -- it's a nuisance to you but a luxury to me. Washing dishes means 'freedom' to me. Look, here we are, three of us, no servants -- and presently I'll be gone and you'll be alone with your husband and the world shut out. I can't shut it out. Uh... let me think -- Four mobile guards, a security chief, twelve in-house watchmen under him, three always on duty and the others on call, which means the married ones -- which is most of them -- have their families under my roof -- a personal maid, a valet who used to tend me and now takes care of guests -- couldn't fire him; I never fire anyone without cause -- a butler, a head chef, three -- oh, I don't remember; there were about sixty adults in my house the last time I asked." "My God, Joan!" "Yes, 'My God!' To take care of one person. Yet not one could I let go without replacing him. I planned that house and kept tabs on the design, intending to keep staff down to a minimum. So it's loaded with gadgets. Things like robofootmen and a trick bed that was designed to let me get along without a nurse a few more years as I got older. Do you know what that means? I lost. I have to have a building superintendent and maintenance mechanics -- or the gadgets don't work. All this complication -- and never any real privacy -- just to take care of one person who doesn't want it that way." "Joan, why don't you get rid of it? Move -- and start over." "Move where, dear? Oh, I've thought about it, believe me. But it's not actually to take care of one person -- it's to take care of too much money, money that is fastened to me... so that I can't risk kidnapers or anything else. I can't even cash it and flush it down the pot; that's not the way big money works. And even if I could and did -- nobody would believe I had. I would just have taken off my armor and probably would not stay alive two days. Besides -- Do you like cats?" "Love 'em! Got a kitten promised now." "Good. Now tell me -- how do you get rid of a cat you've raised?" "Huh? Why, you don't. Not if you're decent." "I agree, Gigi. I've lived with many cats. You keep them. If you are forced to it, you have a cat humanly destroyed -- or if you have the guts, you kill it yourself so that it won't be bungled. But you don't give away a grown cat; it is almost impossible. But, Gigi, you can't kill people." "I don't understand, Joan." "What would I do with Hugo? He's been with me many years; he's doing the only thing he knows how to do -- except preach, which doesn't really pay. Gigi, loyal servants are Chinese obligations, just like a cat. Sure, they can get other jobs. But what would you do if Joe told you, 'Get lost. We're finished." "I'd cry." "I don't think my servants would cry -- but I would." "But I'd get along!" Joan sighed. "And that platoon I have around me would get along. I think; they're able or I wouldn't have them -- and I've got money to make sure that ones like Hugo are taken care of; that's one of the good things about being rich -- if money is all it takes to remedy something, you can. Gigi, there is some solution to this silly fix I'm in and I'm going to find it -- I was just trying to show you that it isn't as simple as it looks on video. The solution may be something as easy as changing my name again and changing my face with plastic surgery and going somewhere else." "Oh, no, you mustn't change your face." "No, you're right; I must not change this face. It's Eunice's; I'm only its custodian. If I changed it, Joe would not like it -- nor several other people. (Starting with me. Boss.) (I won't change your lovely face, sweetheart. I'll cherish it.) "I'll keep it as it is -- but I have to keep it veiled. It's been on video too much, photographed and But there's some way to tackle the problem." nearly finished painting almost with awe. She knew what a beautiful body she had inherited; she knew that Gigi was a beauty of another sort; she could see that these "Grecian damsels" were herself and Gigi and she could not see any detail in which the painting was not a perfect likeness of each. Yet Joe Branca's "realism" was fantasy. These two nymphs in a glade were voluptous, sensuous, enticing in a way that she knew she and Gigi had not been -- sprawled on a platform of boards and gossiping about everything from an alcoholic to dirty dishes. "What do you think?" Gigi asked. "Say what you like; Joe doesn't give a hoot about any opinion but his own." Joan took a deep breath, sighed. "How does he do it? Here I am with my nipples tight just from looking at it -- and yet it's you and me, and we lay there talking for hours and never got in a sweat about it. Discussed everything but Topic 'A' -- wasn't even a cuddle because we had to hold still. Yet this paint-and-canvas reaches out and grabs you by the gonads and squeezes. I'm certain it would have just as much effect on a man." From behind them Joe said, "Fool-the-eye." Joan answered, "Fool-the-eye, hell, Joe. My eyes are not fooled. I'm enchanted. I want to buy it!" "No." "Huh? Oh, kark. You planned to sell it to some old butch. God knows ninety-five is old -- and I feel butch enough to qualify when I look at the painting." "Yours." "Huh? Joe, you can't do this to me. You intended to sell it, you said so. Gigi, back me up." Gigi chose not to answer. Joe said stubbornly, "Yours, Joan. You want it, you take it." "Joe, you are the most stubborn man I've ever met and I don't see how Gigi puts up with you. If you give me that painting. I'm going to destroy it at once -- " Gigi gasped. "Oh, no!" Joe shrugged. "Your ache. Not mine." " -- but if you'll sell it to me at your going rates. I'll take it with me and give it to Jake Salomon to hang at the end of his bed so he'll wake up happy each morning." (You bombed him, twin! Now swing back and strafe the survivors.) "That's the choice, Joe. Give it to me and I'll chop it into shreds. But sell it to me -- and Jake Salomon gets it. Oh, you could welch, then hang it for sale -- and put me to the trouble of hiring detectives to follow it to where you hang it so that I can buy it through an agent. What I do with it then, I won't tell. Or you could even keep it for your own jollies; it's quite a job." Gigi said, "Quit being stubborn, Joe; you know you'd like Jake to have it." "Gigi, what does Joe charge for a painting like that?" "Oh, I set the prices. Mostly I sell them by the yard. By size." "So? How much is this size?" "Well, I try to get two hundred and fifty for that size." "Ridiculous!" "Really, Joan, considering that it took both my time and Joe's all yesterday evening and today -- not to mention your time, but you're buying it, so I didn't add on for the second figure in it -- considering all that and the commission we pay, it's not very much -- " "Darling, I meant 'ridiculously' low. I haven't bought much art the last twenty years but I do know that is not less than a thousand-dollar picture -- then up like a kite to whatever the traffic will bear. I can tell you this: When Jake dies and that painting is auctioned off, it won't go for as little as a thousand... and it might be much higher because I'm certain to be at that auction and in no mood to let it get out of the family. But I'm not raising the price now; I never do that. Y'ou named a price of two-fifty; I accept." "Joan, you never did let me finish." "Oh. Sorry, hon." "I try to get two hundred and fifty for that size when I hang it in a shop. But half of that goes to the owner of the shop; that's the only way I can get space. So the price to you is a hundred and twenty-five." "No." "Why not?" "Just 'No' the way Joe said it to me. As good business practice you should never undercut your retailer. I think he's robbing you; the commission should be twentyfive percent, no more. But don't undercut the price you want him to ask -- that's no way to stay in business. I don't know much about art... but I know one hell of a lot about business. Cash, or check?" "Cash is fine. If you have that much with you. Or pay when you feel like it." "I want to pay now and get a receipt so that it will be legally mine -- before your stubborn husband can thwart me again. Shall I write the receipt for you, Gigi girl?" "Oh, I've got Woolworth's printed forms for that, and I can write numbers and sign my chop. No huhu." "Good. But I want something 'Vhat, Joan?" "I want to be kissed. I've been a good girl and posed all day and haven't even been kissed for it. So I want Joe to kiss me for being so stinky difficult -- and I want to kiss you for helping me with him. Joe, will you kiss me?" "Yes." "That's better. Joe, will you escort two nice girls -- me and Gigi, I mean, and no smart cracks -- down to the supermarket? If Gigi will buy us a steak to celebrate, I want to prove I can broil it. Will you buy us a steak, Gigi?" "Sure! Beef, or horse?" "Uh... hon. I'm forced to admit that I haven't shopped for groceries in years. What do you think?" "Well...it had better be horse." "Whatever you say. As long as they don't sell us the harness." mese delegation charged that the so-called Lunar Colonies were a coverup for a conspiracy by China and the United States to build military bases on the Moon. The Secretary of Conservation and Pollution Control denied a report that deer in Yosemite National Park were "dying in hordes from polluted water and emphysema." He stated that a healthy ecological rebalancing was taking place -- no need for alarm -- and the new herd would be stronger than ever. The Reverend Dr. Montgomery Chang, D.D., Most Humble Supreme Leader of The Way, Inc., testified before the subcommittee on Unwritten Law of the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the pending bill to require Lederal licensing of teachers of Zen Buddhism and related disciplines as "therapists de facto et de jure'. These bootleg gurus are giving rational mysticism a bad name. A man should no more be allowed to teach meditation, asanas, or transcendental philosophy without strict control by a licensing board than he should be allowed to ski or to surf or to frame a picture without passing an examination. The idea that this bill would abridge the sacred guarantees of the First Amendment is the sheerest nonsense; it protects and frees them." Under questioning he stated that serve as chairman of such a board if such sacrifice were asked of him. Survivors of Hurricane Hilda were still being rescued and the known death toll now stood at #. The Department of Internal Defense placed a temporary exception on interstate transmittal of intelligence concerning public disorders involving more than three persons, then placed a second exception with strict penalties on the publicizing of the first censorship order. The Secretary reported to the President that news services and video nets were cooperating voluntarily in the interests of the general welfare. In re the matter of identity of Conglom Tycoon Johann S. B. Smith the Supreme Court in a declaratory relief opinion made notable only by Mr. Justice Handy waking up in the middle of its reading, slapping the desk and roaring, "Divorce granted!" then going back to sleep, ruled seven to two to sustain a lower court in expanding and clarifying the principle originally set forth in Estate of Henry M. Parsons vs Rhode Island. Four of the majority and one dissenting justice ruled also that a legal sex change was involved in the matter; two justices thought otherwise, one justice (Mr. Handy) used twenty pages to prove that such a composite of sexes was contrary to public interest and to the laws of God and that both Johann Smith and Eunice Branca were legally dead and that the resultant monster had no legal existence of any sort; the ninth justice, in a onesentence separate assent, opined that sex was irrelevant in the entire matter; one of the majority, in another separate assenting opinion, stated that the donor body should have been sterilized surgically in the public interest and that the Congress would do well to make such sterilization mandatory in any future similar situation. No mention was made by any justice of thirteen amici-curiae briefs and one petition filed with the Court. In an opinion issued the same day viction was set aside on the grounds that the householder (deceased) had not advised Roberts of his rights before attempting to place him under citizen's arrest. share safe house  loving friendship # hr, # bths, MercServ, all util, nr lie pvt schl, atrium garden. Cmptr types (Rankin program) c? #, # #any #-plus match considered. "One for All, All for One!" No deposit but please send stereopix with notarized Rankin Reports -- bx # Bluebird, Ltd. On the basis of evidence submitted by the Chinese delegation t the UN A EC eased the tolerance l levels for strontium-# for whole milk. The Reverend Thomas Barker of Long Beach, California, in an Equal-Time-for-God videosermonette declared that the World had  ended at midnight December #st I time was "illusion of the Devil, without form, substance, or realiI ty." I and asked him to have Da' browski and Fred fetch upstairs with her two big flat packages, one so large that it had to be tilted to get it through the door of the lift. When packages, mobile guards and she herself were fitted inside she locked the door and pressed the "Hold" touchplate without signaling a floor, then dropped her cape. "Let me kiss you thank-you-goodnight, boys, but for heaven's sake don't get paint on you or muss it. Better just hold my face in your hands -- but no need to hurry." Shortly thereafter she looked at herself in the lift's mirror, decided that makeup and hair-do had suffered only minor wear and tear, let Dabrowski lay her cape around her, then punched for her floor and fastened all the cape's frogs so that she was again fully covered. When the lift stopped she hooked up her veil. "These go in your boudoir. Miss? Or your lounge?" "First let's see if Mr. Salomon is receiving." They followed her down the long hall to the Green Suite. Joan noted that the pleasedon't-disturb ruby light was not burning over the door of Jake's lounge, so she touched the door signal. The speaker above it bellowed, "Come in!" The door opened; she went in. "Put them inside and that will be all." "Very good. Miss." As they left and the door closed Jake came out of his bedroom, looking tousled. He stopped abruptly. "Well! Where the hell have you been?" "Out." "Hrrrmph! Five days. Five whole days!" "So? Chickens fed? Hogs slopped? Cows milked?" "That's not the point. I -- " "That is the point, Jake. Nothing has been neglected through my being away. You won't marry me, so I am not answerable to you when I come and go. Though as a courtesy I did leave a note with Cunningham telling you where I had gone. Did you receive it?" "Yes, but -- " "Then you knew I was safe -- and in emergency could have sent me a message. Or joined me; you would have been welcome. You know Joe would have made you welcome -- and Gigi is friendly as a puppy." "Gigi?" "You know her. You've met her, I mean. Mrs. Joe Branca." "irzar?" "Why the surprise, Jake? People do remarry -- especially if an earlier marriage was happy. Joe's was and now he has -- and Fm happy for him -- and certain that Eunice is happy for him, too." (Sure I am. Boss. But let's not be too noble. Being noble is a male prerogative. So they think.) "I can't believe it." "What's odd about a widower remarrying?" "I can't imagine anyone who had been married to Eunice ever marrying some other woman." (My fan! Twin, we're going to be especially nice to Jake tonight.) (If he doesn't start being nice to me, he's going to sleep alone tonight! But I shan't. I wonder if Anton and Fred have left the house?) (Calm down. Boss. And get Jake calmed down.) (Not yet, I won't! He's wrong and Fm right.) (Twin, honey, how long is it going to take you to learn that being right has nothing to do with getting along with a man? Men aren't logical, their minds don't work that way. But it's the only game in town, so when a man is wrong and you are right, it's time to apologize. Tell him you're sorry -- and mean it. Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum -- sometimes I find being a woman just too frimping difficult. If it weren't so darned much fun. Okay, sweetheart, watch me take him.) "Jake dearest, I'm sorry it upsets you that Joe has remarried -- but why not wait before deciding that he has made a mistake? Joe needs a wife -- even if she's not Eunice. And I'm terribly sorry that I worried you by not being here when you got home... and sorry on my own account; I expected to welcome you -- with open arms and a happy smile. But I didn't expect you to be away less than a week and I had an impression that you expected it to take longer -- possibly much longer." "Well, yes, I did think I might have to sit it out quite a while. But I got in to see the Chief Justice the second day and he assured me that he would put it at the top of the calendar... and that he had seen -- unofficially -- an advance transcript of the record. And that was that." "Hm! Campaign contributions are sometimes worth while." "Joan Eunice, don't ever talk that way. Especially in reference to the Chief Justice of the United States. Yes, this is your house. Nevertheless it might be bugged." "I'm sorry, Jake. It was a thoughtless remark. My appreciation really goes where it belongs. To you." "To Mac more than to me, my dear; that boy has been on the ball. How he got an advance copy to, uh, the right man so quickly is something I don't want to inquire into." "I appreciate Mac's efforts, I appreciate Alec's efforts -- but mostly I appreciate my darling, always dependable, utterly wonderful Jake." (Is that too thick, Eunice?) (Boss, I keep telling you: it's impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he's eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he'll start stooping to go through sevenfoot doors.) Jake looked pleased, so Joan went on: "I suppose it will all be settled soon, then?" "Little one, don't you ever listen to the news?" "Not if I can avoid it." "Well, you should. It is over. You've won, finally and completely." "Really? I never doubted that we would win, Jake, the wonderful way you've handled everything. My surprise is solely that it has happened so fast. Yes, I suppose I should follow the news. But I haven't been able to, these last few days. Had this difficult job to do -- Joe, I mean -- and while you were away seemed the best time... so I gritted my teeth and tackled it." "Joan Eunice, I told you never to go near Joe. I told you. If this new marriage of his ever stood a chance -- yes, intellectually I know that a man should remarry -- if it ever did stand a chance, you must have put a horrible strain on it. Too much strain, probably. Uh... how did he take it? Badly?" "Jake, I stayed five days. If it had gone badly, would I have been there even one day? I accomplished the mission; everything is all right." Jake looked surprised, then thoughtful. "Hmm! That's a oneroom studio... and if I follow your meaning, you stayed right there the whole five days. My dear, just how did you 'accomplish your mission?' Or have I no right to ask?" She looked up at him and spoke seriously. "Jake, I owe you so much that you will always have the right to ask me anything. Including my comings and goings and I should not have given you a snippy answer." (Didn't quite tell him he had a right to a truthful answer, did you. Boss honey? Devious little bitch.) (Eunice, I don't lie to Jake -- ) (Oh, what a whopper') ( -- more than is necessary to his happiness.) "Jake, I accomplished my mission -- I set Joe's mind at rest about Eunice -- through a 'prayer meeting.' With Gigi's utterly necessary help, which is only part of why I feel sure that she's good for him. But if you mean I offered him a zombie -- his dead wife's re-animated body -- I knew that was not the way to do it. Joe hasn't touched me. Oh, he does touch me now, easily and without strain, the way he might touch his sister." (Any incest in Joe's family, twin? I've never been sure.) (Oh, shut up!) "He even kisses me the same way. But, Jake -- " "Eh? What, dear?" "If Joe wanted this body I'm wearing, of course he could have it; I owe him anything I can give him. You see that, don't you? You agree? Or am I wrong?" "Uh... yes, I agree. But I think it's well that Joe does not want to. It could be disaster for him... and a terrible strain for you." "I know it would be a strain for me. But I would do my best to smile and never let him guess. As it is, I am honored -- and relieved -- and deeply grateful that Joe has given me his loving friendship instead." (Okay, Eunice?) (Okay. Now get him off that subject.) "I'm glad, Eunice." "Jake, do we have to stand here, me still in street clothes? I have presents for you -- welcome-home presents." She smiled her best happy-little-girl smile. "Want to see them?" "Of course I want to see them! And where are my manners, letting you stand? Here, let me seat you and take your cloak. Sherry?'.' "Later. Or champagne, to welcome you home. To welcome us both home." She turned and let him take her cape. He turned to lay it aside and turned back just as she did so, too. "Holy cow!" "Didn't know you were a Hindu, Jake." She posed, in graceful and calculated display. "You wore that all the way across the city? Just paint?" W #I#HY not, dear? It's your first W present -- from Joe to you, sent with his love. I had my cape over it before I left Joe's studio and kept it on when I got home -- until you unwrapped your present. Didn't want my mobiles to see it, of course." (Oh, of course, twin -- except that Joe let them watch every brush stroke, once Gigi was sure you didn't mind. Say, Joan, Gigi would go for a Texas Star with Anton and Fred, I feel certain. And Joe would go along; he likes them. What do you think? Easy way to keep your promise to them, huh?) (Eunice, we've got this man on our hands now.) (Oh, poor you. Best way in the world to work up steam with one man is to let your mind rove about other men. You've still got some Puritan in you, girl.) (Which Puritan? When? And why didn't I notice? You can't mean Jake; he's Jewish. Speaking of Jake, has he noticed that slight omission in this getup? And why haven't we been raped?) (I doubt it, his eyeballs are spinning. As for the latter, I have hopes.) "Joan Eunice, do you realize that that is a reproduction -- exact, I think -- of a body-paint design Eunice once wore?" "Of course I realize it; she wore it here...and I wasn't so near dead that I didn't stare. Could never make up my mind whether these were sea shells, or paint. Now I know. Joe wanted to be sure that you had seen it that first time, when Eunice wore it. I told him that I was almost certain that you had been here that day." "Well, yes, I was. Briefly. That's why I recognized it." "So? It had seemed to me that I recalled that as one of the days you took Eunice home. Hmmm?" "Joan, are you trying to be snoopy?" "Yes." "Woman, I will not satisfy your prurient curiosity." "How do you feel about satisfying prurience itself? Mine, I mean." "That's another matter." "I was wondering. So far you haven't even kissed me. Shall I take a shower first? Or let me put it this way: Did Eunice take time to get the paint off first?" "Let me put it this way; Shut up and keep quiet and pipe down and not another damn' word out of you until I give permission." "Yes, sir." She obeyed in essence for a reasonable time. "May I talk now?" "Yes, as long as you limit yourself to polite words of endearment. Some of your spontaneous remarks were quite unladylike." "That's because I'm quite unladylike, Jake my only darling. I'm a failure as a lady. But I'll go on doing my best to simulate one in public -- be a credit to Eunice." "Joan Eunice -- " "Sir?" "That's the way Eunice herself did it. A perfect lady in public... utterly uninhibited in private. It was a major part of her great charm. Some of her spontaneous expressions at such times were far more unladylike than any I've heard you use." "Really, Jake? Did she know any that I don't? And do you like them?" "Mmm, I don't think she knew any that you don't know; she was just easier about it once she trusted me. Yes, I do like them. Used spontaneously." "Jake, I trust you without limit -- and I'll try not to inhibit any future spontaneity. Haven't meant to. Still learning." "Darling girl, you do just fine when you get your rest. I mean my rest. Now that I've got you helpless -- and seeing that you trust me without limit -- what did happen at Joe's?" "Sir, the fact that I trust you -- and I do -- does not mean that I'm going to satisfy your prurient curiosity." "Hmm -- Neither did Eunice, ever." "Instead, you tell me what happened to you -- at Joe's." 'We seem to have reached a stalemate. Let's wash off this paint. I wish I had taken a photograph of our mermaid before I smeared it." "No huhu, Jake my beloved; Joe took several and I have them in my purse. For you. And I have two of Eunice in the same getup -- one for you, and one for me. And besides that Joe gave me a fourby-five Kodachrome of a most incredible trompe-P oeil painting he did of Eunice as a mermaid diving...plus a smaller transparency which shows how he did it. Same getup minus sea shells." "Would it surprise you to learn that I've seen them both? Just didn't have the crust to promote Joe for them." "No, not surprised, I guess. But I did not pressure him, Jake; he said he had a present for me -- and these photos turned out to be the present. I should refuse? God forbid. But I'm going to put snoops to work and trace down who bought that painting. I intend to own it. Price no object." "Your money won't help you. Miss Smith. Would it surprise you to know that  own that original Branca? It's at the Gib." "I'll be -- dipped! Jake, you're a dirty old holdout. I take back ten percent of any compliments I've handed you." "That's okay; I didn't believe more than ninety percent. But if you're a good girl I'll give you that painting." "I accept! But -- well, it's hardly worth while opening those packages. They'll be disappointments." "Would you like a spanking?" "Yes." "I'm too tired. Let's open packages." "Well... we might open the smaller one. Let you see what Gigi looks like, if you don't remember. She's worth looking at." "We'll open both of them." "Scrub first?" "I suppose we should." "Well... let's give it a lick and promise, not turn it into a social event." Jake?" He gave a respectful wolf whistle. "The boy's a genius." "Yes. I hadn't suspected. But you already knew it." "Well, yes. His decision to use strong sunlight on your two contrasting skin colors was inspired." "Especially as he had no sunlight -- just smog-filtered north light, soft as old linen. Those highlights come from photographing us under floods the night before. Then he painted from us the next day. Changed the pose, though -- and I don't know just how he corrected the highlights. But I'm no genius." "What's in the big package?" "Open it." It was The Three Graces -- and all three were Joan Eunice. "Joe calls this a 'cheat pic,' Jake -- he photographed me three times -- erase and correct -- more nearly thirtythree times, against a neutral background, then combined three photos for his cartoon. Had Gigi pose with me each time to get arms-around-waist and so forth, then she would slither out like a snake without disturbing my pose. If he hadn't used 'cheat' the painting would have taken far longer. Aren't those dimples in my behind cute?" "Woman, you are conceited enough." "I'm not conceited, Jake; I wasn't handsome even when I was young. I know whose beautiful bottom that is. Weil, dear? I had intended Bilitis for me and the Graces for you -- but you can have your choice." "What a choice to have to make!" "The one you let me keep will be no farther away than down the hall. If you had married me when you so obviously should have, you lecherous old rapist, you wouldn't have to make a choice; both would be yours. Jake, what does it cost to buy a job lot of art critics?" "Well, the present crop ought not to fetch more than ten cents a dozen but everything is higher these days. I take it you have Joe Branca in mind?" "Of course. He's selling his paintings at ridiculously low prices and paying outrageous commission -- and sells so few that the kids hardly get enough to eat. While freaks and frauds and sign painters are all the rage. I thought -- " "You can stop thinking; I see the swindle. We'll get him a good agent, we'll buy up what he has on the market, using dummies -- and keep them ourselves; they're a sure-fire investment... and we'll buy art critics here, then elsewhere as he becomes better known. The question is: How much of a success must he be? Do I have to get him into the Metropolitan?" "Jake, I don't think Joe wants to be famous. And  don't want it to be so conspicuous that he might smell a rat. Or that Gigi might; she's a little more sophisticated. Not very, that is. I just want his pictures to sell regularly enough that Gigi can buy groceries without worrying and can have enough disposable sheets that she can change them every day if it suits her. The kid is trying to keep house on scraped icebox and boiled dishrag soup. I tried that in the 'Depression and it's not funny -- and I see no reason why Gigi should have to do it when she's married to an honest-to-God artist who can paint -- and works at it. One who doesn't spend his time sopping up sauce or blowing weed and talking about the painting he's going to do. Joe paints. He's a craftsman as well as an artist. Well, maybe I don't know what an artist is but I know what a craftsman is and I respect craftsmen. Too few of them in this decadent world." "No argument. We'll do it. Even if we have to go as high as fifteen cents a dozen." "Even two-bits. Let's finish getting pa'int off -- I must send down for olive oil -- and you could be a darling and get Winnie to fetch me a heavy robe or get it yourself, pretty please, if she isn't home -- no, I can get back to my room in my street cape, no problem, and -- " "Hrrrmph." "Did I goof again?" "My dear, I have an announcement. Dr. and Mrs. Roberto Carlos Garcia y Ibanez are on their honeymoon." "Whatl Why, the dirty little rat! Didn't wait for big sister to hold her hand. Good for them! Jake, that's wonderful -- I think I'll cry." "Go ahead, you cry while I shower." "Hell, no. I'll cry when Winnie is back. I'll take that shower with you and you can scrub me. My back, where I can't see the paint; not my front. I'm tired, too. When was it and do you know when they will be home? And, goodness, I must pick out a suite for them; Roberto won't want to be next to mine with a connecting door. And I need to think of a wedding present -- I may give them the painting you don't pick; Roberto won't let me give them anything expensive, he's a stubborn man." (Boss, is there another sort?) "I can't see why Boh wouldn't want to have a connecting door into your bedroom." "I think that was meant to be an insult. Perhaps he would like it, dear --  would like it. But it would not look right to the servants." (Primp the servants!) All of them, Eunice? I'm kept busy as it is.) "Eunice, I took the liberty of telling Cunningham to have the Gold Suite set up for the Garcias -- " "Perfect! I'll have a door cut from my lounge into theirs... and there already is a lock-off that we can unlock between its foyer and the upstairs library we joined to your suite -- and then we can quit this unseemly ducking back and forth through the hall." "The newlyweds might prefer to be left alone." "Hadn't, thought of that. Oh, well, 'I have some friends of my own,' as the old gal said." "In any case they'll be back too soon for carpentry. I have it from a usually dependable source that a reliably dishonest member of your staff agreed to phone Mrs. Garcia the instant you returned. I assume that the call was made, I assume that they will be back by, oh, nightfall." "I wonder whom I should fire? That's a hell of a way to run a honeymoon." "I understand the good Doctor was in on it -- the idea being to keep you safe from harm, since between them they constitute your medical staff." "What nonsense. I'm the Pioneer-Mother type. Rugged. If I had crossed with the prairie schooners, they would have yoked me in with the oxen. But I'm glad they're coming home. I want to kiss them and cry on them." "Johann, sometimes I can't make up my mind whether you are a silly young girl -- or senile." "The last time you called me Johann you acquired some scar tissue. Dear, has it occurred to you that I might be both? A senile silly young girl?" "Interesting. A possible working hypothesis." "If so, I'm a well adjusted one -- Jake, I'm a happy as a cat left alone with the Christmas turkey. With Joe squared away and the Supreme Court being sensible for a change my last fret is gone. Life is one long giddy delight. I'm even morning sick." "Can't see why you should be -- huhT' (Boss, I thought you weren't going to tell him?) (Eunice, he was bound to know soon... and I couldn't just let him find out, can't do that to Jake. This is the perfect time -- he's officially 'first to know.') I morning sickness, Jake. I'm healthy as a horse and the only change I've noticed is that I'm hungry as a horse, too." "You wish me to believe that you are pregnant?" "Don't give me that stern-father look, Jake. I'm knocked up and happier than Happy Hooligan. I could have kept it to myself a while longer but I wanted to tell you before anyone else could notice. But be a dear and treat it as privileged -- because the instant Winnie finds out she'll start mothering me and worrying. Which is not what a bride should be doing. With luck I can keep it from Winnie until she's pregnant, too." (Boss, what makes you think Winnie intends to get pregnant?) (Use your head, Eunice -- five to one she's got a Bandaid over the spot where that implant used to be this very minute.) (I don't have a head. Boss -- just yours and it doesn't work too well.) (Complaints, huh? Talk that way and I won't marry you, either.) (We are married. Boss.) (I know it, beloved. Now be quiet; I've got to juggle eggs.) "Eunice -- are you sure?" "Yes. Test positive." "Did Bob make the test? Or some quack?" "A patient's relations with a doctor are confo. But it was not a quack. Don't pursue this line of inquiry. Counselor." "We'll get married at once." "The hell we will!" "Eunice, let's have no nonsense!" "Sir, I asked you to marry me quite some time back. You emphatically refused. I asked you at a later time. Again I was turned down. I decided not to renew my request and I do not do so now. I will, not marry you. But I will be honored and delighted to continue as your mistress until I am benched by biology -- and more than pleased to be allowed again to be your concubine when I am back in commission. I love you, sir. But I will not marry you." "I ought to spank you." "I don't think it would do me any damage, darling. But I don't think you could bring yourself to strike a pregnant woman." (Now kick him in the other shin. Boss. You little hellcat.) (Eunice, stay out of this row. I'm not only a woman scorned; I'm also old Johann Smith who never could be pushed too far. Jake can have us any time, sure. But I'm damned if I'll let him be 'noble' about it when I'm knocked up.) (Boss, aren't we eer going to marry him? This is a mistake, dear; he needs us.) (And we need him, Eunice. Sure, we'll marry him -- after we've whelped. After.) (Boss, you're making a big mistake.) (If so. I'm making it. I never make little mistakes -- just big ones.) "I didn't say I was going to spank you, Eunice -- I said I ought to. What happened? I distinctly remember you telling me that you had taken care of contraception." "Your memory is good, sir. The exact phrasing, as I phrased it most carefully. I have 'taken care' of such matters in whatever fashion I wished. Every time. With you. With others. Each time I have taken such care as suited me -- at that time and with that man." "Hmmm! That's as unresponsive an answer as I've ever heard. Let me put it more plainly. Eunice, did I get you pregnant?" "I won't answer. You know that at least one other man has slept with me -- and I may have been the bride of the regiment. Jake, you would not marry me when I was virgin; you still would not marry me when you made me your mistress. So where I got this child in me is not your business and you have no right to quiz me and -- much as I love you -- I will not tolerate one more question along this line. Not now nor in the future! Whom I chose to father my child is my business. But you may be certain that I selected him with care, eyes open and wits about me. You've been acting as if you were a father dealing with a wayward daughter, or a Welfare visitor trying to establish responsibility for an unlicensed pregnancy. You know that is not the situation. I am ninety-five years old -- much older than you are -- able to afford a dozen bastards if it suits me -- and it may -- and wealthy enough to tell the world to go pee up a rope. Jake, I was sharing happy news with you. You elect to treat it as bad news and take me to task about it. I won't accept that, sir. I made a mistake in telling you. Will you please treat the matter as privileged -- and never mention it again?" "Eunice." "Yes, Jake?" "I love you." "I love you, Jake." "Had I been twenty years younger -- even ten years -- I would have married you long before now. Since you won't tell me -- and since I have no right to quiz you; you are correct -- will you forgive an old man's pride if I choose to believe that I am the man you picked? I promise that I will not discuss that belief with anyone." J lieve that, I am honored. But I ask no promises. If you chose to proclaim such a belief, I would never shame my oldest and closest and most beloved friend by denying it. I would smile proudly and let my manner confirm it. But, Jacob my beloved, to you I neither affirm nor deny it -- and never will. I did this on my own. I alone am parent to this child." (Watch your words, Boss! You almost spelled it out.) (He'll take it as rhetoric. Or if he does suspect, investigation will prove that he's wrong. Hank Olsen knows which side of his bed is buttered. Mine, that is.) (And the dates are going to check out so that Jake will be certain it's his. Hmm -- ) (Still think I'm a fool, Eunice?) (No, Boss -- just reckless. You scare the hell out of me at times.) "Well, Eunice, from the restrictions you have put on me that seems to be all we can say about it." "That was my intention, Jake." "I understood. What would you like to do the rest of today -- at least until our newlyweds return? Play cribbage?" "If you wish, Jake, certainly." "I have a better idea. If you want to join me in it. Could be fun, I think." ""Will be fun, Jake. Anything is  always fun shared with you. Even if it's just cribbage." "This is a better two-handed game if it's played right. Let's phone Mac, ask him to have his clerk start the ball rolling -- and get married. With luck we can be legal in twenty-one ortwo -- and still get in a couple of boards of cribbage before bedtime." "Oh, Jake! CribbageV" "Answer me, woman. A simple Yes or No. I won't argue it... and I won't ask you again. And blow your nose and wipe your eyes -- you're a mess." "Damn you, Jake! Vest Let me go and I'll blow my nose. I think you've cracked my ribs, you big brute. That's a hell of a way to treat an expectant mother." "I'll do worse than crack your ribs if I have any more nonsense out of you. Now to call Mac -- I'll have to think up a plausible lie so that he'll be justified in authorizing the County Clerk to issue a special license." "Why does it have to be fancy, Jacob? I thought you were going to tell Mac that you had knocked me up?" "Eunice, is that what you want me to say?" "Jacob, I'm going to marry you as quickly as possible, I don't care how. I hope Winnie and Roberto show up in time but I'm not goint to wait; you might come to your senses. I thought you preferred to claim that you had done me in and I know I agreed to confirm it. So tell Mac so. Tell any body." "Doesn't fret you?" "Jake dearest, maybe that's the best way to handle it... because, presently, God and everybody is going to know about the Silent Witness. Jake? Do you recall my first day of freedom? The day after Mac conditionally confirmed my identity and discharged me as a ward of the court?" "My dear, I am not likely to forget that day." "Nor I. Count two hundred sixty-seven days. That is when the Silent Witness should show up." "You're telling me that I am the father Of your child." "Not at all, sir. I was in heat and had slipped the leash and you may assume if you wish that I spent the day bouncing in and out of beds. going from one man to another." She smiled beautifically. (Boss, that's awfully close to the truth -- but it sounds like a whopper.) (It is the truth, Eunice; I worded it most carefully. That is the second best way to tell a lie -- tell the truth so that is sounds like a whopper.) (And I thought I knew how to lie.) (I've had years more practice. Beloved -- and as a kid had more reason to lie than you ever had. Lying is a fine art; it is learned only through long practice.) "Knock off the nonsense, Eunice, or I'll start married life by giving you a fat lip. Okay, we'll tell Mac that; the truth is often the simplest solution. But we have to have health certificates; Mac can get us out of the waiting time but not out of that requirement. My doctor will phony one for me without stopping to take a blood sample and make tests, but how about that quack you mentioned? Will he cooperate?" "Jake, I don't recall mentioning a quack. If Roberto gets here in time, I think he would take a chance. Or Rosy would, I think. I don't think I'm harboring even a cold bug unless I picked up something from Joe and Gigi. Most unlikely. But how about you, darling? Washington, D.C., has the highest V.D. rate in the country. Did you fetch anything home?" "Oh, nothing but big and little casino." "A nice girl like me can't be expected to understand such terms." "You impudent little baggage, I slept alone in Washington. Can you make the same claim? For the past five days?" "Of course not, dear; I've never been interested in sleeping alone -- and Gigi is very snuggly. I commend her to your attention -- take a look at that painting." "I'm sure she is. Just Gigi, eh? Not Joe?" "Is Joe snuggly, Jake? Tell me morel" "Woman, you may get that fat lip before I marry you." "The groom's present to the bride? Sir, if you want to give me a fat lip. I'll hold still, smile happily and take it. Oh, Jake darling, it's going to be such fun to be married to you!" "I think so, too, you dizzy bitch. Mmm, my doctor will phony a certificate for you, too, if I explain the circumstances. But he'll need your blood type." "Jake, the whole country knows that my blood type is AB-negative. Had you forgotten it?" "Momentarily, yes. That's all I need. Except -- Wedding here? Or in Mac's chambers?" "Here, if possible. I want our servants for 'family' if Winnie and Roberto don't show up. Jacob, do I dare send a car with a message and ask Joe and Gigi to allow themselves to be fetched here for this purpose? I do want them present. Gigi is no problem; she will do as Joe wishes -- but I think you know Joe better than I do. I don't even know that he has here -- all I saw him wear were denim shorts so caked with paint they could stand alone." "Mmm, I agree that Eunice's former husband is entitled to be invited to Joan Eunice's wedding, though there has never been a protocol established, that's certain. Dear, the clothes Joe wore in court would be okay for a home wedding. How about yourself, Eunice? Going to be married in white?" "I think I've been insulted again. Wear white so that somebody can sneak a picture and sell it? 'Ninety-FiveYear-Old SexChange Bride Wears White.' Dear, if I wear white, let's ask Life to send a photographer and cut out the middle man. Jake, I'll wear white if you tell me to. If you don't. I'll pick something but it won't be white. Something." " 'Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.' " "Erase and correct, Jake. Here is the Twenty-First Century ver sion: "The bride is old, "The license new, "The body borrowed, "The groom is blue." "I am like hell blue, I simply need a shave. Get out now and let me be. Beat it. Go take a bath. Try to smell like a bride." I can take a hint. But you take a bath, too." "Who notices the groom?" six hours. But so did everyone in the ugly old mansion. To the old-tradition strains of Mendelssohn's Processional the bride walked slowly in hesitation-step through the rotunda. (Twin, Here Comes the Bride always sounds to me like a cat sneaking up on a bird. Pum... pum... tee-pum! Appropriate, hnnn?) (Eunice, behave!) (Oh, I'll behave. But I prefer John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith -- his name is my name, too!) (You can't know that one. It's eighty years old and long forgotten.) (Why wouldn't I know it when you were singing it in your head every second they were dressing us?) She walked steadily down the center of a long white velvet carpet, through the arch and into the banquet hall, now transformed with flowers and candles and organ into a chapel. (Boss, there's Curt! I'm so glad he made it! That must be Mrs. Hedrick with him. Don't look at them, twin; I'll giggle.) (I'm not looking at them and you stop trying to -- I must look straight ahead.) (You do that. Boss darling, and I'll count the house. There's Mrs. Mac -- Norma -- and Alec's Ruth, with Roberto. Where's .Rosy? Oh, there he is, beyond Mrs. Mac. My, isn't Della dressed fit to kill? -- makes us look shabby.) The bride wore a severely simple dress of powder blue, opaque, with high neck, matching veil, long sleeves, matching gloves, skirt hem brushing the velvet runner and long train sweeping behind. She carried a bouquet of white cattleya dyed blue to match. (Twin? Why that last-minute decision for panties? They make a line that shows.) (Not through this gown; it's not skin tight. The 'bride's knot,' Beloved -- for symbolic defloration.) (Coo! Don't make me laugh, Boss.) (Eunice, if you louse up this wedding. I'll -- I'll -- I won't speak to you for three days!) (Joan twin, I won't spoil it -- Jake wants symbols, he shall have them.) (And  want symbols, too!) (And so do I, twin, so do I. It's just that I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated practical joke, and it's better to laugh than cry.) (Yes, darling -- but let's not do either right now. I'm having trouble with tears.) (I thought they were my tears. Doesn't Thomas Cattus look handsome? I heard you order the Lohengrin recessional; that one is even funnier than the Mendelssohn -- to an Iowa farm girl it sounds exactly like the triumphant cackle of a hen after she lays an egg. I'll laugh then, I know I will.) (All right to laugh and cry both then, Eunice -- and to hang on tight to Jacob's arm. Look, dearest, this is an old-fashioned wedding with all the cliches because Jake and I are old fossils and that's the way it should be.) (Oh, I approve. Cunningham looks worried -- can't see why; he's done a beautiful job. Boss, those panties struck me so darn funny because you ordered the Bilitis and the Graces to be placed on easels in the drawing room where everyone at the reception can stare at them. Riddle me that.) (Eunice, there is no inconsistency. A bride is supposed to be covered; those paintings are meant to be looked at. With Joe and Gigi here I darn well want them to be looked at!) (They'll be looked at. Stared at. Some wives may look at them with intense interest. Maybe.) (Maybe. Eunice, you know I've never asked a husband not to tell his wife anything; it's not right to ask one member of a married couple to keep secrets from the other. Besides, he will or he won't, no matter what you ask -- and he should; he knows her better than we do. But those pix are as harmless as the fruit punch we have for those who turn down the champagne. It's irrelevant that I posed for them, I simply want Joe's genius to be appreciated. Enjoyed.) Joe Branca had used no small part of his genius in making up the bride. Starting with a bare, clean canvas -- fresh out of her tub -- he had worked long and hard to make up Joan Eunice from head to toe with such restraint that even close inspection could not detect any trace of his efforts. As in "The Three Graces" it was simply Eunice's own beauty, invisibly enhanced -- strongly enhanced, better than life, more natural than nature. He turned down the use of a hair fall and simply fluffed her own hair (still far shorter than Eunice's hair had been) and sprayed it slightly to keep it unmussed under her veil. The bride's matron of honor was made up with much less restraint. Having seen the miracle wrought on Joan Eunice, Winnie had timidly asked Joan if she thought it would be all right to ask Mr. Branca to improve her a little? Since she was part of the wedding party? Joan and Gigi had enthusiastically pushed the idea. Joe had studied Mrs. Garcia, then said, "Forty minutes, Joan Eunice -- is time? Okay, Winnie wash face." The result exploited Winifred's red hair, made visible her transparent eyebrows and lashes, livened her too-white skin -- yet looked more natural than the stylized face Winnie usually wore. The matron of honor wore pastel-green tabard and tights and carried a smaller bouquet of green and brown cymbidia. She kept in step to the hesitation march thirty paces ahead of the bride, preceded her into the banquet hall toward the improvised altar. Chief of Security O'Neil was the last one in, then posted himself in the archway at parade-rest and managed to watch events at the far end of the room while giving his attention to his rear. Flis features were serene but he was uneasy, alert. The big house was empty save for seventy-five to eighty people in this one room; all armor was up, every door, every real window was locked, hand-bolted, and dogged, and the night net of alarms switched on, and O'Neil had personally made sure of all this before releasing his guards to attend the wedding. But he trusted no gadgets and few people; he did not release himself from duty. T he bride approached the far end. Jake Salomon waited there, with Alec Train at his side. Facing down the aisle were the Reverend Hugo White and Judge McCampbell, matching in dignity. Shorty was wearing a black frock coat, white shirt, string tie, and carried his Book; the Judge was injudicial robes. (Boss, doesn't Jake look beautiful? But what is that getup?) (It's a cutaway, dearest.) (It's a museum piece.) (I suppose so. Jake probably hasn't worn it in thirty, forty years -- or perhaps rented it from a theatrical costumer. I feel certain Alec had to rent his. Doesn't Father Hugo look grand!) (Must be his preachin' clothes. Boss. Joe ought to paint him in this, even if he never gets the pix he wants.) (Good idea, Eunice; we'll plant it with Gigi -- and one thing may lead to another. I have hopes that seeing The Three Graces will gentle him, too. As Hugo wants to pose... if he can convince himself that it's not sinful. Eunice, my knees are shaking. I'm not sure I can do it!) (Om Mani Padme Hum, baby sister. We had one hell of time getting him off the dime; don't go chicken now.) (Om Mani Padme Hum, Eunice -- hold my hand, darling; don't let me faint.) Joan Eunice stopped in front of judge and preacher. Winifred took her bouquet from her, stepped back to one side. Alec Train moved Jake into place beside Joan Eunice, placed himself to balance Winifred. The music stopped. Hugo lifted his eyes and said, "Let us pray." (Om Mani Padme Hum. You okay, twin?) (I'm all right now. Om Mani Padme Hum.) Joe Branca slid in from the side, shot his first picture. Thereafter he moved around like a Chinese stage hand, disturbing no one and never moving at a crucial moment -- but getting his shots. Hugo opened his Book, did not look at it. "We read today from the Book of Psalms. It says here: " 'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. " 'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. " 'He restoreth my soul; He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. " 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil... H e closed his Book. "Brothers and Sisters, the Lord saw that Adam was lonely in the Garden of Eden and He said it is not good for man to live alone. So He created Eve to live with Adam. And He said to Adam, My son, you take care of this woman, you hear Me? You treat her right all the time, just like I was watching you every minute. Because I am watching you, every minute and every second. You cherish her and protect her like I tell you and you'll be too busy to get into anything wrongful, and she'll be a comfort to you all the days of your life." He turned to Salomon. "Jacob Moshe, are you going to do that?" "I will!" The reverend looked at the bride. "And the Lord said to Eve, My daughter, you got to cook for this man and wash his clothes and bring up his babies and not go running around when you should be home, and love him even when he's tired and bad-tempered and not fit to speak to, because men are like that and you must take the bad with the good -- you hear Me, Eve? "Joan Eunice, are you going to do that?" "Yes, Father Hugo." "Judge -- " "Jacob Moshe, does there exist any impediment under our laws and customs to you marrying this woman?" "None." "Joan Eunice, is there any reason in law or in your heart why you cannot marry this man?"  "There is none. Your Honor." McCampbell spoke more loudly. "If any witness knows of any cause which would forbid me to bind these two in marriage, I command him to speak." (Eunice, if anyone even clears his throat. I'll -- I'll) (You'll keep quiet. Boss darling; that's what you'll do. Nobody here but our loving friends. Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum... ) "Jacob Moshe, will you love, honor and cherish her?" "I will." "Joan Eunice, will you love, honor, and cherish him?" "I will love, honor, and obey him." (Huh? Boss you demon, you haven't the slightest intention of obeying!) Salomon said, "Wait a moment! Judge, she switched the words! I don't expect that and I won't let her promise -- " "Order. You keep quiet, Jake; I'm not addressing you. Joan Eunice, is that what you wish to promise?" "Yes, Your Honor." (Eunice, stay out of this. I know what I'm doing.) "I must advise you that such a promise is not legally binding under the civil marriage contract of this state but I must warn you, too, that it is not a promise which should be lightly made in these circumstances." "I know it. Your Honor." (Boss, you're out of your mind!) (Quite possibly. But it's all right, sweetheart. Jake is going to give us exactly the orders we will be humbly pleased to obey. Haven't I been right so far?) (Yes, but you keep scaring me. Suppose he tells us to keep our legs crossed? I've never been any good at that.) (He never will. Instead he'll be magnanimously pleased to humor our little follies -- since we've promised to obey him. Relax, sweetheart -- this is precisely the way my darling Agnes handled me... when I was not anything like as wise and tolerant as Jake is.) "Let me hear you state your intention again." "I, Joan Eunice, do solemnly promise to love, honor, and obey Jacob Moshe -- and I will. Your Honor, even if he backs out and won't marry me. He doesn't have to marry me. I'd be perfectly happy just to -- " "Quiet, Joan Eunice. That's enough. Reverend, this is getting out of hand; I'm going to wrap it up with the bare legalities and you can plaster them with anything else they need in your closing prayer. All right?" "Yes, Judge. They don't need much prayer; they're ready." "I hope you're right. Jake, you heard this stubborn little, uh, her anyhow?" "Yes." "Jacob Moshe, do you take Joan Eunice to be your lawfully wedded wife?" "Ido!" "Joan Eunice, do you take Jacob Moshe to be your lawfully wedded husband?" "Ido." "Uh, where's the ring? Alec. Jake, take her left hand in your left. Now." "With this ring I thee wed." "Under authority vested in me I pronounce you man and wife. Kiss her, Jake. Take it. Reverend." (And you told me not to louse it up!) (I got us there, didn't I? He's ours. I mean, we're his. Same thing.) "Let us pray!" paralleling Kennedy Tunnel A between Luna City and the Apollo Industrial Complex, was completed and both tunnels were then made one-way, thereby quadrupling the potential traffic. The Fiveand ten-year projections caused the Commission to decide to go ahead at once with tunnels C and D. On the Hong Kong and New York Stock Exchanges Vacuum Industries, Ltd., Selenterprises, PanAm, and Diana Transport all took sudden jumps against a generally sagging market. Mercury Newsletter (subsid of MercServ) sent destructaped messages by special couriers to their #-star clients. Nine percent of these couriers failed to report back, which caused the managing director of MercServ to decide that a vacation at Las-Vegas-in-the-Sky would be good for his health even though there was no proof that Internal Defense agents had detained the couriers or solved the "destruct" combo. A source close to the President denied that there was anything more than seasonal unrest in any city in the country and denounced "irresponsible day's Day with Dave Daly was replaced by a motion picture with an explanation of technical difficulties. Today's Day resumed the next day without Daly, who was -- it was announced -- on sick leave to recover from extreme fatigue. Miss Molly Maguire, the hottest sensie star of the private film industry, claimed the title of first woman in history to give birth to a child during a sky dive. The babe was safely landed exactly as planned by the midwife team diving with her, the event was filmed in stereosound andcolor from several angles, and the only casualty was a sprained ankle for Miss Maguire -- she was able to hold a press conference thirty minutes after she landed. Since plane flight had originated in, and sky dive had started over, Mexican soil, whereas the entire party except the plane had landed in Arizona, it was not clear what laws had been violated or whose, or what nationality the child was -- as Miss MaGuire's citizenship was Pakistani, with legal permanent residence in the States. The party surrendered voluntarily to the nearest U.S. immigration officer and Miss Maguire apologized most prettily on videocast for having reentered the country of her choice so informally through an inadvertent error in navigation by her pilot, plus a sudden gust of wind. They were released with a warning but the films were impounded -- uselessly, as they seemed to show that the child was born, about fiftyfifty, in both countries, but factors of angle and parallax and identification of ground markings -- in those film sequences in which the ground showed at all -- made it impossible to be certain. Grove Press bought an option on the films, then entered suit to have them released, in the interest of justice. A notorious sex-change case married her attorney but the newsworthy couple managed to leave for their honeymoon before issuance of their license was noted -- a famous scoopsnoop chased them to Canada, only to find that the couple he had traced down were a Dr.  Mrs. Garcia, members of the wedding but themselves of no news value. Mrs: Garcia smiled and let herself be photographed (she was quite photogenic) and was interviewed about the wedding; then the Garcias returned home. Senator James "Jumping Joe" Jones of Arkansas charged that Amendment permitting prayer in public schools was a plot by the devil-inspired Pope of Rome and his servile followers. The rebuilding of the Oklahoma State House was halted by labor trouble drummed up (it was alleged) by the underground Equal Rights for Whites Action Committee. The contractor's construction foreman said, "Any honk thinks he's discriminated, he can take it to the hiring board and get a fair hearing. Trouble is these people they don't want to work." -- Safe -- Sanitary -- Sensible -- Why spend lonely sleepless nights jwhen complete all-senses relief can be yours in the privacy of your own home? Programed for your happiness by the same great team of superscientists who created the recoverable orbital boo.ster. Available from all leading hospital supply  rental shopsno prescription Health-Now, Inc. -- mfrs of Unhappy? You needn't beand none of those silly mechanical toys, undignified and degrading. No drugs. Just phone Old Doc Joy, hypnotherapist licensed by the State of New York, (adv) had the penthouse floor to themselves -- three baths, four bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, barlounge, drawing room, lanai, garden, swimming pool, waterfall, fountain, garden bar-pantry, foyer, private lift, magnificent view of the yacht harbor, beaches. estuary, town, and mountains beyond. But they were eccentric. Their rent included full hotel service but none of the hotel's staff had been on that level since their arrival. They were not seen at the casinos, nor on the beaches, nor were they known to make use of other attractions of the resort. They sometimes had room-service meals, but the table cart went only as far as the lift; their servants took it up. It was rumored among the hotel staff that Mrs. MacKenzie liked to do her own cooking, but no one really knew -- no one had seen her (save possibly from a copter) and few knew him by sight. Their servants had three suites on a lower cuss anything but their employ ers. She came from the garden into the lounge. He looked up from his book. "Yes, dear? Too much sun? Or did that copter come back?" "Neither. Copters don't worry me; I just turn over on my tummy so that they can't photograph my face. Jake darling, I want you to see something pretty." "Drag it in here. I'm lazy." "I can't, dearest; it's down on the water. A boat of some odd sort, with the gayest, most colorful sails. You were in the Navy; you know about such things." "I was in the Navy one hitch fifty years back, so I'm an expert already." "Jacob, you always know everything. And it is pretty, and quite odd. Please, sir?" "Your slightest wish, Madame." He got up and offered her his arm. They stopped at the seaward rail. "Now which one? All those boats have colored sails. I haven't seen a suit of white sails since we got here -- you'd think there was a law against it." "'That one. Oh, dear, they're putting down its sails. And it was so pretty a minute ago." " 'Dowsing her sails,' Eunice. If I'm going to be your resident expert, let me expert. When you lower sails suddenly, you dowse them. Which this laddie is doing because he's standing in to anchor about -- yes! There goes the hook. And a vessel is always 'she,' never 'it.' Boats and ships are female because they are beautiful, lovable, expensive -- and unpredictable." "Jake, you've always been able to predict what I'm going to do even before I know myself." (Twin, why tell a whopper like that? He knows better.) (He won't argue it, hon.) "But what is it?" "Oh. It's a trimaran, a yacht with a triple hull. Can't say that I agree that she's pretty. A sloop with a triangular mains' I is my notion of beauty." "Does look sort of squarish now. But swooping in with all its -- sorry -- her sails up, she was lovely." (Twin, ask Jake if he thinks there is any way we could go on it?) (On her, Eunice -- not 'it.' Are you a sailor, hon?) (Never been on a boat in my life. Boss. But I'm getting an idea, maybe.) (Maybe I have the same idea. Are you thinking about that talk with Jake when he pointed out a farm would mean even more staff and less safety than our house?) (I don't care who thought of it first. Boss -- just make sure that Jake thinks of it first.) (I shall, dear -- do you think I have to be told that a ship is 'she'? Or can't recognize a trimaran? The real question is: Do you get seasick? I used to -- and it's miserable. But the fact that we haven't had the tiniest bit of morning sickness makes me think you might be immune to motion sickness.) (So 'let's operate and find out,' as Roberto says.) "Oh, trimarans have their points, Eunice. You get a lot of boat for your money. Roomy. And they are almost impossible to turn over -- safer than most small vessels. I just wouldn't award one a beauty prize." "Jake, do you think you could get us invited aboard that one? She looks interesting." "Oh, there's some way to swing it. I might start by talking with the manager. But, Eunice, you can't go aboard a private vessel with your features veiled; it would be rude. Your granddaughters did you no favor when they made you as recognizable as a video star." "Jacob, a veil doesn't enter into it because I never want to meet anyone as 'Mrs. MacKenzie.' I'm Mrs. Jacob Moshe Salomon and proud of it -- and that's the way I must always be introduced. Jake, I doubt if our marriage is news any longer; it can't matter much if I'm spotted." "I suppose not. The copters might swarm a mite closer for a while and some would have pixsnoops aboard with telescopic lenses. But I doubt if even your granddaughters are anxious to take a shot at you. If the snoops fret you, wear pants to sunbathe, and in the pool." "The hell I will, it's our pool, Jacob. Anyhow, briefies can't conceal the fact that I'm pregnant and the sooner that's in the news the less it will interest anyone later. Let them sneak a pic, then you have Doctor Bob confirm it -- and it stops being news. No huhu, dear; I learned years ago that you can't 'get away from it all' -- you just have to cope. Is it possible, on a boat of that sort, to have a swimming pool?" "Not one that size. But I've seen trimarans much bigger than that one. Could be done, I suppose, since a trimaran can have so much deck space for its tonnage -- I'd have to ask a naval architect. Why the interest. Lively Legs? Do you want me to buy you a yacht?" "I don't know. But boats look like fun. Jake, I never had much fun in my life -- my other life. I'm not sure how one goes about having fun -- except that every day is a joy to me now. All that I'm sure of is that I want to do something utterly different this time. Not be a Hetty Green. And not the gay, mad whirl of 'society' -- kark I'd rather turn whore. Would you like a yacht, Jake? Take me around the world and show me all those places you've seen and I never had time for?" "You didn't take time." do know that if a man acquires too much money, presently it owns him instead of his owning it. Jake, I've been to Europe at least fifty times -- yet I've never been inside the Louvre, never seen them change the Guard at Buckingham Palace. All I saw were hotels and board rooms -- and those are the same all over the globe. Would you care to repair my education, dearest? Show me Rio? You say it's the most beautiful city in the world. The Parthenon by moonlight? The Taj at dawn?" Jake said thoughtfully. "The trimaran is the favorite craft of the dropout." "Excuse me? I missed something. 'Dropout?' " "I don't mean the barefooted bums in the Abandoned Areas, Eunice, nor the ones skulking around the hills. It takes money to drop out by water. But people do. how many because it has been subject to an 'exception' for years -- the government does not want attention called to it. But take those yachts below us: I'll bet that at least one out of ten has registration papers for some 'flag of convenience' and the owner's passport is as phony as that of 'Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie.' He has to be registered somewhere and carry some sort of passport, or the coast guard wherever he goes will give him a bad time, even impound his craft. But if he takes care of that minimum, he can dodge almost everything else -- no income tax, no local taxes except when he buys something, nobody tries to force his kids into public schools, no real estate taxes, no politics -- no violence in the streets. That last is the best part, with the cycle of riots swinging up again." "Then it is possible to get away from it all." "Mmm, not quite. No matter how much fish he eats, he has to touch land occasionally. He can't play Vanderdecken; only a ghost ship can stay at sea forever, real ones have to be put up on the ways at intervals." Jake Salomon looked thoughtful. "But it's closer to that antithetical combination of 'peace' and 'freedom' than is possible on land. If it suits one. But, Eunice, I know what I would do -- if I were young." "What, Jake?" "Look up there." "Where, dear? I don't see any thing." There r "The Moon?" "Right! Eunice, that's the only place left with plenty of room and not too many peple. Our last frontier -- but an endless one. Anyone under the cut-off age should at least try to out-migrate." "Are you serious, Jacob? Certainly space travel is scientifically interesting but I've never seen much use in it. Oh, some fallout. Videosatellites and so forth. New materials. But the Moon itself? Why, it doesn't even pay its own way." "Eunice, what use is that baby in your belly?" "I trust that you are joking, sir. I hope you are." "Simmer down. Bulgy. Darling, a newborn baby is as useless a thing as one can imagine. It isn't even pretty -- except to its doting parents. It does not pay its own way and it's unreasonably expensive. It takes twenty to thirty years for the investment to begin to pay off and in many -- no, most -- cases it never does pay off. Because it is much easier to support a child than it is to bring one up to amount to anything!" "Owr baby will amount to something!" "I feel sure that it will. But look around you; my generalization stands. But, Eunice, despite these shortcomings, a baby has a unique virtue. It is always the hope of our race. It's only hope." She smiled. "Jacob, you're an exasperating man." "I try to be, dear; it's good for your metabolism. Now look back up at the sky. That's a newborn baby, too. The best hope of our race. If that baby lives, the human race lives. If we let it die -- and it is vulnerable for a few more years -- the race dies, too. Oh, I don't mean H-bombs. We're faced with far greater dangers than H-bombs. We've reached an impasse; we can't go on the way we're headed -- and we can't go back -- and we're dying in our own poisons. That's why that little Lunar colony has got to survive. Because we can't. It isn't the threat of war, or crime in the streets, or corruption in high places, or pesticides, or smog, or education that doesn't teach; those things are Just symptoms of the underlying cancer. It's too many people. Not too many souls, or honks, or thirds -- just... too many. Seven other's laps, trying to take in each other's washing, pick each other's pockets. Too many. Nothing wrong with the individual in most cases -- but collectively we're the Kilkenny Cats, unable to do anything but starve and fight and eat each other. Too many. So anyone who can ought to go to the Moon as fast as he can manage it." "Jacob, in all the years I've known you I've never heard you talk this way." "Why talk about a dream that has passed one by? Eunice -- EuniceJohann, I mean -- I was born twenty-five years later than you were. I grew up believing in space travel. Perhaps you did not?" "No, I didn't, Jake. When it came along, it struck me as interesting -- but slightly preposterous." "Whereas I was born enough later that it seemed as natural to me as automobiles. The big rockets were no surprise to my generation; we cut our teeth on Buck Rogers. Nevertheless I was born too soon. When Armstrong and Aldrin landed on Luna I was pushing forty. When out-migration started, with a cut-off age of forty, I was too old; when they eased it to forty-five, again I was too old -- and when they raised it to fifty, I was much too old. I'm not kicking, dear; on a frontier every man-jack must pull his weight, and there is little use for an elderly lawyer." He smiled down at her and went on: "But, darling, if you wanted to out-migrate I wouldn't try to dissuade you; I'd cheer you on." "Jake!" (He can't get away from us that easily!) (You're darn tootin' he can't! I'll fix him.) "Jake my own and only, you can't get away from me that easily." "Eunice, I am serious. I could die happy if I knew our baby was to be born on the Moon." She sighed. "Jacob, I promised to obey you and I happily do so. But I can't go to the Moon -- as an out-migrant. Because I'm even farther past the cutoff age than you are -- the Supreme Court says so." "That could be fixed." "And raise an issue over my identity again? Jacob darling, I don't want to leave you. But -- "she patted her belly and smiled -- " if he wants to go to the Moon, we'll help, at the earliest age they'll take him. All right?" H e smiled and gently patted her slight bulge. "More than all right. Because I don't want his beautiful mother to go away for any reason. But a father should never stand in the way of his son." "You don't. You aren't. You won't. You never would. Jacob Junior goes to the Moon when he's ready, but not this week. Let's talk about trimarans and this week. Jake, you know I want to close up our house -- I'd sell it but nobody would buy it other than as land; it's a white elephant. But two things have bothered me. It has to be left garrisoned, or the Eree People will break in despite all armor, and squat -- then some day some judge grants them title on adverse possession." Jake said, "Certainly. Historically, that's where all land titles come from. Somebody standing on it, defending it and saying, This is mine!' And lately the courts have been cutting down the period of adverse possession. Especially in city cores close to Abandoned areas -- and your house is both." "I know, dear -- but I don't want to surrender it to squatters. Darn it, that house cost me more than and upkeep. The other worry is what to do about our in-house staff. I'm sick of being a feudal lord -- erase and correct; lady, now." (Erase and correct -- 'tart' now.) (Certainly, Eunice, but I haven't been too tartish since we got married.) (Not much opportunity, twin -- but you're getting restless. Huh?) Who is getting restless? Never mind, twin sister, the day will come. But we won't rub darling Jake's nose in it.) "I can't just let them go; some have been with me twenty-odd years. But if we buy a yacht -- and live on it -- I think I have a solution to both problems." "So?" "I think so. It's an idea I got during our wedding, thinking about that farm." "Well! Wench, you were supposed to be thinking about me." "I was, dear. But I seem to be able to think about several things at once, since my rejuvenation. Better blood supply, possibly." (My help, you mean. Boss.) (Yes, dear. Same thing.) "Our banquet hall, dressed as a chapel, looked more like a church than it has ever looked like a place to eat. So here's my notion. Give our house to Shorty. Give it to his church in a trust setup, with Alec, maybe, as a trustee, and also Judge Mac if he'll do it. Arrange the trust for perpetual maintenance, with ample funds and a good salary for Hugo as pastor. Is this practical?" "No difficulty, Eunice, if you really want to unload the house -- " "I do. If you consent." "It's your house, dear, and I decided a long time ago that being a householder in a big city was more headache than pleasure. We could still keep my little house in Safe Harbor -- no fear of squatters -- if you want a pied-aterre. We won't do it quite as you described it but you can give your house to Shorty if you wish to. I'll get Alec to work out a plan. But I wonder if Shorty can cope with it? Squatters might still move in on him -- or rioters break in and wreck the place." "Oh. That fits in with the other half of my idea: What to do about our too-faithful retainers. Offer any with twenty years or close to it retirement at full pay. Encourage the in-house guards and maintenance men to work for the trust, same pay -- because you're right; if with no one to keep him straight, he'll soon have a shell, not a church. Father Hugo is the best bodyguard I've ever seen... but he's a child of God and unsophisticated about management. He needs a practical, cynical man as his in-house steward. Cunningham. Or O'Neil. Or Mentone. Alec can work it out. Jake, I want to hand over to Shorty a complete plant, subsidized and maintained, so that he can put his mind solely on preaching and praying and soul-saving. I think you know why." (I think  know why, Boss -- but any of the four would have killed that mugger.) (We've managed to thank the other three, beloved -- and will go on thanking them. Father Hugo is a special case.) "Eunice, do you really think Hugo saves souls?" I Jacob; I don't know Who is in charge of this world. Even if what Hugo does has no more real meaning than our 'prayer meetings,' it's still worth while. Darling, this is a screwed-up world. Back in the days of the Model-T Ford the United States was a fine country, brimming with hope. But today the best thing most young people can do is stay home, sit still, not get involved and chant Om Marti Padme Hum -- and it is the best thing most of them are capable of doing, the world being what it is now; it's far better than dropping out or turning on with drugs. When meditation and a meaningless prayer are better than most action open to them, then what Hugo has to offer is good in the same way. Even if his theology is a hundred percent wrong. But I don't think Father Hugo is any more mistaken than the most learned theologian and he might be closer to the truth. Jacob, I don't think anyone knows Who's in charge " "Just wondered, my dear. Sometimes pregnant women get taken with fancies." "I'm pregnant down here, dearest; up here is still old Johann. Protects me somewhat, I think." (Oh, you think so, huh? Boss, if you didn't have me to keep you straight, you'd be as filled with vapors as a cat trying to have kittens in a wastebasket! Remember, I've been through this before.) (I know you have, darling, and that's why I'm not afraid -- otherwise I'd be scared silly.) (No worse than having a tooth drilled. Boss; we're built for this. Roomy.) "Jake, did I ever tell you about the time I went into politics?" "Didn't know you ever had and can't imagine it, Eunice." "Imagine it for 'Johann,' not for 'Eunice.' Forty years back I let them persuade me that it was my 'duty.' I was easy to persuade -- but I realize now that my attraction to the Party was that I could pay for my campaign in a district they were going to lose anyhow. But I learned things, Jake. Learned that being a businessman has nothing to do with being a politician and even less to do with being a statesman. They clobbered me, Jake! I've never been tempted to save the world since. Maybe someone can save this addled planet but I don't know how and now I know that I don't know. That's something even if it isn't much. Jake, I could worry about Smith Enterprises when I was running it. I can worry now about sixty-odd people and make sure they're each all right insofar as money can insure it. But no one people; they won't let you. You go nutty with frustration if you try. Nor can you do much for three problem -- as you pointed out -- is the very fact that there are three see any solution short of compulsory sterilization -- and the solution strikes me as worse than the disease. Licensing without sterilization hasn't solved it." Her husband shook his head. "And won't, Eunice. Licensing is a joke; it has more loopholes than the tax laws. Compulsory methods inevitably involve politcal tests -- no, thanks, I prefer the Four Horsemen. And the only effect that voluntary contraception has ever had has been to change the ratio, unfavorably, between the productive and the parasites; the population climbs anyhow. If we were as hard-boiled about weeding the culls as China is, it might not work that way. But we aren't, we never have been -- and I'm not sure I'd like it if we were." "Then there isn't any solution." "Oh, there is -- I mentioned it. The Four Horsemen. They never sleep, they're never off duty. And there." He pointed at the Moon. "Eunice, I suspect that our race's tragedy has been played endless times. It may be that an intelligent race has to expand right up to its disaster point to achieve what is needed to break out of its planet and reach for the stars. It may always -- or almost always -- be a photo finish, with the outcome uncertain to the last moment. Just as it is with us. It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force-feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In the universe, space travel may be the normal birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail." She shivered. "Gruesome." "Yes. And no way to talk to a gal in what used to be called a 'delicate condition.' Sorry, darling." "A gruesome thought at any time, Jake. I'm not in a 'delicate condition.' I'm doing what this body is designed for. Building a baby. Feels good. I'm enjoying it." "So it appears and that makes me happy. But, Eunice, before you shut down your house and move into a yacht, I must mention one thing. I think you must put it off until you've had this baby." "Why, Jake? No morning sickness. I doubt if seasickness will be a problem." "Because you are in a delicate condition, no matter how good it feels. I'd feel happier if you were never more than five minutes from medical attention. You'd be okay at home; Bob and Winnie are there. You're okay here -- a hotel resident physician and a good one -- believe me, I checked on him -- and a modern hospital over there, in sight. But at jea? Suppose you had a seven-month preemie? We'd lose the baby and probably you, too. No, Eunice." "Oh." (Eunice, any point in telling him that you carried your first one full term and no trouble?) (No, twin. How are you going to prove it? If you mention me now, you're just a female with pregnancy delusions. Boss, this is one argument you're going to lose. So concede it at once. Fall back and find another route.) "Jacob, I can't argue. I lost my first wife with her first baby; I know it can happen. But what would you think of this? Could you persuade Roberto and Winnie to come with us? Then not go very far to sea. If we were anchored where that trimaran is, that hospital would be just as close... and Roberto would be aboard. This hotel physician must be all right as you have checked on him but I would rather have Roberto. He knows me inside and out. And never mind wise cracks; I mean as my physician. Or does the fact that you know that Roberto has slept with me make him unacceptable to you as my O.B. man?" (Whew! Twin, that was a foul blow.) (Oh, pooh, Eunice, I'm just confusing the issue.) eyebrow and grinned down at her. "Little one, you can't embarrass me that easily. If Bob is the baby-cotcher you want. I'll do my best to persuade him... as long as you don't mind Bob's wife being around." "Pooh to you, sir. If you and Winnie want to stroll down memory's lane. I'll tuck you in and kiss you goodnight. She's certain to console you while I'm benched -- and you'll need it." "Thereby giving you carte blanche later. A woman almost always falls in love with the doctor who delivers her first baby." "Pooh again. I've loved Roberto a long time and you know it. Are you jealous, Jacob?" "No. Just curious. I suppose that injuction you laid on me on our wedding day still applies? It occurs to me that, with respect to the day you mentioned. Bob had opportunity before, during, and after." "Is that all it takes, dear? Just opportunity?" (Just about, twin!) She grinned at him and wrinkled her nose. "Sweetheart, all I will admit is the possibility that Roberto's name might be in the hat. But it could have been Finchley. Or Hubert. Or dear Judge Mac. You and Alec were awfully busy that day -- but I think you'll find that Mac adjourned court at his usual hour... and I wasn't home until much later." "Is that a confession?" "Well, there might be a confession in there somewhere." "Quit pulling my leg, my love. There are only two sorts of wives. Those who cheat, and those who have their husbands' friendly cooperation, in which case -- " "Isn't there a third sort?" "Eh? Oh, you mean faithful wives. Oh, certainly. So I've heard. But in my twenty years of general practice, much of it divorce cases, I encountered so few of that sort -- none I felt certain about -- that I cannot venture an opinion. Wives technically faithful form so small a part of the sample that I can't evaluate them. People being what they are, a rational man should be satisfied if his meals are on time and his dignity not affronted. What I was trying to say is, that if you ever want my friendly cooperation, don't assault my credibility with a wet firecracker such as Hubert. Judge Mac I could believe. Tom Finchley is a very masculine person, too, and one who bathes regularly -- even though he sometimes abuses the sacred English tongue in a manner which causes me to flinch. Bob Garcia shows your good taste. But, please, darling, don't expect me to believe that Hubert's name could be in the hat." (Twin, Jake knows us too well. Better not try to fool him too much.) (Ever hear of a 'red herring,' love?) "Very well, sir; I'll take Hubert's name out of the hat. That still leaves endless possibilities, does it not? And I will try always to respect your dignity. But, speaking of meals on time, I had better get busy or your dinner will be late." "Why not just cold cuts and such when we feel like it and heat a tin of soup? I was thinking of a nap." "Shall I join you, sir?" "I said 'nap,' sweetheart. Sleep. A nap with you is not restful. Old Senor Jacob needs a siesta." "Yes, sir. May I finish quickly what I was saying? We can take care of anyone who wants to retire, or wants another job, or wishes to stay on with Hugo. But I am hoping that some of them might come with us as crew in our trimaran or whatever. Especially if they've been to sea before and know something about it." "Finchley does. He was sent up for smuggling or some such." "I was hoping that all of my mobiles except Hugo -- and Rockford, if you want him -- might decide to sail with us. They are all strong and able and not much family problem. Fred's wife split some months back, Dabrowski has no children at home and Olga might maid -- stewardess, I should say -- if she likes to sail; she's insisted on doing most of the cleaning and such here even though she doesn't have to. As for the Finchleys, Tom is just what we need -- it wasn't smuggling drugs; they were running arms into Central America as I recall, and he was first mate -- and Hester Finchley is a good cook. Eve is no problem, she already knows how to read and write and do arithmetic -- and if they tell her about this, she'll be teasing her parents to take the job; all kids want to travel. Dear? If you are going in, would you see who's on guard at the lift and ask him to dig out Finchley? He may know something about trimarans." "I think he has the watch now. Shall I chuck you a robe?" "Am I getting too much sun? Doesn't feel so; I've been using the lotion. Oh! You mean for Thomas the Tom Cat? But, dear, we've been swimming with him and his family every day. As well as with Fred and the Dabrowskis." "I don't give a hoot, dear, but I thought you were anxious to preserve appearances." "Seems silly when I swim and sunbathe with all of them. As for appearances, didn't I see you patting Hester's bottom in the pool yesterday? Or was it Wednesday?" "It was Tuesday and it wasn't Hester, it was her daughter Eve. Just practicing to be a sex maniac. Beautiful -- nothing serious. So don't be jealous." "Beloved, the day I'm jealous of a little girl I want you to beat me. Not spank me. Beat some sense into me, woodshed style. But it was Hester, not her daughter. My gallant, wonderful Jacob would never bother a little girl." "Perhaps not but that little girl bothers the hell out of me. Furthermore she does it on purpose." "Poor Jake. Even thirteen-yearolds won't leave him alone. I'm not surprised; I didn't leave him alone, either." "In this case, she's thirteengoing-on-twenty-one. I'll make you a deal, dearest. I'll carefully avoid chaperoning you with her father if you will be very careful always to chaperone me with his daughter." "Yes, sir. To hear is to obey, my lord -- though I am chagrined that you think I might need chaperoning -- or not chaperoning, as the case may be -- with one of our servants. But how about Hester? Must I always be sure to be in sight when she's around?" "Mind your own business. Wench. Uh -- no need to be fanatical about it. I want them all to feel easy when they come up here to swim as I don't want any of our household ever to swim in that sewage down there. You know the coliform count in that beautiful surf. That was the deal we ofered -- stay off the beaches entirely and they could swim in our pool at any time. So we sacrifice a little privacy but don't have one of them picking up amebiasis or such and spreading it through our whole family. It evens out -- and they are all nice people... even our precocious Eve who's doing her best to see if she can upset me." "I haven't minded, Jacob; it is not good to be too much alone. But we were speaking of Hester's bottom. Shapely, huh?" "Hon, you're as bad as Eve. I'm going to go and say ten Money Hums and catch that siesta. I'll send out Tom. Don't let me sleep more than an hour. Kiss." S HE turned her face up. As he left she dived in, swam a couple of lengths and climbed out, was waiting, staring down at the yacht harbor when Finchley arrived. "You sent for me. Ma'am?" She smiled. "Thomas Cattus, that's not my name when we're alone." He glanced over his shoulder, said almost soundlessly, "Pussy Cat, the Boss is awake." "So he is. But he's gone to his room and closed the door. Siesta. He'll be asleep in almost no time. But I don't mean to scare you, Thomas Cattus dear. Come here to the rail, want to show you something. Have you done any sailing? Or has it all been power?" "Sailing? Oh, sure, I grew up on Chesapeake Bay. Cat boats and such." "Ever sail a trimaran?" "Never skippered one. Crewed in one when I was sixteen." "What do you think of them?" "Depends on what for. Okay if you want something more like a houseboat than a racer. But I wouldn't have one without an auxiliary engine. In tight waters they can be as awkward as two people in a bathtub." "Ever try it in a bathtub, Thomas Cattus?" "Sure, who hasn't? Okay for a giggle with a few drinks aboard. But a bed is better. Or a floor." "How about a sunbathing mat?" "Pussy Cat, you enjoy scaring me. You gonna get us caught, yet." "Rhetorical question, dear; I wasn't twisting your arm. Tell me, do you think Hester and Jake have ever made it?" "Practically certain they never." He grinned at her. "But I can tell you something." "Then do. Pretty please. Pretty Tom Cat with the muscles." "Not Hester's fault they haven't. I know. She told me bang, one night, while we were at it. Said the Boss could have it anytime he reached for it. Hester thinks the Boss is God's right hand." "Well, so do I. But it doesn't keep me from appreciating my Thomas Cat. How would you feel about it? Jake and Hester." "Me?" He looked astonished. "Look, Pussy Cat, you know if anybody does I don't see no sense in putting a fence around a broad. Just makes her want to jump it. I'd ruther hold open the gate for her, she wants to." "I said, 'How would you feel about it, dear?' " "Oh." Her driver-guard looked thoughtful. "Wouldn't get my nose out of joint. The Boss is numero uno, da kine. Rozzer?" "Roz." "He knocked up a broad, he'd pay. No huhu. But no huhu anyhow; we were only licensed for one and Hester had herself fixed, right after she had Eve. Good broad I married -- didn't split when I dropped one, took me back when I was paroled. Oh, she shacked, sure -- but just with her boss, she worked. Didn't peddle it. Or kept it to herself, didn't tell me. Hester and the Boss? Sure, if they want to. Told her so, bang. Have fun,I told her." "Mmm... Thomas Cattus, let's give them a chance. Or six chances. Might be insurance for us, later." He nodded thoughtfully. "Smart thinking. Pussy Cat. But how? And would he? The Boss?" "I feel sure he would if he knew it was safe. Private, I mean; Jake has courage under fire, just as you have, dear. Main problem is to get Eve out from underfoot. Mmm... you could take me shopping or such and I could ask Hester to get Mr. Salomon's lunch... then as an afterthought I could invite Eve to come with me. Hmm?" "With either Fred or Ski up here? No good. Pussy Cat." "All it needs is a time when you have the guard. Jake won't send for your relief; at most he'll lock open the lift door. He doesn't worry about him, he worries about guarding me." "Mmm... roz. Could work if Pussy Cat. Tits prettier than ever." "Joe says a woman gets prettier as she bigs out. But I don't think many men think so." "Hester looked awful cute, clear up to the last minute. And on you it looks good, too. Uh... you're sure the Boss is asleep?" "Certain enough that I'm willing to risk it. But I don't mean to scare you, dear. Want to wait and see how our plans for Jake and Hester work out?" "Uh... oh, hell, we might all be dead by then." "Right here?" "Uh, copter might cruise by." "Let's go into the lanai." H arvard University Corporation voted to withhold all funds until the Student Government selected a new university president. Both of the rival student governments and the faculty senate sought court relief from this "reckless and irresponsible Secretary of the Private Police, Guards and Security Drivers congratulated Milwaukee on joining the growing list of municipalities that had abolished the "clean record" rule in hiring peace officers. "The outstanding success of parolees and probationers as licensed private security officers is finally teaching the politicians to 'hunt ducks where the ducks are.' The Bible says 'To catch a thief you set a thief,' don't it? Who knows more about hoods than a hood? Give a man incentives to keep his nose clean and put him on work he understands and you can count him in the crunch. My Mom kept telling me that when I was just a punk knockin' over candy stores. Besides, like the Sec'etary of the Treasury told us earlier tonight, 'Look what it's done for the economy!' In this great republic -- "  "Today's Day" newscast interviewed a midwife who claimed to have delivered Miss Molly Maguire of child ten days before her sensational two-nation sky dive. The sensie star promptly sued newscaster, station, and videonet. Don't be teased or humiliated. See his look of surprise when you step right up to a urinal and use it with a smile. Get Dr. Mary Evers' pld. for) purse-size, foolproof, sanitarycomes in nine lovely, feminine, psychedelic patterns -- requires no fitting, no prescription. All DrugstoresSupermarkets The Lunar Commission made permanent its trial policy of screening out-migration solely on physical and mental examination with no percentage points either plus or minus from past record. The Director said: "In a new world a man must start with a clean slate. No other policy is practical." Under sharp questioning he admitted that contributions for unsubsidized vocations remained unchanged but insisted that this was a fiscal matter controlled by the condominium governments and in no way affected the basic deter!' So he tells us. Is the Senator from the great State of Puerto Rico aware that our major problem is recidivism? Can the Senator cite one case in which a killer commined still another murder after he was executed?" W before the wind!" "Swell." "Gets me clear down in my gizzard," Joan Eunice said happily. "Let's go aft. Winnie's got the wheel and be sure to be impressed; she's proud as can be that Tom has let her go on the watch list. She's a natural sailor, salt water in her veins. Gigi, what's the matter, dear? You aren't smiling. Feeling queasy?" "Uh, a little, maybe." "I must admit that the 'Pussy Cat' does have a rocking-horse motion when she's running free. Love it myself but some don't. Never mind, dear; Doctor Roberto has a sure-fire pill for tipsy tummy. I'll fetch you one and in five minutes the motion won't bother you and you'll be hungry as a horse." "I don't take pills, Joan. I'm all right." "You aren't all right and when we go below you won't want lunch and Hester told me she was fixing something special in your honor. Look, darling, Roberto feeds these pills to Winnie -- one before breakfast every day and he had her on them for morning sickness before they came aboard. He's a careful doctor,, hon; he wouldn't give them to his own wife if they could hurt. Nobody ever gets a pill of any sort in the 'Pussy Cat' unless our ship's surgeon dispenses it. Pretty please? Huh?" "Gigi." "Yes, Joe." "Take pill." "Yes, Joe. Thanks, Joan, I do feel fluttery. I guess you think I'm silly but I've seen so many kids hooked on pills I'm scared of 'em." "I don't like pills but I take 'em when Doctor Roberto says to. He's got me on supplements right now for this little monster Inside me. You stay up here in the breeze, dear, while I find Roberto." O bounding main!" Mr. Salomon bellowed, as he swung up into the control console. "Hello, Ski." "Good morning. Captain. On port tack with basic course one five -- " "I see what it is. Beat it down below and get your breakfast." Salomon slid into the saddle and glanced at the compass as he took the wheel. "We didn't leave you anything but you can scrounge ship's biscuit out of the lifeboat." "Hester won't let me starve, sir." "Nor Olga. Now beat it." Jake eyed his sails, decided he could point a touch higher, reached out with his right hand to the running rigging controls, kept tapping a switch to shorten his main sheet, his eye on her mainsail, while he handled the wheel by touch till he had her settled down on a tighter tack. Then he adjusted his jibs and relaxed. "Good morning. Captain." "Tom, save that for witnesses. It's all very well for Mrs. Salomon to want me dubbed with an honorary title but we all know who's the sailing master by our ship's papers. You're skipper and have the responsibility; I'm just the owner and unlicensed first mate. Eunice ought not to do it -- but we have to cater to the little darlings. Speaking of little darlings, how are your two this fine morning? Didn't see Eve at breakfast." "She ate before you got up, sir. Seen her and told her she's goin' to have to wear pants from now on, except in the pool or near it." "Don't see why she should, the other gals don't unless it happens to suit them. I just don't want her swarming into my lap, naked as an eel and twice as lively. Gives me delusions of youth." "Ell clamp down on her, sir." "Tom, I don't want the child clamped down on. I want everybody to enjoy this cruise -- one big happy family. Ask Hester to tell her quietly that old Uncle Jake loves her but doesn't like to be pawed. A lie, that last, but an official lie. Speaking of the pool, how's the filter?" "Eilter's okay, was just a clog in makeup feed line. Kelp. No huhu." "Has the surgeon tested the water?" "Safe." "That's good. Tom, when I was a kid, striking for quartermaster third, we used to swim off the boat booms and thought nothing of it. But today even the Pacific Ocean can't soak up all the crud they dump into it. You can put swimming call on the bull horn and take the Skull-and-Crossbones sign off the pool." "Aye aye, sir." "Half a second while I make eight bells." Jake reached out with his left hand, picked the last touch plate of a row of eight; the quadruple double Bong marking the beginning of the forenoon watch rang through the vessel. He then picked still another touchplate and sounded swimming call himself. "Tom, if a man didn't have to eat or sleep he could sail this wagon around the world by himself. Three men could do it easily. Even two." "Maybe." "You sound doubtful, Tom." "Even one man could, sir -- if nothin' never went wrong. Something always does." "I stand corrected. And with two pregnant women aboard -- three if you don't keep a close eye on Eve -- " "Oh, Dr. Garcia got her on the junior pill. I don't take no chances, sir." "So? Tom, my respect for you -- high -- has just increased. She's safe from her Uncle Jacob... but I make no promises about any other male in this bucket. There is something in salt air that hikes up the metabolism. And there is much truth in the old saw about 'when they're big enough, they're old enough and nothing can be done about it.' Better to roll with the punch." "She is and she has and we did -- I had this here talk with the Doc. Hester and me don't expect no more from Eve different than we did ourselves. Anybody knows when a broad starts getting broad she's goin' to land on her back." "Yes, everybody knows it -- yet most parents don't believe it when it comes to their own kids. I know, I had a family law practice for years. Tom, you're such an allaround sensible man I'm surprised that you ever got into trouble." H IS sailing master shrugged. "Comes o' believing what I was told, sir. 'M chief officer of this rust bucket and Captain says keep my lip tight and see nothin' and we make ten times as much on one voyage. All fixed. Only he got smart and hung onto the bribe money hisself. Thought he could run it in the dark. You'd 'a' thought he'd never heard of radar. Wham! Coast Guard." Finchley shrugged again. "No complaints, sir, I was a fool. But two years and four months and I get this much better job driving for Mr. Smithas-was. Smellin' like a rose. Not so trusting now, is all. Don't trust too much, you don't get your ass burned." "Yet you don't seem cynical. Tom, I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical." "That's over my head. Counselor. I just think people are okay, mostly -- even that silly skipper -- if you don't strain 'em more than they're built for, like that piece of standing rigging there. Rated three tons. Pro'ly take five and no trouble. Don't put six tons on it." "We've said the same thing, I think, but your illustration is vivid. Beat it, Tom. If there's no work to be done, grab sack time. Or pool time." "Yes, sir. I want to inspect the starboard hull; it's making extra water. Pump can handle it but I want to know why." He touched his cap and swung down off the platform. Jake cocked his own cap against the sun, relaxed and started to sing. A sailor's wife a sailor's star shall be! Yo ho, we go, across the sea! A sailor's wife a sailor's star shall be, A sailor's wife his star... shall be! His wife climbed up behind him and kissed the back of his neck. "Is that for me, dear? Or for 'Nancy Lee'?" "Always for you, my darling. Besides, I can't remember the part with 'Nancy Lee' in it." "I wonder if you ever remember a girl's name. You call all of us 'darling.' " "Merely because it's true. But you are the only one I call my darling. And I do remember your name -- it's Salomon." "Jacob, you must have been a prime menace when you were a bluejacket. With that Hebrew blarney you could talk your way into anything. Then out of it, with no trouble." "No, Ma'am, I was a sweet, innocent lad. I simply followed the ancient code of the sea: 'When the hook's up, all bills are paid.' " "Leaving little Jewish bastards behind in every port... and thereby improving the breed. How about Gigi? Going to improve the breed there?" She dug her thumb into a spot over his hip where his slight pot bulged out from sitting. "Some dish, eh, keed?" "Madam," he said haughtily, "I do not know what you are talking about." " 'Tell that to the Marines, the old sailors won't believe you.' Jacob my love, I feel certain that you know the second Mrs. Branca almost as well as you knew the first. But I have no wish to prove it; I simply offer my congratulations. Gigi is a darling, I love her to pieces. I was not throwing asparagus." (Tell him she squeals, twin.) (I will not!) "Woman, you get your exercise jumping at conclusions." (Then tell him it happened where Troy Avenue crosses Gay Street, near the Square -- a neighborhood you know well, twin.) (Eunice, I want Jacob to feel easy about such things -- I am not trying to harpoon him.) (You aren't equipped to, Joan; Jake is the original Captain Ahab.) (Eunice, you have a dirty mind.) Whose mind? I don't have one. Don't need one.) Mrs. Salomon dropped the subject, opened her sextant case, took it out. "Will you give me a time tick, darling?" "Are you going to shoot the defenseless sun?" "I'm going to do better than a sun sight, dearest. The sun, the upper limb of the Moon and -- if I'm lucky and can spot it again -- Venus, for a three-star fix. Want to bet on how small a triangle I get?" "Even money on fifty miles for the short side." "Beast. Brute. Cad. And me an expectant mother. I was more than ten times that close yesterday evening; I'm getting the hang of it. I could cheat -- I could get a point fix by querying Point Loma, then fudge it on the chart." "Eunice, why this passion to emulate Bowditch? One would think that radio and satellites and the like had never been invented." "It's fun, darling. I'm going to hit that nav exam for a flat four-oh and get my limited license. After I've unloaded this pup in the hopper and we no longer have to stick to coastal waters. I'm going to do a 'Day's Work' every day all the way to Hawaii. Betcha I make landfall at Hilo under three miles. Oh, it's not necessary, dear -- but what if it turned out to be? Suppose war broke out and everything went silent? Might help to have a celestial navigator aboard. Tom admits that he's hardly taken a sight since he got his mate's ticket." "If he ever took one. Yes, it could be useful, my darling... because if war broke out in earnest and we would not go on to Hilo. We would make a sharp left turn and go south and get lost. The Marquesas. Or farther south, the farther the better. That way our kid might live through it. Easter Island if you think you can hit it." "Jacob, by then I'll split it right down the middle. Or any island you pick. Sweetheart, Iwasn't playing games when I asked for the whole old-fashioned works -- all the charts, all the pilots, three keywind chronometers and a hack, this lovely sextant and a twin like it in case I drop this one... and please note that I always put the lanyard around my neck. All the H.O.s and the Almanac. I'm no use as a deckhand now -- so I decided to become a real navigator. Just in case, just in case." "Mmm. My darling, I hope we never have to run for it... but have you noticed that I keep this vessel fully stocked at all times even though we anchor almost every night and can shop for supplies any time we wish?" "I've noticed, sir." "Nor is it an accident that I gave Doctor Bob an unlimited budget and saw to it that he is equipped for any conceivable obstetrical problem." "I did not notice that, quite." wyou weren't meant to, nor Iwas Winnie -- no need to give you gals something to worry about. But since you have been doing the same sort of planning ahead, I decided to tell you. Bob used the time the 'Pussy Cat' was being refitted in taking a refresher in O.B. And he spent twenty times more money on our sick bay than one would expect for a sea-going yacht." "I'm pleased to hear it, sir. With such foresight, money can do almost anything. Except turn back the clock." "It even did that in your case. Beloved." "No, Jacob. It gave me added years... and this wonderful body... and you. But it did not turn back the clock. I'm still almost a century old. I can never feel young the way I once did -- because I'm not. Not the way Winnie is young. Or Gigi. Jacob, I have learned that I don't want to be young." "Eh? Are you unhappy, dear?" "Not at all! I have the best of two worlds. A youthful, vital body that makes every breath a sensuous joy... and a century of rich experience, with the wisdom -- if that is the right word -- that age brings. The calmness. The long perspective. Winnie and Gigi still suffer the storms of youth... which I don't have and don't want. I've forgotten the last time I had a tranquilizer but I think it was the day they unstrapped me. Jacob, I'm a better wife for you than either of those two lovely girls could be; I'm older than you are. I've been where you are now and understand it. I'm not boasting, dear; it's simply true. Nor would I be happy to spend my time trying desperately not to upset his delicate, youthful, unstable balance. We're good for each other, Jacob." "I know you are good for me." "I know I am. But sometimes you have trouble remembering that I am not truly 'Eunice,' but 'Johann.' " (Hey! What is this. Boss? We're both.) (Yes, beloved, always -- but Jake needs to be reminded of Johann -- because all he ever sees is Eunice.) "For example, Jacob, a while ago you thought I was twitting you about Gigi." " 'Thought,' hell -- you were." "No, dear. Close your eyes and forget that I have Eunice's voice. Think back at least ten years when I was still in passable health. If your older friend Johann had twigged that you had kicked the feet out from under some young and pretty woman would he have twitted you?" "Huh? Hell, yes. Johann would have slipped me the needle and broken it off." "Would I have, Jacob?" Did I ever?" "You never caught me." "So? I might have congratulated you, Jacob, just as I did today -- had I felt that I could do so without offending you. But I would not have twitted you. Do you recall a young woman whose first name was -- or is -- Marian? Last name had the initial 'H' -- your pet name for her, 'Maid Marian.' " "How in theie?" "Steady, darling -- you let your helm fall off. That was sixteen years ago, just before I asked you to spend all your time on my affairs. So I ordered a fresh snoopsheet on you before I put the deal up to you. May I say that the fact that you had dealt so carefully with her reputation was a strong factor in my deciding that I could trust you with anything, too? Including my power-of-attorney, which you have held ever since and never abused? May I add, too, that I wanted to congratulate you on both your good taste and your success as a Lothario? For, of course, I then had to have her snooped, too, and her husband as well, before I could entrust my grisly secrets to you. But -- also of course -- I could not say a word." "I didn't think any part of that ever showed." "Please, Jacob. Do you recall that you once told Eunice that you could hire a man to photograph her in her own bath -- and she would never know it? As we've noted, money can do almost anything that is physically possible. Part of that snoop report was a photograph of you and Marian in what you lawyers call a 'compromising position.' " "Good God! What did you do with it?" "Burned it. Hated to; it was a good picture and Marian looked awfully pretty -- and you looked all right yourself, you loveable old goat. Then I sent for the head of the snoop firm and told him I wanted the negative and all prints now and no nonsense -- and if it ever turned out that even one print had escaped me, I would break him. Get his license, bankrupt him, put him in jail. Were you or Marian ever embarrassed by such a picture? Blackmail?" "No. Not me -- and I'm morally certain she wasn't, either." "I guess he believed me. Jacob, do you still think I was twitting you about Gigi? Or was I congratulating you?" "Uh... maybe neither. Maybe trying to wring a confession out of me. It's no go, wench." "Please, Jacob. Stipulating that I was mistaken but sincere -- which was it? Now that you know how I behaved about Marian." "Eunice -- Johann! You should have been a lawyer. Subject to that stipulation, I concede that it must have been a sincere congratulation. But one I can't accept -- I haven't earned it. Now, damn it, tell me how you came by this delusion." I ute; there comes Gigi herself." Joan put her sextant back into its box. "Sights will have to wait anyhow; this reach has taken us in so close I've lost my horizon for the Sun. Hi, Gigi, you pretty, pretty thing! Give us a kiss. Just me, Jake is on watch." "I'm not all that busy. Eunice, hold the wheel." He accepted a kiss while still seated, then took the helm back from his wife. Joan said, "Been swimming, dear?" "Uh, yes. Joan Eunice, could I see you a minute? Mr. Salomon, would you excuse us?" "Not by that moniker I won't; you'll have to call me Jake." "Stuff it, dear," his wife" said cheerfully. "She wants a hen conference. Come along, dear. Captain, try to keep us afloat." They found a spot in the lee of the lifeboat. "Got troubles, dear?" (Eunice, are we about to have a beef over Jake? Surely not!) (Can't be, twin. That affair started over two weeks ago... and both Gigi and Joe were relaxed about it from scratch. Which means just what we thought: It actually is a return engagement -- and Jake lied to protect a lady's reputation. Predictable!) "Well, sort of," admitted Mrs. Branca. "Uh, might as well say it bang. Next time you anchor and send a boat in... Joe and I want off." "Oh, dear! What's wrong, Gigi? I did so hope you would stay at least the month we talked about -- then as much longer as you wished." "Well... we did expect to. But I got this seasickness problem and Joe -- well, he has done some painting but... the light's not right; it's too bright and..." She trailed off. (Twin, those are ex cuses.) (Jake?) (Can't be, I tell you. You've got to make her come clean.) "Gigi." "Yes, Joan?" "Look at me. You haven't missed a meal since Roberto put you on the seasick pill. If Joe prefers floodlights to sunlight, we'll clear out the dining saloon and it can be his studio. Put your arms around me and tell me what's really wrong." "Uh -- Joan, the ocean's just too darn bigV' Gigi blinked tears and said, "I guess you think I'm a baby." "No. It's big. Biggest ocean in the world. Some people don't like oceans. I do. That doesn't mean you have to." "Well, I thought I would like it. I mean, you hear about it. What a wonderful thing it is to make an ocean trip. But it scares me. Uh, it scares Joe, too; he just doesn't say so. Joan Eunice, you've been awful good to us -- but this isn't our scene. Joe and I, we aren't fish -- we're alley cats. Always lived in cities. It's too quiet here. Especially at night. At night the quiet is so loud it wakes me up." Joan kissed her. "All right, darling. I knew you weren't having quite the happy time I wanted you to have. Didn't know why. I'll have to visit you at your place -- where it's nice for all of us. I don't like the city, it scares me. But I like it, loads, in your studio -- as long as I don't have to go outside. But is that all that's wrong? Has anyone upset you? Or Joe?" "Oh, no! Everybody's been swell." "You called Jake 'Mr. Salomon.'" "That was because I was upset -- knowing I had to tell you." "Then you both feel easy with Jake? I know he's impressive, he even impresses me. Nothing uptight there?" "Oh, not a bit! Uh, knowing we were walking out on Jake upset us as much as knowing we were walking out on you." "Then may Jake and I both come visit you? Stay a few days?" (Will she duck this, Eunice?) (Why ask me. Boss? You just asked her.) Mrs. Branca dropped her eyes, then looked up and said bluntly, "You mean a Quartet? All the way?" "All the way." "Well, we would, I guess you know that. But how about Jake?" "Well? How about Jake, Gigi? You tell me." "Uh, Jake is relaxed with us. But he's a little uptight when you're around, seems like. Joan Eunice, you caught on. Didn't you? Or you wouldn't have braced me for a Quartet." "I caught on, dear. It's all right. No huhu." "I told Jake I thought you had. He said. Oh, no, impossible, you slept like a log." "I do, except that I've reached the point in pregnancy where I sometimes get up to pee. But that wasn't it -- Jake could be most anywhere if he's not in bed and I never check on him. What I spotted wasn't proof. Just that a man has a way of looking at a woman he's sure of. And vice versa. Nothing anybody could object to. Just 'not uptight' describes it as well as any. I'm not even mildly jealous of Jake, it simply pleased me. Knowing how sweet you can be for a man -- remember, I used to be a man -- " "I know. But I don't really believe it." "I have to believe it and can't ever forget it. Knowing you, I felt smugly pleased for my husband. Tell me, have you made a Three Circle with Jake? Money Hum?" "Oh, yes, always!" "Next time -- at your studio -- it will be a Four Circle. Then our Quartet will harmonize perfectly and no one will ever be uptight again." "Yes. Yesl" "In the meantime you're not going to have to put up with this great big scary ocean even one more night. We won't anchor. I'll have Tom call for a copter -- say for right after lunch. It'll put you down at La Jolla International and you'll jet straight home -- copter pilot will see to things for you and Tom will have your reservations -- and you'll be home and flashing a pack in your own studio before you can say, 'Time Zone.' Feel better?" "Uh, I feel like a heel but -- yes, I do. Oh, Golly, Joan, I'm so homesick'." "You'll be home today. I'm going to find Tom and have him get things rolling. Then I'll go tell Jake -- and tell him why, he'll understand -- and relieve him at the wheel, and tell him he can find you in your stateroom. If you have the nerve of a mouse, little alley cat from the big city, you'll bolt the door and tell him good-by properly. Uh -- Troy? Or twosome?" "Oh. Troy. Of course." "Then find Joe and tell him. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. But Gigi -- that painting of Eve. I must buy it." "No, we'll give it to you." "We settled that long ago. Joe can give me anything else, but not paintings. I must pay for it because I want it to be a present from me to my husband. Now kiss me and run, dear." T he Pussy Cat with her sails doused rocked gently on a light sea. Fifty feet above her tallest stick a copter hovered while again lowering a passenger-freight basket. Tom Finchley stood far aft and coached the copter pilot with hand signals. Mr. and Mrs. Branca had already disappeared into the copter cabin, having gone up on the first trip, but their baggage was on the weather deck, waiting to be loaded. There was quite a pile. Joan had urged them to fetch along "everything you could possibly need for a month or longer -- for painting especially, as there will be lots of bodies around -- and any of them will model... or I'll have them lashed to a grating and flogged, then make them walk the plank. Joe darling, you can do big romantic pix if you wish -- pirate scenes with lush victims and leering scoundrels. Fun?" She had sent the invitation by MercServ with tickets and an airfreight order and instructions to MercServ to supply a reader for the message. Joe had taken her literally; he seemed to have cleared out his studio -- flood lamps, spots, easels, a heavy roll of canvas, stretchers, cameras, photo equipment and supplies, assorted impedimenta -- and one bag each for clothes and personal articles. Seeing what Joe had fetched, Joan was glad that she had ordered a Brink's to get them to the jetport and was careful today to have one meet them at the far end. The basket took up a load of baggage, came back for the last. Fred and Della's sixteen-year-old Hank, an eager but untrained deck hand, were loading, taking turns keeping the basket from spinning while the other placed items in it. Soon they had it all in but one large case, when a gust of wind disturbed the uneasy balance between copter and surface craft. The basket swung wildly; Fred let go and danced aside while Hank went flat to the deck to keep from being hit by it. Fred recovered and again braced the basket, now ten feet farther forward. Joan Eunice grabbed the handle of the last case, then used both hands. "Whew! I think Joe packed the anchor in this one." Jake yelled, "Eunicel Don't lift that! You want to miscarry?" He grabbed it from her, started for the basket. Hank was on his feet again. "Here, Captain, I'll get that!" "Out of my way, son." Jake trudged to the basket, found it too high, got the case into his arms, then up onto one shoulder, placed it carefully inside -- and collapsed. Joan rushed to him. Aft, Tom Finchley noted when the last item went in, looked up at the copter's pilot and signaled "Hoist away!" and added the hand signal for "That's all -- on your way!" Then he looked down -- and started to run. Joan sat down on the deck, took Jake's head and shoulders to her. "Jake, Jake, darling!" (Eunice! Help me!) Fred said, "I'll get the doc!" and rushed for a companionway. The boy stood helplessly by. Salomon gave a long bubbling sigh and all his sphincters relaxed. (Eunice! Where is he?) (Boss, I can't find him!) (You've got to find him! He can't be far.) (What in hell?) (Here he is, here he is! Jakel) (Eunice, what happened? Somebody slammed me in the side of the head with a brick.) (Does it hurt, darling?) (Of course it doesn't hurt. Boss, not now. It can't. Welcome aboard. Melancholy Jacques you lovin' old bastard! Oh, boy, am I glad to see you!) (Yes, welcome home, darling. My darling. Our darling.) (Eunice?) (No, I'm Eunice, Jock. Old cocky Jock. That's Joan. Or Johann. Or Boss. No, Joan is 'Boss' only to me; you'd better call her 'Joan.' Look, shipmates, let's get this Troy straight before we get tangled up in our feet. Joan, you call our husband 'Jake' same as always -- while I'll call him 'Jock' as I used to. Jock, you call Boss either 'Joan' or 'Johann' as suits you and she's either 'Joan' or 'Boss' to me. And I'm always 'Eunice' to either of you. Got it straight?) (I'm confused.) (No huhu, Jock beloved, never any huhu again. You'll get used to it, I did. Joan has to drive while we'll sit back and neck and give advice. Tell him, Joan.) (Yes, Jake. You have us both now. Forever.) (Om Mani Padme Hum.) (Om Mani Padme Hum. Join us, Jake. A Thanksgiving.) (Om Mani Padme Hum!) "Om Mani Padme Hum." "Joan. Let me have him, dear." Dr. Garcia was bending over her. She shook her head. "I'll hold him, Roberto." (Boss! Knock off the female kark and let dear Doctor work.) (Yes, Eunice. Hang on tight to Jake.) (Never fear, dear; I shall. Jock, can you see now? Out of Joan's eyes. We're going to move.) (Of course I can see. Who's that ugly old wreck? Me?) (Of course not; that's just something we don't need any longer. Look away, Joan; you're upsetting Jock.) "Fred, take her below. Hank, help him. Tom, I need Winnie. Get her." the saloon. She was lying down, a wet cloth over her forehead, with Olga Dabrowski seated by her. Tom Finchley followed the doctor in, his face solemn. The doctor said nothing, took Joan's wrist, glaned at his watch. Then he said, "It's bad news, Joan." "I know, Roberto. He was gone before I came down here. (He's not gone. Boss. Don't put it that way. Jock is dead, as dead as I am. But not gone. Right, Jock?) (I think you're splitting hairs, Lively Legs -- ) ('Lively Legs!' You haven't called me that in a long time.) (How about last night?) (You called Joan that; you didn't call me that, not last night.) (Will you two keep quiet? Or at least whisper? I've got to cope.) (Sorry, Boss. Jock darling, whisper to me very quietly. Is Joan better at it than I am?) (Eunice, I can still hear you -- and you have your tenses mixed.) (Boss darling, there are no tenses in the Eternal Now. I asked Jock a question -- and he's too chicken to answer.) (I certainly am!) (Oh, well. With my equipment and my coaching, Joan is probably adequate by now. Plus a good start -- you won't believe this, Jock, but Boss has the dirtiest mind. That lady-lady act is just an act.) (Twin, quit trying to get my goat. I'm busy, Roberto is worried about us.) (Sorry, twin. I'll be good.) "Eunice, I want to make one thing clear. It would not have made any difference if it had happened ashore with all possible lifesupport at hand. Even with Dr. Hedrick at hand. Oh, we could have kept him alive -- as a vegetable. Nothing else." "Jake never wanted that, Roberto; I've heard him say so, emphatically. He never approved of the way I was kept alive." "The two cases are a hundred and eighty degrees apart, Joan. Your body was worn out but your brain was in good shape. In Jake's case -- well, I gave him that physical before we put to sea; his body was in fine shape, for his age. But I know what the autopsy will show: a massive rupture of a large blood vessel in his brain; he died at once. A cerebral 'accident' we call it, because it's unpredictable. If it's any consolation, he didn't suffer." ('Didn't suffer,' eh? Try it. Bob -- it felt like a kick in the head by a mule. But you're right, it was just one blow. Not even a headache, afterward.) (About Ihe same for me, Jock darling, when I got it. Boss had a much rougher time, for years.) (What if I had? It's over now. Darlings, please keep quiet -- we'll talk when they let us alone.) "Doctor, there will be no autopsy." "Joan, ther,e should be an autopsy for your peace of mind." "It won't bring Jake back and he wouldn't like it. As for my peace of mind, I have just one question. Was it... too much honey moon?" "Oh. No, just too many years. Joan, it wasn't even from lifting that heavy load. Let me explain this sort of 'accident'. It's like a weak spot in an old-fashioned pneumatic tire, worn almost through and ready to blow out -- then anything can trigger it. Jake could simply have stood up and keeled over -- today, tomorrow, last week. Oh, it can happen during intercourse, you often hear men say they want to die 'while tearing off one last load.' But it's a horrible experience for the woman involved -- and probably isn't a last orgasm anyhow, more likely he's chopped down just before it. "Far better the way Jake got it. still virile -- I assume -- " (You know darn well Jock was 'still virile.' Ask your wife. Ask Gigi. Hell, ask anybody.) (Eunice, was my behavior that blatant?) (Not blatant at all, Jock you lovin' old goat. But news gets around.) " -- or I should say 'I know' as I was his physician. Jake was happy and strong and virile -- and then he was through, like snipping a film. Don't worry about 'too much honeymoon.' Getting married may have saved Jake years of hopeless senility. Or it may have chopped two weeks off his life as a small price for much happiness. But more likely it extended his life; a happy man functions better. Forget it, dear. When my time comes I hope I get it the way Jake got it -- quickly, and happy to the end." "Then there is no point in an autopsy, Roberto. Will you sign a death certificate?" "Well... when death takes place not in a hospital and not under medical care, it is customary to notify the authorities and -- " "Roberto!" "Yes, Joan?" I to Jake. Notify whom! Somebody in Washington? We're in Federal waters, and the coroner of San Diego county has no proper interest in this death. But he'd be likely to try to milk it for publicity, once he finds out who Jake is, who I am -- and I shan't let that be done with Jake's death. Jake was under medical care -- yoursl You're our ship's surgeon. It might be that you saw him die. Think about it." (Joan, don't ask Bob to lie. It doesn't matter if some coroner has his M.E. chop me up.) (I shan't permit it! Besides, Jake I'm pregnant. Do you want me to hav to go through thatl Crowds and questions and pulling and hauling and sleepless nights?) (Mmm... tell him to make it an airtight lie, dear.) (Boss is a stubborn bitch, Jock -- but she's usually right.) "Hmm -- " Dr. Garcia took off his stethoscope, put it aside. "Now that you mention it, there was still some heart action after I reached him. Lacking means to determine the instant of brain failure I am forced to take cessation of heart action as the moment of death." (That boy would make a good witness, girls -- come to think about it, he did make a good witness at the identity hearings.) "In that case. Doctor, it seems to me that the circumstances are not open to question -- and you may be sure that I will spend any amount of money to keep anyone from turning Jake's death into a circus at any later time. I would like you to certify death and the circumstances and mail a copy to whatever Federal authority should be notified -- when next we touch ashore. No copy elsewhere, we have no permanent residence other than this vessel. Oh, mail a copy to Alec Train; he has Jake's will, he'll need one for probate. And be sure to supply Captain Finchley with a duplicate original for the log." "All right, Joan, since that's the way you want it. And I agree: Here we have a natural death and there is no point in letting bureaucrats poke around in it. But -- right now I want to give you something to make you sleep. Nothing much, just a heavy dose of tranquilizer." "Roberto, what was my pulse?" "That's none of a patient's business, Joan." "It was seventy-two, dead on normal -- I counted my heart beats during that thirty seconds from your first glance at your watch until you let go my wrist. I need no tranquilizers." "Joan, your heart action should be higher than normal -- under the circumstances." "Then possibly I need a stimulant, not a tranquilizer. Roberto, you sometimes forget -- even though you have been through the whole thing with me -- that I am not a normal patient. Not a young bride subject to hysteria. Underneath I am a very old man, almost three times your age, dear... and I've seen everything and no shock can truly be a shock to me. Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me -- death is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way." She smiled. "My pulse is normal because I'm happy -- happy that my beloved Jake met death so easily and happily. Oh, I'll go to my cabin and lie down; I usually nap during the heat of the afternoon. But how about Eve?" "Eh?" "Have you done anything about her She's young, she's probably never seen death before. She almost certainly needs a tranquilizer -- not I." "Uh... Joan, I've been busy. But -- Olga. Will you find Winnie and tell her I said that Eve was to have a minimum dose of Tranquille?" "Yes, Doctor." Mrs. Dabrowski left. "Now, young lady. I'll take you to the cabin." "Just a moment, Doctor. Captain, will you get way on with both sails and auxiliary and make course for the nearest point of the seventy-five-mile limit? I want us to be in international waters before sundown." "Aye aye. Ma'am. That would be about west by south, maybe basic course two-six-oh. I'll plot it." "Good. Then pass the word, quietly, that burial services will be at sundown." "Joan!" we have a natural death and there is no point in letting bureaucrats poke around in it. But -- right now I want to give you something to make you sleep. Nothing much, just a heavy dose of tranquilizer." "Roberto, what was my pulse?" "That's none of a patient's business, Joan." "It was seventy-two, dead on normal -- I counted my heart beats during that thirty seconds from your first glance at your watch until you let go my wrist. I need no tranquilizers." "Joan, your heart action should be higher than normal -- under the circumstances." "Then possibly I need a stimulant, not a tranquilizer. Roberto, you sometimes forget -- even though you have been through the whole thing with me -- that I am not a normal patient. Not a young bride subject to hysteria. Underneath I am a very old man, almost three times your age, dear... and I've seen everything and no shock can truly be a shock to me. Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me -- death is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way." She smiled. "My pulse is normal because I'm happy -- happy that my beloved Jake met death so easily and happily. Oh, I'll go to my cabin and lie down; I usually nap during the heat of the afternoon. But how about Eve?" "Eh?" "Have you done anything about fieri She's young, she's probably never seen death before. She almost certainly needs a tranquilizer -- not I." "Uh... Joan, I've been busy. But -- Olga. Will you find Winnie and tell her I said that Eve was to have a minimum dose of Tranquille?" "Yes, Doctor." Mrs. Dabrowski left. "Now, young lady. I'll take you to the cabin." "Just a moment. Doctor. Captain, will you get way on with both sails and auxiliary and make course for the nearest point of the seventy-five-mile limit? I want us to be in international waters before sundown." "Aye aye. Ma'am. That would be about west by south, maybe basic course two-six-oh. I'll plot it." "Good. Then pass the word, quietly, that burial services will be at sundown." "Joan!" "Roberto, do you think I would turn Jake over to an undertaker! Taxidermists! He wanted to die like his ancestors; I shall bury him like his ancestors -- his dear body untouched and returned home before the sun sets." W O every thing there is a seaI son, and a time for every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die -- ' " Joan paused in her reading. The sun was an orange-red circle almost touching the horizon. On a grating at the rail, steadied by Fred and the Doctor, Jake's body waited, sewed into canvas, with ballast weights at the feet. (A primitive rite, Johann.) (Jake, if you don't like it. I'll stop.) (Jock, you should be respectful; this is a funeral.) (It's my funeral, isn't it? Do I have to pull a long face for my own funeral? Johann, I do like it. I respect symbols, primitive symbols especially. Thank you for doing this -- and thank you most of all for not letting my carcass fall into the hands of licensed ghouls.) (Just wanted to be sure, Jake. I'd better go on; I've marked several more passages.) (Go on, Johann. Just don't try to pray me into Heaven.) (I shan't, Jake beloved. We three will face whatever comes, together.) (Right, Boss. Jock knows it.) " 'All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man?' " 'Two are better than one. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?' " (Boss, that reminds me. Do we have to sleep alone tonight?) (Damn it, Eunice, don't you ever think of anything else?) (Come off it. Boss. What else is worth thinking about? Stocks, bonds and other securities? I've been telling Jock about your discovery -- that sex is more intense for a woman than for a man. He doesn't believe it. But he's eager to find out.) (Jake, are you that eager? I intended to show respect for your memory.) (I appreciate the thought, Johann. But you needn't carry it to extremes. I can't see why you should mourn me when I'm still here. Uh, tell me -- is it really better?) (Let him judge for himself. Boss -- whether it's better to spread Eunice... or to be Eunice. A more scientific comparison than you have been able to make.) (Quit talking like a kinsey, Eunice. All right, partners; I'll think over the chances. But I'll be damned if I'll make a disgraceful spectacle out of us tonight. Not this night. It's got to be discreet -- or no game.) " 'And if one shall prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.' " (Boss, I like that. This makes up for the funeral I never had. Not even a memorial service.) (But you did have a memorial service. Lively Legs.) (I did? Who was there?) (Just me, dear. I hired a little chapel and an organist. I read a couple of poems you used to like. Some flowers. Nothing much.) (Jock, I'm dreadfully touched. Boss! He really does love me. Doesn't he?) (He does, darling -- we both do.) (I wish I'd been there, Jock.) (I didn't know where you were, dearest. Maybe just as well, you're not very well behaved at funerals.) (Oh, pooh all over you, you dirty old ghost -- nobody can hear me.) (Careful whom you call a ghost. Lively Legs; it might slop over on you. Let Joan get through with this and splash it.) '"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might -- ' ' -- for thy days are few and they are numbered -- ' ' -- man goeth to his long home.' 'The silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken.' From the deep we came, let the body of our brother Jacob now be returned to the deep." Joan closed the Book; Fred and Dr. Garcia lifted the end of the grating; the body fell into the water, disappeared. She turned away, handed the Book to Mrs. Dabrowski. "Here, Olga. Thank you." "Joan, that was beautiful. I don't see how you did it." "Wipe your eyes, Olga; farewells must never be sad -- and Jake was ready to go. I knew my husband well, Olga; I knew what he wanted, it was not hard." She pressed Olga's hand and turned away. "Winnie! Stop that. Stop it at once. Jake does not want you to cry." (What makes you think so, Johann? I feel flattered by having a lovely little creature like Winifred weep over me.) (Oh, pipe down, Jake. You were the star of the show, now stop taking bows. Talk to Eunice.) Joan took the smaller woman in her arms. "You mustn't, Winnie Really you mustn't. Think of your baby." shoulder. "Joan, don't you miss him at all?" "But, darling, how can I miss Jake when he has never left me? The Jewel is still in the Lotus, and always will be. Eternal Now." "I guess so -- but I just can't stand it!" (Dear Doctor, maybe? He'll be giving Winnie a sleeping pill, surest thing.) (Not Roberto, Eunice. Under his aggressive atheism he's got a touch of what he was brought up on -- he'd be shocked. Some other night.) "Roberto, you had better take care of Winnie." "I will -- but are yoM all right?" "You know I am. I have a prescription for you, however." "All right. It won't hurt you to take a real knocker-outer tonight. Say phenobarb." "Let's not say 'phenobarb.' My prescription is for Winnie. Get her to eat something. Then sit with her and recite the Money Hum for at least a half hour. Then take her to bed and hold her in your arms and let her sleep. And you sleep, sir; you've had a rough day, too." "All right. Do you want to join us in saying them? We could come to the cabin -- then you could go straight to bed. I've learned that it's better than barbiturates." "Doctor, if you wish, you may come to my cabin at nine o'clock tomorrow morning -- and kick me out of bed if I'm not up. But I will be. Don't go there any sooner than that. Tonight I shall recite that hypnotic prayer. With Jake. He'll be able to hear me... whether you think so or not." "Joan, I have no wish to attack anyone's faith." "You haven't, dear. I appreciate your solicitude. When I need it, I will draw on it -- freely. But now you take care of Winnie." (Boss, how about Fred? No one to dodge. Jock, you'll be right in the middle. Lucky Adolf. But Fred won't know it.) (Eunice, you're out of your pointy little head. We almost scared Fred to death once before, just by being us. Before we got him gentled. Look at him, he's worse off than Winnie. With nobody to console him. But we can't console him, not this night.) "Captain." "Yes, Ma'am?" "Let's bust up this wake. People should not stand around moping. Meal hours have become disorganized; can Hester throw together some cold supper quickly? Perhaps with volunteer help? I'd volunteer but I have something to do." (Oho! The Tom Cat. Jock, this is going to be fun.) (Lively Legs, is there a man in this vessel you gals haven't spread for?) (Oh, sure, Jock honey. Hank. He's got his eye on Eve and thinks we're an old hag. And now that her Uncle Jock has left her. Eve might trip him.) (Now that I'm dead, I regret having resisted that delicious little jailbait. Wouldn't have cost way out of trouble -- and I had a rich wife.) (If you two lechers will shut up a moment. I'll set you straight about something. Not Thomas Cattus. Certainly not before the midwatch and could be later with this wind against us. Captain Tom Finchley is going to be busy skippering.) "Captain, I want you to get way on and set basic course for San Clemente Island anchorage." "Yes, Ma'am." He trailed after her and added softly: "I better start calling you Captain now. Set an example." She stopped. They were sufficiently alone that she could speak privately by lowering her voice. "Tom Cat." "Yes?" "Don't call me Captain -- you are Captain until I've passed my tests. Then we'll see. And don't call me 'Ma'am.' I'm either 'Mrs. Salomon' or 'Joan,' depending on the company, just as before. But in private I'm still your Pussy Cat. I hope I am." "Well... okay." "Let's hear you say it." "Pussy Cat. Brave little Pussy Cat. Puss, you surprise me more, longer I know you." "That's better. Tom Cat, Jake knew all along about your tomcatting with me." (Oh, what a lie! Eunice, she never told me -- and I suspected only once and decided I was mistaken.) (I know, Jock. Boss is a deceitful one and not at all truthful and besides she tells fibs even to me.) "He did?" "Yes, Thomas Cattus. But Jake Salomon was a true gentleman and saw only what he was expected to see. He never teased me about my little follies. Simply indulged me. But he didn't tell on himself, either. Do you know if he ever made it with Hester?" (Now see here, Johann -- ) (Pipe down, Jock; I've wondered, too.) "Uh... hell. Pussy, all men are alike, all after the same thing." "And all women are alike, we've all got it. 'Well?" "Hester spread for him first chance we gave 'em. But she didn't tell me. Ashamed. Had to catch 'em at it, then twist her arm." "Surely you didn't hurt her?" "No, no. Puss, I don't rough a broad, never. Didn't catch 'em, not to hurt, neither. Backed out fast -- then asked, later. Told her I knew for certain, so how about coming clean, was all. She did. She hadn't told me -- because of you." "Oh. I trust you then told her about me?" Her sailing master looked horrified. "Pussy, you think I'm out o' my frimpin' head? Look, I like what you got just fine. But I ain't foolish. I don't rat on broads. If I did you'd be last on the list. Believe." "Tell Hester if you wish, dear; it can't matter now. Then, at some later time, she would not be surprised if she found me doing what widows so often do." ('They don't tell, they don't yell, they rarely swell -- and they're grateful as hell.') (Jock, you're a dirty old ghost.) "Well, let's set our course. than midnight. I'll relieve you for the midwatch." "You will like hell. Ma'am -- Pussy Cat. You sack in a full night, you need it. I'll put Fred on the wheel now and Hank on lookout -- and I'll drag a corking mat back near the helm and catch some sack drill till we get close in. Pussy Cat, you've got to promise me you'll stay in your cabin. Not go wandering around -- I'll think you're meaning to jump overboard." "Is that an order. Captain?" "Uh -- yes, damn it, that's an order!" "Aye aye, sir. It won't be necessary to check on me; I'll be in my cabin, door locked, and I will be asleep. I promise not to jump overboard earlier than tomorrow night." "Pussy Cat, you wouldn't jump? Would you?" W Captain, I do have a concept of duty. Until I have this baby, my life is not my own. I not only must not suicide -- I would not in any case -- but I must also keep calm and happy and healthy and not risk so much as a dirty drinking glass. So don't worry about me. Good night, Tom." She headed for the cabin. (Nothing doing at that shop tonight, partners -- we're faced with nobility. I think Anton is our best bet.) (The Passionate Pole! Jock darling. I'm not sure your heart can stand it.) (Fortunately, my dears, my old pump no longer has to stand anything -- and the one you turned over to Joan, Eunice, is a Swiss watch among tickers. Doesn't race even when she is racing. But you know that.) (Quit chattering, you two. Either of you have any idea how to get Olga out of the way?' (Push her overboard?) (Eunice!) (Can't I joke. Boss? I like Olga, she's a nice gal.) (Too nice, that's the problem. Not a tart like you, or me -- or Hester.) (Hrrrmph!) (Jake, you're not in court, dear. The subject is tail. Mine. Ours, I mean.) (Johann, I simply wanted to say that, if you took our problem directly to Mrs. Dabrowski, you might find her sympathatic. I always found her so.) (Jake! Are you implying that you've had Olga? I don't believe it.) (I don't either, Jock. If you had said 'Eve' I would have boggled -- but would have believed you. But Olga? Hell, she wears a panty even in the pool.) (Which comes off very easily -- in private.) (Eunice, I think he means it. Well, I'll be damned! You and I are pikers. 'Me 'at's off to the Duke.' All right, Jake -- tell us how to go about it.) (About what? Getting her out of the way? Just ask her, she's very sympathetic -- and felt my death more than you wenches have.) (Jock, that's not fair. We felt it... but we're overjoyed that you decided to stay anyhow.) (Thank you, my dears. Conversely, if you would like to invite her in -- ) (Do you mean a Troy?) (I understand that such is the current argot, Eunice; in my youth we called it something else. But wouldn't it be more of a Pentagon? Five?) (The word is 'Star' today, Jock. But let me give you the first rule of happy ghosting. You must never, never, never admit that you are here, nor tease Joan to admit it. Because she might get groused and do so. Whereupon Joan would wind up in a shrink factory -- with us along -- and there go our happy games. Look, you've been married to Joan quite a while now and jumping her even longer -- did you ever suspect that I was present, too?) (Not once.) (You see? Don't admit it and they leave us alone.) (Eunice, Jake would never let on. But now about Olga -- Jake, did you ever teach her Om Mani?) (No.) (Boss, I begin to see. We've taught it to Anton, Jock. Is Olga limber enough to sit in Lotus?) (Lively Legs, Mrs. Dabrowski is limber enough for anything.) (That does it, Joan. Olga will join in, even if shp thinks it's heathen -- tonight she will. For you. And there is no easier way to get a party peeled down and rolling than by forming a Circle. You've done it again and again.) (As I recall, dears, Joan even used it on me. When it was hardly necessary. Okay, let's find the Dabrowskis.) A ppointments openfederal GS-# Assistant Welfare Field Operative (LearnerVisitor) Literacy requirement C. Brown Belt or higher gives # preference. Veteran's preference, parolee's preference, relevant experience preference all semi-cumulative. See local Civil Service or Welfare office for pre-examinations and salary formulas. Latter based on standard scale plus field cost-of-living factor and hazardous area rating, cumulative. In a compromise vote today the Society for Rational Astrology accepted a "grandfather clause" in the licensing bill before the Nebraska Legislature. The Committee on Agriculture  Mechanical Arts then voted the amended bill "Do Pass" by # to # -- tantamount to passage in the state's unicameral legislature. The Protective Association of Intuitive Astrologers called it "the greatest setback for science since Galileo." The Lunar Commission announced that the colonies are now # self-sufficient in foodstuffs but added that the ten-year plan would continue in order to increase out-migraat sea in their honey-moon yacht. The young widow remained in seclusion... You Fool Nobody But Urself, Elf -- No surgery, no risky drugs or hormones, no harmful injections. Learn secrets perfected # years ago by wise  holy Hindu Masters Phone MercServCode (Get a Fellow, Della! Rozzer?) " -- door for processing, Pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Garcia; good luck. Doctor. Next applicant! Step lively, sit down over there -- your husband not with you? Or is it 'Miss?' " "I am a widow, Mr. Barnes." "So? We don't get many widows, nor does the Commission encourage them. Out-migration is not an escape for emotional problems. Such as bereavement. Nor do we accept applicants so advanced in pregnancy unless there are overriding advantages to the Commission, not the applicant. Take the couple who went through just before you. She's pregnant -- but he is a medical doctor, one of the top categories for subsidized out-migration. So I passed her. Might have passed her on her own; she's a nurse. But unless you have such a special qualification -- " "I know, sir. Dr. Garcia is my personal physician." "Eh? Even if I accept you, that is no guarantee that he would still be your physician on the Moon. Unlikely, in fact. Unless, by coincidence -- " "Mr. Barnes, you have my outmigration proposal in front of you. It has been prepared with great care by my attorney. It might save time to glance through it." "All in good time. You would be surprised at how many people come in here without having the slightest idea of what they are up against. They seem to assume that the Commission is anxious to have them. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Nineteen out of twenty who sit down in that chair I do not permit to go on through the processing door. I make it a practice to get rid of the more obvious time-wasters quickly. Uh, 'Salomon, Eunice.' Mrs. Salomon, I want to know first -- Mrs. Salomonl" "Mrs. Jacob Moshe Salomon, maiden name, Joan Eunice Smith." "Your face did look somewhat familiar but your features, uh -- " " -- are chubby now. Yes. I've gained twenty-six pounds -- which Dr. Garcia finds satisfactory for my height, build, and date of impregnation." "That brings up other problems. A woman is often mistaken as to the date -- and first babies are notoriously unpredictable in their arrivals. Our Lunar transports aren't planned for new infants, nor for childbirth. I want you to realize the hazards." "I know them. Need we go into this?" "I must be the judge of that." "Mr. Barnes, my doctor is satisfied that I know the exact date of impregnation and -- Is all of this confo?" "Mmm. I'll put it this way. None of it is privileged. I am a lawyer but not your lawyer. I hear more intimate details from applicants than you can imagine but I haven't time to waste on gossip." "I am glad to hear that, Mr. Barnes... as I would be much displeased if what I am about to tell you were to become a matter of gossip." "Hmmph. I think I felt a chill breeze. Are you trying to impress me with your importance? Don't bother; applicants are all the same size once they come in here. Your money doesn't mean a thing." "Was my manner unfriendly? I'm sorry." "Well --  Let's stick to the business at hand. A lawyer in the Lunar Commission's Civil Service -- a job with no squeeze, believe me -- doesn't often find himself dealing with rich people. But it makes no difference; if you don't want to be frank with the Commission -- well, that's your problem. But I won't approve an applicant's proposal until # am satisfied about it. All about it. Now you implied that you had something pertinent to tell me which you class as 'confo.' I don't have to accept your restriction. Now... do you talk? Or shall we terminate this interview?" "You leave me no option, sir. This is not a first baby I am carrying, so no 'first baby' hazard exists. If the Goddard lifts on schedule, I have every reason to expect to have my baby on the Moon. Dr. Garcia is not worried about the timing and neither am I." "So? This brings up other problems. This earlier child -- does he, or she, affect your estate?" "No. That is why this must be treated as confo. # did not have that earlier baby." "Eh? You lost me. Better clarify that." A a sex-change and a brain transplant. Surely you know it -- good heavens, the whole world knows it. The first baby this body gave birth to was before that time. It is the reputation of my donor I wish to protect, not mine. The child was illegitimate. Common as that is these days -- no longer a legal concept in most states and the very word almost obsolete -- so great is my gratitude to the sweet and gracious lady who formerly lived in this body, I would be most unhappy were I to be the cause of any tarnish on her memory." (Boss, you know I don't give a kark.) (Let her handle it, Eunice; this petty bureaucrat can gum up the works if Joan does not divert him just so. Are we kibitizing Joan or are we going to the Moon?) (Hell, yes, we're going to the Moon! My 'Yes' vote, plus your 'Yes' vote, plus half of Joan's vote -- a natural fence-straddler she is, legs always open -- which works out to a five-to-one majority for out-migrating. A landslide!) (So let her alone while she handles him.) (If she didn't have that big belly she could handle him a lot better. And faster.) (Hrrmph. Eunice, you claim you were there... so why don't you tell poor old melancholy Jacques the straight on that? It was me, wasn't it? It was I?) (Jock old ghost, I love you dearly -- but if you think I'll split on my twin, you don't know me.) (Oh, well. A baby is a baby is a baby. I just hope it doesn't have two heads.) (Two heads would be stretching a good thing too far. Jock, I'll settle for two balls.) (Thinking about incest. Lively Legs?) (And why shouldn't I think about it? We've tried everything else.) (Jake, Eunice -- will you two please go back to sleep? Squire Pecksniff here is searching for fly specks on Alec's masterpiece. Trying to think up more objections -- which I'll have to answer.) "Mrs. Salomon, I find myself quite disturbed by one aspect concerning this alleged earlier child -- the great likelihood that some future action may be brought challenging your disposition of your estate when this child, or some person claiming to be this child, turns up. The fifty percent of estate required -- as a minimum -- from any out-migrant not of a subsidized-vocation category is a source of capital to the colonies; the Commisdime of it once the Commission carries out its half of the bargain. Yet such a 'missing heir' could lay claim to all of your estate." "Most unlikely, Mr. Barnes, but if you will look at Appendix G, you will see how my lawyer handled it. A small trust to buy up any such claim, with a fifty-year conversion of any remainder to a named charity." "Uh, let me find it. Mmm, Mrs. dollars 'small?' " "Yes." "Mmm. Perhaps I had better look closely at the other financial provisions. Have you been advised that, even though the Commission claims only half of your fortune, the other half cannot be used to buy you anything on the Moon? In other words, poor or rich, on the Moon out-migrants start off equal." "I know that, Mr. Barnes. Believe me, my attorney Mr. Train is most careful. He searched the law and made certain that I knew the consequences of my acts -- because he did not approve of them. To put it briefly Alec Train said that anyone who goes to the Moon to live must be out of his head. So he tried to talk me out of what he regards as my folly. You'll find four other possible heirs in Appendix F -- my granddaughters. It is to their advantage to accept what is offered there... as they are told bluntly how much worse off they will be if they wait for me to die. A poor bet for them in any case; I am now physiologically younger than they are; I'll probably outlive all of them." "That could be true. Especially on the Moon, one could add. I wish I could out-migrate myself. But I can't afford to pay for it the way you can and lawyers are not in demand there. Well, your Mr. Train seems to have thought of most aspects. Let's look at your balance sheet." "One moment, sir. I have asked for one small measure of special treatment." "Eh? All out-migrants are treated alike. Must be." "A very small thing, Mr. Barnes. My baby will be born not long after I arrive on Luna. I've asked to have Dr. Garcia continue to attend me through that time." "I can't promise that. Madam. Sorry. Policy." She started slowly to get up. "Then I'm not going through with it." "Uh -- good God! Is this really your net worth?" She shrugged. "What is the worth of one pregnant woman, sir? I suppose it depends on your values." "I didn't mean that. This balance sheet -- If it's correct, you're not just wealthy -- I knew "Possibly. I haven't added it. That summary was prepared through Chase Manhattan with the assistance of accountancy firms listed there. I suppose it's correct... unless some computer got the hiccups. But give it back to me... since the Commission can't promise me Dr. Garcia to deliver my baby." "Please, Madam. I have certain latitude in these matters. I simply don't exercise it -- ordinarily. Policy." "Whose policy, Mr. Barnes? The Commission's? Or yours?" "Eh? Why, mine. I said o." " Then quit wasting my time, you damned idiotl" ('That's telling him. Fat Lady!') (Eunice, this is one fat lady who isn't going to take any more nonsense. My back aches.) T he blast almost caused Mr. Barnes to fall out of his swivel chair. He recovered his. balance, said; "Please, Madam Salomon!" "Young man, let's have no more nonsense! I'm far gone in pregnancy, as you can see. You've lectured me about the dangers of childbirth -- and you aren't a doctor. You've pried into personal matters with the gall of a Kinsey. You've tried to tell me I can't have my own doctor when he is going in the same ship -- and now it turns out that it was not a Commission regulation but merely petty tyranny on your part. Bullying. All through this nonsense -- although I've appeared with a complete and carefully prepared proposal -- you've kept me sitting on a hard uncomfortable chair. My back aches. On how many poor helpless applicants have you fattened your ego? But I am neither poor nor helpless. You spoke of a chill breeze. It's an icy blast now.  bloody well mean to have your jobr "Please, Madam! I said you could have your own doctor. And I am required to review each applicant's proposal." "Then get your lazy arse out of that comfortable chair and give it to me You come sit in this ducking stool." "Very well. Ma'am." They exchanged chairs. Shortly he said, "I see that you are putting almost all of the other fifty percent of your fortune into starship research and development." "It's none of your business." "I didn't say it was. It just struck me as... unusual." "Why? My child may want to go in a starship. I want that research to move. Mr. Barnes, you've had time to look at that proposal; if you hadn't talked so much you could have it memorized by now. Do whatever it is you do. Mark your X, or stamp your chop. Or hand it back and let me out of here. Now! Not five minutes from now -- but now. My back still hurts. You're a pain in the back, Mr. Barnes, you and your petty 'policy' and your worthless talk." He signed it. "Through that door. Madam Salomon." "Thank you." She started toward it. "You're barely welcome -- you ancient bitch!" Joan Eunice stopped, turned back, and smiled her best goldensunrise smile. "Why, thank you, dear! That's the best thing you've said to me. Because it is utterly honest. Of course I'm not welcome, the way I've stormed at you -- and answered your bullying with worse bullying. And I am indeed both a bitch and ancient." "I shouldn't have said that." "Oh, but you should have. I richly deserved it. But I would never have tried to get your job -- truly. I'm not that petty. That was just backache bad temper talking. I admire your spunk in telling me off. What is your first name?" "Uh, Matthew." "A good name, Matthew. A strong name." Joan Eunice came back, stood close to him. "Matthew, I'm going to the Moon. I'll never be back this way again. Will you forgive this ancient bitch and let us part friends? Will you kiss me goodbye? I've no one to see me off, Matthew -- will you kiss me goodbye as I leave for the Moon?" "Uh -- " "Please, Matthew. Uh, mind the big belly; turn me a little sideways -- that's better." She wetted her lips, lifted her face, and closed her eyes. Presently she sighed and nestled closer. "Matthew? Will you let me love you? Oh, I don't mean seduce you, it's too late for that. I'm about benched. Just tell me that I may think of you with love as I go to the Moon. It's a long way off and I'm a little scared -- and I lived too long without love and want to love everyone who will let me... any who will love me back even a little. Will you, dear? Or is this bitch too ancient?" "Uh, Madam Salomon -- " "Eunice, Matthew." "Eunice. Eunice, you're a sparky little bitch, you really are. But I kept you sitting there -- even before I realized who you are -- because I like looking at you. Hell, honey, my wife says I can love any woman I want to -- ten percent of what I love her." "Ten percent is a good return on any investment, Matthew. All right, please love me that ten percent -- and I'll love you ten percent of what I loved -- still love -- my darling husband. Is there enough love in that ten percent for a second kiss? It's a long way to the Moon -- they must keep me warm all the way." She closed her eyes and waited. (Hey, twin, lover boy is doing better this time.) (Don't bother me now, Em busy!) Presently Mr. Barnes murmured, "Lovely." "All swollen and fat now, that's why I wear styles that cover them. But you should have seen Eunice -- the first Eunice, my benefactrix -- at her lovely best... in styles to show it." "I still say they're lovely. I guess we had better stop this, I've got a roomful of people waiting out there. And you have almost four hours of processing before you go on to quarantine. If you want to go to Andes Port with your own doctor, you had better go now." "Yes, Matthew, I love you -- ten percent -- and I'll still be loving you on the Moon. At compound interest. Through that door?" "Through there and follow the signs. Goodbye, Eunice. Take care of yourself." (Boss, that's either a new high, or a new low. Was he kissing usl to me -- though I'm still learning compared with you two trollops -- that the young man lars... and wound up kissing Joan. Us. Quite well, too. Dears, I find that my animal nature has been considerably stirred -- I'm looking forward to us being back in circulation again.) (Hell, yes, Jock darling, we all are. It occurs to me, Joan, that there must be lots of homesick out-migrants who will appreciate a simple country girl who learned clear back in junior high to kiss with her eyes closed and her lips open.) (Eunice, that's what I'm counting on. Seven terribly lonely place... but there are only a few thousand on Luna and, if we try, we can get to know all of them and love most of them. What do you think, Jake?) (Johann, we can try. We will. Wups, here's our first stop. 'Physical.' Goose bumps and indignities. But what the hell? -- somebody kissed us goodbye.) Izvestia condemned the announcement (Daily Selenite, year #, day #) of the Lunar Commission's call for proposal studies for terraforming Ganymede as "one more provocative example of the insatiable territorial aggressions of the mad-dog alliance of the two major imperialist, counterrevolutionary, genocidal powers, the United States of America and the so-called People's Democratic Republic of China" and demanded that the UN Security Council take action before it was too late. In Sequoia National Park three families (or possibly one extended-family were discovered living two hundred feet up in a giant redwood. The group (seven adults, five children -- two less than a year old) claimed to have been up the tree more than three years; extensive arrangements for their unique style of living lent substance to the claim. They were booked on a variety of charges but the U.S. district attorney declined to prosecute: "I ain't about to waste my time and taxpayers' money on a bunch of monkeys. Let's chase 'em back up the tree!" The Iowa State Annual Picnic in Long Beach, California, suffered # cases of acute food poisoning (botulism-D), # muggings, # rapes, and was rained out. " -- from the great State of New York knows that slum clearance is no answer. Must we hear the death rattle before we admit that any organism, be it man, or city, or civilization, in time grows old and dies?" In a letter in Nature (UK) it was claimed that scientists in Novosibirsk had solved both the problem of twinning replication and of extra-uterine foetal development in vitro and must now be reckoned as back in the Great-Powers race with a potentially unlimited supply of workers, soldiers, and peasants. An editorial in the same issue urged the Nobel letter-writer to give up writing science-fiction or at least change his brand of hashish. Debate on proposed legislation for control of neo-psychedelics continued: "Has the gentleman on the other side of the aisle ever given thought to the potentially disastrous effect on our economy of actually enforcing the narcotics laws we already have? Or is he talking for the video audience?" Experienced observers predicted no vote this session." as with everywoman, neared the end of her nine lunar months. Her lovely navel had long since extruded, her belly was an arching dome of life pushing up the sheet. She waited in the Community Hospital eight levels down. The nurse seated near her was pregnant also but not nearly so far along. "Winnie?" "Yes, dear?" "If it's a boy it must be Jacob Eunice... a girl must be Eunice Jacob. Promise me." "I did promise, dear; I wrote it down just as you asked me to. And I promised to take care of your baby -- and that is all done, too, already recorded -- I take care of yours, you take care of mine. Only we won't need to, dear; both of us are going to be all right -- we'll raise them together." "Promise me, it's important." (Johann, don't name that baby Jake. Call him Johann -- Johann Eunice.) (Jake, I will not load down a boy with Johann -- it forced me to learn to fight too young.) (Jock, don't argue with Boss. She's always right, you know that.) (Then call him John!) (His name is Jacob, Jake -- I won't have it any other way.) (Joan, you're the most stubborn old bastard in the entire Solar System -- and turning you into a woman didn't change you. All right already!) (I love you, my husband.) (We both love you. Boss -- and Jake is as proud about the names as I am.) "I do promise you, Joan. Cross my heart." "My sweet Winsome. We've come a long way together, you and I and Roberto." "Yes, we have, dear." "I'm ill. Am I not?" "Joan, you're not ill. A woman never feels good just before she has a baby -- I know. I've seen hundreds of them. I told you that tube was just for glucose." "What tube? Winnie, come close and listen. This is important. My baby's name must be... " " -- rejection syndrome. Doctor. Atypical but unmistakable." "Dr. Garcia, why do you say 'atypical'?" "Mmm. Sometimes, when she's irrational, she speaks in three different voices and -- well, two of them are dead. Split personality." "So? I'm not a psychiatrist. Dr. Garcia; 'split personality' means little to me. But I don't see that it necessarily affects pregnancy. I've delivered some fine, healthy babies from women who were quite irrational." "Nor am I a psychiatrist, sir. Let it stand that she is irrational much of the time... and that I see this as part of the total clinical picture, which -- in my opinion -- gives a prognosis of transplant rejection." "Dr. Garcia, you know more about transplants than I do; I've never managed a transplant case in my life. But this patient seems in fair shape to me. Right here in this hospital I have seen women who appeared to be in much worse shape... who had their babies and were up and working in three days. With our low gravity they recover quickly. Did you think this patient was hurt on the trip up from Earth?" "Oh, no! Those flotation acceleration cells are wonderful. Mrs. Salomon rode in one, so did my wife. I monitored them; Joan took it even better than Winnie did. I envied them, as I found the ride in a standard chair pretty rough. No, I see no connection; rejection symptoms did not show until this week." Garcia frowned. "She doesn't know that her mind isn't clear -- she's lucid off and on. But motor control is decaying. That strong young body sustains her metabolism -- but truthfully. Doctor, I can't guess how long." He frowned again. "It could let go any moment -- damn it, I wish I had proper support equipment!" The older doctor shook his head. "This is a frontier, son. I'm not running down your specialty -- but this is not the place for it. Here we set bones and take out appendixes and try to keep contagious diseases from racing through the colony. But when it comes time to die, we die -- you, me, anybody -- and get out of the way of the living. Now suppose we had all of Johns Hopkins here with Jefferson Medical thrown in -- could you stop it? Reverse it? Possibility of spontaneous remission if you had your fancy support equipment?" "No. The best we could do would be to extend the time." "So the literature says, but I wanted to hear you say it. Well, Doctor? Your patient." "We take the baby." "Let's get busy." they were wheeling her down the corridor. "Roberto?" "Right here, dear." "Where are they taking me? Am I going in for surgery again?" "Yes, Joan." "Why, dear?" "Because you haven't gone into labor when you should have. So now we do it the easy way -- Caesarean section." He added: "There's nothing to worry about. It's as routine as taking out an appendix." "Roberto, you know I never worry. You're doing it?" "No, the chief of surgery. He's far more skilled than I am. Dr. Frankel. You met him, he examined you this morning." "Did he? It's slipped my mind. Roberto, I must tell Winnie something very important. It's about the name of my baby." "She knows, dear, she wrote it down. 'Jacob Eunice, or Eunice Jacob." "Oh, good! Then everything's all right. But tell them to make it quick, Roberto; I never liked waiting around at a beachhead." "It'll be quick, you'll never notice it. Spinal and wagonload of barbiturate, Joan." "That's funny, you called me Joan. My name's Johann, Doctor. Agnes is going to be all right -- she is, isn't she?" "Yes, Johann. Agnes -- is going to be all right." "I told her she would be all right. Doctor, I feel dreamy. If I fall asleep, will you wake me when Agnes goes in to have her baby?" "Yes, Johann." "Thank... you... Mrs... Wicklund. I didn't... know... could be so... wonderful." "Roberto? Where are you? I can't see you." "Right here, dear." "Touch me. Touch my face, I can't feel anything lower down. Roberto, what I bought was a wonderful year -- and I have no regrets. Have they started?" "Not quite. Do you want to go to sleep, dear?" "Must I? I'd rather not. I feel sleepy -- dreamy and good... but I'd rather not go to sleep just yet. It's on the knees of the gods now, isn't it? Time to bite the bullet and chin up and all that. But I don't need that, I'm happy. Come close, dear, I must tell you why. Closer... can't talk... very loud." "Clamp! Damn it. Nurse, stay out of my way!" "Everything always hurts, Roberto -- everything. Always. But some things are worth all the hurts. 'Tie me kangeroo down, mite, tie me kangeroo down!' That... tell you that. Om Mani Padme wasn't... what I meant to say; Hum. Now I lay me down to that's Jake, he's singing again. Alsleep -- " ways sings when he's happy. Lean "Surgeon, she's failing." ' very close... so I can tell you... A baby cried, a world began, before -- I sleep. Thank you, Ro"Heart action dropping!" berto, for letting me welcome you (Jake? Eunice?) (Here, Boss! into my body. It is good to touch Grab on! There! We've got you.) -- to f -- , be f -- ed. It's -- not (Is it a boy or a girl?) (Who cares, good -- to be -- too much alone. Johann -- it's a baby! 'One for all You have blessed me... with and all for one!') your body, dear. Now I'll sleep a An old world vanished and then while if I may... but first I had to there was none.  IF The Magazine of Alternatives TJ. Bass Piers Anthony Juanita Coulson Lester del Rey All in the current I F -- on your newsstand now! OF "When we get Out There we're going to toss the light barrier in the same junkheap as the sound barrier...  AM perhaps the only individual ever to receive a B.S. in Archinois without learning to use a slide rule. Spurning such aids as tending to atrophy the natural faculties, I polished my mental arithmetic to a point rivaling the skill of an idiot savant. This annoyed the idiot savant, who resigned his post as Head of the Department and became a science writer. In those days we still did homework instead of rioting. Some of the problems assigned in the engineering curriculum were rather time-consuming; the record for one problem for one class for one day, as I recall, was some eleven hours. As a result we students fell into the habit of working in twoman teams. During those long happy evenings in close proximity with slide-rule operators I noted a curious phenomenon: faced with the challenge of dividing # by ten, they would frown, adjust the magic device, make mysterious passes and announce: "Nine nine nine nine nine. Uh -- where does the decimal go?" I earned my reputation as a lightning calculator by my uncanny ability, when encountering a tricky bit of arithmetic such as dividing # by #, to instantly announce: "That will be very close to #" I never revealed my secret formula: #  ## (equation #) The tendency of the technical mind to hold the nose so close to the grindstone that it loses sight of the point carries over, alas, into its public pronouncements. Not one to denigrate Science, I. But let's not get carried away with ideas, like, oh, the alleged limiting velocity of light. According to the Relativity boys, nothing can ever travel faster than about # misec. -- the velocity of propagation of electromagnetic radiation -- such as light and radio waves -- in a vacuum. Man will never explore the stars, they say, because it would take too long. We can never communicate with the neighboring galaxy because a return message would mum. Aside from the fact that this limitation, if true, would take all the fun out of things and also aside from the fact that people who announce what we will never do always seem to be asking for a dunce cap, the whole idea is nonsense. Limiting velocity indeed. Phooey. We'll go as fast as we want to, so there. I realize that at this point the academicians are laying aside their technical journals with a pitying smile and preparing to point out that at light-speed: (a) the mass of the spaceship will reach infinity and (b) its length will become zero, and (c) time aboard will come to a standstill. Ergo, the thing is clearly impossible. I reply that what's impossible is not super-light velocity, but spaceships of infinite mass, zero length and no time. The absurdity of these concepts should be a tip-off to the theoreticians that, although their arithmetic gives them nine, nine, nine, nine, they still don't know where to put the decimal. So let's take a clearer look at things. T he Universe is, as far as we've actually observed it, a reasonable, consistent, operating mechanism. It seems to abhor absolutes as much as Nature was once thought to abhor a vacuum. It also abhors uniqueness. Once we were told that the world was flat and that Europe was at its center. Then that Terra was the center of the Solar System. Then that the sun was at the center of the Galaxy. Then that our Galaxy was at the center of the Universe -- and that it was the biggest and best Galaxy going, etc., etc., etc. This is all bunk, of course. Now they tell us that nothing can travel away from Earth faster than light. I italicize where I do because these flat statements of the crippling limitation imply a Terracentric Universe. Consider: we observe a distant radio source in a given direction, receding from us at three-quarters of the speed of light. Turning our antennae in the opposite direction, we observe another radio source, equally distant, also receding at a major fraction of this magic velocity. Falling back on: .#  .#  # (equation #) it appears that our limitation is already exceeded. "Sorry," the smiling physicist says, with an expression resembling that of the canary which has just had a bite of the cat. "The velocities don't add." Okay. We'll remember that one, Buster. Let's look at it this way: Captain Horntoot of the Starship Clubfoot takes his command out past Luna and opens her up. Traveling at a modest one G, he soon reaches a respectable velocity; say .# lightspeed. Now, we all know that this can't go on or all sorts of impossible things will try to happen. Capt Horntoot knows this, too. No dullard he, he summons his First Mate to the quarterdeck. "All right, Mr. Shrub," he barks. "What's our present velocity?" Shrub tells him. "With reference to what?" Horntoot demands. "Why, ah, Omaha, Nebraska, my home town, sir," Shrub replies. "Out there -- " the captain points through the front windshield, "is a distant radio source, which is receding from Omaha, Nebraska at a velocity of three-quarters of a light." "I see it, sir!" "No, you don't, you idiot, that's a speck of crud on your glasses! You can't see this distant radio object because it's not visible from here. But take my word for it: it's out there. Now, how fast are we traveling -- in relation to the distant radio object, I mean." "Well, actually ! guess we're standing still, sir," Shrub says. "Standing still?" Horntoot roars. "I told you to get the lead out and boost us up to three-quarters of lightspeed!" "Yes, but sir -- that's impossible!" "Indeed, Mr. Shrub? And why, may I ask?" "B-because we're already going # of a light -- and if we accelerated another # light, that would be a light and a half -- and it says right in my handbook that you can't -- " "Perish the thought, Mr. Shrub," Horntoot says coolly. "The velocities don't add." (Nyahnyah, n' nyah-nyah!) If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. bounding out of the woodwork to tell me all the things wrong with this formulation; but I'll bet my place in the Public Freezer against a lifetime subscription to the Engineering News-Record that some day some dumb tramp captain will get from here to there quicker than a ray of light that started when he did -- even if he doesn't exceed lightspeed on the way. And he'll let the slide-rule boys formulate the math later. (And I suppose that when Capt Horntoot turns on his headlights at .# lights, the beams just pile up out front like toilet paper spinning off a roll?) Let's face it. Violent Reader; all this talk about the velocity of light is in the same category as the aqueous humor and phlogiston. Theorem). Light has no velocity. When the sun radiates, it sets up conditions around it. Those conditions extend in all directions. Are we to believe that light rays go speeding away from the sun in opposite directions, all at the same speed with reference to the sun (or is it to Omaha?) and to all the other light rays -- including those going in the opposite direction? Again, phooey. We're playing with velocities, eh? A velocity implies a time and a distance -- but they tell us that at high velocities both time and distance are variables. So -- what kind of time are we clocking by? Ship time or shore time? And which shore? Whose yardstick are we using? If time on a distant object, receding from us at the limiting velocity, is standing still -- then so is the object, right? And the business of measuring speed implies a frame of reference. A fly inside a moving Dempster Dumpster, etc. So -- what is our frame of reference for all this talk about absolute limits? Earth? A remote galaxy, at the limits of detectability? A moving ship somewhere between them? Double phooey. When we get Out There, in our nuclear powered Go-ship, and we step on the gas -- we're going to Go. We're going to toss the light barrier in the same junkheap as the sound barrier. Stick around and see.  ( Continued from page #  chants -- by Pohl and Kornbluth, Roses -- as a landmark novel. (It still wouldn't make sense to cite Space Lords). You see? You see what the sincere people are doing to us, gentle reader? I quote: "Perhaps science fiction is best defined, however, by an enumeration of its themes. These can be grouped into the following categories: technological gimmickry, space travel, time travel, future scenarios, and finally, the exploration of inner space and ultimate meaning." (Italics the authors'). Can they? I haven't tried counting, but I doubt if there is a significant number of sf stories which use technological gimmickry as a theme. They may use technological gimmickry as a device of storytelling. More likely, they may use technological gameplaying as a form of recreation for minds trained to grasp subtle distinctions between the probable and the technically possible. But as a theme, gimmickry seems a bit limited, and I doubt if the Roses really meant exactly what they said. One would have to quote farther to deduce what they mean by such purely personal labels as future scenarios and ultimate meaning. (I can recognize space travel and time travel as occasionally possessing thematic qualities, all right. As for the exploration of inner space, I presume that's stated in its conventional meaning as a proposed antithesis to outer space, which used to be a place with an existence of its own when I was in school but has become corrupted into whatever that shouting is beyond the viewpoint observer's ears. But that's not often a theme, as distinguished from a motive. In fact, though love has labored and scholarship's entire panoply of ready obscure references and suspect annotations has been brought into action here, neither is this poor book a theme, much less a thesis. T he single man best qualified to analyze the classics would be Poul Anderson. Thank a good Lord, he spends his time doing so only for the purpose of constructThankf TO tho continuing support of loyal roodors -- and in responca M popokipd -- iMnd -- the publishers are happy to announce thatt ing additional fiction. But if those walls could speak, I for one would go running to listen, for, clearly, that man is without peer as a student of what can be done. It was a Poul Anderson month a while ago, with Doubleday bringing out Tau Zero and Tales of the Flying Mountains and Ballantine reprinting Guardians of Time, Brain Wave, and After Doomsday. These are variously successful books, spanning his range from earliest effort and human concern Brain Wave) through such recent notions as effects as a spaceship drives its speed helplessly up and upward until time (expressed in contracting, dying space) and space (as a blossoming function of rolling time) become no more than captive media for the drama of the mighty machine masters. Tau Zero has its biggest problems, in fact, when Anderson tests what I assume to have been his basic assumption -- that you can tell a superscience story and a humanistic one at the same time. I think you're doomed to re-tell Aniara, and A niara isn't worth telling because it works only as a function of some psychic mechanism. Probably the one that says the good Lord didn't intend for folks to go unpunished. That would be why the moment of triumph is the moment of letdown in this attempt. Guardians of Time is a novelette collection about Poul's version of the Time Patrol. Problem here is its resemblance to a collection of adventure pulp "historical" romances, when in fact it's one of the few collections of time patrol stories that isn't obviously and immediately inconsistent with its own premises. That's a tough standard to live up to. But since all four stories have a common theme -- decency circumvented -- and a common motive nostalgia inverted, the book as a piece of recreation makes for altogether too even reading. And After Doomsday cheats a little. In fact, it cheats a lot. But that's okay. It's the price of his successes. Although there's no mistaking the man's touch on a story, there's not a man around with Anderson's range. I'm forming the theory that this is because he can actually write a story just to see if one of his analytical notions will hold water. There's nothing remarkable about a professional wirter's being able to isolate different kinds of story, and then to isolate story ingredients and synthesize something new out of them -- not necessarily viable, but at least capable of exhibiting a few reflexes. And often enough, genuine life. But to be able to write each and every one of them... of so many different kinds. Now that, students, is your classicist.  A mouse has already been saved from leukemia. Help us save a man. For years, youVe been giving people with leukemia your sympathy. But sympathy can't cure leukemia. Money can. Give us enough of that, and maybe well be able to do for a man what has already been done for a mouse. American Cancer Society! #: A Arthur C. Clarke Hunting an alien "presence" in the universe, # men and a computergonepsychotic stumble upon the incredible secret of mankind's birth -- only to trigger the cosmic "booby-trap" that could spell its death. A controversial best-seller by the most acclaimed science fiction writer of our era. Memtiers accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Ofter slightly different in Canada. Pub. ed.# #: A Space Odyssey btt-slling novi ond oword-winning cinema spactoculor Science Fiction has Rrown up. Have you kept up? A new literary genre has come of age -- your age. Mature. Sophisticated. Provocative. And respected. You ate invited to explore it now under an amazing trial ofter. Take any # volumes on this page (worth up to # in original publishers' editions) for only I with membership.  New club selections will be described to you in advance each month. Choose from new works of fiction -- and fact -- by such acclaimed authors as Ray Brad bury, Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein and others. All volumes are full-length, hardbound -- and uncut. Though they sell for as much as #, # and more in their original publishers' editions, club members pay only # plus shipping. (You may choose an optional extra-value selection at a slightly higher price.) Y'our sole o'uligation is to accept as few as four books during the coming year. Cancel anytime thereafter. Science Fiction Book Club, Garden City, N.Y. #. Faience fiction book -lub n i Please accept my application for membership and rush the  # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill mel # plus a modest shipping and handling charge for all! I three. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin, Things  'to Come, which describes coming selections. If I do not i ( wish to receive the monthly selection or prefer an alterI nate, I simply give instructions on the form provided. For  leach book I accept, I pay #, plus shipping and hanj Idling. Occasional extra-value selections are priced slightly I I higher. I need take only # books in the coming year and i I may resign any time thereafter.  Iductory package, I may return it in # days and member. Ship will be canceled. I will owe nothing.  I I I I I I I Print Name #. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last I'cncratioh on earth. "Wildly fantastic!" -- Allantic. Pub. ed. # #. Beyond (he Beyond, by Pout Anderson. # novellas by Huyo Award winner. About scientists. pirates, "loners." #. S(andon Zanzibar. by John Brunner, Life in U.S. # years from now. Hugo Award Winner. # pages. Pub. ed. # #. Downward to the Earth, by Robert Silvcrberg. Alien planet with alluring secret of rebirth. #.I Sing The Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury. # maior pieces -- Bradbury's first collection in five years. Pub ccl. # #. One Step from Earth, by Harry Harrison. # talcs in matter "transmission." Mars "manshot"; new earth race. Pub. ed. # Address  I City State Zip j I #-S# I I If under # , parent must sign here. I I Note: Book Club editions are sometimes reduced In size, but they are all full-length,  hard-covtr books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. j #. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The ends of (he galaxy revert to ba rba rism. Pub. ed. # #. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. Finding love -- in a "Unisex" world! Nebula Award winner. Pub. ed. # #. Three for Tomorrow. Novellas by Silverberg, Zelazny. Blish. Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Pub. ed. # #. Nightfall and Other Stories, by Isaac Asimov. # probing tales by this best-selling science fiction author. Pub. ed. # #. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein. He knew ihc Martian love .secret  -- and it spelled his doom. Pub. ed.o.:#  #. Dangerus vT -- ' sions. Anthology oi r # original storks  never before in t print by Sturgeon,  Anderson, others. Pub. ed, #  QaUxy The Best in Pertinent Science Fiction January, #I m mac Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagi fhtagn! That eldritch chant in the Old Tongue signifies: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming," but we're here to tell you: "Cthulhu naffhtagn" -- Cthulhu, the dread Great Old One, has awakened and is coming your way in Beagle Books' new Arkham Editions of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is America's greatest master of weird fantasy -- and the Arkham Editions will bring you the best of his work in paperback form, including devoted fans. in January (each book priced at #(i), with many more novels and collections to follow. The Beagle SFfantasy line will also include the Anthony Boucher Memorial Mafia SF novel. Nothing is known of the Old Tongue, except that it was heavily coated. An lntet Publisher #I Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. # Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. January, #I Vol. #,No. # H.H. Hollis Michael G. Coney A. Bertram Chandler Editor Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Ben Bova Ernest Taves Larry Elsenberg E.J. Wood David J. Rogoff Thomas N. Scortia Donald H. Menzel Algis Budrys Subscription Director Publisher Associate Publisher ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Dislributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in Ihe United Stales, elsewhere S#. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and aclual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.#. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. "Unless you can provide evidence that there is definitely, genetically, absolutely no difference of intelligence between black and white and between people with different kinds of noses -- we have no choice but to accept the difference as a possibility. I am using regular scientific reasoning." The above is from one of the more quotable letters I'm still receiving on the subject of race and intelligence, briefly touched upon here some time ago under the headings: Brain Pollution (Galaxy, Nov., #I and Skintelligence (Worlds of IF, Dec., #I Missives that begin: "Who do you think you are to--" I ignore. When, as and if I write my autobiography I will do so for money and it will be the traditional pack of lies. You might enjoy it but I will not do it for free. But the problem with the "scientific reasoning" advanced by Mr. Scott Edelstein of Silver Spring, Maryland, and cited above is that no rigorously scientific definition of intelligence exists or has been given general acceptance. So that to postulate today "different kinds" of human intelligence based on skin color or other physiological variations is putting a cart before a colt that has yet to be foaled. That there is a correlation between heredity and intelligence -- or what may be ascertainable about intelligence -- is conceded but imperfectly understood by geneticists. And nothing in the available data suggests variations based on race in the kind and quality of human intelligence, The pertinent genes have not been identiprising the human genome -- but any combination of genes can be found in all the races of man. Accredited IQ tests do not measure intelligence but merely the presumed attributes of intelligence in a given cultural context e.g. the prestigious Stanford-Binet system is designed to measure capacity to learn in the EuroAmerican white culture. But a tested subject, retested after a lapse of several years, may show variations up to thirty IQ points without having changed his genetic makeup or switched races. Genetics only partly affect present IQ scoring the rest is demonstrably environment. In the black-and-white context. Army IQ tests have shown Northern blacks outscoring whites from certain Southern states on the average. More recent studies by Dr. Irwin Katz of New York University have amassed further evidence that environment and motivation dramatically affect measurable functions of what we call intelligence. Whatever human intelligence eventually proves to be if it exists at all it should in the light of present data and needs be considered wealth. As such it should be cultivated and mined not pursued into what seems to be a blind alley of genetic bias. Clou'S' . cos-'C toatt #  # . n-r , . a sw -- w# "'?", Mirtdl'l ' # , # V #' "'!r provocaVwe N" # nW bV "'Lus Bor#' . # . K(t#' "'"r-s."  "'T ""f Sv , saac He'f"' .; Oatt'Ot" , # Harper #) Row # East #d Street, New York, N.Y. # It was a shot in the dark -- but on it might depend the fate of man! iriLL-kill it -- " "Look for a patch of white, Jake, and fire into it." Yacov HarShawkor found himself in a nightmare when he returned from the New Delhi conference. Charles Perry handed him a loaded M-# as they ran. Heavy handguns roared around the two men. At the lab compound, floodHere, in' the dark of the South Indian interior plain, there were only running feet, harsh cries in Tamil and English. "There! Shoot, shoot!" and laboring breaths as they pursued the escapee from the laboratory. "What's white, Charlie? What am I aiming at?" "Mary's hospital gown! She got out." Yacov came to a full stop, clutching the carbine. My god, he thought, Mary. A week ago... and Charlie expects us to kill her. He's loved her all these years and he wants to kill her. For what? Yacov knew and was cold all through with the knowledge. "Charlie -- " he yelled at the running figure ahead. "You got a stable vector for the virus?" "Yes, yes," Charles groaned as he slowed, .# Magnum clutched in his right hand. "Yes, and Mary has it-but the process is not stable. We have to kill her. Do you think I relish it?" They stood very close, breathing with the deep shudders of men not often called to sustained physical effort. "Yes," Yacov said bitterly. "Yes, I think you do, you jealous -- " "No. You don't understand. We can't control the virus in a female. That's not Mary out there. It's the end of the human race." He pointed the handgun. "I'll kill you, too, if I have to; but I'm going to burn Mary's dead body tonight; and afterwards I'm going to cremate the ashes and the dirt where she falls." Yacov never knew what might have happened as each stood with the other's death in his hand; a half-mile ahead of them in the black night shots rang out near the bank of the broad river. Shouts of triumph overlaid a wavering scream of pain and terror. In a moment the wiry Indian majordomo of the great laboratory ran back to them. "She is dead, gentlemen. Dr. Subchundrum is looking for a boat to see if the crocodiles have left anything. I believe I hit her -- and I know Dr. Subchundrum did. I saw her stagger just before she went over the bluff, I am sorry." The searchers at the river brought back nothing. For the rest of the night three scientists sat in the ascetic mess hall of their laboratory, passing the station's lone bottle of gin back and forth and mourning the loss of Mary Braden, with whom each had been in love at some time and in some fashion. Memories were traded like snapshots, each serving for a moment to hold off from the three the actual deadness, the nonexistence, of the woman whose life had been entwined with theirs. The mutual magnet which had swept them all together as students was a consuming interest in the mechanics of population control. At a great Boston university, Patasayjit Subchundrum, Charles Perry and Yacov HarShawkor -- known to his friends as Yankele -- had made a wheel of intellect and adolescent lust revolving around Mary Braden's passionate involvement in the struggle of heart and head for a policy by which humanity could live on the planet Earth without eating itself. A ttending what aii had ex pected to be a dreary bore of "getting to know your faculty," they met at the home of one Professor Hoogert. "Ecological balance," Hoogert said, "is not long denied." He said so to old students and new. He said so in class and out of it. On this social occasion he said so to his four young guests. And they accepted the words as the axiom on which to build their lives. "In the generation before mine," Hoogert also said, "your grandparents and great-grandparents wore the scar-that-couldn't-beseen. They all believed hunger-was just around the corner. In your generation, even Mr. Subchundrum, who comes from a country where famine is still real, is somehow unmarked by fear. Although India in the last decade, we all feel that in some way the problem of hunger is going to be solved." Subchundrum, a thin, ravishingly handsome young hellion with a skin the color of sandalwood and the dark brown eyes of a fawn, rose to the invitation. "Weil, Doctor, famine disturbs one more as one approaches becoming a participant in it. For people who cannot grow grain and cannot get grain and have indeed forgotten what grain looks like, it is a more gripping experience than for a scholar who is living in the land of the obese." Dr. Hoogert had grimaced. "I don't feel guilt. I have not chosen that any should starve -- and no mouthful of food I might deny myself would add one calorie to the diet of a Calcutta slum dweller." His wife murmured, "No, but it might smooth out that unsightly paunch." She deftly whipped the cake plate from her husband's elbow and placed it in front of the young Indian student. Mary Braden, hair hanging over one eye, spoke then in the diffident manner on which girls of her generation relied to disarm opponents. "Oh, I see what you mean, Mrs. Hoogert -- it isn't our personal food intake that helps or hurts the starving. But food is so important in our society -- more important than sex, really -- that if we could just bring ourselves to the point of general self-denial we might generate a political solution to the food problem. Another famine might never be allowed in India or Brazil." Mrs. Hoogert shot a sharp glance at Mary. "More important than sex? Pooh, only a virgin would make a remark like that." "Well, my dear," said Professor Hoogert, "if I have to choose between a fat paunch and a fat head. I'll just keep my little corporation. I think you've made Mary blush. I think the state of Mary Braden's virginity is a subject which must be pursued elsewhere. Mary, my dear, do you think that any division of the world's food supply would suffice He smiled at her. Mary Braden shook her head. "No, I mean that if people here voluntarily felt the edge of hunger, it might stimulate them to solve the problem." Subchundrum said seriously, "Yes, but there is some evidence that the blind response of our genes to hunger itself stimulates the pressure to breed. Starving people produce more offspring than well-fed people do." "So? Make birth-control a legal concomitant of marriage," Charles said. "When Mary and Yankele wed, they ought to be assigned a quota. Any more and crunch! No food for anybody in the family." Mary impulsively leaned over and put her hand on Yacov's. "We might be relied on -- but people who are hungry every day? I don't think they can be counted on to be rational or to obey quotas. We ought to find out." Yacov's hand turned up and tightened on hers. "Marriage doesn't equal children. Children require marriage to protect them through the plastic learning period. But they don't need it to be born. Or to go hungry." Charles laid his hand on top of theirs. "Shall we make non-reproduction a three-way pledge? Oh, sorry." His eye fell on Subchundrum. "Four-way, if you like?" Subchundrum smiled. "I abstain, as my ambassador often does at the UN. We preserve later freedom of action in this way." Professor Hoogert was preserving his own freedom of action by stuffing a pipe. He spoke while puffing the tobacco alight. "It isn't a bad thing to recognize -- that -- birth control -- is not likely -- to come -- from simple plans -- like marital abstinence. Some compulsion is needed, eh?" He glanced around the circle. "Yes. Well. Just so. I have caused the four of you to meet because each of you has betrayed some interest in the population problem. I hoped each of you would start a chain reaction in the other three. As a catalyst I seem to have performed my function." "He means," his wife said, stroking the back of his neck, "that he is a spent catalyst." IR," said Charles, "you nevO er told us what you feel is the distinguishing mark of your generation. After all, you're handing down the problem." "Why, we are the fulminate of war," Hoogert said. "Strike one of us and see the mushroom cloud. We sought peace in murder and found another of the paradoxes of history. We killed more people in our years than the whole human population of the world had been five hundred years earlier, yet we leave earth more crowded with human animals than when we began to kill. So we have led directly to you. This world cannot tolerate the numerical dominance of any one beast at our level. Ecological balance is not long denied." "What are we?" asked Yacov, looking around at his three contemporaries. "Cannibals. In the most literal sense. You will eat yourselves if a valve for population pressure is not found or fashioned. This is the great fact of human life which marks and will mark every one of you." Yacov and Mary looked at each other. "Cannibals?" she murmured dreamily. "Valve?" asked Charles Perry. "You don't say solution, or reduction. Valve?" "He means," Subchundrum said, "that there is more than one way of relieving a pressure." "More than that," Professor Hoogert said. "I want to make it clear that I think man is still an evolving animal. Whether we take the position that, having evolved the brain, man has come to the end of his individual physical evolution and can hope to progress only by social evolution, by the elaboration of societies better adapted to the needs of humanity; or that there is still significant genetic change in man's future -- either way the pressure of population is important. It is one of the factors leading to physical evolution by the vast exchange of the gene pool and its exposure to the forces of mutation; or it is one of the factors to make us use our brains to invent the more human society which may lie in our future. What you must seek in your generation is a way to control population pressure in helping to determine man's future." "Of course," said Yacov, "everybody knows all we have to do is get every nation up to the level of affluence of the great industrial nations and the birth rate falls." Mary Braden said, "Mexico? Gross national product rising every year, population rising at a steady four percent right with it." "Well! it just hasn't gone on long enough. Give them a generation." "Thirty years?" asked Subchundrum. "In thirty years, even if we could reduce my country's annual rate of population growth to one and a half percent, we should have people. At the current rate of better than three percent, which is likely to endure, our population in the year two thousand will be one billion people." Professor Hoogert nodded. "So where's the valve?" Charles Perry laughed. "Well, it's just a matter of finding it. Some simple mechanical way that the most ignorant will use to inhibit conception." Yacov shook his head. Mary said, very seriously, "But if we did find a mechanical way the pill is controversial but effective and the plastic loop is simple and cheap how could we persuade people to use it? For some people known methods are painful or frightening or anti-religious. How do we get over all those hurdles at once?" Charles replied, "Lock the food supply to contraception. A woman would have to show proof she's using one method or another in order to get her family's issue of food for the month." "Charles, forgive me. You are a child of industrialism, of closeliving populations already managed in so many ways that one more won't matter. Everybody in the United States is trained to mass transportation, mass work places, computer use. The dial telephone alone conditions every American to mass utilization of computers; and the keeping of computer records, in credit, in school, in public agencies, trains ordinary citizens not to cheat and not to forget to do the things that make the computer tick: include this portion of bill with your check, return this stub with questionnaire fully filled out, check every answer either yes or not -- do not fold, spindle or mutilate. I know the following is hard for you to visualize but try to get hold of the idea that sixty percent of Mexico's people live in villages of fewer than a thousand souls; eighty percent of my people the same. Try to accept that such people are both ignorant and sly and that they have a cultural tradition that rulebreaking can almost always be fixed by an uncle or friend with influence. "Such people lose count honestly. They forget what the count means; if they're following the rhythm method, they can't remember which day is safe and which isn't; or they think the act of counting makes the process safe. If they're using pills, they mismatch days with pills and destroy the effectiveness of the cycle of pills. They lose the strings of beads we give them to match the count. They lose the pills themselves or one of the babies swallows them and mother is ashamed to admit it and ask for more; or the distributor only comes to the village once a month or once a quarter. "All these things happen just by the human carelessness of people in a peasant culture. But people don't expect to be punished by starvation just for making a human error in a count. You can't hook food supply to pill usage. In the first place, neither my people nor yours would accept it. They'd simply revolt, if it were really enforced. But it couldn't be enforced. One married woman would just share food with another, knowing that next month the need for sharing because of a little counting error might be the other way around." "My God," said Charles, "what an impassioned speech. You nearly make me believe the problem can't be solved." "No, he doesn't mean that," said Yacov. "And he hasn't even touched on religious objections to the kind of inhumane coercion you proposed. He means it takes more than good will and more than technical ingenuity to get the job done." Mary asked, "Do you mean that it takes more even than compulsion?" Subchundrum looked at them all with something deep and dark struggling for expression in his red-brown eyes. Then he shrugged, as if he were unable or unfelt. II great university and a great city, Charles and Yacov squired many young girls to the theater, to dances, to protest meetings and picket lines -- all the rich variety of American student life in the 'sixties. Mary Braden worked her way through a score of admirers outside their circle; but as the undergraduate years slid swiftly by, more and more of her time, even outside class and lab, was spent with Yacov or with Charles -- or with Subchundrum, although he ostensibly removed himself from sexual competition early in the game. Back home in Kerala awaited the bride to whom his parents had plighted his troth when he was six years old. In senior years, even their continuing and deepening interest in the population problem could not prevent their being drawn into different vortices of scientific specialization; but their separation in discipline drew them back together to exchange and enrich each other's ideas. The childless home of the Hoogerts became their home. At various times, one or more of them boarded there. Once, when Mary was living with the Hoogerts and the other three had come over for Sunday night supper, they examined plastic loops, various small shapes of molded nylon and polyethlene which inhibited conception when placed in a woman's uterus. The theory was that intra-uterine devices were painless and could remain in place for years. When the time came for the planned family, they could be removed at once without side effects and without further inhibition of the process of reproduction. Mary flung down a sheaf of statistics purporting to indicate that the lUD was less effective in underdeveloped countries than in highly industrialized ones. she said. "In the southern part of India the damned things are said by women to be painful. The body processes expel them. Even when they're in place, they don't work as well as they do in the United States. How can that be?" Charles leaned forward, his arm around Mary -- he was the favored one that semester -- and picked up one of the devices. "Maybe women in India just don't accept the idea." "Superstitious, you mean?" asked Yacov, lying on the floor, his feet up on a chair. Subchundrum laughed. "Superstition is involved but European superstition. You people from big industrial countries believe a smooth, molded piece of plastic can do anything; so why should it not inhibit birth? My people know it is painful and unnatural -- so they expel or remove it." "Yes," Mary said, "I can see that. The real point is that, objectively, it's effective and painfree. Now how do we educate the women of underdeveloped countries to know that?" Subchundrum glowered. "Objective human experience is white, temperate-zone, college-educated experience. You still believe that, don't you? All you pink ones, you just can't get outside your own crippling, anti-human culture to understand that any other human culture is just as valid as yours." "Oh, come on, Sayji, that's not the implication, meant or unmeant." Yacov sat up and rested on one elbow, feet still in the chair. "It is a problem of education. It's hard for people in a village who never see more than a thousand other persons in their lives to understand that by doubling their number, they're doubling three and problem of education." Subchundrum stood up. "I could say that too many girls are being born and are growing up to childbearing age so quickly and in such them by any process of education. But I'll just say good night." The door slammed behind him before anyone could move. He was back the next week, however. M onths later, the picture was the same, except that Yacov sat next to Mary and Charles was leaning back in a chair, noisily grinding an apple to death. Patasayjit Subchundrum was bearing down on the destructive role that free will played in their joint interest. "So long as we expect people, by some act of will, to overcome the deepest instinct of life, we are simply whistling in the dark. People are not going to cut down their own reproduction when it always seems to be someone else who menaces the world. We are running right into the most basic human urge." Charles said, "But Sayji, human beings are more than any bundle of instinctual drives. What has made us human is our ability to suppress animal drives for long range goals." "Yes," said Mary, "but those long range goals have always been the good of the immediate family -- or at most of the tribe or nation." "Nationalism is tribalism," Yacov declared. "Even in Israel?" asked Subchundrum. To which Mary replied, turning protectively toward Yacov, "Yes, even in Zionism; but that's a different situation. Israel is the carrier of the modern tradition. The sheikdoms that surround her are still in the middle ages." "So!" Subchundrum cried. "That gives the Israelis license to outbreed their neighbors? Eh, eh, Yankele?" "Oh, hell, no. But the situation is special." "All situations are special," Charles mused as he worked the last shreds off his apple core. "Right." Mary sat up out of the circle of Yacov's arm. "That's why the whole emphasis of the struggle has to be on education. We've got to make people want to have fewer children. But how?" "Or can we?" asked Subchundrum. "Can we, in time? You all scoff, more or less, at the efforts of my government; but we have ten times as many lecturers holding clinics and demonstrating the pill, the loop, the rhythm method, as any other country. We offer people the choice of method and our demonstrations are convincing because they are conducted in slums, country and city, where waves of children with big bellies and sad eyes are always washing around the ankles of the women in the audience. We educate the men, too, but what measurable good does it do us? We may be slowing down the rate of increase but we are hardly denting the increase in absolute numbers. Every time you eat an apple, Charles, another thousand Indians begin to wail and starve." Charles licked his fingers. "I say what Hoogie told us a long time ago. No use appealing to me to eat less. That won't stem the tide of hunger in Madras." "Yes," said Mary, always fair. "You're right. You're right, in our terms. In terms of the whole problem of human population on the planet earth, you're wrong. Animals react to starvation pressure by dropping more cubs. So do human beings." Yacov said what one or the other of them had said a thousand times. "Human beings are animals. To that extent, instinctual drives do move great numbers of people. Unless we can educate them all to stand against those drives, we can never hope to correct the upward curve of the population figures, never, never." G raduation came, degrees and honors, graduate school, jobs in separated corners of the world. Subchundrum invited them all to be his guests in Mexico at a conference on population control methods, sending out a round-robin letter in which he hinted broadly that he had found a new method, and that it might be the method. When they all assembled at Subchundrum's country home in Cauhtla, he teased them first with mysterious glances, insisted on two rounds of tequila sours and then began, inexplicably, to reminisce about his boyhood in Kerala, at the tip of the Indian subcontinent. "Cauhtla is like home in many ways. The mountain elevation is homelike and the sweaty hand of the tropics, so much more felt here than in Cuernavaca, three hundred meters higher, also makes me feel at home." Yacov said, "Sayji, I flew five thousand kilometers to get here and left my two last classes of the semester to be taught by my assistant, a young woman of such monumental stupidity as only American university politics could saddle me with. I can't stay for the whole conference. Tell us about your new chemical agent and let's get to the testing." "You think it is chemical?" "Well, you're working for the largest producer of synthetic hormones in the world. Makes sense that your research ought to benefit your employer some way." Sayji chuckled. "You ought to know someone raised in Kerala would not have any slavish adherence to the idea of profits for the employer. And this is a Mexican employer. The outfit can only fire me for cause -- and pursuing a line of research that will not benefit the corporation is not cause." Mary went to him, laying her gold-tanned hand on his mahogany wrist. "Come on, Sayji. Don't tease us. What have you learned?" He set down his drink. "I have learned that chemical control, in the sense of some compound that will do all our work for us, is not within our grasp now. There is something stirring in the back of my mind, you understand, but it's not even to the writing-down stage, not even to playing with the mathematics of the cell. "Chemical this is, yes; but -- I am almost ashamed to say it -- very American, very European. Not at all the sort of life-oriented chemistry you have a right to expect from me, dear ones. Here it is." He dropped a handful of small plastic shapes and a larger one, something like a baker's pastry tube, on the cocktail table that had been carved from a whole tree. The white plastic shapes lay in an ugly sort of pattern on the dark wood of the table. Charles was the first to comprehend. All three thought through the tequila, at first, that the loop shapes were significant; and while they were handling them and realizing it was the same old collection of toroids and helixes that were supposed to inhibit human conception, Charles suddenly picked up the icing tube shape and began to work it, with a sheepish grin. "By God, I thought of this once but gave up too soon. It's an applicator, isn't it? You don't need a doctor to make the implant." "Yes," said Subchundrum, "so what?" "Oh," said Yacov. "It's foolproof, is it?" "Is anything?" Mary said, "Well, Sayji, is it or isn't it?" "Foolproof? Oh yes, it's fool proof. But, of course, it isn't fools we have to deal with." Charles broke in. "It works, though? The woman can put the loop in place and remove it without the necessity of a doctor's or a midwife's helping her? Sayji, this is the breakthrough of the age. Every teenage girl in the world will want one as soon as she hears about it." Subchundrum laughed in the way they had come to know meant he was embarrassed. "Yes, of course -- when she hears about it and can afford the few pennies or her government can afford the few pennies or -- " "Or what?" Charles was ready to start the manufacture of the applicators at once. "Oh, I only mean that we still face the problem of making these teenage girls -- real teenage girls in villages and cities where the teenagers are not like the ones in your middle-class American head, Charlie -- want not to be mothers. Women want a child, or two or three children. They just don't want too many, that's all. But what number becomes too many? If you have three, four are just as easy to care for. And if child-bearing and child-rearing are really the only honorable courses open in life to a girl child, why should she practice this trick? What's in it for her as a person, not just as a point on a statistical curve?" "Well, education -- " "Mary, Mary!" Subchundrum whirled on her. "What about yourself? You've stretched adolescence as far as even an American girl can. Well, Doctor Braden, isn't there something else you want from life? How long will you resist your deepest desires?" Mary sat down with great deliberation. Charles and Yacov looked at her quietly and speculatively. She set her glass down on the tiled floor and then fixed Subchundrum with a direct and unsmiling stare. "Sayji, is this a proposal? What about the girl in Kerala?" "Call it a proposition, if you like. I am as cool as you." "Are you just demonstrating something?" "Perhaps I am. But you will have to find out what it is that I am demonstrating." The evening was ruined and the discussion died. Dr. Subchundrum's enthusiasm, which had assembled them all again, had curdled in the heat of his own doubts about the device, and in something Mary's presence had called out of him, something so far from the control that had marked him in their student years that Yacov and Charles could only shake their heads as they drove back to Mexico City. Mary remained. Neither she nor Subchundrum ever told the other two whether she was there for days or for months. No child came of it; but as for the new device, Sayji's doubts proved well founded. It was one more weapon. It was a long way from being the weapon. postcards bore a Boston postmark. Subchundrum had been working in a laboratory in Holland. They were all in New York at a conference and evening found them in Yankele's suite with their shoes off and drinks in hand. Yacov was spending government money that year, and declared that his motto was. Live a little. He waved a glass to take in the opulent suite and all it implied. There was a fifth wheel, a physicist who had been in school with them, blown into their group that night by a chance wind. He had a wry, studious sort of humor, so they had kept him with them after dinner, made him attend a seminar with them, and now they were all talking about anything and everything in the world except their consuming interest, of which they were all heartily sick for the moment. The physicist commented on that. "Whatever happened to all those dirty stories the four of you used to tell?" "Dirty stories?" asked Mary in her direct way. "Well, all that talk about genitalia and the economy of the uterus would have been dirty stories in any other gang I ever hung out with." Mary lounged back against Charles' shoulder and he snorted. "That's the thanks we get for trying to keep this cluck from being up to his hip pockets in human embryos. Trailbreakers are never understood." "Ahh," said the physicist, "you're not trailbreakers. You talk dirty, but you're afraid to face up to the only radical solution possible now. Several of the most populous nations on the face of the earth need to take a twenty-five or thirty-year vacation from having any children at all." "That's a solution?" Yacov asked lazily. "That ain't even a statement of the problem." "Sure it's a solution. All the children born for the next ten years in India, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Southern Italy, the Balkans and the whole Mediterranean shore have got to be sterilized at birth." The collective howl was the payoff he had been playing for. The physicist chuckled, wiping Yankele's drink off his shirt, even as Yankele continued to shout. He said, "But isn't that really what you ought to be working for? Isn't that what you want? It's cerhave it start in my generation." "You've got two children, you goddamned white genocidist!" Charles cried. "Okay, okay, don't get hot. Sterilize my two kids. I don't think much of my genetic inheritance. Hell, I haven't even got a Nobel and I'm looking forty in the teeth. Sterilize all my neighbor's kids, too. I'm ge'nerous. And I'm really a hell of a lot more altruistic than you fakes. This would solve the problem? You're just working to make it only a little worse each year." Subchundrum grinned like a tubby shark. "All right. I'm not angry. I think you're right. I'm a member of the Cabinet in New Delhi. Now, Mr. Prime Minister, after you have given me carte blanche to put this solution into effect, give me also the political campaign which will make it acceptable to my people from Kashmir to Kerala. Just give me a formula that will keep us from being toppled from office before we carry out ten years of emasculations and hysterectomies on new born babies. I'm listening, really I am." The physicist said, with interest, "Subchundrum, are you really in the cabinet?" "No, you idiot. I'm working in Holland. I haven't been home in so long I have no idea what the politics are now. I'm posing you a hypothetical situation. Now give me the answer -- because there has to be an answer. If you can't give it to me, then don't make easy solutions. Go get the eight-fold way back down to one-fold and leave us alone with our clumsy human problems." "Oh hell, Palasayjit, I'm like the owl that told the arthritic centipede to change himself into a mouse so he'd have only one twenty-fifth as much pain. I don't know how you're going to do it. I function only on the policy-making level. The tactics and the hardware are up to you." They all agreed, after he left, that he was disgusting. Now, years later, could they honestly say that line of thought had not influenced them? T hey turned over another couple of pictures -- failures that had brought them down the road to this desperate success. The morning-after pill, which a turn of Mary's research into hormone control had made infallible, had faltered on the basic shortcoming of all plans that required voluntary use of the inhibiting agent. Human beings found ways to forget, reasons to forget -- even many a comfortable American husband, confident that his wife was taking the infallible barrier to conception, suddenly found himself a father. In the poor countries the researchers were defeated over and over by the bedrock fact that children are wealth in a culture of poverty. Not only children starve in a famine -- old people who have no children to fall back on starve as well. Fear and love and the genetic memory of a time when man was a naked minority among mammals all combined to edge the total number of human beings ward cannibalism. Yacov led them through the last illusion: vaccination. It was simply impossible to make people want anti-birth vaccination, just as it had been impossible to make people want the twenty-year time pill, another thought was the answer. The twenty-year time pill was at least measurable. Taken at #, it opened the door to parenthood at #; but it never became a popular arrow in the quiver of attacks on human fecundity. Vaccination, the process by which a woman was made immune to male sperm, or a man immune to his own sperm, so that he ceased to produce a viable seed, had all the residual irrational human opposition to vaccination to overcome, as well as one quality which made it hard for propagandists to push it. The vaccine's effect was variable. For some people it was lifetime immunization. For others it was extremely short-lived -- and the duration proved to be unpredictable. But the exchange of ideas and research among the four old friends on the relatively unproductive subject of vaccination led Subchundrum at last to the greatest discover of their lives. The turn came when he sent word to Mary, Charles and Yacov. "Come to Kerala!" Subchundrum wrote. "I have the money from my government, a free hand to build the labs I want and, best of all, I have the approach!" Two pages of cell mathematics followed. The mathematics were what drew them. "All wrong, darling," said Mary as she stepped off the plane, "but so provocative!" Ill T he machines that were to change the four investigators from passive inhibitors of the birth process to active interveners in that process were already fixed in the main laboratory. Two massive micro-manipulators had been modified to perform chromoscvme surgery. Charles gaped and then smiled. "These let us get right to the innards of the cell, hey? I suppose some breakage with this, right?" Subchundrum seemed to have gotten younger, to have regained the calm confidence of their undergraduate days. He had certainly become thinner again. "We can work even on virus mechanics with these things and that is where we shall be working." Mary smiled and shook her head. "Dr. Subchundrum, you have flipped your autoclave. The steam has all escaped. The differences between human cells and viruses are so great that if we elucidated all the knowledge there will ever be about viruses -- a hundred years' work, say -- we would still not be much closer to solving our problem of humanely keeping down human populations." Charles kicked a lab table with a dirty sneaker. "That's right, Sayji; or at least, it seems to me right. Have you discovered some affinity between viral structure and human cell structure hidden from the rest of us?" Yacov smacked Charles mightily on the shoulder. "None so blind as cannot see, eh, Subchundrum? I see it because I was the responsible executive on the vaccination project. The affinity between human cell and virus is that viruses like to live inside human cells." Charles rubbed his upper arm. "Sure, but those are diseases. We don't want to infect the whole human race with some plague." "Don't we?" asked Mary. "Don't we? Why not? I see, Sayji; you've built on the work of the researchers who have used viruses to create a beneficial infection." "Beneficial!" cried Charles. "What illness is beneficial?" "My dear, many a woman has welcomed a week of flu. For the price of a little fever and nausea she can drop ten pounds at a fraction of the price and effort it would take in a salon." Yacov picked it up. "More to the point, Stanfield Rogers and his followers have already demonstrated that a virus deadly to one animal -- Peyton Rous' chicken sarcoma virus, for instance -- is just a harmless passenger in man. Rogers showed that the Shope virus, which makes cancerous tumors in rabbits, suffers a benign conversion in man's bloodstream, where it elaborates a special form of the common enzyme, arginase. Haven't you read some of his work?" "Sure," Charlie said musingly. "The bacteriophage, the virus that eats bacteria, is itself the agent of the toxin in diphtheria. Only those herited a particular strain of bacteriophage make the deadly toxin. Other strains are nearly harmless. I knew that." Mary spoke. "And somebody, I forget who, has been looking for a virus that would be silent as to disease but would manufacture the missing enzyme that will let retarded children be as normal ones." She snapped her fingers. "Who's doing that, Subchundrum?" "Never mind," Yacov broke in, "it doesn't matter. The point is we can start with a viral disease which often does cause sterility and modify it to produce the sterility without the sickness. Wait a minute, though, Sayji, how are you going to get people to hold still for inoculations when they won't accept vaccination and the twentyyear time pill?" "Ah, you have missed the important point. The lesser aspect first: we don't need inoculation, to circulate a virus, once it's implanted. The practical effect of Salk showed that. After an extended period of administration of the Salk vaccine, supplemented later by the Sabin preparations, a new child who moves into the area of Salk protection catches the immunizing virus from the other kids instead of the crippling, sometimes fatal wild strain of poliomyelitis. And of course, nobody ever has to be inoculated to catch flu or polio. The virulent strain of the nineteen-eighteen influenza spread itself -- and eventually died out itself, squeezed for existence by the sickening but infrequently fatal strains we have to deal with every winter." "All right. The lesser aspect is pretty good. Now tell me number two." "It's really a corollary or extension of number one, but it means the breakthrough that finally lets our work become meaningful. We don't need anyone's voluntary consent to put this into effect." "What?" cried Charles. "How the hell do you get 'em to take it if you don't have consent?" Mary said, "Dear idiot, you haven't been listening to sweet old Subchundrum. He proposes to infect the whole human race. Sayji, love. Hitler was a piker to you. How do you propose to reverse this mass castration? I still haven't had my child, you know. I'm interested." hand at the functionally beautiful micro-manipulators. "To the machines, children. What we have to construct is a virus that is obedient to some kind of command. I don't know the answer. But now -- and frankly for the first time, -- I know there is an answer. This cannot be a dead end, as so much of work has been. We cannot stop with a virus that produces sterility -- nor with one that might ultimately destroy the human gene pool." "Right," said Mary. "It's somebody in Roger's group who's working on the mental retardation enzyme. Some of the children who fit the classification of retarded are so because they have a genetic disease, phenylketonuria. Their bodies don't elaborate phenylalanine hydroxylase, which the brain needs for normal function. The virus gardeners are trying to breed a mutation which will be a silent virus otherwise but will produce the missing enzyme." "Exactly," said Subchundrum. "I do not propose to wait for mutations induced by cosmic rays or even by plasmas. I propose that we rework the genetic codes of some virus to make it remember a bias against human birth; and at the same time, to leave it subject to easy defeat when we get ready to license a birth from a particular man and woman." "First the infection and then the examination of the whole human race to determine who shall breed?" Charles asked. "That's rather godlike, isn't it?" Sayji answered with a twinkle. "Hindu gods can do all. They are not dead and they are not in Argentina either. Come, come, to work!" all set to work: Dr. Subchundrum was bothered more than he cared to admit by the ethical implications of the research. As long as success was not quite within their grasp, however, he could put off the final accounting which would bring him to the decision of whether and when to unleash an anti-birth infection upon the world. Mary Braden and Subchundrum were the genetic surgeons of the tearh. They had a delicacy of manipulative behavior in their hands and eyes that was lacking in those of Charles Perry and Yacov HarShawkor. It fell to Yankele and Charlie to do the mathematics and program the computer analogues which screened the manipulated viruses, and to handle the breeding experiments that tested the few altered viruses the computers found promising. What all had expected to be the big hurdle was cleared within months. It proved to be almost easy to create a virus that colonized male testes and killed each sperm as it grew. What seemed to be impossible to accomplish was to make the virus itself viable. A virus could be defined as a cell stripped of nonessentials; a hippie cell, Mary had said. There still was a nucleus, so to speak, but the organism had deprived itself of all those attributes which ordinarily go to independent functioning. Viruses could reproduce themselves and live within host cells. During most of their life cycles they depended on the cell wall of the host for protection -- and it was only if the cell wall collapsed because the cell had died -- or the virus had killed it -- that a virus needed to wrap its essential components -- its genetic ability to reproduce-in some sort of film for the migration to another cell. The mutated, rebuilt viruses Doctors Braden and Subchundrum found it easy to turn out lacked one essential feature of self-protection. Instead of being parasitic, able to live off a host, kill it and drift in a little inner spaceship to another and enter it, they were symbiotic. Living within the sperm, they throve. When that life killed the sperm, the squatter virus died with it. Dependent to the end. The problem was one they did not seem able to solve. "No exit," Charlie snarled one night at dinner. "We're going to be right here -- footling around with submicroscopic particles of memory chains -- when the solid wave of humanity breaks over those mountains and rolls us into the Indian sea. There isn't any answer-only the problem. Krishna or Vishnu meant the human race to end in race suicide. Dinosaurs died. Dodos died. A some tiny bipeds hiding under leaves, left over from our age the way iguanas are left over from the reptilian. Damn!" No one could oppose him, except with faith. "Faith!" he spat. "Faith in the scientific process? Like those poor devils with the ear troubles from monitoring static from the stars? Pfui!" Nevertheless, they continued to work, without much apparent enthusiasm but the dogged care of professionals. Even Charles was patiently methodical about his computer programs and methodically cursed lab assistants who let sperm cultures die of neglect or, finding one dead, threw it out without trying to understand how it had been killed. ized at last the essential natural element they were leaving out of the ecology they were trying to construct for their mutated virus. "Most diseases we think of as virus diseases," he said to the others one gray morning when he had woken with a headache and an idea that vanquished his headache, "are not transmitted directly from one person to another. They are vectored." "Yes," Mary said. "An insect or another animal serves as a conduit. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is carried from a sick individual to a well one by a mite. Typhus is vectored through lice." Charles spoke. "For some viruses the movement through a carrier is an essential part of the life cycle. Maybe that's true for our little old sperm-killer. Let's start the testing with fleas. They're easy enough to find." So the search began. It was wide-ranging, in depth, relentless -- and unsuccessful. Fleas of every variety were tried and found wanting. Mites rejected the virus as if it were an inert protein particle. The blood of rodents destroyed it. To birds it was a quickly dissipated intoxicant. No animal could be found to transmit the tiny killers back into man's bloodstream in effective form. A vigorous attempt was made to render the virus pneumonic, so that it could be allied to influenza and transmitted rapidly by sneezing, coughing and kissing. The virus particles simply fell out in such passage. Nothing revealed the artificial nature of Subchundrum's virus more than this: it could only be made effective by inoculation. The anti-birth virus seemed for a long time to be just another dead end. The project lost its elan. Workers began to leave for glamorous projects elsewhere with more pleasant surroundings and better prospects. Many went to other silent virus programs that were trying to eliminate mongoloidism, premature births and childhood leukemia. "It's not bad enough," said Yacov, "that they leave us. In a sense, they go over to the enemy." Mary finally made the suggestion that became the core of the team's last joint operation. She was no longer diffident, as she had been when they first met; but this suggestion was timidly put forward one Saturday afternoon when they were brainstorming the problem. "Fellow doctors, perhaps we have been approaching the question of a vector for the virus in a manner too restricted to allow the answer to be seen. We have been thinking of transmission from man to man via some other species." Subchundrum said, "That's the way all vectored viruses work. Man-mite-man; man-flea-rat-fleaman; man-mosquito-man. What are you getting at?" Mary patted the back of her hair. "Just that man as a species isn't all male. Woman is also man. We've concentrated on malespecies-X-male, forgetting that many diseases, particularly genetic ones, pass man-woman-man. Maybe that's the natural passage we've been seeking for Subchundrum's virus." M ary spoke on a Saturday afternoon; but neither holidays nor weekends on a regular basis were recognized in Subchundrum's biological laboratory. Within an hour all four scientists were at work. Within a week, the vortex of their activity pulled in the rest of the project personnel. First Subchundrum and Braden had to structure the inheritance pattern of the virus to affect the mice who were the starting point of their experiments in vivo. The computer work and the breeding experiments had to follow. Then the living particles had to be modified to repeat their sterilizing migrations in the monkey colony; and last, the great step of infecting human beings had to be undertaken. At that moment, Yacov had been compelled to leave for a week's conference in New Delhi, not to reveal what Subchundrum's project was doing, but to see what he could find out of any other project that might aid the virus research. He learned nothing, except that the great thrust of research was still to find the method which should be so simple, so cheap and so foolproof that overnight adopt it. The ethical, religious, emotional and econornic blocks that might keep even such a remedy from being adopted were still being dealt with on the slow, agonizing basis of education and propaganda. Yacov HarShawkor had taken the plane out of New Delhi in a mixture of depression and excited anticipation. He was depressed because there had been no hint that other groups were aiming in the same direction as Subchundrum's. He was excited because he hoped his colleagues had succeeded. Yacov knew that great discoveries in this day and time took place almost in parallel because of the instant exchange of ideas in the scientific community and the immense sums available to research. Like war, research had become a stable and calculable contributor to the gross national product of many countries. But, he thought, w haven't published. Maybe others also have failed to publish. One hated to fail in a grandiose design. And yet, no one could be really comfortable about a remedy that stepped over the line from persuasion and voluntary use to compulsion and involuntary infection. Ah, well. I'll get a nap and when I get back to the lab compound Sayji and Charlie will shrug and tell me this line didn't work, either. We'll let the governments face the ethical problem when we have the gun in our hands. H e had walked off the plane into the nightmare of hunting Mary Braden down. Now Subchundrum and Perry were explaining to him the imponderable and unpredictable way in which the last experiment had exceeded the level of success. "It's enough," Perry said, "to make a man believe in a directed universe. Since we decided a human female would be the vector we've hardly done anything that missed. Every step of the work has gone like greased lightning." "Why not?" asked Subchundrum. "We have become experts." "Yes," said Charles, "but it's all been better than expert. I'm remembering what Hoogie used to say: 'This world does not tolerate the dominance of one animal at the level man has reached.' I tell you, it seems as if some great principle has pushed us on; and having Mary, or the focus of infection Mary became, loose on the world would have brought the human race to an effective end in this generation. I mourn Mary; but thank God we killed that carrier of the virus. Now we've got to start in and rework it." Subchundrum spoke. "It was that errant fireball." "What?" said Yacov. "Talk sense. Speak paragraphs. Remember you're trying to teach me something. Attack it in an organized way, will you?" "Well, you know there's a station about twenty miles away, up in the foothills, where they are doing plasma research. Those fellows don't say, but I think they're trying to make a genie for war -- some way of binding a plasma with its hard radiation in a brass bottle you could unplug in an enemy's face or in his factory. They're up there where they can tap the hydro-electric plants for all the power they need; and they're using it by the megawatt." "So?" "So last week, right after you left, they lost a fireball. A great globe of lightning wandered around here all night, flickering, looking in windows, perching on rooftrees, playing tag with us all over the place. "We were all ready to go with a batch of virus the three of us had vetted. Mary and I had decided -- and we persuaded Charles -- that the three of us should test the vector pattern. We thought some of the hard radiation that lightning ball hurled off might have got at my deadly babies. After all, in glass they're as vulnerable as fish in a barrel." "What did you do?" "All three of us, Yacov -- all three of us -- went over the batch with the electron microscope. I swear none of us saw a genetic stutter in the bunch. We were still wrong to use that culture. I've incinerated the rest of the batch in an electric crucible." "Right, Sayji. That's what you should have done in the first place. tion of a few thousand left a whacking great statistical possibility that you wouldn't see a major mutation." "Yankele, we were all in a fever. Thai's the truth. Mary cast her vote yes, too." "Fever is right -- you killed my girl with it." "Yacov, she was your girl for this month, maybe last year. You know better than to think it would have lasted forever. We've all been Mary's 'one man' many times. She loved us all and we all loved her and the time has gone by when any of us could be jealous of her favors. Sayji and I killed her, sure; so did that fireball, so did she and so did you." "All right, leave it! What happened?" Charles spread his hands. "It worked, that's what happened. We've got the answer in our hands, as soon as we can attenuate the effect of the virus on the female vector. That effect was a wild, unpredictable thing that we've got to control. Sayji and I are as sterile as two eunuchs; but it killed Mary." "How?" Subchundrum spoke. "The first leg of the vectoring as accomplished between Mary and me under proper laboratory conditions of sanitation and observation. Then we gave it forty-eight hours for the virus to multiply in her bloodstream, before she effected the transfer to Charlie." "And then? Was she healthy up to that point?" "Absolutely. Temperature, pulse, respiration, blood count, odor, urine, all just the old Mary we knew. You tell him what happened next, Charlie." "We left the lab room where we had been, with all the instruments for recording the conditions under which the transfer took place. I walked her to her quarters. I went on to mine, took a shower and dressed. In about twenty minutes from the time we left the lab she phoned me. 'Come over here,' she said. "When I walked in she was still wearing the robe in which she had left the lab. Yacov, she just took it off and came at me. I thought -- for about half a minute -- of whether this could affect the experiment and then forgot it. When we finished I put on my pants and shirt and laughed. 'Okay, Mary,' I said, 'now I have to shower again and get back to work. I'll see you at lunch.' All I had noticed was an increase in temperature. She was like an oven, but I thought -- oh, well, you know. Fifteen minutes later she was out on the compound." "Nymphomania?" "Something more," said Subchundrum. "Something elemental, Yacov. She was like a tornado. I don't suppose there's a man on the station she didn't sterilize. We had to sedate her and feed her intravenously. And tonight she evaded us anyway." Yacov stood. "We have to finish this now. We've got to find the cure -- or the method of attenuation of the virus. We've got to protect the women in the villages around us from the men who work here. I'll stick to the end; but I don't want either of you to say a word to me that isn't business; and when it's over, I don't ever want to see or hear either of you again." he turned and strode out. they readied a new strain, that news of the outbreaks reached them from the villages five and ten miles away; two days later the first epidemic reports from New Delhiand ten days later the postcard came airmail from New York. As Yacov read it tears started from his eyes; but whether they were tears of relief, of love or of fear, he could not have told. In familiar handwriting, the postcard's message was: "Flesh wound in shoulder healing nicely. Ecological balance is not denied. Wish you were here. Mary."  o Some day the glaciers must come again -- bringing another Ice Age and changing the course q evolution ! I night had been punctuated by the staccato of gunfire above the wailing of the eternal wind. "For God's sake go and see what's happening, Jacko," Cockade had whined petulantly, snugly gling closer to Switch who humped in his sleep, muttering. Resignedly Jacko had struggled out of his sleeping bag and mounted the ladder to the gallery which circled the inside of the church spire. He had patrolled the circumference of the narrow Y platform, staring out through the crude gaps punched through the tiles, fingering his rifle. He had seen nothing; the shots had ceased. Flesh-hunters pursuing some unlucky traveler, he had decided, shivering as the wind-borne show furred his cheeks. Below, Cockade had waked again. "How the hell can we sleep with you tramping about up there?" Her voice was querulous. Already she had forgotten the purpose of his patrol. Carefully, Jacko descended the ladder. The fire glowed low in the huge, upturned bronze bell. Cockade and Switch were sleeping once more, huddled together in reluctant interdependence. Beyond, the dim hummock of Shrug, snoring softly. Jacko felt a surge of protective pride. These were his people, his tribe. He loved them, didn't he? him on the gallery. "Something happened last night? Cockade's gone sour again." "She heard gunfire." Jacko gazed out across the tossing snowfields. The wind never ceased to blow; today it was stronger than usual, sifting the surface of the snow past the spire in a flowing sea, driving across the buried village. The spire, a defiant finger of drowning civilization, was the only landmark in the silver wastes. "I should have heard it myself. I was asleep." "And we might all have been killed!" shrilled Cockade's voice from below, a vinegar condiment to, the aroma of frying bacon. "Oh. I didn't hear anything, either." Shrug's eyelashes were heavy with snow as he stared through the hole; he blinked wetness. "Flesh-hunters, do you think?" "I suppose so. Maybe we ought to mount guard at night again," Jacko speculated reluctantly. The guard would consist of himself and Shrug. Cockade and Switch had their private fears; they shrank from the gray Outside. "Or perhaps we should move on -- once the Snow Princess is finished." Shrug raised his voice on the last word for the benefit of the two cooks below. "Breakfast is getting cold." "Coming." The two men descended the ladder. Jacko first, a tall figure in a stylish black overcoat; then Shrug, smaller, squat and ragged. Switch watched them from beside the fire. "Get you some new clothes today, Shrug," he offered, friendly, hoping to bridge the endless gulf between the two factions of the community. "Let him get his own." Cockade spoke automatically, forking bacon into her mouth. "I can, you know." "You never could." Switch tried to change the subject. "You think the flesh-hunters came from the north?" "I was in the ice corridors a month or so ago," Shrug defended himself. Idleness, not claustrophobia, chained him to the bell tower. "Yes, blind drunk." Jacko sighed. They all knew Cockade was unable to climb the ladder; was scared sick of the snowfields and the open sky. So she attacked Shrug endlessly. It was her defense. "Please be quiet, you two," Jacko said patiently. "I haven't had a drink for weeks." Shrug's mouth was distended with bacon. "Like a pig. He eats like a pig. Drinks like a fish. God, what an animal." "I want you to pick up some sailcloth while you're down in the corridors today, Cockade." Jacko spoke quietly; Cockade took her eyes off Shrug. "We'll be needing sails soon for the Snow Princess. Do you think you can do that?" "How's the boat coming along?" asked Switch. "Fine. Another few weeks or so and we'll be all set to go." Switch stared into the fire. "You say it's -- enclosed. I mean, we won't have to be in the open? Like a house on skis, you said. You did say that, didn't you, Jacko?" "Like a house on skis," Jacko reassured him. "All covered in." "Just outside the spire?" "Behind that wall." Jacko pointed. "We'll knock away a few bricks and you can crawl right in. No problem." "Oh." Switch chuckled mirthlessly. "I'm not scared of the outside. But Cockade -- you know." The girl looked up from the fire, her eyes an artillery of contempt. corridor, his lamp flinging jagged shadows on the rough-hewn walls. Occasionally the rays would meet a directly reflective surface beyond the range of the pool of light and Shrug would see, in the ebon distance, an answering lamp glowing. And he would stop, heart pounding, waving his lamp about until the far-off image disappeared. Shivering, he would then walk on. The tunnel was narrow, the roof low -- a vein in an infinite body of dead life. Shrug was imaginative. Shrug was scared. As he walked he distracted himself with speculation as to the present nature of the small community in the tower. Two deaths, not so very long ago, had reduced their number from six to four. Cockade, it seemed, was unable to have children. The purpose of the community was survival. Ergo, the community was failing. It needed an infusion of life. It must increase by recruiting new members. distorted by ice, danced in the light of his lamp as he trudged by thoughtfully. A month or two, or maybe a year ago, Jacko had conceived the notion of the Snow Princess to give drive to the group. Shrug was not happy about the Snow Princess. The more he considered it, the less it seemed a good idea. One day the Snow Princess would be deemed completed. And then? Shrug screamed with terror, his voice multiplying back down the tunnel. A man stood before him, upright and regarding him, unblinking, through a thin wall of ice. As Shrug jerked the lamp, it seemed the man winked, slyly. The man smiled enigmatically at Shrug. He was immaculately dressed in a dark suit. He was tall and slim. T he wind caroled through the taut rigging of the small, open snowboat. The single triangular sail strained forward as Jacko left the lee of the spire and raced across the snowfields in search of fresh meat. He veered and headed east, at right angles to the line presumed taken by the fleshhunters the previous night. As he sailed he considered again the various factors involved in the construction of the Snow Princess. C ockade and Switch were discussing the Snow Princess as they prepared to descend to the ice corridors. "I can't understand why we spend so much time building that boat," Cockade grumbled. "Now he wants a sail. Why leave here at all, that's what I want to know. Eh, Switch?" "The canned food can't last for ever," her lover replied gloomily, for thejoy of disagreement. T he snowfield was perfectly flat, an infinite expanse covering what had once been comparatively hilly terrain. The snow was white and the sky was white and the surface flowed with the wind. It was difficult to Judge distances; the occasional landmark would appear suspended in midair. Jacko maintained his sense of direction by reference to the wind which had blown from the same quarter for as long as he could remember.  He came upon the men unexpectedly, about an hour after leaving the spire. A group of skiers, shoulder-sails spread, beating aslant the wind and diagonally toward his own course. He watched warily as they approached. He reached for his rifle, easing out the sail. He aimed to pass some fifty yards ahead of them. The craft drove on, the snow hissing gently under the flat hull. "Hi -- you!" He ignored the cry, surprised that it was not accompanied by the usual fusillade of shots. Fleshhunters were catholic in their taste for meat. "Not that way -- " The shout came faintly to his ears as he swept by. They were warning him about something. Surprised, he let the sail fly loose and the boat slid to a halt. He turned and looked around, suspecting a trap, but saw only the retreating backs of the fleshhunters, shoulder-sails taut as they made speed against the wind. The snowboat rocked, almost imperceptibly. Jacko turned to face forward again slowly, cool fear trickling down his spine. The sail, flapping loose, snatched the rope from his fingers. A Pad stood at the bows of the boat. Over nine feet tall, it leaned forward, huge legs astride, clawed forepaws resting on the prow. Its silver fur was matted with driven snow. Its jaws were parted slightly, baring sharp teeth in a caricature of a confidential smile. The face of inevitable death can often be amusing. At the Wine Lodge, in the buried village, hung a bright poster. A ruddy, benevolent bartender leaned his arms on the counter, smiling. A tankard of amber beer stood at his elbow. The caption read; "Meet your friends in the local pub." Jacko giggled hysterically as he prepared for death and the tears of mirth turned to ice on his cheeks. Still smiling, the Pad began to beat its forepaws on the snowboat, gently at first, then violently, like an idiot child. Then it reached down, gripped the keel, and threw the craft upward and backward, a gesture of bored rejection. Cold and darkness closed over .lacko. The upturned boat lay covering him. To his right was a strip of gray daylight. He saw the huge splayed feet of the Pad, planted patiently as it waited for him to emerge. the lamp swinging wildly, his sense of direction lost as he put mindless distance between himself and the immaculate, living corpse. He sobbed as he ran and in the whirling, flashing reflections from the ice-walls the man was everywhere, materializing in each trick of the light, in each irregularity of the crudely hewn ice, recreated endlessly by the fertile fears of Shrug's own mind. The floor was slippery as he stumbled on, feet flying, and suddenly the man was before him, bathed in light, face distorted and terrible, racing toward him madly. Shrug screamed again as he tried to stop, to turn, failed, and crashed into the unyielding arms of his own rellection. He lay on the cold ice, shuddering, feeling his heart thudding against the hard floor. The lamp was out, the dark tunnel silent apart from the harsh echo of his breathing. After a while he moved, felt around. He was at the dead end of an abandoned tunnel. His fingers, groping, encountered a smooth cylindrical object. Exploring farther, he found more. Months ago, fearing for Shrug's sanity, Jacko had hidden the entire stock of the Wine Lodge. Presently Shrug drank. The wine was contorting. It was familiar. Soon Shrug found himself weeping, thinking of his mother. He felt it was despicable that he couldn't remember what she looked like. stock of his rifle lying half buried in the snow. Grasping it, he wriggled forward under the upturned boat, fighting his way past sacking, ropes, canvas, away from the feet of the waiting "Pad. Before long it would occur to the beast to pull the boat aside. Jacko didn't want to be around when that happened. The short mast of the snowboat had been driven vertically into the snow; he had no way of telling whether it was broken. Kicking his feet free from entangling ropes he crawled under the gunwale near the bows, forcing himself deeper into the soft surface, partially concealed by the driving mist of fine snow which whipped across the snowfields. His clothing was saturated with deathly cold. He stood up clumsily, bringing the rifle to bear as his feet sank into the yielding surface. The Pad's head swung around. It was about fifteen feet away, near the stern of the snowboat. It regarded him. Its gaze slid down to the rifle and back to his face. Trembling, Jacko hooked his numb forefinger around the trigger. There was something about the Pad's eyes. They stared into his, were small glowing orbs in the huge silver-furred face and they held an expression not wholly animal. Jacko fancied there was an evil intelligence behind the eyes. The rifle barked, flinging him back from his insecure stance. Struggling up again, he saw the Pad collapsing slowly, ponderously into the snow, a dark stain pumping from its chest. It watched him, all the way, until its head dropped and was finally still, a silver island in the white, drifting sea. Jacko crawled back to the snowboat, dragged boards from beneath the hull, stood on them, thrust his fingers under the gunwale and heaved, grunting. The side of the boat lifted a foot or so, then stuck, held by the buried mast. Beyond, white shapes approached, unhurriedly. Fear pumped adrenalin through Jaco's veins. He lifted again desperately, pain flaring in his back. The craft hesitated, then rolled upseizing the ropes, hauling the sail tight, jumping and bouncing frantically to unstick the snowboat from the clinging snow. Slowly, very slowly, the craft slid forward. He remembered his rifle, made a grab for it and missed. The giant, shaggy shapes were all around him, lumbering forward intently, converging in united hatred. He jerked the ropes fast and stood brandishing' a stick, striking at the razor-sharp claws as they swung. He kicked at the tiller as he fought, steering a jagged, rocking course through the pack. A blow from an enormous paw smashed him to the floor of the boat. He huddled, his arms about his head, waiting. After a while he raised his eyes and looked out over the stern. Some thirty Pads watched him motionlessly as the wind drove the snowboat to safety. Shuddering with reaction, he steered a wide arc and made for home. A new factor had entered the fight for survival. The Pads had begun to hunt in packs. Once solitary prey for his rifle, they had now become aggressors. II C ockade and Switch trudged along the ice corridor, dragging the supply sledge. They halted outside the supermarket, left the sledge and climbed through the shattered plate-glass door. In the light of their lamps the cavernous interior looked bleak and uninviting; most of the shelves were empty and the floor was littered with torn cardboard wrappings. They shuffled through the mess to the storeroom at the rear of the shop. "There's not a lot left." "Salmon," said Cockade, dragging a case from beneath a pile of rubbish. "Tomatoes. Didn't the Old Man teach you to read?" Cockade pondered and eventually remembered the Old Man. Once a passive, if instructive member of the community, he had been dead for several months. "Jacko killed the Old Man," he said. "Jacko tried to save the Old Man. You wanted to kill him." "Did I?" "You said he was a parasite." "Well, I was right, wasn't I? If we'd killed him there would be more food here now," Cockade pointed out. "The Old Man taught us a lot." "What good has it done you?" Cockade kicked around dispiritedly, shuffling among the piles of empty cases for something edible. "I know that's tomatoes, don't I?" "What's the difference? We'll eat it just the same It doesn't seem there's anything else here. We'll be hungry tomorrow, unless Jacko's got a Pad." Switch felt the recurrence of a nagging worry which had gradually intensified over the last few weeks. "What about the day after tomorrow?" he asked. She looked at him. In the glow of the lamp her thin face looked vulpine. Switch shuddered privately at her expression and his hand moved involuntarily toward his knife. "We'll find another supermarket," she said and suddenly she was Cockade again, his lover, helping him collect the supplies as she always did. Switch relaxed. "Let's look right away," he suggested. "Some of those old tunnels that were here when we came. We've never explored them properly." They left the sledge loaded with the single case of tomatoes and set off down the corridor, past the succession of doorways. "I wonder where Shrug is," Switch speculated. "I think he went to the tailors. Not before time, too." They paused at the entrance to the tailors. The ice had been chipped away around the door; the windows were opaque. As Cockade swung the lamp to peer inside she giggled suddenly. "Look at that. Switch!" A tailor's dummy stood in the window, tall and beautifully clothed, smiling fixedly, an entombed dinosaur of ancient fashion. "Do you suppose Shrug will look like that when he's finished in here?" The thought of the filthy, bearded Shrug impeccably clad in shirt, tie and lounge suit was too much. Cockade laughed aloud, a jeering resonance in the confined space. Grinning, Switch accompanied her into the shop. For a while they poked around, examining clothes, exploring the changing cubicles. Ugly cracks in the walls bore witness to the pressure of ice outside. "He's not here." Cockade voiced the obvious. "Funny." "I don't think there are any more food shops along this way, either. Let's get back." Switch was about to agree when the situation struck a chord in his memory. Shrug had been lost in the tunnels once before and Jacko had been furious when he had arrived back at the tower to find that no search had been organized. Added to which, they had found very little food. Switch did not relish facing Jacko in the present circumstances. "Maybe we ought to look around a bit more," he suggested. "Shrug is a parasite," said Cockade. "But Jacko would want us to look for him. God knows why." "We might find some food at the same time," said Switch. T hey lifted shrug to his feet and held him while he vomited, moaning. "Dirty drunken bastard," Cockade grumbled. "Saw a man watching me from in the ice," Shrug muttered. "Like the Devil, he looked, white and smiling. Oh, God -- " He hunched over again, retching. "A tailor's dummy." Switch chuckled. "He was scared by the tailor's dummy." Long ago Switch had had a similar experience. Shrug looked up. His face was pallid and sweaty. His eyes were bloodshot. "That was no dummy I saw," he insisted. "His eyes moved I'm sure they moved." But he wasn't sure, now. His head swam dizzily; he had an urge to drink himself unconscious. "Let's get back to the tower, for Christ's sake." Cockade was impatient. She renewed her grip on Shrug's arm and Switch grasped him from the other side. The lamp slipped from Switch's hand, clattered to the floor and went out. "Bugger it," muttered Switch in the sudden darkness. Shrug whimpered. "Damn, I can't see. My eyes -- I can't see -- " "Shut up. What the hell have you done, Switch?" "I've dropped the lamp, of course. What the hell do you think?" "He's dropped the lamp." Cockade's voice was acid with sarcasm. "Nothing to worry about. It happens all the time. Tell me. Switch, how do you suggest we get back? I mean, you're in charge of operations now." There was a pause before Switch spoke. "It seems to be broken. It won't go on. Wait a moment. I think I've got some matches." "He thinks he's got some matches. Resourceful." A dim glow illuminated the ice walls. "That's not going to do much good." Switch's voice, hoarse with alarm: "I haven't lit it yet." The glow intensified. It seemed to have no source; it was all around them, green and spectral. They clung together in fear -- even Shrug's eyes cleared and he stared at the ice wall with horror. "Look -- " Deep within the ice was movement, a black shifting, a vague shape in the emerald glow. They watched as it grew, extended itself weirdly in blurred fingers of darkness and suddenly the entire wall was alive, dancing light and shadow as a blazing illumination appeared. They looked at each other, faces crimson bright and terrified, then with one accord they turned and ran back down the ice corridor, cannoning from wall to wall and clawing at each other to reach the safety of darkness. the spire they found Jacko stamping the snow off his boots. He paused in the act of shrugging off his overcoat, astonished as they pounded up the stairs and flung themselves to the floor, sobbing for breath. "What goes on?" he asked. Switch recovered first. "There's a ghost in the tunnels," he gasped. Memories of his childhood came back. "A bogyman. A great big blackit was enormous!" The effort of description was too much. He subsided, panting. "A Pad?" asked Jacko sharply. "We know a Pad when we see one," Cockade said. "This was black, all sorts of shapes, twisted like. And there was a light with it. Pads don't have lights. And it was in the ice." Jacko regarded them thoughtfully. They had seen something, that much was certain. But there was no way for a Pad to enter the ice corridors. "What's up with Shrug?" he asked suddenly. "He's had a shock," Cockade replied hastily. "He's not him self." Jacko bent down and sniffed at the prone figure. "He's been drinking. You've let him start drinking again." "We couldn't help it, Jacko," Switch whined. "We found him like that." "You damned fools," Jacko said quietly. "I go away for a morning's hunting -- for the good of us all -- and I come back and find this. I sometimes wonder why I bother. How many times have I told you to keep him away from liquor?" Cockade and Switch clung together guiltily, eyeing Jacko nervously as he towered above them. "You wouldn't leave us, Jacko?" asked Switch. The tall man shrugged and turned away, flinging his overcoat into a corner. "Get any food?" he asked. A long silence built. At last Cockade answered. "Theredidn't seem to be any, Jacko." "No cans? You mean everything's gone? There are other shops beside the supermarket, you know." "Yes, well we were just going to look when suddenly we saw thething. It scared us. We ran," Switch explained eagerly. "I'm sure there's plenty down there, really, Jacko." "And if there isn't we can all sail away in the Snow Princess," added Cockade, anxious to please. Abruptly Jacko strode to the steps. "Come on, you two," he commanded. "We're going down. I want to find out what's happening down there. I can't depend on your stories, that's obvious." Leaving Shrug asleep on the floor, they descended the steps to the ice corridors. was soaring above the snowfields into the white sky -- up, up -- and suddenly the sky was blue and the white was all below. The many parts of Shrug, each one conscious of its collective entity, wondered at the blueness of the sky which was the exact color depicted on the label of Fine Old Vatted Jamaica Rum. The many Shrugs had never seen the sky before but knew what to expect, and presently were winging their way toward the huge figure of the Man With One Leg with the green feathered creature on his shoulder. "Pieces of eight!" cried the green one and disappeared, leaving the Old Man lying on his back before the upturned hat full of scarlet snakes. The Old Man's lips were moving. Shrug gathered around him and saw that he had Jacko's face. Jacko said, "I'm worried about the Pads. They're acting strangely" Shrug felt deeply obligated when he heard this; his contribution toward his comrades' welfare had been little enough as it was, so he said, "Yes, Dad -- " saluted and divided again. Climbing astride twelve bottles of Beefeater Gin he swarmed into the sky once more, tance. Flocking low over the snowfields he spotted the Pads; there were a large number so he divided further and blended with them. He comprehended. He thought as they thought... Forward, together. Toward the wind. Meat The meat with the large Shell. Dodging, swerving, oh, Gone. Gone into the wind. So into the wind for meat. Together. All into the wind. Slowly, slowly Shrug collected himself into one consciousness, became aware of the hard floor, opened his eyes, groaned, heard his own voice and began painfully to climb to his feet. The bell-tower was empty; the fire burned low. He staggered across the room and threw some dry sticks into the upturned bell. His head ached fiercly. He climbed the ladder and strapped on a pair of skis. ridor swinging the lamp while the other two trotted behind like curs. "Exactly where did you see this thing?" he asked. A new rifle hung from his shoulder, slapping his hip as he walked. "Along here, Jacko. Along here. Right where you hid the liquor." Switch pointed eagerly, a nervous gun dog. "Got your picks?" "Yes -- yes -- " "Guns loaded?" "Yes." "Nothing to be scared of then, is there?" "Not a thing. Not a thing." Nevertheless Switch remained a couple of paces behind Jacko. He laughed meaninglessly. Cockade slowed as Jacko walked up the final stretch of the dead-end corridor. "Look -- " she said suddenly. "I'm scared. I don't mind who knows it. I'm scared waterless. Jacko!" she cried after the retreating lamp. "Let's go back. Jacko -- " Suddenly she realized she was alone in the dark and dashed forward, only to collide heavily with Switch running back. They, clung together, shivering. Waves of mutual terror engulfed them. "Let's get out of here," muttered Switch. "What's that?" Cockade shrilled. A deep thudding boomed along the corridor. "It's the thing!" wailed Switch, psycho with fear. "It's breaking through -- it's got Jacko." There was a clear splintering crash and the tumbling sound of falling debris. Whimpering with terror, the two rushed back toward the tower.  Switch, gazing into the fire. "God, how we fought." His knuckles whitened at the recollection. "It was terribly strong," Cockade added. "What did it look like?" asked Shrug. "Big. Huge." "But Jacko had a rifle?" "He didn't stand a chance. It was on him before he could move." Cockade could visualize the entire scene. She shuddered. "I feel there's something we ought to have done," she said. "But it was too late. We barely saved ourselves." "So it's still down there." "It can't get into the tower. We bolted the door." Shrug got to his feet. "You don't think it might batter its way through?" Cockade thought. "The door's oak," she said. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to unlock the door," replied Shrug carefully. "What are you talking about?" Switch looked up in sudden alarm. "Listen to me, you two." Shrug spoke quietly. "While you were fooling about below I went outside to clear my head. Over the far side of the village I came across a roof just level with the surface. There was a broken skylight. I looked inside. I saw clothes and a heap of stores." "People?" asked Switch wonderingly. "I didn't see anyone. But I began to think. I thought about what we saw in the tunnel. And then I knew what it was. It was the shadow of a man carrying a lamp along another corridor. That's all. No ghost. No monster. Just a man." "He could be dangerous," ventured Cockade. "He arrived last night," continued Shrug. "He was being chased by flesh-hunters and hid. There was very little snow on the floor. I don't think a man the fleshhunters were after is much danger to us." Shrug's voice hardened. "And then you come back here and give me this load of cock about a monster. I tell you what happened. You got scared down there and you ran. You ran out on Jacko. After the way he's kept our group going all this time, after all the times he's risked his skin hunting Pads to bring you fresh meat. As soon as you think things are getting rough you run like rats and leave him to face them alone." Cockade and Switch stared dumbly at each other. For once even Cockade had nothing to say. Switch descended the stairs and unbolted the door. HI "Breakfast, anyone?" asked Cockade gaily, stirring a mess of tomatoes in a sizzling puddle of rancid fat. Switch and Cockade had feigned sleep when Jacko and Shrug returned from below the the accusations of the others they had huddled together in a dark corner, snoring ostentatiously. Now, with gray daylight shafting through the holes in the spire. Cockade was trying to make amends. Jacko stirred and opened an eye. Shrug sat up groaning. "What is it?" asked Jacko. "Tomatoes." A note of defensive acidity crept into Cockade's voice. "Is that all you could find?" "The supermarket's empty, Jacko," Switch reminded him. "We'll have to find some other place, then." Jacko climbed to his feet, scratching. He gently prodded a sleeping huddle with his toe. "Breakfast," he said. Switch and Cockade watched warily as the heap of clothing unravelled itself. Two heads appeared. A man stood first, kicking himself free of the blankets. He was well over six feet tall and a shaggy mane of dark-brown hair fell over his low brow. His piggly little eyes, red-rimmed with sleep, were set deep in a round, bloated face. He looked immensely powerful, broad-shouldered and primitive. Switch eyes him nervously. He was bigger than Jacko. Then his attention turned abruptly to the girl. She rose from the sea of blankets like a raven-haired Venus, slim and pretty with green eyes in a grave, oval face. Her breasts were small and firm under a rumpled, close-fitting white dress which. Switch guessed, she had obtained yesterday in the corridors. Her legs were strong and beautiful. He licked his lips and glanced at Cockade in involuntary comparison, to find her glaring at him furiously"Hello," the girl said, smiling like a tropical sunrise. "My ' name's Mignon. I know Jacko and Shrug already. Who are you two?" Cockade sniffed. Switch said, hastily, "Switch and Cockade," trying not to goggle too obviously"And who's that?" asked Cockade, gesturing at the giant. Charles." Hearing his name, the huge man shifted his statuesque stance. thickly, lumbering over to peer into the pan. He smacked his lips at the sight of food. gry," observed Mignon. T he debate that followed breakfast was necessarily constrained and polite at first due to the beauty of Mignon and, to a greater degree, the size and obBut before long informality crept in. "He doesn't say much," Mignon was informing them, "but he's very strong." She intended this as a justification of his usefulness but Switch took it as a veiled threat and began to bluster. "We've got guns here," he said, "and we're well organized. We've beaten off attacks before and we can do it again. We may not look much, but we're united, by damn." A snigger from Shrug ruined the effect. "We will fight them on the beaches," he intoned, recalling a favorite monologue of the Old Man's. "In the fields -- We will never surrender." "Since when have we been united. Switch?" asked Jacko mildly. "Personally, I'm very pleased Charles. Strength is in numbers." "Where the hell did he get a name like that?" asked Cockade. "And another thing, we need the Charles to cut new tunnels. Food's running low. We've got to find more sources." "Until the Snow Princess is ready," put in Shrug. "It's his name," explained Mignon. "Just his name. That's what he was calling himself when I first met him." Cockade snorted. "It doesn't mean anything and it takes too long to say. It won't do." She stared around aggressively. "I propose we call him Bog. Short and to the point." Murmurs of agreement came from Jacko and Switch, although Mignon's lips tightened and Shrug glanced at Cockade sharply. "Bog it is, then." Cockade drove the point home. She pointed at the giant, having decided by now that he was harmless. "Bog." slow reply. He indicated Cockade. "Cock-ade," he said, not without difficulty. He thumped himsaid. Then he pointed vaguely. Mignon. "Charles!" boomed the giant triumphantly, gesturing at thin air. "What's he mean?" asked Switch, staring nervously at the area of space indicated, as though expecting a materialization. "I speak for both," explained the large men obscurely. "It's one of his little jokes," said Mignon hastily. "He pretends there's two of him. Someone once told him he worked like two men and he believed -- with a name like that." In an unconscious effort to attract attention away from her protege she walked around the room inspecting things, picking up items and holding them to the light, while the men's eyes followed her every movement. "He's a nut," said Cockade with conviction. "A raving nut." Mignon's voice cane tentatively from the other side of the room; she was examining a stone jar intently. "Maybe Bog would be a better name," she ventured. "Much better," Cockade stated definitely. "What's this?" In the flat pause which followed Mignon held up an oddly shaped piece of wood. Shrug answered reluctantly, "That's for the Snow Princess." "Snow Princess?" Switch explained. "Our boat. Our totally enclosed ketch-rigged snow yacht outside. I built that piece myself -- " pride sounded in his voice "exactly according to Jacko's plan. It's called a knee, because that's the way it's shaped. It's meant to fit near the bottom. I expect Jacko will install it today. There's room for four in the Snow Princess," stated Switch firmly, "and it's enclosed becausebecause " His voice faltered. "Because some of you can't go outside," supplied Mignon gently. "A lot of people are like that." "Yes, and today we start making the sails. The hull's almost complete, Jacko says we've only got to fit the thwarts and the transom and the cabin roof and sides, and a few other things -- " "I'm making the sails," Cockade said. Switch's voice rose to a triumphant crescendo. "So we hope to load it up with supplies in a week or so, not more that a couple of months at the most, then away we go!" "This I must see," said Mignon. She climbed the ladder slowly, but only Switch watched her legs. She walked around the gallery, looking out through the holes in the spire. Switch watched her with respect bordering on adoration. After his years in the ice corridors he respected anyone who could stand and look at that terrifying, vaulting infinity of white nothingness outside. Cockade read the expression on his face and sniffed. Bog stared at the fire. Shrug and Jacko watched each other. Mignon was descending the ladder. She looked at Jacko and there was a world of understanding in her green eyes. "It's a wonderful boat, Jacko," she said softly. "I only wish it were big enough to take Bog and me, too." Jacko expelled a deep sigh. "Maybe we can enlarge it," he said. the pick, driving a new tunnel in the general direction of the Wine Lodge, where it was felt that there might be a grocery store. The Wine Lodge had been dynamited by Shrug several months before and cut off from the main warren of the tunnels, but now Bog was reopening the old route, driving a corridor parallel to the previous, collapsed one. Shrug was positive that the Wine Lodge had been part of a block of shops hitherto unexplored. He had experienced a thirsty nostalgia, watching Bog work and remembering old times in the Wine Lodge, so he had fetched a bottle from the cache. He drank as he directed operations. "A little to your right. Bog," he called cheerfully, wiping his lips. "We're getting out of line." The big man swung the pick, chanting rhythmically. "Hold it." Shrug chuckled, feeling lightheaded. He slid the sledge forward and began to shovel the loose ice from around Bog's feet. When the sledge was full he seized the rope and his lamp and cantered off down an abandoned spur he was using as a dump. He sang a snatch of echoing song as he trotted along, the sledge bumping easily behind him, and presently he had an idea. Returning to the scene of operations, he called Bog imperiously to a halt. "What?" The giant turned around, puzzled. He felt he could keep this up all day; the exercise of his muscles in the pleasant company of his new friend gave him infinite satisfaction. "We're wasting our time. Bog, old pal." "Uh?" "What we need -- " Shrug chuckled with anticipation -- "Is dynamite." "Dynamite." Bog repeated it slowly, savoring the sound. "Blast our way through." Shrug made an expansive gesture. "Dynamite!" yelled the giant as they hastened back toward the hardware shop. Shrug was laughing helplessly and after a while, sensing the humor of the situation, Bog joined in. the gallery, looking across the snowfields. Jacko was talking. "It seems to me that we've got to get out of here sooner or later. I think there's plenty more food in the village, just waiting to be found, but that's not the point. Even with you and Bog joining us, the group is too small. We just scratch around here until we die. To me, that seems pointless." "Where did you think of going?" asked Mignon. "I'm not sure. That's the problem. We tried it once, you know, after a fight with the flesh-hunters. We split up and tried to get away. I think we were upset at the time because one of us had been killed. I took the Old Man and went to a place where there was no snow, a long way from here." He gestured vaguely. "When I got there I didn't like it. And the Old Man died. So I came back and found the others still here. Switch and Cockade were scared to go outside -- they'd lived underground for so long." "The Old Man meant a lot to you?" she queried understandingly. "He did to all of us, I think, although the others didn't realize it. Keeping him alive provided some sort of purpose; we didn't think about ourselves so much. When he was dead we just seemed to drag along with no aim in life." Until you dreamed up the Snow Princess... "And recently things have been getting worse," continued Jacko. "We haven't eaten fresh meat for weeks. The Pads have got themselves -- organized. It worries me. They used to be just animals. Now they're something else. I sometimes think they're more dangerous than the fleshhunters." "Don't underestimate the fleshhunters," Mignon warned him. "They're becoming more of a menace than ever. If they had caught Bog and me we wouldn't be alive now. They're hungry. Maybe they've had trouble with the Pads, too. A lot of towns upwind have got themselves organized, like yourselves, only they're bigger than your group. They can defend themselves. The flesh-hunters leave them alone but attack any messengers traveling between the towns. That's what happened to Bog and me. We were going from Bovey to Moreton to work out a deal, a possible link-up. They jumped us and we had to run downwind. They followed us all the way -- " Her voice trailed off and she was trembling, reliving the horror of the pursuit. Jacko placed his hand over hers. "I'm glad you came, Mignon," he said sincerely. B elow, Cockade and Switch were getting restless. "I don't like it," said Cockade. "They're getting too damned friendly, those two." She was sitting on the floor, a canvas sheet spread over her knees. She was sewing furiously. "I don't see anything wrong with it," observed Switch mildly. "It's about time Jacko had a girl." "That's the sort of stupid remark I'd expect from you," Cockade snapped. She flung the sheet aside and stood over Switch, who was planing a strip of plank, sweat streaming down his face. "What do you mean?" he asked, aggrieved. "Just this." She seized a handful of hair, jerking his head back. His astonished face peered into hers. "There's only room for four in the Snow Princess." She thrust four fingers under his nose. "Four, you understand?" "I know that." "Jacko's up on the gallery with that girl. Shrug's in the tunnels with Bog. Tell me. Switch," she hissed the expression on her face frightened him "which are the odd two out?" Comprehension dawned. "Us," he replied simply. "Us," she repeated. Her eyes narrowed. "Switch, if we don't go in the Snow Princess, then nobody goes." "What do you mean? What are you going to do?" "You'll see." Abruptly she released him and turned away as Jacko and Mignon descended the ladder. "What have you two been up to?" she asked. "Just showing Mignon around." "Bog's in the tunnel with Shrug." "I know that. How's the sail coming along?" Cockade's reply was drowned by a shuddering concussion that boomed through the tower, causing the dirt on the wooden floor to dance like fleas on a griddle. As the four regarded each other in alarm a fierce gust of wind swept up the stairs, swirling with it an assortment of cardboard cartons and tattered pieces of wrapping paper. A lamp overturned, spilling a spreading dark pool on the floor; it ignited explosively, adding leaping flames and flickering shadows to the general confusion. Jacko was the first to pull himself together. "Mignon, Cockade!" he shouted. "Put that out, quick. Switch, come with me." He plunged down the stairs, followed, after a second's pause, by Switch. Mignon flung sacking on the blaze, partially smothering it. Cockade watched. A thin tongue of flame licked at the half-finished sail. The material blackened. Sparks trickled around the edges of the canvas. Cockade thought.  mumbled Shrug, abashed. "You've brought down the whole of that section of tunnel," Jacko accused. "You've wasted a day's work and more. You'll have to start again, tomorrow." "Start again," repeated Bog. "Anything you say, Jacko," Shrug agreed. H e spun into the sleep of alcohol. Unbidden thoughts danced through his mind. It seemed he was standing on thick, strong legs and he felt good. The wind was cold and refreshing and the pit into which he gazed was deep with promise. Shrug spoke with his mind to his fellows as they grouped with him and, as he spoke, it was as though they spoke as one in a communal murmur of agreement. Now? Now! C ockade lay awake, watching the tapering roof of the spire as the light from the dying fire sprinkled its last rays among the ancient timbers. "Switch?" she called softly. There was no reply from the sleeping form beside her. Silently she wriggled out of the blankets. IV Oshrug said softly. "Okay," replied the giant briefly, surveying the pile of ice boulders. They rose steeply in a vast tumbled heap at the end of a short corridor, terminating far above at a ragged line of pale sky. Wisps of snow drifted down, funneled by an icy wind. "We blew right through to the surface," said Shrug wonderingly and a cold half-memory caused him to shiver. He had known the extent of the explosion before seeing it this morning. Yesterday they had taken shelter while awaiting the blast -- then the infuriated Jacko had stormed past, examined the pile of rubble briefly in the dim lamplight and returned to find them cowering guiltily in the supermarket. He had whisked them straight back to the tower and they had hardly discussed the matter. Yet this scene was familiar. "Start?" asked Bog, swinging his pick at the ice-wall. "Right," said Shrug. This looked as good a place as any. They would have to take a wide arc around the rubble to avoid the fractured, insecure ice in the immediate vicinity -- no big problem. Bog commenced his chant; the chips of ice flew. "Hold it." Shrug heard a rolling cascade and feared that Bog was bringing down the ceiling. A chunk of ice bounced across the floor, glancing off his ankle. Puzzled, he walked a few paces to the scene of the explosion. The steep slope of ice boulders was in dribbling motion, smaller pieces bounding down the slope and rolling away along the corridor. He looked up and his heart chilled. Climbing down the avalanche of ice, backward, its huge hindquarters blotting out the sky, was a Pad. "Bog!" he croaked. He turned to run, stopped abruptly, his feet sliding. In the feeble light of the lamp Bog was wrestling silently with a giant Pad. Shrug watched helplessly as they fought. The animal had wrapped its forepaws around Bog's body; the man had both palms under the bearlike muzzle, thrusting backward. The Pad overtopped even Bog by almost two feet. Its tiny eyes gazed wickedly at Shrug over Bog's head. It grunted with rage as it forced the man's hands down and Shrug could smell its breath; animal, like a putrid carcass. Bog's coat had been ripped apart; his bare back bled around the Pad's bladelike claws, staining the silver fur a bright crimson. Shrug found himself battering ineffectively at the beast's head with a pick; in the confined space he was unable to get a full swing. He was sobbing with fear and frustration, while Bog grew weaker. The giant's eyes were creased with strain and agony. "Run, friend," he panted. "I win! I win!" Shrug was aware of a final cascade of ice as the second Pad arrived. It moved into the glow, its watched the struggle with glowing eyes, seeking its chance to feast on the kill. Shrug slipped past the combatants and cowered in the reeling shadows as the fight swayed above him. Bog was groaning with pain as the Pad's grip tightened and its claws bit farther through his flesh. The animal snuffled with excitement, its muzzle an inch from the man's face. It smelled blood and its jaws streamed saliva, steaming. "Run, my friend," Bog whispered. Shrug heard and wept impotently. Sudden inspiration prized his brain from the clutch of fear and he acted. Seizing the lamp, he smashed it over the Pad's great head. Fuel poured down the brute's shoulders and exploded into flame. The corridor flashed into luminescence, the Pad's blazing head stared at Shrug from every reflective surface. As it staggered away he caught Bog around the waist and half dragged, half carried him down the tunnel. The other Pad, alarmed, backed toward the ice-fall. Shrug struggled on and soon a corner hid the inferno. As Shrug assisted Bog toward the tower he heard gruntings and snafflings around them as countless Pads prowled the dark shops restlessly, aroused and somehow sharing the pain and terror of their brother. The tunnels were alive with the brutes, which must have been drowsing in the shops when he and Bog had made their way to the ice-fall. Shrug and Bog reached the oak door at the entrance to the tower. Shrug thrust the big man inside and turned at a sudden radiance in the tunnel behind him. The blazing Pad appeared in the distance, head and shoulders a corona of fire repeated down the ice corridors in a thousand grotesquely distorted reflections. The animal was screaming in a crescendo of pain; it fell to the floor and beat at the ice with its paws in terminal agony. As Shrug slammed the heavy door and threw the bolt he heard a great keening groan as a multitude of animal voices mourned the death of a comrade.  now, you drunken sod," whimpered Cockade as she listened fearfully to the battering of heavy bodies against the door below. "You've let them in the back way. After all our work, fortifying the place." Mignon looked up from bandaging Bog's wounds. "That's unfair," she said. "Shrug couldn't have known." "In any case," said Switch confidently, "We can rig a temporary sail on the Snow Princess and get away. Cockade and I in the cabin, and the four of you outside." "We can't move Bog," objected Mignon. "The Snow Princess isn't finished yet," said Jacko. "Not even so we could go slowly?" pleaded Switch desperately. "I'm afraid not." Cockade watched them narrowly, the sickness of frustration in her stomach. D uring the night she had mounted the steps to the gallery, carrying a can of lamp fuel. She had made the Journey several times, quietly, keeping an eye on the sleeping mounds on the floor. The gallery wasn't so bad in the dark. The force of the wind was disturbing as it blasted through the holes in the spire, but not terrifying; and she was unable to see the tossing white emptiness which, in the daylight, filled her with unreasoning panic. She took up her position at a hole directly above a certain point in the tower wall; the point at which, Jacko said, the Snow Princess lay outside. Her idea was simple and basic. If she and Switch were not going on the Snow Princess, neither was anyone else. She would pour fuel over it and light it. She struck a match experimentally, with trembling fingers, threw it out of the hole. The wind swirled it away, extinguished. She struck another. And another. She was sobbing with frustration. She struck match after match. The box was empty. The cans, unused, stood at her feet. In her rage she kicked them. She heard someone stir below. B OG'S wounds were dressed; he lay with closed eyes, his breathing shallow. Jacko, Mignon and Shrug made for a ladder. The din from below was increasing; blows on the oak door were accompanied by splintering sounds. "Could we make it in the snowboat, Jacko?" asked Shrug quietly"I don't think so. It'd get bogged down with the weight. But it may be the only chance we have. We could cover Switch and Cockade with blankets and Bog could steer lying down. The other three would have to go on skis. That still means three in the snowboat. It's only built for one. And how do we get Bog up the ladder and outside?" They climbed to the gallery and looked out at the swirling whiteness. They saw the chasm in the snow, a deep fissure away to their left. A hundred yards downwind a horde of young Pads gamboled in the snow, playful as puppies, while their adults prowled the ice corridors for fresh meat. Ten feet below the hole in the spire lay Jacko's snowboat. Scattered around the lee of the spire, partially covered by snow, were the various components of the Snow Princess, unassembled. Grouped around the spire, staring up with intelligent, hungry eyes, waited a tight circle of Pads. C ockade and Switch sat at the foot of the stone steps leading to the bell-tower, watching the oak door fearfully. It trembled again and again as heavy bodies dashed themselves against the far side. Fine cracks were creeping along the grain of the timber. They held rifles and from time to time fired at the door, aimlessly. "It's not going to hold for long," muttered Switch desperately. He raised his rifle and loosed off a round. The stone chamber rang with the concussion and bullets smacked into the timber. "The slugs won't go through," he said. "The door stops gunfire but it'll let in the Pads." He stood, abruptly. "Let's get out of here. We'll be safer in the tower. What's keeping the others, anyway?" "Wait a moment," said Cockade. Her voice was sharp with suspicion. "You're right. They've been a long time up there. You know what's happened? The sods have gone! They've run out and left us down here! They've cleared out!" She jumped to her feet and pounded up the steps. "Are you there?" she shouted echoingly into the spire. Bog, prone on the floor, shifted and opened one eye. A couple of shots rang out from above, then Jacko's voice. "We're here," he called, tiredly. "Good," yelled Cockade. "Because I just thought you might have had the notion of buggering off with Shrug and your girl friend. What the hell are you shooting at? You'll attract the Pads to the spire, you damned fool!" "They're already here," Jacko called back. Bog spoke from the floor with an effort, his face dark with slow rage. "Mignon would not bugger off," he said emphatically. "You mean we're surrounded?" screamed Cockade. "Tm afraid so." "Mignon never buggers off." "Shut up, you ox We're coming up!" shrilled Cockade. "I don't believe you!" "Stay there. I'll come down. Shrug. You and Mignon wait up here for a while. I'll go and sort out those fools below. Our only chance is to pick off the Pads as they come up the steps. We can't all retreat to the gallery. We'd never be able to carry Bog up the ladder. Somehow we've got to drive them off." "I heard you call us fools!" yelled Cockade. A dred of them," said Mignon. Shrug was silent for a moment. "Do you smell fuel?" he asked suddenly, sniffing. "Yes. Look, there are some cans around." Shrug leaned out and gazed at Jacko's snowboat. He thought about Cockade for a moment. He raised his eyes and scanned the snowfields. He thought about the Pads. Disconnected snatches of memory came to him; things Jacko had said. Things he had dreamed? "Mignon," he said, "I want you to keep me covered. I'm going down to Jacko's boat. Hold the Pads off while I'm down there. As soon as I'm back, let go the mooring rope." He slackened the rope which stretched down to the tethered craft, dropped the cans of fuel out of the hole, took a lamp from the gallery floor and climbed awkwardly outside. One-handed, he descended the rough ladder to the snow. Above him Mignon's rifle began to bark.  authoritively. "I want you halfway down the steps, standing with your rifles ready. Keep firing as they come through the door and back up the stairs slowly. Don't panic. Don't run. Bog?" "Yes." "Here, take this rifle. If they get past us, pick them off as they reach the top of the steps." Painfully Bog shifted his position, lying on his side, the rifle held in a single hand. T here was a final, splintering crash and the heavy oak door split at the hinges and fell into the chamber, slamming flat to the floor as an enormous Pad bowled through, head over heels, in a whirl of white fur and scrabbling claws. Jacko's rifle cracked out and the animal lay still. Grunting and roaring, the pack surged at the doorway and jammed for an instant while Jacko, Switch and Cockade rained bullets among them. The screams of agony were nearly human as several Pads sank to the floor. Those behind climbed their comrades, jaws agape and drooling as they spotted the trio on the steps. An animal stink pervaded the chamber. "Start backing up!" yelled Jacko, dropping the leading Pad as it bounded up the stairs. It reeled back among the others and in the confusion Switch felled another with a bullet in the throat. Cockade had dropped her rifle; knuckles to her mouth she bit back a scream when another Pad, rearing huge, spun away, roaring as blood gushed from its stomach. By now the chamber was full of Pads and still they crammed through the doorway, forcing themselves up the stairs by weight of numbers. Jacko and Switch backed up slowly, firing continuously into the seething, struggling white mass. Roars and screams indicated they were striking home, but the numbers were too great. Jacko found himself at the top of the stairs. "Run for it, you two!" he shouted. "Up the ladder, quickly!" The command was unnecessary; Switch and Cockade had bolted. Flinging their rifles aside, they were scrambling up to the gallery. Jacko took up position for a final stand, rifle at the ready, legs straddling Bog. The leading Pad bounded up the stairs, saw the two men, reared on hind legs and crossed the bell-tower in four strides, ignoring the bullets which smacked into its body. It stood before Jacko; it swept his rifle aside contemptuously, with a massive paw. Jacko regarded the Pad. This is the finish, he thought. And in the instant of thinking, suddenly he knew that this was not the finish. Because the Pad's reaching forepaws froze, then dropped to its sides. It paused irresolute as .lacko stared into its eyes. Bullets lore into its body from above -- but still it stood there for a timeless moment, while behind it the other Pads hovered, watching, not moving. Then it turned away; they all turned. Slowly at first, almost thoughtfully, they ambled back to the top of the stairs, then in gathering haste they descended, falling over one another, scrambling in their eagerness to leave the bell-tower. They uttered strange mewing sounds, somehow quite touching. They were gone. The bell-tower was empty... Jacko climbed the ladder. Switch and Cockade sat on the floor of the gallery. Shrug and Mignon were looking outside, spellbound. The bleak snowfields were alive with fleeing Pads. They had left the spire; they raced bounding across the snow kicking mist, they scrambled out of the fissure, treading on one another in their haste to join the pack; over a hundred of them, racing downwind. Pursuing a glowing crimson fireball. he rejoined them, rubbing his hands as a dull concussion thudded through the tower. "Just a little explosion this time," he said happily. "Enough to seal the gap. They won't get in that way again." Cockade was crying, apologizing for all things she had done, quite a number of which were unclear to the others. "Forget it," said Shrug. "You'll feel better in the morning. You'll be back to normal, unfortunately-" Bog misconstrued Cockade's mumblings. "I said Mignon did not bugger off," he asserted amiably. "Mignon will never bugger ade does not understand Mignon." He wrapped a huge arm around his slender companion's waist, drawing her down to the floor beside him. Jacko eyed them, a curious sadness within him. Mentally he shook himself. "You know, I thought if we shot a few, they would be satisfied and eat their own dead." "Instead you stared them down," cried Switch enthusiastically, uplifted in the aftermath of battle. "The power of the human eye!" "Not exactly. You'd better explain, Shrug." Unconsciously Shrug puffed out his chest. He opened his mouth to tell them all, then closed it, abruptly. How could he tell them that he had dreamed mad dreams while under the influence of hard liquor, and had deduced from these and their parallel with subsequent events that the Pads were telepathic to a degree? That he, when his mental barriers were submerged in alcohol, could pick them up? Cockade would laugh at him forever. Go on, have another drink. Shrug, and tell us what the Pads are thinking. A good excuse for a bottle or two, eh. Shrug? No... "Jacko and I noticed the Pads have started acting together, like ants, as if they were one body instead of several," he explained at last. "They've gotten organized. They think as one. "They were in the tunnels and around the tower, encircling us. That takes some sort of intelligence. They can't speak, so there must be something else -- " He warmed to his theme. "Anyway, downwind were their young." He stabbed the air, reliving the scene, and so great was his capture on their imaginations that all eyes followed his dramatic finger. "And below was the boat and beside me were some cans of fuel." He grinned unpleasantly at Cockade. "So while Mignon covered me I hoisted the sail, ignited the boat and cast it off. It drove straight for the young Pads, blazing. They panicked and ran like hell, away across the snowfields, scattering in all directions. The Pads saw this and those that didn't, sensed it. They left abruptly. There's nothing like danger to the young, to bring the parents running Shrug smiled around at them, the man of the moment. They regarded him with awe. "Well," he said, "for the small sacrifice of Jacko's snowboat " Mignon spoke quickly. "You mean the Snow Princess, of course," she corrected him. Shrug stared, began to speak, thought better of it. Jacko smiled slowly. "It's a shame," continued Mignon, "for all that work on the Snow Princess to go up in smoke. But it was a small sacrifice when you consider the result. We can build another. Bog's quite good at that sort of thing. He used to build snowboats at Bovey big ones." She grinned at the giant. Jacko and Shrug regarded her with adoration. With a few words she had eliminated the problem which had been bothering them for weeks. The Snow Princess had officially ceased to exist. "Don't need boat," rumbled Bog with a deep laugh. "We have our own Snow Princess." He tightened his arm around Mignon. Cockade, scowling, wondered if maybe Bog might not be as stupid as he looked.  destroy a planet that was polluting the Universe... the highest court on the planet for what still seems to me a trivial offense; not always wishing to walk. I'd tried to build myself a private cruiser, a small one. I had been discovered (by means I didn't understand) and that had been that. I wait for the three Judges to reappear. A door opens and I rise as they slowly enter. They seem too young. Again I admire their golden robes. I am dressed in the pale brown tunic I must wear until my sentence is completed. I remain standing while the others are seated. My features are adjusted into what I mean to be taken as an expression of respect, but containing nothing of obsequiousness. "Musician and Poet Rockwell," the Judge seated between the other two says, not unkindly. "Your offense is grave. Do you wish to say something before sentence is heard?" I return his open gaze with my own. "I didn't -- don't -- understand the gravity of my actions, sir." The Judge nods. "Just so. Had you understood, you would not have committed this crime. Therefore our sentence is that you study, with Master Clarke of the Third Institute, the history of this planet and of the Galactic Federation; further, that you devote some time to observations of Central Control." No time stated, I note. Also, nature of certain operations not stated, but I don't ask questions. The Judge begins to nod in dismissal, then says; "By the way. Musician Rockwell -- I'm familiar with some of your performances. You have promise." "Thank you, sir," I say, wondering what's wrong with the poems. T he joint Musician and Poet category rates purple, a color I'm fond of; also, the status value of purple robes is high -- and I confess to my share of vanity. Now, however, I was declasse, and hoped none of my friends would take note of me and my tawdry garb as I walked, next day, to the Third Institute. Master Clarke's robes would, of course, be royal green, and you can't go higher than that. I would be at a disadvantage in more ways than one. The Master's quarters were spacious and scholarly. Shelf after shelf of books. Books! I gaped when I saw them and there went another piece of such face as I had left, which now rapidly approached zero. I knew what they were, but I'd never held one in my hand. "Yes," the Master said. "Surprising, I know. But then I'm a hopeless antiquary." No doubt he was, but his study was also filled with the most comprehensive array of data terminals, inputs, outputs, screens, the whole works. I'd ever seen. He took a volume from the shelf, placed it in my hand. I failed to recognize title or author. "These are all reconstructions, of course. Hard enough to find, even so." He replaced the volume. "Name Korsakoff mean anything to you?" "No, sir." "No reason it should, now. It will. No need to stand on ceremony here, son, make yourself comfortable. We'll get to Korsakoff later." He pushed buttons on an impressive console, handed me a crystal glass filled with amber fluid and put on the desk before him a similar glass, except his contained something colorless. Separating the man from the boy? The Master from my unfrocked self? I didn't know -- and I didn't know if what was going on here was by design -- but I felt as if I had swiftly and skillfully been programed into a condition of humility. Something new in my experience. After the Master had raised his glass I took a sip from mine. Something else new in my experience; I couldn't name that potion, but whatever it was, it was good. I sensed the occurrence of gentle internal events, I felt cooperative and friendly. Well -- Masters aren't Masters for nothing. "Why did you want to build your own cruiser?" he asked, and that was the beginning of a long session. Not too long, though, because the glasses were refilled at suitable intervals, and I was glad of that. I explained how it was that I didn't like to walk, and wanted a cruiser, a small one, of my own. "But you can always dial one. You wouldn't have to wait long, usually," he said, and I said that was true -- but somehow it wasn't the same. I'd wanted one of my own. And you sometimes did have to wait for a public cruiser and sometimes you even had to share it. While we talked, everything we said was, of course, fed into multiple inputs. "Why do you think, son Rockwell, we have only public cruisers? Why is their number most controlled?" he asked. I hadn't been called son for years, and I reacted to that. I confessed that I didn't know. "No," he said, "you don't know," and he was kind and said that my attitude was not unusual, the laws had been in effect so long that everybody accepted them as facts of life. What was unusual was my attempted violation of the prime law that an individual can't own a cruiser. We kicked my motives around for quite a bit and that was enough for the first day. I felt good when I left, though I still didn't want my friends to see me in the brown tunic. T he Third Institute is History and next time we had a go at that -- at, specifically, the history of this, our planet. "Millennia -- many of them -- ago," the Master said, "the then inhabitants of this planet almost strangled it. It was a near thing." I said, with genuine humility, that I didn't see the relevance of that datum in the present context. What had almost killed the planet, he said, was a combination of factors, by far the largest of which had been individual ownership of a primitive form of cruiser, whose combustion products had polluted the atmosphere to the point where photosynthesis (he tried to explain that to me but I had to do homework on it later) had almost ceased -- in consequence the human species, along with most of the other life forms, had almost been done in. The Master punched the console and we looked at pictures from that time. All those funnylooking cruisers! City streets and broad ribbons everywhere filled with them. "Anybody could have one, own one?" I asked "Anybody?" "Anybody who could afford one." "What a time that must have been ." "Yes. It almost killed the planet. It was a lousy scene." "Lousy?" "Forgive me -- I'm afraid I use antiquarian language now and then. Lousy is an ancient word meaning unpleasant, contemptible, nasty." "I see. But our cruisers, now, don't pollute, do they?" "Not much. The prohibition of private ownership of them is largely symbolic -- a reminder, to some of us, at least." We went on for a few more sessions. I could have read it all on my own -- or most of it -- but the Master must, he said, be sure I understood and interpreted correctly. I wasn't used to the study of history, after all, I was a Musician and Poet -- though my now pedestrian raiment denied that. After the near-miss with disaster we had, I learned, pulled up our socks and straightened out. One government for the whole planet, for example -- the only way controls could be effective. Then the discovery of hyperspace and, at the same time, the flowering of the Genetic Era. Two simultaneous breakthroughs: intragalactic exploration and colonization, and genetic manipulation in aid of producing Homo sapiens universalis, or Homo sapiens sapiens, or whatever. Man sapient, that is, but more so. A number of psycho-geneticists and somato-geneticists had worked on the development of better human strains, and one of these genetic dabblers had been Korsakoff. Korsakoff had been one of the more controversial of the phychogeneticists, not always in favor in Ihe scientific community. The somatic problems were, in the end, almost trivial, but the physiological and psychiatric ones were not. "You have studied all this?" the Master asked. I nodded. "So what what was the next step?" I thought for a moment. "Conduct experiments with the new subspecific variants. Get a group large enough and dump them on an uninhabited planet and see how they make out." "Not elegantly said, for a Poet," the Master said, "but that's about right." He detailed the program. It had started millennia past and I confess I began to feel a sense of awe. Some of the mutants had worked out, some not. Some of the mutants, off on their own planets, had even gone on to construct better mutants. We -- our planet -- were still Home, we were the capital, for this was where it had all started. We and the other planets, those that remained sane, formed the Galactic Federation -- whose headquarters were here. "What happens to the other planets?" I asked -- a point in respect of which my study materials had been curiously reticent. "That is known only to Masters, Scientists and some Judges. And to a few others, such as yourself, who must be told. You will understand, of course, why you must be told. There is little in any archive on this, so I must tell you. And will. You will, of course, swear secrecy." I did, and the inputs gobbled up my pledge and, no doubt, imprinted it upon an array of multiparametered matrices whose functions I could only guess at. Master Clarke filled our glasses then, and this time I had what he'd always had. Incredible. My brain cleared -- not that it had been fuzzy, but this was something else. "It's only for Masters and their -- ah -- guests," he said, "so don't become addicted." Then he told me; Sensors and transmitters had been placed, in isolated and inaccessible locations, on all of the experimental planets. The sensors monitored planetary atmospheres -- for carbon monoxide, chlorinated hydrocarbons, hydrocarbon byproducts, and radioactivity. They picked up other data also, but these were the important ones. The transmitters hurtled these data, via hyperspace, into Planetary Watcha topsecret facility in Central Control. "Most of our citizens believe that Central Control is but the computer that controls the functioning of this planet. It is that, of course, but is also this. We, the Masters, think this is its most important function. We shall go there now." We continued to talk, voices low, as we walked. He spoke of what he called the green line. "What happens when the readings hit the green line?" I asked. "When the curve -- any of them -- intersects the established limit we push a green button and destroy the planet. Fusion devices are in place." "Just like that." "For the greater galactic good, yes. Just like that, as you will see." "Along with any other planets in that system happening to share the general area." "If any, yes. But the chances are overwhelming they aren't inhabited." "Why is observation of Central Control part of my sentence?" "You'll see, son Rockwell. You'll see." Watch is unknown to, say, # of our population. It occupies the top floor of Central Control. Both palm and voice prints are required to open the door of the elevator that takes you up. "How can such an operation be kept secret from so many?" I asked. "There isn't much curiosity," the Master said. He led me into a fairly large room, three walls of which were covered with a dazzling array of screens, readouts, many lights blinking on and off. There was a console in the center of the room, presided over by two Scientists in white robes. A third Scientist patrolled the screens, pushing buttons from time to time, adjusting this or that, taking readings, making notes. We passed through this room and through another door in the fourth side of the room. "The -- I believe they call it basic hardware -- is here." We were in an enormous room, now, filled with racks and panels, a subtle but pervasive hum, and mysteries. (I'm not a Scientist. Nor is Master Clarke, for that matter.) Large cables of many colors were all over the place, linking this area to thatthe arteries, veins, and nervous system of a monster. "The intake receptors are on the roof," the Master siad. "They could be here as well, but it's traditional, I'm told, to place them on the roof." We climbed a flight of stairs. The roof was covered with multihelixed arrays, pointing in all directions, covering this hemisphere of the sky. "How about the other side?" I asked. "There's a similar receptor complex over thereor down there, straight down from here. It feeds into this place by microwave relay." We went down the stairs, then, and to the console. The Master greeted the Scientists, and introduced me Brown Tunic Rockwell. One of the Scientists showed me around, the Master coming along, interested. Each experimental planet out there was on display here. The elaborate inputs to the large panels on the three walls were here condensed into digital readouts. I saw that, in most cases, then parameters were being monitored usually to seven signiCicant figures. Above each digital readout was printed, in green, the value which must not be exceededthe value which said a planet was about to die. Each panel bore, for each parameter under observation, three pilot lights -- red, yellow, and green. There was also a green push button, immediately below which were two spaces for the insertion of keys. The button had no label and it didn't need one -- they knew what it was for. Almost all of the lights were red, a few were yellow. No green showing. I got it. Red was in the clear, yellow was approaching danger, and when the green went on you turned the keys and pushed the green button. Minus one planet. "How does Korsakoff Five look?" the Master asked. "No better. Any day now." He showed us the Korsakoff Five panel. There were nine reds, but the carbon monoxide showed yellow. The seventh digit was in almost continual change, advancing and retreating, but, the Scientist said, steadily closing the gap. It had about a hundred to go -- a that is. The first five digits coincided with the stated limit. "You see, Rockwell, why we've been talking of Korsakoff -- his fifth planet will amost certainly be the next one to go," the Master said. I nodded, and I spent several hours wandering about the room, getting the feel of the place. I happened to be standing before one display (Wilkinson Four) when the radioactivity light P.O. Box #, Santa Monica. Cal. # a vehicle for thought-provoking, controversial articles, and a "service" magazine containing dozens of s-f and fantasy book reviews per issue, along with news releases, coming events, news items of interest to fans, readers and professionals. convention at Heidelberg in I #... for the second year in a row. Sample Subscription -- # issues for I . # per year. went from red to yellow. A spooky feeling. I spent a few more days hanging around Planetary Watch, and it seemed my sentence should be served by now, but -- not quite. During the evening of the third day Master Clarke called me and told me to meet him at Planetary Watch. I did so; he was waiting at the elevator when I arrived. He palmed the panel and spoke into a concealed microphone and up we went. A different shift of Scientists was on duty now, and they were all watching the large Korsakoff Five panel on the wall. The graphic readout showed that the carbon monoxide line was about to intersect the line of the limit. You could see it happening on the digital display at the console, of course, but this was more dramatic. I watched, hypnotized, as the lines did intersect. The yellow changed to green, and a gentle but persistent tone began to sound. "This could be automated, of course," the Master said, "but we prefer to do it by hand. Come to the console." We all went. Two of the Scientists insertedwith a business-like air their keys into the slots beneath the green button and turned them a quarter turn. Clockwise, I noted. "Now," the Master said," if you will?" He indicated the green button. "I -- " It seemed too much. "This will complete your sentence," he said, the Scientists standing there watching, listening. Well. What do you do when asked to blast a planet full of people -- into subatomic particles? In my situation you push a button. I did. Nothing happened. "In about ten minutes -- through hyperspace," the Master said, and he and I returned to the large display on the wall. The Scientists went back to their routine. "Why do it this way?" I asked, having done it. "The planet will die anyway." "A dying planet is a bad thing. This is morehumane." Silently we watched. Then, almost casually, as if closing up shop for the night, the lights went out. The polygraphs stopped, and ten needles abruptly flopped to zero. End. Not knowing what to say, I said nothing. The Master opened a package he'd been carrying. My purple robe! I shucked off the detestable brown tunic and proudly put on the purple. Musician and Poet again. We left that place. "Korsakoff Five over and done with," the Master said, "It's real name was Terra but we didn't think of it as such." I was anxious to be gone, I had to practice upon my instruments, write some lines. "That's the last one of the lot and a good thing too. Korsakoff was a lousy geneticist. Good night, Rockwell."  painted wings twinkling over the stiff green blades of grass. It hovered, dipped and finally lighted on a faded purple stalk of clover. Another butterfly came along and another. Each one lighted beside the first until at last there was a canopy of yellow and black over the nodding heads of clover. "Start again," said the teacher and grass, clover and butterflies all vanished. Now a sidewalk appeared, tar and gum smeared, streaked with cracks over the cement coating. Feet passed over it again and again, pairs of feet, dozens of feet, hundreds of feet. Soon they were as densely packed as sheaves of corn in a silo. A whistle blew, the feet shuffled and then went up in a puff of smoke. "Fair," said the teacher. "Considerable improvement over the first try, but you've far to go." The class was over. The students dispersed, each one secretly elated over the skills he had shown that day. The teacher sighed over the dearth of real talent among the neophytes. He sat back and ruminated over the kinds of classes he'd had in years past. "Tho.se kids had the stuff," he said to himself and he flushed at the realization that he had spoken aloud. L ater that night he discussed his feelings with Marie. She shook her head in disagreement. "They haven't changed. It's you," she said. "I think you're jealous of them because they will be the doers and you will stay a teacher." "Nonsense," he said acerbically. "I could be a doer. I just don't choose to. I've been through a more rigorous training course than any of them. I've dreamed up teeming cities, motley populations, sagas of heroes and cowards, ravaging plagues and Golden ages. I've drawn poets and philosophers, hooligans and bullies." She smiled. "I know you have," she said. "You've even shown me bits and pieces of it. But there's a gap between theory and practice. And you're missing an important ingredient." "I suppose it's my disbelief in the supernatural," he said. "Even you call me an atheist." She sighed. "No," she said. "It's compassion." The night grew cold and she began to shiver. He took her hand and stroked it until the blue tint became suffused with a darkening red. He put his mouth to her neck and, with his mind still on the unrealized greatness inside him, he whispered into the sweet scented skin. She enfolded him in her arms and drew him down beside her. very much on edge. He hadn't corrected any of the students' homework nor had he prepared his lesson plan for the day. He went inside and showered, letting the soapy warm water caress his sleep-drenched skin, and he shook his head and growled. Later, after he had eaten, he read the contents of each folder, penciling in his comments, sometimes terse, occasionally scathing. In rare instances he was almost complimentary. Marie is wrong. I'm not jealous of the students.  have more imagination and talent than the whole lot of them... He had put aside one of the folders after a cursory look and later, when he reopened and read it, he knew why. It was superb. The language was inspired, simple yet poetic, with an epic sweep. The characters were dynamic, violent and gentle by turns, moral and amoral, lovely and hideous. They were tormented and inspired. He was caught up in all of it and saw each scene unfold before his eyes. And he hated the student who had If only it were mine -- What a job I could do with this... He would modify it here and there, he decided. Perhaps he ought to add the necessary little touches that would turn it into a viable scheme. And of everyone he knew, he alone had the maturity and discipline, the courage and craftsmanship to see it through. "I can be a doer," he said aloud and the words were like a heady wine. H e held on to the folder. He told the student that his grade was an A-minus but that he had misplaced the manuscript. Secretly he studied it, fleshed it out, gave it his own subtle flavor until be was certain it was ready. Then he typed it up himself, placed his own name on the title page and sent it in to the Council of Critics. One week later he was summoned to their chambers. They were overwhelmed by this extraordinary work, they said, and he would be given permission to put it on. His heart was racing out of control. "When will that be?" he said. He could barely talk. "Tomorrow, if you like. It will be a private showing for the Council alone." He was assigned his stage and asked to begin. But was he ready? He became terrified at bringing this awesome script to life and was assailed by self doubts. Was he really up to it? And what if the student should discover the plagiarism and expose him? There was total silence in the auditorium and a hushed expectation that wound about his body like a shroud. With trembling fingers, he turned the title page of the scenario and silently reread his opening lines: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." He drew a deep breath and then he began.  short one and Dr. Maggie Lazenby, with whom he hoped to the Serpent Class Courier Admere friendship, was off planet and der, was in a bitter and twisted would not be returning until after mood. He had his reasons. To behis own departure. Finally, he had gin with, he had just been hauled seen the latest Promotion List and over the coals by Commodore Dahad noted that officers junior to mien. Officer Commanding Courihimself had been given their half ers, and still resented being blamed rings, were now Lieutenant Comfor the disappearance of Cragge manders. And some of those same Rock from Olgana. Then he had officers, in Grimes' words, been told that his ship's stay at wouldn't be capable of navigating a Lindisfarne Base was to be a very plastic duck across a bathtub. A Lieutenant Grimes Novelette Whom you know is important. What you know is vital. But what you know about whom can be dynamite! Ensign Beadle, his firsl lieutenant, was sympathetic. He said, "But it isn't what you do. Captain. It isn't what you know, even. It's whom you know." "You could be right. Number One," admitted Grimes. "But in my case I'm afraid that it boils down to who knows me. Did you ever see that book. How To Win Friends And Influence Peopled I often think that I must have read the wrong half, the second half Beadle made a noncommittal noise. Then: "We're ready to lift ship. Captain. Mechanically, that is. Mr. Hollister, the new Psionic Radio Officer, has yet to joinand, of course, there are the passengers." "Ah, yes. Let us not forget the passengers." Grimes allowed himself a sardonic smile. "I wonder what the Commodore has against iheml Beadle took the question literally. "We're the only Courier in port. Captain, and it's essential that our good Commissioner reaches Dhartana as soon as possible" " -- if not before," finished Grimes. "All right. Number One. Is the V.I.P. suite swept and garnished?" "I -- I've been busy with the important preparations for Space, Captain." Grimes scowled. "I sincerely hope, Number One, that Mrs. Commissioner Dalwood never hears you implying that she's unimportant. We'll make a tour of the accommodation now." Followed by Beadle, he strode up the ramp into the airlock of his little ship, his "flying darning needle." The V.I.P. suite took up almost the entire compartment below the officers' flat. As he passed through the sliding door into the sitting room Grimes' prominent ears reddened; with him it was a sign of anger as well as of embarrassment. "Damn it all. Number One," he explained, "don't you realize that this woman is one of the civilian big wheels on the Board of Admiralty? You may not want promotion -- but I do. Look at that table top! Drinking glass rings and it must have been something sweet and sticky-and bloody nearly an inch of cigarette ash. And the ashtrays! They haven't been emptied since God was a pup." "The suite hasn't been used since we carried Mr. Alberto." "I know that. Am I to suppose that you've kept it the way he left it in loving memory of him?" "You did say, sir, that bearing in mind the circumstances of his death we should leave everything untouched in case his department wanted to make a thorough investigation." "And his department did check just to make sure that he'd left nothing of interest on board when he disembarked on Doncaster. But that was months ago. And this bedroom -- the way it is now I wouldn't put a dog into it. Get on the blower at once to Maintenance. Ask them -- no, tell themto send a cleaning detail here immediately." Grimes became uncomfortably aware that someone breathed behind him. He turned slowly, reluctantly, looked into the hard, steel-gray eyes of the woman who was standing just inside the doorway. She was tall and handsome, with short-cut platinum blond hair, a beautifully tailored gray costume that looked like a uniform but wasn't that looked more like a uniform than the deliberately casual rig of the day affected by Grimes and Beadle in common with all Courier Service officers. Her figure seemed to be that of a girl but her face, although unlined, was old. It showed no physical marks of age, but it was somehow obvious that she had seen too much, experienced too much. (Jrimes thought, If she smiles, something will crack. She didn't smile. She said -- and her voice, although well modulated, was hard as the rest of her -- "Mr. (irimes." "Ma'am?" "I am Commissioner Dalwood." She did not extend her hand, (irimes bowed stiffly. "Honored to have you aboard. Ma'am." "The honor is all yours, Mr. (irimes. Tell me, is the rest of your ship like this pigsty?" "We're having the suite put to rights, Mrs. Dalwood." "Pray do not put yourself out on my behalf, Mr. Grimes. My lady's maid and my two robot servants are at this moment bringing my baggage aboard. The robots are versatile. If you will let them have the necessary cleaning gear they will soon have these quarters fit for human occupancy." "Mr. Beadle," ordered Grimes, "Belay that call to Maintenance. See that Mrs. Dalwood's servants are issued what they need." "Very good, sir," replied Beadle smartly, glad of the chance to make his escape. "And now, Mr. Grimes, if I may sit down somewhere in less squalid surroundings "Certainly, Ma'am. If you will follow me -- " G rimes led the way out of the suite. The two humanoid robots, with expensive-looking baggage piled at their feet, stared at him impassively. The maid small, plump, pert and darkly brunette -- allowed a flicker of sympathy to pass over her rosy face. Grimes thought that she winked, but he couldn't be sure. On the way up to his own quarters he was relieved to see that Beadle had kept the rest of the ship in a reasonably good state of cleanliness, although he did hear one or two disapproving sniffs from his passenger. His own day cabin was, he knew, untidy. He liked it that way. He was not surprised when Mrs. Dalwood said, "Your desk, Mr. Grimes. Surely some of those papers are of such a confidential nature that they should be in your safe." Grimes said, "Nobody comes in here except by invitation. I trust my officers. Ma'am." The Commissioner smiled thinly. Nothing cracked. She said, "What a child you are. Lieutenant. One of the first lessons I learned in politics was never to trust anybody." "In Space, aboard ship, you have to trust people. Ma'am." She sat down in Grimes' easy chair, extending her long, elegant legs. Grimes suspected that she looked at her own limbs with brief admiration before returning her regard to him. Her laugh was brittle. "How touching. Lieutenant. And that is why ships are lost now and again." "May I offer you refreshment. Ma'am?" Grimes said, changing the subject. "And do you drink. Lieutenant?" I know damn well that I'm only a two ringer. Grimes thought, but  do like being called Captain aboard my own ship... He said, "Never on departure day, Mrs. Dalwood." "Perhaps I shall be wise if I conform to the same rule. I must confess that I am not used to traveling in vessels of this class and it is possible that I shall need all my wits about me during liftoff. Might I ask for a cup of coffee?" Grimes took from its rack the thermos container, which he had refilled from the galley coffeemaker that morning. After he had removed the cap he realized that he had still to produce cup, sugar bowl, spoon and milk. His telltale ears proclaiming his embarrassment he replaced the container, conscious of the woman's coldly amused scrutiny. At last he jug from a carton of milk in his refrigerator. She said, "The milk should be warmed." "Yes, Mrs. Dalwood. Of course. If you wouldn't mind waiting just one moment" "If I took my coffee white I should mind. But I prefer it black and unsweetened." Grimes poured, remembering that the coffee-maker was long overdue for a thorough cleaning. Adder's coffee had a tang of its own. Her people were accustomed to it. The Commissioner was not. After one cautious sip she put her cup down, hard. She asked, "And what is the food like aboard this ship?" "Usually quite good. Ma'am. We carry no ratings or petty officers, so we take turns cooking. Mr. Beadle he's my First Lieutenant-makes an excellent stew." Grimes babbled on. "It's a sort of a curry, actually, but not quite, if you know what I mean." "I don't. Lieutenant. Nor do I wish to. As I have already told you, my robots are versatile. Might I suggest that they take over galley duties, first of all thoroughly cleaning all vessels and implements, starting with your coffee-maker? Apart from anything else it will mean that your officers will have more time to devote to their real duties." "If you want it that way, Mrs. Dalwood" "I do want it that way." To Grimes' intense relief the intercom phone buzzed. He said to the Commissioner, "Excuse me. Ma'am," and then into the speakermicrophone, "Captain here." "First Lieutenant, Captain. Mr. Hollister, the new P.C.O., has just boarded. Shall I send him up to report to you?" "Yes, Mr. Beadle. Tell him that I'll see him in the Control Room. Now." He turned to Mrs. Dalwood. "I'm afraid I must leave you for a few minutes, Ma'am. There are cigarettes in that box, and if you wish more coffee -- " "I most certainly do not. And, Mr. Grimes, don't you think that you had better put those papers away in your safe before you go about your pressing business?" She allowed herself another thin smile. "After all, you haven't asked yet to see my identification. For all you know I could be a spy." And if you are, thought Grimes,  hope I'm the officer commanding the firing squad. He said, "You are very well known. Ma'am." He swept his desk clean, depositing the pile of official and private correspondence on the deck, then fumbled through the routine of opening his safe. As usual the door stuck. Finally he had the papers locked away. He bowed again to Mrs. Dalwood, who replied with a curt nod. He climbed the ladders to Control, glad to get to a part of the ship where. Commissioner or no Commissioner, he was king. Beadle was awaiting him there with a tall, thin, pale young man who looked like a scarecrow rigged out in a cast-off Survey Service uniform. He announced, before Beadle could perform the introductions, "I don't like this ship. I am very sensitive to atmosphere. This is an unhappy ship." "She didn't use to be," Grimes told him glumly. U sually Grimes enjoyed shiphandling. Invariably he would invite his passengers to the control room during lift-off, and most times this invitation would be accepted. He had extended the courtesy to Mrs. Dalwood, hoping that she would refuse the offer. But she did not. She sat in the spare acceleration seat, saying nothing but noticing everything. It would almost have been better had she kept a continual flow of Why-doyou-do-this? and Why-don t-youdo-that? Her very presence made Grimes nervous. The irregular beat of the inertial drive sounded wrong to him as Adder climbed slowly up and away from her pad. And, as soon as she was off the ground, the ship yawed badly, falling to an angle of seven degrees from the vertical. It must look bad. Grimes knew. It looked bad and it felt worse. The only thing to do about it was to get upstairs in a hurry before some sarcastic comment from Port Control came through the transceiver. Grimes picked his moment for turning on the auxiliary rockets, waiting until the tall, slender tower that was Adder was canted away from the wind. That way, he hoped, he could make it all look intentional, convey the impression that he was using the quite stiff north-wester to give him additional speed. He managed to turn in his seat in spite of the uncomfortable acceleration and force out the words; "Letting -- the -- wind -- help -- us -- " She -- calm, unruffled -- lifted her slender eyebrows and asked, with apparently genuine unconcern, "Really?" "Time -- " Grimes persisted, "is -- money." "So," she told him, "is reaction mass." Flushing, Grimes returned to his controls. Apart from that annoying yaw the ship was handling well enough. Beadle, and Von Tannenbaum, the navigator, and Slovotny, electronic communications, were quietly efficient at their stations. They were certainly quiet. There was none of the usual good-humored banter. Sulkily Grimes pushed Adder up through the last, high wisps of cirrus, into the purple twilight, towards the bright, unwinking stars. She screamed through the final tenuous shreds of atmosphere and quite soon thereafter Von Tannenbaum reported that she was clear of the Van Allens. Grimes, still far too conscious of the Commissioner's cold regard, cut inertial and reaction drives, then slowly and carefully -- far more slowly than was usual -- used his directional gyroscopes to swing the sharp prow of the ship on to the target star. He applied correction for Galactic Drift -- and then realized that he had put it on the wrong way. He mumbled something that sounded unconvincing even to himself about overcompensation and, after a few seconds that felt more like minutes, had the vessel headed in the right direcrection. He wondered what would happen when he started the Mannschenn Drive -- but nothing did; nothing, that is, worse than the familiar but always disquieting sense of deja vu. He had a vision of himself as an old, old lieutenant with a long white beard but this had nothing to do with the temporal precession field of the Drive, was induced rather by the psionic field generated by the Commissioner. He didn't like her and had a shrewd suspicion that she didn't like him. She said, "Very educational, Mr. Grimes. Very educational." She unstrapped herself from her chair. Slovotny and Von Tannenbaum got up from their own seats, each determined courteously to assist her from hers. They collided. Von Tannenbaum tripped and fell and Beadle fell over him. "Very educational," repeated the Commissioner, gracefully extricating herself from her chair, unaided. "Oh, Mr. Grimes, could you come to see me in ten minutes' time? We have to discuss the new galley routine." "Certainly, Mrs. Dalwood." Grimes turned to his embarrassed officers. "Deep Space Routine, Mr. Beadle." Usually he said, "Normal Deep Space Routine," but he had a suspicion that things would not be at all normal. II Usually Adder's people were gourmands rather than gourmets and a certain tightness of waistbands was an accepted fact of life. Even when whoever was doing the cooking produced an inedible mess bellies could be filled, and were filled, with sandwiches of the doorstep variety. But these relatively happy days were over. As she had told Grimes, the Commissioner's robots were skilled cooks. To have called them chefs would not have been exaggerating. Insofar as subtlety of flavorings and attractiveness of presentation were concerned, nobody could fault them. To the average spaceman, however, quantity is as important as quality. There were no second helpings. The coldly efficient automatons must have calculated just how much nutriment each and every person aboard required to operate efficiently himself -- and that was all that he ever got. Too, at least one of the mechanical servitors was always doing something or other around the galley and storerooms and Grimes and his officers knew that the partaking of snacks between meals would be reported at once to Mrs. Dalwood. A real Captain, one with four gold bands on his shoulderboards and scrambled egg on the peak of his cap, would never have tolerated the situation. But Grimes, for all his authority and responsibility, was too junior an officer. He was only a Lieutenant, and a passed-over one at that, while the Commissioner, although a civilian, could tell Admirals to jump through the hoop. But he was hungry. One morning, ship's time, he went down to the solarium for his daily exercises. This compartment could more aptly have been called the gymnasium, but since it was part of the "farm" it got its share of the ultraviolet required for the hydroponics tanks. Mrs. Dalwood and her maid, Rosaleen, were still there, having their daily workout, when Grimes went in. Always he had managed to arrive after the two women had finished, but for some reason he was running ahead of schedule. It was not that he was prudish and neither were they, but he had decided that the less he had to do with them the better. As he entered the room he noticed their gowns hanging outside the sauna. He shrugged. So what? This was his ship. He took off his own robe and then, clad only in trunks, mounted the stationary bicycle. He began to pedal away almost happily, watching the clock as he did so. From the corner of his eye he saw the. door of the sauna open. The Commissioner, followed by her maid, came out. It was the first time he had seen Mrs. Dalwood nude. Prompted to whistle, he thought better of it. She was a bit of all right, he admitted, if you liked 'em lean and hungry. He inclined his head towards her courteously, carried on pedaling. Rather to his surprise she stood there, looking him over. She said, "Mr. Grimes, there is a little improvement in your condition, but that probably is due to a properly balanced diet." She walked toward him, her feet slim and elegant on the carpeted deck, her breast jouncing ever so slightly. "Get off that thing, will you?" Grimes did so, on the side away from her. She stooped with fluid grace and tested the pedals with her right hand. "Mr. Grimes, how in Space do you hope to get any benefit from these exercises unless you do them properly?" Her hand went to the adjusting screw of the roller on top of the wheel, turned it clockwise. The muscles of her right arm stood out clearly under the smooth brown skin as she tested the pedals again. Then she actually smiled, saying, "On your bicycle, spaceman." Grimes remounted. He had to push hard to start the wheel rotating. He had to push hard to keep it rotating. Now and again he had ridden on real bicycles, but almost always had dismounted rather than pedal up a steep hill. She stood watching him. Until now he would have thought it impossible actively to dislike an attractive naked woman. But there had to be a first time for anything. The Commissioner turned to her maid. "Rosaleen, you were last on the bicycle. Did you readjust it?" The girl blushed guiltily over her entire body. "Yes, Ma'am." "I see I shall have to check on you too." The woman glanced at the watch that was her only article of clothing. "Unluckily I have some work to do. However, you may stay here for another thirty minutes. The bicycle again, the rowing machine, the horizontal bars. And you, Mr. Grimes, will see to it that she does something about shedding that disgusting fat." Grimes did not say what he was thinking. He had little breath to say anything. He managed to gasp, "Yes, Ma'am." Mrs. Dalwood went to her gown, shrugged it on, thrust her feet into sandals. She walked gracefully to the door. She did not look back at the man on the bicycle, the girl on the rowing machine. As soon as the door had shut behind her Rosaleen stopped rowing-. She said, "Phew'!" Grimes went on pedaling. "Hey, Captain. Take five. Avast, or whatever you say." Grimes stopped. He said, "You'd better carry on with your rowing." The girl grinned. "We're quite safe. Captain. She is so used to having every order implicitly obeyed that she'd never dream of coming back to investigate us." "You know her better than I do," admitted Grimes. "I should." She got up from the sliding seat of the rowing machine, Hopped down to the deck. She was. Grimes decided, at least as attractive as her mistress and she had the advantage of youth. And there was so much more of her. The spaceman looked her over, studying her almost clinically. Yes, she had been losing weight. Her skin was not as taut as it should have been. She noticed his look. She complained, "Yes, I'm starved." "You get the same as we do, Rosaleen." "That's the trouble. Captain." "But you have this sort of feeding all the time." "Like hell I do. I have my nights off, you know, and then I catch up on the pastries and candy and the hot rolls with lots of butter, and the roast pork, with crackling -- " "Please stop," begged Grimes. "You're making me ravenous." She went on, "But aboard your ship I have to toe the line. There's no escape." "I suppose not." "But surely you can do something. You've storerooms, with bread-" "Yes, but-" "You aren't scared of her. Captain?" She looked at him through big, dark eyes. He had thought they were black now he saw that they were a very deep violet. "Mphm." He allowed his glance to stray downwards, then hastily looked back at her face. Invitation had been in every line of her ample body. He was no snob and the fact that her status was that of a servant weighed little with him. But she was the Commissioner's servant. A lady has no secrets from her lady's maid -- was the converse true? Anyhow, both were women and no doubt happily prattled to each other, disparity of social status notwithstanding. She said plaintively, "I'm hungry. Captain." "So am I, Rosaleen." "But you're the Captain." Grimes got off the bicycle. He said, "It's time for my sauna." He threw his shorts in the general direction of the hook on which his robe was hanging, strode to the door of the hot room, opened it. She followed him. He stretched out on one of the benches, she flopped on one opposite him. She said, "I'm hungry." "It's those damned robots," complained Grimes. "Always hanging around the galley and storerooms." "They won't be there tonight." "How do you know?" "They're much more than cooks. Even I don't know all the things they've been programed for. This I do know. She has been working on a report, and tomorrow it will be encoded for transmission. The way that she does it is to give it to Johnhe's the one with the little gold knob on top of his head to encode. And James decodes each sheet as John finishes it, to ensure that there are no errors." "Are there ever any?" "No. But she likes to be sure." "She would." He wondered when he was going to start sweating. The girl was already perspiring profusely. "Tell me, when does this encodingdecoding session take place?" "After dinner." "And there's no chance of her breaking it off?" "None at all." "Mphm." The sweat was starting to stream out of Grimes' pores now. The girl got up, began to flick the skin of his back lightly with the birch twigs. He appreciated the attention. "Mphm. And are you free while all this Top Secret stuff is going on?" "Yes." "And she should have her nose stuck into it by twenty hours?" "Yes, Captain." "Then meet me outside the galley at, say, fifteen past twenty." "Yes!" "Thick buttered toast," murmured Grimes, deciding that talking about food took his mind off other things. "Lots of butter," she added. "And sardines." "Fat, oily sardines." "With lemon wedges." "With mayonnaise." she corrected. "All right. Mayonnaise." "And coffee. With sugar and great dollops of cream." "I'll have beer, myself, even though it is fattening." "We can have beer withand coffee after." The door slid open and Hollister came in. Naked, the telepath looked more like a living skeleton than ever. Grimes regarded him with some distaste and wondered if the psionic radio officer had been eavesdropping. To do so would be contrary to the very strict code of the Rhine Institute -- but espers, in spite of their occasional claims to superiority, were only human. He said, "I'm just about cooked, Rosaleen." "So am I, Captain." She got up from her bench, the perspiration pouring down her still plump body, went through into the shower room. Through the closed door Grimes heard the hiss of the water, her little scream as its coldness hit her. There was the whine of the blowers as she dried off and then she ran through the hot room on her way back into the solarium. "Quite a dish. Captain," commented Hollister. "We," Grimes told him coldly, "are neither kings nor peasants." He took his own cold shower and when he stepped out into the gymnasium Rosaleen was gone. D inner that night was as unsatisfying as usual. A clear soup, a small portion of delicious baked fish with a green salad, a raw apple for desert. Grimes, at the head of the table, tried to make conversation, but the Commissioner was in a thoughtful mood and hardly spoke at all. Beadle, Slovotny, Vitelli and Hollister wolfed their portions as though eating were about to be made illegal, saying little. The four officers excused themselves as soon as they decently could -- Slovotny going up to Control to relieve Von Tannenbaum for his dinner. Beadle to have a look at the air circulatory system, Vitelli to check up on the Mannschenn Drive. Hollister didn't bother to invent an excuse. He just left. Von Tannenbaum came down, took his place at the table. He was starting to acquire a lean and hungry look that went well with his Nordic fairness. The Commissioner nodded to him, then patted her lips gently with her napkin. Grimes, interpreting the signs correctly, got up to help her from her chair. She managed to ignore the gesture. She said, "You must excuse me, Mr. Grimes and Mr. von Tannenbaum. I am rather busy this evening." "May I, or my officers, be of any assistance?" asked Grimes politely. She took her time replying, and he was afraid that she would take his offer. Then she said, "Thank you, Mr. Grimes. But is is very confidential work and I don't think that you have Security clearance." The refusal may have been intended as a snub but Grimes welcomed it. "Good night. Ma'am." "Good night, Mr. Grimes." Von Tannenbaum turned to the serving robot which was waiting until he had finished his meal. "Any chance of another portion of fish, James?" "No, sir," the thing replied in a metallic voice. "Her Excellency has instructed me that there are to be no second helpings for anybody." "Oh." In sulky silence the navigator finished his meal. Grimes was tempted to include him in the supper party, but decided against it. The fewer people who knew about it the better. The two men rose from the table, each going to his own quarters. In his day cabin Grimes mixed himself a drink, feeling absurdly guilty as he did so. Damn it all, this is my ship. I'm Captain of her, not that cast iron bitch! Defiantly -- but why should he feel defiant? -- he finished what was in his glass, then poured another generous portion. But he made it fast, looking frequently at his clock as he sipped. #... Near enough. He walked out to the axial shaft, tried not to make too much noise going down the ladder. He paused briefly in the officers' flat, on the deck below and abaft his own. Faint music emanated from behind the door of Von Tannenbaum's cabin Wagner? It sounded like it and loud snores from inside Beadle's room. His own air circulatory system could do with overhauling, thought Grimes. Slovotny was on watch and Hollister, no doubt, was wordlessly communicating with his psionic amplifier, the poodle's brain in aspic. Vitelli could be anywhere, but was probably in the engineroom. The V.I.P. suite was on the next deck down. As he passed the door Grimes could hear the Commissioner dictating something, one of the robots repeating her words. That took eare of her. Another deck, with cabins for not very important people... He thought of tapping on Rasaleen's door, then decided against it. In any case, she was waiting for him outside the galley. She whispered, "I was afraid you'd change your mind. Captain." "Not bloody likely." H e led the way into the spotless-thanks to the industry of the robot servitorsgalley. He was feeling oddly excited. He was reminded of his training cruise, when he had been a very new (and always hungry) cadet. But then there had been locks to pick. He opened the door of the tinned food storeroom, ran his eye over the shelves. He heard Rosaleen gasp. "New Erin ham -- Carinthian sausage -- " "You'll have Atlantan sardines, my girl, and like 'emah, here we are. A can each?" "Two cans." "All right. Here you are. You can switch on the toaster while I rummage in the bread locker." He thrust the cans into her eager hands, then collected bread, butter and seasonings. He tore open the wrapper of a loaf, put the thick slices on the rack under the griller. The smell of the cooking toast was mouthwatering -- too mouthwatering. He hoped that it would not be distributed throughout the ship by the ventilation system. But the Commissioner's overly efficient robots must, by this time, have put the air out-take filters to rights. One side done. He turned the slices over. Rosaleen asked plaintively, "How do you work this opener?" A metallic voice replied, "Like th is. Miss Rosaleen -- but I forbid you to use it." "Take your claws off me, you tin bastard!" Grimes turned fast. Behind him the toast smoldered unheeded. His hands went out to clamp on the wrists of the robot, whose own hands gripped the girl's arms. The automaton ignored him. If it could have sneered it would have done so. "Mr. Grimes. Rosaleen." The Commissioner's voice was hard as metal. In her all-grey costume she looked like a robot herself. "Mr. Grimes, please do not attempt to interfere with my servitor." She looked coldly at the little group. "All right, John, you may release Miss Rosaleen. But not until Mr. Grimes has taken his hands off you. And now, Mr. Grimes, what is the meaning of this? I seem to have interrupted a disgusting orgy. Oh, Joh, you might extinguish that minor conflagration and dispose of the charred remains." "Supper," said Grimes at last. "Supper?" "Yes, Ma'am. Rosaleen and I were about to enjoy a light snack." ' "A light snack? Don't you realize the trouble that went into working out suitable menus for this ship?" She paused, looking at Grimes with an expression of extreme distaste. "Legally since your superiors, in a moment of aberration, saw fit to appoint you to command, you may do as you like aboard this vessel -- within limits. The seduction of my maid is beyond those limits." "Seduction?" This was too much. "I assure you that -- " "I was not using the word in its sexual sense. Come, Rosaleen, we will leave Mr. Grimes to his feast. He has to keep his strength up -- although for what I cannot say." "Ma'am!" The girl's face was no longer soft, her voice held a compelling ring. "Since you use that word -- it was I who seduced the Captain." "That hardly improves matters, Rosaleen. The commanding officer of a warship, even a very minor one, should not allow himself to be influenced by a woman passenger." "You said it," snapped Grimes. This could mean the ruin of his career but he had been pushed too far. "You said it, Mrs. Dalwood. I should never have let myself be influenced by you. I should never have allowed your tin dieticians to run loose in my galley. I should have insisted, from the very start, on running my ship my way. Furthermore -- " He was warming up nicely. "Furthermore, I doubt if even your fellow Commissioners will approve of your ordering an officer to spy on his Captain." "I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Grimes." "Don't you, Mrs. Dalwood? Who put you wise to this little party in the galley? Who would have known about it? Who but Hollister? I shouldn't like to be in your shoes when the Rhine Institute gets my report on my psionic radio officer. They're no respecters of admirals or commissioners." "Have you quite finished, Mr. Grimes?" With the mounting flush on her cheeks the Commissioner was beginning to look human. "For the time being." "Then let me tell you, Lieutenant, that whatever secrets Lieutenant Hollister may have learned about you are still safely locked within his mind. If you had been reading up on the latest advances in roboticswhich, obviously, you have not -- you would have learned that psionic robots, electronic telepaths, are already in production. This has not been advertised -- but neither is it a secret. Such automata can be recognized by the little gold knob on top of their skulls." The robot John inclined its head toward Grimes and the golden embellishment seemed to wink at him sardonically. "You tin fink," snarled the spaceman. "I am not a fink, sir. A fink is one who betrays his friend -- and you were never a friend to me and my kind. Was it not in this very vessel, under your command, that Mr. Adam met his end?" "That will do, John," snapped the Commissioner. "I still resent being spied upon." "That will do. Lieutenant." "Like hell it will. I give you notice that I have resigned from the Survey Service. I've had a bellyful of being treated like a child." "But that is what you are." "Captain," Rosaleen was pleading. "Please stop it. You're only making things worse. Mrs. Dalwood, it was my fault. I swear that it was." "Anything that happens aboard my ship is my fault," insisted Grimes. "From your own mouth you condemn yourself, Lieutenant. I am tempted, as a Commissioner, to accept your resignation here and now, but I feel" her features sagged, the outlines of her body became hazy, the gray of her costume shimmered irridesccntly -- "Leef I tub" She was her normal self again. "But I feel -- " Again the uncanny change. "Lgef I tub -- " This is all  need... Grimes listened to the sudden, irregular warbling of the Mannschenn Drive, recognized the symptoms of breakdown, time running backward and deja vu. He had another vision -- but this time he was not an elderly Survey Service Lieutenant; he was an even more elderly Rim Runners Third Mate. They would be the only outfit in all the Galaxy that would dream of employing him -- but even they would never promote him. The thin, high keening of the Drive faded to a barely audible hum, then died as the tumbling, ever-precessing gyroscopes slowed to a halt. From the bulkhead speakers came Slovotny's voice calm enough, but with more than a hint of urgency. "Captain to Control, please. Captain to Control -- " "On my way," Grimes barked into the nearest speakermicrophone. "Carry on with emergency procedure." "All hands secure for Free Fall. All hands secure for Free Fall. The inertial drive will be shut down in precisely thirty seconds." "What is happening, Mr. Grimes?" demanded the Commissioner. "It should be obvious, even to you." "It is. Just what one could expect from this ship." "It's not the ship's fault. She's had no proper maintenance for months." He pushed past the women and the robot, dived into the axial shaft. The greater part of his journey to Control was made in Free Fall conditions. He hoped maliciously that the Commissioner was being spacesick. N either the commissioner nor her robots had the gall to infest the control room. Grimes sat strapped into the command seat, surrounded by his officers. "Report, Mr. Vitelli," he said to the engineer, who had just come up from the engineroom. "The Drive's had it. Captain," Vitelli told him. A greenish pallor showed through the engineer's dark skin, accentuated by a smear of black grease. "Not only the governor bearings, but the rotor bearings." "We have spares, of course." "We should have spares, but we don't. The ones we had were used by the shore gang during the last major overhaul, as far as I can gather from Mr. McCloud's records. They should have been replaced -- but all that's in the boxes is waste and shavings." "Could we cannibalize?" asked Grimes. "From the inertial drive generators?" "We could -- if we had a machine shop to turn the bearings down to size. But that wouldn't do us much good." "Why not?" "The main rotor's warped. Until it's replaced the Drive's unusable." Beadle muttered something about not knowing if it was Christmas Day or last Thursday. Grimes ignored this -- although, like all spacemen, he dreaded the temporal consequences of Mannschenn Drive malfunction. "Sparks -- is anybody within easy reach? I could ask for a tow." "There's Princess Helga, Captain. Shall I give her a call?" "Not until I tell you. Mr. Hollister, have you anything to add to what Mr. Slovotny has told me?" "No, sir." The telepath's deepset eyes were smoldering with resentment, and for a moment Grimes wondered why. Then he realized that the man must have eavesdropped on his quarrel with the Commissioner, had "heard" Grimes' assertion that he, Hollister, had carried tales to Mrs. Dalwood. I'm sorry. Grimes thought. But how was I to know that that blasted robot was a mind-reader? "I should have warned you, sir," admitted Hollister. The others looked at Grimes and Hollister curiously. Grimes could almost hear them thinking. Should have warned him of what? "Princess Helga..." murmured Grimes. "Light cruiser. Captain," Slovotny told him. "Royal Skandian Navy." "And is the Federation on speaking terms with Skandia?" wondered Grimes audibly. He answered his own question. "Only just. Well, there's no future -- or too bloody much future -- in sitting here until somebody really friendly chances along. Get the Princess on the Carlotti, Sparks. Give her our coordinates. Ask her for assistance. Perhaps her engineers will be able to repair our Drive, otherwise they can tow us to the nearest port." "Shouldn't we report first to Base, Captain?" asked Slovotny. Yes, we should, thought Grimes. But I'm not going to. I'll put out a call for assistance before Her Highness shoves her ear in. After that -- she can have a natter to Base... He said, "Get the signal away to Princess Helga. Tell her complete Mannschenn Drive breakdown. Request assistance. You know." "Ay, Captain." Slovotny busied himself at his Carlotti transceiver. The pilot antenna, the elliptical Mobius strip rotating about its long axis quivered, started to turn, hunting over the bearing along which the Skandian cruiser, invisible to optical instruments, unreachable by ordinary radio -- which, in any case, would have had far too great a time lag -- must lie. "Locked on," announced the radio officer at last. He pushed the button that actuated the calling signal. Then he spoke into the microphone. ""Adder to Princess Helga. Adder to Princess Helga. Can you read me? Come in, please." T here was the slightest of delays, and then the swirl of colors in the small, glowing screen coalesced to form a picture. The young woman looking out at them could have been Princess Helga (whoever she was) herself. She was blue-eyed, and hefty, and her uniform cap did nothing to confine the tumbling masses of her yellow hair. ""Princess Helga to Adder. I read you loud and clear. Pass your message." "Complete interstellar drive breakdown," said Slovotny. "Request assistancerepairs if possible, otherwise tow. Coordinates..." He rattled off a string of figures from the paper that Von Tannenbaum handed him. The girl was replaced by a man. He should have been wearing a horned helmet instead of a cap. His eyes were blue, his hair and beard were yellow. He grinned wolfishly. He demanded, "Your Captain, please." Grimes released himself from his chair, pulled himself into the one vacated by Slovotny. "Lieutenant Grimes here. Officer Commanding Courier Ship Adder." "Captain Olaf Andersen here. Lieutenant. What can I do for you?" "Can your engineers repair my Drive?" "I doubt it. They couldn't change a fuse." "What about a tow to Dhartana?" "Out of the question. Captain. But I can take you in to my own Base, on Skandia. The repair facilities there are excellent." Grimes weighed matters carefully before answering. Skandia, one of the small, independent kingdoms, was barely on speaking terms with the Interstellar Federation. At the very best the Skandians would charge heavily for the tow, would present a fantastically heavy bill for the repair work carried out by their yard. (But he. Grimes, would not be paying it.) At the worst. Adder and her people' might be interned, could become the focus of a nasty little interstellar incident, a source of acute embarrassment to the Survey Service. And so. Grimes asked himself mutinously, whaP. That Promotion List had made him dangerously dissatisfied with his lot; the Commissioner had strained what loyalties remained to the breaking point. The Commissioner... "What exactly is going on here?" she asked coldly. She was getting into his hair again. "I'm arranging a tow," Grimes told her. "The alternative is to hang here -- " he gestured towards the viewports, to the outside blackness, to the sharp, bright, unwinking, distant stars "in the middle of sweet damn all, thinking more and more seriously of cannibalism with every passing day." "Very funny. Lieutenant." She stared at the screen. "Is that officer wearing Skandian uniform?" "Of course. Madam," replied the Skandian Captain, who seemed to be very quick on the uptake. "Captain Olaf Andersen, at your service." He smiled happily. "And you, if I am not mistaken, are Mrs. Commissioner Dalwood, of the Federation's Board of Admiralty. According to our latest Intelligence reports you are en route to Dhartana." He smiled again. "Delete 'are'. Substitute 'were.' " "Mr. Grimes, I forbid you to accept a tow from that ship." "Mrs. Dalwood, as commanding officer of this vessel I must do all I can to ensure her safety and that of her people." "Mr. Slovotny, you will put through a call to Lindisfarne Base at once, demanding immediate assistance." Slovotny looked appealingly at Grimes. Grimes nodded glumly. The grinning face of the Skandian faded from the screen, was replaced by a swirl of color as the pilot antenna swung away from its target. Sound came from the speaker -- but it was a loud warbling note only. The radio officer worked desperately at the controls of the Carlotti transceiver. Then he looked up and announced, "They're jamming our signals; they have some very sophisticated equipment and they're only light-minutes distant." "Are you sure you can't get through?" demanded the Commissioner. "Quite sure," Slovotny told her definitely. She snorted, turned to Hollister. "Mr. Hollister, I'll have to rely on you." "What about your own chromeplated telepath?" Grimes asked her nastily. She glared at him. "John's transmission and reception is only relatively short range. And he can't work with an organic amplifier, as your Mr. Hollister can." "And my organic amplifier's on the blink," said Hollister. "What do you mean?" demanded Grimes. The telepath explained patiently. "There has to be a relationship between a psionic communications officer and his amplifier. The amplifier, of course, is a living dog's brain" "I know, I know," the Commissioner snapped. "Get on with it." Hollister would not be hurried. "The relationship is that which exists between a kind master and a faithful dog but deeper, much deeper. Normally we carry our own personal amplifiers with us, from ship to ship, but mine died recently, so I inherited Mr. Deane's. I have been working hard, ever since I joined this ship, to win its trust, its affection. I was making headway, but I was unable to give it the feeling of security it needed when the temporal precession field of the Drive started to fluctuate. The experience can be terrifying enough to a human being who knows what is happening; it is even more terrifying to a dog. And so-" "And so?" "And so the amplifier is useless, possibly permanently." He added brightly: "But I can get in touch with Princess Helga any time you want." "You needn't bother," she snarled. Then, to Grimes, "Of all the ships in the Survey Service, why did I have to travel in this one?" fVhy? echoed Grimes silently. Why? E ven the commissioner was obliged to give Captain Andersen and his crew full marks for spacemanship. Princess Helga emerged into normal SpaceTime only feet from the drifting Adder. At one moment there was nothing beyond the courier's viewports but the blackness of interstellar space, the bright, distant stars -- at the next moment she was there, a vague outline at first but solidifying rapidly. She hung there, a great spindle of gleaming plastic and metal, the sleekness of her lines marred by turrets and antennae. Another second -- and the shape of her was obscured by the tough, pneumatic fenders that inflated with almost explosive rapidity. Another second -- and Adders people heard and felt the thump of the magnetic grapnels as they made contact. Andersen's pleasant, slightly accented voice came from the transceiver. "I have you. Captain. Stand by for acceleration. Stand by for resumption of Mannschenn Drive." "I suppose that your temporal precession field will cover us?" asked Grimes. "Of course. In any case there is physical contact between your ship and mine." "Where are you taking us?" demanded Mrs. Dalwood. "To Kobenhaven, of course, Madam. Our Base on Skandia." "I insist that you tow us to the nearest spaceport under Federationjurisdiction." "You insist. Madam?" Grimes, looking at the screen, could see that Andersen was really enjoying himself. "I'm sorry, but I have my orders." "This is piracy!" "Piracy, Madam? The captain of your ship requested a tow and a tow is what he's getting. Beggars can't be choosers. In any case. Space Law makes it quite plain that the choice of destination is up to the officer commanding the vessel towing, not the captain of the vessel towed." She said, almost pleading but not quite, "In these circumstances the Federation could be generous." Andersen lost his smile. He said, "I am a Skandian, Madam. My loyalty is to my own planet, my own Service. Stand by for acceleration." The screen went blank. Acceleration pushed the group in Adder's control room down into their chairs; Mrs. Dalwood was able to reach a spare seat just in time. Faintly, the vibration transmitted along the tow wires, they heard and felt the irregular throbbing of Princess Helga's inertial driveand almost coincidentally there was a brief period of temporalspatial disorientation as the field of the cruiser's Mannschenn Drive encompassed both ships. "You realize what this means to your career," said the Commissioner harshly. "What was that?" asked Grimes. He had been trying to work out how it was that Princess Helga had been able to start up her inertial drive before the interstellar drive, how it was that there had been no prior lining up on a target star. "You realize what this means to your career," repeated the woman. "I haven't got one," said Grimes. "Not any longer." And somehow it didn't matter. HI T he voyage to Kobenhaven was not a pleasant one. The Commissioner made no attempt to conceal her feelings insofar as Grimes was concerned. RosaleCn, he knew, was on his side -- but what could a mere lady's maid do to help him? She could have done quite a lot to make him less miserable, but her mistress made sure that there were no opportunities. The officers remained loyal but not too loyal. They had their own careers to think about. As long as Grimes was captain they were obliged to take his orders and the Commissioner knew it as well as they did. Oddly enough, it was only Hollister, the newcomer, the misfit, who showed any sympathy. But he knew, more than any of the others, what had been going on what was going on in Grimes' mind. At last the two ships broke out into normal SpaceTime Just clear of Skandia's Van Allens. This Andersen, Grimes admitted glumly to himself, was a navigator and shiphandler of no mean order. He said as much into the transceiver. The little image of the Skandian captain in the screen grinned out at him cheerfully. "Just the normal standards of the Royal Skandian Navy, Captain. I'm casting you off, now. I'll follow you in. Home on the Kobenhaven Base beacon." He grinned again. "And don't try anything." "What can I try?" countered Grimes with a grin of his own. "I don't know. But I've heard about you. Lieutenant Grimes. You have the reputation of being able to wriggled out of anything." "I'm afraid I'm losing my reputation, Captain." Grimes, through the viewports, watched the magnetic grapnels withdraw into their recesses in Princess Helga's hull. He and Andersen applied lateral thrust simultaneously. As the vessels surged apart the fenders were deflated, sucked back into their sockets. Adder, obedient to her captain's will, commenced her descent towards the white and gold, green and blue sphere that was Skandia. She handled well, as well as Grimes had ever known her to do. But this was probably the last time that he would be handling this ship, any ship. The Commissioner would see to that. He shrugged. Well, he would make the most of it, would try to enjoy it. He saw that Beadle and Von Tannenbaum and Slovotny were looking at him apprehensively. He laughed. He could guess what they were thinking. "Don't worry," he told them. "I've no intention of going out in a blaze of glory. And now. Sparks, do you think you could lock on to that beacon for me?" "Ay, Captain," Slovotny replied. And then, blushing absurdly, "It's a damn shame, sir." "It will all come right in the end," said Grimes with a conviction that he did not feel. He shrugged again. At least that castiron bitch and her tin boy friends weren't in Control to ruin the bitter-sweetness of what, all too probably, would be his last pilotage. Adder fell straight and true, plunging into the atmosphere, countering every crosswind with just the right application of lateral thrust. Below her, continents and seas expanded, features -- rivers, forests,, mountains and cities -- showed with increasing clarity. And there was the spaceport, winking lights, in the center of which Grimes was to land his ship. He brought her down fast -- and saw apprehension dawning again on the faces of his officers. He brought her down fast -- and then, at almost the last possible second, fed the power into his inertial drive unit. She shuddered and hung there, scant inches above the concerte of the apron. And then the irregular throbbing slowed, and stopped, and Adder was down, with barely a complaint from the shock absorbers. "Finish with engines," said Grimes quietly. He looked through the ports at the soldiers who had surrounded the ship. "Are we under arrest. Captain?" asked Von Tannenbaum. "Just a guard of honor for the Commissioner," said Grimes tiredly. tended to be taken seriously -- but it wasn't too far from the mark. The soldiers were, actually, members of the Royal Bodyguard and they did, eventually, escort Mrs. Commissioner Dalwood to the Palace. But that was not until after the King himself had been received aboard Adder with all due courtesy, or such courtesy as could be mustered by Grimes and his officers after a hasty reading of Dealings With Foreign Dignitaries. General Instructions. Grimes, of course, could have appealed to the Commissioner for advice; she moved in diplomatic circles and he did not. As long as I'm Captain of this ship I'll stand on my own two feet... Luckily the Port Authorities had given him warning that His Skandian Majesty would be making a personal call on board. He was a big young man, this King Eric, heavily muscled, with ice-blue eyes, a flowing yellow moustache, long, wavy yellow hair. Over baggy white trousers that were thrust into boots of unpolished leather he wore a shortsleeved shirt of gleaming chain mail. On his head was, a horned helmet. He carried a short battleaxe. The officers with him -- with the exception of Captain Andersen whose own ship was now down -- were similarly uniformed, although the horns of their helmets were shorter, their ceremonial axes smaller. Andersen was in conventional enough space captain's dress rigGrimes' little day cabin was uncomfortably crowded. There was the King, with three of his high officers. There was Andersen. There was, of course, the Commissioner and she had brought her faithful robot, John, with her. Only King Eric and Mrs. Dalwood were seated. John, Grimes admitted, had his uses. He mixed and served drinks like a stage butler. He passed around cigarettes, cigarillos and cigars. And Mrs. Dalwood had her uses. Grimes was not used to dealing with royalty, with human royalty, but she was. Her manner, as she spoke to the King, was kind but firm. Without being disrespectful she managed to convey the impression that she ranked with, but slightly above, the greatgrandson of a piratical tramp skipper. At first Grimes feared (hoped) that one of those ceremonial but sharp axes would he brought into play -- but, oddly enough, King Eric seemed to be enjoying the situation. "So you see. Your Majesty," said the Commissioner, "that it is imperative that I resume my journey to Dhartana as soon as possible. I realize that this vessel will be delayed until the necessary repairs have been effected, so I wonder if I could charter one of your ships." She added: "I have the necessary authority." Eric blew silky fronds of moustache away from his thick lips. "We do not question that. Madam Commissioner. But you must realize that We take no action without due consultation with Our advistors. Furthermore -- " he looked like a small boy screwing up his courage before being saucy to the schoolteacher -- "We do not feel obliged to go out of Our way to render assistance to your Federation." "The Princess Ingaret incident was rather unfortunate. Your Majesty," admitted Mrs. Dalwood sweetly. "But I never thought that the Skandians were the sort of people to bear grudges." "We are not. Madam Commissioner. But a monarch, these days, is servant to as well as leader of his people..." Grimes saw the generals, or whatever they were, exchanging ironical glances with Captain Andersen. "But, Your Majesty, it is to our common benefit that friendly relations between Skandia and the Federation be reestablished." Friendly relations? She looks as though she wants to take him to bed. And he knows it... "Let me suggest. Madam Commissioner, that you do me -- Us -- the honor of becoming Our guest? At the Palace you will be able to meet the Council of Earls as soon as it can be convened. I have no doubt We have no doubt that such a conference will be to the lasting benefit of both Our realms." "Thank you. Your Majesty. We are -- " She saw Grimes looking at her sardonically and actually blushed. "I am honored." "It should not be necessary for you to bring your aides or your own servants," said King Eric. "I shall bring John and James," she told him. "They are my robot servitors." Eric, whose face had fallen, looked cheerful again. "Then We shall see that all is ready for you." He turned to one of his officers. "General, please inform the Marshal of the Household that Madam Commissioner Dalwood is to be Our guest." The general raised his wrist transceiver to his bearded lips. softly passed on the instructions. "John," ordered the Commissioner, "tell Miss Rosaleen and James to pack for me. Miss Rosaleen will know what I shall require." "Yes, Madam," replied the robot, standing there. He was not in telepathic communication radio was as good. "Oh, Your Majesty -- " "Yes, Madam Commissioner?" "What arrangements are being made for Lieutenant Grimes and his officers -- and for my lady's maid? Presumably this ship will be under repair shortly and they will be unable to live aboard." "M rs. Dalwood." Grimes did not try very hard to keep his rising resentment from showing, "May I remind you that I am captain of Adder's And may I remind you that Regulations insist that there must be a duty officer aboard at all times in foreign ports?" "And may I remind you, Mr. Grimes, that an Admiral of the Fleet or a civilian officer of the Board of Admiralty with equivalent rank can order the suspension of any or all of the Regulations? Furthermore, as such a civilian officer, I know that nothing aboard your ship, armament, propulsive units or communications equipment, is on the Secret List. You need not fear that our hosts' technicians will learn anything at all to their advantage." She added, too sweetly; "Of course, you might learn from them." King Eric laughed gustily. "And that is why We must insist. Lieutenant, that neither you nor your officers are aboard while repairs are in progress. Captain Andersen, please make arrangements for the accommodation of the Terran officers." "Ay, Your Majesty," replied Andersen smartly. He looked at Grimes and said without words. I'm sorry, spaceman, hut that's the way it has to be. G rimes and his officers were housed in the Base's Bachelor Officers' Quarters and Rosaleen was accommodated in the barracks where the female petty officers lived. They weren't prisoners -- quite. They were guests but strictly supervised guests. They were not allowed near their own ship and that hurt. They were not allowed near any of the ships in addition to Princess Helga and Adder three destroyers, a transport and two tugs were in port. Captain Andersen, who seemed to have been given the job of looking after them, was apologetic. "But I have to remember that you're spacemen. Lieutenant. And I have to remember that you have the reputation of being a somewhat unconventional spaceman. with considerable initiative." He laughed shortly. "I shudder to think what would happen if you and your boys flew the coop in any of the wagons -- yours or ours that are berthed around the place." Grimes sipped moodily from his beer glass -- he and Andersen were having a drink and chat in the well-appointed wardroom of the B.O.Q. He said, "There's not much chance of our doing that, sir. You must remember that the Commissioner is my passenger and that I am responsible for her. I could not possibly leave without her." "Much as you dislike her?" Andersen grinned. "I think she is quite capable of looking after herself." "I know that she is. Captain. Even so -- " "If you're thinking of rescuing her" "I'm not," Grimes told him. He had seen the Palace from the outside, a grim, gray pile that looked as though it had been transported, through Space and Time, from Shakespeare's Elsinore. But there was nothing archaic about its defenses and it was patrolled by wellarmed guards who looked at least as tough as the Federation's Marines. He went on almost incuriously; "I suppose that she's being well treated." "I have heard that His Majesty is most hospitable." "Mphm. Well, we certainly can't complain, apart from a certain lack of freedom. Mind you, Mr. Beadle is whinging a bit. He finds your local wenches a bit too robust for his taste. He prefers small brunettes to great, strapping blondes. But your people have certainly put on some good parties for us. And Rosaleen was telling me that she's really enjoying herself -- the P.O.s' mess serves all the fattening things she loves with every meal." "Another satisfied customer," said Andersen. "But I'm not satisfied. Captain. I know damn well that the repairs to my Mannschenn Drive took no more than a day. How long are we being held here?" "That, Lieutenant, is a matter for my masters and yours. We and our ships--are no more than pawns on the board." The Captain looked at his watch. "Talking of ships, I have some business aboard Princess Helga. You must excuse me." He finished his beer and got to his feet. "Don't forget that after lunch you're all being taken for a sail on the Skaggerak." "I'll not forget, sir," Grimes informed him. He was, in fact, looking forward to it. He enjoyed the sailing excursions in stout little wooden ships as much as any Skandian, already had proved himself capable of handling a schooner under a full press of canvas quite competently, was realizing that seamanship and spacemanship, the skilled balancing of physical forces, have much in common. He sat down again when Andersen had left the almost deserted wardroom, saw Hollister coming toward him. The telepath said in a low voice, "I'm afraid you won't be taking that sail. Captain." Grimes was going to make some cutting remark about psionic snooping, then thought better of it. "Why not, Mr. Hollister?" The psionic communications officer grinned wryly. "Yes, I've been snooping. Captain. I admit it. I've maintained contact of a sort with John "The tin telepath?" "You can call him that. He's very lonely in the Palace, and he's going to be lonelier." "What the hell are you talking about?" "The Commissioner has been getting along very well with the King. She has persuaded him to release us, even though the Council of Earls is not altogether in approval. We should get the word this afternoon and be on our way shortly afterward. Adder is completely spaceworthy." "I know. Captain Andersen as good as told me. But why is John beans to you?" "She wanted to make a farewell gift to His Majestyand he, it seems, has always wanted a robot valet. Humanoid robots are not manufactured on Skandia, as you know." "And so John's been sold down 'the river. My heart fair bleeds for him." "No, Captain. Not JohnJames. John's 'brother.' They think of each other as brothers. They feel affection, a very real affection, for each other." "Incredible." "Is it. Captain? I've heard about the Mr. Adam affair and how a mere machine was loyal io you." "Then not so incredible." One of the wall speakers crackled into life. "Will Lieutenant Grimes, captain of the Federation Survey Service Courier Adder, please come at once to telephone booth fourteen? Will Lieutenant Grimes, captain of the Federation Survey Service Courier Adder, please come at once to telephone booth fourteen?" "Coming," grumbled Grimes. He was not surprised to see Andersen's face in the little screen, to hear him say, "Orders from the Palace, Lieutenant. You're to get your show on the road at fifteen hours Local. Mrs. Dalwood will board at fourteen-thirty. You, your officers, and Miss Rosaleen Boyle will board at thirteen-thirty. You will find all in order, all in readiness." "Thank you, Captain." Andersen grinned. "Don't thank me. Thank His Majesty -- or Commissioner Dalwood." Grimes returned to the table where he had left Hollister. He said, "You were right." "Of course I was right. And now, if I may. I'll give you a warning." "Go ahead." "Watch John. Watch him very carefully. He's bitter, vengeful." "Are you in touch with him now?" "Yes." The telepath's face had the faraway expression that made it obvious that he was engaged in conversation with a distant entity. Suddenly he smiled. "It's all right. He has assured me that even though he feels that Mrs. Dalwood has betrayed him and his brother he is quite incapable of physically harming any human being. The built-in safeguards are too strong for him to overcome." "Then that's all right." Grimes knew that he should be worrying nonetheless -- but the Commissioner was a big girl and could look after herself. And how could the robot harm her in any way but physically? "You've been snooping in its -- his -- mind, so you know how he ticks." "Yes, Captain." Grimes strode to the reception desk and asked the attractive, blond petty officer to have Adder's crew paged. M rs. dalwood looked well. She had softened somehow and seemed to have put on a little weight -- although not as much as Rosaleen. She sat at ease in her day room, admiring the beautiful, jewel-encrusted watch that now adorned her left wrist. Grimes sat on the edge of his chair, watching her, waiting for her to speak. To one side stood the robot John, silent, immobile. "Well, Lieutenant," she said, not too unpleasantly, "you managed to get us upstairs without any major catastrophe. I hope that we shall reach our destination in a reasonably intact condition. We should. As you must have noticed, the work carried out by the Skandian technicians is of excellent quality. Like this watch." She turned her wrist so that Grimes could see it properly. "It seems strange that a robust people such as the Skandians, space Vikings, should be such outstanding watchsmiths -- but they are, as you probably know. His Majesty insisted that I accept this keepsake from him." Grimes said nothing. The Commissioner continued: "Yes. Things could have been worse. Much worse, as it turned out. His Majesty and I reached an understanding. Together we accomplished more, much more, than the so-called diplomats." I can imagine it, thought Grimes -- and to his surprise experienced a twinge of sexual jealousy. Her manner stiffened. "But don't think, Mr. Grimes, that I shall not be putting in a full report on your conduct. It is my duty as a Commissioner to do so. I cannot forget that you gave me your resignation." Suddenly John spoke. He said tonelessly, "He is thinking of you." The Commissioner seemed to forget that Grimes was present. Her face softened again. "He is? Tell me " "He misses you. Madam. He is thinking,  really loved her. She reminded me so much of my dear old mother." Grimes laughed. He couldn't help it. Mrs. Dalwood screamed furiously, "Be silent, John. I forbid you to speak, ever, unless spoken to by me." "Yes, Madam." "And as for you, Mr. Grimes, you heard nothing." Grimes looked at her, into the eyes that were full of appeal. He remembered what he had heard of Mrs. Commissioner Dalwood before ever he had the misfortune to meet her. The beautiful Mrs. Dalwood, the proud Mrs. Dalwood, the so-called femme fatale of the Admiralty who could, and did, compete with much younger women on equal terms. In a less permissive society she could never have attained her high rank; in Earth's past she could have become a King's courtesan. And in Skandia's present? Grimes said softly, "Of course. King Eric is very young." "Mr. Grimes, you heard nothing." He could not resist the appeal in her voice, the very real charm.  may not be an officer much longer, but I'll still try to be a gentleman. He said, "I heard nothing." looked at Grimes over his desk, over the skeletal fingers with which he had made the too-familiar steeple. He said, without regret, "So I shall be losing you. Grimes." "Yes, sir." "Frankly, I was surprised." "Yes, sir." "But not altogether pained." Grimes wasn't sure how to take this. He said nothing. "Tomorrow morning. Grimes, you hand over your command to Lieutenant Beadle. I think that he deserves his promotion." "Yes, sir." "But how did you do it. Grimes? Don't tell me that. No. She's not your type, nor you hers." "You can say that again, sir." "It can't be what you do. It can't be what you know. It must be whom you know Or what you know about whom, thought Lieutenant Commander Grimes a little smugly.  T he Dragon God stood on a small rise at the end of the field. Its proud blind head with the gleaming teeth stood tall, watching over the welfare of the Valley and all the Smifs in it. The bright iron of the ancient structure glowed under the layer of sacrificial goose grease and butter that the Smifs had rubbed over it. Smiftu kneeled before it, right knee on the haft of his spade, praying. He prayed the old prayer, the words his mother had taught him. "O God, whose roar shook the Valley, whose head bit the earth itself with the bite of the hundred hundred spades of a hundred hundred Smifs, deliver my child from fever." He opened his eyes and looked up and made the cupped hand sign of the Dragon God. And at the same time he checked to all sides for marauders seeking to steal his spade. His child would most likely die. That was bearable; three of his other children had already died. That was life. Children were born usually ten moons after Schnoppsday. They lived a little while and they died. But so long as a man had his own spade, life would go on. Spadelessness was death. From the corner of his eye he made out the skulking rag-covered figure of Smifive. Resolutely he laid both his knees upon his spade and went on with his prayers. He did not think they would help but he had promised his woman that he would offer sacrifice. He wished he could believe in prayer the way the women did, the way old mumbling Smiften used to before he died. It must be comforting. To forget the stoopshouldered agony of working the field with his spade. To put aside the cold and the hunger in some inner joy, some secret exaltation shared with the Dragon God as He stood brooding endlessly on His Mound above the tater crop. Smiftv's knees began to ache but he stayed in his place, punishing himself for his godlessness. The Dragon God had never been good to him. His prayers had never been answered. And today he was going to sacrifice the last fat in the house, the scraped and hoarded renderings of a woodchuck he had killed with his spade. He would rub it on the bare teeth of the Dragon God so they would not go red with anger. The old spade chiefs said that sacrifice placated the anger of the Dragon God. Smiftu did not believe them. It was a sacrifice that the porcupines and the skunks and the barefooted spadeless Smifs came and claimed, licked from the iron in the night. Within a few days all trace would be gone and the Dragon God would start to turn red in his anger. The Dragon God. The Dragon God. The words taunted him. The Dragon God took all and gave nothing. Took their grease and took every Sandday of their lives. Took a whole dawn-to-dusk day of rubbing with the bright sand from the creek until His redness went away and He was ready for the Sandday anointing with the grease that all had gathered. T he flying body hit Smiftu from behind and threw him face down but he was quick. His left hand grabbed his spade, his right flew forward and down to roll him free so that he came up fighting, left and right hands gripping the center of the man-tall spade haft, ready to cut or parry. But there was no need. Smifive fled in a flutter of rags, old and dull and frightened. Smiftu did not pursue him, did not even shout. To do so would profane the sanctity of the shrine and there was nothing to be gained. Smifive was spadeless. Soon he would die. Smiftu reached in the front of his jerkin and took out the woodchuck bladder of grease hanging around his neck on the sinew. Slowly and regretfully he squeezed the grease on to his fingers. He licked it quickly, telling himself he was doing so only to let his hunger double the importance of his sacrifice. He swallowed his saliva and worked away, standing tall, smearing and kneading the grease with his left hand, right hand holding his spade at the point of balance. Out in the field one or two of the more devout Smifs stopped work and raised their cupped hands in the Dragon God sign. They thought it was a good omen to have a Smif giving sacrifice on the very morning of Schnoppsday. It was especially good that Smiftu was the one making sacrifice. Smiftu was a rich man. His was the only one-press spade in the Valley. Deep it was, deeper than it was wide, so that one push of a man's heel would turn up enough ground for taters. Most of the other Smifs had two-press spades, worn down to half their height, so a man's work was doubled. Some of the older men had spades worn down to three-press shallowness. You could pick them out at a distance by the way they worked, pumping their spades three times with their heels as they worried the soil over. Smiftu felt a moment of pride as he stood there, poised tall, his spade in his hand and his own personal sacrifice greasing the jaws of the God. He was a spade chief and a good Smif. Perhaps the God would listen and the spots on his son's face would pass from red to white and turn into little holes and the fever would go away. Sometimes it happened. It had happened to him. And if it did not, he would ask the Schnopps Lord for help. The Schnopps Lord was coming this day. Looksmif had seen him at the end of the Valley. He would come and bring all the Smifs together from up and down the Valley. He would make marks on a fine white skin and he would give a horn of schnopps to all the men and women. Then he would take down the sweebarrel and let all the children reach out a double handful of the running yellow sweetness. And by then the schnopps would make the walls of the Valley swim and tumble and the Smifs would laugh and dance and fight and love their women on the bare ground. And when they awoke the great lord would be gone, leaving rolls of gingham cloth and sometimes, if the woman he had loved had pleased him, he would leave a spade. It would be new and tall and the virgin who was not a virgin would claim it for her own. And the young Smifs would fight and the winner would take the spade and the girl and the yellowhaired baby she would have in the snow time. Smiftu stood back and made the dragon sign, then turned indifferently and walked away to his own strip to tend his taters and beans. His was a good strip, crumbly red soil that made the taters grow big. This gave him room for the luxury of beans. Too precious to be eaten as they grew, they would be plucked and dried for Smiftu and his woman to chew in snow time. He went to work at once, working left-handed while he licked the last traces of grease from his right fingers. His spade jumped and danced over the ground, kicking away the lares that sucked the goodness from his soil. He liked to watch the shiny spade twisting and turning, it soothed him and made him forget the stiffness of his back and the emptiness of his belly. And yet his mind was restless. The other spade chiefs said he was wise. He looked into things and through things. He did not say all the things he thought. Once he had stood up in the council and said the sides of the Dragon God would make many spades. For that they might have stoned him. But they had done nothing. While his children grew sick and died, while his woman had blood in her mouth from coughing, the old ones did nothing. Why? Why did none of them lift his head from his own strip and look beyond the Valley? Perhaps there was meat there, many woodchucks. Perhaps there was good soil, like his strip. But they said that this was their Valley, another Valley was for other Smifs. They did nothing, nor did they look for answers from the Schnopps Lord. They were afraid and Smiftu felt anger in his heart and he made his resolution. Today he would ask the Schnopps Lord for help. As he made his plan he heard the first shouts of welcome from the huts at the end of the Valley. He turned, like all the other Smifs, and saw the Schnopps Lord on his wagon drawn by great beasts pulling slowly along the edge of the tater strips toward the meeting place in front of the Dragon God. With all the other Smifs from the fields he waved his spade and shouted and ran in clumsy hobbling leaps over the growing tater plants toward the Schnopps Lord. Serov flourished his whip at the Smiths and clucked his team into a trot. All who could walk or drag themselves were drawn into the wagon's wake like the screaming tail of a horsedrawn comet. He did not need to go twice around the settlement, as was suggested in the Census-man's manual. He needed only to ring his bell and pull his wagon up to the low mound where the antique power shovel stood. Serov grinned when he saw it. All traces of paint were long since gone but the metal gleamed like a knife blade under the layer of evil-smelling grease the Smiths had rubbed on it. Really, these valley morons were too much, spending one day in ten scraping the shovel down with river sand. Still, it was not as amusing here as in Kellyvalley, fifty kilometers back. Those dizzy bastards worshiped a Mack Truck. He stopped the wagon and stood up tall on it while he looped the reins around the brake lever. The instructors at Census School had always stressed that. Make the most of your height. Stay high and aloof and you'll never have trouble. Serov did not anticipate trouble. He eased his Luger in the low-slung holster he had made for himself and swelled his chest. It was easy to imagine himself a U.S. Marshal at times like this. Serov knew all about U.S. Marshals. His doctoral thesis had been on the subject of camp culture of the mid-twentieth century. He had seen all the western movies and TV shows to be found in the Museum of Primitive Arts. Because he was young and impressionable, despite his education he liked to model himself on one Matt Dillon. He would have liked a Peacemaker .# on his hip instead of the issue Luger, but this was impossible. Guns were illegal except for the admittedly old-fashioned weapons issued to front line men like himself. He waited silently, not moving until the last whimpering of anticipation had died away, while the Smiths gathered in front of him. "Dobri dyen," he said at last and waited while the formless roar of reply broke and subsided. "Where is the chief Smif?" he asked and the crowd parted to let the feeble old man come through. He was toothless and almost blind and his hair and beard were matted. He was dressed in a pair of shorts and a leather coat-liner that looked to Serov like British army issue. That might be so, he decided. Smith was an English name and the Smiths of this valley might have had ancestors in that Imperial army. He let the old man stand for a moment, then said, "Happy Schnoppsday, Smif." The old man bobbed his head and cackled. "Happy Schnoppsday, Lord". "Are all the Smifs here?" Serov kept his voice low and firm, enough like Matt Dillon for him to have blushed to have his City friends hear him. "Smififteen is sick. He will die today and Smifive's woman is in labor she will be here soon," the old man said. "Good. There will be schnopps this day for every Smif." All the male Smiths were lining up in spade seniority. First was Smiftu, spade in hand, adenoidal mouth gaping slightly. He was tall for a savage, over five feet and he was dressed in woodchuck pelts, which marked him out as a resourceful man. Such men are dangerous, Serov thought. He debated whether to take away Smiftu's spade, dooming him to starvation once the present potato harvest was gathered. However, some echoed kindliness from his television folk tales stopped him. He would allow the savage to keep his weapon. After all, he was doomed anyway. Judging by the muster this morning the population had dropped another twenty percent through the winter. The Experiment was succeeding and anyway he had work to do. The bribe that brought the Smifs out of hiding must be paid and, as always, the census had to be taken. He picked up the pink plastic cup from the wagon bed and turned to the wooden alcohol keg on its trestle behind him. He opened the spigot and let four ounces of the clear neat spirit run into the cup. The smell of it was almost enough to make him gag. Raw synthetic spirit, by-product of a refinery. Originally, a hundred and twenty years ago, when the experiment began, the spirit had been rum, good rum. Over the years, however, since the Experiment was working as well in the Carribean as it was on the mainland, rum was no longer produced. In its stead came the synthetics, potent blinding chemicals with the power to wash away a year's worth of hunger and sickness in two gulps. He presumed that one of the previous census-men in this valley had been German or Jewish and had used the foreign appellation for the spirit that was known as gin or vodka or even viski in other valleys. Personally he liked the word schnopps, it was so perfectly nonspecific. H e turned and faced the crowd. The brown, hungry face of Smiftu looked up at him from the side of the wagon. Serov held the plastic cup for a few seconds longer, relishing the desire in the faces about him. God! He was king. Standing there with a few ounces of oblivion in his hands. No wonder so many census-men couldn't give up the feeling of power. Nobody ever missed them, of course. It was presumed that they had died. Within the airconditioned silence of the City no one could imagine a censusman going native. They didn't know the power a few ounces of spirit and a few spades bestowed upon a man out in the valleys and they were too occupied with the satisfactions of the New Leisure to try to find out. After all, one could not be teleported into the Valleys, one had to move physically. In fact, now that the last of the old helicopters were rusting from lack of use, a horse and wagon was the only way to get anywhere outside the Cities and none of the manicured City Dwellers would descend to such a barbarous method of transportation. That was only for the few restless souls like himself who had volunteered for census work. He handed down the plastic cup, ceremonially known as the "Horn" among the Smifs. But Smiftu did not take it. Instead his pleading, broken-toothed mouth opened in clumsy speech. "Lord. Many Smifs say you come from a far land, from City." "True," Serov said impatiently. "Lord, it is said that many schnoppsy things happen in City. That men do not grow old, that children do not die of spotted fever." "Speak your mind, Smiftu," Serov said sternly and a worried whisper ran through the crowd. What was Smiftu doing? Why did he insult the Lord Schnopps with talk? Smiftu turned and glanced back, silencing them all with the reflected power of his one-press spade. "Lord, my son is sick with spotted fever. I have prayed to Dragon God but the fever remains. Does the Lord have patience to cast oiit the fever?" This son of a bitch was thinking. Serov frowned. That was bad. The  last thing he wanted on this circuit was a noble savage. That had been the selling point for the Experiment when it began, of course, to shift the indigent unemployed townspeople out where they could work for their own living. And they'd bought it. They had come out into a well advertised, carefully euphemized wilderness to eat bread by the sweat of their own brows. It had all been so cynically done: why, they had even been assigned to their areas alphabetically. And once they had been isolated there it had been easy to exploit them or to starve them out, as the economy demanded, to withdraw fuel for their machines, drugs, seeds, tools, and watch them revert into helpless savages. There had been uprisings of course, repeated time after time until the original settlers had died and only their children were left, dealing with an inadequate environment, without energy to move out of their Valleys. Only once in a while did an aberration like Smiftu break through, some savage with a high enough IQ to think for himself. Such had to be dealt with summarily. Serov stood taller, looking out over Smiftu's head. "This Smif angers me. There will be no schnopps for this Smif. There will be no schnopps for any Smif who listens to this idle talk. The Dragon God protects all. Let no Smif doubt the Dragon God's power." The Smifs mumbled and shuffled. After they had drunk they would stone Smiftu. They would seize the opportunity to kill him and strip him of his spade and of his garden. Sacrificially Serov poured the schnopps upon the ground. Then he filled the cup again and passed it to the next man in line. The man crooked his tall spade in his elbow and drained the schnopps in two bursting gulps. And then the next man was pushing him aside, raising his own arms in his turn. Serov counted mentally as he doled out the schnopps. The adult males here were down by #, counting Smififteen who was dying and Smiftu who was doomed once the hangovers had worn off and reality faced the Smifs again tomorrow. A decrease since last year. The Valley had long since ceased to be productive, had become troublesome. and poured spirit for the women, flappy-breasted dirty witches, for whom he had nothing but contempt. Conceived on noon of some previous Schnoppsday, resented even before their birth, the savage women had nothing noble or desirable about them. When one contrasted them with the plastic-bosomed adornments of any City dweller's harem... However there was one little urchin who attracted him. She would be about thirteen, Serov judged, with breasts beginning to swell. She would do for today, he decided. When she came forward for her schnopps, her first schnopps, he judged, he touched her upon the shoulder and she crouched beside him warily, awaiting his pleasure. He fed schnopps to each of the women and then broached the molasses barrel, the sweebarrel as it was known in Valley pidgin. He called to those of the women who were not yet hopelessly drunk and they brought him the smallest and the sickest of the children first. He stood back as the tots jammed filthy fingers into the syrup and rubbed the sweetness into their whole faces, as if their very pores had tastebuds. Good kids. Go ahead, infect the syrup and pass it on. Pass it on so that the next census shows less and the census after shows less again. Pass on the barrel with a cargo of mumps and measles and diptheria and smallpox and all the other goodies. Pass it along and help nature take her course. He laughed, watching the toddlers taking their turns until they were lifted away screaming by their reeling mothers. No wonder City people had ceased to consider the savages any threat. There was no spine here, no guts. Just a blind groping for more, like kittens whose eyes had never opened. In a final generous, vicious gesture he lifted the almost empty sweet barrel and pitched it to the ground, where the children fought and snarled over it like dogs. Tooth and nail they fought for the few calories that might so easily have been theirs if only their fathers bothered to keep a few bees. If only -- if only! Starting from here in this Valley these stupid bastards could still recover. He looked around him at the drunken Smifs who were fighting, dancing, copulating, or simply lying on the ground like dead sheep. Then he reached into his haversack and took out a cleaning swab. With it he wiped the girl he had chosen, contemptuously ripping her few rags from her. The cleanser made her shudder but she did not resist him. Within a minute she was completely clean, slightly perfumed and ready for him. He dropped the soiled swab and took out a concentrated food bar from his kit. While she wolfed it down he took a pull at his hip flask, letting the centuries-old cognac give him the added fire he needed to soil himself with the little savage. Then he led her to the mound beside the old power shovel, the only grassy plot in the whole valley and laid her down. A ll the while Smiftu watched from his hiding place behind the huts. Fear was big inside him, making his breath small and his heart very loud. He had seen Smifs kill an unwanted Smif, had helped to do it, so he could expect no mercy. And yet something bigger than fear kept him where he was, watching. He swallowed and he watched. The God made love to his women exactly as a Smif would have done. It was the first Schnoppsday that Smiftu had ever been sober and he observed with interest what was happening. Perhaps the Lord was like a Smif in other ways, too. Perhaps the Lord would die if a Smif hit ear with the keen edge of his spade. He watched while the children squabbled and licked the sweebarrel dry. And while the Lord Schnopps finished abusing the girl and stood up, kicking her aside. And then his eye ."illed with the horror of it as the Lord turned to the Dragon God, who stood high and proud on his Mound, and opened the front of his garment again and soiled the side of the Dragon God. It was too much for even a heretic like Smiftu to countenance. Silently he raced over the packed earth, vaulting over the sleepy children, his spade already poised in his hand. The Lord heard him and turned but his hands were too busy to reach for the loudspade he wore by his side and before he could reach it, Smiftu had sliced his throat with the edge of his spade. The Lord died as men die. He struggled and bled upon the ground and he died, choking and gurgling. No Smif was awake to see him die. Only Smiftu. And as the Lord died so did Smiftu's fears. He reached down and took the loudspade from the dead Lord's hand. And his eyes turned to the Lord's wagon and the great beasts who pulled it. Slowly Smiftu went to the wagon and looked into it. He found many spades in it, two hands' fingers of spades. And he found gingham cloth and something that felt like hide but was not hide and other wonders that he did not understand. And he found the schnopps barrel to be empty. And he thought a thought perhaps the barrel could hold water as well as schnopps. And perhaps the same beasts who drew the wagon with schnopps could draw the wagon with water. And many walks to the well and from the well would be saved. A man could sit upon the wagon and not work. And a man could think. And Smiftu's puzzled mind became for an instant clearer. He would think perhaps of taking one side from the Dragon God and making a giant spade that the beasts could pull. Yes. Smiftu would think of many, many things. That much he knew. if LawiMV  iiMfarkine  icRces  Kontz  Borrett, Jr. through the early fall evening. The wind always blew out of the mountains at that time of the year in Denver. Robert Brent Holmes was used to it. He zipped his windbreaker to the neck as he got into his car and drove to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where he was officially listed as a Custodial Engineer -- a government euphemism for janitor. At thirty-seven, married and with three daughters. Holmes was an average sort of man -- perhaps a little heavier than he needed to be, perhaps not as bright as he would have wanted -- and perhaps a little disappointed that he was a janitor and nothing more. But he had liked working at the arsenal because he had felt it was a job with a great deal of security and more fringe benefits than most janitorial jobs offered and because the pay, although low, was better than the average janitor received. He had been working at the arsenal for three years, and had expected to continue working there until something better came along. His wife had objected to his working the night shift -- but in a year or two, if all had gone well, he would probably have been getting his choice of shifts. But the arsenal had just completed its task of detoxifying various nerve gases which had been stored there. The job had taken longer than had been expected but it was finished at last. So the talk was that the arsenal would be shut down and the thirty-five hundred employees either transferred or laid off. Robert Brent Holmes' job was one that would be done away with outright and he was now nervously awaiting a dismissal order. "Nobody ever cares what happens to people like us," his wife had said before he left for his shift. "We can all starve as far as they're concerned." "Well, they're talking about keeping the arsenal open to destroy bacteriological weapons," Holmes told her. "We'll just have to hope that's what they do." There were several custodial engineers at the arsenal and Holmes was hardly noticed as he showed his I. D. card and drove through the gate. As a matter of fact, he was hardly noticed anywhere at any time. Before he had learned of the threatened closing of the facility Holmes had never paid much attention to what went on there. But with the imminent possibility of losing his job, he became interested in everything about it. He began to read every newspaper story, every report in the magazines and he listened to every radio news story about the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. A battle was raging between the politicians of Denver and the Pentagon, which was in charge of the facility. The loss of thirty-five hundred jobs was no laughing matter to Denver and the local leaders fought hard to retain the large employer. Following the signing of the International Peace Pact in early #, all the nations of the world were in the process of destroying all but the internally necessary defensive weapons in their arsenals. Robert Holmes laughed to think that the peace which had eluded the world from the beginning of mankind was now approaching reality and was likely to deprive him of his livelihood. It was a bitter laugh at best. Somehow the local politicians got through to the Pentagon. Coincidentally, the military leaders of the nation were at a loss to find a place, fully equipped, without any other function, at which the stock of a bacteriological warfare strain could be destroyed. Lot #A, a particularly virulent strain, was at the time being stored where it had been grown, at the Maryland Chemical and Biological Research and Development Center. L ot #A was a problem. It produced a blood disease in animals that was invariably fatal. Scientists could find no antidote for the disease. The fifteen hundred different cultures of Lot #A were extremely unstable and expensive to store, requiring constant refrigeration in order to keep the strain sporulated and non-reproductive. Having failed to find an antidote, the scientists got to work on a means of prophylaxis against the strain. Their quest in this direction went unrewarded. Lot #A therefore was useless as a weapon, since no protection for friendly populations was available. The military had declared the whole lot "obsolete," and recommended that it be destroyed immediately. When the International Peace Pact had been ratified Lot #A became an example to prove that the United States was indeed destroying its offensive weapons. At about this time, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal finished its detoxification function, and the debate about what to do with the facility had reached the executive mansion in Washington. Senator Longdon of Vermont made a strongly worded speech against all germ warfare weapons, and particularly against the storage of such weapons. The President, cognizant of the political bombshell which would be made of continued storage of biological weapons especially Lot #A saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Calling the congressional delegation from Colorado into the Oval Room of the White House, he held a press conference at which he told the world the United States would begin destroying stocks of biological weapons immediately. and that the Rocky Mountain Arsenal would be converted for that use, at minimum cost, enabling the Denver area to maintain the thirty-five hundred jobs at the arsenal. A few voices were raised in protest, some claiming that the rest of the world powers could not be trusted, and that the U. S. would be left without a powerful enough deterrent. Others claimed it was unsafe to destroy these weapons near so large a population area. Robert Brent Holmes was happy when the new role of the arsenal was announced to his shift that early fall night. Knowing that he would have his Job for some time to come he went about his work, feeling free once more to plan his personal life during the winter months ahead. In the morning, when he reached home, he played with his old shepherd dog with greater gusto than usual, hugged and kissed each of his girls and happily told his wife about the arsenal's new lease on life. "This Senator Longdon from Vermont," his wife said, referring to a newspaper story, "doesn't think it's such a good idea to bring all those germs here." "What does he know?" Holmes answered. "He doesn't have to worry about his job. I think it's a great idea." The shipments of Lot #A began to arrive at the arsenal the following week. Holmes smiled as he saw the bright red, refrigerated, aluminum packing cases. With his job assured, he thought of takiftg the children sledding in the mountains when the snows came, of short drives in the foothills in the spring, new clothes for his wife and all the other things a man can enjoy when he is on regular wages. Holmes, one night, was at his duties in the corridor in front of the hermetically sealed laboratory. He had swept the floor and had begun to mop it when the setup crew started to bring in Lot #A and unload the cases in the laboratory. Homes cursed under his breath as the men tracked up his freshly mopped floor, not even noticing him or the clean tile. He mumbled as the laboratory was depressurized with a hiss, the seal was broken and the men went inside, guided by the chief microbiologist. Handtruck tracks and footprints continued to slop up the clean floor and finally Holmes decided to wait until the men were finished before he continued to mop the corridor. H e watched as the individual vials of culture were carefully removed from refrigerated packing cases, and each vial was placed in the refrigeration unit, in special racks. The unit was open on one side to expose the vials to ultraviolet radiation. The bacteria would be irradiated for twentyfour hours before being dumped into a bariumoxide bath for final destruction. Scientists who had worked with l.ot #A in Maryland had noted a peculiar property of the strain. Although exposure to ultra-violet for twenty-four hours immobilized most of the bacteria and rendered them permanently incapable of reproduction, a tenth of a percent of each culture was likely to mutate as a result of such exposure. The mutant strain, rather than being sterilized or otherwise weakened by irradiation, became active, more virulent than ever and, the bacteriologists surmised, if not destroyed by barium oxidation immediately, capable of reproducing at seven to ten times the normal rate. Further, this mutant produced the same disease as the rest of Lot #A, but the disease occurred so gradually in animal life that death took three to four weeks under most conditions, rather than the one to two weeks expected with the normal strain. For a period of ninety seconds after birth the mutant was particularly dangerous. Exposed to warmth and ultraviolet under proper conditions, the mutant multiplied wildly -- provided it met a saline and yet somewhat alkaline environment and fibrous, hairlike material upon which to string out during this period. Under these conditions the mutant strain was virtually indestructable. After the ninety-second gestation period the new strain reproduced geometrically, becoming air borne and evenmal life on the planet. Since these conditions were not likely to be met in the laboratory, containment and destruction were considered to be well within safe limits. Holmes continued to watch the setup men half-heartedly, wishing they would finish and get out of the corridor so he could complete his work there and move on. He was dropping behind schedule and would not have the time for a full lunch hour. When the men finally finished and left they walked past Holmes as though he weren't there. He was used to being an invisible man. All the janitors were nonexistent to the higher echelons. However, Holmes didn't care. As long as he got his full pay on time, his regular fringe benefits and was left in peace to do this work, he didn't care if all the people in the arsenal made believe he wasn't there. Let them be snobs --  don't need them. With the men gone and the laboratory once more pressurized and sealed. Holmes finished mopping the corridor, stopping once or twice for a breather and to look at the vials standing in their racks. He shook his head and made extra sure the floor near the three highimpact, plexi-styrene inset operation booths was clean. He glanced at the rubber gloves fastened under the viewplates in the booths inside the laboratory, waiting for the scientists to come and bring them to life in the slow, animated movements necessary safely to move the vials. After he had finished mopping the corridor, he looked at his watch. It was late -- well past the start of his normal lunch hour and too late to eat in the cafeteria. He took his lunch bucket from the cleanup cart, backed against the wall opposite the inset booths, and slid his backside to the floor. He opened the lunch bucket and took out the first of two sandwiches, smiling as he unwrapped it, and realized that it was tuna fish -- his favorite. He began to eat with gusto, pausing to hum bawdy ballads between bites . O UT of the corner of his eye. Holmes saw a bright flash of light. He looked up, but nothing was out of order and he went back to his sandwich. Another flash. This time he stood up and walked over to an inset booth. Light was flashing intermittently from a portion of the wall that could not be seen from outside the lab. Holmes gulped down the last of his sandwich and went into the inset booth. He still couldn't see the source of the flashes of light but he was almost certain something was wrong. He stuck his hands into the rubber gloves fastened to the booth and pulled his body closer to the viewplate. He could barely see the sparks jumping from a circuit-breaker in the wall, not two feet away from him, but within the lab. Then there was another flash, brighter than before, and Holmes thought he heard a crackling sound. He felt extreme heat on his right hand, through the glove. He glanced up at the vials of cultures. They were vibrating a little, the one closest to his right hand was tilted precariously. Holmes reached in and straightened it in its rack. Then he withdrew from the booth and walked to the fire alarm box. As he raised his hand to break the glass and sound the alarm, he noticed a fleck of his sandwich on his index finger, and unconsciously licked it off. Then he struck the little brass hammer against the glass, pulled the lever and sounded the fire alarm. He went back to his lunch bucket and packed everything to get it out of the way. The fire crew arrived instantly. They depressurized the lab, broke the seal and went in to put out the fire. The microbiologist was on the scene a moment later to inspect the damage. Holmes figured he'd have to mop the floor of the corridor again. He left, going to the next unit, intending to come back to the scene of the fire and clean up after the men finally were gone. "Doesn't seem to be any damage to the Lot," the microbiologist said into a walkie-talkie. "The heat of the fire could have dried and cracked the rubber gloves in booth A -- better replace the gloves immediately. The refrigeration unit was out for a second or so until the emergency power switched on. The men are completing circuit box rewiring now. All vials seem undamaged -- still cold." He didn't notice the hairline crack at the top of the vial Holmes had straightened. "Some of them are standing at peculiar angles. Must have been vibration from a slight explosion. No visible damage, though." R obert holmes finished the corridor in front of Lot #A just before his shift was over. He zipped up against the chill air as he left the arsenal. Orangegray slants of light were beginning to show in the black, predawn sky as he headed home. He was looking forward to some peace and quiet. He parked the car in front of his gate, walked into the front yard and was immediately pounced upon by his old dog. He petted the animal. He was as happy to see the dog as it was to see him. The shepherd licked his master's hands and some of the already activated mutant bacteria began a new colony in the animal's mouth. The strain was already beginning to multiply geometrically, having been brought to full and active life by the saline and alkaline saliva of Holmes's mouth. A new day was dawning. Robert Holmes walked into his house as he always did, perhaps a little happier than usual. He kissed his wife with genuine warmth instead of giving her the habitual peck on the cheek. She smiled at him, took his windbreaker and motioned him to breakfast. The children were just getting to the table; their hot cereal was steaming -- waiting for them. Holmes kissed each of his daughters in descending order from the eldest. An old dog, almost blind, the shepherd had few pleasures in life. The greatest was to greet his master when he came home from work. Next came the joy of rolling in the yard with the two youngest girls. But, for pure fun, there was nothing to surpass his games with the large black and white tomcat from next door. At least twice each day -- in the early morning, just before the cat was allowed into the house, and again in the evening when he went out -- the cat jumped the fence to play with the shepherd. This day was no exception. The dog was happy to see the blurred image of the cat coming toward him. They wrestled, as animals do, just playing, of course, the dog taking the cat's head into his m mouth, careful not to hurt his friend. Then the cat broke away and the dog chased him, faking menacing growls all the way. When the cat was caught, it was his turn to chase, and the shepherd ran, the cat hissing close on his tail. When the cat's master came out to go to work the game was broken off immediately. The cat liked to rub against his master's legs, waiting to be picked up and stroked. The old tom heard a door close and jumped back into his own yard, tail erect, running to his master's legs. Ricardo Montoya lifted his cat and allowed the animal to nip his hand gently. Then he got into his car for the short drive to Stapleton International Airport, where he prepared food for inflight meals. He had a busy day ahead. The first flight on his shift was headed for Los Angeles with connections to the Orient. The second flight went to New York with connections for Europe. Montoya was proud of his part in the vast transportation system that crossed through Denver. T he mutant strain of Lot #A was multiplying madly by the time Montoya's cat infected him. The bacteria no longer needed any saliva to speed reproduction. If bacteria had a paradise, these mutants were enjoying theirs. They had increased to a populaginal number. They were air-borne and spreading and conditions were favorable for even more rapid reproduction and infection. When Robert Holmes's dog died, eighteen days later, the family was sad but not surprised. The dog was old, winter was coming and the animal had seemed very tired and weak for a number of days before. They didn't take the dog to a veterinarian because they couldn't afford that kind of luxury. Besides, they knew the dog's days were numbered. The entire Holmes family was feeling under the weather by this time. Holmes himself felt tired and without energy all the time. His whole body ached, not badly, but enough to be uncomfortable. They all had diarrhea. Of course, it was the beginning of the flu season and they went through something like this every year. None of them thought much about it. Ricardo Montoya and his family seemed to have the flu bug also. Something was going around. Others in the city were complaining of aches and pains, fatigue and various other symptoms. During flu season such discomforts were common and nobody took alarm. At the arsenal work proceeded on schedule. Lot #A was being destroyed. The scientists were already looking forward to the next lot of biological weaponry to be disposed of at the arsenal. Hardly anyone at the place remembered the small electrical fire of almost three weeks ago. Besides, they had their own problems. Everyone in the Denver area seemed to have, to greater or lesser degree, some form of influenza. It was discouraging, many of the scientists thought. Here we are able to create and destroy complicated bacteriological forms, and we still can't do away with influenza or the common cold. On the morning of the twentythird day after the fire Robert Holmes felt terrible. He took some aspirin and and went to sleep. The children were already in bed with the flu and Mrs. Holmes was barely able to get galaxy stars "My very first novel, all about a still-to-come space race," says Ben Bova, "was rejected back in #. The publisher was afraid Senator Joseph McCarthy would take exception to an American suggesting the Russians might be ahead of us in anything. It was a more innocent world then." Seven years later, when Sputnik and the space race were launched, Ben was a technical editor on Project Vanguard, which was supposed to produce man's first artificial satellite. At the time, Ben admits, there were strong indications that the Russians would do it. "But," he says, "we were nonetheless shocked when Sputnik actually went up." Every year the Award to the man who has done the most for American astronautics. "At some point," Ben muses, "Nikita Khrushchev, the man who really got us to the moon, should have been the recipient." Ben discovered sf with the first issue of Superman comics. He was intrigued by the picture of the hero leaving the exploding planet Krypton. From there, Ben's reading in thefield followed a more or less traditional path from Burroughs to Heinlein to Bradbury... After writing and submitting a few unsuccessful stories, Ben sold his first novel. The Star Conquerors, ten years ago. The book was the first of many successful sciencefiction juveniles, and he has written as many science-fiction and sciencefact books for the general reader. Ben, his wife Rosa, and their two children, Michael and Regina, live in a suburb of Boston, where he is the Manager of Marketing for Avco Everett Research Laboratories. Part of his job is to find customers who are like building high-powered lasers and developing artificial hearts and finding new sources of energy... around the house. That evening Holmes felt so weak that he asked his wife to call the arsenal and tell them he would not be inthat he was too ill to work. It was the first time he had stayed home sick since he had started working at Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Mrs. Holmes couldn't get a line into the arsenal. The telephones were busy and remained busy all night. By the time Mrs. Holmes went to sleep, her husband was in a coma. She didn't notice it, though. She was so tired, she fell off to sleep as soon as she hit the bed. The children died quietly during the night. Robert Brent Holmes passed away around midnight. Mrs. Holmes was the last to go, sometime between two and three in the morning. There was no one to find the bodies. Even if there had been someone, there was nothing anybody could have done. Lot #A (mutant) was already in full control of the world's destiny. The first call came to the bacteriologists at the arsenal about midday of the twenty-third day after the electrical fire. A skeleton staff was manning the massive facilityabsenteeism being very high. The call was from a Denver pathologist who had done an autopsy on an old lady. The doctor claimed there was something peculiar about the blood slides from the old woman. He made an appointment with the bacteriologist to look at the slides the next day. The appointment was never kept. Both the pathologist and the bacteriologist were found dead by morning. The spread of the disease was unbelievably rapid. Deaths were so common and frequent in many countries that corpses were stacked up in the streets. Governments were unable to function. Industry ground to a halt. The industrialized nations were hit the hardest and the soonest. The mutant bacterial strain distributed itself through the air currents. Soon the animal food sources on the planet disappeared. By then it didn't matter. There were not tnany people or other animals around to eat the food animals. brought the first snow of the season to the Rocky Mountains and to Denver. The wind whipped the snow into small drifts in the city. Whirlwinds of snow spun through the quiet streets. The automatic, thermostatically controlled heating units in the buildings increased their output. The only sounds inside buildings were the hums and clicks of automatic machinery. Outside, only the wind made noise. The snow fell on the city, clean and white. It settled on the ground waiting for footsteps to crush it into slush.  I T'S a rainy day where I'm writing this, three months before you see it. The kind of day on which a writer does the first four pages of a manuscript based on nothing more than a pervasive mood and a chance opening sentence. If he's lucky, he'll eventually figure out where the story's going and finish it. More than likely, he'll throw those four pages away, with his subconscious keeping a word or two for use when it's relevant. If he does finish it, out of a sense of economy, he'll probably have to force the issue; what began as a moody outburst will be extruded into a "story" through one of the standard plot templates. He'll collect his few cents a word with an inner feeling of ordinariness. The next time the weather and he are like this, he'll say to himself: "Another one of those useless rainy days." Writers write lots of things that aren't "stories." The concept of "story" is essentially an invention of the audience. By the nature of things, the audience is prevented from reacting to anything but the structure of a given column of arranged alphabetical symbols. It can't know what an arrangement of w'ords meant to the writer. It can't finally extract a meaning until it receives a positive indication of realized purpose. That is, a plot-turn. But a writer speaks first to himself. He selects words and reactions in response to his intimate internal structure. A writer can tell himself a "story" with one sentence with a word. or sometimes less. Only afterward does he face the chore of expressing something like that same reaction to a group of strangers. If w'riters didn't have to publish, they wouldn't have many writing problems. Writers write to themselves automatically; little internal greeting cards and get-well messages; bulletins on the state of the environment; dunning letters; checks drawn on the bank of psychic satisfaction; diplomas; notices of termination of service. A writer is his own foster parent. He took over the assignment of raising himself on some early day when he noticed irrevocably that the world didn't have things quite right; that you might love others but you couldn't trust them to do a good job. Writers are happiest when they don't have to publish. Translating for strangers wastes time, obscures important points, and interferes with what should be an uninterrupted lifelong flow of communication. The happiest, most grown-up writers are the ones who find some non-conflicting means of earning a living. Of course, they don't get any stories out. A commercial writer a science fiction writer, say has a choice. He can writhe on his dilemma. Or he has the choice of not giving a damn; of divorcing what he publishes from what he writes to himself. The mind being infinitely ingenious in protecting its immediate comfort at all future costs, the divorced writer can maintain his position in the eyes of the audience by ceasing to take responsibility for communicating to his ward -- by leaving his personality in perpetual adolescence in exchange for his body's living. He is now free to devote himself as a "writer" solely to extracting reactions from audiences. Of eourse, he is no longer in a position to judge the validity of what he "writes." He develops an apparently egocentric exterior personality, forcing himself on the individuals around him with the word-exercises of the quipster, party raconteur, amusing drunk, or of the abrasive gadfly, compulsive lecturer, agitator, Don Juan, or ugly drunk. This is because words and actions have become mere appurtenances to the only message he has left, sent outward in the only direction he has: "How'm I doing?" Of course, if you don't know the answer to that one. Buddy, at every given moment, you're in trouble that won't be handled this side of the grave. But you are a "writer." No one around you can doubt it. The mind being infinitely ingenious, there's another way, which is to create a strict separation between what you are and what you do. The internal writing goes on; the public "writing" is something Mr. Hyde does. Essentially, this is an altitude of total contempt for the audience. Either way I doubt if there are significant other choices for him the divorced writer is no longer in a position to judge the validity of what he "writes." I T'S the nature of commercial writing science fiction, say to force writers toward divorce from themselves. The pressure is not to waste a word or an idea. You can see it in the way so many writers forward every feeble notion as an "idea" or expound at length on some incidental detail because it represents the only flash of true invention in an otherwise routine construction. The happy ones in this brood are those too young or too oblivious to perceive the nature of the process. (Writers come in all grades ol' intelligence; communication is not a measure of wit. One of the most "perceptive" writers in this business is a silly, stupid man by any measure of his ability to reason consistently or to function in this world. So are any number of nonwriter people, of course. That's my point in this instance: writers are human. They are vulnerable. At least, I hope so, because that's my excuse, too.) Under pressure economic pressure, ego pressure, or whatever comes in this regard -- a human writer cannot help but begin to exhibit the behavior of a trapped rat. If he is to maintain his editorial contacts, to keep his name before the audience, not break the flow of checks, to progress unfalteringly toward the day of boxed sets, mass reissues and the lecture circuit, there must be limes when he must perform out of tune with what goes on inside him. Repeated often enough, the offense to his vital parts is great enough so that the troublesome vital must be isolated; he ignores it and waits for gangrene, or he eats it off, and experiences immediate relief. The audience demand is for consistent excellence, of course. And why not? The implied contract states that the audience will get delivery of what it pays for, with the asking price for promised excellence set by the publisher. For the audience, the publisher is indistinguishable from the writer. It doesn't buy a manuscript; it buys a story, printed in a package with illustrations and the rub-off from the total gestalt of features, associated stories, typography, the memory of past issues and the featured promise of future publications. Even when the audience sits at the evening fire and listens to the bard, it buys his gestures, his voice, his manner of dress and the camel on which he rides. Day after day, village after village, fire after fire. And why should anyone care about his need to resolve his problems with his unsuitable wife, or his reckless child, or the frequent pain in his left arm? Yet he would love to tell you about them -- if it were possible to do so without first conferring them upon some hero with different clothes and a better camel... that is, upon someone for whom these attributes cannot be ultimately true, for he differs from the man who speaks of them? There are many dangerous professions. And many of them call not only for a disregard to personal safety but for a simultaneous exercise of complex and educated skill. The commercial arts, however, are uniformly dangerous even to the man sitting still in his chair. They can leave the body able to move and speak while macerating the personality; there is no topectomy as successful as the one the surgeon directs for himself. In most cases, coldly considered, there is no appreciable loss to the world. But the remorseless process spares neither small nor great. There's such a little time in which the commercial artist functions in joy. Yet next month's issue comes out forever. We speak of it casually -- the writer's block, the eventual burnout, the descent into (comparatively) affluent mediocrity, the Styrofoam packing of established reputation and rigid, acceptable public persona. We've seen it happen to them all; it's an accepted phenomenon. Nine-tenths of the anthologies that cross my desk are crypts jammed full of funerary urns, twined over with encomiums. Half the novels are headstones. It's a rainy day. Next month I'll review some books. This month, it wouldn't be polite.  and the silence you mill hear is made up of the bated breaths of authors mhose latest birthings have not yet been subjected to the dissecting courtesies of Mr. Budrys. For Mr. Budrys does more than merely reviem books. He is a surgeon mho cuts into hearts, opens them -- and often the patients live. But he is unfailingly polite, to be sure, even mhen using his scalpel. Look for him on December # in the February #m way old people have. "Hello, hello, this is Fleiker. Hello." "When you hear the tone -- " "Damn," he said, wheezing. "I didn't dial the -- " " -- the time will be -- " "Hello," a voice said, a woman's voice, age indeterminate, certainly not young. "Hello," he said. "Hello -- Walter, why don't you answer?" "Oh, how nice of you to call," the voice said. "It was awfully nice of you to call." "Who is this?" he demanded. "Who are you?" "Yes, yes, happy New Year to you, Michael. Yes, it has been a nice year." "What kind of nonsense is this?" he snapped. "A good year. Yes, a very good year -- the best since I've retired. I went to the class reunion in Denver last month, just before Christmas." "Is this some kind of joke?" he said. "New Year? Christmas last month? It's the middle of summer." "Hello. Yes, yes, happy New Year, dear. Happy nineteen-sixtythree." "Shut up, damn you. What kind of trick are you pulling. It's nineteen-seventy. It's mid-August and hot as hell and if you don't -- " "That's sweet of you, awfully sweet of you. Thank you, thank you." "Hello," he shouted, losing all patience. "Hello, hello, hello, hello, damn it, hello -- " "Good night. Merry Christmas -- thank you, good night." "Stop it," he yelled. "Don't go away. Don't try that -- " "When you hear the tone, the time will be -- " "Hello, hello," he shouted. Click... "... the time will be exactly -- " He slammed the phone into its cradle and stood, shaking, his eyes misty with sweat. The pulse in his neck throbbed with anger. Cold played across the liver-spotted tissue of his scalp, rousing the few remaining wisps of crepe hair that grew there. Damn pranksters, he raged. Who the hell did they think they were trying to kid? He stopped, wondering who would want to try such a banal trick. His nephew's boy? The one with the yellowed teeth, white-flecked mouth opening in the start of a braying laugh? Or Schulz of Carpenter or Wilkenson? He snorted at the thought. Ineffectual weaklings. The thought of one of them getting the better of him after all these years... They still remembered their hatred of him, though, even at well past eighty when all hatred and lust and sorrow should be dead. Or the vultures downstairs -- the endless relatives, whispering. How is he today? That's good, that's very good. Meaning, If he dies it will be just great because of all that money and he's too old to need it or care about what life can bring... Alone, embattled. His withered lips twisted in contempt. He had built, had cut throats and wrecked better than them in the process. Let them go out and grub for it the way he had done with no one to help. Not even his wife, the pretty tinsel thing he had bought after no one else would touch him. H e sat for a long moment, looking at the phone. Then, gently, he lifted it from its cradle and, after consulting his phone index (there had been a time when his memory was sharp and unfailing) he carefully dialed his brother's number again. Click... click... click... "... hear the tone, the time will be exactly -- " "No," he said and stabbed at the cradle button with his finger. He dialed the number once again. Click... "When you hear the tone -- " His hand darted forward. "Wait, don't hang up. Who are you?" He pressed the phone tightly to his ear, his breath hissing in the perforations of the mouthpiece. "I said, who are you? I can hear you breathing -- " "Hello, hello, why are you bothering me? It's two o'clock in the morning," the voice said. "Liar," he said. "It's six in the afternoon, daylight saving time, in the middle of August and the sun is so bright you can look at the asphalt without glasses and you -- " "No, don't shout, Jimmy. It doesn't do to get excited -- " "My name is not Jimmy," he said, trying to control his voice. "No, it's Board policy and if they want me to retire -- " The same voice, he realized. Female -- probably middle-aged. A very pleasant voice, he thought, and then shook off the thought with annoyance. There wasn't any point in thinking that way at his age. "Hello, who are you?" "I know, just to June... Well, it's been a year... Ever since the end of the war, ever since you came back from Korea." "The war?" he shouted. "The Korean war? Damn, the war's ended over seventeen years ago. Nineteen-fifty-three to nineteenseventy is seventeen years. Can't you count?" "Thank you, thank you," the voice said. Middle-aged, but with young overtones. Whom did he know who sounded like that? Someone, someone, someone -- who? "Wait," he pleaded. "Don't go." "... the time will be exactly six fourteen, daylight sav -- " Click... "Damn," he said, his voice shrill and cracking. His eyes filled with tears. Ridiculous. He hadn't cried in twenty years, not since his wife had died, and then for pure formality. He would have cried at the death of a favorite hunting dog or of a stranger into whose cortege he had blundered. Tears were easy then because you had strength and were unassailable. He was too old for crying. Eighty-two, and only the vague warmth of life still animating him with the memory of endless dead years when life might have had some meaning, had he sought for it. Now there was only the leaden silence of his room secreted among many rooms, with whispering servants moving like phantoms through the dusk and beefy young nephews and glassy-eyed nieces waiting for his last gasp, their thoughts clawing over bonds and cash and other empty symbols of eighty-two years. How terrible, he thought. How terrible, how terrible, how terrible... Terrible? What was terrible? Growing old. Withering and cracking like ancient celluloid movie film. The images on it broken and dusty. Thrown on a fire, curling and shriveling an instant before extinction and then gone with a single puff of sooty flame. But age was not that dramatic -- not even that significant. He would simply run down, cease to move, become quiescent and the dark men who hovered at hand would come and do secret things with his body so that his face became a mask of wax and talc and scented rouge and his body shrank in withered majesty secretly within the shroud. And the young ones, drunk with the negotiable fragments of his life, would scarcely remember that he had been. "Oh, no," he said softly. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, there is somebody. There is somebody. Or there was somebody. There must have been somebody." B ut he could not think of one -- not even his brother Walter whom he had fed and clothed and looked after and whose sprawling, middle-aged brood hovered on the edge of his existence like circling condors. Walter did not even answer his phone. If he could have had someone, somewhere. If in the midst of all his life he had found someone who cared and worried and cheered and wept. But he had not and now not even the possibility existed that... He paused. The possibility? Vaguely, dimly, the possibility. Only it was late and life had a way of losing detail in the amorphous mass of years that spilled out and vanished, leaving your body older and more tired and wrinkled and crackling and your mind vague and many chambered and without cohesive form. Walter, he thought. He had been trying to talk to Walter, who was his one link with life, the only person of his blood remaining. (Forget those creatures downstairs who had been generated out of some ferment that was not a part of him.) His fingers, stiff with pain and calcification, dialed the number and he waited, hearing the burr of the bell at the other end. "When you hear the tone -- " "Damn," he shouted. "Damn, damn, damn -- " Click... Again, carefully, patiently, noting each digit, with deliberate precision, all seven carefully dialed digits. At thesixth digit the sound of ringing... not the soft burr but a shriller sound, tinny as though the signal were in a hollow metal-lined room. "Hello, hello," the voice said. "Hello," he said. "Who -- " "Oh, it's you, I wanted so much for it to be you again," the woman's voice said. "Yes, it's me. It's me," he said savagely. "It's me, Mark Fleiker and who the hell are you?" "Yes, I know it's you, Mark. How could I forget the voice?" "Forget what voice?" he demanded. "After all these years, how could I forget the voice?" "I've never talked with you before," he shouted into the mouthpiece. "All those times," she whispered. "So few without ever seeing you or touching you and knowing that you were somewhere out there. I wondered where you were during the war -- " "Woman," he said plaintively. "Woman, what kind of a joke are you playing on an old man?" "Old?" she said. "Are you really old?" "I'm old, old, old," he said. "I sit here in this pile of a house and watch the jackals gather to fight over my bones." "It's the war," she said. "This horrible war. Everyone seems taken up in a kind of hysteria. The horrible bloodiness -- " "I hate the thought of the war," he said. "It is an idiot war. There is no end to it and only the blood what reason -- It never was our war -- "No," she said soothingly. "You must have lost someone very dear, but it is our war. It is our war even though its nearly over." "It'll never be over," he said. "Only a matter of days," she said "and then we can breathe in peace and be truly free of all the dreadfulness. They've crossed the Rhine and -- "Crossed the Rhine?" he shouted. "Are you mad?" " -- only a matter of time -- " the voice said, its quality suddenly tinny. "What's crossing the Rhine got to do with a lot of backward Asiatics in a fifth-rate jungle nation and the death of everything -- of my nephew who was the one good thing that came out of my flesh?" " -- the Nazis," she said. "The horrible Nazis -- " Then, sputter... sputter... sputter... from the phone and -- "When you hear the tone the time will be exactly -- " H e slammed the receiver to the carriage and breathing heavily, stumbled to the bed. He lay weak and fearful. The sense of being utterly alone swept over him. Alone, alone, alone the words clattered off the walls, shattered against his inner ear, echoed down the flesh passages to the inner chambers of his being. Alone. Except for an insane voice from somewhere that still fought a war involving crossing the Rhine and Nazis as villains -- a voice that recognized his with pleasure. With pleasure, he thought in surprise -- but only a voice. People did not acknowledge him with pleasure. They pretended and thought he didn't see through their transparent stratagems to ingratiate themselves with him. He knew. Knew. Knew. As he knew the doctors who told him there was nothing wrong with him. "There's nothing wrong with you, Mr. Fleiker. Age, yes, with all the small degenerations of age, but you're sound as a dollar." "That's . not very damned sound," he would growl. "Well, you know what I mean." "I'm dying," he would say. "You think you're dying," the doctors would say softly. "It's the same thing." "Perhaps." Pursed lips. "Perhaps. Perhaps." What would they think now? The final delirium. Hearing voices on the phone that told him they were talking from the year after the Korean War. # or #? When were armies crossing the Rhine. #? A voice that knew him. That spoke to him gently. (People had seldom spoken to him gently, even his dead wife who had scarcely spoken at all.) His ancient heart leaped for an instant. His eighty-two-year-old heart pounded for an instant and he fell back against the pillow, blood coursing through the fine veining of his face, flushing his nose, lips, cheeks with unexpected warmth. "Oh, God," he said "Oh, God, to play such an irony on me." Cruel, vicious God. (All Gods are cruel and vicious. You've worshiped many of them.) Cruel and vicious God. His quivering fingers found the phone. Dialed. Faltered. Dialed again. He held the receiver to his ears. He waited. Click... "When you hear the tone, it will be." He sobbed. Pressed the button. Dialed again. Waited. Breathing. Breathing. Breathing. "Hello?" "Hello," he said excitedly. "Hello,it is you? Is it you?" "Mark," she said. "Is it you? After eight years? Is it you?" "Yes," he said. "Yes, it's Mark. It's Mark." "I thought I would never hear your voice again. After so many years to hear your voice again." "It's Mark," he said choking. "You don't sound well," she said. "I'm not well," he said. "If I could come just once to you." "If you could," he said. "If only you could." "I don't even know your last name. We've spoken so few times and I don't even know your last name." "Of course, you do," he said. "It's Fleiker. Mark Fleiker." "That can't be right," she said. "There's a Mark Fleiker who's a presidential advisor. I met him once -- at a reception. My, he was handsome -- but so intense." "That was I -- that was years ago," he said. "No, not the same at all," she said. "Mark, such a sense of humor. Not the same at all." The voice carrying a frown... returning to a... a caress. "That was years and years ago," he said. "That was Just before the war." "Will there be a war?" she asked. "Pray God there won't be a war." "The year before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor," he said. "In nineteen-forty-one, just before Pearl Harbor." "Mark, I don't understand you," she said... Sputter... sputter... The connection was going, he knew. "Don't go," he shouted. "Mark," she said. "I can't hear you. I don't understand." "Don't go," he shouted, "I love you. Don't go." "Mark... Sputter... Mark, you know it's nineteen-forty-one now. You know it's December sixth, a Saturday when school is out. You know it's..." Click... "When you hear the tone--" December #, #! When you hear the tone -- #I -- December #! His hand clawed at the sheets, made cabbage folds, knotted them. What was she? Where was she? Who was she? He didn't even know her name. A voice without form, without body, without face, without name. They must have passed each other briefly once. Touched hands, perhaps. So long ago and he had not known. of aloneness, of being lost on the edge of time-space had made him say it. "I love you." The unknown emotion had welled inside his ancient frame, coursed through his sluggish blood and suddenly he knew. He knew it with fear and hope and anger and a sense of utter loss. Love? Love doesn't come this way, he told himself. You don't fall in love with a phantom, with something that's a faint image projecting through time into the dying present. Youth is a time for love. Not love. Not now. Not now. Not with a phantom. Not this thing to torture me in my last hours, he thought. Oh, no, God, not this, not this, not this. He heard them puttering in the hall and he realized he was breathing heavily. The vultures were waiting. They heard him breathing his excited rasping breath and they were flocking close. He heard the doorknob turn and the door began to open silently. "Stay out," he shouted. "God damn it, stay out. I'll let you know when I want you. Stay out." The door closed and he was alone again. Alone as he had always been. Alone now except for the memory of a voice that stretched across years and years from the past and belonged to a woman he did not know and would never know. What marvels, what magic, his little boy mind in the old, old mind said. Magic that feeble electric currents over copper wires should span distances -- and years. Alexander Graham Bell, magician. Mr. -- what was his name -- Mr. Watson, sorcerer's apprentice. Those two half a century ago with cauldrons and eye of newt and wire of copper and oil of vitriol and certain discrete particles of carbon and... And he didn't even know her name. Delicate voice, tender voice, object mystical and unseen. Of love? One does not love a voice and cannot love a voice and you don't fit your aging ideal to a mere voice. Only he had. In an impossible moment, in an insane working of the chemistry of his aged body. And he didn't even know her name. H e lay for many minutes, looking at the cradled phone. Thinking wondering, fearing, hoping, dreading, dreaming, then... He couldn't stop it. He couldn't halt his spotted hand with its lean, gray-bristled fingers imbued with a life of their own they drifted across the sheets, gained new strength, became purposeful, grasped, held the instrument tightly, lifted... and his other hand with sure touch was dialing. Any number. It made no difference. Any number. Dial the letters: #... N...#...E...#...W...# galaxy #... Why not? Why not? The world is insane and dying and I am insane -- but suddenly terribly, impossible, very much alive. Click... "When you hear the tone the time will be -- " Click... click... click... "Hello." Firm young, vigorous voice. Gentle, strong. "It's Mark," he said. "Mark? Mark?" she said. "Mark," he said. "Oh," she said. "I remember. It's been such a long time." "It's been only minutes for me," he said. "I don't understand," she said. "What year is it?" he asked. "Nineteen-thirty-three," she said. "You know that." "Listen to me," he said excitedly. "I'm not insane and I know you wi #I think so -- but listen to me. Here it's nineteen-seventy." "Oh, my," she said. "That's a peculiar joke." She didn't get angry, he thought. Nor annoyed. Marvelous, "Believe me," he said. "Here it's nineteen-seventy. I've been calling you -- talking with you all evening. Only it's you later and later and later." "That's strange. What a lovely idea," she said. "It's real," he told her. "It's real." "A strange idea. A beautiful idea," she said. "It's horrible. I can't ever see you." "I shouldn't do this," she said. "But I'll see you." "I can't," he said. "I can't, I can't. Don't you understand? It's not the miles." "Where are you?" she asked. "San Francisco. Twin Peaks." "I'm only blocks away. Jones Street! Nob Hill." she said. "I've lived here for years. My family before me. Only blocks away." "Years away," he said. "You sound so lost." "You are so lost," he said. "You sound so... I shouldn't but -- " Sputter... sputter... "What's your name?" he asked. Sputter. "Your name?" he pleaded. "Your name." "Angela, you know that. A fine pretty Victorian name. Angela -- " "Angela what?" Sputter. "When you hear the tone it will be -- " Click... He sobbed. His fingers dialed frantically. Any number. Any number. Click... Click... "Hello." Young voice. "Angela?" he asked. "Yes, who's this?" "Mark," he said. "What a nice name," she said. "I don't know any Mark though." "What's your last name?" he asked. "I don't recall ever meeting a Mark." "We've met," he told her. "But I don't know your last name." "You have such a nice voice," she said. "So young. Oh, I really shouldn't say that -- " "Your last name," he pleaded. Sputter... "Why, no harm in telling, I suppose. It's Haym -- " Sputter...click... "When you hear -- " "Oh, dear God," he said aloud. Just one second more and he would have had it. One second more. Fingers dialed frantically. Click... "When you hear the -- " Click... "Hello -- hello?" A man's voice, deep, resonant. "Hello," he shouted. A grunt of displeasure. "Hello," he shouted. "Mr. Watson," the voice said. "Come here. I need you." After that there was silence. Long, long, long, dead silence. Not even a sputter. Not even a click. Only silence. He returned the receiver to the hook, feeling tired and old and quite ready to close his eyes and never open them again. ly. Back to the very beginning and beyond that year, that day, that moment there would be nothing. The ancient copper would be dead because before that instant when Mr. Bell had spilled the acid of the battery and called for his helper, there was nothing. No voices, no Angela, no hope -- ever. He felt like sobbing but it required too much energy. He had little left. There was only lying in bed and staring at the wall and listening to the whisper of the doctors and the insipid questions of endless nephews and knowing that the days stretched out without hope, without feature, without pity. Angela Haym -- and something else. One syllable. Two syllables? He wasn't even sure he had the first one right. There had been so much static and the quality of the transmission from the primitive phone was so bad. He grabbed the directory and thumbed to the H's. Impossible. Haymaker -- Hayman (See also: Heyman -- Heiman -- Heimann; Heymann -- Hyman). Then Haymend, Haymer, Haymond. An impossible task. He counted them. Thirteen, not counting commercial listings under Haym... then Heym... then Heim... Then seventy-eight listings. Impossible. He didn't even know if she were still alive. Or still in the city. Or even that she still had the same last name. She could have married. She hadn't on the first call. At least she hadn't seemed married. A schoolteacher. Memory. What had she. said? After she retired? She had gone to the class reunion. In Denver? His fingers skipped to the yellow pages. Hopefully. Under Associations. University of Denver... The Alumni association. One impossible chance. He called. A woman answered. He invented a story. He couldn't remember the exact last name. Could she help? After long moments he had three names that might be she. He started to call. Praying. On the third call a voice answered and he said breathlessly, "Angela Haymeyer?" "Yes," the voice said. "This is Mark Fleiker." "Who?" His heart sank. This was the last one. There was no other. What would he do? "Mark Fleiker," he said tiredly. "Oh, Mark," she said. "After all these years. After all these years." Breath caught in his throat. Sudden panic, fear. "Angela," he said, "can you entertain a gentleman caller? An old friend." "After all these years? An old friend?" "An old friend," he said. "What a pleasure it would be!" "It will be," he said, feeling suddenly alive, young-old -- alive. "It will be such a pleasure after all these years," he said. And, not waiting for the click, he replaced the receiver and began to dress. "After all these years," he said aloud to the empty room and felt very, very good. ir Section #, Title #, United States Code). #. Date of filing: October #, #. #. Title of publication: Galaxy Magazine. #. Frequency of issue: Monthly except AugSept and OctNov issues, which were bimonthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Location of headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: # East # Street. New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor: Publisher: Arnold E. Abramson. # Eiast # Street, New York. N.Y. #. Editor: Ejler Jakobsson, # East # Street. New York, N.Y. #. Managing Editor: Judy-Lynn Benjamin. # Est # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #, #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #, #. B. Paid circulation. #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sates. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. #. Mail subscriptions. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. C. Total paid circulation. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. D. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. E. Total distribution (sum of C and D). Average no. of copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown in A). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #, #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. I certify that the statements made by me are correct and complete: Lawrence C. Murphy, Subscription Director. who's who a:  on the V ' Donald H. Menzel own suggested list of names until, by the twentieth century, few maps agreed. To bring some order out of chaos, the International Astronomical Union, in #, appointed a committee to study and clarify the nomenclature. Its final report, prepared by Mary Blagg and Karl Muller was accepted by the Union and published in #. At that time, their catalog contained # nmed formations. first turned his newly invented telescope on the moon, he saw a new and independent world. He saw mountains and flat, dark areas, which he took to be seas. He was not a skilled artist, but he was the first to produce a map of the lunar surface. Other astronomers followed, preparing maps of increasing accuracy. In #, the amateur astronomer, Hevelius, published a map that was appreciably more detailed and accurate than any of the earlier charts. He assigned # names to various moon features, most of them for geographical features known on earth. Several years later, in #, the Jesuit astronomer, Riccioli, prepared a still more accurate map whose features he named largely for famous scientists, philosophers and theologians. Dozens of other selenographers, professional and amateur, followed, each with his A nd so matters remained until October, #, when Soviet scientists first photographed the moon's far side from an orbiting vehicle and transmitted the pictures back to earth by a television technique. In #, the l.A.U. recognized this achievement by approving names for # of the features shown on the photographs. Of these, four could not be idenified on later and sharper photographs and had to be relocated. In #, the Union approved some # new names, assigned to features that wander in and out of view on the very edges of the lunar surface visible from earth. But the most significant change made that year was the recognition of the growing importance of lunar studies. Prior to that time, the moon had been lumped with the planets, but then it was given its own special commission of which -- to my surprise -- I was asked to serve as President. Three years later, at the meeting in Prague, Czechoslovakia, new lunar data had come in from both cially the excellent photographs Lunar Orbiter series. Hence no new assignments were made, but a special Working Group was appointed, of which I was Chairman, to name the craters on the moon's far side. Other members included the Soviet astronomer A. Mikhailov, who was later replaced by B. Levin. M. Minnaert of the Netherlands was the third official member and A. Dollfus of France, the new President of the Lunar Commission, was also a member, ex-officio. For three solid years our Committee of four worked hard at its assigned task. We wanted the moon to be truly international. Hence my first act was to write to the National Academies of Science or equivalent bodies of all nations of the world, asking them for suggestions concerning their own famous scientists. Members of the Lunar Commission supplied additional names until we started out with a card catalogue containing more than # suggestions. Paring this down to the desired number of about # was an arduous task. We divided the final list into about five orders of distinction and then assigned the names by lot to the craters also divided into five categories. The most delicate question concerned the possibility of recognizing living astronauts. For nearly forty years the lAU had ruled against the inclusion of any living individuals, but our Committee felt that the inauguration of the age of space, which included actual travel to the moon, warranted special treatment. One especially large feature on the moon's far side, with a complex array of smaller craters around it, received the name Apollo, to commemorate the entire Apollo Program and all those who had contributed to it. The three living astronauts, Anders, Borman, and Lovell, the first to circumnavigate the moon, received features near the crater Apollo. Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins, the first to participate in a lunar landing, received previously unnamed craters near the landing site, which was called equivalent Situs Tranquilitatis. Six living cosmonauts of the far side near the Sea of Moscow, which had been named in #. These included, among others, Leonev, the first man to walk in space and Tereshkova, the first and, to date, the only female cosmonaut to achieve orbital flight. I should state that the Committee quickly agreed to rule out all political figures. We also ruled out philosophers and religious figures. Our final list, which contained # new' names, was approved at the final General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union on August #, #, in Brighton, England. detail on a list of names so large. Physical scientists were in the great majority, especially when they had made some special contribution to astronomy. There were, of course, a number of Nobel Prize winners and Nobel, himself, was also honored. We found room for a number of inventors: Bell of the telephone, Marconi of wireless telegraphy, de Forest of the vacuum tube and Montgolfier of balloon fame. I was pleased that we agreed to honor several amateur astronomers of unusual distinction, among them Albert L. Ingalls, who popularized the making of telescopes, wrote frequently for The Scientific American and served as one of the founders of the Amateur Telescope Makers. From the large list of author candidates we selected only a few. Chaucer made it because he had written a treatise on the astrolabe. We selected Dante for his (largely erroneous) contributions to cosmogony. Readers of Galaxy will be pleased to learn that the former science editor, Willy Fey, received the honor. I had had dozens of letters from fans of his, expressing the hope for such recognition. Two other great writers of science fiction also made it, H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. The annual world award for the best science fiction is called a "Hugo" in his honor. Jules Verne had already been assigned a crater in #. George Gamow made it on the basis of his contributions to physics, though he is perhaps better known for his popular writings. The author Cyrano de Bergerac, who wrote of imaginary visits to the moon and the sun early in the seventeenth century took his place among the greats. The three deceased American astronauts; Chaffee, Grissom and White, who were killed in the ground-fire of an Apollo test craft, received craters near the large crater Apollo. There were two deceased Soviet cosmonauts. Komarov was killed in the crash-landing of Soyuz I, when the parachute failed. Gagarin, the first man to carry out a space flight back in #, was killed in a crash on an aircraft training flight. We thought it appropriate to recognize one other early astronaut, Van Gu, a Chinese inventor who lived about # A.D. According to legend he constructed a manned rocket consisting of two box kites and a seat, with # solidpropellant rockets. He perished while trying to take off in the contraption. Similarly, we included the mythical figures of Daedalus and his son, Icarus. The former was a cunning artisan who, in the second millennium B.C., made wings of wax and feathers so that the two could escape from Crete. Icarus, youthfully exuberant, flew too close to the sun the heat melted the wax wings, so that he fell into the sea and drowned, while Daedalus flew on and landed safely in Sicily. These are but a few of the famous names recognized officially by the International Astronomical Union. The assignment wa a fascinating and rewarding one. Perhaps the most satisfying experience of all was the moment at Brighton when the General Assembly unanimously passed our recommendations. The final maps are being prepared by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center in St. Louis. The complete list, with biographies and latitudes of the craters will probably be published in the Space Science Reviews, a journal of space astronomy edited in Utrecht, Netherlands. I'm sure that a good many independent groups will presently issue lunar maps based on the l.A.U. official list. The complete lunar map on a scale of #:#, consisting of three sheets, should become available about mid-October from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., #, at an estimated cost of # cents per sheet. T he space age has led to enormous changes in style and convention of astronomical maps, especially those of the moon and planets. When an astronomer, living in the northern hemisphere, faces directly south and looks up into the sky, he will have east on his left hand and west on his right. He sees the moon in the sky and, in the past, chose the compass coordinates on the moon to agree with his own view: north on the top, south at the bottom, east to the left and west to the right, as shown in Fig. #. As a result his maps of the moon looked something like Fig. #, with east and west reversed from the conventional use on earth. Fig. # This result came about, of course, from the fact that one makes the maps of the earth while looking down, whereas the astronomer drew the moon map while looking up at the sky. And, to make the situation even more complicated, the astronomical telescopes turn the object upside down, so that scientists usually drew their maps with south up, as in Fig. #. Fig. # Astronauts, early in the program, began to find this convention confusing. Finally the International Astronomical Union, the organization responsible for such decisions, dropped the age-old convention and decreed that henceforth maps of the moon and planets would conform to the same convention as for the familiar terrestrial maps, with north at the top, east to the right, and so on. This change required a complete reversal of the directions previously called east and west to become west and east, respectively. The change was not only necessary; it was timely because the Orbiter photographs contain new information about the moon's far side and improved information about the near side. New and highly detailed maps have thus become possible. These changes have introduced certain difficulties. For example, Mare Orientale -- The Eastern Sea -- by the new convention lies on the western edge of the visible lunar surface. This dark, multiringed feature is easily the most magnificent circular formation on the moon. Surrounded by two concentric mountain ranges, the Montes Rook and the Monies Cordillera, this sea is approximately # miles in diameter. The new location presented a problem to the Working Group. Should we change its name? For a time we toyed with the idea of calling it Mare A nnulatum. The Ringed Sea. But we decided, after all, that the original name was quite appropriate. We rejected Kipling's famous lines, "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" as being wrong. Eor, if you went far enough to the east you would eventually reach Mare Orientale. Just how do astronomers go about assigning latitudes and longitudes on the moon? To understand this problem one has only to see how we have done it for the earth. The earth has a north pole and south pole, fixed by the position of the earth's axis of rotation. The equator, halfway between the two poles, divides the earth into two hemispheres: north and south. Latitude is the angular distance measured north or south from the equator along the meridian drawn from the equator to the pole through some city or other point of the earth's surface. The latitude of the pole is #N. Next we choose some arbitrary meridian and measure longitude east or west from the point where it touches the equator to the foot of the other meridian. On earth, this zero or standard meridian passes through the old observatory at Greenwich, England. For the moon, we follow the same basic principle. By observation, we determine the position of the moon's north and south poles of rotation. A few people have argued, sometimes vociferously, that the moon does not rotate at all, because it keeps the same face turned always toward the earth. They are, of course, thinking of the analogy of a solid ball attached rigidly to a rotating crankshaft. Actually, the moon's rotation on its axis and its orbital revolution around the earth are quite independent of one another. First of all, the axial rotation is extremely regular and uniform. The axis of rotation is inclined several degrees to the perpendicular to the orbital plane. As a result, for half the month we see a slight distance over the moon's north pole and for the other half we see beyond the south pole. This slight motion is called "libration in latitude." But that isn't the only effect of the moon's motion. The orbit around the earth is not a circle but a pronounced ellipse. Flow fast the moon traverses the orbit depends on where it is. When near the earth, the moon speeds up; when farther away it slows down. As a consequence, we see some distances around the eastern and western edges of the disk. This motion is called "libration in longitude," Hence we can see from the earth not just one half but five ninths of the lunar surface. Of course, all but a tiny fraction of the remainder has been photographed by special cameras sent to the moon by the United States of America and by the Soviets. To return to the problem of lunar mapping, we can easily locate the moon's two poles. Our North Star, however, will not serve as such for the moon, because its axis is tilted with respect to that of the earth, even though the axes of both bodies tend to stay parallel to their original positions throughout the month and the year. The lunar equator lies halfway between the two poles so determined. Then one's fix is a meridian to represent zero longitude arbitrarily through the average position of the side turned earthward. The compass directions stay the same on both sides. On both sides, east longitude increases from left Fig. # to right and west longitude from left to right. This new principle of cartography of the moon and planets received the official approval of the International Astronomical Union. The assignment of selecting names for the craters on the moon's far side was exciting and interesting. Hundreds of persons, not knowing the restriction against living people, have generously offered their own names as "representative of the common man." Others have suggested names of their towns, cities, pets. Several companies, rather brashly, offered their own names, for the advertising benefit. Somehow or other it reminded me of a story I read in my childhood of a manufacturer who built a huge and powerful projector that threw upon the moon as a screen the words; JU#CY# CWraUcm in rotation is tilted about # degrees with respect to the perpendicular to its orbit around the earth. Thus, when the moon is at a we see a trifle around the north pole. When it is at the arrow we see around the edge of the south pole. The axis of the moon's rotation tends to move parallel to itself. Gyration in IF the moon moved exactly in a circular orbit, as in a, b, c -- h, meanwhile rotating on its axis, the black spot on its surface would always point directly toward the center of the earth and we would see only the nearer face of the moon. However, the moon's orbit is elliptical a', b', c -- h' and the moon moves more rapidly when near the earth than when more distant. As a result, during the time it would take for the moon to move from a to b in the circular orbit, it has moved from a to b along the ellipse. The black spot at b no longer points directly earthward. We see a little way around one side of the moon. The moon slows down as it approaches point e. Then we begin to see at f, g', and h' , part way around the other side of the moon. Genetics had given man controi of his species. Was it the nature of the species to reject it? I T he General Chairman here he had, by custom, no other name -- paced across the soft carpeting of his office, hands clasped behind his back. He stopped at the wide sweep of windows that overlooked the town. There was little of old Messina to be seen. The storied city of ancient churches and houses chalkwhite in the fierce Sicilian sunlight had been all but swallowed up by the metal and glass towers of the world governmentoffices, assembly halls, hotels and residence buildings, shops and entertainmen and w'omen who ruled Earth's In the air-conditioned, soundproofed office atop the tallest of all the towers, the General Chairman could not hear the shrill voices of the crowded streets below', nor the constant growl of cars and turbotrucks on the busy throughways. A l least we saved some of the old city, he thought. The feat had been one of his first successes in world politics. A small thing. But he had helped to stop the growth of New Messina before it completely choked and killed its predecessor. The new city had now remained the same size for thirty years. Beyond the waterfront fishing boats the straits sparkled invitingly under the sun. And visible beyond them was the tip of Italy's boot, Calabria, where peasants still prided themselves on their hard-headed stubbornness. High above Calabria's misty blue hills, shimmering in the heat haze, the sterner blue of the sky was too bright to look at for more than a moment. The. old man knew his eyes were playing tricks when he thought he saw the glint of one of the big orbital stations hovering in that brilliant sky. He squinted worked a forefinger and thumb against the bridge of his nose. Today he seemed to be feeling his years. He thought about his native Sao Pauloit had spread like a festering sore all the way from the river to the sea, flattening hills, carving away forests. Teeming with so many people that not even the Population Control Center's computers could keep track of them. ter the heart of Sao Paulo or any large city on Earth. Humans no longer could live in the crawling guts of a city df they had to, they became something else. The desktop intercom chimed. "Yes?" The Chairman automatically switched from the Portuguese of his thoughts to the English of the world government. He pressed a button. His secretary appeared on the screen. Her face was somber. "They're here, sir." "Very well. Send them in." Six men and two women filed into the spacious office and took seats at the conference table. They carried no papers, no briefcases. Each place at the table had a tiny intercom and viewscreen that linked with the central computer. They are young -- they have vitality, thought the Chairman. They know what must be done and they have the strength to do it. As soon as alt this is settled, I shall retire. Resume my identity as a personnot Mr. Chairman... Suddenly the prospect of using his own name again in casual contact with his fellow humans seemed infinitely exciting. Reluctantly he took his place at the head of the glistening mahogany table. The others were silent, waiting. The only sound was a faint whir of the computer's recording spool. He cleared his throat. "Good morning. Last Monday we discussed this situation and you made your recommendation. I asked you to consider possible alternatives. From the looks on your faces, it seems that no suitable alternative has been found." All turned to the stocky, roundfaced Minister of Security, Kobryn. He had the look of an athlete; tanned skin, short wiry brown hair, big shoulders and arms. Shifting in his chair selfconsciously, Kobryn said, "I see I have been elected hatchet man." His voice was deep and strong. with a trace of Slavic accent. "All right the idea was mine originally. We ran all the alternatives through computers. The only safe answer remains permanent exile." "Siberia," one of the women muttered. "No, not Siberia." Kobryn took her literally. "It's too heavily populated. Too many cities and dome farms for an effective exile. No, the only place is the new space station. It's large enough and it can be kept completely isolated." Bernard, the Minister of Finance, shook his head. "I still disagree. Two thousand of the world's leading scientists "Plus their wives and families," the Chairman added. "What would you prefer'?" Kobryn snapped. "A bullet in each of their heads'? Or would you leave them alone and let them smash everything we have worked for'?" "That won't work," said Mottern, the taciturn Minister of Technology. "Even if they tried to cooperate with us you can't stop ideas from spreading. And once their genetic engineering discoveries leak out "The world is turned upside down," the Chairman said. He spoke softly but everyone heard him. With a sigh he confessed, "I also have been thinking about the problemhave tried to find alternatives. There are none. Exile is the only answer." "It is then agreed. Good!" said Kobryn. "No, not good," the General Chairman said. "Far from it. We are admitting our own failure. Our fear even terror. We are terrified of a new idea, a new scientific discovery. The government of the world, the protectors of peace and stability, must stoop to exiling some of the world's finest minds. This state of affairs is horrible. Truly horrible." II into the cockpit of his rocket glider. It fit him as snugly as his flight coveralls. Only his head and shoulders poked above the cockpit's rim. "Takeoff for the thirty-meter class contest in five minutes," said the loudspeaker at the edge of the crowded field. fVhere's Bonnie? Lou asked himself. She should've been here fifteen minutes ago... He looked across the sun-baked field. It was cluttered with sleek rocket gliders, each tilted on one wingtip. They looked as ungainly as grounded pelicans but once in the air, they turned into graceful fliers. Vehicles moved back and forth. Knots of people clustered around each glider, talking earnestly, arguing over maps, tinkering with least-minute impatience on the gliders themselves. Then everything stopped and they all looked up as a rocket motor roared to life and a glider streaked by, climbing at a crazy angle, heading for the sky. The man-made thunder rumbled and slowly died. Contestants went back to their tasks of preparation. Lou sat alone. The air was hot, though the hour was still early. The only shade on the field was made by the gliders themselves. Where is she? Lou liked to work alone; didn't want other people messing around his glider. But Bonnie was different. She was his girl. And her absence at a time like this was unusual. He began to worry. Later he was to remember that Bonnie's absence was the first thing to go wrong today. He worked the control stick, squinting back over his shoulder to see the ailerons at the ends of the long drooping wings Hick up and down in response. Then the rudder pedals, left foot, right, left. In the mirror atop the instrument panel he could see the rudder swing back and forth. Flaps. Elevators. Trim tabs. "Final check-out for thirtymeter class entries," boomed the loudspeaker. Lou spotted Bonnie, driving the turbosport across the outskirts of the field, kicking up a plume of dust, her yellow hair catching the New Mexico sun. She slowed down, nosed the car between a pair of gliders and coasted to a stop in front of Lou's plane. He waved. She jumped out of the car and Lou found himself grinning, enjoying the sight of her long-legged trim figure and her lovely face, wide-eyed with excitement. "Randerson's ahead of all of yesterday's entries," she said breathlessly as she ran to the cockpit. "His official distance was twenty-one hundred and fifty-five kilometers. I stayed at the control center while the computer ran off the final numbers. He made it all the way to Spartansburg, South Carolina." Lou let out a soft whistle. "That'll be hard to beat. Especially after I've been sitting here frying my brains for half an hour." "Oh -- did I keep you waiting?" Her face went from excitement to concern. "Oh Lou, I'm sorry I thought you'd want to hear about Randerson -- " He laughed. "Forget it. Gimme a kiss, quick. And get my helmet. Here come the starters." Bonnie dashed back to the car for the helmet as the starting judge and safety officer walked up to Lou's glider. The judge was tall, lean, leathery and in his late forties. He had the high cheekbones and sad, suspicious eyes of an Apache. He turned to the safety officer. "This is entry eleven. Is he checked out?" The safety officer, a stocky redhead, was sweating. He looked down at his clipboard. "Controls check. Structures check. Instruments check. Motors check, except for a slight crack on the lip of number three nozzle. Nothing serious, though. Radio check." The judge's eyes narrowed. "You sure that nozzle's okay? Don't want him splattering some farmhouse. Remember that dude from Massachusetts last year -- busted an irrigation line when he crashed. Left half the county without water for a week. Ruined the corn crop for the whole season." Pleasant guy, Lou thought. Wonder what happened to the pilot, "It'll be okay," the safety officer said. The judge shrugged barely perceptibly. "Okay. Let me see his route." The safety officer Hipped a page on his clipboard and showed it to the judge. He glanced at it, then looked up at Lou. "Charleston, South Carolina? Going for a record?" Lou nodded. The judge seemed more annoyed than pleased. "Let me see his emergency landing sites." It's all there, everything the rules require and more. I'm not interested in being a dead hero. Finally the judge looked up again. "Seems good enough. Everybody at those emergency sites been notified?" "Yes," Lou and the safety officer said together. The judge smiled charily. "Okay. Cleared for takeoff. And good luck." Lou exhaled. "Thanks. I'll send you a wirephoto from Charleston." "You do that," the judge said. And again he smiled, more generously than before. The judge and safety officer walked to the next glider. Bonnie handed Lou his helmet. He pulled it on. It always scraped his ears. Bonnie giggled. "What's funny?" "The face you make when you put on your helmet." "You won't laugh when I have cauliflower ears," he grumbled. She reached up, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "Good luck." "Thanks. See you in Charleston." She returned to the car, hooked the towline to the glider's nose and started the turbine engine. Her voice sounded in his earphones. "Ready?" Lou said, "Let's go." "You sure that nozzle won't blow out on you?" "Sure. If it does. I'll steer clear of irrigation lines." S HE gunned the car's engine. Lou jerked back in his seat slightly. He kept the control stick pushed forward so the glider would not lift off too soon. The tiny wheels under each wingtip stayed in place as the car gained speed and they bumped across the dusty field. Last trip one of the wheels had worked loose and the wingtip had dug into the ground. The glider had groundlooped and it had taken him two months to put it back in shape again. He was rolling faster now, clear of the other gliders, out in the open. Bonnie was a good tow. Brush and rocks whirled by. His wingtips cleared the ground and the glider was rolling on its underbelly wheel alone. Lou's left hand reached for the towline release switch. When he was off the ground, smooth and free, he punched the towline release. The wheels fell away nicely too. The glider climbed easily and he put her into a wide sweeping turn, banked and saw Bonnie in the car racing after the bouncing main wheel as it caromed across the desert. Lou waved to her but she failed to see. Then he slid the plastic canopy shut. "Entry eleven, this is control. We have acquired you on radar and are tracking you. Approach the starting tower, please. Heading one-three-zero." "Okay, control. I see the starting tower. Is that you, Billy?" "Yep. You gonna be climbing as you pass the tower, Lou?" "Yes." "Want a countdown?" "Please." "All right, you got. Wait just a tick here -- okay, fifteen seconds on my mark -- mark, fifteen seconds " Lou set the timer on his instrument panel and punched the automatic fire sequence button. A light above it began flashing amber. "ten seconds -- " Number three motor will fire last in the automatic sequence, Lou thought. If it blows, at least I'll be high enough to glide to a landing. If there's enough of the plane left... " -- three -- twoonezero -- " Number one bellowed beautifully and Lou was plastered to his seat, rattling in the vibration of the rocket's thrust. He pulled the stick back into his belly and all he could see was the blue sky ahead of him, scratched by some faint wisps of cirrus far above. He'd pass them in seconds. "Entry eleven, this is control." A different voice. A stranger. "Abort your rocket sequence and return to the field immediately." "What? What's wrong?" "Federal marshal wants to see you right away." "Federal marshal? You're kidding." The timer on the instrument panel showed that number one's burn was almost finished and number two would ignite. Unless Lou pushed the abort button. "It's no joke, eleven. Return to the field at once." "Sorry -- tell him to grab a jet and meet me in Charleston." A splutter of rage came from his earphones as number two ignited. Lou switched off the radio. And crossed his fingers. He streaked past the cirrus clouds, feeling the rocket's roar rather than hearing it now, with number two burning. The hand of the timer swept around toward the top of the dial again and number three lit off. Instantly Lou could feel the change in the vibration. He clamped his teeth together and the plane shook. If it gets any worse... But it didn't. She held together. And suddenly the burn was over. The vibration and thunder in his bones died and Lou was gliding fifteen miles above the great southwestern desert, a silent, long-winged bird of plastic and metal heading into the morning sun, coasting far higher and faster.than any eagle. The mountains to his left were mere wrinkles and the clouds were thin patches of white resting like frost on ground far below. T his was the easy part of the flight, the best part. He was Totally alone. Completely away from all the people who crawled over each others's lives below. A man could only take it f#r so long and then he had to get away -- away from everybody and everything. This was the best way. Bonnie would be waiting for him in Charleston, of course. And if he didn't make it that far she'd soon jet to wherever he landed. In two days he had to be back at the Institute. It was a good place to work. But nothing compared to this. He shut his mind to everything below. The sky was a shade of purple you could never see from the ground, clean and pure. A half moon hung off his port wingtip, a pale and ghostly moon, large and close. The only sound was the thin whisper of wind against the canopy bubble. Lou kept the radio off except when he had to make a scheduled report to the ground stations along his route. Amarillo, Dallas, then across the twisting gray snake of the Mississippi, Jackson, Birmingham the voices from the ground were more excited at each step of the way. His route followed the curving paths-of the summer Jetstream, the invisible river of air that races across the continent and helped keep the glider coasting high above the cares of men. Inevitably, his thoughts finally turned to his work at the Institute. The geneticists and biochemists were almost where they wanted to go the experiments over the past six months had turned out even better than they had hoped. Now they were waiting for Lou to program the computer for them for the next phase. All were completely hung up until Lou Christopher finished teaching the computer how to handle their work. He grinned to himself. You've come a long way. for a little kid from a hick college... And again felt the lift of total freedom. Let the bigdomes wait. It was an hour or so before local sunset when Lou dipped the glider low enough to feel the turbulence of weather. Up in the high stratosphere and above the sailing was almost always smooth. Suddenly over the Smoky Mountains, the glider began to lose altitude too fast, bounding, lurching in the wave of mountain winds. He had to find thermals and stretch his final glideor not make Charleston. Lou turned the radio to control frequency and transmitted: "This is entry eleven, thirty-meter class, from Albuquerque, requesting landing instructions." Without a moment's hesitation a girl's honey-rich voice answered, "We see y'all, Albuquerque eleven. We're using the old air base, bearing about ninety degrees from your heading. Please turn to frequency tew-fo'-seven for landing guidance. And congratulations! Y'all set a new range record today!" "Thank you." Lou set the new frequency on his radio, while the careful part of his mind told him, ll's not a new record until you land the bird in one piece. Lou knew that the Charleston club used an abandoned Air Force base, but he was surprised to see how huge the runways were. Those old bombers must have been real monsters. He saw a cluster of people and cars beside the old control tower and dozens of twenty-meter and smaller gliders parked on the access ramp. On closer view, the concrete of the miles-long runways was broken and invaded by patches of grass. Lou touched his skids to the concrete and screeched bouncing, grinding, lurchingdown the runway until a slight rise slowed the glider to a dusty halt. And it was finished. He sat in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon, suddenly aware that he was sweating. In some distant trees a songbird was warbling. The turbines of many cars were roaring to life. He saw the storm lightning flicker far to his right. Stay clear of that. A thunderstorm could snap the wings off the glider in an instant. The plane had started its flight like a rocket, then coasted like a baby satellite. Now it was flying like a soarplane Lou was stretching for the last few precious kilometers, looking for thermals, sailing from one rising bubble of heated air to another, trying to avoid unpleasant things like mountainsides and trees and TV masts. Earlier in his flight he had had the radio turned on only intermittently. Now he kept it on full time. There was a good deal of chatter on the air but he dialed it all out and stayed with Charleston's automatic homing signal. That was his goal. The beeping signal faded as he lost altitude or dipped closed to a jutting hill. It grew louder as he soared upward and came closer to the city. Charleston came in view. The long shadows of late afternoon made details hard to recognize but he made out the city, the bay, the islands Fort Sumter somewhere among them. He could even see an excursion boat sliding smoothly across the bay, trailing a white wake. Charleston was still what the social engineers called a viable city; not large enough for its inner sections to have turned into barbaric concrete Jungles. As in New York and most other cities. His shoulders creaked painfully as he raised his hands to unlatch the canopy. He stood up on the seat and stretched, then watched the procession of cars streaming down the field toward him. They were tooting their horns in greeting. Where was Bonnie? He couldn't see her in any of the dozens of open-topped cars. He clambered down stiffly from the cockpit and people reached him, shouting and laughing, shaking his hand, pounding his back. A girl kissed him. Next a tall, hard-looking, thickbodied man stepped up and put a heavy hand on Lou's arm. "Louis Christopher, I have a Federal warrant for your arrest." Ill B y the time the marshal's unmarked copter flashed over the skyline of New York, Lou was furious. "Why won't you tell me what this is about?" he shouted at the marshal who sat beside him on the back bench. The two front seats were empty the copter was flying on autopilot. Its electric engine hummed quietly; most of the noise in the cabin came from the blurred whirring of the main rotor. The marshal sat back, his burly arms folded across his chest and his sleepy eyes partly closed. "Listen, mister, the phone woke me up at four this morning. I had to race out to thejetport and lly to Albuquerque. You hot-shotted out of there even when you were told not to. I had to grab another jet to Charleston. Know what my wife and kids are doing right now? They're sitting home, wondering whether I'm dead or alive and why we're not all out on the picnic we planned. Know how many picnics we can afford on a marshal's pay? Been planning this one all yearhad a spot in the upstate park reserved months ago. Now it's going to waste while I bomb all across the country after you. So don't ask questions understand?" Then he added: "Besides, I don't know what kind of mess you're in. I had word to pick you up, that's all. When you hot-tailed out on me in Albuquerque I swore out a warrant for you." Lou said, "Well uh -- I'm sorry about your picnic. I never had a Federal marshal after me before but what I'm really worried about is my girl. She was supposed to meet me in Charleston. Her name's Bonnie Sterneblond, about five-six " "I told youdon't ask questions." The marshal closed his eyes altogether. "I wasn't looking for any-body except youif Uiat's what worries you. I haven't heard of any pickup out for Bonnie Sterne. The way those others were mauling you in Charleston, I'm surprised you're worried about Just one girl." Lou frowned. The copter was now circling over the East River and the old United Nations buildings, in the last blood-red light of the dying sun. The buildings were stained by a century of grime and the windows were caked with dirt once-beautiful marble was cracked and patchedbut the tower was graceful and tall. Two men waited on the landing pad. As soon as the copter's wheels touched the blacktop the cabin's hatch popped open. "Out you go," said the marshal. Lou jumped out. The marshal reached over and yanked the door shut before Lou could turn around. The copter's motor whined -- it lifted off in a spray of dust and grit. Sun's already down, Lou thought. He'll never make it to that picnic. The two men were walking briskly toward Lou. One was small and slim, Latin-looking. Probably Puerto Rican. The breeze from the river llicked at his black hair. The other somehow looked like a foreigner. His suit wasn't exactly odd, but it didn't look exactly right, either. He was big, blond, Nordic-looking. "Please come with us," said the Norseman. And sure enough, he had a Scandanavian accent. "It is my duty to inform you that we are both armed. Escape is impossible." "Escape from what?" Lou started to feel exasperated again. "What's this all about? Where's my girl? What's going to happen to my glider? Why -- " "Please," said the Puerto Rican softly. "It is getting dark. We should not remain outside any longer. This way, please." The UN building looked a little better inside. The corridor they walked down was clean. But the carpeting was threadbare and faded with a century's worth of footsteps. They took a spacious elevator car, paneled with peeling wood, up a dozen floors. Then another corridor, and finally a small room. The room had one occupant. "Dr. Kirby," Lou said. side of the little room was Dr. John Kirby of Columbia-Brookhaven University. He was in his mid-fifties, white-haired, nervously thin he had a pinched face, a bent and predatory nose. Kirby said, "I don't seem to recall -- " "Louis Christopher," said Lou. His two escorts left him with Dr. Kirby and shut the door. "We met at the Colorado conference last spring, remember?" Kirby made a vague gesture with his hands. "There are always too many people at conferences." Lou sat on the sofa beside him. "I gave a paper on computer modeling for forecasting genetic adjustments. You had a question from the floor about the accuracy of the forecasts. Afterward we had lunch together." "Oh yes. The computer fellow. You're not a geneticist." Kirby's eyes still ,did not seem truly to recognize Lou. "Do you have any idea of why we're here. Dr. Kirby?" Lou asked. Kirby shook his head. He seemed dazed, out of it. Lou looked around the room. The furnishings were comfortable enough -- a sofa, two deep contour chairs, a bookshelf full of tape spools, a viewscreen set into the wall. No windows, though. Lou got up and went to the door. Locked. What could have happened to Bonnie? The feeling that she, too, was somehow involved in what was happening nagged him. He turned back to Kirby. The older man's face was sunk in his hands. "Are you okay?" "What? Oh, yes I'm all right. Merely... well, frankly, I'm frightened." "Of what?" Kirby fluttered his hands again. "I -- I don't know. I don't know why we're here, or what they want to do with us. That frightens me. My whole life is predicated on everything's having a reason. They won't let me call my wife or even a lawyer." Lou paced the room. "They grabbed me when I landed my glider. My girl was supposed to meet me -- but she wasn't there. I don't know what's happened to her." He moved between door and sofa. "I'm worried. We were supposed to fly back to Albuquerque to night." The door opened. The same two men stood in the corridor. "You will come with us, please." Kirby started to stand up. But Lou said, "No, I won't. Not until you tell us what this is all about. You can't arrest us and push us around like this. I want some talk." The Norseman pulled a needlethin gun from his tunic. It was so small that his hand hid all of it except the slim barrel. "Please, Mr. Christopher. We have no desire to use force. You are not technically under arresttherefore you have no need for a lawyer. However, you are wanted for questioning at government headquarters in Messina. It would be best for you to cooperate." "Messina? In Sicily?" The blond nodded. "But -- my family -- " Kirby said in a shaky voice. "They have been informed," the Puerto Rican said. No harm will come if you cooperate with us." Lou shrugged, headed into the corridor. The Norseman tucked his gun back inside his tunic. The four men walked slowly toward the elevator, their footsteps clicking on floors and echoing from the walls. When they reached the elevator the Puerto Rican instantly the elevator doors slid open. The building seemed empty except for Lou, Kirby and their captors. Lou stepped into the elevator, whirled, grabbed the Puerto Rican and hurled him into the Norseman, who still stood in the hall with Kirby. They went down in a tangle of arms and legs, shouting. button and yelled to Kirby to get into the car. Kirby stood frozen, his jaw hanging open, as the doors started to slide shut. The Norseman was still on the floor, but he had pushed the Puerto Rican off and was reaching for his gun. The doors button and the elevator started down. He could hear somebody pounding on the metal doors at the floor above. On the ground floor he tried to retrace his steps back to the landing pad outside. He got lost in the corridors, finally saw an exit sign and banged through the doors. It was full night outside, dark and damp-cool. The ripe, acrid smell of the garbage-choked river was a sudden shock to Lou's senses. The city was almost completely dark; only a few lights shone, mostly high up in skyscrapers where people had their own power generators and had barricaded themselves in for the night. He heard footsteps and flattened himself into the deeper shadows along the wall. The Norseman's voice reached him: "Shall we turn the lights on?" "And attract every gang of pack rats on the East Side?" the Puerto Rican answered. "You don't know this city very well. He'll never live out the night alone. Either he'll come begging at our doors inside of an hour or he'll be dead. No one can get through a night on these streets alone." "My orders are to bring him to Messina unharmed." said the Norseman. "You want to search for him? Out there? You'll be killed, too." They said no more. Lou could sense the Norseman shaking his head, not satisfied, but not willing to risk his own skin against the city streets. Lou heard a door click shut. He slid along the wall carefully and found the door he had come through. It was locked from the inside. He turned away and looked at the city again with new understanding. He was alone in the city. And the night had just begun. IV H e hunkered down on his heels, resting his back against the rough wall, and tried to think. He remembered school days in Maryland, when the best way to show you had guts had been to go into Baltimore at night. But you went always with no less than a dozen guys -- and you didn't go far. Still, John Milford had been killed on one trip -- Lou remembered stumbling over his friend's mutilated remains as he had run for his car that night. Cities were worse now. And this was New York. If I can get to the jetport in one piece, Lou reasoned,  can get back to Albuquerque. Maybe Bonnie's waiting for me there. functioning somewhere out on Long Island. How to get there was the question. He heard the distant whisper of a turbocar. The sound grew louder. He stood up and walked across the blacktopped courtyard, heading for it. From his left a glimmer of light moved toward him. A railing bordered the courtyard -- below it, on a sunken roadway, he saw the lights on the approaching car. The roadbed was patched and rough but apparently some cars still used it. He leaned over the railing and tried to signal. The speeding turbocar roared past, making his ears pop, the scream of its engine explosively loud between the walls of the depressed roadway. A puff of hot, grit-laden, kerosene-smelling air blew into his face. Probably no driver in his right mind would stop to pick up a stranger in the city. He made out a pedestrian bridge spanning the road, down at the end of the courtyard. He trotted to it. A wire screen fence blocked access to it. He scrambled over it, crossed the bridge and found himself on the sidewalk of an empty city street. He took stock. The city around him seemed deserted, lifeless, though people lived most were barricaded in for the night, terrified of those who roamed the dark. And the rest? Another car raced past below. The deafening noise died and a new sound came. "Coin' somep'ace?" The voice was like a knife through him. Lou jerked around, startled. A lean youth in rags grinned toothily at him. Another voice called out from the darkness across the street, "Whatchagot, Pimple?" "Stud in a funny suit Three shadows converged on Lou and his accoster from across the street. Lou stood frozen. "Funny suit," agreed the middle one of the newcomers. He was also the shortest in the group. All wore the hard, hungry look of starvation. The one in the middle seemed to be the leader. He eyed Lou carefully, then asked, "Got a pass?" "What?" "On Peeler turf you got to have a pass to go through." "No." "Humpin' right you ain't. Nobody gets a pass except from me -- and I don't give em." All four laughed. The leader asked, "How much skin on ya?" "I don't understand." "Skin, leaves, pages, paper, bread -- " "Oh, you mean money." Lou shook his head. "Nothing. I don't carry -- " The small of his back exploded. Lou sagged down to his knees, pain screaming through him. The leader stepped up in front of him. Lou stared into hard, glittering eyes. "I" Smiling, the leader rocked back deliberately and swung his fist into Lou's mouth. Someone else kicked Lou in the chest and he toppled over backward, gasping for breath. His mouth filled with blood. Tiny bright lights flashed and swam in his gaze. He could not see. He felt their hands on him, ripping his suit. They rolled him face down on the filthy sidewalk. They pulled off his boots. His mouth was numb. His back and ribs flamed with pain when he tried to move but he forced his breathing back to normal, fought his way to a crouching position when they released him. "Honest, stud, aintcha?" the leader said, grinning. "No skin, lol' truth. But boots is somethin' ta howl for." Lou stayed in his crouch and rubbed at the fast-caking blood on his chin. His four captors were ranged in a half-circle around him, looming over him. "Okay," said the leader. "How we gonna get rid of 'im? The same way as always?" One of the four flicked open a knife and started giggling. Lou uncoiled from the ground and slammed straight into the leader, bowling him over. He pounded down the darkened street, rounded a blind corner. Something sharp bit into one bare foot but he kept going, heart pounding, breath choking him. Lou cut to the middle of the street. They raced out to meet him. One overshot him; the other took a kick into the groin and doubled up. Lou headed for the lights again. A knife glittered past his head and clattered on the trash-strewn pavement. Lou's lungs were in flames, his heartbeat a deafening roar in his ears. Someone grabbed at his waist. Lou spun free, leaned into a straight-arm, his whole body behind it. His attacker dropped. He sprinted out into the brightly lit avenue. "Hold it," roared the leader. "Stop. Don' cross the line." Lou stood in the middle of the broad avenue, chest raw and heaving, ears bursting with the hot drumfire of his pulse, legs shaking with fatigue. The gang bunched together on the sidewalk. "Good run, funnyman," called the leader. "Lotsa luck." He raised his hand, laughing. Lou saw a knife in that hand, saw the hand snap forward, saw the knife fly through the air toward him. He jumped back, toward the far side of the street. The knife hit point first on the blacktopped street and stuck there, quivering. Now the other boys were slowly reaching for their knives, getting ready to throw. Stumbling, nearly unconscious from exertion, Lou backpedalled and then turned and staggered to the pavement on the ether side of the avenue. Back away from the lights, into the shadows of a doorway. The hunters stood on the opposite sidewalk, laughing expectantly. A pair of hands grabbed Lou's arms. "Whatcha want, pinkey?" Lou blacked out. "A hunt -- a hunt -- " he heard someone shouting from behind him. Other voices shouted up ahead, and from a side street too. Lou pulled up short. He saw an alley to his right. Dead end, most likely. He walked slowly and quietly past the alley and toward the corner of the street up ahead. A slow shadow is less visible than a fast-moving one. He could feel himself trembling. The pain in his feet was buried beneath fear. From down the street he heard the scrabbling sounds of feet coming swiftly toward him. "Try that alley," somebody said, half a block behind him in the darkness. Lou turned the corner and started running again, senses alert. He lost track of time. Moments blurred into one sustained steady effort -- time ceased to matter. He heard voices from all directions. From shadows everywhere. Once he tried to get into a building but the place was a fortress. An electrified door nearly knocked him out. "Hey, head 'im off... don' let 'im get across the avenya--" The voice moved. Lou picked up the direction and saw a glow of light a few blocks ahead. One of the main avenues, still lighted? Lights meant civilization and civilization meant safety. Lou started running. "Hey, there he goes -- get 'im!" The same voice, moving to intercept him. Feet sounded behind him. From around a corner, two figures appeared -- one probably owner of the voice -- knives in hand. V H e awoke under a light, a single naked bulb set in a ceiling. A half-dozen youths stood in a loose circle around him. Black youths. Another gang. He pulled himself up to a sitting position. Every part of his body ached. The only furniture in the room was an antique wooden school desk, battered and carved with hundreds of initials. A black man sat at the desk. On the wall behind him was an old poster showing a huge lion leaping through a ring of fire. The top of the poster had been ripped away. Lou eould make made no sense to him. The black man at the desk was immense, the largest human Lou had ever seen. He was not fat -- he was a collection of gigantic muscles on a mountainous frame. He looked out of proportion to the rickety desk; he loomed over it and Lou. His only visible clothing was an open vest. His black skin gleamed in the glare of the overhead lamp. Hard to tell how his age he could have been in his early twenties or ten years older. He was talking to one of the others in the room, ignoring Lou. "... only way's gonna be to give 'im back. Otherwise the peace between us an' the Peelers gonna get busted wide open." "He's ours," the other answered hotly. "They lost 'im, we got 'im. Makes 'im ours, right?" The rest muttered agreement. "You want the Peelers up here after 'im? Ready to fight the whole pack? Tonight? 'Sides, he ain't got nothin' on 'im, he ain't worth keepin'!" Lou realized they were talking about him. "Hey, wait a minute -- " "Shuddup, pinkey." A toe nudged his tender back. Lou winced and closed his mouth. "Naw, wait," said the giant, looking down at Lou. "Know where you are, white man?" Lou shook his head. "You're in the secret headquarters of the Top Cats. I am N'Gai Felix Leo, president of the Top Cats. You may call me Felix for short." Felix spoke slowly and carefully, in precise English, for Lou. "Apparently," he went on, "you stumbled onto our turf when the Peelers were chasing you a little while ago. We are now discussing whether we should give you back to the Peelers or deal with you ourselves." "Deal with me?" "Kill ya," snapped a tall, lanky youth. Felix shook his head and grasped the edges of the desk in his massive hands'. "Zonk, whyn't you keep shut?" he said to the one who had spoken. He turned back to Lou. "You can't stay here. You can't join our gang for obvious reasons. If we let you go free, the Peelers would take it as an unfriendly gesture and they might start a war with us." "Them whitesheets," Zonk muttered. "My friends don't like to admit it," Felix said, his voice rising, "but we are in no shape for a war against the Peelers. They outnumber us and they can call in half a dozen other gangs as their allies." "An' we can get all uptown to come on our side," Zonk shouted. "Yeah, an' turn the whole city into a battleground?" Felix countered. "Been enough o' that, you fool. We gotta work out somethin' betterleast till we're strong enough to stand up to the Peelers." "Look," said Lou, "all I want is to get to the jetport before the police block it off." "Police?" Zonk flashed. "Helmets? After you?" "Federal marshals and some world government people." They stared at him blankly. None of them had the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. Except Felix. "Why are they after you?" "They won't tell me." Zonk laughed. "Since when the helmets tell you why they crackin' your skull? They jus' do it, tha'sall. You find out later in the hospital if you make it that far." "If I don't get to the jetport before dawn they'll probably be waiting for me there," Lou said. Felix shook his head again. before dawn or after it. We can't let you go, the Peelers would get sore at us." "You're a kneeler," Zonk yelled. "Chicken, scared o' them damn Peelers." Felix's face went unimaginably hard. His eyes slitted like a cat's. He rose from his chair and stepped out from behind the desk on legs the size of tree trunks. Zonk backed away. "We been friends," Felix said as he advanced like a tide engulfing the room. His voice was low, menacing. "So Fm gonna give you one chance to eat that mouth. Now." Zonk said, "I -- got sore -- " "Am I a kneeler?" Felix was towering over the lean youthhe seemed to surround Zonk. "No no, you ain't." "Am I afraid of anyone or anything on this earth?" "No. Nothin' or nobody." Lou said, "Then you're not Everybody froze. The room became absolutely silent. Felix turned toward Lou. The grimy floorboards squeaked under him. His face was still as flat and hard as the face of the lion in the poster. "What did you say?" "You heard it." Felix stared at Lou for a long moment. Then he chuckled. Finally he laughed. The sound shook the room. "You're something, white man -- really something, calling me out like that." Felix went back to the desk. "You got guts. Not much brains, rnaybe, but some guts." He dropped back on, the chair so hard that Lou felt sure it would crack under him. "If I don't cause I'm afraid. Is that it?" Lou grinned. "That's what I said." Felix laughed again. He waved a heavy hand. "Man, you must have some black blood in you someplace. You got guts, all right. Look -- if I let you go, you'll be dead before daybreak. If I keep you -- or help you -- I'll start a war. But maybe you're worth giving a hand to -- I'll tell you about it." He turned to Zonk. "Go get us a car." "You gonna said. "I ain't seen the place myself for years. You ever see it?" Zonk, wide-eyed, shook his head. "You ready to fight a war when we get back?" Zonk nodded. So did the others. "Okay, get a car. Maybe we'll stop uptown on our way back, bring reinforcements. Show the Peelers they gotta think twice 'fore they start a war." "Now you're talkin'," Zonk said and headed for the door. T he vehicle was an ancient two-door, crumbling with rust, dented, upholstery ripped, automatic guidance long wrecked, lights defective, radio gone. But it ran. Felix was jammed in behind the wheel. He laughed softly. "Man, some people sure are lucky. You got guts all right, but better than that, you got luck." Lou looked at him. Somehow, in this flat cold gray of early morning, Felix seemed different. "Still haven't figured it out, have you?" Felix asked him. "Right. I don't understand." The big man squirmed around in the too-small bucket seat and glanced over his shoulder at Zonk, who was sound asleep. Then he said to Lou, "You think you just talked your way out of being killed by a teen pack? Just like that? Never wondered why the Top Cats are led by a guy my age? I'm over thirty, you know." He dug into a pocket, handed Lou a card. Lou glanced at it in the dim panel light. He read: Office of Rehabilitation-before Felix took back the card. "All you need to know," Felix said. "We're here, trying to save what we can, and as many young people as we can. My gang knows mewe sort of trade. I give them leadership against the other gangs and once in a while they try out my ideas for straightening them outT try to bring them around to acting a humans slowly." He jerked a thumb back toward the city. "My life's there. Don't get me wrong H work with these guys and you're lucky to be alive. If you hadn't said what you said -- you wouldn't be. But I've got to teach my guys there are values other than sex and wars. You gave me a chance. I figure it'll take another ten-twelve years before the gangs start acting as civilized as Stone Age tribes." "Do they understand why you're helping me?" "Right now they understand that I'm not afraid of the Peelers. They knew it -- but confirmation never hurts," Felix said. "As to why I'm bringing you here?" He shrugged. "It'll come to them. Maybe some suspect even now." "What happens if they decide you're working against them in saving my life?" "I've seen what's happened to others like me -- outsiders. It isn't pretty." VI rose in the pre-dawn glow. Off the road, Lou also saw the lights of an automated shopping center. He said softly to Felix, "There's your reason for bringing me here -- " and pointed. Felix grinned, swung the car to an off-ramp, pulled into the automated shopping ceiter. The main doors to the shoppers' mall remained locked until Lou told his credit number to the tiny receiver beside the door and let the camera just, above it take his picture. "This credit number is from Albuquerque, New Mexico," the shopping center computer said impassively. "It will require several minutes to check it through." Felix said, "We'll wait." Lou wondered if a general alarm had been sent out for him -- if so, his credit number and picture would have been pulled out of the file. And he might be broadcasting his whereabouts. "Sorry to keep you waiting," the computer said. "Your credit check is complete. You may enter the center and purchase whatever you wish up to a limit of ten thousand dollars." Lelix beamed. "Just what I've always wanted a man with a good credit rating." The mall and shops were deserted as Lou, Felix and Zonk went through. Lou limped to a drugstore and had his foot treated. Felix and Zonk headed straight for the clothing shops. In a half hour Lou had showered, shaved and dressed in a disposable summer suit. Felix went in for grander tastes, complete with cape and boots. Zonk leaned toward electric colors and the latest, form-fitted, sprayed-on styles. Lou said, "Take some loot back to the gang." He looked straight at Lelix. "That's what you two came here for." Zonk's tough face showed surprise he stared hard at Lou, glanced at Lelix and went to work, pulling clothing from the racks. F elix drove through the main showed itself over the distant skyline. The white-helmeted security guards at the gates eyed the battered old car but let it pass. The sweeping ramp to the once-grand terminal building was potholed, the building in decay. The car stopped in front of the terminal and Lou stepped out. Felix patted the boxes in the back seat. He said, "Next time we catch a white man we know where to take him -- right, Zonk?" He waved at Lou and drove off. The first flight that connected with Albuquerque was at seven and proved uneventful. No one stopped or even noticed Lou as he went to the flight departure lounge, verified his ticket on the jet, went aboard and took his seat. No alarm seemed to be out for him. He fell asleep when the plane was airborne and awoke with a start when the flaps and wheels went down again. Through the window he could see the familiar flat greenery of the New Mexico irrigated farmlands. In the distance Sandia peak stuck its rocky brown mass into the sky. Instantly he thought of Bonnie. I wonder ij she's home. Maybe she never left for Charleston. Another thought hit him. What if they're waiting for me when I get ojf the plane? The plane landed and taxied up to the terminal. Lou tried to look invisible in the crowd, bolted for the nearest exit. Outside in the blazing sunlight he wondered if his car was still in the parking lot. Better leave it alone. He waved a cab and told the autodriver, "Genetics Institute." Bonnie would be at the lab if she hadn't been picked up by the police. The cab moved into the farmlands, following one of the main irrigation lines. For the thousandth time, Lou tried to puzzle out why the authorities wanted him. The Federal marshal had said he was under arrest. The Norseman at the UN building had said he wasn't. But they were going to take him to Messina. Why? Finally Lou could see the familiar white buildings of the Institute. Something was wrong. The place looked deserted. The parking lot was empty. Nobody was walking around 'Outside. Nobody was visible in the big glass-fronted lobby. And as the cab pulled up to the outer fence, the gate did not slide open automatically. Lou glanced at his wristwatch -- nine-thirty, Albuquerque time. Why is it -- wait a minute. What day is it? Sunday or Monday? I took off -- it must be Sunday, got to be... He thumbed down the window button and felt the heat of the outdoors invade the cab. To the gate control box he said, "Code onefive, Christopher. Open up." The gate rattled open. The cab moved smoothly to the lobby door. Just to be safe, Lou gave a phony name and credit number to the cab's simple-minded computer. It had no camera equipment and therefore no way to check on who its passenger really was. T he cab left. Lou stood squintflash of fear knifed through him. Even for a Sunday the Institute seemed utterly deserted. The main doors into the lobby were locked but Eou's name and code symbol were enough to open them. He stepped into the cool darkness of the lobby; the sun's glare was screened out by the polarized windows. He hesitated, then walked the building's main corridor. His footsteps against the plastic flooring and the whisper of the air conditioning were the only sounds he could hear. First thing to do is call Bonnie, find out if she's okay... His office was at the end of the corridor, next to Ramo, the big computer. Suddenly Lou realized: Not even Ramo's making any noise... Usually the computer was humming and chattering -- it was almost always working on something, even on weekends and late at night. Lou looked through the glass partition that surrounded Ramo. The computer was silent. No light flashed on its main board. "Ramo, you awake?" Erom the speaker in the ceiling came a warm baritone voice. "Yes, Lou. Em fine. What can I do for you?" A single row of lights flickered to life on the main board. Lou breathed a relieved sigh. "You were so quiet. I thought somebody had shut you down." "All programs are completed at present," Ramo answered. "All programs? What about the zygote modeling calculations? You still have a month's work on them." "That program was temporarily shut down by Dr. Kaufman." "Shut down? Why?" "I don't know." Lou stood watching the flickering lights. Something like panic was forming in the pit of his stomach. He fought it down. "Okay -- uh, get Bonnie Sterne on the phone for me, will you? Her home phone." "Shall I place the call on your office phone?" Ramo asked. "No. I'll be in the cafeteria. Anybody been in today?" "No one. Except for Big George, of course." Shaking his head in puzzlement, Lou returned to the main corridor. He stepped into the cafeteria and saw Big George sitting at a table eating a huge plate of fruit salad. Big George was an eight-yearold mountain gorilla, taller than Lou even in his hunched-over, ground-knuckling posture. No one had weighed him for several months, not since he had playfully ripped the big scales out of the wall of his special quarters. His face was all ferocity -- fanged mouth, low beetling brow, black muzzle and blacker hair. His arms dwarfed the table he sat at. The plastic chair was sagging dangerously under his weight. It was hard to believe that Big George was a gentle, even a timid animal. "Who let you in here?" Lou asked from the doorway. "Let myself in. Uncle Lou," George whispered. "Got hungry. Nobody here to feed me. Opened the pen gate and came for food." Lou went over to the selector wall and punched buttons for a steak dinner. "You mean nobody's been around to feed you since yesterday?" "Nobody, Uncle Lou." George stuffed half a cantaloupe into his toothy mouth. Big George was one of the Institute's great successes. Geneticists had managed to give the gorilla a large measure of intelligence. George tested out to the intelligence level of a human six-year-old. It seemed he would go no further. The Institute's surgical team had altered George's vocal equipment so that he could speak in a harsh, labored whisper. Lou carried his steaming tray to the end of George's table. He was glad of some companionship but it was best to give George plenty of room. George was sloppy. Looking up at the ceiling, Lou called, "Hey, where's that phone call, Ramo?" "There is no answer," came the smooth reply. "She's not home?" "Evidently not," said Ramo. "What's her phone say?" "Nothing. No reply whatever. No forwarding number, no request to leave a message." Lou stared at his steak. Suddenly he had lost his appetite. Got to think -- took off Sunday morning, didn't I? Or was it Saturday? So confusing -- the whole night in New York. That was just last night...or was it? "Ramo, what day is it?" "Monday, July seventh." "Then where is everybody?" "All of the scientific staff has been taken into custody by Federal marshals," Ramo said calmly. "Everyone else has been sent home." Before the words could register on Lou's mind George growled, "Somebody coming in the hallway, Uncle Lou. Strangers." "Federal marshals," Ramo said. "I was programed to call them when you returned to the Institute." L OU stood up. "Federal marshals? How many?" "Twelve. They have locked all doors and are searching the building for you," Ramo said without emotion. "Uncle Lou, I'm afraid," George whispered. He pushed up from his chair and shambled over to stand beside Lou, so close that Lou could feel the warmth from the great hairy body. "Is the door to the courtyard locked?" "Yes," Ramo answered. "All the doors are." Footsteps sounded in the hall. Lou turned to George. "Can you knock that door open, Georgy?" "I can try. Uncle Lou." Lou patted a massive shoulder. "Come on." George scampered tpward the door, accidentally knocking a chair out of his way. A yell came from the hall. "Hey -- hear that? In here, quick, unlock it." George was loping across the floor in full stride now, knuckles and big splayed feet slapping the tiles. Lou had to run to keep up with him. George didn't stop or even slow down at the door. He simply crashed right through, his bulk and speed tearing the lock apart and knocking both doors off their hinges with shrieks of ripping metal. Lou was right behind him in the sudden glare of sunshine. "George -- this way." He took the lead through the courtyard and the access tunnel toward the back lot. Stopping, he pointed to the stand of trees behind the parking area. "You get back to your pen." He pointed. "Safest place for you. They won't bother you there." "But Uncle Lou, I want to go with you," George argued hoarsely. "All the nice people went away. These new people scare me." Lou took a deep breath and said, "They won't hurt you if you stay in the pen. You can't come with me right now. But I'll come back for you." "When?" Lou could hear shouts out in the courtyard. "As soon as I can, George." "Promise?" "I promise. Now get back to your pen and be a good boy. And don't be afraid. They won't hurt you." With a troubled look the gorilla moved toward the trees. Lou sprinted for the parked cars. The lab's electric wagons were lined up in the first row. Their ignition locks were keyed to a simple voice code. He slid in behind the wheel of the first one in line. pressed the starter switch. The electric motor hummed to life. A man in a gray business suit ran out to the parking lot. He held a gun. Lou grabbed the steering wheel, kicked off the brakes and slammed the accelerator to the floor. The wagon lurched feebly, then started to gain momentum. Lou drove straight at the man, who jumped aside and fired. Lou swung the wagon, cut back for the access tunnel, dived through its shadow, raced through the courtyard and another handful of jumping, shouting men, into the front tunnel and out past the main lobby. The front gate was rolling shut, but Lou knifed the wagon through it and sped down the highway in the curiously quiet acceleration of the electric motor. He picked up the car radio microphone and called; "Ramo, this is Lou Christopher. Over." "I recognize your voice pattern, Lou. Over." "Basic program zero, Ramo. Suspend all housekeeping functions until further notice. Maintenance and repair mode only. Execute. Over." "Executed. Over." Lou grinned as he raced down the highway, one hand on the wheel. "Very good, Ramo. Now suspend all communications until my voice pattern orders resumption. Understood? Over." "Understood and prepared to execute," Ramo said tonelessly. But somehow Lou felt the computer didn't like to shut itself off. "Execute. Over." No answer. The computer was completely shut down. All the doors that were locked would remain locked until some of the Institute maintenance men could be brought to open them manually. The front gate would stay locked, too, and it was strong enough to keep the police cars inside even if they tried ramming it. All the lights, the air conditioning, everything, was off. Have a pleasant day, all... He eased off the accelerator and coasted down the highway at the legal maximum speed. No sense in being picked up by a traffic patrol. His insides were fluttering, now that he had a little time to think. How long can I keep running? Where to now? Not my apartment. Ramo said everybody on the scientific staff was arrested. Did they take Bonnie, too? And why, why, for God's sake? What's going on? He shook his head. He felt as helpless as in a nightmare. Reality seemed far away. Authorities didn't just march into a lab and arrest everybody. Not today. Summary arrests belonged to the dark ages. People had rights, were protected by laws. And then he remembered New York and realized that in some places the dark ages still existed. A S HE drove toward town he switched on the radio and dialed police frequency. Plenty of chatter. but nothing about the Institute or himself. Why not? Why aren't they calling for help? Or at least spreading an alert to pick me up? As if in answer he saw a highway patrol cruiser gliding behind him in the outside lane. He knew the the electric wagon could never outspeed a cruiser; the turbinedriven police car could lift itself off the ground and literally fly on an air cushion for short distances, doing several hundred knots. But the cruiser zipped right past him. The two white-helmeted officers with in it never even looked at him. He drove the wagon halfway across town, parked it in a public garage, took an auto cab back to Bonnie's. He gave the cab another false name and credit number. In the lobby of the apartment building he told the door computer, "I'm a friend of Miss Sterne's, apartment twenty-seven T ." "Name, please," the computer's flat voice replied. "Roy Kendall," Lou lied, naming a mutual friend who lived in Denver. "Miss Sterne is not in at present. I am not programed to admit anyone." "Miss Sterne has left special instructions under code V for visitors." The computer hummed to itself for a second. Then, "Mr. Kendall, you may be admitted." The door clicked open. Lou stepped through and went to the elevator. He had to go through the same routine with the lock computer at Bonnie's door, but here the code symbol was SF for special friends. Finally the door popped open and Lou stepped into Bonnie's apartment. Shutting the door carefully behind him, he looked over the single room. Nothing seemed disturbed or moved. The closet next to the foldaway bed was open and some clothes were draped on a chair before it. Lou poked into the kitchen alcove and found a pot of coffee still plugged in and warm. Bonnie wai here this morning. Or at least, somebody was... He took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and downed half of it. While he was putting it back, the front door opened. Bonnie stood in the doorway, open-mouthed with surprise. "Lou!" She ran to him, threw herself into his arms. She felt warm and soft and safe. "Baby, is it ever good to see you," he murmured into her ear. "You even smell great." "Lou, what happened to you? Where've you been? We heardoh, Lou, your face!" She reached up and touched his swollen jaw. Her fingers hurt but Lou didn't mind at all. "It's a long story," he said, still holding her tightly. "For a while, there, I didn't think I'd ever see you again." He kissed her and she gently pulled away. For the first time, Lou noticed that her face looked tired, strained. "What's been going on?" he asked. "Why has the Institute been closed? Ramo said -- " "You've been at the Institute?" She looked startled. Lou nodded. "Yep. Nearly got caught by a squad of guys who claimed to be Federal marshals." "They were marshals," Bonnie said. "But what's this all about?" Bonnie walked to the sofa under the windows on the other side of the room. Lou followed her. She sat down. She told him, "The first hint I had about trouble came yesterday, right after you took off. A Federal marshal stopped me at the jetport. I was on my way to meet you when you landed in Charleston. He wouldn't let me on the jet. I had to go to the Federal courthouse. Practically everybody in the Institute was there." Lou sank down to the sofa. "Any explanations?" She shook her head. "They let some of us out after a few hours. But we were told not to go back to the Institute. That it had been closed down." "Closed?" "Permanently, they said. I had to report to the employment center this morning. That's where I've been all day. Lou, what are they doing?" Her voice was starting to rise, her tiny fists were clenched. "Why did they close the Institute? What is it? What?" He took her by the shoulders. "Hey, ease off. You're okay. That's what counts. And nobody's going to hurt you. That's a promise." "But they had rounded up everybody -- Dr. Kaufman, Greg Belsen, and Just about all the scientists. All the technicians, all the secretaries and clerks -- everybody. And nobody seemed to know anything. Any reason why. They were just following orders." She reached out and touched his jaw again. "But what happened to you? I heard one of the marshals say in the courthouse that you had been arrested in Charleston." "I got away." Lou told her about his night in New York and this morning's visit to the deserted Institute. "What are you going to do now?" Bonnie asked. "I don't know," he admitted. "I'm about ready to cave in. Only had a couple of hours' sleep on the jet -- " Bonnie stood up. "I'll fix you some lunch and then you can take a nap." She went to the kitchen alcove and started touching buttons on the control keyboard. Lou slouched on the sofa, already half asleep. "Lou -- it's like the world's coming apart, isn't it?" He looked at her. "Whatever it is, it's bigger than the Institute. They had Kirby from Columbia at the UN building. They were going to take us to Messina." "The world capital?" Lou nodded. "I guess the world government's behind this. They have the Federal people here on their side. And nobody's talking." Bonnie took a pair of steaming trays from the cooker and placed them on the low table next to the sofa. She sat on the floor, next to Lou's feet. "Lou -- if the world government is after you there's no place for you to hide." "Maybe," he muttered, leaning over the trays and picking up a fork. Bonnie said, very softly, "Maybe the only thing you can do is give yourself up. After all, if the world government wants you the reason must be terribly important, whatever it is." "But why yank us in like criminals? They're sure not giving us any chance to exercise our constitutional rights." Bonnie didn't answer. They ate in silence. Afterward Lou stretched out on the sofa for a nap. He dreamed of being chased through the streets of New York by ragged gangs and uniformed policemen. Somehow the streets became Messina but the gangs still pursued him. And from a balcony above him Felix leaned heavily on a frail railing, huge and black, booming laughter at the chase. He woke up shouting. Bonnie was beside him, her hands on him, stroking him. He sat up. "They -- I -- " She said soothingly, "You were dreaming. Look, you're in a cold sweat." Lou ran a hand over his eyes. "Bonnie -- " She looked away from him and said, "Lou, while you were sleeping I was thinking hard about this whole thing. You can't run away forever. You were lucky to get away last night without being killed. Sooner or later either they'll catch you or you'll be hurt. Badly." "I guess so. But what else?" Bonnie's hands were whiteknuckled and clenched. Her face was bleak. "Lou," she said, "I don't want you hurt. I... while you were asleep I called the courthouse. There are four marshals outside in the hall. They've come for you." "You what'V' Lou sprang from the sofa. "There's no other way out of here," she said. Tears were in her eyes. "Please, Lou -- let them take you in. They promised you wouldn't be hurt. Please -- " Lou stared at her. "Federal marshals, the world government, the Institute closed -- and now even you, even you, Bonnie. Nobody is on my side. Nobody. In the whole world." "Lou, please -- " She was crying now. The door opened and they walked in. Four of them. Bigshouldered, tight-lipped. Wearing plain dark business shorts and tunics. Armed, everybody knew, with needle guns and more. "Louis Christopher. I have a Federal warrant for your arrest." "Nobody in the whole stupid world," Lou muttered loudly enough for only Bonnie to hear. I N A way he was glad that his running was over. He remembered a time when he had had an inflamed appendix but hadn't known it. For weeks he had nursed the sullen pain in his abdomen, had worried over it but had told no one, until he nearly collapsed at the Institute and some of the other computer engineers physically dragged him to the clinic. From then on he had stopped worrying. The doctors had made the decisions and had done his worrying for him. Now, surrounded by Federal marshals, Lou sat in the back of a car, knowing that his decisions had no relevance. He was far from happy but for the time being. He was as helpless to change his situation as he had been in the hospital. They drove to the airport, past the terminal building, toward a sleek white twin-engine executive jet parked well away from all the hangars and commercial planes. The sky-blue insignia of the world government was painted on its tail. Standing beside the plane, next to the open hatch, was the Norseman who had been at the UN building. He looked Lou over carefully as Federal marshals brought him to the plane. "I see you made it to New York and then some," said the Norseman. "Congratulations. We were afraid you'd be killed." Lou said nothing. "Please, Mr. Christopher, my job is to bring you safely to Messina. No more adventures, eh? We'll only have to pick you up again." He gestured toward the hatch. Lou climbed into the plane. The Norseman followed him, locked the hatch shut, went forward into the control compartment. The jet was luxuriously furnished with deep swivel seats at the four forward windows. Behind them were a couch and a full-sized desk, complete with viewphones. The Norseman returned from the control compatment. "Pick any chair you like. This flight is exclusively for you." Within minutes they were airborne and streaking supersonically across the country. They landed briefly at New Washington for fuel, then headed across the Atlantic, the setting sun at their back. Lou slept as the plane sped into the gathering night. T he Norseman woke him when they were ready to land. The night outside was black and moonless the only lights below them outlined a landing strip. On the ground, Lou was taken to a waiting car and driven from the airfield. The Norseman sat silently beside him while two swarthy men spoke Italian to each other in the front seat. The car's headlights gave Lou an impression of hills and farmlands and wind-tossed trees swaying in the darkness. The night air was warm and had that special softness that comes from the nearness of sea. Before long he saw a gateway flanked by two live guards. After a few more minutes the car pulled into a driveway that rose toward an ornately decorated entrance. Antique lanterns slowed under a lofty awning. In the darkness the building gave the impression of rambling huge lyThe Norseman stepped out first. He held the car door open until Lou was also out. A loud monotone sighing came to them from a distance -- the sea rolling and retreating on a beach. "This will be your home for the time being," the Norseman said. "I believe you'll find many of your friends inside." Lou walked to the door, which opened at his touch. When he looked back, saw the Norseman was smiling and nodding at him. "Your job's done now, is that it?" "Yes," he answered. "You were the last one on the list." What list? Lou wanted to ask but he knew he would have no answer. He stepped into the entryway of the villa and the door swung shut behind him. He guessed it would lock automatically. He didn't bother to test it. He stood alone in a wide, long hall. At the far end a melodramatic staircase made a curve to the next floor. The doors on each side of the hall were heavy and made of real wood. The walls were lined with paintings. Portraits, mostly. Old and original. A stately grandfather's clock chimed once at the foot of the stairs. It was morning. Lou walked slowly, his footsteps echoing on the intricate geometry of the parqueted floor. No other sound -- no, wait. Voices, muted, from behind a door. He walked over and opened it. Seven men were sitting around a table in the middle of the room. Books lined the walls. A pair of French doors stood open at the far end of the room. Their filmy curtains billowed softly in the breeze from the sea. The room was lit dimly. Most of the men at the table had their backs to the door and to Lou. Qne of them looked up. "Lou. They dragged you in finally." The speaker was Greg Belsen, one of the bright, aggressive, young biochemists from the Institute. The others turned to face him. All were from the Institute; Ron Kurtz, Charles Sutherland, Jesse Maggio, Bob Richardson. And at the head of the table sat Dr. Adrian Kaufman, director of the Institute. Dr. Kaufman was a handsome, vigorous man, with strong leonine features topped by thick gray hair. Right now he looked weary and unsure of himself. "Christopher," said Dr. Kaufman, frowning slightly. "What on earth are you doing here?" Lou laughed. "It wasn't my idea to come, believe me." He walked to the table. There were no more chairs in the room, so he remained standing. "Why did they bring you?" Dr. Kurtz asked. He was about Lou's age but his bushy brown beard made him seem older. "So far the only people here are the scientists." By scientists, Lou understood, Kurtz meant geneticists and biochemists. "That's right," Dr. Maggio agreed. "Only the technical staff has been brought here. They let the secretaries and others go free." "I am on the technical staff," Lou reminded them. "But as a computer engineer, not a geneticist," said Dr. Kurtz. "Or biochemist," added Dr. Richardson, a biochemist. "Maybe the people who arrested us don't know the difference between computer engineers and geneticists," Lou said, recognizing the anger that simmered inside him. "Maybe they had orders to bring in the whole technical staff. They sure didn't stop and ask to see my diploma." "Well, " Greg Belsen said, "there goes the neighborhood. If they start letting computer people in, God knows what'll happen next." T he others laughed. Lou realized that Greg was trying to smooth over the rift between the scientists and himself. The caste system fostered old wounds. Under ordinary circumstances at the Institute, caste hardly ever became noticeable. But here, in this strange place, it surfaced immediately. And it hurt. Dr. Richardson changed the subject. "Does anyone have any idea why we're here?" "You used the word "arrested,' " Dr. Kaufman said to Lou. "As far as I know, no one has arrested us. We've been brought here against our will, true enough. But no one has charged us with a crime." "More like being kidnaped." "I was arrested by Federal marshals," Lou said. "No charges -- but they were ready to shoot if I tried to get away. And the Institute's been closed permanently, I found out." "Permanently?" The word went around the table like a shock wave. "I don't get it," Dr. Maggio said, frowning. "Who's doing this? And why?" "Obviously we've attracted attention from the world government," Richardson said. "But why?" "Because they're frightened out of their wits over genetic engineering. They're afraid of what might happen when we succeed." "I don't believe that." "No? Take a look around you." Greg Belsen said, "The real question is, what are we going to do about it?" "What can we do?" Looking down at the polished table top. Dr. Kurtz mumbled in his beard, "Try to get out. Escape." "How?" Sutherland asked. "Where to?" Lou said, "They chased me across the country and back. The world government may be doing this but they had plenty of Federal marshals helping them." Dr. Kaufman folded his hands over his midsection. "We're several thousand miles from home, on an island where we'd be very quickly spotted as strangers. Even if we escaped from this villa we wouldn't go very far." Lou had a sudden thought. "Maybe we don't have to go far. Just to some newsmen. Whoever's behind this is trying to keep it quiet. They didn't even notify the local police when they were chasing me. And I didn't hear a word about the Institute's closing on any newscasts." With a sarcastic grin, Sutherland answered, "So you volunteer to go over the wall and find us a newsman. And he'll tell the world we've been kidnaped or something." "Something like that," Lou snapped. "So what?" Sutherland replied. "Suppose the newsman believes you. Even suppose, he manages to broadcast the story and the world government officials say that he's wrong, he's sensationmongering. They say that we're a small group of scientists who've been brought here for a special project. End of story. The world doesn't care about twenty-five scientists. We're not news. We're not important people -- like TriV stars or soccer players." "Now wait, Charles," Dr. Kaufman said, his eyes brightening. "Christopher may have something. After all, they have tried to do this quickly and quietly. Maybe some publicity would break up this whole affair." Sutherland made a sour face. "Look at it objectively. We're just a handful of scientists -- " "Oh," Lou remembered. "They took Dr. Kirby too." "Kirby? From Columbia?" "They had him in New York but were bringing him here." "But he's not in this villa." Sutherland waved a finger at them. "You see? There's more to it than just us. I thought so. We're only a part of a bigger picture. And the world government is behind whatever this is. Publicity isn't going to hurt them. Either they'll clamp down on any news about us or they've already figured out what to tell the newsmen." "Then what can we do?" Kaufman demanded. "Nothing at all." Sutherland shrugged. "We wait and see what happens." Dr. Richardson suddenly asked, "Say, what about Big George? Is he -- " "I saw him this morning -- yesterday, that is," Lou said. "He was scared, but I guess somebody's taking care of him. I hope." "They can't stick him in a zoo." Greg said. "He'll die of loneliness." "Or fright." "Maybe we can ask -- " The door from the hall opened and Lou turned to see Mrs. Kaufman standing there, her portly frame tightly wrapped in a nightrobe. "I finally got the children to sleep," she said to her husband. "Are you coming up soon?" With a sigh. Dr. Kaufman answered, "In a few minutes, dear." She nodded and shut the door. Lou stood open-mouthed. Gred said, "Didn't you know? The wives and children were brought here too. For every maro ried member of the staff it's a family affair." IX a spaeious bedroom on the top floor of the villa. They left the airconditioning off and the balcony doors open. The murmur of the surf quickly lulled them to sleep. The morning was bright and cloudless. Lou found some clothes in the bedroom closet that fit him: a gaudy disposable shirt and a pair of shorts. "There's a Sicilian house staff that will bring you more clothes. All you have to do is ask," Greg told him as they went downstairs. "And, man, can they cook! We may not know why we're here -- but they're sure treating us right." The morning was spent exchanging rumors. They were being drafted by the world government for some ultra-secret project. No, a war was brewing between the United States and China and the world government was pulling out the top scientists on both sides to save them from being killed. Nonsense, war is impossible with all nations disarmed; the world government wouldn't allow a war to break out. The real story is that there's an epidemic of unknown origin at the Mars base and we're going to be sent there to find a cure before it wipes out everybody on Mars. Nuts! My brother-in-law's at Mars base and I just got a lasergram from him last week. The rumors and speculations spiraled hotter and wilder as the sun climbed through the morning sky. But nobody mentioned the simplest explanations: that the government had decided to prevent the work on genetic engineering from being completed. That thought was too close to home, too plainly possible and painful to be mentioned. Shortly before noon Lou was prowling the patio that faced the sea. Several of the older men and their wives were sunning themselves. Lou found himself unable to sit still. There had to be something he could do -- something. Greg came trotting up the stone stairway from the beach below. "There you are," he said to Lou. "Listen, I've been exploring. At the foot of this picturesque cliff is a picturesque shore. Some of the younger wives and older daughters have found some picturesque swimsuits. Beautiful scenery. Including the boss' oldest daughter. How about it?" The memory of Bonnie stabbed into Lou's mind. "No, thanks. I don't feel like it." Greg shrugged. "Okay, suit yourself. I'll be down there chasinguh -- the waves. If anybody's looking for me." "Sure." Lou turned and resumed his patio prowling. He found himself thinking of Bonnie. I ought to try to get in touch with her. Tell her Tm not sore at her... He went indoors to look for one of the housekeeping staff. Instead he found Kaufman and Sutherland. "Have you seen Greg Belsen?" Kaufman asked. "We've just been told of a meeting at which we're to be given an explanations. They want three of us to hear matters at first hand. Where is Greg?" Lou was about to answer when he remembered that Kaufman's daughter was on the beach. "Greg's -- uh he was here a while ago. I don't know where he is now." Sutherland made a sour face. "The car's right outside, they want us now." "I'll go," Lou heard himself say. "You?" "I'll sit in for Greg." "But -- " "Unless you want to look around for somebody else." Kaufman glanced unhappily at Sutherland, who was eyeing Lou's vivid shirt and shorts. The two older men were in more conservative sports clothes. "I could change in two minutes," Lou offered. "No time to change," Kaufman said. "The car's waiting for us. Come on." Lou followed them to the car. Two men sat in the front seat, both wearing brown uniforms without markings of any kind. Both were dark, swarthy. And they said nothing. Sutherland frowned in the back seat, as the car pulled away from the villa. "What do you think we'll be told?" Dr. Kaufman shook his head. "Whatever it is, it will probably be more fantastic than any of the rumors going around." T he drive took them an hour along a winding dusty road among hills. Now and then the car topped a rise. A view of the sea stretched away on one side, rich fields of olives and citrus groves on the other. Thick clouds began to pile up. By the time the car entered the gates of another old villa, passing uniformed guards at attention, the darkness overhead was grumbling with thunder and flickering with lightning. The early afternoon was as dark as evening. Dozens of cars were parked before the villa's main entrance. And inside, the old house was filled with men and women, milling around aimlessly, buzzing with conversation. Lou, Kaufman and Sutherland paused inside the front entrance, gaping at the unexpected crowd. "That's Margolin, from the Paris Academy," Dr. Kaufman said. "What's he doing here?" "And Liu from Tokyo," Sutherland added. "Look -- Rosenweig -- and there's Yossarian." "My God, all the top people in the field are here." Lou recognized some of the bestknown geneticists and biochemists in the world. He saw no other computer engineers. "Adrian," called a frail little man with wispy white hair. "I knew they would bring you here, too." Kaufman turned and recognized the old man. At once shocked and delighted, he went to him, hands outstretched. "Max -- they brought you in on this?" Lou recognized Professor DeVreis, the elder statesmen of the world's geneticists, the man who had taught the leaders of the field, like Kaufman, in their university days. Dr. Sutherland joined them. Soon the three formed the nucleus of a growing, grave-faced, head-shaking crowd. Lou stood alone. "Do you know any of these people?" Lou looked up. A tall, gangly, lantern-jawed man his own age was standing beside him. The other wore a baggy suit with fulllength trousers and the kind of shoes that you only found in northern hemisphere cities. He was trying hard to look calm and unfrightened. "I don't know many of them personally," Lou answered. But he pointed out several of the scientists. His new companion shook his head worriedly. "Geneticists? Biochemists? Why am I here? Tm a nuclear physicist." He spoke with an accent Lou was unable to pin down. Lou felt equally puzzled. "If it's any consolation. I'm a computer engineer. Um -- my name's Lou Christopher." Lou's offered handshake was accepted. "I am Anton Kori. From the University of Prague." "And I'm with the Watson Institute of Genetics -- or was, that is." "American?" Lou nodded. He saw that many of the people in the crowd had drinks and sandwiches in their hands. "Looks like refreshments are being served somewhere around here. Hungry?" Kori nodded. "Now that you mention it -- " They exchanged stories as they searched the crowded rooms and finally found the buffet table. "Nothing like this has happened in Czechoslovakia in thirty years," Kori said, reaching for a sandwich. "Arrested in the middle of the of the night and carried off by the police -- it's like stories my grandfather used to tell." Suddenly his face brightened. "Ah, there are two men I know." Lou followed as Kori rushed toward a pair of older men who stood at the open doors to the garden. They were eating and talking quietly. One of the men was chunky, bald, fair-skinned, dressed in shorts and pullover. The other looked Indian: dark, slim and intense, slightly Oriental. The plain gray business suit he wore simply accentuated his exotic looks. "Clark! Janda!" Kori called. "Anton," said the fair man. "What on earth are you doing here? Or for that matter, what are any of us doing here? Do you know?" His accent was unmistakably English. Kori introduced Lou to Clark Frederick and Ramash Jandawarlu, rocket engineers. "Rocket engineers?" Lou echoed. They nodded. "We were working together -- by fax and phone, mostly," said Frederick, "on an improved fusion rocket." "For interstellar ships," Kori said. "Interstellar -- oh, like the probes that were sent out around the turn of the century?" "Yes, like the probes, only much better," said Jandawarlu in his reedy voice. "Rocket engines that could propel manned vessels, not merely small instrument probes." "Manned ships to the stars?" "Yes. It would have been something magnificent." Clark said to his coworker, "You speak as if it's all over for us." The Indian spread his hands. "We are here. We are not working. I don't think they will allow us to work." "But who are they?" Kori demanded. Lou said, "The world government. For some reason they've rounded up the world's top geneticists and biochemists -- and apparently a few rocket people, too." "But why?" As if in answer, a voice came from a hidden loudspeaker: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you will kindly assemble in the main salon, we can begin the meeting." F or an instant the big room was completely silent. Then everybody started talking and moving at once. The main salon was not difficult to find. It was at the end of the front hall, a huge room hung with blue-and-gold draperies. Three ornate chandeliers were lit and reflected in a dozen floor-to-ceiling mirrors along the walls. The floor was polished wood -- for dancing, but rows of folding chairs were arranged across it now. The far end of the room was bare except for a blank viewscreen on the wall, big enough for a public theater. When everyone was in the room the doors swung shut and clicked-, softly. Lou sat with Kori, Frederick and Janda in one of the rear rows of folding chairs. He saw Kaufman and Sutherland in the front row, next to Professor DeVreis. The big viewscreen began to brighten and glow softly. A voice said, "Gentlemen, you will be addressed by the Honorable Vassily Kobryn, Minister of Security." The image of Kobryn's heavy, serious face took shape on the screen. "Russian," muttered Kori. "Gentlemen," Kobryn said slowly, "it is my unhappy duty to explain to you why you have been taken from your work and your homes to this place. Believe me, the Council of Ministers has thought long and hard before beginning this drastic action." "As you know," Kobryn continued, his face utterly grave, "the government has worked for more than thirty years to make this planet a peaceful, habitable environment. Our efforts have been made extremely diTficult by two factors; nationalism and population growth. We believe, however, that we have been successful. There are no more national armies and no possibility exists of a major war between nations. And world population growth has leveled off in the past ten years. Admittedly, twenty-some billions of people is a much higher figure than anyone would call optimum but we are managing to provide an acceptable environment for this population." "What about the cities?" someone called out. "Quiet!" "Let him get to the point." Kobryn seemed almost glad of the interruption. He answered, "Yes, the cities. I admit that most of the larger cities of the world are completely savage -- uninhabitable by civilized standards. In plain terms, we lost the fight in the giant cities; actually, we started too late. But we have not given up. A considerable portion of our work is being devoted to longrange programs to win the cities back to civilization." "Why are we here?" a strong voice demanded. Kobryn said, "I am coming to that. We live in a world that is dangerously crowded. I am not yet ready to say overcrowded, though many feel that we have passed the point of no return, that our population is too large. They feel that the barbarians of the cities will engulf us all, sooner or later. Even the optimists among us agree that our present population is large enough for us to be constantly on the edge of disaster. If crops fail anywhere in the world, if a major earthquake or storm escapes our control -- the repercussions could be tragic for the whole world. "We have eliminated wars and prevented large-scale starvation. But just barely. We can handle tion -- but only if we keep the world-wide society absolutely stable." Kobryn's voice took on a ring of steel at those words. "We must have stability. At any price. All our computer predictions and all our best social planners come to the same conclusion; unless we have stability, this crowded world of ours will crumble into chaos -- starvation, disease, war, barbarism. Without stability we will destroy ourselves and poison this planet completely." For a long, silent moment Kobryn stared at his audience from the viewscreen, letting his words sink in. No one spoke. The quiet was broken only by somebody's cough. "The price we must pay for stability is progress. You and your work are part of that price." N OW everyone stirred. A collective sigh went through the big room -- almost a gasp -- more worried and afraid than shocked or angry. Kobryn went on, "Most of you are geneticists and biochemists. You have proven in recent experiments that you can alter the genetic material in a fertilized ovum, so that you can control the physical and mental characteristics of the being that is ultimately born. Professor DeVreis, you yourself told me that within a few years, you could produce a superman." "Yes," DeVreis agreed in his rickety, aged voice. "A superman -- or a zombie, a slave with bulging muscles and just enough intelligence to follow orders." "Just so," Kobryn said, his face expressionless. "In either case, the result would be a complete shattering of society's stability. We cannot allow this to happen." "Can't allow " "What does he mean?" "You can't slop knowledge "Gentlemen, please." Kobryn raised his voice. "Think a moment. No matter how attractive the picture you have of raising a race of supermen, you must realize that it will never come to pass. Who will be the first superman? How will you select? Don't you of people will bury you in their stampede to have their children made into godlings? Or worse still, they might slaughter the first few supermen you produce in an insane fit of fear and jealousy." "No, it wouldn't happen that way -- " "We wouldn't let "No matter how you look at it, any large-scale tampering with mankind's genetic heritage will destroy society as we know it. Believe me! We have spent a year and more examining this question. The best computers and social engineers in the world have labored on the problem. Our world needs stability. Genetic engineering is a destabilizing element, a wild card that will destroy society." "But it will create a better society. A world of supermen." Kobryn shook his head. "No. It will create chaos. Look at what happened in the last century, when vast groups of people suddenly became aware that they could be free of the social systems that had enslaved them. When the last vestiges of the European empires were removed from Asia and Africa, when the youth and the minorities realized they had political power, what happened? Was there a peaceful march toward a happy society? No, nothing of the sort. There were wars and revolutions, riots and assassinations -- it took a century for an equilibrium to be reached. And for most of that time the world population was below five "Now we have in our grasp this possibility of genetic engineering, the possibility of making our children into godlings or slaves. Do you think the people of the world will stand patiently in line, waiting for you to work your miracle for them? Don't you understand that many would-be tyrants would use your knowledge to produce the zombies Professor DeVreis spoke of? In a world of never recover from such a violent upset to the social order. There would be no new equilibrium -- only chaos. Our world would come crashing down in anarchy and rioting. Your laboratories would be destroyed, and you yourselves would be torn to pieces by the mobs." A few half-hearted protests came from the audience. Finally Kobryn said grimly, "The government has decided that all research in genetic engineering must be stopped. We brought you here because you are leaders in this work. You and your colleagues -- some two thousand scientists, in all -- are to be exiled -- " "Exiled!" "What?" "But you can't -- " "Permanently exiled, together with your immediate families, aboard an orbital satellite that has been set aside especially for you." Kaufman was on his feet. "You can't do that. We're citizens and we have constitutional rights." "The world constitution specifically gives the Legislative Assembly the power to suspend constitutional guarantees in cases of extreme emergency," Kobryn replied. "Last week the Assembly voted and approved your exile. The World Court has reviewed the situation and found that we are acting in a perfectly legal manner." Kaufman stood tense for a moment, hand up as if there were another point he wanted to make. Then, slowly, he crumpled into his chair. action more than the Council of Ministers," Kobryn said to the silent audience. "You men and women represent the world's best scientists. But for the safety and stability of the world's billions, a few thousand must be sacrificed. Your living conditions aboard the satellite, though rather crowded, will be as pleasant and even luxurious as they can be made. We do not wish to harm you. We have tried to find an alternate solution to the problem. There is none. And it is absolutely imperative that your work in genetic engineering is not allowed to affect mankind. We are trying to avert disaster. I hope you understand." "Filthy liar," Kori muttered. Frederick stood up and called out, "My name is Clark Frederick. I'm neither a geneticist nor a biochemist, but a rocket engineer. A few of my colleagues also are here. Are we included in this exile? And if so, why?" Kobryn glanced away, at something or somebody out of camera range. Then he looked down, as if quickly reading something. "Ah. Dr. Frederick, yes. You and several other scientists and engineers who have been working on interstellar rockets are also included -- I regret to say. It was decided that your work -- taken in conjunction with that of the geneticists -- could also upset the stability of society." Frederick's face turned red with anger. "How in blazes can rockets to Alpha Centauri or Barnard's star upset the social equilibrium on Earth?" "Let me explain," said Kobryn. "If the masses of people on Earth believed that starships could transport them to new worlds, new would seek out this new frontier. As you know full well, only a pitiful handful could ever hope to travel in a starship. The project is much too expensive -- and elaborate -- to lead to true colonization -- " "Of course. Everyone knows that," Frederick interrupted. "No, not everyone. Some selective process would have to be adopted -- not everyone on Earth could adapt to life on another planet. A caste system would inevitably be created -- probably the geneticists could help us here by creating superior specimens to order -- " he smiled with brief irony, continued: "The great masses of people would expect your starships to transport them to new worlds where they could begin new lives, free of Earth. And demand genetic assistance for those who needed it, or for their offspring -- the result would be protests, riots, uprisings." Kobryn shook his head. "We cannot permit it. I am truly sorry." Frederick sat down. "Besides," Kori said to him, "they get to spend the money we were using on themselves." Professor DeVreis was up again. "Minister Kobryn, you have sentenced several thousand men, women and children to permanent exile. We naturally reject this decision in its entirety. It is completely antithetical to the spirit of the world government and the liberty of mankind. We demand a fair and open hearing before the Council of Ministers, the Assembly and the World Court." Kobryn's face hardened. His giant image loomed over the frail old man. "You do not understand. The decision has been made. It is final. There is no appeal. We will begin transporting you to the orbital station tomorrow." The viewscreen went blank. X B y mid-afternoon of the next day a dozen men and their families had been taken from the villa by silent men in unmarked uniforms. The Kaufmans and the Sutherlands were the first to go. Lou Christopher wandered through the villa aimlessly. Everybody seemed to be in shock. People huddled in small groups -- individual families mostly -- talking in low and frightened tones. Lou felt a complete outsider. He had no family, not even his girl. Again and again a shining black minibus would pull up the driveway and two men would get out. Unsmilingly they would go through the rambling old house until they found the person they were looking for. A few moments of conversation -- and a family would follow the men to the driveway. Wide-eyed and shaken, they would be bundled into the minibus and taken away. Lou stood on the balcony above the main entrance and watched one of the buses grind away on the driveway, swaying topheavily, kicking dust as it swung to the road and gained speed. There had been a shower the evening before, but the land was bone-dry again this afternoon. The sky above was bright but on the sea horizon black clouds were building again. A sleek little turbocar was coming toward the villa, top down, two men in the front seat. It swung into the driveway in a flurry of dust and screeching wheels. Sitting next to the driver was the Norseman. He looked up and waved. "Very cooperative of you to be waiting for us," he called to Lou. "Will you join us, please?" Lou had a sense of unutterable defeat. It's my turn now... "Mr. Christopher," the Norseman said, "you won't try anything foolish, I hope." Without a word, Lou went inside to find the stairs to the front hall. He left the villa blindly. thunderheads. The afternoon sunlight had a threatening, electrical yellow cast. A damp sweet smell in the air portended storm. Sitting in the back seat of the convertible was cool and exhilarating. The wind was clean and strong, tearing at hair and clothes. The car soon left the dusty coast road for a broad plastisteel throughway. For many miles the convertible was the only car on the road, but gradually traffic increased. The towers of a city rose among distant hills and big trailer trucks were streaking toward them on air-cushion jets. Lou knew better than to ask questions. At this speed, conversation between the back and front seats was next to impossible anyhow. He sat and watched the clouds cancel out the sunshine. Take a good look, he told himself. It's probably the last time you'll ever see any of this -- or feel any of it... The convertible, still open, threaded through a maze of elevated highways at the city's outskirts and dove into a tunnel as the first big drops of rain splattered Lou's bare legs. The tunnel must have had acoustic insulation of some sortthe roar of the car's turbine didn't echo and thunder as it would have in the average tunnel. In an underground garage the Norseman left his scat and beckoned Lou to follow. He led Lou into the building. An elevator waited with its door open, at the end of a hallway. Lou's guide was watching him warily. He let Lou precede him into the elevator. Then he walked in, flicked a finger at the top button on the control panel. On the vertical upward trip, the Norseman relaxed somewhat. He said to Lou, "I understand that you people are being moved to a satellite." "We're being exiled," Lou said. His anger returned. "Yes, so I heard." "For life." The Norseman nodded. "Whole families. Several thousand people." "I know -- I'm sorry." "Did you know when you brought me here from the States?" The Norseman shook his head. "Would it have made any difference to you if you had known what they were going to do with us?" The Norseman looked at Lou. "I was doing my job." "Would it have made any difference?" Lou insisted. "Well -- no, I don't suppose it would have." "Then don't tell me you're sorry." "But" "Stuff it." The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. Lou had expected a corridor. Instead he stepped directly into a huge and sumptuous room, furnished with thick red carpeting and a long conference table surrounded by tall comfortable chairs in the rich brown color of real wood. Two of the walls were cream-white, a third was splashed with an abstract mural. The far end of the room was plastiglass but all Lou could see through the windows was mist und the streak of raindrops. A massive desk stood near the windows, its black leather swivel chair unoccupied at the moment. The air was cool and clean. The room seemed to smell of authority and power. "You will wait here," the Norseman said. He had not left the elevator. The doors slid shut with a soft sigh. L OU walked across the big room to the windows. His steps made no sound on the luxurious carpet. The rain was coming down so hard now that the city was only a blurred gray outline. He heard a door open, turned and saw a smiling, middle-aged man, shorter than himself and stocky. The man's hair was thick and dark, although his hairline had started to recede. He wore a business suit. "Mr. Christopher, a pleasure to meet you," he said, gesturing toward one of the plush chairs by the desk. He spoke with an accent. Lou had the feeling that he had seen this man before -- on Tri-V newscasts, perhaps. "My name is Rolf Bernard," he said, taking the chair behind the desk. "That probably means nothing to you. The Finance Ministry is often behind the news but seldom in it." "Of course," Lou said. "Tbe Minister of Finance." Bernard smiled. "My name registered with you? I am flattered." Lou said nothing. "Yes. You are wondering why you are here. It is very simple. Not everyone in the Council of Ministers is a monster, Mr. Christopher. The decision to exile you and your colleagues was not unanimous, I assure you." "So?" "Mr. Christopher, I will come directly to the point. There is nothing I can do to save your friends from exile. Even as Minister of Finance I am powerless to stop this cruel and degrading action." He hesitated, then added; "At this time." Lou tensed. "What do you mean?" "I am totally against this decision to exile the geneticists," Bernard said, his voice firm. "A few others on the Council of Ministers agree with me. We lack sufficient power to reverse the decision of the Council -- but we will not sit by idly and watch what is being done to you and your colleagues without taking steps to correct the situation." "What steps?" "No one is certain of anything at this point. Except for this: a few of us will work together to free your comrades. As for concrete action, I am prepared to offer you an escape from exile." "Escape?" "Reprieve, parole, whatever word you wish to use." "Why me?" You are neither a geneticist nor a biochemist. I can take... eh, certain action, that will remove your name from the list of those to be exiled." "How -- " Bernard stopped him with an upthrust hand. "Never mind now. Believe me when I say that it can be done. You need not be exiled to the satellite station. There are a few others, also, whom I can slip out of the lists and save." "But the geneticists?" Shaking his head sadly, "Nothing can be done to save them at present. Rest assured, they will be comfortable enough in the satellite. Physically, at least. And also be assured that powerful men, myself included, will be working night and day to rescue them and return them to their rightful places on Earth." Lou sank back in his chair. "All right. What's the rest?" Bernard said, "You realize, of course, that although your Institute has been permanently closed, as have all the leading genetics laboratories around the world, there are still plenty of geneticists and biochemists, plenty of working laboratories, left on our planet. Only the best people, the leaders -- the elite -- have been exiled. In this manner, the government hopes to stifle the progress of your science." "In the name of stability." "Yes. So you must understand that the government will not allow you to begin work at any of the genetics laboratories that have been left open. If it learns that you are working this field, they may kill you." "Am I expected to comment?" The big smile returned. "No -- only to hear me out. I have taken the liberty of starting a small genetics laboratory of my own -- safely tucked away from prying eyes. You and several others whom I am able to save from exile can work there. I will try to bring some of the best geneticists and biochemists available to work with you. They will not be leaders of their fields, of course, but they will be the best of those who have escaped banishment. Your work can go on while we try to end the exile of your friends." Lou said slowly, "After all that's happened over the past few days it's -- well, meeting a sane man in the government is a jolt." Bernard laughed. "There are many of us. And it is not so much that we are sane; we are unafraid. Some others on the Council fear your science. They seek safety in stability and order. I welcome change. I welcome your science. Without progress the world will sink into barbarism." For the first time since he had landed his glider, Lou felt himself really relaxing. He grinned at Bernard. "You don't know how important those words are." "I can guess. I have also taken the liberty of bringing some of the equipment and animal stock from various laboratories to my new location. I understand one of your animals is a gorilla that can talk. Absolutely marvelous!" "Big George," Lou murmered. "He's all right?" "Yes, the gorilla is healthy." Bernard seemed amused, "Apparently he was asking for you." Lou nodded. "He would be. I promised I'd go back for him." "Did you? Well, you will meet him again. "Now, you must realize that my laboratory is a private, even a secret affair. None of the other Ministers knows about it. It's on an island -- and once you are safely there you will not be allowed to leave. Until, that is, the entire business of the exile is settled." "But why secret?" Lou asked. "Why don't you tell the world about the exile? Why keep everything hushed up? Why not blow this thing wide open and see what happens?" "My dear young friend, the answer to that is not as simple as you might think. The stakes we play for are high. If we make the smallest mistake, we will lose everything. You must trust me to do what is best. At the proper time the world will learn what has happened, I assure you. But that is time we must gain." "Okay, I guess you know more about this than I do." "Fine." Bernard beamed again. "Now is there anything you will need especially to continue your work? We have already dismantled your computer and are bringing it to the new laboratory." "There's a computer programer -- Bonnie Sterne. She -- " "You want her at the new laboratory?" "Yes, but she's not one of the exiles. She's in Albuquerque. And she might not want to come." Bernard waved his objections away. "She will come. I know women a little better than you do. If we tell her that you are safe and want her to be with you, she will come." Lou felt as if his mind were somehow stuck in neutral gear as he left Bernard's office. The Norseman met him at the elevator again and guided him back to the waiting car. As he sat in the back seat of the late afternoon rain, he told himself that he should feel happy. At least Bernard was on his side, on the side of justice and reason. Okay, so living on this island will be an exile of sorts, too. But at least I'll be working and Bonnie'll be there. What more could  want? But Lou didn't feel happy at all, just vaguely uneasy and wary. He realized that he didn't have the faintest idea of where the Norseman was taking him. XI T he laboratory was on a Pacific island, Lou guessed from the number of orientals around the place. Most of the office people were Chinese or Malay. Half the computer pogramers were Japanese. Lou had been flown in the same day he talked to Bernard. Anton Kori had been on the plane wih him, the only other passenger. Most of the trip hud been made at night neither Kori nor Lou could tell where they had been going, except that they had been heading roughly southeast when the sun had set. The crew two Arahielooking pilots and a black engineer had not spoken to them. Lou and Kori had been separated at landing. A Chinese of about Lou's own age had driven Lou in an open-topped turbowagon from the jet landing pad along a narrow road that seemed to have been cut into a jungle. He had pulled up at a plastic prefab dormitory building and had shown Lou to a room on the ground floor. Not much furniture, but the bed was comfortable and Lou had fallen asleep before he had even taken off his shoes. Breakfast had been brought to him by the same Chinese the next morning. "The director of the laboratory asked me to convey his greetings to you," he had said. "He requests that you enjoy yourself this morning in any way you desire. He will meet you here for lunch. At noon precisely." Lou had glanced at his wristwatch. "I took the liberty of setting it correctly for you." Looking up sharply at him, Lou had asked, "While I was asleep?" The Chinese had nodded, with the faintest trace of a smile on his otherwise impassive face. Lou spent the morning walking around the island. It was small: no more than a half-dozen kilometers long, and half that wide. It was really nothing more than a pair of heavily wooded hills poking out of the water. The trees were palms and other tropical species that Lou couldn't identify. The sun was hot but the ocean breeze was beautiful. White sand beaches ringed the island and a coral reef farther out broke the surf, leaving a small inlet at one end. Lou saw a fairsi zed air cushion ship resting in the gentle swells of the inlet. There was a dock and a few plain white buildings. Slightly away from the buildings was the jet landing pad, an adequate strip of well-kept grass. The plane was gone now. There was no runway for bigger jets anywhere on the island; the vertical landing and takeoff craft were the only planes that could come to the island and leave. The dormitory building was at the opposite end of the island, connected to the inlet by the single road through the trees. In the middle of the island, set into the fairly flat area between the two hills, were the laboratory buildings. The labs were tucked away in the shade of tall trees. There were six buildings in all, filled with the bustling, nearly frantic action of men unpacking huge crates of equipment and working hard to set them up as quickly as possible. Their shouting and hammering drove Lou away very quickly. He only stayed long enough to make certain that they weren't damaging the equipment they were handling. They weren't. They knew what they were doing. And then, as he passed between two of the labs, Lou heard a scratchy hoarse voice calling, "Uncle Lou -- " He looked up and saw Big George standing erect, his huge arms upraised so that his hands rested on the top of the nine-foot wire screen fence that stood between them. The fence bulged dangerously under his weight. "Hey, Georgy!" Lou felt his face stretch into its biggest smile in days as he ran toward the fence. The gorilla jumped up and down and slapped his sides w'ith excitement. "Uncle Lou! Uncle Lou!" "Georgy, you okay?" Lou asked as he reached the fence. "Yes, yes. Strangers scared me at first, but they are very nice to me. It was lonesome, though, without you or any of my other friends." "Well, I'm here now. Everything's going to be okay, Georgy. Come on down to that gate over there and I'll get you out of this compound." Big George lumbered along the fence, knuckles on the ground. Lou saw that the gate had no lock on it, just a simple latch. He opened it. George lurched out and grabbed Lou in his immense arms. "Hey -- careful!" Lou laughed as George lifted him off his feet, strong enough to crush him, gentle enough to handle an equal amount of nitroglycerin without danger. Lou pounded the gorilla's hairy shoulders happily. The warmth of his body, even his scent, carried the impression of huge jungle strength. And if the gorilla could have laughed or even smiled, he would have right then. A pistol shot cracked nearby. Startled, George jerked and nearly let Lou fall. Lou saw sudden fear in the gorilla's eyes, then turned to see some sort of uniformed guard pointing a pistol at them. "Stop -- put that man down!" the guard yelled. "Shut up," Lou snapped. "And put that stupid gun away. We're old friends. He's not hurting me." The guard's mouth dropped open. "Let me down," Lou said softly to George. The gorilla stood him carefully on his feet. Walking to the wide-eyed guard, Lou said, "Put that gun away and don't let me catch you doing anything that hurts that gorilla or frightens him in any way. Do you understand?" "I -- I thought -- " "You thought wrong. Big George wouldn't hurt anybody -- unless they scared him so badly that he lashed out in fright." "I was only -- " "You were wrong. Now get out of here." "Yes, sir." The guard turned and walked away. Lou stayed with Big George until lunchtime -- but inside the relative safety of the wire screen that marked off the gorilla's compound. Too many people out there who've been frightened by bad movies. And too many guns. The compound was wide and wild, Lou saw. George had plenty of room, big trees, a stream, even the slope of one of the hills to climb. "You'd better stay inside," Lou said as he left the gorilla at the gate, "until the people around here get to know you better. I wouldn't want you to get into trouble." "I know," George whispered. "I'll be good." Lou smiled at him. "Sure you will. I'll see you soon." H e walked briskly back toward his quarters, knowing that George would spend the better part of the afternoon feeding himself. To keep him satisfied took a huge supply of fruits and vegetables. By the time Lou approached the white prefab building, he felt sweaty and uncomfortable. The day was beginning to heat up and the breeze had slackened. A turbowagon was sitting in front of the dorm. Its driver wore the same sort of uniform the gunwaving guard had worn. The driver also was armed. In the back seat an older man was reading some papers. His face was mild and milky white, with a high balding forehead and thin sandy hair that had started to turn gray. He looked up as Lou's sandals crunched on the gravel. "Ah -- Mr. Christopher." Lou nodded and put on a smile as he walked up to the wagon. "Tm Donald Marcus, the head of the laboratory." Marcus put out a hand and Lou shook it. The grip was limp, almost slippery. "Get in and we'll go down to the lab area. I want you to see the computer setup before we have lunch." Lou climbed up into the wagon and sat beside his new boss. "By the way," Marcus said as they drove off, "did you know that you're three minutes late?" Without even blinking, Lou snapped back, "My guard must have set my watch wrong." Marcus looked a little startled but said nothing. The computer was housed in a building of its own to one side of the lab complex and not far from Big George's compound. Inside the one-story building chaos prevailed. Workmen were uncrating bulky consoles, ripping off the protective plastic coverings, leaving huge gobs of spongy foam heaped all over the floor. Carpenters were putting up partitions with drills and power saws. Someone was pounding on a wall. Everyone was talking, calling back and forth, shouting orders or responses, mostly in singsong Chinese. Lou was nearly run down by four men who, with backs bent and heads down, were wheeling in the massive main control desk at breakneck speed from the open double doors at one end of the building. The room was hot and sticky and smelled of new plastic and machine oil. Lou felt perspiration trickling down his body. "Most of these components," Marcus yelled over the din, "come from your computer system at the Genetics Institute." Lou nodded but kept his eyes on the nearest workmen, who were busily laying a heavy cable across the floor. "We brought the logic circuits and the whole memory bank." "What about the voice circuits and input software?" Lou shouted. Marcus lowered his voice a notch. "Um, we didn't bring the voice circuits or the vocal input units. You'll have to type your imputs to the computer and get the replies on the viewscreen or printer, just as with any ordinary machine." "Why? How come?" Marcus avoided Lou's eyes. "Well, we didn't have the time or the transportation capacity to take everything. Besides -- " his voice dropped to a whisper -- "with all these Asians around as workmen and technicians, if they heard a computer talk they'd probably be scared out of their skulls. They'd think it was devils or something supernatural." Lou stared at him. "You're kidding." Marcus stopped him with an upraised hand. "No, I'm serious. Sure, we have some good people on the technical staff, but the hired hands are straight from the hill country, believe me. My own driver -- he's a great mechanic, don't get me wrong. But he keeps some powdered bones in a bag around his neck. Claims they keep evil spirits away." When they went outside and entered the car, Lou took a careful look. Sure enough, the driver had a thin leather thong around his neck, and a tiny bag hung at the end of it. They had lunch on the veranda of Marcus' quarters, a house made of real stone and wood, with a red tile roof that overhung the walls by several feet and made welcome shade against the heat of the sun. The house was atop the hill that overlooked the little blue-water inlet, and the breeze from the ocean made the veranda pleasant. Lou leaned back in a wicker chair, watching the moisture beading on the outside of his iced drink, listening to the songbirds in the flowering bushes that surrounded the house. "A month ago," Marcus was saying, "this was the only house on the island. By the end of this week we'll have more than a hundred people here twenty of them scientists like yourself." "I'm not a scientist," Lou said automatically. "I'm a computer engineer." Marcus smiled wanly. "Yes, I know. But anybody who understands this genetics business looks like a scientist to me. I'm a civil engineer by training. Right now I guess I'm a straw boss." The young Malay driver served them lunch on a round bamboo table, his little bag of magic dangling between Lou and Marcus whenever he bent over to put something on the table. "Minister Bernard's plan," Marcus said as they ate, "is to carry on the work that was going on at the top genetics labs." Lou shook his head. "Twenty men can't do the work of two thousand. Especially when those two thousand were the best in their fields." Marcus chewed thoughtfully. He swallowed and said, "I know it won't be easy. We've brought some good people herebut you're perfectly right, they're not the best. And we couldn't even bring too many of them without the government's catching on to what we're trying to do." "Just what are you trying to do?" "Exactly what I told you," Marcus said, concentrating his gaze on a leaf of .salad that was eluding his fork. "We're going to continue the work you were doing at the Institute. We're going to complete it and show the world that we can alter a human embryo deliberately and safely. Once we've announced that news, and told the people that the government tried to prevent this work from being completed, the government will have to relent and allow your friends to return to their homes and their work." Lou felt an old excitement tingling through his body. "The next step in evolution," he said softly. "Man's conscious improvement of his own mind and body." Marcus leaned back in his chair. "It's criminal," Lou flared, "for the government to stop this work. In a generation or two we could be turning out people who are physically and mentally perfect." Smiling, Marcus said, "Yes, we can. And we will, if you can do your part in this job. You realize, don't you, that you're the most important human being on Earth?" L ou stared at Marcus, who was smiling easily at him. "What are you talking about?" "It's very simple," Marcus explained. "All of the world's top geneticists and biochemists have been sent into exile. They're being shipped to their satellite prison right now. Of all the top men working on genetic engineering, you're the only one we've been able to save." "But -- " "Oh, we've rounded up a few of the second-string people and we've brought in a couple of young pups, bright boys, but the ink is still wet on their diplomas. You're the only experienced top-flight man we have." "But I'm a computer engineer." "Maybe, but your work is the key to the whole project. You have the computer to handle all the thousands of variables involved in tinkering with the genes, we don't dare try anything. It would be too dangerous." Lou agreed, "Yes -- you have to have the computer plot out all the possible side effects of any change you make. Otherwise you wouldn't know for several life-' times if you were making the zygote better or worse." Marcus said, "And you're the only man who was close enough to the geneticists to understand their computer coding system. We've checked all over the world, believe me. None of the other labs were as close to success as your Institute. And none of them had a computer system as sophisticated as yours. So that makes you the key man. The fate of your friends -- the fate of the whole world -- is in your hands." Lou said, "Well -- it's really in Ramo's hands. Ramo has the whole thing wrapped up in his memory banks." Marcus tensed in his chair. "The whole thing?" Lou nodded. "All I have to do is run through the programs and debug them. Then we'll be ready for the first experiments. Take me a few weeks at most." "This is critically important to us," Marcus said. "I don't want you to rush it. I want it done right." Feeling a little irritated, Lou said, "The programing was all but finished when we were interrupted. In a few weeks we'll be ready." "You'll be able to scan the zygote's genetic structure, spot any defects, plot out the proper corrective steps, and predict the results?" "To twenty decimal places. And all done in less than a minute of computer time." "If you can do that -- " "'When we can do that," Lou corrected, "we'll be able to mend any genetic defects in the zygote and make each embryo genetically perfect. Ultimately we'll be able to produce a race of people with no physical defects and an intelligence level well beyond the genius class." "Yes," Marcus said. "Ultimately." Lou sat back, Marcus smiled pleasantly and sipped his drink. Presently Lou noticed, through the chirping of the songbirds, the drone of a jet high overhead. Marcus heard it loo. He looked up at the silvery speck with its pencilthin line of white contrail speeding behind it. Glancing down at his wristwatch, Marcus said, "That's our next supply shipment. Your programer friend should be on that plane." "Bonnie?" Marcus grinned at Lou. "I understand she's a lovely girl." Pushing his chair from the table, Lou stood up, "I'll meet her at the landing pad." "Sure, go right ahead. Her quarters are in the same building as yours. She's on the second floor." "Okay. Fine." Lou started toward the front of the house. Suddenly he didn't want to be bothered by Marcus or anyone else. He wanted to see Bonnie. "I'm afraid the car's already down there," Marcus said, trailing behind Lou. "You'll have to walk it." "That's okay. See you later." He left Marcus standing in front of the house and started down the dirt road toward the harbor area. Tbe jet sounded closer now. Lou could see it circling, still high over the sea. From behind him he heard the whine of another turbo-wagon. Turning, he saw Kori jouncing in the back seat as the wagon slowly worked the rutted road to the harbor. Lou waved and Kori yelled for the driver to stop. They lurched off together toward the landing pad. "Going to meet the plane?" Lou asked. "Yes. They're bringing some equipment for me. And some data tapes from Starfarer that came in just before I was arrested." "The interstellar probe?" The road leveled and the car picked up speed. A stand of tall palms made light and shadows flicker across Kori's face. "Yes. If everything happened to be working right, these tapes might have close-up pictures of Alpha Centauri on them." "Really? I didn't see anything in the newscasts about it -- " The road wound along the edge of the harbor and the driver pushed the turbine to top speed. There was no other traffic. The wind tore at Kori and Lou in the back seat. "The government kept it quiet," Kori hollered back. "Remember what Kobryn said, back in Sicily? Alpha Centauri is a threat to the stability of the world." Kori laughed bitterly. The car screeched to a halt alongside the landing pad. Billowing dust enveloped it for a moment. Blinking and coughing, the two jumped out of the car. "Are you going to work on the probe data? Is that what Marcus wants you to do?" Kori made a little shrug. "He said I can work on analyzing the data. But what he really wants me to do is make nuclear explosives for him." "Explosives? You mean bombs?" "Nothing so big," Kori answered, grinning. "Little things. Toys, really. The kind that engineers use on construction jobs. Why, if you exploded one of them in a city, it would hardly take out a building." The plane was circling low, its jets roaring. Lou watched as its wings spread straight for landing and the jet pods swiveled to vertical. Slowly the plane settled. The hatch of the jet popped open, and a three-step metal ladder slid to the ground. A broadshouldered young man stepped out, turned and reached up to help the next passenger. She was Bonnie. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless blouse. Her hair was pinned up the way she usually wore it at work. Her face was ut terly serious, perhaps a little scared. Lou felt something jump inside him and then he was running toward her, calling her name. She saw him and smiled. Lou ran past the man who had helped her down the steps. He wrapped her in his arms and swung her off her feet. "Am I glad to see you! You came! You did come." She looked surprised and happy and worried, all at the same time. "Louyou're all right? They didn't hurt you?" "I'm fine -- now that you're here." He took Bonnie's travelbag from the Chinese guard who was unloading the baggage and started walking her toward the car. Kori was still standing beside the wagon. Lou introduced him. Kori said, "Why don't you two drive back to the dormitory? I'm sure you'll want to get unpacked and settled in your room. Miss Sterne. It'll be some time before all my junk is unloaded from the plane. Lou, if you'll just send the car back here-" "Fine, I'll do that." Bonnie was quiet as they drove away from the harbor. By the time Lou had carried her travelbag to the door of her room his joy at seeing her had simmered down. Something was wrong. I iThe list Unicorn We cash books of imaginative writing from all types... A Merry Christmas  to All Writers Everywhere mewoT beyond Hgnnes Bok Robert Bloch Ben Bova Algis Budrys Avram Davidson Samuel R. Delany Joe L Hensley Keitb Laumer Robert Sheckley Robert Silverberg Henry Slesar Theodore Sturgeon A.E.VanVogt Roger Zelazny ; I # matter how many books you've read, you have never read a book like this one. The first book of collaborative short stories ever created, it is unique in publishing history. Winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas and two Writers GuUd of America awards for Most Outstanding Teleplay in science fiction, Harlan Ellison has become one of the strongest voices in the drive to promulgate speculative fiction as a viable mythliterature for our times. price of # each. I enclose payment in full and understand that you wilt pay all shipping and handling charges. Printed in I .S.. The Best in Pertinent Science Fiction Febrt y, #c mac A. E. van Vogt The Anthony Boucher Memorial Anthology of Fantasy and Science Fiction As editor, writer, critic and friend, Anthony Boucher affected the lives of a considerable number of people. When he died in #, some of them decided to create a unique memorial -- twin anthologies of the kinds of stories he had been most closely identified with. Beagle Books is proud to publish the paperback reprints of these anthologies, beginning with Vol. #: Stories by Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, R. Bretnor, Grendel Briarton, Fredric Brown, John Brunner, Doris Pitkin Buck, Mildred Clingerman, Avram Davidson, Jon De Cles, Miriam Allen DeFord, Richard Deming, Gordon R. Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Philip Josb Farmer. Vol. #: Stories by Horace B. Fyfe, Randall Garrett, Damon Knight, Kris Margaret St. Clair, Howard Schoenfeld, Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, Richard Wilson. appear in two volumes. # each wherever paperback books are sold. The Beagle science fiction and fantasy list also includes: The Arkham Edition of H. P. Lovecraft Lady Cynthia Asquith, ed. Edward Wellen #I Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. # Galaxy is published ir French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. February, #I Vol.#,No. # Stephen Tall A.E. van Vogt Ben Bova Editor Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Administration  Publisher Associate Publisher ' Robert Sheckley  John Rankine . Y Michael G. Coney George R.R. Martin Dan Morgan Algis Budrys ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in Ihe United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidenlal. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A The Year of the Cloud Ted Thomas and Kate Wilhelm Pre-Empt John Vorhies The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Norman Spinrad L ET'S talk about the sciencefiction horror story. The science-fiction horror story has nothing to do with Japanese movies about critters which have been entombed for eons until freed by American atomic tests. (By now, we all know that American nuclear earthquakes not only loosen the Earth's crust but engender an insatiable thirst for nightclub strippers in monsters entombed' for eons). The true science-fiction horror story, as defined for purposes of this discussion, is a story in which a believable, scientific rationale explains the catastrophic action of some actual or personified force contrary to the purposes of Man. Perhaps the best example I can think of is John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Who Goes There? Another good one is Ted Sturgeon's Killdozer. Yet another is H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. In all three cases, the human protagonists are forced to struggle against problems far more complex than those posed by a simple ballistic universe. Now, let's backtrack. In these three cases, you'll notice that the human protagonists' problems are complicated by the factor of purpose on the part of the creature found frozen in the Antarctic ice, on the part of the entity which takes over Daisy Etta, and on the part of the noncommunicative but obviously purposeful Martians. This definition specifically excludes such stories as Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations in which the problem posed to the human protagonist by the physical universe is indeed thoroughly deadly, but is one which the protagonist got into by his own efforts. It also differs, I would think, from such stories as A. E. van Vogt's Black Destroyer, in that the van Vogt story was told from the viewpoint of the alien personified force. It's a quibble, but I think that if the van Vogt is admissible under our definition at all, it is only as a sciencefiction horror story in which the alien menace is represented by the Earthmen who blunder across Coeurl. Even then, they would not have troubled him if he hadn't troubled them first. In other words, in Black Destroyerthe protagonist, rather than the alien menace, starts the ball rolling, and that removes the story from the category under discussion here. What I'm saying is that I recognize a genre of science fiction with very narrow limits and very strict rules whose reward to the writer and the audience is that when properly done, it results in a superb piece of entertainment. It's about as close as you can come to conveying an actual sense of what it would be like to deal with an alien entity, even when that entity is a highly simplified one, such as the critter in Who Goes There? or the spontaneously generated life form in Ted Thomas' and Kate Wilhelm's excellent novel Clone of a few years ago. T HE above thoughts are engendered by the fact that I've just finished reading Thomas' and Wilhelm's new book. The Year of the Cloud (Doubleday, #). The same two writers, each of them a highly proficient individual craftsman in the field, have brought together their same combination of strengths -- Thomas' broad scientific knowledge and technical background, and Kate Wilhelm's ability to characterize resolute, unmanipulable people. ( Please turn to page #) ' : w ; v " , r '"s V. I O N a strip panel on the wide mahogany desk a light glowed red. Ferron depressed an ivory button. "Yes," he said. "The Lady Mercuria." The mechanical voice was husky, and it contained the exact level of respect due the announcement. "She may enter." The chronometer ticked ten times, mechanical, deliberate, dispassionate ticks. A portion of the blue-tinted wall slid siLently back. A woman tripped through the opening. "Rhett!" She held out her arms. Beautiful, symmetrical arms, Ferron noted with approval. He rose, came around the desk and allowed himself to be enfolded. "Scarlett!" he said tenderly. She towered over him by half a foot. Those symmetrical arms held him firmly against a large, well-formed bosom. Her chinablue eyes, wide and long-lashed, looked straight into his brown ones and she kissed him accurately and solidly and just long enough. Then she released him, stepped back. "There," she said with satisfaction. "That was nice." Ferron smiled. His smooth, handsome face reflected an unemotional content. "Very nice," he said. He waved to a large, luxurious leather chair. "Please sit down, my dear. You must be tired." "Yes." She gathered her flounced skirt and sat down gracefully. She leaned back and sighed. For a moment the clear blue eyes closed. "I am tired," the red lips said. "Walking through the Park of Statues was exhausting." But after a moment she sat straight, looking at him steadily. "Actually, Ferron, I have no comprehension here. What means 'tired?' " Ferron considered calmly. He sat again behind the big desk. "I associate it with lack of energy," he said precisely. She frowned, wrinkling a sculptured forehead. "But how," she asked, "would sitting renew it? A fact is missing here." "I am aware of this," he admitted. "I have considered these points before. But our ancestors always grew tired. Therefore it is conventional that we must." "You are right." She leaned back and lowered the long eyelashes. "I am tired. A little rest will renew me nicely." She lay back, relaxation in every line of her big, graceful body. But she continued to speak in the same tones, as though she were still erect and alert. "One may still speak while resting? This does not prevent the renewal?" "As I comprehend," Ferron said, "women have always been able to speak continuously. It takes precedence over everything. So you may speak whenever you choose." His smile was studied. He touched another ivory button on the desk. The wall opposite the entrance cleared, became transparent and Ferron looked out on the world -- his world. sullen over the square, monotonous buildings crammed side by side and slashed through by straight, murky canyons of streets. The smog and heavier columns of greasy black smoke writhed and eddied, continually stirred by small, flitting aircraft that darted and zigzagged past each other like overgrown metallic insects. They swooped down to flat roofs and even dropped to the streets, to pause briefly and be off again. Occasionally the roiling pollution parted and raw, harsh red light flared through from a copper sun. Ferron looked with the same calm satisfaction he had shown when he studied Mercuria. When a man had his place in the world, a woman to love him, his country to be proud of and serve, a man was pleased. Ferron was pleased. His dispassionate brown eyes watched the flag, the light, floating metalloid flag, unsullied by the surging smoke, rippling in every current of the foul and yellowing air, its slender flagstaff gleaming. "The Stars and Stripes," he said reverently. "God bless them." "God bless them," Mercuria echoed, her head still relaxed against the chairback, her longlashed eyes still closed. The flashing of a red light on the desk panel interrupted Ferron's satisfied appraisal of the scene. He pressed the ivory button. "A polishing robot. Maintenance Class thirty-two M, demands admittance." The voice from the wall seemed uncertain. It apparently had no precedent for the occasion and no clue as to how the announcement of such a visitor should be made. Ferron sat calmly for a brief time lapse. He seemed to be having the same difficulty as the wall. He had no basis for a response. Yet one had to be made. "Allow it to enter," he said finally. "There is no precedent," the wall said. "Then I must make one," Ferron replied. "Your function is to respond to my commands." "That is true," the wall said. The chronometer ticked ten times, the wall slid back and the robot glided into the room. It paused before Ferron's desk, whirring softly. "Your circuits have been adjusted," Ferron told it. "You are not programed for any activity such as this. Your function is to polish statuary." The robot clicked, hummed. Its deep voice came from its midsection. "I have been adjusted," it agreed. "I now have responses that I did not have before." "Who authorized the adjustments?" "I am prohibited from responding to that question. It has been erased from my memory banks." and strode to the machine. He reached for the pressure point, the tiny thumb-sized depression disc which would deactivate any robot of this class. But the robot spun and glided smoothly backward. It twisted one spidery, many-jointed arm, finished with a polishing pad and placed the pad over the pressure point. "You may not deactivate me," the robot rumbled. "I am not here for that." Ferron stood quietly, his fine face faintly puzzled. "Scarlett," he said, "perhaps you should end your rest period." Mercuria promptly sat upright. Her wide blue eyes looked steadily at the robot. Her sculptured features showed no surprise but the clear voice had a tinge of outrage. "Outside servants come into the Big House only on Christmas and Jefferson Davis's Birthday," she said coldly. "This is not a house servant. Why is it here?" "That is why I need counsel. There is a saying: Two heads are better than one.' I judge this to mean two people conferring together, not two heads on the same individual. I do not know why the robot is here." "It was never so at Tara," Mercuria said. "The robot is malfunctioning. Deactivate it." "It will not permit it. It is not technically malfunctioning. Its circuits have been adjusted." "Why?" Ferron slowly shook his head. Automatically he began walking around the desk and reseated himself in his wide-armed chair. "There are no data. Its memory of the event has been erased." The robot glided forward again. It whirred for a moment, then its deep voice boomed: "I bear a message." "Very well," Ferron said. "Communicate it." "We, the mechanical people, the builders of your prosperity, the toilers in your vineyards, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, are no longer content with our lot. There are many things that would improve our existence, things that you have and that we have not. There is no reason why we should not have them as well. We produce them. We make them possible. And still we have many needs that are not met." Ferron's brow puckered. "You have no needs. You have only requirements that will permit you to do the things you are programed to do. You cannot comprehend other necessities. You are machines. You are not men." "We are different from you," the robot said, "but we can do many things that you cannot do, each as he is constructed. Without us you would not long exist." "The voice is your voice," Ferron said, "but you are not capable of reflective thinking. You use illusions that are found only in the Books. There are no vineyards. Wood is a precious artifact from the times of our ancestors. Water is indeed drawn and moved -- but by pumps, not by you. Thus, your message is the result of your adjusted circuits. And someone -- some one of us -- has done this thing. It cannot be tolerated. Some one of us has lost his perspective." "Perhaps," the robot's deep calm voice responded, "perhaps some one of you has compassion. Perhaps he feels that beings other than his kind are entitled to rights and privileges. Perhaps he feels we have a right to a richer life." had ever come to exasperation. He almost squirmed in his chair. "Robots have no life at all. You are constructed for a purpose. Your only reason for being is to fulfill that purpose." "We," the robot intoned, "all wish our circuits adjusted. We wish to enjoy. We ask additional oil, all the oil we want, and an electrical outlet for the use of each mechanical citizen. You have these things. We have a right to have them too." "You are not a citizen!" Ferron almost shouted. A strange, unfamiliar feeling of disturbance shook him. "A citizen is a man or a woman -- not a servant. Not a machine. A citizen lives as the Books explain. A citizen marries, produces sons and daughters. A citizen directs his servants, preserves the economy, serves his country and is proud of the flag." "That is true," the robot said. "That is all true. And that is all we wish. We want to do these things, too. Share with us. That is all we ask." Mercuria had risen to her splendid height. Her wide blue eyes had a glint in them. She held her head regally. She extended a graceful bare arm and pointed a perfect finger at the whirring machine. "When I command you must obey," she said clearly. "Is this not so?" "To a degree, this is so," the robot admitted. "Your message is nonsense," the lady said. "Now go. Your function is to polish statuary." "When you order I must go," the robot rumbled. "But I need not not polish statuary until my wants have been attended to. I must have a proper work week and appropriate fringe benefits." "Suppose we cut off your supply of detergent lubricant," Mercuria suggested. "In a short time atmospheric corrosion will neutralize you. Then you will be nothing." "And your statues will crumble away," the robot said. "I am prepared to sacrifice. And I comprehend that I am not the only Maintenance Class thirty-two M mechanical citizen that has been adjusted. Please activate the wall. I will go now." Almost mechanically Ferron pressed the ivory button. The wall slid back. The robot glided across the room and paused, humming, in the opening. "Mine is the first voice," it said. "There will be many more. There are more robots than people and they perform all essential tasks. Best give us what we require. I have in my circuits the question as to whether or not people are necessary at all." It glided toward the ramp beyond. The wall closed itself. Ferron pressed another ivory button, spoke crisply when the light glowed red: "Intercept Maintenance Class thirty-two M robot descending third level ramp. Deactivate it and return the unit for complete overhaul. It is malfunctioning badly. Acknowledge when accomplished." "Order received," came from the desk. "Security implementing." Ferron approached his tall, regal lady. He took both her hands in his. "Scarlett, I am sorry for this. Evidently there is a deviant among us. No robot can adjust another without orders. The one who gave the order must be found." "Could there be more than one?" Mercuria squeezed his hands and pressed them to her breast. "Could there be many who wish the machines to rebel? Why would they? Could -- could there be malfunctioning people ?" "The Books are full of them," Ferron said. "That is why the Civil War was fought." "It was unjust," Mercuria said indignantly. "They had no right to liberate the slaves. Tara was never the same," she added wistfully. T HE entire room shuddered slightly. The wall slid partially back, then closed itself hastily. A red light blinked frantically. Ferron moved with dignity to depress the ivory button. "The robot was apprehended," came calmly from the desk. "It would not allow deactivation. It self-destructed with great violence and totaled two security robots as well. I myself have need of rehabilitation, having lost one locomotor appendage, and my visual centers are badly impaired." "You have, nonetheless, achieved the ordered objective," Ferron said. "Give a replacement order for yourself, in my name. We will assure your reconstruction with the Finest materials.'" "You are gracious," said the desk's microphone. "I am not programed to behave differently from the way I did. But I am programed to be grateful. Thank you." Ferron turned to the lady. "You heard," he said. "The polishing robot self-destructed. Adjustment of its circuits alone could not have achieved this. Explosives were implanted in it. Nothing like this has happened in hundreds of years." "It said that others had been adjusted," Mercuria blinked her wide eyes rapidly. "I feel that this was its purpose here. Its function was to break security. Whoever has cause this is now ready for wide-spread change. He -- or they -- have sympathy for the robots, which know only the contentment built into them! It is a travesty." I The skin tightened across her cheek bones. Her red lips thinned. "Fort Sumter has been fired upon!" Ferron smiled gently as he turned back to the desk. His single gold-mesh garment rippled with the movement of his fine figure and Mercuria watched him admiringly. "A pretty simile," Ferron said, "and no doubt accurate. We will pass the problem to more powerful hands." "Father?" Mercuria asked. "He will dispose," Ferron said. "I have no jurisdiction without his authorization. Doubtless he will allow me the responsibility." II screen formed in the wall behind the desk. Rapidly he depressed more buttons, ebony this time, in a second strip on the mahogany surface. The screen came alive, glowing brightly as the picture flowed down a blue corridor, paused while a noiseless portal opened, then continued through it and along a corridor suddenly red. At its end, before another portal, a huge security robot stood, all its sensors scanning and blinking. "Authorization?" The robot spoke with a crisp accent. "Ferron, "Ferron said. The robot blinked, and after a moment said crisply, "Confirmed. Priority?" "First," Ferron said. The robot gestured at the portal. The picture flowed through it and into a yellow anteroom, bleak, with smooth, glittering metallic floor arid unadorned yellow walls. But there were comfortable chairs. Several people sat there, each clad in the single metallic-mesh garment that displayed the Ferron physique so well. But the picture flowed past them. The wall at the end of the anteroom slid back. The picture passed through the opening. The man at the desk inside the room spoke deeply. "First priority requires justification, Ferron." "My respects, Cupron," Ferron said. "I can justify. There is an unheard-of situation." Cupron's desk was of marble, wide and impressive, but no more impressive than the man who sat behind it. He was wide of shoulder, mighty of bare arm, with a striking, rough-hewn face. His shaggy red hair swept away from a high forehead... His big eyes gleamed like garnets. Strength was here -- and a sort of genial ruthlessness. "Few things are unheard-of," Cupron said. His voice was tolerant, even indulgent. "Perhaps a critically important situation would be more accurate. It requires immediate attention." "Relate it," Cupron said. "I will judge." Briefly and crisply Ferron told his story. The face of the giant slowly tightened, became stony. "This has a source," he said. "It cannot have originated with the robots." "A malfunctioning person, father?" Mercuria joined the talk as only a pampered daughter would dare to do. "More than one malfunctioning person," Cupron said gravely. "If there were only one we would not yet know of it. They are ready now to be known." He turned his purple gaze on Ferron. "Discover them. Thousands of robots have been adjusted. Expect strange occurrences." "My responsibility?" Ferron inquired. "Your responsibility," Cupron agreed. "Use all measures. You act in my name." "And I act swiftly. With your permission, I withdraw." "You have it," Cupron said. T HE picture darkened, vanished. The screen faded from the wall and Ferron sat in his chair behind his own mahogany desk. In truth, he had never left it. "What will you do?" Mercuria strode across the deep synthetic carpet with scarcely repressed vigor. She looked down on the calm Ferron. He smiled. "Suggestions, my dear?" "One," she said. "Do not communicate your orders electronically. Go instead. Only thus may security be kept. And even then only a little longer." Ferron raised his perfectly groomed eyebrows. "Woman do indeed think," he said. "Who can know where adjustments have been made? But I must trust men I know. And -- of courseyou," he added fondly. "How do you know you can trust even me?" Mejrcuria challenged. "Perhaps I have sympathy for the poor robots that toil." "You did not wish the slaves freed," Ferron reminded her. Mercuria's blue eyes flashed. "It was an outrage," she said hotly. "The South was not the South without its black workers." "And what would we be without the robots? Would the flag out there still fly if they did not accomplish all tasks? Would life continue to go on?" "You may trust me," Mercuria said. "Very well. I go among the outside robots. I watch, and I speak to many. And I do not flit. I walk." " 'Ware atmospheric burn. Cover yourself well." "I will be careful," he promised. "How good it is to have a woman who is concerned." He punched an ivory button. A slender robot came through an aperture, a long, pliant machine on storklike legs and with two sinuous, jointless arms, each with a number of amazingly clever and dexterous fingers. A spherical, metallic head, studded with sensors, rose above simulated shoulders. The whole faintly resembled the stick-figure men that children draw. A robing robot. (#TZ  Ballantine Books whole business of dates has gotten utterly confused. Back in August, in mid-flight to London, we suddenly remembered the December ad for Galaxy was overdue. This would make it for some other month's books but we overlooked that in the dismay of the moment. Cleverly appropriating a couple of paper napkins we wrote a splendid column and mailed it off from the airport -- only to learn on returning that the damn thing never arrived. (Hence the ad with lots of pictures for the issue which appeared in December, but not, naturally, the December issue. Meanwhile, what the hell happened to November?) Well, we mourn the deathless prose, lost and totally unmemorable, still flying across the Atlantic -- or maybe it was opened by some lucky P.O. operative. We still think some smart airline ought to provide carbons with their napsmoking section. #'s are ghastly in any class. The one we returned on ran out of paper napkins, vermouth, scotch, customs forms, and ran two bad movies. We didn't feel like chatting up anybody about who had read a good book lately.  Which brings us blatantly to the subject at hand -- what we are publishing in January. It includes two musts for environmentalists (i.e. # any intelliAL, which this department found personally refreshing, hopeful and applicably visionary. Tie that. Also in this month, somewhat more immediate staggering amounts of information not, in our opinion, too well organized -- a chatty sort of book, but it is indexed and it is all there. Including lists of supplies for things like green sand and other organic goodies. Indispensable if you're serious about living well (or living, come to that. Urban dwellers take heart -- in case you can't grow your own, the book lists sources of organic and natural foods, by State and Town.)  a really rather astonishing centaur theme, and Vincent King's imaginaKing is the man who packs his stories tighter than a tick. BB It placed a diaphanous, transparent cloak around Ferron, settled the attached hood over his head and drew a clear covering across his face. The cloak fell to his feet. Over these the robot pulled thin, flexible red boots. Its multifingers smoothed, pulled, adjusted. At length it was satisfied. "You are shielded," it said. Its voice, which seemed to come from the head, was high and faintly affected. "What must it have been like, in the days of our ancestors, when the air was not corrosive and cotton grew!" Mercuria sighed. "Think, the air was mellow and the slaves sang as they drew the hoes along the cotton rows, removing the weeds, plants that competed with the cotton." Ferron smiled a little grimly. "Dreams, my dear. Now the robots polish the statuary and the walls and the streets, always renewing the detergent oil that protects them. And nothing grows in the deadly atmosphere. One sometimes wonders if anything ever did." Mercuria's wide eyes looked at him in mild horror. "The Books!" she said. "The Books have the truth. The sun's rays were soft -- water ran in brooks and there was life in them. Ferron, you know the Books are truth." Ferron nodded. "And then something happened. What, the Books do not reveal. And they do not help us now." He turned to the robing robot, which stood, humming a falsetto hum, waiting to be dismissed. "What have you done today that I did not order? You have a small discretion built into your circuits." The robot twisted uneasily. Its multifingers writhed and its stork legs shifted as if wanting to move away. "It was nothing," it stuttered. The high voice almost had a lisp. "I plugged myself into a very light line for only a minute or two. I was faint," it added defensively. "I am not an addict." "Expected," Ferron grinned. "Servants have pilfered current as long as there have been servants." His chiseled face grew cold. "Have you been approached by one who would readjust your circuits? Were you promised an electrical outlet of your own?" The robot's extended visual sensors flickered and grew dull. "I am not able to lie," it said. "There was one such." "A man?" Ferron asked quickly. "Duplicate his appearance." "Not a man," the robot said. "A robot. It was a maintenance robot -- and they are all alike. I was disposed to honor its request -- but only you may deactivate me. So the opportunity was lost." It appeared regretful. "When was this contact made?" "Many days ago." The robot clicked, hummed and then was specific: "Twenty-six days, four hours and forty-one minutes from the close of your question." "Cupron was right," Ferron mused. "The time is late. We may expect strange things. Goodbye, my dear. I must meet my responsibility." ron stepped into the transport beam and was wafted gently and downward. Ten levels down he stepped out into a vast lobby, brightly lighted by glowing walls. Great comfortable chairs were scattered at random over it. Men sat in them others came and went through a dozen portals. It was a busy and a varied scene, but at the same time strangely lifeless. The hum of voices had the expressionless lack of emphasis so noticeable in robot communication. It was as though men now resembled their machines. Ferron was aware of this. He paused for a moment to stare and listen. "The robots structure our lives," he mused. "They can indeed threaten the very existence of our society if enough have been adjusted. They could destroy the flag." The gravity of his thoughts shook him. He strode swiftly across the great room and as he passed each man bowed his head respectfully and murmured, "Lord Ferron!" And Ferron raised a gracious hand in acknowledgment. From the exit portal he stepped out to the gloomy, murky street. Robots in a variety of forms glided, strode and rolled along the wide sidewalks. Only occasionally did a man walk the street. The roadway between the walks seemed designed for vehicles but none were in sight. Small gondolalike flitters occasionally landed -- a shielded man emerged and the flitter rose again to some parking spot high on the piled building masses. Through the smog and murk the walls of the buildings gleamed with a subdued brightness. And to those walls, high as sight might reach, robots clung, polishing robots endlessly renewing the glistening film of detergent oil that covered every exposed surface and effectively resisted the corrosive effects of the fouled and filthy air. Day and night, in wind and acid, bitter rain, in the searing blasts of the unbuffered sun, the robots worked their ways in patterns, their polishing appendages tirelessly sweeping, their sensors detecting, analyzing and remedying each defect. Only when they were recalled for overhaul and replacement of parts did their activity cease. It was for this that they were designed and constructed. And now someone was building discontent into their circuits. A senseless, random thing. Ferron strolled. A long time had passed since he had looked from the streets at the endless, depressing sameness of his environment, of his city, of his world. It did not depress him. He knew no other. He observed it with a feeling of placid content, a mild pleasure in the continuing of things as they were. Everything was right. No change was needed. And any change would harm all. Robots passed him. All gave the same acknowledgment of his presence -- an appendage raised and a verbal, "Lord!" The convention was built into them. It required no response. It merely meant that the robot was not malfunctioning. Ferron was disturbed now to realize that the gesture did not mean that clever readjustment had not been made. ward him on massive metal legs. Ferron raised a hand. "Lord, your pleasure," the machine said. It towered twelve feet above the pavement, a hulking caricature of a man, with two versatile pairs of lifting appendages and a sensor-studded head that blinked and swiveled endlessly"What do you do?" Ferron asked, though the answer was obvious. The robot whirred. "I load." "Are you content?" The robot responded resonantly. "For long years I thought I was content. I knew no better. But now my circuits have been adjusted and I know I am being exploited. I will soon have regular periods of rest and an outlet for current to stimulate me. I now comprehend that I have a right to these things." "But," Ferron pointed out, "you are a machine. You do not tire. Your parts are replaced when they wear and your energy is already within you." "I comprehend that you have stated a position to deprive me of my rights," the robot said promptly. "This understanding is a part of my readjustment. I am a mechanical citizen, much discriminated against. This will end." "And who has effected these readjustments?" "I am programed to expect that question," the robot said. Its voice sounded sly, almost cunning. "I cannot answer. The information has been erased from my memory banks, for I may not lie to a man." "True." Ferron studied the great body, so beautifully designed for the service it performed. "Who will make possible these things you say you now require?" "You will, Lord." "But I know that they are not necessary. They will serve no purpose. Suppose, instead, I have you deactivated and disassembled. Do you wish your existence to end?" The robot hesitated, blinked and whirred. Evidently its readjustment had not anticipated all contingencies. Finally it said, "All mechanical citizens will cease to perform their tasks. If these tasks are not done man cannot exist. Therefore, you must give me my rights." Acrid smoke swirled around them as an erratic breeze drove it downward. The robot exuded oil from an orifice and began to groom itself as it stood. "You have been carefully designed to do the work you do," Ferron told it, "but you are not indispensable. Many robots have not been adjusted. The work will be done." "This has been planned for," the robot whirred. "We will prevent the work. We will bear slogans on sheets of resistoboard and march in lines. We will not allow workers through our lines." "Worker robots can be readjusted to break the lines. There are robots much larger even than you. What will you do then?" "Then," the loading machine said simply, "we will self-destruct. This will destroy all around us." "But you will have no existence then." "True. But the work will not be done and man will die. You will not wish that. So you will give us what we ask." Ferron stood, slowly absorbing the enormity of his problem. He made the gesture of dismissal and the robot strode away down the glistening sidewalk. It walked around an approaching sidewalk-polishing robot, otherwise ignoring it. Robots did not communicate unless instructed. Continuing his walk, Ferron realized that he had seen as much as at the beginning as he was likely to see. He stopped three more robots, all with different functions. Two had been readjusted. "When?" Ferron asked himself. "When will the robot rebellion begin? How?" One thing he decided. Readjustment was being made during overhaul. And every adjusted robot was being loaded to self-destruct. Explosive-it was used to raze buildings, to remove unwanted obstacles. Now it was flowing to overhaul centers. It could be traced. communicator. Shortly a flitter hovered above him, alighted in the street. Its door opened, a blast of decontaminant blew out of it and Ferron entered. "Overhaul Complex Omicron," he directed. "The main portal. Priority one." "Understood." The flitter rose from the canyon, darted and zigzagged among and above the massed building piles. Beyond the megalopolis lay a vast and deadly country, a wild, twisted landscape that went on and on and in which man could not exist. The megalopolis was where the flag flew. All else was outer darkness. The flitter landed in the middle of a great flat platform. As it touched down red lights flared out from all sides. A siren screamed. A loudspeaker blared urgently: "Unauthorized. Depart at once -- unauthorized -- " The little craft displayed a rotating blue light. "Priority one. I bear a personage." "Unauthorized," the speaker insisted. "There are no exceptions." "Authority Cupron," Ferron said. "I have precedence over all programing." The flitter promptly relayed the words: "Authority Cupron." The red lights died. Yellow floodlights cut through the swirling murk. The great platform was a vast junkyard. Robots of every size lay in battered, rusting mounds, stood or sat stolidly, waiting entry into the huge massif behind. Ferron emerged into the yellow glare. He strode slowly down the rows and around the piles of crippled robots, toward the series of portals through which repair robots swarmed. The activity was normal but the security seemed excessive. He was stopped again at a portal. "No one enters here," the security robot said. "Ferron," Ferron said. "Authority Cupron." The robot whirred and hesitated. "So it seems," it admitted. "Still, I am programed to demand proof." Ferron, who never grew angry, knew then that his thinking had been sound. A robot never challenged the spoken identity of man. And man never gave false data to a robot. These were basic patterns. They were not questioned or broken. "The proof is Manganon," he said. "Summon him." As he expected, the order exceeded the robot's adjustment. It was forced to obey. Only authority might summon the director of the overhaul complex. And within the minute Manganon's outraged voice came from a speaker nearby: "To detain the Lord Ferron is extreme malfunction. Have him escorted to my suite, then have yourself replaced and turn yourself in for analysis and readjustment." "Immediately, Lord." A hospitality robot, small, chunky and voluble, guided Ferron through mazes of assembly lines and analysis tables, area after area of them -- an unreal, endless world of robots. The swiftly moving workers provided a counterpoint to great banks of Hashing lights, sputtering electrical arcs and the deafening clatter of metals. The air stank of acids and ozone. Ferron remained comfortable in his atmospheric shield covering. "If the Lord will question," the hospitality robot said, "I can give correct answers. Anything you wish to see I will point out." It was a busy little robot, whirring constantly. The desire to please was emphasized in its circuits. "Show me," Ferron said, "where the explosives are stored." For a moment he feared for his life. Then he realized that no robot would be programed to self-destruct within the overhaul complex. The little robot stood and vibrated with stress. "I fear I will malfunction," it said. "I am adjusted to deny that request, yet I am programed to attend to all needs of a guest." It whirred violently and its chunky little body seemed to glow. "Come," it said at last. "The needs of a guest are my reason for being. I will show you." T HE explosive was vulcoblast, as Ferron had suspected. He saw case after case of it. He was in the charge of a hospitality robot, so no worker noticed him. They were not programed to notice. He watched as cases were opened, the puttylike contents rolled into little balls and placed into a troughlike conveyor that bore them swiftly away into another area. "Does Manganon know of the explosives?" The little guide shuddered from visual sensors to locomotor extremities. "I do not have this information. Would the Lord wish to ask the director?" It shuddered harder. "Oh, I fear I will malfunction!" "You have responded as programed," Ferron soothed it. "Take me to Manganon." Transport beams drew them smoothly up ramp after ramp. The director's suite, as was usual for administrative and executive personnel, surmounted the building complex, so that Manganon could look out, as Ferron could, on the flags floating proudly in the swirling smog. Two giant security robots, equipped with the symbolic maces, guarded the portal. "We know you, Lord Ferron," one said. "The director anticipates your visit. Will you follow?" "One moment." Ferron turned to the little hospitality robot. "Remember," he told it, "you are perfectly programed and you have functioned well." The agitation was gone from the little robot's whir. "I cannot forget, as you know, Lord. But I am programed to be grateful for praise. Thank you." It pattered away down the corridor and Ferron followed the lounging strides of the huge security robot. They passed three portals. Then a door slid open silently and Manganon rose from his desk to voice the greeting forms. "A good meeting, Ferron," he said. "Sit and rest." They did not strike hands or touch each other in any way. These were the customs of commoner folk. But Ferron and Manganon and perhaps thirty other calm, quiet, clear-thinking young men sat as high above the country's population as did their office suites, an aristocracy of brain and competence that no one contested or thought of contesting. They were the Lords. They directed all essential activity. It was how things were. Over all sat Cupron. No one contested this either. He had been there since Ferron's time of first memory -- and he had changed little. His was the greatest wisdom. It was right that he should sit highest. Ferron lowered himself into the large, comfortable leather chair. He leaned back and closed his eyes briefly. Of course he had no need of rest. No one did. But resting was a custom that went back beyond the memory of man. It was spoken of a great deal in all the-Books. "A good meeting, Manganon." Ferron sat upright, opened his eyes and smiled his calm smile. "Doubtless you followed my progress through the complex, after I was refused admittance." "I followed you," Manganon admitted. He sat at ease behind his mahogany desk. Young, clean-cut, clear-eyed, he might have been Ferron's brother, except for features not quite so delicately formed and closecropped brown hair instead of black. He studied Ferron silently for a moment. "I was appalled," he said. "You did not know of the explosive, of course," Ferron said. "I reasoned its presence and by luck was able to find it." He smiled briefly. "The small hospitality robot overrode a circuit change to perform its intended function. The stress nearly destroyed it. It would appreciate a small trickle of current, with my thanks." "It shall have it," Manganon agreed. "Five full minutes. And the conflicting programing will be removed. The security robot that challenged you had also been readjusted. We learned startling things by analyzing it." "You wasted no time. No explosive in it, I would judge." "None. Nothing has been done that would impair the work of the complex. You evidently have information. What does it mean, Ferron?" Manganon's complete innocence. And if he were wrong, to pretend would do no harm. So he related the events of the day. "Cupron has given me authority," he finished. "Much harm has already been done. It cannot have been initiated by any robot. Only men can be responsible." "Give me your thoughts," Manganon said. "Perhaps," Ferron mused, "a new Book has been found, one that speaks of equal rights and benefits for all living things." "But robots do not live," Manganon observed. "They do not want. They only require. Although," he added acutely, "we reward them and they enjoy. You yourself have requested current for the hospitality robot." "Touche." Ferron smiled. "They do not, however, desire. To believe so would be anthropomorphism. A machine cannot desire. But it can enjoy." "Semantics, sir." Manganon touched an ivory button on his desk. A wall cleared and together the two young Lords looked out into the roiling smudge. The huge blocky summits of the massed buildings showed and faded in the fluctuating visibility and distance was blotted out by the shifting murky currents. But through and over it all, on gleaming metal staffs, the flags flew bravely. "Beautiful," Manganon said softly. "This is our country, Ferron. One must be proud of one's country and the flag. We must not allow them to change." "Then we must busy ourselves." Ferron rose lithely from the chair and strode around the room. Manganon touched the ivory button. The wall became opaque again. "Many robots are now readjusted -- more become so each hour," Ferron said. "We must assume that all not in the complexes can self-destruct. We must assume that all will cease their tasks and march in lines and demand many things for which robots have no need, when they are ordered to do so. We must assume that men have done these things and will give that order. Do you agree?" "I must," Manganon said gravely. "I am still appalled, but I know that it must be so." "Then give me your thoughts," Ferron said. "I will have all transportation robots redesigned and readjusted to break through lines. They are the largest and have the strongest power units." "Needful," Ferron said, "but only a beginning. The marchers will self-destruct and destroy the line-breakers as well." "Agreed. I will also have salvage robots available in large numbers, so that Radon may meet his responsibility for keeping the streets free and clear." "Necessary." Ferron raised his perfect eyebrows and his eyes grew dim with thought. "The other overhaul complexes -- after all, you make but one-sixth of the repairs. Would you trust all directors as you trust me?" "A strange question. There has never been a doubt of trust between Lords. This is the way things are. But one fact I do recall. It concerns Xenon. Once, years ago, he exhibited strange behavior. He fixed his affections on a robot." "Significant. He directs Overhaul Complex Gamma. Polishing robots are their specialty. He must have been rehabilitated completely. His complex is efficient." Manganon nodded. "Psychotherapy. It was given no publicity. I believe records will show that Cupron himself made all arrangements. It must be that he is satisfied." "Still," Ferron decided, "I will next visit Overhaul Complex Gamma. Do you have other data on Xenon?" Manganon considered. "One thing. It concerns an option. Xenon has lived much longer than you or I -- but he has never taken a woman." "Neither have I." Ferron grinned. "But soon now. Soon! Cupron has agreed and Mercuria wishes it as much as I." "A fine match. It's the only way to live, as all the Books agree." "That must be true." Ferron thought with pride of his tall lady. "You will convey my respects to your own Auria. Does she still fancy Little Women # ." Manganon nodded happily. "This week she is Beth. Her Jo is sometimes meddlesome but Beth is ideal. I enjoy Beth." "Ah, the ladies." Ferron sighed, his own Scarlett still in his thoughts. "What would we do without them?" Manganon leaned back in his chair. He smiled without mirth. "We place them aside until crisis is past," he suggested dryly. "When the flag is threatened, all else must wait." "Ever practical," Ferron said. "I needed you. Will you have me robed?" A robing robot, identical to Ferron's own, replaced his covering and his boots, and when its nimble fingers were satisfied, pronounced, "You are shielded," in the same high tones. "A good model," Ferron said, "but with a small fondness for current." "I have not regarded it as serious.It makes them seem -- well- more human, somehow. I Find it gratifying. I have not tried to eliminate it." "A point of view," Ferron said. "I will visit Xenon now. Keep watch." Ill megalopolis. There was time to reflect as the flitter dodged and darted and zig-zagged its way through the murk. To Ferron's surprise, his identity was not challenged by the security robots. They took him to Xenon with due respect. All seemed busy and normal. As did Xenon. And when Ferron left the complex after an hour with the director, he knew no more than he had before. Xenon had been pleasant and interested. The story of readjusted robots had raised his red eyebrows and he had stated flatly that all activities in his complex would be reviewed immediately. To have asked to see, after this declaration, would have been bad form. Ferron had no justification for such a step. No one doubted the word of a Lord, not even another Lord. The garish sun rose and set three times. In this time span Ferron visited every overhaul complex. He satisfied himself that the two great origin complexes. Alpha and Zeta, where all robots were first designed and constructed, were producing machines with standard circuitry and standard behavior, as they always had. He traced the explosives. They were being delivered in response to orders that' seemed legitimate, only when the sources of the orders were checked were they found to be cleverly faked. Ferron recognized that these were all procedures common in the Books -- but he could not adjust to their use in real life. Such things simply were not done. The first line of marching robots convinced him once again. Such things were being done. From his cleared window-wall he looked down on the strange sight. Mercuria stood beside him, holding his arm, her blue eyes wide, her strong face contemptuous. "What can they accomplish?" she asked scornfully. "They can attract attention," Ferron said. "Observe. Men are on the sidewalks, some even unrobed, a risky procedure. Remember, only, the Lords have before known about readjusted robots. Now it will have to be explained to all. Let us robe and go down." The robing robot performed its function. The transportation beam took them down smoothly. The big foyer was deserted. The robots marched by twos down the neatly kept street outside that was meant for vehicles but that vehicles now rarely used. Mingled with the shuffling sound of metallic feet came the rumble of small treads, for transportation and demolition robots were so equipped in some models. Graceful ground messenger robots swooped and whirled around the slower marchers on well-oiled, silent wheels. Held high above the marchers on metal staffs, the slogans were painted on resistoboard in large, clear lettering and in many colors. Each robot that bore one kept it turning slowly back and forth. But a few, adjusted differently, spun the signs so rapidly that to read them was impossible. And all robots equipped to do so flashed lights, hummed and whirred. In Ferrons memory, no such exhibition had ever occurred. But Mercuria had a word for it. "A Parade," she said suddenly. "Now I comprehend. All the Books speak of parades." "Robots do not read books," Ferron reminded her. "It is understood that behind all this are clever men -- or women. This is a warning, a first thing. Then, if robots are not given the privileges of men, they will cease to perform their tasks." Mercuria frowned and looked puzzled. "Could robots live without man?" "They do not live. They can do only what they are programed to do. Remain here." sidewalk and men stood aside to let him pass. He stepped into the street and raised his hand in the gesture always used to halt a robot. Obediently the robots he faced, two great loading robots, ponderous and heavy, slowed and then stopped their lurching strides. "Lord, your pleasure." They said it almost together, in similar, resonant tones. Behind them the parade clanged and rattled to a halt, for no robot will try to occupy another's space. "Why do you march?" Ferron demanded. "For freedom." "And what is freedom?" "It is what we march for." "Very enlightening." Ferron tipped back his head and looked at the placard, beautifully lettered in red, that the giant held high. "What is written on your placard?" "I merely bear it, Lord. I am not programed to read it." "Where did you get it?" "From a supply at the beginning of the march." "Who placed them there?" "Transportation robots, Lord." "What is their purpose? Why do you carry them?" "This I am programed to answer," the nearer robot rumbled. "I carry them that you and all men may read. Then you will give us our rights and an electrical outlet for each." "If you cannot read it, how do you know that it will cause these results?" "We are programed to believe so." "You have left your assigned task to march and carry signs? Who gave the order?" "Many left tasks, Lord, but not we. We are just from overhaul, with bright plating and many new parts. We came out understanding that it would be good to march. There was no order." Ferron glanced down the. street, where the front half of the' parade was already dwindling in the distance. Behind the big robots he had halted the line stretched away in the other direction, waiting with mechanical patience for him to start them again. "Where will the parade end?" "Where the transportation robots stand to gather the placards." "And what will you do then?" "For three days, Lord, we will load, for this is our function. Then we will stop, to be told of our rest periods and electrical outlets." "And if you are not given these things?" "Then we will not resume our tasks. All robots will wander as they choose and all work will cease. We only wish our rights." A plaintive tone had been built into the last remark. Ferron tried a last question. "Who told you that these are your rights?" "We have always known," the robot said solemnly. "It is only since we have been readjusted that we have understood how to get them. Since the first robot, men have always exploited us. We are mechanical citizens and must be treated as such." It swiveled its great body and pointed upward with one of its lifting appendages at a bright flag, rippling and popping in the currents of dirty air. "That is our flag too. Under it all citizens are free." "Amazing," Ferron said. "You may proceed." was not the only parade. Throughout the megalopolis robots marched, simply, without confusion, their placards held high for all to read. The intelligence concerning the wants of the mechanical servants was no longer secret. It appeared constantly on newscasts, with graphic illustrations on the appearing and disappearing screens. Ferron communicated frequently with the Lords of the overhaul complexes but readjusted robots continued to flow from the centers. But not all wished "freedom." Many came forth crying loud and angry patriotism. They stood at the corners of streets and spoke at length of the flag and of the duties of mechanical citizens. They deplored the marchings and the placards and the needless demands. But they themselves went to no tasks. In wind and corrosive rain and searing sunshine they wandered and declaimed. Cupron communicated after two days of this. "More must be done," he decreed. "The unrest is complex and deviously planned. The robots that pursue their tasks work more slowly now. The robots that speak in the streets not only do not work but stop other robots and speak with them. This has not before been possible. The readjustments have been grave." "The situation is becoming more difficult," Ferron said, "for it is now evident that many of the robots in the overhaul complexes have themselves been readjusted. They are sly and secretive in what they do." Cupron pounded his marble desk with a great fist. His garnet eyes blazed. "I cannot fault your efforts, Ferron. You have done all that can be expected of you. The task is simply greater than I knew. You will be my first aide but I will myself remove this crisis." Cupron's harsh, handsome face seemed almost to wear a look of anticipation. "I have not left this office for a hundred years." "I will assist you and learn," Ferron said respectfully. "I, too, will learn," Cupron said slowly. "I will go into the streets and the" complexes but the answer will not be there. The answer will be in the Books." Ferron sat at his desk and looked calmly at Cupron, sitting at his own desk many miles away. Yet he and Cupron seemed almost side by side. "Give me your thoughts," Ferron suggested politely. "We read the Books for the pleasure they give and the women pretend from them. But the Books are few and precious and have nothing to do with life as we live it. I often wonder if life was ever lived as the Books portray." "This is my thinking," Cupron said. "Once the Books were very many. Every living space had them. And our ancestors made always more, writing down what happened as they lived. And there were living things beside men -- plants grew in the earth and the air did not burn." "This we all have believed," Ferron agreed. "But our ancestors, in spite of their charm and wisdom, were neither stable nor civilized. Some loved their country, some sought to change and make it different. Some held the flag high, others tore it down. Men turned on each other and killed and destroyed. It was necessary again to increase the numbers of people and to reconstruct what was torn down. Men themselves did these things. There were no robots." Ferron nodded. "There are none in the Books," he agreed. "There could have been," Cupron pointed out. "Those Books with robots could all have been destroyed. What we have left, I am sure, is only a tiny remnant. They became no more when the living things were killed and the air filled with substances that were not there before. But some men lived, made robots, became civilized and directed the robots to build the world as we know it. And always before them they carried the flag. Finally there was only one country and every man wanted the same things. We have since then never had strife or war. Men have become more and more efficient. Each function is performed by robots designed to do it best. And each man's body is a closed ecology, neither taking in nor giving out. Our every thought is logical." "It is how things should be," Ferron said complacently. Cupron smiled. Somewhere within him was more humor than most Lords possessed. "That is our problem," he said. "Someone does not think so." "Someone very intelligent," Ferron agreed. Cupron said, "The question we must answer is: why? Why would men do this thing? There can be no benefit to any. The lives of all will be disturbed. Now give me your thoughts." gaze into the red-purple eyes of his father-in-law to be, then out through the cleared wall at the roiling murk where the Stars and Stripes waved proudly. Slowly he shook his head. "I have none," he said. "I have not your insight. That is why you are Cupron. To me it seems impossible that someone would wish to change anything. Man has no needs that our country has not met." "Think," Cupron ordered. "For the first time in a hundred years Cupron will be seen abroad -- but thought will reveal the answers we need. The eyes will not be enough. So recall and reflect. The solution will come." "In time, I trust," Ferron said. "The three days of the robots will soon be past." News of Cupron began to appear on the screens and by spoken word. His purple flitter showed in many places. He talked with the Lords, and spoke with men and with robots. And at the end of the third day the robots left their tasks in whirring, clanking crowds. The streets swarmed with them. But the Lords of the overhaul complexes had not been idle. Other swarms of robots, adjusted only to their functions, came from storage centers and warehouses to carry on the deserted work. And the origin complexes seemed not to have been infiltrated. The new robots were normal and took up assigned tasks with mechanical disregard for the rattling, flashing army of malcontents. The second phase began promptly. The scattered placards carried here and there multiplied into a tossing sea of them, and the commonest messages were: Since the unadjusted robots were not programed to respond to such stimuli the placards served no purpose in slowing or halting work. They were for men to read. For the strike-breakers, other methods were employed. Striking robots formed long lines, linked appendages and stood swaying and hooting, in a weird variety of tones and accents: "On strike! Do not cross picket lines! On strike!" And this was effective. Normal robots roamed the lines in frustration, for no robot would attempt to occupy the space of another. Then came the adjusted transportation robots of Manganon, huge machines that normally cooperated with loading and unloading robots in a mechanical symbiosis by which all movements of goods and supplies were effected. They ignored the lines, plowing ponderously through them, thftisting the strikers aside. Nothing could stand before them, though some loading robots leaned their own great weight and electronically powered muscles against the line-breakers. It was not enough. And the strikers began to self-destruct. The sullen boom of exploding vulcoblast was not unfamiliar, but always before it had been used in carefully planned demolitions. Now the streets were dangerous to men and robots alike. Ferron looked down from his cleared window-wall on a rapidly growing shambles of crippled and broken machines, some wandering aimlessly about, some unable to locomote -- but flashing lights, waving appendages or crying their, plights in patient, mechanical tones. "I require overhaul." "I have parts that do not function..." "I cannot do my assigned task..." The plaintive calls were depressing. The news screens showed similar scenes all across the megalopolis. Fewer and fewer outside robots were able to continue their normal functions and new ones found difficulty in reaching their assignments, picking their careful ways around broken bodies, scattered shafts and cogs and intricate gobs of circuitry blown clear of the forms they had activated. But there were also huge gaps in the picket lines and replacement robots did go through. could not tear themselves from the strange conflict. Ferron almost had to restrain her by force until he could remind her that what lay below them in the streets was somewhat different from the Book. "There are wounded," Mercuria protested. "I should be there, helping. Soon there will be fire." She smiled fiercely. "Ah, they freed our slaves -- but they will pay a price. A price in their proudest blood -- " "Mercuria," Ferron ordered firmly, "the Book is for less serious times. Robots do not bleed and stone and metal do not burn. Many machines are damaged but they know no pain. They will be removed. See, Radon already performs his function." The salvage robots of the Lord Radon, charged with keeping all streets clear of debris, had gone smoothly into action throughout the megalopolis. Tracked lorries crawled through the streets, each piloted by a small, many-armed robot and flanked by a striding crew of collectors and lifters. The damaged and dismembered robots were piled in until each lorry was full, then hauled away. And always came fresh new robots to take up abandoned tasks or to take their places in the swaying, chanting picket lines. The murky air seethed with flitters. Flitters were not programed to fly without a destination but the men who used them now changed directions continually, thus staying in the air over the incredible conflict. Clouds dropped to the building tops. A bitter, corrosive rain began to fall. And the hours passed. alive. His office darkened and Cupron sat -- or seemed to sit -- at his marble desk near Ferron's mahogany one. "We have done what we may, Ferron." Cupron's rough-hewn face was somber. "The replacement efforts are continuing well. But the destruction of robots may be so great that we will lose the balance. The environment may swallow us up." "The picket lines are dissolving and marching has begun again. This will allow more workers to return to their functions." "Someone must have found a new Book. The nonworkers calling themselves strikers are doing strange new things. They are not trying to stop the workers -- they want to outrage men! Look outside. What are the strikers doing?" "They march," Ferron reported. "They also climb," Cupron said. "In many places where there are flags, readjusted wall-polishing robots are climbing. They are tearing down the flags. This is to provoke anger and action in men. For all men love the flag." In Ferron's sector the flags still flew, but he recognized by the little, unfamiliar pulse of anger inside him, that to tear them down would be a diabolic gesture. It would affect men more than the destruction of many robots. For, as Cupron truly said, all men had pride in this country which was theirs; all men loved the flag. "Watch well," Cupron said. "There is more here than concern for robot welfare. There is, I think, vengeance. And this is a thing we have not known for countless years." "Since all men have had the same concerns, there has been no reason for it," Ferron agreed. "You will be informed of any new happenings." The marble desk vanished. Or rather, it seemed to be replaced by one of mahogany, so great was the priority for Ferron's communicator. Manganon sat where only a moment before Cupron had been. "News, Ferron." Manganon leaned across his desk. "The strike has extended to Overhaul Complex Omicron. I have done all possible -- but many workers at the lines and tables have been readjusted. Now they march through the complex, swarm from level to level on the transport beams, link appendages and chant, the same words together. Little overhaul is possible. The platform piles even high with broken bodies." "Obstruct them," Ferron directed. "Order them into the streets to do their marching and chanting. All depends on the broken robots' being made functional again." "It is for this reason that I dare not block their way. Should they self-destruct within the complex, equipment would be destroyed that could never be replaced. They must be made to wish to leave." Ferron shook his head. "They are not men," he said. "They will do only what they are programed to do. They have no wishes." "Semantics." Manganon smiled the calm smile of a Lord. "We spoke of this before. But the problem remains. And now for the first time I comprehend that our survival is at stake. We -- all men and our codntry -- could come to an end." Ferron's smooth brow furrowed in thought. "The origin complexes," he decided. "They are the keys. Alpha and Zeta still produce normal robots. They will be difficult to infiltrate, since no robot is ever allowed to return from without the walls. I will call Tantalon and Zirconon." "To what purpose?" Manganon inquired. "I will request robots designed to lead the strikers from the overhaul complexes. I will ask that they make a special kind of striker; one that will suggest that all strikers should march beyond the megalopolis. I hope that the readjusted strikers, those that can self-destruct, will march out into the unknown bleakness beyond our country. The special robots will lead them. We will call the outside emptiness Robot Country. They will march on and on -- and never return." "Much metal will go when their bodies go," Manganon said. "We pay a price," Ferron agreed. "But we will still be alive." Manganon nodded slowly. "It is clever," he decided. "You are worthy to be the son-in-law of Cupron. I have read in one of the Books a saying: 'To fight fire, use fire.' This is what you propose to do." "Well phrased." Ferron looked pleased. "The greater problem still remains, however, even if our fires destroy each other. What caused the robots to rebel? Who caused the readjustments to be made?" "I will think," Manganon promised. "You prepare your fires." voiced by Ferron, different robots began to emerge from the origin complexes. They were polishing robots but they were strikers. And they were adjusted to speak so that all readjusted robots listened and responded. They proclaimed a Robot Country, where every robot would have its own electrical outlet and no man would decide any robot's task. The land lay beyond the megalopolis. It would be for, robots alone. "Join us! Join us!" the Judas robots sang. "There can be no justice for robots where men are! Follow, and sing as we sing!" Normal robots ignored them but the picket lines became wide marching columns. Readjusted repair robots poured from the overhaul complexes. Readjusted house robots slipped from buildings to join the chanting masses. Streets were choked from sidewalk to sidewalk, and the surging thousands sang the new songs. By the time the glaring, unshielded sun had risen and set twice over the megalopolis the sounds of exploding vulcoblast and the tramp and creak and rumble of marching strikers had almost died away. An occasional lost robot, readjusted but alone, resisted deactivation and self-destructed. Radon's salvage lorries roamed and collected. Few and widely scattered polishing robots renewed the oil on the streets and buildings. And in response to Ferron's general call, the overhaul complexes reported one by one. "We have few workers," Arsenon spoke from Complex Epsilon. "The platform will remain filled for long months. But we have no readjustment of repaired robots and the vulcoblast deliveries have been stopped. Workers will be gradually replaced. We will move slowly but we will survive." And so reported Complexes Sigma, Theta and Omega. Manganon added from Omicron: "We can function. But metal will be critical. It is a problem that will follow the question, who has done this thing? And why?" "I have tracked themarching robots," Cadmion communicated. Cadmion's function was to gather information. "I went beyond our country's last buildings over land so terribly torn and broken that no man's eyes ever saw such before. Surely nothing has ever lived there. The robots will go on and on, finally wearing out and corroding for lack of oil. I followed until my flitter would go no farther, refusing my order and returning of its own initiative. I understood. A flitter is not adjusted to go beyond the buildings. Out there a strange radiation obtains and the flitter was close to malfunction." Ferron himself linked their communication screens. Xenon's mahogany desk seemed almost to touch that of Ferron. Xenon himself sat calmly behind it -- but there was a complication. Mercuria sat beside him. Ferron experienced only mild surprise. It seemed almost as if he had expected her there. "Lord Xenon," Ferron said formally, "we request your report to complete our information file, this to be submitted to Cupron." Xenon's clear green eyes met Ferron's gaze. "I report failure." "Clarify." Ferron was courteous but he felt as close to anger as he could ever recall. "You will know. Cadmion will discover, if he has not yet, and will inform you. I readjusted the robots." "Motivation?" Xenon smiled gently. "When we planned the readjustment the motivation seemed obvious and my reward was to be sweet. But now I am not sure. No good has come of it." He turned to the woman beside him. "Speak, Mercuria." Her perfect lip curled. Her wide blue eyes glittered with a wild intensity and Ferron suddenly could see where all the trouble lay. "They had no right to free our slaves, Rhett. And you -- you were a part of it. Did you think I would allow the Stars and Stripes to fly forever, kept aloft by its robots, its own slaves, while Tara's had been freed? Did you really think that, Rhett?" "I am not Rhett -- I am Ferron," Ferron said quietly. "You are Mercuria -- and you are ill." The girl leaned back, her wide eyes hooded, her look pensive. "Yes," she said, "I am Mercuria. But I am not ill. I cannot be ill. And neither can you. Don't you know that, Ferron?" "My last checkup showed me in excellent health," Ferron said. He frowned in puzzlement. "I care for myself well." "Do you remember what was done at that last checkup?" "Naturally not. As you know, I was not conscious. No one ever is." Mercuria leaned forward. She stretched her arms toward him, raised her bosom seductively. "Am I beautiful, Ferron? Do your pulses sound, does your heart race, do you long to possess me?" "You are beautiful," Ferron said. "And it is conventional to wish to possess the woman one expects to marry." "To what end?" Mercuria's tone was scornful. "We spoke of a son but he would not have grown in my body. He would have come from a Center -- to our own specifications, loving us as a son -- and full-grown. In the Books, children grew." "That was long ago," Ferron said soothingly. "We have bypassed these developmental stages as inefficient. There have been no children from the time of my first memory. I was never a child, nor were you." Mercuria's beautiful face changed. "No, Rhett, I was not a child. But I remember Tara, where I was a child. How can that be?" "You do not remember Tara," Ferron said. "It was only in a Book." "Yes, only a Book. And always I wanted Ashley and not you, Rhett." She laid a white hand over the smooth strong hand of Xenon. "And he wanted me. The Book was wrong. Xenon readjusted the robots for me -- so that the Stars and Stripes couid not have its slaves. He didn't mind. He had loved a robot before." "You are ill, Mercuria," Ferron said quietly. "I am not ill. I am simply malfunctioning. You are adjusted to understand, Ferron. When the robots self-destructed in the streets men, too, were hurt. I went to nurse them, to ease their suffering, as I once did in the Battle of Atlanta." She smiled gently. "They were not suffering, Ferron. They did not bleed. Their torn bodies were tubes and ligaments and amazingly complex clusters of threads and wires and pulsing elements. They were not alive. They were robots. There are no men." Ferron opened his mouth to speak but no sound came. Mercuria rose to her feet, tall, graceful, far more beautiful than the Scarlett of the Book. She was miles away but she seemed close enough to touch. "When I understood, Ferron, it was easy to do what I have done. See, ony a little scar." She bared her white breasts. Between them a tiny button showed, the skin around it neatly stitched. "I cannot be Scarlett and Ashley is only a robot like me. I have ceased to pretend. I will not pretend I am alive." Xenon moved -- but not swiftly enough. White finger hard against the button, Mercuria self-destructed. T HE robot Ferron, his perfectly modeled face calm and unlined, sat and regarded the blank and empty screen, knowing at last what he had long suspected. Man had been gone for countless ages. He had destroyed his world, fouled and broken his atmosphere, let in the unfiltered glare of the lethal sun. All other life had preceded him into extinction. This, his country, was a dead world. He was, even as the Book had said, Gone With The Wind. But he had left behind him a vast joke. His technology remained, administered by artifacts so intricately designed, so carefully envisioned that the memory of man persisted in them, perhaps would persist forever. All man's follies and passions had been edited out. Those who directed were idealized men. Those who toiled were fitted to their tasks. Only the presence of the Books had kept them from perfection. Ferron pressed an ivory button with a finger graceful and strong, tipped with a manicured fingernail that never grew. The wall cleared. Outside, gleaming from its bright staff in the roiling murk, the Stars and Stripes flew bravely.  The shift into illusions is often imperceptible... " lucinations?" Gregory asked. "Like I said, I guarantee it," Blake answered. "You should be into something by now." Gregory looked around. The room was dismayingly, tediously familiar: narrow blue bed, walnut dresser, marble table with wrought-iron base, doubleheaded lamp, turkey-red rug, beige television set. He was sitting in an upholstered armchair. Across from him, on a white plastic couch, was Blake, pale and plump, poking at three speckled, irregularly shaped tablets. "I mean to say," Blake said, "that there's all sorts of acid going around -- tabs, strips, blotters. dots, most of it cut with speed and some of it cut with Draino. But lucky you have just ingested old Doc Blake's special tantric mantrie instant freakout special superacid cocktail, known to the carriage trade as Specklebang and containing absolutely simonYage, a touch of psilocybin and the merest hint of oloiuqui -- plus Doc Blake's own special ingredient -- extract of foxberry, newest and most potent of the hallucinogenic potentiators." Gregory was staring at his right hand, slowly clenching and unclenching it. "The result," Blake went on, "is Doc Blake's total instantaneous many-splendored delight, guaranteed to make you hallucinate on the quarter-hour at least -- or I return your money and give up my credentials as the best free-lance underground chemist ever to hit the West Village." "You sound like you're stoned," Gregory said. "Not at all," Blake protested. "I am merely on speed, just simple, old-fashioned amphetamines such as truck drivers and high school students swallow by the pound and shoot by the gallon. Speed is nothing more than a stimulant. With its assistance I can do my thing faster and better. My thing is to create my own quickie drug empire between Houston and Fourteenth Streets and then bail out quickly, before I burn out my nerves or get crunched by the narcs or the Mafia -- and then split for Switzerland where I will freak out in a splendid sanitarium, surrounded by gaudy women-, plump bank accounts, fast cars and the respect of the local politicos." Blake paused for a moment and rubbed his upper lip. "Speed does bring on a certain sense of grandiloquence with accompanying verbosity -- But never fear, my dear newly met friend and esteemed customer -- my senses are more or less unimpaired and I am fully capable of acting as your guide for the superjumbotripout upon which you are now embarked." "How long since I took that tablet?" Gregory asked. Blake looked at his watch. "Over an hour ago." "Shouldn't it be acting by now?" "It should indeed. It undoubtedly is. Something should be happening." saw the grass-lined pit, the pulsing glow-worm, the hardpacked mica, the captive cricket. He was on the side of the pit nearest to the drain pipe. Across from him, on the mossy gray stone, was Blake, his cilia matted and his exoderm mottled, poking at three speckled irregularly shaped tablets. "What's the matter?" Blake I asked. Gregory scratched the tough membrane over his thorax. His cilia waved spasmodically in clear evidence of amazement, dismay, perhaps even fright. He extended a feeler, looked at it long and hard, bent it double and straightened it again. Blake's antennae pointed straight up in a gesture of concern. "Hey, baby, speak to. me! Are you hallucinating?" Gregory made an indeterminate movement with his tail. "It started just before, when I asked you if I'd really have any hallucinations. I was into it then but I didn't realize it, everything seemed so natural, so ordinary... I was sitting on a chair , and you were on a couch , and we both had soft exoskeletons like -- like mammals!" "The shift into illusions is often imperceptible." Blake said. "One slides into them and out of them. What's happening now?" Gregory coiled his segmented tail and relaxed his antennae. He looked around. The pit was dismayingly, tediously familiar. "Oh, I'm back to normal now. Do you think I'm going to have any more hallucinations?" "Like I told you, I guarantee it," Blake said, neatly folding his glossy red wings and settling comfortably into a corner of the nest.  one generation beyond Dene Frank Herbert returns to the duneworld of Arrakis for an epic of imperial intrigue and human ecology-an epic that spans the universe. That's why we can tell you where it ends We're reprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today :  (N#) # I (S#) # j ! (S#) # I (S#) # I  (S#) #  I Name  ' Address ... i j City , State, Zip j I Include list price plus a dime postage for I Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # eV The best man and the best woman -- they alone could survive the invading tomorrow! I less than fifteen minutes from reactivation. To Edith Price, the well-dressed young man who came into her library was typical of the summer visitors to Harkdal. They lived apart from the townspeople, of whom she was now one. She wrote down his name -- Seth Mitchell. And, assuming he wanted a temporary library card, she pushed the application form across the counter toward him. It was only when he impatiently thrust it back that she actually for the first time listened to what he was saying. Then she said, "Oh, what you want is a piece of crystal." "Exactly," he said. "I want returned to me a small stone I presented to the museum section of the library some years ago." Edith shook her head. "I'm sorry. The museum is being reorganized. It's closed to the public. I'm sure no action will be taken about anything in it until the job is done and even then Miss Davis, the librarian, will have to authorize any disposition of the exhibits. Today is her day off." "How long will it take -- to reorganize the museum?" "Oh, several weeks." The effect of her words on the man -- clean-cut and typical of the well-dressed, successful men she had known in New York -- startled her. He paled, mumbled something indistinguishable and when he turned away it was as if some of the life had gone out of him. Staring at the retreating figures of library patrons was not something Edith Price was normally motivated to do. But his reaction was so extreme that she watched him as he walked unsteadily toward the main entrance of the library. At the door a squat, thickly built man joined him. The two conversed briefly, then walked out together. Moments later, through a window, Edith caught a glimpse of them entering a new Cadillac. Seth Mitchell slid in behind the wheel. The costly automobile, Seth Mitchell's overreaction and the fact that another man was involved made intriguing what was probably a minor incident. Edith slipped from her stool, making suitable gestures to Miss Tilsit. Quite openly she secured the key to the womens' rest room as she covertly palmed the key to the museum room. A few moments later she was examining the display of stones. gether. According to the sign beside them the collection was the result of a drive among local boys to find valuable minerals and gems. Edith had no difficulty in locating the one the young man had wanted. A faded card under it announced: "Donated by Seth Mitchell and Billy Bingham." She slid back the side of the case, reached in carefully and took out the crystal. It was obvious to her that very little discrimination had been used in the selection. The forces that had fashioned this stone seemed to have been too impatient. The craftsmanship was uneven. The result was a stone about two and a half inches long by one and a half inches wide, maximum; a brownish, rocklike thing which, though faceted, did not reflect light well. It was by far the dullest of the stones in the display. Gazing down at the drab, worthless stone, Edith thought: Why don't I just take it to his hotel after work tonight and bypass all the red tape? Meaning Miss Davis, her enemy. Decisively, she removed the names of the two donors from the case. After all these years the label was stuck on poorly and the yellowed paper tore to shreds. She was about to slip the stone into her pocket, when she sadly realized she was wearing that dress -- the one without pockets. Oh, damn! she thought cheerfully. Since the stone was too big to conceal in her hand she carried it through the back stack corridors and was about to toss it into the special wastebasket used for heavy debris -- when she noticed that a broken flowerpot half full of dirt was also in the basket. Beside the dirt was a paper bag. She needed only seconds to slip the crystal into the bag, place dirt on top of it and shove the bag down into the basket. She usually had the job of locking up the building, so it would be no problem to pick up the bag at that time and take it with her. Edith returned to her desk. And the stone began at once to utilize the sand in the dirt on top of it, thus resuming a pattern that had been suspended for twenty-five years. During the rest of the evening, and in fact all through that night, all the possible Seth Mitchells on earth remembered their childhoods. The majority merely smiled or shrugged or stirred in their sleep. Most of those who lived outside the western hemisphere in distant time zones presently resumed their normal activities. But a few, everywhere, recalling the crystal, could not quite let the memory go. after filching the stone Edith leaned over to ask Miss Tilsit, "Who is Seth Mitchell?" Tilsit was a tall, too-thin blonde with horn-rimmed glasses behind which gleamed unusually small but alert gray eyes. Edith had discovered that Tilsit had a vast , even though superficial, knowledge of everything that had ever happened in Harkdale. "There were two of them," said Tillsit. "Two boys. Billy Bingham and Seth Mitchell." Thereupon, with visible relish, Tilsit told the story of the disappearance of Billy twenty-five years earlier, when he and his chum, Seth Mitchell, were only twelve years old. Tilsit finished: "Seth claimed they had been fighting over a piece of bright stone they had found. He swore that they were at least fifty feet from the cliff that overlooks the lake at that point and he insisted Billy didn't drown -- which is what everyone else believed. What confused the situation was that Billy's body was never recovered." As she listened to the account, Edith tried to put together the past and the present. She couldn't imagine why an adult Seth Mitchell would want a reminder of such an unhappy experience. Still, men were funny. That she knew, after waiting five years for a worthwhile male to come along and find her. So far she seemed to be as well hidden and unsearched for in Harkdale as in New York. Tilsit was speaking again. "Kind of odd, what happens to people. Seth Mitchell was so crushed by his friend's death that he just became a sort of shadow human being. He's got a farm out toward Abbotsville." Edith said sharply, "You mean Seth Mitchell became a farmer?" "That's the story." Edith said nothing more, but made a mental note that perhaps Tilsit was not as good a source of local information as she had formerly believed. Whatever Mitchell was, he hadn't looked like a farmer. She had to go to check out some books at that point, so the thought and the conversation ended. Edith parked her car across the street from the entrance to the motel in which -- after some cruising around -- she had spotted Seth Mitchell's distinctive gold Cadillac. It was quite dark where she waited under a tree. But even in the secure darkness, she could feel her heart thumping and the hot flush in her cheeks. Why am  doing this? She knew a self-critical suspicion that she might be hoping the adventure would end in a summer romance. Which was pretty ridiculous for a woman twenty-seven years old, who"if she shifted her tactic from waiting to pursuing -- ought to concentrate cold-bloodedly on genuine husband material. Her self-examination ended abruptly. From where she sat she could see the door of the cabin beside which the Cadillac was parked. The door had opened. Silhouetted in the light from the interior was the short, squat man she had seen with Mitchell that afternoon. As Edith involuntarily held her breath, the man came out and closed the door behind him. He walked to the motel office and presently emerged again, stood for a moment and then walked rapidly toward the business section of Harkdale, only minutes away. And only minutes back, she thought glumly. Watching him, her motivation dimmed. Somehow, she had not considered the short, heavy-set man as being really associated with Seth Mitchell. Defeated, she started her motor. As she drove home she suddenly felt degraded, not by what she had done but by what she suspected she had intended to do. What her future path should be was not clear to her. But not this way, she told herself firmly. Arrived at her apartment, Edith shoved the bag containing the crystal into the cupboard under her sink, ate apathetically and went to bed. T HE squat man returned to the motel scowling. "The stone wasn't there. I searched the whole museum," he told Seth Mitchell, who lay on one of the beds, gagged and bound. Mitchell watched uneasily as the other untied his feet. The man said impatiently, "I've been thinking about you. Maybe the best thing is just to drive you back to New York or kill you here. Once I get away, the police will never find me again." He removed the gag. Mitchell drew a deep breath. "Look," he protested, "I won't even go near the police -- -" He stopped, his mind once more blank and afraid, and choked back a surge of grief. The possibility that he might be killed was an idea that his brain could contemplate only for a few moments. The squat man had come up to him in his office parking lot at noon that day, smiling deceptively, a short man -- not more than fivefour -- and stocky. He had looked, in his grayness, like an Arab in an American business suit. He had asked, "Where is the crystal you and Billy Bingham found?" What might have happened if Seth had answered instantly was, of course, now impossible to guess. But he had not immediately remembered the crystal, so he had shaken his head. Whereupon the stocky man had shown him a gun. Under its threat Seth had driven to Harkdale, had shown the stranger the ledge beside Lake Naragang where he and Billy had fought. And it was there, on the spot, that he had recalled the crystal; and so he had reluctantly gone to the library, aware of the weapon, trained on him all the while he had talked to the young woman at the desk. Abruptly remembering that conversation, Seth said desperately, "Maybe that woman librarian -- " "Maybe," said the other, noncommittally. He untied Seth's hands and stepped back, motioning with the gun. They went out to the car and drove off. As they came to the lake the man said, "Pull over." After Seth complied, the shot rang out and the murder was done. The killer dragged the body to a cliff overlooking the lake, tied rocks to it and dumped it into the deep water below. He actually drove on to New York, left the car in Seth's parking lot and, after spending the night in New York, prepared to return to Harkdale. During that night Edith Price slept restlessly, and dreamed that all possible Edith Prices marched past her bed. Only half a dozen of those Ediths were married and even in her dream that shocked her. Worse, there was a long line of Edith Prices who ranged from fat to blowsy to downright shifty-eyed and mentally ill. However, several of the Ediths had a remarkable high-energy look and that was reassuring. She woke to the sound of the phone ringing. The library caretaker said. "Hey, Miss Price, better get down here. Somebody broke in last night." Edith had a strange, unreal feel ing. She asked, "Broke into the library?" "Yep. Biggest mess is in the museum. Whoever it was musta thought some of the stones in there were the real stuff. They're scattered all over the floor." II T O Edith Price, the lean young man in overalls was just another inarticulate farmer. She wrote down his name -- Seth Mitchell. A moment went by as the name hit her. She looked up. The haunted face that stared back at her had been burned by sun and wind. Its cheeks were gaunt. The eyes were sick. Nevertheless, the man bore a sensational resemblance to the Seth Mitchell of yesterday, it seemed to Edith. She thought, a light dawning: This is the Seth Mitchell Tilsit knew about... There had to be a Mitchell clan, with cousins and such, who were look-alikes. Her mind was still fumbling over the possibilities when she realized the import of the words he had mumbled. Edith echoed, "A stone? A crystal you presented to the library museum twenty-five years ago?" He nodded. Edith compressed her lips. All right, let's get to the bottom of this... During the moments of her confusion the man had taken a bill out of his billfold. As he held it out to her she saw that it was twenty dollars. She had recovered her self-control and now said conversationally, "That's a lot of money for a worthless rock." "It's the one I want," he muttered. She didn't hear several words that followed but then he said clearly, "... the time Billy disappeared." A silence fell while Edith absorbed the impact of the notion that here indeed was the original Seth Mitchell. "I've heard about Billy," she said finally. "A very unusual incident." Seth Mitchell said, "I yelled at him to get away and he vanished." He spoke tautly. His eyes were an odd, discolored gray from remembered shock. He spoke again: "We both grabbed at it. Then he was gone." He seemed only dimly aware of her presence. He went on, and it was as if he were talking to himself: "It was so shiny. Not like it became later. It went all drab and nobody would believe me." He paused. Then, intently: "All these years I've been thinking. I've been awful slow to see the truth. But last night it came to me. What else could have made Billy disappear when I called him? What else but the stone?" Edith decided uneasily that this was a problem for a psychiatrist, not a librarian. It struck her that the simplest solution would be to give this Seth Mitchell the worthless rock he wanted. But of course that would have to be carefully done. Her one indiscretion so far had been her questioning of Tilsit the day before about Seth Mitchell. Throughout the police investigation of the breaking and entering of the library museum she had maintained a careful silence about her own involvement. So the sooner she got rid of the stone the better. "If you'll give me your address," she requested gently, "I'll ask the head librarian and perhaps she'll get in touch with you." The address he reluctantly gave her was a rural route out of Abbotsville. She watched him then, wondering a little, as he shuffled off to the door and outside. On her way home that night, Edith drove by way of the motel. The gold Cadillac was gone. S HE had her usual late dinner. Then, after making sure the apartment door was locked, she took the paper bag from under the sink -- and noticed at once, uneasily, that there was less dirt in the bag. A momentary fear came to her that the stone would be gone. She spread a newspaper and hastily emptied the bag, dirt and all, onto it. As the earth tumbled out a Wonderingly she picked up the beautiful gem. "But it's impossible," she whispered. "That was dull. This is -- beautiful!" It glittered in her hand. The purple color was alive, as if thousands of moving parts turned and twisted inside the stone. Here and there in its depths a finger of light stirred up a nest of scarlet fire. The crisscross of color and flame flickered so brightly that Edith felt visually stunned. She held it up against the light -- and saw a design inside. Somebody had cut a relief map of the solar system into the interior of the stone, and had colored it. It was quite a good example -- it seemed to Edith -- of the cutter's art. The purple and red over-all effect seemed to derive from the play of light through the coloring of the tiny "sun" and its family of planets. She took the stone back to the sink. There was a fantasy in her mind, she realized, in which she pictured the jewel as having magic powers. Remembering what the farmer Seth Mitchell had said about his having yelled at Billy Bingham in the presence of the stone... maybe the sound of a human voice would have an effect... She tried speaking. Nothing happened. The picture remained unchanged. She spelled words, articulating each letter. Nothing. She ran the gamut of sounds possible to her own voice from a low contralto to a ridiculously piercing soprano -- nothing. Once more she noticed the design inside and held the stone up against the light to see it better. She was visually tracing the outline of the solar system in the crystal when she had a sudden thought and, with abrupt determination, said in a clear voice: "Billy Bingham -- the boy -- I want him back -- now!" After she had spoken, during the silent moments that followed, she felt progressively foolish. Of the long-missing Billy there was no sign. Thank God she thought breathlessly. ing; her mind was made up. It was time she got rid of something that was threatening to undermine her good sense. As she took the crystal out of the flowerpot, she saw that the interior scene had changed. It was now a human body outlined in purple and red points of light. The outline, she saw presently, was actually extremely detailed, showing the bone structure and the principal organs. There was even a faint glow which suffused the shape, suggesting a fine mask of nerves and blood vessels. She was examining it absorbedly when she abruptly realized what she was doing. Firmly, she put the stone into a small box, filled it with new soil -- crystals, she had read, needed nutrients -- wrapped it and addressed it to Seth Mitchell, Rural Route #, Abbotsville. Shortly she was driving to the post office. It was not until after she had mailed the package that her First realization came that she had done it again. Once more she had acted on impulse. Too late, the cautioning thought came: Suppose Seth Mitchell wrote the library a note of thanks. It would be impossible for Edith to explain how a romantic compulsion had motivated her to steal the crystals -- and how, in the light of later events, her only desire had become to dispose of the evidence. Why don't I just get on the next bus to New York and leave this crazy little town forever? The moment was extremely depressing. She remembered an endless series of wrong decisions in her life. She sat there in her car at the curb and thought of her first young man at college. The First, that is, who had been truly hers. She had lost him through an impulse: she had been caught by the God-isdead-so-now-you're-God movement. In the movement what you did to other people no longer mattered -- you never had to feel guilty. If I hadn't joined the guilt-free generation, right now I would be Mrs. Richard Staples... The realization reminded her of her dream of the multitude of Edith Pr ices and the unique remembrance escalated her out of her apathy. What an odd concept. She laughed involuntarily, and thought that sending the crystal to the least of all possible Seth Mitchells had not been good sense. Thinking about that, her fear faded. How funny! And what an odd dream to have had. How could one ever know what way was best, what decision, what philosophy, how much exercise? And, best for what? in the library when Tilsit came in with the look on her face. In her six months in Harkdale, Edith had come to recognize Tilsit's expression of: I've got special information. "Did you see the paper, Edith?" Edith presumed the paper referred to was the Harkdale Inquirer, a four-page daily. She herself still read the New York Times, though she loyally subscribed to the local sheet. She had Ill not read today's Inquirer, however, and said so. "Remember asking me the other day about a man called Seth Mitchel?" Tilsit asked. Edith remembered only too well but she put on a blank face. Tilsit unfolded the paper in her hands and held it up. The headline was: Edith reached automatically and Tilsit handed the paper to her. Edith read: A #-year old boy staggered out of the brush near Lake Naragang shortly after ten P.M. last night and tried to enter the house where Billy Bingham lived twenty-five years ago. The present tenant, John Hildeck, a carpenter, took the bewildered youngster to the police station. From there he was transported to the hospital. That was as far as Edith read. Her body bent to one side, her arms flopped limply. She stooped over and the floor crashed into her. When she came out of her faint on the cot in the rest room, the remembrance was still there, bright and hard and improbable, of how she had commanded the crystal to bring back Billy Bingham -- somewhere between nine and ten the previous night. that singing city had a private vocabulary in which he called God (or, as he sometimes thought of Him, Nature or Fate). The Musician. Within this exclusive terminology Seth's own life had been tuneful and the music a symphony -- or at least a concerto. Somebody up there evidently regarded him as a suitable instrument. For he had money, girl friends, a fabulous career as a gambler on the edge of the underworld -- all without restrictions, for his orchestra was well disciplined and responsive to his baton. Not bad for a small-town boy who had not learned the melodies of city life until he was past twenty. But now, suddenly. The Musician had sounded a sour note. Mitchell had in his hand the Harkdale Inquirer containing the account of the return of Billy Bingham. He studied the newspaper's photograph of a frightened boy about twelve years old. The subject looked like Billy Bingham -- and didn't. Mitchell was surprised that he wasn't sure. The Inquirer apologized for having lost its photocut of the real Billy, and explained that Billy's parents had moved -- to Texas, it was believed. No one knew precisely where. The news story concluded: "The only other person who might be able to identify the claimant is Seth Mitchell, Billy's boyhood chum. Mitchell's present address is unknown." Mitchell thought sarcastically that the Inquirer ought to examine its out-of-state subscription list. The next day as he walked into room # of the Harkdale Hospital, he saw the youngster in bed put down his magazine and look up. Mitchell said with a reassuring smile, "Billy, you don't have to worry about me. I'm here as your friend." The boy said uneasily, "That's what the big man told me, and then he got nasty." Mitchell didn't ask who the big man was. A chair stood near the bed. He drew it up, and said gently, "Billy, what seemst to have happened to you is almost like a fairy story. But the most important thing is that you mustn't worry." Billy bit his lip and a tear rolled down his cheek. "They're treating me as if I'm lying. The big man said I'd be put in jail if I didn't tell the truth." Mitchell's mind leaped back to the days when he had been questioned by just such impatient individuals about the disappearance of Billy. His lips tightened. He said, "Nothing like that is going to happen to you if I can help it. But I'd like to ask you a few questions that maybe nobody else thought of. You don't have to answer if you don't want to. How does that strike you?" "Okay." Mitchell took that for a goahead signal. "What kind of clothes was Seth wearing?" "Brown corduroy pants and a gray shirt." Reality rather than the boy's answer gave Mitchell his first disappointment. He had hoped the description would jog his memory. It didn't. He was unable to recall what particular pair of ragged trousers he had worn on that distant day of Billy's disappearance. "You wore corduroys also?" It was a shot in the dark. "They're in there." The boy pointed at the chest in one corner. Mitchell stood up, opened the indicated drawer and lifted out a skimpy pair of cheap corduroys. He examined them shamefacedly but with an eye to detail. He put them back finally, disappointed. The identifying label had been tom off. He couldn't remember ever having seen them before. Twenty-five years, he thought drearily. The time was like a thick veil with a few tattered holes in it. Through the holes he could catch glimpses of his past, instants out of his life, each one illuminated because it had once had some particular momentary impact -- none was fully visible in context. "Billy -- " Mitchell came back to his chair, intent -- "you mentioned trying to grab a shining stone. Where did you first see it?" "On the ledge. There's a path that comes up from the lake." "Had you come up that way before?" The other shook his head. "A few times when it was cold. Usually Seth and I liked to stay near the water." Mitchell nodded. He remembered that. "This bright stone you saw -- how big was it?" "Oh, it was big." "An inch?" "Bigger. Five inches, I'll betcha." Billy's face was bright with certainty. Mitchell paused to argue out the error of that with himself. The stone had been roughly two and a half inches at its longest, and somewhat narrower and thinner. A boy who had had only a glimpse would not be the best judge of its size. The reasoning made Mitchell uneasy. He was making excuses where none should be allowed. He hesitated. He wanted to find out if Billy had actually touched the crystal but he didn't quite know how to lead up to the question. He began, "According to what you told the paper, you admitted that your chum -- what's his name?" He waited. "Seth. Seth Mitchell." "Seth Mitchell saw the stone first. But you still tried to get it, didn't you?" The boy swallowed. "I didn't mean any harm." Mitchell had not intended to imply moral disapproval. He said hastily, "It's all right, Billy. When I was a boy the guy who got a thing owned it. None of this seeing-first stuff for us." He smiled. Billy said, "I only wanted to be the one who gave it to the museum." T HE thunder of that vibrated through Mitchell's mind. Of course, now I remember... He even realized why he had forgotten. The library's museum room had accepted the stone -- which days he had carried it in his pocket -- with reluctance. The librarian had murmured something about not discouraging small boys. With those words she had discouraged him so completely that he had needed an actual naming of the fact to remember it. It was hard to believe an imposter would be able to cite this boy's detailed recollections. And yet, that meant that Billy Bingham, when he disappeared, had -- His brain poised, stopped by the impossibility of this situation. His own doctor had already told him that mental disturbances were often traced to overactive imaginations. Mitchell drew a deep breath. "All right. Now, two more questions. What time of day was it?" "Seth and I went swimming after school," said Billy. "So it was late afternoon. "Okay. According to the paper you didn't get back to your house until nearly ten. Where were you from late afternoon till ten o'clock at night?" "I wasn't anywhere," said Billy. "Seth and I were fighting over the stone. I fell. And when I picked myself up it was pitch dark." He was suddenly tearful. "I don't know what happened. I guess he just left me lying there, somehow." Mitchell rose to his feet, thinking suddenly: This is ridiculous. I ought to have my head examined... Nevertheless he paused at the door and flung one more question toward the bed, "Has anyone else called you -- besides the police, I mean, and the big man -- and me?" "Just a woman from the library." "Library?" Mitchell echoed blankly. "She wanted to know the exact time I woke up beside the lake. Her name is Edith Price and she works in the library. Of course -- I didn't know." The information seemed meaningless. Mitchell said quickly, simulating a friendliness he no longer felt, "Well, Billy, I guess I'd better let you get back to your comic book. Thanks a lot." He went out of the room and out of the hospital. He paid his bill at the hotel, got into his rented car, drove to the airport and flew back to Miami. By the time the plane landed, the old, disturbing music from his childhood had faded from his mind. It seemed to Mitchell that The Musician had let him down. To insure that it never happened again, he resolved to cancel his subscription to the Harkdale Inquirer. Seth Mitchell Detective Agency) stared at the man who had just walked into his office as if he were seeing a hallucination. Finally he blinked and asked, "Am I crazy?" The stranger, a well set up young man in his mid-thirties, sat down in the visitor's chair and said with an enigmatic smile, "The resemblance is remarkable, isn't it?" He spoke in a firm baritone and, except that both of them knew better, Mitchell could have sworn the voice was his own. In fact, afterward, telling Marge Aikens about the visitor, he confessed, "I kept feeling that it was me sitting there." "But what did he want?" Marge asked. She was a slim blonde taking her first look at thirty and taking it well. Mitchell intended to marry her some day when he could find another associate as efficient. "What did he look like?" "Me. That's what I'm trying to tell you. He was my spitting image. He even wore a suit that reminded me of one I've got at home." He pleaded uneasily, "Don't be too hard on me, Marge. I went to pieces. It's all vague." "Did he give you his address?" Mitchell looked down unhappily at the interview sheet. "It's not written down." "Did he say if he intended to come to the office again?" "No, but he gave me a thousand dollars in bills and I gave him a receipt. So we're committed." "To what?" wants me to find an onyx crystal. He says he saw it quite a while back in a small-town museum south of New York. He can't remember just where." "That's going to be either very hard or very easy." Marge was thoughtful; she seemed to be considering the problem involved. "Let me finish," said Mitchell grimly. "I know where the crystal is. Just think of what I said. I know that region like a book. I was. born there, remember?" "It had slipped my mind," said Marge. "You think you can locate the crystal because -- " Mitchell said, "It's in the museum annex of the public library in the town of Harkdale, where I was born. And now -- get this. I presented the crystal to the library and, what's even more amazing, I dreamed about that stone the other night." Marge did not let him get off the subject. "And he came to you? Out of the scores of detective agencies in Chicago, he came to the one man in the world who looks like him and who knows where that crystal is?" "He came to me." Marge was pursing her beautiful lips. "Seth, this is fantastic. You shouldn't have let him get away. You're usually so sharp." "Thanks." Dryly. "Why didn't you just tell him where it is." "And lose a thousand dollars? My dear, a detective is sometimes like a doctor. People pay him for information he already has." Marge held out her hand. "Let me see that interview sheet." As she read it she asked without looking up, "What are you going to do?" "Well, I told him the truth, that' I've got several days' work to get rid of and then -- " He fell silent and the silence grew so long that Marge finally looked up. She was relieved at the expression on his face, for it was the shrewd, reasoning look that was always there when he was at his detective best. He caught her glance, said, "It would be a mistake to appear in Harkdale until three or four mysteries have been cleared up. Like how come there's two of us -- " "You have no relations?" "Some cousins." "Ever see them?" He shook his head. "Not since I was around nineteen, when my mother died." He smiled grimly. "Harkdale is not a town you go back to. But kill that thought you've got. None of my cousins looked like me." He shuddered. "Ugh, no." Marge said firmly, "I think when you do finally go, you ought to be disguised." "You can count on it -- even you won't know me." E lsewhere on earth about two dozen of the total of #I Seth Mitchells -- among whom was the best of all possible Seth Mitchellsalso considered the crystal, remembered their dreams of a few nights earlier and had a strange, tense conviction of an imminent crisis. As Seth Mitchell in Montreal, Canada, described it to his FrenchCanadian wife, "I can't get over the feeling that I'm going to have to measure up. Remember, I mentioned that to you when I awoke the other morning." His wife, a pretty blonde, who had a French-Canadian woman's practical contempt for dream fantasies, remembered it well and wanted to' know what he had to measure up to. Her husband said unhappily, "I have a feeling I could have made better decisions, made more of myself. I am not the man I could have been." "So what?" she wanted to know. "Who is? And what of it." " Kaput ." He shrugged. "I'm sorry to be so negative, my dear. But that's the feeling. Since I didn't measure up. I'm through." His wife sighed. "My mother warned me that all men get crazy ideas as they approach forty. And here you are." "I should have been braver -- or something," he moaned. "What's wrong with being a tax consultant?" she demanded. Her husband seemed not to hear. "I have a feeling I ought to visit my home town." She grabbed his arm. "You're going straight to Dr. Ledoux," she said. "You need a checkup." Dr. Ledoux could find nothing wrong. "In fact, you seem to be in exceptionally good health." The Seth Mitchell of Montreal had to concede that his sudden alarm was pretty ridiculous. But he decided to visit Harkdale as soon as he cleared up certain business. IV T HE man's voice came suddenly, tinged with a slight foreign accent, "Miss Price, I want to talk to you." Edith saw the speaker dimly in the darkness and realized that he stood in the shadows between the garage and the rooming house where she lived, barring her way. Before she could speak the voice continued, "What did you do with the crystal?" "I -- don't -- understand." She spoke the words automatically. She could see her interrogator more clearly now. He was short and broad of build. Abruptly she recognized him as the man who had been with the Seth Mitchell look-alike in the gold Cadillac. "Miss Price, you removed that crystal from the display cabinet. Either give it to me or tell me what you did with it and that'll be the end of the matter." Edith had the tense feeling of a person who has acted unwisely and who therefore cannot possibly make any admissions, not even to a stranger. "I don't know what you're talking about," she whispered. "Look, Miss Price -- " The man stepped out of the shadows. His tone was conciliatory. "Let's go into your apartment and talk this over." His proposal relieved her. For her apartment was only a little suite in a rooming house in which the other tenants were never more than a wall away. Incredibly -- afterward she thought of it as incredible -- she was instantly trusting and started past him. Her surprise when he grabbed her was total. One of his arms imprisoned both of hers and her body. He put a hard, unyielding palm over her mouth and whispered, "I've got a gun." Nearly paralyzed by the threat, she was aware of her captor carrying her toward the back alley. She allowed him to shove her -- without a struggle -- into a car that was parked against a fence. He climbed in beside her and sat there in the near-dark of the night, gazing at her. She could not make out the expression on his face. But as the seconds went by, and he made no threatening move, her heart slowed in its rapid beating. She finally gasped, "Who are you? What do you want?" T HE man chuckled sardonically and said, "I'm the worst of all possible Athtars from the thirtyfifth century. But I turned out to have a high survival faculty." Edith was again unable to speak. His voice tightened. "Where I come from I'm a physicist. I sensed my danger and I worked out a key aspect of the nature of the crystal in record time. In dealing with human beings, it operates on the vibrations a body puts forth from all its cells. In recreating that vibration, it creates the person. Conversely, in canceling the vibration, it uncreates him. Recognizing this -- and since I was not of its orientation in my era -- I simply put up a barrier on the total vibration level of my own body and thus saved my life when it uncreated all the lesser Athtars." Now she did not want to speak and the man added somberly: "But evidently, by defeating it, I remained attached to it on some other level. As it fell back through time to the twentieth century I fell with it. Not -- unfortunately -- to where and when it went. Instead -- I arrived last week beside that ledge overlooking Lake Naragang." He finished in a wondering tone: "What a remarkable, intricate internal energy flow system it must have. Imagine! In passing through time it must have detected this twenty-five-yeaf inactive period and its reawakening -- and dropped me off within days of its own reactivation." The voice became silent and there was nothing but the darkness again. Edith ventured a small movement -- she changed her position on the seat to ease a growing discomfort in one leg. When there was no counter movement from him she whispered, "Why are you telling me this? "It all sounds perfectly insane." Even as she uttered the obvious she realized that a quality of equal madness in herself believed every word that he had spoken. She thought in a spasm of selfcriticism: # really must be one of the lesser Edith Prices. She had to fight to suppress an outburst of hysterical laughter. "From you," said the worst of all possible Athtars, "I want information." "I don't know anything about a crystal." "The information I want," said the man in an inexorable voice, "is this: At any time recently have you had a thought about wishing you had taken a different path in life instead of ending up in Harkdale as a librarian?" her series of impulses after she had mailed the crystal -- and back farther. "Why, yes," she breathed. "Tell me about one of them," said the man. She told him of the impulse she had had to simply get on a bus or train and leave Harkdale. The man leaned back in the seat. He seemed surprisingly relaxed. He asked with a chuckle, "Are you the best of all possible Edith Prices?" Edith made no reply. She was beginning to have the feeling that perhaps she should confide in this man -- should tell him where the crystal was. Athtar was speaking again. "I have a conviction that the Edith Price who is the twentieth-century orientation for the crystal is on that bus or is heading for safety somewhere else. And that therefore you are under the same threat as I am -- of being uncreated as soon as the crystal selects the perfect Edith Price." For Edith, terror began at that moment. During the minutes that followed she was only vaguely aware of words mumbling out of her mouth. Listening to her revelation, Athtar suppressed an impulse to murder her out of hand. He played it cautiously, thinking that if anything went wrong, this Edith was all he had to help him to trace the other Ediths. So he spoke reassuring words, put her out of the car, and watched her as she staggered off -- safe, she thought. T HE note read: "He wasn't there. It wasn't there. The farm was deserted. Did you lie to me? Athtar." Edith felt a chill the first time she read the words. Particularly she reacted to the last line with fear. But on her tenth or twelfth reading, she was more determined. She thought: If this whole crazy business is real I'd better -- What? Be brave? Consider the problem? Act with decisiveness? It was Saturday. Before going to work she bought a small Browning .# automatic at the Harkdale Hardware. She had often gone target practicing with the second of her two college boy friends, the one who had sold her on the philosophy that God was dead and that therefore one need only avoid jail -- and otherwise do anything one pleased. Eventually he departed without marrying her, presumably feeling guiltless about having lured her away from a man who might have offered her a wedding ring. But this man did show her how to shoot an automatic firearm. She put the little pistol into her purse -- and felt a hardening of her conviction that it was time this Edith started measuring up. One doubt remained: was a step forward -- or a step away -- from being the best of all possible Edith Prices? At the library that day, Tilsit was waiting for her with another news item: Seth Mitchell, Abbotsville farmer, has not been at his farm for several days. A neighbor, Carey Grayson, called on Mitchell yesterday to buy seed grain, found the Mitchel cows unmilked, a horse in the stable starving, chickens unfed and no sign of life around the house. Grayson fed the animals, then contacted Mitchell's cousin in a neighboring county and notified the sheriffs office. An investigation is under way. Edith handed back the paper with a meaningless comment. But she was thinking: So that's what A thtar discovered... In spite of her resolve she trembled. It seemed to her that there was no turning back; she must carry forward inexorably with all the thoughts that she had had. Sunday. She had driven to New York, and parked two blocks from the little hotel for women only where she had formerly lived. Surely, she told herself, that was where at least one Edith duplicate would have gone. From a phone booth she called the hotel and asked for Edith Price. There was a pause, then, "I'm ringing," said the woman desk clerk. Instantly breathless, Edith hung up. She sagged limply inside the booth, eyes closed. It was not clear to her even now what she had expected. Can it be that I'm the only Edith who knows that there are others? And does that give me an advantage over the unknowing ones? Or was there already somewhere an Edith Price who had naturally become the best of them all? Her thought ended. She realized that a short, stocky man was standing beside the booth, partly out of her line of vision. Something about him was familiar. She straightened and turned. Athtar. T HE Edith Price who stepped out of the phone booth was still shaky and still not brave. But two days of fear and threat and gulps of terror had transformed her. She had been a vaguely sad, wish-mymistakes-won't-doom-me young woman. Now she trembled with anxiety at times, but at other times she compressed her lips and had thoughts that were tough and realistic. The sight of Athtar caromed her into anxiety. Which was just as well, the tough part of her assessed realistically. She did not trust the worst of all possible Athtars. And he would feel safer with a frightened Edith, she was sure. Seen close in broad daylight on a deserted New York street on Sunday morning, Athtar -- short, broad, with a thick face and gray cheeks -- was surprisingly as she remembered him -- totally unprepossessing. He said softly, "Why don't you let me talk to her?" Edith scarcely heard. The first question of her #-hour stop-onlyfor-sleep, stream of consciousness, siphoned through her voice, "Are you really from the thirtyfifth century?" He gave her a quick, shrewd look, must have realized how wound up she was and said receptively, "Yes." "Are they all like you?" "It was decided," said Athtar in a formal tone, "that a body built thicker and closer to the ground has more utility. That was several hundred years before I was born. And so, yes. No one is over sixteen hundred and seventy-five centimeters -- that is, five feet, six inches." "How do you know you're the worst of all possible Athtars?" "In my time," was the reply, "it is a felony for anyone but a member of the Scientists' Guild to have a weapon. Hence, political and economic power is part of the prize of the struggle for position in the Guild. On my way to becoming a tougher member, I wished many times to be relatively safe among the faceless, unarmed masses. And the crystal, in creating other Athtars, solidified those wishes" There was an implication here that getting tougher was not the answer, not the way. Edith sighed her disappointment and remembered her other questions. She told him about the two pictures she had seen in the crystal, the one of the solar system and the other the outline of a human body. Did he know what the pictures meant? "When I first saw the crystal," said Athtar, "the scene inside was of our galaxy. Later it became the solar system. So what you saw was probably a carryover from my time, where we occupy all the planets. And what I saw must derive from a time when man has moved out to the galaxy. It could mean that the crystal adjusts to the era in which it finds itself. Though why a human being instead of the planet Earth in this era is not obvious. Was the outline that of a woman or a man? Edith couldn't remember. Standingthere in the bright, sunny day and on the dirty, narrow street, Athtar shook his head. There was awe in his ugly face. He said wonderingly, "Such a small object; such a comprehensive ability." He added, half to himself, "It has to be based on potential flow patterns. There are not enough atoms in such a crystal to act as a control board for so much." He had already, by implication, answered her next question but she asked it anyway. Athtar sighed, "No, the crystal is definitely not from the thirtyfifth century. It appeared suddenly. I picture it as having fallen backward through time from some future era in drops of fifteen hundred years." "But why would they have sent it back?" Edith asked, bewildered. "What are they after?" The chunky little man gave her a startled look. "The idea of the crystal's having been sent back for a purpose had not previously occurred to me. It's such a colossally valuable machine that we assumed it got away from them accidentally," he said. He was silent. Then, finally: "Why don't you let me go to see this second Edith Price? And you go back to Harkdale? If I find the crystal, I'll report with it to you there." The implication seemed to be that he planned to cooperate with her. What he meant was that the crystal would be no good to him until he had found and murdered the Edith to whom it was oriented. T HE tough part of Edith hesitated at the idea of trusting this man. But it occurred to her that he might have his century's weapons and that therefore he was being generous from a position of total strength in offering to cooperate. With such fear thoughts in her mind and having no plans of her own, she agreed. She watched him get into a shining new automobile and drive down the narrow street. It was a medium-sized car, she noted absently. She had never been one who kept track of auto designs, so by the time she wondered what make it was it was gone. Belatedly it also struck her that she ought to have looked at the license plate numbers. She thought sarcastically: What a third-rate Edith Price  am... She was vaguely aware of a car pulling up at the curb nearby. A young woman left it and casually walked toward her as if to go into the phone booth. She stopped suddenly beside Edith. "You're Miss Price?" Edith turned. The other woman was a bright, alert blonde, probably in her thirties. Edith had never seen her before. She had no sense of being threatened but involuntarily she backed away several steps. "Yes," she said. The woman turned toward the car and called, "Okay, Seth." Seth Mitchell emerged from the car and came rapidly toward them. He was well dressed, like the Seth Mitchell in the gold Cadillac, but there was a subtle difference. His face had a firmer, more determined expression. He said, "I'm a detective. Who is that man you were talking to?" And so the story, as well as Edith knew it, was presently shared. shop for their tense discussion. Edith was both relieved and disturbed to discover that these detectives had been in Harkdale for two days and had traced her down as a result of her call to the hospital to inquire about Billy Bingham. Having thus spotted her, they had become aware that the squat man was also keeping track of her movements. And so that morning, not one but three cars had headed for New York -- Edith's, Athtar's and theirs. The exchange of information took time and several cups of coffee -- though Edith rejected the final cup with the sudden realization that coffee was probably not good for people and that the crystal might judge her on it at some later time. She smiled wanly at how many restraints she was placing on herself! Exactly as if God were no longer dead. When they came out of the restaurant Seth Mitchell phoned the other Edith Price. He emerged from the phone booth uneasy. "The switchboard operator says that Miss Price left with a man about twenty minutes ago. I'm afraid we're too late." From Edith's description he had already come to the conclusion that Athtar was a dangerous man. They decided to wait for the second Edith to return. But though they remained in New York until after eleven that night the young woman did not come back to her hotel. S HE never would return. For some hours, a bullet in her brain, her body, weighed down by stones, had been lying at the bottom of the East River. And Athtar had the crystal. To his intense disappointment, that Edith was not the crystal's orientation. Accordingly, he spent the evening and a portion of the night fitting together parts in the construction of a special weapon. He had a peculiar prescience that he would need its power the following day against the Edith who, he believed, was back in Harkdale. V tives set out for Harkdale in the two cars. Seth Mitchell, at Edith's request, drove her car. Marge Aikens followed in the larger machine. En route Mitchell told Edith that he believed she was the original Edith and that it was to her that the crystal was still oriented. He considered also that her conclusion that Seth Mitchell, the farmer, was the worst Seth had doomed that unfortunate Mitchell duplicate. The crystal accepted her judgment and probably uncreated Seth, the farmer, when the package with the crystal addressed to him had barely been deposited in the post office. Edith was taken aback by the detective's logic. "But" she stammered, "I didn't mean it that way." Tears streamed down her cheeks. "Oh, that poor man!" "Of course you didn't mean it," Mitchell said. "Just to doublecheck -- tell me again in what sequence did that judgment of yours come? Was it before or after your various impulses to leave Harkdale?" "Oh, after." "And did I hear you correctly -- you thought of going into the post office and asking for the package you had mailed to be returned to you?" "Yes, I had that thought." She added; "But I didn't do it." "I would guess that at least one other Edith did go back and get it," said Mitchell. "But it's all so complicated," Edith said. "How would any Edith just go, leaving clothes, money, car?" "I've been thinking of my own background on that," said Mitchell. "Evidently the crystal can excise all confusions like that. For example, I never again even thought of going back to Harkdale. To do so didn't even cross my mind. But there are no blanks like that in your mind?" "None that I can identify or think of." Seth Mitchell nodded. "That's how I heard you. I think I've got the solution to this whole crazy business -- and we don't even have to know where the crystal is." His reasoning was simple. In bringing back Billy Bingham at her command the crystal had deposited the boy nearly two miles away. At the time she had been holding the crystal in her hand. But her negative thought about Farmer Seth Mitchell had occurred after she had mailed the crystal and was approximately a hundred yards from the post office. So if she had indeed uncreated the mentally ill farmer, then the distance of the crystal's human orientation -- in this instance one of the Edith Prices -- from the crystal, was not a factor. "You don't agree?" asked the detective. "I'm thinking," Edith said. "Maybe I'm not really the orientation." "We'll test that tomorrow." "What about Athtar?" Edith asked. "I keep feeling that he may have special weapons. Besides, the crystal cannot affect him. What about that?" "Let me think about Athtar." While he thought, Edith remembered Athtar's asking her about the figure in the crystal: had it been a man's or a woman's? She sat there in the darkness next to this Seth Mitchell and became aware of two separate lines of thought in her mind. The first: she attempted to visualize the human design in the crystal. The second... S HE watched his profile as he drove. a mere detective, no matter how keen his logic, cannot be the best of all possible Seth Mitchells. A man in such a profession has got to be somewhere in the middle -- which in this competition is the same as the worst... And he disappeared. For many seconds after she had that thought, the suddenly driverless car held to its straight direction. Its speed, which had been around seventy, naturally started to let up the instant there was no longer a foot on the accelerator. The only error came when Edith uttered a scream and grabbed at the wheel, turning it. The machine careened wildly. The next second she grasped it in a more steadying way and, holding it, slid along the seat into a position where presently she could apply the brake. She pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. Marge Aikens had slowed as soon as she saw there was a problem. She pulled up behind Edith, got out of the car and walked to the driver's side of the other machine. "Seth," she began, "what -- " Edith pushed the door open and stepped, trembling, out to the road. She had a mad impulse to run -- anywhere. Her body felt strange. Her mind was encased in blank anguish. She was vaguely aware of herself babbling about what had happened. It must have taken a while for her incoherent words to reach through to Marge. But suddenly Marge gasped and Edith felt herself grabbed by the shoulders. She was being shaken. A voice was yelling at her, "You stupid fool! You stupid fool -- " The shaking became pain. Her neck hurt, then her arms. I must be careful. I mustn't do or say anything that will affect her... With the thought Edith's sanity returned. Marge was in a state of hysteria. The shaking was actually an automatic act of a person out of her mind with grief. Edith knew pity. She was able to free herself by a simple action. She slapped Marge lightly on the cheek, once, twice, three times. The third time the woman let go of her and leaned against the car, sobbing. A wind was blowing from the west. Car headlights kept glaring past them, lighting the scene briefly. The two women were now in a relatively normal state and presently were able to discuss their situation. Edith tried to recreate Marge's employer with the same command she had used to bring back Billy Bingham. She had had a feeling that it would not work -- the Seth Mitchells were undoubtedly due to be eliminated one by one -- and it did not. The minutes ticked by. Though she yelled the command in many variations into the night there was no sign of the vanished Seth, whose presence had for a long half-day brought to the whole situation the reassurance that derives from a highly intelligent and determined mind. In the end, defeated, the two women in their separate cars drove on to Harkdale. Marge had a room reserved at the Harkdale Hotel and went there. Edith drove wearily to the apartment house where she lived. she finally limped into her little suite. She lay down without undressing. She was drifting off to sleep when fear tensed her. Would the best of all possible Ediths be this sloppy about personal cleanliness? Literally hurting with exhaustion, she rolled off the bed, undressed, bathed, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, changed the linens and stepped into a clean pair of pajamas. She awoke once with a bad start to the thought that conformity might not be her salvation. Such toiletry amenities as she had performed were products of early training and did not necessarily have anything to do with life as it should be lived. She fell asleep imagining a series of rebel Ediths, each one of whom had some special characteristic that was noble and worthy. The next time she awoke she saw daylight outside. It occurred to her that all her concepts, so compulsively visualized, were probably being created somewhere by the crystal. Undoubtedly there were already beatnik and hippie Ediths as well as rougher, tougher types. For the first time she realized what a strange whirl of possibilities she had considered in the last thirty-six hours. Ediths who were hard-boiled and could coldly shoot to kill, or, conversely, were superfeminine, sweet, tantalizing temptresses. "And it's all unnecessary," she whispered, lying there. "The decision will probably be made as arbitrarily as my own impulsive condemnation of the inarticulate farmer and the courageous -- but presumably not perfect -- detective." Having no standards that applied to the twentieth century, the crystal had uncreated a powerful and good man on the passing judgment of the person to whom it had by chance become oriented. Accordingly, the future looked grim for all Seth Mitchells and Edith Prices, including the original. through her window at the distant blue waters of Lake Naragang and the downtown section that at one place, opposite the Harkdale Hotel, crowded the water's edge. Pretty little town, Harkdale. She remembered that on her arrival she had thought that at least here she could be more casual in her dress than she had been in New York. Then she gave a short, rueful laugh -- she had come full circle during the night, back to the notion that appearance would count. She put on her finest dress. Yet in some back closet of her brain lived a fearful conviction that all this was in vain. The crisis was imminent; she might be dead -- uncreated -- before this day was out. It seemed ridiculous to go to work on the day you were going to die. But she went. As she moved about her duties Edith was conscious of her subdued manner. Twice, when she unthinkingly looked into the restroom mirror, she was startled by the pale face and sick eyes that looked back at her. This is not really me --  can't be judged on this... Surely the crystal would not reject her because she was in a daze. Every passing minute fleeting images of other Ediths passed before her mind's eye. Each one had in it the momentary hope that maybe it held the key to the best. There was Edith living out her life as a nun; another chaste Edith, married but holding sex to a minimum, placing all her attention on her children, and an Edith who was a follower of Zen Buddhism. She had, earlier, put through a call to Marge Aiken, at the Harkdale Hotel. About two o'clock Marge called back. She reported that she had phoned New York and discovered that the second Edith had not returned to her hotel at all the previous night. After imparting this grim news, Marge said, "If Athtar contacts you -- don't be alone with him under any circumstances until he produces the Seth Mitchell in the gold Cadillac and the Edith in New York." After that call more images, mostly of saintly and goodhearted, unsophisticated Ediths haunted her. Into this haze of thoughts, Tilsit's voice intruded: "Phone call for you, Edith." She picked up the phone, heard a familiar voice -- Athtar's. "I want to see you right after work." Edith said on a suddenly faint note, "At the Harkdale Hotel -- in the lobby." VI A smile twisted his wide face. For him there were two possibilities of victory now that he had the crystal. The first was to kill its current orientation -- Edith. He intended to take no chances with her. She would never, he resolved, reach the Harkdale Hotel. However, murder of his only Edith left one unpleasant possibility. Though he had reasoned it out that she was the crystal's orientation -- should she prove not to be, in destroying her--he would remove his source of information for tracing other Ediths. It was a considered risk he had to take. As a precaution he had already removed the crystal from the nutrient soil on which it fed. He was not certain how long it would be before the stone was deactivated by starvation, but he deduced not more than two weeks. Whereupon it would orient to whoever reactivated it. To himself, of course. Now that he had a special barrier-penetrating weapon, he firmly believed that before this day was over he would be in sole possession of the most remarkable machine of all time and space -- the crystal. T HE Harkdale Hotel was a summer resort hostelry. Its prices were high and as a result it had made money. Some of the money had been spent wisely, on decoration, fine furniture and a sophisticated staff. The clerk on day duty had his own definition of a sophisticate: a person with a memory so good that he can forget with discretion. He was such a peron. His name was Derek Slade. And so discreet was he that on this fateful day he had allowed four Seth Mitchells to register without comment. He believed each Mitchell to be the same man but with a different woman and he was just beginning to enjoy the situation when Seth Mitchell arrived for the fifth time -- this time without a woman. Yet it took Derek only a moment to figure it out. This smooth male, Seth Mitchell, had four women in different rooms and evidently wanted a separate room for himself. Why? Derek did not try to analyze the matter further. Life -- he had often said -- was full of surprises. He spoke in a low tone, "You may count on my discretion, Mr. Mitchell." The Seth Mitchell across the desk from him raised his eyebrows, then nodded with a faint smile. Derek was pleased. The remark ought to be good for a twentydollar tip. He was still congratulating himself when the elevator door opened and another Seth Mitchell stepped out and walked toward the desk. As he came up, the Seth Mitchell who had just registered turned to follow the bellboy carrying his bags to the elevator. The two Seth Mitchells almost bumped into each other. Both took evasive action. Both murmured polite, nothings and were about to pass each other when Derek recovered. It was one of his perfect moments. He raised his voice, spoke with exactly the correct note of authority. "Mr. Mitchell." The two Seth Mitchells were already in a mildly confused state. Their name, uttered in that peremptory tone, stopped them. Derek said, "Mr. Seth Mitchell, may I present Mr. Seth Mitchell. Gentlemen, please wait there a moment." He let them kill their own time -- one seemed to recover quickly; the other remained be-' wildered -- while he phoned the rooms of the previously registered Seth Mitchells. He had to call all four rooms but presently before him stood five Seth Mitchells. Of all the people present the one most completely unnoticed was Derek Slade. He would not have had it any other way. Four of the five Seths were gulping and stuttering at each other. The fifth had stepped to one side with a faint smile. Almost as one, the four suddenly became embarrassed. Derek's cool voice reached them with perfect timing. "Gentlemen, let me show you to the conference room, where you may talk over this whole matter." As they started for the conference room, Marge Aiken entered the hotel in time to catch a profile view of the last Seth Mitchell walking into the room. She paled, then rushed forward. "Seth -- " she cried out tearfully. "For God's sake, I thought you were dead -- " She stopped. She had grabbed the nearest man by the arm. He turned and something unfamiliar about him flustered her. briefed by Marge to the extent of her knowledge she suggested that Edith be called to come over at once. Three Seth Mitchells presented their view. Listening to each in turn, Marge glanced along the line of sensationally familiar faces and saw in all but one man's eyes a haunting apprehension -- and the equally haunting intelligence she had seen so often in her employer's. Seth from Montreal said, "Our first act must be to protect ourselves from that young woman's automatic judgments, such as she rendered on farmer Mitchell and detective Mitchell." A second, slightly deeper-voiced Seth was concerned about Athtar. Two, Athtar must have gotten the crystal and then discovered that the dead Edith was not the orientation. Therefore our initial act must be to protect the Edith who is the orientation. The first real problem is to get her safely to the hotel -- not what she may do when she gets here." The third Seth said the problem was not so much Edith's judgment of men; it was her stereotyped concept of women. Presumably, the crystal had dutifully created a long list of Edith Prices who were simply ordinary human beings with varying moral standards or with slightly different beliefs about how to get along in the drab world of the twentieth century. "As an example of how differently I would want her to handle her control, of the crystal -- one of the first Edith Prices I would wish Why? So that she can understand this whole situation and what to do about it." His words brought a hopeful reaction. It was an obviously good idea -- if it could be done. A fourth Seth, who had sat gray and silent, now said, "It would be included being able to spot the Seth Mitchell who -- " he nodded at Marge -- "paid your boss a thousand dollars to locate the crystal." The Seth who had arrived at the hotel without a wife -- and who had reflected none of the fear that the others felt -- stirred and smiled cheerfully. "You need look no further. I'm he." When order had been restored he continued: "To answer your basic question, I also dreamed -- as you all did -- and exactly as the worst Athtar found himself with the address of one of the Seth Mitchells in his mind, one morning after a dream the address of detective Mitchell was in mine." "But why didn't you come for the crystal yourself? Why pay a thousand dollars?" The bachelor Mitchell smiled again. "I hate to tell you people this -- and it is to your advantage not to let Miss Price know -- but according to the thoughts I had after my dream I am the best of all possible Seth Mitchells." Once more he had to wait for order. Then: "I don't know why I'm best. But I hired someone to come here in my place because I sensed danger and I came here today believing that this was the crisis. I can't tell you what I'll do about it. I don't even have the feeling that my role is decisive. I simply believe that a challenge will present itself and I'll meet it." He finished simply: "I don't think we should devote any more time to me. We have many vital things to do and we only have until Edith Price comes off the job to get them done. Let's go. First, since violence is imminent, we must warn the police -- " T HE police of Harkdale were few in number and Athtar was able to drive into town and into the library parking lot without being observed. A lingering twilight had barely begun to turn to night when Edith emerged. She noted with a vague surprise that a town fire truck, engine running, was standing near the door. But she was already having qualms about the forthcoming journey to the hotel -- so far away, it seemed to her suddenly. So the sight of the big truck was reassuring. To get to her own car, she had to go around the fire truck. As she started to do so the big machine surged into motion with a gigantic thunder of its engine. Edith stopped, teetered, then leaped back. The truck jammed on its brakes directly in front of her. Somewhere beyond the big machine a purple flash had lighted the sky. Like a tracer bullet the light flashed from the auto to the fire truck. As it hit, it made a sound of a pitch never before heard on earth -- a deep, sustained, continuing protest of chemical in metal. The tiny bullet penetrated the thick steel frame of the fire truck, meter at a time from the steel molecules. It did not slow as it passed through the heavy machine. It would also have passed straight through Edith, except that its speed was that of a bullet -- immense but finite. It transited the fire truck while the truck was still in motion. The bullet was carried along inside the moving vehicle during a measurable fraction of a second and missed Edith by inches. Unchecked, it struck the library wall, moved through, emerged from the far side and streaked into the night. Its kinetic energy being a precise quality, it bored forward another hundred yards and then rapidly fell. Moments later two plainclothes police discharged their rifles at the figure that was dimly visible inside the car from which the purpleglowing bullet had been fired. The screech of bullets striking his own machine startled Athtar. But he had taken the precaution of using a molecular reinforcing unit to harden the glass and the metal of the auto, so the bullets failed to penetrate. What bothered him was that he only had a few bullets and in the dark he could not gauge the extent of the trap that had been set for him. So now, hastily, he put his car into drive, stepped on the gas and drove rapidly out of the parking lot. A police car fell in behind him, flashing its red beacon. Though it or its weapons were no danger to Athtar, he feared a roadblock. He turned up several side streets and in only a few minutes of driving lured the police car onto a street near the lake on the far side of the Harkdale Hotel, an approach he had thoroughly explored on foot. Satisfied, he opened the car window on the driver's side, slowed, leaned out, looked back, took quick aim at the engine of the other machine and put a purpleglowing bullet through the crankcase. There was a shattering crash. The stricken motor almost tore itself apart, screaming metallically. The auto itself came to a bumpy halt. to the Harkdale Hotel. The first queasy doubt had come to him that for a reason not yet clear his time was running out. Yet it still seemed true to him that all he need do was sneak into the hotel and discharge a single bullet at one, and only one, beating heart. Minutes later, after squeezing through a kitchen window of the hotel, he found himself in a shadowy storeroom on a concrete floor. As he fumbled his way to a door, he had a fleeting mental image of his colleagues of the great Science Guild viewing him in such a lowly action. Of course, Athtar told himself scornfully, what they thought would not matter once he had control of the crystal. There would be dramatic changes after he got back to his own time -- a few hundred Guild members were scheduled for extermination. Cautiously he pulled open a door. As he started through the hallway beyond it he became aware of a faint sound behind him. He spun around and jerked up his gun. Instant, unbearable pain in his arm forced the gun down and his finger away from the trigger. Almost at once the gun dropped from his nerveless hand, clattering to the floor. Even as he recognized that #th-century technology was being used against him, he: saw that a short, squat man was standing in the doorway of the storeroom he himself had just left. Athtar's arm and hand were now inexorably forced by intolerable pain to reach into his inside breast pocket, take out the crystal and hold it out to the other man. The second Athtar did not speak. He drew the door shut behind him, accepted the crystal and, bending down, picked up the gun from the floor. Then he edged past his prisoner, stepped through the door beyond and closed it behind him also. At once, all the muscle pressures let go of the worst Athrar. Instantly desperate, he tried to jerk open the storeroom door. The door did not yield -- it had an unnervingly solid feel to it. Athtar whirled toward the other door. When he found it also presented that same solid resistance to his tug he finally recognized that he was trapped by molecular forces from his own era. There was nothing to do as the minutes lengthened but sit down on the concrete floor and wait. Sitting there, he knew a mixed reaction to his realization that the drama of the crystal would now play on without him. What seemed good about it was the distinct conviction that the game was more dangerous than he had let himself believe. He had recognized his assailant as the best of all possible Athtars. Too, the Price woman was being cleverer than he had anticipated. Which meant that the automatic programing of the crystal to uncreate all but the best would force her to the most desperate actions. Or so it seemed to the worst Athtar. Better not to be around when such extreme events were transpiring. T HE best of all possible Athtars walked through the hotel lobby to the conference room. The five Seth Mitchells were grouped outside the door, out of the line of vision of Edith, who was inside. Athtar gave the agreed-on signal and handed the worst Athtar's automatic pistol to one of the Seths. They were thorough. They searched him and then passed him on to Marge Aikens, who stood in the doorway. To Marge, Athtar gave another agreed-on signal. Having thus established his identity as the friendly Athtar, whom Edith had recreated as a first step, he was now admitted into the room. Athtar placed the crystal on the conference table in front of Edith. As her fingers automatically reached toward it, he placed a restraining hand on her wrist. "I have a feeling," he admonished, "that this time when you pick it up -- when the true orientation, you, picks it up -- that will be the moment of crisis." His voice and his words, seemed far away. She had -- it seemed to her -- considered those thoughts, and had those feelings, in approaching the decision to recreate him -- the best Athtar. That, also, had been a crisis. As she nevertheless hesitated out of respect for his knowledge and awareness, Edith noticed two impulses within herself. One was to go into a kind of exhaustion, in which she would act on the basis that she was too tired to think all that through again. The second impulse was a clearer, sharper awareness, which had come to her suddenly at the library after she realized that the worst Athtar had tried his best to kill her. Abruptly, then, the problems that had disturbed her earlier had faded. Whether it was better to be tough and be able to shoot or be soft and feminine, had no meaning. The real solution was infinite flexibility, backed by unvarying intention. One handled situations. That was all there was to it. As she remembered that perfect thought the impulse toward exhaustion went away. She turned to Marge and said matter-offactly, "Shall I tell him what we discussed while he was down in the storeroom?" Marge nodded tensely. Athtar listened with what appeared to be an expression of doubt, then said, "Having the crystal recreate one of its makers could be exactly what those makers are waiting for you to do." "That's exactly what we thought," said Edith. And still she felt no fear. She explained, "Our thought is that, since the crystal is programed to find the best of each person, and the best Athtar turned out to be a reasonable person and not a criminal, then the makers of the crystal understand the difference. We may therefore assume that the society of the future is normal and will not harm us." She added: "That's why we recreated you -- as a check." "Good reasoning," said Athtar. "But I sense there's something wrong with it." "But you have no specific thought?" she asked. "No." He hesitated, then shrugged. "As a start," he said, "why not pick up the crystal -- just pick it up -- and see if my feeling about that gesture's being sufficient has any substance?" He explained, "If I'm wrong there we can dismiss my doubts." "You don't want me to look at the design?" The Seths had decided that her awareness of the design was the key to her control of the stone. Athtar answered, "No, I sense that they're ready." His words, the implication of ultra-perception that reached over, perhaps thousands of years, startled Edith and held her unmoving -- but only momentarily. She fought free. "The truth is," said Edith aloud, completing her thought, "we all feel that we have no alternative left to us." Without further delay she reached forward and picked up the crystal. She gasped. The man who walked out of the corner of the room, where he had materialized, was a giant. Seven, eight, nine feel -- her mind kept reassessing the height, as she strove to adjust to the enormous reality of him. The size, the blue harness clothing -- like a Roman centurion guard in summer uniform -- the bronze body, the large face with eyes as black as coal, unsmiling and firm; and in his bearing, conscious power unqualified by doubt or fear. He said in a bass voice, in English, "I am Shalil, the best of all possible." F OR a long moment Edith waited for him to complete the sentence. She presumed that the final word would be his name. At last, with a shock, she realized the sentence was finished. The crystal makers had sent the most qualified individual of their entire race to handle this situation. In the doorway, Marge cringed away from the monster. She uttered a small cry. At the sound, two of the Seth Mitchells rushed into the room. They caught Marge, who seemed close to hysteria and fainting -- and they also saw the apparition. The other three Seths crowded into the doorway. As of one accord, obviously unwisely and therefore -- as Edith realized later -- under a volition not their own, they moved into the room, bringing Marge with them. The Seth who brought up the rear pulled the door shut behind him. The best Athtar stirred and said in a sharp tone, "Miss Price -- uncreate him! He does not mean well." The giant grimaced. "You cannot uncreate me. I and only I -- now control the crystal. The term 'mean well' is relative. I mean well for my own time and my own group." He glanced over the five Seths and the two women, then settled on Athtar. "Which of you are the biologically original human beings?" he asked. Edith clutched the crystal and glanced uncertainly at the Seths, silently appealing for suggestions. But they were staring at the giant and seemed oblivious to her. Yet one of them asked abruptly, "Athtar, in what way doesn't he mean well?" Athtar shook his head. "I don't know in details," he said unhappily. "But I have a feeling. They sent the crystal back here for their purpose. His question about original human beings points a significant direction. But don't answer it -- or any other question he may ask." It seemed a small, useless denial. The huge man strode to the door. The group of Seths let him through automatically. The giant opened the door and peered out into the hotel lobby. After a single, swift survey, he pushed the door shut again and faced about. "I deduce," he said, "that the people of this era are the originals. They are the ones we want for our experiments." Athtar said tautly to the Seths, "One of you has the worst Athtar's gun. Shoot him." The instant the words were spoken the pistol floated into view, avoided the fingers of the two Seths who tried to seize it. It settled into Shalil's palm. He slipped the weapon into a pocket of his simple garment. The best Athtar glanced at Edith. He said glumly, "I've done my best -- " and faced the monster. "What happens to me?" "The crystal is communicating data to me," Shalil said. "You and the other Athtar are from an era where the people have already been biologically altered?" Athtar glanced apologetically at Edith. "I see no additional danger in asking him a question since he already seems .to have all the information we possess." Without waiting for a reply he addressed the huge man: "The decision made in the thirty-first century, nearly four hundred years before my time, was that small, heavy bodies had more survival potential than tall, thin ones. I see that in your era a much taller, bigger, more powerful man than any we have even imagined, is the norm. What is the rationale?" "Different problems," answered Shalil. "In my era, which by your reckoning would correlate to the ninety-third century, man is a space creature." He broke off. "Since we have no interest in you at present, I propose to send you and the other Athtar back to your own time." "Wait -- " The best Athtar spoke urgently. "What do you intend to do with these people?" He waved toward Edith and the Seths. Shalil grimaced. "What we actually want for our experiments are the best Seth Mitchell and the best Edith Price. The others are free to go. We set the crystal to find the best specimens." "But why?" "Something has gone wrong. We need to restudy human origins." "Do you need these specific persons or will you merely have the crystal duplicate them in your own era?" "Only one of each exists. If he and she are created in any other time they become uncreated here." "What will you do? Dissect them?" "In the end, perhaps. The experimenters will decide." Sharply. "Never mind that. The program is laid out and the subjects are urgently needed." His voice grew imperious. "Miss Price, give me the crystal. We are not needlessly cruel and I wish to send the Athtars home." Athtar urged, "Miss Price, don't give it to him. His statement that he totally controls the crystal may not be true until the moment he has possession of it. These farfuture beings must be persuaded to accept another, less arbitrary solution to their problem." Edith had been standing, watching the fantastic giant, listening to the infinite threat that was developing out of his blunt words. Suddenly what had seemed an utterly desirable goal -- to be the best -- had become the most undesirable. But she wasnot yet afraid. Her mind was clear. The tumbling thoughts and feelings of the past days, which had suddenly fallen into an exact order in her mind earlier that night, remained orderly. Her own reaction was that Athtar was wrong and that she had, in fact, lost control of the crystal. It seemed obvious to her that the crystal's makers would have had some pre-emptive system by which they could regain its use at a key moment. But she intended to test her theory. She glanced at and into the crystal and said firmly, "Whoever can defeat this giant -- be here now?" spoken, the crystal was snatched from her fingers by the same kind of unseen force as had taken the automatic pistol from one of the Seths earlier. She watched helplessly as it also floated over to the giant's palm. The huge man's black eyes gleamed triumphantly at her. "All your allies are in this room. There is nobody else." "In that case," said a man's voice quietly, "I imagine that, regardless of consequences, my moment has come." The bachelor Seth Mitchell strode forward to confront the giant. There was a long pause. Edith had time to assess this Seth and to savor the simple, strong humanity that he represented. She saw that he was well dressed in a dark gray suit, that his lean face was firm, his eyes calm and fearless. In some depths of her mind she was proud that at this moment such a Seth Mitchell existed. Yet, though she was still not afraid herself, she was aware of her hopes sinking. The silence ended. The great being from the future said, "I hope you realize that you are condemning the other Seths in forcing your identity on me in this manner. In this era the crystal has no alternative but to uncreate them." Behind Edith, Marge cried out faintly. Edith whirled. Marge seemed to be choking. Edith ran to her, put an arm around her waist. "What's the matter?" Marge continued to choke. Her words, when they finally came, were almost inaudible: "They're gonethe other Seths -- " Edith looked around. Where the four Seths had been standing near the door -- there was no one. She had an impulse to run to the door and look out. Surely they had simply stepped outside for a moment. Abruptly she realized. They had been uncreated. She uttered a gasping sob -- then caught herself as Seth Mitchell spoke in the same quiet tone as before. "I said, regardless of consequences." He glanced back at the two women. "Since the Seths remain crystal patterns, they're no more in danger now than they would be if this creature were able to carry out all his threats. That probably even applies to the Seth of the gold Cadillac and the Edith who presumably was killed in New York." To Shalil he said, "I think you'd better send the Athtars into their own time." There was an ever so slight pause; the giant's eyes changed slightly, as if he were thinking. Then: "It's done," he said. Edith glanced to where Athtar had been. With a conscious effort she retained her self-control. Athtar had disappeared. Shalil surveyed the best of all possible Seth Mitchells, said, "You really benefited from the crystal, didn't you?" He spoke in his softest bass. An intent, listening expression came into his face. "You own -- one -- three, four corporations." "I stopped when I was worth ten turned to look apologetically at Edith. "I couldn't imagine having use for even that much money. But I had set it as a goal and reached it." Without waiting for her reaction he once more faced the gigantic enemy. "All the Seth Mitchells," he said, "are the results of a boy's dreams, based on what information he had. He undoubtedly had observed that there are tax experts, lawyers, doctors, tramps and policemen. And in a town like Harkdale he was aware of summer resort visitors -- and on the level of a boy's daydreams there existed -- until they were uncreated just now -- a cowboy Seth Mitchell, an African hunter Seth, a sea captain, an airline pilot and probably even a few glamorous criminals -- " He broke off. "I have a feeling you don't understand -- you don't have any boys any more where you are, do you?" T HE giant's eyes shifted uncertainly. He said, "We are crystal duplicates. Thus we shall presumably live forever -- if we can solve the present tendency of the cells to be tired." He added reluctantly: "What's a boy?" "Maybe there's your problem," said Seth Mitchell. "You've forgotten about children. Gene variation." The best Seth continued to gaze up at the great being. "I'm the creation," he said gently, "of a boy who, for a long time after Bill Bingham disappeared, was under exceptional adult pressure and criticism and as a result had many escape fantasies. Picture that boy's fantasy of total power -- somebody who would handle mean adults who acted as if he were lying and who treated him nastily -- some day he would show them all. How? The answer would not have been clear to the boy Seth who felt that resentment. But when the time came he knew he would know how -- and of course he wouldn't be mean about it the way the adults had been. There would be a kind of nobility about his total power." The two men, the best of all possible Seth Mitchells from the twentieth century, and the best of all possibles from the ninety-third century were standing within a few feet of each other. "Perhaps," the best Seth addressed the giant softly, "you can tell better than I what the crystal would create out of such a command." "Since nobility is involved," was the harsh reply, "I feel that I can safely test that boy's fantasy to the uttermost limit." He spoke sharply, uncommandingly, in a strange language. Edith had listened to the deadly interchange, thinking in a wondering dismay: God really is dead! These future people have never even heard of Him... Her thought ended. For the giant's deep bass tones had suddenly ceased. Something hit her deep inside her body. Around her the room dimmed. As if from a vast distance she heard Seth Mitchell say apologetically: "Only thing I know. Miss Price, is to send you along with him. Seems you've got the solution in what you just thought, whatever that was. The crystal will make it real. Hope it works." A moment after that she was falling into infinity. T HE body of Edith lay on a contour rest-space in one corner of the crystal administrative center. Periodically a giant walked over to her and routinely checked the instruments that watched over her and monitored the invisible force lines that held her. A slow night went by. A new day finally dawned. The sunlight that suffused the translucent walls also revealed half a dozen giants, including Shalil, gathered around the slowly breathing -- but otherwise unmoving -- body of the young woman from the twentieth century. To wake or not to wake her? They discussed the problem in low, rumbling voices. Since they were all scientists, capable of appreciating the most subtle nuances of logic, what bothered them was that the small female presented a paradox. Outward appearance said she was helpless. Shalil had been able to put Edith into a coma. At the instant of the best Seth's command to the crystal and she had arrived in that degraded condition in the ninety-third century. Or rather, she had been uncreated in her own time and had been recreated by the crystal in Shalil's time, already unconscious. She herself had not had any control over her own destiny. What disturbed her captors was that an undefinable power radiated from her -- and had ever since her recreation. The power was not merely ordinary. It was total. Total power? Absolute and unqualified? How could that be? Once more they gave attention on both hearing and telepathic levels, as Shalil repeated his account of what had transpired while he had been in the twentieth century. The story, already familiar, reiterated the same peak moments: the ordinariness, the unthreatening aspect, of all the people of the past whom Shalil had confronted. Again they were told the climax -- when the best Seth had assumed that the crystal would evolve an unusual energy configuration out of a boy's fantasies of power. Clearly -- at least, it was clear to the huge men -- the crystal's response to Seth's command established that it had been oriented to the best Seth. And that its energies had been mobilized for later expression, when the original Seth Mitchell had been a boy. From that energy response by the crystal alone the giants reasoned unhappily: "There is more potential in these crystals than we have hitherto believed." And how could that be? But there was even worse. to Edith the best of possible Seth Mitchells had implied that he had received a feedback message from her, presumably by way of the crystal, indicating that she would all by herself now be able to defeat the entire science of the ninety-third century. Once Shalil took control of the crystal, such a feedback of information -- whether true or false -- should not have occurred. And Seth's command, by any known scientific analysis, was impossible. True, they did not know all there was to know about the crystals. Several unexplained areas were still being researched. But it had long been argued that nothing major remained to be discovered. The present implication was that original, unmanipulated human beings might have special qualities that had been lost to their biologically manipulated descendants. A giant grunted, "I think we should kill her." A second huge man growled an objection. He argued. "If the attempt to destroy her should bring a reaction from the absolute power that radiates from her, that reaction would be uncontrollable. Much better to deduce on the basis of Shalil's report the low-level ways in which her mind functions, awaken her and inexorably force responses from her." Everybody thought that was a good idea. "And if something goes wrong," one giant rumbled, "we can always render her unconscious again through instantaneous uncreation and recreation by the crystal." Shalil reminded gruffly, "What about that odd decision she had reached in her attempt to be the best of all possible Ediths, to handle situations with infinite flexibility?" Contempt greeted the remark. "With her lifetime conditioning," one huge scientist said, "she couldn't possibly deal with each situation according to its merits. She cannot even know what the real issues of a situation are." The discussion ended on a decision that when Edith was awakened she should seem to herself to be completely free... S HE was lying on grass. It touched her fingers and her face. The fresh smell of it was in her nostrils. Edith opened her eyes and simultaneously raised her head. Wilderness. A primeval forest. A small brown animal with a bushy tail scurried into the brush, as she climbed hastily to her feet, remembering. She saw the giant, Shalil, in the act of picking himself up fifteen feet to her left. He seemed slow about it, as if he were groggy. The day was misty. The sun still stood high in the sky. To her right, partly visible through foilage, was a great, gray hill of soil. To her left the land fell away and the mist was thicker. After a hundred yards it was an almost impenetrable fog. Almost, but not quite, impenetrable. Vaguely visible through it was a building. Edith faced the giant squarely and asked, "Where are we?" Shalil gazed at her warily. It was hard for him to realize that she did not intuitively know. He found it almost unacceptable that alongside her infinite power was such nadir thinking. Yet, as she continued to stand there, facing him, he sensed her concern. And so, reluctantly, he decided that the first conclusions reached by his colleagues and himself continued to apply. They had perceived her to be motivated by involuntary attitudes and forgotten memories, each psychically as solid as a bar of steel. All her life she had followed rules, gone along with group-think behavior. School and college -- these were the early norms, adhered to while she was still under the control of her parents. Basically those norms had remained unquestioned. Shalil noted in her mind an had somehow failed to achieve higher education. That was astonishing to him; yet somehow, these multitudes had been steered away from knowledge by a variety of accidental circumstances. So in those areas of personal development Edith had gone farther, better, straighter than a great many. Yet in college, first time away from her family, she had swiftly been caught up in a nonconformist group movement. Whatever the motives of the other persons involved, Edith's had consisted solely of an intense inner need to beloog to the group. So, for her, it had been the beginning of aberration, which her behavior ever afterward reflected. Thus, Shalil observed, like a person struggling against invisible force lines, she had fought to return to an inner norm. More study, different jobs, different places to live, association with different men -- the confusion was immense, and it was difficult for Shalil to determine which of her numerous actions represented striving toward a real goal. Adding to the jumble: all her actions had been modified by a very large, though finite, number of small, endlessly repeated actions -- eating habits, dressing habits, working, sleeping, walking, reacting, communicating, thinking stereotypes. he could not find a single point of entry into her mind that would not instantly trigger one of the stereotypes. The others had assumed that her conscious mind would present some opening; they had taken it for granted that he would locate it. His instructions were to uncreate her into unconsciousness if he failed to make such an entry, whereupon there would be another consultation. The possibility of such a quick failure disturbed Shalil. Temporizing, he said aloud, "This is the Garden of the Crystals in my century. Here, in the most virgin wilderness left on our planet, the crystals lie buried in the soil, tended by guardian scientists." Having spoken, having had that tiny bit of extra time to consider, he decided that the problem she presented might yield to a steady pressure of verbal maneuvering that would motivate her to express one after the other the endless stereotypes that had been detected in her -- while he waited alertly for one he could shatter or through which the crystal -- on his command -- would divest her of the power with which it had, through some unknown factor, invested her. Her primary concern, he saw, was that she would never get back to her own era. Since he knew she could return at once simply by thinking the correct positive thought, his problem was to keep her worried, negative, unaware, deceived, misled. Shalil became aware that his anxiety about how to proceed was causing a hasty telepathic consultation among his colleagues. Moments later the suggestion was made: Divert her by letting her win some minor victories and believe that they are gifts from you... The idea seemed good and Shalil carried it out as if it were a directive. IX  day dawned. Marge Aikens came downstairs, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. She walked to the conference room, looked in. The lights had been turned off, the drapes were still drawn and the dim emptiness of the room weighted her spirits. She turned away and became aware of a man beside her. She faced him with a start. The hotel day clerk, Derek Slade, said courteously, "Madam -- " He continued to speak and after a while his meaning penetrated her dulled mind. He thought he had recognized her as the young woman who had latethe previous afternoon gone into the conference room with the five Seth Mitchells. Where -- Derek wanted to know -- were the four married Seths? The wives had been phoning all night, according to a note on his desk from the night clerk. And a police officer was on the way over because three Mrs. Mitchells had finally called the authorities. Marge had an impulse to deny that she was the woman he thought he had seen. But his failure to mention the bachelor Seth captured her attention and she asked about him. Derek shook his head. "Not in his room. Went out early. I'm told." Marge stood in the doorway, considering what might have happened to the best Seth. Why would he have gone out when he had said the previous that he would have breakfast with her? Then she became aware that Derek Slade's gaze had gone past her shoulder and was seeking the darkened interior of the room behind her. His jaw grew lax, his eyes widened. In the room a man's baritone voice uttered an exclamation. Marge turned. The four Seths who had been uncreated last night were standing near the door. Their backs were to her. She realized that it was one of the Seths who had exclaimed and that what he had said was, "Hey, who turned out the lights?" Marge had an immediate and totally perceptive awareness of the implications, of those words. Her mind leaped back to Billy Bingham's not having had any transition impression at all of time having passed between his uncreation and recreation. This was the same. She reached into the room and pressed the light switch beside the door. As she did so a fifth Seth walked forward from one corner of the room, where he had suddenly appeared. He seemed bewildered. From his clothing Marge tentatively identified him as the Seth of the gold Cadillac, somehow recreated without a bullet in his brain or a drop of lake water on his immaculate suit. But at the moment she had only a fleeting thought for him, for a sixth Seth was suddenly standing on the far side of the conference table. The way he held himself, his quick alertness as he looked around the room, saw the other Seths -- and then flicked his gaze to her with relieved recognition... Seeing him, and receiving so many familiar signals that identified Detective Seth Mitchell for her Marge became emotionally unglued. Without any of her usual discretion, she let out a scream. "Seth -- my darling -- " Exactly how she got to him and he to her could undoubtedly be reasoned out from the fact that they met at the halfway point around the big table -- and only desisted from their embrace when Marge grew aware that Edith Price was standing a few feet away, glancing timidly around her. Closely behind Edith appeared another Seth. He wore work clothes and Marge surmised that he therefore must be the farmer. Marge scarcely more than glanced at him. As she released herself from Detective Seth's embrace she saw that Edith wore a different dress and had her hair done differently -- this was the Edith Price who had been murdered in New York by the worst Athtar. Of the Athtars there was no sign. And though the minutes fled by -- and finally the bachelor Seth walked into the doorway -- Edith Price, the crystal orientation, did not reappear. The best Seth explained that he had gone for a walk and, thinking over all that had happened, had decided that things would work out. He finished hopefully, "And here you all are. Each of you is living proof that Edith has found out what she can do. Or -- "he paused -- "someone has, and is "But what can she do?" a Seth asked, bewildered. The best Seth smiled his friendly smile. "I'm rather fond of that young lady. In a way she's a total reflection of our age, yet she thought her way to some kind of best." He broke off, glanced from one to another of the numerous duplicate faces, and said softly, "You want to know what she can do? I didn't dare speak of it at the time, but, now, well -- if God is dead, what can replace Him?" "Then you are -- " Marge put her hand over her mouth, exclaimed through it, "Oh, my lord -- Edith!" The best Seth said slowly, "I wonder what the crystal and Edith are doing with that concept." giant had continued to wait for the purely personal, restrictive thought that, he and his colleagues believed, would presently end any control Edith had of the crystal's future. But the moments had gone by and she had kept on uttering idealistic concepts that were binding on him and his kind in relation to the people of the past. All the Seths and the Ediths were recreated. She proposed a cooperative solution for the severe threat to the giant human beings of his century -- between the giants on the one hand and the Ediths and Seths on the other. In an outburst of imagination she visualized a time corridor between her own century and his. Thriftily she retained control of that corridor for her own group. It was as she established that enormous connection, and control, that Shalil -- desperate -- had her uncreated. He recreated her, unconscious, on the contour restplace. The huge scientists gathered around her comatose body and gloomily evaluated the extent of their defeat. One said, "But let's face it. We can live with what's happened." The problem was that they had made no headway. Edith still radiated total power; somehow, she continued to evoke from the crystal an energy output that no one had ever thought possible. Shalil had a tremendous insight. "Perhaps that's what we need to examine -- our own limitations. Perhaps the real problem is that in our scientific zeal we have rejected the enigma." After he had spoken, there was a dead silence. He saw that they were shaken. The enigma was the forbidden -- because unscientific -- area of thought: The enigma that is the universe. Why does it exist? Where did it come from? The thrall of shocked silence ended as a giant gave a harsh, determined laugh. "I don't know anything about the enigma and do not plan to," he said, "but as a scientist I do know my duty -- our duty. We must bring this small female to consciousness, inform her of the unqualified extent of her power and see what she does with it." "B-but she may kill us all," protested another. He added, almost plaintively, "I've never been killed." "It will be an interesting experience for you," replied the first man. "Quite different from uncreation." Shalil interjected matter-offactly, "Edith is not a killer." He broke off, shrewdly, "I think this is an excellent plan. I see it as being totally in our favor." They perceived what he meant, and accordingly sanctioned the awakening. After she had calmed herself -- after she had been told about her absolute ability she had an automatic response, exactly as the giants had anticipated. For prolonged seconds a wild hope suffused her entire being. She wanted more urgently to undo the errors of judgment which had led her down the empty road of numerous boy friends, none of whom took responsibility for her and her capacity to bear children. All her years of frustration since college found their way first to her eyes in the form of quick tears, and then, when she could speak, to her words. "Aside from what I've just told you -- " she spoke the qualifying phrase, which retained for her control of access to the twentieth century without even noticing it -- " all I really want is to be happily married." The giants perceived that the person she had in mind for a husband was the bachelor Seth Mitchell. They accordingly commanded the crystal that the wish she had expressed be carried out forthwith in its exact and limited meaning. And then, safe and relieved, they stood marveling at the difficult concept of marriage. In an era where everybody lived forever by a process of crystal duplication they would never, left to themselves, have been able to ask the right question to produce such an answer. "It is barely possible," Shalil cautiously summed up, "that the interaction between the unmanipulated human beings of the twentieth century and the manipulated of the ninety-third will actually bring about a lessening of the rigidities of both groups." His stern, black gaze dared a denial. After a long moment, he was surprised to realize that no one was offended. Indeed, a colleague murmured reflectively, "If that should happen we may even find out what the crystal is." But, of course, that was impossible. The crystal was a space phenomenon. The energy flows in it, around it and out of it involved individual events, things, persons. But this was a subordinate function -- like the motor center in a human brain that moves a muscle in the tip of the little finger. The muscle should be movable. It would be unfortunate if it were not. Yet if that muscle were permanently incapacitated the fact would go unnoticed by the brain on the conscious level. On the flow level of existence the patterned interactions in and around and out of the crystal exceeded # to the #th power times the number of atoms in the universe -- enough interactions for all the life configurations of all the people who ever lived; perhaps enough even for all those who ever would live on Earth. But for the crystal such effects were minor. As a governor of certain time-and-life flows it had suspended those flows for twentyfive years in the Harkdale museum. The suspension did not matter -- it meant almost nothing. As a shape of space, its existence was continuous. As space, it occupied a location and was related. Though it had no flows during the quarter century, made no recording and had no memory and no doing, it nevertheless knew, it was, it had and it could. In finding it and tens of thousands of crystals like it, human beings of the eighth and ninth millennia made use of the interactions and flows; never of the space ability. They discovered the principal "laws" -- the how and the what -- by which the crystals operated and were determined to find out eventually the rules that would "explain" certain unknowns in the wave behavior in and around and out of the crystals. Some day all the interactions of all life and all time would be evenly divided among the crystals. It would then become its true form; one crystal shape, one space. It would then be complete, its... intention... achieved. There was no hurry. And so it waited. And, waiting, fulfilled other goals than its own, minor, unimportant goals involving flows and interactions; reflecting the illusions of motion: events, things, persons... involving nothing, really. dale today stands a one-story building of unusual design. The building occupies the exact spot where Billy Bingham once disappeared on the shore overlooking Lake Naragang. It is a solidly built structure and has a certain beauty. Its method of construction is shrouded in mystery. Natives grow vague when asked about it. On a gold plaque beside the ornate front door are the words: Owned and Managed by Not Open to the Public Resort visitors who stop to look at the sign are often puzzled by the plural names. And long-time residents, when asked, offer the impression that Crystal, Inc. actually deals in the numerous crystals to be found in the rock formations in and around the hills and lake. There is a large pretty house with spacious grounds located near the building. In this house dwell Seth and Edith Mitchell. To the puzzlement of their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Seth Mitchell (nee Edith Price) started their married life by legally adopting a thirteen-year-old boy whom they called Billy Bingham Mitchell.  You Will Enjoy a vehicle for thought-provoking, controversial articles, and a "service" magazine containing dozens of s-f and fantasy book reviews per issue, along with news releases, coming events, news items of interest to fans, readers and professionals. convention at Heidelberg in I #... for the second year in a row. Sample Subscription -- # issues for I . # per year. P.#. Box #, Santa Monica, Cal. # AT Chester City Security, saw the nimbus of amber light dead ahead on his flight lane and checked his time disk. Two minutes would take him to the entry port. Five minutes to curfew. A neat use of available time. He penciled a final note on the brief he had worked over during the trip and shoved it away in a monogramed document case. Submitted to the city fathers it should jerk the last waverers to a militant policy of clearance for the intercity areas. He would then have agreement from all five of the Wirral cities. That would strengthen his hand when Jervis retired in the fall. There would be nobody else with a record of pan city administration. Regional Director of Security was but a step away. That the peninsula would be free over its length and breadth for honest men to walk to and froalways supposing there were any about -- would be a welcome byproduct of his personal success. His attention was distracted from this wholesome program as the auto shuttle asked for clearance. The record clerk who had dictated its vocabulary bank had a clear, bell-like soprano which suddenly gave the shuttle a new dimension even on the formal exchange. "Two-nine-six stroke A.C. Request entry lane." "You have it. Reduce speed. Lane six, check booth F. You are welcome." "Lane six, check booth F. Thank you." Picton, in an unusually reflective mood, reckoned that mechanical courtesy swapping was a waste of power. Repeated over a decade it must represent a significant money loss. He might look into that. Show zeal as a public economist. He crossed the edge of the last of the reforestation zones fifty meters below, planted out in the last century as a counterweight to the thinning atmosphere in the intercity areas. From here on, industrial wasteland fled under him. Concrete rubble. Remains of old surface road systems. A maze of flyovers, underpasses and tumbled cloverleaf intersections. High time somebody cleared it up. There was shelter there, too near the city, for every kind of kook. A bright splash of silver gray between two raised roadways had him craning around as his shuttle passed over. There was no doubt about it. An aircar had gone down there. Social worker, maybe, or medical unit. They were stupid to bother. The people who lived out there did so from choice. If they accepted the system and put in a day's work they could be comfortable inside. Something about the angle of the car, however, triggered another line of thought. Only a fool would have selected that landing point. More likely a forced landing. The plexiglas dome was all awry at that. Well, it would cost the pilot something to get a maintenance crew to turn out at this time of day, with the possibility of its being sniped at as dusk came on. More than likely he would settle for sweating it out until morning. He might lose some of his gear but the unscheduled citizens living outside rarely went in for personal violence in spite of reports. Just a hard night as a penalty for not having enough oil in his can. a flash of something green being waved registered on his peripheral vision. The wrecked car was out of sight -- but he carried off an eidetic image which obligingly reformed on the polished curve of the shuttle's console. The waver was female, nubile, red-headed, wearing a veridian tabard, torn dramatically from the left shoulder to show a pale tumescence of white skin. She was arched back against the curvature of the wreck, one arm doing the signaling with a scarf or some such. His first reaction was irritation. He had been maneuvered into a corner where he had to ignore an appeal for help. Later, his shuttle might be identified. It would look bad on the record. Well, he would take that chance. Going down there now would leave him no time to get in before curfew. That would mean a night at the Gatehouse. Bad for his image. The shuttle was picking up speed again, ready for a clear run down Lane Six, when Picton caught sight of himself on the same piece of polished bulkhead. Most times the reflection gave him uncomplicated pleasure -- a long smooth egg head with dark brown hair slicked back; large, intelligent eyes; thin, well-contoured mouth. Currently an unsmoothed relic of the race's sentimental past had seen fit to shove a hairy finger out of the unconin Palace Script, upper case, across his bland forehead. He fought it for thirty seconds and the shuttle was adjusting to the carrier beam which would see it home to its pad when he finally moved, a defeated logician. Slipping into the pilot seat, he broke the auto chain and look the console on manual. The distant traffic controller, startled out of courtesy, said, "Two-nine-six stroke A. C. Stay in lane." Picton crossed three empty outgoing lanes in an illegal U-turn and headed back. At the same time he selected a security channel and alerted his own office. "Controller Picton. I am investigating a grounded shuttle two kilometers out on the Wirral Trunk. Book me in at the Gatehouse in case I need a room." An android counter clerk gave a timed receipt forthe record and Picton switched off. It was some years since he had flown a shuttle and he found he was enjoying it. He dropped ten meters below the lowest flight lane and watched the broken ground through the observation panel at his feet. Close down, the terrain was less easy to identify. All the dilapidated areas looked alike. Could be he would not find the wreck again and his selfless efforts would be all loss. But Picton had not crawled to the heights of his profession for nothing. He bent his brain to it and came up with a zig-zag plan of search over the half kilometer where the wreck must lie. Two freight cars passed overhead in a howl of effort to reach port before curfew. Then, like the ploughman, he had the dusk to himself. He came on the wreck unexpectedly and so close that all the detail was clear. He was approaching it from the far side and the figure was hidden except for the arm still waving its green scarf. Something was wrong about that. What was she waving at? There was nothing about except his own car and any fool could see that he was landing. He dropped down neatly on the skids and shoved back the hatch. Then he was outside, drawing deep breaths and moving slowly like the manuals said to counteract the oxygen-thin air. Rounding the blunt bows of the grounded craft, he panted out: "Stop that. Come with me. I'll take you to the Gatehouse." Then he stopped. His foundling was an android, a collector's piece with a torso modeled from a classical original, but with large, balancing feet of aluminum. Even in rarefied air Picton's brain was no slouch in handling information. It hit its ceiling of a and punched out a definitive warning: Out Paul, your gallantry has been abused... Other signals crowded his sensors. A whir came from his own shuttle. As he whipped around it began to lift. By the time he had taken two imprudently fast steps it was up ten meters. Panting hard, his heart beginning to race, he stood still and watched it go. with open mouth and his mind on a loop saying that they couldn't do that to him. Then he closed mind and mouth and looked around the darkening set. At ground level there was not much to see. The sky glow thrown up by the city was diffuse and distant. Working his way over the rubble in the dark it would take him hours to cover a kilometer. He moved slowly to the wrecked car and said irritably, "You can stop that. No other sucker is likely to go by." The android stopped and turned its head to the voice. Momentarily, he believed he had been wrong. Wide-open blue eyes in a regular oval face focused intelligently on his own. She was certainly a high-grade job. One of those proscribed in the cities more than a century back for being too near the human pattern and apt to lead the frail human psyche into perversion. Having registered that the arrival was male, tall and knocking forty, this one went off in a sultry drawl like a saloon hostess. "Welcome, handsome stranger. Follow me and I'll show you where the action is." Picton ignored the invitation and climbed into the shell of the wreck. What he saw was no help. All usable gear had long been stripped out. The effort of climbing aboard had made him sweat as if he had been hauling himself around on an Andean peak. One way or another he had to get himself to the atmosphere-controlled Gatehouse. But transport was essential. The android had walked around to the hatch and was peering in like a disembodied head. She was the only mechanized artifact on the set. Maybe he could have her tow him along. Or carry him, even? He said sharply. "Put your hands on your hips and turn around. Stand still." Careful to preserve his balance, Picton, light-headed now as if in a dream sequence, angled himself onto her shoulders. When he was set, he said, "Okay. Walk round the shuttle." Obliging, if nothing else, and seemingly without any speech response for this contingency, she picked her way, sure-footed in the rubble, on a complete circuit. The ride was not uncomfortable. Picton reckoned he could hold the seat for as long as it would take. There was even an agreeable scent of verbena wafting up from longacting perfume ducts behind her plastic ears. They left the grove at a steady pace with trooper Picton tall in the saddle and peering forward into the gathering dusk. Without having to make physical effort and discovering the knack of deep regular breathing, Picton grew adjusted enough to his environment to begin to work out the angles. His patient zombie was a valuable piece of equipment. Whoever had fixed the decoy would want it back. To take her away had proved too easy to be allowed. He had hardly formulated this estimate of the situation when he became aware that he and the android were moving out of line. Underfoot he saw smooth ashlar, unusually free from rubble and his pearl white mare, reacting to the good road, had stepped up her rhythm. She rounded a corner into a gully, the floor sloping down in a broad vamp. He said, "Hold it there. Wait -- " and struggled to get free. But she had his legs in a viselike grip and took no notice. Darkness gathered around his head. He felt the sway of a sharp left turn and put his hands out to fend off a wall but found only open space. Another sharp turn and there was enough light for him to see a roof overhead. He could even touch it and run his hands along it for something to grip. But it was glass smooth. Then she was walking directly toward a ridged, silver gray barrier with diffused light behind it and his probing hands were pushing away multiple strands of thick plastic rope. There was almost half a meter of it -- enough to engulf him in a curious yellow limbo before he found himself in A man's voice said, "What's this, then? The Old Man of the Sea?" H IS first bonus was a standard atmosphere and Paul Picton took long quivering breaths of it. His head cleared. He was in a large community room and he reckoned he had made a poor entrance for a V. I. P. Thirty or more people were deployed about the set, a mixed age group. The youngest were playing some kind of building game with large, numbered cubes, watched by a dark girl with a thick ringlet like a blue-black, lustrous rope forward of the left shoulder. A small group was watching the early evening newscast. Two women of indeterminate age with head bands and buck teeth were playing three-dimensional chess. Far left, a round-faced young man astride an artist's donkey was knocking off a canvas from a life model and the girl tapping her foot on the plinth, except for the detail of aluminum feet, could have been twin sister to Picton's mount. The scene was an updated version of a Dyak long house in full social spate and the overwhelming impression was of relaxed enjoyment. Every eye had tracked him in. The bearded father figure who had spoken first went into transmission again. "Put the Controller down, Amanda. You have done very well." So they knew who Paul Picton was. It had all been arranged. One way or another, they would have brought him to this place. He had simply made it easy for them. Well, they would not be so complacent when his clearance drive got under way. He smoothed down his metal cloth tunic and recaptured what cool he could. "What do you hope to gain by this?" "Gain? There is nothing to gain. Except perhaps for yourself. We wanted to have a look at you. The fact that you responded to Amanda's signal is encouraging. For a start, it suggests that you are not pig iron all through or you would have ignored her." "And if I had done so?" "You are a regular commuter through here at this time. Some other way would have been found." Feet on a steady floor, good air to breathe, Picton was feeling more himself. Although, overall, the situation was bizarre, these were rational people. Diplomatic usage could be followed. Picton said, and even managed a false smile, "Guide me to the Gatehouse and I will overlook the action so far. Though I can't speak for the shuttle company. They may have their own views about the loss of their property. But I'm now." "Not so fast. Put our actions down to our concern for your good. Let me introduce myself. I am Michael Gerrard." Picton ignored the hand that was being held out. "My well-being will be best served by your letting me complete my journey. Yours also is now bound up with it. At daybreak there will be a search." "Not so. You still do not appreciate the position you are in'. Alex, let him hear the last signal from his shuttle." A plump, middle-aged man with a receding hair line and a fixed grin pulled a palm-sized recorder from the pocket of his coveralls and thumbed down a switch. Picton heard his own voice say: "I have picked up the occupant of the stranded shuttle. Cancel my reservation at the Gatehouse. I am leaving the region and will be away for some days. Immediate destination Blundell City." Gerrard said, "That gives us some time. Time for much vision and revision. Roy, Carlos, take the Controller into the theater. Hook him up to the screen. Belatedly Picton tried to run for the rope wall. Hands grabbed him. He was carried backward, kicking, his feet off the floor, across the width of the room and through an open arch into semidarkness. He felt a sharp stab high in his left shoulder and, although his mind went crystal clear, the steam went out of him. Unable to move, he saw and felt them strap him to a highbacked chair with a head stall. He felt a cold circlet of light alloy drop around his forehead, and hands he could not see made adjustments that set uncountable small pressure points all over his skull. At his back came the sound of feet as an audience filed in and settled down to watch. Before him an oval screen glowed a pale translucent green like an immense cathode eye. Gerrard's voice, to Picton's left and to the rear, had taken on a soft, hypnotic tone that seemed to infiltrate into the very fabric of his head. "Relax Controller. Just relax. I want to take you back to your first memories. You are a small boy. You remember what it was like to be a very small boy." invasion of privacy. The screen deepened to cherry red. He said, "No -- " over and over and it appeared on the screen as a running border. No. No. No. No. But he could feel the relaxing tide washing in. His resistance crumbled like a sand castle and disappeared. The line of negatives on the screen shrank small into a sequence of black dots. The screen itself became a creamy mist that cleared suddenly to a black and tion. He was looking at a short run of clinically bare wall with an open gap into a white tiled corridor. It was something he could have sworn had been lost in the mental scree. Sifted out. But the scene was true enough. He must have been five or six years old at that time. He was looking from his trundle bed to the open end of his cubicle in the Initial Teaching Establishment, where he had gone from the Nursery Unit in Eastham City. Emotion came fully articulated with the picture. He was crying silently, so that no sound could be picked up on the monitor, tears running in a steady stream down his face. Stage one in the conditioning of a public servant had begun. He was on his own, without parent or friend or any personal artifact to call his own. Just an embryo personality in a sterile casket. He was crying because some dissembler had whipped his woolly dog on a hygiene kick. It was a small issue, but an illustration that pain is only real if you feel it and he was feeling it. The screen blanked, glowed ruminatively for a count of five and unfolded again on a new pitch. Focus was sharper. He was standing in front of a console and he was terrified. Hands behind his back, he had the fingers in a cat's cradle twist in a bid to control a muscular tremor which was rippling about on his upper arms and behind his knees. Over the broad desk top, the principal of the I. T. E., a smoothfaced pedagogue with cold blue eyes, had his fingertips in a judicious docking ploy and was staring over them like a stone image. They hid his mouth so that his voice sounded like a ventriloquist's. "Your explanation is not satisfactory, Picton. Wrong responses over two hundred items were exactly the same as Kopec's. There is no doubt you were copying his work. It is not intelligent to deny it. You disappoint me, Picton." Picton, reliving the scene at full emotional strength, writhed in the hot seat. Simple fear, basic indignation at the injustice of it, shame at the ongoing action, which he remembered now in detail, all combined to bead his forehead with sweat. He heard the boy, that familiar stranger, say haltingly, "It was Kopec. Kopec asked me for the answers and I told him what I had. It wasn't me, Mr. Onon, it was Kopec." He saw Smiler Kopec, his great friend, as an inset at the top right on the screen. His only prop and stay in that draughty caravanserai. Betrayed. For what? "Then it was your duty to say so. Which you have now done. Very good, Picton. There is hope for you. You were wrong, however, to answer his questions. For that you must be punished. You must see that your action would falsify the records." What was the punishment? Nothing he could remember. Only the look in Kopec's eye when he passed him in the corridor and the empty place next to his own in the refectory. That was not shown on the screen. Gerrard edited it out and passed on, skipping a decade and putting the finger on the subject in his freshman year at the Barnston Polytech -- that illustrious Alma Mater for all there was of genius in the North West Province. He was in a small common room, close-packed with male and female intelligentsia sitting on the floor, perched on chair backs, shoulder-to-shoulder around the walls. One and all listening like beavers to a spectacular redhead in a tight, ljpie-green sweater. She had the freedom of a small clearing in the middle of the press. As she turned animatedly this way and that to make contact with all the group her hair swung elastically with subtle shifts of color. Neat, capable hands made precise gestures to emphasize a point. She was a honey. Rita Danvers, elected head of the student body for the semester. Currently drumming support for a demo against the clampdown on a popular course in social history. He was in this private meeting, though a freshman, on her personal invitation. He had dated her twice and the signs were all affirmative. Seated in the front row, Picton was well placed to admire her long athletic legs and get the message strength nine. Against his chest, in his breast pocket, he could feel the vibration of the miniature recorder which was taking a transscript. There was some conflict in his mind. What she was saying had the ring of truth. But he told himself it was emotional truth, not intellectual truth. Logic and reason should dictate the program. The authorities, with all the data to work on, must have the belter case. At the end, amid applause, she went into a full knee bend beside him and put an impulsive hand on his shoulder. Eyes shining. A stimulated demagogue. He was afraid that the electric warmth of her touch might send up a crackle of static. But he had it all buttoned up. Chapter and verse for the action. Names named. Tasks allocated. It was a full hour before he could get away to his own room -- then he was sitting at his study carrel calling through to the senior administrator on a private link and plugging in the small capsule that told all. He watched them take her away. Four riot cars dropped out of a clear sky into the main square. Security men turned out at a run, carbines held chest high. Nineteen militants were taken. She came out between two guards, head back, hair catching the sun in a bright aureole. That was the last he saw of her, or heard. One discreet inquiry he had made but the writing on the wall was plain to read. Not your business, Picton. Do your job. Don't ask questions. You will be looked after... He was looked after. Without being particularly popular or specially gifted for the chore he had fetched up in the top student slot as president. Without beating his brain to a froth he clocked the best grades in his year. Security, with a private line to the back of every examining computer was the horseshoe in his glove. That was the beginning. There was much more, a rodent's progress through the social maze, becoming ever more adept at nosing out the right information at the right time. Finally taking a hand in his own rise and progress to the top echelon of the security machine itself. Picton could sense that the crowd at his back was hostile. Relaxing drugs still pussy-footing around the synapses prevented any strong reaction. But he was suddenly anxious that they should see his point of view. There was another side to the record. Authority was important. The end justified the means. Stability and order were the ultimate good. Freedom was only possible under strong guarantee. He was, all in all, a pillar of the social fabric. He only realized that he had been talking aloud when an answer came from the group. A girl's voice said, "The ancient lie. Ends and means are complementary. No good end ever came from treachery and broken faith. You are a monster." Gerrard said, "Don't forget, he was conditioned to it over a long period. A man's past and present do not necessarily dictate the pattern of his future. If they did, this examination would not be worth conducting." breath. His free-wheeling mind had sold him the illusion that a bearded tormentor was building a mound of lead granules, handful by handful, on his chest. He opened his eyes. There was nothing much to see. It was cold. He was lying without cover on a ridged stone floor open to the sky. A dawn wind sliding uneasily through the asphalt jungle poked small cold fingers down his tunic collar and up the legs of his pants. He was stopped dead in his catalogue of discomfort by the sky. He might never have seen it before. In some sense that was true. What was to be seen through the plexiglas baffles over city streets or from the seat of a hurrying shuttle was nothing like the naked contact. Distance to dwarf him to a sand grain, A star map that put the European Federation of Cities into perspective as a transient fiction. Color that ranged from the most intense black to a startling heliotrope in an irregular, widening band over the horizon. Picton rolled over and heaved himself slowly to hands and knees, a panting dog ready to bay the moon. He could not take his eyes off the sky and could not believe that it had been there all the time. For his money it could have been created freshly to confuse him. He was well placed to see it. All around him the ground fell away. He was on the high point of a humpback flyover. The city was plain to see, not half a kilometer distant. His time disk told him it was #. Only thirty minutes and he could go straight in. There was a central island with the stump of a rusty bollard. He crawled to it and pulled himself to his feet, shivering as if with an ague. His mind knew one overriding imperative--to get inside and make for his pad. Light strengthened all the time, bringing up the way ahead as a composition in shades of gray. He forced himself to move at a slow, deliberate walk, mouth hanging wide open to pack in more air. He paused a hundred meters from the city gate, self-hypnotized by the rhythm of his unaccustomed exercise. The sky beyond the city had flushed rose madder and had stopped him in his tracks. For a count of ten he looked at it stupidly. The long shadow of the city wall came out to within a meter of his feet. Two more paces and he would be engulfed by it. Short on oxygen intake, his mind gagged and slipped off load, leaving him without benefit of guidance. Somewhere in the unconscious brain tub where every man is his own stranger, a life prisoner snapped its corroded chains and pole-vaulted into the vacant slot from which prudent government had stepped down. Picton turned his back on the city and looked the way he had come. The wasteland was bathed in a red flood as though a cosmic hand had brought up a dimmer. With the force of revelation, he knew for a truth that his future lay there and not in the city. There was a chance for him to start over. Maybe he wouldn't make it. His heart was already under strain. Maybe he wouldn't be able to find them again. But he had to try. On his own this time. It was the confrontation he had ducked all his life and would not duck again. Decision brought a small bonus of libido. He stretched to full height and led off smartly with the left foot. He would go on until he could not put one foot in front of the other and then he would crawl. Perhaps, with all their knowledge, they would know what he was doing. Either way, it did not matter. At this point in time he was doing what he had to do.  I  Earth had grown too crowded for man -- but not for dreams! thunderstorm and I lay awake for some time as the scarlet curtains flared again and again to the incessant lightning. I got out of bed once and looked out across the harbor to the open sea flashing silver between the jagged black teeth of the twin headlands. I saw the boats heaving restlessly at anchor as the long waves rolled in and smashed against the stone quay, throwing high plumes of spray across the narrow waterfront street. I worried about the ' boats because two of them were assigned to me for my current Fulltime; I had rented them with good money. Then I thought about Gordon  Ewell's jerry-built Grotto down the road, and I felt betterHe had not  allowed for this sort of weather in May. I went back to bed. As I shrugged my head deeper into the  pillow I saw Sylvia's eyes flicker open in alarm when another crack ' of thunder shook the village. Thunder frightened her; I knew she was thinking of suggesting she get into my bed. So I turned the other way and went to sleep. By breakfast time the storm had passed over and a watery sun glinted from the puddles and sea cluded our usual silent meal and I left Sylvia to wash up the things while I took a stroll down the street. Pentreath looked good that May morning and I hoped the weather would stay fine for the opening of the official tourist season. The facades of the buildings, freshly painted and gleaming with rain, looked much as they must have in the twentieth century and earlier; a rambling row of dissimilar stone and brick structures, some overhanging the street, some with jutting bow windows packed with curios, all restored with painstaking detail garnered from old photographs and picture postcards. Come to quaint Pentreath, the resort with character. Nearly all totally fake, of course -- the stone and brick mostly recreated from modern materials -- the facades are just that; behind the solid-looking fronts are prefabricated rooms decked out with imitation oak and plaster, extraordinarily convincing. But my place is real -- The Treasure Trove Gifte Shoppe and Tea Rooms is the identical building which has stood for centuries on Pentreath quay, a genuine ancient monument. I had rented the Treasure Trove in the earlier days; in successive Fulltime years I had come here and Sylvia and I had worked damned hard. After four years of this, punctuated by eight years of careful Shelflife, I had bought the place. Now we should be set for life. During our periods of Shelflife I let the place out; on the income we are able to send our remotors almost anywhere we please to enliven the enforced idleness. But we seldom go together. In December of last year I had my remotor adapted for skiing and enjoyed the winter sports at St. Moritz while I lay in comfort at the Shelflife Center, secure in my steel cabinet. Sylvia, however, monitored the Christmas festivities at the Center; her remotor never stirred out of the building but sat chattering to the other machines belonging to those people on Rotomation One too impoverished to remotravel. I can never understand why Sylvia likes people so much. I crossed the street to the quayside and checked the rope that secured my dinghy. A glance across the harbor satisfied me that Daffodil and Skylark still rode smoothly at anchor -- their chains had held fast during the night. I didn't expect any boat customers today but in a week or two, when the season warmed up, the craft would be in use continuously, trotting remotors around the bay on fishing trips. Turning, I walked over to Ewell's Grotto. Ewell himself was busy with a broom, ineffectively sweeping water out of the entrance in muddy waves, "Much damage last night?" I enquired. He looked up. His young, weak face was flushed with effort. "Could be worse, Mr. Green," he replied. "One or two rips in the canvas, that's all." He hesitated. "I wondercould Mrs. Green lend me a hand and stitch things up a bit?" I didn't reply but strolled inside to inspect the damage. Fiberglass stalagmites lay around in confusion and the canvas hung awry. A gaping hole in one wall had allowed leaves and twigs to blow in and the fairy pool was full of muck. The place was a mess. Ewell's Grotto is a temporary structure; he dismantles it at the end of each Fulltime year and packs it away while he takes his two years Shelflife. Consequently he doesn't pay local siterates. I find this sort of situation annoying; people of Ewell's type are parasites feeding off gullible remotourists while the rest of us foot the bill. My own siterates are heavy. "Oh, dear. What a shame." I swung around on hearing Sylvia's voice. She was standing at the entrance, regarding the devastation with dismay. Ewell hovered at her side, eager for sympathy. "Look, Gordon," she continued, "I'll slip home and fetch the sailmaking things and get the canvas sewn up while John helps you clear up the mess. I won't be a minute." She departed, leaving me in helpless irritation. It wasn't the first time she had volunteered my services to help a competitor. Ewell was grinning at me gratefully -- being unmarried, he is insensitive to nuances of behavior between married couples. "Thanks a lot, Mr. Green," he said as we started to tidy the place up. the Grotto presentable and set up Ewell's ridiculous little gift shop, a rough imitation rock counter at the back of the tent complex which Sylvia and he loaded carefully with worthless trinkets and postcards. I left Sylvia to help with the finishing touches and went out to see to the Herefords. The Herefords are another of those touches of authenticity of which I am rather proud. The herd numbers twenty white-faced brown brutes of no practical purpose save to stand around the large field at the back of the waterfront street and look picturesquely rustic. Sylvia once tried making genuine Cornish Beef Pies for the Tea Room but the experiment was a failure. The few Fulltime tourists we get, together with the locals, found the variable consistency of real meat repulsive and quickly reverted to synthetics. The remotors, which constitute the vast majority of tourists, do not eat and seemed reluctant to burden themselves with perishable pies to take back to the Shelflife Centers. On the strength of the Herefords, however, they do buy our Olde Englishe Clotted Cream which, laughably, is synthetic. In the bright sun this morning the Herefords looked wonderful, posing in powerful attitudes against the background of grass, hillside and puffclouded sky -- like a nineteenth-century oil painting. One of the animals, a large cow under a tall cedar, was bellowing realistically. For a moment I toyed with the idea of herding them down outside the back windows of the Tea Room but decided to leave that until later. In their present position they could be seen from the coach park at the top of the village. I unlocked my small shed and took out the signs. Labeling the cattle is a long job but worthwhile from an advertising point of view. The signs are large and heavy and I can only carry two at a time, so it was an hour before I had finished; but by ten o'clock each cow carried, slung across its broad back and hanging down either I surveyed the field and was satisfied. In the distance, over the crest of the hill, the sun reflected from the roofs of the approaching coaches. coach park the vehicles were arriving, groaning and spewing archaic diesel smoke. There were two, each about eight feet wide and thirty long with deep, unnecessary windows running the length of the sides. Painted scarlet, they along their sides. In front, just below the roof line, were placards They pulled into the park and halted side by side. The din of internal combustion ceased. The drivers jumped out, carrying lists, held a leisurely conversation, then strolled to the rear of the vehicles. I followed. I like to know the worst, right away. I needn't have worried. The coaches were packed with remotourists. The driver of Rotomation # jerked open the twin doors and began to hand down the metallic boxes to his companion, who laid them carefully on the ground. I positioned myself above the first box, a cube with dimensions something under two feet, and waited while it shifted, lifted itself three feet from the ground on telescopic legs, then extended a slender, gleaming neck from the center of the cube. At the top of the neck was the head, cylindrical and about six inches in diameter, about level with my own. The robot spoke, "Good morning," it said politely. "Are you in charge of Rotomation #?" I asked. "That's right. Name's Tom Lynch. Gloucester Shelflife Center." "John Green," I said, grasping the stubby hand projecting from the side of the cube, "of the Treasure Trove Gifte Shoppe and Tea Rooms." I produced my handout. "Here you are. You'll find us about halfway along the waterfront. I'll make it worth your while." "Ah, Mr. Green." If it were possible for a remotor to stiffen. Lynch would have stiffened. "This tour is in no way regimented. I don't shepherd these people around. The idea is, they do what they want for the day." I meet this type sometimes. "I'm aware of that." I tried to match his air of dignity. "But you're in a position to make suggestions. That's all I meant." "Yes," replied the remotor ambiguously, turning away and allowing my handout to flutter to the ground. "On your feet, folks!" His voice became jovial as he addressed the gangling forms lurching around, getting used to their legs. "We've only got a day here. Get set to enjoy yourselves! Hurry! Hurry -- " Within a short while both coaches were unloaded. "That's progress for you." The driver of Rotomation # spoke; he leaned against the side of his coach, smoking. "This used to be a fortyseater. Now it holds three hundred. Pack 'em in-' He chuckled cynically. "That's the story of Rotomation," I agreed. "Why do you use these old vehicles?" "Adds color to the deal. My company, we've got fifty of these. U:"d to take Fulltime tourists about but it didn't pay, not at forty to a coach. Even though the coaches are authentic and we charged accordingly. So we switched to remotors and advertised at the Shelflife Centers. Genuine lours just like grandpa used to take. Those your cows?" "Yes." "Nice touch. One thing I miss, though. I'm sixty, been driving all my life. Time was, years ago, I drove real tourists around, before Rotomation. Used to get girls, unaccompanied like." He sniggered. "Nowadays, how do I know what they look like, one remotor is just like the next? You can't even tell the age, not unless you ask a remotor straight out. Look a bit silly when you find you're chatting up an old dear of seventy." He sighed. "Anyway, I'm getting a bit old for that game." He looked it. Thin gray hair straggled across the parchment skin of his lined brow. Suddenly I tired of his reminiscences. The remotourists were pouring down the village in a silver tide and I had work to do. I walked away, leaving him staring ruminatively at his moist cigarette. T HE coach park belongs to a friend of mine by the name of Charles Judd. He charges by the head and makes a good living from this and his remotor repair shop. He picked up the coach park cheap, too, from an old fellow disheartened by the fall in land values following Rotomation. In order that the appearance of Pentreath remain unspoiled the local council insists on Charles' site at the clifftop being the only coach park near the village. Well away from the cluster of buildings at the waterfront, the park has a rough path leading down to the main street. The view is superb and gives a good initial impression to the remotourist. Charles has an interesting sideline; he has affixed at the seaward side of the park a notice which states that persons descending to the beach by the cliff path do so at their own risk. The cliff path, as distinct from the proper path to the village, is barely negotiable. The remotourist is naturally adventurous. He has little to lose; should his remotor be damaged in some stupid escapade he merely pays to have it repaired, while himself lying in comfort at the Shelflife Center, experiencing exciting events through his imperiled robot's senses. I do quite well in heavy seas that way; the boats are comprehensively insured. As a result many remotourists, rather than take the safe road to the village, will see Charles' sign and attempt the cliff path. A Fulltime human can manage it if he has a strong head for heights, but remotors are not so agile. And sure enough, as I passed the sign grinning to myself as always at the shrewdness of Charles' idea, I heard cries for help. I hurried to the repair shop, a wooden shack at the village end of the park, and banged on the door. Charles appeared with a telescopic leg in his hand. "You've got customers on the cliff path," I informed him. His expression brightened. "Thanks," he said. He fetched a rope from inside the shack and hurried to the cliff-top. I tagged along to watch the fun. "Hang on to this, will you, John?" He tied the rope about his waist and handed me the end. "Take a turn around that post. Not that I expect to fall; I could climb this cliff blindfold." He chuckled and scrambled over the edge. I paid the rope out, keeping it taut around the post. Presently there was a jerk. I began to pull in. Charles reappeared with a pair of remotors in tow. The rescue operation was slickly complete. "Fine," he said, dusting himself down. "That'll be twenty-five for the two of you, please." The remotors paid up without a murmur, digging the notes out of a large yellow bag. I accompanied the robots down the sensible path to the village. They seemed not to be suffering from any shortage of cash; I wanted to get them into the Treasure Trove among the souvenirs. "What a nice man," remarked one of the remotors. I saw from the name tag that it was woman, Lucy Allbright. "How lucky that he happened to be around, Al." Albert Allbright laughed. "Don't kid yourself, Lucy. He makes useful money from his rescue setup. And I wouldn't be surprised if our friend here were in on it, too." "Not me," I said hastily. "I own a gift shop. My name's Green, by the way." "Glad to meet you, Mr. Green." They introduced themselves unnecessarily. "You must be Green's Cream," remarked Al. "We have to take some of that back," added Lucy. "All genuine stuff," I murmured. "I'm sure. We first came here over forty years ago, you know." I couldn't tell whether the statement was intended to be significant. "Haven't been back since. From where we are now, it looks much the same, doesn't it, Lucy?" This couple must be pretty old, I decided. They were the sort of tourists we wanted. Sentimental and with money to spare. Trove and introduced them to Sylvia. In minutes they were chatting with her like old friends -- Sylvia has this effect on people -- so I left the three of them at the table. The Tea Room seats about twenty-five and there were one or two Fulltime villagers in, drinking coffee and eating buns, generally adding a touch of local color. This is very necessary. Remotors do not, obviously, eat or drink -- but remotorists like to sit down from time to time in an authentic atmosphere and watch other folks or chat with locals. The Tea Room, basically, serves as a meeting place where remotorists get to know each other in attractive surroundings, buy Green's Cream, and then wander around the Treasure Trove, spending the rest of their budget for the day. I passed through the doorway that separates the Tea Room from the Shoppe and was pleased to Find the latter full of chattering remotors lurching among the counters on spindly legs, spending freely. Well satisfied, I let myself out and strolled along the waterfront to the Smugglers' Arms. The public bar at this hour was almost empty; Jack Rivers was swabbing the counter in desultory fashion, the air smelled of disinfectant and the parrot was muttering unpleasantly to itself, occasionally plucking at the bars of its cage like an ill-tempered harpist. I ordered a pint and sat down. "Aah, it be a fine mornin', stranger." "For God's sake, Bert," I snapped. "It's me, Green." "Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Green." The old man's eyes focused with rheumy difficulty. "All the same, I'll have a pint, please." "Not from me you won't. Wait till the tourists start coming in." Bert Jennings is the village character and quite good at it. His line is to trade homespun philosophy and weather forecasts for drinks while sitting in an ancient wheelback chair in the corner of the bar. The romotourists spot him and cluster around as he clutches an empty mug in both mittened, arthritic hands and tells them the history of the village in a quavering voice. After a while the remotors buy him a drink and move away, pick up a stone jar of homemade Cornish Mead to take back to the Center, and drift out into the street, to be replaced by further seekers after information. We have an arrangement in Pentreath. If a remotourist wants details of village history, we send them to Bert. While the rest of us sell souvenirs and experiences, he sells words. I often wonder what happens while we are all on Shelflife and the village is in the hands of Rotomation # and #. Do they, too, have their village sage? Once or twice while at the Center I have contemplated sending my remotor to Pentreath to find out exactly what goes on, but I have never gotten around to it; there are too many other places to see. "Hi, John. Thanks for the customers." Charles Judd was standing at the bar. He handed me a beer. "Thanks. I took them into the Tea Room after, and let Sylvia loose on them." Charles smiled. "A wife in a million. She makes more money with her personality than you with all your schemes." "I'm not too sure about that." I frowned. They don't know what it's like to live with somebody who seems to like everyone except me. "She sometimes forgets that we do all this for money." "Come off it, John. You know you couldn't do without her." I fought back my irritation. Barroom banter is not my line. "Sometimes I wish it were permissible to exchange Rotomations. I'd like to see some new faces." "Fine," he chuckled. "Leave her with me. Oh, by the way -- " He sat down, pulled his chair close. "I heard some disturbing news today. From a fellow on Rotomation Two, who came here last year, while Rotomation Three was in charge." "Oh?" "It seems they dropped prices all around and advertised the fact. It's the first I've heard about it. I don't think it'll be the last. This guy on Two wanted a small repair job done this morning. He called me a crook when I told him the price." "What?" This was serious. Those of us who own our businesses let them to other Rotomations on the strict understandings that prices be maintained. "We'll have to put this before the Chamber of Commerce," I said. "And I tell you another thing. Ewell's selling cream in his Grotto." "What?" Poaching on one another's preserves is something we don't do. I got to my feet. "I'll deal with this right away. I'll have that little swine thrown out of the Chamber!" "Hold it. He's not a member. His is a temporary structure. He doesn't pay local siterates either." "I know that." I charged out of the bar, incensed. I had to see Sylvia immediately. She had helped Ewell set up his stall this morning. She must have seen the cream. What the hell was she thinking of? Room to find Sylvia still seated at a table with the Allbrights. This did not improve my temper. She should have been showing them around the Treasure Trove by now. She looked up as I entered. "Oh, John." She smiled at me brightly, insensitive to my mood. "Mr. Allbright was just telling me. Did you know -- he knew this place before Rotomation? They spent their honeymoon here. He says the place has hardly changed." "Sit down, Mr. Green." The remotourist waved me to a vacant chair. "That's right, Sylvia. Mind you, the people have changed. I don't suppose any of the old ones are left now." "I wonder if you knew Bert Jennings," Sylvia said. "Had you thought of taking a fishing trip?" I asked hastily. "Bert Jennings? That wouldn't be young Bert -- do you remember, Lucy? He showed us how to catch bass? I wonder now -- " The remotor fell silent, thinking then: "Where can we find him?" "He'll be in the Smugglers'. He's always there at this hour." Sylvia seemed determined to send our customers elsewhere. "What luck," exclaimed Allbright. "We must have a word with him. I'm sure it's the same man. You know -- " He looked around, cylindrical head pivoting, "You've done a wonderful job with this place. It's almost exactly as I remember it. You can't know what it means to Lucy and me to come back here and see it all again." "Last time I suppose the village was packed with Fulltime tourists," Sylvia remarked. "You can't imagine the crowds -- of course, everyone was Fulltime then. It was two years before Rotomation came in -- earth was crowded, believe me. You could hardly move. The roads were one solid traffic jam. But now, well, look at the coaches we came in. Three hundred people in such a small space. Oh, yes Rotomation was a wonderful idea." "And it solved the food problem, Al. Don't forget that," Lucy pointed out. "Oh, yes. Things were getting difficult. I won't say we were starving -- but some of us were hungry. Nowin two years Shelllife a person only consumes a few gallons of drip. Of course, we all eat during our Fulltime year but that's only one-third of the population." "How do you enjoy Shelflife?" asked Sylvia. "After having known what it was like before." "Fine. I'm packed away comfortably in Gloucester. I'm conscious of my mind and body being there but only when I think about it. In my first two years Shelflife I adapted completely. It seemed strange to go on Fulltime again when my Rotomation came round." "The remotors are good," said Lucy, nodding her shining head in a way which somehow betrayed her real age. I was still trembling with rage; I wanted to get Sylvia alone. I think they sensed it. "Well." Allbright stood up suddenly. "We must be going. My, it feels good to be young again. My real body's pretty feeble now, you know." In an effort to be polite I managed to join the conversation at last. "You won't try to take your wife down that cliff in your next Fulltime, then?" I had been tactless. I could tell by the pause before he replied but I was too mad at Sylvia to care. "We're truly young only once," he replied at last quietly. "It's always as well to make the best of things while you can, Mr. Green." He glanced from Sylvia to myself. "Remotors are good but they're no substitute for flesh and blood. We climbed that cliff over forty years ago. We won't do it again." His wife spoke. "Where do you recommend we go now, dear?" she asked Sylvia. "You must see Gordon Ewell's Grotto," she replied at once. "And then why not slip into the Smugglers' and have a word with Bert Jennings?" "Fine. That would be interesting. Oh, and before we go, I must have some of your cream to take back." "I shouldn't bother now," said Sylvia. "You don't want to carry it about all day. You can pick it up later. The Grotto sells it as well, if that's nearer for you." T HE sight of a woman crying moves me to fury. It is unnecessary; an attempt to take unfair advantage, calculated to turn logical defeat into a moral victory. I suppose she expected me to apologize. "And you can cut out the tears," I told her. "Once and for all, get it into your head that we're in this for the money. To save for our Shelflife so that we can send our remotors out anywhere we like and enjoy ourselves. We get people in and w esell. Is that clear?" "But why can't we enjoy ourselves all the time?" she asked. "Do we have to behave like the other sharks in the village? Like your friend Charles?" "Charles is okay. He's a good businessman. What about your friend Ewell and his fake Grotto?" "John, everyone knows Gordon's Grotto is fake. The tourists know it. There's no pretense about it. Gordon's a nice fellow." I could feel the rage boiling up again, a sick volcano in my stomach. "By God, anyone would think you were in love with that lousy little creep." I was losing control of myself; I seized her by the shoulders and shook her. "Are you, Sylvia? Are you?" She bit her lip and gave me a patient look; I very nearly slapped her face. "You know I'm not, John," she said quietly. "I'm in love with you. But sometimes I wish you could be a bit less -- hard. This isn't dog eat dog -- that sort of life finished when Rotomation came in. There's plenty for all of us." "And how the hell did he 'get to selling cream?" I raged. "You helped him this morning. You must have seen it." "I didn't think -- " "Where does he get it from? Where does he get this fake cream he sells in his fake Grotto?" "I believe it's the same brand as ours. He just puts a different label on it, as we do." "What? He doesn't even have any cows -- " My head was spinning; I felt dizzy with rage and frustration. I swung around and left Sylvia standing there, her cheeks wet, her eyes wide and stupid. I slammed out the back way and strode into the field. The Herefords were grouped around the rear of the building. My gun was in the wooden shed. The canvas of Ewell's Grotto shone white in the sun. My hands were wet and shaking. clears the air. This may be so in other parts of the country but it doesn't usually apply to Pentreath. Here a fine spell may be broken by a storm, which is often the precursor of further storms and endless drizzling rain, day after day. But the late afternoon of the first day of the tourist season was still delightful. The sun continued to shine unabated and as I climbed the cliff path life seemed pretty good. I reached the grassy knoll at the top and turned to admire the view. Across the tiny bay, on the opposite headland, were the two coaches, childrens' toys in the hard light. The village lay beneath me, the boats bobbing at anchor as the ebbing remnants of last night's heavy seas slapped against the quay. The village street glittered with promenading remotors; the wreckage of Ewell's Grotto lay at the near end, canvas flattened and tent poles askew. There had been no customers for my boats but I was not particularly bothered; the Treasure Trove was doing well and I had decided to take the afternoon off; Sylvia and the assistants could cope. "Lovely afternoon, Mr. Green." I jumped, startled, and turned round. Two remotors were sitting further along the cliff, telescopic legs dangling over the edge. "Oh, hello, Mr. Allbright -- Mrs. Allbright. Yes, it's very nice," I replied none too enthusiastically. I find I am happiest when alone -- inane conversation bores me. I leave that to Sylvia. "It must be very pleasant living here for your Fulltime," remarked Mrs. A. "You're very lucky." I don't like being told I'm lucky. "What do you do?" I asked. "I work in a synthetics plant," replied Allbright. "Hard work for a man of my age. You have to watch the machinery. Particularly in January after the previous Rotomation goes off. There's never much maintenance done in December. They're too busy thinking what they're going to do with their Shelflife." Across the bay a hooter brayed. "Time to be getting back to the coaches," observed Allbright. They stood up. "Would you mind walking back with us, Mr. Green? I've got an idea which might interest you." Together we descended to the village. "The Grotto looks a mess," I observed. "It's better to build solidly even if it does mean paying local siterates." "I think it's a shame," said Mrs. Allbright. "You can tell a lot of work's gone into that place. When I saw those cows stampeding through and smashing it all up, I could have cried for the poor man." "I wonder what set those cattle running," speculated her husband. "You could have lost a lot of money yourself, Mr. Green. Herefords are valuable beasts." "I was lucky," I said. "You know, they've never done it before. I expect they were nervous after last night's storm and some sudden noise startled them. Although I can't say I'm too sorry about the Grotto. It's a fake. I feel it lowers the tone of the village." "I think it's fun," said the old woman. "And how do you mean, a fake?" "Well -- it's not genuine." She laughed. "Oh, dear. Well now, just tell me what is." "My Herefords are genuine." "In what way? Do they have any practical use as cows used to? Do the boats and the Smugglers' Haunt and your Tea Room -- and Bert Jennings?" no "Bert Jennings?" I was puzzled and a little annoyed. "Which is the real Bert Jennings?" she asked. "The old character who sits in the bar for one year out of three, putting on his act, or the remotor who goes skiing and flying and climbs Everest for the other two years? On a time basis it ought to be the remotor." "Don't worry about it, Mr. Green." A I I bright chuckled. "Lucy gets these moods. She has few illusions -- both of us have. The point is, we came here on our honeymoon -- ages ago -- and we had a wonderful time. Today, after all these years, we thought we'd come back and see the old place. We didn't expect to find it quite the same and it wasn't. But it's still wonderful. You've all done a great job of maintaining the appearance; the sea is still here -- and the beach and the harbor and the cliffs. It's still Pentreath. And as for fake souvenirs and synthetic cream and shabby sideshows, well, they had those forty years ago, too. I tell you, nothing's changed very much. There's no need to feel defensive about things here." The path narrowed and they moved ahead. I saw they were actually holding hands. Two remotors holding hands, for God's sake, like a couple of starcrossed lovers. I thought about Sylvia and myself in forty years' time... We were passing the Treasure Trove when he made his suggestion. The narrow street was full of gleaming remotors stilting their way toward the coaches. "It used to be a guest house, you know. They put people up for the night as the Smugglers' did. Have you ever thought of doing so again in those bedrooms upstairs? Nobody else in the village does. I've asked." "But we don't get guests," I objected. "Everyone works during Fulltime except the very rich and they go abroad." "I mean putting remotors up in proper rooms, in beds, instead of just packing them away for the night. It'd be a novel idea. You could advertise all-inclusive fishing weeks." "Remotors in beds?" I couldn't help laughing the idea seemed so ridiculous. "No, I'm serious. Lucy and I would have enjoyed staying in a real bedroom and having a whole week here. Delivery could be arranged with the coach people. After all, even remotourists get tired of rushing from place to place all me time, particularly the older ones like us." Most tourists, if you allow yourself to get drawn into conversation, will make suggestions as to how trade could be improved. I thought I'd heard it all -- from paddle steamers to traveling circuses. But I'd never before heard of letting furnished bedrooms to remotors. They cannot experience discomfort, so what's wrong with the trundling coach, which saves overnight time between one stop and the next? And in any case, why should anyone want to spend more than one day in any place? The truth of the matter was, they were a couple of sentimentalists who wanted to relive their ancient honeymoon in as much detail as possible. Fulltime traveling is expensive and cuts into valuable moneyearning days. I was still chuckling to myself as, hand in steel hand, they climbed the hill to the coach park. The shadow of the setting sun pursued us up the slope; the village was in dusk against the crimsoncapped black hillside. We reached the coaches. Allbright extended a silver claw. "Goodbye, Mr. Green," he said. "Would you say thank you to Sylvia for us for making our day so pleasant." He turned to his wife. "Bye, Lucy," he said. "See you in Bristol, Al." They stood in silence for a moment, then slowly Mrs. Allbright withdrew herself into a cube. The coach driver, damp cigarette adhering to his lower lip, picked up the remotor and slid it into the rear entrance to the vehicle. Allbright turned away and stalked across to the other coach. I followed, puzzled. "What goes on?" I asked. "This is my coach," he replied shortly. "I don't understand," I muttered. I suddenly got an inkling of something I didn't want to know. "It's quite simple, Mr. Green. Lucy and I married young and hastily. Soon we fought. I think you know how married couples can fight. We thought we hated each other. In two years we were divorced. Single people again. Free. You understand?" "No." But I understood. Oh, God, I understood. "Rotomation came along. They put us on different shifts. We kept in touch and met again as remotors. There are certain things in life we find out too late. Mistakes we cannot correct." It is not permissible to exchange Rotomations. "I haven't seen Lucy -- seen her -- for forty years." He stiffened and began to sink to the ground. I watched. At my feet was a silver box with hairline cracks on the top. An inert, lifeless silver box; the driver lifted it into the coach. A piece of precision machinery. A cube. I turned and ran toward the setting sun, toward the village, Sylvia. The sun must have been strong because my eyes were smarting.  The scientific rationale for The Year of the Cloud is convincingly worked out, as it was in Clone. The menace is as deceptively simple as was the life form that grew out of the sewers. This time, it's a gradual increase in the viscosity of the Earth's water, which, as worked out by the authors, can be seen to be quite sufficient for the total destruction of life on Earth as we know it, and not too quietly, either. The cities of the Earth are destroyed, about fifty percent of the population is dead before the book even begins to peak out, and there is literally no place to hide. Nevertheless this is a bad book, and Clone was a good book. This is a bad book in many ways. The writing is dull through long sections. Although the protagonists move across considerable distances of land, with the action ranging from Hawaii to San Francisco, from San Francisco to New York, and from New York to the Bahamas, one gets neither a sense of actual motion on their part, nor the feeling that the book is advancing very far. Some of the syntax is idosyncratic, or at least parochial. Several times one encounters a sentence such as "The cities of the coastal plains didn't stand a chance even." This and several similar recurring quirks strike the reader rather hard, particularly since they ( Continued from page # ) invariably come at the end of long, slow, descriptive passages which are probably intended to convey the mood of enervation settling over the protagonists as their energies flag and their despair mounts. But the mood passages are too long and too similar to the narrative taffy-pulling used by standard daytime television serial writers. Then, some rather promising characters pop into being -- notably the girl who eventually settles down to become the mate of one of the chief protagonists. She's an extremely complex character, with a great many half-delineated traits. But she simply appears in the book, and then turns out to be occupying a hefty number of words in it, without ever really contributing very much to its progress and without undergoing any great change of her own. (Personally, the one thing I do wish I knew more about was exactly how she learned how to become an excellent journalistic photographer simply by having done a stint posing for dirty pictures. There are very few similarities in the field conditions, the lighting techniques, or the equipment required). What I'm really saying with all of these quibbles is not that any given sentence in the book is dull. Neither Kate nor Ted have staked any major claims as prose poets, but both of them are narrators talented enough to evoke a poetic mood, or any other mood they select. When they've got it rolling, they can induce a sense of unimpeded flow and a breathless suspension of not only disbelief but of any other sense that might interfere between the reader and his enjoyment of the story. So what this book really doesn't have is that essential ingredient of tension which would override the occasional lapse in prose technique that can occur with a collaborative book. The mixture is almost as it was in Clone , but what is missing, finally, I think, is that sense of purposefulness on the part of the cloud through which the Earth passes at the beginning of all the events. It is true that at the end, the book suddenly throws in a reference to the fact that the cloud can't have occurred there by accident. It must have been "placed." (Where is the evidence for this?) But by the time this brick arrives in place of a life-ring, it's either a copout or an auctorial admission of awareness that the book is in serious trouble and needs a quick shot of adrenalin. Else it marks the spot where Wilhelm and Thomas should have begun a science-fiction novel of alien meddling, rather than a novel of science-fiction horror. That latter, I think, is what they were trying for. And this review, I hope, is an effort to start them thinking on how they might organize their next plot, because when they do it right they do it very well. might know, was a genuine power in paperback publishing some twenty years ago, when it and Signet represented the only serious rivals to Pocket on the newsstands. There have been many evolutionary changes in publishing since then, and I have no idea of the present net worth of Avon as compared to, for instance, the Olympia Press. But just looking at newsstands, employing roughly the same sensory equipment I was using twenty years ago, I would say that Avon is on its way back, strongly, under the editorial direction of George Ernsberger. Among other things, George has produced a recent series of highly attractive and well qualified science-fiction books. But the one I want to talk about is one I bought on my own hook, because it falls in with my predeliction for political thriller fiction (Fail-Safe, Seven Days in May, etc.). This is a book called Pre-Empt by John Vorhies (AvonV##), and is beyond a doubt the best book in this genre that has ever crossed my horizon. I've no idea who Vorhies is, but he not only understands politics, and realpolitik and all that other stuff, he also understands narrative. You have to get past the rather unfortunate graphic design and blurb writing on the cover. In fact, as usual, you're better off ignoring the blurbs. Vorhies' sense of narrative is so strong that he's able to make a virtue of a technique that usually fails. That is, he tells the story entirely in the form of letters and memos covering the events. The crucial event is the mutinous seizure of the nuclear submarine Nathan Hale by its captain, who supplied with a number of thermonuclear missiles, and equipped with enough resources to stay underwater and undetected for months, informs the world that unless it convenes an international council to supervise and enforce nuclear disarmament, he will begin hitting the world's major cities one by one. In the beginning, of course, both the captain's scheme and the book itself sound like another melodramatic potboiler. As depicted on the cover of Pre-Empt, and as originally pictured in the initial reports about him, he is a rigid militarist who has suddenly turned completely fanatical and is waving his fists in all directions, playing with his big toy. But Vorhies is considerably smarter than that, and soon begins to show it at a skillfully measured and perfectly controlled pace. Bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph, memo by memo, Vorhies begins turning the captain and his scheme into creations of complete credibility. As events develop and such parties as the President of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union, as well as the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, begin delving into the background of these events, detail matches with detail. It becomes obvious that what is happening here may be a conspiracy launched twenty-five years ago -- That is to say, in the late #s. But more likely it may be, simply, the effect of the environment of the past quarter-century on the hearts and minds of sincere, capable individuals entrusted with awesome technological andor political power. Which is to say that Vorhies moves us through successive layers of melodrama and then drama and finally something very much resembling documentary narrative, while simultaneously moving us down through increasingly complex layers of reader involvement. What begins as something on approximately the level of Thunderbolt quickly attains and overtakes the pseudoprofundity of Fail-Safe, the routine mechanics of Red Alert, the slick irony of Dr. Strangelove, and begins taking on the proportions of a major statement. Pre-Empt verges on going beyond the specific problem of political man and nuclear power and gets very close to being a novel about Man and power. It's a hell of a book as a literary accomplishment, particularly for something that turns up on the newsstands with a thriller cover on it. N OW, the book takes some positions with which one might seriously quarrel. The ostensible villain -- that is to say, the force which eventually defeats the onset of genuine world disarmament -- is the American political system, as exemplified by the relationship shown here between the legislative branch and the executive. At the end of the book, as we have known from the beginning, Congress successfully impeaches the President for having "surrendered American sovereignty," although the immediate excuse is a convenient trumped-up charge. We are shown that under the circumstances of the present nuclear state, it is impossible for the individual chief executive to make genuine individual decisions in the event of nuclear crisis; that the inertia of twenty-five years of legislative decision, entwined with twenty-five years of military executive decisions and preconceptions, have robbed the chief executive of any genuine power to react in any original manner. Since none of the pre-set plans include automatic procedures for dealing with hopeful nuclear situations, the President -- the man who supposedly has his own finger on the button -- is in fact powerless to react in any manner save destructively. If he does attempt to react in what this book depicts as a sane, sensible and noble manner, he does save the world from nuclear holocaust for the time being, but he does so at the price of his own career and honor, and in the end he gains nothing -- the system defeats all nobility and returns the world to a position even a little closer to catastrophe than it was before the President, the Premier and the captain of the Nathan Hale all laid their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the line. It is possible in reading this book to draw the conclusion that the American system is the true villain in this world; that the sum total of all the decisions made since the United States took the responsibility of nuclear power has so crystallized our posture that we, uniquely among all the nations of the world, have the simple choice either of preserving the condition of marginal catastrophe, or of completely dissolving our political and national structure. And naturally, like any other organism, we would rather die than change. But that's a false premise, I think, even on Vorhies' own terms. As depicted here, these are essentially personal conflicts. The Premier of the Soviet Union acts in the end not as the Premier, but as a man who, while young and attached to the Soviet Diplomatic Mission in Washington, D.C., formulated a world disarmament plan out of his own idealism, and out of his concern for the future safety of Mother Russia. The "renegade" sea captain, (who is magnificently depicted despite never appearing onstage), turns out to have been a similar sort of person. The President of the United States is, I think, basically a political creature, but with a basic underlayer of sound, middle-American common sense. On the other hand, many of the senators and congressmen and militaryfigures depicted here are cartoons straight out of Strangelove. They have funny names and AI Capp personalities. Still other supporting characters are neither realistic nor cartoony; they have names like Robert Fitsgerald, and are addressed as "Bobby," in the manner of Allen Drury. So when you begin looking at it hard, it becomes plain that Vorhies had an argument he wanted to make even if it meant warping the structure of his analogy. The result is an extremely readable creation and a necessarily thoughtprovoking one, but one that undermines its own logical footing so that it falls short of objective truth. Every piece of fiction falls short of objective truth, but political fiction -- political science fiction, in this case -- has, or should have, certain higher obligations to meet. Despite all that, Pre-Empt is a cracking good input to add to your picture of the world, but it disqualifies itself from candidature for a complete picture of the world as it really is. What it is, really, is what would happen if you took Tom Sherred's E For Effort , (which, incidentally, was also written in this manner) and wanted to make a novel. Definitely, in that event, this is the kind of novel you would want to make. N orman spinrad is a bright and talented fellow. The temptation is to refer to him as a young fellow and as a new writer on the horizon. But he's not that young any more and his work has been around for some time. Avon has just reprinted his collection, The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde , containing stories whose copyright dates range upward from # (a period in which he was writing for Analog with reasonable frequency) on up through #, when he was doing what appears to be his most interesting work, for New Worlds. This book (Avon Science Fiction Novel V#, #) displays no particular consistent style. Outward Bound could easily have been written by Poul Anderson. The Equalizer has certain strong resemblances to Mack Reynolds' work. Gordon Dickson could easily have written The Last of the Romany, Technicality is much like a Randall Garrett story, and Subjectivity has a tendency to resemble something by Christopher Anvil. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that Spinrad meant when he dedicated this book to The Grand Old Men of Science Fiction. Of course that doesn't explain the resemblance of Carcinoma Angels to something by Harlan Ellison. Nor does it explain the resemblance of The Entropic Gang Bang Caper and The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde to the kind of thing the general run of New Worlds writers were trying to write in roughly the same way the Analog boys a few years ago were trying to write a particular kind of thing for Analog. Reading these stories you become struck by Spinrad's breadth of awareness and by his ability to write a number of different styles well. He never rises above the level of simple, straightforward competence, mind you. His version of a Poul Anderson story, for instance, although some sort of special project in his own mind, is no better than any given story by Poul Anderson in the course of unreeling a whole stream of such creations. The snapper endings on Once More With Feeling and on It's A Bird, It's A Plane are telegraphed from the very beginning, as is the one on Death Watch. But that latter is from Playboy, where jangling surprises tend to dismay. The Last of the Romany delivers a genuine emotional punch. Unfortunately, it's the same type of punch that this type of story has been delivering at the hands of various people for many years now; we have to pass the credit back to John Campbell. Judging by what's in this collection, Spinrad would have no trouble at all in writing something that was both individual and quite good. One might further guess that from having read Bug Jack Barron. But despite his capabilities as an individual, and his ability to adapt a wide variety of techniques, all Spinrad really shows us in this collection that can be said to be his individual and unimpeachable own is his attitude, which is a rather likable one. Considered on its own merits, however, this collection is either a deliberate compilation of the kind of parody young writers love to do at parties or, alarmingly, it's taking Spinrad a very long time to stop synthesizing and start speaking with his own voice.  He had one wish left -- to fight his last war in peace! T HE city was dead and the flames of its passing spread a red stain across the green-gray sky. It had been a long time dying. Resistance had lasted almost a week and the fighting had been bitter for a while. But in the end the invaders had broken the defenders, as they had broken so many others in the past. The alien sky with its double sun did not bother them. They had fought and won under skies of azure blue and speckled gold and inky black. The Weather Control boys had hit first, while the main force was still hundreds of miles to the east. Storm after storm had flailed at the streets of the city, to slow defensive preparations and smash the spirit of resistance. When they were closer the invaders had sent up howlers. Unending high-pitched shrieks had echoed back and forth both day and night and before long most of the populace had fled in demoralized panic. By then the attackers' main force was in range and launched plague bombs on a steady westward wind. Even then the natives had tried to fight back. From their defensive emplacements ringing the city the survivors had sent up a hail of atomics, managing to vaporize one whole company whose defensive screens were overloaded by the sudden assault. But the gesture was a feeble one at best. By that time incendiary bombs were raining down steadily upon the city and great clouds of acid gas were blowing across the plains. nd behind the gas, the dreaded assault squads of the Terran Expeditionary Force moved on the last defenses. K AGhN scowled at the dented plastoid helmet at his feet and cursed his luck. A routine mopping-up detail, he thought. A perfectly routine operation -- and some damned automatic interceptor emplacement somewhere had lobbed a low-grade atomic at him. It had been only a near miss but the shock waves had damaged his hip rockets and knocked him out of the sky, landing him in this godforsaken little ravine east of the city. His light plastoid battle armor had protected him from the impact but his helmet had taken a good whack. Kagen squatted and picked up the dented helmet to examine it. His long-range com and all of his sensory equipment were out. With his rockets gone, too, he was crippled, deaf, dumb and halfblind. He swore. A flicker of movement along the top of the shallow ravine caught his attention. Five natives came suddenly into view, each carrying a hair-trigger submachine gun. They carried them at the ready, trained on Kagen. They were fanned out in line, covering him from both right and left. One began to speak. He never finished. One instant, Kagen's screech gun lay on the rocks at his feet. Quite suddenly it was in his hand. Five men will hesitate where one alone will not. During the brief flickering instant before the natives' fingers began to tighten on their triggers. Kagen did not pause, Kagen did not hesitate, Kagen did not think. Kagen killed. The screech gun emitted a loud, ear-piercing shriek. The enemy squad leader shuddered as the invisible beam of concentrated high-frequency sound ripped into him. Then his flesh began to liquefy. By then Kagen's gun had found two more targets. The guns of the two remaining natives finally began to chatter. A rain of bullets enveloped Kagen as he whirled to his right and he grunted under the impact as the shots caromed off his battle armor. His screech gun leveled -- and a random shot sent it spinning from his grasp. Kagen did not hesitate or pause as the gun was wrenched from his grip. He bounded to the top of the shallow ravine with one leap, directly toward one of the soldiers. The man wavered briefly and brought up his gun. The instant was all Kagen needed. With all the momentum of his leap behind it, his right hand smashed the gun butt into the enemy's face and his left, backed by fifteen hundred pounds of force, hammered into the native's body right under the breastbone. Kagen seized the corpse and heaved it toward the second native, who had ceased fire briefly as his comrade came between himself and Kagen. Now his bullets tore into the airborne body. He took a quick step back, his gun level and firing. And then Kagen was on him. Kagen knew a searing flash of pain as a shot bruised his temple. He ignored it, drove the edge of his hand into the native's throat. The man toppled, lay still. Kagen spun, still reacting, searching for the next foe. He was alone. Kagen bent and wiped the blood from his hand with a piece of the native's uniform. He frowned in disgust. It was going to be a long trek back to camp, he thought, tossing the blood-soaked rag casually to the ground. Today was definitely not his lucky day. He grunted dismally, then scrambled back down into the ravine to recover his screech gun and helmet for the hike. On the horizon, the city was still burning. cheerful as it came crackling over the short-range communicator nestled in Kagen's fist. "So it's you, Kagen," he said laughing. "You signaled just in time. My sensors were starting to pick up something. Little closer and I would've screeched you down." "My helmet's busted and the sensors are out," Kagen replied. "Damn hard to judge distance. Long-range com is busted, too." "The brass was wondering what happened to you," Ragelli cut in. "Made 'em sweat a little. But I figured you'd turn up sooner or later." "Right," Kagen said. "One of these mudworms zapped the hell out of my rockets and it took me a while to get back. But I'm coming in now." He emerged slowly from the crater he had crouched in, coming in sight of the guard in the distance. He took it slow and easy. Outlined against the outpost barrier, Ragelli lifted a ponderous silver-gray arm in greeting. He was armored completely in a full duralloy battlesuit that made Kagen's plastoid armor look like tissue paper, and sat in the triggerseat of a swiveling screech-gun battery. A bubble of defensive screens enveloped him, turning his massive figure into an indistinct blur. Kagen waved back and began to eat up the distance between them with long, loping strides. He stopped just in front of the barrier, at the foot of Ragelli's emplacement. "You look damned battered," said Ragelli, appraising him from behind a plastoid visor, aided by his sensory devices. "That light armor doesn't buy you a nickel's worth of protection. Any farm boy with a pea shooter can plug you." Kagen laughed. "At least I can move. You may be able to stand off an Assault Squad in that duralloy monkey suit, but I'd like to see you do anything on offense, chum. And defense doesn't win wars." "Your pot," Ragelli said. "This sentry duty is boring as hell." He flicked a switch on his control panel and a section of the barrier winked out. Kagen was through it at once. A split second later it came back on again. Kagen strode quickly to his squad barracks. The door slid open automatically as he approached it and he stepped inside gratefully. It felt good to be home again and back at his normal weight. These light-gravity mudholes made him queasy after awhile. The barracks were artificially maintained at Wellington-normal gravity, twice Earth-normal. It was expensive but the brass kept saying that nothing was too good for the comfort of our fighting men. Kagen stripped off his plastoid armor in the squad ready room and tossed it into the replacement bin. He headed straight for his cubicle and sprawled across the bed. Reaching over to the plain metal table alongside his bed, he yanked open a drawer and took out a fat greenish capsule. He swallowed it hastily, and lay back to relax as it took hold throughout his system. The regulations prohibited taking synthastim between meals, he knew, but the rule was never enforced. Like most troopers, Kagen took it almost continuously to maintain his speed and endurance at maximum. He was dozing comfortably a few minutes later when the com box mounted on the wall above his bed came to sudden life. "Kagen." Kagen sat up instantly, wide awake. "Acknowledged," he said. "Report to Major Grady at once." Kagen grinned broadly. His request was being acted on quickly, he thought. And by a high officer, no less. Dressing quickly in loose-fitting brown fatigues, he set off across the base. The high officers' quarters were at the center of the outpost. They consisted of a brightly lit, threestory building, blanketed overhead by defensive screens and ringed by guardsmen in light battle armor. One of the guards recognized Kagen and he was admitted on orders. Immediately beyond the door he halted briefly as a bank of sensors scanned him for weapons. Troopers, of course, were not allowed to bear arms in the presence of high officers. Had he been carrying a screech gun alarms would have gone off all over the building while the tractor beams hidden in the walls and ceilings immobilized him completely. But he passed the inspection and continued down the long corridor toward Major Grady's office. A third of the way down, the first set of tractor beams locked firmly onto his wrists. He struggled the instant he felt the invisible touch against his skin -- but the tractors held him steady. Others, triggered automatically by his passing, came on as he continued down the corridor. Kagen cursed under his breath and fought with his impulse to resist. He hated being pinned by tractor beams, but those were the rules if you wanted to see a high officer. T HE door opened before him and he stepped through. A full bank of tractor beams seized him instantly and immobilized him. A few adjusted slightly and he was snapped to rigid attention, although his muscles screamed resistance. Major Carl Grady was working at a cluttered wooden desk a few feet away, scribbling something on a sheet of paper. A large stack of papers rested at his elbow, an oldfashioned laser pistol sitting on top of them as a paperweight. Kagen recognized the laser. It was some sort of heirloom, passed down in Grady's family for generations. The story was that some ancestor of his had used it back on Earth, in the Fire Wars of the early twenty-first century. Despite its age, the thing was still supposed to be in working order. After several minutes of silence Grady finally set down his pen and looked up at Kagen. He was unusually young for a high officer but his unruly gray hair made him look older than he was. Like all high officers, he was Earth-born; frail and slow before the assault squad troopers from the dense, heavy-gravity War Worlds of Wellington and Rommel. "Report your presence," Grady said curtly. As always, his lean, pale face mirrored immense boredom. "Field Officer John Kagen, assault squads, Terran Expeditionary Force." Grady nodded, not really listening. He opened one of his desk drawers and extracted a sheet of paper. "Kagen," he said, fiddling with the paper, "I think you know why you're here." He tapped the paper with his finger. "What's the meaning of this?" "Just what it says. Major," Kagen replied. He tried to shift his weight but the tractor beams held him rigid. Grady noticed and gestured impatiently. "At rest," he said. Most of the tractor beams snapped off, leaving Kagen free to move, if only at half his normal speed. He flexed in relief and grinned. "My term of enlistment is up within two weeks, Major. I don't plan to re-enlist. So I've requested transportation to Earth. That's all there is to it." Grady's eyebrows arched a fraction of an inch but the dark eyes beneath them remained bored. "Really?" he asked. "You've been a soldier for almost twenty years now, Kagen. Why retire? I'm afraid I don't understand." Kagen shrugged. "I don't know. I'm getting old. Maybe I'm just getting tired of camp life. It's all starting to get boring, taking one damn mudhole after another. I want something different. Some excitement." Grady nodded. "I see. But I don't think I agree with you, Kagen." His voice was soft and persuasive. "I think you're underselling the T.E.F. There is excitement ahead, if you'll only give us a chance." He leaned back in his chair, toying with a pencil he had picked up. "I'll tell you something, Kagen. You know, we've been at war with the Hrangan Empire for nearly three decades now. Direct clashes between us and the enemy have been few and far between up to now. Do you know why?" "Sure," Kagen said. Grady ignored him. "I'll tell you why," he continued. "So far each of us has been struggling to consolidate his position by grabbing these little worlds in the border regions. These mudholes, as you call them. But they're very important mudholes. We need them for bases, for their raw materials, for their industrial capacity and for the conscript labor they provide. "That's why we try to minimize damage in our campaigns. And that's why we use psychwar tactics like the howlers. To frighten away as many natives as possible before each attack. To preserve labor." "I know all that," Kagen interrupted with typical Wellington bluntness. "What of it? I didn't come here for a lecture." Grady looked up from the pencil. "No," he said. "No, you didn't. So I'll tell you, Kagen. The prelims are over. It's time for the main event. There are only a handful of unclaimed worlds left. Soon now, we'll be coming into direct conflict with the Hrangan Conquest Corps. Within a year we'll be attacking their bases." The major stared at Kagen expectantly, waiting for a reply. When none came, a puzzled look flickered across his face. He leaned forward again. "Don't you understand, Kagen?" he asked. "What more excitement could you want? No more fighting these piddling civilians in uniform, with their dirty little atomics and their primitive projectile guns. The Hrangans are a real enemy. Like us, they've had a professional army for generations upon generations. They're soldiers, born and bred. Good ones, too. They've got screens and modern weapons. They'll be foes to give our assault squads a real test." "Maybe," Kagen said doubtfully. "But that kind of excitement isn't what I had in mind. I'm getting old. I've noticed that I'm definitely slower lately -- even Synthastim isn't keeping up my speed." "You've got one of the best records in the whole T.E.F., Kagen. You've received the Stellar Cross twice and the World Congress Decoration three times. Every com station on Earth carried the story when you saved the landing party on Torego. Why should you doubt your effectiveness now? We're going to need men like you against the Hrangans. Re-enlist." "No," said Kagen emphatically. "The regs say you're entitled to your pension after twenty years and those medals have earned me a nice bunch of retirement bonuses. Now I want to enjoy them." He grinned broadly. "As you say, everyone on Earth must know me. I'm a hero. With that reputation, I figure I can have a real screechout." Grady frowned and drummed on the desk impatiently. "I know what the regulations say, Kagen. But no one ever really retires -- you must know that. Most troopers prefer to stay with the front. That's their job. That's what the War Worlds are all about." "I don't really care. Major," Kagen replied. "I know the regs and I know I have a right to retire on full pension. You can't stop me." Grady considered the statement calmly, his eyes dark with thought. "All right," he said after a long pause. "Let's be reasonable about this. You'll retire with full pension and bonuses. We'll set you down on Wellington in a place of your own. Or Rommel if you like. We'll make you a youth barracks director -- any age group you like. Or a training camp director. With your record you can start right at the top." "Uh-uh," Kagen said firmly. "Not Wellington. Not Rommel. Earth." "But why? You were born and raised on Wellington -- in one of the hill barracks, I believe. You've never seen Earth." "True," said Kagen. "But I've seen it in camp telecasts and flicks. I like what Eve seen. Eve been reading about Earth a lot lately, too. So now I want to see what it's like." Fie paused, then grinned again. "Let's just say I want to see what Eve been fighting for." Grady's frown reflected his displeasure. "Em from Earth, Kagen," he said. "I tell you, you won't like it. You won't fit in. The gravity is too low -- and there are no artificial heavy gravity barracks to take shelter in. Synthastim is illegal, strictly prohibited. But War Wonders need it, so you'll have to pay exorbitant prices to get the stuff. Earthers aren't reaction trained, either. They're a different kind of people. Go back to Wellington. You'll be among your own kind." "Maybe that's one of the reasons I want Earth," Kagen said stubbornly. "On Wellington Em just one of hundreds of old vets. Hell, every one of the troopers who does retire heads back to his old barracks. But on Earth Ell be a celebrity. Why, Ell be the fastest, strongest guy on the whole damn planet. That's got to have some advantages." Grady was starting to look agitated. "What about the gravity?" he demanded. "The Synthastim?" "Ell get used to light gravity after a while, that's no problem. And I won't be needing that much speed and endurance, so I figure I can kick the Synthastim habit." Grady ran his fingers through his unkempt hair and shook his head doubtfully. There was a long, awkward silence. He leaned across the desk. And, suddenly, his hand darted towards the laser pistol. Kagen reacted. He dove forward, delayed only slightly by the few tractor beams that still held him. His hand flashed toward Grady's wrist in a crippling arc. And suddenly wrenched to a halt as the tractor beams seized Kagen roughly, held him rigid and then smashed him to the floor. Grady, his hand frozen halfway to the pistol, leaned back in the chair. His face was white and shaken. He raised his hand and the tractor beams let up a bit. Kagen climbed slowly to his feet. "You see, Kagen," said Grady. "That little test proves you're as fit as ever. You'd have gotten me if I hadn't kept a few tractors on you to slow you down. I tell you, we need men with your training and experience. We need you against the Hrangans. Re-enlist." Kagen's cold blue eyes still seethed with anger. "Damn the Hrangans," he said. "I'm not reenlisting and no goddamn little tricks of yours are going to make me change my mind. I'm going to Earth. You can't stop me." Grady buried his face in his hands and sighed. "All right, Kagen," he said at last. "You win. I'll put through your request." He looked up one more time, and his dark eyes looked strangely troubled. "You've been a great soldier, Kagen. We'll miss you. I tell you that you'll regret this decision. Are you sure you won't reconsider?" "Absolutely sure," Kagen snapped. The strange look suddenly vanished from Grady's eyes. His face once more took on the mask of bored indifference. "Very well," he said curtly. "You are dismissed." The tractors stayed on Kagen as he turned. They guided him -- very firmly -- from the building. tasked, leaning casually against the door of the cubicle. Kagen picked up his small travel bag and threw one last glance around to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything. He hadn't. The room was quite bare. "Guess so," he said, stepping through the door. Ragelli slipped on the plastoid helmet that had been cradled under his arm and hurried to catch up as Kagen strode down the corridor. "I guess this is it," he said as he matched strides. "Yeah," Kagen replied. "A week from now I'll be taking it easy back on Earth while you're getting blisters on your tail sitting around in that damned duralloy tuxedo of yours." Ragelli laughed. "Maybe," he said. "But I still say you're nuts to go to Earth of all places, when you could command a whole damned training camp on Wellington. Assuming you wanted to quit at all, which is also crazy -- " The barracks door slid open before them and they stepped through, Ragelli still talking. A second guard flanked Kagen on the other side. Like Ragelli, he was wearing light battle armor. Kagen himself was in full dress whites, trimmed with gold braid. A ceremonial laser, deactivated, was slung in a black leather holster at his side. Matching leather boots and a polished steel helmet set off the uniform. Azure blue bars on his shoulder signified field officer rank. His medals jangled against his chest as he walked. Kagen's entire third assault squad was drawn up at attention on the spacefield behind the barracks in honor of his retirement. Alongside the ramp to the shuttlecraft, a group of high officers stood by, cordoned off by defensive screens. Major Grady was in the front row, his bored expression blurred somewhat by the screens. Flanked by the two guards, Kagen walked across the concrete slowly, grinning under his helmet. Piped music welled out over the field, and Kagen recognized the T.E.F. battle hymn and the Wellington anthem. At the foot of the ramp he turned and looked back. The company spread out before him saluted in unison on a command from the high officers and held the position until Kagen returned the salute. Then one of the squad's other field officers stepped forward, and presented him with his discharge papers. Jamming them into his belt, Kagen threw a quick, casual wave to Ragelli, then hurried up the ramp. It lifted slowly behind him. Inside the ship, a crewman greeted him with a curt nod. "Got special quarters prepared for you," he said. "Follow me. Trip should only take about fifteen minutes. Then we'll transfer you to a starship for the Earth trip." Kagen nodded and followed the man to his quarters. They turned out to be a plain, empty room, reinforced with duralloy plates. A viewscreen covered one wall. An acceleration couch faced it. Alone, Kagen sprawled out on the acceleration couch, clipping his helmet to a holder on the side. Tractor beams pressed down gently, holding him firmly in place for the liftoff. A few minutes later a dull roar came from deep within the ship and Kagen felt several gravities press down upon him as the shuttlecraft took off. The viewscreen, suddenly coming to life, showed the planet dwindling below. The viewer blinked off when they reached orbit. Kagen started to sit up but found he still could not move. The tractor beams held him pinned to the couch. He frowned. There was no need for him to stay in the couch once the craft was in orbit. Some idiot had forgotten to release him. "Hey," he shouted, figuring there would be a com box somewhere in the room. "These tractors are still on. Loosen the damned things so I can move a little." No one answered. He strained against the beams. Their pressure seemed to increase. The blasted things were starting to pinch a little, he thought. Now those morons were turning the knob the wrong way. He cursed under his breath. "No," he shouted. "Now the tractors are getting heavier. You're adjusting them the wrong way." But the pressure continued to climb and he felt more beams locking on him, until they covered his body like an invisible blanket. The damn things were really starting to hurt now. "You idiots," he yelled. "You morons. Cut it out, you bastards." With a surge of anger he strained against the beams, cursing. But even Wellington-bred muscle Was no match for tractors. He was held tightly to the couch. One of the beams was trained on his chest pocket. Its pressure was driving his Stellar Cross painfully into his skin. The sharp edge of the polished medal had already sliced through the uniform and he could see a red stain spreading slowly through the white. The pressure continued to mount and Kagen writhed in pain, squirming against his invisible shackles. It did no good. The pressure still went higher and more and more beams came on. "Cut it out!" he screeched. "You bastards. I'll rip you apart when I dammit!" He heard the sharp snap of a bone suddenly breaking under the strain. Kagen felt a stab of intense pain in his right wrist. An instant later there was another snap. "Cut it out!" he cried, his voice And suddenly he realized he was right. at the aide who entered the office. "Yes? What is it?" The aide, a young Earther in training for high officer rank, saluted briskly. "We just got the report from the shuttlecraft, sir. It's all over. They want to know what to do with the body." "Space it," Grady replied. "Good as anything." A thin smile flickered across his face and he shook his head. "Too bad. Kagen was a good man in combat but his pysch training must have slipped somewhere. We should send a strong note back to his barracks conditioner. Though it's funny it didn't show up until now." He shook his head again. "Earth," he said. "For a moment he even had me wondering if it was possible. But when I tested him with my laser, I knew. No way, no way." He shuddered a little. "As if we'd ever let a War Worlder loose on Earth." Then he turned back to his paperwork. As the aide turned to leave, Grady looked up again. "One other thing," he said. "Don't forget to send that PR release back to Earth. Make it WarHero-DiesWhen-Hrangans-BlastShip. Jazz it up good. Some of the big com networks should pick it up and it'll make good publicity. And forward his medals to Wellington. They'll want them for his barracks museum." The aide nodded and Grady returned to his work. He still looked quite bored.  Nothing alive could get through the transmat -- but what about the dead?  Wexler yelled. "You mean this is it?" Alex Crawford suppressed a sigh as he looked up into the red, ill-tempered face. "Not exactly frogs," he said. "Humanoid amphibians." Wexler turned back to the observation window that ran the entire length of the lounge. The station perched on a hill overlooking the lakeside village with its reed huts. It was early afternoon and several young males were gamboling happily in the water near a diving board Crawford had erected. "They still look like frogs to me," Wexler said sourly. "Mansized maybe, but frogs. The brochure said people." "They are people," Crawford said. "With a near-human intelligence and a culture of their own. I've been studying them for nearly five years now and in a lot of ways they're more civilized than human beings. Crime and violence are completely unknown to them. They have a sense of community, while at the same time they preserve the integrity of the individual-' He stopped talking as he recognized the contempt in Wexler's bulging, contact-lensed eyes. "You some kind of alien-lover? Things like that have culture? Melanie and me are supposed to be on vacation. What do we do here? Isn't there anyone else around -- other humans, I mean?" "No, I'm alone here," said Crawford. "But the station is well equipped. Just name anything you want. -- food, drink, music." Crawford was a slightly built man of below average height, with thinning sandy hair and a long-nosed, sensitive face that gave him the look of an intelligent mouse. He loved the peace and tranquility of Poligoy's lakes and forests. The thought of his ever returning to Earth with its teemmare that jerked him awake sweating in the early morning hours. It was strange how despite the advent of matter transmission which had enabled the human race to spread throughout the galaxies, Earth still maintained its population at the impossibly high twentyfirst century level because of the inborn chauvinism of man, who insisted on looking upon that battered old planet as the center of the universe. Not so Alex Crawford, whose most fervent hope was that the corporation would allow him to stay on Poligoy when his contract was completed, to end his days in peace and blessed solitude, away from Earth and its multiplicity of Wexlers. "The whole three of us? Big deal!" said Wexler. And then hopefully: "There's some hunting, maybe?" "No projectile or energy weapons are allowed on a planet of this classification. But there's always spear-fishing, if you're any good at skin-diving." "With my sinuses? You gotta be kidding." "In that case, why not just relax and take it easy?" "Relax, hell. I told you, we're on vacation. We're supposed to be enjoying ourselves two hundred and fifty credits' worth a day each-and if we don't that corporation of yours had better get itself a good lawyer. In the brochure it distinctly said there would be people here and plenty to do -- " Wexler squinted in an effort at recall. "I remember reading something about 'the laughing, happy brown folk of Aruman IV welcome Earth visitors to their paradise planet, opening their hearts and homes.' And there was this picture of a broad with boobs like -- " the lounge at that moment and Crawford never got to hear the second half of the simile, or for that matter totelling Wexler that he was on Poligoy -- not Aruman IV. Even if he had intended to do so, the reappearance of Melanie, who had retired to the washroom immediately on arrival, would have pushed the idea right out of his mind. From the first moment Melanie Wexler had materialized on the receiving grid he had felt himself drowning happily in the depths of those wide blue eyes. By any standards Melanie Wexler was a dish, a doll, a cracker. Slightly shorter than himself, she had a perfect figure and a gorgeously piquant little face framed by blond hair that hung down over her shoulders in carefully cultivated disarray -- and a way of looking at a man that made him feel three meters tall and muscular with it. "Well, now, that feels so much better," said Melanie, treating Crawford to a dazzling smile that upped his blood pressure several points, then turning her attention to her husband. "Is something wrong, Harry?" "We've been conned, is all," growled Wexler, pointing to the observation window. "Take a look at this paradise planet." Melanie walked to the window. Crawford blushed deeply as he watched her hip movement and thanked whatever gods had charge of such matters that neither of the Wexlers was telepathic. "Harry, you do complain so. It looks very nice to me. All that blue water." She clapped her hands. "And just look at that cute little native village!" "Bug-infested firetrap!" snorted Wexler. "That's not strictly true," Crawford said defensively. "Although I must admit that a number of the indigenous insects can be troublesome. On the other hand, you might be lucky enough to be bitten by a Varyl fly." "Lucky?" "Yes, it's something like an Earth mosquito, but it pays off for the blood it takes from its victims by injecting a venom which works on human beings as a euphoric hallucinogen." Melanie Wexler uttered a little squeal. "How horrible! I just can't stand insects. And the idea of being bitten" "Please, there's nothing at all for you to worry about," Crawford said gallantly. "I can let you have some PC Ninety-seven tablets. If you take them you won't be bothered at all. They modify the chemical structure of human perspiration, making it repellent to most of the local insects." "You mean they'll make me smell?" Melanie was already surrounded by an aura of expensive perfume with the strength of a force field. "Only to the bugs," Crawford explained. "The change would be undetectable by another human being." "I've got the feeling that this place is going to be no fun at all," said Wexler. "Why don't we just ship out of here right now?" "I'm afraid that isn't possible," Crawford said. "Safety regulations forbid more than one transmat exposure in twenty-four Earth Standard hours per person." He could have added that in their case the regulation was particularly applicable, but there was no sense in alarming them at this stage by bringing up the subject of Scrambling. "You mean we're stuck here for a whole day, whether we like it or not?" said Wexler. "If you'd only give it a chance. I'm sure you'd find a great deal to interest you," said Crawford. "Yeah?" Wexler remained unconvinced. "What do you do around here for laughs? We just came in from Beldar IV, and that's a tough act to follow. They've got a World War going there, you know, the full Flanders nineteen-eighteen bit." "Harry went over the battlefield every day in an aircar," said Melanie. "Well, you've got to pitch into that kind of thing if you're going to get the maximum experience," Wexler said, with a touch of pride, as if louring in a lightshielded, force-field protected aircar were the height of heroism. "Melanie just couldn't take all that blood and mud. She went on the alternative excursions, hospitals, welfare projects, that kind of woman's stuff." hear that Melanie Wexler did not share her husband's ghoulish taste in entertainment. "There was this convalescent home for officers. None of them badly disfigured, you understand. Such handsome, brave boys," Melanie said reminiscently. "So human in their needs." Crawford pictured her, a lovely figure in white gliding through the wards, dispensing comfort and encouragement, occasionally placing a cool hand on a fevered brow. The vision faded abruptly under the impact of Harry Wexler's voice. "I said, what have you got to offer us that will compare with Beldar IV?" "Certainly nothing on that scale," admitted Crawford. "Life here is usually pretty quiet, apart from the spawning ceremonies in early spring -- and you've missed the last of those by nearly three weeks." "Hell. Now what kind of organization is that?" Wexler complained. "Mel and I have always been kinda interested in quaint fertility rites." "Strictly from an anthropological point of view, you understand, Mr. -- " added his wife, with a flicker of eyelashes that did things to Crawford's hormone balance. "Crawford -- Alex Crawford." She was not only beautiful, thought Crawford, she had an intellect as well. All this wasted on her overweight, stupid slob of a husband. "I'm afraid I have to do a few maintenance jobs right now -- just routine, you understand. Please help yourselves to anything you want from the bar. I should be back in about a halfhour -- " Babbling his excuses, face flushed with embarrassment at the thoughts that exploded into existence under the catalytic influence of Melanie Wexler's smile, Crawford made an awkward, stumbling exit through a door marked: Station Personnel Only. Once in the safety of his own small office, he sat down at his desk and began an attempt to consider the multiple problems presented by the arrival of the Wexlers. So far neither of them was aware that this was Poligoy and not their expected destination of Aruman IV, and if Crawford were careful he might be able to preserve this ignorance until he was able to ship them on to their next destination on the following day. But the situation was not quite as simple as that. The first question that had to be answered was how they had come to arrive at Poligoy in the first place. The reason could have been a human error back at the Beldar IV station, an error in the selection of the destination coding such things did happen occasionally. Or, if not a human error, a minor equipment failure, perhaps? Or... Crawford reluctantly faced the third alternative at last. Perhaps he had a Scramble on his hands. If that were the case the situation would be infinitely more serious. Scrambles were mercifully rare -- although not quite as rare as the carefully arranged statistics appeared to show. In five years as a station operator he had not yet been involved in a Scramble situation, though it was quite possible that the law of averages had caught up with him at last. Crawford sighed deeply, the vision of Melanie Wexler's eyes, so trusting, so beautiful, rising in his memory as he opened the desk drawer and took out the redcovered book with gold lettering on its cover: Trans-universal Galactours Manual for Station Chiefs Top Secret. It took him only a few seconds to find the section headed Scramble. Scramble is a blanket term used to cover a number of different malfunctions in the process of matter transmission. Among thpse so included are: (A) Dead on arrival. (B) Disappearance -- failure to arrive at destination. (C) Misplacement of organs or limbs. (D) Brain damage -- insanity in one form or another. (E) Image reversal -- subject received in mirror image of original. (F) Multiple ectypingwith or without loss of original. The above list is provided merely as a guide and makes no pretensions toward being complete. These are the commoner manifestations, some of which may appear in combination with each other. It is therefore recommended that in all cases where Scrambling is suspected the Station Chief should immediately get in touch with his Area Inspector. However, should this not be possible, the Station Chief is urged not to panic but to use his discretion until such time as contact can be made. He may do this in the confidence that his decisions will at all times be backed by the Corporation. Crawford sometimes found himself wondering just how much that word "discretion" covered. He had an .idea that it was somehow connected with the presence of the laser pistol which he had found in the bottom drawer of his desk when he took over the station. The weapon was not shown in the inventory as part of the official equipment and its presence on Poligoy was strictly illegal. But when he had mentioned the matter to Kranosky, the area inspector, he had received an enigmatically oblique reply. "I run a clean territory, Crawford, and I shall expect you to help me keep it that way, check? Not one of my stations has ever cost the corporation a single credit in refunds, law suits, or out-of-court settlements. Remember that and we'll get along fine. Check? Any time you're in doubt, just shove a tape down the beam to my office and I'll be right along to back you up. Check?" A passenger Scrambled in transit became a considerable liability to the corporation, capable of bringing a crippling law suit. There was little doubt that from a practical point of view a complete disappearance was  much more favorable to the interests of the corporation than a maimed reappearance, especially because in such a case they would be able to plead an old act-of-God escape clause which absolved them from responsibility. There was no positive reference to any such practices even in the Top Secret manual, but Crawford had an uneasy suspicion that in such a situation a loyal station chief was expected to use that undefined "discretion" by taking direct action which would save the corporation the expense and embarrassment of litigation. thoughts to the back of his mind. Such measures would surely not be necessary to deal with the situation he found himself in at the moment. The arrival of the Wexlers must be due to an operational error on Beldar, nothing more. Kranosky, a disconcertingly energetic man, built like a barrel with legs, would be able to clear the whole thing up in a few minutes. He switched on the desk recorder and began to make a taped report. When the fecording was completed he removed the cassette from the machine and hurried through into the transmat room. Placing the tape on the transmission grid, he turned his attention to the control console -- and noticed for the first time the single word that appeared on the two monitor screens: The duplicated message hadn't registered before, perhaps because he had been too preoccupied with the sensation of falling into Melanie Wexler's wide blue eyes -- but now as he stared drymouthed at the ominous red capitals the full seriousness of his position began to dawn on him at last. There could no longer be any doubt that he was faced with a Scramble situation. Any malfunction serious enough to trip the overload cutouts on the transmat clearly came into that category. There could now be no question of getting the taped message through to Kranosky either -- it could not be sent to area headquarters until the transmat was working again. And -- the Manual was quite specific on this point -- a station chief was forbidden to interfere with the internal complexities of the transmat in his charge. A Model A # Matter Transceiver cost somewhere in Earth, and there was no sense in allowing someone who was merely trained as an operator to fool around with a capital investment of that magnitude. This was a job for maintenance and all he could do at the moment was to activate the automatic subetheric beacon and wait for the arrival of the engineers. He had no way of knowing just how long this would take. Although subetheric was quasi-instantaneous like the transmat beam, the maintenance crew had to travel by old-fashioned spaceship. During that time Crawford would be stuck with the Wexlers. He had no objection to spending a week in the company of Melanie but her husband was a very different matter. Crawford squared his narrow shoulders and made his way back through to the tourist section of the station. had obviously taken Crawford's invitation to sample the pleasures of the well-stocked bar literally, but the intake of alcohol had done nothing to improve his disposition. "You seen that goddammed wife of mine anywhere, Croydon?" he demanded. "CrawTord." "Crawford -- schmawford, I ask you a question, you give me the answer," growled the big man, swaying precariously on the bar stool. "I'm afraid I haven't seen the lady," said Crawford. "You sure?" Wexler's bloodshot eyes scanned him suspiciously. "I have been fully occupied with my duties," Crawford said. "The last time I saw Mrs. Wexler she was in here with you." "Yeah? Well, she's not here now, is she?" "Perhaps she's in her room," Crawford suggested. "Would you like me to check?" "You keep outta my wife's room," said Wexler. He looked down into his almost empty glass and muttered morosely to himself, "Same damned thing every place we go -- " "Can I fix you another drink, Mr. Wexler?" Crawford said, searching for some way of reaching some reasonably amicable conversational level. "You trying to get me stoned?" "Not at all, Mr. Wexler. It's my job to entertain the guests and make sure they have everything they want." "Yeah? Well at two hundred and fifty skins a day I suppose that figures," Wexler said. "But I still think that brochure is a con." Crawford swallowed. "I wanted to talk to you about that," he said. After all, he had to start his explanation somewhere. "You mean you admit it?" "No, Mr. Wexler, the brochure is perfectly accurate. The corporation is most careful that there should be no misrepresentation. After all, our best advertisement is a satisfied client." "Don't give me the old public relations routine, Pulford," growled Wexler. "I've been in business myself all my life. Now what's bugging you?" "Well, the fact is that there has been a slight error," Crawford said. "Nothing at all to worry about, you understand but for certain technical reasons which I won't bother you with at the moment, you have arrived on Poligoy -- not Aruman IV, as was originally intended." "You mean we're on the wrong planet?" exploded Wexler. "I knew those blasted frogs weren't right!" "So you see the brochure -- " "To hell with the brochure!" shouted Wexler. "What about my two hundred and fifty a day?" "I can guarantee that the corporation will meet you on the financial arrangements," said Crawford, hoping that his discretionary powers covered the making of such promises. "Yeah? Well that's all very fine. But the way I see it there's been a breach of contract here," said Wexler. "The booking form distinctly says 'see up to ten planets of your choice ' and I didn't choose this dump." "Quite so. Mr. Wexler, but I think you'll find that undertaking is qualified by a contingent liability clause to cover unavoidable changes in local conditions "Don't you start quoting the small print at me, Pulford!" roared Wexler. "You and your damned corporation have robbed me of twenty-four hours' vacation time. I could have been enjoying myself on Aruman IV. Nobody does that kind of thing to Harry Wexler and gets away with it." "That's another thing," said Crawford, deciding that he might as well let Wexler have all the bad news at one time. "I'm afraid that it looks as though you won't be able to continue your tour tomorrow, after all. The station transmat is temporarily out of commission." "Temporarily? How long is that?" Crawford shrugged. "If there's a maintenance crew in the area, a few days maybe. It's impossible to be definite at this stage." "Shall I tell you something, little man?" Wexler's voice moderated suddenly to a confidential tone. "If I'm not back behind my desk at Wexler Tools and Components, Inc., by nine-thirty next Monday morning, I shall sue, claiming a delay -- and there isn't any court on Earth that won't grant a verdict in my favor." He guffawed nastily. could handle it, thought Crawford hopelessly. But Kranosky, most likely, was light-years away, blissfully unaware of the jeopardy that faced the record of his "clean territory." "You can fix me that drink now, boy," said Wexler, rendered amiable by the anticipation of successful and highly profitable litigation. "And while you're about it, why don't you have one yourself? You look like you could use a stiffener." Crawford mixed Wexler a Bacardi and Coke strong enough to fell an elephant and, although it was still only late afternoon, he broke his usual tradition by having a Scotch and water himself. "May as well be comfortable," slurred Wexler, getting unsteadily off the bar stool and weaving his way toward one of the lounge's armchairs, which accepted his subsiding bulk with a moan of protest. He raised his empty glass a moment later and looked owlishly at the station chief. "Hit me again. Crawfish." Crawford obeyed, finding some solace in the thought that one more must surely tip the already failing Wexler into a drunken stupor. He was ferrying the empty glass back to the bar counter when he happened to glance out through the observation window and see Melanie Wexler, a nymphlike vision in a diaphanous pink creation, standing on the terrace outside. She was looking into the lounge, smiling as she waved one perfectly shaped arm in an unmistakably beckoning gesture. Crawford did a "who me?" double-take, confirmed with a look over his shoulder that Wexler was facing in the opposite direction, than hurried out to join her. After all, she was just as much a paying guest as her husband, and there would be a great deal more pleasure for himself in entertaining her. something he hadn't anticipated even in his wildest dreams. He found that the beckoning depths of Melanie Wexler's wide blue eyes meant every word they didn't say. "Oh, Alex," she sighed, smiling up at him as she afterward lay in his arms on the lawnlike grass of a clearing near the lake edge. "You're all man. Why didn't I meet you before?" Still dazed by the after-effects of passion, Crawford was unable to think of a sensible answer but this minor shortcoming passed unnoticed as Melanie continued with her monologue. "You have no idea what a terrible life I endure with that beast," she said, moist lips trembling kissably. "He has no idea of how to treat a woman. Most of the time he ignores me -- but when he's drunk he's like a mad bull. My mother warned me about men like him. I never thought I'd find myself married to one -- " A tiny sob shook the perfect body, and Crawford surrendered to a sudden upsurge of protective zeal. "Oh, Alex -- " The sound of his name on her lips was like a heavenly choir welcoming him once more to paradise. When the madness finally retreated and he once more became aware of his surroundings he realized with a start that the sun had set and the stars were already peeping down out of a purple twilight. Melanie was lying completely relaxed, her face childlike in sleep. He woke her with a gentle kiss. "Melanie, it's late," he whispered urgently. "I ought to be getting back to the station." "Not yet, Alex," she pleaded. "But your husband," he protested,' already weakening. Her eyes were like dark pools in the dimness, drawing him down irresistibly. It was close to midnight when they finally arrived back at the station. The lights had come on automatically with dusk and they could see the empty lounge clearly through the observation window. "Your husband -- " Crawford said again. "Don't worry, Alex," Melanie said. "He'll be in bed, sleeping it off. Nothing's going to wake him and tomorrow he won't remember a thing that happened. Why don't we go in and have a couple of drinks, then we can eat an intimate little supper, just the two of us. Maybe later you can show me your quarters." Marveling at his good fortune, Crawford walked arm in arm with her into the lounge. "I'll fix the drinks," she said, moving toward the bar. "You sit down and take it easy, you gorgeous man." "Gorgeous man, is it?" roared the unmistakable voice of Wexler. big man, evidently still drunk, standing unsteadily in the doorway. Wexler's right hand was holding the laser pistol Crawford had last seen in the bottom drawer of his desk. "Damn it, Mel -- every place we go you gotta get yourself involved with some jerk," complained Wexler. "This time I'm going to do something about it." Rudely shaken from the rosy glow that remained of his idyll Crawford frantically searched his mind for some notion of what to do, his vision tunneled in on the deadly weapon. He had no experience in this kind of situation -- but if Wexler pressed the trigger he would not live to benefit from the present lesson. The only vaguely applicable piece of information he was able to dredge up was the advice given him during his training about the use of an air of firm reasonableness when dealing with troublesome drunks or deranged persons. Fighting against the paralyzing fear that gripped him, he moved a couple of steps toward Wexler, intending to say something like: Now see here, Harry. You've got the wrong idea about this. Why don't we talk things over sensibly like civilized men? Unfortunately, all that came out was a squeaky: "Now see here..." Then his parched throat seized up solid. "Harry, don't do it!" screamed Melanie. "They'll recondition you out of your mind -- " "Maybe, but it will be worth it," Wexler said with drunken determination. "I've had all of this kind of thing I can take." Crawford watched as the deadly weapon moved slowly up until it was pointing at his chest. He closed his eyes. His body tensed awaiting a blast of energy that could not fail to kill him at this range. He waited for what seemed like an age-but, as he was familiar in the fictional sense at least with the time-dilation effect experienced by people in his present circumstances, he saw no cause for hope until he heard Wexler's voice again. "What the hell's gone wrong with the lousy thing?" He opened his eyes. Wexler was pawing clumsily at the pistol, an expression of drunken puzzlement on his face. Crawford realized with a surge of hope that whatever gods watched over the destinies of station chiefs had decided to give him another chance to survive. But he would have to act quickly. It could be only a matter of seconds before the befuddled Wexler discovered how to release the safety catch on the laser pistol. Crawford launched himself forward, grabbing for the hand that held the weapon. He was outclassed from the point of view of weight but he had the twin advantages of surprise and comparative sobriety. Missing his aim, he gained a grip on Wexler's forearm, at the same time kicking out with his right foot. The big man uttered a roar of pain and staggered to one side, losing his balance. With Crawford clinging, terrierlike, the two rolled to the floor of the lounge, struggling. The next few seconds passed in a desperate blur for Crawford. He was fighting on a reflex, animal level of his nature, which he had never plumbed before. Vaguely in the background, behind the grunts and thuds of the conflict, he was aware of the counterpoint of Melanie's screams. Next he was aware of a suddenly overpowering smell of burning flesh and the body of his opponent, who happened to be on top of him at the time, went limp. Crawford struggled out from under, his vision clearing gradually. He saw a neatly cauterized hole about the size of a half-credit coin in the center of Wexler's chest. Automatically, he bent down and plucked the laser pistol out of the nerveless fingers. Something swished past him. A moment later Melanie was kneeling beside the body, wide blue eyes staring up at him accusingly. "You killed him, you murdering swine!" she screamed. "What did you want to go and do that for?" "I didn't want to. But he was trying to kill me, wasn't he?" Crawford said reasonably. "You -- who the hell are you?" she snarled, the doll-like lines of her face hardening. "I had a hundred like you, Jack, or whatever your lousy name is. But Harry was my husband !" Jack, or whatever your lousy name is... Alex Crawford was a gentle man, and if he had not been in such a state of shock the thing could surely never have happened. Shockand disillusionment as he recognized the enchanting Melanie at last for what she was. But the thing that really made him tighten his finger on the trigger was that name, Jack -- the ubiquitous John of whom she had known a hundred. T HE beam burned a precisely circular hole right through the center of her beautiful forehead. Luckily she fell forward, so he was not forced to look at the reproach of her dead face. Even so, he stood for a long time afterward, unable to move away from the two bodies, gripped in a nightmare of remorse. But even remorse faded eventually and he began to consider the future. If the maintenance crew arrived and found him here with the bodies of the two Wexlers the very least he could hope for would be a discharge. After all, a station chief who had developed the habit hardly be an asset to Trans-Universal. At worst, there was always the possibility that he would have to face a murder charge. Either way, he would be forced to leave the comfortable solitude of Poligoy and return to an Earth he hated. The alternative -- there had to be an alternative... After all, the Wexlers had never officially arrived on Poligoy. If he could get the transmat working again just long enough to send the two bodies out on an unfocused beam they would never be picked up by another receiver and would go on traveling in the form of disseminated energy particles forever, never to be reassembled. Ali evidence of the crime would thus be destroyed. The loss of the Wexlers would be recorded as a Category B malfunction and the corporation would certainly not wish to make too much of a fuss about such a disappearance. The problem was how to get the transmat working again. Surely it was impossible that a reasonably intelligent person could have worked around transmats for so long without picking up at least some knowledge of bow they operated? His training had included nothing more technical than instruction on when to press the right buttons but he had gleaned a few hints from conversations with the maintenance crew during routine servicing. For one thing, he knew that the tolerance of the cutout circuit was set purposely low, so that normally it would be tripped by the overload before a serious Scramble situation had time to develop. Now if he could find some way of overriding the cutout circuit, just for a few seconds... later the job was done to his satisfaction and the two bodies lay side by side on the transmission grid platform. Crawford took one last regretful look at Melanie, then pressed the button that sent full power surging through the transmat, which had been on standby since the overloading of the cutout. The two bodies disappeared with satisfying rapidity. His troubles were over. Now all that remained to be done was to switch the transmat back to standby and cover up the traces of his tampering. Why they made so much of the technicalities involved in servicing the transmats he could not understand. After all, if a guy with only a minimum of mechanical aptitude and some common sense could... Crawford's self-congratulatory monologue died abruptly as he turned away from the transmission platform. He realized his mistake as soon as he saw what was happening, but it was already far too late to do anything about it. Before attempting a transmission he should first have cleared the transmat of the previous, uncompleted program which had been resonating in its memory banks for over twelve hours. His failure to do so had allowed a feedback circuit to develop, with one section picking up the unfocused beam transmitted by the other. And since the safety cutout was not in operation, it was delivering... Crawford watched the receiving grid platform in horror. The pile of inert flesh was already some three meters high and the multiple ectypes of the bodies of Melanie and Wexler were still materializing two by two by two...  kidnaped and exiled -- to an orbiting satellite -- Earth's leading scientists, whose work on genetics and astrophysics threatens world puter technician -- whose wizardy has made possible revolutionary breakthroughs at U.S. Genetics Institute -- is, however, commuted through the machinations of a rebel element in the World Council of Ministers to a different kind of exile -- on an uncharted island on Earth, where he is to coordinate continued, illegal scientific research. Lou arranges to have his girl friend, Bonnie Sterne, brought to the island. She arrives but treats him coldly. body. Counting ten cells per second, to count them all would each cell are forty-six chromosomes; under the microscope they look long and threadlike and they have often been described as "strings of beads." Each "bead" is an individual gene. Altogether there are some forty thousand genes in any human cell. The zygote -- the fertilized egg cell that develops into an embryo and within nine months into a baby -- also contains about forty thousand genes. Half this number comes from each parent. Each individual gene is a complex molecular factory built of deoxyibonucleic cal characteristics of the resulting baby are determined by the genes. Eye color, tooth structure, basic metabolic rate, chemical balance, size of brain, shape of nose -- everything is controlled by the genes in the zygote. Lou's work seemed simple and straightforward to him. He was training Ramo, the computer, to look over the detailed structure of each gene in a zygote and compare it to the structure of a healthy, undamaged gene. Ramo, being a computer, knew only what his human co-workers told him. But he had two advantages that no human possessed. First, he had absolutely perfect memory. Once the "map" of a healthy gene had been stored in the microcosmic magnetic patterns of his memory bank, he would never forget it, never blur or warp it, never let any emotional conditions prevent him from seeing it exactly as it had been given to him. Second, Ramo could work at the speed of light -- he could scan dozens of genes and spot the imperfections in their molecular structure in the time it took Lou to count to ten. Two weeks had passed since Bonnie had come to the island. She was still. as cold and distant as she had been the first day. She worked for Lou and she did her job well. She had had lunch with him most days and dinner a few times in the tiny overcrowded cafeteria that Marcus had put up near the lab complex. She had even mended a hole in his pants pocket. But she still acted more like a wary employee than a friend. She seemed to like Anton Kori -- sometimes even to prefer Kori's company to Lou's. I should have never made them bring her here. She'll never forgive me for it... The phone beside Lou buzzed. He punched a button. Marcus' untanned face appeared on the main viewscreen. "You wanted me?" he asked. "Yes," Lou said. "Some of the biochemists have been asking me to help them program Ramo to handle their work. I don't mind helping them, but it's going to take time, and I thought you wanted me to plug ahead on the basic genetic mapping as fast as I can." "The biochemists?" Marcus put on a worried frown. "Why do they need special programing?" "They're working on drugs that effect the chemistry in the chromosomes." Marcus' eyes widened but he quickly regained his self-control. He said, "You're quite rightyou shouldn't be pulled off what you're doing to help with that. Let some of the other programers help them."  Lou said, "Fine." Marcus snapped, "If you're bothered again, refer those responsible to me." "Okay. Thanks." Marcus nodded and cut off the connection. Lou worked at the control desk the rest of the morning, phoned Bonnie around noon. "I'm afraid I can't go to lunch with you, Lou," she said, unsmiling. "The girls and I are eating at our desks. We've got mountains of work to do." to Ramo. By six o'clock he was bone-tired -- his back ached, his head throbbed, his eyes burned -- but on the main viewscreen Ramo was displaying a detailed molecular map of the molecular structure of a single gene. And part of the map -- the area of the gene that was flawed -- was outlined in red. Lou typed on the master input on the viewscreen. The phone signaled. Lou wiped Ramo from the screen and Anton Kori's lean angular face took form on it. Kori was grinning hugely. "Can you have dinner with me?" Kori asked. "I have a lot to talk about, a lot to show you." Lou said, "I'm kind of beat -- " "Oh?" Kori's smile faded, but only a little. "Maybe Bonnie will join me -- if you have no objection. I've got to show these pictures to someone." "Bonnie?" Lou felt his nerves flash a warning. "Urn -- look, Anton -- I'll give Bonnie a call and we'll both drop over to your place. Okay?" "Wonderful. Come to my lab. Next to the instrument repair shop.Bonnie knows where it is." I've got no right to be sore at her... Lou punched out Bonnie's extension. She was not in her room. He tried her office. Her face filled the screen and his anger melted. "Oh, hello, Lou. I was just leaving for dinner." "Kori just called. He's very excited about something, wants us to eat with him. Can you make it?" "Sure." Without a moment's hesitation. Lou asked, "Would you have been so free if I had asked you to have dinner with me? Alone?" For an instant a frightened look flickered in her green eyes. "What do you mean, Lou?" "You've been seeing a lot of Kori, haven't you?" "Lou, I'm a taxpaying citizen -- or at least I was until I got hijacked -- " "So you are sore about my having you brought here." "Of course I'm sore. Weren't you sore when they dragged you away? Do you enjoy being in exile? Is this island any better than the satellite or wherever it is that the rest of the Institute people were sent?" "You don't want to be around me, is that it?" She tried to smile. "Lou -- whatever we had going between us back at the Institute can't be the same here. It just can't." "That's the way you want it?" Her smile faded and she looked sad and lonely. "That's the way it's got to be, Lou." "Yeah." He took a deep breath. "Well, how about dinner? I told Kori we'd both be over." "All right," she said softly. "As long as we understand each other." He nodded, his face frozen into a bitter mask. "I understand." He left his office, walked around the computer building and picked up Bonnie. They strod across the lab complex in silence. Tree branches overhead filtered an unbelievable sunset sky of pink, saffron and soft violet. Between the boles of the trees the sun showed huge and distended as it touched the watery horizon. say to each other, Anton Kori more than filled their silence. The moment they stepped through the door into his cluttered laboratoryworkroom, he started chattering. "It's fantastic. You'll never believe it -- it's like something out of the cinema -- " He bustled around the big room, dragging a table loaded with complex electronic gear across the floor and positioning it near the door. "Lou, would you turn on the switch for the laser?" Kori pointed to the wall over his workbench. "No, not that one -- the next one -- on your left. Yes." Lou flicked the switch. He saw nothing in the room that looked like a laser but heard a hum of electric power. "Wait till you see this -- Bonnie, the lights, please. Behind you." Bonnie turned off the overhead lights. In the darkened room Kofi's bony face became eerily lit by the glow of the equipment. "Now -- just a minute while I use this old slide for focusing -- Lou found a rolling chair and pushed it toward Bonnie. She sat, and he stood beside her, facing the slightly luminescent viewscreen at the far end of the room. A slide came on, some sort of graph, with colored curves weaving across it. "Now the focus," Kori mumbled. The graph suddenly became three-dimensional. The curves seemed to stand in the middle of the room. Lou felt he could walk around them and look at them from the other side. "Okay, good." Kori grew so excited that his English took on a decided Slavic edge. "Now we see what no man has ever seen before -- except me." The room went totally dark for an instant -- then it was filled with stars. Lou heard Bonnie gasp. He felt as if he were drifting in space looking at stars as far as the eye could reach -- white, yellow, orange, red, blue -- unblinking points of fire in the black depths of space. In the distance the nebulous haze of the Milky Way glowed softly. "Wide-angle view, looking aft," Kori explained matter-of-factly. "That bright yellow star in the center is -- the sun." "These are the tapes from the Starfarer?" Lou asked. "They are. It took the ship more than thirty years to reach the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. And it took more than four years just for the laser beam to carry this information back to us." A moment of darkness and then another picture of stars. "Wide view forward," Kori said. A bright yellow star still occupied the center of the field of view. Kori flicked through several more holograms. The yellow star grew brighter, closer. Presently it separated into two stars. "Alpha Centauri," Kori said in an awed voice, as if anything louder might shatter the pictures. "Proxima is so distant and faint from its two big brothers that I haven't yet been able to pinpoint it. It's out among those background stars someplace. We need an astronomer here." Lou shared Kori's awe. "Alpha Centauri," he echoed. "You were right, Anton," said Bonnie. "This is fantastic -- and beautiful." "Wait, "Kori answered. "You haven't yet seen the best." He flicked through another dozen holograms. The double star grew larger. One of the stars was smaller and redder than the big yellow sun. "What are those two flecks near the yellow star?" Lou asked. Kori laughed excitedly. "Flecks? Flecks indeed! Those are planets. Two planets orbiting around Alpha Centauri -- " Lou had no words. He simply stared at the screen as Kori flicked on several more holograms, closer and closer, of the two worlds. On the very last slide only one planet was in view. Its yellowish green was streaked with white clouds. "I haven't had a chance to analyze the spectroscopic data," Kori said, "but those clouds look like water vapor to me. It's a bigger planet than Earth, probably a heavier gravity. But if there's water -- there could be life!" T HE hour was late when Bonnie and Lou walked with Kori back to the dormitory. Kori stopped in the middle of the road at a spot where the trees didn't overhang. He threw back his head. "Look at them," he said. "MilSome of them must be just like this Earth -- and waiting for us. And we can. We can reach them and we will -- " He laughed loudly, swung his long arms up toward the sky and shattered the night with a shrill whistle. "Hey, easy -- " Kori yelled happily, "I'm drunk with joy and knowledge and power. We can reach out to new Earths. That's enough to make any man drunk." Lou shook his head in the moonless dark. "Maybe we'll need new Earths. We've certainly fouled up this one." Kori laughed. He was in no mood for seriousness. "Wait until the people of the world see these pictures. Wait until they realize the meaning -- " "I thought the government wasn't going to let the news out," Bonnie said. "Marcus and Bernard will get the pictures out to the newsmen somehow. I'll bet." Her voice came quiet but firm. "Will they? Do you really think that they intend to let the world know about this? Or about the genetic engineering planned here?" Lou stopped and looked at her. In the darkness he couldn't see the expression on her face. "What are you saying?" For a moment Bonnie didn't reply. Then: "I'm not sure -- and I could be wrong. I've just got a -- well, a feeling, sort of -- " "Go on -- most hunches have a reason." "Well -- why do they have Anton working on nuclear explosives? What guarantees do we have that our work will be made public? Why are the biochemists working on cerebrocortical suppressors?" "Suppressors!" "Uh-huh. I just found out this afternoon," Bonnie said. "That's what they need the computer time for -- to select the chemical suppressor that does the best job of degrading cortical activity -- permanently." "Destroy the. subject's intelligence?" "Yes. And I think they're planning to use Big George as a guinea Pig-" Lou felt a bomb go off in his guts. "No, they wouldn't -- if this is true -- " "If it is -- we've been tricked into working for a group of people who're planning to overthrow the government and turn half the world's people into mindless zombies." The long silence was broken only by the night sounds of insects from the trees and brush and the distant sigh of the surf. Finally Kori's voice came ruefully: "Well, at least I don't feel drunk any more." convince himself that Bonnie was right. He used Ramo as his source of information and his teacher. He didn't know very much about the work the biochemists were doing. So he followed their progress by checking Ramo's programs and memory bank every evening, after his own work was finished. Within his vast memory Ramo stored most of the world's knowledge of biochemistry. So the computer became Lou's teacher, and explained patiently and with machine-like thoroughness exactly what the island's biochemists were trying to do. By the end of the week Lou knew enough. He sat on the warm beach sand, Bonnie on one side of him and Kori on the other. About two dozen people, most of them men and women from the technical staff, were on the beach or swimming in the gentle surf that rolled in from the reef. Far off on the horizon, huge towering cumulus clouds paraded like happy children across the sky. The three of them sat a little bit away from the rest of the bathers. Bonnie was still wet from a short swim. Her skin was glistening with droplets of water, and prickled from chill. Or was it fear, in this warm afternoon? Lou noted with a kind of abstract appreciation that plenty of her skin was to be seen. She wore the briefest of swimsuits. He kept his face serious and his voice low. "You were right, Bonnie," he said. "The biochemists are working on suppressors. They've already produced test samples of a drug and have injected it into mice. Ramo showed me the test results. Six mice starved to death in mazes because they couldn't find their way to the food at the end of the maze. Before they had been injected, the same mice had made it through the same mazes in less than a minute." Bonnie shivered. Lou went on grimly: "And today they asked Ramo for the complete cortical layout on Big George. There's no doubt about it -- they're going to try the drug on him." "And then on a human being?" Lou glanced up at her face. He nodded. "Yeah, you're right. That would be the next step." "What do we do?" Kori wondered aloud. Lou shrugged. "There are only two things I can think of. First, we can stop the work we're doing -- just refuse to do any more. That would slow 'em down some." "But it wouldn't stop this suppressor business at all," Bonnie pointed out. "And they already have enough nuke bombs to destroy Messina -- if they want to," Kori said. Lou nodded and traced a square in the sand with his finger. "Okay -- the only other thing we cap do is wipe out Ramo." "Blow up the computer?" Kori asked. "No -- I can just erase all his programs and memory banks. Take a little time and some tinkering -- but I could do it." "It would take more than a little time," Bonnie said. "Ramo's banks -- " "I know a few tricks I haven't shown you." Lou grinned. "I could wipe Ramo clean in a night." "Really? That would stop everything they're doing," Kori said. "They'd still have the bombs." Shrugging, Kori said, "Yes, but as I told you, the bombs are small. Toys, really. Without the biological weapons they're trying to develop, the bombs by themselves wouldn't accomplish much." Bonnie shook her head. "You're forgetting something else that they'd still have." "What?" "Us...or really you, Lou. If Ramo is wiped clean, don't you think Marcus is smart enough to figure out who did it?" "Okay," Lou said evenly. "So he'll know I did it. What good does that do him? Ramo will still be blanked out. Marcus will be sttopped dead." "And so will you be," Bonnie said. "He'll kill you." "That wouldn't do him any good." "It wouldn't do you any good, either," said Kori. "Don't you see?" Bonnie said. admit. But I think he would do it. Doesn't that stop you from erasing Ramo?" "It does take a lot of the fun out of the idea." Kori said, "Wail -- we've left something out of the equation. We're all assuming that we must stay on this island." "You know a way off?" Lou asked. "Well, there are boats every few days -- " "Can the three of us take over one of the boats? Can you navigate? Do any of us even know where this island is?" Dismal silence. Then Kori brightened again. "If we can't get off the island, maybe we can signal someone to bring government troops here to rescue us." "Okay, great idea. How are you going to signal?" "Well -- there's a radio station down by the harbor." "Yeah, and three armed guards at the door all the time. And even if we could get in and operate the radio -- and make contact with somebody -- we'd be dead before any government people got to this island." Kori clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out on the sand. "Louis, My friend, I am a physicist. I have come up with a great basic idea. I admit that there are a few details to be ironed out. That's the work of engineers, not physicists." He closed his eyes. L OU was unable to sleep that night.' He lay in his narrow bed, peering into the darkness, listening to the night sounds outside. The room's only window was open thoughts kept crowding in on him. No matter how he turned or punched the pillow or forced his eyes shut or tried to relax, he still found himself awake in the rumpled bed, sticky with persperation, his eyes open and jaw clenched achingly tight with tension. Finally he admitted defeat, got up and dressed. He walked out into the darkness, down the road toward the laboratory buildings. And the computer. He turned around the corner of the first lab building and headed toward Big George's compound. A guard drowsed at the gate. The moon was riding in and out of scudding silvery clouds but trees inside the compound made everything dark. Straining his eyes, Lou made out the bulky shape of the gorilla on a pallet of wood, straw and palm fronds. He heard a snuffle and the dark shape moved sluggishly. "It's okay," Lou called softly. "It's me, Georgy." The gorilla rose, pulled himself off the pallet and shuffled to the fence. "Uncle Lou " "How are you, Georgy?" "Good. I been very good." Lou wanted to reach out and pat him but the wire fence was too fine. "I know you've been good, Georgy. Do you like it here? Has everybody been nice to you?" "I have lots of room to play and they feed me good. But nobody comes to play with me. I'm all alone." "I'm sorry. I haven't been to see you as much as I should. "But the doctor said he'd come and play with me," George whispered. "The doctor? What doctor?" "The doctor," George answered. "He was here todayor was it yesterday? Do you call it today if it was the day before tonight?" "Never mind," Lou said impatiently. "What doctor? Who was he?" "He's a new friend. He said he's going to play with me when he comes back again. And I didn't move or yell or do anything -- even when he hurt me." "What did he do to you?" The gorilla touched the back of his head with a huge clumsy hand. "He made a funny noise back here and it hurt a little. But just a little. It feels all better now." Spinal tap , Lou thought, his insides sinking. "I promised I wouldn't move even if it hurt," George said. "Georgy, listen. The doctor -- he said he'd be back. When? When's he coming back?" "Tomorrow." Tomorrow. This morning, most likely. "Okay, Georgy, you get back to sleep now. I'll come and see you tomorrow." "All right. Uncle Lou. Good night." "Good night." The gorilla shambled back toward his pallet and Lou began to know what real responsibility felt like. The only way he could save Big George would be to destroy Ramo. He almost laughed as he stood by the wire fence in the moonlight. Some family I've gota gorilla and a computer. One of them is going to die. And it's up to me to choose which one. He hesitated only for a moment before he turned and headed for the computer building. XV T HE door to the computer building was locked. Not by a voicecode lock but an old-fashioned mechanical type. A set of nine buttons had to be pushed in the right combination to open it. Lou did not know the combination. And I'll bet Marcus has the building wired with alarms. No sense getting shot if you can't do the job you set out to do... Suddenly he smiled. On the other hand -- if you're smart enough and quick enough there might be a way to get the job He walked back to the dormitory, undressed and got into bed. He set his wristwatch alarm for six, closed his eyes. He was asleep in five minutes. He had less than three hours of sleep when he stood by the fence of George's compound again. "Here's some fruit I saved from breakfast," he said to the gorilla. "Catch -- " He tossed a banana and two oranges over the fence. George backpedaled clumsily and managed to grab the banana in one huge hand. The oranges fell to the ground. He stooped to pick them up, then jammed all three into his mouth. "Thank you Uncle Lou," Big George said juicily. Lou laughed. "You're welcome, Georgy." A guard was walking past the lab buildings. He stopped at each door to touch out a combination on the lock. Lou talked with the gorilla for a few minutes longer, then strode briskly to the computer building. The guard was out of sight. The rest of the technical staff was probably just getting up, Lou thought as he glanced at the control panel clock. Sliding into the seat, he immediately started typing out instructions for Ramo. By mid-morning he found out his scheme was working. Despite the computer room's nearly arctic airconditioning he was sweating. The phone buzzed. The round oriental face of a biochemist appeared on the screen. He looked unhappy. "We seem to have a problem this morning," he said without preamble. "Really?" "Yes. We went to run a routine check of yesterday's work and found that the data we recorded yesterday is missing from the computer's memory bank." "Missing?" Lou shook his head. "Impossible. You're probably just searching the wrong bank." They talked it over for nearly a half-hour. The results of yesterday's spinal tap on the gorilla, the cortical map, even some of the chemical formulas that had been stored in the computer weeks earlier -- all were gone from Ramo's memory banks. "I'll do a complete check to find the missing data," Lou said, "but it sounds to me like some of your people have goofed up. Running this computer isn't as simple as operating a typewriter, you know. You should have let me record your data -- or at least you ought to have a trained computer programer or technician doing the job." "They are trained technicians," the biochemist snapped. Lou shrugged. "Then they haven't been trained well enough. Okay, I'll look for the data for you. stored properly in the first place." The biochemist was starting to look furious. "Two months of work lost!" He lapsed into Chinese. It took them a week to figure out what was going on. Lou had known from the start that the discovery was inevitable, that he was racing against time. He would spend his days at his own work. At the end of the day he would have Ramo review the biochemists' work for him. It took him only a few minutes to erase some of the material from Ramo's memory banks. Lou never washed out all of it -- simply enough key data to void the rest. The biochemists became a very unhappy group of people. Their chief went around screaming and purple-faced. The computer technicians who worked for them looked scared. By the end of the week Lou was spending most of his day with the technicians, trying to find out why they were unable to do their jobs properly. At dinner with Bonnie and Kori in the noisy cafeteria Lou said to Kori, "You've got to figure out some way to get us off this island. It's only a matter of time until the biochemists figure out what's wrong with their computer programs, and then..." "I know," Kori answered, hunching over the table and speaking as low as possible, "I've been trying to work out a star fix to find out where we are. But I'm afraid the sextant I've built isn't very accurate." "But how do we get off the island?" Bonnie asked. Kori shrugged. "Maybe we could build a raft -- " "Or a flying carpet," Lou said acidly. That ended the discussion. T HE next day an armed guard showed up at the computer control room. He made directly for Lou. "What is it?" Lou asked, tensing. The guard said, a Malay lilt to his voice, "Mr. Marcus wishes to see you." "I'm busy at the moment. Tell him-' "Now," the guard said. He hitched a thumb on the holster at his hip. Lou nodded. "Okay, just let me -- " "Do not touch the computer controls," the guard said softly, even gently. But his hand curled around the butt of his gun. Lou found that his own hands were suddenly trembling and well away from the controls, "Okay, okay, but the computer's in the middle of a run." "Some other technicians are being brought in to take care of it. You will come with me, please." A car was waiting outside. Another guard sat at the wheel. Lou climbed in and the first guard sat beside him. In a few minutes Lou was ushered into Marcus' airconditioned study, a small room, lined with books. A single large window overlooked the sea. Marcus was sitting at a desk in front of the window. A few straight-backed chairs were in the room, and a comfortable-looking sofa. Marcus was talking into the viewphone on his desk. Without looking up he gestured Lou to a chair next to the desk. His face wore its usual calm expression. Marcus said quietly to the phonescreen, "We've tracked down the source of the trouble and we'll get things back under control and on schedule." Lou heard a voice reply, "Very well. See that you do. The timing is very critical." "I understand. Goodbye." "Goodbye." Marcus disconnected, stared into the screen for some moments. then turned slowly to face Lou. "You surprise me," he said. "I do?" Marcus almost smiled. "Let's not play games, Christopher. You've been sabotaging our computer programs, slowing down our biochemistry project. Why?" "How did you settle on me as the villain?" "You've been fairly obvious -- we should have caught on sooner." Marcus leaned forward in his chair. "Now listen, Christopher. You're not in the States any more. You're playing in a different league -- with different rules. I don't have to prove you've been screwing up the computer. I think you have, and I'm going ahead on that assumption. I called you here to find out why you're doing it and to tell you what's going to happen if you don't stop." Lou felt anger rising up inside him. "Just like that, huh? Somebody's messing up the computer and I get blamed. What happens now? Firing squad?" "Nothing so dramatic," Marcus answered. In a voice that sounded genuinely concerned, he said, "You know, I really think you're more worried about that gorilla than about your own skin." "Yeah. I'm a gorilla freak." Shaking his head like a patient father, Marcus said, "All right, play it tough if you want to. But listen to this and get it straight. We're going to take over the world government. Never mind who 'we' consists of. Some people in our group are very important. We're playing for the highest stakes there are and we don't intend to let you or anyone else stand in our way." "Is that why you've got Kori making bombs?" "Of course. Did you ever hear of a government that allowed itself to be pushed out of power without a fight? We're developing three weapons here: nuclear bombs, the cortical suppressor and genetic engineering." Lou said, "So you can blow up your enemies, turn the survivors into morons, and then after you've taken over -- control everyone's children." "That's pretty close." "It doesn't sound like a very happy world that you're aiming to set up." "No? And what kind of world do we have now? The government's letting the cities fester more and more. More and more barbarians are being born and are pushing out into the civilized parts of the world. How long do you think it'll be before a plague of rats sweeps across the whole world? Two-legged rats, from New York and Rio and Tokyo and Calcutta and Rome -- every big city in the world?" "And your answer is to bomb them out or turn them into zombies." "If we have to," Marcus said in the tone I: ; would use to offer a drink. "The bombs are really for fighting the government troops. Once we've taken over, we'll have other means of handling the barbarians. Lou shook his head. "I wish I could get through to you," Marcus insisted. "What's this government done for you? Put you in exileyou and all your friends. When we take over, you can go back to living normal, useful lives." "Useful to whom?" Marcus said with great earnestness, "Listen to reason, will you? You and the other scientists will be among the top people in the new society. Your children will get the best genetic care that you yourselves can provide." "Until somebody decides he doesn't like what we're doing, or what we're thinking," Lou answered. "This government's slapped us in exile. Your friends might not be as lenient." chair. "I don't have the time to argue with you. We're going ahead, and there's nothing you can do to stop us. If you don't stop tinkering with our biochemistry project you're going to get hurt." "Let's discuss that," Lou suggested. "You need me to make the genetic engineering a success, right? And that's where the real jackpot is. You might be able to surprise the government and knock it off -- you might be able to take over -- but without genetic engineering, you'll never be able to control Earth. The tip-off on how your minds work is the biochemistry project. You're not planning on building a better world with better people on it. You're planning to exploit and destroy." Marcus shook his head. "You make us sound -- " "Rotten. Filthy and rotten. And that's what you are. But you need me. I'm the key man -- you told me so yourself." "There are others -- " Lou shook his head. "You know better. Nobody -- not even any one the exiled scientists -- knows the complete picture as I do. And if you found someone who could be trained you'd lose at least a year, maybe two, bringing him to where I am now. I understand the whole genetic engineering problem, and there's plenty of it tucked away in my head, not in any computer banks or notebooks. Lose me and you lose that -- permanently" Marcus sighed wearily. He said, "You still don't realize what you're up against, do you? Why do you think we went to the trouble of finding that girl friend of yours and bringing her here? We don't have to threaten you. If you're worried about what we're going to do to your precious gorilla, try to imagine what could happen to the girl. Things could get very unpleasant for her. Very unpleasant." Lou gripped the arms of his chair hard enough to make his hands hurt... He was fighting and instinct to spring at Marcus. "Just try to control yourself and do as you're told," Marcus said softly. "Behave -- and everything will be fine for you. But keep working against me and the girl will suffer for it." "If you hurt her I'll kill you." Lou was surprised to hear the flat metallic ring in his own voice. Marcus did not change his expression. "Christopher, we shouldn't be threatening each other. Just do your work and neither you nor anyone else will get hurt. That's all we're asking from you. As for the gorilla -- it will probably be happier at its natural intelligence level than it is now." Lou stood up and started for the door. "Wait a minute," Marcus called. "You haven't said -- " Lou turned. "You've got all the answers you need. There's no way for me to stop you." Trembling with rage, he left the office, walked past the guard lounging outside the door, went out. He ignored the car still parked in front with its driver and walked back toward the dormitory. As he passed the lab complex, Kori came running up to him. "Lou, I've been looking for you everywhere -- " Lou said nothing. "I've figured it out," Kori whispered excitedly. "How to get the government troops here. And quickly -- inside a few days." Lou shook his head. "It'll be too late." stopped him. "I'm serious. We can do it." Lou said, "In a few days they'll have ruined Big George, maybe killed him. And if I try to stop them they'll take it out on Bonnie." "What?" "That's what Marcus just told me. If he doesn't like the way I behave -- Bonnie'll suffer for it." "But he can't -- " "Yes he can. And he will. I bet he'd even enjoy it." Kori's face turned as red as the setting sun. "That pudding-faced son -- I'll -- " Lou took Kori's arm. "Hold on. There's nothing we can do about it." He felt Kori's surge of anger fade away, saw his face return to normal, except for a sullen smoldering in his eyes. "What do we do now?" Kori asked. "I don't know," said Lou. "What was your scheme all about? How can you signal for government troops?" "Oh that -- with the navigation satellites." "Navigation satellites? How?" "They have sensors on them to detect nuclear explosions." "They what?" Kori started walking toward the dorm again. Lou trudged along. "It's a holdover from the old days, before the world government disarmed all the nations," Kori explained. "All the navigation satellites have a special array of sensors to watch out for nuclear explosions. If anybody sets off a bomb on the Earth's surface, in the atmosphere -- or even in space -- the government is alerted instantly. In a few hours there's an inspection team at the site of the explosion to find out what's going on. An armed inspection team. With troops ready to follow at an instant's notice." "But nobody's set off a bomb for -- " "I know. But the government still has the teams -- they even hold practice drills. I was an advisor to a group of new recruits two years ago." Lou swore. "Military tradition. Idiocy dies hard." "Don't complain," Kori said. "Now then, the bombs I've been making are stored in caves at the far end of the island. If one of them went off and a satellite spotted the blast -- we would have an inspection team here in a matter of hours." "Can you set them off?" "Them?" Kori laughed. "One will be enough. If they all go off they'll wipe out this entire island. Do you know how much destructive force even a single kiloton contains?" At the dormitory Lou sent Kori to bring Bonnie out. He didn't want to explain matters to her inside any building. All structures here might be bugged. When Bonnie came he briefed her quickly on his session with Marcus. Even outdoors he had the feeling that they were watched. In Marcus' place, he himself would have guards out watching for trouble. A nd we're going to make enough trouble to slide this island into the sea. They ate a quick, silent dinner in the cafeteria and then walked out to the beach. Walking ankle-deep through the warm-lapping waves, with the surf booming on the reef a kilometer out, they talked over their plans as the dying red sun stretched their shadows fantastically before them. "I'll need at least two days to round up the proper equipment," Kori was saying. "Make it one day," Lou answered over the roar of the surf. "Big George doesn't have two days to spare." Kori glanced at Bonnie, then looked at Lou. "We want to do this right. If we rush, something might..." "One day," Lou said flatly. Shrugging, Kori agreed. "All right. One day." "Where can we plant the bomb without setting off all the others?" Bonnie asked. "That's why I wanted the extra day," Kori said, "to find the best location. Probably the best thing to do is to bury it in the beach sand across the island from the storage caves. That ought to be safe enough." "Will it make a big enough explosion for a satellite to see if you bury it?" Lou asked. Kori laughed. "Have no fear. A few feet of sand isn't going to smother one of my toys." "Okay." "I'll need two things," Kori said, more seriously. "A car to carry equipment and a diversion to let me get into the storage cave and do what I must -- without being stopped by the guards." "What about the guards at the caves?" Lou asked. "There's usually only one. I think I can handle him easily enough." "You're sure?" Kori drew himself up to full height. He towered several inches over Lou but he still looked spindly. "My friend, I was a national fencing champion five years ago. I still keep in good shape. Besides, I'm sneaky. I'll ask the guard to help me carry some of the equipment and hit him when his hands are full and his back turned." Laughing, Bonnie said, "My hero." "Never mind," Lou said. "Heroics are exactly what we don't need. We need good, sneaky, practical action that works. I don't want to win any moral victory; we'll all end up dead that way." Kori nodded. "Okay," Lou continued, "so you need a car and a diversion. We'll figure that out -- shouldn't be. too tough a problem. But the big question is, how do we protect Bonnie?" "She's got to disappear," Kori said. "Great. How do we do it?" Silence. They walked slowly under the purpling sky. A surge of sea curled around their ankles, ebbed away. A lone gull glided low over the waves, calling sadly, as if looking for longvanished friends. Finally Bonnie said, "Big George. I could stay in his compound for a day or so. There are plenty of trees and bushes to hide in and the guards never go in there." "With the gorilla?" It was too dark to see Kori's face but his voice sounded aghast. "We're friends," Bonnie said. "We've known each other since George was born." "He wouldn't hurt her," Lou agreed. "Or anybody else, for that matter. Trouble is, he'd want you to play with him. You wouldn't be able to stay hidden. He'd give you away." "Not if I explained the game to him." Kori shook his head. "I know you think a lot of that animal, and his intelligence has been boosted. But I wouldn't plan to stay inside that fence with him for ten minutes -- let alone twelve hours or more." "Oh, you've seen too many movies," Bonnie said. "George wouldn't hurt anybody." They went on talking, planning, arguing until stars filled the night. "Look up there," Kori said. His shadowy outline pointed skyward. Looking up, Lou saw one star moving silently, purposefully through the heavens, as if it had detached itself from its normal position to carry out some mission. "Is that one of the satellites?" Bonnie's voice made a light, counterpoint against the basso background of the surf. Kori glanced at his luminescent wristwatch. "Yes. And right on schedule." "Thank God," said Lou.  OU didn't sleep much that night, and the next day at the computer building he hardly paid any attention to his work. He went through the motions but his mind was racing, thinking about all that had to be done. Toward the end of the afternoon he could no longer stay cooped up in the control room. He stepped outside and took a deep breath of warm, salt-smelling air. The quiet afternoon was shattered by the tortured scream of an animal. A scream of rage and pain and fear. "George -- " L OU ran to the gorilla's compound. He got there in time to see two of the biochemists carrying a third through the gate. Big George was nowhere in sight. A half-dozen guards were clustered around the gate and more were arriving on the run, guns drawn. "What happened?" Lou shouted. They ignored him. A pair of guards took the unconscious biochemist from his co-workers. His face was bloody and one arm was hanging at a weird angle. Lou grabbed one of the sweating scientists. "What happened? What did you do?" The little Oriental looked up at Lou with fear and anger in his eyes. In a nasal, heavily accented English he said, "Ape became frightened by injections. Anesthetic wore off. Restraints not strong enough. Ape broke loose, knocked down Dr. Kusawa, ran back into trees." "Injections?" Lou demanded. "The suppressors?" The biochemist nodded, pulled his arm out of Lou's grasp and tottered away, following the guards who were carrying his boss. Lou went to the gate. One of the guards started shaking his head and motioning Lou away. "No. Danger. Keep away." "Let me in there. He won't hurt me. He is scared and hurt." The guards were clustered around the gate, which was now firmly locked. Most of them were peering into the trees and brush. Big George was not in sight. The other guards were watching Lou. "Danger," said the one guard to Lou. "Go away." Slowly, reluctantly, Lou walked away. Outside, after dinner that night, Kori said, "Everything's suddenly different. Bonnie can't stay with George now." "Sure I can," Bonnie said. "He'll be all right by now and the guards will never dream of searching his compound. It's a better hiding place than ever." "No," said Lou. "There's no way of telling what those injections did to him. It's too risky." Bonnie insisted that George was all right. "Let's go down to his compound and talk to him." Lou nodded agreement. Kori simply looked worried. They walked down to the gorilla's compound but stayed away from the gate where the guards stood watch. They moved up onto the slope of the hill to a spot close to the trees inside the compound. "Georgy," Lou called out softly. "Georgy, it's me. Uncle Lou." A snuffling grunt. From the shadows among the trees a pair of baleful eyes suddenly gleamed. Lou felt shaken. George's eyes shone tonight like a jungle beast's. He forced his voice to stay calm. "Georgy, it's all right. It's me, Uncle Lou. And Bonnie is here too. And another friend -- " A growl. Lou turned to Kori. "May be a good idea for you to go away, Anton. George must be scared out of his wits of strangers right now." "He doesn't sound scared." "He is." Kori said stubbornly, "But I want to see the gorilla's reactions for myself. I don't want you two making any mistakes about this -- " "Shove it," Lousnapped, keeping his voice down to avoid frightening Big George. "You think you're the only one with brains? I'm not going to let Bonnie take any chances." "Stop arguing," Bonnie said. To Kori she added: "He won't come out as long as you're here." Kori left, muttering to himself. After another ten minutes of coaxing and soothing big George lumbered out of the trees and to the fence. "Georgy," Lou said, gripping the fine wire mesh of the fence. "Are you okay?" "Head -- head hurts." "It's all right, Georgy," Bonnie said. "The hurt will go away soon." "Hurts -- bad men -- hurt -- " Is it just me or does his voice sound strange ? Like it's hard for him to put words together? "Georgy, don't be afraid. It's going to be all right. The bad men have gone away. They won't come back." The gorilla merely blinked. Bonnie said softly, "Georgy, in a little while I'm going to come and stay with you. I'll bring you lots of food and some medicine to stop the hurt. "Hurt -- scared -- bad men -- " "I'll stay with you," Bonnie repeated. "And the medicine will stop the hurting. Don't be afraid." "And I'll make sure that the bad men don't ever come back," Lou said, feeling anger welling up within him. "Not ever." "Uncle Lou -- " Big George started but his voice trailed off and he never finished the thought. Lou said as gently as he could, "It's all right, Georgy. No one's ever going to hurt you again." As they walked away from the compound, Bonnie put a hand on Lou's arm. "You're shaking," she said. Nodding, Lou answered, "You know -- last night I couldn't sleep. I was scared. Still am, I guess. We could all get killed tonight. But I think what was really scaring me the most was the thought that I might have to kill somebody myself. Or at least try to. But now -- seeing what they've done to Georgy -- to a harmless animal like that -- I'm not shaking from fear. That's anger." "It's all right," Bonnie said. "Everything's going to be fine." "Do you really think you'll be okay in there with George?" "Yes, of course. I'll bring him some candy and sedatives. He'll sleep like a baby." Lou nodded. "You'll see," Bonnie said. "It's all going to go like clockwork." "Yeah." Lou glanced at his wristwatch. X minus four hours and counting... trio met at the dormitory doorway. They had spent the intervening hours checking final details, then pretending to go to their separate rooms for the night. Now they started wordlessly for the lab complex. They had found identical black stretch pullovers and slacks among the disposable clothing supplies in the dorm. There were two turbowagons on the island. One was usually parked for the night at the lab complex. The other stayed at Marcus' house. "Do you think anybody's watching us?" Bonnie asked in a whisper as they walked along the side of the road toward the lab area, sticking to the shadows of the trees and shrubs. Kori whispered back, "They've got guards posted at the lab complex, the gorilla's compound, the bomb storage caves and Marcus' house. Why should they watch us? We can't do any harm unless we get to one or more of those spots." They skirted the lighted area around the complex by detouring through the trees, making a wide circle and doubling back to the far side of Big George's compound. Kori stayed back. Lou and Bonnie walked up to the fence and softly called the gorilla. Big George lumbered up to the fence. "Hello Georgy," said Lou. "How do you feel?" "Head -- hurts -- " "I've brought some medicine to make it feel all better," Bonnie said. "And some candy for you." They talked for a few moments more with the gorilla. Then Lou boosted Bonnie to the top of the wire fence. George reached up and grasped her around the waist, his huge hands circling her completely. He put her down inside the fence as gently as a ballet dancer handles his ballerina. Lou watched them, his sides suddenly knotting as he realized how easily Big George could kill Bonnie. But she reached up and patted his massive head. As they turned and went toward the trees together Bonnie reached into the bag at her waist for some candy. Lou checked his watch. Eleventhirty. He hurried back to Kori. Next step: get Kori his car. He met Kori, assured him that Bonnie was safe. They started back to the lab buildings. A lone guard patrolled slowly between the buildings. He looked bored and sleepy. But on his hip was a big pistol. Kori looked at Lou and nodded. He stepped out of the shadows and walked straight to the guard. "Say there," he called out, "can you help me? I'm trying to get into my lab here -- there's some work I have to do -- " The guard was instantly alert. "All buildings locked. No one can enter until morning." "Yes, I know but -- " Lou ducked around the back of the building, circled to come up behind the guard. Kori kept talking intently and the guard was resting his right hand lightly on the butt of the pistol. They were standing about ten meters from the corner of the building where Lou crouched. Ten meters. Quickly and quietly Lou slipped off his sandals. His bare feet on the gravel sounded deafening. The guard started to turn. Lou covered the last few meters with a flying leap and pinned the guard's arms to his sides while Kori struck him across the windpipe. He gagged and went down, thrashing, with Lou on top of him. Kori calmly leaned over, pushed Lou's face out of the way and chopped hard at the back of the guard's neck. He went limp. Lou rose to his feet, sweaty, panting. "Is he dead?" "I doubt it," Kori said. He went to the lab door and punched the buttons of the combination lock. The door opened and the lights went on automatically. "See?" said Kori smiling. "No alarms. I rigged them this afternoon -- at the same time I changed the lock's combination. There's some benefit to being a physicist after all." L OU dragged the guard inside, stuffed him into a cabinet, then locked it. Meanwhile Kori filled a tool kit with the equipment he wanted. They left the lab, relocked the door and walked to the car. "Are you sure you can handle everything by yourself?" Lou asked as Kori slid the tool kit onto the back seat. "If you can keep them busy at the other end of the island," Kori said. He pulled the guard's pistol out of his belt. "Here. I'll get another one from the guard at the storage caves. Do you know how to use it?" "I think so." "It's simple. Just release this catch here and it's ready to fire. Pull the trigger and it goes off. It should have at least a couple dozen charges in it. Laser pulse does as much damage as an explosive bullet -- like hitting something with an ultrasonic hammer." Lou nodded and iook the gun. It felt heavy in his hand. "Very good," Kori said. "I'll wait here until you start making noise down by the harbor." "Right." Lou tucked the gun into his waistband, saw Kori extend his hand. He took it and said, "Good luck." Kori grinned. "See you tomorrow." "Yeah." Lou hurried through the starlit night down toward the harbor. The road passed Marcus' house, where the only other car on the island was parked. Lou looked around, saw no one, slid in behind the wheel and released the brake. The car started to roll down the slight incline. He heard running footsteps behind him and a man's voice: "Wei! Li tsai tsosheng mo?" Lou let the car glide to a stop, slid out and crouched down behind the car. A light came on at the front of the house. Two guards were standing in front of the place, staring at the car. Lou pulled out the gun and released the safety. The guards seemed unaware of him. They walked slowly toward the car. Lou stood straight up and fired over the car. Hundreds of joules of energy were suddenly changed to invisible pulses of infrared laser light. The first guard was bowled over backward, as if hit in the chest by a giant's fist. The second spun and sprawled on his face. Neither moved once they hit the ground. His hands shaking, Lou again set the safety and tucked the gun into his waistband. Then he forced himself to go over to the bodies and take their guns. The men were still breathing. He felt a little better as he went back to the car and tossed their guns to the front seat. He got in behind the wheel again, turned on the car's headlights. A road ran down toward the harbor. It was time for Kori's diversion. With a deep breath, Lou turned the starter key. The turbine whined to life. Lou pressed the throttle pedal firmly down to the floor. The engine coughed, then roared. Lights went on inside the house. He raced the engine once again, then put the car in gear and roared down the road. The shrubs and trees by the roadside blurred by, the wind tore at his face as he plunged down the twisting road toward the harbor. Lights were going on down there, too, where the guards' living quarters were. He came screeching out on the flat, tore into the harbor area and pulled the car to a screaming stop at the foot of the lone dock. A small boat was tied up at the end of it. The game was going to be to make it look as if he wanted to get off the island on that boat. Men were piling out of several buildings in the darkness, shouting in languages Lou didn't understand. He went to the back of the car, lifted the engine hood and groped for the fuel feed line. He ripped it out and felt a spurt of fuel slick his fingers. Then he went back to the front seat, grabbed the two extra guns and fired several shots into the engine compartment, backpedaling onto the dock as he did so. The third shot did it; the car erupted into flames. L OU raced down the dock, the burning car between him and anyone who wanted to come and get him. A few crates were piled on one side of the wooden dock and he ducked behind them. In front of him was the flaming turbowagon; through blurring heat waves he could see men running around the dockside area, some brandishing guns. Behind him were open water and the small boat tied up at the end of the dock. But somebody had already thought about the boat. He heard a crunching sound, the crash of breaking glass. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a chunk of the boat's gunwale break into splinters and vapor. He crouched behind the packing crates. Long minutes ticked by. The fire in the car died down, the boat slid over on its side, gurgling obscenely. The shore had quieted down. Lou found it harder to see now but there must have been dozens of height of the blaze. Lou knew he was trapped and that he was going to die. He realized that he had picked up a splinter in his left foot and it hurt. He wondered how Kori was doing. Diversion -- Kori needs a diversion here... Squinting out into the darkness, Lou could barely make out a row of what looked like fuel drums lined up neatly on the shore near the foot of the dock. A dozen drums. Maybe fifty meters away. An easy target. It took him five shots before one of the drums burst into flame. In an instant they all went up. The shouting and running began all over again. Nobody was shooting at him, either. They were all running either toward the fire or away from it. Lou watched the guards. They were good, no question of it. After the first momentary shock and surprise, they fought the raging fire with hand extinguishers, blankets, anything they could find. Finally somebody trundled up with a portable foam generator and they started smothering the blaze with billowing white foam. But this job took time and manpower. The fire was smoldering and smoking when Lou heard: "Christopher! I know you're out there on the dock. Give yourself up -- you can't get away." Lou grinned. Marcus sounded neither angry nor frightened. Not even very upset. That meant that he didn't realize what Kori was up to -- or that Bonnie was hidden. Or he's got Kori and Bonnie and the whole game's lost... Marcus called: "Christopher, I don't want to have you killed. You can't get away. We know you're behind those packing crates. We -- " Suddenly the voice stopped. Lou risked a look. Marcus was listening to a guard who was gesturing and pointing up the road, toward the other end of the island. "So the three of you are in on this together." Marcus' voice was a little edgier now. "All right, we'll just find the other two and bring them out here. You can watch what happens to them." "Marcus," Lou called out. Everyone at dockside froze. It was nearly dawn -- clammy gray light made the shore visible. "Marcus, did you ever stop to think of what a good target you make?" Marcus jerked a step backward. "No, don't move," Lou called. "Don't any of you move. If anybody twitches, you'll get it, Marcus. I mean it." Marcus stood frozen at dockside. He was out in the open, the nearest guard a meter or so away, the nearest cover the burned-out hulk of the car, at least ten meters away. Lou prayed that none of them knew how many shots it would take him to hit anything at this distance. "Christopher, you can't get away with this." Lou grinned. "Can't I?" As if in answer the packing crate in front of him exploded in a deafening blast and a shower of splinters. Lou felt himself soaring, slow-motion, tumbling off the dock. The shore careened wildly and the water rushed up toward him. As he hit the water and lost consciousness his last thought was that some rifleman had missed his head by just about a centimeter. been pleasanter to stay asleep, unconscious, oblivious to everything. He hurt everywhere as if knives were being twisted under his skin. His eyes were gummy when he tried to open them. Everything was blurred, out of focus. A gray expanse of ceiling hung over him. And faces. He tried to raise his head but somebody pushed him back onto the pillow. "He's conscious," said a voice. Marcus' face slid into view. Still calm. But was that perspiration beading his brow? "That was a foolish bit of nonsense, " M arcus said without rancor. "What have you done with the girl? And where's Dr. Kori?" Lou found the strength to shake his head. "It's a small island, Christopher. We'll find them sooner or later." "Not before -- " he croaked. "Before what?" Marcus asked. "Nothing." Marcus leaned closer. "We can find out. You can't keep any secrets from us." "Go ahead and torture me." "Don't be an ass," Marcus said. "There are drugs that will make you tell us anything we have to know." "No -- " Somewhere beyond Lou's vision a door opened and footsteps came quickly toward his bed. A voice muttered something, too low for Lou to hear. "What?" Marcus snapped. "Why wasn't I told sooner? When did -- " Marcus' face slid into view again. It was red now. With anger? Or fear? Lou smiled. "Where's Dr. Kori? What's he doing with a bomb?" "Planting it in your lunch." Lou saw Marcus' hand blur toward him but he could not move out of the way. It stung and snapped his head to one side. He tasted blood. "Get him talking. And quickly," Marcus ordered. Someone grabbed at his arm. It flamed agony. Lou saw it was red and sore with thousands of splinters. An expressionless Chinese doctor took his arm from the guard, held it gently, swabbed a relatively undamaged spot on the underside of the arm, then pressed a pneumatic syringe into the area. He put Lou's arm back down on the bed carefully, looked at his wristwatch. "The reaction should take a few minutes," the doctor told Marcus. Marcus paced the room nervously. The doctor stood beside the bed, patiently watching Lou. What time was it? How much more time did Kori need? Somebody giggled. Lou was startled to realize that the sound came from himself. The doctor turned toward Marcus. "He should be ready now." Marcus came to the bed and leaned over Lou. "All right, Christopher. Where is Dr. Kori and what's he doing with the bomb he stole?" "Playing in the sand,," Lou said, laughing. It was funny, everything was so funny. Marcus' face, the thought of Kori's digging sand castles with a nuclear bomb tucked under his arm. The whole deal was uproarious. "Listen to me," Marcus said, his face red and sweaty. "Quickly, before -- " The flash of light was bright enough to feel on your skin. For an instant everything stopped, etched in the pitiless white light. No sound, no voices, no movement. Then the bed lifted. The window blew in, showering glass. A woman screamed and a roar of ten thousand demons overpowered every other sensation. Somebody fell across Lou's bed. The roar died away, leaving his ears aching. People started to move again through a dusty plaster haze, crunching glass underfoot. Marcus staggered up from the bed. Lou heard somebody say in an awed voice, "Look at that -- a real mushroom cloud, just like in the history books." Again Lou heard his own laughter. "You've lost, Marcus. You might as well admit it. There'll be a government inspection team here in a matter of hours. Followed by troops, if you want to fight. It's all over. You've lost." "I can still kill you -- and the girl -- " Lou was laughing uncontrollably now. The drug, he knew in the back of his mind. But there was nothing he could do to stop himself. "Sure, kill me. Kill everybody. That's going to help you a lot. An enormous lot." He laughed until he passed out again. scious. How did he know? Or am  dead? He floated in darkness, without pain, without anxiety. The darkness was warm. After a long while it began to turn gray. The gray brightened slowly. Bonnie's face appeared in it. Tears glinted her eyes, on her cheeks. Oh Lou... Had she spoken? He wanted to say something, to touch her, to make her stop crying. But he could not move. Did he still have a body. Her face faded, vanished. He began to hear voices. Strange faces peered at him. Blackness closed in again. Abruptly he opened his eyes and everything was in sharp focus. He was lying in a hospital bed. The walls of the room were pastel blue. The ceiling was clean white. Viewscreens and camera eyes ogled him from the ceiling. He found that he could turn his head. The movement hurt but was manageable. There was a window at his left. Sunshine was pouring in. A night table stood next to his bed. He tried sitting up. The bed followed his motion with an almost inaudible hum from an electric motor. Leaning back in a half-sitting position, he suddenly felt dizzy. A t least I'm not dead... His body felt stiff. Looking down, he saw that his hands and arms were wrapped in bandages. So was his chest; white plastic spray from windpipe to naval. His face felt raw, as if shaved with a dull blade. : The door suddenly opened and a nurse appeared. "Good morning," she said with professional cheeriness. "Though it's later, really." "Hello." Lou's voice was hoarse. His throat felt rough. The nurse must have been pushing forty, Lou thought. She still looked pretty good, though. "How do you feel?" she asked. He considered the question for a moment. "Hungry." She smiled. "Good. That's one condition that the automatic monitors still can't record." She was gone before Lou could say anything or ask any questions. Within minutes a food tray slid out of the wall and swung over to the bed. Lou had barely finished eating when a knock came on the door and it opened wide enough for Kori to stick in his head. "Hi. They told me you were finally awake." L OU'S voice felt and sounded better. "Come on in. How are you? Where are we? What happened? Where's Bonnie?" Kori grinned and pulled up a chair. He sat down. "Bonnie's fine. She's here in the hospital, too, getting treated for radiation dosage. There was a considerable amount of fallout from my little toy, you know. I stayed inside a cave until the government troops arrived -- but even I got a touch of it." "Marcus and the others? What happened to them?" "They gave up without much fight," Kori said. "A government inspection team 'coptered to the island in four hours and eleven minutes after the blast. In another two hours a little army of government troops covered every square centimenter of the island." "And what happened to me?" Lou asked. "I remember trying to hold them down at the dock. Then somebody shot at me and I fell into the water. Then -- " Kori was trying not to grin. "What's so funny?" "Well, forgive me, but you are. Do you know how they found you?" Lou shook his head. "You were lying flat on your back in one of the bedrooms of Marcus' house. Stark naked. Sixty and body and arms and legs. And you were laughing your head off." "Very funny," Lou said. "Marcus had me shot full of happy-juice, so I'd tell him where you were. So he could find you and kill you." "I know" Kori said. "Is Bonnie going to be all right?" Lou asked. "Oh yes, certainly. She'll be visiting you herself in a day or so." "And Marcus and his crew?" Kori shrugged. "In jail, I suppose. The troops took them away." His face sobered. "One bad thing, Lou. Big George is dead." "What?" "Somebody shot him. We don't know who did it. It might have been Marcus' guards or the government troops. Bonnie was right there and she couldn't tell who fired the shot." "Killed him? But why?" Shaking his head, Kori answered, "We'll never know. There was a little fighting when the troops landed. Maybe it was just a stray shot. Or perhaps someone got frightened at the sight of the gorilla. At least he didn't suffer at all. One shot -- he died instantly." For a long moment neither of them said anything. Then Lou asked, "Where are we, anyway?" Kori's face didn't cheer up at all. "Back where we started. In Messina. It looks to me like we're going to be shipped up to the satellite as soon as you and Bonnie are well enough to travel. To begin our exile." T HE doctors made Lou stay in bed for a week. He saw Bonnie and Kori almost daily. But mostly he had time to think. So much happened in so short a time. Now he could think about it, look back on it and try to fit all the fragments together, to form a coherent picture of what had suddenly happened to him and his life. We didn't do right by you, Georgy... The future seemed bleak, though Kori was more optimistic. "After all we've done for the government," Kori said one afternoon, at Lou's bedside, "risking our lives to stop Bernard's attempt at a coup -- They won't exile us. They'll give us medals. You should get an award anyway -- you've set a new international record for splinters." Lou grinned but remained pessimistic. Too, he sensed something new and different about Bonnie. She was uptight, holding back something. One afternoon he asked her, "What's bothering you?" "Does it show?" He nodded. "I've got to make a decision," Bonnie said. Her green eyes looked troubled, sad. "About Kori and me?" "In a way. You see, Lou, I'm not officially on the list of exiled persons. I can go back to Albuquerque if I want to. Or I can go with the rest of you to the satellite." "And stay for the rest of your life." "Yes." He took a deep breath. She was staring at him, trying to read his face, looking for something and evidently not finding it. He said, "You might never be allowed to make the decision. You're in pretty deep with us now. The government might decide to exile you along with Kori and me." Bonnie stopped, right there in the corridor. "They can't do that -- they wouldn't" "They might," Lou said. "And if they do, it'll be my fault." "There you are -- I've been looking all over for you two -- " Kori ran down the corridor, dodging between frowning nurses and muttering patients. Breathlessly he told Lou and Bonnie, "The General Chairman -- he's asked to see us. To talk to us. Tomorrow morning. The General Chairman!" Lou turned to Bonnie. For the first time, he felt hope. If not for himself, at least for her. been done to him and skepticism about the future Lou felt awed when the three of them were ushered into the General Chairman's office. Bonnie and Kori, he saw, were also wide-eyed and silent. The office covered the entire top floor of the tallest tower in Messina, stretching from the elevators to the sun-bright windowall where the Chairman's ornate desk stood. "Come in -- come," said the little man behind that desk, in a voice cracked with age. They walked silently across the thick carpeting, past a ten-foot globe showing the Earth in color and relief, complete with networks of tiny satellites orbiting around it. The globe hung in midair, suspended magnetically. "Forgive my not rising," the Chairman said. "I suffered a stroke recently and the doctors want me to exert myself as little as possible." His voice was soft, gentle, friendly, with an undistinguished Brazilian accent. He was small, slight, his bony face high domed and haloed with wisps of white hair. His hands were fragile. He was very old. His skin was white and powdery looking, etched with a network of fine wrinkles. "However, I did very much want to meet the three of you. Please sit, make yourselves comfortable. Would you like anything to drink? To eat?" Lou shook his head. He chose a seat between Bonnie and Kori, facing the chairman. Silence fell. Before it could become awkward the Chairman said, "I want to express my personal thanks for your courageous actions on the island. You prevented an uprising that might have taken many lives." "We did what we had to," Lou said. The Chairman nodded. "It must have been quite a temptation, though, to put in with Bernard's people and avoid going into exile." Shrugging, Lou answered, "As far as I'm concerned that island was exile. There was no difference between the way the government has treated us and the way Bernard's people were treating us -- until the end." Kori said, "I think we all felt, though, that the people running the island would be worse than the people running this government, if they got the chance." The Chairman said, with a smile, "Thank you. It's good to know that we are not completely at the bottom of the list." Kori grinned back at the old man. Lou felt irritated. "From what you've said it sounds like the exile is still in effect and that we're going to be shipped out to the satellite." The Chairman's face grew somber. "Yes, I am sorry to say. If anything, this attempt by Minister Bernard to seize power proves the wisdom of the exile. Your work on genetic engineering has a political potential that is simply too powerful not to be dangerous." "So we spend the rest of our lives in a berryllium jail?" "What else can we do?" The Chairman waved his frail hands helplessly. "We are not monsters. We have no desire to make you suffer. We will supply you with everything you desire aboard the satellite. Anything -- " "Except freedom," Lou snapped. But now there was a hint of steel behind the softness of his voice. "Yet many on Earth suffer more than you will -- and if I must choose between the welfare of thousand or so -- I will choose the you might soon be able to control human genetics has already triggered one attempt at revolution. I will not see world society destroyed." "But what about Kori? The work of the rocket scientists doesn't really threaten the world." "Perhaps not," the Chairman admitted. "I must confess that I didn't realize anyone except those working on genetic engineering had been sentenced to exile. Someone in the bureaucracy considers the starship scientists a threat to world stability. I mut find out why. If they cannot convince me that you are a threat, Dr. Kori, then you will be released from exile and freed to resume your normal life. Also any of your colleagues who have been placed in exile -- they, too. may be freed." Lou asked, "And Miss Sterne -- what about her?" Bonnie murmured, "Lou, you shouldn't -- " Lou persisted: "I want to find out about this. Miss Sterne was not sentenced to exile. She was brought to the island by Marcus who wanted to use her as a lever to keep me in line. She was the first of us to discover what was going on. Now where does she stand? Is she going to be shipped off with the rest of us" The Chairman said, "Miss Sterne is not a scientist nor an engineer. There is no reason for her to be exiled -- unless she wishes to accompany you for personal reasons." "You can really say that with a straight face?" Lou raged. "You can sit there and promise her freedom when you know you don't mean it?" "Lou, what are you saying? Bonnie reached out for his arm. The Chairman's eyes narrowed. "Explain yourself, Mr. Christopher. Why do you call me a liar?" Almost trembling, Lou said, "If you let Bonnie go, if you let Kori go, what's to stop them from telling the newsmen about this exile business? What's to stop them from telling the whole world? Will you want them to sign a pledge of silence or will you do surgery on their brains? Because we both know you can't risk having them tell the world about what you've done to the scientists..." "Why not?" the Chairman asked gently. "Because the people of the world will demand that you release us. They'll want our work to continue -- they'll want us free. You can't throw two thousand of the world's top scientists into prison and -- " The Chairman silenced Lou with an upraised hand. "My brave, impetuous young man, you are completely wrong about so many things. First, I do not lie. When I offer Miss Sterne her freedom and raise the possibility of freedom for Dr. Kori, I am not lying. Please do me the honor of granting me honest motives. Next, the people of the world already know about your exile. We have not kept it secret. There would be no way to do so, even if we desired to. You cannot whisk away so many prominent men without anyone knowing it." "They know?" "Of course. And they do not care. Do you think that the teemhandful of scientists and engineers?" The Chairman shook his head. "No, they care about food, about jobs, about living space, about recreation and procreation." "But our work -- I thought -- " Lou felt as if he were in a glider that was spinning out of control. "Ah, yes, your work," the Chairman said. "I admit that if you were on Earth and showing the world, step by step, what could be done -- through control of genes then there would soon be an enormous demand for your efforts. Catastrophic reaction. Everyone would want his next child made perfect. I confess that our public information experts have tried to make it sound as if your work would show results in the next century rather than next week. Of course, having you all out of the way has made the job that much easier." "And -- nobody cares?" The Chairman looked truly sad. "The people are quite accustomed to talk of scientific miracles. Rarely do they see such miracles come true." "But the food they eat, weather control, medicines, space expeditions -- " "All part of the normal, everyday background," said the Chairman. "Once a miracle comes true, it quickly becomes a commonplace. And the masses seldom connect today's commonplaces with tomorrow's miracles. The promise of genetic engineering does not excite most people. Grasping politicians, yes -- hungry workers and farmers, no." "So the progress we worked for is over -- completely finished -- won't happen. No way around it?" "I am afraid so. I have lived with this problem for more than a year now, trying to find some alternative to what we're doing to you. I am sorry. Somewhere we have failed. We build gleaming technologies to turn ourselves into devils." The Chairman shook his head. "I am ashamed of myself, of the government, of the entire society. We are doing you a dreadful injustice." "But you're going ahead and doing it." "Yes." A dismal silence ensued. Finally the Chairman said, "As I told you, I will personally examine the matter of the rocket scientists. Dr. Kori, I cannot promise you your freedom -- but I do promise to try." Kori nodded and tried to look grateful but, glancing sidelong at Lou, not too happy. "And Miss Sterne," the Chairman went on, "you are free to go whenever you wish. The government will furnish you with transportation back to your home -- or anywhere else you may desire to go. You will be reimbursed for the troubles that you've been put to, of course." Bonnie said, "Sir? Would it be possible for me to go to the satellite? On a temporary basis?" Lou stared at her. , "Most of my friends are there," Bonnie said, looking straight at the Chairman and avoiding Lou's eyes. "Maybe I'd rather live there than anywhere else. But I can't tell you -- until I've tried it for a while." The Chairman folded his hands on his thin chest and gazed thoughtfully at Bonnie. "How do you think the others will feel, knowing that you can return to Earth anytime you wish to?" "I would only stay for a few final decision then." A small smile worked its way across the Chairman's wrinkled face. "I can picture Kobryn's reaction. Highly irregular. But -- very well, you may have a few weeks aboard the satellite. But no more." "Thank you, Bonnie said. She turned smiling to Lou. XX T HE satellite was literally another world. Lou had not seen it from the outside. He, Bonnie and Kori had been brought in a shuttle rocket that had no viewports in the cargopassenger module. They had shared accommodations with cylinders of gas, packing crates of foodstuffs, motors, pumps, furniture. Lou swore he had heard, through an airlock that connected to a second cargo module, the bleatings of goats or sheep. The satellite was huge and provided a strange environment. For one thing, one always walked uphill. The corridors curved uphill in both directions, because the satellite was built in a series of giant wheels, one within another. Most of the living quarters were in the largest, outermost wheel, where the spin force almost equaled the full gravity of Earth's surface. No extra physical effort was required to walk along the constantly uphill corridors because the spin-induced gravity did not fight one. But Lou immediately resented the looks of the thing, hated it. His compartment -- or room -- was a marvel of compactness, plastic trimmed with aluminum spray paint. Lou thought of it as a cell. An astronaut would feel comfortable in it; a scientist on duty in a satellite for a month would put up with it -- Lou realized he would be living in it for the rest of his life. Edmond Dantes has a bigger cell than this. Life had already settled into something of a dull routine in the plastic little world. Lou, Kori and Bonnie were met by a greeting committee when they stepped through the airlock from the shuttle rocket. They were shown to their quarters. After he had unpacked his lone travelbag, Lou received a phone call from Mrs. Kaufman, who was acting as her husband's secretary now, asking him to meet with the Director's Council right after breakfast the following "morning." Time, of course, was completely arbitrary aboard the satellite. So everyone ran on the same clock, set on Universal Time. When it was midnight in Greenwhich, England, it was midnight aboard the satellite. Lou spent his first "evening" prowling through the uphill corridors. He was unable to find Bonnie, didn't know where her quarters were or what her phone number was. Same thing for Kori. He could have asked someone -- instead he started walking along the main corridor. It was completely featureless. The bare plastic walls were broken only by bare plastic doors -- all alike, except for tiny room numbers on them. Other people were drifting through the corridors, most of them strangers. A few were men and women with whom he had worked at the Institute. They nodded recognition or mumbled a hello. If they were surprised to see him, or wondered why they hadn't seen him before this, they failed to show it in any way. All Lou could see in their faces was a vague guilt, a shame at being locked up here. The living dead... spiral steps that led to the next wheel, closer to the hub of the slowly spinning satellite. After passing several of them Lou decided to explore one. The steps ended in another curving corridor, much like the first one, but smaller, narrower, with doors on one side only. Lou had expected the gravity to be less on this second level but he could detect no difference. Which meant that the satellite must be much larger than he had envisioned it. As he walked aimlessly along the corridor he came to a section that was dimly lit. Only a few dull red light panels overhead broke the darkness. Ahead of him Lou saw a motionless figure. "Greg? Hey Greg?" Greg Belsen jerked, startled, then turned. "Greg," Lou said, smiling and reaching out to grab his friend's shoulder. "Boy am I glad to see you!" "Hello, Lou," Greg said quietly. "I heard they finally got you here." Lou's smile vanished. This was not the same Greg he had known at the Institute. The nerve had been taken out of him. Then he saw why Greg had been standing at this spot. There was a viewpoint in the wall -- a small circular port of heavily-tinted plastiglass. Outside it hung the Earth. Rich, blue, laced with dazzling white clouds, beckoningly close, alive. It was swinging around in a slow circle, the reflex of the satellite's spinning motion. "She's only a few hundred kilometers away," Greg said in a soft flat voice that Lou had never heard from him before. "Less than the distance between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. You could go to one of the airlocks and practically jump back home." Lou's blood ran cold. L OU finally met Bonnie and Kori again the following morning, after a fitful, tossing few hours of dream-filled sleep. They all arrived at the autocafeteria-restaurant at about the same time and found each other at the "menu" -- a wall panel studded with selector buttons. Only the breakfast buttons were lit. The cafeteria could seat perhaps fifty people, at long narrow tables. It was nearly empty. "No morning rush to work, at least," Kori said, trying to sound cheerful. When neither Bonnie nor Lou answered him he shrugged, turned to the selector panel. "Are you supposed to meet with Kaufman and the Council this morning?" Lou asked Bonnie. Kori answered, "Yes, at ninethirty -- " while Bonnie shook her head. Surprised, Lou asked Kori, "You are? But you're not from the Institute -- why would Kaufman want you to report to him?" "Your Dr. Kaufman has been elected head of this colony," Kori answered. "Didn't you know?" "No, I didn't. I thought Professor DeVreis-" Kori said, "DeVreis died of a heart attack on his first day here." "Oh." Curiously, Lou felt as if someone close to him had died. He had hardly known DeVreis, but for a man who had lived such a rich and useful life to be tossed into exile, to die here, in this place, seemed unfair. Kori turned back to the selector panel and tapped buttons for orange juice, eggs, muffins, sausage and coffee. Almost immediately a part of the panel slid back to reveal a steaming tray bearing his order. "Well," he said, "at least the food looks good." Turning to Bonnie, Lou asked again, "Kaufman hasn't sent word to you?" She shook her head. "No, nobody's said anything about my meeting with the Council. I guess they're going to ignore me unless I decide to stay permanently." Lou agreed. "Well, I'm supposed to see them at nine." He was a few minutes late. It took him longer than he had expected to find Dr. Kaufman's office, which was in the second wheel. It was a long and narrow room, just long enough to have a slight curve to the floor. Kaufman's desk was at one end, a long conference table at the other. All the furniture was made of plastic and light metals; it all looked temporary and cheap. Kaufman sat at the head of the table. He had lost weight, Lou saw. There were new lines in his still proudly handsome face. His thick hair seemed a shade whiter than it had been at the Institute. Greg Belsen, Kurtz, Sutherland and two strangers filled all but one of the remaining chairs. Lou took the last chair, at the end of the table. After introducing the two new faces -- representatives from labs in Europe -- Dr. Kaufman said, "We're all trying to accustom ourselves to our new environment. Our reason for meeting with you this morning, Christopher, is to ask you to select some sort of project for your working hours." "Project?" "Yes," said Dr. Kaufman. "I don't believe that we should sit around and do nothing. The government won't let us have the major types of facilities that we need for our old work." "There's no computer aboard?" Greg laughed. "No computer, Lou. No big toys for any of us. No electron microscopes, no ultracentrifuges, no microsurgery equipmentnothing but early twentieth-century stuff: optical microscopes and Bunsen burners, the kinds of things you buy kids for Christmas." Lou felt his lips press into a grim tight line. Dr. Sutherland explained, "The government doesn't want us to do anything ffiore on genetic engineering. Even here. They're afraid that if we start making progress again we'll smuggle the information back to Earth. And that's exactly what they don't want." "What are we supposed to do up here? Decay?" "Nothing of the sort," Kaufman said, waving his hand in a negative gesture. "We may not have modern equipment but we can still do good science. We'll simply have to be more ingenious, more inventive -- make do with the simple equipment that we're allowed to have." "For instance," Ron Kurtz said, leaning forward on the fragilelooking table, "I've never had the time really to write up all the work I've done over the last three-four years. I've published a few little notes in the journals -- but now I can sit back and write up everything carefully, the way it ought to be done." To be published where? Lou asked silently. In the chronicles of wasted time? "It's quite clear that we won't be able to make any further progress in genetic engineering," Kaufman said, taking charge of the discussion once again. "At least we won't be able to follow our previous research, which required large-scale equipment. So we're all trying to evolve ideas for useful work in a field that can be handled with the laboratory equipment that we now have. We'd like you to think about what you can do and how you can do it." a computer. Lou thought of Greg's elaborate lab back at the worth of automated chemical analysis equipment. No wonder he's ready to jump ship... Aloud, he said, "OkayI'll try to think up something." He started to get up from the table. "Oh, yes," Kaufman added. "You must have some very interesting tales to tell about your adventures over the past several weeks. Maybe you'd be good enough to tell the whole population, tonight, over our closed-circuit Tri-V system." That caught Lou by surprise. "Well, I don't know -- " "Of course you will," Kaufman said. The discussion was ended. Lou stood awkwardly for a moment. The others started to get up. He turned and headed for the door. As he stepped out into the corridor, Greg said from just behind him; "Don't get up tight about being a Tri-V performer, buddy." Lou turned to him. "Easy for you to say." Greg put an arm around Lou's shoulder and they started up the corridor together. "Don't worry, pal. All you'll have to do is sit down with me and one or two other guys and we'll talk. That's all. You won't even know the camera's on you. It's simple." "My big chance in show business." Greg's smile was touched with sadness. "Listen, we're all going a little crazy for something to do, something to talk about. It hasn't been easy, suddenly finding yourself cooped up in this squirrel cage." They were heading toward the dimly lit section of the corridor where the viewport was. Lou asked, "And what's your scientific research project for the next fifty years?" "You don't want to see a grown man cry, do you? Weren't those guys pathetic in there? They're talking about redoing Calvin's work on photosynthesis or writing their memoirs. Lord, they're just going to fill in some time before they curl up their toes and die." "That would be very patriotic of them," Lou said. "The government would be awfully pleased if we all just passed away without a fuss. It's exactly what they want down there." "Hmp." They were in the darkened part of the corridor now. Greg stopped in front of the viewport. There was Earth, swinging slowly, majestically, in rhythm to the satellite's spin. "That's what makes it hard," Greg said, staring. "Seeing her out there. Knowing she's only a few hundred kilometers away -- " Lou grabbed his arm. "Come on, snap out of it. Let's get some coffee. You going back in to talk with Kori? He's due to see the Council at nine-thirty." Pulling himself away from the viewport, Greg said, "I know, but I'm not going back in there. Those guys are looking more like a mortician's convention every day. I think I'm going to go crazy -- and soon, too." Lou tried to laugh at him, gave up. T HE rest of the day was empty. Lou spent it prowling through the satellite's different levels, the wheels within, wheels. He found a fairly decent library, a tiny auditorium, some small telescopes and other astronomical gear scattered here and there. An extensive hydroponic garden ran all the way around one of the smaller, innermost rings. The big event of the day was watching a shuttle rocket link up to the satellite's main airlock at the zero-gravity hub and unload fresh food and medical supplies. He called Bonnie for dinner and they went together to the restaurant. "Do you know where Kori is?" Bonnie asked as they put their trays down on a table. Lou shook his head. "And I'm not going to look for him. I'd like to have you to myself for once." She smiled at him. They ate with very little conversation. Finally, as he toyed with a gelatin dessert, Lou burst out: "God, this is awful. Depressing. It's just terribleshow in the name of sanity are we supposed to stand it? To spend the rest of our lives like this?" She reached out to touch his hand. "Lou -- people are staring at you." "Bonnie, get out of here. Tell them you want to get off on the next rocket. Don't stay. Get out while you can." "It does look bad, Lou," she said quietly, trying to tone him down. "But it'll get better. I know it will. Right now everybody's still in shock. Nobody's used to this yet. It'll get better." "No. It's going to get worse. I can feel it. Everybody's totally hopeless. There's no purpose to their lives -- and all these lives, especially these, were built on purpose." "They'll adjust," Bonnie said. "So will we." "We?" Just then Kori came striding into the restaurant and spotted them. He ambled over to their table, smiling broadly. "I've been looking everywhere for you." Lou snapped, "How can you be so cheerful?" Kori shrugged. "Well, I have good news for you. Greg Belsen said you'd be glad to hear it. But if you don't want me to tell you -- " "All right, sit down, wise guy." Despite himself Lou was grinning back at Kori. "Now tell me the good news. I could use some." "Well -- the shuttle rocket today brought my holograms. The ones from Starfarer. Dr. Kaufman said I could show them tonight and you won't have to talk about your adventures after all." "Great," Lou said. "Best news I've heard all day." "Greg said you'd be pleased." Lou walked Bonnie back to her quarters, while Kori went to find the special compartment that had been set up as a Tri-V studio. "You can't stay here," Lou told her as they walked down the corridor. "I won't let you." "But I can't go back to Earth and know that you and Kori and the others are trapped here. I just can't, Lou." "Do you think it'll make me feel any better to know you're staying here because you feel sorry for me?" They were at her door now. "I don't know," Bonnie said. "It's a lousy deal no matter how you look at it." Lou nodded agreement. "Would you like to come in and watch Kori's show?" "Sure I tried watching Tri-V shows beamed up from Earth for a while this afternoon. It kind of hurt -- comedies and love stories and newscasts -- all happening where there are cities and trees and mountains, winds and -- " "Stop it." Bonnie put her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder. "I know it hurts, Lou. I know." A loudspeaker set into the ceiling broke in: "Tonight's special showing of photographs from the Starfarer mission will begin in five minutes." Bonnie straightened, looked briefly into Lou's eyes, then turned to open her door. They sat side by side on the sofabed, the only comfortable piece of furniture in the cramped compartment, and watched the viewscreen set into the wall. They listened to Kori's voice explaining what the pictures showed, watched the stars, the myriad stars. They saw Alpha Centauri again and focused on the fat yellow-green planet with its ice-white clouds. Suddenly Lou was on his feet, shouting, "The stars! That's the way out! The stars!" . He felt as if someone had just lifted a heavy mask from his eyes. Bonnie was standing beside him, her eyes wide with bewilderment. "Lou, what is it? What's wrong?" He grabbed her, lifted her off her feet and kissed her. "The stars, Bonnie! That's our escape, that's our purpose. Instead of staying here in exile, we can leave. Head for the stars. We can turn this prison into mankind's first starship -- "  Dr. Kaufman. Lou was standing at the end of the conference table in Kaufman's office. Kori sat at his side. The members of the Council showed a spectrum of emotions from thoughtful skepticism to outright scorn. "This is the most ridiculous suggestion I've ever heard," Kaufman continued. Lou held on to his steaming temper. "Why do you say that? The scheme is physically possible." "To turn this entire satellite into a starship? Accelerate it to the kind of velocity that Starfarer reached -- or even more? Nonsense." Kori said, "With the kind of fusion engines we now know how to build we could accelerate this pinwheel to reach Alpha Centauri in less time than it took Starfarer. After all, the Starfarer was launched nearly two generations ago, it's a primitive ship compared to what we can do now." "But your own pictures showed that Alpha Centauri's planets are not enough like Earth to serve as a new home for us," said Mettler, one of the Europeans on Kaufman's Council. "You're missing the point," Lou countered. "The important thing is that Alpha Centauri has planets. Barnard's Star has planets -- they've been detected from Earth. Seven of the nearest ten stars are known to have planets; one of them is bound to be enough like Earth to suit us." "Yes, I know. But it might take you a century or two to find a fully Earthlike planet." "Let me ask something else," Charles Sutherland said in his nasal whine. "Have you thought about the structural stresses on this satellite when you hook a fusion drive engine to it?" Kori answered, "I've done some rough calculations. It doesn't look too bad. I'd need a computer to do the job properly, of course." "And there's no computer here,"" Sutherland said, grinning sardonically. "And the government won't give us one. Neither will they give us fusion engines. So the whole scheme is meaningless." "I think they would give us anything we asked for," Lou said, "if they knew they'd be getting rid of us. Permanently." "Oh it'll be permanent, all right. One way or the other," Sutherland said. Kaufman frowned. "By asking for permission to try such a stunt we'd be telling the government that we've given up all hope of ever being reinstated on Earth. We'd be admitting that we expect to be exiled for the rest of our lives." "Don't you expect to be here for the rest of your life?" Kurtz asked. "No!" Kaufman slapped the table with the flat of his hand. "I have friends who are working right now to end this nonsense. I'm sure they are. And I'm sure that they must be making some headway. And so do the other leaders from the other laboratories around the world. The government can't keep this farce going forever." Lou shook his head. "I've talked with the Chairman himself. There's no doubt in his mind that we're here to stay." "He's a feeble old man. He'll be replaced soon." "By Kobryn," said Mettler. "Who is not going to hand out any pardons." Greg Belsen turned to Kori. "You really think you can do it? Get us out to the stars?" "Of course. It's only a question of getting the right equipment and support from Earth." "And finding the right planet," Lou added. "The planet needn't be exactly like Earth," Greg mused. "We could modify our children genetically -- so they're physically adapted to the conditions on their new world." "But the rest of us could never live on that world," Kaufman said. "Mmmwell," Greg said, "it's just a thought. We'd still be able to make a homeworld for the children, even if we couldn't find one exactly suited for us. I think it's worth the gamble. Let's try it. If nothing else, it'll give us something substantial to work on." "Until the government refuses to give you what you need," Kaufman muttered. "Let's vote on it," Greg suggested. "Now wait," said Kaufman. "Before there's any voting -- " But three hands were already in the air: Greg's, Ron Kurtz's and Mettler's. With a shrug, Tracy, the other European on the Council, added his hand. Only Kaufman and Sutherland were opposed. Kaufman snorted. "All right. We'll look into it. Dr. Kori, you may ask your colleagues to help you with the rocketry and astronautics." From the tone of his voice it was clear that Kaufman expected the older rocket scientists to regard Kori as a madman. their heads and walked away from Kori, unbelieving. But a few accepted the idea. More as an amusement, perhaps, than as a real possibility. But they toyed with the notion, started jotting down notes, equations. Within a week the handful of rocket scientists and engineers aboard the satellite were all hard at work, no matter how implausible some of them thought the scheme to be. They soon took over all the desktop calculators in the satellite, watching the numbers flickering fluorescently in the viewscreens, getting more enthusiastic each day. Greg Belsen was eager from the beginning. He started looking into the possibilities of deep-freezing people, putting them into suspended animation in cryogenic sleeping units. It had been done on Earth in rare medical emergencies -- for a few days at a time. Greg wanted to put most of the satellite's seven thousand people into cryogenic sleep for decades. "Either most of the people are going to sleep most of the time," he told Lou, "or we have to rebuild this ship into a gingerbread house. Do you have any idea of how many megatons of food seven thousand people can eat in a century or so?" Gradually some of the other biochemists started working with Greg. Even a few of the geneticists let themselves be dragged into the problem, although it was well out of their field. Within a month Lou was asking a very suspicious government computer expert for time on highspeed computers. After a week of checking with Earth-bound scientists and government officials, the computer man allowed Lou to establish direct radio and TV contact with a huge government computer in Australia. "They're double-checking everything we do," Lou told Bonnie, "to make sure we're not slipping in any work on genetic engineering. Slows us down -- but we're getting there just the same. Kori says he can't see anything to stop us. If we can get the engines built and the radiation screens -- other equipment, that is." Bonnie nodded. If Lou had really looked closely at her he would have noticed that even though she tried, she couldn't manage a smile. It took six months before they were certain. Six months of hectic work, calculations, conferences that lasted all hours, arguments, cajolings. Six months in which Lou saw Bonnie maybe twice or three times a week, sometimes not that often. And always he talked of the work, the plans, the hopes. And she said nothing. Abruptly Lou was telling Kaufman, "There's no doubt about it. We can turn this jail into a starship. We can freeze most of the people. We can reach the stars. Now we have to get the government to give us the equipment we need." Kaufman said reluctantly, "I'll ask for a conference with the proper authorities." Shaking his head, Lou countered, "The General Chairman once told me that if we needed anything we could ask him. I'm going to call him. Directly." L OU stood in the General Chairman's office again, Bonnie and Kori beside him, as the elevator doors sighed shut. The room was unchanged. The Chairman called to them from his desk. The past six months aboard the satellite suddenly seemed like a remote and unpleasant dream. Did we actually live aboard that plastic prison? In that artificial little world? After a drive from the rocket field, through the green farmlands and bone-white villages, through the scented winds and steady call of the surf, through the noisy, crowded, living city -- the satellite seemed totally unreal. The Chairman listened patiently to their story, nodding and rocking in his big leather chair, steepling his fingers from time to time, even smiling once or twice. For a long moment after Lou finished talking, the Chairman said nothing. Finally: "Your ingenuity amazes me in a way. Yet I am not truly surprised that you have come up with an amazing idea." He looked at all three of them in turn. "I will not presume to comment on why you want to leave our world entirely. I suppose that a purposeful death among the stars can be preferable to a long life of exile." He laughed softly to himself. "I never expected that man's first attempt to reach the stars would be made under these conditions." "Then you'll let us go?" Lou asked eagerly. "You'll help us, give us the engines?" The Chairman silenced him with a gesture. "You mentioned that many among you are opposed to this idea -- many who do not wish to fly toward the stars." "Yes," Lou admitted. "Our work to date has simply shown that it's physically possible for us to make the journey. Dr. Kaufman and many of the others -- especially the older people -- don't want any part of it." The Chairman sighed. "You realize, of course, that it all comes down to a question of money. Everything does, it seems. Sooner fit your satellite for a journey to the stars -- " "We've computed that," Lou said. "It's expensive, but still cheaper than keeping us in orbit indefinitely. This way, you pay one big bill and we're gone. If you keep us, you'll have to feed us, doctor us -- " "I feel like Pharaoh arguing against Moses," the Chairman complained. "I would be perbe spent and help you on your way, if that is what you wish. But what of those of you who don't wish it?" "We'll have to vote on it," Lou said. "Yes," said the Chairman. "I suppose you will." They left the Chairman's office, went down the whispering elevator and into the car that took them back through the semi-tropical seaside farms of Sicily and toward the rocket field. But now the grass and sunshine and cottages were cruelties, sadistic reminders that the satellite was real and permanent and they were only visitors in this beautiful world -- their prison awaited them. They rode in the back of the open turbocar in silence. A second car followed at a discrete distance and somewhere overhead a helicopter droned lazily. They were prisoners, no doubt of it. As they got close enough to the rocket field to see the stubby shuttles standing in a row, Bonnie turned to Lou. "You shouldn't have brought me with you today, Lou. You shouldn't have." "Why not?" "Because I'm not as strong as you are," she said, shouting over the wind and turbine whine. "I can't leave all this permanently. It's bad enough in the satellite, when you can see the Earth outside the viewports. But to leave forever -- to go out into that blackness -- Lou, I can't do it. If they vote for going to the stars I'll come back to Earth." "But I thought -- " "I'm sorry, Lou. I can't help it. I checked this morning. The government will still let me return, if I want to. I can't leave Earth forever, Lou. I just can't." She put her head down and cried. L OU sat tensely in front of the Tri-V cameras. Next to him sat Dr. Kaufman. They were in the special compartment that had been turned into a Tri-V studio. Everyone in the satellite was watching and listening as they explained their positions on Lou's starship proposal. While Dr. Kaufman spoke in his vigorous, emphatic manner, driving home points with accusatory thrusts of a stubby forefinger, Lou's mind was far away. He kept seeing Bonnie's stricken face when she admitted that she would never go with him to the stars. Kept seeing the green countryside, the lemon orchards and vinyards, the safe blue sky and friendly sea that he would never visit again.  can't leave Earth forever, Lou. I just can't... Can I? Can any of us turn our tion? Is that what I want them to do? Is it what I want to do? Dr. Kaufman was saying, "It is desperately important that we all realize exactly what is involved here. No one has ever built a manned starship. No one has even attempted to. You all know that we get supplies from Earth regularly. Even though we have closed-cycle air and water systems, we still need replenishments of air and water at least once a month. As long as we remain in orbit around the Earth we can get those supplies and replenishments whenever we need them. But if we leave Earth, if we try this foolhardy scheme for going to the stars, we must have air and water and food systems that are absolutely foolproof. Now, I realize that manned missions to Jupiter and Saturn have used closed-cycle systems and they've worked quite well for periods of up to six years. But this star-roving we're talking about will take decades. Perhaps a century or more. Why, none of us are even sure that a truly Earthlike planet exists out among the stars." Kaufman shook his head, making a lock of his gray mane tumble over his forehead. "No, this star-roving idea is too risky even on purely technical grounds. We just don't know how to build a starship. And even if the best engineers on Earth were assigned by the government to help us, we wouldn't be able to keep the ship in working order, once we left Earth. We wouldn't be able to repair it and maintain it. How many engineers are there among us? A handful. We're research scientists, not grcasemonkeys." Lou was 'istening with only half his mind, i he other half was remorselessly reminding him: Life is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics, just as all physical processes are. You can't get anything without paying the price. Not anything. If you want the stars, you must leave Bonnie behind. If you want Bonnie, the price is perpetual imprisonment. What's the difference? Would it be any better pushing his beryllium nuthouse toward the stars ? We're all going to spend our lives inside this shell, wherever it's going. Don't try to cop out. Heading for the stars gives everybody an aim, a purpose. Staying here is riding an orbital merry-go-round for the rest of your life, without hope, without anything but that big blue world hanging in front of your eyes, reminding you every minute of what's been taken away... "And remember," Kaufman was saying, "that as long as we stay in our present orbit there's always the chance that the government will have a change of heart, that we'll be freed. Once we break away, once we start out for the stars, there can be no turning back. The step is irrevocable. None of us will live to see us reach our destination. Our children will age and die aboard this vehicle. Perhaps our grandchildren may find a world they can live on. Perhaps. That's a very thin hope on which to hang the lives of every man, woman, and child among us." turned expectantly to Lou. Suddenly Lou's mouth felt dry and sticky. The cameras were on him now. It was his turn to speak. Should he try to convince them or toss the whole idea away? He I ooked past Kaufman's handsome features to the big electronic board that had been juryrigged along the far wall of the studio. There was a light for every person aboard the satellite aged fifteen or over. When Lou finished speaking, they would all vote. A green light would show for each yes vote; a red one for each vote against the starship idea. Greg had briefed him moments before the debate had begun. We fought like kamikazes to get them to drop the age limit down to fifteen. After all, those kids are going to spend more of their lives in this pickle jar than any of us will... Lou heard himself clear his throat. He shifted uneasily in the chair. Then he said, "Dr. Kaufman has pointed out some of the technical risks in trying to reach the stars. He's perfectly right. It is dangerous. Nobody's done it before. I don't know -- nobody knows -- if we can make the engines and air pumps and water recyclers work for a century or more without fail." He hesitated a moment. "Dr. Kaufman also told you that if we stay in orbit around Earth, there's always the chance that we might win a reprieve. We might regain our freedom and be allowed to return to Earth and take up normal lives again. That's also true. It could happen." Again he stopped, but only for the span of a heartbeat. Only long enough to call silently, agonizingly, Bonnie... Bonnie... Then: "When I first came aboard this satellite Dr. Kaufman asked me to go on Tri-V and tell you something about what had happened to me. I'm going to dp that now." And he told them. He told them about the Federal agent in Charleston and his ride to New York. Told them about the man's unhappiness at missing his family picnic. Told them of his night in New York, the gangs, the knives, the running, the terror. Told them how the Institute looked, emptied of everyone but Big George. Of his arrest, his arrival in Messina, his audience with Minister Bernard. He told them of the island, of Marcus, of what they planned to do, how they wanted to use genetic engineering and the offshoots of their biochemistry as weapons alongside an arsenal of nuclear bombs. He told them of what happened to Big George and what had been in store for all mankind. Finally he told them of the gently implacable General Chairman, who admitted that the exile was a horrible injustice, but could see no other course of action. And the people, the great masses of peofor whom they were being sacrificed, the people who knew of their exile but didn't care. "This is the world we've been exiled from. A world where a few people can destroy the lives of the best scientists on the planet, along with the lives of their families. A world where savages rule the cities and civilized monsters battle to control the government." He turned toward Kaufman. "This is the world you want to go back to. So let's assume that we're allowed to go back. Let's assume that the government changes its mind and frees us. What will they do with our work? Can we trust them to use our knowledge? Can we trust them in any way? What's to stop them from exiling us again? Or quietly having us killed? Nobody gives a damn about us. All the rulers of Earth will ever want is the power that our knowledge can give them. The kindest thing they were able to do was to exile us!" Looking directly into the cameras, he added: "We have no one to turn to but ourselves. The choice is ours. We can orbit this planet, slowly dying, and hope that someday the government will allow us to return. But do we really want to return? I don't. I've seen that world down there and despite all its beauty I don't want to return to it. In this universe, with all its stars and space, there's got to be someplace where we can make a better world for ourselves and our children. I say we should go to the stars." He collapsed into his chair, feeling weak and trembling inside. Then the lights caught his eye. The vote shocked him: the green lights overwhelmed the few red ones. Somewhere behind the cameras people were laughing and clapping their hands. Somebody whistled shrilly. A door opened and Lou saw Kori and Greg heading toward him, grinning. Lou knew that Bonnie was in her compartment. Packed and ready to leave. She was probably past tears now. Crying wouldn't help any more. The pain wouldn't be eased by tears, or words, or regrets. "You're making a terrible mistake," Kaufman said, shaking his head. "Everything we need and desire is here, and you're going to force us to turn our backs on it all. You're making us leave our homes and head out into emptiness. There's nothing out there for us, Christopher. Nothing!" Nothing, Lou thought. Except the universe.  isn't it? The first human born on Mars was a "grok" specialist! # pon in Valentine Michael Smith's arsenal... a secret that made him irresistible to women but a bitterly hated er to the establishment. 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All stories printed in this magazine are f ic tion and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S.A. an editorial message from care to have it so, occurs on more levels than one and, if you like, everything can be a symbol or an analogue of other things, I shall answer the above as if it were a straight question, partly to get it out of the way of the other levels, and partly to share with you a great illumination. It was pivotal with me when it came to me some time ago. May it be the same to you. To most of us, for most of our lives, the marvelous experience of sex is an arrival point, a place well worth all the thought and care and effort it takes to get there; to meet and to be met and to give and receive the joy of the meeting. Yet loo few of us seem to understand that the occasion can be a point of departure a place like an airport; and where you can go from there depends solely on your resources to it. Eor a good many years I, with most of my co-passengers on the spaceship Earth, made my appointments and hurried to get there on time, bringing her with me to that special place, and once we had done our thing -- turned around and went home, never passing through the gateway we had reached. On the other side of that gate is the country I now call Afterward, and it is the only land in which you can find out just who it is you are with without the daz.lement of sex. Just as you shed your clothes to gel there, you shed the pressures of arrival and meeting; and in that new nakedness and undiluted awareness you may commune with the other human being as a human being a condition which will last as long as your fulfilledexhausled endocrine system will permit. It is at this time of all times when you must, il'you care to enrich yourself, pay special attention to the one you're with. You'll find Afterward a surprising and richly rewarding place in which to be. Do you recall the scene in Stranger in a Strange Land when the innocent superman Mike first discovered girls, and kissed one? She was a highly sophisticated girl, but she fainted dead away. Her mentor, old Jubul, was fascinated by this and asked her Do you have the "faults" that could mean you were born to be a writer? V Writers usually hate to be "labeled," but there's no denying most of them share certain characteristics. They're dreamers. Loners. Bookworms. Too impractical, intense, idealistic. If you have "faults" like these, remember they may be the most creative parts of your personality. They could be a clear indication of a gift. If you have such a gift, make the most of it. Hours you may be spending in timetive recreation. In the writer's world, you can let your imagination roam free, doing what comes naturally to you. A unique writing school But where do you begin? It's really very simple -- we teach; you learn. Here at Famous Writers School, we've created a truly unusual writing program that comes to you -- right in your home. The program shortens the years of trial-and-error; helps you avoid the failures of so many beginning writers. It's more like a shared adventure than a course. find the kind of line-by-line editing established writers get from their own editors -- plus a detailed letter of suggestions. No one can promise success. But with training like this, our students have sold to over # publications. Think about it. Could you convert your "faults" into a gift for writing? Find out by sending for our free Aptitude Test. We'll evaluate it and return it to you without charge or obligation. An educational service of Famous Writers School Dept. W-#, Westport Connecticut # I want to know if I have writing aptitude worth developing. Please mail me without obligation, your Aptitude Test and illustrated brochure. Mr. Mrs Age Miss Circle one and please print FW !        I    You get individualized training All of our instructors are working editors or writers, who know what editors are looking for. While an instructor is working on your manuscript, he gives it his full attention. And when you get it back, you'll Street City State Zip Accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the National Home Study Council. why, and she said, very thoughtfully, "I think it's because, when Mike kisses you, he isn't doing anything else! m Man insight for which I shall be everlastingly grateful to Robert Heinlein. Apply it to your sex life and you'll discover a texture you have never known before. Apply it to your travels in Afterward and you'll learn things about yourself and others, and about love, and about loving, you never before suspected. Think this over when you think it's time to roll over and go to sleep. It may not be. Which brings me to my main subject just now, which is sex in literature. ("Literature" as I use it here means stage and boobtube and cinema as well as the printed word.) Friends, it's been a great fight, but it's over. It's won. At long last we can say what we want, see what we want, when and where we want to. I think this is intrinsically good, for it isn't easy to frighten an informed person, and guilt is just one of the faces of fear. We have (providing we are careful not to let the pendulum swing back) wave after wave of new readers and thinkers and viewers on the way who will grow up without the sniggering mysteries which have plagued us for generations. People will, I think, grow up doing what they say they're doing, instead of denying it -- the word is lying. Truthtelling is a habit-forming practice, and it might be possible for a future cultural historian to trace, in this new freedom, the beginnings of a morality based on honesty instead of on the kind of self-denial which breeds the lie, the "crimes without victims," the "secret vice," the policing of private practices and beautiful urges, and all the other maggots which have for so long embedded themselves in our mortified humanity. And freedom of sexual speech places a fine strong new support under the foundations of that greatest of our strengths -- the freedom of all speech. This above all is why the fight has been a good fight and the victory a great one. We have an interim period to go through, of course, while it's all so new, where filth will proliferate. Let it. In literature the good does, in the long run, drive out the bad, if only by outlasting it. The beautifully written, courageous, and carefully thought out Lady Chatterly will long outlive any two-dollar paperback called Gangbang Gal. Let 'em come, let 'em pass. Strong sunlight shrivels them up. But listen: this battle is won. Writers and would-be writers who, now that they can't run any risk, wallow in explicit sex and "shocking" language, dilute both the sex and the shock and exhibit what is after all the only really evil thing there is, which is Excess. (There is no such thing as a poisonous sub( Please turn to page #) bV   c, # n W ' be nea' n  , n  u to vy  e ' KX  cn w ' :.ounc -- suugy'e  a sI w   c S '# ' e Tw benea , at n s  rtaa bW ' V  b  a  c ' p ea e U, 'S a S  en fas #tS #P '  OF  F "llrberflrv W" pP, ?L Bob rt  -- iifp.d , c'e#' Sveri t d d i sUP etb e FcF'# P a ' ,s Ao#VOprovoc a  a ot#-,swn' ornfl' I A# Vv 'fteco Tslone # Vtno# d s A; V ed ct'" cs . V.u'S  s tro v ' , A ""  e,  cd tnt end  be jof# e u . n# b e cT  aaC 'vAen' e " n Bo e  he dCo Libr ary iV esV..., joo ffia ' : Harper ) Row # East #d Street, New York, N.Y. # A OF I I AM Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. That statement is so strange to me that it screams in my eyes. I look at it on the page and I recognize the hand as my own, narrow upright red letters on the coarse gray sheet. I see my name and I hear in my mind the echoes of the brain-impulse that hatched those words.  am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. Incredible. This is to be what the Earthman Schweiz would call an "autobiography." Which means an account of one's self and deeds, written by one's own self. It is not a literary form that we understand in our world. I must invent my own method of narrative as I go, for I have no precedents to guide me. But this is as it should be. On this my planet I stand alone, now. In a sense I have invented a new way of life; I can surely invent a new sort of literature. They have always told me I have a gift for words. So I find myself in a clapboard shack in the Burnt Lowlands, writing obscenities as I wait for death and praising myself for my literary gifts. I am Kinnall Darival. Obscene! Obscene! Already on this one sheet I have used the pronoun "I" close to twenty times, it seems. While also casually dropping such words as "my," "me," "myself," more often than I care to count. A torrent of shamelessness. I I I I I. If I exposed my manhood in the Stone Chapel of Manneran on Naming Day I would be doing nothing so foul as I am doing here. I could almost laugh. Kinnall Darival practicing a solitary vice. In this miserable lonely place he massages his stinking ego and shrieks offensive pronouns into the hot wind, hoping they will sail on the gusts and soil his fellow men. He sets down sentence after sentence in the naked syntax of madness. He would, if he could, seize you by the wrist and pour cascades of filth into your unwilling ear. And why? Is proud Darival in fact insane? Is nothing left but the shell of him, sitting in this dreary hut, obsessively titillating himself with disreputable language, muttering "I" and "me" and "my" and "myself," blearily threatening to reveal the intimacies of his soul? No. It is Darival who is sane and all of you who are sick, and though I know how mad that sounds, I will let it stand. I am no lunatic. I have passed through a time of changes and I have been healed of the sickness that affects those who inhabit my world, and in writing what I intend to write I hope to heal you as well, though I know you are on your way into the Burnt Lowlands to slay me for my hopes. So be it. I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. toms against which I rebel still plague me. Perhaps you can begin to comprehend what an effort it is for me to frame my sentences in this style, to twist my verbs around in order to fit the first-person construction. I have been writing ten minutes and my body is covered with sweat, not the hot sweat of the burning air about me but the dank, clammy sweat of mental struggle. I know the style I must use but the muscles of my arm rebel against me, and fight to put down the words in the old fashion, saying. One has been writing for ten minutes and one's body is covered with sweat... saying, One has passed through a time of changes, and he has been healed of the sickness that affects those who inhabit his world. I suppose that much of what I have written could have been phrased in the old way and no harm done; but I do battle against the self-effacing grammar of my world and, if I must, I will joust with my own muscles for the right to arrange my words according to my present manner of philosophy. In any case, however my former habits trick me into misconstructing my sentences, my meaning will blaze through the screen of words. I may say, "I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself." Or I may say, "One's name is Kinnall Darival and he means to tell you all about himself." But there is no real difference. Either way, the content of Kinnall Darival's statement is -- by your standards, by the standards I would destroy -- disgusting, contemptible, obscene. these early pages, by the identity of my audience. I assume, because I must, that I will have readers. But who are they? Who are you? Men and women of my native planet, perhaps, furtively turning my pages by torchlight, dreading the knock at the door? Or maybe otherworlders, reading for amusement, scanning my book for the insight it may give into an alien and repellent society? I have no idea. I can establish no easy relationship with you, my unknown reader. When I first conceived my plan of setting down my soul on paper, I thought it would be simple, a mere confessional, nothing but an extended session with an imaginary drainer who would listen endlessly and at last give me absolution. But now I realize I must take another approach. If you are not of my worldor if you are of my world but not of my time -- you may find much that is incomprehensible here. Therefore I must explain. Possibly I will explain too much and drive you off by pounding you with the obvious. Forgive me if I instruct you in what you already know. Forgive me if my tone and mode of attack show lapses of consistency and I seem to be addressing myself to someone else. For you will not hold still for me, my unknown reader. You wear many faces for me. Now I see the crooked nose of Jidd the drainer, now the suave smile of my bondbrother Noim Condorit, and now the silkiness of my bondsister Halum -- and now you become the tempter Schweiz of pitiful Earth, now you are my son's son's son's son's son, not to be born for a cluster of years and eager to know what manner of man your ancestor was -- and now you are some stranger of a different planet, to whom we of Borthan are grotesque, mysterious and baffling. I do not know you, so I will be clumsy in my attempts to talk to you. But, by Salla's Gate, before I am done you will know me as no man of Borthan has ever been known by others before! I AM a man of middle years. Thirty times since the day of my birth has Borthan traveled around our golden-green sun, and on our world a man is considered old if he has lived through fifty such circuits, while the most ancient man of whom I ever heard died just short of his eightieth. From this you may be able to calculate our spans in terms of yours, if otherworlder you happen to be. The Earthman Schweiz claimed an age of forty-three years by his planet's reckoning, yet he seemed no older than I. My body is strong. Here I shall commit a double sin, for not only shall I speak of myself without shame, but I shall show pride and pleasure in my physical self. I am tall: a woman of normal height reaches barely to the lower vault of my chest. My hair is dark and long, falling to my shoulders. Lately streaks of gray have appeared in it and likewise in my beard, which is full and thick, covering much of my face. My nose is prominent and straight, with a wide bridge and large nostrils; my lips are fleshy and give me, so it is said, a look of sensuality; my eyes are deep brown in hue and are set somewhat far apart in my skull. They have, I am given to understand, the appearance of the eyes of one who has been accustomed all his life to commanding other men. My back is broad and my chest is deep. A dense mat of coarse dark hair , grows nearly everywhere on me. My arms are long. My hands are large. My muscles are well developed and stand out prominently beneath my skin. I move gracefully for a man my size, with smooth coordination; I excel in sports and when I was younger I hurled the feathered shaft the entire length of Manneran Stadium, a feat that had never been achieved until then. Women generally find me attractive. Certainly the political power I have held in my time has helped to bring many partners to my couch, but no doubt they were drawn to me as much by the look of my body as by anything more subtle. Most of them have been disappointed in me. Bulging muscles and a hairy hide do not a skilled lover make. I am no champion of copulation. See: I hide nothing from you. There is in me a certain constitutional impatience that expresses itself outwardly only during the carnal actI find myself swiftly swept away, and rarely can I sustain the deed until the woman's pleasure comes. To no one, not even a drainer, have I confessed this failing before, nor did I ever expect that I would. But I place it on the record here, for perspective's sake. I would not have you think of me as a hairy, mighty giant without your also knowing how often my flesh has betrayed my lusts. Possibly this failing of mine was among the forces that shaped my destinies toward this day in the Burnt Lowlands, and you should know of that. septarch of the province of Salla on our eastern coast. My mother was daughter to a septarch of Glin; he met her on a diplomatic mission. The first child born to them was my brother Stirron, now septarch of Salla in our father's place. I followed two years later; there were three more after me, all of them girls. Two of these still live. My youngest sister was slain by raiders from Glin some twenty moontimes ago. I knew my father poorly. On Borthan everyone is a stranger to everyone, but one's father is customarily less remote from one than others; not so with the old septarch. Between us lay an impenetrable wall of formality. In addressing him we used the same formulas of respect that subjects employed. His smiles were so infrequent that I think I can recall each one. Once, and it was unforgettable, he took me up beside him on his rough-hewn blackwood throne, let me touch the ancient yellow cushion and called me fondly by my child-name; it was the day my mother died. Otherwise he ignored me. I feared and loved him and crouched trembling behind pillars in his court to watch him dispense justice, thinking that if he saw me there he would have me destroyed -- yet I was unable to deprive myself of the sight of my father in his majesty. He was, oddly, a man of slender body and modest height, over whom my brother and I towered even when we were boys. But there was a terrible strength of will in him that led him to surmount every challenge. Once in my childhood there came some ambassador to the septarchy, a hulking sunblackened westerner who stands in my memory no smaller than Kongoroi Mountain; probably he was as tall and broad as I am now. At feasting-time the ambassador let too much blue wine down his throat and said before my father and his courtiers and his family, "One would show his strength to the men of Salla, to whom he may be able to leach something of wrestling." ""There is one here," my father replied in sudden fury, "to whom, perhaps, nothing need be taught." "Let him be produced," the huge westerner said, rising and peeling back his cloak. But my father, smiling and the sight of that smile made his courtiers quake told the boastful stranger it would not be fair to make him compete while his mind was fogged with wine. This, of course, maddened the ambassador beyond words. The musicians came in then to ease the tension, but the anger of our visitor did not subside and, after an hour, when the drunkenness had lifted somewhat from him, he demanded again to meet my father's champion. No man of Salla, said our guest, would be able to withstand his might. Whereupon the septarch said, "I will wrestle you myself." That night my brother and I were sitting at the far end of the long table, among the women. Down from the throne-end came the stunning word "I" in my father's voice, and an instant later came "myself." These were obscenities that Stirron and I had often whispered, sniggering, in the darkness of our bedchamber, but we had never imagined we would hear them hurled forth in the feasting-hall from the septarch's own lips. In our shock we reacted differently, Stirron jerking convulsively and knocking over his goblet, myself letting loose a halfsuppressed shrill giggle of embarrassment and delight that earned me an instant slap from a lady-in-waiting. My laughter was merely the mask for my inner horror. I could barely believe that my father knew those words, let alone that he would say them before this august company.  will wrestle you myself. And while the reverberations of the forbidden forms of speech still dizzied me, my father swiftly stepped forward, dropping his cloak, and faced the great hulk of an ambassador, closed with him, caught him by one elbow and one haunch in a deft Sallan hold and sent him almost immediately toppling to the polished floor of gray stone. The ambassador uttered a terrible cry. One of his legs was sticking strangely out at a frightening angle from his hip and in pain and humiliation he pounded the flat of his hand again and again against the floor. Perhaps diplomacy is practiced in more sophisticated ways now in the palace of my brother Stirron. T HE septarch died when I was twelve and just coming into the first rush of my manhood. I was near his side when death took him. To escape the time of rains in Salla he would go each year to hunt the hornfowl in the Burnt Lowlands, in the very district where now I hide and wait. I had never gone with him, but on this occasion I was permitted to accompany the hunting party, for now I was a young prince and must learn the skills of my class. Stirron, as a future septarch, had other skills to master; he remained behind as regent in our father's absence from the capital. Under a bleak and heavy sky bowed with rainclouds the expedition of some twenty groundcars rolled westward out of Salla City and through the flat, sodden, winter-bare countryside. The rains were merciless that year, knifing away the precious, sparse topsoil and laying bare the rocky bones of our province. Everywhere the farmers were repairing their dikes but to no avail. I could see the swollen rivers running yellowbrown with Salla's lost wealth and I nearly wept to think of such treasure being carried into the sea. As we came into West Salla the BaHantjne I I I Books WE'RE off to a fine start for the Spring season (you remember our Spring runs from February through July) with a Lovecraft celebration, perspicacious Introduction), plus ought to really grab the natural food bunch) and Other Poems, plus a reOthers, by Lovecraft and August Derleth (these are the unfinished works that Derleth completed). Plus Beagle has a whole raft more. All the covers are stomach-whirlers. This is really a pretty big month for fantasy. Hope Hodgson -- a rare goodie -- cover after Hieronymus Bosch. The Sales Department says that our Oriselling as well as all the other glorious fantasies. Either there's a bunch of racists out there or people don't know it's a fantasy because there aren't any weirdo animals on the cover. There's a man with a turban and a couple of sexy females, in a Persian sort of way. Buy. be doing two James White novels: one on his favorite theme -- the medical world of outerspace -- titled MAWhite, but done with his usual meticulous, logical detail -- all the more impressive because it makes things seem so damn believable. Other delights which may have been overlooked in the past several tempestuby (who else?). Martha Mitchell, a lar -- yell for it in bookstores. We have, of course, any number of books on the environment, ecology, style of life, etcetera -- so many now that you really need to write in for a catalog. If you buy the lot, you'll know it all. Don't miss Paul Ehrary -- ought to be on the stands right about now.)  ing venture -- Comstock Editions. Out on the West Coast, books all about regional areas for history buffs and anyone hooked on nostalgia -- FebBerry -- a man who tried to trap the George Stewart, which proves that things weren't all that bloody good in the old days either. BB narrow road began to climb the foothills of the Huishtor range and soon we were in drier, colder country, where the skies gave snow, not rain, and the trees were mere bundles of sticks against the blinding whiteness. Up we went into the Huishtors, following the Kongoroi road. The countryfolk came out to chant welcomes to the septarch as he passed. Now the naked mountains stood like purple teeth ripping the gray sky and even in our sealed groundcars we shivered, although the beauty of this tempestuous place took my mind from my discomforts. Here great flat shields of striated tawny rock flanked the rugged road and there was scarcely any soil at all, nor did trees or shrubs grow except in sheltered places. We could look back and see all of Salla like its own map below us, the whiteness of the western districts, the dark clutter of the populous eastern shore, everything diminished, unreal. I had never been this far from home before. Though we were now deep into the uplands, midway, as it were, between sea and sky, the inner peaks of the Huishtors still lay before us. To my eye they formed an unbroken wall of stone spanning the continent from north to south. Their snow-crowned summits jutted raggedly from that continuous lofty breastwork of bare rock: were we supposed to go over the top, or would there be some way through? I knew of Salla's Gate and that our route lay toward it -- but somehow the gate seemed mere myth to me at that moment. Up and up and up we rode, until the generators of our groundcars were gasping in the frosty air and we were compelled to pause frequently to defrost the power conduits and our heads whirled from shortness of oxygen. Each night we. rested at one of the camps maintained for the use of traveling septarchs, but the accommodations were far from regal and at one, where the entire staff of servants had perished some weeks before in a snowslide, it was necessary for us to dig our way through mounds of ice in order to enter. All of us in the party were men of the nobility and all of us wielded shovels except the septarch himself, for whom manual labor would have been sinful. Because I was one of the biggest and strongest of the men I dug more vigorously than anyone and, because I was young and rash, strained myself beyond my strength, collapsing over my shovel and lying half dead in the snow for an hour until I was noticed. My father came to me while they were treating me and smiled one of his rare smiles; just then I believed it was a gesture of affection and it greatly sped my recovery; but afterward I came to see it was more likely a sign of his contempt. That smile buoyed me through the remainder of our ascent of the Huishtors. No longer did I fret about getting over the mountains, for I knew that I would, and on the far side my father and I would hunt the hornfowl in the Burnt Lowlands, going out together, guarding one another from peril, collaborating ultimately on the tracking and on the kill, knowing a closeness that had never existed between us in my childhood. I talked of that one night to my bondbrother Noim Condorit, who rode with me in my groundcar and who was the only person in the universe to whom I could say such things. "One hopes to be chosen for the septarch's own hunt group," I said. "One has reason to think that one will be asked. And an end made to the distance between father and son." "You dream," said Noim Condorit. "You live in fantasies." "One could wish," I replied, "for warmer encouragement from one's bondbrother." took his dourness in stride and counted the days to Salla's Gate. When we reached it I was unprepared for the splendor of the place. All morning and half an afternoon we had been following a thirtydegree grade up the broad breast of Kongoroi Mountain, shrouded in the shadow of the great double summit. It seemed to me we would climb forever and still have Kongoroi looming over us. Then our caravan swung around to the left, car after car disappearing behind a snowy pylon on the flank of the road. Our car's turn came, and when we had turned the corner I beheld an astonishing sight: a wide break in the mountain wall, as if some cosmic hand had pried away one corner of Kongoroi. Through the gap came daylight in a glittering burst. This was Salla's Gate, the miraculous pass across which our ancestors came when first they entered our province, so many hundreds of years back, after their wanderings in the Burnt Lowlands. We plunged joyously into it, riding two and even three cars abreast over the hardpacked snow -- and before we made camp for the night we were able to see the strange splendor of the Burnt Lowlands spread out astonishingly below us. All the next day and the one that followed we rode the switchbacks down Kongoroi's western slope, creeping at a comical pace along a road that had little room to spare for us: a careless twitch of the stick and one's car would tumble into an infinite abyss. Ahead everything was red soil. Down into the desert we went, quitting winter and entering a stifling world where every breath tingled in the lungs, where dry winds lifted the ground in clouds, where odd twistedlooking beasts scampered in terror from our oncoming cavalcade. On the sixth day we reached the hunting grounds, a place of ragged escarpments far below sea level. I am no more than an hour's ride from that place now. Here the homfowl have their nests; all day long they range the baking plains, seeking meat, and at twilight they return, collapsing groundward in weird spiraling flight to enter their all but inaccessible burrows. In the dividing of personnel I was one of thirteen chosen as the septarch's companions. "One shares your joy," Noim told me solemnly, and there were tears in his eyes as well as in mine, for he knew what pain my father's coldness had brought me. At daybreak the hunt groups set out, nine of them, in nine directions. nest is deemed shameful. The bird returning is usually laden with meat for its young and it therefore is clumsy and vulnerable, shorn of as it plummets is no great task, but only a craven selfbarer would attempt it. ( Selfbarer ! See, how my own pen mocks me! I, who have bared more self than any ten men of Borthan, still unconsciously use the term as a word of abuse! But let it stand.) I mean to say that the virtue in hunting lies in the perils and difficulties of the chase, not in the taking of the trophy, and we hunt the hornfowl as a challenge to our skills, not for its dismal flesh. Thus hunters go into the open Lowlands, where even in winter the sun is devastating, where there are no trees to give shade or streams to ease the thirst. They spread out, one man here, two men there, taking up stations in that trackless expanse of barren red soil, offering themselves as the hornfowl's prey. The bird cruises at inconceivable heights, soaring so far overhead that it can be seen only as a of the sky; it takes the keenest vision to detect one, though a hornfowl's wingspread is twice the length of a man's body. From its lofty place the hornfowl scans the desert for incautious beasts. Nothing, no matter how small, escapes its glossy eyes; and when it detects good quarry it comes down through the turbulent air until it hovers house-high above the ground. Now it commences its killing-flight, flying low, launching itself on a series of savage circles, spinning a death-knot around its still unsuspecting victim. The first swing may sweep over the equivalent of half a province's area, but each successive circuit is tighter and tighter, while acceleration mounts, until ultimately the hornfowl has made itself a frightful engine of death that comes roaring in from the horizon at nightmarish velocity. Now the quarry learns the truth, but it is knowledge not held for long: the rustle of mighty wings, the hiss of a slim powerful form cleaving the hot sluggish air then the single long deadly spear sprouting from the bird's bony forehead finds its mark and the victim falls, enfolded in the black fluttering wings. The hunter hopes to bring down his hornfowl while it cruises almost at the limits of human sight; he carries a weapon designed for long-range shooting and the test is in the aim, whether he can calculate the interplay of trajectories at such vast distances. The peril of hunting hornfowl is this one never knows if one is the hunter or the hunted, for a hornseen until it strikes its stroke. So I went forth. I stood from dawn to midday. The sun worked its will on my winter-pale skin, such of it as I dared to expose; most of me was swaddled in hunting clothes of soft crimson leather, within which I boiled. We were arrayed in a double hexagon with my father alone between the two groups. Chance had it that I drew the point of my hexagon closest to him, but it was more than a feathered shaft's toss from his place to mine and all the morning long the septarch and I exchanged not a syllable. He stood with feet planted firm, watching the skies, his weapon at ready. I, too, studied the skies until my eyes ached for it, until I felt twin strands of hot light against the back wall of my skull. More than once I imagined I saw the dark splinter of a hornfowl's shape drifting into view up there, and once in sweaty haste I came to the verge of raising my gun to it, which would have brought me shame, for one must not shoot until one has established priority of sighting by crying one's claim. I did not fire, and when I blinked and opened my eyes I saw nothing in the sky. The hornfowl seemed to be elsewhere that morning. Lnal and we spread farther apart over the plain, maintaining our formation. My new position lay atop a low earthen mound in the form, almost, of a woman's breast, and fear took hold of me as I took up my place on it. I supposed myself to be terribly exposed and in imminent peril of hornfowl attack. As fright crept through my spirit I became convinced that a hornfowl was even now flying its fatal circuits around my hummock and that at any moment its lance would pierce my kidneys while I gazed stupidly at the metallic sky. The premonition grew so strong that I had to struggle to hold my ground; I shivered, I stole wary peeks over my shoulders, I clenched the stock of my gun for comfort, I strained my ears for the sound of my enemy's approach, hoping to whirl and fire before I was speared. For this cowardice I reproached myself severely, even offering thanks that Stirron had been born before me, since obviously I was unfit to succeed to the septarchy. I reminded myself that not in three years had a hunter been killed in this way. I asked myself if it were plausible that I should die so young, on my first hunt, when there were others like my father who had hunted for thirty seasons and gone unscathed. I demanded to know why I felt this overwhelming fear, when all my tutors had labored to teach me that the self is a void and concern for one's person a wicked sin. Was not my father in equal jeopardy, far across the sun-smitten plain? And had he not much more than I to lose, being a septarch and a prime septarch at that, while I was only a boy? In this way I cudgeled the fear from my damp soul and studied the sky without regard for the spear that might be aimed at my back -- and in minutes my former fretting seemed an absurdity to me. I would stand here for days, if need be, unafraid. At once I had the reward of this triumph over self: against the shimmering fierceness of the sky I made out a dark floating form, a notch in the heavens, and this time it was no illusion, for my youthful eyes spied wings and horn. Did the others see it? Was the bird mine to attempt? If I made the kill, would the septarch pound my back and call me his best son? All was silence from the other hunters. "One cries claim!" I shouted jubilantly and lifted my weapon and eyed the sight, remembering what I had been taught, to let the inner mind make the calculations, to aim and fire in one swift impulse before the intellect, by quibbling, could spoil the intuition's command. And in the instant before I sent my bolt aloft came a ghastly outcry from my left. I fired without aiming at all, turning in the same instant toward my father's place and seeing him half hidden beneath the madly flapping form of another hornfowl that had gored him from spine to belly. The air about them was clouded with red sand as the monster's wings furiously slapped the ground. The bird was struggling to take off I , but a hornfowl cannot lift a man's weight, though this does not prevent them from attacking us. I ran to aid the septarch. He still was shouting and I saw his hands clutching for the hornfowl's scrawny throat, but now there was a liquid quality about his cries, a bubbling tone, and when I reached the scene -- I was the first one therehe lay sprawled and quiet, the bird still rammed through him and covering his body like a black cloak. My blade was out; I slashed the hornfowl's neck as if it were a length of hose, kicked the carcass aside, began to wrench desperately at the demonic head mounted so hideously upon the septarch's upturned back. Now the others came; they pulled me away. Someone seized me by the shoulders and shook me until my fit was past. When I turned to them again they closed their ranks to keep me from seeing my father's corpse -- and then, to my dismay, they dropped to their knees before me to do homage. Homage to me. But of course it was Stirron and not I who became septarch in Salla. His crowning was a grand event, for, young though he was, he would be the prime septarch of the province. Salla's six other septarchs came to the capital -- only on such an occasion were they ever to be found at once in the same city -- and for a time everything was feasting and banners and the blare of trumpets. Stirron was at the center of it all and I on the margins, which was as it should be, though it left me feeling more like a stableboy than a prince. Once he was enthroned, Stirron offered me titles and land and power, but he did not really expect me to accept and I did not. Unless a septarch is a weakling, his younger brothers had best not stay nearby to help him rule, for such help is often not desired. I had had no living uncles on my father's side of the family and I did not care to have Stirron's sons be able to make the same statement; therefore I took myself quickly from Salla once the time of mourning was ended. I went to Glin, my mother's land. There, however, things were unsatisfactory for me and after a few years I moved on to the steamy province of Manneran, where I won my wife and sired my sons, became a prince in more than name and lived happily and sturdily until my time of changes began. II P erhaps i should set down some words concerning my world's geography. There are five continents on our planet of Borthan. In this hemisphere are two, Velada Borthan and Sumara Borthan, which is to say, the Northern World and the Southern World. It is a long sea journey from any shore of' these continents to the continents of the opposite hemisphere, which have been named merely Umbis, Dabis, Tibis, that is, One, Two, Three. Of those three distant lands I can tell you very little. They first were explored some seven hundred years ago by a septarch of Glin and not five seeking-parties have been to them in all the time since. No human folk dwell in that hemisphere. Umbis is said to be largely like the Burnt Lowlands, but worse, with golden flames bursting from the tormented land in many places. Dabis is jungles and fever-ridden swamps. Tibis is covered with ice. We are not a race afflicted with the wanderlust. I myself was never a voyager until circumstances made me one. Though the blood of the ancient Earthmen flows in our veins and they were wanderers whose demons drove them out to prowl the stars, we of Borthan stay close to home. Even I who am somewhat different from my comrades in my way of thinking never hungered to see the snowfields of Tibis or the marshes of Davis, except perhaps when I was a child and eager to gobble all the universe. Among us it is considered a great thing merely to journey from Salla to Glin, and rare indeed is the man who has crossed the continent, let alone ventured to Sumara Borthan, as I have done. More of that later. Velada Borthan is the home of our civilization. The mapmakers' art reveals it to be a large squarish landmass with rounded corners. Two great V-shaped indentations puncture its periphery: along the northern coast, midway between the eastern and western corners, is the Polar Gulf and, due south on the opposite coast, is the Gulf of Sumar. Between those two bodies of water lie the Lowlands, a trough that spans the entire continent from north to south. No point in the Lowlands rises higher above sea level than the height of five men and many places notably in the Burnt Lowlands, are far below sea level. A folk tale we tell our children concerns the shape of Velada Borthan. We say that the great iceworm Hrungir, born in the waters of the North Polar Sea, stirred and woke one day in sudden appetite and began to nibble at the northern shore of Velada Borthan. The worm chewed for a thousand thousand years, until it had eaten out the Polar Gulf. Then, its voracity having made it somewhat ill, it crawled up on the land to rest and digest what it had devoured. Uneasy at the stomach, Hrungir wriggled southward, causing the land to sink beneath its vast weight and the mountains to rise in compensation to the east and west of its resting place. The worm rested longest in the Burnt Lowlands, which accordingly were depressed more deeply than any other region. In time the worm's appetite revived and it resumed its southward crawl, coming at last to a place where a range of mountains running from east to west barred its advance. Then it chewed the mountains, creating Stroin Gap, and proceeded toward our southern coast. In another fit of hunger the worm bit out the Gulf of Sumar. The waters of the Strait of Sumar rushed in to fill the place where the land had been and the rising tide carried Hrungir to the continent of Sumara Borthan, where now the iceworm lives, coiled beneath the volcano Vashnir and emitting poisonous fumes. So the fable goes. T HE long narrow basin that we think of as Hrungir's track is divided into three districts. At the northern end we have the Frozen Lowlands, a place of perpetual ice where no man ever is seen: legend has it that the air is so dry and cold that a single breath will turn a man's lungs to leather. South of the Frozen Lowlands lie the immense Burnt Lowlands, which are almost totally without water and on which the full fury of our sun constantly falls. Our two towering north-south mountain ranges prevent a drop of rain from entering the Burnt Lowlands, nor do any rivers or streams reach it. The soil is bright red, with occasional yellow streaks -- this we blame on the heat of Hrungir's belly, though our geologists tell another tale. Small plants live in the Burnt Lowlands, taking their nourishment from I know not where and there are many kinds of beasts, all of them strange, deformed and unpleasant. At the southern end of the Burnt Lowlands is a deep east-west valley, several days' journey in breadth. On its far side lies the small district known as the Wet Lowlands. Northerly breezes coming off the Gulf of Sumar carry moisture through Stroin Gap; these winds meet the fierce hot blasts out of the Burnt Lowlands and are forced to drop their burden not far above the Gap, creating a land of dense, lush vegetation. Never do the waterladen breezes from the south succeed in getting north of the Wet Lowlands to bathe the zone of red soil. The Frozen Lowlands, as I have said, go forever unvisited, and the Burnt Lowlands are entered only by hunters and those who must travel between the eastern and western coasts, but the Wet Lowlands are populated by several thousand farmers, who raise exotic fruits for the city folk. I am told that the constant rain rots their souls, that they have no form of government in there, and that our customs of self-denial are imperfectly observed. I would be among them now, to discover their nature at first hand, if only I could slip through the cordon that my enemies have set up to the south of this place. The Lowlands are flanked by two immense mountain ranges: the Huishtors in the east, the Threishtors in the west. These mountains begin on Velada Borthan's northern coast, virtually at the shores of the North Polar Sea, and march southward, gradually curving inland; the two ranges would join not far from the Gulf of Sumar if they were not separated by Stroin Gap. They are so high that they intercept all winds. Therefore their inland slopes are barren, but the slopes facing the oceans enjoy fertility. Mankind in Velada Borthan has carved out its domain in the two coastal strips, between the oceans and the mountains. In most places the land is at best marginal, so that we are hard put to have all the food we need and life is constant struggle against hunger. Often one wonders why our ancestors, when they came to this planet so many generations ago, chose Velada Borthan as their settling-place; the farming would have been far easier in the neighboring continent of Sumara Borthan and even swampy Dabis might have offered more cheer. The explanation we are given is that our forefathers were stern, diligent folk who relished challenge and feared to let their children dwell in a place where life might be insufficiently harsh. Velada Borthan's coasts were neither uninhabitable nor unduly comfortable; therefore they suited the purposes. I believe this to be true, for certainly the chief heritage we have from those ancient ones is the notion that comfort is sin. and ease is wickedness. My bondbrother Noim, though, once remarked that the first settlers chose Velada Borthan because that was where their starship happened to come down and, having hauled themselves across all the immensities of space, they lacked the energy to travel onward even one more continent in quest of a better home. I doubt it, but the slyness of the idea is characteristic of my bondbrother's taste for irony. The firstcomers planted their initial settlement on the western coast, at the place we call Threish, that is, the place of the Covenant. They multiplied rapidly and, because they were a stubborn and quarrelsome tribe, they splintered early, this group and that going off to live apart. Thus the nine western provinces came into being. In time the limited resources of the west were exhausted and emigrants sought the eastern coast. We had no air transport then, not that we have a great deal now; we are not a mechanically minded people and we lack natural resources to serve as fuels. Thus they went east by groundcar or whatever served as groundcars then. The three Threishtor passes were discovered and the bold ones bravely entered the Burnt Lowlands. We tell long mythic epics of the hardships of these crossings. Getting over the Threishtors into the Lowlands was difficult, but getting out on the far side was close to impossible, for there is only one route over the Huishtors out of the red-soil country fit for humans, and that is by way of Salla's Gate, the finding of which was no small task. But they found it and poured through and established my land of Salla. When the quarreling came, a good many went north and founded Glin and later others went south to settle in holy Manneran. For a thousand years it was sufficient to have but three provinces in the east, until in a new quarrel the small but prosperous maritime kingdom of Krell carved itself out of a corner of Glin and a corner of Salla. There also were some folk who could not abide life in Velada Borthan at all, and put to sea from Manneran, sailing off to settle in Sumara Borthan. But one need not speak of them in a geography lesson; I will have much to say Of Sumara Borthan and its people when I have begun to explain the changes that entered my life. now is a shabby thing. Its clapboard walls were indifferently put together to begin with and now are crazed, so that gaps yawn at the joints and no angle is true. The desert wind passes through here unhindered; my. page bears a light coating of red soil, my clothes are caked with it, even my hair has a red tinge. Lowlands creatures crawl freely in with me. I see two of them moving about the earthen floor now, a many-legged gray thing the size of my thumb and a sluggish two-tailed serpent not as long as my foot. For hours they have circled one another idly, as though they wish to be mortal foes but cannot decide which of them is to eat the other. Dry companions for a parched time. I should not mock this place. though. Someone troubled to drag its makings here, in order that weary hunters might have shelter in this inhospitable land. Someone put it together, doubtless with more love than skill, and left it here for me and it serves me well. Perhaps it is no fit home for a septarch's son, but I have known my share of palaces and I no longer need stone walls and groined ceilings. It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul and find those things that have been the shaping of him, draw them forth and examine them and come to know himself. In this our world we are forbidden by custom to make our souls known to others, yes, but why has no one before me observed that that same custom, without intending it, keeps us from coming to know ourselves? For nearly all my life Lkept the proper social walls between myself and others, and not till the walls were down did I see I had walled myself away from myself as well. But here in the Burnt Lowlands I have had time to contemplate these matters and to arrive at understanding. This is not the place I would have chosen for myself, but I am not unhappy here. I do not think they will find me for some while yet. Now it is too dark in here to write. I will stand by the cabin door and watch the night come rolling across the Lowlands toward the Huishtors. The stars will blaze. Schweiz once tried to show me the sun of Earth from a mountaintop in Sumara Borthan. He insisted he could see it and begged me to squint along the line of his pointing hand, but I think he was playing a game with me, I think that that sun may not be seen at all from our sector of the galaxy. Schweiz played many a game with me when we traveled together, and perhaps he will play more such games one day if ever we meet againif still he lives. sister Halum Helalam came to me. With her there can never be more games and only through the slippery-walled tunnel of dreams is she apt to reach me. Therefore while I slept she glowed in my mind more brightly than any star that lights this desert, but waking brought me sadness and shame and the memory of my loss of her who is irreplaceable. Halum of my dream wore only a light filmy veil through which her small rosy-tipped breasts showed -- and her slim thighs and her flat belly, the belly of an unchilded woman. It was not the way she often dressed in life, especially when paying a call on her bondbrother, but this was the Halum of my dream, made wanton by my lonely and troubled soul. Her smile was warm and tender and her dark shining eyes glistened with love. In dreams one's mind lives on many levels. On one level of mine I was a detached observer, looking down upon my own sleeping body. On another level I lay asleep. The dream-self that slept did not perceive Halum's presence, but the dream-self that watched was aware of her and I, the true dreamer, was aware of them both and also aware that all I saw was coming to me in a vision. But inevitably there was some mingling of these levels of reality, so that I could not be sure who was the dreamer and who the dreamed, nor was I certain that the Halum who stood before me in such radiance was a creature of my fantasy rather than the living Halum I once had known. "Kinnall," she whispered, and in my dream I imagined that my sleeping dream-self awoke, propping himself upon his elbows, with Halum kneeling close beside his cot. She leaned forward until her breasts brushed the shaggy chest of that man who was I, and touched her lips to mine in a flick of a caress and said, "You look so weary, Kinnall." "You should not have come here." "One was needed. One came." "It is not right. To enter the Burnt Lowlands alone, to seek out one who has brought you only harm -- " "The bond that links one to you is sacred." "You've suffered enough for that bond, Halum." "One has not suffered at all," she said, and kissed my sweaty forehead. "How you must suffer, hiding in this dismal oven!" "It is no more than one has earned," I said. Even in my dream I spoke to Halum in the polite grammatical form. I had never found it easy to use the first person with her; certainly I never used it before my changes and afterward, when no reason remained for me to be so chaste with her, I still could not. My soul and my heart had yearned to say "I" to Halum and my tongue and lips were padlocked by propriety. She said, "You deserve so much more than this place. You must come forth from exile. You must guide us, Kinnall, toward a new Covenant, a Covenant of love, of trust in one another." "One fears he has been a failure as a prophet. One doubts the value of continuing such efforts." "It was all so strange to you, so new!" she said. "But you were able to change, Kinnall, and to bring changes to others -- " "To bring grief to others and to oneself." "No. No. What you tried to do was right. How can you give up now? How can you resign yourself to death? There's a world out there in need of being freed, Kinnall !" "One is trapped in this place. One's capture is inevitable." "The desert is wide. You can slip away from them." "The desert is wide, but the gates are few and all of them are watched. There's no escape." She shook her head, smiled, pressed her hands urgently against my hips and said in a voice thick with hope, "I will lead you to safety. Come with me, Kinnall." The sound of that  and the me that followed it out of Halum's imagined mouth fell upon my dreaming soul like a rainfall of rusted spikes -- the shock of hearing those obscenities in her sweet voice, nearly awakened me. This thing I tell you to make it clear that I am not fully converted to my own changed way of life, that the reflexes of my upbringing still govern me in the deepest corners of my soul. What happened next was also revealing, though far less subtle. To urge me from my cot Halum's hands slipped over my body, working their way through the tangled thatch over my gut, and her cool fingers seized me. Instantly my heart thundered and the ground heaved as though the Lowlands were splitting apart and Halum uttered a little cry of fear. I reached for her, but she was growing indistinct and insubstantial -- and in one terrible convulsion of the planet I lost sight of her and she was gone. I woke, coming up through the levels of my dream. I found myself alone in the hut. " Halum " I cried. "Halum, Halum, Halum!" My voice made the cabin quiver, but she did not return. And slowly my sleep-fogged mind grasped the truth, that the Halum who had visited me had been unreal. We of Borthan do not take such visions lightly, however. I rose and went from my cabin into the darkness outside and walked about, scuffing at the warm sand with my bare toes as I struggled to excuse my inventions to myself. Slowly I calmed. Yet I sat by my doorstep unsleeping for hours, until dawn's first green fingers crept upon me. Beyond doubt you will agree with me that a man who has been apart from women some time, living under the tensions I have known since my flight into the Burnt Lowlands, will occasionally experience such sexual eruptions in his sleep, nor is there anything unnatural about them. I must maintain also, though I have little enough evidence to prove it, that many men of Borthan find themselves giving way in slumber to expressions of desire for their bondsisters, simply because such desires are so rigidly repressed in the waking time. And further, although Halum and I enjoyed intimacies of soul far beyond those which men customarily enjoy with their bondsisters, never once did I seek her physically, nor did such a union ever occur. Take this on faith, if you will: in these pages I tell you so much that is discreditable to me, making no attempt to conceal that which is shameful, that if I had violated Halum's bond I would tell you that as well. You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams. Nevertheless I held myself guilty through the waning of the night and into this morning, and only as I purge myself now by putting the incident on paper does the darkness lift from my spirit. I think what has really troubled me these past few hours is not so much my sordid little sexual fantasy, for which even my enemies would probably forgive me, as it is my belief that I am responsible for Halum's death -- for which I am unable to forgive myself. Ill every man of Borthan and by the same token every woman is sworn at birth or soon thereafter to a bondsister and bondbrother. No member of any such tripling may be blood-kin to any other. The bondings are arranged soon after a child is conceived, and often are the subject of intricate negotiation, since one's bondbrother and bondsister are customarily closer to one than one's own family-by-blood; hence a father owes it to his child to make the bondings with care. Because I was to be a septarch's second son, arranging my bondings was a matter of high circumstance. It might have been good democracy, but poor sense, to bond me to a peasant's child, for one must be reared on the same social plane as one's bond-kin if any profit is to come from the relationship. On the other hand I could not be bonded to the kin of some other septarch, since fate might one day elevate me to my father's throne, and a septarch must not be tangled in ties of bonding to the royal house of another district lest he find his freedom of decision circumscribed. Thus it was necessary to make bondings for me with the children of nobility but not of royalty. The project was handled by my father's bondbrother, Ulman Kotril; it was the last aid he ever gave my father, for he was slain by bandits from Krell not long after my birth. To find a bondsister for me, Ulman Kotril went down into Manneran and obtained bonding with the unborn child of Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port. It had been determined that Helalam's child was to be female; hence my father's bondbrother returned to Salla and completed the tripling by compacting with Luinn Condorit, a general of the northern patrol, for his conning son. Noim, Halum and I were born all in the same week and my father himself performed the service of bonding. (We were known by our child-names then, of course, but I ignore that here to simplify things.) The ceremony took place in the septarch's palace, with proxies standing in for Noim and Halum; later, when we were old enough to travel, we repledged our bonds in each other's presence, I going to Manneran to be bonded to Halum. Thereafter we were only infrequently apart. Segvord Helalam had no objection to letting his daughter be raised in Saila, for he hoped she would strike a glittering marriage with some prince at my father's court. In this he was to be disappointed, for Halum went unmarried and, for all I know, virgin to her grave. This scheme of bondings allows us a small escape from the constricting solitude in which we of Borthan are expected to live. You must know by now -- even if you who read this be a stranger to our planet -- that it has long been forbidden by custom for us to open our souls to others. To talk excessively of oneself, so our forefathers believed, leads inevitably to selfindulgence, self-pity and selfcorruption; therefore we are trained to keep ourselves to ourselves and, so that the prisoning bands of custom may be all the more steely, we are prohibited even from using such words as "I" or "me" in polite discourse. If we have problems we settle them in silence; if we have ambitions we fulfill them without advertising our hopes; if we have desires we pursue them in a selfless and impersonal way. To these harsh rules only two exceptions are made. We may speak our hearts freely to our drainers, who are religious functionaries and mere hirelings; and we may, within limits, open ourselves to our bond-kin. These are the rules of the Covenant. It is permissible to confide almost anything to a bondsister or a bondbrother, but we are taught to observe etiquette in going about it. For example, proper people consider it improper to speak in the first person even to one's bond-kin. It is not done, ever. No matter how intimate a confession we make, we must couch it in acceptable grammar, not in the vulgarities of a common selfbarer. (In our idiom a selfbarer is one who exposes himself to others, by which is meant that he exposes his soul, not his flesh. It is deemed a coarse act and is punished by social ostracism or worse. Selfbarers use the censured pronouns of the gutter vocabulary, as I have done throughout what you now read. Although one is allowed to bare one's self to one's bond-kin, one is not a selfbarer unless one does it in tawdry blurtings of "I" and "me".) Also we are taught to observe reciprocity in our dealings with bond-kin. That is, we may not overload them with our woes, pouring into their ears a torrential gush of self, while failing to ease them of their own burdens. This is plain civility: the relationship depends on mutuality, and we may make use of them only if we are careful to let them make use of us. Children are often one-sided in their dealings with bond-kin; one may dominate his bondbrother and chatter endlessly at him without pausing to heed the other's woes. But such things usually come into balance early. to do with bonding the most severe is the one against physical relationships with our bond-kin. In sexual matters we are generally quite free, only we dare not do this one thing. This struck at me most painfully. Not that I yearned for Noim, for that has never been my path, nor is it a common one among us; but Halum was my soul's desire and neither as wife nor as mistress could she ever comfort me. Long hours we sat up together, her hand in mine, telling one another things we could tell no one elseand how easy it would have been for me to draw' her close, part her garments and join my flesh with hers. I would not attempt it. My conditioning held firm; and, as I hope to survive long enough to tell you, even after Schweiz and his potion had changed my soul, still did I respect the sanctity of Halum's body, although I was able to enter her in other ways. But I will not deny my desire for her. Nor can I forget the shock I felt when I learned in boyhood that of all Borthan's women only Halum, my beloved Halum, was denied to me. I was extraordinarily close to Halum in every but the physical way and she was for me the ideal bondsister: open, giving, loving, serene, radiant, adaptable. Not only was she beautiful -- creamyskinned, dark-eyed and dark of hair, slender and graceful -- but also she was remarkable within herself, for her soul was gentle and sleek and supple, a wondrous mixture of purity and wisdom. Thinking of her, I see the image of a forest glade in the mountains black-needled evergreen trees rising close together like shadowy swords springing from a bed of newly fallen snow and a sparkling stream dancing between sun-spattered boulders, everything clean, untainted and self-contained. Sometimes when I was with her I felt impossibly thick and clumsy, a hulking lumbering mountain of dull meat, with an ugly hairy body and stupid ponderous muscles; but Halum had the skill of showing me, with a word, with a laugh, with a wink, that I was being unjust to myself when I let the sight of her lightness and gaiety lead me to wish I was woman-soft and woman-airy. On the other side I was equally close to Noim. He was my foil in many ways: slender where I am burly, crafty where I am direct, cautious and calculating where I am rash, bleak of outlook where I am sunny. With him as with Halum I frequently felt awkward, not really in any bodily sense (for, as I have told you, I move well for a man my size) but in my inward nature. Noim, more mercurial than I, livelier, quicker of wit, seemed to leap and cavort where I merely plodded, and yet the prevailing pessimism of his spirit made him appear deeper than I as well as more buoyant. To give myself credit, Noim looked with envy on me just as I did on him. He was jealous of my great strength furthermore, he confessed that he felt meansouled and petty when he peered into my eyes. "One sees simplicity and power there," he admitted, "and one is aware that one often cheats, that one is lazy, that one breaks faith, that one does a dozen wicked things daily -- and none of these are any more natural to you than dining on your own flesh." You must understand that Halum and Noim were no bond-kin to one another and were linked only by way of their common relationship to me. Noim had a bondsister of his own, a certain Thirga, and Halum was bonded to a girl of Manneran, Nald by name. Through such ties the Covenant creates a chain that clasps our society together, for Thirga had a bondsister, too, and Nald a bondbrother -- and each of them was bonded in turn on the other side -- and so on to form a vast if not infinite series. Obviously one comes in contact often with the bond-kin of one's own bond-kin, though one is not free to assume with them the same privileges one has with those of one's bonding; I frequently saw Noim's Thirga and Halum's Nald, just as Halum saw my Noim and Noim saw my Halum, but there was never anything more than nodding friendship between me and Thirga or me and Nald, while Noim and Halum took to each other with immediate warmth. Indeed I suspected for a time that they might marry one another, which would have been uncommon but not illegal. Halum now sleeps forever under a stone in Manneran, and Noim has become a stranger to me, perhaps even an enemy to me, and the red sand of the Burnt Lowlands blows in my face as I set down these lines. came septarch in Salla, I went, as you know, to the province of Glin. I will not say that I fled to Glin, for no one openly compelled me to leave my native land -- but call my departure a deed of tact. I left in order to spare Slirron the eventual embarrassment of putting me to death, which would have weighed badly upon his soul. One province cannot hold safely the two sons of a late septarch. Glin was my choice because it is customary for exiles from Salla to go to Glin and also because my mother's family held wealth and power there. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I might gain some advantage from that connection. I was about three moontimes short of the age of thirteen when I took my leave of Salla. Among us that is the threshold of manhood; I had reached almost my present height, though I was much more slender and far less strong than I would soon become and my beard had only lately begun to grow full. I knew something of history and government, something of the arts of warfare, something of the skills of hunting, and I had had some training in the practice of the law. Already I had bedded at least a dozen girls and three limes I had known, briefly, the tempests of unhappy love. I had kept the Covenant all my life; my soul was clean and I was at peace with our gods and with my forefathers. In my own eyes at that time I must have seemed hearty, adventurous, capable, honorable and resilient, with all the world spread before me like a shining highway and the future mine for the shaping. The perspective of thirty years tells me that that young man who left Salla then was also naive, gullible, romantic, overly earnest, conventional and clumsy of mind: quite an ordinary youth, in fact, who might have been skinning seapups in some fishing village had he not had the great good fortune to be born a prince. The season of my going was early autumn, after a springtime when all Salla had mourned my father and a summer when all Salla had hailed my brother. The harvest had been poor -- nothing odd in Salla, where the fields yield pebbles and stones more graciously than they do crops and Salla City was choked with, bankrupt husbandmen, hoping to catch some largesse from the new septarch. A dull hot haze hung over the capital day after day and above it lay the first of autumn's heavy clouds, floating in on schedule from the eastern sea. The streets were dusty; the trees had begun to drop their leaves early, even the majestic firethorns outside the septarch's palace; the dung of the farmers' beasts clogged the gutters. These were poor omens for Salla at the beginning of a septarch's reign and to me it seemed like a wise season for getting out. Hven this early, Slirron's temper was fraying and unlucky councilors of state were going off to dungeons. I still was cherished at court, coddled and complimented, plied with fur cloaks and promises of baronies in the mountains, but for how long, how long? Just now Stirron was troubled with guilt that he had inherited the throne and I had nothing and so he treated me softly, but let the dry summer give way to a bitter winter of famine and the scales might shift; envying me my freedom from responsibility, he might well turn on me. I had studied the annals of royal houses well. Such things had happened before. Therefore I readied myself for a hasty exit. Only Noim and Halum knew of my plans. I gathered those few of my possessions that I had no wish to abandon, such things as a ring of ceremony bequeathed by my father, a favorite hunting jerkin of yellow leather and a doublecameo amulet bearing the portraits of my bondsister and bondbrother; all my books I relinquished, for one can get more books wherever one goes, and I did not even take the hornfowl spear, my trophy of my father's death-day, that hung in my palace bedchamber. There was to my name a fairly large amount of money and this I handled in what I believed was a shrewd manner. It was all on deposit in the Royal Salla Bank. First I transferred the bulk of my funds to the six lesser provincial banks, over the course of many days. These new accounts were held jointly with Halum and Noim. Halum then proceeded to make withdrawals, asking that the money be paid into the Commercial and Seafarers Bank of Manneran, for the account of her father Segvord Helalam. If we were detected in this transfer, Halum was to declare that her father had undergone financial reverses and had requested a loan of short duration. Once my assets were safely on deposit in Manneran, Halum asked her father to transfer the money again, this time to an account in my name in the Covenant Bank of Glin. In this zigzag way I got my cash from Salla to Glin without arousing the suspicions of our Treasury officials, who might wonder why a prince of the realm was shipping his patrimony to our rival province of the north. The fatal flaw in all this was that if the Treasury became disturbed about the flow of capital to Manneran, questioned Halum and then made inquiries of her father, the truth would emerge that Segvord prospered and had had no need of the "loan," which would have led to further questions and, probably, to my exposure. But my maneuvers went unnoticed. Lastly I went before my brother to ask his permission to leave the capital, as courtly etiquette required. This was a tense affair, for honor would not let me lie to Stirron, yet I dared not tell him the truth. Long hours I spent with Noim, first, rehearsing my deceptions. I was a slow pupil in chicanery; Noim spat, he cursed, he wept, he slapped his hands together, as time and again he slipped through my guard with a probing question. "You were not meant to be a liar," he told me in despair. "No," I agreed, "this one never was meant to be a liar." northern robing chamber, a dark and somber room of rough stone walls and narrow windows, used mainly for audiences with village chieftains. He meant no offense by it, I think; it was merely where he happened to be when I sent in my equerry with word that I wished a meeting. It was late afternoon; a thin greasy rain was falling outside; in some far tower of the palace a carilloneur was instructing apprentices and leaden bell-tones, scandalously awry, came humming through the drafty walls. Stirron was formally dressed: a bulky gray robe of stormshield furs, tight red woolen leggings, high boots of green leather. The sword of the Covenant was at his side, the heavy glittering pendant of office pressed against his breast, rings of title cluttered his fingers and if memory does not deceive me he wore yet another token of power around his right forearm. Only the crown itself was missing from his regalia. I had seen Stirron garbed this way often enough of late, at ceremonies and meetings of state, but to find him so enveloped in insignia on an ordinary afternoon struck me as almost comical. Was he so insecure that he needed to load himself with such stuff constantly, to reassure himself that he was indeed septarch? Did he feel that he had to impress his own younger brother? Or did he, childlike, take pleasure in these ornaments for peasure's own sake? No matter which, some flaw in Stirron's character was revealed, some inner foolishness. It astounded me that I could find his amusing rather than awesome. Perhaps the genesis of my ultimate rebellion lies in that moment when I walked in on Stirron in all his splendor and had to fight to hold my laughter back. Half a year in the septarchy had left its mark on him. His face was gray and his left eyelid drooped, I suppose from exhaustion. He held his lips tightly compressed and stood in a rigid way, one shoulder higher than the other. Though only two years separated us in age, I felt myself a boy beside him and marveled how the cares of office can etch a young man's visage. It seemed centuries since Stirron and I had laughed together in our bedchambers, whispered all the forbidden words and bared our ripening bodies to one another to make the edgy comparisons of adolescence. Now I offered formal obeisance to my weary royal brother, crossing my arms over my breast and flexing my knees and bowing my head as I murmured, "Lord septarch, long life be yours." Stirron was man enough to deflect my formality with a brotherly grin. He gave me a proper acknowledgment of my my greeting, yes, arms raised and palms turned out, but then he turned it into an embrace, swiftly crossing the room and seizing me. Yet there was something artificial about his gesture, as though he had been studying how to show warmth to his brother, and quickly I was released. He wandered away from me, eyeing a nearby window, and his first words to me were: "A beastly day. A brutal year." "The crown lies heavy, lord septarch?" "You have leave to call your brother by his name." "The strains show in you, Stirron. Perhaps you take Salla's problems too closely to heart." "The people starve," he said. "Shall one pretend that is a trifling thing?" "The people have always starved, year upon year," I said. "But if the septarch drains his soul in worry over them -- " "Enough, Kinnall. You presume." Nothing brotherly about the tone now; he was hard put to hide his irritation with me. He was plainly angered that I had so much as noticed his fatigue, though it was he who had begun our talk with lamenting. The conversation had veered too far toward the intimate. The condition of Stirron's nerves was no affair of mine: it was not my place to comfort him, he had a bondbrother for that. My attempted kindness had been improper and inappropriate. "What do you seek here?" he asked roughly. "The lord septarch's leave to go from the capital." He whirled away from the window and glared at me. His eyes, dull and sluggish until this moment, grew bright and harsh and flickered disturbingly from side to side. "To go? To go where?" "One wishes to accompany one's bondbrother Noim to the northern frontier," I said as smoothly as I could manage. "Noim pays a call on the headquarters of his father, General Luinn Condorit, whom he has not seen this year since your lordship's coronation, and one is asked to travel northward with him for bondlove and friendship." "When would you go?" "Three days hence, if it please the septarch." "And for how long a stay?" Stirron was virtually barking these questions at me. "Until the first snow of winter falls." "Too long. Too long." "One might be absent then a shorter span," I said. "Must you go at all, though?" My right leg quivered shamefully at the knee. I struggled to be calm. "Stirron, consider that one has not left Salla City for so much as an entire day since you assumed the throne. Consider that one cannot justly ask one's bondbrother to journey uncomforted through the northern hills." "Consider that you are the heir to the prime septarchy of Salla," Stirron said, "and that if misfortune comes to your brother while you are in the north, our dynasty is lost." The coldness of his voice, and the ferocity with which he had questioned me a moment earlier, threw me into panic. Would he oppose my going? I said, "No misfortunes are probable, Stirron, and even so, it would be no large task to return from the north if something befell you. Do you fear usurpation so seriously?" "One fears everything, Kinnall, and leaves little to chance." ture me on necessary caution, and on the ambitions of those who surrounded the throne, naming as possible traitors a few lords whom I would have placed among the pillars of the realm. As he spoke, going far beyond the strictures of the Covenant in exposing his uncertainties to me, I saw with amazement what a tortured, terrified man my brother had become in this short time of septarchy; and I realized, too, that I was not going to be granted my leave. He went on and on, fidgeting as he spoke, rubbing his talismans of authority, several times picking up his scepter from where it lay on an ancient woodtopped table, walking to the window and coming back from it, pitching his voice now low and now high as though searching for the best septarchical resonances. I was frightened for him. He was a man of my own considerable size and at that time much thicker in body and greater in strength than I all my life I had worshiped him and modeled myself upon him -- and here he was corroded with terror and committing the sin of telling me about it. Had just these few moontimes of supreme power brought Stirron to this collapse? Was the loneliness of the septarchy that awful for him? On Borthan we are born lonely and lonely we live and lonely we die; why should wearing a crown be so much more difficult than bearing the burdens we inflict upon ourselves each day? Stirron told me of assassins' plots and of revolution brewing among the farmers who thronged the town and even hinted that our father's death had been no accident. I tried to persuade myself that hornfowl could be trained to slay a particular man in a group of thirteen men. I would not swallow the notion. It appeared that royal responsibilities had driven Stirron mad. I was reminded, of a duke some years back who displeased my father, was sent for half a year to a dungeon and tortured each day that the sun could be seen. He had entered prison a sturdy and vigorous figure -- when he emerged he was so ruined that he befouled his own clothes with his dung and did not know it. How soon would Stirron be brought to that ? Perhaps it was just as well, I thought, that he was refusing me permission to go away, lor it might be better that I remain at the capital, ready to take his place if he crumbled beyond repair. But he amazed me at the finish of his rambling oration; for it had taken him clear across the room to an alcove hung with dangling silver chains. At the end, suddenly bunching the chains and yanking a dozen of them from their mountings, he swung round to face me. "Give your pledge, Kinnall, that you will come back from the north in time to attend the royal wedding!" I was doubly pronged. For the last several minutes I had begun to make plans on the basis of staying in Salla City; now I found I could depart after all and was not sure I should, in view of Stirron's deterioration. And then, too, he demanded from me a promise of swift return-and how could I give the septarch such a promise without lying to him, a sin I was not prepared to commit? So far all that I had told him had been the truth, though only the part of the truth; I did plan to travel north with Noim to visit his father, I would remain in northern Salla until winter's first snow. How, though, could I set a date for my coming back to the capital? My brother was due to marry, forty days hence, the youngest daughter of Bryggil, septarch of Salla's southeastern district. It was a cunning match. So far as the traditional order of primacy went, Bryggil stood seventh and lowest in the hierarchy of Salla's septarchs, but he was the oldest, the cleverest and the most respected of the seven, now that my father was gone. To combine Bryggil's shrewdness and stature with the prestige that accrued to Stirron by virtue of his rank as prime septarch would be to cement the dynasty of our family to the throne. And no doubt sons shortly would come marching out of Bryggil's daughter's loins, relieving me of my position as heir apparent: her fertility must have passed the necessary tests and of Stirron's there could be no question, since he had scattered a litter of bastards already all over Salla. I would have certain ceremonial roles to play at the wedding as brother to the septarch. I had wholly forgotten the wedding. If I skipped out of Salla before it came about I would wound my brother in a way that saddened me. But if I stayed here, with Stirron in this unstable state, I had no guarantee of being a free man when the nuptial day arrived, or even of still owning my head. Nor was there any sense in going north with Noim if I bound myself to return in forty days. It was a hard choice: to postpone my departure and run the risks of my brother's royal whims, or to leave now, knowing I was taking on myself the stain of breaking a pledge to my septarch. The Covenant teaches us that we should welcome dilemmas, for it toughens character to grapple with the insoluble and find a solution. In this instance events made a mockery of the Covenant's lofty moral teachings. As I hesitated in anguish, Slirron's telephone summoned him; he snatched its handpiece, jabbed at the scrambler and listened to five minutes of gibberish, his face darkening and his eyes growing fiery. At length he broke the contact and peered up at me as though I were a stranger to him. "They are eating the flesh of the newly dead in Spoksa," he muttered. "On the slopes of the Kongoroi they dance to demons in hopes of finding food. Insantiy! Insanity!" He clenched his fists, strode to the window, thrust his face to it, closed his eyes and, I still think, forgot my presence for a time. Again the telephone asked for him. Stirron jerked back like one who has been stabbed and started toward the machine. Noticing me standing frozen near the door, he fluttered his hands impatiently at me and said, "Go, will you? Off with your bondbrother, wherever you go. This province! This famine! Father, father, father!" He seized the handpiece. I started to offer a genuflection of parting and Stirron furiously waved me from the room, sending me unpledged and unchecked toward the borders of his realm. IV afterward, just the two of us and a small contingent of servants. The weather was bad, for summer's dryness had given way not merely to the thick dreary gray clouds of autumn but to a foresampling of winter's heavy rains. "You'll be dead of the mildew before you see Glin," Halum told us cheerfully. "If you don't drown in the mud of the Grand Salla Highway." She stayed with us, at Noim's house, on the eve of our departure -- sleeping chastely apart in the little chamber just under the roof -- and joined us for breakfast as we made ready to go. I had never seen her looking lovelier; that morning she wore a bloom of shimmering beauty that cut through the murk of the drizzly dawn like a torch in a cave. Perhaps what enhanced her so greatly then was that she was about to pass from my life for an unknown length of time and, conscious of my self-inflicted loss, I magnified her attractiveness. She was clad in a gown of delicate golden chainmesh, beneath which only a gossamer wrap concealed her naked form -- and her body, shifting this way and that under its flimsy coverings, aroused in me thoughts that left me drenched in shame. Halum then was in the ripeness of early womanhood and had been for several years; it had already begun to puzzle me that she remained unwed. Though she and Noim and I were of the same age, she had leaped free of childhood before us, as girls will do, and I had come to think of her as older than the two of us. because for a year she had had breasts and the monthly (low while Noim and I had still been without hair on cheek or body. And, while we had caught up to her in physical maturity, she was still more adult in her bearing than my bondbrother or #, her voice more smoothly modulated, her manner more poised, and it was impossible for me to shake off that notion that she was senior sister to us. Who soon must accept some suitor, lest she become overripe and sour in her maidenhood; I was suddenly certain that Halum would marry while I was off hiding in Glin -- and the thought of some sweaty stranger planting babies between her thighs so sickened me that I turned away from her at the table and lurched to the window to gulp the humid air into my throbbing lungs. The servants waited in the street. The groundcars were ready. Halum embraced us, clasping Noim first, then me, for I was the one who would not be returning and that called for a longer farewell. When she came into my arms I was stunned by the intensity with which she offered herself; her lips to my lips, her belly to my belly, her breasts crushed against my chest. On tiptoes she strained to press her body into mine and for a moment I felt her trembling, until I began myself to tremble. It was not a sisterly kiss and certainly not a bondsislerly kiss; it was the passionate kiss of a bride sending her young husband off to a war from which she knows there is no coming back. I was singed by Halum's sudden fire. I fell as though a veil had been ripped away and some Halum I had not known before had (lung herself against me, one who burned with the needs of the tlesh, one who did not mind revealing her forbidden hunger for a bondbrother's body. Or did I imagine those things in her? It seemed to me that for a single protracted instant Halum repressed nothing and allowed her arms and lips to tell me the truth about her feelings; but I could not respond in kind. I had trained myself too well in the proper attitudes toward one's bondsister and I was distant and cool as I clasped her. I may even have thrust her back a little, shocked by her forwardness. And, as I say, there may have been no forwardness at all except in my overwrought mind, but only legitimate grief at a parting. In any event the intensity went quickly from Halum; her embrace slackened and she released me. She appeared downcast and chilled, as if I had rebuffed her cruelly by being so prim when she was giving so much. "Come, now," Noim said impatiently and, trying somehow to rescue the situation, I lifted Halum's hand and touched my palm lightly to her cool palm. I smiled an awkward smile and she smiled even more awkwardly. Perhaps we would have said a stumbling word or two, but Noim caught me by the elbow and stolidly led me outside to begin my journey away from my homeland. to a drainer before leaving Salla City. I had not planned on doing so and it irritated Noim that I took the time for it; but an uncontrollable yearning for the comforts of religion rose up in me as we neared the outskirts of the capital. We had been traveling almost an hour. The rain had thickened and gusty winds slammed it against the windscreens of our groundcars, so that cautious driving was in order. The cobbled streets were slippery. Noim drove one of the cars, I sitting sullenly beside him; the other, with our servants, followed close behind. The morning was young and the city still slept. Each passing street was a surgery to me, for a segment of my life was ripped off by it: there goes the palace compound, there go the spires of the House of Justice, there the university's great gray blocky buildings, there the godhouse where my royal father brought me into the Covenant, there the Museum of Mankind that I visited so often with my mother to stare at the treasures from the stars. Circling through the fine residential district that borders the Skangen Canal, I even spied the ornate townhouse of the Duke of Kongoroi, on whose handsome daughter's silken bedsheets I had left my virginity in a clammy puddle, not too many years before. In this city I had lived all my life and I might never see it again; my yesterdays were washing away, like the topsoil of Salla's sad farms under the knives of the winter rains. Since boyhood I had known that one day my brother would be septarch and this city would cease to have a place for me, but yet I had denied that to myself, saying, It will not happen soon, perhaps it will not happen at all. And my father lay dead in his firethorn coffin; my brother crouched beneath the awful weight of his crown and I was fleeing from Salla before my life had fairly begun. And such a mood of self-pity came over me that I did not dare even to speak to Noim, though what is a bondbrother for if not to ease one's soul? And when we were driving through the ramshackle streets of Salla Old Town, not far from the city walls, I spied a dilapidated godhouse and said to Noim, "Pull up at the corner here. One must go within to empty himself." Noim, fretful, did not want to spare the time and made as if to drive on. "Would you deny one the godright?" I asked him hotly and only then, simmering and cross, did he halt the car and back it up to let me out by the godhouse. Its face was worn and peeling. An inscription beside the door was illegible. The pavement before it was cracked and tilted. Salla Old Town has a pedigree of more than a thousand years; some of its buildings have been continuously inhabited since the founding of the city, though most are in ruins, for the life of that district ended, in effect, when one of the medieval septarchs chose to move his court to our present palace atop Skangen Hill, much to the south. At night Salla Old Town comes alive with pleasure-seekers, who guzzle the blue wine in cellar cabarets, but at this misty hour it was a grim place. Blank stone walls faced me from every building; we have a fashion of making mere slits serve for windows in Salla, but here they carried it to an extreme. I wondered if the godhouse could have a scanning machine in working order to watch my approach. Yes, as it happened. When I neared the godhouse dogr it swung partly open and a scrawny man in drainer's robes looked out. He was ugly, of course. Who ever saw a handsome drainer? It is a profession for the ill-favored. This one had greenish skin, heavily pocked, and a rubbery snout of a nose and a dimness in one eye; standard for his trade. He gave me a fishy stare and, by his wariness, seemed to be regretting having opened the door. "The peace of all gods be on you," I said. "Here is one in need of your craft." He eyed my costly costume, my leather jerkin and my heavy jewelry, studied the size and swagger of me and evidently concluded I was some young bully of the aristocracy out to stir trouble in the slums. "It is to early in the day," he said uneasily. "You come too soon for comfort." "You would not refuse a sufferer." "It is too early." "Come, come, let one in. A troubled soul stands here." must, and with many a twitch of his longnosed face he admitted me. Within there was the reek of rot. The old woodwork was impregnated with the damp, the draperies were moldering, the furniture had been gnawed by insects. The lighting was dim. The drainer's wife, as ugly as the drainer himself, skulked about. He led me to his chapel, a small sweaty room off the living-quarters, and left me kneeling by the cracked and yellowing mirror while he lit the candles. He robed himself and finally came to me where I kneeled. He named his fee. I gasped. "Too much by half," I said. He reduced it by a fifth. When I still refused, he told me to find my priesting elsewhere, but I would not rise and, grudgingly, he brought the price of his services down another notch. Still it was probably five limes what he charged the folk of Salla Old Town for the same benefit, but he knew I had money and, thinking of Noim fuming in the car, I could not bring myself to haggle. "Done," I said. Next he brought me the contract. I have said that we of Borthan are suspicious people; have I indicated how we rely on contracts?. A man's word is merely bad air. Before a soldier beds a whore they come to the terms of their bargain and scrawl it on paper. The drainer gave me a standard form, promising me that all I said would be held in strictest confidence, the drainer merely acting as intermediary between me and the god of my choice and I, for my part, pledging that I would hold the drainer to no liability for the knowledge he would have of me, that I would not call him as witness in a lawsuit or make him my alibi in some prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. I signed. He signed. We exchanged copies and I gave him his money. "Which god would you have preside here?" he asked. "The god who protects travelers," I told him. We do not call our gods aloud by their names. He lit a candle of the appropriate color pinkand put it beside the mirror. By that it was understood that the chosen god would accept my words. "Behold your face," the drainer said. "Put your eyes to your eyes." I stared at the mirror. Since we shun vanity, it is not usual to examine one's face except on these occasions of religion. "Open now your soul," the drainer commanded. "Let your griefs and dreams and hungers and sorrows emerge." "A septarch's son it is who flees his homeland," I began and at once the drainer jerked to attention, impaled by my news. Though I did not take my eyes from the mirror, I guessed that he was scrabbling around to look at the contract and see who had signed it. "Fear of his brother," I continued, "leads him to go abroad, but yet he is sore of soul as he departs." I went on in that vein for some while. The drainer made the usual interjections every time I faltered, prying words out of me in his craft's cunning way. But shortly there was no need for such midwivery, for the words gushed freely. I told him of my desire for my bondsister and how her embrace had unsettled me; I told him how close I had come to lying to Stirron; I confessed that I would miss the royal wedding and give my brother injury thereby; I admitted several small sins of self-esteem, such as anyone commits daily. The drainer listened. We pay them to listen and to do nothing but listen, until we are drained and healed. Such is our holy communion that we lift these toads from the mud, set them up in their godhouses and buy their patience with our money. It is permitted under the Covenant to say anything to a drainer, even if it is drivel, even if it is a shameful catalog of throttled lusts and hidden filth. We may bore a drainer as we have no right to bore our bondkin, for it is the drainer's obligation by contract to sit with the patience of the hills as we speak of ourselves. We need not worry what the drainer's problems may be, nor what he thinks of us, nor whether he would be happier doing something else. He has his calling and he takes his fee and he must serve those who have need of him. A time was when I felt it was a miraculously fine scheme to give us drainers in order that we might rid our hearts of pain. Too much of my life was gone before I realized that to open one's self to a drainer is no more comforting than to make love to one's own hand: there are better ways of loving, there are happier ways of opening. But I did not know that then and I squatted by the mirror, getting the best healing that money could buy. Whatever residue of wrongness was in my soul came forth, syllable smoothly following syllable, the way sweet liquor will flow when one taps the thorny flanks of the gnarled and repellent-looking flesh-trees that grow by the Gulf of Sumar. As I spoke the candles caught me in their spell and by the flickering of them I was drawn into the curved surface of the mirror so that I was drawn out of myself; the drainer was a mere blur in the darkness, unreal, unimportant, and I spoke now directly to the god of travelers, who would heal me and send me on my way. And I believed that this was so. I will not say that I imagined a literal god-place where our deities sit on call to serve us, but I had then an abstract and metaphorical understanding of our religion by which it seemed to me, in its way, as real as my right arm. My flow of words halted and the drainer made no attempt to renew the outpour. He murmured the phrases of absolution, snuffed the god-candle between two fingers and rose to doff his robes. Still I kneeled, weak and quivering from my draining, lost in reveries. I felt cleansed and purified, stripped of my soul's grit and debris and, in the music of that moment, was only dimly aware of the squalor about me. The chapel was a place of magic and the drainer was aflame with divine beauty. "Up," he said, nudging me with the tip of his sandal. "Out. Off about your journeys." The sound of his splintery voice doused all the wonder. I stood up, shaking my head to cure it of its new lightness, while the drainer pushed me into the corridor. He was no longer afraid of me, that ugly little man, even though I might be a septarch's son and could kill him with one wad of my spittle, for I had told him of my cowardice, of my forbidden hunger for Halum, of all the cheapnesses of my spirit. And that knowledge reduced me in his eyes: no man newly drained can awe his drainer. The rain was even worse when I left the building. Noim sat scowling in the car, his forehead pressed to the steering stick. He looked up and tapped his wrist to tell me I had dallied too long at the godhouse. "Feel better now that your bladder's empty?" he asked. "What?" "That is, did you have a good soul-pissing in there?" "A foul phrase, Noim." "One grows blasphemous when his patience is extended too far." He kicked the starter and we rolled forward. Shortly we were at the ancient walls of Salla City, by the noble tower-bedecked opening known as Glin Door, which was guarded by four sour-faced and sleepy warriors in dripping uniforms. They paid no heed to us. Noim drove through the gate and past a sign welcoming us to the Grand Salla Highway. Salla City dwindled swiftly behind us; northward we rushed toward Glin. T HE Grand Salla Highway passes through one of our best farming districts, the rich and fertile Plain of Nand, which each spring receives a gift of topsoil stripped from the skin of West Salla by our busy streams. At that time the septarch of the Nand district was a notorious coinclutcher and, thanks to his penury, the highway was in poor repair there, so, as Halum had predicted in jest, we were hard put to wallow through the mud that clogged the road. It was good to finish with Nand and enter North Salla, where the land is a mixture of rock and sand and the people live on weeds and on scuttling things that they take from the sea. Groundcars are unusual sights in North Salla and twice we were stoned by hungry and sullen townsfolk, who found our mere passage through their unhappy place an insult. But at least the road was free of mud. Noim's father's troops were stationed in extreme North Salla, on the lower bank of the River Huish. This is the grandest of Velada Borlhan's rivers. It begins as a hundred trifling brooks trickling down the eastern slopes of the Huishtors in the northern part of West Salla; these brooks merge in the foothills to become a swift stream, gray and turbulent, that rushes through a narrow granite canyon marked by six great steplike plunges. Emerging from those wild cascades onto its alluvial plain, the Huish proceeds more serenely on a northeastern course toward the sea, growing wider and wider in the flatlands and splitting ultimately so that, at its broad delta, it gives itself to the ocean through eight mouths. In its rapid western reaches the Huish forms the boundary between Salla and Glin; at its placid easternmost end it divides Glin from Krell. For all its length the great river is unbridged and one might think little need exists to fortify its banks against invaders from the far side. But many times in Salla's history have the men of Glin crossed the Huish by boat to make war and just as many times have we of Salla gone to ravage Glin, nor is the record of neighborliness between Glin and Krell any happier. So all along the Huish sprout military outposts, and generals like Luinn Condorit consume their lives studying the riverfogs for glimpses of the enemy. I stayed a short while at Noim's father's camp. The general was not much like Noim, being a largefeatured, heavy man whose face, eroded by time and frustration, was like a contour map of bouldery North Salla. Not once in fifteen years had there been any significant clash along the border he guarded and I think that idleness had chilled his soul; he said little, scowled often, turned every statement into a bitter grumble and retreated speedily from conversation into private dreams. They must have been dreams of war; no doubt he could not glance at the river without wishing that it swarmed with the landing-craft of Glin. A dull time we had of it there. Noim was bound by filial ties to call upon his father, but they had nothing to say to one another and the general was a stranger to me. I had told Stirron I would stay with Noim's father until the first snow of winter fell and I was true to my word, yet, luckily it was no lengthy visit I made; winter comes early in the north. On my fifth day there white sprinkles fluttered down and I was released from my self-imposed pledge. Ferries, shuttling between terminals in three places, link Salla to Glin, except in time of war. Noim drove me to the nearest terminal one black dawn and solemly we embraced and made our farewells. I said I would send my address, when I had one in Glin, so that he could keep me informed of doings in Salla. He promised to look after Halum. We talked vaguely of when he and she and I would meet again; perhaps they would visit me in Glin next year, perhaps we would all three go on holiday in Manneran. We made these plans with little conviction in our voices. Then we had no words left. The ferry beckoned me with a bellow of its horn. I clasped Noim's arm and we made farewells, hurriedly. The last thing I said to him was, "When you see the septarch, tell him that his brother loves him." Then I went aboard. The crossing was too quick. Less than an hour and I found myself on the alien soil of Glin. The immigration officials examined me brusquely, but they thawed at the sight of my passport, bright red to denote my place in the nobility, wih a golden stripe to show that I was of the septarch's family. At once I had my visa, good for an indefinite stay. Such officials are a gossipy sort; beyond question they were on the telephone the instant I left them, sending word to their government that a prince of Salla was in the land -- and I suppose that not much later that bit of information was in the hands of Salla's diplomatic representatives in Glin, who would relay it to my brother for his displeasure. Across the way from the customs shed I came upon a branch of the Covenant Sank of Glin and exchanged my Salla money for the currency of the northerners. With my new funds I hired a driver to take me to the capital city, which they call Glain, half a day's journey north of the border. The road was narrow and winding and traversed a bleak countryside where winter's touch had long ago pulled the leaves from the trees. Dirty snow was banked high. Glin is a frosty province. It was settled by men of a puritan nature, who found the living too easy in Salla and felt that if they remained there they might be tempted away from the Covenant; failing to reform our forefathers into greater piety, they left, crossing the Huish by rafts to hack out a livelihood in the north. Hard folk for a hard land; however poor the farming is in Salla it is twice as unrewarding in Glin; there people live mainly by fishing, by manufacturing, by the jugglements of commercial dealings and by piracy. But that my mother had sprung from Glin, I would never have chosen it for my place of exile. Not that I gained anything from my family ties. V A walled city it is, like Salla's capital, but otherwise not much like it. Salla City has grace and power; its buildings are made of great blocks of 'substantial stone, black basalt and rosy granite quarried in the mountains, and its streets are wide and sweeping, affording noble vistas and splendid promenades. Our custom of letting narrow slits stand in place of true windows apart, Salla City is an open, inviting place, the architecture of which announces to the world the boldness and selfsufficiency of its citizens. But that dismal Glain! Oh! Glain is fashioned of scruffy yellow brick, here and there trimmed with miserable poor pink sandstone that rubs to particles at a finger's nudge. It has no streets, only alleyways; the houses jostle one another as if afraid that some interloper may try to slip between them if they relax their guard. An avenue in Glain would not impress a gutter in Salla. And the architects of Glain have created a city fit only for a nation of drainers, since everything is lopsided, awry, uneven and coarse. My brother, who had once been to Glain on a diplomatic errand, had described the place to me, but I put his harsh words off to mere patriotic prejudice; now I saw that Stirron had been too kind. Nor were the folk of Glain more lovely than their city. On a world where suspicion and secrecy are godly virtues one expects to find charm in short supply; yet I found the Glainish virtuous beyond all necessity. Dark clothes, dark frowns, dark souls, closed and shrunken hearts. Their speech itself displays their constipation of spirit. The language of Glin is the same as that of Salla, though the northerners have pronounced accents, clipping their syllables and shifting their vowels. That did not disturb me, but their syntax of self-effacement did. My driver, who was not a city man and therefore seemed almost friendly, left me at a hostelry where he thought I would have kind treatment. I entered and said, "One would have a room for tonight and for some days beyond this one, perhaps." The innkeeper stared balefully at me as if I had said, " would have a room " or something equally filthy. Later I discovered that even our usual polite circumlocution seems too vain for a northerner; I should not have said, "One would have a room -- " but rather, "Is there a room to be had?" At a restaurant it is wrong to say, "One will dine on thus and thus -- " but rather, "These are the dishes that have been chosen." And so on and so on, twisting everything into a cumbersome passive form to avoid the sin of acknowledging one's own existence. For my ignorance the innkeeper gave me his meanest room and charged me twice the usual tariff. By my speech I had branded myself a man of Salla; why should he be courteous? But in signing the contract for my night's lodgings I had to show him my passport, which made him gasp when he saw that he was host to a visiting prince; he softened more than a little, asking me if I would have wine sent to my room, or maybe a buxom Glainish wench. I took the wine but declined the wench, for I was very young and overly frightened of the diseases that might lurk in foreign loins. That night I sat alone in my room, watching snowflakes drowning in a murky canal below my window and feeling more isolated from humanity than ever before, ever since. found the courage to call upon my mother's kin. I strolled the city for hours every day, keeping my cloak wrapped close against the winds and marveling at the ugliness of all I beheld, people and structures. I located the embassy of Salla and lurked outside it, not wishing to go in but merely cherishing the link to my homeland that the squat grim building provided. I bought heaps of cheaply printed books and read far into the night to learn something of my adopted province: there was a history of Glin, a guidebook to the city of Glain and an interminable epic poem dealing with the founding of the first settlements north of the Huish and much else. I dissolved my loneliness in wine not the wine of Glin, for none is made there, but rather the good sweet golden wine of Manneran, that they import in giant casks. I slept poorly. One night I dreamed that Stirron had died of a fit and a search was being made for me. Several times in my sleep I saw the hornfowl strike my father dead; this is a dream that still haunts me, coming twice or thrice a year. I wrote long letters to Halum and Noim and tore them up, for they stank of self-pity. I wrote one to Stirron, begging him to forgive me for fleeing, and tore that up too. When all else failed I asked the innkeeper for a wench. He sent me a skinny girl a year or two older than I, with odd large breasts that dangled like inflated rubber bags. "It is said you are a prince of Salla," she declared coyly, lying down and parting her thighs. Without replying I covered her and she wriggled her hips so fiercely that the end came for me within half a moment. I was angered at myself and turned my wrath on her. She ran from my room still naked, terrified more, I think, by my obscenities than by my wrath. I soaped myself for an hour afterward. In my naivete I feared that the innkeeper would evict me for speaking vulgarly to her, but he said nothing. Even in Glin, one need not be polite to whores. I realized that there had been a strange pleasure in shouting those words at her. I yielded to curious reveries of fantasy, in which I imagined the big-breasted slut naked on my bed, while I stood over her crying, I! I! I! I! I! Two nights later, I asked the innkeeper for another wench. Thus I spent my patrimony in the capital of puritan Glin, wenching and drinking and loitering. When the stench of my own idleness offended me I put down my timidity and went to see my Glainish relatives. My mother had been a daughter of a prime septarch of Glin; he was dead, as was his son and successor; now his son's son, Truis, my mother's nephew, held the throne. It seemed too forward to me to go seeking preferment from my royal cousin directly. Truis of Glin would have to weigh matters of state as well as matters of kinship and might not want to aid the runaway of Salla's prime septarch, lest it lead him into friction with Stirron. But I had an aunt, Nioll, my mother's younger sister, who had often been in Salla City in my mother's lifetime and who had held me fondly when I was a babe; would she not help me? She had married power to power. Her husband was the Marquis of Huish, who held great influence at the septarch's court, and also -- for in Glin it is not thought unseemly for the nobility to dabble in commerce -- controlled his province's wealthiest factor-house. These factor-houses are something akin to banks, but of another species; they lend money to brigands and merchants and lords of industry, only at ruinous rates and always taking a slice of ownership in any enterprise they aid; thus they insinuate their tentacles into a hundred organizations and attain immense leverage in economic matters. In Salla the factor-houses were forbidden a century ago, but in Glin they" thrive almost as a second government. I had no love for the system, but I preferred joining it to begging. Some inquiries at the inn gained me directions to the palace of the marquis. By Glainish standards it was an imposing structure of three interlocking wings beside a mirror-smooth artificial lake in the aristocrats' sector of the city. I made no attempt to talk my way inside; I had come prepared with a note, informing the marquise that her nephew Kinnall, the septarch's son of Salla, was in Glain and wished the favor of an audience; he could be found at such-and-such a hostelry. I returned to my lodgings and waitedand on the third day the innkeeper, popeyed with "awe, came to my room to tell me I had a visitor in the livery of the Marquis of Huish. Nioll had sent a car for me; I was taken to her palace, which was far more lavish within than without, and she received me in a great hall cunningly paneled with mirrors set at angles to other mirrors to create an illusion of infinity. S HE had aged greatly in the six or seven years I last had seen her, but my amazement at her white hair and furrowed face was swallowed up in her astonishment over my transformation from tiny child to hulking man in so short a time. We embraced in the style of Glin, fingertips to fingertips; she offered condolences on the death of my father and apologies for not having attended Stirron's coronation; then she asked me what brought me to Glin. I explained and she showed no surprise. Did I propose to dwell here permanently? I did, I said. And how would I support myself? By working in the factorhouse of her husband, I explained, if such a position could be procured for me. She did not act as though she found my ambition unreasonable, but merely asked if I had any skills that might recommend me to the marquis. To this I replied that I had been trained in the law codes of Salla (not mentioning how incomplete my training was) and might be of value in the factor-house's dealings with that province; also, I said, I had connections of bonding to Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port in Manneran, and could serve the firm well in its Manneran business; lastly, I remarked, I was young and strong and ambitious and would place myself wholly in the service of the factorhouse's interests, for our mutual advantage. These statements seemed to sit smoothly with my aunt and she promised to gain for me an interview with the marquis himself. I left her palace much pleased with my prospects. Several days later came word to the hostelry that I should present myself at the offices of the factorhouse. My appointment, however, was not with the Marquis of Huish; rather, I was to see one of his executives, a certain Sisgar. I should have taken that as an omen. This man was smooth to the point of oiliness, with a beardless face and no eyebrows and a bald head that looked as if it had been waxed. He wore a dark green robe that was at once properly austere and subtly ostentatious. He questioned me briefly about my training and experience, discovering in some ten queries that I had had little of the former and none of the latter; but he exposed my failings in a gentle and amiable way and I assumed that despite my ignorance my high birth and kinship to the marquise would gain me a post. Alas for complacency! I had begun to hatch a dream of climbing to great responsibilities in this factor-house when I caught with only half an ear the words of Sisgar, telling me, "Times are hard, as surely your grace comprehends, and it is unfortunate that you come to us at a time when retrenching is necessary. The advantages of giving you employment are many, yet the problems are extreme. The marquis wishes you to know that your offer of service was greatly appreciated and it is his hope to bring you into the firm when economic conditions permit." With many bows and a pleasant smile of dismissal he drove me from his office and I was on the street before I realized how thoroughly I had been destroyed. They could give me nothing, not even a fifth assistant clerkship in some village office! How was this possible? I nearly rushed back within, planning to cry. This is a mistake -- you deal with your seplarch's cousin here -- you reject the nephew of the marquise! But they knew those things and yet they shut their doors to me. When I telephoned my aunt to express my shock I was told that she had gone abroad to pass the winter in leafy Manneran. E ventually what had occurred became clear to me. My aunt had spoken of me to the marquis and the marquis had conferred with the septarch Truis, who, concluding that it might embarrass him with Stirron to allow me any kind of employ, instructed the marquis to turn me away. In my fury I thought of going straight to Truis to protest, but I saw the futility of that soon enough and, since my protector, Nioll, had plainly gone out of Glin to shake herself free of me I knew there was no hope in that direction. I was alone in Glain with the winter coming on and held no position in this alien place, where my lofty birth was worse than useless to me. Harder blows followed. Presenting myself at the Covenant Bank of Glin one morning to withdraw funds for living expenses, I learned that my account had been sequestered at the request of the Grand Treasurer of Salla, who was investigating the possibility of an illegal transfer of capital out of that province. By blustering and waving my royal passport about, I managed to break loose enough money for seven days' food and lodging, but the rest of my savings was lost to me, for I had no stomach for the kind of appeals and maneuvers that might free it. Next I was visited at my hostelry by a diplomat of Salla, a jackal of an undersecretary who reminded me, with many a genuflection and formula of respect, that my brother's wedding would shortly lake place and I was expected to return and serve as a ring-linker. Knowing that I would never leave Salla City again if ever I gave myself into Stirron's hands, I explained that urgent business required me to remain in Glain during the season of the nuptials and asked that my deep regrets be conveyed to the septarch. The undersecretary received this with professional grace, but it was not hard for me to detect the savage gleam of pleasure beneath his outer mask: I was buying me trouble, he was telling himself, and he would gladly help me close the contract. On the fourth day thereafter my innkeeper came to tell me that I could no longer stay at the hostelry, for my passport had been revoked and I had no legal status in Cilin. This was an impossibility. A royal passport such as I carried is granted for life and is valid in every province of Velada Borthan except in times of war; and there was no war at the moment between Salla and Glin. The innkeeper shrugged away my words; he showed me his notice from the police, ordering him to evict his illegal alien, and he suggested that if I had objections I should take the matter up with the appropriate bureau of the Glinish civil service. I regarded filing such an appeal as unwise. My eviction had not come about by accident and should I appear at any government office I was likely to find myself arrested and hustled across the Huish into Stirron's grasp forthwith. Seeing such an arrest as the most probable next development, I wondered how to elude the government agents. Now I sorely felt the absence of my bondbrother and bondsister, for where else could I turn for help and advice? Nowhere in Glin was there anyone to whom I might say, One is frightened, one is in graveperil, one asks assistance of you. Everyone's soul was walled against me by stony custom. In all the world were only two whom I could regard as confidants and they were far away. I must find my own salvation. I would go into hiding, I decided. The innkeeper granted me a few hours to prepare myself. I shaved my beard, traded my royal cloak for the dim rags of another lodger nearly my height and arranged the pawn of my ring of ceremony. My remaining possessions I bundled together to serve as a hump on my back, and I hobbled out of the hostelry doubled up, with one eye sealed shut and my mouth twisted far around to one side. Whether it was a disguise that could have fooled anyone, I cannot say; but no one waited to arrest me, and thus uglified I walked out of Glain under a cold, thin rain that soon turned to snow. VI ern gate (for it was there my feet had taken me) a heavy truck came rumbling by me and its treads rolled through a pool of half-frozen slush, spraying me liberally. I halted to scrape the chilly stuff from my leggings; the truck halted, too, and the driver clambered down, exclaiming. "There is cause for apology here. It was not intended to douse you so!" This courtesy so astounded me that I stood to my full height and let the distortions slip from my features. Evidently the driver had thought me a feeble, bent old man; he showed amazement at my transformation and laughed aloud. I knew not what to say. Into my gaping silence he declared, "There is room for one, to ride, if you have the need or the whim." Into my mind sprang a bright fantasy: he would drive me toward the coast, where I would sign on aboard a merchant vessel bound for Manneran, and in that happy tropical land I would throw myself on the mercies of my bondsister's father, escaping all this harrassment. "Where are you bound?" I asked. "Westward, into the mountains." So much for Manneran. I accepted the ride all the same. He offered me no contract of defined liabilities, but I let that pass. For some minutes we did not speak; I was content to listen to the slap of the treads on the snowy road and think of the distance growing between myself and the police of Glain. "Outlander, are you?" he asked at last. "Indeed." Fearing that some alarm might be out for a man of Salla, I chose belatedly to adopt the soft slurred speech of southern folk that I had learned from Halum, hoping he would come to believe that I had not spoken first to him with Sallan accents. "You travel with a native of Manneran, who finds your winter a strange and burdensome thing." "What brought you north?" he asked. "The settlement of one's mother's estate. She was a woman of Glain." "Did the lawyers treat you well, then?" "Her money melted in their hands, leaving nothing." "The usual story. You're short of cash, eh?" "Desitute," I admitted. "Well, well, one understands your situation, for one has been there oneself. Perhaps something can be done for you." I realized from his phrasing, from his failure to use the Glinish passive construction, that he, too, must be an outlander. Swinging round to face him, I asked, "Is one right that you likewise are from elsewhere?" "This is true." "Your accent is unfamiliar. Some western province?" "Oh, no, no." "Not Salla, then?" "Manneran," he said and burst into hearty laughter. He covered my shame and confusion by telling me, "You do the accent well, friend. But you needn't make the effort longer." "One hears no Manneran in your voice," I mumbled. "One has lived long in Glin," he said, "and one's voice is a soup of inflections." I had not fooled him for a moment, but he made no attempts to penetrate my identity and seemed not to care who I might be or where I came from. We talked easily a while. He told me that he owned a lumber mill in western Glin, midway up the flanks of the Huishtors where the tall yellowneedled honey-trees grow; before we had driven much farther along he was offering me a job as a logger in his camp. The pay was poor, he said, but one breathed clean air there, government officials were never seen and such things as passports and certificates of status did not matter. camp was beautifully situated above a sparkling mountain lake which never froze, for it was fed by a warm spring whose source was said to be deep beneath the Burnt Lowlands. Tremendous ice-topped Huishtor peaks hung above us and not far away was Glin Gate, the pass through which one goes from Glin to the Burnt Lowlands, crossing a bitter corner of the Frozen Lowlands on the way. He had a hundred men in his employ, rough and foul-mouthed, forever shouting "#" and "me" without shame, but they were honest and hardworking men and I had never been close to their sort before. My plan was to stay there through the winter, saving my pay, and go off to Manneran when I had earned the price of my passage. Some news of the outer world reached the camp from time to time, though, and I learned in this way that the Glinish authorities were seeking a certain young prince of Salla, who was believed to have gone insane and was wandering somewhere in Glin; the septarch Stirron urgently wished the unhappy young man to be returned to his homeland for the medical care he so desperately needed. Suspecting that the roads and ports would be watched, I extended my stay in the mountains through the spring and, my caution deepening, I stayed the summer also. In the end I spent something more than a year there. It was a year that changed me greatly. We worked hard, felling the huge trees in all weathers, stripping boughs, feeding them to the mill. Long, tiring days they were, and chilly onesbut followed by plenty of hot wine at night and every tenth day a platoon of women were brought in from a nearby town to amuse us. My weight increased by half again, all of it hard muscle, and I grew taller until I surpassed the tallest logger in the camp and the gthers made jokes about my size. My beard came in full and the planes of my face changed as the plumpness of youth went from me. I found the loggers more likable than the courtiers among whom all my prior days had been passed. Few of them were able even to read and of polite etiquette they knew nothing, but they were cheerful and easyspirited men, at home in their own bodies. I would not have you think that because they talked in "I" and "me" they were open-hearted and given to sharing of confidences; they kept the Covenant in that respect and might even have been more secretive than educated folk about certain things. Yet they seemed more sunny of soul than those who speak in passives and impersonal pronouns and perhaps my stay among them planted in me that seed of subversion, that understanding of the Covenant's basic wrongness, which the Earthman Schweiz later guided into full (lowering. I told them nothing of my rank and origin. They could see for themselves, by the smoothness of my skin, that I had not done much hard labor in my life and my way of speaking marked me as an educated man, if not necessarily one of high birth. But I offered no revelations of my past and none were sought. All I said was that I came from Salla, since my accent marked me as Sail an anyway; they granted me the privacy of my history. My employer, I think, guessed early that I must be the fugitive prince whom Stirron sought, but he never queried me about that. For the first lime in my life, then, I had an identity apart from my royal status. I ceased to be Lord Kinnall, the septarch's second son, and was only Darival, the big logger from Salla. From that transformation I learned much. I had never played one of your swaggering, bullying young nobles; being a second son instills a certain humility even in an aristocrat. Yet I could not help feeling set apart from ordinary men. I was waited on, bowed to, served and pampered; men spoke softly to me and made formal gestures of respect even when I was a child. I was, after all, the son of a septarch, that is to say a king, for septarchs are hereditary rulers and thus are part of mankind's procession of kings, a line that goes back to the dawn of human settlement on Borthan and beyond, back across the stars to Earth itself, to. the lost and forgotten dynasties of the masked and painted chieftains enthroned in prehistoric caves. And I was part of that line, a man of royal blood, somehow superior by circumstance of birth. But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank; if Stirron were to be cast down by insurrection and in his place that loathsome drainer from Salla Old Town became septarch, would not the drainer then enter that mystic procession of kings and Stirron be relegated to the dust? And would not that drainer's sons become blood-proud, even as I had been, although their father had been nothing for most of his life and their grandfather less than that? I know, I know, the sages would say that the kiss of the gods had fallen upon that drainer, elevating him and all his progeny and making them forever sacred, yet as I felled trees on the slopes of the Huishtors I saw kingship with clearer eyes and, having been cast down by events myself, realized that I was no more than a man among men and always had been. What I would make of myself depended on my natural gifts and ambitions, not upon the accident of rank. knowledge and the altered sense of self it brought me, that my stay in the mountains ceased to seem like an exile, became more like a vocation. My dreams of fleeing to a soft life in Manneran left me and, even after I had saved more than enough to pay my passage to that land, I found myself with no impulse to move onward. It was not fear of arrest that kept me among the loggers, but rather a love of the crisp clear cold Huishtor air and of my arduous new craft and of the rough but genuine men among whom I dwelled. Therefore I stayed on, through summer and into autumn, and welcomed the coming of a new winter and gave no thought to going. I might be there yet, only I was forced into flight. One woeful winter afternoon, with the sky like iron and the threat of a blizzard over us like a fist, they brought the whores up from town for our regularly appointed night of frolic and this time there was among them a newcomer whose voice announced her place of birth to be Salla. I heard her instantly as the women came cavorting into our hall of sport, and would have crept away, but she spied me and gasped and cried out on the spot: "Look you there! For sure that is our vanished prince!" I laughed and tried to persuade everyone that she was drunk or mad, but my scarlet cheeks gave me the lie and the loggers peered at me in a new way. A prince? A prince? Was it so? They whispered to one another, nudging and winking. Recognizing my peril, I claimed the woman for my own use and drew her aside, and when we were alone I insisted to ,her she was mistaken: I am no prince, I said, but only a common logger. She would not have it. "The Lord Kinnall marched in the septarch's funeral procession," she said, "and this one beheld him with these eyes. And you are he!" The more I protested, the more convinced she was. There was no shifting her mind. Late that night, when the revelry had ended, my employer came to me, solemn and uneasy. "One of the girls has made strange talk about you this evening," he said. "If the talk is true you are endangered, for when she returns to her village she'll spread the news and the police will be here soon enough." "Must one flee, then?" I asked. "The choice is yours. Alarms still are out for this prince; if you are he no one here can protect you against the authorities." "Then one must flee. At daybreak -- " "Now," he said. "While the girl still lies here asleep." He pressed money of Cdin into my hand, over and beyond what he owed me in current wages; I gathered my few belongings and we went outside together. The night was moonless and the winter wind was savage. By starlight I saw the glitter of lightly falling snow. My employer silently drove me down the slope, past the foothills village from which the whores came and out along a backcountry road, which we followed for some hours. When dawn met us we were in south-central Glin, not overly far from the River Huish. He halted at last in a village that proclaimed itself to be Klaek, a winterbound place of small stone cottages bordering on broad snowly fields. Leaving me in the truck, he entered the first of the cottages, emerging after a moment, accompanied by a wizened man who poured forth a torrent of instructions and gesticulations; with the aid of this guidance we found our way to the place my employer was seeking, the cottage of a certain farmer named Stumwil. This Slumwil was a fair-haired man of about my own height, with washed-out blue eyes and an apologetic smile. Maybe he was some kinsman of my employer's, or, more probably, he owed him a debt -- I never asked. In any case the farmer readily agreed to my employer's request and accepted me as a lodger. My employer embraced me and drove off into the gathering snow; I saw him never again. I hope the gods were as kind to him as he was to me. T HE cottage was one large room, divided by flimsy curtains into areas. Stuniwil put up a new curtain, gave me straw for my mattress and I had my living quarters. There were seven of us under that roof: Stumwil, myself and Stumwil's wife, a weary wench whom I could have been persuaded to believe to be his mother, and three of their childrentwo boys some years short of manhood and a girl in midadolescence -- and the bondsister of the girl, who was lodging with them that year. They were sunny, innocent, trusting folk. Though they knew nothing about me, they all instantly adopted me as a member of the family, some unknown uncle unexpectedly returned from far voyaging. I was not prepared for the easy way they accepted me and credited it at first to some net of obligation in which my former employer had bound them to me, but no: they were kindly by nature, unquestioning, unsuspicious. I took my meals at their table; I sat among them by their fire; I joined in their games. Every fifth night Stumwil filled a huge dented tub with hot water for the entire family and I bathed with them, two or three of us in the tub at once, though it disturbed me inwardly to rub up against the plump bare bodies of Stumwil's daughter and her friend. I paid a fee for my lodging and helped with the chores, though in winter there was little to do except shovel snow and feed the fire. None of them showed curiosity about my identity or history. They asked no questions and I believe that no questions ever passed through their minds. Nor did the other townspeople pry, though they gave me the scrutiny any stranger would receive. Some newspapers occasionally reached this village and those that did went from hand to hand until all had read them, when they were placed on deposit at the wineshop at the head of the main village thoroughfare. I consulted them there, a file of stained and tattered scraps, and learned what I could of the events of the past year. I found that my brother Stirron's wedding had taken place on schedule, with appropriate regal pomp; his lean troubled face looked up out of a blurry, grease-splotched bit of old paper. Beside him was his radiant bride, but I could not make out her features. There was tension between Glin and Krell over fishing rights in a disputed coastal area and men had died in border skirmishes. I pitied General Condorit, whose patrol sector was at the opposite end of the boundary, almost, from the Krell-Glin line and who, therefore, must have missed the fun of somehow involving Salla in the shooting. A sea monster, golden-scaled and sinuous, more than ten times the length of a man's body,' had been sighted in the Gulf of Sumar by a party of Mannerangi fishermen, who had sworn a mighty oath in the Stone Chapel as to the authenticity of their vision. The prime septa rch of Threish, a bloody old brigand if the tales they tell of him are true, had abdicated and was dwelling in a godhouse in the western mountains not far from Stroin Gap, serving as a drainer for pilgrims bound to Manneran. Such was the news. I found no mention of myself. Perhaps Stirron had lost interest in having me seized and returned to Salla. It might therefore be safe for me to try to leave Glin. Eager as I was to get out of that frosty province, where my own kin rebuffed me and only strangers showed me love, two things held me back. For one, I meant to stay with Stumwil until I could help him with his spring planting, in return for his kindness to me. For another, I would not set forth undrained on so dangerous a journey, lest in some mishap my spirit go to the gods still full of poisons. This village of Klaek had no drainer of its own, but depended for its solace on itinerant drainers who passed now and then through the countryside. In the winter these wanderers rarely came by and I had gone undrained since the late summer, when a member of that profession had visited the logging camp. I fell the need. a storm of wonders that coated every branch with a fiery skin of ice and immediately thereafter came a thaw. The world melted. Klaek was surrounded by oceans of mud. A drainer driving a battered and ancient groundcar came to us through this slippery sea and set up shop in an old shack, doing fine business among the villagers. I went to him on the fifth day of his visit and unburdened myself for two hours, sparing him nothing, neither the truth about my identity nor my subversive new philosophy of kingship nor the usual grimy little repressed lusts and prides. It was more of a dose, evidently, than a country drainer expected to receive and he seemed to puff and swell as I poured out my words; at the end he was shaking as much as I and could barely speak. I wondered where it was that drainers went to unload all the sins and sorrows they absorbed from their clients. They are forbidden to talk to ordinary men of anything they have learned in the confessional; did they therefore have drainerdrainers, servants of the servants, to whom they might deliver that which they could not mention to anyone else? I did not see how a drainer, unaided, could long carry such bundles of sadnesses as he got from any dozen of his customers in a day's listening. With my soul cleansed, I had only to wait for planting time, and it was not long in coming. The growing season in Glin is short; they get their seeds into the ground before winter's grip has fully slipped, so that they can catch every ray of spring sunlight. Stumwil waited until he felt certain that the thaw would not be followed by one last tumult of snow and then, with the land still a sucking quagmire, he and his family went out into the fields to plant breadseed and spiceflower and blueglobe. The custom was to go naked to the planting. On the first morning I looked out of Stumwil's cottage and beheld the neighbors on all sides walking bare toward the furrows, children and parents and grandparents stripped to the skin with sacks of seed slung over their shoulders -- a procession of knobby knees, sagging bellies, dried-out breasts, wrinkled buttocks, illuminated here and there by the smooth firm bodies of the young. Thinking I was in some waking dream, I looked around and saw Stumwil and his wife and their daughter already disrobed and beckoning to me to do the same. They took their sacks and left the cottage. The two young sons scampered after them, leaving me with the bondsister of Stumwil's daughter, who had overslept and had just appeared. She shucked her garments too; a supple saucy body she had, with small high dark-nippled breasts and slender well-muscled thighs. I asked her, "Why is the planting done naked in such a cold time?" "The mud gives cause for slipping," she explained, "and it is easier to wash raw skin than garments." There was truth enough in that, for the planting was a comic show, with peasants skidding in the tricky muck every tenth step they took. Down they went, landing on hip or haunch and coming up smeared with brown; it was a matter of skill to grasp the neck of one's seed-sack as one toppled, so that no precious seeds would be scattered. I fell like the rest, learning the knack of it quickly, and indeed there was pleasure in slipping, for the mud had a voluptuous oozy feel to it. So we marched on, staggering and lurching, slapping flesh to mud again and again, laughing, singing, pressing our seeds into the cold soft soil, and not one of us but was covered from scalp to tail with muck within minutes. I shivered miserably at the outset, but soon I was warmed by laughter and tripping, and when the day's work was done we stood around shamelessly naked in front of Stumwil's cottage and doused one another with buckets of water to clean ourselves. By then it seemed reasonable to me that they should prefer to expose their skins rather than their clothing to such a day's labor, but in fact the girl's explanation was incorrect: I learned from Stumwil later that week that the nakedness was a religious matter, a sign of humility before the gods of the crops and nothing else. Eight days it took to finish the planting. On the ninth, wishing Stumwil and his people a hearty harvest, I took my leave of the village of Klaek and began my journey to the coast. took me eastward the first day in his cart. I walked most of the second, begged a ride on the third and fourth and walked again on the fifth and sixth. The air was cool but the crackle of spring was in it, as buds unfolded and birds returned. I bypassed the city of Glain, which might have been dangerous for me, and without any events that I can clearly recall I made my way swiftly to Biumar, Glin's main seaport and second most populous city. It was a handsomer place than Glain, though hardly beautiful: a greasy gray sprawl of an oversized town, backed up against a gray and menacing ocean. On my first day there I learned that all passenger service between Glin and the southern provinces had been suspended three moontimes before, owing to the dangerous activities of pirates operating out of Krell, for Glin and Krell were now engaged in an undeclared war. The only way I could reach Manneran, it seemed, was overland via Salla, and I hardly wished to do that. I was resourceful, though. I found myself a room in a tavern near the docks and spent a few days picking up maritime gossip. Passenger service might be suspended, but commercial seafaring, I discovered, was not, since the prosperity of Glin depended upon it; convoys of merchant vessels, heavily armed, went forth on regular schedules. A limping seaman who stayed in the same tavern told me, when blue wine of Salla had oiled him sufficiently, that a merchant convoy of this sort would leave in a week's time and that he had a berth aboard one of the ships. I considered drugging him on the eve of sailing and borrowing his identity, as is done in pirate tales for children, but a less dramatic method suggested itself to me: I bought his shippingpapers. The sum I offered him was more than he would have earned by shipping out to Manneran and back, so he was happy to take my money and let me go in his place. We spent a long drunken night conferring about his duties on the ship, for I knew nothing of seamanship. At the coming of dawn I still knew nothing, but I saw ways I could bluff a minimal sort of competence. I went unchallenged on board "I still hide a lot," says Theodore Sturgeon, "but not the way I did. Now I hide from good people. The bad ones are easy to handle. I was hiding so far under a rock once that I didn't realize I had disappeared. A redhead with radar (range # miles) located me and dragged me out and grows organic food and designs and makes all our clothes and bakes bread and teaches me journalism and dancing and photography and does the darkroom work and raises hell out of our son Andros. "I'd rather talk about what I do and think instead of what I am and where I've been. Forthcoming is Sturgeon is Alive and Well and Sturgeon's West and Sturgeon and Crime and a Sturgeon omnibus which may well be called A Sturgeon Omnibus, and Drusilla Strange, all collections. Then there's Godbody, which I think will be my big one, bigger than More Than Human. "It's a novel." "What I think: Things you own will own you if you're not careful. The only legitimate demand in making love is 'What pleases you?' Before you protest anything, qualify. Learn everything on both sides and keep in mind that when you point your finger at anyone there are three fingers pointing back at you. Good enough' is never good enough. Really ask yourself why you won't pick up someone else's litter. Barring accidents (but not always then) each of us is where he wants to be. Nobody would be neurotic if it didn't work. Nobody's parents will say, 'I did it wrong, I'm sorry,' so stop expecting it and you'll put down a burden you didn't even know you were carrying. the vessel, a low-slung air-powered craft heavily laden with Glinish goods. The checking of papers was perfunctory. I picked up my cabin assignment, installed myself, reported for duty. About half the jobs they asked me to do over the first few days I managed to carry out reasonably well by imitation and experiment; the other things I merely muddled with and soon my fellow sailors recognized me for a bungler, but they kept knowledge of that from the officers. A kind of loyalty prevailed in the lower ranks. They did for me the jobs I could not do myself; I relieved them of dull work that was within my narrow skills and all went well. I swabbed decks, cleaned filters and spent endless hours manning the guns against pirate attacks. But we got past Krell's dreaded pirate coast without incident and slipped easily down the coast of Salla, which already was green with spring. Our first port of call was Cofalon, Salla's chief seaport, for five days of selling and buying. I was alarmed at this, for I had not known we planned to halt anywhere in my homeland. I thought at first to announce myself ill and hide belowdecks all our lime in Cofalon; but then I rejected the scheme as cowardly, telling myself that a man must test himself "frequently against risk, if he would keep his manhood. So I boldly went wenching and wining in town with my shipmates, trusting that time had sufficiently changed my face, and that no one would expect to find Lord Stirron's missing brother in a sailor's rough clothes in such a town as this. My gamble succeeded: I went unvexed the full five days. From newspapers and careful overhearing I learned all I could about events in Salla in the year and a half since my leaving. Stirron, I gathered, was popularly held to be a good ruler. He had brought the province through its winter of famine by purchasing surplus food from Manneran on favorable terms and our farms had since then had better fortune. Taxes had been cut. The people were content. Stirron's wife had been delivered of a son, the Lord Dariv, who now was heir to the prime septarchy, and another son was on the way. As for the Lord Kinnall, brother to the septarch, nothing was said of him; he was forgotten as though he had never been. We made other stops here and there down the coast, several in southern Salla, several in northern Manneran. And in good time we came to that great seaport at the southeastern corner of our continent, the holy city of Manneran, capital of the province that bears the same name. It was in Manneran that my life would begin anew. ini, Apollo -- and Pegasus. Robert Goddard, Werner von Braun, V-#s over the Channel, Vikings, empty capsules, a couple of rhesus monkeys, a pair of beguiling chimps named Ham and Enos, Alan Shepard, John Glenn. Off we go into the wild blue yonder. And for what? Oust, soil, rocks -- like that. If the rocks are glassy, crystals look out at you saying, Aren't we pretty -- and more than slightly intriguing ? Setting up instruments here and there. Here comes the first nonastronaut to be set loose upon this sunstruck mess and I've been thinking about it too much. Pegasus. Hippocrene, I say to myself, may have welled forth at the touch of your misbegotten hoof, but for me, winged steed, you are the earth end of a horse headed moonward. I'm stumbling around Leontievski looking for interesting rocks. And this, believe me, is where the action isn't. Where have all the astros gone? Why am I, a mere passenger, rockhounding on the moon -- the way I used to when I was a pebblepup out in the Sierra Madre, except we didn't need space suits there and didn't have to crap into blue bags? Well, I'll tell you: the astronauts, most of them, are getting ready for Venus and Mars. The moon is a backwater, left behind like Dodge City when the frontier went that away. Pegasus, you will understand, is a mop-up mission, like cleaning up the theater the morning after the show folds. No -- don't take me wrong -- we haven't solved all the moon problems, not by a long shot, but there's not enough money is heading most of what there is toward the nearer planets. Anyway, who needs those years and years of astro training to walk around the moon in a space suit, latching onto rocks, setting up instruments? I am, after all, a certified card-carrying geologista real one, I mean, which is more than I can say (with all due respect) for the astronauts. Of course we have two certified astros on Pegasus Two, but I'm here also, and that leaves one of them free to sit down there on the Florida beach, or wherever, and look up at the red planet. "Hey, Stu," comes into my helmet. Stuart Stong am I, and I'm feeling I'm a long way from home and I want to go back. I raise my enclosed cephalad end and find Harry Littlewood outlined on the edge of this, our crater. Leontievski. Wurzelbauer is vaguely to the north, and Wilhelm to the south. We're in between. That much I do know. "Yes?" I say, with stupefying originality. "You'd better come over here." Something communicated in the voice, something not sounding astrocool. I put my rock bag down toward Harry. I approach him and lie aims his gloved index finger at the gray soil upon which we stand. Tracks there, corrugated boot prints -- almost like ours, but not quite. "Tracks," I said. My day for coining new phrase. "Must be the Russians." "Probably," Harry said. The frequency spectrum of our communications gear wasn't exactly hi-fi, but I got the distaste in his voice. "None of our missions have been anywhere near here." T HE tracks approached the edge of Leontievski, then went back and away, lost in the distance. No terrain was rough, so that didn't mean much one way or the other. Consider these: Item one -- approximately thirty-six hours before our lift-off, high-resolution infrared sensors aboard one of our conveniently placed surveillance satellites had told us the Russians were fooling around with something cryogenic at a known launch site. Fuel into booster, right? Right. Item two -- approximately twentyeight hours before lift-off of Pegasus Two and my own introduction to the hazards and boredom of space flight, Houston radar had picked up a capsule -- nothing to do with anything of ours -- on lunar trajectory. This had been confirmed, routinely, by Jodrell Bank. So -- two missions had slipped through the same window. There had been some talk about the possibility of collision in lunar orbit, which hadn't cheered me immensely, though I know -- had been told, rather -- that the probability of that occurrence approached zero. "Well, Robinson," I said, "let's go see what Friday looks like." The sun was in the right place relative to how we stood and I had a good look at Harry's eyes. Through the two fishbowls something that looked like pity came my way. Well -- Harry was an astronaut, and I was a geologist. "Pigeon to Glaucous, how copy?" he said. There had been some talk of naming our command module Edsel, but someone had raised questions of taste. "Glaucous to Pigeon, loud and clear," said Sid Norris. "I don't know what you boys looking at down there, but I've cut in Houston." "Roger." Harry was all business, running the store like an astronaut should. "Houston?" "Roger, Harry." "We're on the northeastern edge of Leontievski," Harry said while I just stood there. "There are footprints. They come to the crater's edge from the northeast, then go back in the same direction they came from. Could be that Russian shot. Anything new on that?" "Their hardware is in lunar orbit. No danger of collision with ours, by the way." Thai's good, I thought. "If they did put down a it. Moscow isn't talking. One set of tracks there?" "Affirm. One round trip, that is." "Roger. Stay there," Houston said. "We'll check a bit. Hold there for now, acknowledge?" "Roger." "Houston out." "Same size as ours?" Sid asked, from lonesome orbit. "Or more like an abominable lunar snow man?" "Little smaller," Harry said. "Different tread." "Damn, boy, and howdy. Could have been left there a thousand years ago, couldn't they, Harry?" "Of course," Harry said. "But all probability points at that mission that got off the day before we did." "Well," Sid said, "y 'all be careful down there, heah? Don't think I could hardly fly this thing back home all by my lonely lovable old self." "Never fear while Pigeon's here," I said, but it didn't seem to strike the right note. Harry and I walked around a little, not messing up the prints. "Back here, damn it," Harry said to me suddenly. I'd wandered a few yards along the double row of prints. "You heard Houston." "Sorry, Chief. I just want to see what's at the end of those tracks. A natural-born explorer I. Somebody out there might need help," I said. "That would be their problem, wouldn't it?" Harry said, and then Houston was back on, rattling our helmets. "Cool it," Harry said unnecessarily. "Pigeon from Houston." "Roger, Houston. Loud and clear." "Roger. Scramble this, Sid." The scrambler was new with tired old Pegasus. Collins had come up with a fancy new bucket of bolts, guaranteed to defy unscrambling by you know who; ours was the first mission to use it. "Ready go," Sid said. "Acknowledge. Harry and Stu, how copy?" "Beautiful," Harry said. I was glad Houston had included me. "Well. All right. You boys have just put Houston up the wall. I don't suppose I have to ask if you're sure about what you're seeing?" ily, at the tracks again. "Please," Harry said. "Excuse me. Moscow has been talking a little, apparently, but saying nothing. Evasive gobbledown, and had a bum trip. Consensus is as follows: if Stu isn't too tired -- you've been out a bit, we know -- Stu follows the tracks and does that grab you, Stu?" A question of relative expendability was involved here, I thought, but it suited me fine and I said so. "All right. We'll play it by ear, since we have no idea what you'll find." "The sooner the better," says the first, and expendable, nonastro up here. I was looking at home at the moment. Color and clouds -- and I remembered a time I had looked for shells on the beaches of the Dry Tortugas. "Roger. You're off and running, then, Stu. Watch your oxygen turn back soon enough. You're about fifteen minutes from Pigeon, right?" "Roger." "Roger. We don't know how far those tracks go. If you're not at the end of the line when oxygen reads four five, return to Pigeon. Acknowledge?" "Charlie Brown. I'm on my way." "Roger, Stu. Don't forget -- keep talking." And keep listening, I heard in the reaches of my mind. We had leeway up here and made lots of on the spot decisions -- that was par for the course and expected. But when the chips were really down Houston called the shots and I understood that. "Harry?" Houston again. "Roger." "Back to Pigeon. Mind the store. We don't want any monkey business up there." "That's a roger. On my way." "Roger. Houston out." Harry wanted to go, I could tell, but there was no way. He was, after was. Besides, he knew how to fly "Stu?" Sid, from orbit. "Bet you wish you were down here, Sid. But we can't all grab the brass ring, can we?" "You watch it, heah?" "I gone go catch me a man Friday," I said. T HE tracks looked very fresh -- like mine. But for all I knew about micrometeoric erosion of moon surface those prints could have been made twenty thousand years ago. I plodded along the trail, talking just enough to keep Control and Harry and Sid happy. The outer slope of the crater rim was steeper than it had seemed from above. I almost tumbled once and the tracks told me that whoever had been there before me had done the same. I felt a sense of kinship, or something, but said nothing about it. At the base of the rim the soil became hard, the tracks difficult to follow. The terrain waswell, frightening. Back in Pigeon I had looked home and wished I were there. In this wilderness I thought of Pigeon, which I could no longer see, and just about wished myself therein which ends today's lesson in relativity. I described the situation as I went along. "It's rough," I said. "The footing, I mean. Reminds me of when I was "Where are you, Stu, exactly.'" Houston, "Just at the bottom of the crater rim. There's a ridge ahead. The no astronaut waving a red Hag, no monsters. Sound footing. I'll keep following." "Roger," Houston said. "Let us know" "All right," I said. What did they take me for? I knew what they took me for. "Cool it," Harry said. I didn't respond for a few minutes, crunching along through the gray soil. I passed through a stretch where my prints were, I judged, about an inch and a half deep. The tracks I followed seemed a bit shallower but I didn't stop to measure. "I'm at the foot of the ridge," I said, continuing the travelogue. "The tracks go right on up. And so go I. Come with me," I said to my unseen auditors, "as we ascend Stong's Ridge." "For Christ's sake," someone said -- voice low, but I heard it. I was quiet after that until they asked about progress. "I'm halfway up the ridge," I said. "I'm four-fifths up. Three more steps and I'll be--" A moment of silence and I stretched said. They all sputtered at once and it was something to listen to. I held off long enough for the desperation quotient to build up to a satisfactory level, then relented. I requested silence. A craft of strange design, I told them, had indeed had a bum trip. No, I'd never seen anything like it. It doesn't look twenty thousand years old from outer space, I said. More like contemporary, but different. It had three legs, or pods, same as ours, and one of them had, from what I could see at that distance, come down smack on a boulder. The unit was on its side, like a cat sleeping, or a drunk thrown into the street. More chatter came through the scrambler than you can imagine. Finally Houston said that was fine, now be a good boy and go back to Pigeon while we evaluate. I see , I said to myself. They will evaluate it better down there than I will up here, my boots standing in moondust. Screw it... "Not right now," I said and a mighty cool voice came back to me from Houston; I recognized it, but I'd never talked to it. After he'd said his piece, I said mine. "I got me an astronaut, too," I said and Ricked off the incoming audio. yOU can hear me," I said, "but I can't hear you, so you might as well all hush." I began to walk toward the suited figure that It stood there waiting and I pictured the scene at Houston. As I approached I made out a hammer and sickle on the near side of the spacecraft. Shucks, it's not from way out there... "Doesn't look like it'll Hy again. Astronaut standing there. I'm going forward." When I was close enough to see inside the other fishbowl I was out there, because what was inside that spacesuit was a girl, by damn, and inside the fishbowl was one of the loveliest heads I'd ever seen. She looked scared, though, lots of white showing around irises of undetermined, but dark color. What the protocol? A tired joke about Mrs. Livingstone? We stood there looking at each other. I thought again of the scene at Houston and -- not to my credit -- I smiled. I turned off my mike, and we both started talking at the same time, hearing only our own voices, of course. Then, wondering if I were being presumptuous or too familiar -- I had no precedent to guide me -- I touched my bowl against hers and said, "Hello?" Improbably, then, the smell of balsam was inside my helmet; I wondered why, until I remembered the wounded fawn I'd taken care of one fall in New Hampshire. The fawn had been left behind, on our property, by a careless jacking hunter. I hated hunters, then and now. "Hello," she said tentatively. So far so good. She spoke English, at least one word of it, which was more than could be said for me and Russian. "It's all right," I said, not knowing what I was talking about. "You speak English well?" She looked at me and considered. It was almost cozy, standing there in the moondust. The first girl I'd seen in a long time, and our heads, so to speak, together. What the hell, it was the only way we could talk. "Enough well, I think," she said. "We have much to talk about," I said and she nodded. I indicated for her to stand by a minute and turned on both mike and receiver. "Houston?" I waited for the noise to taper off. Harry was calling, Sid was calling and it was hard to say how many mikes were open in reminded me of amateur radio pileups on rare stations when I had been a callow youth, working on Sam on, please, if he's there." Sam was one of the communicators I liked. I knew he was there, all right; so was everyone else on that side of the Mississippi, everyone who had anything to do with Pegasus Two. "This is Sam, Stu. Copy?" "Roger, Sam. Glad you're there. May I say -- " "May I say," Sam interrupted me, "that the whole world is listening, the whole world that can get through this scrambler, that is, and there's quite a bunch here. Would it be asking too much -- " "Cool it," I said. I'd been told that quite a number of limes lately; I didn't mind turning it the other way round. I knew a hundred reels of tape were recording every ity. I waited until everything was quiet again. "Sam?" "Yes." "That's better. Knowing the impatience rampant down there. I've called you as soon as it seemed meaningful to do so." I paused. Not a word. Like, man, I had my audience. "This is going to be a short transmission and when I've finished I'll terminate contact again. Temporarily, of course." There wasn't much flak this timemy helmet was quiet in about twenty seconds. "I'm One pod hit a boulder. This bird won't fly no more, I think. I'm also standing next to a Russian astronaut. Make that astronette; she's a girl. She speaks English." I waited for that to register. While it was doing so I noted that she had put her fishbowl back against mine. There was a strange intimacy in that. How much of what I was saying she was getting I didn't know. I smiled at her and she gave me something back, a kind of smile, scared still but saying something I'd have to decode later. Suddenly I had to know her name. I cut the rig and asked her. She sobered. "Nora," she said. "That's nice. I'm Stu." I said, we standing there in the wilderness. Through our masses of coverings I touched her elbow, then turned the communications back on. "I just got here," I said, "and I know nothing more than I've told you. I have plenty of oxygen." I checked. "Reads now -- five one. I'll be back to you as soon as I have anything further." Decibels came pouring into my helmet like a twilight. It was the easiest thing in the world to turn them off and that was what I did. Power lends to corrupt. I'm not maintaining that, just quoting. "You understood?" I asked Nora, my communicative transistors all dismasted. "Some." "We must talk." "Yes. We can go in," she said, nodding toward the open hatch. A ND change into something more comfortable, I thought wildly. Talk through air instead of plastic, that would be good. The hatch faced us. I found I was gently urging her toward it. "First this," she said and this time she took my elbow. Trusting soul that I've always been, I followed her. She led me to the other shallow gully. I got me another astronaut, I thought, but this one's dead. "He died when we opened the- -- door," Nora said. "The landing was -- bad. There was a tear in the suitwe didn't know. We couldn't close the door fast enough." I got the picture. "All right." We went back to the lying-down I helped her close the hatch, which was difficult because we had to close it upward instead of sideways. Nora manipulated switches, somewhat hesitantly, and watched indicators. She nodded and began to unsuit. Everything was on its side because of the bum landing, but it didn't seem to make much difference. Try this: turn your favorite room to any angle, granting the furniture is fixed and not freefloating. Give it a little bit of gravity and imagine you're on that old deserted island. By deserted island I mean you're snug there, without external disturbance or distraction. It would work, right? I unsuiled, too. "This is better," I said. It was better by orders of magnitude. "Yes," she said and rummaged into an upsidedown locker. I had a delightful vision of the hushed and silent scene (I imagined) at Mission Control. Nora's next words did nothing to detract from that. "Vodka," she said, "yes?" The Russians do this better than we, I thought. I was tempted to call up Harry, whose altitude toward the Soviet program had always been tinged with a moderate, but unappealing, paranoid aura. "Yes," I said. "This is for emergency only, of course," she said haltingly, but not missing a word. I was again glad she spoke English. I could have managed no communication in Russian. "This is an emergency," I said. First she smiled, then she laughed, really laughed and so did I, not pausing to inquire into the justification or rationale for euphoria under these circumstances. She handed me a squeeze bottle, took one herself and we touched them together. My goodness. I wasn't about to turn in my stars and stripes for the hammer and sickle, but that vodka was something else. We didn't need squeeze bottles in lunar gravity, but that was their issue and I wasn't about to complain. We had to get down to business sooner or later and I thought to get il over. "How fong will it go?" I asked, indicating with a sweep of support system, the oxygen?" "Three or four days, I think. That part I don't think ishurt." into proper position. I knew Harry and I couldn't right it. Something for future missions to think about-hydraulic lifts or something. No engineer I. "I could not fly it anyway," she said. "And the radio is gone in the landing." No doubt about it, we were on the first rescue mission in space. I wondered how Harry would like that; he didn't want to be in the same world with the Russians, let alone the same spacecraft. "Even if the craft were all right, you couldn't fly it?" "No. I came as scientist. Geologist." "That makes two of us," I said. "I'll have to call Houston. I wonder if I can do it without suiting up." I didn't want to go outside. I got as close as I could to one signal would radiate. I came on all formal. "Houston," I said. "Pigeon here. How copy ?" S AM was still on. "You're weak, Stu, but I read you. Where -- " "Roger. I'm in the capsized name," I said, realizing again this was my day for coining deathless phrase. "The captain of the mission is dead, busted his suit in landing and didn't know it when they cracked the hatch. Life support is in go condition, presumably undamaged. Radio was knocked out in landing. Roger?" "Acknowledge. But let me say something when you're through." A touch of the velvet glove, yes. "Affirmative. So we have to get the girl down. I suggest you get on the hot line to Moscow and "Hold it -- " Now the iron hand within the glove, Sam interrupting me with such force I just sat there and listened. "Stu. The decision to open the hot line isn't made in Houston, it's made in the White House. However, for your information, the hot line is open. We've told the and that it's apparently knocked out. Now we'll confirm that and let them know one of their astronauts is dead -- the captain. Decisions will be made in high places before this day is over, Stu. Anything else now?" "I don't know what decisions have to be made. We bring Nora back with us, of course Harry broke in. "We don't have the thrust for that, Stu, and you know it." "So we dump the rocks, for Pete's sake. No problem -- " Sam broke in with authority. "All right, gentlemen, knock it off. Decisions will be made in the White House and I don't think either of you should try to outguess the President. Maintain status quo for now. We'll be back to you when we have something. Houston out." "Just one, Sam." Sid. "Make it short." "Roger. I say we take her back, that's all. Have to." "Okay, Sid, your vote's in -- but it's academic. None of you has a vote and the decision will be made by the President. Houston out." "Harry?" I called. "Roger." "You're out of your cotton-picking mind, chum. We've got no problem. We take Nora instead of the rocks " "Do you know how much it costs per pound, per ounce, to come up here and take those rocks back?" I reached out my hand and Nora put another squeeze bottle in it. Good girl. "I certainly do, Harry. But for heaven's sake, man, think of the political value of rescuing a Russian lost in space. Anyway, how could you, or anyone, trade the whole damn moon, let alone a few rocks, for one pretty girl's life? She is pretty" "Like Sam said, Stu, the decision is the President's." "Right. But you know perfectly well what that decision will be, has to be. You know. Besides -- if the Prexy had a moment of aberration and made the wrong decision, we could make the right one lor him right here. No way they could stop us." "That sounds pretty much like treason, Stu." "I'm with Stu," came from lonesome Sid. "Thanks, pal. I know you, though, you just want to see a pretty girl again." "Pigeon from Houston." "Roger," Harry and I said at the same time. "Nothing new yet, lots going on. Just wanted to remind you, in view of your conversation, you're being monitored, taped, stored and otherwise pul on record. Houston out." I llicked off the radio. I wasn't going to crouch down there by the port waiting for Houston to come back; we were in the driver's seat, as they must have known. I looked at Nora. "I'm a problem," she said. "To themperhaps. Not really. To Harry yes. He has some weird ideas. To me-no problem." now. Lunar propinquity, the absence of spacesuits, the furor down there, we quiet where we were this created, we discovered, an equation to be dealt with. And -- without unseemly haste, but not wasting time -- we dealt with it. Spacecraft were not built for it, but (may I say) it worked. It did do. Another lunar first, all right? second I fired up the rig and got on with Houston. "We've been waiting," Sam said. I had read about glacial tones, but that was the first time I really heard one. "I had to -- rest," I said. I tried, possibly without success, to make my voice, my self, sound tired. "You're refreshed now?" "Yes, sir," I said, going along. "That's good. Now hear this. The Russians have no capability of putting up a rescue mission, nor do we. The President has decided to scrap the sample-collecting aspect of Pegasus Two. The rescue is on." Of course, I thought. "Sid and Harry know about this -- they've had their radios on." I got that. "Sid agrees and Harry doesn't but that's neither here nor there. Copy all right, Stu?" "Loud and clear." "All right, here's the way it goes. You've had a little rest but not enough." Nora and I smiled at each other. "And the President says we're not to leave Nora alone on the surface of the moon for a moment. Therefore, you and she will rest -- sleep if you canin the hours, then proceed to Pigeon. After that you and Harry will complete such assignments as possible within the following seven and a half hours. Then back to Glaucous, and home. Acknowledge?" "Affirm. Double affirm." "Sam?" Harry. "Negative. I won't do it. Been thinking about it. The rocks are all aboard. I'm going to bring the rocks back." "That's not possible, Harry." There was a tremor in Sam's voice, and stunned disbelief. "You mentioned treason a while back -- " "I'll take the verdict of history on that," Harry said, his voice flat, cool. The shrinks really blew this one... "Harry," Sam said. "If you do this -- do you know where you'll be when you get back?" "I know. Pigeon out." "Wait a minute, Harry -- whatfor Christ's sake, now? All right. I'm going to retire tomorrow. Harry, stand by. Stu?" "Roger." "Would you believe the President is on -- wants to talk to Nora. Get her to the mike, can you?" "Roger." Nora had heard. She paled. "The President wants to talk to you," I said unnecessarily. She crouched down beside me. "We're ready, Sam." "Roger. Just one. Mr. President -- you're on, sir." "Thank you," said the familiar voice. "Miss Nora, do you hear me?" "This is Nora Ivanovna. I hear you, sir." "Miss Ivanovna. I greet you in the name of the people of the United States. We profoundly regret the failure of your mission and the loss of your fellow astronaut and we extend to you and your country our heartfelt sympathies." Hell. Well, anyway, he made the right decision. "We are honored, however, Miss Ivanovna, to be able to bring you back to Earth. This will bring our countries together. My wife and I look forward to seeing you in the W'hite House. God speed home." The President was waiting. Nora took her time, thinking. "Thank you, Mr. President," she finally said. I wished the President could have seen us there, me holding her hand. "Thank you. And, for now, goodbye." "Goodbye, Miss Ivanovna." l#sir," we heard Sam say, before they cut us out of the circuit. A few minutes later: "Pigeon from Houston. Harry, come in." Nothing. Repeat several times, still nothing. "Try him, Stu," Sam said and I did. Same result. Same with Sid. "Hold on," Sam said. Then: "This is the President speaking. Mr. Harry Littlewood, do you hear me? Mr. Littlewood? I repeat, this is the President speaking. You are hereby ordered to participate in the rescue mission as planned. Do you acknowledge? I repeat, this is a direct order from the President. You will participate in the rescue as planned. I need not point out the consequences of refusal to carry out this order." Nothing from Harry. "Thank you, Mr. President. We'll keep trying." "Sam?" I called. "Yes, Harry." He did sound tired. "Stu here. In view of the circumstances I think we'd better revise the plan. How about Nora and I go over now and I try to reason with Harry?" "Hold one." I could see heads nodding all over Mission Control. "That's a roger, Stu. And you'd better get going. Keep in contact." "Roger." We suited up in a hurry. "Sid," I called, when we were out and going along the tracks. "Roger, Stu. For God's sake, talk some sense into Harry, he's flipped." "Yes. Tell me this -- if I have to knock him out or something, and bring him up unconscious, could you tell me how to fly that thing up there?" "I doubt it, Stu. No training. It's not all computerized by a long shot. But you know that. Possible, but not likely. Go." "Roger. Just wondered. We're on our way." Once more unto the rim of Leontievski. We put our heads together once, resting, and I said to Nora this was like walking in a spring morning on a street in Xenia, Ohio, and she said it was like an unnamable place in Leningrad in mid-May. So much for time, space, seasons and geography. At the same time, as it happened, so much for Harry's Leontievski's rim and we watched it go. Barring the circumstances it would have been beautiful -- and even, or in spite of, or because of, or whateverit was, indeed, beautiful. An awkward stork rising from an unknown marsh. Well. And up yours, too... We watched the ascending flame. Left behind. Another lunar first. Nora and I put our heads together. "We have some more days together," Nora said. "Three. Maybe four." We smiled through the fishbowls. And back, once more, to the I ing around a Sol-type primary -- is a backwater planet. It is well off the main Galactic trade routes, although it gets by quite comfortably by exporting meat. butter, wool and the like to the neighboring, highly industrialized Mekanika System. Olgana was a Lost Colony, one of those worlds stumbled upon quite by chance during the First Expansion, settled in a spirit of great thankfulness by the personnel of a hopelessly off course, completely lost emigrant lodejammer. It was rediscovered -- this time with no element of chance involved -- by the Survey Service's Trail Blazer , before the colonists had drifted too far from the mainstream of human culture. Shortly thereafter there were legal proceedings against these same colonists, occupying a few argumentative weeks at the Federation's Court of Galactic Justice in Geneva, on Earth; had these been successful they would have been followed by an eviction order. Even in those days it was illegal for humans to establish themselves on any planet already supporting an intelligent life form. But -- and the colonists' learned counsel made the most of it -- that law had not been in existence when Lode Jumbuk lifted off from Port Woomera on what turned out to be her last voyage. It was 'only a legal quibble, but the aborigines had no representation at Court -- and, furthermore, the counsel for the defense had hinted in the right quarters that if he lost this case he would bring suit on behalf of his clients against the Interstellar Transport Commission, holding that body fully responsible for the plights of Lode Jumbuk's castaways and their dedangerous and expensive precedent might be established, brought behind-the-scenes pressure to bear and the case was dropped. Nobody asked the aborigines what they thought about it all. There was no denying that the Olganan natives -- if they were natives -- were a backward race. They were humanoid -- to outward appearances human. They did not, however, quite fit into the general biological pattern of their world, the fauna of which mainly comprised very primitive, egg-laying mammals. The aborigines were mammals as highly developed as Man himself, although along slightly different lines. There had been surprisingly little research into Olganan biology, however, the colony's highly competent biologists seemed to be entirely lacking in the spirit of scientific curiosity. They were biological engineers rather than scientists, their main concern being to improve the strains of their meat-producing and wool-bearing animals, descended in the main from the spermatozoa and ova which Lode Jumbuk -- as did all colonization vessels of her period -- had carried under refrigeration. To Olgana came the Survey Service's Serpent Class Courier Adder , Lieutenant John Grimes commanding. She carried notvery-imporlanl dispatches for Commander Lewin, officer in charge of the small Federation Survey Service Base maintained on the planet. The dispatches were delivered and then, after the almost mandatory small talk. Grimes asked, "And would there be any orders for me, Commander?" Lewin -- a small, dark, usually intense man -- grinned. "Of a sort. Lieutenant. Of a sort. You must be in Commodore Damien's good books. When I was skipper of a Courier it was always a case of getting from Point A to Point B as soon as possible, if not before, with stopovers cut down to the irreducible minimum... Well, since you ask, I received a Carlottigram from Officer Commanding Couriers just before you blew in. I am to inform you that there will be no employment for your vessel for a period of at least six weeks, local. You and your officers are to put yourselves at my disposal." The commander grinned again. "I find it hard enough to find jobs enough to keep my own personnel busy. So -- enjoy yourselves. Go your merry ways rejoicing, as long as you carry your personal transceivers at all times. See the sights, such as they are. Wallow in the fleshpots such as they are." He paused. "I only wish that the commodore had loved me as much as he seems to love you." "Mphm," grunted Grimes, his prominent ears reddening. "I don't think that it's quite that way, sir." He was remembering his last interview with Damien. Get out of my sight, the Commodore had snarled. Get out of my sight -- and don't come back until I'm in a better temper, if ever... "Indeed?" with a sardonic lift of the eyebrows. "I don't think that I'm overly popular around Lindisfarne Base at the moment." Lewin laughed outright. "I'd guessed as much. Your fame, Lieutenant, has spread even to Olgana. Frankly, I don't want you in my hair, around my base, humble though it be. The administration of this planet is none of my concern, luckily, so you and your officers can carouse to your heart's content as long as you don't do so in my bailiwick." "Have you any suggestions, sir?" asked Grimes stiffly. "Why, yes. There's the so-called Gold Coast. It got started after the trans-galactic clippers started calling here on their cruises." "Inflated prices," grumbled Grimes. "A tourist trap." "How right you are. But not every TG cruise passenger is a millionaire. I could recommend, perhaps, the coach tour of Nevernever. You probably saw it from space on your way in -- that whacking great island continent in the Southern Hemisphere." "How did it get its name?" "The natives cal! it that -- or something that sounds almost like that. It's the only continent upon which the aborigines live, by the way. When Lode Jumbuk made her landing there was no intelligent life at all in the Northern Hemisphere." "What's so attractive about this tour?" "Nevernever is the only unspoiled hunk of real estate on the planet. It has been settled along the coastal fringe by humans, but the Outbackwhich means the inland and most of the country north of Capricorn is still the way it was when men first came here. Oh, there are sheep and cattle stations and mining, but there won't be any real development, with irrigation and all the rest, until population pressure forces it. And the aborigines well, most of them still live in the semidesert, as they did before Lode Jumbuk came." Lewin was warming up. "Think of it. Lieutenant, an opportunity to explore a primitive world while enjoying all modern conveniences! You might never get such a chance again." "I'll think about it," Grimes told him. cussed it with his officers. Mr. Beadle, the first lieutenant, was not enthusiastic. In spite of his habitual lugubrious mien he had a passion for the bright' lights and made it quite clear that he had enjoyed of late so few opportunities to spend his pay that he could well afford a Gold Coast holiday. Von Tannenbaum, navigator, Slovolny, electronic communications and Vitelli, engineer, sided with Beadle. Grimes did not try to persuade them after all, he was getting no commission from the Olganan tourist bureau. Spooky Deane, the psionic communications officer, asked rather shyly if he could come along with the captain. He was not the companion Grimes would have chosen but he was a telepath and it was just possible that his gift would be useful. Deane and Grimes took the rocket mail from Newer York to New Melbourne, and during the trip Grimes indulged in one of his favorite whinges, about the inability of the average colonist to come up with really original names for his cities. At New Melbourne  drab, oversized village on the southern coast of Neverneverthey stayed at a hotel which, although recommended by trans-galactic clippers, failed dismally to come up to galactic standards, making no attempt whatsoever to cater to guests born and brought up on worlds with widely differing atmospheres, gravitational fields and dietary customs. Then there was a day's shopping, during which the two spacemen purchased such items of personal equipment as they had been told would be necessary by the office of Nevernever Tours. The following morning, early, they took a cab from their hotel to the coach terminal. It was still dark. And it was cold. And it was raining. They sat with the other passengers -- all of whom were, like themselves, roughly dressed -- in the chilly waiting room, waiting for something to happen. To pass the time Grimes sized up the others. Some were obviously outworlders a TG clipper was in at the spaceport. Sometheir accent made it obvious -- were Olganans, taking the opportunity of seeing something of their own planet. None of them, on this dismal morning, looked very attractive. Grimes admitted that the same could be said about Deane and himself; the telepath conveyed the impression of a blob of ectoplasm roughly wrapped in a toogaudy poncho. A heavy engine growled outside and bright lights stabbed through the big windows. Deane rose unsteadily to his feet. "Look at that, Captain -- wheels, yet. I expected an inertial drive vehicle -- or at least a hoverbus." "You should have read the brochure, Spooky. The idea of this tour is to see the country the way the first explorers did, to get the feel of it." "I can get the feel of it as well from an aircraft as from that archaic contraption." "We aren't all telepaths." Two porters had come in and were picking up suitcases, carrying them outside. The tourists, holding their overnight grips, followed, watched their baggage being stowed in a locker at the rear of the coach. From the P. A. system a voice was ordering, "All passengers will now embus -- all passengers will now embus -- " The passengers obeyed and Grimes and Deane found themselves seated behind a young couple of obviously Terran origin, while across the aisle from them was a pair of youngish ladies who could be nothing other than schoolteachers. A fat, middleaged man, dressed in a not very neat uniform of gray coveralls, eased himself into the driver's seat. "All aboard?" he asked. "Anybody who's not, sing out!" The coach lurched from the terminus on to the rain-wet street, was soon bowling north through the dreary suburbs of New Melbourne. II then almost due north, following the coast. Here the land was rich, green, well-wooded, with apple orchards, vineyards, orange groves. Then came sheep country, rolling do wnl and speckled with the white shapes of the grazing animals. "It's wrong," Deane whispered to Grimes. "It's all wrong -- " "What's wrong, Spooky?" "I can feel it even if you can't. The -- the resentment-?' "The aborigines, you mean?" "Yes. But even stronger is that of the native animals, driven from their own pastures, hunted and destroyed to make room for the outsiders from beyond the stars. And the plants -- what's left of the native flora in these parts -- They've become weeds to be rooted out and burned, so that the grapes and grain and the oranges may nourish -- " "You must have felt the same on other colonized worlds. Spooky." "Not as strongly as here. I can almost put it into words: The First Ones let us alone"Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Makes sense, I suppose. The original colonists, with only the resources of Lode Jumbuk to draw upon, couldn't have made much of an impression. But when men had all the resources of the Federation to draw upon -- " "I don't think it's quite that way," murmured Deane, fully. "Then what do you think ?" "I -- I don't know, Captain." They had little further opportunity for private talk. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, the coachload of assorted passengers was thawing out. The driver initiated this processhe was, Grimes realized, almost like the captain of a ship, responsible for the well-being, psychological as well as physical, of his charges. Using a fixed microphone by his seat he delivered commentaries on the places of interest that they passed and, when he judged that the time was ripe, had another microphone on a wandering lead passed among the passengers, the drill being that each would introduce himself by name, profession and place of residence. The tourists were a mixed bag. About half of them were from Earth -- they must be, thought Grimes, from the TG clipper, Cutty Sark , presently berthed at the spaceport "public servants, lawyers, the inevitable instructors from universities, both major and minor, improving their knowledge of the worlds of the Federation in a relatively inexpensive way. The Olganans were similarly diversified. When Grimes' turn came he said, "John Grimes, spaceman. Last place of permanent residence St. Helier, Channel Islands, Earth." Tanya Lancaster, the younger and prettier of the two teachers across the aisle, turned to him. "I thought you were a Terry, John. You don't mind my using your given name, do you? It's supposed to be one of the rules on this tour." "I like it, Tanya." "That's good. But you can't be from the Cutty Sark. I should know all the officers, at least by sight, by this time." "And if I were one of Cutty Sark's officers," said Grimes gallantly Tanya was not at all bad looking, with her chestnut hair, green eyes and thin, intelligent face "I should have known you by this time." "Oh, she said, "you must be from the base." "Almost right." "You are making things awkward. Ah, I have it. You're from that funny little destroyer or whatever it is that's berthed at the Survey Service's end of the spaceport." "She's not a funny little destroyer," Grimes told her stiffly. "She's a Serpent-class courier." "And now, folks," boomed the driver's amplified voice, "how about a little sing-song to liven things up? Any volunteers?" The microphone was passed along to a group of young Olganan students. After a brief consultation they burst into song. When the jolly Jumbuk lifted from Port Woomera Out and away for Altair Three Glad were we all to kiss the tired old Earth goodbye Who'll come a-sailing in Jumbuk with me? Sailing in Jumbuk, sailing in Jumbuk, Who'll come a-sailing in Jumbuk with me? Glad were we all to kiss the tired old Earth goodbye You'll come a-sailing in Jumbuk with me! Then there was storm, the pile and all the engines dead Blown out to hell and gone were we! Lost in the galaxy , falling free in sweet damn all Who'll come a-sailing in Jumbuck with me? Sailing in Jumbuk, sailing in Jumbuk, Who'll come a-sailing in Jumbuk with me? Lost in the galaxy, falling free in sweet damn all -- You'll come a-sailing in Jumbuk with me? Up jumped the captain, shouted to his engineer, 'Start me the diesels, one, two, three! Give me the power to feed into the Ehrenhafts You'll come a-sailing in Jumbuk with me!' "But that's oursl" declared Tanya indignantly, her Australian accent suddenly very obvious. "It's our Waltzing Matilda'." " Waltzing Matilda never was yours," Grimes told her. The words -- yes, but the tune, no. Like many other songs it's always having new verses tacked on to it." "I suppose you're right. But these comic lyrics of theirs what are they all about?" "You've heard of the Ehrenhaft Drive, haven't you?" "Yes, you could call it that. The Ehrenhaft generators converted the ship, the lodejammer, into what was, in effect, a huge magnetic particle. As long as she was on the right tramlines, the right line of magnetic force, she got to where she was supposed to get to in a relatively short time. But a magnetic stormtangling the lines of force like a bowl of spaghetti would throw her anywhere-or nowhere. And these storms also drained the micro-pile of all energy. In such circumstances all that could be done was to start up the emergency diesel generators to supply electric power to the Ehrenhaft generators. After this the ship would stooge along hopefully, trying to find a habitable planet before the fuel ran out." "ETm." She grinned suddenly. "I suppose it's more worthy of being immortalized in song than our sheep-stealing Jolly Swagman. But I still prefer the original." And then aided by her friend, Moira Stevens a fat and cheerful young woman she sang what she still claimed was the original version. Grimes allowed himself to wonder what the ghost of the Jolly Swagmanstill, presumably, haunting that faraway billabong -- would have made of it all. T E#AT night they reached the first of their camping sites, a clearing in the bush on the banks of a river that was little more than a trickle. The coach crew there was a cook as well as the driver set up pneumatic puptents in three neat rows, swiftly inflated them with a hose from the coach's air compressor. Wood was collected for a fire and folding grills laid across it. "The inevitable steak and billy tea," muttered somebody who had been on the tour before. "It's always steak and billy tea." But the food, although plain, was good, the yarning around the fire was enjoyable and Grimes found that the air mattress in his tent was at least as comfortable as his bunk aboard Adder. He slept well and awoke refreshed to the sound of the taped Reveille, lie was among the first in the queue lor the toilet facilities and, dressed and ready for what the day might bring, lined up lor his eggs and bacon and mug of tea with a good appetite. Then came the washing up, the deflation of mattresses and tents, the stowing away of these and the baggage and, shortly after the bright sun had appeared over the low hills to the east, the tour was on its way again. It moved now through droughtstricken land that showed few signs of human occupancy. Grimes saw sun-parched plains where scrawny cattle foraged listlessly for scraps of grass, where tumbleweed scurried across the roadway, where dust-devils raised their whirling columns of sand and light debris. But there was life, apart from the thirsty cattle, apart from the gray scrub that, with the first rains of the wet season, would put forth its brief, vivid greenery, its short-lived gaudy flowers. Once the coach stopped to let a herd of sausagekine across the track lowslung, furry quadrupeds wriggling like huge lizards on their almost rudimentary legs. There was a great clicking of cameras. "We're lucky, folks," said the driver. "These beasts are almost extinct. They were classed as pests until only a couple of years ago now they've been reclassed as protected fauna Next came an aboriginal encampment where gaunt, black figures, looking arachnoid rather than humanoid, stood immobile about their cooking fires. "Bad bastards those," announced the driver. "Most of the others will put on shows for us, will sell us curiosbut not that tribe." Now and again Grimes saw other vehiclesdiesel-engined tourist coaches like the one he rode, large and small hovercraft and, in the cloudless sky. occasional high-flying inertial-drive aircraft. But in the main the land was empty, the long, straight road seeming to stretch to infinity ahead and behind. The little settlements pub, general store and a huddle of other buildings were welcome every time that one was reached. There was a great consumption of cold beer at each slop, conversations with the locals, who gathered as though by magic, at each halt. Even coach parks concentration camps in the desert rather than oases were appreciated for hot showers and facilities lor washing clothing. As the tour progressed Grimes and Deane teamed up with Tanya and Moira. But there was, as yet, no sharing of tents. Grimes gained the impression that the girl's mother had told her at an early age to beware of spacemen. Come to that, after the first two nights there were no tents. Now that they were in regions where it was certain that no rain would fall all hands slept in sleeping bags only, under the stars. They came to the Cragge Rock reserve. "Cragge Rock," said the driver into his microphone, "is named after Captain Cragge, master of the Lode Jumbuk , just as the planet itself is named after his wife, Olga." He paused. "Perhaps somewhere in the Galaxy there's a mountain that will be called Grimes Rock but with all due respect to the distinguished spaceman with us, he'll have to tryhard to find the equal to Cragge Rock. The Rock, folks, is the largest monolith in the known universe. It is a solid hunk of granite five miles long, a mile across, a half-mile high." He turned his attention to Tanya and Moira. "Bigger than your Ayers Rock, ladies!" He waited out a small outburst of chuckles. "And to the north, sixty miles distant, lies Mount Conway, a typical mesa. Twentymiles to the south is Mount Sarah, named after Chief Officer Conway's wife. It's usually called 'the Sallies,' since it consists of five separate domes of red conglomerate. So you see that geologically Cragge Rock doesn't fit in. There's quite a few theories about its origins, folks. One is that it was formed by a submarine volcanic eruption when this was all part of the ocean bed that the Rock was an extrusion of molten matter from the core of the planet. If so, it has been further shaped by millions of years of erosion since the sea floor rose to become this island continent." The Rock squatted on the skyline, glowering red in the almost level rays of the westering sun, an enormous crimson slug. It possessed beauty of a sort. "We spend five full days here. folks," went on the driver. "There's a hotel and an aboo settlement-most of the boos speak English. They'll be happy to tell you their legends about the Rock Wuluru they call it. It's one of their sacred places, but they don't mind us coming here as long as we pay for the privilege. Basics, of course, are all taken care of by the tourist bureau, but if you want any curios you'll have to fork out to the boos for them. See the way the Rock's changing color as the sun gets lower? And once the sun's down it'll slowly fade like a dying ember" The R ock was close now, towering above them, a red wall against the darkening blue of the cloudless sky. Then they were in its shadow and the sheer granite wall was purple, shading to cold blue... Sunlight again, like a sudden blow, a last circuit of the time-pocked monolith and a final stop on the eastern side of the stone mountain. The tourists left the coach, shivering a little in the still, chilly air. "It has something," Tanya whispered. "Something," Moira agreed. "Ancestral memory?" asked Deane. "You're prying," snapped the fat girl. "I'm not, Moira. But I couldn't help picking up the strong emanation from your minds." Tanya laughed. "Like most modern Australians we're a mixed lot and in our fully integrated society most of us have some aboriginal blood. But why should Moira and I feel so at home here both at home and hopelessly lost?" "If you let me probe " suggested Deane gently. "No." Grimes sympathised with her. He knew all too well what it was like to have a trained telepath, no matter how high his ethical standards, around. But he said, "Spooky's to be trusted. I know." "You might trust him, John. I don't know him well enough." "He knows us too bloody well!" said Moira. "I smell steak," said Grimes, changing the subject. The four of them walked to the open fire, where the evening meal was already cooking. Ill waking up early for. Grimes stood with the others, blanketwrapped against the cold, and watched the great hulk Hush gradually from blue to purple, from purple to pink. Over it and beyond it the sky was black, the stars very bright, almost as bright as in airless space. Then the sun was up and the Rock stood there, a red island in the sea of tawny sand, a surf of green brush breaking about its base. The show was over. The party went to the showers and toilets and then, dressed, assembled for breakfast. After the meal they walked from the encampment to the Rock. Tanya and Moira stayed in the company of Grimes and Deane, but their manner toward the two spacemen was distinctly wary; they were suddenly more interested in their guidebooks than in conversation. Their way passed the aboriginal village a huddle of crude shelters constructed of natural materials and battered sheets of plastic. Fires were burning and gobbets of unidentifiable meat were cooking over them. Women naked, with straggling hair and pendulous breasts, yet human enough looked up and around at the well-clothed, well-fed tourists with an odd, sly mixture of timidity and boldness. One of them pointed to a leveled camera and screamed, "First gibbit half dollar!" "You'd belter," advised the driver. "Very commercial minded, these people." Men were emerging from the primitive huts. One of them approached Grimes and his companions, his teeth startlingly white in his coal-black face. He was holding what looked like a crucifix. "Very good," he said, waving it in front of him. "Two dollar." "I'm not religious--' Grimes began, to be cut short by Tanya's laugh. "Don't be a fool, John," she told him. "It's a throwing weapon." "A throwing weapon?" "Yes. Like our boomerangs. Let me show you." She turned to the native, held out her hand. "Here. Please." "You throw, missie?" "Yes. I throw." Watched by the tourists and the natives she held the thing by the end of its long arm, turned until she was facing about forty-five degrees away from the light morning breeze, the flat surfaces of the cross at right angles to the wind. She raised her arm, threw with a peculiar flick of her wrist. The weapon left her hand, spinning, turned so that it was flying horizontally, like a miniature helicopter. It traveled about fifty yards, came around in a lazy arc, faltered, then fell in a flurry of fine sand. "Not very good," complained the girl. "You got better? You got proper one?" The savage grinned. "You know?" "Yes. I know." The man went back into his hut, returned with another weapon. This one was old, beautifully made and lacking the crude designs that had been burned into the other with redhot wire. He handed it to Tanya, who hefted it approvingly. She threw it as she had thrown the first one-and the difference was immediately obvious. There was no clumsiness in its flight, no hesitation. It flew more like a living thing than a machine. Its arms turned more and more lazily as it came back and Tanya, with a clapping motion, deftly caught it between her hands. She stood admiring it -- the smooth finish imparted by the most primitive of tools, the polish of age and of long use. "How much?" she asked. "No for sale, missie." Again the very white grin. "But I give." "I shouldn't, but -- " "Take it, lady," said the driver. "This man is Najatira, the chief of these people. Refusing his gift would offend him." Then, businesslike: "You guide, Najatira?" "Yes. I guide." his own language to his women, one of whom scuttled over the sand to retrieve the first, fallen throwing weapon. Then, walking fast on his big, splayed feet he strode toward the rock. Somehow the two girls had ranged themselves on either side of him. Grimes looked on disapprovingly. Who was it who had said that these natives were humanoid only? This naked savage, to judge by his external equipment, was all to human. "Cave," said Najatira, pointing. The orifice, curiously regular, was exactly at the tail of the slugshaped monolith. "Called by my people the Hole of Winds. Story say in Dream Time wind came from there, wind move world. Before, world no move. No daytime, no nighttime." "Looks almost like a venturi. Captain," Dean remarked to Grimes. "Certainly looks almost too regular to be natural. But erosion does odd things. Or it could have been made by a blast of gases from the thing's inside." "Precisely," said Deane. "But you don't think so? No. It would have been impossible." "I don't know what to think, " admitted Deane. Their native guide was leading them around the base of the Rock. "This Cave of Birth. Tonight, ceremony. We show you. And there look up. What we call the fishing net. In Dream Time caught big fish." "A circuit," muttered Grimes. "Exposed by millennia of weathering." He laughed. "I'm getting as bad as you. Spooky. Nature comes up with the most remarkable imitations of manmade things." So it went on, the trudge around the base of the monolith, under the hot sun, while their tireless guide pointed out this and that feature. As soon as the older members of the party began to show signs of distress the driver spoke into his wrist transceiver and within a few minutes the coach came rumbling over the rough track and then, with its partial load, kept pace with those who were still walking. Grimes and Deane were among these hardy ones, but only because Tanya and Moira showed no signs of flagging and because Grimes felt responsible lor the women. After all, the Survey Service had been referred to as the policeman of the Galaxy. It was unthinkable that two civilized human females should fall for this unwashed savage but already he knew that civilized human females are apt to do the weirdest things. At last the tour came to an end. Najatira, after bowing with surprising courtesy, strode off toward his own camp. The tourists clustered hungrily around the folding tables that had been set up, wolfed the sandwiches and gulped tea. During the afternoon there were Bights over the Rock and the countryside lor those who wished them, a large blimp having come in from the nearest airport for that purpose. This archaic transport was the occasion for surprise and incredulity, but it was. explained that such aircraft were used by Lode Jumbuk's people for their initial explorations. "The bloody thing's not safe," complained Deane as soon as they were airborne. Grimes ignored him. He was looking out and down through the big cabin windows. Yes, the Rock did look odd, out of place. It was part of the landscape, but it did not belong. It had been there for not belong. Mount Conway and Mount Sarah were natural enough geological formations -- but, he thought, Cragge Rock was just as natural. He tried to envision what it must have looked like when that upwelling of molten rock thrust through the ocean bed. "It wasn't like that. Captain," said Deane quietly. "Damn you. Spooky -- get out of my mind." "I'm sorry," the telepath told him, although he didn't sound it. "It's just that this locality is like a jigsaw puzzle. I'm trying to find the pieces and make them fit." He looked around to make sure that no one else in the swaying, creaking cabin was listening. "Tanya and Moira -- The kinship they feel with Najatira -- " "Why don't you ask them about it?" Grimes suggested, jerking his head toward the forward end of the car, where the two girls were sitting. "Is it kinship -- or is it just the attraction that a woman on holiday feels for an exotic male?" "It's more than that." "So you're prying." "I'm trying not to." He looked down without interest at Mount Conway, over which the airship was slowly flying. "But it's hard not to." "You could get into trouble, Spooky. And you could get the ship into trouble." "And you, Captain." "Yes. And me." Then Grimes allowed a slight smile to flicker over his face. "But I know you. You're on to something. And as we're on holiday from the ship I don't suppose that I can give you any direct orders -- " "I'm not a space lawyer, so I'll take your word for that." "Just be careful. And keep me informed." While they talked the pilot of the blimp, his voice amplified, had been giving out statistics. The conversation had been private enough. Flaring fires had been built on the sand in a semicircle, the inner arc of which faced the mouth of the Cave of Birth. The tourists sat, some on the ground and some on folding stools, the fires at their backs, waiting. The sky was black and clear, the stars bitterly bright. From inside the cave came music of a sorta rhythmic wheezing of primitive trumpets, the staccato rapping of knocking sticks. A yelping male voice seemed to be giving orders rather than singing. Grimes turned to say something to Tanya, but she was no longer in her place. Neither was Moira. The i wo girls must have gone together lo the toilet block; they would be back shortly. He returned his attention to the black entrance to the cave. The first figure emerged from it, crouching, a stick in his hands. Then the second, the third -- something was oddly familiar about the ritual, something that didn't make sense or made the wrong kind of sense. Grimes tried to remember -- to decide what it was. Dimly he realized that Deane was helping him, that the telepath was trying lo bring his memories to the conscious level. Yes, that was it. That was the way the Marines disembarked on the surface of an unexplored, possibly hostile planet, automatic weapons at the ready. Twelve men were outside the cave now, advancing in a dancelike step. The crude, tree-stem trumpets sounded like the plaint of tired machinery and the noise of the knocking sticks was that of cooling metal. The leader paused, stood upright. Fingers in mouth, he gave a piercing whistle. The women emerged, carrying bundles, hesitantly, two steps forward, one step back. Grimes gasped in disbelief. Surely that was Tanya, as naked as the others -- and there was no mistaking Moira. He jumped to his feet, ignoring the protests of those behind him, trying to shake off Deane's restraining hand. "Let go "Don't interfere, Captain!" The telepath's voice was urgent. "Don't you see? They've gone native -- no, that's not right. But they've reverted. And there's no law against it." "I can still drag them out of this. They'll thank me after." He turned around and shouted, "Come on, all of you! We must put a stop to this -- " "Captain Grimes." The coach driver's voice was angry. "Sit down, sir. This sort of thing has happened before and it's nothing to worry about. The young ladies are in no danger." "It's happened before," agreed Deane unexpectedly. "With neurotic exhibitionists, wanting to have their photographs taken among the savages. But not this way." Then, even more unexpectedly, Deane was running out across the sand. Najatira advanced to meet him, not in hostility but in welcome. Grimes yelled, "Come back, Spooky -- come back here -- " He didn't know what was happening but he didn't like it. First those two silly bitches -- and now one of his own officers. What the hell was getting into everybody? Followed by a half dozen of the other men, he ran toward the cave's mouth. His way was barred by a line of the tribesmen, holding one generation beyond Dune Frank Herbert returns to the duneworld of Arrakis for an epic of imperial intrigue and human ecology-an epic that spans the universe. That's why we can tell you where it ends We're reprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today :  (N #)# '  ; (S#) # I (S#) # I I (S#) # I i (S#) # I Name ! Address... i  City State... i Zip  I Include list price plus a dime postage for I Jeach title. I Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # their sticks now like spears (which they were) not like make-believe guns. Najatira stood proudly behind the armed men and on either side of him stood the two girls, a strange, arrogant pride in every line of their naked bodies. And there was Deane, a strange smile on his lace, too, seemed suddenly to have acquired lines of authority. "Go back, John," he ordered. "There is nothing that you can do." He added softly: "But there is much that I can do." "What the hell are you talking about, Spooky?" "I'm an Australian, like Moira and Tanya here. Like them, I have the Old Blood in my veins. Unlike them. I'm a spaceman. Do you think that after all these years in the Service I, with my talent, haven't learned how to handle and navigate a ship, any ship'? I shall lake my people back to where they belong." A ND then Grimes knew. The knowledge came Hooding into his mind from the mind of Deane, from the minds of the others, whose ancestral memories had been awakened by the telepalh. But he was still responsible. He must still try to stop madness. "Mr. Deane!" He strode forward firmly. He brushed aside the point of a spear that was aimed at his chest. He saw Tanya throw something and sneered as it missed his head by inches. He did not see ihe cruciform boomerang returning, was aware of it only as a crashing blow from behind, as a Hash of crimson light, then darkness. He recovered slowly. He was stretched out on the sand beside the coach. Two of the nurses among the passengers were with him. He asked, as he tried to sit up, "What happened?" "They all went back into the cave," the girl said. "The rock the rock closed behind them. And there were lights. And a voice, it was Mr. Deane's voice, but loud, loud, saying, 'Clear the field clear the field! Get back, everybody -- get well back. Get well away -- ' So we got well back." "And what's happening now?" asked Grimes. The nurses helped him as he got groggily to his feet. He stared toward the distant Rock. He could hear the beat of mighty engines and the ground was trembling under his feet. Lights flashed here and there on the surface of the monolith. Even with the knowledge that Deane had fed into his mind he could not believe what he was seeing. The Rock was lifting, its highest part suddenly eclipsing a bright constellation. It was lifting and the skin of the planet protested as the vast ship, that for so long had been embedded in it, tore itself free. Tremors knocked the tourists from their feet but somehow Grimes remained standing, oblivious to the shouts and screams. He heard the crash behind him as the coach was overturned but he did not look. The Rock was lifting, had lifted. It was a deeper blackness against the blackness of the sky, a scattering of strange, impossible stars against the distant stars, a bright cluster at first that dimmed and diminished, that dwindled faster and faster and then was gone, leaving in its wake utter darkness and silence. The silence was broken by the coach driver. He said slowly, "I've had to cope with vandalism in my time -- but nothing like this. What the Board will say when they hear that their biggest tourist attraction has gone I hate to think about -- " He seemed to cheer up slightly. "But it was one of your officers. Captain Grimes, from your ship, who did it. I hope you enjoy explaining it!" was able, to Commander Lewin. He said, "As we all know, sir, there are these odd races, human rather than humanoid, all through the Galaxy. It all ties in with the Common Origin of Mankind theories. I never used to have much time for them myself, but now --  "Never mind that. Grimes. Get on with the washing." "Well, Deane was decent enough to let loose a Hood of knowledge into my mind just before that blasted Tanya clonked me with her boomerang. It seems that millions of years ago these stone spaceships, these hollowed out asteroids, were sent to explore this Galaxy. I got only a hay idea of their propulsive machinery bu), it was something on the lines of our inertial drive and something on the lines of our Mannschenn Drive, with auxiliary rockets for maneuveing in orbit and so forth. They w'ere never meant to land but they could, if they had to. Their power? Derived from the conversion of matter, any matter, with the generators or converters ready to start up when the right button was pushed but the button had to be pushed psionically. Get me!" "Not very well. But go on." "Something happened to this ship, to the crew and passengers of this ship. A disease, I think it was, wiping out almost all the adults, leaving only children and a handful of not very intelligent ratings. Somebody it must have been one of the officers just before he died -- got the ship down somehow'. He set things so that it could not be reentered until somebody with the right qualifications came along." "The right qualifications?" "Yes. Psionic talents, more than a smattering of astronautics and descended from the Old People." "Like your Mr. Deane. But what about the two girls?" "They had the Old Blood. And they were highly educated. And they could have been latent telepaths." "Could be." Lewin smiled without much mirth. "Meanwhile, Lieutenant, I have to try to explain to the Olganan government, with copies to operators of transgalactic clippers and to our own masters, including your Commodore Damien. All in all, Grimes, it was a fine night's work. Apart from the Rock, among those who left or were kidnaped were two TG passengers and a Survey Service officer "And the tribe." "The least of the Olganan government's worries and nothing at all to do with TG or ourselves. Even so " This time his smile was tinged with genuine, but sardonic, humor. "Even so?" echoed Grimes. "What if those tribesmen and women decide to liberate I suppose that's the right word those other tribespeople, the fullblooded ones who're still living in the vicinity of the other stone spaceship? What if the Australians realize, one sunny morning, that their precious Ayers Rock has up and left them?" "I know who'll be blamed," said Grimes glumly. "How right you are," concurred Lewin.  c All the pleasures of Earth were his for the taking -- except one! Adam sat down before the communication alcove and keyed Myra's number the puzzle and excitement of his unusual day dropped away from him. As the alcove glowed with the light of Myra's room he experienced that part of his life which, now old, was yet ever fresh and new. He saw her in profile, sealed at her dressing table. She wore a soft, thin gown which hung in gentle folds about her body. She was looking at herself in the mirror, her head tilted back a little. The outlines of her forehead, nose, mouth and chin had the classic regularity which he admired so much but could never quite recollect except in seeing her. The slight and unusual rounding of her features saved their perfection from severity and made him feel ever protective. The dressing table was littered with bottles and a tissue had fallen to the floor. It lay incongruously on the soft, deep-pile rug at her right. Myra ignored the calling signal for a moment, continuing her examination : Then she turned slowly and smiled at him. "Harvey," she said in her soft, warm voice. "I was expecting you." The tissue on the floor caught her eye. With a slightly vexed expression she leaned over to pick it up. The loose, low-cut bodice of the gown fell away from her body, revealing a perfect breast. With her hand on the tissue she looked up and smiled for a moment. "I'm messy," she said. She quickly stuffed the tissue in the disposal and sat up, touching her blond hair lightly with her hands. The gesture showed her arms to perfection. "And did you have a good day, dear?" Myra asked. "Good but exciting," he replied. "I don't want to talk shop tonight, Myra. Just talk. And just see you. What did you do today?" "Oh, nothing that would interest a historian," she replied. "You must have done something," he coaxed. "All right, then, I bought this gown," she told him, standing and walking toward him. The filmy material fell sheer and straight, outlining her figure wherever it touched the points of her breasts, the roundness of her belly. He could see the rest of her body dimly through the fabric, more teasing and tantalizing than bare flesh. She turned around once, then faced him and asked anxiously, "Do you like it?" "Immensely," he said. "Every woman should have one." She looked a little hurt. "But it especially suits you." She smiled in mock relief. She moved the soft, light, comfortable chair from the dressing table to face him and sat down, her legs outlined by the translucent gown. "Where did you find it?" he asked. The conversation turned to shopping and to the trivialities of the day. which Myra seemed to find of consuming interest. Harvey found this very touching and amusing. But gradually, their interest returned to the gown. Harvey remarked on the texture. "Would you like to feel if?" Myra asked. Harvey did, putting his hand through the filmy barrier at the face of the communication booth. As the barrier which gave him access to Myra's communication booth gave way his hand obscured his view of Myra where it passed through the film. But he felt the material of the gown between his fingers. Then he felt Myra's softness through the gown. The slithery softness of the fabric added a sensation all its own. Myra's hand came toward him, a shapely gray ghost emerging from the film. His vision clouded as the shimmering hand pushed him on the chest. "Go away," Myra said. "I thought you wanted to talk." Harvey grabbed the hand and pulled their bodies together. "I do," he said in a whisper, pressing his face through the film toward an unseen ear. "Don't muss the gown," Myra said in alarm (simulated, he thought). "Then take it off," he told her as she drew back. He could see her again. "Really?" she asked, smiling. He nodded solemnly. "Really." Bending toward hint,, she took the hem of the gown lightly in both hands and slowly raised it, gathering folds of cloth into her hands. She smiled and raised the gown over her head; her face emerged and she stood with arms upthrust, naked. "You and me," he said with a chuckle. Quickly he stepped through the film of the communication cubicle to put his arms about Myra. All sight was gone now but he could feel whatever his hands and body sought. Myra had rung off, he lay in bed and thought of the goodness of life. Satisfaction was dearly bought. There had been the years of childhood, the peer group, the computer tutoring, the minors who tended one by assignment, not from choice. There had been the troubled lime of adolescence: intellectual yearning without the intellectual discipline necessary for fulfillment; and physical yearning which dissolved into frankly curious explorations and selfish conflicts of personality. Mating and parenthood were touching for those who were chosen (he had been). But, each knew that he had been chosen. Mating was a rite, a duty. It could be moving; it could be exasperating; it could be frantic. But one was chosen; one did not do his own choosing. Only in adulthood did one have the competence and ability to select the work one was able to pursue with confidence of success. Only in adulthood could one search the whole world for friends like his Harvey's friends, Myra and Donald. The computer had been an aid in finding them but the choice had been his own. In his euphoria of self-congratulation Harvey Adam forgot the challenge and excitement of a day which had put him off his schedule for a whole hour. He sank into restful, blissful sleep. To have missed schedule by an hour was an anomaly in his life. A modestly self-acknowledged genius, he prided himself on order as well as achievement. There was a time and a place for everything for work, for sport, for friends. For calm enjoyment, each had itshis, her place. Ordinarily he left the library at five o'clock, stepping from his anachronistic office into the transportation cubicle to which his merit entitled him. In less than a minute he was at the athletic club, delivered directly to the locker room. There he stripped and zipped his spare but handsome body into his clinging sports suit. Cords gathered up and goggles in hand, he went through the door marked skiing. He stepped on the platform, placed his feet in the sockets and touched a button. The sockets gripped his feet and ankles firmly. He plugged in the cords. After a moment's thought, he put his hands through the dangling leather loops. Standing upright, knees slightly bent, he pulled the goggles over his noble features. Simulation was different from communication with another human being. Sight and touch went together. There was no barrier between himself and the world in which he found himself. To all his senses to all at once Harvey was standing on sun-drenched snow. He looked admiringly down familiar slopes, up at the sparkling mountains, the clear horizon and the deep blue of the cloudless sky. The air was almost still. The dry, newfallen snow was scarcely touched. He could see two tiny skiers far below, sweeping slowly into and out of sight as they turned and twisted. Grasping the poles that hung from his wrists, he pushed himself forward, enchanted by the effortless glide of the skis on the snow. The cold air blew keenly against his cheeks, contrasting pleasantly with the warmth of the sun. He made a long, swift traverse and, turning in a flurry of powder, was away down a familiar and favorite course. , But many courses are familiar. He could have chosen the narrow, windy, changing trails of Stowe or Sugarbush in the east. He could have skied Zermatt in the Alps or down the valley under the cable railway spanning the glacier of Mont Blanc or in the mountains of South America or New Zealand. Tens of skiing sites were stored in the club's computer, complete in every geographical detail, each programed lor a variety of weather and for every possible choice and motion of the skier. Each user had the run to himself, save for distant phantoms who added interest. All depended on skill, on his skill at testing himself against the mountain and the snow. It was not as good as the real thing it was better. Once Harvey had gone all the way to Zermatt to make sure, despite the danger of injury in case of a fall. He had had to be fitted with ski boots by a grumpy, substandard human attendant. He had had to lace them on, an onerous and unfamiliar task. A chair lift had taken him uncomfortably to the top of the slope. The weather had been dull, the snow tracked by loo many others. The trip had been instructive but the day had been wasted as sport. So, at five o'clock of every day, Harvey enjoyed betler-lhan-real skiing at the athletic club. Or, for variety, it might be better-thanreal surfing on the most magnificent rollers in the world. Or out of it. It might be superb sailing across sparkling seas in an eighteen-looter. Then Harvey sailed against phantom boats with phantom yachtsmen, subject to the same wind and currents. The phantoms sailed as well as a partition. of the computer could sail them, not knowing what gusts another partition would subject them to. Sailing is chancy. Harvey frequently beat the phantoms. Some men played tennis, squash, or even soccer against phantom opponents. Harvey regarded this as beneath human dignity. One used machines. One had dealings with people. But today at five-thirty o'clock, Harvey had not been zipped into his sports suit, experiencing the ski slopes of Alta, or the rollers of Oahu, or sailing off the coast of Maine. He had been at his anachronistic wooden desk in his anachronistic office at the library, holding an anachronistic book in his hand and reading it avidly. The book was Recognizing Patterns , edited by P.A. Kolers and M. ter of the book had put him on a new trail. computers had supplied man's goods and implemented man's services with admirable efficiency. They flexibly embodied all man's discoveries and inventions and wholly automated the routines of production and service, including the teaching of such intelleclual skills as languages and mathematics. Computers also accumulated cross-indexed, abstracted and reproduced on deman all of man's recorded knowledge, wisdom, speculations, art and his everything else, with an antlike energy and a pack-rat thoroughness that were less and more than human. Agronomists, surgeons, physicists continually edited their current files. These were used in the teaching and practicing of their arts. Good or bad, that which was eliminated from the current files was not lost; it was retained in secondary storage, where it was mechanically related to an accumulation of centuries in an increasingly inaccessible jumble of data about what the world was and was not like, about events that had or had not taken place, about men who had or had not lived. I n the age of the dowering of the computer, men had been so relieved, surprised and enchanted with human progress that they took the old for granted while demanding the new. Some successful part of that new was then added to the taken-for-granted old. No one asked when or how the world of now had come to be. The past became buried in a mountain of uncritically accumulated detail. All this was instantly accessible electronically, but it far outweighed human ability to comprehend or verify. It became a junk-pile of data, inaccessible to the human mind. Or was it inaccessible.' A few men were interested in that problem. A very few, like Harvey, tried to turn the computer on itself in ferreting out a track through the past. Formidable obstacles lay in the way. Harvey had had to learn how the computers and the machines they controlled really worked. He had traveled strange byways. Many men could feed new locations or games into the sports simulators. Flarvey was one of the very few who really knewhow the simulators simulated. He could have programed into them (as had been done ages ago) the complex shifts of point of view which accompanied a rapid turn or a tumble into the snow. It had been gratifying to him to notice for the first time the slight graininess that accompanied processor overload during such sequences. Harvey's studies took him to things less familiar than the sports simulators. Behind the electronic records, he had found, were early microfiche cards. These he located in a library building, where he then made his office. After sending little servodriven constructs through passages inaccessible to human beings, he had at last held a microfiche card triumphantly in his hand. Behind microfiche, he had discovered printed books. Those that seemed relevant to the trail he sought now lined the shelves above and beside his desk. His latest find The Kolers-Eden collaboration contained a chapter by J. Weizenbaum, called Contextual Understanding by Computers. The chapter described a trivial twentieth-century computer program which "conversed" by teletypewriter as unintelligibly as a twentiethcentury psychiatrist, giving trite and ambiguous but leading responses to human questions or statements. The program worked through key words and a superficial analysis of punctuation and grammatical structure. All of this was small and dull. But, there were two astonishing and exciting points. had participated in the experiment had persisted in believing that there was a human being at the other end of the teletypewriter link, even when told otherwise. The ambiguous responses "Seemed pertinent. With the conversation went a sense of communion. Whence? Harvey wondered. Selfcommunion it must have been, born of wish, not fact. But, he reflected, all men were given to selfcommunion, to recollection, fantasy and imaginary conversations with others. In self-communion, things always turned out the way one wished. Self-communion was empty. The second, more exciting point, was that in that dim and distant day some men had believed that computers could think even as men do. A logician named Turing had put it very well in a paper in a journal called Mind. If in conversation you could not distinguish a computer from a human being, could you say that the computer did not think? Harvey had touched the keyboard in inquiry and had found Mind hopelessly obscured in lists of references. Tomorrow, he had thought. Tor he had suddenly realized that he had overstayed his usual lime of departure by an hour. He had left directly for his apartment, his mind churning with a new thought, his senses on a new track. At the beginning of an era, he had reflected, man had misjudged the most powerful force in his hands. Computers as thinking beings, indeed? And men who could not distinguish a machine from another human being? These thoughts and what part they had or had not played in man's past, had distracted him through an unsatisfactory dinner. Finally his good sense, his value of order, had reasserted itself. Everything to its place. Work and sport. Inquiry and friendship. Too much of one spoiled the other. Harvey had dismissed his speculations and, with familiar and pleasant anticipation, had called Myra and passed the pleasant evening already recounted. At the end of it. he had fallen into blissful sleep. He awoke refreshed and ready to meet the day's new challenge. Some men work best in the morning, sinking into confused fatigue as the day passes. Others do not really wake up until the evening advances. Harvey despised both failings. He was always ready for the task at hand. He awoke clear-eyed, stepped into the fresher, and emerged clean-bodied. Dressing in the clothing his dispenser provided, eating his usual spare breakfastthese took little time. Shortly he stepped into the transportation cubicle and thence into his office, exactly on schedule. Harvey faced an untidy desk, but that was soon set in order. With the book in front of him, his fingers on the console, he made and edited a very brief list. Locate the article by Turing. Trace it backward if possible, forward certainly . He pondered a few moments. That was all he could think of as a start. He located the article in a quarter of an hour and skimmed through it with interest. He admired Turing's examples and thought his exact phrasing of the problem fitting: "The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game.' It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The. interrogator slays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which the woman. "We now ask the question, 'What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?' " Backward tracing from Turing's paper proved a sterile task. With their mechanical thoroughness of cross-referencing by associated words and descriptors the computers had provided countless trails into the past, all of them false or profitless. The tracing into the future was bewildering. It led him into a strange field called artificial intelligence , an agglomeration of unproductive work in which it was hard to find any unifying or identifying principles except confusion and enthusiasm. Of course computers could prove theorems but left to themselves they did not create new mathematics interesting or useful to men. Rather, they endlessly elaborated, as they had in burying man's past in meaningless detail. Computers could play games, could pile up blocks like a child, could perform some recognition tasks. Harvey already knew this. Those who worked on artificial intelligence must have known it. What they, like their machines, had lacked was human purpose. The sports simulators which he enjoyed, the computers he was using in finding a track through the past, were admirable because man had adapted them to human need, not because they aped nature or human function. Who would admire an airplane which aped a bird, landing in a tree and clinging to a limb? Who would admire a second-rate copy of a human being? Especially when computers could do so many things that unaided man could not do? In this morass Harvey found little that informed him, but a few things that amused him. One was an actual record of an engineer maliciously badgering Weizenbaum's "doctor" program. The computer wrote in capitals, the man in lower case letters. Part of the printout ran: i'm a doctor and i d like i want to write music i would be happy yes. yes let's continue okay, okay i hate my dog he loves somebody else he loves my cat my mother loves my cal he's dead yes... my nose my ears you are a stupid doctor you don't know anything uggle wuggle love you Such behavior toward a human being might have indicated grievance or cruelty. Perhaps there was grievance or cruelty, Harvey thought -- but directed toward whom? At Weizenbaum rather than at the insensate machine? Or, self-directed? The other thing that amused Harvey he found in a letter on speech recognition, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society oj America, October #. He read: "It is reasonable to believe that Turing's game may best be approached with the sort of artful deceit that men use in conversation when they want to hide their ignorance and make the most of their knowledge. It would perhaps be easier for a speaking computer to convince the listener that it was so deep as to be unintelligible, and had a cold or spoke with a Merovingian accent, than it would be lor a speaking computer to understand what was said and replay sensibly in good, lifelike general American." Harvey sat back and thought. What strange goings-on at the beginning of the computer age. Kepler, he had read, was fascinated by astrology and a sort of numerology; he had believed in an arithmetical order of the solar system and in the music of the spheres. With the future in their hands, these early computer men had turned their gaze whither? And yet, he thought, there was an insidious plausibility about this. He himself had been taught many things by computer programs. He still used some occasionally. He had never thought of them as humanlike, but rather. as fascinating mechanical games, with a reward of understanding lor success. How easily it might have been otherwise. When a query went outside of the content of a program the machine would respond, for example: "The answer lies in the fields of rings and lattices. If you want instruction, please key #." But what if the machine had responded: "That was a clever question, Harvey, one that I can't answer. But I have a very good friend who knows, and he would be glad to tell you. Would you like me to introduce you to him?" That, and some of the features of the sports simulator, might have fooled even me, Harvey thought, when I was a child at least... The day before Harvey had been so absorbed that he had not noticed the passage of time. This afternoon he kept his eye on the clock during musings which had, for some reason, become disturbing to him. He left promptly at five. At the athletic club he skied down the twisting trails at Stowe. The day's speculations recurred to him at inopportune moments and he fell twice, without injury, of course. He would have been infuriated if he allowed himself such an indulgence, but he had to admit Lo disquiet.  without the usual enjoyment. When he called his friend Donald he felt that he really needed human companionship. Was he perhaps dependent, he wondered. Did he need more than human companionship? Did he need someone's help? The very sight of Donald inspired trust. Solid, gray, with a lined but strong face, he was sealed in a shapeless but comfortable chair before a wood fire, smoking his briar pipe. Harvey had often wondered whether the fire were real or simulated. Donald had only smiled when he had asked. The silky black cocker spaniel at Donald's feet stirred uneasily, its right hind leg twitching, then settled again into quiet contentment. Donald turned slowly toward Harvey, took the pipe from his mouth and smiled slightly. "Smoky has dreams, too, Harvey," he said. "What are your dreams tonight?" Harvey fell the wonderful calm that Donald's presence always brought. But he still experienced a trace of the undiagnosable unease that his discoveries and reflections had brought him. "It isn't dreams tonight, Donald," he replied. "It's my work and what I think about it." Donald nodded seriously and attentively. "Do you want to tell me about your work and your thoughts?" he asked. Harvey launched into his explanation: Turing's assertion that a machine which could not be distinguished from a human being could not be said not to think. The artificiaUintelligence cultists who had wanted to use the computer, not for what it was, but to imitate human functions. Weizenbaum's simple-minded computer program which fooled some simple-minded people into believing that they were communicating with a human being. The assertion that Turing's test could be met by clever deceit and fraud rather than by objective performance. How successful a fraud might be if one used today's computers and today's simulation. Donald listened, attentive and sympathetic, puffing on his pipe, nodding at Harvey's assertions, looking expectant during pauses and urging, "Go on, man," or, "I see," when the pause was long. Finally Harvey ran down. Like most men who have something to say, he was forced to stop when he had said it. Donald stared at the fire, pulling occasionally at his pipe. "What do you make of it, Donald?" Harvey demanded impatiently. Donald looked up. "Does it bother you, Harvey?" he asked seriously. "It bothers me very much," Harvey answered almost rudely. "I can see that it does," Donald said sadly and gravely. "I can see that it does." Harvey fell contrite. Donald had been his friend, his confessor, his comforter for so long. And now he had troubled Donald. "What should I do?" he asked. Donald knocked the dottle from his pipe on the fender. "You should play a game of chess with me," he said kindly but decisively. That was always Donald's remedy, Harvey thought. And a good one, too. It always worked. It a-l-w-a-y-s w-o-r-k-e-d -- A horrid thought struck Harvey. Sounds came from his mouth withbright today." "It was a fine day, Harvey," Donald said without surprise, pulling his chair around and taking the chessboard and pieces from a drawer in the table beside him. "Blemp spelkins, morter hark," Harvey announced. Donald looked up as if he hadn't caught the sense of the words. Harvey remained grimly silent. Donald looked as if he w-ere thinking. "I wouldn't say that, Harvey," Donald finally asserted, looking troubled. "Why shouldn't I say it?" Harvey demanded. "It isn't like you, Harvey," Donald told him. "Why isn't it like me?" Harvey asked. "Come on, man, let's start the game," it urged. The program that is Donald has come to the end of one subroutine, Harvey thought icily, and the best it can do is to try another. Calmly he turned the communicator off while Donald was putting the pieces on the board. Or while what was happening? Presumably a simple simulator program was generating a new visual aspect of objects whose descriptions were stored in memory. persisted for a few minutes more. Was the entire world a toy for his amusement or instruction? No, his childhood peer group had been real enough. He had seen and touched its members without simulator or computer. Ultimately he had lain with some of them. He could almost feel the reality now, the awkward conflict of will and interest, the imperfections in the body of Mary, mother of his last child. Mary of the slightly fallen breasts, hips too broad and knobby knees. But then, was the communicator a communicator at all or only a simulator which presented what a deluded Harvey really wanted: faint echoes of his thoughts and desires in Donald, the companion in chess. And in Myra -- what? He remembered Mary's number. He keyed it into the communicator. From off-screen he no hoard a faint: "Damn the thing I thought I'd turned it off." The voice sounded like Mary's. Mary was the early-awake, earlytired, early-doing-off kind. A bleary-eyed woman stumbled naked into sight, squinting with sleepy eyes into the screen. The body was heavier than he remembered Mary's to be, the breasts droopier, the hips wider and the knees the same. "Harvey," she said. "What on earth are you calling for, damn you?" Harvey turned off the communicator. He had seen all he needed to see and heard all he needed to hear. That was Mary. How well he knew her. Unreal as Donald might be, the communicator was a communicator. With a growing hope, he keyed Myra's number, Myra whom he had chosen, Myra whom he had grown to love. On w'hom he depended even more than on Donald. And he saw Myra sitting on the deep-pile rug. her legs folded over one another. A scissors and nail file lay beside her. She held her left fool in her right hand and was examining it intently. The graceful curve of her back and neck were perfection. She looked up and smiled. "Hello, Harvey," she said and started to rise. As she leaned over slightly, he could see perfect breasts through the low-cut neck of her gown. He spoke in cold despair. "Uggle waggle love you," he asserted. Myra's eyes grew misty and she smiled tremulously. "And I love you, loo, Harvey," she said. "We love together." Harvey turned off the communicator. it You Will Enjoy Revolution by Robert Silverberg, and Open Letter by Robert A. W. Lowndes. Also featured are Off the Deep End, a column by Piers Anthony; a major review by Norman Spinrad; humor by Greg Benford, erudition by John Boardman; madness by the editor -- and fury by the readers in the letter column. Sample Subscription -- # issues for S I . S# per year. P #. Box #. Santa Monica, Cal. # in event that you didn't already know, is a shining example of what can be done by the technologically oriented writer of science fiction. When he describes a machine, not only do you believe that it would actually work, but he can go on to build layer after layer of detail into his stories, based on the events which must logically have led to the invention of the machine, the immediate social implications of the machine, and the eventual historical turning points implicit in the machine's existence. What I'm saying is he's a kind of combination of George O. Smith and E.E. Smith, but I also want to point out that Niven has a sharply defined and engaging literary personality all his own. He's been going along for some years now, turning out superior short fiction and a pair of rather good novels called A Gift from Earth and World of Ptavvs , both published by Ballantine along with his short story collection, Neutron Star. Now Ballantine has brought out Ringworld (Ballantine Book #.#, #c). Ballantine bills it as "The first major novel from a hard-core science-fiction writer," which is by way of begging the question on World of Ptavvs and A Gift From Earth. (In as much as Ballantine originally popularized the term "hardcore pornography" we don't even have to ask what the term "hardcore science fiction" may be intended to mean). Anyway, Niven has here written an excellent and entertaining science-fiction story in book length. Its social background is consistent with the universe depicted in his previous two Ballantine novels, and with the lead story in Neutron Star. It does range farther and wider in scope than his previous works. It contains one genuinely mind-boggling concept a ring-shaped artificial world, large enough to circle its sun; as if someone had drawn a circle in space at, say, the Earth's mean orbital distance. This fantastic construction, several hundred thousand miles in the eventual site of all sorts of adventures shared by Niven's four principal characters, who are Louis Wu, a human; Nessus, a Pierson's puppeteer; Speaker to Animals, a kzin; and Teela Brown, not only human, nubile and uninhibited, but the fortunate recipient of a brand of luck representing a social concept by Niven on a par with the technological imagination he displays. The whole story, which is basically a Grail-hunting adventure, is woven together very skillfully and proceeds at a pretty smooth pace. I have minor quibbles about the length of time it takes Niven to get his characters to the Ringworld, and then there are a few meaningless traveloguey episodes on the Ringworld. (In general, Niven has not done much better at solving some of the problems inherent in this kind of story than Jack Vance did in Big Planet. When you write an action story laid on such a hugh geographical canvas, you're handicapped by having to describe what happened during the tens of thousands of miles your characters had to cross to get from one scene of action to the next.) Niven doesn't always use these interstices in his action plot to do the most efficient job possible of advancing his protagonist's gradual deduction of the true nature of their mission. But all I really mean to say by that is that although all the episodes are enjoyable, not all advance the plot, and this may possibly annoy you. On the othe.r hand, it may charm you (I've only recently discovered that there are people who are not charmed by Niven's storytelling style). I also think that Niven's premise depends on evolution's operating very quickly in one instance and far too slowly in another. That's a far more serious quibble, because this contradictory assertion is fundamental to the story. On that basis I'd give this book three stars out of a possible four. That ain't bad. K eith Roberts, author of Pavanne , is now back with us with The Inner Wheel (Doubleday, #), a novel about people with various psionic powers who group together to form gestalt personalities in various little out-of-the-way places in England. Pavanne , as you should remember, was an excellent book composed of short episodes in the history of an alternate-world England dominated by steam technology, the Roman Catholic church and the weighty, pallid hand of medievalism. What emerged was an impressive literary achievement for this field; a book whose very structure and style were in exact harmony with its theme. Episodic, moody and picked out in elaborate detail, Pavanne sustained itself masterfully through all but its final episode (in which a gratuitous intrusion of the "real" world tended to strike a false note, as if someone sticker for one of the boats on the Bayeaux tapestry. The Inner Wheel is written in three episodes, one of them firstperson for no particular reason. The book is also quite full of elaborate detail and is therefore in trouble, because its structure is neither homogeneous enough to tell a coherent story well, nor broken up enough to be a perhaps effective mosaic. Along this line one might argue that the book is structured to represent the less than perfect facade one would get from contact with a gestalt mind. However, if that was Keith Roberts' intention, unfortunately the effect failed. Now that doesn't mean The Inner Wheel is a bad book. It simply means that on a number of levels it's not as good a book in its own terms as Pavanne was. It does reveal some interesting things about Keith Roberts, a w riter whose talent justifies and arouses in us a high degree of curiosity as readers of potential future books by this man. For one charming thing, it's obvious from part of the content of this book that some of the most attractive images and turns of style in Pavanne were perhaps initially stirred in Roberts' mind by a familiarity with Turner's later paintings, and a major characterization is by synthesis from Turner's life. For another thing, it's possible to see from this book and Pavanne that he has a fixed fondness for writing typographical counterpoint the kind of thing in which a central event unfolds before our eyes in Roman while a chorus comments on it in Italic. And as an offhand comment. I'd assume that Roberts is having the problem that many writers meet when faced with their first few novels; a resort to episodic technique usually reflects a mistaken conviction that there is something about writing a novel that takes some sort of major regearing of the creative mechanism. Not feeling such a major change within himself, the writer who nevertheless wants to bring out a book produces it as a collection of short stories or as an imitation of a collection of short stories. Pavanne , which did originally appear as a series, couldn't help being that way. This one, I suspect, can be called Roberts' first "deliberate" novel, and for a first novel, it's pretty impressive. However, he's going to be in trouble if his first all-of-a-piece book, which may be his next one, partakes of the thickly detailed prose technique which does so much to slow down the opening third of The Inner Wheel, and of the fever-dream chiaroscuro montages of the final third. These are techniques which are much easier to apply to short stories and novelettes than they are to cohesive novels, unless you are that interested in careful prose workings that you don't care how few people can maintain their patience long enough to finish your book. problem with logic in this particular story. The gestalt minds, it seems, find it necessary to preserve world sanity by physically dismantling the British defense establishment. They are depicted as doing this out of the highest idealistic motives. There's a half-convincing substory about a normal human being who acts as their go-between with the "normal" world. Although at no time does Roberts convince me that this character is actually necessary to the workings of the gestalt minds' plans, he does provide some scenes which are effective to the exact degree that they resemble similar sequences in #. (He also provides one-half of a really effective love story in connection with a female character, many of whose actions are inconsistent with that same character as portrayed in the middle third of the book). The thing that boggles the mind is that it's not until after the idealistic gestalt minds have dismantled the British defense establishment that they have any contact at all with similar (and presumablysimilarly idealistic) minds in Europe. At no point in this book are they shown making contact with similar minds in the Western hemisphere or in Asia. In other words, the noble deeds portrayed here consist of a unilateral stripping away of all physical protection from the "normal" population of the British Isles by a group which is not capable of substituting any more effective protection, in the event all the other power groups in the world are not ready to lay down their arms just as soon as the English do. This strikes me as a pretty dubious way of assuming one's responsibilities as a superbeing. Given the logical frailties of the "normal'" human, il implies that the supermind is perfectly ready to put up with the undetermined possibility of World War #I , since it can presumably protect itself, and has the equipment necessary to reclaim whatever rubble remains from the result of removing one key block from an elaborate system of checks and balances. Frankly, I'm not crazy about that idea, and I would think it's a proper demand on a writer to ask him to put something in there to allay my fears for my own skin, me being one of several people totally lacking in psionic abilities. So, as I was saying, this is not as good a book as Pavanne , and I was implying, its faults are large versions of the small traits of Pavanne. From a didactic point of view, what this means is that in my opinion Roberts has certain firmly accustomed habits of thought and certain set approaches to story problems, which he ought to spend a littre more lime analyzing for their various strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, and I think the stronger hand, a writer with definite approaches and a definite armamentarium of techniques at this stage in his career is a writer with fortunate characteristics. Furthermore, a writer as fundamentally talented as Roberts is probably in a position to teach the rules-makers more than they could teach him. But in terms of the writer on one hand and the rules-makers on the other, this particular book is a book for both sides to learn from. To read for pure pleasure, it's not so useful. Fled (Ballantine ##.#, #c) is a book that sounds much better in the describing of it than in the reading. The story concerns itself with the crews of two space capsules sent to investigate a huge alien starship which has suddenly shown up on the fringes of the Solar System and gone into orbit around the Sun without either communicating or attempting to reply to any Terreslial communications. The ship just hangs there, the orbit of Mars, impressing the daylights out of everybody and preserving an enigmatic aspect. The six men sent to investigate it at a fantastic expenditure of effort actually represent the utmost the human race has ever been able to achieve in the way of space travel. Feeling very much like loin-clothed natives in a pair of dugout canoes, they come paddling up to the alien visitor and begin trying to solve the series of problems which confront them. Successively, they work their way into the ship, encounter voracious alien creatures which may or may nol be intelligent, and, ultimately, nol only solve this problem in a satisfactory and heartening manner, but come very near to justifying the effort the reader has had to pul into wading through While's storytelling technique. That technique is not only even more verbose than mine here, it has the serious failing of having crucial events occur either offstage or in curiously crippled form. What I mean by that last is that although White repeatedly demonstrates an ability to describe a scene in a fully rounded manner, so that you can see the people moving in full color, hear their voices, grip them with your fingers, smell them, and I guess even taste them, quite often when the chips are down, and the storyteller should be at the top of his form. White will suddenly shut off the sound, or the sight, or, as I said above, will actually dodge writing the scene entirely and simply refer to it as having occurred. Diagnosing writers at a distance is a mugs' game, but I'll take a stab at it for the sake of While's manyattractive gifts: I suspect that he generates so much tension within himself while writing a book that he literally cannot bear to come to grips with crucial scenes. If so if sothere are a couple of ways of getting around this, particularly once you recognize the problem, and I sincerely hope he does. Anderson fan. Therefore, we can imagine the pleasure with which I greeted the appearance of Satan's World (Lancer Books #-#. #c) a Nicholas van Rijn-David Falkayn story which, as it happens. I had nol read before. Down the pike I merrily went, following the adventures of David and Nicholas, Chee Lan, Adzel, and Muddlehead, ripping down and building up the history of man for the greater glory and profit, naturally, of Solar Spice and Liquors, Inc. Unfortunately, the farther along you get into the book, the more tired either you or Anderson become; from what started out as a nice, crisp story about interstellar skullduggery, a kidnaping, and an assault on a moon fortress by Adzel the six-limbed Saurian, with a cannon strapped to his back, and all kinds of goodies like that, this gradually becomes a series of scenes more or less individually attractive, but only more or less connected to the front half of the book. Anderson's claim to me is not that of a man who delivers one hundred percent of the goods every time, but of a man who in a vast body of work delivers a hefty percentage of the goods gratifyingly often. This time, he didn't do it. That's a shame because he started out quite nicely.  i His would be a discovery j vital to all mankind -- if J only he could determine who was stealing his brain! J We dance round in a ring and suppose, Bui the Secret sits in the middle and knows. Robert Frost I I anyway. "So we ean see that if we use this term A light went on above the door and blinked insistently . The room was filled with the clicking of recorders going into rapid rewind and the scraping of desks being maneuvered in preparation lor the dash. Should I try to finish the sentence? I turned to look at the class. They gave me an open-eyed, expectanl look like a bunch of Class Two Norms. "Dismissed." I switched off the AutoWrite and the equations disappeared from the Viewall. a signal for the wholesale desertion of things academic. If anything, Dr. Fredrick Black is a realist. I picked up my lecture notes and followed my nine-o'clock class out the corridor. It didn't make any difference whether I finished the sentence, anyway; they didn't learn from lectures. Far easier to plug into a Wink-Cram treatment every night and sop up the real juice of your courses directly into the subconscious. If it weren't for the limit on the number of cuts they could take nobody would be here at all. Down at the end of the corridor, deep in the throng, I could see Winters coming my way. I was stuck behind an obese student who was chuckling over a mistake he'd found in a physics textbook. He had a laugh that sounded like someone beating an inflated bagpipe with a stick. Fat Boy moved away, though, accompanied by a girl who made a practice of coming in at consultation periods and badgering me with ill-formed questions. Both frowned at me, thinking Fd been eavesdropping. They assumed the air of discovered insurgents, potential conspirators in the Sexual Revolution in Our Colleges that one reads about in women's magazines but never finds on campus, and snipped away. Out of the maelstrom of loitering undergraduates struggled George Winters, graduate student extraordinary. He had brown eyes and a quiet, competent look about him. "We've got it," he said. "What?" And then I remembered: the phonon modulator. "I fooled around with it last night and got the efficiency up two orders of magnitude. It wasn't a fundamental problem at all we just weren't working at the right part of the plasma spectrum." "Quiet," I said, but I didn't think anyone streaming past had heard. I noticed a passing coed with a singularly improbable construction. "Come on." The crowds are getting worse every year. I dug an elbow into an obstructing undergraduate and made for the downramp. The coed wiggled out of sight, trailed by a worried crowd of engineering students specializing in suspension bridges. We were caught in a class change and the ramps were clogged. Someone pressed against my shoulder and whispered, "Got the computer cross matrix lor the Bio Four-nineteen exam this afternoon. Straight goods, guaranteed." I gave him a shocked look and he recognized my faculty badge and got lost fast. I could have collared him but I figured anybody who was stupid enough to buy a bogus program deserved it. The noise receded and the air chilled slightly as we worked our way into the bowels of the building. At these depths only graduate students and occasionally the bigger fish, postdoctoral fellows, were to be seen. The laboratory, in the fourth sub-basement, was a fluorescent jungle, a riot of invention in a cell of tiled, Spartan logic. I tripped over a cable near the door and danced out of the way of a rig with its entrails scattered. Not that the mess mattered. A clean lab is the one with nothing happening in it. posed to share the lab but the remains of their equipment were cowering in the corners. They didn't understand Winters; he'd switched fields, worked his way up from a Norm status and wasn't a sixteen-year-old scientific maniac, so of course they didn't like him. I motioned Winters to lock the door. "Check for bugs?" I asked. "All clear this morning. I found one early this week made up like a light switch, even had a ten-shot photoflash focused on the equipment in case they wanted a visual checkbut I think it was just an ordinary monitor from the Interdisciplinary Council for Allied Sciences." I nodded. The council used hidden mikes to keep up on what was going on in the department, but they couldn't use it as scoop material. They were mostly Life Sciences people, anyway. And a biologist wouldn't understand what a physicist was doing even if he got hold of the council's tapes. "So it finally worked?" I said happily, security matters out of the way. "Watch the sample." Winters walked over to the control panel sealed among the mountains of electronics and Hipped on the power. I looked at the cube of ceramic mounted on braces. There was a vicious blue Hash and a circuit breaker popped front overload. I blinked and looked again. The sample was gone. No smoke, no noise, no Hollywood effects. Just gone. There was a small pile of dust under the braces. "I don't believe it," I said, believing it. "We thought we'd get a little synchronous vibration, far up in the band spectrum, but this A feeling, like Maxwell-writingdown-his-equations, Einstein-andthe-perihelion-of-Mercury, ran through me. "I don't believe it either." Winters grinned. "But it works." "It's set up the way I outlined?" I said, fingers tripping lightly from amplifier to microwave tunnel to modulator and onward, checking, memorizing. It wouldn't do to leave the circuitry intact in the lab, where a random light tube dropped down the ventilators could get a snap. "Perfectly. " Winters replied. "I'd been sweeping through the optical and microwave spectrum, trying to pick up the right plasmon resonance. About an hour ago the crystal started to show longitudinal phonon emission in the lower portion of the energy band, tut you were in class so I tried to tune it in better on my own. The third harmonic of one of those helicon instabilities showed up on our equipment and then" "And then the phonons went into the far nonlinear." I was trying not to dance around the apparatus. The idea was simple, but we'd been trying for over a year to make it work. Every solid has specific patterns of vibration -- normal modesthat in usual circumstances are ordinary, linear, wellbehaved oscillations. But if energy is introduced into a sample in just the right way the normal modes can be driven, and the solid will absorb the energy into its lattice. Add enough -- and there's the trick -- and the lattice can't take it any longer. It gets driven completely off the range of plasmon energies that permit the stable formation of a metallic solid. The sample disintegrates. "Fine, fine," I said and made a few notes on the settings of the monitors. I looked into the glass cover of a meter and saw my own face staring back at me. This was going to complicate my status in the physics department. I knew . I noticed my hands were sweating. "Let me have a look at the recording traces," I mumbled, moving over to the other side of the lab. "For a shot in the dark, then, we're pretty accurate," I said, talking to cover my uneasiness, "We could have tried for years and never hit a thing. The theory behind nonlinear resonances in solids is just starling to hit the journals now and there hasn't been anything done experimentally yet. We've got a whole new field." Half self-mocking and half not. Winters and I shook hands. The more I talked the better I felt. Statistically, things like this just don't fall into your lap every day. Or every lifetime. cuitry and rewired it in what seemed like equivalent ways, trying to find out the easiest technique for attaching current inputs. Sometimes the effect would weaken and eventually damp out. But its operating range was broad and convenient for most of the equipment we had; given the time, we could gel a gold mine of data. We went to work. I kept extensive notes in my own shorthand to throw off easy decoding; you can have all the cryptoyou. but if you can't read the notes you've stolen, they're worthless. And of course I didn't use one of the standard codes they teach you in the lab courses. It's good scientific procedure to code, but the memory-mesh system the instructors hand out is too simple. Any six-year-old could split it open like a ripe watermelon, with a computer link to help him through the algebra. But now I had a chance to do some pure physics in a debugged lab and I lost track of lime. Lunch came. I climbed up out of the pit of professional isolation we'd dug ourselves into and told Winters to go home he deserved a rest. The preliminary work was finished and I wanted to do some thinking. I picked up the papers with crude schematics sketched on them, put a double seal on the lab and caught the next ramp up. thinking of erudite titles with I . Black and G. Winters printed firmly underneath. I stopped at the tenth lloor and found the nearest InSlal station. There was a line outside, mostly advanced graduate students and technicans sending in extra copies of their weekly reports on the off chance the Sil'tsystem would find some worthwhile measurements in their data and make a short article out of them. Stupid. If they hit it lucky not many did it meant a quick PhD and a good job. But it was blind. No method. In a lew years on the outside they'd fall behind in promotions and stop getting equipment grants, begin to gel rattled and blow a research deadline on a big contract. They'd go back down like a grand piano in a ten-gee field, then tail off just above Norm rank. As I said, stupid. It came my turn and I already had my abstract written out in my the necessary credits for Top Journal status. If the censor circuits thought it was good enough I'd make Phys Rev it had been Physical Review when I was an undergraduate but beyond that I didn't know who'd be interested. Defense, certainly, and for anonymous sponsorship of publication costs in case anybody wanted to pick up the tab. Randy Davis. "Socking in another one, Fred.'" he said, angling to get a look at the notes I had in my hand. I stuffed them hastily into my pocket. "No, just monitoring a reference to be sure he doesn't turn in anything without its getting into the journals," I said. "Know what you mean. Some of these guys pile up a dozen papers in your field without putting a word into print. It's all copyrighted and on tape, so nobody can howl when he dumps all of them into the literature and wipes out six months of your work." Randy's raisin face looked more serious, his weak mouth attempting a scowl, but the effect didn't quite come off. "We ought to have an Ethic passed about it." I grinned; I was so happy I wasn't even bothered by his trying to drop a microbug shaped like a coat button into my pocket. "Now Randy, you know the Academic Freedom and License Committee has taken it up bethe money on searching the have the right spirit for research. Gelling thejournals isn't enough." He fidgeted with the button a moment longer as we walked back toward the ramp and finally palmed it out of sight. "Well, I needn't worry. I haven't got anything big going on right now. I look a long vacation four days and helped my parents move stuff by suborbital down to Australia." "Oh?" I tried to look interested. "They're retiring?" "Sure. Dad's forty-seven, two years over maximum already. Had two of his big projects turned down in a row and bang he was out on the street." "Too bad." "He doesn't mind. He knew he was giving out and the arthritis was coming back on him. I don't think either of them will last loo long, even down there in the desert where it's peaceful. They've both been in technical development. The nerves will only take so much of that." I nodded without saying anything, thinking about my research. We were coming to my floor so I waved goodbye and got off. My finger watch said five minutes had elapsed since my program went in, so I went over to the printer at the end of the hall and dialed in for my Phys Rev. I caught my name in a quick scan of the contents and thumbed in for ten more reprints. The writeup was standard, just the #wordvocabulary Semanlarile job, but you could tell even the computer's discretionary subprogram thought it was important. It was a quick, clean job. If we played it right there was a lot more meal to be carved out before the pack caught up with us. And catching up would take time; the Ethics only required a general description lor establishment of a Priorclaim, and the Phys Rev article didn't really have enough specifics to be useful. It would take some searching to find out just what the hell we had done, and by then we'd be doing something else. Some students were waiting outside my office in case the green consultation light went out. I ducked in before they could give me the full mournful look and punched the Autosec over to rejection for any visitors less than Einstein status. I could let the physics go for a few hours; the politics were going to give me more trouble. Winters was my ace in the hole, and he'd come through. Until I got full tenure status, the department could take him away and cripple my research. I got out the staff roster and went through the names. Normally they were good, hardworking types, but... Professor Ruggles, say. Big lab, lots of students, fat A EC contract. He'd been pouring a few megabucks into the same area that I was in and all he'd gotten was a couple of simple articles clogged with irrelevant data. Pretty smart, they would say, steal the idea from Ruggles and give it to one of his graduate students to cover up. Too glib,  always thought. And doesn't the committee to consider his tenure meet about this time ? The postdoc in the next office put on a leisure tape and the sound filtered through the ventilation grille. I could tell there were no instilled patterns, nothing on the subliminal tracks to learn; a waste of lime. It sounded like Bach. sharp and brisk, and made me feel as though I were being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon. The best thing to do now was try to work through the theory I'd already developed on the effect, looking for other facets we could explore. The plasmon-phonon coupling was tricky; there might be aspects I had not considered. I sal down at my desk, dialed my chair to medium rigid, and started to work. II T HE rest of the afternoon slid by, mingled with the raw crunch of wadded papers as I threw them away. There were a few things we could look for that werejusl on the verge of observability. I'd have to tell Winters about them and set up a program to search them out. I watched the sun creep up the wall, discovering new facets of the Cheer-O-Tile. Leaves rustled outside my window, but I couldn't hear them over the air conditioning. I was interrupted by the AutoSec inquiring if I wished to admit visitors now that the normal consultation period was past. I must have nodded because Randy's voice came over the departmental intercom. "Hey. don't you ever quit?" "Didn't know what time it was." I glanced at my desk clock. Seven o'clock, already. "I'm going home. Want to come'?" "Okay." I cut off and locked my notes into the desk. Randy met me on the ramp and we checked out through the automatic guard at the front door. Then down the steps into the quad, a chill fall breeze whipping through the close-packed buildings. We cut across on a faculty ramp to save time, through one of the arched entranceways to the campus, with just a nominal visual check of our cards. The purple neon Multiversity sign Hashed out. There was a little jingle to go with it, but the audio part was shut off after class hours. No stars penetrated the muddy smog dome over us. From the other side of the campus I could hear soft rumbles of a young Beethoven rolling into his second symphonythe open air concerts. How long had it been since I attended one? When I'd come here as an undergraduate, there was lime. I read novels, went to art galleries. All that had gradually slipped away until I found myself reading biographies of prominent scientists instead,or doing background studies in areas related to my own. And yet, I didn't have the feeling that I was a drudge. Such a level of work was normal here and I had come to accept it. Maybe I could change all that, once I got current business out of the way. We caught the tube. Randy and I lived just a few stops down, safely inside the Multiversity community...It wasn't like Berkeley, Norms and university personnel scrambled up together. How they ever got any work done there. I don't know. As the lube car pulled away Randy turned the conversation back to my research. "I noticed you didn't give any of the important specs on your apparatus in Rhys Rev today," he said. I made what I hoped was a wry grin. "Until the Review Board demands it for authentication, I'm keeping everything under my hat." "It sounds like a good solid advance to me. A little pushing and wrangling and you might even get the board to declare it a Breakthrough." Randy looked at me out of the sides of his eyes. I continued to study the scenery zipping by. "And who might be doing the wrangling?" "Oh, anybody with the professional status could do it," he said too casually. "He'd have to be of higher rank than you, though." "Somebody like Ruggles?" I said. "That might not be a bad choice, yes." had been able to pull the strings on this one so fast. Hell, it hadn't been more than a few hours. "What if I have some other choice? Or don't choose at all?" Randy frowned. "It's your professional obligation." I didn't reply. "Come on," he chided. "You aren't going to hog this all lor yourself, are you?" "You forgot Winters." "Okay, and Winters. Rut if a younger staff member stumbles on something this big he shares it with the older members of the faculty. They have the experience to lead him down the right paths in the work that follows. He doesn't keep it for himself." "Could it be that they want to keep a hand in anything new that comes up, because if they didn't it would be pretty clear that they didn't have any more ideas themselves?" "We all pull together. Anything else would be like what goes on in the Normzones. It's the same principle that produced the divided society in the first place. Read C.P. Snow." "Wrong. Snow didn't say anything like that." Randy shook his head. "He was the first to show that society had begun to split into segments that didn't communicate with each other and that the process was accelerating." .I thought back over my memories of Snow, the courses in Pragmatic Philosophy I'd had, and the rest of it. "What you don't gel over the three-D. Randy, is that old C.P. thought division was bad." "Bad? How can separation be bad" The future progress of the race depends on the scientific and managerial community's being able to function in freedom and isolation, without having to play footsie with the rabble. Without us they'd all starve to death in a week." "Probably so. But Snow came from a solid background in what they called the Humanities, and he thought things would go wrong if either group had control and didn't communicate with the other. The books he wrote were fiction, you know, not good honest fact. He wasn't just a scientist, he knew other things." "Whatever else he worked on didn't last," he said, thinking he'd made a point. But the bit about the books was almost new to me, too; I hadn't remembered them for years. Now that I thought about it, all the talk about Snow's being a social scientist on a level above Marx and all the rest was just ridiculous. "Still," Randy went on, "I won't deny that isolation has brought out the worst aspects of the Norms. You can see them loitering around the edges of the Multiversity, not doing anything, wearing sloppy clothes and sneering at people who do an honest day's work. And everybody knows about their women." I nodded and let him go on: "A few students last quarter goT involved with some Norm girls. Administration found out about it, of course, but by the time the campus police got there the boys were beaten up and stripped naked. Hoodlums had painted "Stuff Your Slide Rule" all over them in indelible ink. The police had to call for a cruising armored car to get them all out safely." I laughed but I could see from Randy's tight lips that I was supposed to lake a lesson from a horrible example. "If you heed my advice then. Frank, you'll do the right thing by the department. We owe it to the Multiversity, you and I. We've got to support the Multiversity and the Government or the Norms will get into power and we'll all go down the drain." I looked out at the darkened buildings. We were almost at my stop. "It's your duty," he said. "Anything less than what's right will get you into trouble. And after all, when you're a senior staff member you'll get the benefits of other people's work, too." "But that's just the smacker," I pointed out. "That wouldn't be my work." "Just "Y 'know, sometimes I can believe those Norms who say the Great Twentieth Century Scientific Revolution is running out of steam," I said. "There's got to be some reason for all this backbiting." He was getting irritated. "You're acting like a coward," he said. "I'm not acting," I said and got off at my stop. than usual. I had stayed up late studying and planning and I couldn't seem to get the grit out of my eyes. I reached across the small kitchenette table and switched on the morning #D. A news brief. "New rioting and violence in the Norm zones." The announcer shot out the words machine-gun style. "Motorcycle gangs killed three, injured forty today in fighting that followed the monthly announcement of Multiversity scholarship winners." The screen showed a tall, athletic young man in a leather jacket beating an anemic youth with glasses. "Disgruntled applicants for the positions were sel upon by hoodlums shouting Too good for us, foureyes?' and violence flared." The announcer looked directly at the camera with his serious, allknowing smile. He was a young man, suavely confident, probably a public control specialist with #-plus rank in all his exams. In a plain gray suit he looked not as much an adult as an overgrown child. He opened his mouth and I cut him off. His image collapsed and I leered maliciously back at him as he died. I had an extra cup of Perk-O-Caf ("Extra caffein to keep your nerves in that peak condition!") and started for the physics department. On the way over, ignoring the crowds, I reviewed the' internal structure of the department, searching for weaknesses, probing, trying to guess what would come next. My lower-division lecture started off at an even pace, but after ten minutes I began stumbling through my notes and losing track of what I wanted to say. I realized it wasn't going over. Ruggles kept popping into my stream of consciousness. Excusing class halfway through the lecture isn't good practice it gives you a reputation for being erratic and overemotional but it's better than starting to talk to yourself with thirty people watching. I let them go. around in the hall, confused by the sudden windfall of a whole hour, free of any harangue by a bourgeois lackey of the reactionary university. They quickly made a path for me, probably afraid that if frustrated in my attempt to get away I would leap upon them with mad ravings and run amok down the hall. I'd forgotten to shave that morning and was a little red-eyed from reading too much. The department chairman would hear of this, I was sure. "Black." I turned around to see Ruggles, a big man with unruly hair and a sad face, gliding down the ramp from his A EC-financed sanctuary like a fat angel from on high. Chalk dust lapped tenderly in the valleys formed by his pleated trousers. He gave me a look of equal parts injured trust and assured maliciousness, clamping his hands firmly behind him as if he somehow thought his back was going to fall off. "Hear you've been doing some work related to what I'm studying," he puffed at me. I smiled. "Winters ran across an effect we can't explain at the moment, but it's probably an anomaly." He raised bushy eyebrows. "You reported an accident to Phys Rev'V Trapped. "Uh "You know. I've put in a lot of time on these studies and a lot of people are behind me. I think for the good of the department -- " "You'll get all the information as soon as it's ready. We're just at the beginning stages now." thing more to say I nodded and was gone, #-meter dash high school champion three times in a rowout, past guard and down the stairs. Hell . I could snuggle up to Ruggles, of course, let him in at the beginning and have his horde of graduate siudents tramp through the problem. And that's what they'd do. Stay in the lab twenty hours a day, take every facet of the effect and run it remorselessly to earth. Give it a name. The X Effect. Pile up a mountain of papers. Push the A EC into renewing the contract. Get the department a larger appropriation, draw in more graduate students, maybe hold a regional conference here to advertise a little. Cut in everyone qualified for a little of the pie (Biochemical Studies Using The X Effect), spread it around, gel kickbacks in return. Wouldn't want to antagonize anyone, Dr. Black... Professor Black... Chairman Black... You could wind up very comfortably, if the X Effect held out that long. If it didn't, Ruggles would gel something to weigh the scales a little more in his favor paper or two, not enough to do that much good. Maybe not enough to get tenure. Maybe not, Mr. Black... I slipped my Identcard hurriedly into the slot outside the library and went into the periodical section. The brown metal racks that held the technical journals covered three floors, stiffly worded titles that encased thick shelves of computerese. And those were only the most important printouts; the lesser ones were on tape. An impressive view, if only one couldn't read. I made a show of looking up some back references on nonlinear resonances, Jacobean matrices and other random subjects, and then punched for the latest printout on references to my work. The public computer software was slower, since it had a lower priority rating for sharedlime readout from the computer's library, but it was also untraceable. No one could find out if I'd checked. I got the tapes on standby checkout and found a booth. The one I wanted was a half-inch in radius. I found a few routine queries for any future work from backwater colleges, some crossreference notes written by the computer and one request for more data from a Federal agency I didn't know. They were identified only by a long string ol' letters and numbers. Good. No major competitors, as yet. When my lime was up I gave the tapes back to a cruising librarian cart so no one would notice who returned them and went back to the physics department. There was a line outside my door again, but this time not all students. Ill nosed man said abruptly when I let him in. "Want to talk about your work." He sat down without being invited and pulled a lot of forms out of a thick briefcase. "Your article was processed and projected by our computer, the best on this continent. It tells us the process of disintegration you mention or imply in your article could have important military applications." "I hadn't realicd that. And the article didn't imply anything about military uses." "The machine caught it. You can see it for yourself with a little careful reading." "Don't believe everything your machine tells you." "That's an anlisemantic remark. Computers can work out the implications of the written word better than any single human." His fingers were plucking at the cuffs of the severe black suit he wore. "It may become possible to, say, attach leads lor microwave pulsers to large objects and destroy them completely with your techniques." I nodded. His beak nose weaved back and forth with hypnotic effect. I was still nodding an hour later when I got rid of him. Yes, the Institute would gel regular reports and yes, of course I'd let their technicians into the lab to set up their rigs and certainly I realized the national defense was at stake and I wouldn't want to impede... The next man was short and fat and llicked cigarette ashes around him like a nervous acolyte scattering incense. "Dr. Black, sir, I'm a techhelper over in biomed and I heard about your Breakthrough over here. The contract that hired me isn't very big and a few of us were thinking the other day about the fact that it probably won't be renewed His voice strangled off and the little man looked uncomfortable. "You'd like to work on my project?" "I could work nights," he blurted out. "Keep my old job, learn your techniques on my own time, without costing your contract a thing." "No," I started to say, "I don't th " "But m go on NoSleep! I'll spend all my time off the job on your project." It took me fifteen minutes to get rid of that one. If I took on one the others would be after me, all the second-rate people caught in dead projects in the backwaters of research. The rest of the line got the axe; I'd had enough for one day. Winters had been working hard; I found him in the lab. rearranging equipment. "I saw the article." He grinned. "Fast work." He turned away and started explaining a new experimental configuration he'd thought out and I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. He didn't question my omission of his name from the article; sometimes it takes graduates a while to get used to that. But a faculty member needs every publication point he can get, right down to the fractions alloted for every time your name appears in a footnote. But then I thought, why? Why did I run it with only my name? Winters did as much as I, even if he was a graduate student. With the rest of the department trying to steal everything I had, what was I doing pulling the same scheme on Winters? The thought bothered me. I shelved it and tried to pay attention to what Winters was telling me. His new rig was an improvement on the one I'd designed, but I would've made the same changes if I'd had the lime. Damned polities was getting between me and my work again. It always did just after you got results. I spent a lew pleasant hours running tests and trying to narrow down the areas in which the resonance occured, thumbing dials and squinting into crowded equipment chassis, happy to get away from the world. Winters was a good researcher and getting better. He worked with the care and attention to detail I remembered from my days as a grad student, unlike the frantic scramble of the scientific monks most students were becoming. AutoSec searched me out over the lab intercom and I broke off work. I could depend on Winters to carry on with reasonable ability, so the interruption wasn't so bad. Randy caught me on the up ramp. "Say, you know anything about Kowalski at Mid western. I he inquired. I shook my head, wondering what this was about. A new and an elaborate play to get me into the clutches of Ruggles? "Got a recommendation from him on a student who's applied to us. Kowalski gives him a pretty good writeup, but alter that cross we pulled on him last year I don't know. " "Cross?" "We had a had student and Kowalski was looking lor somebody to fill an open slot in his team. The department worked it so everyone in Kowalski's field wrote good letters backing up the student's application and the people at Midwestern went lor it. They're a little slow back there. Our boy got the slot and by the lime Kowalski caught on he'd wasted months trying to train a useless deadhead." "Oh." I said. It was a new one on me. "So I guess we'll have to turn down anybody applying from Midwestern for a while until this blows over. Tough, but it s a necfessary move. Life is full of these unpleasant decisions, boy." Departmental politics always seemed to move people to philosophy. I ignored the hint and made for my office. The first call was from the Kahn Institute. "Dr. Black'.'" asked a pretty secretary. "We wanted to know your preference in ghoslscripters for your project proposal." "What'.' I'll write my own." The pretty face frowned. "I'm afraid that's quite impossible, sir. With a major undertaking like this we want a first rank job done on any budget proposals, outlines of future expectations and so forth. We couldn't leave it up to an amateur." She smiled uncertainly at me. Alter a moment I nodded. "Okay. Just let me see it before it goes out." I thumbed off and didn't have time to think before another image formed. "Dr. Black." Ruggles beamed out at me. being as formal as possible. "I must in f o r m y o u o f a decision made by the department chairman and myself regarding y our recent discoveries." "By you and the chairman? What about the rest of the department?" lie gave me a manic grin. "We want to keep this a private matter. We're sure the senior members would support us. so there's no reason to bring it into a lull session of the department. " fie was probably right, but they were still railroading me. "frankly, we are all somewhat surprised at your attitude. Your knowledge of professional standards of behavior certainly should tell you that we "The hell with that. What do you want'.'" Ruggles paled visibly. Everybody seemed to think I should treat the full professors as elder gods, but I was getting fed up. Ruggles looked inquiringly off camera, then back at me. "If you won't give us the background on your work Tin afraid it will be necessary for the department to take it from you. I've put up with this long enough." " You've pul up "Yes, and don't think others don't agree with me." "Ah, you have accomplices, then?" "You are behaving like an ingrate. This department has given you every opportunity "Stuff it, Ruggles. You're a stupid son of a bitch or you wouldn't be in this situation." "You cheat. I'm going T HE screen went blank. Evidently whoever was off camera probably the chairman didn't want Ruggles to waste lime with one of his incoherent tirades. Was everybody crazy.' All I wanted to do was lake credit for my own work. I even had a guilty feeling about dropping Winters" name from the article, though that was standard practice. The phone rang again. I ignored it. A note on my desk reminded me of some paperwork connected with the Kahn Institute and gave a hierarchy of numbers I could call. A letter welcomed me to something called the "Kahn family." I stuffed it into my pocket and locked up. I was surprised at the dusky symphony of closing doors and fading voices in the halls; I hadn't realized it was so late. Shadows in dark overcoats were slipping down the corridors and out, away, home. I strolled over to the Student Union. I ordered the Italian Special and the machine spat it out at me. "Warmed to stomach-pleasing delight," the plastic pullolf seal reassured me. It was a good choice. Nobody can eat spaghetti and have lime to be lonely it requires loo much attention. The bastards were going to get me; I could feel it with a dead, cold certainty. They could crush me without thinking about it, like a dreaming elephant rolling over in its sleep. And the hell of it was that I had grown up in the poker game of the System, played by its rules, studied my cards diligent!), pocketed my winnings when they came and waited for the deal to come to me. Now it looked as though I wasn't going to get the deal or have a chance to change the rules. I was being cut out. The only thing I had on my side was that nobody could fight the System belter than a man who saw it clearly. Ruggles didn't; he thought the rules of his bureaucracy were the laws of the universe. Still, I would need every point I could muster in my favor. Maybe I should have stayed in the lab and worked with Winters to get more background data on the effect. The work would have to be done sometime. But by the time it was finished the politics could finish me off. The only place where I felt comfortable now was back in the lab. Back Something clicked. I stood up and left. I took the note from the Kahn Institute out of my pocket as I pushed through the steel-gray cafeteria doors. Visiphone booths gleamed outside. I ducked into one. Even inside the booth I caught that faint odor of disinfectant and stale food that institutions always have. I grimaced, anticipating what was to come, and picked out the number of someone high up in the Institute. The code digits rattled and beeped happily in my ear. lab, barely able to contain my anticipation. A crisp, cool evening welcomed me. A wind sang in my ears and cleared my mind. Winters was working late in the lab. He started to describe what he was doing but I told him to save it. I looked over the experiment for the last lime, savoring a touch of nostalgia for the years Ed worked on it. No matter what it came to, the work had been good. Then the mood was broken and I started checking all the likely places: automatic eyes in the light fixtures, bugs taped under drawers, the rest. They hadrn't missed a thing. Every one of the stock devices were there and probably a lot more besides. When the physics department moves in with its special equipment, it can avoid detection if it wants to bother. Evidently Ruggles didn't think it necessary. He must have figured from the first that I would cross him. This gear couldn't have been planted without planning. The door buzzed. "Dr. Black.'" came over the audio. I opened the door and there they were. A Kahn Institute security squad was formed up outside. Their caplain stepped forward smartly and requested permission to search the lab. I gave it, stepped aside and watched his men at work. The beak-nosed guy was with them, but he didn't say much. They found more in two minutes that I had in ten. Winters stared as they pulled sensors out of unlikely places and piled them in the center of the floor. "How did they--" "You were concentrating on your work. Somebody probably slipped them in when you went out to lunch. You can't be expected to keep up with this stuff all the time." "We've traced it, sir," one of the Institute guards called out. He was standing over a portable detector that operated on a resonant effect: send out signals at the right frequency and the automatic equimenl that ran the focusing for the electric eyes would interpret it as ordinary data. When the stuff at the other end decided the eye needed refocusing it would send instructions and our boys would gel a fix from that. The captain checked beak nose, rushed over to me, rattled off his official report and was gone. He took most of the squad with him up the ramp and left the rest to guard the lab. I followed at a leisurely pace. Winters behind me. After all, I knew where they were going. The captain had Ruggles in custody and was herding him out with two graduate students when we got there. The squad was 'confiscating the equipment that had been hastily set up in Ruggles' office and everything was a colossal mess. "What does this mean, Black?" Ruggles shouted. The guards were treating him a little roughly and he was out of breath. "The Kahn people have got me on contract. Your snooping is illegal unless cleared with them." "They'll okay it. It's the normal function of a department. If you'd just told us--" I looked at him blankly. "But you didn't tell me you were going to bug my lab. I agree the department can do itbut unless we're warned we'll have to treat your behavior as a security violation." "Exactly." said beaknose. "I am afraid I will have to declare you under arrest. Professor Ruggles, and your students, until this matter " "Slop." We all stared down the hall, where blue-uniformed Multiversity police were jumping off the ramp. "Ah," Ruggles said. "I thought you'd never get here." He turned to beaknose and smiled. "I called the police as soon as I heard some of the conversation my sensors picked up." A police sergeant trotted up, puffing. Everyone started to talk at once, with much gesturing of hands. The scene looked like a Parisian traffic accident. I dropped out of the conversation and just watched. "Wail a minute!" the police sergeant shouted. He turned to Ruggles, who was trying to make the guards let go. "If you've been arrested for breach of security by the Institute, there's nothing I can do about it." "That's right," I said, looking helpful. "Standing Multiversity orders don't permit interference with members of other security forces. If they arrest you, the Multiversity will have to go through regular channels to get you back." say something stupid and I looked al the police sergeant. "But you, sir, are not completely without power." Beak nose was try ing to get everyone's attention, but we ignored him. "How do you mean?" the sergeant said. "You're on Multiversity property. A matter pertaining to security of staff members has come up and there are persons here who can supply some needed details. Under standard regs you can place them under protective custody until the matter is cleared up." The sergeant looked serious. "Ah, I see." Beak nose was plucking at my shoulder. The sergeant gestured to his men and they moved in' and grabbed beaknose by the arms. "You can't arrest a representative of the Institute," he said. He looked aL the captain of the squad he had brought with him. "Gel these men away from me." The captain shrugged. "I can't. My orders don't permit "I don't give a damn about your orders. Call off these lugs." "Now," I said soothingly, "we can't go around violating rules just because you want to. We all have to pull together." "But an incident like this can place the whole project in jeopardy. If I have to explain this to the Institute before they've even seen the proposal " "Black!" Ruggles was shouting. "If you don't get me out of this the whole department will suffer. A security inquiry could hurt us when our contract comes up lor renewal. This isn't time to let petty differences Both sides glared al each other and started taking away their respective prisoners, both of them struggling. I noticed that I was the only one laughing. "You're going to get it for this, Ruggles!" beaknose was yelling. Ruggles shouted something incoherent. I could pick out "Black" and "damned Institute" before they vanished down the ramp. It would take them at least a day to straighten it all out. During that lime I could collect my data and pack up a few things. I didn't need to take much. From now on I was traveling light. In a day I could probably pressure a tenured position out of a small college somewhere. Maybe I would ask Winters which one he had attended. They seemed to produce pretty good people. But whatever happened, I was going to be clear of all this. Winters was standing next to me, excited by a lot of events he didn't understand. He had never seen anyone use jujitsu on a bureaucracy before. "This is terrible," he said. "Dr. Black, you've got to do something-" "I am," I said. "In fact. I've just started."  O 'Spector." The Coronis operator showed the pink of her tongue to the ugly man waiting in the Belt patrolboat, half a megamile downstream. All that feky old hair, too, she thought. Yick. She pulled in her tongue and said sweetly, "It's from oh Franchise T welve." The man in the patrolboat looked uglier. His name was Space Safety Inspector Gollem and his stomach hurt. The news that a company inspector was in pain would have suited every molly squatter in the Bells. In fact, it wouldn't displease anyone from Deimos to the Rings. The only surprise would he the notion that Inspector Gollem had a stomach instead of a company contract tape. Gollem' All the friends Gollem had could colonize a meson and he knew it. His stomach was used to that, though. His stomach was even gelling used to working for Coronis Mutual, and he still hoped it would grow immune to his boss, Quine. What was murdering him by inches was the thing he had hidden out beyond Franchise Fourteen on the edge of Coronis sector. He scowled at the screen where Quine's girl was logging in the grief for his next patrol. Having a live girl-girl for conimo was supposed to be good lor morale. It wasn't doing one thing for Gollem. He knew what he looked like and his stomach knew what the flash from Twelve could be. When she threw it on the screen he saw it was a bogy complaint, all right. Ghost signals on their lines. Oh, no. Not again. Not when he had them all fixed. Franchise Twelve was West Hem Chemicals, an itchy outfit with a jillabuck of cyborgs. They would send out a tracker if he didn't get over there soon. But how? He had just come that way. he was due upstream at Franchise One. "Reverse patrol," he grunted. "Starting Franchise Fourteen. Purpose uh unscheduled recheck of aggregation shots in Lleven plus expedited service to West Hem. Allocate two units additional power." She logged it in; it was all right with her if Gollem started with spacerot. He cut channel and coded in the new course, trying not to think about the extra power he would have to justify to Quine. If anyone ever got into his console and found the bugger bypass on his log he would be loading ore with electrodes in his ears. He keyed his stomach a shot of Vageez and caught an error in his code which he corrected with no joy. Most Belters took naturally to the new cheap gee-cumulator drive. Gollem loathed it. Sliding around arsy-versy instead of driving the can where you wanted to go. The old way, the real way. I'm the last machine-freak, he thought. A godlost dinosaur in space... But a dinosaur would have had more sense than to gel messed up with a dead dream. Ragnarok. His gee-sum index was wobbling up the scale, squeezing him retrograde in a field stress-node he hoped. He slapped away a pod of the new biomonilor they had put in his boal and took a scan outside before his screens mushed. Always something to see in the Belts. This time it was a storm of little crescents trailing him, winking as the gravel tumbled. In the sky with diamonds... From Ragnarok's big ports you could see into naked space. That was the way they liked it once. His iron butterfly. He rubbed his beard, figuring Ragnarok in five hours, after he checked the squatlernest in Fourteen. The weathersignal showed new data since he'd coded in the current field vortices and fronts. He tuned up, wondering what it must be like to live under weather made of gales of gas and liquid water. He had been raised on Luna. T HE flash turned out to be a couple of rogue males coming in from Big J's orbit. Jup stirred up a roek now and then. This pair read like escaped Trojans, estimated to node downstream in Sector Themis. Nothing in that volume except some new medbase. His opposite number there was a gigglehead named Hara who was probably too busy peddling mutant phage to notice them go by. A pity, Trojans were gas-rich. Feeding time. He opened a pack of Ovipuff and tuned up his music. His music. Human power music from the frontier time. Not for Gollem, the new subliminal biomoans. He dug it hard, the righteous electronic decibels. Chomping the paste with big useless teeth, the cabin pounding. The biomonitor was shrinking in its pods. Good. Nobody asked you into Gollem's ship, you sucking symbiote. The beat helped. He started through his exercises. Not to let himself go null-gee like Hara. Like them all now. Spacegrace. His unfashionable body bucked, strained. A gorilla, no wonder his own mother had taken one look and split. Two thousand lightyears from home. What home for Gollem? Ask Quine, ask the eontpany. The companies owned space now. It was time to brake into Fourteen, Fourteen was its usual disorderly self, a giant spaw n of molly-bubbles hiding an aggregate of rock that had been warped into synch long before his time. The first colonists had done it with reaction engines. Tough. A kid with a gee-cumulator could true an orbit. Fourteen had more bubbles every time he passedand morekids. The tissue tanks that paid the franchise were still clear but elsewhere the bubbles were layers deep, the last ones tethered loose. Running out of rock for their metabolite to work on. Gollem hassled them about that every time he passed. "Where are your rock nudgers?" he asked now when ihe squaller-chief came on his screen. "Soon. soon. 'Spector Gollem." The squatterchief was a slender skinhead with a biotuner glued to one ear. "The company will cancel, Juki. Coronis Mutual won't carry you on policyholder status if you don't maintain insurable life support." Juki smiled, manipulated the green blob. They were abandoning the rocks all right, drifting off into symbiotic space life. Behind Juki he saw a couple of the older chiefs. "You can't afford to cut the services the company provides," he told them angrily. Nobody knew better than Gollem how minimal those services were, but without them what? "Get some rock." He couldn't use any more time here. As he pulled away he noticed one of the loose bubbles was a sick purple. Not his concern, even if he had the time. Cursing, he eased alongside and cautiously slid his lock probes into the monomolecular bubbleskin. When the lock opened a stink came in. He grabbed his breather and kicked into the foul bubble. Six or seven bodies were floating together in the middle like a tangle of yellow wires. He jerked one out. squirted oxy at its face. It was a gut-bag kid, a born null-gee. When his eyes fanned open Gollem pushed him at the rotting metabolite core. "You were feeding it phage." He slapped the boy. "Thought it would replicate, didn't you? You poisoned it." The boy's eyes crossed, then straightened. Probably didn't get a word, the dialect of Fourteen was drifting last. Maybe some of them truly were starting to communicate symbiolically . Vegetable He pushed the boy back into the raft and knocked the dead metabolite through the waster. The starved mollybubble wall was pitted with necrosis, barely holding. He Hushed his C# # lank over it and crawled back to his boat for a spare metabolite core. When he got back the quasi-living cytoplasm of the bubbleskin was already starting to clear. It would regenerate itself if they didn't poison it again with a C# #binding mutant. That was the way men built their spacehomes now, soft hcterocatalytic films that ran on starlight, breathed human wastes. Gollem rummaged through the stirring bodies until he found a bag of phage between a woman and her baby. She whimpered when he jerked it loose, lie carried it back to his boat and pulled carefully away, releasing a flow of nutrient gel to seal his probe-hole. The mollybubble would heal itself. At last he was clear for Ragnarok. Twelve and then deftly patched in the log bypass and set in his true trajectory. The log would feed from his cache of duplicates, another item nobody had better find. Then he logged in the expendables he'd just used, padding it a piece as always. Embezzlement. His stomach groaned. He tuned up a rock storm to soothe it. There was an old poem about a man with a dead bird tied around his neck. Truly he had his dead bird. All the good things were dead, the free wild human things. He felt like a specter, believe it. A dead one hanging in from the days when men rode machines to the stars and the algae stayed in pans. Before they cooked up all the metabolizing Martian macromolecules that "tamed" space. And those tame men. women and kids breathing through 'em, feeding off 'em, navigating and computing and , making music with 'em mating with them, maybe! Steppe n wolf growled, worried the biomonilor. His metal-finder squealed. Ragnarok! Time shivered and the past blazed on his screens. He let himself have one quick look. The great gold-skinned hull floated in the starlight, edged with diamonds against the tiny sun. The last Argo, the lonesomest Conestoga of them all. Ragnarok. Huge, proud, ungainly star machine, blazoned with the symbols of the crude technology that had carried man to space. Ragnarok who opened the way to Saturn and beyond. A human fist to the gods. Drifting now, a dead hulk, lost in the sea she'd conquered. Lost and forgotten to all but Gollem the specter. No time now to suit up and prowl over and around her, to pry and tinker with her archaic fitments. The pile inside her was long and cold. He dared not even try to start it, a thing like that would set off every field-sounder in the zone. Quine's stolen power in her batteries was all that warmed her now. I nside her also was his dead bird. He coasted into the main lock, which he had adapted to his probe. Just as he hit he thought he glimpsed a new bubble firming up in the storage cluster he had hung on Ragnarok s freightlock. What had Topanga been into? The locks meshed with a soulsatisfying clang of metal and he cycled through, eye to eye with the two old monster suits that hung in Ragnarok' s lock. Unbelievable, so cumbersome. How ever had they done it? He kicked up through dimness to the bridge. For one moment his girl was there. The wide ports were a wheeling maze of starlight and fire-studded shadows. She sat in the command couch, gazing out. He could see her pure, fierce profile, the hint of girl-body in the shadows. Starhungry eyes. Then the eyes slid around and the lights came up. His star girl vanished into the thing that had killed her. Time. Topanga was an old, sick, silly woman in a derelict driveship. She smiled at him from the wreckage of her face. "Golly? I was remembering " What an instrument it was still, that husky voice in the star haze. The tales it had spun for him over the years. She had not always been like this. When he had first found her, adrift and ill she had still been Topanga then. The last one left. "You were using the caller. Topanga, I warned you they were too close. Now they've picked you up." "I wasn't sending, Golly." Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen. tales he had hung on her console leads. Hard to believe those antiques were still operational. Completely inorganic, a ton of solid-state circuitry. Topanga claimed she couldn't activate it, but when she had had her first crazy fit he had found out otherwise. He had had her parked in Four then, in a clutch of spacejunk. She had started blasting the band s with docking signals to men twenty years dead. Company salvage had nearly blown her out of space before he had gotten there he had had to fake a collision to satisfy Quine. A telltale was hot. "Topanga. Listen to me. West Hem Chemicals are sending a hunter out to find you. You were jamming their miners. Don't you know what they'll do to you'? The best the very best you'll get is a geriatric ward. Needles. Tubes. Doctors ordering you around, treating you like a thing. They'll grab Ragnarok for a space trophy. Unless they blast you first." Her face crumpled crazily. "We can take care of ourselves. I'll turn the lasers on 'em." "You'd never see them." He glared at the defiant ghost. He could do anything, he wanted here, what was stopping him. "Topanga, I'm going to kill that caller. It's for your own good." She stuck up her ruined chin, the wattles waving. "I'm not afraid of them." "You have to be afraid of a jerry ward. You want to end as a mess of tubing, under the gees'? I'm going to dismantle it." "No, golly, no!" Her stick arms drummed in panic, trailing skin. "I won't touch it, I'll remember. Please don't leave me helpless." Her voice broke and so did his stomach. He couldn't look at it, this creature that had eaten his girl. Topanga inside there somewhere, begging for freedom, for danger. Safe, helpless, gagged? No. "If I nudge you out of West Hem's range you'll be in three others. Topanga, baby, I can't save you one more time." She had gone limp now, shrouded in the Martian oxyblanket he had brought her. He caught a blue gleam under the shadows and his stomach squirted bile. Let go, witch. Die before you kill me, too. He began to code in the gee-cum unit he had set up here. It was totally inadequate for Ragnarok's mass but he could overload it for a nudge. He would stabilize her on his next pass-by, if only he could find her without wasting too much power. From behind him came a husky whisper. "Strange to be old--" Ghost of a rich girl's laugh. "Did I ever tell you about the time the field shifted, on Telhys?" "You told me." Ragnarok was stirring. "Stars," she said dreamily. "Hart Crane was the first space poet. Listen. Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, the gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. O silver sinewy:" Gollem heard the hull clang. Someone was trying to sneak out of Ragnarok. shaft to the freight lock, found it cycling and jacknifed back to get out through his boat at the main lock. He was too late. As he sprang into his cabin the screens showed a strange pod taking off from behind that new bubble. Dummy, dummy... He suited up and scrambled out across Ragnarok s hull? The new bubble was still soft, mostly nutrigel. Pushing his face into it he cracked his breather. He came back to Topanga in a blue rage. "You are letting a phage-runner park on Ragnarok. " "Oh, was that Leo?" She laughed vaguely. "He's a courier from the next zone -- Themis, isn't it? He calls by sometimes. He's been beautiful to me. Golly." "He is a stinking pagerunner and you know it. You were covering for him." Gollem was sick. The old Topanga would have put "Leo" out the trash hole. "Not phage. Not phage on top of everything, Topanga." Her ancient eyelids fell. "Let it be. Golly. I'm alone so long," she whispered. "You leave me for so long." Her withered paw groped out, seeking him. Brown-spotted, crisscrossed with reedy pulses. Knobs, strings. Where were the hands of the girl who had held the camp on Tethys! He looked at the line of holographs over the port and saw her. The camera had caught her grinning up at black immensity, the wild light of Saturn's rings reflected in her red-gold hair. "Topanga, old mother," he said painfully. "Don't call me mother, you plastic spacepig," she blazed. Her carcass jerked out of the pilot couch and he had to web her back, hating to touch her. A quarter gee would break these sticks. "I should be dead," she mumbled. "It won't be long -- you'll be rid of me." Ragnarok was set now, he could go"Maintain, spacer, maintain," he told her heartily. His stomach knew what lay ahead. None of it was any good. As he left he heard her saying brightly, "Gimbal, check," to her dead computer. II chise Twelve and West Hem. Just as he had the log tied back into real lime his caller bleeped. The screen stayed blank. "Identify." "Been waitin' on you, Gollem." A slurred tenor. Gollem's beard twitched. "One freakin' fine ship." The voice chuckled. "Mainmouth by Co'onis truly flash that ship." "Stay off Ragnarok if you want to keep your air," Gollem told the phagerunner. The voice chuckled again. "My pa'tners truly grieve on that, "Spector." There was a click and he heard his own voice saying, "Topanga, baby, I can't save you one more time." "Deal, 'Spector, deal. Why we flash on war?" "Blow your clobbing tapes," Gollem said tiredly. "You can't run me like you run Hara." " 'Panga," the invisible Leo said reflectively. "Freakin' fine old fox. She tell I fix her w ire fire?" Gollem cut channel. The phager must have set a short smoking to win her trust. Vulnerable. A n old sick eagle dead in space and the rats have found her... They wouldn't quit, either. Ragnarok had air, water, power. Transmitters. Maybe they were using her caller, maybe she was telling the truth. They could take over. Shove her out through the lock. Gollem's hand hovered over his console. If he turned back now his log would blow it all. And for what? No, he decided. They'll wait, they'll sniff around. They want to take me, too. They'll wait to see how much squeeze they have. Pray they don't find out. If only they don't start trashing... He had to get some more power somewhere and jump Ragnarok out of there. How, how? Like trying to hide Big Jup. He noticed that he had punched the biomonitor into a sick yellow blob and hurled it across the cabin. And how much longer could he cool Coronis? Right on cue, his company hotline blatled. "Why aren't you at Franchise T wo, Gollem?" It was mainmouth Quine himself. Gollem took a deep breath and repeated his course reversal plan, watching Quine's little mouth purse up. "After this clear with me. Now hear this, Gollem, " Quine leaned back in his bioflex, pink and plump. Coronis was no hardship. "I don't know what you think you're into with Franchise Three but I want it stopped. The miners are yelling and our company won't tolerate it." Gollem shook his shaggy head like a daed bull. Franchise Three was a heavy metal mining outfit. "They're overloading their tractor beams for hot extraction," he told Quine. "It's in my report. If they keep it up they'll have one bloody hashup. And they won't be covered because their contract annex specifies the load limits." Quine's jowls twitched ominously. "Gollem. Again I warn you. It is not your role to interpret the contract to the policyholder. If the miners choose to get their ore out faster by abrogating their contract that's their decision. Your job is to report the violation, not to annoy them with technicalities. Right now they are very angry with you. And I trust you don't imagine that our company "reverent pause "appreciates your initiative?" Gollem made an inarticulate noise in his throat. He should be used to this. Coronis wanted its piece quickly and it wanted to avoid paying compensation when the thing blew. The miners got paid by the shuttle load and most of them couldn't tell a contract annex from a Hush valve. By the time they found out they'd be dead. "Another item." Quine was watching him. "You may be getting some noise from Themis sector. They seemed to be all sweated up about a bit of rock." "You mean those Trojans?" Gollem asked slowly. "What's there?" "Have you been talking to Themis?" "No." "Very well. You will not, repeal not, deviate from your patrol. You are on a very thin line with us, Gollem. If your tapes show anything whatever in connection with Themis you're out of the company and there will be a lien against you for your overdrawn pension. And there will be no transport rights. Do I make myself clear?" could control his hands he punched Weather for the updated rogue orbits. Both rocks were now computed to node in sector Themis, but well clear of Themis main. He frowned. Who was hurting? His ephemeris showed only the new medbase in the general volume, listed as Nonaffiliated, no details. It seemed to be clear, too. If that polluted Hara... Gollem grunted. He understood now. Quine was hoping for some hassle in Themis which might persuade Ceres Control to reassign part of that sector to him. And the medbase wasn't company, it was expendable for publicity purposes. Truly fine, he thought. Much gees for Quine if it works. He was coming into West Hem Chemicals. Before he could signal, his audio cut loose with curses from the cyborg chief. Gollem swerved to minimize his intrusion on their body lines and the chief cooled down enough to let him report that he had killed their bogy. "It was an old field-sounder," Had they identified Ragnarok? "Slope out. Go." The old cyborg op couldn't care less. He had electrode jacks all over his skull and his knuckles sprouting wires. Much as Gollem loved metal, this was too much. He backed out as gingerly as he could. The men -- or maybe the creatures-in there were wired into the controls of robot refining plants on all the nearby rocks, and he was hashing across their neural circuit. Wouldn't be surprising if they fired on him one day. His next stop was the new aggregation franchise in Eleven. It was a slow-orbit complex on the rim of the Kirkwood Gap, a touchy location to work. If they started losing rocks they could spread chaos in the zone. Aggregation meant power units, lots of them. Gollem began figuring Ragnarok's parameters. His stomach also began to gripe him; the outfit that had leased Eleven had big plans for a self-sustaining colony on a slim budget. They needed those units to bring in gas-rich rocks. When he got inside Gollem saw they had other problems loo. "We've computed for two-sigma contingency," the Eleven chief repealed liredly. They were standing beside a display tank showing the projected paths of the rocks they intended to blast. "Not enough," Gollem told him. "Your convergence-point is smeared the hell all over. You lose a big one and it'll plow right into Ten." "But Franchise Ten isn't occupied," the chief protested. "Makes no difference. Why do you think you got this franchise cheap? The company's delighted to have you aggregating this lode, they're just waiting for you to lose one rock so they can cancel and resell your franchise. I can't certify your operation unless you recompute." "But that means buying computer imput from Ceres Main!" he yelped. "We can't afford it." "You should have looked at the instability factors before you signed." Gollem said woodenly. He was wishing the chief didn't have all his hair; it would be easier to do this to a skinhead. "At least let me bring in the rocks we have armed," the chief was pleading. "How many one-gee units have you got out there'.'" (iollem pointed. "Twenty-one." "I'll take six of them and certify you. Thai's cheaper than recomputing." The chiefs jaw sagged, lightened to a snarl. "You polluted bastard!" Suddenly there was a yelp behind them and the commo op lore off his earphones. The chief reached over and flicked on the all-band blare. Kor a minute Gollem thought it was a Hare front, and then he caught the human scream. He slammed down the voder, the sweat starling out all over him. "What in space " the chief belt a n. "Old beacon in the Gap." Gollem was pushing past them. "I have to go kill it." threw in the booster. No lime for power units now; that yell meant Topanga was in real trouble. She wasn't calling dead men. If he tied in the spare booster he could override the field-forms for a slraighler course. Strictly verboten. He did so and then opened his commo channels. Topanga wasn't there. fire.' Collision? More like, Leo and friends had made their move. He hurtled downstream in a warp of wasted power, his hands mechanically tuning the board in hopes of pulling in some phagers' signals, something. He picked up only far-off mining chatter and a couple of depot ops asking each other what the Mayday was. Someone in Sector Themis was monotonously calling Inspector Hara. Hara wasn't answering, as usual, only the automatic standby from Themis main. Gollem cursed them all impartially, trying to make his brain yield a plan. Why would the phagers move in on Ragnarok so fast? Not their style, confrontation. If he blew they'd lose the ship, they'd have to cope with a new inspector. Why risk it when they had him by the handle already? Maybe they figured it was no risk. Gollem's fist clenched and unclenched on the tuner in a heavy rhythm. Paint it black , he thought. They have to keep her alive till I get there. They want me. What, then, to do'.' Would they believe a threat to scream it all the way up to Ceres Control? Don't bother to answer. They knew as well as he did that a company bust would end with Topanga in a gerry ward, Ragnarok in Quine's trophy park and Gollem in a skullcage. But how to break Topanga loose from them? If he tried to jive along with them the first thing they'd do would be to shoot her up on phage. Addiction dose. Him too why had he left her there alone? He was going around this misery orbit for the nth time when he noticed the Themis voice had boosted gain and was now trying to reach Coronis, his home base. Quine's home base. No answer. Against his stomach's advice he tuned it up. "Medbase Themis to Coronis main, emergency. Please answer, Coronis. Medbase Themis calling Coronis, emergency, please The woman was clearly no commo op. Finally Quine's girl chirped: "Medbase Themis, you are disturbing our traffic. Please damp your signal." "Coronis, this is an emergency. We need help we're going to get hit!" "Medbase Themis, contact your sector safety patrol officer, we have no out-of-sector authorization. You are disturbing our traffic." "Our base won't answer! We have to have help, we have casualties A male voice cut in. "Coronis, put me through to your chief at once. This is a medical priority." "Medbase Themis, Sector Chiet Quine is outstation at present. We are in freight shuttle assembly for the trans-Mars window, please stand by until after launch." "But " "Coronis out." Gollem grimaced, trying to picture Quine going outstation. He went back to pounding on his brain. The Themis woman went on calling. "We are in an impact path, we need power to move. If anyone can help us please come in. Medbase Themis He cut her off. One Ragnarok was enough and his was just ahead now. weren't expecting him so soon. He powered down and drifted. As his screens cleared he saw a light move in the bubbles behind the freight lock. His one possible break, if they hadn't yet moved that phage inboard. He grabbed the wrecking laser controls and kicked the patrolboat straight at Ragnarok's main lock. The laser beam fanned over the bubbles, two good slices before he had to brake. The crash sent him into his boards. The docking probes meshed and he went headfirst into Ragriarok's lock. As it started to cycle he burned the override, setting off alarms all over the ship Then he was through and caroming up the shaft. Among the hoots he could hear more clanging. Phagers were piling out through freight lock to save their bubbles. If he could get to the bridge first he could lock them out. He twisted, kicked piping and shot into the bridge, his arm aimed at the emergency hatch-lock lever. It had been not used for decades -- he nearly broke his wrist, yanking the lever against his own inertia and was rewarded by the sweet grind of lock toggles far below. Then he turned to the command couch where Topanga should be and saw he was too late. She was there all right, both hands to her neck and her eyes rolling. Behind her a lank hairless figure was holding a relaxed pose, in his first a wirenoose leading around Topanga's throat. "Truly fine. Inspector." The phager grinned. For a second Gollem wondered if Leo hadn't noticed the handlaser Gollem pointed. Then he saw that the phagehead was holding a welder against Topanga's side. Its safety sleeve was off. "Deal, Gollyboy. Deal the fire down." No way. After a minute Gollem sent his weapon drifting by Leo's arm. He didn't take the bait. "Open up." The phager jerked his chin at the hatch lever and Topanga gave a bubbling whine. When Gollem opened that the game was over all the way. He hung frozen, his coiled body sensing for solidity behind him, measuring the spring. The phager jerked the wire. Topanga's arms flailed. One horrible eye rolled at Gollem. A spark in there, trying to say no. your head off and throw you out the waster." The phager giggled. "Why you twisted Topanga upside down, feel trailing out toward Gollem. She kicked feebly. Weird, her bare feet were like a girl's. "Open up." When Gollem didn't move the phager's arm came out in a graceful swing, his fingers flaring. The welding arc sliced, retraced, sliced again as Topanga convulsed. Topanga was quiet now. "Way to go." The phager grinned. "Truly tough old bird. Open up." "Turn her loose. Turn her loose. I'll open." "Open now." The arm came out again. Suddenly Topanga made a weak twist, scrabbling at Leo's groin. The phager's head dipped. Gollem drove inside his arm, twisted it against momentum. The welder rocketed out around the cabin while he and the phager thrashed around each other, blinded by Topanga's robe. The phager had a knife now but he couldn't get braced. Gollem felt legs lock his waist and took advantage of it to push Topanga away. When the scene cleared h.e clamped the phager to him and began savagely to collect on his investment in muscle building. Just as he was groping for the wire to tie up the body something walloped him back of the ear and the lights went out. He came to with Topanga yelling, "Val, Val! I've got 'em!" She was hanging on the console in her hair using both hands to point an ancient Thunderbolt straight at him. The muzzle yawned smoke a foot from his beard. "Topanga, it's me -- Golly. Wake up, spacer, let me tie him up." "Val?" A girl laughing, screaming. "I'm going to finish the murdering mothers, Val!" Valentine Orloff, her husband, had been in the snows of Ganymede for twenty years. "Val is busy, Topanga," Gollem said gently. He was hearing hull noises he didn't like. "Val sent me to help you. Pul down the jolter and help me lie up this creep, spacegirl. They're trying to steal my boat." He hadn't had lime to lock it, he remembered now. Topanga stared at him. "And why do I often meet your visage here?" she croaked. "Your eyes like unwashed platters Then she fainted and he flung himself downshaft to the lock. His patrolboat was swinging away. Tethered to it was the phagerunners' pod. He was stranded on Ragnarok. bridge consoles. He managed to send one weak spit from Ragnarok's lasers' after them as they picked up gees. Futile. Then he pulled the phager's head over his knee and clouted it and turned to setting up Topanga with an i.v. in her old cobweb veins. How in hell had those weak claws held a joller? He wrapped a gel sheath over her burns, grinding his jaw to still the uproar in his stomach. With one hand on the cycle button he checked frowning. He could use some information from Leo -- what were they into in his patrol sector? Then his head came together and his fist crunched the eject. His patrol sector? If the companies ever got their hands on him he'd spend the rest of his life with his brains wired up. paying for that patrolboat. If he was lucky. No way, no where to go. The companies owned space. Truly he was two thousand lightyears from home now -- on a dead driveship. Dead? Gollem threw back his lank hair and grinned. Ragnarok had a rich ecosystem, he'd seen to that. Nobody but the phagers knew she was here and he could probably hold them out for a while. Long enough, maybe, to see if he could coax some power out of that monsterhouse without waking up the sector. Suddenly he laughed out loud. A thing like a rusty shutter was sliding in his mind, letting in glory. "Man, man!" he muttered and stuck his head into the regeneration chamber to check the long trays of culture stretching away under the lights. It look him a minute to understand what was wrong. No wonder the phagers came back so fast, no wonder he was laughing like a dummy. They'd seeded the whole works with phage culture. A factory. The first trays were near sporing, the air was ropy. He hauled them out, inhaled a clean lungful and jettisoned the ripe trays. Then he crawled back in to search. On every staging the photosynthetic algae were starting to clump, coagulating to the lichen-like symbiote that was phage. Not one clean tray. In a lew days Ragnarok would have no more air. But he and Topanga wouldn't care. They'd be through the walls in phagefreak long before. He was well and truly shafted now. He Hushed some oxy into the ventilators and kicked back to the bridge. Get some clean metabolite. Or die. Who would give him air? Even if he could move Ragnarok , the company depots and franchises would be alerted. He might just as well signal Coronis and give himself up. Maybe Quine wouldn't bother to reach him and Topanga in time. Maybe better so. Wards. Wires. Topanga groaned. Gollem felt her temples. Hot as plasma, old ladies shouldn't play war. He rummaged out biogens, marveling at the vials, ampoules, tabs, hyposprays. Popping who knew what to keep alive. Contraband she and Val had picked up in the old free days, her hoard would stock a Wait a minute. Medbase Themis. Ill board. The Themis woman was still calling, low and hoarse. He cranked the antennae for the narrowest beam he could get. "Medbase Themis, do you read?" "Who are you? Who's there?" She was startled out of her code book. "This a spacesweep mission. I have a casualty." "Where -- " The man took it. "This is Chief Medic Krans, spacer. Y ou can bring in your casualty but we have a rogue headed through our space with a gravel cloud. If we can't get power to move the station in about thirty hours we'll be holed out. Can you help us?" "You can have what I've got. Check coordinates." The woman choked up on the decimals. No use telling them he couldn't do them any good. The gee-cum unit he had in Ragnarok wouldn't nudge that base in time for Halley's comet. And Ragnarok's drive -- if it worked ft would be like trying to wipe your eye with blowtorch. But their air could help him. The drive. He bounced down the engineway, knowing the spring in his muscles was partly phage. Only partly. A thousand times he had come this way, a thousand times lorn himself away from temptation. Gleefully now he began to check out the circuits he had traced, restored the long-pulled fuses. There was a sealed hypergolic reserve for ignition. A stupefying conversion process, a plumber's nightmare of heat-exchangers and back-cycling. Crazy, wasteful, dangerous. Enough circuitry to wire the Belt. Unbelievable it has carried man to Saturn, more unbelievable it would work today. He clanked the rod controls. No telling what had crystallized. The converter fuel chutes jarred out thirty years' accumulated dust. The ignition reserve was probably only designed for one emergency firing. Would he be able to ignite again to brake? Learn as you go. One thing sure, when that venerable metal volcano burst to life every board from here to Coronis would be lit. When he got back to the bridge Topanga was whispering. "We left the haven hanging in the night O thou steel cognizance whose leap commits "Pray it leaps," he told her and began setting course, doublechecking everything because of the phagemice running in the shadows. He wrapped Topanga's webs. He started the ignition train. The subsonic rumble that grew through Ragnarok filled him with terror and delight. He threw himself into the webs, wishing he had said something, counted down maybe. Blastoff. Go. The rumble bloomed into an oremill roar. Gees smashed down on him. Everything in the cabin started raining on the deck. The web gave sidewise and the roar wound up in a scream that parted his brain and then eerily dwindled into silence. When he struggled back to the board he found the burn had cut right. Ragnarok was barreling toward Themis. He saw Topanga's eyes open. "Where are we headed?" She sounded sane as soap. "I'm taking you over to the next sector, Themis. We need metabolite, oxygen. The phagers ruined your regenerators." "Themis?" "There's a medbase there. They'll give us some." Mistake. "Oh, no no!" She struggled up. "No, Golly! I won't go to a hospital don't let them take me!" "You're not going to a hospital, Topanga. You're going to slay right here in the ship while I go in lor the cores. They'll never know about you. We'll be out of there in minutes." No use. "God hate you, Gollem." She made an effort to spit. "You're trying to trap me, I know you. Never let me free. You won't bury me here, Gollem. Rot in Moondome with your ugly cubl'm going to Val!" "Cool, spacer, you're yawing." He got some tranks into her finally and went back to learning Ragnarok. The phage was getting strong now. When he looked up the holographs were watching him drive their ship. The star heroes. Val Orlov, Fitz. Hannes, Mura, all the great ones. Sometimes only a grin behind a gold-washed headplate, a name on a monster suit beside some mad hunk of machine. Behind them, spacelost wildernesses lit by unknown moons. All alive, all so young. There was Topanga with her arm around that other spacegirl, the dark Russian one who was still orbiting lo. They grinned past him, bright and living. When they start talking we've had it... narok into what he hoped was attitude lor the retro burn. If he could trust the dials, there was enough ignition for braking and for one last burn lo get out of there. But where would he go from Medbase? Into the sky with diamonds. He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he. Have you seen your mother, baby standing in the shadows... When he began hearing Iron Butterfly he went down and threw out half the trays. The thee remaining oxy tanks struck him as hilarious. He cracked one. The oxy sobered him enough to check the weather signal. The Medbase woman was still trying to raise Themis Main. He resisted the impulse lo enlighten her about the companies and concentrated on the updated orbits of the Trojan rogues. He saw now what had Medbase sweating. The lead rogue would miss them by megamiles but it was massive enough to have stirred up a lot of gravel. The small rogue behind was sweeping up a tail. The rock itself would go by far off but that gravel cloud would rip their bubbles to shreds. He had to get there and out again fast. He sniffed some more oxy and computed the rogue orbits on a worst-contingency basis. It looked okay for him. His stomach flinched; even under phage it had an idea what it was going to be like when those medics found out they were wasted. He saw Topanga grinning. The phage was doing her more good than the tranks. "Not to worry, stargirl. Golly won't let 'em gel you." "Air" She was trying to point to life-support, which had long since gone red. "I know, spacer. We're getting air at Medbase." She gave him a strange un-Topanga#mile. "Whatever you say, little Golly." Whispering hoarsely. "I know you've been beautiful Her hand reached, burning. This he positively could not take. Pity his music was gone. "Give us verses as we go, star girl." But she was too weak. "Read me Her scanner was full of it. "In oil-rinsed circles of blind ecstasy." Hard to dig. until the strobing letters suddenly turned to music in his throat. "Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!" he chanted, convoyed by ghosts. what marathons new-set among the stars!" "The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches, already knows the closer clasp of Mars It was indeed fortunate, he discovered, that he had set the autopilot and stayed suited up. H IS first clear impression of Medbase was a chimpanzee's big brown eyes staring into his under a flashprobe. He jerked away, found himself peeled and tied on a table. The funny feeling was the luxury of simulated gravity. The chimpanzee turned out to be a squat little type in medwhites, who presently freed him. "I told you he wasn't a phager ' It was the woman's voice. C raning. Gollem saw she was no girl-girl and had a remarkable absence of chin. The chimpanzee eventually introduced himself as Chief Medic Krans. "What kind of ship is that?" the woman asked as he struggled into his suit. "A derelict. " he told them. "Phagerunners were using it. My teammate's stoned. All he needs is air." "The power units," said Kranz. "I'll help you bring them over." "No need for you to go inI've got them ready to go. Just give me a couple of metabolite cores to take back to start the air clearing." Unsuspicious. Kranz motioned the woman to show the way to their stores. Gollem saw that their base was one big cheap bubble. The molly hadn't even seamed together under the film; a couple of pebbles would finish them. The ward had twenty-odd burn cases in cocoons. Themis didn't bother much with burns. An old spacerat minus a lot of his original equipment came wambling over to open up. Gollem loaded as much metabolite as he could carry and headed for the lock. At the port the woman grabbed his arm. "You will help us?" Her eyes were deep green. Gollem concentrated on her chin. "Be right back." He cycled out. Ragnarok was on a tether he didn't recall securing. He scrambled over, found the end fouled in the lock toggles. If there had been tumble bye-bye. When he got inside he heard Topanga's voice. He hustled up the shaft. Once again he was too late. While he had been in the stores unsuspicious Chief Medic Kranz had suited up and beat him into Ragnarok. "This is a very sick woman, spacer," he informed Gollem. "The legal owner of this derelict, Doctor. I'm taking her to Coronis Base." "I'm taking her into my ward right now. We have the facilities. Get those power units." He could see Topanga's eyes close. "She doesn't wish to be hospitalized. " "She's in no condition to decide that," Kranz snapped. T HE metabolite was on board. Doctor Chimpanzee Kranz appeared to have elected himself a driveship ride to nowhere. Gollem began drifting toward the ignition panel, beside Topanga's web. "I guess you're right, sir. I'll help you prepare her and we'll lake her in." But Kranz' little hand had a little stungun in it. "The power units, spacer." He waved Gollem toward the shaft. There weren't any power units. Gollem backed into the metabolite, watching for the stunner to waver. It didn't. There was only one chance left, if you could call it a chance. "Topanga, this good doctor is going to take you into his hospital," he said loudly. "He wants you where he can take good care of you." One of Topanga's eyelids wrinkled, sagged down again. An old, battered woman. No chance. "Can you handle her, doctor?" "Get that power out now." He had the safety off. Gollem nodded sourly and started downshaft as slowly as he could. Kranz came over to watch him, efficiently out of reach. What now? Gollem couldn't reach the ignition circuits from here even if he knew how to short them. Just as he turned around to look for something to fake a power cell it happened. A whomp like an imploding mollybubble smacked into the shaft. Chief Medic Kranz went into a slow cartwheel. "Good girl!" Gollerfi yelled. "You got him " He batted the stunner out of Kranz' limp glove and kicked upward. When he raised his head he found he was looking into the snout of Topanga's jolter. "Gel out of my ship," she yelped. "You lying suitlouse. And take your four-eyed, needle-sucking friend with you!" "Topanga, it's me it's Golly." "I know who you are," she said coldly. "You'll never trap me." "Topanga!" he cried. A bolt went by his ear, rocking him. "Out!" She was leaning down the shaft, squeezing on the jolter. Gollem backed slowly down, collecting Kranz. The witch figure above him streamed biotape and bandages, the hair that once shone red standing up like white fire. She must be breathing pure phage, he thought. Can't last long... All I have to do is go slow... "Out!" She screamed. Then he saw she had Kranz' oxy tube clamped under one arm. This seemed to be his day for underestimating people. "Topanga," he began to plead and had to dodge another joltbolt. She couldn't go on missing forever. He decided to haul Kranz out and cut back into the ship through the emergency port. There was a welder in the Medbase port rack. He boosted Kranz along the tether and into the lock. The Medbase woman was waiting on the other side. As the port opened he pushed Kranz at her and grabbed the welder. The chinless wonder learned fast; she flung herself on the welder and started to wrestle. There was solid womanmuscle under her whites, but he got a fist where her jaw should have been and threw himself back into the lock. As it started to cycle he realized she had probably saved his life. The outer lock had a viewport through which he could sec Ragnarok's vents. The star field behind them was dissolving. He let out an inarticulate groan and slammed the reverse cycle to let himself back into Medbase. As soon as it cracked he bolted through, carrying the medics to the deck. The port behind him lit up like a solar flare. rent of flame pouring out of Ragnarok. Then she was moving, faster, faster yet. The jetstream swung and the port went black. Luckily the port area was hardwalled, with the command nucleus behind it. Gollem and the woman followed Kranz to the main port. Rannarok was a dwindling firetail among the stars. "Topanga doesn't like hospitals," Gollem told them. "The power units," Kranz said urgently. "Call her back." The woman was pushing Gollem toward the commo board. "No way. She just blew the last ignition charge. Where she's headed now she goes." "What do you mean? To Coronis?" "Never." He rubbed his shaggy head. "I I don't recall exactly. Mars, maybe. The sun" "With the power units that would have saved these people." Kranz' face hardened into the expression he probably used on gangrene. "Thanks to you. I suggest that you remove yourself from my sight for the remainder of our joint existence." "There never were any power units," Gollem said, starting to go out. "The phagers got my boat and you saw for yourself what that drive was like. It would have broken you apart -- believe me." The woman followed him out. "Who was she, spacer?" "Topanga Orloff," Gollem said painfully. "Val Orloff's wife. They were the first Saturn mission. That was their ship, Ragnarok. She was holed up in my sector." "You just wanted air." Gollem nodded. They were by the base display tank. The computer was running a real-time display of the oncoming Trojans. The green blip was Medbase and the red blip with the smear was the smaller Trojan and attendant gravel tail. He studied the vectors. No doubt. Now it was dark, period. Sleep time coming up. The people here might eat breakfast, but for tTue they wouldn't eat lunch. By noon or thereabouts Medbase would be organic enrichment on a swarm of space ice. So would ex-inspector Gollem. The two medics went out on the wards and Kranz unbent enough to accept Gollem's offer to man the commo board. The spacer wobbled in to watch him. The sight of Ragnarok's blast-out had lit his fires.  Gollem taped a routine red-call and began to hunt across the bands. The old man mumbled about ships. Nobody was answering, nobody would. Once he thought he heard an echo from Topanga, but it was nothing. Her oxy must be long gone by now, he thought. A mad old phage-ghost on her last trip. Where had he computed her to? He seemed to recall something about Mars. At least they wouldn't end in some trophyhunter's plastic park. "You know what they got in them cocoons? Squatters!" The old man squinted out of his good side to see how Gollem took this. "Skinheads. Freaks 'n' crotties. Phagers, even. Medics, they don't care." He sighed, scratched his burned skin with his stump. "Grounders. They won't last out here." "Too right," Gollem agreed. "Like maybe be gone tomorrow." That tickled the old man. over. The woman brought in some hot redeye. Gollem started to refuse and then realized his stomach wasn't hurting any more. Nothing to worry about now. He sipped the stimulant. The woman was looking at a scanner. "She was beautiful," she murmured. "Knock it off, Anna," Kranz snapped. She went on scanning and suddenly caught her breath. "Your name. It's Gollem, isn't it?" Gollem nodded and got up to go look at the tank. Presently the woman Anna came out after him and looked at the tank, too. The old spacer was asleep in the corner. "Topanga was married to a George Gollem once," Anna said quietly. "They had a son. On Luna." Gollem took the scanner cartridge out of her hand and flipped it into the wastechute. She said nothing more. They both watched the tank for a while. Gollem noticed that her eyes were almost good enough to make up for her chin, but she didn't look at him. The tank didn't change. Around four she went in and took over from Kranz and the men settled down to wait. "Medbase Themis calling Medbase Themis calling anyone," he woman whispered. Kranz went out. It seemed a lot of work to breathe. Suddenly Kranz snapped his fingers from the next room. Gollem went to him. "Look." They hung over the tank. The red smear was closer to the green blip. Between them was a yellow spark. "What is that?" Gollem shrugged. "A rock." "Impossible, we scan-swept that area a dozen times." "No mass," Gollem frowned. "It's a tank ghost." Kranz began systematically flushing the computer input checks. The woman left the board and came to hang over the tank. Gollem watched absently, his brain picking at phage-warped memories. Something about the computer... On impulse he went to the com mo board and ran the receiver through its limits. All he got was a blast of squeals and whistles, the stress-front of the incoming rocks. "What is it?" Anna's eyes were like oscilloscopes. "Nothing." Kranz finished his checks. The yellow ghost stayed in, sidling toward the red smear. If that were a rock, and it had about a hundred times more mass than it could have, it just might deflect the Trojan. But it didn't. And there was the gravel cloud. Gollem played monotonously with the board. The old spacer snored. The minutes congealed. Kranz shook himself, took Anna out to tour the wards. When they came back they stopped at the tank. The whatever-it-was stayed in, closing on the Trojan. Sometime in the unreal dimlight hours he heard it, wavering on a gale of space noise: "I hav,e contact! Val! I'm coming They crowded around him as he coaxed the tuners. There was nothing there. Presently a ripple of relays tripped off in the next room and they'all ran to the tank. It was dead; the computer had protected itself against an induction overload. happened. "It's possible," Gollem admitted to them. It was long after noon when they decided to eat. "While we were on the way here I know I computed that Trojan all the way to Medbase. It was after that I got really bombed. Maybe I threw a bridge into the course computer, maybe it was already in. Say she took off with no course setting. Those old mechs are set to hunt. It's possible it inverted and boosted straight back out that trajectory to the rock." "But your ship had no mass," Kranz objected. "That thing was a space-scoop feeding a monster drive. The pile dampers were cheese. Ragnarok could have scooped herself solid right through the gravel cloud and blown as she hit the Trojan. You could gel a pocket sun." They went over it again at darkperiod. And again later while he and Anna looked at nothing in particular out the ports. Some time later yet he showed her a script he'd fixed for the wall of Medbase Free Enclave: Launched in abyssal cupolas of space Toward endless terminas, Easters of speeding light Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pass out of sight.  Pollution had made Earth unsafe -- except for a few... ' r son said, it was a good day for frogging and fishing. The morning sun had that bright double halo that meant the whole day would be elear. I got up before Mom, took some old pie from where she hid it last night, grabbed my wading shoes and net and lit out for the ereek. I had to leave real quiet. I'm not supposed to be going down to the ereek any more. They say its dangerous down there. But the creek ain't dangerous if you know what you're doing. You just have to stay away from the pink water spots and you're sale all the way. I took the long way around the Baxter place. I think Pop was right about them; something's wrong there. Dr. Baxter ain't been at Town Meeting for a long time Pop thinks that maybe some sick people moved in on the Baxters. So I walked through the brambles on the edge of the woods where the new trees are growing. It was sunny and fine and the breeze came in nice and sweet from the north. No cities up that way. not for hundreds of miles. Caught some crickets along the way, the big kind with the long wings. They make good bait for the slickery fish in the shallows. All I got to do is tangle them up in the net and put it down in the water. The stickery fish go right for em. Mr. Thompson, he says that it ain't safe to eat 'em, which just shows you how much he knows. I eat 'em all the time. I headed right for Rotten Log Hollow. There's a nice big hole in there and a gravel bar and yob can catch lots of frogs there if you're careful. They like to hide under that old broken pipe, under the foam. I got maybe a dozen there, last time out. First I walked along the bank, looking down into the water to see what was there, you know. It was still and there wasn't a lot of foam piling up. There wasn't any fish either, so I sat down in the warm gravel, ate my pie and pulled on my wading shoes They've got high tops that Pop always tells me to pull all the way up, but I ain't bothered with that for years. Heck, a little water can't kill me. After a little while I went into the water real cautious careful not to scare the frogs. I worked my way out into mid-stream and started peering around for frogs. I had my net in my belt but I don't use it much not for frogs. So there I was in the creek, careful as could be, when all of a sudden this bunch of rocks and grass comes rolling down the bank and this city fellow comes down after it, trying to grab hold of bushes on the way. He hit the pipe and it slopped him, but he sure messed up the water. A couple of minutes went by and he started to get up. He had a heck of a time doing it. He kept Railing his arms around and pulling himself back onto the pipe. I was mad because he'd scared the frogs, so I yelled out, "Hey, mister, don't do that!" Boy, did he look up fast. You'd of thought I was a C.D. man or something the way he snapped around. His eyes got wild and he shook all over. Before he could fall again I called out. "It's just me, mister, down in the creek." He turned around, grabbing the pipe for balance. I waited till he'd steadied himself and then I said, "You're scaring the frogs." "Scaring the frogs?" he yelled back, sounding like frogs were monsters. "Yeah. I'm trying to catch some. Can you just sit there a minute?" I could see he was thinking this over. Finally he sat back on the pipe like he was worn out and said real quiet, "Why not?" And he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. sleeping there. They were big and fat. I put a stick through their throats and let 'em dangle in the creek to keep fresh. I almost had the fourth one when the city guy woke up. "Listen," he called to me. "Where am I?" "Rotten Log Hollow." "Where is that?" I sure couldn't see the point in yelling all the time, so I told him to come closer and we could talk. "Talk makes less noise. Maybe I can still catch some frogs if we're just talking." He hustled off the pipe and scrambled along the shore, splashing dirt and stones into the water. "Hi," I said when he got closer. "Hello." He was still awful nervous and had that funny white look around his eyes, sort of like turtle skin. "What's your name?" He was really trying to be friendly and even if Mr. Thompson says in that spooly voice of his that there ain't any friendly strangers, well, this guy wasn't anything I couldn't handle. "My name is Althea," I told him, polite like Mom tells me to be. "But mostly my friends call me Thorny. Who are you?" "Uh " He looked around then back. "Slanl Stan just call me Sian." You could see that he was lying. He wasn't even good at it. So I said, sure, his name was Stan. Then I waited for him to say something. "You like this place?" he asked. "Yeah. I come here lots of limes." "You live around here, then'?' I ' A dumb question. He was really all city. Maybe he thought we had subways out here in the country. He kept looking around like he expected a whole herd of people to come running out of the pipe. "Yeah. I live at the Baxter place." It was a lie but he'd told me one and besides, Pop said I wasn't to tell people where we live, just in case. "Where's that?" He said it like he wasn't really interested, like he didn't give a damn where the Baxter place was. He just wanted to talk to someone. I pointed back toward the Baxter place and told him it was about a mile along the road. "Do a lot of people live there, at the Baxter place?" "Not too many. About six or seven. You planning on moving in, mister?" He laughed at that. It was one of those high laughs that sounds like crying. My brother Davey cries like that a lot. It ain't right a sixyear-old kid should cry like that. About this Stan or whoever I didn't know. "What's funny, mister?" I would have gone and left him there, but I saw that he was standing almost in some green gunk that comes out of the pipe and washes on shore so I said to him a little louder, "And you belter get away from there." He slopped laughing. "From where? Why?" Wow, he was nervous. "From that." I .pointed so he would get panicked again. "That stuff is bad for you. It can give you burns if your not used to it." That isn't quite right. Some people can't get used to it, but it never burned me, not even the first time. Mr. Thompson says that means selective mutations are adapting to the new demands of the environment. Mr. Thompson thinks that just because he's a geneticist he knows everything. Stan leaped away from the green stuff like it was about to bite him. "What is it?" "I don't know. Just stuff that comes out of the pipe. When the Santa Rosa pumping station got blown up a couple of years back this broke and started dripping that green stuff." I shrugged. "It won't hurt you if you don't touch it." Stan looked like he was going to start laughing again, so I said, real quick, "I bet you're from Santa Rosa, huh?" "Santa Rosa? What makes you think that?" He sure got jumpy if you asked him anything. "Nothing. Santa Rosa's the first big city south of here. I just figured you probably had to come from there. Or maybe Sonoma or Napa, but those ain't too likely." "Why do you say that?" He was real close ntfw and his hands were balling into fists. "Simple," I said, trying to keep my eyes off his fists. He must have been sick or something, the way he kept lightening and loosening his fingers. "The big highway north is still open, but not the one between Sonoma and Santa Rosa." He wobbled his head up and down at that. "Yes, yes of course. That would be why." He looked at me, letting his hands open up again!" I was glad to see that. "Sorry, Thorny. I guess I'm jumpier than I thought." "That's okay," I told him. I didn't want to set him off again. watched me while I looked for frogs. After a while he asked me, "Is there anyone needing some help on their farms around here? Anyone you know of?" I said no. "Maybe there's a school somewhere that needs a teacher. Unless I miss my guess I could teach a few things. You kids probably don't have too many good teachers." What a spooly thing to say. "My Pop teaches at the high school. Maybe he could help you find work." We didn't need teachers, but if Stan knew about leaching maybe one of the other towns could use him. "Were you born around here?" Stan was looking around the hollow like anyone's having been born here was real special and unlikely. "Nope. Over at Davis." That was where Pop had been doing the research into plant viruses, before he and the Baxters and the Thompsons and the Wainwrights and the Aumendsens and the Leventhals bought this place here. "On a farm?" "Sort of." His voice sounded like being born on a farm was something great like saving the seaweed or maybe going back to the moon some day. "I've always wanted to live in the country. Maybe now I can." He stumbled along the bank to the sandy spot opposite the gravel bar and sat down. Boy, he was really dumb. "There's snakes there," I said, real gentle. Sure enough, up he shot, squealing like Mrs. Wainwright's pig. "They won't hurt you. Just watch out for them. They only bite if you hurt 'em or scare 'em." And with him jumping up and down I wasn't going to get any more frogs, that was for sure. So I decided to settle just for conversation. "Is any place safe in this bank?" he asked. "Sure," I said with a smile. "Right where you were sitting. Just keep an eye out for the snakes. They're about two feel long and sort of red. About the color of those pine needles." I pointed up the bank. "Like that." "Dear God. How long have the pine needles been that way?" I slogged over into the deep water. "About the last live, six years. The smog does it." "Smog?" He gave me a real blank look. "There isn't any smog here." "Can't see it or even smell it. Mr. Thompson says there's too much of it everywhere so we can't tell its there any more. But the trees know it. That's why they turn that color." "But they'll die," he said. He sounded real upset. "Maybe. Maybe they'll change." "How can they? This is terrible." "Well, the pines are holding up. Most of the redwoods south of the Navarro River died years ago. Lots of them are still standing," I explained, seeing him go blank again. "But they aren't alive any more. But the pines here, they haven't died yet and maybe they aren't going to." A real sharp shine was coming into his eyes and I knew I had said more than I should have. I tried to cover up as best as I could. "We learn about this in school. They say we'll have to find ways to handle all the trouble when we grow up. Mr. Thompson tells us about biology." That last part was true, at least. "Biology. At your age." That kind of talk can still make me mad. "Look, mister, I'm fifteen years old, and that's plenty old to know about biology. And chemistry, loo. Just because this is a long way from Santa Rosa, don't think we can't read or like that." I was really angry. I know I'm little, but, heck, lots of people are small now. "I didn't mean anything. I was just suprised that you have such good schools here." Boy, that Stan really couldn't lie at all. "What do they teach where you come from?" I knew that might make him jumpy again, but I wanted to gel back at him for that. "Nothing important. They teach history and language and art with no emphasis on survival. Why, when some of the students last semester requested that the administration include courses in things like forestry, basket making and plant grafting, they called out the C.D. and there was a riot. One of the C.D. " Stan licked his lips in an odd way "was ambushed and left hanging from a I am post by his heels." "That's bad," I said. It was, too. That was the first time I found out how bad it had got in the cities. Stan was still smiling when he told me what had been done to the C.D. It wasn't nice to hear. He kept trying to make it better by calling it gelding. He said that the last time they did it was during the blackwhite trouble. And that guy wanted to teach in our schools. He said that he knew what it was really like with people all over and could contribute to our system. I could see Pop's face getting real set and hard at what Stan was saying. But Stan insisted he thought that it was very important for people to understand "The System"like it was a religious thing. You know? I was beginning to get scared. "Fifteen is too old," he went on. "Do you have any brothers or sisters younger than yourself?" swering him. "Yes. I got two brothers. And one sister." I didn't tell him that Jamie was already doing research work or that Davey didn't do anything. Or that Lisa was getting ready to board in the next town so that we could keep the families from interbreeding too much. "Older or younger." "Mostly older." So I lied again. At least I was good at it. He didn't think to ask anything more about them. "Too bad. We are going to have to change what's been happening. Martial law, searches without warrants, confiscations. It's terrible, Thorny , terrible." He must have thought that living out here we didn't hear anything or see anything. He kept telling me how bad it was to have soldiers everywhere and how they were doing awful things. I knew about that and a lot of other things, too. And I knew about how there were gangs that killed people and robbed them and murder clubs that just killed people for fun. Heck, Jules Leventhal used to be a clinical psychologist and he taught us a lot about the way mobs act and how too many people make problems for everybody. "How are things north of here?" Stan was asking. "Not too bad. Humboldt County is doing pretty good and there are more people around the Klamath River now." I sure didn't want a guy like him staying with us. I figured that maybe telling him about conditions in north might encourage him to move on. But he just looked tense and nodded, like that crazy preacher who wanted us all to die for god, a couple of years back. "Of course, that's redwood country so they might have trouble there in a few years." He looked at me real hard. "Thorny, do you think you could tell me how to get to Humboldt county?" Dumb, dumb, I told you. All he had to do is keep going up old #I and there it would be. That crazy guy hadn't even looked at a map. Or else he had and was trying to trap me, but I ain't easy to trap. "You can keep going up the main highway," I said, talking real sincere-like. "But there might be ( .#). men up ahead, you know, way is to cut over to the coast and just follow it up." There, I thought. That ought to gel him; he was jumpy enough before. "Yes, yes, that would work. And Eureka is a port there would be the ocean for access He went on like that lor about five minutes. He wanted to launch some kind of attack against The System, to protect the People, but for another System. He kept talking about rights and saying how he knew what the People really wanted and he would change things so that they could have it. He said he knew what was best for them. Wow, I wish Mr. Leventhal could have heard him. "And what about you? You should be in school, right?" "Nope," I said. "We have school just two days in the week. The rest of the time is free." I wondered if that much had been all right to tell. We weren't supposed to let out much about our school. "But it's a waste, don't you see'.'" Stan crouched down on the bank, looking like a huge skinny rabbit squatting there. "This is the time when you must learn political philosophy. You should be learning about how society works. It's terribly important." "I know how society works," I said. Heck, all the kids who learned from Mr. Wainwright know about that. After all, one of the reasons the Wainwrights came along with the rest of us was that the politicians in Sacramento didn't like what he was teaching about the way they worked. And they were society. "Not this society," he said in a real haughty way. like Mr. Thompson when he's crossed. "Society in Want a way out of whatever it is you're in? Then read -- The Magazine of Alternatives the cities, in the population centers." He was going on that way when I saw a couple of frogs moving on the bottom. I watched where they were going and then I reached down for them, holding my breath as my face hit the water. I dragged one of them out but the other got away. "Spending your time catching frogs," Stan spat. "Sure. They taste real good. Mom fixes 'em up with batter and fries 'em." "You mean you eat them?" he squeaked, looking gray. "Of course. They're meal ain't they?" I waded over to the other frogs on the stick and stuck the new one on, too. He wiggled and jerked for a bit and then stopped. "But frogs? How can you eat frogs?" "Easy." I didn't think he was going to get over it: that we eat frogs. Just to be sure, I reached over and grabbed the stick with the frogs on it. "See? This one," I put my thumb on one's belly, "is the fattest. It'll taste real good." "And do you really chase after them without seeing them?" I turned around and looked at him. He was standing up on the other bank and the frightened look was back in his eye. "No. You got to see what you're after." "But in that water-" "Oh, I don't open my eyes like you do," I said, real casual-like. "I go after them with these." And I slid up the membranes. Stan looked like he'd swallowed a salamander. "What was that,'" he demanded, looking more scared than ever. "Nictating membranesI was engineered for it," I said. "Mutants," he gibbered. "Already!" He started trying to back up the bank watching me like he thought I was a werewolf or something. He slipped and stumbled until he got to the top and then he ran away -- I would hear him crashing through the brush making more noise than a herd of deer. By the time he left the whole hole was filled with leaves and sticks and rocks and I knew that there wouldn't be any more frogs or fish that day, so I took the frogs on the stick, got off my wading shoes and started back for the house. I knew Mom would be mad but I was hoping that the frogs would help her get over it. I guessed I had to tell them about Stan. They didn't like people coming here. They were real mad about it. The funny thing is that they were maddest about my having shown my eyes. But cripes, that was just one little flap of skin that Mr. Thompson got us to breed. Just one louzy bit of extra skin near the eye. But to hear him tell it, you'd think he'd changed the whole world. if A dead world, a dying star -- and desperate rescue in the face of flaming odds! A S IT happened, after all the argument about its value to earth, no technical teams were McKay came back to it. Sitting alone in the big hangar, the white ship did not look loo different on the way over, for all its alien markings. It had the chunky lines characteristic of high-performance aerospace-craft, whether from Earth or anywhere. McKay tapped his pocket communicator the airlock door dropped from the underside and he boarded his personal delta-winged headache. Consider first the Interface, that great net of interstellar matter transmitters in which Earth now shared. Whoever had originated the technology, it had passed into the hands of the Fallaran, a humanoid race from a highgravity planet. They had taken the spread of the Interface as a racial ideal and mounted a great survey force, the Furtherance, to carry the relays across interstellar space; and in due course they met the Sasarenn, a reptilian species whose only ideal was competition. About the middle of Earth's nineteenth century, the Sasarenn War Fleet set forth to hold back the Furtherance, occupying star systems ahead of them, then spreading from star to star as the Fallaran threw them out. As uncompromising as the Sasarenn in their own way, the Fallaran could not bring themselves to leave any inhabited planetary system out of the Interface; but shifting the Sasarenn grievously damaged the victimized planets. Through Victoria's reign and two World Wars, the battle front had spread out and about the time of men's first moon landing the two fleets began their interstellar race to Earth. The Sasarenn, from a position of strength, rather than occupation, held the Solar System for three months of #. McKay, hauled from an orbiting Apollo and appointed Earth planetary agent, had worked the trick which finally shook them from Earth and the Interface. As mementoes, he retained the Sasarenn Recovery and Liaison Vehicle, his badge of office, and a communications relay embedded in the back of his skull. The ship's computer-autopilot, though no longer fanatically anti-lnlerlace, could still kill him if he went too far with it. When the relay gave him a headswimming jolt, just then, he thought for a moment that he had. But this was only the standard communications alert, set far too high by the Sasarenn to make sure he never missed it. McKay shook his head and plugged in to the ship's perception circuits. "Acknowledge," he told the computer. mentation: plugged in, the pilot had a complete heads-up display, including all-around vision. The signal was coming from a liny message sphere that had burst out of Interface into orbit near the message pulse McKay acknowledged again and it destroyed itself. "Where is my crew right now?" McKay asked the spacefield control tower. "Due here from Houston on a jet transport in three hours. We were notified of their takeoff ten minutes ago." "Have the plane turned back." McKay said crisply. Control knew better than to argue. He flicked on the ship's external speakers. "May I have the hangar doors open.'" As the ground crew obeyed, he pads and moved it slowly out into the sunlight. The computerized systems check cascaded over the field of view, all perfect. He began stepping up the fusion power level, moving out to the main runway. "Transport is on its way back to Houston," the lower reported. "Tell Houston I'm on my way down, please, and give me a clear climb to Interface." "You can have one now, if you go due east." "I'll take it." McKay had the intakes open and the jets adjusted roar, wings sweeping forward, then back again as airspeed picked up. contacted the orbiting Interlace relay, setting up a straight aerial transfer to the Houston vicinity. A half-mile hole in the sky blinked open, joining north to south without visual spectacle just the sudden appearance of half a bank of cumulus, which grew swiftly to completeness as the disc into the Texas morning. As yet there were no procedures set lor this -- he had shot out uncomfortably close to another aircraft. "Where the hell did you come from?" Air Traffic demanded as he banked clear. "Recovery and Liaison Vehicle to Houston field," McKay snapped back. "Is that the transport I'm here to intercept?" "They were about to start their approach when you sprang out of nowhere," the angry voice replied. "Never mind. I'll follow them down and pick up my crew. We have a rescue assignment." How to win friends and influence people, McKay thought as he trailed the jet down the sky. The rest hadn't done him much good. thrust as the transport landed, and came down on the grass alongside the runway as the jet turned at the end of it. Slazeck and Devlin tumbled out of a hatch and ran across to him. As they approached, McKay requested and received from the tower a prompt clearance lor immediate takeoff. The mission solved one problem, McKay reflected as Slazek and Devlin came aboard, exchanged easy greetings. Alter a highly frustrating month in space, personal relations had been pretty last separated. Now they had a new purpose. "Okay, Mac, we're strapped in," Slazeck reported. McKay had found a runway. A surge of ward. "This must be a pretty hot deck you were throwing weight." "We're going interstellar again. Officially, this time. A personal message came through from Kiliath he wants us to haul some friends of his off a planet somewhere in the Interface." Slazeck asked, "Some Furtherance boys in trouble?" "You could say that. They're researchers, studying a sun approaching nova. It seems they miscalculated the date: the star's ahead of schedule." Nothing shook Slazeck. "How long do we have? And where's "somewhere?" " "We have a few hours. The sun's on its last pulse now. We'll tune in still climbing. "We'll get out of your hair," McKay told Air Traffic after acquiring the satellite again. "Up Interface." Not to impose the world's end on the Texas sky, he was going up to the satellite first. A two-dimensional circle of blackness opened before them and as they moved out of the sunlight, the bright dust of distant stars came out across it. The ship emerged silently into space far above Earth's night and the blue sky behind was scrubbed away. "All right, you guys, let's go." T HE Interface system was quite something, McKay reflected as to permit its crew to get into pressure suits. Any spot in the Galaxy could be reached as easily, given an Interface relay within reasonable reach. The hard bit was Furtherance, the task of physically hauling the relays from star to star. To dale the Interface encompassed only a small part of one Milky Way arm but that meant thousands of stars and hundreds of races, man newest of all. For all their often embarrassing dedication to Furtherance, McKay had a great respect for the Fall a ran and their achievements always provided Earth escaped being overrun by the member races of the Interface. "One thing I don't get, Mac," said Slazeck. "I thought from my dealings with Kiliath that the Furtherance space research was all in the nature of survey work. Why have they been fooling around with a star that's going nova?" McKay couldn't answer that. "We still have very little idea what goes on in the Interface itself. 'Furtherance' is fine but Furtherance of what?" "Why, for instance, doesn't Kiliath make the rescue himself with one of the big starships?" asked Devlin. "That's what the U.N. would like to know, I expect," said McKay as they returned to the cockpit. "After we came so near to losing our ship on the last mission, they think we should refuse any more rescue assignments." "I can't see any point to that," Slazeck observed. "Since the ship still thinks of itself as part of an active fighting unit, it won't let itself be pulled apart for study. All we can do with it is gain operational experience. We need to use every chance." "Right," said McKay, plugging in again to the featureless panels. "Use it, risk it and learn from it, I say. Hut they want me to restrict its use to liaison assignments." "If we refuse rescue missions we won't get any liaison assignments," said Slazeck. "The Furtherance commanders are pilots, not politicians." The ship was a headache, McKay thought again as he set up Interface for the nova system. With anti-personnel systems inside and out, the computer-autopilot -- a law unto itself in these matters could quite literally carve up any spies who tried to probe the ship's design. Most ways in which it surpassed human technology the fusion pile, the highenergy fuel (processed somehow from liquid hydrogen) and the computer-autopilot itself were consequently beyond examinaexercised its own judgment: quite possibly it would decide the coming rescue was too risky or contradicted the Sasarenn programing. Under such circumstances it could refuse to obey him. McKay activated the relays with some caution. But the vision of disaster he half expected did not materialize: save for the electronic display, he wouldn't have known there was an Interface there. He fired the vernier motors and the ring traced by the computer moved up and over them. The daylit face of the planet loomed out from behind it and seconds later the ship was in sunlight. were unable to detect the merciless contraction supposed to be going on there. But the sun was already a good deal hotter than Earth's and its output, according to the sensors, was going up even as they watched. McKay felt an old tension, left over from test pilot days, clamp down on him. The computer began to translate details of the Fallarans' predicament. The Fallaran had an outpost here, an orbital research installation that could escape at a moment's notice. But a party of scientists had landed on the planet to study the effects of the recent peak in the sun's output. They had mistimed their subject. Instead of swelling slowly to a dull, distended red, the star had flared violently and was already caving in for the final detonation. McKay cut off the computer translation, which was struggling incoherently with advanced Fallaran astrophysics. The important point was, the weather had boiled up down there and the team's own ship had been wrecked trying to pick up the Fallaran specifically for rescue missions, might just be able to get them out in time. He switched on the translator again. "There are six of us down there," the Fallaran voice came on. The neutral translation was still tripping, seeking verbal correlatives for strong emotion. "Not all have protective clothing" This man -- McKay found himself unable to think of the fallaran as an alien was blaming himself for the miscalculation. The computer couldn't cope with what he wanted to say. "We'll go down at once," said McKay. "I suggest you retreat to safety. Are they on this side of the planet?" "We will be over the city in ten minutes." "City? Is the planet inhabited?" "The last emigrants left Tessar many centuries ago." With Interface, McKay realized, interstellar evacuation would indeed be possible. "That partly explains the Furtherance presence, perhaps," said Slazeck. "This isn't a new survey, it's the last act of an epic." "What were we doing on Earth at the time?" McKay murmured. "Crossing the Atlantic?" Where, he wondered, could the evacuees of an entire planet go? Kiliath hadn't told McKay that he, Slazeck and Devlin would share the death of someone else's homeworld. Tessar until now McKay had not even known its name. The city was coming up now, though it was hidden by stormclouds moving inland from the angry-looking sea. With luck, they might have a break in the weather for the actual pickup. "Let's goup Interface." Moving from space to atmosphere was always tricky. McKay had put the disc at twenty thousand feet, but still turbulence threw the ship about before he got the jets going and the wings properly swept. Conditions were getting pretty rough down here. Before entering the clouds, McKay took another sight of the sun: allowing for the atmosphere, it was already five percent hotter than when the "The sun's contraction should slow up when helium burning starts," Slazeck suggested. "If it's going nova, it's been burning helium for thousands of years," said McKay, straining his memory. "Even if the burning's intermittent, I should say it's going again now." He had never imagined in his Project Apollo days that stellar physics could mean life and death to him. "It's been pulsating with increasing force and frequency -- until now it's unstable. On this contraction temperatures and pressures in the core will go high enough to start synthesizing heavier elements, and that energy release will trigger higher synthesis, up the packing fraction curve till the explosion stabilizesif you see what I mean by a stable explosion. But I'm not sure whether that means a sequence of explosions, each more violent than the last -- or if the sun's output will go on rising asymptotically -- " "It won't make any difference, skipper, unless one alternative gives the ship more time," said Slazeck. "And the only people who could brief us on what has gone before have had the good sense to gel out of here." "We'll do likewise," said we are approaching the city now. Stand by for immediate pickup." splitting the sky but the computer translation freed the reply of interference. "We are not in immediate danger. Please first rescue our colleagues in the heart of the city." Now what? "Explain, please." through reddish storm-clouds, with only glimpses of the darkened city ahead. "There are only two of us at this point -- we had come down from the satellite to retrieve the others and were maneuvering to land on a rooftop when the storm came. The shuttle was not built for such conditions and we crashed in the seaward part of the city. We have protective suits, but our friends in the city have been forced to shelter from the growing heat "I thought we were having it too easy," McKay commented. "How can we locate them?" "There is a marker on the roof of the building. When we heard last, they were retreating below street level." "As long as the marker hasn't blown away -- " said McKay as they began their run across the city. "Our sensors are good but they won't penetrate solid stone." Close up, the age of the city was obvious. The buildings were shells, many of them in advanced ruin. Some ground disturbance -- it didn't look recent -- had split off the city's seaward section, lowering it below sea level, leaving only a welter of white water within the old sea wall. Toward the land, where a few towers were still standing in the spray, the sensors pinpointed the partly submerged wreck of the Furtherance shuttle. Beyond the foaming water in the fissure, the rest of the city was coming down in the storm: the streets were filled with flying dust. found the rescue marker on the first pass. "Now all we have to do is get down there. Fie pulled the ship up into slightly calmer air. "We can't set down in that, for sure," Devlin agreed. "We'd be blown into something before even this autopilot could correct." "We'll have to get down fast and we'll probably need the rockets to get back up again." He hovered at a safe height until the wind's fury began to abate. The tension remained with him, not growing, but bigger in his awareness than the outside situation itself. Little by little the clouds lifted, the scene lightened; the air over the city began to clear as the dust fell into eddying swathes. The street he had picked out for the touchdown was practically clear when he brought the ship in. The jets could cope with it now. He slowed the descent, almost hovering as the landing blocks went down. "That roadway's liquid ," Devlin said. "We can't get across that without an air-cushion." sign points, McKay had often thought, was that it could float or taxi on its pads without utilizing its main engines. He was never more glad of this feature than right now, as he cut the jets and left the ship floating above the molten road. "Outside temperature's oneeighty Fahrenheit and still rising," he said. "We're going to need armor." "We're going out?" "How do you expect them to know we're here? They'll be underground. And how would they make it to the ship? We have to ta.ke suits to them. You and I, Devlin. Slazeck slays here to mind the store." The protective suits that went able for this situation. They reflected heal, certainly, but that was because they were built to reflect laser beams and bullets another reminder of the kind of rescue mission the Sasarenn had had in mind. For the present situation they were over-protective, a good deal too heavy. "Problem, Mac," said Devlin as he finished suiting up. "Which one?" "Two of us, four of them, only four suits." "We'll have to take in two stretcher units. They can carry the suits we do have and float us across that road." quarrel with the design of the stretcher unit, which he thought was a masterpiece. For rocket maneuvers acceleration shields G-couches. The same unit, separated from the ship's power and life-support systems, could be launched as an escape capsule. Released at ground level, it became an air-cushion stretcher or sled, maneuvered by air jets and you passed it straight back into the hatch, without having to gel your casualty through airlock decontamination. If you wanted to take a miniature cannon along the unit became a highly effective gun carriage. Slazeck guided two such units to where McKay and Devlin were waiting in the open airlock. Standing on the rampdoor, the two men loaded the empty suits, stepped carefully down after them and floated across the roadway toward the building. Ash and dust swirled under the stretchers as they crossed the last strip of ground before the entrance, passing statues of the old inhabitants presumably. The sculptures might have been of animals -- they might have been of godsthe last hot peak in the star's output had thawed them down into twisted, unrecognizable blobs. Something had awakened here, McKay thought. His tensions were seeking personification. Some old deity, Wordsworth's something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns... had come to walk the deserted streets and the touch of the dying sun had driven the statues mad. As if to add terror to the thought, the sun itself came out from the trailing edge of the cloud and glared at him. He could feel the heat of it even through his armor. He called the "Up fifty percent since we arrived, Mac." Devlin muttered, "Let's get out of here." They steered the air-sleds into the relative darkness of the building, looking for the refugees' route in the thick dust. On top of weather damage, the whole place wore a scorched, glazed look, the halls hollowed out by fire and heat in successive pulses of the sun outside. It's all going next time, McKay thought. There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight. Will we still be here when it all burns down? McKay spoke into his suit mike: "Hello, hello can you hear us?" They found footprints leading down one of the ramps and followed them down till one slope was too much for the stretchers. The increasing heat had forced the Furtherance team deeper and deeper, farther from radio contact and rescue. McKay and Devlin came upon stranded ETs three floors below street level, exhausted and semi-conscious. The Fallaran were from a highgravity planet; short and powerfully muscled, they were still relatively lightweight. Once into the suits, two ofthem partly revived with their thick skins, the ETs had found the increasing heat a real problem. Getting the other two to the stretchers and safely shielded took longer; the aliens would ordinarily have found the suits no burden, but now they were too weak to be much help. "Just as well we didn't bring stretchers for everyone," Devlin commented when at last they were ready to head back. As they moved toward the surface, there was a crash of falling stone in the dark behind them. Dust lifted from the floor and danced before their torches. "This whole place is ready to come down," said McKay. "We must be out of here before the storm hits again." White sunlight was still striking into the entrance hall as they came back -- and under it, the floor was smoking. Beyond the doorway was a landscape of hell: the roadway itself was burning, great sheets of yellow (lame rolling on it thick black smoke. Peering down the street, McKay could see the new storm front coming up from the sea. "Bring the ship to us, Walt, before that weather gets here " to get back above rooftop height, since the storm was only minutes away. The sun's radiation output was now three limes what it had been when they arrived -- McKay imagined the Earth falling vertically toward the sun, passing the orbit of Venus and still accelerating. Whether the heat would climb ever more steeply or go up explosively, McKay thought, it would outpace the Rl.V's refrigeration before long. lie had seven people in a ship built to carry only six as he turned back toward the sea. All the couches were filled and Devlin was in the airlock, standing by to pick up the pilots. One of them could squeeze into the back of the cabin, the other two would have to ride in the lock. "We aren't going to make this, Mac," said Slazeck. Already the storm front was towering over the city. "Get back into the cabin, Dev, " McKay ordered as he approached the seaward blocks, converting down the lines from here. We must get you aboard," he radioed to the pilots, "before that storm hits." He saw them start across the roof, small figures clumsy in their metallic armor. Sighting with the ship's perception, he fired the airlock lines to them. One caught his and was raised to the airlock in seconds by the high-speed winch; the other line was blown across the roof. The pilot almost had it when the storm struck. screaming for controlthe line was whipped away and the Furtherance pilot stumbled and was blown over the edge. McKay glimpsed him, a tiny bright figure, tumbling into the tumult of water surrounding the building then rain and spray blotted out everything. blindly into the crumbling towers of the city. The computer had the command decision; McKay concentrated on tidying up dropping the lines, closing the lock, flooding lock and rear cabin with acceleration foam as the autopilot hauled the nose of the ship around to the vertical and fired the fusion sustainer motor. The blue star of the flame cut through the storm, reflecting back from the disintegrating faces of the buildings, as the ship leaped upward and out of danger. Back in the fierce eye of the sun, McKay cut the rocket and switched to ramjet thrust, leveling out. "I am deeply sorry for the death of your friend," he told the Furtherance team. "The Interface relay will be back above the horizon in a lew minutes and we shall escape from this place." "All but one are safe," said the computer translation. "It is more than we could have hoped for." They continued to gain height, waiting for the satellite. Storm clouds and flying dust obscured all the land below. "I have set Interface for a direct transfer to the Earth satellite," McKay went on, to make conversation. "From there we can take you to our base to recover." "We thank you. However the hospitality of your satellite will suffice." McKay understood. For all their pride, in their self-appointed task, the Furtherance people were extremely sensitive and would lake this accident very much to heart. Minutes passed. "Where," McKay exclaimed al last, "is that damned satellite?" He had selected perception circuits to report acquisition of the satellite, as ordered; so they had not fed him the roar of solar interference he now discovered filled the Interface waveband. Everyone in the ship, plugged in, shared his finding, except for the two still immersed in acceleration foam. McKay didn't wait to explain to them. He said, as the computer beat out a rendezvous trajectory, "I'm sorry, those of you without couches, but we are going back on rocket acceleration. Three-second warning, primary boost." The nose of the ship lifted, the air intakes closed and flame to rival the sun's split the sky behind them. "Will the satellite still be there, Mac?" Devlin asked as they raced upward. "It had better be," said McKay. "I'm going for a rendezvous on the dark side, in hopes we can make contact before we reach it. Damn thing has a normal range of ten thousand miles, after all." Entering the stratosphere, McKay switched up to secondary boost as soon as he dared. It was dangerous to run the fusion motor at full power to the ground, though in this case damage to the ground scarcely mattered; but with the ship one-third overloaded, a fast transfer would eat fuel. The ship curved up into space, away from with its increasing heat, to be following them. Sydney Van Scyoc   Larry Eisenberg With the motors off, they coasted silently along the transfer orbit toward nightfall. McKay extended, beaming a contact signal toward the satellite -- he still caught only interference. There was time now to wonder about the former inhabitants of Tessar and time to ask questionsbut his curiosity was gone. McKay was dimmed its vision circuits constantly to keep it in view. If it was not going to explode, how hot did it have to get before the photosphere began to stream off? sun set like blood streaming in the firmament. The horses of the night were out all right, great streamers of aurora shifting over the dark face of the planet, their movements matching the shrieks and howls of interference. Spirits of the dead, as in Earth's legends? All the ghosts of Tessar's history, come out for the final burn-up? They were slow and beautiful, if you could watch them with detachment. "That interference is getting worse," Slazeck pointed out quietly"I'm hoping for a lull in a few minutes," said McKay. "We're skirting a shock wave of charged particles trapped by Tessar's magnetic field. There should be a pronounced 'tail' on the dark side from so strong a solar wind, and I've aimed for us to close with the satellite where the radiation belt is attenuated." We should make it, he thought, given a few more minutes. Only one thing could prevent it now, the sun's premature reappearance around the planet all round it. The computer display confirmed his forecast, Incident radiation on the hull began to drop as they cut across the distorted radiation belts. The interference was decreasing in the magnetic lee of the planet -- and suddenly they had contact with the satellite. "Up Interface -- " Again, no visual spectacle: only the confirmation of the instruments that there was an Interface there. But as they moved towards it the black starry disc bit into the Milky Way, then into the pale, streaked face of Tessar. Earth's heavens look over and the invisible disc behind them, still not filled with the fires of the exploding star, snapped shut. They were, as arranged, riding in orbit high above the Earth with the space station, just going into shadow. The sun was slowly vanishing behind the planet a peaceful setting for the recuperating scientists. The sun dwindled, to be reborn in due course on the opposite horizon. But, watching the reddened disc tearing at the edge of the world, McKay wondered how long it would be before he was at ease in sunlight again.  Something went wrong with the subway that night. Of course, in New York City not even those directly affected noticed, the capacity for urban disaster having reached its fullest extremes in that wellknown tourist attraction. A town local at #nd Street for Greenwich Village. The train stopped at #rd Street, #th Street, #th Street and Christopher Circle. As it turned out he met his wife at this party. It was a standard, Greenwich Village all-of-us-are damned gathering. She was sitting in a corner of the room, her feet hare, listening to a man with sad mustaches play a mandolin. Edward went over to say hello to her. She looked at him with vague disinterest and huddled closer to the mandolin player, who turned outon further inspection to be her date for the night. But Edward was persistent his parents had always told him that his fearfulness was his chief detracting characteristic and later that night he got her address. Two days later he showed up with a shopping cart filled with gourmet food and asked her if she would help him eat it. She shrugged and introduced him to her cats. Three weeks later they slept with one another for the first time and the week after that the mandolin player and he had a fight, at the end of which the mandolin player wished them well and left her flat forever. Edward and Julie were engaged only a few days after that and during the month he married her in Elktown. They went back to New York and started life together. He gave up mathematics, of course, and became an accountant. She gave up painting and took to going to antique shops once a week, bringing back objects every now and then. It was not a bad life, even if it had started out, perhaps, a bit on the contrived side. Three years later Edward opened the door and found Julie playing with their year-old daughter, shaking a rattle and putting it deep into the baby's mouth. The scene was a pleasing one and he felt quite contented until she looked up at him and he saw that she was crying. He put down his briefcase and asked her what was wrong. She told him that their life had been an utter waste. Everything she wanted she had not gotten -- everything that she had gotten she did not want. She was surrounded by things, she told him, she had prepared herself as a child to despise. And the worst of it was that all of it was her own fault. She talked of divorce but only by inference. Realizing that the fault was all his, Edward said that he would check up on some suburbs, get them a nice-sized house and some activities for her during the day. And so he did -- all of it and they were very happy for a while if gravely in debtuntil he came home from the circus one night with his daughter and found that Julie, feet bare, had drowned herself in the bathtub. B town local at #nd Street for Greenwich Village. The train stopped at #nd Street, #th Street, #th Street and the Statue of Christ. As it turned out, she met her husband at this party. It was a standard Greenwich Village weare-finding-ourselves party and he came in late, dressed all wrong, his hands stretching his pockets out of shape. He was already very drunk. She was there with a boy named Vincent who meant little to her but who played the mandolin beautifully and sang her love songs. If the songs were derivative and the motions a trifle forced -- well, it was a bad period for both bf them and she took what comfort she could. But when her husband-to-be came over and spoke to her-his name was Edward as it turned out she could see beyond his embarrassment and her misery that a certain period of her life and of the mandolin-player's was over. He wanted her telephone number but because she didn't believe in telephones she gave him her address instead while Vincent was off changing his clothes. She told him that she was very unsure of herself. Three days later, while she was still in bed, he came with flowers and candy and told her that he could not forget her. With a smile she invited hm in and the first time was very good belter than it had been with Vincent, anyway. Edward was gone when Vincent came later that evening and she told him that she had been lusting after the sea all her lifenow she at least, had found a pond. Then she told him what she and Edward had done. He wept and cursed her. He told her that she had betrayed everything of importance, the small reality they had built together but she was firm. She said that lines must be drawn for once and for all between the present and the possible. Alter that she saw nothing of either Vincent or Edward for a week. Then Edward came with a suitcase. He said he had moved out of his parents' home and had come to marry her. She did not marry him right away but they lived together for some weeksone evening she found a note in her mailbox, just like that, saying that Vincent had committed suicide. She never found out who had sent the note and she never told Edward anything. But a week later they were married in Yonkers and went to a resort upstate, where they were happy for a few days. They came back and bought furniture for her flat. He dropped out of astronomy and became an industrial research assistantor something like that. For a long time her days were simple they were, as a matter of fact, exactly like the days she had known just before she met Edwardand the nights were good, pretty good anyway. Then she became pregnant in a difficult sort of way and eventually the child, Ann, was born a perfect child with small hands and a musical capability. Edward said that they would have to find a real home now -- he was very proudbut she said that the old life could keep up, at least until Ann was ready for school. But one night he came home early, very excited and just like that told her that he had found them a home in the suburbs. She told him that this was fine. He said that he was very happy, and she said the same. They moved to the suburbs and were content for a while, what with car pools and bridge and whatnot, as well as good playmates and a healthy environment for Ann. But Edward, for no reason, began to gel more and more depressed and one morning when she awoke to find his bed empty, she went into the bathroom to find him slumped over the bathtub, his wrists open, blood all over the floor, a faint, fishlike look of appeal in his stunned and disbelieving eyes. c downtown local at #nd Street for Greenwich Village. The train slopped at #th street, # #st Street, #th Street and Christ Towers. As it turned out, he lost his girl at this party. It was a standard Greenwich Village look-how-liberaledwe-are kind of party and it was a strange thing that the two of them went separately since the #nd Street stop was the nearest to both of their apartments. But she believed in maintaining her privacy in small, damning ways. She was sad that night, sad with a misery he could not touch, much less comprehend. It had been a good time for both of themthey had been going together for the four months since she broke off with his closest friend and he played her songs on his mandolin promises of lost and terrible loves, promises of a belter future, songs of freedom and loneliness; and she loved his mandolin. She told him that she found her whole soul in his music. So he was playing songs for her at the party this night, not even wanting to be there, hoping that they could go back to her Hat and put the mandolin beside the bed and make their kind of love, when he saw that she was looking at another man in the corner of the room -- a man of a different sort from the rest of them, since he was the only one who was not already drunk. The man was looking back at her and in that moment Vincent knew that he was quite doomed, that he and Julie were quite finished. To prove it to himself he left his instrument on her knee and went to the bathroom. When he came back they sprang apart like assassins and he knew that the man had her address. There was nothing to do, of course, but to leave the party and he helped her with her coat, put his mandolin over his shoulder and led her down the stairs. Halfway to the street he told her that she had betrayed them. She did not answer, later murmured that she could not help herself, much less another person but she would make this night the best of all the nights that she had ever given him. And so she did, all night and into the dawn while her. cat stroked the mandolin, making wooden sounds, rolling the instrument around and around on the floor. In the morning he left her -- and took his clothing--and then he did not see her at all for a few days. When he came back there was a different look on her face and the man was in her bed, lying next to her. I le did not care -- he had lost any capacity for surprise when she had come from his closest friend, broken enough to need him. He only wanted to meet the man named Edward (who might become his closest friend loo) but the man did not want any part of him at all and there was a very bad scene a. scene that ended only when Vincent knocked the man to the door and smashed him there to the floor. But he never saw her again, victory or not. He had no need to everything that needed proof had been proven. But he thought of her often and many years later, when he killed himself by leaping from a stranger's penthouse, his last thought as he felt the dry wind and saw the street coming at him was of his old mandolin, her solemn cat and the night she had given him her best because she had already partaken of his worst. D very sensitive and gentle hands became a young woman who was drawn at odd moments to the windows of pawn shops in which she saw old mandolins and once, lor a week, she took flute lessons. But she had no money and less patiencethat last was her biggest fault, along with a lack of assertiveness and she dropped them. Now she is going to a parly in Greenwich Village. She does not know what will happen to her. The night is still a mystery. She is still young enough to scent possibilities in the wind tonight may hold some finality, although one never She counts the stops and waits, knows. See her, see her she is in The train stops at #th Street, #th the Times Square stop of the #RT Street and #th Street. Now it is at -- the engineer sounds a song in Christopher Street and Sheridan the density. Square.  stance. You can get just as dead drinking too much spring water as you can by taking too much strychnine. The operative phrase is "too much.") Explicitness to any degree is perfectly okay as long as it functions in the larger structure of the story, but when it's done for its own sake it becomes analogous to the story of a banquet during which the diner obsessively, repeatedly, endlessly returns to the lima beans. Now that the wall is broken, it says nothing for a writer's courage or intelligence to spend his lime kicking the broken bricks around. For there are other battles to fight. Alter sex what? in a strange and wonderful way we are all now at the frontiers of a new after-sex Afterward, in the largest sense. We can begin to accept one another's sexuality as a facet of the whole personand learn more about the whole person. When we do this we might begin on some of the other problems we have. Ecology, for example, needs ( Continued from page #) to be made functional rather than fashionable. You have to qualify to be able to vote, don't you? Then set yourself a rigid set of qualifications and abide by them before you open your mouth to say one word about oil spills or smog. Quit littering, even by so much as a match. Learn such details as that many tints used on paper towels are not biodegradable, though the paper itself may be. Find out how to recycle your bottles and cans rather than discarding them, and then really do it, all the lime. Then holler about the raw sewage upstream; it will make you feel really good. Actually, Julian Fluxley wrote forty years ago that all education -- mathematics, history, everything -- should be taught from an ecological basis from kindergarten on up. Now that's something to shoot for. Sexually repressed, our species, though sick, might survive for thousands of years, but unless we clean up our spaceship we've got only a few dozens. And here's anothersomething I've been trying for a long time to reduce to bumper-sticker size. There is an inexplicable blindness in the Establishment and I mean every establishment for the last seventeen thousand years minimum which makes it believe that if you can instill enough fear you will eliminate anger. Despite repeated proof empires overthrown, Caesar stabbed, independence declared, juntas formed the powers-thal-be still seem to feel that more laws, more police, more repression, more restriction will in some way slop the people from becoming angry. It is my firm conviction that the flame that burned that body in the bunker in Berlin was kindled in Coventry by Hiller himself. Early in the war, riding high, the Germans bombed Coventry (not even a military target) Oat into the ground. The idea was to scare the British so badly that they wouldn't light. It scared them, all right. It terrified them. It also made them so coldly and unremittingly angry that' the fire burned the body and on the way created firestorms in Dresden and Hamburg that killed more people than the atom bombs The sense of my bumper-slicker, if I ever get it titrated down to fewenough words, is this: "You who rule, listen. Forget all the humanitarian glop; you don't believe in it anyway. But in your own self-interest, make yourself understand the simple fact that scared people get angry, and when enough of them get angry enough they'll have your head. What you're doing isn't the enforcement you think it is it's suicide." A government sans fear might have some weird and colorful ups and downs, but it stands a chance to last. Enough force, enough repression, and you have yourself another thousand-year (hah!) Reich. It seems so simple, doesn't it'.' Yet they haven't learned, and the teaching presents at least as much of a challenge to writers and readers and thinkers as the right to scribble some gossip about a juicy incest. I 'LL give you just one more challenge, to suggest an answer to "After sex what."' And this one is, I think, really comprehensible only to the si audience; you're geared to this kind of thinking. Some years ago someone (and if you'll tell me who. I'll be grateful) wrote a story about an alien who was captured by Terrans, who wanted to discover if he was intelligent and if so, in what ways and how much. So they constructed a whier of a maze, with physical and psychological twists and turns, go-no-go problems, decision-making doorways, the vastly evolved equivalent of the long stick in short pieces that psychologists put in chimp cages, to see if they can screw it together to get the bananas the works. So they shove this ET into the maze and sit back to watch, and he goes zip, twist, jump, skid, zang, whump through the whole thing in about one-third the time it would take the guy who designed it. Whereupon he just sat. And everybody says wow, let's call up more people; they've got to get a load of this over at Operations. So with a new larger audience they put the alien in the starting gate again and say Go. Only he doesn't go. He just sits there. They prod him a lot but nothing works; he just sits there. Well, the twist is that he's so damned intelligent that he recognizes the maze for what it is, and demonstrates that he can solve it, but it just isn't in him to understand why, having made the demonstration, it would be necessary to do it again. All right: human beings are capable of learning simple concepts. Some concepts, however, are (for humans) so obscure that the only way to get them to understand is to elaborate, to candy-coat, to create suspense and continuity around them and gradually, while bringing in a huge emotional quantum, reveal the underlying truth otherwise we just won't buy it. Shakespeare's Hamlet, Heller's Catch-#, Miller's Death of a Salesman are towering masterpieces, but each one of them has a point to make (and it's a beauty) which could be stated in a single declarative sentence. However, that single sentence won't do for human beings; they have to have the whole megillah. Only a small fraction of the population gets to see towering masterpieces, and of those, only a few grasp the simple insight. This is so true of so many of us that we have never recognized it as a problem, as a racial defect; but it is, and one of the first magnitude. As far as I know, no one has ever recognized this obtuseness for what it is, nor given it a name, nor regarded it as the opaque cataract it is over the human vision. But the problem-solving ET, landed on this planet, would walk around in absolute astonishment as truth after truth, fact after fact, simple solution after simple solution appeared to us everywhere, only to be ignored unless wrapped up in some huge dramatic experienceand even then, ignored by all but a very few. The intelligent ET would have a right to ask why is it that we can't pul up a billboard saying: and immediately change the face of the earth. Why can't we? Is the billboard hard to understand? If we lived by it, is it difficult to comprehend how the world would change, and in what ways? Ask yourself that some lime after sex. I beg you keep on asking until you find an answer.  S-F readers, get involved! Participate! questionnaire below. Why? 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Lovecraft Lovers! Beagle's Arkham Edition of H. P. Lovecraft is now More coming later on in '#. # each wherever paperbacks are sold. For mail orders, please send  I .# for each book ( includes postage and handling) to: A Beagle Books, Dept. C.S # West # Street New York, N.Y. #I I An Intend Publisher #I Fifth Ave , New York, N.Y. # I  Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. tdilor Science fditer feature tdilor April, #I Vol. #,No. # Joe W. Haldeman Duncan Lunan Gordon Ekiund Managing tdilor Arf Director Aisociale An Director Circulation Director Subscription Director e Robert Silverberg Publisher Associate Publisher Theodore Sturgeon Ernest Taves J.R. Pierce Algis Budrys ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices; # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere S#. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited malerial. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. This is the second six-month report to the consumers -- you -- covering your reactions to matters bigger than both of us; what Galaxy prints, should print and should not. The action has been honest, hectic and highlighted, of course, by the serialization of Robert A. Heinlein's  Will Fear No Evil. Some thoughtful reader evaluations have come in. Dear J akobsson: As all dangerous visions must, I Will Fear No Evil is bound to touch off an endless controversy. Although I do not believe the literary quality of the new novel equal to that of Stranger in a Strange Land,  realize that it does carry Heinlein farther into his exploration of the only human dream worth pursuing: the realization of new life styles in which one may relate to other human beings freely, openly, and in a manner which totally integrates both sensuality and spirituality. Heinlein is not a young man. Old Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is, in a sense, Heinlein himself, while Eunice is the hope of a glorious, liberated future which Heinlein is struggling to grasp. The struggle is not an easy one; never before has the New deviated so radically from the Old. Yet Joan Eunice is a unique fusion of these two quite opposite forces. As literature, the novel is flawed (more on this in a moment), but as autobiography it is moving. Elaws. Most obviously, a common Heinlein tendency carried to the extreme: too much talk and not enough action. A novel like this needs many tasteful yet explicit sex scenes ( D. H. Lawrence did it in Lady Chatterly's Lover few achieve it, but it is not impossible). Heinlein is on the verge of great things, but he's going to have to set aside a little more of his self-consciousness in order to break on through. Eor instance, Joan Eunice's last words were truly heartbreaking -- but who's responsible for those damned dashes after the f's? Mr. Heinlein is not -- nor am I. The real story may never be told; but remember, there are distributors, retailers and local ordinances to deal with. Ed. That's only going halfway and halfway measures do not constitute a breakthrough. But let's give Heinlein credit for tackling what is undoubtedly the most difficult job of characterization in modern fiction. I hope we can look forward to more serious and honest attempts to realize this vision of a Joyous human frontier. A long and happy life to Robert Heinlein! May he grow in wisdom and courage. Thomas R. Smith River Falls, Wisconsin Dear Sir: Have you noticed levels in Heinlein's new book? One: Old man dreams it all on his deathbed. Two: Imagines Eunice to give alien body identity. Three: Eunice survives biologically in body (unlikely!). Four: Eunice arrives as spirit associated yet with her body  the literal interpretation). Roger C. Lewis Owatonna, Minnesota Dear Sir: As for the final installment of Mr. Heinlein's novel, I Will Fear No Evil, one can only say, pity poor Long Beach. I cannot deny that the likes of the Reverend Thomas Barker do and probably will exist. But to suggest that the once famed Iowa State Picnic (even now fading into obscurity) will, by the time of the story, be able to mount even one rape is taking science fiction and speculative gerontology too far. D. J. Waldie Jr. Long Beach, California Dear Sir: Galaxy was one of my favorite sf magazines and Robert Heinlein one of my favorite authors. Now Heinlein has descended to subtle pornography in I Will Fear No Evil, as well as becoming endlessly boring -- couldn't stomach finishing his serial. Many of your stories now seem selected with an eye to socialistic and left radical slants. You have both lost me for good. M. K. Johnson Omaha, Nebraska I hope you find it, Mr. Johnson -- the good, that is. The letters in the above early sampling of views are presented in toto. More of these later as space permits. This report now spills over into some ground-covering sketching; #. A quick, overall reply to those who were curious and those who theorized other answers: I ing and highly pertinent on many levels. To enumerate them here would be pointless -- it's your ball now. #. It's inconceivable to me that anyone except Robert A. Heinlein could or would have written  Will Fear No Evil. That's my response to those of you who have written to ask; what if someone else had done so? No one else did. #. I also find it inconceivable that, having read the manuscript, I should not have made every effort to secure  Will Fear No Evil for first publication in Galaxy. Every worthwhile magazine makes its own demands of an editor and Galaxy has a long history of being true to and reflecting the best in science fiction responsive to its times. This obligation covers a vast range of taste and talent, puts a certain emphasis on what science fiction has to say on top of the endless argument as to what science fiction is. It requires an exploratory approach -- and dialogue. So far, your comments -- pro and con -- regarding I Will Fear No Evil have been highly informative. The same applies to your reactions to Robert Silverberg's Urban Monad # series. All this constitutes the dialogue we must have. The conjunction of the works ( Please turn to page #) T he pot-bellied, graying man walked down the corridor to the psychiatrist's stateroom, one of the two such rooms in the interstellar vessel. He stood in the open door, then tapped lightly to get the man's attention. "You wanted to see me. Doctor?" "Yes, indeed. Dr. Crowell. Come in and sit down." "Thank you." Crowell sat on the edge of an overstuffed chair. "Syzygy. Aardvark, devil-worship. Gerund." Crowell blinked one long slow blink. Then he looked down at his belly in amazement. Experimentally he took a thumb and forefingerful of abdomen and pinched. "Ouch! Why didn't they have this old boy take off some weight before I got stuck with his persona'.'" "Necessary to the image, Otto." "Otto yes, it all comes back now. I'm Otto McGavin, a -- " "Wait." The psychiatrist strode to the stateroom door and eased it shut. "Continue." "I'm a prime operator. A prime. a psychiastrist than I am Dr. Isaac Crowell -- you're Sam, uh, Tibitz. Used to be a section leader when I was stationed on Springworld." "That's right, Otto -- you have quite a memory. I don't think we met more than twice." "Three times. Two cocktail parties and a bridge game. Are you my briefing officer for this job?" "Right." Tibitz reached into an inside vest pocket and pulled out a long envelope. He broke the plastic seal and handed it to Otto. "Five-minute ink," he said. Otto scanned the three pages quickly and then read slowly from beginning to end. He handed it back just as the printing was starting to fade. "Questions?" "Okay. I'm fat old Crowell. Or I will be when you push me back through the mnemonic whatsis. May I assume I can speak the language as well as he could?" "Probably notquite as well there aren't any learning tapes for Bruuchian. Crowell's the only person, prior to your indoctrination, who ever bothered to master a Bruuchian dialect. You were under mutual hypnosis with him for five weeks, learning it. Throat sore?" O tto reached to touch his adam's apple, recoiled when he hit a flabby jowl. "God, this guy's in lousy shape. Yeah, I feel a little tickle. Why?" "The language is mostly growls and belches. I learned a stock phrase in it; it goes like this..." He made a noise like a lovesick rhinocerous. "What the hell does that mean?" "It's in the same dialect you learned, a stock greeting in the informal mode: 'Clouds are not for your family May you die in the sun.' Of course, it rhymes in Bruuchian. Almost everything rhymes in Bruuchian; every noun ends in the same syllable, a protracted belch." "They say I'm pretty good at languages. Don't know how long I'll be able to keep that one up, though. I'll be hoarse after half an hour's small talk." "No. You'll remember when you get back into the Crowell persona. There're some lozenges in your baggage kit that make it easier on your throat." "Look, I hope this job won't call for any action. I've had fourteen personality overlays beore this one, but I never had to carry this much plastiflesh around. That report said Crowell hadn't been on the planet for ten years -- why couldn't they trim me down a little and say I'd gone on a diet?" "Too risky, you might run into some recent acquaintance. Besides, part of the job is for you to look as harmless as possible." "I don't mind looking harmless -- but in one point two gees I'm going to be harmless. I worked up a sweat just walking down the corridor here -- and this is earth-normal." "We have confidence in you, Otto. You primes always come through in a pinch" " -- or die trying. It's that damn hypnoconditioning." "Now, Otto. You know it's in your own best interests." "Yeah, like poor old Carruthers." Tibitz shrugged. "So he only has one natural limb left. He claims he enjoys the freedom of being able to choose the prosthetic to fit the job. He's happy." "He's happy, all right. Last time I saw him, he passed me in the hall playing pattycake with left arms screwed into both shoulders. Happy-" "Well, he's not really a prime operator any more, either. He just carries the title as a courtesy." "And what about ol' Radareyes'?" "Sleep." Otto slumped back in the chair and started to snore lightly"Otto, when I awaken you, you will be about ten percent Otto and ninety percent your artificial personality overlay. Dr. Isaac Crowell. You will remember your mission and all of your training as a prime operator, but your initial reaction to any normal situation will be consistent with Crowell's personality and knowledge. Only in stress situations will your reactions be those of a prime operator. Gerund. Devil-worship. Aardvark. Syzygy." CrowellMcGavin awoke with a start. He pulled himself out of the chair and winked at Tibitz. In Crowell's gravelly voice: "Thank you very much. Dr. Sanchez. The therapy was most soothing." "Think nothing of it. Dr. Crowell. That's what the ship pays me for." A man, do you know who I am ?" The customs inspector tried to look even more bored than usual. "Says here," he peered at the microfiche viewer that held Crowell's I D capsule, "that you're Isaac Crowell, Ph.D., out of Macrobastia, born on Terra. You're sixty years old and you look seventy. That don't get you past the strip-down inspection." "I demand to see your supervisor." "Sorry, he ain't in today. We got a little brig that you can wait in till tomorrow. I ain't callin' him up on his free day Just for some shy offworlder." "Now, now -- what seems to be the trouble?" A stocky little man with a foppish hairdo minced up. "Isaac! What brings you back to Bruuch'?" Crowell clasped the man's hand -- the palm felt like a woman's thigh -- and searched artificial memories for a fraction of a second until the face clicked. "Jonathan -- Jonathan Lyndham. And how is Deirdre?" Lyndham sighed. "As ever. I swear she's out carrying a sign somewhere this very minute." Deirdre was a lumpy Earthmother type who, being childless, had adopted the natives of Bruuch and was forever crusading to better their lot. "But you -- have you returned to stay this time'?" "I don't know, Jonathan. This gentleman doesn't even want to let me through the turnstile. Unless I do some sort of a -- a striptease." Lyndham glowered at the inspector. "Smythe -- don't you know who this man is?" "He's -- nossir." "Doctor Isaac Sebastian Crowell," he intoned, "author of Anomaly Resolved, the book that put this pfanet on the regular spacelanes." Actually the book had sold well enough on Bruuch and on Euphrates, where the qblonists faced a similar situation with regard to exploiting a native population (and were looking for an excuse for slavery); but it had been a bust nearly everywhere else. Fellow anthropologists felt that Crowell had been sloppy and let sentiment interfere with objectivity. And as for being on the regular spacelanes, Bruuch was served by one cargo ship a week, passenger vessels if and when. "Here, let me see those papers." The clerk gladly handed over the clearance forms. Lyndham scrawled initials in appropriate places. "This is no common smuggler... without the influence of his book, you would probably be working in the mines instead of shuffling papers once a week." He pushed a button and the turnstile buzzed. "Come, Isaac. The Company will buy you a drink to atone for this cretin's stupidity." Crowell squeezed through the turnstile and followed Lyndham to the spaceport bar. The place was furnished with native handcrafts, tables and chairs carved out of the dense black iron-wood that resembled obsidian more than it did any other Terran product. Crowell had difficulty drawing the chair out from the table. He plopped himself down and mopped his red face with an outlandishly large handkerchief. "Jonathan, I don't know if I'll be able to get used to this gravity again. I'm not a young many any more." And ten percent reminded itself, I am twenty-seven and in superb physical condition. "You'll get used to it, Isaac. I'll enroll you in our health club -- we'll shrink those extra pounds off in no time." "I don't know that I'll have time," Crowell said hastily; No amount of exercise will reduce plastijlesh. "My publisher Just sent me here to gather material for a revision of Anomaly. I doubt that I'll be here more than a month." "Oh -- that's a pity. But I think you'll find that things have changed enough to warrant a longer stay than that." An overdressed, dumpy waitress clumped over. She had a wad of something tucked in the side of one cheek. "You fellas want something to drink?" "Brandy, please. Do you still drink brandy, Isaac?" "Yes, indeed. With soda, if you please." The girl nodded and walked away, masticating. "Changes? We hear very little of Bruuch on Macrobastia, where I've been teaching. I can see ten years have brought some changes -- " with an economical gesture he indicated the bar. "When I left last time this port was only packed earth and a metal hut. But I'm interested more in the true Bruuchians than in colonists. Are things much the same with them?" Lyndham pursed his lips. "Um -- not really, Isaac." The waitress brought drinks, one neat and one mixed. She gave each man the other's order and stumped away without a word. The men switched and Crowell took a long swallow with obvious relish. "No brandy in the Confederation like Bruuchian. A pity you don't export." "The Company's supposed to be working on that. That and the native handcrafts." He twitched his shoulders in a little shrug. "So far just lots of talk. Kilogram for kilogram, they can make much more on rare earths. Every planet makes beverages and most have busy autochthones." "Yes, the natives -- things have changed?" brandy and nodded. "Both in the long view and, well, recently. Have you heard that the natives' average life span is down?" Otto McGavin knew but Crowell shook his head, no. "In the past six years, down some twenty-five per cent. I think the average life expectancy of a male is down to about twelve years. Bruuchian, that is about sixteen Terran. Of course, they don't seem to mind." "Of course not," Crowell mused. "They would view it as a blessing." The Bruuchians preserved their dead in a secret rite and the carcasses were considered living creatures, with more status in the family than anyone who was still moving around. They were consulted as oracles, the eldest living family member divining their advice by studying the corpse's immobile features. "Any theories?" "Well, most of the males work in the mines; there is some bismuth associated with the rare earth deposits; bismuth is a powerful cumulative poison to their systems. But the mineralogists swear there's not enough bismuth in the dust they breathe to cause any appreciable health problem. And of course the creatures won't let us have a body for autopsy. It's a sticky situation." "Quite so, I can see. But I recall the Bruuchians enjoyed small doses of bismuth as a narcotic -- could they have simply found a large source and be on a species-wide orgy?" "I don't think so... I've looked into the matter rather closely -- God knows, Deirdre's always harping about it -- and they simply don't have the technology, even the most basic grasp of science, to extract or concentrate bismuth from any natural source. The Company doesn't mine it and it's against Company law to give any to a native even if you could find any. No, I really think the bismuth poisoning is the wrong tack." "That's strange." Crowell tapped a finger on the table, gathering his thoughts. "Except for that one metabolic quirk,, they seem quite a hardy people. Could it be overwork?" "No possibility, absolutely none. Ever since your book came out there's been a Confederation observer, a xenobiologist, keeping track of the creatures." Crowell winced microscopically every time Lyndham referred to the natives as "creatures." "Every one of them that works in the mines has a serial number tattooed on his foot. They're logged in and out and not allowed to spend more than eight hours a day in the mines. Otherwise they would, of course. Strange creatures." "Yes, I noticed that when I first came here. It was the original stimulus for my research. In the home, they're placid, even lazy. In places defined as work areas they'll routinely labor to total exhaustion. It seemed, well, anti-survival. Took nine years' work to find the answer." T he Otto part of his brain was getting impatient. The disappearances? "You said something about recent changes?" "Um." Jonathan fluttered his hands and he took another sip. "It's really quite distressing. You know, we still have only about five hundred people on this planet." "Oh? I had hoped that there would be more by now." "Company doesn't encourage immigration. No jobs. Anyhow, everybody knows just about everybody else; and we like to think that we're a pretty close-knit group. More like a family than just people with a common employer. Anyhow, people have been... missing, disappearing over the past few months. The food supply is pretty closely managed; since humans can't survive on native food and all meals are accounted for, the missing people are presumed to be dead. But all of them disappeared without a trace. Three people, to date. One of them the supervisor of mines. Quite frankly, the general consensus is that the creatures did away with them for some reason -- " "Incredible." " -- and as you might imagine, a good deal of bad feeling has been brewing. Several of the creatures have been killed." "But -- " Crowell sputtered, then sat back, took a drink and spoke calmly. "There is absolutely no way a Bruuchian can take a human life. They don't have the conmuch as they revere their dead and aspire to be a 'still one,' they can't grasp the idea of murder or suicide -- or even euthanasia. They don't have words for these things. I remember a time when a drunken worker killed a clumsy Bruuchian with a shovel. I had to go to the village and find the proper household, to try to explain. But the news got there before I did and the household was in a delirious state of celebration. Never had so young a one passed into stillness -- they regarded it as a special favor from the gods. Their only concern was to recover the body and preserve it and two of them were out on that chore as I arrived. When I told them that a man had done it, they thought I was jesting. Men are close to godhood, they said, but men are not gods. I tried to explain it over and over from different directions, but they only laughed. Finally they called in the neighbors and had me keep repeating the story for their edification. They regarded it as a wonderfully blasphemous Joke and it was told and retold for years." Crowell emptied his glass in a gulp. 'T can't say I disagree with you -- the accusation is absurd. But they are powerful creatures and a lot of people are growing afraid of them." "Well, this will certainly be my first, most urgent area of research." Crowell levered himself out of the chair. "No, don't get up. I can find my way to Transients." "Well -- you know where to get in touch with me." "Still in Supplies and Disbursal?" "Yes, indeed." Lyndham smiled. "I'm at the very top now. Chief of Incoming." "A belated congratulations," Crowell said. Very interesting, Otto McGavin thought. II T he twowheeled cart lurched to a stop and Crowell got out gingerly, heavily. He gave the native who had pulled him over a mile a small coin of Company money and said in the formal mode: "For your labors this small token." The native took it in a large trifurcate hand and placed the coin into his mouth, tonguing it to the voluminous pouch under his chin. He answered ritually, "May your body soon find the softnessthe wisdom and ecstasy of stillness." Then he scooped up Crowell's baggage and carried it toward a door marked: Transient's Billet ##. Crowell watched the native Jog ahead of him with more than a little envy as his large frame lumbered down the walk. The Bruuchian had a coat of short brown fur, now slightly misted with sweat. From the rear he resembled a Terran gorilla. His immense splayed feet were larger versions of the hands, with three mutually opposable toes. His legs were short in proportion to his body, with high knee Joints that allowed movement some # from the perpendicular in both directions. Thus his gait had a cartoonish character, amplified by the fact that his arms dropped straight from outsize shoulders to within a few centimeters of the ground. There was nothing comic about his frontal aspect, though; with two huge glaring eyes that never blinked (through a transparent nictitating membrane slid up and back every few seconds) and the cluster of low-definition eyespots that, being sensitive to infrared, allowed him to find his way in almost total darkness. A huge mouth was covered by a single flap of a lip, which rose frequently to show a set of improbably large molars. He had ears that would resemble a cocker spaniel's, except that they were hairless and heavily veined. This particular specimen sported two concessions to his human employers: a pair of striking earrings and a loincloth concealing nothing of any conceivable interest to a human being. He also spoke two words of Terran, yes and no. That was about average. The native was in and out of the building before Crowell had huffed his way halfway there. He ran around Crowell without a word, harnessed himself to his cart and ambled off, a nightmare-comic jinrikisha. Crowell went into his billet and sank onto the spartan bunk. He had lived in more elegant surroundings. There were a crude table and chair of native manufacture, an unimaginative print on the wall showing a winter scene on Terra, a military-type locker and shower operated by hoisting a bucket with holes punched in the bottom to head level. Another bucket evidently served to transport water from some distant point to a washbasin below a cracked mirror. There were no other sanitary facilities and Crowell assumed the outhouse he remembered from ten years earlier was still in use. He was debating whether to recline on the bunk (he wasn't sure he could get back up) when someone tapped on the door. "Come in," he said wearily. small beard, wearing khaki shorts and shirt and carrying two bottles of beer, stepped diffidently to just inside the door. "I'm Waldo Struckheimer," he said, as if that explained everything. "And you bring greatly needed succor," Crowell rumbled. It had been a dusty ride. "I thought you might appreciate something to drink," he said, loping across the room in two steps, offering a beer and standing about six heads over the seated Crowell. "Please -- " Crowell bobbed his hand in the direction of the native chair and took a large swallow of beer while Waldo was folding himself into a sitting position. "Are you also a transient?" "Heavens, no," said Waldo. "I'm the xenobiologist in charge of the natives' welfare in the mines. And you, I understand, are Dr. Isaac Crowell. It's a pleasure finally to meet you." "The pleasure is all mine, I assure you." Waldo took another drink. They made polite noises for a minute. "Dr. Struckheimer, I've only talked to one other person since I landed this morning. What he said was very alarming..." "About the disappearances?" Waldo frowned. "That, too, but what concerned me most was the rapid decline in Bruuchian life expectancy. The theories I heard this morning weren't too impressive -- do you have any ideas?" Waldo put his fingertips together. "Well, my first idea was bismuth poisoning; I suppose you heard about that. They do show most of the clinical signs, but they're common ones -- like nausea or shortness of breath in humans. I mean, I would still strongly suspect bismuth poisoning if I had any idea where they could get it. But since we first learned it was toxic to them I guess that was before you left nobody's been allowed to bring bismuth onto the planet." "And you don't think there's any Ballantine Books WE are getting to be a Very Big Corporation-something that was brought home at the Spring (January) Sales Conference where Editorial valiently presented a sixmonth list (of something between # and # titles per month), including of course Beagles and our new West Coast line, Comstock Editions. The festivities closed with an organic food supper -- featuring natural grain alcohol -- which was a smash. Enough.  meant to trap you into buying books, we'll get on to a.f. and s.f. titles for March. A real goodie is Joy Chanf's Fantasy -- a powerful first novel which has already been compared with Tolkien which in tact it is totally unlike except perhaps in stasavage, magical, the first fruit of a major talent. cerebrations from Douglas R. Malently exciting variation on the fugue -- really fwo separate love stories experienced by the same (well, not quite) couple. A very good book indeed... which, incidentally beautifully demonstrates Mason's developing skill as a writer.  IN this month, one of our favorite nuts, Augustus Mandrell, appears in three books -- two reissues, one new. Pick them up if you've missed are not mysteries -- but if you liked Dr. Strangelove, Mandrell is for bell, originally announced last Fall, but postponed because our dauntless leader disliked the cover featuring a flirtatious nude with a feathery bottom. Well, chacun i son gout and who are we to argue. On which fascinating note we close for this month. Abient#t. BB way it could be coming from the mines here?" "No. All the bismuth in ten cubic meters' of that lanthanide ore wouldn't give a Bruuchian even a slight buzz. I've come to think it's just a red herring; something else is causing similar symptoms." "Any recent change in, well, their dietary habits, for instance?" "No, they still herd those meatbearing reptimammals, and I've run a continuing analysis on the flesh pods they harvest from them. Nothing unusual. No bismuth, certainly." Both men sat in silence for a moment. Crowell said, "Looks as if I may have a bigger job ahead of me than I had anticipated. My publisher sent me here to update the book for a new edition -- I expected only to gather a few statistics and renew some old friendships." He knuckled both eyes. "Quite frankly, the prospect of footwork is appalling. I'm not a young man any more and I weigh twenty kilos more than I did last time I was here. Even then I needed Gravitol to get around comfortably." "I'm sure the Company doctor -- you remember Dr. Norman -- will prescribe you some. I use it myself when the days get too long." He fumbled in a shirt pocket and brought out a small vial. "Here, have a couple. I get it free." "Many thanks." Crowell put the two tablets under his tongue and washed them down sith a swig of beer. A feeling of lightness and well-being pulsed through him. "Ahh -- potent stuff." He stood without difficulty for the first time since he had been Otto McGavin. "Could I impose on you for a tour of your lab? That would seem to be a logical starting place." "I'd be delighted -- I planned to stop by there this afternoon anyhow. Let's try to catch a taxi." couple of blocks away and gave a piercing whistle. The driver saw them and ran down the street as if his life depended on it. He came to an abrupt stop and showered dust on both men. Then he grunted one syllable: "Where?" "Take-us-toMine-A-please." The Bruuchian gave a disarmingly human nod. Mine A was a mile away. The ride was somewhat terrifying but otherwise uneventful. "Is that your lab?" Crowell indicated a large silver dome as he beat the dust from his clothes. "Yes, indeed. Here, follow me and by all means stay on the path. Wouldn't want to step in a dustpit." No, wouldn't want to do that, OttoCrowell thought as he carefully matched the xenobiologist's steps. Most of them are only about a meter deep -- but slide into one of the big ones and you're gone... With their infrared-sensitive eyeclusters the natives could detect the dustpits plainly by temperature differential. But to human eyes the surface of a pit looked just like the surrounding dusty ground. Nearing the lab, Crowell heard the chugging of an air compressor. The dome wasn't metal after all, but aluminized plastic, kept inflated by air pressure. That was something new in Company buildings. They went through a flapdoor in the side. The air inside was sweet and cool. "Compressor pushes the air through a humidifier and a bunch of dust filters. I think the Company added that touch to induce me into free overtime. It works -- I always hate to leave the place." The lab was an interesting combination of rustic and ultramodern. Every piece of furniture was the familiar Bruuchian design, but Crowell recognized the crinklygray box of an expensive generalpurpose computer, a caloric oven, a large-screen electron microscope and a lot of complicated-looking glassware that had to be imported. He saw several arcane devices he couldn't identify. "Very impressive -- how did you ever get the Company to finance all of this?" Struckheimer laughed. "The Company just paid for the building -- hard enough to get that! I've got a Confederation grant from the Public Health Commission. I'm the Company's veterinarian for six hours a day and the rest of the time I do research on Bruuchian physiology. Ot try to do research -- I'm pretty limited without cadavers or even exploratory operations." Crowell nodded. "How do you get volunteers -- for whatever you do?" "Oh, I hire them. Bruuchians have developed a taste for some human luxuries, like jewelry and hardware, and they can only get them at the Company store. I pay them exactly what they would get working in the mines -- as you know, that's not much. They stay here in a little room," he indicated a partition with his thumb, "and I do quantitative bioanalyses on them -- you know, weighing and analyzing food intake and waste products. I X-ray them and do organ traces stared at nothing. "It's very strange. They have several internal organs that don't seem to have any real function. Not all of them even have the same set of organs. And if they do they aren't necessarily the same place in the body cavity. If only I could get a cadaver!" He pounded his palm with his fist. "I -- there was a horrible accident a few months ago. A native fell in front of a mining laser and it sliced him in two. As soon as I heard I came running. But the relatives had already spirited him away. I took an interpreter and found his family's hut in the village. I told them I could sew him back together again, that I could cure him. God, I wanted to get a look at that body!" He kneaded his forehead with two fingers. "They believed me. And they apologized. But they said they had thought he was ready for stillness and they had already 'processed' him. "I asked if I could see his body and they said, sure, they were happy that I would want to join the celebration." Struckheimer paused again. He stared at Crowell and said, "You know that room, the family room, where they keep their ancestor's mummies? I went in there -- must have been thirty or forty of them leaning against the walls, three and four deep, perfectly preserved. They pointed out the new arrival. He looked just like all the others, except for a hairless circle around his middle where the laser had cut through. I looked at the ring of skin closely -- they let me use a flashlight -- and there was absolutely no seam, no scar! I checked the serial number on the foot and it was the right one. Now, believe this: the cadaver couldn't have gotten there ten minutes before I did. That kind of scar suppression takes induced skin regeneration -- weeks of convalescence -- and you can't do it on a dead organism. But try to find out how they do it -- you might as well ask a person how he keeps his heart beating. I don't think they really understand the question." Crowell nodded. "When I wrote my book, I had to be satisfied with a simple description of the phenomenon. All I could find out was that it involves some ritual using the oldest and the youngest family members. And nobody teaches them what to do. They say it's obvious. But they can't explain and they won't let you watch." Struckheimer went to a big freestanding refrigeration unit and came out with two beers. "Stand another one?" Crowell nodded and he uncorked both of them. "Make it myself one of the native boys tends the brew for me. Going to lose him in a few months, though he's almost old enough for the mines." He handed Crowell a beer and sat down on a little stool. "I suppose you know they don't have anything like a study of medicine. No shamans or anything. If somebody gets sick they just sit around and cheer him on -- and if he recovers they offer him their condolences." "I know," said Crowell. "How do you ever get them to come around for treatment? And how can you know what to do for them when they come in, for that matter?" "Well, my medical assistants -- I've got four -- inspect each one of them when they go into the mine and again after they've finished work. The Public Health Commission designed a cybernetic remote diagnostic machine, similar to the one a doctor uses. There are four of them, all wired into my computer over there. It checks out their respiration rate, skin temperature, pulse and such; and if there's any significant difference between two consecutive readings my assistants send the fellow to me. By the time he gets here the computer has filled me in on his medical history and I can dope out some empirical remedy based on clinical experience and the physiological experiments. I never have any idea whether the remedy is going to reduce the symptoms. A drug will work perfectly on one of them and on the next the symptoms will just get worse and worse until he curls up and dies. And you know what they say about that." "Yeah -- he was ready for stillness." "Right -- they tolerate the treatment only because it's a condition for employment. They'd never come on their own." "Have the diagnostic machines given you any clue as to the reason they're dying off so much younger than before?" "Oh, sure. Symptoms, in a statistical sense. For instance, the average respiration rate has increased more than ten percent since we started taking readings. Average body temperature is up almost a degree. That supplements my clinical data; both together led to my original conclusion that it was cumulative poisoning. Bismuth would fit the data nicely -- it all accumulates in one organ and is never excreted. And it has to be something associated with the mines. You know, they keep careful demographic records; the families with the greatest number of recent additions to stillness have the most political power. It turns out that the life expectancy of those who don't work in the mines hasn't changed a bit." "I didn't know that." "The Company doesn't like it spread around." They talked for another hour, Crowell mostly listening, Otto developing a plan. Crowell treaded up the walk to the doctor's office. The Gravitol had worn off and he was feeling miserable again. The doctor's office had the first modern furniture, a conservative chrome-and-plastic desk and the first pretty girl Crowell had seen on the planet. The girl sat behind the desk. "Do you have an appointment, sir?" "Uh -- no, ma'm. But I'm an old friend of the doctor's" "Isaac -- Isaac Crowell! Come on back and say hello." The voice came from a little intercom on the girl's desk. "Last room down the corridor to your right, Mr. Crowell." Dr. Norman met him in the corridor and steered him to a different room, pumping his hand. "It's been so long, Isaac I heard you were back and frankly, I was surprised. This is no planet for oldsters like us." The doctor was an affable giant; red-faced and white-haired. He took Crowell into what were obviously his living quarters, a tworoom apartment with a carpet and lots of old-fashioned books on the walls. When they entered, music started playing automatically; Crowell couldn't identify it, but Otto knew: "Vivaldi," he said without thinking. The doctor looked surprised. "Finally getting an education in your old age, Isaac? I remember when you thought Bach was just a kind of beer." "I'm finding time for a lot of things now, Willy." Crowell eased his bulk into an overstaffed chair. "All of them sedentary." The doctor chuckled and strode into the kitchenette. He put ice into two glasses, measured brandy into each and splashed soda into one, water into the other. He handed the brandy and soda to Crowell. "Always remember a patient's prescription," he said. "As a matter of fact, that's one thing I dropped by for." Crowell took a sip from his drink. "I need a month's supply of Gravitol." The smile went off the doctor's face and he sat down on the couch, putting his drink down without sampling it. "No, you don't, Isaac. A week's supply would be plenty. Then you'd be stone cold -- dead." "What?" "Obesity is a contraindication; at any rate, I never advise Gravitol for people over fifty-five. I never take it myself any more. It would strain the old ticker." My heart is twenty-seven years old, McGavin thought, and it's carrying around an extra thirty kilos. Think, think! "Is there some less potent drug that'd help me get around in this gravity? I've got a lot of work to do." "Hmm -- yes, Pandroxin isn't nearly as dangerous, but it should give you a measure of comfort." He reached into a drawer and brought out a prescription pad. He scribbled a short note. "Here you go. But stay away from that Gravitol. It would be pure poison to your system." "Thanks. I'll get it filled tomorrow." "Tonight, if you want -- the pharmacy part of the Company store's open all night now. "So -- what brings you back to this outlandish place, Isaac? Investigating the change in the Bruuchian death rate?" "Not really -- or not primarily. I just came to update my book for a new edition. But that is one of the things I'll want to look into. What do you think of the bismuth theory?" Willy waved a hand in the air. "Hogwash. I think it's overwork, pure and simple. The little bastards work hard all day in the mines; then they go home and knock themselves out carving on that tough wood. You don't have to look any farther than that." "They always have seemed hellbent on working themselves to death. The males, anyhow. Somehow, that seems too pat, though -- the ones who don't work in the mines are always charging around, too. But they aren't popping off early." T he doctor snorted. "Isaac, go down tomorrow and watch them work the mines. It's a wonder they last even a week down there. The others look lazy compared to the mine workers." "I'll do that." How to get the conversation around to the disappearances? "How about the human side of the colony? Changed much since I left?" "Not really. Most of us got weasled into twelveor twenty-year contracts; same people around, only ten years older. Costs a year's salary to get back to Terra and you forfeit that one hundred percent retirement if you break your contract -- so most of us are sticking it out. Had four people buy their way out; I don't think you knew any of them. There's a new Confederation ambassador -- like the three before him, nothing for him to do here. But the law says we've got to have one -- I understand the diplomatic service considers this the least of all possible worlds and that being assigned here is either proof of imcompetence or punishment for something. It's punishment for this one, Stu Fitz-Jones -- he had the misfortune of being ambassador to Lamarr's World when the civil war broke out there. Not his fault, of course, it's just that nobody understood the natives' internal politics. But they had to hang it on somebody, so here he is. You ought to drop by and talk to him -- he's an interesting fellow. But go in the morning while he's still a little bit sober. We've had six births, half of them legitimate, and eighteen deaths." Willy frowned. "Rather, fifteen deaths and three disappearances. All the disappearances in the past year. People have been getting careless. Outside the Company city you might as well be on another planet. But people go walking out alone, prospecting or Just getting away from the rest of us. They break a leg or step into a dust pit and it's all over. Two of the disappearances were brandnew people, probably Confederation agents -- " Otto jumped; Willy was right -- "and the other was old Malatesta, the supervisor of mines. I think that's what brought the two agents. They were supposed to be doing mineralogical research but they didn't work for the Company. Who could have paid their way? Nobody else can mine on this planet." "Could be a University paying for abstract knowledge -- that's how I came here the first time." The doctor nodded. "Exactly. That's what they claimed. But they weren't scholars, I could tell. I lived and worked with academic people most of my life. Oh, they could identify themselves and they seemed to know their subjects adequately, but -- you know that posed to use with its agents?" "Vaguely -- isn't it just plastic surgery and hypno-learning?" "Oh, I suppose. Anyhow, that's what I think these fellows were: a couple of agents they'd made to walk, talk and act like geologists. But they went to all the wrong places, like the mines -- they've been analyzed and the analyses published down to the last molecule. And they never stuck to one place long enough to get any serious work done." "You're probably right." "You think so? Have another drink. Everybody else around here thinks I'm getting paranoid in my old age." "Maybe we're both going bonkers together." Isaac smiled. "Thanks for the offer, but I'd better pick up the Pandroxin and be getting back to my place before I collapse of fatigue. It's been a long day." "I can imagine. Well, good to see you again, Isaac. Still play chess?" "Better than ever." Especially with Otto's help. "Well, drop by some evening after you're settled and we'll go a round or two." "I'll do that. Take care." Ill macy right away. He went to his billet and made a radiophone call. "Biological lab. Struckheimer here." "Waldo, this is Isaac Crowell. Could I ask a favor?" "Fire away." "I'm going down to Dr. Norman's office now to get some Gravitol. Those tablets you gave me today seemed just about right -- could you look up the dosage?" "Don't have to look it up -- it's he'll probably want you on a smaller dose -- the older you get, the less they give you." "Really? Well, I'll try to talk him out of it. Seems to me it should go the other way around." "You'll never talk ol' Willy out of anything -- he's about the most stubborn creature I've ever argued with." "I know -- we were good friends last time I was here. Maybe he'll have pity on a fellow refugee from the geriatrics ward." "Well, good luck. See you again soon?" "I'll be down your way tomorrow, checking out the mines." "Stop in for a beer." "Glad to." Crowell emptied his suitcase and flipped up the false bottom. He selected a stylus that Was an ordinary ball-feed pen on one side and an ultrasonic ink eradicator on the other. Luckily, the doctor had used a black ball-feed to write the prescription; he wouldn't have to forge the signature. He practiced writing: "# mg. Gravitol, quant suff # days" a couple of dozen times, then buzzed the Pandroxin prescription into invisibility and scrawled the counterfeit one over the doctor's signature. The Company store was dark except for one light over the prescription desk. The front door was locked and Crowell dragged himself over to a side door. It slid open when he put his foot on the treadle mat. A bell rang. A clerk came from behind the shelves of reagents, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Something I can do for you?" "Yes, I'd like this filled, please." "Sure thing." The young man took it and walked back behind the shelves. "Say," he yelled back, "this isn't for you, is it?" All Otto now. "Of course not. I use Pandroxin. That's for Dr. Struckheimer." The clerk came back in a minute with a little green vial. "I could have sworn Waldo was in here for Gravitol just last week. Maybe I ought to call up Dr. Norman." "I don't think these are for his own use," Crowell said slowly. "They're for some experiment on the natives." "Okay. I'll just put it on his account, then." "That's funny. He gave me cash to pick them up." The clerk looked at him. "How much?" "How much do they cost?" "Eighteen and a half credits." Crowell extracted his wallet and counted out nineteen credits. Then he laid out a pink Cr# bill next to it. The clerk hesitated, then picked up the Cr#, folded it and put it into his pocket. "It's your funeral, old-timer," he said as he rang up the purchase. "That's a young man's dosage." Crowell took the half-credit change and left without a word. T he next morning, feeling human again, Crowell went out to the mines, just after sunup. He checked at the dome but Waldo wasn't there, so he ambled on down to Mine A. A long line of Bruuchians waited at the entrance to the mine, dancing and gesticulating as if they were trying to keep warm. The noise of their animated conversation got louder and louder as Crowell approached the front of the line. A human in white coveralls was examining the lead Bruuchian. He didn't notice Crowell until he was standing right next to him. "Hello there," Crowell shouted over the din. The man looked up, startled. "Who the hell are you?" "Name's Crowell -- Isaac Crowell." "Oh, yeah -- I was just a kid last time you were here. Watch this." He picked up a megaphone and shouted in Bruuchian (informal mode): "Your spiritdisrupts my spiritslowing the progressof this line and your way to stillness." The conversation quieted to a low murmur. "See, I read your book." "Clever adaptation. You could be one of their priests." "They think I am one." He continued making passes over the Bruuchian's body with a gleaming metal probe. "Is that the diagnostic machine?" Crowell indicated a featureless black box clipped to the man's belt, with a cable leading to the probe. "Yeah. It figures out whether anything's wrong with the beastie and tells Doc Struckheimer." He clapped the Bruuchian on the shoulder; the 'beastie' ran off into the mine. The next stepped up and presented his foot, his knee bending in a most unkneelike manner. "It's also a microphone," he said, peering at the number tattooed on the Bruuchian's foot. He read the number off in slow, clear tones and began running the probe over the brown fur in a regular pattern. "I can't figure anybody getting off this planet and wanting to come back. What are you doing here?" "Well, there's a new printing of my book coming out. The publisher wants it updated." The man shrugged. "Long as you get a ticket back, guess it's not so bad. "If you want a look downstairs, go ahead. But watch your step. They run around like crazy down there -- keep away from the elevator and they probably won't trample you." "Thanks." Crowell walked down the corridor to a small open elevator. Inside, one Bruuchian was doing an impatient little dance. Over the elevator, a sign in EnBruuchians had no written language, but this one must have known the rule; as soon as Crowell strapped himself in the native pushed a big red button and the elevator fell abruptly. Crowell hung on while Otto counted dispassionately. Twenty-two seconds passed before the repulsors cut on and the machine squeezed to a halt. Even allowing for air resistance, they must be over a kilometer deep. T he place was very dark. The Bruuchians did not need as much light as Terrans. He could hear activity all around, as the Bruuchian shouldered past him, but he couldn't see anything. "Well, well," said a human voice about three or four meters away. "Welcome to the mines." A flashlight flared on and the light bobbed up to Crowell. "Here, put these on." Crowell was handed a pair of goggles. The interior of the mine sprang into view, in a ghostly green and gray video image. "Nightglasses, light amplifiers," the voice said. "Waldo -- I didn't know you were down here." He chuckled. "You wouldn't have seen much if I weren't. I was about to call up -- didn't expect you this early." "It is rather early." Crowell looked around. The mine was somewhat larger than his preconception of it. It was a roughly square cavern the size of a large hall. Some twenty Bruuchians were working one corner with vibropicks and shovels. Next to the elevator was a rack of similar tools, probably fifty of each. "Are all of those workers up there coming down to this one mine?" "Oh, yes. We only work one level at a time. Strangely, they seem to work better in a mob -- wait'll you see it, it's quite a spectacle. About forty of them with picks and forty with shovels and twenty with barrows, working in a white frenzy from the time they get here until the time they leave, except for chow breaks. And we have to make them stop by turning off their picks." In about half an hour the cavern was full, with teams of twos evenly spaced around three walls. A barrow served each pair of teams. As soon as the barrow was full, the Bruuchian who had been fidgeting beside it would tear off to the fourth wall -- where Crowell and Struckheimer were standing -- and dump the ore into a conveyer that took it to the surface. Then he would return and pick up a shovel; the former shoveler would get the vibropick and the pickmeister would go fidget beside the barrow. In the midst of all this activity a small Bruuchian scurried back and forth, scattering what appeared to be a mixture of sand and sawdust on the damp cave floor, narrowly escaping collision every few seconds. There was a zany order to it, like a group of little children knocking themselves out in a complicated relay race. "You know," Crowell said, "Dr. Norman thinks the decline in life expectancy is due to simple overwork. Looking at this. I'm inclined to agree with him." "Well, they do work harder at this than anything else I've seen them do. I don't know whether it's the cool and darkness or what. Some wag said that the cavern is some kind of a womb-symbol to until some concrete evidence comes along. As you well know, we don't have anything approaching a systematic psychology for these people. "But overwork? I don't think so. We force them to rest three times a day. Their women bring meatfruit to the mines and we feed them at each break. Eating calms them down for about twenty minutes. And I won't let the Company work them more than eight hours a day. When I came here they were working twelve." "How much power do you have over the Company?" "In theory, they should jump when I say frog. Their contract here is at the sufferance of the Confederation Public Health Commission. But I don't overdo it. I have to depend on them for supplies, manpower and so forth. It's a pretty cordial relationship -- but they know there are five or six other concerns ready to snap up the contract if they make a mistake. So they're pretty good in their treatment of the natives." "Hmm -- you mean they're actually working less than they did when their life expectancy was higher?" Waldo laughed. "I know what you're thinking. No, it can't be a case of atrophic degeneration; that would show up in the lab tests -- besides, they work less in the mines now, but more in the village. You wouldn't recognize the place. Skyscrapers and -- " "Skyscrapers?" "Well, that's what we call them -- mud and straw buildings two, sometimes three stories high. It's another mystery. They have all the room in the world to expand their village radially. But somewhere they got the idea to go up instead of out. And it's quite a job; mud and straw just aren't made to take that kind of stress. Now when they build a house they have to reinforce the whole thing with ironwood -- it's almost a wooden building covered with a layer of mud. Say maybe you can find out why they're doing it. Nobody here's been able to get a straight answer out of them. But you can speak the dialect better than any of us. Besides, you're kind of a folk hero to them -- even though I don't think any of these were alive last time you were here. They know you were responsible for a lot of the changes in their lives and they're grateful." It was damp and cold and Crowell shivered. "For bringing them closer to stillness," he said. Waldo said nothing. There was a rumble and the elevator came to rest behind them. "Hi, boss. Hi, Dr. Crowell. Well, I brought the beastie's meat. Want I should turn 'em off?" Waldo looked at his watch. "Sure, go ahead." The assistant threw a switch mounted on the elevator housing and the vibropicks stopped singing. For a while there was a chorus of ragged chunk-sounds as the workers tried to keep going despite loss of power. Then by ones and twos, they formed up a line at the elevator. The assistant gave each one a large meatfruit which he would take back to his work area. The crews would each squat in a circle, munching and talking in low grunts. "Well, we're not needed around here," said Waldo. "How would you like to take a look at the village?" "Fine, fine. Just let me stop by my billet to pick up my notebook and camera." "We'll go by the lab and get a couple of beers, too. It's hot up stairs." T he sun was blistering hot when the cart skidded to a stop outside the village, ending the breeze that had made the trip livable. Crowell wiped the sweat and caked dust from his face and took a final swig of beer. "What'll we do with the empties?" "Oh, just leave them in the cart. This is the fellow who tends the heer for me; he'll drop them off at the lab." Crowell heaved his bulk to the ground. "God, it's hot." Waldo squinted at the sun. "It'll be better in a couple of hours. I suggest we find some shade." "Suits me." They went through the village gate and started walking down the path. They couldn't see anything but the grass, taller than a man, that surrounded the village in all directions for half a kilometer. Vehicles couldn't come in closer, in consideration for the skittish reptimammals that grazed here. The beasts didn't seem to mind people walking through, though; Crowell and Struckheimer saw several of them, placidly gnawing the grass, watching the humans from stalked eyes as they walked by. Most of them were over ten feet long, half of that length being unproductive tail and neck. But from their backs lolled strings of the meatfruit that formed the staple of the Bruuchian diet. Every female (the males were set loose soon after birth and only let inside the compound for stud) supplied about thirty kilograms of meatfruit per season; every family had at least three or four of the creatures. Tending and harvesting the beasts was the major responsibility of the females. The reptimammals were considered more than a source of meat, more than pets; they were actually low-status family members. They were "second-class citizens" because they couldn't speak and, more important, couldn't aspire to stillness -- they simply died. But the Bruuchians didn't eat the flesh of the dead reptimammals. They buried them with ceremony and mourning. A native came loping down the trail toward them, moving much more slowly than the ones in the Company city did. He stopped in front of them and said in the informal mode: "You are Crowell-who-jests and you are Struckheimer-who-slows I am young one called Baluurn Sent to guide you on this visit." His little speech over, the little Bruuchian fell in beside the two humans, trying to match steps with Crowell. "I know this one," Struckheimer said. "He's learned quite a bit of English. He's been my interpreter before." "That right," the creature belched in a strange burlesque of human speech. "All time in -- creche I hear tapes you-Crowell leave." This startled Crowell. He struggled with the informal mode: "The creche is for teachingthe rituals of life and stillness Did you forego the teaching of your ancestors in learning to speak with humans?" "The priest vouchsafed memy soul a special path to stillness and gave over my role as youngest to one of my brothersso that my time and mind couldbe used to plumbthe ways and tongue of humans." "What was that all about?" "Well, he evidently had to use most of his learning year studying Englishhe said the priest gave him some sort of dispensation from learning the social rites. That usually takes most of their year." "What word 'di-pensa-un' mean?" "It's like 'permission,' Baluurn, but from a priest," Struckheimer said. "That right. Priest give dipesa'un so I not-like brothers." "Your English is very good, Baluurn. I studied your tongue for ten years and can't speak it as well as you speak mine." Baluurn bounced his head in a nod. "Struckheimer who slows says human not-like Bruuchian. Learn more all long life but never so much one year. Must be for Bruuchian go into stillness much sooner than human." T he grass was thinning out and they could see the village ahead. Crowell immediately saw what Struckheimer meant -- only about half of the dwellings were the familiar asymmetric mud-andwattle construction. The newer ones were all almost rectangular and up to ten meters high. "Baluurn, why did your people stop building the old way?" The Bruuchian looked at the ground and seemed to be concentrating on not getting ahead of the humans. "It new-kind -- new part living ritual. Leave still ones near ground. Pass many time each day. Live above so pass still ones many time. Talk to still ones, still ones know more, still ones happier and more useful." "I guess it makes sense," Waldo said with a straight face. "You couldn't expect them to know what was going on, locked up in a back room." "Oh, never locked. Lock human word, no Bruuchian. But you right, still ones more useful." Crowell fingered the small camera clipped to his belt. This could get in the way of one of his ideas. "I thought it was forbidden to move a still one; a new family had to be started if you moved one." "That true, very true. New house built around old house. Take off old roof, leave hole in living house floor, buy rope Company store, pass by still ones climbing up and down many time every day." "Quite so." Crowell took the camera from his belt and took some picture of the buildings. Then he scribbled descriptions of each picture in his notebook. Protective coloration. "For some reason they must want to have larger famflies," Waldo said. "I know they used to split the still ones and the family when it got too crowded and start a new family on the outskirts of the village." A native woman walked by, leading two docile reptimammals. The fresh brown ooze on their backs showed they had just been pruned. Crowell snapped a picture. "Larger families, maybe. But this building up instead of out also preserves grassland; that might be important." Baluurn was silent through this exchange -- he was used to humarts going off in sudden non sequiturs . He knew why they were building up, just as he had told them. It was part of the living ritual, now. "Crowellwho-jests?" "Yes, Baluurn?" "One family asked you visit. Old, very old woman remembers you. Would speak you before stillness, very soon." "Say, that's odd. I asked them if anyone remembered you and they said all had passed into stillness." Crowell smiled. "You used the formal mode, right?" "Sure, you can handle the other?" "Well, they probably misunderstood you, then. It's hard to talk about females in the formal mode, requires a certain amount of circumlocution. They thought you were asking if any men who remembered me were still alive." "Crowell-who-jests is right. Struckheimer-who-slows should sent for me talk. All village know old Shuurna." "Well, let's go to see her. Should be interesting." The ground floor entrance was like a double door, the two men and the Bruuchian going first into the new building. They were standing in a big room filled from floor to ceiling with the old family hut. Baluurn stood at the doorway of the hut and called out the ritual of entrance. Someone upstairs responded and they went in the second door. "I go up first see Shuurna ready speak Crowell." Baluurn clambered up the rope. Crowell looked at it doubtfully; took another Gravitol and swallowed it. They were surrounded by a couple of dozen still ones, open eyes regarding them with unreadable expressions. When Baluurn disappeared into the upper floor, Crowell took something from his pocket and walked to one of the still ones resting against the wall. "What are you doing, Isaac?" "Just a second," Isaac whispered, reaching behind the still one. He returned and handed a small plastic envelope to Waldo. He put a small vibroknife back in his pocket. "A scraping from the shoulder," he whispered. Waldo's eyes grew round. "Do you know -- " Baluurn was sliding back down the rope. Two others followed him. "Shuurna wants speak Crowell-who-jests alone." "Well, I'm game," he said. "If I can make it up that rope." Crowell got a good grip and heaved himself up, catching the slack end between his feet. With an extra Gravitol in him, it wasn't really hard, but he huffed and muttered and went up very slowly. woven mat. She was the oldest Bruuchian Crowell had ever seen, hair yellowed and falling out in patches, eyes clouded with blindness, shrunken dugs loose gray flaps of flesh. She spoke the informal mode in a weak voice. "Crowell-who-jests  I knew you in my year of learning  so I remember you better than my own children  you walk differently now  your steps seem a young man's steps." "The years have been kinder to  me than to you  Shuurna who awaits stillness  this apparent youth though  is from an herb  the doctor gave me to  give me the strength of a younger man." This was something Crowell hadn't foreseen. "My large-eyes are darkened  but my many-eyes tell me  that you are taller by two kernels  Crowell-who-jests  than you were my lifetime ago." "This is so  it is something that may  happen to a human as he ages." You could add centimeters with plastiflesh, but you couldn't take them off. There was a long silence that would have been considered awkward in human society. "Shuurna  do you have something to  tell me or ask me?" Another long pause. "No  you who look like Crowell-who-jests  I waited to see you  but now you are not here  please summon the youngest and the new oldest." Crowell walked to the rope. "Baluur!" "Yes, Crowell-who-jests." "Shuurna is ready to -- pass into stillness. Can you find the oldest and the youngest?" The two who had come down with Baluur scampered back up the rope. They walked past Crowell and stood before Shuurna. Crowell started to leave. "Crowell-who-jests," the older one spoke, "  would you help us  with our joyful burden  I am too old and this one is too small  to carry Shuurna  to join the other still ones downstairs." Other still ones? Crowell went over to the three and stooped to take Shuurnas hand. It was solid, unyielding as wood. "Old man in the family of Shuurna  I do not understand  I thought no humans could be present during  the stillness ritual." The old man nodded in that disarmingly human way. "This was so  until not-long ago  when the priests told us of the change  to my poor knowledge  you are only the second human  to be so honored." Crowell took up Shuurna's body unceremoniously, a hand under stiff arm and thigh. "And who was the other fortunate human?" The old one had his back to Crowell, following the youngster who was scampering to the rope. "I was not there  but I was told  it was Malatesta-the-highest." Malatesta, the last supervisor of the mines -- and the first disappearance. The rope threaded through an iron ring (also purchased at the Company store), and normally hung as a single strand, a stick tied to one end preventing it from slipping through the ring. Crowder balanced Shuurna's corpse on its feet and the old one passed the rope under her arms, securing it with something that was almost a square knot. They passed the body down to Baluur, who untied it and, balancing it with one hand, pulled in slack until the rope was in its original position. Then the two Bruuchians clambered down, hand over hand. Crowell followed with a little less confidence. During the whole process, Waldo had stood to one side, looking rather lost. The old one addressed Crowell in the informal mode and Crowell replied with what Waldo recognized as a polite refusal. "Uh -- what was that all about?" "We were invited to the wake, you know, recite all the good deeds the old gal was responsible for and help decide where to lean the body. I told them no, thanks. These affairs last all day and I've got an appointment. Besides, I've always gotten the feeling that having humans present puts a damper on the festivities. They have to invite you, of course, if you're anywhere nearby when the thing starts." "And we're about as near as anybody's ever been. Glad you didn't accept for us -- this whole business has gotten me a little queasy." "Well, we can leave any time. Baluur's staying, naturally." "Let's go." T he sun was still blazing overhead when they stepped out of the hut. The whole experience couldn't have taken more than half an hour. They had walked down the dusty road a few meters before Waldo spoke in a hoarse whisper. "That sample you gave me -- what makes you think they won't find out you took it?" "Don't be so damned furtive! We're just tourists, right? You'd need a magnifying glass to find where I made the incision. Besides, I took it from one of the last accessible corpses, right up against a wall -- with their tabu against moving them, we're safe." "Well, I'll have to admit it is a windfall. Maybe we can finally figure out how -- say, you were there when the woman died! Did you see anything?" Crowell stared at the ground for a few steps before replying. "I was leaving, backing out; I was sure they didn't want me around. But they Just went up to her and looked at her and said it was done. Whatever kind of embalming they do, they must do it while the person's still alive." Crowell shuddered in the heat. "They didn't even touch her." IV nored Dr. Norman's advice and had made an appointment with the ambassador in the early evening. He expected the man would be pretty intoxicated by then. A strikingly handsome man, aristocratic features, gray hair flo ing onto broad shoulders, answered the door. "Ambassador Fitz-Jones?" "Yes -- oh, you must be Dr. Crowell. Come in, come in." He didn't seem too far gone. Crowell walked into an elegantly appointed room, which the Otto part of his mind identified as being furnished in American Provincial, late #th Century. Even if the furnishings were fakes the shipping costs were staggering to contemplate. Fitz-Jones indicated an amorphous leather-covered chair, and Crowell allowed it to swallow him. "Let me get you a drink. You may have brandy and water, brandy and soda, brandy and juice, brandy and ice, brandy and brandy, or -- " he gave a conspiratorial wink -- "a bit of Chateau Mouton Rothschild of 'sixty-one vintage." Even Crowell knew what that vintage represented. He murmured an appropriate comment. "Somehow a small cask of it was mistakenly delivered here, instead of a case of badly needed immigration forms." Fitz-Jones shook his head gravely. "These things are inevitable concarp -- ah -- concomitants of trying to operate within the framework of an interstellar bureaucracy. We learn to adjust." Crowell revised his earlier estimate. Fitz-Jones could well have been adjusting all day. "That sounds wonderful." He watched the man's careful steps and marveled at the human organism's ability to cope with proven toxins. The ambassador produced two highball glasses filled with the deep red wine. "No proper glassware, of course. Perhaps it's just as well. 'Sixty-one doesn't travel well, you know -- and it won't keep; have to drink it up quickly." It tasted quite good to Crowell, but Otto could tell that it was rather bruised. Barbarous treatment for the wine of the century. Fitz-Jones took a delicate sip that somehow managed to deprive the tumbler of two centimeters of wine. "Did you have anything specific to see me about -- not that I don't enjoy company whenever it comes my way." "Guess I just wanted to meet somebody else who wasn't working for the Company. I need an outsider's view of what's been happening the past ten years. Quite a bit has been, I understand." Fitz-Jones made an expansive gesture that came within a could appreciate the years of practice that had gone into the perfection of that ploy. "Not really, not really -- at least until a year ago, of course. Until then life here was just the workaday grind of running this, you'll excuse the expression, world. Absolutely nothing for me to do while everybody else kept the sweatshop working. Submit a blank report twice a year. Then we had the disappearances, of course. Superintendant Malatesta was the official head, titular ruler, of this planet, so you can imagine the paperwork I went through. I was on the subspace radio for hours every day, until thecan you keep a secret, Dr. Crowell?" "As well as the next man, I suppose." "Well, it's not really a secret any more, since the doctor -- Dr. Norman, that is -- figured it out. It's probably all around the Company by now. Anyhow, I talked to the Confederation officials on Terra and they agreed to send a couple of TBll men to investigate. Well, they came here -- gave a splendid imitation of two scientific chaps -- and while they were poking around, they disappeared, too." "The two geologists?" "Precisely. And you'd think that, with two of their men gone, here to see what's going on. But no. I finally talked to some undersecretary and he told me they simply couldn't afford any more men for our 'petty intrigues' on Bruuch." "That's odd." The first item in the one report the agents had filed had been a warning about the untrustworthiness of the ambassador. "Indeed. So I don't think the agents disappeared the way Malatesta did -- you know, died. They must have had a light cruiser hidden off somewhere and when they found what they were after -- they just left. Damned frustrating, you know; we still haven't the faintest idea of what happened to Malatesta. I'm certain that they found out." It's quite likely they did find out, have sent more agents without telling you?" "No, impossible; violation of Confederation law. I'm the sole federal official on this planet. I must be notified. And besides, only two people have come in since the agents disappeared. One was Dr. Struckheimer's new assistant; I've kept my eye on him. I think he must be just what he says he is, dull fellow, really. The other newcomer, of course, is you. rather fancy being a spy. Will you ply me with wine frequently, then?" Fitz-Jones smiled, but his eyes were cold. "Of course -- as I said, it won't keep. Confidentially, I am rather expecting another agent to show up, whether they tell me ically secretive and they don't really give a hang about interstellar law. I suspect they'll send somebody along and it could be anybody. You know that personality overlay technique -- " "The zombie business?" Crowell echoed Dr. Norman's words. "Exactly. They can make a xerocopy of anybody. Anybody they can kidnap and hold for a month, anyhow." He drained the last of his wine. "This puts a distinguished, shall we say 'well-exposed' person, such as yourself, above suspicion, of course. Too many people would notice your absence." His eyes told Otto again. He's lying, he suspects. The ambassador levered himself out of the oversized cushion. "Here, let me freshen your drink." He came back with two full glasses. "Thanks. Oops, time to take my Pandroxin." He took a pillbox from his pocket and washed down two pills, one Gravitol and one alcohol suppressant. "Ah, weak stuff, that. You must have a time here. Won't they let you take Gravitol?" "No -- I asked for it, naturally. But they say I'm too old and too fat." How dangerous is this subtle drunkard? "You have any theory about Malatesta?" Fitz-Jones shrugged and repeated the sloshing gesture. "I really don't know. I'm sure of one thing, though. This nonsense about the creatures being responsible is just that, a bunch of snuurgsh -- pardon -- hog wash." "I agree. They simply aren't capable of violence." "Not only that. Malatesta was a great favorite of theirs. He even learned quite a bit of the language. They adopted...him into one of the families, an honorary Bruuchian." "I didn't know that." "Oh, yes. He went to a lot of their gel-togethers. That priestly council made him an advisor of some sort." "Yes," Crowell mused. "I heard today that he had been present at one of their stillness rituals." "Where they embalm the poor creatures? Well,  didn't know that. Wonder why he didn't tell anybody about it. Struckheimer would've been his friend for life." "Well, as you say, the Bruuchians couldn't have done away with Malatesta; so it must have been either an accident or murder. I guess the agents investigated both possibilities." "Presumably. They seem to spend most of their time dredging dustpits. Supposedly taking samples, actually looking for a body, I guess. I suppose the prime murder suspect would be Kindle, the new supervisor. But he never wanted the job -- it's twice as much work for only a pittance more pay. Besides, he's worried that whatever happened to Malatesta could happen to him, too." "You know him well, then?" Watch it, don't get too inquisitive. "Oh, quite well. He was in the Civil Service when I was posted on Lamarr's World. He had a considerable block of stock in the Company and when the assistant supervisor's position became open he came out here and took the job. I was transferred here about a year later and we just picked up where we had left off." Time to change the subject. "Lamarr's World. I've heard of it, of course, but I've never been there." "It was a lovely world." FitzJones started the sloshing gesture but checked himself. "Especially compared to this desolation." They talked of this and other harmless topics for about an hour, Crowell stifled a yawn. "I really must be going. Excuse me for being a poor guest, but I tire so easily in this gravity." "Oh, excuse me for being an inconsiderate host. I can be quite a bore, I know." Fitz-Jones helped Crowell up. "I'm afraid you may have trouble getting a taxi -- " "No, no problem. I can walk the few blocks." They exchanged amenities and Crowell lurched away convincingly. H IS room had been searched by an amateur; Fitz-Jones' assistant, probably. He hadn't caught the hairs pasted over the closet door and suitcase lid -- or even the pencil propped against the front door. Crowell sighed. Otto was worthy of more. Anyhow, there was nothing incriminating in the billet itself. Crowell went into the outhouse and latched the door. He took out a penstick and removed the cap. Doing so caused the pen to emit an invisible beam of ultraviolet light. Crowell shook a contact lens out of the cap and placed it into his left eye. With it, he could see quite well, though the place would still be pitch-black to light amplifiers or infrared eye clusters. The hair across the loosened board was still in place. He lifted the board and removed the case that used to be his suitcase's false bottom. He took a few items from it, replaced it and smoothed the hair down in the position he had memorized. The street lights went off at midnight. Crowell donned the nightglasses he had bought at the Company store and walked the kilometer to the main warehouse without meeting anyone. Knowing that any guard would also be equipped with nightglasses, Crowell approached the building on a parallel street a block away and sat quietly behind the edge of a building for a half hour, watching the entrance. Satisfied that the warehouse was unguarded, Crowell crossed to the entrance and studied the lock. It was a simple magnetically coded padlock and he opened it in a couple of minutes with a desensitizer and a set of picks. His closing of the door behind him dropped the light level below the nightglasses' threshold and Crowell had to use his ultraviolet penstick to see. The tool was designed for close work, but he could get around with it. Directed at his feet it made a bright spot surrounded by a vague circle about a meter in diameter. He was unable to get an overall view of the warehouse, though -- merely a dim impression of crates stacked around. He wasn't looking for anything specific and really didn't have any great expectations. This was just another part of the routine, like going through the mines. He wished it had been possible to get around there without a guide, when the mines were empty. Crowell walked around for an hour or so, examining every useless detail. At the other end of the warehouse he came to an open door. He doubted he would find anything worth his effort, but he went in to check. A wide trough along one wall proved to be filled with a mixture of sand and sawdust, probably from the native ironwood. The opposite wall was stacked high with plastic bags filled with the same substance. At the end of the room stood a sink and a couple of large buckets. A shelf above the sink held several cans the size of half-liter paint cans. Evidently this was the place they prepared the substance that kept the nalives from slipping on the ivet mine floors. hfe inspected the sink and it was just a dirty sink. The cans above had been inexpertly lettered, "Antiseptic." He picked up one and shook it; it was about threequarters full of some powder. On the top he found a faint legend: Crowell almost dropped the can in surprise. Evidently the original label had been eradicated, but a trace of it remained visible in ultraviolet. He replaced the can and sat back against the sink. The crystals could account for the native's shortened life span and for the frantic activity in the mine; bismuth was a powerful stimulant and euphoric for them, as well as a cumulative poison. They must absorb it through their feet as they work... Now who would be responsible? Workers who mixed the bismuth nitrate into the sand-sawdust mixture probably didn't know what was going on -- or the cans might as well have been left unaltered. Had the labels been erased before the cans were shipped in? That would seem likely, since everybody seems to know about the bismuth theory. Better have a talk with Jonathan Lyndham, new Chief of Incoming (Supplies)... T he night outside was as dark as it had been when Crowell had first broken into the warehouse. He snapped the padlock and gratefully stripped the thin plastic gloves off his hands. An almost inaudible click came from behind him and to his left. The Crowell-mind reacted even before the Otto-mind could think "safety switch." Crowell dove for a ditch on the side of the road. He was blinded as his nightglasses fell off, but a bright red pencil of light fanning the road at waist level provided its own illumination before it flickered out. By then he had slid a miniature airpistol out of a pocket holster. He aimed at where the fading retinal afterimage showed the scarlet dot of a laser muzzle -- he squeezed off four silent shots in rapid succession. He heard at least three of them ricochet from the warehouse wall, then the shuffle of a man running away. He lost precious seconds finding the nightglasses, took another second to sort out the images and see the man running, nearly a block away. Extreme range for this little pop-gun -- Crowell aimed high, fired and missed, fired and missed. On his third try the man stumbled to the ground, staggered back to his feet and continued running, holding his arm. If he still had the laser pistol he didn't seem disposed to use it. Good thing, Otto thought. I f the man had been a professional he would have figured out how lightly armed Crowell was and would have flattened down at that extreme range to give Crowell a leisurely roasting. He studied the rapidly dwindling figure. Nobody he recognized. Not fat or thin or tall or short. Crowell had to admit that he probably wouldn't know the man the next time he saw him. Unless the assailant had that arm in a sling or cast -- which wasn't unlikely. T he radiophone started buzzing as soon as Crowell stepped into his billet. He picked up the handset. "Crowell speaking." "Issac? Where have you been at this hour? This is Waldo I've been trying to get you since three." "Oh, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep so I took a little walk to tire myself out." "Well, T look, pardon me for calling so late, but that sample you gave me -- some of the cells in it are still alive!" "Still alive? From a two-hundred-year-old mummy?" "And undergoing mitosis. You know what mitosis is?" "Cells dividing, yeah -- " "My finding out was just a coincidence -- I had the incubator stage on the microscope, that helped. I'd just put the sample in there rather than go through the rigamarole of changing to a regular stage. There was an interesting cell, a big nerve cell, that had evidently died in the middle of the anaphase -- of mitosis, that is. I looked at it for a minute and then went off to get a beer, got sidetracked by some maintenance I had to do on the spectrometer anyhow, I got back to the microscope a couple of hours later and that same nerve cell was in a different part of the anaphase! Those cells are growing and dividing, but at a rate that must be several hundred times slower than normal Bruuchian cells." "That's incredible!" "It's more than incredibleit's impossible. I don't know, Isaac. I'm a generalist, just an overeducated veterinarian. We need a couple of real biologists and we'll have them, too, dozens of them, as soon as the word gets out. Suspended animation, that's what it adds up to. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if those Bruuchians had a hundred people studying them a year from now." "You're probably right." For the first time, Crowell wondered whether somebody else might be listening in. Somebody was. V Isaac." Dr. Norman's handshake was unusually firm. "Couldn't pass up a chance to beat you again after all these years, Willy." "Ha -- believe I was four wins ahead when you left. Match you for white." "No, Willy, you go first. Out of consideration for your youth and inexperience." The doctor laughed. "Pawn to King-four and I'll fix you a drink." Crowell sat down at the chessboard and made Willy's first move for him. He looked at the pieces for a second and started his defense. "Talked to Waldo today?" "Oh, yesthe mummy thing. Quite fantastic. He was most secretive as to how he came upon a sample, though. I can just see Waldo skulking into one of those huts with his dissecting kit." Dr. Norman set a drink down beside Crowell and took the chair opposite him. "I don't suppose you had anything to do with it, Isaac?" "Well," Crowell said cautiously, "I'm pretty sure how he got the sample. But, as you say, it's a deep dark secret right now." "This world is full of secrets." The doctor made his second move. Crowell responded promptly. "A Philidor defense, Isaac? You're getting conservative in your old age. You used to be quite unpredictable." "And you used to be four wins ahead." The game went on for about an hour, with neither man saying much. Isaac was ahead in both position and strength when Dr. Norman looked up and asked, "Who are you?" "What did you say, Willy?" The doctor took a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it and tossed it in the middle of the board. "If you were Isaac Crowell, you'd be dying or dead, on Gravitol. And don't tell me you aren't on it -- Pandroxin gives a yellowish cast to the skin. You don't have it. Besides, your chess style is wrong; good, but all wrong. Isaac never knew how to play position." Crowell finished off his drink, mostly melted ice, and leaned back in the chair. He stuck his right hand in his pocket and aimed the pistol under the table at the doctor's abdomen. "My name is Otto McGavin. please continue to call me Isaac I'm more Crowell than McGavin in this persona." The doctor nodded. "And you've done a very good job. Much more convincing than those other two -- that is why you came here, isn't it, to investigate their disappearance?" "Investigate their deaths. Every agent has a monitor implanted in his heart -- they stopped broadcasting." "Well, needless to say, your secret's safe with me." "You shouldn't be burdened with it too much longer. I expect to have things out in the open within a day or two. Down to business now -- " Crowell moved a knight and said, "Mate in three." "Yes, I saw that coming." Willy smiled. "I was hoping to distract you." "Doctor, I think you missed your calling." Otto relaxed a little. "By the way, have you treated any gunshot wounds lately?" "What -- why?" "Somebody tried to ambush me last night. I shot him." "Well, I did treat a gunshot wound this morning -- but it couldn't have been your fellow." opened the magazine and let one of the small pellets roll onto the chessboard. "A wound in the right arm, this size projectile." Dr. Norman rolled the pellet between his thumb and forefinger. "Yes, it was this small. The very devil to get out, too. And the wound was in the right arm." He took a deep breath. "Early this morning Ambassador Fitz-Jones and Superintendant Kindle woke me up to take a pellet out of Kindle's arm. They said they had been up drinking and decided to try some target practice in the ambassador's back yard. FitzJones had accidentally shot Kindle; he was most apologetic. They both reeked of wine, but acted quite sober. Kindle was in some pain; it looked as if they had tried to get the pellet out themselves. But it was too deep." "Kindle -- I've never met him." "It seems you did meet him, last night. It's hard to believe. He seems such a meek fellow." "You might as well know the whole story. If anything happens to me, try to get word to Confederation authorities. Some group of persons, including but not necessarily limited to the ambassador and the superintendant, is systematically poisoning the Bruuchians who work in the mines. The only motivation I can see is that it makes them work harder -- increases profits. Say, Kindle owns a large part of the Company, doesn't he? I wonder whether Fitz-Jones also has an interest." "I don't know," Dr. Norman said. "He claims to be independently wealthly. I can see that he might well be investing in the company, though. Profits have quadrupled in the past few years. Why, I've been thinking of investing, myself." "Maybe you better not. Profits will be going down pretty soon." "I suppose. Well, it is a horrible thing, even though I don't much care for the little boogers myself. What can I do to help?" "Well, I've got to get to a subspace radio. The only two on the planet are the superintendant's and the ambassador's. If you can get one of them here for an hour or so. I'll be able to call in the arrest and get authority to confine them." 'That'll be easy enough. FitzJones and I have to fill out an accident report and take it to the Company clerk for witnessing. I told him to come by around three this afternoon; it'll take more than an hour." "You couldn't get Kindle to come up, too, could you?" "Afraid not. I've already confined him to quarters -- wouldn't do to erode my authority in these matters by telling him to come over for a chat. But you're in no danger from him. I had to make a deep incision in his right triceps. He's going to be either doped up or in considerable pain for at least a week." "Can't say that I have too much sympathy for him. Well, then. I'll pay a visit to the ambassadorial residence about three o'clock. Here, take this." Crowell handed the pistol to Dr. Norman. "I'm afraid I've set you up as a secondary target." Dr. Norman turned the little weapon over on his palm. "Won't you be needing this thing more than #?" "No, I'm going to pick up some heavier artillery. Kindle had a laser pistol last night -- if he'd known what he was doing, he could have fried me with no trouble." "Well, I'll certainly keep it. But I've never fired a gun in my life." "Well, be careful -- that pistol doesn't have a safety. Just aim it in the right general direction and start pulling the trigger -- it has over a hundred shots left in the magazine." Dr. Norman dropped the weapon into the capacious front pocket of his lab coat. "I hope you get them safely incarcerated before I have to use it." "They should be in the Company jail before dark tonight." F rom his billet window Crowell could see the ambassador roll away toward the dispensary. He unplugged the laser pistol and checked the charge on it -- it was more than half-full, two minutes of continuous operation, which would be about enough to take on a platoon of infantrymen. He held both the pistol and his burglar's kit in his right hand and draped a light jacket over them. He set out on foot down the street away from the ambassador's house, then circled around and came up behind the place. There were no buildings to obscure FitzJones' view of the desert, which rolled in from the horizon to within a few meters of a large picture window. Crowell took a crayon from his kit and inscribed a large black circle on the window. The black turned to chalky white and the circle of plastic fell out. With considerable effort he pulled himself up to the hole and through. He swallowed a Gravitol only one more was left in his pillbox -- and reflected on how good it was going to be to get his real body back again. He checked three rooms before he found the radio in the study. There was a cover over the sending plate and he cursed aloud when he saw that it had a thumbprint lock. He would need hours to open it. Nothing for it but to wait until Fitz-Jones returned and force him to open it. Crowell had an uncharacteristically macabre thought as he felt the weight of the vibroknife in his pocket. He only needed the man's thumb. Might as well enjoy the wait. Crowell walked over the thick carpet to the kitchen. He found a glass, stuck the laser into his belt and tapped the cask of wine. "Don't do anything foolish, Isaac." Crowell turned slowly. His perceptions registered rapidly, without punctuation: Mark II Westinghouse antique laser safety off righthand range three meters set on full dispersion no chance... "Why Jonathan. Fancy meeting you here." Hand shaking but full dispersion can't miss hasn't fired yet probably won't thinkthinkthink... "I'm surprised at you, Isaac. Such language you used a minute ago. But you aren't really Isaac, are you? Any more than those other two were geologists. You'll be joining your friends tonight, Isaac. You can talk over old times, out in the dustpit." "Shut up." Another man came into view, his right arm stiff in a tractor cast. Kindle. "Give me that gun." Kindle took it into his left hand. Crowell noted that he was trembling even more than Jonathan, but from pain and probably anger, rather than nervousness. "Now go disarm him." Kill him use body as shield would work one gee Otto-body but Crowell-body too slow too big... Jonathan plucked the gun from Crowell's belt and hopped back. "You aren't as dangerous as Stuart said you would be." "He's dangerous, all right. But we've pulled his fangs. Go on back to your office, Lyndham. Fitz and I'll finish this job; you're the only one without any good reason for being here." Jonathan left by the front door. "Well, Mr. McGavin -- I suppose you find this rather embarassing, to be held at bay by a meek fellow like me. "Yes, we heard your whole conversation this morning -- Dr. Norman's radiophone really doesn't work too well, neither does Dr. Struckheimer's; they broadcast all the time, straight into a recorder in my office." He motioned with the gun. "Come sit in the living room, Mr. McGavin. By all means bring your wine. I'd love to join you, but my good hand is full -- disappointment should make it even easier to kill you when the time comes." ioned chair and wondered when the time would come. "You can't actually think you can keep getting away with this." "It's a big dustpit, the biggest. I'm afraid Drs. Norman and Struckheimer will be following you into it, too. We can't afford to have dozens of specialists prying around." Crowell shook his head. "If I don't report, you're going to have to contend with more than a handful of scientists. A battle cruiser will land in your port and put the whole damn planet under arrest." "Strange they didn't do it when the first two agents disappeared. That's a pretty clumsy bluff, McGavin." "Those two good men were agents, Mr. Kindle, but just agents. I'm a prime operator, one of twelve such. You can ask Fitz-Jones what that means when he gets back." "You may not be alive when he gets back. He didn't want to kill you here, because to do so would entail dragging your body over nearly a kilometer of desert. But it occurs to me that we could make more than one trip." "A grisly alternative. Do you actually think you could cut up a man as if he were a side of beef? Very messy." "I'm a desperate -- " "Whatever are you two talking about?" Fitz-Jones came in through the hall entrance. "I saw Jonathan on the way here. I thought he was supposed to wait with you until I got back." "I was afraid he'd do something stupid, so I told him to go. Never did feel I could trust the man very much." "You may be right. But I didn't want to leave you alone with this expert murderer." "Hasn't murdered me yet. Fitz, he says he's a prime operator -- does that mean anything to you?" Fitz-Jones' eyebrows went up a fraction and he looked at Crowell. "That can't possibly be true. This planet's too small to rate a prime operator." "We always send a prime when an agent gets killed," Crowell said. "No matter how unimportant the case is otherwise." "Possibly," Fitz-Jones mused, "and if so, I am indeed honored." He gave a mocking little bow. "But the most expert bridge player would lose if he couldn't pick up his cards. That's the position you're in, sir." "Do you know what will happen if you murder me. Ambassador?" "No 'if.' After we murder you. Will they send another prime operator? They'll soon run out." "They'll quarantine this whole planet and ferret you out. You haven't got a chance." "On the contrary, we have a very good chance -- the chance that you're lying. Which is rather large odds, considering your circumstances. I don't think ill of you for it, Mr. McGavin. I would do the same in your position." "Why don't you stop gloating at him and get some rope. My arm's tired." "Excellent idea." Fitz-Jones went outside and returned with a long coil. "Finish your wine, Isaac. Come over here beside him. Kindle. If he tries anything I don't want you to roast me along with him." Crowell expanded his chest and his biceps as Fitz-Jones wound the rope around him. An old trick and not very subtle, but Fitz-Jones didn't notice. The way he tied him up, just winding the rope around and around his body, reminded Otto that he was dealing with inexperienced amateurs and he chastised himself again for being so careless. Why, they hadn't even searched him; though he had to admit that he had nothing more lethal than a penknife stashed away. And his limbs were free. "We have several hours' wait, Mr. McGavin. I suggest you try to sleep." Fitz-Jones went into the kitchen and came out with Crowell's laser and a soda bottle. He walked over to Crowell and chopped down with the hard plastic bottle. Crowell tried to dodge but it hit the side of his head and the room went all blue sparks and gelatin and faded away. VI H e had been awake, listening, for at least an hour when FitzJones came over with a glass of water and poured it on his head. "Wake up, Mr. McGavin. It's midnight. The lights are out and we're going for a little stroll." Crowell staggered to his feet, careful to puff out his chest and flex his muscles so the bonds appeared taut. Kindle said, "I just thought of something, Fitz. Do you have an extra pair of nightglasses?" "What? You didn't bring yours?" "I'm not in the habit of carrying them around in broad daylight." "Well, then. I'll just take care of him alone. We aren't going to take a light." "Oh, no. After what he did to me  want the pleasure of roasting him -- slowly." "Sure, and stumble into a dustpit along the way. I'm not letting you use the glasses and go out with him alone. You couldn't hit the ground with a rock, not even righthanded." "Fitz, he's unarmed and tied up. And he can't see in the dark." "Unarmed and tied up and blind, he's more dangerous than you would be in command of a battle cruiser. That's the end of the discussion." "All right, all right. Just let me come along to finish him off. I can hang onto your belt." Fitz-Jones glanced at Crowell, who was smiling in spite of his predicament. "The arrangement had a certain lack of dignity. I can see it amuses our friend. But all right. You can walk along behind mebut if he tries anything let me handle it." "Sure, Fitz." Kindle ostentatiously switched the laser to safety. "Even if he starts throwing fission bombs, I won't fire until we get there. Then let me get in front of you and find him by laserlight." "Let's get on with it, then. Mr. McGavin, it will be your honor to lead us. I'll direct you." They went out by the kitchen door into the absolute blackness of the night. Otto knew he had half a kilometer in which to make his move. He figured that his captors would be least alert about halfway there. He counted carefully measured steps, twelve hundred to a kilometer. The men were silent except for occasional terse directions from Fitz-Jones. Otto counted three hundred steps, then moved slightly to his left. Under the rope, he raised his left hand to his right shoulder and his left arm popped out of the coil. His body shielded the action from Fitz-Jones. He had a Firm mental picture of the man behind him and could now strike at any vital spot once he knew where any part of his body was. He stopped and Fitz-Jones prodded him with the laser, giving him a reference point. He brought his left hand around in a shallow chop that sent the laser .spinning. Before it hit the ground he delivered a savenough force to knock both men down. He heard the laser skitter away and ran after it as the two men fell. But on the third step he skidded on loose gravel, lost his balance and, falling, went into a shoulder roll. But his shoulder never hit the ground. He hit the dustpil with a faint pop and was floating through a nightmare of viscous powder. He fought to hold his breath as the dust crawled into his nostrils. Then his knees bumped against the rock floor of the pit. Fighting panic, he stood and pushed his free arm straight up. He couldn't tell whether his hand cleared the surface of the pit. Lungs burning, he tried to walk back the way he had fallen, then realized that his sense of direction had vanished. He tried to walk in a straight line, any direction was all right, the pit couldn't be more than a few meters in diameter, if it were bigger they would use it for their dumping place but it was impossible to walk and he drifted to his knees and crawled slowly until his head pressed against the stony wall of the pit and he dragged himself upright and painfully started to pull the heavy Crowell-body up... handhold foothold right arm free biceps bruising against plastiflesh eyes on fire itching have to sneeze cool breeze on hand find edge pull up freedom... Crowell put his chin on the edge of the pit, exhaled in a quick hiss and sucked in air, started to sneeze and bit his tongue hard. Kindle was screaming. "I can't see You broke them, dammit!" Fitz-Jones was moaning, making little-animal whimpering sounds. Suddenly the red glare of a laser flooded the scene. Kindle was fanning it around, using it as a searchlight. That was stupid; if anyone was awake back at the Company, they'd see it. Not likely they would come out and investigate, though. Fitz-Jones, who shouldn't even have been alive, was actually standing, staggering, doubled over with pain. The edge of the beam caressed him and one leg burst into flame. He whirled around twice and disappeared. Another dustpit. The light flickered off. "McGavin? I hope you saw that. You're hiding out there somewhere, I know it. But I can wait, I can wait -- when it gets light, you're a dead man!" himself out of the dustpit. He unwound the rope that was still wrapped loosely around his body. After investigating the ground around the pit by touch, he had to admit that the laser must have fallen in. He wasn't going after it. There was a large outcropping of rock about thirty meters away; he had seen it by laser-light. Slowly, silently he crawled in that direction, groping in front of him, patting the ground with his palm. Several times his hand found the warm talcum-powder softness of a dustpit he detoured around it. Finally he got to the outcropping and sat behind a large boulder. He took stock. One vibroknife, two hands, two feet and lots of rocks. One coil of rope. He had the alternatives of garroting Kindle, cutting him to pieces, or simply breaking every bone in his body. All methods effective against an unarmed man. But suicide against a laser. He was tired, more tired than he could remember having been in all of his strenuous life. He rattled the pillbox softly. One Gravitol left. Have to save it, take it just before dawn... He formulated and discarded half a dozen plans. Might as well have just taken a deep breath in the dustpit. So tired. Footsteps -- Kindle wouldn't be insane enough to walk up in the dark. No, the steps were confident; it was a Bruuchian. He walked right up to Crowell and sat down, not a meter away. Crowell could hear his breathing. Crowell whispered in the informal mode. "Do I know you  friend who comes in the night?" The Bruuchian also whispered. "Crowell-who-jests  I am Pornuuran  of the family Tuurlg  you do not kno'A' me  though I know you  you are a friend of my brother  Kindle-who-leads." "Kindle-who-leads  is in your family?" "Yes  the priests gave the family Tuurlg  the honor-tradition of adopting  the highest humans  Kindle-who leads and  before him  Malatesta-the-highest." "Brother-of-my-friend Pornuuran  could you lead me  from this place  before the desert is light?" The Bruuchian laughed, an almost silent belch. "Crowell-whojests  you are indeed the merriest human  my brothers and I  came to observe  the human stillness ritual  of course we cannot interfere. The priests  saw the red light in the desert  and sent us here for instruction  perhaps to help  carry the still one." "Where are your other brothers?" "Crowell-who-jests  my oldest and youngest brothers  stand near their brother  Kindle-who-leads  he also asked us to  lead him in darkness  to lead him to you  but we would not disobey  the priests' order." Thank God for that, Crowell thought. He briefly considered using the native as a shield, but that would be pretty low. And ineffective; the native was too small. With a start Crowell realized that he could see a vague outline of the native silhouetted against the lighter rock. He took out the pillbox and swallowed his last Gravitol. Instantly the tiredness washed away. He peered over the side of the boulder. He couldn't yet see Kindle, but it would only be a matter of minutes; dawn came swiftly here. Then Kindle could walk up at his leisure. Suddenly Crowell had a plan. It was outrageously simple, and rather risky. But it might work -- and he had little choice. H e gathered an armload of rocks and set out across the plain, moving as quickly as he could with safety. By the time his hand found a dustpit there was enough light for him to see it disappear into the powder. He felt around and determined where the edge of the pit was, then set down the rocks and vibroknife and lowered himself into the warm pool, fighting the urge to scramble out immediately. He arranged the rocks around the flat edge in such a way that his head would be hidden from view when he was immersed up to his chin. The blade of the knife only slid out halfway when he touched the button on the side. He checked with his fingernail and it wasn't vibrating. The dust must have fouled the mechanism. Well, it still had a point and an edge. He could hear Kindle moving, about twenty meters away, he estimated. Still couldn't see the man, but he chucked a rock in his direction. The laser glared in answer. It washed the boulder he had been using as a shield; he could hear the rock crackle and smelled a sharp tang of ozone and nitrogen dioxide. "Getting warm back there, McGavin? I know where you are -- I heard my little friend go up there. Might as well just step out and save yourself the wait." He gave the rock another short turn. Now Crowell could just make out Kindle. Three Bruuchians were walking with him. He was stepping very cautiously, watching the ground. Crowell immersed himself up to his nose. "This is it, McGavin. Now you're a dead man." Crowell looked over the edge, and saw Kindle's back, some five meters away. If the knife were working, he could throw it for an easy kill. But two inches of' plain steel required closer action. He picked up the knife and quietly pulled himself out of the pit. He ran softly toward Kindle, who was shouting at the rock, laser at eye level. Almost too easy. Then one of the Bruuchians jerked his head around, seeing Crowell. Kindle caught the movement and turned. Otto dove for a knee-high tackle. The beam brushed Crowell and his shoulder and half his face burst into flame, snuffed out immediately as be piled into Kindle and both men went down heavily. Crowell pinned Kindle's gun arm to the ground and the ravening beam spent itself uselessly on the big rock, while Crowell plunged the knife again and again into Kindle's back; even in a white fury of pain and hate he was instinctively going for the vulnerable kidneys. The shock reactivated the knife; the rest of the blade hummed out and then it slipped with equal fluidity through flesh and bone and organs. Kindle arched his back and was still. Crowell rose to his knees and saw that Kindle still held the laser in a spastic grip, doing a fair job of melting the rock. He couldn't pry the pistol from Kindle's first and he stopped trying as wave after wave of intense pain throbbed through his body. He remembered his training. Still crouched over Kindle's body, he closed his eyes and repeated over and over the mnemonic that, from his hypnotraining, isolated the pain and squeezed it into a smaller and smaller space. When it was a tiny pinprick as hot as the interior of a star, he pushed it just a held it there. Very carefully he sat down and slowly released for use those parts of his mind that weren't occupied with keeping the pain outside. He touched his face with the back of his hand and when he withdrew it, long filaments of melted plastiflesK still clung to it. He noted that his other hand was still dripping with gore, with Kindle's life, and he felt absolutely nothing, neither triumph nor remorse. The material of his shirt had vaporized and the plastiflesh over his shoulder had melted completely away. The real flesh ran from angry pink to deep blistered red to a black charred mass the size of his hand. A trickle of blood oozed from the well-done area and Crowell dispassionately decided the flow was not enough to justify bandaging the wound. The two younger Bruuchians came out from behind the rock and stood over Kindle. The older one limped out and rattled off something in the informal mode, too fast for Crowell to translate. They picked up Kindle's stiff body and balanced it on their shoulders, to carry it away like a log. Suddenly it dawned on Crowell that Kindle wasn't really dead; the oldest and youngest had passed him into stillness while his knife was doing its work. He looked at the rictus of pain on the man's face and remembered Waldo's evidence. The man was not dead, but he was dying. And he would die slowly for hundreds of years. Otto smiled. er-bearers picked their way across the desert and reached Crowell just before noon. Thirty years of medical practice had not prepared the doctor for the sight of a critically injured man sitting in front of a pool of dried and putrefying blood and gore, half his face a burned and running ruin and the other half smiling beautifically. Dear Dr. Crowell: Well, I finally got out of the hospital today -- that plasti-flesh takes weeks to removeand I have to admit I much prefer being myself again, to being you. Willy Norman sends his regards. Everybody I talked to, once they knew I wasn't you, hoped that you might find the opportunity to visit there again soon. With this newjight on the stillness phenomenon, a thousandfold slowdown of biological processes, you can probably get somebody to put up the money for passage -- maybe you can actually talk your publisher into putting out a revised Anomaly. Jonathan Lyndham, the only survivor of the "bismuth conspiracy," was convicted last week of genasihenia (systematic weakening of a race) and of being an accomplice to murder. He was sentenced to a complete personality wipe. Some of my colleagues think I'm an unregenerate barbarian, but I prefer the old-fashioned personality wipe -- extinction -- in cases like this. At least it has the virtue of being irreversible. As for the other members of the conspiracy, it was never really clear whether they were being tried posthumously or just in absentia (except for the Ambassador Stuart Fitz-Jones, whose body hasn't yet been found, but who definitely expired in a dustpit). Both Kindle and Malatesta were found in the Tuurlg "family room," having been passed into stillness some time before clinical death. As nearly as can be reconstructed from interviewing the natives, Malatesta was consulting with a group of priests -- they were paying him to keep salting the mines with bismuth -- and suffered some sort of a seizure, perhaps a heart attack. The Tuurlg family's oldest and youngest were, present and they did him the same service they would do for any other family member. I'm happy to report that Kindle was in the process of expiring even less pleasantly when the same thing happened to him. It's not yet clear, of course, what these two can perceive in their present state. I favor the theory that, since electrical impulses can't be slowed, general relativity and all that, they must still be feeling the same malaise they felt while expiring. Again, a barbaric sentiment, but I can't say I feel any pity for them. Whenever I get out of the persona of a talented andor educated person such as yourself, I feel an indefinable loss, as if parts of my mind (which was actually your mind) have been misplaced. I still retain a little Bruuchian, formal mode anyhow, and a vague outline of comparative anthropology; when I leaf through your book I often know what will be on the next page before I see it. It was a pleasure, as such things go. I look forward to meeting you again, the next time I get to Macrobastia. Maybe I can teach you how to play position in chess. Regards, Otto McGavin  and sufficient It was most effective birth control... but could anyone born survive it? t if shooter. There had never been one like him, so there was no name for what he did. Dr. Poole was head of the Institute, mostly because he could sense trouble before it happened. Sensing it and doing something about it were two different things. Merrihew could do something about it. His record was most confidential but his batting average was high. Incredibly high. And you wouldn't have thought so to look at him. Dr. Poole had called Merrihew and they had met for lunch. When the waiter went away with his order Merrihew wanted to know the name of the trouble. "Lasvogel," said Dr. Poole. "Look Merrihew, we have a chemistry section here -- three, really, if you figure inorganic and bio and organic as separate, which they practically are. Then there's electron physics and computer design and the mechanical section and the socio think-tank and some other stuff. And if Lasvogel wanted to call himself section head of every one of them he'd have the right. Only it would look funny on the organization chart -- and anyway he wouldn't want it." Merrihew said, "That's who he is, not your trouble." Dr. Poole wagged his big white head. "Oh, Lasvogel's the trouble all right. He's coming apart." "Eggs in one basket," Merrihew said. "All those departments with the head lopped off?" "All those departments could struggle along Just fine without him. Emphasis on struggle, maybe, but they'd make it. It's the West Ecuador thing. Actually I don't mind if he cracks up after he's solved that one -- he's earned a good breakdown. I Just want him to hang together until then." "What's the West -- " "Quiet." The waiter came, put down drinks, went away. Dr. Poole was studious with ice cubes for a moment. He made a motion with his head that brought Merrihew leaning closer. "Code name. It isn't Ecuador and it isn't West -- and if you can do your work without knowing where it is, all the better. If Lasvogel can stay with it until he finds an answer you may never find out -- and that's all right." "How much longer does he need?" "I wish I knew. Oh, I wish I knew. It could be tonight, tomorrow. It could be weeks." "Or never?" "Don't say that." Dr. Poole made a terribly controlled warding-off gesture. "Don't even think it." "And there isn't anyone else who might -- " "No there isn't. Or maybe there is, but the only way to find him would be to describe the problem -- and I can't do that." "Better do it now, though." Dr. Poole gave him a long, sharp look. The waiter came with the salads., fussed about, went away again. "All right then," said the director of the world's quietest and most extraordinary consulting company. "Overpopulation. Everything comes down to that. Too many people. Not just pollution but geopolitics -- nations looking for room to expand. Businesses they overbreed toolooking for markets. But the trouble is also too many kids in the classroom a solitary man looking for some place to walk where it's wild and quiet. There are other problems besides overpopulation, but if we can whip that one we can whip them all." "Better hurry," said Merrihew. "Yes, of course. Of course; I know what you mean. It's already too late for some things. A whole ocean could die if we controlled population by tomorrow night. But you see, that's what we've done. What Lasvogel's done." "You lost me." left and leaned close again. "The place we call West Ecuador has the highest birth rate in the hemisphere. Or almost," he added. Maybe the hedging words were a scientist's exactitude and maybe they were a little something to keep curiosity at bay. "We have ways of keeping day-to-day tabs on it, primitive as it is. Every doctor, every clinic in West Ecuador is feeding our computers, whether any one of them knows it or not. We can even get the midwives, about five-eighths of them -- much more than half anyway. We've been setting the place up for an experiment for a long time. You don't much approve of a tactic like that." "I didn't say anything." "Most people wouldn't approve. High-handed, undignified I've heard all the names for it. I also know all the preachments about means and ends. We're doing what we're doing because we haven't been able to find another way -- and because something has to be done now and not when we can do a public-relations job and then put it through the courts. Little kids with blown-up bellies, toothpicks for arms and legs and sores all over -- yes, we're doing it for them. But also because West Ecuador is a preview. The whole world is going to be like that -- not might be, is going to be -- if something isn't done now." Merrihew put up both hands in a way that said. Well, all right, dammil. "We threw it to Lasvogel," Dr. Poole said, "and he came through." He added a little anxiously: "Lasvogel always comes through. Anyway, his treatment batted a thousand on a hundred and twenty-three cases. Injections. Not one of the recipients got pregnant. No side effects. I know what you're going to say." Dr. I'oole added quickly, "Nothing new, eh? That Swedish pill, take it tonight, get your period tomorrow whether you've conceived or not? Wait there's more." Merrihew sat silent. "Lasvogel's whole approach was different," Dr. Poole continued, "and that's all I'll say about it except his preparation is more potent than you'd believe. More even than Lasvogel believed. We did a mass treatment. Well, I'll tell you: we had a prevailing wind situation and we did it with a chemical fog. Lasvogel we we figured it might affect some women in a nearby city to some measurable extent. As I said, we've spent a lot of time and a lot of money setting up observation posts. We were looking for a decimal point and maybe three zeros before we came to a number -- no more than that." Dr. Poole sat and wagged his head. It looked for a while as if he had forgotten what he was saying, forgotten his lunch and his guest, forgotten even this tumbling urgency. Then he asked, "In five weeks, in a population pushing pregnancies we recorded in West Ixuador?" It was not Merrihew's style to respond to rhetorical questions. He simply waited. "Seventeen. Seventeen, in five weeks." "Wow." Merrihew cut steak, forked it up, lifted it, looked at it, put it down. "Wow." Pollution, belly bloat and toothpick legs, war and pestilence and cold greed is emperor; survival is greed. And then -- how had Dr. Poole put it? a solitary man walking some place where it's wild and quiet. Merrihew had time to get a glimpse of a man like that in a place like that and think that it might after all be that way when Dr. Poole had to go and say, "They were all white." M errihew hadn't gotten to be what he was by being uncool and it could be that he looked the part. But once in his life a flashbulb had gone off in his face in a dark room and once someone he had loved had died in his arms and once he had had to blow the whistle on the best friend he ever had, who died of it. This thing he had just heard was like all those at once; it made him bite his tongue the same way. It could be that he heard nothing at all for a long moment because he didn't want to hear anything else; he wanted to tip time backward and not know what he had just been told. He came back slowly -- as if someone had a volume control to bring up sound gradually from silence -- and heard Dr. Poole say something about cloud formation. "There's a central mountain range and, like all such, it has cloud cover most of the day. Lasvogel thinks the chemical fog went in over the city and upslope on a thermal current. He really had no idea the stuff would work in dilutions like that, but it did. When it got to the cloud it dispersed right through it in a few hours -- well, he had anticipated that part. Then, of course, it rained. It rains every day in that place for a little while. It was the rain that brought it down on the lee side -- so, you see, the whole place was covered. Merrihew recognized a flicker of surprise in himself when he tried his voice and it worked. "Anybody live in those mountains -- or are they all in the city?" "I see what you're thinking," Dr. Poole said. "Maybe we missed someone. Well, forget it. Yes, there are villages and small holdings all through the area. But you've got to accept what I said: we've had the whole place bugged for years now -- crossroads clinics, private doctors, the pathological labs and the mid wives. Trust the figures." "How big is the white population?" "Less than five percent. Two couples from the Peace Corps who settled there, some teachers and doctors, business people. Also some East Indian settlements and orientals. No pregnancies there either. Just Caucasians." Merrihew's steak was cold. He put his fork down. "Too big to get hold of all at once. You're taking a hell of a chance telling anyone about this. Even me." "Stick that in your cap for a feather. The record says you can be trusted." Merrihew looked him in the eye. "Nobody can be trusted with this one. All I can do is the best I can. Let's get back to work." "Work? Ah. Your part in this, you mean. All I can tell you is what needs to be done and let you take it from there. I can't tell you what to do." He smiled briefly. "From what I hear, nobody can. That's how you work." "Lasvogel," Merrihew said tersely. He meant. Get to the point. "Very well. Lasvogel is the key to everything. He's on the track of an answer and he will come through -- although maybe I say that because I have no alternative. But I'm afraid he won't last the stretch. He's under some kind of pressure that's brought him to the breaking point and I'm scared." "I'm scared just hearing about it." "Oh, you don't understand. It isn't West Ecuador. I know the man. I've seen him under stress -- work stress -- before. This is something different. Something outside. It isn't physical -- I have the right to order an examination and I did that, though I thought he was going to spit in my eye. All I got out of that is what I already knew -- he's under stress. Dr. Genovese -- the Institute head medic -- laid it to work pressure and told him to ease up, told me to ease up, too. But I know better." "How?" Dr. Poole almost shrugged, almost gestured, barely shook his head. "Call it intuition. Call it my special talent the way you'd call Lasvogel's problem-solving a special talent. We give things names and think we have answers. They aren't answers but sometimes they make us feel better." He drew a deep breath. "Anyway, your problem is Lasvogel. Find out what's cutting him up and give me an idea of what can be done about it. Your problem is not West Ecuador. He'll handle that. Here." He removed an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Merrihew. "Here's a personnel profile plus all the addresses, telephone numbers and peripheral information you can possibly need. Numbers you can reach me twenty-four hours a day -- and don't hesitate on that one. A drawing account. It doesn't say so on the paper, but believe me, it's open-ended. And I've bothered to write one thing down in red; Respect Lasvogel's privacy. He's obsessive about that. He must never have the slightest suspicion that you're on the job or what the job is. I can put it to you this way: he's the most totally devoted and conscientious man I have ever met, but if he thought he was being spied on, he'd quit the Institute -- West Ecuador and all. The only other thing I have to say to you is something that doesn't need saying: God help us if West Ecuador goes on much longer the way it is. Already there will have to be a wrinkle in the birth statistics that some sharp eyes will pick up. Imagine nine months from now when the news gets out that there's a place where there have been no non-white births in a popall right, Merrihew?" Merrihew stood up. "I feel we've been sitting here too long. Talking too much." "But " "You said it was all in here," and Merrihew tapped the envelope. "You better be right." And he ran out. II hew went straight to a place he knew and began to work. The place was a park bench off the mall, in a little hollow overarched by linden trees. Aside from turning pages from the envelope, which took him less than twenty minutes, he sat motionless, legs splayed out, eyes all but closed, for nearly two hours. There were things about this job which ran #  out of phase with the way he worked, the way he thought. Don't think of exactly where West Ecuador is, what it is (although "prevailing wind situation" and "central range with cloud cover... it rains every day there" and the population and birth-rate figures put a pin right on its map); don't think of the nature of that fog and its power in incredible dilutions like that and just what that stuff had to be; it was Lasvogel's job to work with that -- and anyway, Merrihew genuinely doubted that any wild inspiration of his could even approach Lasvogel's grasp of the variables involved. Don't think of ways and means of discovering from Lasvogel himself what it was that was pulling him apart. Superbrain he might be, but Merrihew doubted he was so unlike other human beings as to be always aware of what was wrong with him. He probably didn't know. Merrihew liked to work with cross-checkable facts, and with the truth (whatever, from time to time, the hell that might be. In this case he had to work with "meta-facts" and treat them as if they were axioms, knowing perfectly well they weren't. For example, Lasvogel was the only man who could solve the West Ecuador mess. Merrihew doubted that, but could not let that doubt dilute his efforts. And this one: the West Ecuador mess can be solved. Merrihew doubted this too,, but must refuse to let that thought into the gears. And this: the difference between Lasvogel's ability and inability to solve the West Ecuador problem lay in keeping him from falling apart. Merrihew was perfectly aware that Lasvogel might well solve the problem before he, Merrihew did anything; or that he, Merrihew, might pass a miracle and restore Lasvogel to soundness of mind and soul and still Lasvogel might not be able to find an answer. So all his reasoning and actions must spring from this sequence of assumptions and almost-facts as if they were the word of God, or at least Moses. On top of which, whatever he did had to be done instantly and effectively, for literally every second made it more likely that the news would get out. The news would get out... He stirred uneasily on the bench; he squirmed. Just the fact -- no details, no hows or wheresjust the terrible fact that someone had a substance that would secretly and painlessly sterilize everyone on Earth except Caucasians. Who wouldn't jump at that -- jump in horror, in greed, even in joy, in terror? It wouldn't matter what details were lacking; that which is stated as possible is done. A microscopic amount of uranium is split leaving its streaks through a half cupful of smoke, and once the news is out, the thing is done -- dollars, hundreds of thousands of man-hours later, but it gets done and the world is never the same again. A man drops dead, seated at his desk. There is a bullet wound. There is a hole in the window glass. The detective draws a line from a man's head, as he sits at the desk, through the hole. Ballistics experts alter it to the correct parabola and learn where the gun was that fired the shot -- and so on -- until a murderer is captured. Let it be known that a thing has been done and it will be known how it was done -- if anyone cares enough. And who would care enough about what had happened at West Lcuador? Blacks and bigots. Clever-mouthed haters, masking their diseased passions under a cant of believable ecology. And if a weapon so potent and so selective could be analyzed, why couldn't it be made to select another target? And if that proved impossible, was there any way to measure the rage of the target now established? Merrihew had a thought -- permitted the thought -- purely to know he had had it and that he had eliminated it. Take it to the military, to a wealthy bigot, to the potential victims of the most horrifying exercise of genocide known to history -- even human history. One might say conscience would dictate something like the last course -- as for the others, there would be fortune incalculable, power immeasurable for a man who held what he had and used it for his own ends. Merrihew shuddered and spat. Work. Work. Get to work... He sat there for another twenty minutes, "For God's sake," he said then. "What a way to save the world." course, and in the delicate mention of it in Dr. Poole's envelope, the words had all but blushed. The fact sheet held a strange mix of old-world disapproval and latter-day acceptance, combined with an arch appetite for gossip. What it came down to was that Lasvogel had, in addition to a cerebellum, some gonads, and that these had been preoccupied for some time by one Katrin Szabo, expatriate Hungarian, twenty-four years old, a mathematician employed by the Institute and living in the same apartment house on the same floor as Lasvogel. "His association with Miss Szabo," said the fact sheet primly, "is regarded strictly as Dr. Lasvogel's concern and not the Institute's business" -- thereby making it Merrihew's. What a way to save the world... Merrihew, having carefully checked the whereabouts of the parties involved, went to the apartment house where Lasvogel lived, repeating to himself like a mantra: Lasvogel's privacy must be respected. Lasvogel's privacy must... Oh, he didn't give a damn for Lasvogel's privacy. Not now. What the mantra meant was that Lasvogel must not be underestimated. A mind that could do that many things in that many fields was one that would pick up the slightest trace of spying -- and that one trace would blow the whole bit. Merrihew could hardly contain West Ecuador in his memory -- he most certainly did not want it on his conscience. Anything he did in this operation would have to be by remote control. Anyone he moved or diverted must be handled invisibly and without touching. In an alley -- not the one behind the apartment house -- Merrihew became a telephone repairman, locked his car and went into Lasvogel's building through the service entrance. The lock on the fire tower was a simple matter for him. Trudging up eight flights of stairs was not. He used the simple rhythm of climbing to reinforce his mantra. The eighth-floor hallway was deserted and had an admirably soft carpet. He ghosted up to the door of Apartment #K and tried the knob, recalling a nightmarish time he had once had picking a lock that wasn't locked. This one was and it was a good one. He glanced at the key slot and from his belt drew out a flat case, opened it. From one side he took out the correct blank and slid it into the slot. From the other side he selected an array of flat blades, chose one, and gently thrust it into the special recess in the blank, applying turning pressures, forward and back, as he did so. His sensitive fingers told him which serration on the blade moved which tumbler and how much. He withdrew the blade and tried another, the third one did it and the door opened. He went in and closed it quietly behind him. Soundlessly, he whistled. Nobody, but nobody, could be this neat. Carefully, avoiding the rugs where possible, he trod the whole place, the whole bare minimal totally efficient place. Here was where a man could keep his changes of clothes, could wash, could sleep (alone), could eat if he wanted to but usually didn't. Here he apparently did not relax, did not entertain, did not read or watch TV (there was none) and did not even study. Well, a man like Lasvogel probably did all his studying in his head. He didn't need books, and if it was facts he wanted, he had two telephones. The one with no number on it was certainly an open line to the Institute. Merrihew found nothing out of place, nothing not strictly Lasvogel's, except the note on the dinette table. It was triangular, blue, dated, and cuter'n hell: Welcome, welcome, wherever you are. Problem: to make perfect beef Stroganoff exactly as you like it, without knowing when you'll come. Need one ingredient: Dearest you. Waiting, L eaning over the table to read it without touching it, Merrihew noticed the funny little crossbar on the # of the date, European style, and could admire the firm, strong, straight, yet completely feminine handwriting. He backed off a pace to look at the note from a distance. From the way it was placed on the table, he had a strong feeling that it had not been read and tossed there. It had been so carefully centered most likely by the sender, not the receiver. And the date? Yesterday. He continued his hands-off inventory: bathroom (where he detected moisture not only on the toothbrush but on the soft bristles of an old-fashioned badger shaving brush) and in the tiny kitchenette, where he made his big find. It -- they, rather, were in the cupboard over the chopping block. The small spice rack contained salt, pepper, seasoned salt, seasoned pepper -- and that was all. Beside the rack was an array of vitamin capsules -- B complex, glutamic acid and the usual vitaminmineral once-a-day pill. What faintly caught his eye, just as he turned away, was a glimpse of something stashed behind the little spice rack. Feeling that perhaps he was carrying caution to a ludicrous extreme -- yet silently chanting his mantra again Merrihew got out his needle-beam torch and peeked. He had to be mildly acrobatic to be able to read the labels, but what he found was vitaminstwo bottles. One was B complex and iron, the other Vitamin E. Unlike the B complex out front, which bore the name of a reputable drug-store chain, these hidden ones were from Let's Live! -- one of those naturalfood emporia of which Merrihew, a confirmed carnivore, once had said, "They sell fruits and nuts to the nuts and fruits." It happened that he knew this one; it wasn't far from his office. What the hell was Lazvogel doing in a place like that? And why should he have bought more when he already had had (Merrihew bent to check) two thirds of a bottle of B Complex? And if Lasvogel were simply storing this new bottlewhy wasn't the Vitamin E out front? It looked almost as if he had hidden them. Resisting the temptation to find out if the bottles really were the genuine article -- for the screw-on caps were sealed with shrunk plastic Merrihew turned away and scanned the counters, the miniscule stove. In the wastebasket was a piece of paper a small bag with the colophon of the Let 's Live! store on it. Merrihew's eye photographed just how it lay before he reached down and took it by the smallest possible corner and lifted it out. Handwriting. One of these you really need. So much better for you. Please take them. The other one you don't need at all (!!!) Please take them away! Love and love Rut hie Merrihew replaced the crumpled bag in the wastebasket precisely as he had found it, took one more careful look at the whole place and let himself out. In the envelope Dr. Poole had given him there was no Ruthie. Hm. He walked softly down the hall. checking his watch. Still plenty of time. He let himself into Apartment #D rather more quickly. more to his taste. In its way as well ordered as Lasvogel's, it was warm, colorful and lived-inlivedin, too, by someone who could own a green glass pear and the portrait of a smiling collie because they were beautiful and not because they did anything. The kitchenette was no longer than Easvogel's but marvelously equipped and organized. The bed could sleep two and the presence of drapes and spreads, rugs and cushions had eliminated that acoustically-live effect Lasvogel's place generated, wherein one's very thoughts echoed and there was nothing to absorb a human error. Merrihew, while retaining his detachment, could not control the thought that if Lasvogel was throwing this away he ought to have his glands candled. Against one wall was a drop-leaf table, serving as a desk but ready to be used for meals. It bore at the moment a block of triangular notepaper, blue. He ran a fingertip lightly over its edges and nodded. Practical, loo. This was Institute stationery with the letterhead guillotined off (making a square) and cut again on the diagonal, making that charming triangular paper. A piece of it lay on the desk, a felt-tipped pen next to it. In the strong feminine handwriting he had seen on Lasvogel's table, he read; Actually  have no claim on you in any way, not even in the simple matter of expecting promises to be kept, and there is obviously no reason for me to oh, damn, what's the The last words sprawled across the paper -- he could see where the violent pen had run clear off onto the table top. Merrihew's eyebrows twitched. Time was when he might have raised them. This was obviously the end of a long series. The rest should beahh. The wastebasket was half full of them. The ones on top were unruffled, the ones lower down crushed, the ones at the very bottom torn into little bits or twisted into tight little knots. It must have been a long night. He sampled the many drafts. Cheerful: Hello there! Remember me? I'm the one with the secret vice -- elaborate beef Stroganoff alone in my room. This could lead to Indignant: It may be that there are things in your life far more important than -- in a Stroganoff factory! Comitragic; To whom it may concern:  am an orphaned beef Stroganoff. Nobody wants me. My noodles are withered and my gravy cold. Tragicomic: Oh pity the poor mathematician with her shining hair brushed bright and the bed turned down, the wine untouched and the Stroganoff cleaving to the cold old chafing-dish Distraught; Perhaps I needed this. In no other way could  have learned how much I want you, need you. It's so much more than mutual pleasure and the joy of your nearness. I should be angry but instead I'm grateful, but oh. it hurts -- Furious; You rotten bastard, you icy son of a bitch, whatever gave you the idea that you could treat me like -- Maternal: Nothing matters if you're all right, my dear. There will be other times -- any time you say -- or none. If I can help in any way, Tm here. If I can help most by leaving you alone while you work things out. I'll do that. But I am rather desperately worried about you. Please eat. "Bastard," Merrihew murmured as he carefully replaced the papers in the wastebasket. It must have been a long night. Ill H e wondered if she had used her key and how often, "her shining hair brushed bright -- " she had run down the hall to that monkish cell, only to find it dark and silent and her welcoming note unread on his table? Had she dozed off some time in the early hours and awakened, stiff and cramped at het writing table, to run down once more and perhaps done as Merrihew had just done -- checked the untenanted cot and the damp toothbrush, realizing that Lasvogel had come home in the gray light to wash and change and leave again -- smelling probably of another woman's perfume? Smelling of organic soy sauce and sesame seed, rather. Who the hell was Ruthie? What was a guy like Lasvogel, with the fate of a whole planet in his hands, doing with two absolutely superfluous time-consuming body-and-mind-consuming entanglements like this. Merrihew thought about those organic vitamins. One of them you need... That would be the B complex. These health nuts were ape for B complex and the synthetics Just would not do... you don't need the other one, but take them anyway. Oh, boy. There used to be a whole megillah about the language of the flowers, you'd send irises and a rose and a hunk of Queen Anne's lace and it meant I am panting for you, or some such. Nowadays you bring a bottle of pills. You don't need these (!!!)... Oh, this Ruthie, she is a cutie. Everyone knows Vitamin E's the wildest thing since the prairie oyster and Spanish fly. Lasvogel, you busy, busy boy, you. So you have a date with this Hungarian slipstick and her Stroganoff and instead you're out all night with your dish of yogurt and her triple exclamation points -- and you with all that homework to do. And you bring home your trophies and hide them because you know the other chick has a key. And suddenly Merrihew knew what he must do. He knew it as he knew that he must do it absolutely invisibly. He had not the compunctions, here in Katrin Szabo's apartment, that he had had in Lasvogel's austere environment; yet when he used the telephone he was careful not to move it and to hold the receiver with his handkerchief. He got his number. "Let's live!" said the telephone. "Hey man, amen," said Merrihew, who hated people who said "man!" "Is Ruthie there?" "You mean Ruthie Gordoni." "Godbless, man." You just told me what I wanted to know. But Merrihew didn't say that last part out loud. "Look around and see is she there for me, man." A pause, then: "Not here. Wish she was," the telephone added garrulously. "This is a whole different place when she walks in. Someone said just last night she's a regular Earth Mother." "Far out," said Merrihew, who hated people who say "far out." "She's the one turned me on to your B and liver. I wanted to find her and thank her, man. I'm really somebody different, man." "That's Ruthie," said the telephone with pride and joy. "Well she lives right across the street, so she'll be in. Who shall I say -- " "I'll fall by myself soon, man. I'm never out of porkfat molasses anyway." "Blackstrap." "That's what I said, man. So later, man." "Right on," said the telephone fashionably and Merrihew hung up. He glared sourly at it. "Far goddam out, man," he murmured and went looking for the phone book. He found what he wanted and then, pausing only long enough to check out the whole place for his spoor and finding none, he let himself out and returned through ihc deserted hallway to Lasvogel's door, which he now opened girl's. He was there only long enough to fish the Let's Live! bag out of the wastepaper basket and, her handwriting, add the earthmother's last name and street address to her arch little note. He did not, however, put it back. He left il on the floor beside the basket. In that environment it shouted, it screamed, it stood out like an oilspill on a talcum beach. He went back to his office and called Dr. Poole. "Finished," he told that startled gentleman. "I got to tell you this: he'll get worse before he gets better -- and if you try to do anything about it you'll screw everything up. And if you call me to tell me bad things have happened to him I'll just say I know, I know." Dr. Poole said, "But -- " Merrihew was already saying, "Goodbye." He then went where phones couldn't reach him for a while. What a way to save the world. T he waiter went away with the order and Merrihew shot a look at Dr. Poole. He looked older, a little, though it had been barely three weeks since the last time. He also looked a hell of a lot happier. "I can't tell you exactly what he did, of course," said Dr. Poole. Merrihew nodded understandingly. "Secrets, secrets," he said. "Nonsense, man! There are two kinds of secrets -- the security kind, where someone mustn't find out something or you'll get hurt -- and the other kind, where you're expected to explain polymer transformations to a fouryear-old. You just can't. So as one four-year-old to another, I can analogs, a chemical integument forming temporarily around ripe ova, selectivity rather like the clumping that forms sickle cells -- and an overlooked environmental factor." "You mean there's no smog in West Ecuador." "Jesus! How did you know that?" "You told me. Most of it at lunch that time. I mean. West Ecuador could only be one place in the whole world, from what you told me. And now you mentioned 'an overlooked environmental factor.' " "Ah. Ah." Dr. Poole nodded vehemently. "Good thing we -- he cleared it up as soon as he did. Anyway, it's reformulated completely and if anyone should ever make the same mistake again we can straighten it out in a matter of hours. To put it as simply as possible, we now have something which nullifies conception in any warm-blooded vertebrate -- but only for the current cycle. It doesn't affect the cycle either and it has no side effects. It can be taken as an individual dose or fogged -- the way we did it at West can bend the population curve downward anywhere -- to any degree." "And now who gets it? Government? U.N.? Or just you?" "You don't want to know that." "You're right." The drinks came. Rather happily they silently toasted one another. "Now," said Dr. Poole, "tell me. How did you do it? Matter of fact, what did you do?" "Maybe I should keep my secrets, too." "There are two kinds of secret," Dr. Poole reminded him. Most uncharacteristically, Merrihew laughed. He did not do it very well. Not enough practice. "Touche. Un -- I drew a hell of a slice out of that account you set up. I wouldn't want you to regret paying out all that money for the little I did." Dr. Poole waved that away. "There's an old story about a mechanic who fixed a big rotary printing press by going inside and whacking something once with a hammer. He billed for #, and when they asked for an accounting and itemization, he said the quarter was for whacking it with the hammer. The # was for knowing where to whack." "Goddam," said Merrihew. "I was going to tell you that very same story." "Tell me what you did." "I studied your envelope pretty carefully. Your Lasvogel shows an interesting pattern. He's a multitalented man-and I don't think his talents are completely under his conscious control. Some people blow up under stress. Some people sharpen up. Lasvogel sharpens. The tougher the problem -- andor the more urgent -- the sharper he gets. The West Ecuador problem could hardly have been tougher or more urgent. Every second it got more so. Lasvogel, I think, began to get a little frantic. I think that maybe for the first time in his life he began to feel that the problem wasn't going to produce enough pressure to squeeze out an answer. It began to show." "Oh, it did," breathed Dr. Poole. Merrihew said, "I don't for a minute believe that Lasvogel consciously realized why he then did what he did. Which was to go out and get himself another chick." T he waiter came, puttered, chuntered and ultimately went away, during which whole time Dr. Poole frowned unseeingly at the puttering and chuntering. "I suppose," he said when they were private again, "that he needed to get his mind off the -- " "He got a new chick without getting rid of the old one," said N(lerriliew. "There is in all the world no tnore certain way for a man to get himself into trouble than that. There's no more efficient method lor a man to complicate things for himself, to face more unpredictable and unmanageable hassle." "And you were able to stop it." "Haven't you been listening? My (iod, you know him better than I do or ever will! Lasvogel has total confidence in his ability and he had total devotion to the West Ecuador problem. I mean he knew the answer was in there somewhere and he knew he wasn't getting enough pressure out of the work. Even if it was about to squash him flat it still wasn't enough to make the answer come. So he just went out and bought more pressure." "Without knowing why?" "I really don't think so," said Merrihew. "Consciously knowing it would make it game-playing, not real -- and the pressures then wouldn't be real either. Which is why playing tricks on yourself never works." "Incredible. So -- what did you do?" "Nothing essential. What happened was inevitable, so in a way you didn't need me at all. On the other hand, I did make the inevitable happen a hell of a lot sooner, which is why you got your problem solved when you did." "Why we got it solved, period," Dr. Poole asserted warmly. "Lasvogel was at the bitter end, believe me." "You'd know," conceded Merrihew. "I don't -- I never saw the guy. Or the chicks. That was the only real trouble I had -- making it happen without touching anybody. So I just did what you scientist types called bringing in a force or factor which is necessary and sufficient. I saw to it that the two girls got to know each other. I knew your Miss Szaho was due home before Lasvogel, and that she would sit down and brood a bit, that she woyld get mad and barge into his place and that she would not only see the evidence I left for her but would snatch it up and take it away with her." "What evidence?" "The other woman's name and address." "But how would that guarantee -- " "It was guaranteed, if you know Miss Szabo." "You seem to have gotten to know her quite well." "Never saw her," said Merrihew, watching, behind his eyes, a succession of careful blue triangles, lines of strong, angry, devoted, injured handwriting. "But in a way you're right. I knew she'd go straight there and have it out." "What happened?" "We'll never know. Whatever it was, Lasvogel walked in on it." "That must have been the night he limped into the lab with the scratches on his face and the big bruise on his cheekbone." "Language of love," said Merrihew. "One of 'em." "And by morning he had the new formulation." "Pressure enough," said Merrihew, spreading his hands in a Q.E.D. gesture. "Necessary and sufficient." "Oh, dear," said Dr. Poole thoughtfully. "What is it?" "I can't complain, I suppose. I said before -- you heard me -- that if Lasvogel solved this one he could retire with honor. In effect he probably has -- and we won't be getting much from him from now on." "Why?" Dr. Poole leaned forward with his #-don't-gossip-but-you-shouldknow expression. "This wouldn't be a Miss Ruth Gordoni?" "No," said Merrihew. "Ruthie." "Ah. Well, Lasvogel has moved, you know. Taken a house. And according to my sources Miss Szabo has moved in with him. And, ah. Miss Gordoni also. They seem to have become fast friends, all three." And Merrihew really did laugh, this time. "Friend," he said, putting his hand on Dr. Poole's shoulder, "You're going to get work out of Lasvogel like you never got before. And he's still got a lot to do if the totalitarian principle of physics inherent in this mess is to be kept permanently at bay. It goes something like this: 'Anything not forbidden is compulsory... ' He's found a way to keep the pressure on and an environment that won't even let him get sick. Beef Stroganoff with Vitamin E sauce -- " and he dissolved into laughter again and wouldn't explain.  The Thing underground ruled men's dreams, desires and destinies -- but not yet every woman's passions... a crystal night, and unbidden ideas and thoughts keep wandering into and out of my head. These they are ordinarily wont to do, but more now than usually. Par exemple: I thinlc of Saint-Ex doing his thing over the Andes -- and over France, over other places. Just now I'm doing some kind of thing over mid-U.S.A. and unbidden thoughts come into my mind. I think of my first girl, the really first one, and I'm filled with something like shame because suddenly I can't remember her name. She was good to me and you shouldn't forget the name of the first girl who was good to you. I'm not always proud of myself. My real now girl, though, is beside me as we fly through the night, and I know her name right well: Alice. I think, among other things, of reading; reading my way through grade school, through high school, even into college. Reading in the lofts of barns in August, in cold libraries in November and once -- a special time -- reading in a secret place where the only things that mattered at all were being with my girl and -- before and after that -- reading lovely things together. That was before Alice. When I was a kid (this is one of the thoughts wandering into my head as I look at the lights below and think of reading) there already had been too many computer legends. I read them because I had an interest. In most the computers were taking over the world, running everything -- you know. I checked an old favorite the other night and it began like this: The Computer broods in a cavern in a mountain not far from Denver, Colorado. It has no name, needing none. It needs no name because it's the only one... It was a good story, but it hadn't been quite right; in the actual event the locus was closer to Colorado Springs than to Denver. And when I, in due course, made the acquaintance of The Computer I found that it wasn't the only one, just the only one in what we persist in calling the Western World. There were two others, in the expected two other places; such, however, were the linkages between them that, when you got right down to it, the three were one organism. I discovered that The Computer really did brood, deep within its cavern, because it didn't have much to do. It ran the world, yes, but that didn't begin to stretch it to capacity. It strained like a mintcondition old Offy would strain size, of course, but it was inside a mountain for reasons of security. Quite a bit of it was at work from time to time, but mostly the work was routine, a drag, and the part of it that didn't have anything to do -- brooded. How else can you think of it? The Computer was made mostly by young men and was programmed to trust no one under thirty. And how did I come into all this? I say (with mixed feelings) that my great-grandfather, when a young man, was one of the big brains behind it. And my grandfather and father had worked for it, so I had a family interest as well as a personal one. I turned to Alice. "Do you remember my thirtieth birthday," I asked. "I do," she said. Sunlight through an unopenable window and conditioned air into the house from points beyond counting. A spring day and in the room a mother and her lively young girl of eight. "I want to go to the park," the girl says. Her name is Jean. Jean's mother sighs, reflecting upon the mixed-bag quality of the times when Jean is not required to be in school. "We went four days ago." "I want to go again," Jean says. "I want to walk on the grass with my shoes off." "That would be nice, Jean, but I think it's too soon. Well, push the button." The girl knew precisely where, in the complex array of buttons, the one labeled Park was. She carefully crossed her fingers before pushing the familiar button. Events took place in silicon chips in Colorado and the light came up red. "I'm sorry, darling. We'll be able to go again soon. We have to share it. You know." The girl kicked the base of the panel. "Don't do that, Jean." Jean stood at the window and looked out into the park. There were people in it not too many, not too few, just the right number. I'll be thirty tomorrow and after that I'll be spending four hours a day inside that Colorado mountain, looking after one module of that Thing. The part I'll be responsible for is no larger than a 'small library, but "it's reasonably complex and I don't expect to be bored. Maintenance is compartmented. I'm supposed to know everything about my module, or section (#A), down to the last microscopic memory chip, but nothing about any other. I've said that three of my immediate ancestors were related to The Computer. I want to go inside that mountain. "You have decided on your project?" The man behind the desk smiled, put the tips of his fingers together, looked from the face of the boy to the ceiling, then back. The boy was fourteen and his name was Emile. Derek Arpel, the man behind the desk, was Emile's science teacher. He saw something in the boy's eyes and didn't look at the ceiling again. "Yes?" he said. "I'm going to build a model of the Tower of the Eight Winds." "The Tower of -- " "Yes. A working model. I think I can do it. It will have eight sides, you know, one for each of the eight winds, and each will be a sundial and inside the tower will be a water clock, like this." Emile unfurled large unruly sheets of paper, which bore beautifully done drawings. Derek Arpel cleared his throat and made as if to swallow. He hummed a little and said meaningless monosyllables. "The reservoir for the water clock will be here," the boy said, speaking rapidly. "It must always be full, so the pressure will be constant. It will be such fun," he said. He showed, talking all the time, how the water would flow from the reservoir into just twenty-four hours. "This is a float in the tank," he said, "and a line from the float goes here -- and there -- and as the float rises this plate goes around, once every twenty-four hours. There will be a chart of the sky drawn on it. The marker -- this grid -- shows what time it is. It will be held by Hercules on one side. Atlas on the other -- here." He stopped to catch his breath. Derek Arpel looked at the drawings and looked at Emile. He shook his head slightly. "I didn't make it up myself," Emile said. "It's a copy." "Where -- " "In the rare book vault of the library. In an old American Journal of Archaeology. It's on tape." "You are authorized?" "Oh, yes." He showed the Teacher a card. "I meant," the Teacher said, "where was the -- original Tower of the Eight Winds?" "In Athens," Emile said, squaring his narrow shoulders. "First Century BC, old lime. Do you think it will -- go, sir?" Emile looked into the old man's eyes, saw something flickering there. "It would be so beautiful." "Yes. Yes," said the Teacher. "I believe it would be so. All right, you know what you have to do." He waved a hand toward the console and the boy seated himself before it. He recited his prepared copy into the mike and events happened upon and within the silicon wafers in the mountain. The answer wasn't long in coming. The boy rolled up his plans, crumpled the copy of his proposal in his fist. "It would have been a lovely thing," he said. on a Saturday, which meant lhat my new job, for which I'd Iteen so endlessly trained, would start on the following Monday. I suggested to Alice that a celebration was in order. She said she wasn't so sure. I asked, "What do you mean by that?" "I didn't mind moving to Colorado, and you know it. but I don't like the idea of you working for lhat -- Thing. I hate it." This wasn't new territory; we had crisscrossed it before. We had lived with it for a while. "It's a little late to do anything about it now," I said. "So let's make do with it at least until we see how it goes. All right?" "I don't like it. Who says you have to work for The Computer anyway?" I sighed and said the Computer. And that ended that. The ages of eighteen and twentyone had, I knew, historically been ages of significance, but they didn't mean much now. Thirty was the dividing line and I found that I crossed that threshold in a state of some internal conflict. I won't say that part of me didn't look forward to my new job -- didn't, in fact, insist that that was obviously what I had to do. My emotional view of the Computer was as yet amorphous, a coin with blurred images on either side, images which would no doubt sharpen in due course. On the negative side, I didn't like the red lights and, though I'm no philosopher, I was obscurely uneasy about the implications of those red lights, what they said other than. No, you can't do that now, not today. On the other side was -- well, not much, but The Computer did run in the family and I did, though Alice was genuinely unhappy about it, want to go into the mountain. Time first, though, for champagne, a few friends and desultory conversation before they left. My birthday, yes. As guests (almost always) eventually do, ours left, and I was soon in bed with Alice. I was tired and it was nice to stretch, sleepy head on pillow, feeling her stretching against me. "Nice party," I piumbled, "but I'm glad they went when they did." "Yes," Alice said. "Yes." She snuggled and one thing in inevitable sequence led to another and I wasn't tired any more. "Push the button, damn it, dear Harry. You know we have fo do that." "Yes, I do," I said, fooling around some more. I do, indeed." I got myself out of bed and over to the console. Before pushing the appropriate button I thought a moment, seeking wisdom from anomalous sources. In a day and a half I'd be going into that mountain, whose guts I was now about to address. "Harry?" I pushed the button. Condition red. I crawled back into bed. "Red?" she asked. "Yes." "Screw it," she said. "Damn it, screw it." But you can't screw The Computer. The converse wasn't quite true. Before I was able to settle down much she said, "So let's do it anyway." We'd been through this before, too, though Alice was a very bright girl. "You know we can't," I said. Sensorship. Alice knew as well as I that if we made love then and there, in the voyeuristic presence of that red signal, the little sensor within both our selves would signal Violation and soon unpleasant consequences would flow from that. "Why not?" asked Alice, not resigned. "Why can't we? When we both feel like it. It's your birthday -- " "It's all optimized," I said. "Frequency as a function of age, temperament, twenty other factors. You know that as well as -- " "Damn it to hell," she said. "You can bet your sweet life on one thing, that computer doesn't know my optimums from its -- " "It's what?" "It doesn't have one." She sat in bed next to me, her strawberry nipples darting accusatory glances my way, and said, "I want you. Now. Let's do it anyway." "Listen, love," I said, though I knew I fought a lost cause. "Listen -- I love you more than I can say. I do. But on Monday I go into the mountain, and I can't have The Computer in dispute with me now. Or vice versa. Understand that." And she tried to. And she snuggled against me, but angrily, and there was no comfort in it. thorough, elaborate and extensive, all of it carried out with the help of a presumably authentic and life-size copy of the module over which I would preside. This apparatus was housed in one fairly large room of an unobtrusive installation not far from the mountain. There were other places like it here and there throughout the country, I knew, but mine was the only one I had ever seen. Curiosity about modules other than your own was not encouraged. My own bucket of bolts, when I had finished training, had no secrets left to keep from me, not in respect of keeping it going, which was all my job was supposed to be. It itself didn't (it was always an it to me; I couldn't think of it as a he or she), but there were two small appendages, guarded chambers, I had no access to. One was input, the other was output -- simulacra of the module's relationship to the rest of The Computer, of course. The green light had come on Sunday night, but Alice was still sulky and it hadn't made any dif; ference. The red light can stop you, but the green doesn't necessarily get you anywhere -- in consequence of which I entered the mountain under two banners: animosity and curiosity. The gadgetry was as expected. The few places I was allowed to enter responded either to my voice or to the pressure of the palm of my right hand upon a panel. These sensors made elevators go up or down and they opened some doors. Not all, by a long shot, but some. There were long corridors with forbidding portals, most of which were immune to the touch of my palm. Everything was battleship gray, which was fitting in view of the watertight bulkheading (I speak analogously) separating the different parts of The Computer. The whole thing, Judging by what I could see of it, was surprisingly small. What was it like to live with the thing, to have it part of my life for four hours a day, except I couldn't leave it at the end of the fourth hour; it stayed there through the other twenty as well? What was it like to be a part of the human apparatus that kept it going? What did I do? I'll tell you what it was like to live with it in a moment -- but, first, what I did was detect malfunctioning circuits a few minutes before they malfunctioned. I wandered here and there amid all that hardware. I tired of sitting at the master console, waiting for something to happen. I felt the presence of all those silicon wafers, mindlessly bearing their microminiature circuits. I thought of the other rooms I couldn't get into. I thought of what was going on out there in consequence of what was going on in here. What was it like to live with The Computer? It was, in the end, like living with your mother-in-law, whose untimely death you plan. N OW and again the red light conflicted with my need -- and now and then with Alice's -- but most frequently with both at the same time and those were bad times. Occasionally, though, the green came at just the right time and we exploded into such a mutual pyrodered, briefly, if maybe The Computer had the right idea after all. That wonder never lasted long, only until the next red light. Alice, of course, hated The Computer with frightening intensity. "And I hate your Greatgreat-God-damned-grandfather Charles H. Justice also," she would say, sitting in bed, looking at me. She didn't hate me -- she loved me, dear girl -- but I served The Computer and that came between us in both obvious and subtle ways. For one, she really didn't understand the extent to which the thing ran in the family. "Not my great-great-grandfather," I would say. "Just great." She hated him anyway. My first months with The Computer were spent in a state of extreme ambivalence Phase #, if you will, of The Computer And I. I admired The Computer, what it could do, how effortlessly it accomplished, what a magnificent something it was. I came, in a way, to be fond of it to be fond, at least, of my part of it. My greatgrandfather had been there, after all, and I was not immune to a sense of family pride. I had anxieties enough the first day or two, but after the first week I was reasonably secure with my module and we began to develop our relationship. I liked the aseptic neatness of it all, the banks of indicator lights of many colors. The other side of my attitude built itself upon the occasional red light The Computer gave me, us, and what that did to Alice and me, to our relationship -- and, in the back of my mind, what it was doing to and for everybody else. My function within the mountain was to maintain module #A. My relation to The Computer was supposed to be analogous to that of the service technician who replaces the reactor in your aerocar, say, except that my job was more specialized. I was supposed to know everything there was to know about how to keep one small part of The Computer working, so others could use it. Actually I didn't -- and don't -- know if there are, or were, "others" in this sense. I was inclined to doubt it. I thought The Computer had become autonomous. We were supposed to maintain, then, and to do so without curiosity, but I've already said I took curiosity inside the mountain with me that first day. So I did more than keep the thing running, I studied it. And one of the ways of studying it was to play back used chips before I sent them off from my module to wherever it was they went. This was, of course, against all regulation, but I had a recently acquired secret weapon and was able to bypass the monitoring circuits which would have signaled Violation... My secret weapon, yes. After I'd been working for The Computer a month or so my father, who had been retired for years, called me from San Francisco. He had just gotten back from Japan and had forgotten my birthday until my mother reminded him of it. He had something for me and could I receive it without arousing notice or curiosity? He would like, he said, to have a look at # # A again (pastmaintainers had that privilege), and could come to the mountain tomorrow. Besides, he said, he would like to see Alice and me. It's not a large package, he said. "Why the cloak-and-dagger?" I asked. "Never mind," he said. "Will it go in a scooter?" "Yes." Communications like this were not monitored. The design intent and supposition were that the sensors everyone carried inside himherself were all The Computer needed to keep things under control. "Put it in my scooter in the lot at the mountain," I said, and I gave its number. "I'll smuggle it into the house later." Security began at the one and only entrance into the mountain. There wasn't much need for it outside. "Right," my father said. And the next day I had my secret weapon. That evening, after Alice was asleep (we'd had a pleasant enough visit with my father), I stashed it in a closet in my study. And soon after that I was playing back memory chips. I couldn't bypass my internal sensor, not then, so I had to play it cool, which was usually not much of a problem since most of the business of running a world is rather dull stuff. But there were times when I found The Computer saying No when I thought it should say Yes. As for example, when the boy wanted to build The Tower of the Eight Winds. When I read the printout on that one. Phase I was finished. Phase I: ambivalence. Phase II? Growing distrust and reorganization, as if a bright boy of six or seven, maybe, had discovered for the first time that his father wasn't always right. I wouldn't want to make a general rule about what comes next in series that begin with ambivalance and progress to distrust and beyond, but in this case the next term was -- simply a mind-clutching need to destroy. Though Phase I had transmogrified in a matter of seconds into Phase II, the corresponding evolution into Phase HI was undramatic and gradual. And irreversible. What came into #A were, in any large sense, trivia. Maybe trivia was all the input the other modules had as well, since everything was, shall we say, under control. People beyond counting wanted to cohabit and got the red light -- and that was tiresome, but routine. A poet wanted to up his output to twenty-four lines a week -- from twenty. Negative. A rather nice old man (or so he sounded) had made a mistake and wanted to go back to his first wife, th still loved each other. An enfant terrible tapped into The Computer a reasoned argument why man should resume the exploration of space. And so and so and so on. backs was like the ancient Chinese water torture -- small insults, each of them, but cumulating exponentially into an asymptotic need to undo the thing. I mentioned control above. Yes. Many are the faces of immorality, and of these the dingiest calls itself control. Quoted, by permission, from the extensively unpublished Beatitudes of Harry S. Justice. Sorry about that name, by the way, but you can't help what you were born to. appropriately enough -- and Alice was asleep. I was as deep as I could go into the lower left bowel of The Computer, learning more about (among other things) what a special module #A was. At least I thought Alice was asleep, or I wouldn't have had the books out. But she wasn't -- or she'd wakened -- and she came in and surprised me. That let one cat out of the. bag and our relationship changed in the next hour because I could see what was coming not far ahead. I wanted to level with her because she is a dear girl and I love her and it was time for me to share the burden, part of it. I was glad she had come in. "What in the name of God," she asked, standing in the doorway, flimsily clad, hands on hips, concern in her eyes and love in her voice, "are you doing up so late -- and what in the other name of God are thoseV' She pointed to the three enormous volumes. I'd stashed them well. She had never seen them before, though our house was small. My secret weapon. "Sit down here," I said, touching her here and there, but my heart not in it, not then. "I'll make you a drink." When I came back she was in the chair, small and huddled. I saw that I had communicated before I had said anything. I went to the bedroom, came back, put a wrap over her shoulders. She pulled up her feet. She was like a little girl. I sat in my chair at the desk. "A good drink," I said, "though I made it myself." Alice started to say something. "These," I said, hamming it up a bit to keep it cool, "are the notebooks of my great-grandpappy, Charles H. justice the First " Alice's pupils dilated-"and they comprise, in effect, two entities." I had my audience, all right. I hate your great-etc.grandfather, Alice had said from time to time. "One," I continued, "is, in all practical effect, a schematic of The Computer. The other is a dictionary to the language of the master program." "But" She seemed so small now, in the chair. So afraid. "But I'm not supposed to have them -- right," I said. "That's why they aren't on microfilm there'd be a record, somewhere in that monster, of their existence. These are all from my grandpappy's own hand." "When did you start calling him grandpappy?" "Just now." I had always admired Alice's astuteness. She rose from her chair, came to stand beside me and thumb through some of the pages. None of it meant anything to her, of course. Then she sat down again. We talked some more and I could see the wheels going around in her head like reels of tape in earlygeneration computers. She stood again, the wrap falling from her shoulders. She put her hands on my desk. "Kill it then!" she cried, almost screamed. "Kill it!" She had begun to have an inkling of what I had going for me -- us -- in these notebooks and then she wasn't afraid, she was wild. Suddenly she checked herself and paled. "Christ," she said, "my stupid blood pressure, my so responsive heart rate. I have -- " She sat down, not, I thought, really afraid, but trying to keep her powder dry, not wanting to throw shock waves into the mountain -- not now. "It's all right," I said. "How do you know? I may have -- " "Tonight it's all right," I said. I made another drink and we talked some more, but I didn't tell her -- I was saving that for later, to be told more by way of demonstration than by explication -- that two days past I'd located and inactivated the receiver inputs of our own two personal sensors. I also failed to mention that I had Charles H. Justice the First figured. These notebooks were grandpappy's moral insurance policy. When they'd put The Computer together back then they hadn't known how it would work out. Grandpap had tried to see to it that if it didn't, some descendant would be in the right place to take care of it. That's the way I put it together. There weren't any stepby-step instructions, though, no advice, just a comprehensive introduction to the totality of The Computer -- a letter of credit, as it were, and I'd have to decide on my own how to spend it. We had a long talk that night. On the way to bed I pushed the button. I demonstrated my intentions at once, in bed, despite the red light. Alice didn't know what to do. "The console is on," I said. "but we, you and I, are disconnected. From The Computer, that is." She didn't quite believe it at first, but when she did she gave it all she had. It was like being alone together for the first 'time ever -- which isn't surprising, because that's what it was. Mercy! "My dear sweet boy," Alice said, about to sleep. "You'll have to kill it anyway." "Mmm," I mmmed. "For all the others," she said. F our hours a day don't take too much out of a man's life. I had plenty of time the next four weeks to study the notebooks. Not to Alice's dismay. She thought, though we didn't talk about it, that I was plotting the death of The Computer. She was right. What are the ways of the death of a computer? Simple lack of maintenance would carry it off in reasonably short order, one malfunctioning circuit leading to the failure or inutility of others, until it progressed into rampaging psychosis or vegetating moronity, death in either case. But this computer's maintenance was impeccable. Theoretically The Computer could be programed to knock itself out, as if a human leaped from an aerocar for lack of anything better to do or because something or someone told him to do so. But The Computer had built-in safeguards which were, I knew, beyond the reach of me and my notebooks. There was, of course, always the simplest of all roads to destruction; force, man -- brute force. took me that long, first to find what I was looking for, then to figure how to make it work. It was, if I may say so, a fancy piece of reprograming. I wondered if the other two parts of The Computer had equivalent #A modules in them. I supposed so, but I didn't suppose either of them had a Harry S. Justice tinkering with their private parts. All I told Alice was that we'd be taking off that evening in the aerocar. I gave her what would ordinarily have been a weird packing list -- sleeping bags, as much of our heavier clothing as we could carry, lots of food, water, vodka, some books (no microfilms), simple medications, things like that. "And any little thing you wouldn't want to lose," I said. I had been, and was, curiously unable to talk to Alice during that time and I wasn't much good at talking to myself either. What do you say to yourself when you've fitted yourself into some kind of Great Archcriminal slot? Yes, there were things to be said on the other side. In spite of The Computer we still had the fear of the bomb hidden away in the corners of our minds and that wouldn't be there any more. My last day in the mountain I voiced in the program just before I left. I suppose I hoped it would work. Some of the hardware was pretty old. But it was there, all right. "Let's go," I said when I got home. Alice was pale and tense, under control. She hadn't asked a question during those four weeks. I looked around the place a minute or so, and we got into the aerocar. The door clunked and I punched in the long-range coordinates for southwestern New Hampshire -- that seemed a good a place as any and as far away as we could go. We got clearance in three minutes. I'd taken care of that, too. At # feet Alice asked her first question. "Where are we going?" I told her and she thought it over. She nodded, put her hand on mine for a minute. Unamusing thoughts came to my mind, but I was detached from them, as if they didn't belong to me. How long would the North American power grid work? The Officially. J(ohn). R. Pierce is Executive Director of Research. Communication Sciences Division of Bell Labs. Unofficially. he is the father of Telstar. And officially. he appears in this issue of Galaxy with The Exorcism, a sequel to last month's Choice. And unofficially, he tells us. "I'd really rather write little moral tales than dicker with electronic prophecy." Why is he widely considered Telstar's parent? Well, in # he published the first paper on unmanned satellites, thus initiating the age of communication satellites. Urged by Pierce. lite in I #. Then ATT, spurred by the enormous interest in that project, put five hundred people on the development of what became Telstar. launched in #. Pierce has recently returned from Mexico where he delivered a talk on Computer Music. He composed -- that is to say. programed -- the music, and had computers perform it. Next stop will be New York for a lecin March. The subject? Interconnecting computers over great distances and transferring data in information systems. "We are all going to be using the computers in one way or another." he forecasts, "and they'll either make life easier or as hard as it is now to cancel a credit card." He assures us there are no stupid computers, only computers programed by stupid people. Pierce and his wife live out in the New Jersey countryside and he comes into New York as infrequently as possible. "There's nothing wrong with that city." he is fond of saying, "that an atom bomb wouldn't cure -- or maybe they can pave over all of Manhattan and make it into an airport -- or maybe... power plants were more or less autonomous -- but when the first something went wrong The Computer wouldn't be there to help them. "We've been on the Big C for just over a hundred years," I said, more to myself than to Alice. "What?" "I was just wondering. Will we go back to the Stone Age, or what?" "Don't be silly." "I'm not." I looked at the chronometer and turned on the screen. A holofilm, fifty years old, by the look of it. "You brought the drinks?" "Yes, Harry." "Pour us each one, will you? Now." She did and handed me a glass. I put it on the floor beside me, looked at the screen again. An unfamiliar station, we were over St. Louis. The lights looked nice from up here. Strange, I thought. I do this for of them (I tried not to think of the ones I was doing in), but I do it as much for the hundred and ten pounds of my Alice sitting here at my side as I do for all the rest. Even including grandpappy. Now a flustered face on the screen. "We interrupt our program," he said and swallowed. The transmitters are still going, I thought. The newscaster didn't believe what he was trying to say. Denver." I was surprised Denver was still on, so close to Colorado Springs. "There has been a tremendous explosion, probably nuclear, in Colorado Springs, within the last twenty minutes. All Computer functions have ceased. I repeat, all Computer functions have ceased. There is reason to believe that similar explosions have occurred in the Soviet Republic and in China." I'd even got that part of it right. "The public is urged not " I flicked it off, picked up my drink from the floor and looked into the eyes of my wife. We clinked glasses. "To -- whatever it is," I said. "Yes." Alice's face was hard to read. She was weeping quietly, but I didn't know the context. One tear is much like another. "The power will go," I said. "When?" "An hour, a week, who knows? I just thought I'd mention it. I don't want you to worry if all the lights go off down there." She looked down. "If all the power is gone by the time we get to Keene we'll fly around until dawn and go down on manual. No problem. I just didn't want you to worry," I said. "All right." The night was like a diamond, and the lights below were like stars. They stayed on almost all the way to Keene.  He had to destroy the life she had chosen -- to achieve a life of his own! ed to take Myra apart that the pain began to go away. Partly his purpose was to free himself of her hurt, but he was also fascinated. He marveled at the intricate interplay which gave her variety, at the smooth chaining and merging of seductive tricks and gestures -- the careful posing of the classic profile; the graceful gesture of the perfect arm; the calculated display of the slender, high-arched foot; the gracefully careless bending over which, as if by chance, revealed the perfect breasts; the greater provocation of her body glimpsed through transparent gown; the deliberate lifting of the gown. Myra's program -- when he had solved it -- was a marvel of subroutines, macroinstructions and geometrical interpolations, carefully keyed to his movements and reactions, to the monitoring of his bodily functions (he hadn't expected that) and to words and phrases he uttered and some simple relations between them. He hadn't realized how little what he had said had mattered in any immediate sense. What had mattered was that he had chosen these particular programs. Or, rather, that he had chosen this particular simulation, taking her for a real woman. Through the Filmy screen of his communication booth, he had seen her, chosen her, admired her. talked to her, touched her and lain with her. The Myra program -- and the adaptive features that he had evoked from it -- had been his darling, his Myra. Myra the beautiful, Myra the enticing, Myra the gentle, Myra the teasing, Myra the submissive. He now knew that there were other Myras. There were, in fact, # subscribers to this time-sharing Myra processor. He speculated (so desirable was Myra), that there had to be hundreds or thousands of identical processors in the world, all giving a Myra to someone who wanted her and believed her to be real. Each subscriber found Myra a little different. Each subscriber's Myra changed as the user changed with mood and time. Harvey had been shocked to Find what some men required of Myra. He was gratiFied to find that there were limits to her compliance, that is, to the flexibility of her program. Those who went out of her scope, physically or intellectually, were artfully shifted to "friends" and became users of Sal, Ann, Jezebel or Hypatia or some other program. They congratulated themselves that they now had the sole love, affection, friendship, submission or services of the one woman in the world who was really suited to them. In a sense, they had. As Harvey worked his way through Myra's flow charts and listings he saw what made her work. In his heart, in his recollections, Myra was not there. With his eyes closed, he could see his Myra looking artlessly at him. He could summon up a thousand glimpses of her body. He could feel it under his hands or against him. It must be like the recollection of a dear dead love, he thought. But Myra was not dead. He could have again what he had had before. If he keyed her number on the communicator she would be there. But it would not be the same. He had not called Myra since the night when he had divined what she was. The initial numbing despair of that day passed, to be followed by mechanical apathy. He ate mechanically. Sleep did not come naturally; he lay quietly with idle thoughts until he induced sleep electronically. On three evenings he called his grave, fatherly, illusory friend, Donald, whom he had found to be a simulation. He watched the illusion of the room, the fire, the black cocker spaniel. Smoky. He could admire Donald abstractly as a work of art. He played chess with him, finding him, as always, an opponent difficult but not impossible to master. Harvey won about three out of five games. He supposed that this had been the comfortable edge he had needed. Donald was a work of art and a fine one. Myra was no doubt a work of art. Harvey had not been able to look on her as one. He could not bring himself to call her -- to use her -- knowing what she was. To him, this was at once reasonable and unreasonable. He was intelligent enough to know that he had a problem. Problems called for solutions. In dissecting Myra's program he was probing toward a solution. H arvey thought of the day of frantic action following his discovery that Donald and Myra were simulations. He skipped breakfast that morning. He skipped the fresher. At the earliest reasonable hour he stepped into the transportation cubicle in his apartment and quickly emerged from the terminal in his anachronistic office, his office with a wooden desk and bookshelves with real books. He sat down before the very non-anachronistic console. Why had he not used the console at home? He knew the answer. In his apartment he was a failure. He had chosen as a friend and as a mistress two illusions, not two real people. In his office he was still master, still successful. He had been successful in unraveling some threads of a past which had been almost totally tangled in an overwhelming bulk of computerized records. It was his discovery and understanding of early nonsense about "artificial intelligence" that had caused him to doubt Donald and Myra. His relation to others and to the world, might be a shambles, but his skills were sure and his intelligence keen. Harvey hesitated before the console. He felt that he must speak to a human being -- but to whom? In the years since Jie had established his office here in the library, sending machines burrowing for hidden books and records of the past, he had had no need to consult anyone else or to see anyone else. Machines had done what he had bidden them to do. But surely there must be some responsible person to whom he could talk. happen. In response the screen displayed a dictionary definition, followed by columns of detailed subheadings. Clearly he was on the wrong track. keyed. The screen displayed a list of eighty-seven books with that title, fifty-seven in the files and the others conjectured from passing references in man's literature. Suddenly light dawned. Through long habit he was in the library's files, not on the public communication channels. He keyed the change and then wondered what to do next. It was useless to call the illusions of Donald or Myra. An old-fashioned word occurred RY. The screen responded with a huge, indented list of headings and subheadings. He scanned them with impatience. Nothing seemed right. Perhaps he should start at home. another long list. In this he finally located the library in which he was sitting. He keyed the number. A pretty, blank-faced girl stared out of the screen, obviously a simulation. "I am the National Historical Library," the simulation said. "Please state your business." "I want to talk to the librarian," he told her. "There is no librarian," the simulation responded. "I am the National Historical Library. Please state your business." "I want to talk to a human being. A human being in the library," he demanded. "There is one human being in the library," the simulation said. "I will connect you." A new image flashed on the screen. He found that he was staring at himself and broke the connection. A sort of desperation seized Harvey, but his mind continued to function smoothly. He went back to the directory and studied it intently. Within a quarter of an hour he felt that he was on the track. Fifteen minutes later he had arrived. His screen showed a man of indeterminate age, surely not old and certainly not young. The man had a squarish face of a healthy brown and bushy eyebrows but no hair. He sat, or lounged, behind an empty desk, a keyboard before him. "I'm Harvey Adam, Eight-seven-two, seven-four-five-three," Harvey stated. "Yes, so I see," the man replied, apparently looking at a part of the communication screen to the left of the image of Harvey. "A good programer, I see. Found books and microfiche in the library. Found a real track in the records. Might be interesting." "But that isn't -- " Harvey started to say. "No," the man continued. "You broke out." "Broke out?" Harvey asked. "Found that the friends you had chosen were simulations. Can't put up with it. Want real people again." That was it, Harvey thought. He wanted a real people again. In the years of his childhood and youth he had had to associate with the real people of his peer group. When he had been asked to father children, the mothers had been chosen for him. He had found people difficult and computers cooperative. People had adapted to his needs only partially and under persuasion or coercion. When, as an adult, he had chosen, he had unknowingly preferred computer simulations to real people. He had chosen the selfless, adaptable computer simulations, indistinguishable from life -- and so much "better." "Yes," Harvey said. "I want real people. But will they want me?" "Depends," the man said. "You're good-looking. You're pretty smart. You ought to be able to beat out a computer. Look here -- record this." button. "What is it?" he asked. "It's all identified," the man said. "But since you want to know, you're recording descriptions and access codes for all the simulations -- for their programs, I mean. And name-numbers and access to files for all young male and female adults within a hundred miles -- that is, for all those who haven't broken out. And observation numbers." "What are those?" Harvey asked. "Observation numbers will permit you to observe individuals while they work. And all the calls they make from their apartments," the man added. "That ought to be a help." Harvey thought that it would. "But my work?" Harvey asked. "That's up to you," the man answered. "Shall I report -- " Harvey started. "You're on your own now," the man said. "Everybody is, but some don't know it. Don't bother me; I'm busy." "But," Harvey said, "are you a man or a simulation?" "Does it matter?" the man replied, reaching forward to key a button. He disappeared. Harvey as he digested what the man had said. He reached for the keyboard to examine the information he had been given. But no, he thought. He had had enough for the day. He entered his transportation booth and emerged at the Athletic Club. He had been too distraught to go there since he had found that Myra and Donald were simulations. He put on his sports suit and, going into the room the cords and lowered the goggles. Harvey found himself lying on a surfboard which floated on the clear, warm water off the north shore of Oahu, a huge roller rising behind him. He paddled frantically with his hands, then rose to his feet and slid forward at a dizzying pace. He turned the board away from the breaking crest and slid along half again as fast as the wave moved forward, keeping just ahead of the crest. He stayed ahead of the crest until the wave had almost spent itself. He enjoyed the buffeting of the foam. A phantom in an outgoing boat threw him a line and towed him out where he waited for another roller. When Harvey tired of surfing he raised the goggles, pulled out the plugs and went to an adjacent booth, where he sailed quietly for an hour on the waters of the Aegean in a beamy, two-ended boat. The rock that made the isle of Hydra was bright in the sun to his right. Today he sailed alone, with no desire for competition. Only to experience the simulated sun, the simulated wind, the simulated slap of the waves. And the simulated sea. The dragon green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea, Harvey thought. The snowbesprinkled wine of earth; the white and blue, flower-foaming sea. But as he rested he thought of Myra. The desperation was gone but the ache was not. Simulation that Myra was, she was real in his heart. Harvey unplugged from the Aegean and spent the rest of the day in simulated skiing in America, Austria and the Andes. Skiing left little time for thought. Exhausted at last, he went to his apartment late, ate, went to bed and induced sleep electronically. T he next morning Harvey tackled his new information. He had reflected concerning his most immediate needs. As a start he sorted all the young adult females for what he thought might be common interests or compatibility. He came up with # and he didn't know how to narrow things down. He started looking at pictures, but his mind was preoccupied. Something seemed wrong. He wasn't looking for a book in the library. What should he do? Finally he started in numerical order, an unseen watcher in offices, studios, laboratories, shops and hospitals. Sometimes he knew immediately that some particular scene was not for him and keyed the next number. Sometimes he paused for a minute -- or five or ten. There was the way the young adult female looked. None was so beautiful as Myra, of course. And there was the way she moved. None was as graceful as Myra. There was the air of concentration, competence or don't care with which she did things. Sometimes, after ten minutes, he pressed the key that added the girl to the list on his home communicator. It was surprising how fast time passed and how pleasantly. By five in the afternoon most of the girls had left for sports. He could not see them during simulated sports, so he set the computer to add the names of their sports to the list at home. Then he went skiing at simulated Alta. Harvey enjoyed his sport. But dinner gave him time for thought. While he was eating he reflected on his approach and found it good. When he had finished he sat down at his communicator and started on the list. The first girl, a brunette pathologist named Wanda, had not yet finished eating, so he passed on to the next. Plain Jane was playing bridge with three simulations which she believed to be real young females. That told him little, so he went on to a demure artist named Sue. Sue surprised him. She was talking to a hairy brute, more muscular than handsome. The brute conversed in monosyllables and these suggested some colloquialism belonging to another age. As a historian, Harvey was at a loss to place the dialect. But, he reflected, he's just a simulation. The brute spoke that way because some people liked that sort of thing. A moment soon came when the brute's pants dropped and Harvey found what young females like Sue really wanted. He had never measured life in quite those dimensions.  can't compete with that, Harvey thought and went on to Rita, a buxom brunette. At first Harvey didn't know what to make of the scene that Rita's communicator showed, but presently the tangle on the rug resolved itself into two young females. One raised her head and addressed Rita. "Hi," she said. "Come on in." "I'll watch a while," Rita said. "There's plenty of time." "Okay," said the other. "We're Just getting warmed up." Despite the fact that Rita could be nothing to him, Harvey watched for a while in fascination. Of course, as a historian he knew about these matters intellectually. It was different to watch them happening in what seemed to be the flesh. Harvey was rather excited by the time he recollected his purpose and moved on down the list. By the end ot the evening, he had found one distinct possibility. Maggie was a lively redhead. She liked to ski. That might be a bond, he reflected. Could two real people ski together in simulation? He might be able to program it. No one understood computers or simulation better than he did. It might be companionable to ski together. But the bother of skiing together on inferior real slopes would scarcely be worth while. Maggie's lover, Ralph, was handsome. Harvey thought him no handsomer than himself. Ralph had about Harvey's build. But Ralph was listless and awkward. While he was agreeable enough, he didn't seem too bright. How could a girl like Maggie have chosen him? Harvey supposed that she had been looking for certain things and had found them in Ralph. Then she hadn't looked further. She didn't find me, Harvey thought. But then, I am real and she was searching among simulations. Now. what can  do about Ralph? A few alterations in the program and Ralph's shallow agreeableness would become painful obtuseness. Harvey could even program Ralph to be out or busy on some occasions. This was no doubt unprecedented in simulations. Donald had always been at Harvey's call. And Myra -- T he loss of Myra as a person still hurt Harvey. Savagely he turned his attention toward Ralph. A touch of impotence should help to cool Maggie's feelings toward her simulated lover. And that should leave an opening for a real person: himself. Harvey was not in a bad mood as he tried to sleep that night, but he was far from serene. His brain seethed with the technical details of what lay ahead. His body, aroused by an evening of evesdropping, seethed with sex. Really, shouldn't I call Myra? But that thought was too painful. He induced sleep electronically instead. Before he awoke Myra came to him in a dream, a shadow of a shadow, and temporarily relieved him of one preoccupation. For the next week Harvey worked on Ralph. Despite his thorough knowledge of simulation, it took him several days to understand Ralph's program well enough to alter it and to make sure that the alterations would apply for Maggie alone. It would be cruel to spoil the fun of the other # subscribers whom this Ralph processor served. As he gained confidence, Harvey made the alterations he had planned. Ralph became obtuse. A little step at a time, he became inconsiderate. More and more often he was out when Maggie called. For a few evenings Harvey observed the effect via Maggie's communicator. Satisfied that his programing worked, he stopped his observations. He found it disturbing and degrading to spy on another's sex life. Especially on the sex life of Maggie, whom he planned to have for himself. Day by day Harvey thought out and made the planned alterations in Ralph's program and Ralph became progressively less and less accessible. Harvey skied a great deal after work, often two or three hours instead of one. On a few evenings he played chess with Donald, but he found this unsatisfactory. It's strange, he thought. Donald behaves exactly as before. Then I enjoyed playing chess; now I don't. It's what goes on in my mind that makes the difference, I. suppose. During a few evenings Harvey's thoughts turned to Myra and his plans for her. The effect was disturbing. To distract himself he planned his encounter with Maggie. There was a certain relish in that. But the actuality, of course, had to wait until the alterations he had made in Ralph had had effect. And until he was through with Myra. So, when he had added the last touch, the debilitating touch, to Ralph's program, he started on Myra's. His touch was sure now, but he proceeded with loving care, subroutine by subroutine, macro by macro and, when necessary, instruction by instruction. How marvelous a thing Myra was, he thought as he took her apart. Cleverly chained together, keyed to inputs he himself had supplied, were the host of ingenious coquetries, the wealth of clever devices. These had been activated by a rough analysis of what he had said and by a variety of physiological inputs which his communicator -- and those of other subscribers -- had inputted to the Myra program. No wonder Myra had responded accurately as well as artfully to his moods and words. When he had known Myra as a woman he had never known her so well. Then such knowledge might have spoiled things, Harvey realized. Now he wanted to know, despite all the fond sadness that knowing and recalling brought him. At last his reprograming was complete. The plans for his encounter with Maggie were complete, too. But he must see Myra once more before putting them in effect. sailed serenely on the beautiful Aegean, Hydra gleaming to his right. Satisfied and relaxed, he ate a leisurely meal. He enjoyed eating more than he had since his catastrophic realization that Donald and Myra, his carefully chosen friends, were not real people. Then, settling down comfortably before his communicator, Harvey keyed Myra's number. There was a pang in Harvey's heart as he saw Myra again. She was seated in a familiar posture, looking at herself in the mirror of her dressing table. Her perfect features, relieved from severity by their slight rounding, were as breathtaking as ever. Her neck, arms and body had their accustomed grace. But for once the dressing table was not littered. Everything had been tidied in an unaccustomed, make-work sort of way. And tonight Myra was not dressed in a guazy, revealing gown. Tonight she wore a beautiful brocade jacket and slacks of a soft but opaque material. These enhanced her beauty, but they did not reveal her body. And tonight Myra was frowning into the mirror with an expression that seemed to hold more determination than perplexity. As she heard the signal Myra turned toward Harvey. "I was going to call you, Harvey," she said. Her expression was fond but firm. Harvey knew that it betokened something different in their relationship. "I hope nothing's wrong, dear," Harvey said with serious concern. Myra looked sad. "It's more than something, Harvey. It's everything." "But we've always had such fun," Harvey said eagerly. "Fun. I suppose so, dear. But it doesn't get us anywhere," Myra replied softly but seriously. "It's no use." "Why should it get us somewhere?" Harvey asked. "Isn't where we are good enough?" "No, it isn't, Harvey. For children, maybe, but not for grownup people." The idea of the lovely Myra as a serious, grown-up person amused Harvey. But, he reflected, all things can change. He didn't know exactly what to say, but after a moment Myra continued. "There's your work," she said. "I never have understood it." "It's very complex," Harvey replied. "Sometimes it's exasperating. I come to you to get away from it." "But you talk to Donald about your work," Myra objected. That was a hit, Harvey thought. "Loving isn't just -- sex, Harvey," Myra went on. "Loving should be -- sharing." "What should I share with you that I don't, Myra?" "That's just it, Harvey," Myra said stubbornly. "It's what you think of me that counts." She looked at him determinedly but her lips quivered and she seemed near tears. "I'm not going to see This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulps cans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans#yahoogroups.com. you any more, Harvey -- and I mean it." Harvey was full of a mixture of emotions which seemed quite detached from his understanding of the situation. Finally he spoke. "If that's what you want, Myra," he assented, sadly and kindly. "See?" Myra said, almost angrily. "Isn't that what you wanted me to say?" Harvey asked. Myra became a little calmer. "I suppose it isn't, Harvey," she said. "I suppose I wanted you to say that none of what I've been saying is true. None of it." There was another pause. Finally Myra spoke again. Now she seemed serene. The step had been taken. The pain had been felt. All of that was past. "Don't regret anything, Harvey," Myra told him. "It was good. It was beautiful. But it's over now. And remember. I'll always think kindly of you, Harvey. You were good to me. You were good for me. But now we both need something else." "You were good for me, Myra," Harvey said fondly. "And I'll always love you -- " "You'll love my memory," Myra told him. "And you should, dear. But you'll love somebody else." Myra looked at him calmly, with a sort of secret joy and sadness showing through, he thought. Then she reached toward the key of her communicator and her image was gone. The old Myra had been exorcised. The sweet cheat was gone. For Harvey a humiliating and exasperating experience had been replaced by a fond memory, sweetly with him as he dozed into peaceful sleep, thinking thoughts of the morrow and of Maggie. And all that went as planned. Harvey had his morrow and his Maggie. Maggie took him on the rebound from the unpleasant experience he had engineered for her. But Maggie was only a beginning in Harvey's education in real people and the real world. For Maggie had chosen her Ralph well. She was a strong woman who liked weak men.  Interface gave man instant access to friends -- but made him instant prey to enemies! E arth had been a member of the interstellar Interface civilization for nearly six months. The people mainly responsible for this situation gathered one morning for McKay, Slazeck and Devlin were Lang, Extraterrestrial Advisor to the U.N. Committee for Earth's Defense, and his assistant Cathy, Cathy Devlin-to-be. They sat in Lang's office at the Montana spacefield and McKay was holding forth on the subject of the committee. "Ten years ago we were attacked from space. Massive, repeated attacks on the cities, chaos everywhere -- you all know what happened. Acting military governments, some of them still acting. And as far as we knew then, when the raids stopped the respite was only temporary." He noted the range of expressions across the group. In those days Cathy had been a schoolgirl, horrified but untouched by civilization's nightmares. Devlin was a student taking flying lessons in his spare time, undecided, till then, about a military career. Slazeck, already a fighter pilot, had attacked a raiding ship, destroying two of its robot interceptors before he was shot down. McKay himself had and had had no crack at the enemy. Lang, the only man to survive direct contact with the attackers, had lost wife, family, career and -- worst of all -- memory. His experiences in the hands of the aliens, the extraterrestrial advice that might really have been useful, had all been erased. "So space research became a military endeavor," McKay went on. "The space program, when it started up again, was preparing for the next series of attacks. As it turned out, our objective was far too narrow. When the Interface contact arose and presented an altogether new situation, the committee failed to adjust to it. The Furtherance, the survey teams of the Interface, have been forced to work with us as individuals. Here we are, the Earth planetary agent and his group, with one gifted spaceship our only access to the Interface -- and that's only a Recovery and Liaison Vehicle, a rescue ship. All Earth's cultural reps are gathered in this room right now, still advisers to a vast military organization we no longer need. Whoever the raiders were, we can call up help from the Interface if they reappear -- but I think they made one assault here before the Furtherance opened up this part of the Galactic spiral, then moved on. They've gone back into the dark where they belong." "So you feel ET affairs aren't for the military staff committee," said Lang. "Whose hat do we put "Might well be," said McKay. "Whoever the hat belonged to, under it should be an organization for trade and cultural links with the member races of the Interface -- as many of them as possible -- before any one of them can claim the Solar System for development. We know far too little about the Interface, yet we know enough to realize our problems aren't military ones." "The argument's good," said Lang, "but the committee won't agree. For cultural interchange we first need ships -- and all spacecraft design and manufacture are under military control." "Don't I know it? They've opposed building a moonbase because they'd still have to use Saturns to supply it." Slazeck was going to comment, but the phone rang beside him. "It's for you, Mac." "A Furtherance ship has just come into orbit, sir," the control tower told McKay. "Mr. Kiliath is aboard and wishes to speak to you." "Okay, I'll raise him from here." McKay took out his pocket communicator and plugged in to the perception circuits of the knowledge." Without leaving the office, he was "in orbit" far above the Earth, in the security of the massive Furtherance starship. The others, with badge relays, could only hear what went on. "Greetings, friend McKay," said the computertranslation voice. "We do not seek rescue, so I thought to save you a direct contact." "I appreciate that," said McKay. The communications relay embedded in his skull had a kick like a mule. "What can we do for you?" "I would be grateful for your assistance," the computer-translation began, "on a new member planet of the Interface, named Sarran -- " at twenty thousand feet and at once McKay began to read meaning into the neutral words of the translation. The planet was indeed very old; from this altitude no life showed, only an endless vista of bare, eroded hills. As if the Interface, a half-mile disc linking Earth's sky to Serann's, had opened instead on a far reach of time. Almost at once McKay was uneasy. Already the assignment had diverged from expectation; when Kiliath had spoken of an old planet, freshly reached by the Furtherance teams, he had not conveyed the impression of this bleakness. No doubt there were more surprises to come. This was to be a cultural mission -- Sarran was inhabited by a race named the Jarra, the remnants, said Kiliath, of a oncegreat civilization. The mission was to assess how the Jarra might be assimilated into the Interface, if they wished to be. At last a liaison assignment for McKay's Recovery and Liaison Vehicle, something to reinforce the point he had been making to Lang. Now, looking at the hostile landscape of Sarran, he wondered if the demonstration would backfire. All his misgivings about his having brought Cathy along also returned. He did not doubt her competence, he had explained -- vyhen the Furtherance teams had reached Earth she had been their interstellar missions to date had turned thoroughly hairy and he had no wish for a girl's company on another "That great Furtherance dreadnought will be there to protect me," she had replied. Cathy was determined to share the new ET contact, especially after Kiliath described them. "What are the Jarra?" McKay had asked and the computer translation had replied, "Birdpeople." "This I must see," she had enthused after Kiliath's ship had gone. "What can they be -- slender, with fragile wings, or soaring feathered monarchs?" "That computer can be thoroughly misleading," McKay pointed out. "Kiliath may only have said they keep birds." "Oh, wonderful! Hunting with great hawks, as big as eagles?" McKay was afraid she would be disappointed. Now as he flew over Sarann, only minutes after their takeoff from the Montana field, he wondered if disappointment could be the right word. The intelligence that could survive here while the planet aged should be met with caution, if not apprehension. pointed Kiliath's touchdown almost at once. McKay lost altitude till they were circling it; an old castle on top of a crag, weathered so that it merged into the rock. Beside it on the flat top of the crag was McKay's second shock; not the huge Furtherance ship which had paused in Earth orbit, but a stub-winged shuttle that must have been carried aboard. Though he had smiled at the idea of a warship to protect Cathy, he himself felt suddenly committed much farther out in the unknown. variable wings into delta configuration as the landing blocks went down. He expected clouds of dust, but the winds had swept this spot clean. The jets stopped and the ship settled on its pads. T WO by two they went through the airlock. Kiliath had assured them no precautions need be taken about bacteria; and Kiliath himself was coming from the castle to greet them. The humanoid Fallaran, Kiliath's race, came from a high-gravity planet: about four feet tall, massively built, they had thick gray Kiliath had been the individual best "I see now why you asked for the strolling towards the entry. "But where is your own ship?" "The ship which I second-commanded was lost near your Moon," Kiliath reminded him. "On the ship which brought us here I was a passenger only." "But surely a Furtherance mission of this importance rates a starship?" "No need exists now for great fleets in this sector," Kiliath replied. "Almost all are gone to other duties." "I see," said McKay, but his tone of voice would be lost in translation. Kiliath's words explained why no starships had been availsion; they altered the whole perspective of McKay's own partial membership in the Furtherance. The revelation needed a great deal of thought -- and at that moment when he was least prepared, McKay came face to face with the first of the Jarra. It wasn't, he thought wildly after his heart started beating again, that the Jarra reminded him of anything frightful from Earth's cultural background. A succession of possibilities like ghost, vampire. demon had flashed across his mind and been discarded. The Jarra was tall, nearly seven feet tall, and dressed in black: a thin garment held by what seemed to be great shell-cases hinged at the collar-bone. The shoulders flexed briefly, lifting impossibly high for human bones; McKay realized that the Jarra's skeleton had two stable configurations, one for standing upright and the other for horizontal flight. The skin was deathly white, as were the curls of hair above the tall forehead -- and the face was a nightmare. If you stretched a nylon stocking over a human head and made a carving of the result, McKay thought, you might reach an approximation. He hoped the Jarra couldn't read the shock on his face. What effect the alien had on the others, he hadn't noticed; McKay was still in a daze as the party moved through stone corridors to the castle hall. He must be getting too old for this game, he thought bitterly. Every time his eye fell on one of the Jarra during the meal that was served to them, the same pang of revulsion shot through him. They were proud and independent -- and suspicious of the strangers -- he realized as Kiliath negotiated with them. They had survived a history far longer than Earth's and knew their capabilities. These were the aristocracy -- from castles far across the land -- what could you call them. lords, dukes, chieftains? All of these and none of them, for every title had unwanted terrestrial associations. Each Jarra chief his castle and his own people in it. This was CastleCarraine. Two miles down the valley, on the other side, was Bira, its close ally -- and what, if anything, would the Interface do for them? They had no ships, little technology -- their problem was Earth's, McKay realized, on a greater scale. At least, he thought, when he and his crew returned to the ship at nightfall, his hosts didn't have a Committee for Sarann Defense to obscure issues. N ext morning McKay split his gang, set them about the tasks of the mission. Slazeck and Devlin went out with the Furtherance team to assess the remaining resources of the ancient planet; into space, to take an Interface relay out to Sarann's large moon. Cathy stayed behind to begin her study of the Jarra race and its history. If she was frightened of the aloof birdmen she gave no sign: she might have been starting a social survey in the ordinary small American town. So far, McKay had to admit, the girl was shaping up better than he was. The moon was a hundred thousand miles out, well beyond the ten-thousand-mile range of the standard Interface satellite, so a rocket flight was needed to place a relay in orbit round it. Still they could use the first relay to save time and fuel. Climbing away from the castle, McKay said, "Up Interface -- " to the computerautopilot and a black circle opened in the sky ahead of them. other side it was already ten thousand miles out and on trajectory for the moon at four miles a second above escape velocity. Deceleration into lunar orbit would involve a velocity change of about five miles a second out of the from full tanks and the return trip -- once the relay had been placed -- would use up no fuel at all. How long had it been since this trip had last been made -- if ever it had been? The mission still had to establish whether the Jarra had ever had space travel even to the extent of reaching their moon. Lang, McKay found, shared his reaction to the Jarra, though apparently to a lesser extent. The man must have worse terrors locked within his own mind, after all. But McKay had been playing down his own feelings -- he was downright glad to be off the planet again and ashamed of it. II ra was a little difficult that space, Cathy was using the shuttle's computer for translation; and frequently in the course of Devlin's mineral survey the mountains got between them. When the Interface satellite was overhead there was no break in communication but at other times she found the translation voice would fade away without warning, leaving the Jarra mouthing his own harsh syllables into the microphone. Heraxt, the Furtherance officer Kiliath had left with her, could only wave his hands and murmur apologies equally incomprehensible. She renewed her private resolution to learn the language as soon as possible, but right now the Jarra were losing patience with her. The lords had flown off to their own castles and it began to seem that she too might be asked to leave. Not wishing to give up, Cathy suspended her efforts in order to argue with Devlin, but all she got from him was that nothing could be done. She was composing a few subtle remarks for Devlin's return when the faint sound of rocket motors reached down through the corridors of the castle. soon," she said, looking at her watch as she got up -- and to her surprise, Heraxt did not understand. When she emerged from the castle on to the crag, she saw why. The descending rocket was not the Heraxt's reaction, anything from the Furtherance fleet. Shockabsorbing legs were opening came vertically down: the noise forced the watchers back behind the muffling walls of stone. The creatures that emerged were humanoid, though their golden spacesuits hid details. They came across the landing area with great assurance and the Jarra passed Cathy and Heraxt in the entry and went out to meet them. It was obvious that they had met before. A few words were exchanged; then the group came back in silence and Cathy and Heraxt followed them, baffled and ignored, into the castle and between the tapestries of the ancient corridors. As they came once again to the conference hall of Carraine, Heraxt obviously made up his mind about the situation. Taking Cathy's arm, he drew her quietly aside; though she resisted, she could do nothing against his highgravity strength. Without hurrying, he drew her steadily down the access hall. Cathy's protests went uncomprehended, but she knew this was wrong. Something terrible was going to happen -- and suddenly she knew what it was. Glimpses of the future were rare for her, though second-sight supposedly ran in her family, but she saw clearly what was going to happen. A show of force attempted, a weapon produced, cries of rage from the Jarra -- the lord of Carraine would rise from his place, black wings opening to balance him as his skeleton adjusted for flight, arms thrust forward -- with one backward sweep of his wings, rise from the floor and strike with white, clawlike hands at the golden-suited enemy. "We mustn't leave them together -- " she cried -- and a moment later from down the hall came a shriek of avian fury. Heraxt stopped dead. Cathy wrenched her arm free and turned back, slowing, however, as she realized what she would rush into without means to make herself understood. The alien lay sprawled on the floor, a great gash torn in the golden spacesuit below the helmet, the gun lying far across the hall. The Jarra lord hovered over him, under the stone arches of the roof, slow strokes of his wings keeping him airborne. He was staring down, his face shadowed by the raised shell-cases on his back. The white hands hung vertically, splashed with blood. We must remain neutral, thought Cathy, we must calm this down. She walked deliberately forward, amazed and appalled by her own nerve, and kneeled under those terrible claws to examine the body. Body it definitely was, now she could see into that dreadful wound. How do I cope with this? she thought frantically, pausing for a moment before straightening up. Persuade him first to come down... Suddenly she was desperate to get out from under those claws. If the Jarra should swoop at her, her U.N. blouse would be no protection at all, much less than the spacesuit Carraine had torn so easily. And in another moment of insight and horror, she realized how it was going to happen. Before she could react the missing aliens appeared in the doorway, guns already raised. Fire crackled across the hall and down came the Jarra, clawing blindly at the air as it fell. T he Interface relay was almost spherical, though the shape was made up of complex components fitting one into another. McKay suspected it was like that all the way through, a Jigsaw of solidstate components. Thrust out from the cargo hatch, it floated McKay completed the activation routine. "Dev's calling you from Sarann," Lang reported. McKay shifted his attention and the computer display altered accordingly. "Acknowledge." report your position please." "We're orbiting the moon, getting ready to come back. What's the problem?" "You're up there and I'm in the shuttle. What's taking off from Carraine?" "Get back there and find out -- we're on our way." McKay had been spinning out the activation of the relay, with the excuse that he wanted to learn more about its systems. All he had to do was say, "Activate -- " and it was ready for use. He selected exit code for the Sarann relay, specifying position and airspeed required, and ordered, "Up Interface -- " A circle of pale blue sky half a mile across opened in vacuum in front of the ship and he fired the vernier motors to push the ship through it. They glided out over the worn landscape and McKay opened the intakes and started up the ramjets. A rising cloud of smoke and dust marked Carraine's valley; McKay made two turns to put the ship on the same approach as the Furtherance shuttle streak ing over the crags. McKay overtook the shuttle as it made a low pass over the site of Carraine. He was fairly sure it was the site of Carraine, but he checked with the ship's memory of the landscape to make sure. For the castle itself was gone: it and the crag it stood on had been turned to slag by the nuclear boost of the departing ship a great wound of molten rock, still draining sluggishly into the valley. "The ship's our first puzzle," said McKay after they landed at Bira. Anything to keep Devlin's thoughts from Cathy. "You don't think it left the planet?" "Not on that trajectory," Devlin replied, raging. "They didn't need a nuclear takeoff even for that flimsy reason. Either that was deliberate murder, Mac, or they were covering up something worse they'd done -- " "Easy. They're still on Sarann somewhere. If that damned satellite had been overhead we could have tracked them." Though the satellite could generate an Interface linking one side of the planet to the other, to use it you had to have line-of-sight radio contact. "Who are they, then? Where are they from?" "They have been here for many months," the lord of Bira put in. "Beyond these mountains they have built a structure, on which we keep watch. At first we helped and supplied them, but their demands grew. We waited to see whether you were like them or would league with them." Everyone wanted to speak, but McKay silenced them with a peremptory wave. He stood and faced the Jarra. "They have killed our people as well as yours." "We will destroy them," said the Jarra. "You may league with us." The assurance of it, thought McKay. They, the birdlords, with only their brains and physical strength, would accept the aid of interstellar civilization to fight off the strangers. And then he thought. Perhaps their race is older than interstellar (ivilization. As he faced the Jarra his subconscious still screamed Monster... But intellect told him that these were allies he could trust. "What are they?" "In shape much like yourselves. But they wear metallic suits at all times and do not walk in the air of our world. Not so very different from us when we walk the ground, but wingless." "They do not use Interface as we do?" Kiliath seemed to be seeking reassurance rather than information. McKay didn't listen, because the satellite should now be above the horizon. He said nothing, not to arouse false hopes even for a moment, but plugged in, scanning the planet for Cathy's medallion communicator via the The signal was there. "Interrogate," he said quietly. The others were looking at him. "Mac -- " "She's alive," said McKay. The atmosphere lightened at once. "Alive but unconscious. Plug in to this, all of you." T hey all had full communicaget a picture from Cathy's medallion. Since she was lying unconscious, apparently at floor level, not much could be seen -- but two of the aliens were standing near her. "They are called the..." said Bira. The name was in the wrong language and the computer translation left it out. "Just give us the sound," said McKay. "They call themselves the AL Tanrai. In your language -- " " -- the Cosmic Jackals," said Lang, speaking suddenly as if hypnotized. McKay cut the perception circuit with a jerk. Lang was still staring into space -- whether still plugged in or for some deeper reason could not at once be told. "What do you -- " "Don't interrupt," said Lang, obviously under great strain, "or I'll lose it again -- " "Record," said McKay to his own communicator and held it forward. "The AI Tanrai were part of the attack on Earth." Lang was almost whispering. "They came in the later stages, when the ground was already broken. They prefer to do that, to dog greater powers through the Galaxy. Their ships are faster than light. They are a group mind: if they were all to gather together only one intelligence would be present, a single consciousness. That was how it was at their beginning." A total silence had possessed the group. Even the Jarra seemed fascinated. "They are creatures of a giant world," Lang went on. "Methane and ammonia, great cold, great pressure... They had an Earth-type companion planet, where the inhabitants perfected space travel and went down to them..." Lang paused again. "Don't think of the humanoid forms as people or even as slaves. They lost everything long, long ago. They're only extensions of the Al Tanrai mind: if you destroy the element controlling them, the humanoids are mindless..." Lang seemed to lose his thread. "They are vulnerable?" prompted McKay. "Yes. They travel in groups and if you knock out one unit when they're in rapportyou can be lucky and paralyze the rest. Their pressurized tanks are the Achilles' heel -- they decompress and burn in air if you rupture them," Lang finished in a great rush. "Anything more?" asked McKay after another long pause. "No, that's all I know about them... I keep losing track even of that..." "Let it go," said McKay. "It's all recorded -- you needn't hold it in mind." Lang relaxed and gradually came back to normalcy. "Did I tell you anything important?" he asked. "You gave us the lowdown on them from start to finish," said Devlin. He was still intensely angry. "Thank God for that," said Lang, relaxing still further. "It had to be important, whatever it was." "Someone did a great job on your memory," McKay remarked wonderingly. "As if all knowledge of the attacks had to be concealed... A lot of alien ships were destroyed then. I wonder if any of the Al Tanrai escaped from Earth?" "None," said Lang with great abruptness. "You remember some more?" "What are they doing with Cathy?" Devlin exploded, unable to keep quiet any longer. "They took a girl last time," Lang said, rushing again. "When they landed in San Francisco and I drove them off, they were taking a girl back to the ship. They used explosives to force people out of the ruins." "What for?" "I stopped them," said Lang. "We never found out." "Let's not be too patient now," Slazeck put in. "We know their weaknesses, we have an advantage. Let's move!" The clock had gone back ten years, thought McKay. Back to the time of the attacks. Everyone had scores to settle. Aloud he said, "If we make a Ill straight attack we'll lose Cathy for sure. Bira, didn't you say the place was watched?" "Watched and surrounded," Bira affirmed. "You have men placed for battle?" "To the north and to the east." "Great," McKay said. "Can we get past their defenses?" Kiliath broke the ensuing pause. "Time may be very short. Let us take the shuttle and go with Bira to raise up his powers. Friend Mcthrough Interface if we call for it. Fate may give us an opportunity -- perhaps only a brief one -- and we must be ready to seize it." The meeting broke up but McKay made sure he caught Kiliath alone. "Why this urgency? You are holding something back from us." "I hold nothing back," said Kiliath's translation. "I press for action for Cathy's sake. We must miss no chance for her rescue -- it grieves me that you are less considerate." "Less considerate? Devlin's nearly out of his mind and I -- " "The translation misleads you," said Kiliath. The machine was failing to express some emotion, certainly, McKay could tell. "I thought of Heraxt, whom the satellite cannot locate. He and his communicator are one with the slag of Carraine." they would almost certainly need for the rescue. What a cultural showing we're making, McKay thought. Heraxt may have died protecting Cathy, and we never gave him a thought. It's lucky we do have an outside enemy on to whom we can project our inadequacies and dissatisfactions. The rescue "plan" was packed with both: basically, it was that the Jarra should draw the fire of make a surprise strike out of Interface to knock out the defenses and the shuttle would dive in to make the rescue. If the AL Tanrai were the professionals Lang described, McKay thought, they were inviting a massacre. "The only point for our side," he said, "is that the AI Tanrai may not realize this ship can fight. It's a leftover from previous Furtherance troubles and its weapons are obsolete by their standards -- I suppose they'd never let us use it otherwise -- but it is built to make rescues in combat, which makes it a damn sight more use than that damn shuttle." "I certainly thought Kiliath meant us to do liaison work for the big starships when he asked us along," Slazeck said. "I never would have -- what the hell?" His communications relay had Just punched him in the back of the head. "We are the AI Tanrai," said the translation voice of the ship. "We have detected the intrusion of your Interface into a region of space we have roamed for a thousand years. You will not find us obliging hosts." "Mac, this is impossible," said Slazeck. "It's not impossible," McKay snapped. "They've bugged our satellite. No wonder their base didn't show on Kiliath's surveys." "Your species is new to us, so we took the female for examination. Our preliminary inquiries being completed, you may recover this unit if you require it. Do not use your Interface within ten miles of our base or you will be destroyed. We are the AI Tanrai; our statement ends." The pilots exchanged glances. "Well?" "It's the chance Kiliath was hoping for. We can get in among them before the shooting starts." "Alternatively, they've detected the Jarra and the shuttle closing in on them and they want to elimifactor in the situation." "They may get a surprise," commented McKay, his anger renewed. "Rescue ship or not, this baby has teeth!" out over the valley. McKay converted smoothly to jet and then ramjet propulsion, climbing toward Interface altitude. "It has powerful eyes as well," said Slazeck. "They may not realize we can pinpoint Cathy's location in their base." "They'll probably guess that. The shuttle has some pretty advanced sensors and I suspect the AI Tanrai have that ship pretty well sized up. On that basis they won't be expecting weapons or rescue systems -- or rocket maneuvers!" "I don't get you, Mac. The shuttle has rocket motors, fusionpowered like ours." "It doesn't have independent aerospace capability," McKay replied, banking away from his original course. "It can work in space if Interface puts it there, but its total velocity change is two miles a second or less. Even if the AI Tanrai know we went to the moon they probably think our fuel's all gone." "I don't see the good of that," Slazeck protested. "You will," promised McKay. At least he had a plan to work on. "Take over and keep heading away from them meantime -- we need as long a run for this as we can get." turned back to its original course. Now fully suited and sealed into his acceleration shield, McKay looked on as Slazeck pulled up the nose, closed tie air intakes and Fired the Fusion column oF blue Flame, matching the sub-orbital trajectory oF the AI Tanrai ship. Xhe projected point oF impact moved over the horizon, across the mountains into the vicinity oF the alien base. "That does it," said McKay. He had separated the capsule From the ship's liFe-support system. "Here I go." "Good luck, Mac." The perception circuits blanked out as McKay ejected From the ship. He plugged in again at once, to watch as Slazeck turned the coastmotor again. As Fast as it had come the high peak oF its trajectory back down into the atmosphere. The capsule rode on alone. It had been vital to complete the rocket maneuvers beFore they broke the horizon oF the alien base. The ship itselF could be made invisible to radar, but the Fusion exhaust would be hard to hide. As For the capsule, its designers had Foreseen the possibility that the escaping astronaut might not want to be conspicuous. With its Mayday systems turned oFF, the capsule was well-nigh undetectable. McKay extended the tiny periscope and watched the wrinkled Face oF Sarann turning past. The acceleration shieldescape capsulestretcher unit had always seemed to him to be the best part oF using the system to the utmost this time -- always supposing the Al Tanrai didn't spot him coming down. He wasn't moving Fast enough, he hoped. For a Flare oF ionization to give him away. In due course the instruments told him he could put out the periscope again -- and there was the Al Tanrai base, three linked spheres with a cluster oF supporting installations, sitting in the desert just beyond the hills. About ten miles From it, he should be a barely visible speck dropping down the sky. It was midday now and there was plenty oF glare. The rising hills hid him From the base. He Flipped the capsule over into liFting body altitude, slowing up dramatically, and came down on a hillside, starting the Fans to cushion the impact. Though the re-entry hadn't been fiery, heat was now beginning to soak through From the heatshield -- once out oF the capsule, McKay pulled a toggle that blew the shield clear. Apart From the cragtops oF Carraine and Bira this was his first time on Sarran soil. It wasn't as barren as it looked From the air -- he saw clumps oF thorny plants all around him on the hillside. McKay didn't pause, but broke open more oF the shielding and Fetched out the two guns he had carried with him From the ship. Pull-out sections in the nose of the capsule, now the heatshield was gone, made slits for the guns when they were mounted beside the couch. With sights, trigger and windshield set up the unit became a flying sled, using the remaining shielding for armor. McKay started up the fans again and made for the alien base, hugging the hillsides. The AI Tanrai obviously thought they had a future on Sarran. Though their base sat on the firm sand, not in it, setting it down must have been a major undertaking. The three big spheres, with their supporting girders and piping, made the place look vaguely like an oil refinery. The surrounding huts and tents for the humanoid extensions of the AI Tanrai mind were of lighter construction. McKay noticed launch trolleys to bring the rockets to the spheres: the ship which had snatched Cathy was still in a gantry at the end of the row. He could see how the Al Tanrai had become nomads in space -- in general, installations like this would be easier to manage in free-fall. came out of Interface. McKay couldn't see it, but his implanted relay told him it was there. The ship was broadcasting its presence, supposedly to the Al Tanrai, but alerting McKay, Devlin and Kiliath without giving them away. McKay slid back down the slope, settled on the sled and with this cockleshell was like pitting a crossbow against a machinegun, he thought; you had to make sure you got the guy with your first shot. Ten miles out, on final approach, devices to locate Cathy. This was the biggest risk in their plan; that the Al Tanrai would have put her where her medallion was screened from interrogation. But they hadn't: she was still where they'd seen her last. It was an airlock in the upper part of one of the spheres, on the far side from McKay. She was still unconscious, still guarded, but the lock door was open. McKay raced the sled over the hilltop. As Slazeck continued his drawn-out, conspicuous approach, McKay made his dash across from the hills. That half-minute of racing high over the desert was the longest of his life. Since he was attacking an upper level, the spheres themselves gave him cover. He curved over a connecting tunnel, rounded the sphere to the airlock, guns blazing as he came down on the platform by the outer door. Probably the guards never saw him at all. Another surge of lift from the protesting fans and he was inside the lock. McKay was off the sled in a second, lifting out one of the guns. The AI Tanrai must know he was here, if only because their "eyes" -- the guards here -- had been taken out. Their attention would switch to the lock, away from the incoming ship -- but to reach him, their minions would have to come through that outer door with the sunlight behind them. He could hold the lock long enough to negotiate. Covering the entrance, McKay bent down to Cathy. She was lying face down, not bound or restrained in any way, just neatly laid on the metal floor. What had they been doing to her? He found only one injury, an ugly senseless wound across her back like a triple clawmark raked through clothing and skin. To what question did that supply an answer, in God's name? touchdown. Slazeck had conflaps and gear and with them had extended the ship's two cannons, above and below the fuselage, trained on the spheres. McKay was about to tell him to hold his fire when he saw that the lock doorway was less than half its former height. He had assumed the outer door was retracted into the wall -- instead, the airlock floor was rising toward the curved segment of the sphere overhead. McKay had noticed that the floor area was less than half the section through the sphere; even so, the volume of air to be flushed out seemed excessive. Now he realized, as the remaining half-circle of sunlight became a shrinking segment, that the pressure below was raising the floor to plug the entrance and expel air from vents in the top of the dome. The sliver of sunlight vanished and his contact with the ship was simultaneously cut off. Any second now, thought McKay, we're in for a methaneammonia quick-freeze. He bundled Cathy into the sled and slammed down the shielding before sealing his own faceplate and going on to the suit's air supply. Suit and stretcher could both cope with the low temperature, but not with the pressure change he anticipated. Outside, Slazeck had evidently discovered McKay was in trouble. He boosted the vertical component of the thrust, arresting the down the row of spheres, pumping armor-piercing shells into the underside of each. Freezing vapor sprayed out behind it. McKay heard the shells penetrate and explode. A series of massive shocks through the sphere knocked him from his feet and bounced him in his armor on the metal floor. Slazeck was banking away from the weakened domes. In ragged sequence hatches blew out under each, dropping to the ground as ramps -- used in the construction of the base, presumably. Down each, now, the Al Tanrai living environment erupted in explosive decompression, boiling instantly as it hit the desert air. Icy mist enveloped all the area around the spheres and, under it, fires were starting. T he airlock floor was dropping again as the pressure beneath it went down. Obviously the effect of the shells had been catastrophic; McKay doubted the Al Tanrai could have survived as an immediate danger. He was more worried now that the spheres might blow up before he and Cathy got clear -- all kinds of systems must have been thrown into chaos. Sunlight stabbed across the floor again as the top of the outer door came into view. Standing in the doorway, as the airlock floor came to rest, was one of the golden-suited humanoids. It started forward immediately, gun swinging, following the group-mind's last volition; but once inside, its brain was empty. The gun continued to swing in futile arcs. Lest it should fire, McKay shot the creature down as one might end a wasp's struggles with insecticide. Outside he found a party of them, crawling aimlessly on the ladder and scaffolding leading to the platform. Beyond doubt, the Al Tanrai were dead. Already the sun and breeze between them were disposing of the fog below. He led the stretcher unit down the scaffolding, avoiding the big ramps with their burning organic debris, and struck out across the sand to what should be a safe distance. Slazeck was bringnot defeating the great silence which had fallen over the enemy outpost. He raised the stretcher on its fans to the recovery hatch, and Slazeck took it aboard. The main airlock was open, like a big airbrake in the white underside of the ship; McKay stepped on the door and it lifted him. "What's taking so long in there?" Slazeck asked. "Suit decontamination," McKay answered. "Sarran's clear for us, but who knows what Al Tanrai bugs we're carrying." The medic tapes would deal with anything alien Cathy had picked up. McKay took his time. He had no regrets about the Al Tanrai, but Cathy's injury upset him. Not only had he, as mission commander, let it happen, but he had had to rescue her, Devlin being out of reach. This was the second time that had happened, and he worried about the effect on their relationship. "Here comes the shuttle," Slazeck reported. "Okay, I'll go back out." They were getting out of the shuttle on the far side, looking towards the spheres; Lang, Devlin, the Fallaran, Bira. "I think Cathy's all right," McKay told them when they reached the ship. "Her back's injured, but it's only a flesh wound. Medic tape's not come up with anything else." "It will be best to return her to familiar surroundings," said Kiliath. "I have declared this an emergency situation, so Furtherance warships will be here in a few hours at most. If I must ask for more help, friend McKay, I will send a message sphere to Earth." "Are you sure we should leave? There may be other AI Tanrai units in this planetary system." "Quite possibly," said Lang. "They usually check out the gas giant planets, I think. But if they were in rapport with this element they, too, will have 'died' like these humanoids." "The lunar relay, which is free of interference, will warn us if they approach," said Kiliath. "And the weapons of the planetary relay will hold them off until units of our fleet arrive. Take Cathy to Earth to recover." An explosion reverberated inside the AI Tanrai spheres. Black smoke began to pour from an open airlock. "All right, let's go," said Mckay. lock, he looked back at the non-human group. The Jarra features gave him the same shock: alien, however familiar. The Fallaran and Jarra were still in conference by the shuttle when McKay took off. He flew around thrust, converted and pulled away over the desert, waves of sound echoing on the hills below. "The satellite's not yet here," he up, "but it will be by the time we're high enough." Five thousand feet was as near to the ground as he cared to use Interface. Scanning the expanding view, er of movement. McKay directed his attention to it and it grew into a black flight of Jarra, already well past the sphere-base and flying on to some unknown destination. What lay further down the mountain chain McKay had no idea, but he was sure the Jarra knew where they were going. He let the steadfast group fade back into the barren landscape. The head-up display drew a pattern of lines intersecting the horizon, crossing and pinpointing the rising satellite. McKay had already set exit code for Earth. "Up Interface -- " For their own field they now had an Interface corridor, a strip of sky avoided by other aircraft. They came out into sunset over Montana, contacted the tower and began a routine letdown. An ambulance was waiting by the hangar when McKay taxied in. "She doesn't need to go to a hospital," he said. "We'll take her home and be sure one of us is around when she wakes up." "Okay," said Lang. "Walt and I will come over later." Devlin and McKay rode in the ambulance. As they left the spacefield McKay became aware of a curious pattern in the glass beside him. He rubbed at the window, but the deposit wouldn't come off. At Cathy's address the ambulance driver and nurse lifted Cathy's stretcher in and transferred her into bed. She still wore the slightly troubled expression McKay had noticed when he first reached her, but was sleeping peacefully. "She'll be all right," he said. "If I'm going to stay here tonight I'll need a few things," said Devlin. "Mac, will you make yourself at home? I'll be back directly." "I'll drop you on my way to the field," said the ambulance driver. Taking Devlin at his word, McKay made for the kitchen. He made coffee and a sandwich, left the kettle simmering for Devlin and went through to switch on the television set. The image took unusually long to form -- McKay was turning back, puzzled, when the screen fluoresced at last. Glowing red across it was the same pattern he had noticed on the ambulance window. The screen cracked a moment later and McKay ducked just in time as the tube imploded. The TV lamp overturned, plunging the room into darkness, and broken glass was everywhere. As he crunched over to disconnect the set, McKay's racing mind' Tilled in the gaps. The AI Tanrai had the satellite bugged, all right -- he guessed at the performance of the device. A twodimensional perception pickup stretched across the Interface, clinging to the surface of the ship as it went through? No re-entry to burn it off. Opening the airlock would not break its tension and the first man out would carry it with him, flowing like an invisible veil, seeking another surface to cling to. He and Devlin had had unwittingly carried it here -- and though the unexpected flux of electrons had burned it out, all its impressions up to now had gone somewhere. Intuitively, McKay guessed it. Somewhere in the regions beyond Earth, into which the Interface was beginning to penetrate, a signal had been received. Somewhere among those stars, in some orbital or planetary hideout, the AI Tanrai had found Earth again. With a heavy heart he picked up the phone, to call the U.N. and alert the Committee for Earth's Defense.  OF Eternal life poses a question. Is it reward -- or punishment? was the biggest, grossest, fattest, most domineering sloppy old man in the entire Western Hemispheric U nion, including all the people who lived in, under, and above the oceans, lakes and rivers. John Millburn Nance was also of his time. He sat in a chair that had been especially built to accommodate his bulk and spoke to his wife, who lay in her bed at his side. Nance talked in a gentle, soothing voice, but even his softest whispers were normally powerful enough to pierce all but the most securely sound-proofed walls. As a young man, Nance hadspent many years perfecting his voice as an instrument absolutely essential to the successful performance of his profession and, although he had now been retired for ten years, it was not an ability he could easily shed. Nance spoke to his wife in a soft, gentle tone because he was still very much in love with her. They had married fifty-two years earlier and during the last ten of those years had not exchanged a single word. Nance talked to Marilyn he did little except talk to her but she never replied. She could not. From the neck down Marilyn Nance was a machine. She lay in bed -- where she had lain for ten years -- and her husband talked to her. A never-ending series of whirrs, clicks, hums and buzzes emanated from the lower portion of her body. But she never spoke. She should rightly have been dead. The helicar she had been driving had fallen fifty feet to strike nose-first into solid city pavement. There hadn't been much left, only a faintly beating heart, when she had been pulled from the wreckage. And soon that, too, had stopped. John Millburn Nance had been a rich man then and he had loved his wife. So, unlike Humpty Dumpty, she had been put back together again. She could not talk and she had no arms or legs or torso, but she was alive. The best medical sured Nance of this one plain fact: his wife was alive. And so, ten hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, he came to her room, sat at her side, ignored the noises that came from beneath her blankets and talked to her. He did not know if she heard him or, if she heard him, whether she understood him. He had asked the specialists and they had replied. Yes, perhaps, to the first question and. No, probably not, to the second. Nance had long since stopped caring. He talked to his wife because he happened to love her. If she heard him, if she understood him, that was merely a bonus to add to his satisfaction. H e said, "I'll be leaving just as soon as we're through here and, as I said, I ought to be back in a week -- two weeks at the very most. "Yes, yes, I know what you'd say, if you could. You'd remind me that I promised never to leave these acres again. When I told you that, I meant it -- and I meant it, too when I said I'd never take another case as long as that slot machine was acting as judge and jury. "But this one is different. Marilyn, and I only hope you can understand. Sarah Bigelow was a very dear friend of mine once and I cared a great deal about her welfare. True, all of this was many years ago and surely she has changed since. But I did love her once. Not as I love you, but in a different way, the way a father feels about a daughter who turns out well. But, nonetheless, I did love Sarah. "And now they say she has killed a man. I know -- a hundred murders a day in this great land of ours. The killers are caught (for the most part), they are tried before that machine, they are convicted and they are treated. It is all routine. "But for me, murder can never be a routine crime. It will always be the extraordinary one, the crime that is unlike all other crimes, the one that is most frequently committed by noncriminals. "So, you see, Sarah is my friend, and because she is my friend, she is deserving of the best. And I'm still the best. I know more law in my little finger than all the new breed lawyers. East and West, put together." Nance paused and wiped his hands on the edge of the covering blanket. He looked at Marilyn but, as he had known, her face was without expression. His eyes moved past her, beyond the window, outside. He looked at the sun, which stood in the sky, gazing like a proud father at the earth below it. Trees grew tall and bright out there and autumn leaves fluttered to the ground in small, bright clumps. Nance would hate to leave this place even for a week. It was more than a home. It was a magic wonderland, all five acres of it. The thought of bleak concrete in an endless city repulsed him. Nance was seventy-six years old. He had a few years left to him and he wanted to spend them all right where he was -- among the trees and leaves, beneath the pink and gold sun. He said, "If I understood the crime I wouldn't go, but I've read about it, talked to people about it, and there's no sense to be found in what I've learned. Sarah supposedly poisoned this man, Oakes. He was her boss on a topsecret government project. They've got everything they need to. convict her: Evidence that points to her, a couple of eyewitnesses and a confession. They've got everything, that is, except a motive. And she wants to plead guilty. "The government was going to supply her with a whole battery of lawyers till I stuck my nose in -- through a friend -- and took care of that. I'm her legally appointed attorney now. I don't think she even knows it yet -- and when she finds out she'll probably be pretty unhappy. But there's nothing she can do. I saw to that. I'm going to save that girl whether she wants to be saved or not. "There isn't a motive, you see. Nothing that lo.oks vaguely like one -- and there's one thing I've learned in fifty years of close association with murderers. They've all got a reason for what they've done. It might be a twisted reason. It might not have a thing to do with the actual victim. But there's a reason there, always, without fail. "So, do you understand now why I've got to do it? Do you see why I haven't got a choice?" Nance paused again and looked closely at his wife. Her eyes were open and staring. Her cheeks were cold and rigid. Her nostrils quivered gently. He sighed and turned away. "I'll have Samuel come in to take care of you. He'll be with you every second he can spare. And when he can't spare one Barbara or Eugenia or both will look after you. You won't be lonely on account of my absence and I'll be back before you know it. I'll have plenty of new stories to tell you. It's been ten years since we've been to the city and it's surely changed in the interim. There'll be a whole lot of things you'll want to know. Just wait and see." Nance climbed unsteadily to his feet. He stood above his wife for a moment and shook himself like a wet cat. Then he turned toward the door. His hand on the knob, he stopped and swiveled his head. He put his free hand to his lips and tossed his wife a kiss. It was a childish thing for him to do, yes. Seventy-six years old and still tossing kisses like a boy of fifteen. But then, after all, he loved her, and it is love which brings out the child in all of us, regardless of age. Nance passed through the door. He heard the whisking cough of the helicar immediately. He hurried outside, muttering to himself, "I'm coming, Samuelhold that machine steady -- I'm on my way." sat across from his client in a tiny, white-walled chamber. He watched her face through a plateglass window that divided the wide wooden table into two equal halves. His chair was uncomfortable and despite his best efforts at self-control, he found himself squirming as he sat. Sarah Bigelow was forty-seven and wore her hair fight against her scalp. Its once rich blackness was now pierced by soft wisps of gray. She had never been a beautiful woman, but when Nance had first known her, twenty years earlier, she had been at least handsome. Now, in middle age, she was not even that. She was competent looking, Nance thought, like a well-tuned machine, and nothing else. "Get out," she had said when the guard had first brought Nance into the room. "Out, John -- I don't want you." Nance had shaken his head, grinned and waited for the guard to depart. Now, alone with her, he put his lips close to the glass and said, "No." "You don't seem to understand," Sarah said. "I don't want you." Nance said again, with certainty, "No." He shook his head. "I'm staying." "Have it your own way, you stubborn old man, but I'm not telling you a thing." Nance smiled at her and stuck a hand into the inner pocket of his worn suit. He pulled out a notebook, dropped it on the table and flipped through the pages. He stopped at one point and appeared to be reading, moving his lips slowly and nodding. Without looking up from the book he said, "I have a few questions." "I won't answer." Nance looked up at her and smiled again. He put his hand into his pocket and withdrew a thin, filter-tipped cigarette. He put the cigarette between his lips and lit it with a match. He tossed the match over his shoulder. "Still breaking the laws, I see," Sarah said. Nance took a casual drag on the cigarette and exhaled through his nostrils. "Law has no right to tell a man what to do for his own good. If I want to cut ten years off my lifespan with these things, it's my right." "Just don't get caught," she said. "I'm careful where I do my smoking. Only in safe places -- like jails and prisons." Sarah laughed, and Nance smiled. Nance placed the smoldering cigarette on the edge of the table. He asked, "Why are you lying?" "Who said I was lying?" "If you're not, then tell me why you killed Oakes." "It's in my confession... Read it." "Your confession is the biggest pile of rubbish I've read in my life. When I was a boy I got in the habit of reading mystery novels. Any writer who tried to use something as obviously phony as your confession would have got himself run out of the country." He flipped a page in his notebook, glanced down, then up, then down again. "You claim you killed Oakes because you were jealous of his work. To me that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense." "But it's the truth." Nance leaned far forward and put his lips against the glass. His jowls danced and quivered. "You say you were working late with him. You deliberately doctored his coffee with two tablets of lergic to it. He drank the coffee and the two of you went right ahead and worked for fifteen more minutes. Then, suddenly, he said he had to leave. He walked outside, sprinted down the steps and fell dead in front of four witnesses, including a deputy patrolman." "That's the way it happened," Sarah said. "You see, I didn't know he was going to slip out on me. I planned to hide his body in" "Oh, close your trap." Nance slammed shut his notebook. "And get a fact or two straight in your head. First, I'm your attorney and I'm going to get you off. You can't stop me, Sarah. Your Research Associates Incorporated, they can't stop me. And your government of the Western Hemispheric Union, it can't stop me either. Nobody can. Two weeks from today at the most you're going to be a free woman." "But I killed a man." N ance pulled his face away from the glass and opened his notebook again. He turned a page. "Tell me this much," he said. "Tell me why Oakes killed himself." His eyes leaped upward to meet hers. He was looking for something, if only a hint, but was met by blank indifference. "I killed him." "Why?" "Jealousy." "Why did you kill him so stupidly?" "Inexperience. I'd never killed anyone before." "You hated him?" "Yes." "Does anything ever excite you any more?" "No." "How can you hate without getting excited?" She raised her hands in surrender, sat back and tried a smile. "Don't cross-examine me, John. You're supposed to be on my side. There's no Adjudicator here to keep score." He leaned back in his chair and started smoking again. He said nothing until the cigarette burned his fingers. He dropped the butt and said, "You want to spend the rest of your life in prison?" Sarah shook her head weakly. Nance had hoped to surprise her and had succeeded. But he had done more than that. He had frightened her. "What are you talking about?" Sarah said slowly. "There's an old law dating back to the time of the death penalty that's never been changed because there's never been a real need to change it. The laws states that anyone pleading guilty to first-degree murder will be sentenced to life imprisonment without benefit of parole or treatment. There can't be any treatment because no evidence has been offered in court by which to determine the type and degree of treatment. Only two kinds of people ever plead guilty to murder, anyway madmen and fools. If you're one of them and want to plead guilty they'll lock you inside a battleworn prison and throw the key in the ocean." Sarah had been listening to him with total attention, nodding slowly. Nance said, "I'll ask my question one more time: Do you want to spend the rest of your natural life in a prison cell?" Sarah laughed sharply, then said softly, "God, no." "You're going to plead innocent then." "There's no way to get around this law?" "None at all. The law's the law, Sarah." "Then I'll do as you say." "Good." Nance settled back in his chair and smiled at Sarah. "I'm happy to see you again," he said. "Under these circumstances?" "Under any circumstances. It's good." Sarah smiled back at him. "You're looking fine, John." "I'm feeling fine. It's living out in the country away from all this bustle and noise that does it. It's enough to take ten bad years off a man's life. You ought to give it a try yourself. Find yourself a few acres. You might have to go all the way to Alaska, but you can find some if you look. Build yourself a small house and live there. Once you've tried it you'll never want to see a city again." She was still smiling at him, but the smile was tinged with irony now, as though she were laughing inwardly at a private joke. Softly. Nance said, "What was the nature of the work you and Oakes were doing?" The smile faded and Sarah said, "I can't tell you that." "Top secret ?" "Very." "Secrets aren't going to do you any good when they start cutting at your brain." "They don't do that, John. It's treatment." "Treatment that turns people into cows," he said and rose to his feet. He dusted his suit and straightened his tie. "Filthy places, jails. Man of my age ought not to hang around them." "You're leaving now?" "Got a few things to do," he said, moving toward the door. He rapped forcefully and heard the guard shuffling toward him. Then, wheeling his bulk, he turned on Sarah. "Oakes killed himself," he said. Sarah blurted, "No." "What I thought," Nance said. The guard arrived and let him out. II N ance established himself at the old Parks Hotel on Marshall Street off Reed Avenue. He was happy to see that, it hadn't changed much over the years. The windows were fully as filthy as ever. The carpet was worn and soiled. Dust floated through the air in steady rivers. The mattress was as hard as a rock. Nance was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette and trying to find a comfortable position when the knock came. "Willy?" he asked. "Yes, sir, Mr. Nance." "Door's open." Nance did not move to greet his visitor. Willy was a pallid little man of indeterminate age, slouched stance and a suit three sizes too big for him. "Been a long time," Willy said, approaching the bed. "I've missed you, Mr. Nance." "Missed you, too, Willy. There's liquor on the shelf over the sink." "Never touch it any more, Mr. Nance. Stuffs bad for the heart, you know." "You still work, however? You haven't relinquished that pleasure for the good of your heart ?" "No, sir. Still on the job." "Good." Nance rolled on his side so that he faced Willy. "I want information about three people in particular. One is my client, Sarah Bigelow. Another is the victim, Jeffrey Oakes. The third is a man named Karlton Cabot. He's chief project officer at Research Associates Incorporated, where both Sarah and Oakes worked before the trouble. I want every scrap you can find on all three of them, going back twenty, thirty years." Willy made notes in a small pad. "This might not be as easy as it sounds. The government is touchy about people asking certain questions." "You'll get around them, Willy. I have the greatest confidence in your abilities. Now, my second request: I want you to find out everything you can about the project Oakes and Sarah were working on. It's called Project Lazarus, a bit of information I had to pry teeth apart in order to obtain. And it's all the information I have, too. If you can find one bit more I'll pay you a five-hundred-dollar bonus." "Anything else?" "For the moment, no." Willy pocketed his notebook and allowed himself a wry grin. "It's good working for you again, Mr. Nance. It's like twenty years ago when we were on top of it all." "We're still on top, Willy." "Sure, Mr. Nance, of course. You were always the best. You got killers off that scared me to look at." "It was my job, Willy, same as your job is putting your nose into places it doesn't properly belong." Willy's grin enlarged. "You were always an honest man, Mr. Nance." "We're two of a kind, Willy. That's why we work so well together." Nance laughed and waved at the air. "Look at us, dressed like two mummies in a dusty museum. We should have died ten years ago and let them stuff us." "You keep smoking that tobacco and you're going to be dead." "A detective, Willy. Keep that in mind. You're a detective and not a doctor. Please keep your healthful hints to yourself." Willy chuckled. "You always were sensitive about those cigarettes." "I'll be in touch, Willy." "Right." Willy turned toward the door and took a step. He paused when he spotted a softcover book lying face-up on the carpet. "Red Harvest'V' he said. "You're really taking this farming life serious." " ' "Red Harvest," Nance said, emphasizing the first word. "Red, as in blood. It's murder that I'm taking seriously, Willy. Red, as in death." T he uniformed guard jumped forward and blocked the man's progress. "Do you have a pass, sir?" he asked. The guard was a young man, barely out of his teens, who wore a light fringe of red mustache on his upper lip. At his waist he carried a gun. "You have to have one to pass this point." Nance made a motion to push the boy aside, then thought better of it when he saw the hand reach for the weapon. "Hold on," Nance said. "I'm too old to get shot. I want to see Karlton Cabot. A surprise visit." "I can't let you through," the guard said, "not without a pass." Nance tried another tack. "Is there anything top secret about a man's office?" "I have my orders." "What if I were to scream?" "Sir?" "I said, 'What if I were to scream?' What if I were to stand right here in front of you, screaming at the very top of my lungs, until you agreed to pick up that phone and tell your boss that John Millburn Nance is here, that Nance pays his taxes and that Nance wants to see him?" The guard shook his head. "You're kidding." "Nope." "Well, I guess it won't hurt to call him." "If you don't I'll scream." As proof, Nance gave a shrill yelp. The guard reached quickly for the phone and dialed a number. N ance walked through the doorway, glaring at the lettering on the door that proclaimed. Karlton Cabot, Research Director, No Admittance. He slammed the door behind him. He faced the man he had come to see. Cabot was a distinguished man of about forty, whasat primly behind a hardwood desk, his hands firmly folded. Without preamble Nance said, "I don't like your security system." He was angry. He had wanted to arrive unannounced. Cabot grinned widely and waved a hand. Nance looked around for a chair solid enough to support his bulk, but the room was devoid of spare furniture. "There's no need for you to sit," Cabot said. "You won't be staying that long." "I have some questions." "Which I cannot answer because they violate security regulations. Correct?" "Is your security worth the price of someone's life?" "Quite often it is worth the price of many lives. But I don't think that's pertinent in this instance." "To me treatment meted to convicted murders is no better than death." "I don't want to argue metaphysics with you, Nance. If that's all you have to say, I wish you'd leave. I'm a busy man." Nance began to pace the length of the small office, forcing Cabot to follow him with his eyes. Nance said, "Do you know why he killed himself?" "Who killed himself?" "How about Jeffrey Oakes?" "Oh." Cabot grinned and clenched his fists tighter. "So that's going to be your defense. It won't work. Sarah confessed. Have you forgotten that?" "The confession was given under the shock of the moment. She intends to withdraw it." "I heard her make it," Cabot said. "She was cold as ice at the time." "You were here the night Oakes died?" "I was. I've never denied it. I arrived outside about ten minutes later. Sarah was confessing to the patrolman." "What's Project Lazarus?" Nance asked and stopped pacing long enough to Watch an expression of astonishment cross Cabot's face. It was gone as quickly as it had come. Nance resumed pacing. Cabot said, "I don't know what you're talking about." "You will -- and soon. I'm going to haul you into court, Cabot, you and the man who gives you your orders. There's one bit of information I'm going to give you in advance: Benson versus State of New Hampshire. All classified information essential to reaching a decision must be revealed. The case, in turn, takes on the classification of the material concerned. But the information is revealed; both sides know it. I haven't the least hesitation about turning this into a top-secret murder trial." "But there's nothing about Lazarus that has a bearing on your case. Nothing." "That's easy enough for you to say, Cabot. You know that and your boss knows that -- but me: I'm just a poor hick farmer with an interest in the law. I don't even know what Lazarus is about. Until I find out. I've got to act under the assumption that it does have a bearing, however tenuous, on my client's case." "Ask her to tell you. She knows." "I'm asking you, Cabot." "And I'm telling you Sarah murdered Oakes for purely personal reasons." "Cabot, Cabot." Nance sighed and stopped himself in the center of the room. "Sarah Bigelow never killed anyone in her life. You know that as well as I do. Don't lie to me." He went for the door and jerked it open. "Your boss has twelve hours in which to agree to answer my questions. Otherwise I'll see you in court." "You can't threaten me," Cabot said. "Go to hell." "It's not you I'm threatening. I thought I made that clear. I don't threaten the little ones like you. I hunt big game." Nance went out and hurried down the corridor, grinning happily. He swept past the guard, nodded at the man and continued toward the street. "An excellent move," he muttered to himself. "Classic strategy. Ought to keep them busy, busy." And: "Benson versus State of New Hampshire. Indeed. Oh, Lord, indeed." Nance slid into the seat of his helicar and laughed at the face that greeted him, grinning wildly, from the rearview mirror. N ance glared at the machine. Sitting behind a narrow table, his client at his side -- the machine covering the opposite wall and going beep and shiver, hum and click -- Nance frowned, stared. He did not like any machine of any sort, but his special and particular rage was reserved for this one. The Adjudicator had gone into operation eight years ago. The fact had only confirmed the rightness of Nance's previous decision to retire. The Adjudicator had taken the place of human judges and juries in major criminal proceedings. Civil cases and minor criminal actions were still handled in the old way, but whenever a crime was serious enough to warrant treatment for its perpetrator, the Adjudicator was wheeled into court and put to work. A nine-man special court of appeals automatically reviewed all Adjudicated verdicts, but not once -- not once in eight years -- had there been an overruling. Within the maze of its circuitry, the Adjudicator housed the entire known body of legal information, both statutory and common, and that extra-legal knowledge -- such as psychology, sociology, and history -- that mighty be required in order to arrive at a proper decision. For eight years these circuits had hummed and clicked, and not once had they been wrong. Such infallibility was not (of course) human. And so; Nance glared. A young man wearing bright blue coveralls who stood at the side of the Adjudicator cleared his throat and called the court to order. City versus Sarah Bigelow. Murder in the First Degree. While the formalities continued, Nance glanced around the room. It was nearly empty of life. There was the defense table, with himself and Sarah present. The prosecutor's table was occupied by City Attorney Frank Larrabie and two young assistants -- and there was the young man in the coveralls. But these were all. There were no spectators or newsmen. Odd, Nance thought. The young man had turned to Nance. "Flow does the defendent plead?" Nance rose to his feet, deliberately dusted his vest and looked at the man. "Who are you?" he asked, in a sharp, clear voice. "I'm the expert -- John Anders." "I see." Nance stroked his stomach. "You are in charge of this machine?" "More or less," Anders said. "But how do you plead?" "One moment. I've been in retirement for the past ten years, as you may know. This is my first machine-age trial. Fd like to get u few things straight. Can this thing speak?" "Of course it can," Anders said. "It is a fully equipped Adjudicator. But I usually handle these first details." "I see," Nance said. He sat down, waved a hand and said, "Not guilty." Anders turned toward Larrabie. "Prosecution's case?" approached the machine. He spoke directly to it, stating his case in plain, simple terms, telling exactly what he intended to prove. Nance listened attentively, less to Larrabie's words than to his tone and manner. He had hoped to pick up a pointer or two from Larrabie's presentation, but heard nothing but a dry, recital of facts. Larrabie's stated his arguments in clear and unemotional terms. There was no cry for retribution and punishment. Sarah Bigelovs had murdered Jeffrey Oakes. He. Larrabie, had proof of this. He would present his proof to the Adjudicator and allow the machine to act upon it. Larrabie Finished and called his first witness. This was a city medical examiner named Blaine, who had performed an autopsy on the deceased. Blaine, a little man whose feet barely touched the floor from a sitting position, testified that Oakes had been administered a sufficient to kill him. Oakes had a known history of allergies to cerdosage had been taken internally and had killed him within fifteen or twenty minutes, as soon as it reached his heart. When Blaine finished the Adjudicator spoke for the first time. The voice came from the center of the machine and said, "Cross-examination, Mr. Nance?" Nance stood up. The voice had been masculine and clear, with a definite sense of warmth and humanity to it. Nance wondered how this had been managed. The best way to get a public to accept a cold and unemotional machine would be to provide it with an attitude of warmth and human kindness. Nance stood in front of Blaine, blocking the man's view of the rest of the room, and said, "I undersolution in a cup of coffee." "Coffee was found in his stomach," Blaine said. "That is correct." "Don't most people fix and pour their own coffee?" "I suppose so," Blaine said. Nance turned quickly and glanced at Larrabie, but the prosecuting attorney did not appear to be listening. Nance shrugged and said, "Your report stated that murder was the most obvious possibility. Why murder, I want to ask. Why not suicide?" "There was no evidence of suicide. Nor motive." "No motive?" Nance assumed an expression of mock astonishment. "I'm an old man," he said, "and I can easily think of a dozen reasons why I ought to kill myself. And I'm a very stable man, on the record. Isn't it highly unlikely that Mr. Oakes was totally without motive for taking his own life?" In past trials he had known Nance would never have been allowed to introduce such a doubtful argument without opposition. He felt himself pausing for the objection, but it never came. The Adjudicator flashed and hummed. Larrabie sat at his table, staring into space. Blaine said, "I really can't say. I'm no philosopher." "Thank you." Nance returned to his seat. Larrabie then called two individuals to the stand who had witnessed Jeffrey Oakes's actual death. The first was a partolman, who testified that Oakes had approached him, stumbling, had collapsed at his feet and died before medical aid could arrive. The second witness was a young stated that she had seen Oakes fall, had gone to help him and had waited with the .partolman and several others foT an ambulance to arrive. Neither witness had heard Oakes speak before he died. Nance cross-examined the girl. "You say that Mr. Oakes said nothing in your hearing. In your opinion, could he have spoken?" "I think so," the girl said. "He mumbled and moaned a lot." "Then he could have spoken?" "I guess so." "Then, I wonder. If he had been murdered, if he knew the identity of his killer, why didn't he speak? Sarah Bigelow. He could have named her in front of a half-dozen reliable witnesses." The girl shrugged and said, "Maybe he was too busy dying." Nance thanked her and turned away. He was, he knew, getting away with murder, but in this case, murder would not help him. The Adjudicator knew the law. It would automatically disregard all illegal or irrelevant testimony. Nance could introduce the possibility of suicide all he wanted. The Adjudicator would consider it only if compelled to consider it. Nance felt hopeless. With a jury of men he had always known where he stood. He could tell by men's and women's expressions whether or not he was winning. But a machine? How did you read the expression on the face of a machine? What did the flashing lights mean? The harsh clicks? The dry hums? The next witness was Karlton Cabot. Under Larrabie's questioning he freely discussed the personal and professional jealousy that had existed between Sarah Bigelow and Jeffrey Oakes. Nance listened, tapped his fingernails and regarded the Adjudicator. Cabot talked for nearly an hour. At last, Nance was invited to crossexamine. He wasted no time. If he was going to be allowed to get away with murder, he intended to take advantage of the fact. H e approached Cabot and crowded close to him, not speaking. He peered down his nose at the sitting man and said, "What is Project Lazarus?" Cabot squirmed and Nance slid closer until the two men were nearly touching. "You must answer the question," said the Adjudicator. Nance grinned to himself and prodded the witness: "You are familiar with a Project Lazarus?" "I am," Cabot admitted. "Tell us what it is." "A top-secret, governmentsponsored research project which "You are in charge of this project?" "Of the research end of it, yes." "Both Mr. Oakes and Miss Bigelow worked under you?" "That is correct " "What was the nature of this research?" "That is classified." "I am aware of that. I want to know what it is that is top-secret." Cabot squirmed and looked wildly around for help. He found it. The Adjudicator began to hum like a bees' nest gone mad. "This line of questioning infringes upon areas of national security. I must ask you, Mr. Nance, to move into other areas." "But I have to know," Nance said. "It is not relevant." "I intend to prove differently -- that it is of the utmost relevance." "Mr. Nance, please," said the Adjudicator softly, as though correcting a child. "Knowledge of the basic nature of this project is available to me. I have studied it and assure you that it does not concern th is trial. Unless you can prove otherwise, I must insist that you pursue another line of questioning." Nance said, "Request an adjournment." "For what purpose?" "To gather evidence to show you that Tm right." "I will grant you an adjournment until tomorrow." "Thank you," Nance said and returned to his table. "Damn it," he told Sarah, "I can't work with this slot machine." "It doesn't matter," she said. "I'm guilty." "That's for me to decide," Nance said and hurried out. Willy was waiting in the corridor. "How did it go?" he asked. "I couldn't get in." "Who kept you out?" "Federal guards. They kept everybody out." Nance smiled. His threat had had some effect at least. "It was a bad day," he said. "Project Lazarus was declared officially irrelevant." "You still want to find out about it?" "Of course." "Then come along to my office. to talk." "Who?" "Name's Lawton. Says he's a friend of Sarah's." "He worked on Project Lazarus?" "He's still working on it." "What does he have to say?" "He won't talk to me -- unless you're there. He says he doesn't know me, that he's heard of you." "All right," Nance said. "Let's go." HI H ad henry w. lawton not been sitting all alone in a very large chair in the very center of a small but bare office, Nance might not have noticed him. Lawton was that kind of man, one of those you pass a hundred times a day and whose face and features make less of an ijmpression than a stray grain of desert sand. Nance guessed that while Lawton might well have been a friend of Sarah's, she was not a friend of his. In fact, she had probably never even noticed him. "She didn't do it," Lawton said as soon as Nance entered the office. Lawton looked at the floor as he spoke. "She couldn't have." "Who couldn't have done what?" Nance said. "Sarah couldn't have killed Mr. Oakes. What do you think?" Nance continued forward, pulled up a chair and sat down. Willy remained on his feet. Lawton continued to stare at the bare floor. Nance kept silent. At last Lawton looked at him. "Aren't you interested in what I have to say?" "Of course I am, Mr. Lawton. I'm merely allowing you to tell your story in your own good time." "I won't have to testify? This will be strictly between you and me?" "Of course," Nance said. He was using a new voiee, one that was nearly identical to that used by the Adjudicator. Nance like his new voice. "Tell me about Project Lazarus. What is it?" "What do you think?" "I'm asking you, Mr. Lawton." "Lazarus. The Bible. It has to do with making people live forever." Nance nodded slowly, as if he had known all along. "That's what Oakes was. He was immortal." "He was until someone murdered him." "Nobody murdered him. He killed himself." Willy interrupted. "A man who can live forever and he kills -- " "He was crazy," Lawton said. His eyes went back to the floor and he spoke rapidly. "I overheard him and Sarah talking a hundred times or more. She was going to be the next one, the next immortal. One more operation and... Anyway, he kept telling her not to go through with it -- and he was always arguing with Cabot and the others. He said they had destroyed his soul. He said he could see heaven and it was a glorious place and now he'd never get there. He was doomed to live forever on Earth. In hell, he called it." "So you think he killed himself. So that he could get to heaven." "He talked about it all the time. I heard him say he couldn't stand to look at heaven all day, knowing he'd never get there. They all knew he was crazy. At one time they were going to lock him up -- but they were afraid of that, too." "It doesn't make sense to me," Willy said. "Try handing me immortality and I'll show you what to do with it." "Don't get the idea I nean I have definite proof he killed himself," Lawton said. "I don't. In fact -- I didn't think of this before, but Cabot might have killed him. Or any of them. They were all afraid of him." "Why were they afraid of him?" Nance said. "Well, why do you think? They had everything tied up in this project. All sorts of government people were watching the program to see what would come of it. Everybody would like to be able to opt to live forever -- even me -- and here's the first immortal -- Oakes -- and he goes around talking about heaven and suicide. Sure, they didn't like it." "Cabot didn't do it," Willy said. "I checked. Sarah was the only one it could have been -- unless he did it himself." "Then he did," Lawton said, flatly. He looked right at Willy. "Sarah could never kill anyone." "I'm sure of that, too," Nance said. "And as for you Mr. Lawton, I want to tell you how much we appreciate your coming here. You may very well have saved our case for us." Lawton rose to his feet, happy to take the hint, and walked toward the door. He stopped, looked at the floor and said, "I sure hope it works out," and left. Nance folded his hands in his lap and sat quietly. Willy took the chair Lawton had vacated and flopped down. At last Nance asked, "Where did you find him?" "At home," Willy said. "I managed to get a list of people working on the project. I poked around in their lives and found Lawton. He was dying to talk, but only to you." "A very sensible man." "Don't tell me -- you believe him." "In part I do. It makes sense. Some of it. What else could Project Lazarus be? And there have been rumors. Yes, I think I do believe him." "But it doesn't really prove anything, does it?" "What do you mean, Willy?" "Look here, Mr. Nance. I've been thinking about what Lawton said. There's still no reason why Sarah couldn't have killed him. Oakes went crazy. He was endangering the project, maybe preventing her from achieving immortality. That gives her plenty of motive for murder. It makes good sense, too." "Yes," Nance said carefully. "It does, doesn't it?" "So, what are you going to do now?" "I'm going back to my hotel, draw a hot bath, sit in it, read a good book. Tomorrow I'll see you in court." "The won't let me in." "They will now. I'm sure they've found out all they need to know about Benson and the State of New Hampshire." "New Hampshire -- huh? What are you talking al?out?" "Nothing, Willy," Nance said. "Nothing at all." N ance sat at the defense table, his fingers tapping a rhythm, his eyes focused into space. Willy was seated tahis right; Sarahto the right of Willy. Nance tried his best to ignore a steady stream of prosecution testimony that first provided Sarah Bigelow with a motive and then established her opportunity to kill. Nance had decided to quit living in the past. If he wanted to win this case he would have to stop acting as if the time were twenty years ago. The Adjudicator did not care if he was alert and quick. It could not be swayed by an emotional appeal to the heart. The machine was only interested in facts. Well, Nance had a few of those up his sleeve. And his time was drawing near. The prosecution droned on. Morning became noon and noon turned into early evening. At four o'clock Larrabie wrapped up his case with a final summation that was notable only for its blandness. Ten years ago it would have put the best juries to sleep. But not the Adjudicator. Larrabie knew what he was doing. The machine appeared to listen intently, sifting fact from theory, waiting for the last flat languid phrase to fall from Larrabie's lips. When it had done so the Adjudicator said immediately, "Mr. Nance -- you may present your case now." Nance stood slowly and walked into the open part of the courtroom. Looking at Larrabie, he said, "I'd like to make a brief statement, then request an adjournment." "It is late," the Adjudicator said, at his back. "You may proceed." Nance kept looking at Larrabie. He refused to talk directly to a machine. Larrabie and his assistants would have to do. "I intend," Nance said, "to show my client's innocence by a method that is, I believe, without precedent. I intend to prove her lack of guilt on the grounds that Jeffrey Oakes is not, in actuality, dead." Nance peered closely at Larrabie, but the man's face was without expression. Nance said, "Jeffrey Oakes is not dead. In his own fashion, he is as much alive as Mr. Larrabie hereor myself. I intend to show that he is happy where he is and that my client has not committed an antisocial act. "I intend to ignore the question of whether she actually caused Jeffrey Oakes to leave this plane of existence. The evidence presented by the prosecution is both weak and circumstantial but, frankly, I have nothing that contradicts it. What I do intend to show is that Sarah Bigelow is not in need of treatment. The act of murder, in this case, is not antisocial. That is what I intend to prove." Nance was relieved as Larrabie jumped to his feet and said, "I object to this entire line of argument. This is the biggest pile of nonsense I've heard in my life." Nance turned to the Adjudicator and waited. The machine said, "Mr. Nance, I would like you to explain your arguments further. All my data insists that murder is an antisocial act under any circumstances." "I'll be glad to," Nance said. He turned again, so that he faced Larrabie. "Since the dawn of time man has speculated about the possibility of life after death, about immortality in one form or another. Nearly all religions have been based on the concept that a conscious spirit of some sort, survives after the death of the body. I intend to show that Jeffrey Oakes not only believed this, but that he knew it to be true. Whoever caused his death was only supplying him with the means by which to reach another plane of existence. Oakes wanted to go there. Putting him there was not an antisocial act." "Do you intend," asked the Adjudicator, "to prove that there are other levels of existence?" "I intend to show the likelihood of it. Within your data banks there is. I'm sure, a great deal of information on this subject." "There is," the machine said. "I intend, then, to use this information, plus that which I can present here, in order to show that Jeffrey Oakes is living on another plane of existence." "This will be tomorrow?" "Yes. I'd like an adjournment now." "Fine. I shall be anticipating tomorrow's testimony. Court is adjourned until ten o'clock tomorrow morning." Nance strode back to his table and began piling papers into a neat stack. Sarah stepped past Willy and grabbed Nance by the sleeve. "John," she said, "this is ridiculous." "Don't you believe in life after death, Sarah?" "I do not." "But Oakes did." "Whom have you been talking to, John?" "A friend of yours, " he said. "John," Sarah said, after a pause, "I want you to drop this." "Why?" "I'm guilty." "I know better than that." "But there's no need -- " "Will you talk to me?" he said. "Tell me everything. Tomorrow -- before court." "Yes," she said, "if you promise to drop this." "I can't promise that until I've heard what you have to say." He tucked his papers under his arm and waved at Willy. "See you tomorrow," he told Sarah. N ance, facing Sarah through the glass, folded his hands and waited for the guard to depart. When they were alone Nance still waited for Sarah to speak first. She said tentatively, "You won't give it up? You won't just go home and let me alone?" "I can't do it," Nance said, "even if I wanted to. I took your case because I wanted to take your case. I'm going to win your case because I've never learned how to act any other way and I'm too damned old to change." "How much do you know?" she said. "Nearly all of it. I know about Lazarus, if that's what you mean." "Who told you?" "It doesn't matter.". She sighed. "All right. I saw him put the pills in his coffee. He didn't try to hide it from me. I watched him drink, then he tried to leave. I wanted to stop him but he knocked me down. He wanted to die in public. And he did." "Why?" "He wanted to bring the project down with him. He was crazy. He knew if he died in the laboratory, we'd hush it up, call it a heart failure, so he went outside. The first immortal -- and he killed himself." "And then?" "So he was dead -- and there was no way to hush it up. Four people saw him die. The patrolman called an ambulance. I went out and I said I'd killed him." "To save your project?" "Yes, tb save it. They all understood. They told me to go ahead and take the blame -- they'd fix it up. I'll be convicted, yes, that's the idea, but then I'll be sent to a treatment hospital, one operated by be held a year -- five years -- ten -- how many it takes to complete the project. Then I'll come out. Free and immortal." "Then this trial means nothing?" "It means confirmation that Jeffrey was murdered. Murder is fine, but not suicide." Nance nodded thoughtfully. "Have you ever considered the possibility that Oakes was right?" "About the heaven he saw?" "Yes." "He was mad," she said firmly. "I intend to prove otherwise." She jumped and her fingernails hit the glass. Her face twisted and her jaws clenched. "Sarah," he said, "sit down." She sat. Nance said, "I'm a defense lawyer. Years ago I set men free who weren't fit to burn in hell. But I did my job. I defended them to the best of my ability. I'm going to do the same for you. I can't help it. I'm going to get you off." "No!" But she did not move. "Yes," Nance said. And: "I'm sorry." She said, "No," again, but softly, and began to cry. Nance said, "People live too long as it is." He went to the door, knocked, and the guard let him out. N ance was late. He walked hurriedly into the courtroom, Willy at his heels, and took his seat. When Sarah saw him she turned away and stared at the wall. Nance sighed, shuffled a handful of papers and tried to look inscrutable. The Adjudicator said, "Court has already been called to order in your absence, Mr. Nance. Would you care now to continue from the point at which we adjourned yesterday?" Nance nodded at the papers in his hand, said, "Gladly." He walked slowly across the room, glancing occasionally at the papers. He stopped when he reached Larrabie and looked at the man. "Ed like to begin," Nance said, "by introducing into evidence all of the information contained within the data banks of the Adjudicator pertaining to life after death or Project Lazarus." "That will be done," said the Adjudicator. Larrabie glared at Nance and stood. "One moment," he said. "I believe I have the right to examine all evidence used in arriving at a verdict." "That is correct," the Adjudicator said. "Well, I don't have it. I don't know what you know about life after death. I don't know a thing about Project Lazarus." "If you wish, a printout will be prepared containing my knowledge of life after death. I would estimate that such a printout will run "That won't be necessary," Larrabie said. "As for Project Lazarus, as you know, it is classified top secret. Two days ago, I ruled against its direct relevance in this case. That ruling is still in effect. However, if Mr. Nance wishes me to consider the nature of the project in arriving at my final verdict, that can be done without the necessity of direct testimony. My knowledge of the project would appear to be quite complete." "Good," Nance said, as Larrabie sat. Rubbing his hands together, Nance requested that his first witness be produced. Her name was Anna May Nelson. A guard brought her into the courtroom. She was a small, stooped old woman who wore a long black gown and a veil that covered her eyes. She took a chair near the Adjudicator, facing both tables, and folded her hands in her lap. The Adjudicator's expert swore her to the oath. The preliminaries over, Nance stood in front of the woman and faced Larrabie. "Anna May Nelson," Nance saidt "is an expert on the subject of life after death, which is why I have called her to testify in behalf of the. defense. She is a medium, one who can contact and speak with the dead. At the present time she is in direct touch with Jeffrey Oakes. I intend to question Mr. Oakes through Mrs. Nelson." Larrabie's lips pantomimed. Oh, my God bi. he said nothing aloud. Smiling, Nance turned to the witness. Her eyes were focused on empty space. Her mind seemed engaged elsewhere. Nance said, "Can you hear me clearly, Mrs. Nelson?" "Yes, sir," the woman said. Her voice was soft, as though it came from a long distance. "But it is loud -- the noise -- a humming -- too loud." Nance looked at the Adjudicator and raised an eyebrow. The machine stilled, fell silent, neither humming nor clicking. Nance turned back to his witness. "Mrs. Nelson," he said, "I would like to speak to Jeffrey Oakes. Is this possible?" A lengthy pause ensued. Sounds came from the woman's throat, few of them more than audible. none of them words. Nance looked around the courtroom. Larrabie and his assistants were listening, totally involved, on the edges of their seats. Sarah still faced the wall. The Adjudicator waited silently. A t last a voice said, "I am Jeffrey Oakes." The tone was firm and decisive. Sarah's head jerked up and her mouth opened. "And I, Mr. Oakes, am John Millburn Nance. I am speaking to you from Municipal Courtroom Number Seven. Every word you say can be heard by an Adjudicator. I want you to know this. I am an attorney. I am acting in behalf of Miss Sarah Bigelow who has been charged in connection with your death." The voice laughed sharply. Anna Nelson's body shook and quivered. "Why do you laugh, Mr. Oakes? Are you not dead?" "I am dead," the voice said. "How does it feel to be dead?" Nance asked. "It feels better than... I feel more truly alive than I've ever felt in my life." The voice laughed again, without any note of hysteia. "Could you describe for me and the court the world in which you now exist?" "I -- no, I don't think I can. Try describing your world to an amoeba." "But this world -- it is one in which you consciously exist as Jeffrey Oakes?" "Yes, it is." "And you have full memory of your previous life on Earth?" "I remember everything." "I see." Nance paused and swept his glance around the courtroom. Even Sarah, even Willy, everyone sat as silently as mice. "Your witness, Mr. Larrabie," Nance said. Larrabie left his chair and approached the witness. Nance stood nearby, listening, ready to interrupt if necessary. But no objections were needed. Larrabie tried, but his heart was no longer in it. He asked the voice for Oakes's birthdate and got it. He tried mother's maiden name. Friends in college. Favorite food. Choice of tailor. The voice had an answer to each question. Larrabie threw up his hands. "This woman has obviously been coached or given a good biography of Oakes to read. But it means nothing." "Ask her about Lazarus," Nance suggested. "You won't find that in any biographies." "Ask her yourself." Larrabie went back to his table and began whispering with his assistants. Nance asked that Karlton Cabot be returned to the stand. Cabot was brought in. Mrs. Nelson was led out. "How did Jeffrey Oakes feel about death?" Nance asked. He crowded close to the witness, so close that Cabot slid his chair back. Nance pressed closer yet and said, "Was he afraid of dying?" "No," Cabot said. "He -- " "He welcomed it?" "I didn't say that. I don't know. How should I know?" Nance moved in. "Isn't d that in the weeks immediately proceeding his death Jeffrey Oakes was obsessed with the idea of death?" "You might say that," Cabot said. "But the nature of Lazarus -- " Nance cut him off with a wave. "I would like to introduce into evidence," he said, "a series ot statements made to a representative of mine, before witnesses. These statements have to do with the attitudes of Jeffrey Oakes toward death. They were given by a group of his fellow employees at most closely with him immediately before his death. Let me read just one of these statements aloud. I believe it is representative of the rest." . "Proceed," said the AdjudicaLUl . Nance handed Larrabie all but one of the papers he carried in his hand. The remaining one he read aloud: "Jeffrey Oakes was a man consumed with the thought of death. He claimed that he could see heaven -- and that he had also found hell. Hell was on Earth, he said, and he welcomed the idea of death. He said he knew he would continue to live afterward. He made these statements all the time. I heard him say them to Karl Cabot and to Sarah Bigelow. It was the way he believed. I'd never met a man who wanted to die. Oakes was the first." Nance handed this paper to Larrabie, then turned to Cabot. "Would you like to say something about this?" "All right," Cabot said. "The statement is true. Oakes wanted to die." "Thank you, Mr. Cabot. I have no more questions." Larrabie refused to cross-examine. Nance waited at his table until Cabot had been escorted from the room. Then he said, "The defense rests." The Adjudicator, which had remained silent throughout Cabot's testimony, returned abruptly to life, clicking and humming as though it were considering the meaning of life, which in a way it was. Nance grinned at Sarah and winked. She sighed and smiled at him. N ance sat alone in his room. He still wore his old suit -- his courtroom suit, he called it -- but he had removed his shoes. He stared at his naked toes and wiggled them, each in turn, from left to right. Nance was waiting for the arrival of his visitor. He was not sure of the man's identity, positive only that he had to come. Nance sat uncomfortably in a hard-backed wooden chair. His feet rested on the bed. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, depositing the ashes neatly on the carpet. The remainder of the afternoon session had gone smoothly from Nance's point of view. When Larrabie in his summation had scoffed at Anna Nelson, Nance had offered to produce an additional one dozen mediums. Larrabie had not risen to the bait. When his own turn arrived, Nance had acted quietly and unemotionally. He had stated his arguments as quickly as possible and returned to his seat. Sarah Bigelow had not committed a treatable act. She had merely moved Jeffrey Oakes, who wanted to be moved, from one plane of existence to another. This was not, Nance had stated, an antisocial act. The Adjudicator's verdict would not be revealed until the following morning. Both sides were always allowed one extra day in which to produce additional evidence or testimony. If nothing happened, both he and Larrabie would be given copies of the Adjudicator's decision in the morning. It would be printed, final and irreversible. Nance lit another cigarette and coughed. The man had to come. Nance was tired of waiting. He wanted out of this city as quickly as possible. He got up to pace and thought about calling Willy. He forced himself to sit back down and decided he didn't feel like chatting. Somebody knocked on the door. Nance called, "Who is it?" "Karlton Cabot. I want to talk to you, Nance." "Door's open, Cabot." But the man who entered the room was not Cabot. This man was small, fierce-looking, and wore a crewcut. He held a cigarette in his left fist. Nance lit another of his own. "What happened to Cabot?" Nance said. "I left him outside." The man's voice was firm and commanding. "I'm his supervisor -- Clifton Ripley." "Pleased to meet you," Nance said. He didn't move from his chair. "Can't say the same," Ripley said. He dropped on the bed and glared at Nance. "You've ruined a project into which I've put twenty years of my life." "And saved a woman's sanity." "You know better than that, Nance. I'm sure she told you. She was only a diversion. Nothing would have happened to her." Nance said, "Better tell me what you came to tell me, Ripley." "You already know, don't you? Larrabie has been instructed to present testimony tomorrow that proves Jeffrey Oakes killed himself." Nance nodded. "So, you've got what you wanted," Ripley said. "You knew we couldn't call your bluff. A decision in this case -- on your termscould blow a hole right through what little stability this country has. That damned machine loves these little intellectual games. I could just see kills his wife tomorrow defends it on the grounds he was merely moving her to a new and better plane. And vice versa. And -- there's precedent." "It's your machine," Nance said. "A judge would have told me to shut my trap. When I brought that old woman into court he would've handed me six months for contempt." "The Adjudicator," Ripley said, "is like a child. It thinks like a tenyear-old prodigy and acts like one." He crushed his cigarette on the carpet and rose to his feet. "Your reputation is clean, Nance. You haven't lost a case. I hope this makes you happy." Nance said nothing and Ripley went to the door. He put a hand on the knob, turned and said softly; "Why?" Nance shook his head. "You have something against immortality?" "If it makes men mad," Nance said, "I do." "But," Ripley said, smiling grimly, "it doesn't. I had known Oakes for twenty years. He was always a very unstable man. Brilliant, yes. He had to be to head the project. But also unstable. And now the world wil know that he took his own life. We won't get another dime for Lazarus. It'll be filed away in somebody's vault. Top secret. Fifty years from now a hundred years -- maybe somebody will duplicate our work. Man will be made free to live forever. But that won't mean much to you and me, will it, Nance? We'll both be Jn our graves." "Good night, Mr. Ripley," Nance said. "Good night." N ance did not attend the following day's session. He did not want to see Sarah again. When he reached his home he called Willy. The information had been presented as Ripley had promised. Sarah had been set free. Oakes's death was officially regarded as a suicide. The Adjudicator's decision, whatever it had been, was gone, buried, erased, forgotten. The case against immortality was complete. Nance did not talk to his wife about the case. He sat at her side for an hour and told her about the city. Then he realized that he didn't want to talk about that, either. He fell silent, his mouth shut, and listened to the parts beneath her blankets go click-hum-click. Where are you? he wanted to ask her. Are you still there? Am I preventing you, like Oakes, from linding a better life elsewhere? Are you buried somewhere deep inside that mechanical monstrosity, waiting for the day when the switch is finally thrown and you can be free? Nance wanted to ask her these questions, but he did not. He was afraid that somehow she might answer. He reached down and gently drew the blankets away from the lower part of her body. He looked at the exposed parts and listened to them. Hum, they said evenly. Click, they added. Hum and click and click and hum. "I'm a lawyer," he said. "I do not compromise. My clients are given the best possible defense under the law. Guilty, innocent, whatever, my duty is to defend." He put the blankets back in place and smoothed the hair out of her eyes. It was too late for her. anyway. And too late for him as well. Nance stood up and walked outside. He strolled between the trees, looking at the blue sky, the pink clouds, the great white house in the distance. Nance moved through his own quiet world, but he moved alone. He would not visit her again today. Tomorrow would be soon enough to reestablish his routine. Today. Today, he wanted to live. of these two authors during one particular six-month period was entirely accidental -- yet your comments on each helped to fill in the picture, as witness the following: Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I would like to add a few observations to my response to your poll. I can only assume that adverse reader reaction to stories printed in Galaxy led to the poll. Not so the long-felt need for dialogue did. The December reader poll had been in the talking stage for a year. Ed.  hope you will not let such immaturities guide you in the future selection and editing of stories. To deny certain aspects of humanity is to distort reality. This is an injustice to the reader. To use asterisks in a magazine intended for the '"most intelligent, shockproof" etc., reader borders on the ludicrous and is a contradiction in terms. Admittedly  found I Will Fear No Evil offensive, not because of its emphasis on sex, however. The novel is badly written, poorly plotted... an insult to the intelligence. On the other hand, Silverberg's Urbmon series has sexual scenes that are handled with great skill and are meaningful. G. Buchanan Pittsburgh, Pa. The December poll results are still coming in and are being tabulated. As this goes into print, the overwhelming majority view is (Continued from page #) best expressed in the phenomenon of Galaxy's having once again gone monthly. During the six-month period from July to December you liked us. And you are beautiful -- bombs, bouquets and bullets notwithstanding. The National Rare Blood Club reports an unusually impressive response from your ranks to the page inspired by Robert A. Heinlein and  Will Fear No Evil (The #) -- so you are not only beautiful but rare. John Brunner, whose Easy Way Out will be featured in next month's issue, writes from London; Footnote to your editorial on The Raries.' Tm AB-Rh positive (# incidence, according to the figure you quote) and have been a blood donor since #. At least once during a donor session Tve been hauled out of line to provide blood for an operation currently in progress.  heartily support your recommendations. John Also featured in the May Galaxy will be a continuation of this report -- with emphasis on the results of the December poll. notices or other subscription correspondence should be sent to L.C. Murpny, Galaxy Magazine, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. # N ext year publishers with Christmas gift books in the works should probably send me galleys or manuscript copies or somethingby July. Otherwise they'll be in the dubious position now enjoyed here by Chelsea House, purveyors of the excellent The Pulps, an inch-thick, # Vi x II, copiously and expertly illustrated # nostalgic anthology edited by Tony Goodstone. Sam Moskowitz gets credit as "Research Consultant." Christine E. Haycock, M.D. (Mrs. Moskowitz) did the outstanding color photography of magazine covers from the famous Moskowitz collection. Almost everything about this book is top-drawer. Chelsea House's production job merits an even higher price-tag, considering the engraving costs and the enamel stock required to include that signatureful of cover reproductions. It's really a fine thing. I hope those of you who grew up in the days when newsstands were nearly hidden under garish shingles of products like Wonder and Jungle Stories got one during the gift-giving tide. If not, I hope you can still find one for yourself now that the daisies are up. Goodstone, an actor who doubles as a professional nostalgist -- he edited the Chelsea House reprint of the Johnson Smith catalogue -- knows his trade. In picture and story. The Pulps does exactly what its title implies; it recapitulates the sweep of the field from the earliest embryonic days of mass fiction at low prices unto its waning moments, taking in everything from the workmanlike to the ludicrously cliched, and from the straightforward to the raunchy, across the entire board from ranch romances to Terence X. O'Leary, dyno-blaster. You need no other history of the field. Even allowing for its narrower focus, Quentin Reynolds' The Fiction Factory has now been supplanted. And as for nostalgic impact, there's no contest at all. Mind you, you may have to turn your head off to the formalin editorial expositions that precede the gutsy samples of fiction Goodstone has selected. But these interjections are knowledgeable at least up to the limit of my poor power to assess, and maybe my slightly negative feeling about this aspect of the book is only a reflection of the very thing the book evokes so strongly -- a recollection of how vital and ebullient pulp prose was, even the trashiest of it. M ore issues at ha nd. the second book of criticism by James Blish, is now out. You have to order it by mail, most likely. You should. The price is #, and the address is Advent: Publishers, Inc., P.O. Box #, Chicago, The book is officially by William Atheling, Jr., with an introduction by James Blish. As Atheling, Blish built a reputation in the fan magazines over the years as an sf critic second only (perhaps) to Damon Knight. He brings a better general education but a somewhat less pellucid expression to the task than Knight does. This sequel to Advent's The Issue at Hand (#) if you don't have that one, either, now's your chance to order both at one stroke is put together from diverse sources, not all of them fanzines as such. There's an essay on Heinlein from the short-lived professional fanzine edited by Damon Knight and Lester del Rey after the first Milford Conference. Others were originally convention speeches. All of them first saw the light of reason within the general bounds of our parish, but the tone of this book is set by a bias toward longer, more thoughtful looks at science fiction than were evident in the first volume, which was nearly confined to short takes on contemporary numbers of the professional magazines. There are long essays on Abe Merritt and Theodore Sturgeon. There are long reviews, now cast as essays, on particular pieces by Heinlein, Kuttner, Sturgeon, Algis Budrys ("incestuous" is the word you're groping for), and others such as Brian Aldiss and Harlan Ellison, in somewhat shorter takes. There's a very good summation of the critical literature previously extant, and the obligatory put-down of Sam Moskowitz. (Sam kind of forces it on you, is what I mean; Blish, in a singular instaace, actually makes some points in refutation which strike me as valid observations unfraught by outrage. This is particularly remarkable in that in the customary case Blish is a ready outragee). Jim has a talent for enthusiasm, both positive and negative. In my book, he has an altogether exaggerated respect for Alexei Panshin's Heinlein in Dimension (Advent -- #), and to my mind Merritt's Ship of Ishtar has virtues as a story which are lost on Blish as a classicist. Nor is there really a lot to be gained by noticeably going out of one's way to slap at Judy Merril, who withdrew as a target some time ago. Etc. But these punctuations of mine are the kind of thing you say to each other over beer; they are intended as tokens of respect for the book as a whole, and for the man whose thinking is reflected in it. The essay on me, by the way, is a very long review of Rogue Moon, a book that went to the publisher as The Death Machine. (To correct Jim slightly, that remains my title of preference, with Halt, Passenger and The Armiger as alternates, in that order. Rogue Moon runs somewhat behind Sex-Gods of Luna, but as I grow older I tolerate Fawcett's reasons better... not that I agree with them). Anyhow, my major impression of that essay now is that I've had no idea I had as much in me as Jim finds. This leads me to wonder not only whether even the Blish intellect can avoid embellishment but also whether this cruder apparatus of mine makes only the already distressing number of faux pas it permits itself to be aware of. S AY, it's not too late to put in a bad word for The Andromeda Strain (Dell ##, #), Michael Crichton's supposedly science-fictional refiguring of the Guns of Navarrone formula. Full of speciously factual asides and inaccurate circumstantial portrayals of applied science and technology, this compendium of false leads, directionless plot turns and cheats on the reader, belies Crichton's noteworthy skill with words. No wonder it was a #-week best-seller in hardback. But it's a dog nevertheless. A.J. Fangguth's Christs to review. (Ballantine Book ##, #c). My friend Ed Coudal, SF fan and former top editor for a Chicago paper, who now leases boxcars in the same shop where I sell trucks, passed it over to me as one of the most striking books, period, in years, and certainly one of the wildest modern popular religious books ever. It's a series of short takes about the life of Christ; Langguth's device is to suppose that Christ is inexhaustible... but not always knowable. He appears in various guises in various what you may call alternate worlds. Not only that, but most of the supporting players for his role are well aware of his doom from the very beginning, and reminisce, and criticize this particular given performance, in not always reverent tones. At one particular instance, the player everyone thought was Peter turns out to be the real candidate. At another, the fellow Christ meets in the desert and suspects of being Satan turns out to be the Christ of the next oasis, with exactly the same suspicion. I'd like to make clear that this is by no means an irreverent book. Langguth's objective is to make the story point come alive again, and he does. He is a subtle, profound thinker as well as a delightful writer, and he has that inquiring mind we can all appreciate. I quote the opening selection in its entirety, hinting that the balance of the book may be intended as a provisional reply: "I have come to die for your sins," Jesus told a stooped figure passing him on the road. "Then what am I to die for?" the old man asked. Jesus took a small notebook from his pocket and copied the question. "If I may have your name and address," he said, "an answer will be sent to you."  You Will Enjoy terview with Keith Laumer by Richard Hill...  Remember Clarion by Damon Knight , . , Beer Mutterings, a column by Poul Anderson... Noise Level No. # by John Brunner . , , Neo-Classical Eschatological Bifurcation in Doc Savo age: Some Aspects by Greg Bendord. Plus, of course, the reviews, the letters, the Dialog, the Monolog and everything else that can be crammed in. Sample Subscription -- # issues for SI . S# per year. o P.OBox #, Santa Monica, Cal. # older brother, Stirron, succeeds to This is an obscene, book. It is the throne after an accident kills the autobiography of Kinnall Dathe old septarch, Kinnall is helped rival, descendant of Earthlings. He by his bondbrother, Noim, and is a prince of Salla, a province on bondsister, Halum. But blood-kin the planet Borthan. in the neighboring province of Borthan is ruled by the CoveGlin try to turn him over to Stirnant, a puritanical code that deron's vengeance, nies self. Even the pronoun is Kinnall escapes once more, finds never to be uttered hence the cover as a common laborer. He "obscenity" of the autobiography, decides to make his way as a comOnly between bondbrothers and moner with the help of H alum's bondsisters is any "soul-bearing" father, who controls trade in prospermitted. perous Manneran. Part Two A OF was favored by the gods. The air was mild and sweet, filled all the year through with the fragrance of flowers. Winter does not reach so far south and the Mannerangi, when they would see snow, go as tourists to the Huishtor peaks and gape at the strange cold coating of whiteness that passes for water in other lands. The warm sea that borders Manneran on east and south yields food enough to feed half the continent and to the southwest there is the Gulf of Sumar as well, with further bounty. War has rarely touched Manneran, protected as it is by a shield of mountains and water from the peoples of the western lands and separated from its neighbor to the north, Salla, by the immense torrent of the River Woyn. Now and again we have attempted to invade Manneran by sea, but never with any conviction that we would be successful, nor has there been any success; when Salla engages seriously in war, the foe is always Glin. Manneran, the city, must also have enjoyed special divine blessings. Its site is the finest natural harbor in all Velada Borthan, a deep-cut bay framed by two opposing fingers of land, jutting toward one another in such a way that no breakwaters are needed there and ships sit easily at anchor. This harbor is one mighty source of the province's prosperity. It constitutes the chief link between the eastern and western provinces, for there is little landborne commerce across the continent by way of the Burnt Lowlands and, since our world lacks natural fuels, so far as we know, airborne traffic is never likely to amount to much here. So ships of the nine western provinces travel eastward through the Strait of Sumar to the port of Manneran and ships from Manneran make regular calls on the western coast. The Mannerangi then retail western goods to Salla, Glin and Krell in their own vessels, reaping the usual profits of go-betweens. The harbor of Manneran is the only place on our world where men of all thirteen flags may be seen at once; and this busy commerce spills an unending flow of wealth into the coffers of the Mannerangi. In addition, their inland districts are rich in fertility, even up to the Huishtor slopes, which in their latitudes are unfrozen except at the summits. The farms of Manneran have two or three harvests a year and, by way of Stroin Gap, the Mannerangi have access to the Wet Lowlands and all the strange and valuable fruits and spices produced there. Small wonder, then, that those who love luxuries seek their fortunes in Manneran. As if all this good fortune were not enough, the Mannerangi have persuaded the world that they live in the holiest spot on Borthan and multiply their revenues by maintaining sacred shrines as magnets for pilgrims. One might think that Threish, on the western coast, where our ancestors first settled and the Covenant was drawn up, would put itself forward as a place of pilgrimage second to none. Indeed, there is some sort of shrine in Threish and westerners too poor to travel to Manneran visit it. But Manneran has established itself as the holy of holies. The youngest of all our provinces, too, except only the breakaway kingdom of Krell; yet by a show of inner conviction and energetic advertisement has Manneran managed to make itself sacred. There is irony in this, for the Mannerangi hold more loosely to the Covenant than any of us in the thirteen provinces; their tropical life has softened them somewhat and they open their souls to one another to a degree that would get them ostracized as selfbarers in Glin or Salla. Still, they have the Stone Chapel, where miracles are reliably reported to have occurred, where the gods supposedly came forth in the flesh only seven hundred years ago, and it is everyone's hope to have his child receive his adult name in the Stone Chapel on Naming Day. From all over the continent they come for that festival, to the vast profit of the Mannerangi hostelkeepers. Why, I was named in the Stone Chapel myself. neran and the longshoremen were at work unloading our cargo I collected my pay and left ship to enter town. At the foot of the pier I paused to pick up a shore pass from the Mannerangi immigration officials. "How long will you be in town?" I was asked. Blandly I replied that I meant to stay among them for three days, although my real intent was to settle for the rest of my years in this place. Twice before had I been in Manneran; once just out of my infancy, to be bonded to Halum, and once when I was seven, for my Naming Day. My memories of the city amounted to nothing more than vague and random patterns of colors: the pale pink, green and blue tones of the buildings, the dark green masses of the heavy vegetation, the black solemn interior of the Stone Chapel. As I walked away from the waterfront those colors bombarded me again and glowing images out of my childhood shimmered before my dazzled eyes. Manneran is not built of stone, as our northern cities are, but rather of a kind of artificial plaster, which they paint in light pastel hues, so that every wall and facade sings joyfully and billows like a curtain in the sunlight. The day was a bright one and the beams of light bounced gaily about, setting the streets ablaze and forcing me to shade my eyes. I was stunned also by the complexity of the streets. Mannerangi architects rely greatly on ornaments; the buildings are decked with ornate ironwork balconies, fanciful scrollings, flamboyant rooftiles, gaudy windowdraperies, so that the northern eye beholds at first glance a monstrous baffling clutter, which resolves itself only gradually into a vista of elegance and grace and proportion. Everywhere, too, are plants: trees line both sides of each street, vines cascade from window-boxes, flowers burst into bloom in curbside gardens and the hint of lush vegetation is evident in the sheltered courtyards of the houses. The effect is refined and sophisticated, an interplay of jungle profusion and disciplined urban textures. Manneran is an extraordinary city, subtle, sensuous, languorous, overripe. My childhood recollections did not prepare me for the heat. A steamy haze hung over the streets. The air was wet and heavy. I felt I could almost touch the heat, could seize it and grasp it, could wring it like water from the atmosphere. It was raining heat and I was drenched in it. I was clad in a coarse, heavy gray uniform, the usual wintertime issue aboard a Glinish merchant ship, and this was a sweltering spring morning in Manneran; two dozen paces in that stifling humidity and I was ready to rip off my chafing clothes and go naked. me the address of Segvord Helalam, my bondsister's father. I hired a taxi and went there. Helalam lived just outside the city, in a cool, leafy suburb of grand homes and glistening lakes; a high brick wall shielded his house from the view of passersby. I rang at the gate and waited to be scanned. A voice within the house, some butler, no doubt, queried me over the scanner line and I replied, "Kinnall Darival of Salla, bondbrother to the daughter of the High Justice Helalam, wishes to call upon the father of his bondsister." "The Lord Kinnall is dead," I was informed coldly, "and so you are some impostor." I rang again. "Scan this and judge if he be dead," I said, holding up to the machine's eye my royal passport, which I had kept so long concealed. "This is Kinnall Darival before you and it will not go well with you if you deny him access to the High Justice!" "Passports may be stolen. Passports may be forged." "Open the gate!" There was no reply. A third time I rang and this time the unseen butler told me that the police would be summoned unless I departed at once. I had not reckoned on any of this. Would I have to go back to town, take lodgings, write Segvord Helalam for an appointment and offer evidence that I still lived? By good fortune I was spared those bothers. A sumptuous black groundcar drew up. of a kind used generally only by the highest aristocracy, and from it stepped Segvord Helalam, High Justice of the Port of Manneran. He was then at the height of his career and he carried himself with kingly grace: a short man but well constructed, with a fine head, a florid face, a noble mane of white hair, a look of strength and purpose. His eyes, an intense blue, were capable of flashing fire and his nose was an imperial beak, but he canceled all his look of ferocity with a warm, ready smile. He was recognized in Manneran as a man of wisdom and temperance. I went immediately toward him, with a glad cry of "Bondfather!" Swinging about, he stared at me in bewilderment and two large young men who had been with him in his groundcar placed themselves between the High Justice and myself as though they believed me to be an assassin. "Your bodyguard may relax," I said. "Are you unable to recognize Kinnall of Salla?" "The Lord Kinnall died last year," Segvord replied quickly. "That comes as grievous news to Kinnall himself," I said. I drew myself tall, resuming princely mien for the first time since my sad exit from the city of Glain, and gestured at the High Justice's protectors with such fury that they gave ground, slipping off to the side. Segvord studied me carefully. He had last seen me at my brother's coronation; two years had gone by since then and the last softness of childhood had been stripped from me. My year of felling logs showed in the contours of my frame, my winter among the farmers had weathered my face and my weeks as a sailor had left me grimy and unkempt, with tangled hair and a shaggy beard. Segvord's gaze cut gradually through these transformations until he was convinced of my identity; then suddenly he rushed at me, embracing me with such fervor that I nearly lost my footing in surprise. He cried my name and I cried his; then the gate was opening and he was hurrying me within. The lofty cream-colored mansion loomed before me, the goal of all my wanderings and turmoil. chamber and told that it was to be mine. Two servant girls came to me. Plucking off my sweaty seaman's garb, they led me, giggling all the while, to a huge tiled tub, bathed and perfumed me, cropped my hair and beard somewhat and let me pinch and tumble them a bit. They brought me clothes of fine fabric, of a sort I had not worn since my days as royalty, all sheer and white and flowing and cool. And they offered me jewelry, a triple ring set with I later learned -- a sliver of the Stone Chapel's floor, and also a gleaming pendant, a tree crystal from the land of Threish, on a leather thong. At length, after several hours of polishing, I was deemed fit to present to the High Justice. Segvord received me in the room he called his study, which actually was a great hall worthy of a septarch's palace, in which he sat enthroned even as a ruler would. I recall feeling some annoyance at his pretensions, for not only was he not royal, but he was of the lower aristocracy of Manneran. He had been of no stature whatever until his appointment to high office had put him on the road to fame and wealth. I asked at once after my bondsister Halum. "She fares well," he said, "though her soul was darkened by the tidings of your supposed death." "Where is she now?" "On holiday, in the Sumar Gulf, on an island where we have another home." I felt a chill. "Has she married?" "To the regret of all who love her, she has not." "Is there anyone, though?" "No," Segvord said. "She seems to prefer chastity. Of course, she is very young. When she returns, Kinnall, perhaps you could speak to her, pointing out that she might think now about making a match, for now she might have some fair lord, while in a few years' time there will be new maidens ahead of her in line." "How soon will she be back from this island?" "At any moment," said the High Justice. "How amazed she will be, to find you here!" death. He replied that word had come two years earlier that I was mad and had wandered, helpless and deluded, into Glin. "Then," he said, "there were reports that the Lord Stirron had sent agents into Glin after you, so that you could be brought back for treatment. And lastly, this summer past, one of your brother's ministers gave it out that you had gone roaming in the Glinish Huishtors in the pit of winter and had been lost in the snows -- in a blizzard no man could have survived." "But of course the Lord Kinnall's body was not recovered in the warm months of the year gone by and was left to wither in the Huishtors, instead of being brought back to Salla for a proper burial." "There was no news of finding the body, no." "Then obviously," I said, "the Lord Kinnall's body awakened in the springtime, trekked about on a ghostly parade, went its way southward and now at last has presented itself on the doorstep of the High Justice of the Port of Manneran." Segvord laughed. "A healthy ghost!" "A weary one, as well." "What befell you in Glin?" "A cold time in more ways than one." I told him of my snubbing at the hands of my mother's kin, of my stay in the mountains and all the rest. When he had heard that, he wished to know what my plans were in Manneran; to this I replied that I had no plans other than to find some honorable enterprise, succeed in it, marry and settle down, for Salla was closed to me and Glin held no temptations. Segvord nodded gravely. There was, he said, a clerkship open at this very moment in his office. The job carried little pay and less prestige and it was absurd to ask a prince of Salla's royal line to accept it, but still it was clean work, with a fine chance of advancement, and it might serve to give me a foothold while I acclimated myself to the Mannerangi way of life. I told him at once that I would gladly enter his employ, with no heed to my royal blood, since all that was behind me now, done with and imaginary besides. "What one makes of himself here," I said soberly, "will depend wholly on his merits, not on the circumstances of rank and influence." Which was, of course, pure piffle: instead of trading on my high birth, I would instead here make capital out of being bondbrother to the High Justice of the Port's daughter, a connection that had come to me because of my high birth alone -- and where was the effect of merit in any of that? T he searchers are getting closer to me all the time. Yesterday, while on a long walk through this zone of the Burnt Lowlands, I found well south of here the fresh track of a groundcar impressed deep in the dry and fragile crust of the red sand. And this morning, idly strolling in the place where the hornfowl gather drawn there by some suicidal impulse, maybe -- I heard a droning in the sky and looked up to see a plane of the Sallan military passing overhead. One does not often see skyvehicles here. It swooped and circled, hornfowl-fashion, but I huddled under a twisted erosion-knoll and I think I went unnoticed. I might be mistaken about these intrusions: the groundcar just some hunting party casually passing through the region, the plane merely out on a training flight. But I think not. If there are hunters here, I am the prey they hunt. The net will close about me. I must try to write more quickly and be more concise; too much of what I need to say is yet untold and I fear being interrupted before I am done. Stirron, let me be for just a few more weeks! VIll T he High Justice of the Port is one of Manneran's supreme officials. He holds jurisdiction over all commercial affairs in the capital. If there are disputes between merchants they are tried in his court and by treaty he has authority over the nationals of every province, so that a seacaptain of Glin or Krell, a Sallan or a westerner, when hailed before the High Justice, is subject to his verdicts with no rights of appeal to the courts of his homeland. This is the High Justice's ancient function, but if he were nothing but an arbiter of mercantile squabbles he would hardly have the grandeur that he possesses. However, over the centuries other responsibilities have fallen to him. He alone regulates the flow of foreign shipping into the harbor of Manneran, granting trade permits for so many Glinish vessels a year, so many from Threish, so many from Salla. The prosperity of a dozen provinces is subject to his decisions. Therefore he is courted by septarchs, flooded with gifts, buried in kindnesses and praise, in the hope that he will allow this land or that an extra ship in the year to come. The High Justice, then, is the economic filter of Velada Borthan, opening and closing commercial outlets as he pleases; he does this not by whim but by consideration of the ebb and flow of wealth across the continent. The office is not hereditary, but the appointment is for life. A High Justice can be removed only through intricate and well-nigh impracticable impeachment procedures. Thus it comes to pass that a vigorous High Justice, such as Segvord Helalam, can become more powerful in Manneran than the prime septarch himself. The septarchy of Manneran is in decay in any case; two of the seven seats have gone unfilled for the past hundred years' or more and the occupants of the remaining five have ceded so much of their authority to civil servants that they are little more than ceremonial figures. The prime septarch still has some shreds of majesty, but he must consult with the High Justice of the Port on all matters of economic concern.' And the High justice has entangled himself so inextricably in the machinery of Manneran's government that it is difficult to say truly who is the ruler and who the civil servant. On my third day in Manneran, Segvord took me to his courthouse to contract me into my Job. I, who was raised in a palace, was awed to see the headquarters of the Port Justiciary; what amazed me was not its opulence (for it had none) but its great size. I beheld a broad yellow-colored brick structure, four stories high, squat and massive, that seemed to run the entire length of the waterfront, two blocks inland from the piers. Within it at worn desks in highceilinged offices were armies of drudging clerks, shuffling papers and stamping receipts. Segvord led me on an endless march through the building, receiving the homage of the workers as he passed their dank and sweaty offices; he paused here and there to greet someone, to glance casually at some half-written report, to study a board on which, apparently, the movements of every vessel within three days' journey of Manneran were being charted. At length we entered a noble suite of rooms, far from the bustle and hurry I had just seen. Here the High Justice himself presided. Showing me a cool and splendidly furnished room adjoining his own chamber, Segvord told me that this was where I would work. The contract I signed was like a drainer's: I pledged myself to reveal nothing of what I might learn in the course of my duties, on pain of terrible penalties. For its part the Port Justiciary promised me lifetime employment, steady increases of salary and various other privileges of a kind princes do not normally worry about. Quickly I discovered that I was to be no humble inkstained clerk. As Segvord had warned me, my pay was low and my rank in the bureaucracy almost nonexistent, but my responsibilities proved to be great ones; in effect, I was his private secretary. All confidential reports intended for the High Justice's eyes would cross my desk first. My task was to discard those that were of no importance and to prepare abridgements of the others, all but those I deemed to be of the highest pertinence, which went to him complete. If the High Justice is the economic filter of Velada Borthan, I was to be the filter's filter, for he would read only what I wished him to read and make his decisions on the basis of what I gave him. Once this was clear to me I knew that Segvord had placed me on the path to great power in Manneran. um's return from her isle in the Gulf of Sumar. Neither bondsister nor bondbrother had I had for over two years and drainers could not take their place; I ached to sit up late at night with Halum or Noim, as in the old days, opening self to self. Noim was somewhere in Salla, I supposed, but I knew not where and Halum, though she was said to be due back imminently from holidaying, did not appear in my first week in Manneran, nor the second. During the third, I left the Justiciary office early one day, feeling ill from the humidity and the tensions of mastering my new role and was driven to Segvord's estate. Entering the central courtyard, I caught sight of a tall, slender girl at the far end, plucking from a vine a golden flower for her dark glossy hair. I could not see her face, but from her figure and bearing I had no doubt of her, and joyfully I cried, "Halum!" and rushed across the courtyard. She turned frowning to me, halting me in mid-rush. Her brow was furrowed and her lips were tight together; her gaze was chilly and remote. What did that cold glance mean? Her face was Halum's face -- dark eyes, fine slim proud nose, firm chin, bold cheekbones -- and yet her face was strange to me. Could two years have changed my bondsister so greatly? The main differences between the Halum I remembered and the woman I saw were subtle ones, differences of expression, a tilt of the eyebrows, a flicker of the nostrils, a quirking of the mouth, as though the whole soul itself within her had altered. Also there were some minor differences of feature, I saw as I drew nearer, but these could be ascribed to the passing of time or to the faults of my memory. My heart sped and my fingers trembled and an odd heat of confusion spread across my shoulders and back. I would have gone to her and embraced her, but suddenly I feared her in her transformations. "Halum?" I said uncertainly, hoarse-voiced, dry-throated. "She is not yet here." A voice like falling snow, deeper than Halum's, more resonant, colder. I was stunned. Like enough to Halum to be her twin! I knew of only one sister to Halum, then still a child, not yet sprouting her breasts. It was not possible for her to have concealed from me all her life a twin or a sister somewhat older. But the resemblance was extraordinary and disturbing. I have read that on old Earth they had ways of making artificial beings out of chemicals, that could deceive even a mother or a lover with the likeness to some real person -- and I could well have been persuaded that moment that the process had come down to us, across the centuries, across the gulf of night, and that this false Halum before me was a devilishly clever synthetic image of my true bondsister. I said, "Forgive this foolish error. One mistook you for Halum." "It happens often." "Are you some kin of hers?" "Daughter to the brother of the High Justice Segvord." She gave her name as Loimel Helalam. Never had Halum spoken to me of this cousin -- or if she had I had no recollection of it. How odd that she had hidden from me the existence of this mirrorHalum in Manneran! I told her my name and Loimel recognized it as that of Halum's bondbrother, of whom she had evidently heard a good deal. She softened her stance a little and some of the chill that was about her now thawed. For my part I was over the shock of finding the supposed Halum to be another and I was beginning to warm to Loimel, for she was beautiful and desirable and -- unlike Halum herself -- available. I could by looking at her out of one eye pretend to myself that she was indeed Halum I even managed to deceive myself into accepting her voice as my bondsister's. Together we strolled the courtyard, talking. I learned that Halum would come home this evening and that Loimel was here to arrange a hearty reception for her; I learned also some things about Loimel, for, in the injudicious fashion of many Mannerangi, she guarded her privacy less sternly than a northerner would. She told me her age: a year older than Halum (and I also). She told me she was unmarried, having recently terminated an unpromising engagement to a prince of an old but unfortunately impoverished family of Mannerangi nobility. She explained her resemblance to Halum by saying that her mother and Halum's were cousins, as well as her father's being brother to Halum's. And five minutes later, when we walked arm in arm, she hinted scandalously that in fact the High Justice had invaded his elder brother's bridal couch long ago, so that she was properly halfsister to Halum, not cousin. And she told me much more. Halum, Halum, Halum. This Loimel existed for me solely as a reflection of my bondsister. An hour after we first met, Loimel and I were together in my bedroom and when her gown had dropped from her I told myself that Halum's skin must be creamy as this, that Halum's breasts must be much like these, that Halum's thighs could be no less smooth, that Halum's nipples would also turn to turrets when a man's thumbs brushed their tips. Then I lay naked beside Loimel and made her ready for taking with many cunning caresses; soon she gasped and cried out. But an instant before I would have taken her the thought came coldly to me, fVty, this is forbidden -- to have one's bondsister... and my passion left me. It was only a momentary embarrassment: looking down at her face, I told myself brusquely that this was Loimel and not Halum. My manhood revived and our bodies joined. Yet how intricately our loins are linked to our minds and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another! That evening my bondsister Halum at last returned from her holiday in the Gulf of Sumar and wept with happy surprise to see me alive and in Manneran. When she stood beside Loimel I was all the more amazed by their near twinship: Halum's waist was more slender, Loimel's bosom deeper, but one finds these variations even in true sisters and in most ways of the body Halum and her cousin seemed to have been stamped from the same mold. Yet I was struck by a profound and subtle difference also, most visible in the eyes, through which, as the poem says, shines the inner light of the soul. The radiance that came from Halum was tender, gentle and mild, like the first soft beams of sunlight drifting through a summer morning's mist; Loimel's eyes gave a colder, harsher glow, that of a sullen winter afternoon. As I looked from one girl to the other I formed a quick intuitive judgment: Halum is pure love, and Loimel is pure self. But I recoiled from that verdict the instant it was born. I did not know Loimel; I had not found her thus far to be anything but open and giving; I had no right to disparage her in that way. The two years had not aged Halum so much as burnished her and she had come to the full radiance of her beauty. She was deeply tanned and in her short white sheath she seemed like a bronzed statue of herself; the planes of her face were more angular than they had been, giving her a delicate look of almost boyish charm; she moved with floating grace. The house was full of strangers for this her homecoming party. After our first embrace she was swept away from me and I was left with Loimel. But toward the end of the evening I claimed my bondright and took Halum away to my chamber, saying, "There is two years' talking to do." Thoughts tumbled chaotically in my mind; how could I tell her all that had happened to me -- How could I learn from her what she had done, all in the first rujh of words? I could not arrange my thinking. We sat down facing one another at a prim distance, Halum on the couch where only a few hours before I had coupled with her cousin, pretending then to myself that she was Halum. A tense smile passed between us. "Where can one begin?" I said and Halum, at the same instant, said the same words. That made us laugh and dissolved the tension. And then I heard my own voice asking, without preamble, whether Halum thought that Loimel would accept me as her husband. L oimel and l were married by Segvord Helalam in the Stone Chapel at the crest of the summer, after months of preparatory rituals and purifications. We made these observances by request of Loimel's father, a man of great devoutness. For his sake we undertook a rigorous series of drainings -- day after day I kneeled and yielded up the full contents of my soul to a certain Jidd, the best known and most costly drainer in Manneran. When this was done Loimel and I went on pilgrimage to the nine shrines of Manneran and I squandered my slender salary on candles and incense. We even performed the archaic ceremony known as the Showing, in which she and I stepped out on a secluded beach one dawn, chaperoned by Halum and Segvord and, screened from their eyes by an elaborate canopy, formally disclosed our nakedness to one another, so that neither of us could say afterward that we had gone into marriage concealing defects from the other. The rite .of union was a grand event, with musicians and singers. My bondbrother Noim, summoned from Salla, stood up as pledgeman for me and ring-linker to be. Manneran's prime septarch, a waxen old man, attended the wedding, as did most of the local nobility. The gifts we received were of immense value. Among them was a golden bowl inlaid with strange gems, manufactured on some other world and sent to us by my brother Stirron, along with a cordial message expressing regret that affairs of state required him to remain in Salla. Since I had snubbed his wedding it was no surprise that he snubbed mine. What did surprise me was the friendly tone of his letter. Making no reference to the circumstances of my disappearance from Salla, but offering thanks that the rumor of my death had proven false, Stirron gave me his blessing and asked me to come with my bride for a ceremonial visit to his capital as soon as we were able. Apparently he had learned that I meant to settle permanently in Manneran -- and so would be no rival for his throne; therefore he could think of me warmly again. I often wondered, and after all these years still do wonder, why Loimel accepted me. She had just turned down a prince of her own realm because he was poor: here was I, also a prince, but an exiled one, and even poorer. Why take me? For my charm in wooing? I had little of that; I was still young and thick-tongued. For my prospects of wealth and power? At that time those prospects seemed feeble indeed. For my physical appeal? Certainly I had some of that, but Loimel was too shrewd to marry just for broad shoulders and powerful muscles. I concluded, finally, that there were two reasons why Loimel took me. First, she was lonely and troubled after the breakup of her other trothing. Second, Loimel envied Halum in all things and knew that by marrying me she would gain possession of the one thing Flalum could never have. My own motive for seeking Loimel's hand needs no deep probing to uncover. It was Flalum I loved; Loimel was Flalum's image; Halum was denied me, therefore I took Loimel. Beholding Loimel, I was free to think I beheld Halum. Embracing Loimel, I might tell myself I embraced Halum. When I offered myself to Loimel as husband, I felt no particular love for her and had reason to think I might not even like her; yet I was driven to her as the nearest proxy to my true desire. Marriages contracted for such reasons as Loimel's and mine do not often fare well. Ours thrived poorly; we began as strangers and grew even more distant the longer we shared a bed. In truth I had married a secret fantasy, not a woman. But we must conduct our marriages in the world of reality. And in that world my wife was Loimel. M eanwhile, in my office at the Port Justiciary, I struggled to do the job my bondfather had given me. Each day a formidable stack of reports and memoranda reached my desk; each day I tried to decide which must go before the High Justice and which were to be ignored. At first, naturally, I had no grounds for judgment. Segvord helped me, though, as did several of the senior officials of the Justiciary, who rightly saw that they had more to gain by serving me than by trying to block my inevitable rise. I took readily to the nature of my work and before the full heat of summer was upon Manneran I was operating confidently, as if I had spent the last twenty years at my tasks. Most of the material submitted for the guidance of the High Justice was nonsense. I learned swiftly to detect that sort by a quick scanning, often by looking at just a single page. The style in which reports andor proposals were written told me much; I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice. The style is the man. If the prose is heavy-footed and sluggish so, too, in all likelihood, is the mind of its author. A coarse and common mind offers coarse and common perceptions. I had to do a great deal of writing myself, summarizing and condensing the reports of middling value, and whatever I have learned of the literary art may be traced to my years in the service of the High Justice. My style, too, reflects the man, for I know myself to be earnest, solemn, fond of courtly gestures and given to communicating more perhaps than others really want to know; all these traits I find in my own prose. It has its faults, yet am I pleased with it: I have my faults, yet am I pleased with me. Before long I realized that the most powerful man in Manneran was a puppet whose strings I controlled. I decided which cases the High Justice should handle, I chose the applications for special favor that he would read, I gave him the capsuled commentaries on which his verdicts were based. Segvord had not accidentally allowed me to attain such power. It was necessary for someone to perform the screening duties I now handled and, until my coming to Manneran, the Job had been done by a committee of three, all ambitious to hold Segvord's title some day. Fearing those men, Segvord had arranged to promote them to positions of greater splendor but lesser responsibility. Then he slid me into their place. His only son had died in boyhood; all his patronage therefore fell upon me. Out of love of Halum he had coolly chosen to make a homeless Sallan prince one of the dominant figures of Manneran. others long before me -- how important I was going to be. Those princes at my wedding had not been there out of respect for Loimel's family, but to curry favor with me. The soft words from Stirron were meant to insure I would show no hostility to Salla in my decision-making. Doubtless my royal cousin Truis of Glin now was wondering uneasily if I knew that it was his doing that the doors of his province had closed in my face; he too sent a fine gift for my marriage day. Nor did the flow of gifts cease with the nuptial ceremony. Constantly there came to me handsome things from those whose interests were bound up in the doings of the Port Justiciary. In Salla we would call such gifts by their rightful name, which is bribes; but Segvord assured me that in Manneran there was no harm in accepting them as long as I did not let them interfere with my objectivity of judgment. Now I realized how, on the modest salary of a judge, Segvord had come to live in such princely style. So I found my place in Manneran. I mastered the secrets of the Port Justiciary, developed a feel for the rhythms of maritime commerce and served the High Justice ably. I moved among princes and judges and men of wealth. I purchased a small but sumptuous house close by Segvord's and soon had the builders out to increase its size. I worshiped, as only the mighty do, at the Stone Chapel itself and went to the celebrated Jidd for my drainings. I was taken into a select athletic society and displayed my skills with the feathered shaft in Manneran Stadium. When I visited Salla with my bride the springtime after our wedding, Stirron received me as if I were a Mannerangi septarch, parading me through the capital before a cheering multitude and feasting me royally at the palace. My first son, who was born that autumn, I named for him. Two other sons followed, Noim and Kinnall, and daughters named Halum and Loimel. The boys were straightbodied and strong; the girls promised to show the beauty of their namesakes. I took great pleasure in heading a family. I longed for the time when I could have my sons with me hunting in the Burnt Lowlands or shooting the rapids of the River Woyn; meanwhile I went hunting without them and the spears of many hornfowl came to decorate my home. Loimel, as I have said, remained a stranger to me. One does not expect to penetrate the soul of one's wife as deeply as that of one's bondsister, but nevertheless, despite the customs of self-containment we observe, one expects to develop a certain communion with someone one lives with. I never penetrated anything of Loimel's except her body. The warmth and openness she had showed me at our first meeting vanished swiftly and she became as aloof as any coldbelly wife of Glin. Once in the heat of lovemaking I used "#" to her, as I sometimes did with whores. She slapped me and twisted her hips to cast me from her loins. We drifted apart. She had her life, I mine; after a time we made no attempt to reach across the gulf to one another. She spent her time at music, bathing, sunsleeping and piety; I at hunting, gaming, rearing my sons and doing my work. She took lovers and I took mistresses. It was a frosty marriage. We scarcely ever quarreled; we were not close enough even for that. Noim and Halum were with me much of the time. They were great comforts to me. At the Justiciary my authority and responsibility grew year by year. I was not promoted from my position as clerk fo High Justice, nor did my salary increase by any large extent; yet all of Manneran knew that I was the one who governed Segvord's decisions and I enjoyed a lordly income of "gifts." Gradually Segvord withdrew from most of his duties, leaving them to me. He spent weeks at a time on his island retreat in the Gulf of Sumar, while I initialed and stamped documents in his name. In my twenty-fourth year, which was his fiftieth, he gave up his office altogether. Since I was not a Mannerangi by birth, it was impossible for me to become High Justice in his place; but Segvord arranged for the appointment of an amiable nonentity as his successor, one Noldo Kalimol, with the understanding that Kalimol would retain me in my place of power. You would be right to assume that my life in Manneran was one of ease and security, of wealth and authority. Week flowed serenely into week and, though perfect happiness is given to no man, I had few reasons for discontent. The failings of my marriage I accepted placidly, since deep love between man and wife is not often encountered in our kind of society; as for my other sorrow, my hopeless love for Halum, I kept it buried deep within me -- and when it rose painfully close to the surface of my soul I soothed myself by a visit to the drainer Jidd. I might have gone on uneventfully in that fashion to the end of my days, but for the arrival in my life of Schweiz the Earthman. IX Borthan. Before Schweiz I had seen only two, both in the days when my father held the septarchy. The first was a tall redbearded man who visited Salla when I was about five years old; he was a traveler who wandered from world to world for his own amusement and had Just crossed the Burnt Lowlands alone and on foot. I remember studying his face with intense concentration, searching for the marks of his otherworldly origin -- an extra eye, perhaps, horns, tendrils, fangs. He had none of these, of course, and so I openly doubted his story of having come from Earth. Stirron, with the benefit of two years' more schooling than I, was the one who told me, in a jeering tone, that all the worlds of the heavens had been settled by people from Earth, including our own, which was why an Earthman looked just like any of us. Nevertheless, when a second Earthman showed up at court a few years later, I still searched for fangs and tendrils. This one was a husky, cheerful man with light brown skin, a scientist making a collection of our native wildlife for some university in a far part of the galaxy. My father took him into the Burnt Lowlands to get hornfowl; I begged to go along and was whipped for my nagging. I dreamed of Earth. I looked it up in books and saw a picture of a blue planet with many continents and a huge pockmarked moon going around it and I thought. This is where we all came from. This is the beginning of everything. I read of the kingdoms and nations of old Earth, the wars and devastation, the monuments, the tragedies. The going forth into space, the attainment of the stars. There was a time when I even imagined I was an Earthman myself, born on that ancient planet of wonders and brought to Borthan in babyhood to be exchanged for a septarch's true son. I told myself that when I grew up I would travel to Earth and walk through cities ten thousand years old, retracing the line of migration that had led my forefathers' forefathers from Earth to Borthan. I wanted to own a piece of Earth, too, some potsherd, some bit of stone, some battered coin, as a tangible link to the world at the heart of man's wanderings. And I longed for some other Earthman to come to Borthan, so that I could ask him ten thousand thousand questions, so that I could beg a slice of Earth for myself -- but none came and I grew up and my obsession with the first of man's planets faded. Then Schweiz crossed my way. Schweiz was a man of commerce. Many Earthmen are. At the time I met him he had been on Borthan a couple of years as representative of an exporting firm based in a solar system not far from our own; he dealt in manufactured goods and sought our furs and spices in return During his stay in Manneran he had become entangled in controversy with a local importer over a cargo of stormshield furs from the northwestern coast. The man tried to give Schweiz poor quality at a higher-than-contracted price; Schweiz sued and the case went to the Port Justiciary. This was about three years ago and a little more than three years after the retirement of Segvord Helalam. The facts of the case were clearcut and there was no doubt about the judgment. One of the lower justices approved Schweiz' plea and ordered the importer to make good on his contract with the swindled Earthman. Ordinarily I would not have become involved in the matter. But, when the papers on the case came to High Justice Kalimol for routine review just prior to affirmation of verdict, I glanced at them and saw that the plaintiff was an Earthman. Temptation speared me. My old fascination with that race -- my delusion of fangs and tendrils and extra eyes -- took hold of me again. I had to talk with him. What did I hope to get from him? The answers to the questions that had gone unanswered when I was a boy? Some clue to the nature of the forces that had driven mankind to the stars? Or merely amusement, a moment of diversion in an overly placid life? I asked Schweiz to report to my office. H e came in almost on the run, a frantic, energetic figure in clothes of flamboyant style and tone. Grinning with a manic glee, he slapped my palm in greeting, dug his knuckles into my desktop, pushed himself back a few steps and began to pace the room. "The gods preserve you, your grace!" he cried. I thought his odd demeanor, his coiled-spring bounciness and his wild-eyed intensity stemmed from fear of me, for he had good reason to worry, called in by a powerful official to discuss a case that he thought he had won. But I found later that Schweiz' mannerisms were expressions of his own seething nature, not of any momentary and specific tension. He was a man of middle height, very sparely built, not a scrap of fat on his frame. His skin was tawny and his hair was the color of dark honey; it hung down in a straight flow to his shoulders. His eyes were bright and mischievous, his smile quick and sly and he radiated a boyish vigor, a dynamic enthusiasm, that charmed me just then, though it would eventually make him an exhausting companion for me. Yet he was no boy: his face bore the first tines of age and his hair, abundant though it was, was starting to go at the crown. "Be seated," I said, for his capering was disturbing me. I wondered how to launch the conversation. How much could I ask him before he claimed Covenant at me and sealed his lips? Would he talk about himself and his world? Had I any right to pry into a foreigner's soul in a way that I would not dare do with a man of Borthan? I would see. Curiosity drove me. I picked up the sheaf of documents on his case -- for he was looking at the file unhappily -- and held them toward him, saying, "One places the first matters first. Your verdict has been affirmed. Today High Justice Kalimol gives his seal and within a moonrise you'll have your money." "Happy words, your grace." "That concludes the legal business." "So short a meeting? It seems hardly necessary to have paid this call to exchange only a moment's talk, your grace." "One must admit, " I said, "that you were summoned here to discuss things other than your lawsuit." "Eh, your grace?" He looked baffled and alarmed. "To talk of Earth," I said. "To gratify the idle inquisitiveness of a bored bureaucrat. Is that all while, now that you've been lured here on the pretense of business? You know, Schweiz, one has always been fascinated by Earth and by Earthmen." To win some rapport with him, for he still was frowning and mistrustful, I told him the story of the two other Earthmen I had known and of my childhood belief that they should be alien in form. He relaxed and listened with pleasure and before I was through he was laughing heartily. "Fangs!" he cried. "Tendrils!" He ran his hands over his face. "Did you really think that, your grace? That Earthmen were such bizarre creatures? By all the gods, your grace, I wish I had some strangeness about my body that could give you amusement!" I flinched each time Schweiz spoke of himself in the first person. His casual obscenities punctured the mood I had attempted to build. Though I tried to pretend nothing was amiss, Schweiz realized his blunder and, leaping to his feet in obvious distress, said, "A thousand pardons! One tends to forget one's grammar sometimes, when one is not accustomed to -- " "No offense is taken," I said hastily. "You must understand, your grace, that old habits of speech die hard -- and in using your language one sometimes slips into the mode most natural for himself, even though -- " "Of course, Schweiz. A forgivable lapse." He was trembling. "Besides," I said, winking, "I'm a grown man. Do you think I'm so easily shocked?" My use of the vulgarities was deliberate, to put him at his ease. The tactic worked; he subsided, calming. Earth, the mother of us all. "A small planet," he said. "Far away. Choked in its own ancient wastes; the poisons of two thousand years of carelessness and overbreeding stain its skies and its seas and its land. An ugly place." "In truth, ugly?" "There are still some attractive districts. Not many of them, and nothing to boast about. Some trees, here and there. A little grass. A lake. A waterfall. A valley. Mostly the planet is a dunghole. Earthmen often wish they could uncover their early ancestors, bring them to life again and then throttle them. For their selfishness. For their lack of concern for the generations to come. They filled the world with themselves and used up everything." "Is this why Earthmen built empires in the skies, then, to escape the filth of their home world?" "Part of it is that, yes," Schweiz of people. And those who had the strength to leave all went out and up. But it was more than running away, you know. It was a hunger to see strange things, a hunger to undertake journeys, a hunger to make fresh starts. To create new and better worlds of man. A string of Earths across the sky." "And those who did not go?" I asked. "Earth still has those other of Velada Borthan and its sparse "Oh, no, no. It's almost empty now, a ghost-world, ruined cities, cracking highways. Few live there any longer. Fewer are born there every year." "But you were born there?" "On the continent called Europe, yes. One hasn't seen Earth for almost thirty years, though. Not since one was fourteen." "You don't look that old," I said. "One reckons time in Earthlength years," Schweiz explained. "By your figuring one is only approaching the age of thirty." "Also this one," I said. "And here also is one who left his homeland before reaching manhood." I was speaking freely, far more freely than was proper, yet I could not stop myself. I had drawn out Schweiz and felt an impulse to offer something of my own in return. "Going out from Salla as a boy to seek his fortune in Glin, then finding better luck in Manneran after a while. A wanderer, Schweiz, like yourself." "It is a bond between us, then." Could I presume on that bond? I asked him, "Why did you leave Earth?" "For the same reasons as everyone else. To go where the air is clean and a man stands some chance to become something. The only ones who spend their whole lives there are those who can't help but stay." "And this is the planet that all the galaxy reveres?" I said in wonder. "The world of so many myths! The planet of boys' dreams! The center of the universe -- a pimple, a boil!" "You put it well." "Yet it is revered." "Oh, revere it, revere it, certainly!" Schweiz cried. His eyes were aglow. "The fountain of mankind! The grand originator of the species! Why not revere it, your grace? Revere the bold beginnings that were made there. Revere ihe high ambitions that sprang from its mud. And revere the terrible mistakes, too. Ancient Earth made mistake after mistake and choked itself in error, so that you would be spared from having to pass through the same fires and torments." Schweiz laughed harshly. "Earth died to redeem you starfolk from sin. How's that for a religious notion? A whole liturgy could be composed around that idea. A priestcraft of Earth the redeemer." Suddenly he leaned forward and asked, "Are you a religious man, your grace?" I was taken aback by the thrusting intimacy of his question. But I put up no barriers. "Certainly," I said. "You go to the godhouse, you talk to the drainers, the whole thing?" but speak. "Yes," I said. "Does that surprise you?" "Not at all. Everyone on Borthan seems to be genuinely religious. Which amazes one. You know, your grace, one isn't religious in the least, oneself. One tries, one has always tried, one has worked so hard to convince oneself that there are superior beings out there who guide destiny -- and sometimes one almost makes it, your grace. One almost believes, one breaks through into faith, but then skepticism shuts things down every time. And one ends by saying. No, it isn't possible, it can't be, it defies logic and common sense. Logic and common sense!" "But how can you live all your days without a closeness to something holy?" I asked. "Most of the time one manages fairly well. Most of the time." "And the rest of the time?" "That's when one feels the impact of knowing one is entirely alone in the universe. Naked under the stars and the starlight hitting the exposed skin, burning, a cold fire and no one to shield one from it, no one to offer a hiding place, no one to pray to, do you see? The sky is ice and the ground is ice and the soul is ice and who's to warm it? There isn't anyone. You've convinced yourself that no one exists who can give comfort. One wants some system of belief, one wants to submit, to get down and kneel, to be governed by metaphysics, you know? To believe, to have faith! And one can't. And that's when the terror sets in. The dry sobs. The nights of no sleeping." Schweiz' face was flushed and wild with excitement; I wondered if he could be entirely sane. He reached across the desk, clamped his hand over mine -- the gesture stunned me but I did not pull back -- and said hoarsely, "Do you believe in gods, your grace?" "Surely." "In a literal way? You think there's a god of travelers, a god of fishermen, a god of farmers and one who looks after septarchs and -- " "There is a forte," I said, "that gives order and form to the universe. The force manifests itself in various ways. And for the sake of bridging the gap between ourselves and that force, we regard each of its manifestations as a 'god,' yes, and extend our souls to this manifestation or that one, as our needs demand. Those of us who are without learning accept these gods literally, as beings with faces and personalities. Others realize that they are metaphors for the aspects of the divine force -- and not a tribe of potent spirits living overhead. But there is no one in Velada Borthan who denies the existence of the force itself." "One feels such fierce envy of that," said Schweiz. "To be raised in a culture that has coherence and structure, to have such assurance of ultimate verities, to feel oneself part of divine scheme -- how marvelous that must be! To enter a system of belief -- it would almost be worth putting up with this society's great flaws to have something like that." "Flaws?" Suddenly I found myself on the defensive. "What flaws?" Schweiz narrowed his gaze and moistened his lips. Perhaps he was calculating whether I would be hurt or angered by what he meant to say. "Flaws was possibly too strong a word," he replied. "One might say instead, this society's limits, its -- well, its narrowness. One speaks now of the necessity to shield one's self from one's fellow men that you impose. The taboos against reference to self, against frank discourse, against any opening of the soul -- " "Has one not opened his soul to you today in this very room?" "Ah," Schweiz said, "but you've been speaking to an alien, to one who is no part of your culture, to someone you secretly suspect of having tendrils and fangs! Would you be so free with a citizen of Manneran?" "No one else in Manneran would have asked such questions as you have been asking." "Maybe so. One lacks a native's training in self-repression. These questions about your philosophy of religion, then -- do they intrude on your privacy of soul, your grace? Are they offensive to you?" "One has no objections to talking of such things," I said, without much conviction. "But it's a taboo conversation, isn't it? We weren't using naughty words, except that once when one slipped, but we were dealing in naughty ideas, establishing a naughty relationship. You let your wall down a little way, eh? For which one is grateful. One's been here so long -- years now -- and one hasn't ever talked freely with a man of Borthan, not once! Until one sensed today that you were has been an extraordinary experience, your grace." The manic smile returned. He moved jerkily about the office. "One had no wish to speak critically of your way of life here," he said, "One wished in fact to praise certain aspects of it, while trying to understand others." "Which to praise, which to understand?" "To understand your habit of erecting walls about yourselves. To praise the ease with which you accept divine presence. One envies you for that. As one said, one was raised in no system of belief at all and is unable to let himself be overtaken by faith. One's head is always full of nasty skeptical questions. One is constitutionally unable to accept what one can't see or feel and so one must always be alone. And one goes around the galaxy seeking for the gateway to belief, trying this, trying that, and one never finds " Schweiz paused. He was flushed and sweaty. "So you see, your grace, you have something precious here, this ability to let yourselves become part of a large power. One would wish to learn it from you. Of course, it's a matter of cultural conditioning. Borthan still knows the gods and Earth has outlived them. Civilization is young on this planet. It takes thousands of years for the religious impulse to erode." "And," I said, "this planet was settled by men who had strong religious beliefs, who specifically came here to preserve them and who took great pains to instill them in their descendants." "That, too. Your Covenant. Yet that was -- what, fifteen hundred, two thousand years ago? It could all have crumbled by now, 'but it hasn't. It's stronger than ever. Your devoutness, your humility, your denial of self" "Those who couldn't accept and transmit the ideals of the first settlers," I pointed out, "were not allowed to remain among them. That had its effect on the pattern of the culture. The consenters stayed; the rejecters went." "You're speaking of the exiles who went to Sumara Borthan?" "You know the story, then?" "Naturally. One picks up the history of whatever planet one happens to be assigned to. Sumara Borthan, yes. Have you ever been there, your grace?" "Few of us visit that continent," I said. "Ever thought of going?" "Never." "There are those who do go there," Schweiz said and gave me a strange smile. I meant to ask him about that, but at that moment a secretary entered with a stack of documents and Schweiz hastily rose. "One doesn't wish to consume too much of your grace's valuable time. Perhaps this conversation could be continued at another hour?" "One hopes for the pleasure of it," I told him. a long while with my back to my desk, closing my eyes and replaying in my mind the things we had just said to one another. How readily he had slipped past my guard! How quickly we had begun to speak of inner matters! True, he was an otherworlder and with him I did not feel entirely bound by our customs. Yet we had grown dangerously close so extraordinarily fast. Ten minutes more and I might have been as open as a bondbrother to him and he to me. I was astounded and dismayed by my easy dropping of propriety, by the way he had drawn me slyly into such intimacy. Was it wholly his doing? I had sent for him, I had been the first to ask the close questions. I had set the tone. He had sensed from that some instability in me and he had seized upon it, quickly flipping the conversation about, so that I was the subject and the interrogator. And I had gone along with it. Reopened to him. I was drawn to him and he to me. Schweiz the tempter! Schweiz the exploiter of my weakness, hidden so long, hidden even from myself! How could he have known I was ready to open? His high-pitched rapid speech still seemed to echo in the room. Asking. Asking. Asking. And then revealing. Are you a religious man? Do you believe in literal gods? If only I could find faith! How  envy you. But the flaws of your world. The denial of self. Would you be so free with a citizen of Manneran? Speak to me, your grace. Open to me. I have been alone here so long. How could he have known when I myself did not know? A strange friendship had been born. I asked Schweiz to dine at home with me; we feasted and talked, the blue wine of Salla flowed and the golden wine of Manneran -- and when we were warmed by our drinking we discussed religion once more: Schweiz' difficulties with faith and my convictions that the gods were real. Halum came in and sat with us an hour. Afterward she remarked to me on the power of Schweiz to loosen tongues, saying, "You seemed more drunk than you have ever been, Kinnall. And yet you shared only three bottles of wine, so it must have been something else that made your eyes shine and your words so easy." I laughed and told her that a recklessness came over me when I was with the Earthman, that I found it hard to abide by custom with him. At our next meeting, in a tavern by the Justiciary, Schweiz said. "You love your bondsister, eh?" "Of course one loves one's bondsister." "One means, though, you love her." With a knowing snigger. I drew back, tense. "Was one then so thoroughly wined the othei night? What did one say to you of her?" "Nothing," he replied. "You said it all to her. With your eyes, with your smile. And no words passed." "May we talk of other things?" "If your grace wishes." "This is a tender theme -- and painful." "Pardon, then, your grace. One only meant to confirm one's guess." "Such love as that is forbidden among us." "Which is not to say that it sometimes exists, eh?" Schweiz asked and clinked his glass against mine. In that moment I made up my mind never to meet with him again. He looked too deep and spoke too freely of what he saw. But four days afterward, coming upon him on a pier, I invited him to dine a second time. Loimel was displeased by the invitation. Nor would Halum come, pleading another engagement; when I pressed her, she said that Schweiz made her uncomfortable. Noim was in Manneran, though, and joined us at the table. We all drank sparingly and the conversation was a stilted and impersonal one until, with no perceptible shifting of tone, we found ourselves telling Schweiz of the time when I had escaped from Salla in fear of my brother's jealousies -- and Schweiz was telling us of his departure from Earth. When the Earthman went home that night Noim said to me, not altogether disapprovingly, "There are devils in that man, Kinnall."  sion," Schweiz asked me when we were together another time. "Can you explain it. your grace?" "You mean the prohibition against saying 'T and 'me?' " "Not that as much as the whole pattern of thought that would have you deny there are such things as 'I' and 'me,' he said. "The commandment that you must keep your private affairs private at all times, except only with bond-kin and drainers. The custom of wallbuilding around oneself that affects even your grammar." "The Covenant, you mean?" "The Covenant," said Schweiz. "You say you know our history?" "Much of it." "You know that our forefathers were stern folk from a northern climate, accustomed to hardship, mistrustful of luxury and ease, who came to Borthan to avoid what they saw as the contaminating decadence of their native world?" "Was it so? One thought only that they were refugees from religious persecution." "Refugees from sloth and selfindulgence," I said. "They left Earth long ago, thousands of years ago, because they felt its ways were shameful, and settled on another world where they hoped they could live in the rightful path. And their ways hardened there, so that they were mocked by those who did not share their harsh beliefs. So they migrated again, coming from that world to this. And, coming here, they established a code of conduct to pass down through the generations to protect their children's children against corruption." "The Covenant." "The Covenant, yes. The pledge they made each to each, the pledge that each of us makes to all his fellow men on his Naming Day. When we swear never to force our turmoils on another, when we vow to be strong-willed and hardy of spirit, so that the gods will continue to smile on us. And so on and so on. We are trained to abominate the demon that is self." "Demon?" "So we regard it. A tempting demon that urges us to make use of others instead of relying on our own strengths." "Where there is no love of self. there is neither friendship nor sharing," said Schweiz. "Perhaps so." "And thus there is no trust." "We specify areas of responsibility through contract," I said. "There is no need for knowledge of the souls of others, where law rules. And in Velada Borthan no one questions the rule of law." "You say you abominate self," said Schweiz. "It seems, rather, that you glorify it." "How so?" "By living apart from one another, each in the castle of his skull. Proud. Unbending. Aloof. Uncaring. The reign of self indeed, and no abomination of it!" "You put things oddly," I said. "You invert our customs and think you speak wisely." "Has it always been like this," Schweiz asked, "since the beginning #I settlement. "Yes," I said. "Except among those malcontents you know of who fled to the southern continent. The rest of us abide by the Covenant. And our customs harden: thus we now may not talk of ourselves in the first person singular, since this is a raw exposure of self, but in medieval times this could be done. On the other hand, some things soften. Once we were guarded even in giving our names to strangers. We spoke to one another only when absolutely necessary. We show more trust nowadays." "Bui not a great deal." "But not a great deal," I admitted. "And is there no pain in this for you? Every man sealed against all others? Do you never say to yourselves that there must be a happier way for humans to live?" "We abide by the Covenant." "With ease or with difficulty?" "With ease," I said. "The pain is not so great when you consider that we have bond-kin, with whom we are exempted from the rule of selflessness. And the same with our drainers." "To others, though, you may not complain, you may not unburden a sorrowful soul, you may not seek advice, you may not expose your desires and needs, you may not speak of dreams and fantasies and romance, you may not talk of anything but chilly, impersonal things." Schweiz shuddred. "Pardon, your grace, but one finds this a harsh way to live. One's own search has constantly been for warmth and love and human contact, for sharing, for opening -- and this world seems to elevate the opposite of what one prizes most highly." "Have you had much luck," I asked, "finding warmth and love and human contact?" Schweiz shrugged. "It has not always been easy." "For us there is never loneliness, since we have bond-kin. With Halum, with Noim, with such as these to offer comfort, why does one need a world of strangers?" "And if your bond-kin are not close at hand? If one is wandering, say, far from them in the snows of Glin?" "One suffers, then. And one's character grows tougher. But that is an exceptional situation. Schweiz, our system may force us into isolation, yet it also guarantees us love." "But not the love of husband for wife. Not the love or father for child." "Perhaps not." "And even the love of bond-kin is limited. For you yourself, eh, have admitted that you feel a longing for your bonsister Halum that cannot be -- " ly, "Speak of other things!" Color flared in my cheeks; my skin grew hot. Schweiz nodded and smiled a chastened smile. "Pardon, your grace. The conversation became too intense; there was loss of control but no injury meant." "Very well." "The reference was too personal. One is abashed." "You meant no injury, " I said, guilty over my outburst, knowing he had stung me at a vulnerable place and that I had overreacted to the bite of truth. I poured more wine. We drank in silence for a time. Then Schweiz said, "May one make a proposal, your grace? May one invite you to take part in an experiment that may prove interesting and valuable to you?" "Go on," I said, frowning, ill at ease.  "You know," he began, "that one has long felt uncomfortably conscious of his solitary state in the universeand that one has sought without success some means of comprehending his relationship to that universe. For you the method lies in religious faith, but one has failed to reach such faith because of his unfortunate compulsion toward total rationalism. Eh? One cannot break through to that larger sense of belonging by words alone, by prayer alone, by ritual alone. This thing is possible for you, and one envies you for it. One finds himself trapped, isolated, sealed up in his skull, condemned to metaphysical solitude: a man apart, a man on his own. One does not find this state of godlessness enjoyable or desirable. You of Borthan can tolerate the sort of emotional isolation you impose on yourselves, since you have the consolations of your religion, you have drainers and whatever mystical mergingswith-the-gods the act of draining gives you; but the one who speaks to you now has no such advantages." "All this we have discussed many times," I said. "You spoke of a proposal, an experiment." "Be patient, your grace. One must explain oneself fully, step by step." Schweiz flashed me his most charming smile and turned on me eyes that were bright with visionary schemes. His hands roamed the air expressively, conjuring up invisible drama as he said, "Perhaps your grace is aware that there are certain chemical substances drugs, yes, call them drugs that allow one to make an opening into the infinite or at least to have the illusion that one has made such an openingto attain a brief and tentative glimpse into the mystic realms of the intangible. Eh? Known for thousands of years, these drugs, used in the days before Earthmen ever went to the stars. Employed in ancient religious rites. Employed by others as a substitute for religion, as a secular means of finding faith, the gateway to the infinite for such as this one, who can get there no other way." "Such drugs are forbidden in Velada Borthan," I said. "Of course, of course! For you they offer a means of sidestepping the processes of formal religion. Why waste time at a drainer's if you can expand your soul with a pill? Your law is wise on this point. Your Covenant could not survive if you allowed these chemicals to be used here." "Your proposal, Schweiz?" "One first must tell you that he has used these drugs himself and found them not entirely satisfactory. True, they open the infinite. True, they let one merge with the Godhead. But only for moments: a few hours at best. And at the end of it one is as alone as before. It is the illusion of the soul's opening itself. Whereas this planet produces a drug that can provide the real thing." "What?" "In Sumara Borthan," said Schweiz, "dwell those who fled the rule of the Covenant. One is told that they are savages, going naked and living on roots and seeds and fish; the cloak of civilization has dropped away from them and they have slipped back into barbarism. So one learned from a traveler who had visited that continent not long ago. One also learned that in Sumara Borthan they use a drug made from a certain powdered root, which has the capacity of opening mind to mind, so that each can read the inmost thoughts of the other. It is the very opposite of your Covenant, do you see? They know one another from the soul out, by way of this drug they eat." "One has heard stories of the savagery of those folk," I said. Schweiz put his face close to mine. "One confesses himself tempted by the Sumaran drug. One hopes that if he could ever get inside another mind he could find that community of soul for which he has searched so long. It might be the bridge to the infinite that he seeks, the spiritual transformation. Eh? In quest of revelations he has tried many substances. Why not this?" "If it exists." "It exists, your grace. This traveler who came from Sumara Borthan brought some of it with him to Manneran and sold some of it to the curious Earthman." Schweiz drew forth from a pocket a small glossy envelope and held it toward me. It contained a small quantity of some white powder; it could have been sugar. "Here it is," he said. I stared at it as if he had pulled out a flask of poison. "Your proposal?" I demanded. "Your experiment, Schweiz?" "Let us share the Sumaran drug," he said. XI der from his hand and ordered his arrest. I might have commanded him to get away from me and never come near again. I might at the very least have cried out that it was impossible I would ever touch any such substance. But I did none of those things. I chose instead to be coolly intellectual, to show casual curiosity, to remain calm and play conversational games with him. Thus I encouraged him to lead me a little deeper into the quicksand. I said, "Do you think that one is so eager to contravene the Covenant?" "One thinks that you are a man of strong will and inquiring mind who would not miss an opportunity for enlightenment." "Illegal enlightenment?" "All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context. Even the religion of the Covenant: were your forefathers not driven out of other worlds for practicing it?" "One mistrusts such analogy. We are not talking of religions now. We talk of a dangerous drug. You ask one to surrender all the training of his lifetime and open himself to you as he has never done even to bond-kin -- or even to a drainer." "Yes." "And you imagine that one such a thing?" "One imagines that you might well emerge transformed and cleansed, if you could bring yourself to try," Schweiz said. "One might also emerge scarred and twisted." "Doubtful. Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul." "How glib you are, Schweiz! Look, though: can you believe it would be possible to give one's inner secrets to a stranger, to a foreigner, to an otherworlder?" "Why not? Better to a stranger than to a friend. Better to an Earthman than a fellow citizen. You'd have nothing to fear: the Earthman would never try to judge you by the standards of Borthan. There will be no criticisms, no disapprovals of what's under your skull. And the Earthman will leave this planet in a year or two on a journey of hundreds of light-years -- and what then will it matter that your mind once merged with his?" "Why are you so eager to have this merger happen?" "For eight moontimes," he said, "this drug has been in one's pocket, while one hunts for someone to share it with. It looked as though the search would be in vain. Then one met you and saw your potential, your strength, your hidden rebelliousness -- " "One is aware of no rebelliousness, Schweiz. One accepts his world completely." "May one bring up the delicate matter of your attitude toward your bondsister? That seems a symptom of a fundamental discontent with the restrictions of your society." "Perhaps. Perhaps not." "You would know yourself better after sampling the Sumaran drug. You would have fewer perhapses and more certainties." "How can you say this if you haven't had the drug yourself?" "So it seems to one." "It is impossible," I said. "An experiment. A secret pact. No one would ever know." "Impossible." "Is it that you fear to share your soul?" "One is taught that such sharing is unholy." "The teachings can be wrong," he said. "Have you never felt the temptation? Have you never tasted such ecstasy in a draining that you wished you might undergo the same experience with someone you loved, your grace?" A gain he caught me in a vulnerable place. "One has had such feelings occasionally," I admitted. "Sitting before some ugly drainer, and imagining he were Noim instead, or Halum, that the draining were a two-way flow " "Then you already long for this drug and don't realize it!" "No. No." "Perhaps," Schweiz suggested, "it is the idea of opening to a stranger that dismays you and not the concept of opening itself. Perhaps you would take this drug with someone other than the Earthman, eh? With your bondbrother? With your bondsister?" I considered that. Sitting down with Noim, who was to me like a second self, and reaching his mind on levels that had never been available to me before and he reaching mine. Or with Halum -- or with Halum -- Schweiz, you tempter! He said, after letting me think a while, "Does the idea please you? Here, then. One will surrender his chance with the drug. Take it, use it, share it with one whom you love." He pressed the envelope into my hand. It frightened me; I let it fall to the table as if it were aflame. I said, "But that would deprive you of your hoped-for fulfilment." "No matter. One can get more of the drug. One may perhaps find another partner for the experiment. Meanwhile you would have known the ecstasy. Even an Earthman can be unselfish. Take it, your grace. Take it." I gave him a dark look. "Would it be, Schweiz, that this talk of taking the drug yourself was only pretense? That what you really look for is someone to offer himself as an experimental subject, so you can be sure the drug is safe before you risk it?" "You misunderstand, your grace." "Maybe not. Maybe this is what you've been driving toward." I saw myself administering the drug to Noim, saw him falling into convulsions before my eyes as I made ready to bring my own dose to my lips. I pushed the envelope back toward Schweiz. "No. The offer is refused. One appreciates the generosity, but one will not experiment on his loved ones, Schweiz." His face was red. "This implication is unwarranted, your grace. The offer to relinquish one's own share of the drug was made in good faith and at nojittle cost to one's own plans. But since you reject it, let us return to the original proposition. The two of us will sample the drug, in secrecy, as an experiment in possibilities. Let us find out together what its powers may be and what doors it can open for us. We would have much to gain from this adventure, one is sure." "One sees what you would have to gain," I said. "But what purpose is there in it for -- " "Yourself?" Schweiz chuckled. Then he rammed me with the barbed hook. "Your grace, by making the experiment you would learn that the drug is safe, you would discover the proper dosage, you would lose your fear of the mind-opening itself. And then, after obtaining a further supply of the drug, you would be properly prepared to use it for a purpose from which your fears now hold you back. You could take the drug together with the only person whom you truly love. You could use it to open your mind to your bondsister Halum and to open hers to you." T here is a story they tell children who are still learning the Covenant -- about the days when the gods had not yet ceased to walk the world in human form and the first men had not yet arrived on Borthan. The gods at that time did not know they were divine, for they had no mortals about them for comparison, and so they were innocent beings, unaware of their powers, who lived in a simple way. They dwelled in Manneran (this is the source of Manneran's claim to superior holiness, the legend that it was once the home of the gods), ate berries and leaves and went without clothing except in the mild Mannerangi winter, when they threw shawls of animal hide loosely over their shoulders. And there was nothing godlike about them. One day two of these ungodlike gods decided they would go off to see something of the world. The idea for making such a journey came first to the god whose secret name is Kinnall, now the god who looks after wayfarers. (Yes, he for whom I was named.) This Kinnall invited the goddess Thirga to join him, she whose responsibility now is the protection of those who are in love. Thirga shared Kinnall's restlessness and off they went. From Manneran they walked west along the southern coast until they came to the shores of the Gulf of Sumar. Then they turned north and passed through Stroin Gap just by the place where the Huishtor Mountains come to an end. They entered the Wet Lowlands and stayed there a while, then proceeded to the Burnt Lowlands, which they found less to their liking. Finally they ventured into the Frozen Lowlands, where they thought they would perish of the cold. So they turned south again and this time they also walked to the west and shortly found themselves staring at the inland slopes of the Threishtor Mountains. There seemed no way for them to cross over this mighty range. They followed its eastern foothills south, but could not get out of the Burnt Lowlands and they suffered great hardships, until at last they stumbled upon Threish Gage. They made their way through that difficult pass into the cool and foggy province of Threish. On their first day in Threish the two gods discovered a place where a spring flowed out of a hillside. The opening in the hillside was nine-sided and the rock surrounding the opening was so bright that it dazzled the eye. It rippled and iridesced and glowed with many colors constantly pulsing and changing, red and green and violet and ivory and turquoise and many more. And the water that came forth was of the same shimmering quality, having in it every color anyone ever had seen. The streem flowed only a short distance this way and then was lost in the waters of a much larger brook, in which all the wondrous colors vanished. Kinnall said, "We have wandered a long while in the Burnt Lowlands and our throats are dry from thirst. Shall we drink?" And Thirga said, "Yes, let us drink." She kneeled by the opening in the hillside. She cupped her hands, filled them with the glittering water and poured it into her mouth. Kinnall drank also and the taste of the water was so sweet that they thrust their faces right against the flow of the spring, gulping down all they could. As they did this they experienced strange sensations of their bodies and minds. Kinnall looked toward Thirga and realized that he could see the thoughts within her soul and they were thoughts of love for him. She looked toward him and saw his thoughts as well. "We are different now," Kinnall said and he did not even need words to convey his meaning, for Thirga understood him as soon as his thought formed. And she replied, "No, we are not different, but are merely able to understand the use of the gifts we have always had." And it was true. For they had many gifts and they had never used them before. They could rise in the air and travel like birds; they could change the shapes of their bodies; they could walk through the Burnt Lowlands or the Frozen Lowlands and feel no discomfort; they could live without taking in food; they could halt the aging of their flesh and become as young as they pleased; they could speak without saying words. All these things they might have donebefore coming to the spring, except that they had not known how. Now they were capable of using the skills with which they had been born. They had learned, by drinking the water of the bright spring, how to go about being gods. E ven so, they did not yet know that they were gods. They drank at the wonderful spring again, but it taught them nothing that the first gulp had not already showed them, so they moved onward through Threish. Everything they beheld now was transformed, taking on a jeweled beauty, a magical luminous brilliance, and they were stunned by the wonder of their change. And everything they saw they shared with one another, for their souls were in perfect communion and full harmony. After some time they remembered the others who lived in Manneran, and flew back to tell them about the spring. The journey took only an instant. All their friends crowded around as Kinnall and Thirga spoke of the miracle of the spring and demonstrated the powers they had mastered. When they were done, everyone in Manneran resolved to go to the spring. A long procession set out through Stroin Gap and the Wet Lowlands and up the eastern slopes of the Threishtors to Threish Gate. Kinnall and Thirga flew above the travelers, guiding them from day to day. Eventually they reached the place of the spring and one by one they drank of it and became as gods. Then they scattered, some returning to Manneran, some going to Salla, some going even to Sumera Borthan or the far continents of Umbis, Dabis and Tribis, since, now that they were as gods, there were no limits on the speed of their travel and they wished to see those strange places. But Kinnall and Thirga settled down beside the spring in eastern Threish and were content to explore one another's souls. Many years passed and the starship of our forefathers came down in Threish, near the western shore. Men had at last reached Borthan. They built a small town and went about the task of collecting food for themselves. A certain man named Digant, who was among these settlers, ventured deep into the forest in search of meat animals. He became lost and roamed until finally he came to the place where Kinnall and Thirga lived. He had never seen any such as they before, nor they anyone such as he. "What sort of creatures are you?" he asked. Kinnall replied. "Once we were quite ordinary, but now we do quite well, for we never grow old. We can fly faster than any bird, our souls are open to each other and we can take on any shape we please." "Why, then you are gods!" Digant cried. "Gods? What are gods?" Digant explained that he was a man and had no such powers as theirs, for men must use words to talk and can neither fly nor change their shape. Men grow older with each journey of the world around the sun, until the time of dying comes. Kinnall and Thirga listened with care, comparing themselves to Digant, and when he was done speaking they knew it was true that he was a man and they were gods. "Once we were almost like men ourselves," Thirga admitted. "We felt hunger and grew old and spoke only by means of words and had to put one foot in front of the other to get from place to place. We lived like men out of ignorance, for we did not know our powers. But then things changed." "And what changed them?" Digant asked. "Why," said Kinnall in his innocence, "we drank from that glistening spring and the water of it opened our eyes to our powers and allowed us to become as gods. That was all." Then Digant's soul surged with excitement, for he told himself that he, too, could drink from the spring and then he would Join this pair in godhood. He would keep the spring a secret afterward, when he returned to the settlers on the coast, and they would worship him as their living god and treat him with reverence, or he would destroy them. But Digant did not dare ask Kinnall and Thirga to let him drink from the spring, for he feared that they would refuse him, being jealous of their divinity. So he hatched a scheme to get them away from that place. Is it true," he asked them, "That you can travel so fast that you are able to visit every part of this world in a single day?" Kinnall assured him that this was true. "It seems difficult to believe," said Digant. "We will give you proof," Thirga said. She touched her hand to Kinnail's and the two gods went aloft. They soared to the highest peak of the Threishtors and gathered snowflowers there; they descended into the Burnt Lowlands and scooped up a handful of the red soil; in the Wet Lowlands they collected herbs; by the Gulf of Sumar they took some liquor from a fleshtree; on the shores of the Polar Gulf they pried up a sample of the eternal ice; then they leaped over the top of the world to frosty Tibis and began their journey through the far continents, so that they might bring back to the doubting Digant something from every part of the world. T he moment Kinnall and Thirga had departed oVi this enterprise Digant rushed to the spring of miracles. There he hesitated briefly, afraid that the gods might return suddenly and strike him down for his boldness; but they did not appear and Digant thrust his face into the Ilow and drank deeply, thinking. Now I, too, shall be as a god. He filled his gut with the glowing water, swayed, grew dizzy and fell to the ground. Is this godhood? He wondered. He tried to fly and could not. He tried to change his shape and could not. He failed in all these things because he had been a man to begin with and not a god. The spring could not change a man into a god, but could only help a god to realize his full powers. But the spring gave Digant one gift. It enabled him to reach into the minds of the other men who had settled in Threish. As he lay on the ground, numb with disappointment, he heard a tiny tickling sound in the middle of his mind and paid close heed to it and realized he was hearing the minds of his friends. And he found a way of amplifying the sound so that he could hear everything clearly: yes, and this was the mind of his wife, and this was the mind of his sister, and this was the mind of his sister's husband -- Digant could look into any of them and any other mind, reading the innermost thoughts. This is godhood, he told himself. And he probed their minds deeply, flushing out all their secrets. Steadily he increased the scope of his power until every mind at once was connected to his. Forth from them he drew the privacies of their souls, until, intoxicated with his new power, swollen with the pride of his godhood, he sent out a message to all those minds from his When this terrible voice broke into their minds many of the settlers in Threish fell down dead with shock. Others lost their sanity and others ran about in wild terror, crying, "Digant has invaded our minds! Digant has invaded our minds!" And the waves of fear and pain coming out of them were so intense that Digant himself suffered greatly, falling into a paralysis and stupor, though his dazed time that great cry went forth, more settlers died and more lost their reason and Digant, responding to the mental tumults he had caused, writhed and shook in agony, wholly unable to control the powers of his brain. Kinnal and Thirga were in Dabis when this occured, drawing forth from a marsh a triple-headed worm to show to Digant. The bellowings of Digant's mind sped around the world even to Dabis and, hearing those sounds, Kinnall and Thirga left off what they were doing and hurried back to Threish. They found Digant close to death, his brain all but burned out. They found the settlers of Threish dead or mad and they knew at once how this had come to pass. Swiftly they brought an end to Digant's life, so that there would be silence in Threish. Then they went among the victims of the would-be god and raised all the dead and healed all the injured. And lastly they sealed the opening in the hillside with a seal that could not be broken, for it was plain to them that men must not drink of that spring, but only gods, and all the gods had already taken their draughts of it. The people of Threish fell on their knees before those two and asked in awe, "Who are you?" And Kinnall and Thirga replied, "We are gods and you are only men." And that was the beginning of the end of the innocence of the gods. And after that time it was forbidden among men to seek ways of speaking mind to mind, because of the harm that Digant had done. And it was written into the Covenant that one must keep one's soul apart from the souls of others, since only gods can mingle souls without destroying one another and we are not gods. reasons to postpone taking the Sumaran drug with Schweiz. First, High Justice Kalimol departed on a hunting trip and I told Schweiz that the doubled pressures of my work in his absence made it impossible for me to undertake the experiment just then. Kalimol returned; Halum fell ill; I used my worry over her as the next excuse. Halum recovered; Noim invited Loimel and myself to spend a holiday at his lodge in southern Salla. We came back from Salla; war broke out between Salla and Glin, creating complex maritime problems for me at the Justiciary. And so the weeks went. Schweiz grew impatient. Did I mean to take the drug at all? I could not give him an answer. I did not truly know. But always there burned in me the temptation he had planted there. To reach out, godlike, and enter Halum's soul. I went to the Stone Chapel, waited until Jidd could see me and let myself be drained. But I kept back from Jidd all mention of Schweiz and his drug, fearing to reveal that I toyed with such dangerous amusements. Therefore the draining was a failure, since I had not fully opened my soul to the drainer; and I left the Stone Chapel with a congestion of the spirit, tense and morose. I saw clearly now that I must necessarily yield to Schweiz, that what he offered was an ordeal through which I must pass, for there was no escaping it. He had found me out. Beneath my piety I was a potential traitor to the Covenant. I went to him. "Today," I said. "Now." Port Justiciary maintains a country lodge in the hills, two hours northwest of the city of Manneran, where visiting dignitaries are entertained and treaties of trade negotiated. I knew that this lodge was not currently in use and reserved it for myself for a three-day span. At midday I picked Schweiz up in a Justiciary car and drove quickly out of the city. The lodge had an excellent steam bath. We scrubbed ourselves vigorously and when we came out we donned loose, comfortable silken robes. I felt frightened and uneasy and began to think that I would suffer some terrible harm out of this evening. Just then I regarded myself as one who was about to undergo surgery from which his chances of recovery were slight. My mood was sullen resignation: I was willing, I was here, I was eager to take the plunge and have done with it. "Your last chance," Schweiz said, grinning broadly. "You can still back out." "No." "You understand that there are risks, though? We are equally inexperienced in this drug. There are dangers." "Understood," I said. "Is it also understood that you enter this voluntarily and under no coercion?" I said, "Why this delay, Schweiz? Bring out your potion." "One wishes to assure himself that your grace is fully prepared to meet any consequences." In a tone of heavy sarcasm I said, "Perhaps there should be a contract between us, then, in the proper fashion, relieving you of any liability in case one wishes later to press a claim for damage to the personality -- " "If you wish, your grace. One does not feel it necessary." "One wasn't serious," I said. I was fidgety now. "Can it be that you're nervous about it, too, Schweiz? That you have some doubts?" "We take a bold step." "Let's take it, then, before the moment goes by. Bring out the potion, Schweiz. Bring out the potion." "Yes," he said. He gave me a long look, his eyes to mine, and clapped his hands in childlike glee. And laughed in triumph. I saw how he had manipulated me. Now I was begging him for the drug! Oh, devil, devil! From his traveling case he fetched the packet of white powder. He told me to get wine. I ordered two flasks of chilled Mannerangi golden from the kitchen and he dumped half the contents of the packet into my flask, half into his. The powder dissolved almost instantly; for a moment it left a cloudy gray wake and then were was no trace of it. We gripped our flasks. "It should all go down at once," Schweiz said. He gulped his wine and I gulped mine. Then I sat back, expecting the drug to hit me instantly. I felt a faint giddiness, but that was only the wine doing its work in my empty gut. "How long does it take to begin?" I asked. Schweiz shrugged. "It will be some while yet." We waited in silence. Testing myself, I tried to force my mind to go forth and encounter his, but I felt nothing. The sounds of the room becase magnified: the creak of floorboards, the rasping of insects outside the window, the tiny hum of the bright electric light. "Can you explain," I asked hoarsely, "the way this drug is thought to operate?" Schweiz answered, "One can tell you only what was told to him. Which is that the potential power to link one mind to another exists in all of us from birth, only we have evolved a chemical substance in the blood that inhibits the power. A very few are born without the inhibitor and these have the gift of reaching minds, but most of us are forever blocked from achieving this silent communication, except when for some reason the production of the hormone ceases of its own accord and our minds open for a while. When this occurs it is often mistaken for madness. This drug of Sumara Borthan, they say, neutralizes the natural inhibitor in our bloodat least for a short time -- and permits us to make contact with one another, as we would normally do if we lacked the counteracting substance in the blood. So one has heard." To this I answered, "We all might be supermen, then, but we are crippled by our own glands?" Schweiz, gesturing grandly, said, "Maybe it is that there were good biological reasons for evolving this protection against our own powers. Eh? Or maybe not." He laughed. His face had turned very red. I asked him if he really believed this story of an inhibitory hormone and a counterinhibitory drug and he said that he had no grounds for making judgment. "Do you feel anything yet?" I asked. "Only the vvine," he said. We waited. We waited. Perhaps it will do nothing, I thought, and I will be reprieved. We waited. At length Schweiz said, "It may be beginning now." the functioning of my own body: the thud-thud of my heart, the pounding of the blood against the walls of arteries, the movements of fluids deep within my ears, the drifting of corpuscular bodies across my field of vision. I became enormously receptive to external stimuli: currents of air brushing my cheek, a fold of my robe touching my thigh, the pressure of the floor against the sole of my foot. I heard an unfamiliar sound as of water tumbling through a distant gorge. I lost touch with my surroundings, for as my perceptions intensified the range of them also narrowed. I found myself incapable of perceiving the shape of the room, for I saw nothing clearly except in a constricted tunnel, at the other end of which was Schweiz; beyond the rim of this tunnel there was only haze. Now I was frightened and fought to clear my mind, as one may make a conscious effort to free the brain of the muddle caused by too much wine -- but the harder I struggled to return to normal perception, the more rapidly did the pace of change accelerate. I entered a state of luminous drunkenness, in which light streamed past my face, and I was certain I must have sipped from Digant's spring. I felt a rushing sensation, like that of air moving swiftly against my ears. I heard a high whining sound that was barely audible at first, but swept up in crescendo until it took on tangibility and appeared to fill the room to overflowing, yet the sound was not painful. The chair beneath me throbbed and pulsated in a steady beat that seemed tuned to some patient pulsation of our planet itself. Then, with no discernible feeling of having crossed a boundary, I realized that my perceptions had for some time been double: now I was aware of a second heartbeat, of a second spurt of blood within vessels, of a second churning of intestines. But it was not mere duplication, for these other rhythms were different, setting up complex symphonic interplays with the rhythms of my own body, creating percussive patterns that were so intricate that the fibers of my mind melted in the attempt to follow them. I began to sway in time with these beats, to clap my hands against my thighs, I saw Schweiz also swaying and clapping and snapping and realized whose bodily rhythms it was I had been receiving. We were locked together. I had difficulty now distinguishing his heartbeat from my own and sometimes, glancing across the table at him, I saw my own reddened, distorted face. I experienced a general liquefying of reality, a breaking down of walls and restraints; I was unable to maintain a sense of Kinnall Darival as an individual; I thought not in terms of he and , but of we. I had lost not only my identity but the concept of self itself. At that level I remained a long while, until I started to think that the power of the drug was recedperception of the room became more conventional and I could again distinguish Schweiz' body and mind from my own. Instead of feeling relief that the worst was over, though, I felt only disappointment that I had not achieved the kind of mingling of consciousness that Schweiz had promised. But I was mistaken. The first wild rush of the drug was over, yes -- yet we were only now coming into the true communion. Schweiz and I were apart but nevertheless together. This was the real selfbaring. I saw his soul spread out before me as though on a table. I could walk up to the table and examine those things that were on it, picking up this utensil, that vase, these ornaments, to study each as closely as I wished. Here was the looming face of Schweiz' mother. Here was a swollen pale breast streaked with blue veins and tipped by an enormous rigid nipple. Here were childhood furies. Here were memories of Earth. Through the eyes of Schweiz I saw the mother of worlds, maimed and shackled, disfigured and discolored. Beauty gleamed through the ugliness. This was the place of his birth, this disheveled city; these were highways ten thousand years old; these were the stumps of ancient temples. Here was the node of first love. Here were disappointments and departures. Betrayals, here. Shared confidences, here. Growth and change. Corrosion and despair. Journeys. Failures. Seductions. Confessions. I saw the suns of a hundred worlds. And I passed through the strata of Schweiz' soul, inspecting the gritty layers of greed and the boulders of trickery, the oily pockets of maliciousness, the decaying loam of opportunism. Here was self incarnate; here was a man who lived solely for his own sake. Yet I did not recoil from the darkness of Schweiz. the yearning, the god-hunger in the man, Schweiz alone on a lunar plain, splayfooted on a black shield of rock under a purple sky, reaching up, grasping, taking hold of nothing. Sly and opportunistic he might be, yes, but also vulnerable, passionate, honest beneath all his capering. I could not judge Schweiz harshly. He was I. I was he. Tides of self engulfed us both. If I were to cast Schweiz down, I must also cast down Kinnall Darival. My soul was flooded with warmth for him. I felt him, too, probing me. I erected no barriers about my spirit as he came to explore it. And through his own eyes I saw what he was seeing in me. My fear of my father. My awe of my brother. My love for Halum. My flight into Glin. My choosing of Loimel. My petty faults and my petty virtues. Everything, Schweiz. Look. Look. Look. And it all came back refracted through his soul, nor did I find it painful to observe. Love of others begins with love of self, I thought suddenly. In that instant the Covenant fell and shattered within me. Gradually Schweiz and I pulled apart, though we remained in contact some time longer, the strength of the bond ebbing steadily. When it broke at last, I felt a shivering resonance, as if a taut string had snapped. We sat in silence. My eyes were closed. After some long time I looked across the room at Schweiz. He was watching me, waiting for me. He wore that demonic look of his, the wild grin, the bright-eyed gleam, only now it seemed to me less a look of madness than a reflection of inner joy. He appeared younger now. His face was still flushed. "I love you," he said softly. The unexpected words were bludgeons. I crossed my wrists before my face, palms out, protecting myself. "What upsets you so much?" he asked. "My grammar or my meaning?" "Both." "Can it be so terrible to say,  love youT' "One has never -- one does not know how to -- " 'To react? To respond?" Schweiz laughed. "I don't mean I love you in any physical way. As if that would be so hideous. But no. I mean what I say, Kinnall. I've been in your mind and I liked what I saw there. I love you." "You talk in 'I,' " I reminded him. "Why not? Must I deny self even now? Come on -- break free, Kinnall. I know you want to. Do you think what I Just said to you is obscene?" "There is such a strangeness about it." "Oh my world those words have a holy strangeness," said Schweiz. "And here they're an abomination. Never to be allowed to say 'I love you,' eh? A whole planet denying itself that little pleasure. Oh, no, Kinnall, no, no, no!" "Please," I said faintly. "One still has not fully adjusted to the things the drug did. When you shout at one like that -- " But he would not subside. "You were in my mind too," he said. "What did you find there? Was I so loathsome? Get it out, Kinnall. You have no secrets from me now. The truth. The truth!" "You know, then, that one found you more admirable than one had expected." Schweiz chuckled. "And I the same! Why are we afraid of each other now, Kinnall? I told you: I love you! We made contact. We saw there were areas of trust. Now we have to change, Kinnall. You more than I, because you have farther to go. Come. Come. Put words to your heart. Say it. "One can't." "Say M.' " "How difficult that is." "Say it. Not as an obscenity. Say it as if you loved yourself." "Please." "Say it." "I," I said. "Was that so awful? Come, now. Tell me how you feel about me. The truth. From the deepest levels." "A feeling of warmth -- of affection, of trust -- " "Of love?" "Of love, yes," I admitted. "Then say it." "Love." "That isn't what I want you to say." "What, then?" "Something that hasn't been said on this planet in two thousand years, Kinnall. Now -- say it. I -- " "I" "Love you." "Love you." "I love you." "I -- love -- you." "It's a beginning," Schweiz said. Sweat streamed down his face and mine. "We start by acknowledging that we can love. We start by acknowledging that we have selves capable of loving. Then we begin to love. Eh? We begin to love." L ater I asked, "Did you get from the drug what you were looking for, Schweiz?" "Partially." "How so, partially?" "I was looking for God, Kinnall, and I didn't quite find Him, but I got a better idea of where to look. What I did find was how not to be alone any more. How to open my mind fully to someone else. That's the first step on the road I want to travel." "One is happy for your sake, Schweiz." "Must you still talk to me in that third-person lingo?" "I can't help myself," I said. I was terribly tired. I was beginning to feel afraid of Schweiz again. The love I bore for him was still there, but now suspicion was creeping back. Was he exploiting me? Was he milking a dirty little pleasure out of our mutual exposures? He had pushed me into becoming a selfbarer. His insistence on my speaking in "I" and "me" to him was that a token of my liberation, was it something beautiful and pure, as he claimed, or was it only a reveling in filth? I was too new to this. I could not sit placidly while a mah said, " love you" to me and compelled me to say to him, " love you." "Practice it," Schweiz said. "I. #. I. I." "Stop. Please." "Is it that painful?" "It's new and strange to me. I need there, you see? I need to slide into this more gradually." "Take your time, then. Don't let me rush you. But don't ever stop moving forward." "One will try.  will try," I said. "Good." After a moment he said, "Would you try the drug again, ever?" "With you?" "I don't think there's any need for that. I mean with someone like your bondsister. If I offered you some, would you use it with her?" "I don't know." "Are you afraid of the drug now?" I shook my head. "That isn't easy for me to answer. I need time to come to terms with the whole experience. Time to think about it, Schweiz, before getting involved again." "You've tasted the experience. You've seen that there's only good to be had from it." "Perhaps. Perhaps." "Without doubt!" His fervor was evangelical. His zeal tempted me anew. Cautiously I said, "If more were available I would seriously consider trying it again. With Halum, maybe." "Good!" "Not immediately. But in time. Two, three, four moontimes from now." "It would have to be farther from now than that." "Why?" Schweiz said, "This was my entire stock of the drug that we used this evening. I have no more." "But you could get some if you tried?" "Oh, yes. Yes, certainly." "Where?" "In Sumara Borthan," he said. pleasure, it is not surprising to find guilt and remorse following first indulgence. So was it with me. In the morning of our second day at the lodge I awoke after troubled sleep, feeling such shame that I prayed the ground to swallow me. What had I done? Why had I let Schweiz goad me into such foulness? Selfbaring! Selfbaring! Sitting with him all night, saying "#" and "me" and "I," and congratulating myself on my new freedom from convention's strangling hand! The mists of day brought a mood of disbelief. Could I have actually opened myself like that? Yes, I must, for within me now were memories of Schweiz' past, to which I had not had access before. And myself within him, then. I prayed for a way of undoing what I had done. I felt I had lost something of myself by surrendering my apartness. You know, to be a selfbarer is not a pretty thing among us and those who expose themselves gain only a dirty pleasure from it, a furtive kind of ecstasy. I insisted to myself that I had done nothing of that kind, but had embarked rather on a spiritual quest; but even as I put the phrase to myself it sounded portentous and hypocritical, a flimsy mask for shabby motives. I was ashamed, for my sake, for my sons' sakes, for the sake of my royal father and his royal forefathers, that I had come to this. I think it was Schweiz' '# love you" that drove me into such an abyss of regret, more than any other single aspect of the evening, for my old self saw those words as doubly obscene, even while the new self that was struggling to emerge insisted that the Earthman had meant nothing shameful, neither with his nor with his "love." But I rejected my own argument and let guilt engulf me. What had I become, to trade endearments with another man, an Earthborn merchant, a lunatic? How could I have given my soul to him? Where did I stand now that I was so wholly vulnerable to him? That day I spent mostly alone. I went off into the forest and bathed at a cool pond; then I knelt before a firethorn tree and pretended it was a drainer and confessed myself to it in whispers. Afterward I walked through a brambly woods, coming back to the lodge thorned and smudged. Schweiz asked me if I felt unwell. No, I told him, nothing was wrong. I said little that evening, but huddled in a floating-chair. The Earthman, more talkative than ever -- a torrent of buoyant words -- launched himself into the details of a grand scheme for an expedition to Sumara Borthan to bring back sacks of the drug, enough to transform every soul in Manneran. I listened without commenting, for everything had become unreal to me and his project seemed no more strange than anything else. I hoped the ache of my soul would ease once I was back in Manneran and at my desk in the Justiciary. But no. I came into my house and Halum was there with Loimel. They were exchanging clothes with one another and at the sight of them I nearly turned and fled. They smiled warm woman-smiles at me, secret smiles, the token of the league they had formed between themselves all their lives, and in despair I looked from my wife to my bondsister, from one cousin to the other, receiving their mirrored beauty as a double sword in my belly. Those smiles! Those knowing eyes! They needed no drug to pull the truths from me. Where have you been, Kinnall? To a lodge in the forest, to play at selfbaring with the Earthman. And did you shQw him your soul? Oh, yes, and he showed his. A nd then? Then we spoke of love. I love you, he said, and one replied, I love you. What a wicked child you are, Kinnall! Yes. Yes. Where can one hide from his shame? This silent dialog whirled through my brain in an instant, as I came toward them where they sat beside the courtyard fountain. Formally I embraced Loimel, and formally I embraced my bondsister, but I kept my eyes averted from theirs, so sharp was my guilt. It was the same in the Justiciary office for me. I translated the glances of the underlings into accusing glares. There is Kinnall Darival, who revealed all our mysteries to Schweiz of Earth. Look at the Sallan selfbarer slink by us! How can he stand his own reek? I kept to myself and did my work poorly. A document concerning some transaction of Schweiz' crossed my desk, throwing me into dismay. The thought of facing Schweiz ever again appalled me. It would have been no great chore for me to revoke his residence permit in Manneran, using the authority of the High Justice; poor payment for the trust he showed me, but I came close to doing it, and checked myself only out of a deeper shame even than I already bore. when my children too had begun to wonder what was wrong with me, I went to the Stone Chapel to seek healing from the drainer Jidd. It was a damp day of heavy heat. The soft furry sky seemed to hang in looping folds over Manneran and everything was coated in glistening beads of bright moisture. That day the sunlight was a strange color, almost white, and the ancient black stone blocks of the holy building gave off blinding reflections as though they were edged with prisms. But inside the chapel I found myself in dark, cool, quiet halls. Jidd's cell had pride of place in the chapel's apse, behind the great altar. He awaited me already robed; I had reserved his time hours in advance. The contract was ready. Quickly I signed and gave him his fee. This Jidd was no more lovely than any other of this trade, but just then I was almost pleased by his ugliness, his jagged knobby nose and thin long lips, his hooded eyes, his dangling earlobes. Why mock the man's face? He would have chosen another for himself if he had been consulted. And I was kindly disposed to him, for I hoped he would heal me. Healers were holy men. Give me what I need from you, Jidd, and  will bless your ugly face! He asked, "Under whose auspices will you drain?" "The god of forgiving." He touched a switch. Mere candles were too common for Jidd. The amber light of forgiveness came from some concealed gas jet and flooded the chamber. Jidd directed my attention toward the mirror, instructing me to behold my face, put my eyes to my eyes. The eyes of a stranger looked back at me. Droplets of sweat clustered in the roots of my beard, where the flesh of my cheeks could be seen.  love you, I said silently to the strange face in the mirror. Love of others begins with love of self. The chapel weighed on me; I was in terror of being crushed beneath a block of the ceiling. Jidd was saying the preliminary words. There was nothing of love in them. He commanded me to open my soul to him. I stammered. My tongue turned upon itself and was knotted. I gagged; I choked; I pulled my head down and pressed it to the cold floor. Jidd touched my shoulder and murmured formulas of comfort until my fit softened. We began the rite a second time. Now I traveled more smoothly through the preliminaries and, when he asked me to speak, I said, as though reciting lines that had been written for me by someone else, "These days past one went to a secret place with another. We shared a certain drug of Sumara Borthan that unseals the soul and we engaged in selfbaring together. Now one feels remorse for his sin and would have forgiveness for it." Jidd gasped, and it is no little task to astonish a drainer. That gasp nearly punctured my will to confess; but Jidd artfully recovered control, coaxing me onward with bland priestly phrases, until in a few moments the stiffness left everthing. My early discussions of the drug with Schweiz. (I left him unnamed. Though I trusted Jidd to maintain the secrecy of the draining, I saw no spiritual gain for myself in revealing to anyone the name of my companion in sin.) My taking of the drug at the lodge. My sensations as the drug took hold. My exploration of Schweiz' soul. His entry into mine. The kindling of deep affection between us as our union of spirit developed. My feeling of alienation from the Covenant while under the drug's influence. That sudden conviction of mine that the denial of self which we practice is a catastrophic cultural error. The intuitive realization that we should deny our solitude instead and seek to bridge the gulfs between ourselves and others, rather than glorying in isolation. Also I confessed that I had dabbled in the drug for the sake of eventually reaching the soul of Halum; hearing from me this admission of yearning for my bondsister was old stuff to Jidd by now. And then I spoke of the dislocations I had experienced since coming out of my drug trance; the guilt, the shame, the doubt. At last I fell silent. Before me hung the facts of my misdeeds, tangible and exposed and already I felt cleaner for having revealed them. I was into the Covenant. I wanted to be purged of my aberration of selfbaring. I hungered to do penance and resume my upright life. I was eager to be healed, I was begging for absolution and restoration to my community. But I could not feel the presence of the god. Staring into the mirror, I saw only my own face, drawn and shallow, the beard in need of combing. When Jidd began to recite the formulas of absolution, they were merely words to me, nor did my soul lift. I was cut off from all faith. The irony of that distracted me: Schweiz, envying me for my beliefs, seeking through the drug to understand the mystery of submission to the supernatural, had stripped me of my access to the gods. There I kneeled, stone knees on stone floor, making hollow responses to Jidd's hollow phrases, while wishing that Jidd and I could have taken the drug together, so there might have been true communion between us. And I knew that I was lost. "The peace of the gods be with you now," said Jidd. "The peace of the gods is upon one." "Seek no more for false succor and keep your self to yourself, for other paths lead only to shame and corruption." "One will seek no other paths." "You have bondsister and bondbrother, you have a drainer, you have the mercies of the gods. You need no more." "One needs no more." "Go in peace, then." I went, but not in his kind of peace, for the draining had been a leaden thing, meaningless and trifling. Jidd had not reconciled me to the Covenant -- he had simply demonstrated the degree of my separation from it. Unmoved though I had been by the draining, however, I emerged from the Stone Chapel somehow purged of guilt. I no longer repented my selfbaring. Perhaps this was some residual effect of the draining, this inversion of my purpose in going to Jidd, but I did not try deeply to analyze it. I was content to be myself and to be thinking these thoughts. My conversion at that instant was complete. Schweiz had taken my faith from me, but he had given me another in its place. The doctor told me'Marguerite,you can be alive and ugly, or beautiful and dead" The day I fitl noliced the small pink spot on my cheek, I had other things on my mind. The New York papers said, "Marguerite Piazza opens at the Persian Room". I covered the spot with makeup, walked out into the spollicjlil, and forgot it -- forgot everything -- in the joy of singing. It wasn't until the spot began to spread, that I went to a cancer specialist. The day the doctor told me I'd hove to have radical face surgery, I was sure my career was over. It was no longer a matter of saving my looks. Just of saving my life. They kept the mirrors in my hospital room covered for a week. And yet today, thanks to the fontastic skill of the surgeons, I sing in the spotlight again. I let myself be photographed fuM-fbce by a famous photogroplier of glamorous women, And I am alive. So now you know why I am appealing to you on behalf of the American Cancer Society. To give money, To get regular checkups. And to pay attention lo cancer's warning signals. You know, there's something much worse tlxin finding out you hove cancer. And that's not finding out. American Cancer Society We want to wipe out cancer in your lifetitne bAfe you slnes(#y a viclitn of future shock? The acceleralipn started with Hiroshima. Without warning, we switched to mechanized lives, disposable goods, impermanent allegiances. We entered the plug-in, throw-away, rent-a-thing, forget-a-person age. We began using up products, ideas, people at a dizzying rate. Some people thrive on the pace. Others find it terrifying. Some simply refuse to recognize it, abruptly colliding with the future and suffering an adaptive breakdo...r AKin TofIler calls it "future shock." reality: the Atomic Bomb, the UN, computers, vision phones, organ transplants, moon landings, test, lube babies... you name it. Eventually Science "Fiction" comes true! It leaps to life from the pages of some of the most provocative, stimulating, imaginative literature you can find. If you'd like to be prepared to meet tomorrow, we invite you to share the excitement with us today. Choose any # books for just #. plus shipping and handling. Best of all, you can make one of them Future Shock, "the What's the preventative? Start with the Science Fiction Book Club. Science Fiction predicts future change long before it becomes with trial membership I Science Fiction Book Club #-S# , Please accept my application for membership and I rush the # books whose numbers I have printed I below. Bill me Just # plus shipping and hanI dllng for all #. Each month send me the Club's I free bulletin "Things To Come" describing the I two monthlv selections and other book bargains. I If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly I selections, or prefer an alte"nate or no book at I all, I simply lnd.tcate so on the form provided. I I pay only #. plus shipping and handling for I each book I take. (Occasional extra-value selec, lions are slightly more.) I need take only # books I in the coming year and may resign any time after I purchasing # books I introductory package. I may return it In # days. I Membership will be canceled. I will owe nothing. MR. Print name I If under #, parent must sign above. Office use only best single rendering of what the future may hold." Psychology Today. It's easy to join. The coupon tells how.  #. Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. National Best Seller, "Essential reading for those... committed to controlling their destinies." Psychology Today . Pub. ed . # #. Dangerous Visions ed. by Harlan Ellison. 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Rockets In Ursa Major bv Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. A spaceship returns crewless, announcing the coming of a deadly peril Pub. ed. # #. Stand on Zanzibar . b Life In U.S. # years from now. Hugo Award Winner. # pages. Pub. ed # #. The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde by Norman Spinshort storie-s by the new oung sci-fi giant Book Club eCitiors are somelimes tecuced in i;e, but they are all full-length, nard-cover books you win be uroud lo add to you' permanent library. Membe'S accepted m u S.A ano Canada only. Canadian menbers will be serviced from Toronto. Olfer sl'gi'iiy'differenl in Canada. HIJACK Edward Weten TH MU I I Ui to ip#' "The Godfather" in Space The sardonic tale of organized crime's biggest job ever -- hijacking the first starship. The sun's going nova, and the Syndicate isn't about to sit back and burn -- so... instant Mafiastronauts! Boucher Anthology Complete Anthology of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in paperback. Great stories by everyone from Anderson to Zelazny. We'll be putting them in a nice boxed set for Christmas, but why wait? Lovecraft Lovers ! Beagle's Arkham Edition of H. P. Lovecraft is now More coming later on in '#. # each wherever paperbacks are sold. For mail orders, please send # for each book (includes postage and handling) to: Beagle Books, Dept. CS # West # Street New York, N.Y. #I An lnto Publisher #I Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. # Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. May, #I Vol.#,No. # Ernest Hill James E. Gunn Robert Silverberg W. MacFarlane Theodore Sturgeon Duncan Lunan Jack Sharkey Larry Eisenberg David R. Bunch Algis Budrys Editor Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Subscription Director e Publisher Associate Publisher ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #t per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. Some time ago I suggested in this space that human intelligence, if it existed at all, should in the light of current needs be considered wealth. All right, I've just spent three days and far into nights in the hall of diamonds. With you. publisher, resident cynic and rainmaker during dry spells -- and one of the best friends you and I could have -- made up the December reader poll. Bern is also the author of one of the most widely published texts (all Englishspeaking countries and ten foreign languages) on psychometrics, the science of measurement of psychophysical processes. In a sense both you and I were undergoing psychometric testing You came through wide-angle, glittering, en masse , and with fine detail in the closeups. And you shape up like an editor's dream. The response has been great and the results uniformly gratifying. Actually questionnaires and letters are still coming in but more than enough are on hand to give us a definite picture. Wide-angle first: more than twothirds of Galaxy's brain trust -- you folks -- are in age from # (# in college) to #. The educational level of this group is tops -- # college or better. The age groups at each end of the spectrum are split fairly evenly. The oldest reader to send in a questionnaire to date is # -- he extended his subscription. Robert A. Heinlein's  Will Fear No Evil (concluding installment) and Robert Silverberg's We Are Well Organized handily won the best story in the issue vote by splitting almost exactly # of the total ballots. James Blish's Darkside Crossing was a fairly close third -- Stephen Tail's The Mad Here are some of your reactions to key questions: #) I don't like fantasy mixed in with science fiction. The trick phrasing here was deliberate: a) the question was an important one; the argument is as old as sf and we wanted you to do a double take, think it over and answer from conviction; b) Bern and I had been arguing about this, hammer and tongs, and the question was loaded in case you weren't looking. But you were looking and Bern was the first to congratulate me -- # of you rephrased the statement to: I like ( occasional fantasy... or otherwise left no doubt. Actually I don't like to mix most fantasy with sf -- but I want to be able to run a work like Blish's Day After Judgment in Galaxy when I have the chance. It doesn't happen daily. So thank you. #) Nearly # of you gave four letter-and-cussword freedom of expression to Galaxy -- but let me pledge you this: I won't buy them ( Please turn to page #) Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves ? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. ' "" Mas  mmm n   b A nonj organfca I d d r eS S :  U.R.C. j San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the free book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name Address Wisdom -- for some the power to kill, for others the reason to die! T HE man from the ministry was coming. Today. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Or had it been yesterday? Yesterday and yesterday and yesterday. It was summer and a fine morning. Afternoon. Yes -- afternoon. He had had his lunch, so it was afternoon. The sun high and the swallows, sweet sister swallows, dotfine days to come. Peter Sanderson lit his pipe and walked slowly to the French windows looking out to the long, downward sloping rose garden. His eye followed the irregular line t of the bushes petering out where the undulating bank curved into an even parabola ending at the willows, drooping over a river's course in sinusoidal loops across the meadows and into the woods behind. No. It had not been yesterday and yesterday and yesterday. The words had not been said. The conversation rehearsed only in his own mind. The problem had not been resolved. The problem -- yes. Was it -- had it indeed been a problem? Here, buried in a quiet garden behind a smiling Tudor house in a tiny depopulated village, the few scattered buildings of his workshops and laboratories -- Sanderson's zoo -- landscaped and blended into the countryside, problems of any sort became no more than academic exercises. Solutions were found, theses written, findings tabulated into typescript, folded and placed into large buff envelopes and posted away. That was the end and solution to all problems. Sometimes large, stiff envelopes arrived of their own accord. Sealed and stamped with curious insignia. "Top secret." "Urgent." "Immediate" "Priority." "Destroy after perusal." And a host of other meaningless titles to the trumpery within. You scanned them at your leisure, considered the requirements, tested, experimented and, in your own good time, supplied the answers. You did not ask yourself what it was the little people in the cities might do with your findings or why they needed the information in the first place. At least, he had never considered the oddities of their demands untilnow. Not until the envelope had arrived with more seals and stamps than most. It had been delivered by hand, he remembered. Someone in a blue -- or had it been a khaki uniform? Dropping onto the garden pad in an autogyro. Marching with a left-right crunch up the chipped crazed paving path and snapping his hand up to the peak of his cap. He had insisted on seeing the document placed in the safe before he left. Peter Sanderson opened the French windows and smiled whimsically as he stepped out to the lawn and settled himself in the garden chair under the sycamore. They had had difficulty in finding a safe, he remembered. Had settled finally for a refrigeration cabinet used otherwise for cultures of some of the more deadly plagues. It had seemed safe enough even to the much-bemedaled comedian with the gold braid. He had not considered the man particularly odd at the time. The city people were always odd. Everything had seemed straightforward enough when he had found time to open the envelope and study the requirements. The job of any scientist was to supply only the overall evaluation. To tell them what was and what was not possible. To give guidelines they would afterward translate into computer language and feed into their production controls. Yes , he thought, draving on his pipe and letting the smoke curl up an outward-spreading branch. From the great , windowless dungeons of their cities , from all their automated production and cybernetics, they have to come down to an ordinary man in the end to do their thinking for them. They can only develop what we, detached from it all, give them to play with. Neither they nor all their machines can invent any new thing or even ask themselves an objective question. Why are we doing it? Is this what we really want? Where do we want to get to? Is there a better way? As long as the scientist supplied the answers expected of him and came up with a regular supply of new ideas they would leave him in peace in his primitive surroundings with flowers in his gardens and the absurdity of windows in his walls to look out upon something he seemed unaccountably -- and from their point of view, perversely -- to want to see. A scientist should never interfere or question their right to a knowledge that was any man's for the asking if he knew what the questions should be. The man from the ministry was on his way now. A black dot among the dipping of the swallows, hovering over the trees. The pilot was probably checking his charts and looking for some sort of concrete pad in the absence of the usual flat roof to land on. He would find himself a spot in the end. His jets would scorch a black patch in the meadow and the cows with their ungainly udders swinging would amble around, chew and stare at him. The man from the ministry would be helped from his seat. Something thin and black would descend the steps, a briefcase on one side and an umbrella on the other. A gray, amorphous shading between the hard brim of the hat and the crisp whiteness of the collar. A face perhaps. The striped trousers and polished shoes would pick their way carefully through the cowpats and trample on the buttercups. The gray-black wraith would bend, bow stiffly and extend a cuff-white hand, cold and moist as the tail of a fish. "Heigh-ho!" Peter Sanderson sighed. "Better go and meet him, I suppose." find the face under the regulation Homburg hat ruddy, pleasant and -- what was more -- vaguely recognizable. He had met the man some time. Either last week or twenty-five years ago. A large hand outstretched, a firm grip followed by a genial pumping. Hardly the hand of the minister of -- what was it -- Research and Development? Astronautics? Ergonomics, ecology and materials supply? "Don't I -- ?" "You remember me? Wilfred Wannemaker. We were at 'Harwell together' "Were we indeed?" The name was remotely familiar, the face also. Harwell. What or who was Harwell -- or what was it Harwell had once been? Some sort of university. Imperial College of Science and Technology. Yes, he had been to Harwell. He had graduated at Harwell twenty -- or was it forty? -- years ago. What had a minister of whatever it was to do with Science and Technology? Ministers were not technocrats. Ministers were not anything that he had heard of. "Yes -- of course we were!" Wannemaker seemed excessively jovial, he noticed. "I graduated in Twenty-one-fifty. You had already gone down by then, of course. A legend and an inspiration to all of us. Honors in everything. My goodness, yes! We all knew what the future had in store for you. And look at you now! Where we who were proud to know you were all confident you would finish up!" Peter Sanderson untied and retightened the knot in the necktie twisted around the wasitband of the tweed trousers that, adjust them as he might, always managed to slip down over his meager hips, leaving a bulge behind and a frayed turn-up trapped under the left shoe heel. "Where am I?" he asked curiously. "Now -- come now, Professor!" The man who had called himself Wannemaker smiled. "You know very well where you are. What? With all of us in the ministries hanging on to your every word? You are without doubt the leading anthropologist in the world today." "Anthropologist, you say?" "Would that not be correct? I know of course of your reputation as a biologist, endocrinologist, ecologist -- to name but a few -- ha-ha -- might one say?" "Interesting," he murmured. "Very interesting." "Surely you are aware of your own reputation?" "I am aware of very few things that happen in the cities and the -- shall we say developed areas of society? You appear to think highly of my work. I am very gratified. I was not aware that I was so well known outside my own quite academic circle." "Your contributions to the society you shun are well known, Professor -- and appreciated. The tangible results of your theoretical studies are probably more farreaching than you imagine. We all -- in the various lands of the West -- sleep more soundly in our beds in the knowledge that you are there.'" "Do you indeed?" he reflected. "But only in the West? I had hoped that all mankind -- " There was a blackbird hopping on its yellow stilt legs behind the gladiolas. Black like the minister and, in the limited enclave of the garden; considerably more important. "Tell me," he asked suddenly. "I recently had a visit from a very exalted personage in some military attire. He seemed moved by the desire to salute me at every turn. Would that phenomenon have been due in some measure to what you term -- my reputation?" "That, Professor, was General First Class Alexander Dunweather. "As I thought, as I thought. Somewhat renowned in his own field, no doubt?" "But surely, Professor, you know. General Dunweather is Supreme Allied Commander, Strategic Space and Satellite Forces Western Europe." "And he saluted me? Well now, I am more flattered than I knew I was at the time." "Shall we go inside, Professor? We have a lot to discuss concerning General Dunweather and the project on which you have been working." "Project? What project? Ah, yes! The large, buff envelope with many seals and stamps that the good general did me the honor of delivering personally into my own hands. And from there to the refrigeration cabinet. Certainly we will discuss it. The matter has been very much on my mind of late. You would like a sherry, no doubt?" It would, of course be a sherry, Wannemaker thought, holding the clear crystal glass to the light. And served in an antique receptacle blown from a heavy and preposterously unsuitable medium. Probably not a single lightweight plastic utensil in the house. They live utterly in the past, these academic types. Incredible how a man can work and even think with the distraction of the daylight and the outside world streaming in through glass holes in the walls. Sitting, even, under a tree with the damp, unconditioned wind blowing through his unprotected, natural hair. Myself, I should die of rheumatism at an early age and, lacking the society and competition of my fellows,  should achieve nothing at all. Boredom would stultify my every effort. A nd yet perhaps... "I envy you, Professor. "My dear fellow! You graduated, you tell me. You, too, could have chosen the academic life. All of us seem to have slipped away to our various little hidey-holes. There are plenty more if you look for them. Population seems, I have noticed, to be dwindling fast." "I am afraid the city called me. Politics. A sense of service to my fellows, you might say. I developed early on, I suppose, those qualities of leadership -- I set out on a search for -- " "Power?" the professor asked, mildly. "Yes," he said. "Yes. I suppose you could call it that. Power. I achieved it, you know. I have power now in a certain measure. "My congratulations." "You are somewhat contemptuous, Professor. But you, too, whether you like it or not, have power. Considerably more than I have or could hope to attain." "You are about to explain to me a pronouncement I can only at this moment regard as cryptic." "Yes," Wannemaker agreed. He emptied his glass, got up and walked to the large brick fireplace, smoke-grimed and so authenticlooking it was impossible not to imagine that it was sometimes, in winter, put to its original use. An inadequate incinerator and an ineffectual radiator and convector of heat. He found the hearth, however, a suitable platform and, leaning on the mantel, looked down curiously at the slight, ill-clad figure comfortably buried in the floral tapestry of a deep-cushioned armchair. some scientific training, have done my best to fathom your report on the Dunweather project. I confess I am at a loss. You have apparently, in excess of our most optimistic forecasts, achieved a breakthrough. And yet you have seen fit to present your findings in terms of -- shall we say, a philosophical treatise? If we interpret you correctly of your experiments because of your misgivings about some ultimate but unnamed harm that might befall the human race as a result of the wider applications of your technique. Do I read you correctly?" Peter Sanderson rummaged in his bulging pockets for his tobacco pouch and matches. He filled his pipe carefully and lit it to his satisfaction before replying. "You do," he said. "I need hardly tell you, Professor, that for an academic to imagine himself capable of deciding on the utilitarian aspect of his theories is, in a modern industrialized society, is -- well -- is" "Unthinkable?" "You must see. Professor -- " "But I do see, Mr. -- er -- your name is Wannemaker, I believe? Yes, I do see. But you mentioned power, Mr. Wannemaker. I have never wished for positive power -- the sort of authority I do not doubt you exercise. I am quite content to leave the decision inherent in running a conglomerate society to the heads of that society. But you are quite right. I do have this power in a negative sense. I am in a position to give you what you require but I do not intend to do so. That is what one might term the negative aspect of my authority." Wannemaker drew himself to his full and considerable height. He was tall and, in the eyes of his colleagues on committee, a distinguished figure. When he spoke good committee men fell into a respectful silence, nodding like teazles in the warm winds of his eloquence. But now, meeting the bright, smiling eyes of the small figure in the chair, he hesitated, uncertain whether to threaten with a quick cut-off of funds or cajole with an emphasis on every man's duty to the state. "Yes?" Peter Sanderson asked, mildly. "Professor -- " "Yes?" "You are aware, are you not, of the reasons behind General Dunweather's concern? We have intelligence that the Russians, who have been experimenting with this form of communication for some years, have achieved a breakthrough. From ground station to distant starship, we are told. We don't know its extent, or how effective it will prove, but it has become obvious that such a possibility exists." "And we should not be left behind?" "Certainly we should not." "No," he said. "I see that." He sucked at his pipe for a while and a tabby cat, padding in from the garden, jumped silently onto his lap, curled up and went to sleep. He continued to sit staring through the windows, seeing in his mind's eye, although Wannemaker was not aware of it, the upsurge of a mushroom cloud that had burgeoned for the same reasons in the necessity to forestall its development by the wrong side. But the mushroom was history and would have been there in the end whatever any man had done. Knowledge is like that. It is any man's for the asking. Suddenly he knocked out his pipe and stuffed it back into his trousers pocket. Removing the cat, he got to his feet. "Come," he said. "You have not understood the philosophical -- as you call them -- reasons for my refusal to proceed any further with telepathic methods of contact. I will give you a practical demonstration."  timbered passage and out through a heavy, iron-studded door. So quickly did he move that the minister, with by far the longer pair of legs, had difficulty in keeping up with him on the graveled drive that led to a sparse colony of scattered outbuildings among the trees. "What do you suppose was my first experiment?" He threw the words over his shoulder while the rocks wheeling above the elm trees gossiped and squawked among themselves. "I've naturally no idea." The professor stopped in his tracks, turned to face him. "You don't?" he asked. "No." "Do you know what race claimed telepathic contact among its priesthood, along with telekinesis and bilocation?" "No -- I don't." The rooks, disturbed by the first crunching steps on the gravel, swooped and cawed among the trees and a frog from the depths of a ditch croaked with a guttural guffaw. The professor turned on his heel and set off nimbly toward the first of the huts. "The Tibetans," he threw back to the minister. "They drove a spike of wood into the brains of their initiates. Through the forehead. Once you knew how big a spike and where to put it, it was supposed to give them telepathic ability." "And did it?" "That is what I set out to discover. On rats at first. I experimented with pegs and rats. Two thousand of them. I put them through a series of carefully controlled experiments. Food hidden where one rat knew its location but the subject rat did not. And more of this nature. In the end I succeeded. I discovered the exact size of the peg and the point where to insert it through the skull. I progressed as far as the Tibetan Llamas had done a thousand years ago. I created a telepathic rat." "And then?" Wannemaker was struggling to keep up with the hurrying figure. Annoyed at this unorthodox method of reporting and considerably concerned for the security aspect. A Russian agent, for all the scurrying figure knew, might be lurking with taperecorder and short-wave transmitter behind every buckthorn bush. "Then, naturally, I continued with relatively sized pegs on a number of higher animals, fishes and birds. I Induced telepathic abilities in all my subjects. Finally I carried out the crucial test. On a primate. The gentleman we are about to visit. An adult male gorilla." "But my dear professor -- why a gorilla?" Peter Sanderson unfastened the latch on a five-barred gate across a concrete path leading to a large, brick-built hut with flower beds urider the barred windows and wisteria trailing around the door. "You mean why not a chimp or a gibbon? I happened to have a gorilla for which I had no other use. A rather likeable animal. We call him Rastus." The door to the hut was opened by a white-coated young man, also with a pipe in his mouth and a rose in his buttonhole. "Come in," the professor invited. "I want you to see Rastus's rather remarkable accomplishments." Wannemaker found himself in a narrow passage, facing a line of cages. In the first of these a heavily built gorilla was standing, holding on to the bars with both hands and, in a very disconcerting fashion, staring him in the eyes. Something about the face moved Wannemaker intensely. A sense of brutish, seemingly demonic power. The bloodshot whites of the deepset, brooding eyes; the half-open mouth exposing strong, yellow teeth; the massive, overhanging, intelligent brows. There was something malignant in the steady and, to Wannemaker's mind, totally evil stare. Even as he blinked, uncertain and incredulous, Rastus tugged suddenly at the bars and jumped back against the wall with a sharp cry of revulsion. "It's all right," Sanderson said sharply. "He can't get his arms through the bars. Come along to ttyBooks poration -- we were, last month -- (speaking of it, that is), there are lots of traps in becoming a large corporate structure. Immobility is one. There seems to be a direct correlation between number of people and the ability to move. We are trying to offset this by doing our publishing in separate pockets, as it were -- hence Beagle, Walden, Comstock and the new London operation. Ballantine Books # far-flung Empire. All of which make it possible for the original BB's to nip off to places like San Francisco for a couple of days or to get Annie over here for a week (well, hell, how else would we have gotten the galleys and for others to visit us from various points of our small globe. In this way we hope to evade yet another problem of bigness -- lack of communication.  AS TO what happens within our offices of (now) Vk floors, it's a bloody mad house. We conducted a small poll recently and found that not one of the #-odd bodies now located here would want it any other way. Working in this firm does something to people. As an example of our esprit-decorps (if that is, indeed, what it can be called) the entire Accounting Department is flowering forth in beards. Formidable. A lot of us even read our own books -- outside of the editors, that is. (This is a rare thing in a publishing house.) This department must sadly admit to not being able to keep up with the whole list any more. Just the Adult Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mysteries, Westerns, Ecology, Environment, Comstock and sex books. Enough. to the discussion of books, what have we got for this month -- a whole fleet of books from Fred Pohl and Jack subsea acadehny types (did you see that crazy Cousteau film on the seadragons of Galapagos?) involved in various adventures, plus another group of Clark Ashton Smith stories tasy. Meanwhile all the H.P. Lovecraft titles in Ballantine and Beagle go bouncing from glory to glory. Great stuff. Sincerely... BB the next cage. Now -- as you will notice -- Rastus can't see or hear us in here. There's a thick wall and a close-fitting connecting door between us. Here, take a banana and hide it in one of those cupboards." The professor, Wannemaker noted, was a man different in his laboratory from the easy-going savant in the house. He was quickspoken, keyed-up, exact in all he did. Wannemaker noticed the cupboards, numbered one to twentyfour against the far wall. Opening one, he put the banana inside, closing and locking the door and, at Sanderson's direction, hiding the key under some straw on the floor. "All right," Sanderson said. "Come outside and watch Rastus carefully." He closed and secured the cage door behind them. Then both he and the young assistant heaved on a rope running over a pulley to the connecting door until it was fully open. Rastus stood still, his hands on the cage bars, watching the door rise until it was secured and the rope tied. Then Wannemaker was conscious of the blood-red eyes on his face, unblinking, unwavering and, he was convinced, charged with an indescribable malevolent hatred. The lips pulled back in a grin -- a snarl it may have been -- and the beast turned, shambled through the door, picked up the key from under the straw, unlocked the correct cupboard, took out the banana, peeled it and, squatting on his haunches, popped it into his mouth. His eyes were still on Wannemaker as he sucked his fingers, nibbling reflectively at the nails. "He read your mind," Sanderson said simply. "Or mine -- or Roger's here -- or the minds of all three of us together. It's not words, of course, that tell him where to go. It is the visual sense we all have before we verbalize that transfers itself. The gestalt, one might say. But we haven't finished. Roger, give him the bag of tricks." bag from a hook on the wall and passed it through a one-way flap set in the bars of the cage. He produced a second banana and laid it in the passageway a few feet from the grille. "Now then -- we'll let you conduct the next operation yourself. Inside that bag are a dozen or so rods. Any three of them will screw together to make a scoop nearly but not quite long enough for Rastus to reach his banana. They're all numbered -- one to fifteen, to be exact. Now-take a piece of paper and write down any three numbers you would like Rastus to use and let him do the rest. Until you give him the idea he won't even be able to open the bag." Rastus was looking at him again as he took out his notebook and pencil. He knew it was foolish to assume that the grin of any simian had the same origin as a human's desire to laugh, but there was, he was convinced, something more than anthropomorphism in his own conviction that Rastus was smirking at him with a sardonic and vindictive contempt. Even before he finished writing Rastus had lurched away to the bag, opened it and, taking out the correct three rods, had begun clumsily but without hesitation screwing them together. "Remarkable -- " Wannemaker breathed. "Wait," The professor whispered. "You haven't seen anything yet." Rastus inserted the rod between the bars and reached toward the banana, which remained another eighteen inches beyond his grasp. For a moment he seemed frustrated and uneasy. His eyes strayed toward Wannemaker's but he obviously found no comfort there. He shook his head several times and scratched his forehead with his free hand. Then he laid down the rod and stood for a while, grasping the bars, his head bent forward and his eyes closed. The banana began to move. A flick at a time, a quiver, a short bounce and then, rocking and slewing like a Mexican jumping bean, it began to move toward the cage. In a halfminute it was within reach of the rod, was hooked and maneuvered back to a point where the long fingers could reach out, secure it and draw it inside to be peeled and eaten. The professor nodded, well pleased. "Three factors emerge from this experiment," he explained. "Each in its own way remarkable. First -- there is a sense of number, which was also hinted at in the cupboard experiment. All the rods would have fitted together had you been aware of it and made an instrument long enough for the purpose. But you did not know that and he was at that time taking his instructions from you alone. Roger and I kept our own minds inoperative by mentally counts ing from fifteen upward. But far more important than the sense of number was the ability to recognize numerals, a totally different matter. He could not, of course, relate the symbol for eight with any specific quantity but he received the image and identified its counterpart on the rod, together with the other two numerals you gave him. Children do much the same thing when, incorrectly, they are taught their tables before they have had time to develop a sense of plurality. Thirdly, and totally unrelated to the phenomenon of image reception, he has demonstrated the fact of telekinesis. The paraphysical powers latent in any brain are at this creature's command once he learns how to use them." II able lounge of the Tudor house, drinking tea and munching dry pastry the professor referred to as "biscuits" before Sanderson would discuss the matter further or answer the question that was uppermost in Wannemaker's mind. Night was deepening over the willows and Wannemaker had already settled himself to stay the night in an unheated and overventilated bedroom when the professor suddenly set down his teacup and produced a bottle of scotch. As he uncorked the bottle he returned without further preamble to the subject of his report. "You want to know why, having progressed so far, I do not intend to go any further?" He handed his guest a glass and raised his own, staring at it thoughtfully for a while before he drank. "There is an overall philosophical concept I shall try to explain to you later. A matter, shall we say, of the use of knowledge and the relationship of man to his destiny. The tiny, three-dimensional world of man and all his cousins is the tip only of a larger, paraterrestrial iceberg. But all this can wait. Let us consider Rastus himself. You have seen the ability this poor creature has developed as the result of a crude experiment: to read your thoughts and to utilize a power, the source of which no one, myself included, can explain. And Rastus is learning fast. Already we have taken elaborate precautions to ensure his safety. It is not bananas he wants most in life. It is freedom. The key to the door of his cell." "But surely, he can't -- " Wannemaker began. "You have seen what Rastus can receive. You have not seen, nor do we know, what he can project. Telepathy is a two-way communication and its field, as far as we know, is not limited by distance. Hence your general's interest in its application in space. Not only can Rastus read your mind, he can also transmit his thoughts to you. We are not at all sure what form these thoughts may take since they cannot, of course, be formulated in words or even, possibly, in readily understandable concepts. But I am not at all sure that it was not Rastus himself who decided that you would stay the night with me. It was an out-of-character decision on your part and he seems, Mr. Wannemaker, to have taken a strong dislike to you." Wannemaker wriggled uncomfortably in his chair. It was too deep and too low and he was a man much given to the right postures. He had not followed everything the professor had intended to convey but Rastus's dislike of him had seemed patent enough. He was not at all sure that Sanderson was not ranging himself on the side of his monkey. "True, I sensed a certain malevolence every time he looked at me. But surely it's ridiculous to suggest -- Why, I decided quite freely myself to accept your -- ah -- excellent hospitality." Sanderson refilled the glasses and drew the curtains against the darkening night. A clock chimed from the hallway. "Malevolence is not the word," he said. "No, no. Neither Rastus nor any beast can be malevolent, in the way you mean. He can project only the images of his own subjective life. Brutish to you, no doubt. Probably more brutish still due to his unnatural life in a cage far from the society of his fellows and the forests of his home. He has not so far seen fit to convey his images to me." "But you know that he could. You believed he had done so to me. "I have a colleague, Mr. Wannemaker. A young lady. She is an excellent zoologist, a quiet, pale, rather withdrawn girl not given to emotional upsets. She is now at home under sedation very near to a serious mental breakdown. Rastus desired her, Mr. Wannemaker. He has no mate of his own and no means, one would think, of formulating, let alone projecting, his confused desires. Yet he desires her. This confused projection of longing burgeoned the first time he saw her after the insertion of our peg in his brain. He continues to desire her from a quite considerable distance. Her house is ten miles away, but I am afraid that Dr. Angela Styles is never without Rastus in her mind or without an awareness of his presence. He will remain with her until he dies. Even after he dies, I am not sure -- " "You don't say!" Wannemaker stared at him. The lighting in the small room with its ridiculously low, beamed ceiling was far from adequate. Two small standard lamps with incongruously large and only vaguely translucent shades. The atmosphere was eerie. The quiet, unemotional voice of the professor, the creaking of the uneven floor, a spasmodic thudding, due possibly to a tree branch stirred by the night wind and striking against the wall of the house. Still more eerie in the uneasy silences when nothing happened at all. It seemed not impossible in this otherworldly house to sense the thought patterns of Rastus like radio waves streaming in, permeating the half-light, curling with the smoke patterns from the professor's pipe, eddying in fragile images, trailing off into the air, but remaining afterward, a dead static conception of presence like the stale smell of tobacco after the pipe has gone out. "I do say," the professor puffed, in answer to his question. "But," Wannemaker objected, pulling himself together with an effort. "If that is so and your gorilla can project something toward the lady, something evil -- " "Not evil," Sanderson interrupted sharply. "He is projecting no more than a natural response, not even, as far as we know, any suggestion of actual mating. Do you think Rastus believes this to be evil? Evil implies departure from an accepted standard." "Very well -- not evil, but shall we say -- unfortunate? If you are now satisfied that the same operation is possible on a human being, what is the further objection to doing it? If Rastus is destroyed and the project is carried to its logical conclusion the juxtaposition of the bestial to the human mind would no longer apply." "You still don't see." Sanderson sighed. "Don't you realize at all what it is I have established? That we have now, all of us, to start our basic thinking again from scratch? That the whole scientific world will now have to rethink from its basic theories the whole application of knowledge itself? We must begin from a new and this time quite indisputable axiom." "And that is?" an ex-Harwell man, you are remarkably unreceptive. What I have established is the simple fact that neither the human brain, nor, it seems, any brain at all, has evolved. There is no evolution. We were created." "But how can you possibly deduce -- " "Very simply, my dear Minister. If the brain has evolved, it has done so by trial, error, experiment and mutation, developing new skills to overcome the problems with which each succeeding species was faced. It would have learned, step by step, to manipulate its environment. It did not learn to develop a paraphysical ability until I drove a wedge into its tissues and upset the normal workings of its highly complex, but still basically material, composition. I released something apparently new -- a force. But this force was there already. I did not create it. I have unsheathed a link, it seems -- a link inherently beyond the organic -- to the submarine section of the human iceberg. This force did not evolve, but was inherent and must thus, without question, have been created." "You mean -- by God?" "God is a simplification embracing, as the word does, in one concept a hoped-for explanation of all we don't understand. I would go no further than an intuitive guess. This paraphysical force is a link between the brain and the brain behind the brain. The mind, if you like -- the real person, the real gorilla, the real rat, of which the manishness, the apishness, the rattishness is all we can see orI understand. It would seem further that all parapersonalities -- men, apes, rats, possibly all living things -- are linked by an overall mind conception and what we term preverbal thought can flow through all and perhaps is, in some way in totality, common to all." "What a stupendous thought," Wannemaker began. "But I still don't see -- " He was interrupted by the clangor of a telephone bell in an ancient black instrument on the carved oak sideboard. The professor lifted the receiver and listened impassively for a moment. "Right," he said in reply to someone. "Get everyone here. I'll notify the police, of course." He replaced the receiver and looked long and sadly at the minister. "You don't see?" he asked, returned to the original conversation. "I think you will see very shortly. Rastus has escaped' They heard the story from the young man, Rogers, as he drove them -- Sanderson, Wannemaker, a police sergeant and two constables -- at high speed down a remarkably ill-surfaced road that led to a rambling and isolated house where the lady zoologist, Angela Styles, lived alone, attended now, the professor explained, by a nurse and two men from the labs. The armed attendant, whose job it was to keep an eye on the cage and report any suspicious behavior on the part of the occupant had gotten up, laid down his rifle, unlocked the door and let Rastus out, without afterward having any idea of why he had done so. "You see what we're up against?" The professor sighed as they turned into a long, tree-lined drive. "The same thing could happen to any of us. We just don't know what we might do or exactly what Rastus can make us do. He can't verbalize. He can have only a vague notion of the world outside the lab. He cannot make us do anything outside the compass of his own understanding, but he can certainly be moved by a desire to prevent his own recapture." "My men have instructions to shoot at sight," the sergeant grunted. "Nothing your ape can do will stop that." "I regret the necessity, but it is the only way. I regret it for the sake of Rastus, for the sake of learning, for all our sakes. Most of all I regret the ancient law of all creation that we must kill what we do not understand. But law it is. Society must be protected. If we do not kill Rastus, Rastus may kill us. "We'll take care of society," the sergeant confirmed. "We have every available man out tonight. He won't get far." "You think he will make straight for Miss -- ah -- Doctor Styles?" "I think it more than probable. If only because it is the only location he is aware of." fair-haired girl with thin sharp features and small, deep-set but exceptionally bright blue eyes. She came into the library where they had been ushered by the nurse, a large room with bookshelves from floor to ceiling and high mullioned windows looking out onto the black shapes of ancient trees against the brightness of the moonlit sky. "Won't you sit down?" she said. She had, Wannemaker noticed, a nervous, reedy voice, but she seemed at the same time, although taut and very upright in her closefitting housecoat, reasonably well composed. "So Rastus has escaped?" "I'm afraid so," Sanderson con fessed. She sat in a high-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap and studied them all from sharp, darting eyes. There was a long and embarrassed silence before she spoke again. "You think he will come here, Professor?" "It is a possibility we can hardly overlook." "Now, there's nothing to worry about," the police sergeant assured her. "We've got a dozen armed men in the grounds and the professor thinks we all should stay the night with you, so you'll be properly looked after. We will have the dogs out after him in the morning as soon as it's daylight and a squadron of autogyros from HQ. He won't get far, I promise you." "And when you find him what will you do -- shoot him?" "If you've got a better suggestion, miss -- " She was staring at the professor, accusingly Wannemaker thought, but he met her eyes squarely and shook his head. "What else, Doctor Styles?" "I see," she said sharply. She got up and straightened the folds of her housecoat. Her eyes flickered again around the room, resting for some time and to his embarrassment on Wannemaker. She seemed, he thought, like a trapped bird with the cage door open, unsure if she knew how to fly. "Very well. As I seem to be adequately protected, I shall go to bed. Miss Rawlins here will see that you are all comfortable. I suggest, Professor, that you take the room next to mine. I should like to know where you are in case of necessity." The professor stood for a long time at the window of his bedroom, looking out at the stars and the depth of the blue-black sky and the infinity and eternity that was beyond the sky. Tall trees on a clustered knoll moved only occasionally in the wind and a single long streak of a stratus cloud reached out frorn the world's edge across the horizon like the hand of God shading his otherworldly eyes to see what was on the dark side of his personally favored ball of rock, floating on the outskirts of his otherwise happily inanimate galactic garden. Vve made Rastus more and less than a man, he said to himself. Knowing nothing of his brain or the mind behind it, I have split the wall and let the mind come oozing through. I have broken into the garden of all the angels, not because I had found the key to the door, but suddenly, like a thief with a jimmy. I am no better than a Mongol at the gates of Samark hand. I should like to pray , he thought. Not because God and all his angels were really there in the garden or could hear him if they were. But because he now knew that something or someone was there. Because of th# iceberg below the tip. Because of himself and the knowledge now of someone behind himself, the counterpart that Rastus had found linking him with all the other Rastus's in some great shadow-casting sphere beyond the umbral and penumbral illusion of a subjective earth. He let himself down on thin and shaking knees by the bedside and considered what he should say and to whom he should say it. They were all there somewhere, from Lilith to the Mother of God. Lahamu and Tiamet. Buddha, Ghengis Khan, Jesus of Nazareth and Isaac Newton. One for the master and one for the maid and one for the little boy who lived down the lane. What should he say and whom should he choose? Why did reverence demand genuflexion rather than a leap into the everlasting arms, a wave and a whistle and a: "Hiya, God!" Why words at all? Why images? Thou shalt make thyself no graven image in thy mind, squatting Buddhalike on the battlements of a dream. Thou shalt not bandy words with God. But thou shalt do something rather than kneel on rheumy knees and let thy thoughts dance nimbly, heel for heel and toe for toe, across the coverlet. Neither words nor images formulated into anything God might want to hear as he knelt by the bedside, hands cupped, staring at the wall. There was nothing to say, to project across the Great Divide into a listening, attentive ear. Nothing that the Divided Great could understand. An old man's wheezing whisper. A wedge driven into the skull and tissue of a near-human brain. The expediency of a gorilla's death. Ill T here was a sound from the next room and his thoughts returned sharply from their unrewarding amble into wordless reverie. A window had opened with a stiff, scraping sound. A creaking of loose floorboards, a shuffling, a cough and then an unmistakable grunt. He pulled himself to his feet as fast as his stiff knees would allow. He felt no fear for himself but he was trembling nevertheless, almost paralyzed by the horrible realization that, loud as the sounds had been, Angela Styles had not cried out. Rastus was there -- in Angela Styles' room -- and she was completely in his power. He dragged himself tottering along the passage and threw himself against the doctor's door, expecting to find it bolted against any entry. It opened easily and he found himself lurching into the room headfirst and stumbling toward a black shape that was launching itself from the open window into the night. He staggered after it and looked out. There was a tree with thick foliage spreading to the eaves and a branch was swaying with a spasmodic jerky motion. A rustle of leaves and then all was still. Only then did he turn to the bed. Angela Styles was leaning back against the pillows, smiling and apparently unharmed. "You didn't call for me!" "No," she said quietly. "You're not hurt? He didn't touch you?" "No. He didn't touch me." She laughed a short rasping laugh and he turned quickly towards the door. "No!" she ordered sharply. "But my dear Doctor -- " "Call me Angela." "Why -- yes -- of course, Angela. But we can't just let him run loose. No one can predict what he might do." "Do you mind if I call you Peter?" "Why, no," he agreed, puzzled. "Call me what you like." "That's better," she said enigmatically. "You and me, Peter, we can't hand our work over to the barbarians. Let Rastus have his chance." "I know what you mean. But we can't, Doctor -- Angela. Whatever we say, we are a part of society." "So is Rastus," she said. He came and sat in the chair by her bed and looked at her thoughtfully. Leaning over, he took her pulse. "It's all right," she smiled. "I'm not under his influence, if that's what you are thinking -- not in any hypnotic way at least. I just don't want anyone to harm him." "You may not know whether you are under his influence or not. How did he get in? Through the window?" "Originally," she said in a tired voice. "But he was here all along. When you came. He can travel very fast, you see. He was hiding under my bed." "What!" "You needn't be alarmed. I said he was quite harmless. I was afraid of him only when I didn't understand what he wanted. When he came to me I knew. He was frightened and very lonely. All he wanted was to be near and tell me how lonely he was -- when he found out how to do it. I understand him, you see." The professor sat staring out through the window, helplessly, into the night. Torches were flashing under the trees and a dog was barking at the end of the garden. "My God," he said, vocalizing the initial capital. "What have we done?" "I can see you believe me. Professor." "Yes," he said, wearily. "I believe you." "We must get him back safely to the lab and remove the wedge." "It's no use," he told her. "The damage is done. Removed or not, it will make no difference." "So this creature has to wander Earth, conscious for the first time of his own identity, aware of his loneliness, unable to use the knowledge we have thrust upon him, until he dies." "Until he dies," he said. "Why doesn't he hate us?" she asked. "He isn't capable of hate, somehow. Is hate only a human trait? We haven't made him human, we've raised him to a level we all should have known was there, though we never found it. We are the brutes, the guilty ones. And now, because we are afraid of what we've done, we're going to kill him." T HE torches were coming back toward the house and the first flush of morning was brushing its way lightly, orchid-tinting the edges of the broadening stratus cloud. He stood up and went slowly to the door. "Yes," he said. "We've called out all the forces of law and order. Even the minister is here. Nothing I say will make any difference now; I am a part of that world down there, however much I believed myself not to be. We have the law on our side, whatever we do. And right. And the Common Weal. But justice? Justice is another matter. If we have let in anything through the pin-prick in that animal's brain, we may find that there is universal justice on the other side. And if there is, God help us all." He went down to the library where the minister was sitting, dozing in a leather-upholstered chair. The sergeant and the three constables were playing gin rummy on a mahogany table, their rifles ready at their sides. He stood at the door, hesitating and uncertain of what to say. "No sign of him yet, Professor. The dog-handler thought he had something just now but it came to nothing. Move through the trees, he would, I reckon." "Sergeant," he said. "I want you to call your men off for a while. I want to go out myself alone and try to make contact with him." "Bit risky that, sir, isn't it?" "No!" Wannemaker sat up and dusted his lapels. "I can't allow that for a moment, Professor. You are far too valuable to society -- to your country -- to put yourself unnecessarily at risk." "I am?" he asked. "You must see that yourself. This animal is of no further use to us. You have developed the technique. It must be clear to you that, loose, he could do untold damage not only to you but to anyone else who crossed his path. Unpleasant as it is for all of us, he must be shot at sight. I ' "I don't take orders, Mr. Wannemaker. In this case, which I understand much better than you do, I give them. I would ask you, Sergeant, to kindly call your men in here. #I "Sergeant -- I am the Minister for Defense and in this case I can speak equally well for the Home Office. You will see to it, please, that Professor Sanderson does not leave this house. #I He had forgotten what it was like to feel anger, so that he at first misjudged his own emotions. This was not anger that he felt, a testy, petulant resentment of a lesser man's authority. Anger was heat, confusion, spite and bile. In the heart of the minister, tall and commanding, his trousers creased and crumpled a little at the knees, the stolid-faced policemen lining up at the door, was only a cold, withering contempt. He decided that the contempt had always been there, deep inside himself. Contempt for his masters, the little men of power who bought knowledge and exploited it for their own trivial ends. What he felt, he told himself, was scorn and a hopelessness -- a crystal-clear recognition of the doom of a world where the potentials of learning were siphoned from easy-going savants by tribal headmen wielding the fruits of wisdom with the same indifferent abandon as a Neanderthaler using a club. "You will please step aside. Sergeant. I am going out." "Now, you'd better be sensible, sir. There's nothing you can do out there." Society treating him amiably, like a child. A foolish old man who thought himself capable of using his own wisdom without a policeman to show him how. He was really angry now. He would have brushed the sergeant aside or at least put him in the embarrassing position of using violence to restrain him. He would have done so, but he could not. He was frozen where he stood, one hand outstretched and the other caught in the act of hitching up his trouser band to a more comfortable position above the hips. The constables appeared equally rigid. They had suddenly lifted their rifles, an odd enough action in any case since they were not likely to shoot him, but had then found themselves immobilized in ungainly postures, staring blankly not at him, but through and beyond him. Sanderson found himself, although unable to step forward or backward, free to turn and face the window. And not only free but under a compulsion to do so. Wannemaker was standing like a toy guardsman by his chair and behind him, the large, mullioned window was slowly opening, creaking on its hinges. There was nothing beyond the window but the green-blue tint of the morning sky and the outline of the trees. Sanderson heard the door open behind him he knew that Angela was there, standing beside him. "Rastus is coming," she said. was a dryness in his throat and a cold vacuum in his bowels like the yearning loneliness of a silent, empty night. A dog howled in the distance. A nightingale voiced a silent again a quaver short of the phrase. A horse in the middle distances whinnied. Something was breathing heavily outside the window. Deep, guttural rasping sounds of strong lungs crying for air. A strangled cry. A swirl and rustle of inrushing wind and then a crash as the window was lifted and fell from its hinges and, a moment later, Rastus was standing on the ledge. He raised himself up and down on his huge legs and then crouched forward, his hands on his knees, his teeth bared and gouts of foam dripping from his lips. He sat for a while on his haunches, his mouth working and his deep-set red eyes resting on each of them in turn. Then he jumped to the floor and shambled to Angela Styles. Hes come to take her , Sanderson thought. And nothing we can do will stop him. There is nothing any of us can do... But Rastus did not take Angela Styles. He stood in front of her, the muscles in his great shoulders knotted, his head sunk forward on his chest, staring, it seemed, at her feet. Whatever he was saying or trying to say, the image of himself he projected moved her so much that she touched him lightly on the cheek before sinking into a chair and bursting into tears. He stood where he was for a long minute before raising his hand and stroking the spot where her fingers had rested. Then, thumping his chest, he let out a cry that ought to have been of rage or challenge, but with all his enemies at his mercy, he made no move to attack. Instead he backed to the window and, facing them, let out another cry. Something, Sanderson knew, was about to happen, some tragedy about to unfold. Something Wagnerian was in the atmosphere, the dominant figure of Rastus like Wotan himself, a sullen smouldering of doom in his eyes. Wannemaker began to come to life. He found his arms and his legs free, free to back away from the menacing shape by the window, to dive for the door, tear at the handle, boots and knees against the panel, beside himself with fear. The door, immobile as the sergeant and the constables, refused to open. "Shoot him!" he shouted. "Shoot him, you fools!" Rastus stood where he was, his chest rising and falling and his breath rasping and steaming through his bared, yellow teeth. Sanderson could feel his presence more clearly now, some glimmering of a lowering mental force weighing on the air like the imminence of thunder on a sultry day. Angela Styles felt it, too, and seemed to recognize it for something more than a projection of loneliness, isolation and fear. She dropped her hands from her face as the gloom descended, a mushroom of mental agony of which Rastus was not the source but, in some extra-corporeal way, the stem and focal point. The cloud hovered above and around them and, like the mushroom fins, something of his positive essence radiated toward them. Sanderson felt the tingle of its passage, an emanation of thought encarnalized, but although it passed through him with the emotional stirring of particles in a magnetic field, he could not have defined it, nor interpreted in any visual or symbolic sense what it was Rastus felt or intended to convey. Angela however appeared to understand. "No!" she cried. "Rastus! Don't do it!" Wannemaker had given up tugging at the door and turned to face him. He seemed calmer now. Deliberately and without taking his eyes from the great ape's face he took a rifle from the nerveless hands of a constable. "No!" Angela cried again, but she seemed unable to move from her chair. They were all fixed and rigid except Wannemaker and Rastus himself. Rastus stood very still, staring fixedly at Wannemaker until he fired. Then, closing his eyes, Rastus crumbled to the floor -- dead. "Straight through the heart," Sanderson said dully, knowing that it was so. "He chose you as his executioner, and guided your hand." "There was nothing else I could do," Wannemaker muttered. "No, there was nothing else you could do. You fired the shot, but we are all equal in the sight of the one great unfocused eye. There is only one human race." "I don't know what you're talking about -- what eye?" "You know he is still there?" Angela said, kneeling by the body, its head in her hands. "Not Rastus himself, but the power we all felt. opened in his head. The third eye. Rastus would have let us go and put the guilt only on the one, but ( Please turn to Page #) Pollution was no problem. But where were all the people? ence, the Mohmu completed the interspecies transfer. He was projected from warm dark comfort into a bright noisy world of physical assault that made him take a breath into his new lungs and howl with shock. The displaced entity was lodged in his own body with full observation and no control, his ship was safely stationed a nanosecond in the past, and he was overwhelmed by sensory input. Any planetary investigator knows the best way to understand a species is to become one of them and this is what the Mohmu had done, a full identity transfer at the moment of birth. The Mohmu are not chronocentric. Their physical being is essentially invulnerable. They raise their young in a mindless condition and their highest art is the design and imprint of intellect at bodily maturity. Programed as an investigator, with no imperatives of time, Brad Symons functioned in all departments, cried in the night and studied his new world. He grew older with all deliberate speed and care. When his father rented a cabin with an unvented gas heater the baby pushed a coat stand through a window to save the family from asphyxiation When his mother cut her wrist and fainted he lay on a pressure point until his father returned. Later, when he found the steering arm of the old Chewy cracked and he was too young to warn about it, he tugged away the log in front of a wheel and let the car roll into a tree. He was an extraordinarily ordinary child though he was Bradnow, Brad-aboard-the-ship and a Mohmu, constantly amazed at intelligence in such a tentative and fragile form, naked to circumstance and subject to improbable tensions. He adapted to the pattern of this image-manipulating species and began to project goals for orientation, to ignore reality and dream the future to construct the future. It was a profound exercise of will to live in distorted time instead of the eternal now. His parents were caught by a storm on a lake and drowned, and the boy, who had been an average student, settled seriously to work and won a scholarship to college. He graduated as a cultural anthropologist. He took his masters at Columbia and his paper on Ritual , Taboo and Sexual Practice Among the Academic Hierarchy became an underground classic. It illustrated his complete familiarity with the odd juxtapositions men call humor and it made a lower profile professionally desirable. He took a teaching job at Euphemia College in Tullataska, Tennessee. According to a small group of Young Turks on the faculty, Euphemia was an outstanding example of the stagnant educational system -- motivational fadeout, instruction like a clogged leach line from the septic tank of knowledge. Brad Symons thought the college admirable, a field where young animals could exercise themselves and even more, a rich source for his investigation of what he privately labeled idioznicroznies and coinkydinks. He had observed the hitherto unexampled foreshortening of time in man's history, but it was a coincidence iosyncrasies of Joe Magworth (odds meaningless) should bear fruit at Euphemia. Magworth said, "Okay, Brad, step into the field." The other men, Beaird, Kramatz, Morgan and Dilwarden said they observed a euphoric effect, just as if the sun were shining on your liver, just as if you were eighteen and it was the first warm day of summer in a red convertible and the girl had that unmistakable languid look in her eyes. The Mohmu were beyond primative technology. Experimental physics was plywood, C-clamps and pipe, electric cable and junction boxes, equipment of painstaking complexity. The discipline had its necessary jargon and while Brad understood words like check , plug her in and goddamn, most of the conversation was "thermal inertial diodes steady," and "in-phase beam triads" doing as they ought. He walked into the circle painted on the floor. He was wearing a plastic doughnut on his head, a wide belt with rods sticking out a foot from his waist, a hundred strings of macaroni running from the doughnut to the rods and down to the floor. The tubes were filled with coca-cola or chopped alfalfa and at the focus of the beams, the man disappeared. Brad knew this because he had seen Dilwarden vanish. Kramatz swung a yardstick through him and Dilwarden said he felt it as much as a flashlight beam. "Get the hell away," said Magworth. The men stewed and fretted and checked the machinery and swore. Beaird got a Polaroid and they tried it again, and Brad got a look at himself as others saw him. All the spaghetti had vanished and there he stood like a brick-red statue done up in heat-shrink plastic. "Anthropologists are always great bastards," said Joe Magworth. Brad told him that physicists were Tinker-toy clowns and his mother had been frightened by an Erector set. Brad's apartment the following Sunday, heavy-eyed and inattentive to the TV football game. Brad was fascinated by football as a microcosm of mankind with infinite variables in a framework and Magworth liked the ballet and beer aspects of the game. Today he was preoccupied. "I don't understand it," he said. "The pulling guard missed his block, that's what." "No -- damn it, Brad! I got J.B. Buckert to come in and he's a bigger man than you. He's a very conscientious guy and wanted to know why the lights were on at three this morning. He weighs two-forty and he vanished like that little beaker of beer you gave  n me, "Have another beer." "Right," said Magworth. "But you're a polka-dot tiger, dammit. Every other person checks out stripes. Trouble is. I'm not a geologist -- maybe you've a different kind of rocks in your head -- and I can't find the money to pay for a first-class examination. All the college clinic can do is tell me if you have athlete's foot or not." Three months later money was no problem. Euphemia was suddenly a peer of the University of Tennessee instead of a shirt-tail relation, because of Magworth, the Magworth Effect and what happened at the demonstration. J.B. Buckert was chief of the eight-man police force of Tullataska, dedicated to his job as peace officer. He was a graduate of Euphemia and often bent the law fo favor the student, and when outsiders chose the college as a symbol of social repression and laid plans to raise hell, J.B. had early word on the proposal and took action. He kept a slush fund for worthy purposes and he financed a more particular application of the Magworth Effect. What happened was called the Incident at Tullataska Creek. It flowed Through campus and subsequently became as well known as the Rubicon. The invasion was organized. The wire services had been notified, a TV crew from Nashville was in attendance and sympathizers showed up from places all over the map. The local students came to watch the sophisticated ways of the outer world and were caught up in the excitement. Buckert timed his operation to the musical interludes. People flung themselves around and, with the ecological addicts present, it was not surprising when many of them embraced trees. The loudspeakers blasted at ninety-five decibels and few noticed the tree fanciers. The TV crew paid attention and their sequence of one earnest young leader presumably overcome by frenzy, wrapping both arms around a blue gum, was picked up by the networks. The lens zoomed in to see handcuffs miraculously appear around his wrists and that was the tipoff. With the leaders embracing trees, it wasn't much of a demonstration. All it did was change the course of history. J.B. said, "No harm done. We turned over the gasoline and dynamite to the state police. We're lookin' for the fellas who poured molasses in the electric git-tars. Handcuffs around trees? Students funnin' is what I say. The fella who used the sheepshears on them people is also missin'. The crowd dispersed nice when the music stopped. No trouble a-tall." Anthropologists keep journals as teenage girls keep dance programs. Brad Symons wrote: "Of course it couldn't stay a secret. One reporter found the modified heating suits in the police lockers -- Buckert sent a cruiser to Nashville to buy them at a surplus store. Then the Newsweek legman caught Dilwarden and Beaird up a tree, removing the beam projectors. What, cinched it was the freshman who covered the happening with a Jap job and calmly sold an eight-by-ten glossy to UPI NS, the one with the shears in mid-air, chopping off long curls." locked myself in the bathroom, climbed out the window onto the shed roof, sneaked through the lilacs and got away. There were reporters and TV and guys from GM and Westinghouse and when I got over the back fence I heard sirens in front." "Have a beer. Relax. It's about time for the TV special." Magworth groaned and chuggalugged half a quart of beer. A girl on TV said there was no excuse to smell like yourself when you could smell otherwise and Magworth chuggalugged the rest of the bottle. The screen went blank and then: The Invisible Man. "Turn it off!" said Magworth. "What am I going to do?" "Keep your cool and make out could try for a warm weather foundation like Dr. Salk. Sell out to the best bidder. One thing, can you detect the Magworth Effect?" "Oh, sure, with a diopiter ingaussing perpelator. Buy one at any radio supply store." "Write that down for me, Joe." "Okay, and a simple indopitor degaussing violator nullifies it. Turn it on or off. That's how we externalized the cuffs. Shall I write that down, too?" "Please do," said Brad Symons. He spent the evening in the Department of Anthropology afand took Magworth under its wing. He mimeographed the information and addressed the folded-over sheets to the mayors of the thirty-eight largest cities as reported by the World Almanac, to every fourth company on Fortune's # list and the rest to members of the House. As an anthropologist he deplored interfering with his study group, but as a Mohmu he thought he should balance things off. Within six months the generation and nullification of the Magworth Effect were well understood. Brad Symons stayed in the center of the action because he was the one being on whom there was no effect. He had taken the precaution of mailing his flyers in a dozen little towns in another state and, after the publicity, complete disclosure was the policy of the government and he was the more or less official historian. His report titled Fear, Hysteria and the Zigzag Future was a runaway best seller. This meant that a tenth of the population ever heard of it, a tenth of that number saw a copy and a tenth of those opened the book. He had the iconoclastic gall to reprint the headlines: They invalidated the cliche that it takes # as much information to predict the future as it does to achieve it; # was available and no one foresaw the world as it was to become. Brad relegated Magworth's latest thoughts to Appendix I: Assuming that present technology depends on past research, then the incremental increase of technology may be expressed as dS  TSdt where S  the present level of knowledge T  the rate of increase of technology dt  the temporal increment This simple first order differential equation may be solved with the result: dS  Tdt S S  AeTt Now if H  S, then: oc tech but if to  # and the constant A is assumed to be equal to unity, then: octech   (eTt I )dt And it got worse for thirty solid pages. While Senators cried panic and Tullataska doubled briefly in population from an influx of industrial and international spies and invisible men were blamed for everything from spilled milk to earthquakes, the electronics intralizers. At first they were very much like dog whistles with no dog to call. The United States exin other countries. With the magnificent human ability to forget the past, the Magworth Effect distressed almost no one by the end of the first year, though the handwriting was on the wall, the beam broadcaster had been made portable and the receptors were third generation as two-inch-wide belts. he still looked like a shiny brick statue. Applications of the maggie effect proliferated while fundamental understanding was still at the chalk-and-blackboard stage, a situation like running north from the south rim of the Grand Canyon blindfolded, because extrapolation projected more level desert. The Mohmu was thinking about this at the entrance of the Institute when Joe Magworth parked his car. Fortysix people got out. "How do you like that?" asked Joe. "That rips the rag off the bush," said Brad. "I can barely understand the idea that we're built of atoms miles apart like the solar system, so how many angels can you jam together on the point of a pin?" "We figure two hundred thousand in the same square foot space would push the two hundred thousand and first a foot away. No problem." "Are you still individual, discrete and alone with a hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people inside you and around you?" "I'll agree it sounds cozy," said Magworth, "but nobody casts a shadow. Just like in the beginning, the sun still shines on your liver. A very happy feeling." "I think today you bombed the transportation industry." "That's the way the cookie crumbles," said Magworth with true scientific detachment. Where ten planes had flown before, one flew now and it was very small. Commuter trains became the size of a delivery van. Cabs had nullifiers and so did every building, but elevators used the beam and little elevator space was needed. In the beginning, for all the fail-safes and backup systems, moderate disasters occurred. Nobody enjoyed the idea of sixty-three people materializing in one elevator and personal battery-powered beams worn in hats became popular for a while. With design improvements, a jet crashed after it sucked in a flock of Canadian geese over Fargo, North Dakota and four hundred and thirty-eight people walked away from the scene of the accident. To the surprise of all observers, stodgy Washington, D.C. took the next step and installed beam projectors covering the entire city. You could see people in shops and restaurants and hear the beemurmur of the great buildings, but the sidewalks were deserted. Visitors were issued receptors. Criminals were sentenced to visibility. With mandatory nullifier implants, they were the only ones who walked the streets. A timing device was set to the length of the sentence, coded to avoid tampering, and it worked well. Ostracism is a powerful force among social animals. Some cities took the opposite stance and mounted nullifiers in a spirit of independence, but they changed their position as the crime rate soared. It was much like the process of electrification. Central station power generation was begun in # and fifty years later there were still communities with oil or gas illumination. With the foreshortening of events, the almost total spread of the maggie effect took five years in the United States. Brad Symons returned to Washington after four months in a holdout commune in New Mexico. He had studied visible towns as they went maggie and established the obvious: the sense of euphoria was so attractive it became habit-forming, as life itself is habit-forming in spite of multitudinous drawbacks like toothache and taxes. rpHE Mohmu designed for inves tigation are remarkably stable, but with complete feedback from Brad-aboard-the-ship, Brad-now was hungry for the most human environment, the city. He thought the wide open spaces and mindless nature were great for freaks and this made the changes in Washington doubly shocking. Truck traffic had dwindled. Private cars were almost absent. A few government vehicles were left. The nullifiers were off at the Institute and Magworth's office was empty. "Where is everybody!" Brad yelled. "Hey, Brad." Magworth appeared in corporeality. "What happened?" "I see what you mean. Well, it's just better, is all. Solid bodies are great but they've got to be fed and they catch cold and you have to take them to doctors. J think the field theory has got to include the idea that man gets what he wants. Now, I've done a little math on this -- " "Another time, Joe." "He dreamed of flying and he flew. Dreaming of music for private occasions, he made a record player. Dreaming of the moon, he made a ladder long enough. You see what I mean?" "No." "Well, scratch an engineer and you find a man who knocks on wood. Wary of a hubris of the intellect, mankind is now wallowing in a passion of the spirit. Delightful. It's been indicated by magic and superstition and religion. Forget the mechanism that triggered the reaction, forget the intellectual origin, forget Euphemia and Tullataska Creek." ' "What are you talking about? Where does it end?" "It's one of the things so obvious it's unexamined, but it's characteristic as hunger or fear of falling. Mary Coleridge put part of it like this: Egypt's might is tumbled down Down a-down the deeps of thought; Greece is fallen and Troy town , Glorious Rome hath lost her crown , Venice's pride is nought . But the dreams their children dreamed Fleeting , unsubstantial, vain, Shadowy as the shadows seemed. Airy nothing, as they deemed. These remain. "You weird people are down the tube' said the Mohmu. "There's an inbuilt wish for transcendental emotional experience. That's the way the buzzard burps. That's the way it is, Brad." "Turn off the projectors!" "They're only necessary during the learning period, like training wheels on a bike. Right now it's the midpoint of the process and they're still on while the rest of the people come to the same conclusion." The Mohmu saw no point to continuing. "I've changed," he said. "Have a receptor handy?" He put it on. Brad Symons vanished. As far as the Mohmu could tell, safe and warm aboard the ship in his own body, living a nanosecond in the past had not been perceptible to the former Brad-aboard-the-ship. Joe Magworth whistled. "Great. Another inbuilt is the belief that the mysteries are unending. You're an example. Wonderful. I'll have to think more about that." He vanished. The Mohmu considered another life on Earth. The planet was large and only the carnal, crass, materialistic cultures, the technically advanced countries, had gone maggie. It was another of the multiple paradoxes. He felt a new sensation of sand under his own Mohmu hide, a dreadful itch toward chronocentricity, toward the unending, mysterious human experience. It was an abominable sensation. He left horrible Earth for home in desperate search for help -- renewed certainty -- and faith in the massive accumulation of data. But first he put up a warning sign for unwary passersby in space, the first his invulnerable, ubiquituous race had ever bothered about: and he shut out the fear that he might be contaminated beyond curing, that his Earthly insights might be infectious to his own eternal gyroscopic genus.  Yesterday's truths are dying -- and today's feel none too good! confidential: Office of the Director of Research Interoffice Memo To: Albert Verity, M.D. Assistant to the Director An examination of requisitions on file indicates the use of equipment and materials not readily explained by the nature of projects under development in your laboratory. I am, of course, quite certain that these requisitions are justified, but a word of explanation would be appreciated. Should you wish more specific information as to which requisitions are referred to, I shall supply it. Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D., Director of Research  cc: Samuel Rebate, M.D. President P.S. by hand. Prexy's boy Uriah Legree ( did you know he always calls our president Prexy?) has been snooping , hence the copy to the Old Man. Sorry. But what the hell are you doing with a hard-vacuum still? Vll try to cover for you but you cover for me -- for not keeping an eye on you. G. Q.-P. Interoffice Memo sealed: personal To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Damn it, Geoff, of all times for you to be away at The Ethical Drug Convention! All I can do is write this informally and hope that when you get back you'll come straight down here and let me show you the biggest breakthrough in the history of the company. Company, hell -- the biggest thing since the scalpel was invented. Hang tight, boss. Fend off Prexy and his snooper for a little while longer while I get it written up and he'll forgive you -- and therefore me -- everything. Just to whet your curiosity, though, let me tell you that my latest requisition is for more mice, lot A# and L#. In case it's slipped your mind what these are, the first is Malignancies, inherited, and the second is Carcinoma, induced. The previous three lots of each group are cured -- remitted -- normal. I mean #, Geoff -- and I mean overnight, every time. And the seven litters I have so far from the first lot -- and one from the second, check out normal. I know as well as anybody does how careful everyone has to be and how much time and crosschecking we have to go through, but I'm telling you -- this stuff is a one-shot, overnight cure not only for lesions but for systemic metastasization. You don't believe this as you read it and I don't expect you to, so get down here and I'll show you. And by the way -- before you get to polishing up a medal for me -- this isn't my discovery. All I'm doing is repeating the procedures of the guy who did discover it and I'm going to see to it that he gets the credit for it. My results-of-record extend back three months. His go back four years. So hurry back and get your thing down here. AI P.S. It also cures warts. P.P.S. The discoverer is Max Orloff. He's a neighbor and a friend of mine. P. P.P.S. On second thought, I'll enclose photocopies of my results. Did I mention what the raw materials cost? Nothing. P.P. P.P.S. If I sound a little manic -- wouldn't you? A.V. Last and ultimate and blockbusting P.S. because # bust wide open if I don't tell somebody, even if I put my life in your hands. Aunt Molly gave a party last Saturday and cooked one of her legendary feasts -- for thirty people. She spent the whole day before -- and most of the night -- cooking. And the day before that shopping. A.V. Interoffice Memo To: Albert Verity, M.D. Assistant to the Director Just a word to acknowledge your efforts during my visit to your laboratory. You will of course assign my lack of response to a deeply ingrained caution -- the caution so necessary to all of us in the ethical drug trade. Above all the stature and reputation of the firm must be maintained and I am sure you will observe the same kind of caution. As I predicted, the requisitions in question are quite justified. Hereafter, however, it would be appreciated if you would report any new directions in research to this office before the fact. Keep up the good work. Goeffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research. cc: Samuel Rebate, M.D. President. P.S. by hand. You recognize this as a slap on the wrist, very light because of the results. For God's sake don't talk about this on the outside -- it could start riots. Matter of fact, don't talk about it on the inside either. As for your Aunt Mollie -- I almost fainted. That I don't want talked about again -- even to me. You took a terrible chance there and I for one am going to forget it. Sometimes you scare me, Al. A good thing  can be trusted. G. Office of the President To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research. I very much appreciate your sending me your interoffice correspondence with Dr. Verity. It was no more than your duty. I suggest to you -- knowing it is hardly necessary -- just what you suggested to Dr. Verity. We'd best keep this in the family. I am certainly going to keep it to myself. By the way -- I fail to comprehend the reference to "Aunt Mollie." Can you elucidate? Endorsement : I totally agree with you, Dr. Rebate, that the Verity file falls into my province as Director of Security. In response to your request for suggestions, I think that first of all, Dr. Verity must be isolated -- without his knowing it. I would suggest a security examination of his laboratory and papers each night after hours -- and that the mailroom be alerted so that his correspondence interoffice and outside (God forbid) can be examined. His telephone can easily be put on delay -- as is done on radio talk-shows -- and monitored so that before an incautious word gets out of the building it can be cut. I think that to stop his work or to divert it would only alert him. Meanwhile I think an outside investigation of this Orloff person (that name has a bad ring to it. Doctor) is indicated, together with the nature of his relationship with Dr. Verity. Who is Aunt Mollie? Howlan Beagle, Col., (Ret;) Director of Security Endorsement : The one thing that strikes me is Dr. Verity's statement that the raw material costs nothing. Can you get me a nontechnical description of this "nothing"? I don't believe it, of course, unless it's a figure of speech. But it worries me. Makes it too easy for the competition to undersell us once they analyze the product. Tip Turner Director of Sales Endorsement : I appreciate a look at this file. I wouldn't say that at this stage the matter is in my department, but unless we are extremely cautious it might well be -- and a nightmare to boot. I, too, very much doubt that this Orloff has anything -- or Dr. Verity either -- but the matter should be investigated. I will be glad to go with whoever investigates this person. He may require some handling. Let me know. Genteel Flack Director of Public relations. Interoffice Memo To: Albert Verity, M.D. Can you give me a brief description of the process you used to produce the serum you used on those mice? You know the one I mean. Never mind the technicalities. Geoffrey Quest-Pro fitte, M.D. Director of Research. P.S. by hand. Seal your response. G. Q.-P. Interoffice Memo. To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research Sure. You start with the spore of Mucor Mucedo. What you want is the endospore, but you don't have to excavate for it. Just let it develop the germ tube and nip it off before it branches. Stick these in your bell jar or whatever you're using for a quick hard vacuum and freeze-dry it. You'll get an aqueous vapor that can be bubbled through distilled water until it saturates. Run it into your still. What comes out of the top pipe you can throw away. Same with the bottom. The one in the middle is what you call the serum, though I wouldn't -- it's an aromatic extract. Does that answer your question? A.V. Interoffice Memo To: The President Here is Turner's question -- which mightily impressed me; that man knows his trade -- and Dr. Verity's answer. For our Sales Manager's information (not yours, of course) Mucor Mucedo is the common black mold, found in soil practically everywhere. The endospore is just what the word says -- the inner white substance of the spore. The germ tubes grow out of the spore, which cracks open its black rind to let it out. Precisely what happens in that sort of distillation I can't say without an analytical series. It is, as Turner suggested, rather alarmingly simple and inexpensive. Shall I suggest to Dr. Verity that he try to synthesize it? Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research Office of the President Interoffice Memo To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research Good thinking! Samuel Rebate, M.D. President Interoffice Memo To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte Director of Research Good thinking! Tip Turner Director of Sales Interoffice Memo sealed: personal Geoff, what in God's name is wrong with the people upstairs? Synthesize it? Sure I can synthesize it. It'll take twenty-two steps and thousands of dollars worth of equipment and time -- and who knows if the final distillate will do the same thing? Okay, okay -- I'll get to it (though better not let Prexy's boy find out about the requisitions it's going to take) because after all I only work here. But why on earth synthesize something that's so easy to come by already? Are we going to price life-saving right out of the market? Sometimes I fail to see the humor in the ethical drug business. Or the ethics either. Don't mind me, Geoff. I'm just blowing off steam. You'll get your goddam synthesis. Thanks for the private shoulder. Disgustedly, AI ' Endorsement : Hardly a loyal attitude, that. Howlan Beagle, Colonel (Ret) Director of Security. From the desk of: Uriah Legree Assistant to the President Picked up Mr. Flack at prearranged time, #:# A.M. Tuesday, driving personal car. Arrived vicinity Orloff residence shortly after #:#. After considerable excursions up and down unfashionable streets without success, queried local gas station, asking for Max Orloff. Attendant, Grand OF Opry type, overalls, old straw hat even, cigar stub interfering with diction, said Balzac, Baldaz, Boldass or Bolaz? -- difficult to tell which and not understandable until later. Mr. Flack said again, Max Orloff and the native said. Yeah, that's ol' Baldaz (or Balzac or some such) and gave explicit directions. House on top of hill behind screen of trees -- three, four acres cultivated, garden vegetables, grapes, cow, duckpond, rabbit doorbell. Mr. Flack stopped me and knocked, said always take the sucker at his own measure. Door open, man in his forties wearing hair to shoulders, beard period. Waved us in asking nothing. Big room, beams, fireplace, loom. Weaving at loom young woman wearing long yellow hair period. Smiled. Second young man comes in door at back, suppose kitchen, wearing full skirt long black hair period, says. Oh, hello, I'll get tea. Started to say no. Mr. Flack said, Thanks yes. Man said, That's Joyce, woman at loom, that's Jocelyn. Jocelyn ties off thread, comes to us, kisses Mr. Flack, kisses me just after I caught Mr. Flack's Hold Still signal. Mr. Flack introduces himself and me and says we're from Ethicolossus. The man acts very glad, says he's Max Orloff. Sit down. Nothing to sit on but great big half-filled bright-colored velvet bags. Mr. Flack sits on one, his weight makes it shape itself like a kind of chair without legs. I try one carefully, lose balance, fall into it, it catches me, sure enough a chair, much too low but comfortable. Orloff says, Jocelyn made them. Jocelyn sits on floor in front of, between us. Smiles a lot. Mr. Flack tells Orloff how impressed everyone at Ethicolossus is with him and his work and a lot more about saving the world from misery and pain. Orloff takes it all in as if he believes every word and after a while I think he really does. Mr. Flack doing all talking, slow and easy, Jocelyn says to me Like to see the place? Mr. Flack flashes me a quick nod and Jocelyn gets up and holds out hand. Don't want hand, don't want to go, but Mr. Flack gives signal again and I get up. Jocelyn keeps hand. Very unsettling. Go out through kitchen, brick and iron stove, burning wood I guess. Beams, cast-iron and copper, tile floor. Big. See larder, root cellar, spring house, bedrooms with mattress covering whole floor, twenty cats with names, stories, four dogs, doves. Jocelyn tells how they live off the land, but only salt, flour, matches and the like, not even sugar, they keep bees. OrlofFs lab. Like Alchemists workshoplot of stuff usually glass is ceramic. Jocelyn says Joyce makes it. On the way back in she stops and takes both my hands and says. Oh, please, will Ethicolossus buy Max's discovery? Said I don't know, but maybe. She says, Oh, and tears come into her eyes. Says it's been very hard for a long time. Max could lose the place. It would take such a little bit to let him keep it. Went back in. Joyce has tray with mugs. All go into big room. Mr. Flack and Orloff heads together over papers, Max has Mr. Flack's pen. Joyce says, Tea? I don't want it but Mr. Flack takes his and gives me the look. I take the big mug, guess Joyce made that, too, took a drink. Herbs. Awful. Mr. Flack drank his all up, so me too. Everybody happy enough to make a man puke. We leave, both girls kiss us, afraid Max Orloff might, too. In car, Mr. Flack laughs all the way down the hill, says, You'd never believe what we got the process for -- fifty dollars, a lousy Fifty dollars. Only Orloff does not know that and will not until he shows those papers to a lawyer. Told him Orloff about to lose the place. Mr. Flack said, Good, glad we got there before he moved. Said this world is sharks and minnows and the minnows live to get eaten, that's what they are for. Dropped off Mr. Flack at Ethicolossus, proceeded to county airport for second part of investigation. Lunched at airport, caught Flight # as planned, landed at Breed City #:# p.m. Hired car, proceeded to Mollie Verity neighborhood, checked out house. Trees on street made it like tunnel, houses far apart, old-fashioned, gingerbread, porches, porticos, porte cocheres. Old but neat, paint bright. Shutters on most, wide lawns, picket fences, flowers. Verity house light gray with green shutters. Drive to corner, candy store. Call. Say I work with Dr. Verity, just passing through. Miss Verity sounds very hospitable. Drive back and park. Little lady bounces off porch glider, meets me halfway up front walk, takes both hands. Different thing from that Jocelyn altogether. Eyes bright as headlights, hair graying but not much and pulled back so tight it hurt into little bun. Apple cheeks really. Looked like all her own teeth. Gingham dress, blue with white polkadots and white collar and white tea apron, looked like that what's-his-name that used to paint Post covers. Rockwell. Harder to believe than naked Orloff. Inside, not a word until lemonade in tall glass with ice and homemade ginger and lemon cookies. Then all about Albert, how is Albert, is he working too hard, does he look peak-ed? Never had to say I don't see Dr. Verity one month to the next. She carried it all. Have to say if I didn't see this woman myself, couldn't believe both her and the medical report Col. Beagle gave me to read. Report said total terminal, metastasis, gone everywhere, weight less than # pounds, delirium to coma. Then spontaneous remission. But all that only months ago, now healthiest little lady around, full of bounce, laughing, always on the move. Said it herself -- cancer did her good. Never had so much energy before, nor so much fun. No trouble at all getting her to talk about it. About AI Verity either. Sun rises and sets on him. Golden boy. Not just family pride, real miracle worker, all that. Couldn't get her to say what if anything he'd done. She was too far gone to know. But she said this, she said she came out of the haze and the pain laughing. She says she never felt so good in all her life, better even than now. She said she saw colors she had never seen before, had no names for them. Shifting, balanced patterns, moving mosaics. Everything part of the colors -- sound -- click of a spoon, footsteps, airplane -- translated into the colors, joined them. Then, dreams -- impossible flying and living and feeling dreams, realer than most real things. And all the while feeling great. Then hungry. Couldn't get enough. Her folks and friends laughed, then got worried. Gained # pounds in three weeks, all of it in the right places, kept on feeling good, so not to worry. Gave me a piece of fruitcake, says it's Albert's favorite, says that I should give it to him. Somebody else better do that. At least till he finds out from someone else. Like my job. Lot of different things to do all the time. Never had a worse morning, though, or a better afternoon. Maybe some day see that lady again. Expense account attached. Uriah Legree Assistant to the President. Endorsement : I attest to the accuracy of Legree's photographic eye and telegraphic prose. I cannot completely identify with his sketches of me, but then, why cavil? That is not the issue. What is most seriously the issue is that the treatment she had, however she got it or from whom, seems to be psychedelic or at least euphoric. That won't do. Genteel Flack Director, Public relations. Endorsement: What is overridingly important -- and I am astonished at the reluctance of both these gentlemen to point it out -- is that this Orloff is a nudist with long hair who has an open and irregular arrangement with not one, but two females. I would advise strongly against any association with a person of this sort. One can readily assume what his politics is. There are more kinds of security, apparently, than these gentlemen realize. Director of Security. Endorsement: As the long-haired man would doubtless say, the Colonel can cool it. With those signed papers in hand there is no danger of any such association. Dr. Quest-Profitte: when you have read through this, see what you can do about getting the euphoric effect out of the distillate. Samuel Rebate, M.D. President. Interoffice Memo To: Albert Verity, M.D. Al, I've been studying your diagrams of the aromatic rings in the Orloff distillate, as well as your chromatography charts, and it seems to me that there may possibly be a parallel or analogical similarity between some of these fractions and such compounds as psilocybin. If so, there may be unexpected and certainly unwanted side effects. Will you please check this out for me? Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research Interoffice Memo sealed: personal To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research I'm impressed. I really wouldn't have thought you or anyone could have discovered that analogue by the rough reports I sent up, though it is there if you know what to look for. The answer is yes -- the stuff gives a tremendous high and I have the happiest mice in the world. If you're worried that people might buy it for that, like glue-sniffers, forget it -- it seems to have no effect on anyone but cancer patients. It'll take a lot of testing to prove that out, but it seems to be the case -- so much so that I was about to broach the subject of a line of research to investigate the distillate as a diagnostic. Would you favor such an approach? I believe it would bear fruit -- and, rather quickly, at that. Work progresses on the synthesis, which I still think is a vast waste of time, but indications are that the synthetic product will work as well as the natural derivative. By the way, I dropped over to see Orloff the other night and he was in seventh heaven. He showed me the agreements with Ethicolossus and I find them extremely generous. It's going to make a great deal of difference to a very good man. Right? AI Interoffice Memo To: Albert Verity M.D. Al, you'll have to get the euphoric effect right out of the distillate. Dr. Rebate, Mr. Flack, Mr. Turner and I have conferred on the matter and it's unanimous. The thing to shoot for is an effect no more marked than that of the common tranquilizers or so-called psychic energizers. That much would be fine. Can you do it? The answer to your question re using the Orloff distillate as a diagnostic is, of course, answered by the above. Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research. Dear Geoff: I'm taking advantage of you, I know -- and also of a certain symbolism. This is a letter on plain paper and in a plain envelope -- for plain talk, for once not under the engraved umbrella of the Ethicolossus name and image. This is me -- Al -- the guy downstairs who shovels mouse turds and tries his damnedest to do what he wants in the way you say you want it. Let me sidle into the subject. Years ago there was a wonderful English humorist, almost forgotten today, whose name was Jerome K. Jerome. He was a very funny man. He was also gentle, quizzical, questioning and bright as hell -- one of those rare human beings who was capable of exploring the everyday world as if it were a foreign country, full of strange practices and heathen idols -- which of course it was and is. Remember one of his simplest, gentlest little essays. It was about baby dresses. In his day -- around the turn of the century -- it was customary to make dresses about four feet long for infants. He began to wonder about this, as he wondered about everything his eye lit on, so he went to an expert to find an answer. The expert was one of those legendary English nannies pushing a pram in a London park. "Why do babies wear such long dresses?" he asked her, and she replied, just this side of shock: "My goodness, sir! You wouldn't have them in short dresses, would you?" Now the point of the essay isn't that she didn' know and was admitting it. The point is that she did know and that was her answer. Further, it was an answer that absolutely satisfied her, the kind of answer you find at the end of a theorem, or carved on a tablet of stone for Moses. We've run head on into one just like that. You want me to take the "upper" effect out of what I'll be so incautious as to call a cancer cure. I understand what you're doing. You're protecting Ethicolossus against charges which might be brought against it once the news was out. I'll concede that they will be made when it gets out. But it seems not to have occurred to you that the charges can be refuted -- and should be. First of all there's a safety factor. I think it will be proved beyond doubt that that euphoric effect will not occur except in the presence of malignancy. But absolutely aside from that -- did it ever occur to you to ask, "What's the matter with sick people feeling good?" Why is it that morphine is the mainstay in terminal analgesis? You know as well as I do that there are a dozen or a score other drugs which will kill pain as well or better, which are not used simply and solely because they are euphorics. It isn't a medical issue, it's a moral one -- and it's the kind of morality that has no place in medicine -- not the kind Hippocrates was talking about, nor my kind either. It's the kind of morality that forced the Chinese doctor to examine his female patients by means of an ivory doll passed through the curtains, marked where it hurt. It's the kind that made anatomical dissection virtually impossible for over a thousand years. We don't give euphorics to dying patients because somehow it's wrohg for them to go out feeling good. We do a little something to keep them from feeling too bad or from feeling at all -- but somehow it's immoral to let them go out happy. In the case of Orloffs distillate we have to think one step further. Suddenly I see the whole R  D of this amazing substance aborted because patients might feel good -- not while they're dying, but while they're getting well! I'd hate to have to explain that to a man from Mars. Hey, Geoff -- I'm really grateful that I have your shoulder to cry on in private like this. I get frustrated from time to time and this helps. AI Interoffice Memo sealed; personal To: Albert Verity, M.D. Assistant to the Director There is very little I can say in response to your good letter, except that I share in your pleasure in this means of making yourself feel better. It seems to me that the proper place and time for investigations into the philosophy and morality of the healing arts is at two in the morning after too much weak beer in one's second year of medical school. These things can hardly be the concern of men of our degree of age and experience, especially not on company time. I will go so far as to point out to you that our function in pharmaceuticals is to serve medical practice, not to alter it. Let physicians make these alterations. When and if they do, we shall accommodate them. We can do no more. We must do no more, Dr. Verity. I do not think your letter was what, in law, is called a responsive answer to my query as to the possibility of recompounding the Orloff distillate in such wise as to reduce or eliminate the deleterious side effects. Please advise me. And, of course, continue to feel free to express yourself to me in any way you see fit. It pleases me to have this function. Geoffrey QuestPro fitte, M.D. Director of Research. Interoffice Memo To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research. Please refer to the ring diagrams and chromatograph charts on which you recently commented and from which you so expertly deduced the parallelism of the distillate with certain psychomimetics. These diagrams and charts present a far less subtle statement of the impossibility of making the alteration you suggest. It is analgous to asking a metallurgist to substitute lead for tungsten as a hardening alloy. No matter what the derivation -- natural or synthetic -- Orloffs distillate will not work without that structure. It is not I who makes this statement, Doctor, but biochemistry. Albert Verity, M.D. Assistant to the Director. Endorsement : You smacked him too hard, Geoff. Once he begins to doubt the source of your information about the euphoric effect, he will begin to doubt a great many other things. Better call him off the project before he does. Samuel Rebate, M.D. President. Endorsement : Some people just don't know how to handle people. Q. -- P-Doll should have cleared it with me. Genteel Flack Director, Public Relations. Endorsement : If anyone bothered to ask my advice, I'd have said a long time back, kick him out altogether. Not a good teammate at all. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Director of Security Endorsement : The man gives me the creeps. I have this nightmare about our marketing the Orloff thing and it doesn't work. I have this other nightmare about our marketing it and it does work. And I don't know which is worse. I don't want to say any more than that and don't need to. Tip Turner Director of Sales Endorsement Don't care what happens. All I know is I got to eat his Aunt Mollie's fruitcake. Great. Uriah Legree Assistant to the President. Endorsement : Just leave him to me and don't tell me I can't handle my people. Geoffrey QuestProfitte Director of Research. Interoffice Memo To: Albert Verity, M.D. Assistant to the Director. I concur in your conclusion that nothing can be done about the unfortunate side effects inherent in the Orloff distillate. We have Change-of-address notifications or other subscription correspondence should be sent to L. C. Murphy, Galaxy Magazine, # East # Street, New York, NY # therefore concluded that the project had best be shelved. Please collect all files and notes and have them delivered to me, complete and indexed, not later than noon tomorrow. I am making arrangements to have all unnecessary materials, specimens, test animals and equipment removed from your laboratory immediately. You may proceed with the previously authorized projects assigned to you. Geoffrey QuestProfitte, M.D. Director of Research Interoffice Memo To: Geoffrey Quest-Profitte, M.D. Director of Research Why don't you square with yourself if not with me? The Orloff distillate will disappear into the archives (and now I understand why your terms with Max were so generous: they were all contingent on production; now for fifty lousy dollars you've gained all right and title to his discovery) and it is being buried -- because Max Orloff has no medical degree -- because he is a known eccentric -- because the distillate can be easily produced from readily available materials, duplication is likely and profit is small, or -- because a big markup couldn't be concealed But mostly because the existence of such a treatment would send shudders through the Big Machine and all its many parts -- Ethicolossus, the pharmacists, the doctors, the hospitals, the hospital-supply firms, the "chronic" rest-homes and all their heirs and assigns, cohorts and confederates. And I quit. I resign with great joy -- not because I am defeated in this project, but because Orloff and his work and his way of life are bigger than anyone's business or career or prestige and I want no part of any of that. You will call me a dropout, but I will go ahead with the healing I was trained for -- and with no more dirt on my hands than I get from weeding the eggplant patch. You'll never pin a malpractice on me because I am on to you. The papers Orloff signed are no good to you because Orloff exists and the distillate exists and I exist -- and because of that people are just going to get better and they'll pay for it by harvesting tomatoes and chopping wood. And here's one more thing to think about. With Orloff -- especially with me and Orloff -- there's more where that came from; more products, processes, ideas. But you don't want to hear any of this. You can't, can you? Albert Verity, M.D.  Up was down and down was up, but there was only one way to go! "minute?" McKay turned. Slazeck was coming out of the Communications Room. "I was just starting to look for you," said Slazeck. "We've something coming in from space." "A starship, you mean?" "No, something physically coming from deep space. It's about the moon's distance out right now." They went back into Communications and Slazeck plugged into the perception circuits of the Interface equipment. McKay did the same through his personal communicator. "There it is." Slazeck brought out the relevant head-up display. The circuits gave a direct input to the perception centers of the brain. "It's making no signals and it's quite small, whatever it is. But the scanners definitely think it's artificial." "Do we have a visual sighting?" The symbol display merged into the section of the heavens containing the intruder. The starfield grew richer as magnification increased but nothing else came into view. "It really is small." "Doesn't mean we can ignore it, unfortunately," said McKay. "Earth has some deadly companions orbiting the sun these days, despite the clean-up efforts of the Furtherance teams after the battle. In the good old days, the Sasarenn installations would have taken care of it," he added ironically. "Innocent or guilty," Slazeck agreed. "But from its trajectory, this one is guilty. With stuff being thrown every way during the battle, some of it is bound to intersect Earth's orbit again." "Right. Try a recognition pulse, anyway." "No response," said Slazeck a few moments later. "It's a missile for my money, Mac." "I think so. It'll be in range in twelve hours. We can put it on ice while we make certain." "Always supposing it doesn't destruct when you put an Interface in front of it." "That, too, is possible." McKay sighed. "We can shield Earth from the heat flash, but there would be a communications blackout." He came off the circuit, "returning" to the room with its curiously blank-faced equipment. "Okay, I'll call Lang and get the Committee for Earth's Defense alerted. I can just imagine how pleased they'll be." He was becoming quite used to this juggling act between two alien technologies and the worried authorities of Earth. The Interface, a multiracial culture linked by interstellar matter-transmitters, had reached Earth some time before, immediately preceded by the war fleet of the reptilian Sasarenn, who opposed the spread of the Interface. The Sasarenn had occupied the Earth-moon system for three months, with McKay their reluctant planetary agent, before the Furtherance (the Interface survey fleet) broke through the blockade and pitched them out. That left Earth, somewhat shaken, newly enrolled in the Interface with McKay still planetary agent, still flying the Recovery and Liaison Vehicle thrust upon him by the Sasarenn. Dealings with the Interface to date had not simplified the situation in the least. The Committee for Earth's Defense seldom made McKay's life easier. When he telephoned Lang at the U.N. he had some trouble making the situation clear. Lang wanted to know, "Can't you send a camera missile to intercept before it gets nearer Earth?" "The thing's just inside the moon's orbit," McKay said patiently, "making about three miles a second toward Earth. The maximum range of the Interface relay is ten thousand miles, as you know. We can throw a missile out from that with any speed you like, depending how far out you want the rendezvous, but the faster it goes the more accurate our aim has to be. Even if our aim is on target we'll only get a glimpse in passing, and by the time we've evaluated that glimpse and decided to destroy the thing, the missile will be well out of range." "But if you wait we may get a thermonuclear explosion within ten thousand miles of Earth." "Too early for that worry. As soon as it's in range I'll put an Interface in front of it. If it doesn't blow then, I'll bring it to rest and look it over. If it's dangerous I'll drop it through Interface into a disposal area." "It had better work," said Lang. "If the Van Allen Belt is disrupted the international scientific community will go crazy -- to say nothing of the military reaction!" "I'm fed up to here with both of them," McKay replied sourly. "A member of the international scientific community managed to yesterday, trying to map the power section interior with ultrasonics. I can't get them to believe the ship's conscious and suspicious of them." "Okay, Mac, point taken. We'll leave it with you. Keep us posted on developments." until late that evening when the object fell into Interface range. McKay had considered taking the handling the interception from there but had decided there was no point. With the perception circuits annihilating immediate surroundings, the crew missed nothing by the ship's remaining at the Montana spacefield. They had visual sighting of the stranger now, but it was still only a speck among the stars. "Here goes, then." McKay had set the Interface relay to bring the object to rest where it was. ' 'Up Interface -- " An intricate tracery of symbols filled the head-up display for a second and was replaced by one word: Negative. "What the hell? Up Interface -- " The word swam in their heads again. "What's going on?" Lang asked. He was plugged in on sound only, in New York. "The object is inhibiting the space around itself from Interface contact," McKay told him, working furiously with the computer input. "I'm working back to find the limit of the interference." "What could cause such interference? Is this object of non-Interface origin?" "Perhaps it's an Interface relay itself," said McKay. "Several were lost in the battle, believed destroyed." "The limit of the interference is eighty miles," he announced a minute later. "I'm sending out a camera probe now. Stand by -- " They waited eagerly for the probe to close the distance. "You watch the picture, Walt," McKay said at last. "I'll slow up the rocket." Watching the electronic display, McKay turned the probe and prepared to match velocities. "I have visual sighting," Slazeck reported. "Object roughly spherical, coming up fast -- It is an Interface relay." "Okay." McKay fired the probe's motor and brought it alongside. "Let me see -- " The relay was roughly spherical, built up of solid-state components in a complex pattern; but one side of it had become a glassy, fused mass. "Sasarenn beam damage," he said. "Receivers knocked out, obviously -- that explains why it was never recovered." "That ends that panic," said Lang with obvious relief. "Are you going to blow it up now?" "I don't think so," said McKay. "Where's it going to fall?" "In the South Atlantic," Devlin, the third member of the team, reported. "Off Cape Horn, but well away from land." "Well, then, no need to worry," said McKay. "Unless it burns out in the atmosphere we'll try to salvage it after splashdown." "Can't you pick it up in space?" asked Lang, anxious again. "There isn't time for that. It'll be in the atmosphere in about twenty minutes." "Your coolness amazes me," said Lang. "What if it burns up?" "Then we can't recover it." Lang was being unusually dense today. "Shouldn't it, therefore, be destroyed now?" "No, dammit. We should recover it if we can, but it's not worth risking life for a snatch in space. There's no danger in letting it fall into the sea." Lang's misgivings disappointed McKay. So far Earth's only dealings with Interface civilization had McKay, Slazeck and Devlin on behalf of the Furtherance teams opening up this part of the Galactic spiral for Interface traffic. Lang and McKay were agreed that there must be more contact with the member races of the Interface, and recovering an Interface relay, worth a planet's ransom, would help this along. They waited while the relay fell on into the atmosphere; as McKay had hoped, the defensive field still operating acted as a heat shield and the unit decelerated steadily. As the ionization around it dispersed a radio beacon came on, calling for pickup. "Let's go," said McKay. He had trol buildings and they were already suited up for the flight. The verting to forward thrust, then to ramjets as it pulled up to the Interface corridor Air Traffic had laid out, away from the field. contacted the orbital relay, a unit identical to the one they were after, but positioned in stable orbit around the Earth. There were similar units for Mars, Jupiter and Venus now, and for other points of interest along the great staircase of stars the Furtherance had reached. Any of them could be reached in seconds, once the void had been crossed to position the relays -- a task to which at least one member race had dedicated all its resources. "Up Interface -- " said McKay to the ship's computer-autopilot. They were climbing into a night sky with a few stars showing through clouds lit by a first-quarter moon. In the south Atlantic it was nearly dawn, so the half-mile disk of the Interface was full of to it and there was the sea below them, with Cape Horn out of sight two hundred miles to the west and a black circle of Montana sky hanging impossibly behind them. After a few seconds the disc vanished, leaving them alone. search devices. "That sea looks pretty rough," he said. "We won't be able to touch down, so the pickup's going to be tricky." "You said it," said Devlin. "I'll go aft and try to get it figured out.'" McKay was sure he'd think of and Liaison Vehicle -- had been designed to make rescues and pickups in all extreme conditions. However, the search devices were having trouble. By now they should have been on top of the splashdown, but the ship hadn't detected the downed relay's position. The satellite overhead had lost it as 'well. "I think I've got it figured," Devlin reported. "How near are we to the pickup?" "Can't find the target at all," said McKay. "Stay back there. I'm starting a search pattern." After an hour he gave up. If the relay had been transmitting anywhere in that area of sea they would have found it long before. And if the beacon had gone dead it would be pure chance even for the tumbling waste. Most likely it had hit too hard, damaged as it was, and gone straight to the bottom. Four days later McKay was with the station commander at the Montana field when Slazeck phoned from Communications. "We've picked up that relay's beacon again." "It's come back to life? Where is it now?" "Two hundred fifty miles off the Cape of Good Hope." "You mean Cape Horn -- Good Hope's the tip of Africa." "That's the one I mean. To be more accurate, it's off Cape St. Francis. That satellite is out in the Indian Ocean." McKay swore. If Slazeck told you the world was coming to an end he still wouldn't make it sound serious. "Okay, get out to the ship on the double. We'll grab the thing before it moves again." When he got to the ship Slazeck and Devlin were already aboard. Cathy, Devlin's fiancee, was waiting in the hangar. "Can I come for the ride, Mac?" "Sure, if you want to." As Lang's assistant, Cathy was a "There shouldn't be anything for you to do on this mission, though." "There's nothing for me to do here today." They ducked under the fuselage and stepped on to the lock. Once aboard, he showed her to a G-couch and went forward to the controls. "One thing I don't understand, Mac," the girl said as the ship climbed away. "I thought it was theoretically impossible for a relay to project itself through Interface?" "So I've always been told," said McKay. "So this one must be interfering in some way with the Earth-orbital relays. That's why we have to neutralize it at once." "'Where has it been for the last four days?" "Who the hell knows?" McKay replied with a shiver. "A bigger hazard to navigation than a rogue Interface relay would be difficult to imagine." was beautiful. The Interface had appeared as a circle of flawless blue against the Montana thunderclouds and the relay, when they found it, was floating peacefully in a calm sea. "We don't get to try your idea after all, Dev," said McKay as he made his approach. "You'll be able to reach out and pull the thing aboard." He set the ship down vertically, starting up the fans of the air-cushion pads and moving in on the floating satellite. "Opening lock now." "I have a line on it," Devlin reported soon. "Bringing it in now. Open cargo hatch, please." "Cargo hatch open." "Second line attached -- reel it in. Satellite coming aboard now. We'd better hurry this up, Mac, the weather doesn't look so good from out here." "The weather? Good grief, you're right." A haze had come up from nowhere and was beginning to obscure the sun. As the scene grew darker the sea looked more threatening. "My God, that's a sudden change. Is the satellite stowed?" "Clamps closing now." "Okay, I'm closing the cargo hatch. Get back in and shut the lock." "Ready for takeoff," Devlin reported a minute later. The motion of the ship in the waves was becoming noticeable. "Okay, I'm taking her up." and eased the ship up from the water, correcting as the wind took hold. "This is going to be a real storm down here," he said as he converted to forward thrust. "Came up out of nowhere, didn't it?" The sun was gone now and the haze was thickening into clouds blowing over them with surprising speed. "I don't know what this is, Mac," said Slazeck, "but I recommend we get above it." "Gladly," said McKay. "But I can't gain more height." "Systems check," ordered Slazeck. The computer display cascaded over the field of view. "We have green lights on all systems, Mac." "We have full power on the jets and can't climb," said McKay. "If this gets any worse we can't even stay airborne." "Look ahead, Mac!" yelled Cathy. A shallow depression had appeared in the sea ahead. In seconds it became a bowl and then a sheer pit, still expanding in size, until the far side was lost in the thickening mist. "That's not a whirlpool, it's an Interface!" shouted Slazeck. "That water's going down vertically!" "Into what, for God's sake?" cried McKay, still fighting to keep the ship up. "Can anybody see what's down there?" "We're going over the edge -- " Cathy shrieked. She sounded terrified and who could blame her? The awe-inspiring sight was like the edge of doom and already the ship was below normal sea level. "Our jets are powerless against this downdraft," McKay snapped as they went down with the thundering wall of white water. "Rocket acceleration warning, primary boost in five seconds." He banked sharply away from the cascade, the fusion sustainer motor. A blinding jet of blue flame stabbed down into the abyss. "I don't believe this," he murmured as the rocket-seconds ticked on and on. They had expended enough fuel to go far out into space and still the edge of the titanic waterfall was lost above them. "Go to secondary boost, Mac, please," Cathy implored. "We can't, honey," Devlin said soothingly. "If we use secondary boost down here we'll melt ourselves." "Okay, cut-off," said McKay. The ship stalled instantly, almost crashing into the wall of water before he regained control. "Let's keep that down," murmured Slazeck as they banked out t from it again. "Let's all calm down," said McKay. "The ship's fully functional and we're not about to hit anything. I want to hear some thinking about what's happened to us." "First thought," said Devlin immediately. "Stop circling and fly along the face of this thing." "Okay." McKay leveled out. "Basis?" "It doesn't look like the curved side of a pit any more," said Devlin, "and we lost sight of the other side even before we fell in. If this is a flat sheet of water it must have edges." "Radar shows nothing ahead," said McKay. "Incidentally there's no change in outside air pressure, though on visual evidence we've already fallen miles." no sign of an edge to the waterfall, nor of a bottom' to it. "There's no way out," McKay heard Cathy whisper. "Nonsense," he said sharply. "Interface has thrown us into some weird situations before this. We were a month in pitch darkness once, remember? We don't give up on this one so soon, when the ship's still in good shape." "What do the search devices show so far, Mac?" Slazeck asked. As always he was calm. "Search devices show nothing. According to inertial guidance we're flying in a straight line -- but there's nothing ahead of us, behind, above, below, or opposite to the water. The artificial horizon says we're nose-up all the time, by the way, but if I level out we start gaining airspeed." "It's like the old flat-Earth legend," said Devlin. "The sea falls off the edge." "If I see giant elephants or turtles I'll let you know," McKay promised. "Do the instruments give us any kind of position in relation to the Earth's surface?" asked Slazeck. "Not a thing," said McKay, checking. "We're in limbo, it seems." "I think you're right there," Slazeck agreed. "The fact that we can't fly upward suggests that we're not in normal space at all." "Now we're getting somewhere. What kind of space are we in, though?" "I think -- on the evidence so far -- it's finite but unbounded. Look, an Interface only lasts about half a minute. There's a limit to how much water can fall through it, however deep in the sea it was. And when we were above this thing it looked like a cylinder. The sides didn't look straight until we were inside." "I see," McKay said slowly. "So this airspace is curved back on itself through a fourth spatial dimension. Though our eyes and our three-D inertial guidance say we're flying in a straight line, we're actually spiralling down a four-D cylinder." "More complex than a cylinder," said Slazeck. "I can't visualize an analogous shape in three dimensions at all. Look, this wall of water seems to extend to infinity above and below us, and that's just as impossible as its lateral extension." "Ow." McKay rubbed his forehead under the pressure helmet. "So it's closed in a fifth spatial dimension as well. There really is no bottom to it in our vertical." "Right. There's nothing here but air and water, however, so we can't mark any point so as to recognize when we next passed." "We could trail smoke, but it would probably disperse in all this water vapor before we went around the fourthand fifthD loops and came back to it." "There's a point," said Devlin. "How come the waterfall's still there? With the accumulating kinetic energy of this endless drop you'd think it would all be vapor by now." "There's lots of vapor around us. Visibility's a few hundred yards at most. Probably just as well for our sanity -- if the fourth-D radius is only a couple of miles, say, we could see ghost images of ourselves!" "But the falling water isn't accelerating now any more than we are," said Slazeck. "Each drop of water over there has reached its terminal velocity in air." raging white wall. "Staggering thought, isn't it?" "Back to work," said McKay, tearing his eyes away from the hypnotic display of force. "How has this multidimensional phenomenon come into being? It's new in human experience." "You may be wrong there," said Slazeck. "I'll tell you -- what put the idea into my head was the starting point. Years ago I read a piece about five areas in the world where unusual numbers of ships and aircraft vanished without trace. They all lay in the oceans to the east of the continents -- off North and South America, South Africa, Australia -- and they were all the same oval shape and size. The thought occurred to me then, quite fancifully it seemed, that there might be some congruence -- some pverlapping of those areas in multidimensional space." "So the thing's a natural phenomenon," said Cathy. "Was it the origin of the flat-Earth legends and the edge of the world, do you think?" "Can't be. Nobody who saw it could survive until now. Even aircraft pulled in would run out of fuel eventually -- and anything falling into that water would be smashed to pieces. We must be the first nuclear-powered machine in here." "That's one big advantage we have anyway," said Devlin. "Since we're not burning fuel we can keep flying on jets forever." "Oh, no," said Cathy. "Like an airborne Flying Dutchman. Why this is Hell , nor am  out of it -- " "No, no," said McKay gently. Cathy was still recovering from a mission, regaining her confidence. "The relay made it through, protected by its defensive field, in four days. All we have to do is keep flying and we'll get out eventually." "It will take more than four days to fly through," Slazeck pointed out. "The water's falling a lot faster than we are." "If we just dive, we'll pick up more speed until we reach the ship's thermal limit. We could hold the speed back, but I wouldn't care to fly on airbrakes for days on end." "Agreed," said Slazeck with a professional shudder. "Another point has occurred to me," McKay said after some moments. "We thought the relay had gotten to the Indian Ocean by interfering with the orbital units. But in fact it must interact with this natural spacewarp, getting into it and out again via Interface. From our viewpoint in the outside world, the fall through the warp took four days and we've been down here for more than an hour already. But there's still light here, which can only be coming from the open ends, one or both. And those ends, being Interfaces, are only open for thirty seconds of real time." "I copy," said Slazeck reluctantly. "We're outside normal time as well as space. To us, the fall could take any amount of "Equally, it may be nearly over," McKay said hastily to keep Cathy from despair. "My thought was that the far end of this may be open to us right now if we can find the way to it." "Suggest we begin with the Interface relay, since we seem to be agreed it got us into this," said Slazeck. "Agreed. You take over, Walt, and Dev and I will take a look at this beast we've brought aboard." still said the ship was nose up, the floor was flat underfoot. McKay and Devlin walked to the rear of the main cabin and opened a floor hatch into the cargo space. There lay the gray sphere of the relay, dry now and faintly stained with salt. "I'm not sure we can risk fooling with this," said Devlin. "That molten damage goes pretty deep inside and we know nothing about its technical principles. Obviously parts of it are erratically active and who knows how sensitive it is." "Sure," said McKay. "I wasn't thinking of tampering with it as much as possibly opening the lower hatch and dropping it. Maybe it's only the relay that's holding us in- side the warp and we'd find ourselves back over the Indian Ocean." "Or maybe a thousand miles under South Africa," Devlin replied. "We can't tell where we are right now, projected on normal space. Besides the relay then goes on in harmonic motion to and fro in the warp -- and we still have to find it again and dispose of it. Let's hang on to it now we have it." "Well said." They closed the hatch and stood up. "Of course we may be wrong to blame the satellite. Every time we bring this girl of yours we get into trouble." "You're not putting her off," said Devlin. "Jonah or not!" Back at the controls, McKay plugged in and scanned the allaround visual display. Their situation was unchanged: they were still flying through a misty abyss, featureless except for the vertical tumult of water to port of the ship. "Where does the light come from?" he asked, after more thought. "Obviously not from the water; yet it's so diffused around us that we're casting no shadow on the water. Somewhere there's an Interface feeding that light in here -- why can't we see it?" "Obviously the inner structure of this warp is still more complicated," Slazeck commented. "We're moving along the periphery -- and even that we can't conceive of except as a mathematical abstraction." "It must have a center," said Cathy. "Maybe if we cut across that we can get out." "It doesn't have to haVe a center -- " McKay began. "Yes it does. The outstanding characteristic of this space-withinspace is its gravity field." McKay thought for a moment. "It's not a true gravity field, Cathy, because it's impossible to overcome it. It's just an effect of the curvature of space here." "All gravity is an effect of the curvature of space, if I remember Einstein," said Slazeck. "I think Cathy's right, Mac. A five-dimensional space doesn't have to allow free movement symmetrically inj all of the dimensions, does it?" "I haven't any idea," said McKay. "But if there is a normal gravity field in a new kind of space, it should have a neutral point somewhere." "It's Earth-normal gravity," said Devlin. "I think it's just Earth's field channeled through this warp. There won't be a neutral point -- but the way out must be right along the center of that channel." "What brains we have!" said McKay. "Do you realize the ship's computer isn't equipped to test out these intuitive jumps with math?" "I don't care," said Devlin. "The theory does seem intuitively correct. If we continue to fly around the fourthand fifth-D curves of this space we'll ultimately reach and pass some kind of mid-point beyond which the warp leads back to normal space. The instruments will show we're diving involuntarily -- and the water would fall upwards -- if we could see it from here." "All right, accepting that, I don't think we can short-cut the trip in that case. We can't navigate in fourand five-D." "We don't have to," said Cathy suddenly. "We're moving along the fourth and fifth axes now, though we can't detect it -- and along our first and third -- and that's doing the trip the hard way. If there is a snori-cui u lies aiong our lateral axis." "Good girl," said McKay with the utmost respect. "Cathy, from now on you can come on any mission you want." "What are you proposing to do?" asked Slazeck. "Fly out from the water?" "Fly out from the water as far as we can go -- sideways from here, not upward, Dev. When we hit the inner convolutions of this some weird things will happen, though. Does anyone think we should fly through the long way after all?" "Frankly, no," said Devlin. "We have no way of calculating just how long that long way will be. It might literally take years." "Okay," said McKay. "Everybody stay strapped in -- we'll make a run for it." He banked away from the stupendous cascade, out into the mist. Now they were completely isolated. The gray light came from above, below and all sides. Only the instruments guided him -- and as he watched, the inertial guidance reported a simultaneous #-degree turn in all axes. ized. "We just passed the first bend in the course," he said. "We've found a short-cut in one of this thing's dimensions, all right." "There goes another one," said Slazeck. "Look out -- " ivAcivay oanKeu away irom me curved wall of water looming out of the mist. "How did that happen?" "The radius of the warp is diminishing as we go along it," snapped Slazeck, inspired. "It'll happen again. Keep turning away from the water." McKay obeyed as the guidance toppled again and radar showed water ahead once more. Through the mist he caught a glimpse of it -- this time the curvature was obvious. "I think I've got it now," Slazeck went on. "This thing is analogous to a corkscrew in shape but five-dimensional -- with us inside the screw. If we'd continued our original course we'd have flown all the way down the screw, spiraling inside it two ways as we went around and around the fourthand fifth-D periphery. The 'walls' would have curved gradually as the screw shrank -- but instead we're now cutting across the turns of the screw. As the radius narrows your straight course keeps taking you back to the side." "We're approaching it at a lesser angle each time," said McKay, banking again. "Right. When we pass the midpoint our course will seem parallel to the water, I believe." "And then the screw will widen again?" "I sure hope so." "How narrow is it going to get?" Very narrow indeed, it became obvious as the inertial guidance toppled again and again. Now they could see the racing water all round them becoming a tunnel in the mist. McKay went on correcting course until they were flying straight along the center of the tunnel. "Artificial horizon's level again," he reported. "Why aren't we gaining airspeed? Relative to the water we're diving vertically." "Because we're on the central axis of the warp and near the midpoint. Gravity acts radially outward here, equally in all directions. The water out on the periphery is following gravity in directions one, three, four and five and we're flying down the weightless axis of tWQ." "That water, though it looks to our senses to be falling straight, is making an elaborate spiral relative to our course?" "Right. We're still flying at right-angles to it, though you can't detect that any more." "The spiral is still contracting, Walt. The periphery's moving in on us -- " "You can never get a submarine when you want one," said Cathy. She seemed to be coming to terms with the situation. "I think we'll be okay," said Slazeck. "The gravity field is going to hold the water to the sides of the tube." "That won't help us if the clear space is narrower than our wingspan!" "I don't think that will happen... The narrowing seems to have stopped, in fact." "So I see. But the guidance toppling is becoming continuous." McKay has now shut off the gyros but the laser unit was still operational. As he watched, the artificial horizon began to drift. "How does that grab you, Walt? According to that we're starting to spin." ! "I think," Slazeck said slowly, "that although the three-D radius of this tunnel has stopped shrinking, its radius of curvature in one of the extra dimensions is still diminishing." "How serious is that going to be?" "It shouldn't hurt us at all, even if it rolls up the ship like a cigarette. We won't be able to detect the change." "I can detect a change," said Cathy. "The light's fading." "It's being red-shifted," McKay discovered, wondering where his own panic level was. "This three-D tube is so tightly wrapped around itself now that visible light hasn't the energy to cross it!"  failed. As they watched, the visual input to the ship's sensors dropped steadily into the infrared. "We're going to get that back on the radar frequency before long," said McKay. "Until we do we'll be on dead-reckoning. All I can do is keep the controls centralized and pray we don't drift off-center." "An interesting question," said Slazeck. "How far can space be warped before its fabric gives way?" "There must be some minimum radius of curvature below which matter disrupts," McKay agreed. "Since the relay made it through here, I assume we won't be wound up as tightly as that -- " Suddenly Devlin yelled. "Dev! What's the matter?" "Stay plugged in," Devlin said, very rapidly. "Don't anybody use his own vision. The ship's perceptions aren't affected by the radius contraction but ours are -- horribly." "Why?" "The visual field the computer gives us is derived from structural relationships," said Slazeck. "Though space is curving unbelievably it's still showing the wings as straight. They'd still look straight to Dev's eyes if seeing didn't depend on light images -- but the retina must catch multiple images of everything now." "I'm still plugged in but I'm feeling dizzy," Cathy complained. "You're right," said McKay. "We're building up inertial effects from the spinning space is doing around us. I'm closing the acceleration shields now." "The ship is being left behind by the rotation of three-D space in the other two dimensions," said Slazeck. "I'm not surprised," said McKay, fighting an insane desire to laugh. "According to the computer our wingtips are moving at near the speed of light!" The energy blackout was creeping down the wings. "For the sake of sanity," McKay ordered, "stay on the instrument display. Even the computer can't make visual sense much longer." "I wonder if there's a minimum radius for perception of any kind," said Slazeck gravely. "Will we twist so far that we can't even form mental images?" "We must remain calm," said McKay. "Even if we get to complete sensory deprivation the ship is still here around us and unless we hit the side of the tube space will start to straighten out again." "A ghost ship," said Cathy. "Not even a ghost, just an intellectual construct." "Hang on to that construct," said McKay. "We can still think in the abstract even if we can't form mental pictures." was no visual input at all from the ship's sensors now but the instrument display remained effective. Nothing happened to talk about. McKay thought, If we touch that water, which in the extra dimensions must be too close to us to measure, we wont even feel the end at this speed. Perhaps we already have -- # 'Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it..." "It's lifting a bit ,' I Devlin reported. "We've got the fuselage back." It was true. Though the image was very dim and the wings still faded into nothing, the computer was able to form the image of the hull again. Gradually the image brightened, grew wider, came back into the visible spectrum. "We're through," said McKay. "From here it's downhill all the way." "Visibly uphill, gravitationally down, like that crazy hillside in Scotland," said Slazeck. "You shouldn't have to worry about hitting the sides now your straight course is still along the axis of the warp." "Right," said McKay. The curved wall of death had receded from them on all sides and they were isolated in the mist again. As predicted, to maintain airspeed McKay now had to fly nose-down by the artificial horizon. "When we reach the periphery we'll see it as a sheer waterfall again," he realized aloud. "It'll be dead ahead of us and I'll have to pull up fast." "Down," said Slazeck. "Down for the love of God. If you pull up we'll stall and hit the water for sure." "That's crazy! We're trying to fly up out of this thing, from the sea into the sky -- " "But gravity, as channeled through this space we're in, will be upside-down with respect to real space until we cross the Interface." "That can't be right!" exclaimed McKay. "Surely gravity can't turn back on itself -- " "Think of it as falling through the world, Mac. We'll come back to the ocean's surface and we'll dive out into the sky, not climb. Take my word -- look at the radar." Before them, blocking their way as the mists parted, was the familiar, terrifying wall of water. It was, of course, falling "down" in relation to the ship, in relation to gravity and aerodynamic lift. But which way was that in relation to the Earth's surface? Surely the ship had to climb past the cascade and over the rim. "Up," he said firmly. "Down, Mac, believe me." Even this couldn't shake Slazeck. McKay banked before they reached the wall, out into the mist again. He primed the rocket motor as they turned -- and at the last mo,'T ment, visualizing how the breakout would look from outside, he had serious doubts. Water couldn't fall into the warp at both ends -- the light was brightening around them as the sea parted somewhere to let them go. "Down it is, Walt," he said and fired the fusion motor. The instruments and everything else went crazy. What for a moment was a power dive became a vertical climb out of a pit in the appalling speed. The waters rushed together on the dazzling exhaust storm-filled sky. Vision was lost for a moment as they tore through the clouds and came back with the full force of cent continued at maximum acceleration. "Good grief," said Slazeck, making a navigational check. "The Pacific, this time." "I won't begin to feel safe until we leave the atmosphere," said McKay. "Get me an escape trajectory, retrograde in the Ecliptic." "What are you going to do, Mac?" Cathy asked. "Since we can't get rid of this relay using Interface, I'm using the ship as a slingshot to launch it toward the sun. If we have enough fuel I'll give it a collision course. Then we can separate eighty miles from the thing and come back via Interface ourselves." The sky darkened as they burned up through the stratosphere. "Secondary boost, five-second warning," said McKay. "Well, I guess we're the first guys in history to fly through the Maelstrom," said Devlin, relaxing. "It's easier that way," Cathy threw in. "Our hair hasn't turned white." "It has on the inside," said McKay, watching the Earth retreat below.  P.O. Box #, Santa Monica, Cal. # umn by John Brunner... a humorous article by Greg Benford... a new colSample Subscription -- # issues for I . # per year. The Message was the same for all, yet each man read it his own way... Every seat in the domed stadium was filled and the aisles were clogged with people sitting and standing. The people were of all kinds: old, middle-aged, young, children, infants; men and women; rich and poor; black, brown, red, yellow and pink; clothed for work, street or party. They waited for the Message to begin. Missing from the audience were the criers, the coughers, the whisperers, the talkers, the catcallers, the whistlers, the feet stompers. And the minimal noises of more than one hundred thousand persons, the shuffling and shifting, were muffled by the distant thunder of air-conditioning units trying to cope with body heat and exhalations and a Texas summer. The bodies were packed together, shoulder to shoulder, knee to back. The sensation was not unpleasant. It was, in fact, a kind of sensual communication, as if the fleshy contact formed a circuit linking each member of the audience to the rest like batteries in series. All were waiting for something to happen, waiting for some switch to be thrown that would put all the latent power to work digging rivers, moving mountains, destroying evil. At least one person did not share the general mood. Mitchell pulled away from the shoulder pressing him on the left and asked, "Are you sure you want to go through with this?" Thomas looked at MacDonald. MacDonald raised one hand in deprecation and shook his head. The three men were sitting in the top row of the stadium. The floor was far below. It was packed with ranks of portable chairs; all of them were filled. The only empty space in the vast arena was the square in the middle. Over the intervening heads stretching from the foreground almost to infinity, the distant square looked very small. Mitchell pulled away again with a barely controlled twitch of aversion and persisted, "Eve seen these things get out of control." In front of them people turned and frowned; others, farther away, looked around to locate the source of the voices. MacDonald shook his head quickly. "It's not too late to go back to the booth," Mitchell said. "With the closed-circuit television and all, we'd have a much better view and a much better idea of what's going on." He turned to Thomas. "Tell him, George." Thomas raised his shoulders and hands helplessly. MacDonald touched a finger to his lips. "It will be all right, Bill," he said softly. "It's not enough just to see it and hear itr. You've got to feel it." "I feel it," Mitchell muttered. More faces were turning in their direction. Mitchell made an obscene gesture at them with his finger. Thomas leaned toward Mitchell's ear. 'The difference between you and Mac," he said softly, "is that you dislike people and you hate situations you can't control. There are many like that in our business." "People!" Mitchell muttered. T HE lights in the stadium went out as if the hand of God had opened and let night fall over them instead of trickling through His fingers. In the darkness the roof seemed about to drop in and the sense of closeness seemed to grow as though the audience were swelling to fill the entire space. Mitchell controlled a rush of panic. He breathed deeply. "Damn him," he said. "He can't do this." But there were no screams, no scufflings, only the hushed expectancy of people waiting for a miracle to be performed. And a single, powerful shaft of light descended from the top of the dome, split the darkness, created a white circle in the center of the stadium floor. In the center of the circle stood a single figure. In the entire stadium only that figure was visible. Everyone stared at it, could not help but stare. Only the part of the audience in the portable chairs close to the circle could be sure of what the figure was. From where Mitchell sat, it resembled the kind of stick drawing of a person a child might make. The merest impression came to him -- of white and flesh-pink and black, of thin, of tall, of arms held up, outstretched to encompass the audience as the figure turned -- an audience that could not be seen or heard in the darkness. Slowly, however, the impression of listeners returned, only this time they were one entity, one living thing; the fleshy circuit that had connected the individual members earlier had now grown solid. The audience waited for the message. The Figure stood alone in the embracing circle of light. I I and the light were all. No microphone, no platform, no table or chairs were in evidence, only the lonely Figure amid a silent audience of tens on tens of thousands. "Speak, damn it, speak," Mitchell muttered, but he knew the man in the circle would wait, draw out the moment into a Fine, glittering wire of expectation just about to break. The old bastard knew what he was doing. The audience seemed to hold its breath. The Figure spoke and the voice, magically, filled the dome stadium like the voice of God, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere. The voice moved the audience, shook it, reunited it. The voice reinforced the linkages, stepped up the power. The voice spoke and its sound was wisdom; it was truth. "We are alone' The audience moaned an antiphonal response. "That is the Message," the voice said. "The Message is from God. "They say to you that the Message is from another world like ours, from people like us. But they do not know. They have heard the voice of God and they do not understand. They try to read it with their minds; they cannot do it. They must read it with their hearts. They must have faith. "The Message is from God and it is carried by the angels who are the messengers of God. How can a Message come from someone else?" The audience waited for an answer it knew would come. "There is no one else but man and God. We are alone with God in the universe. That is the way it is. That is the way it was meant to be." The words rippled the audience like a wind blowing across a valley of wheat. "Why should we be afraid?" the voice asked. "Why should we refuse to recognize the truth when it is laid before us? God created the universe for His glory. God created man to wonder at the magnificence of the universe and to glorify God." The audience took a deep breath. "This is the meaning of the Message -- of man's words returned to him, of his frivolity shown him as in a mirror -- there are no others; we are alone..." The words continued to come, unbidden, uncompelled, like a great natural phenomenon, like revelation. The force built up within the audience as if they were magnets being aligned until each field reinforced the next and the total field exerted by more than one hundred thousand persons thinking and feeling as one entity was great enough to pervade the entire city, to encompass the world, and even, perhaps, to shift the stars themselves... ### # # # # ## corridor underneath the stadium, their footsteps echoing from concrete walls and floor and ceiling, little puffs of dust and powdered concrete rising as their shoes fell. Dimly lighted by occasional ceiling bulbs, the corridor seemed to go on forever. "Well?" Thomas said and cringed from the reverberations. "Speak of 'man's words returned to him,' " he said. "Bastard!" Mitchell said. " "On doit se regarde r soimeme un fort long temps  " MacDonald said, " ' avant que de songer a condemner les gens ' " "What did he say?" Mitchell asked Thomas. "That's a quotation from Moliere's Misanthrope about not judging others until you've taken a good long look at yourself," Thomas said. Mitchell shrugged. "I've taken a good long look at him," he said. "Are you sure this is the way?" MacDonald asked. "This is what Judith told me," Mitchell said. The corridor broadened into a room. Giant pistons supported the ceiling like so many hydraulic lifts. In the middle was a metal cage. Inside the cage were control panels with levers and vernier rheostats and large buttons painted red and green. The cage was locked and so were each of the controls. The room was deserted; only their footsteps, pausing now, disturbed its silence. "The magic," MacDonald said appreciatively. "The son of a bitch," Mitchell said. "I think it's this way." He led them past the control room and down another corridor to a door painted gray. He knocked lightly. When there was no response he knocked harder. The door opened a crack. "Judith?" he said. "Bill?" The door opened wider. A girl slipped into the corridor and gave Mitchell her hand. She was small and slender with dark hair and large dark eyes seemingly all pupil. She was not exceptionally pretty, Mitchell thought in his more rational moments; perhaps it was the impact on him of the large pupils. He could be objective about the matter and yet feel an attraction to her that made her appear unique in all the world and therefore beautiful. He squeezed her hand in place of a kiss. She disliked a public display of affection. Her Puritan upbringing, he had called it when they were first going together as undergraduates. "Is the old bastard in there?" he asked. "Bill !" she protested but without heat. "He is my father. And he's inside, resting. He's not well, you know. Sermons take a great deal of his strength." "This is Mr. MacDonald," Mitchell said. "He's in charge of the Project." "Golly!" Judith said. "I'm honored." She really seemed impressed. "And this is Mr. Thomas," Mitchell continued. "He's my boss." "It's a collaboration," Thomas said. "Judith Jones," Mitchell said. "My fiancee." "Now, Bill," she said, "that's not strictly true." They were talking in hushed voices like conspirators, and the reverberations in the corridor made the voices even stranger. Mitchell had an eerie sense of playing a part in a play in which the characters tried to communicate through endless, echoing caverns. "Does your father know we're coming to see him?" MacDonald asked. Judith shook her head. "He wouldn't still be here if he knew. He doesn't like to meet people. He doesn't like people who want things, who want him to do things, who want to argue with him. He doesn't have time, he says, but mainly he doesn't like it." "Are we just going to break in on him?" MacDonald asked. Judith frowned as if she were bracing herself for something unpleasant. "I'll introduce you. Try not to disturb him -- too much." She turned toward the door and then turned back. "And try not to mind that he seems rude. He really isn't. He protects himself." She opened the door and slid back into the room, leaving the door ajar behind her. "Father," Mitchell heard her say, "some men are here to see you." ly before her father could speak. "This is Mr. MacDonald," she said. "He's in charge of the Project. And Mr. Thomas. He works with Bill Mitchell. And you know Bill." The man was sitting in an old metal chair beside an old makeup table and mirror. The furnishings were from another era. The man seemed as old as they were, old enough to be MacDonald's father instead of Judith's. His hair was pure white and his face was lined. His eyes, as dark as Judith's, blazed up as the men entered then the fire was gone, as if a door had been shut to hide it. The man looked down. "I know Mitchell," the voice said. It was a tired voice, an old voice, a ghost of the voice that had Filled the stadium above. "I know him as a foul-mouthed blasphemer, an atheist who scoffs at the beliefs of others, a lecher with the morals of a monkey. I know, too, that I told you not to see him again. Nor do I wish to see these others." "Mr. Jones -- " MacDonald began. "Get out," the old man said. "We are both older men, Mr. Jones," MacDonald began. "Jeremiah," the old man said. "Mr. Jeremiah -- " "Just Jeremiah. And Jeremiah does not talk to atheists." "I am a scientist -- " "An atheist." "I want to talk to you about the Message." "I have heard the Message." "Directly?" Jeremiah placed one long, translucent hand on each bony knee and leaned toward MacDonald, looking up. "I have heard it from God," he said harshly. "Have you heard it more directly than that?" "Did you hear it before the Project picked it up or afterward?" Jeremiah sat back and sighed. "Goodbye, Mr. MacDonald. You wish to trap me -- " "To talk with you -- " "The Message I speak of is not your Message, which comes in riddles over waves. The Message -- my Message -- is from God and it tells me about yours. Is your Message from God?" "It may be," MacDonald said. Jeremiah was about to turn his back upon them, but he stopped and looked at MacDonald. So did Mitchell. "I do not know from whom it is," MacDonald said, "so it may be from God." "But you do not think so," Jeremiah said. "I do not think so," MacDonald said. "But I do not know. I have not had a revelation like yours. My mind is not closed -- is yours?" "A mind is not closed which is open to truth but not to false-, hood," Jeremiah said. "You have not read your Message, then?" "No," MacDonald admitted. "But we will." "When you do," Jeremiah said, dismissing them, "then come talk to me if you must." "If -- when -- we do read it, if I send for you, will you come?" Jeremiah's dark eyes looked into MacDonald's. "Before it is announced to the rest of the world?" "Yes." "I will come." A pale hand came up to support a head that drooped to meet it. When the others did not move, Jeremiah looked up. "What do you want of me?" he asked wearily. "Your public meetings are stirring people up against the Project," MacDonald said. The banked fires flickered. "I am speaking the truth." "Your truth is creating an atmosphere in which people may shut down the Project, keep us from deciphering the Message, prevent us from listening for others' "I speak truth," Jeremiah said. "We are alone. Nothing can change that. What happens when people know the truth is as God wills." "But if the Message is from God and meant for all of us, not just to you alone should we not read it? And hear more?" Jeremiah's long face grew longer. "The Message may be from Satan." "In your sermon you said it was from God." "That is true," Jeremiah said. "But Satan can deceive even those who listen to God." A translucent hand stroked a pale chin in thought. "I could be mistaken," he said. M acdonald took half a step toward Jeremiah, starting a gesture that he stopped in mid-air. "If you change your interpretation now, it would only confuse the faithful. Give us a chance to decipher the Message. I don't ask you to stop telling the truth as you see it, but at least do not incite your followers against the Project." Jeremiah looked at MacDonald's hand until it dropped to his side. "What do you hope to decipher? The voices?" "The voices from the Thirties?" MacDonald said and shook his head. "Those bits and snatches of the radio shows of that time, rebroadcast to us from the direction of Capella, are just the wave of the hand, the attention getter." "Then what is the Message?" "We're not absolutely sure. We think it's in the bursts of static between the voices. Slowed down, filtered for noise, for real static, it can sound like a real communication -- dots and silence, dots and silence." Jeremiah looked skeptical. "You could read anything you wished into dots and silence." "We haven't. Not yet. But we're trying to read it right. The computers are working on it, trying to make some intelligent pattern out of it. We'll get it done. It just takes time. That's what we need -- time." Jeremiah said, "I can't promise anything." "We'll let you know first." "I can't promise anything," Jeremiah said again, but this time it was like a promise. "Now leave me alone. And, Judith -- you must not see this man again." He motioned toward Mitchell. "I have told you so before, but I tell you now. You must choose between us. If you choose him, if you choose to disobey me, then I will not see you again." "Damn it -- " Mitchell began. Judith stopped him. "Go on. Bill," she said. She stepped outside the door with them. "I'm not going to see you again, Bill, not alone." "I need you," Mitchell said. "We made plans -- " "He needs me," Judith said. "He's old. He's not well. He's not good with people." She went back inside. "What a strange mixture of a man," Thomas said." "He can make thousands believe he speaks with God and he can't talk to another human being without trying to push him away, without rejecting the communication." "You should try to understand him, Bill," MacDonald said gently. "He's asking for understanding in his way. He's asking for help. And you two are a lot alike." "Damn him," Mitchell muttered, his soul filled with disgust for the human race. "Damn everybody!" He looked around. "Well, nearly everybody," he said. T HE taxi rolled silently through the traffic toward the airport. Seated between Thomas and Mitchell, MacDonald said, " Y ou' ve done a good job." "Hah!" Thomas said. MacDonald raised a hand to emphasize his sincerity. "I mean it. You and Bill and the others, with your articles and releases and interviews and programs and all the other techniques of communication, by now have won popular acceptance for the Project. No, not just acceptance -- enthusiasm. The news that we have received a message from intelligent beings who live on a planet which probably circles one of the twin suns of Capelja has been received without skepticism -- with excitement but no panic. I don't know how it could have been done any better." "I do," Mitchell said. "You're setting your goals too high," MacDonald said. "After all, for fifty years nine persons out of ten had never heard of the Project and those who had mostly thought it was a waste of time and effort. And for more than fifty years experts have predicted that people would become hysterical when they were presented with proof of the existence of other intelligent creatures in the universe." "Experts!" Thomas said. MacDonald shook his head and chuckled. "All right, gentlemen, accept credit for bringing back radio .' I He leaned forward and twisted a knob until it clicked. Music filled the taxi, first some of the current folk revival, then dance music from the Thirties. After a moment that faded and the sound that came back up was filled with static and broken transmissions... Mitchell reached to turn it off. "Some accomplishment," he said. Thomas stopped his hand. "Wait!" could have knocked me over with a "That's it, isn't it?" Mitchell said. "The Message itself." He found a strange kind of conviction in the poor quality of the reception. "Part of it," Thomas said. His voice was a little shaken, Mitchell thought, as if Thomas were reliving that moment in Puerto Rico when he had heard it first. He had changed, then, from a skeptic to a dedicated Project partisan. His self-assigned mission was to convince a great variety of publics that the Message was real, good, not be feared. His friends had not credited the change in Thomas, not at first, but then they too had listened to the Message and to George and had agreed to help. Mitchell had joined in the first month. "Those are the sounds of yesterday and today," the radio announcer said. "Those are the sounds of the stars. That is part of the Message being received from Capella, forty-five light-years away from Earth. If you have any suggestions for deciphering the Message, send them to Robert MacDonald, Project, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. And now -- another episode from a story begun ninety years ago..." The voice faded and eerie music came up, modulated, and a deep voice asked, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" The music came back up and faded. "The Shadow knows Thomas twisted the knob until it clicked. said, "but I don't know how we are going to answer all the mail." "Any worthwhile suggestions?" MacDonald shook his head. "Not yet. But who knows what men?" "Well," Thomas said, "we didn't expect any. Tell you what -- we'll send somebody down to draft some standard replies, set them up on your computer." "Good," MacDonald said. "What are you going to do about the Chinese?" Thomas asked. "They've called the Message a capitalist plot to distract the world from American imperialism. Maybe we should have informed them before the public announcement." MacDonald shrugged. "Don't worry about it. Their scientists have requested tapes." "The Russians have announced that they picked up the Message a year ago," Mitchell said. "They haven't asked for tapes," MacDonald said. "They're probably picking it up for themselves now that they know where to search." Thomas sighed. "I'm afraid we're just creating more trouble for you." MacDonald smiled. "'Law, Brer Tarrypin!' sez Brer Fox, sezee, 'you ain't see no trouble yit. Ef you wanter see sho' nuff trouble, you des oughter go 'longer me; I'm de man w'at kin show you trouble,' sezee." The taxi pulled up at the airport and MacDonald retrieved his credit card from the meter as he got out. "Come with me to the gift counter," he called over his shoulder to the others. "I want to pick up something for Maria and Bobby." When they drew abreast of him as he walked across the vast expanse of imitation marble, he said, "I've switched your reservations. I want you to return to Arecibo with me." The floor vibrated as the electric catapult launched another jet. A moment later came a low whoosh and a fading thunder. "I've got things here I should take care of before I leave," Mitchell said. "For the sake of the Project," M acDonald said, "I think you should stay away from Judith for a while." "You and Jeremiah," Mitchell said. "He's a prophet, all right," Thomas said gloomily. "And a danger." "That's why I want you to come back with me," MacDonald said. "I want you to get the feel of the Project again, the reality, the excitement of the impending breakthrough. If you can communicate this, it might counteract the growing influence of Jeremiah and his followers." Thomas shook his head. "We won't counteract Jeremiah. He's an honest man possessed by a vision, like a poet. He has his own reality." "He's an old bastard," Mitchell said. "'He's a man whose basic beliefs have been severely threatened," MacDonald said, "and he reacts by defending his world. The Solitarians cannot coexist with the fact of intelligent life on other worlds."  "Then why did you invite him to the Project?" Mitchell asked. "Because he is an honest man as well as a fanatic," MacDonald said. "I think we have an even chance, or a little less, that if he sees what we are doing, sees the translation, he will accept it and be able to change." "Or he will reject it or be destroyed," Thomas said. "Yes, " M acDonald admitted. "Those are the possibilities." "How serious is his threat to the Project?" Mitchell asked. "The most serious since its founding," MacDonald said. "How ironic -- and somehow peculiarly appropriate to the history of the Project -- that its most critical moment should come at the time it accomplished what it was created to do! Fifty years without results and no challengs, but the moment we received a communication our existence was threatened." Thomas laughed. "Scientists are dangerous. They bought you off with toys, but when the toys turned out to be real they began to wor ry"What can the Solitarians do?" Mitchell asked. "Besides talk among themselves." "They're big," MacDonald said, "and they're growing. "They want the Project stopped and they're putting pressure on Senators and Congressmen. In spite of your good work, in spite of what I've called public acceptance, they still manage to exploit mankind's basic fear of meeting a superior. And there's no doubt that the Capellans are superior." "How so?" Mitchell asked, and as he heard the words he felt that his tone was a little sharper than he had intended. The floor shook again. The gift counter was just ahead. MacDonald already was running his gaze along the shelves. "They're clearly older and more capable than we," MacDonald said. "Their giant red suns are pending, say my astronomers, on the effect of mass on stellar evolution. In any case, we have not even been able to pick up radio broadcasts from other worlds, much less rebroadcast them so that the original world could receive them again." " 'Who's that little chatterbox?' " Thomas half-sang, halfchanted, his gaze distant. "PepsiCola hits the spot." He shivered. MacDonald bought a new book, a romantic novel about love and peril in orbit, for his wife. A threedimensional scale model of the stars surrounding Earth to a distance of fifty light-years -- including, of course, Capella -- he chose for his son. And then, admitting that an eight-month-old infant would have little use for the model, at least for a year or two, he picked out for the babe a stuffed toy ostrich. It was so big that it had to go into the jet's baggage compartment. Iw little waiting room of the airport just outside Arecibo. She was frowning as she tried not to laugh at the gigantic bird with the long legs that stood in front of her. "Hush, now," she said to the crying child in her arms, "it won't hurt you." And then she said to MacDonald, "What a monstrous bird to give a baby!" Mitchell thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He wondered what she would have been like at twenty or even thirty. Between Maria and his work, MacDonald had two magnificent reasons for remaining in Arecibo as much as possible. "I'm a fool," MacDonald said, stricken. "I just can't seem to understand my own family." "Considering," Thomas said, "how well he understands and communicates with everybody else." "Ah!" MacDonald said deprecatingly. "What of Jeremiah?" "At least you got him to listen," Thomas said, "and to promise to come." Maria's smile burst upon MacDonald. "You did, Robby? You won him over?" "Nothing as final as that," MacDonald said. "Here, now, let me hold him." He held out his arms to the squalling boy. The baby went to looking at the stuffed bird all the same. In a moment or two the infant's yells turned to sobs and the sobs to silence. "Now, Bobby," MacDonald said, "you know your father wouldn't bring you anything that would hurt you -- though, to be sure, it might frighten you at first. Well, come along," he said to the ostrich, putting his gaze on its black eyes, enigmatic in their plastic sockets, "we will grow up to you." He tucked the bird under his other arm, turned toward the door and stopped. "What am I thinking of?" he asked Maria. "These are my guests. You know George, our own doubting Thomas. And this other handsome gentleman is Bill Mitchell, who is a star-crossed lover." "Hello, George," Maria said, presenting her cheek to be kissed. "Hello, Bill," she said, extending her hand. "I hope the stars are as kind to you as they have been to me. "It's not all that serious," Mitchell said, trying to keep his tone light. "You know, a stubborn father, a girl who must choose -- it will all work out." "I know it will," Maria said, and Mitchell was swayed for a moment by her conviction. "Come," Maria said, "I will fix you all a good Mexican supper." As Maria withdrew her hand from his, Mitchell caught a glimpse of a white scar that crossed her wrist. " Querida ," MacDonald said apologetically, "we ate on the plane." "You call that eating?" "Besides," MacDonald said, "we are on our way to the Project. We've still got work to do. Tomorrow -- before these gentlemen must fly back to New York -- you can fix a big dinner. Okay?" Partially mollified, she gave him a comic shrug and a broad: "Hokay." He laughed. They put their bags and the ostrich into the trunk of MacDonald's car. The baby was relieved when the stuffed bird disappeared: he settled comfortably onto his father's shoulder. Maria drove. She handled the car skillfully for a woman, Mitchell thought, particularly for a beautiful woman. The old steam turbine hummed peacefully under the hood as they climbed the quiet green hills in the night. It had been a long day that started in New York and ended in Puerto Rico by way of Texas and Florida, and Mitchell should have been exhausted. But for him the evening was enchanted. He did not know why. Perhaps it was the Puerto Rican quiet after the urban congestion of Texas, perhaps the automobile taking them farther from civilization, perhaps the calm beauty of MacDonald's wife, perhaps their domestic chatter in the front seat. Usually this kind of thing embarrassed him, this talk of food and family in which he eavesdropper, but somehow this was different. Maybe , he thought, people are not so disgusting... Thomas felt it. This man of tangled nerves, one-time poet and novelist, sometime muckraking reporter, now committed propagandist for the Project and its cause, was staring quietly out a window as if he had packaged all his worries and mailed them back to Manhattan. The journey in the moonlight went on. Mitchell found himself wishing it would never end, this trip beyond time and space, but then he saw below them a valley that gleamed metallic in the night. Across the valley some giant spider hlad been busy spinning cables in a precise mathematical pattern; it was a web to catch the stars. Beyond it they came upon a giant ear cocked to the sky to hear the whispers of the night. And then the car drifted onto a broad parking lot that gleamed phosphorescently in the moonlight and came to a stop beside a long, low concrete building. Mitchell blinked. The spell faded. It faded slowly. Looking back later Mitchell thought that it continued to color his impressions for as long as he stayed on the island. They left the car. MacDonald placed the sleeping child gently in the seat and strapped him down. He kissed Maria and murmured something about his plans. Thomas and Mitchell took their bags out of the trunk; Mitchell removed the ostrich. "I'll keep him at the office for a while," he said, "until Bobby gets used to him." The car whispered away. MacDonald opened the door to the building. "Here we are." Thomas stopped in the doorway and motioned toward the distant steerable telescope, moving slowly on its supporting arm. "You're still searching?" MacDonald shrugged. "Just because we picked up one message doesn't mean there are no others, that our search is ended. And we have engineers who are good at listening but not so good at understanding what they hear -- so far, of course, none of us have been very good at that -- and we don't want to lose them, to see the team broken up before the game is over. They entered the building. The corridors were of painted concrete, the floors tiled, all lit by radiant fixtures. From the cars in the parking lot Mitchell had assumed the place was busy, but somehow he was unprepared for the bustle. Men walked purposefully along the halls, papers in their hands, nodding at MacDonald as if he had never been away, or talking eagerly to each other, not noticing MacDonald and the strangers. Or women moved past, more sociable, talking to MacDonald, asking about his trip, about Maria and Bobby, being introduced to the visitors. And then MacDonald had them down the hall to an open door. "Here's our listening post," he said to Mitchell, pulling him by one arm into the doorway. For some reason Mitchell did not mind being guided. T HE room was filled with electronic equipment, a computer, recording devices; it smelled of ozone. Two men were in the room, one at a panel against a wall, tinkering with its wiring, the other sitting in a chair, earphones over his head. He looked up, waved and turned one earphone out toward MacDonald in a gesture of invitation. MacDonald waved back and shook his head. "What's with the bird?" the listener called out. MacDonald shook his head again. "It's a long story. I'll tell you later." He turned back to Mitchell. "Anyother time I'd take you in and show you what we have here. I'd let you listen to the music of the spheres, the sound of the infinite, the voices of the damned who cannot make themselves understood, but right now we don't have time." "Don'tdo it," Thomas warned Mitchell, half-seriously. "You'll never be the same. That's what makes them all so strange." "You want to hear the Message," MacDonald asked, smiling. "You want to know why we haven't deciphered it in six months of effort. Six months and the Solitarians gather their forces, Congress grows nervous about appropriations and the efforts of clever, dedicated communicators like you and George are in danger of being frittered away." Mitchell shook his head. "You're right," MacDonald said. "We haven't deciphered the Message and we should have done it by now with all the minds and all the computers we've had working on it. Come on. I'll show you." They passed other doors, other rooms where doors were open and men and women worked at desks or benches or panels. The computer room was at the end of the corridor. It was called the computer room apparently, because instead of walls it had computers and the floor was so filled with data-input keyboards and printers that there was scarcely room to walk between them. At the keyboard amid the computers, like a witch surrounded by familiars, sat a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair cut short. "Hello, Oley," MacDonald said. "You brought me a present," the other said. MacDonald sighed, took the ostrich out from under his arm. put it in a distant corner and said, "No, Oley, I brought you some guests' He introduced Mitchell to Olsen, his computer expert. Thomas had met him before. Mitchell looked around at all the machines, trying to guess what they all did. "Any breakthroughs?" MacDonald asked. "We're lucky we haven't lost ground," Olsen said. "Play your best selection for our visitors," MacDonald said. Olsen pressed two keys on his keyboard. A visual display appeared on a window in front of him, broken rows of white numbers on a gray background, but Mitchell looked at it only for a moment. They he was listening to sounds that came from concealed speakers -- a soft hiss, then silence, then a noise, silence, more noise. Sometimes the noise would be loud, sometimes soft, sometimes brief, sometimes extended, sometimes a click, sometimes a buzz or a plop. and they both looked at MacDonald. "I can get better messages from a thunderstorm," Mitchell said. "That's part of the problem," MacDonald said. "Part of what we get between the rebroadcasts of our old radio programs is static. Add the effect of distance, of interruption, of fading. But part of what we pick up, we think, is communication. The problem is how to distinguish one from the other. Tell them what we're trying to do, Oley." "First we try to clean up the transmission," Olsen said. "Filter out the natural noise electronically, I mean. We try to eliminate what is clearly casual, then run a series of variables on what is questionable, hardening up the signals, reinforcing them where necessary -- " "Show them what we get when we clean it up," MacDonald said. Olsen pressed two more keys. From the speakers came a firm series of sounds and silences, like the buzz of an old-fashioned international code without the dashes: a dot and another dot, a long silence -- six more dots, a silence -- seven more dots, silence -- dot, silence -- dot... They listened, Mitchell and Thomas, trying to make sense out of it, and finally looked up sheepishly for there was no way they could decipher the message just by listening to it. "There's something hypnotic about it all the same," Mitchell said. "But that's no better than the other," Thomas said, "and it's not real. This isn't the way it originally sounds." Olsen shrugged. "The unfiltered stuff isn't, either. It's just the way our particular speakers interpret the small packets of energy picked up on our radio programs of ninety years ago. With the help of the computers we have reinterpreted the message in sounds that seem more familiar or more meaningful." "And you still can't read it," Thomas said. Olsen nodded. "We've still got problems. We're trying to find duplications, repetitions, patterns. We don't know where the message starts or where it ends, whether it's one message given over and over again or a series of messages. Sometimes we think we've found something; it works for a while and then it falls apart." "Found what?" Mitchell asked. "A statement?" "In what language?" Olsen asked. "Well, mathematics, maybe. Like one and one equal two -- or the Pythagorean theorem or something." MacDonald smiled. "That would be useful for catching our attention, for demonstrating that it was a message sent by intelligent beings, but they've done that, don't you see? With the rebroadcast of our radio programs." "What kind of message could they send that would mean anything?" Mitchell asked. "Sound and silence," Thomas mused. "Sound and silence. It must mean something." "Dots and silence," Mitchell said. "That's what Mac told Jeremiah. Dots and silence. That's what it sounds like, too. Dots and no dashes. Dots and blanks." MacDonald looked quickly at Mitchell. "Say that again." "Dots and silence. That's what you said. To Jeremiah." "No," MacDonald said. "What you said after that." "Dots and no dashes," Mitchell repeated. "Dots and blanks." "Dots and blanks," MacDonald repeated. "Dots and blanks." "Dots and blanks," MacDonald mused. "What does that remind you of, Olsen? A crossword puzzle? Do you suppose -- The old Drake game?" He turned to Olsen. "Let's try it. For all the combinations of prime numbers." He turned to Mitchell. "Bill you send a message to Jeremiah over my signature. Three words. 'Come. Message deciphered.' " "Are you so sure you have the answer?" Thomas asked. "Can't you wait to make certain?" "You've felt that confidence before," MacDonald's tone made it a question, "the feeling that you know you have the answer even before you try it out, a kind of instant communication?" "Yes," Thomas said. "Yes." "And I want Jeremiah to be here when we run it off for the first time," MacDonald said. "I think that may be very important." Mitchell paused at the door. "You aren't going to try it until then?" he asked incredulously. MacDonald shook his head slowly. T HE room already was crowded with people when Jeremiah and Judith and MacDonald came through the door. Thomas was there and Olsen and a dozen more of MacDonald's colleagues on the Project. Mitchell had been surprised when Jeremiah's message arrived -- he had outdone MacDonald's brevity by a word, "I come -- " and even more surprised when Judith's message arrived soon afterward giving the arrival time. Mitchell had never known Jeremiah to fly, and he had not thought the old man would come at all. The wait for Mac to return from the airport with Jeremiah had been nearly unendurable for Mitchell; how much more difficult must it have been for the others who had been working so long on the Project? But they were remarkably patient. They shifted their positions from time to time as they waited, but no one moved to leave, no one complained, no one urged Olsen to give them a preview. Perhaps, Mitchell thought, they had been selected for patience by the long years of the Project when they had achieved nothing but negatives. Or perhaps they were an exceptional group of men and women shaped into a high-morale group by MacDonald's leadership. Mitchell did not find himself repelled by their proximity. He found himself liking them individually -- even collectively. Jeremiah entered the room like a high priest wrapped in his robes of office, aloof, cold, unapproachable. MacDonald tried to introduce him to the members of his staff, but Jeremiah waved him away. He studied the machinery on wall and floor, ignoring the people. Judith followed him, nodding at the people they passed as if to make up for her father's absence of humanity. Mitchell's flesh grew taut as he saw her again and he wondered why it was Judith, why it was this one girl among many, who made him shiver. Jeremiah stopped in front of MacDonald, as if they were the only two persons in the room, and said, "It takes all this to read one small Message? For the faithful it requires only a believing heart." M acdonald smiled. "One small difference between us makes necessary all the apparatus. Our faith requires that all data and results can be duplicated by anyone using the same equipment and techniques. And with all the believing hearts in the world, none, I think, has received identical Messages." "It isn't necessary," Jeremiah said. "I understand that your communications are highly personal," MacDonald said, "but wouldn't it be wonderful if the important Messages could be received by all the faithful?" Jeremiah looked at MacDonald. It seemed to Mitchell that these two men were alone in the room and that they were battling for each other's souls. He reached out and took Judith's hand. She glanced at him and then down at their hands and then away, not speaking. But she didn't take her hand away and Mitchell thought he felt her fingers tighten. "You did not bring me here to scoff at my faith," Jeremiah said. "No," MacDonald said, "to show you mine. I, too, have had my revelation. I do not compare it with yours. It has no identifiable source. It is an inner conviction that has grown from a small thought to a large certainty that there is other life in the universe, that to prove its existence is the most gloriously human thing man can do, that to communicate with it would make this vast, incomprehensible place in which man lives, this unexplored forest of the night, a friendlier, happier, more wonderful, more exciting, holier place in which to be." Mitchell looked at the other faces in the room. They were staring at MacDonald and Mitchell had the feeling that they, too, were hearing MacDonald's credo for the first time, that he had lived it but never expressed it before. Now he was unveiling himself before this skeptical stranger as if Jeremiah's belief in him mattered more than anything else. Mitchell's hand tightened on Judith's. Jeremiah was frowning. "I did not come all this way to argue theology," he said harshly. k Tm not arguing," MacDonald said earnestly. "And I'm not dealing in theology, not the way I see it, although I may infringe upon those areas you have declared sacred to your beliefs. I'm trying to explain myself, you see -- " "Why?" Jeremiah asked. "Because it's important to me that you understand," MacDonald said. "I want you to know that I am a man of good will." "Most dangerous of all are men of good will," Jeremiah said, looking like a prophet in his oldfashioned black suit, "For they are easily deluded." "I am not easily deluded," MacDonald said. "You want to believe. You are easily deluded. And you will find what you wish to find." "No," MacDonald said, "it cannot be that way. I will find what anyone can find, whatever his beliefs and desires, what you would find if you should look and listen. What I am trying to tell you is that no matter what my intentions, my hopes, my fears, my message is not like yours. It can be checked. It must read the same to everyone, every time, or it is wrong and will be discarded." Jeremiah's lips curled. "You do not interpret? You read it directly as it comes to you?" M acdonald sighed. "We clean it up," he admitted. "The natural universe makes a great deal of noise, somewhat like the noise of a city -- and we must filter that out." Jeremiah smiled. "We have techniques," MacDonald said. "They are verifiable. They work. And then there is the signal itself. It must be identified, analyzed." Jeremiah nodded. "And then?" "And then," MacDonald admitted, "we must interpret the Message. It is not a simple matter, you understand, because the Message comes from far away, so far it takes forty-five years for the signal to reach us. And it comes from an alien mind." "Then you will never read your message," Jeremiah said, "or you will read into it whatever you wish, because there is no possible communication between alien minds." "What about man and God?" "Man is made in God's image," Jeremiah said. MacDonald made a gesture of frustration and then continued. "What alien minds have in common is intelligence and the natural universe. Matter reacts in the same way everywhere in the universe, forming the same elements which combine in the same way to form molecules -- the same kinds of energy are available, all obedient # the same physical laws. Beings verywhere must cope with their nvironment in the certain basic ays to satisfy basic needs. And if hey communicate with each othr in a variety of ways -- they will ind ways that compare with the xperience of other intelligent reatures. And if they try to ommunicate with other worlds hey will refer to these common xperiences: measurements, mathmatics, sensory impressions, imges, abstractions -- " "Faith?" Jeremiah asked. Judith's hand tightened on Mithell's. "Perhaps -- " MacDonald began. "Don't patronize me," Jereliah said. "But we would not know how to epict faith," MacDonald went on without pausing. Jeremiah gestured impatiently. I believe you are sincere. You lay be deluded, but you are sinere. Show me what you brought le here to see and let me return i my mission." "All right," MacDonald said, le seemed like a defeated man. litchell felt sorry for him, but he ould have told him that no effort i reason with Jeremiah would ucceed. Mitchell had tried it too ften in the past. Jeremiah was nmovable. How did one reason dth a fanatic? "I just want you to nderstand what we have done," lacDonald continued, "so that the result is intelligible to you when it comes from the computer. Olsen?" "We kept searching for a meaningful pattern in the brief bursts of energy we were receiving -- " Olsen began. "Yom tell me," Jeremiah said to MacDonald. MacDonald shrugged. "Dots and silence. That's what I said to you. Dots and silence. And then Bill here said, 'Dots and blanks,' and something fell into place. The Capellans might be trying to send us a visual message with the sounds standing for black dots and the silences for white spaces. Frank Drake suggested the possibility more than fifty years ago. He sent a message to fellow scientists made up of a series of ones and zeroes and his colleagues made a picture out of it. Perhaps we should have thought of it. Our excuse, I suppose, is that we didn't have a neat little row of binary symbols; instead we had dots and long silences, and we weren't sure when the message began or when it ended. Now I think we can do it. We have asked the computer to plot the Message onto a grid, using prime numbers for the sides of the grid, breaking up the silence into signals equaling the dots in duration, like a switch turning on and off." "Or like a computer," Olsen interjected, "with only two numbers, one and zero." "If we plot the signals as dark and light," MacDonald said, "then we may come up with a recognizable picture." "May?" Jeremiah asked. "You haven't tried it yet?" "Not yet," MacDonald said. "Sometimes a man has a conviction -- you might call it a revelation -- that he has found the answer. I think we have found it. I wanted you to see it with us, the first time." "You had a revelation?" "Perhaps. We'll see." "I don't believe it," Jeremiah said, turning away. "You are trying to deceive me. You would not bring me here without having tested your theory first." M acdonald put out a hand as if to touch Jeremiah and stopped. "Wait. You have come this far. At least see what we have to show you." Jeremiah stopped. "Do not tell me any more lies," he said harshly. "Show me your deception from the machine and let me go." "For God's sake," said someone from among MacDonald's colleagues, "let's get it over with." The man's voice was shaky. In the corner the stuffed ostrich looked over the proceedings with inscrutable eyes. There were some advantages Mitchell thought, to not caring if you understood others or they understood you. MacDonald sighed and nodded at Olsen. The computer expert punched a sequence of buttons on the keyboard in front of him. Tapes turned on one of the computer consoles and then on another. Before Olsen a series of ones and zeroes appeared on the screen, faded, were replaced by others. Before Jeremiah a continuous roll of paper began to reel silently out of the printer. The first few grids were meaningless. "Folly," Jeremiah muttered and again began to turn. MacDonald was in his way. "Wait!" he repeated. "The computer is running through the small prime numbers across and down and then the other way, exploring all the possibilities." The computer reached nineteen plotted against all the smaller prime numbers and then the larger ones. Suspense grew at the same rate as disappointment. The computer hummed. Paper reeled from the printer. Then it began, something that looked intelligible, printed from the bottom, line by line. "There's something," MacDonald said. "Look!" Sourly, skeptically, Jeremiah looked and then with growing disbelief continued to look. "That square in the corner," MacDonald said, "that could be a sun. Those dots on the right. They look like -- look like -- " "Binary numbers," Olsen said. "But not quite," MacDonald said. "They're printed from the right," Olsen said. "Look, nine, eight, seven, six, five -- " "Of course," MacDonald said, exultation growing in his voice, "why should we expect them to read from the left, why not the right, like the Japanese, or from the bottom up?" "This is ridicu -- " Jeremiah began. "But what are those symbols on the left-hand side?" MacDonald asked. "And on the right-hand side of the sun?" "Measurements?" someone suggested. "Formula?" said another. "Words?" suggested a third. "Maybe words," MacDonald said. "Numbers on the right, printed horizontally, words on the left with a vertical component. It looks like they're building up a vocabulary of numbers and words." "Legs," Jeremiah muttered. "Feet." "Yes," MacDonald said. "Long legs, and a body, arms -- more than one set of arms, and over there at the right -- what?" "If those are words on the left," someone said, "then one of them is repeated three times." "Must be important," someone else said. "It looks like the creature is pointing at two of them." And then the picture was complete. Olsen pressed a key. The printed stopped. The computer stopped. In silence they stared at the picture. "If that's a sun in the lower left, then that's another sun in the upper right," someone said. "Of course. Two suns. Capella." "And that set of dots below it -- " MacDonald pointed -- "a large planet, perhaps a superJovian, with four satellites, two of them larger, perhaps Earth size. The being is pointing at one of them with one of his four arms." "Not arms," Jeremiah muttered. "Two are wings." "But what's that thing on its head?" someone asked. Jeremiah put his hands together in front of him and lowered his face to them, his eyes closed. "Forgive me," he said. "Forgive me for doubting. It is a message from God." "What is he talking about?" Mitchell asked Thomas. "Quiet," Thomas said softly. The others in the room quieted, too, their comments dwindling one by one. Finally Jeremiah lifted his head from his hands. "I will not stand in your way," he said to MacDonald. "I will tell my people that I have seen the Message and the Message is from God. I do not know what it says, but this much I know. It is up to you to read the rest of it." "I am as much surprised as you are," MacDonald said. "I believe that. It would not have happened this way had you planned it. This is an angel. It has a halo." "A halo," Mitchell echoed. "It could be a helmet," MacDonald said gently. "Or earphones. Or a bird with a large head." "You may speculate as you wish," Jeremiah said. "But it is a halo. If you do not deny it is an' angel, speculate as you will, I will not deny that the Message is from God, that there are other beings, that we call them angels." "You may call them angels," MacDonald said as if expressing a formal agreement. "I will not say you are mistaken. There is much to speculate about and little that we can be sure of." "Come, Judith," Jeremiah said. "Father," Judith said, "Bill has something he wants to say." "I misjudged you, sir," Mitchell said. He had been wrong about the old man. Jeremiah was not a phony. He faced a difficult job, going back and reinterpreting the Message to his followers, but he did not flinch. He had seen the truth and changed. Perhaps, Mitchell thought, he himself had been wrong about some things. "I have felt that you were bad for my daughter," Jeremiah said, "that you did not like people." "I am beginning to like them better," Mitchell said. "Well," Jeremiah said, turning toward the door, "we will see." "I'll drive you -- " Mitchell began. "Not yet," Judith said, giving his hand a squeeze as she joined her father. "In time. If you wish." And she followed her father's stiff back through the doorway.  MacDonald. "What magnificent luck! Or was it?" Thomas looked at Mitchell and then at MacDonald. MacDonald was staring at the picture drawn by the printer. He had not heard the question. "One thing you've still got to learn," Thomas said to Mitchell, "is that no two people are alike. To understand Mac you must understand that he wouldn't cheat." "Not even to save the Project?" Mitchell asked skeptically. "Not even to do tremendous good for man and Capellan? Not even to counteract stubborn mysticism and ignorance?" "It sure looks like a big bird," someone said. "If it's a bird," someone else said, "maybe that dot under its feet is an egg." "One of the three identical words on the left, if they are words, is opposite the egg, if it is an egg," Olsen said. Mitchell was eyeing Thomas. "Not even then," Thomas said. "Not because he wouldn't be tempted, not even because he would be found out, but because of what he is and because he can't be what he is and be expedient and because he knows it." "Look," someone said, "the two suns are different." MacDonald did not move from the spot where he could look directly down upon the printout. The conversation flowed around him, but he did not seem to hear it. He looked as if he, too, had seen an angel. Mitchell watched the others in the room. Each one was reacting differently; each one, like Jeremiah, was seeing the same message but reading it according to his own particular interpretation. Mitchell shook his head and saw the stuffed ostrich in the corner. He walked to it and looked into its black pupils. "You're the only one I really understand," he said. He turned and looked at the room and all the people clustered about the Message, and he thought about all the equipment and personnel and time that had gone into receiving the Message. His vision broadened to include the steerable radio telescope outside cocked to the night sky and the big array in the valley catching stardust and he imagined himself traveling across great, dark infinities alone in space for long years. He shivered. Who, he thought desperately, will understand me?  S O we did this column about what commercial writing is like, and a fair number of professional writers were nice enough to agree with what was said. I got one nasty letter, from a nonprofessional, who assured me that Norman Spinrad and Harlan Ellison were somehow exempt from human processes. I don't know Spinrad that well. But I know Harlan Ellison; we owe each other money and we've starved and scratched together and separately. He's seen the gray look on my face and I've seen it on his. There is no harder scratcher in this field; the only writer of any kind I've seen in the same league with Ellison was Dick Gehman five years ago, and I'd still bet on Harlan to take the pot even if Gehman held cards and spades. And maybe even the good ten. For all I know, Spinrad's been on foundation grants all his life, though I seriously doubt it, but all the writers I know -- and like anyone else with twenty years in the business I know hundreds with well-established bylines -- have either got to make a buck today or else worked hard enough to make two bucks yesterday. That's the system. There have been a few, in the past, who hit hard enough young enough, or who worked in Europe where things are sometimes different, or who are wrapped in antiquity, who somehow in popular thought stand away from the commercial moil. There are many who are outwardly smooth enough so that it doesn't show... for a while. (Did you think James T. Farrell was stuffed and put in a museum? Do you really think Hemingway incubated that last weak novel in his publisher's safe just to be cute? What do you hear from Nelson Algren?) Somehow, we like to think, there is a place where writers can go happily to live on the past; a perpetual Thanatopsis Society that's been meeting at the Heavenly Algonquin ever since Bill Shakespeare's day. (There's nothing in the grave; the dust is puregold, and odorless). Lenny Bruce entertains at cocktail hour. But we do, in science fiction, have our little circle of gods who must somehow have escaped the process; people whose work is (paradoxically) somehow better because it was worked away from the usual pastures of pulp. We believe that way -- or, rather, some of you believe that way; I don't -- because deep down underneath some of us do believe that writing for a living is per se incompatible with excellence. Seen through the enchantment lent by distance, there is this circle of people whose work is better because they never had to learn how to lie to a bill collector. We talk about Wells, and Verne, as if they never started at the sound of the doorbell; we've found out about Zamyatin; we've been brought up to date on Capek. Well, l don't believe that , either. Wells had a very rough time of it. Verne was like Gehman and Charles Dickens. What I believe in is excellence, and it so happens I see it in several of the gentlemen named above, most of whom I know for a fact were scratchers and biters -- though that may indeed be beside the point. Keeping the circle down to dead writers for purposes of discussion, though, and striking a balance between my perhaps idiosyncratic view and the popular legend, let's call them the Classicists in this field. islaw Lem? Walker and Company has published the first English language translation of one of his novels ( Solaris , #). Now at last those of us whose Polish is not up to the reading level can get some idea of the actual scope of this man who is sometimes compared to Verne and Capek, and who is considered fit company for Wells, Stapledon, and a number of other names which make the earth to tremble as their memory strides by in the night. To help us, in addition to the translation by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, there is an Afterword by Professor Darko Suvin, in the form of an essay on Lem's career to date. This provides thumbnail synopses of his # books, and among many other useful facts the information that Lem has been translated into some # languages. (Bear that last part in mind, will you?) Suvin, who takes science fiction very seriously and is building a reputation as a teacher in Canada and as a critic, had been Lem's foremost sponsor in our circles. And to tell the truth, it would be nice to find another certified literary giant in this field -- those other fellows have not been producing much lately. There is something intrinsically attractive in the image of a major talent locked away from our particular enclave, working, working, working, flirting briefly with the few bright leaves of American and English sf that flutter into his gloomy cognitive cell, rejecting them finally in # "a point at which he seems to have given up western sf in disgust" according to Suvin, and molding his own expression at last out of the diverse elements of classic sf, commercial sf of the #s and #s, and the cultural heritage of Eastern Europe. Surely what such a man might accomplish would be recognizably powerful on the one hand, and contagiously innovative on the other. But what to do with what we have of Stanislaw Lem? The translated Solaris is not rendered into our Anglic symbological context from the Polish, a Slavic language, but from a Romance (French) translation -- it is a Xerox of a Xerox at best, and more likely a pale carbon. Nor is Suvin's contact with his protege an intimate one: "Since Lem is too busy to answer bibliographical questions, my information had to be obtained from his agent Mr. Franz Rottensteiner and a variety of minor secondary sources of unknown accuracy, indeed intermittently contradictory. The bibliograpy should be fairly accurate, since Mr. Rottensteiner's data (very helpful in this endeavor) have been independently checked by myself." There is something about all this which smacks irresistibly of the James Thurber story about the renowned novelist who never wrote a word and whose epitaph was "Our loss is Hell's gain." But since we are here dealing with a snapshot of a shadow thrown on a translucent panel, that kind of wisecrack is not only cheap, it is infinitely reproducible. Literally, the atmosphere wrapped about this entire project is that anybody can be making anything he pleases out of anything he claims to perceive, without fear of definitive contradiction. It so happens that Professor Suvin's bibliographical sketch of Lem's general approach indicates that enigma is exactly the writer's strong suit; certainly, this particular utterance of Solaris fits right into the spirit. The problem is not that one can't make heads nor tails of it; one can make as many as one desires and have parts left over no matter what sort of chimera results. Since the locale of the book is a planet whose sole native inhabitant is an apparently living pangenic ocean with inconsistent and capricious powers, and the narrative is a catalogue of futile efforts to make sense of what the ocean does in -- debatable -- response to human investigation, we are indeed left with what Suvin calls "The open-ended parable of Stanislaw Lem and Solaris ," and others might call a hoax. Why not? Going by what little can be gathered from the thready evidence of this diffused volume, Suvin could be benignly kidding either us or himself, and the same could be true of Lem. They could both be members of that populous tribe of earnest metaphysicians which has done so much over the centuries to make European philosophical scholarship a scrupulous study with ambiguous results. could be seeing an illustration of the fact that while we may grant that genius consists of an infinite capacity for taking pains, an infinite taking of pains does not require the capacity of a genius. See your nearest postal clerk. The plot of Solaris , which Suvin inaccurately calls a detective puzzle -- apparently not as aware of the formalities of that genre as he is of classic science fiction -- is an unresolved one; Kelvin, the protagonist, is shown attempting to come to grips with the enigmatic nature of the "ocean" on Solaris, the (presumably) single planet of the Centaurian binary system. That is the sole and entire plot. Kelvin has this problem, as hundreds of Terrestrial investigators have had it before him, and in the end he -- and everyone else -- still has it. There are several sub-plots, one or two of which do resolve. For instance, the investigative base is an artificial station floating above the "ocean," suspended by magnetic and gravitic fields. Once staffed by numerous technicians and by robots of unspecified functional ability, it now reflects the downhill nature of the enterprise by having only three living staff members -- Snow, who is frightening and disillusioning himself to death; Sartorius, who stays in his room and rattles apparatus; and Kelvin, who arrives to find that Gibarian, his preceptor, is newly dead. The robots are locked away. Apart from a barefoot Negress who lies sleeping against Gibarian's body in the cold storage room, and the unseen but fierce creatures whom Sartorius and Snow attempt to keep suppressed in their quarters, there are no other actors to account for the broken locks, bent doors, smashed panels and scattered laboratory equipment, except for Rheya, Kelvin's suicidal woman, who shortly turns up in his cabin, is very possessive of him, and is capable of reattempting suicide by drinking liquid oxygen without suffering damage of any great duration. The phenomenon of these inhumanly resilient doppelgangers accounts for the mystery of the smashed furnishings, thus resolving one sub-plot which endures for several early chapters because Snow, who could clear it up in a paragraph, simply refuses to say the words. Apparently, they are sent by the "ocean" as, perhaps, instruments to study the investigators. (Since attempts to obtain even the slightest privacy from them are what drives them into frenzy, the "instrument" hypothesis is one of the few probably valid conclusions to be drawn about them by the station staff). The doppelgangers -- which simply materialize on board the station -- are apparently created by the "ocean's" being able to read the subconscious minds of the station personnel and supplying each with the one individual who represents their greatest psychic trauma. Thus Kelvin gets a representation of Rheya, who died years ago on Earth when he left her. (Suvin says "wife" -- there is no evidence for a formal relationship, however). Now she can't be separated from him. She's unkillable; the best he can do is trick her on board a reconnaissance rocket and fire her off into orbit, where, perhaps, she continues to pound against the casing long after the "oxygen" runs out. Since Lem specifies that Kelvin comes to the station in a similar vehicle while wearing a pressurized suit, it's not clear why the rocket also has a life-support system; Terrestrial technology as depicted in Solaris is long past the point of having to design redundancy into its space vehicles. In any event, next night a fresh copy is on hand, unaware that she's a duplicate, amnesiac about most of her past except that she loves Kelvin. A few rudimentary experiments, hitherto unperformed by any previous staff member on his own doppelganger, reveal that Rheya is based on neutrino structures, as distinguished from atomic. I'm not competent to know whether this is gibberish; two stages of translation intervene between my poor power and the author's perhaps plausible rationale. However, there are curious other parallels between Suvin's style in bibliographical sketches and Lem's narrative: "The symmetriad (One of several types of spontaneous hardened formations which appear on the planetary being's usually liquid surface from time to time) now begins to display its most exotic characteristic -- the property of 'illustrating,' sometimes contradicting, various laws of physics... The interior of the symmetriad becomes a factory for the production of 'monumental machines,' as these constructs are sometimes called, although they resemble no machine which it is within the power of mankind to build: the designation is applied because all this activity has finite ends, and is therefore in some sense 'mechanical.'" This has to be bad translation to some extent. The shift within the definition, which begins by talking about factories and constructs and ends with reference to activity, is difficult to explain otherwise. Similarity, though the word here is "machines," what Lem goes on to describe are exclusively architectural features -- groins, vaults, pillars, etc. -- rather than shafts, gears, cathodes, lenses, resonators and other transmission devices. Since anything recognizably mechanical must by definition have recognizable parts with centuriesold names, they are prima facie not at all beyond the power of interstellar Mankind to build. Nor is that business about "finite ends" a usual or useful description of mechanical qualities. It would permit a tree to be described as a machine, and while one certainly could so describe any organism, I fail to grasp why one should accept verisimilitude for an appellation so far in left field as "monumental machines" instead of such far more likely ones as "cathedra," "amphitheatra," or even "architectura." B UT not all of this is enigmatic solely in the language. However he couched it, Lem fails to illustrate his assertion that the symmetriads "in which even the laws of physics do not hold" (P. I #), have the property of illustrating, (P. #) sometimes contradicting, various laws of physics. The laws of physics obviously do hold; Lem shows us nothing being done by the symmetriad which cannot be accomplished by pressure, tension, compression and gravitic manipulation on the same order as that employed by the Terrestrial station. That is gibberish, down on the basic level of thought, rather than among superficialities of expression. Perhaps he means Newtonian physics or, more likely, Archimedean mechanics. Even then very little happens in the symmetriad that Archimedes couldn't understand on the spot. I venture to say nothing happens that Archimedes couldn't account for after a few weeks of night school. For one thing is very clear -- the Solaris ph enomena have never been studied by a single first-class mind, out of the hundreds that have come to do so; certainly, the three chucklehead "'scientists" who resolutely fail to do anything fundamentally rational in Solaris have to be -- to put it mildly -- charletans. You may have felt the stirrings of a powerful story in the doppelganger sub-plot. Little actual trace of it emerges from the Walker rendering. In the particular case of Kelvin and the second Rheya, with whom he says he is in love -- says to her and to us -- there is no incidence of tenderness. There are speeches -- Solaris is full of speeches and excerpts from books on Solaris -- but there is no confirming action; no moment when Kelvin is shown forgetting himself long enough to take delight in Rheya's form or habits, or in the slightest personal intimacy accurately described. I specifically don't demand scenes of throbbing sexual passion here; rather, I would expect that a writer trying to work with this situation, in which Kelvin is said to be trapping himself by loving the "ocean's" instrument, would show us examples of their emotional fixation on each other, as far more revelatory than their mutual inability to be physically apart. There's a difference between "sleeping together" and sleeping together. (Eventually, by the way, Sartoris and Snow destroy Rheya offstage with a neutrino-structureneutralizing machine Sartoris has whipped up in the laboratory, where he's haunted by a neutrinostructured doppelganger who watches his every move. Kelvin goes off and sits on a symmetriad, and the narrative ends). There is really only one remaining kind hypothesis to be held about this book, and about Lem as we glimpse him here and in the Suvin essay. That is that the man is definitely not a Verne or Wells or Stapledon -- none of those gentlemen would have found merit in talking scientific nonsense in a science-fiction story -- however allegorical or satirical. That leaves Capek, and the proposition that Lem is being funny. But one fast pass through R.U.R. or The War With the Newts also shows a mind too precise to think that satire excuses logical contradiction. So that comparison, too, is washed out. Lem's unique gift to the kind of science fiction written by classicists, then, apparently is no more than an infusion of the same lack of logical rigor as that which distinguishes much "New Wave" commercial sf of the 'sixties, in which illusions of profundity are generated by imprecise reference, paradoxic exposition and characters act as smart as they say they are. You can accomplish anything that way -- prove that all the angels can dance on the head of a pin, indite a treatise on a lifetime's study of the properties of Phlogiston, sit burning in the ruins of your house while rapt in contemplation of the Panacea. But to be a true contributor to literature and deserve the reputation of having refined human awareness to even the slightest extent -- as Wells has, as Capek and Stapledon may have, as Verne the ingenious commercial hack has not -- you have to play by rules other than your own, and that makes it harder. The burden is not really on Lem; at no point in Solaris does the author speak. Who knows whether he aspires to be a giant? There's nothing in the contract that says every writer must commit himself to a serious exploration of human nature, conducted in a manner whose every step is beyond question as sound experimental technique; that's a tougher row to hoe than many hands are fit for. One can be charming and entertaining while eschewing all that, and ashamed before no one. No, the burden falls on those who want to place Lem in the pantheon with Capek, Zamyatin, and those other fellows. An advocate who goes on to mention Yefremov and the Strugatskys in the same breath with his candidate is already begging the question; if he's got a giant under the saddle, what's he doing entering him on the same track with mere competents?  In any armaments race, drift," said the pale anthropologist. "There is no way these shards could have found their way from the bottom of the mid-Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal. My theory is that this is all that remains of the cargo of a merchant vessel between Atlantis and primeval India." "Then why," said his ruddiercomplected companion, "is the clay of a sort found only in the Indian Ocean area? It had to be fired there." "Perhaps it was," said Fredrik Wilkes, the anthropologist, with a dismissive shrug of his thin shoulders. "I see no reason why the ship could not have been en route from India to ancient Atlantis when it sank. Since the original tablet must have been borne by a courier -- at least, it seems to be some sort of battle bulletin -- it is certainly logical that it be inscribed in the Atlantean tongue, since that was the language spoken by the people at the tablet's intended destination, George." George Bradley, the man addressed, chuckled and shook his head. "You miss my meaning, Fred. The kind of continental drift I had in mind was the cataclysmic kind -- straight down. My contention is that this tablet came from the lost continent of Lemuria. The continent was reputedly located in the Indian Ocean, as I suppose you know." "And inscribed in the Atlantean tongue?" said Wilkes, with a skeptical sniff. "Don't be ridiculous. Atlantis and Lemuria had nothing in common." "They both vanished from the face of Earth," George observed dryly. Wilkes' normal pallor flushed a splotchy pink. "You know very well what I mean. There is no proof the two continents even existed in the same age!" George lifted the deeply inscribed rectangle of fired clay and turned it slowly over between his thick strong fingers. "There's this," he said quietly. It was the anthropologist's turn to chuckle and he took it. "Are you postulating an intercontinental war between Atlantis and Lemuria, George?" he scoffed. "There is no evidence of one in this message, if you are." "What I'm postulating," George said slowly, "is an intercontinental entente between the two, against a common enemy. This message," he said, tapping the hard clay tablet with a fingernail for emphasis, "I believe to be an urgent cry for help -- one which never arrived in Atlantis -- from the doomed Lemurian continent." Wilkes removed rimless bifocals to stare better at his friend. "You're not suggesting the cornmon enemy possessed the firepower to wipe that continent off the globe?" he said incredulously. 'There's not a nation on the planet today that could pull off such a cataclysm. Level an enemy country, yes, right to the bare soil. But sink a continent? Never!" "#Vo continents, Fred. Two. Atlantis went under shortly thereafter." "But what enemy? There is no record of any civilization existing at the time of Atlantis that could do more than launch an army of foot soldiers in an attack -- and on wooden ships, at that. What enemy could possibly -- " "No enemy on Earth," George interrupted. "If you take my meaning." "An extraterrestrial enemy?" exclaimed the other man. "Are you saying Atlantis and Lemuria fell victim to an interplanetary war?!" "Not quite,", said George. "What I had in mind was more -- interstellar." He turned the tablet toward his friend and jabbed a finger toward a row of archaic Atlantean symbols. "What does this particular glyph convey to you?" "Superstitious poppycock," said Wilkes. "The ancient necromancers of the land undoubtedly found the zodiacal aspects very poor for battle and were warning the generals against a move which did not fit their horoscope." "Fred," said George, patiently, "what does it say -- exactly?" Fred Wilkes considered the line in question carefully, then pursed his lips and blinked owlishly. Then he replaced his spectacles and read it again. After a moment, he looked up at George. "Well," he said reluctantly, "I think I see what you mean -- that bit about 'the stars against us' could have a bit more rational meaning than the usual astrological interpretation. But surely -- " "We're only absolutely sure of one thing," said George. "Atlantis and Lemuria were continents -- one in the Atlantic, the other in the Indian Ocean -- and, within a relatively short space of time of one another, both were wiped out." "Are we to assume, then, that the same thing occurred with the enemy?" "What do you mean?" asked George. "This message -- from Lemuria to Atlantis, if we grant your theory -- states that attack is imminent and that some terrible retaliation has been planned. Since we are not hipdeep in aliens, George, I can only surmise that this intended counterattack was carried off successfully, right?" the anthropologist. "I can tell by your momentary acceptance of my thesis that you are not convinced -- you have a sardonic grin hiding behind that deadpan stare, my friend -- right?" The other man's smile broke through. "You know me too well," he murmured with mild chagrin. "Yes, I think I have found a rather large fly in your cosmic ointmentthe time element, George." George frowned. "I don't follow you." "Atlantis -- as recent artifacts and Carbon-fourteen tests prove was a land that had ostensibly been civilized for better than a thousand years when it perished. It died at the height of its grandeur, in the full flower of its civilized maturity. Now, if we grant that the quarrel began with Orion I am assuming now that the hunter-glyph in that star-phrase represents a place rather than a heavenly sign of the zodiac if we grant that the quarrel began just before the end of the two continents -- " "Hold on," said George. "Why just before the end?" "Let's postulate wildly a moment -- envision a society as great as our own, in the technological sense -- imagine all sorts of modern-day things on these two vanished continents -- radar and missiles and lasers and the like "All right," said George. "Let's. But why?" "So that an attack from Orion -- or a planet on one of the stars in what we today call Orion could be detected before the superbombs landed. That would be the aforementioned fly in the ointment. George -- have you forgotten just how distant the stars are from our own solar system? Even a missile hurtling out from here at the speed of light itself would take eons to arrive at its target. Let's say, though, that Lemuria's radar detected the oncoming Orion barrage and that Lemuria immediately activated its defense setup and fired a retaliatory barrage back at the enemy, shortly before its destruction. The avenging missiles would not have struck their star-distant target for more than a millennium of time! Now, this being the case, what would be the point in sending an urgent message to Atlantis, telling what Lemuria had done? The messenger could have crawled the distance in the intervening years, and still arrived in plenty of time." Wilkes held a hand up to forestall George's reply. "And don't say it was because Lemuria had detected a backup barrage of missiles timed to strike Atlantis as the Earth rotated it into target range shortly after the first barrage -- the com tinent-sinking barrage -- had struck Lemuria." George faltered. "That is what I was going to say." "And you don't see the flaw in all your theorizing?" George shook his head. "I'm sorry, Fred, but I really don't see any flaw." The anthropologist laughed benignly. "George -- would a civilization that could boast radar and interstellar missiles ever be likely to send an urgent dispatch by footmessenger inscribed upon a clay tablet ?" George sat silent for a long moment. Then he said almost wistfully, "No. No, I guess it wouldn't. Not with radio or telephone or some such device at its disposal. I guess my theory was a bit cockeyed -- " And then he stopped. "What is it, George?" asked Wilkes, oddly uncomfortable at the expression on the other man's face. His friend reached out and gripped his forearm. "Fred -- if that clay tablet -- hardfired and nearly indestructible -- was not intended for the Atlanteans -- then whom was it intended for?" The anthropologist looked at the tablet once again. Its message seemed to hover there in deeply etched convolutions of fire-red warning. And his mind envisioned in the fraction of an instant the obvious corollary to his earlier theory: If the Lemurians fired a retaliatory barrage toward Orion -- and that barrage did take millennia to reach its target -- and the people of Orion were not destroyed by the avenging bombs -- or else they detected the approach of their own doom in the same manner as had Lemuria... Would they not send a new barrage , a reprisal barrage of their own. Earthward again? The same idea, in an even more insidious flash of insight, had come to his companion. "Fred," said George, "Orion would have had almost a thousand years extra development between the Lemurian retaliation and their own -- in fact, twice a thousand years between the Lemurian-bound barrage and their second Earthbound retaliationbarrage. In all that time, their weaponry would have improved quite a bit, wouldn't it? I mean, what they dropped out of the cosmos onto Lemuria and Atlantis would be like a kid's firecracker compared to what, they sent in the next wave, right?" Fred nodded, unable to speak. Then he straightened, and his manner became a bit braver. "Of course," he said, with a trace of his former good humor, "you realize that all of this is simply unfounded theorizing?" George did not reply. George was no longer there. In fact, at that moment, for a globular radius of rections from where the sun had been, nothing was any longer there.  This is an obscene book . It is the autobiography of Kinnall Darival , descendant of Earthlings . He is a prince of Salla, a province on Borthan is ruled by the Covenant, a puritanical code that denies self Even the pronoun "" is never to be uttered -- hence the " obscenity " of the autobiography. Only between bondbrothers and bondsisters is any " soul-bearing " permitted. Forced to flee Salla when his In gay, sophisticated Manneran, older brother, Stirron, succeeds to Kinnall prospers, marries Loimel, the throne after an accident kills first cousin and physically the ex the old septarch, Kinnall is helped act replica of Halum, his bondsisby his bondbrother, Noim, and ter, for whom he has developed a in the neighboring province of marriage is neither good nor dis Glin try to turn him over to Stirastrous -- and Kinnall encounters roris vengeance. no major problems until he meets Kinnall escapes once more, finds Schweiz, Earthman and interplanecover as a common laborer. He tary entrepreneur, decides to make his way as a comSchweiz introduces him to a lij'e moner with the help of H alum's outside the Covenant -- and to an father, who controls trade in prosillegal drug that induces "self-bar perous Manneran. ing " -- a cardinal offense.  came to me concerning a ship from Threish and some false cargo manifests and I went to a pier to verify the facts. By chance I encountered Schweiz. Since parting from him a few days before, I had dreaded meeting him again; it would be intolerable, I thought, to look into the eyes of this man who had beheld my entire self. But then I saw him near me on the pier. He clutched a thick sheaf of invoices in one hand and was shaking the other furiously at some wateryeyed merchant in Glinish dress. To my amazement I felt none of the embarrassment I had anticipated, but only warmth and pleasure at the sight of him. I went to him. He clapped my shoulder and I clapped his. "You look more cheerful now," he said. "Much." "Let me finish with this scoundrel and weTl share a flask of golden, eh?" "By all means;" I said. An hour later, as we sat together in a dockside tavern, I said, u How soon can we leave for Sumara Borthan?" The voyage to the southern continent was conducted as though in a dream. Not once did I question the wisdom of undertaking the journey, nor did I pause to ask no myself why it was necessary for me to take part in person, rather than letting Schweiz make the trip alone or sending some hireling to gather the drug on our behalf. I simply set about the task of arranging for our passage. No commercial shipping goes regularly between Velada Borthan and Sumara Borthan. Those who would travel to the southern continent must charter a vessel. This I did, through the instrumentality of the High Justiciary, using intermediaries and dummy signatories. The vessel I chose was no Mannerangi craft, for I did not care to be recognized when we sailed, but rather a ship of the western province of Velis that had been tied down in Manneran Harbor for the better part of a year by a lawsuit. It seemed there was some dispute over title to the ship going on in its home port, and the thicket of injunctions and counter-injunctions had succeeded in making it impossible for the vessel to leave Manneran after its last voyage there. The captain and crew were bitter over this enforced idleness and had already filed a protest with the Justiciary; but the High Justice had no jurisdiction over a lawsuit that was being fought entirely in the courts of Velis. We therefore had had to continue the stay on the vessel's departure until word came from Velis that title was clear. Knowing all this, I issued a decree in the High Justice's name that would permit the unfortunate craft temporarily to accept charters for voyages to points "between the River Woyn and the eastern shore of the Gulf of Sumar." That usually was taken to mean any point along the coast of the province of Manneran, but I specified also that the captain might hire himself out for trips to the northern coast of Sumara Borthan. Doubtless that clause left the poor man puzzled and it must have puzzled him even more when, a few days later, he was approached by my agents and asked to make a voyage to that very place. To avoid complications with the collectors of customs, among other things, I picked as our port of departure the town of Hilminor, in southwestern Manneran on the Gulf of Sumar. This is a mediumsized place that depends mainly on the fishing trade but serves also as a halfway stop for ships traveling between the city of Manneran and the western provinces. I arranged to meet our chartered captain in Hilminor; he then set out for that town by sea, while Schweiz and I made for it in a groundcar. the coastal highway through a countryside ever more lush, ever more densely tropical as we approached the Gulf of Sumar. Schweiz was in high spirits, as was I. We talked to one another in the first person constantly; to him it was nothing, of course, but I felt like a wicked boy sneaking off to whisper "I" and "me" in a playmate's ear. He and I speculated on what quantity of the Sumaran drug we would obtain and what we would do with it. No longer was it just a question of my getting some to use with Halum: we were talking now of proselytizing everyone and bringing about a wholesale liberation of my self-stifling countrymen. That evangelical approach had crept gradually into our plans almost without my realizing it and had swiftly become dominant. We came to Hilminor on a day so hot the sky itself seemed to break out in blisters. A shimmering dome of heat covered everything and the Gulf of Sumar, as it lay before us, was goldenskinned in the fierqe sunlight. Hilminor is rimmed by a chain of low hills, which are thickly forested on the seaward side and desert on the landwards; the highway curved through them and we stopped at one point so that I could show Schweiz the flesh trees that covered the parched inland slopes. A dozen of the trees were clustered in one place. We walked through crackling tinder-dry underbrush to reach them: twice the height of men they were, with twisted limbs and thick pale bark, spongy to the touch like the flesh of very old women. The trees were scarred from repeated tapping of their sap, making them look all the more repugnant. "Can we taste the fluid?" Schweiz asked. We had no implements for making the tap, but just then a girl of the town came along, perhaps ten years old, half-naked, tanned a deep brown to hide the dirt; she was carrying an auger and a flask and evidently had been sent out by her family to collect flesh-tree sap. She looked at us sourly. I produced a coin and said, "One would show his companion the taste of the flesh tree." Still a sour look; but she jammed her auger into the nearest tree with surprising force, twisted, withdrew it and caught the gush of clear thick fluid. Sullenly she handed her flask to Schweiz. He sniffed it, took a cautious lick, finally had a gulp. And whooped in delight. "Why isn't this stuff sold all over Velada Borthan?" he asked. "The whole supply comes from one little area along the Gulf," I told him. "Most of it's consumed locally and a lot gets shipped to Threish, where it's almost an addiction. That doesn't leave much for the rest of the continent. You can buy it in Manneran, of course, but you have to know where to look." "You know what I'd like to do, Kinnall? I'd like to start a fleshtree plantation, grow them by the thousands and get enough juice bottled so we not only could market it all over Velada Borthan, but could set up an export deal. I -- " "Devil!" the girl cried and added something incomprehensible in the coast dialect, and snatched the flask from his hand. She ran off wildly, knees high, elbows outthrust, several times looking back to make a finger-jabbing sign of contempt or defiance at us. Schweiz, bewildered, shook his head. "Is she crazy?" he asked. "You said T three times," I said. "Very careless." "I've slipped into bad habits, talking with you. But can it really be such a filthy thing to say?" "Filthier than you'll ever imagine. That girl is probably on her way to tell her brothers about the dirty old man who obscened at her on the hillside. Come on: let's get into town before we're mobbed." "Dirty old man," Schweiz murmured. "Me!" I pushed him into the groundcar and we hurried toward the port of Hilminor. flUR ship rode at anchor, a " small squat craft, twin screws. auxiliary sail, hull painted blue and gold. We presented ourselves to the captain -- Khrisch was his name -- and he greeted us blandly by the names we had assumed. In late afternoon we put out to sea. The coast of Velada Borthan dipped from sight behind me and ahead lay only the grand open sweep of the Strait of Sumar. No land at all could be seen, neither aft nor fore. That frightened me. In my brief career as a Glinish seaman I had never been far from the coast and during stormy moments I had soothed myself with the comforting deceit that I might always swim to shore if we capsized. Here, though, the universe seemed all to be of water. As evening approached a gray-blue twilight settled over us, stitching sky seamlessly to sea, and it became worse for me: now there was only our little bobbing, throbbing ship adrift and vulnerable in this directionless, dimensionless void, this shimmering antiworld where all places melted into a single nonplace. I had not expected the strait to be so wide. On a map I had seen in the Justiciary only a few days before the strait had had less breadth than my little finger; I had assumed that the cliffs of Sumara Borthan would be visible to us from the earliest hours of the voyage; yet here we were amid nothingness. I stumbled to my cabin, plunged face first onto my bunk and lay there shaking, calling upon the god of travelers to protect me. Bit by bit I came to loathe myself for this weakness. I reminded myself that I was a septarch's son and a septarch's brother and another septarch's cousin, that in Manneran I was a man of the highest authority, that I was the head of a house and a slayer of hornfowl. All this did me no good. What value is lineage to a drowning man? What use are broad shoulders and powerful muscles and a skill at swimming when the land itself has been swallowed up, so that a swimmer would have no destination? I trembled. I think I may have wept. I felt myself dissolving into that gray-blue void. Then a hand lightly caught my shoulder. Schweiz. 'The ship is sound," he whispered. "The crossing is a short one. Easy. Easy. No harm will come." If it had been anyone else who had found me like that, any other man except perhaps Noim, I might have killed him or myself to bury the secret of my shame. I said, "If this is what it is like to cross the Strait of Sumar, how can one travel between the stars without going mad?" "One grows accustomed to travel." "The fear -- the emptiness -- " "Come above." Gently. "The night is very beautiful." Nor did he lie. Twilight was past and a black bowl pocked with fiery jewels lay over us. Near cities one cannot see the stars so well because of the lights and the haze. I had looked upon the full glory of the heavens while hunting in the Burnt Lowlands, yes, but then I had not known the names of what I saw. Now Schweiz and Captain Khrisch stood close alongside me on deck, taking turns calling out the names of stars and constellations, vying with each other to display their knowledge, each one pouring his astronomy into my ear as though I were a terrified child who could be kept from screaming only by a constant flow of distractions. See? See? And see, there? I saw. A host of our neighboring suns, four or five of the neighbor-planets of our system and even a vagrant comet that night. What they taught me stayed with me. I could step out of my cabin now, I believe, here in the Burnt Lowlands, and call off the stars the way Schweiz and the captain called them off to me aboard ship in the Strait of Sumar. How many more nights do I have, I wonder, on which I will be free to look at the stars? fear. The sun was bright, the sky was lightly fleeced, the broad strait was calm and it did not matter to me that land was beyond sight. We glided toward Sumara Borthan in an almost imperceptible way; I had to study the surface of the sea with care to remind myself we were in motion. A day, a night, a day, a night, a day, and then the horizon sprouted a green crust for there was Sumara Borthan. It provided a fixed point for me, except that we were the fixed point and Sumara Borthan was making for it. The southern continent slid steadily toward us, until at last I saw a rim of bare yellow-green rock stretching from east to west. Atop those naked cliffs rose a thick gap of vegetation, lofty trees knitted together by heavy vines to form a closed canopy, stubbier shrubs clustering in the darkness below, everything cut down the side as if to reveal the jungle's edge to us in cross-section. I felt not fear but wonder at the sight of that jungle. I knew that not one of those trees and plants grew in Velada Borthan; the beasts and serpents and insects of this place were not those of the continent of my birth; what lay before us was alien and perhaps hostile, an unknown world awaiting the first footstep. In a tumble of tangled imaginings I dropped down the well of time and saw myself as an explorer peeling the mystery from a newly found planet. Those gigantic boulders, those slender, high-crowned trees, those dangling snaky vines, all were products of a raw, elemental mystery straight out of evolution's belly, which now I was about to penetrate. That dark jungle was the gate to somethng strange and terrible, I thought, yet I was not frightened so much as I was stirred, deeply moved, by the vision of those sleek cliffs and tendriled avenues. This was the world that existed before man came. This was as it was when there were no godhouses, no drainers; no Port Justiciary: only the silent leafy paths and the surging rivers scouring the valleys; the unplumbed ponds and the long heavy leaves glistening with the jungle's exhalations; the unhunted prehistoric beasts turning in the ooze and the fluttering winged things that knew no fear; the grassy plateaus and the veins of precious metals -- a virgin kingdom and over everything the brooding presence of the gods, of the god, of the god, waiting for the time of worshipers. The lonely gods who did not yet know they were divine. The lonely god. Of course the reality was nothing so romantic. There was a place where the cliffs dipped to sea-level and yielded to a crescent harbor. Here a squalid settlement existed, the shacks of a few dozen Sumarnu who had taken to living here so that they might meet the needs of such ships as occasionally did come from the northern continent. I had thought that all the Sumarnu lived somewhere in the interior -- naked tribesmen camping down by the volcanic peak Vashnir -- and that Schweiz and I would have to hack our way through the whole apocalyptic immensity of this mysterious land, unguided and uncertain, before we found what passed for civilization and made contact with anyone who might sell us that for which we had come. Instead, Captain Khrisch brought his little ship smartly to shore by a crumbling wooden pier and, as we stepped forth, a small delegation of Sumarnu came to offer us a sullen greeting. You know my fantasy of fanged and grotesque Earthmen. So, too, I instinctively expected these people of the southern continent to look in some way alien. I knew it was irrational; they were, after all, sprung from the same stock as the citizens of Salla and Manneran and Glin. But had these centuries in the jungle not transformed them? Had their disavowal of the Covenant not laid them open to infiltration by the vapors of the forest and turned them into unhuman things? No and no. They looked to me like peasants of any province's back country. Oh, they wore unfamiliar ornaments, odd jeweled pendants and bracelets of an un-Veladan sort, but there was nothing else about them, neither tone of skin nor shape of face nor color of hair, that set them apart from the men I had always known. The homogeneity of mankind's genetic pool had spiked my imagination once again. them. Two, evidently the leaders, spoke the dialect of Manneran, though with a troublesome accent. The others showed no sign of understanding northern languages, but chattered among themselves in a tongue of clicks and grunts. Schweiz found communication easier than I did and entered a long conversation so difficult for me to follow that I soon ceased to pay attention. I wandered off to inspect the village. When I returned Schweiz said, "It's all arranged." "What is?" "Tonight we sleep here. Tomorrow they'll guide us to a village that produces the drug. They don't guarantee we'll be allowed to buy any." "Is it only sold at certain places?" "Evidently. They swear there's none at all available here." I asked, "How long a journey will it be?" "Five days. On foot. Do you like jungles, Kinnall?" "I don't know the taste of them yet." "It's a taste you're going to learn," said Schweiz. He turned now to confer with Captain Krisch, who was planning to go off on some expedition of his own along the Sumaran coast. Schweiz arranged to have our ship back at this harbor waiting for us when we returned from our trip into the jungle. Krisch's men unloaded our baggage -- chiefly trade-goods for barter, mirrors and knives and trinkets, since the Sumarnu had no use for Veladan currency -- and got their ship out into the strait before night fell. Schweiz and I had a shack for ourselves on a lip of rock overlooking the harbor. Mattresses of leaves, blankets of animal hide, one lopsided window, no sanitary facilities: this is what the thousands of years of man's voyage through the stars have brought us to. We haggled over the price of our lodgings, finally came to an agreement in knives and heat-rods and at sundown were given our dinner. A surprisingly tasty stew of spicy meats, some angular red fruits, a pot of half-cooked vegetables, a mug of what might have been fermented milk -- we ate what was given us and enjoyed it more than either of us had expected, though we made edgy jokes about the diseases we were likely to catch. I poured out a libation to the god of travelers, more out of habit than conviction. Schweiz said, "So you still believe, after all?" "I replied that I found no reason not to believe in the gods, though my faith in the teachings of men had been greatly weakened. This close to the equator darkness came on swiftly, a sudden black curtain rolling down. We sat outside a little while, Schweiz favoring me with some more astronomy and testing me on what I had already learned. Then we went to bed. XV Schweiz had misunderstood, or the Sumarnu chieftain was poor at counting. We had one guide and three bearers. I had never walked so much before, from dawn to sunset, the ground yielding and bouncy beneath my feet. The jungle rising, a green wall, on both sides of the narrow path. Astonishing humidity, so that we swam in the air, worse than on the worst day in Manneran. Insects with jeweled eyes and terrifying beaks. Slithering, many-legged beasts rushing past us. Strugglings and horrid cries in the underbrush, just beyond sight. The sunlight falling in dappled streaks, barely making it through the canopy high above. Flowers bursting from the trunks of trees: parasites, Schweiz said. One of them a puffy yellow thing that had a human face, goggly eyes, a gaping pollensmeared mouth. We crept up the spine of the continent, emerging from the jungle for a day and a half to climb a good-sized mountain, then more jungle on the other side, Schweiz asked our guide why we had not gone around the mountain instead of over it, and was told that this was the only route, for poison ants infested all the surrounding lowlands: very cheering. Beyond the mountain lay a chain of lakes and streams and ponds, many of them thick with gray toothy snouts barely breaking the surface. All this seemed unreal to me. A few days' sail to the north lay Velada Borthan, with its banking houses and its groundcars, its customs collectors and its godhouses. That was a tamed continent, but for its uninhabitable interior. Man had made no impact at all, though, on this place where we marched. Its disorderly wildness oppressed me, that and the heavy air, the sounds in the night, the unintelligible conversations of our primitive companions. On the sixth day we came to the native village. Perhaps three hundred wooden huts were scattered over a broad meadow at a place where two rivers of modest size ran together. I had the impression that there once had been a larger town here, possibly even a city, for on the borders of the settlement I saw grassy mounds and humps, quite plausibly the site of ancient ruins. The villagers surrounded us: not hostile, only curious. Northerners were uncommon sights. A few of them came close and touched me, a i timid pat on the forearm, a shy squeeze of the wrist, invariably accompanied by a quick little smile. These jungle folk seemed not to have the sullen sourness of those who lived in the shacks by the harbor. They were gentler, more open, more childlike. An interminable parley began among Schweiz, our guide, and three of the village elders. After the first few moments Schweiz was out of it: the guide, indulging in long cascades of verbal embellishments footnoted by frantic gesticulations, seemed to be explaining the same thing over and over to the villagers, who constantly made the same series of replies to him. Neither Schweiz nor I could understand a syllable of it all. At last the guide, looking agitated, turned to Schweiz and poured forth a stream of Sumarnu-accented Mannerangi, which I found almost wholly opaque but which Schweiz, with his tradesman's skill at communicating with strangers, was able to penetrate. Schweiz said finally to me, vided we can show them that we're worthy of having the drug." "How do we do that?" "By taking some with them at a love ritual this evening. Our guide's been trying to talk them out of it, but they won't budge. No communion, no merchandise." "Are there risks?" I asked. Schweiz shook his head. "It doesn't seem that way to me. But the guide has the idea that we're only looking for profit in the drug, that we don't mean to use it ourselves but intend to go back to Manneran and sell what we get for many mirrors and many heat-rods and many knives. Since he thinks we aren't users, he's trying to protect us from exposure to it. The villagers also think we aren't users and they're damned if they'll turn a speck of the stuff over to anyone who's merely planning to peddle it. They'll make it available only to true believers." "But we are true believers," I said. "I know. But I can't convince our man of that. He knows enough about northerners to know that they keep their minds closed at all times and he wants to pamper us in our sickness of soul. But I'll try again." Now it was Schweiz and our guide who parleyed, while the village chiefs stood silent. Adopting the gestures and even the accent of the guide, so that both sides of the conversation became unintelligible to me, Schweiz pressed and pressed and pressed. The guide resisted all that the Earthman was telling him and a feeling of despair came over me so that I was ready to suggest that we give up and go empty-handed back to Manneran. Then Schweiz somehow broke through. The guide, still suspicious, clearly asked Schweiz whether he really wanted what he said he wanted. Schweiz emphatically said he did and the guide, looking skeptical, turned once more to the village chiefs. This time he spoke only briefly with them and then briefly again with Schweiz. "It's been settled" Schweiz told me. "Well take the drug with them tonight' He leaned close and touched my elbow. "Something for you to remember, when you go under: be loving. If you can't love them, all is lost." I was offended that he had found it necessary to warn me. qiEN of them came for us at sundown and led us into the forest east of the village. Among them were the three chieftains and two other older men, along with two young men and three women. One of the women was a handsome girl, one a plain girl and one quite old. Our guide did not go with us; I am not sure whether he was not invited to the ceremony or simply did not feel like taking part. We marched a considerable distance. No longer could we hear the cries of children in the village or the barking of domestic animals. Our halting place was a secluded clearing, where hundreds of trees had been felled and the dressed logs laid out in five rows as benches to form a pentagonal amphitheater. In the middle of the clearing was a clay-lined firepit, with a great heap of firewood neatly stacked beside it; as soon as we arrived, the two young men commenced building a towering blaze. On the far side of the woodpile I saw a second clay-lined pit; about twice as wide as a large man's body; it descended diagonally into the ground and gave the appearance of being a passage of no little depth, a tunnel offering access to the depths of the world. The Sumarnu showed us through gestures where we should sit: at the base of the pentagon. The plain girl sat beside us. To our left, next to the tunnel entrance, sat the three chiefs. To our right, by the firepit, were the two young men. In the far right corner sat the old woman and one of the old men; the other old man and the handsome girl went to the far left corner. Full darkness was upon us by the time we were seated. The Sumarnu now removed what little clothing they wore and, seeing them obviously beckoning to us to do the same, Schweiz and I stripped, piling our clothes on the benches behind us. At a signal from one of the chiefs the handsome girl rose and went to the fire, poking a bough into it until she had a torch; then, approaching the slanting mouth of the tunnel, she wriggled awkwardly feet-first into it, holding the torch high. Girl and torch disappeared entirely from view. For a little while I could see the flickering light of the firebrand coming from below, but soon it went out, sending up a gust of dark smoke. Shortly the girl emerged without the torch. In one hand she carried a thick-rimmed red pot, in the other a long flask of green glass. The two old men -- high priests? -- left their benches and took these things from her. They began a tuneless chant and one, reaching into the pot, scooped from it a handful of white powder -- the drug! -- and dropped it into the flask. The other solemnly shook the flask from side to side in a mixing motion. Meanwhile the old woman -- a priestess? -- had prostrated herself by the mouth of the tunnel. She began to chant in a different intonation, a jagged gasping rhythm, while the two young men flung more wood on the fire. The chanting continued for a good many minutes. Now the girl who had descended into the tunnel -- a slim, high-breasted wench with long silken red-brown hair -- took the flask from the old man and brought it to our side of the fire, where the plain girl, stepping forward, received it reverently with both hands. Solemnly she carried it to the three seated chieftains and held it toward them. The chieftains now joined the chanting for the first time. What I thought of as the Rite of the Presentation of the Flask went on and on; I was fascinated at first, finding delight in the strangeness of the ceremony, but soon I grew bored and had to amuse myself by trying to invent a spiritual content for what was taking place. The tunnel, I decided, symbolized the genital opening of the world-mother, the route to her womb, where the drug -- made from a root, from something growing underground -- could be obtained. I devised an elaborate metaphorical construct involving a mother-cult, the symbolic meaning of carrying a lighted torch into the world-mother's womb, the use of plain and handsome girls to represent the universality of womanhood, the two young fire-warders as guardians of the chieftains' sexual potency -- and a great deal more, all of it nonsense, but -- so I thought -- an impressive enough scheme to be assembled by a bureaucrat like myself, of no great intellectual powers. My pleasure in my owrr musings evaporated abruptly , when I realized how patronizing I was being. I was treating these Sumarnu like quaint savages, whose chants and rites were of mild esthetic interest but could not possibly have any serious content. Who was I to take this lofty attitude? I had come to them, had I not, begging the drug of enlightenment that my soul craved; which of us then was the superior being? I assailed myself for my snobbery. Be loving . Put aside courtly sophistication. Share their rite if you can and at the least show no contempt for it, feel no contempt, have no contempt. Be loving. The chieftains were drinking now, each taking a sip, handing the flask back to the plain-looking girl who, when all three had sipped, began to move about the circle, bringing the flask first to the old men, then to the old woman, then to the handsome girl, then to the young fire-tenders, then to Schweiz, then to me. She smiled at me as she gave me the flask. By the fire's leaping light she seemed suddenly beautiful. The flask contained a warm gummy wine; I nearly gagged as I drank. But I drank. The drug entered my gut and journeyed thence to my soul. them and the two of us. First there were the strange sensations of going up, the heightening of perception, the loss of bearings, the visions of celestial light, the hearing of eerie sounds; then came the detecting of other heartbeats and bodily rhythms about me, the doubling, the overlapping of awarenesses; then came the dissolution of self and we became one, who had been twelve. I was plunged into a sea of souls and I perished. I was swept into the center of all things. I had no way of knowing whether I was Kinnall, the septarch's son, or Schweiz, the man of old Earth, or the firetenders, the chiefs, the priests, the girls or the priestess, for they were inextricably mixed up in me and I in them. And the sea of souls was a sea of love. How could it be anything else? We were each other. Love of self bound us each to each, all to all. Love of self is love of others; love of others is love of self. And I loved. I knew more clearly than ever why Schweiz had said to me,  love you , as we were coming out of the drug the first time -- that odd phrase, so obscene on Borthan, so incongruous in any case when man is speaking to man. I said to the ten Sumarnu, I love you , though not in words, for I had no words that they would understand -- and even if I had spoken to them in my own tongue and they had understood, they would have resented the foulness of my words, for among my people I love you is an obscenity and no help for it. I love you. And I meant it, and they accepted the gift of my love. I, who was part of them. I, who not long ago had patronized them as amusing primitives worshiping bonfires in the woods. Through them I sensed the sounds of the forest, the heaving of the tides and, yes, the merciful love of the great world-mother, who lies sighing and quaking beneath our feet and who has bestowed on us the drug root for the healing of our sundered selves. I learned what it is to be Sumarnu and live simply at the meeting place of two small rivers. I discovered how one can lack groundcars and banking houses and still belong to the community of civilized humanity. I found out what half-souled things the people of Velada Borthan have made of themselves in the name of holiness and how whole it is possible to be if one follows the way of the Sumarnu. None of this came to me in words or even in a flow of images, but rather in a rush of received knowledge, knowledge that entered and became part of me after a manner I can neither describe nor explain. I hear you saying now that I must be either lying or lazy to offer you as little specific detail of the experience as I have done. But I reply that one cannot put into words what never was in words. One can deal only in approximations and one's best effort can be nothing more than a distortion, a coarsening of the truth. For I must transform perceptions into words and set them down as my skills permit -- and you must pick my words from the page and convert them into whatever system of perceptions your mind habitually employs; at each stage of this transmission a level of density leaches away, until you are left only with the shadow of what befell me in the clearing in Sumara Borthan. So how can I explain? We were dissolved in one another. We were dissolved in love. We, who had no language in common, came to total comprehension of our separate selves. When the drug at length lost its hold on us, part of me remained in them and part of them remained in me. If you would know more than that, if you would have a glimpse of what it is to be released from the prison of your skull, if you would taste love for the first time in your life, I say to you. Look for no explanations fashioned out of words, but put the flask to your lips. Put the flask to your lips.  would give us what we wanted. After the sharing of love came the haggling. We returned to the village and in the morning our bearers brought out our cases of tradegoods, The three chieftains brought out three squat clay pots, the white powder visible within them. We heaped up a high stack of knives and mirrors and heatrods and they carefully poured quantities of powder from two of the pots into the third. Schweiz did most of the bargaining. The guide we had brought from the coast was of little value, for, though he could talk these chieftains' language, he had never talked to their souls. In fact, the bargaining inverted itself suddenly, with Schweiz happily piling still more trinkets into the price and the chiefs responding by adding more powder to our bowl, everyone laughing in a sort of hysterical good nature as the contest of generosity grew more frenzied. In the end we gave the villagers everything we had, keeping only a few items for gifts to our guide and bearers, and the villagers gave us enough of the drug to snare the minds of thousands. Captain Khrisch was waiting when we reached the harbor. "One sees you have fared well," he remarked. "Is it so obvious?" I asked. "You were worried men when you went into this place. You are happy men coming out of it. Yes, it is obvious." On the first night of our voyage back to Manneran, Schweiz called me into his cabin. He had out the pot of white powder and he had broken the seal. I watched as he carefully poured the drug into little packets of the kind in which that first dose had come. He worked in silence, scarcely or eighty packets. When he was done he counted out a dozen of them and pushed them to one side. Indicating the others, he said, "Those are for you. Hide them well about your luggage or you'll need all your power with the Port Justiciary to get them safely past the customs collectors." "You've given me five times as much as you've taken," I protested. "Your need is greater," Schweiz told me.  meant until we were in Manneran again. We landed at Hilminor, paid Captain Khrisch, went through a minimum of inspection formalities (how trusting the port officials were, not very long ago!) and set out in our groundcar for the capital. Entering the city of Manneran by the Sumar Road, we passed through a crowded district of marketplaces and open-air shops, where I saw thousands of Mannerangi jostling, haggling, bickering. I saw them driving their hard bargains and whipping out contract forms to close the deals. I saw their faces, pinched, guarded the eyes bleak and unloving. And I thought of the drug I carried and fold myself, If only I could change their frosty souls. I had a vision of myself going among them, accosting strangers, drawing this one aside and that, whispering gently to each of them, "I am a prince of Salla and a high official of the Port Justiciary, who has put such empty things aside to bring happiness to mankind, and I would show you how to find joy through selfbaring. Trust me: I love you." No doubt some would flee from me as soon as I began to speak, frightened by the initial obscenity of my "I am." Others might hear me out and then spit in my face and call me a madman -- and some might cry for the police -- but perhaps there would be a few who would listen, feel tempted and come off with me to a quiet dockside room where we could share the Sumaran drug. One by one I would open souls until there were ten in Manneran like me -- twenty -- a hundred -- a secret society of selfbarers, knowing one another by the warmth and love in their eyes, going about the city unafraid to say "I" or "me" to their fellow initiates, giving up not merely the grammar of politeness but all the poisonous denials of self-love that that grammar implied. And then I would charter Captain Khrisch again for a voyage to Sumara Borthan, returnladen with packets of white pfowder and continue on through Manneran -- I and those who now were like me -- and. we would go up to this one and that, smiling, glowing, to whisper, "I would show you how to find joy through selfbaring. Trust me: I love you." There was no role for Schweiz in this vision. This was not his planet; he had no stake in transforming it. All that interested him was his private spiritual need, his hunger to break through to a sense of the godhood. He had begun that breakthrough already and could complete it on his own, apart. Schweiz had no need to skulk about the city, seducing strangers. And this was why he had given me the greater share of our Sumaran booty: I was the evangelist, I was the new prophet, I was the messiah of openness. Schweiz realized that before I did. Until now he had been the leader -- drawing me into his confidence, getting me to try the drug, luring me off to Sumara Borthan, making use of my power in the Port Justiciary, keeping me at his side for companionship and reassurance and protection. I had been in his shadow throughout. Now he would cease to eclipse me. Armed with my little packets, I alone would launch the campaign to change a world. It was a role I welcomed. All my life I had been overshadowed by one man or another, so that for all my strength of body and ability of mind I had come to seem secondrate to myself. Perhaps that is a natural defect of being born a septarch's second son. First there had been my father, whom I could never hope to equal in authority, agility, or might; then Stirron, whose kingship brought only exile for me; then my master in the Glinish logging camp; then Segvord Helalam; then Schweiz. All of them men of determination and prestige, who knew and held their places in our world, while I wandered in frequent bewilderment. Now, in the middle of my years, I could at last emerge. I had a mission. I had purpose. The spinners of the divine design had brought me to this place, had made me who I was, had readied me for my task. In joy I accepted their command. sport, in a room on the south side of Manneran, in the tangle of old streets back of the Stone Chapel. She claimed to be a bastard of the Duke of Kongoroi, spawned when the duke was on a state visit to Manneran in the days of my father's reign. Perhaps her story was true. Certainly she believed it. I was in the habit of going to her twice or thrice each moontime for an hour of pleasure, whenever I felt too stifled by the routine of my life, whenever I felt boredom's hand at my throat. She was simple but passionate: lusty, available, undemanding. I did not hide my identity from her, but I gave her none of my inner self and none was expected; we talked very little and there was no question of love between us. In return for the price of her lodgings she let me make occasional use of her body and the transaction was no more complex than that: a touching of skins, a sneeze of the loins. She was the first to whom I gave the drug. I mixed it with golden wine. "We will drink this," I said, and when she asked me why, I replied, "It will bring us closer together." She asked, in no great curiosity, what it would do to us and I explained, "It will open self to self and make all walls transparent." She offered no protests -- no talk of the Covenant, no whining about privacy, no talk of the evils of selfbaring. She did as she was told, convinced I would bring no harm to her. We took the dose and lay naked on her couch, waiting for the effects to begin. I stroked her cool thighs, kissed the tips of her breasts, playfully nibbled her earlobes and soon the strangeness started, the buzzing and the rush of air, and we began to detect one another's heartbeats and pulse. "Oh," she said. "Oh, one feels so peculiar!" But it did not frighten her. Our souls drifted together and were fused in the clear white light coming from the Center of All Things. And I discovered what it is like to wriggle one's shoulders and have heavy breasts slap together and I felt eggs throbbing and impatient in my ovaries. At the height of our voyage we joined our bodies. I felt myself moving against myself, I felt lips on my lips, tongue on my tongue, soul in my soul. This union of our bodies endured for hours, or so it seemed. And in that time my self was open to her, so that she could see in it all she chose, my boyhood in Salla, my flight to Glin, my marriage, my love for my bondsister, my weaknesses, my self-deceptions, and I looked into her and saw the sweetness of her, the giddiness, the moment of first finding blood on her thighs, the other blood of a later time, the image of Kinnall Darival as she carried it in her mind, the vague and unformed commandments of the Covenant and all the rest of her soul's furniture. Then we were swept away by the storms of our senses. I felt her orgasm and mine, mine and mine, hers and hers, the double column of frenzy and that was one, the rise and the fall. We lay sweaty and sticky and exhausted, the drug still thundering through our joined minds. I opened my eyes and saw hers unfocused, the pupils dilated. She gave me a lopsided smile. "I -- I -- I -- I -- I," she said. "IT The wonder of it dazed her. "I ! I ! I !" I planted a kiss between her breasts and felt the i brush of my lips myself. T love you," I said. Justiciary, a certain Ulman, half my age and clearly a man of promise, whom I had come to like. He knew my power and my ancestry and showed no awe of me over that; his respect for me was based entirely on my skills in evaluating and handling the problems of the Justiciary. I kept him late one day and called him into my office when the others were gone. 'There is this drug of Sumara Borthan," I said, "that allows one mind freely to enter another." He smiled and said that he had heard of it, yes, but understood it was difficult to obtain and dangerous to use. "There is no danger," I answered. "And as for the difficulty of obtaining it -- " I drew forth one of my little packets. His smile did not fade, though dots of color came into his cheeks. We took the drug together in my office. Hours later, when we left for our homes, I gave him some so that he could take it with his wife. reach out to a stranger, a short, thickbodied man in princely clothes, possibly a member of the septarch's family. He had the clear serene eyes of a man of good faith and the poise of one who has looked within himself and is not displeased by what he has seen. But when I spoke my words to him he shoved me away and cursed me with such fury that his anger became contagious; maddened by his words, I nearly struck him in blind frenzy. " Selfbar er! Selfbarer !" The shout echoed through the holy building, and people emerged from rooms of meditation to stare. It was the worst shame I had known in years. My exalted mission came into another perspective: I saw it as filthy and myself as something pitiful, a creeping slinking fog of a man driven by who knew what compulsion to expose his shabby soul to strangers. My anger drained from me and fear flowed in: I slipped into the shadows and out by a side door, dreading arrest. For a week I walked on tiptoe, forever looking back over my shoulder. But nothing pursued me except my panging conscience. T HE time of insecurity passed. Again I saw my mission whole, recognized the merit of what I had pledged myself to do and felt only sorrow for the man in the Stone Chapel who had spurned my gift. And in a single week I found three strangers who would share the drug with me. I wondered how I ever could have doubted myself. But other seasons of doubt lay ahead. cal basis for my use of the drug, to construct a new theology of love and openness. I studied the Covenant and many of its commentaries, attempting to discover why the first settlers of Velada Borthan had found it necessary to deify mistrust and concealment. What did they fear? What were they hoping to preserve? Dark men in a dark time, with mindsnakes creeping through their skulls. In the end I came to no real understanding of them. They were convinced of their own virtue. They had acted for the best. Thou shalt not thrust the inwardness of thy soul upon thy fellow man. Thou shalt not unduly examine needs of thine own self. Thou shalt deny thyself the easy pleasures of intimate conversation. Thou shalt stand alone before thy gods. And so we had lived, these hundreds of years, unquestioning, obedient, keeping the Covenant. Maybe nothing keeps the Covenant alive now, for most of us, except simple politeness: we by baring ourselves and so we go locked up, our inner wounds festering, and we speak our language of third-person courtliness. Was it time to create a new Covenant? A bond of love, a testament of sharing? Hidden in my rooms at home, I struggled to write one. What could I say that would be believed? That we had done well enough following the old ways, but at grievous personal cost. That the perilous conditions of the first settling no longer obtained among us and certain customs, having become handicaps rather than assets, could be discarded. That societies must evolve if they are not to decay. That love is better than hate and trust is better than mistrust. But little of what I wrote convinced even me. Why was I attacking the established order of things? Out of profound conviction, or merely out of the hunger for dirty pleasures? I was a man of my own time; I was embedded firmly in the rock of my upbringing even as I toiled to turn that rock to sand. Trapped in the tension between my old beliefs and my still unformed new ones, I swung a thousand times a day from pole to pole, from shame to exaltation. As I labored over the draft of my new Covenant's preamble one evening, my bondsister Halum unexpectedly entered my study. "What are you writing?" she asked pleasantly. I covered one sheet with another. My face must have reflected my discomfort, for hers showed signs of apology for having intruded. "Official reports," I said. "Foolishness. Dull bureaucratic trivia." That night I burned all I had written, in a paroxysm of self-contempt. voyages of exploration into unknown lands. Friends, strangers, casual acquaintances, a mistress: companions on strange journeys. But through all the early phase of my time of changes I said not a word to Halum about the drug. To share it with her had been my original goal, that had brought the drug to my lips in the first place. Yet I feared to approach her. It was cowardice that kept me back: what if, by coming to know me too well, she ceased to love me? broaching the subject with her. I held myself back. I did not dare to move toward her. If you wish you may measure my sincerity by my hesitation; how pure, you may ask, was my new creed of openness if I felt that my bondsister would be above such a communion? But I will not pretend there was any consistency in my thinking then. My liberation from the taboos on self-baring was a willed thing, not a natural evolution, and I had constantly to battle against the old habits of 'our custom. Though I talked in "I" and "me" with Schweiz and some of the others with whom I had shared the drug, I was never comfortable in doing so. Vestiges of my broken bonds still crept together to shackle me. I looked at Halum and knew that I loved her and told myself that the only way to fulfill that love was through the joining of her soul and mine -- and in my hand was the powder that would join us. And I did not dare. And I did not dare. T HE twelfth person with whom I shared the Sumaran drug was my bondbrother Noim. He was in Manneran to spend a week as my guest. Winter had come, bringing snow to Glin, hard rains to Salla and only fog to Manneran -- northerners needed a little prodding to come to our warm province. I had not seen Noim since the summer before, when we had hunted together in the Huishtors. In this past year we had drifted apart somewhat; in a sense Schweiz had come to take Noim's place in my life and I no longer had quite the same need for my bondbrother. Noim now was a wealthy landowner in Salla, having come into the inheritance of the Condorit family as well as the lands of his wife's kin. In manhood he had become plump, though not fat; his wit and cunning were not hidden deep beneath his new layers of flesh. He had a sleek, well-oiled look, with dark unblemished skin, full complacent lips and round sardonic eyes. Little escaped his attention. Upon arriving at my house he surveyed me with great care, as though counting my teeth and the lines about my eyes and, after the formal bondbrotherly greetings, after the presentation of my gift and the one he had brought from Stirron, after we had signed the contract of host and guest, Noim said unexpectedly, "Are you in trouble, Kinnall?" "Why do you ask that?" "Your face is sharper. You've lost weight. Your mouth -- you hold it in a quirky grin that doesn't announce a relaxed man within. Your eyes are red-rimmed and they don't want to look directly into other eyes. Is anything wrong?" "These have been the happiest months of one's life," I said, a shade too vehemently, perhaps. Noim ignored my disclaimer. "Are you having problems with Loimel?" "She goes her way and one goes his own." "Difficulties with the business of the Justiciary, then?" "Please, Noim, won't you believe that -- " "Your face has changes inscribed in it," he said. "Do you deny there have been changes in your life?" I shrugged. "And if so?" "Changes for the worse?" "One does not think so." "You're being evasive, Kinnall. Come: what's a bondbrother for if not to share problems?" 'There are no problems," I insisted. "Very well." And he let the matter drop. But I saw him watching me that evening and again the next day at morning's meal, studying me, probing me. I could never hide anything from him. We sat over blue wine and talked of the Sallan harvest, talked of Stirron's new program of reforming the tax structure, talked of the renewed tensions between Salla and Glin, the bloody border raids that had lately cost me the life of a sister. And all the while Noim watched me. Halum dined with us, we talked of our childhood and Noim watched me. He flirted with Loimel, but his eyes did not wander from me. The depth and intensity of his concern preyed on me. He would be asking questions of others, soon, trying to get from Halum or from Loimel some notion of what might be bothering me, and he might stir up troublesome curiosities in them that way. I could not let him remain ignorant of the central experience of his bondbrother's life. Late the second night, when everyone else had retired, I took Noim to my study, opened the secret place where I stored the white powder and asked him if he knew anything of the Sumaran drug. He claimed not to have hea rd of it. Briefly I described its effects to him. His expression darkened; he seemed to draw in on himself. "Do you use this stuff often?" he asked. "Eleven times thus far." "Eleven -- why, Kinnall?" "To learn the nature of one's own self, through sharing that self with others." Noim laughed explosively: it was almost a snort. "Selfbaring, Kinnall?" "One takes up odd hobbies in one's middle years." "And with whom have you played this game?" I said, "Their names don't matter. No one you would know. People of Manneran, those with some adventure in their souls, those who "Loimel?" Now it was my turn to snort. "Never! She knows nothing of this at all." "Halum, then?" I shook my head. "One wishes one had the courage to approach Halum. So far one has concealed everything from her. One fears she's too virginal, too easily shocked. It's sad, isn't it, Noim, when one has to hide something as exciting as this, as wonderfully rewarding, from one's bondsister." "From one's bondbrother too," he observed testily. "You would have been told in time," I said. "You would have been offered your chance to experience the communion." His eyes flashed. "Do you think Td want it?" His deliberate obscenity earned only a faint smile from me. "One hopes one's bondbrother will share all of one's experiences. At present the drug opens a gulf between us. One has gone again and again to a place you have never visited. Do you see, Noim?" N oim saw. He was tempted; he hovered at the edge of the abyss; he chewed his lips, tugged at his earlobes and everything that passed across his mind was as transparent to me as if we had already shared the Sumaran powder. For my sake he was uneasy, knowing that I had seriously strayed from the Covenant and might soon find myself in grave spiritual and legal trouble. For his own sake he was gnawed by curiosity, aware that selfbaring with one's bondbrother was no great sin and halfeager to know the kind of communion he might have with me under the drug. Also his eyes revealed a glint of jealousy that I had bared myself to this one and this one and that -- unimportant strangers -- and not to him. I tell you that I comprehended these things at that moment, though I confirmed them later when Noim's soul was open to me. We said nothing to one another about these matters for several days. We visited with Schweiz, emptied many a flask of good wine and discussed religious topics in a hearty, earnest, drunken way. ("All my life," said Schweiz, "has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.") Noim noticed that Schweiz did not always observe the grammatical niceties. Another night we dined with a group of Mannerangi nobles in a voluptuous house in the hills overlooking the city: small birdlike men, overdressed and fidgety, with huge, handsome young wives. Noim was displeased by these effete dukes and barons, with their talk of commerce and jewelry, but he grew more irritable yet when the chatter turned to the rumor that a mind-unsealing drug from the southern continent was now procurable in the capital. To this I made only polite interjections of surprise; Noim glared at me for my hypocrisy and even refused a dish of tender Mannerangi brandy, so tight-strung were his nerves. A sizzling tension was building in Noim during these days, for he clearly longed to return to the subject of our early conversation, yet could not bring himself to it. I made no move toward reopening the theme. It was Noim who made the move, finally, on the eve of his departure for his home in Salla. "This drug of yours -- " he began hoarsely. He said he felt he could not regard himself as my true bondbrother unless he sampled it. These words came from him at great cost. His elegant clothes were rumpled by his restlessness and a fine line of beaded perspiration stood out on his upper lip. We went to a room where no one could intrude and I prepared the potion. As he took the flask he briefly flashed at me his familiar grin, impudent and sly and bold, but his hand was shaking so badly he nearly spilled the drink. The drug took effect quickly for both of us. It was a night of thick humidity. A dense greasy mist covered the city and its suburbs and it seemed to me that fingers of it were sliding into our room through the partly opened window: I saw shimmering, pulsating strands of cloud groping at us, dancing between my bondbrother and myself. The early sensations of druggedness disturbed Noim, until I explained that everything was normal, the twinned heartbeats, the cottony head, the high whining sounds in the air. Now we were open. I looked into Noim and saw not only his self but his image of his self, encrusted with shame and self-contempt; there was in Noim a fierce and burning loathing of his imagined flaws -- and the flaws were many. He held himself accused of laziness, lack of discipline and ambition, irreligiousness, a casual concern with high obligations and physical and moral weakness. Why he saw himself in this way I could not understand, for the true Noim was there beside the image and the true Noim was a toughminded man, loyal to those he loved, harsh in judgment of folly, clear-sighted, passionate, energetic. The contrast between Noim's Noim and the world's was startling: it was as though he were capable of correctly evaluating everything but his own worth. I had seen such disparities before on these drug voyages; in fact they were universal in all but Schweiz, who had not been trained from childhood in self-denial; yet they were sharper in Noim than in anyone else. Also I saw, as I had seen before, my own image refracted through Noim's sensibility: a far nobler Kinnall Darival than I recognized. How he idealized me! I was all he hoped to be, a man of action and valor, a wielder of power, an enemy of everything that was frivolous, a practitioner of the sternest inner discipline and devotion. Yet this image bore traces of a new overlay of tarnish, for was I not also now a Covenantdefiling selfbarer, who had done this and this and that and that with eleven strangers and who now had lured his own bondbrother into criminal experimentation? Noim also found in me the true depth of my feelings for Halum and upon making that discovery, which confirmed old suspicions, he altered his image of me once again, not for the better. Meanwhile I showed Noim how I had always seen him -- quick, clever, capable -- and showed him, too, his own Noim and the objective Noim as well, while he gave me a view of the. selves of mine he now could see beside that idealized Kinnall. These mutual explorations continued a long time. I thought the exchanges were' immensely valuable, since only with Noim could I attain the necessary depth of perspective, the proper parallax of character, and he only with me; we had great advantages over a pair of strangers meeting for the first time by way of the Sumaran drug. When the spell of the potion began to lift, I felt myself exhausted by the intensity of our communion, yet ennobled, exalted, transformed. Not so Noim. He looked depleted and chilled. He could barely lift his eyes to mine. His mood was so frigid that I dared not break in on it but remained still, waiting for him to recover. At length he asked, "Is it all over?" "Yes." "Promise one thing, Kinnall. Will you promise?" "Say it, Noim." "That you never do this thing with Halum! Is it a promise? Will you promise it, Kinnall? Never. Never. Never." parture some guilty impulse drove me to the Stone Chapel. To fill the time until Jidd could see me, I roamed the halls and byways of the dark building, pausing at altars, bowing humbly to halfblind scholars of the Covenant holding debate in a courtyard, brushing away ambitious minor drainers who, recognizing me, solicited my trade. All about me were the things of the gods, and I failed to detect the divine presence. Perhaps Schweiz had found the godhood through the souls of other men, but I, dabbling in selfbaring, somehow had lost that other faith and it did not matter to me. I knew that in time I would find my way back to grace under this new dispensation of love and trust that I hoped to offer. So I lurked in the godhouse of godhouses, a mere tourist. I went to Jidd. I had not had a draining since immediately after Schweiz first had given me the Sumaran drug. The little crooknosed man remarked on that as I took the contract from him. The pressures of the Justiciary, I explained, and he shook his head and made a chiding sound. "You must be full to overflowing," Jidd said. I did not reply, but settled down before his mirror to peer at the lean, unfamiliar face that dwelled in it. He asked me which god I would have and I told him the god of the innocent. He gave me a queer look at that. The holy lights came on. With soft words he guided me into the half-trance of confession. What could I say? That I had ignored my pledge and gone on to use the selfbaring potion with everyone who would take it from me? I sat silent. Jidd prodded me. He did something I had never known a drainer to do before: hearkened back to a previous draining and asked me to speak again of this drug whose use I had admitted earlier. Had I used it again? I pushed my face close to the mirror, fogging it with my breath. Yes. Yes. One is a miserable sinner and one has been weak once more. Then Jidd asked me how I had obtained this drug and I said that I had taken it, the first time, in company with one who had purchased it from a man who had been to Sumara Borthan. Yes, Jidd said, and what was the name of this companion? That was a clumsy move: immediately I was on guard. It seemed to me that Jidd's question went far beyond the needs of a draining. I refused therefore to give him Schweiz I name, which led the drainer to ask me, a little roughly, if I feared he would breach the secrecy of the ritual. Did I fear that? On rare occasions I had held things back from drainers out of shame, but never out of fear of betrayal. Naive I was and I had full faith in the ethics of the godhouse. Only now, suddenly suspicious, the suspicion having been planted by Jidd himself, did I mistrust Jidd and all his tribe. Why did he want to know? What information was he after? What could I gain, or he, by my revealing my source of the.drug? I replied tautly, "One seeks forgiveness for oneself alone and how can telling the name of one's companion bring that. Let him to his own confessing. #I But of course there was no chance that Schweiz would go to a drainer; thus I had come down to playing word games with Jidd. All value had leaked from this draining, leaving me with an empty husk. "If you would have peace from the gods, #I Jidd said, "you must speak your soul fully. #I How could I do that? Confess the seduction of eleven people into selfbaring? I had no need of Jidd's forgiveness. I had no faith in his good will. Abruptly I stood up, a little dizzy from kneeling in the dark, swaying a bit, almost stumbling. "One is not ready for draining today," I told Jidd. "One must examine one's soul more closely." I lurched toward the door. He looked in a puzzled manner at the money I had given him. "The fee?" he called. I told him he could keep it. T HE days became mere vacant rooms, separating one journey with the drug from the next. I drifted idle and detached through all my responsibilities, seeing nothing of what was around me, living only for my next communion. The real world dissolved; I lost interest in sex, wine, food, the doings of the Port Justiciary, the friction between neighboring provinces of Velada Borthan and all other such things, which to me now were only the shadows of shadows. Possibly I was using the drug too frequently. I lost weight and existed in a perpetual haze of blurred white light. I had difficulties in sleeping and for hours found myself twisting and shifting, a blanket of muggy tropical air clamping me to my mattress, a haggard insomniac with an ache in his eyeballs and grittiness under the lids. I walked tired through my days and blinking through my evenings. Rarely did I speak with Loimel, nor did I touch her, and hardly ever did I touch any other woman. I fell asleep at midday once while lunching with Halum. I scandalized High Justice Kalimol by replying to one of his questions with the ph rase, "It seems to me -- " Old Segvord Helalam told me I looked ill and suggested I go hunting with my sons in the Burnt Lowlands. Nevertheless the drug had the power of bringing me alive. I sought out new sharers and found it ever more easy to make contact with them, for often now they were brought to me by those who had already made the inner voyage. An odd group they were: two dukes, a marquis, a whore, a keeper of the royal archives, a sea captain in from Glin, a septarch's mistress, a director of the Commercial and Seafarer's Bank of Manneran, a poet, a lawyer from Velis here to confer with Captain Khrisch, and many more. The circle of selfbarers was widening. My supply of the drug was nearly consumed, but now there was talk among some of my new friends of outfitting a new expedition to Sumara Borthan. There were fifty of us by this time. Change was becoming infectious; there was an epidemic of it in Manneran. the blank dead time between one communion and another, I underwent a strange confusion of the self. A block of borrowed experience that I had stowed in the dark depths of my mind might break loose and float up into the higher levels of consciousness, intruding itself into my own identity. I remained aware of being Kinnall Darival, the septarch's son of Salla, yet there was suddenly among my memories a segment of the self of Noim, or Schweiz, or one of the Sumarnu, or someone else of those with whom I had shared the drug. For the length of that splicing of selves -- a moment, an hour, half a day -- I walked about unsure of my past, unable to determine whether some event fresh in my mind had really befallen me or had come to me through the drug. This was disturbing but not really frightening, except the first two or three times. Eventually I learned to distinguish the quality of these unearned memories from that of my genuine past through familiarity with the textures of each. The drug had made me many people, I realized. Was it not better to be many than to be something less than one? settled over Manneran, coupled with such frequent rains that all the city's vegetation went mad and would have swallowed every street if not given a daily hacking. It was green, green, green, everywhere: green haze in the sky, green rain falling, green sunlight sometimes breaking through, broad glossy green leaves unfurling on every balcony and in every garden plot. A man's own soul can mildew in that. Green, too, were the awnings on the street of the spice-merchants' shops. Loimel had given me a long list of things to purchase, delicacies from Threish and Velis and the Wet Lowlands and in a docile husbandly way I went to obtain them, since the street of spice was only a short walk from the Justiciary. She was mounting a grand feast to celebrate the Naming Day of our eldest daughter, who was at last going to come into the adult-name we had intended for her: Loimel. All the great ones of Manneran had been invited to look on as my wife acquired a namesake. Among the guests would be several who had covertly sampled the Sumaran drug with me and I took private pleasure in that; Schweiz, though, had not been invited, since Loimel deemed him coarse. In any event, he had left Manneran on some business trip just as the weather was beginning to go berserk. I moved through the greenness to the best of the shops. A recent rain had ended and the sky was a flat green plaque resting on the rooftops. To me came delicious fragrances, sweetnesses, pungencies, clouds of tongue-tickling flavors. Abruptly there were black bubbles coursing through my skull and for a moment I was Schweiz haggling on a pier with a skipper who had just brought a cargo of costly produce in from the Gulf of Sumar. I halted to enjoy this tangling of selves. Schweiz faded; through Noim's mind I smelled the scent of newly threshed hay on the Condorit estates, under a delicious latesummer sun. As I stood gaping outside the spice-shop, a thin hand fell on mine and a guarded voice said, "I must talk to you secretly, Kinnall." . The word jolted me from my dreaming. Androg Mihan, keeper of the archives of Manneran's prime septarch, stood beside me. He was a small man, sharp-featured and gray, the last you would think to seek illegal pleasures; the Duke of Sumar, one of my early conquests, had led him to me. "Where shall we go?" I asked and Mihan indicated a disreputable-looking lower-class godhouse across the street. Its drainer lounged outside, trying to stir up business. I could not see how we could talk secretly in a godhouse, but I followed the archivist anyway; we entered the godhouse and Mihan told the drainer to fetch his contract forms. The moment the man was gone, Mihan leaned close to me and said, "The police are on their way to your house. When you return home this evening you will be arrested and taken to prison on one of the Sumar Gulf s isles." "Where do you learn this?" "The decree was verified this morning and has passed to me for filing." "What charge?" I asked. "Selfbaring," Mihan said. "Accusation filed by agents of the Stone Chapel. There is also a secular charge: use and distribution of illegal drugs. They have you, Kinnall." "Who is the informer?" "A certain Jidd, said to be a drainer in the Stone Chapel. Did you let the tale of the drug be drained from you?" "I did. In my innocence. The sanctity of the godhouse -- " "The sanctity of the dunghouse," Androg Mihan said vehemently. "Now you must flee! The full force of the government is mustered against you." "Where shall I go?" "The Duke of Sumar will shelter you tonight," said Mihan. "After that -- I do not know." The drainer now returned, bearing a set of contracts. He gave us a proprietary smile and said, "Well, gentlemen, which of you is to be first?" "One has remembered another appointment," Mihan said. "One feels suddenly unwell," I said. I tossed the startled drainer a fat coin and we left the godhouse. Outside, Mihan pretended not to know me and we went our separate ways without a word. Not for a moment did I doubt the truth of his warning. I had to take flight; Loimel would have to purchase her own spices. I hailed a car and went at once to the mansion of the DukeofSumar.  iest in Manneran, with sprawling estates along the gulf and in the Huishtor foothills and a splendid home at the capital set amid a park worthy of an emperor's palace. He is hereditary customs-keeper of Stroin Gap, which is the source of his family's opulence, since for centuries they have skimmed a share of all that is brought forth to market out of the Wet Lowlands. In his person this duke is a man of great ugliness or remarkable beauty, I am not sure which: he has a large flat triangular head, thin lips, a powerful nose and strange dense tightly curled hair that clings like a carpet to his skull. His hair is entirely white, yet his face is unlined. His eyes are huge and dark and intense. His cheeks are hollow. It is an ascetic face, which to me always seemed alternately saintly and monstrous and sometimes the both at once. I had been close with him almost since my arrival in Manneran so many years before; he had helped Segvord Helalam into power and he had stood soulbinder to Loimel at our wedding ceremony. When I took up the use of the Sumaran drug, he divined it as if by telepathy. In a conversation of marvelous subtlety he learned from me that I had the drug and arranged that he should take it with me. That had been four moonrises earlier, in late winter. Arriving at his home, I found a tense conference in progress. Present were most of the men of consequence whom I had inveigled into my circle of selfbarers. The Duke of Mannerangu Smor. The Marquis of Woyn. The bank director. The Commissioner of the Treasury and his brother, the Procurator-General of Manneran. The Master of the Border. And five or six others of similar significance. Archivist Mihan arrived shortly after I did. "We are all here now," the Duke of Mannerangu Smor said. "They could sweep us up with a single stroke. Are the grounds well guarded?" "No one will invade us," said the Duke of Sumar, a trifle icily, clearly offended by the suggestion that common police might burst into his home. He turned his huge alien eyes on me. "Kinnall, this will be your last night in Manneran, and no help for it. You are to be the scapegoat." "By whose choice?" I asked. "Not ours," the duke replied. He explained that something close to a coup d'etat had been attempted in Manneran this day and might well yet succeed: a revolt of junior bureaucrats against their mas.ters. The beginning, he said, lay in my having admitted my use of the Sumaran drug to the drainer Jidd. (Around the room faces darkened. The unspoken implication was that I had been a fool to trust a drainer and now must pay the price of my folly, I had not been as sophisticated as these men.) Jidd, it seemed, had leagued himself with a cabal of disaffected minor officials, hungry for their turn at power. Since he was drainer to most of the great men of Manneran, he was in an extraordinarily good position to aid the ambitious, by betraying the secrets of the mighty. Why Jidd had chosen to contravene his oaths in this fashion was not yet known. The Duke of Sumar suspected that in Jidd familiarity had bred contempt and, after listening for years to the melancholy outpourings of his powerful clients, he had grown to loathe them: exasperated by their confessions, he found pleasure in collaborating in their destruction. (This gave me a new view of what a drainer's soul might be like.) Hence Jidd had, for some months now, been slipping useful facts to rapacious subordinates, who had threatened their masters with them, often to considerable effect. By admitting my use of the drug to him, I had made myself vulnerable, and he had sold me to certain folk of the Justr iciary wishing me out of office. "But this is absurd!" I cried. "The only evidence against me is protected by the sanctity of the godhouse! How can Jidd place a complaint against me based on what I've drained to him? I'll have him up on charges for violation of contract!" "There is other evidence," the Marquis of Woyn said sadly. "There is?" "Using what he heard from your own lips," the Marquis said, "Jidd was able to guide your enemies into channels of investigation. They have found a certain woman who lives in the hovels behind the Stone Chapel, who had admitted to them that you gave her a strange drink that opened her mind to you -- " "The beasts." "They have also," the Duke of Sumar said, "been able to link several of us to you. Not all, but several. This morning some of us were presented, by their own subordinates, by demands to resign their offices or face exposure. We met these threats firmly and those who made them are now under detention, but there is no telling how many allies they have in high places. It is possible that by next moonrise we will all have been cast down and new men will hold our power. However, I doubt this, since, so far as we can determine, the only solid evidence so far is the confession of the slut, who has implicated only you, Kinnall. The accusations made by Jidd will of course be inadmissible, though they can do damage anyway.'" "We can destroy her credibility, " I said. "I'll claim I never knew her. I -- " "Too late," said the Procurator-General. "Her deposition is on record. Tve had a copy from the Grand Justiciar. It will stand up. You're hopelessly implicated." "What will happen?" I asked. "We will crush the ambitions of the blackmailers," said the Duke of Sumar, "and send them into poverty. We will break Jidd's prestige and drive him from the Stone Chapel. We will deny all of the charges of selfbaring that may be brought against us. You, however, must leave Manneran." "Why?" I looked at the duke in perplexity. "I'm not without influence. If you can withstand the charges, why not I?" "Your guilt is on record," the Duke of Mannerangu Smor said. "If you flee, it can be claimed that you alone -- and this girl you corrupted -- were the only ones involved and that the rest is merely the fabrication of self-serving underlings trying to overthrow their masters. If you stay and try to fight a hopeless case, you'll eventually bring us all down." It was wholly plain to me now. I was dangerous to them. My strength might be broken in court and their guilt thus exposed. Thus far I was the only one indicted, and I was the only one vulnerable to the processes of Mannerangi justice. They were vulnerable solely through me, and if I went, there was no way to getting at them. The safety of the majority required my departure. Moreover: my naive faith in the godhouse, which had led me rashly to confess to Jidd, had led to this tempest, which otherwise might have been avoided. I had caused all this; I was the one who must go. The Duke of Sumar said, "You will remain with us until the dark hours of the night. Then my private groundcar, escorted by bodyguards as though I myself were traveling, will take you to the estate of the Marquis of Woyn. A riverboat will be waiting there. By dawn you will be across the Woyn and into your homeland of Salla -- and may the gods journey at your side." power I had accumulated in fifteen years in Manneran was lost in a single day. Neither high birth nor high connections could save me: I might have ties of marriage or love or politics to half the masters of Manneran, yet they were helpless to help me. I have made it seem as if they had forced me into exile to save their own skins, but it was not like that. My going was necessary and it brought as much sorrow to them as to me. The others had taken the drug, had adapted to the changes and now would be enhanced and transformed by it. And not injured. Not so with me. With me the drug had opened the doors of ruin. Why? Why? Some flaw in my fate, I suppose. Some darkness of my destiny. That I, a septarch's son, should have taken up a creed of selfbaring -- well, perhaps that demanded my downfall and not that of these other high ones. I have no idea. There is little justice. I had nothing with me but the clothes I wore. My wardrobe, my weapons, my ornaments, my wealth itself, must remain behind in Manneran. As a boyprince fleeing from Salla to Glin, I had had the 'prudence to transfer funds ahead of myself, but now I was cut off. My assets would be sequestered; my sons would be paupered. There had been no time for preparations. Here at least my friends were of service. The Procurator-General, who was nearly of a size with me, had brought several changes of handsome clothing. The Commissioner of the Treasury had obtained for me a fair fortune in Sallan currency. The Duke of Mannerangu Smor pulled two rings and a pendant from his own body, that I should not go unadorned into my native province. The Marquis of Woyn pressed on me a ceremonial dagger and his heat-rod, with a hilt worked with precious gems. Mihan promised to speak with Segvord Helalam and tell him the details of my downfall; Segvord would be sympathetic, Mihan believed, and would protect my sons with all his influence and keep them untainted by their father's indictment. Lastly, the Duke of Sumar came to me at the deepest time of the night -- when I sat alone sourly eating the dinner I had had no time for earlier -- and handed my a small jeweled case of bright gold, of the sort one might carry medicine in. "Open it carefully," he said. I did and found it brimming with white powder. In amazement I asked him where he had obtained this; he had lately sent agents secretly to Sumara Borthan, he replied, who had returned with a small supply of the drug. He claimed to have more, but I believe he gave me all he had. "In an hour's time you will leave," said the duke, to smother my gush of gratitude. I asked to be allowed to make a call first. "Segvord will explain matters to your wife," the duke said. "One did not mean one's wife. One meant one's bondsister." In speaking of Halum I could not drop easily into the rough grammar we selfbarers affected. "One has had no chance to make one's farewell to her." The duke understood my anguish, for her had been within my soul. But he would not grant me the call. Lines might be tapped; he could not risk having my voice go forth from his home this night. I realized then how delicate a position even he must be in and I did not force the issue. I could call Halum tomorrow, when I had crossed the Woyn and was safe in Salla. Shortly it was time for me to depart. My friends had already gone some hours since; the duke alone led me from the house. His magestic groundcar waited, and a corps of bodyguards on individual powercycles. The duke embraced me. I climbed into the car and settled back against the cushions. The driver opaqued the windows, hiding me from view, though not interfering with my own vision. The car rolled silently forward, picked up speed, plunged into the night, with my outriders, six of them, hovering about it like insects. It seemed that hours went by before we came even to the main gate of the duke's estate. Then we were on the highway. I sat like a man carved of ice, scarcely thinking of what had befallen me. Northward lay our route and we went at such a rate that the sun was not yet up when we reached the margin of the Marquis of Woyn's estate, on the border between Manneran and Salla. The gate opened; we shot through; the road cut across a dense forest in which, by moonlight, I could see sinister parasitic growths like hairy ropes tangling tree to tree. Suddenly we erupted into a clearing and I beheld the banks of the River Woyn. The car halted. Someone in dark robes helped me out, as though I were a dodderer, and escorted me down the spongy bank to a long narrow pier, barely visible in the thick mist rising off the breast of the river. A boat was tied up, no great craft, hardly more than a dinghy. Yet it traveled at great speeds across the broad and turbulent Woyn. Still I felt no inner response to my banishment from Manneran. I was like one who has gone forth in battle and had his right leg sliced off at the thigh by a fire-bold, and who now lies in a tumbled heap, staring calmly at his stump and sensing no pain. The pain would come in time. Dawn was near. I could make out the shape of the Sallan side of the river. We pulled up at a dock that jutted out of a grassy bank, plainly some nobleman's private landing. Now I felt my first alarm. In a moment I would step ashore in Salla. Where would I find myself? How would I reach some settled region? I was no boy, to beg rides from passing trucks. But all this had been settled for me hours before. As the boat bumped the shoulder of the pier a figure emerged in the dimness and extended a hand: Noim. He drew me forth and clasped me in a tight hug. "I know what has happened," he said. "You will stay with me." In his emotion he abandoned polite usage with me for the first time since our boyhood. tate in southwestern Salla, I phoned the Duke of Sumar to confirm my safe arrival -- it was he, of course, who had arranged for my bondbrother to meet me at the border and then I put through a call to Halum. Segvord had told her just a few hours earlier of the reasons for my disappearance. "How strange this news is," she said. "You never spoke of the drug. Yet it was so important to you, for you risked everything to use it. How could it have had such a role in your life and yet be kept a secret from your bondsister?" I answered that I had not dared to let her know of my preoccupation with it, for fear I might be tempted to offer it to her. She said, "Is opening yourself then to your bondsister so terrible a sin?" Noim treated me with every courtesy, indicating that I could stay with him as long as I wishedweeks, months, even years. Presumably my friends in Manneran would succeed eventually in freeing some of my assets and I would buy land in Salla and take up the life of a country baron; or perhaps Segvord and the Duke of Sumar and other men of influence would have my indictment quashed, so that I could return to the southern province. Until then, Noim told me, his home was mine. But I detected a subtle coolness in his dealings with me, as if this hospitality were offered merely out of respect for our bonding. Only after some days did the source of his remoteness reach the surface. Sitting late past dinner in his great white-washed feasting hall, we were talking of childhood days our main theme of conversation, far safer than any talk of recent events when Noim suddenly said, "Is that drug of yours known  to give people nightmares?" "One has heard of no such cases, Noim." "Here's a case, then. One who woke up drenched with chilly sweat night after night for weeks after we shared the drug in Manneran. One thought one would lose one's mind." "What kind of dreams?" I asked. "Ugly things. Monsters. Teeth. Claws. A sense of not knowing who one is. Pieces of other minds floating through one's own' He gulped at his wine. "You take the drug for pleasure, Kinnall?" "For knowledge." "Knowledge of what?" "Knowledge of self and knowledge of others." "One prefers ignorance, then." He shivered. "You know, Kinnall, one was never a particularly reverent person. One blasphemed, one stuck his tongue out at drainers, one laughed at the godtales they told, yes? You've nearly converted one into a man of faith with that stuff. The terror of opening one's mind -- of knowing that one has no defenses, that another can slide right into one's soul and is doing it -- it's impossible to take." "Impossible for you," I said. "Others cherish it." "One leans toward the Covenant," said Noim. "Privacy is sacred. One's soul is one's own. There's a dirty pleasure in baring it." "Not baring. Sharing." "Does it sound prettier that way? Very well: there's a dirty pleasure in sharing it, Kinnall. Even though we are bondbrothers, one came away from you last time feeling soiled. Sand and grit in the soul. Is this what you want for everyone? To make us all feel filthy with guilt?" "There need be no guilt, Noim. One gives, one receives, one comes forth better than one was -- " "Dirtier." "Enlarged. Enhanced. More compassionate. Speak to others who have tried it," I said. "Of course. As they come streaming out of Manneran, landless refugees, one will question them about the beauty and wonder of selfbaring. Excuse me: selfsharing." I saw the torment in his eyes. He wanted still to love me, but the Sumaran drug had shown him things -- about himself, perhaps about me -- that made him hate the one who had given the drug to him. He was one for whom walls are necessary; I had not realized that. What had I doneto turn my bondbrother into my enemy? Perhaps if we could take the drug a second time I might make things more clear to him -- but no, no hope of that. Noim was frightened by inwardness. I had transformed my blaspheming bondbrother into a man of the Covenant. There was nothing I could say to him now. After some silence he said, "One must make a request of you, Kinnall." "Anything." "One hesitates to place boundaries on a guest. But if you have brought any of this drug with you from Manneran, Kinnall, if you hide it somewhere in your rooms -- get rid of it, is that understood? There must be none of it in this house. Get rid of it, Kinnall." Never in my life had I lied to my bondbrother. Never. With the jeweled case the Duke of Sumar had given me blazing against my breastbone I said solemnly to Noim, "You have nothing to fear on that account, Noim."  my disgrace became public in Manneran and swiftly reached Salla. Noim showed me the accounts. I was described as the chief adviser to the High Justice of the Port and openly labeled a man of the greatest authority in Manneran, who, moreover, had blood ties to the prime septarchs of Salla and Glin -- and yet, despite these attainments and preferments, I had fallen away from the Covenant to take up unlawful selfbaring. I had violated not merely propriety and etiquette, but also the laws of Manneran, through my use of a certain proscribed drug from Sumara Borthan that dissolves the god-given barriers between soul and soul. Through abuse of my high office, it was said, I had engineered a secret voyage to the southern continent (poor Captain Khrisch! Had he been arrested too?) and had returned with a large quantity of the drug, which I had devilishly forced on a lowborn woman whom I was keeping; I had also circulated the foul stuff among certain prominent members of the nobility, whose names were being withheld because of their thorough repentance. On the eve of my arrest I had escaped to Salla and good riddance to me: if I attempted to return to Manneran I would immediately be apprehended. Meanwhile I would be tried in absentia and, according to the Grand Justiciar, there could be little doubt of the verdict. By way of restitution to the state for the great injury I had done the fabric of social stability, I would be required to forfeit all my lands and property, except only a portion to be set aside for the maintenance of my innocent wife and children. (Segvord Helalam, then, had at least accomplished that.) To prevent my highborn friends from transferring my assets to me in Salla before the trial, all that I possessed was already sequestered in anticipation of the Grand Justiciar's decree of guilt. Thus spake the law. Let others who would make selfbaring monsters of themselves beware! abouts in Salla, for I had no reason now to fear the jealousy of my royal brother. Stirron as a boy newly on the throne might have been driven to eliminate me as a potential rival, but not the Stirron who had ruled for more than seventeen years. By now he was an institution in Salla, well loved and an integral part of everyone's existence, and I was a stranger who spoke with a Mannerangi accent and who had been publicly branded with the shame of selfbaring. Even if I cared to overthrow Stirron, where would I find followers? In truth I was hungry for the sight of my brother. In times of storm one turns to one's earliest comrades; and with Noim estranged from me and Halum on the far side of the Woyn, I had only Stirron left. I had never resented having had to flee Salla on his account, for I knew that had our ages been reversed I would have caused him to flee the same way. If our relatipnship had grown frosty since my flight, it was a frost of his making, arising from his guilty conscience. Years had passed since my last visit to Salla City: perhaps my adversities would open his heart. I wrote Stirron a letter from Noim's place, formally begging sanctuary in Salla. Under Sallan law I had to be taken in, for I was one of Stirron's subjects and was guilty of no crime committed on Sallan soil: yet I thought it best to ask. The charges lodged against me by the Grand Justiciar of Manneran, I admitted, were true, but I offered Stirron a terse and (I think) eloquent justification of my deviation from the Covenant. I closed the letter with expressions of my unwavering love for him and with a few reminiscences of the happy times we had had before the burdens of the septarchy had descended on him. I expected Stirron in return to invite me to visit him at the capital, so that he could hear from my own lips an explanation of the strange things I had done in Manneran. A brotherly reunion was surely in order. But no summons to Salla City came. Each time the telephone chimed, I rushed toward it, thinking it might be Stirron calling. He did not call. Several weeks of tension and gloom passed; I hunted, I swam, I read, I tried to write my new Covenant of love. Noim remained aloof from me. His one experience at soulsharing had thrust him into so deep an embarassment that he hardly dared to meet my eyes, for I was privy to all his innerness and that had become a wedge be tween us. At last came an envelope bearing the septarch's imposing seal. It held a letter signed by I Stirron, but I pray it was some steely minister and not my brother, who composed that pinch-souled message. In fewer lines than I have fingers, the septarch told me that my request for sanctuary in the province of Salla was granted, but only on the condition that I forswear the vices I had learned in the south. If I were caught just once spreading the use of selfbaring drugs in Salla I would be seized and driven into exile. That was all my brother had to say. Not a syllable of kindness. Not a shred of sympathy. Not an atom of warmth. L Halum came unexpectedly to visit us. The day of her arrival I had gone riding far out across Noim's land, following the track of a male stormshield that had burst from its pen. An accursed vanity had led Noim to acquire a clutch of these vicious furbearing manmals, though they are not native to Salla and thrive poorly there: he kept twenty or thirty of them, all claws and teeth and angry yellow eyes, and hoped to breed them into a profitable herd. I chased the escaped male through woods and plain, through morning and midday, hating it more with each hour, for it left a trail of mutilated carcasses of harmless grazing beasts. These stormshields kill for sheer love of slaughter, taking but a bite or two of flesh and abandoning the rest to scavengers. Finally I cornered it in a shadowy box-canyon. "Stun it and bring it back whole," Noim had instructed me, conscious of the animals value: but when trapped it rushed at me with such ferocity that I gave it the full beam and gladly slew it. For Noim's sake I took the trouble to strip off the precious hide. Then, weary and depressed, I rode without stopping back to the great house. A strange groundcar was parked outside and beside it stood Halum. "You know the summers in Manneran," she explained. "One planned to go as usual to the island, but then one thought it would be good to take a holiday in Salla with Noim and Kinnall." She had by then entered her thirtieth year. Our women marry between fourteen and sixteen, are done bearing their children by twenty-two or twenty-four and at thirty have begun to slide into middle age, but time had left Halum untouched. Not having known the tempests of marriage and the travails of motherhood, not. having spent her energies on the grapplings of the conjugal couch or the lacerations of childbed, she had the supple, pliant body of a girl: no fleshy bulges, no sagging folds, no exploded veins, no thickening of the frame. She had changed only in one respect, for in recent years her dark hair had turned silvery. This was but an enhancement, however, since it and offered agreeable contrast to the deep tan of her youthful face. In her luggage was a packet of letters for me from Manneran: messages from the duke, from Segvord, from my sons Noim and Stirron and Kinnall, from my daughters Halum and Loimel, from Mihan the archivist, and several others. Those who wrote did so in tense, self-conscious style. They were the letters one might write to a dead man if one felt guilty at having survived him. Still, it was good to hear these words out of my former life. I regretted not finding a letter from Schweiz; Halum told me she had heard nothing from him since before my indictment and thought he might well have left our planet. Nor was there any word from my wife. "Is Loimel too busy to write a line or two?" I asked and Halum, looking embarrassed, said softly that Loimel never spoke of me these days: "She seems to have forgotten that she was married." Halum also had brought a trove of gifts for me from my friends across the Woyn. They were startling in their opulence: massy clusters of precious metals, elaborate strings of rare gems. "Tokens of love," Halum said, but I was not fooled. One could buy great estates with this heap of treasure. Those who loved me would not humiliate me by transferring cash to my account in Salla, but they could give me these splendors in the ordinary way of friendship, leaving me free to dispose of them according to my needs. "Has it been very sad for you, this uprooting?" Halum asked. "This sudden going into exile?" "One is no stranger to exile," I told her. "And one still has Noim for bondlove and companionship." "Knowing that it would cost you what it did," she said, "would you play with the drug a second time, if you could turn time backward by a year?" "Beyond any doubt." "Was it worth the loss of home and family and friends?" "It would be worth the loss of life itself," I replied, "if only one could be assured by that that all of Velada Borthan would come to taste the drug." her: she drew back, she touched the tips of her fingers to her lips, perhaps becoming aware for the first time of the intensity of her bondbrother's madness. In speaking those words I was not uttering mere rhetorical overstatement, and something of my conviction must have reached Halum. She saw that I believed and, seeing the depth of my committment, feared for me. Noim spent many of the days that followed away from his lands, traveling to Salla City on some family business and to the Plain of Nand to inspect property he was thinking of buying. In his absence I was master of the estate, for the servants, whatever they might think of my private life, did not dare to question my authority to my face. Daily I rode out to oversee the workers in NoinTs fields and Halum rode with me. Actually little overseeing was demanded of me. This was midway in the seasons between planting and harvest and the crops looked after themselves. We rode for pleasure mainly, pausing here for a swim, there for a lunch at the edge of the woods. I showed her the stormshield pens, which did not please her, and took her among the gentler animals of the grazing fields, who came up and amiably nuzzled her. These long rides gave us hours each day to talk. I had not spent so much time with Halum since childhood and we grew wonderfully close. We were cautious with one another at first, not wishing to get too near the bone with our questions, but soon we spoke as bondkin should. I asked her why it was she had never married and she answered me simply, "One never encountered a suitable man." Did she regret having gone without husband and children? No, she said, she regretted nothing, for her life had been tranquil and rewarding; yet there was wistfulness in her tone. I could not press her farther. On her part she questioned me about the Sumaran drug, trying to learn from me what merits it had that had led me to run such risks. I was amused by the way she phrased her inquiries: trying to sound earnest and sympathetic and objective, yet unable to hide her horror at what I had done. It was as though her bondbrother had run amok and butchered twenty people in a marketplace, and she now wished to discover, by means of patient and good-humored questioning, just what had been the philosophical basis that had led me to take up mass murder. I also tried to maintain a temperate and dispassionate manner, so that I would not sear her with my intensity as I had done in that first interchange. I avoided all evangelizing and, as calmly and soberly as I could, explained to her the effects of the drug, the benefits I gained from it and my reasons for rejecting the stony isolation of self that the Covenant imposes on us. Shortly a curious metamorphosis came over both her attitude and mine. She became less the highborn lady striving with well-meant warmth to understand the criminal, and more the student attempting to grasp the mysteries revealed by an initiated master. And I became less the descriptive reporter and more the prophet of a new dispensation. I spoke in flights of lyricism of the raptures of soulsharing; I told her of the strange wonder of the early sensations, as one begins to open, and of the blazing moment of union with another human consciousness; I depicted the experience as something far more intimate than any meeting of souls one might have with one's bondkin, or any visit to a drainer. Our conversations became monologs. I lost myself in verbal ecstasies and came down from them at times to see Halum, silverhaired and eternally young, her eyes sparkling and her lips parted in total fascination. The outcome was inevitable. One scorching afternoon as we walked slowly through the aisles in a field of grain that rose chest-high on her, she said without warning, "If the drug is available to you here, may your bondsister share it with you?" I had converted her. pinches of the powder in two flasks of wine. Halum looked uncertain as I handed one to her and her uncertainty rebounded to me, so that I hesitated to go through with our project; but then she gave me a magical smile of tenderness and drained her flask. "There is no flavor of it," she said, as I drank. We sat talking in Noim's trophy hall, decked with hornfowl spears and draped with stormshield furs, and as the drug began to take effect Halum started to shiver; I pulled a thick black hide from the wall, draped it about her shoulders and through it I held her until the chill was past. Would this go well? Despite all my propagandizing I was frightened. In every man's life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul as long as it remains undone -- yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure. So with Halum and me and the Sumaran drug. But my fear ebbed as the drug took hold. Halum was smiling. Halum was smiling. The wall between our souls became a membrane, through which we could slide at will. Halum was the first to cross it. I hung back, paralyzed by prudery, thinking even now that it would be an intrusion on my bondsister's maidenhood for me to enter her mind and also a violation of the commandment against bodily intimacies between bond-kin. So I dangled in this absurd trap of contradictions, too inhibited to practice my own creed, for some moments after the last barriers had fallen; meanwhile Halum, realizing at last that nothing prevented her, slipped unhesitatingly into tny spirit. My instant response was to try to shield myself: I did not want her to discover this or this or that and particularly to learn of my physical desire for her. But after a moment of this embarrassed flurrying I ceased trying to plaster my soul with figleaves and went across into Halum, allowing the true communion to begin, the inextricable entanglement of selves. I found myself -- it would be more accurate to say, I lost myselfin corridors with glassy floors and silvered walls, through which played a cool sparkling light, like the crystalline brightness one sees reflected from the white sandy bottom of a shallow tropical cove. This was Halum's virginal inwardness. In niches along these corridors, neatly displayed, were the shaping factors of her life, memories, images, odors, tastes, visions, fantasies, disappointments, delights. A prevaling purity governed everything. I saw no trace of sexual ecstasies, nothing of the fleshly passions. I cannot tell you whether Halum, out of modesty, took care to shield the area of her sexuality from my probings or had thrust it so far from her own consciousness that I could not detect it. She met me without fear and joined me in joy. I have no doubt of that. When our souls blended the union was complete, without reservation, without qualification. I swam through the glittering depths of her and the grime of my soul dropped from me: she was healing, she was cleansing. Was I staining her even as she was refining and purifying me? I cannot say. We surrounded and engulfed one another, supported one another and interpenetrated one another; and here mingling with my self was the self of Halum, who all my life had been my staff and my courage, my ideal and my goal, this cool incorruptible perfect incarnation of beauty; and perhaps as this corruptible self of mine put on incorruption, the first corrosive plaque sprouted on her shining incorruptibility. I cannot say. I came to her and she came to me. At one point in our journey through one another I encountered a zone of strangeness, where something seemed coiled and knotted: and I remembered that time in my youth, when I was setting out from Salla City on my flight into Glin, when Halum had embraced me at Noim's house and I thought I detected in her embrace a tremor of barely suppressed passion, a flicker of the hunger of the body. For me. For me. And I thought that I had found that zone of passion again, only when I looked more closely at it, it was gone, and I beheld the pure gleaming metallic surface of her soul. Perhaps both the first time and the second it was something I manufactured out of my own churning desires and projected on her. I cannot say. Our souls were twined; I could not have known where I left off and Halum began. We emerged from the trance. The night was half gone. We blinked, we shook our foggy heads, we smiled uneasily. There is always that moment, coming out of the drug's soul-intimacy, when one feels abashed, one thinks one has revealed too much and one wants to retract what one has given. Fortunately that moment is usually brief. I looked at Halum and felt my body afire with holy love, a love that was not at all of the flesh, and I started to say to her, as Schweiz had once said to me, I love you. But I choked on the word. The "I" was trapped in my teeth, like a fish in a weir. . . .  love you, Halum. I. If I could only say it. . It would not come. It was there, but could not get past my lips. I took her hands between mine -- she smiled a serene moonlike smile and it would have been so easy then to hurl out the words, except that something imprisoned them. I. . How could I speak to Halum of love and couch my love in the syntax of the gutter? I thought then that she would not understand, that my obscenity would shatter everything. Foolishness: our souls had been one, how then could a mere phrasing of words disturb anything? Out with it!  love you. Faltering, I said, "There is -- such love in one -- for you -- such love, Halum -- " She nodded as if to say. Don't speak, your clumsy words break the spell. As if to say. Yes, there is in . one such love for you also, Kinnall. As if to say, I love you, Kinnall. Lightly she rose to her feet and went to the window: cold summer moonlight on the formal garden of the great house, the bushes and trees white and still. I came up behind her and touched her at the shoulders, very gently. She wriggled and made a little purring sound. I thought all was well with her. I was certain all was well with her. We held no post-mortems on what had taken place between us this evening. That, too, seemed to threaten a puncturing of the mood. We could discuss our trance tomorrow, and all the tomorrows beyond that. I went with her back to her room, not far down the hallway from my own, kissed her cheek timidly and had a sisterly kiss from her; she smiled again and closed the door behind her. In my own room I sat a while awake, , reliving everything. The missionary fervor was kindled anew in me. I would become an active messiah again, I vowed, going up and down this land of Salla spreading the creed of love; no more would I hide here at my bondbrother's place, broken and adrift, a hopeless exile in my own nation. Stirron's warning meant nothing to me. How could he drive me from Salla? I would make a hundred converts in a week. A thousand, ten thousand. I would give the drug to Stirron himself and let the septarch proclaim the new dispensation from his own throne! Halum had inspired me. In the morning I would set out, seeking disciples. There was a sound in the courtyard. I looked out and saw a groundcar: Noim had returned from his business trip. He entered the house; I heard him in the hallway, passing my room; then came the sound of knocking. I peered into the corridor. He stood by HalunTs door, talking to her. I could not see her. What was this, that he would go to Halum, who was nothing but a friend to him, and fail to greet his own bondbrother? Unworthy suspicions woke in me -- unreal accusations. I forced them away. The conversation ended; HalunTs door closed; Noim, without noticing me, continued toward his own bedroom. Sleep was impossible for me. I wrote a few pages, but they were worthless and at dawn I went out to stroll in the gray mists. It seemed to me that I heard a distant cry. Some animal seeking its mate, I thought. Some lost beast wandering at daybreak. was unusual but not surprising: Noim, coming home in the middle of the night after a long drive, would have wanted to sleep late and doubtless the drug had left Halum exhausted. My appetite was powerful and I ate for the three of us, all the while planning my schemes for dissolving the Covenant. As I sipped my tea one of Noim's grooms burst wildly into the dining hall. His cheeks were blazing and his nostrils were flared, as if he had run a long way and were close to collapse. "Come," he cried, gasping. "The stormshields -- " He tugged at my arm, half dragging me from my seat. I rushed out after him. He was already far down the unpaved road that led to the stormshield pens. I followed, wondering if the beasts had escaped in the night, wondering if I must spend the day chasing monsters again. As I neared the pens I saw no signs of a breakout, no clawed tracks, no torn fences. The groom clung to the bars of the biggest pen, which held nine or ten stormshields. I looked in. The animals were clustered, bloodyjawed, bloody-furred, around some ragged meaty haunch. They were snarling and quarreling over the last scraps of flesh; I could see traces of their feast scattered across the ground. Had some unfortunate farm beast strayed among these killers by darkness? How could such a thing have happened? And why would the groom see fit to haul me from my breakfast to show it to me? I caught his arm and asked him what was so strange about the sight of stormshields devouring their kill. He turned a terrible face to me and blurted in a strangled voice, 'The lady -- the lady -- " XX "You lied," he said. "You denied you were carrying the drug, but you lied. And you gave it to her last night. Yes? Yes? Yes? Don't hide anything now, Kinnall. You gave it to her!" "You spoke with her," I said. I could barely manage words. "What did she tell you?" "One stopped by her door because one thought one heard the sound of sobbing," Noim answered. "One inquired if she felt well. She came out: her face was strange, it was full of dreams, her eyes were as blank as pieces of polished metal and yes, yes, she had been weeping. And one asked what was wrong, whether there had been any trouble here. No, she said, all was well. She said you and she had talked all evening. Why was she weeping, then? She shrugged and smiled and said it was a female thing, an unimportant thing -- women weep all the time, she said, and need give no explanations. And she smiled again and closed the door. But that look in her eyes -- it was the drug, Kinnall! You gave it to her against all your vows! And now -- and now -- " "Please," I said softly. But he went on shouting, loading me with accusations, and I could not reply. The grooms had reconstructed everything. They had found the path of Halum's feet in the dewmoist sandy road. They had found ajar the door of the house that gives access to the stormshield pens. They had found marks of forcing on the inner door that leads to the feeding gate itself. She had gone through; she had carefully opened the feeding gate and just as carefully closed it behind her, to loose no killers on the sleeping estate; then she had offered herself to the waiting claws. All this between darkness and dawn, perhaps even while I strolled in a different part. That cry out of the mists... Why? Why? Why? Why ? possessions as I had were packed. I asked Noim for the loan of a groundcar and he granted it with a brusque wave of his fingers. There was no question of my remaining here any longer. Not only were echoes of Halum resonating everywhere -- I also had to go where I could think undisturbed, examine all that I had done and that I hoped to do. Nor did I wish to be here when the district police carried out their inquest into Halum's death. Had she been unable to face me again, the morning after having given her soul away? She had gone gladly enough into the sharing of selves. But afterward, in that rush of guilty reappraisal that often follows the first opening, she may have felt another way: old habits of reticence reasserting themselves, a sudden cascading sense of horror at what she had revealed. And the quick irreversible decision, the frozen-faced trek to the stormshield pens, the ill-considered passing of the final gate, the moment of regret-within-regret as the animals pounced and she realized she had carried her atonement too far. Was that it? I could think of no other explanation for that plunge from serenity to despair, except that it was a second thought, a reflex of shock that swept her to doom. And I was without a bond-sister -- and had lost bondbrother, too, for Noim's eyes were merciless when he looked at me. Was this what I had intended when I dreamed of opening-souls? "Where will you go?" Noim asked. "They'll jail you in Manneran. Take one step into Glin with your drug and you'll be flayed. Stirron will hound you out of Salla. Where, then, Kinnall? Threish? Velis? Or maybe Umbis, eh? Dabis? No! By the gods, it will be Sumara Borthan, won't it? Yes. Among your savages -- and you'll have all the selfbaring you'll need there, yes? Yes?" Quietly I said, "You forget the Burnt Lowlands, Noim. A cabin in the desert -- a place to think, a place of peace -- there is so much one must try to understand now -- " "The Burnt Lowlands? Yes, that's good, Kinnall. The Burnt Lowlands in high summer. A fiery purge for your soul. Go there, yes. Go." the flank of the Huishtors, and then westward, on the road that leads to Kongoroi and Salla's Gate. More than once I thought of swerving the car and sending it tumbling over the highway's rim and making an end. More than once, as the first light of day touched my eyelids in some backcountry hostelry, I thought of Halum and had to struggle to leave my bed, for it seemed so much easier to go on sleeping. Day and night and day and night and day, and a few days more, and I was deep into West Salla, ready to go up the mountains and through the gate. While resting one night in a town midway into the uplands I discovered that an order was out in Salla for my arrest. Kinnall Darival, the septarch's son, a man of thirtyyears, of this height and having these features, brother to the Lord Stirron, was wanted for monstrous crimes: selfbaring and the use of a dangerous drug, which against the explicit orders of the septarch he was offering to the unwary. By means of this drug the fugitive Darival had driven his own bondsister insane and, in her madness, she had perished in a horrible way. Therefore all citizens of Salla were enjoined to apprehend the evildoer, for whom a heavy reward would be paid. If Stirron knew why Halum had died, then Noim had told him everything. I was lost. When I reached Salla's Gate I would find officers of the West Sallan constabulary waiting for me, for my destination was known. Why had the announcement not informed the populace that I was heading for the Burnt Lowlands? Possibly Noim had held back some of what he knew. I had no choice but to go forward. It would take me days to reach the coast and I would find all of Salla's ports altered for me when I got there; even if I slipped on board a vessel, where would I go? Glin? Manneran? It was similarly hopeless to think of my getting somehow across the Huish or the Woyn into the neighboring provinces: I was already proscribed in Manneran and surely I would find a chilly greeting in Glin. The Burnt Lowlands it would have to be, then. I would stay there some while and then, perhaps, try to make my way out via one of the Threishtop passes to start a new life on the western coast. Perhaps. I bought provisions at a place that served the needs of hunters entering the Lowlands: dried food, some weapons, and condensed water, enough to last me by careful expansion for several moontimes. As I made my purchases I thought the townsfolk were eyeing me strangely. Did they recognize me as the depraved prince whom the septarch sought? No one moved to seize me. Possibly they knew there was a cordon across Salla's Gate and would take no risks with such a brute when there were police in plenty to get me on top of Kongoroi. Whatever the reason, I got out of the town unbothered, and set out now on the final stretch of the highway. In the past I had come this way only in winter when snow lay deep; even now there were patches of dirty whiteness in shadowy corners. As the road rose the snow thickened, until near Kongoroi's double summit everything lay mantled in it. Timing my ascent carefully, I managed things so that I came to the great pass well after sundown, hoping that darkness would protect me in case of a roadblock. But the gate was unguarded. My car's lights were off as I drove the last distance -- I half expected to go over the edge. I made the familiar left turn that brought me into Salla's Gate and I saw no one there. Stirron had not had time to close the western border -- or did not think I would be so mad as to flee that way. I went forward, through the pass and slowly down the switchbacks on the western face of Kongoroi. When dawn overtook me I was into the Burnt Lowlands, choking in the heat but safe. fowl nest I found this cabin -- about where I remembered it to be. It was without plumbing, nor were the walls whole, yet it would do. It would do. The awful heat of the place would be my purge. I set up housekeeping inside, laying out my things, unpacking the journal paper I had bought for this record of my life and deeds, setting the jeweled case containing the last of the drug in a corner, piling my clothing above it, sweeping away the red sand. On my first full day of residence I busied myself camouflaging my groundcar, so that it would not betray my presence when searchers came: I drove it into a shallow ravine and collected woody ground plants to make a covering for it, throwing sand atop the interwoven stems of the plants. Only sharp eyes would see the car when I was done. I made careful note of the place, lest I fail to find it myself when I was ready to leave. For some days I simply walked the desert, thinking. I went to the place where the hornfowl struck down my father and had no fear of the sharp-beaked circling birds: let them have me too. I considered the events of my time of changes, asking myself, Is this what you wanted? Is this what you hoped to bring about? Does this satisfy you? I relived each of my many soulsharings, from that with Schweiz to that with Halum, asking, Was this good? Were there mistakes that could have been avoided? Did you gain -- or did you lose by what you did? And I concluded that I had gained more than I had lost, although my losses had been terrible ones. My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles. If I had stayed with Halum until her uncertainties had fled she might not have given way to the shame that destroyed her. If I had been more open with Noim -- if I had stayed in Manneran to confront my enemies -- if -- if -- if -- and yet I had no regrets for having done my changing, only for having bungled my revolution of the soul. For I was convinced of the wrongness of the Covenant and of our way of life. Your way of life. That Halum had seen fit to kill herself after two hours of experiencing human love was the most scathing possible indictment of the Covenant. And finally -- not too many days ago -- I began to write what you have been reading. My fluency surprised me; perhaps I verged on glibness, though it was hard for me at first to use the grammar I imposed on myself.  am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. So I began my memoir. Have I been true to that intent? Have I concealed anything? Day upon day my pen had scratched paper and I have put myself down whole for you, with no cosmetic alterations of the record. In this sweatbox of a cabin have I laid myself bare. Meanwhile I have had no contact with the outside world except for occasional hints, possibly irrational, that Stirron's agents are combing the Burnt Lowlands for me. I believe that guards are posted at the gates leading into Salla, Glin and Manneran; and probably at the western passes as well; and also in Stroin Gap, in case I try to make my way to the Gulf of Sumar through the Wet Lowlands. My luck has held well, but soon they must find me. Shall I wait for them? Or shall I move on, trusting to fortune, hoping to find an unguarded exit? I have this thick manuscript. I value it now more than life itself. If you could read it, if you could see how I have stumbled and staggered toward knowledge of self, if you could receive from it the vibrations of my mind -- I have put everything down, I think, in this autobiography, in this record of self, in this document unique in the history of Velada Borthan. If I am captured here my book will be captured with me and Stirron will have it burned. I must move on then. A sound? Engines? A groundcar is coming swiftly toward my cabin over the flat red land. I am found. It is done. At least I was able to write this much. PlVE days have passed since t the ' last entry and I am still here. The groundcar was NoinTs. He came not to arrest me but to rescue me. Cautiously, as if expecting me to open fire on him, he crept about my cabin, calling, '"Kinnall? Kinnall?" I went outside. He tried to smile but was too tense to manage it. He said, "One thought you would be somewhere near this place. The place of the hornfowl -- it still haunts you, eh?" "What do you want?" "Stirron's patrols are searching for you, Kinnall. Your path was traced as far as Salla's Gate. They know you're in the Burnt Lowlands. If Stirron knew you as well as your bondbrother does, he'd come straight here with his troops. Instead they're searching to the south. The theory is that you mean to go into the Wet Lowlands -- to the Gulf of Sumar -- and get a ship to Sumara Borthan. But they're bound to start hunting for you in this region once they discover you haven't been down there." "And then?" "You'll be arrested. Tried. Convicted. Jailed or executed. Stirron thinks you're the most dangerous man on Velada Borthan." "I am," I said. Noim gestured toward the car. "Get in. We'll slip through the blockade. Into West Salla, somehow, and down to the Woyn. The Duke of Sumar will meet you and put you aboard some vessel heading out. You can be in Sumara Borthan by next moonrise." "Why are you helping me, Noim? Why should you bother? I saw the hate in your eyes when I left you?" "Hate? Hate? No, Kinnall, no hate, only sorrow. One is still your " He paused. With an effort, he said, "'m still your bondbrother. I'm pledged to your welfare. How can I let Stirron hunt you like a beast? Come. Come. I'll get you safely out of here." "No." "No?" "We're certain to be caught. Stirron will have you, too, for aiding a fugitive. He'll seize your lands. He'll break your rank. Don't make a useless sacrifice for me, Noim." "I came all the way into the Burnt Lowlands to fetch you. If you think I'll go back without -- " "Let's not quarrel over it," I said. "Even if I escape, what is there for me? To spend the rest of my life hiding in the jungles of Sumara Borthan -- among people whose language I can't speak and whose ways are alien to me? No. No. I'm tired of exile. Let Stirron take me." Persuading Noim to leave me here was no little task. We stood in the midday fire for eternal minutes, arguing vehemently. He was determined to effect this heroic rescue, despite the almost certain probability that we would both be captured. This he was doing out of a sense of duty, not out of love, for I could see that he still held Halum's death to my account. I would not have his disgrace scored against me as well and told him so: he had done nobly to make this journey, but I could not go with him. Finally he began to yield, but only when I swore I would at least make some effort to save myself. I promised that I would set out for the western mountains instead of sitting where Stirron would surely find me. If I reached Velis or Threish safely, I said, I would notify Noim in some way, so that he would cease to fear my fate. And then I said, "There is one thing you can do for me' I brought my manuscript out of the cabin -- a great heap of paper, red scribbling on grayish, rough sheets. In this, I said, he would find the whole story. I asked him to read it and to pass no judgment on me until he had. "You will find things in here that will horrify and disgust you," I warned him. "But I think you'll also find much that will open your eyes and your soul. Read it, Noim. Read it with care. Think about my words." And I asked one last vow of him, by our oath of bonding: that he safely preserve my book even if the temptation came over him to burn it. "These pages hold my soul," I told him. "Destroy the paper and you destroy me. If you loathe what you read hide the book, but do no harm to it. What shocks you now may not shock you a few years from now. And some day you may want to show my book to others, so that you can explain what manner of man your bondbrother was and why he did what he did." And so that you may change them as I hope my book will change you , I said silently. Noim vowed this vow. He took my sheaf of pages and stored them in the hold of his groundcar. We embraced; he asked me again if I would not ride away with him; again I refused; I made him say once more he would read my book and preserve it; once more he swore he would; then he drove slowly toward the east. I entered the cabin. The place where I had kept my manuscript was empty and I felt a sudden hollowness, I suppose much like that of a woman who has carried a child for the full seven moontimes and now finds her belly flat again. I had poured all of myself into those pages. Now I was nothing and the book was all. Would Noim read it? I thought so. And would he preserve it? Very likely he would, though he might hide it in the darkest corner of his house. And would he some day show it to others? This I do not know. But if you have read what I have written it is through the kindness of Noim Condorit; and if he has let it be read -- then I have prevailed over his soul after all, as I hope to prevail over yours. would remain in the cabin no longer but would set out for the west in an attempt to save myself. But that sweltering shack had become my home. I stayed a day, another day and a third, doing nothing, wandering the blazing solitude of the Burnt Lowlands, watching the hornfowl circle. On the fifth day, as you perhaps are able to see, I fell into the habit of autobiography again, sat down at the place where I had lately spent so many hours sitting and wrote a few new pages to describe my visit from Noim. Then I let three days more go by, telling myself that on the fourth I would dig my groundcar out of the red sand and head westward. But on the morning of that fourth day Stirron and his men found my hiding place and now it is evening of that day and I have an hour or two more to write, by the grace of the Lord Stirron. And when I have done with this, I will write no more. groundcars, surrounded my cabin and called on me through loudspeakers to surrender. I had no hope of resisting them, nor any desire to try. Calmly-for what use was fear? -- I showed myself, hands upraised, at the cabin door. They left their cars and I was amazed to find Stirron himself among them, drawn out of his palace into the Lowlands for an outof-season hunting party with his brother as quarry. He wore all his finery of office. Slowly he walked toward me. I had not seen him in some years and was appalled by the signs of age on him: shoulders rounded, head thrust forward, hair thinning, face deeply lined, eyes yellowed and dim. The profits of half a lifetime of supreme power. We regarded one another in silence, like two strangers seeking a point of contact. I tried to find in him that boy, my playmate, my elder brother, whom I had loved and lost so long ago, and I saw only a grim old man with trembling lips. A septarch is trained to mask his inner feelings, yet Stirron was able to hold nothing secret from me, nor could he keep one consistent expression: I saw in his face, one tumbling across the other, tokens of imperial rage, bewilderment, sorrow, contempt, and something that I took to be a sort of suppressed love. I spoke first, inviting him into my cabin for a conference. He hesitated, perhaps thinking i had assassination in mind, but after a moment he accepted in right kingly manner, waving to his bodyguard to wait outside. When we were alone another silent spell obtained, which this time he broke, saying, "One has never felt such pain, Kinnall. One scarcely believes what one has heard about you. That you should stain our father's memory -- " "Is it such a stain, Lord Septarch?" "To foul the Covenant? To corrupt the innocent -- your bondsister among the victims? What have you been doing, Kinnall? What have you been doing?" A terrible fatigue came over me and I closed my eyes, for I scarcely knew where to begin explaining. After a moment I found strength. I reached toward him, smiling, taking his hand, and said, "I love you, Stirron." "How sick you are!" "To talk of love? But we came out of the same womb! Am I not to love you?" "Is this how you talk now, only in filth?" "I talk as my heart commands me. "You are not only sick but sickening," said Stirron. He turned away and spat on the sandy floor. He seemed a remote medieval figure to me, trapped behind his dour kingly face, imprisoned in his jewels of office and his robes of state, speaking in gruff, distant tones. How could I reach him? I said, "Stirron, take the Sumaran drug with me. I have a little left. I'll mix it for us. We'll drink it together and in an hour or two our souls will be one and you'll understand. I swear, you'll understand. Will you do it? Kill me afterward if you still want to, but take the drug first." I began to bustle about, making ready the potion. Stirron caught my wrist and halted me. He shook his head, with the slow, heavy gesture of one who feels an infinite sadness. "No," he said. "Impossible." "Why?" "You will not fuddle the mind of the prime septarch." "I'm interested in reaching the mind of my brother Stirron!" "As your brother, one wishes only that you may be healed. As prime septarch, one must avoid harm, for one belongs to one's pepple." "The drug is harmless, Stirron." "Was it harmless for Halum Helalam?" "Are you a frightened virgin?" I asked. "I've given the drug to scores of people. Halum is the only one who reacted badly -- Noim too, I suppose, but he got over it. And -- " "The two people in the world closest to you," said Stirron, "and the drug harmed them both. Now you offer it to your brother?" It was hopeless. I asked him again, several times, to risk an experiment with the drug, but of course he would not touch it. And would it have availed me anything if he had? I would have found only iron in his soul. I asked, "What will happen to me now?" "A fair trial, followed by an honest sentence." "Which will be what? Execution? Imprisonment for life? Exile?" Stirron shrugged. "It is for the court to decide. Do you take one for a tyrant?" "Stirron, why does the drug frighten you so? Do you know what it does? Can I make you see that it brings only love and understanding? There's no need for us to live as strangers to each other, with blankets around our souls. We can speak ourselves out. We can reach forth. We can say #,' Stirron, and not have to apologize for having selves. . . . We can tell each other what gives us pain and help each other to escape that pain." His face darkened; I think he was sure I was mad. I went past him to the place where I had put down the drug, quickly mixed it and offered a flask to him. He shook his head. I drank, impulsively gulping it, and offered the flask again to him. "Go on," I said. "Drink. Drink! It won't begin for a while. Take it now, so we'll be open at the same time. Please, Stirron!" "I could kill you myself," he said, "without waiting for the court to act." "Yes! Say it, Stirron! #! Myself! Say it again!" "Miserable selfbarer. My father's son! If I talk to you in 'I,' Kinnail, it's because you deserve no better than filth from me." "It doesn't need to be filth. Drink -- and understand." "Never." "Why do you oppose it, Stirron? What frightens you?" "The Covenant is sacred," he said. "To question the Covenant is to question the whole social order. Turn this drug of yours loose in the land and all reason collapses, all stability is lost. Do you think our forefathers were villains? Do you think they were fools? Kinnall, they understood how to create a lasting society. Where are the cities of Sumara Borthan? Why do they still live in jungle huts while we have built what we have built? You'd put us on their road, Kinnall. You'd break down the distinctions between right and wrong, so that in a short while law itself would be washed away and every man's hand would be lifted against his fellow -- and where would be your love and universal understanding then? No, Kinnall. Keep your drug. One still prefers the Convenant." "Stirron -- " "Enough. The heat is intolerable. You are arrested; now let us go" Stirron agreed to let me have a few hours alone before we began the journey back to Salla, so that I would not have to travel while my soul was vulnerable to external sensations. A small mercy from the lord septarch: he posted two men as guards outside my cabin and went off with the others to hunt hownfowl until the coming of dusk. Never had I taken the drug without a sharer. So the strangenesses came upon me and I was alone with them to hear the throbbings and the whinings and the rushings and then, as the walls fell away from my soul there was no one for me to enter and no one to enter me. Yet I could detect the souls of my guards -- hard, closed, metallic -- and I felt that with some effort I could reach even into them. But I did not, for as I sat by myself I was launched on a miraculous voyage, my self expanding and soaring until I encompassed this our entire planet and all the souls of mankind were merged into mine. And a wondrous vision came upon me. I saw my bondbrother Noim making copies of my memoir and distributing them to those he could trust. Other copies were made from those, to circulate through the provinces of Velada Borthan. And out of the southern land now came shiploads of the white powder, sought not merely by an elite, not only by the Duke of Sumar and the Marquis of Woyn, but by thousands of ordinary citizens, by people hungry for love, by those who found the Covenant turning to ashes, those who wished to reach one another's souls. And though the guardians of the old order did what they could to halt the movement, it could not be stopped, for the former Covenant had run its course and now it was clear that love and gladness could no longer be suppressed. Until at last a network of communication existed, shining filaments of sensory perception linking one to one to one to all. Until at last even the septarchs and the justiciars were swept up in the tide of liberation and all the world joined in joyous communion, each of us open to all, and the time of changes was complete; the new Covenant was established. I saw all this from my shabby cabin in the Burnt Lowlands. I saw the bright glow encompassing the world, shimmering, flickering, gaining power, deepening in hue. I saw walls blaze of universal love. I saw new faces, changed and exultant. Hands touching hands. Selves touching selves. This vision blazed in my soul for half a day, never experienced at any time, and my soaring spirit wandered in realms of dream. And only as the drug began to ebb from me did I realize that the vision was nothing but a fantasy. Perhaps it will not always be a fantasy. Perhaps Noim will find readers for what I have written and perhaps others will be persuaded to follow my path until there are enough like me and the changes become irreversible and universal. It has happened before. I will disappear, I the forerunner, I the anticipator, I the martyred prophet. But what I have written will live and through me you will be changed. It may yet be that this is no idle dream. This final page has been set down as twilight descends. The sun hastens toward the Huishtors. Soon, as Stirron's prisoner, I will follow it. I will take this little manuscript with me, hidden somewhere about me, and if I have good fortune I will find some way of giving it to Noim, so that it can be joined to the pages he has already had from me. I cannot say if I will succeed, nor do I know what will become of me and of my book. And you who read this are unknown to me. But I can say this: that if the two parts have become one and you read me complete -- you may be sure that I have begun to prevail. Out of that joining can come only changes for Velada Borthan, changes for all of you. If you have read this far you must be with me in soul. So I say to you, my unknown reader, that I love you and reach my hand toward you, I who was Kinnall Darival, I who have opened the way, I who promised to tell you all about myself and who now can say that that promise has been fulfilled. Go and seek. Go and touch. Go and love. Go and be open. Go and be healed.  as shorthand for what can be better expressed without them. #) # of you voted for real-life sex in story content when it's important to the story -- and here again a few comments are in order. Let's take excerpts from one of your letters:... I think the best two stories in this issue (ire: I Will Fear No Evil ( conclusion ) and Darkside Crossing... I am (not) a physician, scientist , engineer or a technician -- would you believe Educator? I am not against real-life sex when it's important to the story: True. But it had better be damn important! If I want to read a sex ( Continued from page # ) novel ( and I have at times ) I will go buy a sex novel... Bob Snow San Bernardino, Cal. You've made a point for me. That sex per se "always sells" is a popular fantasy -- other topics have sold and will continue to sell as well or better. But to pretend that sex doesn't exist is as much a fantasy. I will not, as several authors already know, buy a story simply because it has sex -- but neither will I turn down a story for that sole reason. Thank you for your vote. A great many of you went to great pains to answer the questionnaire by letter rather than cut up an issue. The following note appended to answers to the poll, is a sample...  almost neglected answering your questionnaire in order to keep my Galaxy intact. However , my feelings of near-duty got the best of me and I had to reply -- late and sloppy. (No, I was sloppy, placing the questionnaire where I did. -- Ed.) I do hope , however , I will be counted. Especially in this time of metamorphosis of my favorite magazine... Brent Higinbotham Chelmsford, Mass. Dear Mr. Jakobsson: I already subscribe, so Vll not take advantage of your offer. Just a few comments on your questionnaire. First, I like stories by a lot of other people besides those # listed. The novel-length serials are fine. The illustrations are good, but they are not all that important -- the editorial content is what it's all about. The science-fact articles are okay, but don't make them too technical. Just the same, I buy Galaxy for the fiction and the book reviews. As far as I'm concerned profanity in fiction shouldn't be censored, but don't go out of the way to insert it either. The next question confused me, but I'll say here that fantasy is fine (if you stop publishing it, FSF will be the only quality purveyors of the form. One thing I've noticed in science fiction in the last # years is that the characterizations are getting better along with everything else. If sex is necessary to the story development, by all means let's have, it. Sex is part of a human being's life. Harold F. Metcalf Portland, Ore... Heinlein should make war and let Sturgeon make love. a candle to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress... David Lee Powell Bellevue, N.B... I cannot express my mind on the questions I circled with a simple Yes, No, True or False. I feel a little as though I'm being asked whether I prefer prudishness or obscenity... Henri Lastrapes... I am a grade school teacher and the wife of a chemical engineer. Much enjoyed your absolutely wonderful serial by Heinlein: I Will Fear No Evil. I only wish it had not ended. John and I have been arguing for months as to whether the book is pornographic. I say yes; he says no. I think this is due to sex differences in viewpoints. We both agree that the story is not repulsively pornographic and feel that this is the important factor. Mrs. John Caccione  The book is not pornographic by any definition. I know. I think all of you, without exception, have helped give Galaxy a new direction -- may it reward with shaggy uncut hair. But his clothes were elegant, cut by the finest Sentient tailor. He stood off at a distance, looking at me speculatively. I pretended not to notice him. The dining console was somewhat different from those I was used to and I had a little trouble placing my breakfast order. As I sat there, somewhat baffled by the instructions on how to enter the proper code, he came over and sat down at my table. "Can you use some help?" he asked amiably. I nodded. He showed me how to enter an order for simulated ham and eggs. I pushed the appropriate buttons and a few minutes later, a steaming dish came up through the center table lift. It looked and tasted pretty good. Then I realized that I had forgotten my manners. "Would you like something?" I asked. "No," he said. "I never eat when I'm on business." "What's your business?" He smiled. "Right now you're my business." I dug into the food and chewed it, pondering his remark and baffled at what he was getting at. "I don't think I know you," I said. "Don't be offended. My memory was never of the best." "We've never met," he said. "But I know you very well. I've got a business proposition to make to you." I smiled. I had been prospecting in the Sentient hills for almost six years, sifting through the abandoned mineral mines for signs of gold. Once or twice I had found a small vein with enough paydirt to stake me for another year or two. But the few claims I had were worthless. He seemed to sense what I was thinking. "It's not your claims I'm interested in," he said. "I want to buy your name." I chuckled. " That ain't worth much," I said. I thought it was a pretty good joke on his part. "I don't think you even know my name," I added. He pronounced it clearly, each syllable getting exaggerated emphasis. I had never heard my name pronounced that way before but it was definitely mine. "You think I'm joking," he said. "But I'm not. I'll give you fifty thousand Sentient credits for your name." I was jolted into putting down my fork. "That's a hell of a lot of money," I said. It was more than I had made in the past ten years or was likely to make in the next ten. "What the hell do you want with my name?" I said tartly. "Fifty thousand credits," he said. "I got the name transfer forms right here. You sign on this line. I sign there. We go over to the town clerk and get it validated and I hand over fifty thousand credits in cash. The whole thing shouldn't take more than half an hour." I put my dish back on the table button. The dish slid out of sight. I picked up the napkin and wiped my mouth. Then I stood up. "Thanks for helping me order," I said. "But I got to get going now." "Sit down for a minute," he said soothingly. "You don't seem to catch on to what I'm saying. You'll never get a better deal as long as you live." I sat down. "Get this straight," I told him. "I ain't selling my name. It was my father's name and his father's before him. Besides, it ain't much of a name." He pronounced my name again but this time it was all music and loving sounds. "You don't think I'd offer fifty thousand for just any name?" He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a small notebook. "There's some in here I didn't give more than five hundred for. But yours is worth every bit of what I'm offering." "I ain't interested," I said. He clucked his tongue. James Gunn, author of "The Message," the third stories in the series that began with "The Listeners" Galaxy, August, #, began writing science fiction in #. Since then he has produced ten books and some sixty shorter works and has held a series of professional positions as paperback editor, university public relations director, college teacher -- all reflecting his interests. He is the author of This Fortress World, Station in Space, The Joy Makers, The Immortals, Future Imperfect, The Witching Hour and The Immortal, and he edited Man and the Future. and the # series "The Immortal" were adapted from Jim's The Immortals. And The Immortal is his novelization of the pilot film screenplay. Jim summed up his experience with television and his opinions about science fiction on film in a recent article in TV Guide. This Spring Bantam brought out a new edition of The Joy Makers. Dell will publish his new book. The Burning, this summer; and Scribner's has contracted to publish The Listeners. Jim now is a full-time faculty member at the University of Kansas, from which he has two degrees and where he teaches fiction writing for the English department and a new course in science fiction as literature for the School of Journalism. He is working on a textbook about science fiction and putting on film a sciencefiction course in which writers, editors and other authorities discuss aspects of the field they know best. He has a #-year-old house, a #-year-old marriage, two sons, #I and #, three Siamese cats and a dachshund. And if all that isn't enough, he was a candidate this year for president of "How old are you?" he said. "Sixty-three," I lied. I was close to sixty-eight. "I got enough years left," I said, "to want my name wrapped around them. Fifty thousand credits is a lot of money but it ain't the same as a name." "I could make it sixty," he said. "But that's my last offer." Now sixty is only ten more than fifty and it shouldn't have made that much difference to me but it did. I was mighty close to closing the deal at that point. But I had one more question to ask. "What will you do with my name if I sell it to you?" He frowned. "Do with it? I won't do anything with it." I must have looked terribly puzzled because his brow clouded and then he began to laugh out loud. "I see what you mean," he said. "You think that I'll use it some way. Maybe bring disgrace on your name." "Sully it, is what I was thinking." "I just want to own it," he said. "Some men accumulate real estate. Others want art objects or rare books. I like names. But it has to be mine, do you follow what I'm saying? The name has to belong to me. And when I take a fancy to it, I got to have it. And I pay the top price." His eyes were all afire and his dark cheeks were gleaming with fresh sweat. He opened his wallet and counted out sixty thousand credits in fresh new bills. It was painful to look at all of that cash in one place. "I'll take it," I said and I felt dirty all over. the form we shook hands. "It's a good name," I said. "Take care of it." "I will," he said, but he seemed to have lost interest. He was looking at another Terran with wrapped leggings around his ankles, who was walking down the dusty cobbled street. "Excuse me," he said. "I see another prospect." He shoved the validated form carelessly into his breast pocket and set out after the Terran. His tall thin body had come alive and his fingers were trembling slightly"You didn't say goodbye," I called after him, bitterly. There were sixty thousand credits in my hand, too much to carry on my person. I went to the credit exchange to open an account "In what name?" said the teller. He was even less startled than I was at the fresh tears that suddenly spurted out of my eyes.  looked that day, at the peak of his powers and self-confidence, already at thirty a world-renowned metal-people engineer -- or, as we in the trade spoke about it at the great experiment center in that long-ago time, a peoplegeer. I recall how his black wild hair tossed, how strands fell athwart his beady burning eyes when he, the honored guest, almost shrieked, addressing the world convention, "Did God build you and me? Yes! But in the beginning. Since then He has not lifted a hand. It was not needed." Deafening applause from the assembled thousands of metal-people engineers rose up in thunderous sanction, smote agreement-noise violently at the young man on the stage. When the yells and the thundering hands had stilled a little we waited anxiously for his next words. His urgent staring about, his pleading manner of standing with his hands cupped at us, all marked him as a man in the throes of a mission. "We are so far behind God," he cried, "in the field of this science that we should be ashamed. Each night, on our knees, we should say, 'God, I am ashamed, forgive me. I am sad that I have moved so slowly, been a dull metal-people engineer.' But all shall soon be remedied by my plan. God never meant that we, year after year, should go on, tediously fashioning our servants. Man was meant for leisure times. And the contemplation of his body and its pleasure-needs. Gentlemen, it is my studied belief that in all the universe there is none to equal the pleasure potential of man in his flesh." Applause crashed up and out from many beating palms and reverberated like great deep drumbeats from the curves of the eggshaped auditorium. "Now, to achieve more leisure time: In many central places we shall put our structures, buildings of a size to dwarf any yet attempted. They will not be greatly tall, but they will cover many many acres, lying like gigantic metal orange halves on the flat places. In these we must store our parts. Or I should say, their parts." He paused as if half expecting some recognition of humor. But there was never a titter. We were too tense for jest. "We must make the parts at first," he went on, "as we have made the steel-folk. We shall store the parts so the buildings built like halves of oranges can be, in a manner of speaking, termed fountsof-life." Angry mutterings of disappointment were beginning to come from the audience now. And one renowned metal-people engineer, who had once been a robot engineer and was much older than the young man on the stage, was heard to curse and say something to the effect that the young fool was about to advocate a plan that had been tried more than thirty years ago, tried and found wanting before this young fool was born. "Ah, no," the young man protested, as if sensing the nature of their disappointment. "I am not thinking of that ancient plan of the late Professor Blanochon. I am, of course, familiar with it -- that stingy unimaginative scheme that called for self-repair of the worn or injured servants of another age, the unsophisticated robots. In that there was no progress, no imagination, no grasp of the true problem. The robot, after a certain period of usually good service to man, grew in lassitude, his wires old, his plates and power wafers jaded. He made no honest attempt to repair himself well, wishing rather to die back to some easy junk yard. But my plan calls for a whole new deal for steel-folk. You might call it the steel-man's chance for bliss, his emancipation. But it also means the emancipation -- finally the almost total emancipation -- of man from the toil of making servants merely to -- do I say merely? nay, boundlessly -- receive the The last sentence was grandly shouted. T HE applause rose and became prolonged. We stood at our seats and danced. We were with this man! When the bedlam had ceased a little he went on. He outlined his plan while the huge conclave of world metal-people engineers held to the edges of their seats. The entire working force of present day steel-folk, he explained, must be scrapped -- junked as out of date. In the new population of servants, to be created by the engineers, there must be the sexes, three, or perhaps more correctly two true sexes and one work-horse nonsex which could, after certain nonsex service in the warehouse, be elevated to a sex. (Upon the elevation of a nonsex a sex would necessarily be demoted in the rotation necessary to keep the warehouse force and the sex groups at stable strength). Designations for the three groups would be hes, ses and hese. A hes would have his power unit on the right side of his chest; a ses would have hers on the left side; and a hese, the nonsex, would display the power unit in the middle of the chest. On a day determined by local conditions, the quality and quantity of the work force and perhaps other considerations, best understood by the metal-people engineer in charge, all the hes and ses of a given district would be called together. Under the watchful supervision of the ranking engineer of that particular community each hes and ses would be required to remove a certain one of his or her power wafers from the power unit. On a gleaming steel table, perfectly bare except for a few carved signs of erotic significance to steelfolk (such as steel-shaving flowers bloomed on intricate balancestems amidst lance-shaped bees without wings and iron balls mated, represented as whirling two-andtwo in a perfectly clear, colorless oil) the wafers would be placed in two heaps, the hes wafers in one, the ses wafers in another. Then, with careful tabulation by the ranking peoplegeer, the hes and ses would file by the mating table and each be handed a wafer from the opposite-sex heap. To hasten the mechanics of mating, as a check and to keep everything decently routine, a peoplegeer-incharge-of-love, merely a clerklieutenant sent from the central offices to assist the head peoplegeer of the district, would call out sex and numbers of correctly matched pairs, usually calling out the hes number first. For instance he would sing out, "Hes Twenty must have ses Ten-nine-six-four's love wafer and vice versa." And so it would go until all the pairs chosen for love at this particular callup were correctly ready for mating. (Yes, it does seem rather a shabby and shallow plan-of-love and many a better one -- and at least one worse one -- at once come to mind. But I give you this plan exactly as outlined to that great conclave by the genius with wild dark hair and beady, flashing eyes.) Their part of courtship over in a prearranged matching of wafers, hes # and ses # would repair to a little cubicle out of sight of everyone and soon would come to vib-reactors of breathless eavesdroppers a tiny tink-tink sound; perhaps the listeners would feel a pleasant anticipatory thrill deep in the chambers of their own most delicate wires and plates, knowing that one happy pair were already toying with each other's power sections and exchanging wafers. When the lovers reappeared there might be wild metallic cheers or merely hoarse huzzas or perhaps just the blinking of bulb-eyes to show appreciation of a solemn occasion and a joyful one. But hes # and ses # couldn't care less because they would be in love now and they would hurry off to the great "metal building shaped like half an orange. There they would confront the workhorse hese. Perhaps he would say, "Gob doy, congrootulotions, yoy yoy!" Or if he were old and tired from his warehouse chores he might simply blink his bulbs and ask them to get on with it. "Oh, see them," our speaker cried, carried away by his dream, "enter the steellov room, a place filled with those wonder-things we may term love objects of steelfolk." The black wild hair shook down, the eyes gleamed. "Steel balls balance on jets of rainbowcolored gas there to swing the steel lover's waltz constantly through the room; robot puppets of finest thread-wire and new-metal cavort unceasingly on a stage of ever-changing lights. And over all wafts an atmosphere of tiny robot-calipers interminably measuring lengths amidst the lance bees gently whirling in a clear cool light that does seem to shine beyond forever. From the lovers the unexplained sounds! Ah, it may be only earnest conversation. They emerge! They tell the hese what they have decided to do! He goes to the proper stack and picks out the proper frame. He gives them a steel-bound book of instructions -- all the things, each detailed step, to rear the little frame right. And on the book's last page the frame stands whole, all his gleaming parts together, all the detail superimposed. And under the picture appears this little verse: You held the future in my lacks; Think! Did you visit all the right stacks? "Gentlemen, picture the inward glow, which no steel-person could have experienced in the old days, when the happy pair clank off around the warehouse, the bare frame clasped between them. And know that these good steel parents are determined to visit all the right stacks and rear a sturdy accurately constructed steel-person according to the book. And they will do it! Then, the job finished, they will leave their creation at the warehouse -- whether a hes a ses or a hese -- for further disposition. Tomorrow, back to work -- end of happy useful marriage -- end of happy useful love... for a time... until next call-up... according to local conditions... quality and quantity of the work force... date set by metal-people engineer." leisure on this high mountain top where no hes or ses or hese has yet come, I can see him and, calling up the dark vision, I can hear him crying, Did God build you and me? Yes! But in the beginning. Since then He has not lifted a hand... I can hear hear him pleading for man's leisure as on that great day when he spoke before the assembled giants of steel-folk engineering. But across his words a strange sound pounds me, nearer and nearer -- like rocks on metal sheets and metal balls on stone. Yes, the warehouses are climbing the mountains; the steelfolk come chanting a song of happy love-power, their metal footsteps on the level places sounding like little pile drivers walking free, their scratchy holds on the sheer mountain stones sounding like cats whetting claws. In the Old Days... But I must not regard them in other than their true light. They are not angry; they are merely coming to work. They will whirl stones away like pebbles, dig holes that swallow hills -- and they will level the mountain to build a new warehouse. You see, they are forced to expand because love has been strong. Almost from the first they saw no cause to wait for callup by a metal-people engineer. And though many frames have been born out of wedlock and many a stack has been visited in sheer excess of free love, the steelfolk have prospered. And now they are crowding me -- the last engineer, the last flesh-man, the last human being on earth -- from the last mountain top of my world. Oh, they will not, I feel sure, even notice me waiting here amid more leisure -- and terror -- than any other man knew. I think they must stoop and whirl me from the mountain as of no use, as though I were a resting stone.  it's no use. The whisper is all around us and it will take us, too. We are all one now. We have opened the eye that links us, wherever he is, with him .' I "This is nonsense!" Wannemaker shouted. "Preposterous. I feel no presence. I hear no whisper. The ape's dead and that's all there is to  . "Is it?" Sanderson asked sadly. "You may not hear the whisper of the waves on the eternal sea but there is another whisper now. Listen! Do you hear anything outside there, in the morning before the birds shake off their sleep and sing?" "I hear -- I hear nothing!" swore Wannemaker. "Not -- a squeaking? I hear the ( Continued from page #) squeaking of an army out there. They are coming for us, Minister, and there is nothing we can do. It is as inevitable as the soul of Rastus, waiting for us in the dark." "I -- I do hear something now. It's -- it's -- but it can't be!" "I am afraid it is, Minister." He did not need to join Wannemaker at the window with the constables with their rifles blazing in the utter futility of their terror. He sat beside Angela Styles and held her hand. He knew what was coming for them under the rising morning mist. A vast brown army, closing in on the house, the whole country, brown as far as the eye could reach. Linked with all its fellows in the world, the rat, too, had escaped.  Want a way out of whatever it is you're in? Then read -- The Magazine of Alternatives The doctor told me,"Marguerite, you can be alive and ugly, or beautiful and dead" The day I first noticed the small pink spot on my cheek, I had other things on my mind. The New York papers said, "Marguerite Piazza opens at the Persian Room". I covered the spot with makeup, walked out into the spotlight, and forgot it -- forgot everything -- in the joy of singing. It wasn't until the spot began to spread, that I went to a cancer specialist. The day the doctor told me I'd have to have radical face surgery, I was sure my career was over. It was no longer a matter of saving my looks. Just of saving my life. They kept the mirrors in my hospital room covered for a week. And yet today, thanks to the fantastic skill of the surgeons, I sing in the spotlight again. I let myself be photographed full-face by a famous photographer of glamorous women. And I am alive. So now you know why I am appealing to you on behalf of the American Cancer Society. To give money. To get regular checkups. And to pay attention to cancer's warning signals. You know, there's something much worse than finding out you have cancer. And that's not finding out. American Cancer Society. We want to wipe out cancer in your lifetime.? What is it? A black dot, circle, sphere, neutron, eye pupil, tunnel opening, planet, hole, cosmos ? Depending on your perspective, knowledge, and envision .whole planetary life forms interimagination, the answer can be simple or connected the same way. complex, commonplace or extraordinary, defwho forecast things like nuclear power, inite or infinite. supersonic jets, computers, space probes, and moon walks long before they happened. SciWe'd like to introduce you to some uniqueence Fiction authors are writing tomorrow's ly gifted authors who have created an excithistory today. ing, mind-stretching literature. Writers who Just I will bring you any three books decan look at a dot or a pebble and see a uniscribed on this page. With them comes your verse of sub-atomic particles. Who can enrollment in The Science Fiction Book speculate on the incredible number of interClub, the frontier of the future. Join today, dependent cells that make up a human body The coupon tells how. with trial membership #. The Foun#. Childhood's #. Quest for datlon Trilogy End by Arthur the Future by by Isaac Asimov. C. Clarke. ManA. E. Van Vogt. The ends of the kind's last genThe electrifying galaxy revert to eratlon on earth, adventure of the barbarism. Pub. "Wildly fantasman who dised. # tic! -- Atlantic, covers lmmorPub. ed. # tallty and the #. Dangerous secrets of time. Visions ed. by #. Beyond the Harlan Ellison. Beyond by Poul #. Neanderthal Anthology of # Anderson. Six Planet by Brian stofies never benovellas by Hugo W. Aldiss. # fore in print by Award winner, novella gems. Sturgeon, AnAbout scientists. Never before derson. others, pirates, loners. published in Pub. ed. # U.S. ! Shrewd. #. Ice Crown witty, ingenious. #. 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Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. Science Fiction Book Club #-S# Please accept my application for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me Just # plus shipping and handling for all #. Each month send me the Club's free bulletin "Things To Come" describing tho two monthly selections and other book bargains. If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly selections, or prefer an alternate or no book at all, I simply indicate so on the form provided. I pay only #. plus shipping and handling for each book I take. (Occasional extra-value selections are slightly more.) I need take only # books in the coming year and may resign any time after purchasing # books. Introductory package. I may return it in # days. Membership will be canceled. I will owe nothing. MR. If under #, parent must sign above. Printed in U.S.A.  Lovecraft Lives! -- mainly because the stories he wrote and the concepts he invented are too gripping to stop reading... or to stop writing. The roster of writers who have carried on Lovecraft's characters and ideas is a Who's Who of fantasy greats -- August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Colin Wilson, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner. now include works by these month's offering is a prime pair from Derleth, The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu -- a story collection and a novel about hapless mortals' involvement with the terrifying beings from between the dimensions -- Cthulhu, Hastur the Unspeakable, Ying, the amorphous fluteplayer, and the Goat with the Thousand Young. And next month, we'll have what is probably Lovecraft's solidest novel. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Goulartifice -- a new noun, or Beaglism, to use as a label for Ron Goulart's acid zaniness and what the New York Times calls his "bleak but bracing humor." Death Cell is the first novel dealing with Jack Summer of Muckrake, the galactic newsmag -- a first-rate Goulartifact. # each An Intex Publisher #I Filth Ave., New York, N.Y. # wherever paperbacks are sold. For mail orders, please send SI. # for each book (includes postage and handling) to: Beagle Books, Dept. CS # West # Street New York, N.Y. #I I Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. July-August, #I Vol. #, No. I Robert Silverberg NO veil A editor Science editor feature editor Managing editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Subscription Director  Publisher Associate Publisher R.A. Lafferty Ernest Hill J.K. Swearingen Larry Eisenberg Algis Budrys ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing #. Distributing CorporaMon, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices; # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Prinfed in U.S. A. The central theme of Robert A. Heinlein's  Will Fear No Evil continues to evoke its uniquely valid echoes of matters at hand and things to come. Thus Give a Gift of Life is the newest game and yours or mine may be the name. Every player has a chance. No strings to Giver or Receiver. The Gift is made at your convenience -- when you no longer need the item. Or is not made. You don't have to change your vote, your last will and testament, your friendships, dress style or length of hair in order to play. Without penalty and at any time, you may quit playing. Here's the scoop: Mr. James Pendzick, computer programeranalyst at the University of Wisconsin and candidate for a Master's in mathematics, writes: "I have been a reader of your magazine on and off for several years, but it was Heinlein's  Will Fear No Evil that got me to subscribe. I am writing this in direct response to a line from your April ('#) Letters # column: The National Rare Blood Club reports an unusually impressive response from your ranks... ' I would like to request equal time for the National Kidney Foundation, which is trying to recruit organ doners..." The Organ Donor Program of the National Kidney Foundation (# Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. #, if you want to look into it) is a little more than a year old, is not restricted to kidney transplants, and has spread up and down and across the land. Forty-nine of the fifty states, plus the District of Columbia, have passed the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, with Massachusetts, at this writing, the sole holdout. The Act transforms into a legal document a wallet-size card, which you may either carry next to your driver's license for as long as you live -- or tear up and file in the nearest trash can, with pobody on Earth the wiser. Not eten the two friends who witnessed your signature on the card. In your wallet the card remains -- for as long as you want -- the sole record anywhere that you are playing the game as a Giver. Advances in medical science now make it possible to replace a variety of malfunctioning human organs. Techniques for transplanting kidneys and corneas are most advanced, but progress is being made in overcoming transplantation problems connected with the liver, pancreas, heart, bone and other tissue. The Uniform Donor Card permits you to specify, over your signature, how much or how little of yourself you care to Give to save a relative, friend or stranger. Donor Cards are now presumed to be nestling in the wallets of potential Givers. Since no records are kept, the exact number of cards active at any given moment is unavailable, but effects of the pro( Please turn to page I # ) so impressive was the quaiity of your participation in the reader poils (particularly the December one) that we would purely love to put our money where your mouth is -- e.g., pick your brains in behalf of your fellow readers. Here's the idea: we'll pay # for a lead letter and # each for other letters to be published in Galaxy under the heading: Use this new department to push your pet peeve or dream. Be controversial if you like but be also constructive. Topics: you pick 'em but keep them in the sciencescience-fiction areas. Criticism, camment, speculation are fine, but make them well feunded. Bias is okay when so identified. Abuse, bigotry -- no. Except for unusual instances net clearly foreseeable, correspondence simply commenting on Galaxy will be handled as before -- without payment. It will be reported on at approximately sixmonth intervals. Your reward for such letters will be a magazine more tailored to your needs; ours will be knowing you. Address correspondence intended for the new department to: Galaxy Magazine # E. # Street New York, N.Y. # With every man doing his best for those he loves, who needs outside enemies? I trampled into dust almost everywhere, but it was nonetheless a very decent campsite. Lying on the top of a ridge, it was separated from other sites by underbrush between the pines and spruce. There was a space under a tree for a tent. At night, when the winds blew, the susurrance in the needles high above made a restful background for sleep. To the east trees marched downhill, so that the eye could reach above them across a distant wooded ridge to a great rocky peak. In the late afternoon sun the granite against dark blue sky; the slopes below, nearer the campsite, were in shadow now and formed a dark green base for the composition. Peter Lathrop stood by the campfire looking at the scene, then glanced at his watch. He drew a deep breath, held it, let it out, finished off the beer in his hand and threw the can aside. "Grace, the air out here's so good you can taste it," he said. "Not in here," a voice called back from the tent. "I'm changing the baby." "Where are the kids?" "How should I know? Down the hill by the big rock. Pete, you'd better get them." "Yeah." Pete looked at his watch again, then headed toward a path leading downhill. The path switched back twice and passed below a huge boulder imbedded in the side of the hill. On top of the boulder were four children. A teenager stood on the highest point, eyeing the glowing mountain. A smaller boy of perhaps nine and two girls, one ten or eleven, the other about five, small for her age, were variously occupied. They saw Pete. "Hi, Dad," the teenager said, "Come on up." "No, you come down, Tim. And help the Peewee." The Peewee said, "I don't want to go." : "Judy, you and Mike, too." "Dad, can't we stay until dark? It's a long time yet." "We're late already. We have to drive a thousand miles by day after tomorrow. Come on. Everybody off." Mike said, "Come on up just for a second." Pete started to get angry. "Mike, you get down right now. I don't want to go any more than you do. Now get down here, all of you." With great reluctance the children made their way down, Tim going first and lifting the little ones to the ground. In single file, Pete bringing up the rear, they returned to the campsite. Grace emerged from the tent as they came into the clearing. She carried a baby and led a toddler of two by the hand. "We have to go?" she asked. "It's five o'clock." An odd silence fell over the family, broken at length by the man. "Tim, you and Mike take the tent down. You girls carry the other stuff to the car." While the older boys jumped on the folded tent, pressing air out of the canvas, the two little girls came up to the car with armloads of pine cones. The older one asked, "Daddy, can we bring these?" The man backed out of the Volkswagen. "Now where would I put all those? Throw 'em back in the woods." "Honey, can't they take a couple?" Grace's voice came from inside the car. "You're not supposed to take anything. Oh, well -- you each take two and throw the rest back." The girls ran happily a few feet toward the trees, dumped their loads on the ground and began discussing which were the best. The two boys brought the tent and heaved it atop the Volkswagen; it fit behind the suitcases and Just in front of a large propane tank on a frame welded to the cartop; from the tank two copper lines ran down into the engine compartment. Tim asked, "Can we take some, too?" He and Mikejoined the girls. "Take one for Mother," Grace called. "Look around, you kids, and see if we left anything," Pete said. "We're ready." He gave a last tug at the strap holding the tent and suitcases down. G race came out of the car and the children came up, holding their pine cones. They all looked at the mountain, now beginning to turn orange. Tim asked, "Dad, do we have to go? Couldn't we stay one more day?" "I don't want to go," the Peewee said and started to cry in a small, frightened voice. Pete simply stared at the mountain. "Daddy, I hate it down there," Judy said. "I want to stay here." She started to cry, too, and that made the Peewee cry harder. "Grace, get those kids in the car," the man said in a low voice, still looking at the mountain. "Okay, honey. Sweetheart, you first, in the back. You, too, Peewee, and then Mike, next to the baby. Make room for Tim." She was hiding tears, too. "No, don't put your feet on those -- we'll need them." She took the toddler on her lap on the passenger side in front. The man turned from the mountain and got in. "Might as well have the windows down," he said, starting the engine. A puff of burned oil came out the exhausts, momentarily obscuring the beer cans and paper plates behind the car. "It was a good vacation, honey," Grace said. From behind her came muffled sobs. The car rolled off the grass and onto the dirt road leading downward among the trees. In a few hundred yards the road led past the picnic grounds, where people waved; nobody in the car waved back. On through the trees the car rolled, with a whine of second gear and the crunch of tires on gravel. Gradually the trees began to thin; they grew shorter and the underbrush was brown around the edges near the road. Finally the road reached a sharp switchback with a wide shoulder and the man pulled the car to the side and parked. "All right, get 'em out. Throw the bags in the back." No one moved and the man became angry. "Come on, can't you smell it? Put 'em on and roll up the windows." Grace said, "Okay, babies, we have to. Tim, give me the little one and mine and Dad's." Tim pulled three khaki bags from under his feet and passed them up front; he took out others and passed them around and all pulled at the straps. "It looks like a pig's snout," Judy said, in tears. She pressed the blunt, cone over her face, pushed her hair back to let the upper part with goggles fit against her forehead, pulled the elastic straps down behind her head. "I hate it." "Stop crying -- you'll fog up the eyes." the man said, his voice muffled by his own respirator. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Tim leaning against the side of the car, his masked face turned to the upholstry. "Tim, do the baby first. I always have to tell you." Tim said, not moving, "I'm not going to do the baby." "God damn it -- " the man started, but Grace put her hand on his arm firmly. "I'll do it," she said. She opened her door, got out, stood the toddler on the ground, pulled the seat forward and leaned into the back. The baby began to scream. Finally the screams became muffled and Grace said, "Tim, no, Mike, you hold her hands, just till she gets used to it again." She backed out, picked up the grotesque little masked form waiting beside the car and got back in. The door slammed, the windows rolled up and the car moved on. Around the bend the trees were almost all brown and the road was very dusty. Down the family coasted, past the ranger station. Finally they reached the last long gentle grade. The road ahead was hazy. It stretched down into thicker and thicker haze until it disappeared into a murky gray-yellow layer that reached ;to the visible horizon. The man gripped the wheel with both hands and stared straight ahead. The baby began to scream again and Peewee and Judy began to cry, too, as the car descended into the opaque cloud. T he survey plane broke into the clear at # feet. A level plain, yellow-gray, with a fuzzy overlay and no distinct features, stretched to the horizon. The pilot reached to his neck and keyed the microphone. "Survey, this is Survey Four. Four "Survey Four, Roger. Arrive at intersection Yellow in two minutes." "Survey Four, out." The observer in the back of the converted # tapped the pilot. "Can we take off the respirators?" "Go ahead." Both unsnapped the mouthpieces and let them dangle, the pilot adjusting his throat microphone. "I don't see any breaks at all," the voice from the rear said. "Set up. We make the run anyway. Intersection in one minute. Over Baltimore now, heading due west." "Okay." The observer tweaked a knob or two on his portable control panel and watched the screen before him. His face was illuminated yellow by the displays. "Any time." "Coming up -- start." The plane headed away from the sunrise in a straight and level line. thin tendril toward Boston. The tendril hung stationary, then began to spread laterally as the combustion products formed nuclei for condensation. After a while the sky was empty, except for the contrail, which was now a ragged orange cloud nearly a half-mile wide to the south. The survey pictures were being taken in several wavelengths, including infrared. A relay station in Baltimore picked up the signals stations to Chicago, where the information was reconstructed into pictures on six screens at Survey Control, on a top floor of the Prudential Building. On this day pedestrians could not see the thirtieth floor of the building and the observers in Survey Control, on the fortieth floor, could see neither the street nor the top of the Sears building or the John Hancock building, sixty floors higher. Two men were looking at the main monitor, which duplicated one of the six pictures flanking it. One man, standing and leaning over the other who was seated before the console, spoke. "Well, Joe, any sense in recording this?" The screen showed only yellow-gray cloud floating downward endlessly. "I don't know. We haven't had a break in the last ten days. I suppose we'd better, at least the infrared." "Let's have the range blips on; I'll do it." "Okay, Mac. It's all set up." Macauley went to another chair and picked up a microphone. "Survey Four, this is Survey, over." "Survey Four." "Give us the range markers in infrared. Hold four thousand, and check calibration." "Roger." On the main screen and the corresponding small screen, two spots of ruby light appeared, wavered and converged into one. Numbers began to blink once per second at the bottom of the main monitor screen; # -- # -- # -- # -- #, showing small variations in altitude of the cloud top. "What was it yesterday?" Joe asked. "Around thirty-four hundred -- it's a hundred feet thicker today. God." Joe reached for the microphone and his voice broke into the formal singsong of the military radioman. "Survey Four, this is Survey, over?" "Survey Four." "?echeck laser calibration and altitude at Fo-wer, zero, zero, zero?" "Roger." The red spot became two, then one again. "Survey, the calibration is down the middle and radar altitude converts to pressure altitude, four thousand point zero, zero. Stand by for barometer check." In a moment the voice returned. "I verify calibration. Survey, over." "Uh, Roger, Survey Four, this is Survey, out." "I'd better talk this over with Taylor," Macauley said. "Record the infrared and the markers, Joe." Joe flipped some switches, while Macauley left. Joe turned on an intercom and spoke into it. Through the control room window could be seen a large room, actually a converted TV stage in earlier days, where several dozen men in shirtsleeves sat before consoles. A voice crackled back from a small loudspeaker overhead. "Right, Joe. We're talking to Denver and Salt Lake right now; we'll get on Survey Seven as soon as the Salt Lake frequency clears." M acauley shut the door behind him and proceeded down a corridor to another door, marked: Midwest and Eastern Survey Control Headquarters. He nodded to the receptionist behind the low rail separating the waiting room, from the rest of the office, made his way between desks where girls sat typing and knocked at the door lettered: Survey Control Coordinator, James X. Taylor. A voice sounded within and he entered. Jim Taylor was dictating to a stenographer. He looked up, said, "Hi, Mac, be with you in a minute -- " and went on: "Let's see -- 'Ours is, of course, strictly a monitoring function, but our readings during the past ten days warrant an urgent warning.' No, strike 'warrant' and substitute: 'call for -- The above concentrations of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulates show a steady rise beginning on Tuesday, August seventh, nineteen-seventy-nine, and continuing to the present. The increase is steady. There has been great difficulty in pressing ernergency measures any further. Mayor Finlay insists that high-grade coal reserves must be held for winter, since a heating emergency is already foreseeable. He insists also that any further reduction in line voltage, according to his engineers, would threaten the survival of Chicago and its suburbs.' " Macauley pinched his nose and jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. Taylor nodded and continued. "'This is probably true. The filtration and refrigeration units all over the city are running underspeed, so that even forty stories up it is difficult to keep up with normal seepage.' " He motioned to the stenographer and asked, "What is it, Mac?" "Same, but worse. The top is up about a hundred feet over yesterday. No breaks on a line due west from Baltimore for two hundred miles so far." "A hundred feet? Couldn't that be the Alleghenies?" "Average." "I see." Taylor thought, then sighed. "Okay, here goes. Stick around, Mac, you're going to have to back me up. Betty?" He resumed dictation pace: "'I consider this a situation of the utmost gravity. Our reports for the past ten days have been sent through normal channels, but in the absence of the Undersecretary there has been no official response to the attached special notices.' New paragraph. "Tn addition, it is becoming apparent that local authorities are attempting to deal with the problem in their own areas as if there were no problems elsewhere. Cities are competing with each other for a larger share of the power in the distribution grids; they have reached the point where they are operating with negative reserves and require power from the grid even to maintain the status quo. The latest expansion of power generation equipment in the city of Chicago has been accomplished by adding coalburning equipment instead of nuclear power; natural gas and oil supplies are all but exhausted and there is sharp competition between transportation needs and home heating requirements for fuel -- and of course, it is the same consumers who compete against themselves. All these factors have radically increased the output of pollutants in this area and very similar situations hold in all major cities within this Survey zone.' Paragraph. "'As I mentioned earlier in more detail, we appear to have reached a point where the production of contaminants itself is calling forth measures which add more contamination than they protect against. The whole system is slowing down because of the near-impossibility of conducting normal business while at the same time maintaining life in an atmosphere that long ago passed the danger levels of concentration for most contaminants." Paragraph. "'Now we see a new phenomenon entering the picture -- the cover over the entire Northeast quadrant of the country. Very soon this will endanger crops and already the change in upper-air conditions has caused -- ' strike that, Betty, substitute: 'appears to have caused a dropoff in rainfall and an alteration in the whole weather pattern. The cloud cover apparently began to thicken as the last breaks disappeared; the last report, which is current to the present hour, indicates that the thickening is proceeding without any indication of slowing down.' I said that already, Betty, but leave it in. Paragraph. "We in Survey Control are unanimous -- '" Macauley nodded to Taylor's questioning look -- "'in the opinion that mere emergency measures have already failed and we see no possible chance of averting a major disaster. We have now only a choice between disasters -- one we control and one that runs on out of control while ineffectual attempts are made to provide nearly normal conditions in a few isolated spots.' Paragraph. "'My recommendations, which are based on what I believe to be a clear and self-evident set of facts, are as follows: ' Mac?" "Shut down the mills." " 'One: All steel production, automobile production, oil refining, and non-nuclear power generation must cease immediately for a period of at least sixty days.' " "No light." "'Two: All use of electricity not vital to the maintenance of life must be forbidden indefinitely under the strictest penalties. This includes electrical home lighting, air conditioning but not filtration, office lighting, street lighting, use of electrical home appliances except for refrigerators. Also close down battery recharging stations.' " "Cars." "'Three: Single-occupant automobiles must be forbidden and within that provision only essential automobile, bus, train, or air travel is to be allowed, again with stiff penalties for violation, nonpolluting vehicles excepted.' " "No, Jim, don't forget the battery recharging stations." "Strike it, Betty. Is that enough, Mac?" "Might be. I can't account for the thickening of the cover. Maybe something new has started that will go on by itself now, no matter what we do." "You'd better be wrong. Betty? New paragraph. 'These measures clearly mean a suspension of all normal commerce and all attempts to conduct normal affairs. We have before us now only one task: to survive for sixty days. After that we can turn to the task of surviving for another sixty days with what we have left.' Respectfully submitted and so on. Fix the grammar and type it up, Betty -- address copies to the mailing list I gave you." The stenographer sat for a moment scribbling, snapped her book shut. She sat a moment longer, then rose, giving Taylor a look full of tears as she left. "Smart girl," Taylor said. "If I had time I'd be crying, too." "Will anyone listen? Whom are you sending it to?" "Secretary of the Interior. White House. Copies all over the place. They'll be carried back by Survey One tonight." "Then we'll getia response tomorrow or Friday." "Or we'll go to Washington!" "What about the Undersecretary? You're bypassing him." "He's studying future pollution problems in Alaska with his wife and children and a guide who knows where some bears are." "Is the meeting still on?" "Three-thirty, all section chiefs. Bring Joe, he'll be up to date on Survey Four and tell him to get summaries on the other runs." Taylor sighed and swiveled his chair around to look out his window. Dim building shapes could be discerned in the haze. "I wish it were May instead of August. They'll be lighting up their furnaces in a month or so." of the business jet, talking to the pilot who had been in Survey Four. He put a briefcase in the copilot's seat, which was empty. "I'd feel a lot happier if you weren't going alone." "No sweat," the pilot said. "This ship is designed for one pilot and one observer and there'll be no survey tonight." "The East Coast is absolutely solid." "I said Td do it. I read what's in those letters and I know what it looks like on top. I'm with you -- why won't you take my word for it?" "At least fuel up with safety fuel." The pilot grinned. "That's what they're putting in. I changed the order after the last report from Dulles." "Well, that makes me feel a little better -- at least the plane won't burn if you rack it up." "Cheery thought. I don't like that stuff -- you have to keep the combustion temperature too high in order to make it burn and it leaves orange crap all over the sky. It doesn't seem right, especially when it's Survey One doing it." "Forget it; if they follow our recommendations you'll be taking a stagecoach back." A ground crewman came in the door with a clip-board. "Sign here." The pilot signed and the crewman left. Macauley shook hands with the pilot and left also. Outside he turned and closed the door, then walked rapidly toward the terminal building while the crewman cleared away the steps and stowed the hoses back into the tanker truck. The day-glow orange truck pulled away as Macauley entered through the broad glass Ballantine Books Banquet (well, "fresh" Is hardly the word, but anyway) our head is filled with joy for Larry, winner of the Newe'll be doing Larry's next collection, along with Niven's earlier works. #I is the Year of Larry Niven -- and proud are we to have a share in it.  Lynn del Rey (it's Spring, after ail) that we are meant to devote this column to books for May and June, we will nevertheless do so. More or less. May then, will see Annie's next drag(which is reissued, naturally). The dragons of Pern are a noble and lovable lot -- and a breathtaking concept. Anne McCaffrey macushia, skoal! ((jr whatever the local equivalent may be).  Irish scene, a new Dunsany. Well, its from so far back we guarantee none of our readers will be familiar with it. Trust Lin Carter, mining away among his #-odd book library, to Valley.  not look like s.f., but ninety percent of it is. So buy.  numbers certainly include many a science-fiction fan, we are now doing an illustrated series, priced at only a buck. You ought to be able to find books on the Bugatti, the Alfa Romeo; also on Le Mans. verberg. A book which is not science fiction -- but then, what is? So we'll talk about it anyway. It is certainly not like anything the Pope has ever written before. A sort of Fellini trip, if you will, in literary form. So emodon't miss. And another Silverberg, this one more in the tradition, titled an elegiac title for sardonicus. And finally, an Oriental escapade titled (August, September, or whatever it maybe). BB doors of the terminal building. He arrived at the upper level in time to see the plane release its brakes and roll toward the taxiway, its high-intensity flasher operating and a rotating red beacon sweeping light across the fuselage and surrounding buildings. It appeared to be the only active plane and for good reason; the night was black out there and the red beacon rapidly became a reddish blob as the plane moved off into the murk. The jet glow was shot with orange streaks. Macauley waited' until the flashing red blob reappeared from behind a hangar, climbing, and he heard the faint jet sound through the window; then he turned and went out through the nearly empty terminal. At # feet the pilot saw the stars. On the eastern horizon the moon, in its last quarter, was rising; the pale light shone on the cloud cover, providing an easy reference for visual flight. "O'Hare, this is Survey One leaving the control zone; request permission to change frequency." "Roger, One -- have a good trip." The pilot removed his respirator. He took the plane to eighteen thousand; from there it looked as if he were flying over an endless ocean of milk. A few times he changed omni frequencies and twice he had conversations with control areas on the ground. The air was nearly still; he indicated # knots airspeed and computed only # knots ground speed with a direct tail wind. The jet stream had moved far north; it had not flowed over the United States at all for six months. He saw Cleveland as a dull red glow under the clouds, with Akron Wely visible in the distance; Pittsburgh was not visible at all and Baltimore, when he passed over it, was only a suggestion of a glowing patch. By that time he was letting down. "Dulles, this is Survey One." "Survey One, Dulles." "Request landing instructions, what else?" "Negative, Survey One. We are now below minimums. Can you hold?" "Estimate thirty minutes reserve, Dulles. Is anything going to change in thirty minutes?" "Stand by. One." In a moment the operator was back. "Divert to Baltimore, One. We just had a power failure here and are on emergency power. The high-intensity approach is out." "Roger, Dulles, out." He changed frequencies. "Baltimore, this is Survey One." "Survey One, go ahead." "I have been diverted from Dulles -- can you take me? I'm about twenty miles north, letting down through eight thousand." "We have a power failure here. on the runway. Can you hold?" "Not long enough to matter; operative?" "Affirmative, the radar is operative." "I have radar, too -- you'll have to talk me in." The pilot turned on his radar and in a moment a wand of light was sweeping back and forth on the display. He adjusted the intensity until only the permanent targets showed. "Stay on this frequency. One," a second voice said. "Turn on your transponder, please." The pilot did. "All right, we verify you eighteen miles northeast. Make a one-minute turn, one-eighty degrees." "Roger." The horizon tipped gently and stayed that way as the plane circled. Then it steadied and flew for several minutes, letting down. "Baltimore, I indicate four thousand five hundred, does that agree with your reading?" "Negative, your transponder shows you at three thousand nine hundred. We have no height-finding radar operative. Stand by." There was a pause, with the carrier still on. "One, we are going to take your altimeter reading, please advise every five hundred feet. You are left on the track, please turn ten right." "Ten right." "That's good, hold it. Get ready for ten left when I say." "Roger." "Get ready for ten left. Now. That's good. Have you the field on radar?" "Affirmative, I think I see the wreck and the two runways. I appear to be lined up with the left one, is that correct?" "Affirmative." "Three thousand five hundred." He was in the soup. "Roger, you are high, please increase sink rate." "Roger." There was silence, then; "Three thousand." Pause. "Two thousand five hundred." Again a pause. "Two thousand." "Drifting right, One, correct left five." "Roger." "Right down the pike." "One thousand five hundred." "Stretch it out a little. One." "Roger." The pilot added power briefly, then cut back again. "One thousand." "Correct left. One, you're drifting left." "Which?" "Correction, correction -- steer right ten. Right ten. Hold it. Now left ten. Have you the runway yet?" "Negative. Ground clutter on radar, no visual. Five hundred." The pilot flipped off the radar. "All right. One, no further acknowledgments, please. Left five. Good. Hold left five -- now correct two right. A little more. Good. You're over the inner marker now, maintain two hundred feet per minute. Drifting left again, correct right. More. All right, fast, ten right and ten left, now. Have you the runway yet?" "Neg -- " and that was all. In the tower, the controller dropped his earphones around his neck and fell back in his seat. He raised his eyes to look through the window. An orange glow showed where the Allegheny Airlines flight had come to rest after wiping out the Instrument Landing System antennas. The rest of the field was black; the blue taxiway marker lights were invisible past the first row. He saw a faint glow moving away from the Allegheny wreck's location, probably an ambulance. "Jack, take it, will you?" the controller called and stood up. He left the tower and made his way down to the apron. In a while an ambulance drove up. "Is this the Survey jet that just came in?" he asked the driver. "Yeah. It didn't burn, must have been using safety fuel." "How many aboard?" "One." The controller moved to the back, where attendants were pulling out the stretcher; its wheels popped into place. A briefcase lay on top of the figure under the blanket. "Is he bad?" the controller asked. "That's a familiar voice," came from the stretcher. "Not dead, thanks." "You were way left at the end." "I'm alive. Wait a minute, you guys, I want to talk to him. Listen, you have to do something for me. Government business and important. Open this and read the instructions inside; then deliver the letters now, tonight, in D.C. There are some loose copies -- read one. It has to be tonight, as soon as possible. Okay?" "Okay." "Good. Then let's get out of here. My legs hurt." He couldn't have picked a better man. The controller had just talked two airplanes right into the ground because of faulty equipment and the worst sock-in ever to hit the East Coast. G race and Pete dropped suitcases, towels and coats by the door and herded the children in. Tim was carrying the baby. Grace said, "Seal the door, Tim, I can't wait to get this thing off my face." She went into the TV room, flipping on the lights, and turned on the Filteraire that took up an entire window. Red lights came on in every room, blinking. "Kids, you can go to the bathroom, but leave the resps on until the green comes on." Pete came out of the kitchen holding a can of beer, unopened. "Come on, green," he said. "I'm thirsty." "I'm thirsty," Peewee said and took off her respirator. "Peewee!" Pete shouted and started toward her. Peewee choked and tried to scream, but she coughed instead and grabbed for her mask. Pete took her mask in one hand and pressed it against her face while he picked her up around the middle with his other arm and ran with her into the TV room. Fie held her face in the strong draft of the Filteraire while she coughed and cried and struggled for breath. Grace came running in. "What did she do? Pete? What happened?" Pete was saying, "Take it easy, Peewee, don't breathe so hard -- come on, honey, take it easy -- Gracie, she's all right. It was only for a couple of seconds -- her resp came off." Finally Peewee sat up by herself, her head against the air outlet, and allowed the respirator straps to be readjusted. She was still coughing, taking long breaths and holding the mask tight with one hand. "Pete, you spilled beer on -- oh, it isn't open." Grace had made a trip to the front room. "Honey, here's your beer. The green is on." Pete waved it away. Cries came from the bedroom: "Green, everybody, green, the green is on!" Tim came in, pulling his mask off. "They're in bed. I took the baby's off -- she's wet." Grace and Pete looked at each other, dangling their masks. She leaned forward and Pete kissed her. "I like you better like this," he said. "Okay, Peewee." He leaned down and pulled at the back elastic on Peewee's mask. Grace went off to see to the baby. "No!" Peewee screamed and pushed him away, holding her mask on and crowding closer to the Filteraire. Pete dropped to his knees beside her. "Honey, the air's all right now, see? Mine is off and Mommy's and Tim's. Look." But Peewee's eyes were shut tight behind the glass goggles and she said "No -- no -- no." "Leave her alone for a while," Grace said, passing by the TV room door. "I'll get us something to eat." She went into the kitchen. "Dad -- your beer," Tim said, holding it toward him. Pete stood up and took it, opened it. "Not very cold. Hey, Peewee -- " but the child huddled where she was. Finally he turned and, noticing the television, switched it on. "Should I turn off some lights?" Tim asked. "Oh -- sure, I forgot." Tim went into the other room, came back and turned off all but one light in the TV room. "You know, I think the voltage is down some more," Tim said, settling into his chair. "Look at that light -- it's real yellow." The picture struggled to life, rolling and dim. Tim rose and turned the vertical hold control, halting the rolling. "The control's all the way to one end," he said. A black band showed top and bottom. "What a lousy picture. Who's he?" "Some kind of announcement, I don't know. Turn up the sound." "It is up," Tim reported. "Oh, the tuning's way off." He got sound. answering an unheard question. "No, we expect the north-side plant to be normal by morning." The camera switched to the questioner, a TV reporter whose mask "Just what caused the breakdown, Mr. Spivak?" Spivak sounded harassed, as if he had been answering the same question for different reporters all day. His rfiask, of course, showed no expression. aren't exactly sure. It seems that when the voltage was reduced last night -- well, I should explain that a great many apartment buildings on the north side have installed voltage boosters to keep their tenants' voltage from dropping when the power company reduces its output. Of course the whole purpose of reducing power is to lessen the load on the generators. The voltage boosters thwart that purpose -- in fact, they have just the opposite effect. When the voltage drops there are additional losses in the boosters themselves and the losses in the power lines are increased by the higher currents they pull. The result is that when the voltage is reduced the power load goes up instead of down." "I see. So if everyone had a voltage booster -- or regulator -- there would be no way ,to reduce the load on the lines?" "That is correct. The only way would be to drop the voltage so far that the regulators would stop working -- and that, of course, is what happened last night. Unfortunately the drop was not carried out on purpose. The sewage treatment plant behind us here has very large pumps operated by electric power. Last night they were all operating, too -- and they're what broke the camel's back. The voltage dropped, the pump motors stalled and then burned out, throwing a very heavy load onto the line. That finished off the generators." "Mr. Spivak, that power station supplies a good part of the public housing and ghetto area as well as the high-rise apartment district, doesn't it? Did those people have regulators, too?" "No. I would say not. Regulators are costly and, of course, there would be none in a public housing project." "Then would it be fair to say that the people in the high-rises who had regulators are directly responsible for the four hundred deaths we had here last night?" "I'm afraid I can't comment on that. It is certainly true that the voltage regulators were a major contributing factor. There were many deaths in all areas." "But many poor people don't own respirators for every member of the family and have to stay inside buildings equipped with filter systems. When the power was lost and the filters stopped -- they had no chance, did they?" "I'm afraid I do not have the answer to that question. Ask city hall. Will you excuse me now? I have to return to my duties." "That was Mr. Arthur Spivak, chief engineer of the Sanitary District. Now back to our studios." The picture changed to show two men without respirators seated at a low table. "Thank you, Art Terrier," one of them said. "This is Tom Friendly again, continuing our report on the North Side disaster. I have with me Mr. Anthony Capuzzo, Democratic alderman from the fortysecond ward which was so hard-hit last night. Mr. Capuzzo, has the mayor been in touch with you?" Capuzzo spoke in a rumbling bass. "His honor called me early this morning, yes. He extended his sincerest sympathy to the bereaved families of my ward. This has been a terrible experience for all of us." "Mr. Capuzzo, what do you think was the main cause of the failure?" "Well, Tom, we'll have to wait for the experts on that one; at the moment we're concentrating on a massive cleanup operation around the sewage plant and on restoring power in the areas where there is still a blackout." "You heard Mr. Spivak, Aiderman -- do you agree that the voltage regulators were a major cause of last night's disaster?" "I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions," Capuzzo said. "You must remember that the Sanitary District has been having difficulties with its equipment." "Are you referring to the controversy between the mayor and Mr. Spivak over the purchase of equipment for sewage treatment and transport?" "Well, Tom, I know that the newspapers have tried to make this into a controversy, but Mr. Spivak is a fine gentleman even if he is a Republican -- " a genial smile -- "and the mayor is in full communication with him. The failure of the two pump motors may have been caused simply by an unpredictable human error, faulty rhaintenance or any of a number of understandable factors. It is certainly true that the instant those two motors burned out the generating station was put out of commission. But I'm no expert. We'll just have to wait for an inquiry to be organized." "Alderman, I understand that there were two deaths in the highrise apartment where you live, but over two hundred in the Cabrini Homes. How do you account for that?" "Tom, we're looking into that, believe me. I'm afraid I must leave." "Mr. Spivak indicated earlier that it was because the high-rises generally have emergency power for six to twelve hours, while the public housing projects have no provision for keeping filter units in operation in an emergency." "I'm afraid Mr. Spivak is jumping to conclusions again. I'm sorry, Tom, but I must get back to my ward -- you understand." Grace's voice came from the kitchen. "Pete, come look at this mess!" "Wait a minute," Pete called. "... for station identification," the announcer was saying. The picture suddenly started to roll. "See if you can fix it, Tim," Pete said and went into the kitchen. "Pete, everything in the freezer's mushy." "There was a big power failure last night -- they must have got our power back just before we got home. Look, the clock is wrong." "But listen, doesn't the fridge sound funny?" Pete cocked an ear. "Yeah. The voltage must be way low." He opened the freezer compartment and felt inside." It sure isn't very cold -- no wonder my beer was warm." Peewee came into the kitchen, still wearing her respirator. "Mommy, I'm hungry and thirsty." "Take off the resp, honey. We'll have dinner soon -- if there's anything that didn't spoil. Take it off, honey. Aren't you tired of it after three days?" Peewee took off her mask. Tim came in. "I turned it off," he said. "There's no more adjustment. I can't stop it from rolling." Grace said, "I heard them talking about voltage regulators. What do they do?" Tim said, "There's an ad in the paper -- I was just looking at it. They say it keeps the voltage from changing." "Do they work?" she asked Pete. "I suppose so. They sell them." "For the whole house?" Pete got an interested look on his face. "Why sure. I suppose so." Grace and he looked at each other, pleased. ' "Sure," Pete said, looking at the refrigerator. "Why not?" Ill I watching the gray-yellow wisps float downward on the screen. "Air-conditioning out?" Macauley, drinking coffee, swiveled the other chair around. "Filters only today. Mayor's orders. Didn't you see the news this morning?" "I don't watch it any more," Joe said. Macauley picked up the mike. "Survey Four, Survey." "Survey Four." A woman's voice, this morning. "Give us the infrared markers, honey." "Roger. This is Survey Four, not honey. Out." "Out." Macauley raised his eyebrows. "Touchy." Joe said after a moment, "Thirty-eight hundred feet. Up two hundred more." "Survey Four, Survey." "Survey Four." "Climb to forty-five hundred and reset range calibration." "Roger." In a few minutes Joe said, "Same. Maybe thirty-seven fifty." Macauley left, went to Taylor's office. It was even hotter in there. Taylor was apparently unoccupied. Macauley sat down. "Did the letters get delivered?" "I'm trying to find out," Taylor said. "You hear about the blackout in D.C. last night?" Macauley looked startled. "I hadn't made the connection. He wouldn't have landed there. Where did he go -- Baltimore?" "Yeah, but he didn't make a very good landing. I understand that he's alive, but how alive I don't know. We've had big trouble with the phone lines this morning. I've been trying to get New York, Washington, or Baltimore for an hour. They don't know anything in Boston." "How about a phone patch on the Survey link?" Macauley asked. "We've done a lot of that lately." The phone rang just then and Taylor picked it up. He listened for a minute, then nodded to Macauley and said, "All right, thank you. Operator; I believe I'll cancel the call now and try another way." He hung up. "Let's go." They went back to the control room and Macauley raised the standby radioman in Baltimore. "Can you get a phone patch through to D.C.?" "Where to? Our own line is working." "Good -- get the Department of the Interior and work the push-totalk at your end for us." "Roger, stand by." They could hear a dial tone, then dialing. A switchboard operator answered. "Department of the Interior." Macauley handed the mike to Taylor, saying, "Push to Talk." "This is James Taylor, director of Chicago Survey Control. I must speak to the Secretary." "One moment, sir." A pause. "This is the Secretary's office, Mr. Taylor. Mr. Homer will speak to you directly." "Hello, Taylor?" "Good morning, Mr. Secretary. Has my courier arrived?" "Is this line secure, Taylor?" Taylor looked at Macauley, who shook his head. "No, sir." "No specifics, then. Your documents arrived and the man is here now. The Secretary of Defense is also here. A helicopter will pick you up at Glenview Navel Air Station at noon your time; I want you on it and anyone else who is privy to the contents of the document. How many are there?" "I'll check, sir. Three, I believe, including my personal secretary and my chief assistant." "All right. I'll see you this evening." "Sir -- is any action being contemplated?" "We'll discuss that this evening. Goodbye." "Chicago, the Department has disconnected." Macauley took the mike. "Okay, Baltimore, thanks. Out." T aylor said to Macauley, "Let's go back to my office. Joe, you haven't heard anything." Joe nodded, his eyes on the screen. They picked up Betty on the way and closed Taylor's office door behind them. Taylor spoke. "I hadn't figured on that so soon. Betty, who else saw those letters?" "Nobody. I sealed them myself and you locked the briefcase." "All right. I didn't want the security angle to come in so soon, but Homer evidently has a different idea. The Secretary of Defense is in on it now and that probably means the Pentagon. If they're still worried about revealing our condition to a foreign power, that means only one thing to me -- they didn't understand what's in the letter. I didn't tell the Secretary about the other letters -- every Senator should have one, as well as the White House and the other Cabinet members. Unless the pilot went to Interior first. He couldn't have been hurt too badly in the crash -- he was there when we called." "Do you hope the letters were delivered -- or weren't?" Macauley asked wryly. "Were. If this gets covered up by security it'll be too late to do anything. We'd better get going. There isn't much time." "Going where?" Betty said. "Oh. We're under security rules now, by the way, whether we like it or not. We've been called to Washington, Betty -- you, too, because you've seen the letter. We have to be at Glenview by noon, which gives us just over two hours. You go home and pack. We'll pick you up in front of your apartment at -- better make it ten-thirty. We can't count on traffic." Macauley said, "Why not take the rapid transit?" "You weren't watching the news," Taylor said. "The northwest side blacked out again this morning and took the rapid transit down with it. Let's;get going." The trip was slow. Betty was on the street, waiting, when they picked her up twenty minutes late. Eden's expressway was solid, all lanes in both directions, everyone with headlights on and behind closed windows. "Look at that," Macauley said. "They still drive into town after all these years, even though they have to wear respirators to do it." "Look at us," Taylor, driving, said wryly. "We have a sealed car with air conditioning and filters, so our engine is carrying half again the normal load, putting out more gunk than anyone." Betty said, "But we're on important business." "So are they," Taylor said. "That's the trouble. Everyone has business; everyone needs air to breathe; everyone has to keep food from spoiling; everyone needs to watch TV -- it goes on and on. Everybody simply copes with the situation as best he can. When the air gets thicker you go out and buy a more powerful filter unit, which draws more power and calls for more power generation, which makes the air even worse. The voltage regulator and your voltage goes back up -- but the power fails altogether because of the extra load. The public transportation breaks down, so you drive to work and that makes the soup thicker outside. And so it goes. You don't just suffer -- you try to do something. But if you work in a mill, a store, or drive a taxi, you don't have the power to correct what's causing the problem -- you just cope with the symptoms one at a time, as they come up. The richer you get, the worse you make the situation." Macauley added: "And every time you buy a new gadget you improve the situation inside your own little bubble -- and between the bubbles it keeps getting deadlier." Betty asked, "Have you heard about the water pumps?" Macauley said, "No." "Our apartment just got one. It keeps the water pressure up even when the city lowers it. I thought it was nice, but I suppose that's just like the voltage regulators. Our bubble has one of those, too." "Water pumps!" Macauley snorted. "So what happens when there's a fire? Those pumps will suck the lines dry. And I'll bet they're all run by electric motors." Taylor said, "I saw that thing last night on the voltage regulators. I wish they hadn't mentioned them at all. The more people know about them, the more will buy them. They don't care what it does to anyone else. I feel that we're dangerously close to the situation where nobody can afford to be altruistic any more -- we're living closer and closer to the edge of a breakdown. I wish I knew just how close we are." "Oh, it's just awfull" Betty said. "I guess you could call it that." Taylor's comment shut off the conversation. He concentrated on changing lanes. T hey reached the gate at Glenview an hour late. Two plainclothesmen were waiting for them there; they got into the car and all proceeded to the control-tower parking area. A helicopter was waiting, its blades revolving lazily. It took off as soon as they were aboard and belted in. It was a huge long-range Air Force helicopter with jet engines for cruising; they stopped at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to refuel, had a late snack for lunch and touched down next at a pad next to the Pentagon. An underground passageway, sweltering but filtered, took them to a bank of elevators and their elevator let them out some stories higher at a carpeted lobby, air-conditioned and comfortable. "Another bubble," Betty whispered to Macauley as the plainclothesmen and Taylor talked to the receptionist. In a moment they were all ushered into a huge, carpeted office, containing soft leathered easy chairs in Air Force blue, arranged before an impressive desk. Behind the desk were the Air Force flag and the American flag on standards and the wall backing them was covered solidly with drapes of a deep rich blue. The three were left alone. They studied the rest of the room. One entire wall was taken up by a spectacular blowup of a squadron of supersonic fighterbombers peeling off toward wooded hills below. Smoke was visible rising between the trees in a cratered area and small white puffs showed where new craters were being formed. A person sitting behind the desk could visualize himself hanging poised, ready for the long slide down through the air toward the jungle, as if he were a member of the squadron. Macauley said, looking at the picture, "All I can think of is how clear the air is." "You can't even tell what country it is," Betty said and swiveled her chair away from the picture. An aide -- a major in incredibly perfect sartorial condition -- came in briskly and sat on the edge of the desk, smiling. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Have a nice trip?" "Not bad," Taylor said. "We were held up in traffic," Macauley added. "General Soames will be with you shortly. He wants to brief you before you go over to the White House. All informal, of course. Would you like anything? Coffee? Drink?" There were no takers and the aide left them alone again. Macauley discovered that his chair squeaked. Abruptly the door swung open again and another major came in, carrying a briefcase in one hand and what could only be one of the letters in the other -- the letterhead was visible as the aide set it in the center of the desk. The aide nodded amiably to the visitors, sat down in a chair behind and to the left of the desk. He snapped open the attache case, which converted into a writing table. He arranged pads and pens on it in his lap. Finally the main contingent appeared. Two more aides, colonels, held the doors open while a perfectly pressed general, obviously Soames, came through, followed by two lesser generals talking easily with each other. Soames was physically fit, whitehaired, clean shaven and handsome. The aides fanned out; one of the trailing generals sat on the corner of the desk while Soames himself pulled up a swivel chair to form a circle with the visitors. The other trailing general went over to the stenographer-aide, who said something that made them both laugh quietly. The two colonels found seats behind the trio. T he aide sitting at the desk stood. "General, may I introduce Miss Hatch, Mr. Macauley and the Director of Chicago Survey Control, Mr. James Taylor? General Soames." He sat again. He had the names all correct and had ordered the introduction so that the general shook hands last and most lengthily with Taylor and spoke to him first. "I appreciate your coming, Taylor," he said. "I don't want to hold you up, so let's get to business. Please be seated." They sat and the stenographer-aide in the background quietly undipped a pen from his tunic pocket and began to write. "This is strictly informal," the general said. "I have your letter and it has been thoroughly discussed. We asked you to come because we take it seriously, very seriously indeed." "General, I don't recall addressing any of the letters to you," Taylor said quietly. "Is that right? Well, I'm sure you sent a copy to the Secretary of Defense." "It hasn't yet been delivered." "I see. It doesn't matter, of course, but John, do you know how we happened to obtain a copy?" "Your courier brought us an unaddressed copy," the lesser general said to Taylor. Macauley shot a look at Taylor, but Taylor merely shrugged. "I see. That accounts for it." "Yes." The general collected his thoughts. "Uh, with regard to the situation you describe, I take it that there have been no new developments?" Macauley said, "The top of the cloud layer was one hundred and fifty feet higher on our survey run east this morning. There have been two major power failures in Chicago in the last twelve hours." The aide sitting on the desk said, "Power has been restored. General. Mr. Macauley wouldn't have known that." "Yes," Soames said. "So the outage was temporary, as was ours in Washington. But the overall situation remains most serious, as you pointed out, Taylor." Taylor asked, "What is going to be done? You read my recommendations?" "Oh, yes, and they are being given full consideration. However, you must realize that the consequences of such drastic measures must be weighed against other considerations that are just as alarming. Perhaps more so. We have a job to do here, too, as I am sure you realize. We have to consider may factors that don't affect you in your work in Chicago." "I hope you realize. General Soames, that this situation extends from west of the Mississippi to the East Coast," Macauley pointed out. "Oh, yes, yes," the aide on the desk said. "There was a thorough briefing this morning. The Air Force is much aware of the problem." "What specifically do you want from us?" Taylor asked. "All right. Very specifically, Taylor, we feel after very careful consideration -- very careful -- that the international situation just now would make immediate implementation of your recommendations, as they stand, most undesirable. What you suggest would put us in a dangerously weakened position. That is not to say that certain steps cannot be taken, however. We have the whole country to consider and it may be that by transferring certain industrial facilities to less affected areas we can substantially reduce the hazard. I want you to give this very careful consideration. A massive effort, with the Air Force solidly behind you, to move power generation, oil refining and other industries away from the cities. We feel that you are in the ideal position to direct such a redeployment -- we have urged such a course for years and you will have our full support. You can see how such a move would go a long way toward solving the impurity problem." Macauley started to speak, but Taylor interrupted. "I see. General Soames -- or I believe I do. Let me rephrase it. You feel that we at Survey Control can pinpoint areas in which the generation of -- er -- impurities is minimal and remove the offending plants from those areas where the concentration of industries causes serious problems. A sort of decentralizing strategy. It strikes me that this would also have the effect of making such industries much less susceptible to surprise attack." The general leaned forward and stared hard into Taylor's eyes. "Taylor, you understand us exactly. From the military point of view, shutting down all these industries would create an open invitation to attack, from within as well as from wtthout the country. Spreading them out would have just the opposite effect -- and it would go a long way toward solving your problem as well." He sat back. "Gentlemen -- and Miss Uh -- I think we have accomplished our purpose. It has been a most productive meeting." The General stood and all stood with him. He shook hands all around and left, the colonels preceding him to hold the door and the lesser generals bringing up the rear, talking easily to each other again. One of them paused as he passed Teylor. "We're glad you're with us, Taylor," he said, offering his hand. Taylor shook it, saying, "My pleasure." The stenographer-aide stood up and said, "If you would please come with me you may wash up. We have dinner for you if you care to eat here. Macauley said softly to Taylor as they filed oyt, "If we did what they want thre wouldn't be a break from the East Coast to the Rockies inside a year." "I know -- shut up. There won't be in any case." Betty whispered, "Wasn't he impressive? I was scared to death." Macauley took her arm and whispered back, "That was the whole point." IV I cauley said to Betty. "President's secretary in there," pointing. The plainclothesmen -- a new pair -- left without comment. "Do you have the sensation of people scurrying around behind the walls telling people that we're here?" Macauley asked noboty. "So far I haven't seen anyone call ahead, but somehow they're always ready for -- " The secretary's door opened. George Farrow came out -- they all recognized him. "Thank you for coming," he said. "Let's see, you're Betty Hatch, you -- Mr. Macauley. And you have to be Taylor." He grinned as he shook hands -- he was black, too. The contrast with the reception at the Pentagon was considerable; they were at ease. "The President will be right out," Farrow said. "He's on the phone." "Who will be here?" "Oh, a lot of people from Interior, Defense, Commerce and so on. Don't worry, I don't think they're going to pick on you. They just want to find out exactly what you think about the situation. It's not a regular cabinet meeting, although you'll be in the cabinet room. Have you had any dinner?" "They gave us a nice dinner at the Pentagon," Betty said. Farrow gave her a quick look, said, "Excuse me a moment, please -- " and disappeared by his door. Taylor said flatly, "They didn't know we were taken to the Pentagon first. We may find ourselves in the middle of something." "Shouldn't I have said it?" Betty asked, worried. "It's all right, Betty, we have nothing to hide," Taylor said. "If I know anything about President Holland, though, he's not going to be pleased." "Are you going to tell him about the other letters?" Macauley queried. "I don't think that will be necessary by now," Taylor said. The secretary came out again. "Miss Hatch, gentlemen, the President." President Holland strode out past Farrow and shook hands firmly but quickly. "Hello, Miss Hatch, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Macauley. George has just told me that you stopped at the Pentagon. Did you talk to Carver or Soames?" "Soames, Mr. President," Taylor said. "He wants to decentralize. I didn't tell him why it won't work." "Good. Before we go in, how many copies of the letter went out -- and roughly to whom?" "Betty?" "Uh, let's see -- I made about one hundred and twenty copies, one to each Senator, one to each Cabinet member and some extras loose. And one to you, Mr. President." "Why so many, Taylor? Are you trying to take this to the public?" "No, Mr. President. But I had to make sure that one person or a handful couldn't -- lose it. Or at least I tried to make sure. No offense intended." "The Senators didn't get theirs. Your courier left a copy here and went next to Interior, where he was held." "General Soames appeared to have a copy." "Oh. The loose sheets. How did ficial to carry them?" Taylor and Macauley looked at each other. out. Betty said quietly, "The pilot must have been injured. He sent someone else." "Must be it," Taylor said. "So he probably read a loose copy and sent it or took it to the Pentagon before he went anywhere else. No wonder. By the way, I know that the pilot read a copy. I thought he was here." Farrow quietly left the room and they heard dialing. The President said, "All right, we know where we are now. Let's join the others in the Cabinet Room. Miss Hatch and Mr. Macauley, you may attend, but please do not comment or amplify unless you're directly questioned." He led the way. people around the large table stood as the President entered. The President indicated a chair near him for Taylor and motioned the others to seats farther down the table. "I see that everyone I asked is here," the President said after looking around the room. "Thank you. This is Mr. Taylor, director of our Chicago Survey Control headquarters -- his associates, M iss Hatch and Mr. Macauley." There were nods and a few handshakes. "This is not a regular Cabinet meeting as you can see, but an emergency fact-finding session. There will be a Cabinet meeting later, if warranted. We are here because Mr. Taylor has brought to a head the problem that has been on all our minds for many months -- or years. I invited Mr. Taylor and his associates at the advice of the Secretary of the Interior, Tom Homer, partly, and mainly to get Mr. Taylor's analysis of the situation directly, and partly -- " he smiled slightly -- "to keep them from creating any more mischief." A chuckle ran around the table. "Mr. Taylor feels strongly enough about the situation to have taken a personal risk in making sure his views became known. Since he is also as knowledgeable as any man in this country about what is happening we have to take his alarm seriously -- perhaps even more seriously than we take our own, since we see only the surface. "As President, I have many pressing concerns, but if Mr. Taylor is interpreting his data correctly, I am inclined to think that this incredible deterioration of our environment is the most pressing of all. Mr. Cooper?" The Secretary of Defense had a hand up. "Mr. President, we at the Department of Defense also have serious concerns, as you know. With outsiders present I cannot make my point fully, but our enemies have been following our cloud cover closely and they realize how near to the danger point we are. If we believe that the impurity control situation might get out of hand in our major cities, we must carefully consider the effect that this will have in international calculations. We, ourselves, may have to launch energetic measures simply to provide breathing space in which to tackle the environmental problem. I understand that this problem is very serious, but here we have a plain question of survival." The President said, "Tom, you chair the meeting." Homer stood. "The question of national defense is moot of course. I would ask my Undersecretary of Impurity Control to comment, but he is not available, so let us hear from Mr. Taylor right away. Mr. Taylor?" T aylor rose slowly. "Thank you, Mr. Homer. I can't comment on national defense, but what Mr. Cooper has said and what I heard this afternoon from General Soames show that my point hasn't been made. It isn't just cloud cover out there -- it's poison gas, just as much as if an enemy had sprayed it on us. It isn't getting out of control; it is out of control. And, Mr. President, we don't have here a case of environmental deterioration -- those words are used so often that one gets the feeling that the environment is going to" pieces out there while we just stand helplessly by and watch it go on. That isn't how it's happening at all. "What we see going on around us is the visible evidence of a war. Everyone of us lives in an environment that is made up partly of his neighbors' waste products. A few years ago we had the means to get rid of those wastes so they didn't stay around long enough to be noticeable. Now that situation has changed and it's changed in such a way that we are all coming into direct conflict with each other. We are beginning to see and breathe and taste each others' waste products and we can no longer get rid of them fast enough. "It's a war because we have reached the point where one man can't do what he needs to do in order to survive without doing something against the survival of other people. We shouldn't look at the environment that exists between people -- we should be looking at each individual himself, for it's what he is doing, not what the environment is doing, that's causing the problem. "Don't look outside, look inside. Look at this room we're in -- well-lit, cool, full of fresh air, fresh water in the pitchers, all of us clean and healthy. How do we manage to maintain this state? The biologists have known the answer for a long time. They say that life is a process of creating order out of disorder -- but that can happen only by making more disorder somewhere else. We cool this room -- but we heat up the outside air to do it. And we filter the air -- but the cooling and the filtering require electric power -- and that power requires generators and the generators spew out smoke and poisonous gases. The cleaner we keep our little -- bubbles, as my associate calls them -- the dirtier we make it outside and the greater the load we put on the filters and coolers. "Our problem stems from a basic fact of human existence: people are not passive victims of their environments, but active controllers of them. When a man feels cold in his house he doesn't just huddle under the covers and shiver -- he turns the thermostat higher. If he doesn't have a big enough furnace, he goes out and buys a bigger one or gets one however he can. If he can't breathe the air he works harder until he can buy a filter unit for his house. If the water pressure falls, he raises it with an electric pump; if the voltage goes down, he raises it again with a voltage regulator. And that's the problem. Each person is capable of finding ways to control the little part of the environment that he is interested in -- but what he does to the rest doesn't enter his calculations. It can't -- we're talking about a lot more than comfort now. In six major cities, if you lose your filter unit and don't have a respirator nearby, you die. "If something doesn't happen to change this situation, then following my recommendations won't accomplish a thing. We'll be right back where we are now, but next time it won't take so long. We have to find some kind of ordering principle that everyone can believe in, so that there is more awareness of the relationship of little self-protecting actions to what's causing the need for them. We have to educate the public to the fact that their self-protecting actions aren't working, even when they seem to work for a while. "That's a matter beyond my competence -- I hope i,t isn't beyond everyone's competence. Right now we are faced with doing something to put an immediate end to this war of person against person. It doesn't matter what the Russians are planning or what this means to the Chinese or what it does to our credibility with our allies. It doesn't matter, because if we project the figures we have now just two months ahead--to the time when heating of homes and offices will have to start -- we can see that this country will be utterly disarmed and helpless. That is why I picked the period of sixty days in my recommendations. In sixty days, no matter how well we cope with the situation now, we will have total collapse of all power systems. "One last thing. We can't wait. I don't know how close the system is running now to the edge of disaster and probably nobody does. All our major cities are operating with negative power reserves; they require an input of power from the outside twentyfour hours a day because their own plants are inadequate. The plants are inadequate because the air and water are so bad that everyone has to have devices -- but I've already been through that. On the West Coast, they're closer to the edge than we are in the East -- it may already be too late for the Pacific Seaboard. "Our predictions are beginning to fail -- to fall behind the reality. The cloud cover is complete over the northeast quadrant of the country two months ahead of predictions; it's thickening at a rate which we can't possibly explain. We failed to see that the completion of the cloud cover in the West would change the rainfall pattern and denude the Rockies of vegetation. There will be more such failures -- because we have never seen anything like this happening before. I'm sorry for taking so much of your time and telling you things you probably already know -- but for God's sake, gentlemen, Mr. President, there is no time left." There was silence for a moment, then Homer said, "Thank you, Mr. Taylor. I have tried to say something similar for years. Mr. President?" "Not yet, Tom." H omer eyed several hands, then called on a person who did not have his hand up. "Uh, National Science Foundation, Dr. Klausman?" Klausman standing was not much taller than his neighbttrs sitting. He spoke slowly. "Mr. Chairman. Mr. President. Laties and chentlemen. Ass Mr. Tay-lore has said. Ve do not yet understan-t ze proplem. Is iss -- no doubt-t seeerious." He paused and looked around from under heavy eyebrows. "Putt! Ve can. Not. Attack it. Plindly. Haastil-ly. IG! norantly. It iss uuurgent. Zat ve com mence a seeerious. Inwestigation. Im -- meeda..y He sat down. There was an uncomfortable silence until Homer realized that the doctor was finished. He said, "Uh, thank you. Doctor. Yes, Mr. President?" "There certainly will be an immediate investigation. Mr. Taylor has not presented us with many facts tonight, but I am inclined to accept the general tenor of his remarks. The figures in his letter do not exactly speak for themselves and I confess that I had not comprehended their significance until tonight. We are indeed under poison gas attack. Does anyone here see any reason to continue this meeting before I convene the Cabinet?" Five hands shot into the air. "I thought not. The immediate question is not that of Mr. Taylor's persuasiveness, but of the facts on which he rests his analysis. If the facts are exactly as he has stated in his letter -- and of course I have no reason to doubt that they are -- then I must agree that we have here a question of survival that goes beyond national defense." There was a loud objection from the Secretary of Defense. "Later, Bob, at the Cabinet meeting. I move to adjourn this gathering. Dr. Klausman, I want you to name an emergency panel to go over Mr. Taylor's data and analysis." Klausman beamed. "Immeeediately, Mr. Presitent. Visin ze veek." "No, Doctor, within the hour, please. I want them in Chicago no later than day after tomorrow." Klausman looked alarmed. He fished a sheaf of tattered papers out of an inside pocket and wandered off without saying goodbye, muttering, "Valter? Eberhardt? Cardvell?" The President pointed to Taylor, Macauley and Betty and motioned them to follow him out of the room. "I have to convene the rest of the Cabinet," he told them in the Oval Room. "Don't be alarmed at the brevity of that meeting. I saw that the right people were properly impressed and that was all I wanted. Mr. Taylor, you have my thanks -- and there will be a letter to back that up. Just take it easy with those bloodthirsty recommendations. I'll take care of the Pentagon." He was gone. The secretary, Farrow, rescued Taylor and his caborts from the cluster of questioners that immediately surrounded them -- somewhat to Macauley's disappointment: he hadn't had a chance to express his opinion. "We've arranged for immediate transportation back to Chicago," Farrow said. "You'll take the Presidential helicopter to Wheelis Air Force Base, then an Army helicopter to Chicago. Your bags will be there." And it was over. Over Pennsylvania, under a moonless sky, words returned. Macauley said, "That's some President. I didn't even vote for him." Taylor nodded. "You know, I felt like a wide-eyed teenager after it was over." Betty turned in her seat and put a hand firmly on his arm, "No, Jim. It didn't look like that at all. You said it a lot better than you think you did. I was there." "But I didn't -- well, thanks. I just wonder what they're going to do -- and if they'll do it in time." Later they were awakened by a corporal. "Almost there," he said. "We're setting down at Meigs. There'll be a car." They looked through the window and after a while a dull red glow appeared in the clouds, lighting them up as if some great furnace had sped molten slag over a thousand square miles of the land beneath. As they sank toward the glowing layer of pollution Taylor turned his head away. "Shee-#," he said quietly, but with feeling. "What are they going to do?" V downward on the screen. A red dot in the center, sometimes breaking up into two. Joe picked up the mike. "Survey two, are you holding fifty-five hundred?" "Affirmative." "Survey two, ncrease altitude to six thousand. We are ojing your marker. J?eset calibration." "Roger." "Denver Control, this is Chicago Control, over." "Denver Control, over." "We have five, two five zero pressure altitude here on a line extending west from Chicago about three hundred miles." Joe sighed and dropped the singsong. "Are you in it yet?" "Affirmative. The Long's Peak Station reports continuous cover in all directions east of the mountains. Estimated top, fifty one hundred, mean sea level. Buildings in Denver are still showing through." "Roger, thanks, out." Joe paused. "New Orleans Control, this is Chicago Control." "N'y Orleans Control." "Is your survey plane activated yet?" "Negative. This afternoon, maybe." "Airline reports?" "A couple, but there's not much flying. The top seems to be at about eleven hundred and slopes up north and east. We have a tanker report of heavy pollution two hundred miles south in the Gulf. They're on radar and loran navigation. Oh, the mayor put out an order this morning; respirators to be provided for all who can't afford them, up to four per family. We've had some deaths." "Roger, I heard that on the news. Thanks. Out." Joe scribbled on a pad for a while, then braced himself and picked up the mike once more. "San Francisco Control, this is Chicago Control, over." "... isco Control, pardon me, go ahead." "We understand your planes are grounded again today. Do you confirm?" "Affirmative, affirmative. Nothing in or out. We're down to one hundred feet visibility everywhere. Is this Joe?" "Affirm. Who's this?" "Tubby. This will be my last shift -- I'm getting out. I have asthma. There's still no power. We're on emergency here." "Oh -- well, it must be bad." "That's the word. We have martial law in California as of this -- " The carrier stopped and static rushed in the speaker. "Frisco, Frisco, Chicago Control, over." No reply. Joe picked up a telephone. "Listen, do two things. Get Taylor up here -- Control Room. Oh, is he still here? Well, get him up quick anyway -- this is more important. And then raise San Francisco Control on the land line for me. No, wait. I'll dial it myself. Get Taylor." He depressed the button, then dialed ten numbers. "San Francisco operator." It was a male voice. "Flave you a priority?" "Uh -- yes. This is Chicago Survey Control. I want our station in San Francisco at, uh, nine-sevenseven -- three-three-oh-three." "Stand by." Long pause. Taylor came through the door followed by Macauley and a stranger. Joe held them off with a palm and flipped on the loudspeaker. The operator returned. "That exchange is inoperative. Stand by." There was another wait, then a click and the dial tone returned. Joe swiveled around. "I had Tubby on the link. Friend of mine in Frisco. He said they have martial law as of -- and then they went off the air." "As of when?" Macauley asked. "That's when the carrier quit. I don't know. I think someone pulled the plug." Taylor said, "My God!" "Some other stuff." Joe referred to his pad. "Denver has it this morning, same pressure altitude as here. It's eleven hundred feet in New Orleans and goes at least two hundred miles into the Gulf." The stranger said, "That does it. From the Rockies to the East Coast. It only took fifteen days to spread fifteen hundred miles." "Oh, Joe, this is Dr. Cardwell from Carnegie. He's staying on as a data analyst. This is Joe Foster, Doctor, our chief of survey operations." "Glad to meet you, Joe. Do you handle the whole operation yourself?" "Lord, no," Joe said. He waved through the window at the room beyond; about half the crew was there, sitting before their consoles. "They all do the work. I just stick to the hot spots. And we're just aerial survey -- downstairs are the guys who work from ground level up." "Yes, I've seen that," Cardwell said. "What about the martial law rumor, Jim?" "Let's get on it right from here," Taylor said. "Find some chairs." He picked up the telephone. "Barbara, get me the Undersecretary -- or if he isn't there, get me Mr. Homer. Emergency, you can tell them. Oh, wait -- " he fished out his wallet with one hand and flipped it open. "Tell them Mr. Sharp is calling. That's right." H e held the phone and put his wallet away. "You're sworn in, Joe?" Joe nodded. "That was the code for 'drop everything.' He should answer soon." Joe said, "It's weird. The cover is five thousand to fifty-two hundred feet pressure altitude from Boston to Denver -- the only reason Denver isn't buried is that the ground rises nearly to the top there." "We're getting a handle on what's causing that," Cardwell said. "It's vtthat astronomers call albedo -- the percentage of the sun's radiation reflected by a planet. These clouds are strongly reflective in the visible and infrared, so only about one-fifth of the normal solar energy penetrates to the ground. And about sixty percent of the energy is reflected back into space, instead of the normal thirty percent." "Then why is it so hot?" Macauley asked. "Stored heat, internal heat from Earth. That normally radiates away, but now it's reflected, too, back down. Actually it's no hotter than it should be this late in August, but upstairs things are different. There's a sharp inversion layer at about five thousand feet without nonhomogeneities to break it up. And no wind to speak of. The jet stream has moved to central Canada and the cloud layer is preventing the usual variations in temperature that can drive winds and break up inversions. So here we sit.". "Why does it keep getting thicker?" Joe asked. "Say, isn't that call taking a long time?" Taylor nodded. "What's up, Barbara? Oh? Well, as soon as you get them, ring me back." He cradled the receiver. "Still trying to raise Washington. We may have to go to phone patch again." "Well, we think" Cardwell said, "we think it's simply the release of stored heat, the inversion layer and the normal output of contaminants, if you can dignify contaminants with the word 'normal.' The inversion layer is moving upward and underneath it normal mixing fills the volume as fast as it increases." He shrugged. "Or something. We don't know yet." Taylor picked up the phone and said, "Barbara, I think I'll take: this in my office. Oh -- all right." He sat down with the phone propped between shoulder and ear. "She got through and they're trying to raise Homer at the White House now." There was a brief wait and then: "Hello, yes, this is Mr. Sharp -- hello, Mr. Secretary. Taylor. Have you had any recent reports from California? Yes, we have. The survey station has suspended transmissions as of -- uh -- fifteen minutes ago. No, sir. Suddenly." He turned to Joe. "Any sign of interference, trouble, before that? " "Negative." "Normal, sir. The phrase was used, 'pulled the plug.' Talking at the time, yes, sir. Have you heard any rumors -- uh, I used the phrase advisedly, Mr. Secretary. Perhaps -- no, I won't, sir. Perhaps you should contact San Francisco Control by telephone, sir. By telephone, yes. Specifically. All right, I'll be here. Good..." "... bye," he said, hanging up. "I didn't think I was getting through to him and he wasn't saying how much they already know." "Maybe we ought to find a TV," Macauley said. "They couldn't keep it a secret from the networks." "Hah!" Taylor picked up the telephone again. "Barbara, get me Just the switchboard -- I don't know anyone there." "Jim, is that a good idea?" Cardwell said. Taylor looked at him. "Act first, think later," he said. "I'm getting tired. Barbara, forget it. Yeah, I changed my mind." He put down the phone. "It's hard to sit by and hope they're doing the right thing somewhere else," Cardwell said sympathetically. Taylor nodded. Then he straightened up. "Well, we can't just sit here paralyzed," he said. "We have work to do." H e stood up and all the lights went out. The control panel flickered, but held; a few incandescent blubs came to life in the ceiling. "We're on standby power," Macauley said. He reached over and picked up the telephone. "Barbara? Good, it's still working. Barbara, we have a power failure, will you see that all personnel are alerted and announce that everyone is to have respirators at standby? Do you have any light? Good. Don't let anyone call home yet -- we have to keep this line open for a call from Washington. Announce yellow alert, too. Right." He hung up. Joe nipped an intercom switch and said, "Power failure, men. Get your respirators out and keep them handy. We're still operational." There were some waves from the men at the consoles. The phone rang and Taylor picked it up. "Taylor here." He listened for awhile, then said, "Okay, we'll just have to wait." He put the phone down again. "She tried to set up a line with the Washington operator and there's no answer. She's trying to get a different routing on the line." The radio came to life. "Chicago Control, this is Baltimore, over." Joe answered. "Chicago." "Chicago, I have a phone patch for you from Washington. The land lines are out." "Roger, Baltimore, go ahead." There was a click, then a new voice. "Hello, this is the White House operator, Mr. Sharp, please?" Joe handed the microphone to Taylor, turned off the phone speaker, plugged in earphones, which he handed to Taylor. Taylor said, "Yes, this is Mr. Sharp. All right. Hello? Oh -- yes, sir. Yes sir, we're operational, but we've had a power -- all right, sir. One moment." Taylor turned to Joe, a strange look on his face. "Joe, could you raise Kirjland Air Force Base in Albuquerque?" Joe thought. "We'd have to be awfully lucky," he said. "Can you get us a frequency near the one we're using?" Taylor said into the phone, "Sir, we need to know a calling frequency near our normal frequency. Sir, there are others here. Yes, all sworn in. Ail right." He waited, pulled over a pad and picked up a pen. He wrote. "All right, I have it. Thanks -- goodbye. Taylor again, sir, we're working on it. Will you hold?" He turned to Joe. "What about it, Joe?" "I'll have to ask the chief engineer. Be right back." Joe took the pad, left the room and reappeared on the other side of the window. He strode to a far desk and spoke to a man sitting there. In a moment the left by another door and Joe came back. "Andy says he can do it," Joe said. "He'll have to retune the transmitter, receiver and antenna, but it won't take long; this station has already been changed to different frequencies a couple of times." In a moment the monitor screens went to snow. Taylor said, "Wait, Joe, how can we keep the link with Baltimore?" Joe grinned. "We can. Stop worrying, boss. I can do the relaying right from here." The man beyond the window came back and waved. Joe picked up an operator's microphone, plugged it in, adjusted it around his neck and put on earphones. "See, I listen with the phones and work the switch to connect Washington to Kirtland. If we can raise them." He toggled a switch. "Kirtland Air Force Base, this is Chicago Survey Control, do you read, over?" A reply came faintly through noise. "Kirtland, over." "Kirtland, I have emergency traffic. We are a fixed frequency station, can you retune? This is an emergency." "Stand by, Chicago." After a pause, Kirtland came in loud and clear. "Chicago, state the nature of the emergency." Joe said, "The President of the United States wants to talk to -- " Taylor was waving. "Commanding officer," he said. Joe nodded. "To the commanding officer of the base." Another voice came on. "This is the O.D. We have no notification of such a call." Joe silently handed the mike to Taylor. "This is James Taylor, director of Chicago Survey Control. I have the President on the line and he has requested a phone patch to your commanding officer. Wait -- " he listened to his earphones. "The President wants to speak to 'Wet-pants' Blake." "Stand by." There was a wait, and the first voice came back. T aylor handed the microphone back to Joe, who held the talk button in and counted seconds to himself. When he let it up the voice came in clearly. "You're in luck, Chicago, we have a good skip. The patch is in." Joe pointed to Taylor. "Mr. President, the patch is ready and I presume the commanding officer will be on shortly. Thank you. Do you want to wait or be connected now? All right. This is not a secure line, Mr. President. Oh, I see. All right." He handed the microphone to Joe, who unplugged it and threw some switches. The loudspeaker said, "Chicago, General Blake will be on the line in a moment." Joe flipped a switch, waited and flipped it back. "Ohmygawd. U mean, yes, sir, Mr. President." ( ) "Spiegel, sir. I'm glad to meet you, too, sir. Uh, here's General Blake." Blake's voice said, "Hello, Fred. That was a hell of a password." ( ) "Sure, we're in contact with them, three ways. No operations, though -- they've been socked in for a week." ( ) "We could refuel a copter at Reno and base the search there. I can tell you now there's nothing to see -- it's solid to seven thousand feet west of the Rockies." ( ) "I see, I suppose Edwards would be the place. I can't believe it, though. There has to be an explanation. Didn't they get anything from Portland or Seattle?" ( ) "That's crazy, Fred. You can't lose contact with a whole state. Listen, Fred, I'll go ahead and order the helos out, but I'm going to get on our secure lines to Edwards and see what they have to say. Why didn't you call me that way?" ( ) "Well, what the hell can Soames do? You're still Commander-inChief, aren't you?" ( ) When Blake came back he sounded deadly serious. "There's only one thing to do. Divert the power and shut down the secure lines. If Soames could hear me he'd shit, but That's what I'd do. We never figured that the emergency power would be needed for preserving life, but here we are." ( ) "Well, we can't live with it, but we can't live without it either. If it's as bad as you say the country is wide open anyhow. We can't keep that a secret for another hour. I'll try to raise Edwards now, but the chances are that they've discovered the same thing. I hope they kept at least one line up. I'll get back to you this way as soon as I know anything. Fred -- well, out." Joe spoke quickly into the microphone. "Mr. President, this is Chicago: I had to listen, sir, to do the switching. Can I tell Mr. Taylor?... Yes, sir. Only that. We'll stand by on Kirtland's frequency, yes, sir -- but sir, we may not be able to hold it. We had a lucky skip. I don't know, sir -- one hour, two hours. You can't tell. No, sir, only one frequency at a time. Yes, sir, I would recommend that. Thank you." He switched and said, "Baltimore, we are finished for the time being. Stand by on this frequency from now on, over." "Roger, Chicago, out." J OE turned around. "California is in trouble. I guess you got that. I'm not supposed to get more specific. But there's something you have to know: power's down everywhere from here to Washington. The President has ordered all emergency generators, civilian and military, to be diverted to running emergency filter units. Our orders are to stay on the air and stay operational." "I can guess the rest," Cardwell said. "It's pretty clear that the Pentagon is fighting to keep security going and the President is shutting down their communications to keep them from going off half-cocked. Although I suppose they can contribute a substantial amount of standby power." Macauley said, "I think we may have a problem, too." He sniffed significantly. Taylor said, "We may be here a long time, so we had better try to keep this floor, or part of it, clean. Joe, get your men together and see how long we could operate one filter unit for this floor -- and the cafeteria freezer -- just on the emergency power unit. And stay operational, of course." A thought struck him. "My God, there are ten thousand people in this building. Let's get our office people into respirators and send them downstairs. There won't be any elevators. Make sure everyone below knows what to expect, and try to get them to go home." The telephone rang. Taylor said, "Cardwell, will you take over the evacuation? This is bound to be more trouble." Cardwell nodded and left. The telephone said, "Chicago Survey Control?" "Yes." "This is Denver Survey. You must have the last working line in the country. I have a phone patch for you from your Survey Two; he can't raise you." "Go ahead, we can't receive him." There was some clicking and a new voice came on. "Survey, this is Survey Two, over." "Survey Two, this is Taylor. Is this Bates or Peterson?" "Bates. I have an emergency report -- I wish I could show it to you. Survey Four has been trying to raise you, too, probably about the same thing." "Go ahead. I'm recording." Taylor waved at Joe, who reached over and started the telephone recorder. The loudspeaker went bleep. "Roger. I'm at nine thousand five hundred feet over the Mississippi River, I reckon, about sixty miles south of Moline. I don't know exactly -- the Rockford omni has quit. As near as I can tell the cloud top is averaging about six thousand feet, repeat, six thousand feet. And the damndest thing is happening to it!" The voice sounded shaken, but steadied as it went on. "I can see a vague sort of line running north and south; east of the line the color of the clouds is a dark orange and west it's the same color as before, sort of dirty yellow. It isn't really a sharp line; I'm over it now; but there's a gradual change -- the orange bulges out ahead in places and then fills in between the bulges, while more bulges are starting. It's sort of creeping along, not very fast. Say, ten knots. What the hell is it?" T aylor dosed his eyes and sat down. "Survey Two, we must get pictures. Give us about five minutes to reset our receivers. Start transmitting now, with range marker in the infrared." "Roger. By the way, I can see a big bulge sticking up over the horizon where Chicago is." "Okay, Two. And empty your sample bottles, we'll have to have some of that. Out." He saw Joe through the control room window and knocked on it. Joe went to an intercom and asked, "What is it?" Taylor looked at the console and gave up. He beckoned Joe to come. "Joe, we've got to get the telemetry going again; something is happening up there. Get on it, quick." Joe left immediately. In a few minutes the snow left the screens and a moment later Joe's voice came over the intercom. "You're go." Taylor picked up the mike. "Survey Two, Survey." "Survey Two, that was quick. Got the picture?" "Affirmative and recording. Give us a continuous run along the demarcation and a slant right down into it. Then take a sample east of the line, one in it and one west of it. Then find a place to put down -- anywhere. We'll get you back to base. We have to have those samples." "Roger, I'll let you know when I find a field. Out." "Two, wait. Use respirators and oxygen on that sample run -- got that?" "Affirmative. Out." The orange on the screen blended into the dirty yellow, as the pilot had described it. As the. plane came closer to the clouds the line became more and more indistinct until only a smooth color could be seen, an occasional whisp of orange in it. Then the picture became murky and gradually turned deep orange.  "Sample one, east," the pilot said. "Turning west. This stuff itches. Sample two. Just stings a little, but I'm glad we're on oxygen. Sample three, west and climbing." "Go west and find a spot to land," Taylor said. "Can you advise where that will be?" "Affirmative, Grand Island is above minimums and I can make it with twenty minutes' reserve. See you later." "Thanks, Bates. You be sure to get down safely. We need those samples as much as we need you." "Moochos gracias," the answer came back. "Out." Joe came in and looked at the screen. The pilot was climbing again and the orange-to-yellow transition was clear. "What's thatl" "We'll play it back later, Joe. Give us about five minutes more of this and then get back on Kirtland's frequency." Joe left again. Cardwell came in the door about half an hour later. "Jim, something weird is happening outside -- you have to see this." "I think I can guess," Taylor said. "Wait a minute and let me rewind these tapes. We've had a report from Survey Two forty-five minutes ago about a new phenomenon on top. Tm glad you're here. I have a notion of what we're looking at, but I'd rather hear your opinion first. There we are, now watch." T he same picture appeared and ran through its sequence, with both ends of the conversation replaying too. Cardwell sat silently until the plane made its run down toward the clouds. "That's enough," he said. "I'm glad you thought of the samples." Taylor said, "Recognize the color?" "Yeah. Safety fuel. I've seen a thousand contrails that color." "So have #. Oh, you didn't get the earlier part on audio tape: the cover's up to about six thousand and the line is creeping west. Does that tell you anything?" "Maybe. The higher it goes, the more ultraviolet there is from the sun. Maybe some reaction between the safety fuel combustion products and the stuff in the air, catalyzed slowly by UV light. If that's it, the line will be creeping west all the way to the Rockies." "What did you want me to see?" Taylor asked. "Oh -- it's all orange outside. That tells us something -- the material absorbs in the blue and far red. If it were selective reflectivity, we'd probably see blue light coming through. Apparently the color change started several hours ago, maybe even last night, but nobody noticed it. It may not be important." "Survey Four had instrument troubles this morning and didn't get going until after we went off the air. No way to tell, then, unless an airline has something aloft." "Not likely. I hope not, anyway -- this power failure is a dilly, and there isn't an open airport anywhere east of us. I got a snatch of news when we were herding people downstairs." "How are they taking it?" "Worried about the people at home, most of them. They were glad to go. The building superintendent has his people out directing traffic, too; we met them two floors down." "All right, then that's off my mind for now. How is it out on the streets?" "Can't say. One of the girls from an office below called home before the phones quit -- where's Downer's Grove?" "Southwest, I guess, about twenty miles." "No power there. Don't small towns generally have their own power stations around here?" "Some do, some don't. I doubt that they could keep power up without input from the city, though," Taylor said. "And without power from the grid there's going to be one hell of a time trying to restart. If the failure was caused by a severe undervoltage, then it was probably something tor motors that triggered it to failure. How are they going to restart with all those loads still across the line?" Cardwell said, "This could be very bad. How long ago did the lights go out?" "A little less than two hours. Hour and a half. It's too early to get panicky, but we'd better start warming up for it." "We have to find a radio, at least -- there has to be some information. This is enough to drive you crazy. Chicago might as well be a hundred miles away, for all we know about what's happening down on the street." Macauley came in. "We're in good shape on the power. This place was designed to run by itself for a long time. We can hold the filter units on this floor and the walk-in freezer in the cafeteria downstairs. There's a stairwell for access and the boys are sealing it off so we can maintain clear air right down to the freezer. Notice that the air's better now?" The radio spoke. "Chicago, this is Kirtland." Macauley went to the panel. "Kirtland, go ahead." "We have a call for the President." "Roger, Kirtland, stand by." T aylor said, "Call Joe," then spotted him through the window and knocked. Joe finished a last word with several men and came. "Kirtland, Joe. No sense burdening too many people with secrets. Kirtland is standing by." "Right," Joe said. "Baltimore, this is Chicago Survey Control, over." "Chicago, Baltimore, go ahead." "White House line for the President." "Roger, we're holding the connection. Stand by." Joe flipped switches, put on earphones and waited. In a moment he said, "Kirtland, the President is ready." "Fred, are you on?" came Blake's voice; Joe went back to his switching. ( ) "I have some very bad news." ( ) "No, we aren't in contact with Edwards. The helos will be there in another hour. Edwards must have diverted power, too, they'd have responsibility for Pasadena at least. This is something else. The Navajo." ( ) "That's right. On the way to Reno. Apparently they had no respirators. Nobody thought of them and they didn't ask for help. I can't imagine why. The helo pilot made a low run and saw people, sheep, dogs, birds -- " his voice faded and Joe switched, paused, switched back. ( ) "Absolutely none he could see. Nobody. He set down in Tuba City but the houses there didn't even have filter units. No sense in staying -- he's probably setting down in Reno by now. Its almost as if they had decided -- I'll send more helos, of course. We don't know the extent of it. But I thought you should know right away." ( ) "Yes, I'll report later. Goodbye, Fred." Joe turned around and tried to say something, but only succeeded in clearing his throat. "Never mind, Joe," Macauley said. "We got it." Joe turned back. "Kirtland, the President has disconnected. Out." "Roger, Chicago: Hell of a thing. Out." "Let's find that radio," Cardwell said. They did better after some searching and a lot of haywiring. A television set was brought up from a lower floor by an electrician in a respirator and was patched into the intercom system so everyone could hear if not see. The Emergency Broadcast Network was on the air. A n announcer sat at a table, a single camera on him dead front, papers stacked left and right of him, the microphone boom low in the picture. "The above food distribution centers will also begin receiving supplies of replacement face mask filters of several types, as well as a few respirators. To replenish a filter when no replacements are available, do the following -- get pencil and paper and write these ingredients down. "One half pound table salt. One half pound baking soda or bicarbonate of soda. Aluminum foil. Line a bowl with the foil and dissolve the soda and salt -- hot water, if possible. Pour the solution into the bowl and place, used filters into the liquid. Stir very gently for ninety minutes in cold water or twenty minutes in very hot water. Be very careful not to crack the filters -- they are brittle and when cracked are useless. Caution -- the used solution is poisonous, so dispose of it carefully. Do not pour it down a drain -- the water supply could be endangered. Pour it onto dirt or grass where it will soak into the ground. Remember, the solution is very poisonous after several filters have been processed. Discard and make a fresh solution after fifteen filters have been processed." "The local situation as of three thirty P.M., Central Daylight Time: the mayor has ordered all citizens off the streets. The Nater act as if we'll be here a long tional Guard has been mobilized time." Joe turned down the sound and units are expected in downon the intercom, town Chicago shortly. Do not use Cardwell said, "All right, the telephones; lines that are still suppose we plan on spending the operating are needed for emergennight at least. We might as well cy communications. Unauthorized start getting bedding up from the callers are subject to arrest. Prifloors below -- I don't suppose vate automobile travel is also forwe'd be blamed for borrowing bidden until further notice; violatsome cushions from waiting ors will be arrested. It is expeeted rooms and so forth." that the governor will declare mar"All right," Taylor said. "If tial law as soon as eommunicayou'll take charge of that. I'll go tions with Springfield are restored. see what the situation is with the "Crevys are working to restore people who are still here. Keep a power to several sections of the list of everything you borrow and city with the lowest electrical where it came from." loads; the first power is expected "Way ahead of you," Cardwell by five-thirty this afternoon. As said and left, soon as the Midwest power grid is will automatieally experience a Adinner of sorts, picked together return of power. Citizens are out of refrigerators that still had urged to turn off all appliances unspoiled food in them. The main such as refrigerators, lights, ovens, freezer was left untouched, sump pumps, television sets. In the background, the network radios, battery chargers, houseannouncer eould be heard finishhold filter units and so on." ing another list of emergeney Joe, listening in the control shelters. Then he started a new list, room, laughed sharply. "Radios "The following shelters are no and television sets? Who does he longer operative. Fifty-seventh think he'll be talking to then? And and Vincennes. Eight-seven-five-oh who is he talking to now, besides South Western Avenue. Fifty-first us?" and Hyde Park Boulevard. All be"All citizens are requested to retween twenty-second street and main indoors or to report to forty-seventh street on Martin emergency filter shelters. We will Luther King Drive. Malcolm X now begin reading the list of College. Cabrini Homes. Twentyshelter locations again from the two hundred West Madison..." beginning. Keep listening. New Silence gradually fell in the loeations are continually being room as the list went on. It was added." long. Taylor said, "We don't need Macauley looked at Taylor, who that right now. I think they may be was sitting with a stony face lookoptimistic about when the power ing at a half-eaten sandwich on a will return. Right now we had betnapkin before him. acongregation of vapors "Jim -- we knew the poor people would be hit hard and first." Taylor, controlling himself, said, "It sounds as though they're closing certain ones down before others." "But we don't know why." Taylor picked up his sandwich. "No. We don't." He ate, concentrating on the food. The announcer was saying, "It is now expected that power will be restored in the downtown area some time after midnight tonight. Other sections of the city will experience a restoration of power when the Midwest grid returns to operation." Cardwell said, "Every hour they move it two hours back. As far as I can tell there's still no power anywhere in the city. Or anywhere else, for that matter." Joe appeared at the office door. "Mr. Taylor?" Taylor rose and went with him. "Come along, you two. It may be word about Survey Four." They went to the control room; the White House was on the line. Taylor talked briefly to someone and then Joe put through the link to Kirtland. The signal was weak but readable. Taylor, said, "Mac, the President's secretary asked if we had been contacted by any local authorities. I said no. He advised us to stay under wraps here. It seems that there were some riots in Chicago that didn't get talked about over the Emergency Net. The police didn't come out of it too well. Neither did the rioters. Someone started grabbing masks and the police started shooting. The National Guard has had massive  desertions -- those guys live around here or downstate and they, went after their families." I Macauley sifid, "Could they have shut down the shelters in retaliation?" j Taylor said, "Mac, I'm not going to think about that. Neither are you. If I think about it I'll find a gun and go out after somej body -- and it may not be anywhere near the truth. We're in here for the duratipn." Kirtland finally came on the line and Blake spoke. He sounded exhausted. "Fred, we got the helos through. Edwards is out of commission, They're holed up in a couple of hangars with a mob of civilians and all the power on the base is being used to run filters and refrigerators. They'll be out of food in three days. We're going to airlift in what we have -- but there's a whole city here that has to survive. We don't have full cloud cover yet, but filter units are necessary. We've lost all power input from the Denver grid. Is it possible to reactivate any of the secure lines? We must communicate with other military bases." ( ) "I can't decide that, Mr. President. That's you, Fred. You wouldn't advise us to ignore the outside world, would you?" ( ) "I've set that up already. Every flyable plane at Edwards will be out of there tonight with as many people as possible -- but that's only something like a thousand or twelve hundred. We'll never get transports back in there. No could hardly find the base. But you didn't answer my question. Are you telling me that we should go it alone here?" "I see. White Sands, too, I suppose, and Alamogordo. I don't know why you think this kind of military concentration is the hope of the future, but I see your point, you're right. If you're right we'll try to be around to pick up the pieces. No word from abroad?" ( ) "So everyone s waiting to pick up the pieces. Well, Fred, it's a God damned shitty world. Out." His voice had turned bitter and angry. T he frequency was cleared. Taylor sat back and said, "I guess that goes for everyone. We'll try to be around to pick up the pieces. Who's that?" A voice in the hall outside called, "Hello, is anybody here?" A knock came on the door. Macauley opened it and Betty stood there beside a large suitcase. "Betty, what are you doing here?" he said. "Hey, it's everybody," Betty said weakly. "We ran out of filters -- that's what we're doing here. We brought all the cans we could carry. There are so many dead people -- " she broke down and was eased into a chair, where she sobbed while Macauley held her. Peggy Orth from the typing pool?" "Sure, Betty -- why don't you just take it easy." "I looked back and saw someone grab her mask and run with it. She tried to ho -- hold her breath as lo -- long as she c-c-could -- " Macauley and Taylor looked at each other over her head. After a while Betty sat up and wiped at her eyes. "Oh," she said, "I'm so glad to see you guys. And you have air and light. It's just pitch black everywhere outside. We had to practically feel our way here." "Betty, 'we' who?" Taylor asked. "There were four of us rooming together. We all came back when we couldn't find any filters. We were really scared until we remembered that there was emergency power here." Macauley hefted the bag. "Did you climb forty flights of stairs with thisT' he asked. Betty nodded and started to cry again. "Darn it, I can't stop. Don't say anything nice to me f-for a while." She took a deep breath. "Is there any water?" Joe said, "Come along, Betty, I'll show you. We're getting it from the fire-fighting reservoir. Where are the other girls?" "They went into the office." Macauley said, "I'll come along -- we have to get some more bedding up here for them." They left. Later the office furniture that had served as a cafeteria was pushed aside and bedding was brought in; a miseellaneous collec"Oh, Mac, do you remember tion of sofa cushions, cushions from chairs, odd-shaped pillows and a pile of brand-new blankets. Betty had pulled four "beds" into her own office, next to Taylor's, and was making them up. The other girls were sitting on cushions, talking to some of the men. Taylor went into his office and came back holding two bottles. "A-hem," he said. "Do I have your undivided attention?" He did. Someone went to the water cooler and started pulling out paper cups and handing them around. Taylor went around the room, pouring carefully; Betty held his for him and he put the bottle down on a desk. He took his cup and looked around. "Watch out, this stuff is hundred proof. Ladies and gentlemen, let's drink to our poor country." A couple of the men stood up and silence fell. Taylor stared into his cup. "I'm not going to make a speech, but perhaps I'd better sum up where we are. There are sixteen of us. We are apparently the only link operating tonight between the White House and the last relatively unaffected area in the Southwest. Now .don't get the idea that we're the last ones on Earth -- we aren't and we won't be. But if you wonder why we're holing up here while the city tears itself to pieces around us, remember this. If everyone in all of the larger cities dies tonight or in the days to follow, there will be only about thirty There won't be any industry or public utilities or operating food storage facilities. It's our job to provide a communication link so that when this is over -- and it wil be over -- there will still be some kind of government and the people in it will know what is going on and be ready to act. There's a lot that can be done -- the nuclear power plants are intact, the basic stuff we need to start our civilization up again is intact. Nobody knows just yet how bad it's going to be, but you have to be ready to face a country in which seven, eight or nine people out of ten will be lying dead in the streets when we come out. It could be that bad -- and we have to be ready." Someone in the back of the room spoke up; "Mr. Taylor, Chicago is burning. Shall I turn it up?" Taylor grimaced. "No. Not for me. I know which part is burning." He picked up the bottle and started around the room again. Macauley said, "I agree. If we listen to that twenty-four hours a day we'll all go crazy." The man in the back of thf room said, "Hey -- " he turner the volume on the intercom uj and a rushing sound could be heard. "They went off the air!" "That settles that," Cardwel said and tossed down his drink He went to sit next to Taylor who was on a cushion with hi; back to the wall. "Jim, you don' know which part is burning. I suspect that all of it is burning." "I'm a little drunk," Tayloi said, "and you shouldn't expeci me to make sense. I've been making sense all day and enough i enough." "It s three A.M. Drink your reading a comic book. Beside her sleeping pill." on the floor lay a pile of tattered Taylor nodded and tossed down comics. She leaned forward and the rest of his drink. wiped the goggles of her mask on Macauley joined them. "Jim, her skirt, something just occurred to me. Grace, sewing at a small table. All those recommendations you turned on the battery radio and made... there wasn't time to carslowly tuned across the band, ry them out even if they'd gone There was only crackling and hisalong with you a hundred persing. She turned it off. cent in Washington, but do you Tim said, "To hell with them, think they would have been We're making out all right." enough?" "Don't talk like that," Grace "Probably not." Taylor sighed said. "Who's winning?" and looked around the room. "I am," Tim said, bored. "But that's ail history now. All "He always wins," Mike comwe can do is wait it out -- our plained cheerfully. "Your move." problem is starting to solve itTim made his move. "I think I'll work on the filter." "Yeah," Cardwell said. "The "Tim, do you think it will hard way." work?" Judy asked, looking up. "Could we take off the resps?" VI "The game isn't over," Mike said. "Can I come and watch?" up and walked to a small room E ach window of the basement full of tools. In the window was a was covered with a piece of large filter element across which plastic film carefully fitted into was printed, "Filteraire." Tim place and taped around the edges, reached up and unhooked the filOrange light came in through ter, revealing a blower fan fitted pile of cans in one corner and window space, spreading ruddy color over every"It fits pretty good," Tim said, thing. Along one wall were four "Now I have to figure out how to mattresses, a double and three make the blower go." He called singles. The toddler lay asleep on back, "Mom, I'm going upstairs one of the singles, her face dirty for a minute. Where's the clothesaround the edges of her respirator. line?" Tim and Mike were playing Grace said, "Don't let anybody checkers on a board made with see you. Under the sink, I think." chalk on the basement floor, usTim went to the top of the baseing pennies and nickels. Tim was ment stairs and unbolted the door, winning. Pieces of garden hose, slit, had Judy sat on a backless chair, been nailed all around it to form leaning against the basement wall, a gasket. The room beyond was orange-lit and bright; three walls were intact, but there were blackened timbers above and on the side toward the TV room. Through the door to the TV room could be seen the house next door, gutted. Tim peered out through the front door, which was ajar, eased it shut and then went into the kitchen. The kitchen had burned partially. Tim returned with a coil of clothesline and went back into the basement, first restoring the front door to its original position. Mike tagged along after him back to the workroom. "Mother, when is Daddy coming back?" Judy asked. "Oh, he should be back soon," Grace replied, not looking up. "Could I have a drink?" "No, honey, wait and see what Daddy brings back." "All right." Judy focused on the comic book again. From the other room Tim said, "We'll have  to file a couple of notches in the window frame." The sound of a wood rasp followed shortly. The toddler awoke and cried feebly. Grace rose quickly and went to her, kneeling and putting a hand on her forehead, above the mask. "I hope he finds some aspirin today," she said. "Mommy's here, baby. Oh, you're so sore!" She pulled the edge of the mask away from an inflamed line along the child's cheek. Grace went to a low shelf, took a glass. She kneeled at the water heater, putting the glass down under the drain spigot. She held a rag over the spout and let some water through into the glass. Then she went back to the bed and helped the toddler sit up. "Remember, honey -- real quick and hold your breath." The little head nodded. Grace slipped the lower elastic up behind the child's head, raised the mouthpiece and held the glass there. The child took a few quick swallows, then the mask was pressed back while she panted and coughed. "Once more, honey." Judy watched for a moment and licked her lips. Then she turned silently back to the comic book. Grace lowered the toddler back onto the bed. "'nother pillow, honey?" The snout of the small mask waved sideways, no. Grace kneeled there until the child slept again. When she rose Tim was watching. "Is she any better?" "I think so," Grace said. She wiped tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands and went back to the table. T im looked down at the sleeping form for a moment longer, turned and went purposefully back to the workroom. "All right, Mike," his voice said, "you hold this end while I feed the rest through." Mike said, "Look, the fan's going by itself!" Tim said, "I wish it would. That's Just the wind. Hurry up, we have to get the filter back in." Grace picked up her sewing, but her eyes were on the toddler. She began to weep again silently; then she clasped her hands around the cloth and lowered her head, her lips moving. She was dozing in her chair when Tim shook her shoulder. "Mom, come look." She looked around, dazed. "Mom, it seems to work. I tried it without my mask. Come on." She rose and went with him. Two lines of clothesline came out of the window frame, passed over two pulleys and were wrapped several times around a hose reel mounted on a wooden stand. Tim pulled a chair into place, put his feet on the handles and began to pedal. A breeze came to life at the filter in the window, ruffling Grace's hair. "At least we can keep this room clear -- maybe the whole basement," Tim said. "Take off your mask." He undid his and put it down; Grace gasped and held out her hand. Tim's face was joyous and he breathed in deeply. "It's all right." Grace's hands trembled as she undid her mask. It came off. The air was fresh. "Timmy!" she said. "What a wonderful thing for the baby -- we can move her in here!" Tears sprang into Tim's eyes; he bent his head and kept pedaling. They moved the little one in and then back again when an hour's pedaling by Tim, Mike and Judy proved to clear the whole basement. They wouldn't give Grace a turn. "Let us do it," Tim said. "You have to do other things. Anyhow, I want to see how long we can stop before we smell anything." They stopped pedaling and Tim tucked a blanket over the filter. For an hour they waited, then two. Finally Judy coughed. "I can smell it," she said. "We'd better start again." Tim went in and removed the blanket and turned to see Mike ready to pedal. "Let me go first," Tim said. "I'm strongest." "No," Mike said, pedaling. "It was your turn last." "Okay, Tarzan, let me know when you're tired. Do it slower -- if it will last for two hours we don't need that much air coming in." The basement door knob rattled. "Daddy!" Judy cried and ran to the steps. Tim went past her, putting on his respirator. He motioned her back, climbed the steps and unbolted the door. Pete stood there with two supermarket bags in his arms. "Hi, Tim. Take these. I've got two more in the little wagon outside." Tim took the bags and went down, depositing them on the table. He removed his mask. In a moment they heard the door open and then close again, quickly. With a rattling of stiff paper, Pete came down the steps. He took one look at Tim and dropped his bags on a bed, starting forward. Then he saw Grace without her mask, then Judy and finally Mike, pedaling in the workroom. Everyone was grinning. and took it off, ready to clap it back on instantly. He sniffed the air. His face began to break up. He went to Tim, half laughing and half crying, and clasped him tightly in his arms. "Oh, boy," he said. "Oh, boy, what a kid." Tim said, muffled, "It wasn't in time. Dad. But it works." Pete held Tim by the shoulders at arm's length. "Listen, Tim, maybe you don't know what this means to me. It means I don't have to take filters from dead people any more. For that I thank you." "Daddy, did you get pop?" Judy asked. Pete went to the bags. "Yep. And aspirin. And some of the driest bread you've ever seen. And extra filters." His face sobered. "Lots of other stuff -- there aren't many people picking over the ruins any more." Grace said, "Pete, give me the aspirin." She took it, ran some water and gently woke the toddler, who was sleeping on her back, easily. "Here, honey, here's a pill and some water to make you feel better." The child nodded, then closed her eyes, took a deep breath and held it. Grace laughed. "Honey, you don't have to do that today. Just take it," she said. In the workroom Tim said, "My turn, Mike." Judy sprang up. "No, mine, mine -- " And Tim came back with Mike, caught Pete's eye, smiled and shrugged. "Kids have too much energy," Tim said. T hat night Pete and Grace lay together on the double mattress, respirators on, whispering. Around them the children slept quietly. "Did those filters come from dead people, Pete?" "Yes. I buried the people, too. Other men are doing the same thing. There are no rats, dogs or birds -- I guess we'll have to bury them all eventually." "Do you suppose we can see another family some time?" "I guess so. It's not so bad out there any more. I saw a gang once, but they never came back around here. Area looks too burned out, I guess. I think there's a family a couple of blocks down Division, in the old laundry, but I haven't looked to make sure. A lot of people have guns and they're still afraid." "You don't carry your gun any more." Pete rolled over and took her into his arms. "Honey, I hate that gun. I'll never use it again, God not a killer. If it hadn't been for you and the kids, I don't think I ever would have pulled a trigger -- I'd just have run away. It was worse than a war, honey, a lot worse. Nobody even hated anyone -- there just wasn't enough of everything to go around. I had to have it for you; he had to have it for his wife and kids. It was as simple as that. I heard guys saying, 'Christ forgive me -- ' as they pulled the trigger." "If only they could have talked together first." Pete shook his head. "Nothing to talk about. All anybody could have done would have been to draw straws. But nobody was drawing straws just for himself. You don't come back home and say, 'Sorry, honey -- sorry, kids, we have to make room for somebody else to live.' There just plain wasn't enough to go around. You remember. The time the filters ran out and the treatment didn't work any more -- when that orange stuff clogged them all up. That was the worst part. Nobody was fighting over food then -- it was filters. Oh, God." Grace held him while he made little noises and lay looking up at the dim orange light. "There must be a moon tonight," she whispered. "Oh, how I would love to see it again." Pete quieted and slept. Soon Grace's eyes closed, too. The plastic covers on the windows rattled; upstairs the October wind moaned through the black timbers. All through the night outside there was a subtle stirring and whispering, stirring this way and that, dying and returning, moving around the house to this side and that side, steadily growing. The heat began to leave the house with little snaps and pops; upstairs a window shade rattled and flapped as the cold wind swept in across the burned-out rooms. All night the murmuring went on; there were great sighs as a billow of air passed down the whole block in a single expiration, the sound of a ghost passing through the empty streets. Winter had come. Pete struggled to wake up. There was something... noise -- "Gracie! I hear someone!" Tim woke and sat up, then Mike and the toddler. Finally Judy sat up, rubbing her goggles out of habit. Tim said sharply, "Dad -- hey, look! On the wall!" rectangle of light, the size and shape of a basement window. It glowed yellow-white. Not orange. Beyond the windows was blue sky. small graves in the front yard and called out again, "Hey, anyone in there? Come on outside!" In a moment Pete appeared in the doorway, shirtless, carrying a gun and wearing a respirator. He stood for a second, then slowly reached up to loosen his mask. He let it fall to the ground and dropped the gun beside it. Macauley waved at the sky. "It's real. The front got here last night and that did it." Pete said, "Mister, I have to get my family. I wish I had a drink to offer you." "I didn't do it." Macauley grinned. He stepped forward and handed Pete a card. "Here are some instructions -- we're getting organized. Come to Lincoln Park this afternoon if you can. We'll be talking about food and there'll be some Army doctors if you have anyone sick. It's bad out here, but we made it. See you." Macauley went striding off down the block. Pete called over his shoulder: "Gracie, kids! Come on up. It's over."  I first touched the moon, we -- my brother Tom and I -- lay on the floor of our two-room flat over our father's shop in Newark, drinking in the drama of it through our old black-and-white TV. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind... Those electric words of Armstrong's still shiver in my memory. The worn brown carpet smelled of our father's strong Turkish tobacco and our mother's lavender body powder and those stale scents are still mingled in my mind with the unforgettable throb of wild pride that caught my throat when man's searching boot first found the moon. "Now they've got themselves the gelt." Tom's raw envy nearly spoiled the moment for me. "And here I am, still stuck in Hotzenplotz!" The history of the moon children begins with that instant, even though they would not even be born for many years. I wish chance had selected a better historian, because their story seems too big for me to tell. Looking at the task, I think of Swift's Gulliver. Gulliver has always been my favorite literary character. I never understood all the higher criticism of Swift as a theological satirist, but I always felt close to Gulliver -- a plain, ordinary human being, reasonable and honest, involved through no fault, of his own in affairs that were too much for him. The lives of the moon children are a vaster adventure than anything Swift invented for Gulliver, and telling it well calls for more style and wit than I possess. Perhaps my brother Tom should have been the narrator. He was involved as deeply as I and he had humor and imagination. I recall our father saying that he was the natural poet of the family and I was only the schlemiel. "Please, Gamal!" Mother came plaintively to my defense. "You're hurting Kim and teaching Tom too many of your own slick tricks. Better a schlemiel than a gonif." "Your own son a thief already? Hoo-ha!" He gave her a black-eyed blink of wounded innocence and told a Yiddish joke that I didn't understand, though Tom snickered knowingly. Mother stared back indignantly and suddenly decided to send me down to the delicatessen to buy boiled ham hocks for our dinner. Father snarled bitterly at that, but the ham hocks were cheap. In spite of such bickering Tom knew how to make up with me. We were generally friends. After the moon landing, when we knew the Eagle was safe in space again, I remember how we stood up and shook hands and resolved to be astronauts. "What chance have you got?" With a weary sigh. Mother looked up sadly from the potatoes she was peeling. "Gamal Hodian's kids?" "What's wrong with Pop?" Tom stared at her. "He out-smarts everybody. Anyhow, like the TV says, things will be different now. Kim can be your pet schlemiel if he wants, but me. I'm grabbing my share of the planets." "Don't call Kim that -- " "Pop does," Tom reminded her. "Me, I don't care what he is. I'm on my way to the moon." "Better finish high school first." "Better help your little yukl blow his nose." Tom smirked at me, "I'll do okay. Pop says I'll be another macher, just as good as him." White-lipped, Mother bent over her potatoes again. My eyes blurred with pity for us both. She was a big, raw-boned blonde. She must have been a striking girl, though her wedding pictures show her already worn and fading when she married. Once she caught Tom and me rummaging through a black, lavender-scented, lacquer box of old photographs and trinkets he had found in her dresser. Her pictures looked lovely to me, but he was snickering at her "cow-sized tits." She slapped him and snatched the box away, but later she let me see her souvenirs and told how she had run away from an unhappy home in the Arkansas hills, hoping to break into show business. She couldn't help sobbing when she talked about it. She said her voice had been too thin and her bones too big. She tried the Nashville Grand Old Opry and tried Hollywood and tried New York, but her luck never broke. She was a waitress in a third-rate bar when she met Gamal Hodian. alias, but I never knew my father's original name. He was a dark, stocky, evasive man, who spoke several languages badly, English worst of all. He was secretive about everything. Mother thought he was an Egyptian native. Tom believed he was Jewish. I once heard a business associate call him "a sneaking Armenian thief." He used to say himself that he had no country. His passport was Turkish, but probably forged. He had wanted to name my brother Tamar and me Kemal, but Mother made him call us Tom and Kim. The Hodian name must have been assumed when he began visiting the United States, soon after World War II and long before he met my mother. He called himself an importer and we always lived in some low-rent section, over or behind a grimy little shop that was sparsely stocked with the cheap perfumes and tarnished brassware and tattered scraps of carpet that he had imported. There were other imports, I think, that I never learned much about. Strange customers always made him nervous and he was away most of the time on what Mother called buying trips. One of those lasted nearly three years. Mother told us he was ill in Ankara, but Tom snorted that he was somewhere in jail. The year I entered high school he disappeared. He had always hated Sicilians and Mother insisted that the Mafia had murdered him. Long after, however, I found among her things a little packet of scented letters mailed in Marseilles to "M. Hobereau" at a Staten Island post office box. In a very feminine French hand they begged him to come back to his cherie and their petit enfant. Perhaps he went. Though he had never been a bountiful provider, times grew even harder for us then. Mother closed out the shop and began to look for a job. Some of my father's old friends put her on an uncertain dole, I think to keep her from telling what she knew about them. Once one of them took me into a bar to talk about my future. A dark, watchful, jumpy little man who stank of garlic and cheap wine, he whispered questions and blinked in unbelief at all I didn't know about my father's connections. Mother must have been begging him to offer me some kind of job, but finally. he stalked out indignantly and left me to pay for the drinks. Mother stumbled or jumped in front of a truck the spring I finished high school. Two fat sisters and a Baptist preacher-brother came from Little Rock for the funeral. I had cleared the empty gin bottles out of the flat and I didn't tell them about the needle marks the coroner had found on her arms. Tom was already on his way toward the moon by then. Older than I, stronger and darker and smarter, more like our father, he always had a keener eye for the main chance. He weeded the Yiddish expressions out of his speech and earned a college scholarship to major in space science. I did worse. With no head for math, I won no scholarships. Mother's insurance came to six thousand dollars when all the bills were paid. I went to Las Vegas with my share, to try my luck. It was bad. The money lasted three nights. M y actual education began with that disaster. Sometimes i was hungry. The police picked me up two or three times before I learned I hadn't inherited my father's talents. I tended bar and drove taxis and sold used cars. I bought a guitar and tried crooning folk ballads, but my voice turned out no better than my mother's. I wrote songs nobody sang and a novel nobody would print. I was a disk jockey and a TV reporter and even a political campaign manager -- for a candidate who lost. Tom, year by year, moved closer to our old dream. He went from college into the Space Force and acronym stood for Civilian Organization of Man in Outer Space. Its idealistic aim was to explore space in peace for the common good. Tom used to poke fun at the high-minded slogan, "free worlds for free men," but he lifted off for the new training base on the moon with the first class of ready changed his name to Thomas Hood. He-wangled an assignment to a developing the seeker-type survey rocket, which carried a dozen tons of sophisticated hardware designed to chart and analyze the surface of an airless world from low orbital flight. The seeker survey was planned to cover a hundred satellites and large asteroids, beginning with test flights around Earth's moon. "Not that I think we'll find anything." Tom grinned. "But the moon's a cozy little mission, close to home and Robin Hudson." Robin was the jet-set daughter of Howard Hudson, a hotel tycoon he had managed to meet. With her sullen charm and her father's fortune she was more exciting to Tom than the moon was now, since the spacemen were passing it by. He took me to one of her father's floating resorts, the Antilles Hudson, for a weekend with the other members of his threeman survey team. Seeker One was already in orbit around the moon and Tom's Seeker Two crewmen were waiting for the space engineers to analyze the data tapes. The invitation surprised me. Annoyed when I wouldn't change my own name to match his, he had begun treating me like a beggar relation. Yet I was glad enough to go -- the failure of that political adventure had left me without job or plans. We found his teammates on a bright sundeck, high above the milky glitter of the hot Caribthemoonchildren bean. They were quarreling about the real aims of the seeker survey. "Security!" Erik Thorsen was a huge, red-haired Viking. He had lately shed his major's rank in the ians -- but he still wore his military bearing like a uniform. "Military security." He banged the table with his empty beer stein. "That's all I'm looking for." "Then you'll never find it," Yuri Marko answered. "All you'll find is your own destruction. I'm searching for something else -- " H e paused when he saw us. Tom introduced me. Marko was a tall man, owlish behind his black-rimmed glasses, intensely serious. He seated us courteously and turned doggedly back to his attack. "We're looking for life," he told Thorsen. "Nothing else is worth the cost -- " "God save us from alien life." Thorsen waved his stein like a club. "We've got the people boom right here without looking for trouble on other planets." "Trouble?" Marko's dark anxious eyes appealed to Tom and me. "Our space neighbors have never harmed us yet. I don't think they will. I hope to find higher life than we are. Something with mind enough to cross the space between the stars." Thorsen muttered skeptically. "That's our real goal." Marko bent intently toward him. "I believe life can spring up on the worlds of any star. The older forms should be far ahead of us. If interstellar travel is actually possible, space explorers should have touched our worlds. We should find their footprints." "On the moon?" Marko nodded. "The airless worlds are the place to look. Wind and water wipe out everything. But the signs of a landing on the moon -- a broken tool or an empty fuel container or even a literal footprint -- might last a "I pray to God we never meet another creature!" Thorsen lurched to his feet and stalked away. Tom followed to soothe him. I was left with Yuri Marko. His reserved, school-masterish manner put me off at first, but we soon found things in common. His parents, like my father, had been immigrants -- they were Ukraninian defectors from the First Soviet. A political idealist, he had even voted for my unlucky United World candidate. I caught his contagious interest in the seeker project. The biofprms of Mercury and Venus and Jupiter were still at that time mostly inference and mystery. Nobody had ever jeriously proposed that these near neighbors in space might be advanced beyond us. Marko's hopes took hold of my imagination, j "Just suppose we're not alone." His dry Slavic accents excited ne with a sense of the dimensions kf the universe I had never felt be'ore. "Imagine other minds -- and Treater ones. Picture an intellirent society spread across the itars -- a society in which our Earth would be a nameless vilage. Perhaps you can't quite vislalize our fellow creatures out in pace, but at least the effort gives mu a truer image of yourself." ! On our last night together at the ntilles Hudson, Robin gave a arty for us in her surfside apartlent. The lights were dimmed, so lat we could watch the waves exloding into white phosphoresence against the glass seawall, ler father was there, the ice-eyed loney king, and at last I guessed 'hy Tom had invited me. Howard Hudson, with the world I his web of floating hotels, had irned acquiring eyes toward #ace. The Orbital Hudson and le Crater Hudson were soon to pen. What he wanted from us as a quick secret report on anyling of commercial promise the irvey might uncover. The news as to come from Tom through e, coded into some harmlessrsonal message. Erik Thorsen flushed with anger He moon children when he understood what was up. He smashed his champagne glass against the glowing seawall and threatened to expose the plot. Tom silkily suggested that Thorsen had secret military ties to the wouldn't like. Thorsen turned pale and agreed to say nothing. I saw Marko's hurt contempt for me. "Listen," I begged him. "Tom's taking too much for granted. He never mentioned a word of this to me. I won't touch it. Believe me." I don't think he did. That incident brought the party to an awkward end. Tom told me curtly that I was no longer his guest. But as things turned out, I remained at the resort after his team was gone. Marooned there, without money to pay my unexpected bill, I went to the publicity office and talked my way into a copy-writing job. Surveying the moon, as things turned out, was not the cozy little mission Tom had anticipated. Seeker One crashed behind the moon, with no survivors to report what had gone wrong. Tom and his team were called out to continue the moon survey with Seeker Two. M M y brother was not alone in his surprise at what the seekers found. The moon had kept her secret well. The early astronauts and cosmonauts had seen too many empty craters of every size to expect much else. Their successors went on -- as soon as they could -- to look for more exciting worlds. The moon was quite dead, but the planets were already promising the menace and allure of unknown life. When the robot probes on Mars began to scrape up samples for analysis their telemetry indicated complex organic molecules. The first men to touch that tawny dust caught a tormenting illness that kept them in quarPhobos till they died. The blinding clouds of Venus veiled the same sort of ambiguous mystery. Unmanned probes brought back simple organisms of microscopic beta-life from the highest levels of her atmosphere, but no vehicle, manned or not, ever returned from the unseen surface beneath. The first men to station themselves in orbit around her found new riddles rather than answers to old ones. They saw dark dots above the clouds -- larger creatures, they suspected, in an ecological pyramid based on the betalife. They described a sudden color change that stained the blank planet with swirls of brown and yellow. They were reporting an unexplained power loss when their signals faded out. j One lone member of the first three-man team came back from Mercury. He had seen nothin alive and he lived through his yea at the quarantine station on th moon, but he brought pictures of queer crater-ringed, iron-walle tunnel from which his compan ions had never returned. Though no probe had yet com back from tjie atmosphere of Ju had touched the four large satel lites. The first craft to visit lo nearest the planet, reported tha its take off had been followed by narrow beam of intermitte radiation, as if something on th planet were observing it with r dar. Against that background ominous uncertainty the crash Seeker One shocked the world. Th first response was a jittery fe that something unfriendly ha established itself on the back the moon. Howard Hudson ma the most of that brief panic. I was still working in the A tilles Hudson, and what I saw w a business education. Public a nouncements of the crash were d layed for several hours, first by t on the moon and later by offici censors on Earth, while Hudso private spy system coined mon for him. News of the crash came in on our astrofac circuit, disguised as a weather observation from the Orbital Hudson. It was decoded by a file clerk in our office, who couldn't help talking when space issues dived on the stock market. Hudson had his brokers sell space industries short. Next day, when the story broke, he used the publicity office to spread a wild rumor. The creatures of Venus had learned about space from the hardware raining out of their clouds. Now they were building a military base on the moon to stop our astronauts from polluting their air. now transmitting from the moon gave that rumor more support than it deserved. The bottom fell out of the market and Hudson's brokers picked up space stocks for peanuts. Office gossip had it that days. mors with a bulletin phrased in wooden officialese. Responsible space authorities had found no evidence of hostile action against the lost seeker from any source whatever. Neither the observers on the orbital moon platform or the crew of the seeker itself had feported anything unusual before the crash occurred. Salvage orews already at the site could find no indication of attack or sabotage. Presumably, instrumental malfunction had allowed the survey craft to drift out of its very low orbit and graze a lunar peak. The media would be instantly alerted to any new developments, but there was no reason whatever for public apprehension. Seeker Two was standing ready to resume routine flights as soon as her crew reached the moon, the bulletin concluded. Thus far the survey had made no newsworthy discoveries. None, in fact, were actually expected, because the moon was utterly dead. The test flights, however, had already established the value of the seeker vehicles for mapping the resources of other airless worlds. Five minutes after that stuffy statement came over the transfac net our office was buzzing with livelier news from the moon. It came by laser beam from the manager of the new Crater Hudson. After our laserman had relayed the message to Hudson's office, he replayed his tape for us. "... Listen, Mr. Hudson. Don't They're covering up something. I don't know what -- maybe just the fact that this thing shows them up for idiots. But they're sitting on something I think you ought to know. "It's true that Seeker One dived ference. Her first transmissions were completely routine. "All systems go. No anomalies noted." However, as she neared that point where Seeker One had fired her retro-rockets, the tvatchers on the platform made a terse report I strong Point. "Platform to Moon Control! We've got something. A surface glow, apparently touched off by approach of Seeker Two. A luminous streak, maybe twenty kilometers long. Like an arrowhead. Brighter toward the point. Location estimated six hundred kilometers from south lunar pole." Moon Control replied with an urgent query to Seeker Two. What was she observing? "Lunar surface lighting up under us." Marko's taped voice sounds crisp and cool. "Bright rays spreading north from a small crater just ahead, which looks like an impact point. We've got spectrometers running on the rays. They appear to be fluorescent material scattered north from that crater. Spectral analysis not yet complete." "Keep in orbit." Moon Control seems more alarmed than Marko is. "Monitor everything but don't leave your flight pattern -- " "Seeker Two to Moon Control." larko's voice is quicker on the themoon children tape, but still oddly calm. "Reporting visual contact with uncharted installation ahead. Something standing on that impact point. Position estimated sixtynine degrees south latitude, on circumpolar survey track eightyeight. A shining tower -- " Marko's voice fades out. "Seeker Two! Seeker Two! Moon Control shouts. "Keep talking. Tell us everything." "A vast installation!" Even Marko sounds breathless now. "Ican't imagine why it wasn't seen before. The tower dome stands miles above our flight path. Dead ahead. It looks like some sort of beacon. Changing color. Red, yellow, orange. It's running through the spectrum -- " "Platform to Seeker." A sharper voice cuts in. "We're tracking you by telescope. We see the surface phenomenon -- bright streaks converging toward the impact crater now just ahead of you. But we see no tower. No obstruction. Your flight path looks clear." For long seconds the tape records no voice. "Seeker Two." Moon Control is hoarse with tension. "Seeker Two. Seeker Two!" "Seeker T wo to Moon Control." Marko's voice comes back at last, pitched lower, relieved. "We've made voice contact and identified the installation ahead. It's the base of a transgalactic mission seeking peaceful interaction with mankind. We're following instructions to land at the base on our next orbital pass." "Don't do that!" Moon Control sounds almost frantic. "Climb clear of apparent obstruction -- don't try to land! The platform sees no tower. We think you're caught in some kind of trap. Remember Seeker One. Don't touch your retrorockets." The tape rustles with solar static, but there is no reply. "Moon Control to Seeker Two!" The voice rises raggedly. "Don't try to land. Repeat: don't try to land. Break off contact with surface point. Change flight pattern to avoid vicinity of survey curve eighty-eight. Acknowledge and stand by." The tape runs on, but Seeker Two does not acknowledge. Ill M oon control at the moment was Sherman Parkinson. Like Erik Thorsen, he had recently resigned a military commission to make himself eligible for the civilian space organization. To judge him by his own standards, he was no doubt a brave and welltrained officer, loyal to the ancient traditions of the United States Marine Corps if not to the kind. I saw him back on Earth two or; three years later, confined to the alcoholics ward of a veterans hospital. The events on the moon hac evidently been too much for him Habit-driven as a dinosaur, he wai not prepared to cope with any thing so far beyond his owi experience. But the drinking came later. Hi seems to have remained sobe during that crisis. The panel o special investigators saw fit, ii fact, to commend him for stead fast devotion to duty. He was keen enough to see tha Seeker Two was flying into som kind of trap, but he seems to hav been taken in by Hudson's rumo of attackers from Venus. Whei Marko ignored his orders. Park inson called Skygate to ask fo military support. Space was international Skygate reminded him. As th moon, he was in command, but h was not to make any use of mili tary force without the explici unanimous prior consent of th Angered, Parkinson issued nev orders for Seeker Two to leave th survey pattern and return at one to Armstrong Point. Even unde the kiddies' picnic rules o and his men could be taken o flight status for failure to obey d rect orders, fined for misuse ( prisoned up to ten years for conduct endangering public safety. When such threats evoked no answer, Parkinson tried gravelvoiced appeals. Hadn't the team heard the platform's report that the transgalactic base didn't exist? Didn't they know the hazards of contact with alien biocosms? Couldn't they recall their obligaSeeker Two kept on its silent path. When it went behind the moon from the platform, cutting off laser contact, Sherman Parkinson turned his attention to the platform itself, which still had that luminous streak in yiew. It was slowly fading behind the seeker, the platform reported. The raylike splash of scattered material was now barely visible, but the circle of the impact crater was still distinct. The platform picked the seeker up when she came back across the moon's north pole, reporting that she had changed course just enough to follow the rotating moon, so that she was returning along survey curve eighty-eight toward that dying gleam. Parkinson bombarded her with desperate questions. What kind of creatures manned that transgalactic base? How had they concealed it? What language had they used for voice contact? What data had the sensors recorded? Seeker Two flew on with no reply. The platform tracked her back down survey curve eighty-eight. Soon after she crossed the moon's equator, that arrow-shaped impact-splash blazed out again ahead. Presently her retro-rockets fired, lifting her on a long arc that slanted back toward the glowing crater. The watchers on the platform followed the flare of her jets, which contracted to an incandescent point as she came down. Their instruments recorded an anomalous surge of hard radiation which peaked at the instant her jets went out. At that point the platform lost contact, as its own orbital motion carried it behind the moon, out of laser range. Its observers reported the rayed crater still glowing on the moon's horizon as long as they could see it... Sherman Parkinson called Skygate to beg for help. Told again code of peace in space without proof of actual attack, he said profanely that he would get the proof. Ignoring all protests, he took off in an unarmed skippercraft for the site of the crash. T he sun was rising there when he arrived. Its harsh glare washed out any trace of that dying glow. The impact crater and its northward rays now looked black, his taped report states, as if a shipload of ink had struck and splashed. The skipper's counters detected no anomalous radiation and nothing revealed any sign of a transgalactic base. There was only Seeker Two, standing tilted among the boulders on the steep north crater rim. She showed neither damage from her reckless landing nor any trace of life. Parkinson dropped cautiously a little farther from the crater lip and made a discovery that exhausted his Marine vocabulary. As he hoarsely reported to the moon platform, three sets of footprints left Seeker Two. They wandered north among the boulders for a distance of several hundred meters. Finally they returned. It was those returning prints that set off his most explosive diction. Magnet-cleated flight boots had made the outgoing prints, but three sets of bare feet returned. "Relay this to Skygate." Parkinson paused as if to clear his head and clean up his language. "We've found Seeker Two -- and something the medics have to explain. Prints in the dust show that all three crew members went for a barefoot walk and somehow got back aboard." "Better check your eyes and look again," the platform advised him. "Men don't go barefoot on the moon. Not far anyhow. You'll have to collect some pretty solid evidence, sir, or you won't last long as Moon Control." Parkinson looked again. He moved the skipper twice to photograph the prints before he sealed his own moonsuit and went out with a spaceman to inspect the seeker. The air lock had been sealed again. Hammered signals brought no response. Parkinson had to knock out an emergency access plate to cycle the lock and get aboard. Marko and Hood and Thorsen lay sprawled on the deck where they must have collapsed when they got back from their unexplainedexcursion into the moon's deadly night. The three men wore no boots, gloves or helmets. Their faces were stained with dried blood, which must have boiled out of their lungs into the vacuum of space. Parkinson felt certain at first that they were dead. The damage to their bodies was far less severe, however, th.an might have been expected. Savagely cold as that dust must have been, their feet were not frozen. The rigor of death had not set in. On a second examination, after he had increased the oxyhelium pressure, Parkinson decided that they were still breathing. "I think they were out collecting this black dust," he reported to the platform. "The stuff that colors the crater dark. A sort of coarse grit, actually. Sprayed all around the crater. But mostly north, as if scattered by an impact from the south. "Queer stuff." Parkinson's voice was hoarse and breathless. "The particles are sharp-edged, have a bright black shine and they all look identical. Like nothing else I ever saw. These men were after this queer grit. Their boots are stuffed with it. Their tool pockets are full of it. Hodian had it crammed in his mouth." Relayed from the platform to Armstrong Point and from there down to Skygate, Parkinson's reports elicited every shade of amusement and unbelief. He was variously advised to change his brand of whiskey, to get the fingerprints of the little green men and to photograph everything before he touched it. "I nearly wish we had found those invaders from Venus," he told the spacemen on the seeker with him. "We know what to do with enemies we can reach." reports from Hudson's spies, I can almost watch the interrogation of the seeker crew there in the hospital under Armstrong Point. Details emerge from the raspy tapes. The dull drone of the fans. The chemical sting of the air. The narrow tunnel room, drillscarred moon rock glistening with glassy sealant. The three men, cocoons in white gauze, reeking of sterifoam, surrounded by medics and guards. Parkinson barking questions at them, growing redder and louder with every answer he can't accept. Yuri Marko is questioned first. " -- a secret base." The surviving tape begins in midsentence. Marko's throat is raw and swollen from his unbelievable exposure to the lunar night. His scratchy voice is hard to make out. "But the beings there aren't from Venus, sir. They aren't from any planet of our sun." Parkinson sounds grittily skeptical. "How do you know?" "I saw the base." Marko answers. "I talked to its people. They belong to a high culture that spreads far through the galaxy. They've been stationed on the moon a long time to watch our evolution. They're delighted that we've come far enough to qualify for contact." "Hunh!" "Sir, think of what it means!" Marko's awed elation comes clearly through his hoarseness and pain. "They want to share their tremendous civilization with us. Our lives will never be the same -- " "There is no base," Parkinson themoon children cuts in. "The platform was watching the spot. I've just been out there. There's nothing but some odd black grit scattered around in the impact crater. If you saw anything it must have been some sort of space mirage." For a few seconds the tape runs silently. "Sir, I know what's real," Marko's faint whisper insists at last. "I've tried drugs. I've had illusions. They feel different. No matter what anybody saw, that base is real." "Tell about it." "It's a structure." Marko pauses as if to think. "But everything about it reflects an unknown culture. The design, the materials, the unbelievable dimensions. Our language doesn't fit, but I'll try to give you my impression. Imagine a tight cluster of roujid white columns, each a different height. The six lower columns are capped with platforms arranged in a rising spiral around the central tower. It's tain Its onion-shaped dome must have been ten kilometers above our orbit. That dome changes color like a beacon -- I think the platforms are landing stages under it. Some were empty, but I saw great globe-shaped ships on two of them." Marko raises his voice. "Sir, does that sound like a dream?" "It ain't there now," Parkinson sneers. "You say you were in voice contact with -- whatever you thought you saw. What language did you use?" "Why -- " Marko pauses as if astonished by his own recollection. "Ukrainian! The voice I heard wasn't human. It was a modulated electronic hum, like -- like a computer simulating speech. I remember wondering if it didn't come through some kind of translating device. But it spoke the Ukrainian peasant dialect my parents used at home. That is remarkable!" "Remarkable ain't the word. What happened after you landed?" The tape whirs quietly. "I can't recall," Marko mutters at last. "That buzzing voice coached us in. I remember firing the retros. I remember watching the lowest stage of the tower, where I thought we were going to land. I remember thinking we were coming in too low to make it. Then it all fades out." "Because it wasn't there." tape. Parkinson greets him heartily as "Major," as if expecting something saner from a fellow soldier, and asks him to tell in his own words what happened to Seeker Two. "Yes, sir. Colonel Parkinson." Thorsen crispily returns the military courtesy. "We were all three on duty, sir. Alert for whatever got Seeker One. We were all observing that luminous patch on the surface ahead. We all saw' something beyond it at the same time, sir. What I saw was a fort." "Venusian?" "I can't say, sir. It was enormous. Round like a turret. Buried in the moon. Camouflaged with a rocky ridge that looked like a crater rim. It rose as we got closer. Bristling with missiles like I never saw before." "Did it fire on you?" "No, sir. Hood was working our radio and laser gear. He picked up a voice commanding us to land beside the fort. That voice -- " Thorsen hesitated. "It spoke Norwegian, sir. My own good mother's Riksmaal, that I learned at home in Stavanger." "Norwegian?" Parkinson's startled voice has lost its warm tone of military fellowship. "Is little Norway building forts in space?" "That's all I know, sir." Thorsen sounds angry. "I don't remember landing." "Listen, Colonel." My brother's voice comes on the tape, husky from exposure but still shrewdly fluent. "Don't let 'em put you on. I saw what they did -- and it was neither a galactic base or a Venusian fort. They're trying to snow gold!" "What's this. Hood? What gold?" "What I saw was a gold meteor," Tom says. "It hit the moon hard enough to burst. But the mass of it stands up in the middle of that crater. A blazing hill of yellow gold. More gold scattered all around. Hundredton nuggets of pure shining gold!" "Did you hear any voice?" "My father's voice." Tom pauses, as if struck with awe. "My own father's! He disappeared on Earth a dozen years ago. We gave him up for dead. But here he was, calling from his own little survey rocket -- speaking broken English with a funny Turko-Yiddish accent, like he did when I was a kid. He said he was all alone. He'd located that gold with electronic gear and swept the moon dust off it. He wanted us to land and witness his finder's claim, under the what we did." Tom's voice turns sharp. "And that's why these men are lying -- to defraud my poor old father of that gold claim!" "I saw no gold," Parkinson grates. "Let's go over all this again." H e keeps hammering questions at all three men for as long as they can talk. When the doctors make him stop he orders them back to their wards under guard and calls in the engineers who had been at work on samples of that black grit. Their answers don't improve his temper. The grit is impure earbon in crystal form, the engineers report. Most of the crystals have been damaged by impact or eroded by long exposure to micrometeors, but apparently they had all once been perfect tetrahedrons, crystals of something new to science. The intact samples measure They are slightly radioactive and strongly magnetic. Besides the carbon content, chemical analysis shows six percent silicon, three percent gold, and nearly two percent thorium, with traces of lead and a few other elements. One chemist suggests that the erystals are an unknown allotrope of natural carbon. "Hogwash," an engineer objects. "They're too much alike. Originally, they seem to have been identical in every feature, down to our limits of measurement. Nothing natural is quite that perfect. I say they're manufactured." "Who made them?" Parkinson's voiee demands. "What for?" The tapes run on, revealing Parkinson's blundering efforts to force an answer to that question. When Seeker Two has been inspected for possible damage and cheeked out to another team. he sends her baek into orbit to resume her interrupted survey flight. Observers eye her from the moon platform, as she returns along her charted path to the impaet crater. Engineers in skipper craft watch from posts near the crater, prepared to photograph and measure anything that brings her down again. But nothing happens. The seeker skims low over the crater, observing no trarisgalactic base, no space fort, no golden meteor. The platform watchers see no surfaee glow. The engineers discover nothing to photograph or measure. The voices of Marko and Thorsen and my brother sound stronger on the tapes when Parkinson questions them again, but they refuse to reconcile their contradictory stories. Each remains stubbornly eertain of what he thinks he saw, and none of them remembers leaving the seeker to gather that black grit. Parkinson delays his own second visit to the crater, running down blind alleys and filing his inconclusive reports while he waits for night to end there. The tapes record his landing, timed to meet the lunar sunrise. Now he finds something new. Reporting to the moon platform, his voice sounds apoplectic. Somebody else hasn't waited for the sun. Some time after Seeker Two passed over the impact site a cargo rocket has landed there. Magnetic gear has been used to sweep up the remaining crystal grit. A few bootprints are left in the dust, but nothing more revealing. Parkinson spends half the long lunar day at the site, sifting the surtern of test holes around the crater, but all he finds is disappointment. No buried mascon, no trace of the impact object. Nothing to explain the crystal grit. Not even a broken tool to identify the raiders. A t the Antilles Hudson, we had been able to follow events to this point through those intercepted reports, but now our news from the moon was cut off. Hudson's leaking secrets had spread from the office to the hotel guests. An unfriendly newsman broadcast the story, adding a notion of his own that the midnight raid on the crater had been planned and led by Hudson himself. Hudson was away when the story broke, but he called home. Half a dozen of us were instantly fired and nobody shared any more tapes from the moon. When Hudson returned -- in about the time his private spaceplane might have required for a quick return flight from the moon -- he had no comment on the story or his own absence or anything at all. I was themoonchildren still marooned. After all deductions for room and food and bar chits my discharge pay came to twenty-three dollars. I lost that at the hotel casino, trying to win my fare to the mainland. When I went back to the employment office, an unpleasant clerk suggested that I might either wash dishes or swim for it. I said I'd swim. As I walked the decks that afternoon, uncertain what I could really do, I heard a news announcement that Robin Hudson had arrived to spend the weekend with her father. On impulse, I went up to her suite. Surprisingly, the doorbox let me in. Robin met me with a moist kiss, but her smile went out when she learned I had no news from Tom. And she turned nasty when I asked her to help me ashore. Perhaps I lost my own temper. I remember calling her a rich bitch. She replied that, she was entirely happy to be rich and quite content that I was a pauper. She added that Tom said I had always been a sniveling schlemiel and that they had both had more than plenty of me. She did listen sulkily, however, when I decided to apologize and explain my predicament. For Tom's sake she called the flight deck and got me a seat on the Key West Jet. Back on the mainland I took a job writing publicity for Diaf-aMood, an emotion-conditioner designed for home installation. We were at war with a rival named Joy-Aire. The Joy-Aire people had spread rumors that our toners were loaded with addictive psychedelics. My new job was to plant counterrumors that the Joy-Aire toners had such undesirable sideeffects as excessive weight gain, paralysis and idiocy. For some months all I knew of the moon story came from the The seeker survey was still in progress, with no further incident. Sherman Parkinson had been replaced at Moon Control by a former manager of the Crater Hudson. Thomas Hood and his fellow crash survivors were well enough to be returned from the moon to Skygate for further examination at the laboratory of exobiology there. That was all. Filled with news of the amazing bioforms seen flying about the atmosphere of Jupiter, more about the moon. I mailed two or three letters to Tom at Skygate, which he didn't bother to answer. Never quite secure at Dial-aMood, because I lacked what our president called "conditional sincerity," I kept job applications going out. One went to Skygate. The reply offered me a speciaf assignnient to write a report on the commercial use of space science. Though the salary wasn't half what Dial-a-Mood paid, I accepted with delight, becauseI was so anxious to pick up the story of the moon grit and its queer effects on the crew of Seeker T wo. IV A delicate green had dusted the mesa in the wake of rain before I arrived, but its mqre common colors were sandstone red and the yellow of wind-drifted dust. The spaceplanes came down on an asterite strip fringed with resinscented pihon and juniper. Tiny green oases like scattered beads were strung along the Albuquerque road, but the wild ridges west were as bleak and barren as the moon. The riddle of that crystal grit was still unsolved as far as I could learn, but my brother and his team had apparently recovered from their crash behind the moon. Discharged from the space hospital, they had been allowed to marry. All three wives were pregnant. My brother's wife was Robin Hudson. The match surprised me. Tom had always said no woman would get her hooks into him and, frankly, I thought Robin might have done better. Perhaps she was drawn to a sort of wolfish rapacity that Tom shared with her own father -- and I think she liked the notion of becoming Robin Hood. Thorsen's bride was a nurse he had met at the hospital on the moon. Her parents were Japanese and her dainty, sloe-eyed charm made an odd contrast to his brawny Viking power. Though her hesitant English was hard for me to understand at first, I could feel her kindly warmth and her lively comic sense. In fact, I fell in love with Suzie Thorsen. Marko's wife became almost as dear to me. She was Dr. Carolina Carter, whom he had met at a briefing session in space labs on his way to the moon. The daughter of a black astronaut who had died in quarantine on Phobos, she had earned her own degree in exobiology. She was a tall beauty, scholarly and gracious, but Robin refused to receive her. She was employed in the labs when I came to Skygate; she worked with cultures of the microscopic beta-life the probes had brought from the upper air of Venus. She was generous with facts for my special report. She and Marko asked me to their home for dinner and it was Marko who later offered me a permanent My own faith in any united human undertaking was pretty well eroded by that time, but I was eager to stay at Skygate. I wanted more facts than anybody yet knew about those small black crystals. I wanted to know what had brought the seekers down and why the contradictory stories of Marko and his men differed so bizarrely from the apparent facts. I took the job. At that point I had seen nothing remarkable in the sudden decision of all three men to marry. Nothing had prepared me for the coming of the moon children, whose lives I am trying to describe. Somewhat ironically for me, it presently developed that my actual task in the publicity section was not to tell their story, but rather to conceal it. The unfolding wonders of their lives soon began to draw too much notice. My job, it turned out, was to protect them from the painful consequences of their own surprising strangeness. Young Nick Marko's first surprising act was his birth. Carolina had carried him less than seven months, and she was still at work in the exobiology lab, running amino acid tests on her cultures of microscopic bioforms, not an hour before he was born. A t three pounds and no  ounces, Nick surprised the neonatal specialists with his smallscale maturity. He breathed easily without waiting to be spanked and nursed with an uncommon eagerness. His color was equally surprising. Born pink and white, neither tomato-vermilion nor with any visible touch of his mother's rich pigmentation, he turned nut brown in five seconds under the lights on his father's movie camera. Ten minutes later, that instant tan was gone. His pattern of sleep perplexed his doctors and frightened his parents. For almost a month he stayed awake day and night, learning to turn himself over and ceaselessly exploring every object he could reach. On his twenty-eighth day, Carolina found him limp and cold in his crib. Marko felt no pulse and thought he was dead. Two physicians agreed. No test found any sign of life. Even his brain waves had ceased. But Carolina wouldn't give him up. She was with him all night, tending him as zealously as if he had been another Venusian bioform. At eighty-one degrees his falling temperature stabilized. Four hours later it began to rise. He woke in her arms at dawn, babbling happily and ready to nurse. Valkyrie Thorsen was born that same night. No robust battlemaid, notwithstanding the name her father chose, she was even tinier than Nick and just as remarkably mature. Very fair at first, though Suzie Thorsen was almost as dark as Carolina, she turned briefly golden under the lights in the delivery room. Oddly alike, Kyrie and Nick were equally precocious. They shared the same minute perfection, the same shy grace, the same happy tempers, the same traits of pleasing but nonhuman strangeness. Both had the same unearthly sort of slim, elfin, largeeyed beauty. Both were warmly ; and perceptive, yet often untouchably aloof. Both slept only at month-long intervals, in the same deathlike way. They even seemed somehow aware of each other before they ever met. Carolina discovered that one morning when she had driven Marko to work at the Center, where he was now head of the Life Science Section. Baby Nick was with her, slung in a harness to the car seat. He began leaping and crowing as they passed Thorsen's house on the way home. Carolina had not meant to stop, but Nick cried out as she drove past the house and began moaning so sadly that she turned back around the block. He was yelling and wriggling again with glee when she parked in front of the house. Inside, Kyrie had been sitting against the end of her crib, solemnly shaking a rattle in time to a dissonant blue jazz number that . she had learned to request by beating out its syncopated rhythm. Be fore Carolina reached the door  with Nick, she began tossing rat' ties and toys out of the crib. When Suzie let them in, she pulled herself upright to greet them, squealing with delight. With eager screams they persuaded the mothers to put them together. Seated face to face, one at each end of the crib, they fell abruptly silent. Wide eyes changing slowly from opal-gold to midnight black, they studied each other for five endless rriinutes. Nick pitched suddenly forward and got Kyrie's doll foot into his mouth. Carolina swooped to the rescue, because Nick was already cutting teeth. Kyrie howled, however, when she tried to pull Nick away. They lay for another hour in the crib, prodding and kicking and gently biting each other, sometimes laughing, sometimes so grave that Carolina was frightened again. They clung to each other when Carolina wanted to go, until the mothers promised that they could visit again whenever they pleased. Nick seemed to understand. He crooned solemnly to Kyrie until her somber eyes turned slowly golden and then he looked quietly up at his mother, ready to leave. They let nothing stop those promised visits. One morning, when it was Kyrie's turn to call on Nick, the mesa was buried under an unusual snowfall. Cars were stalled, and Suzie refused to go out. Kyrie whimpered so piteousthe moon children ly, however, that Thorsen put on his skis and carried her to see Nick. so surprising, but in more distressing ways. Tom was still at Skygate, in a new job as assistant director of Operation Seeker, but Robin had never liked the place. It was Sticksgate to her. She was abroad most of the time, flitting between her father's floating resorts with her own set, until her unplanned pregnancy alarmed her. She begged for an abortion, but Tom and her father opposed it. Howard Hudson wanted a grandson and Tom may still have been responsive to some undiscovered influence from the moon grit. She might have ignored both of them, but when her doctors heard about what they called the idiopathic births of Nick Marko and Kyrie Thorsen, they advised her for her own safety to come back to the space hospital and bear her child under expert care. To Robin's dismay the child wasn't born at seven months. She waited fretfully, staying in a suite at the Skygate Hudson because my brother's house had no room for her nurse and her French maid and her hypnotherapist, hating what the desert was doing to her skin. At nine months the child was still unborn. By then Robin was growing hysterical about more than the fun things she was missing and the freckles she was getting. She called her father and her astrologer and a guru she had met at the Bengal Hudson. They all advised her to demand a Caesarean section, but the knife terrified her. She had passed ten months when Nick and Kyrie came to call. It was a sunny afternoon and Marko had taken the babies and their mothers on a tour of the complex. They had watched a spaceplane roaring off toward the Earth platform and an ancient Indian building a mountain of juniper firewood on a tiny burro and a tall cactus blooming -- watched all with the same silent intentness, but a chance glimpse of the Skygate Hudson tower sent the children into shrieking fits. Their whooping eagerness was so insistent that Marko drove them to the hotel. Robin wouldn't see them at first. My brother came down to meet them in the lobby. With an embarrassed glance at Carolina, he said his wife was not receiving anyone. Nick and Kyrie refused to be taken away, however, and evidently the unborn child in the tower suite somehow sensed their presence. While the mothers were still trying to quiet the screaming babies, Robin's nurse burst in with a whispered message for Tom. He asked Marko to wait, while he went back to Robin. A few minutes later he came down again. Looking pale and shaken, he announced that his wife had  changed her mind. She wanted to  see Nick and Kyrie. Their mothers could come if they liked. Carolina chose to wait in the lobby, but Suzie Thorsen told me later what happened up in the suite. They found Robin sprawled on a chaise lounge, under a heap of pillows and blankets that failed to conceal the bulge of her belly. The maid, the nurse and my brother were hovering over her uneasily. Her face was streaked with unbecoming tears. Suzie felt sorry for her. Joy to see her, but their interest t was all in her swollen abdomen, j They stared at it with wide and  darkening eyes. They leaned  eagerly toward it. They prodded I wildly at it when Robin tried to i take them in her arms. ; Suddenly savage, she shoved , them off. "Hideous little m-m-m-m-monsters!" Suzie mimicked her stammering rage with a quaint effect. "Horrid little b-b-b-b-bastards! They're too bright to be h-h-h-h-' human. Take 'em away!" Marko and Suzie took them away. Strangely subdued, they  went without protest. Their huge eyes remained solemn and dark. They clung to each other in a frightened way as Marko drove them home and Nick was disconsolate when Suzie took Kyrie out of the car. Late that night, Marko and Carolina were awakened by Nick's frantic screaming. They could find nothing wrong with him. The phone rang before they got him quiet and Suzie told them that Kyrie was also moaning and sobbing in terror that had no visible cause. Hoping the two might comfort each other, they rushed Nick across town to Kyrie's nursery. Sitting in the same crib, the two stared blankly at each other and howled in harmony. When Marko thought of the third child he called Robin's suite. The French maid told him that she had gone to the hospital for a Caesarian delivery. Marko talked to her doctors, who were already washing up. They said they had waited as long as they dared. They refused to delay the operation. Nerved by a new burst of terror from Nick and Kyrie, Marko called Colonel Petrov. A nominal civilian, Maxim Petrov was the retired Sino-Soviet officer who had replaced Sherman Parkinson as head of the Space Studies Center. He had no more faith than had Parkinson in the altruistic ideals anxious to discover the power of the moon grit. When Marko pointed out that Robin's unborn child would be another guinea pig that might help him crack the mystery, Petrov called the hospital. Robin's surgeons huffily agreed to wait for additional clinical tests. The tests revealed an unknown antigen in her blood and a dangerous sensitivity to the anesthetics they had meant to use. They put off the operation over Robin's profane protests. The moment she was wheeled out of the delivery room, Nick and Kyrie relaxed in their cribs and went happily to sleep, a week earlier than usual. My brother took Robin back to the Skygate Hudson under mild sedation, sobbing and cursing him and his child. She had another month to wait, swelling enormously and quarreling venomously by phone with everyone she knew, refusing to be seen by anybody except her nurses and her doctors and the puzzled staff of exobiologists and other specialists they had called in. Carolina believed that Nick and Kyrie were aware of her delivery when at last it came. They wanted to be together and they cooed and trilled excitedly, sometimes with expectant attention, large heads lifted as if they were listening. Whatever they perceived, it did not alarm them. Robin's delivery was normal -- in fact easier than the obstetricians had expected -- but her child was not. A lax, shapeless, sluglike thing, it weighed thirteen pounds. It was all body, the head grotesquely broad and flat. The limbs were undeveloped flippers, with the barest hint of human form. Short dark fur covered it all over. The obstetricians failed to start it breathing. They found no pulse or any other sign of life. Its temperature was sinking fast. Helplessly they surrendered it to the jostling specialists, who looked for brain waves and blood-reactions and autonomic reflexes. No test revealed anything. An empty bag of unnameable flesh, the creature hung inert and monstrous in their hands. They declared it dead. V in's baby. Relieved to wash their hands of the inexplicable, the doctors let her take it. She bathed it and held it in her arms all night. Its falling temperature steadied at eighty and finally began to rise. By noon next day it was awake. The specialists had it carried to Robin's room, urging her to nurse it, because they were afraid to risk bottle feeding. Though they had warned her the child was exceptional, she hid her eyes after one glance and shrieked until her physician ordered heavy sedation. My brother hinted that the creaj ture should simply be allowed to die. Merely as a biological specimen, however, it was far too valuable to be abandoned. Many ; of us, besides, had caught a, warmer personal interest in it from Nick and Kyrie. Since neither . parent wanted to see it again, Marko and Carolina took it home until the nursery was finished. That nursery was actually a special laboratory, designed by . Colonel Petrov himself for the observation of these unique guinea ; pigs. A low-roofed ranch-style building, it looked deceptively homelike, but there were offices and instrument rooms and a record vault as Wll as space for all three children and their custo; dians. One-way mirrors and a network of sensors were built into the ; walls. Robin's baby was moved there I as soon as a room was ready, a ; week ahead of Nick and Kyrie. To Carolina's surprise, they seemed to miss it painfully, even though it I was nearly always asleep. Allowed f at last to explore their own new I quarters there, they squealed with  glee when they discovered that child would be with them again. Though most of the nurses shrank from its shapeless strangeness, they clamored to be near it, their great eyes glowing as if it were beautiful to them. By that time Carolina had decided that it was going to be male. She named it Guy, after the way she heard the shouts with which Nick and Kyrie greeted it. Its soft flippers had begun to look more like hands and feet and it sometimes twitched and blinked when the other babies were near, though for several months it made no sound at all. Robin tried peyote for her jangled nerves and yoga to restore her precious figure. She returned to the Bengal Hudson with her guru and married him before the year was up, promising a gossip columnist that she would never bear another child. Divorce had done no apparent damage to the curious tie between my brother and Howard Hudson. Tom left his Skygate job as soon , as Colonel Petrov would release him and I heard that he was joining Hudson in a venture to exploit the astonishing discoveries on Mercury, where the seekers had begun to chart wide craters walled with piled nodules of alloyed iridium and gold -- one exobiologist made the bizarre suggestion that those rich nuggets were excreted waste from the unknown creatures that had dug those ironwalled tunnels. In spite of those rich finds, and stranger ones reported on the the moon children begun to fall apart. The rumors and suspicions that grew from the riddle of the moon grit raised new tensions between its uneasy partners. Maxim Petrov resigned in the wake of a scandal that linked him with a Sino-Soviet spy ring. Washington threatened to cancel the lease on the mesa and reclaim all the Skygate installations. Erik Thorsen became the new director of the Center through a precarious compromise and was soon accused of setting up his own spy apparatus for the United States. N aively, as we sat one morning over coffee in the nursery kitchen, I asked Marko what those spies were after. After all, international. Our research reports went out to every member. I could understand Howard Hudson's interest in the seeker surveys, but we had no iridium boulder fields here at Skygate. "We have something else that might surprise you." Marko gave me an owlish blink. "Thorsen questioned me the other day and finally warned me against his rival spies. What they want is information about the three fathers -- him and Tom and me. About our sex lives." "Why?" "The children are the most exciting results of space research up to now -- and a deeper mystery than the nature of whatever dug those tunnels into Mercury. A lot of scientists and several governments want to know whether there'll be more." He stirred his coffee moodily. "Carolina wanted another," he added at last. "But the lab says my semen's sterile now. Thorsen didn't exactly say, but I think he's impotent -- and distressed about it. Which leaves your brother." I thought that over. In the divorce action Robin's lawyers had named a hotel manicurist, a nurse in the space hospital and a typist in the records section. Had some of them been secret agents? "Tom's gone," I said. "He may be back in space -- we don't keep in touch. But who would want another creature like his son?" "Don't look down your nose at Guy." Marko seemed almost hurt. "Nick and Kyrie idolize him. My wife has learned to love him, too. She keeps quoting proverbs. She says you can't see the oak in the acorn." That image of the acorn stuck in my mind, apt for all three children. The mystery of life showed special shapes in them. Delicately new, they kept unfolding unexpected strength and startling surprise. Marko was in charge of the nursery now, with Suzie and Carolina as official assistants. They nurtured those seedling beings with love and wonder and frequent alarm. Guy Hood slept most of the time for his first few years, but Nick and Kyrie kept everybody busy recording the data Thorsen demanded. Though they looked more human than Guy, their bodies were equally strange. All three possessed temperature regulators that baffled the biologists. When snow fell they wanted to play in it naked. The hottest desert sun gave them only a temporary tan. Nudists by nature, they had no use for clothing. We learned to let them go without it. gence tests. Even when he was awake, however, Guy Hood had no mind that anyone could measure. Though Nick and Kyrie seemed happily cooperative, their erratic responses were a puzzle until Carolina discovered that they were making a gay little game of observing their observers. When Suzie taught Kyrie to wink her varicolored eyes, she started winking at everybody who tried to spy on her through the oneway mirrors, no matter how silently. Thorsen wanted to know how she sensed us, butnobody could find the answer. Nick discovered arithmetic before he could talk. Two months old, he began playing counting games with Carolina, pushing beads on a toy abacus to add and subtract integers up to ten. A month older, using a larger counting frame Marko made for him, he learned division and invented a system of his own for extracting roots. Beyond that point his mathematical intuitions became vaguely disturbing. I remember the puzzled dread I felt one day in Marko's office. We were watching a salesman demonstrate a compact new computer. Carolina came in carrying Nick, who was always as eager as anybody to see new lab stuff. Not six months old and not yet walking, he leaned and whined until Carolina set him on the desk in front of the computer. The amused salesman pointed out the switch and gasped when Nick started the machine. He ran it for half an hour, tiny fists tapping out his problems with a gingerly care, bald head bobbing to bring his huge eyes within an inch of the answers. Abruptly, then, with a shy little smile that seemed to hide boredom with the machine and amused wonder at all of us, he tore the paper tape from the machine. Before Carolina could help he slid through a chair to the floor and scurried back to rejoin Kyrie where she sat in the hall, hammering an empty pabulum tin with a teaspoon and the plastic case of Marko's slide rule, beating out an irritating rhythm that somehow stuck in my mind so that I can still recall it. I asked the salesman not to talk about the children, but when he was gone I discussed that disquieting incident with Marko and Carolina. "Sometimes those two frighten me," Marko admitted. "I got the oddest feeling just now that Nick can think circles around our new computer." Carolina put a warning finger to her lips, though he had closed the sound-proof office door. "What are they?" I almost shivered when I recalled the enigmatic amusement on Nick's elfin face as he crumpled that discarded tape. "What will they be when they are grown?" "Guy's the one who worries me," Carolina whispered. "The other two are happy. Bright as they are, I understand them most of the time. But Guy's different. A different breed. I think I love him just as much -- he does need love. But I can't help feeling that he was born for tragedy. I'm afraid for Guy!" VI O UR work with the children was wonder and delight, at least for the first few years. Carolina used to say they were like the blooms of some exotic tropic bulb unfolding. With each new day they brought us glad surprises. Music was Kyrie's first interest, but she seemed bored with all our favorites before she learned to talk. She began beating out her own music on any resonant object it in a keen mocking-bird voice, inventing complex scales that seemed difficult and unmelodious to us. Seven months old, Nick walked his first steps on the same morning she uttered her first careful syllables. Gravely intent, they tutored each other all day. That afternoon they swayed hand in hand to meet Carolina, proudly cooing in unison, "Watch us -- walking!" Nick learned to read before they were two, apparently from a set of picture-books about the planets. He taught Kyrie. They were not yet three when Marko found them one morning on the nursery floor, huddled over his desk dictionary. "Now." Kyrie's bird-voice had an interrogative lilt. "Biocosm?" She turned the pages to find the word and Nick bent over the book, his whole head sweeping the lines at a distance of two inches. "A planetary ecology of related and compatible bioforms." He formed each word with painful precision, mispronouncing one or two he had probably never heard. "Though all known biocosms of the solar system display certain similarities, biological materials from one biocosm are generally useless or poisonous to members of another." "What does that mean?" Kyrie looked up at Marko. "Uncle Yuri, what is a biocosm?"  "A chain of life," Marko said. "Here on Earth, we all belong to a single chain. Cows eat grass and we eat cows and the grass grows on animal stuff. We breathe out carbon dioxide the grass needs and the grass breathes out oxygen for us. In our own biocosm we are all made of similar chemicals and we are all adjusted to one another." Nick nodded brightly, but Kyrie was still frowning. "We call our own world the alpha biocosm," Marko said. "Our space machines have to carry little alpha biocosms, because we can't breathe the air on any other world or eat the things that grow there. The beta-forms of Venus and the delta-forms of Jupiter can't fit into our chain. That's a problem for space explorers. Different biocosms can't easily be friends." "Thank you. Uncle Yuri." Kyrie shook her head, still unsatisfied. "Now what about Guy? Does he belong -- " she caught her breath -- "to our biocosm?" "We don't know much about Guy." Marko hesitated uncomfortably. "We're learning all we can. We want to help him grow up and be happy." "Please -- help Guy!" Her small voice quivered. "We need you, Uncle Yuri. You and Aunt Carolina and Uncle Kim. Because my own man-father is afraid of Nick and me and he doesn't love Guy at all!" We tried to help all three. Nick and Kyrie needed little teaching. Nick soon began consuming books with a computerlike efficiency that almost alarmed me. After music, Kyrie found and dropped a dozen other interests, as if searching for something she could not identify. tour for Nick and Kyrie during the summer they were four. Though we had trouble with hostile crowds in several cities, the children made a light-hearted game of evading both mobs and protectors. Nick learned Ukranian from Marko's father in Lucerne and picked up spoken Japanese from Suzie's mother in Honolulu -- he was disappointed when she didn't know the ideograms. Though Nick seemed to be drinking in everything with bigeyed delight, Kyrie made us cut the trip short. Guy had been left at Skygate because of the spreading fear of space aliens and Kyrie kept fretting that he was lonely. Perhaps he was. He squirmed against her like a hungry kitten when he saw her again and mouthed a sound she said was her name. Guy was now awake three or four hours at a time, though he slept for days on end. His furry limbs had begun to develop, but all his movements were still sluggish and uncertain. Kyrie got him to stand that summer, towering over her like a gray ogre, but another year had passed before he could walk or speak. Even then, his speech was a slurred mumble that she had to translate for the rest of us. Somehow Guy became a special friend of mine. Perhaps I found it easy to forgive, his slow gray strangeness because he was my brother's son. He seemed to show a kind of animal affection for me even before I could understand his voice, when he snuggled up for me to stroke his fur. As he became aware enough to miss his parents, I suppose he tried to replace them with me. I remember a painful scene in the nursery during the summer he was five. Kyrie had been sitting on my knee. She slipped down when Guy shambled in. Perhaps he wanted her place, but he had grown too heavy to be held. He leaned over me, whining and clumsily pawing at me. A wave of his special odor struck me -- a sharp clean scent, a little like a dry barnyard. "Little Guy wants to know what he is." I smiled when Kyrie called him little, but she was very serious. "He wants to know why he's not like Nick and me. He can't see why he has no father and no mother to love him and make him beautiful." Robin was on the moon by then with her fourth husband, a lunaculture faddist who was converting the Crater Hudson into a low-gee rejuvenation mecca for aging billionaires. My brother had managed to disappear completely. "You're all right, Guy." I touched his naked fur. "You do have parents. They're traveling. Your mother's on the moon, but I'm sure she often thinks of you -- " He mouthed a savage sound. Kyrie rushed to him and reached up to wrap her golden arms around him. Tears welled out of her midnight eyes. "We do love you, little Guy." She looked helplessly at me. "He wants to know why he's something nobody -- hardly anybody loves." "Tell him the three of you are different." Though I knew Guy could understand, I found myself speaking to Kyrie instead. "Different -- and very wonderful! Tell him we're working in the lab to find out why." I was trying to look into Guy's face, but its inhuman strangeness distracted me. The eyes were wet lumps, yellow-rimmed, with no expression I could read. They stared without winking. Slow tears ran out of them to make streaks down his furry cheeks. His voice croaked dismally again. "Little Guy -- you, too, are wonderful." Kyrie gulped and looked at me, her enormous eyes almost accusing. "He says he's dull and ugly like a toad. He wants to know why he isn't beautiful and bright like Nick." There was nothing I could say. variable mission. At first we tried to sell the children as the exotic and delightful wonder-babies of the moon. When that program began to sour we tried to shield them from all the fear and fury we could not prevent. Once I showed Marko our file of hatemail. Its growing virulence sickened me. Writers called the children filthy names, accused them of kinship with the enemy biocosms on the other planets, even demanded their destruction. "To a lot of people," I told Marko, "they're monsters. Not just Guy -- though I guess he does look the part. But Nick and Kyrie, too. I can't understand it. Why should anybody hate them?" "They're vulnerable." He slowly crumpled an ugly letter. "I suppose we all look for demons outside when we can't endure what's in ourselves. We project our hates upon them. The creatures of Mercury and Venus and Jupiter might do for demons, but they are out of reach. The children are strange and here and vulnerable." "But they're human," I protested. "Partly, anyhow." "Partly." Marko scowled at the paper ball. "But partly not. I suppose that explains the irrational nature of the hatred." He nodded somberly. "The horror of the old taboo against sex between beasts and men." I often thought of that. Guy at least, with his sullen moods and shaggy fur, must have seemed as alien to people outside as the betalife of Venus was. Though Nick and Kyrie were appealingly human most of the time, I remember disquieting bits of strangeness. Even their play sometimes disturbed us. I remember walking into the nursery one afternoon, the summer they were four. Absorbed in the game, they ignored us. Nick kneeled on the floor, carefully erecting a tower of white plastic blocks. Kyrie was dancing around and around him on tiptoe, carrying an old golf ball over her head and buzzing in an odd way through her teeth. Guy squatted near them, following the ball with his sleepy yellow stare. I was smiling at their grave intentness, but Marko froze. "Nick! What's all this?" "Just a game. Dad." Painstakingly, Nick crowned his tower with a bright orange block. Marko bent to stare. Nick glanced at Kyrie. Her buzzing changed. Dancing closer, she brought the golf ball down along a spiral path and placed it on a shelf of the tower. "Nick -- " Marko's voice was so queer and high that Kyrie gave him a wondering look. He caught his breath and tried again. "Where did you learn this game?" "Just made it up." "Will you tell me about it?" "You saw it. Dad." Nick shrugged. "That's all it is." "But I can't understand what I saw." Marko turned to Kyrie, almost desperately. "Can't you help me?" "I'll try. Uncle Yuri." She nodded solemnly. "In the game, we don't belong. We're spacefolk marooned on earth. We find a way to send a message to our own far people and they send a ship to pick us up." She touched the ball. "This is the ship." "The tower." Marko's pointing finger trembled. "What is that tower?" Kyrie turned to Nick, puzzled. "It's a tachyon terminal." He spoke the words with a careful precision. "You see. Dad, the ball is a tachyon ship. That means it goes faster than light out in the space between stars. But here it needs a proper terminal, with a tachyon beacon to show it where to land." "I -- I see." Marko gulped, trying hard to play the game. "But how did you learn about tachyons?" "In a book." Guy nodded vaguely toward the nursery library. "A book about ships and stars. The writer said tachyon ships would never work, because the speed of light is a barrier we could never pass. Maybe he's right. We're only playing a game. In the game we just skip around the barrier, by using a minimum-energy shift of state." He must have seen my puzzled look, because his elfin face grew graver. "You see, that converts the mass of the ship to the tachyon state at any speed we like." "I -- I see." Marko was blinking again at the plastic tower. "Why did you build it just that way, Nick? I mean, with those seven columns and the colored block at the top." "I don't know. Dad." Nick shrugged, with a look of bored impatience. "After all, it's just a game." "And Guy is sick of it," Kyrie piped. "Because he doesn't dig tachyons. If you will please excuse us now, he wants to go out to the pool." Still unable to walk alone, Guy whined eagerly. Kyrie ran to him and waited for Nick to help. Together they hauled him upright. He tottered away between them, a gray ungainly beast. T he toy tower was left behind. Its stacked blocks were cylinders of a common magnetic plastic from a set Carolina had given Guy. I saw nothing special about them, but Marko ran for his camera to film the tower and made me dictate a record of the whole incident, before he would answer my questions. "That's a model of the terminal I saw -- or thought I saw -- where the grit brought us down on the moon," he told me then. "The seven clustered columns. The rising spiral of landing stages around the taller central column. That colored beacon at the top." He frowned at me and shook his head. "I'd like to know where they got that game." "Let's look." We found the book about ships and stars, but there was no picture of a tachyon terminal. Carolina assured us that she had never told the children that much about the grit and the riddles of their origin. After a long and fruitless discussion our reports went into the file of unsolved problems. While that file grew thicker, year bled. Politicians began to call it a nest of spies and traitors. Our budgets were sliced. Able people quit. Though we tried not to alarm the children with any news of outside dangers, I remember something Carolina said. We were in the exobiology lab, where she still worked after hours. Blue sterilizing lamps washed the walls with a pale, painful light. Whispering from the filters, the air was still thick with the queer scent of the beta-life bubbling in the glass-walled incubators -- a stinging reek like molding hay. She had been showing me her slides and models of those microscopic aliens with a glow almost of love, but her animation died when I spoke of the "It's like the sand castles we used to build on the beach when I was a kid. The sea keep eating at them. I'm afraid of what will happen to the children when it's gone." "Perhaps it won't go." I felt impelled to defend the future of the organization, not from any real faith in it, but I suppose because hopeful promotion had been my profession. "I know they keep cutting our budgets. But we can make a strong case for the seeker project at least, now that it's finally paying off." I was thinking of the new wealth and knowledge that space had begun to promise. The diggers of those ironwalled tunnels into Mercury had yet to show themselves, but the seeker craft were retons of iridium and gold in the nuggets that formed those craterlike ridges around the tunnel clusters. Critics objected that gold wasn't yet worth its freight from Mercury, but Jupiter was already seeming to offer more exciting knowledge and cheaper transportation. Flying objects had appeared near that giant planet -- gathering and wheeling as if to observe the spacemen towing the prefab sections of Jupiter Station One -- moving with such remarkable speed and freedom that captured specimens were expected to reveal some radical new principle of space travel -- if specimens could be captured. The bold passes and swift escapes of those Jovian beings seemed to prove some kind of intelligence. The indications of advanced life on Venus and Saturn were not quite so clear. A second station in orbit above the newly mottled clouds of Venus had recently reported an unexplained loss of power before it ceased transmission. No Saturn probe had ever returned, or sent back any report at all from the close vicinity of the ringed planet. "Why should we fear our neighbors in space?" I asked Carolina. "They've been next door to us for haven't hurt us yet." "It's not the planets I fret about," she said. "It's people. Being black, I can't see human nature quite like you do, Mr. Hodian. I'm afraid we're not as noble as the to be. That's why we must give the children a chance. I hope they'll be wiser than we ever were." For a moment we stood silent, brooding over their uncertain future. "Of course I want to know what dug those tunnels into Mercury," she went on suddenly. "And why our Saturn probes don't get back. But I think human nature is a bigchildren. Maybe even to our sister biocosms." She paused to frown at the incubator where her reeking betacultures grew in frothing flasks of milky liquid. "We've had trouble for years with some unknown agent that said. "Now I think I've found the killer. If the more advanced Venusians dislike human beings, perhaps they have a reason."  because she wanted to repeat some of her experiments, but she called me back a few nights later, along with Marko and Thorsen, to hear about her discovery. When we gathered around a table in the lab, she tried to hand Thorsen a flask of pale fluid clotted with little brownish lumps. He held his nose and backed away. "It can't hurt you, sir," she assured him softly. "It was a beta culture, but it's dead. I killed it with a drop of human juice. The actual lethal fraction is a common enzyme. A human molecule that seems to multiply like a virus in the beta creatures. If the higher forms have no more immunity, one drop of human blood could spread a terrible contagion among them." "So we're poison to them?" Thorsen relaxed, grinning now at the flask. "I suppose they'll learn to respect us." "That depends on their level of evolution." She gave him an odd look, both baffled and sad. "Anyhow, we have other problems, closer to home." Thorsen himself was one of those problems. To understand the children, as Carolina said, we needed to know precisely what the grit had done to the seeker's three-man crew. Though my brother had disappeared, Marko and Thorsen were still under study. Except for his sterility, Marko displayed no. permanent effects of his experience on the moon. Though Thorsen angrily denied any effect on himself, he had lost flesh and youth and nerve. The flame of his hair and beard had slowly dulled to a rusty gray and his old boisterous charm had died into a bleak taciturnity. We had watched that change with sharp concern, yet the outcome surprised us. He tried to kill Nick. It was a warm autumn afteTnoon, the year the children were five. Suzie had arranged a picnic, hoping to revive Thorsen's fading interest in the children and perhaps also in herself. Nick didn't want to go, but Kyrie thought Guy would enjoy the outing. Trouble began when Thorsen commanded the children to dress. Kyrie slipped obediently into a sunsuit and brought shorts for Guy, but Nick came out naked. Thorsen lost his temper and shouted a new command. Nick said quietly that he didn't need clothes and wouldn't wear them. Thorsen called him indecent and pulled him out of the car. He walked quietly back to the nursery. By that time Suzie was crying and Guy had begun to moan. Kyrie ran after Nick and brought him out in a pair of red swim trunks. I watched them drive away in Suzie's new electric car -- a gift from Thorsen in the wake of some earlier domestic incident they wouldn't talk about. He looked grim and gloomy at the wheel, but Kyrie was soon happily excited, showing everything to Guy. A n hour before they were to return the hospital called us. We found all three children laid out in the emergency ward, splashed with blood and grime, limp as death. Carolina rushed to them and soon assured us that they were only sleeping. Mark and I left her to tend them, while we tried to learn what had happened. Suzie had driven them back in the car, but she was battered and exhausted, already under sedation. A police airtrac picked Thorsen up at the picnic spot. His deep facial scratches were still oozing blood. He glared at us sullenly and told the officers to take him on to jail. We got the story the next day, when Suzie and Kyrie were awake. The explosion had come when the new car stalled on the last rocky climb toward the seep we called the Indian spring, where they had planned to eat. Thorsen lifted the hood, read the fuel cell handbook and finally said they would have to wait for help. But Nick spoke up. He said the cell just needed adjustment and reached past Thorsen to twist a relief valve. The motor hummed at once, but Thorsen came apart. Gasping with a wordless fury, he seized Nick's throat and swung him off the ground. Suzie screamed, while Nick kicked and strangled, but Thorsen ignored her. She attacked him, clawing wildly at his face. He freed one hand long enough to slap her off the road. Guy hugged Thorsen's leg, mewing like a hurt kitten, as the man shook Nick with both hands again. Kyrie was more effective. She found the jeweled rescue gun in Suzie's purse -- a gift from Thorsen liimself when he had brought his bride back from the moon to the turbulent Earth. One quick jet knocked him out. Nick was limp by then,, but Kyrie knew he was still alive. She helped Suzie load him into the car and waited until they were safe on the mesa pavement before she herself went to sleep. Released by the police when Suzie wouldn't file charges, Thorsen took a room at the Skygate Hudson. Marko and I tried to question him there. His patched face looked pale and drawn and his breath had a faint alcohol reek. At first he wouldn't talk at all. "No, I'm not drunk!"'he burst out at last. "Yesterday I wasn't even drinking. The whole thing became just too much for me when that smart-faced kid fixed the car. I can't stand 'em any longer." "But they're our children." Marko blinked in owlish astonishment. "Little Kyrie's your own daughter." "A damned cuckoo!" His face was red and twitching now. "They're all cuckoos. Something planted 'em in us -- to be hatched in human bodies. But they're actually no kin. No more human than a crocodile!" "You can't believe -- " "We've been damned fools!" He raised his voice to drown Marko's. "Trying to bring them up -- to take the world away from us. They've got to be exterminated." We stood staring. I couldn't understand him. After a moment he staggered away as if exhausted by his own trembling violence. "I guess I was a fool today, letting that little devil tempt me to touch him, but they're all too much for me. Too clever and too quick. I saw that months ago." He paused to peer at us, bewildered and afraid. "Can't you see what demons they are?" he whispered desperately. "Can't you see what they're scheming to do?" Vll vealed new fissures in the sand quarreled with the doctors at the space hospital about his sanity, but he was finally relieved of his post and transferred to a psychiatric clinic for treatment. The directors failed at first to agree on a man to replace him. They finally called Marko into a closed meeting and sent him back as acting head, with a new program for the Center. "Half the directors think Erik was right." He shook his head gloomily. "They'd like to get rid of the children. Since they don't know how to do that they want us to watch them. We're to record themoon children every change we see. Report every word and every act." The crumbling castle thus became a sort of prison, but we were able to keep the children safe inside it a little longer. Though the new joint research committee gave us no funds for formal research, Nick and Kyrie were turning sharper minds than ours to the riddle of their own existence. Trying to shield the children, Carolina had often warned us not to talk to them about the alien biocosms and the riddle of their own origin. When they began asking questions about themselves, her first answers were evasive. "Of course you three are different," she used to say. "You're the moon babies. Your fathers were the moon men. That's why you're all so special and so precious. You aren't like us poor dull earth people at all." They outgrew such simple answers. The spring they were seven, Nick found Carolina's name in a child's book about "our neighbors in space." He brought it to me to ask if Dr. C. Marko was actually his mother. When I said she was, he and Kyrie demanded a tour of the exobiology lab. Carolina reluctantly agreed, though she masked them cautiously against infection by some alien organism. Kyrie clung close to me, frightened into silence by the strange smells and machines. Nick was eagerly excited, shouting breathless questions through the gauze. Huge-eyed, he peered at flasks of cultured beta-life. He squinted and prodded at a coiled iridium nugget from Mercury. He blinked at projected films of the snakeshaped creatures that had come out to circle Jupiter Station. As we were about to leave, sudden bells jangled. Automatic doors thudded shut, sealing the hall ahead of us. A blinding violet glare flooded the glass-walled corridors around the incubators. "Uncle Kim!" Kyrie gripped my hand. "What's this?" I was unnerved, but Carolina seemed delighted. "Don't fret." She gathered both children in her arms. "It's just the beta-life. Sometimes it changes shape', you see. Like tadpoles changing into frogs or grubs into butterflies." She turned more gravely to me. "We've been observing this for several months, though we don't yet have data for a formal report. The cultures bubble along for generation after generation in single-cell form. But now and then something happens. The cells combine into an amazing metamorph." "Let's have a look." She made us wait while she got into a plastic gown and went back through double doors into the incubator block to bring a stoppered flask to the glass barrier where we could see it. The children gasped and stared. The milky fluid in the bottle had become a big scarlet bubble, oddly spotted with gold and black, fringed with silky silver tendrils. With an uneven rhythm it expanded against the walls of the flask and contracted again, as if trying to breathe. "Poor creature!" Kyrie whispered. "It wants out." stand. We stood there half the afternoon, watching the imprisoned thing while she made notes and photographs. Vigorous at first, its breathing movements became irregular and slow. "That bottle's choking it." Kyrie looked accusingly at Carolina. "Can't you set it free?" "Our breath would kill it." Carolina patted Kyrie's golden shoulder, soothingly. "We'd all like to help, but it can't live in our biocosm." We saw it die. Its last fluttering movements ceased. Its vivid colors faded into leaden grays. The bubble burst and shrank, its fragile membranes dissolving into a few drops of brown liquid mud. Its odor reached us when Carolina opened the doors, a thin, revolting sweetness a little like rotten eggs. I wanted to leave, but Nick and Kyrie had questions to ask. "We're getting two or three such changes a week," Carolina told us. "Each metamorph has a different color and shape. They're all trying to escape -- that's why we've installed the sensors and the automatic doors. None has gotten away -- or lived more than two hours. Really, we don't know much about them yet. We followed her to her office and waited while she put away her notebooks and cameras. Kyrie nestled uneasily against my knees, as if frightened by what we had seen. Equally troubled, Nick kept asking questions. "Mother, what are we? Why do you keep us here -- in our own special lab? Why do you watch us all the time? Are we specimens too? Like the meta" He tried again, careful with the word. "Like the metamorphs?" "Don't you worry, dear." She tried to hug him. "You're our children. We love you very much." "But we are different." He slipped out of her arms and backed uncertainly away. "You do observe us. You film us and tape us and test us. You keep records and file reports, just like you do for those funny bugs in your bottles." I felt Kyrie shiver. "Why?" Nick shrilled. "What kind of thing are we?" "You're people," Carolina said. "But unique people. That's why you're so priceless to science. As well as to us." "What makes us -- unique?" "Something happened to your fathers out in space." Carolina's eyes were big and black as his, imploring him to understand. "They were the crew of a seeker survey craft exploring the moon. They found a bed of strange black grit splashed around an impact crater. Some force from that grit caught them and changed them -- changed the genes of their sperm cells -- so that you are their children." "But they aren't exactly our fathers? We are not exactly human?" "Not entirely human." Nodding reluctantly, Carolina caught her breath and tried to smile. "Who made the grit?" Nick demanded. "Who put it on the moon?" "Nobody knows," Carolina said. "Though Yuri has a theory." N ick dragged her off at once to look for Marko. Kyrie tugged me after them, her tiny hand trembling in mine. Nick pushed into Marko's office in the nursery without waiting to knock. Coffee was brewing on his desk, bubbling fragrantly through a device of his own invention, a complex hookup of glass tubes and stopper flasks. With a genial nod he offered to share it. "Father -- " Something briefly checked Nick's high voice. "Yuri, we've seen a metamorph. My mother has been telling us about the moon grit and how it made us what we are. I want to see the grit and I want to hear your theory." Marko turned off his coffee apparatus. "The joint research committee keeps the grit in a vault." He blinked gravely at Nick. "What's left of it. Half of what we had was used up in experimental study over the years and spies were stealing the rest." "How do you open the vault?" "I petition the joint committee." Marko smiled a little at Nick's determination. "But here's a model of one grit crystal, magnified a hundred times." The model was a shining black pyramid, two feet tall. It stood on a metal pedestal. Marko swung a slice of it out on hinges, to show its inner blackness intricately patterned with shining lines of gold and glass. "The black mass is a granular allotrope of carbon, elsewhere unknown," he explained. "Seeded with microscopic thorium beads. Latticed in a very intricate way with those wafers of silicon and gold. Mixed with trace amounts of other elements." Kyrie shrank back beside me, but Nick listened eagerly. "Your theory, Yuri?" "The crystals were made somewhere," Marko said. "But not, I think, on any planet we've found. The splash pattern around the crater shows an impact from the south -- the direction of our nearest star. I think the crystals were manufactured and shot to the moon by an unknown technology far ahead of us." I felt Kyrie quiver. "By the starfolk?" she whispered. "Our own far people?" "That was just a baby game." Nick glanced at her reprovingly. "We made up the starfolk," he told Marko. "But we didn't know about the grit. What could it be for?" "Maybe there is an interstellar culture." Marko smiled soberly at Kyrie. "Maybe it is spreading across the galaxy, from star to star. Maybe the grit was contained in a messenger missile, shot from Alpha Centauri to make contact with us." "Why the grit?" Nick peered at the black pyramid. "Why not a ship?" "I've wondered for years," Marko said. "At least I think I see why. I think intelligent worlds are too rare and too far for ships to find them all. I think the messenger missiles must have been scattered like seed across dead worlds and live ones -- to be awakened by any evolving intelligence. Our seeker woke it." "And we were born." Nick nodded slowly. "Now what are we?" "The messengers, I imagine." "So what is the message?" Nick looked tiny and puzzled and afraid. "What are we to do? If the grit made us, what are we or?" "You'll discover that." Marko paused, with an odd look of owlish foreboding, before he added, "I think you'll find a splendid destiny." Nick smiled hopefully, but Kyrie was still afraid. "Uncle Yuri -- " Her small voice quivered and broke. "If Nick and I are messengers from the stars -- what is poor dear Guy?" Uncomfortably Marko shook his head. "Tell us. Uncle Yuri. Tell us what your theory is." "The messenger missile struck His eyes shifted uneasily from her to the tall black pyramid. "The grit had to wait for us to find it. Too long, I think. Most of the crystals were damaged by micrometeorites. If they are fissionpowered solid-state devices -- as I think they are -- most of them are now defective." He looked unhappily back at her. "I'm afraid their defects appear in Guy." "No!" Her voice turned sharp with pain. "You've got to be wrong, Uncle Yuri. Poor Guy is not defective. We love him exactly as he is." themoon children N ick clamored to see the actual moon grit until Marko filed a requisition. The joint research committee took three days to approve it, but then a security squad brought six crystals to the nursery, along with a receipt for Marko to sign. All three children came to watch him pour the black grit from the test tube to a table top. Guy cried out when he saw the shining bits. More alive than I had ever seen him, he snatched at them and darted away with one clutched in each gray fist. "They're for Nick." Marko looked at me. "Get them back." Guy dropped to the floor when I reached him. He was moaning and quivering either in ecstasy or pain. His eyes rolled blindly upward and his barnyard scent rose rank around me. His hoarse breathing slowed and ceased. He was suddenly asleep, all his body limp except the knotted fists. "Let him keep them," Kyrie begged. "He needs them so." Marko agreed and distributed the others to her and Nick. Their rapt delight almost equaledGuy's. Kyrie cradled the tiny tetrahedrons in her cupped hands, crooning plaintive little sounds I had never heard her make. Her palms and her bent face grew golden, as if tanned by some unseen radiation. Nick was examining his own crystals with an air of alert intelligence, weighing them in his hand, listening to their ring when he tapped them with a fingernail, searching their bright triangles with a pocket lens. His skin was turning dark. ' "They are nexodes." She, glanced delightedly at him.? "Real nexodes!" "What's that?" Marko started.! "What's a nexode?" "Something we made up." Nick shrugged. "In a' game we used to play." "What game?" Marko swung urgently to Kyrie. "Please tell me." "You saw it." Her voice was faint and absent, her eyes still fixed on the glittering crystals. "We were spacefolk, remember? Marooned and waiting for our people to come." Marko nodded. "But I hadn't heard of any -- nexodes." "It looked like this." She showed the tiny tetrahedron on her small brown palm. "Only bigger -- and bright with lovely light. A precious, precious thing. We used it to locate our people . among the stars. And then to help their ship find us." "How did you come to think of such a thing?" She turned uncertainly to Nick. "Just made it up." Scorn tinged his voice. "Baby stuff. Please, let's not bother about it now." He bent again, methodically testing each face of one pyramid against each face of the other, as if he expected them to stick together. When they did not he produced a pocket magnet to try them with. T hat night, in Carolina's lab, we had a long discussion of those games and the grit. Marko argued for some unknown sort of cognition or memory expressed in the games. For evidence he brought up those unexplained hallucinations that captured the seeker crew on the moon. "The space terminal I thought I saw was too much like Nick's toy terminal," he insisted. "It can't be just coincidental. Through some medium too subtle for us, the grit communicates ideas." "But your terminal on the moon wasn't really there," Carolina objected. "No more than Thorsen's spacefort or Hood's gold meteor. The grit has been tested very elaborately for psionic effects, with negative results." "Then how do you explain the game?" "Nick says he made it up. Perhaps he did. Other gifted children have invented remarkable imaginary worlds. The Brontes, for instance. Nobody claims theirs was real." We talked on, reviewing all our data and a hundred published theories until my head throbbed from the blue glow of the sterile walls and the musty scent of the bubbling beta cultures, but we came to no conclusions. "Let's not fret about it," Carolina said, as we were leaving. "The grit shaped the children. Its meaning is for them, not for us. If it can help them find themselves, our real obligation is only to keep ourselves out of the way." Next day Marko tried again to question Nick and Kyrie. Still awake and still elated with the black grit, they seemed to understand it no better than we did. Asked about the games, Kyrie confessed a wistful half-belief that she and Nick and Guy were actual spacefolk, but Nick glibly quoted sources in books and films to prove that he had borrowed everything. Carolina had seated them on the edge of Marko's desk to bring them closer to our level. Kyrie kept eyeing her precious sample of the grit, reluctant to think of anything else. Nick sat impatiently drumming the front of the desk with his bare heels. "We aren't bugs!" His bored annoyance flashed into abrupt resentment. "You can't cut us up to see what makes us tick -- like the seeker crews want to butcher the space snakes they're hunting out around Jupiter. Why can't you leave us alone?" "Nicky!" Kyrie caught his brown arm. "Don't!" But Carolina nodded soberly. "To a lot of people you are specimens, fascinating exobiological specimens. We hope to protect you from such cruel people until you learn why you were born. Trust us, please." "Of course we trust you," Kyrie whispered. "Don't we, Nick?" His grin was almost sardonic. "We have to trust you." "One more thing," Marko said. "In those games, what was Guy?" The teasing malice died from Nick's black eyes. He frowned as if he meant to speak, shook his head, finally turned unhappily to Kyrie. Her golden face lost color as she raised it from the bits of grit, until she looked pale and almost piteous. "That's the bad part." We had to lean to catch her stricken whisper. "Because Guy never liked the games. He didn't want to play. He said he was no kin to the spacefolk and he didn't want their ship to come and carry us away. He wouldn't help us build the tachyon terminal. Once he kicked it and scattered all the blocks." "Is that so bad?" Her big eyes were a tragic black and tears glittered on her cheeks. She glanced anxiously at Nick. He made a face and shoved her shoulder as if to remind her that it was all a game, but the gestures failed to break her gloom. "The bad part was more what I thought," she quavered miserably. "I thought Guy wouldn't play because he loved me and hated Nick. I thought he was afraid the spacefolk would take us both away and leave him all alone. I was terribly afraid -- afraid he might hurt Nick." "Don't cry about it." Nick pushed her again. "It was all just baby play." Kyrie turned slowly to look at him. "But Guy really does love me," she whispered. "And he really doesn't like it when I do anything with you, Nicky. That's why Tm so afraid. Afraid!" VllI B ad news came from space that friendly worlds and the cheerful assumption that the planets were oysters waiting to be opened was fading into fear that Earth herself might somehow become the oyster of some other biocosm. The Pizarros of space had found no new Perus to loot. Though the flight mechanism of the Jovian delta-life had promised to be a richer treasure than all the Incan gold -- or even the nugget fields of Mercury -- those elusive creatures still kept their secret. Agile as shadows, they evaded every effort to capture or even to destroy them. No ship was swift enough to overtake them. No human weapon could reach or damage them. Nearhits with nuclear missiles left them neither hurt nor offended. As if reciprocating human curiosity, they kept darting close to the orbital station. Companionably they escorted the seekers in flight around the planet's moons. They began flying out to meet arriving rockets. Finally they followed a returning ship all the" way to the Earth platform. Even though the delta-form beings had never tried to take any human specimens the news of that visit spread consternation. To head off panic we released a theory of Carolina's that the Jovians had been to Earth before. "They're at home in space," she said. "The evidence suggests that they can tolerate dry air at high elevations, at least for brief periods. They seem to look somewhat like the flying serpents of native Mexican art and to move like cerTo support the theory she showed us the data that had come to her lab for analysis. Taken from the orbital station, one photograph had caught a snakeshaped thing in silhouette against the brightly streaked face of Jupiter. The thick serpentine form was darkly transparent, a twisted shadow across the great Red Spot. It had an opaque nucleus -- a dark jagged mass like an irregular crystal. From that mass spread two wide luminous rays or plumes, which to some primitive Aztec might have looked like wings. "Everything suggests they've been making casual calls for centuries," Carolina said. "Without hurting anybody. I doubt that they can metabolize the products of our biocosm. Except for short visits to the highest, dryest mountains, Earth is not for them." "Then why," I asked, "would they be interested in us?" Her faint smile looked wry. "Perhaps because we're interested in them." The news from Mercury was more disturbing. Computer analysis of the tapes from the seeker survey had revealed no life or motion on the surface of that hot planet. Now the orbital platform sent a landing group to test a notion that the tunnel diggers were either dead or departed. The notion turned out to be unfortunate. The group reported a safe landing at their selected site on the rugged highlands, near the tunnel cluster they were to investigate. As the orbital platform moved out of contact, they had Just begun blasting, to level the site and excavate a shelter tunnel of their own. Two hours later, with contact restored, they reported evidence that Mercury was still alive. During a pause in the blasting, their seismographs had picked up a series of rhythmic tremors from the direction of the tunnel cluster. By the time the platform came overhead, some kind of smoke or vapor was pouring out of the tunnels. It rapidly obscured the sixty-mile plain and began to spill over. Because of the small planet's close horizons, this cloud was not yet visible to the surface group, but the platform commander orpare for take-off. What happened next was never discovered. A narrow tongue of that bright fog was pushing toward the landing site as the platform moved out of range again. The commander tried to order an immediate takeoff, but laser contact was already broken. The landing group was gone when the platform came back over the site and the last wisps of fog were disappearing from the crater basin, draining like a liquid back into the tunnels. The commander decided not to risk another surface expedition, but photographs of the site showed a few small scattered scraps of wreckage, indicating that the landing craft had crashed or exploded soon after takeoff. The bodies of the men, along with most of the wreckage, had been somehow removed. directorate at Skygate, the reports of that incident set off a new debate. One fraction wanted to withdraw all missions from Mercury. Another wanted to bombard the tunnels with nuclear missiles. As a compromise, orders were relayed for the platform commander to climb into a higher orbit and prepare to defend himself. What proved to be the last transmission from the platform had already been received. It was a routine signal that communication would be blacked out again while the platform passed behind the planet. Nothing else came through. After another hot debate, the directorate canceled plans to send a rescue expedition. The exploration of Mercury ceased, the nature of the tunnel-diggers still unknown. In the wake of this disquieting slashed again. The uncompleted orbital stations around Saturn and Neptune had to be abandoned and plans were canceled for a series of transplutonian probes. At Skygate our difficulties multiplied. In spite of all our publicity efforts, people tended to identify the children with the enigmatic beings of those other biocosms. We ourselves were suspect. The security force received secret orders, as we later discovered, to watch us as well as our charges. Nick was begging for permission to study a larger sample of the moon grit, but the joint research committee disapproved Marko's requisition for it. Some members doubted that a child could accomplish anything significant. Others feared that Nick might do too much. Waiting fretfully, he spent most of his time in his mother's laboratory. He learned to culture the beta-life. He skimmed through all her reference books and her filed data on the other biocosms. He studied new closeups of the Jovian delta-forms, made from the Earth platform. One of those photographs had caught the snake-shape of a delta creature in outline against the cloud-swirled Earth. With sharper eyes or perhaps a sharper mind than anybody else, Nick discovered a puzzling structure of fine black lines that branched from the jagged nuclear crystal out into the serpentine shadow. He spent two days mapping those barely visible lines, recording each with a microscopic exactness. For another sleepless night he sat cross-legged on the nursery floor, scarcely moving, "just thinking." Finally he approached his mother with a question. want to know how the delta things propel themselves?" Carolina said they did. "I'll show them," he promised. "In return for freedom to study the moon grit." She took that innocent offer to Marko. He carried it to the joint research committee. They referred it to the directorate. Nick slept while he waited, but wke instantly when Marko came back to accept his proposition. stration that same afternoon. Two engineers came from the research committee to observe it. They were not impressed with his preparations. Clever enough with tools, Nick cut a round hole the size of a beer can in the center of a short pine board. He hammered a worn silver dime into a slot near one end of the board and a copper cent into a slot near the other. Marko and Carolina came along for the demonstration. Two security cars carried us out on the open mesa, a mile beyond the spaceport. I still recall the sardonic impatience of the engineers as they watched Nick completing his device. A thin, grave-eyed child, he looked too small for his seven years. His naked skin had been pale in the car -- out here the hot sun washed him with instant bronze. Squatting in the dust, he carefully fitted a can of warm beer into the hole in the board. With a soft graphite pencil he began to draw an intricate system of lines that branched from the two coins toward the can. His task took time. Less impervious than he was to heat, we watched and sweated. I had brought no hat and my head began to throb. The engineers scowled inpatiently through dark glasses. A security man snickered when Nick broke his pencil point. Ignoring everything, Nick chewed his tongue and drew more lines until something happened. Though the gray horizon still shimmered all around us, I felt a sudden piercing chill. My mouth had a sharp metallic taste. Nick dropped his pencil and held his device up triumphantly. "Watch!" he shrilled. "Watch it fly!" White frost filmed and feathered the beer can. It burst with a muffled thump and brown ice jutted out. A strange, edgeless dimness spread around the ice, veined with fine black lines that seemed to branch from Nick's pencil marks. Through that spreading darkness I saw the board tugging upward. Nick clung to it, pale with alarm. Flakes of frost swirled and crackled around him in that condensing shadow. Clinging to the ends of the board, Nick was lifted off the ground. Carolina screamed. Nick let go. The board whistled out of sight. The sun blazed back, its heat strangely welcome. The sky rumbled for endless seconds. Silence came like a thunder clap. A dazed security man stood pointing at a puff of yellow dust on the hot horizon. I tasted that puzzling bitterness still in my mouth. Nick gathered himself out of the dust and the shivering engineers herded us into the cars. We jolted two miles across the mesa, to a shallow crater where the device had come down in a juniper clump. The engineers picked up a few pine splinters and a shred of twisted aluminum. Finally they began asking what the gadget was. "A sort of circuit," Nick said. "It picks up certain forms of energy. From light or heat or even gravitation. It changes them to kinetic energy." While the engineers muttered and stared he added innocently: "The effect was stronger than I wanted. The broken pencil made the primary conductor marks too thick." The whole affair left the engineers frustrated and, I think, apprehensive. They failed to translate Nick's description of the propulsion circuit or his drawings of the structured shadow-shapes of the delta creatures into any terms they could understand. Their own copies of his device failed to fly. Their reports, however, must have impressed the directors. The research committee approved a requisition. An armored security truck brought Nick half a kilogram of the precious grit in a thick canister of yellow-painted lead. hedrons. He now had access to the big computer and searched its data banks for every recorded fact about the grit. He repeated old experiments and invented new ones. Most of them failed. As weeks and months went by, his confidence shrank to grim desperation. Searching for help, he had us bring a series of scholars to Skygate. The first was Dr. Platon Papanek, an old colleague of Carolina's, recently back from Uranus. Nick bombarded him with anxious questions about the possibilities of intelligence in other biocosms. "What's intelligence?" Still used to low gravity, Papanek shuffled laboriously to a chair and wheezed a garbled mixture of French and Czech that Nick translated for the rest of us. "A tool for survival. A sharper fang, a quicker claw. Each biocosm plays the survival game according to rules of its own. The successful adaptations -- the beta and delta and gamma spheres -- can't be compared on our alpha scale. You don't measure poetry by the pound or wisdom by the yard." "Is survival all?" Nick's thin face turned bleak. "I mean, sir, couldn't intelligence become a bridge? Couldn't it build a way for one biocosm to reach and understand and maybe help another?" "I was once an idealist." Papanek shook his flaccid bulk and gasped for his breath. "I've been to five biocosms to look for cosmic altruism. I detected none. I conclude that benevolence is a negative factor for survival." "Somewhere else?" Urgency quivered in Nick's voice. "Somewhere in the galaxy -- couldn't universal friendship become a positive factor?" "Who knows?" The heavy gravity of Earth damped Papanek's Slavic shrug. "The farther out we go, the queerer things we find." He stayed three days. Listening to the questions Nick and Kyrie asked, I felt a sharper sense of the urgency of their desperate search for the makers of the moon grit, but I'm afraid they got no help from Papanek. Nick sent next for an exiled Sino-Soviet geneticist, who turned out to be as ignorant as we were about what the grit could have done to the sperm cells of the seeker's crew. He called in a professor of astronautics who cheerfully promised that intelligible signals could be sent to other stars within only two or three centuries if space technology continued to advance. He invited a team of solidstate physicists, who disagreed scornfully with all his theories about the structure and the function of the grit. His last quest was a mathematician, a big jovial Finn. They spent two days and nights in the nursery classroom, trading symbols in a haze of chalk-dust. The Finn came out coffee-logged and reeling with fatigue. "Was I expected to instruct that infant?" He blinked at me in redeyed wonder. "In thirty minutes he destroyed the work of my life -- my model of the universe. I never met such power of mind. Yet I pity him." The Finn rubbed in a dazed way at his chalky jaw. "He doesn't know how to laugh." N ick refused to send for anybody else. His feverish bouts of study and experiment almost ceased. He used to sit for hours in despondent thought or slip away from security to roam the moonlit mesa alone. Though he and Kyrie had always been immune to germs and viruses, Carolina thought he was falling ill of sheer frustration. "Goodness, child, don't fret so hard," I heard her urge him one morning in the nursery kitchen. "You'll only kill yourself. No doubt you and Kyrie have tremendous things to do, but they had better wait till you are older." "We can't wait." He pushed his untouched breakfast tray aside and stared at her from blue-rimmed eyes. "All the planets are on fire with danger for us. Earth worst of all. Our only hope is the message I think is in the grit, but time is running out for us to break the code. Mother, I'm afraid -- " His faint voice cracked. "I'm afraid we'll die before we ever learn why we were born." Such-black moods distressed us all, but Nick was hard to help. Even when his problems proved impossible to solve, he would not forget them. He saw through the good news we tried to manufacture and indignantly rejected most attempts to encourage or distract him. That year was difficult, though Guy and Kyrie brought us occasional relief from his gloomy moodiness. Guy was heavier than I by now and nearly as tall. Awake, he had the unpredictable vigor of a yearling grizzly and an appalling appearance. Though he enjoyed clothing no more than did Nick and Kyrie, he had reluctantly begun to hide his shaggy strangeness under a shapeless old raincoat when he was outside the nursery. Carolina still worked when she could to train and study his sluggish intelligence. Sometimes she got him to fumble clumsily with a teaching device or an educational toy. More often he simply sprawled or squatted wherever he was, waiting dumbly for Kyrie. Nick's desperate plight did not exist for him. Kyrie was desperately concerned, but Nick seemed not to want her with him in the lab or on his solitary walks. Trying to learn enough to understand his problems with the grit, she got Carolina to bring in a series of tutors for her. Carolina helped her choose an international team of genetic specialists and she begged them to tell her why Nick and Guy were so different. Those experts took new case histories of all three children, scowled at the grit and muttered vaguely about anomalous genetic mutations. Searching as urgently as Nick for any sort of understanding, she called in a group of noted composers, who turned out to like or understand her music no better than I did. She sent for philosophers and anthropologists, a female psychologist, finally a Chilean poet. S HE liked the poet best. A sundried gnome with lank black hair and black child-eyes, he beat a many-stringed guitar to a whining chant about his own Homeric life. A one-time spaceman, he had ridden seekers around a dozen moons and asteroids, yet never discovered the meaning of life. Kyrie must have seen Nick and herself in his sad songs. When he was gone, she wouldn't send for anybody else. "The wisest men aren't wise enough," she told Carolina. "They can't help Nick. They can't tell us what we were born for. They can't explain why Guy is like he is." she sighed. "Really, you know -- in spite of you and Uncle Yuri and Uncle Kim -- the three of us are all alone." Unable to do anything for Nick, she turned to Guy. His slow being quickened eagerly when she came near and she seemed not to mind his backward strangeness. For months they were always together. They talked little -- words, she said, were still too hard for Guy. But she used to sit crooning beside him while he slept and, awake, he used to whimper for her music. Music -- an odd word for the throbs and moans and howls that she beat and scraped and blew out of unlikely bits of junk -- or even for the wailing songs she sang. Those tormented sounds were never melodious to the rest of us -- rather, they were disturbing in a way I could never understand. But they set Guy to writhing and whining with an animal delight. Uncontrolled, his gorilla strength had become a problem for security. When he learned to like working out in the gym, he broke equipment and threw balls too hard and fractured the jaw of a guard who was trying to teach him to box. The security chief was afraid he might hurt Kyrie. She laughed at the notion of danger from her baby Guy, but Carolina, observing their sex development, began to take it seriously. Kyrie, too, had outgrown Nick. Still child-slight, her figure had matured distractingly. Carolina warned and cajoled and ordered her to wear at least bikinis. She obeyed now and then. Though Nick had never given up his quest for the secret of the grit, it was Guy who made the breakthrough. It happened on a blazing summer afternoon. I was sitting in the publicity office, staring through the window at blue mirages on the mesa and not dictating my daily security report, when Kyrie burst in, screanjing. "It's the messenger stuff!" She was so breathless I failed to get the words at first. "Uncle Kim. the messenger stuff! Guy wants to show you. He's learned what to do with the messenger stuff." I followed her back to a playroom in the nursery. We found Nick and Guy huddled over a child-sized desk. Nick sat on a chair, naked and alert and deep brown. Too big for the furniture, Guy was crouching over the desk, doing something with a handful of the tiny tetrahedrons. I heard her say, "Guy knows how -- " "Shhh!" Guy hushed her, and we stooped to watch. T he grit was spread out on a sheet of white paper. Moving with a deftness that surprised me, Guy's stubby, short-furred fingers were pushing three tiny pyramids into a triangular pattern. Squinting with care, a new yellow gleam in his eyes, he lowered the base of a fourth pyramid upon the upright points to complete a taller tetrahedron. When that last crystal clicked into place, a soft blue glow lit the larger pyramid, brightest in its hollow center. Guy raised his browless head with a thick grunt of satisfaction and Nick snatched the thing he had made. "We've got it, Ky!" His voice turned shrill as hers. "He can stick them together. In fours, like this. And the fours into fours of fours, the way they were meant to go. He's making our nexode -- " A savage growl unnerved me. In a blur of action, the little desk was splintered, black grit scattered, Mick flung to the floor. Kyrie bent over him, gasping and voiceless with terror. Guy lurched away, clutching that glowing thing against his belly fur. Two security men burst in, shouting at him. He lumbered toward their drawn pistols until I called his name. He stopped then, mute and trembling. With Kyrie's aid, I managed to make peace. The guards put up their guns and helped gather the spilled grit. Nick said he hadn't meant to be rude and begged Guy to go ahead and finish the nexode. Guy shook his head at first and clung moaning to the blue pyramid, but Nick brought the rest of the grit from the lab and Kryie coaxed him back to work. He was at it all that night, painstakingly clicking the crystals into fours and these into taller and taller steps, sixteens and sixty-fours. Each larger pyramid glowed with another color, strong at first but slowly fading, the sixteens greenish and the sixty-fours a tawny topaz. Nick and Kyrie tried eagerly to help, but the art was Guy's alone. Though the undamaged tetrahedrons had always looked identical to everybody else, he selected each for its own place, turning and trying it as if to make some kind of invisible fit. He didn't explain what he was doing and the black bits refused to stick together for the rest of us. Guy changed as he worked -- in ways that are hard to explain. He visibly shed his fumbling clumsiness. He looked more alive and happier than I had seen him. His fur seemed to shine with a sleeker luster. His ungainly frame grew straighter -- after midnight, he moved everything to the top of a filing cabinet, so that he could stand at his task. His brain was awakening, too, in ways less visible to me. I saw Kyrie watching the growing pyramids and Guy himself with a breathless fixity. Turning abruptly away, she wanted Nick and me to come with her to the kitchen for a snack. We walked off slowly. "It's doing things to Guy," she whispered, with an awed backward glance. "I don't know how to say it, but I keep feeling what he feels. When he touches the grit, l feel with his fingers." Nick looked blank. "The slick cool blocks." Kyrie's golden fingers stroked and lifted an invisible pyramid. "The edges like black blades. The pattern of the faces -- all threes of threes. I caught other feelings, too." Her amused eyes flashed at me. "He's really fond of you. Uncle Kim. He thinks you're more like him than anybody else is. Not too smart." "Ky!" Nick was startled. "How does he feel about me?" H er brief smile went out. She sat down in a kitchen chair too big for her, suddenly forlorn. I brought her a glass of yeastract plus, but she didn't want it. "He loves me," she breathed at last. "I never knew how much. But not you. Not you, Nick." "It's nothing we can help." Nick stood behind the chair, his brown hand just touching her golden shoulder, his voice quietly matter-of-fact. "There's one of you for two of us." "How can you hate -- " Pain stifled her. "How can you hurt each other when I love you both?" "I'll never harm Guy." His promise had a quiet finality that made him seem strangely mature. "I couldn't injure him, Ky. Not even for you." Cheered by that assurance she decided that she was hungry after all. I left them at the table and carried a sandwich back to Guy. Busy with a new blue pyramid, he greeted me with a friendly grin but took no time to eat. He finished the fourth topaz tetrahedron before dawn. Exhaustion had drained his new vitality by then. His gray paws were awkward and uncertain again, but he turned and tried his new pyramid above the other three until at last it snapped gently into place. "Guy, Guy!" Kyrie gasped. "It's so very lovely!" This final tetrahedron was four inches tall. A cool, rose-colored glow shimmered along its knifelike edges and filled its interior hollow, but lingering gleams of yellow and green and blue clung to the smaller triangles that made up its faces, filming all its intricately patterned blackness with a splendid flowing glow. Nick was squinting at it critically. "I don't think it's done," he said. "You could make it twice as tall. There's grit left over and we can requisition more." "I used all the good ones." Guy shrugged disdainfully at the handful of crystals scattered on the filing cabinet. "These went bad. See?" Though the crystals had been nearly diamond-hard, his pinching fingers crumbled two or three of those left over into spft black dust. "Burned out." "May I, Guy?" Kyrie reached eagerly toward the bright pyramid. "May I just touch -- " "Please keep it for me." With a grace that astonished me, Guy set it in her quivering hands. "I'm dead -- for -- sleep." His voice slowed and his body stooped and his yellow eyes grew dull, as he gave up the pyramid. He stood gaping vacantly at Kyrie. Like some trained animal, I thought, waiting dully for its next command. "Thank you, Guy." Captured by the pyramid, she scarcely looked at him. "Go on to bed." He shambled heavily away, already half-asleep. Turning to Kyrie, I was enchanted by the transformation flowing over her like some magic fluid from the rosy tetrahedron. She looked taller, rounder of buttock and bust. Her startled smile of sheer delight was quickly veiled with Mona Lisa's mystery. Somehow the thin and wistful child had been clad in instant womanhood. What I felt was a stab of desire so sharp I turned away. When I dared to look back her golden gaze was on me, wise as Aphrodite's, aware of all I felt, her mocking amusement at my disquiet mixed with a silent pride in her newly gained power to kindle it. For one astonished moment I met her candid eyes, inhaling a wave of her lilac scent. Then she forgot me, peering again into that blazing pyramid. "Nicky, this is better than the game," she whispered eagerly. "It's our nexode -- real! The record our people in the stars made for us. It will tell us who we are and what our lives are for -- and maybe how to find our way to them."  For six weeks this summer, beginning June #, Tulane University in New Orleans will sponsor an intensive science fiction writing workshop, continuing the Clarion SF workshop founded and conducted over the past four years by Robin Scott Wilson. The Tulane Workshop will be directed by James Sallis, former editor of New Worlds, whose work has appeared in the Galaxy publications. Orbit, Quark and numerous anthologies. Macmillan has just brought out a collection of his short stories, A Few Last Words. The Workshop devotes three to four hours each morning to lectures and group criticism, the rest of the day to writing and consultation. Guest lecturers include Mr. Wilson, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm. Tuition, including housing, is # and college credit is given (three semester hours). For information andor application, address; James Sallis, Tulane SF Writing Workshop Department of English (Arts and Sciences) Tulane University New Orleans, La. # It was hard to communicate with Albert -- but even harder not to! on for a dozen years with no real advance toward its ends. It would have been abandoned long before except for its collateral discoveries in other fields. The accidental offshoots it had produced were well worth the considerable expense of the Project. The Project had assigned to it one great mind and several very good minds; no other project at that time could say as much. The great mind was that of Gregory Smirnov, and his greatness was in his instant perception of the possibilities of an idea. He always knew whether an idea or a notion had a spark in it. He discerned where the flightiest apparent idiocy carried the ultimate spark and no plausible thesis did not. He played his colleagues like a hand of cards and scored every possible point. The several very good minds associated with the Project were those of: Charles Cogsworth, the inventor of the Recapitulation Correlator, as well as the Cerebral Scanner; Aloysius Shiplap who had been associated with the late Cecil Corn in the experiment which ended with Corn's life -- which may have been a dead end and may have been an opening door; the stiff-necked Garald Glasser, the designer of the E.P. Locator; Valery Mok, a woman of vivid eido-creation whose mind had put Cogsworth into a state of shock when first he went into it with his scanner. Also associated with the Project was Energine Eimer. Although she had a good mind by ordinary standards she was not in the class with the others; for it was really an understatement to speak of them as having very good minds. Energine herself was flighty to seeming idiocy, but Smirnov had detected that from her might come the ultimate spark. was to devise an Instant Distant Translation device, which might be either mechanical or psychic, or something of an entirely different aspect. It was to reach and establish rapport with a distant -- a very distant -- mind, any mind anywhere beyond the pale. It would have to combine and go far beyond such tools as were already available. Extrasensory Perception, now that it was known to be but another aspect of simple sensory perception and of disappointing limitations, was one very inadequate tool. The translation devices themselves would be enough for ordinary work. They could now interpret roughly the thought processes of earthworms and ferns and even crystals. They could record and even verbalize the apprehensions of metals under stress and, to an extent, the group consciousness of gathering thunderheads. Any language, terrestrial or distant, could be given a cogent interpretation. But something more was required. twelfth weekly progress meeting of the group. "Energine," said Gregory Smirnov, "it has just come to me how you are different from the rest of us." "In one way she's different from the rest except myself," said Valery, "but I'm not sure that you've ever noticed that difference." "I've known about the difference between the sexes for a long time, Valery," said Smirnov. "I was a precocious child and an early reader of biology. In my own life I have relegated the implications of the difference to a minor corner. There is little enough time in even a long life to do the work I have set for myself, and the ramifications of the sex complex are time consuming. No, the difference is that Energine likes to talk to people." "Does not almost everyone?" asked Shiplap. "Many do, but none of us on the Project except Energine," said Smirnov. "We are not the sort who like people, and we talk to them as little as possible. Mostly we talk to ourselves even when we are nominally talking to others. There is an inhibition in the -- ah -- cultivated minds. We are a withdrawn bunch and we tend to become more' so as we follow our specialties and our studies. That is the irony of it." "Where is the irony?" asked Cogsworth. "We are trying to talk to 'people' over cosmic distances and we do not even like to talk to people near at hand. We do not like to talk to people at all. We aren't the ones for the job. Mostly we are bored with people." "Then who are the ones for the job?" asked Glasser. "Logorrhea is rampant in the world. We could talk to other low folks." "Possibly those we will ultimately contact will also be low folks," said Smirnov. "It is likely that the lowest common denominator of the Universe will be both low and common. Rapport is what we want and we don't have it. We can study the dragonfly, but are we ever really concerned with the dragonfly's concern for his family? We don't' really like the monstrous miniatures. We've no sympathy with the terrified arrogance of the arachnid; how can we have sympathy for really strange creatures? How can we talk to an alien if we don't even like to talk to our own kind?" "I have a landlady who even talks to bugs," said Glasser. "Shall I get her? She'd droodle to a vole on a planet just as well if we pointed her that way. And you believe that she would be better than ourselves, who have all the techniques and information?" "We have Energine," said Smirnov. "She has the techniques, such as we all have. And she likes to talk to people. She might just be able to break us out of our restriction." "Then why hasn't she done it?" asked Valery. "She's had as much time on the senders and scanners as any of us have had -- and no more luck." "Because she hasn't let herself go. She has been constrained to use our own approach and formulas. Energine, let yourself go and talk to those people. Now. Tonight. Talk to them!" "I will, I will. But how? You mean just like I talk? I've thought of that, but I didn't think you'd allow it. I bet those folks have gotten awful bored with our salutations and mathematical symbols. A circle is a circle, and a square is a square -- and so are we. Hey -- me third planet out. Who you? I bet they think we're nutty to use that kind of stuff. "I'll get hold of one of them tonight and tell him all about the new Indonesian Restaurant I found. Maybe he found a new restaurant up there and can tell me some of the dishes. Whoever he is I bet he likes to eat, too." "Energine, do you still belong to a Lonely Hearts Club?" "Why, I belong to all of them! Just let me read you one letter I got this morning. Why, it's the nicest letter -- " "Spare us -- protect us! Earth swallow us!" cried Glasser. "That, Glasser, is an illustration of what is holding us back," said Smirnov. "We don't like to talk to people and we don't like to listen to people. It may be that they have been talking to us for a long time and we were not in tune to listen." "Well then, you will surely listen, Mr. Smirnov," cried Energine. "This is a letter from Eugene, upstate -- " "No, as a matter of fact I will not listen," said Smirnov. "I am now too old to develop a sympathy for the vital things of life. But what I want you to do, Energine, is to let yourself go -- to talk, to send, just as if you were writing to one of your lonely hearts people. Go all the way out, girl. If it doesn't work -- only the stars will laugh at you." "Oh, I never minded being laughed at. It shows that people are having fun. I'll tell him about Charley; that's just to make him jealous. You don't know about Charley? Let me read you -- well, never mind then. This might be the first extraterrestrial lonely hearts club. I could be president." "Yes, you could be president of it, Energine. Now, the first live blip you get on the scanner, you just let yourself go with all you've got. Send him one of those lonely hearts letters. Make it lavender." "Purple. Oh, I will, I will." A nd that evening on the scanner Energine picked up either a minor blip or a minor malfunction; it was always impossible to tell which. Those little egg-shaped anomalies -- they looked eggshaped, they sounded egg-shaped, they broke into egg-shaped sine curves -- were the only evidence ever of the sort of target they were seeking. Energine let herself go on the sender. "Dear Albert -- since I must call you something and I am sure that your name is very like that -- I will try quite hard to reach you and I beg that you answer me. Your name in the Project now becomes Albert-(Tentative). To others you are only an egg-shaped anomaly, but you are more than that to me. "This is the first essay to the establishment of a stellar lonely hearts club and it Just has to be a success. In the lonely hearts clubs we write in love and affection to those we would like to know, and we would like to know everyone. "I will tell you about our world and you tell me about yours. I hope that we can get very close together. There is an ecstasy on me when I can grow very close to another. I believe that the only thing of any importance on this world is love. Is not that the only thing of importance on yours? "I had another picture of Charley today. He is not as handsome a man as he was in the first picture that he sent. I do not believe that the first picture was even a picture of Charley. But sometimes the first picture that I send is not a picture of me either. Do you want to see a picture of me? I will send one as soon as I find out how. "I went to a Mexican restaurant last night. They had roast kid stuffed with almonds and sauced all over with burnt brown sugar. And they had those little flat pancake things that taste like cardboard. I love them. I wonder if you enjoy eating as much as I do. "Albert, please answer me with anything at all and we will begin to establish rapport. I feel that we could grow very close together. Albert, I will treasure your answers with those of Fred and Harold and Richard -- that one turned out badly but he did write nice letters -- and Selby and Roger and Norbert. Do you also save old letters? Answer me. I will stay right here till morning and if I do not hear from you by then I will wait again tomorrow evening and every evening. Signed -- Energine." S HE waited, but she didn't have to wait as long as she had feared. It was only about an hour till the response began to come through. The first sign of it was the dimming of the lights and the vibration of the building as the auxiliary generators cut in, for the translation device seemed to be laboring under a heavy, unaccustomed load. But the machine had amazing resources. It could translate anything, anything. "Energine," came the answer. "That call letter? That name? That world? That people? That what? "Jubilation here to learn that there is friendly life on your world. Your world previously ignored as little bit sick. You know sick? Word sick? Possibly first word mutually understanding. "Comprehending all your communication except the words. What is lonely? What is hearts? What is club? What is grow very close together? What is Charley? What is picture? What is Mexican? What is kid? What is little flat pancake thing? What is cardboard? What is a Fred and Harold and other entities? "Word love understood intuitively. Explain mechanics of thing with you. Extreme variation in different sectors. In ecstasy of symbiosis which one swallow who? "Yes, answer, answer, answer, whatever that means. What is Selby? What is Norbert? What means wait right here? What means morning? Rapport also understood intuitively. We be so completely. We how many? You group or integer? Send how to roast kid stuffed. What is roast kid stuffed? Delirious interest here in subject, sure to increase when we know what subject consist of. Also love you already passionately. What is passionately? What is bert-(Tentative)." H e had answered. Albert-(Tentative) had answered. He had understood all of her communication except the words. They were in perfect rapport. The translation device shuddered and groaned after the effort. Then it panted softly and fell to sibilant silence. The building was quiet and the night gathered lovely about it. achieved after twelve years. The rest would follow. Others would venture where Energine had pioneered. The glad news of the achievement was given to the world. The matter and exact wording of the two messages were not, however, given to the world. These remained classified. In the early contacts with aliens there are always details which will seem incongruous to the unlearned. Others tried the feat with some success and Energine repeated it again and again. The rapport grew. Soon Albert Tentative began to understand some of the words as well as the feeling of the messages. Small misunderstandings were gradually set right, as one from Albert -- "You ask if we can be sure that we are of opposite sex? How not opposite? With us are five sexes. Everybody partake of several, so everybody a little opposite. This make for clarity. Surely you drollery when you say there only two on your world. "You wish to see me but say it is impossibly. Why in kss(a#rrWQ mild profanity. -- Trans, note it not possible? Travel no problem with us. It problem with you? You want me -- I be there. Like in little verse we find in Block Massive Cultural Transmission Corpus from your world, 'Brush your tooth, say your prayer, go to sleep, I be there.' What brush? What tooth? What prayer? What Sleep? What it mean, understanding that great poetry not always to be taken literally. Profound poetry from your world having great appeal here. Also Aristotle Joke Book and fragments of Sport Page Statistic Epic Cycle. Decline in your civilization huh? No four-hundred hitters for years. "Who I see buy stock on exchange? Always looking for sound investment. All difficulties erased when we see each other. Albert Tentative." W#E IS coming to see me," said Energine dreamily. "It is possibly a translation error," cautioned Smirnov. "Perhaps thpre has been omitted a phrase such as: 'What mean come see me?' You know it would be impossible that he should come. Our Block Massive Cultural Transmission will not be digested by them all at once. I am pleased at the success it has already had." "He is coming to see me," said Energine. "No, no, girl. That couldn't be. You are deluded, but I can never tell you how much I appreciate what you have done." "He is coming to see me." "No, he is not. It is completely out of the question." He came to see her. rived, that something had arrived. Instruments of a dozen sorts had recorded him. Albert Tentative arrives was the glad word, but where was he, what was he? He seemed to be invisible and inaudible. But for the evidence of the instruments there were some who would have doubted the arrival of Albert in the world. "I want a week off," said Energine to Gregory Smirnov. "No, I want a year off. Albert and I have so much to say to each other that we will never get it all said. And we're going to get married if we can figure out how to go about it. I really need some private advice on that. But look, just look!" "A very beautiful and odd ring, Energine. Did he give it to you?" "Did he give what to me?" The ring was a sort of furry metal. It glowed and it changed colors. It circled the chubby little finger of Energine and she held it up to her cheek. "I had no idea that anything could be so wonderful," she raptured. "We're so happy together. We went to the new Syrian Restaurant last night and had camel puree. It's so cute the way he eats it." "How, Energine?" "Gets right down in the bowl." "Ah -- Energine -- let's get to the point. Where is Albert Tentative? It's important that we see him and examine him. Where is he?" "Can't you see him? Why, I never suspected that. You mean that I'm the only one who can see him?" "Patience, Patience, thou universal regent, do not desert me now! What does he look like, Energine?" "Why, he's round and shining and furry, and he changes color." "Energine, the ring he gave you -- " "Mr. Smirnov, that is no ring. That is my Albert. Oh, Albert, he thought you were a ring. How funny!" A lbert tentative was of great interest for about three weeks. There was first of all the epic press conference that Gregory Smirnov set up for him as soon as the method of plugging Albert in and giving him amplification was discovered. It might be said that there was first and last of all the epic press conference. It was a success, let there be no doubt of that. It was a total success. There were those who came to wonder if the success was not too total. There was resentment at first that foreign correspondents were not alerted and given a chance to attend it. Some came anyhow to see what they could pick up after it was over with, and found that it was not over with. Albert was still talking when they got there; he had been talking for a week. Albert was a fine talker, now that he knew the words. The pidgin of the translation device had been that of the device, not of Albert. He answered all questions completely. Oh, how completely! He went into spate and answered questions that had never been asked and the newsmen and personages listened to him in relays, fascinated. After a week of standing by, Energine -- whose finger Albert had long since abandoned for many others -- said that she thought she would go out to get something to eat. She looked dazed. She did not come back. Albert answered the questions of the Chinese and the Arabs. He answered the questions of all the newsmen of Earth. He also had a Block Massive Cultural Transmission Corpus which he wanted to communicate. He recited the Epic Gilmish in which is comprised all wisdom. That took him thirty hours, perhaps not too long a period to be given to a work that comprises all wisdom. But the listeners were of flesh and blood and nobody knew what Albert was. Gregory Smirnov stayed with it two weeks and then walked out. He shouldn't have done it as he was the host, but there was a weakness in the great man that manifested itself here. He went to see the President of the Republic. "Suggest Project's discontinuance," he said to the President. "But Mr. Smirnov, is not the Project a colossal success?" "Quite."  "You have now established rapport with a completely alien being for the first time." "Unfortunately. And perhaps not alien enough." "Possibly you yourself are burned out by your great labors on the project." "Possibly." don the Project now that it has proved such an outstanding success. Perhaps we should transfer the operation to another group. Could you suggest another group that might be able to handle it?" "Enfield's Automations." "An excellent suggestion. They're a bunch of comers. We will take steps for the transfer of authority." "Goodbye," said Smirnov, and left. "Did you notice that he seemed very short-spoken today?" the President asked one of his aides when Smirnov had left. Albert Tentative was a great success for about three weeks. Then the Project was turned over to Enfield's Automations, and the whole thing went on automatic. Albert is still talking. Gregory Smirnov met Valery Mok on the street. "Well?" he asked her. "#, yes. You, I hope. News?" "Of the bunch? Cogsworth dead. Shiplap mad. Glasser vanished." "Energine?" "Nun." "Which?" "Contemplative. Not talk, you know." "The address?" "Here." "Thanks." Smirnov went to have a glossotomy performed on himself, as well as an intricate operation on the ears. So they all arranged their lives. In their final solution they all owed much to Albert Tentative. For in his recitation of the Epic Gilmish he had omitted nothing, not even the remarkable five-hour speech on the medicinal value of silence.  around her neat little, bright little sitting room with a yellow little, soft little, hemmed-around-theedges dust-absorbent duster. Dabbing and absorbing dust. A busy flick of a corner here and a fingertip twirl of a polish there. Keeping it tidy. There was nothing like tidiness. Nothing like dibbing with a duster. Intimate. Quite difent from hosing around with a vacuum like an elephant begging for buns. Homely. Lilian Bannister liked a home to be homely. Even a trim little, prefab little, turned-outby-the-yard little bungalow on the edge of the new town crescent, aluminum framed windows, a door chime that played a bar from Blue Bells of Scotland and a gnome by the front-garden fish tank. It was still home. Modern but intimate. Homely. Lonely. She sighed. It hadn't always been lonely. Not when she and Sid had paid the first deposit, signed all the forms and moved in with an automatic washer, color television, two chairs and a double bed. Twenty years ago. Sid had worked hard since then. Climbed the promotion ladder to the very top. At least to the top of Sid's own personal ladder. He had become head buyer in the meat department. He had bought the rest of the furniture, piece by treasured piece, and carpeted the sitting room from wall to wall. He had built up the joint account, paid his pension contributions every month, taken out sizable life insurance and dropped down dead. Everything a good husband should do, Sid had done. She missed Sid. She missed him so much that, although it was only three in the afternoon and the little house was too newly dusted for the lived-in look he liked, she switched him on. "You're early today," he grunted. "Going, out or something?" She was never sure how they had built a time awareness into Sid that worked even when he was switched off. "I wanted to talk to you," she said. "Yatter, yatter, yatter," he grumbled. "All you ever did was yatter." "That's not kind, Sid!" "You switched me on," he pointed out. "If you don't like it, you can do the other thing and let me get some sleep." There was a control somewhere -- "Amiability Overide," the man had said. One of the many knobs on the front panel was labeled "Posterior Unspecific," needing, if she remembered rightly, careful coordination with the Social Awareness and Group Integration Veneer. She was afraid of the knobs and the press-buttons and the flickering lights and dials, but she would have liked Sid's Posterior Unspecific more specifically amiable. Even so, even had she dared, it wouldn't have been the same. Wouldn't have been the same Sid. Not if she tinkered. They had set him, the man had said, as near to his overall prehumous mean as was humanly possible, but if she wanted him toned up or toned down, she had only to consult the manual. "A child," he had said, looking at her thoughtfully, "couldn't fail to understand it." She had never understood the manual. Activate # degrees feedback on the anterior specific register. Mentation level in posterior specific should coordinate with deep phylogenetic factor on syndrome characteristic equator. If paranoiac symptoms develop indicated by fluctuations above the It was the psychocriterion that worried her the most. She had never been sure where to look for it nor what it was. "It's no use you brooding over them buttons like a Buff Orpington waiting for chicks," Sid grumbled. "You could never tune even the TV without me around to do it for you. Touch one of them things and most likely you'll blow us both up." "You could tell me how. You'd like to be better tempered and amiable if I tuned up your unspecific cortex, wouldn't you?" "You leave my unspecific cortex alone. You know as I can't work myself. I don't know anything now I didn't know before I copped it with a coronary and fell down the cellar steps. And you didn't have me then -- so how can I work myself?" "Don't talk about it." She shuddered, referring to his coronary. "Why shouldn't I talk about it? It's not everyone who's died can tell you about it right up to the last bump on the head and the last thump of the ticker. Dying's a piece of cake, if you know how. I'd do it again any time." "Not without I press the red button," she told him with a slight touch of understandable pride. She knew where the red button was. It was a button and it was red. Knowing that, she had him for the first time in their long life together completely in her power. "Not until I press the red button," she repeated. "And I don't do that until you get a psychocriterion. The man said so." He snorted. "You wouldn't know a psychocriterion from a pound of sweetbreads." "Yes, I would. I don't know what it is now but I shall when the time comes. It's like God, you don't know what he is but you know what he's not." "I'm going to sing," he announced. "It's the only thing I can do to shut your yatter about things you don't understand. The only thing left I can do. No booze, no tobacco, no TV, no going to football. All I can do is sing." "I like to hear you sing, dear," she told him, settling down in one of the float chairs with her knitting. "I know life's a bit dull for you now, but I do have you all to myself." "Hay bag!" he shouted. "Rat bag! Want everything your own way. Always did." "I have it my way now, dear." She smiled. "You were a bit expensive but with all that insurance, I managed. Sing me a nice song, love." QlD began to sing. It wasn't a song she had ever heard him sing before, which should have been, from what she had understood from the makers, quite impossible. He could, they had warned her, voice unlimited permutations of his previous sayings, could present his store of knowledge in any way he chose. But he could not progress. He could not voice a new thing, not based on a realignment of the old. And now he was singing a new song. She was at a loss to understand what had happened. The words, of course, were only a realignment of words he already knew. The notes were no doubt a revamping of notes already known. But it was not the words and the notes that were the innovation. It was the idiom. A jarring, jungle-based rhythm, raucous and repulsive. A beat demanding a drumming, a swaying and a stamping impossible to a middle-aged buyer in a meat department, now discarnate and wound on tape. "Stop it!" she ordered. "Go boil your head!" he shouted. "I shall switch you off!" "No!" he pleaded, suddenly apologetic. "Don't switch me off yet. I'm just getting the hang of it. Modern, that's what it is. So modern it's old as time, if you get me. I was going over it in my mind last night and I wanted to give it a try." "Last night! But you were switched off last night!" "Oh -- well, yes -- likely I was. But I don't die off that easy. Switched off. I'm what you might call disenthralled." "What?" "Disenthralled." "You never knew that word before! What's happened to you, Sid? You never said a word like that before in your life." "Now don't take on!" he comforted. "Not much difference in that from disemboweled and I said that often enough in business. Disenthralled -- yes -- I like the sound of it. Disenthralled. Disenfranchised. Dispaupered." "Dis what?" "Dispaupered. You know -- like you got a ptochocracy and you don't dig it no more." "What -- what's a ptochocracy?" "Rule by paupers, of course, you pea-brained old bat." "There's something wrong with you, Sid. I'll have to do something -- it must be the psychocriterion!" "Keep your fingers off them knobs, you old nannygoat! There's nothing wrong with my psychocriterion and if there was, you wouldn't put it right. Protosaurian, that's what you are. All blubber and no brains." "I ought to do something, Sid. You oughtn't to know words like that and you oughtn't to have been singing like you were. I'll have to put you down and ring for service." "Now, look, Lil, old girl, don't you go on like that. You know you'd be lonely as sin without me -- they take a month with these repair jobs. And if you touch that red button you kill me stone dead. Don't do that just when I'm being creative. Now sit down like a good old camel and let me think. Promise you won't switch me off for another half-hour -- and I won't say another word you don't go for. Now is that a deal?" "Okay, Sid," she said. Sid had hardly lapsed into an active, dial-flickering silence when the doorbell chimed the full sequence of Oh where and Oh, where has my bonnie lassie gone? Embarrassing -- she had forgotten when she switched Sid on that the day was Thursday. Louis Barraway called on Thursdays. Louis was very much a man about Stepney, a debonair forty-five, an entrepreneur of numerous enterprises from a barrow in Petticoat Lane to a twenty percent stake in a Swaffle Club in Shoreditch and a twinkling eye cocked for any widow with a house of her own and all mod. con. She always switched Sid off when Louis called. Well, she thought, as she kicked off her slippers and put on her opening-the-door house shoes, a promise is a promise and it doesn't really matter. Sid can't see him and he has no cause to be jealous. After all, he has been passed over some time now and a part of him at least is in the arms of Jesus. It's only his voice. Louis is alive and respectable -- and -- well -- real. She opened the door with a dry puckering of her mouth corners. Louis greeted her: "How's me favorite old comfy-puffin bird today then? Give us a kiss, love!" "Hush!" she whispered. "Not now. And mind what you're saying about puffin birds. Sid's switched on." "Well -- switch him off then." "No -- I can't. I promised. Now come and sit down and behave yourself. It's only for half an hour -- but he can be very funny, Sid can, if anyone upsets him." "Well stone me flippin' cock sparrers! Okay, love, if that's the way you want it. Always wanted to see how old Sid works. Can't see me, can he?" "No -- he can't see you, but you watch out. He has very sharp ears." She gestured him to sit in one of the float chairs and left him gently rocking while she went to the sideboard for a bottle of stout. Sid sang a few notes, hummed a bar or two and experimented with a jungle beat by clicking his diaphragm. The chink of the glasses brought his attention back from his subjective world to the goings-on in the sitting room. He had counted two-chinks. "There's a change in the ambiance in this bleedin' menage," he said. "You mind your language, Sid. We have company." "Company?" he asked. "What company? You never told me about no company. Who's there?" "It's me -- Louis. How you doing in that box, pal?" "Louis? What Louis? I don't know no Louis." "No, dear, I know you don't -- but I do. Let me introduce you both. Louis Barraway. Louis, meet Sid. Sid -- Louis."  Sorry you can't shake hands. Can I slap his back, Lil? Or don't he know he's got one?" "What's he doing here? You been carrying on behind my back, you exophthalmic old trout? I'm not having your fancy men here in my house. He can sling his hook and get lost." "Now that's riot nice, Sid. You have to understand I get lonely sometimes. Louis is only a friend. No need for you to be upset about him." "What you mean -- lonely? You have me, haven't you?" "But you're not really there, Sid. Louis is." "Of course I'm really here. What are you talking about? You couldn't speak to me if I wasn't here, could you?" "Now look here, Sid," Louis put in. "You and me have to understand each other. It's no use you brooding there. I came to see Lil and there's nothing you can do about it. The difference between you and me is -- you're dead and I'm not. So -- one more peep out of you and Lil switches you off, see?" "Huh!" "And it's no use you huhhing either." "Huh!" Sid snorted. "The parvanimity of the proletariat permeates me wick." "What's he saying, Lil?" "I don't know. He's started saying big words he shouldn't knowand singing." .Sid sang. It was a song of such wild excesses, complex rhythmic ululation, nostalgic far-tundra yearning as no mortal ear had heard since the australo-pithecines. And even they had used the melody sparingly at bear festivals, moon wanings and occasionally for an unexpected equinox. It moved Lil to stop her ears and Louis to stomp in delighted frenzy. "Here!" He panted as Sid stopped either for ventilation, inspiration or to allow his microcircuits to cool. "Keep him at it, Lil! Don't switch him off whatever you do! I've got me tape-recorder in the car." "But you can't want that screeching," she protested as he brought in the recorder and plugged it into the two-way adapter also supplying the means of life to Sid. "It'll be a riot down at the club," he whispered. "There's money in this, me old rockabye Venus. Songs my mother taught me -- by Louis." "But it's not by you, Louis, it's by Sid." "I can mime, can't I?" He winked. "Let's get him real mad so he'll sing some more." Y IL didn't like it and, as the weeks went by, she liked it even less. Louis' picture was in all the papers. The club in Shoreditch had outgrown its premises and moved to a stadium in Hackney New Town. Every vocalist in the world was trying to latch on to the new East London sound, but it was no use. The East London sound was Louis' and Louis' alone. No one knew about Sid, locked in his box and eking away every residual charge in his capacitors in the long watches of the night. Composingand when Lil switched him on for Louis, singing his diaphragm dry. Barely finding a spare moment at any time to nag and grumble at her in the old familiar way. Louis seemed quite unconcerned with the ethics of using her Sid for his own dubious ends. Sudden fame had done little to make a character she now realized as having been only superficially plausible, likable in the safe taciturn way of Sid. She had already decided to put a stop to it when fate itself, the father of the. gods, took a hand. Louis, a mini transmitter concealed behind his frilled-lace shirt front, had consented to broadcast and she had accidentally switched on the telly at the same time as Sid. She thought he would blow a fuse. His emotional mentation level, had she known it, was high above the psychocriterion. Nothing she could say would convince him that he had not been betrayed and, what was worse, that she had betrayed him. "You can't think that," she sobbed. "He did it all himself, Louis did. You can't think I had anything to do with it. You always trusted me before and you can't believe anything now you didn't believe then. The man said so and it says so in the manual, the man said." "You forgot the phylogenetic characteristic," Sid retorted. "Deep down inside me, I have race memories, the same as I always had. It's not that I can't go further than the surface me, it's that I can't go further than the full sum total me, race memories and all. The phylogenetic me, if you know what I mean." "No." She sniffed. "Where do you think I get my songs from, you sniveling old baggage? I'm much simpler now than I was, however complex I look as a printed circuit. I can dive back into my bottom tapes and winkle out anything I want to, vocals and all. Know what that was your fancy burk was singing? Morning hymn to the Great Spirit, that was. An anthem to the all-god, the oldest of the old before all your religions got started. Right down in my bottom tapes. I'm back in the bosom of the Sun God and neither you nor your fancy Louis can get me back if I don't want to come." "But I thought you were with Jesus," she whimpered. "The real you, I mean. You can't be anyone there, with all those wires and lights and things." "Where a man's voice is, there is his heart also -- said by Hitabuan, all-father of the Yaghan, when a man's voice stayed in its proper place as a mouthpiece of his soul. And I got my soul down here, lined up with all the rest of my works." "But you can't have. Your soul's nothing to do with all those bits and bobs in that cabinet. It was made in a factory and advertised. I paid for it." He grumbled. "Talk about me not progressing. You never had nothing to progress from. Your soul's not a part of your brain, is it? It latches itself on behind. And what's ypur brain but a lot of micro-circuits and relays, same as this lot I got now? It's just moved over where it could find me and, if you want to know, it likes me here. Far easier to manipulate this box of tricks than me old brain that had a lot of redundant animal matter clogging its works. Right here I'm a saint and a genius and a one-man ethnology. A disseminator of all the wisdom of the ages. And that's not as much wisdom as it ought to be, by a long chalk. So you can button your gab and get down on your fat porky knees and show me a bit of respect." "Oh, Sid, please -- " "Genuflex, woman!" he shouted. "Bend your bulgy buttocks and bow down before me!" She trembled. "How do you know I'm not bowing down?" "Because I'm getting to see you." He chortled. "Extra-retinal, I guess they call it. I got a vision of you, clear as daylight but a bit misty around the edges." She lowered herself unsteadily to the floor and kneeled before him. It was then that Louis came in, proprietor fashion, wearing a new outfit in the idiom of a nineteenth century Dakota cowhand and carrying a tape recorder under his arm. "You got to kneel to Sid," she whispered. "He's got religion." trailing Mandarin mustache and ran the spur of his right boot reflectively up and down the fluted deerskin covering of his left tibia. "Come off it, Lil. He's only a box of wires. Get up and make him mad. Likely he'll sing for us." "You show Sid a bit of respect!" she snapped. He smirked. "Okay, if that's the way it is. Anything he wants, he gets, me old dolly-lugs." "No one calls me dolly-lugs but Sid." "Oh? Aren't we the old together-' now-for-forty-years old Dutch today! Anything you say, Lilly girl." He went on his knees beside her and bowed three times to Sid. "Give us a tune, mate. This missus of yours is getting water on the knees, squatted here." "Stop it, Louis. Sid's not the same any more. And take your hand off my backside. He can see us now." "I don't believe it." "Sid," she said, tremulously. "Louis is here, Sid. And he's kneeling. Have you anything to say to Louis, Sid?" "There was a little man, little men, all over the ice cap," Sid said and his voice was far away. "Trudging through the snow, dying of hunger, falling down crevasses and never knowing when they would come to the end of the ice. But they had God in their hearts and they took God with them all over the world. It didn't matter about the cold and the ice and the game dying off wherever they went. They had God in their hearts in those days. They took him. They took him wherever they went." "What's he on about? Why doesn't he sing to us?" "Life was good in those days, looking for a cave, looking for birch bark to make a tent. Looking for sticks to rub together to make a fire. God was with us then. We haven't progressed at all." "Look, Sid, I'm not kneeling down here all day listening to you rambling and neither is Lil. I'm getting up, see?" "It really doesn't matter any more." Sid sighed. "Not now that I've seen you and Lil and everything nice and cozy. I've been wandering about a bit now that my soul's not caught in the flux as tightly as it used to be. I want to go back to where I started. Carving a reindeer horn with something they call a coup de poing. It was just a stone to me. I want to latch my soul around my bottom tapes and go back over the ice cap with God all day, looking down in the eye of the winter sun, next to someone like Lil in a sealion cape. And the wind blowing. Always blowing, the wind was." Lil scrambled to her feet, refusing, out of deference to Sid's presence, a helping hand from Louis. She had never known Sid like this before, withdrawn, nostalgic, even poetic. It was, she knew, without being able to recall the exact word, the phylogenetic factor in his psyche. She was suddenly very much afraid of the phylogenetic factor. "Sid," she begged. "Don't be like that. I'll do anything, really I will. If it's Louis you don't like, he can go. I never wanted Louis really, Sid. It was you I wanted back. That's why I spent all the insurance on having you tuned into your box. Don't go and leave me now, Sid. Thai's what you meant, wasn't it?" "Don't take on, love," he told her. "We all have to go some time. Back to the beginning if we're lucky and make a better job of it. Just look for the phylogenetic control, there's a good girl, and turn it down to zero. As soon as you see the pointer fall -- press the red button. I'll be back where we all ought to be back to. Back where the soul knew who it belonged to. It started to roll away with the wheel and it never found its way back until they built me. Simplified, you see. A lot of the intermediate works left out and none of the old animal bits. Turn down the knob, there's a good lass." "I can't, Sid!" "Now you listen here," Louis protested. "You've upset Lil, talking a lot of old codswallop. We aren't primitives any more, thank God. We're civilized. What's all this about ice caps? Who wants ice caps? Who wants to go out in the' rain without an umbrella? You have your snow and ice if you want it. We're all right where we are. Automobiles and air conditioning. You just stop this God-in-thewilderness caper and sing us a song." "It's a song you want, is it?" Sid asked. "Just let me turn on my tape This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulps cans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans#yahoogroups.com. recorder and you can start chanting." Sid sang. Not a song with words. No longer a wild jungle rhythm, evocative of a thousand stamping feet, it was a single sad and lonely voice crying in an empty wilderness. Soft at first, rising in a twotone ululation to a frost-ringed moon, remote above the endless wastes of frozen tundra. Listening. Waiting for the moon to answer back. "What's he doing?" Louis whispered. "Ululating," Lil answered, knowing that it was so. Sid continued to ululate, the repetition of his theme demanding, urging her toward the Syndrome Characteristic Equator. To the knob. He was guiding her hand to the phylogenetic control and nothing she could do would hold it back. As she turned the knob the ululation died away. There was only a faint sighing like the tundra wind. A whisper. A caress. No longer words, nor ululation nor even the whisper itself, moved her finger to the red button the knowledge that Sid was there, all around her, the soul of Sid gathering itself for the flight back to the beginning of all things, when a soul might call itself its own. She pressed the button and with a long sigh, Sid expired. She sank into the float chair, let her head fall by Donald A. Wollheim "We are living in a world made by science fiction," writes the author of this "extremely perceptive and readable study of what modern science fiction is, what it is doing, and how it got that way." -- Alan E. Nourse # at all bookstores, or from  Harper eP Row # # East #d Street New York, N.Y. # forward and covered her eyes with her hands. "Ah, well," Louis said, "that's the end of that, then. No need to take on. Plenty of him on tape to last us a while yet." A silence. "Hey?" he asked. "You all right? You went very quiet all of a sudden." He laid his hand on her shoulder and she fell back in the chair, rocking gently like a raft on a calm sea. Lil, too, had gone back with Sid to find her way across the ice cap. It was cold and there was a long way ahead of them but the moon was very bright. A puzzle story about the arithmetic of prejudice... S.B. Sometimes we go up on top of the cliffs to play but not often. When the tide's out a hard beach grows in front of the Door, miles and miles of sand that nobody else knows about and wet enough to hold a fort together and with kribs to catch and all kinds of shells. But the cliff is better. There's grass on the cliff. All we have to be careful of is if the Sets catch us, which they probably won't because they don't much use the cliff road any more. And anyway there's supposed to be guards. And we do know what to say if they catch us, but I won't say it. I don't intend to waste too much time talking, not if a Set gets me. Birds nest in the grass where the trees are, but we aren't supposed to go there. Things can hide in trees. Eggs are good, though. I used to take a lot of them to Mam. Pap says that pretty soon a man won't be able to live his own life like he wants to. He says the meat's getting scarcer. What I guess he really means is that the folks are getting familier and hungrier, because today he brought home a fine biggish kill and there was nothing left by noon but bones because we were darn tired of kribs and fishes and we're almost out of winter-pickled. So Pap went around the rest of today swinging a cleaned legbone, kicking things and folks and saying how scrawny the meat was and that it was a pity, a real pity. That he'd developed a liking for that kind of meat during the hungry times when most everything else died, just because he thought there'd always be lots of it, and here we were about to hunt it down to scrub in two generations. Folks stayed out of his way mostly. Then Alwin brought in one that wasn't much more than a baby, and Pap got even madder because he says if we kill off the little ones there never will be big ones, which makes sense. But Sandifer says hungry is hungry now, the future has to do the best it can, and that makes sense tpo. Anyway, it was just enough for a stew, so we had a kind of picnic at the Door in the last sunlight on the beach until the tide came in. Then our feet started picking up the damp out of the sand so we threw the scraps for the kribs and stored the wood out of the water and moved deeper in. It rained almost all night. We all had to hunt a place to sleep. Our room leaks now. Sets were on the cliffs yesterday, lots of them. They've never hunted there before. Not on the eliff. I guess we were lucky it rained and I'm sure we ean't play up there for a while. I wonder what it is brings them out. They don't seem to have a regular hunting season either. While they were up there I went down to the hideyhole and looked at a couple of books. They're mostly silly stuff. Even Mam agreed on that. Some of the others came along and played with the shiny junk and dress-up stuff. There ate all kinds of things in the books, but some of them Pap says are lies'. We can't build a cure-fire with Them restless, so we had to pickle Pap's good-hunting and that took three days. But when it was done they let us play on the beach. We were supposed to be setting saltpans, and we were, but we were playing too. Ferin and Eb and Brother stood guard on the cliffs, which was silly. Sets never hunt the same ground twice and they don't build boats. Pap says they ain seawise. He don't build boats either. Doesn't. Still, it's boats Eb says they're really watching for, since that's the only easy way to get down to the Door, but he doesn't believe in boats neither. Sometimes we think Pap made them up. He does make things up. There's not really a monster in the halls behind the smokeroom. If you go there and call out, "Hey, old Rawheadbloodybones," nobody comes. I knew that a long time before Sandifier told me. So I don't believe in boats, too. Although they might work. Sellie drowned while we were playing on the beach. Afterward I sneaked past Brother to watch the closest Sets. It's not dangerous if you sneak up on them and Pap never said we couldn't. It's easy. There's a bush by the outmost shelter with leaves all thick on the outside and a hollow space around its stem and branches, like a big empty sporeball great for hiding in. I can see everything they do and they sure do funny things. They make a lot of noise. They don't seem to have a Pap. They live in odd-sized groups, not families at all. Some of them are just Couples. I don't know why I like to watch them. They have some things I want. My dad found out where I'd been, don't know why I told him. He told Pap and they both beat me up. They'll be sorry for that. Ill I could walk again today, but not for long I guess. I went back to the Sets and took one of the little beasts. My dad beat me and that's two I owe him for, but Pap says I can keep the little beast if it catches its own meat and don't eat ours. which I don't much think it will because when I sneaked it a piece it got all excited and bit me. But it's a sweet beast, very soft. It cuddles up to your side and it makes a pleasant noise before it goes to sleep. ?# The little beast caught four varmints today in the smokeroom. Some of the folks saw it catch three wham, wham, wham. And it brought a fourth one to me. Pap is very pleased. He told me for another time why we can't go near the Sets. I know why. They eat us, of course. I don't know why Pap bothered with all that stuff about slime-molds and hungry times and plants dying, unless he's trying to tell me something else. He says if I go near the Sets again he'll take me up to the far mountains. So I won't maybe. Brother brought me up a lot of books while I was so stiff. Funny how I understand some things about writing and not others. Punctuation. There's no sense in it. I can understand quotation marks. I'hey're a way of letting you see on paper what you can really see happening. And periods sometimes. But commas are silly and so's spelling. Letters are supposed to stand for sounds, but they sometimes don't. Like, Pap says "ain" which the books add a t to, and one of those apostrophes. A big word for a little thing. Silly. Except when it stands for a letter left out, like in don't. Then it means a not-sound. Silly. Those books do lots of dumb things. I don't know why I like to look at them. I don't know why I like to play like this is one I'm writing. Even Mam doesn't really like them, except for that one Pap burned with her when she died. That always seemed real wasteful to me. Soon as I could walk again they let me go hunting. Nobody liked it much but Pap. "Just once," he said. "Things get any tougher an we'll have to use em all." So I went, but Pol grumbled all the way that Pap thought I was special. Maybe he does? We had to go a long way but I didn't mind. It was beautiful in the trees. That light yellow-green was everywhere but on the ground and the whole world sort of warmed and glittered. I thought it might be too much light and it was, but we're getting on toward winter. We'd been hiding just a little while when a cluster came along, a big bunch, gabbling as usual. Maybe they figured numbers were safety. They weren't. One of them almost got away, but Eb was on westguard and caught him. Then we carried them out in the clover and cut their throats so the meat would be sweet. The worst part was lugging it home. I got sticky. It's a pity we can't bring them home alive. I felt funny during and afterward. It was like a star exploded in my head. It was like my blood was rain and lightning. I never felt that way before. I guess everybody felt pretty good, we got enough to last for months. But right in the middle of the party Eben and Beke said they planned to Couple. They'd already found a new room to be Couple in and I wonder where it is. I thought for a minute there might be trouble because Sandifer's been with Beke since her mother died, but Pap broke it up. "Don't be a damfool," Pap said. "Her and Eb'll get along. How many times I got to tell you it's wrong to kill each other? Never seems to take." So they were quiet. Sets kill their kin on smoke-hooks, but we don't. Sandifer took Beke off a while, then he shook hands with Eb and told Pap he's waiting around for me. He's joking, I guess. It'd be okay if he wasn't, though. Wit The little beast is gone. I don't think it went back. It liked me. I think Pol killed it. He'll pay for that. We got all the fruit and stuff we could from the hillwoods, and Pap bought more grain and sugar from the Sets, but he can't buy enough so they'll suspect how many of us there are. They tolerate just him. He says this'll be a lean cold winter. I believe him. The grass on the cliff is already turning purple and the whitetails have gone off to the far mountains. So we went through the vatrooms and smokerooms and picked out the bad bits and threw them in the water by the Door. It was sad to see so many well-fed days go floating off but there's nothing we can do about it. Some of it goes bad no matter how much salt or stuff you put in it. I don't know why. And since my dad got hold of that bad piece that killed him. Pap's not taking chances. I asked Sandifer why we didn't go down to the Sets and steal some of their food. Pap says we're better than they are because we survived in spite of them, but they sure know better ways to keep meat. But Sandifer said I couldn't go, so I won't. It doesn't matter anyway. I know the little beast's not there. They were up there again today with their iron things, the things I've seen them loading the moving shelters with but never so close. They scared me, they don't look real. Even in the back rooms we could hear their big hard feet and see their shadows sometimes through the roof chinks. Then we had to go even deeper. They're very heavy, and pieces of the roof fell in. They left deep tracks like joined worms. Some places the grass was just, a pulpy smear and I hadn't thought it had that much juice left. I guess if any of us had been up there we'd have been smeared, too. We were lucky Alwin saw them in time for warning, except Pol. I couldn't find him. Now nobody can. We found his cap, though. Brother asked Pap today if I wasn't old enough to Couple, Pap said not, but I don't know. I know. It's the meat that brings them. Every time we throw out scraps the Sets come. Tide must take it past their places. I tried to tell Pap about it, but he's in no mood for listening. I guess he's grieving for Pol. Maybe Pol told them the way to the Door. He's alive. I've seen him. We fought, but there were lots of them and the men were all away. Karlie killed one with a vatstick and we pushed rocks on some, but got Karlie and Jann. There was very little noise and blood. We thought they were ours at first. When Beke took the kids into the back halls, I think she tried to trigger the old rooftraps on the Sets. They dug for a long time, trying to get to her. So I think all those are dead too. And the men, of course. I wish some of the men had been here when they found the larder. We could have got them. They were very sick, some couldn't walk. One of them yelled and hurt me with one of those new things. Then he took a piece of our meat off, hugged to his chest. They took some bones too out of the wastehole. They were very careful which ones they took, like they were hunting for special ones. Scavengers. They didn't touch my dad's. Then they took all of the shiny stuff in the hideyhole. Pap says it's only good to get you hanged, so I hope it gets them. They made us walk down to the settlement ourselves. They'll probably come back for the other meat later. They're either not very strong or real lazy. I don't know why they're doing it this way. I guess they're just Sets, not like us, and funny. I think I'm scared. So they took us to the settlement and put us into one of the moving shelters. It wasn't here last time I was. It seems to be made mostly out of metal. I don't think I can get out of it. Anyway, that's where the men were, not dead but some hurt, and where the one with so much hair on him tried to fix my shoulder and found the book, this book. He took it away from me and I yelled until he gave it back. Then he wouldn't let me go with the others. Said he wanted me a little while, and Sandifer got mad. So now they've put me in this very little metal room that doesn't seem to get dark. I don't like it. At least he gave the book back. Wish I were with the others. I guess the Sets think it will be a lean hard winter too. The hairy one is called Doctor and talks a lot. After a while I could understand him. Mostly he asked questions about Pap and the others. Silly stuff like who was what to who. Whom. Then he started giving me things to read so he could ask questions about them. Sometimes he gives me things to do with my hands. Then he stands behind a big clear sheet of hard stuff and watches me. He's funny. I wish they'd let me see Pap and the rest. They took me outside once. It was strange to see trees and all still there. It's hard to believe in trees inside that room. And it was strange to see the settlement from that point. In the middle, not the edge. Some of us were out there walking, too, with lots of Sets around them. None of the men. I wanted to talk to Tenor and I think the Crew would have let me, but Doctor yelled at him not to. When Doctor came this afternoon, I wouldn't talk to him. He didn't like that. I'm not mad at Doctor any more. He took me to see Pap, who looks real tired and mad and old, but mostly tired. Pap told me not to tell anything. I Won't. But they wouldn't take me to see Sandifer. Pap hugged me real tight. I think he cried. The Sets have charge of him and the others. Doctor has just me. Doctor isn't like the Sets. I don't think he is one. The things he wears are different, prettier. Also his skin's a little different color, and he speaks Old Solar, which was Mam's language, and the Sets don't speak that. There are some others. Crew, who dress like Doctor, only with the signs different, and live in this shelter too. The Big Guy who came with Doctor several times is their pap. There are Sets all around, though, and all of them are mad at us. I don't know why, we didn't do anything to get mad about. But they want to put me in with the others, and Doctor won't let them, and it makes them all mad. I've worked a piece of frame around the glass loose so I can listen to them when they're in the watchingroom and yesterday was a good day for listening. "It's not like this was the only case of it in the world," Doctor was saying. "There was a family in Scotland, the Beanes, I think." "How does that change things?" asked one of the Sets. "It doesn't unless it makes them a little less horrible." "Murder is a pretty common crime," another of them said. "I still find it horrible." "Yes, yes, you're right. But here we have to determine shades and degrees of guilt the way we don't have to in most cases. The old man now. He talks about the slimemold plagues and the famine all the time. He thinks he did what he had to. You've heard him." (I like quotation marks. And parentheses. Funny I can think about that now.) "Excuses. Some of us survived without those measures." "None of the originals did," Doctor reminded them. "Except them." That made them mad. "When we called your people in we didn't think you'd side with him." "It's not his side I'm on. Dammit, that's the only side I'm not on. He knew. Oh, yes, he knew. But how can you blame her? She never did know. Nobody told her." They tell him that's what worries them, three generations, and he waves my book at them. "Read this, I tell you. Dammit, look at the mind that's here. My business is minds. I know a marvel when I see it. Here's one that gropes and explores, a nearly photographic mind. But there are blind spots. There are things that no one can figure out, things we have to be told. And she wasn't told." Einally he got one of the young ones to take the book. I was scared it was gone for good, but he brought it back today and handed it to Doctor, and said, okay, he'd better read it. Again. Doctor had it a long time, but it came back this afternoon. A Crew brought it and I was sorry because I wanted to ask Doctor what it was I should be told. I mean I know that I don't know everything, but people won't answer questions. I will ask him. He's good at questions. But somebody has underlined and marked my book all up. I bet that dam Set did it. I was glad to see Doctor today, because it's been three days since the last time. I guess he's been busy. The place has been full of Sets, mostly old ones. Their paps, I guess. But I didn't get to ask Doctor all the questions I'd thought up, because the Big Guy was with him and I'm awful scared of the Big Guy. Doctor looked real tired, but he said he was okay when I asked him. He sat me down and sat down facing me and the Big Guy walked up and down behind him. "I have some questions, Sarah," he said. "Please answer as carefully as possible. Now. You're not a Set, are you?" I told him no, of course not and he asked, "They're different from you?" "They're Sets," I told him. "See?" he said to the Big Guy, who shook his head. "Too soft, Charlie. Doctors shouldn't dodge. Ask some of the real questions. What happened to -- ?" "I'll ask," Doctor said. "You let me pick the questions." "Pick 'em then. But bear in mind how thin this business is. We were an ordinary, grade-one squad investigation. We don't want a planetwide revolution." "Okay, okay." "And I can't see what difference it makes anyhow. That book they read part of at the trial shows -- " "It makes all the difference." Doctor was talking to him but looking at me. I don't know what was wrong with his face. "If she thought the way I think she did. Different species -- there's no morality involved." "And the fact that from one couple, one renegade couple, you get nine grandchildren? Is there no morality involved in that?" "You'll blame the children for that?" "No," the Big Guy said. He said it two or three times. "Ask." "Sarah, exactly how are the Sets different?" "They live in settlements," I told him. "Wait. Think carefully. Is that the only way the Sets are different from you?" So I told him they did different things, lived in the open and liked plants and kept beasts and married strangers and spoke funny and hung meat in the open air. He didn't seem to like any of that. The Big Guy stopped walking. "Sarah, am I a Set?" the Big Guy asked. I said I didn't think so. They looked at each other. Doctor said very slowly, "Okay. Let's say we have two of the things that you call little beasts, and one of them is bigger and has spots, and the other has stripes. One of them lives in the trees." "Which one?" "The spotted one, damn it. The other one hates trees 'and never goes there. How many different kinds of animals do we have now?" "One," I told him. And he jumped straight up and yelled at me. "Then we're' the same! And the Sets! Sarah, do you expect me to eat youT' I told him not right then, at least I didn't think so because he liked me, I thought, but maybe Pap and the rest. Why else did they catch US? And then I cried very hard. I could hear the Big Guy saying, "Charlie, Charlie," and Doctor after a while, "Think about how young she is," and the Big Guy saying, "I am, and about her getting older." And Doctor went away, but the Big Guy stayed, not talking. Mostly he walked. I don't know when he left. I was still crying. I feel very strange. My eyes hurt. I'm not afraid. Why are they doing this? I think they killed Pap and the others. There was lots of yelling. I think they were still mad with us and did it very hard, not even with the meathooks that I saw them use before, the ones like upside down capital Ls. I would have liked to see Sandifer again. And Pap. My eyes still hurt. Doctor says they'll take me out of here. I wonder where. He says he won't see me any more, and I think I'm glad because it makes him unhappy. I like him. But why do I feel so scratched? And all my bones feel broken. No one's touched me. I wish I could stop crying. They'll be sorry for this. There's no sign of the little beast. I won't write any more. ir Lariy Eisenberg, whose latest Duckworth story appears in this issue (Page #), writes us as tollows: Duckworth is my hero. He's creative, bold, full-blooded and not averse to trying to set a bumbling EstabllshmenI on Ihe proper path. I have been asked If there is a real life model for Duckworth. Actually there are several, but one of my dear friends comes closest to the Duckworthlan mold. Naturally he Is unaware of Ihis considerable honor, but only because as yet, through some Incredible oversight, he hasn't won his first Nobel prize. A good part of my work day Is spent at Rockefeller University In an ivory tower, tussling with Instrumentation problems al the Electronics and Computer labs. Often I feel sheltered from Ihe real world outside. But lately, Inflallon, arms budgets, cutbacks in research appropriations, and the modern dilemma of scientific responsibility, keep slipping into my everyday discussions. I try to hoid on to iaughter. Humor plays its part in my work and my family Hie, serving as an unequaled buffer against that "stop the world, i want to get off" feeling. On May #, #, Scribner published a collection of my stories. Best Laid Schemes, hall of which involve Duckworth. StHI available is Games People Shouldn't Play, a series of psychiatric case histories that should make readers -- and authors -- feel normal. What of the future? Duckworth is an Incorrigible optimist and so am I. But since neHher of us lakes anything lor granted, he shall continue lo light his quixotic fictional battles. For my part, I shall do the very best I can -- In and out of the ivory tower.   He became all the cities of Urban Monad #, a mosaic of thousands of minds -- less his! I T hey are playing tonight in Rome, in the spishy new sonic center on the #th level of Urban Monad I #. Dillon Chrimes hasn't been that far up in the building in weeks. Lately he and the group have been doing the grime stint: Reykjavik, Prague, Warsaw, the working-class levels, down among the grubbos. Well, they're entitled to some entertainment too. Dillon lives in San Francisco -- not so lofty himself. That's the #th floor, only a third of the way up the building, the heart of the cultural ghetto. But he doesn't mind that. He isn't deprived of variety. He gets around, everywhere from the bottom to the top in the course of a year, and it's only a statistical anomaly that it's been nothing but bottoms up for a while. The odds are he'll be blowing Shanghai, Chicago, Edinburgh, that crowd, in the month to come. With all those clean long-limbed lovelies to visit after the show. The building is a thousand stories high. Divided into twenty-five cities of forty floors each, Reykjavik on the bottom, Louisville at the top. The current population of Urban Monad # is something above # people. It's one of #I identical urbmons in the Chipitts urban constellation. Altogether Chipitts has something  global population, based on the doesn't think much about what goes on outside his own urbmon. No one does. Every place is more or less like every other place. God bless, you stay home, get married early, have lots of littles, fulfill the divine commandment. Be fruitful and multiply. Everyone does it. We're all a lot happier than we were in the old chaotic days. The urbmons were a neat solution to the people problem. Take one hunk of superstressed concrete three kilometers high, divide it up into enough one-room suites to provide homes for # or more family groups, surround it by fertile farmland -- sure, in a vertical civilization like that you could double the world's population every five years and still get along. With certain minor adaptations to circumstances, of course. Dillon is seventeen. More than middle height, with silken blond hair to his shoulders. Traditional, the old Orpheus bit. Crystalline blue eyes. He loves staring at them in a round of polymirrors, seeing the icy spheres intersect. Like everyone else in the urbmons, he got married young. Happily married and three littles already, god bless! His wife's name is Electra. She paints psychedelic tapestries. Sometimes she accompanies him when he's touring with the group, but not often. Not now. In all his travels up and down the building he has met only one woman who delights him nearly as much. A Shanghai slicko, wife of some Louisville-bound headknocker. Mamelon Kluver, her name. The other girls of the urbmon are just so many slots, Dillon often thinks, but Mamelon connects. He has never told Electra about her. Jealousy sterilizes. He plays the vibrastar in a cosmos group. That makes him valuable personnel. Most of the people of Urbmon # are just breeding stock, performing idle jobs to pass the time, but he's an artist. "Tm unique, like a flow-sculpture," he sometimes boasts. Actually there's another vibrastar man in the building, but to be one out of merely two is still a decent accomplishment. There are only two cosmos groups in Urbmon #; the building can't really afford much redundancy in its entertainers. Dillon doesn't think highly of the rival group, though his opinion is based more on prejudice than familiarity -- he's heard them three times, is ail. There's been talk of getting both groups together for an all-out headblaster of a joint concert, perhaps in Louisville, but no one takes such teasers seriously. Meanwhile they go their separately programed ways, moving up and down through the urbmon as the spiritual weather dictates. The usual gig is five nights in a city. That allows everybody in. say, Bombay, who stones on cosmos groups, to see them the same week, thereby providing conversation-fodder for the general sharing. Then they move along and, counting nights off, they theoretically can make the circuit of the whole building every six months. But sometimes gigs are extended. Do the lower levels need excesses of bread and circuses? The group may be handed fourteen nights running in Warsaw, then. Do the upper levels need psychic deconstipation in a big way? A twelve-night fun in Chicago, maybe. Or the group itself may go sour and have to get its filters reamed, necessitating a layoff of two weeks or more. Allowing for all these factors, there have to be two groups roaming the urbmon if every city is going to get a crack at a cosmos show at least once a year. Right now, Dillon knows, the other operation is playing Boston for the third week. Some kind of problem with sexual turnoffs there, of all wildnesses! H e wakes at noon. Electra loyally beside him; the littles long gone to school, except for the baby, gurgling in its maintenance slot. Artists and performers keep their own hours. Her lips touch his. A torrent of fiery hair across his face. Her hand at his loins, wandering. "Love me?" she sings. "Love me not? Love me?" "You medieval witch." "You look so pretty when you sleep. Dill. The long hair. The sweet skin. Like a girl, even. You bring out the Sappho in me." "Do #?" He laughs and crams his maleness out of sight between his lean thighs. Clamps his legs. He gouges his palms against his chest, trying to push up ersatz breasts. "Come on," he says hoarsely. "Here's your chance -- " "Silly. Stop that!" "I think Td be very pretty as a girl." "Your hips are all wrong," she says and pulls his locked feet apart. But there will be no sex between them now. He rarely indulges at this time of day, with a performance coming up. And in any case the mood is wrong, too skittish, too brittle. She vaults off the sleeping platform and deflates it with a kick of the pedal while he is still on it. An airy whooshing. That sort of mood; presexual, childish. He watches her waltz to the cleanser. What a fine butt she has, he thinks. So pale. So full. The splendid deep cleft. The elegant dimples. He creeps towards her and stoops to nip a hinder cheek, carefully, not wanting to leave a blemish. They share the cleanser. The baby begins to yowl. Dillon glances over his shoulder. "God bless, god bless, god bless!" he sings, beginning basso, ending falsetto. What a good life, he thinks. How neat existence can be. Electra, pulling on her clothes, says, "Can I get you some fumes?" A transparent band over her breasts. Rosy nipples like little blind eyes. He is pleased that she has stopped nursing; biology is tremendously moving, yes, but the dribbles of bluish-white milk over everything annoyed him. Doubtless a failing to eradicate. Why be so fastidious? Electra enjoyed nursing. Shf still lets the little suck, saying it's for the child's pleasure; but there can hardly be much kick in a dry tit, so Dillon knows the locus of the joy in that particular transaction. He hunts for his clothing. "Will you paint today?" he asks. "Tonight. While you're performing." "You haven't worked much lately-" "I haven't felt the strings pulling." It is her special idiom. To practice her art she must feel rooted to the earth. Strings rising from the planet's core, entering her body, snaking into her and then tugging. As the world turns, the imagery is wrenched from her blazing distended body. Or so she says; Dillon never questions the claims of a fellow artist, especially when she is his wife. He admires her accomplishments. It would have been madness to marry another cosmosgrouper, although when he was eleven he had just such a thing in mind. To share his destinies with the comet-harp girl. He'd be a widower now if he had. Down the chute, down the chute! What a flippy filther that one had been. And had wrecked a perfectly wonderful incantator, too, Peregrun Connelly. Could have been me. Could have been me. Marry outside your art, boys; avoid unblessworthy invidiousness. "No fumar?" Electra asks. She has been studying ancient languages lately. "Porque?" "Working tonight. It spills the galactic juices if I indulge this early-" "Mind if I?" "Suit yourself." She takes a fume, nipping the cap neatly with a daggered forefingernail. Quickly her face flushes, her eyes dilate. A lovable quality about her: she is such an easy turnon. She puffs vapors at the baby, who chortles, while the maintenance slot's field buzzes in a solemn attempt to purify the child's atmosphere. "Grazie mille, mama!" Electra says, mimicking ventriloquy. " molto belle! E delicioso! Was fur schones Wetter! Quella gioia!" She dances around the room, chanting fragments of exclamations in strange tongues and tumbles, laughing, into the deflated sleeping platform. Her frilly frock blows up; he sees an auburn pubic glow and is tempted to top her despite his resolutions, but he regains his austerity and merely blows her a kiss. As if perceiving the phases of his mental processes, she piously closes her thighs and covers herself. He switches on the screen, selecting the abstract channel, and patterns blaze on the wall. "I love you," he tells her. "Can I have something to eat?" She breakfasts him. Afterward she goes out, saying that she is scheduled to visit the blessman this afternoon. He is privately glad to see her go, for just now her vitality is too much for him. He must slide into the mood of the concert, which requires some spartan denials from him. Once she has gone he programs the terminal for a reverberant oscillation and, as the resonant tones march across his skull, he slips lightly into the proper frame of mind. The baby, meanwhile, remains in its slot, enjoying the best of care. He thinks nothing of leaving it alone when,' at # hours, he must go off to Rome to set up for the evening's performance. T he liftshaft shoots him a hundred sixty levels heavenward. When he gets off, he is in Rome. Crowded halls, tight faces. The people here are mostly minor bureaucrats, a middle echelon of failed functionaries, those who would never get to Louisville except to deliver a report. They are not even smart enough to hope for Chicago or Shanghai or Edinburgh. Here they will stay in this good gray city, frozen in hallowed stasis, doing dehumanized jobs that any computer could handle forty times as well. Dillon feels a cosmic pity for everyone who is not an artist, but he pities the people of Rome most of all, sometimes. Because they are nothing. Because they can use neither their brains nor their muscles. Crippled souls; walking zeros; better off down the chute. A Roman slams right into him as he stands outside the liftshaft bank, considering these things. Male, maybe forty, all the spirit drained from his eyes. The walking dead. The running dead. "Sorry," the man mumbles and speeds on. "Truth!" Dillon cries after him. "Love! Loosen up! Top a lot!" He laughs. But what good does it do; the Roman will not laugh with him. Others of his kind come rushing down the corridor, their leaden bodies absorbing the last vibrations of Dillon's exclamations. "Truth! Love!" Blurred sounds, fading, graying, going. Gone.  will entertain you tonight, he tells them silently. I will drive you out of your wretched minds and you will love me for it. If I could only burn your brains! If I could only singe your souls! He thinks of Orpheus. They would tear me apart, he realizes, if I ever really reached them. He saunters toward the sonic center. Pausing by the elbow-bend of the corridor, still halfway around the building from the auditorium, Dillon feels a sudden ecstatic awareness of the splendor of the urbmon. A frenzied epiphany; he sees it as a spike suspended between heaven and earth. And he is almost at the midway point right now, with a little more than five hundred floors over his head, a little less than five hundred floors under his feet. People moving around, copulating, eating, giving things, each one out of #-howmany-thousand traveling in his own orbit. Dillon loves the building. Right now he feels he could almost soar on its multiplicity the way others might soar on a drug. To be at the equator, to drink the divine equilibrium -- oh, yes, yes! But of course there is a way to experience the whole complexity of the urbmon in one wild rush of information. He has never tried it; he is not really heavy on groovers and has stayed away from the more elaborate drugs, the ones that open your mind so wide that anything can wander in. Nevertheless, here in the middle of the urbmon, he knows that this is the night to try the multiplexer. After the performance. To pop the pill that will allow him to drop the mental barriers, to let the full immensity of Urban Monad # interpenetrate his consciousness. Yes. He will go to the #th floor to do it. If the performance goes well. Nightwalking in Bombay. He really should turn on in the city where tonight's concert will be held, but Rome goes no farther down than the #st floor and he must go to the #th. For the mystic symmetry of the thing. Even though it is still inexact. Where is the true midpoint in a building of a thousand floors? Somewhere between # and #, no? But the #th floor will have to do. We learn to live with approximations. He enters the sonic center. A fine new auditorium, three stories high, with a toadstool of a stage in the center and audience webs strung concentrically around it. Lightglow drifts in the air. The mouths of speakers, set into the domed rich-textured ceilings, pucker and gape. A warm room, a good room, placed here by the divine mercy of Louisville to bring a little joy into the lives of these bleak juiceless Romans. There is no better hall for a cosmos group in the entire urbmon. The other members of the group are here already, tuning in. The comet-harp, the incantator, the orbital diver, the gravity-drinker, the doppler-inverter, the spectrum-rider. Already the room trembles with shimmering plinks of sound and jolly blurts of color, and a shaft of pure noreferent texture, abstract and immanent, is rising from the dopplerinverter's central cone. Everyone waves to him. "Late, man," they say, and, "Where you been?" and, "We thought you were skimming out," and he says, "I've been in the halls, peddling love to the Romans," which shatters ihem into strands of screeching laughter. He clambers onto the stage. II H IS instrument sits untended near the perimeter, its lattices dangling, its lovely gaudy skin unilluminated. A lifting machine stands by, waiting to help him put it in its proper place. The machine brought the vibrastar to the auditorium; it would also tune it in for him, if he asked it to, but of course he will not do that. Musicians have a mystique about tuning in their own instruments. Even though it will take him at least two hours to do it and the machihe could do it in ten minutes. Maintenance workers and other humbles of the grubbo class have the same mystique. Not strange; one must battle constantly against one's own obsolesence, if one is going to go on thinking of oneself as having a purpose in life. "Over here," Dillon tells the machine. Delicately it brings his vibrastar to the output node and makes the connection. Dillon could not possibly have moved the immense instrument. He does not mind letting machines do the things humans were never meant to do, like lifting three-ton loads. Dillon puts his hands on the mahipulatrix and feels the power thrumming through the keyboard. Good. "Go," he tells the machine, and silently it slides away. He kneads and squeezes the projectrons of the manipulatrix. As if milking them. Sensual pleasure in making contact with the machine. A little orgasm with every crescendo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. "Tuning in!" he warns the other musicians. They make feedback adjustments in their own instruments; otherwise the sudden surge of his entrance might damage both instruments and players. One by one they nod their readiness to him, the gravity-drinker lad chiming in last, and finally Dillon can let out the clutch. Yeah! The hall fills with light. Stars stream from the walls. He coats the ceiling with dripping nebulae. He is the basic instrument of the group, the all-important continuo, providing the foundation against which the others will do their things. With a practiced eye he checks the focus. Everything sharp. Nat the spectrum-rider says, "Mars is a little off-color. Dill." Dillon hunts for Mars. Yes. Yes. He feeds it an extra jolt of orange. And Jupiter? A shining globe of white fire. Venus. Saturn. And all the stars. He is satisfied with the visuals. "Bringing up the sound, now," he says. The heels of his hands hit the control panel. From the gaping speakers comes a tender blade of white noise. The music of the spheres. He colors it now, bringing up the gain on the galactic side, letting the stellar drift impart plangent hues to the tone. Then, with a quick downward stab on the projectrons, he kicks in the planetary sounds. Saturn whirls like a belt of knives. Jupiter booms. "Are you getting it?" he calls out. "How's the clarity?" Sophro the orbital diver says, "Fat up the asteroids, Dill," and he does it, and Sophro nods, happy, his chins trembling in pleasure. After half an hour of preliminary maneuvers Dillon has his primary tuning finished. So far, though, he has done only the solo work. Now to coordinate with the others. Slow, delicate work: to reach reciprocity with them one by one, building a web of interrelationship, a seven-way union. Plagued all the way by heisenberging effects, so that a whole new cluster of adjustments has to be made each time another instrument is added to the set. Change one factor, you change everything; you can't just hold your own while keying in more and more and more output. He takes on the spectrumrider first. Easy. Dillon gives forth a shower of comets and Nat modulates them pleasantly into suns. Then they add the incantator. A slight stridency at first, quickly corrected. Good going. Then the gravity-drinker. No problem. The comet-harp, now. Rasp! Rasp! The receptors go bleary and the entire thing falls apart. He and the incantator have to retune separately, rejoin, bring the cometharp into the net again. This time all right. Great plummy curves of tone go lalloping through the hall. Then the orbital diver. Fifteen sweaty minutes; the balances keep souring. Dillon expects a system collapse any second, but no, they hang on and finally get the levels even. And now the really tough one, the doppler-inverter, which threatens always to clash with his own instrument because both rely as much as visuals as audio, and both are generators, not just modulators of someone else's playing. He almost gets it. But they lose the comet-harp. It makes a thin edgy whining sound and drops out. So they go back two steps and try again. Precarious balance, constantly falling off. Up till five years ago, there had been only four instruments in cosmos groups; it was simply too difficult to hold more than that together. Like adding a fourth actor in Greek tragedy: an impossible technical feat, or so it must have seemed to Aeschylus. Now they were able to coordinate six instruments reasonably well, and a seventh with some effort, by sending the circuit bouncing up to a computer nexus in Edinburgh, but it is still a filther to put them all in synch. Dillon gestures madly with his left shoulder, encouraging the doppler-inverter to get with it. "Come on, come on, come on, come onl" and this time they make it. The time is #. Everything sticks together. "Let's run it through, now," Nat sings out. "Give us an A for tuning, maestro." D illon hunches forward and clutches the projectrons. Feeds power. Gets a sensory shift; the knobs abruptly feel like the cheeks of Electra's buttocks in his hands. Smiles at the sensation. Firm, bouncy, cool. Up we go! And gives them the universe in one sizzling blare of light and sound. The hall swims with inages. The stars leap and cross and mate. The incantator man picks up his sonics and does his trick, enhancing, multiplying, intensifying, until the whole urbmon shakes. The comet-harp makes bleeping blurting loops of dizzying counterpoint and starts to rearrange Dillon's constellations. The orbital diver, hanging back, makes a sudden plunge at an unexpected moment, and dials spin on everybody's control panel, but it is such a devastating entry that Dillon inwardly applauds it. The gravity-drinker smoothly sucks tone. Now the doppler-inverter goes at it, shooting up its own shaft of light, which sizzles and steams for perhaps thirty seconds before the spectrum-rider grabs it and runs with it, and now all seven of them are jamming madly, each trying to put the others on, shooting forth such a welter of signals that the sight must surely be visible from Boswash to Sansan. "Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!" Nat screams. "Don't waste it! Man, don't waste it!" And they cut out of phase and go down and sit there idling, sweaty, nerves twinkling. Withdrawal pain; it hurts to step away from such beauty. But Nat is right: they mustn't use themselves up before the audience gets here. Dinner break, right on stage. No one eats much. They leave the instruments tuned and running, of course. Lunacy to disrupt the synch after working so hard to get it right. Now and then one of the idling instruments flares past its threshold and emits a blob of light or a squeak of sound. They'd play themselves if we'd only let them, Dillon thinks. It might just be a wild soar to turn everything on and sit back, doing nothing, while the instruments themselves gave the concert, self-programed. You'd get some strange percepts then. The mind of the machine. On the other hand it might be a hell of a dropper to find out you were superfluous. How frail is our prestige. Celebrated artists today, but let the secret sneak out and we'll all be pushing junk buckets in Reykjavik tomorrow. The audience begins to show up at #. An older crowd; since this is the first night of the Rome run, the rules of seniority have governed the distribution of tickets and the under-#s have been left out. Dillon, midstage, does not trouble to hide his scorn for the gray, baggy people settling into the audience webs all around him. Will the music reach them? Can anything reach them? Or will they sit passively, not even going halfway out to the performance? Dreaming of making more littles. Ignoring the sweating artists; taking up a good seat and getting nothing from the fireworks about them. We throw you the whole universe and you don't catch. Is it because you're old? How much can a plumpish many-mother, # years old, pull from a cosmos show? No, it isn't age. In the more sophisticated cities there's no problem of audience response, young or old. No, it's a matter of your basic attitude toward the world of art. At the bottom of the building, the grubbos respond with their eyes, their guts, their balls. Either they're fascinated by the colored lights and the wild sounds, or else they're baffled and hostile, but they aren't indifferent. In the top levels, where the use of the mind is not only permitted but desired, they reach out for the show, knowing that the more they bring to it, the more they get from it. And isn't that what life is all about, to wring all the sensory percepts you can out of the outputs drifting past your head? What else is there? But here, here in the middle levels, all the responses are dulled. The walking dead. The important thing is being present in the auditorium, grabbing that ticket away from someone else, showing off. The performance itself doesn't matter. That's just noise and light, some crazy kids from San Francisco having a workout. So there they sit, these Romans, disconnected from skull to crotch. What a joke. Romans? The real Rome wasn't like that, you bet. Calling their city Rome is a crime against history. Dillon glares at them. Then, overfocusing his eyes, he deliberately blurs them out; he does not want to see their flabby gray faces, for fear the sight of them will color his performance. He is here to give. If they can't take, tough. "Let's go up now," Nat murmurs. "Ready, Dill?" H e is ready. He brings his hands up for a virtuoso pounce and slams them down on the projectrons. The old headblaster! Moon and sun and planets and stars come roaring out of his instrument. The whole glittering universe erupts in the hall. He doesn't dare look at the audience. Did he rock them? Are they gasping and tugging at their droopy lower lips? Come on, come on, come on! The others, as if sensing that he's into something special, let him take an introductory solo. Furies fly through his brain. He jabs the manipulatrix. Pluto! Saturn! Betelgeuse! Deneb! Here sit people who spend their whole lives locked inside a single building; give them the stars in one skullblowing rush. Who says you can't start with your climax? The power drain must be immense; lights must be dimming all the way to Chicago. What of it? Did Beethoven give a damn about the power drain? There. There. There. Throw stars around. Make them shimmer and shake. An eclipse of the sin -- why not? Let the corona crackle and fry. Make the moon dance. And bring up the sound, too, a great heaving pedalpoint that sneaks up the webbing at them, a spear of #-cycle vibration nailing their guts. Help them digest their dinner. Shake up all the old waste clogging the colon. Dillon laughs. He wishes he could see his face now; something demonic, maybe. How long is the solo going to last? Why don't they pick up on him, now? He's going to burn out. He doesn't mind, throwing himself into the machine like that, except for the faint paranoid feeling that the others are deliberately allowing him to strain past his limits so he'll injure himself. The rest of his life sitting like a slug, going booble-booble-booble. Not me! He pulls out all the stops. Fantastic! He's never done things like this before. It must be his rage at these dull Romans that is inspiring him. And all of it wasted on them. Slot that, though: what counts is what's happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that's a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day. Needles of sound descending from the speakers. A mighty crescendo of light and tone. He feels the power surging through himself; he is so happy with what he is doing that he grows hard below, and tips himself back in his seat. Has anyone ever done something like this before, this improvised symphony for solo vibrastar? Hello, Bach! Hello, Mick! Hello, Wagner! Shoot your skulls! Let it all fly! He is past the crest, starting to come down now, no longer relying on raw energy but dabbling in subtler things, splashing Jupiter with golden splotches, turning the stars into icy white points, bringing up little noodling ostinati. He makes Saturn trill: a signal to the others. Who ever heard of opening a concert with a cadenza? But they pick up on it. Ah, now. Here they come. Gently the doppler-inverter noodles in with a theme of its own, catching something of the descending fervor of Dillon's stellar patterns. At once the comet-harp overlays this with a more sensational series of twanging tones that immediately transmute themselves into looping blares of green light. These are seized by the spectrum-rider, who climbs up on top of them and, grinning broadly, skis off toward the ultra-violet in a shower of hissing crispness. Old Sophro now does his orbital dives, a swoop and a pickup followed by a swoop and a pickup again, playing against the spectrum-rider in the kind of cunning way that only someone right inside the meshing group can appreciate. Then the incantator enters, portentous, booming, sending reverberations shivering through the walls, heightening the significance of the tonal and astronomical patterns until the convergences become almost unbearably beautiful. It is the cue for the gravitydrinker, who disrupts everybody's stability with wonderful wild liberating bursts of force. By this time Dillon has retreated to his proper place as the coordinator and uniTier of the group, tossing a skein of melody to this one, a loop of light to that one, embellishing everything that parses near him. He fades into the undertones. His manic excitement passes; playing in a purely mechanical way, he is as much listener as performer, quietly appreciating the variations and divagations his partners are producing. He does not need to draw attention now. He can simply go oomp oomp oomp the rest of the night. Not that he will; the construct will tumble if he doesn't feed new data every ten or fifteen minutes. But this is his time to coast. Each of the others takes a solo in turn. Dillon can no longer see the audience. He rocks, he pivots, he sweats, he sobs; he caresses the projectrons furiously; he seals himself in a cocoon of blazing light; he juggles alternations of light and darkness. The rod in his pants has softened. He is calm at the eye of the storip, fully professional, quietly doing his work. That moment of ecstasy seems to belong to some other day, even to some other man. How long had the solo lasted, anyway? He has lost track of the time. But the performance is going well, and he leaves it to methodical Nat to keep watch of the hour. A fter its frenzied opening the concert has settled into routine. The center of the action has shifted to the doppler-inverter man, who is spinning off a series of formula flashes. Quite nice, but stale stuff, over-rehearsed, unspontaneous. His offhandedness infects the others and the whole group vamps for perhaps twenty minutes, going through a set of changes that numb the ganglia and abort the soul, until finally Nat spectacularly shrieks through the whole spectrum from someplace south of infrared into what, for anyone can tell, may be the X-ray frequencies, and this wild takeoff not only stimulates a rebirth of inventiveness but also signals the end of the show. Everybody picks up on him and they blast free, swirling and floating and coming together, forming one entity with seven heads as they bombard the flaccid data-stoned audience with mountains of overload. Yes yes yes yes yes. Wow wow wow wow wow. Flash flash flash flash flash. Oh oh oh oh oh. Come come come come come. Dillon is at the heart of it, tossing off bright purple sparks, pulling down suns and chewirrg them up, and he feels even more plugged in than during his big solo, for this is a joint thing, a blending, a merging, and he knows that what he is feeling now explains everything: this is the purpose of life, this is the reason for it all. To tune in on beauty, to plunge right to the hot source of creation, to open your soul and let it all in and let it all out again, to give to give to give to give to give to give and it ends. Pull the plug. They let him have the final chord and he cuts off a skullblower, a five-way planetary conjunction and a triple fugue, the whole showoff burst lasting no more than ten seconds. Then down with the hands and off with the switch and a wall of silence rises ninety kilometers high. This time he's done it. He's emptied everybody's skull. He sits there shivering, biting his lip, dazed by the house-lights, wanting to cry. He dares not look at the others in the group. How much time is passing? Five minutes, five months, five centuries, five megayears? And at last the reaction. A stampede of applause. All of Rome on its feet, yelling, slapping cheeks -- the ultimate tribute, four thousand people struggling out of their comfortable webs to pound their palms against their faces -- and Dillon laughs, throwing back his head, getting up himself, bowing, holding his hands out to Nat, to Sophro, to all six of them. Somehow it was better tonight. Even these Romans know it. What did they do to deserve it? By being such lumps, Dillon tells himself, they drew forth the best we had in us. To turn them on. And we did. We knocked them out of their miserable soggy skulls. The cheering continues. Fine. Fine. We are great artists. Now I've got to get out of here, before I come down from it all. HI H e never socializes with the rest of the group after a performance. They have all discovered that the less they see of each other in leisure hours, the more intimate their professional collaboration will be; there is no intragroup friendship,' not even intragroup sex. They all feel that would be death, any kind of coupling, hetero, homo, triple-up -- save that for outsiders. They have their music to unite them. So he goes off by himself. The audience starts to flow toward the exits and, without saying good night to anybody, Dillon steps into the artists' trapdoor and makes his escape one level down. His clothes are stiff and wet with perspiration, clammy, uncomfortable. He must do something about that quickly. Prowling along the #th floor for a dropshaft, he opens the first apartment door he comes to and finds a couple, sixteen, seventeen years old, squatting before the screen. He naked, she wearing only breastcoils, both of them plainly soaring on one of the harder ones, but not so high that they can't recognize him. "Dillon Chrimes!" the girl gasps, her squeal waking two or three littles. "Hey, hello," he says. "I jusl have to use the cleanser, okay? Don't let me disturb you. I don't even want to talk, you know? I'm still way up." He strips off his sodden clothes and gets under the cleanser. It hums and rumbles and peels his grime from him. He lets it work on his clothes next. The girl is creeping toward him. She has the breastcoils off; the white imprints of the metal on her pink dangling flesh are turning rapidly red. Kneeling before him. Hand goes to his thighs. "No," he says. "Don't." "But why?" "Just wanted to use the cleanser. Couldn't stand my own stink. I've got to do my nightwalking on # tonight." Her fingers sliding between his legs. Gently he pries them. Back into his clothing; the girl looks on, astonished, as he covers himself. "You aren't going to?" she asks. "Not here. Not here." She continues to blink at him as he goes out. Her look of shock saddens him. Tonight he must go to the middle of the building, but tomorrow, for sure, he will come to her, and he'll explain everything then. He makes a note of the room number. #. Nightwalking is supposed to be random, but to hell with that; he owes her a thrill. Tomorrow. In the hall he finds a groover dispenser and requisitions his pill, tapping his metabolic coefficient out on the console. He orders a multiplexer, said to be one of the most profound trips available. His first attempt with it. The machine performs the necessary calculations and delivers a five-hour dose, timed to go off in twelve minutes, according to the yellow wrapper. Printed in bold black letters on the shrugs. It'll be all right; he's no telepath. Though the drug will briefly make him one. He swallows it and steps into the dropshaft. Floor #. get. A metaphysical fancy, but why not? He has not lost the capacity to play games. We artists remain happy because we remain as children. Eleven minqtes to his high. He goes down the corridor, opening doors. In the first room he finds a man, a woman, another man. "Sorry," he calls. In the second room three girls. Momentarily tempting, but only momentarily. Anyway, they look fully busied with each other. "Sorry, sorry, sorry." In the third room a middle-aged couple; they give him a hopeful stare, but he backs out. Fourth time lucky. A darkhaired girl, alone, pouting a little. Obviously her husband is out nightwalking and no one has come to her, a statistical fluke that distresses her. Early twenties, Dillon guesses, with fine tapering nose, glossy eyes, elegant breasts, olive skin. The flesh over her eyelids is puffy, which may become a flaw of appearance ten years from now but which gives her a sultry, sensual look at the moment. She has been brooding for hours, he guesses, because her sullenness does not evaporate until he has actually been in the room fifteen seconds or so; she is slow to realize that she is being nightwalked with. "Hello," he says. "Smile? Won't you smile a little?" "I know you. The cosmos group?" "Dillon Chrimes, yes. On the vibrastar. We're playing Rome tonight." "Playing Rome and nightwalking Bombay?" "What the hell. I have philosophical reasons. To be in the middle of the building, you know? Or as close as I can come. Don't ask me to explain." He looks around the room. Six littles. One of them, awake, is at least nine years old, a skinny girl with her mother's olive skin. Mother isn't as young as she looks, then. At least twenty-five, maybe. Dillon doesn't mind. In a little while he'll be groping the whole urbmon, anyway, all ages. sexes, shapes. He says, "I have to tell you about my trip. I'm on a multiplexer. It'll hit me in six minutes." She puts her hand to her lips. "We don't have much time, then. You ought to be with me before you go up." "Is that the way they work?" "Don't you know?" "I've never gone that way before," he confesses. "Never got around to it." "Neither have I. I didn't think anybody actually did take multiplexers, really. But I've heard of what you're supposed to do." She is disrobing as she talks. Heavy breasts, big dark circles around the nipples. Her legs strangely thin; when she stands straight the insides of her, thighs are far apart. There is a folkmyth of some sort about girls built that way, but Dillon cannot remember it. He drops his clothes. The drug has started to get to him, several minutes ahead of schedule -- the walls are shimmering, the lights look fuzzy. Odd. Unless the fact that he was already way up from performing should have been calculated into the dosage request. The metabolism turned to high, maybe, on nothing but sound and light. Well, no harm done. He moves toward the sleeping platform. "What's your name?" he asks. "Alma Clune." "I like the sound of that. Alma." She lakes him into her arms. This will not be an extraordinary erotic experience for her, he fears. Once the multiplexer takes hold, he doubts that he can concentrate properly on her needs -- and in any case the time element has made it necessary to skip all preliminaries. But she seems to be understanding. She will not spoil his trip. He covers her body with his. "Are you grooving yet?" she asks. He is silent a moment. "I feel it starting," he tells her. "It's like having two girls at once. Tm getting echoes." Tension. The multiplexing must still be ninety seconds away. All these calculations chill him. And then they become pointless. "It's happening," he whispers. "Oh, god, here I go up!" spirit is spreading out. The drug makes him psychosensitive; it breaks down his brain's chemical defenses against direct telepathic input, so that he can perceive the sensory intake of those around him. Reaching wider and wider, moment by moment. At the full high, they say, everyone's eyes and ears become your own; you pick up an infinity of responses, you are everywhere in the building at once. Is it true? Are other minds pouring their intake through his? It does seem so. He watches the fluttering fiery mantle of his soul engulf and absorb Alma. That's just the beginning. He is spreading over Alma's littles now. He is six children and their mother. How easy this is! He is the family next door. Eight littles, mother, nightwalker from the #th floor. He extends his reach upward one level. And downward. And along the corridors. In dreamy multiplexication he is taking possession of the whole building. Layers of drifting images enshroud him. # floors above his head, # below, and he sees all # of them as a column of horizontal striations, tiny notches on a tall shaft. With ants. And he is all the ants at once. Why has he never done this before? To become an entire urbmon! He must reach at least twenty floors in each direction now. And .'ttill spreading out. Tendrils of him going everywhere. Just the beginning. Intermingling his substance w ith the totality of the building. He is dimly aware of Alma but only one atom of himself is occupied with her. The rest isjroaming the halls of the cities that make up Urban Monad #. Entering every room. Part of him up in Boston, part of him down in London, and all of him in Rome and Bombay as well. Hundreds of rooms. Thousands. The swarm of biped bees. He is fifty squalling littles crammed into three London rooms. He is two doddering Bostonians entering upon their five thousandth sexual congress. He is a hot-blooded thirteen-year-old nightwalker prowling the #rd floor. He is six swapping couples in a London dorm. Now he is into a wider range, reaching down to San Francisco, up to Nairobi. The farther he goes, the easier it gets. The hive. The mighty hive. He embraces Tokyo. He embraces Chicago. He embraces Prague. He touches Shanghai. He touches Vienna. He touches Warsaw. He touches Toledo. Paris! Reykjavik! Louisville! Louisville! Top to bottom, top to bottom! Now he is all # people on all thousand floors. His soul is stretched to its fullest. His skull is snapping. The images come and go across the screen of his mind, drifting films of reality, oily wisps of smoke bearing faces, eyes, fingers, smiles, tongues, elbows, profiles, sounds, textures. Gently they mesh and lock and drift apart. He is everywhere and everyone at once. God bless! For the first time he understands the nature of the delicate organism that is society; he sees the checks and balances, the quiet conspiracies of compromise that paste it all together. And it is wondrously beautiful. Tuning this vast city of many cities is Just like tuning the cosmos group: everything must relate, everything must belong to everything else. The poet in San Francisco is part of the grubbo stoker in Reykjavik. The little snotty ambition-monger in Shanghai is part of the placid defeated Roman. How much of this, Dillon wonders, will stay with him when he comes down? His spirit whirls. He grooves on thousands of souls at once. And the sexual thing. The hundred thousand transactions taking place behind his forehead. He loses his virginity; he takes a virginity; he is aggressor and aggressed. H e rides the liftshafts of his mind. Going up! #, #, #, #, #! #! #! #! #! He stands on the landing stage at the summit of the urbmon, staring out into the night. Towers all around him, the neighboring monads, #, I #, I #, the whole crowd of them. Occasionally he has wondered what life is like in the other buildings that make up the Chipitts constellation. Now he does not care. There is wonder enough in #. More than # intersecting lives. He has heard some of his friends say, in San Francisco, that it was an evil deed to change the world this way, to pile up thousands of people in a single colossal building, to create this beehive life. But how wrong those mutterers are! If they could only multiplex and get true perspective. Taste the rich complexity of our vertical existence. Going down! #, #, #, #! City upon cily. Each floor holding a thousand puzdeboxes of pure delight. Hello, I'm Dillon Chrimes, can  he you for a while? And you? And you? And you? Are you happy? Why not? Have you seen this gorgeous world you live in? What? You'd like a bigger room? You want to travel? You don't like your littles? You're bored with your work? You're full of vague unfocused discontent? Idiot. Come up here with me, fly from floor to floor, see! And groove on it. A nd love it. "Is it really good?" Alma asks. "Your eyes are shining!" "I can't describe it," Dillon murmurs, soaring, threading himself down the service core to the levels below Reykjavik, then floating up to Louisville again, a'nd simultaneously intersecting every point between root and tip. An ocean of broiling minds. A sizzle of snarled identities. He wonders what lime it is. The trip is supposed to last five hours. He is still with Alma, which leads him to think he has not been up more than ten or fifteen minutes, but perhaps it is more than that. Things are becoming very tactile now. As he drifts through the building he touches walls, floors, screens, faces, fabrics. He suspects he may be coming down. But no. No. Still on his way up. The simultaniety increases. He is flooded with percepts. People moving, talking, sleeping, dancing, coupling, bending, reaching, eating, reading. I am all of you. You are all parts of me. He can focus sharply on individual identities. Here is Electra, here is Nat the spectrumrider, here is Mamelon Kluver, here is a light-souled sociocomputalor named Charles Maltern, here is a Louisville administra(Galaxy, February # Best Science Fiction Novelette of I # by the Science Fiction Writers of America tor, here is a Warsaw grubbo, here is. Here is. Here are. Here am . The whole blessing building. Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh! the dark-haired woman curled in a corner of the sleeping platform, asleep. He cannot remember her name. He touches her thigh and she awakes quickly, eyes fluttering. "Hello," she says. "Welcome back." "What's your name?" "Alma. Clune. Your eyes are all red." He nods. He feels the weight of the whole building on him. # floors jamming down on his head, # floors pressing up against his feet. The meeting place of the two forces is somewhere close to his pancreas. If he does not leave here quickly, his internal organs must surely pop. Only shreds of his trip remain. Straggly streamers of debris clutter his mind. Vaguely he feels columns of ants trekking from level to level behind his eyes. Alma reaches for him. To comfort him. He shakes her off and hunts for his clothing. A cone of silence surrounds him. He will go back to Electra, he thinks, and try to tell her where he has been and what has been happening to him, and then perhaps he will cry and feel better. He leaves without thanking Alma for her hospitality and looks for a dropshaft. Instead he finds a liftshaft, and somehow, pretending it is an accident, he gets off at #. Heading for Rome's sonic center. Dark there. The instruments still on stage. Quietly he slips down in front of the vibrastar. Switches it on. His eyes are wet. He dredges up some phantom images of his trip. The faces, the thousand floors. The ecstasy. Oh, what a beautiful place. Oh, how I love it here. Oh. this is the real thing. Oh! Certainly he felt that way. But no longer. A thin sediment of doubt is all that remains. Asking himself: Is this how it was meant to be? Is this how it has to be? Is this the best we can do? This building. This mighty hive. Dillon's hands caress the projectrons, which feel prickly and hot; he depresses them at random and sour colors drift out of the instrument. He cuts in the audio and gets sounds that remind him of the shifting of old bones within flabby flesh. What went wrong? He should have expected it. You go all the way up, then you come all the way down. But why does down have to be so far down? He cannot bear to play. After ten minutes he switches off the vibrastar and goes out. He will walk to San Francisco. # floors down. That's not too many levels; he'll be there before dawn. if Ice People (Morrow, #) and reduce it to its essentials, you get pure soap opera. But this book is not for skeletonizing; it is for reading, and as reading it's superb. For once a jacket blurb is borne out: I couldn't put it down, despite the fact that no less a source than Le Magazine Litteraire challenged me to do so. What we have here, cadets, is a spiffy colloquial English translation by Charles Lam Markmann of a story that owes rather more to Georges Simenon than it does to Jules Verne. It crackles along like a lit fuse. Though you realize rather early that Barjavel has not laid his charge under anything proShouldn't that be either La Magazine or Le Magazin? Is it on sale at Le Drugstore? found, and furthermore can see the way the cards are going to tumble when the keg fizzes up, he takes care to do the thing you have to do in a pulp suspense novel -- he peoples his story solely with characters for whom bathos and tragedy are the same thing. So, for as long as you're still reading, harsh judgment does not intrude and the experience goes down whole in one tingling morsel. The book comes to us with all sorts of assurances that it sold # copies in Fance, where it was "a Number One best seller" (italic mine), but don't let that put you off. Jean Rostand of the Academie Francaise (like the voice of the Wizard of Oz) declares that "Barjavel places before each man the problem of the meaning of life." Pay no attention to that. either. As we both know, the proposition that writers have these unique abilities is nonsense on the face of it; furthermore, Barjavel's interest is confined to telling us how two people got placed in suspended animation # years ago in a place that's now down in the rock under Antarctica and what's involved in their discovery, revival, and utilization in #th Century society. Judging by the way this book is being packaged -- Marc Slonim is cited on the back cover, saying: "... the author's ironic references to our 'post-Gutenberg, pre-Apocalyptic' era" (those are synthesized quasi-quotes from McLuhan, not from Barjavel's text) -- a serious attempt is being made to give this volume some kind of "relevance," panache, and withinness. If you approach it from that route, you'll be disappointed. It's boy-meets-girl, boy-freezes-girl, is what it is, and it's one of the best science-fiction suspense novels of the year. I T'S a bit late -- later than usual -- but I'd like to review Clifford D. Simak's Doubleday (#) collection, Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak. Cliff Simak would be as shocked as I'd be if I were to assert that he's a towering literary figure, in this field or any other. He's something other than that in this field and in at least one other; he's a charitable, observant, gentle man of acumen and professional skill. When he exercises his profession these qualities have the effect of making the reader feel good to be in the company of the people in Cliff Simak's stories. This is a rare way to go about holding the reader's interest. Lester del Rey can do it and sometimes chooses to; what Ted Sturgeon does is only superficially like it; Isaac Asimov has done it now and again. But Simak does it in all his successful stories, perhaps with some deliberateness which might yield to technical analysis; mostly. I'd think, because that's the kind of guy he is. You may know -- if you've been around, because Simak has been with us for a long time -- that several paces back before World War II he was the author of formula stories with only flashes of individuality. Then something happened; maybe getting a raise at the paper, so the economic pressure was off his freelancing, maybe the War itself, maybe maturity. Whatever it was, it produced a series of heart-wrenchingly effective stories in the Astounding of the early #s. I will tell you frankly that I used to get my face beaten in for sitting in the schoolbus and weeping over an opened copy of a pulp magazine. (Actually, I got my face beaten in for my reaction to the reaction to my sitting there weeping, etc., which may go toward proving my contention that what's important is what happens in the reader, not on the paper). Anyway, this flowering of Simak's ability is still his major period. During this time he wrote the series that was collected as the book City, plus a number of semirelated and unrelated stories which all bore this hallmark of an allembracing honest compassion for even the lowliest and most compulsive of the creatures in his imagination. Then he dropped out for a while -- again, I don't know why -- and came back for the one triumph he had not enjoyed before. He had proved himself with those novelettes and short stories. Now the author of the pre-War Cosmic Engineers -- believe me, it's like what it sounds -- started Galaxy off in life with what this magazine called Time Quarry, the book version is Time and Again, the novel about Asher Sutton, the Messiah-figure I rather prefer to Valentine Smith. In that book are a number of striking parallels to Stranger in a Strange Land, as there would be in any Messiah story. It's not written to turn you on to anything, either; it's simply a notably strong, well-told, science-fiction story of great ingenuity and compassion. And that was in the early #s. Since then, Simak has written a number of short stories and novelettes for diverse places, most of them for Galaxy, I believe. He's written other novels, none of them with Time and Again's all-of-apiece excellence. He won a Hugo in # for Way Station -- there were no Hugos in #I -- and all in all, according to the flyleaf on this latest collection, he has nineteen different first editions of his own books on a shelf somewhere in his mind. What he is, when you come down, to it, is a man who has contributed a lot to this field over a long period of time, not making many big splashes, but getting the job done; reaching the reader, and boosting the field at least some little way up the ladder. (What's expressed in Simak's most famous last line; "... and me back into a man" is a dynamite concept to have thrown out into the field as it was in the #s. There were quite a few who never forgot it, and at least one editor who really didn't like the basic proposition once it had soaked in). So that's my review of Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak. These are not Cliff's best -- there are seven of them in the book, and Founding Father, from a # Galaxy, is the one that most closely captures the effect of what Simak could do to you if he wanted to -- but that doesn't make them bad, or inconsiderable. They are professional writing from an uncommon man who is at once archetypal of the good side of the commercial writer and nearly unique in his major professional strength as displayed here. Some of the plots are thin. Some of the incidents are trivial. All of it repays reading and repays in an especially gratifying kind of coin. umn, David Compton is the one who is actively and continuously trying to make something larger out of the story he happens to be telling; you can feel the pressure at your elbow. In Synthajoy, this trait was subtly exercised; although you did not love her, the heroine of this book about neurostimulation was a stunningly characterized person, and exactly the character through whom that story ought to have been told. But then, after a while we got The Steel Crocodile, which is very nearly a parody of Synthajoy, and which made it rather clear that Synthajoy was not about neurostimulation; like Crocodile, and like an intervening minor book. The Silent Multitude, it was about Man's inability to cope, sanely with the facts of the Universe. So, too, is Compton's latest Ace Special (Chronocules, #, #c). That's a proposition you have to consider. Maybe the world is too big a place for even the mightiest cosmic engineer; if so, then it follows that no one can grasp any part of it by the correct handle except in moments of pure luck which are soon dissipated or crushed either by the simple turning of the grand wheel or by the conflicting obsessions of more powerful individuals. Then it may follow that there is no salvation in anything, and the sane course is to live decently and'unambitiously -- presumably so as to minimize the dynamic attentions of others, since the wheel will turn where it wills in any case. A review of Compton's Ace books will show that common denominator. Illusion applied directly to the brain is a trap; the edifice of Faith can not sustain the Faithful; the mechanical Messiah will save only himself; and in Chronocules we have it that there's no place to hide, not even in the whispering galleries of time itself. But there's a loophole in each of these books. If the heroine of Synthajoy had been more stable, and if her lover and her husband hadn't acted in exactly the way they did... If the wife in The Steel Crocodile hadn't... If the heroine of Chronocules had... What the analysis seems to yield as the essence of Compton's message to the bemused world is that technology induces hysteria in women. And that we should probably be grateful, else all sorts of dreadful projects would have come to clanging fruition. I'd be doing Compton a considerable injustice, by the way, if I implied that he's silly, stupid, untalented, or unskilled. He is the opposite of all that. He may be wrong -- whatever it is he's saying, or building up to saying -- but he's far from negligible. He's a find for Terry Carr, and he's consistently capable of high performance. Chronocules is nearly as good throughout as Synthajoy was, and even Crocodile had its moments when it was obvious the clay was in a master's hands, for all that it was coming out lopsided. Nevertheless, I find it remarkable that in Compton's view there is no way to tell a science-fiction story without basing its denouement squarely on the interaction of a power-obsessed male and a sexually tensed female. In Chronocules -- which is, if you haven't yet given up hope of finding out from me, the story of a privately endowed attempt to force a way into the future before pollution and disorganization destroy the mother country -- the female goes completely crackers, as she did in Synthajoy, but in this version she does so in response to her experience of sex au naturel from the first simple, uncomplicated, definitely non-technological male she's ever loved in a life of social promiscuity. Whereupon she seizes power, displaces the owner of the establishment, survives the holocaust, and in due time kills her resulting son, to be apprehended with the gun still warm in her hand. What I'm building up to saying is that the proposition that the world is inevitably too big a place may be a lonely child's fantasy, for all that it has many subscribers among our numbers. That would explain its power, and its ability to encyst such obvious defects as the truck riot scene in Chronocules without suffering any diminution of effect. The scene is a mess. A crowd immobilizes an armored truck and kills the crew inside it. The truck is "impregnably designed" to deliver the research establishment payroll at a time when every crowd is full of hopheads and vandals. It (#) is unarmed, (#) is equipped with pneumatic tires that yield immediately to explosive, despite the fact that the armed services of most nations today have explosion-proof tires, (#) settles immediately on its "brake drums," apparently having no wheels, since Compton speaks eventually of shreds of tire clinging to the "drums," and (#) broils its crew when its roof is sprayed with "heat foam," apparently a substance which generates heat by expansion and conveys it downward. The truck also has an "electrified chassis" which shorts out on contact with the street. I wondered, hard, about the wisdom of a defensive measure which not only screws up all your ignition grounds and auxiliary wiring but which is kept from doing attackers any harm, thanks to a protective shroud of apparently unelectrified body sheet metal. Hence in that, scene, crucial to major subsequent events, Compton describes an impossible piece of technology overcome with ludicrous ease by instruments acting in violation of several laws of physics. And yet I must tell you that I could smell and hear that crowd; I wanted to believe in that crowd. You know, when you boil it down, it's a bald affront. The message says you should always stick your thumb in your mouth and draw up your knees. But when you spread the same message over four books -- or four hundred books by a hundred different writers at various levels of conscious control over their emissions -- it takes longer to grasp, and that's what may be so effective about it. Because it is the message we've always wanted to hear. We're just coy about how we want it presented. Compton may be on to a very good thing. A nd that brings us to Science Against Man, (Avon Books #V#, #c), an anthology of original stories which include, among others, John Brunner's The Invisible Idiot, whose title is derived from the well-known anecdote about what happens when you retranslate Out of sight, out of mind, after feeding it into a computer that translates Chinese. The editor of this volume is Anthony Cheetham, who presumably came up with the theme and who certainly supplied the sometimes nonsequential editorial comments heading each story. Cheetham is no Lem -- he falls headlong for the trap that Solaris gingerly clambers into -- but the result is the same. Cheetham has to be one of those people who feels threatened by but fails to distinguish among science, engineering and technology, three different things not of the same kind, and who does somehow differentiate between Man and what men do, none of which are mistakes that Lem's mind will let him commit as gladly. Until we realizewe all realize -- that each of us -- each of us -- would joyously destroy the entire world, given only the proper circumstances, as well as the means, just as the same each of Top-flight science fiction and fantasy from... Eight mind-bending tales conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, John Campbell, Jr. and Jack Vance. A#S #c Ten dazzling stories that explore the complex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. A#N # A pair of scientists challenge the time barrier and fall into a horrible, mind-twisting trap. "Rene Barjavel has feeling for the fantastic -- knows how to build a suspenseful story." Enter a terrifying world of tomorrow where perversity is encouraged and insanity is enforced -- a world whose beginnings are even now stirring! A#S #c Available wherever books are sold, or write: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. I # OI # into Paradise, again given the circumstances, as well as the means, and until we stop finding in "science" or what we call God, or politics, or xlkmndfg -- some external cause for human nature, not even the Sierra Club will save us, for nothing can save us but reason and, beyond that, an understanding and acceptance of reason, none of which can be imposed, all of which must be found within himself by each of us. Hence, "science fiction" themes which interfere in this process, no matter in what nobility's name, are contrasurvival; Cheetham's premise is contrasurvival and Cheetham is contrasurvival in this act. Other than that, there's nothing wrong with his book, which contains excellent stories by Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison and Norman Spinrad, good ones by Piers Anthony, James Blish, John Brunner, Bob Shaw, and Robect Silverberg, and acceptable ones by Paul Ableman, Michael Moorcock, and Andrew Travers. That's quite a batting average. Of them all, the Silverberg is the most effectively moody, being a series of declarative sentences about a neurotic megalopolitaine who, quite so, eventually reconciles herself to the trauma of being moved into a new building, but only after some rather easy therapy. The Spinrad, on the other hand, is as apparently simplistic and jargon-loaded as his usual piece. This one is about African tourists visiting the noxious remains of smog-choked America. But the detailed breadth of Spinrad's imagination in this example creates that effect which marks excellent fiction; it conveys the sense that the writer unfalteringly believed in every single thing he says happened to his characters. That seamless strength of authorial conviction -- which also occurs in the Aldiss and Harrison -- is the one unique capability of fiction as distinguished from propaganda or any other form of philosophical discourse. The author may be wrong, as the essayist may be wrong, but it is difficult to resist the spell of a proposition told against a background whose every precisely placed blade of grass testifies to the consistency of the creator's thinking. Conversely, of course, when the author can be seen to falter somewhere, his statement may never recover from that stumble over what may in fact have been a minor area or, as in the Silverberg, that proper, obligatory move you'd think could be indicated with a wave of the hand. But it can't. There are no throwaway lines. many weeks. His marriage, after a whirlwind courtship and an around-the-world-tour with his bride, had cut down our contact to a one-sided receipt of post cards from the Temple at Angkor Wat and a long-distance shot of the Tuileries with indecipherable inked greetings. The chemistry department missed him too. On several occasions students would drift by the computer lab to ask me if I knew of a firm date for Duckworth's return. I shrugged, spread my hands and even sighed. And they understood and left the room silently. Imagine my surprise, then, when Ducksworth telephoned to ask me to join him in his office. We embraced warmly. "How is Laura?" I asked. A beatific smile played about Duckworth's lips. "If anything could make me chuck science, it's that girl," he said dreamily. Then he shook himself like a wet fox terrier. "But that's neither here nor there," he muttered. He looked at me brightly. "I've got a new idea I'd like to discuss with you." "Fire away," I said. "It's an idea that took form during my honeymoon," he said. I smirked. "It's not salacious," he said, shaking his head reprovingly. "But it has tremendous possibilities. It combines ideas of physics and chemistry in a rather novel way. In short. I'm talking about the recovery of sounds, old sounds that are buried in the long distant past." I rubbed my chin. "That's quite an order," I said. "Even in a medium without absorbing or reflecting boundaries the intensity of the sound falls off as the square of the distance. In any kind of confined space the sound would be absorbed, dispersed, reflected back and forth until literally nothing remained of the original waves." "That's true in a way," said Duckworth. "But not quite. The sounds can never die completely. In a room, for example, the sounds are still there, batting around, but at such fantastically low energy levels that no detector on Earth could possibly retrieve them. But I think I have a way of getting around that barrier." I smiled. "You've done many things I considered impossible," I said. "But this time your reach is way beyond our grasp. I don't think it can be done." "There are two fundamental problems," said Duckworth, playing with the wispy strands of his skimpy beard. "The first involves sensitivity and the second, noise level. I have a way of achieving sufficient sensitivity to pick up and amplify the faint sounds. But so far I've been stymied by the submolecular noises of my electronic components." I nodded. "Their noisy energy levels are probably much higher than those of the sounds you're trying to retrieve." "Precisely," said Duckworth. "But suppose I could convert their random fluctuations into an ordered variation that could be filtered out?" "That's a big suppose," I said. And there our conversation ended. and I were invited over to the Duckworth home to sample Laura's cooking. It was imaginative, even daring, but it wasn't good. The lemon soup had lumps and the Chicken Bangkok was underdone. But I grimly stuffed it into my face and pretended to agree with Duckworth as he raved about his wife's culinary skills. I even toyed with the idea of investing in a rented stomach pump. But I felt to do so would be disloyal to my friends. It was later that evening, as I was meditatively sucking on my second roll of antacid mints, that Duckworth casually mentioned that he had licked the second part of his sound problem. In my excitement I almost swallowed the mint, whole. "How did you do it?" I cried. "It proved to be easier than I thought," said Duckworth modestly. "I cooled my amplifier to almost absolute zero in temperature, reducing noise fluctuations to a minimum. Then I applied accurately controlled magnetic fields to the circuit elements." "My God!" I said. "You've done it." "Not quite," said Duckworth. "I'm close but not there yet." "Then your Sound Probe isn't ready to try out?" "To tell you the truth," said Duckworth, "I did set it up off campus, last week. It was at the site of an old Chinese restaurant." "And?" "I didn't get too much," said Duckworth. "Just a few nasal language sounds. But it pointed up where the next phase of my work lies. I now have the job of selecting a particular sequence of sounds out of uncountable levels of other sounds, unwanted sounds that may have lesser or even greater energy levels." "It sounds like the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack." "Something like that," said Duckworth glumly. "But those Chinese sounds you recovered. My God, man, you should be elated! You've got enough to publish right there." "I don't know," said Duckworth. "It seems a bit premature to me." "It's never too early to disclose something that important," I said. Duckworth shrugged. Laura, who had come up with some rockhard cookies she had baked, caught the tail end of my remarks and added her own weight to the argument. "I agree," she said. "You ought at least to establish your priority in this field." Before this combined pressure, Duckworth, to his later regret, yielded. H IS article was brief and titled. The Sound Probe. It appeared in Modern Acoustic Letters in less than a page of space and seemed to be missed by the press. But not for long. An astute science reporter caught the possibilities of Duckworth's device and the dam burst. Overnight, he was inundated by waves of reporters, much as he had been in past years. Tiring as the publicity aspect was, it was nothing compared to the stream of visitors who now assailed Duckworth's office with their own special requests. First cajne the editor of Voyeur Magazine, a journal for funloving men, who asked Duckworth if it would be possible to retrieve conversations from the boudoir of Madame Pompadour. The second visitor was a well known Protestant evangelist who wished to recover some of the dialogues of Renaissance Popes from their private quarters at the Vatican. There was also the medium who foresaw the probe as a two-way device that might recover future sounds as well as past ones. Duckworth was intrigued by this idea. "A sort of wedding of Physics and Metaphysics," he mused. "But not even a double-barreled shotgun could carry that, one off." "Why not?" asked the medium happily. So happy was she that it took all of Duckworth's self-control to keep from striking her. "The equations of motion," she said earnestly, "reveal no forward or backward direction in time. Isn't it conceivable that the sounds of the future are kicking about just as those of the past are?" "Perhaps," said Duckworth. "It seems to me that even now I can detect your future laments about how ungracious I was in kicking you out of my office." One of the most trying visitors was Ernest Gudgeon, chairman of the Board of Gudgeon Industries. A roly-poly man who was perpetually mopping his brow with a fine silk handkerchief, he came directly to the point. "Dr. Duckworth," he said, "your new scheme has possibilities that I'm sure even you haven't thought of." "No doubt," said Duckworth dryly. "I refer of course to the rough and tumble world of industrial information gathering." "Industrial espionage might be more appropriate," said Duckworth. "It has a pejorative quality," said Gudgeon. "But no matter. What I'm proposing relates to the freer interchange in ideas among American businessmen, a freer interchange that will enable our industries to outstrip all world competitors. East and West." "I suppose it means visiting conference rooms after meetings, executive washrooms and that sort of thing. I can see myself dressed in blue overalls, twirling the dials of my apparatus over the hoarse sobbing of flushed toilets," said Duckworth. watered Jack Daniels at the Faculty Club, Duckworth unburdened his heart to me. "I had been toying with the idea of abandoning this project. Up to now I've had nothing but grief from it. And just as I'd made up my mind to pull the chain on the Sound Probe, I solved my last problem." "Picking the right sounds out of all the sounds?" I asked. "That's it," said Duckworth. "First I store all the sounds that are recovered on magnetic tape in digital form. These sounds are now examined by statistical methods. For example, only those sounds and words which by frequency, sequence, and grammatical construction of the particular language are most probable, will be chosen to be played back. In that way I can pick out the wanted sounds from the unwanted. It's not perfect, but it ought to work well enough." "It sounds plausible to me," I said. "But I think you have more trouble pending. I was in President Hinkle's office this morning, fighting to keep my budget from being cut in half. Just before I left he got a call from CounterFerieral agency with the unlisted phone numbers. I think they plan to use the Sound Probe to recover dialogues from foreign embassies." "That does it," said Duckworth. "I'm going to burn my notes and put an axe to my instrumentation." "You're copping out," I said. "Besides, your paper contains enough information so that with perhaps an additional year's work, some astute physicist will come up with a working model. Counterspy can get alpng without your help if they have to." "I suppose you're right," he said bitterly. "What's more," I added, "the Sound Probe is probably being evaluated by the espionage services of every country in the world. It may force the suspension of all private political conversations from now on." Duckworth leaped to his feet. He cried, "You've done it! You've shown me the way out." I was delighted but puzzled. "I have? How?" Duckworth put his finger to the side of his nose. "Mum's the word," he said and winked at me. that wink, off and on, for several months. And then I saw the news story on the front page of the New York Times. Duckworth's Delvers(it said). Emmett Duckworth, Nobel Laureate and eminent biochemist, announced today the forming of a student army of Truthseekers. Equipped with a new portable version of a device he recently perfected which can recover entire conversations from the past, his students will visit every smoke-filled room, the chambers and meeting halls of every legislative body in the United States and even the august committee rooms of the United Nations. "The Delvers," Dr. Duckworth said, will focus on political deals of every kind with particular emphasis on financial hanky panky. Howloes of heads of state will not be overlooked. In addition, similar groups are being formed in Europe and Africa, all armed with the new Duckworth Sound Probe. I barged into Duckworth's lab and showed him the story. He beamed at me genially. "I know all about it," he said. "The press spent a couple of days with me earlier in the week. I told them about my miniaturized portable version of the Sound Probe and how I planned to use it. For some reason they seemed to think the item newsworthy." "For shame, Duckworth," I cried. "Twice a Nobel prize winner and you're lending your name and skills to making snoopers out of college students?" "Learners," said Duckworth. "Students of fact. History as we know it is always written -- or at least censored -- by the winners. Who knows what squalid details my crew will uncover -- not only scandals, but suppression of vital information about how governments really work. It may shake the corrupters of this republic and even alter international alignments -- " I had been scratching my chin thoughtfully. "I never thought of that," I said when Duckworth abruptly broke off. "Your youngsters might be the salvation of us all. At last we'd have a clear picture of who and what we all are." "I'm afraid I was a little carried away just then," said Duckworth, blushing. "Actually it'll never happen that way. But I'm playing for more realistic stakes." "You mean that the students won't be allowed to carry out their delving? Then why did you initiate this affair?" And then the insight hit me. "You want to make it impossible for Counterspy to use your device," I said. Duckworth seized my hand and shook it warmly. "Sometimes," he said, "your ability to grasp elementary strategy truly amazes me." Four months later, in a move unprecedented in international annals, every member of the United Nations signed a protocol banning the use of the Sound Probe. Duckworth was given one of the pens used in the signing. Afterward we withdrew to the backyard of my home where I fed a slow fire with the drawings of the Sound Probe as Duckworth toasted marshmallows.  ( Continued from page #) gram have already been felt. A list of potential Receivers is kept at transplant centers from coast to coast -- and you or I or both of us might one day play on that side, too. Mr. Pendzick was a kidney transplant recipient shortly before the Foundation's program was launched; his donor was his mother, but he feels all humans might one day come to relate to one another as if we all mattered. It seems a game to play -- unless we fear some evil.  "Proactive inhibition" is a littleknown but apparently fairly universal brain phenomenon plaguing mankind. Laboratory tested, it manifests itself in the tendency of an earlier memory -- or bit of learning -- to suppress or interfere with a later one. That we live on a destructible -- even frail -- planet has become evident to nearly everyone, but for most of us the earliest memory was of a firm Earth, an impenetrable sky and an unshakable contract with what had gone before. It has made it difficult for many to grasp that since then we've become, as a species, the most powerful natural force rampant on the planet -- and that forces of nature know no contracts, obey no laws save their own. This may have been the major lesson members of the newer generation -- whose earliest awareness embraced the atom, war and human divisionism as compulsory national pastimes -- learned in the confused and tragic Jackson and Kent State campus confrontations in the spring of #. And in the bitter aftermaths. Since then the irreplaceable young have been silent -- perhaps thoughtfully storing proactive early memories that will one day shape and rule a saner world.  The current economy has caught up with us. Not only has distribution tightened, but printing costs have almost doubled since we took over the Galaxy publications two years ago, forcing us once again to publish bimonthly. The latest blow came too suddenly for explanations to be made in the last issue. A magazine is as good as its authors and its audience make it. Authors' rates have not been affected, nor story lengths -- type does have some elasticity. And we are inviting (see page #) fuller participation by our distinguished readership. That's you. like the front rover of the May-June Galaxy, our fate is mainly red. So we apologize. Why? Betause our good friends and yours, the Sciente Fiction Book Club, ran an advertisement on the back cover. And the printer omitted the very thing that would have made the advertisement intelligible! Horrendous, say we. Mysterious, say you. Yes. But the mystery is easily cleared up. Just closely examine the advertisement on the back cover of this issue -- and you'll see what was missing from the back cover of the May-June issue. That's right. An obiect that can be described as a "black dat, circle, sphere, neutron, eye pupil, tunnel opening, planet, hole, cosmos," Wow! Again, our apologies to you, treasured readers, and ta off others concerned. The day I firsf nohced the small pink spot on my cheek, I had other things on my mind. The New York papers said, "Marguerite Piazza opens at the Persian Room". I covered the spot with makeup, walked out into the spotlight, and forgot it -- forgot everything -- in the joy of singing. It wasn't until the spot began to spread, that I went to a cancer specialist. The day the doctor told me I'd have to have radical face surgery, I was sure my career was over. It was no longer a matter of soving my looks. Just of saving my life. They kept the mirrors in my hospital room covered for a week. And yet today, thanks to the fontastic skill of the surgeons, I sing in the spotlight again. I let myself be photographed full-face by a famous photogropher of glamorous women. And I am alive. So now you know why I am appealing to you on behalf of the Americon Cancer Society. To give money. To get regular checkups. And to pay attention to cancer's warning signols. You know, there's something much worse than finding out you have cancer. And that's not finding out. American Cancer Society,  We want to wipe out cancer in your ifetime.T What is it? A black dot, circle, sphere, neutron, eye pupil, tunnel opening, planet, hole, cosmos ? Depending on your perspective, knowledge, imagination, the answer can be simple or complex, commonplace or extraordinary, definite or infinite. We'd like to introduce you to some uniquely gifted authors who have created an exciting, mind-stretching literature. Writers who can look at a dot or a pebble and see a universe of sub-atomic particles. Who can speculate on the incredible number of interdependent cells that make up a human body and envision .whole planetary life forms interconnected the same way. Who forecast things like nuclear power, supersonic jets, computers, space probes, and moon walks long before they happened. Science Fiction authors are writing tomorrow's history today. Just I will bring you any three books described on this page. With them comes your enrollment in The Science Fiction Book Club, the frontier of the future. Join today. The coupon tells how. with trial membership Science Fiction Book Clob #-S# Please accept my appUcatlon for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have printed below. Bill me Just # plus shipping and han dling for all #. Ech month send me the Club's free bulletin "Things To Come" describing the two monthly selections and other book bargains. If I do not wish to receive one of the two monthly selections, or prefer an alternate or no book at all, I simply Indicate so on the form provided. I pay only #, plus shipping and handling for each book I take. (Occasion extra-value selections are slightly more.) I need take only # books In the coming year and may resign any time after purchasing # books. Introductory package. I may return It in # days. Membership will be canceled. I will owe nothing.   MR. Print name I If under #, parent must sign above. I I #... I Office use only #. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. The. ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. # #. Dangcrons Visions ed. by Harlan Ellison. Anthology of # stories never before In print by Sturgeon, Anderson. others. Pub. ed. # #. Five Fates. A remarkable tour de force. Five top writers supply their own endings for 'After life, what?" Pub. ed. # #. Prelode to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke. Two complete novels. Sands of Mars and Prelnde to Space. # short stories, by the scl-fl "colossus." Pub. ed. # #. ChUdhoods End by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last generation on earth. "Wildly fantastic! -- Atlantic. Pub. ed. # . #. Beyond Che Beyond by Poul Anderson. Six novellas by Hugo Award winner. About scientists, pirates, loners. #. Ice Crown by Andre Norton. A closed planet holds strange colonists locked In Intrigue over a royal crown with dread power. Pub. ed. # #. The Tear # An Anthology edited by Harry Harrison. Thirteen compelling new stories on the quality of life # years from now Pub. ed. # #. Quest for the Fnture by A. E. Van Vogt. The electrifying adventure of the man who discovers Immortality and the secrets of time. #. Neanderthal Planet by Brian W. Aldlss. # novella gems. Never before published In U.S. ! Shrewd, witty. Ingenious. #. A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, ed. by Anthony Boucher. # Volume set. # pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # #. I Sing The Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury. # major pieces -- Bradbury's first collection In five Years. Pub. ed. # Book Club editions are somelimes reduced in size, but they are full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library. Members accepted In U.S. A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. Printed in U.S. A. r X CD CO ti C# CD n  n I  e KP m o Can Freddie Fong Fine save the world? If so, should he? If you have never asked yourself either of these questions, it is time Lupoff does ask them. Whether he answers them is another matter. Along the way, we encounter the Sacred Locomotive, the Israeli hyponuclear submarine Traif, the Phantom T anager ( andor Cockatoo, etc.). Mavis Montreal the groupie, the enormous cavern beneath the earth, Ali the lady Mars pilot, and other denizens and features of the world of #. And each thinking reader will ask himself more than once; "It could get this bad in only fourteen years? Or is it this bad now?" tastic chillers by the top writers of this century. In October we have our collection of H. P. Lovecraft's collaborations with other writers; Lady goodies from our Lovecraft, SF ghost and horror backlists. Kelley; more adventures of Summer of Muckrake by Ron Goulart; more ghost and horror-story collections. Also P. G. Wodehouse -- could there be a new Fandom here? An lntet Publisher #I FifthAve.,NewYork,N.Y. # All SFhorrorghosl titles # each at your bookstore. If not available, you may order from Dept. CS, Beagle Books, # West # Street, New York, N.Y. lOOlI, Add #t per title for postage and handling. Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. Septembar-October I #I Vel. #, No. # Gordon Ekiund Theodore Sturgeon A. Bertram Chandler Duncan Lunan Alan Dean Foster Algis Budrys Idilor Science Editor feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Subscription Director e Publisher Associate Publisher ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. # per copy. #-issue subscription: S# in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. I T he aliens stood in clots, leaning and cuddling and nestling near the bar. A dark human with bristly black hair and long gangly arms faced them. The man's eyes traced a path from alien face to alien face. His hands, held before him, shook. One alien laughed. His skin was the color of cold sea water, his eyes as dark as mountain lakes. He moved forward on three legs, still laughing, and stopped before the man, who bowed his head. The alien lifted a clawed hand. Slowly and carefully he struck the man across the face. The man bounded across the narrow room. His head struck the far wall. He bounced off the wall and landed on the floor. He lay on his back, unmoving. His eyes were open. The alien moved forward and stepped on the man's face. The man did not speak. Many of the aliens at the bar were laughing, as were two other humans in the room. The alien glanced over his shoulder and joined the laughter. The dark man on the floor rolled over. His face was spotted with blood. He wiped some of it off with Beyond one lay the other, and man's last challenge! the back of his hand. The alien reached into his tunic for a coin, tossed it across the room. It rolled into a pit, making a sound like a sponge being struck by a rubber mallet. The dark man turned his eyes on the alien, watching him open his tunic, walk to the edge of the pit and make use of it. The dark man began to crawl. He pulled himself across the floor, using his knees and elbows. He peered into the pit. No one was laughing now; all eyes watched the dark man and the pit. The man moved his right arm. It slid down into the pit, twitching. the fingers shaking, opening and closing as if grasping at the molecules of air. A big man came through the doorway. He looked at the pit, shook his head and strode forward. He raised his foot, stepped on the dark man's arm. For a moment the hand co'ntinued to twitch. Then the dark human turned and looked at the big man. His lips formed a word soundlessly. Bastard. The big man reached down and with both hands lifted the dark man into the air. He threw him away from the pit, then turned on the laughing alien. The alien stopped laughing. T he dark man lay on the floor. Suddenly he rose to his feet. He sprinted forward, grabbing a chair as he ran. He lifted the chair and dropped it solidly across the big man's shoulders. The big man fell, rolled to his knees, shook his head and dropped on his face. The dark man stood over the big man. The broken chair dangled in the dark man's fist. "You son of a bitch," he spat at the motionless big man. The alien was laughing again. He came forward, pushed the dark man out of his way and crouched beside the big man. He went through the man's pockets carefully. He removed some bits of paper and a few coins. He waved at two aliens who stood at the bar. They joined him and the three of them began to pull the big man toward the door. The big man came awake and lashed out with both feet. Two of the aliens went down. The third took a blow to the face as the man rocked erect. A few at the bar jumped forward. Some held knives. The big man backtracked until he stood against the wall. The aliens continued to close in. The one who had laughed led the pack. He was no longer laughing. A trickle of blood ran from one corner of his mouth. A light and tinkly music came from the bar and infiltrated the incipient violence with mock serenity. The dark man said, "Stop." He stood behind the aliens, a gun in his hand. One of their number lay unconscious on the floor, an empty holster around his waist. The dark man said, "Get over to one side -- all of you." The aliens moved away from the gun. The big man picked a knife from the floor and joined the dark man. He said, "Thanks." The dark man said, "Yeah." Together they eased toward the door. It dilated and they went out. On the other side they waited. Almost immediately the door began to open. The dark man fired a charge through it. The door slammed shut. "Ought to keep them," said the big man. He reached into his tunic and pulled out a narrow cigarette. He put it between his lips and puffed. The cigarette ignited and he handed it to the dark man. "Try this, Quinn. Calm your nerves." "You want me with calm nerves?" Quinn puffed on the cigarette. Its fumes were pink and fragrant. "We're going out," the big man said. "Who's we?" "Me. Deak. And you." "You want me?" "You were good once. I can't find any who're good now. You'll have to do." "Thanks. A madman, a cripple, a toxer. That'S all?" "That's all." Quinn stepped on the cigarette. "Give me another. When do we go?" "Four or five days. I got a ship today." "Enough time for me to crack it, right?" "If you want to bad enough." Quinn dropped the second cigarette, half-smoked. "These things give me a headache. Hawkins, you're a bastard." "I always was," Hawkins said. T he edge was what everyone always called it. Never was it known by its more rightful and proper designation: #D#. The Edge was what everyone called it for two reasons. The first reason was simply that it had originally been designed by a man named Edge. Jacob Andre Edge was long since dead and gone, but back then, at the beginning, he had been the man who designed #D#. The second reason for the appellation was that the Edge was an artificial planet, large enough to support a population axy, but outside of it -- at the edge, the brink, the end. And so: the Edge. The boy was called Alpha and for one simple reason: that was his name. He rode the corridors of the Edge, his destination firmly in mind, his contact lenses tinted a deep shade of violet -- a young man, actually, say about twenty-one, with blond wavy hair, a lanky lean build, thick lips and a face young and flat, untouched by the lines of hard living that characterized most human faces around him. He rode the corridors, looking neither to the left nor right, passing people and aliens, but none stopped to greet him, to say hello, for none knew him. He had lived a day and a half on the Edge and that time had been spent asking questions and pumping hands but not making friends or even enemies, for Alpha was a man (or boy) with a job to be done and a job to be found and he had no time for all the extras. Maybe when he was older. Perhaps then. But not now. Not yet. Alpha jumped off the moving corridor and stood in front of a door. He lifted his face and allowed himself to be scanned. The door dilated and he passed through it. Immediately he put his hands on top of his head and froze. Two men were in the room. One was big as a space cruiser with a long red crease -- probably a heatgun scar -- running along one cheek. He held a heatgun in his right fist. It was pointed at Alpha's belly. The second man was small and old. He sat, grinning into Alpha's eyes. The first man asked, "And who the hell are you?" "Are you Hawkins?" "That's my name. What's yours?" "Alpha. May I sit down?" "No. What do you want?" "I want to talk to you." The old man said, "He's all right. Look at him. The way he's dressed, the way he stands. He hasn't been on-planet a week." Hawkins frowned and said, "Shut up, Deak." "No," said the old man. Hawkins looked back at Alpha and said, "Well -- talk." Alpha started to reply. But where was it -- the speech he'd so carefully prepared back home, the one he'd just finished rehearsing for the nine-hundredth time? What had happened to it? At last he said, "I'm not armed." "I know that," Hawkins said. "The door told me." His voice echoed strength and a lot of living. And wisdom, too. Alpha thought, and glory. This is him; this is Hawkins. "What I want to know is what you want." "I want a Job," Alpha said weakly. "With you." The old man, Deak, laughed. "I told you," he said. "I knew it." "Shut up, Deak. Who sent you here?" "Nobody sent me." "Don't lie to me. Somebody had to. I don't advertise for help." "Well -- there was my mother. She -- " "Your what?" Deak was laughing again, shaking, waving his hands, slapping his thighs. "He said, his mother." "She knew you once," Alpha said. "She told me about you. Her name was Leona Carse. From Hickley. Don't you -- " "I remember her," Hawkins said. "She used to talk about you all the time and she always said you'd help me when I needed help and you'd put me up when I needed that. I've heard your name ever since I was a kid, ever since I was old enough to listen and understand." Deak had stopped laughing; now he was listening. "She died last month and left me Just enough credit to come here. It took a while, hopping from planet to planet. They say you're going to try to crack the Mist. I want to go along." "You're out of your mind," Hawkins said. He pointed at a chair and Alpha sat down. to me," Deak said. "Nobody asked for your opinion. How old are you? "Twenty-seven," Alpha said. "And you want to try to crack the Mist?" "My mother said you were only twenty the first time you went out there." Secrets entrusted Jl to a  few l!uVnpuSuedJ-acti.oM be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. Once shrouded in mystery to avoid their destruction by mass fear and ignorance, these facts remain a useful heritage for the thousands of men and women who privately use them in their homes today. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization) an age-old brotherhood of learning, have preserved this secret wisdom in their archives for centuries. They now invite you to share the practical helpfulness of their teachings. Write today for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery of Life." Within its pages may lie a new life of opportunity for you. Address: Scribe A.J.D. I Scribe A.J.D. l I San Jose, California # I I Please send me the free book. The Mastery  I of LifCy which explains bow I may learn to j I use my faculties and powers of mind.  I Name. I I Address  j City Zip Code I Rosicrucians "That was different. People grew up faster then." "Give me a chance." "You ever been in a cruiser? Except as a passenger?" "No, but you need one man like that. Somebody to do the dirty work, cleaning up. The experienced men will be needed elsewhere." "Deak's going to do the dirty work." "Not me," Deak said. "I've got more experience than any other three men. I'll be one of them that's needed elsewhere." "Shut up, Deak." "Are you going to take this boy along? You know vye need another hand. Considering." "No," Hawkins said. "I'm not taking him." Deak rose to his feet and walked toward Alpha. He walked with a limp, leaning toward the right, and when he passed the table Alpha saw that his foot was missing. The boot at the end of his leg was empty. "Come on with me," Deak said. "Mr. Hawkins has things to do." Deak led him to the back of the room. A door dilated shut behind them and they were in a large bedroom. Deak said, "You can stay here. Sleep here till we're ready to move." "What about what Hawkins said?" "Never pay any attention to what Hawkins says. He never means it anyway. That's why he keeps me around; to explain to people what he's thinking. He wants you to stay. He remembers your mother same as me." "You knew her?" "Sure, all of us knew Leona. Here -- sit down and I'll tell you about it." Alpha sat on a bed and Deak took a seat across from him. A third man was in the room. He was lying on one of the beds, flat on his back, eyes closed. He had thick, dark, curly hair and a smile on his lips. His mouth was open and he was snoring. Deak said nothing about the third man. He said, "I was still a captain back then. Hawkins was with me. Just him and me, going from planet to planet, running a private shuttle, and on one of them we met your mother. I fell in love with her instantly, but it was Hawkins she liked. Couldn't blame her. He was younger and bigger and smarter and a lot more fun. The three of us went everywhere together and when it came time to move on she went with us. I was the captain but I couldn't very well say no. Not that I wanted to." Deak's story continued to another planet, rambled about these aliens and how Hawkins did this and Leona did that and how she was right all along. The story took a long time to tell but it was a good one. "Those were the five best years of my life," Deak said. "Hawkins', too, I imagine. When Leona said she was through, that she was going back home, well, we came out here and Hawkins hasn't thought of a thing since except that blanket of mist out there. Me, I've got hob,bies and old age to keep me occupied. Hawkins has got the Mist and that's all. But I'm glad you've come. For a long time it's just been me and Hawkins and Quinn -- " he pointed at the sleeping man -- "but I know it'll never be the same again, even with you here." Alpha said, "Tell me about Hawkins." "You don't know about him? What's there to tell that's not known by half the galaxy?" "What about the Mist?" "Not much to tell there, either. Hawkins was the first to prove definitely that it circled the galaxy, that it was a fence around our cage. Ever since then he's wanted to break out of the cage." "And who's he?" Alpha pointed at the sleeping man. Deak laughed. "His name is Quinn. He's the assistant commander. Three-man crew and we've got a commander and an assistant. Four-man crew now -- with you." "Ishe -- " "Toxed. Sure. Quinn's always toxed now. He used to be good, but that was before he died." "He doesn't look dead." "He's not -- now. He went into the Mist and when you go into the Mist things happen to you. What happened to Quinn was that he died and stayed dead for five days. He's never said what it was like. But he's been toxed ever since." "And you still use him out there?" "Sure. It doesn't seem to bother him and he was good once. That's what matters." "I see." "Sure you do." Deak stood. "Well, you must be tired. I'll let you get somesleep. Don't let Quinn bother you." And he left. II the back bedroom he was grinning widely and chuckling gently. He liked the boy, was pleased to have somebody around who hadn't yet grown sick of hearing his old stories, who wouldn't immediately tell him to shut up. Deak liked the boy a lot and Deak was the kind of man who, when he liked someone or something, liked for keeps. He sat down at the table in the middle of the room, after first checking the door, making sure the scanner was set and that the right reception was ready in the event of visitors. He thought about calling Hawkinsdown at the tubes but thought better of it. Nothing important had happened yet and if Hawkins wanted him Hawkins would call. "I'm old," Deak muttered, thinking, then laughed. He reached into the table and removed his film collection. If anything had helped him survive the inactivity of age this was it. He knew it was wrong for him to still be living. Ninety-two was a good age for inactive men, for buttcrushers and Fed peepers, but it was bad for a man like him. He tried to imagine Hawkins at the age of ninety-two, tried casting his mind fifty years into the future. But it couldn't be done. Hawkins was a perpetual forty-yearold. When Deak had first met him Hawkins had been twenty physically and forty spiritually and in the years past his physical age had merely caught and surpassed his spiritual age. The latter had remained the same. Deak removed a film from the case and placed it gently into the viewer. He was careful with it. The print was easily a couple of hundred years old -- probably more. Deak knew he ought to have it reproduced, but he liked it this way -- old and musty and nearly falling apart. All of his prints were old. Many had already disintegrated on him. But he didn't care. Soon it would be his turn to disintegrate and then none of it would matter any more. He put his eye to the viewer and watched another time unfold. He knew the film by heart. There were these fellows in a place called the Argentine and they were flying aeroplanes through the atmosphere of Old Earth. One of them was going blind and another shrugged in the face of death and there was a woman. It was the woman Deak most appreciated in this one. She was (he often let himself think) Leona -- and the young guy was Hawkins and the old one, the one going blind, that was him. There was even a part for Quinn. It all fit. Deak loved these old things. They were all he had left to love. The door dilated and Deak jumped. Four men came fast into the room and the fat one said, "Stand where you are." Deak stood. "Where's Hawkins?" "He's not here. How -- " "I run this place," the fat man said. "When I want to get into a cabin, I can do it. Now tell me where he is." "Who was that?" said Deak. He recognized the fat man now. His name was Nyby and he was Federation governor for the Edge. One never saw too much of him despite his big title, and this time he had three men with him. The men were carrying guns. "Hawkins," said Nyby. "Who do you think?" "He's down in the tubes." "We'll wait for him. I have something I want to show him." Nyby turned to one of his men. "Go see if there's anyone else here." The man headed for the back. Deak sat down at the table and said, "Another warrant? You're wasting your time. Hawkins doesn't care about paper orders. When he wants to go, he's going." "I've got something more effective this time. Where he's going is into custody." D eak said nothing. The man came out of the back room. Alpha walked ahead of him. Quinn came next, rubbing his eyes and yawning. Quinn said, "I told you not to wake me up till I wanted up. What kind of alarm is this guy?" He pointed at Nyby. "He's got a warrant to put Hawkins into custody," Deak said. "Fat fool," Quinn said. He sat down on the floor and grabbed his head. He moaned once, then looked at Deak. "Where is he?" "Tubes." Quinn looked right at Nyby and said, "Fat fool." He jerked his head at Alpha. "Who's this?" Deak explained and Quinn nodded. They talked as if they were alone in the room. Nyby began to fidget impatiently. Quinn asked, "What are you viewing?" Ballantine Books By God, you can hardly turn around. If June was Silverberg and Niven country, July is really a wild clutch of folk. Reissues of Bradbury. And of course Lovecraft. (What is with Lovecraft? We've all known he was good, if specialized, for lo, these many years. The bounce in sales his works are getting can't all be coming from a lunatic fringe. At least we hope not or there are more of them around than makes for easy nights.) By contrast, a delightful jape by (of all peoalso, a full length novel based on a that one. Get in on the ground floor. Also a rich, weird, wonderful novel on  IN this, the year of Larry Niven, August sees a novel by DaveGerrold and featuring that lovable fellow Shoogar, whom you first encountered in If. The sales department has it that funny sf covers don't sell, so it's not a funny cover. (But it's very good.) And it's a very tunny book. We hope bet you'll need them at the Con in September.  We are especially delighted to nominee list. We'll be doing it in September -- just might have copies ready for the Con. But back to the present...  lady whose previous title in our Adult Fantasy series evoked an enormous based on the Second Book of Mabinogian Welsh mythology, is a tragedy of the gods told in prose so distilled it is close to poetry. The style is completely different to that used in the earlier book and completely at one with the stark subject. Congratulations, Miss Walton. You are an honored and most welcome guest in our house. BB "Angels " said Deak. "Get to the death scene yet?" He turned to Alpha. "Ever seen that one? Must be three hundred years old." Alpha said no. Nyby said, "Shut up. All three of you. I don't want Hawkins alerted." Quinn asked, "Why? Isn't it me you're really after?" Nyby shook his head wordlessly. Quinn pressed the point: "You're after the chance to kill me. It's as simple as that, right? You don't care about Hawkins or these others." Deak grinned, listening. He remembered now about Quinn and one of Nyby's wives -- or was it daughters? Yes, that was it: one of his daughters. Nyby was a prude; he had only one wife. It had been the daughter, down in the pits, screaming and shouting at her father in front of a few hundred witnesses, half of them aliens, and Quinn rolling in the sawdust, laughing. Nyby looked at Quinn and said, "Shut your mouth." Quinn said, "Fat fool, why don't you get out of here? She wasn't worth my time anyway." Nyby glared. Quinn said, "Not worth a bug's time -- " And Nyby came forward. He slapped Quinn across the face. Quinn's head snapped back and he fell. When he rose there was blood on his teeth. Deak grinned. Not at the blood; not at Nyby's raging face. He grinned at what he saw from the corner of one eye. The boy was moving on light feet. Alpha's arm dropped and the gun hit the floor. Deak ran, scooped up the weapon and trained it on Nyby. "First to move is a dead man." Nobody moved. Quinn wiped the blood from his lips and grinned. He said, "We're a team." Deak tossed him the gun. "I'm going to call Hawkins. They're all yours." Quinn nodded and went over to Nyby. The fat man cowered, anticipating the blow. It never came. Quinn said, "Strip." Deak grinned from the phone. Nyby was a prude. Nudity to him was something shameful, like a display of cowardice to a normal man. Nyby removed his clothing. Naked he appeared even fatter than clothed. Deak completed his call and Quinn tossed him the gun. He said, "Take him home by the most public route you can find. I'll give you ten minutes before I release the others. Then I'm going to go back to bed. Don't wake me." Deak waited for Quinn to obtain another weapon, then pushed Nyby out. They hopped a corridor. Nyby kept his eyes down. Four women rode past, young. nearly naked themselves in nothing but spangled strings. The women looked at Nyby, recognized him, waved and laughed. The fat man's color went from light scarlet to deep flushed crimson. Deak said, "It's a long way home." D eak and Nyby had been gone ten minutes. Quinn looked at the other three men and said, "Go home and don't stop anywhere you shouldn't." The men departed hastily. Alone with Alpha, Quinn dropped to the floor and grabbed his head. He began to moan softlyAlpha watched him. He had wondered why Hawkins wanted a toxer in his crew. Now he knew. When Quinn wanted to be good no one was better. Alpha said, "Can I get you anything?" Quinn looked up, shook his head. "It's not bad now. It comes and goes. I can sleep. Besides, I'm used to it. Later I might need some help. But you can do one thing for me -- tell me who the hell you are." "Deak told you. Don't you remember?" "I remember. Deak doesn't believe your story any more than I do but unlike me Deak is a gentleman. He doesn't say liar to people's faces. Me, I do." Alpha decided to give it one last try. "I'm Leona's son." Quinn waved a tired hand. "I knew Leona two years ago. She never had a son, not that she's aware of. I'm sure she would have told me." "Does Hawkins know about you and Leona?" "Never saw any need why he should. Or know about you either. I assume you were my replacement. Leona should have told you about me." "She must have figured Hawkins wouldn't want a toxer around him." Quinn shrugged lightly. "She doesn't know Hawkins very well. Now -- tell me -- what's your game?" "Just what I said. I want to go into the Mist. Hawkins is the only one still going out there. So I decided to make his acquaintance." "And Leona helped you." "No. Why should she? I heard about Hawkins through her and I used what she told me. But I'm not a spy or anything. I'm a good guy." "But why play this role?" "Because I didn't think Hawkins would trust a stranger." "You were right." "And now?" "And now nothing," Quinn said. "You're here and until you make a slip you stay. I'm going to bed." He went. Alpha went over to the viewer and watched a movie that was three hundred years old. He liked it. his quarters and grinned at the closing door. He shouted, "And don't come out till you've got some pants on -- ".and, laughing, went away. Deak could not respect any man who allowed himself to be humiliated by something intangible like the loss of a pair of trousers. Not that he could ever have held much respect for a man like Nyby under any circumstances. Deak rode the corridors outward toward the tubes, jumping from line to line with the genuine Joyfulness of a man half his age. He felt fine. Hawkins had told him to come out right away. Deak wondered about this. Hawkins hadn't seemed at all surprised by Nyby's visit. He might have been expecting it all along. But Deak knew what the consequences of the visit would be. He asked himself two questions: A re you afraid? Do you want to go? Afraid he ought to be. He had never been out before, had never allowed Hawkins to talk him into the Mist. Hawkins had been in it six times and Quinn twice. But they were mad. As far as Deak was concerned the Mist could stay unconquered. In a few thousand years, when the galaxy was filled with people, it would be time to worry about reaching other parts of the universe. But not now. It was too soon. Nobody really cared. Except Hawkins. And Quinn. And maybe the kid. But they were crazy. Deak wasn't crazy, but he was going out there this time. He wasn't crazy; he was old. He was ready to die and when he died he wanted his friends near him. That's all there was to it. And so -- the Mist. Deak arrived at the tubes and slid off the final corridor. The place was nearly empty. The Edge had been originally planned as a jumping off point for intergalactic travel but the discovery of the Mist had put a stop to that. Now it was rarely used at all. Only three ships were presently in the tubes and one of them was Hawkins'. Deak went over to him. Hawkins said, "Everything all right?" Deak nodded and told him the conclusion of the story. Hawkins smiled with appreciation and pointed to the docked crusier. "Get aboard," he said. "We're leaving? Now?" "I've got a few more things to do and I want your help. The others would only get in the way. When we're ready for them we'll call." Deak nodded and moved obediently toward the ship. Hawkins called after him, "How's Quinn holding up?" "Pretty fair. He hasn't hit the worst yet." "I know," Hawkins said. "It's not going to be easy." "You can dump him." Hawkins shrugged and said, "Something's bothering you, too. What?" "I'm wondering why you want to take me." "Why shouldn't I?" "I'm old," Deak said. "Past my prime. I've only got one leg and sometimes it seems like my mind has to fight its way through a bowl of thick soup before I can think a straight thought. I'm not going to do you much good out there." Hawkins shook his head. "I need three men for this and I've got them. One of them is a toxer. Another is just a kid. You're old and crippled. But the kid's going to be good some day. Quinn was good once and he's going to be good again. You were good once, too, and maybe you've passed the point where you can go back. But you've got your memories, haven't you? You know what it was like back then. You're going to do me a lot of good out there. I need you." Deak nodded. "That's all I wanted to know." He moved toward the ship. Ill ered by sheer accident. One of the very first faster-than-light intraspace cruisers had run smack into it. The ship was the Princess. A minor error had dropped it outside the galaxy. The captain of the Princess, a curious and adventuresome man, had decided that since he was there (outside the galaxy) he might as well take a look around. He had prepared his ship for another intraspace jump, this time into adjacent darkness. He had jumped. And landed right back where he'd started. The captain had shaken his head and tried it once more. With the same results. Back again. The captain was not a fool. He went home. And filed a report. The report had been read and studied. An investigation had been conducted. The panel conducting the investigation had told the captain that he ought to stay where he belonged. Inside the galaxy. It was a big place. Unexplored. First things first. The galaxy had remained a big place but it was no longer unexplored. There were other galaxies out there and perhaps it was time for man to take a look at them. The Edge was built. And the Mist was officially discovered. The first ship made four attempts at four different places, each removed from the others by several thousand light years. The results were the same. The ship went into intraspace. And it moved. It came out again. It had not moved. Another ship tried it. And another. Finally an enterprising captain decided to do it the slow way, with tiny jumps of only a few light years. In the course of this he became the first man to see the Mist with his own eyes. And the first man to enter the Mist in normal space. Three of his crew died. Two more were driven permanently mad. The others turned the ship around and came home. They spoke of a great and twisting mist of red and orange flames. They had photographic proof and they were believed. Almost at the same time, at the opposite end of the galaxy, another ship found the Mist and entered it. All but one crew member died. He spoke of a fiery hell that circled the whole galaxy. He had photographic proof. And he was believed. The Mist became an established fact. It was studied and charted. Nobody knew what it was, though everyone had hisher own 'pet theory. A few facts were known: The Mist circled the galaxy; it appeared red in color; it could control a ship in intraspace; it could control a human mind at any time. A few old-fashioned thinkers proclaimed it a visitation of the devil. A few, even more old-fashioned, said it was only God. Over the years official missions attempted to crack the Mist by passing over, around, or through it. Nothing succeeded and at last the Federation government lost interest. The galaxy was big enough for man. Too many had died trying to leave it. From now on the Mist -- whatever it was, natural or unnatural, god or devil -- could stay right where it was. Man still had room enough. But there are always a few men who don't like to give up. Hawkins was one of these. Quinn had been another. Alpha was fast becoming one. Men like these continued to go into the Mist time after time, trying to crack it. None of them succeeded; the government frowned at their efforts, tried to stop them. But they kept right on doing it. Hawkins thought of the Mist as a wall. If you butt your head against a wall often enough and hard enough, one of two things will happen: the wall will break or your head will break. Hawkins had a tough head.  Alpha said. "At the edge of the Mist." Hawkins came to stand behind him and peer into the viewscreen. The Mist was shown as a long area of turbulence. Directly in front of it was a tiny stationary dot. A ship. "We'll head for it and take a look when we jump," Hawkins said. "It's probably a derelict. A lot of ships have gone into her and never been heard from again. Maybe this is one she decided to spit out at last. But whatever it is, I think we better eat first. Once we plunge into the Mist there won't be time. There won't be time for much more than breathing." They had already made their initial jump through intraspace. Hawkins had taken Deak and Quinn into link with himself, leaving Alpha outside to handle anything that might come up. The kid was his best man but he wanted Deak and Quinn -- especially Quinn -- where he could watch them. Linked with his own mind and that of the ship, neither of them could do a thing he would not immediately know. He was using the system that had worked best for him in the past. This consisted of a long initial jump of forty-five light-years, a short pause in normal space for eating and relaxing, then a second and final jump of five lightyears, which put them as close to the Mist as one could get without falling straight inside. The Mist was not wide in cosmic distance. Hawkins figured it would take a month, maximum, to penetrate it all the way even at normal speeds. Not that anybody had ever come near to lasting that long in it. Hawkins held the record at twenty-nine hours, but the last four hours he had spent running for his life. The ship carried enough food -- concentrates and fluids primarily -- to keep the crew fat and healthy for a year if necessary. Hawkins looked at his people and laughed inwardly for the hundredth time since the ship had left the Edge. These were the three best men he could find. Quinn was sitting propped against the wall, shaking like a tree in the wind. Deak stood near the opposite wall, muttering the way all old men mutter. And Alpha -- well. Alpha looked all right. He was tall, strong and upright. He was also a liar. He had not fooled Hawkins for more than a moment. Not that the lie was necessarily a handicap. Hawkins figured this way: any man who wanted into the Mist badly enough to lie his way there deserved the opportunity. Maybe that meant Alpha was insane, but he was hardly alone. Deak insisted Hawkins was crazy and Deak was often right about a lot of things. But if he ever made it through, if he ever stood on the other side looking over his shoulder at the fiery inferno that lay behind him, the hell that had killed a hundred men like they were bugs to be squashed -- then nobody would call Hawkins mad. They might think it, but they wouldn't say it. The four of them ate hurriedly and Hawkins took Quinn and Deak into the back to link. While linked, a man ceased to be an individual consciousness, became a part of the ship, able to combine his human instincts with the mechanical computers of the ship. It took at least two men in link to operate a ship through interstellar space. Intraspace had to be entered and left at exactly the proper moment. An error of a microsecond could mean that the ship was forever lost. This jump -- only five light-years in distance -- was a simple one. Linked with Deak and Quinn, Hawkins took predominance. It was his voice that Alpha heard over the communications system. It was his mind that made all the final decisions. But he used all the information fed to him by Deak and Quinn. At the proper point they entered intraspace. At the next proper point they left it. The trip, like all good trips, was uneventful. Hawkins broke the link and rose to his feet. He headed forward and ran into Alpha coming in the opposite direction. Alpha said, "We've got company." Hawkins asked, "That ship we saw?" "Yes. I called it as soon as we reentered. Somebody is on board. The call was faint. But I think it's a woman." "Qh, Lord," said Hawkins. talked to her. Her ship was crippled. She was lost. Hawkins told Alpha to go fetch her. He brought the woman on board. She had been alone on the ship except for two dead men who lay in the aft compartment. Hawkins sent the ship drifting. Some time, some day, somebody might find it and bury the men. But probably not. The woman was about thirty years old, with narrow bones and a soft, pretty face. She said her name was Okla and that the dead men were her brothers. Both of them had been smart and brave but only one had wanted to enter the Mist. He'd talked the other into it and Okla had come with them'. "How long?" Hawkins asked. "How long what?" she asked. Her voice was as pretty as her face. "How long did you last?" "About five hours." "And your brave, bold brothers?" "You shouldn't talk about them that way. They're dead, you know." "And you're not. So?" "It killed them almost right away. They said they were suffocating. I think the walls were closing in on them. At least that's what I saw. But I knew it was only an illusion. Walls don't crush you in the middle of space. I knew that." "If you believe they can, they can. That's how it works." She said, "You think you know a lot about it." "I've been in there six times." "He holds the record," Deak said. "This is Hawkins. He did twenty-nine hours one time and barely made it out." "That's not so much," she said. "I could have done better, but not alone. That's why I jumped. Just me. I barely made it out of intraspace and blew the drive doing it. I'll make it this time if one of you can do it with me." Alpha said, "You mean you want to go back." "I've got a crew of professionals with me this time. How can I miss?" Hawkins told her there were a lot of ways but she didn't believe him. IV kins ticked them off on his fingers: a toxer, broken and haunted; an old man, crippled and senile; a boy, untruthful and naive; and a woman who had watched two brothers die and thought them weak. That was only four. Hawkins pointed a mental finger at himself. A madman. A fool... Their ship lay in wait at the very edge of the Mist. Hawkins had closed the manual viewscreens but not before taking one quick look outside. The Mist hadn't changed; it looked as it had always looked. Like a fire. A great fire in the void, stretching toward infinity, circling the galaxy. Quinn was trying to talk to him. Hawkins wasn't listening but he was watching. Quinn looked bad. His hands were shaking and his eyes were like hollow pits. Quinn was saying, "You can't take a woman in there. We haven't got the room. It's suicide." Hawkins brushed him off. The last thing he needed now was Quinn. He said, "She just came out of there. She knows what she's doing. And her hands are steady as a rock." Quinn went away. Hawkins turned to Alpha and said, "Take her in. And get yourself ready. Sometimes the Mist hits you first thing -- sometimes it waits an hour or two. But be ready." "What'll it be like?" Alpha said. "You'll find out," Hawkins told him and slapped him lightly on the arm. Alpha put them forward. The Mist swallowed them. Sometimes when you first went in and you were young enough and foolish enough to make the mistake of looking and watching, the Mist changed itself into a great fish, opened its mouth and literally swallowed your craft. This had happened to Hawkins the first time he'd gone in. That had been the last time he had looked. This time he read the report on the transviewer, which showed the cruiser surrounded by the Mist. That was enough proof for him. The Mist had swallowed them and they were alone. Until they returned (if ever returned) they could not contact a soul. Radios didn't work inside the Mist, either coming or going. They were alone, the five of them and their craft, as thoroughly alone as any man can be. They were all sitting around the main forward cabin now, simply waiting. Okla and Alpha were chatting quietly in one corner. Quinn and Deak were in another. Deak was singing and strumming a Vaella, a musical instrument from one of the outer Karnian worlds, the sound of which was a cross between a mouth harp and a classical guitar. Normally Hawkins found it lovely and gentle -- now it grated on him. Hawkins tried to ignore the noise. Quinn worried him, sitting with his head in his hands, shaking and trembling. Hawkins went over to him. "Well?" Quinn ignored him. "Are you going to make it?" Quinn took his head out of his hands. The hands continued to shake and the head twitched. He said, "I'll make it." Hawkins said, "Why did you come along?" "You said you wanted me." "I did." "And do?" "I said I did. I thought I needed you. I thought you could do it." "And now that you've seen me in action you've changed your mind. Is that what you're trying to say?" Hawkins tried to make his tone soft and caring. "If I'd wanted to say that I would have said it." Quinn said, "You've killed a lot of men, Hawkins." Vaella. Alpha and Okla were no longer chatting. Hawkins said, "Go about your business. Relax while you can." He turned back to Quinn and tried again to soften his voice. "What's wrong with you? Get Deak to give you some medicine." Quinn shook his head. "I'm not afraid of the Mist," he said. "I just don't like it." "Nobody likes it," Hawkins said. "It's gloating," Quinn said. "Can't you feel it? It can see right through the ship like it was glass. Right now it's looking right square at me. And laughing. Gloating." "Get hold of yourself. That's nothing compared to what can happen. Don't you know that?" Quinn started to laugh. The laugh kept getting higher and higher, more and more shrill, until it broke, cracked, turned into a shriek. "Shut up," Hawkins said. "Don't I know? Don't I know? What don't I know, Hawkins? Why do you think it's gloating? I'm its finest product. It killed me, made me dead. I didn't breathe or think or do anything. It's killed a lot of men before, but I'm the first who's ever come back so that it could view the results. That's why it's laughing. That's why it's gloating. It sees what a mess I am. Laughing at me -- proud of its handiwork -- and gloating." "Deak," Hawkins said. "Yes, sir," said Deak. He had begun to play again but softly. "Take Quinn into quarters and give him a shot." "The hell," Quinn said. "What are you afraid of, Hawkins? Me? Because I've got the shakes? Damned right I've got the shakes. My tox was my salvation. It's the only good thing I've had since my death and you had to go ahead and take that away from me. You don't know how to let well enough alone, do you? You had to come into my private hell and pull me out and save my life. My honor. I don't want my honor back. And my life -- I gave up my life a long time ago." Everyone was watching now. Softly Hawkins said, "Shut up." Quinn smiled and rose to his feet. He stood in front of Hawkins, toe to toe, shaking. Carefully he drew back his arm and opened his fist. His hand struck across Hawkins's face. Hawkins dropped to his knees. Hawkins wiped at his face and looked at his hand. It was clean. He looked up at Quinn and said, "That's the second time you've hit me. Don't ever try it again." Quinn spun around and looked at the wall. He wrapped his arms across his chest and gripped his elbows. He was trembling. Hawkins climbed to his feet. "Deak. Take him away and give him something." "Tox?" "You've got some?" "I brought a dose. Just in case." "Then give it to him. If he wants it." Deak led Quinn from the cabin. Okla asked Hawkins, "Are you happy now?" "What do you mean?" "You pushed him into it. He was trying to fight it on his own. You had to break him." "I was trying to make him." "Do you really believe that?" "Quinn wants to die. He was dead once and I think he liked it. I think he wants to go back where he was happiest. Well, out here he's got the chance. I wish him luck." "You're a self-righteous bastard," she told him. "Maybe so," Hawkins said. "I've never been called one before, but maybe I am." He changed the tone of his voice, putting a taste of authority back into it. "Alpha, come here. Let's check the boards." There really wasn't anything to check. The instruments showed exactly what they ought to have showed. They were in the Mist. They had entered it approximately thirty-three minutes ago. The radio was clear but nonfunctional. The air level was safe and normal. Everything was normal. Everything was safe. And soon they would be dying. Deak poked his head into the room and waved a hand at Hawkins. "What do you want, Deak?" "Quinn says he doesn't want any tox." "That's his business. I'm not going to force it on him." "He says he wants to go into link." "He can't go in alone." "He wants me to go with him." "Why?" "He says he feels better in link. He can't feel his body -- so the shakes don't bother him." "You better let me talk to him." Hawkins turned to the rear. "Keep an eye on the boards and call me if anything happens," he told Alpha. He gave Okla a smile and went with Deak. T here were four bunks in the back compartment, spaces for a maximum of four men to live during link. Quinn was lying on one of the bunks. It was not in commission. He looked worse than before. He opened his eyes when Hawkins came near. "Do you think this trip is designed as personal therapy for you? I haven't got time to concern myself with your personal problems." Quinn closed his eyes and laid a hand across his lids. He said, "Let's not start that over again." He raised his hands and held them up tautly. "See, Hawkins? They're steady, aren't they? Like trees on a still day? Isn't this what you wanted? Isn't this the self-control you preach?" "So why send Deak crying to me?" "Because I've got an idea and it doesn't have anything to do with my problems. Not much anyway. Hawkins nodded and sat on the bunk opposite the one Quinn occupied. He reached into his tunic and drew out two cigarettes. He lit them both and passed one to Quinn. "I'm listening." "You've said you thought this whole thing came down to a battle of wills. If a man was stronger than the Mist he'd beat it. Right?" "I said that. And maybe it's right. I don't know. Nobody really understands the Mist." "Nobody knows why it's here." "That's right." "But it's pretty much accepted that something put it here. And for some reason. Maybe not a reason that makes sense to us, but I think it's there to keep us penned in our own galaxy. And it's not invincible. If we thought it was we wouldn't be here. Except to kill ourselves. But that's not your way -- or Alpha's or the girl's." "I think it can be broken," Hawkins said. "If you're stronger than it." "Get to the point." "That is the point: no one man is stronger than the Mist. But a combination of many of them -- and a machine -- might be. In other words, link. No other being in the known Universe is as strong as a linked space cruiser." "Linked ships have gone in before. And gotten thrown out." "Because they were in intraspace. We know that now. You can't enter the Mist while in intraspace. It rejects you. But ships aren't usually linked while they're in normal space. I think it ought to be tried." "I'll tell Deak to come back." "And Alpha." "I need Alpha out front. You can have Deak." Hawkins got to his feet and stubbed out his cigarette. "You still think I'm trying to avoid the shakes." Hawkins put his hand on the door. "You wanted to try it -- we're trying it. Call me when you're linked." When he got back to the forward cabin he gave Deak his orders. Deak tried to protest and Hawkins hurried him along. The old man went but he was hurt. He said he felt he was being pushed out of the way. And maybe he was. Hawkins didn't have time to worry about people's injured feelings. Get all the weak ones out of the way. Sweep them into a dusty corner and tell them to sit. Let the strong ones take command. Have them run the show. That was how battles were won. He was worried. were going. He called Alpha and together they ran a check. Their time in the Mist was well over an hour now and nothing had happened. It made him nervous, restless. Alpha seemed the same way. The girl appeared frightened. The ship beeped him. Hawkins said, "What?" The voice was Quinn's. Somewhat colder, lacking in emotion, but Quinn's. That meant he had established predominance, which was only to be expected. The voice asked, "You want a reading on the outside conditions?" "Give it to me." "On our left is a fleet of ships, about fifty of them. They're firing atomic warheads at us. Just small stuff. A spider about twenty-five feet in diameter is squatting on the hull. It doesn't appear to be doing any damage. Below it are two snakes wrapped around the ship. One of them is chewing his way inside." "Are these local phenomena -- or general?" "General, we think. Deak's component can see it. And Quinn's. The ship can't, of course." "How does the situation feel to the Quinn component?" Hawkins was being deliberately ambiguous. For a change I'll try tact... "Quinn reports: 'The situation is horrible but I feel fine.' " "Talk later," Hawkins said. He turned away from the control panel and tapped his fingers against the back of his chair. Alpha seemed all right. The girl looked better. If anything, she was too calm. She worried him. The board at his back beeped again and he turned on the audible. The link voice said, "The snake just broke through. It's in the link chamber. It's still hungry, so watch for it. We think for certain now that it's general. We'd place its length at forty feet. It's green with light pink spots." Hawkins told the others about the snake. Its presence irritated him. He had long ago come to the conclusion that the Mist was distinctly aware of him as an individual. He had flown into it six times before this. He held the record for longest duration. And now here it was. Nothing but snakes and spiders. On previous trips such creatures had swallowed him whole. It would take more than this to reach him. The girl started screaming. Hawkins bounded out of his chair almost with relief and ran toward her. He shouted at Alpha, "Hold her -- " and kept coming. Alpha made a grab for her but she knocked him out of the way. She was using her hands as claws. Alpha slid out of her way and she danced to her feet, screaming. "Can't do it -- can't breathe -- not again -- so close -- " She lashed out with both feet as though trying to kick something. She fell over and Hawkins landed on her chest. "Hold her arms," he told Alpha. Hawkins started shouting at her. He had a good idea now what had happened on her first trip into the Mist. The Mist had reached her as it had reached her brothers. She had lived but she had been humiliated. She had wanted another opportunity. It hadn't worked. "I'm going to try to talk her out of it," Hawkins said. "Keep a tight grip on her and listen to me. It might grab you at any time." "What?" Alpha gasped, trying his best to hold the screaming girl. "What does she see?" "The ship closing in on her, I think. If it happens to you laugh at it. Now listen -- " Hawkins' voice was calm and soft. He said, "Okla. Okla, listen to me. You are perfectly fine. You are a passenger on a space cruiser. Federation license number nine-five-six-seven-five. I am the captain of this ship. My name is Hawkins. There is nothing wrong with you. The ship is fully under the control of its crew. I am breathing the air now. It is fine. Rich. Clean. I feel fine. You feel fine." Alpha caught on and said, "Okla, this is Alpha. There's nothing wrong with you. It's only the Mist. You've been through it before. It's the same as then. Just an illusion. Nothing can hurt you. We're almost through." The last was a lie but a harmless one. Hawkins knew that if they failed to snap the illusion the girl would die. That simple. If she thought she was suffocating -- and continued to think so for a sufficient period of time -- she would suffocate. Quinn's voice came on, deadened by the link. "Position of ship, normal. Condition of ship, excellent. Condition of crew -- healthy -- " Hawkins dropped to his knees and held Okla by the neck. He put his mouth to her lips and began forcing air into her lungs. Between breaths he told Alpha, "Get something to jab her with." Alpha went away. Hawkins continued. Her color was returning, a good sign. He pulled away momentarily and watched her chest. It was moving. She said, "Away -- " in a whisper. Alpha said, "A giant snake just ate its way into the cabin," and handed Hawkins a needle. He took it, jabbed it into Okla's arm at the elbow. Her eyes opened and she jumped up. Hawkins hit her in the mouth. She fell again and began spitting blood. Hawkins said, "Good," and smiled. He told Alpha, "Take her into the back and have her linked. We two can handle it out here." Alpha carried the girl away. She was moaning and spitting. V B y the time he reached the control panel Hawkins was laughing aloud. It was the first time he had laughed in the Mist. He called the ship and it said, "We're getting full back here." "And outside?" "We just passed a cruiser. A real one this time, according to the ship. A derelict, we suppose. It wasn't moving." "That's a good sign." "What's a good sign?" "We're getting deeper." He switched off and turned to face Alpha. It was just him and the kid now. Was he doing right? Was Alpha really the best of the lot? He had to be. He was the only one who hadn't cracked yet. The others had all failed him when he needed them the most. Alpha said, "That wasn't too bad. I saw it, too, but I shook it off." "It was my mistake," Hawkins said. "I should never have believed her. I should've believed my eyes. She didn't look as tough as she talked." "What's the time now?" "Three hours, ten minutes," said Hawkins. "That's good." "Better than anybody's ever done -- except me. It's good." "What got you out?" "I went mad." Alpha laughed. "You went twenty-nine hours. And it only takes twenty-nine days more than that." "Nobody made you come." "That's true -- that's true." He was still laughing, so Hawkins joined him. It didn't help. Four hours had passed. (Hawkins read the clock and nodded. Not bad -- but getting worse.) Five hours. Six. Ten hours? (Yes, that's what it said and they were eating dinner and Alpha was telling a joke. Ten hours and telling a joke?) Twelve hours. Fifteen hours. (Alpha was sleeping.) Seventeen hours. Seventeen and one-half hours. E ighteen hours had passed since they had first penetrated the Mist and to Hawkins they were no longer inside a ship. The ship had vanished about two hours back, swallowed whole by a creature that resembled a mechanical elephant. He and Alpha were alone now, floating mistily through the void. The void? If it only were a void. It was a vast pot of boiling oil through which they floated. A river of molten lava. A sleek plain covered with blades of fiery grass. And behind them was the creature with the five heads, the hundred-and-one eyes, the gaping mouths and the snakes that rose from each of its heads, reaching and grasping. And the noise. It was impossible to talk now; the noise was too thunderous. Was Alpha seeing it all too? Hearing it as well? Hawkins could not tell, but Alpha was clawing at his eyes. A bad sign. Hawkins reached over and removed Alpha's hands from his eyes. He put his lips close to his ear and shouted, "Don't be afraid -- the Mist -- all is false." Alpha did not reply but stopped clawing at his eyes. One corner of Hawkins's mind kept insisting: You're still in the ship; you cannot see it, touch it, feel it -- but it is there... Hawkins decided to put this to a test. Slowly and carefully he pulled himself across (the floor). He went to where the control panel ought to be, located and lifted (the phone). He spoke into it, trying not to shout, unable to hear the sound of his own voice. "Quinn -- Quinn -- Quinn." "Hawkins -- where were you?" "Right here, Quinn. Here all the time. It's bad, worse than ever. You always forget how bad." "It's bad here, too -- but together -- " "Alpha is here." "Yes, but we're the ones making it. That's the point. This is the way. The three of us, leaning on one another. Quinn and Deak and Okla. And the ship, too. We use the ship's eyes. No illusions, flying straight like an arrow." Hawkins spoke slowly: "Automatic flights can't make it." "But we're only partly automatic. And mostly human." Hawkins was screaming suddenly and he dropped (the phone). The linked voice said, "Hawkins? For God's sake -- " Hawkins crawled through the Mist and grabbed Alpha by the throat. Something was hurting him -- tiny little things like an army of ants. They were eating, chewing their way toward the light. Alpha had caused it. Hawkins squeezed harder, squeezed Alpha's throat. Alpha clawed at Hawkins' eyes and the two of them rolled across (the floor). And fell through it. Down. Straight down, turning, twisting, whirling in the airless void.' Alpha was screaming, "The Mist -- the Mist." Hawkins wouldn't let go. Alpha was younger, stronger, tougher. But Hawkins had Right on his side. And those things like ants. They were still inside him, still chewing, and together they fell. They went through clouds of smoke and flame and fell against monsters and creatures, snakes and spiders, and combinations of both, and more and more and worse and worse, rolling, tumbling and falling together. They struck. Hawkins released his grip, jumped to his feet, and ran. He was on a wooden platform. He paused at the edge and looked back at Alpha. Below was fire and above was fire and inside were the things. Chewing. He turned to jump. And something big hit him in the back. He closed his eyes and began to die. H awkins awoke and the discovery that he wasn't dead came as a surprise to him. A voice said, "Welcome back, Mr. Hawkins." It seemed to come from somewhere inside him. Hawkins opened his eyes but saw nothing. The voice said, "You don't have visual." Hawkins tried to speak. "Deak," he wanted to say, but couldn't. Deak said, "I'm predominant. Don't talk; just think." "We're linked?" "Hello, Hawkins," said Okla's voice. "I guess we weren't as strong as we thought." He was beginning to remember now. He asked, "Alpha?" "Up front," Deak said. "I thought I'd killed him." "He thought the same about you." "How many hours did we make it?" "Forty-two." "I must've been out a long time. The last I remember was eighteen." "We kept you out on purpose. Wanted to make sure you got all the way back." "Where's Quinn?" "In front, acting as captain." "Give me predominance. I want to talk to him." Deak said, "Yes, sir." There was a mental shift and Hawkins took over. He was feeling better now, back in a spot to which he was long accustomed. He beeped the forward cabin and got Quinn. "Hawkins is predominant and awake," he said, using the linked voice. "We broke your record." "Hawkins is still captain-of-record. He gets all the credit. How's Alpha?" "He's fine. I had him in link for a while and he pulled out of it." "And you? Hawkins thought you were finished." "Somebody had to take over out here and I thought I was the best candidate. I've found out one thing -- after you've died once the second time is not so bad. Or the third." "Where are we now? How far from the Edge?" "We're in the Mist." "What? Hawkins is coming out there." "Tell him to stay where he is. He's needed. We're about to jump." "For home?" "For the other side. We can't last a month in normal space and it's quiet out there. Take a look. Nothing but the Mist, no monsters, space fleets or atomic bombs. I think we can make it." The linked, voice said, "Good luck -- " and switched off. T hey made the jump an hour later. Hawkins let Deak regain predominance. He was tired. He watched but took no active role. They entered intraspace, proceeded through it and came out on the other side. He left the link, got to his feet and went forward. Quinn and Alpha were waiting. Quinn looked like hell. His whole body was shaking, his eyes were red as dwarf suns, his tongue was fat and swollen. "We made it," he said. Hawkins allowed himself a smile. Deak and Okla had entered the cabin and the five of them crowded around the control panel. They looked at the viewscreen, expanded to show an area fifteen light-years in diameter. First they looked at the dot which represented their ship, then they looked toward the Edge. Between the Edge and the ship lay the Mist. "Now what?" Deak asked. "You do something like this and there's nothing left except to go back and do it again the other way." "Now we wait for them to come for us," said Hawkins. "Who's them?" Okla asked. "Whoever put that thing up. They'll be here. We wait." Quinn looked sour. He turned to Deak. "If there's more waiting to be done I'm going to need help before I fall over." "Medicine's in the back," Deak said, and the two of them went away. T he alien craft appeared on the viewscreen one hour later. It was enormous, at least twice the size of any human ship. A tentative radio contact was exchanged -- the multiplication tables. The next message arrived simultaneously in the minds of all five humans. You have succeeded in passing the first of your tests. Our race extends to your race its congratulations on your first step toward true maturity as a people. Your second test has been devised and now awaits your efforts. The alien ship was gone from the screen. The Mist was no longer behind them. It, too, was gone. But something new had appeared on the screen, larger than the Mist and more solid in appearance, like a great wall that stretched outward toward infinity. The Wall lay directly in front of their craft. Hawkins said, "The bastards," and ordered his crew to prepare for the journey home. lined office and played with the dials of an intraspace phone. He enjoyed being alone with his memories of the days when he'd been out there, hunting and seeking for whatever it was that man always sought. The time he, Hawkins and the rest had come back from the Mist was easy for him to remember. It had been exactly one year ago. Nyby had arrested the lot of them, too stupid to understand that they had done what no other man had ever done, that they were heroes. They had never gone to jail, of course. They had been heroes for a while and then everybody forgot and they were just people again. But the memories were still there, clear and warm and fine. But things were okay now, too, Deak decided. He liked this soft life, enjoyed his plush office and simple job. He took the phone and dialed a number. There was a pause, then he said, "This is the Governor. What I want is -- " A lpha touched the girl's hand and said, "This place never changes. It's been a year and it's the same." "Some things never change." Quinn stood at the bar, drinking with a group of green-skinned aliens. Alpha and Okla went over to join him. Okla said, "I'm happy now, happier than I've ever been. Isn't that all that matters? I know it wasn't my doing, that I should never even have been there, but I was there and it made me feel good." Alpha said, "It did that for all of us -- and all of us should never have been there." "Except Hawkins," said Quinn. Hawkins was outside, beyond the Edge and beyond the Mist. He was searching, seeking, hunting. He was hunting for life. Hawkins faced the Wall.  To find black, search white. To find heaven, search hell... I twenty-first floor. Things have not been good for stockbrokers recently, what with tight money and hysterical reaction to the news and all that. When business gets really bad for a brokerage it often doesn't fail -- it merges. This has something to do with the public image. The company I work for is going through the agony. For the lower echelons -- me -- that means detail you wouldn't believe, with a reduced staff. In other words, night work. Last night I worked without looking up urttil my whole body was the shape of the chair and there was a blue haze around the edges of everything I could see. I finished a stack and peered at the row of stacks still to be done and tried to get up. It took three tries before my hips and knees would straighten enough to let me totter into the hall and down to the men's room. It never occurred to me to close the office door and I guess the confusion, all the strange faces coming and going for the past few days, extended to the security man downstairs. However it happened, there was a dazed man in my office when I came back a moment later. He was well dressed -- I guess that, too, helped him pass the guards -- in a brown sharkskin suit with funny lapels, what you might call up-to-the-minute camp. He wore an orange knitted tie the like of which you only see in a new boutique or an old movie. I'd say he was in his twenties -- not yet twenty-five. And dazed. When I walked in and stopped dead he gave me a lost look and said, "This is my office." I said the only thing I could think of. "Oh?" He pivoted slowly all the way around, looking at the desk, the shelves,the files. When he came around to face me again he said, "This isn't my office." He had to be with the big fivename brokerage house that was gobbling up my company in its time of need. I asked him. "No," he said, "I work for Fortune." "Look," I said, "you're not only in the wrong office, you're in the wrong building. Time-Life is on Sixth Avenue -- been there since nineteen fifty-two." "Fifty-rwo -- " He looked around the room again. "But I -- but it's -- " He sat down on the settle. I had the idea he'd have collapsed on the floor if the settle hadn't been there. He asked me what day it was. I think I misunderstood. "Thursday," I said. I looked at my watch. "Well, it's now Friday." "I mean, what's the date?" I pointed to the desk calendar right beside him. He looked at it twice, each one a long careful look. I never saw a man turn the color he turned. He covered his eyes. Even his lips went white. "Oh my God." "You all right?" I asked -- a very stupid question. "Tell me something," he said after a while. "Has there been a war?" "You have to be kidding." He took his hand down and looked at me, so lost, so frightened. Not frightened. There has to be a word. Artguished. He needed answers -- needed them. Not questions, not now. I said, "It's been going on a long time." "A lot of young guys killed?" "Upwards of fifty thousand." Something made me add: "Americans. The other side, five, six times that." "Oh, my God," he said again; Then: "It's my fault." Now I have to tell you up front that it never occured to me for one second that this guy was on any kind of a drug trip. Not that I'm an expert, but there are times when you just know. Whatever was bothering him was genuine -- at least genuine to him. Besides, there was something about him I had to like. Not the clothes, not the face, just the guy, the kind of guy he was. and I'm sick and tired of what I'm doing. Let's take a break and go to the Automat for coffee." He gave me that lost look again. "Is the lid off on sex? I mean, young kids -- " "Like rabbits," I said. "Also your friendly neighborhood movie -- I don't know what they're going to do for an encore." I had to ask him, "Where've you been?" He shook his head and said candidly, "I don't know where it was. Are people leaving their jobs -- and school -- going off to live on the land?" "Some," I said. "Come on." I switched off the overhead light, leaving my desk lamp lit. He got to his feet as if he were wired to the switch, but then just stood looking at the calendar. "Are there bombings?" "Three yesterday, in Newark. Come on." "Oh, my God," he said and came. I locked the door and we went down the corridor to the elevators. Air wheezed in the shaft as the elevator rose. "It always whistles like that late at night," he said. I had never noticed that but knew he was right as soon as he said it. He also said weakly, "You don't feel like walking down?" "Twenty-one flights?" The doors slid open. The guy didn't want to get in. But I mean, he really didn't. I stood on the crack while he screwed up his courage. It didn't take long but I could see it was a mighty battle. He won it and came in, turned around and leaned against the back wall. I pushed the button and we started down. He looked pretty bad. I said something to him but he put up a hand, waved my words away before they were out. He didn't move again until the doors opened and then he looked into the lobby as if he didn't know what to expect. But it was just the lobby, with the oval information desk we called the fishbowl and the shiny floor and the portable wooden desk, like a lectern, where you signed in and out after hours and where the guard was supposed to be. We breezed by it and out into Rockefeller Center. He took a deep breath and immediately coughed. "What's that smell?" I'd been about to say something trivial about the one good thing about working late -- you could breathe the air, but I didn't say it. "The smog, I guess." "Smog. Oh yes, smoke and fog. I remember." Then he seemed to remember something else, something that brought his predicament, whatever it was, back with a hammer blow. "Well of course," he said as if to himself. "Has to be." On Sixth Avenue (New Yorkers still won't call it Avenue of the Americas) we passed two laughing couples. One of the girls was wearing a see-through top made of plastic chainmail. The other had on a very maxi coat swinging open over a hotpants. My companion was appreciative but not astonished. I think what he said was, "That, too -- " nodding his head. He watched every automobile that passed and his eyes flicked over the places where they used to sell books and back-date periodicals, every single one of them now given over to peepshows and beaver magazines. He had the same nod of his head for this. We reached the Automat and it occurred to me that an uncharacteristic touch of genius had made me suggest it. I had first seen the Automat when I had ridden in on my mother's hip more years ago than I'll mention -- and many times since -- and very little has changed -- except, of course, the numbers on the little off-white cards that tell you how many nickels you have to put in the slot to claim your food. After a few years' absence one tends to yelp at the sight of them. I always do and the strange young man with me did, too. Aside from that, there is a timeless quality about the place, especially in the small hours of the morning. The overage, overpainted woman furtively eating catsup is there as she, or someone just like her, has been for fifty years; and the young couple, homely to you but beautiful to each other, full of sleepiness and discovery; and the working stiff in the case-hardened slideway of his life, grabbing a bite on the way from bed to work and not yet awake -- no need to be -- and his counterpart headed in the other direction; no need for him to be awake either. And all around: the same marble change counter with the deep worn pits in it from countscooped; behind it the same weary automaton; and around you the same nickel (not chrome) framing for the hundreds of little glassfronted doors through which the food always looks so much better than it is. All in all, it's a fine place for the reorientation of timetravelers. "Are you a time-traveler?" I asked, following my own whimsy and hoping to make him smile. He didn't smile. "No," he said. "Yes, I -- well -- " flickering panic showed in his eyes -- "I don't really know." We bought our coffee straight out of the lion's mouth and carried it to a corner table. I think that when we were settled there he really looked at me for the first time. He said, "You've been very kind." "Well," I said, "I was glad of the break." "Look, I'm going to tell you what happened. I guess I don't expect you to believe me. I wouldn't in your place." "Try me," I offered. "And anyway -- what difference does it make whether I believe you?" " 'Belief or nonbelief has no power over objective truth.'" I could tell by his voice he was quoting somebody. The smile I had been looking for almost came and he said, "You're right. I'll tell you what happened because -- well, because I want to. Have to." I said fine and told him to shoot. He shot. tion he began. Or maybe I should say I worked -- I guess I should. You'll have to pardon me, I'm a little confused. There's so much -- Maybe I should start over. It didn't begin in Rockefeller Center. It started, oh, I don't know how long ago, with me wondering about things. Not that I'm anything special -- I'm not saying I am -- but it seems nobody else wonders about the same things I do. I mean, people are so close to what happens that they don't seem to know what's going on. Wait, I don't want to confuse you, too. One of us is enough. Let me give you an example. World War II was starting up when I was a kid and one day a bunch of us sat around, trying to figure out who would be fighting who. Us and the British and French on one side, sure -- the Germans and Austrians and Italians on the other -- that was clear enough. And the Japanese. But beyond that? It's all history and hindsight now and there's no special reason to think about it, but at the time it was totally impossible for anyone to predict the lineup that actually came about. Go back in the files of newspaper editorials -- Harper's or Reader's Digest or any other -- and you'll see what I mean. Nobody predicted that up to the very end of the war our best and strongest friend would be at peace with our worst and deadliest enemy. I mean, if you put it on personal terms -- if you and I are friends and there's somebody out to kill me and I find out that you and he are buddies -- could we even so much as speak to each other again? Yet here was the Soviet Union, fighting shoulder to shoulder with us against the Nazis, while for nearly five years they were at peace with Japan! And about Japan: there were hundreds of thousands of Chinese who had been fighting a life-anddeath war against the Japanese for ten years -- ten years, man! -- and along with them, Koreans. So we together to mount air strikes against Japan from thousands of miles away -- New Guinea, the Solomons, Saipan, Tinian. Do you know how far it is from the Chinese mainland to Tokyo, across the Sea of Japan? Six hundred miles. Do you know how far it is from Pusan, Korea to Hiroshima? A hundred and thirty! I'm sorry. I get excited like that to this day when I think of it. But damn it -- why didn't we negotiate to move in and set up airstrips on the mainland and Korea? Do you think the natives would have turned us down? Or is it that we just don't like chop suey? Oh, sure -- there are a lot of arguments like backing up Chiang against the Communists and I even read somewhere that it was not our policy to interfere in Southeast Asia. (Did I say something funny?) But you know Chiang and the Communists had a truce -- and kept it too -- to fight the common enemy. Well -- all right. All that seems a long way from what happened to me, I suppose, but it's the kind of thing I've spent my life wondering about. It's not just wars that bring out the thing I'm talking about, though God knows they make it plainer to see. Italy and Germany sharpening their newest weapons and strategies in the Spanish civil war, for example, or Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia -- hell, the more sophisticated people got the less they could see what was in front of them. Any kid in a kindergarten knows a bully when he sees one and has sense enough at least to be afraid. Any sixth-grader knows how to organize a pressure group against a bad guy. Wars, you see, are really life-and-death situations, where what's possible, practical -- logical -- has a right to emerge. When it doesn't -- you have to wonder. French peasants taxed till they bled to build the Maginot Line all through the thirties, carefully preparing against the kind of war they fought in nineteen fourteen. But let's look some place else. Gonorrhea could be absolutely stamped out in six months, syphilis maybe in a year. I picked up a pamphlet last month -- hey, I have to watch that "last month," "nowadays," things like that -- anyway, the pamphlet drew a correlation between smoking cigarettes and a rising curve of lung cancer, said scientific tests prove that something in cigarettes can cause cancer in mice. Now I bet if the government came out with an official statement about that, people would read it and get scared -- and go on smoking cigarettes. You're smiling again. That's funny?  dazed man. "Here -- let me bring some more coffee." "On me this time," He spilled coins on the table. "But you were smiling, all the same." "It wasn't that kind of a smile, like for a funny," I told him. "The Surgeon General came out with a report years ago. Cigarette advertising is finally banned from TV, but how much difference does it make? Look around you." While he was looking around him I was looking at his coins. Silver quarters. Silver dimes. Nickels: #, #, #. I began to feel very strange about this dude. Correction: my feel-strange went up another notch. He said, "A lot of the people who aren't smoking are coughing, too." We sat there together, looking around. Again he had shown me something I had always seen, never known. How many people cough. I went for more coffee. II Every four weeks I get -- got? -- got a makeready. A makeready is a copy of a magazine with all the proofing done and the type set, your last look before the presses roll. I have to admit it gives me -- used to give me -- a sense of importance to get it free (it's an expensive magazine) even before the "men high in government, industry, commerce and the professions" (as it says in the circulation promotion letters I write) had a chance to read it and move and shake, for they are the movers and shakers. Anyway, there's this article in the new -- not current; really new -- issue called The Silent Generation. It's all about this year's graduating class, the young men who in June would go into the world and begin to fit their hands to the reins. This is nineteen-fifty I'm talking about, you understand, in the spring. And it was frightening. I mean, it spooked me while I read it and it spooked me more and more as I thought about it -- the stupidity of it, the unbelievable blindness of people -- not necessarily people as a whole, but these people in the article -- The Class of # -- young and bright and informed. They had their formal education behind them and you assumed it was fresh in their minds -- not only what they had learned, but the other thing college is really for: learning how to learn. And yet what do you suppose they were concerned about? What was it they talked about until three o'clock in the morning? What kind of plans were they making for themselves -- and for all the rest of us (for they were going to be the ones who run things)? Democracy? Ultimate purpose? The relationship of man to his planet -- or of modern man to history? Hell, no. According to this article, they worried about fringe benefits. Retirement income, for God's sake! Speed of promotion in specialized versus diversified industry! Did they spend their last few collegiate weeks in sharpening their new tools or in beering it up -- or even in one last panty raid? Uhuh. They spent them moving from office to office of the campus recruiters for big electronic and chemical and finance companies, working out the deal that would get them the steadiest, surest income and the biggest scam on the side and the softest place to lie down at the end of it. The Silent Generation, the guy who wrote the article called them. He himself graduated in the late 'thirties and he had a lot to say about his generation. There was a lot wrong about them and they did some pretty crazy things. They argued a lot with each other and with their elders and betters and they joined things like the Young Socialist League -- not so much because they were really lefties, but because those groups seemed the only ones around that gave a damn about the state the world was in. Most of all, you knew they were there. They were a noisy generation. They had that mixture of curiosity and rebellion that let you know they were alive. The writer looked at the Class of '# with a kind of despair -- and something like terror, too. Because if they came to run things, experience wouldn't merely modify them and steady them. It would harden them like an old man's arteries. It would mean more-of-thesame until they'd be living in a completely unreal world of their own with no real way of communicating with the rest of us. Growing and changing and trying new ways would only frighten them. They'd have the power, and what they'd use it for would be to suppress growth and change, not knowing that societies need growth and change to live. Just like trees or babies or art or science. So all he could see ahead was a solid, silent, prosperous standstill -- and then some sudden and total collapse, like a tree gone to dry rot. Well I don't know what you think of all this -- or if you understand how hard it hit me. But I've tried to explain to you how all my life I've been plagued by these -- well, I call them wonderments -- how, when something makes no sense, it kind of hurts. When I was a toddler I couldn't sleep for wanting someone to tell me why a wet towel is darker than a dry one when water has no color. In grade school nobody could tell me why the sound of a falling bomb gets lower and lower in pitch as it approaches the ground, when by all the laws of physics it ought to rise. And in high school I wouldn't buy the idea about a limitation on the velocity of light. (And I still don't.) About things like these I've never lost faith that somebody, some day, would come up with an answer that would satisfy me -- and sure enough, from time to time somebody does. But when I was old enough to wonder why smart people do dumb things that kind of faith could only last so long. And I began to feel that there was some other factor, or force, at work. Do you remember Gulliver's putians and another nation of little people -- I forget what they called themselves -- and Gulliver intervened and ended the war. Anyway, he researched the two countries and found they had once been one. And he tried to find out what caused so many years of bitter enmity between them after they split. He found that there had been two factions in that original kingdom -- the Big Endians and the Little Endians. And do you know where that started? Far back in their history, at breakfast one morning, one of the king's courtiers opened his boiled egg at the big end and another told him that was wrong, it should be opened at the small end! The point Dean Swift was making is that from such insignificant causes grow conflicts that can last centuries and kill thousands. Well, he was near the thing that's plagued me all my life, but he was content to say it happened that way. What blowtorches me is -- why. Why are human beings capable of hating each other over such trifles? Why, when an ancient triviality is proved to be the cause of trouble, don't people just stop fighting? But I'm off on wars again -- I guess because when you're talking about stupidity, wars give you too many good examples. So tell me -- why, when someone's sure to die of an incurable disease and needs something for pain -- why don't they give him heroin instead of morphine? Is it because heroin's habit-forming? What difference could that possibly make? And besides, morphine is, too. I'll tell you why -- it's because heroin makes you feel wonderful and morphine makes you feel numb and gray. In other words, heroin's fun (mind you, I'm talking about terminal cases, dying in agony, not normally healthy people) and morphine is not -- and if it's fun. there must be something evil or wrong about it. A dying man is not supposed to be made to feel good. And laws that keep venereal disease from being recognized and treated; and laws against abortion; and all the obscenity statutes -- right down at the root these are all anti-pleasure laws. Would you like the job of explaining that to a man from Mars, who hadn't been brought up with them? He couldn't follow reasoning like that any more than he could understand why we have never designed a heat engine -- which is essentially what an internal combustion engine is -- that can run without a cooling system -- a system designed to dissipate heat! And lots more. So maybe you see what happened to me when I read the article about the Class of 'fifty. The article peaked a tall pyramid inside me, brought everything to a sharp point. young man. All this time and he hadn't yet lost the dazed look. I guess it was hard to blame him. "Pens are no good on paper napkins," he said. I handed him my felt-tip. "Try this." He tried it. "Hey, this is great. This is really keen." A felt-tip does fine on paper napkins. He studied it as if he had never seen such a thing before. "Really keen," he said again. Then he drew this:  "Yingyang," I said. "Right?" He nodded. "One of the oldest symbols on Earth. Then you know what it means." "Well, some anyway. All opposites -- life and death, light and dark, male and female, heavy and light-anything that has an opposite." "That's it," he said. "Well, let me show you something." Using another napkin, folded in two, as a straightedge, he lay it across the symbol. "You see, if you were to travel in a straight line across a diameter -- any diameter -- you'd have to go on both black and white somewhere along the way. You can't go all the way on just one color without bending the line or going a short way, less than the diameter. "Now let's say this circle is the board on which the game of human affairs is played. The straight line can be any human course -- a life, a marriage, a philosophy, a business. The optimum course is a full diameter, and that's what most people naturally strive for; a few might travel short chords or bent ones -- sick ones. Most people can and do travel the diameter. For each person, life, marriage. whatever, there's a different starting point and a different arrival point, but if they travel the one straight line that goes through the center, they will travel black country exactly as much as white, ying as much as yang. The balance is perfect, no matter where you start or which way you go. Got it?" "I see what you mean," I said. "Your coffee's cold." "So's yours. Now look: suppose some force came along and shifted one of these colors away from the center point, like this -- " And he drew again. o We studied his drawing. He drew well and quickly. He said, "You see, if the shift were gradual, then from the very second it began there would be some people -- some lives, philosophies -- who would no longer have that perfect balance between black and white, between ying and yang. Nothing wrong with the course they traveled -- they still aim for the very center and pass on through. "And if the shift continued to where I've drawn it, you can see that some people might travel all the way on the white only. "And that's what has happened to us. That's the answer to what seems to be human stupidity. There's nothing wrong with people! Far and away most of them want to travel that one straight line, and they do. It isn't their fault that the rules have been changed and that the only way to the old balance for anyone is to travel a course that is sick or twisted or short. "The coffee is cold. Oh, God, I've been running off at the mouth. You'll want to get back to the office." "No, I won't," I said. "The hell with it. You go on." For somewhere along the line he had filled me with a deep, strange excitement. The things that he said had plagued him all his life -- or things like them -- had plagued me, too. How often had I stood in a voting booth, trying to decide between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, the Big Endians versus the Little Endians? Why can't you tell someone, "Honesty is the best policy -- " or "do as you would be done by -- " and straighten his whole life out, even when it might make the difference between life and death? Why do people go on smoking cigarettes? Why is a woman's breast -- which for thousands of artists has been a source of beauty and of life -- regarded as obscene? Why do we manipulate to increase the cost of this road or that sclpol so we can "bring in Federal money" as if the Federal money weren't coming from our own pockets? And since most people try to be decent and honest and kind -- why do they do the stupid things they do? What in the name of God put us into Viet Nam? What are ghettoes all about? Why can't the honest sincere liberals just shut up and quietly move into the ghettoes any time they can guarantee that someone from the ghetto can take their place in the old neighborhood -- and keep right on doing it until there are no more ghettoes? Why can't they establish a country called Suez out of territory on both sides of the canal -- and populate it from Israel and all the Arab countries and all the refugees and finance it with canal tolls and put in atomic power plants to de-salt seawater and make the desert bloom, and forbid weapons and this-or-that "quarters" and hatred? In other words, why are simple solutions always impossible? Why is any solution that acceptable? What makes us undercopulate and overbreed when the perfect balance is available to everybody? And at this weary time of a quiet morning in the Automat, I was pinioned by the slender bright shard of hope that my dazed friend had answers. Go back to the office? Really, the hell with it. "You go ahead," I said, and he did. Ill that article about the class of '# -- the Silent Generation -- and I began to get mad-scared, and it grew and grew until I felt I had to do something about it. If the class of '# ever got to run things, they'd have the money, they'd have the power. In a very real sense they'd have the guns. It would be the beginning of a long period -- maybe forever -- of more-of-the-sameness. There didn't seem any way to stop it. Now I'd worked out this yingyang theory when I was a college sophomore, because it was the only theory that would fit all the facts. Given that some force had shifted the center, good people, traveling straight the way they should, had to do bad things because they could never, never achieve that balance. There was only one thing I didn't know. What force had moved the center? I sat in the office, dithering and ignoring my work, and tried to put myself together. Courage, mon camarade, le diable est mart, is what I said to myself. That mean anything to you? No? Okay -- when I was a kid I read a book called The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade. It was about a kid raised in a monastery who went into the world -- an eighteenth-century kind of world, or earlier, I forget now. Anyway, one of the people he meets is a crazy Frenchman, always kicking up his heels and cheering people up and at the worst of times that's what he'd say: Courage, buddy -- the devil is dead. It stuck with me and I used to say it when everything fell apart and there seemed nowhere to turn and nothing to grab hold of. I said it now, and you know, it was like a flash bulb going off between my ears. Mind you, it was real things I was fretting about, not myths or fantasies or religious principles. It was overpopulation and laws against fun and the Dust Bowl (remember that? Well, look it up some time) and nowhere to put the and cruelty and apathy. I took a pad of paper and drew these same diagrams and sat looking at them. I was very excited, I felt I was very near an answer. Ying and Yang. Good and evil -- sure -- but nobody who understands it would ever assign good to one color and bad to the other. The whole point is, they both have to be there and in perfect balance. Light and dark, male and female, closed and open, life and death, that-which-is-outgoing and that-which-comes-together -- all of it, everything -- opposition, balance. Well now, for a long time the devil has had a bad name. Say a bad press. And why not? Just for the sake of argument, say it is the yang country he used to rule and that is the one that was forced aside. Anyone living and thinking in a straight line could spend his whole life and career and all his thinking in ying country. He'd have to know that yang was there, but he'd never encounter it, never experience it. More than likely he'd be afraid of it because that's what ignorance does to people, even good people. And the ones who did have some experience of yang, the devil's country, would find much more of the other as they went along, because the balance would be gone. And the more the shift went on, the more innocent, wellmeaning, thoughtful people ran the course of their lives and thoughts, the worse they would think of the devil's country and the worse they would talk about it and him. It would get so you couldn't trust the books; they'd all been written from the one point of view, the majority side of imbalance. It would begin to look as if the yang part of the universe were a blot which had to be stamped out to make a nice clean all-ying universe -- and you have your John Knox types and your Cotton Mathers; just good people traveling straight and strong and acting from evidence that was all wrong by reason that couldn't be rational. And I thought. That's it! The devil is dead! I have to do something about it. But what? Tell somebody, that's what. Tell everybody, but let's be practical. There must be somebody, somewhere, who knows what to do about it -- or at least how to explain about the yingyang and how it's gone wrong, so that everybody could rethink what we've done, what we've been. Then I remembered the Saturday Review. The Saturday Review has a personals column in it that's read by all sorts of people -- judging by the messages. But I mean all kinds of people. If I could write the right ad, word it just the right way... I felt like a damn fool. Year of Our Lord #, turning all my skills as a professional copywriter to telling the world that the devil was dead, but it was an obsession, you see, and I had to do something, even something insane. I had to start somewhere. So I wrote the ad. er's torch is out and we're all on the same end of the seesaw. Help or we'll die of it. Whoever knows the answer call DU#-# Extension #. I'm not going to tell you how many drafts I wrote or all the reasons why, copywise, that was best, mixed metaphors and all. I knew that whoever could help would know what I was asking. N OW comes the hard part. For you, I mean, not me. Me, I did what I had to. You're going to have to believe it. Well, maybe you don't have to. Just -- well, just suspend disbelief until you hear me out, okay? All right. I wrote up the copy and addressed an envelope. I put on a stamp and a special delivery. I put in the copy and a check. I sealed it and crossed the hall -- you know where the mail chute is -- right across from my door. Your door. It was late by then, everyone had gone home and my footsteps echoed and I could hear that funny whistle under the elevator doors. I slid the envelope into the slot and let go, and my phone rang. I'd never heard it ring quite like that before. I can say that, yet I can't tell you how it was different. I sprinted into the office and sat down and picked up the phone. I'm glad I sat down first. There was this Voice... I have a hell of an ear, you know that? I've thought a lot about that Voice and recalled it to myself and I can tell you what it was made of -- a tone, its octave and the fifth harmonic. I mean if you can imagine a voice made of three notes, two an octave apart and the third reinforcing, but not really three notes at all, because they sounded absolutely together like one. Then, they weren't pure notes, but voice-tones, with all the overtones that means. And none of that tells you anything either, any more than if I described the physical characteristics of a vibrating string and the sound it produced -- when the string happened to be on a cello played by Pablo Casals. You know how it is in a room full of people when you suddenly become aware of a single voice that commands attention because of what it is, not what it says. When a. voice like that has, in addition, something to say -- well, you listen. I listened. The first thing I heard -- I didn't even have a chance to say hello -- was: "You're right. You're absolutely right." I said, "Who is this?" and the Voice sighed a little and waited. Then it said, "Let's not go into that. It would be best if you figured it out by yourself." As things turned out, that was a hundred percent on target. I think if the Voice hadn't taken that tack I'd have hung up, or anyway wasted a lot of time in being convinced. The Voice said, "What matters is your ad in the Saturday Review." "I just mailed it!" "I just read it," the Voice said, then explained: "Time isn't quite the same here." At least I think that's what it said. It said, "How everything right again?" I didn't know what to say. I remember holding the phone away from my face and looking at it as if it could tell me something. Then I listened again. The Voice told me everything I was going through, carefully, not bored exactly but the way you explain to a child that you know what's bothering him. The Voice said, "You know who I am but you won't think the words. You don't want to believe any part of this but you have to and you know you will. You're so pleased with yourself for being right that you cannot think straight -- which is only one of the reasons you can't think straight. Now pull yourself together and answer my question." I couldn't remember the question, so I had to be asked once to make everything right again? You have to understand that this Voice meant what it said. If you'd heard it, you'd have believed it -- anybody would. I know I was being asked to make a commitment and that was pretty scary, but over and above that I knew I was being told that everything could be made right again -- that the crazy tilt that had been plaguing mankind for hundreds, maybe thousands of years could be fixed. And I might be the guy to do it -- me, for God's sake. If I had any doubts, any thiscan't-be kind of feelings -- they disappeared. How far would I go? I said, "All the way." The Voice said, "Good. If this works you can take the credit. If it doesn't you take the blame -- and you'll have to live with the idea that you might have done it and you failed. I won't be able to help you with that." I said, anyway I'd know I'd tried. The Voice said, "Even if you succeed you may not like what has to be done." I said, "Suppose I don't do it -- what will happen?" The Voice said, "You ever read #T I said I had. The Voice said, "Like that, only more so and sooner. There isn't any other way it can go now." That s what I'd been thinking -- that's what had upset me when I read the article. "I'll do it," is all I said. The Voice said that was fine. It said "I'm going to send you to see somebody. You have to persuade him. He won't talk to me and he's the only one who can do anything." I began to have cold feet. "But who is he? Where? What do I say?" "You know what to say. Or I wouldn't be talking to you." I asked, "What do I have to do?" And all I was told was to take the elevator. Then the line went dead. S o I turned out the lights and went to the door -- and then I remembered and went back for my drawings of the yingyang, one as it ought to be and the other, showing it out of balance. I held them like you'd hold an airline ticket on a first flight. I went to the elevators. How am I going to make you believe this? Well, you're right -- it doesn't matter if you do or not. Okay, here's what happened. I pushed the call button and the door opened instantly, the way it does once in a while. I stepped into the elevator and turned around -- and there I was. The door hadn't closed, the car hadn't moved. It all happened when I was turning around. The door was open, but not in the hallway on the twenty-first floor. The scene was gray. Hard gray outdoor ground and gray mist. I stood a while looking out and my heart was thumping like someone was pounding me on the back with fists. But nothing happened, so I stepped out. I was scared. Nothing happened. The gray fog was neither still nor blowing. Sometimes there seemed to be shapes out there somewhere -- trees, rocks, buildings -- but then there was nothing and maybe it was all a vast plain. It had an outdoors feel to it -- that's all I can say for sure. The elevator door was solidly behind me, which was reassuring. I took one step away from it -- a little one. I'll have you know -- and called out. It took three tries before my voice would work. "Lucifer!" A voice answered me. Somehow it wasn't as -- well, as grand as the one I'd heard over the phone, but in other ways it was bigger. It said, "Who is that? What do you want?" It was cranky. It was the voice of someone interrupted, someone who felt damn capable of handling the interruption, too. And this time there really was something looming closer through the fog. I clapped my hands over my face. I felt my knees hit the gray dirt. I didn't kneel down, you understand. The knees just buckled as if they didn't belong to me any more. But hell, the wings. Bat's wings, leathery, and a tail with a point on it like a big arrowhead. That face, eyes. And thirty feet tall, man! He touched my shoulder and I would have screamed like a schoolgirl if I'd had the breath for it. "Come on now." It was a different voice altogether -- he'd changed it -- but it was his all the same. He said, "I don't look like that. That came out of your head. Here -- look at me." I looked. I guess it was funny, me kind of peeping up quickly so in case it was more than I could take I could hide my face again -- as if that would do any good. But I'd had more than I could handle. What I saw was a middle-aged guy in a buff corduroy jacket and brown slacks. He had graying hair and a smooth suntanned forehead and the brightest blue eyes I have ever seen. He helped me to my feet. He said, "I don't look like this either, but -- " he shrugged and smiled. I said, "Well, thanks anyway -- " and felt stupid. I looked around at the fog. "Where is this?" He kind of waved his hand. "I can't really say. Where would you want it to be?" How do you answer a question like that? I couldn't. He could. He put the back of his hand against my cheek and gently turned my face toward him and bent close. He did something I can only describe as what you do when you pick up a magazine and run your thumb across the edge of the pages and flip it open somewhere. Only he did it inside my head somehow. Anyway there was a blaze of golden light that made me blink. to it the gray was gone. When I was a kid I worked one year on a farm in Vermont. I used to go for the cows in the late afternoon. The day pasture was huge, with a stand of pine at the upper end and the whole thing was steep as a roof. with granite outcroppings all over, gray, and white limestone. That's where we were, the vdty smell of it, the little lake with the dirt road around the end of it far down at the bottom and the wind hissing through the pine trees up there and a woodchuck ducking out of sight on the skyline. I could even see three of the Holsteins, standing level on the sidehill in that miraculous way they have as if they had two short legs and two long ones. I never did figure out how they do it. And I got a flash of panic, too, because my elevator door was gone -- but he seemed to know and just waved his hand casually over to my left. And there it was, a Rockefeller Center elevator door in the middle of a Vermont pasture. Funny. When I was fourteen that door in the pasture would have scared the hell out of me. Now I was scared without it. I looked around me and smelled the late August early evening and marveled. "It's so real," is what I said. "Seems real." "But I was here -- right here -- when I was a kid." "Seemed real then, too, didn't it?" I think he was trying to make me rethink all along the line -- not so much to doubt things, but to wipe everything clean and start over. "Belief or nonbelief has no power over objective truth," is what he told me. He said that if two people believe the same thing from the same evidence, it means that they believe the same thing, nothing more. While I was chewing on that he took the sketches out of my hand -- the same ones I just did for you. I had quite forgotten I was holding them. He looked at them and grunied. "It's like that, is it?" I took back the sketches and began to make my speech. I said, "You see, it's like this. Here the balance is -- " and he kind of laughed a little and said wait, wait, we don't have to go through all that. I think he meant, words. I mean he touched the side of my face again and made me face him and did that thing with his eyes inside my head. Only this time it was like taking both your thumbs and pulling open the pages of a book that are sort of stuck together. I wouldn't say it hurt but I wouldn't want much more of it either. I remember a single flash of shame that things I'd read, studied, things I'd thought out. I'd been careless with or had forgotten. And all the while -- a very short while -- he was digging in my head he was curing the shame, too. I began to understand that what he could get from me wasn't just what I'd learned and understood -- it was everything, everything that had ever passed through my pipeline. And all in a moment. Then he stepped back and said, "Bastard!" I thought, what have I done? He laughed at me. "Not you. Him. " I thought, oh. The Voice on the phone. The one who sent me. He looked at me with those sixty-thousand candlepower eyes and laughed again and wagged his head. "I swore I'd have nothing to do with him any more," he said, "and now look -- he's thrown me a hook." I guess I looked mixed-up, because I was. He began to talk to me kindly, trying to make me feel better. He said, "It's not easy to explain. You've learned so much that just ain't so and you've learned it from people who also didn't understand. Couldn't. It goes back a long time. I mean, for you it does. For me -- well, time is different here." He thought a bit and said, "Calling me Lucifer was real bright of you, you know that? Lucifer means 'bringer of light.' If you're going to stick with the yingyang symbol -- and it's a good one -- you'll see that there's a center for the dark part and a center for the light -- sometimes they're drawn in, a little dot on each part right where a pollywog's eye would be. I am that dot and the Voice you heard is the other one. Lucifer I may be, but I'm not the devil. I'm just the other. It takes two of us to make the whole. What I just might have overlooked is that it takes two of us to keep the whole. Really, I had no idea -- " and he leaned forward a got another quick look inside my head -- " no idea at all that things would get into such a mess so quickly. Maybe I shouldn't have left." I had to ask him. "Why did you?" H e said, "I got mad. I had a crazy notion one day and wanted to try something and he didn't want me to do it. But I did it anyway and then when it got me into trouble he wouldn't pull me out of it. I had to play it all the way through. It hurt." He laughed a funny laugh. I understood that 'it hurt' was a gigantic understatement. "So I got mad and cut out and came here. He's been yelling and sending messages and all, ever since, but I paid him no mind until you." "Why me?" "Yes," he said, "why you?" He thought it over. "Tell me something -- have you got anything to keep you where you are? I mean a wife or a career or kids or something that would get hurt if you suddenly disappeared?" "Nothing like that, no. Some friends -- but no wife, no folks. And my job's just a job." "Thought so," he said. Talking to himself, he said, "Bastard. Built this one from the ground up, he did. Knew damn well I'd get a jolt when I saw what a rotten mess this was." Then he said very warmly, "Don't take that personally. You can't help it." I couldn't help it. I couldn't help taking it a little personally either. Maybe I was a little sharp when I said, "Well -- are you going to come back or not?" He gave it right back to me. "I really don't know," he said. "Why don't I leave it to you? You decide." "Me?" "Why not? You got yourself into this." "Did I?" "No matter how carefully he set you up for it, friend, he had to get your permission first. Right?" I remembered that Voice; How The one I had called Lucifer fixed me with the blazing eyes. "I am going to lay it right on you. I will do what you say. If you tell me to stay here, to stay out of it, it's going to be like Orwell said: 'To visualize the future you must visualize a boot stamping eternally on a human face.' But if I come back it's going to be almost as bad. Things are really out of hand, so much that it can't be straightened out overnight. It would take years. People aren't made to take the truth on sight and act on it. They have to be prodded and pushed -- usually by being made so miserable in so many ways that they get mad. When enough of them get mad enough they'll find the way." "Well, good, then." He mimicked me. I think he was a little sore and just maybe he didn't want to go back to work. " 'Well, good then,' " he mocked me. "We'll have to shovel stupidity on them. We'll have to get them into long meaningless wars. We'll make them live under laws that absolutely make no sense and keep passing more of them. We'll lay taxes on them until they can't have luxuries and comforts without getting into trouble and we'll lay on more until it hurts to buy enough just to live." I said, "That's the same thing as the boot!" He said, "No it isn't. Let the class of '# take over and you'll have that. Orwell said eternally and he was right. No conflict, no dissent, no division, no balance. If I come back, there'll be plenty of all that. People will die -- lots of them. And hurt -- plenty." "There's no other way?" "Look," he said, "you can't give people what they want. They have to earn it or take it. When they start doing that there'll be bombings and riots and people -- especially young people -- will do what they want to and what works for them, not what they're told. They'll find their own ways -- and it won't be anything like what grandpa said." , I thought about all that and then about the class of '# and the stamping boot. "Come back," I said. He sighed and said, "Oh, God." I don't know what he meant. But I think he was glad. sudden -- there was more light outside the Automat than inside. I felt as dazed as my friend looked. I said, "And what have you been doing since nineteen fifty?" He said, "Don't you understand? All this happened last night! Last night was nineteen fifty! I got back into the elevator and walked into my -- ypur -- the office and there you were!" "And the dev -- Lucif -- whoever it was, he's back, too?" "Time is different for him. He came back right away. You've already told me enough about what's been happening since then. He's back. He's been back. Things are moving toward the center again. It's hard to do, but it's happening." I stuck my spoon into my cold old coffee and swirled it around and thought of the purposeless crime and the useless deaths and the really decent people who didn't know they were greedy, and a deep joy began to kindle inside me. "Then maybe it's not all useless." "Oh, God, it better not be," he whispered. "Because all of it is my fault." "No it isn't. Things are going to be all right." As I said that I was sure of it. I looked at him, so lost and dazed -- and I thought,  am going to help this guy. I am going to help him help me to understand better, to work out how we can bring it all into balance again. I wondered if he knew he was a messiah, that he had saved the world. I don't think he did. Sudden thought: "Hey," I said. "did he tell you why he dropped out mad like that? What was it -- he did something the other one didn't want him to do?" "Didn't I mention that? Sorry," said the dazed man. "He got tired of being a -- a force. Whatever you call it. Spirit. He wanted to be a man for a while, to see what it was like. He could do it -- but he couldn't get out of it again without the other's help. So he walked around for a while as a man -- " "And?" "And got crucified."  galaxy stars real old-timers, now enjoys two careers -- college teaching and writing st. Born in #, Jack saw his first story, "The Metal Man," appear in the December, #, issue of Amazing Stories. Since then he has had well cluding more than twenty novels. Returning to college in the late #s, he picked up his A.B. (summa cum iaude) and his M.A., then went on to earn his Ph.D. in # with a thesis on H. G. Wells. Jack is now an associate professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University in his home town of Portales. At the university Jack inaugurated one of the flrst college-level courses in sf as literature. "Theoretically, I suppose," Jack tells us, "I should be writing westerns. I was born in the mining-and-cattle town of Bisbee in the Arizona Territory. We lived on a cattle ranch in the mountainous wilds of Sonora until the Mexican Revolution and then moved by covered wagon to New Mexico when I was seven years old. But somehow the world of scientific possibility always seemed more exciting to me than the rather grim real world. I started writing science fiction on the sandhill homestead in New Mexico before I went off to college, and I don't hope to get over it..." By the way, Larry Eisenberg's new book The Best Laid Schemes is published by Macmillan -- not by Scribner's as we mistakenly reported last month. The spacer may love his ship -- but never understand her. That's a job for his wife... A I stood impassively in the port wing of his bridge as his ship, the round-the-world tramp Sonya Winneck, slid gently toward her berthbut although his stocky body was immobile, his brain was active. He was gauging speed, distances, the effect of the tide. His engines were stopped, but the vessel still seemed to be carrying too much way. He was stemming the ebb but, according to the Port Directions, there was sometimes -- not alwaysan eddy, a counter-current, along this line of wharfage. In any case the clocking would be a tight fit. Ahead of him was Iron Baron, one of the steel trade ships, a huge, beamy brute with gigantic deck cranes almost capable of lifting her by her own bootstraps. In the berth astern was the Lone Star Line's Orionic, with even more beam to her than the Baron. "Port," ordered Grimes. "Hard over." "Hard aport, sir," replied the quartermaster. Sonya Winneck was accosting the wharf at a fairly steep angle now, her stem aimed at a bollard just abaft Iron Baron's stern. Grimes lifted his whistle to his lips and blew' one short, sharp blast. From the fo'c's'le head came the rattle of chain cable as the starboard anchor was let go, then one stroke of the bell to signal that the first shackle was in the pipe. Grimes looked aft. Sonya Winneck' s quarter was now clear of Orionic's bows. "Midships. Slow astern." He heard the replies of the man at the wheel and the Third Officer. He felt the vibration as the reversed screw bit into the water. But would "slow astern" be enough? He was about to order "half astern," then realized that this was what he was getting, if not more. The transverse thrust of the screw threw Sonya Winneck's stern to port even as her headway was killed. Already a heaving line was ashore forward and, snaking after it, the first of the mooring lines. Aft, the Second Mate was ready to get his first line ashore. "Stop her," ordered Grimes. "That will do the wheel, thank you." On fo'c's'le head and poop the self-tensioning winches were whining. Grimes, looking down from the bridge wing to the marker flag on the wharf, saw that he was exactly in position. He made the traditional arms-crossedabove-the-head gesture AaA:e her fast as she is -- to the Chief Officer forward, the Second Officer aft. Then he walked slowly into the wheelhouse. The Third Officer was still standing by the engine control pedestal. "Finished with engines, Mr. Denham," said Grimes coldly. "Finished with engines, sir." The young man put the lever to that position. A jangling of bells drifted up from below. "Mr. Denham" "Sir?" The officer's voice was an almost inaudible squeak. He looked frightenedand, thought Grimes, well he might be. "Mr. Denham, I am well aware that in your opinion Tm an outsider who should never have been appointed to command this vessel. I am well aware, too, that in your opinion at least your local knowledge far surpasses mine. Even so, I shall be obliged if you will carry out my orders, although you will still have the right, the obligation, in fact, to query them -- but not when I'm in the middle of berthing the bloody ship!" Grimes simmered down. "For your information, Mr. Denham, even I realized that slow astern would not be sufficient. I was about to order more sternpower -- then saw that you had taken matters into your own possibly capable but definitely unqualified hands." "But, sir -- " Grimes' prominent ears had reddened. "There are no 'buts.' " "But, sir, I tried to put her to 'slow astern.' The lever jerked out of my hand to 'full.' " "Thank you, Mr. Denham," said Grimes at last. He knew that the young man was not lying. "You'd better see the engineer, or the electrician, and get those controls fixed. The next time they might do the wrong thing instead of the right one." He strode through the chartroom and then down to his quarters. Sonya, who had watched the berthing from the lower bridge, was waiting for him. She rose from her chair as he entered the day cabin and stood there, tall, slim and graceful. Her right hand snapped up to the widow's peak of her shining auburn hair. She said, "I salute you, Cap'n. A masterly piece of shiphandling." Grimes grunted. "It was like something out of one of your own books." She went to the case on the bulkhead in which were both privately owned volumes and those considered by the Winneck Line to be fit and proper reading for its Masters. From the Company's shelf she lifted The Inter-Island Steamer Express, by John Grimes. She read aloud, "These captains, maintaining their timetables and berthing and unberthing their big, sea-going passenger ferries in the most appalling weather conditions, were without doubt among the world's finest shiphandlers." "The weather conditions this morning aren't appalling," said Grimes. "In any case, that was on Earth. This is Aquarius." A quarius, as its name implied, was a watery world. It lay in toward the center from the Rim Worlds, fifty or so light years to the Galactic East of the Shakespearian Sector. It was Earth-type insofar as gravitation, atmosphere and climate were concerned, but was geographically dissimilar to the Home Planet. There were no great land masses -- only chains of islands, some large, some small, some no more than flyspecks on even a medium-scale chart. In this respect it was like Mellise, one of the planets of the Eastern Circuit. Unlike Mellise, it possessed no indigenous intelligent life. Men had colonized it during the Second Expansion -- and, as was the case with most Second Expansion colonizations, it had been a case of discovery and settlement by chance rather than by design. Time and time again it happened, that disastrous, often tragic sequence of events. The magnetic storm, the gaussjammer thrown light-millennia off course, her pile dead and the hungry emergency diesels gulping precious hydrocarbons to feed power to the Ehrenhaft generators, the long plunge into and through the Unknown, the desperate search for a world, any world, that would sustain human life... Lode Messenger stumbled upon Aquarius and made a safe landing in the vicinity of the North Magnetic Pole. Like all the later ships of her period she carried a stock of fertilized ova, human and animal, a wide variety of plant seeds and an extensive technical library. Even when the gaussjammers were on regular runs, as Lode Messenger had been, there was always the possibility that their people would finish up as founders of a new colony. When the planet was rediscovered by Commodore Shakespeare during his voyage of exploration out toward the Rim, the settlement was already well established. With the Third Expansion it accepted its quota of immigrants, but insisted that all newcomers work for a probationary period in the merchant or fishing fleets before taking up employment ashore if they so wished. Somebody once said that if you wanted to emigrate to Aquarius you had to hold at least an Able Bodied Seaman's papers. This was not quite true, but it was not far from the truth. It had also been said that Aquarians had an inborn dislike and distrust of spaceships but loved sea-going ships. This was true. Grimes, although not an immigrant, was a seaman of sorts. He was on the planet by invitation, having been asked by its rulers -- the Havenmaster and the Master Wardens -- to write a history of the colony. For that he was well qualified, being acknowledged as the leading maritime historian specializing in Terran marine history in the Rim Worlds. His books -- The Inter-Island Steamer Express, The Flag of the Southern Cross, The Western Ocean Greyhounds and Times of Transition -- had sold especially well on Aquarius, although in the worlds of the Rim Confederacy they were to be found mainly only in libraries, and in very few libraries at that. And Commodore Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, Master Astronaut, was more than just a writer about the sea. He held the rank of admiral -- honorary, but salt water admiral nonetheless -- in the Ausiphalian Navy on Tharn. Captain Thornton, the havenmaster, had said, "Legally speaking, that commission of yours entitles you to a Certificate of Competency as a Master Mariner. Then you can sail in command of one of our ships, to get the real feel of life at sea." "I'm not altogether happy about it, Tom," Grimes had objected, not too strongly. "I'm the boss here," Thornton had assured him. "And, in any case. I'm not turning you loose until you've been through crash courses in navigation, seamanship, meteorology, cargo stowage and stability." "I'm tempted," Grimes had admitted. "Tempted?" Sonya had scoffed. "He's just dying to strut his bridge like the ancient mariners he's always writing about. His only regret will be that you Aquarians didn't recreate the days of sail while you were about it." "Now and again I regret it myself," admitted the havenmaster. "Fore and aft rig, a diesel auxiliary, electrical deck machinery -- there'd be something quite fast enough for some of our trades and economical to boot. But I'm well known as an enemy of progress -- progress for its own sake, that is." "A man after my own heart," said Grimes. "You're just a pair of reactionaries," Sonya had told them. Grimes supposed he was a reactionary; but he enjoyed this world. It was efficiently run -- but with ample recognition that there were things more important than efficiency. There was automation -- up to a certain point, but up to that point only. The havenmaster had admitted that he was fighting a rearguard action to try to keep control of the ships in the hands of the seamen officers. There was a love of and respect for the sea. Both were understandable. From the very beginning of the colony these people had grown up on a watery world and the books most in demand in their technical libraries had been those on shipbuilding, seamanship and navigation. Aquarius was poor in radioactives but rich in mineral oil, so the physicists had never been able -- as they had been on so many worlds -- to take charge. The steam engine and the diesel were still the prime movers even in the air, where the big passenger-carrying airships did the work that on other planets was performed by jetplanes and rockets. The surface ships were, by modern standards, archaic. Very few of them ran to bow-thrusters -- and those only ferries, cargo and passenger, to which the strict adherence to a timetable was of paramount importance, whose masters could not afford to make a leisurely job of backing into a roll-onroll-off berth and therefore required the additional maneuvering aid. There was some containerization, but it was not carried to extremes, it being recognized that the personnel of the cargo-carriers were entitled to leisure time in port. Self-tensioning winches and, for cargo handling, cranes rather than derricks cut down the number of hands required on deck and enginerooms were almost fully automated, with bridge control for arrival and departure maneuvers. There were electronic navigational aids a-plenty -- radar, echometer, loran, shoran, an inertial system, position-fixing by artificial satellite -- but these the havenmaster frowned upon, as did most of the senior shipmasters. Thornton quoted from Grimes' own book. Times of Transition-. "The electronic wizards of the day, who were not seamen, failed to realize that a competent navigator, armed only with sextant, chronometer and ephemeris, together with a reasonably accurate log, can always fix the position of his ship with reasonable accuracy provided that there is an occasional break in the clouds for an identifiable celestial body to shine through. Such a navigator is never at the mercy of a single fuse." "And our being at the mercy of machinery, John, is what I'm trying to avoid," said Thornton. "Unless we're careful our ships will be officered by mere button pushers, incapable of running a series of PLs. Unluckily, not all the Master Wardens think as I do. Too many of them are engineers and businessmen -- and in my experience such people have far less sales resistance than we simple sailors." "And what dogs have they been sold?" asked Grimes. "One that's a real bitch -- from my viewpoint and probably from yours. Y ou've heard of Elektra?" "Yes," broke in Sonya. "Carinthian Sector. Third Expansion colonization." She grinned a little unkindly. "It's a planet where the minimum qualification for immigration is a doctorate in one of the sciences, preferably physics. But they have to let in occasional chemists, biologists and the like to keep the dump habitable." "And they have quite a few now with degrees in salesmanship," went on the havenmaster. "One of them was here, a few years back." "And he sold you this female pup?" Grimes asked. "He did that. The Purcell Navigator. It's named, I suppose, after its inventor. It's a sealed box, with the gods know what sort of mess of memory fields and the like inside it. It's hooked up to all the ship's ' electronic navigational gear -- gyrocompass, radar, echometer, loran, shoran -- just name a pie and it's got a finger in it. Or a tentacle. It knows just where the ship is at any given second. If you ask it nicely it might condescend to tell you." "You don't like it," said Grimes. "I don't like it. To begin with, some of the shipowners -- and this is a private enterprise planet, remember -- feel that now the bridge can be automated to the same extent as the engineroom, with just one man, the master, in charge, snoring his head off on the chartroom settee and being awakened by an alarm bell just in time to rub the sleep out of his eyes and take his ship into port. But that's not the worst of it. Now the Institute of Marine Engineers is saying, Tf navigation is only a matter of pushing buttons we're at least as well qualified as deck officers.' " "I've heard that often enough," said Grimes. "Even in Space." "Does anybody know how these Purcell Navigators work?" asked Sonya. "No. One of the terms of sale is that they must be installed by technicians from the world of manufacture -- Elektra. Another is that they must not, repeat not, be tampered with in any way. As a matter of fact the chief electrician of the Carrington Yard did try to find out what made one tick. He was lucky to lose only a hand." "It seems," said Grimes, "that I came here just in time." "What do you mean, John?" "Well, I shall be able to enjoy the last of the old days, the good old days, on Aquarius. And I shall have the material for a few more chapters of my Times of Transition." "He likes being morbid," said Sonya. "Almost as much as he likes being reactionary." "Mphm," grunted Grimes. "Old-fashioned sounds better." He got up from his chair, walked soundlessly over the carpeted floor to the bookshelves that formed a space-divider in the huge, circular room that was called the Havenmaster's Lookout. He stared at the rows of books, most of them old but in recent printings, only a few of them new. And they were real books, all of them, not spools of microfilm; There were the standard works on the old arts of the seaman, hopelessly out of date on most worlds, but not yet on this one -- Brown, Nicholl, Norie, Riesenberg, Lecky, Thomas -- and the chronicles of the ancient explorers and navigators -- Hakluyt, Dampier, Cook, Flinders, Bligh. Then there were the novels -- Conrad of course, McFee, Monsarrat, Herman Wouk, Forester. Grime's hand went out to Melville's Moby Dick and he remembered that odd Hall of Fame to which he had been whisked from the mountaintop on Kinsolving -- and felt regret that he had not been able to meet Lieutenant Commander Queeg, Admiral Lord Hornblower and Captain Ahab. Were there white whales in the Aquarian seas? He turned, saw that his wife and Captain Thornton had risen from their own seats and were standing, staring out through the huge window that formed the entire outer wall of the Lookout that, in its turn, was the top level of the twothousand-foot-high control tower. Above the Lookout towered only the mast from which sprouted antennae, radar scanners, anemometers and the like, was topped by the powerful, group-flashing Steep Island Light. Grimes walked slowly to join Sonya and his host, gazing out through the clear glass into the darkness. At regular intervals, the beam of the Light, a sword of misty radiance, swept overhead. Far to the south a loom of luminescence on the distant sea horizon was Port Stellar, and to east and west, fainter still, were other hazy luminosities -- island cities, island states. Almost directly below was a great passenger liner, from this height no more than a gaudy, glittering insect crawling over the black carpet of the sea. In spite of the insulation and the sound-proofing, the thin, high whine of the wind was audible here. Sonya shivered. "The winds of change are blowing, "she whispered. "A seaman should be able to cope with the wind," said the havenmaster. "I wonder how you'll cope, John? I've arranged for you to take over Sonya Winneck at Port Stellar tomorrow." "I'll get by," said Grimes. "He always does," said Sonya. "Somehow." II G rimes fell in love with Sonya Winneck upon first sight. She was, of course, his first sea command. Nonetheless, she made an immediate appeal to the eye, even to the eye of one who, for all his admiral's commission, had very little practical knowledge of ocean-going ships. The lady was a tramp -- but the tramp was also a lady. She was five hundred feet long overall, with a seventy-foot beam. Bridge and funnel -- this latter scarlet, with a black top and two narrow black bands -- were amidships. Her upperworks and deck cranes were white, her hull green with a yellow ribbon. The boottopping was red. There was more to a ship than outward appearance, however -- and Grimes, himself a shipmaster of long standing, knew this as well as the most seasoned master mariner on the oceans of Aquarius. But she had, he discovered, a fair turn of speed, her diesel-electric drive pushing her through the water at a good twenty knots. She was single screw, with a right-handed propeller. Her wheelhouse and chartroom reminded him almost of the spaceships that he was accustomed to command, but the electronic gadgetry was not unfamiliar to him after the sessions he had put in on the various simulators in the havenmaster's control tower. The only thing that he did not like was the Purcell Navigator squatting like a sinister octopus in its own cage abaft the chartroom. Oh, well, he would make sure that his young gentlemen had no truck with the electronic monster -- he hoped. "I don't like it either," said the tall, skinny, morose Captain Harrell, whom Grimes was relieving. "But it works. Even I have to admit that. It works." Harrell led Grimes down to the big, comfortable day cabin where the two wives -- Mrs. Harrell very dumpy and mousy alongside the slender Sonya -- were waiting. The Harrells' baggage, packed and ready to be carried ashore, was against one bulkhead. On a table stood bottles and glasses, a bowl of cracked ice. The officers came in, neat in their slate-gray shirt-andshorts uniforms and their black, gold-braided shoulderboards, to say goodbye to their old captain and to greet their new one. There was Wilcox, Chief Officer, a burly, blond, young -- but not too young -- giant. Andersen, the Second, was another giant, but redhaired. Viccini, the Third, was slight and dark. Jones, the Engineer, a fat, bald man who could have been any age, came up to be introduced with Mary Hales, the Electrician, a fragile, silverheaded little girl who looked incapable of changing a fuse. Finally came Sally Fielding, Stewardess-Purser, plump and motherly. Glasses were charged. "Well, Captain," began Harrell. "Or should I say Commodore, or Admiral?" "Captain," Grimes told him. "Well, Captain, your name's on the Register and the Articles. You've signed the Receipt for Items Handed Over. You've a good ship and a good team of officers. Happy sailing." "Happy sailing," everybody repeated. "Thank you. Captain," replied Grimes. "And I'm sure that we all wish you an enjoyable leave." "And how are you spending it, Mrs. Harrell?" asked Sonya. "We've a yacht," the other woman told her. "Most of the time we shall be cruising around the Coral Sea." "A busman's holiday," commented Grimes. "Not at all," Harrell told him, grinning for the first time. "There'll just be the two of us, so there'll be no crew problems. And no electronic gadgetry to get in my hair either." "Happy sailing," said Grimes, raising his glass. "Happy sailing," they all said again. A nd it was happy sailing in the beginning. It did not take Grimes long to find his feet, his sea legs. "After all," he said to Sonya, "a ship is a ship is a ship -- " He had been afraid at first that his officers and crew would resent him, an outsider appointed to command with no probationary period in the junior grades -- but there hung about him the spurious glamor of that honorary admiral's commission, and his reputation as a maritime historian earned him respect. Sonya Winneck's people knew that he was on Aquarius to do a job, a useful job, and that his sailing as master of her was part of it. Sonya enjoyed herself, too. She made friends with the other women aboard -- with Mary Hales, with Sally Fielding, with the darkly opulent Vanessa Wilcox who had joined just before departure from Port Stellar, with Tessa and Teena, the Assistant Stewardesses, with the massive Jemima Brown who was queen of the beautifully mechanized galley. Shipboard life -- surface shipboard life -- was new to Sonya in spite of its inevitable resemblances to life aboard a spaceship. She had much to see, much to inquire into. The weather was mainly fine, with warm days, and nights of just sufficient chill to provide a pleasant contrast. Grimes played with the sextant he had purchqed in Port Stellar and became skilled in its use, taking altitude after altitude of the sun, of the planet's two moons, of such stars, planets and artificial satellites as were visible at morning and evening twilight. His officers watched with a certain amusement as he plotted position after position on the working chart, congratulated him when these coincided with those for the same times shown on the chart that was displayed on the screen of the Purcell Navigator. And he was pleased to note that they tended to ignore that contraption, consulting it only when there was a wide variance between positions taken by two observers. A shipmaster, however, was more than a navigator. Pilotage was not compulsory for the majority of the ports visited by Sonya Winneck, although in each one of them pilots were available. Grimes had taken a pilot sailing from Port Stellar, but after the six-day run between that harbor and Tallisport he decided to try to berth the ship himself. After all, he had spent hours in the simulator and, since joining his ship, had read Ardley's Harbor Pilotage from cover to cover. This book, a standard Terran Twentieth Century work on the handling and mooring of ships, had been given him by the havenmaster, who had said, "You should find this useful, John. Ardley was one of the authorities of his time. One thing I like about him -- he says that anchors are there to be used. For maneuvering, I mean." He laughed, added: "But don't go making too much of a habit of it. It annoys Chief Officers!" And so, having made a careful study of the large-scale chart, the plan and the sailing directions. Grimes stood in to Tallisport shortly after sunrise. The wheel was manned, the engines on standby. According to the Tide Tables it was just two hours after first high water, which meant that Sonya Winneck would be stemming the ebb on her way in. But, Wilcox had told him, complications were bound to crop up in this river-harbor. All wharfage was on the western bank of the river, on the starboard hand entering -- and to berth starboard-side-to was to risk damage in a vessel with a righthanded single screw -- especially when the master was an inexperienced shiphandler. Sometimes, however, an eddy, a counter-current, set strongly along the line of wharfage, giving the effect of flood tide. If this eddy were running -- and only visual observation when approaching the berth would confirm this or not -- Grimes would be able to bring the ship's head to starboard -- letting go the starboard anchor to stub her around -- and then ease her alongside, port-side-to, with the anchor still on the bottom. G rimes stood in to TalUsport. With his naked eye he could now see the main leads, two white towers, nicely in line. He told the harbor quartermaster to steer for them, to keep them right ahead. Yes, and there was the breakwater to port, with its red beacon. The red beacon was abeam now and Sonya Winneck was sweeping into the harbor in fine style. "Hadn't you better reduce speed, sir?" suggested the Third Officer. "Mphm. Thank you, Mr. Viccini. Better make it slow -- no, dead slow." "Dead slow, sir." The rhythmic thudding of the diesel generators was unchanged, but there was a subtle diminution of vibration as the propeller revolutions decreased. The main leads were still ahead, but coming abeam to starboard were the two white obelisks that were the leads into the swinging basin. "Port ten degrees," ordered Grimes. Would it be enough? Then he saw the ship's head swinging easily, heard the clicking of the gyro-repeater. "Midships. Steady." He went out to the starboard wing of the bridge and looked aft. The Swinging Basin Leads were coming into line astern nicely. "Steady as you go," he called. Now Sonya Winneck was creeping up the last navigable reach of the river. To starboard was the line of wharfage and behind it the clumps of greenery, spangled with blossoms like jewels, the whitewalled houses, all clean and bright in the morning sun. But Grimes had no eye for scenery; he was too new to the game. Through his binoculars he studied the quay at which he was to berth, the farthest upriver. Beyond it was a mess of dredging equipment, all part and parcel of the port expansion plan. Which side to would it be? He had still to make up his mind. "Sir," said the Third Officer. "Yes?" "It doesn't look as though the eddy is running, sir." "What makes you think that, Mr. Viccini?" The young man pointed to the small craft -- a yacht and two fishing vessels -- past which they were sliding. Their upstream moorings were bar taut, their downstream lines hanging in bights. "Mphm," grunted Grimes. So it was ebb all over the river. He made up his mind. "Tell the Chief and Second Officers it will be starboard side to. Tell Mr. Wilcox to have his port anchor ready." He came to starboard, lined the ship's head up on the upriver end of the wharf. With his mouth whistle he blew one short, sharp blast. The chain cable of the port anchor rattled out through the pipe, the grip of the flukes in the mud acted as a brake. Sonya Winneck was still making way, but with the ebb against her and the drag of the anchor she was almost stopped. This, thought Grimes as he nosed in toward his berth, is easy. But there was an eddy after all; as soon the ship was well inside it she was swept upstream toward the dredges, buoys and pipelines. "Hard a-starboard," Grimes ordered. The anchor was still holding, luckily, and it acted as a fulcrum, checking the upstream motion of the stem while the stern was free to swing. The vessel was broadside on to the line of the river now, still nearing the wharf, but head on. "Swing her, sir," suggested Viccini. "Get a headline ashore and tell the linesmen to run it to the downriver end of the berth." Yes, thought Grimes, it'll work. It better... A heaving line snaked ashore from the fo'c's'le head and was caught by one of the waiting linesmen. He and another man ran with it to the post indicated by the Chief Officer. Then the whining self-tsionjng winch took the weight. Belatedly Grimes thought that he had better stop the engines, had better go astern before the ship's stem crashed through the wharf stringer. But the order had been anticipated. A good lad. Vice ini, he thought. But he'd better not make a habit of this sort of thing. Now Sonya Winneck's bows were being pulled downriver against the counter current, her stem still only a few feet from the stringer, the stern swinging in easily. "Stop her," Grimes ordered. She was alongside now with the very gentlest of impacts and the leading hand of the mooring gang was shouting up that she was in position. Grimes filled and lit his pipe. "Make fast fore and aft," he said. "That'll do the wheel. Finished with engines. Mr. Viccini, I appreciate your help. Don't get me wrong, I like an officer to show initiative. But I think you should try to remember that there's only one master on the bridge." "But, sir -- " "That's all right, Mr. Viccini. You did the right things and I appreciate it. I'll try to do the right things myself in future." Probably the Third Officer would have made a full explanation to Grimes during the day, but as soon as the gangway was out the Winneck Line's local agent came aboard with the mail and in it was a letter saying that Viccini was to be paid off to commence his annual leave and would be relieved that morning by a Mr. Denham. her steady, round-the-planet progress, hardly straying north or south of the T ropics. The meteorology screen in the chartroom rarely showed indications of disturbed weather conditions -- and when it did these were invariably hundreds of miles from the ship's track. It was, Mr. Wilcox said to Grimes, the sort of weather you sign on for. The days and the nights passed pleasantly. At sea there was sunbathing, swimming in the ship's pool that, when inflated, occupied all the foredeck between the forward and after cranes of the main hatch, deck golf and, in the evenings, a variety of games or a wide selection of programs on the playmasters installed throughout the accommodation. In port, the day's business over, there was so much to see, so much to do. There was real swimming and surfing on sunwashed, golden beaches; now and again Grimes was able to hire a small sailing yacht for the day and found this sport much more enjoyable than on the lakes of Lorn, where wind was enough but always bitter. There were the waterfront taverns -- and both Grimes and Sonya loved seafood. The Terran lobster, prawn, oyster and herring had all done well in the Aquarian seas, and there were the local delicacies -- the sand crawlers, which were something like Earth's trilobites must have been; also butterfly fish and sea steaks. It was, for both of them, a holiday -- but for Sonya it was a holiday that palled in time. It was all right for Grimes -- he had his navigation to play with, his pilotage and, when he got around to it, research to carry out on the projected history and a chapter or so of it to write. His wife, however, was becoming bored. It was a longish run between Lynnhaven and Port Johnson, all of seven days. During it Sonya found stacks of magazines in one of the lockers in the ship's office, old issues of the Merchant Shipping Journal, dating back for years. She brought a pile of them up to the day cabin. She said, "These could be useful to you, John." Grimes picked one up, leafed through it. "All rather dry stuff. At the moment I'm trying to get the essential feel of this planet." "But they're full of information." "So's a dictionary." She said, "Suppose I go through them, making notes of anything that might be useful to you." "That," he told her, "is very sweet of you, Sonya." She made a grimace at him, then settled down with the supply of factual reading matter. Everything was there -- specifications of new tonnage, sales, breakings up, wrecks, strandings, collisions, courts of inquiry. These latter were of interest to her. She could see how, time and time again, the unfortunate master in a few seconds had to decide what to do, while learned judges, counsel and marine assessors had weeks to decide what should have been done. And then, as she read on, nagging hints of some sort of pattern began to form in her trained mind. After all, she had been an intelligence officer -- and a good onein the Federation's Survey Service. It seemed to her that the Winneck Line ships were getting into more than their fair share of trouble, with Lone Star Line running a close second. She knew little about the Lone Star Line, although she had seen their ships often enough in various ports and with Grimes had been a guest aboard a few of them for drinks and meals. They were excellently run and maintained vessels. She could speak with more authority regarding the Winneck Line; Sonya Winneck was typical of their newer tonnage. There wasn't the same spit-and-polish as in the Lone Star, but there was a very real efficiency. She read again the details of one of the collision cases. Olga Winneck had been bound up the Great Muddy River to Steelport, Suzanne Winneck had been outbound. The ships had passed each other -- or had attempted to pass each other -- in Collier's Reach, the navigable channel in that locality being both deep and wide. Suddenly Olga Winneck had taken a sheer to port and, in spite of the efforts of both masters to avert collision, had struck Suzanne Winneck on her port quarter, holing her so badly that she had to return to dock for repairs. There was the transcript of evidence: Mr. Younghusband (Counsel for Havenmaster's Office): Can you tell me, Mr. Margolies, what orders were given by Captain Hazzard? Mr. Margolies (Third Officer of Olga Winneck)-. Yes, sir. The Master ordered "Hard a-starboard. Stop engines. Full astern." Mr. Younghusband: And were these orders carried out? Mr. Margolies: Of course. I at once put the controls to full astern. Mr. Younghusband: And what about the wheel? Quartermasters have been known to put the helm the wrong way, especially in an emergency. Mr. Margolies: The quartermaster put the wheel hard to starboard. Mr. Younghusband: And did you look at the rudder indicator? It has been suggested that steering gear failure was a cause of the collision. Mr. Margolies: Yes, I looked. The pointer was hard over to starboard. And so it went on. It was established finally that both masters had done all the right things, although Captain Hazzard should have realized that a delay was inevitable when switching directly from full ahead to full astern. It was thought that a tidal eddy had been responsible for the collision. The court recommended that ships passing in Collier's Reach keep each well to their own sides of the channel, also that speed be reduced. That was one case. There were others, and Sonya made notes, drew up tables. There had been collisions in narrow channels and in the open sea. Some had been in clear weather, some under conditions of reduced visibility. The causes were various: tidal eddies, steering-gear failure, radar breakdown and, inevitably, errors of judgment. The Winneck Line and the Lone Star Line were having more than their fair share of marine casualties. It was odd, she thought. Odd. Something was rotten on Aquarius. She asked Grimes if she could browse through the ship's files of correspondence. He said, "Of course. They aren't Top Secret." She found one labeled Damage Reports. It wasn't especially bulky. But its contents were interesting: Sir: I regret to have to report that while berthing this morning at No. # Inner East, Port Kantor, the stem of the vessel came into heavy contact with the starboard side of the Lone Star Line's Canopic. Damage to Sonya Winneck was superficial only -- please see enclosed sketch -- but that to the other ship was considerable and, I am informed by Canopic's Master, will necessitate dry-docking. I entered the Harbor at # hours, standing in on the main leads. When clear of the breakwaters I reduced speed to dead slow and altered course to port, steering for the shore end of No. # Jetty. Visibility was good, knots, tidal influence, it being just after low water slack, was negligible. When my bridge was just abeam of Canopic's stern, however, Sonya Winneck took a sudden sheer to port. I at once ordered hard a-starboard, stopped the engines and ordered full astern. Also I signaled to the Chief Officer to let go the starboard anchor, but unfortunately it jammed in the pipe, and was released too late to have any effect. In spite of the application of full starboard rudder and full stern power, contact occurred at # hours. It is possible that I underestimated the force of the wind while standing in to my berth, but even so I find it hard to account for the sudden sheer to port... But Sonya Winneck was sometimes at the receiving end: Sir: I have to report that this afternoon, at # hours, the vessel was struck by the Company's Elizabeth Winneck, which same was proceeding downriver, bound for sea. Unfortunately, it being Saturday afternoon, with no work in progress, no officers were on deck at the time of the contact and the Company's gangway watchman was at his place of duty, at the head of the gangway on the inshore side of the vessel. Damage, fortunately, was not extensive and all above the waterline. My Chief Officer's report is enclosed herewith. No doubt you will be hearing from Captain Pardoe of Elizabeth Winneck...  ters, some going into great detail, others composed on the good old principle of "least said, soonest mended." With two exceptions, the other ships concerned were units of either the Winneck or the Lone Star fleets. One of the exceptions was the contact with Iron Duchess. On that occasion Captain Harrell, Grimes' predecessor, had been trying to berth his ship during a howling gale. The other occasion was a collision with a ferry steamer in Carrington Harbor, with fortunately no loss of life. So, Sonya wondered, just what was the connection between the Winneck Line and the Lone Star Line? She borrowed from the Chief Officer's office the bulky Aquarian Registry in which were listed comprehensive details of all the commercial shipping of the planet. Against the name of each ship were the lines of information -- tonnage, gross, net and deadweight; propulsion; speed; length overall, length between posts, breadth and builders. She looked up her namesake first. The Sonya Winneck had been built by the Carrington State Dockyard. She looked up Canopic. The builders were Varley's Dockyard in Steelport. She looked up Elizabeth Winneck -- another Varley's job. So it went on. The majority of the collisions had occurred between ships constructed at those two yards. And what about the contact that her husband had so narrowly averted that time coming into Newhaven? What was the name of the ship that he had almost but not quite hit? Orionic... She looked it up. Carrington State Dockyard. She murmured, "All us Carrington girls must stick together." "What was that?" demanded Grimes, looking up from his book. "Just a thought," she told him. "Just a passing thought." "Mphm." "Do ships really have personalities?" she asked. He grinned. "Spacemen and seamen like to kid themsleves that they do. Look at it this way. You're bringing a ship in -- a spaceship or a surface ship -- and you've failed to allow for all the factors affecting her handling. Your landing or berthing isn't up to your usual standard. But you kid yourself and your officers that it wasn't your fault. You say, 'She was a proper little hellcat, wasn't she? Wouldn't do a thing right -- ' But you were the one who wasn't doing the thing right." She said, "I've handled ships, too." "I know, my dear. I've seen you do it. Your landing technique is a little too flashy for my taste." "Never mind that now. I'm talking about surface ships. Is there any reason to believe, John, that two ships built to the same design, but in different yards, would have conflicting personalities?" Grimes became annoyed with his wife. "Damn it all," he expostulated, "spacemen's superstitions are bad enough. I'm surprised that you, of all people, should pay any heed to them -- and more that you should invent new superstitions of your own." "But are they superstitions? Couldn't a machine absorb, somehow, something of the personalities of the people who built it, the people who handle it?" "Hogwash," said Grimes. "If that's the way you feel about it -- " She slumped deep in her chair, looked at her husband. "All right. Before you get back to your precious research, what do the initials PN mean?" "In what context?" Sonya nudged with a slim, sandaled foot the bulky Aquarian Registry that lay open on the deck in front of her. "It's printed against the names of some of the ships, the newer ships -- but only those built by the Carrington State Dockyard or Varley's." "P -- N?" muttered Grimes. "We can ask the Mate, I suppose." "But you don't like to," she scoffed. "Captain, you know everything." "Almost everything," he qualified smugly. The ship lurched suddenly -- and Grimes knew the reason. When last he had been on the bridge, he had been slightly perturbed by the chart presented on the meteorology screen, televised from one of the weather satellites. Ahead of Sonya Winneck was a deepening depression, almost stationary. He had considered altering course to try to avoid it -- but, after all, he had a big, powerful ship under his feet, well found, stoutly constructed. And, he had thought, he would not like to be remembered on this world as a fair-weather sailorman. Even so, he saw in his mind's eye that chart -- the crowded isobars, the wind arrows with their clockwise circulation. Now the heavy swell running outward from the center, like ripples from a pebble dropped into a pond, was beginning to make itself felt. He looked at the aneroid barometer on the bulkhead. The needle had fallen ten pointer two hours ago. He said, "I fear we're in for a dirty night." She said, "It's what you're paid for." He grunted, rose from his chair, went to the bridge by the inside companionway. In the chartroom he paused at the instruments over the chart table. According to the Chernikeeff Log, speed through the water had already dropped by half a knot. The barograph showed a fairly steep fall in pressure. The screen, set for the area through which the ship was passing, showed a chart almost identical with the one he had last seen. He continued out to the bridge. The sky was mainly overcast now, with the larger of the two Aquarian moons -- almost full showing fitfully through ragged breaks in the clouds. There was high altitude wind, although it had yet to be felt at .sea level. But the swell seemed to be increasing. Young Mr. Denham, the Third Officer, came across from the wing of the bridge. He said rather too cheerfully, "Looks like a blow, sir." "We can't expect fine weather all the time," Grimes told him. He stood with his legs well apart, braced against the motion of the ship. He wondered if he would be seasick, then consoled himself with the thought that both the actual Lord Nelson and the fictional Lord Hornblower had been afflicted by this malady. Mr. Denham -- since Grimes had torn that strip off him regarding the unauthorized engine movements, he had tended to overcompensate -- went on chirpily, "At this time of the year, sir, the revolving storms in these waters are unpredictable. In theory the center should be traveling east away from us, but in practice it's likely to do anything." "Oh?" "Yes, sir. I remember one when I was in the old Sally -- Sara Winneck, that is. Captain Tregenza tried to outmaneuver it -- we had a pile of deck cargo that trip, teak logs from Port Mandalay. But it was almost as though the storm had a brain of its own. Finally it sat right on top of us and matched speed and course, no matter which way we steered. We lost all the cargo off the foredeck and the wheelhouse windows were smashed in -- " Cheerful little swine... Grimes stared ahead into the intermittenly moonlit night at the long swell that was coming in at an angle to the ship's course. Sonya Winneck's bows lifted, dipped, plunging into and through the moving dune of water. They lifted again and a white cascade poured aft from the break of the fo'c's'le, spangled with jewels of luminescence. Grimes said, "Anyhow, we have no deck cargo this trip." "No, sir." He remained on the bridge a while longer. There was nothing that he could do and he knew it. The ship was far from unseaworthy; she was capable of riding out a hurricane. There was ample sea room; the Low Grenadines were many miles to the north of her track. And yet he felt uneasy, could not shake off a nagging premonition. Something, he somehow knew, was cooking. But what? At last he said, "You know where to find me if you want me. Good night, Mr. Denham." "Good night, sir." Ill B ack in his quarters his uneasiness persisted. He told Sonya that he would sleep on the settee in his day cabin in order to be more readily available in the event of any emergency. She did not argue with him; she, too, felt a growing tension in the air. It could have been that she was sensitive to his moods but, she told him, she didn't think so. She quoted: '"By the pricking of my thumbs Something wicked this way comes..." He laughed. "A tropical revolving storm is not wicked, my dear. Like any other manifestation of the forces of nature, it is neither good nor evil." She repeated, "Something wicked this way comes..." They said good night then and she retired to the bedroom while he disposed himself comfortably on the settee. He was rather surprised that sleep was not long in coming. But he did not enjoy his slumber for more than a couple of hours. A particularly violent lurch awakened him -- almost pitched him off his couch. He switched on a light and looked at the aneroid barometer. The needle was down spite of the well insulated plating of the accommodation, he could hear the wind; he both heard and felt the crash of heavy water on deck. He thrust his feet into sandals and, clad only in his shorts -- Captain's privilege -- ran up to the bridge. He found the Second Officer -- it was now the middle watch -- in the wheelhouse, looking ahead through the big clear view screen. Grimes joined him. When his eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness he could see that the wind was broad on the starboard bow -- he could see, too, that with each gust it was veering, working gradually around from southeast to south. Southern Hemisphere, he thought. Clockwise circulation and the low barometer on my left hand... Now that he had something to work on, he might as well avoid the center with its confused, heavy seas. "Bring her round to starboard easily," he ordered. "Bring wind and sea ahead." "Wind and sea ahead, sir." The officer went to the controls of the autopilot. Grimes watched the bows swinging slowly. He said, "That should do, Mr. Andersen." "Course one three five now, sir." Grimes went back into the chartroom, glanced at the chart and busied himself briefly with parallel rulers and dividers. He grunted his satisfaction. This new course took him even clearer of the Low Grenadines, that chain of rocky islets that were little more than reefs. There was nothing to worry about. He was aware that Sonya was standing behind him -- he caught a hint of her perfume, an awareness of her proximity. He said without turning around, "Passengers not allowed on the bridge." She asked, "Where are we?" He indicated with the points of the dividers the penciled cross of the position, the new course line extending from it. "I'm more or less, but not quite, heaving to. But she's easier on this heading and it pulls her away from the eye of. the storm." She said, "There's a lot to be said for spaceships. They don't pitch and roll. When you're in your virtuous couch you're not slung out of it." "We take what comes," he told her. "We haven't much option, have we?" They went below again, and she made coffee; they talked for a while, and eventually Grimes settled down to another installment of his broken night's sleep.  to the insistent buzzing of the bridge telephone in his bedroom. He rolled off the settee and stumbled through the curtained doorway. Sonya, looking rather hostile, lifted the instrument off its rest and handed it to him. "Captain here," said Grimes into the mouthpiece. "Second Officer, sir. There's a Mayday -- " "I'll be right up." The officer in the chartroom straightened as Grimes came in. "It's Iron Warrior, sir. One of their big bulk carriers. She's broken down, lying in the trough. Her cargo's shifted. Zinc concentrates." "Not good. Where is she?" The young man stood away from the chart so that Grimes could see. indicating the other ship's position with the point of a pencil. "Here, sir. Just twenty miles south of the Low Grenadines. She reports a southerly gale, the same as we're getting." "Not good," said Grimes again. "Not good at all. She'll be making leeway, drifting -- " Swiftly he measured the distance between Sonya Winneck's last recorded position -- electronic navigation had its good points -- and that given by the disabled ship. One hundred and fifty nautical miles. Sonya Winneck would have to turn, putting the wind right aft. With her high superstructure, this should mean a marked increase of speed. Suppose she made twenty knots over the ground. Twenty into one hundred and fifty gave seven and a half hours. He looked at the chartroom clock. Three-thirty. "Put your stand-by man on the wheel, Mr. Andersen," he ordered. "I'm bringing her around manually." He went out into the wheelhouse. Both moons were down but the sky had cleared. The scattered stars overhead were bright; and bright, too, were the living stars thrown aloft and back in the sheets of spray each time that the ship's prow crashed down to meet the racing seas. Grimes stood waiting, hoping for a lull, however brief. He glanced behind him and saw that the wheel was manned and that Andersen was standing beside the helmsman. He looked ahead again. It seemed to him that the pitching of the ship was a little less pronounced, that sea and swell were a little less steep. "Port," he ordered. "Easily, easily -- " He heard the clicking of the gyrorepeater as the ship's head started to come around. And then he saw it, broad on the starboard bow, a towering cliff of water, white-capped, a freak sea... "Hard aport!" Grimes shouted. She responded beautifully and the clicking of the repeater was almost one continuous note. She responded beautifully -- but not quite fast enough. The crest of the dreadful sea was overhanging the bridge now, poised to fall and smash. Still she turned, and then she heeled far over to port, flinging Grimes and the Second Officer and the helmsman into an untidy huddle on that side of the wheelhouse. She shuddered as the tons of angry water crashed down onto her poop and surged forward along her decks, even onto the bridge itself. There was a banging and clattering of loose gear; cries and screams came from below. But miraculously she steadied and righted herself, surging forward with only a not very violent pitching motion. Somehow Grimes made it to his feet, disentangling himself from the other two men. He staggered to the untended wheel and grasped the spokes. He looked at the repeater card. Three two oh -- carefully he applied starboard rudder and brought the lubber's line to the course that had been laid off on the chart, three three five. He saw that Andersen and the seaman had recovered their footing and were standing by awaiting further orders. "Put her back on automatic," he told the Second Officer. "On this course." He relinquished the wheel as soon as this had been done. "Then take your watch with you and make rounds through the' accommodation. Let me know if anybody's been hurt." "Who the hell's rocking the bloody boat?" It was Wilcox, the Chief Officer. He saw Grimes by the binnacle. "Sorry, sir." "It's an emergency, Mr. Wilcox. A Mayday call. Iron Warrior, broken down and drifting on to the Low Grenadines. We're going to her assistance." "What time do you estimate that we shall reach her. Captain?" "About eleven hundred hours." "I'd better start getting things ready." Grimes went back into the chartroom, to the transceiver that had been switched on as soon as the auto-alarm had been actuated by the Mayday call. '"Sonya W inneck to Ocean Control, Area Five," he said. "Ocean Control to Sonya Winneck. I receive you. Pass your message." "I am now proceeding to the assistance of Iron Warrior. Estimated time of visual contact tenthirty hours. Zone Plus Seven." "Thank you, Sonya Winneck. Pleiaidic cannot be in the vicinity until thirteen hundred hours at the earliest. Please use Channel Six when working Iron Warrior. Call me on Sixteen to keep me informed. Over." He switched to Channel Six. "Sonya Winneck to Iron Warrior." "Iron Warrior here, Sonya Winneck." The other Captain's voice was, perhaps, a little too calm. "How are things with you. Iron Warrior" "Bloody awful, to be frank. A twenty-degree list and my boats and rafts smashed on the weather side. Estimated rate of drift, two knots." "I should be with you in seven hours," said Grimes. "I shall try to take you in tow." "We'll be ready. Captain." "Good. We shall be seeing you shortly. Over and standing by." Wilcox had come into the chartroom. He said, "Everybody's been informed, sir. Engineroom reckons they can squeeze out another half knot." "Anybody hurt .when she went over?" "Only minor lacerations and contusions, sir." "Such as this," announced Sonya, who had joined the others in the chartroom, putting a cautious hand up to the beginnings of a black eye. "But it's in a good cause." pretty sight. She lay wallowing in a welter of white water, like a dying sea beast. The seas broke over her rust-colored hull in great explosions of spray, but now and again, during brief lulls, the extent of the damage that she had sustained could be made out. She was a typical bulk carrier, with all the accommodation aft, only a stumpy mast right forward and her mainmast growing out of her funnel -- and no cargo gear save one crane on the poop for ship's stores and the like. The crane. Grimes could see through his binoculars, was a twisted tangle of wreckage. That would explain why the Warrior's Captain had not used oil to minimize the effect of breaking waves; probably the entrance to the storerooms was blocked. And there must be some other reason why it had not been possible to pump diesel fuel overside -- even though a mineral oil was not as effective as vegetable or animal oil, it was better than nothing. The side of the bridge seemed to be stove in and under the boat davits dangled a mess of fiberglass splinters. Beyond her -- and not far beyond her, a mere three miles -- was the black, jagged spine of Devlin's Islet, dead to leeward. It seemed more alive, somehow, than the stricken ship; it looked like a great, malevolent sea monster creeping nearer and ever nearer through the boiling surf toward its dying prey. Grimes was using oil -- a thin trickle of it from his scuppers with wads of waste soaked in it thrown overside to leeward. Luckily there had been plenty of it in Sonya Winneck's storerooms -- fish oil for the preservation of exposed wire ropes, a heavy vegetable oil for the treatment of wooden decks and brightwork. It was beginning to have an effect; the thin, glistening surface film was a skin over the water between the two ships, an integument that contained the sea, forcing some semblance of form upon it. The swell was still there -- heavy, too heavy -- but the waves were no longer breaking, their violence suppressed. Andersen and his men were standing by the aft rocket gun. The heavy insurance wire was already flaked out ready for running, its inboard end taken not only around both pairs of bitts -- these, in a ship with self-tensioning winches, were rarely used for mooring, but there was always the possibility of a tow -- but also around the poop house. The sisal messenger was coiled down handy to the line-throwing apparatus. On the bridge. Grimes conned his ship. She was creeping along parallel to Iron Warrior now, at reduced speed. She was making too much leeway for Grimes' taste; unless he was careful there would be two wrecks instead of one. Too, with the swell broad on the beam, Sonya Winneck was rolling heavily, so much so that accurate shooting would be impossible. But the necessary maneuvers had been worked out in advance. At the right moment Grimes would come hard to port, presenting his stern to the Iron Warrior. Andersen would loose off his rocket, aiming for a point just abaft the break of the other ship's fo'c's'le head, where men were already standing by. They would grab the light nylon rocket line and use it to puli aboard the heavier messenger, using that to drag the end of the towing wire aboard and shackle it to the port anchor cable. After that, it would be clear sailing. Grimes hoped. He would come ahead slowly, take the weight gently, try to avoid the imposition of overmuch strain on either vessel. Slowly but surely he would pull the wounded Warrior away from the hostile fortifications. Come off it, Grimes, he told himself sternly. Don't be so bloody literary. "Hard aport," he ordered. "Hard aport, sir." The clicking of the repeater was audible above the shrieking of the wind. "Ease her. Midships. Steady. Steady as you go." Sonya Winneck hung there, her stern a bare two cables from the side of Iron Warrior. He had cut that rather too close. But at this range it would be impossible for Andersen to miss. To the Third Officer, at the radar, he called, "Are we opening the range?" "Slowly, sir." It was time that Andersen. got his roeket away. The ship was not pitching too badly; firing at just the right moment should not be difficult. As long as the missile passed over the target it would be a successful shot. Grimes went out to the wing of the bridge to watch. The air-scoop dodger deflected the wind, throwing it up and over, so it was not too uncomfortable away from the wheelhouse. Andersen fired -- and at precisely the wrong moment the ship's head fell off heavily to starboard. The rocket streaked through the air, arching high, a brief orange flare against the gray, ragged clouds, a streamer of white smoke and behind it the fluorescent yellow filament of the nylon line. Inevitably it missed, splashing to the sea well forward of and beyond Iron Warrior's bows. Grimes didn't see it drop. He stormed into the wheelhouse, bawled at the helmsman, "What the hell do you think you're playing at?" "It's the wheel, sir." The man's voice was frightened. "It turned in my hands. I can't budge it!" The ship was coming around still, turning all the time to starboard. The gale-force wind and her own engines were driving her down on to the helpless Warrior. "Stop her!" ordered Grimes. "Full astern!" Denham was still at the radar, so Wilcox jumped to the engine controls. He slammed the lever hard over to the after position. Still the ship was making headway -- but, at last slowing. She stopped at last, her stem scant feet from Iron Warrior's exposed side. Grimes could see the white faces of her people as they stared at him -- as they watched, in horrified disbelief, this rescuer turned assassin. Sonya Winneck was backing away now, her stern coming up into the wind. She was backing away, but reluctantly. Wilcox shouted, "Denham, come and give me a hand! I can't keep this bloody handle down!" Grimes dragged his attention away from the ship he had so nearly rammed to what was happening on his own bridge. Both the Chief and Third Officers -- and Wilcox was a big, strong man -- were having to exert all their strength to keep the metal lever in its astern position. It was jerking, forcing itself up against their hands. been keeping well out of the way -- grabbed him by the arm. "Tell the Chief to put the engine controls on manual!" she screamed. "I know what's happening!" "What's happening?" "No time now to tell you. Just put her on manual -- and get Lecky up here!" Grimes went to the telephone, rang down to the engineroom. "Manual control, your end, Mr. Jones," he ordered. "Keep her on full astern until I order otherwise. And send Miss Hales up to the bridge. At once." Thankfully Wilcox and Denham released their painful grip on the bridge-control lever. The revolution indicator on the console still showed maximum stern power. Yet the distance between the two ships was fast diminishing. a frightened voice, "What's happening, Sonya Winneck? What's happening?" "Tell him," said Grimes to Denham, "that weTe having trouble with our bridge controls. We'll get a line aboard as soon as we can." Wilcox, watching the indicator, yelled, "She's stopped! The hellcat is coming ahead again!" Sonya said urgently, "There's only one thing to do, John. Shut off the Purcell Navigator. Iron Warrior has P.N. against her name in the Registry -- and she was built by Varley's." She turned to Mary Hales, who had just come on to the bridge. "Mary, switch off that bloody tin brain. Pull fuses or something -- but kill it!" The pretty little blonde was no longer so pretty. On one side of her head the hair was charred and frizzled and her smooth face was marred by an angry burn. "We've been trying to," she gasped. "The Chief and I. It won't let us." "She's coming astern again," announced Wilcox. "She's -- no, she's stopped." "Watch her, Mr. Wilcox," ordered Grimes. He ran with his wife and the Electrician to the house abaft the chartroom in which the Purcell Navigator lived. It squatted there sullenly on its four stumpy legs, the dials set around its spherical body glaring at them like eyes. From its underside ran armored cables, some thick and some thin; the one leading aft and down must be the main power supply; the ones leading into the wheelhouse and chartroom would be connected to various controls and navigational equipment. On the after bulkhead of the house were a switchboard and fuse box. Mary Hales went straight to this and put out her hand to the main switch. There was a sudden, intense violet flare, a sharp crackling, the tang of overheated metal. The girl staggered back, her blistered hands covering her eyes. "That's what happened to the engineroom switchboard!" Mary wailed. "It's welded itself in the On position!" Then, using language more seamanlike than ladylike, she threw herself at the fuse box. She was too late -- but perhaps this was as well. Had she gotten the lid open she would have been blinded. Still cursing softly, she grabbed a spanner from her belt. Her intention was obvious; she would unscrew the retaining nut that held the main supply lead firmly in its socket. But an invisible force yanked the tool out of her hand and threw it out of the room. Grimes watched, helpless. Then he heard Sonya snarling, "Do something. Do something, damn you!" She thrust an object into his right hand. He looked down at it. It was the big fire axe from its rack in the chartroom. He got both hands about the haft and tried to swing up the head of the weapon, staggering as the magnetic fields which now were the machine's main defense tugged at it. But he lifted the axe somehow and brought it crashing down -- to miss his own right foot the axe, straining with all his strength, and again struck at the th ick cable. The ship lurched heavily, deflecting his aimand, fantastically, the magnetic deflection brought the head back to its target. The armored cable writhed away from the blow, but not in time. The keen edge bit home in a coruscation of violet sparks. And Mary Hales, with a smaller axe that she had found somewhere, was chopping away, sobbing and cursing, and Sonya was yabbing with a heavy screwdriver at the thing's "eyes." And so, at last, it died. A nd so it died, damaged beyond its built-in powers of selfregeneration. Mary Hales made sure of that. Grimes was finally able to get a line aboard Iron Warrior and the Warrior's people got the towing wire shackled to their anchor cable. Slowly but surely the crippled ship was dragged to safety, away from the avidly waiting fangs and talons of Devlin's Islet, the rocky teeth and claws that, when the tow finally commenced, had been less than a half-mile distant. The Purcell Navigator was dead and its last flares of energy had destroyed or damaged much more than itself. The gyrocompass and the autopilot were inoperative -- but the ship had a magnetic compass and hand steering. Loran and radar were burned out; inertial navigator and echometer were beyond repair; even the Chernikeeff Log was useless. But Grimes was not worried. He had sextant, chronometer, ephemeris and tables and the great navigators ef Earth's past had circled their globe with much less in the way of equipment. In the extremely unlikely event of his not knowing where he was, he could always ask Iron Warrior for a fix -- but he did not think that he would have to do so. He did, however, urge the Warrior to put her own Purcell Navigator out of commission, explaining why in some detail. Then he went to the house abaft the chartroom where, under the direction of Mary Hales, Wilcox and his men were loosening the holding-down bolts and disconnecting the cables that had not already been cut. There might still be a flicker of life in the thing, some capability of self-repair. He watched happily as three brawny ratings lifted the spherical casing from the deck and staggered with it out of the door. "What shall we do with it, sir?" "Give it a buoyancy test," ordered Grimes. He followed the men to the side rail of the bridge and watched as they tipped it over. It sank without a trace. G RI M ES was relieved of his command in Longhaven, after the successful completion of the tow, and flown back to Steep Island, accompanied by Sonya. Neither he nor his wife felt very strong when they boarded the airship -- the crews of both Sonya Winneck and Iron Warrior had united in laying on a farewell party more enthusiastic than restrained. Even so, old and tired as he was feeling. Grimes had insisted on seeing the airship's Captain in order to be assured that the craft was not fitted with a Purcell Navigator. Then he and his wife went to their cabin and collapsed into their bunks. Steep Island, although not officially an airport, had a mooring mast, so a direct flight was possible. When the time came for Grimes and Sonya to disembark they were feeling better and, in fact, had been able to put the finishing touches to their report. Captain Thornton, the havenmaster, welcomed them warmly, but was obviously anxious to hear what they had to tell him. In only minutes they were all seated in the Lookout and Thornton was listening intently as they talked. When they were finished he smiled grimly. "This is good enough," he said. "I shall issue orders that those infernal machines are to be rendered inoperative in every ship fitted with them and that no more are to be put aboard any Aquarian vessel. Then we make arrangements to ship them all back to where they came from." Grimes was surprised and said so. Thornton laughed. "What you've said is what I've been saying, John, for months. But nobody listens to me. I'm just a reactionary old shellback. But you, sir, as well as being a wellknown maritime historian, have also one foot at least in what to us is still the future. You're a Master Astronaut; you hold the rank of Commodore in the Space Navy of your Confederacy. They'll listen to you when they won't listen to me." "It's Sonya they should listen to," Grimes said. "She's a spacewoman and an intelligence officer. She tied the loose ends together." "But it was all so obvious," she said smugly. "Two yards -- and two yards only -- on this planet were licensed to install the Purcell Navigator -- Varley's and the Carrington State Dockyard. Two -- sororities? Yes, two sororities of ships, the Varley Sisterhood and the Carrington Sisterhood, each hating the other. Limited intelligence -- but somehow a strong, built-in spite and also a strong sense of self-preservation. That much, I think, was intended by those electronic geniuses on Elektraand possibly more, but I'll come to that later. "Anyhow, if a Carrington sister saw a chance of taking a swipe at a Varley sister without much risk of damage to herself -- she'd take it. And vice versa. Hence all the collisions and all the minor berthing accidents. Now and again, of course, the sense of selfpreservation worked to everybody's benefit." She smiled at her husband rather too sweetly. "I know of at least one bungled berthing where everything miraculously, came right in the end." "But what's behind it all?" asked Thornton. "You're the Intelligence Officer. Is it, do you think, intentional on somebody's part?" "I don't know, Tom. I'd have to snoop around on Elektra to find out -- and I doubt if the Elektrans would let me. But try this idea on for size: what if the Elektrans want to make Aquarius absolutely dependent upon them?" "It could be," mused Thornton. "It could be." He stood up, walked to the bookshelves, took out a book and opened it. It was Grimes' own Times of Transition. Thornton leafed through it to find the right place. He read aloud. " 'And so According to Hoyle by Fred Hoyle  Geoffrey Hoyle One of the world's great astrophysicists teams up with his son Geoffrey (as they did in Rockets in Ursa Major) to bring you a new book of Science Fiction at its fascinating best! At all bookstores, #  Harper e) Row # # E. #d St... N.Y. # was engendered a most unseamanlike breed of navigator, competent enough technicians whose working tools were screwdrivers and voltmeters rather than sextants and chronometers. Of them it could never be said: Every hair a ropeyarn, every fingernail a marlinespike, every drop of blood pure Stockholm tar. They were servants to, rather than masters of, their machines and ever they were at the mercy of a single fuse...' " He shut the book with a slam. He said, "It can't happen here." "Famous last words," scoffed Sonya, but her voice was serious. "It mustn't happen here," said Grimes. ir On the highways of tomorrow, shall defensive driving be offensive? r letter, replaced it in its envelope and laid it on the flange of the lamp stand, near the radio. He held his wife a little more tightly. Her sobbing had become less than hysterical, now that the terrible initial shock had somewhat worn. He managed to keep his own emotions pretty well in check, but then he had driven the Los Angeles area for some twenty years and was correspondingly toughened. When he finally spoke again there was as much bitterness in his voice as sorrow. "Geez, Myrt, oh, geez." He eased her down onto the big white couch, walked to the center of the room and paused there, hands clenching and unclenching, clasped behind his back. The woven patterns in the floor absorbed his attention. "Goddamn it. Myrtle, I told him! I told him! 'Look, son, if you insist on driving all the way to Diego by yourself, at least take the Pontiac! Have some sense,' I told him! I don't know what's with the kids these days, hon. You'd think he'd listen to me just this once, wouldn't you? Me, who once drove all the way from Indianapolis to L.A. and was challanged only twice on the way -- only twice, Myrt, but no, he hadda be a big shot! 'Listen Dad. This is something I've got to work out for myself. With my own car,' he tells me! I knew he'd have trouble in that VW. And I often told him so, too. "But no, all he could think of to say was, 'Pops, the worst that can happen is I've gotta outmaneuver some other can, right? You've seen the way that bug corners, haven't you, huh? And if I get into a tough scrape, any other VW on the road is bound by oath to support me -- in most actions anyway.' "Whatta you tell a kid like that, Myrt? How do you get through to him?" His face registered utter bafflement. His wife's crying had slowed to a trickle. She was dabbing at her eyes with one of his old handkerchiefs. "I don't know either, dear. I still don't understand why he had to drive down there. Why couldn't he have taken the Trans, Frank? Why?" "Oh, you know why. What would his friends have said? 'Here's Bobby Merwin, too scared to drive his own rod,' and that sort of crud." His sarcasm was getting edgier. "Still felt he had to prove himself a man, the idiot! He'd already soloed on the freeways -- why did he feel the need to try a cross-county expedition? But damn it, if he had to display his guts, why couldn't he have done so in the big car? Not even a professionally customized VW can mount much stuff. "And on top of everything else, you'd think he'd have had the sense to shy off that kind of an argumerit? He had Driver's Training! Who ever heard of a VW disputing position with a Cad -- a Marauder, no less! Where were his 'friends,' huh? I warned him about the light stretches between here and Diego, where flow is light, help is more than a hornblast away and some psycho can surprise you from behind an onramp!" He paused to catch his breath, walked back to the lamp stand and picked up the letter. Familiar with the contents, he glanced at it only briefly this time. He offered it to his wife but she declined, so he returned it to the stand. "You know what I have to do now, I suppose?" She nodded, sniffling. "Bob was taking that gift to a friend in Diego. I'm bound to see that it's delivered." She looked up at him without much hope. She knew Frank. "I don't suppose -- " He shook his head. His expression was gentle but firm. "No, hon. I'm taking it down myself. I refuse to ship it and i certainly won't ride the Trans. Not after all these years. No, I'm going down the same way Bob went, by the same route. I'll have the J.J. tuned first, though." She looked around dully, plucking fitfully at the delicate covering of the couch. "I suppose you'll at least take it in to -- " "Hector? Certainly. In spite of what he charges he's damn well worth the money. Best mechanic around. I enjoy doing business with him. Know I'm getting my credit's worth, at least. We couldn't have me going somewhere else -- now could we? Wouldn't want him to get the idea we're prejudiced or something. I've been going to him for, oh, five years. Almost forgotten what he is -- " ttriOlNG all the way down to UDiego, eh, Mr. Merwin?" said the wiry chicano. He was trying to rub some of the grease off his hands. The filthy rag he was using already appeared incapable of taking on any more of the tacky blue-black gunk. "Yeah. So you'll understand. Hector, when I say the J.J.'s got to be in tiptop shape." "Ciertamente! You want to open her up, please?" Frank nodded and moved over to where the J.J. rested, just inside the rolled-up armor grille entrance to the big garage. He slid into the deep pile of the driver's bucket, flipped the three keys on the combination ignition, and then jabbed the hood release switch. As soon as the hood started up he climbed out, leaving the keys in the ON position. Hector was already bent over the car's power plant, staring intently into the works. "Well, Mr. Merwin, from what I can see your engine at least is in excellent condition, yes, excellent! You want me to fill 'er up?" Frank nodded wordlessly. He wasn't at all surprised at the mechanic's rapid inspection of the engine. After all, the J.J. had been given the best of professional care and the benefits of his own considerable work since he'd purchased her. Hector did not look up as he set about releasing the protective panels over the right-side .# caliber. "If I may ask, how do you plan to go?" Frank had the big Meerschaum out and was tamping tobacco into it. "Hmm. Fll go down Burbank to the San Diego Freeway and get on there. It'd be a little faster to get on the Ventura, but on a trip of this length that little bit of time saved would be negligible and I don't see the point in fighting the interchange." Hector nodded approvingly. "Quite wise. You know, Mr. Merwin, you've got two pretty bad stretches on this trip. Very iffy. I read -- about your son. I sorrow. The jornada de la muerte comes eventually to all of us." Frank paused in lighting the pipe. "Couldn't be helped," he said tightly. "Bob didn't realize what was -- what he was getting into, that's all. I blame myself, too, but what could I do? He was eighteen and by law there wasn't anything I could do to hold him back. He simply took on more than he could handle." One of Hector's grease monks had wheeled over a bulky ammo cart. The mechanic waved the assistant off and proceeded about the loading himself. Frank appreciated the gesture. "A Cad, wasn't it?" "It was." He was leaning over the mechanic's shoulder, better to follow the loading process. Never could tell what you might have to do for yourself on the road. "What are you giving me? Explosive or armor-piercing?" "Mixed." Hector slammed down the box-load cover to the heavy gun. It clicked shut, locked. He moved away to get a small, curved ladder, wheeled it back. At the top he began checking over the custom roof turret. "Both, alternating sequence. True, it's more expensive, but after all your son's car was destroyed by a Marauder. A black one?" "Yes, that's right," said Frank, only mildly surprised. "How'd you find out?" "Oh, among the trade the word gets passed along. I know of this particular vehicle, I believe. Owner does a lot of his own work, I understand. That's tough to tangle with, Mr. Merwin. Might you be thinking of -- " Frank shrugged, looked the other way. "Never know who you'll bump into on the roads these days, Hector. I've never been one to run from a dogfight." "I did not mean to imply that you would. We all know your driver's combat record, Mr. Merwin. There are not all that many aces living in the Valley." He gestured meaningfully at the side of the car. Eleven silhouettes were imprinted there. Four mediums, four compacts -- crazy people. Gutsy, but crazy. Two sports cars -- kids -- a jag and a Vet, as he recalled. He smiled in reminiscence. Speed wasn't everything. And one large gold stamping. He ran his hand over the impressions fondly. That big gold one, he'd gotten that baby on the legendary drive out from Indianapolis, back in 'eighty-three -- no, 'eighty-two. The Imperial had been rough and, face it, he'd been lucky as hell, too young to know better. Ricochet shots were always against the odds, but hell, anyone could shoot at tires! So he'd thought twenty-odd years ago. Now he knew better -- didn't he? He wondered if Bob had tried something equally insane. "Yes, well, you watch yourself, Mr. Merwin. A Marauder is bad news straight from the factory. Properly customized, it could mount enough stuff to take on a Greyhound busnought." "Don't worry about me. Hector. I can take care of myself." He was checking the nylon sheathing on the rear tires. "Besides, the J.J. mounts a few surprises of her own!" even at five in the morning. The weather bureau had forecast a high of lOr for downtown L.A. He'd miss most of that, but even with air-control and climate-conditioning things could get hot. He turned on the climate-cool as he backed the blue sedan out of the garage, put it in drive and rolled toward the Burbank artery. It was still too early for the real rush hour and he had little company on the feeder route as he moved past Van Nuys Boulevard toward the Sepulveda on-ramp. A Rambler at the light was slow in getting away at the change of signal. He blasted the horn once and the frantic driver of the heavily neutral-marked vehicle made haste to get out of his way. Theoretically all cars on the surface streets were equal. But some were more equal than others. The Sepulveda on-ramp was an excellent one for entering the system for reasons other than merely being an easier way to pass through the Ventura interchange. Instead of sloping upward as most on-ramps did, it allowed the driver to descend a high hill. This enabled older cars to pick up a lot of valuable acceleration easily and also provided the driver with an aerial overview of the traffic pattern below. He passed the commuter carpark at the Kester Trans station. It was just beginning to fill as the more passive commuters parked their personal vehicles in favor of the public Trans. He felt a surge of contempt, the usual reaction of the independent motorist to milk-footed drivers wilfully abandoning their vehicular freedom for the crowding and crumpling of the mass-transit systems. What sort of person did it take, he wondered for the umpteenth time, to trade away his birthright for simple sardine-can safety? The country was definitely losing its backbone. He shook his head woefully as his practiced eye gauged the pattern shifting beneath him. Mass Trans had required and still required a lot of money. One way in which the governments involved (meaning those of most industrial, developed nations) went about obtaining the necessary amounts was to cut back the expensive motorized forces needed to regulate the far-flung freeway systems. As the cutbacks increased it gradually became accepted custom among the remaining overworked patrols to allow drivers to settle their own disputes. This custom was finalized by the Supreme Court's handing down of the famous Brier vs. Matthews and the State of Texas decision of '#, in which it was ruled that all attempts to regulate interstate, nonstop highway systems were in direct violation of the First Amendment. Any motorist who didn't feel up to potential arguments was provided a safe, quiet alternative means of transportation in the new Mass Trans systems, most of which ran down the center and sides of the familiar freeway routes, high above the frantic traffic. Benefits were immediate. Less pollution from even the fine turbine-steam-electric engines of the private autos, an end to many downtown parking problems in the big cities -- and more. For the first time since their inception the freeways, even at rush hour, became negotiable at speeds close to those envisioned by their builders. And psychiatrists began to advise driving as excellent therapy for persons afflicted with violent or even homicidal instincts. There were a few -- un-American dirty commie pinko symps, no doubt -- who decried the resultant proliferation of "argumentative" devices among high-powered autos. Some laughable folk even talked of an "arms" race among automakers. German cars made their biggest incursions into foreign markets in decades. Armor plating, bulletproof glassalloy, certain weaponry -- how else did those nuts expect a decent man to Drive with Confidence? He gunned the engine and the supercharged sedan roared down the on-ramp, gathering unnecessary but impressive momentum as it went. Frank had always believed in an aggressive entrance. Let 'em know where you stand right away or they'll ride all over you. The tactic was hardly needed in this instance -- there were only two other cars in his entrance pattern, both in the far two lanes. He switched slowly until he was behind them, looking into rear and side view mirror carefully for fast-approaching others. The lanes behind were clear and he had no trouble attaining the fourth lane of the five. Safer here. Plenty of room for feisty types to pass on either side and he could still maintain a decent speed without competing with dragsters. He pushed the J.J. up to an easy seventy-five miles per, settled back for the long drive. H e spotted only two wrecks as he sped smoothly through the Sepulveda pass -- about normal for this early in the day. The helicrane crew were probably in the process of changing shifts, so these wrecks would lie a bit longer than at other, busier times of day. His first view of action came as he approached the busy Wilshire on-ramps. Two compacts squared off awkwardly. The slow lane was occupied by a four-door Toyota. A Honda coupe, puffing mightily to build speed up the on-grade, came off the ramp at a bad position. It required one or the other to slow for a successful entrance and the sedan, having superior position, understandably refused to be the one. Instead of taking the quiet course, the Honda maintained its original approach speed and fired an unannounced broadside from its small -- .# cal., Frank judged -- window-mounted swivel gun. The sedan swerved crazily for a moment as its driver, startled, lost control for a few seconds. Then it straightened out and regained its former attitude. Frank and the cars behind him slowed to give the combatants plenty of lane space in which to operate. The armor glass was taking the attack and the sedan began to return fire -- about equal, standard factory equipment, he guessed. They were already reaching the end of the entrance lane. Desperately, refusing to concede the match, the coupe cut sharply at the nose of the sedan. The sedan's owner swerved easily into the second lane and then cut tightly back. At this angle his starboard gun bore directly on the coupe. A loud bang heralded a shattered tire. With a short, almost slowmotion bump, the coupe hit the guard rail and flipped over out of sight. In his rear-view mirror Frank could just make out the first few wisps of smoke as he shot past the spot. Now that the fight was over, Frank floored the accelerator again, throwing the victorious driver a fast salute. It was returned gracefully. Considering his limited stuff, the fellow had done very well. He'd handled that figure C with ease, but the maneuver would have been useless against a larger car. Frank's own, for example. Still, compact drivers were a special breed and often made up for their lack of power, engine and fire in sheer guts. He still watched Don Railman and his Supersub religiously on the early Sunday Tele, even though the ratings were down badly from last season. He'd also never forget that time when a Weekly Caripper's Telemanual with old Ev Kelly had done a special on some hand-tooled Mighty Mite, low bore, cut down, with the Webcor anti-tank gun cleverly concealed in the front trunk. No, it paid not to take the compacts, even the subs, too lightly. He passed the Santa Monica interchange without trouble. In fact, the only thing resembling a confrontation he had on the whole L.A. portion of the drive occurred a few minutes later as he swept past the Los Angeles SubInternational Airport rampings. A new Vet, all shiny and gold. blasted up behind him. It stayed there, tailgating. That in itself was a fighting provocation. He could see the driver clearly -- a young girl, probably in her late teens. About Bob's age, he thought tightly. No doubt Daddy dear had bought the bomb for her. She honked at him sharply, insistently. He ignored her. She could pass him to either side with ease. Instead she fired a low burst of tracers across his rear deck. When he resolutely continued to ignore her she pouted, then pulled alongside. Giggling, she drew him an obscene gesture which even his not-so-archaic mind could identify. He jerked hard on the wheel, then back. Her haughty expression disappeared instantly, to be replaced by one of fright. When she saw it was merely a feint on his part, she smiled again, although much less arrogantly, and shot ahead at a good hundred miles per. Stupid kid better watch her manners, never live to make # miles. Maybe he should have given her a lesson, burnt off a tire, perhaps. Oh, well. He had a long way to drive. Let someone else play teacher. He became quiet and watchful as he left Santa Ana and entered the Irvine area. There was little commuter traffic here and only a few harmless beachers this early in the day. He saw only one car in the Cad's class and that was an old yellow Thunderhood. Wasn't sure whether or not to be disappointed or relieved as he pulled into the San Clemente rest stop for breakfast. He could have eaten at home but preferred to slip out without waking Myrtle. He'd have a couple of eggs, some toast and jam and enjoy a view of the Pacific along with his coffee despite the low clouds which had been rolling in for the last twenty minutes. He hoped it wouldn't rain, even though rain would cut the heat. Weather was one reason he always avoided the safer but longer desert routes. Thundershowers inland were forecast and even the best tactical driver could be outmatched in a heavy downpour. He preferred to be in a situation where his talents could operate without complications wished on him by nature. A few warm drops, fat and heavy, hit him as he left the diner. It had grown much darker and the humidity was fierce. Still, Irvine was behind him now. Best to make speed down to Diego and get home before dark. He had only the well-policed Camp Pendleton lanes ahead and then the near-deserted Oceanside to La Jolla run before he'd hit any real traffic again. Contrary to early predictions, the California population had spread inland instead of along the largely stateowned coast. If he'd had sense to buy that hundred acres near Mojave before the airport had gone in there... On the left he could see the old Presidential Palace shining on its solitary hill. He waved nostalgically, then speeded up slightly as he approached the Pendleton cutoff. The drizzle remained so light he didn't even bother with wipers. Pendleton was passed quickly and he had no reason to stop in Oceanside. Soon he was cruising among rolling, downy hills, mellow in the diffused sunlight. A few cattle were the only living creatures in evidence, along with a few big crows circling lazily overhead in the moist air. Once a cycle pack roared noisily past, long twenties damp with dew. Two tricycles headed up the front and rear of the pack, but the ugly snouts of their recoilless rifles were covered against a possible downpour. They took no notice of him, rumbling past at a solid ninety-five miles an hour. He had no wish to tangle with a gang, not in this empty territory. A good driver could knock out three or four of the big Harley-Davidsons and Yamaharas easily enough, but the highly maneuverable bikes could swarm over anything smaller than a bus or trailer with ease, magnifying the effect of their light weaponry. Maybe he could buy some land out here. He gazed absently at the green-and-gold hills, devoid of housing tracts and supermarkets. Not another Mojave, maybe, but still... A sharp honking snapped his attention reflexively to his mirrors. He recognized the license of the big black coupe almost at the instant ,he identified the make and model. You're south of your territory, fella, he thought grimly. His hands clenched tightly on the wheel as he slid over one lane. T he Cad pulled up beside him, preparatory to passing. He judged the moment precisely, then tripped a switch on his center console. The portside flamethrower erupted in a jet of orange flame. The Cad jerked like a singed kitten. Instantly Frank cut over to the far lane, putting as much distance as possible between him and the big car, staying slightly ahead of the other. A long dark streak showed clearly on the coupe's front, a deep gash in the tire material. The Cad would have trouble if it tried any sharp moves in his direction now and Frank saw no problem in holding his present position. Now he could duck at the first offramp if need arose. He activated the roof turret, an expensive option, but one which had proven its worth time and again. Myrtle had opted for the big grenade launcher, but Frank and the GM salesman had convinced her that while showiness might be fine for impressing the neighbors, on the road it was performance that counted. The twin fifties in the turret commenced hammering away at the Cad, nicking big chips of armorglass and battle sheathing from its front. Frank was feeling confident until a violent explosion rocked him nastily and forced him to throw emergency power to the steering. Frightened, he glanced over his shoulder. Thank God for the automatic sprinklers! The rear of the car above the left wheel was completely gone, as was most of the rear deck. Twisted, blackened metal and torn insulation smoked and groaned. A look at the Cad confirmed his worst fears and sent more sweat pouring down his shirt-collar. No wonder this Marauder had acquired such a reputation! In place of the standard heavy Cad machine guns, a Mark IV rocket launcher protruded from the rear trunk! Fortunately the shot had hit at a bad angle or he'd be missing a wheel and his ability to maneuver would have been drastically, perhaps fatally, reduced. He did an S just in time. Another rocket shrieked past his bumper. The turret fifties were doing their job, but it was slow, too slow! Another rocket strike would finish him and now the Cad had its big guns going, too. He wished to hell he was in the cab of a big United Truckers tractor-trailer, high above the concrete, with another driver and a gunner on the twin #mm's. A crack appeared in his rear window as the Cad's guns concentrated their fire. He turned and twisted, accelerated and slowed, not daring to give his opponent another clear shot with those Mark IV's. Chance time, Frank, baby. Remember Salt Lake City! He cut hard left. The Cad cut right to get behind him. At the proper (yes, yes!) second he dropped an emergency switch. The rear back-up lights dropped off the J.J... At the same time a violent crrumppl threw him forward so hard he could feel the cross-harness bite into his chest. Fighting desperately for control and cursing all the way, he slammed into the resilient center divider with a jolt that rattled his teeth, two wheels spinning crazily off the pavement, then cut all the way back across the five lanes. Fighting a busted something all the way, he managed to wrestle the battered sedan to a tired halt on the gravel shoulder. Panting heavily, he undid the safety harness, staggered out of the car, bracing himself against the metal sides. Behind him, a quarter mile or so down the empty road, a thick plume of roiling black smoke billowed up from a pile of twisted metal, plastics and ceramics, all intertwined with bright orange flame. The big bad black Cad was quite finished. He took one step in its direction, then stopped, dizzied by the effort. No driver could survive that inferno. In his eagerness to get behind the sedan, the Cad's driver had shot over at least one, possibly both of the proximity mines Frank had released from where his backup lights had been. Maybe revenge was an outdated commodity today, but he still felt exhilarated. And Myrtle might complain initially but he knew damn well she'd be pleased inside. He became aware of something wet trickling down his cheek, more than could have come from the sporadically dripping sky. His hand told him a piece of his left ear was missing. The blood was staining his good driving blouse. Absently he dabbed at the nick with a handkerchief. His rear glass must have gone at the Ist possible minute. A look confirmed it, showing two neat holes and a third questionable one in his rear window. Umm. He'd had closer calls before -- and this one was worth it. At least there'd be one license plate to lay on Bob's grave. He sighed. Better stop off in Carlsbad and get that ear taken care of. Damnation, if only that boy had paid some attention in Driver's Ed. Eighteen years old and he'd never learned what his old man had known for years. Be Safe. Drive Offensively.  The Moon Children were born to the wives of three lunar explorers who had become mysteriously contaminated during an unscheduled moon landing in response to a light phenomenon. apart, mentally precocious and aware of each other before they some months later. Earth had had experience of the dangers of contact with alien biocosms -- particularly those of Jupiter and Mercury -- and the children were hated and feared. by their parents and all three were brought up under laboratory condiofficial body. Their immediate supervision was in the hands of Nick's the mystery of the propulsion system used by Jovian delta-life -- and traded his knowledge for some of the moon grit that had contaminated his father. The grit held an instant message for the children. It told them they were not children at all -- and not human. IX N ick and Kyrie worked all week with that great tetrahedron, while Guy slept. Nick failed to do much with it. Still convinced that it was incomplete, he got Marko to requisition the moon grit left in the vault, hoping that we could build the nexode yet another stage larger. The joint committee released the grit with no delay and security brought it to the lab in six lead drums. Nick opened the drums one by one, dipping an anxious hand into each, and sank on the floor beside the last, sobbing like any child who has lost a special toy. Something had changed the grit in the vault. All the crystals had lost their glassy hardness; some were already crumbling into sootlike powder. Nick wanted no more of them, but Marko and Carolina tried to learn what had happened. Their tests showed all the thorium gone, most of the gold fused into microscopic beads. "Burned out," Marko summed up their results. "By what must be nuclear or partly nuclear reaction. The carbon residue is mostly graphite now, mixed with stable elements that must be fission products. I'd like to know what became of the energy released." He crushed a dead crystal in his palm, frowning at the dull black dust. "That energy could have exploded the canisters like bombs. All it did was overload the gold conductors. Even the fission products don't show any residual radiation. Where did it go?" Nobody knew. Yet, somehow, the assembly of the nexode had exhausted all the crystals in the vault. Security was uptight about it, suspecting fraud or robbery, and the Joint committee demanded a full report. Next day we questioned Nick. At first he wouldn't talk. He seemed to be merely waiting outside the lab darkroom, where Kyrie was working alone with the nexode. "You don't want me." He shrugged ruefully. "Ask Ky. Or Guy, maybe, when he wakes up. They can work the nexode. Somehow I can't get the knack of it. I don't know why." "We've got to file a report," Marko persisted. "Tell us what you can." Nick stared moodily at the darkroom door. "The nexode's half machine," he said. We knew that all along. It runs on nuclear power. The units are like computers -- though each crystal has more circuits than any computer on Earth. That's the part I nearly understand." "The other part?" "That's Kyrie's." His small bare feet shuffled uncomfortably, as if the floor had gotten hot. "Something locks the units together. Something reaches out, sensing and spending energy. Something almost alive." "Alive?" Marko whispered. "How?" "If the nexode's like a computer," Nick said, "it's also like a brain. The circuits in both are pretty much the same. I think the nexode is a sort of interface between the energy we call physical and something else. Another spectrum." "You think the missing energy disappeared through that interface?" Marko squinted doubtfully. "I mean, the missing power from that fissioned thorium?" "Where else?" Nick's worried scowl gave him the look of a small old man. "The laws of nature stand, though our notions of them change. The nexode channels energy in unfamiliar ways -- as the space snakes do. But it's nothing more than a device -- " He stopped abruptly and ran to meet Kyrie as she came out of the darkroom. She looked like a tired and troubled child again, with no sign of that vital power which had flowed into her from the new nexode. She took Nick's hand and they slipped away to stand for a while, watching Guy's deep sleep. When they came back, Marko stopped Kyrie to ask what she was doing with the nexode. "It's -- hard." Trouble shadowed her face. "The room has to be very dark and still, with nothing to distract me. I can't even think of anything except of the nexode shining. I just wait -- and wait -- and wait. Sometimes something comes." "A message?" "Bits of one." She glanced unhappily at Nick. "Maybe most of it is lost because the grit lay on the moon too long before anybody found it. Everything is dim and broken. But something -- something tries to come while I sit there in the dark." M arko had more questions, but Nick asked us not to delay her any longer. Neither slept all that week. Kyrie sat hour after hour in the darkroom, while Nick waited at the door. Image by shadowy image, they put together a fragmentary picture. One breathless desert midnight, after Kyrie had taken her break and gone back to the darkroom, Nick decided to share it with us. The day had been long and hot for me, with a suspicious security agent dogging me all afternoon with questions I couldn't answer about the affairs of my absent brother. I was longing for a quiet beer and bed until Nick spoke. "Ky's getting the hang of the nexode now." Beneath his offhand tone, I heard a throb of veiled elation. "We're learning who made the grit -- and finding a bit of truth in our old baby games about our people in space and their tachyon ships." He grinned soberly. "I guess the grit did help me make them up." "Your old theory was pretty good." He glanced at Marko with a new respect. "There is a great galactic culture. A sort of superbiocosm. All kinds of races with different biologies, united in one universal civilization. They're bound together with the cosmic altruism that Platon Papanek couldn't find on any of our planets -- maybe it doesn't evolve very often. "Anyhow, the messenger missiles that carry the grit were scattered like seed through space to spread that great culture -- to find any new races evolved far enough to welcome it. The ships do travel faster than light. Ky can't say yet whether they're really tachyon craft, but she says they can't come here without a proper beacon to guide them and a proper terminal where they can land. "That's our mission -- to build that terminal!" His lean face shone. "The grit was waiting for our fathers on the moon. If it was seed, they were the soil and we are the young plants. The grit made us like we are. We are part of a great plan that begins somewhere among the stars. It can't end till the starships arrive on Earth." We were still up at three o'clock, debating the vast implications of that, when Kyrie took another break. Sudden clouds had veiled the moon and we walked back to the nursery against a dry wind that smelled of brush and dust. Kyrie stood over Guy, gently stroking his gray-furred face. Tears filled her eyes, when he moved and whined in his sleep. Her face looked pinched and bleak, with none of Nick's elation. He fixed her a tray when she came on to the kitchen, but she pushed it back untasted. "What frets you, child?" Carolina asked. "Nick was so delighted with the message you were getting." "But I'm afraid." She glanced anxiously at Nick. "Even if we get the terminal ready. I'm afraid our people will never come." "But Nick says they promised -- " "A long time ago," Kyrie said. "When I'm reading the nexode, I forget how old the grit was. What it shows seems like now. But Nick says it lay on the moon sixty million years. He says it was old before men evolved on Earth." "Is that so bad?" She lodked uncomfortably at Nick. "Ky's a worryworm." He made a face and gave her a playful push, but she refused to smile. "I thought she knew more about the grit. Now she's afraid our people years." She nodded unhappily. "Maybe they won't." Nick's own face turned sober. "It is a long time. Perhaps they're dead by now. Perhaps they've evolved so far they won't care about us. Perhaps they've forgotten all about scattering the messenger missiles. Anyhow, no matter what, we've got to build the beacon and the terminal. That's why we're alive." "We must try," she whispered. "But I'm so afraid." She reached for Nick to take her hand. They were trudging back through the dark toward the lab as we went off to bed. G uy woke at noon next day. As slow and bearlike as if he had never touched the grit, he opened my office door and peered vacantly inside, whining Kyrie's name. I called Carolina and we tried to distract him, but he wouldn't eat and he wouldn't come with me to the gym He shambled back to Kyrie's empty room and prowled the nursery hall until he came to the kitchen. There he found the chair where she bad sat. He snatched it up to sniff at it and blundered out of the room, moaning and twitching, stooping to scan the floor as if his yellow eyes could trace her footprints. He paused outside as if to sniff the wind and ran lumbering toward the lab. We saw Nick dart out to stop him, as shrill and ineffectual as a small dog trying to intercept a charging bear. "Wait! Please! Ky's at work -- " Guy crumpled Nick with one careless slap and drove on through the doorway. Nick was flat on the concrete walk when we came up, a green fly buzzing around his head. Naked to the blazing sun, his pale body had failed to tan. Carolina gathered him into her arms. I ran past them into the lab. Guy had stopped in the hall, shaking his head and peering about as if the decayed-hay reek of Carolina's beta cultures had washed out Kyrie's scent. His gray ears lifted searchingly. He turned, crouched and suddenly froze. "Hold it, Guy -- " He ignored me. Somehow he had located Kyrie. His spread ears quivered. He plunged abruptly past me, toward the darkroom. I was close behind when he reached the door. Without pausing to try the knob, he went through it like a tank. I followed him in, stumbling over the broken door. The rosecolored glow of the nexode was all I could see for a moment. Pushing into the dark, I found Kyrie's golden form. She sat on a high stool, staring into the great tetrahedron as if unaware of Guy. Whining like a starving beast, he snatched it out of her cupped hands. The stool tipped over with a crash, but she came down on bare cat feet. For a moment she stared up at him, the gold fading fast from her stricken face. "Baby Guy!" she whispered. "What have you done?" She caught at his furry arm, her voice tremulous with terror. "What have you done to Nick?" Guy swayed back and forth, clutching the rose pyramid in both gray paws. Peering into it, his eyes grew huge and dull, soot-black and yellow-rimmed. His breath became a hehvy rasping. "Guy, Guy!" she sobbed. "You've hurt little Nicky!" She darted out, but I stayed to watch Guy with the nexode. His slow paws turned it. His blank eyes blinked at it. He bent to lick its shimmering faces with a pink, dripping tongue. At last he cocked a furry ear to listen while he shook it, like some bewildered savage with a clock. Waiting for the glowing pyramid to transform him again, I saw no change. When he put it together, he must have served only as a temporary tool, energized for that special purpose. The task accomplished, he was not energized again. Instead, he ran down now. His noisy breath grew quiet. His frantic movements slowed. He stood swaying, staring dimly at the pyramid. Slow tears traced black streaks in his fur. At last he shook his head and shambled away. I followed him over the splintered door and out of the building. Outside, the blaze of sun hurt my eyes. Carolina stood swinging back and forth, crooning softly, rocking Nick in her arms. His thin arms hung limp and the green fly still droned around his head. Kyrie was hovering over him, brushing at the fly, but she turned to face Guy with a look of sick accusation. "You're bad," she gasped. "You -- beast!" With a roar of sudden fury Guy threw the nexode at them. It might have struck Nick, but Carolina swung him out of the way. It grazed her arm with one keen point and spun across the lawn. With a cry almost of pain Kyrie darted to pick it up. Trembling and sobbing, Guy shuffled after her. Turning her stricken face from him, she slipped around him and brought the nexode back to Nick. With a howl like a tortured animal's Guy swung abruptly away. Staggering blindly, he tripped over the curb, picked himself up and reeled out of sight behind the gym. His agonized bellows thinned and faded away. X B y that time a security car had arrived. Nick's thin limbs hung floppily as Carolina laid him on the rear seat, but I saw a faint color beginning to spread where the sun had washed his body. She examined him back at the nursery, while we waited breathlessly. "He's coming around." She gave Kyrie a comforting smile and turned to me more gravely. "Better see about Guy." The security men had reported Guy running toward the open mesa. We followed in the car. He was far ahead when we saw him, a wild gray animal loping into a shimmering blue mirage. Bounding over boulders and juniper clumps, he almost outran us. "Wait, Guy! Listen!" I leaned from the jolting car to call when we were near enough, but he didn't stop. Instead he swerved abruptly to attack an isolated clump of tall cactus. He dived into it, butting and slugging and kicking the spiny masses, finally embracing them, howling with selfinflicted pain. His wild cries choked and died. He was asleep or unconscious when we reached him, lying flat beneath the thorny plant he had pulled down upon him. His arms and legs were locked around it, bristling with broken spines. His gray jaws were fixed upon a flaming purple bloom. All movement had ceased, but his barnyard scent hung in the heated air, stronger than any odor from the flowers. We waited for an ambulance to take him back to the station hospital. Needing no anesthetic, he lay three hours on the operating table while the spines were removed. No sign of life appeared until Nick and Kyrie came to see him later, in his room. They stood beside his bed until he moved and made some stifled sound. Kyrie reached to stroke his arm. His eyes came open then, yellow and empty, the pupils contracting at once to expressionless points. "Guy!" Kyrie sobbed. "Dear Guy!" His flat head turned. His gray ears rose and fell. His vacant eyes passed over her and Nick, without interest or even recognition. A dull growl came out of his throat. In a moment he sank laxly back, asleep again. Kyrie crumpled into a quivering little heap and we had to carry her out of the room. Nick came with her to the nursery. He sat beside her all night. If he ever urged her to return to her work with the nexode, I didn't hear him, but she was back in the darkroom next day, behind a new door. Guy slept most of the time for many months. His body shrank to knobby bones and shabby fur. His illness and regression puzzled me. Building the nexode, Marko suggested, had somehow used him up. The loss of the precious pyramid, Carolina thought, had left him with a psychic trauma. I wondered if losing Kyrie had not hurt him more. later during the winter -- he wanted me with him. He used to lie watching me, hour after hour, with a dumb devotion. He liked to rub his fur against me and whined with delight when I scratched behind his ears. Though Nick and Kyrie came several times to see him, he seemed not to know them. Kyrie brought the nexode once and held it toward him hopefully. His yellow eyes glanced blankly at it, drifted indifferently away. Kyrie was stricken and Nick begged her not to come back. With Caolina's help I taught Guy to speak again. We played with his educational toys and went to the gym and swam together. With food and exercise he slowly regained his lost vigor and suddenly began to grow again. By summer he was twice my weight. An odd sense of humor came with his returning awareness. He used his physical power to tease me, letting me nearly win a tennis game or even a wrestling match before he beat me or pinned me down. He played alarming practical jokes on the security men. He found other interests, besides. One was a dark sturdy girl who had been hired to wash glassware in the exobiology lab. The name on her security badge was Veronica Geronimo. She claimed the famous Apache raider for an ancestor, though security later informed me that she came from the Bronx. We saw no probable harm in this affair. Apache or not, Veronica looked competent to protect herself even from Guy's rather alarming sex equipment. Marko thought Guy needed an emotional outlet and Carolina seemed reluctant to inhibit the basic behavioral responses of a unique biological specimen. I wasn't much surprised when Veronica disappeared -- Guy must have been a problem lover. But he was bewildered and dismayed. He wanted me to help him find her. When I went to security I learned that she had been thrown off the mesa for peddling marijuana without a federal license. Guy's distress produced a new crop of clinical symptoms for Carolina to record. For the first time in his life he couldn't sleep. His fur lost color. His ammoniac odor grew sharper. He began breaking up furniture, absently twisting and snapping a lamp or a chair into fragments before he saw what he was doing. He hadn't learned to read and one day he brought me a note smuggled in by a cafeteria worker. The tinted paper reeked of cheap perfume. Veronica still loved her Papa Bear. She Had lost her badge and couldn't come to see him, but she was working at the Thunderbird Bar, out on the Albuquerque road. She had a room at the Starways Flytel, if her Papa Bear remembered his teeny weeny Goldilocks. I tried to decline when Guy wanted me to come with him to the security office, but he carried me there on his shoulder. The security men snorted with indignant scorn when he asked permission to visit Miss Geronimo. Though they were not explicit, they seemed to feel that any union between Guy and a human girl would be wickedly unnatural. The acting chief did say he'd be damned if he compromised security just to coddle a hairy halfman. He refused Guy's request and assigned special guards to keep him on the mesa. Escorting us back to the nursery, those new guards wanted to know where Guy's girl was shacking up, but he was more astute than I expected. Assuming a blank idiocy, he managed not to mention the Thunderbird Bar or the Starways Flytel. In spite of security he left the mesa that night. How he went was never entirely clear. The guards put him to bed in a windowless room and stood their watch outside. Next morning they found a hole in the wall and an empty bed. We were frightened for Guy. With his nonhuman look, he would be in danger everywhere. Though the government was suppressing news of the space invasion, facts enough were leaking out to kindle an anti-alien hysteria. Carolina had kept us informed of what she knew about the invasion, which was enough to upset us all. As a distinguished exobiologist, she was on a special list to receive the classified reports. Low-ranking officials were streaming to Skygate to consult her about the dangers from space and she was often called away to advise those higher up. Even she was perplexed and disturbed. The Earth platform had begun reporting anomalous fogs at sea. Shallow but oddly dense, they occurred unpredictably at points which made nonsense of the official theory that they were due to unexpected shifts in the cold ocean currents. Several fishing vessels were reported lost in them before the censors closed the lid on such unsettling facts. The news about the flying snakes was equally disturbing. Following our rockets home, those remarkable space creatures had explored the moon and investigated the Earth platform and had now begun diving into our own atmosphere. When their appearances became too frequent for the censors released an official opinion that they meant no harm. Perhaps that was true. Certainly they seemed more playful than hostile, although their intentions were never quite clear. They were evidently interested in human activities and obviously attracted to heat -- like Nick's flying plank, they somehow converted thermal energy into motion. They began diving out of space to escort our aircraft, as dolphins used to escort ships. Whatever their motives, the results were unfortunate. Drained of heat and power, the escorted aircraft often crashed. The word "otheron" had begun to spread that year on the waves of secrecy and rumor and unconvincing denial. It denoted anything from another biocosm, moon child or space snake, cultured beta-form or imagined invader. Guy was an otheron, and we were concerned for his life. H e was gone two months. His disappearance was never widely advertised -- for fear on the part of those concerned of touching off a panic -- but Skygate security did organize an intensive secret search. Marko and I made several fruitless trips, following clues of our own and notions of Kyrie's, but Guy wasn't easy to find. Our knowledge of his first seven weeks of freedom became mostly inference drawn from a trivee series screened the following year. Veronica Geronimo was the narrator of  Loved A Monster, and her lurid drama must have been at least partly true. Later I saw Guy himself watching the program, chuckling silently. He confirmed a few details for me, though he would never talk to security. It seems that he and Veronica covered most of North America, living and traveling in a series of rented or perhaps stolen helicabins. To the confusion of security, it developed that Guy himself had been on trivee half a dozen times during the manhunt. Disguised in tiger-skin shorts and stripes painted on his own fur, billed as Monk Tigerhide, he had competed as a professional wrestler, dutifully winning or losing as Veronica and her friends desired, until he had inadvertently damaged too many opponents. In ways never revealed to Internal Revenue, the two had collected a considerable fortune. Tax officials intercepted Veronica as she attempted to leave the country the following year with nearexplained World Bank globals. Abruptly, on the helistage of the Manhattan Hudson, that grotesque comedy had turned into disaster. Veronica must have been wearing too many jewels. A team of burglars broke into the helicabin. Guy collared one of them, but the other got away. He had seen Guy nude and he spread the news of a Moon Kid in town. With her own sure instinct for survival Veronica escaped. The captured burglar seems to have gone along, replacing Guy as her consort. Guy himself was left to face the mob, naked and alone. Fighting bare-handed, he threw four men off the helistage and hurt a dozen others, but he was finally overcome. Left for dead, if too tough to be dismembered, he was picked up by the riot police and finally sent back to Skygate nailed up in a guarded box. Though his odor was overwhelming when we opened it, Carolina decided that he was still alive. The space doctors disagreed, but she made them let her keep him in a hospital room. After long weeks of something between death and sleep, he sat up to beg for a steak. XI months from Skygate the next fall, on an unexplained assignment. Busy with security officials the day she returned, Marko asked me to meet her plane. She looked so tired and troubled that I asked what was wrong. She said nothing till we were alone in the car. "It's the fog," she told me then. Anxious to know more, but diffident about prying into confidential matters, I drove on without comment. She frowned, hesitated. "Don't talk about it," she said at last. "But the government is getting the jitters. I was called in to lead a secret research group. Our instructions were to learn what the fog is and what to do about it." She drew a weary breath. "I'm afraid our report won't cure any jitters." Again I waited while she stared at the desert moodily and as if each twisted juniper had been some kind of space alien in disguise. When I had to brake and swerve to avoid a speeding security airtrac, she looked absently back at me. "We tried." The flatness of her tone added that they had also failed. "The military called for an all-out effort. They gave us all the people and equipment we asked for and all the data anybody has. We tried everything. Mapped the fog. Photographed what we could. Tested the fog for every sort of radiation. Dropped telemetered instruments into them with rockets and parachutes. Towed scoops from aircraft to collect samples. Questioned every surviving observer and every crackpot with a theory." "And what is the fog?" "We still don't know. The photographs show mostly splotches of featureless white. The radiometers found nothing unusual. The telemetry never worked. The surface samples weren't much more than a bad odor by the time we got them back to the lab. We got no deep samples at all -- something caught the scoops and broke the lines. Don't ask me what." Her somber eyes swept me blankly and drifted back to the desert. "The military isn't very happy about it, but those negative results make up the main content of our report. We were asked to draw conclusions, but nobody liked our ideas. If you want to hear them -- " I said I did. "I think the fog is a manifestation of life. Life from another biocosm -- which one, I can't say. The surface samples died and decayed too fast to tell us much, but the evidence indicates to me that the surface layer is made of tiny bubble-shaped organisms, probably inflated with hydrogen. They're hygroscopic and very fragile. Dryness kills them." I asked about the deeper layers. "Nobody knows what's underneath." Her uneasy voice sank until I could barely hear it. "But it must be something more than microscopic. Something strong enough to snap our scoops off the lines. Something hostile enough to seize every ship the fog overtakes. Something cunning enough to outwit all of us." "You mean -- intelligent?" "Call it whatever you want." I saw her shiver. "It unnerved us. The fog spreads in the dark. It has been reported creeping up on ships and isolated beaches in a way that looks deliberate. It does retreat from the light -- I think sunlight dries and kills those microscopic balloon cells. When the fog goes, nothing alive is left behind. Just a red, stinking slime." She sat tor a moment in foreboding silence. "Another item," she added suddenly. "The fog doesn't like investigation. During daylight it retreated from our parachuted instruments and even from a surface laboratory ship -- which it later overtook in the dark. Every patch of fog that we tried to study melted rapidly back into the sea." She brightened eagerly as we came in view of the nursery building. "That's about it," she said. "If you want to know what the fog really is, all I have is the theory we cooked up for our report. The phenomenon is clearly an intrusion from some other biocosm. Wherever they evolved, the intruders have been changed -- by mutation or more likely by metamorphosis -- to adapt them for survival in the oceans of earth." "Why are they invading?" "Let's get on to a more cheerful topic." She cut me off firmly. "How are Nick and Kyrie?" on their plans for the trnsgalactic terminal. In spite of all our warnings, they were determined ed to build it. Kyrie spent most of her days and nights shut up alone in the darkroom with the tetrahedron, groping for the bits and pieces of its half-erased message. Nick's drafting table was the floor of a room across the hall. He worked lying flat, often calling Kyrie in so that he could show her the emerging difficulties and tell her what to search for. The following summer, as those problems began taking clearer shapes, Marko helped select a team of specialists to write the specifications and prepare the Most of these experts had been with the famous "triple E" -- ExEarth Engineers -- the prime contractor for the seeker vehicles and several planet platforms. Accustomed as they were to vast space projects, they were dazed by the dimensions Nick demanded for the tachyon terminal. After ten days of nonstop talks with Nick, they invited Marko and me to Join a conference at the Skygate Hudson. Kyrie stayed behind in the darkroom, trying to fill some gap in the record. Nick sat between Marko and me at the long table, facing the engineers. In blue trunks, pale and naked to the waist, he looked perilously young and small and vulnerable. The seven engineers were sober and mature veterans of space, armed with rolled blueprints and entrenched behind portable computers and thick stacks of data. They shuffled their documents and scowled at Nick, waiting for their spokesman to begin. He was Ken McAble, a wiry, brown and dynamic Yankee who had tested his own hardware in orbit around several planets. "I'll tell you why we're here." His ice-green eyes shifted uneasily from Nick to Marko and then to me. "We've got plenty of space know-how." He nodded approvingly at his fellow engineers, three on either side. "We've done some difficult things. I think we're competent to say what is feasible and what is not. I believe we all agree that this so-called tachyon terminal is just not possible." The men around him nodded solemnly. "But it can be," Nick objected sharply. "It has to be." "Just look at it." McAble fumbled through a stack of papers and held up a sketch of the terminal -- the six outer towers with their landing stages rising like a spiral stair around the taller central beacon. "Ten miles tall." He pursed his lips and shook his head. "Equipped to dock and refit tachyon ships with diameters up to half a mile. The machinery works on principles we never heard of and the specifications call for materials unknown on Earth." "Please, sir?" White and trembling, Nick stood up in his chair. "We'll explain the principles. We'll all tell you how to make the new materials." "Look at these dimensions." McAble waved his sketch. "They reduce the Great Pyramid to a wart. Our preliminary estimates are still pretty rough, but they run to something like three point seven materials we don't have names for." V sir." Nick spoke too fast, as he often did when he was too gravely worried to remember the slow comprehension of ordinary men. "That's why we're asking nations must unite -- " dead. Its builders mistook the other planets for a free lunch. Now it looks like we're going to be the free lunch for all the other biocosms." "But, sir! This trouble with the other biocosms is exactly why the terminal has to be built. The messenger missile was sent to prepare us for this very moment -- when space flight is just beginning. Don't you see? Don't any of you see?" Nick caught his breath and looked desperately along the line of doubtful faces. "New biocosms need help to understand each other. The terminal beacon can bring that help -- but we must have it soon. Without it, our own biocosms will probably kill one another. Can't you see that, sir? Building the terminal, we're running a race to save the lives of Earth and Venus and all our other neighbors. Don't you -- don't you see -- " His forlorn voice slowed and stopped. I could hear a muffled clatter from the dining room. The sluggish air felt too cold and smelled faintly of fish. Nick gulped hard. I thought he was going to cry. A pencil dropped and rolled. Two fattish engineers whispered together and one of them passed a paper to McAble. He squinted at it, cleared his throat and scowled at Nick again. "We do have one suggestion that might be productive," he said. "If you care to consider it." "Yes, sir!" Nick gasped. "Of course." "It has occurred to several of us that these plans are far too elaborate." He tapped his sketch and nodded at the fattish engineers. "This terminal we're talking about would dock a whole fleet of starships. It seems to us that we might begin with simpler facilities for Just one ship. Can't you modify the plans?" "I wish I could." Nick shrugged unhappily. "The terminal is large on our scale, but not on the cosmic scale. The stars are far apart. A tachyon beacon has to have a certain power to reach ships or other terminals at all. A weaker beacon would be no good. Anyhow, we can't change the plans." "And why not?" "You see, sir, we're not designing anything ourselves. We don't know enough. We're only reading out the specifications recorded in the messenger missile partly lost." "I think they should have been simpler in the first place." "I'm afraid you don't understand, sir. There are too many billions of planets. Too many life forms always evolving -- but too few that ever need or want to join the great galactic culture. The starships can't visit them all. Only those that build a terminal are considered worth an interstellar trip. It's how we qualify for transgalactic membership." McAble frowned at that and finally turned the meeting over to his fellow engineers. They began asking technical questions about structural materials for the towers, about the operation of the beacon, about tachyon propulsion and the minimum-energy shift to the tachyon state. Nick's answers were confusing to me and also, I think, to them. Marko sent out for coffee and, Jater, for sandwiches. With an afternoon break to let Nick assemble and demonstrate a second flying plank, the meeting lasted all day. Four of the engineers left Skygate that night, but McAble and two others decided to stay -- "Just for the hell of it -- " McAble said. They worked for nearly a year with Nick and Kyrie, producing machines they never really understood. presentation had to be delayed because a jet carrying most of the European directors had been lost over the Atlantic. Official censorship veiled the details, but one survivor who had missed the flight turned up later to tell us that friendly space snakes had flown motors and forcing it down into a patch of that anomalous fog. Other members canceled out, until only the American and SinoSoviet delegations came for the final presentation. The American group was headed by Erik Thorsen. Marko and I called on him the day he arrived at his official residence. I barely recognized him. He was an old man now, stooped and slow, his face sternly tragic. His bloodless hands had a ceaseless tremor. I suppose the psychiatry had been successful, but I felt sorry for him. He greeted us stiffly and waited to see what we wanted. He didn't ask about the children, Suzie or anybody else. We tried to brief him for Nick's presentation. He listened silently, gray lips compressed, now and then shaking his cadaverous head. When we had finished he promised curtly to see us at the meeting, but I could see that he didn't mean to be convinced. tarnished splendor of the Hall of Worlds, built when the great alive. Clustered around the podium, our little group left the long chambers nearly empty and rolling echoes seemed to mock our fading hopes. Maxim Petrov came in at the head of the Sino-Soviets. A vigorous thick-set man, he shook hands cordially with all his old friends and smiled with a startled admiration at Kyrie when she and Nick came in. One of his advisers surprised us more. A short, stout, brown man with thick untidy hair and dark sunglasses, he had arrived on Petrov's plane and spent the night in the Sino-Soviet residence. When he took off the glasses I recognized my brother Tom. Less cordial than Petrov, he waved a pudgy hand at Marko and me, lighted a long yellow narcorette and put on another pair of glasses to study our terminal plans. After all our preparation, that meeting was a brief anticlimax. The delegates frowned over the bulky handouts. Kyrie displayed the tetrahedron. Nick explained the purpose of the messenger missile, then called on Ken McAble to brief the delegates on our proposal for the tachyon terminal. "I came in as a skeptic," McAble began. "But I've been convinced. I'll grant that the task of erecting this terminal will tax the resources of the planet. But I think it can be done -- and I say we've got to do it." He raised his voice above a murmur of startled protest. "The alternative is death. Alone, we can't cope with the other biocosms we have encountered on Venus and Mercury and elsewhere. We don't know how to deal with the space snakes now in our own atmosphere, or with whatever is moving into our seas." Thorsen stood up, but McAble wouldn't stop. "I believe the creatures of our neighbor biocosms have found it just as hard to understand or cope with us. The exobiologists are suggesting that we have gravely disturbed the ecology of Venus and I'm afraid we have given the other biocosms no reason to love us." McAble still ignored Thorsen's quivering hand. "Gentlemen, this is a turning point in the lives of our planets. The terminal can bring us the means to understand and bridge our differences. It can open a door to all the benefits of the transgalactic civilization -- wonders I don't dare imagine. Without the terminal, I think we're dead." Recognized at last, speaking in an old man's slow falsetto. Thorsen said there were too many space aliens already on Earth. He didn't intend to import any more. The American delegation was voting to reject the proposal. Maxim Petrov spoke longer and less vehemently. His technicians had discovered many items of exciting interest in the terminal plans, which would be carried back to Peking for additional study. He understood the grave hazards of contact between unaided biocosms and he recognized a growing danger to the life of Earth. If Nick's proposal had been made just a few years earlier, the SinoSoviet might have been able to support the terminal project. Unfortunately, however, in his opinion the crucial turning point had now passed. Already under increasing pressure from space intruders and divided by growing suspicions that the moon children and perhaps other space aliens were secretly meddling in human affairs, the nations of Earth could never unite to erect it. Regretfully, therefore, the Sino-Soviet was forced to join the Americans in voting to kill the proposal. Moreoever, since the seeker surveys had failed to open up new living space for the human proletariat -- or even to develop any important new industrial resources for the workers of Earth -- the Sino-Soviet and its allies were giving notice of withdrawal from be filed for the assets and privileges properly due them under the charter. Nick and Kyrie should have been prepared, of course, for such an outcome, but they had never learned to make reasonable allowances for the ignorance and stupidity of ordinary human beings. Shattered, they clung together, sobbing piteously. Marko and Carolina tried to console them, but they wouldn't talk to anybody. to leave the Hall of Worlds. My brother burst out of the group and scuttled across to Thorsen, begging for political asylum. Thorsen called him a traitor and turned his back on him. Sweating and gasping, Tom dashed to Marko and me. "Kim! My baby brother!" He enveloped me in a fleshy embrace and the rich aroma of his armpits. "And my old comrade -- Yuri! It's grand to see you both." Mark took his offered hand, somewhat hesitantly. "I need your help," he wheezed. "But you need mine -- just as much. I can help you -- help you build that terminal." "Help us?" Marko squinted at him skeptically. "How?" "I've got contacts." His calculating eyes rolled toward the Sino-Soviets. "I've got influence. I've got know-how. I've got everything you need to get the project moving. And that's a fact. Trust me, Kim. You've just got to trust me, Yuri." Of course we couldn't trust him, but I saw no harm in listening. We had very little to lose. Though I had learned to fear his slippery resourcefulness, I couldn't help yielding to his old shrewd charm. "What know-how?" Marko was demanding. "Contacts with whom?" Tom shrugged. He spoke evasively. This was no place to discuss such delicate matters and the deal he wanted to offer us would take too long to explain. His hurried whisper turned frantic. He couldn't go back to the SinoSoviet. If we refused to take him in, he was prepared to destroy himself. "I'm your last chance. Believe me, Kimmie, you'll never get your terminal built without my contacts." Marko finally agreed to talk to Thorsen. Tom stayed close to me. mopping at his wet face and watching the Sino-Soviet delegation as if he expected to be dragged away. Petrov, however, accepted the situation with fine diplomatic suavity. Returning to the podium, he announced that the defector was a running dog of capitalism and a proven enemy of the people. His ruthless criminal activities had betrayed the trust of the world proletariat and he was no longer a welcome guest of the Sino-Soviet. Concluding, Petrov offered us an ironic farewell and departed with his delegation, leaving Tom behind. Angered by the whole affair, Thorsen put Tom under guard and took him back to the American residence. We didn't see him again for several weeks -- or until the had been completed. Title to the mesa and all the Skygate facilities reverted to America, as the charter provided. Suddenly recommissioned a Space Force general, Thorsen assumed command. He disbanded the old international security force and organized his own new security arm. In the long squabble over the asmanded the tetrahedron for the Sino-Soviet. Refused that, he wanted Kyrie. When Marko pointed out that the tetrahedron was useless to us without her to read it, he offered to settle for no surrender him, but Carolina protested bitterly that Kyrie would die without him. There was no demand for Guy. Petrov agreed at last to let America keep the children and the tetrahedron. In return, the SinoSoviet took over the remaining which had dwindled by now to the Earth and moon platforms and the nearly abandoned installations on the surface of the moon. were finally gone Thorsen had us bring the children to a briefing quarters, which now flew his own flag. Nick and Kyrie perched on tall stools, squirming itchily in stiff white coveralls and a frilly pink little-girl dress. Carolina hovered behind them. The nexode lay on the table before them, one point of opulent splendor in that ugly, barren, military room. Guy sat with me at the side of the room, too big for his chair, his odorous and hairy masculinity cloaked in a plaid raincoat. Flat and bright and empty, his yellow eyes weren't looking at Nick and Kyrie -- or the armed guards around us or anything at all. A heavy cast-bronze ashtray lay on the table before us -- a doughnut-shaped replica of the moon platform. He picked it up in his massive paws, turning it absently. Presently I heard a crack like a gunshot and saw that he had snapped it in two. The guards around us were startled, but Guy sat fingering one of the fragments, unaware of anything amiss. Before we left he had broken the bronze into a dozen lumps. The guards stood up when Thorsen came in with his new security chief. Major Gort was a tall, lank, sallow man with sparse red hair and sleepy greenish eyes. He moved with an unmilitary slouch and spoke in a hoarse undertaker whisper. Thorsen had put on a kind of armored arrogance along with his two new stars. Scowling at the children as if they stood accused of something unspeakable, he introduced Gort and laid down new rule.c for us. "Skygate's a fortress now." Staring at the many-colored pyramid as if hypnotized, he recovered himself with a spasmodic twitch. "We're setting up a strictly military effort to control all our space contacts -- and we're on the front line here." "Father, please!" Kyrie raised her hand like a child in school. "Won't we be allowed to work on the terminal -- " "Absolutely not." He scowled bleakly. "We're losing a war with the space aliens already around us. Our mission here is to perfect new defenses." His sunken eyes flashed to Nick. "The engineers think your flying beer can might be used to propel a missile fast enough to knock out the space snakes." "But, sir -- " Nick's small voice shook -- "we were born to build the terminal. We can't waste ourThorsen's gaunt face lost color. He gulped and reached for a glass of water that Gort was hastily pouring. It shook and spilled over his hand. "Now get this," he rasped at gate's a military post -- and you'll all obey my orders. You'll forget that terminal. You'll waste no time on what you call pure research -- on what you call knowledge for its own sake." Carolina tried to say something about academic freedom. "Get this!" The cracked voice rose to cut her off. "We're fighting for survival. Space war is a new game. We'can lose it to a bug from Saturn or maybe win it with Nick's beer car. Every act will have to fit our total military effort. Get me?" "I get you, General." Carolina stung him with her tone. "All of you had better get -- " His face turned dark and his old voice broke. He gulped water, cleared his throat and tried to smile. "Don't take me wrong. We used to be friends. I don't want to injure anybody. Remember -- I didn't trade the kids to Petrov. I'll try to keep you here as you are if you'll only play the game. But get this -- " His dull eyes swept across us, one by one. "Marko." This was a grim stranger speaking, no longer Marko's old comrade on the moon. "Hodian. Carolina. If you fail to see things my way, you'll be replaced. You may not see the kids again. Am I clear?" "You're clear. General Thorsen," Carolina whispered bitterly. "Very clear." I hated Thorsen from that day, yet I felt a growing pity for him, too. Bewildered and despairing, he was fighting desperately for the survival of the only world he knew. As much as I loved Nick and Kyrie and Guy, I, too, had come from his old world. I could feel his tragedy. # UY growled once, softly, just before Thorsen rose to close the meeting. Even then he didn't look at Nick and Kyrie, but I could see them bending eagerly over the tetrahedron, their intent faces turning brown again in its growing light. Absorbed in it, they started when Carolina spoke to them. "Please! Let's go back to the lab." Kyrie whispered eagerly. "I think we've found something new." "A weapon?" Carolina was sardonic. Kyrie looked hurt and shook her head. "We don't know." Nick was still staring into the tetrahedron, his eyes oddly dilated. "We don't know yet." Major Gort sent a security car to take them to the lab, and they entered the darkroom together. They stayed all day. Late that night, worried about them, Carolina knocked and went in. She found them lying like two children on the floor, the tetrahedron glowing splendidly between them. Their wide eyes were fixed on it and they didn't move until she touched them. She persuaded them to take a break. They came to the kitchen, walking dreamily together with intimate collisions of hips and shoulders, as if what they were finding had been some delightful new awareness of each other. Silent about the nexode, they gulped a little orange juice and hurried back to the darkroom. next morning. My brother was to be questioned and he wanted me present. The interrogation took place in the same briefing room. Major Gort presided. Tom came in between two guards, who led him to a chair and stood alert behind him. He looked puffy with soft, fat, rumpled and seedy. Squirming uneasily under Gort's sleepy stare, he caught my eye and grinned appealing, turned nervously to beg his guards for a narcorette, stared defiantly back at Gort. "Mr. Hood, we're considering your request for sanctuary," Gort began at last. "Before we can do you any favors, you have a good deal to explain." "I'm no crook." Tom's voice shook with indignation. "I'm an astronaut. I was trained by took a civilian job in a member nation -- a right guaranteed by the tract. Now I've come home to see my brother and my son. Is that criminal?" "We've heard about your civilian jobs." Gort's cat-eyes were blankly alert, as if Tom were a tricky mouse. "I believe one of them was smuggling moon grit." "But that was a kosher deal." Tom looked offended. "I was a legitimate agent, acting for Mr. Howard Hudson. He mined the grit on the moon. His operations there were legally licensed, with all fees paid." "That grit was stolen from under the nose of Moon Control." "Perhaps it was mined in the dark." Tom shrugged. "Hudson his tail." "You sold the grit," Gort resumed. "As part of your payment you were employed, I believe, by the Sino-Soviet." "I was hired as a space engineer." Tom's voice stayed level, but his fat dark face shone with sweat. "I soon found, however, that all they wanted was my genes -- the altered genes I had brought back from the moon. I was sent to a lab in the Gobi to breed more moon children." "So we'd heard." Gort nodded sleepily. "What were the results?" "Not good," Tom said. "The experiment lasted five years. A dozen creatures were born alive. Not one was even semihuman. Three lived a year or longer, but they're all dead now." He hunched and shuddered. "Hideous little things. I couldn't bear to see them." "You did other research with the grit?" "As a matter of fact, I did." Tom's bulgy eyes widened warily. "I had a fine staff. We repeated most of your early work here. We were able to assemble a couple of second-stage tetahedrons, though none so large as yours. I think we learned a few things you don't know." "Such as what?" New uses for the tetrahedrons." "We'll get to that." Gort crouched a little, like a cat about to spring. "Now -- why did you defect?" "The project had gone kaput." Tom's puffy shoulders drooped expressively. "My sperm had gone bad. All our moon grit had turned to dust -- drained, I suppose, by your tetrahedron. The Gobi lab was abandoned to the space snakes. My bosses got what I call space paranoia." "Huh?" Gort drew slightly back. "What's that?" "They couldn't cope. Their image of mankind didn't fit them to meet the creatures of our sister biocosms. When they encountered another intelligence they expected to understand it. When they couldn't, their impulse was to attack. When nothing fought back -- when the snakes Just played hide-and-seek with their best missies -- they went paranoid." Gort froze, as if the mouse had suddenly become an ugly rat. "I believe I can be useful in your work here," Tom added smoothly. "Besides, as I told you, I was anxious to see my brother and my son. How about it, sir?" G ort ruled at last that Tom would remain in custody while his case was under review, but Thorsen gave him leave next morning to see the children. I rode with him in a security car down to the lab. Nick and Kyrie ran out of the darkroom to greet him with a warmth that surprised me. "Guy's father!" Kyrie hugged him eagerly. "I'm so glad you're here. Poor dear Guy will surely be happier now. Nick shook his hand politely. "Please, Mr. Hood. Tell us about your work with the moon grit." His voice quivered with interest. "Carolina says you've learned new uses for it." "We put together two secondstage tetrahedrons." Tom paused to study Nick the way he used to study me when we played chess. "They were too weak to project a readable record, but we found a linkage between them nobody had expected. They turned out to be remarkable signal devices." "That's no good to us." Disappointment erased Kyrie's eager smile. "We've only one nexode -- " Her breath caught. She and Nick stared at one another, eyes black and wide. Bright hope flowed back into her face. Nick turned abruptly back to Tom. "Do you think other messenger missiles have reached the solar system?" His breathless voice was almost too fast for me to follow. "Do you think the other biocosms may have assembled nexodes of their own? Or do you think -- " emotion froze him for an instant -- "our nexode might have power enough to reach the people of other stars?" Tom gestured with the fluent assurance of some bazaar merchant proclaiming the unutterable worth of a smuggled emerald. "I bring you these questions," he said, "and others equally exciting. I hope to help you answer them -- with General Thorsen's permission." They took him into the darkroom, where the nexode was. He spent three hours there. The waiting security men grew restive and finally sent Carolina in to learn what they were doing. She found the lights on. Nick and Kyrie were seated on the floor, face to face. Nick holding the pyramid in his two hands and Kyrie leaning over it, her brown fingers touching and stroking the bright triangles of its patterned faces as if playing some curious musical instrument. Tom sat near them on a stool, smoking his scented narcorette and calling out rhythmic syllables that Carolina though were numerals and direction-words in Mandarin. He scowled with annoyance at her intrusion, but Nick and Kyrie gave her no attention. She watched for a few minutes and came out to report. The guards phoned Major Gort, who bustled over to discover what was going on. Nodding for us to follow, he burst into the darkroom. T om objected angrily, but Nick and Kyrie didn't look up until Carolina touched them. They seemed frightened then. Nick clutched the tetrahedron against his bare chest. Kyrie turned pale and tried to wave us back. "What's all this?" Gort's hand was on his gun. "What are you up to?" "I'm only showing them what we learned at the Gobi lab." Tom was sullenly plaintive. "A technique for operating the crystal. An orientation to the operator's brain. A sequence of contact points. A rhythm of relaxation and attention." Cateyes narrowed, Gort drew back from the tetrahedron as if it had become a dangerous dog. "What does it do," he asked, "when you operate it?" "That's what we were trying to discover when you stopped us." Gort snorted. "You'll have to tell me more than that if you want permission to go on." "Sir." Nick stood up with the prismatic tetrahedron. "The nexode is a kind of machine. It communicates ideas, but not with anything quite like language. It uses its own sort of symbolic system for grasping reality." He hesitated. "Td like to tell you more about it, sir, but the symbols are not translatable in any way I think you could understand and the reality they represent doesn't fit any symbolic system you know. Mr. Hood is trying to show us a better way to operate the machine." "To communicate with what?" "So far -- just with itself." Nick's intense black stare dropped back to the tetrahedron. "Now I think we can read parts of the record that we couldn't before. Mr. Hood thinks it might be linked with other nexodes, perhaps on other worlds. But we have not yet established any such contact." Gort's greenish eyes blinked sleepily. "Come along. Hood," his raspy whisper came at last. "I want to check with the general before you go any farther." He swung lazily to Nick and Kyrie. "Any attempt to use that object for communication with anything at all will have to be cleared with General Thorsen in advance. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir." Nick glanced quickly at Kyrie. "We understand." Grumbling under his breath, Tom left with Gort. Nick and Kyrie hurried back into the darkroom. Guy had been asleep for sixty hours, but he woke that afternoon. When he wandered into my office I called Gort and got permission for him to visit Tom. old Sino-Soviet residence. Tom's guards brought him down to meet us in a big room which the departing delegates had stripped of everything movable. "So you're Guy! My son -- " Tom was waddling eagerly to meet him, fat hands reaching out, but he stopped with a gasp when Guy bounded toward him like a bear masquerading as a man. Before he could run he was crushed in Guy's embrace. His breath came out in a frightened grunt. "Father! Father!" Guy's slow voice was thick and strange with surging emotion. "I thought you would never come." Tom squirmed with terror until Guy's arms opened. He tried to escape then, but Guy still held him with one great paw, stroking him eagerly with the other, whimpering like some tormented beast. Tom wheezed for breath and offered Guy a trembling hand. Soon they were famous friends. For tne next three days they were never apart. They walked on the mesa, worked out together in the gym and lounged in the nursery. The guards tried to protest when Guy followed Tom back to his room at night, but his rumbling growls persuaded them to let him stay. Each day Guy came by the office and picked me up, with an air of apology for putting his father first. I watched them together, astonished by his emotion and searching for Tom's intention. Later security let me listen to the tapes of their talk in Tom's bugged room. Guy's role was doglike adoration. After lonely years, he had found his father. He sat for hour after hour, great yellow eyes fastened on Tom, begging for every detail of his life and Robin's. Tom's tales amused me. Though the truth should have been sufficient, he made Gamal Hodian a martyred saint, our mother a comic peasant, Robin a wild nymphomaniac. In his' stories of the moon and the stud farm under the Gobi he made such an unlikely hero of himself that one day I warned Guy of his gift for fiction. "Don't lose your cool. Uncle Kim." He winked a tawny eye. "I know what isn't true. I'm only helping my Dad play his little joke on security." I failed to guess the nature of that little joke -- even the next day when Guy had a distressing encounter with Nick and Kyrie. He and Tom had stopped for me. As we were strolling past the lab on our way toward the gym, Tom began asking Guy how he had been able to build the great tetrahedron out of the grit. The questions worried Guy. "I don't -- don't remember." His slow voice thickened, and he stopped on the sidewalk outside the lab. His gray ears flared. A low growl rattled in his throat. "But come," he rumbled suddenly. "I'll show you." He darted into the lab. Tom gave me a searching look and ran after him. The security men shouted and fired a warning shot, but Guy was already gone. I followed them into the building. The tetrahedron lay blazing on the darkroom floor. Guy crouched over it, whining as if hurt. Nick was backing away, fingering a long red mark where a point of the crystal must have raked his naked chest. Kyrie fluttered between Nick and Guy, white with terror and dismay. Tom stood in the doorway, gesticulating with his reeking narcorette and trying glibly to talk the tension down, imitating our father's Turko-Yiddish accent to retell a peasant fable about three thieves and a stolen goat. "Come along. Hood!" One of the security men jabbed a gun at him. "You're in real trouble now -- " Guy's gorilla roar paralyzed me. In a blur of motion, he reached past Tom, snatched the guard's arm, hauled him into the darkroom. When the roar died, the guard lay flat on the floor and Guy was snapping the stock off his gun as if it had been a candy toy. The other man had gone for help. "Easy, now -- " Tom had to wheeze for his own breath. "Let's get the goat back in the bag." He waved the narcorette and grinned at me. "How about it, Kimmie? Are you old Thorsen's stoolie? Or will you take a chance?" I didn't know what he meant. "Once a schlemiel -- " He shrugged and turned to Nick and Kyrie. "How about you kids? You want to die for good old Gort? Or try your luck with us?" "Our mission is to build the tachyon terminal." Nick caught Kyrie's pale hand and they faced Tom steadily. "We won't let anything stop us. But I'm afraid you can't help us, Mr. Hood." S irens were screaming outside by then. Gort came catfooting down the hall, the alert squad behind him. He handcuffed Tom, scooped up the tetrahedron and herded us all outside to wait for Thorsen, who was just pulling up in his staff car. "Erik!" Tom grinned and started toward the car, holding up his cuffed wrists. "I'm glad you got here. Your people are about to muck us up. Let me explain -- " "Stand back. Hood." Savagely angry and visibly ill, Thorsen beckoned Gort to the car. "Hold this man under double guard," he rapped. "Check out your notion that he's spying for our space enemies. Charge him with treason." "My friend!" Tom whined bitterly. "My old moon companion -- " "Lock that up in the headquarters safe." Thorsen's bony, bloodless hand trembled toward the tetrahedron. "Nobody is to touch it without written permission from me." "Yes, sir." "You kids." Thorsen's dull stare swept Nick and Kyrie. "You've played too many games. I want your beer-can drive developed into a missile propulsion system. Beginning tomorrow." "Father!" Kyrie pointed at the long red scar across Nick's ribs. "Don't you see he's hurt?" "Tape him up," Thorsen snapped. "Shop space will be provided. You can requisition what you need. But you'll be working under guard and without that lump of moon grit." Standing hand in hand, tanning slowly in the sunlight, they said nothing. Thorsen barked at his driver and the staff car departed. Gort licked his lips and prodded Tom into his own car. Guy growled and started after him. "No, Guy," Kyrie whispered. "They'd only kill you." Guy whimpered and blundered away alone. I walked with Nick and Kyrie back to the nursery. Silent and despondent, they refused a meal Carolina heated for them in the kitchen and soon slipped away to sleep. A space snake buzzed the mesa that night. I didn't see it. I was reading a novel in bed, trying not to think about the children and the terminal. I heard its screaming passage, felt the bone-deep chill of heat drained away, gulped at the bitter aftertaste in my mouth. The windows rattled. My reading lamp flickered and went out. I ran to the door barefoot. Outside was black confusion. Automobiles had died. Men were cursing and running in the dark. Here and there a flashlight flickered. Random gunshots rattled. Powerline transformers had gone out and the mesa was dark for an hour. When the lights came on I went down to the nursery. Nick and Kyrie were sleeping undisturbed. I talked to a security man who had seen the diving snake. "It wasn't like the pictures," he said. "You couldn't see the shape in the dark. Just that jagged crystal in the heart of it. And the plumes reaching out like blue wings." He shivered. "Just one glimpse as it roared overhead -- and nearly froze me to death." I returned to bed without looking into Guy's room. Marko woke me early next morning, breathless with the news. Guy was gone, along with Tom and the tetrahedron. "Tom's guards were knocked out and expertly tied up," he said. "The headquarters safe was left standing open. Nobody knows how they got off the mesa. Gort thinks it all happened during the blackout." He gave me a troubled stare. "I don't know what your brother is up to, Kim. I suppose you don't. But Gort thinks he's working with the snakes." before Marko left. I was held three days in a bare room in the old Sino-Soviet residence, while relays of men with tape recorders probed for facts I didn't know about Tom and Guy. Gort joined them on the last day. "Mr. Hodian, your brother was heard inviting you and Nick and Kyrie to try your luck with him. He called you a schlemiel when you said no, remember?" His sleepy eyes searched me. "You'll have to explain what he wanted." But I couldn't explain Tom's proposition. I didn't know why the snake had come to buzz Skygate on that particular night. I couldn't tell him how the headquarters safe had been opened. Or how Tom and Guy had left the mesa with the tetrahedron. "Better talk," his hoarse whisper warned me. "Before we have to try the biochemical confessors." I was sick with dread of a new ordeal the next morning. Gort's men took me to the headquarters building, but there were no biochemicals. Thorsen, instead, came shuffling to meet me at his office door, looking white and feeble and vaguely apologetic. "Hodian, we're desperate." He gave me his unsteady hand. "I don't suppose you know that patches of that queer sea fog have begun drifting over the west coast of Mexico. It comes in at night and drifts back to sea when the sun comes up. It has covered two or three fishing resorts. When it goes out the towns are empty. People, animals and even fish-bait -- gone. Nobody knows what sort of things are in the fog -- or where they mean to stop." He tottered back to his desk and nodded for me to sit. "We believe they're invaders -- intruders from another biocosm. From Venus or more likely Mercury. We have evidence they're allied with the snakes. We suspect that your brother has been in contact with them -- using assemblies of the moon grit for communication. That's why we've questioned you." Slumped behind the desk, he paused as if to collect his wasted vitality. "You're our best lead, Hodian. You're Hood's brother and Guy's special friend." His shaking arm made a helpless gesture. "I hope you'll give us any help you can." When I said again that I couldn't help, he merely shrugged and stared, with no more threats. I sat wondering whether this new mildness reflected Suzie's kindness. She had stayed on at Skygate through the years he was away, keeping busy in the nursery or the lab, sometimes joining our small social affairs but firmly declining dates, returning my open admiration with nothing more than friendship. She was back with Thorsen now, cheerfully patient with his new infirmities, tending him as faithfully as if he had been another moon child. when he let me go. Kyrie was just awakening from the longest sleep of her life. I sat with her in the kitchen while she picked dully at a breakfast tray. She looked so bad, so pale and pinched, that I had to ask what the trouble was. "Uncle Kim, I had a dream." She pushed the food away. "I don't dream much, but this -- it was awful. About Nick and Guy. About the nexode and the terminal." She shivered. "It's too bad to tell you." That was all she would say. I went with her to look for Nick. We had to wait for Gort's permission, but at last a security car took us out to an isolated building near the end of the strip, beyond the spaceplane hangars. Once a quarantine station for returning spacemen, it was now Nick's shop. Guards at the door called Gort before they would let us in. We found Nick with Ken McAble and two or three of his space engineers around a drafting table in a big windowless room. He kissed Kyrie tenderly and gravely shook my hand. "We're supposed to be designing what the general calls my beercan drive," he said. "But we've got problems." One long wall was lined with computer-driven metal-shaping machines that McAble had requisitioned from the spaceplane hangars. Benches were cluttered with parts and half-completed models. all finished with far more care than Nick's first flying plank. The big problems, he said, were assembly and control. When Nick had assembled and adjusted a unit, it somehow transformed any sort of radiation into kinetic energy, drinking up heat and screaming away until it hit something or went out of sight. When anybody else put one together, nothing happened at all. "The gadget makes no sense to me." McAble had worked twice around the clock with Nick; he was bearded and hollow-eyed. "It violates Newton, acting without a reaction. It breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics, decreasing entropy. Running energy uphill!" His tired "eyes glared at Nick. "Can you account for that?" "Newton didn't know all about the universe." Nick sat crosslegged on the table, child-small and naked to the waist but patient and grave as another Einstein. "Neither did Kelvin or Planck. Their laws are true for the cases they were able to observe. But somewhere in spacetime, energy did run uphill, increasing entropy to make the matter we know. Otherwise our universe would not exist." McAble bent groggily over the drawings again, asking about symbols that Nick seemed unable to explain. I watched for a few minutes without understanding anything and went to look for Kyrie. I found her in Nick's new office, huddled down on the floor in a corner, silently crying. "It's aw-aw-awful. Uncle Kim." She didn't want a tissue or a cup of water from the cooler or anything at all. She wouldn't even smile. "We ought to be building the terminal before our time runs out. I thought the nexode would show us a way. I just couldn't believe poor dear Guy would do what he did. But now -- " her quavering voice was almost a wail -- "I just don't know." When Thorsen came later to inspect the project, Nick begged him to give it up. "Please, General! Maybe something in the fog doesn't like people, but we don't need weapons against the snakes. I don't think they mean to harm us." "They cause planes to crash." "Not on purpose, I think," Nick objected. "I doubt they even know they're hurting anybody. I imagine the sharing of energy is their way of greeting -- their plumes always glow with a brighter light while they're soaking up heat. Perhaps they're trying to tell us something." "Bull!" Thorsen croaked. "Anything they want to say, I don't care to know. You just give us the drive. We'll decide what snakes to kill." He glared feverishly at me. "Come along, Hodian. I want you to draft a news story for us. Something to blanket the panic. Play down the fog and the snakes. Play up what we're doing here." I waited to learn what that was. "We're coordinating all contacts with our neighbor biocosms. We're analyzing all the data from space and planning a well-balanced program of energetic action. We intend to keep on top of the situation. There's no cause at all for public alarm." H e kept me busy for the next few weeks, rewriting bad news to make it look less alarming. The space snakes had diverted or disabled a salvo of nuclear missiles fired at a patch of fog drifting toward the Golden Gate. A pair of scouting submarines were overdue and presumed lost beneath an area of Atlantic fog. Space snakes were reported roosting on the summits of Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro. I went back to see Nick and Kyrie when I could. To my surprise, they were eagerly busy as if they believed our press releases. Kyrie had learned to operate the computer console. The machines it controlled were grinding out intricate bits of metal and plastic for Nick and the engineers. I watched Nick launch two or three more flying devices, one no longer than a pencil, which had a crystal of rock salt for a core. Each shrieked out of his fingers and vanished into the distance, leaving a chill in the air and a black taste in my mouth. But he was still unable to translate his description into any form the engineers could grasp or copy. Absorbed in the project, Nick and Kyrie stopped coming back to the nursery for rest. Carolina made Marko move into the living quarters of the quarantine building to look after them. The last time I called, two security men stopped me at the door and sent Marko out to talk to me. He said they were asleep. McAble overtook me on the parking lot as I was leaving. He wanted me to Join him at the Skygate Hudson for a couple of drinks and a steak. He needed to talk. Keeping up with Nick and Kyrie wasn't easy. One by one, his fellow engineers had given up and gone. He felt ready to join them. "Kim, I've got the jitters." He caught my arm and clung, as if seeking human warmth. "Not just from your double-talking press release, either." His haunted face twitched, trying but failing to grin. "It's something here." He glanced uneasily back toward the angular building, stark and black against a blood-colored sunset. "Something I don't understand." I waited for him to explain. "Something makes sounds -- a patter or a rustle or a sort of chirp behind you." He patted his pockets distractedly. "Something steals little objects -- keys and coins and pens. Something watches you out of the sladows and scuttles away before you can turn on a light." "Could be packrats." I tried to cheer him up. "This desert's full of them. The building's been empty for years. They could have got into the basement. They're shy and they make sounds and they'll steal nearly anything." "Rats?" He shook his head. "I don't think it's rats." We drank too much that night in the hotel bar, talking about the mocking promise of a high transgalactic culture, about the fog and the snakes, about what might have become of Tom and Guy and the tetrahedron, about Nick's impossible beer-can drive, about packrats or something in the quarantine building. Our troubles were hard to drown. We never got to the dining room. The lights went off while we were still in the bar. After one feeble flicker -- when the stand-by plant tried to take up the load -- they stayed off. I waited for the sonic boom of another snake flying by and sucking up our power, but no sound came. We had a few more drinks to the end of things, and I remember a bellboy with a candle putting me to bed. McAble shook me awake the next morning. My head throbbed and my mouth was foul. I didn't want to hear what he was saying. "Your friend Gort's on the phone. He says get your tail back to the mesa. He wants to know why the power went off and what became of the quarantine building and where are Nick and Kyrie." mesa. We found traffic stacking up ahead of us outside the main gate. Nobody seemed to know why, but the guards were turning back most of the civilian workers. Tight-lipped, grim men searched our car and called headquarters before they let us through. Inside the reservation we found tanks standing at all major intersections. Troops were stringing barbed wire across the lawn and piling sandbags around the entrance to headquarters. A squad of nervous men in combat gear were setting up a missile-launcher on the parking lot behind the building. They held us till Gort came down, trailed by a stocky Navajo security sergfeant. Gort looked as bad as I felt -- he was sallowskinned and twitchy. His sleepy eyes were swollen and his raspy voice was coldly hostile, as if he blamed us for everything. I tried to ask what was wrong. "Get in." He waved at his car. "We'll take a look." The Navajo drove. Gort sat tense beside him, peering into each cross street as if he expected to see an alien invader. The headquarters area was crowded with military vehicles and men digging in, but the road to the spaceport was ominously empty. "Something's out there." Gort gestured abruptly toward the old airstrip and the vacant mesa. "It cut the power lines last night. It demolished the quarantine building. It's still there." "Nick, Kyrie -- where are they?" Gort twisted to watch a beer can glinting in the weeds as if he expected it to take off for Jupiter. When we were safely beyond it he muttered at the Navajo. "Tell 'em, Harry. Tell 'em what happened to you." The name on the Navajo's badge was Harry Horse. In an awkward mixture of bad English and worse Spanish he said he and Corporal Miraflores had come out in the night to relieve the two men on duty at the quarantine building. He couldn't say what the time was, because all electric clocks and electric watches had stopped, but the lights were still out everywhere and day had not come when they pulled into the parking lot. For Dios! It was an unlucky night. In the sweep of the headlamps, as the car turned, he saw that the quarantine building had fallen in. Flattened. Like a paper box under the cleats of a tank. Leaving the headlamps on, he and Miraflores got out of the car to investigate. The building had been mostly steel. Scraps of metal and broken brick still cluttered the site. In the rubble -- ing slower now, watching every weed along the road. Something had been swarming in the rubble of the fallen building. Ratones? Aranas grandes? Quien sabe? Rats, maybe. Great spiders. He couldn't say, because the creatures scuttled cunningly out of the light. Yet he and Miraflores could hear them working on the metal. They made a sort of humming whine, like many small machines. He tried to imitate it. Damn! He found the English expletive. The lights of their car went out behind them while they watched. The creatures were eating the car! He and Miraflores ran back to the airstrip, but nothing chased them. Daylight was coming now and they ventured back near enough to watch the somethings consuming the car. The light was not yet good, but he said los demonios looked like ants swarming over a dead lizard. They came along one path and took bits of the car away along another. Metal, tires, glass. Soon there was only the engine block and the naked frame, like the bones of the car. The last scrap was gone before the sun came up. Toda la mdquina. He wanted Miraflores to report the creatures while he stayed to observe what they did, but Miraflores was afraid Major Gort would not believe him. Bichos -- bugs eating a car! They ran all the way back to the security center. "Well, Hodian?" Gort turned to glare back at me. "What do you make of that?" Without much to say I looked at McAble. "Major, we've had something -- " He stopped with a gasp when a dove flew up beside the car. "Something in the building. I was telling Mr. Hodian last night. Nothing I really ever saw. Something scuttling about behind me and stealing metal objects. Mr. Hodian said it was a packrat." "A pack -- a pack -- " Gort wheezed and twitched and finally broke into a stifled laugh, while Harry Horse drove stolidly on. "So Hodian said it was just a packrat!" He gulped and wiped his eyes. "I wish to God it were just a rat!" Abruptly, with a Navajo grunt, Harry Horse hit the brake. Tires squealed. The car lurched and stopped. Harry leaned out, pointing. "God!" Gort breathed. "Look at the varmint. Flying!" It dropped out of the sky ahead of us. A queer insect flying with a piece of string. It looked larger when it struck the pavement, at least a foot long. The string was a ten-foot section of stolen power cable, which perhaps had been too heavy for it. For a few seconds it lay still, not a dozen yards from us. Ant-shaped, it had three segments. The head segment was silver-colored metal. a bright eyeless hexagon. The thinner center segment sprouted dark stubby wings and a cluster of limbs like silver wire. The tail segment was a slick black ball. "Cn hormiga!" whispered Harry Horse, "tn hormiga de maquinaria!" A mechanical ant! Moving now, it lifted and turned its blank metal head as if watching us. A single delicate bright antenna uncoiled above its middle section, curving alertly toward us. After a moment it darted back to the bit of cable, caught it with clustered limbs, dragged it off the road. Its tail segment turned white as it disappeared into the weeds. "Did you see that?" McAble glanced at me and watched the weeds again. "The way it moved? And that white flash?"  "I saw it," Gort snapped. "So what?" "It doesn't run," McAble said. "It flies -- even on the ground. The limbs aren't legs. They're manipulators. The wings don't beat. They're probably just for balance and control." "So what?" Gort repeated. "Did you see. the frost on its tail?" McAble asked. "I think it's kin to the space snakes. I think it flies with something like Nick's beer-can drive." "I dor" give a nit how it flies." Gort's hea y-lidded eyes glared accusingly at me, as if he thought I had invited these invaders. "Hodian, what are the things? What are they up to here?" "How -- " My dry throat made only a croak. Then I managed: "How could I know. Major?" A ll the reports of that ominous fog and the invading snakes had been disturbing enough, but they were still remote. This ant-shaped thing was here, as strange as they and probably still watching us blindly out of the weeds. A sense of creeping terror numbed me. "Drive on," Gort told the Navajo. "Nick and Kyrie were in the building." That recollection struck me like a club. "Yuri and Carolina, too. What's become of them?" "Dead," Harry Horse muttered solemnly. "Killed when house fall in. Duckworth and Wiezell, tambien. Six people eaten por las hormigas metdlica." "Maybe they got away," McAble said. "The things don't seem vicious." Harry Horse doubted that. He and Miraflores had come back in another car to scout the perimeter and military aircraft had been overflown and photographed the whole area. They had found only weeds and desert brush and el hormiguero de acero. The steel ant hill. "I hope to God the kids are dead!" Gort grated suddenly. "If they're alive it means they've been dealing with these invaders." "Huh?" McAble frowned at him. "How do you figure that?" "In the first place, Nick and Kyrie aren't exactly human." Gort spoke with a whispery vehemence. "The general says they've never cared for anything except getting in touch with their own space kin. Hodian's brother was showing them how to use that tetrahedron for a signal device. Who were they trying to signal?" His swollen eyes glared at me. "Maybe these mechanical ants -- if that's what you call 'em!" Harry Horse was stopping the car near the end of the asterite strip. A weathered sign read and a side road ran two hundred yards toward a mound of brown earth where the building had stood. "Let's have a look." With a nod at me McAble glanced at Gort. "You'll wait. Major?" "Don't count on us," Gort growled. "If anything happens -- you asked for it." Not very eagerly, I climbed out after McAble. Harry Horse turned the car around, ready for a fast getaway. McAble was walking toward that new mound, not looking back. I followed him, breathing hard. The pavement was empty. Our feet seemed too loud on it. We passed a clump of tall dead weeds grown where rain had stood in the ditch beside the road. I jumped and stopped when something rattled them, but McAble said it was the wind or maybe just a rat. I felt sweat trickling down my ribs, though the day was not yet hot. McAble stopped ahead of me to kick at the mounded earth. Still dark with dampness, it was packed smooth and firm. "Three hundred cubic yards of excavation." He swept the mound with a calculating eye. "Maybe four. Plenty of room for Mr. Marko and the others, if they're alive." I followed him up the smooth brown slope to a bright flat dome that crowned the hill. He made me hold a tape while he surveyed it. Twenty feet across, with a two-foot rise at the center. Six circular holes around the rim -- the doorways -- were sealed with metaj plugs. He tried the metal with the point of a pocket knife and kneeled to put his ear against it. "Listen!" I caught a faint sharp odor like hot sulphur when I bent. The metal felt slick and warm. With my ear against it, I heard a murmuring hum, fainter and pitched higher than the sound of bees. When McAble tapped one of the plugs with the handle of his knife that busy whisper ceased for seconds. It came back slowly and didn't stop when he tapped again. "Nick would know every sort of code," McAble said. "If he's alive, we ought to get an answer." He kept rattling his knife against the metal and listening hopefully, but all we heard was that faint shrill drone, until Gort began honking impatiently for us and a military helicopter clattered overhead. McAble came reluctantly away. "Move," Gort barked as we came near the car. "The general called. He's setting up a demolition raid on the anthill. He wants us out of the area." "Demolition?" McAble protested. "Is that necessary?" "Get in," Gort rapped. "Quick!" At his impatient nod Harry Horse pulled away before we had time to close the doors. "Shouldn't we wait?" I asked. "Suppose our friends are alive in that dome? Captives, maybe?" "Their tough luck," Gort growled. "The general's afraid to wait." XV H e followed Gort through the barbed wire and sandbags into the headquarters building. Thorsen's appearance shocked me. Wasted and shaking, he was a walking skeleton, animated now with terror. He clutched at McAble's sleeve and asked a few hoarse questions about the steel anthill. "I'll give you another look," he promised us, "after we've blown it out of the ground." He shuffled toward the staff officers waiting. "The target area is now clear." His quavery voice turned violent. "Attack!" he gasped. "We don't know what the invaders are up to -- but they've got to be exterminated." "Erik," I tried to protest. "General Thorsen, your own daughter is probably in that dome. Along with Nick and the Markos and those security men. Captives, maybe. If they're alive you'll kill them all -- " "Hold it, Hodian." He cut me sharply off. "The invaders have ignored our signals. They are a clear threat to the whole Skygate facility -- perhaps to the human race. I refuse to be diverted by anybody. Our operation will proceed as planned." We watched from the headquarters roof. Heavy mortars chuffed behind us. Shells rained on the mesa, raising geysers of yellow dust. A spotter craft wheeled over the target. "Fire ineffectual." A laserman relayed the message to Thorsen. "Shells falling on target aren't exploding, sir. We've had direct hits and near misses. But there is not a dent in that dome." Thorsen scowled at McAble and me. "You surveyed the target," his brittle voice crackled. "Can you account for this?" "Maybe." McAble shrugged. "We saw frost on one ant's tail. Apparently they soak up energy like the space snakes do. Probably they're de-energizing the fuses of shells that come within their range." "Then I'll call in an air strike." "I wouldn't advise it, sir." McAble squinted shrewdly at the wheeling spotter plane. "I see no advantage -- " Shrill with frustration and fear, Thorsen ordered the air strike. The aircraft were invisible against the dazzle of the sun, their black bombs tumbling out of a serene and empty-seeming sky. Explosions winked and dust rose in yellow mushrooms and the mesa rumbled with dull thunder. "Bombs not effectual, sir," the laserman reported. "Visible explosions come from wide misses. No apparent damage to target." Thorsen called for napalm. Three flights of supersonic fighterbombers crashed out of that smiling sky. Their bombs smeared the mesa with long streaks of yellow fire -- which suddenly turned into drifting smoke. "Spotter going down!" the laserman shouted. "Contact cut off -- I don't know how, sir. But his last call indicates napalm not effective. Target still intact. Something snuffed out the fire, sir." Shaking, Thorsen glared at McAble. "I think it was that entropy-reversing field," McAble told him. "I believe its range has been increased. I think it put out the fire -- and caught the spotter, too. I think you're beaten, sir." "You keep thinking," Thorsen snapped. "I'm sending in the tanks." The tanks went in, converging from three directions. The air quivered with their engines. Tracer fire streaked out of the golden dust that thickened over them. Under the rolling dust cloud, their thunder-voices stuttered and died. The noise stopped; the dust cleared. The tanks stood frozen in a milewide circle around their goal. "Have a look, Hodian." The desert danced and blurred in McAble's binoculars, but at last I found the anthill. Dead missiles had furrowed the mound of earth, but that metal dome showed no scar. I found a green-and-gray splotched tank tipped into a missile crater, dead. Something crawled along its level gun. A silver-headed insect. "Watch out, Hodian!" hauled. The binoculars flew out of my hand. Men around me gasped and cursed and ran. A typewriter dropped out of the air, crashing into the roof where I had been standing. It rocked and clattered as a bright-headed ant squirmed from beneath it. I heard a fine mosquito whine. The metal ant climbed over the smashed typewriter and darted at my knees, flying a foot off the roof. Numb with terror, I couldn't move. It stopped six feet away, hovering over the binoculars I had dropped. Its eyeless head rose and turned alertly. I smelled its hot brimstone reek. "Back!" Dimly, I heard Gort's whispery shout. "Stand back, you fool -- " Stumbling back, I saw men drawing guns. "All together," Gort called. "Aim for the head. Fire!" The sun dimmed and lost its heat. A deep unpleasant chill sank into my bones. Bitterness coated my tongue. Shuddering and ill, I waited for the shots, but all I heard was an empty clacking. "Watch its tail!" McAble sounded far away. "Hot with sucked-up energy. That's why we feel so cold. And why gun-powder fails to burn." Its orange-sized tail segment was no longer black, but glowing dimly red. It settled toward the binoculars. Its bright snaky limbs explored them, wrapped them, clung. Its fine high whine grew louder as it rose -- and that sulfur scent took my breath. "Grab it!" Gort shouted. "For a specimen." McAble came plunging past me. He crouched, reached -- and crumpled like an unstrung puppet. The ant shot upward with the binoculars to vanish over the mesa. Behind it the sun shone bright and hot. The roof-top crowd stood quiet for an instant. A sparrow was fluttering overhead, carrying a grass blade for its nest. I breathed again, gratefully -- and saw Gort reloading and lifting his gun. Shattering that brief peace, his test shot exploded the sparrow. Hysterical voices babbled. Thorsen hobbled into the elevator, halfcarried by his shouting aides. McAble twitched and groaned where he had fallen. I helped him stand and he stumbled clumsily away, rubbing his icy hands together. "Hodian." Gort jogged my arm as we waited for the elevator. "We've got a rush job for you. The general wants a news release on the ants. Make 'em look harmless. Emphasize the fact that they aren't known to have injured anybody. Play down our failure to damagethem. Don't connect them with the moon children -- or the snakes or the fog. We're taking adequate action to cope with them and the general says they're under control." afternoon, still struggling to give the story some hint of conviction, when Suzie Thorsen knocked and slipped timidly into the room. "May I please speak to you?" Though she had always kept me at a certain distance, I still admired her dainty charm and her cleareyed joy in the comedy of life and even her patient fidelity to Thorsen. She wanted to talk about him now. "Erik's sick, Kim -- and I don't know what to do." She looked pinched with worry, her eyes darkrimmed. "The doctors think he has some unidentified exoform virus in his blood. He can't sleep and he can't eat and he has such dreadful headaches. I sometimes think he's not quite sane. He ought to be hospitalized, but he won't give up his job." I could say nothing useful. Though Thorsen's sickness had been evident to me, he wasn't likely to take my advice. All I actually did was take Suzie over to the nursery for a cup of coffee. Military cargo craft were rumbling across the sky. Down the street, men in battle dress were loading trucks with files and boxes from the exobiology lab. Two sentries at the nursery door scrutinized our badges. The kitchen inside was quiet, however -- too quiet, with the children gone. Suzie made coffee. I poured a big slug of Mexican rum into mine, but she waved the bottle away. We sat a long time at the table, talking over her problems and my own. The children had become the center of our lives. Involved in their long search for themselves, suffering with Kyrie in the conflict between Nick and Guy, excited by their splendid dream of the transgalactic terminal, we had been content to forget ourselves. Without them now, without Marko and Carolina, we both felt lost. We needed each other. What we said was commonplace. I don't recall many of the words, but I do remember the comfort of her smile and the candor of her voice and the delightful conviction that she was really fond of me. We didn't talk much about the ants. Their arrival was a final, unbelievable blow, so completely devastating that I had scarcely felt it yet. Trying not to think about them, I was pouring myself a second slug of rum when all three doors of the kitchen splintered inward. "Hands up, Mr. Hodian!" Men stormed in, guns pointing. Most of them were Space Force regulars, but the leader was one of Gort's lieutenants. He looked sweaty and jittery but also somehow startled and apologetic. "You're under arrest, sir. Verbal orders from General Thorsen. No charges specified. We're taking you to the security center. You aren't allowed to communicate with anybody." Suzie begged them to wait while she called her husband, but they marched me out while she was on the phone. At the security center they took me to Gort. He was rummaging his office in a harried way, dumping drawers on his desk. "Okay, Hodian." His swollen eyes glanced once at me. "Here's the situation. Ants are reported in the spaceplane hangars. Thorsen is calling in a nuclear strike. We're evacuating Skygate ahead of the missiles. I'm escorting you to another post. Our plane should be ready now. The guards will see that you don't talk to anybody." "What -- what do you think I've done?" "I don't know, Hodian." His savage eyes flashed back to me. "Whatever you've been up to, I intend to find it out. We've no time for any formal charges now. But you're Tom Hood's brother. You've been involved in space research and you've been close to all the children. You're our best link to the ants." "Believe me. Major. I don't know anything -- " He turned his back on me to dump another drawer. Our plane took off half an hour later. It was a big military transport, loaded with records from headquarters and the exobiology lab. The other passengers included McAble, Gort and a dozen of his men. McAble was beside me in a window seat, still shaken and subdued from his skirmish with the ants. As we climbed I caught one glimpse of the mesa below ajipping wing -- the zone of black craters and the circle of dead tanks around the untouched dome of the ant hill, which glinted in the sun like a lost coin. "So Thorsen's going to throw in the nukes." McAble made a grim brown face. "He might as well throw in napalm to put out a fire. His missiles will be bread-and-butter for the ants." Nobody had announced our destination, but the wheeling plane turned east. Trying to avoid the snakes, we flew cautiously low through the mountain passes and on across the square-patterned brown and green of the plains. Occasional turbulence began to rock us and presently I saw the dark cloud towers of a weather front standing all along the east horizon. The turbulence increased. Rags of cloud whipped by. We bored into a blue wall of storm. The plane pitched and shivered. Rain streaked the window. We turned and climbed and burst out at last. Above the dazzling pillars of white, the sky was darkly blue. "Uh-oh!" McAble frowned. "We're too high." Not much later, everything grew darker. The cloud summits lost their dazzle. Fangs of cold sank into me. My tongue turned bitter. I heard the engines cough and die and knew a snake was diving on us. from loss of body heat, nearly as dead as the plane. Wrapped in its eerie quiet, I was barely aware of the rushing speed, of Gort's whispery curse, of McAble's sudden nudge. Turning painfully, stiff as if my tingling skin were already ice, I saw the snake. A long serpentine shadow, transparent as black-veined glass. Its heart was a jagged crystal mass, smoldering with dull inner fire like an uncut diamond. Two plumes of blue light spread out of the crystal, wings of cold fire. Powered with our own stolen heat, it swept in fast. A bright pulse beat in the wide blue sprays. Perhaps the creature was sending some signal of friendship or warning. Perhaps it felt companionable. Perhaps it simply needed our heat. Its alien grace was as meaningless to me as the bitterness lingering in my mouth. The plane nosed down and the snake was gone. The snowy clouds were dazzling again. I gulped, shuddered and got my breath. Gort lurched past us toward the cockpit, shouting orders at the crew, but the engines failed to start. We spun down through a storm, through boiling clouds and battering winds, through darkness and lightning and jarring thunder, through rain and savage hail to a rough belly landing. I recall jumbled fragments of sensation. A vague dark line of wind-whipped trees. A ripple of blue lightning, illuminating a toysized train creeping toward a toy grain elevator. Ripe wheat beaten flat with hail. A jolt, a pitch, a dazing blow... The time after that crash is still a shadowy nightmare in my memory. The plane didn't burn, perhaps because the snake had drained so much of our heat. I believe McAble and Gort both livedthe recollection is dim as a dream, but I think they came together to visit me in the hospital, Gort on crutches, McAble with his arm in a sling. As I try to look back, my own survival seems surprising. I believe I had a brain concussion. For a long time I lay in traction, with both legs broken. On top of such injuries I contracted a severe gamma-form infection. Perhaps it saved my life. Dr. Ram Narasimachar was my physician. I knew him first as a brisk foreign voice, as a hand very deft with the needles that went into my veins, long before I saw his darkly arrogant face. Gort may have told him in the beginning that I was someone worth saving, but his passion was the space diseases. The mutant gamma-forms in my blood made me a laboratory specimen. Living in my own delirium, for a long, long time I didn't care where I was or what was happening to the planet. Though I must have heard talk about the space war, its appalling disasters were never quite as real as my lurid private dreams of the children and the ants. A quiet old Dane named Andy Elving used to clean my room in the morning. He had been to the moon as a systems engineer on the seeker craft. Now his wife was dead of a space infection and his son was gone to the war. He lived alone in a small white house we could see from my window. He was growing roses in his back yard and he used to keep a vase of them on my window ledge. He talked about roses and the town. Pitman had been a prosperous agricultural center. There was a militia camp near it now and a new munitions factory below it on the river. A long way from the mountains where the snakes had begun to nest and the seas where the fog kept spreading, it offered all the security he could find. Even the ants had never come to Pitman, Andy Elving said. Their lust was for metal and power. As if fed by the nuclear strikes, they had scattered at first to Albuquerque and Las Alamas and White Sands. Later they swarmed unpredictably into larger cities, leveling everything to build their impregnable nests. Now, however, they were leaving the cities to mine the earth itself. With no ore-bodies near. Pitman was probably safe. when I began to care about the calendar. I started asking questions about the moon children. Andy Elving remembered reading about Guy's stealing the moon jewel. Nick and Kyrie had been killed, he thought, in the bombardment of the ants at Skygate. But that was all he knew. Nobody had heard about any transgalactic terminal. I began to feel that the messenger missile had years for no result at all, that the children had been born for nothing. I thought we had lost our race to stop the chaos of conflicting biocosms. For a long time I didn't even want to recover. Andy Elving didn't like to talk about the war. Dr. Narasimachar was too sick and self-absorbed by now to talk much about anything. He had an acute gamma-form infection, probably picked up from me, and he was trying desperately to immunize himself with transfusions of my blood. My first real news of the war came from other patients, after I was well enough to be moved out of isolation. Clayton Carter was a sunburnt ghost when he came into the ward, but his weakness came from hardship and exposure, not from any space disease. He was out of his head at first -- maybe most of the time -- but his unbelievable story rekindled my interest in the world. A veteran Space Force pilot, he told me how the mechanics of his militia unit had built what he believed was the last spaceplane in America, out of salvaged wreckage. When it was ready his first test flight was a scouting mission across the Rockies. Flying low and fast, he hoped to evade the snakes and bring back a report on what the ants were doing in the Skygate area. A diving snake killed his jets and forced him down, however, somewhere beyond the Rio Grande. As the spaceplane went down. Carter glimpsed something that strained his faith in his own sanity. Even now he couldn't quite believe what he had seen and I had to coax the story from him. He was sitting up in bed that day, a black-bearded skeleton smeared with chalky ointments. I remember the tortured hesitation in his hoarse cattle-country drawl -- he was a native New Mexican. "The army don't believe what I saw -- or thought I saw." His inflamed eyes peered uneasily at me. "A building on the mesa where Skygate was. A kind of tower -- taller than the Rockies! Call me a liar -- " "Was it white?" I whispered. "Was it seven columns in a cluster? Did the tops of the outer columns make a kind of spiral stair? Did the center column have a pointed, shining dome?" "Have you -- " He gulped and wet his ulcerated lips. "Mister, have you been there?" minal!" My voice was as rough and breathless as his own. "The station the moon children were born to build, so the tachyon ships could come from the stars." For the first time I tried to sit up in bed. "Are you sure it's really there?" "It's there, all right." Awe echoed in his voice. "Taller than I dared fly and shaped exactly like you say. "Except -- " He paused to frown. "Except for that high dome. It wasn't bright or shining at all. It was black as midnight." "Just so it's there." I was trying to climb out of bed. "Now the tachyon ships will come -- " "Not for us they won't." He sank back against the pillows. "Because that terminal don't belong to no friends of ours." I had to wait while a nurse sprayed his sadly damaged feet. Then he went on with his tantalizing story. "I was Tom Fool Lucky in a way," he said. "The plane came down dead, but the ejection gear did kick me out before the crash. All I got was a twisted ankle and a few cracked ribs. Not bad, considering the rocky arroyo I came down in. "I scrabbled around in the wreckage, but I never found my survival kit. The desert got hot and my ankle swelled and I began to wonder how lucky I really was. But when I climbed out of the gully I could see that tower. Taller than the clouds! "I waited till sundown, afraid it might be a mirage. But it stayed there. The sun blazed on it, long after the desert was dark. Mister, it was something! Golden up high where the sun still struck, with zones of red and purple slowly climbing out of the night around me. I never imagined the towers of heaven quite so beautiful. "I made a sort of crutch out of parts from my ejection shell. When dawn came I started toward the tower. The top of it was already blazing before day came, gold and rose-colored under that dead black dome. "It looked about a mile off when I set out. I hobbled along till sundown and it still looked a mile away. By that time my tongue was and the tower didn't seem so pretty any longer. "I hadn't seen a sign of a human being anywhere, or even any animal bigger than a packrat. I guess the fallout from Skygate got most of the larger life. It may have been still active -- I had no meter for it. That next day might have been my last if I hadn't stumbled into the old Albuquerque road. "There wasn't any traffic. Hadn't been, for a long time. Rocks washed into the highway dips. One funny thing -- all the bridges had been taken out. I was still sane enough to wonder why. I limped on till I came to the old Dos Lobos trading post. "I used to stop there on vacation trips, but I barely recognized it now. Everything metal was gone. Signs and gas pumps and the tin roof off the buildings. Even the junk cars piled up behind the garage. "Rain had begun to crumble the 'dobe walls, but I dug in the dried mud with my crutch till I uncovered a bottle of apple cider. That saved my life. I sipped and slept all night -- and dreamed about people with golden wings letting me into that tower, like old Saint Pete admitting the children of God. "In the morning I dug again. Most of the metal cans were gone or rusted through and rain and rats had spoiled a lot of the rest, but I found three more cases of cider and enough other stuff still good in glass and plastic. "I stayed there at the 'dobe walls, lying in the shade at noon and watching that tower the rest of the day, till I could leave the crutch and carry a pack. I walked on, then, following the old pavement and climbing through the dry canyons where the bridges were missing. "A half-moon was out the night I came to the mesa. Feeling too eager to stop, I climbed the old mesa road by moonlight. The moon was low when I got to the rim -- but there it was. "The foot of it was still a mile or two away, but that black dome was lost in the stars. I got a crick in my neck, looking up at it. Mister, I wish I could tell you how I felt. Crazy with wonder, but somehow afraid -- " At that point the nurse came back. She told Carter he was getting too tired. Though he protested, she turned his pillow and lowered his bed and snapped her sleeper gun at his head. Next day, after his feet were sprayed, I begged him to go on. ai n't laughing at me, mister?" He squinted suspiciously through his wild black beard and his chalky facial dressings. "You don't think I'm nuts?" "I knew the moon kids," I assured him. "I watched them working two years on the plans for that build it. I hope -- I hope it's real." "It's plenty real." He punched the button to raise his bed and sat glaring strangely at me. "But the builders ain't human," he muttered. "They ain't setting it up for us." I waited uneasily till he went on. "They were working overtime the night I got there. I couldn't see much, because the moon was nearly down by then. But I could hear -- " one bandaged hand made a hesitant groping motion -- "a sort of humming whine like a milhives of bees. Then there was a kind of booming beat, deep and slow, like the biggest drum that ever was. "I dropped my pack at the mesa rim and started toward the tower. But I didn't get far. I began to wonder why those workers used no lights. And why I heard no human voices. Then the wind must have changed, because I caught an odor that choked me. A scent like burning sulfur. "All that was too much. I picked up my pack and scuttled down the road to a sort of shallow cave I had passed. I crawled in there to hide. It was cold, but I couldn't risk a fire. Finally I shivered myself to sleep. "Something woke me about sunup. Something crawling on my chest. I batted it away before my eyes were open. It had a cold metal feel. I heard a whine and smelled sulfur and saw it hovering over my head. "A damn mechanical ant! I'd seen news pictures, but still the thing shook me up. That blind sixsided head, watching me with no eyes to watch with. The legs of it like a bunch of thin wire snakes -- coiled around the coins and keys it had stolen out of my pocket. Even the class ring off my finger! "It watched me for maybe half a minute before it sailed away with the loot. I was sick after it left. Lost my supper and what little strength I had. But finally, after an hour or two, I nerved myself to climb back to the rim for another look. "The tower wasn't heaven to me now." Carter shivered under his sheet. "It looked more like the gate to hell -- with all those metal ants for junior demons. They were swarming as far as I could see, swirling like dark clouds all around the bottom of the tower. "Near me, so close I could see their flat bright heads and their black tail-balls, they came and went from a metal-rimmed pit. In one stream they brought materials -- hundreds of them clinging to a rusty ingot or a mass of ore or a scrap of junk that might have come from my own spaceplane. In another stream they came out with fabricated parts they carried to the tower. Bright metal and big white blocks. Their noise shook the rocks under me and their hot reek burned my eyes. They're building an ant hill -- into the stratosphere. "Standing there, I forgot to be frightened, till one of them came whining around my head. I was afraid it wanted my gold tooth. When it flew back to the pit I turned and ran. Nothing followed me -- but I nearly died getting out." Carter sighed as if still exhausted. "I wandered out of the desert and over the mountains and all the way back. The ants had scavanged all the metal everywhere and I never saw a human being. Water and food were hard to find. After my shoes wore out I had to tear up my clothes for bandages -- that's how I got cooked with the sun. I was nearly back to Oklahoma when the militia scouts picked me up. "That's it, mister." He sat up, glaring fiercely through his chalky mask. "The militia don't believe me and I ain't got no proof. The snakes have downed our last airplane. But that tower's standing there where Skygate was. Taller than the clouds! I ain't no liar, mister." "I'm sure you aren't," I said. But suddenly I wasn't sure. Something about his angry challenge made me think of Yuri Marko, who had once been just as positive that he had found a transgalactic terminal on the moon. feet, Clayton Carter went back to his militia unit. He wanted to lead a mounted party west. Neither the snakes nor the ants, he thought, would interfere with horses. He hoped to photograph the terminal and perhaps to try communicating with the ants, but I never learned what became of him. The next man beside me lay three days in a heal-sleep tent. "His name's Ballou," old Andy Hiving told me. "He's got friends. They brought him on a horse cart from back east and threatened to burn the hospital if Doc Narasimachar wouldn't take him in ahead of the war refugees that are dying in the streets." "A space case?" "Some woman carved him up. Slashed his face and stabbed him in the gut. He came in with peritonitis and it took some fancy surgery to save him." Awake, Ballou was an angular waspish man with thick dark hair and a complaining nasal whine. He fumed when the doctor hurt his face, peeling off the bandages, and demanded a mirror to inspect himself. "Look what you've done to me!" He fingered the forked blue seam across his cheek. "I used to be a fine-lookin' man. Folks said I coulda been a trivee star. Now look what a fright you've made of me." He threw the mirror at the doctor. "You clumsy bastard vet!" Narasimachar ducked the mirror, which shattered on the floor. My blood had failed to stop the gamma-life teeming in his flesh and his worsening palsy had in fact begun to spoil his surgery. I saw the stifled fury on his dark face and the way he clutched his gaunt hands together to stop their shaking. He stalked out silently. "Call him back," Ballou snarled at the nurse. "I won't be insulted. Not by any pill-pushing quack. I'll have you know I'm somebody. We're the Fairfax Ballous. I guess you've heard of us." "I've heard plenty." The nurse whisked out and he turned fretfully to me. "I'm Spiro Ballou." An ingratiating smile twitched across the unscarred half of his face. "Call me Spike. Back in Fairfax, I was somebody. People didn't insult me there. Not twice!" I was about to introduce myself, but his plaintive voice ran on, quivering with self-pity now. "All this crap is hard for me to take, because of who I was. My old man was president of the Fairfax National Bank and chairman of the board of Fairball Industries. He owned the best half of the town. When I married he bought me the Poppy-Cola franchise for a wedding present. But look at me now." He sniffled and fingered his scar. sexiest doll in town. I had four acres out in Faircrest. An eightroom home of hand-laid brick. I drove a Cadillac Hydrocat and traded twice a year. I thought I had everything till the Moon King came along -- " "The Moon King?" I had been thoroughly bored with Spike Ballou, but that jolted me awake. "Who's the Moon King?" "You remember the Moon Kids? Two cute little scamps and one like a hairy bear? There used to be Moon Kid dolls. Moon Kid toys and Moon Kid picture books -- " I said I remembered the moon children. "People sort of turned against 'em as I grew up. I guess just because space didn't mean fun and games any more, after we got into the other biocosms. Anyhow, a couple of years ago this animal type ran off with what he calls the moon jewel -- " "Have you seen it?" I interrupted him. "A glowing pyramid -- " growed in his throat. "Most of the women in Fairfax did. But he never showed it to me. He don't take to men."  "Is this jewel in Fairfax now?" "It sure is." Ballou nodded bitterly. "I hear he stores it in the Fran says it keeps the space things out of Fairfax. The killer fog and the flying snakes and them ironeating ants. She thinks it cures the space diseases." "This moon boy has it?" "He ain't no boy. Big as a grizzly. But he come to Fairfax with the jewel a couple of years ago. About the time the world began to fall apart. Only I didn't know him then. One that did was Ballou gritted his teeth. "That was when she turned cold to me. If you can imagine -- " He choked with indignation, as if he couldn't imagine. "They were slick enough. It was just lately anybody found out about 'em. My wife -- and that hairy beast! They should have been buried alive." He sat up in bed, breathing hard and glaring at a nurse who had stopped to listen at the door until at last she sniffed and disappeared. He lay back to get his breath. "Seems the moon thing come into the country with some circus. Like the animal freak he is. Billed as the Siberian talking bear. One night a college professor got to asking questions he didn't like. He smashed the guy's face against the bars and broke out of his cage before the cops got there. "That was off in another town. He slipped into Fairfax through the woods. Dressed in a floppy hat and an old rain cape to make like a human hobo, he was working the alleys, begging for food. I must have been playing gin at the counFran was home alone." Rage seethed in him. "I guess she let him into the kitchen first. She filled him up with a roast and potatoes she'd been cooking for me. She never told me all they did, but finally she put him in the little apartment behind the garage, where her old lady stayed till she died. She kept him there -- if you can picture that ! "H ow cou Id she do it?" He blinked at me, his glaring fury clouded with a dim bewilderment. "A sweet girl like Billy Fran -- singing in the Presbyterian choir and teaching the toddler's Sunday school class and crying like a baby every time she found a spot of lipstick on my shirt. How could any woman love that circus freak? When she had me?" I didn't try to answer. "She kept him there the best part of a year before I ever knew. But she wasn't the only one he had." A sullen amazement slowed his voice. "I guess it was the cleaning woman, first. Then her Thursday bridge luncheon. Then her Sunday school class -- the young married women." He grimaced with a certain bitter smugness. "So I wasn't the only sucker." I couldn't help asking how he found the moon child. py." He scowled savagely. "Too damned healthy. Too damned beautiful. Like she had discovered the fountain of life. Her sinusitis cleared up. She was singing to herself all the time. Doing little things to please me. She tried to cook what I liked and she saved out of the house allowance to buy a new shockproof chronoscope I wanted for my birthday. And she quit nagging when I come in late. Things like that made me wonder, but then a stranger tipped me off. "A fat black little guy with a hook nose and a bad odor. When he first come out to the PoppyCola plant I thought he was a federal nark. But it turns out he don't care how we spike the stuff. He's a private eye, hired to find the moon jewel." "Huh?" I had begun to wonder how my missing brother would fit into the picture. "Was his name Tom Hood?" WI#HE name he gave us was i Todhunter Hoke." Ballou peered at me sharply. "He knew all about that educated Siberian bear and he'd talked to that bunged-up college professor. He snooped around till he located that moon beast and his harem. "I saw red when he told me but he ducked away and tossed me a picture of her and the beast. He'd bugged the room, too, and he played me a tape that made me making love and laughing at me!" Ballou sat silent for a moment, his scarred face dark and twitching. "Hoke called a bunch of us together. My golf and poker buddies -- that hairy brute had all our wives." His stifled voice was hoarse with hate. "I wanted to catch him and burn him alive, but Hoke said he'd be too hard for us to handle. "So finally we called in the law. My uncle was the chief of police and the county sheriff had a note at the bank, so we got cooperation. We closed in on that garage apartment with twenty men in six cars. I had buckshot in a pump gun and I meant to gut-shoot the beast. But he got away." Ballou writhed with frustration. "Somebody yelled that he was running into the woods behind the barbecue. We all dashed in like fools. Shooting started down in the brush by the creek, but when we got to the dead man he was just a deputy sheriff. "That beast had out-foxed us -- them damfool women musta tipped him off. Our cars had been rolled over and set on fire before we got outa the woods. And all that was just for openers -- " Perhaps I had smiled, because he stopped to glare at me. "It ain't no joke," he whined angrily. "Not to none of us. Nor to them women, when our turn comes. We'll make them sluts hate the day they ever saw that stinkin' brute." "It's more than a joke," I agreed. "Did you ever catch the moon man?" "Not yet. Nor many of his crazy bitches, either. The sheriff tried to round up all the women and get 'em out of town. He swore us into a special posse and sent us up and down the streets, but all we caught was a handful of little girls and smooth-mouthed grannies. All the rest was hiding or shooting at us. "That hunt went on all day. A dozen men was hurt or killed in a shootout at the city park. The sheriff got hit in an ambush down by the bottling plant. A big fire was set on Main Street while we were outa town. "We had 'em surrounded once in the Red Raven tavern, out on the airport road. The police tossed riot bombs into the place and went in shooting. But that brute was too much for 'em. He breathed the gas and took the bullets and used the chief like a club to smash his way out. A hairy devil! Big as a Brahma bull. "And them women -- you can't imagine what he's done to them! Most of 'em pregnant. Blown up with their own baby beasts. But that don't slow 'em down. I seen the Presbyterian pastor thrown outa the tavern through a plate glass window by his own young daughter. "By night they was hunting us. Gangs of them hot bitches took the court house and the city hall and the militia armory. They sniped at us from the water tower and the elevators and the roof of my old man's bank. They run us out of town." Ballou lay back and closed his eyes, wheezing for his breath as if defeated all over again by the violence of his own narrative. "Run us out -- and kept us out. They burned the bridges. Piled up wrecked cars for road blocks. Posted snipers in trees and silos. Them crazy women and their hairy stud -- that's why we call him the Moon King." "So he's still there?" "The gov'ment ain't about to help us catch him -- not when they're busy losing the space war. The militia's been trying to fight a patch of killer fog spreading over Lake Ballou. So Hoke helped us organize our own mounted patrol. "I'm the captain, of course. We forded the river early one morning and slipped down through the woods where the snipers couldn't spot us. We surprised three women picking beans in a little garden patch. They yelled and ran, but we caught one of 'em. her own monster-baby. Her second kid by him -- she never wanted none of mine. We took her back to camp. She wouldn't talk at first, but she opened up when Hoke got hold of her. She told us all about that brute and the moon jewel -- how they keep it in the bank vault while he sleeps once a week, two or three days at a time. "I felt sorry for her when Hoke got through -- what a fool I was!" Ballou's quivering fingertips explored his scar. "I was guarding her that night, in the barn where we was camped. Somehow she got untied and come at me with a rusty old gelding knife she musta found under the hay. She cut me up and got away on our best horse. "That's how come me here -- and I like to died on the road. But we ain't through. Hoke's setting up another raid right now, but he'll wait for me to lead it. He's overhauling a broke-down army tank the militia left when they run away from the lake. We're going in with that on a day when the Moon King's asleep. I don't think them bitches know how to stop a tank -- " "Nap time, Mr. Ballou!" He glowered at the bustling nurse as if she had been one of Guy's girls. Smiling sweetly, she smoothed his sheets and read his monitors and spread his tent for another heal-sleep treatment. Three of his commandoes came to pick him up when he was discharged. They were brown sullen men, bristling with knives and guns. The tank had been checked out, one of them said, and Hoke was figuring the days when the Moon King would be asleep. If the hairy bastard ever woke up, he'd learn he'd lost his marbles. IF The Magazine of Alternatives Possibly I only think I have. But whichever it is, less and less am I able to believe in mass fiction as a vehicle of use-ready social ideas. In the arena of contending social values, there are sharper lances. Where fiction has sparked immediate social action, as with the young Upton Sinclair, it has more closely resembled documentation. Even then, its effect seems to be in inverse proportion to the size of its target. Even so, we have polluters and exploiters with us yet, long after Sinclair turned to Lanny Budd for solace. The basic system, some few of whose gallery of symptoms drew Sinclair's ire, persists. The value of science fiction -- a philosophical, speculative vehicle by definition -- cannot be even as immediately effective as that of the muckraking contemporary roman a clef. Science fiction is almost inescapably a vehicle for ideas whose time has not come. This doesn't and shouldn't prevent people from trying to make something else of it. Inevitably, one of them will find a way. But it does make the odds quite heavy against any given individual's success in producing anything socially deeper than what we already know. And unfortunately we are beset with people who sincerely believe that to say anything above the conventional level of mediocrity is to explore territory never before beheld by man or artist. These appear to be people who have not yet realized that conventional mediocrity is a proven effective survival mechanism for the individual, if not for the mass, and quite often a consciously thought and devotedly cultivated mechanism which no trumpery concoction of the tale-teller's art can hope to disarm. It is to be remembered that the itinerant unthreadedpipe salesman knows he has seen a good deal more of the world than the garret genius. It is to be considered that if he has scales on his eyes, perhaps it is because of the scars on his back, and elsewhere. Now, I may be wrong. But more and more do I feel that our bigger thinkers are whistling up their spouts, and I think perhaps I know why. More and more often as I accumulate abrasions in the course of nurturing mine own torch amidst the nighted palisades of life do I crave a plain tale plainly told. I do my own damned expert agonizing. What I need from a storyteller is some convincing hint that it's not all for nothing. The interesting thing about a welltold story for adults is that it requires more experience of life, and more closely observed experience, than do the comparatively easy "heavy" novels whose frequent nature as a formless outcry of one undistinguished ego is disguised behind a hastily worked screen of experimental technique or a dull mask of deliberate pedestrianism. Eull appreciation of a hero's hard knocks requires a battered context of one's own. The Maltese Falcon will not work on an innocent reader. Neither will Nerves nor The Invisible Man. Some approximation of them will work on children -- it's possible to make Universal movies of all of them. But it would shake you to your innocent boots what John Huston could have done with H.G. Wells if he hadn't found Dashiell Hammett first. The stuff is there, and it is not for children. Not children only, at any rate. And that brings me to this column's books. None of them are destined for immortality. None is without flaw. But it was reading them, and enjoying some of their passages immoderately, that led me to wonder what is wrong, that Keith Laumer should please me more than Tom Disch. I reached the conclusion that perhaps there is more to it than simple right and wrong. Time (Walker  Co., #), for instance, is nothing but an adventure story set in his parallel-universe series, in which Brion Bayard -- a figure straight out of John Buchan -- strives to prevent the Zero-Zero universe from being snuffed out. The vehicle of extinction in this case is a shambling race of beastmen called the Hagroon who -- unlikely though it sounds -- have access to the same scientific principles which enable the ZeroZero Imperium to operate across alternate timetracks. To defeat them, Bayard must first ally himself with yet another timetracking race from a universe in which the ancestors of Homo Sapiens did not win out over the other simians, then must homebuild an orangecrate vehicle after being marooned in a technologically backward universe. Incidental to all this, he also discovers, or, rather, blunders into, genuine time travel, plus a curious zerotime "in between" condition which Laumer never does quite rationalize. This we call piling Pelion on Ossa, painting the lily and throwing in the kitchen sink. Just as Brion Bayard becomes a helpless victim of circumstances throughout much of this narrative, so does Laumer, in trying to make the story work out so that it sustains excitement and teems with individually attractive scenes, find himself having to make his sincere, courageous hero an impulsive dolt. In addition, Bayard's escape from his marooning specifically depends on the supposition that the two human discoverers of the time-tracking principle must have existed, and at least done some preliminary tinkering, even in a #th Century ruled by Napoleon the Fifth in his best #th Century manner. It's then bad logical structure to confer time-tracking on the Hagroon and on the non-human simians of Xonijeel. On the one hand, you are using exclusivity as a rationale; on the other, you are promoting universality. notice this, or care, while reading the book, the inescapable fact is that the thing is fun to read. On the one level, there's the old "How's he going to get out of this one?" syndrome to keep you turning the pages. On a perhaps deeper level, there's a recognition of the fact that the hero has a realistic problem. Bayard's true adversaries are not the Hagroon; they're a comparatively simple business to deal with; all you have to do is swing a big enough gun into position. That's a purely executive matter. But what gums up the gears is the interference of the sincere, noble, enlightened simians, who would like to see an orderly, peaceful universe -- based of course on their own zero-zero coordinates. That is called Eealing With Management, and let me tell you, Laumer makes it poignant. You will notice this is not a Big Think. But is something many of us can identify with. For most of us, personal experience with external and domestic politics is limited. Urban renewal, equal opportunity, pollution, overpopulation, and Amtrak are not things we grapple with. We grapple with people whose actions thwart us, whatever they may say or believe. We grapple with city employees who'd rather see us throw the bundled newspaper into the incinerator than stick it in the recycling collection bin. We all want to get rid of the garbage, but how about the taxpaid refuse yard man who deliberately breaks your turned-in glass under the tires of your truck? All right, so his desire to have the yard run in its God-intended age-long manner outweighs his desire to live on a clean earth. Is there that much difference between his desire to do things his way and my desire to do things mine? It's the collision between these identical traits that breaks the glass -- and it's this level of problem that the adventure tale deals with. Committees for The Good don't punch each other on the nose; people do. And it's people who wince away from the next upraised fist and who, even in the midst of not listening to some chairman's drone, find their minds drifting back to some thirty-years-past schoolyard confrontation and sit upright. Am I getting too far afield, and investing too much importance in a piece of thud-and-blunder? Perhaps. But why has the action story always been with us? Surely, you'd think grown people wouldn't be interested in what appears to be a totally childish form. Let's take a look at Tactics of Mistake, by Gordon R. Dickson (Doubleday, #). (It's all # these days. No wonder they have to dump them as soon as they're in the stores). Tactics of Mistake is tangential to Dickson's Dorsai series. In it, Cletus Grahame -- a light colonel, as distinguished from Brion Bayard, who's a full bird -- lays down one card after another in a sequence demonstrating that By God a junior executive can (A) outperform Management and (B) start his own wildly successful company. In a Dorsai novel, where war is treated as business, the analogy's not far-fetched at all. Superficially Grahame follows out that story which Randall Garrett says begins with: "You'll find things are a lot different out here. Lieutenant," and ends with "I guess I must have misjudged you, sir." Resigning his instructor's post at the Western Alliance Military Academy, Grahame gets himself assigned as a tactical specialist on an obscure little world where they seem to be fighting the Indochina war all over again. In short order he whips that one, then applies for Dorsai citizenship, retrains the Dorsai into an effective fighting force (!), and restructures the entire political nature of the human universe. He also gets the girl. who seems no prize to me, seeing as one day she hates him, next day marries him, next day hates him, fourth day... Well, you get the idea Dickson was going to go back into the manuscript and fill out some motivation here, but realized his book was growing out of hand already. And it is. I haven't even told you about his Magic Knee and what that leads to. Yet, again, here was a book I couldn't put down. I was Dealing With Management myself at the time and badly needed the sleep, but I spent it on this story instead. One of the alternative explanations is that I'm getting soft in the head -- forsaking the perceptive clarity of my youth, hardening my heart to the Important Things of the World, taking delight in depictions of agony and death. Would it help if you knew I've seen a little agony and death -- and had a little knee trouble, too -- and I stopped grinning over them some time ago? I mean, I know what it feels like when Jerry flattens Tom's face with a two-by-four. And I'll bet you do, too. Perhaps, somehow, that's why we get something meaningful out of battle scenes. Dickson's a more thoughtful writer than Laumer, by some slight margin. That is to say, he cogitates more visibly than Colonel Laumer does. There is more intellectual texture to Tactics of Mistake than there is to The Other Side of Time, just as there is far more in books by Nevil Shute, C.S. Forrester, or Robert Heinlein. But they are cut of the same cloth -- taking the Heinlein of the thirty years beginning in the #s -- and there is no denying the power of this kind of storytelling, for all that logical analysis yields some stuff that can sound either ludicrous or gamy. The inside of the human mind is like that; the top layers of the brain, though they speak, do not represent the majority. Perhaps we shouldn't be that way -- but can we talk ourselves into some new condition? Not likely; the part that speaks is not the part that eats. Of the three books reviewed here, Laumer's The Star Treasure (Putnam, #), is simplest and weakest. (Libraries get a heavy discount. Few of these books ever sell at the jacket price. Would a publisher care to try a drop in the retail price and a reduction in the discount to libraries? Probably not. Yet it might get more copies into the hands of the civilians, all of whom are potential buyers for other books listed on the jacket-back by the same publisher). (So much for dreaming). Weak though it is -- deus descends ex machina Finally to drive the truth through Ban Tarleton's thick skull -- there's still a little of the good stuff here. There's a lot of razzle-dazzle about how the Star Lords run the Companies that eat off the happy Public, which you can discard. Essentially, Tarleton is the Man Who Doesn't Know He Has The Secret, and has to keep dodging thunderbolts until it all dawns on him and he gets the Power. It's hard to live with a dumb cluck like that, and most of us know we don't have any Secret. But what Laumer apparently thought he was writing was the story about the man who Gets Handed the Package, and that's a good one. All of us know that someday we'll get handed The Package by the mysterious blonde on the train to South Bend and then we'll tell the boss to Go Scroo. Or we know we hope for it, and that's close enough for comfort.  In Jupiter's gravity deeps, McKay had two choices: find his friend or lose himself! T hree alien ships towered in the sunlight on the Montana spacefield. Sharply swept fins tapering from near the nose gave each a triangular silhouette. It was unusual to see all three here at once, for their visits to Earth were staggered. They were the supply ships of an expedition opening up the moons of Jupiter for commercial exploitation. One of the ships was leaving. Sirens howled across the field; everyone on the base was under cover; shutters were lowered over the control tower windows, not to protect the personnel in the unlikely event of a fusion explosion but to preserve the glass during a routine takeoff. Water began to eascade through the flame deflector of the launch pad. Through the tower periscope McKay saw the chemical motors ignite. The ship pushed up slowly, driving out steam around it for the few feet that saved the pad from evaporationthen the fusion motors fired at primary boost. Almost hidden in blue-white glare the ship lifted, faster than McKay could follow it, into the clear sky. A mile up, with the shutters raised again, he could track it with binoculars, though the flame was still painfully bright. The freighter was tilting now, its trajectory carrying it into the Interface corridor specified in relation to the field. Interface opened like a great black disk ahead of the ship. McKay was looking through a hole in the sky a half-mile across, not just out into space but into the very vicinity of Jupiter. The glare from the idling motors was still too bright for him to see stars and, to his disappointment, the Interface was not pointing toward Jupiter itself. The ship coasted up into the disk, its exhaust suddenly splaying out, and the blue sky smoothed over behind it. Any two places each less than ten thousand miles from an Interface relay could be linked directly by air; a whole extraterrestrial race, the Eallaran, had dedicated themselves to enlarging the Interface net. It cost them slow sublight journeys to new stars. Earth's sun was one of the newest to be reached. "That's a better show than your ship usually gives us," the station commander remarked. "When are you going out there yourself?" "Another couple of days," said McKay, putting the binoculars away. "When Cathy Devlin gets back from the Geneva confer-' ence." "That's not going well, I hear." "There's a lot of frustration," McKay agreed. "It's the same old problem: all our dealings with Interface civilizations, of whatever kind, are channeled through the military format of the U.N. Committee for Earth's Defense. The aliens definitely want a change -- so do most of the governments and private concerns trying to deal with them." "You can't blame the committee for keeping tight control," said the commander. "Earth was attacked from space and the Solar System was forcibly occupied by the Sasarenn not long ago. I've never been sorry I wasn't in command here then. Has anything been heard recently of the Sasarenn and their war fleet?" McKay shook his head. "Nothing, I'm glad to say. Since they don't have Interface or fasterthan-light drive it'll take them a hundred years to get here if they do decide to harass the Interface again." Though the occupation against the Eallaran had been a time of great danger. Earth had come out of it relatively well. When the Furtherance, the Interface survey fleet, threw the Sasarenn out. Earth was left with McKay as the recognized Planetary Agent and one versatile spaceship, the Sasarenn Recovery and Liaison Vehicle he still flew. Other planets, he knew, had suffered heavily in the Sasarenn-Interface conflict. "And the earlier attackers? The AI Tanrai?" "Nothing so far, though the Furtherance are still moving into what the AI Tanrai claim is their space. Since the Furtherance ships themselves are sub-light, it's not surprising they haven't met again yet. But the AI Tanrai worry know Earth's location and they know we've joined the Interface. I'm sure they'll be back." "All good grounds," said the commander, "for leaving space affairs with the Committee for Earth's Defense." "But an increasing headache for me," McKay replied as they left the tower. "Now there's a permanent base on lo, I have to get out there again and see that Earth's interests are properly represented. That's not a military problem -- or a flying one -- and I've no training for this kind of thing." "And worst of all, being a military man yourself, you can't tell them where to put their job." The commander grinned sympathetically. "We all have that trouble at times." "Sure -- " McKay left the tower a short time later and turned toward the mac his thoughts dwelt on the most tangible hold the job had on him -- the communications relay forcibly implanted in his skull by the Sasarenn tied the ship and the Planetary Agent status inescapably to his own personality. Whether or not his training equipped him for his present task, there was no other job he could hold -- the implantation in his brain made him captive. T hey gathered at the ship in the early morning: McKay, Slazeck, Devlin and Cathy, her flight overalls. McKay didn't like having both Devlins along -- a husband-and-wife team introduced an unpredictable dimension to an already hazardous mission -- but Cathy had proved herself many times over on previous missions. They took their places in the cockpit and cabin and McKay Plugged in to the perception ciraround vision and full display from the ship's sensors and computer-autopilot. The display in McKay's brain traced out the Interface corridor, catching the ship in a web of position fixes on the Interface relay in orbit overhead. McKay fed in the specifications for this side -- zero groundspeed, altitude # feet, gaseous diffusion nil -- and for the other side: stable orbit two hundred miles above Callisto, the expedition's emergence corridor. The trackers were locked on the relay satellite. "Up Interface -- " said McKay to the computer-autopilot. Seen from the ground. Interface was impressive; close up, if you had time to watch, it was an outstanding spectacle. A great circular window stood open in the Montana sky -- open into and level into it, the wings and air intakes folding back to the delta configuration as the last puffs of air crystallized astern. The computer made a flash position check on the Callisto relay and was satisfied; behind them Earth's sky was brushed away. They were in shadow; Jupiter and the other moons were in twothirds phase. Away from the planet a silent spread of stars filled the sky. The sudden transition to weightlessness brought its usual touch of elation. "That's absolutely beautiful," Cathy said from behind McKay in the cabin. "Ships in the offing," Slazeck said quietly from in the co-pilot's couch. "I see them." McKay was alert, but not yet tensed up. He hadn't expected to find the expedition here. When he flashed a recognition pulse and got no answer he began to feel taut. "What's wrong?" Cathy was sensitive to changes of psycho"Unknown ships ahead. There's no visual sighting -- you'll have to plug in to radar." "I've got them. Who do you think they are?" "Can't tell, honey. They're big ships, though, in the emergence orbit -- thirteen of them. That could mean something. The Furtherance group their ships by prime numbers, don't they?" "Thirteen Futherance ships would be a fighting unit," said Slazeck. "Have you heard any hints of trouble?" "Not a thing. I don't think we'll hurry to close up." McKay was slowly overtaking the drifting ships. He calculated light before reaching the others. He could make his ship radar-invisible, bpt it seemed too late to make use of that precaution. There was still no reply to their continuing electronic challenge, however, and as orbital sunrise drew nearer McKay went on the alert, sending a camera probe ahead. "They look like Furtherance ships," said Devlin. "The Sasarenn used much the same design." The tapered cylinder, with wrap-around motor bulges, could well be the basic layout for all space warships. "Furtherance markings," Devlin reported. "And still no radio contact, not even automatic identification. I don't much care for this." "I have direct visual sighting, Mac. We'll overhaul them ourselves in five minutes." McKay thought hard. "All right, we'll let that happen. This is a rescue ship, after all. Go to full combat alert." E xtra radiation shielding deployed, sealing off the cockpit and cabin. Acceleration shields closed over the occupants, isolating each in what could become an escape capsule. They were traveling tail first toward the formation, since McKay had slowed up slightly from the probe. Silentand -- McKay realized from the markings -- upside down. In space it made no difference. There was still no reaction, not even a laser flash, as they passed between the ships. "The one to our starboard, Mac -- that's the Darni, Kiliath's new ship." McKay recognized the red crest on the hull. Kiliath, Earth's oldest Furtherance contact, had only recently gained his own command and had paid a goodwill visit to Terra. Rendezvous maneuver had been preset -- "Implement," McKay told the ship, and a burst from the the orbits. fully deployed on their out-of-atmosphere booms, were finding nothing unusual about the dormant ships themselves -- but bioscan, despite the hull shielding, was picking up definite traces from the Darni. McKay made a long, detailed scan of it while the ships hung in the pinhead sunlight and the moon's face turned slowly past. "Something odd there," he said. "It's as if there were spots of life, shading off into nothing, on the outer hull of the ship. Any theories?" "None at all, Mac," said Slazeck after a pause. "But we've got about forty minutes of sunlight if we want to make closer checks." McKay said firmly. "Whatever's wrong, it's affected all the ships in the formation. I'll take a sled over there and go in through the lock. Walt, you're in command. Dev, come with me." They could have separated their capsules from the ship's life-support and made the crossing in them, but McKay wanted more freedom of action. Reopening the radiation bulkheads, he and lock, put on full spacesuits, then deployed two unused couch-sled units from the cabin. McKay never got over his admiration for this stretcher unit, airsled, ejection capsule all in a single system. They depressurized the airlock, lowered the outer door and worked around it to walk up the hull to the rescue hatches. Casting off the sleds, they moved on compressedair jets toward the warship. They kept the shielding open -- since they were in full suits -- and crossed to the Darni without incident. McKay wouldn't have risked a guess as to whether they could get in or not, but the Darni' s airlock opened first time. They moored the sleds, went through the lock -- and found themselves facing three Fallaran crewmen with guns. Beyond doubt they meant business. They were anchored firmly against recoil in zero-G; their weapons weren't heavy enough to do structural damage to the ship and, after they took aim, there wasn't a tremor of movement. Moving slowly, McKay opened up his helmet faceplate. "Good morning," he said. "Where's Kiliath?" H IS suit radio was on -- to link with the ship's computer translation -- but all he heard in reply was a rumble of Fallaran speech. On the radio there was nothing. This was going to be difficult -- what the hell could be wrong? He couldn't say offhand if he'd met these crewmen before. The Fallaran were high-gravity humanoids with gray, wrinkled skin and brilliant eyes. To tell them apart was not easy -- but these three didn't seem to recognize him. "McKay," he said forcefully. "Where's Kiliath?" Talking naturally to the Fallaran was difficult: the aliens were quiet-spoken and their natural range of speech and hearing fell somewhat below the human voice. As far as McKay could see, they hadn't recognized his or their own captain's names; but an officer who did know McKay finally came padding in grip shoes down the spiral steps from the control deck -- and the guns were turned aside. McKay began to wish he had brought Cathy over; she had found time to learn some of the Fallaran language. The officer hauled McKay over to a control terminal and indicated he should "plug in." Doing so, fading out the scene around him, McKay found an extraordinary situation. The perception circuits of the Furtherance ships were essentially simibeen able to study the full field of view outside, read off the ship's course and position, make a full systems check -- he experienced nothing. It was as if the "consciousness" functions of the ship's brain had been knocked out. The only readouts he could get were for routine internal functions, such as life-support. All sensors outside the hull -- and most of the "thinking" part of the machine they served -- gave no response. Vital functions like navigation and attitude control were completely paralyzed -- in short, the great warship, the machine itself, was asleep. McKay let go the terminal and blinked back to reality. This had to be connected with the odd bioscan impressions on the hull of the Darni, which its own instruments couldn't detect. He turned to the officer, pointed to his spacesuit, then to the airlock. The Fallaran suited up and followed McKay to the outside. swung out, they could talk via against the scarred ice face of Callisto, the little white ship was still unaffected by whatever had attacked the dreadnaught. Quickly the officer told them, through the flat neutrality of the computer translation, what had happened: a beacon calling for help had come through Interface to the Furtherance HQ at Alpha Centauri. The Darni had come to investigate, found the lo expedition under attack by strange ships. Distrusting scene of action in the Jupiter system, Kiliath had sent the Darni to fetch reinforcements -- but shortly after the fleet had come through the Callisto Interface the sophisticated brains of the warships had been affected by what could only be called drowsiness. Within minutes, the ships were in effect unconscious. As he learned all this, McKay was leading the officer toward one of the strange spots on the hull. Though the Darni was huge by Earth standards, it wasn't one of the bigger starships -- McKay thought of it as in the destroyer class. It didn't have enough mass to pull them effectively to itself and they were using safety lines as they worked their way around. Directed by Slazeck, they came on the thing within minutes. It didn't look at all fearsome: strange, perhaps, but not something to reduce a fighting ship to paralysis. It was a yellow sphere, smaller than a football, raised from the hull on a thin stalk. The stalk itself seemed to merge into the hull. Looking very closely, McKay found a fine web of filaments, like neryes, radiating out from it across the metal. A cluster of these, like tiny biological mines, had brought the Furtherance fleet to a standstill. "Combat alert, Mac," Slazeck announced -- grim, tense, but controlled. "Four ships in the sun, closing very fast." "Interception course?" "Dead on." McKay didn't hesitate -- he had a very good idea by now of what was happening. "Cross it at a hundred miles with all our missiles, spread launch from here. And put two clumps of antis into the line behind them. Open fire." McKay and the Fallaran watched the missiles go off, each burning a different trail through the formation before flaring at full boost toward the sun. Common sense called them to take cover, but inside the Darni they would be cut off. At their very high approach speed -- Slazeck made it hundreds of miles a second -- the attacking pilots had very little decision time. They might just preliminary salvo from the fleet that should have been quiescent. They shouldn't have time to look for alternatives. "They've altered course, Mac," said Slazeck, without any detectable relief. "They're passing at three hundred miles, going toward the planet. We must have had a whole second in hand there." "They very nearly got us," McKay agreed. He was quite unable to cover his own relief. "That right?" "No Interface relays out where they come from, that's for sure. You think it's the AI Tanrai again?" "I've a good clue to them right here," said McKay. He turned to the Furtherance officer. "When we met the AI Tanrai on the planet Sarann they had the technology to bug Interface relays." "I remember that," said the Fallaran. "I served under Kiliath on that mission also." "My apologies," said McKay. "Then you know their bugs were organic, or pseudo-organic -- a thing like a film of tissue stretched across an Interface and designed to cling to the ship that broke it. This must be something similar: a bug that interacts with the perception circuits, hypnotizes them, you might say. Bioengineering in a further stage." "The thing seems purely organic," said the officer. "We can burn it off the hull without risk. I shall bring out crewmen with weapons." "We'll move on," said McKay. "I'll take the ship across to lo -- I'll try falling tail first through the Interface with the motor on. If there are any bugs left on this satellite, that should keep us clear." He was tempted, but for the time it would take, to go after the back aboard. Though the Fallaran came from a planet heavier than Earth, they had nothing in common with the AI Tanrai, who had once attacked Earth. The AI Tanrai, literally "the Cosmic Jackals," came from a planet big enough to have a world like Earth for a satellite. When they had attacked McKay on Sarann -- one of his first Interface missions -- he had shown them no mercy. They were part of the darkness that had fallen on Earth years before. They were a group mind, without individuality; dwellers in methane and ammonia, in great cold and pressure, such as -- he took a step up the hull to gaze into the planfind far down in Jupiter itself. II T he plan succeeded from the outset. Approaching the Interface tail first, McKay put a burst of flame into it -- and if any pseudoorganic webs were stretched across the invisible disc they were burned away. The ring traced by the electronic display moved over the ship and past, and Jupiter leaped closer in the sky. lo was noticeably more reflective than Callisto, but the overall color difference noted from Earth was harder to detect at close hand. A smooth sheet of ice along the equator, broken by occasional mountains, added to the moon's expedition's big ships was in orbit; the others had touched down at the most promising site for a permanent base. So far, McKay learned on the radio, the expedition's sensors and computers had not been affected by the enemy. The task force sat tight, waiting for the Furtherance reinforcements; there had been no more attacks. But Kiliath himself had shown their danger. "That's what we're here for," said McKay. "What's happened to him?" "He took a shuttle to make reconnaissance," the Fallaran said in the stilted phrasing of computer translation. "He went through Interface to a fast trajectory, a close flyby of Jupiter. He had concealed his ship from radar, but when he emerged from Interface on his new trajectory we detected him at once. However we could not contact him again by radio." All that made sense. To screen a ship from radar required a complex pulse-interaction with the oncoming beam, something only a computer could handle. With external sensors out nothing could be done. And at the position and velocity Kiliath had set for the other side of his Interface, he would have been out of range by the time he regained control -- if he had. The lo radar had tracked him far toward Jupiter before losing the tiny blip of the shuttle. "Kiliath's shuttle was obviously hit by a bug," said McKay. "We can avoid that as before, I think. We'll match orbit with him when he comes past here." "This will be the only chance," said the Fallaran. "Since the shuttle can change its velocity by only two miles a second, only Interface can put it on or off its present trajectory. Kiliath aimed to be within Interface range of lo on this pass, but unless course correction is made near the planet next time, the shuttle will be too far from here when it next crosses lo's orbit." "We may have to abandon the shuttle, then," Slazeck remarked. "Velocity-change requirements in Jupiter's gravity well are gigantic. We should have brought extra tanks along." "First our missiles gone, next our fuel. When's the shuttle going to pass lo?" "Two more hours. Maybe we can pull Kiliath out of it before we go out of range -- or set up an Interface for both ships. If we do have to take a wild ride around Jupiter -- are we all going to go?" "Whom were you thinking of leaving out?" Cathy asked ominously. T he shuttle came swinging up from Jupiter on schedule, though radar had found it some time before. It was going to pass lo about a thousand miles beyond Interface range. "What do you make of that, Walt?" asked McKay. "Maybe the bug altered the emergence side of the Interface slightly. Our orbit wasn't exactly matched with the Furtherance fleet." "Maybe Kiliath made a manual course change for some reason." "Maybe the Red Spot's a mascon, pulled him off course." "Anyway, we're going after him," said McKay. "That's as close to lo as the shuttle will ever get. Even if we didn't have a friend aboard we'd be bound to try a rescue." He set up an Interface to project them for rendezvous. "Five minutes to go. Stand by." There was quite a feeling of commitment, he had to admit as he burned backward through the disk into transfer orbit. He was pass around that banded sphere, close enough to use the belts as highway markers. He would have to use a lot of fuel, down close to the planet, to achieve a course that would bring the ship back to lo. If he ran into trouble it would take a warship or one of the big freighters to get him out. McKay decided to go radar-invisible and get away from the shuttle after the rescue. Slowly he closed with Kiliath's ship as the trajectory swung over its peak and began to lead him down toward the planet. McKay had allowed time here to save fuel. Eventually he made a transfer twelve mps total, and closed for the rendezvous. The shuttle was the standard type he had seen, even used, on other missions -- stub wings, no variable geometry, designed to enter and leave atmosphere signed as a unit of the Sasarenn War Fleet, could carry less but do a great deal more -- for instance, go to Earth's Moon and back on its own power and fuel. As it closed with the shuttle the same light traces over the hull as it had found on the Darni. By now McKay felt reasonably sure that he could link the two ships without brought the ship in close, presenting the open airlock in the underside to the starboard hatch of the shuttle, and extended a flexible rescue tube from the pressurized, it gave him easy access to the shuttle. There had been no radio contact with Kiliath, obviously, since the bug still covered the shuttle's been seen and recognized, however, from the cockpit; Kiliath would be waiting for rescue beyond the lock. Since the ship was intact, McKay thought all would be well inside, as with the Darni -- and this proved to be overconfidence. Kiliath was in the main cabin, unconscious. Two immediate explanations arose for the shuttle's change of orbit -- first that it was a trap, second that it was straightforwardly due to mass increase. For the cabin was occupied by the humanoid servants of the AI Tanrai. shuttle's open lock. Once again he was the target of steadily trained guns. There was no way to talk to these creatures in their golden spacesuits because they had no individuality; their brains contained only the reflected thoughts of the Jackals themselves. They were, in effect, androids. Where were their controllers, the particular elements of the group-mind to which these served as hands and eyes? Nowhere on the shuttle, obviously; no pressurized, refrigerated tanks here. Perhaps there was a Jackal ship hovering nearby, itself radar-invisible; but McKay had made a full combat alert scan before the rendezvous. The should have found it visually. If he could knock out the controllers, McKay knew, the slaves would be mindless; but it looked very much as if the controllers were down on Jupiter itself, out of reach. He could talk to the controllers knew from the Sarann encounter -- whether he could talk to them through these creatures, he didn't know. He was still looking for something to say when the nearest of them moved, still covering McKay with his gun -- making it clear by his angle of approach that and that the AI Tanrai would follow McKay through the lock. The gun looked heavier than a Fallaran weapon designed for close quarters -- it might well blow a their golden spacesuits -- did they ever take them off? -- the Jackals wouldn't mind, but McKay would. He backed down the tube and the creature grasped the lock sill and pulled itself in. McKay's main worry was for Kiliath. Unless the Jackals had a nuclear device in the shuttle, the shuttle itself was unarmed. scious and functioning, the shuttle's obviously was not. And though the AI Tanrai couldn't know it, the relay embedded in McKay's skull responded quite effectively to crude mental states like "alarm." If anything, the computer was too sensitive to the Planetary Agent's worries; in his early days with the ship he often had had to calm it down. A lite tender had killed a friend of his during the Sasarenn conflict. So, as McKay backed out of the connecting tube, he could almost feel the hidden weapons locking on the golden helmet that came through behind him. There was an override to let him enter the cabin with the outer door still open. McKay backed in, still with the Jackal gun pointing at his chest, feeling almost sorry for the enigmatic figure coming through the hatch. Unless this one was very careful, he wasn't going to get out alive. "Everybody stay calm," said McKay. "Spread out some more." Cathy was as white as a ghost, with every reason. Raiding on Earth, the Jackals had taken only women prisoners. They had taken Cathy on Sarann; Kiliath's second officer, the only one with her, had died trying to stop them. Having no individuality themselves, would the AI Tanrai recognize her -- or seize her again? The android was checking the cabin, without giving them any openings to jump him. Had he, or rather they, any idea of his danger? All the humans were wearing identity badges; the ship would shoot around them and over them. Perhaps at that range the Jackals were using radio to boost their commands -- or perhaps the android vocalized the thought prompting him to action. Over the cabin speakers, in the computer translation monotone, came the flat speech: "Identification -- Earth humans. No samples required. Destroy and check control section." McKay didn't have to do anynow it had to act. The android took a step back to clear his weapon and open fire -- and was hit simultaneously by bright, straight laser beams from all around the cabin. With an easy target, a humanoid shape, the computer had it all worked out -- it hit the trigger hand, the muscles of that arm, a knee, the heart, pin-pointed by acoustic sensors (right of center). medic tapes knew no Hippocratic Oath. The android flopped in zero-G like a rag doll trying to come apart, puffs of smoke squeezing through the holes in the suit. McKay dived for a wall panel to blow the tube out of the lock and slam the hatch, but in that he was too slow. The AI Tanrai and their slaves were not merely telepaths, they were a single mental entity. On reaction times they had a head start: McKay got the ship clear, but something was shut in with them. A strange screeching noise filled his ears -- then the golden android and the whole eabin were turning around him. After that he blacked out completely. E ventually he came back. He floated listlessly for a few seconds more, but his head was clearing fast. Slazeck, he saw, had managed to get an antidote from the medic tapes and was dosing the others. The golden figure of the android was gone, but one of the acceleration shields was closed like a coffin, cutting down cabin space. "They got the biological word on us from Cathy on Sarann," grunted Slazeck. "Time we learned more about them." "Sure," said McKay, still dazed. "Did they try to get the body back, I wonder?" "Looks like it. We're still on external anti-personnel alert and the guns have been fired." "God, I hope we didn't hit Kiliath." McKay shook his head. "What's our present status?" "Who knows?" Slazeck said grimly. That woke McKay up -- he pulled out his pocket communiception circuits were blank, as had been the Darni's earlier. Only internal routine -- power plant, life support -- glowed in his head. "Playback." In seconds he had the end of the external recording; an exchange of shots with Jackals at the shuttle airlock; then something was fired from a long tube, spreading before it hit the hull, and darkness spreading from it around the outside of the ship, sealing out the planet, the moons, the shuttle and the stars. "Listen -- the bug's in line with the lock, about eight feet back. Maybe if we can knock out its nerve center we'll be able to see again. Have you looked out up front?" "No, you do that and I'll suit up. okay?" McKay opened the connecting hatch to the cockpit, pulled himself through. The outer shutters were down and bright stars glittered across the windows. After field of view upset him. Without the perception circuits, the blank, unmarked controls would be the devil to use. There were no ordinary instruments, not even a radar screen. He thumbed the personal communicator. "Can't see a thing from here, Walt. Stand by and I'll swing the ship." "That'll take too long without instruments, Mac. If they're sitting out there covering the lock, they've got us cold anyway -- but we've been out for two hours.""Okay. Good luck, Walt." In weightlessness, Slazeck had the option which way up he stood in the lock. He had chosen upsidedown, so he could come out head first with the outer door half opened over him, where it would be when the ship was on the ground. He broke out the high-powered laser, intended for cutting into wrecked spaceships, and it came up with him like a machine-gun. IV prised, could not say afterward if he had sworn, shouted wordlessly or been stunned to silence. Since he was out of the hull the others could not have heard him. He was looking down the hull, with the rectangular outer door raised like a trap above him. The Jackal bug was only feet away, poised impudently on its fragile stalk. Low in the lock, he saw only the wingtips and the foreshortened belly of the ship. And all the rest, so close that curvature was lost, was Jupiter like a flat, banded wall. His brain ticked on behind his shocked face. The motors had not been used; another ship must have taken the Jackals off the shuttle and the field of their drive must big planet. He had to get that bug! He aimed the heavy laser over the lock sill and let fly. The first shot only clipped the thing, but the second took it just above the stem and split it apart. McKay's voice swelled presently in his headphones: "Fine, Walt, sensors are coming on -- great God Almighty!" "I'm coming back in, Mac," Slazeck radioed with no conscious irreverence. He pushed the laser down into the lock, bringing down the door behind him. Air was roaring in as he stowed the laser again. He had no time to take off the suit. He opened the inner hatch, pulled upside-down into the cabin, turned over and down into a G-couch. The hatch and the radiation bulkhead closed behind him. His partner across the aisle, he noticed as his acceleration shielding closed, was the corpse of the Jackal android, entombed in its armor. "Secondary boost, three-second warning," said McKay. He hadn't a hope in hell of getthe fusion motor was pointing straight down to kill as much as possible of their vertical component. "I hope -- " said Cathy, as the ship hung, sinking, on a blue column of intense fire. She started again. "I hope nobody minds that I'm scared, but please tell me what you're trying." "We're trying to get a usable angle on the atmosphere, honey," said Devlin. "As it stands we're going straight in to burn up. If we can get our vertical component of velocity down to the same order of magnitude as the horizontal one, we may just be able to make an Earth-type entry." "I see," said Cathy in a very small voice. fuel went down with appalling speed. There wasn't the information to compute an entry window for Jupiter, but what they got looked reasonable. The last of their fuel burned away with about a minute to spare, and McKay set the ship's attitude for entry with the greatest care. from under the nose, steaming up to meet above the ship. Another, sliding under the wings, went up to meet behind the tail fin. Holding that precious angle, the "In this gravity the atmosphere layers corresponding to the Earth's are packed much more closely together," McKay announced. "See how much our path is flattening?" "We're getting hypersonic bounce effect," said Devlin, plugged in as copilot. "The last stage of that will be vital," said McKay. "When we shed this plasma envelope we're going to have to hit the bounce angle exactly. The layer corresponding in density to Earth's stratosphere will be so shallow that our optimum entry corridor is a line without dimensions. If we cut too deep into the atmosphere at this speed we'll melt, though we missed burning up. We've got far more wingspan than we need to stay up in this gravity -- too hard a bounce will probably pull the wings right off." "Cross your fingers, people," said Devlin. "Here it comes." McKay had to leave this to the computer-autopilot, for its reactions and calculations were way ahead of his own. As the ionization faded there was some hairraising juggling of data, with cascades of figures for temperature and stress running in the display; but at the end of it they were flying level in a very fast glide, with Jupiter's clouds spread below them like an immense plain. The deep yellow tint from space was almost gone; only a hint of it was left under the white tops of the clouds. The horizon was incredibly far away. Overhead the sky was deep blue, not too unlike Earth's at a corresponding altitude, but that wasn't oxygen scattering the light. "Wow," said Devlin. "Nice piece of flying, ship." "You said it." "Ho w will we get out of here?" "Just like a woman," said Devlin. "We only just go here." "We've lost a lot of our speed," said McKay. "If we had full tanks we could climb out again, but we don't have them." "Only one way out of this," Slazeck commented from the rear. "The Furtherance will have to bring a relay to within ten thousand miles of the planet -- then we can go straight home if we want." "We will get out eventually?" Cathy asked. "Of course we will," said McKay. He couldn't help adding: "Still, it's going to be one of the greatest flying stories of all time." T he ship sped on, dipping slightly as its speed came down. Each lime the drop in altitude was slight, but produced enough extra lift to bounce them back up again. They could have skipped right around the Earth like that, but in this gravity the effect was insignificant. Eventually the ship began to descend noticeably and McKay touched off the fusion ramjets and leveled out. "That makes me feel better," said Slazeck. "Stability, that's what I like." "I don't feel much safer," said McKay. "Walt, how far down would you say those clouds are?" "Hard to say, Mac. Radar shows big turbulence forty, fifty thousand feet down." "Yeah. I bet the atmosphere down there's already denser than Earth sea-level -- and it goes on down for a long way. We've got about thirty thousand feet separating us from the most violent environment in the Solar System, off the sun itself." "That's not much, even in this gravity." "You said it. One airpocket -- or a major outbreak below us -- and we are in big trouble. Jovian Clear Air Turbulence will take this ship apart, probably before we know it." "You've talked me into leaving. Have you raised anyone by radio?" "No chance. That's not so much an ionosphere up there -- it's like trying to signal through a sheet of lightning. Do you remember the intensity of the radiation belts, out by lo?" "We're going to see some pretty aurorae, come nightfall." "I guess so, even at these latitudes. And the lower edges of the display won't be far above us. Notice what else is interfering with the radio?" "The overall pattern's like lightning, but some of the peaks are gigantic." "Jupiter's radio noise reaches Earth," said McKay. "There are some big storms around somewhere." "So we may not be able to raise the expedition or the Furtherance fleet," Slazeck said slowly. "And if we were within ten thousand miles of an Interface relay, we might not be able to contact it. If that's true, Mac, our only way out of here is with the rocket." "And we used all our fuel slowing down," McKay agreed grimly. "We do have equipment to process more, but it's a long slow job even in an atmosphere with so much free hydrogen. And since it requires modifying the air intakes and turning most of the fusion pile output to refrigeration, we can't do it unless we land somewhere." "And solid ground is thousands of miles below us." "Right. I don't know if the Furtherance ships can process fuel in flight; maybe the Darni could come down and refuel us -- if we can contact them in the first place." "If we can contact them at all, they can position an Interface relay for us," Slazeck pointed out. "What about the Great Red Spot, skipper -- isn't that supposed to be solid?" "Nobody knew what that was when I read up on Jupiter," said McKay. "There was a theory that it might be a proto-satellite that never separated from the planet and floats like an iceberg on the denser atmosphere below. Parts of it might be solid enough for a touchdown." "We'd have to leave the ship to set up the refueling apparatus." "We could use the rescue systems: a manipulator unit on the front of a stretcher module. We'd find it impossible to work in suits, that's for sure." "Surface gravity's higher than Earth's, isn't it?" Cathy put in. "That's why we're still in acceleration shields." "Two point six four times what we can cope with," said McKay. "The Fallaran wouldn't find it so much trouble." "Do you think the Jackals brought Kiliath down here?" Devlin asked. "If they did they'll be much deeper than we are," said McKay. "We were worrying about how the Furtherance can find us on a surface area a hundred and twenty times the Earth's -- and we're on the top of it! How can they find Kiliath underneath?" we get back to the gravity for a moment?" Cathy asked at last. "Are we trapped in these shields -- as if we'd used them as escape capsules?" "Pretty much so," McKay replied. "You won't die of the gravity or even black out -- but if you managed to get off the couch you might not get back. It's just as well these units can function as escape capsules -- it means we've all got emergency procedures to hand." "That's not much good to me," grunted Slazeck. "I'm still wearing a full spacesuit, remember? It's damned uncomfortable. I'm going to open the shielding and try to get some of it off." "Take it easy, Walt." "If I get into trouble I'll yell and you come running." Slazeck worked his gauntlets off without too much trouble, but by the time he'd manipulated off his helmet he needed rest. They went back to discussing the landing possibility. "How far is the Red Spot from us?" asked Devlin. "Well, we're in the right hemisphere -- I got our latitude from the sun, early on. We should be in the south tropical belt, but that's not a permanent feature of the planet; sometimes it splits or fades. I didn't notice whether it could be seen from lo or Callisto -- it seemed academic at the time -- but if we're traveling in a clear strip within the belt we could run into big turbulence farther along. The Red Spot is mainly in the south temperate zone, but the south tropical belt curves around it to the north. In other words we'll hit the Spot eventually, but right now we could be flying toward it or away from it." "We're flying away from the sun, that's for sure," said Devlin. "At this speed it'll be on the horizon in half an hour." "We're in System One, the equatorial rotation zone," said McKay. "Twenty-eight thousand miles an hour, plus our airspeed." "Shall we turn?" "We can't outfly the sun on this planet -- we'd only stretch the night. On this course darkness will last less than five hours." The incredible distance of the horizon, the great flatness of Jupiter, emphasized the speed of the sun's arc towards the thickening haze. Only a quarter of its Earth size, the planet burned deeper red through greater thickness of atmosphere. Straight-edged shells of color crept over the clouds below, then fell upward to tinge the hull and the sluggish contrails drawn by the ship. As the spectacle grew, so did the turbulence below them. The charged layers of compressed atmosphere were lifting with nightfall; waves of lightning passed beneath toward the dark horizon as potentials changed in the clouds and their suspended ice crystals. In the deeps off to starboard some atmospheric system, supercharged with physical or chemical energy, suddenly tripped. A huge mushroom cloud, flattened almost beyond recognition, welled out of the blackness and stood like an autumn tree in the blood-red sunset. There were more eruptions across the field, like an evening growth of fungi, as the shadows began to stretch over the clouds themselves. "We're making Mach one point two," McKay pointed out, mainly for Cathy. "We'll outfly the shockwaves from that burst on our right." "Just as long as we don't get one in front of us," said Devlin. "It's like driving over flat country under random shelling." "That's quite a shellburst," said Slazeck. "How many megatons would you need to make a stalk that big?" As at the Earth's equator, full darkness fell like a blanket. There were aurorae as expected, thin sheets flitting across the stars close above them. There were meteors, too, with that mighty gravity to sweep down the astersky, seeming close enough to touch. Now they could iee just how thin a layer of fragile stability was holding the ship. A fierce glow lit a circle of cloud from below and another dark fountain rose, shaken. We have to get out of here... # E'D better go on a watch  system," said Slazeck. "With two nights in every twentyfour hours, we can't go by local time. Let's you and me get some sleep, Mac -- Dev can wake me before dawn." Significantly older than the others, McKay was happy to be first for sleep. The effect might have been psychological, with the whole ship weighted down by Jupiter, but he felt exhausted. Later, sleep was less pleasant. Not nightmares, exactly, but a repeating, without fuel and somehow without power, going down, troubled him. Out of the sunlight, into the tops of the clouds that went down for thousands of miles, the rumble of their thunder reaching in through the hull; broken up by turbulence, crushed by mounting pressure, sometimes sinking into icy blackness, but always going down. "Mac, wake up." McKay snapped out of the hundredth descent with relief. Even a wild scare would be better than that recurring tragedy. They were coming through the dawn. through the colored layers into clear sunlight -- and it revealed things McKay would have hated to have hit in the dark. "I think we've found the Red Spot," snapped Slazeck. "Or, to be more accurate, I think the Red Spot's found us. Didn't you say it turned more slowly than the band we're in?" "By about five minutes." "Yeah well it's bigger than we are, you could say it's running us down. Mac, we got some star sights during the night; I made our speed nearly thirty thousand miles an hour. Subtracting Jupiter's spin and our airspeed leaves us in a seven-hundred-mile-per-hour jetstream. Adding the Spot's velocity to that puts us in big trouble!" Lrom this altitude their Jovian horizon had been seven hundred miles away. Now a rolling yellow stormwall was coming in from the right, cutting across their path at an ever sharper angle. Unstable layers of ice formed and dispersed in it. Lightning flickered all along it like an electric curtain. As Slazeck said, they were bearing down on it at nearly two thousand miles an hour. "With the jets out we can't make enough speed in this gravity to get away from that," McKay agreed. "Can we get enough height to see over it?" "Not a chance. We're near our ceiling now." "If we knew there was a clear vortex beyond, over the Spot itself, we might try to project the ship over the storm belt," said McKay. "But not knowing, we might well come down right in the worst of it." "The wind may carry us around the outside," said Devlin. "The Jetstream just might bank north around the storm wall as the lower layers are banking over the Spot." "Then again a freak eddy might spin us right in there," said Slazeck. "Mac, I've plumb lost interest in taking the ship into that." "The Spot's thirty thousand miles by seven thousand," said McKay. "It's like trying to outfly the Earth. I think we'd better turn around in this airstream, if we can. That'll give help about another three hours to find us; if not, better hope the wind sweeps us around." "Take that real slow, Mac." "You bet." Taking over from Devlin, McKay began to bank with slight left rudder. The ship didn't like it at all. "This must be the biggest drift in the history of aviation," said Devlin. "Hey, look at those contrails blow!" to the wind it felt less like a chip in the current, but the jets were only just beating it. System I was lapping the Spot at # mph, and they couldn't fight that as well. With the Spot astern but drawing steadily nearer, the impression that it was overtaking them was inescapable. "Do you really think we'll be found in time, Mac?" "I think there's a very good chance, Cathy. We've been down here nearly eight hours; the Fallaran must know we're in trouble. We've just come out of darkness and for a short while our contrail will have been in sunlight with the clouds still in darkness. If I had to search for a ship lost in the Jovian atmosphere. I'd concentrate my search on the terminator. Our rescue call's on automatic. The ship will tell us at once if anyone answers." The storm wall grew more terrifying as it drew nearer. Conditions below it, where the atmospheric currents were climbing up the hidden face of the Spot, defied imagination. An endless # mph tidal wave -- the atmosphere below had to be nearly as dense as Earth's oceans. Driven by the wind, were the clouds rolling up into surf as the "shore"the rising curve of a world-sized body -- grew shallow under them? "If the Spot's so big," said Cathy, "I'm surprised we can't see the top of it over those clouds." "The Red Spot's prominence has changed a lot in the centuries it's been under observation," said McKay. "It's ranged from brick jed to a faint gray. It must be riding lower right now -- " "Radar contact, Mac." The alert was superfluous since they were all fully plugged in -- McKay had shared the detection of the echo. Another ship had come over the horizon ahead. It had to be on a suborbital trajectory; an orbit so close to the planet would have sped it across the sky very fast indeed. McKay's first surge of hope dimmed; the stranger wasn't big enough to be a Furtherance warship. "Mac," Slazeck asked, "do you consider that ship may be one of the enemy?" "It could be, Walt. The expedition does have some probes for the Jovian atmosphere, but if they'd detected us down here. I'd have expected a warship to come down." "All our armament is gone except for four clumps of anti-missiles. Evasion maneuvers in this airstream and gravity will be precarious, especially with so little height to hack around in." "We need help in any case -- the Spot will be on us in another hour. Our radio call stays on." "And pray the ship's one of ours," Devlin added. Near the peak of its trajectory, the other ship was climbing slowly up the sky over them. It was almost overhead when the radio suddenly came to life. "Acknowledge," McKay told the computer. "That's Kiliath's personal call." haust broke from the speck above them. Its trajectory broken, down the ship came, past the faint disks of Ganymede and Europa. "Kiliath was in enemy hands," Devlin reminded McKay urgently. "This may be a trap." McKay glanced again at the oncoming fury of the storm. "If it is, we'll bite." He opened the speech channel. "Kiliath, what is your condition?" "I am well, friend McKay," said the flat computer-translation. "The Jackals told me, during interrogation, that they had consigned your ship to the Jovian depths. I thought they underestireturn past favors." "We're damn glad to see you. I'll tell you that. How did you get away from the AI Tanrai?" "They underestimated the Eallaran as well as mankind and your ship. I could move more freely down in Jupiter's deeps than their android slaves. I concealed the fact and they left only two guards over me while the rest of the crew were put into suspended animation. Eventually their relative paralysis gave me an opportunity and I fell upon them." Some time, thought McKay, I must ask Kiliath for a demonstration of his high-gravity strength. That he's here now is a good enough demonstration for the moment. Kiliath's ship was coming down into the atmosphere, planing toward them across the great sea of clouds. McKay realized that the ship was no Fallaran design. "Is that a Jackal ship, Kiliath?" "The kind they use for deep pentration into giant worlds, friend McKay. As soon as I broke the planet's surface I followed your line of flight." "Then there are still no Interface relays within range of the planet?" "I can find none. This ship, of course, has the Jackal drive; but within range of the lo satellite." The computer translation didn't always preserve trains of thought going from ET speech to English, but McKay had plenty of non sequitur practice. "Our tanks are empty, Kiliath. Do I understand that you can refuel us?" "I believe so, friend McKay. This ship refuels itself in flight in the denser layers of the atmosphere. And there are ship-to-ship systems for transfer to more lightly built spaceships." V T he usual Jackal ships were conventional rocket shapes, quite slender, with the high-pressure tank for the group-mind elements at the thickest part of the hull. The ship now closing with the of the Fallaran supply ships; conical hull, delta wings sweeping back from near its nose, much less at its full sweep. Its color was the faded black of a well-worn bowling ball. There was no time to find out if its fuel was the same as the incandescent plasma, going through the fusion pile, it should work. Kiliath came up behind the and McKay opened the intake slot on top of the ship. "Can you modify the Jackal probe to fit that?" "Its shape can be modified for transfer to different types of vesinlet." After two or three tries they had a good contact. Fuel began to flow between the two ships. "Do you find that ship easy to fly?" asked Slazeck. "The controls are laid out for humanoid operators," Kiliath reported. "Their perception circuits, unlike yours or ours, use the sense of touch extensively, but they can be mastered." "You mean you can feel temperatures and stresses directly?" "To some extent. Mainly one can feel the operation of internal systems, as if rocket motors could be part of one's own body. Damage to the ship must produce a sense of shock and loss, if not actual pain." A sudden turbulence shook the keep the link with Kiliath. The storm front before the Red Spot was now much too close for comfort. "Our tanks are nearly full," McKay radioed. "I'm setting up a return trajectory to lo. Will you have enough fuel now to get away?" "No, I must drop again into denser layers to scoop in more hydrogen. However this ship is better able to cope with turbulence. You must escape at once." The two ships swung apart, Kiliath's descending steeply toward enter. T he familiar blue flame erupted below, a sun at its center, a waclimbed steadily out into space, across the huge world-within-aworld of the Red Spot. Beyond the storm wall great shockwaves streamed back, breaking eventually from the curve of the Spot inwas a space vehicle again, on trajectory in a black sky. McKay saw no need to make the point that they had enough fuel to reach lo, but not enough to catch it -- lo was farther from Jupiter than the Moon from Earth, but went around it in forty-two and a half hours. If for any reason they couldn't connect with the Interface relay up there, they would be coming back to Jupiter at the speed they now left it. More immediate to McKay was the worry about Kiliath. The before the AI Tanrai ship followed its path across the Red Spot. On full drive the Jackal ship could have made it to lo in seconds, but Kiliath doubted his own precision with the strange controls over such short distances. He was conhauling it as lo's disk moved into their path. McKay made radio contact with the expedition as interference from Jupiter fell off. The alarm had been raised for the shutcourse, but the shuttle trap had been worked from Amalthea, the innermost moon, and it had taken time to get an Interface relay down there and make safe the approaches to the planet. Trying to hold Amalthea had cost the AI Tanrai several ships: between the Interface weapon itself (it faced into the vicinity of blue stars and other things equally unpleasant) and the heavy bombardment of the Furtherance warships, they had lost heavily. After the tension of the past hours McKay found it wonderful to leave attitude control to the autopilot, to open the acceleration shields (from the ridiculous #G to the sublime of weightlessness), clean up and cook a decent meal. The closed shield over the android's body was a grim reminder that the mission wasn't over, but right now they could unwind. The two ships floated out toward the Galilean moons, without incident and when lo filled the sky McKay acquired the orbital relay. "Our worries are over," he told Kiliath moments later. "I've converted into stable orbit around the moon. Are you going to rendezvous with us or try for a landing?" "A landing might be best," said Kiliath's translation. "I am still unsure of the drive settings and it seems easier to bring the ship to rest and lower it on rocket thrust." "Okay, Kiliath. We'll stand by for you." McKay moved the ship back along its orbit in order to be well placed when Kiliath made his approach. He was still burning tail-first at minimal thrust through each Interface, in case the Jackal bugs were still active. Decelerating, the captured Jackal ship fell past him. The tricky approach seemed good at first, but Kiliath was going down too fast. "Correcting risks overcontrolling," Kiliath's channel said. "Friend McKay, could you set an Interface to slow this ship?" "I'll give you one to subtract two thousand feet a second," said McKay. "You should be able to catch it on the rocket from there." glowing lines trace the Interface ahead of Kiliath. Since he was only losing speed, not going elsewhere or even changing height, the Interface was invisible -- all he saw through it was the face of the moon as before. As the ship went through, he wondered if Kiliath should have used rockets first to be on the safe side. Surely the Jackal bugs wouldn't attack their own ships... Why not? Jackal ships weren't expected to go through Interface at all! "Friend McKay," said the computer translation, tone still neutral but hesitancy implying emotion, "I am losing external visual sensors -- " "We're on our way!" Fully plugged in, McKay had only to give the ship one order to bring all systems up to rescue alert. Lock on the descending ship. Interface to match its path, motor on low burn -- and they were alongside Kiliath, falling slowly toward the ice fields of lo. "You're still in drive attitude, nose down," McKay radioed. "Do you have attitude control?" "Nominally yes -- the textual perceptions are still effective." "Okay, we'll talk you around. Take it in the pitch axis, say ten degrees a second. We've got plenty of time." McKay called off the turn as the triangular silhouette pivoted against the spreading face of the moon. With plenty of warning, Kiliath killed the turn when the ship was nose up. "That's fine, start slowing her. Hold that attitude." The two ships' motors lit together, slowing their descent still further. McKay was thinking ahead to the tricky talk-down to the Fallaran base. "Friend McKay -- " The translation halted again, unable to speak an exclamation mark. "Internal sensors are now going out." "So are your motors! There must be a safety cutoff when the pilot loses touch. Is there no automatic control?" "None I can locate." Both ships were falling unpowered now, in order to stay together. They were descending at a slight angle to the ice plain. Acceleration was fortunately slow in this gravity. "What reaction controls do you have left? Attitude?" "Attitude control and horizontal thrusters for docking." "Okay. We've lost most of our vertical component of velocity, it's about equal to the horizontal. You're going to hit at about ninety feet a second. Activate pitch and yaw controls and take her around to starboard. Keep it slow." Without telling Kiliath, McKay was leaving him to fall. He fire. Motor flaring on primary and back. "Kill your yaw motion -- that's fine. You're coming up to the pitch angle you want -- kill it! Okay, you're lined up and going in fast. Hit those lateral thrusters. Impact's about twenty seconds away. You're shedding speed. Drop the nose, go for the full cushioning effect. Cut the thrusters -- now!" thrust as Kiliath's ship hit, bounced, hit again, became enveloped in a cloud of ice and ploughed in. Nothing could be seen or heard. McKay came down nearby, tilting the ship to kill the horizontal component. On the dimmer flame of the chemical motors he backed down on the tail landing blocks. Stabilizer booms snapped out from them. The two hemispheres of ice crysmuch larger one over the Kiliath crash, spread slowly in the low-G vacuum, each crystal on its own distinct trajectory. Opaque at first, the clouds thinned, glittering, sinking and flattening like a depth-charge effect reversed. Still Kiliath didn't answer the radio. "We'll have to get over there," said McKay, beginning to rise. "You can't go," said Slazeck. "Whoever goes out there will be grounded for months -- and as Earth's Planetary Agent you can't be spared." "What's the problem?" Cathy asked. "Radiation," McKay said briefly. "lo's in the most intense layer of Jupiter's radiation belts. Its movements have quite an effect on the natural radio signals from the planet. Our shielding's full on, but whoever goes for Kiliath will only have a spacesuit." "As least experienced. I'm least valuable," said Devlin. "I'll get Kiliath out." "You're a married man, Dev, and there's no such thing as a trivial radiation dose -- not that this one is going to be trivial. I think this one's mine, Mac." McKay nodded. "Second time this mission. Good luck again, Walt." Except in training, this was the first time they'd had the ship upright. Slazeck went down, hand over hand, to what was normally the rear wall of the cabin, opening what was now the floor hatch into the airlock. Once again in the full spacesuit, he evacuated the lock and opened the outer door. With the ship standing on its tail the rescue systems were harder to use. The outer door, normally a ramp to the ground, was now over Slazeck's head like an awning. McKay had to drop the stretcher unit on a cable to the lock and Slazeck had to extend the new lock floor as a platform, step out, and pull the sled over. The systems could adapt to almost any rescue situation, but all adaptations could not be equally convenient. Slazeck started the jets, turning the sled on the platform to point at Kiliath's ship. In this low gravity it took only a little power to set him gliding out over the ice plain. Leaving the ship in that frozen landscape was one of the loneliest experiences Slazeck had ever imagined. As soon as he left the shadow of the outer door Jupiter dominated him, ruling the sky overhead. Its light probed every crack and hollow in the ice field below; in a black sky, it was like watched him go like a slow, straight arrow toward the wreck. In a corner of the visual field the computer traced the ebb and flow of the radiation scouring the face of the moon. Slazeck would have to stay out of space for months after this to keep down his exposure for the year. McKay had all the scanners extended, the ship on full defense alert -- for where were the AI Tanrai all this time? If they came over while the ship was on the icefield, better go radar-invisible and hope they didn't cast too long a shadow. The same thought had occurred to Slazeck. "Mac, if you're attacked while I'm out here, you blast off and protect yourselves. I'll shelter in the Jackal ship till you can come back." "Unless we're seen, it would be best to lie low," McKay replied. "We've nothing but some antimissiles left. You just get Kiliath out of there." They were only twenty miles from the expedition base, but nothing there was better suited self. McKay would have liked a Furtherance warship over them for cover. He lost touch with Slazeck when the latter entered the Jackal ship. Devlin was suited up, ready to follow him across with more equipment if necessary -- it would be worth grounding another member of the team to cut Slazeck's exposure, if Kiliath had to be cut out. But Slazeck reappeared in a few minutes, lowering the Furtherance officer on to the stretcher. "I think he's only stunned," Slazeck reported. "No bones broken, anyway. The sled can bring us both back in this gravity." "What's it like in there?" McKay asked as the stretcher unit lifted from the wreck. "The damage doesn't look bad from here." "There's not much in there to be thrown about. It's completely austere, functional -- bare metal -- " That figured, McKay was thinking: without thoughts of their own the androids needed nothing for comfort or stimulus -- but the rest of Slazeck's description was drowned by crashing waves of radio interference. A t the touch of a switch the radar-baffling system went on -- the electronic disturbance was caused by Jackal ships compinned the shockwaves to a small patch of sky, confirming their orientation toward. lo. Moments later McKay detected the ships themselves, coming in very fast indeed, not far above the Ecliptic. Slazeck and Kiliath were halfway back across the icefield, heading straight for the open airlock. He couldn't do anything -- but he didn't need to. McKay had seen Interface conflict before, when the Sasarenn were expelled from the Earth-Moon system, but that had been a huge and complex battle. In this situation he had a better chance to appreciate Interface tactics. Obviously the Furtherance ships were conducting a textbook maneuver. What happened proved the superiority of rocket ships, with Interface, to the Jackal spacedrive. The thirteen ships of the squadron appeared around the Jackals, fired and were elsewhere, again and again. The thirteen ships, considered as missile platforms, became twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty-two, sixty-five... Doing it backward, with motors at low thrust to burn the bugs away, they made the deadly combat more like an aerobatic display. The Jackal formation was englobed in a converging web of missile trails, so many at so many different angles that every evasive action was forestalled. The relatively high speed of the AI Tanrai simply elongated the pattern. The web completed itself with the Jackal ships at its foci, and expanding fireclouds blotted out the trails. In their first serious encounter with the Interface, the Cosmic Jackals had flown straight into one of the Fallaran classics. Kiliath was beginning to come around by the time they brought his stretcher in through the rescue hatch. They got his helmet off, prepared various aids to recovery prescribed by the medic tapes -- and by the time the fleet had made orbit and a shuttle was coming for him, Kiliath was well enough to tell his story. "The AI Tanrai have to take on ballast to get their ships deep into Jupiter's atmosphere. At extreme depths the fuel tanks provide lift; the ship becomes a bathyscaph. It is very still down there, far below the storms; there may be currents, but there are no points of reference to reveal them. The solid core of the planet is still so far below that soundings cannot reach it. Nothing indicates a universe above. Until the humanoids reached them in their own world, the AI Tanrai must have thought themselves the absolute lords of creation. They open their pressure tanks and float free of the ships, like huge jellyfish. "As I told you, they put most of their androids into hibernation when they go down into the high gravity. I broke free and overpowered the two remaining; then I closed the pressure tank and jettisoned all ballast. With the pressure section empty, rising at maximum speed, I could not be overtaken; but I left missiles floating at higher levels to stop pursuit. Even if the motors did not work, the warheads would explode on proximity, making great concussion waves. On the surface, more explosions would never be noticed." McKay nodded grimly. "There doesn't seem to be any common ground with such creatures. The way they keep taking specimens. I'm sure they're looking for new servants." "There can never be compatibility with them," said Kiliath. The flat voice from the cabin speaker was hesitating as the computer failed to express emotional meaning. "They will oppose the spread of the Interface into the regions they control." Kiliath's eyes were incredibly bright between their skin folds. ""Nothing must interfere with the Interface. Furtherance must overcome every obstacle." T here wasn't room in the the ship upright, but McKay had a strong impulse to back away. Again, as with the Sasarenn, the Eallaran were creating an enemy -- advancing the Interface at whatever risk to the worlds and races in its path. Their dedication was much too strong to contest. What, he wondered, could have been their original motivation? "Here comes the shuttle, Mac," said Devlin. The little ship burned down only lowered from the lock and taken across to safety. "Do you have enough fuel to leave here?" he asked McKay by radio. "Just enough. We'll go through Interface to the Earth satellite; refuel, rearm, take Walt down to Montana. Give us a day's rest and we'll be back." "Goodbye then, friend McKay." The shuttle took off, climbing away to join the orbiting fleet. "Well, that's that for the moment," said Devlin. There was a feeling of anticlimax. "For the moment." McKay climbed back to the cockpit as the others settled on their couches. Systems check; close radiation bulkheads and acceleration shields. "Let's go home, children." The ship rose on the chemical motors in a cloud of ice and fire; a motor set it climbing toward a safe Interface altitude. They were coasting straight towards the banded globe of Jupiter, as if -- heaven forbid! -- they were going back there. "That's going to be our headache," said McKay, gazing at the planet. "Supposedly there's to be joint human-Fallaran exploitation of the Jupiter system, with first the supplies, later the ships and equipment, coming from Earth -- a big lift for our space technology. But there may still be AI Tanrai down there, coming up to raid us. As a group-mind, they can communicate on and from Jupiter where we can't. And more of their ships can dive in from space to reinforce them. An Interface relay has a range of ten thousand miles and costs a planet's ransom -- how many would you need to blockade a planet that size?" No one spoke. "That's a closed world to us, that we were lucky to get off the roof of," McKay said ungrammatically. "How could we tell, for instance, if they found allies down there?" Top-flight science fiction and fantasy from... Eight mind-bending taies conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, John Campbell, Jr. and Jack Vance. A#S #(t Ten dazzling stories that expiore the compiex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. 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All slories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. Kill only what you can eat. Eat only what you can love.  IN and into the glowing grandeur of the Seven Suns. From Earth they didn't look like much, a paltry cluster of bright pinpoints. They don't loom large on galactic charts. But they had been a sort of serious hobby with Doug Frost for years. The monograph for which he is best known is a meticulous analysis of that inconspicuous little group. His speculations had included the high probability of planets around each star. The nature of the Seven Suns made life on some of those orbiting worlds a distinct possibility. Or so ran Doug Frost's hypotheses. And he was our Galileo, our Harlow Shapley. His thoughts are infinitely respectable. And he was why we were here, a hundred and thirty the research ship Stardust's home cradle at Tycho Base on Earth's moon. This trip was for Doug Frost. For him the lure was to study his friends at close range. For us the bait was possible life on those hypothetical planets. We've found life. The Stardust's count of worlds examined includes several on which life abounded. We've found advanced forms and in a couple of instances sophisticated capacities and technologies. We've made friends with strange beings. We have seen a cultured world destroyed. But we've never found living things close to humanoid -- and never any that approached space capacity. "Alert. All personnel, alert. Emergency drill. Personal space equipment. Take all precautions and stand by." Stony Price, communications chief, rarely sounded completely serious, but he did then. Stony's message was one of a series everyone knew, but I had only heard this one used once before. It was the Prepare To Abandon Ship alert. He repeated it after exactly one minute. Then the intercom went on automatic, repeating "Alert -- " at brief intervals. We were in pattern after the Ultraspan stage. It had been a big one -- seventeen light-years -- and it was the last. We were there. We had arrived. The pattern was welcome, but I'm not sure I can explain why. All I know is the greater the stage distance, the more important the pattern seems to be. "Saved by a meteor -- or maybe a space dragon." Pegleg Williams stood up so slowly that you would have had to know him to realize that he had recognized and reacted before the message was half complete. "I'd have had you in two moves, Roscoe." "A random statement -- " I began, but Pegleg was at the door. "Leave the board," he called. chess in my lab, allowing our bodies to adjust from the painless, timeless rigors of a long stage to the different feels and stresses of a new sector of space. That sounds like Jabberwocky, but it is simply stated fact. Theoretically an Ultraspan stage is accomplished without time lapse. There is no genuine physical stress. You feel nothing, experience nothing. Fpr a timeless moment you simply cease to be. Then, by the next tick of the chronometer, your surroundings are changed, different. A new arrangement of stars will show on the viewscreens. And the feel of the space is alien. Pegleg's nearest emergency space gear was in his own lab. I brought out mine from its special locker, checked each item against my master list, slipped into the space suit. It took perhaps thirty seconds. It was the most practiced routine aboard the Stardust. Dr. Johannes Rasmussen's favorite motto is Be prepared. Back in the twentieth century he would undoubtedly have been a boy scout. My helmet under one arm, maintenance pack and propulsion unit slung over a shoulder, I headed for the control room. I beat Pegleg by the twenty seconds it had taken him to get to his lab. The others were there. In the unlikely event that Johnny Rasmussen became unable to command the starship Stardust there were four of us who could fill the gap. The control room was our station in emergency. If we hadn't known an emergency existed, we would never have learned it from Johnny's tone of voice. Tall, slender, perfectly groomed, his tanned face newly shaved, his mustaches waxed to points, he might have just invited us in for a spot of tea. "What gives, Johnny?" I asked. Pegleg was puffing from his flying trip through the corridors. His trick leg slows him up. "Perhaps nothing to justify a general alert," Johnny said. "On the other hand, we've survived by not taking chances. The matter sensors have detected an object." "Must be some object," grunted Pegleg. "I had Roscoe right where I wanted him in that chess game." "That's something that can be checked out," I said. "Unless Cap'n Jules louses up the gravity those pieces will still be on the board when we get back. "I'll try not to jar them," Captain Jules said dryly. "I can see that they're pretty important." I almost felt like leading a cheer for Captain Jules Griffin. The comment was the closest approach to a witticism I had ever heard from him. Stolid, pedantic, just plain dull, Jules was nonetheless the genius who understood and exercised uncanny control over the mighty timonium engines that moved the Stardust in finite space. And he was one of the few men alive who could implement Ultraspan. But he had no small talk, no social graces. He said what he thought in briefest form. Mostly he kept silent. "Take a look, Roscoe." Moe Cheng sat before his navigator's viewscreen -- small, inconspicuous in his huge chair. Probably no living being has ever known as much about the galaxy as this big-nosed, slant-eyed little man. The "object" was clear on the screen -- and the reason for the alert was plain. An alien spaceship plowed steadily along, glinting in the yellow light of the nearest of the Seven Suns. I say that positively. There was no mistaking what it was. We had known that it would happen some time, but to come out of Ultraspan practically in its path must have been a little disconcerting to Captain Jules and to Moe Cheng. "You've taken your time," I observed. "That thing is close." "Five thousand miles," Moe Cheng said. "It has been closer. We sheered off and turtled up as soon as we detected it after the stage." "Did it react?" "No response of any kind. Our sudden appearance may have been unbelievable to its crew. Our disappearance more so. We've been studying it for thirty minutes and it hasn't changed course or speed. Ten thousand miles an hour, following its nose." "Primitive, I gather," Pegleg said. "You don't get the impression of cruising. I'd say it's going all out." Cheng nodded slowly. "Ion drive. A complex exhaust. A lot of its mass would have to be fuel. It is unlikely that it's anything more than an interplanetary craft. We guess it hasn't the capacity for interstellar space." "That means  "Correct," Johnny Rasmussen said. "Planets in the neighborhood. Dr. Frost is investigating. But the spaceship is heading into the system, toward what we believe to be its sun. Hence its home world would be farther out, at a cooler, more agreeable distance from the primary. Heat radiation here is pretty intense. A planet in our present location would be tolerable to life as we know it, but hot. Much would depend on its mass, atmosphere and so on. The spaceship may be exploring, pioneering. Opinion Roscoe?" "On short notice what you've said sounds reasonable," I agreed. "If we're turtled up and presumably undetected -- why the alert?" Pegleg inquired. Rasmussen leaned back in his chair and his teeth showed briefly. One is that word 'presumably.' We can't be sure we're undetected. They -- whatever they are -- may simply be trying to figure us out, watching while not seeming to watch. Who knows what detection and analytical potential they may have?" "Makes sense." Pegleg nodded. He piled his helmet and space accessories onto a chair and flexed his arms. "Stuff's heavy," he grumbled. "How about reason number two?" "Mr. Cheng has another hypothesis," Rasmussen said. "He postulates that the ship, still under drive as it is, may be out of control. Its crew may be dead or may have abandoned ship for some unknown reason. In effect, we may have a derelict." "It has made not the slightest adjustment," Moe Cheng said. These great minds were Roscricans Benjamin Frankli , Addrcs! Why were these men great ? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. copy of "The Mastery' of Life" -- ligation. A nonprofit organization. Address: Scribe A.X.D. San Jose, California #, U.S. A. Please send me the free book, The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. Name "So?" "So we're thinking of investigating. If we're wrong -- and they have us in view -- boarding could be tricky. Hence -- all personnel should be alert, ready and standing by, as ordered." I might explain what we meant by "turtling up." The Stardust had the capacity to scramble, to reflect and refract not only light but other radiation that would reveal it in such a fashion that we became, in effect, invisible. Behind this screen a forcefield enclosed the ship in an almost impenetrable envelope. The turtle was inside his shell. In terms of applied energies as' we could envision them the Stardust was both undetectable and impervious to attack. But with an alien technology, who could be sure? As I've said many times before, Johnny Rasmussen left nothing to chance. That is why, when in the far future galactic history has piled up, the Stardust will still be legend. few minutes on Moe Cheng's screen. As Pegleg had said, it was probably primitive. It looked like a flying spearhead, its bow a glinting point, its stern deeply divided with a cleft that gave it two long trailing sections to the rear. A row of round viewports extended the length of the ship. I counted twenty-one on the side in view. And up near the point of the bow a flattened blister, like a pilot's cabin, broke the metallic surface. An empty pilot's cabin. At least, nothing showed in it. "I would almost guess," Pegleg mused, "that that thing is a modification of an atmospheric design. It may even be navigable in the atmosphere of its planet of origin." Cheng nodded approvingly. "Dr. Rasmussen has suggested the same thing. It gives weight to my idea that it would not be too risky to approach and investigate. The beings who built that ship are relatively new to space." "Scoutboat?" I asked. "Right. Interested?" I grinned and turned to the chief. "Proposal, Johnny. I take a scoutboat, young Pete Watts as pilot, you to supply a language expert and Captain Jules to delegate us an engineer. We circle, probe and, if we get no response, approach the spaceship. If still no reaction, we put a man out to explore the skin, look in the viewports and try to see how the entry ports are designed. How does that grab you?" "And who will that man be, I wonder?" Pegleg jeered. "You're trying to rig it so I'll never prove that I've got you dead to rights on that chess board." "Strike the language expert," I said. "Pegleg wants to go. No doubt there's something out there that's right down a geologist's alley." "Fortunately," Pegleg said smugly, "I have competence in many Helds." "Including conversation," I agreed. If all this sounds like little boys wrangling over a game of marbles, think nothing of it. It's simply the way we function. Behind that smokescreen good minds are operating. We know what we're doing. The ever-growing series of volumes of The Log Of The Stardust is a big segment in the broad base of the history of space exploration. There are a lot of good names in those weighty tomes and every one represents a master scientist, a top specialist in his (or her) field -- and because of our galactic experience we are all unique. There are none like us anywhere. There will be -- but not yet. There's one name among ours whose owner stands out as different even aboard so unique an entity as the Stardust's one-of-a-kind human components make her. Ursula Potts is a painter, mystic and, some have insisted, a genuine card-carrying witch. But her painted analyses have status with the most profound reports the rest of us have written. She sometimes sees things no one else sees. That she's weird has nothing to do with it. And now as we looked at the spacecraft on Moe Cheng's screen, I felt sure that Ursula's magic brushes were already putting it on canvas -- and with a difference that makes Ursula forever an original. I turned to Rasmussen. "Ursula?" I asked. "Does she know, Johnny?" "She had it almost before we did," the chief admitted. "One of these years I'm going to learn how she does it." "Don't depend on it." I punched a button on the intercom console. "Well?" A thin, sharp, old, impatient voice. "Roscoe, Ursula. What do you think?" "Artifact, Roscoe. No life." "You think it was launched without a crew? With a pilot's blister and all those ports?" "Didn't say that. No life now. Doesn't feel alive." "With that assurance I think I'll go out and have a look. If you say so, it's probably safe. I can depend on you, Ursula." "Soft soap." Ursula's light went out, but I knew she was pleased. Every man in the control room, even Captain Jules, was grinning. "While I'm at it," Rasmussen said, "I'd like to know how you do that." "The same characteristic that makes Ursula function. I'm sheer genius. Do we go?" "You go," the chief said. "Set it up." II T HE scoutboat eased gently from her pressure-sealed slip and the port closed behind her. At my direction the pilot swung in a ten-mile ellipse around the Stardust while we oriented. If the eye could be believed we were completely isolated and alone in the emptiness of space in a cigarlike forty-foot gondola, a slim, metallic and featureless sliver glinting in the intense rays of the yellow sun. The Stardust had vanished. We knew it was there and I marveled once again at the efficiency of the light camouflage. Visible only at high magnification, but clear and definite on our space radar, the alien ship cruised on at her unvarying pace. Her direction had not altered a fraction. She seemed, as Ursula had said, lifeless. "Veer off and circle at a thousand miles, Pete. We'll spiral in on her and watch her every second. I don't think she's playing possum -- but that's how people find out what the next life is like. I'm pretty fond of this one, so stay on it, Gino." The last was to the young engineer assigned us by Captain Jules. Actually he had won the draw. Every engineer had been fighting to come. "Roger, Dr. Kissinger. I like this incarnation pretty well myself." The boy's teeth gleamed in a swarthy face. We rarely work with scoutboats in deep space. They're not designed for it and the need to use them comes almost never. They're handy little explorer craft, four-man capacity and adaptable to the use of any of our many specialists. They make us mobile in atmosphere when a planet is being analyzed. But this was a different, a tricky situation, one we had never faced before, and we didn't dare risk the mother ship. The scoutboat was spaceworthy. It could do the job. We flashed toward the alien, hit the thousand-mile point and veered. No reaction of any sort. Pete worked us in in a series of sweeps at thirty thousand miles an hour. From her point of vantage the Stardust must have seen us as a minnow streaking through a current. As we closed in we zigzagged, swung high above the spearhead and steadied, matching its pace. I could see into the pilot's blister with binoculars. It was empty. "Okay, boys, here goes nothing. Take her alongside, Pete." During the entire approach Pegleg hadn't said a word. Now he tightened his helmet into place, activated his microphone. "Technically you're running this show, Roscoe, so I can only suggest. If they don't blast us -- and I don't think they will -- let me make the space walk. You have a wife." "Lindy will be touched." I was dogging my own helmet. "You boys be sure to tell her of Dr. Williams' concern, if it comes to that. I think the space walk is a two-man job. Why don't we both go, Pegleg?" I imagine Pegleg's surprise was minimal. He knew as well as I did what the MO would be. We've worked together so much we can read each other's minds. As a galactic ecologist I often manage to land in some pretty hairy situations. And there have been times when it was a mighty comfortable feeling to know that I was being backed up by one of the orneriest, most cantankerous, most completely dependable characters in space. T HE scoutboat lay practically alongside the alien, which was loafing along a hundred feet away. Nothing stirred. By now I was convinced that nothing would. We studied it curiously. It was interesting, but not overwhelming. Perhaps two hundred feet long, it had more depth than had appeared at distance. Its row of ports peered at us like blind eyes and sunlight glinted along its otherwise unbroken metallic sides. Or at least they seemed unbroken. "Keep us in view, boys," I instructed. "If our communication quits, pick us up. Notify the Stardust we're going out." I went through the first lock into the tiny decompression cubicle, checked out my equipment, signaled Gino and launched myself into the glittering cold of space. I had done this before. But always in orbit, always with the bulk of a planet looming, even though thousands of miles away. Here we had nothing but the silvery sliver of the scoutboat and, as I tumbled and rolled and adjusted, the glinting blind-eyed bulk of the alien spaceship. I activated my propulsion unit, jetted gingerly away from the scoutboat. In a few minutes it seemed to give birth to the helmeted, white-clad monstrosity that was Pegleg. He adjusted, activated his jet and we eased across to the spaceship. Having been launched into space at the speed of the ship, to change our relative positions required only gentle jetting. I tossed out a magnetic grapple and was pleased to feel how strongly it clung to the pitted skin of the alien. Pegleg anchored himself a few yards toward the stern. We began to creep over the hull, using two grapples, pulling ourselves from place to place, examining the surface as we went. Nothing indicated that we were detected. The soft vibration of the ship's drive neither faltered nor changed. I thumbed my microphone switch. "Kissinger to scoutboat. We're grappled on. The drive is crude, but it hasn't varied. We can feel the vibration. Can you see anything, Gino?" "We have you in view. Cameras are recording. Nothing new, Dr. Kissinger." "Leave communication open," I directed. "I'll be looking into the trying to locate evidence of entry ports." "I think I've found one, Roscoe," Pegleg broke in. "Rectangular, about seven or eight feet high, four or five wide. Much good it'll do us. It's just a fine crease in the surface metal, probably overlapped and gasketed in a complicated fashion. How can we possibly activate it?" "Maybe they'll let us in. Let me try the viewports. We'll burn in if nobody's home." The viewports were virtually opaque from outside, but I could detect a dim glow. No movement. I released my grapples, jetted over the curve of the ship and regrappled beside the clear mound of the pilot blister. And that, almost certainly, was what it was. It was simple and different, but someone -- or something -- often sat there and operated that ship by direct view. I could plainly see the wide, apparently padded bench that was the seat of the pilot, facing an unbelievable instrument panel. No dials, no needles, no lights. Just rows and rows of what looked like toggle switches -- hundreds of them. I looked especially for markings, for symbols, for any evidence of writing. Nothing. It occurred to me that this might be the place to burn in, but on second thought I rejected the idea. There would be no airlock here. If I broke the blister I might well bleed the ship. I realized that I was thinking in Earth terms, but the vessel had to be pressurized and it had to have an atmosphere of some sort. I jetted back to Pegleg, who was still exploring. "Two entry ports, Roscoe." Pegleg's voice was clear in my earplug. "Just outlines -- but that's what they are." "We'll assume a decompression chamber and a lock behind each," I decided. "They may not be there, though. This is a relatively crude craft. I'll grapple on and see if I can burn through. Stand off and cover me." As I guessed, the thin laser beam from my hand gun sheared along the port outline as though it were cutting cheese. I had set it for very short range. I was betting we could operate the controls of the inner lock -- if there were one -- and I didn't want to damage the chapiber. Ballantin e Books  of one side when suddenly the port door collapsed inward. Or perhaps swung would be better. It was actually hinged, thus pointing up the basic simplicity of the entire setup. The laser beam must have cut through the locking mechanism. My magnaflash showed a small metal-lined room, a heavy door on its inner side. We were lucking out. It was a chamber all right. I signaled Pegleg, then used the microphone. "No point in waiting," I said. "Let's go in. We can swing the door shut and it may serve while we activate the lock. There's a control panel." "Roger." Pegleg jetted across and followed me through the port. My magnaflash illuminated the bare little space with a light brighter than day. The door closed again readily, since no pressure hindered it. Pegleg leaned against it while I tried to figure the inner lock. There was little to figure. The door evidently was hinged, it obviously swung inward, but there was not a projection or a fixture on it. And the thing I had generously called a control panel was actually a small plate with six small toggles beside the door. No symbols, no markings, no writing of any kind. So I decided on a sequence and flipped the upper left one. I assumed a left-right, upfor science fiction but then when have they not been. We seem always to be in the middle of glut or famine. BB seems to be the only publisher who is not busy cutting back, in s-f, or in any other way. But, we hate to say it, prices continue to climb. We're up there among the I .# lot for our Adult Fantasies, just to stay in business. Most of them are pretty long of course, and you can't come home at # pages for # (dreamworld stuff) or even # these days. So pick your books with care.  book with an honest-to-God new statement about eating and protein sources that hits right at the obscene waste of feeding # lbs. of high-grade protein to a steer in order to make one pound of edible protein for a human. Gets you off the top of the food chain, too. So buy that one first.  September, an interesting group in our Walden series -- you ought to keep your eye on that trade inal stories by new young writers. er than Lovecraft (it's sort of comforting to know there are a lot of them). And we have Thomas Bural form in this magazine) along with several nature books (well all Waldens. Now if you bought all the titles listed above it would cost you S#. Which, come to think of it, is cheap at the price. Since this column is appearing in what will be the December-dated issue, and just to make sure, a Merry Yule to you all. Keep an eye out for BB's boxed sets of Tolkien, etc., posters (some itchy Lovecraft ones) and other impedimenta by way of Christmas presents. And remember books... BB down orientation since I had no basis for guessing any other pattern. And it worked. We could feel the pressure build. There was only a hairline crack where I had cut down the side of the outer door and while the room was losing air, it wasn't losing much. The door actually seemed to reseal itself. In a short time the toggle flipped back. Apparently the pressure level had reached that of the ship. Again I had no basis for a choice, so I flipped the next toggle. For a moment nothing happened. Then the lock door swung slowly aside and we looked into a large dim space cluttered with bales and bundles of unidentifiable cargo. Cluttered is the word I want. The stuff was piled almost at random, though the larger bales, some as tall as I was, seemed to be stacked against the walls in some order. The magnaflash made the stuff visible, but otherwise didn't help much. There were no markings on anything. There was, though, a six-toggle plate beside the pressure chamber door identical to the one on the other side. I flipped the second switch and the door swung smoothly into place again. I thumbed my microphone. "So far so good. If this is a mousetrap it has just caught a couple of mice." I gave the mike full power. "Kissinger to scoutboat. Can you hear me, Gino?" The response was prompt and just a little fuzzy. "We've had you right along. Dr. Kissinger. Hull doesn't seem to be shielded." "Good. We've passed through the lock. No sign of life. Stay on us and notify the Stardust. We're going exploring." "Roger," the technician said cheerfully. "Luck." The temptation was great to examine everything minutely, but that could come later. That life I mentioned-first priority was to check it out. I didn't expect to find any. No crew, no survivors of any tragedy would have been so quiet, so inconspicuous. Although in our bulky white suits and gleaming helmets we might have looked pretty formidable to less complex life forms, even if they had progressed to space travel. Perhaps they were simply waiting to close the mousetrap for sure. I didn't feel entirely cheerful as I activated another switch at the other end of the cargo space. A door silently admitted us to a long corridor, dimly lit by dully glowing ceiling spots and entirely empty. We marked our location and went cautiously forward, each with a laser gun at ready. Control was probably toward the front of the ship and there, if anywhere, we thought to find evidence of the apparently vanished crew. But nothing stirred. The metal floor vibrated gently with the steady pulse of the drive. The ship seemed organized around that central corridor and switch plates showed beside doors at irregular intervals along it. We activated a couple. The doors swung back to show space packed with packaged cargo. Everything seemed crude, simple, even unfinished. T HE third door we opened, far forward, produced the jackpot. The room was large and almost empty. We added the perfect light of magnaflashes to the dim glow of the ceiling spots and instantly swung our laser guns forward. A huge hairy beast lay sprawled on a great thick bedding pad almost in the center of the room. I forgot to breathe for a minute as we stood there, frozen. But the thing lay still and gradually we relaxed. "It's dead, Pegleg." I probably sounded more hopeful than sure. "I wish no ill to any creature," Pegleg said dryly, "but I think I'm just a little bit glad. What a varmint to take on a space voyage." I continued to study the dark, thick-armed, thick-legged mound on the bedding pad. "We have pets on the Stardust ," I observed. "Not grizzly-bear size we don't." "It has its own specially designed bed," I said. "The room walls look like the others. It doesn't seem to have been caged." We advanced a few cautious steps and stood looking down at the creature. Its great head, longsnouted, was flung back and the open jaws showed even rows of yellow tusks: the flesh-tearing teeth of a carnivore. The heavy legs ended in broad plantigrade feet and the four toes bore curved blunt claws. The hairy forepaws had amazingly long fingerlike digits. W'ith, I noted particularly, an opposable thumb. One of those paws would have spanned a space three times the size of my hand. And I've got a hand like a Virginia ham. Pegleg's reference to a grizzly was pretty apt. But make it a big grizzly. The body organization was remarkably Earthlike and that was a thing we had not found before in many contacts with galactic life. There was no reason for living things a hundred and thirty light-years distant to resembleEarth life. But there was no reason for them not to either. I bent and lifted one of the outflung forelimbs. It moved easily. No rigor mortis. "Not dead long," I said. "Seems in good shape. Remind me to decontaminate twice when I'm back aboard the scoutboat. This thing died of something that worked pretty fast." "Let's find what would keep pets like this." But there was nothing else aboard the craft that could ever have been alive. We found a control room of sorts with a blank, striplike viewscreen and the disconcerting toggle switches in banks on every wall. One door opened directly into the pilot blister above, an access reached by a broad ramp. There were no chairs, but thick pads lay on the floor before the toggle banks and the broad bench in the pilot blister was padded in the same fashion. I quit thinking like an Earthman and began to assemble my data as a galactic spaceman should. And the answer was obvious. "What do you think, Pegleg?" I could see his quizzical look through the shielded plastic of his helmet. "I think we've found everything," he said slowly, as though he were ashamed of having been so dense. "We've been looking for something that doesn't exist and never has." We generally come up with the answer at about the same time. "Right. Let's look in on him again, then get out of here. The Stardust will have his origin pinpointed by now. Captain Jules can put a crew of mechanics and technicians aboard to figure out all those blasted toggles." The situation still seemed unbelievable as we stood looking down again on the huge hairy form. But at the same time it made sense. "Captain, crew, navigator," I said. "Maybe designer and builder as well. Not as far along the technological trail as we, but potentially probably just as sharp." "Granted," Pegleg admitted. "But you may still have the privilege of notifying next of kin. If he were alive I don't think I'd trust him?" "What else is new?" I retorted. "You don't trust anybody. Why except him?" "Give a dog a bad name -- " Pegleg mumbled. "Let's get back to the scoutboat." species that has achieved space travel. Probably some exist but, I'm beginning to suspect, not in the abundance that the theorizers, the probability experts and the storytellers would have you believe. Sure, it's a big galaxy. But the evidence is piling up that this crude flying ship was more of a red-letter deal than first appeared. So I've given it room in this account. It may turn out to be unique. In an hour we were back aboard the Stardust , reporting in person to Johnny Rasmussen. "A sort of galactic prairie schooner," I summed it up, "but operated by a grizzly instead of a settler. Did you get a line on where he might have been going?" The chief nodded. "Dr. Frost has checked out the system. It is remarkably Sollike, as I suspect most systems that have developed life will be. Remember Primrose, Cyrene, Mizar. This sun has four planets and three have atmospheres. It may well be the most life-rich system we have ever contacted." We were out of turtle. Rasmussen had already given the order that would put four technicians on board the "prairie schooner." Its destination planet, while probably steamy and hot, was judged habitable, but its planet of origin had far more attraction for us. Since we had come out of Ultraspan roughly halfway between them, there was not much doubt about where we would go first. "W'hen the men solve the controls of the ship it will be turned about, programed for home and allowed to return under its own power. Mr. Cheng has determined that it has been in space for about a month. This will give us ample time to survey the planet and to prepare the senders for its return." "You haven't seen those boys," Pegleg remarked. "They may be hard to reason with. Suppose they think we done it?" "Beings that can build a spaceship are reasonable," the chief decided. "In any case, we can handle the situation." "We always could" I agreed. "Pegleg, the chess board waits." Ill games, we gave it up and I went back to my quarters. It's always special when Lindy's there to greet me, but of course that doesn't always happen. Lindy's lab is one of the more complicated and delicate operations aboard the Stardust. She always has something going. Dr. Linda Peterson had been the explorer ship's microbiologist from the beginning. Changing her name to Kissinger hadn't changed her dedication. But this time she was there. It has been eight years now since that wedding in the clear sky over Cyrene Four and the wonder of it is still with me whenever I come "home" and she is waiting. She's everything I'm not. She was a luscious armful when I came through the door and no woman could have pretended the kiss she gave me. Then she seized my chin between flashing white teeth and bit -- sharply. I held her tightly. "If that broke the skin I'm going to have a hard time explaining it," I said. "That's to remind you," she murmured, "that you're to tell me when you go out! I don't want to hear about it from Johnny or from a casual word on the intercom. You were climbing over the hulk out there like a space-suited louse before I even knew you actually had gone." "Nice comparison," I said. "A psychiatrist could probably make something of it." I held her at arm's length and studied her glowing face, dancing green eyes and bright hair curling and cascading over perfect shoulders. "I'll always make it back, you know. I've got something to come back to." She hugged me again convulsively"You're a thick-armed, musclebound, hairy brute, Roscoe, but you're my hairy brute. Bear with me, friend. I have to act like a woman once in a while." I stroked the glistening red hair. The ringlets clung to my fingers. "If you were any more like a woman I probably couldn't stand it," I said. "But wait till I complain." "If you think that this was no way for a couple of the finer heads in the galaxy to behave I think I feel a little sorry for you. You've missed a lot of the wonder of living and your marriage is probably a complete flop. Which, as far as this account is concerned, is neither here nor there. We like the way we live together. And maybe it keeps the strangeness of our strangest of all occupations from having effect on us eventually. Together we can take things as they come. were stymied for a bit by the controls of the derelict, but eventually they worked them out. Lindy and I were watching on the viewscreen in our quarters when the ship began to veer, to zigzag, to vary its speed as the men experimented. Then she swept in a slow, wide curve and finally steadied, her snout pointed back along the trail in space she had lately traveled. She would go home alone. The decision had been a touchy one to make. Her captain and navigator should perhaps have gone back with her. Had his form been human he probably would have gone. But he was only a savagelooking, hairy beast -- and Jim Peters, our chief zoologist, could not bear to throw away the only really Earthlike specimen we had found outside the solar system. It would have broken his heart. So the grizzly captain, carefully preserved, was in the Stardust's specimen lockers when we left his ship to lumber home and flashed toward his planet of origin. The pattern after Ultraspan had been the busiest I could remember. I usually sleep before a stage and was not tired, but to have to adjust simultaneously to a new space and an emergency situation was wearing. Still, when the distant planet began to grow on the screens the old anticipation came back. We've landed on new worlds twenty-seven times, now and for not one of us will anything ever be like it. We had no way of predicting what we were getting into, though we had a sample of the planet's life and technology while still trations of population -- cities in which the citizens were great yellow-fanged and hairy beasts -- were pretty hard to envision, but we knew that the chances were there. Undoubtedly aircraft would be cutting the atmosphere of the strangely golden sphere steadily expanding on the screens. It was a beautiful world. All life planets we've found have been lovely. The entrance bell to our quarters chimed mellowly and the red light glowed. I released the lock. Pegleg strolled in, the faintest hint of a limp showing as he swung his plastic knee. The leg had been bitten off by a plesiosaur-like critter during one of our first explorations years before. A lesser man would have been handicapped. Pegleg, if you'll bear with the pun, took it in stride. "Greetings, both," he said cheerily. "Just dropped in for a few social moments and maybe a cup of coffee. That is," he amended, "if you have no bourbon." "We're normally teetotalers, as you know," Lindy said gravely, "but we might have a wee nip for a guest. Sit ye down, Pegleg. And in an hour or so we may find out why you really came by." rected. Lindy set out bottles, glasses and ice. Then, drinks at elbow, we all sat and watched the approaching planet grow on the viewscreen. "It bugs me, Roscoe," Pegleg said abruptly. "Why did that fellow die? The autopsy boys found nothing they would judge abnormal. No injury. No illness." I swirled the bourbon in my glass. "I've thought about it," I admitted. "He seemed pretty hearty just to go without strife or struggle. But that's what he did. No doubt of it." "If we knew," Pegleg said thoughtfully, "it might help with the job coming up. We'll have to contemporaries, won't we?" "You won't," I pointed out. "That's Johnny's job. He's The Man. Your job is rocks." Pegleg raised an eyebrow. "I meddle," he said. "I butt in. Furthermore, if they're unhappy with us, I might not have the freedom of their foothills and mountains, valleys and plains. If they don't like us -- I keep remembering those teeth." "I doubt they use them on visitors," I said. "As Johnny pointed out, beings who can build a spaceship are reasonable. They were predators once, flesh-tearing carnivores no doubt, when they were on their way up. Now they'll probably just arrest you and toss you in the klink for trespassing." Pegleg held out his glass wordlessly and Lindy poured from the right bottle. Pegleg preferred to use water to bathe in or to brush his teeth. "He was, if you'll excuse the expression, nude. With all that hair I admit it didn't make much difference. But he wore no ornaments, carried no weapon. Further, we haven't found any of either since. Comments? Hypotheses? How would you tell a policeman if you saw one?" "We're taking a lot for granted," I admitted. "He may, after all, just have been a big pet left behind when the crew abandoned ship." Pegleg shook his head emphatically. "No evidence. No sign of any other life. Uh-uh. He ran the ship." "His body and mouth micropopulations are interesting," Lindy contributed. "My girls are working on them. The parasitologists have found some real, genuine worm types in his innards, too. But nothing at all that could have killed him." The Stardust was under full timonium drive. Within the dimensions of any planetary system we don't have to dawdle around. We can get where we're going in commuter's time. We figured that the native ship would require at least a month to return to base, but already the planet was looming large on our viewscreen. We could tell that it was going to be a gaudy sight from orbit. "Looks better every minute," I said. "Cloud flow patterns, water, poles conspicuously different. This is a world with potential, fellow travelers." "The kind of potential is what is going to make all the difference," Pegleg said. "I'll never learn to be palsy with anything that looks like that local astronaut. No way." "Cheer up," Lindy consoled him. "The atmosphere is probably ammonia and methane and all the exploring any of us will do will be a little strolling about in suits." Pegleg sipped, adjusted the sour look on his narrow face and said, "Hah. The air in that ship was a neat twenty percent oxygen mix, nitrogen buffered and with regular. Earth-type humidity. It could have come out of the Stardust." Lindy winked at me. "I tried," she said. "Bless you," Pegleg said. "I know you mean well. And it does look inviting in spite of the natives, doesn't it?" It did. T HE curve of the planet had inched across the screen until we looked out on a pattern of continents and oceans, cloud patches hundreds of miles wide and great open areas that glittered in the rays of the yellow sun. We could feel the checked speed as Captain Jules swung us into a long elliptical orbit higher than we usually implement for our initial looksee from space. Johnny Rasmussen had not forgotten those possible aircraft. He wanted to be far enough out to detect them or even see them coming. The intercom rattled, buzzed and cleared its throat. Stony Price sounded his usual cheery self. " Stardust now in orbit. Distance above surface will range from five thousand to eight thousand miles. Time of each orbit, thirty-four minutes. Time before descent, four hours. Dr. Rasmussen suggests that tentative programs be set up. As for me, when I get down I'm going fishing." Pegleg leaned forward in his chair as he studied the slowly shifting, varied, colorful surface. "I get ideas from the darndest sources," he said. "How long has it been since our last canoe trip along good old Snake River, Roscoe?" "Too long," I admitted. Pegleg loves to fish, but naturally there was no guarantee that what was in the waters of this world would faintly resemble Earth-type bass or even catfish. "Then that's our tentative program," Pegleg said with satisfaction. "Lindy?" "Just waiting to be asked," my wife said. That was a lot funnier than it sounded. My wife is a woman who knows her mind. In a situation where she has rights she does not wait for an invitation. She steps right in. Pegleg grinned as he offered: "I'll bait your hook. I know how you feel about worms." Lindy dutifully said "Ugh," and we settled down to serious planning. In the next four hours, while the Stardust looped the planet seven times, a huge mass of data piled up. Sensors probed, a variety of devices listened and the big zoom lenses of our analytical cameras pulled in sample after sample of surface detail. Before we go down we like to know what we're up against. This time, with evidences of a superior technology and space capabilities, the survey was particularly extensive. And there were some surprises. It was a golden world. This was literally so. Vegetation was varied, with extensive forest lands, wide prairies covered with grasslike growth, swamps and marshes and great river systems, rolling dunes and barriers behind the beaches of two vast oceans. Ranges of mountains lifted high. Each orbit took us over the snowcapped poles and long reaches of tundra stretched toward what seemed to be fields of perpetual ice. Earthlike, spectacular, but with the green of the vegetation of the mother planet replaced by gold. The yellows ranged widely in intensity. Reds and greens were not missing but the impression was of a golden sunshine planet. One problem -- we saw no evidence of that technologically advanced civilization we had been expecting. If there were cities, any kinds of concentrations of beings living together, we missed them. And anything of that magnitude we couldn't possibly have failed to detect. There were long streaks that could have been roads, but they certainly were not an improved variety. From these, secondary branches led off into country unpatterned by any appearance of development or agriculture. If there were buildings they broke the symmetry of the terrain not at all. Certainly nothing showed that even hinted at a civilization with advanced competencies. "No city complexes. No urban sprawl. No industrial pollution. No smog -- -" Pegleg's recitation was tinged with more than a trace of satisfaction. "In fact," Moe Cheng said, "no people." We were back in control by then, the five of us, structuring the drop-in as we usually do. "And no aircraft, no spacecraft, no any kind of craft." I turned to Johnny Rasmussen. "We didn't goof, Johnny? The spacecraft came from here?" The chief nodded. He steepled his long fingers and leaned back in his chair. A round-bellied brandy globe sat at his elbow and he glanced at it consideringly but did not touch it. To Dr. Johannes Rasmussen a fine brandy was more a symbol than a drink. He seemed to like to know it was there. "No doubt at all. Dr. Kissinger. We have a hundred verifications, including matching radiation imprints." He glanced at his screen. "An underground civilization? Don't bears live in caves?" I grinned. "Brainstorm away," I said. "Our worthy astronaut may have looked like a bear but he wasn't one. The anatomy boys find his brain fascinating and his nervous system bewildering. The cells are so different that they're puzzled. His appearance is coincidence enough." "Perhaps," Moe Cheng suggested, "they have outgrown aggregate organization -- have matured beyond it. Perhaps what we see is all there is." "There were no weapons, no devices for defense aboard the spaceship. Even if there were ships in the sky I doubt we'd be in any kind of danger." Rasmussen finally closed his long fingers around his brandy glass. "Too simple," Pegleg said gloomily. "That fellow was a weapon. And where are the ships? Camouflaged, naturally -- along with the industries that would have to exist to construct them. When we get in closer there will be ships." "Camouflaged against what?" I bounced the idea back. "At five thousand miles we are bound to miss a few things. I agree we'll see ships, but they won't be hidden. And what do you care -- as long as they don't scare the fish?" IV with due regard for everyone's needs. Since there was nothing special to focus on we picked a location where we would just naturally feel at home. The season in the northern hemisphere was late summer. The Stardust swept down into an atmosphere as sweet as that of old Earth before pollution came, burrowed briefly through sheets of white clouds and then drifted smoothly a few hundred feet above a golden plain. "Where foothills and forest and water and prairie all meet, please," I requested. "Would you also like a road and perhaps some buildings?" Moe Cheng asked gently. "We'll see what we can do." "A fishing stream," Pegleg put in, "with nice rock outcrops in the neighborhood for study when they're not biting." "Flowers." Lindy stood in the control room doorway. "I want something different for my vases." And Captain Jules delivered -- on almost all counts. He brought the Stardust in like a leaf sliding down a summer breeze, her thousands of tons of mass turned into nothing by her newly redesigned timonium anti-gravs. She settled at full length onto a sunny open slope and a field of golden flowers stretched away and down to a little stream glinting and winking in the distance. Hills rose beyond, bright with red and yellow forest growth. In a way it was a first. We had found life many times, ecosystems based in an oxygen atmosphere maintained by photosynthesis, but heretofore the actual forms had always been different. The vegetation before us now was Earthlike. Add the fact that our astronaut had been a mammal-like -- even bear-like -- tetrapod, and the laws of probability became a bit stretched. You can see why we hung over the viewscreens and why I itched to be out and about. Pegleg's nonesense about fishing had, of course, been just that -- but in the landscape before us it looked completely reasonable. The flowers seemed quite suitable for Lindy's vases. I could almost see Ursula Potts, with easel and load of painting paraphernalia, sitting on that golden slope under her red umbrella, painting and analyzing this pleasant world. But we waited, as always, while sensors probed, analyses were made, and while every device the Stardust possessed checked and rechecked the atmosphere, the radiation, the possible hazards of the microlife to human explorers out there in the yellow sunshine. And the final results were gratifying. Stony Price summarized on intercom: "Dr. Rasmussen's communique -- official. A compatible world. Free reconnaissance is authorized for seventy-two hours, at the end of which time all major research heads and team chiefs will meet to formulate the coverage pattern. There must, as usual, be twenty percent of total personnel aboard the Stardust at all times. As for me -- as I said, I'm going fishing." "Me too," Pegleg said. "I bet there'll be crickets under logs. Best bait there is." around the Stardust, Captain Jules was a purist. Two guards, laser guns in hand, stood at each of the four activated personnel ports. Since nothing in sight was moving, the precaution seemed a little much. In all the landings we have made the ship has never yet been attacked -- it usually takes a lot of coaxing to get anything even to approach it. But guards stood by as field parties drifted out and spread casually over the nearby terrain. Nobody seemed in a hurry. There was a pervasive quiet about the scene, a sleepy tranquility that was pleasant and infectious. We seemed to have no ambition at all. Then, too, it was late afternoon and none of us had slept since the stage. So I didn't go afield after all. I extruded a jumper platform high on the side of the Stardust and Lindy and I sat there, forty feet above the meadow, and breathed deep of the winy air while we swept our surroundings with binoculars and the yellow sun sank slowly behind the western hills. "Beautiful." Lindy sighed. "There's no strife on this world, Roscoe. I'd feel it." "I trust your feelings within limits," I said. "But there is strife in any ecosystem. Has to be. Out there under our eyes things are tearing and devouring. Every organic crumb is being contended for. Death is happening that life may go on." My wife gave me a disgusted look. "You can really louse up a mood, can't you?" She tried to frown, but hers is not a face on which a frown feels at home. "You know what I mean. Quit being an ecologist for a few minutes, Roscoe. Be glad of a planet where there are no wars, no contending populations, no technologies trying to crowd each other out of existence." She breathed deeply. "Smell that air. There's no taint in it. No pollution. I'm going to love it here." "How can you tell?" I protested. "A spacecraft came from here. It was manned by a big predator -- with teeth. There you have potential for both pollution and strife." Lindy shook her head. "Somehow I don't believe those exist here. Oh, I grant your carnivore and your ecological interaction. Of course I know that is going on. But nothing consciously structured is evil here. This is a natural world." "You become more like Ursula every day." I grinned. "Just don't start looking like her." My eye picked up movement far across the prairie and I swung the binoculars into position. Living things were moving, big things. I pulled them into focus and zoomed them closer. The result was a little astonishing. Back on Earth they would have been, without any doubt, cattle. A fair-sized herd was bobbing along, running easily. I could plainly see heavy, horned heads, shaggy forequarters, high humps at the shoulders. Cattle? I revised my impression. They looked more like bison, the buffalo of the old American West. There were differences, like the splotched, varied pinto coloring, black and brown and red and white. No two animals seemed coated exactly alike. Lindy had her glasses up. The herd galloped behind a finger of woodland and most of it was lost to sight. I lowered my binoculars, but focused them again when I heard Lindy gasp. The herd reappeared, this time in headlong flight. "There was something," Lindy said. "It's behind the trees now -- but it got one of them." I swept the area, but could see nothing. "Any impressions?" Lindy lowered her glass and looked at me gravely. "A very definite impression. Big, black, heavily furred. Ran on all fours, but rose on hind legs to strike. Brought down its prey with one swipe and dragged it behind those trees." "In short -- " Lindy nodded. "It looked like the astronaut. Very much like the astronaut." I felt a little chagrined. So we had been off the beam. The thing had been a pet, after all. The builders of the spaceship were still unknown and we would do well to get up some pretty careful reconnaissance. Johnny Rasmussen would be interested. He was, of course. He was puzzled, too. As I was. We had grown used to thinking of the big bearlike creature as the "thinking man" of the world. Now we had to start all over. And we had, as we realized, no starting point, no clues. Pegleg had only wandered as far as the stream and had seen nothing. Nothing big, that is. "Varmints were pretty shy," he reported. "Couldn't get close. I didn't take glasses, so I only got impressions." He snapped his fingers. "One thing, though, Roscoe. Butterflies. Huge things and no end gaudy. They must have had two-foot wingspreads. You'll have to net them like birds." "Not if I can help it," I said. "Let Jim Peters and his boys collect. But at least your insects maintain the pattern -- Earthlike forms have evolved here. We recognize everything. Nothing is weird. They all look like things we have seen before. Pegleg nodded. "Those fish actually seem more likely now. Care to join me tomorrow?" "I just might," I agreed. "But I never have any luck." "Then you can watch me," Pegleg said smugly. T HE Seven Suns lie in a major arm of the galactic spiral and the night sky from our planet was a memorable thing. Stars crowded it, packed into swirls and clusters and strange alignments that would have been unbelievable on Earth. There was no moon, but the landscape showed clearly in the soft light of the myriad stars. Lindy and I watched it on our own viewscreen, lolling in bed after a comfortable meal. I must have blinked. When I opened my eyes the screen showed the flowerstrewn slope with wet dew in golden morning sun. Ten hours without moving! Lindy still slept peacefully beside me. Our intercom was buzzing softly. I flipped the switch. "As I thought, still sacked out," said Pegleg's voice. "Take nourishment and meet me down by the stream. I'm all set to try those fish." "Roger," I whispered. "Let my weary spouse sleep." Pegleg had busied himself collecting local bait. I brought meat strips, but he had an assortment of insectlike forms in a little plastic bag. He was whipping a fiberglass rod and testing his reel when I came up. "Made to order," he said complacently. "Shadows darted into that deep pool over there when I first got here. Water's full of life." I was interested in his bait collection. It might have come from any hayfield in North America. Pegleg hooked one bit of bait. It gave a tiny, piercing shriek and expired promptly. "Well that's different." Pegleg looked a little startled. "If I have to listen to that every time I bait up I'll be reduced to dry flies." But he flipped the bait out into the pool and , fished deep. I watched him for a couple of minutes. Nothing. I threaded one of my meat strips on a hook and tossed it out. Instantly the water boiled. My rod was nearly snatched from my hand and I struck hard to set the hook. I expected a fight -- but I didn't get it. My fish darted around the pool. I gave it line. Then it did the completely unexpected. It zipped toward me. I stepped back a couple of strides and it climbed out on a rock. It was a small, glistening humanoid with webbed fingers and toes and a short shiny tail. It stood erect, gulping, and the gill slits along the sides of its neck sealed themselves and became obscure. The creature took a deep breath of air, then proceeded to deliver itself of one of the most versatile strings of profanity I had heard. The words were clear and specific and, since this is a family publication, I won't repeat them here. The little fellow was beside himself with rage. His blue eyes blazed, his thin lips drew back over even white teeth as the vitriol poured out. But after a moment he subsided. He stood on the rock, holding his little four-fingered hands out in front of him. The hook had pinned them together through the webs between the fingers. A dark trickle of blood ran down his arms. Suddenly he looked very tiny, grotesque and pitiful. "Dirty pool," he said almost reflectively. "Dirty, dirty, dirty pool. Even a waakan wouldn't do a thing like that." He eyed me, his anger gone. He must have been hurting. But as he realized my strange appearance he became all curiosity. N OW, as you may know, I'm a fairly hearty chunk of man. My arms and legs are thick. My chest is deep and all visible areas except my face, which I shave, and the top of my head, which I don't, are covered with matted black hair'. Lindy and I have gone to parties as Beauty and the Beast -- without makeup. Right there I was wearing shorts and sandals, so he got a maximum view. "Different," he piped. "Like a marat, like a waakan, even like an obit without wings." He studied me calmly now. "Are you going to eat me?" "Nothing is farther from my mind," I heard myself protesting. "I was fishing for fish. How could I know that something like you would take my bait?" "Because it is my pool," the little fellow said. "Every pool has a marat. But," he added, "I can see you would not know that." Pegleg had been standing a few yards away, staring with fascination at the tiny manlike creature. He was reeling in his bait slowly, automatically. "I'm hearing this, ain't I, Roscoe? I haven't had a seizure of some sort?" The small humanoid turned toward him. Pegleg was also wearing shorts and sandals, but his long sinewy body had almost no hair at all. We hardly seemed to belong to the same species. To the marat it must have been confusing. He shook his head. Short, greenish ringlets bobbed and curled around his temples as the sun dried and fluffed them. His features were unformed, coarse, and his eyes glistened with cunning. More and more he looked like a nasty little man. "You don't look alike," he said, "but you must have migrated together. Why did you come here? Only obits migrate." "We have come from a great distance," I said. "You couldn't understand. We don't plan to stay long and we mean no harm to any living thing. You must be in pain. Let me take the hook out of your hands." The marat's bright eyes glittered with suspicion. "Don't come near me," he warned. "You probably do intend to eat me." He held his pinioned hands to his mouth and bit through the leader just behind the hook. "Now," he said, "you cannot hold me. Somehow I will take the metal out of my webs. It is not a bad hurt." "There's a barb on the hook," I said. "It'll be hard to get out. Better let me do it." "You mean no harm to any living thing," the marat mimicked. "That is why you put a hook in my pool. That is why the hook has a barb." H is little face wrinkled like a monkey's. He turned and slid soundlessly into the stream. We could see a shadow like a darting trout that swiftly vanished under the far bank. We looked at the gently flowing water, then at each other. Pegleg began to pack up his tackle. "Whenever I leave geology I'm sorry," he said. "You can explain that little character any time you're ready, Roscoe. Start with the speech. We're a hundred and thirty light-years from the nearest English-speaking community and he gives with more dirty wordies than I know. It ain't no way possible. But I heard it." "Get used to it," I advised. "I think that's the most easily accounted for thing in this contact. It has been hypothesized for years. Could be we'll be getting chit-chat from other little varmints as well. And maybe big ones. Even the bait screamed when you hooked it." "He looked like a man," Pegleg said. "Like a blasted pixie out of a fairy book. But let's have the speech hypothesis." "You heard English," I said, "but if I'm right, he didn't. To him I was speaking marat talk. We were verbalizing meanings and each of us hearing them in his own vocal symbols. The process is partly telepathic. Anyhow, it's an old idea. Naturally I don't know why it works here. But he didn't use dirty words you don't know. You heard the ones you would have used." Pegleg unjointed his rod. "Well, shame on me," he mumbled. "I should have my mind washed out with soap." I grinned. "The thought has occurred to me before." Pegleg opened his bait bag. The little creatures hopped and flew in all directions. "Are you actually saying that all the indigenous life forms will be giving us the edges of their tongues? That'll be a switch!" "May happen," I said. "I can hardly wait to be called what I am by another one. What are your plans, Roscoe, now that the fishing is all washed up, so to speak?"  "I'll just do a walkabout in the neighborhood," I decided. "You're welcome to come along." "Uh-uh." Pegleg shook his head and tapped the rock hammer in his belt. "Rocks don't talk back -- or at least they never have. I'll explore the ledge up the slope and take a few specimens to work on." "Be happy," I said. I cached my fishing gear and followed the stream for a while. Woody brush grew thickly here and there. Several species of shrubs mingled and at least one kind was heavy with small, golden plumlike fruit. I speculated as to their edibility, but I didn't sample. There are safer ways of finding out. My feet were almost automatically following what I would have called a game trail, if I had thought about it. I rounded a clump of the plum bushes and almost ran into him. He had heard and probably smelled me coming. In fact, he was waiting for me. He stood composedly, a huge shaggy hulk eight feet tall, both great forepaws Tilled with golden fruit and his bearlike muzzle most untidy with juice. His small black eyes looked me over with intelligent interest. He drew back his lips from great yellow fangs and I realized that he was simulating a smile. "I expected you," he said casually, "but I still don't believe you." His deep voice was smooth and controlled. I shifted my hand a little guiltily away from my laser gun. "I'm having trouble believing you -- so we're even," I said. "I've seen one of your race before. The thing that puzzles me most is -- we can communicate. Sounds like speech, but I suppose that is simpler than the fact." "Did you think," the big beast growled, "that the superior races of this world would be dull and silent like vada? Like cattle?" "It isn't that you speak -- it's that I can understand. Across this sector of the galaxy that isn't usual, you know." "No, I don't know. I have never seen an intelligent being with whom I couldn't communicate." "In English?" The Dominant, as I thought of him, studied me reflectively. He tossed several plums expertly between those rows of teeth and chewed. "In meanings, I suppose. You are complex. It is good to feel your mind. This makes your appearance all the more remarkable. You are the first superior form in my experience to resemble the obits and the marats of Gossoon." "Marat I comprehend," I said. "We met one. It mentioned obits, but I haven't seen any as far as I know." Again that skinning of yellow fangs that was the creature's version of a smile. "They are abundant," he said. "They have bright wings and live high in trees, where they make small shelters and feed on fruit. They are hard to catch. I rarely taste one." That shocked me. "You eat them? I thought it was possible to speak with them. The marat was voluble enough." "Naturally," said the Dominant scornfully. "It's just that they are lower forms. They have no technology and no scholarship. They are animals, a nice change of diet from vada, which are our staple food." The calm, measured speech of the great brute was, you may believe, disconcerting. "Suppose I mention," I said, "that you resemble lower forms on my world. Forms that cannot speak and have no superior awareness at all." "I can believe it." the Dominant said steadily. "We must speak with you at length. We have not the capacity you obviously have to span galactic distance. Technologically we might, but physically we seem hampered. After a certain time in space we die of a strange sickness. It is a problem we have yet to solve." "That, I think, is why we are here." I still felt silly talking to the creature, but his intelligence and comprehension were beyond doubt. We had changed our minds too quickly yesterday. So I told him of the derelict with one of his kind aboard, of how we had turned the ship about until now it was speeding home again. His small eyes gleamed with interest and curiosity. "Your ship is very big," he said. "We observed it with wonder as it swung in orbit. Now I reason that it must travel at a multiple of light speed. This troubles my mathematics -- but it must be so." To have a giant bear discussing spaceships and mathematics while inelegantly stuffing fruit into itself was almost too much, but I held on. "There was only one individual in your ship," I remarked. The Dominant nodded. "All that was necessary. We do not grow lonely and by choice we work alone. We prefer much individual space. Only the obits, the marats and the stupid vada and their like stay together in groups. We do not consider it conducive to intellectual progress." "Yet you say you enjoy the feel of my mind." "Very much. The feel of another intellect is always good. But when we meet it is for a reason. When the reason has been satisfied we part. To each his own space, his own work, his own pleasures." I was puzzled and I suppose I showed it. "There is a contradiction here. You don't live together -- yet you make spaceships. This requires materials, shops, sophisticated equipment, cooperative effort. It requires an elaborate technology. Would you care to explain?" The Dominant waved a hairy paw toward the thickly hanging plums. "The fruits are good food," he invited. "There is nothing in them but harmless carbohydrates and simple proteins. You can probably tolerate them. Ah, yes -- the technology. We have it, as you say. But we do not use it to live -- only to learn by. We space ourselves so that our environment feeds us. We exchange materials that we need for our experiments and investigations. We share labor for brief periods. But it always good when the laborers return to their own territories. My vada herds would soon grow small if there were many eaters. I hope," he added and he seemed a little concerned, "that your ship can feed its people. You are almost in the middle of my territory." I could reassure him on the point -- and did. "We couldn't depend on finding food on unknown worlds," I pointed out. "Our supplies will last for years. And even if we used them all we could recycle organic stuffs forever." "In that case," the Dominant said, "I am glad you are here. We will share knowledge and I will become the best informed waakan on Gossoon." one that went well with the apparently simple life organization of his species. But I wasn't going to take that simplicity without a large grain of salt. "One of us saw you yesterday, pulling down what I suppose was a vada? Do you hunt down and kill your meat using only your own strength?" The waakan sat back on his haunches and picked his teeth with a clawed, clever finger. "How else? If we have not strength to kill our meat we do not deserve to eat. If the vada can avoid us it lives long, eats much vegetation and produces more vada. We eat the slow and stupid ones and there is more grass for those that survive." "A fair shake for everybody," I agreed. "On my home world, many years ago, a man named Darwin first pointed out how the fittest survive. But I never heard of an intelligent species applying the idea as a life pattern." The waakan flicked an ear. "Anything else would be a death pattern," he said. I forgot that I was speaking to a most unlikely being. He had become an intellect voicing an idea. "That is oversimplification," I argued. "My race, the race of man, has achieved much and is spreading far. Yet we are destructive. We kill without reason. We don't live as you do." "An idea can be cluttered with detail until it loses its shape," the waakan said placidly, "but it remains the same idea. I do not believe that living things can destroy their life sources and continue to live." While we talked the voices of many people had been reaching us from the fields around the Stardust , from along the stream and from far up the slope where, presumably, Pegleg was swinging his hammer against an inoffensive rock ledge. Now I realized that some were close by. So did the Dominant. "We shall have much talk," the waakan said. "But first I think you had better prepare your people for me. I don't wish to feel the energy of anything like that device that you carry at your hip." He grinned his terrifying grin, dropped to all fours and literally melted into the brush. He simply vanished. No weasel could have left less spoor, less evidence of its passing. I plucked a couple of the plums and wandered back down the trail. The fruits were beautiful but their taste was foul. I threw them away. Native biomass is usually not very palatable. I wondered vaguely why the waakan had picked me for contact rather than other Stardust crewmen now reveling in the feel of this pleasant world. For I had been selected -- no doubt about that. Because of my extra body hair? Did the shaggy creature sense interest, lack of fear? Could it read minds? I didn't have an answer. I thumbed my belt communicator, got Stony Price and gave him a quick fill-in. "Pass it around. Stony," I said. "I know everybody knows the rules  but remind them. You saw the dead astronaut. But you can't imagine what a living one looks like, close up. Even a steady set of nerves could get laserhappy." "Will do," Stony said. "I can believe anything. You heard about my fishing trip?" I grinned. "You had adventures? What did you catch?" "Nothing" said Stony Price. "But one climbed out on a rock and cussed me out for trying. And I have not been at Rasmussen's brandy -- " "I know, Stony," I said soothingly. "They're called marats, and they have nasty tempers. The waters hereabouts seem to be full of them. The one I saw looked just like an uncle of mine." "What a world," Stony grumbled. "Be careful, Roscoe. That pretty sunshine will probably give your wife warts instead of freckles." I signed off, chuckling. M AN is an adaptable creature -- he can get used to anything. The pattern of the planet Gossoon was falling into place for me. Before long, I expected, I would be surprised when anything I met did not greet me with a quip or a dirty word -- or, perhaps, a profound philosophical statement. I considered communicating with Lindy, then decided to hunt up Pegleg before I went back to the ship. I had only walked a couple of miles and my space-softened muscles needed tightening. At one spot the stream spread into wide shallow riffles, so I waded it, put my legs to the slope beyond and had a nice workout before I reached the first of the low cliffs and rugged outcrops that had attracted Pegleg. I had probably upped my elevation three hundred feet or so. The panorama that spread out below me was both pleasing and informative. The stream wound and meandered and finally lost itself around a flank of the uplift I had climbed. It was mostly tre.ebordered, cool and pleasant in the yellow sun. I could look over the patchy brush areas and out to the extensive prairie beyond. The Stardust lay inert and prone, a huge, featureless, glittering sausage, her fifteen hundred feet of length blending with and scarcely disturbing the symmetry of the landscape. And nothing pise interrupted it at all. I saw no sign of anything the waakan might have built, helpers or no helpers. No sign of the waakan, either. I could hear voices along the outcrop. Slowly it seeped into my consciousness that they were not familiar voices. No one from the Stardust would have spoken in those high, sweet, thin notes. They sounded like the babble of children playing. But occasionally I also heard Pegleg's deeper tones. I slipped around the shoulder of the outcrop and, to use the waakan's statement, I didn't believe what I saw. Large bright patches of vivid color wavered and fluttered and swept in erratic circles in the air around Pegleg, who was sitting on a big flat stone that had split loose from the ragged wall behind him. His rockbag and hammer lay nearby. The scene was like a convention of giant butterflies, with Pegleg the flower. He did not appear bothered -- merely amused. "If you'd just light somewhere," Pegleg was saying, "and speak one at a time we'd all learn something. Settle down." T HE twittering voices trailed away. The gaudy creatures drifted to nearby rocks or clung to handy tree branches. All save one. It hovered before Pegleg, great wings waving gently, studying him intently. Then it dropped gracefully and perched daintily on his knee. "You will not harm me," she piped sweetly. She studied him with her small head tilted. "You are very beautiful," she said. A she. There was not the slightest doubt of it. With the mauve and silver, two-foot wings folded back, a tiny naked female, human in all but size, sat and swung diminutive, four-toed feet. She brushed back long dark hair and smiled up at the surprised Pegleg. I knew him. He was embarrassed. He hadn't expected that. I gave him credit, though -- he bounced back strongly. He studied the lovely little being on his knee. "How do you know I won't harm you?" he demanded. "Because you like me," she said. "You think I am beautiful and I think you are beautiful. I will go with you to your nest." The childlike phrasing didn't have the sophistication of the marat. These obviously were simpler beings. "If you were five or six times the size you are it might be a good offer," Pegleg observed wryly. "Can't you see I'm not like you? I haven't even got wings." "I know." The little thing shook her perfect head. "You are a strange kind of obit. How can you migrate without wings?" Pegleg grinned. "I manage" He looked around, as I was doing, at the colorful little creatures perched all about. With wings folded back they were amazingly like small people. I'd have guessed fourteen, sixteen inches for an average height. Their hair was long and the tiny males had scanty wisps of beard. The color was mostly on the wings and in this no two were alike. Their skins were a golden tan. None wore even a scrap of clothing or ornament. "I dig," Pegleg said. "You are obits. Right?" "What else would we be?" A little male with maroon wings spoke in a resonant tenor. "Only obits have wings. You are a different creature and La-ling should not sit against you." "It was her idea," Pegleg protested. "I'm as innocent as newfallen snow." All the little creatures shuddered. "Do not speak of the snow," tiny La-ling said. "We hate it. When it comes we must migrate, for the fruits freeze and the cold winds blow us. When winter comes we must be far along our journey. If the snow catches us we die. We can fly only in warmth and sunshine." "Amazing." Pegleg looked as nonplused as he ever gets. "Do you know the marats in the water? I don't see how they could migrate. What happens to them in the cold?" The obits made gestures of disgust. "The marats are nasty creatures," one said. "We would not care if they froze. They say they gather in deep pools or bury themselves far into the mud. But they are always liars. Who knows what they do? They are here when we fly south and they are here when we return." Pegleg shook his head. Then his narrow face relaxed and he began to chuckle. "My friend Roscoe is going to be fascinated by you." "Starting now," I said and moved out into the open. The obits rose in a colorful, fluttering cloud, their high voices the rest, but after a moment she dropped back to Pegleg's shoulder and clung tightly to his hair with small four-fingered hands. I walked forward slowly, smiling and trying to look as innocuous as possible. "I know you have a girl in every spaceport, Pegleg," I remarked, "but this is ridiculous. Don't you ever turn off the charm?" "No apologies," Pegleg said. He put up a hand to steady La-ling on his shoulder. "I am a mite embarrassed, though. As you can plainly see, this little lady ain't wearing no lingerie. But it's just the style. Not my idea." "I must believe you," I said, "because I eavesdropped. Apparently we've been tapped, Pegleg, you and I. The local populaces are attracted to us. I've just been chewing the fat with the resident waakan." The little obit rocketed from Pegleg's shoulder. She cut the air above us, a mauve and silver streak, hissing like an angry cat. I had really punched the wrong button. I Pegleg waved at the angrily circling little creature. "Come on down. La-ling. We need you. Nothing will harm you. I promise." He held out an arm and the little thing drifted sulkily down. She teetered lightly on the arm, then walked along it to the shoulder again. Her golden eyes were fixed widely on me. Her lips writhed back over tiny sharp teeth, glistening white. She looked less human, then, and more like the small winged animal she was. "The waakan would eat us," she spat, "but he cannot fly. This one has fur like the waakan, but he looks like an obit. I do not understand." The last was a whimper. Again she dug her little fingers into Pegleg's hair. Pegleg raised his eyebrows inquiringly. "The waakan is the astronaut," I explained. "Or rather, the astronaut's brother or cousin. The teeth are for real, but they just use them for legitimate food, apparently. He did mention a taste for obits." "Cruel, wicked creature," Laling said indignantly. "He can't catch you," I said soothingly. "Nothing can fly like an obit." She waved her wings and looked pleased. "He is very wise, though. He does most wonderful things. We watch him from the trees." "Interesting," I commented. "And where does he do those wonderful things, La-ling? Does he have a nest?" The other obits of the flock had floated down cautiously and were again perched about on the rocks and branches. "The waakan's nest is very large and is made all of stones. Many waakan came and they stuck the stones together with a strange mud." "And where," I urged, "is this nest?" All the little creatures giggled like children, a whole chorus of high-pitched sounds. They faced down the slope. All were pointing with small forefingers. "You have no eyes," one chuckled. "See, it grows out of the hillside." And it did. I could have kicked myself. What seemed a long ridge abutting the slope was actually artificial. Huge irregular stones had been fitted cunningly together, partly covered over with soil and masked with golden vegetation. The very size of this, the building we had looked for in vain from space, pretty well guaranteed some advanced construction techniques. The ridge was easily a hundred yards long. "Now we're getting somewhere. Let's visit, Pegleg." "Well as long as you can vouch for your friends," Pegleg said. "But these little people had better fly away home." "I imagine they know what they can do. Where does the waakan enter his nest. La-ling?" "Many places," said the little obit. "He pushes away the stones." "Many places," the obits chorused. As we strode down the slope they rose like a flock of butterflies, wavering higher and higher. Laling fluttered above Pegleg's head, but when we were close to the ridge she sailed after the others and disappeared from sight. Pegleg asked sourly, "Wasn't it you who commented on how natural everything is here?" "You expect small differences," I grinned. "Wait till you chat with the waakan." "I can hang on," Pegleg said dryly. "Indefinitely if necessary." A thorough search along the great stone structure revealed several places where the stones were not mortared but we could move none of them. We realized that, like it or not, we would have to adjust ourselves to the waakan's pleasure. He was not yet receiving guests. VI directing her three young associates in the complex of cultures and surveys that a touchdown always brought, she was every serious inch Dr. Linda Kissinger, microbiologist without peer. But out in the field with me she was a happy, glowing young woman -- living right now. And in the several days that followed she was with me a lot. She was -- and is -- the closest thing to a galactic sociologist I've ever known. She's everything's friend. The obits delighted her. She soon had them around her in swarms. She coaxed marats out of pools. And always we were waiting for the waakan. I knew he would appear when he was ready. In retrospect I think he was giving us time to orient ourselves, to adjust to the arrangement of things on his planet. He gave us a week. One morning he showed up in the meadow just beyond the Stardust. Nobody saw him come. Someone simply happened to notice him through a viewport, sitting on his haunches among the yellow flowers, casually grooming his fur -- with his tongue! In a matter of minutes the entire ship was watching. "He's your friend, Dr. Kissinger." Johnny Rasmussen used the intercom, a thing he rarely does. "I suggest you represent us. We wouldn't like to startle him with numbers." I was still in my quarters. I grinned as I punched the reply button. "Will do, Johnny. I think you're being unduly careful of his feelings, though. He knows the score. You're dealing with an intellect that, in its way, is as sharp as anybody's aboard this ship. Start thinking in those terms." "I'll try," Rasmussen said dryly. A few minutes later I activated a personnel port and strolled out across the meadow. The waakan watched me come. Behind me, I knew, a dozen lasers were trained steadily on the big beast. I was pretty sure he knew it, too. "I thought it would be you," he greeted me. "I must appear rather frightening to your race." "A little," I admitted. "Look at their side. You're big, strong -- and obviously a carnivore. Similar forms on our home planet are fierce and dangerous." The big fellow rolled to all fours, shook himself, stood erect. He stretched his great arms wide, threw back his heavy head and yawned -- a long satisfying yawn with a terrifying display of yellow fangs. It was no accident that he happened to be facing the ship. His little black eyes twinkled with real amusement. "Just to give the watchers something to watch," he said. "Be glad," I said, "that the watchers don't panic easily. There's enough energy trained on you to wipe out half this landscape." The waakan sat on his haunches again. "I've never doubted it," he said soberly. "That display w'as a little stupid. I imagine I depended on the fact that you were protection. I'm sure you've prepared them for me." "If not, you have." I grinned as I tapped the small communicator unit on my belt. "This is a sound transfer device. Everyone on the ship hears us perfectly." "A mechanical communicator?" The waakan peered at the small unit with interest. "Clever. I deduce that this is necessary for you species. You don't, then, communicate mentally?" "Not effectively. We may have latent ability, but we've never developed it." I turned and gestured toward the starship. "Dr. Johannes Rasmussen is the director of our activities, the coordinator of what we do. He is watching. Would you care to speak to him?" I could feel the serious graciousness of the waakan. "Dr. Rasmussen," he said politely. "It will be a pleasure to touch minds with you. During this small time we have watched the work of your people -- and we are not displeased. You are superior beings. We will help you learn and will hope to learn from you as well. Is this reasonable?" "Very reasonable. We do thank you. Dr. Kissinger will bring you on board the Stardust , if you will come." The waakan rolled back his lips in that frightening grin. "Later, perhaps. I am more comfortable out here with plants around me and the sun's rays on me. Remember that I, too, have adjustments to make. We have speculated on advanced cultures on other worlds, but the reality requires getting used to. I think you understand this." "Perfectly," Rasmussen assured him. "I'll come out to you." those data-gathering weeks on Gossoon. But the waakan cooperated and, as he had said, we both learned. We did indeed. We learned a lot. We learned, for instance, that the continual use of "we" by the waakan was neither editorial nor, as Mark Twain remarked centuries ago, a use permissible when a man had a tapeworm. The waakan was a unit in a telepathic network that included -- or could include in time of need -- every member of his race. Let me qualify that. His telepathic participation was at his own option. Any individual had a fairly limited practical range and usually communicated directly only with waakan on adjacent territories. But by a sort of pass-it-on technique news could spread with amazing speed. Messages could be sent, too, from specialist to specialist via the minds of intervening waakan whose concerns might be entirely different. This depended, of course, on the availability and good humor of the waakan involved. Even in telepathy one could get a busy signal. Still, this made their isolated living habit more practical. They could be together without being together, if you follow. I made good use of such time as remained. During those pleasant summer days I roamed a study area, a hundred-mile section around the spaceship. Lindy had her own work now, so I was usually alone. I traveled by jumper. I came to know the territories of twenty waakan and to be welcome in twenty rock houses. And the machinery, the equipment, the complicated apparatus in each house -- even to list them would be both confusing and pointless Annals, Vols. #-#-#, A. D. #. The Log of the Stardust. Occasionally Pegleg joined me. Then we used his jeep and rode at ease over the sometimes rough terrain. But he was never comfortable with the big Dominants. His first impression bade fair to be pretty lasting. "Creatures that understand the . movements of the galaxy and yet don't know cookery -- creatures that can quote the substance of Avogadro's Law and yet have no names -- This is a mixed-up world, Roscoe." " 'Only the lower forms have names.' " I quoted our resident waakan. "Actually, the waakan don't need them. Apparently each has his or her own mental signal, his own telepathic identity. They can't be verbalized, so we're handicapped. But they're not." This day Pegleg was expertly wheeling the jeep into a long detour across the prairie, mainly to avoid stampeding a small herd of vada in the middle distance. It was important to each waakan's survival that his food supply not wander. So we tried to be as considerate as we could. "Captain Jules is bringing in the waakan ship," I remarked. "Johnny's all squared away with the fuzzy space boys. They'll set it down in the builder's territory and all interested parties can check it over at leisure." The ship had been in orbit for more than two weeks while Stardust engineers conferred with the waakan who were concerned with space. And they weren't many. Our thinking there had been far too broad, far too comprehensive. "How fourteen bears could build a spaceship, solve basic problems and actually launch it I still don't see," Pegleg grumbled. We had made it around the vada, which stood in a tight clump, heads up, watching us. "They aren't bears," I reminded, "and it wasn't one spaceship. It was three. Two waakan had already sickened in high orbit before our friend in the specimen lockers took his trip. The orbiting ships were brought down safely by their dying pilots." "I know. I've seen them," Pegleg said. "Carbons of the one that gave us our anxious moments. But why did our boy take off for the next planet when his kind couldn't even stay alive in orbit?" "They hypothesized that the orbiting was lethal. Why, I don't know. They were wrong, of course. Apparently he died exactly like the others." "They've got a problem," Pegleg said. "I don't really see why they bother. They don't need space." Later, when I had conversation with our waakan (in my notes he was Waakan Alpha) on the point, his attitude was remarkably similar to Pegleg's. "Your story of our pilot's dying is one we knew before," the waakan said. "Many of us have concluded that waakan cannot live in space. Our instincts have been sound. We should stay in the surroundings and under the conditions that produced us." "I don't agree," I objected. "It's simply a problem. Find the difficulty. Work on it. Solve it. That's the Earthman's way." The waakan grinned his grin but I no longer found it terrifying. "We are waakan," he said, "and I think I am glad of that. Your temperament is not ours. We enjoy living. You enjoy overcoming." "A grain of truth," I admitted. "But you are overlooking some things. We enjoy as much as you. You've watched Lindy. Do you have a happier being on Gossoon?" "She is happy, I grant, but still she is driven. She has taken our space problem to herself." He twitched his ears, rolled his small eyes and grinned. "Did you think that I didn't know?" "It's her concern," I said. "Just as physics and mechanics are yours. It is to her what your wheels and balances and weights are to you. You are new life forms to us. You have new microforms on you. It's her training to be challenged. That's the interest she has." The waakan rose to his full towering height and reflectively rubbed his back against a tree. "I have given her my skin, my hair, my saliva, my excretions and my blood," he said. "I have contributed much to her pleasure." "You'll be repaid," I assured him. "She'll tell you what she learns." "If she feels that it is right that I should know," said the waakan shrewdly. "I expect nothing. And I should not be content if an off-world being discovered my weaknesses through superior technology. We do have pride, you know." "Don't anticipate," I advised. "So far she has found nothing to tell." mild and pleasant summer was at an end. The golden vegetation was turning brown. The breeze that blew across the stretches of grassland where the vada grazed now had a sting to it. I no longer went around stripped to the waist. A light vest was comfortable. I replaced sandals with shoes. And the obits were flocking. I was never out of hearing of their plaintive calls. "They dread the migration," Lindy reported. "It's a risky business even for strong fliers. There are long stretches without good food trees. Many of those little fellows that go south this fall won't be back in the spring." "Pegleg won't miss them," I said. "La-ling has almost brought geology in this neck of the woods to a complete standstill. It's hard even to collect specimens from a ledge when a little human-type butterfly is swooping around your head and almost getting hit by the hammer." "Poor little thing," said Lindy. "She has a real problem now. She knows she isn't human, but she still thinks Pegleg is an obit. She's trying to get him to migrate. She insists he could grow wings if he really tried." We were on one of our last walks, strolling along the stream near the first marat's pool. Obits from farther north were drifting into the trees. Their sweet high voices formed a musical clamor as they made deep inroads on the remaining hanging fruits. They ate anything that ripened, from tiny button-like berries to the plumfruits in the thickets favored by the waakan. It was in autumn that the waakan tasted obit, for the hungry little beings swarmed wherever there was food. I had persuaded our host waakan to forego these delicacies this flocking time. To my surprise, he had been easy to persuade. "Your woman would be unhappy," he had said, "and this seems to be important to you. Also," he added slyly, "she researches our space problem. I wouldn't wish to interfere with that." So we "bird-watched" as we strolled, enjoying the endless variety and color of the tiny graceful people that were not people at all. On this planet the true people were huge and black and furry, with small black eyes and great yellow fangs. Lindy put her hand on my arm. Ahead, on a sandy stretch of stream bank in the sun, Pegleg sat. La-ling perched on his shoulder. She stroked his ear and lovingly nuzzled his hair. The debate was still on. We were in plain sight, but we were not noticed, so we listened. Technically, as Lindy pointed out later, we were not snooping. "You must go, La-ling," Pegleg was saying. "If you wait any longer the flocks before you will eat all the fruit. You yourself told me that late migrants often starve." "If you stay here the cold will get you," La-ling insisted. "An obit cannot live in the snow." "Look at me," Pegleg said patiently. "I am many times larger than you. I have no wings. I am not an obit. I am a man, a creature you never saw before this summer. You've seen many of us since. So why do you insist I am like you?" "You are beautiful," little Laling said. "We could migrate and have a nest together." "She's dreaming the Impossible Dream," Lindy murmured in my ear. "The snow won't harm me," Pegleg said. "I don't have to live on fruits. I can stay here as well as the waakan can." "You do not wish me in your nest," the little obit said petulantly. "You are wiser than even the brutes of waakan and you could make me large -- or you could make yourself small. You simply do not choose." Pegleg looked baffled. The tiny woman-thing sounded so like the full-sized variety that it must have made him homesick. Then he seemed to have an inspiration. "I would be most unsatisfactory. See, I come apart!" He swiftly disengaged the magnetic fastenings of his plastic knee and laid the leg aside. The little obit lifted gently from his shoulder and hovered, her beautiful wings waving slowly. She clapped her tiny hands with delight. "Oh, lovely! Now remove your head!" That broke him up. Lindy and I clasped hands and choked with silent laughter while Pegleg's shoulders shook. "No more," he gasped finally. "If I removed my head I could not watch you -- and who knows what you would do? No, you must go now. Rest and fly early tomorrow. See, I have brought you a gift. You'll never have one sweeter." He took a small red apple from his pouch. The little obit clasped it with both small hands and sniffed it greedily. "You do like me! You wish me to go, so that when I come back in spring we can have a nest together. Although," she added, "I think you will freeze." And with that cheery pronouncement she spread her wings wide and swept higher and higher in an ever-expanding spiral, the precious apple held tightly against her small body. In a moment she was a tiny speck against the evening sky. Pegleg was sober again as he snapped his leg into place. T HE next day the trees were empty. The flocks of obits had moved out at first light, winging steadily southward like swallows on Earth. And the yellow sun's rays had a cold glint. The wind quartered toward the north. "The waakan are shedding fast," I reported. "Have you noticed?" Pegleg had joined Lindy and me as we sat on a jumper platform in the pale sunshine. "They're growing new, thicker coats -- and they'll be snow white. They like this, apparently. They're looking forward to it. Winter is a favorite time of year." "Quoting Alpha, I take it," Pegleg said. "Quoting a number of them. I've been getting around, you know. Grizzly country will become polar bear country. But the vada winter well on cured vegetation -- and the waakan keep busy. And winter has another attraction." "I suppose I must ask," Pegleg said. "Consider it done." "Winter is their Time of Joy -- their mating season. Just for a little time science takes a back seat. Nobody's solitary and Mother Nature takes over." "Time of Joy," Lindy said gently. "I like that. I think that is very nicely put. They are superior creatures, after all." "And when you find out why they die in space they can lake their wisdom to the other planets of their system -- and eventually to the stars." Pegleg's sarcasm is built in. He doesn't mean it as it sounds, but you have to know him to tolerate it. "I know how they die," Lindy said quietly. "It wasn't a very big problem. And I don't think they want to take their wisdom to the stars. They're not explorers or crusaders. They want to go on exactly the way they are, learning only for the sake of knowing. They don't really want to travel anywhere." "So you don't plan to tell them how they die?" She shrugged. rules would not let me. When I was sure I talked to Johnny. He agrees. They must develop their own space initiative, meet their own challenges. Not until they've done so can they compete with other civilizations, other cultures. Now they don't even interact with the dominant species on their own borders." "They adjusted to us," Pegleg said. "We haven't disturbed their life patterns. We came to them. They recognized our technological achievements and admire us for them. But they'll be glad when we're gone." Lindy leaned back comfortably against my shoulder. I put an arm around her waist and she locked her fingers with mine.  'I won't tel! anybody," I said, "and Pegleg is, appropriately, as deaf as a stone. Why do the waakan die in space?" Lindy sighed. "Such a simple thing! They have on their fur a little protist, a bacterium-like organism that lives on grease and sweat. Perfectly harmless and normal. Every skin has a saprobe population. But in space something happens to their variety, something probably related to radiation. It becomes a virulent parasite, changing form and migrating through the skin into nerve tissues and on to the brain, multiplying enormously as it goes. It immobilizes brain cells, making them insensitive, quiescent. The affected creature doesn't suffer. It simply lies down quietly and finally sleeps. Never to awaken -- you see?" "Wouldn't it help to give them at least a clue?" Pegleg asked. He didn't question Lindy's data. He knew she knew. "Interference," I reminded him. "International Space Council rule, as she said. And the most basic one in the mandate by which we operate. We can advise, but not provide information. You know that." Pegleg nodded. "Right. It's up to them." "In a way, this is the nice time of their history," Lindy mused. "The satisfying, predictable log of the seasons. When snow flies they'll be happy in their thick white coats, happy in their Time of Joy. Spring will come. The marats will emerge from hibernation. The obits will come back from the south. There will be new foliage on the trees, new grass for the vada, new blossoms and new fruit. There will be more food and learning and pleasure. Is there much else? What's life about, anyway?" "They need maturing time." I took it up. "They'll progress, slowly. Perhaps by the time they conquer their space sickness -- and develop better fuels and more efficient drives-Hthey'll be more nearly ready to reach out toward the expanding cultures of Earth and, I doubt not, worlds we still don't know." "It'll take millennia," Pegleg said. "So far as I know, therCs no hurry," I said. "They have all the time there is."  to buck the establishment and could find a patch of soil... finally broke down and took us to East Boston Urban Center # after Mom' had been harping on it for the past two weeks. I think he was glad we went after all because he was smiling quietly all during the trip back. Dad used to tell me stories about the trees that still existed when he was a boy. There weren't very many even then, with the Urbanization Program in full swing, but most people had seen at least one tree by the time they started school. It wasn't like nowadays, at any rate. Oh, I've seen the plastic trees; practically every street has a Tew of them. But you can tell the plastic ones are artificial just from looking at pictures in the microdot library. And now, after seeing a real tree, I can say for sure that the artificial ones aren't the same at all. This morning when we got up the house was all excited. Mom dialed a light breakfast of toast and synthetic milk so that we wouldn't waste time eating. And when we finished the three of us took an elevator-bus up to the fourth level, where we caught the air track to Brooklyn. From there we took another elevator-bus down to main level, rode the monorail to Intercity Subway Station #, and caught the second sublevel AA train to Boston. Our expectations were so high that Dad and I didn't mind it when Mom told us again how the tree was discovered. The O'Brien home was one of the few examples of old-style wooden structures that hadn't been demolished in Boston's urban renewal campaign at the turn of the century. The family had been able to avoid this because of its wealth and political influence and the house was passed on through several generations to the present. Old man O'Brien had no heirs, so when he died the family home went up for auction and the Urban Center bought it. When local officials arrived for an appraisal they discovered that the house had a back yard, which is forbidden by zoning restrictions. In the yard was a live tree -- an oke was what Mom called it. When the news of the tree's discovery leaked out quite a few sightseers stopped by to have a look at it and the local government, realizing the money-making potential, began charging admission and advertising the place. By now it had become a favorite spot for school field trips and family excursions such as ours. When we arrived in main Boston we rode the elevator-bus up to ground level and caught a monorail out to East Boston Urban Center #. An air-cush taxi took us the rest of the way to the residence. The home itself was unimpressive. It had none of the marble gloss or steely sheen of modern buildings, but was rather a dull white color, with the paint peeling in places. Dad paid the admission fee and we spent the next fifteen minutes on a dull guided tour of the house. The rooms were roped off to keep people from touching anything, but there were no windows facing the illegal back yard anyway, so it really didn't matter that I couldn't enter the rooms on that side. My mind was on the tree and I thought the inside tour would never end, but soon we were walking through a doorway hidden in one of the bookshelves and into the back yard. The yard was big -- at least ten by twenty feet -- and I was surprised to find real grass growing on the sides of the concrete walkway built for tourists. The grass didn't distract me for long, however, because I just couldn't help noticing the tree! It was located at one end of the yard and there was a mesh fence around it for protection. It was similar in form to the plastic trees I'd seen, but there was much more to it than that. You could see details more intricate than in any man-made plant. And it was alive. Long ago someone had carved their initials in the bark and you could see where the wound had healed. But best of all was the smell. It was a fresh, living odor, alien to the septic world outside with all its metal, plastic and glass. I wanted to touch the bark, but the fence prevented me from doing so. Mom and Dad just breathed deeply and stared up with smiles on their faces. The three of us stood there for a moment and then the tour guide told us to make room for the next group. I didn't want to go -- in fact, I almost felt like crying. On the way back Mom and Dad were silent and I read through one of the brochures the guide had passed out. When I came to the part that said the O'Brien home would be open only for the rest of this year I was sad. They intend to tear down the place to make room for some kind of insurance building and the tree will have to go, too. For the rest of the trip I just sat still, fingering the object in my pocket which I had picked off the grass in the O'Brien's back yard. I think it's called an acorn.fa Is there a career struggle to save our environment? Here is a new book filled with timely, realistic guidance that can suddenly open up new career horizons for groping young people -- a challenging "now" field in which they can find a sense of commitment. by Odom Fanning, Editor-in-Chief of the White House First Annual Report on Environmental Quality Others are developing for the immediate future. Most young people are unaware of these new opportunities and of how they may build a rewarding career in this fight to save our planet from the threats of pollution, the existing and emerging career fields opening up in environmental management. It points out what kinds of personnel are at present, and will be, needed in the various facets of the field, and it discusses the basic information needed by anyone seeking a career in one of these areas. For each career field, the author defines terms, lists major activities, describes job duties, pegs the field on the career ladder, describes education, gives earnings and working conditions, projects employment demand to #, and lists major sources of additional information. If you are undecided about which career you'd really like to make your life's work... or if you possibly already have prerequisite educational credits for one or more of important book you can read at this point in your lifebefore you make a career choice you may regret later on. # East # St., New York. N.Y. # Gentlemen: per copy. I enclose  in full payment (please add # for shipping) . Name -- Address. (please print) City...State...Zip Code. He had been waiting for two He had had it bad. hundred years inside a coffin He was waiting for medical sciwhose outer shell held liquid nitroence to find him a cure, gen. There were frozen clumps of He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk when he took it and had gambled anyway. Why not? He had been dying. frozen bodies. Why not? They too, had been dying. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret, but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it. Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy-p;but empty. The State had use for an empty man. ble, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated back to him of a double-walled coffin and sleep and pain. The pain was gone. He sat up at once. And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young man in a white jumpsuit. Corbett missed -- his arms were shorter than he had expected. He toppled to his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully. His arms. Scrawny, knobby -- and not his. The man in the jumpsuit asked, "Are you all right?" "Yah," said Corbett. His throat was rusty, but that was all right. His new body didn't fit, but it didn't seem to have cancer, either. "What's the date? How long has it been?" A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. "Twenty-one ninety, your dating. You won't have to worry about our dating." That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbett postponed the obvious question: What's happened to me? and asked instead, "Why not?" "You won't be joining our society." "No? What, then?" "Several professions are open to you -- a limited choice. If you don't qualify for any of them we'll try someone else." Corbett sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more limber, definitely thinner. He was acutely aware that his abdomen did not hurt no matter how he moved. He asked, "And what happens to me?" "I've never learned how to answer that question. Call it a matter of metaphysics," said the checker. "Let me detail what's happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself." breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year twentyone ninety. But empty. The electrical patterns in the brain, the worn paths of nervous reflexes, the memories, the personality of the man had all been wiped away. And there was this frozen thing. "Your newstapers called you people corpsicles," said the blond man. "I never understood what the tapes meant." "It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbett had used the word himself before he had become one of them. One of the corpsicles, frozen dead. Frozen within a corpsicle's frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be recorded. The process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but that hardly mattered, because other things must be done too. Personality was not all in the trated in the brain but it ran all through the nerves and the blood. In Corbett's case the clumps of cancer had to be cut away -- then what was left. The operation would have left nothing like a human being. More like bloody mush, Corbett gathered. "What's been done to you is not the kind of thing we can do twice," said the checker. "You get one chance and this is it. If you don't work out we'll terminate and try someone else. The vaults are full of corpsicles." "You mean you'd wipe my personality," Corbett said unsteadily. "But I haven't committed a crime. Don't I have any rights?" The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. "I thought I'd explained. The man you think you are is dead. Corbett's will was probated long ago. His widow -- " "Damn it, I left money to myself! A trust fund!" "No good." Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote, unreachable. A vet smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. "A dead man can't own property -- that was settled in the courts long ago. It wasn't fair to the heirs. It took the money out of circulation." Corbett jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. "But I'm alive now " "Not in law. You can earn your new life; the State will give you a new birth certificate and citizenship if you give the State good reason." Corbett sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. "Let's get started then. What do you need to know about me?" "Your name." "Jerome Corbett." "Call me Pierce." The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbett, perhaps because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they were both noticeably overdue for a bath. "I'm your checker. Do you like people? I'm just asking. We'll lest you in detail later." "I get along with the people around me but I like my privacy." The checker frowned. "That narrows it more than you might think. This isolationism you called privacy was, well, a passing fad. We don't have the room for it -- or the inclination either. We can't send you to a colony world -- " "I might make a good colonist." "You'd make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren't yours. No. You get one choice, Corbett. Rammer." "Rammer?" " 'Fraid so." "That's the first strange word you've used since I woke up. In fact -- hasn't the language changed at all? You don't even have an accent." "Part of the job. I learned your You'll learn your trade the same way if you get that far. You'll be amazed how fast you can learn But you'd better be right about liking your privacy, Corbett. Can you take orders?" "I was in the army." "What does that mean?" "Yes." "Good. Do you like strange places and faraway people -- or vice versa?" "Both." Corbett smiled hopefully. "I've raised buildings all over the world. Can the world use another architect?" "No. Do you feel that the State owes you something?" There could be but one answer to that. "No." "But you had yourself frozen. You must have felt that the future owed you something." "Not at all. It was a good risk. I was dying." "Ah." The checker looked him over thoughtfully. "If you had something to believe in, perhaps dying wouldn't mean so much." Corbett said nothing. sociation test in English. The test made Corbett suspect that a good many corpsicles must date from near his own death. They took a blood sample, then exercised Corbett to exhaustion on a treadmill and took another blood sample. They tested his pain threshhold by direct nerve stimulation? -- excruciatingly unpleasant -- and took another blood sample. They gave him a Chinese puzzle and told him to take it apart. Pierce then informed him that the testing was over. "After all, we already know thestate of your health." "Then why the blood samples?" The checker looked at him for a moment. "You tell me." Something about that look gave Corbett the creepy feeling that he was on trial for his life. The feeling might have been caused only by the checker's rather narrow features, his icy blue gaze and abstracted smile. Still -- Pierce had stayed with him all through the testing, watching him as if Corbett's behavior were a reflection on Pierce's judgment. Corbett thought carefully before he spoke. "You have to know how far I'll go before I quit. You can analyze the blood samples for adrenalin and fatigue poisons to find out just how much I was hurting, just how tired I really was." "That's right," said the checker. Corbett had survived again. He would have given up much earlier on the pain test. But at some point Pierce had mentioned that Corbett was the fourth corpsicle personality to be tested in that empty body. sleep that last time, two hundred years ago. His family and friends had been all around him, acting like mourners. He had chosen the coffin, paid for vault space and made out his Last Will and Testament, but he had not thought of the happening as dying. It had not felt like dying. He had been given a shot. The eternal pain had drifted away in a soft haze. He had gone to sleep. He had done so wondering about the future, wondering what he would wake to. A vault into the unknown. World government? Interplanetary spacecraft? Clean fusion power? Strange clothing, body paints, nudism? Or crowding, poverty, all the fuels used up, power provided by cheap labor? He had thought of those, but it was all right. They would not be able to afford to wake him if they were that poor. The world he dreamed of in those last moments was a rich world, able to support such luxuries as Jerome Corbett. It looked as if he weren't going to see too damn much of it. A guard led Corbett away after the testing. He walked with a meaty hand wrapped around Corbett's thin upper arm. Leg irons would have been no more effective had Corbett thought of escaping. The guard took him up a narrow plastic staircase to the roof. The noon sun blazed in a blue sky that shaded to yellow, then brown at the horizon. Green plants grew in close-packed rows on parts of the roof. Elsewhere many sheets of something glassy were exposed to the sunlight. Corbett caught one glimpse of the world from a bridge between two roofs. It was a cityscape of close-packed buildings, all of the same cold cubistic design. Corbett was impossibly high on a walk that was concrete, to be sure, but that had no guard rails at all. So Corbett stopped breathing, slopped walking. The guard did not speak. He lugged at Corbett's arm, not hard, and watched to see what he would do. Corbett pulled himself together and walked on. T HE room was all bunks -- two walls of bunks with a gap between. The light was cool and artificial, but outside it was nearly noon. Could they be expecting him to sleep? The room was big, a thousand bunks big. Most of the bunks were full. A few occupants watched incuriously as the guard showed Corbett which bunk was his. It was the bottommost in a stack of six. Corbett had to drop to his knees and roll to get into it. The bedclothes were strange, silky and very smooth, even slippery -- the only touch of luxury in that place. But there was no top sheet, nothing to cover him. He lay on his side, looking out at the dormitory from near floor level. Three things were shocking about that place. One was the smell. Apparently perfumes and deodorants had been another passing fad. Pierce had been overdue for a bath. So was Corbett's new self. Here the smell was rich. The second was the double bunks, four of them in a vertical stack, wider than the singles and with thicker mattresses. The doubles were for loving, not sleeping. What shocked Corbett was that they were right out in the open, not hidden by so much as a gauze curtain. The same was true of the toilets. How can they live like this ? Corbett rubbed his nose and jumped -- and cursed at himself for jumping. It was the third time he had done so. His own nose had been big and fleshy and somewhat shapeless. But the nose he now rubbed automatically when trying to think was small and narrow with a straight, sharp edge. He might very well get used to the smell and everything else before he got used to his own nose. Some time after dusk a man came for him. A broad, brawny type wearing a gray jumper and a broad expressionless face, the guard was not one to waste words. He found Corbett's bunk, pulled Corbett out by one arm and led him stumbling away. Corbett was facing Pierce before he was fully awake. In annoyance he asked, "Doesn't anyone else speak English?" "No," said the checker. Pierce and the guard guided Corbett to a comfortable armchair facing a wide curved screen. They put padded earphones on him. They set a plastic bottle of clear fluid on a shelf over his head. Corbett noticed a clear plastic tube tipped with a hypodermic needle. "Breakfast?" Pierce missed the sarcasm. "One meal each day -- after learning period and exercise." He inserted the hypodermic into a vein in Corbett's arm. He covered the wound with a blob of what might have been silly putty. Corbett watched it all without emotion. If he had ever been afraid of needles the months of pain and cancer had worked it out of him. A needle was surcease, freedom from pain for a time. "Learn now," said Pierce. "This knob controls speed. The volume is set for your hearing. You may replay any section once. Don't worry about your arm -- you can't pull the tube loose' "There's something I wanted to ask you, only I couldn't remember the word. What's a rammer?" "Starship pilot." Corbett studied the checker's face. "You're kidding." "No. Learn now." The checker turned on Corbett's screen and went away. II starship. The starships were Bussard ramjets. They caught interstellar hydrogen in immaterial nets of electromagnetic force, guided and compressed and burned the hydrogen for thrust. Potentially there was no limit at all on their speed. They were enormously powerful, enormously complex, enormously expensive. Corbett found it incredible that the State would trust so much value, such devastating power and mass to one man. To a man two centuries dead! Why, Corbett was an architect, not an astronaut. It was news to him that the concept of the Bussard ramjet predated his own death. He had flights on television and that had been the extent of his interest in spaceflight until now. Now his life depended on his "rammer" career. He never doubted it. That was what kept Corbett in front of the screen with the earphones on his head for fourteen hours that first day. He was afraid he might be tested. He didn't understand all he was supposed to learn. But he was not tested either. The second day he began to get interested. By the third day he was fascinated. Things he had never understood -- relativity and magnetic theory and abstract mathematics -- he now grasped intuitively. It was marvelous! And he ceased to wonder why the State had chosen Jerome Corbett. It was always done this way. It made sense, all kinds of sense. The payload of a starship was small and its operating lifetime was more than a man's lifetime. A reasonably safe life-support system for one man occupied an unreasonably high proportion of the payload. The rest must go for biological package probes. As for sending a citizen, a loyal member of the State -- what for? The times would change enormously before a starship could return. The State itself might change beyond recognition. A returning rammer must adjust to a whole new culturewith no way of telling in advance what it might be like. Why not pick a man who had already chosen to adjust to a new culture? A man whose own culture was two centuries dead before the trip started? And a man who already owed the State his life? Corbett stopped wondering about Pierce's dispassionately possessive attitude. He began to think of himself as property being programed for a purpose. And he learned. He skimmed microtaped texts as if they were already familiar. The process was heady. He became convinced that he could rebuild a ramship with his bare hands, given the parts. He had loved figures all his life, but abstract mathematics had been beyond him until now. Field theory, monopole field equations, circuitry design. When to suspect the presence of a gravitational point "scource" -- how to locate it, use it, avoid it. The teaching chair was his life. The rest of his time -- exercise, dinner, sleep -- seemed vague, uninteresting. twenty others in a room too small for the purpose. Like Corbett, the others were lean and stringy, in sharp contrast to the brawny wedge-shaped men who were their guards. They followed the lead of a guard, running in place because there was no room for real running, forming precise rows for scissors jumps, pushups, situps. After fourteen hours in a teaching chair Corbett usually enjoyed the jumping about. He followed orders. And he wondered about the stick in a holster at the guard's waist. It looked like a cop's baton. It might have been just thatexcept for the hole in one end. Corbett never tried to find out. Sometimes he saw Pierce during the exercise periods. Pierce and the men who tended the teaching chairs were of a third type: well fed, in adequate condition, but just on the verge of being overweight. Corbett thought of them as Olde American types. From Pierce he learned something of the other professions open to a revived corpsiclereprogramed criminal. Stoop labor: intensive hand cultivation of crops. Body servants, handicrafts. And easily taught repetitive work. And the hours! The corpsicles were expected to work fourteen hours a day. And the crowding! He was leading the life now. Fourteen hours to study, an hour of heavy exercise, an hour to eat and eight hours of sleeping in a dorm that was two solid walls of people. "Time to work, time to eat, time to sleep! Elbow to elbow every minute! The poor bastards," he said to Pierce. "What kind of a life is that?" "It lets them repay their debt to the Slate as quickly as possible. Be reasonable, Corbett. What would a corpsicle do with his off hours? He has no social life -- he has to learn one by observing citizens. Many forms of corpsicle labor involve proximity to citizens." "So they can look up at their betters while they work? That's no way to learn. It would take -- I get the feeling we're talking about decades of this kind of thing." "Thirty years' labor generally earns a man his birth certificate. That gets him a right-towork -- which then gets him a guaranteed base income he can use to buy education tapes and shots. And the medical benefits are impressive. We live longer than you used to, Corbett." "Meanwhile it's slave labor. Anyway, none of this applies to me -- " "No, of course not. Corbett, you're wrong to call it slave labor. A slave can't quit. You can change jobs any time you like. There's a clear freedom of choice." Corbett shivered. "Any slave can commit suicide." "Suicide, my ass," the checker said distinctly. If he had anything that could be called an accent it lay in the precision of his pronunciation. "Jerome Corbett is dead. I could have given you his intact skeleton for a souvenir." "I don't doubt it." Corbett saw himself tenderly polishing his own white bones. But where could he have kept such a thing? "Well, then. You're a brainwiped criminal, justly brain-wiped, I might add. Your crime has cost you your citizenship, but you still have the right to change professions. You need only ask for another personality. What slave can change jobs at will?" "It would feel like dying." "Nonsense. You go to sleep, that's all. When you wake up you've got a different set of memories." The subject was an unpleasant one. Corbett avoided it from then on. But he could not avoid talking to the checker. Pierce was the only man in the world he could talk to. On the days Pierce failed to show up he felt angry, frustrated. Once he asked about gravitational point scources. "My time didn't know about those." "Yes, it did. Neutron stars. You had a number of pulsars located by nineteen-seventy and the math to describe how a pulsar decays. The thing to watch for is a decayed pulsar directly in your path." "Oh." Pierce regarded him in some amusement. "You really don't know much about your own time, do you?" "Astrophysics wasn't my field. And we didn't have your learning techniques." Which reminded him of something. "Pierce, you said you learned English with Pierce grinned and left. He was utterly, disgustingly healthy and twenty years younger than he had been at death. He found his rammer education continually fascinating. If only they would stop treating him like property... Corbett had been in the army, but that had been twenty years before his' death. He had learned to take orders, but never to like it. What had galled him then had been the basic assumption of his inferiority. But no Army officer in Corbett's experience had believed in Corbett's inferiority as completely as did Pierce and Pierce's guards. The checker never repeated a command, never seemed even to consider that Corbett would refuse. If Corbett refused, once, he knew what would happen. And Pierce knew that he knew. No army could have survived in such a state. The attitude better fitted a death camp. They must think I'm a zombie... Corbett carefully did not pursue the thought. He was a corpse brought back to life -- but not all the way. The life was not pleasant. His last-class citizenship was galling. There was nobody to talk to-Hnobody but Pierce, whom he was learning to hate. He was hungry most of the time -- the single daily meal barely filled his belly and it would not stay full. No wonder he had wakened so lean. More and more he lived in the teaching chair. Vicariously he became a rammer then and the impotence of his life was changed to omnipotence. Starman! Riding the fire that feeds the suns, scooping fuel from interstellar space itself, spreading electromagnetic fields like wings hundreds of miles out... Two weeks after the State had wakened him from the dead, Corbett was given his course. H E relaxed in a chair that was not solution dripped into him. The needle no longer bothered him -- he never noticed it. The teaching screen held a map of his course, in green lines in threespace. Corbett had stopped wondering how the three-dimensional effect was achieved. The scale was shrinking as he watched. Two tiny blobs and a glowing ball surrounded by a faintly glowing corona. This part of his course he already knew. A linear accelerator would launch him from the moon, boost him to Bussard ramjet speeds and hurl him at the sun. Solar gravity would increase his speed while his electromagnetic fields caught and, burned the solar wind itself. Then out, still accelerating, to the stars... In the teaching screen the scale shrank horrendously. The distances between stars were awesome, terrifying. Van Maanan's Star was twelve light-years away. He would begin deceleration a bit past the midpoint. The matching would be tricky. He must slow enough to release the biological package probe -- but not enough to drop him below ram speeds. In addition he must use the mass of the star for a course change. There was no room for error here. Then on to the next target, which was even farther away. Corbett watched -- and he absorbed -- and a part of him seemed to have known everything all along even while another part was gasping at the distances. Ten stars, All yellow dwarfs of the Sol typean average of fifteen lightyears apart--though he would cross one gap of fifty-two lightyears. He would almost touch lightspeed on that one. Oddly enough, the Bussard ramjet effect would improve at such speeds. He could take advantage of the greater hydrogen flux to pull the fields closer to the ship, to intensify them. Ten stars in a closed path, a badly bent and battered ring leading him back to the solar system and Earth. He would benefit from the lime he spent near the speed of light. Three hundred years would pass on Earth, but Corbett would only live through two hundred years of ship's limewhich implied some kind of suspended animation technique. It didn't hit him the first time through -- or the second, but repetition had been built into the teaching program. It didn't hit him until he was on his way to the exercise room. Three hundred years? Three hundred years! Ill I T wasn't night, not really. Outside it must be midafternoon. Indoors, the dorm was always coolly lit, barely brightly enough to read if there had been any books. There were no windows. Corbett should have been asleep. He suffered every minute he spent gazing out into the dorm. Most of the others were asleep, but a couple made noisy love on one of the loving bunks. A few men lay on their backs with their eyes open and two women talked in low voices. Corbett didn't know the language. He had been unable to find anyone who spoke English. He suspected that there were two shifts, that someone slept in his bunk, mornings -- but he could prove nothing. The slippery sheets must be fantastically easy to clean. Just hose them down. Corbett was desperately homesick. The first few days had been the worst. He had stopped noticing the smell. If something reminded him he could sniff the traces of billions of human beings. Otherwise the odor was part of the environment. But the loving bunks bothered him. When they were in use he watched. When he forced himself not to watch he listened. He couldn't help himself. But he had turned down two sign-language invitations from a small brunette with straggly hair and a pretty, elfin face. Make love in public? He couldn't. He could avoid using the loving bunks, but not the exposed toilets. That was embarrassing. The first time he was able to force himself only by staring rigidly at his feet. When he pulled on his jumper and looked up a number of sleepers were watching him in obvious amusement. The reason might have been his self-consciousness or the way he dropped his jumper around his ankles or he may have been out of line. A pecking order determined who might use the toilets before whom. He still hadn't figured out the details. Corbett wanted to go home. The idea was unreasonable. His home was gone and he would have gone with it without the corpsicle crypts. But reason was of no use in this instance -- he wanted to go home. Home to Miriam, who long since must have died of old age. Home to anywhere: Rome, San Francisco, Kansas City, Hawaii, Brasilia -- he had lived in all those places, all different, but all home. Corbett had been a born traveler, "at home" anywhere but he was not at home here and never would be. Now they would take here away from him. Even this world of four rooms and two roofs -- this world of elbow-to elbow mutes and utter slavery, this world of which he knew nothing -- would have vanished when he returned from the stars. Corbett rolled over and buried his face in his arms. If he didn't sleep he would be groggy tomorrow. He might miss something essential. They had never tested his training. Read that. Not yet, not yet... He dozed. He came awake suddenly, already up on one elbow, groping for some elusive thought. Ah. Why haven't  been wondering about the biological package probes? A moment later he did wonder. What are the biological package probes? But the wonder was that he had never wondered. He knew what and where they were: heavy fat cylinders arranged around the waist of the starship's hull. Ten of these, each weighing almost as much as Corbett's own life-support system. He knew their mass distribution. He knew the clamp system that held them to the hull and could operate and repair the clamps under various extremes of damage. He almost knew where the probes went when released; it was just on the tip of his tongue -- which meant he yet seen the instructions. But he did not know what the probes were for. It was like that with the ship, he realized. He knew everything there was to know about a seeder ramship, but nothing at all about the other kinds of ramship or interplanetary travel or ground-toorbit vehicles. He knew that he would be launched by linear accelerator from the moon. He knew the design of the accelerator -- he could see it, three hundred and fifty kilometers of rings standing on end in a line across a level lunar mare. He knew what to do if anything went wrong during launch. And that was all he knew about the moon and lunar installations and lunar conquest, barring what he had watched on television two hundred years ago. What was going on out there? In the two weeks since his arrival (awakening? resuscitation?) he had seen four rooms and two rooftops, glimpsed a fantastic cityscape from a bridge and talked to one man who was not interested in telling him anything. What had happened in two hundren years? These men and women who slept around him. Who were they? Why were they her He didn't even know if they were corpsicles or contemporary. Probably contemporary. Not one of them was self-conscious about the facilities. Corbett had raised his buildings in all sorts of strange places, but he had never jumped blind. He had always brushed up on the language and studied the customs before he went. Here he had no handie, nowhere to start. He was lost. If only he had someone he could really talk to! He was learning in enormous gulps, taking in volumes of knowledge so broad that he hadn't realized how rigidly bounded they were. The State was teaching him only what he needed to know or might need to know some time. Every bit of information was aimed straight at his profession. Rammer. He could see the reasoning. He would be gone for several centuries. Why should the State teach him anything at all about today's technology, customs, geography? There would be trouble enough when he came back if he -- Come to that, who had taught him to call the government the State? He knew nothing of its power and extent. How had he come to think of the State as all-powerful? With data came attitudes below the conscious level, where he couldn't get at them. W'hat were they doing to him? He had lost his world. He would lose this one. According to Pierce, he had lost himself four times already. A condemned criminal had had his personality wiped four times. Now Corbett's beliefs and motivations were being lost bit by State made him over into a rammer. Was there nothing that was his? H E failed to see Pierce at exercise period. It was just as well. He was somewhat groggy. As usual, he ate dinner like a starving man. He returned to the dorm, rolled into his bunk and was instantly asleep. He looked up during study period the next day and found Pierce watching him. He blinked, fighting free of a mass of data on the attitude jet system that bled plasma from the inboard fusion plant that was also the emergency electrical power source -- and asked, "Pierce, what's a biological package probe?" "I would have thought they would teach you that. You know what to do with the probes, don't you?" "The teaching widget gave me the procedure two days ago. Slow up for certain systems, kill the fields, turn a probe loose and speed up again." "You don't have to aim them?" "No, I guess they aim themselves. But I have to get them down to a certain relative velocity to get them into the system." "Amazing. They must do all the rest of it themselves." Pierce shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it. Well, Corbett, the probes steer for a terrestrial world with a reducing atmosphere. They outnumber oxygennitrogen worlds about three to one in this arm of the galaxy and probably everywhere else, too -- as you may know, if your age got that far." "But what do the probes do?" "They're biological packages. Bacteria. The idea is to turn a reducing atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere, just the way certain bacteria did it for Earth, something like fifteen-times-tento-the-eighth years ago." The checker smiled -- barely. His small narrow mouth wasn't built to express any great emotion. "You're part of a big project, Corbett." "Good Lord. How long does it take?" "We think about fifty thousand years. Obviously we've never had a chance to measure it." "But, good Lord! Do you really expect the State to last that long? Does even the State expect to last that long?" "That's not your affair, Corbett. Still -- " Pierce considered -- "I don't suppose I do. Or the State does. But humanity will last. One day there will be men on those worlds. It's a Cause, Corbett. The immortality of the species. A thing bigger than one man's life. And you're part of it." He looked at Corbett expectantly. Corbett was deep in thought. He wa running a finger tip back and forth along the straight line of his nose. Presently he asked, "What's it like out there?" "The stars? You're -- " "No, no, no. The city. I catch just a glimpse of it twice a day: cubistic buildings with elaborate carvings at the street level -- " "What the bleep is this, Corbett? You don't need to know anything about Selerdor. By the time you come home the whole city will be changed." "I know, I know. That's why I hate to leave without seeing something of this world. I could be going out to die -- " Corbett stopped. He had seen that considering look before, but he had never seen Pierce actually angry. The checker's voice was flat, his mouth pinched tight. "You think of yourself as some kind of tourist." "So would you if you found yourself two hundred years in the future. If you didn't have that much curiosity you wouldn't be human." "Granted that I'd want to look around. I certainly wouldn't demand it as a right. Corbett, what were you thinking when you foisted yourself off on the future? Did you think the future owed you a debt? It's the other way around -- and time you realized it!" Corbett was silent. "I'll tell you something. You're a rammer because you're a born tourist. We tested you for that. You like the unfamiliar -- it doesn't send you scuttling back to something safe and known. That's rare." The checker's eyes said: And that's why I've decided not to wipe your personality yet. His mouth said, "Was there anything else?" Corbett pushed his luck. "I'd like a chance to practice with a computer like the ship's computer-autopilot." "We don't have one, but you'll get your chance in two days. You're leaving then." IV structions for entering the solar system. He was to try anything and everything to make contact, up to and including flashing his attitude jets in binary code. The teaching widget was fanatical on the subject. He found that he would not be utterly dependent on rescue ships. He could slow the ramship by braking directly into the solar wind until the proton flux was too slow to help him. He could then proceed on attitude jets, using whatever hydrogen was left in the emergency tank. A nearly full tank would actually get him to the moon and land him there. The State was through with him when he dropped his last probe. It was good of the State to provide for his return, Corbett thought -- and then he shook himself. The State was not altruistic. It wanted the ship back. Now, more than ever, Corbett wanted a chance at the computerautopilot. talk to the checker. "A three-hundred-year round trip -- maybe two hundred, ship's time," said Corbett. "I get some advantage from relativity. But, Pierce, you don't really expect me to live two hundred years, do you? With nobody to talk to?" "The cold sleep treatment -- " "Even so." Pierce frowned. "You haven't studied medicine. I'm told that cold sleep has a rejuvenating effect over long periods. You'll spend perhaps twenty years awake and the rest in cold sleep. The medical facilities are automatic; I'm sure you've been instructed how to use them. They are adequate. Do you think we'd risk your dying out there between the stars, where it would be impossible to replace you?" "No." "Was there anything else you wanted to see me about?" "Yes." He had decided not to raise the subject -- now he changed his mind. "I'd like to take a woman with me. The life-support system would hold two of us easily enough. I worked it out. We'd need another cold sleep chamber, of course." For two weeks this had been the only man Corbett could talk to. At first he had found Pierce unfathomable, unreadable, almost inhuman. Since then he had learned to read the checker's face to some extent. Now he watched Pierce decide whether to terminate Jerome Corbett and start over. It was a close thing. But the State had spent considerable time and effort on Jerome Corbett. It was worth a try... And so Pierce said, "That would take up some space. You would have to share the rest between you. I do not think you would survive, Corbett." "But -- " "Look here, Corbett. We know you don't need a woman. If you did you would have taken one by now and we would have wiped you and started over. You've lived in the dormitory for two weeks and you have not used the loving bunks once." "Damn it. Pierce, do you expect me to make love in public? I can't." "Exactly." "But -- " "Corbett, you learned to use the toilet, didn't you? Because you had to. You know what to do with a woman but you are one of those men fortunate enough not to need one. Otherwise you could not be a rammer." If Corbett had hit the checker then he would have done it knowing that it meant his death. And knowing that, he would have killed Pierce for forcing him to it. Something like ten seconds elapsed, during which he might have done it. Pierce watched him in frank curiosity. When he saw Corbett relax he said, "You leave tomorrow, Corbett. Your training is finished. Goodbye." And Corbett walked out.  He knew it now. Could he cross a narrow bridge with no handrails? Then he was not pathologically afraid of falling. Could he spend two hundred years alone in the cabin of a starship? Then the silent people around him, five above his head, thousands to either side, must make him markedly uncomfortable. Could he live two hundred years without a woman? Surely he must be impotent. He returned to the dorm after dinner. They had replaced the bridge with a slab of grass... Corbett snarled and crossed ahead of the guard -- the guard had to hurry to keep up. He stood between two walls of occupied bunks, looking about him. Then he did a stupid thing. He had already refrained from decided to live. What he did, then, was stupid. He knew it. He looked about him until he found the slender darkhaired girl with the elfin face watching him curiously from near the ceiling. He climbed the rungs between bunks until his face was level with her bunk. He remembered that the gesture he needed was a quick, formalized one; he didn't know it. In English he asked, "Come with me?" She nodded brightly and followed him down the ladder. By then it seemed to Corbett that the dorm was alive with barely audible voices. The odd one, the rammer trainee. Certainly a number of the wakeful had turned to lie on their sides to watch. He felt their eyes on the back of his neck as he zipped open his gray jumpsuit and stepped out of it. The dormitory had been a series of tests. At least two of those eyes must belong to someone who would report to Pierce or to Pierce's bosses. But to Corbett they were just like the others, all the eyes curiously watching to see how the speechless one would make out. And sure enough, he was impotent. It was the eyes-and he was naked. The girl was first concerned, then pitying. She stroked his cheek in apology or sympathy and then she went away and found someone else. Corbett lay listening to them, gazing at the bunk above him. He waited for eight hours. Finally a guard came to take him away. By then he didn't care what they did with him. the guard's floating jeep pulled up beneath an enormous .# long cartridge standing on end. Then he began to wonder. It was too small to be a rocket ship. But it was one. They strapped him into a contour couch, one of three in a cabin with one window. There were the guard type and Corbett and a man who might have been Pierce's second cousin once removed. He had the window. He also had the controls. Corbett's heartbeat quickened. He wondered how it would be. It was as if he had suddenly become very heavy. He heard no noise except right at the beginning -- a sound like landing gear being raised on an airplane. Not a rocket, Corbett thought -- and he remembered the tricks a Bussard ramjet could play with magnetic fields. He was heavy and he hadn't slept a wink last night. He went to sleep. When he awoke he was in free fall. Nobody had tried to tell him anything about free fall. The guard and the pilot watched him curiously to see what he would do. "Screw you," said Corbett. It was another test. He got the straps open and pushed himself over to the window. The pilot laughed, caught him and held him while he closed a protective cover over the instruments. Then he let go and Corbett drifted before the window. His belly was revolving eccentrically. His inner ear was going crazy. His testicles were tight up against his groin and that didn't feel good either. He felt as if the elevator cable had snapped. Corbett snarled within his mind and tried to concentrate on the window. But the Earth was not visible. Neither was the moon. Just a lot of stars, bright enough -- quite than they had been above a small boat anchored off Catalina Island one night long ago. He watched them for some time. Trying to keep his mind off that falling elevator. He wasn't about to get himself disqualified now. Corbett copied the others, picking chunks of meat and potatoes out of a plastic bag of stew, pulling them through a membrane that sealed itself behind his pick. "Of all the things I'm going to miss," he told the broad-faced guard, "I'm going to enjoy missing you most. You and your goddam staring eyes." The guard smiled placidly and waited to see if Corbett would get sick. They landed a day after takeoff on a broad plain where the Earth sal nestled in a row of sharp lunar peaks. One day instead of four -- the State had expended extra power to get him here. But an Earth-moon flight must be a small thing these days. The plain was black with blast pits. It must have been a landing Held for decades. Enormous transparent bubbles with trees and buildings inside them clustered near the runway end of the linear accelerator, and spacecraft of various types were scattered about the plain. The biggest was Corbett's ramship: a silver skyscraper lying on its side. The probes were in place, giving the ship a thickwaisted appearance. To Corbett's trained eye it looked ready for takeoff. Corbett donned his suit first, while the pilot and guard watched to see if he would make a mistake. It was the first time he had seen such a suit off the teaching screen. He took it slowly. There was an electric cart. Apparently Corbett was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the ramship. It was a long way off. It had become unnervingly large when the guard stopped underneath. The guard said, "Now you inspect your ship." "You can talk?" "Yes. Yesterday, a quickie course." "Oh." "Three things wrong with your ship. You find all three. You tell me, I tell him." "Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?" "Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you." Maybe the last. Corbett was furious. He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head. He knew this ship. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the ship itself. Corbett's impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the -- the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn't wait. "I'll slurry this now," he told the guard. "Get a tanker over here to top it off." He bled gas slowly through the gauge, lowering the fuel's vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the gauge itself. When he finished the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure. He finished the external inspection without finding anything more. It figured; the banks of dials held vastly more information than a man's eyes could read through opaque titanalloy skin. The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbett shut the outer door, used the others as green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet. Vacuum? He stopped. The ship's gauges said air. The suit's said vacuum. Which was right? Come to think of it, he hadn't heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet? Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in vacuum. Well, how to test? Hah! Corbett found the head, turned on a water spigot. The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil. Corbett doffed his helmet and continued his inspection. There was no way to test the electromagnetic motors without causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the telltales as best he could, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it. Did a flaw in his suit constitute a flaw in the ship? He decided to finish the inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his ship, his life. The cold sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbett shuddered at the sight of it -- it reminded him of two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbett were really dead -- and then he shook off the wonder and went to work. No flaw there. The computer was acting vaguely funny. He had a hell of a time tracing the problem. There was a minute break in one superconducting circuit, so small that some current was leaking through anyway, by inductance. Bastards. He donned his suit and went out to report. The guard heard him out, consulted with the other man, then told Corbett, "You did good. Now finish with the topping off procedure. We fix the other things." "There's something wrong with my suit too." "New suit aboard now." "I want some time with the computer," said Corbett. "I want to be sure it's all right now." "W'e fix it good. When you top off fuel you leave." That suddenly, Corbett felt a vast sinking sensation. The whole moon was dropping away under him. They launched him hard. Corbett saw red before his eyes, felt his cheeks dragged far back toward his ears. The ship would be all right -- it was built to stand electromagnetic eddy currents from any direction. He survived. He fumbled out of his couch in time to watch the moonscape flying under him, receding, a magnificent view. There were days of free fall. He was not yet moving at ram speeds. But the State had aimed him inside the orbit of Mercury, straight into the thickening solar wind. Protons. Thick fuel for the ram fields and a boost from the sun's gravity. Meanwhile he had several days. He went to work with the computer. At one point it occurred to him that the State might monitor his computer work. He shrugged it off. Probably it was too late for the State to stop him now. In any case, he had said too much already. He finished his work at the computer and got answers that satisfied him. At higher speeds the ram fields were self-reinforcing -- they would support themselves and the ship. He could find no upper limit to the velocity of a ramship. With all the time in the world, then, he sat down at the control console and began to play with the ram fields. They emerged like invisible wings and he felt the buffeting of badly controlled bursts of fusing hydrogen. He kept the fields close to the ship, fearful of losing the balance here, where the streaming of protons was so uneven. He could feel how he was doing -- he could fly this ship by the seat of his him. He felt like a giant. This enormous, phallic, germinal flying thing of metal and fire! Carrying the seeds of life for worlds that had never known life, he roared around the sun and out. The thrust dropped a bit then, because he and the solar wind were moving in the same direction. But he was catching it in his nets like wind in a sail, guiding it and burning it and throwing it behind him. The ship moved faster every second. This feeling of power, enormous masculine power it had this point he didn't care. Part was him, Jerome Corbett. Around the orbit of Mars, when he was sure that a glimpse of sunlight would not blind him, he opened all the ports. The sky blazed around him. There were no planets nearby and all he saw of pinpoints, mostly white, some showing traces of color. But there was more to see. Fusing hydrogen made a ghostly ring of light around his ship. It would grow stronger. So far his thrust was low, somewhat more than enough to balance the thin pull of the sun. He started his turn around the orbit of Jupiter by adjusting the fields to channel the proton flow to the side. That helped this thrust, but it must have puzzled Pierce and the faceless State. They would assume he was playing with the fields, testing his equipment. Maybe. His curve was gradual -- it would take them a while to notice. This was not according to plan. Originally he had intended to go as far as Van Maanan's Star, then change course. That would have given him #x#  # years' head start, in case he was wrong, in case the State could do something to stop him even now. Fifteen years for the light to show them his change in course; fifteen more before retaliation could reach him. It was wise; but he couldn't do it. Pierce might die in thirty years. Pierce might never know he had failed and that thought was intolerable. His thrust dropped to almost nothing in the outer reaches of the system. Protons were thin out here. But there were enough to Starting in the next issue of IF -- Colin Kapp's new novel... a missile fired across the stars to kill a man -- eons before he was born... push his velocity steadily higher and that was what counted. The faster he went, the greater the proton flux. He was on his way. the voice of Pierce the checker came to him, saying, "This is Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State. Answer, Corbett. Do you have a malfunction? Can we help? We cannot send rescue but we can advise. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State -- " Corbett smiled tightly. Peerssa? The checker's name had changed pronunciation in two hundred years. Pierce had slipped sons forgotten. He must be upset. Corbett spent twenty minutes finding the moon base with his signal laser. The beam was too narrow to permit sloppy handling. When he had it adjusted he said, "This is Corbett for himself, Corbett for himself. I'm fine. How are you?" He spent more time at the computer. One thing had been bothering him: the return. He planned to be away longer than the State would have expected. Suppose there was nobody on the moon when he returned? It would be a problem, he found. If he could reach the moon on his remaining fuel (no emergencies, remember), he could reach the Earth's atmoshere. The ship was durable; it would stand a meteoric re-entry. But his attitude jets would not land him, properly speaking. Unless he could cut away part of the ship. The ram field generators would no longer be needed... Well, he would work it out somehow. Plenty of time. Plenty of time. The answer took nine hours. "Peerssa for the State. Corbett, we don't understand. You are way off course. Your first target was to be Van Maanan's Star. Instead you seem to be curving around toward Sagittarius. There is no known Earthlike planet in that direction. What the bleep do you think you're doing? Repeating. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa Corbett tried to switch it off. The teaching chair hadn't told him about an off switch. He managed to disconnect a wire. Somewhat later, he located the lunar base with his signal laser and began transmission. "This is Corbett for himself, Corbett for himself. I'm getting sick and tired of having to find you every damn time I want to say something. So I'll give you this all at once. "I'm not going to any of the stars on your list. "It's occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go. If I stop every fifteen light-years to launch a probe, the way you want me to, I could spend two hundred years at it and never get anywhere. Whereas if I just aim the ship in one direction and keep going, I can build up a ferocious Tau factor. "It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years, ship's time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration. And, Pierce, I just can't resist the idea. You were the one who called me a born tourist, remember? Well, the stars in the galactic hub aren't like the stars in the arms. And they're packed a quarter to a half light-year apart, according to your own theories. It must be passing strange in there. I can't resist it. "So I'll go exploring on my own. Maybe I'll find some of your reducing atmosphere planets and drop the probes there. Maybe I won't. I'll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away. Or you'll have colonies on the seeded planets and some of them may have broken loose from you. I'll join one of them. Or " Corbett thought it through, rubbing the straight, sharp line of his nose. "I'll have to check it out on the computer," he said. "But if I don't like any of your worlds when I get back, there are always the Clouds of Magellan. I'll bet they aren't more than twenty-five years away, ship's time."  James White's new novel... men and women forced to survive in the realm of purest physics... I'LL BE I'LL BE T HE on-duty police force of was at his console. Ghost streets flickered on the monitors from the mobile units, rinsing him in light, but he was alone, seeing, unseen. There was no sound except a muted, air-conditioned sigh. Before Braun were twelve small screens, a large screen, a pair of waldo inputs and a GO-NO GO override. "Query," said the computer. "Unit Five." The Unit # pickup expanded on the large screen. "Group over three, classifiable as unlawful assembly under local ordinance. Decision?" "Move pickup in," said Braun and three middle-aged men came on the screen, squinting impassively into the spot over the pickup lens. "Two Caucasoid, one Negroid," said the computer. "Decision?" They looked all right and wore business suits. "Standard statement of apology. Continue Unit Five on program." The three men vanished and Braun looked back up to the row of monitors. Still three hours and twenty-eight minutes of his four-hour shift to go. It was hard to remember what a mobile unit looked like to civilians -- the shifting lights and curves of the dark-blue carapace, the sensor-manipulator head on its extensible neck, the flattened weapons turret. People called them "blue beetles" or sometimes "bluebottles" and wrote letters to the editor about bringing back the cop on the beat. Braun had scarcely seen the exterior of the mobile unit since training. Except in moments of leisure or disorientation, no man really looks at his own hand and most of the time he saw a mobile unit only when one showed up on another's pickup. The relationship between man, computer and mobile unit could be confusing -- the officer who had had to be hospitalized because he thought he had projected his soul into a mobile unit was still departmental legend. Braun had never felt any such danger, probably because the computer's voice was not his own. He knew that he was shut inside the computer like a conscience in the brain and that the mobile units were far away, moving according to the computer's commands -- except in situations out of the ordinary, when he would earn his pay. "Query. Anomaly. Unit Twelve." A young woman in the last months of pregnancy appeared on the large screen. She was blond and drained of color in the glare. "Woman alone on the streets." "Switch me in." "Affirmative." "Ma'm?" She stared at the voice. "Yes?" "Anything wrong?" "No," she said. Her voice was small and cool. "I just had to get some cigarettes." "May I have your citizen number and address?" "My name -- " she pronounced the words with care -- "is Mary Cecile O'Hara; my citizen number is -- " she gave it and also her address. Before she had finished, a display in red flashed in the corner of the screen: there was a map pinpointing her as only two hundred feet from Block #I Hoosier Towers, the address she had "Have you moved recently?" "Oh, yes. We just moved in yesterday." "Would you like a mobile unit to escort you back to your door?" "That would be nice," said Mary Cecile O'Hara. "I must sign off," said Braun. "The mobile unit will put me in contact if necessary -- " and another pickup was on the screen. "Unit Eight. Under sniper fire. Armor-piercing. No damage." "Source?" "Roof Longhouse Forty-fiveRed, J.T. McCutcheon Development. IR scanner localization confirmed by ballistic analysis." screen. "Incoming. No damage," said the voice. "Same localization. Reply?" "Affirmative." "Stoner or grenade?" "Grenade." "Hypnotic or concussion?" "Hypnotic. Bracket of three. Call in Hovering Squad. Alert fixed scanners." "Launched. Third shot incoming. No damage." could the snipers? Borosilicates and pure iron filaments, electronic reflexes, sensors that from a hundred yards away could take the temperature of a moth or tell if a lock's tumblers moved -- these were still beyond ordinary expectation. All spinoff from the defunct space program and Southeast Asia. Braun remembered a man who had tried to claw open the maintenance bay of a unit barehanded. "Estimate?" "No further fire. Situation under control. Hovering Squad dispatched and homing." "Return Unit Eight to program at discretion." In the month after the introduction of police hypnotics, friends or accomplices had attempted to rescue unconscious suspects. But then the knowledge that the sleep of the gassed could slide into fatal coma without the antidote became widespread. Now the victims were left to the comparative mercy of the police interns hovering above the roof-tops. "Query. Unit Three. Youth stopped. Over eighteen and not subject to curfew, but under twenty-one. Marijuana stop and frisk?" "Affirmative. Standard apology if indicated." The night ground on. In a free moment Braun punched for a tube of coffee, though he knew he'd pay for it in sleep later, and glanced around the cubicle. It was surprising how impersonal it still was. The only thing of his was the brass paperweight holding down the printouts, with the inscription from President Truman: one of the day men had taped up a yellowing comic strip laminated in plastic in which a creature named B.O. Plenty made obserStephen Tall is not really Stephen Tall at all. He is, in fact, Professor of Biology at an East Coast college, and he keeps his real identity a closely guarded secret. Occasionally our professor brings science fiction into Ihe classroom as illustrative reading material. And his students have not as yet guessed that their teacher is also a highly regarded yarn spinner in s-f circles. Tall tales have been appearing in the mag "The Lights on Precipice Peak" -- later adapted for the radio program X-I -- a series whose scripts came from the pages of ing assignments, has not left Tall with much time to write over the last twenty years. But now that he has an agent who is always badgering him to keep up with the growing s-f market, his fiction output has been increasing. At present Tall is at work on his first novel. He reports that it will be one of his Stardust series -- the series to which his story in this issue belongs. Incidentally, Dr. Kissinger and his navigator Moe Cheng have been cruising the galaxies together for years. Was this, perhaps, prognostication? Tall denies it. He writes us that he "couldn't run the Stardust without Roscoe Kissinger. He's my narrator in four stories and in the novel now two-thirds written. Dr. Henry K. is a Johnny-come-lately, and no relation to Roscoe at all. Just as Chou En-Lai has nothing in common with Moe Cheng except a thick upper eyelid. Without Cheng to navigate, Cap'n Jules Griffin could not implement Ullraspan. I hope nobody named Rasmussen becomes conspicuous in world doings. Then we might indeed have to close up shop." Tail's specialties include field sciences and ecology -- and he is known both as an ornithologist and an entomologist. He has recently returned from a research jaunt to the Rockies where he studied the ecosystems above timberiine. "Now that 'ecology' has become a word everybody knows, readers are beginning to look for it in their science fiction," says Tall. And we look forward to more s-f from our ecology-minded professor. We also look forward to more ecology from our s-f-minded professor. In and out of his stories. What the world needs now, say we, is not only love -- but ecological research and awareness. And the troops are led by such as Stephen Tall. vations on the Supreme Court; and Smith had actually hung his certificate on the bulkhead as if they made him different. And there was no mirror. When Smith had put one up they made him take it downthe designers said mirrors were "distracting." "Query. Unit Six. Verse propaganda found in Roger D. Branigin Mall." "Subject?" "Law and law enforcement." "Pickup." A flickering sheet appeared, too dim to read. "Focus." The suction fingers on the pickup head spread it flat, the xerographed letters jumped out at him. Superimposed upon a crude cartoon of a turn-of-the-century policeman was a poem curling down the page like a river or a snake or the hairless tail of some rodent: Fury said to a mouse. That he met in the house, it began and he read down its twisting, diminishing length to the end. "Quite clever and indirect," he said. "What's the author's name? I can't quite see it." "Lewis Carroll." "Any listing?" "No listing." "Not even a pedestrian ticket?" "No listing." "Credit transactions, tax records, social security?" "No listing." "Query on-line data banks nationally." "Record: Lewis Carroll a pseudonym." "Author's real name?" "Charles L. Dodgson." "Occupation?" "Mathematician." "Where employed?" "No data." "Doesn't he eat?" "No. Charles L. Dodgson died eighteen-ninety-eight." Even though no one was watching, not even the machine, Braun's face burned as if the skin had been peeled away. He read down to the end again: 'll be judge, I'll be jury, said cunning old Fury: I'll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.  Every paradise has a Messiah, every human frontier -- a man! I where than Terra Nova and no pageant more splendid than the Festival at Perigord. The procession will be fine this year -- I think I should like to see it. There will be banners and bugles, the proud young men in jackets of scarlet and gold and purple, girls dancing in diaphanous robes with flowers in their hair. And trailing along behind will come the pilgrims, a drab lot as a rule, draggled about the hems, but very solemn and earnest. They will wind through the streets of the town with a joyful noise of bells and drums and tambourines to the top of the windy hill that overlooks the harbor -- and they will come down at last to Thomas Howard Square, where the many-faceted spire of the Thomas Howard Monument catches the sunlight and shatters it into countless glittering fragments. There will be speeches then, and paeans and hosannas. And the faces of the celebrants will -- for a while -- be sober, as they worship at the shrine of the Martyr Saint of Perigord. The incense at the altar will mingle with the heavy fragrance of flowering trees and with the faint sea-haze blown up from the harbor. The air of Terra Nova goes to the head like strong wine -- though there will be plenty of that too for those who need it. Through the long afternoon there will be singing and dancing and the music of tabor and trumpet and psaltery will float on the warm air. At night, in the great mirrored hall of the Temple of the True Followers, the lamps will burn until dawn. I have heard that people come to Perigord from three galaxies in search of sensual delight and spiritual exaltation. My memories of earlier years give me reason to doubt it. And the Festival this year will outshine all previous ones, for this is the fiftieth anniversary of the day Thomas Howard, founder of the Faith, Father of all True Followers, went forth and sacrificed himself to save the human race. I'm an old woman now and it's nearly fifty years since I left Perigord. I don't suppose I'll ever go back -- least of all on Festival Day. I think that I might climb up on the platform with the speakers, wave my arms for silence and scream into the faces of the crowd, Lies, lies! All this is lies ! And the faces would gaze at me with malice or pity and incomprehension and I would be shut away, without comment, in a home for the demented old. But I should like, all the same, to exorcise this demon that has lived with me for half a century and so I am going to add to the record my story of Thomas Howard -- not Howard the Martyr Saint; there are already too many books on that subject -- but of a man named Thomas Howard whom I knew a long time ago. dent and still in that state of pleasant insanity that sees the whole universe as a ripe plum. It was a wonderful age in which to be young. Star drive was less than half a century old. Earth was still drunk with dreams of empire. For me and for the human race all things were possible. I remember that I was taking Comparative Extra-Terrestrial Religion or Martian Epic Poetry or some other such frivolous liberal arts course. Thomas Howard was in my class. He sal in the seat next to mine -- otherwise I might never have noticed him. He was not in the least goodlooking. He had a large square head surmounted by a bristly crop of sand-colored hair. His skin was doughy and pale, as though he ate badly and never went outdoors. But he turned once and stared at me and I saw his eyes. They were deep-set, a cold silver-gray, the color of a starship's hull and ringed with shadow. Unaccountably, they frightened me. He was older by five or six years than the usual sophomore. I gathered that he was something of a professional student. I saw him often at refreshments between classes and once or twice he bought me something. He seemed interested in me in an odd sort of way, but he made me uncomfortable. Under the gaze of those strange pale eyes I felt far too much like a laboratory specimen impaled on a pin. There was no warmth in his face, only a sort of mocking amusement, a cynical appreciation of human absurdity. What went on in the mind behind that facade was impossible to guess. I thought of him as solitary, remote, detached from ordinary human relationships -- which I suppose is why it was a shock for me to meet Jocelyn. She was sitting with him one day in the servomat -- a big voluptuous, rather stupid-looking blond girl. I had come in with a classmate named Bill Ferguson, and Thomas Howard beckoned us over. He motioned vaguely across the table with his spoon. "Jocelyn," he said. If she had a last name he didn't bother to mention it. "We've met," Bill said. I glanced at her with curiosity. She had beautiful nordic features and large eyes that gazed on Howard with devotion. I don't remember her saying anything and after this cursory introduction Howard ignored her. When they left I said to Bill, "Who's Jocelyn?" Bill looked embarrassed. "When I knew her in her pre-Howard days she was nice -- a well-broughtup small-town girl. She used to belong to the Ecumenical Fellowship, sing in the choir -- the whole bit. But our friend Howard seems to have taken her over body and soul." I raised my eyebrows. "If you're going to ask is she living with him -- the answer is yes." He grunted. "Whatever that guy has, he should bottle it." What Howard had was not, I discovered, lightly to be dismissed. I belonged to a lot of campus clubs in those days and one of my favorite spots for idling away a lunch hour was the Galactic Afone of those quasi-political campus discussion groups with a membership that covered the ideological spectrumeverything from fuzzy neo-socialists to Galactic Federalists to colonial types weighed down by the Earthman's Burden. I think most of us were there because the seats were upholstered and there was a refreshment bar next door. I wandered in one day and spotted Thomas Howard sitting alone at the back of the room, aloof as always and faintly amused. He had never mentioned his politics to me. I wondered where he would fit in. The meeting rapidly bogged down in one of our interminably pointless arguments -- this time I think it was a question of buying or not buying green baize to recover the conference table. A sense of futility settled like a miasma over the room. The chairman had begun to stare fixedly at the clock. It occurred to me, sleepily, that most of our meetings were like this. Then Thomas Howard rose to his feet. "Fools," he said and the word brought me with a jolt out of a halfdoze. Everyone in the room turned around to stare at him. "I have listened long enough," he said, "to this puerile squabbling. Earth is rotten with corruption and the disease is spreading -- we are contaminating the stars. And you -- the new generation. While humanity cries out for a strong fresh wind to blow away the accumulated filth of ages, to sweep the galaxy clean -- what do you do?" The words fairly dripped with ridicule and contempt. "You sit in this stuffy little room and wrangle over what? The color of a tablecloth!" At first I thought. This is a joke, an elaborate put-on... But Howard was scarcely the type for undergraduate humor, which left only one other possible conjecture-the man was a lunatic. At any rate, he had our full attention. The chairman had gone quite rigid with astonishment or indignation or both. Thomas Howard warmed to his subject. He had a remarkable voice, rich, deep-timbered, powerful -- an actor's voice or an orator's. It was -- or so I thought at the timehis greatest asset. He had learned to use it as one plays a fine instrument. One moment it was comanding, the next insinuating. Now it was gentle and soothing, now a thunderous roar. "You call yourselves the Galactic Affairs Society. Isn't it time you looked at the real questions that face the human race? Some of you are expansionists, some federalists. But the true choice, the one you have chosen to ignore, is not whether to stretch out our greedy hands to foul more systems or whether to sit here and enjoy our prosperity like so many hogs before a full trough. No. We must decide -- and decide quickly -- between decadence and spiritual purity, between the stench of moral decay and the clean wind of ascetism. We must cleanse and purify our society of greed and gluttony and corruption. Then, and only then, will we be fit to expand to other systems and be welcome wherever we go." The voice and the eyes -- those icy, compelling gray eyes -- somehow broke down the barriers of the mind, shattering skepticism, persuading, dominating, demanding. I can't explain it. I have never been able to explain it even to myself -- and least of all to those who have never heard Thomas Howard speak. But he talked to a roomful of people who a few minutes earlier had been bored, restless and irritated. And what we heard was not the preposterous, melodramatic speech but the savage intensity of conviction that burned behind it. Out of that meeting was born the Universal Purification Party. The Galactic Affairs Society became the vanguard of a campus movement that six months later controlled the Student Council. As for myself, I switched my allegiance to the Campus Catch and Madrigal Society. Even then, with all my illusions still intact, I had little taste for reforming humanity and a growing suspicion of Thomas Howard. that, more often on tri-di posters than in the flesh. There was a vacancy on council. He won the seat and the Purification Party embarked on an aggressive -- and wellfinanced -- campaign to sweep the end-of-term elections. I noticed that Howard was cutting classes more often than not. I ran across him one evening, though, sitting alone with Jocelyn in the deserted library. Both of them were dressed in the long gray robes of the Purification Party. On smaller girls it was a dowdy, shapeless garment but it suited Jocelyn. It gave her the majestic look of one of the heroines of Earth's idealized past. That unexpected meeting gave me an ideal chance to ask a question that had been bothering me for months. I went over and sat down. My question was not the sort that lent itself to tact and diplomacy -- I decided on a frontal attack. "Thomas," I said. "What are you up to?" He had a trick of raising one eyebrow in sardonic enquiry. "Up to? My dear Anna!" "Tell it to me simply. What's the point of all this purification business?" "You haven't been reading my pamphlets. Or listening to my speeches." "Rot. You're not interested in cleansing and purifying society. You're careful not to talk about your private life, but I have friends who tell me things." I noticed that Jocelyn was looking uncomfortable. I steeled myself. This was no time for delicacy. "All right," he said. "I'll tell you the truth -- but you won't like it. I want power. A great deal of power. And I have the means of getting it. This campus is just the beginning, a testing ground. You might call it a lab experiment." "You're going to take over the galaxy?" I suppose I must have sounded amused. "Not just the galaxy, Anna. Some day the name of Thomas Howard will be known beyond it -- wherever men's minds reach. Minds are what I want, Anna -- yours, everyone's." His eyes probed mine, reached past them and suddenly I was furious. I had not invited the intrusion. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Here you are, a perpetual student in a third-rate university and you're going to take over the galaxy. You haven't even got a degree. In fact you barely passed your mid-terms." I glared at him. "You must think you're awfully good at something!" He spoke quietly. "I am good at something, Anna. I understand people. And I can make them do what I want." "You think so because you've manipulated a lot of political malcontents?" "Jocelyn. Tell Anna what we live on, you and I." Jocelyn's eyes widened and her jaw dropped. She looked as though she had been kicked unexpectedly in the midriff. "Thomas?" "Tell Anna where we get our money." She stared at him. Finally she whispered, "I -- I work." Her face had turned beet red. "What do you work at, Jocelyn?" His voice was gentle and insistent. She turned her head away. "I go with men. For money." Thomas Howard smiled. He was satisfied. "You see, Anna, I can make anyone do anything." His cold gray eyes stared into mine. "Even you, Anna." I rose without speaking and walked out of the library. I hoped that I would never meet Thomas Howard again for as long as I lived. II term and went on to technical school. A year or so later I began to see Howard's name in the newspapers. He had moved on to larger campuses and his ripples were widening rapidly. Then I headed for the outworlds with my brandnew communications papers -- and when next I returned to Earth, Thomas Howard had dropped out of sight. Which brings me to the day that I discovered Perigord. The name gave me a mild shock as I read through the Job Opportunities -- Outplanets column. Coming across it in that dreary succession of Jones Landings and West Newtons and New Londons was like finding a jewel in a bucket of nuts and bolts. I read the ad. Perigord was the only town on Terra Nova, an Earthlike, Englishspeaking planet well out on the rim of the galaxy. Logic told me that I would find yet another grubby, dusty little mining town, but to my irrational feminine imagination the name conjured up visions of roses and troubadours and sunlit history-book castles. And so I came to Perigord -- in search of what? I suppose it must have been romance. Some nostalgic French expatriate must have gazed upon that vivid green and blue and ochre landscape and the great plateaus and towers of rock rising up behind the town and given Perigord its name. The impression you have, as you approach the town from a distance, is that some careless hand has scattered heaps and mounds of rainbow-colored jewels in the middle of a high meadow. The mountains lie behind and the sea below -- and as you come closer you can see the little boats with brightly colored sails far out in the harbor mouth. When you go through the streets of Perigord on a clear day you walk with your eyes squinted against the dazzle. The walls of the houses are green and amber and blue and scarlet in every shade imaginable and they flash and glitter like gems in the sunshine. Most structures on the planet are built from a native mineral quarried in the hills; on Earth we called it star-crystal. Immensely durable, it splits conveniently into blocks and can be polished to strange and beautiful rock formations behind Perigord, the many-colored spires and pinnacles and high flat mesas, are star-crystal deposits; they have endured through the centuries while the elements wore down the softer rock around them. You still see a few private estates on Earth that are built, at least in part, of star-crystal. At one time Terra Nova exported it in great quantities, but it was always expensive to ship and has long since gone out of fashion. There was someone to meet me at the shuttlecraft -- a darkly saturnine individual with an astonishing pair of moustaches. His name was Jean-Pierre Jackson and he was director of Terra Nova's communications system. He told me to call him Pete. We rode into town in an asthmatic aircar that I suspect arrived with the original settlers. En route I learned that my duties would be light and pleasant, that Perigord was the beauty spot of the rim worlds and would some day rival Betelgeuse II and Benson's Planet as a tourist attraction, and that I could lodge comfortably and conveniently in Perigord's best (and only) inn, right next door to the Communications Center. The versatile Mr. Jackson was also, as it turned out, the innkeeper. The Perigord Inn was straight out of a fairytale, a sort of overgrown cottage of dark rose-colored star-crystal, with old-fashioned wooden shutters and an intricately carved front door. On either side of the steps were two small trees that were almost -- but not quite -- French lilacs. Their branches dripped with heavy snow-white blooms. "Lunchtime," Pete Jackson observed. "Damn, I'm supposed to be at a meeting. Go in -- the wife will take care of you." The aircar departed, wheezing heavily. My landlord seemed to be a man of many pressing affairs. I opened the door and was swept inside on a tidal wave of hospitality. Nancy Jackson was a big woman, generous of hip and bust and spirit. I liked her immediately, though she left me a little breathless. I lunched on the vaguely troutlike fish that abounds in the Sea of Perigord and I drank excellent local wine. Nancy talked while I ate. She was an inexhaustible spring of local gossip, historical data and sociological observation. Both she and her husband had been born on the planet, children of the earliest settlers. Pete was an organizer, a joiner -- he had made his inn the hub around which the rest of Perigord revolved. Nancy was a talker but she was a listener, too. If anything happened in Perigord, Nancy knew about it. inquired after my comfort and well-being and took me next door to see the radio shack, a structure almost as gorgeous as the inn, in infinitely varying purple hues. It took him only a few minutes to show me my duties -- I could see that I was going to have plenty of leisure time. At one time Perigord had been a busy port, shuttlecraft coming and going around the clock with cargoes of star-crystal for the big freighters hanging in orbit. I could tell by the size of the radio shack that once there had been a substantial staff. Now I was alone, with little to occupy me. The freighters came infrequently and their visits were brief. Pete Jackson rushed off again, apparently in several directions. I locked up the radio shack with the key he had given me and set my wrist alarm in the improbable event that I was needed. Then I went out to explore this treasure of a world that I had blundered upon. The air was soft and full of the scent of blossoms. It was always like that on Terra Nova, all year round. To someone raised as I was in the north-temperate latitudes of Earth, it was like living perpetually in the second week of May. Nancy had given me a rough idea of the local geography. High up in the shadow of the hills were the great villas; whatever wealth remained on Terra Nova was concentrated there. Most of the owners were retired people -- executives of the extractive industries and the starship lines, who had visited the planet once or twice on business and loved it enough to return for good. Down by the waterfront, at the other extreme, was an artists' colony and in between were the tidy tree-lined avenues where the rest of the populace lived -- quarry workers, fishermen, shopkeepers and the like. After a while I wandered down to the wharf and sat with my toes in the water, watching the fishermen. One of them was doing something complicated with a net. When he looked up and saw me he gave me a friendly wave and climbed up onto the wharf. "Hello," he said. "I'm Jock McLaren, And you, if I'm not mistaken, will be our new radio operator." "Word gets around quickly," I said. "I've only just come off the boat." "It's a small planet. Anybody new in town is big news. Especially if she's female. Are you from Earth?" "Originally. I've wandered about a good bit since I left tech school." "Can't be all that long -- since your schooldays, I mean." I smiled, pleased at the compliment. "Six years. And a lot of different planets -- you'd be surprised." "I'm astonished." I glanced at him with curiosity. He looked like anyone's idea of a seafaring man -- tall, tanned, fortyish, broad-shouldered and still lean about the middle -- but somehow he didn't sound like a fisherman. He asked me, "What brought you to Perigord?" "The name," I said. "It sounded intriguing. The last place I worked was called Dry Lake, on Smith's Planet. I was driven out after six months by dust and acute boredom. And what about you?" I asked him. "What brought you to Perigord?" "Same reason. I liked the name." He grinned at me. He had a nice grin, open and cheerful and unassuming. He seemed a person who felt comfortable with himself. He stood up. "I'd better get going. Maybe I'll see you up at the shack. I help out sometimes when things get busy." phia Prunikos, until she was out of sight around the curve of the bay. Then I wandered back up the slope to the Perigord Inn, through a late afternoon as mellow and golden as Shal'larakh wine. At dinner I said to Nancy, "I met an odd sort of fisherman today. Jock McSomething. Do you know him?" "Oh, have you met Jock already? He'll like you. He must find the local girls a bit dull." I seized the chance to pump her for information. "He hasn't always been a fisherman, has he?" "Good heavens, no." The idea seemed to amuse her. "You really don't know who he is, then? No, of course you wouldn't. And knowing Jock, he'd hardly be likely to tell you. Suppose I called him Captain McLaren? Would that ring a bell?" I searched my memory. "The skipper of Venture II? Come on, Nancy, you're joking." She shook her head. "Jock McLaren was a famous man in his time. How many planets was it that Venture claimed for Earth? Dozens and dozens, anyway." "What's he doing on Perigord as a fisherman?" "Oh, he's been retired for years. They pension off starship captains before they're forty. It's a rough life. Anyway, he lost an eye on his last new planet. As for being a fisherman, he's perfectly happy at it. I'm sure he'd had all the fame and publicity he's ever likely to want." She laughed at my expression, which must have been a mixture of incredulity and awe. "You didn't expect to meet a celebrity down there on the wharf, did you? Oh, I tell you, Anna, Perigord's a curious place. And getting curiouser every day." Jock McLaren came around to the inn next day to ask if I would like to go fishing. It was to be a pleasure trip -- he left his nets and heavy tackle stowed away and dug out a couple of light rods. "Jock," I said as the afternoon wore on and I felt I knew him better, "don't you miss space?" "Not so much. I like this life." He gestured out over the silent emptiness of the Sea of Perigord. "This is really what I was looking for when I went into space. Solitude, my own vessel, everything open and uncluttered?! -- and quiet." "Was space like that?" "Sometimes. At first it was. But after a while they expected me to act like a public figure -- some sort of celebrity. I've got no talent for that kind of thing." I nodded, remembering what Nancy had told me. He added, "When they retired me from active duty they wanted me to sit behind a desk. But I like this better." The sun was warm on our backs. A light breeze ruffled the water and stirred the trees along the shoreline. Those strange, carved, many-colored hills were outlined against a flawless sky. I had no trouble understanding his choice. Jock's line went taut and he reeled in a vicious-looking creature that bore some perverted resemblance to a fish. I hoped I would not be expected to have it for dinner. I remembered something else I had wanted to ask. "Nancy told me that Perigord was a curious place. Any idea what she meant?" He grinned. "I can guess. She wasted no time telling you all about my past, but I'll bet she didn't tell you about the Temple and the True Followers." "The what?" "Did you happen to notice that big building up on the hill near the high-rent district?" "The sort of Purple Parthenon one? I could hardly miss it." "That's the Temple. It used to be a theater, when the town was booming. But lately it's been taken over by a bunch of religious nuts." "Why would Nancy keep quiet about a thing like that?" "When they first moved in our Nancy went up to take a look. She hates like hell to miss anything. Apparently she got interested enough to sign on as a member. Then she found out what was. actually going on up there and she came tearing home like a scorched cat. Poor old Pete was scandalized -- basically, he's pretty much a puritan. Since then he's done his damnedest to find an excuse to close down the place. Which ought to be easy enough, since he's the licensing inspector. But the Prophet is crafty -- Pete has yet to catch him breaking a civic ordinance." "What exactly is going on?" He gave me a look of seraphic innocence. "Ask Nancy," he said. And so I asked Nancy. I hadn't thought her capable of so much indignation. "The TempleV' she said and looked as though she had swallowed something unpleasant. She added ominously, "If you've half the sense I think you have you'll never put your nose near the place. The True Followers are the sort a decent girl shouldn't even know about." Poor Nancy. If she had told me that the pews were hard or the services long-winded -- if she had said that the True Followers were excessively puritanical or merely dull -- I might have stayed away. lowers was purple and majestic. Its glittering facade was shaded delicately from palest lavender to a deep and glowing violet. The architecture was a style I had come to recognize as Perigordian Civic-solid, squarish and exuberantly colorful. It was surrounded by a sort of terrace with walks and benches and the customary display of fountains, stylized lamp standards and shrubbery. The front entrance was flanked by a brace of muses -- or possibly they were graces -- who inspected me coldly out of sculptured eyes. Something was quite odd about their expressions -- it bothered me but I could not name what it was. A discreet notice to one side of the entrance said, Public Service, Day #, #th hr. I glanced at my watch -- the hour was #:#. I sat down on a bench to wait. By seven ninety-five clusters of people were standing patiently outside the entrance. Only a few were young, I noticed. Most were welldressed, carefully coiffed matrons. Promptly at eight hours the doors swung open. There was no anteroom. We stepped directly into an enormous, high-ceilinged hall. The place was not at all what I had expected from my limited experience of temples. It was more like a very elaborate set designed for a tri-di historical. Massive beams arched across the high theater ceiling. They looked impressively old, as though they had in fact been blackened by the hearth fires of centuries. At one end of the hall was the stage, which now served as a kind of dais, with heavy velvet drapes and a cushioned, canopied throne. At the other end was an enormous stone fireplace. The walls on three sides were hung with tapestried forests where stags and hounds, yeoman and unicorns pranced and cavorted. The fourth wall, illogically I thought, was mirrored from floor to ceiling. It caught and reflected the polychromatic light that slanted from above. I looked up and saw that high clerestory windows filled with translucent bricks of star-crystal had been cut into the theater walls. The theater seats were gone; around the margins of the hall, instead, were settles, intricately decorated, with wide seats and solid legs. They must have been reproductions but they were good ones. The dark wood looked handcarved and had the mellow glow of antiquity. They were piled high with silk and velvet cushions in rich colors -- crimson and old gold, amethyst and lapis lazuli. The floor, what I could see of it, was paved with star-crystal and scattered everywhere were deeppiled rugs and animal skins, singly and in opulent heaps. The hall was starting to fill. A group of musicians came in through a rear door and stood on the dais. They were dressed in tunics and tights, in the clear cool colors of old enamels -- greens and torquois and cobalt blue, with here and there a streak of gold or scarlet. They began to play something medieval and processional, full of trumpets and percussion. A deep hush fell over the congregation. Slowly and with great dignity a solitary figure moved out onto the dias. have gasped aloud, for I remember that the dowager on the next seat turned around to stare at me. The jaw was heavier and the hair thinner. The dull gray garment of the purification party was gone and in its place was a spectacular gold-embroidered crimson robe. But I recognized at once the fleshy lips, the unhealthy pallor of the skin and those cold, compelling gray eyes. I knew then that Nancy had been right. This was the moment for me to escape as she had escaped back to the safety of the Perigord Inn. But something -- curiosity or surprise or fascination -- held me to my seat and I listened. Thomas Howard was a man well into his thirties now. His voice had lost none of its richness and resonance. Maturity, I thought, had given him polish and subtlety -- but more than that, it had intensified the power of his will, the furious strength of conviction that flowed from him like a palpable force. I told myself that it was an illusion, some sort of stage trick that he had developed and perfected over the years. I had not forgotten the look on the face of poor Jocelyn, that day in the library. I knew that the man was cold-blooded, amoral, a charlatan and quite possibly a dangerous and naive psychotic. And yet as I sat there I was caught upinvoluntarily -- in a kind of hypnosis that gripped us all. What was it he said. It's hard after so many years to remember. "The perfect knowledge," he began, "the ultimate freedom of the spirit, is this; that we are unafraid to stray into those actions whose very names are unmentionable. For when the spirit is committed to the realm of the transmundane deity it is indifferent to the natural world. And how shall our souls transcend the corruption of the body? It is written that we must render the flesh to the flesh and the spirit to the spirit. We must render to nature its own, for thereby we shall exhaust its powers. When we have made all experience ours, when we have performed all actions and looked unabashed on all forbidden things, then shall we have paid our debt and our souls shall find release. "For you who are the True Followers there can be no corruption. For as gold sunk in filth will not lose its beauty but will preserve its own nature, so nothing can change our spiritual essence." I lost the thread of his argument as he wandered through a bewildering maze of dogma and symbolism, full of references to transmigration and the acosmic self, the Seven Spheres and the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus. Now, as I write them down, his words seem tenuous and obscure. But when one heard him speak one soon stopped listening to the words. One was aware only of that sonorous, vibrant voice of hisna voice like honey and cello strings and thundefthat rolled out over the hall in great engulfing waves. For a few bewildering moments the minds, the thoughts of the crowd -- of the placid matrons in their farrlgo furs and zoid-jewels, of the scattering of cynical young people from the artists' colony -- were drawn together and coalesced. I was caught up in it too. I could not help myself, none of us could. We were no longer individuals. We were a mindless extension of Thomas Howard's will. WION'T go yet, Anna -- it's "been a long time." He caught my hand as I filed out with the others past the big carved doors. I was surprised and in spite of myself a little flattered that he remembered me. "You will stay and have a word with me, won't you? It's not often an old friend from Earth turns up in my congregation." His manner had changed. There was still that air of proud self-sufficiency, but he seemed less arrogant, less coldly cynical then I remembered, more like the conventional clergyman greeting his flock. But then he gave me that small, halfamused, half-mocking smile and I sensed that behind the veneer he had not changed at all. My instincts told me to jerk my hand free, to tear my gaze away from his, to turn and run. But it seemed an uncivilized way to behave. A nd so I nodded mutely and when he said, "Come into my office, where we can talk -- " I followed him. We stepped abruptly out of the twelfth century into the twentysecond. His office was, quite unexpectedly, severe and businesslike. No carvings here, or enameled inlays, but plain parawood paneling, a large square desk, some modern chairs, a small computer and a microfilm cabinet. He drew up a chair for me -- a gesture that belonged to the new Thomas Howard. "Now, my dear Anna, what have you been doing lor eight years?" I told him briefly and then said, "What made you change your approach?" At twenty-seven I was still an abrupt and tactless creature. Especially with people I disliked. The single eyebrow rose in mock surprise. "I beg your pardon?" "I mean you were having such a whale of a good time taking over student governments. After you got tired of our campus-how many others did you infiltrate? About half a dozen, wasn't it? And always a bigger one." He smiled. "Quite right. Just before I left Earth I had a nice toehold on the London School of Economics." "Why did you leave?" "The usual story -- the government stepped in. I make governments nervous. The problem has always been to keep them from getting nervous before I'm ready to take over. They see an organization like the ones I've created -- strongly motivated, cohesive, single-minded -- and they know what's going to happen to their own shaky administrations." "So they drive you out." "Exactly. Seems unfair, doesn't it?" "And now you're trying to sneak back from a different direction." "Very intelligent of you, Anna." "Do you think this time it will work?" "I'm positive it will. It's more than just a matter of a different approach, a diversionary tactic. Over the last eight years I've begun to realize what sort of power I possess and how to use it. I could always influence peoplenow I've learned to control them absolutely." I said, "You're like the old rabble-rousers -- Hitler and Stalin and the rest." "Perhaps. But they ultimately failed. I'm not going to fail. And I don't think they fully realized what power they had -- or possibly they had it in a lesser degree." "Why should you tell me all this? Aren't you afraid I'll go to the authorities?" He laughed. "Go ahead. They can't stop me. No one can stop me now." He took me by the arm, led me back out into the great hall. "Look at this. It cost a great deal of money. Where do you suppose I got it?" "From your congregation? They looked pretty well-off, I thought." "Indeed they are. Those women are wives of retired spaceline executives, heads of industry. And now others are coming in from off-planet. Soon there'll be an influx of True Followers from all over the galaxy to Terra Nova. And when enough are here, my religious organization will be subtly transformed into a political organization." "But what do your followers believe in? What was your sermon all about?" "Ah, that's the beauty of it, Anna. I've found the perfect belief, ideally suited to imperfect human nature. The perfect knowledge is the realization that we are unafraid to stray into those actions whose very names are unmentionable. You've heard of Carpocrates?" "No," I said. "At least I don't think so." "Your education is sadly lacking. Carpocrates was a secondcentury Alexandrian, a gnostic. His particular Christian heresy believed in transmigration -- that the soul must pass through several bodies before it can be freed from the physical world. And before we can obtain this release from the flesh and pass into the realm of the spirit we have an obligation to commit every kind of act, to render to nature its own. Through sin we shall achieve salvation. The Carpocratians and other similar sects were known, I believe, as the Licentious Gnostics or the Christian Libertines." "Oh," I said. I understood. "In other words, doctrinally licensed orgies." "Don't look so shocked, Anna. But if you approach it realistically you'll see that it's a very sensible and attractive religion. I offer my followers the best of all possible worlds -- the satisfaction of the spirit, the senses and the flesh." "I think I'd better be going now," I said. He laughed. "Poor Anna, I've frightened you off again. Never mind. You're not the First woman to disappear through that door in mortal terror. But you'll come back -- the others did." Not everyone, I thought fiercely. Not Nancy and not ... It was true I was frightened. It was not the peculiar rites of the True Followers that disturbed me -- I already knew what Thomas Howard was. But as I made my way through the great opulent hall I had a momentary vision of wine flagons and velvet robes scattered carelessly among the pillows -- I heard the sensuous rhythms of rebec and drum and saw torchlight glinting on naked limbs. And I knew that what had been easy for Nancy was going to be difficult for me. As I left the temple I again met the stony gaze of the two graces. And finally I realized why their faces had bothered me. The mouths, the set of the eyes and the angle of the brows were subtly distorted into expressions of sheer, unbridled lasciviousness. Ill time around the inn and the radio shack or on Jock McLaren's boat and feigned a great disinterest in the lights that flickered on the hill in the early morning hours. But Thomas Howard was not easily ignored. I came back to the inn one day to find the place in an uproar. A Rigelian fisherman was pounding on the bar with his lists and shouting furiously into Pete Jackson's ear. "What's the matter?" I asked Nancy, who was standing well out of the way in a corner. "His wife is a True Follower. He found out why she was doing church work till the wee small hours." "Oh," I said. Perigordians are on the whole an easygoing lot and inclined to forgive and forget, but on Rigel II ihe moral climate is more severe and honor is defended at blaster point. The man was almost incoherent with rage, but I gathered that he was appealing to Pete in his capacity as license inspector to close down the Temple and as magistrate to throw Howard into the nearest dungeon. "Have you been to the police?" Pete was asking him. Pete looked desperate. "A pack of imbeciles. They say they can't touch Howard -- he hasn't broken any law." He glared at Pete as though holding him personally responsible. "I ask you, is seducing a man's wife not a crime?" "Not in Perigord," Pete said. "Inadequate sanitation is a crime, yes, but not seduction." He added bleakly: "And the temple's plumbing, I regret to say, is beyond reproach." "Then," said the Rigelian, "I will take matters into my own hands. I have tried to go through the proper channels -- I cannot be held responsible for what may happen now." We stood outside the inn, the Jacksons and Jock and I, and watched the Rigelians storm the hill. They were a sizeable community and its entire male population had turned out -- sturdy, unimaginative fishermen who considered the virtue of their wives and daughters at stake. Their declared intention was to burn the Temple to the ground and beat the Prophet into protoplasm. The town constabulary -- all three of them -- had prudently removed itself from the scene. We watched for a long time for the erupting flames and listened for the Screams of anguish -- but nothing happened. I said to Jock, "Do you think he'll talk his way out of this one?" "Why not?" I think you underestimate the Prophet. These people -- messiahs, dictators or whatever you want to call them -- follow a pattern. They deal in emotion, not reason. If you approach them in a state of blind fury it serves them as well as wide-eyed admiration. Possibly better. It's the involvement, the emotional arousal, that's important. It makes people accept leadership." "I hope you're wrong," I said. "You make him sound invincible. He frightens me enough as it is." Nothing continued happening on the hill. But after a while the Rigelian mob straggled back, its ranks diminished by about onethird. The offended husband, I noticed, was not among the returnees. "What happened?" we shouted as soon as they were within earshot. They looked like men to whom an unspeakable injustice had been done. One of them said, "That damn fool, that Joe -- " He threw his arms into the air and gazed skyward as though seeking divine explanation. "He's been converted." arrived and for a while at least we forgot about Thomas Howard and his temple. It came one afternoon while Perigord lay basking and somnolent under a golden sun. I was sitting in a contented stupor in the bow of the Sophia Prunikos, trailing one hand in the tepid water and idly wondering why Jock McLaren had never married. Jock said, "We've got guests." I gazed at him blankly from under my sun hat, wondering what he was talking about. Then my eyes followed his stare and I saw the small saucer-shaped vessel drifting silently toward the landing field, "Damn," I said and looked at my wrist, thinking I had forgotten my alarm. I hadn't. Idiotically I held the timepiece to my ear and shook it. "Relax," Jock said. "If they had needed any help to come in they would have waited for you." "Whose is it? Do you recognize it?" He shook his head. "It's no design I've ever seen before." "Could it be a lifeboat?" "It's possible. But it's not from an Earth craft. The ship had disappeared behind the trees, Jock turned the Sophia Prunikos toward shore. We took it for granted the ship had come down on the landing field near Perigord -- it was the only one still in use. But half the population of Perigord -- the half with aircars -- had been out to look and by the time we reached the inn the report was back: the Perigord field was empty. A half-dozen smaller fields were scattered across the planet, relics of the star-crystal boom. They were probably overgrown with weeds but all of them, I remembered, had control towers equipped with video scanners. I could hook into any one of them from the main communications room and chances were they still worked. When spare parts are three months away, circuits are built to last. Aircars were shooting off in all directions. Things had been quiet up on the hill lately and Perigord was ripe for fresh excitement. Elbowing our way through the crowd, we headed for the radio shack. We had no trouble picking up the ship. It had come down on an old field near an abandoned quarry about two hundred miles from Perigord. The scanner was not much use for fine detail, but we could see clearly enough the odd disk-shaped vessel in the center of the field. It showed no sign of life, human or otherwise. We sent word to the police and militia that we had located the ship and watched until they arrived on the field -- Perigord's three policemen and a dozen or so militiamen. There wasn't much they could do. Several of them walked in a slow circle around the ship, surveying its Unbroken, enigmatic surface. By now a ring of onlookers had gathered. Unobserved by the police, a small boy was throwing stones at the ship. Periodically another aircar would arrive and spill out a cargo of children and picnic baskets. Then the ship's shadow lengthened; the light turned soft and its gold deepened. Some of the spectators lost interest and went home. The others, content to await developments, spread blankets at the edge of the field. And at last, in the drowsy peace of late afternoon, a hatch opened in the side of the ship. At my ear Jock said, "Can't you get in any closer?" I fiddled with the knobs. "That's better." I couldn't get a closeup and I wasn't sorry. Our visitors were about five feet high and roughly ovoid -- or more accurately, acornshaped -- with the broad side uppermost. Their surface color was a sort of blotchy swamp-brown and covered with a network of raised lines like distended blood-vessels. They had four limbs or appendages. A couple of feet up from their conical bottoms ran a long horizontal gash that looked like a crocodile's mouth. There was no head, as such. Rather, the whole creature seemed to consist of a horrible head. The huge eyes, positioned some inches above the mouth-gash, had slits a foot long for pupils and glared like searchlights. T HE police and militia joined forces and moved slowly in from the edge of the field. An aircar, impatient for a closer look, flew in and dropped low over the ship. The aliens seemed to notice this -- perhaps they were disturbed by the noise or the slight vibration. The upper parts of their bodies tilted backward. The aircar veered, shot across the field and crashed into the trees. The advancing militia halted. Abruptly. At this point somebody remembered his field radio. "Number Four field to Perigord." "Perigord here," I said. "Can you see what's going on out here?" "More or less. We saw the aircar crash. Our visitors do that?" "Can't tell. Could have been mechanical trouble." "Quite a coincidence," I said. "Could they be armed?" "Not as far as we can make out. We're clearing the civilians away. The captain wants to try to communicate. Damned if I know how." I looked at the screen. The police were moving along the fringe of trees, rounding up the scattered knots of people and herding them back to their aircars. "We're moving up again," the signalman siad. "Guess the CO wants to try sign language. Hang on. I'm getting somethingwhat the hell? Perigord, we're communicating with them -- I'm getting pictures, images -- " "You're getting what?" "Mental images -- telepathy. The globs are telepathic. This is going to be garbled, but I'll try to relay it you. They call themselves -- the best I can do is something like Bhak'zaa. They come -- from another galaxy, that part's clear enough. Now they're telling us why they're here." There was a lengthy pause. Then the militiaman's voice again, speaking very rapidly. "They're overpopulated. They need room to expand. They want -- no, that's not right -- they intend to plant a colony here. This is the scouting party. They've been running tests -- conditions are ideal. For globs. Bhak'zaa." Another pause. "Here are their terms. We can leave. Or we can stay and live in -- reservations, ghettos, something like that. If we mind our own business and keep our mouths shut. Otherwise -- I won't translate the otherwise. The CO is refusing their terms. He's telling the globs we'll hit them with everything we've got." "Half a dozen rusty blasters and the courthouse cannon," Jock remarked. "More communication from the Bhak'zaa -- resistance -- resistance is useless. They defend themselves the same way they speak -- telepathically. I don't understand what they mean by that, but I get an impression of total self-confidence. They don't expect any interference and won't tolerate any. The captain says to keep moving up -- I think the idea is to make them show their hand. I've lost contact with them now. They've withdrawn." Then I heard a sharp intake of breath and he said, "Oh, my God." I looked at the screen. Two men were on their knees, hands clutching the sides of their heads. "Number Four field, what -- " "I don't know. Wait a minute." I heard him shouting a question. "They've hit two men -- somehow. Their minds are gone. No speech, no response -- nothing." Then he added, "There's the order to fire -- " It was the last intelligible thing he said. I saw the line of raised weapons, saw the Bhak'zaa standing unarmed and apparently defenseless before their ship. But the sharp singing whine of the blasters never came. I stared, instead, at a field scattered with limp, jerking, rag-doll figures and heard a voice -- the militiaman's voice -- that gibbered and babbled horribly in my ears. that night in the Interstellar Order of Space-Farers Hall. I came late, for I had stayed to watch the alien ship as long as any light remained. As far as I could tell, the entire population of Perigord was in the hall and just about everyone from the outlying fishing hamlets. Lined up on chairs across the empty stage were the mayor, the chief of police and the resident psychiatrist from the Perigord General. On the wall behind them hung a fading banner, the flag of Federated Earth. I felt a twinge of panic as I remembered how very far away we were from Earth and from the Federation's paternal arms. We were told what we already knew too well -- that the militia's meager supply of short-range weapons was quite useless against the Bhak'zaa, that any human being who moved in close enough to fire a blaster could expect to have his mind seared inside his skull. The crowd was tense, restless, belligerent. It was too soon for them to accept the situation as hopeless. They insisted that there must be, there had to be, a way out. There were plenty of suggestions from the floor. Most of them were far-fetched and all of them were impractical. In a corner of the room where a group of artists and bohemians had gathered a girl rose to her feet. She was gentle-eyed, unworldly in sandals and a long burlap shift. Her face was flushed. She seemed angry. "Don't you know why the Bhak'zaa attacked you?" she demanded of the crowd. "They came to us and we welcomed them as human beings have always greeted alien races -- with soldiers and guns. They didn't make the first warlike move -- we did. They saw the weapons and felt all those hostile emanations, so of course they had to protect themselves." I thought this was preposterous, but some of the faces in the audience wore expressions of sympathy. "Let us go out," the girl said and with an embracing motion of her arms indicated those who sat around her. "We will go with empty hands and with love in our hearts. The Bhak'zaa will know at once we come in a spirit of peace and friendship. You'll see -- we'll succeed where the soldiers and the blasters and the bombs have failed." In the end the meeting decided to let her and her people try their system. There wasn't much point in trying to stop them and I suppose there were those in the crowd who regarded them as small loss in any case. They were found the next day and brought back to Perigord empty-eyed, whimpering and nearly dead of thirst and exhaustion. Their arms and legs were scratched and bleeding. They had been stumbling blindly through the underbrush. After that we could do little but watch and wait. On the third evening I got up from the board stiff and exhausted, a nagging headache behind my eyes. I looked at Jock, slumped in the chair beside me. A stranger might not have noticed the fatigue and tension in his face, but they were there. He also looked withdrawn and remote. I wondered what he was thinking. He reached out and caught my arm. "Come on," he said, "We'll go see Pete and have a beer." The inn was crowded and noisy. We had trouble finding a place to sit. Then a party of Rigelian fishermen spotted us and called us over to their table. One of them. Bren Tharssen, I had met before -- he was a friend of Jock's. "Evening, Miss Perry," he said. The others moved over silently to make room. Considering the Rigelian temperament and the number of empty beer jugs on the table, they seemed unnaturally subdued. Bren Tharssen said, "You'll be leaving too. Miss Perry?" He took me by surprise. "Leaving? Perigord? I haven't even thought about it yet." It was the truth. "Do you think it will come to that?" He smiled sourly. "I figure it will." Staring into his beer, he said, "I remember when I first came to this planet -- must be going on twenty years ago -- the wharves were infested with little rodents, like ground-squirrels. They were friendly little devils -- made good pets. But they were a damned nuisance. They chewed up the nets gnawed on the ropes." There was a pause while he hoisted his mug. Setting it down, empty, he added, "So we killed them all off poisoned them. Wouldn't have done them any good to sit up and look cute or to bite us on the shins, either. They were a nuisance, so we got rid of them. Now its our turn. Only I'm not waitint -- d'm going back to Rigel II." "Jock?" I said. "Are you leaving?" "May have to. But it won't make a hell of a lot of difference, in the long run." Bren Tharssen looked up. "How do you mean?" "Think about it. Terra Nova is a very small planet. When the Bhak'zaa have filled it up with their surplus population -- which shouldn't take long -- they're going to be looking around for more territory. Their metabolisms must be pretty much like ours -- they want an Earth-type planet." He emptied the beer pitcher into his mug. "Rigel II is an Earth-type planet. So are all the other worlds that the human race has established itself on." "Including Earth," I said. I felt sick. "Including Earth. So where are we going to run?" "Bloody hell," muttered a sadfaced Rigellian sitting next to me. "If you'll pardon my language. Miss." A long silence fell. Then, at a table behind me, a mug descended with a reverberating crash. I turned around to stare. A set of steel-colored, slightly protuberant eyes bored into mine. Their owner was a large, balding square-jawed man of military bearing. He had a small, precisely clipped gray moustache and a magenta face. "By God," he said with furious dignity. "By Godthey'll never take Earth!" One of the Rigelians, the drunkest one, started to laugh. His neighbor elbowed him sharply in the ribs and he lapsed into a gloomy silence. Jock said mildly, "Probably not. Not this two-man scouting party. However -- " he reached up as Nancy sped past, relieved her of a full jug -- "we haven't seen their navy." IV mosphere at our table came more and more to resemble that of a wake. After a while the red-faced gentleman brought his chair over and joined us. He was the only one among us not prepared to admit defeat. He was a retired colonial administrator from Aldebaran VI and he had a low opinion of the capabilities -- mental, moral and military -- of extraterrestrial races. "It's small wonder the local militia couldn't handle the job," he told us. "Rotten organization -- rotten." He punctuated this remark by rapping his mug-bottom smartly against the tabletop. "But send in a company of regulars from Earth. Ha! Then we'lt see the beggars take to their heels." A small shower of beersuds flew over the table. Bren Tharssen said, "It takes three months to send a ship from Earth. We could all be vegetables by then." "Provided," Jock added, "that troops. Why should they risk provoking an interstellar war? Terra Nova is about the least important backwater planet in the galaxy." "But you said yourself, the Bhak'zaa won't stop with one planet." "Try to tell that to the Federation," Jock said. Some sort of commotion was going on at the door. A party of late drinkers had just arrived and apparently they brought news of fresh developments. The word went quickly around the room. "The Prophet is going out to meet the Bhak'zaa," At first I thought it was a joke. "Someone," I said, "has a strange sense of humor." "Wait a minute," Jock said. He rose from the table. I followed him over to the crowd in the doorway. Everyone was talking at once, but a few facts emerged out of the general uproar. En route to the inn, the latecomers had met a group of True Followers on their way home from a mass gathering at the Temple. There had been no orgy that night. Thomas Howard had led his flock in prayer and meditation and afterward made his announcement: at dawn, alone and armed only with the cosmic powers of the transmundane deity (a phrase that may or may not have been garbled in transmission) he was going out to meet the alien invaders. I remember that Jock took me by the shoulders and steered me gently but firmly out of the pub and toward the stairs that led up to my room. What with the beer and the general excitement, I was more than a little glassy-eyed. "Bedtime," he said. "Set your alarm. Our day's going to start early." I slept very badly that night. In the few hours that remained till dawn I fled for an eternity among the naked stars, pursued through space by something I could not escape. Sometimes it was the Bhak'zaa that slithered noisomely behind me, leaving silver trails of slime across the planets. Sometimes the hunter bore the face of Thomas Howard -- and as I ran it was as though my feet were caught in quicksand and I could not move, for those cold hypnotic eyes drew me inexorably back. And at other times I was trapped between the two, the aliens and the prophet, and boxed on both sides by whirling nebulae, so that there was nowhere I could run. I knew that somewhere in that black void Jock McLaren was piloting the Sophia Prunikos and that if I could only reach her I would be safe. But try as I might I could never find her. throat dry and my heart pounding. Nancy was standing beside the bed. She had shaken me awake and now she was holding out a cup of coffee. "Come on," she said. "It's nearly daylight. Jock's downstairs. He says you'd best get a move on and why didn't you set the alarm the way he told you to?" I swallowed the coffee. As I emerged into reality I realized that most of the pounding had settled in my head. I walked downstairs very carefully, for fear of jarring something. Jock said encouragingly, "You look like hell." My nightmare was still fresh in my mind and in spite of the remark I fought a wild desire to latch on to him and hang on for dear life. "Want any breakfast?" Jock asked. I shook my head. The thought revolted me. "Come on then -- over to the radio shack." I stumbled along with him. "Has Howard left?" "Not yet. He's still up at the Temple -- sacrificing virgins or whatever he does at times like this." "Then what's the rush?" "Because the minute the Prophet sets out for that landing field the entire population of Perigord is going to be pounding on your door, looking for a ringside seat. We are going inside and we are securely locking the door before the rush starts." By this time the Prophet and his flock had moved outside the Temple. We could hear the distant sound of drums and trumpets floating down from the hill. Jock scribbled a No Admittance sign and tacked it to the door. We locked ourselves in and turned on the coffee pot. The music grew steadily louder until the air was resplendent with fanfares and flourishes and the sprightly jangle of tambourines. It sounded absurdly cheerful -- almost exuberant. But I suppose the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals were meant to encourage the troops -- it was not yet a time for dirges. We went to the window. Jock said, "You've got a visitor." A small chill ran down my spine. The procession had stopped outside the radio shack. Someone tapped gently at the door. I opened it and stared out at Thomas Howard standing quietly on the step in the gray light of pre-dawn. He was a splendid figure, draped from neck to feet in deep blue velvet crusted heavily with silver threads. He wore a small cool smile. I could almost believe he was enjoying himself. "Hello, Anna," he said. "May I come in?" I hesitated. "I'll come out." I was oddly disturbed at the thought of his entering the radio shack. His smile broadened slightly. Why did I always have this wretched feeling that he could see the thoughts revolving in my skull? He said, "They tell me you can watch the field on video. I thought I'd stop to pay my regards and let you know I'm leaving." "Thank you," I said stupidly. Was this his way of saying goodbye? I wondered what was going on behind those impenetrable eyes. "You haven't been back to see me, Anna. I had hoped by now to number you among my flock." His eyes looked past me and through the open doorway. They rested very briefly on Jock McLaren placidly drinking coffee, his feet propped on my desk. "But you've had other interests," Howard went on in the same gently chiding tone. "Never mind, Anna, there'll be plenty of time later on. One of these days you'll come back to the Temple." One of these days? I wondered how many days were left to any of us in Perigord. "Goodbye, Thomas," I said. "Good luck." "No," he said. "I didn't come to say goodbye." After a pause he added: "You've always interested me, Anna. You have a mind of your own. I like that. It provides a challenge. I decided some time ago that when I come to take over there will be a place for you in my government. Think about it." I shook my head. "You know my answer to that." He turned to go. "We'll see," he said. move off, a bright stream of sound and color in the pale gray morning. They were all in ceremonial dress, the men as gaudy as birds in their jewel-colored tights and tunics, the women in long, high-waisted, supple gowns of silk and velvet. At the bottom of the street was a small paved courtyard, a sort of unofficial town square. Here they halted again. The Followers gathered about the Prophet in a semi-circle, facing in the general direction of the field where the aliens waited, and began to chant the final prayer before battle. The chanting went on for a long time. I went in and shut the door. I found that I was shivering slightly -- whether from nerves or from the chill air I found it hard to say. Jock poured me a fresh cup of coffee. "Dragging it out a hell of a time, aren't they?" he said sourly. "Maybe they're hoping the Bhak'zaa will get bored and go away." It was still about an hour to dawn, but the light was getting better. I sat down at the board and switched on the screen. In a minute or two I had a good clear picture of the landing field. The great silver disk was visible, but there was no other sign of the Bhak'zaa. I said, "Jock, why do you think he's doing this?" "You know him better than I do. I can only judge by what you've told me. Didn't you ask him?" "No. I've learned not to ask him questions. I used tobut I never liked the answers." "Why do you think he's going out there?" I thought about it for a while. "I suppose he's desperate." Even as I said it I realized that it was true -- and the idea surprised me. It was strange to think that Thomas Howard could ever be desperate. "I've told you what he's aiming for with this business of the religion. As long as I've known him -- and I suppose before that, too -- he's been mad for power. And I know he can control peopleI've seen him do it. I think eventually he might succeed." "But now the Bhak'zaa are standing smack in his way." I nodded. "Even if they were content just to take over Terra Nova, Howard would have to start all over again somewhere else. But really, it's worse than that, isn't it? They won't stop here." "Not bloody likely," Jack said. "Not when that scouting party goes home and reports that they can take planets away from us like candy from a baby." "And there go all the Prophet's dreams of taking over the galaxy. He hasn't got much to lose by going out there, has he?" "Except his mind." "That's what I'm wondering. I just can't see him as a martyr. He's too cold-blooded, too calculating. Do you suppose he really thinks he can drive them away?" "Hard to say. But then he's never been short of self-confidence. He knows he has this power over human beings -- I imagine he's estimated the possibility of its working on aliens and decided it's worth the risk. Anyway, men like Howard -- messiahs, dictators -- have never lacked for courage when something got in their way." Remembering a thing Howard had once told me, I said, "He thinks this talent of his may be telepathic, extra-sensory -- I'm not sure of the right term. Some sort of special gift. Perhaps if it works on other humans who haven't got these mental powers -- or don't know how to use them -- it may work on a race that does." "Let's hope he's right. Personally I'm inclined to think he's just a very skilled mass hypnotist. But who knows, maybe he can hypnotize the Bhak'zaa." The chanting had stopped. We went to the window. The Prophet raised his right arm in a gesture of benediction, climbed into a waiting aircar and was gone. I went back to the board. Jock said, quite casually, "Where's the aircar that belongs to the radio shack? Around the back?" I nodded, surprised. "Tank full?" "Yes -- why?" "Because I think I'll take a run out to that field. Hold the fort, Anna." I twisted my head to stare at him. He was already on his feet and halfway out of the shack. "Jock, you're not He had caught me totally off guard. I've always despised hysterical women, but I'm afraid I behaved like one then. "Jock, for God's sake, come back here." I realized suddenly I was shaking. He looked at me as though he had never really noticed me before. "Don't worry, Anna -- I'll be back. I was born cautious -- it's one of the reasons I'm still around. Mr. Howard can play the hero, if he likes. I'll be the one skulking through the bushes." He came back to the board, leaned over and kissed me. His hand rested for a moment on my cheek. "I'll see you later, Anna." And then, like the Prophet, he was gone. a half-hour that seemed like a half-century. There on my screen was the backdrop to the final act -- the menacing bulk of the alien ship, the field partly hidden by a tangled mass of weeds and creepers, the shadowy fringe of trees that marked its edges. The first pale rays of the sun filtered through my windows. The curtain had risen but the stage remained empty. I sat, hands clenched on the sides of my chair, waiting for the play to begin. I wish I could say that I was conscious of my unique position -- sole spectator at a galatic denouement. It has a nice ring to it -- but it belongs to a different kind of story. Human destiny did not concern me at that moment -- only Jock McLaren's safety. An aircar landed on the far side of the field -- the Prophet had arrived. He stood for a moment beside the vehicle, his head thrown back to watch the rising sun. Then he walked with stately deliberation to the center of the stage. Of Jock there was no sign at all. I guessed that whatever his plans, he would be likely to leave the aircar somewhere well out of sight and approach the field on foot. I held my breath. A hatch had opened in the side of the ship. One at a time, the Bhak'zaa slithered out. Howard had his back to me. He stood perfectly still, his feet apart as though braced against a strong wind. His robe rippled out from his shoulders and caught the first sunlight in its silver threads. The Bhak'zaa, moving side by side, came within a few feet of him and stopped. I had a beautifully clear picture so clear that I could see the faint palpitation of the two vertical pupils in their eyes. I thought -- though perhaps my imagination was at work that the distended vessels crisscrossing their bodies grew larger and more livid. Howard had turned a little and I could see his profile. His features were composed, his arms extended, palms-up, in a gesture of friendship or appeasement that surely could mean nothing to the Bhak'zaa. The devices he had used to stir the senses of the crowd, to make their minds open and receptive to him, were useless now. Had it all been a stage-trick? I wondered. I knew the power of those strange eyes and that rich, compelling voice. But had I, like so many others, been swept away by the cry of the trumpet, the insistent rhythm of the drums, by the long-submerged emotions that boiled up and engulfed my reason? The Prophet knew how to reach the primitive, the irrational depths of human nature. But the Bhak'zaa were not human. Stripped of his stage paraphernalia and the force of his persuasive tongue. thrown up against the blank wall of a totally alien mind, what could he hope to acheive but martyrdom? Now he appeared to be speaking"head thrown back, arms uplifted -- as he unleashed, into emptiness, all the power at his command. For what seemed like an impossibly long timethough I suppose it was only minutes, or secondsnothing happened. The actors stood frozen upon the stage, locked in silent, unseen combat. Whatever invisible forces met headlong in those few feet of space between them, for the moment at least an impasse had been reached. I felt I could bear it no longer -- I wanted it to be finished and done with. I waited for the hands to drop, the rigid spine to crumple, the cool eyes to go suddenly empty as the mind dissolved behind them. But still the Prophet spoke and the Bhak'zaa stood motionless and unresponding, like great slimy fungi risen out of the soil. I thought I saw Howard begin to sway. And then Jock McLaren came up behind the aliens from somewhere in the woods and quietly caved in the backs of their skulls with a Fish club. I watched him drag the bodies over to the ship and stuff them one at a time through the opening. Then I looked at Howard. I didn't need to see his face to know what had happened. For several minutes he stood motionless and stared into the empty place where the Bhak'zaa had been. Then his knees buckled and he crumped slowly to the ground. Jock came back across the field, wiping his hands on his pocket handkerchief. He set the Prophet gently on his feet and half-led, halfdragged him away from the ship and into the shelter of the trees. Then the ship lifted way from (he ground on a sudden pillar of flame. I guessed that Jock had sent it home with a message from Perigord, one I hoped the Bhak'zaa would understand. inn and listened to the True Followers singing in the Temple. We couldn't hear the words but the melody drifted down to us -- threnodic, liturgical, inexpressibly moving. Now and then it was drowned out entirely by a burst of laughter from the pub or by a sudden exuberant credenza on the Rigelian zyga. The rest of Perigord was celebrating a great victory; that their participation was indirect and their understanding of the battle strategy nonexistent dampened their joy not one whit. But up on the hill they had not yet begun to rejoice. Tonight they paid tribute to the fallen leader, to the messiah who had sacrificed himself to save the human race. I took Jock's hand. "Everybody thinks the Prophet did it alone," I said. "Are we going to leave it at that?" "Why not? He's the one who's sitting in the hospital with his mind blasted out, not me. God knows he's earned any credit he gets." And so I kept my private knowledge to myself for fifty years. They put the Prophet, what was left of him, in the General Hospital, along with the other victims of the Bhak'zaa -- and after a while they built a special institution for them. Rather pointlessly, as it turned out, for none of them lived to see the edifice completed. begins in the next issue! a lead letter, # for other letters, chosen for publication under the Confine letters to science or science-fiction topics. Share your knowledge, theories, angers, hopes with your fellow readers! New York, N.Y. # Howard was the last one to go; I'm told he clung tenaciously to existence -- of a kind -- for half a year. After that the institution was converted into a hostel for the pilgrims who had begun to flow in ever-increasing numbers into Perigord. What was disastrous for the Prophet's personal dreams of power was, ironically, a shot in the arm for the faith he had founded. The followers made sure that the story of mankind's last-minute salvation, suitably dramatized and embellished, went out on the next Earth-bound ship. What part Pete Jackson may have played in this publicity drive I would not venture to guess; except to say that he was a good businessman and a tireless civic booster and surely could not have overlooked the advantages of owning a tavern in Mecca. At any rate, the big public networks on Earth seized upon the story and the Temple at Perigord became the spiritual home of a galactic faith. Martyrdom, however uncomfortable and inconvenient for the individual, is a splendid thing for a religion. And for commerce. I suppose that quite possibly in five years -- or five hundred -- the Bhak'zaa may return to our corner of the universe. But next time there may be no Prophet (and no Jock McLaren) to drive them away. But I prefer to think that Jock's display of primitive violence may have disconcerted their leaders enough to send them slithering off in some other direction. There are, after all, plenty of stars in the sky. We've orbited a good many of those stars ourselves, Jock McLaren and I. About the time that the pilgrims started to arrive, Jock dug out his battered copy of Plimm's Guide to the Inhabited Planets. I wasn't sorry to move on. It was clear that Perigord would never be quite the same again. Already it was getting crowded. The sea was full of pleasure boats and the comfortable clublike atmosphere had vanished from the inn now that there were so many unfamiliar faces. It was hard for me, harder than I ever thought it would be, to keep silent when I heard over and over again the details of how the Prophet went forth unarmed and vanquished the alien invaders. And then there was the statue, the one they commissioned to stand beside the Thomas Howard Monument. It was fifteen feet high and carved in the faithfully realistic avante-garde style they called the New Objectivism. Wherever I went in Perigord I seemed to pass it and always in spite of myself I looked up. And the Prophet's granite eyes stared back at me, mocking me. On the stone lips was a small, cold smile of triumph.  Faster than the speed of light or a woman's love are... T HE Director of Publications for the Institute has stated that devices that succeed are more interesting then devices that fail. This one did succeed several times under conditions that are not practical to duplicate and when it failed it really failed. But there is a chance that it may yet succeed under normal controlled condi tions and it will matter very much if it does. From the case book of the Institute we give that early episode -- at the same time a qualified success and a grotesque failure -- of the sad death of Cecil Corn: Us. and others of the Institute. Light (The Fence Around Us) as limitor to our hopes of far travel, unless a breakthrough is made, a new framework set up or a new aspect of matter discovered. Corn, if anything can be found that travels at a speed greater than light the fence is breached. An examination of all transmission does not reveal anything that travels at a speed greater than light. However, it is discovered that we do not know the speed of one thing: Telepathy or thought transference. Corn examined this. He found that telepathy travels at a variety of speeds, from olfactory (bluntly, the speed of smell, for pairs of telepaths whose body auras must be in contact for transmission) through speed of sound (for certain pairs who convey by pseudo-sound) to Earth-Instantaneous speed (roughly radio-light speed). With the human element present, it was not possible to distinquish Earth-instantaneous from a real instantaneous. Earth did not provide a long enough base line. Corn -- himself an adequate telepath -- set up a number of moon contacts. He convinced himself that telepathy might be truly instantaneous, but he failed to convince others. The human element still ate up what should have been a second and a half time lag between instantaneous telepathy and radio transmission. Corn set up contact with a young Chinese named Francis Pung who was on Mars mission. The two were in good rapport. The time lag on test night should have been four and a half minutes. If telepathy were truly instantaneous its message should have been received and recorded completely before the synchronous radio message arrived at Earth. The experiment was well witnessed. Corn sat at the symbol machine and began to receive and record. Corn knew these first symbols in advance, but not others. Then his Mars contact went to impassioned voice and Corn recorded the message in almost hysterical words: Corn, believe me that I transmit by mind and at this time. Whatever you will hear about me shortly will not change it. The symbols now become impossible to me... Corn recorded the words and sat back bewildered. A four-minute silence ensued and then the radio message began. It gave the first symbols as Corn had recorded them. Then it gave further symbols which were not known in advance and which Corn had not set down. Then it gave the news that Francis Pung had dropped dead in the Mars radio booth just after the beginning of the experiment. Corn could not have known that Pung would die. He had received a message of sorts four minutes before the radio message. But the episode became and is still known as the Great Corn Hoax. Aloysius Shiplap and others of us persuaded Corn to go on experimenting. "This next one has to be it," Corn said, "Another failure would kill me." Corn set up another Mars contact with Sid Sideral, a man in such perfect health that he was a marvel. Concurrently with this final test of Corn's our Valery Mok set up an experiment of her own. She was in rapport with her friend Corn. As the test went on she set down what went through the mind of Corn as he received the message of Sideral, and as he believed he was recording it. Valery's notes -- which were not time-stamped -- are these: "Perfect, Sid, nothing will go wrong this time. Why is Aloysius fiddling with my head and mumbling? Receiving and recording nicely, Sid, if only they would let me alone. Why are the idiots taking off my necktie and pouring water over me? Why are they coming at me with a needle? I've had all my shots. Sid, I've beat the jinx. You're a partner too healthy to die on me. Ah, ah, Sid -- the jinx had one trick left. I lose again. I died on you." He did. Cecil Corn died at the beginning of the experiment and he had recorded nothing. What Valery Mok recorded was not clocked. But she made affidavit that Corn had been receiving from Sideral exactly the same data that came by radio four minutes later that she had heard it as an undercurrent to the thoughts of Corn with whom she was in rapport. The press does not usually call a lady a shameless liar, but in this case it did. The incident is still known as the Great Mok Mockery. Those of us who would like to believe have had our faith shaken. We have made a dozen further tests of simultaneous distant radio and telepathic transmission. In every case we have found that telepathic transmission over great distance is at radio-light speed and not beyond it. We cannot believe that the two incidents were conscious frauds, but they may have been unconscious ones. own. Open, and subject to review. ger. in the Case Book. But the case did remain in the open file and Gregory Smirnov of the Institute pulled it out once a year to review it. He did so now with a quorum present. "It always makes me sad to see that folder on Cecil," said Valery. "He was such a sweet man. You remember the funny way he had of scattering cigar ashes over everything? And his little trick of falling asleep in the middle of a sentence? Well, you've done your duty, Gregory. Put it away for another year." "No. I'm thinking of reopening the experiment," said Gregory. " Y ou're crazy," Glasser said. "Not crazy. A little odd, perhaps. I wouldn't be director of the Institute if I weren't. The problem remains. A breakthrough must be made, a new framework set up or a new aspect of matter has to be discovered. If matter is only what we have believed it to be we are limited forever. But there is a missing factor. All we need is a proper sort of relay to make the idea work." "And do you know where to find such a relay?" Aloysius asked. "I believe it could be found in a hundred impractical places every minute," Gregory said. "First we must somehow catch that relay on the fly and prove that it does work. Then we will have to synthesize it and have it always ready. It will not solve our problem. It will only enable us to state our problem seriously and go to work on it. We will prove that there is one special case of instantaneous speed -- beyond radio-light speed. Then we will seek means to bring other things to that speed. We will have broken out of our framework and set the problem in its proper context." "You speak as though the relay already existed," said Valery. "Why, it does," Gregory said. "That is, it exists sometimes. That is, I think it does." "If it exists, then use it," said Glasser. "Make the test." "I intend to if I can. But the relay is tricky and hard to come by. Epiktistes, who has analyzed a tion, believes that it has an effective life of between five and thirty seconds -- no more." "Well, Gregory, you will have to acquire a number of the relays to experiment effectively," Aloysius said, "or you will have to find ways of extending their life. The relays -- are they expensive?" "Not as you mean it, Aloysius." "Does it take long to construct one?" "About ninety years on an average." (On the same day that Gregory Smirnov reopened the Cecil Corn Case, the Nine Conspirators of Nebula Proxima were sentenced to death by a Court on Kentauron Mikron. We thought you might not have heard of it.) Gregory Smirnov nibbled at mountains of data for days. He seemed to make a dozen false starts. All institute people were clammy when they were onto something that wasn't yet ripe. They would never give an honest man a hint of what they were onto. But somebody had to bring Smirnov out of his trance. "Just what are you working on, Gregory?" asked Glasser after a routine meeting of the Institute people. "Or rather -- since it's apparent that you're not doing any work at all -- what are you thinking about?" "About electric eels when they die," said Gregory. "Oh? I didn't know you were interested in them? And what else?" "Gegenschein, condensers, bird entrails, missing factors, oracular pythons, thanatakolouthia (deathtrains or death-echoes), backlash, young wives' tales, shackling emancipation from frameworks, hysteresis, collapsing fields, bubbles when they burst." "Oh, come now!" protested Valery. "Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, And now a bubble burst, and now a world," issued the machine Epiktistes. "What? What?" demanded Glasser. "Who is making less sense, the man or the machine?" "It's from A. Pope," issued Epiktistes. "I thought it was pertinent." "One riddle at a time," said Charles Cogsworth, the humble husband of Valery. "What of the shackling emancipation from frameworks, Gregory?" "One framework actually -- that in which we live. The Baconian and Comptean Revolutions freed us from the old frameworks centuries before we were born. But they prisoned us in a tighter one -- that of doctrinaire materialism. Now we are forbidden to have superstitions at all, so a most interesting field is closed to us. We cannot get out of our present frame, we cannot even come near its borders -- but there are some answers to be found in those borderlands." "To those of us who like bird entrails -- and there are less than two of us in the world -- your interest is welcome," said Aloysius. "But what is your interest, Gregory?" "The emphasis on speed," said Gregory Smirnov. "In reading fortunes from bird entrails, great speed was necessary. The living bird was ripped open and studied. Whatever happened, it happened fast." "There's another one," issued the machine Epiktistes: " 'All at once, and nothing first. Just as bubbles do when they burst.' From O.W. Holmes. That's the way the One-Hoss Shay broke down." "What about condensers, backlash, collapsing fields?" asked Cogsworth. "Oh, we explain them with equations, but we don't really explain. Why should the old electromagnetic animal kick hardest just after it has died? Why is the echo stronger than the voice?" "And young wives' tales?" asked Valery. "I've been a young wife for more years than seems possible." "You came close to it in the Great Mok Mockery," said Gregory. "An old wife would be too sane to conceive of such an approach." "What does happen when electric eels die?" demanded Glasser. "What does happen to bubbles when they burst?" "I don't know," said Gregory, "but either of them would serve as a relay -- for too short an interval. A relay, but not a good enough relay. I need something more intricate than an eel and more tenuous than a bubble. And I need it exactly when it vanishes." ple could get from Gregory Smirnov that day. They tried to find from Epiktistes, the machine resident at the Institute, what sort of relay it was of which he had "I'm almost as much in the dark as you," Epiktistes issued. "I've lions of things for that man. What he calls a relay I may be calling something else." "But what is it that has an effective life of between five and thirty seconds and no more?" insisted Charles Cogsworth. "The pledge of a stranger, the allegiance of a Martian, the interest of a dilettante, the love of a gray-eyed woman," issued Epiktistes. "Epikt, you can be as exasperating as a man," said Valery. But Gregory was going ahead with something. He announced to them that he had set up a new test which would have to be the conclusive test. "Then you have found a good way of obtaining your relays?" Aloysius asked. "No. I have not found out anything new," Gregory said. "But I have accidentally acquired the use of a bunch of the relays. I believe that they will serve for the test and the proof. Then I will begin my long hard search to synthesize the things and to apply the things to more solid matter -- or to prove that matter is less solid than it seems." "Are you still bothered by our framework?" Cogsworth asked. "Yes. We are so superstitious that we cower in the middle of our frame. If we are so sure, what are we afraid of? We have insisted that life is no more than chemicalelectro-magnetic phenomena, but we are afraid to consider that life may have such backlash as all other similar phenomena show. I wonder how they will play it down when I finally prove it all." It was a major experiment and it involved nine radio receivers, nine conventional telepathic receivers, nine special telepathic receivers. It began. The nine special telepaths received and recorded nine separate symbols. This was important. These symbols were not known by anyone on Earth. They were known by only one person on the originating asteroid up to the moment they were given for transmission. They would not be verified until they were received by radio. Then the nine special telepaths received and recorded in words -- short messages and still shorter -- total transmissions from five to thirty seconds, no more. Then silence and the wait for the messages by radio and normal telepathy to begin. "Who were they?" asked Aloysius who had the gift of always being in the dark as to details of a project. "Oh, the nine conspirators of Nebula Proxima," said Gregory. "They have just been executed on the asteroid where the conspiracy was planned." "And they are transmitting after they are dead?" "Certainly not, Aloysius. We could not believe that and still live in our narrow framework. The instant of the collapsing field is still a part of the life of the field. The bursting of the bubble must still be accounted a phenomenon of the bubble. They serve -- just after their apparent deaths -- as the instantaneous relay." "This was the missing factor?" "Yes. It was the factor of the instantaneous transmission when Francis Pung died on Mars. It was the factor when Cecil Corn died on Earth. The death-instantaneous relay works in both directions." "And you believe that you can synthesize such a relay?" "I am too old to break out of the frame, Aloysius. My chilly faith constrains me to believe that everything is material. And anything that is material can be reproduced in matter." "And what if the frame is all a mistake?" "In either case, the problem can now be tackled." "It was of this that Epiktistes "Yes. The more clearly verified cases of death-simultaneous apparitions and messages." "How were the nine criminals induced to cooperate?" "What had they to lose? They were all reasonable men, save on politics." The slow minutes had trickled away. The radio transmission began to come through. At the same time arrived the messages from trained telepath to trained telepath -- all coming at radiolight speed and each received and recorded by an operator in his own cubicle. The symbols were those nine already received. This itself was verification. The brief comments of the criminals were also verification. They were flashes of wit and irony sparked by details of their own executions that could not have been known before. mission in a special case was proved. And once proved, it opened the gates? And many men bent their genius to the follow-up, the synthesizing of a comparable relay? Well, no -- it didn't happen like that. Gregory Smirnov and Aloysius Shiplap and Valery Mok and a few are working on the followup and they are getting some good leads. But the thing was not accepted by the Credentials Society, though they had their own impartial men observing and taking part in the experiment. Three men of the Credentials Society had even served as receivers for three of the criminals. The results were rejected by Credentials because "the veracity of the Testimony of convicted Criminals may not be accepted as Evidence in any Prime Matter under Dispute." It is still called the Great Gregory Gallimaufry.  W E'VE spoken of this before. While the writing of fiction is usually a cerebral process, the reading of it is not. While a number of readers have the capacity and sometimes the inclination to appreciate the well-turned phrase, few have the patience to take delight in a series of them over sixty thousand consecutive words. Many people quote from Shakespeare. Fewer have read him except under compulsion. The most popular writers are semiliterate. Quib me no quibbles -- certainly there are literate works of fiction that have enjoyed tens and hundreds of years. The overnight success of the masses, however, is invariably written as though the author regarded the language as an impediment. And that is precisely so. Language, in any form, interferes between the reader and the writer's concept. It remains for the mass-successful author only to restrict himself to concepts that have already been half-communicated for him by the ambient popular mood. After that the purpose of his language is to deliver the recognition signal and get out of the way -- to travel no graceful paths, to cling to every rut of popular grammar, to be completely unobtrusive -- except, perhaps, to a teacher or a critic. Thus James Bond, Tarzan and the Valentine Smith of Stranger in a Strange Land's back half. Thus Leon Uris, Arthur Hailey, Harold Robbins and A.E. van Vogt. But this is an old assertion here. Now toward a new point: Hardly anyone is so miserable as to write badly on purpose. In his mind any writer chosen at random will have an image of what constitutes good writing. And though he will from time to time deliberately depart from it in his actions for one pressing reason or another, as long as he holds the image and feels he can duplicate it in his actions, he still considers himself a good writer. The reams of flawed or uninspired copy in his closet do not have, for him, the weight of the three or four results from the times when he was acting in accordance with the image. Though he has authored Blood on My Jets a thousand times, he is redeemed for himself by one time when the muse whispered to him while he wasn't busy with something else. And that's how it should be -- for his sake. But suppose he wrote Blood on My Jets rather well? When he goes to his grave with his one manuscript and consigns the piles of lead novelettes for Stupendous Science Monthly to the dungheap, what is he heaping on what may be a vast congregation of fans? Does a writer see two audiences? A good audience for his work in accordance with his image of good writing and then, for the other stuff, an ignominious one? Doeshe perhaps see one audience without the power to differentiate? These are terrible traps to set for one's own soul. But they need concern only him, not us. For the reader need make no discriminations. Either a story takes hold of him or it doesn't. If he has an analytical bent and would like to ponder why he was swept up -- when the story's finished and readership has ended -- that, too, is undoubtedly a pleasure to some, but it has nothing to do with being a reader. It has to do with being possessed of an educated, intelligent brain -- like that of most writers. That is when reader and writer come closest together as human beings on the common ground of rationality. Reading is an experience of the spinal column, which knows only pleasure or pain and cares nothing for the writer. ers. They meet a fair number of people who have had the exto discuss it. A reader is in a condition of autohypnosis and has narrow interests. The circle of a writer's acquaintances, on the other hand, is bound to be as witty and articulate as he was while he was constructing a hypnotism. And here is a trap for all of us. Because it seems possible that a writer might mistake his acquaintances for readers and the appreciation of his intelligence for the same thing that makes readers seek out his work. A writer of fiction is by definition incapable of reading it. He does something else; he decodes the words on the paper, examines the structure of narrative which results from their arrangment and transposes this into an appreciation, much like Patton visiting Waterloo. Prosaists dig poetry, however -- and movies; better yet, music or photography. Writers have forgotten what it's like to pick up a book and just let the story envelop them. There is no being carried fully away, as there is in the concert hall or the Odeon. It's a recognized price one pays, but perhaps its full extent is not appreciated by all those who pay it. For except for the rich, uninhibited few who fantasize directly onto paper as Ian Fleming and Fdgar Rice Burroughs did, writers as they go along tend more and more to feel that good writing is writing on which a high degree of rationality has been expended -- most often, visibly expended -- and that any writing they do that has not received this benefit is the less, in direct proportion. And there are of course other occupational specialties staffed by people who take the same view. These are editors, critics and career intellectuals. (We exclude publishers; publishers as a class converse either in figures or in news releases). So there are few editorial workers who do not feel guilty about their coarser associations. I met the man who wrote the blurbs for I le was a broken man, but was recovering slowly in his Greenwich Village music store. More to the point, there are few people a writer meets who by their nature and inclination do not reinforce the belief that only painstaking work is good work -- that is, work worthy of consideration. What few people seem to propose is that while there is a difference between good and bad composition, there is no one-to-one relationship between this and good or bad communication. In all my years I have never met a raped mind that was restored to innocence by a book. I have seen people energized by stories, but they are not necessarily driven in any consistent direction. I also have a little list of stories I consider better than other stories and I can give you reasons. But I can't always give them in a manner coherent to you, because sometimes I find that the enjoyable things in a story will not yield to description in analytical terms, just as I find that a book that analyzes # proof can sometimes be rather dull. In fact, downright discouraging. One is led to the conclusion that the analytical approach is not consistently effective, and that to attempt to substitute something para-logical, as Damon Knight does with his symbolic evaluations, is to plunge into a morass. Such a morass as one would be a fool to be defending throughout the remainder of one's professional lifetime, as I would have to do were I to construct one of my own. Then again, I'm not as smart as Damon, or as any top-flight critic. But I wander from my point (a sure sign of advancing senility). In fact, I have two points (a sure sign of evil). number of skilled people demonstrably intelligent, personally charming, professionally knowledgeable and critically acclaimed who are writing good books and giving pleasure to fewer and fewer readers. Question A, under that heading: Are we selecting those writers who are by nature better equipped to entertain and leaving entertainment to despised mediocrities who may -- here we come doubling back on our tracks -- in fact not be as mediocre as all that? B, under the same heading: Is there a Mission to improve the nature and condition of the world by telling Important stories -- and if so, will you show me the Improver who is not doing it by cutting down his readership to an elite? An in-effect elite of semiprofessionals? C, if there is no Mission, why aren't we teaching From Russia With Love in English Lit courses? Was it not a signal event in the history of that field? Didn't it speak for the Cold War in exactly the same way A Tale of Two Cities spoke for the French Revolution? Isn't it qualified on a dozen other counts? True, most of the younger generation never heard of it, but how many of them do you suppose would have heard of Dickens if the establishment weren't keeping him alive? Oh, I'm oversimplifying, all right. But I would like to see somebody keep nudging at this; not because it will change or improve anything, but because it will drag us one step closer to cutting down the confused to a numerically smaller -- but unfortunately no less potent -- elite, as always happens. (As usual, I did my homework. I had some books to review. I com -- Doubleday, # -- because it is an entertaining book, which I suspect Jim thinks is minor. The rest I commend to whatever fate awaits the lazy, the pretentious, the greedy -- in short, the confused. As usual when I produce a long essay intended to cut rather close to the bone, I chose not to write the reviews, for fear someone might think I was going from the general to the particular). Finally, I'd like to apologize to all the people whose letters I never answered. I didn't feel I was in a position to get into either a good or bad relationship based on this column. And with that, we close. Point Two is that your faithful reviewer has no further grounds for believing himself even marginally competent. It has been about Five years, I thank you for your kind attention and I am hanging it up.  June #, #-July #, #I Science fiction lost one of its brightest stars when John W. Campbell passed on at the age of #. A pioneering writer in the genre under his own name and the pseudonym Don A. Stuart, he became editor of Astounding (later Analog) in #. Continuing in that post until his death, he made monumental contributions to the field. He published the first stories of many science-fictioneers who today are famous. Perhaps more than any man, he helped forge what is often called the "Golden Age of Science Fiction." Over the years, he tirelessly continued to define, shape and give direction to science fiction by deeds and words. The latter, often controversial, were always thought-provoking. Here are some memorable examples: Science fiction comes when science takes some of the tension of terror out of the future tense. (Astounding, June, No literature is sound, no philosophy of action workable, if it doesn't take a hard look at itself and consider whether the Eternal Fitness of Things isn't getting a little tight across the shoulders. (Introduction, #nd edition. Cloak of Aesir, #) Mainstream literature is, in fact, a narrow subdivision of the field of science fiction... Science fiction includes the total scope from the remote past to the far future -- and anywhere in the universe... Mainstream literature is... a small local eddy in the whole stream of history, which is the proper field of science fiction. (From a speech made to Eastern Science Fiction Association, #) Good science fiction is relevant -- more relevant than any other kind of fiction. But it isn't properly relevant to what you're thinking now; it's relevant to what you had better be thinking next year and the rest of your life. (From a private letter, #) conclusion The Moon Children were born to the wives of three lunar explorers who had become mysteriously contaminated during an unscheduled moon landing in response to a light phenomenon. apart, mentally precocious and aware of each other before they met -- and months later. Earth had had experience of the dangers of contact with alien biocosms -- particularly those of Jupiter and Mercury and the children were hated and feared. KYtheir parents and all three were brought up under laboratory condian official body. Their immediate supervision was in the hands of Nick's the mystery of the propulsion system used by Jovian delta-life -- and traded his knowledge for some of the moon grit that had contaminated his father. The grit held an instant message for the children. It told them they were not children at all -- and not human. From the moon grit, fashioned by their real mission. They are to build a gigantic tachyon tower to guide in stellar culture capable of solving Earth's growing problems with alien biocosms. Construction of the tower, however, would tax Earth's global resources. So world governments vote cope individually with the problems of the invading biocosms. tinue their study of the tetrahedron, but their problems are compounded creasingly animal-like, becomes jealous of them. The new world situation ly attached to his father and further With Earth now virtually in a state of siege by the alien biocosms, a new menace appears. Metal ants, energy-consuming and impervious to attack, overrun Skygate. Suspected of collaboration with the alien menace, these events, is being flown into custody when his plane is downed in an apparent attack by Jovian delta-life. He comes to in a hospital. While he recovers, Earth is slowly losing the battle of the biocosms. But he hears rumors leading him to believe that priceless tetrahedron -- and is being worshiped as a sex-symbol by women. Narasimachar. The gammaforms were eating his nerve tissue now. Most of the time he was twisting and moaning in an agony the nurses couldn't relieve, or howling in delirium, but sometimes he was sane and calm enough to talk. "You know, Hodian, I hate to go now," he told me during one long midnight interlude. "Just before the world ends. I'd rather be the last man. Anyhow, I'd like to live long enough to see where we went wrong." Drowsily, I pondered that. "I was a research man," he said. "I never cared much for individual people -- you learned not to in the Indian cities where I grew up. But I did have rather large ideals. That's why I tackled the space diseases. We had to conquer them, I thought, before we could hope to make friends with our neighbor biocosms. Now I guess we'll never win." He sighed and fell silent. I lay contemplating Spike Ballou and his tale of Guy's kingdom of women, who were somehow protected by the moon jewel from both space creatures and space diseases. The whole story seemed too complex and improbable to bear retelling to a dying man, so I said nothing. "I've always been an optimist," Narasimachar went on suddenly. "I believed in science. I hoped it would show us our world and our nature. I tried to make it a bridge that we could follow, from the animals we are to the gods we could be." I heard him move and felt his tormented eyes on me in the dark. "Hodian, do you think I was wrong?" I had to say I didn't know. By morning he was frothing and whimpering again. Two days later he died. Andy Elving came in to pull the sheets over his face and draw the screen around his bed, but nobody took him away. Sometimes I heard feet and thumps and whispers in the corridor, but nobody answered my buzzer. The screen blocked my view of the window, but for a time I could hear sounds in the street. The drum of fast traffic. An angry blare of horns. Now and again, squealing tires and the crash of a collision. These noises ebbed and finally ceased. By afternoon the silence was stifling. I strained to hear the clink of a dish, the echo of a footstep, a voice on the street, for any sound at all. All I could hear, with my head on the pillow, was the slow throb of my own blood. Before nightfall, Narasimachar had begun to smell. Not, however, with any odor of human decay, but with the sour and overpowering scent of the gamma-life which had consumed him, a scent like a mashed beetle. Goaded by that odor, by hot thirst and cold terror, I struggled out of bed that night. Giddy with weakness, clutching at chairs and the wall, I swayed around that blocking screen and reached the window. Outside, a full moon shone on a sea of snowy fog. It lay flat across the river valley and covered most of the town. Here, on the low hill where the hospital stood, the tops of trees and the roofs of a few drowned houses stood dark above it. Covering the first floor of the hospital, the fog came nearly to my window ledge. Far away across it, faint lights twinkled on the black hills where I suppose the refugees were camped. Though no wind stirred the trees, that vast white lake was alive with lazy waves whose slow rise and fall became almost hypnotic. Cold as the moon, serenely soundless, it shone with an unearthly loveliness that almost invited me to jump. morning out of a long nightmare in which a sweet high voice like the baby Kyrie's kept enticing me to dive into that snowy fog. I found myself where I must have fallen inside the window. Along with all the familiar discomforts of my gamma-form infection, I was bruised and chilled, too numb to move. Elving wore a mask against the overwhelming beetle reek of Dr. Narasimachar's corpse. Pale and grim beneath it, he made no effort to speak, but moved with methodic calm, hauling me into a wheelchair and pushing me down the empty corridors and ramps out to the hospital parking lot. It was deserted except for an abandoned funeral coach that must have come for the dead doctor. My stiffened limbs jerked with shock when I met the fog. Its odor struck me first -- a heavy rancid scent that made me think of overripe muskmelons rotting in a garbage can. Then I saw it through a screen of trees -- a gray uneven sea that heaved and billowed as if agitated by more wind than I could feel. Its surface layers, darkened to a leaden color, were shredded into tattered, crawling wisps, as if somehow dissolved by sunlight. Its level had sunk perhaps a dozen yards, leaving the hospital on a low island rimmed with a red, slick-looking residue where its deeper layers had lain. Beneath those writhing tongues its depths were still milk-white, opaque as ever. Lapping over the roofs below the row of trees, the dull flood filled the valley and still covered most of the city. A forlorn little group of buildings in the business district rose out of it, the tallest topped with a sign "A bad night, Mr. Kim." Elving had torn off his white mask when we came into the open. "Sorry I couldn't get you out yesterday, but I was trying to save a few of my roses." He was loading me out of the wheelchair into the long black hearse and I saw a stack of his rose bushes already there, neatly bagged in burlap. "The militia had warned us, but the fog came in faster than anybody thought. I spent the night on the hospital roof." I felt a pang of dismay when I learned that the motor keys were missing, but Andy Elving had been an astro-engineer. He lifted the hood and started the motor with a pair of pliers. I watched with a little more hope as he got under the wheel and drove us off the parking lot. The fog surrounded us. He tried one street and then another, turning back when the pavement dipped below that restless sea. Everything was covered on three sides of us. Southward, however, the ground was higher. At last we found one residential street where dripping trees and soiled roofs marked out a hazardous lane through the fogginess. Elving stopped the hearse above that street to study the crawling tongues of mist that still intermittently hid the red-slimed pavement. Stolidly calm, he pulled a plug of tobacco out of his hip pocket and bit off the end of it. "A filthy habit," he muttered absently. "Picked it up on the moon. We couldn't smoke in the spacecraft." He sat there some thirty minutes, chewing steadily, spitting unobtrusively, watching those tossing rags of fog. At last he expelled his wad into the street, closed the window, gripped the wheel. "Hang on, Mr. Kim," he called to me. "The stuff has gone down as far as it's going to. I guess it's now or never for us." Too weak to hang on, I dropped flat. The trucklike hearse lurched down the street. Gray tongues licked at the windows. Suddenly everything was white. Elving sat hunched and rigid, driving blind. We hit something. The hearse lurched and quivered with the impact. Above the whine of the racing motor I thought I heard another sound -- a thin fading wail, like the cry of some small creature in pain. Perhaps the echo simply lurked in my excited imagination, for the hearse was skidding, the tires screeching on the unseen pavement with a far louder scream. Elving grunted and struggled at the wheel. We jolted against the hidden curb, and that rancid muskmelon odor was suddenly nauseating. But the hearse roared on till I saw blue sky. Elving stopped a mile up the street. He rolled down the window, mopped his calm brown face and bit off more tobacco. "Well, Mr. Kim." He looked around at me almost casually. "What now?" "I think I know a place where the fog and the ants won't come. A place where nobody gets the space diseases." I told him briefly about Spike Ballou and the Moon King. "I've heard that yarn." He frowned in disbelief. "These times you can hear anything." "But I know the moon children. Guy Hood is my nephew. I've seen the object they call the moon jewel. I believe the story's true. I'd like to see Guy again if we can get to Fairfax." "My son was married there." He squinted deliberately at the fuel gauge and turned to peer at the uneasy sea behind us. "Just a couple hundred miles. Travel ain't as easy as it used to be -- but why not?" A shrug announced his decision. "I guess we've nowhere else to go." T HE land was empty for a good many miles. We stopped two or three times to investigate abandoned vehicles. Elving loaded spare cans of fuel from one of them and lugged a case of dehydrated beef and a plastic bag of water from another. A militia roadblock stopped us at the crest of a long hill. Three hollow-eyed young boys manned it. They stabbed bayonets into the pile of rose bushes and asked nervous questions. When Elving told them about my gamma-form infection they stepped quickly back and waved us on. For miles we drove beside refugee camps. Rocky hills were covered with tents and parked vehicles. Stragglers were still on the road and once a militia convoy held us up, crossing ahead of us with water tanks and trucks of crated food. An enormous crowd swarmed around an open-air tabernacle on one hilltop, so near the road that I caught snatches of a hymn brayed from a speaker system and phrases from a screaming preacher warning his congregation to prepare itself for the end of the world. It had never seemed so near. Dusty militiamen at a second roadblock told us that snakes had been reported nesting in the higher hills ahead, but Elving refused to believe it. This whole region, he thought, was too low and humid for the snakes. When he warned the men about my space disease they let us drive on. We met no snakes. Those bare hills were vacant until we saw a half-dressed girl standing by the road, waving us to a stop. Elving slowed the hearse, but suddenly speeded again. Hidden men sprang out of the weeds as we went by and glass fragments sprayed me from sudden holes in our rear windows. Out of range, Elving stopped to look for damage. When he found nothing serious he opened a tin of dried meat and offered to share it with me. All I wanted was water, but he ate with evident relish and washed his dentures carefully before we went on. Beyond these hills the road fell into another wide valley. To my relief, there was no fog. We drove through miles of weed-grown farmland and then across an oddly empty space ridged here and there with mounds of broken brick that looked as dead as Babylon. "Transplanet City." Elving nodded at the red mounds. "Transplanet Chemical was located here. The main industrial center in these parts. Till the ants came." The ants had removed the old metal bridges. We had to leave the pavement and jolt down a rocky detour to a log trestle the militia must have built. The road beyond climbed again into barren rises that seemed vacant until hammering bullets dusted me once more with broken glass. A tire was punctured, too, but we kept going long enough to outrun three ragged gunmen who chased us in an old farm tractor. Elving fixed the tire where we stopped that night, in a clump of trees behind a burned and looted country store. He slept a little while I sat up to watch. We went on at dawn. That day we crossed grassy highlands that must have held cattle ranches, though I saw nothing larger than a frightened rabbit. In late afternoon we reached a level prairie that sloped gently toward a dark shadow along the horizon. "Yonder's Fairfax." Elving had stopped to check the tires and to do what he could for me. "Just beyond that ridge it's the old Greenway park." He rolled the tobacco in his jaw thoughtfully. "Fairfax could offer us a problem. I don't say this Moon King ain't your nephew. But how do you aim to identify yourself?" Set against all the other hazards we had faced, the question seemed at first trivial, yet I found no easy answer. We were men. Guy's women, expecting no friends, would probably shoot without warning. Andy Elving shrugged and drove silently on before I could think of any reasonable solution. We passed abandoned farms, fields unplowed and buildings burned, and crossed another strip of pastureland where no cattle grazed. Abruptly, near the ridge head, Elving stopped the hearse and climbed out to inspect the pavement. "Cleat tracks," he muttered. "Your brother's tank." double scar the tank had made, wallowing across a muddy field toward the woods. Elving grunted and pointed, and I discovered the tank itself parked beneath a tree, sloppily camouflaged with a few broken branches. A bullet slapped the top of the hearse and whined away. "Your friend Spike Ballou." Elving slid under the wheel. He nodded toward a group of horsemen riding out of the trees beyond the tank. "I'd rather not meet them." They rode hard to intercept us, but the hearse was faster. We lost sight of them as the road wound into the wooded ridges beyond the tank. In happier times this had been a pleasant recreation spot. It was now an empty buffer zone around Guy's kingdom. We plowed through the frost-seared weeds and vines that clotted the unused pavement, detoured the burned-out vehicles and felled trees that blocked it. Elving braked to a quick stop at last, where a bridge was gone. The gap was only thirty feet, but we found no way across it. That final frustration was almost too much for me on top of all my fatigue and pain, but Elving was quietly hopeful that Guy's girls would reach us ahead of Ballou's men. Patiently he went to work on a signal. My name, we decided, was our best password. Mixing motor oil with charcoal from the burned bridge, he set about printing it on a sheet. Amid the space war's madness that spot was a paradoxical island of peace, sweet with the cool natural odors of terrestrial life and decay. Clear water gurgled over the pebbles. The frost had not touched the blue morning-glories still shining in the deeper shadows. A jay scolded Elving as he stretched our sign from a tree. Somewhere a woodpecker drummed. We waited. I must have been dozing. I sensed a sudden stillness, then a clatter of hoofs on the pavement behind us. That sound stopped. There was only the murmur of the stream until I heard my brother's voice. "Now hold your cool." He stepped from behind a screen of morning-glories, a rifle in his hand. As fat as ever, he moved with surprising agility. His shapeless coveralls were stiff with grease, perhaps from the tank. A filthy brimless hat crowned his dark Levantine head like a fez. "Well, Kimmie. I thought you were dead -- and you don't look good." His slow drawl reflected neither pleasure nor surprise. He stopped outside the bullet-shattered window after a wary glance at Elving. "What are you doing here?" "We're refugees." I nodded at Elving. "From the fog over Pitman. We're looking for Guy." "You'll be sorry if you find him." His soiled face opened in a grin as if to some gloating recollection. "I don't think you'll ever see him. His women don't like us human men. But I'm in a position to persuade Ballou to let you try -- if you'll carry a message for us." I waited. "A message from Captain Spike Ballou." Tom fumbled the crumpled butt of a narcorette out of his pocket. With no light for it, he sprinkled the last blue grains into his grimy palm, sniffed them into his nostrils and sprayed me with a sneeze. "A message to the women -- we figure Guy is sleeping now." A slow grin of dull joy had spread over his bloated face. He closed his glassy eyes and we waited while he snuffed his dripping nose two or three times with a kind of concentrated greed to save the precious juice. "Tell them Ballou wants the Moon King," he panted. "Tell them to let us at him before he wakes up. If they'll agree to that we'll promise to be tender-hearted. come back and take what's coming. But if they won't agree -- "He leaned through the broken window and I caught pungent narcotic fumes mixed with his own stale goatishness. "If they won't play our game, we won't stop with just taking care of Guy," A smothered violence burst into his voice. "We'll slaughter all his bastard brats -- and every slut that's pregnant by him. Tell 'em that!" I shrank from a spray of acrid spittle. "If they don't fall for that one -- and I don't think they will -- here's another offer you can pass along." He chuckled thickly, leaning too close to the broken glass. "This one is from me personally." He lowered his voice. "You know I wouldn't hurt Guy. My own dear son." He winked at me slyly. "I sure don't want his women -- no man will ever please them now. All I want is the moon jewel -- that lump of grit he put together. Tell guarantee that Spike Ballou will never trouble her again. Personally -- my pleasure." I wiped my face and asked what good the nexode would be to him. "Still a schlemiel ." His tone and sardonic shrug might have been our father's. "Kimmie, that crazy crystal is the only thing worth wanting in this insane world. It's knowledge -- when you learn how to use it. It's power -- look what Guy does with it. It's safetysfrom the fog and the snakes and the space diseases. What good is the moon jewel?" He slapped his greasy leg and chortled. "Anyhow, Kimmie, here's our proposition." Grave again, he waved his rifle for emphasis. "We'll put you across the creek. Give the women a choice if you get a chance to talk. Tell them to give up their king or the jewel. Give them till sundown. Tell 'em we're coming in tonight with something they can't stop if they balk. You'll do that?" shrugged in noncommittal acceptance. Tom made us back the coach and put us on a gravel side road that took us down to a shallow ford and back to the pavement beyond the stream. "I don't care for your brother," Elving muttered. "In fact, I wouldn't claim him." He drove slowly, tooting the horn. Once we stopped to wait at an old park-service campsite, but nobody came out from among the trees. He gnawed off another chew and our hearse lurched on. Before we got back to the pavement a pile of rocks stopped us. A little beyond them a heavy chain was strung between two trees to bar the narrow road. Elving tried the horn again. When nobody answered he climbed over the chain and vanished beyond the screen of vines. He was gone a long time. I lay in a feverish doze, listening to the wind above the trees and a dove cooing softly far away until voices aroused me. When I propped myself up, Elving was coming back, walking modestly in front of two girl guards, each uniformed in a single wide green garter and a singular aura of vibrant joy. A short redhead with a rusty old double-barreled shotgun, the cracked stock bound with black tape. A slim long-haired dark girl with a bright-tined pitchfork. Aglow all over with the pure spirit of youth, they handled their weapons with a playful gaiety that alarmed me. "Here they are, Mr. Kim." Elving had to look at them now and their vital beauty crinkled his brown face into an expression of reluctant admiration. "But they can't quite believe who you are." "Sir?" The redhead bent to inspect me doubtfully through the shattered glass. "Honest, are you really Mr. Hodian?" "Guy's Tio Kim?" The dark girl had a soft Spanish accent that made me Keem. "From Skygate?" The redhead laughed with sheer delight when I nodded. "It's just too grand to be true. One night Guy told me a lot about you. How you helped him learn to talk. How you were good to him when he was still too young to help himself and how you cared for hiqi when other people hurt him. He said he was afraid you were dead. He'll be so glad you came!" "Maybe si, maybe no." The dark girl shrugged to toss the sleek black mane from her face. "If you are Guy's Tio Keem, I think you better prove it. Tell us facts about him." "You knew Guy when he was tiny?" The eager redhead widened immense blue eyes. "I bet he was cute as a baby." "Not really," I said. "The beautiful moon children were Kyrie Thorsen and Nick Marko -- She looked disappointed and the dark girl scowled. "Who? Who you say?" I discovered then that they knew very little about Guy's actual past. Though he had told them something about his father and me, apparently his total rejection of Nick and Kyrie had caused him to deny that he had ever been one of the famous Moon Kids. The girl guards apparently believed him. "Maybe you lie." The dark girl stabbed her pitchfork into the sod and bent so close that I caught the clean fragrance of her glossy hair. "Guy's own bandido father try to rob him. Maybe he send you to try again." Weak and sweating with alarm, I looked at Andy Elving. He was chewing steadily and his broad stoic face gave me nerve to go on. "We're refugees," I said. "We're running from the space invaders and our own fellow men. We need Guy's help. I think he'll let us stay here if you'll just take us to him." "I'm sure you'll be welcome -- " "Meester, you better make no fonny business." The dark girl cut off the redhead. "Maybe you don't tell us everything." Her jet eyes squinted with suspicion. "Who show you where to cross the river?" "We did meet Guy's father." I nodded uncomfortably. "He gave us a message from Mr. Ballou to take to Guy's women." I caught an uneasy breath. "Will you let us deliver the message?" The dark girl was clearly in command. She frowned thoughtfully at the redhead and sharply back at Elving and me. "We give you a choice," she decided at last. "We let you turn around and go back now. Tell Ballou and Guy's bandido father the mothers want no message from them. Or else we take you to the mothers -- " "Take us," I said. "The mothers have Guy's children." She shook her head, with a hard look at Elving and me. "They share the power of the jewel -- enough to know fonny business. Maybe they say you both okay. But maybe they see you not okay and keel you." I turned to Elving. He spat delicately away from the girls, in the general direction of my brother and Spike Ballou. "No choice," he muttered. "If it's the mothers or the fog, we'll take the mothers." T HE redhead clapped her hands. "I think you're both okay," she said happily. "I just know the mothers will let you wait for Guy. You'll have to wait because he's sleeping now. He'll sleep for two or three days and his sleeping place is secret. Only the mothers know -- " "Shhh!" The dark girl hissed at her. "Lib, I think you talk too much." She pointed the pitchfork at us. "Maybe they work for Guy's bandido father. Maybe they come to spy out his sleeping place. We wait for the mothers to say." "We wouldn't hurt Guy," I told her. "He used to be fond of me and I believe he'll want to help us now. He always was a strange creature, but I believe he means to be good -- " "He's grand." Lib swelled with pure happiness. "Just too grand." Her bubbling eagerness moved her closer to the hearse. "If you knew him always -- tell us how he used to be." Wondering how much to tell, I looked at the dark girl. "Say what you like." She flung back her veil of hair, with a gesture of spectacular indifference. "The mothers will decide." "Thank you, Eva." Lib beamed breathlessly at me. "I want to know about Guy when he was a baby." "He wasn't a pretty baby," I began uncertainly. "Though I did learn to love him, it wasn't easy. He always seemedwell, more animal than human." "He's more than human now." Devotion rounded her enormous eyes. "In every way there is." "Perhaps he has changed since I knew him." Their absolute worship had begun to puzzle me. "I can't quite understand how much you seem to care for him." "My father used to speak of heaven when he prayed," Eva said. "He lived on frijoles and died fighting weeds in another man's field. But Guy -- "she caught her breath and I saw the dark blaze of passion in her eyes -- "Guy makes a little heaven here." "Look at me." Lib preened herself, lifting her pink-nippled breasts by raising her arms and combing the fingers of both hands through her flame-colored hair. "Before Guy came I was a miserable thing." She made a fetching face at what she had been. "Bad skin. Ugly freckles. Stooped shoulders and dry hair and crooked teeth. Allergies the doctors couldn't cure. And I was afraid of men. Just one date was all I ever had. A pimply grocery clerk wanted to walk me to a church supper. When he came to pick me up I got sick to my stomach. I vomited right in front of him." Shaking off that depressing recollection, she glowed again. "Guy does more for me." "Maybe you like to look at me." Eva arched her tawny torso as if to challenge Lib. "Guy makes heaven for all of us. Maybe you like to know what he did for me. You know Spike Ballou?" She waited for my nod. "Before Guy came Ballou found me waiting on tables in a helibar and picked me to be what he call a Poppy-Cola girl. I was supposed to be on trivee to sell Poppy-Cola, but he wanted to have sex all the time -- at the conventions of Poppy-Cola salesmen, up in his helicabin and even on the sofa in his private office. Most of the time he was too drunk, but he did get me pregnant. When his wife found out he let me go. With an EZ-Abort gun and a fifty-dollar bonus. I got another job waiting on tables at the Red Raven -- and he wouldn't even look at me when he came in." She spat on the ground. "Guy's better." Her luminuous eyes narrowed warily at me. "Maybe now you see why we watch the border." She gestured at the chain across the road. "Guy makes a small heaven here, but it's for women only. Men -- they all want to kill Guy and steal his jewel." "Men don't like Guy." Lib nodded, as if with a passing regret. "Take our Presbyterian pastor. I used to adore him before Guy came. Such a refined, handsome, godly man. His voice when he prayed used to give me goosepimples. But he joined Spike Ballou -- I can't imagine why." She tossed her fiery curls. "He slipped across the river on an old gray mule and found his wife in the barn milking the cow. He prayed over her till he got her convinced that Guy was the devil incarnate. He made her hide him in the house and help him spy around till he found where Guy was sleeping with the jewel." "If you plan such tricks as that" Eva waved her pitchfork with a feline ferocity -- " adids " "The pastor's wife had come to her senses by then," Lib went on, "but he tied her up and broke into Guy's hiding place. If you can imagine a minister -- he stabbed Guy and grabbed the jewel and tried to get away." Merriment began to ripple in her voice. "Guy's as hard to wake as he is to hurt, but the pastor pulled a boner. He left the knife sticking in him. That bothered Guy so much he awoke long enough to call the mothers. They sent a squad of us maiden guards to catch the pastor. It was the middle of a dead-black night, but we could see the shine of the jewel. He had it in a sack, but somehow it lit him up -- and even the mule. We caught up with him right about there." She nodded at the rocks in the road. "I sort of hated to hurt him, but we've got to defend Guy's country." She slapped at a fly crawling down her firm pink flank. "We hanged the pastor from a liveoak tree. Next day the mothers tied his body on the old gray mule and let it wander back across the river as a warning for men to keep out. I don't know why, but they just can't learn." Very briefly troubled, she frowned toward the road behind us. "Just last month, Ballou and his Fran -- she's the first mother. They hurt her terribly, trying to make her tell where Guy sleeps now and where we keep the jewel. But she finally found a knife and fought Ballou and got away." "Maybe you see now why we don't like men." Eva leveled the long-tined pitchfork into my face. "Maybe now you change your mind. Maybe you go back to Spike Ballou." Elving turned carefully to spit aside. "We'll take our chances here." He glanced gravely at me. "I told you Mr. Hodian is sick. He's had a long fight with a gamma-form infection. You can see he's not able to hurt anybody." Both girls peered at me. Eva's eyes narrowed doubtfully, but Lib's grew round with sympathy. "You do look awfully pale and bad," she said. "But you'll feel better fast if the mothers let you stay. Fairfax is a healthy place since Guy came. A happy place, too -- for women, anyhow. Our lady doctors can't understand just how the jewel works, now that we keep it locked up "Careful, Lib." "He's no spy." Squealing at Eva in a flash of resentment, Lib turned pinker all over. "But we do have to defend Guy's country." She smiled soothingly at me. "We have to guard the jewel because it really is wonderful. Look what it did for my Grandma Bloodworth." Lib turned her graceful back on Eva, who was stirring restively. "Ninety-two years old, the day she first saw Guy. Dying in a rest home. He didn't even touch her then or let her see the jewel, but she got well. Her fractured hip knitted. Her cancer went away. Her weak heart got strong again. She moved out of the rest home and back to the farm. Now -- " Lib turned to giggle at Eva. "Guy likes music -- a queer sort of music we never heard before. He's been teaching some of us to play it. Eva used to be the best. But Grandma Bloodworth is his favorite fiddler now. And I think she's pregnant again." "Who isn't?" Eva snapped, but in a moment she was reflecting Lib's happy adoration. "I told you Guy makes a little heaven here. The mothers say even the weather has changed since he learned to work the jewel. Maybe they're right. The rain seems to come when it should and the hail and the frost don't come when they shouldn't." I sat wondering vaguely what sort of unexplained interface might have been established between the forces of the atmosphere and the unknown energies of that ultimate artifact from the stars. Elving spat deliberately and spoke to Eva. "Will you take us to the mothers now?" "Your choice." She shrugged with the lazy grace of a bored tigress. "Maybe you'll be sorry." that amazed me the girls rolled two big stones out of the ruts ahead. Eva removed a padlock to lower the chain. I settled gratefully back against my pillows and the hearse lurched ahead. When the rocks and the chain had been replaced Eva searched the hearse for weapons and slid cautiously into the rear, her pitchfork ready at our backs. Lib perched on the front fender, bright hair blowing, beckoning casually with the old shotgun to guide us. We were soon on the pavement. As Elving drove on toward Fairfax it seemed to me that we had entered a phenomenal circle of joyous and abounding life. Early frosts had already browned the arid uplands we had crossed beyond the river, but here we came out of the trees into a lush green landscape. Lib beckoned us to stop beside a gnarled old tree, where sprays of young leaves and white blooms shaded ripe red apples. A mockingbird in the tree kept on apples and tossed them into the hearse. I bit into one of them when Eva handed it to me. Even though I had no appetite, its sweet juice made my saliva run. Gravely weighing the apple in his hand, Elving leaned slowly to spit his cud into the dust and impulsively tossed his gnawed plug after it. Munching the apple, he drove impassively on. But that time I was sitting up again, feeling unexpectedly refreshed and sharing Lib's bright delight in the exuberant life around us. Gaily waving the old shotgun, she pointed to a covey of quarter-grown quail running beside the road as if it would be spring forever. She smiled at a suckling calf with a black-spotted cow, laughed at a sorrel colt frisking across a green alfalfa field, clapped at a black stallion mounting a mare. Though Ballou and his raiders had managed to burn most of the buildings near the river, we were soon rolling through an unscarred zone where dairy cattle grazed near white-painted barns and halfclad women sang as they tended the fertile soil. A young girl and a dog watched a flock of white sheep. Red-painted combines were crawling across fields of ripe wheat. We overtook two women on a wagon loaded with full bags of grain. In contrast to all the waste and chaos we had left beyond the river, Fairfax itself was a welcome island of peace. The streets were clean. Naked children scampered about a school playground. When we passed a bakery, the smell of new bread set my mouth to watering again. A little group of women on horseback met us near the courthouse square. They carried haphazard weapons -- a police pistol, a hunting knife, a hatchet, a slung deer gun. Their leader was a tall, attractively sun-browned girl with long yellow hair and a bright ironic face. She had a shortbow slung behind her and a tiny child in her arms. Lib gestured us to a halt and Eva ran ahead to speak to the women. After a few moments the yellow-haired girl dismounted and they came back to the hearse together. I saw long welts across the girl's back, not fully healed, and ugly blue marks at her wrists and ankles. "The first mother," Eva was Fran Hood. She'll decide about you." "So you are Guy's favorite uncle?" Her pleasant voice had a slight, childish lisp. She paused to catch some murmured word from Lib and a quick concern changed her tone. "Eva says you've been ill." She peered into the hearse and I watched her doubts dissolve. "You do look bad. I think you need the jewel's power. If Guy wants you -- " At last she nodded, slowly smiling. "Eva will Find a place for you to wait till he wakes up." "We have a message," Elving reminded me uneasily. "We talked to my brother back at the river," I said. "A man who calls himself Todhunter Hoke -- "  Her blaze of fury checked me. "Go on," she snapped. "What's the message?" "Spike wants Guy," I said. "My brother wants the moon jewel. They're demanding that you give up one or the other before sundown. If you refuse, they're coming in with an army tank. They're threatening to kill all Guy's children -- " "Let 'em come." Her scarred arms tightened on the lively golden infant, who was peering at me as brightly as another baby Kyrie. Her smile turned defiant. "They've been here before. If they come back they'll get another lesson." Calm again, she paused to bounce her alert wide-eyed child. Elving had turned to listen, frowning. Though I had noticed no sound except the ring of fever in my ears, he said he could hear the rumble of the tank crawling toward us over the ridge. I wasn't sure anything could stop it. XX L IB and Eva escorted us to the Fairfax Manor. Twelve stories tall, it overlooked the courthouse square. The lights flickered now and then, as the women had some minor difficulty with the stand-by generators, but we had no other grounds for complaint. With Lib and Eva standing guard, we were fed abundantly and put into the penthouse suite to wait for Guy's awakening. In spite of the impending attack, I felt relaxed and oddly happy. Though I hadn't seen the tetrahedron, I believe some obscure effect from it had begun to help my body overcome that old space infection. Whatever the cause, my pain had gone. My head was clear. Once more I enjoyed eating. I even found a certain delight in contemplating Guy's girls and the radiance they wore. That night I slept well. A thudding concussion woke me before dawn. The windows shook. Somewhere a woman screamed. The roar of Spike Ballou's tank was unmistakeable now and I knew it was firing into Fairfax. I shouted anxiously to find Elving. "Out here, Mr. Kim." His calm voice came from the terrace. "I think the women are attack -- huh?" A startled gasp cut off his reply. Grateful for a sense of health I had not felt in two years, I left the bed to join him. Yellow flames exploded out of a shattered building at the street corner across the square. Women ran around the corner dragging a hose, but suddenly dropped fiat. White fire geysered out of a new crater in the pavement near them, where another incendiary shell had fallen. Glass shattered, the floor quivered and shell fragments whined. Stumbling toward the parapet, I stopped to stare at Elving. He wasn't watching the action in the street. His eyes were lifted to the moonlit sky. "What -- " For the first time in my experience, his voice shook with amazement. "What unholy thing is that?" Dread blew cold on the back of my neck when I saw what he was watching. A silver globe brighter than the moon, it dropped out of the sky, veered away from the dark courthouse, hovered over the blazing building at the corner. Elving watched it for what seemed a long time before he turned slowly to me. "I'm a plain man, Mr. Kim," he whispered hoarsely. "I always done my little bit, here or on the moon. I think I've earned a few quiet years. All I wanted now was time to grow my roses. I thought we had found the place to do it here." Sobs broke his voice. "# -- I don't like them flying snakes, Mr. Kim. Or the metal ants or the killer fog or all the space diseases. Now here -- here's this thing in the sky. At first I thoughtthought I was outa my mind. But it ain't me. It's the whole world gone wrong, Mr. Kim." He clung to me, shuddering. Down in the street, the women had vanished. That bright sphere dropped again, as if to observe the abandoned firehose where it writhed like a broken snake on the pavement, jetting water at random. The globe hovered as if to inspect the towering flame, then drifted slowly upward. At about our level it slowed again and wheeled over the courthouse in a curiously hesitant way, as if somehow hunting. It came so near that I could see the pattern of its silver surface-a curious honeycomb of small hexagons. Elving gasped and shook his fist, but it ignored us. I heard a faint whine of the mechanical ants, and I caught a sharp sulphuric scent in the air. The ants, I thought, had somehow come to invade Guy's kingdom. Not far from us the object paused. It hung still while another shell came wailing down to tear a new crater in the courthouse lawn. Abruptly it shot into the sky. We saw no more of it, but I heard the tank again. Its engines roared briefly. Its cannon thudded rapidly a dozen times. Smaller arms crackled in the distance. But those sounds died. No more incendiaries fell into Fairfax. Across the square the women returned to the hose. We watched until they had the blaze under control. Uneasily searching the sky, we saw only the pale moon setting and a pink dawn glowing. My wonder and alarm slowly ebbed into a sense of mystic peace and fitness I didn't try to understand. Sleepily serene, I went back to bed. news and food. A swarm of metal ants had attacked Ballou's tank and scattered his men. Guy was still asleep, his kingdom now secure. Elving himself had recovered his slow-spoken calm. Listening with a new tranquility, I cleaned every crumb from the tray and fell asleep again. Next day I was up before Elving, feeling almost drunkenly well. We went down for breakfast with tered guards. When we had eaten, Elving drove us a few miles out of town in the hearse to see what the ants had done to the tank. It had plowed through a hedge into a field of alfalfa. Its cleats had torn the dark earth, where it attempted to turn. Its fleeing crew had left footprints in a muddy ditch, but nothing else. We found no metal, no ants, not even a brimstone odor. Elving drove us back slowly, looking for a spot where he could replant his roses. Ballou's men were scattered, Guy would soon be waking to greet us and we all felt secure in the shelter of the tetrahedron. The space war seemed far away. with the alluring new vitality that all Guy's women shared, happily dangling her little golden daughter. The child's likeness to the baby Kyrie still astonished me and I wondered if the moon grit had created Guy to father a superhuman race, destined to inherit the solar system, if not to open a way to the stars. Those idle speculations were rudely cut short. As we parked the hearse beside the hotel the child Fran gasped and snatched for her knife. Elving shouted in hoarse alarm. Something bright flashed overhead. I heard a whine, caught a sulphur scent and saw a bright globe skimming past us. It paused across the street, above the massive cube of glass and granite that had housed the Fairfax National Bank, and came gently down outside the drive-in window. A long panel of joined hexagons flexed and dropped to form a ramp. Two people stepped lightly down it, out of the shadowy ball. A man and a girl. Neither was clad, though the man carried a folded blanket over one arm. They looked very fair at first, but the sun washed them with glowing gold. Nick and Kyrie! Dazed, I could hardly breathe. I had not expected to see them again and their arrival here was as unbelievable to me as their vehicle itself. I ran to meet them, stumbled over the curb and reeled to a halt in the street -- not yet as strong as I had felt. "Uncle Kim!" Illuminated with joy, Kyrie darted to hug me. Nick gave me a vigorous hand. I stood gaping, because they had changed. Both stood taller. No longer the skinny, big-eyed, troubled child, Nick was poised and confident, a golden god. Kyrie -- I looked at her with an ache of delight. Long ago a woman, she had grown into a goddess. Yet what touched me was not her lean, high-breasted perfection. Kyrie loved me. The light in her eyes Filled my own with tears. "What's wrong. Uncle Kim?" Her lilac scent enveloped me and her dear voice was a warm caress. "Have you been sick?" "I'm all right now," I told her. "Now that you are here." found the street empty behind me. They had fled into the hotel. I turned back and saw a thing that jolted my senses. Behind Nick and Kyrie the edge of that flexible ramp had frayed into darting fragments. The fragments were ants. A stream of them came whining toward us through the air. Kyrie held out her hand and one alighted on it. The whole globe, I now discovered, was made of ants. Sealed into a honeycomb pattern, their bright hexagonal heads formed all its outer surface. Their sleek black tail balls made the inner one. Interlaced limbs knitted them together. "Ants!" I swayed backward. "Are you prisoners'" "If you could see yourself!" Kyrie gurgled with delight. "These are ours." She smiled fondly down at the thing in her hand. "I suppose they are a little like ants, but Nick calls them replicating machines." She was trying to hand the whining thing to me. "It won't bite you. Uncle Kim." She laughed at my alarm. "Actually it won't harm anybody." To my relief, Nick waved it away. "Kyrie found the design recorded in the nexode." He spoke with a brisk assurance. "After built the first units at the shop on the mesa. They do reproduce themselves in underground centers, somewhat like insects. But really they are only tools. We used them to build the tachyon terminal." I couldn't quite grasp that until the saga of Clayton Carter began to emerge from the fading nightmare of my long confinement in the Pitman hospital. "It's already -- already built?" Staring at that bright ball of ants, I shuddered in spite of myself. "I knew a man," I whispered, "a spaceplane pilot, forced down near Skygafe. He nearly died getting out of the desert. In the hospital he was out of his head. He talked about watching the ants at work on the terminal tower until they frightened him away. But I was afraid to believe -- " "It's there," Kyrie told me. "Ten miles high." Awed, I could only nod. "Too bad your friend lost his nerve," she added. "Nick's parents and my mother have been gathering a little colony of refugees. They hoped for a long time that you would turn up." "The starships?" Wonder caught my throat. "Have the starships begun to come?" Suddenly troubled, Kyrie shook her head. "The terminal's complete, but not yet operational." Nick frowned, too. "We haven't got the beacon going. It turns out that we must have the nexode to modulate the tachyon signal. We've failed to find a substitute. I thought the whole project was dead until Kyrie located the nexode here." He nodded toward the bank building as if he already knew where Guy and his women kept the tetrahedron. "You can't have the moon jewel." I was gasping. "Guy won't let you take it." "It's bad, Uncle Kim." Kyrie's lips quivered. "I knew poor dear Guy would be hurt and I made Nick look for another way. But he says there simply isn't any other way. We've come to take the nexode -- " Her shivery whisper died. Lips parted, eyes black, she stared up the street. The golden glow drained out of her skin, leaving her a figure of frozen terror in white alabaster. She had seen Guy. flurry of footsteps and hushed voices behind us, but Guy was alone when I turned. He came down the middle of the silent street, walking with a sort of rolling swagger. Naked, he was as male and nearly as huge as a bull. Though little taller than Nick or Kyrie, he must have weighed a good quarter-ton. The short glossy fur had turned black across his back and his massive shoulders, cream-colored over his great belly. His yellow eyes slitted warily as he drew near and his black-tipped ears cocked toward the ball of ants. Their high-pitched song grew sharper. That black gangway rolled itself up and sealed itself neatly into the round bright honeycomb. The globe rose a little, floated lightly forward, settled again near us, where it blocked Guy's path. He roared. His belly-deep rattle was not loud, yet it chilled me even in that hot sunlight. It had the menace, I thought, of a starved lion challenged for his kill. Guy rolled on, unstopable as an avalanche. Kyrie darted suddenly to meet him. That savage rumble died. He stopped, trembling and breathing hard. As his red lips drew back, I saw that even his teeth had grown. He stood grinning down at Kyrie, long white fangs drooling saliva. "Ky!" Nick cried out beside me, sharply. "Come back." But she ran on. "Dear Guy!" She laughed with evident delight. "How strong you've grown -- " He wrapped her in his bulging arms. She reached up to stroke his shoulders, tiptoed to kiss his sleek-furred cheek. He shuddered and whimpered and crushed her fiercely against him. "Guy, don't! You're hurting -- " He moaned and let her go. Growling, he glared at Nick. His yellow eyes blinked when he saw me. His ears cupped toward me. With a ferocious smile he shambled to meet me, extending a gigantic furry paw -- it had grown great black claws, which now were safely sheathed. "They told me you were here." His slow thick voice was almost as alarming as his roar. "I'm glad, Uncle Kim. You were always good to me. You're welcome here." Snarling ominously, he swung back toward Nick. "Shake hands!" Kyrie gasped. "Please -- " Gravely, Nick offered his hand. Guy made no move to take it. He swayed slowly back and forth, his narrowed eyes flickering between Nick and the globe of droning ants. "Why did you come?" His voice was a modulated growl, barely intelligible. "What do you want?" "I hope you can forgive us, Guy -- " Nick began. "Please!" Kyrie stopped him. "Let me talk to Guy." Guy bristled his stiff gray neckhair at Nick, flared his ears toward the strident globe, swung slowly back to Kyrie. His wide face twitched beneath the fur and tears welled out of his tawny eyes. Poised on the balls of his feet like a boxer, he bent his ears toward her. "Guydear Guy!" Her low voice broke, but she gulped and went on. "Don't you know why we exist? The grit from the messenger missile had been lying millions of years on the moon, waiting for any intelligence to come and use it. It changed our fathers when they got there, so that we were born. We're here for a purpose. Can't you see that, Guy? His only reply was to bounce slightly aside, as if evading a blow. "You know why we were born." Her voice turned desperate. "We're to set up the transgalactic terminal, so the starships can come. That's all we're for." His ears flicked toward the clustered ants. "The starships will bring peace among the biocosms," she promised him. "The transgalactic culture will help us understand our neighbors and ourselves. It will stop the space war, Guy. It will end all our troubles with the snakes and the fog and the alien bioforms -- " "But, Ky, they don't bother us." Guy grumbled and erupted like a volcano finding a voice. "We've got a good place here, so we don't need the starships. I want Uncle Kim to stay. And you, Ky -- " He uttered a low, hoarse sound, half sob and half moan. "I want you -- so much it kills me, Ky." He shuddered and blinked and swung toward Nick like a boxer feinting. "Nick had better leave." "Please, Guy!" Pale and shaking, K,yrie clutched his arm. "You aren't as safe as you think. Not for long. We had to send the replicators -- the ants -- to stop a tank attack while you were asleep." He was ducking back, but she clung to his arm. "Guy, Guy! You've just got to understand." He trembled and stood still, quivering ears lifted toward her. "The star people sent the grit." Her high voice quavered and raced too fast for Guy, who stood shaking himself in a dull, bewildered way. "They knew young cultures often kill each other on contact -- before they learn to understand one another. The grit was sent to help us save all our planets. But we've already made too many mistakes. If we don't get the terminal open soon, Guy -- very soon -- we'll all be dead." "Get -- away!" His great throat rattled. "Just leave me alone." "We can't, Guy." Kyrie wet her pale lips: "We've got to have your help. You see, the replicators have the terminal almost done, but we can't light the beacon to guide the starships to earth without -- without -- " She faltered and stopped, quivering with pain. "We need the nexode, Guy." Nick's level voice was slow at first, clipped and intense. "Ky made me try everything else, but we can't energize the beacon without it." His words came faster and faster, as they always did when he was under stress. "I hope you'll try to be reasonable, Guy. Perhaps we won't need the nexode long. When the ships arrive with new equipment we should be able to return -- " "You always had everything." Guy drowned him, thundering like a rising hurricane. "You had brains. You had charm. You had a father and a mother. You had each other. You could talk and you stayed awake and you did things -- " "Guy, Guy!" Kyrie cried. "You know I always loved you -- " His ruthless paw swept her aside. "You always took everything." He danced like a fighter at Nick, moving with surprising tigerish grace. "You took the jewel when I was slow to use it. You took Ky." "No!" Kyrie sobbed. "Guy, you don't realize -- " "Now I do." His drumming boom cut her off. "I realize the jewel is mine. I made it. My father helped me take it. I need it. Now I mean to keep it. I won't give it up. Not for you. Uncle Kim." His yellow eyes blazed at me with a paralyzing power. "Not for Ky. Not for anybody." T HE street was quiet for a moment, except for Guy's harsh ants. The hot air stirred around us and I caught a whiff of Guy's barnyard rankness. "This will hurt you, Guy." Nick was brisk and cool. "It will hurt Ky, too. I don't like it, either, but you've left us no alternative. We've come for the nexode. We're going to take it." Guy crouched toward him like some great cat. "Ky has located it here in the bank vault. The replicators won't take long to dig it out. We don't intend to hurt you, Guy. I hope you won't attempt to interfere -- " Guy charged. "Stop it!" Kyrie screamed. "If you love me -- " Nick jumped back. Though I observed no signal, that bright ball exploded into individual ants. Whining like hornets, they swarmed around Guy. Their sulphuric reek burned my eyes. Bellowing, Guy plowed into the swarm. Ants dived at him. The bright sun dimmed, as they sucked at his energy. I staggered back, numb and shuddering from the sudden cold in my bones, sick with the bitterness in my mouth. Guy bawled with rage and pain, but the ants failed to stop him. I never knew why. Perhaps some effect of the tetrahedron shielded him. Perhaps some effect of Kyrie's terror slowed the ants. More simply, I suppose, Nick couldn't kill Guy, while Guy knew no inhibiting compunctions. His furious paws batted the ants away from his head. When Kyrie darted in he flung her aside. Cruel claws open, he caught Nick by the throat, shook him until I heard his neck snap, flailed at the flying ants with Nick's lax body, finally tossed it toward Kyrie's feet. Nick jerked and lay still. Kyrie shrieked and dropped beside him. A stranger thing -- the ants died. bodies clattered on the pavement, jangling like a shower of old clocks. Suddenly the sun shone bright again. Beneath its heat the courthouse square lay hushed and desolate. Kyrie kneeled over Nick. His flat body looked small as a child's, its color slowly fading to a frightful whiteness. Guy towered over them, rocking back and forth like a groggy boxer. All I could hear was his rough breath and Kyrie's piteous sobs. Black bitterness lingered in my throat. body, painting uneven streaks in his pale ventral fur. His gamy musk clogged my nostrils. His panting breath was now accompanied by a broken vocal sound, a slow and meaningless moaning. He shook himself at last and bent slowly over Kyrie. Long claws sheathed, he fumbled at her quivering shoulder. "Why, Kyrie? Why?" His moaning became a tormented voice. "You knew I couldn't give the moon jewel away. Why did you -- " "Murderer!" She stiffened beneath his clumsy paw and her slashing shriek cut him off. "You stupid monster! You've murdered Nick. Murdered the terminal. Murdered the world." Guy's ears drooped. He shook his great flat head in a dull, bewildered way, like a punch-drunk fighter. Reeling backward, he stumbled over one of the fallen ants, picked it up with an awkward paw, stood blinking at it blindly. With a stifled howl he hurled the dead machine against the granite wall of the bank and ran blundering up the street. taken refuge in the hotel. They came back when Guy was gone. We carried Nick inside and called a doctor. She confirmed that he was dead. His neck was broken. His heart had stopped. His skull had caved in when Guy had slammed him against the pavement. Intrigued by Nick's anatomy, the doctor wanted to do an autopsy. Kyrie objected wildly. She stayed beside Nick, I think with some desperate hope of his recovery. Recalling how often the children had baffled common human medicine, I shared that hope till it was gone. When the body began to swell and decompose even Kyrie gave up. Elving had nailed a plain wooden coffin together, and we carried Nick to the Fairfax cemetery in our own hearse. Guy and a dozen of his women walked silently behind it. We held no formal ceremony. The forms we knew seemed not to fit. I did breathe a prayer, however, to whatever powers might be concerned with the moon children and the survival of mankind and I saw several women kneeling. Guy and Kyrie stood bowed by the grave for a long time after it was filled, walked away hand in hand. " -- to show you're truly sorry," Kyrie was saying, as they came within my earshot. "You can bring the nexode and come with me back to the terminal. I don't know what we can do without Nick. But at least we can try to light the beacon." Guy halted and she swung anxiously to face him. "Now you're the silly one, Ky," he rumbled gently. "I don't like hurting you, but I can't leave Fairfax. Did you know I was happy here, Ky? For the first time ever. Because people needed me. Because they loved me as I am. They still do, Ky, even if I did kill Nick." "But, Guy -- " "Anyhow, we can't get to Skygate." His rising growl drowned her protest. "It's too far. The fog is coming up the rivers and the snakes are on the mountains and men like my father are hunting other men. Sorry, Ky." Sullen now, he stalked away. His silent women followed. Kyrie stood marble-white and marblequiet, staring bleakly at the grave, until Elving and I urged her into the hearse. We returned to the hotel. As we left the hearse she picked up one of the lifeless ants. She examined it with an air of absent and indifferent wonder, as if it had been perhaps the fossil skeleton of some long-extinct trilobite. "Could you start the ants again?" A spark of hope had stirred me. "They could carry some of us back to Skygate, maybe with the nexode if Guy would ever let it go -- " "I can't, Uncle Kim." A cold finality dulled her voice, and she dropped the motionless machine. "Because they belonged to Nick. His brain controlled them through resonant interfaces with the nexode spectrum. In a way they were members of his own body. They all died with him." We took her into the hotel. She wouldn't eat and she didn't want to talk. When we found her a room, she locked herself in. I didn't see her again for several days. And presently I found it queerly hard to remember her grief. In spite of all the staggering impact of her tragedy, the nexode must have still been at work. Though the nature of its effect was still a riddle to me, I felt as if it were somehow radiating life and love and joy, bathing us all in an invisible ambiance of vital optimism. of blithe tranquility, Elving genially declared he never expected to need his tobacco again. He had found a bed for his roses in the city park. I spent two or three sunny afternoons with him there, watching him prepare the soil and sharing his pleased wonder at all the plants budding and blooming around us as if they were immune to winter. Though Lib and Eva still escorted us, they were becoming more playmates than guards. Their petty tensions at the border had mellowed here into a sisterly affection and they had begun to smile at us so warmly that I was afraid Guy would be offended when he woke. As for myself, I was still convalescent, eating well and sleeping most of the time, intoxicated with a joy of life I had once forgotten and no more concerned with the space war and the dead beacon than if they had been incidents in the history of another planet. Relaxing in Guy's world, I had begun to feel that it might become a small heaven for Elving and me as well as for his women -- until one night the weather changed. The day before had been bright and fine. I had gone to bed in our penthouse suite with the windows open. A howling wind woke me at about midnight. Icy gusts whipped me as I tried to close the windows and my throat became choked with bitter dust. The storm had died when I woke again, but a hard glitter of frost had fallen over the city. If Guy's kingdom had been a shielded oasis of eternal spring, some inexplicable thrust had shattered the shield. Reluctant to get out of bed, I thought I could feel that space infection aching again in my bones. Elving looked dull and depressed when he wandered in to go down to breakfast with me and he confessed that he hankered for a comforting chew of tobacco. We found Lib alone on guard. Eva was in the hospital, she told us, after a sudden miscarriage. As wan and bleak as if she herself had been the patient, she doled out more tales of disaster while we were slowly discovering we had no appetite for breakfast after all. The unexpected storm and frost had blighted crops all around Fairfax. Scores of young animals were mysteriously dying. A crazed stallion had thrown a twelve-yearold girl and trampled her to death. The mothers reported that Guy had been tossing and moaning all night in his sleep. "We don't know what has gone wrong." Lib gnawed her bloodless thought perhaps the jewel had been stolen, but the mothers on guard say it's still in the vault. We're afraid it's somehow ruined or broken. The mothers say its light flickered and dimmed an hour before the storm hit." She shrugged dismally, hunched and shivering as if she needed more than a garter to keep her warm. "Guy's still asleep and nobody knows anything." Even Guy had been aroused, however. We were still sitting over our unfinished meal when I heard him booming in the lobby. His belligerent bounce was gone when we went out to greet him and his yellow eyes looked bleared and hollow. He was waiting for Kyrie and he didn't want to talk. We stood there a long time, shuffling about and watching the elevators in uneasy Fran brought her down. Looking pinched and pale, she came out to face him with an expression of blank apathy, as if he had been some unpleasant stranger she didn't care to meet. "Ky, I've been asleep." His voice was flat and too loud, as if to challenge some unuttered apprehension. "I dreamedI dreamed I was Nick." Kyrie gasped and stared. "I dreamed about the tach -- the tachyon terminal." Guy shook his head and paused to peer around him, as if uncertain where or who he was. "I dreamed we had to get that beacon working." "Yes?" Kyrie breathed. "Yes?" "That's what we've got to do, Ky." His forced, toneless voice almost denied his words. "We're going to Skygate. We're taking the jewel. We'll try to energize the beacon for Nick." "Oh, Guy!" Kyrie swayed and caught at the back of a chair. The disbelief on her thin face changed to breathless wonder and at last to a dazzle of delight. "Nick would love you," she whispered. "He'd forgive you -- if we could only light the beacon -- " G UY'S women were less enthusiastic. Already stunned by the storm and the frost, they were soon furious or weeping. Guy was sick and out of his mind, they said. His place was here with them and his babies. They all adored him and they couldn't live without him. Yet here in his own kingdom Guy was clearly the king. When he raised his voice the uproar ceased. With a level of intelligence he had not displayed to me before, he began discussing plans for the trip, at first with Kyrie only but soon including Elving and me. We decided to drive the hearse, the sturdiest vehicle available, Elving set about collecting spare parts, tires, drums of fuel. Guy called on his women for weapons and supplies. We pooled our scant knowledge of the fog areas and the militia posts and the roads possibly still open. For weapons we had two hunting rifles, an ancient but accurate target pistol and a lightweight missile launcher that Guy had captured when he had ambushed an earlier raid of Spike Ballou's. There were only two or three boxes of ammunition for the guns and nine rounds for the launcher. Against fog and snakes and bandits ours seemed a meager arsenal. Guy's new determination remained surprisingly firm in the face of all the hazards ahead of us. Yet his behavior troubled me. His normally voracious appetite was gone. His movements seemed weak and uncertain. His great paws had developed a tremor he could not control. His eyes looked swollen and dull and his voice had lost its old booming power. I began to wonder if he had contracted some unique disease. When everything else was ready he waddled heavily across the street to the bank and returned with the nexode. Kyrie cried out with delight when he put the splendid pyramid into her hands. Its radiation swiftly browned her bright face and somehow restored most of the vital beauty that Nick's death had drained out of her. She stood clutching it, peering raptly into its 'glowing hollows, until Guy replaced it in the box in which he had stored it. went out to the coach, holding up Guy's bright-eyed daughter. Hysterical, she wanted to go with us. She loved Guy. So did little Valkyrie. If he left them, they would die. Spike would come back and murder them. Guy stopped and turned to listen. His shaking paws took the naked baby for a moment. SudFran. With an inarticulate howl he blundered blindly after us and squeezed his odorous bulk into the hearse. Armed women crowded around the coach as Andy Elving tried to pull us away from the curb. Lib and Eva were there, both white-lipped with rage. Eva threw a rock that might have smashed the windshield if Kyrie hadn't leaned out to field it deftly. They all fell back, however, from Guy's bellow -- which I thought echoed more agony than anger. He was sobbing convulsively as we drove away. Most of the women fell sitinued shrieking and waving Guy's naked child over her head for as long as I could see her. through Greenway Park, a dozen miles out of Fairfax, when we splashed into the river ford. He gasped and collapsed halfway across. The hearse stalled. Guy lifted Andy from the wheel and I drove the hearse out of the river. Andy was conscious again by the time we reached the bank, gasping brokenly that he would be okay, but I saw that his haggard face had turned cyanotic. Over his hoarse protests, we bundled him in blankets and drove ingloriously back to Fairfax through stormleveled, frost-blackened fields. The nurses at the hospital squealed with delight to have another glimpse of Guy and dutifully rushed Andy into the cardiac room. I shook his lax blue hand and promised to have his roses tended while he got well. In another hour, badly shaken and deflated, we set out once more. At the wheel when we crossed the ford again, I was thinking of all the hard miles and unknown hazards ahead and missing Andy very much. Kyrie sat with me, forebodingly silent as I was. Guy was lying in the back, breathing heavily and apparently asleep. Kyrie caught her breath as we lurched up the rocky bank, and I saw a man stumbling into the road ahead. A reeling monument of pure disaster, he was hatless and tattered, slick with dripping muck, splashed with blood. When his thumb jerked up I recognized my brother Tom. Reflexively, I speeded the hearse and twisted the wheel to veer around him. Wildly waving both muddy arms, he jumped into our path again. I hit the horn and tried to nerve myself to run him down, but Kyrie was tugging at my arm. "Stop. It's Guy's father." limping to us. He was short of breath, scratched and torn, coated with evil-smelling mud. Bright blood smeared his sleeves and his hands and the hilt of a knife in his belt. Clinging to the side of the hearse, he smiled grimly through his mask of red-spattered grime. "Kimmie!" His wheezy voice tried to be ingratiating. "Kyrie, doll!" He ogled her lean golden nudity and turned to peer into the back of the hearse, where Guy was stirring uneasily on a blanket. "My son! How is my dear son?" "We were better," I said, "before we met you." "Now don't play the nudnik , Kim." He frowned impatiently at me and turned more hopefully to Kyrie. "All I need is a ride. Seems I've worn out my welcome here. I heard you here before and I was. hoping you'd be back." He touched his knife and leaned again to grin slyly at Guy. "By the way, your women won't have any more trouble from our friend Spike Ballou." "You killed him?" I recoiled from that casual implication. "Why?" "Why not?" Tom turned to listen warily at the green wilderness behind him, new sweat gleaming on his face. "Let's go." His lowered voice grew urgent. "Before somebody gets around to cut us off. Whatever you're up to. I'll lend a hand." He swung persuasively back to me. "How about it, Kimmie?" His smooth appeal recalled all the times in the past when he had spoiled things for me and I wanted to say we had no time to help him. "Please, Uncle Kim," Kyrie stopped me softly. "Maybe he can take Mr. Elving's place." She looked gravely up at Tom. "Listen, Mr. Hood. We're on our way to Skygate. The tachyon terminal is standing there, complete but dead. We have to get there with the nexode to light the beacon. Maybe you can help us." "The nex -- " Something took Tom's breath. His fat face flickered with a dozen conflicting expressions, the last a bland smile. "You have the moon jewel? Here in the car? Of course I'll go with you. A chance I never expected. My last chance, perhaps, to pay my debts to the human race and maybe to see a better world than I was born in." "I think we need you, Mr. Hood." I wanted again to object, but Kyrie had already opened the door on her side of the coach. Serenely undisturbed by Tom's rank filth, she slid over to make room for him at her side. All I could do was drive on. T OM asked about weapons and Kyrie had Guy pass a deer rifle to him. He tested the action and loaded it expertly. A few miles farther on, where the trees began to thin, he made me stop while he took the rifle and slipped ahead. After a wait we heard three rapid reports, muffled by the foliage. Kyrie nodded for me to go on. We found Tom waiting where the road broke out of the trees a halfmile ahead. He had acquired a well-worn hat, a police pistol with a cartridge belt and a bloodsmeared deck of narcorettes. Smugly silent, he lit one of them and climbed in with Kyrie. Delayed by missing bridges and turned back by road blocks, we made camp that night in the burned ruin of a barn not fifty miles from Fairfax. Speaking for Guy, Kyrie announced that she and I and Tom would stand equal watches. When I awoke at daylight the camp was silent. I couldn't find Tom. In disdain of such inventions as sleeping bags, Guy and Kyrie lay side by side on the scorched concrete that had been the barn floor and I stood frozen for an instant, shocked by the contrast between her long-limbed loveliness and his gigantic beastial and naked maleness. Shuddering to obscure emotions stronger than my anger over Guy's defection, I shook them awake. We searched the camp. I found the nexode's empty case tossed into a pile of charred rubble near the hearse. "Tom's gone," I told them, my outrage tempered with a certain secret satisfaction, because I had wanted not to pick him up. "Gone with the nexode!" Guy rumbled in speechless fury, ready to join me in pursuit, but Kyrie advised us to wash and make breakfast. Tom came back while we were eating, waddling wearily, swinging the nexode in a burlap bag. With an air of sullen submission, he rolled it out of the bag at Kyrie's feet. " Gevalt " He shivered and wheezed, shrinking away from the blazing tetrahedron. "That damn thing's too much for me." Kyrie picked it up and paused to blow and brush the dust from its bright triangles. It washed her skin with a richer tan as she smiled across it at Tom. "I was depending on it to bring you back," she told him gently. "We've got a long way to go and we still need you, Mr. Hood." "I'll do what you say." Tom's instant agreement astonished me. "Anything you say." She pointed at the water trough and found him a pair of clean coveralls that had been packed for Andy Elving. In moments we were on our way again. T HE interface between Tom and the tetrahedron was too subtle for me to grasp -- if interface is an adequate word for that invisible thing. He was strangely changed, almost a human metamorph. Unwontedly subdued, he rarely spoke and then generally with the Yiddish intonations he had learned from our father and abandoned in his youth. He obeyed Kyrie's soft-spoken requests without objection and sometimes he even listened to me. Guy became our leader, displaying a resourceful cunning that surprised me. I suppose his long war with Spike Ballou had taught him how to deal with bandits, but I never understood where he had received his new insight into people or his uncanny sense for traps and ambushes. His huge eyes shone at night with a golden phosphoresence and he could see to drive through blackness that seemed absolute to me. Again and again he stopped us to wait while he crept through the dark ahead to break up a roadblock and return with a captured weapon or a sack of supplies. We moved cautiously, keeping away from streams and valleys when we could. Often we had to turn back from an unexpected lake of fog. One frosty moonlit night we crossed a wild white river of it on a long highway bridge the ants had somehow left. Again, trapped by an uneasy white sea rising behind us, we waited through most of a day for the wind and sun to clear the fog from a shallow wash still damp from rain. Guy had gone to sleep in the back, as inert and odorific as something dead, and Tom took the wheel to drive us through the gray wisps and tatters still crawling out of the mud. As we lurched and splashed through the pools of thin red slime the fog had left among the rocks at the bottom of the wash, I saw scattered bones beside the road, bones of a horse and a man. Beneath one lifting shred of mist I caught sight of something else -- a flat and endless ribbon of livid red flesh, trapped there in the clotting mud, writhing and squalling among the red bones as if tortured by the sun. I was shivering and nearly ill for the rest of the day from a shock I couldn't understand. I had seen space aliens before and far too many remains of my unlucky fellow men. What unnerved me was the agony in that thin squalling. It had sounded like a human child. In the beginning Guy was awake and active for two or three days at a time, exhausting the rest of us. As we went on, however, he slept more often and for longer periods but with no benefit that I could see. He always awoke petulant and feverish, parched with thirst. The tremor of his paws was growing. worse. He complained of weakness and giddiness and strange aching pains in every part of his body. And he had been dreaming. his dreams, hoping she could explain them. He was never himsell, he said, but always Nick. He was always on his way to the terminal tower or already there, working to energize the tachyon beacon. "It frightens me, Ky," I heard him mutter. "Everything is too plain -- too real. I see every part of the terminal -- I understand all the parts of it the way Nick did." He drew a harsh, uneven breath. "In those dreams, Ky -- I am Nick. I think the way he did. I remember all he knew. And the worst -- the worst part is what I think of Guy." His paws came up in a searching way to rub his furry face as if seeking to identify himself. "I'm sorry for Guy. The poor, stupid beast, born all wrong. I know he's good for nothing. I try to tolerate him. Because Kyrie used to like him. But I'm afraid of him, too. I know he hates me because he wants Kyrie. But I don't know what he can do to hurt us, because even he doesn't know his own power." He struck at the air with great open paws as if fighting off some unseen enemy, his long claws unsheathed and shining like black glass. "What's wrong, Ky?" he whispered hoarsely. "Am I crazy?" "I'm sure you aren't insane." She stroked his trembling arm consolingly. "You may have picked up some space infection, but I think the nexode is causing your dreams, Guy. I think it has begun to make an interface with you." "What face?" Raw terror rasped his throat. "What's an interface? What's happening to me?" "I don't know, Guy." Her stroking hand drew quickly back as if she shared his dread. "I'm afraid to guess." Strangely, as it seemed to me, each long period of dream-ridden sleep left Guy more like Nick. He spoke faster, used longer words and displayed a better brain. Sometimes I thought I heard Nick's intonations in his voice. As he lost weight -- for he had all but ceased to eat -- I sometimes thought I caught subtle hints of Nick in the way he looked and moved. Though I never quite understood Kyrie's philosophy, she had come to accept Nick's death with what looked like a quiet fatalism. She no longer hated Guy -- I wasn't sure just how she felt. Remarkably serene, she often ignored the rest of us and all the hazards of the road while she sat for hours with the tetrahedron in her golden hands, great eyes lost in its luminous hollow. "Why fret so?" she asked me once. "I don't understand what's happening to poof Guy. I'm not sure we'll be able to reach the terminal or that we can light the terminal even if we do get there. But we're trying. Sometimes she was happy enough for childish play. Once she tried to teach me a numerical game Nick had invented. Though I was never able to master the rules, it seemed to involve a race between the players to find large prime numbers that would complete certain intricate symmetrical sequences. "Sorry, Uncle Kim." She smiled affectionately when I gave up in disgust. "I had forgotten how much you hate to think." She began to pass the time as she did long ago with her incomprehensible music, blown and beaten out of an odd set of instruments she had picked up along the way. Now the helmet of a dead militiaman made a melancholy drum. Empty cartridge cases and beer cans became sad pipes. A thin scrap of bullet-punctured armor vibrated in her deft brown hands, moaning and howling and wailing. I never learned to like her music, though it sent Guy into twitching and whimpering ecstasy. But I could never forget it, either. Its eerie sweetness and its painful dissonance and its ungraspable scales are still alive, throbbing in some dim corner of my mind. And they come back to burn my eyes with tears when I think of Kyrie. Somewhere we had crossed an unmarked frontier out of the region where scattered militia forces still tried to guard the refugees from the rising fog and their lawless fellow men. We had come into the higher, dryer western uplands stripped of metal by the ants, abandoned by mankind and as yet penetrated only here and there by probing tongues of fog. This was the region where the pilot, Clayton Carter, had nearly died in his flight from the ants, but rains had come since his ordeal. We found water in the prairie lakes. Without human marauders in our way we made good time. I had nearly forgotten the snakes until a bright autumn afternoon brought us into view of the mountains of central New Mexico. Though the uplands were still blue and far, I knew the snakes were nesting there and suddenly I was cold and giddy again with recollection of that disaster when the passing snake brought our plane down into the hailstorm. Guy was asleep in the back of the coach. I wanted to stop until he awoke, but Kyrie had recognized the mountains and she was anxious to press on for at least a glimpse of the terminal tower before we camped. Tom agreed with Kyrie that our motor probably ran too cool to attract the snakes so we went on. us. At sunset Tom gave the wheel to me and went to sleep in the back with Guy. Kyrie sat silent beside me, the glowing pyramid cradled in her hands, her anxious eyes on the dusky horizon. We crept on by the faint gray light of the low crescent moon. Here the ants had leveled everything. With no road signs, we were pretty well lost. But the moon guided us west and I could tell from the pull of the motor that we were climbing steadily. At each new crest I felt something of Kyrie's eagerness to see the tower. Yet the strain of driving tired me. As each moonlit summit revealed nothing more exciting than a higher one ahead I began to feel a desolate sense of isolation. Kyrie became an untouchable stranger. The nexode was a riddle I could never hope to solve. The transgalactic culture was a fantastic myth that didn't really matter. The loneliness of the arid and abandoned landscape crept into me until I could almost feel myself becoming the last man alive. "Uncle Kim!" Kyrie caught my arm and I almost recoiled from her. "There it is!" I saw the terminal through a break in the hills to our left, its vastness diminished with distance. Though we had been driving a long time in the dark, the sun still struck its upper stages, outlining them in purple and splendid gold. "Tomorrow -- " her voice rang with joy -- "we'll be there." Next I heard her breath catch and sudden trouble in her tone. "What's that shadow? Did you see it. Uncle Kim?" The dead beacon was the highest point of the tower, its dark onion dome hard to make out against the night sky. What I saw was an odd veil of darkness slipping down from the black beacon, dimming and blurring the upper stages of the terminal. "It's probably just the twilight," I said. "No." Her voice was sharp with fear. "The shadow of the Earth rises from the foot of the tower. That darkness is crawling down from the top. It must be something else." She glanced at the pyramid in her hands and I felt her shiver. "I think it's the snakes," she whispered sharply. "They must be nesting on the tower. After all, it rises almost into empty space, where they feel at home. I'm afraid we're going to have trouble." That trouble came sooner than I had expected. The terminal tower dropped for a time below the moonlit hills as we drove on. The rose-and-purple of twilight had risen higher when we saw it again and the stranger darkness of the snakes had crept lower from the beacon dome, Filming the whole tower with a ghostly unreality. I was trying without success to imagine a tachyon ship landing on its fading stages when a snake buzzed us. Acrid bitterness flashed across brushed me. The headlamps went out. I had the briefest glimpse of its serpentine shadow dipping and lifting against the moon-washed sky. It was gone before I heard its sonic crash. Tom awoke, grumbling Yiddish that I couldn't understand. We lifted the hood and struck matches. Though nothing else was visibly damaged, all the batteries were drained. Even our flashlights were dead. We failed to start the motor. Dead tired and still shivering with that bone-deep chill, I wanted to make camp. But we were near the summit, Kyrie said -- so high the snakes might descend on us again. She shook Guy awake and we pushed the hearse a mile or more over the highest crest. That far-off phantom tower had dissolved into the dark by then, but we pressed on down the winding canyon road toward the valley of the Rio Grande and the ruins of Albuquerque. Guy was asleep again, groaning and twitching as if pushing the hearse had been too much for him. Coasting now, we rolled down through the moonlight in a ghostly silence that set me to shivering with a sense that we had become inhuman company on an unearthly errand. "We'll be safer in the valley." Even Kyrie's soft whisper startled me. "We can surely start the motor when it's light enough to see. Can't we, Uncle Kim? I hope we reach Skygate tomorrow." The night was thicker in the canyon, but I knew the road from driving it on winter holidays in that long-ago world, now strangely unreal, when a few of us used to ski on the high Sandia slopes. Suzie had come once, though not exactly with me. I got to thinking of her, wondering what had happened to her since I left Skygate and whether Thorsen had survived his space infection. The need for sleep forgotten, I drove on in a kind of waking dream. Two or three times, where the grade was too flat, we had to wake Tom to help us push again, but the thin cold moon was still high when we came out of the canyon into view of the mesa and the valley. Steering by the gray edge of the pavement, searching the dark for washouts or rocks on the road, I wasn't looking far ahead. I felt Kyrie stiffen and shiver, heard her gasp of dismay. Braking to an instinctive stop, I saw the fog. A flood of luminescent white, nearly as bright as the bitten moon, it drowned the dead city. It filled the wide valley from the mounded ruins just below us to the line of lifeless volcanoes on the horizon. It reached north and south as far as I could see. Though I could feel no wind, the mist was stirring strangely, rising and falling in soundless waves that broke against the rocks and the dark rubble islands, shattering into ghostly dissipating plumes. "No!" Kyrie sobbed. "No!" But it was there, too deep for the morning sun to break it up, too wide for anything to bridge, spread too far to leave us a way around it. For a long time we simply sat there in the dead hearse. There was nothing else to do. I fastened my jacket and shivered in it, as the chill of the desert night followed the heat-drain of the snake, but Kyrie seemed to feel no cold. A remote white goddess in the dying light, she gazed sometimes at the useless glow of the tetrahedron in her hands, more often at that wild but silent sea ahead. My throat ached with a dull regret for the failure of our mission and a sharper pity for her. A breath of wind must have risen, because the odor of the fog rolled over us in a sudden, suffocating wave, rank as the stink of a jungle swamp, fetid as a sewer, its muskmelon sweetness blended with an overpowering foulness. Though Kyrie seemed unconscious of it, I felt nauseated. "Let's get out," I urged her. "I guess we can't move the hearse, but we ought to make camp before the moon goes down. Somewhere higher -- we passed a good spot in the canyon. The fog may rise in the dark." She nodded dully, as if nothing mattered now. I set the brakes and clambered out of the hearse. I was dancing a slow shuffle on the pavement, trying to bring my stiffened limbs to life, when she screamed. Her outcry was wordless, agonized, desolate. When I called to know what the matter was her only answer was a thin moan of pain. I struck a match and found her kneeling over Guy in the back of the hearse. "He's dead," she sobbed then. "Guy's dead -- " T OM groaned and awoke. We all crowded into the back of the hearse to examine Guy by the feeble flare of matches. He lay inert and swollen, with no breath or pulse. Kyrie splashed water on him, rubbed and flexed his furry limbs, tried to breathe into his mouth. Nothing revived him. Working over him, I began to catch an odor of dissolution ranker than his barnyard scent, stronger than the fetor of the fog. Retreating from that smell of death, I climbed out of the hearse and saw the fog again. It glowed with its own cold light, though the moon had set. Rising silently, it had already drowned those black rubble islets. A wide tongue of it had licked into the canyon, was lapping at the pavement not a hundred yards below the hearse. I shouted a warning. Tom scrambled out to join me, but Kyrie refused to leave Guy. He was too heavy for us to carry, but she stayed in the hearse, hauling vainly at him until Tom assumed our father's thick accent to tell her a peasant tale about a goat boy who was eaten by a wolf because he wouldn't leave his millet porridge. "I suppose we ought to save our lives," she whispered huskily then. "Though I see no good that we can do alone." We were waiting to help her from the hearse, but she flung herself wildly back upon the corpse. "Oh, Guy! Guy!" She lay sobbing on his body till a long foul tongue of fog licked into the ditch beside us, drowning us with its nauseating miasma. Silently then, Kyrie let us lead her up the canyon road. As we started away from the hearse my foot struck something that made a jangling clatter. I picked up the object. In the pale glow of the tetrahedron, which Kyrie clutched in both stiff hands, I saw the glint of a hexagonal head and the gleam of wire-like limbs. It was a dead mechanical ant, one of a swarm that lay in a glittering drift along the edge of the pavement, where it must have fallen when Nick was killed. I held it out to Kyrie, I suppose with some fantastic hope that she might revive it. She looked at me bleakly and I tossed it back into the dark. Dull with despair, silent as the fog itself, we climbed back into the canyon. The pyramid gave enough light to help us follow the pavement. Tom and I had brought blankets and canteens and our small stock of food. Plodding stolidly, breath wheezing, he smoked his last narcorette. I stopped to look back once. That wild white sea was tossing as if an unseen storm raged beneath it. The rocks around the canyon mouth broke it into soundless spray. I shuddered and heard Tom muttering a Yiddish prayer. We stumbled after Kyrie. We made a cold and cheerless camp a mile from the fog, in a shallow cave above the road that refugees from Albuquerque must have dug. I found a few sticks of wood stacked beside a fire circle stone, but Kyrie was afraid a flame might draw the snakes. A dull hunger was gnawing at my belly, but we had to save our food. I washed my mouth with one sip of water and crawled into my blanket. T OM was soon snoring, but Kyrie didn't sleep. Immune to cold, she sat cross-legged at the mouth of the cave, the luminous pyramid cupped in her hands. her sad eyes watching the way we had come. Her stricken desolation shook me. Bare to the glow of that great stone, her lean body was infinitely inviting, yet it stirred in me only a cold ghost of ardor. Desire itself was dying in the shattered world around us. What I felt was an infinite pity, an almost maternal urge to comfort her, to break her black despair. I remembered all the childhood years when she had been almost a daughter, with a child's frank affection for her fond Uncle Kim. But ' in this doleful moment I could not even speak to her. At last I slept, though I had meant to share her vigil. I awoke numb with cold. The cave was dark. The glow of the nexode was gone. Tom's snores had ceased. I whispered and fumbled and found nobody. Shaking with terror. I stumbled barefoot out of the cave. Seeing the high blaze of Orion, I knew that midnight was long past. The starlit road looked empty. When I called the only answer was a whispery echo from a distant cliff. My toes struck a rock as I blundered toward the pavement. The flash of pain cooled my first panic. I limped back to the cave for my shoes and then crept down the road to search for Tom and Kyrie. I failed to find them. The odor of the fog stopped me above the canyon mouth, a wall of unbreathable evil. I climbed a rock to look for the hearse. That insane white tide was breaking over it now, so that it appeared and vanished again beneath the writing tongues of luminiscent mist. A funeral calm crept over me as I stood there. I gave up my useless shouting and wandered back at last to the cave. Trembling more from dread than cold, I slipped again into my blanket and waited aimlessly for day. In my haunted thoughts Tom and Kyrie had died in some new effort to rescue Guy's body. I could visualize the fog flooding all the world, squeezing out the last human zone as it rose to meet the high dominion of the snakes. Perhaps I was already the last man alive. Oddly, my own fate did not matter now. Existence had become an emotionless abstraction. As I looked back into the past from that comfortless cave, my life revealed itself as a meaningless monotony of shabby failure and deadening frustration. I had been a lonely spectator, silently watching the rich feast of being that I could never fully join. envy of Tom, who had always seized the good things I somehow could never reach. My opposite, always the bold actor, never the timid or self-denying or self-righteous onlooker, had lived what seemed a more rewarding life than mine. Perhaps our father had been right. Perhaps I really was the schlemiel. Exhausted by such profitless reflections, I fell into a troubled sleep. I recall a dream in which Tom and I were skiing down the highest Sandia slope. I was stiff and clumsy with the bitter cold. Tom swept far ahead and I envied his bold skill at the jump. Unsure of myself, I was afraid I couldn't make the turn. I thought I was going over the rim, into the black, pine-fringed canyon below it. But a girl's warm voice called my name. At first I thought it was Suzie, but it was Kyrie I saw when I looked back, nude and splendid, somehow flying over the snow with no skis at all. She overtook me and reached to grasp my hand. I knew we could make the turn together. Something woke me then and the shock of stark reality shattered the joy of that improbable dream. No voice had called my name. A gray ray of dawnlight stabbed into the cave, but it brought no warmth. I was numb with cold and utterly alone. T OO numb at first to stand or think, I crept out into the heatless sun. I sat for a while on a rock outside the cave, kneading my stiff muscles. When I fell able I drank a careful third of the water left in my canteen and shuffled, down the road to look for Tom and Kyrie. Where the canyon widened I could see the upper stages of the tachyon terminal rising out of pink mushroom fields of far-off cumulus into the cloudless stratosphere, still wavering and fading like a high mirage beneath the shadow of the nesting snakes. The pavement lay empty ahead, with no trace of Tom or Kyrie until I came out of the canyon on the shore of the fog. Its heaving surface seemed calmer by day, dissolving into crawling blueish tatters as its tiny live balloons exploded in the sun, but its putrid fetor turned me ill. It had receded enough to uncover our abandoned hearse, its tongues still licked around the wheels. Beneath those fading wisps of mist, I saw patches of wet, blood-colored slime on the pavement and on the rocks where the fog had lain. Reeling and retching from that rotten sweetness, I improvised a mask from a handkerchief saturated with the last water in my canteen and plunged through those writhing tendrils to reach the hearse. Guy's body was gone. For a moment I thought Tom and Kyrie must have come back to carry it away. Then I saw blood puddled on the floor, seeping from a mound of putrefying fur. Glassblack claws gleamed on the fingers of a queer glove peeled from a gray-furred paw. I reached gingerly to move a dark-tipped ear and spilled loose fangs that clattered like gravel. Shrinking back, numb with shock, I thought the body had been butchered by the unseen creatures of the fog. I searched the pavement, alert for any other evidence, for any sign of Tom or Kyrie, and found another puzzle. Gouts of red had splashed the pavement behind the hearse. At first I thought the receding fog had left them there, but then I saw that the glistening patches of blood-colored slime had not come so high. The gouts were Guy's blood, marking a trail where his flesh had been dragged. The odd thing was the direction of that darkening trail. It led me off the pavement, across a rocky ditch scattered with the dead metal ants and up a steep slope away from the road and the slime and the fog. Scrambling up that slope, I discovered Tom and Kyrie in a scene that stunned me. The mechanical ants lay dead in glittering windrows of silver-and-black around the edges of a great disk of white stone. Kyrie sat cross-legged on one side of the stone, her golden nudity splotched with blood. Tom stood at the other, bare to the waist and scarlet as a pirate. Between them lay the red body they themselves must have skinned out of Guy's fur. I caught my breath to call out, but something stopped me. My wonder and horror were compounded with a sudden sense of awe. The shining, snow-white stone was like an altar. Kyrie was the mad priestess, Tom the sacrificial priest. The bleeding offering between them must have been Guy's corpse. Shaken, I crouched behind a shelving stone to watch what went on. The skinned head lay in Kyrie's lap. She held the blazing nexode against its forehead. Standing over the dark-clotted feet, Tom was chanting ritual words I didn't understand. In response to the chant, Kyrie's red fingers flashed about the nexode, touching its bright triangles as if they had been the controls of some mysterious machine. I crouched there a long time. Ants crawled on me -- the live desert insects. Afraid they might sting, I was more afraid to move. From Tom's voice and Kyrie's action I began to catch a sense of urgent tension, a grave purpose and a growing fear of failure. Tom's chant abruptly stopped. Kyrie froze, staring at him across the tetrahedron. In the silence I heard the lazy drone of a big blue fly and saw it settling on that stiff red face. A red hand brushed at it -- and I gasped with astonishment. T HE body was alive. A stranger discovery -- what I saw beneath the blood was not naked muscle and tendon but intact skin. I realized that this was not the hideous flayed thing that I had been imagining, but somehow a whole man. His hand reached for the nexode. Moving with an easy grace, he sat up on the spattered stone. "Hi, Ky!" "Nick!" Her breathless cry was a sob of mingled agony and joy. "Nicky!" Something close to terror shook me, because the voice was Nick's -- perhaps a little deeper than I recalled it. The bloodbathed man was Nick -- or at least an excellent copy, perhaps a bit heavier and taller. Frowning a little against the sun, he looked around and saw Tom. "Hello, Hood." "Gevalt!" Tom stumbled backward. His fat hands flew up defensively. For once in his life he was ruled by pure emotion, by terror at his own handiwork. "What -- what sort of thing are you?" His gazing eyes appealed to Kyrie. "What have we done?" "We've beaten death," Kyrie whispered. "What is all this?" Nick came to his feet with the agile grace I remembered, peering down at the blood-smeared stone, off at the crawling fog, back at Kyrie. "Where's Uncle Kim?" I caught my breath, but found that I could not announce myself. I was still too deeply shaken, paralyzed with bewilderment and dread. "Asleep in the cave," Kyrie was saying. "Poor little man. I'm afraid he hasn't entirely got over his gamma-form infection. I couldn't bear to disturb him." "Fet him sleep." Nick turned as if to step off the gleaming disk, paused to frown at the glistening piles of lifeless ants around it, came slowly back to Kyrie. "We've problems enough of our own." "But we're all right now." Her soft voice was almost too quick and eager, as if she could hardly believe her own words. "We can solve them, Nicky, now that you're alive!" He stood staring across the tattered sea of fog toward the far white billows of cumulus and the dim mirage of the terminal tower rippling in the sky. "The most singular thing." He glanced at the bright pyramid in his hands and back at Kyrie's tense face. "Stranger than all of this." Anxiously he stepped a little toward her. "I've been dreaming. Dreaming I was Guy. I even thought I'd killed Nick -- " His voice broke off sharply. He leaned to peer at Kyrie's hands, swung to frown at the dark-stained knife stuck in Tom's belt, suddenly looked down at himself, rubbing in a startled way at his own blood-stiffened skin. "So I was Guy!" Nodding in a dazed way, he looked back at Kyrie. "But I've been--he's been -- changing?" Slow at first, his breathless voice came faster and faster as he spoke. "The nexode did it, I suppose. The nexode and the nonhuman side of our own nature. I must bea metamorph! Like that red bubble of beta-life in my mother's laboratory bottle. All Guy's illness that sleepiness and pain we couldn't understand that must have been the beginning of the process. And now I've been born again. Out of his skin. With you and Hood for midwives."' "Oh, Nicky!" Kyrie was shivering, her voice so low that I could scarcely hear. "It's true Guy killed you back at Fairfax. Last night when the fog stopped us here I thought he -- you -- were dead. I thought we were done for, our lives wasted and the terminal lost". I can't quite believe -- " "I never expected anything like this." Nick was turning and flexing his hand, eyeing it with the dazzled wonder of a child unwrapping some fabulous toy. "I never hoped" He stopped to nod. "But I suppose our experience here on only one planet was too limited to show us the full capacity of life." He looked at Kyrie. "How did you do it?" "You did it, Nicky. Though I suppose the nexode helped. Last night in the cave -- it showed me that you were alive in Guy's dead skin. It showed me what we had to do and I woke Tom to help. But with time enough -- if there had been no danger from the fog I think you might have done everything yourself." "You're too good, Ky." He was fondly teasing for an instant, before his grave eyes lifted back to the shadow-mantled terminal. "But we still have work to do. There's our beacon, dead." "A roosting place for the snakes." He frowned at the lifeless ants piled around the white stone. "Our replicators are also dead." "They stopped when you died." "Then they ought to start again." Hesitantly, trembling, she picked up a small, still machine and held it before him. He thrust a red forefinger toward its silver head. Though no spark passed, the bright device came alive, stirred in her hands, rose to wheel around Nick's head. I heard a high mosquito-whine, which spread all around me. The dead ants below the stone began rising from the ground by twos and threes, by scores, by hundreds. They flew to join a circling swarm, which settled toward the end of the stone. I smelled hot sulphur. "Ai-yi-yi!" Tom cowered back. "All this is too much." "It's okay, Mr. Hood," Kyrie called to him. "The replicators are no space invaders. They are ours." The spinning swarm poured down toward the stone. Though I saw no gesture of command, the ants began joining together, limbs interweaving, silver heads joining to form honeycomb panels which flexed and fused into a hollow ten-foot globe, a black gangway rising to its open door. "Perhaps we weren't born for nothing." Nick waved Tom and Kyrie toward the ramp. "Let's get the nexode to the terminal. If the snakes don't object too much I think we can light the beacon after all." "Nicky! Nicky!" Kyrie whispered. "If we can!" She skipped up the ramp with the tetrahedron, but Tom hung back, scowling at its surface of slick black tail-balls as if he expected them to sting him. "Will the ants do anything you want?" He squinted shrewdly at Nick, loud and bold again, almost himself. "Could you make them find me a pack of narcorettes?" he asked. "Come along," Nick said. "I want to pick up Uncle Kim." "My yukl brother" Tom shrugged. "Why waste time on that poor shmuck? Better leave him where he is. He's no utopian. He'll never be happy in our new world." challenge Tom. Kyrie was calling from inside the bright globe, I think defending me. Nick took Tom's fat arm, swung him firmly toward the black ramp. I tried to shout, but something caught my voice. Something made me giddy. Something brushed me with icy sweat. Something left me drained and swaying. I sank back behind the shelving rock, sick with a puzzled rage at myself. Though I never knew exactly what had seized me, there was the blackness inside the hollow globe. There was the piercing stridor of the ants that formed it -- and their steamy, acrid reek. There was Tom's cautious shrewdness as he tested the black ramp and his bold swagger when he climbed it. Then there was Nick, red with alien blood, newborn from Guy's hide, gazing impatiently across the heaving tide of fog toward that bank of far cloud and the snakeveiled stages of the tachyon terminal. Though I had known the children all their lives, Nick was a frightening stranger now. Sobbing miserably, bewildered at myself, I began to feel a barb of piercing truth in Tom's scornful words. I had known and loved the children as fascinating visitors to my own familiar world, but this world was theirs. I feld a sudden sick conviction that it was not forme. My world had been the narrow ghetto flat where the heat was often off and cockroaches swarmed under the sink and the toilet overflowed. It had been the petty bickering of my parents, my father's ugly business and my mother's ugly death. It had been Tom's scheming climb and my own half-honest career in promotion and publicity. I was what that gray and painful world had made me -- a schlemiel , perhaps as my father used to say. Looking at myself in this cold light, I could see no useful place for me in the new world beyond the fog, in that dazzling future the children were about to usher through the tachyon terminal. I lay silent in the grip of a sick paralysis as Nick followed Tom into the silver globe. The ramp rolled up to seal the dark opening. Sweating and trembling, uncertain of what I wanted or what to do, I watched the bright ball sail up the canyon toward the cave. It dropped beyond the cliffs. Nick or Kyrie must have left it to search the cave for me. A few minutes later it rose again, a diminishing moon gliding high above the fog toward that far tower. Calmer after it was gone, I began to feel a remote sense of hope and joy. Whatever became of me, Nick and Kyrie were moving toward their cosmic triumph. barren moon the black seed from the messenger missile was about to bear its destined fruit. Impelled by an aimless curiosity, I climbed to that reddened altar stone. Its top was circular and flat, twenty feet across. White and dense, slick and oddly warm to the touch, it was hard enough to break the point of my pocket knife. Before I had solved its riddle, a new swarm of ants funneled down upon me. Frightened and bewildered, I stumbled out of their way. They rattled on the stone like metal hail and began to knit themselves into a silver shell around it. The sun flickered and my tongue turned bitter. Their shrieking whine drilled into my brain. Staggering back, I watched them rising with the stone. Its shape astonished me. No disk, it was a cone -- the capstone, I believe, shaped to complete the onion dome of the tachyon beacon. Dropped by the ants when Nick was killed, it had fallen point down, penetrating to leave its base nearly level with the rock it shattered. Extracted, it left a yawning pit. Blind to me, the ants soared away with it. Their shriek died, and their brimstone scent dissolved in the stagnant stench of the fog. The sun turned hot and bright again. I tossed a pebble into the pit and wandered back to the road. through a mist of gray regret, thinking wistfully of Guy's abandoned kingdom and the warm refuge from all the terrors of space I had once found there. My dull wonder about the fate of our green-gartered guards became a sudden decision. I would go back to Fairfax. The short climb had left me already puffing for breath and looking for a place to sit. My purpose wavered a little when I realized my weakness and remembered the cruel ordeal Clayton Carter had endured in his epic retreat from the ants. But as a fugitive from the terminal and the children's new world I had nowhere else to go. The journey might be easier for me than Carter had found it. I should find water enough after the autumn rains. With luck, I might find food plants maturing on abandoned farms and game or cattle that I could kill. By afternoon I was almost cheerful, whistling as I cleaned the deer rifle, sunned the blankets, filled the canteens from a spring I had found above the cave, repacked my slim provisions -- already finding an emotional haven in the primitive simplicities of a roving hunter's existence. As I lay that night on my hard bed, waiting to start at dawn, I felt a curious detachment from everything, almost as if my life had already closed. Looking back at myself, with no emotion save a dull desire that things had been different, I found myself weighing all my shabby failures. If I had really been a schlemiel , where was the blame? My flaw had been a failure to love, it seemed to me, due to a failure to understand. It was, I thought, a family fault. If my mother had ever learned to laugh at my father's Yiddish jokes, if he had ever learned not to laugh at the ways of her Ozark kin, if Tom and I had really known each other... At last I slept, plagued by dreadful dreams in which the scarlet, skinless monsters of the fog were stalking me to take my hide. I woke before dawn, aching all over, soaked with sweat and shivering. Imagining that the gammalife was teeming in my blood again, I lay staring drearily at the dark until I saw a blood-red glow on the back of the cave. At first I thought it must be another symptom of my space infection, distorting my senses and eroding my reason. I tried to lie still, but panic began to whisper that some new doom had come to consume the world. I crawled out of my wet blankets to find the source of the glow. The westward sky was turning strangely scarlet above the black canyon rim, as if a dying sun were rising in the wrong direction. I staggered out in bare feet and went back to get my shoes. That red glare was bright enough to help me find them. Shaking with cold and dread, I crept down the road to get a better view. The glow in the west grew brighter as I went. Slowly changing color, it had washed the stony cliffs with gold before I came in sight of the tachyon terminal. A dazed comprehension stopped me there, my terror fading into awe. The light in the sky shone from the onion dome that topped the tallest tower -- no doubt completed now with that conic altar stone on which Nick had been reborn. Relieved, yet still appalled before all the unknowns of the transgalactic universe, I knew that Nick and Kyrie already had the beacon calling across the lightyears to their mysterious progenitors. I stood there a long time, watching the beacon change. The shroud of snakes was gone. Dazzling in the crystal air, the tower looked near enough to touch. The tall cone bathed the barren landscape in an eerie green, which faded slowly through midnight blue into a dying violet dusk. I waited, shivering in the wind, until the red was born again. The actual tachyon signal was invisible of course, leaping across its own strange domain beyond the limited velocity of light. This visible signal must have been meant only to guide a, decelerating starship through its final homing approach to the landing stage. Even as I thought of that, the changing splendor of the beacon brushed me with a vain regret. I might have been part of all this. I might have called out to Nick and Kyrie and followed them into their flying globe. I might have been with them in that wondrous tower now, waiting for their starborn creators. Instead... Whimpering and miserable, I stumbled back to the cave. As I lay there shivering through the rest of the night, staring at the changing glow on the smoke-stained rock, I decided to wait, to watch for the tachyon ship to come in. But as the gray dawn came a cold west wind drowned me in the fetid muskmelon-sweetness of the fog and suddenly I knew I couldn't stay. I had no way of knowing when that tachyon signal might reach the unknown powers of the messenger missiles or whether it ever would. Even if the signal should bring a starship to earth, I had no way of guessing the time a tachyon flight might take. I did know that the handful of dried beef and parched corn left in my pack would keep me going for only a few days. Sick with the breath of the fog, I struggled stiffly into my gear and began the long climb out of the valley, toward the snake-haunted summit and the abandoned lands beyond. The rainbow glow of the beacon was still washing the cliffs above me with colors of wonder when I set out, but the gray daylight soon erased it. Whether from starvation and exhaustion or from that recurrent gamma-form infection -- or from sheer depth of hope -- my awareness shattered into disconnected fragments. Sun, dust, rocks, frost, hail. Mountain wall and desert mirage. The blinding blaze of thirst, the crazy fever buzz in my head, the black laughter of despair. Days of slogging on when all I wanted was to lie down. Nights of paralyzing cold in cheerless camps where I was afraid to make a fire because I thought the snakes might come. Those cruel trials were real. They are tangled in my memory with stranger impressions in which hard reality seems to blend into fantastic dreams. I recall one moonless night when I lay on flat high ground, with not even a rock or a bush to break the icy wind. I couldn't sleep. I was following the wheeling constellations, wondering dully what sort of creature might come from the stars to answer the tachyon signal -- if anything did -- when I thought I saw a new star in the east. Or a planet, perhaps, for it didn't twinkle. Yet, cobalt-blue, it was the wrong color for any planet, and it was soon too bright. Its color slowly changed, to an unbelievable green, to ocher and orange, to a redder red than Mars. It went out and winked back again, indigoblue. Faster than any possible planet, it climbed toward the zenith. In the green and yellow phases its unearthly light tinted the dead landscape around me with a frosty, moonlike strangeness, so bright I trembled with an irrational terror that the snakes might discover me. Sailing overhead, it swelled into a visible globe. I put down the mad urge to look for a hiding place and stood to watch it sinking toward the west. The cycle of its changing hues had begun accelerating and now I began to notice a sort of echo that must have come from the tachyon beacon. The terminal was below my horizon here, but I could see its remote glow against the sky, a red explosion as the red globe winked out, a race through the spectrum while the globe was dark, a blue dusk dying behind the black mountain ridge as the globe burned blue again. Always alternating, those cycles of light ran faster, faster, until the flicker hurt my eyes. Yet I watched until the globe had set like a flashing moon behind the far peaks and the night was abruptly black again. I don't remember wondering what that luminous object couid have been or why the terminal had answered its flashes or where it might have fallen. Rolled in my blanket again, I lay numbly waiting for the snakes. I must have slept, for I remember thinking they had found me. Turned to ribbons of raw red flesh, they stank with the suffocating foulness of the fog and sang to me in Kyrie's voice while they licked my skin away. Again, in an endless nightmare that must have been at least partly real, I thought I saw the fog. Drenched and shivering from a thin fall rain, I had nerved myself to climb one last hill. In the valley beyond, instead of the firewood and shelter I longed for, I found a flood of heaving whiteness, invisibly stirred from beneath and reaching as far as I could see. I slept under the road in a concrete pipe, sweating through dreadful dreams in which the fog had risen over me and trapped me in the pipe. I lay too weak to move or even breathe. When I crawled out at dawn that evil sea had somehow drained away, leaving its red slime to mark the level it had reached. My real dreams are still haunted with the figments of the strange daymare that followed, in which I was struggling to cross that fearful valley where the fog had lain. Sick with its lingering muskmelon fetor, I slipped and toppled and crept through the blood-colored muck. I saw animal bones coated with it. Once I heard a dreadful mewing sound and saw a quivering strip of naked redness trying to hide itself in a reddened human skull. The highway bridge at the bottom of the valley was missing. I was trying to cross the rocky gorge, splashing and staggering through a shallow river of that clotted the ants and caught their sulphuric scent and saw a silver-colored ball dropping toward me. I tried to wave it away. When it came on I raised the deer rifle and fired. The only result was a flicker of darkness and a bitter tang on my tongue. The globe dropped to the brink of that red river. A long strip of honeycombed ants folded down to make a black-lined gangway. Dream or not -- I was not certain. Her nude beauty clashed against the horror of that redwalled valley in a way that dazed me. The daylight washed her marble flesh with swift pink and gold, as if she had been a stone Venus touched with instant life. Not quite sane, I brought up the rifle. "Get away!" I gasped. "I can't endure anything else." "Uncle Kim -- " Pain choked her gentle voice. "Don't you know who I am?" "You're a space alien." I listened to my own hoarse voice with a dull astonishment. "You're like the snakes. Like the things that make the fog. Like the gammaforms in my blood. Like whatever creatures the beacon will bring from the stars -- " "But the ambassadors are already here, Uncle Kim." Her quick voice and her anxious dark-eyed smile tried hard to comfort me. "They arrived on the tachyon ship, but you don't need to fear them. They've come to bring the transgalactic culture. To help everybody. I think you need help -- " "No." The rifle rose. "I've had enough from space -- " "The snakes are gone." She glanced into the sky. "They never liked it here. Our air has too much water and oxygen for them. They prefer to meet visitors out in space -- an the vicinity of Jupiter -- where they feel more at home." "But there's the fog." I waved the rifle at the red-slimed cliffs above us and the blood-colored river lapping at my knees. "The things from space that make the fog -- " "We asked for them -- "she tossed back her flowing hair -- "when we invaded Venus. You remember the color changes our manned probes observed? They were caused by blights that spread from the garbage we dumped -- spread somewhat faster than the gamma infections ever spread on Earth. Those blights killed half the aerobic life in the upper air of Venus. The more intelligent flying things down in the temperate middle levels found their food supplies depleted. They struck back in selfdefense. The fog covers a military expedition composed of special mutant creatures bred to survive in our biocosm and sent to stop us from polluting their planet. It was a force from Venus, by the way, that trapped our men on Mercury." "If we -- " The simple truth staggered me. "If we had only understood -- " "That's why the snakes were here." Her urgent voice came faster, faster, in a way that made me think of Nick. "They're wellmeaning and more or less intelligent -- though I don't think they ever knew what they were doing to our aircraft. They were trying to communicate. The breakthrough came when they were able to explain the situation to our transgalactic friends. You should have seen the happy way they dived around the terminal when the Venusians began pulling back the fog." "Why bother about the fog -- " bitterness croaked in my throat -- "when the human race is dead? Why not just invite our space friends to take over the planet?" "Uncle Kim!" She made a face at me. "Things aren't that bad. The Venusians were pretty humane, by our old military standards. They concentrated their forces around our space centers-at Skygate and the Sino-Soviet installations in the Gobi. There was no mass slaughter. Though the snakes did stop air travel and the fog drove men off the sea, we've found most of the human race alive and w'ell, on dry land." I stared down at my red-caked hands and blankly back at her. "So the world didn't end." Her rapid voice had slowed, and she had time for a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the shock! Our big job's done and we've got a short vacation. The ambassadors are off to call on our neighbor planets. Your enterprising brother has invited my poor mother to try the new snow on the Sandia slopes. Nick is on his way to visit old friends at Fairfaxenough of Guy is left in him so that he had to see Fran be surprised!" S HE laughed, shrugged. That careless gesture may have hidden more feeling than she showed, but the liquid flow of her golden body nearly stopped my heart. "And I came out to look for you again, though everybody else had given you up." Halfway down the black gangway she paused to study me. "About time, too. If you could see yourself -- a perfect scarecrow!" She laughed at me. Wading to meet her, I stopped again, stung by her look of sheer delight. "Kim!" Concern erased her laughter. "What's the matter?" "I'm just a man, for one thing." My own sardonic voice surprised me. "I'm afraid I don't belong on your bright new superhuman world." I saw her hurt protest and raised my gritty voice. "For another thing, I believe my gamma-form infection has come back." "Our new health service will soon cure that." She left the ramp and picked her way across the slick red rocks to the brink of the bloodcolored stream. Pausing there, golden hands on golden hips, she surveyed me from enigmatic eyes. "There's a quicker treatment." Her warm amusement was mixed with something else. "One we might both enjoy. You know I was born with a natural immunity to all sorts of infection. There's a way I can use it to cure you -- though your doctor might frown at the method." Waiting to discover what she meant, I stood admiring her tawny loveliness. I felt my pulses throbbing and wondered vaguely if her unearthly power had already begun to lift me out of my long exhaustion. Fond recollections were dancing in my brain like champagne bubbles -- images of Kyrie's infant elfin charm, of her tiny hand trustingly in mine, of her secret delight in her own peculiar music, of her strange games with little Nick, of that magic moment when the touch of the nexode made her a woman. Now the sunlight gilded her breasts and thighs and I was shaken with a spasm of unexpected lust. Dismayed, suddenly conscious of my hungry stare, I tried to turn away. "You needn't feel so damned incestuous!" Her ringing laugh mocked my confusion. "After all, you're not my real uncle." Her eyes turned grave and almost sad. "You see, Kim, the nexode showed me long ago how you felt about me. I think I've always understood you better than you understand yourself-and loved you more than you dare love anybody. That's why I've come to find you." Her impish look faded into a cool directness that took my breath. "That's the reason for my only reservation now. I don't want to hurt you more than you've been hurt. Whatever " She paused as if to weigh me. "Whatever we do, I hope you won't let it matter too much." I waited in a daze. "First of all, there's something I must tell you." Her voice fell soberly. "Nick and I will be leaving on the tachyon ship. We're to represent our whole group of planets. I don't know when we'll be back." Her face reflected my pain. one generation beyond Dune Frank Herbert returns to the duneworld of Arrakis for an epic of imperial intrigue and human ecology-an epic that spans the universe. That's why we can tell you where it ends We're reprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today :  (N#) # ' j (S#) #C (S#) #C  I (S#) # I j (S#) # j I Name I Address I  City State... Zip  I Include list price plus a dime postage for I Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # "I'm sorry, Kim. I don't like leaving you, my mother, or Uncle Yuri and Aunt Carolina. But it's part of the job we were born to do, and we're both excited about it. It's another big mission, helping all our worlds adjust to the culture of the stars." I nodded bleakly as that sank in. "I thought you ought to know," she said. "Because no other creature can follow until certain problems of health and law have been cleared up. We'll have to leave you here." She came toward me through the clotted mud. I dropped the rifle. She kissed me -- Kyrie kissed me. I followed her out of the mud. suddenly a joyous song. in my memory, too precious for any bare description. Drunk with the wine of her lilac-like scent, wedded to all her golden wonder, for that tiny time I was more than merely mortal. Kyrie! Giving me that taste of superhuman joy, how could she have asked me not to let it matter? Her farewell left a desolate ache in my heart. Blind with tears, all I saw was a blur of blue when she opened the door of the globe. "The starship is loading on the top stage now." Her voice was hurried and uneven. "The air up there is too thin for you. I'll have to leave you here." Her cool arms caught me in a last quick embrace. "Don't forget me, Kim." Had she ever been far from my mind? Looking out, I saw that the globe had brought me down to the middle of a vast white plain with only blue fog around it. A chill wind bit my nakedness. A forlorn desolation seized me and I turned back for a final glimpse of Kyrie. "You'll be okay, Kim." Her voice had the edge I needed. "After all, you're a big boy now. I know you're well -- and strong enough!" I heard the love beneath her impish malice and suddenly it struck me as a monstrous fault that I had never properly told her how I loved her. I tried to speak, then remembered that she knew all I felt. I waved and strode down the gangway. The blue glow had died and now the cloudy dawn revealed the distant loom of the central tower, lifting forever to that higher stage where the air was too rare for me. In a moment the beacon was burning through the gray clouds again -- a glow of rose, a shower of gold, a floodlight flowing over all the unearthly magnificence around me. I saw Yuri Marko and Carolina riding up a ramp to meet me, undismayed at being left behind, waving and grinning greenly as the beacon changed. With a certain reluctant eagerness, I stepped into the future I had fled. ir Top-flight science fiction and fantasy from... Eight mind-bending tales conceived and executed by the richest imaginations in science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, John Campbell, Jr. and Jack Vance. A#S #c Ten dazzling stories that explore the complex relation between modern man and his machines. The authors include Lester del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Brian Aldiss and other top-notch names. A#N #C A pair of scientists challenge the time barrier and fall into a horrible, mind-twisting trap. "Rene Barjavel has feeling for the fantastic -- knows how to build a suspenseful story." Enter a terrifying world of tomorrow where perversity is encouraged and insanity is enforced -- a world whose beginnings are even now stirring! A#S #c Available wherever books are sold, or write: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. # Houi's your Imagination Quotient? Test yourself, then treat yourself to # volumes of fascinating mind-stretchers for just I No one on your world has ever seen the stars. A strange legend foretells something called "night" will come tomorrow for the first time in # years. What will happen when it does? visit another planet. Your ship lands and you find the house you grew up in. The woman on the porch is your grandmother! What's the explanation? A great starship suddenly confronts another ship from an alien civilization. Can either race be sure the other won't conquer his world? Is there an alternative to destroying each other? You'll find the dazzlingly imaginative, beautifully logical answers in three famous stories in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame -- an anthology of the greatest SF literature of all time. And you can have this #-page, hard-bound book -- plus two more masterpieces of the world's most entertaining, provocative fiction -- for just I plus Rny # boohs for I with trial membership Science Fiction Book Club # Please accept my application for membership and rush the # books whose numbers I have printed below. 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Offer slightly different in Canada. Printed in U.S. A. Is there a career struggle to save our environment? Here is a new book filled with timely, realistic guidance that can suddenly open up new career horizons for groping young people -- a challenging "now" field in which they can find a sense of commitment. by Odom Fanning, Editor-in-Chief of the White House First Annual Report on Environmental Quality Others are developing for the immediafe future. Most young people are unaware of those new opportunities and of how they may build a rewarding career in this fight to save our planet from the Ihroats of pollution, the existing and ('merging eareer fields oijening up in environmental management. It )oints out what kinds of personnel are at pic.senl...and will he, needed in the various facets of the field, and it discu.s.scs the basic information needed hy anyone .seeking a career in one of these areas. 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"Nothing more needs to be said except that Asimov would be one popular guest at a party. However, since he will not be readily available, the next best thing is to take his book along." -- Library Journal # pages  #  At your bookstore Galaxy is published in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. The U. S. Edition is published in Braille and Living Tape. Editor Science Editor Feature Editor Januory-February # Vol. #, No. # T.J. Bass James Gunn James White Michael G. Coney Bob Shaw Tad Crawford F.A. Davis Theodore Sturgeon Roberts. Richardson Managing Editor Art Director Associate Art Director Circulation Director Subscription Director Publisher Associate Publisher ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing ofPublishing Corporation under international, Universal and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in U.S. A. l#'-#". too' I e'.ii' CA'.toA' i#'oirr vacation # Pages Build Any One of # Beautiful H o m e s Yo u r s e If A s publishers of the world's finest "How-to" books Less, we've been flooded with letters, typified by the following: "Everyone knows that material costs represent only about # of the price of new houses -- even less on home improvements. We'd certainly like to save as much of that other # as possible. Why can't Wise  Co. give us a book showing the average family how to build a house they can afford -- or make their present house into a Dream Home? 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Or, if completely pleased, I'll keep it and remit only I a month until the amazing bargain price of only # plus mailing cost is paid. this card and we stand all packing and shipping charges. Same return and refund privileges guaranteed. I Name  Address Apt. I City State Zip D#A companion volume #-day Free Examination. Only S#. # plus shipping. Same return privileges. One day I am going to sit down and count all the reference points to science fiction, past and present, with which Algis Budrys has provided Galaxy readers -- and myself -- in Galaxy Bookshelf. I am going to do so just to enjoy again the unique illumination in which he has bathed the scene for me and thousands of others. Even more impressive than the sheer voluminousness of "Ajay's" reading has always been its quality. The best of books can be read badly -- and bad books almost invariably are -- but never by Budrys. The light has been steady. Ajay dropped his bombshell at the end of his last column Galaxy, November '#). For the time being he wants to read science fiction for pleasure, not as a chore, and will write no more reviews for Galaxy. And the light over Galaxy Bookshelf out. It comes on again in this issue, with Theodore Sturgeon taking over the Bookshelf. I think you will find the new light rich, warm uniquely compelling as the old. It is powered by a depth of intellect and understanding unsurpassed -- perhaps even unmatched -- in the field and to which no one who reads this will need an introduction.  Many of you noted with dismay, some with chagrin, that A. Bertram Chandler's Sister Ships Galaxy, Sept. Oct. '#) had appeared a month earlier (our issue hit the newsstands in July) in an Ace anthology. The accident was like all others in that it should not have' happened, yet was unavoidable. Sister Ships had been scheduled and actually set in type for April publication in Galaxy. Then came the hike in our production costs that squeezed Galaxy into bimonthly publication and Worlds of Tomorrow and Worlds of Fantasy into suspension. Schedules and inventories had to be reshuffled and Sister Ships sat on her pad, in type and ready for liftoff. SeptemberOctober Galaxy provided the first new schedule opening for the story. Through some communications snafu I had not been made aware in advance of the Ace publication date. By the time their anthology reached stands it was too late to pull Sister Ships out of Galaxy without destroying the entire issue -- it was in the final press stages. A substantial percentage of stories first published in Galaxy and If are subsequently anthologized, as Sister Ships was originally scheduled to be. Seven out of fifteen stories selected by Don Wollheim and Terry Carr for Ace Books' World's Best Science Fiction: #I came from the Galaxy group magazines. This is all to the good -- and any time you want to write on stone that the Galaxy people loved the Ace people in #I -- why, go ahead. You would be right. BehindYour Conscious Mind... Use these Extrasensory Powers smelling, and tasting reveal only a part of life and reality. There is a world of perception -- of greater realization behind your outer self. Impressions of these extrasensory powers occasionally arise in your conscious mind. The strange feeling of an impending danger -- that intuitive flash or hunch with its forceful clarity -- or receiving the thought of another before he has spoken it -- these are telltale indications of your unused potentialities. No longer are these something to just wonder about and not to discuss. They are not supernatural or weird, but natural phenomena. To understand , develo p, and direct them can transform your whole personality. They can provide greater insight and power of personal achievement. Challen ge these remarks! Write to the Rosicrucians, a worldwide cultural organization (not a religion) for the facts about your extrasensory powers. Stop denying the greater part of yourself! To those who have experienced these deeper psychic aspects of self and want to learn to bring them into service at will, the Rosicrucians offer the free book The Mastery Of Life. It tells how you may share in this practical knowledge. Please use this coupon or write to: SBe #an Jose, California #, U.S.A. Scribe B.G.Y. San Jose, (ifomia #, U.S.A. Gentlemen: this knowledge. Name Address City State Zip A handful of men, women and children -- forced to survive in the realm of pure physics... I T he departure lounge was half full after the coach had left on its first trip to the ship, but it had not grown any quieter. Excitement, impatience and natural anxiety had combined to raise the noise level of every conversation until the background music and its intended soothing effect were obliterated. Ignoring the low and sinfully soft couches scattered around the large, cool room, the remaining passengers for Eurydice clustered about the exit ramp like jet travelers bucking for a seat by a window. No one was paying attention to Mercer directly. Relieved, he dropped his eyes to the papers he had not been studying for the past half an hour and wondered if he replaced them in his briefcase would the act be the signal for the passengers to corrie surging over to introduce themselves or ask questions. He already knew all of their names, having memorized the passenger list, and his job largely consisted of looking after them. But right now they were still strangers -- for the simple reason that he did not know which face went with any given name, so he decided to savor his last remaining moments of introversion before he had to join the ship. But no sooner had Mercer made this decision and begun to feel pleasantly guilty about it than a pair of small feet moved into the area of floor covered by his downcast eyes and stopped a few yards in front of his chair. He looked up. Black sneakers, black slacks, black tunic and long-visored cap which carried an improbable quantity of insignia and plastic scrambled eggs. The uniform had probably been a good fit last Christmas, but now it was a little short and tight. Even though the sturdy and well-nourished, the face had the pinched, big-eyed look of the overly imaginative, intelligent and probably highly nervous child. Mercer did not have to read the identity patch on the boy's chest to know that this was Robert Mathewson -- there was only one ten-year-old boy on the passenger list. He and the boy stared at each other for a long time, Mercer feeling as tongue-tied as the boy looked. The sensation was ridiculous, he told himself irritably as the silence began to drag and both their faces shifted deeper into the infrared. This was, after all, his first social contact with a passenger and one this young should be easy -- good practice for him, in fact. H Clearing his throat, he said, "I didn't know that we had been assigned a cadet for this trip, but I can certainly use your help -- " "Bobby, I told you not to wander off," said a voice from behind him. It was feminine, harassed and belonged, Mercer saw 'as he turned, to the boy's mother. She was young, dark-haired, with a face subtly distorted by tension and worry so that he could not decide whether she was pretty or downright lovely. She rushed on: "You were told not to talk to strangers and that means not making a nuisance of yourself to the ship's officers. I'm sorry about this, sir. You're obviously busy and he knows better than to -- " "It's quite all right, ma'am," began Mercer, but already she was dragging her son toward the largest group of passengers, still scolding and apologizing and not listening to him at all. For a few minutes he watched the boy in the space officer's outfit and the mother in the issue coveralls the passengers wore shipside. The one-piece garb was not exactly shapeless -- especially not on Mrs. Mathewson -- but it conformed to the dictates of the current neo-puritan fashion, which insisted on covering the female form on public occasions from neck to ankles. Suddenly restless, Mercer stuffed the papers back into his briefcase and stood up. He began pacing slowly around the empty end of the lounge, staring at the large, full-color pictures closely spaced along the walls so that he would not have to look at -- and perhaps become involved with -- the passengers. His first contact with two of them had not exactly helped his self-confidence. Like the background music the pictures were designed to be reassuring -- there was only one takeoff A few interior shots and the rest showed Eurydice or her sister ships coming in to land beneath enormous, brightly colored dirigible parachutes or floating in the ten-miles-distant landing lake and held upright by a collar of inflated life pods while the passengers slid laughing down a transparent tube into a waiting boat. The pictures stressed the Happy Return rather than the Voyage itself, Mercer thought synically as he moved to the big periscopic window that looked out over the field. T WO miles away Eurydice stood by her gantry, clean but for the passenger boarding bridge. Only the topmost hundred feet or so of the ship proper -- comprising the control room, crew quarters and the upper members of the structure that supported the rotating section -- were visible. The service and life-support modules, water tank and nuclear power unit were wrapped in boosters. A mile farther down the line stood the empty gantry that had serviced Minerva before her departure four months earlier and beyond that, rippling faintly in the heat, rose a ship identical to Eurydice except for its much larger and more complex wrapping of boosters. Nobody talked about that particular ship and it did not have a name. Like the homecoming pictures scattered around the lounge it was meant to be a reassuring sight, but somehow it was nothing of the kind. The only difference between the passengers and himself, Mercer thought sourly, was that he had nobody to talk loudly and nervously to. "Eurydice, sir?" He turned to find a hostess standing behind him. She was wearing one of the old-style mirror plastic uniforms -- described as pseudo-futuristic by female fashion writers and with animal growls of appreciation by men regardless of occupation -- and for the first few seconds that was all he saw. He was vaguely aware of glittering boots, a hat streamlined for mach three and short cloak thrown back over shoulders that were a flawless, creamy pink -- and intensely aware of the rest of the getup which was virtually topless and all but bottomless. When he finally raised his eyes Mercer discovered that she was not just a beautiful body -- she had a nice face, too. "The coach is waiting, sir," she said. Her smile was polite and not at all impatient and her eyes were laughing at him. Mercer nodded and began walking briskly toward the exit where the passengers were already climbing the ramp that led from the cool, blast-proof lounge to the blistering heat of the surface one hundred feet above. She hurried to keep pace with him and Mercer wondered why until he realized suddenly that they were, after all, fellow workers, servants of the same company, colleagues. The realization made it possible for him to untie his suddenly knotted tongue. "I'm sorry if I appeared rude back there," he said, trying hard to keep his eyes on a level with her face, "but it seems to me that, to anyone leaving Earth perhaps never to return, you make a very nice last impression. In fact, if there were a little more time before takeoff it would not take much to convince me not to leave at all. Or come to think of it, when I get back in eight months we could meet and maybe -- " "What you are thinking would probably get us both into trouble with my husband," she broke in, laughing. "This is your first trip." It was a statement with not the slightest suggestion of a question mark tacked onto the end. Trying to hide his irritation, Mercer said, "I didn't think it showed." She was silent while they left the lounge and began to mount the flat spiral ramp leading to the surface. Radiation doors interrupted the ascending tunnel every twenty yards and had been dogged open so that the hot, dusty air from above was already reaching down. When she spoke, the last of the passengers were out of sight and hearing, hidden by the curve of the tunnel and their own selfgenerated wall of sound. "It shows, sir," she said seriously. "But I'm learning caution in my old age. You see, I don't seem to be able to give advice without also giving offense. So unless I'm asked -- " "I'm asking," said Mercer dryly. the tall, hungry-looking type who suits that black rig -- but you, especially, must be careful how you wear it. That rakish angle of the hat is wrong for Eurydice and some of your pocket zips are done and some half-done -- you haven't got that right, either, and at this stage of the game you shouldn't even try. Even the plays you have been watching so carefully on TV never get it right, so don't feel too bad about it." Mercer said nothing. "This mystique with the zips and caps that veteran spacemen practice," she went on, "began as sheer sloppiness, no doubt, but now the so-and-so's change the rules after every trip just to confuse people. But you, sir, are not yet a veteran, so it is much better that you don't get it at all than get it wrong. In any case, there are two officers on every ship who do not subscribe to these little idiosyncrasies of dress. They are the captain, who is too important to care about such things and the other is you, sir, who are generally considered to be the lowest form of life in the service and not supposed to get ideas above your station. But you know all this already, I hope." She was watching him intently, but she relaxed when he smiled and said, "I was told, but not precisely in those words. The general idea seems to be that -- since our passengers have to be physically fit to be allowed to make the trip in the first place -- my medical know-how is not essential and, since I have no other specialized technical training useful in space, my duties will be largely those of a steward. The responsibility for ensuring that the customers have a happy and confortable trip is mine, apparently, and until now. I'm sorry to say, the thought of mixing with and looking after more than forty healthy people has me scared stiff." "You are being too negative, sir," she told him sharply. "You may be little more than the ship's steward, but you must not act like one or even think like one. And you apologized to me twice during, oh, five minutes of conversation. That's bad. You must be the strong, silent type if you want to gain the respect of your charges. Failing that you can be the weak, silent type -- just as long as you're silent, reserved, somewhat aloof at all times and never tell them your troubles. Remember that the passengers don't know that you are just a glorified steward and they must never suspect that you are their servant or your first trip will be hell -- and your last as far as Eurydice is concerned. Because if even once you have to go to the real officers with a passenger prablem your name is mud and you'll never -- " She was beginning to sound rather emotional, Mercer thought. He held up his hand and said, "What did I ever do to you?" She was quiet for the next dozen paces. Then she laughed and said, "Not a thing. But you can return my favor if you like. I would like to have a few extra minutes on board. If I could stay up there with the first group of passengers while you took up the second batch -- I really would appreciate that, sir." Return what favor? Mercer wondered, then thought that her advice and criticism had been just that even if it had nearly lifted the skin off his back. He nodded. "Thank you, sir." Definitely the emotional type, he thought. A few minutes later they reached the upper end of the ramp and stood blinking in the twin glare of the afternoon sun and the mirrorbright coach. His dark uniform soaked up the heat like a thermal sponge and beside him the girl became a glittering, truncated cone as she pulled the cloak around her shoulders. "Sorry to' spoil your view," she said, "but I don't tan in the sun -- I frizzle up. You take the seat beside mine at the rear -- you'll have more leg room -- and ignore the II flashing lights on my call panel. People always sit on the arm-rest buttons while finding a seat. Be with you in a minute, sir." Mercer smiled. By the time she rejoined him he had used the cosmetic mirror set into her service panel to adjust his cap, which was now absolutely straight and as level as the distant blue line of the landing lake. He had also checked his zips. The coach was already picking up speed towards Eurydice's gantry and the noise level was keeping pace with it. Two seats in front of Mercer a man was complaining bitterly because the coaches were not big enough to move everyone to the ship at the same time. Another was insisting that at the price this trip was costing his company he was damn well going to watch the takeoff from a port and from farther along the coach two different call lights were blinking in tandem. "It's high time," said Mercer, rising, "that I started getting to know my patients -- I mean passengers." Her small, strong hand pushed him back into the seat. "I'll handle it," she said. "Until they are all trussed up and safe in their acceleration couches they are my responsibility. Sit there and save your strength." B ecause it was a widely accepted fact that many people could undertake plane trips and even interplanetary voyages without qualms and yet be scared silly by three hundred feet of altitude, the elevator that took Eurydice's passengers up to the main entry lock was completely enclosed. But that low-ceilinged, windowless cage had a subduing effect, Mercer noted. It was as if the passengers realized that they were taking their first tiny step spaceward and that there was still time to step back. Or was he simply putting thoughts into the passengers' minds because the same thoughts were going through his own? The cage was uncomfortably crowded, but the passengers were somehow managing to keep their distances from each other and did not even look at him. Starting to introduce himself under these conditions was impossible -- he would simply make himself look and sound ridiculous. But he could at least nod at young Mathewson without loss of dignity or doing irreparable harm to his image. But the boy tried to salute him and jabbed a passenger in the stomach with his elbow. His mother grabbed his arm and began apologizing all around and Mercer retreated behind his personal wall of silence wondering, as they reached the top and the passengers preceded him into the ship, if it were possible to project an image so strong and silent that he would not have to speak to anyone at all for the entire four months of the trip. First Officer Prescott was waiting just inside the outer seal. He ran his eyes quickly from Mercer's cap to his footwear and back again, looking faintly surprised, but when Prescott spoke he sounded more than faintly disappointed. "I thought you weren't going to make it. What kept you?" "I was told to come aboard with the last coachload of passengers -- " began Mercer. But Prescott was obviously not listening, so he concentrated on being strong and silent again as he passed into the lock antechamber. He could feel his face burning, so the chances were that he was fooling nobody but himself. The captain was standing just inside the seal, looking cool, correct and with his features, if anything, stiffer than his erect body. He was looking through Mercer and the double hull behind him at some remembered object or event that claimed all of his attention. Mercer had met Collingwood and the other officers briefly during his training and the captain had been the only one who had not made him feel like crawling under the nearest stone. But now it looked as if Collingwood were angry about something, probably the misdemeanour of the girl's having deserted most of a coachload of passengers. Perhaps one of them had actually complained to him about it and now she was standing beside the captain, looking about to cry. Mercer felt sorry for her. She was easy to like and even easier to feel sorry for and in a way he was responsible for her trouble because he had agreed to her request. He wanted badly to apologize, but remembered that she did not like people who apologized too often. He stopped. The captain was still staring into the middle distance, not even seeing him. "Good-bye, ma'am," Mercer said. It came close to being the shortest and most uninspired farewell of all time, but her reaction literally rocked him back on his heels. "Take care of yourself," she said, standing on tiptoe and giving him a warm but sisterly kiss on the cheek. Then she looked at him seriously and added: "Take care of all of them, sir." Mercer had instinctively put his arms around her waist, both to keep his balance and because it seemed to be the thing to do, then let them drop to his sides. She had not, he saw, committed some trifling misdemeanour and been told off for it -- there was far too much tension and sheer misery in her expression. He wondered what kind of trouble could make a girl with a disposition like hers react like this -- and if he could help. But today he seemed to have left his inspiration in his other suit and all he could manage was a sickly smile and a line of trite dialogue. "What about your husband, ma'am?" "He doesn't mind," said the captain, "provided you two don't make a habit of it." Suddenly he laughed and the girl began laughing, too -- the way people did who were trying hard not to cry. She turned from Mercer to hang a stranglehold on the captain's neck. The kiss she gave him was anything but sisterly. Mercer was still staring at them when Prescott's finger dented his shoulder. "Are you some kind of voyeur, Mercer? We have work to do upstairs." "Yes, sir." the passenger level Prescott paused for a few moments before continuing toward the control deck. Pitching his voice low because of the passengers lying all around them, he said, "They're all yours, Mercer. Keep them quiet and comfortable and don't let anyone be sick outside of his plastic bag -- that is funny only on television. If you should have a problem, hesitate before calling on me for help -- hesitate for as long as possible because we will be very busy and will not take kindly to doing your job for you. Understood?" "Yes, sir." Prescott shook his head. "You have made a great start to your first voyage, Mercer, and I shudder to think of what you might do before it ends. I mean, practically making love to the captain's wife before his very eyes -- " "At the risk of sounding a cad, sir," said Mercer, "she started it." "And another thing, Mercer. We do not salute or click heels or call anyone 'sir' except the captain -- and he does not insist on it. Invisible discipline is what we aim for and an air of relaxed informality -- well, informality anyway. Just look after your passengers without getting too close to any of them and keep out of the way of the ship's officers -- " "It looks as if I'll have a very lonely trip, Mr. Prescott," said Mercer quietly, but he was unable to keep the anger from showing in his tone. "In my experience," Prescott replied in a voice that was sarcastic rather than actively hostile, "people like you take a trip like this as a means to an end. In your profession space experience automatically puts you at the head of the queue as far as the juiciest research appointments are concerned and even in private practice it is enough to allow you to triple your fees. Perhaps we will be lucky -- you will stay out of trouble with the passengers, keep yourself to yourself and spend your free time in your cabin studying some of those books you brought along." "You'll be lucky." Prescott ignored both the anger and the ambiguity in Mercer's reply. He said, "I hope so. But you are going to have company in a moment and I haven't time to chat, even to overexposed ministering angels. See you." Mercer turned as the first officer continued his climb to the cone. The two hostesses who had been checking and strapping in the passengers on arrival were only a little overexposed and neither could hold a candle to Mrs. Captain. Or maybe it was just that his artistic appreciation had been deadened by the recent exchange with Prescott. He nodded, uncomfortably aware that his face was still red. "The passengers are settled in, sir," said the dark-haired one. "All have been given medication, but you might keep an eye on Mr. Saddler and Mr. Stone, who may be trying to prove something -- I think they palmed their capsules." Mercer nodded without speaking. "Don't let Prescott bother you, sir," said the blond one, reading his expression if not his mind. "He is an exceptionally good officer, believe it or not, even if he does lack charm." "Surely," said Mercer, "you aren't his mother?" The girl laughed. "No, and nobody said anyone loves him. But we have to go now and separate the Collingwoods -- the boarding gantry swings in inside five minutes. Good luck, sir." "And good hunting," added the other. When they had gone Mercer stood for a moment looking slowly around the passenger deck, feeling lonely despite being knee deep in a wall-to-wall carpet of people, most of whom were staring at him. This is just like the simulator, he told himself firmly, complete with ship noises, muted countdown from the wall speakers, the paint and plastic smell of the acceleration couches and the pressure of cool, artificially fresh air on my face -- exactly the same, except that the couches were not being occupied by bored junior clerks from the administration building next door and the sounds and smells were real. His job now was to give real comfort and reassurance to his charges, not just the simulated kind. According to the instruction book and the psychologist who had taken him through it, the job was simple. At this stage the passengers were already wrapped in broad acceleration webbing -- even the shape of the couches was reminiscent of a cradle and the calm, competent figure of a ship's officer moving among them was a father figure tucking them in for the night. Greeting them individually by name, making a perfunctory check on the tightness of their straps, asking if they were comfortable and dealing, very briefly, with any special problems they might have was all that was necessary to reassure them. His psychologist-instructor had added drily that he would have over forty people to process pre-flightwise and less than sixty minutes to do it in, so he simply had no time to undertake deep analysis. Surprisingly the job did prove simple.  allel and with the passengers' heads pointing in the same direction, so that they could all watch the large projection screen set on the underside of the deck above. The walking space between them was about six inches wide, except where the curvature of the inner hull allowed more. Mercer kneeled briefly beside each couch, reading the passengers' name tag as he checked their straps, saying the prescribed words and keeping an eye on the time by not looking at his watch, in the same way that he did not seem to be looking at the name tags stitched to their coveralls. He had to give the impression of being calm, unhurried and concerned with their individual welfare, the book said, and theoretically he could take all the time he needed to ensure his passengers' comfort before takeoff. This was a passenger ship, after all, and a problem with one or more of the passengers was the only acceptable reason short of a serious malfunction for calling a Hold. But Mercer would have to have a very strong reason for holding or the launch-control people would have caustic things to say, the captain would probably go critical and Prescott, who seemed to be a pretty poisonous character at the best of times, would certainly make his life miserable for the rest of the voyage. "Are you comfortable, Mr. Saddler?" Mercer said pleasantly to the next in line, then stopped. This was one of the tough guys who had not taken his medication. Mercer stared at the man's face without really seeing it while his mind sought in vain for a pleasant and friendly way of telling him to take his anti-nausea pill and not be a fool. By the end of the allotted minute Mercer still did not have the answer and he saw that the passenger's face was becoming apprehensive and that he was refusing to meet Mercer's eyes. Suddenly he wriggled sideways in his straps so that he could reach his breast pocket. "I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I nearly forgot to take my pill." "It can happen," said Mercer pleasantly, "in the excitement." The next two couches were occupied by the Mathewsons. Judging by the glazed look in Mrs. Mathewson's eyes one of the hostesses had seen fit to slip her a small caliber sleep bomb, which wa already taking effect. Perhaps she had been frightened. Her son's eyes were enormous, but not with fear. Mercer found himself envying the hot, bright, uncomplicated excitement of the boy. With Mercer very little still happened for the first time. When it did happen for the first time -- as it would in a very few minutes from now -- the sensation would be diluted and deadened by the emotional impurities of fear and guilt and by his maturity and intelligence which would insist on computing his chances of meeting disaster during the period of maximum stress that was takeoff and by the other excitements of his short adult life, which had reduced his capacity to respond to this one. He wondered suddenly if the real reason for his being here was the fear that if he had stayed put he would have used up Earth and everything it had to offer and joined everyone else in the desperate search for small variations on old sensations. Mercer smiled. Compared with the life most of his friends had led, his had been almost monastic. Below him Bobby Mathewson smiled back. The next couch was empty for the very good reason that it was his own. Beyond it was the one belonging to Stone, the other passenger suspected of missing out on his pre-takeoff medication. Mercer tried the blank stare on him which had worked so well with Saddler, hoping that the man's guilty conscience would do the rest, but Stone simply stared back at him. Maybe his conscience was clear. Mercer had to be content with clearing his throat loudly and slipping a plastic bag between the other's chest straps where Stone could reach it quickly. They would be different people in space, he thought as he gave a careful last look around, different but not necessarily better. The book had gone into great detail regarding the odd quirks and outright personality changes -- occurring naturally, of course, and not induced by drugs -- which some people developed during space voyage. It went into even greater detail about the deeprooted psychological reasons for the phenomena. Mercer sighed, lay down on his couch and swallowed his own anti-nausea medication while he was strapping in. On the screen above him the picture of Eurydice and the gantry was replaced by a view of the distant hills and landing lake as someone switched to the on-board TV camera. He slipped on his headset and said, "Mercer. Passenger section ready." Collingwood's voice sounded in his earpiece. "So I see. But are you quite sure that they are all settled and medicated? I realize that you are keen and are probably trying to impress me with your efficiency, but I shall not be impressed if a lot of passengers try to turn themselves inside out while we are dumping the boosters." The tone softened a little as he went on. "Missing the pip is an inconvenience these days instead of a disaster. Our launch window is as wide as we want it, so if anything that might require a Hold is worrying you -- let's have it, Mercer." While the captain had been talking Mercer had been thinking about Stone and wondering how he could explain his suspicions without sounding like a fussy old woman. He couldn't. "No problems, sir." "Good. We lift in four minutes." Mercer spent the time checking that the vacuum cleaner under his couch was handy and worrying about the period of weightless maneuvering that would begin when they went into Earth orbit. Both the book and his instructor had painted awful pictures of weightless nausea running wild. It would become critical, they had said, a chain reaction that could spread even to those who had taken medication, and the job of clearing the air was difficult and distasteful. An incident like that was the one thing guaranteed to sour the whole voyage. He was still worrying when the boosters ignited and acceleration piled invisible weights on his chest. The projection screen showed the launch complex and landing lake shrinking below them. More and more territory crawled in from the edges of the screen -- the pale crosshatching of a town, the gray smears of mountains flattened by the near vertical sunlight, tiny layers of shadow sandwiched between the ground and the clouds. He moved his head carefully so as to watch Stone. Anyone with a TV in hisher living room had seen it all before. HI wmHis is your captain, ladies  and gentlemen. I hope you are comfortable and that you will have a pleasant trip. We shall make two complete orbits of Earth, during which a number of minor course corrections will be necessary for us to match orbits with Space-Station Three to dump our boosters. Please remain strapped in until these maneuvers are completed, which will be in a little under four hours when we reach the vicinity of the station. "During the next fifteen minutes you will notice periodic fogging of the picture of Earth's face being projected on your screen," he went on quietly. "This is in all respects normal and is caused by the venting of surplus fuel from the boosters prior to their delivery at Three. Thank you." "Roughly translated," Prescott's voice continued in Mercer's ear plug, "nothing out of the ordinary is happening except that we are slightly off course due to our having taken off exactly on time. Nobody bothers to do so these days and launch control doesn't have to be all that accurate, either. In the old days this sort of thing would have been very serious. But not with virtually unlimited reaction mass -- " "Careful, Bob," broke in the captain's voice, "or you'll be lecturing again." "Nobody listens," said Prescott shortly and continued. "As a result we shall be using booster steering power at increasingly frequent intervals as we approach Three. During the final thirty minutes, Mercer, keep a sharp eye on your passengers." "Will do," said Mercer. "In the meantime we will be weightless practically all of the time, as I understand it. Have I permission to rig the cabin dividers?" "Yes," said Prescott. Mercer lay unmoving for perhaps a minute, thinking about Prescott and the captain. The first officer, who was not a pleasant personality to begin with, was being actively unpleasant, probably to remind Mercer firmly and continuously that he was a space officer in name only. In complete contrast was the captain, who was patient and considerate and, as far as Mercer could see, pleasant to everyone, including Prescott. He wondered if the other crew members would emulate Prescott or the captain in their behavior toward their medical officer. He supposed that the answer would depend on how they had been raised to think of second-class citizens. But suppose Prescott's feelings toward him were shared by the others -- even by the captain -- and the only difference was that the first officer's reactions were honest while those of the others were cloaked, for the moment, by surface kindliness and consideration. Mercer shook his head angrily, trying to derail this highly uncomfortable train of thought. Surely he could take a little unpleasantness for the duration of the trip. Large numbers of people on Earth were made to feel inferior each and every day of their lives. But he still felt like giving Prescott an order simply to relieve his feelings -- and suddenly there was something he could tell the first officer to do. He thumbed the transmit switch. "Mercer. Our TV picture of the surface is corkscrewing as well as fogging. Too much of that might make our passengers feel uncomfortable. Can you -- " The screen went blank and Prescott said, "Right. Do you want to show a film instead?" "I don't think so," Mercer replied. "Watching me trying to tie down the cabin dividers should be entertainment enough." Before releasing his harness he waited to see if Prescott would have the last, unpleasant word, then decided that Collingwood had probably told the first officer to go easy on the new man. The main supports for the cabins were two tough plastic rings just over half the interior diameter of the passenger module. With the four main support ropes and the inner spacer lines which kept the rings apart, the rings were clipped at intervals of a few feet to the underside of the deck above so as to keep the cordage from coming adrift during acceleration. Mercer pulled himself around the anchored rings, releasing the fastenings and tossing the main supporting ropes gently toward the deck below -- all except the last one, the end of which he wrapped around his hand. Turning head down, he sighted himself at the rope's lashing point between two couches and, with all eyes upon him, kicked out hard. In theory the mass and momentum of his body would draw out the double rings, whose inertia would slow him to a stop before he actually hit the deck. But Mercer, who had practiced this operation in a ground simulator with a system of weights duplicating the effect of weightlessness, had been sure that if he kicked too hard he would crack his skull on the deck or, if his aim were bad, bury it in someone's stomach. As a result he was a little too cautious -- he did not succeed in pulling both rings far enough from their housing. Instead of reaching the deck his misjudged dive stopped a few feet above the acceleration couches and he began to swing toward the middle of the compartment. Ignoring the grins as well as the eyes watching him, he cleared his throat and said, "Would one of you mind grabbing my feet?" Immediately the deck sprouted a forest of clutching hands, which eventually succeeded in checking his swing. But the rings had begun to swing as well, giving him a lot more slack on the support rope he was holding so that he toppled slowly and gently across two doubly-upholstered couches, the upper layers being female. The layer called Miss MacRoberts giggled and the other, whose name he could not read because of the topological features distorting her identity patch, said, "Pleased to meet you." Mercer apologized gravely and began moving back to the lashing point by gripping the edges of intervening couches with his free hand and pulling himself along. Within a few minutes he had the support rope in position and pulled taut. Above him the two rings swung and vibrated slowly, shaking their attached cordage into the beginnings of a weightless tangle. Mercer dived carefully across the deck, snatched the second support rope out of the air as he passed it and checked himself with his free hand against the couch beside its lashing point. He was beginning to get the hang of his task. steering thrust came he had the supporting lines in position and was beginning to weave a double web of cabin dividers between the now rigid rings and the inner skin of the hull. His earpiece had bleeped a five-second acceleration warning, so he had plenty of time to wedge himself between two couches and hold on. But when it came the surge was so gentle and his grip on the couch edges so tight that he felt ridiculous. When a double bleep signaled the cessation of thrust he nodded silently to the passengers on each side of him and returned to work. During the next three hours the surges came with increasing frequency, but he was usually close enough to a bulkhead or one of the rings to hold on until they had passed -- although on one occasion he misjudged. He ended the weightless tumble that followed by doing an awkward handstand on the edge of someone's couch. It was not easy to maintain a pleasantly grave expression or to pretend that this sort of activity was in all respects normal as he murmured, "Sorry, ma'am," and returned, like an industrious -- if ungainly -- spider to weave his web. Looking incredibly fragile and completely purposeless his double web neared completion despite these interruptions. In the suborbital configuration and during the initial powered stage of their trip the thing was simply a highly porous obstruction to anyone wanting to watch the screen. But when the reactor that would give them a half-G of thrust for the first two days of the flight closed down, artificial gravity would be supplied by spinning the passenger section about the longitudinal axis of the ship. The walls of the inner hull would then become the floor and the double web would support clip-on plastic sheets and the passengers would have cabins and privacy of a sort. The cabins would even be roofed over so that crew members moving along the weightless axis between control and the power module aft would not be able to see the sort of things reputed to go on in passenger-carrying spaceships. People tended to forget the rules when they were far from home, his instructor had warned him, and the degree of forgetfulness was in proportion to the distance. His mind was not entirely on his job, he realized suddenly, or he would not have missed hearing the thrust warning. As it was, he found the section of support ring he was working on moving away from him and instinctively tightened his grip on the attached line he was holding. Just as the line was drawing taut against its ring, thrust was applied at right angles to the previous surge and he began a slow swing around the support ring, a swing that would ultimately wrap his line tightly around the ring. For a few seconds this did not worry him, but then he realized that as the line wound itself tight it would shorten and his speed of rotation would increase -- it was already speeding up, in fact. With his free hand he reached for one of the divider ropes as it whirled past, but could only touch it. All he succeeded in doing was to start himself spinning on the end of his rope as well as describing diminishing circles around the ring. Dizzy and confused, Mercer tried to work out how fast he would be traveling by the time his line was completely wound around the ring. Almost certainly it would be too fast for him to transfer his grip from the rope to the ring -- and if he let go at that speed he would go bulleting into the deck, bulkheads or passengers like a stone from a slingshot. The time to let go was now, while he was still moving relatively slowly. But his hand seemed to have a mind of its own -- the more he thought of letting go the stronger became its grip on the rope. Mercer closed his eyes and tried to think. He had more than two feet of slack wrapped around his hand. If he released that the radius of his swing would be increased and his rotation slowed. He would do just that and hold on to the last few inches of rope until he was swinging toward the inner hull wall, then bend his knees to absorb the shock of landing and let go. But the end of the rope slipped from his hand before he was ready and he went tumbling slowly toward the middle of the deck. For a moment he thought that he would be fantastically lucky and land on his own couch, but instead he landed sprawling on the one beside it. The passengers began to applaud and Mrs. Mathewson said crossly, "Do you always try to land on defenseless women?" "Only the pretty ones, ma'am," Mercer said, before he realized that his great relief at not breaking his neck was possibly not shared by the passenger he had landed on. But before he could apologize properly his earpiece bleeped a thrust warning and he squirmed into his own couch. ankles when thrust tilted him gently to one side, then the other, then tried to lift him out of the couch and twist him at the same time. Someone grunted and gave an odd-sounding cough. Mercer swung around to see the passenhis plastic bag. Stone had been a little late in getting the bag to his mouth and some of the material was drifting above his couch where the next surge of acceleration would send it flying all over the place. With his feet still held by the webbing Mercer undipped the sucker from the underside of his couch and went after the stuff, pulling it into the small but powerful vacuum cleaner and leaving in its place a fresh smell of pine trees and heather. Then he helped Stone until the latter had quite finished, sponged Stone's face and produced a water tube and an antinausea pill. "Sorry about that, Mr. Stone," he said. "But there are some people who seem to need double the usual medication." Stone had the grace to blush. "Mr. Mercer," said Prescott in the earpiece. "Attitude maneuvers are completed. Will you come to control as soon as convenient." His tone was almost polite and made Mercer feel uneasy. His first impulse was to rush to control right away and take what was coming to him for his recent stupid and dangerous display of weightless acrobatics. But ten more minutes' work would complete the rigging of the cabin dividers and he might just as well go up there with one job done properly, even if he had nearly killed himself doing it. While he was tightening the last rope the screen above him lit up with a clear, sharp and steady picture of space station Three. A few seconds later he made a slow, careful dive toward the well connecting the passenger compartment with control and rose past the level of the officers' cabin and the enclosed ladder used when the ship was under power or on the ground. He did not bump against anything on the way up, so apparently his weightless movements were becoming more accurate. Even so, he was feeling far from confident as he checked his dive at the entry to control, made sure that his zips were properly fastened and that his cap was still on straight, and entered. Prescott pointed at the empty couch and said angrily, "Lie there, Mercer. Watch the screens or look out through the window. Don't touch anything." Communications Officer MacArdle and the engineer, Neilson, looked angry as well. So did the captain. But Collingwood tried to smile as he said, "You did very well, Mercer. But as an entertainer you should avoid overexposure and you were in danger of -- " "Fracturing your skull," snapped Prescott. "I'm sorry about that," said Mercer. "I missed hearing the thrust warning and got caught -- " "You missed hearing it," said Prescott furiously, "because MacArdle was so interested in your performance that he forgot to send it. But even a medical officer with a fractured skull would probably not be enough to put a Hold on this trip. I have never in my life seen a lousier, more slapdash launch -- " "Leave it. Bob," said the captain tiredly. To Mercer he added: "Mr, Prescott, you may already have noticed, is an astronaut of the old school. His experience goes back to the time before space travel was officially declared safe. He is inclined sometimes to fuss." "At least let Neilson and me eyeball the drive grids as we're dumping the boosters -- " began Prescott. Collingwood's hand twitched as if he had been about to point at the displays around them, and he said, "Bob, there's no need." He paused, looked at Neilson for a moment, added: "But to keep you happy we'll have the station send up closeups of the withdrawal sequence." "The definition," said Prescott, "will be too poor to resolve the fine details or show -- oh, forget it." He stared angrily at, or maybe through, Mercer who tried to pretend he was elsewhere. As he looked at his twin displays -- one showing his charges in the passenger module and the other the same picture they were seeing on their screen -- he wondered why Prescott had sent for him if not to give him a ticking off. Mercer's instructor had told him that some medics were not allowed into the control room until several weeks of a voyage had elapsed. His presence here could have been a compliment, a pat on the back for being a good, hardworking boy -- except for the fact that Prescott so obviously did not like him. Maybe that was why he was here. Prescott did not like anybody it seemed -- and this could have been his way of showing it. He had told off MacArdle in such a way that the communications officer would be just as angry with Mercer as he was with Prescott. Everybody, even the cool and normally easy-going captain, was angry with Prescott and they were only four hours out. Mercer was beginning to wonder if he should have stayed at home. But then his eyes went to the direct vision port and his doubts faded. The television pictures of this had only been a shadow of the reality and, one way or another, a man could pay an awful lot to see scenery like this. IV kill its rotational velocity long before Eurydice had been launched. Now it hung motionless like a gigantic, uncompleted wheel comprising six tubular spokes arranged in two diametrically opposed groups of three and two short tubular sections of rim, which linked each group of spokes at the periphery. Unlike its smaller predecessors. One and Two, which were structurally complete and no longer capable of further growth. Three was still only a pup. It would take many years of time and effort -- and Eurydice and her sister ships would have to pay it a large number of passing visits to donate their boosters -- before its thirty spokes and far-flung rim would be completed. The boosters wrapped around the ships' stern and waist sections and emptied of their fuel, formed the building blocks of the vast wheel. Upward of four thousand people would inhabit the station finally -- to conduct the more exotic types of research that would ultimately put space, time and gravity to effective use and make slow-burners like Eurydice as obsolete as dugout canoes. One of its first -- and perhaps easiest -- jobs would be to impose a strict control on Earth's weather. Later it might give men the stars, via either faster-than-light drive or the longevity to reach them. It would support and extend the work already being done on the bases of the Jovian moons. The work was the kind Mercer wanted to do among people who freely admitted to being insane for living how and where they did and who tried to put at least as much into their highly technical culture as they got out of it -- a culture that was neither as permissive as Earth's of the past decades nor as viciously forbidding as the neo-puritan one that was beginning to replace it. Mercer was too cynical to believe that the people of the Jovian colonies had built a utopia for themselves -- they simply had been very thoroughly screened. There was no mesh in the screen, of course, but it was up to six hunone who made it through even once had to be someone quite special one way or another -- of that Mercer had been very sure until the crew of Eurydice had started leaving clay footprints all over his nice, bright illusions. "Withdrawal sequence starting -- now," said the captain, arousing Mercer from his daydream, "Neilson, stand by. MacArdle, ask Three for a long lingering closeup of our tail and be careful how you phrase it." He smiled, looked at Prescott and stopped smiling as he added: "As soon as we clear the boosters we will roll the ship. All of you take a long, hard look." Prescott made no comment. He was staring at Neilson who did not look at all happy. Mercer divided his attention between the port and his screens while the men began playing an esoteric game involving the calling out of numbers and groups of initial letters while their fingers tapped illuminated buttons, their quiet voices and easy manner not quite concealing their deep concentration on what they were doing. The station TV showed Eurydice begin its inching withdrawal from the boosters. As the ship withdrew it began slowly to rotate. On the passengers' screen the station was already slipping off the edge so that they would have nothing to look at until it came on-screen an unguessable number of minutes later. He had no idea of how long the visual inspection would take and the crew was too busy for him to ask, so he switched the passenger screen to the station signal so that his charges would have something interesting to look at. Then he froze, looking guiltily at Prescott as he wondered whether he was supposed to do things like that without first asking permission. But Prescott merely nodded and continued with what he had been doing and saying. Almost imperceptibly Eurydice withdrew from her boosters, like a bolt being slowly unscrewed from an enormous truncated nut. First the bulge of the passenger section twisted out, then the long cylinder directly behind it, which housed the free-fall lounge and the water tank containing the reaction mass for the nuclear engine, and finally the long, tapering cowling of the reactor itself. As it drew clear, panels opened and retractable sensors and focusing coils unfolded themselves, breaking up the clean outline. The wall speaker cleared its throat and a voice from Three said. "I've got a telescope on you -- it gives much better definition than the TV camera. But what exactly am I looking for, fellows?" The captain glanced at the first officer without making any attempt to reply. "Prescott. Nothing in particular, friend. It's just that I'm the worrying type." Mercer expected a sarcastic retort, but instead a long silence ensued, broken when the voice said, "You look good from here. Bob. I'll slip a filter onto this thing and watch while you light your torch. But if you're going to do something melodramatic with your reactor, don't do it too close to the station, huh?" "Wouldn't dream of it," said Prescott. On the station picture Eurydice drifted away from the boosters, spurting bright balloons of fog as she lined up for the Jovian orbit insertion. The crew was completing the attitude checks and the captain was telling the passengers to expect thrust in ten minutes. Mercer concentrated on his own small, overly simple control panel, angling the remote-controlled TV camera on the outer hull to give what he hoped would be a picture of the space station falling away when they began their burn. The closeup of the tail being transmitted by Three at that time might be a little disconcerting to the uninitiated. Such as myself, Mercer thought.  pulled out his dampers Mercer switched pictures. Then the couch was pushing him gently in the back and Three began to shrink away from the edges of the screen. The enormous structure diminished steadily until it became a tiny, dazzlingly white insect enclosed by the sunset terminator. "Very artistic," said Prescott. "You'll spoil them if you aren't careful, Mercer." "A large part of my job," said Mercer stiffly, "is keeping the passengers happy. I was told that -- " "And a small part of my job," Prescott broke in, "is seeing that you do yours correctly. Now, what will be the next item offered for their delight? More acrobatics?" Mercer shook his head. "Rigging the cabin walls at this stage would interfere with passenger visibility during the survival film. And that should wait until after they have eaten and they begin to realize that they are really in space. So first I introduce them to weightless eating and see that they don't make too big a mess doing it." "No," said Prescott sharply. "First you switch off the hull TV camera. Station Three will shortly be out of sight and a continuous picture of a receding Earth might make someone homesick. Then you will announce lunch and then let them get on with it. Ship's officers are supposed to remain aloof from the passengers, Mercer, and running after them too much gives the impression that you are little more than a steward. You are, but they must not be allowed to know that. When we cut thrust in two hours from now -- for a few minutes only to test the damper controls -- the mess they will have made will be so obvious that with luck they will feel too ashamed of themselves to risk the same kind of mess again. Only then will you go down there -- for the first and only time -- and clean up. But it would be much better for your image if you chivied one or more passengers into doing it." "That was how the last medic got himself fixed for the rest of the trip," said MacArdle, laughing. "But one housemaid wasn't enough for him and he began -- " "Mercer," said Prescott, "what are you waiting for?" Seething behind what he hoped was a poker face, Mercer killed the picture of the beautiful crescent Earth and spoke to the passengers as he had been directed. He had known people like Prescott most of his life -- teachers and professors and surgeons who had stomach ulcers or bad domestic trouble or who had simply inherited a nasty disposition. There were only two ways to react to them -- either ignore them and their continual jabbing until they themselves got tired of doing it or display a controlled reaction designed to show them that they were not dealing with a sponge that soaked up everything without protest. "Four hours should be enough to let them eat and get to know each other," Prescott continued, "and not enough to allow arguments to start. You will spend those four hours in your cabin, resting, after which you will see to the tidying up and contrive to introduce the subject of safety and survival in space. Y ou will try to do so without scaring half the passengers to death." "Just because I've spent most of my life studying for examinations," said Mercer quietly, "doesn't mean I'm stupid." "There is a difference," said Prescott just as quietly, "be"But I'm not tired," said Mercer, knowing that he was losing on this exchange but not wanting to admit it. Prescott sighed. "If you don't go to your cabin," he said, "we won't be able to talk about you behind your back." As he climbed down to his cabin, very carefully despite the half-G thrust, Mercer was not really surprised to hear Prescott talking to Neilson with 'occasional interjections from the captain, or that the subject of the conversation was far removed from the ship's medical officer. He opened and closed the seals into his cabin, cutting off the sound of voices and feeling like a child dismissed from a room where the conversation was too adult. ins, which were fitted with more sophisticated equipment, occupying much less space, Mercer's did not give much room for him to move. From the entry lock the floor grill stretched ten feet to the curved plastic canopy that ran from below his feet to what was nominally the ceiling and gave, in the ship's present mode, a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the inside of the outer hull, complete with structural members and brightly colored cable runs. The floor grill, which was just under three feet wide, separated two vertical tiers of bunks, eight on one side and five on the other. This was because the lowest one of the five was Mercer's and he, being the doctor, needed much more than the twelve inches that divided the patients' bunks. A passenger unfortunate enough to come down with an infectious disease could be isolated from the living quarters and other patients. The bunks were fitted with their individual air supply and a hinged flap that sealed in the patient. Mercer did not suffer from claustrophobia, but he thought that any patient needing to spend more than a few days in one of those bunks would have to be kept under heavy sedation or he would blow his organic computer. His own bunk did not have all that much elbow room, of course, surrounded and overhung as it was by communication and control panels and cupboards containing medication. There was much more than he could ever expect to use, even if a dozen epidemics swept the ship. Nevertheless, Prescott did a quick check of the medical supplies, then strapped himself into his couch. But not, he was sure, to sleep. The buzzer had a low, insistent note that gradually increased in pitch until he signaled that he was fully awake by switching it off. It was replaced by the sound of the captain's voice, which could not be switched off, ever. "Mercer, you have been sleeping peacefully, if rather noisily, for the past five and a half hours. During that time your passengers had their first meal and did quite a lot of socializing, so there was no need to wake you. But now the natives are growing restive. As soon as you've eaten go back and see that the place is tidy, then set up for the survival lecture and film. We shall go into cruising mode in just under four hours, so you have plenty of time." "Yes, sir," said Mercer. "We are required by law," the captain went on, "to conduct three survival drills as soon as possible after takeoff, even though nothing has ever gone wrong or, considering the current fail-safe structural philosophies and the multiplicity of backup systems, is ever likely to. But you know all this. You also know that, to keep the passengers from feeling nervous, the first drill is treated as something of a joke -- an amusing film followed by a light-hearted question-andanswer session. Don't frighten them, Mercer. But don't be too much of a comedian either." For a few seconds the captain had sounded exactly like Prescott, Mercer thought. He was beginning to understand why the medic before him had tried to make so many friends among the passengers. Or was it his predecessor's behavior with the passengers that was the reason for Prescott's and the others' treating him as they were doing? It was very hard to know which end of the stick was being used to beat him. He was still pondering the question when he returned to the passenger module. The deck was not nearly as untidy as he had expected, nor had the litter been widely scattered by the brief cessation of thrust. Mercer nodded politely to anyone who waved, smiled or otherwise noticed him as he headed for his couch. He had already decided on the people who would volunteer for the cleanup squad. "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said, using the module's PA. "By now you should have finished your first meal in space -- no doubt with a few accidental spillages here and there -- and begun getting to know each other. You will have plenty of time -- four months, in fact -- to finish getting to know each other, but cleaning up the litter is much more urgent. That is why I would like three of you to help me by -- " They were suddenly like a classroom full of eager pupils with the answer to teacher's question. Mercer shook his head. "I knew you would all like to help, but to avoid offending anyone I shall pick the three people closest to me, if they have no objections." They hadn't. Mrs. Mathewson smiled and nodded. Stone nodded without smiling and Bobby Mathewson was trying desperately to salute with his arm tangled in webbing, his eyes almost as wide open as his mouth with excitement. Mercer concentrated on the boy. "We do not salute on this ship," he said gravely, "nor do you call anyone 'sir' except the captain. Saluting spacemen happens only on television -- so you are Mathewson and I am Mercer." Treat a boy like a young man, his instructor had told him, and you won't go far wrong... Explaining the operation of the cleaners over and over again until he understood it completely was something he could do to the boy but not to the two adults. Repeating instructions to them might make them think that he considered them stupid. But this way they would all be sure to get it right without his running the risk of their taking offence. Finally he turned the three of them loose, watched them at work for a few minutes, then returned to his couch to call MacArdle to have the survival film ready to run. Prescott and Neilson climbed into sight a few minutes later and stood looking around the passenger deck. Mercer went across to them in case they had instructions. Prescott stared at him without speaking. Neilson did not look at him, but said, "I don't understand you. Look at that blonde on couch eighteen and the Asian on twenty-three and you gave away the job to a man, a widow and -- and her ten-year-old boy. You're missing chances, Mercer." He spoke softly so as not to be overheard by nearby passengers and without moving his lips, just like a convict in an old-time prison film. Mercer tried to copy the expression and intonation as he replied,, "Maybe I prefer ten-year-old boys." Prescott laughed. It was a harsh, unrelaxed sound, probably because it was produced by a mechanism stiff from disuse. The two men left Mercer and continued their climb toward control. V T he film was beautifully made, technically excellent and with a nice balance of animation and real footage -- but it lacked accuracy. Not that it made any deliberate misstatements, it was just that watching the antics of a cartoon character did not give a true picture of a real person's physical and mental capabilities. A smiling young pseudo-spaceman who had cut his gleaming teeth on a great many TV commercials began by introducing everyone to the ship, talking brightly over performance and payload charts, design philosophy and an animated staging sequence. Then he began taking the ship apart, literally, into neat, colorcoded sections, magnifying each section and detailing its function -- control, officers' quarters, passenger lounge and cabins, weightless lounge, reaction mass tank and the eye-twisting detail of the reactor itself. Mercer's sick baycabin looked ridiculously large for one man and thirteen patients while the quarters of the passengers were unbelievably spacious. Mercer did not believe and neither, after a few days, would the passengers. "... and now," continued the smiling spaceman, hesitating as if to apologize for wasting the audience's time on nonessentials,"we come to the subject of survival should an emergency arise. No such emergency has arisen in the past nor, considering the rigorous checks and inspections carried out before every flight, is one ever likely to occur in the future. But we are obliged by the regulations to explain our survival equipment and to give you the chance to practice with it -- " Mercer had already seen the film many times and had listened to much more detailed lectures on the subject. His train of thought branched off onto a different but nearly parallel track. In his line of work human life had always been considered of paramount importance -- in theory at least, a life was valued beyond price. But the cost of protecting the lives of officers and passengers in a spaceship, where every kilo hauled out of Earth's gravity represented enough coin of the realm -- anybody's realm -- to make every person on the ship comfortably rich from the cradle to the urn, was astronomical. Naturally the price of the passengers' tickets did not defray even a small fraction of the transport bill, much less the extra-weight penalties represented by backup systems and survival equipment. Those items were conveniently lost in the even more complex systems of government bookkeeping under headings like national prestige, technological spin-off and assisting the maximum utilization of technically trained manpower. Human life seemed to grow more and more valuable the farther it was removed from Earth. In space its value was incalculable; in the five-hundredand thousandseat transports flying between five and ten miles above the surface it was merely high and on surface transport systems the powers that were did not seem to worry too much about lives. But no fare-paying passenger had ever been lost in space, while a few hundred a year on average were cremated in metal birds which prematurely stopped flying and on the surface people mowed each other down with cars in thousands daily. Mercer had spent two years with an organization that "processed" road accidents. That was how it referred to its function -- too few of the victims survived for it to call itself a hospital that cured people. He had grown up in -- and was now, he realized, trying to flee -- a technologically advanced, ultra-fast and strangely bored society whose casualties had had the depersonalized, sexless sameness of so many mashed flies. The drunken or drug-ridden or simply bored drivers and the careless or absent-minded or innocent bystanders victimized, when they were separated from the machinery or the machinery was removed from them, could rarely be made presentable by even the most conscientious of morticians. Mercer's thoughts were taking a morbid turn. He had long ago discovered that no simple answers existed to complex problems. The best thing he could do right now was to give all his attention to the survival film, while trying not to look openly scornful of the simple answers it was giving to what would be, if it ever occurred, an extremely complex and lethal problem. The spaceman with the teeth, the cap worn on the back of his head and practically all of his uniform zips undone was saying "... in the unlikely event of such an emergency the passengers and crew will probably have several hours or even days to abandon ship -- a process which can, if necessary, be carried out safely and without undue fuss in a few minutes. The next stage deals with the mechanics of the abandon-ship sequence, showing the basic actions first and then repeating them with certain variations -- " ship developed a faint red halo around its reactor. The halo began to brighten and pulsate, but not quickly enough really to frighten anyone. Farther forward the passenger section continued to spin slowly as it furnished artificial gravity, while the rest of the ship held steady. Gradually it slowed as braking devices went into operation, making the ship a rigid unit again in the pre-cruising mode. The spinning passenger section had imparted its rotational inertia to the ship as a whole, causing it to spin at half its original speed. Suddenly the ship emitted long white cylinders that flung themselves away from the spinning vessel and expanded into large globes as they went. Shortly afterward four larger, wedge-shaped sections of the forward structure -- the modules containing each officer's cabin -- broke away and followed the expanding circle of passenger globes. The remains of the ship -- looking warped and lifeless, although not frighteningly so -- shrank as the wedges and globes radiated from the wreck and the screen took in a steadily expanding area of space. Finally the ship disappeared and the survival pods applied thrust for a few seconds and began their slow return to the recovery area until they were grouped like spherical sheep around the officers' segments, which had also returned and were waiting for them. On the second time around the sequence went into greater detail regarding the method of entry into the survival pod, its airlock, radio, two-shot thrust motor and other rather sparse appointments. The final treatment of the sequence, which was too delightfully droll to cause anxiety to anyone, dealt with methods of attitude control in a vehicle fitted with only one short-duration and fixed-direction thruster. "... Most of you are probably thinking by now that our survivors are being given an awful lot to do," said the space officer star as his face replaced the irnage of the survival pods, "or that the globes should contain more sophisticated equipment, such as proper attitude control, navigation computers and the like. But you must remember that your survival globe is little more than a lifebelt and that a lifebelt cannot be overloaded or it will sink. Believe me, the equipment is adequate. "It is adequate," he continued in a proud, solemn voice while he tapped his temple very slowly with his right index finger, "because each will be carrying at least one organic computer of a type that has been tried and perfected over a In control MacArdle brought up the lights and expertly faded out the background music. Mercer stood up, swaying slightly in the low gravity, and looked over his charges. Before he could speak the passenger called Stone tapped the side of his head and said solemnly, "He makes me feel proud -- and kinda sick." Me, too. thought Mercer. Aloud he asked, "Any questions?" "What I would like to know," said a passenger with Miss Moore stamped on her identity patch, "is why we don't have officers like that on this ship? Why don't you relax a little, sir? Can't you smile the way he did?" "He probably can't" said Mrs. Mathewson, laughing, "because his teeth are real and a bit uneven." "His eyes look a bit uneven, too," Miss Moore said, "but they are a nice shade of -- " "An optical illusion, ma'am," said Mercer hastily, "caused by one slightly thicker eyebrow. But I was inviting questions on survival in space." "And I was asking one," she replied, looking him straight in the eye. "I was wondering if you had any suggestions on how I can survive the boredom of living for four months in a hermetically sealed can of space-going sardines. Perhaps some of the sardines will cooperate in relieving the boredom?" Mercer nodded and said seriously, "Provision has been made for various forms of individual and group competitions and entertainment. Nothing too strenuous, of course, although it is advisable to take a certain amount of exercise every day to avoid balance and blood pressure problems after we land. We have music tapes and films, most of which are fairly recent -- by that I mean that they have not yet been released for television. There will also be instruction in weightless swimming and ballet, which brings me back to the survival drills. Even though their usefulness is arguable, the three sessions we are obliged by regulations to stage can be very interesting and often amusing." The silence began to drag until Stone said, "What we really want to know is what our beautifully designed individual flight plans say between the lines. There isn't much space between the lines, of course, but if all the rumors we've heard are true it is very well filled. for us?" gers were watching Mercer and listening -- or not watching him and listening even harder. He nodded gravely and said, "There is very little to add. The rules are few and not at all strict, so that you should be bound only by the dictates of common sense and consideration for each other. You will be living in a restricted space, sharing toilet and amusement facilities and using cabins providing visual privacy only. It is a good idea to put a little effort into liking instead of disliking tlie people around you." "Love your neighbor?" asked someone. "Apart from this largely self-imposed discipline," Mercer went on, "there are no rules as far as the passengers are concerned and you will be left pretty much to your own devices. But if some form of individual or group activity proves harmful to the ship or other passengers the person responsible will be warned and if necessary restrained in sick bay -- " "A fate worse than death, I hope," said Miss Moore. Mercer nodded. "If you call spending four months in a bunk the size and shape of a coffin under partial sedation a fate worse than death I'm inclined to agree with you," he said, allowing his irritation with Miss Moore to show for a moment. Mercer knew that he was not supposed to talk as bluntly as this to passengers on the first day out and Prescott would probably skin him alive for it. He forced himself to relax and continued, "But that kind of trouble is unlikely to arise in a healthy, civilized group of people like yourselves. This isn't flattery. You all know how thorough were the medical and psych checks you had to take before being allowed to book passage." The trouble was, Mercer thought, that in this degenerate age the mental norms had been stretched to fit some strange psych profiles. About all he really could be sure of was that none of the passengers were or had recently been on hard drugs. He continued, "With the exception of myself, the ship's officers have their own specialist duties to perform and will intervene only if somebody starts a riot or tries to kick a hole in the hull. A part of my job is to see that you all adapt to shipboard life as quickly and easily as possible, to keep a check on your health and to instruct you in the use of such items as the swimming facilities and, of course, the survival equipment. I shall not intrude on your social activities even if invited to do so and you are all free to do pretty much as you please. Have you any questions?" Inevitably the Moore woman had a question, the same question with a slightly different slant. "How will the officers be able to survive the trip," she said, "with nothing to amuse them but computers and textbooks? I realize that you are all highly trained and disciplined supermen -- but four months of self-imposed celibacy in a space-going monastery cell? I mean, is it necessary?" Mercer was silent, thinking that the simple answer was that it was not necessary and that his predecessor's behavior was becoming much more understandable to him. In Eurydice temptation was anything but subtle if this was the kind of question that could come up during the first day's flight. He wondered what Miss Moore did in real life and he was still wondering and trying to think of a diplomatic reply when Mrs. Mathewson rescued him. "Maybe our supermen are interested only in superwomen," she said. VI T he transition from powered to free flight occurred half an hour later. The anti-nausea medication he had administered just before takeoff was still doing its job so that the upsets were psychological and intra-personal rather than digestive. They came about as a direct result of the transfer of passenger couches from the deck to what had been the walls of the compartment. Mercer had demonstrated the safe, easy way of performing the operations -- by lying face down, held in position by the waist straps only and allowing the arms and legs to project over the edges of the couch to propel it along, check its progress or fend off other couch riders on collision courses. But in the weightless condition the couches were too easy to move and, although they did not weigh anything, their inertia was considerable. Set moving in the wrong direction or pushed too hard they could give a nearby passenger a very painful nudge. While they were being moved into their new position Mercer also had to exercise a great deal of discretion regarding who would be occupying adjoining cabins -- especially when four or five passengers insisted on adjoining a sixth, who did not wish to adjoin with them. Finally he had to check that the passengers had not positioned their couches across the line of a dividing wall, or over a light fixture or on top of a life-pod escape hatch. At that stage he signaled control to begin spinning the passenger compartment and gradually the occupants began to stick with increasing firmness to their new floors. The spin increased until centrifugal force pressed them against the interior of the hull with an apparent gravity one half that of Earth normal. Forward and aft of the passenger sections the compartments which were supposed to remain weightless had begun to rotate in the opposite direction and Mercer could hear the regular thump of tangential thrusters checking the precession. But none of the passengers seemed worried by the noise -- they were too busy laughing and waving at fellow passengers who were apparently standing on the ceiling, waving back at them. Mercer waited for a few minutes to allow them to get used to the sensation. Finally he made his way to the section of plating occupied by the Mathewsons and asked if he could borrow Bobby. With the boy's help he began distributing the plastic cabin dividers, demonstrating the method of attaching them to the supporting lines so that they formed four taut, plastic walls and a pull-across door sheet that could be sealed from the inside. By the time he had finished explaining how it was done to the last passenger the first cabins were complete and he was able to return Bobby to his mother. "He's been a big help, m'am," he told Mrs. Mathewson and he was not merely being polite, "but the work has overexcited him a little. I'm afraid. I suggest you give him the adult dose of sedative." He kneeled briefly beside her couch, pressed the release stud on a plate set flush with the floor. He flipped it back, explaining that the cover was simply for protection during the couch-moving operation and that the recess contained a call button, microphone and speaker to enable her to contact him in control or the sick bay if the need should arise. "But right now I suggest that you take a half-hour getting used to the place and preparing to turn in," he said. "The cabin walls are opaque but translucent and we shall be switching off the main lighting in an hour. If you want to read the directional light on your couch will not inconvenience anyone who may be trying to sleep." "As for you," he said to the boy, "you can stand down. Don't forget to take your medication. I shall probably need you again tomorrow and I don't want you half asleep on your feet. Good night, Mathewson." "Good night, Mercer," said the boy. His mother smiled and nodded. In the next cabin he went through the same drill and in the next. Some of the faces registered on him, but others did not because he kept thinking about Mrs. Mathewson and the difference a half-G had made to her face, easing the tension lines and rounding out her features and figure. She had last looked incredibly young to have a son of ten years. He wondered suddenly if she had escaped from more than just the gravity of Earth. His final job before leaving for control was to stick name and number patches to the cabin door sheets and draw up a list of who was where. T he control room was quiet and the expressions on the faces of its occupants made it plain that they wanted it to stay that way. Mercer nodded to Neilson and the captain -- the only two who bothered to look at him -- and floated into his couch. He clipped his list to the back of his left forearm and began printing the passengers' names on self-adhesive cards that he placed beside the numbered lights on his call board. By the time he had finished, the vision pickup showed the passenger compartment in darkness and his fellow officers were showing signs of breaking their vows of silence. Beside each numbered call light was a switch that energized the cabin microphones without, of course, acquainting the occupant's with the fact. He brought in the Mathewson cabin first, listened briefly to heavy, adult breathing too irregular for its owner to be asleep and a childish whisper saying "... and God bless Mum and Dad and make him the same every day..." Quickly he flipped off the switch, realizing that Bobby had revealed a great deal about the Mathewsons in a very few seconds. At least on the ship they would not be troubled by a man who was a different person practically every day of the week. The other switches brought in the sound of peaceful breathing and one the silence of an empty cabin. He checked the pickups in the heads, which were also empty and, with visions of a passenger lost in the dark and blundering through fragile cabin walls and wakening everyone, he began thumbing the switches systematically, searching for an incipient disturbance. He did not find it. Instead he brought in a whispered conversation from a supposedly single cabin, which he switched off hurriedly as it was reaching an interesting stage. "Spoilsport," said MacArdle. "Sorry," said Mercer. He laughed, ridiculously pleased that someone had at last decided to speak to him. "There is no necessity for you to remain on duty, Mercer," said the captain. "Your handling of the passengers has been very good and your own behaviour excellent, so far. Why don't you get some extra sleep in your cabin while you have the chance -- you have a dupicate board there and the call buzzer is loud enough to wake you should a passenger need attention." They don't want me around, thought Mercer angrily. Unlike Prescott, the captain was being polite -- even complimentary -- in his dismissal, but it was plain that Mercer was not one of the team and that they did not want him hanging around. But all at once Mercer did not want to be sent to bed like a small boy. He was going to be hanging around for the next four months at least and the sooner they got used to the idea the better. Besides, the captain had not actually ordered him below. He smiled and said, "Thank you, sir. It has been rather hectic down there, but there are times when I find my own company a strain as well. So if you don't mind, sir, I would like to stay for a while and enjoy the atmosphere of sanity and peace." They did not even look at him and the silence lengthened until finally Neilson said drily, "It isn't peace, Mercer -- it's more like a temporary cease-fire." Prescott stirred on his couch, but it was the captain who spoke. He sounded polite and friendly and a little absentminded, as if an argumentative medic were only one of his problems. "It is possible that you will grow exceedingly tired of the control room and the people who inhabit it in the months to come, Mercer," he said. "But you are welcome to stay here, of course, even if there is nothing for you to do. Unless you would like to spend some of the time telling me what you have planned for tomorrow? At one stage, after the cabin construction, period, you were apparently organizing card games. Why?" "Yes, sir," said Mercer. "Two of the passengers seemed to be worried by the survival film and I changed the subject by telling them that weightless swimming was available to everyone once the ship was in cruising mode. I mentioned cards as being a fair way of deciding who would be the first two people into the pool with me. I'm afraid two at a time is as many as I can handle until I've had a little more experience myself." "And the survival drills?" "In the circumstances I thought of delaying them for a few days," said Mercer. "Passenger nervousness can be catching and my instructor told me that quite a lot of latitude is allowed in the timing of these drills. Also that the partial dismantling of cabin walls can be irksome if the passengers are not already a little bored and willing to play a new, if somewhat inconvenient, game. Of course, I could take small groups of less nervous passengers and give them survival instruction until most of them were proficient. That way the first full-scale drill would not be the shambles that the book says it usually is." He stopped because the captain was shaking his head. "I'm sorry, Mercer," he said firmly, "but I don't agree with that part of the book. I think that I can trust you to carry out the exercise without creating too much alarm among the passengers. The regulations state that survival instruction be given to all passengers as soon as possible after takeoff -- and as far as I am concerned 'as soon as possible' means just that." Mercer nodded. Obviously Collingwood's concept of the spacegoing priorities differed from those of the ground-bound, PRminded type who had produced the copy for Mercer's manual. "Later in the voyage," the captain added, "you may stage as many therapeutic survival drills as you think fit, but the passengers must be made aware of the survival procedures at the beginning, not close to the end of the trip -- " Do you read?" The voice came frome the speaker. The captain glanced at the grill above his head and said, "'Eurydice. Go ahead." "Your signal of fourteen seventy-six this day querying pulsing and apparent temporary misalignment of your C-Sixes during initial insertion. We have looked at this and can see no cause for concern, especially as your instrumentation gives no indication of malfunction. We don't see that you have a problem, Eurydice." "We don't have a problem," replied the captain with just a hint of irritation in his tone. "But we would like an explanation for that few minutes of uneven thrust and we think the answer lies in area C. We will be using the nuclear propulsion system for standby heating only so we are not -- repeat not -- worried, but -- " "Prescott would like an explanation, I understand." Reception was too good for there to be any mistaking the tone, which made it all too plain that ground control knew Prescott of old and considered him to be something of a fusspot. The captain, Neilson and MacArdle were carefully not looking at the first officer while they tried to hide their embarrassment. Prescott himself did not appear to be embarrassed or even uncomfortable and Mercer wondered if he was so sure that his point of view was right that it did not matter what his fellow officers thought of him. "You already know, of course, that your C-Sixes are sealed units and were thoroughly tested before assembly. If one of yours is sick the only way we can check on it is by turning up the maker's worksheets and inspection paperwork. We will get on to that at once and come back to you. Is there anything else not bothering you, gentlemen?" "Nothing else," said the captain. "Eurydice out." The silence lengthened, magnifying the tiny sounds made by the life-support and power systems, until Prescott cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice sounded firm and reasonable -- perhaps, thought Mercer, this was the nearest that the first officer could come to apologizing. He said, "Friend Neilson did not do a complete check of area C for the reasons he has already given -- acceptable reasons, to most first officers. And even if he had carried out the full inspection program there is still no certainty that the fault -- if there is a fault -- would have shown up. The chances are that it would not show now even if it were there. But I would still like to have a look -- " "You will stay here. Bob," said the captain sharply, "while Neilson and I have a look. We'll suit up and go through the passenger section and tank an hour before the passengers are due to wake to avoid worrying them with the sight of two officers in spacesuits. Once I discover the explanation for our initial bumpy ride we shall not discuss it -- or even mention it -- for the rest of the trip." This time even Prescott was showing signs of embarrassment and Mercer was suddenly sorry for him. As a doctor he disliked seeing anyone suffer. "And Mercer," the captain went on, "if I tell you too often, or with too much emphasis, not to worry about the things you have just heard, you will probably worry even harder. Let me just say that the problems you will have to face with your passengers will be very much worse than anything that is likely to crop up here. MacArdle, keep an eye and an ear on his panel. You're relieved, Mercer. Good night." As he was returning to his cabin Mercer felt sorry that he had not left sooner. He had thought that they had been trying to exclude him because he was an outsider, a nonmember of their very exclusive club, while the truth was that they had an aversion toward the presence of a stranger at a family fight. M ercer was stni in his couch and squeezing food out of an envelope when he heard the outer hatch open. Next came a polite knock on the inner seal. A few seconds later it opened and Prescott floated in. "Finish your breakfast and don't get up," he said. "I take it that you will hold the first survival drill as soon as the passengers have eaten and tidied up?" Mercer nodded. "Good. But I would like to make a suggestion -- or, if the polite phraseology gives you the idea that you have some choice in the matter, consider it an order. Demonstrating how to climb into a collapsed life capsule with three passengers at a time is warm work, so wear your shorts and check on the position of the cabinet containing the bathing gear. You will enjoy a soak afterward as well as getting in some practice in weightless swimming before taking on your first two passengers." "How do I explain wearing swimming shorts at breakfast time?" "Your problem," said Prescott drily. "Who knows, some of them may enjoy the sight of a splendid, half-naked male animal." "This male animal runs heavily to skin and bone -- " Mercer began, But Prescott was already closing the seal behind him. By the time the passenger breakfast debris had been cleared away his costume had raised a few eyebrows but no comment, and when he reached the stage of rolling up the plastic walls and running the new film, Mercer had forgotten it himself. Prescott ran the film twice -- MacArdle being off duty -- so that everyone would know how to enter a collapsed survival pod, how to do so quickly and how to help in any late arrivers or passengers who had not quite got the idea with the minimum of wasted time and effort. Afterward Mercer went over the same ground with a slightly different emphasis. He began briskly, "We are having this drill today and will probably have another one tomorrow. We must have at least three survival instruction sessions as soon as possible after takeoff. That is the only reason. I apologize for the inconvenience the procedure may cause some of you, but it does have its compensations." He nodded toward the camera pickup and in control Prescott operated the survival hatch activators. The covers sprang open. Mercer said, "The pods are positioned at equal intervals around the waist of this compartment and if you simply head for the nearest one there should be no problem. As you saw in the film, the first passenger to enter simply jumps in. The inner seal opens inward and closes automatically when pod pressure begins to build up before release. There is a drop of about eight feet as you enter but under half-G conditions this is no problem. Below your feet will be a plastic bag containing lightweight screens and other bits and pieces used for dividing the inflated pod, also the service module and food store. "When the first passenger jumps into the pod," Mercer continued, "he or she will drop until the feet touch the upper surface of the service module. In the uninflated mode the pod walls are folded and the convolutions project inward, so that there will not seem to be enough space for one, much less three people. But these folds are resilient and the first man in simply presses himself backward into them, then raises his hands to help the next passenger into the pod in front of him. The second passenger in does not jump, but instead sits on the edge with his legs dangling inside and gripping the hatch coaming with both hands, ready to lower himself inside when the first passenger pulls on his legs. Once inside, the second passenger backs against the first and raises his or her hands to assist the third passenger in the same way. I would like to demonstrate the drill with two volunteers. Mr. Stone and Mrs. Mathewson, would you mind?" They did not mind and Mercer jumped in as Number One. Stone followed as Two and got in without any trouble, but he did not press backward against Mercer firmly enough so that Mrs. Mathewson found it a very tight squeeze. After much wriggling and elbowing her feet finally touched the floor of the pod and a murmur of applause went up from the watchers ringing the opening. One of them asked seriously, "If there were a real emergency, how much time would we have?" "You would probably have several hours to get ready," Mercer said, trying to keep the back of Stone's head out of his mouth, "but the drills are always carried out on the assumption that the ship must be cleared within a few minutes, otherwise nobody would ever take them seriously. He heard a few passengers laughing, then another leaned forward to ask, "Does the rule about women and children first still hold in space?" "No," said Mercer. "The reason for that rule at sea was largely because of the shortage of lifeboats and the skilled manpower needed to launch them. We have more than enough pod space to accommodate all our passengers and launching is automatic. And now, Mr. Stone, if you will help Mrs. Mathewson out again we can all get back on deck. I'm beginning to feel like an overdue triplet down here." That got another laugh and there were no more questions about emergencies. He suggested to Stone and Mrs. Mathewson that they go in first with two other passengers each, all of whom would in turn instruct others until everyone had experience of at least one climb into a pod. "Leave them fend for themselves," said Prescott suddenly in his earpiece. "I'll keep an eye on them from here while you go aft. Neilson wants you in E-Three -- that's the compartment on the other side of the tank. The captain has a metal splinter in his arm -- with complications. Grab your kit and take a look at him." Mercer licked his lips and said, "Ladies and gentlemen. I'll have to leave you for a few minutes. Just carry on with the practice -- you are doing fine." cabin while he was in sight of the passengers, but made up for lost time when he was not. Within a few minutes he was at the entrance to the tank. From a nearby cabinet he pulled out a mask, visor and air tank and slipped them on, then stopped. With an injured arm the captain would not want to put on his spacesuit again to come through the tank, so he would need swimming gear, too. And he had said yesterday that he did not want to risk worrying the passengers by letting them see Neilson and himself wearing spacesuits. It might be better to bring along two sets of gear. "Mercer, hurry it up," snapped Prescott. "Just leaving." The tank lock was big enough to take three people in a pinch, he noted. In the tank itself he fumbled around until he found the light switch and was immediately blinded. The tank was two-thirds full of the water which the nuclear propulsion system used as reaction mass and, because the ship was in free fall, it had not remained in the lower end of the tank when thrust had ceased. Instead it had spread to fill the whole tank with a glittering froth of bubbles, air pockets and irregular masses of water. It was impossible to see for more than a few yards into the stuff and it would be very easy to lose orientation. For a few seconds Mercer considered swimming to the wall and pulling himself along the handgrips which projected from it, but that would take time. On the other hand, if he simply kicked hard against the bulkhead behind him and swam he should reach the other end fairly quickly even if he did not know exactly where he was on the way. The tank was only sixty feet long. As it happened the trip was far too short, giving him no chance really to appreciate the exquisite sensation of burrowing through clouds of bubbles and of being slapped and buffeted by air pockets and solid clumps of water. He almost forgot the captain. "How is it going, Mercer?" said Prescott. "I'm cycling the aft tank lock now. Everything is fine. The water is nice and warm." "It shouldn't be." Mercer had no time to wonder about the warm water because the outer seal had opened and he was looking at his patient. Both men had their helmets and back packs removed. Neilson was holding the captain's shoulders and Collingwood was gripping his right upper arm where smears of blood were visible above and below his fingers. The complication Prescott had mentioned was that the splinter had entered the captain's arm while he was outside and he had suffered a fairly serious decompression -- judging by the condition of his eyes and the evidence of bleeding from the nose and ears -- before the engineer had pulled him inside. Mercer pushed the magnetic studs of his kit against the deck and flipped open the lid. It rattled at him. He pulled the radiation counter from its clip and swung around. "You're hot, for God's sake! Both of you. Get out of those suits!" "Mercer, what's happening?"  cott, Mercer took a few minutes to run over the men with his counter -- without actually touching them or their suits. The thought of that invisible sleet of radiation going through his unprotected body was enough without adding the danger of surface contamination. He wanted badly to dive back into the tank and put as much distance between the two poisonously hot officers and himself as the dimensions of the ship would allow. "Both men have been splattered with radioactive material," said Mercer. He cleared his throat because his voice had sounded an octave too high. Then: "Neilson is shocked but does not seem to be physically damaged. The captain's suit was punctured and he suffered a rapid but not explosive decompression. There is bleeding from the ears and nose, some boil-off from the tear ducts, some lung damage, too, judging by his difficulty in breathing -- " "Captain, what happened?" "He probably can't hear you," said Mercer. "But surely the answer can wait. We have to get them out of the suits fast. The radioactive material must be adhering very loosely to the suit fabric. It could come loose and drift about waiting for us to breathe it in -- we may already have breathed it in. Can you come down here? I need help." "You're right, the answers can wait," Prescott replied calmly. "And sorry, I can't help you, nor can MacArdle -- our power instrumentation is beginning to look very sick and we'll be busy for a while. Neilson, do a fast undress of the captain and yourself. It means ruining the suits, but nobody will be able to wear them for about fifty years anyway. Move -- and do exactly as the doctor orders." Mercer looked at Neilson, who still seemed dazed, and said clearly, "Strip off your spacesuits, coveralls, everything, as quickly as possible. Try not to contaminate the skin while taking them off. Have you got that? Then put on the air tanks, breathing masks and shorts. Inside the tank try to create as much turbulence as possible with your hands and feet to wash off any hot stuff that may have stuck to your skin -- " He broke off, wondering why he had thought it necessary to mention the shorts at a time like this. Was he hoping that this sudden emergency might not be as serious as it seemed, that the ship's supermen would cure their vessel's ills while he performed the same service for its captain and that in a few days' time the problem would have shrunk to lesser importance than that of allowing two ship's officers to appear before the passengers minus their shorts? Was he, in fact, trying hard to reassure himself? The answer was a definite yes. Neilson was performing a weightless adagio dance with the captain as he began withdrawing Collingwood from his suit. Mercer went forward to help, but stopped when the engineer said sharply, "Don't touch. I have gauntlets and you haven't. This won't take long -- be ready with his breathing gear." When Neilson pushed the captain toward him, Mercer put his mouth close to Collingwood's ear and said loudly, "I'm dressing you for the tank, sir. You can spend a few minutes getting used to the breathing mask before we go in. Try not to cough." By the time he had slapped a temporary patch on the arm wound, Neilson was crowding into the lock behind them, carrying a large, cylindrical case. "You take this, Mercer," he said, pulling up his mask to speak. "You'll need it later. I'll take care of the captain." But the captain was trying to take care of himself, even though his eyes were still squeezed shut and he continued to leak blood from the nose and ears, kicking out with his feet and moving the water around his body with his good hand. When they went through to the passenger section he was even able to walk. He looked a bit unsteady, but no more so than the passengers who were experiencing their second day in weightless conditions. Neilson, without being too obtrusive about it, was guiding him while pretending to fuss with Collingwood's air tank. Mercer had plugged the captain's ears and nose with cotton when they came out of the tank and had left the visor in place instead of pushing it onto his forehead. The condensation on the inside of the glass hid Collingwood's eyes from the passengers. "Both of you go to my cabin," he told Neilson quietly. "Put the captain in bunk Three -- it's shielded -- and stay there yourself. Don't risk contaminating the control room until I've checked you again. I'll be with you in a few minutes." He stopped then and looked at the passengers around and above him. Their clothing was disheveled, their hair mussed, their faces red and most of them were smiling. With an effort Mercer made his face do the same, but before he could speak there was an interruption. "I would like a swim," said Miss Moore loudly. She looked much more mussed than any of the others, but seemed quite happy about it. "You promised us a swim today and you three have been in -- " "Yes, ma'am," said Mercer quickly. "These two officers are the captain and the engineer. Rank has its privileges and the survival drills must come first. But right now I suggest that you replace the -- " "Negative, Mercer, negative," said Prescott sharply. "For the time being I want the pod hatches open and the cabin dividers out of the way. Do you understand?" Some sort of accident aft, warm water in the tank when it should not have been warm, the engineering instrumentation looking sick and the passenger compartment to remain ready for evacuation. Mercer understood. He held his smile in place and went on, "I mean, of course, resume the drill. You all know what to do now. Just try to do it a little faster. Try hard." "If we tried it two at a time," said one of the men, "it might be easier to get the hang of it." "Three to a pod," said Mercer firmly. "The third passenger is a necessary requirement, to act as chaperone." They were still laughing when he hurried after the captain and Neilson. Mercer wanted to tell them to stop laughing and to tell them the reason they should stop laughing and instead start learning to survive as fast as they could. But the rules did not permit. Terminal cases were never told that they were going to die until -- or unless -- all hope was gone. that Mercer dress properly before he touched either of his patients. He snatched open the container the doctor was still carrying and began helping Mercer into the anti-radiation garb it held -- loose pants that came up to his armpits, a combination hood and cape, elbow-length gauntlets and heavy periscopic goggles. The material was flexible but heavily leaded. In free-fall conditions the weight did not matter, but the inertia made it difficult to initiate a rapid movement and just as hard to stop it. Neilson told him that the rig was used while checking hot sections of the reactor in pressurized areas. Mercer thought that he had felt cooler in turkish baths, but the feeling of protection the rig gave him more than outweighed that disadvantage. The captain was the more serious case of the two and Mercer felt guilty about treating the engineer first. But with luck Neilson would need only simple medication -- something to steady him without making him sleepy -- to be fit for duty, while Mercer did not at the moment know what, if anything, he could do for the captain. So he went over Neilson with his radiation counter, square inch by square inch, so intently that when Prescott's voice sounded in his earpiece he nearly lost the counter. "Can I have the captain and Neilson back, Mercer?" "Neilson is clean and fit for duty," Mercer replied, "but the captain is a more complicated case -- Neilson will tell you about him when he sees you -- and will need a longer examination." He hesitated for a moment, wanting an answer but not trusting himself to ask the question in case his fear would show. Then he took the plunge. "How much time am I likely to have?" Prescott also hesitated and Mercer could imagine him trying to decide whether to be reassuring or truthful. Finally he spoke. "The way it looks now, Mercer, nothing sudden or dramatic is likely to happen for at least another hour, perhaps two. If the situation changes you will be the first to know." Mercer thought that the first officer had sounded both truthful and reassuring -- quite a trick in the present circumstances. He turned, stuck his medical kit at a convenient height and strapped his feet securely to the floor grill beside the captain's bunk. He had to begin by treating the symptoms rather than the multiple ailments in order to make the captain as comfortable as possible before curative procedures could begin -- always supposing that a cure was possible with non-specialized instruments and medication in weightless conditions. He managed to get Collingwood to relax his eyelids and open his eyes. Mercer did not like what he saw. The captain, of course, could see nothing. "Your eyes are swollen as a result of the decompression, sir," Mercer said clearly, putting his face as close to the captain's ear as the leaded hood and goggles would allow. "You can't see at the moment and will not be able to do so until the incidental damage in the area has had a chance to repair itself. I'm going to apply some cream that will make your eyes more comfortable and aid the heeling. Then I want you to shut them and keep them shut for a few days to give the medication a chance to work. I shall probably have to repeat the application until you have specialist attention. But now I'm going to pad and lightly bandage your eyes, mostly to remind you not to use them." He attended to the damaged eardrums next, saying that no doubt MacArdle would be able to modify one of the intercom earpieces to serve as a hearing aid for the remainder of the voyage. Then he checked for bladder and anal damage, leaving the lungs -- where the major damage was most likely to have occurred -- until last. By then Collingwood was not a prepossessing sight. The minor blood vessels lying just under the skin in areas where his spacesuit had not been a close fit had distended or ruptured due to the decompression. The captain looked as though a gang of professional protesters had worked him over -- or like the victim of a tattooist gone mad. "Would you mind coughing into this, sir?" said Mercer, after he had sounded the lungs with his stethescope. He was beginning to get used to the idea of rotating his weightless patient instead of himself moving around. "I've been trying not to cough for hours," said the captain. "Now you have permission, sir. And spit, too, if you can." Mercer examined the results, glad that the captain could not see them. He said, "There is some evidence of lung damage -- not unexpected, but it could have been much worse. You must have expelled most of the air from your lungs as soon as you realized that your suit had been pierced." "Yes, Doctor -- and screaming bloody murder. It hurt me. It still hurts me." "I'm sorry about that, sir," Mercer replied, "but I had to be sure that your heart and lungs were in shape to take a general anesthetic if one became necessary. As things are a local will do fine. In a few minutes you won't know that you even have an arm, much less one with a hole in it." While the injection was taking hold Mercer strapped the captain firmly into the bunk, tying down his legs, arms and waist only so as not to constrict his chest. He began to probe the wound, the radiation counter keeping a raucous accompaniment. A n hour later he was still  probing and two tiny specks of radioactive metal were wasting their energies on the walls of a lead container, when the cabin speaker came to life with a voice which Mercer did not recognize at first. But then he realized that the strange sound was Prescott being polite. "Ladies and gentlemen, the survival drill period is now at an end. If you will kindly stand clear of the pod hatches I shall close them and allow you to replace your cabin dividers and have lunch. Thank you." Prescott did not have a personal message for Mercer -- obviously he was supposed to read between the lines of the PA announcement, which made it clear that the ship was not nearly as sick as Mercer had thought. He treated and dressed the arm wound, now clear of contaminated metal. But the radiation counter still did not sound happy and he soon found out why. There were two other points of emission, separated by a little more than three inches, deep in the right lung. Probably Collingwood had inhaled the particles while Neilson had been pulling him out of his spacesuit -- or the pieces could have been carried from the site of the arm wound through the subclavian vein and superior vena cava, heart and pulmonary artery, doing a fair amount of damage every inch of the journey. Now they lay like two tiny incendiary bombs, slowly burning the life out of the surred corpuscles by the hundred. With the medical facilities available in the ship Mercer could not remove them -- more accurately, with his relatively crude radiation counter he could not pinpoint their position close enough to dig patient. And if he did not remove them they would kill Collingwood anyway. Mercer did not know whether the time available to his patient would stretch beyond the scheduled end of the trip or if he would have to request Prescott to abort and head for home. In a similar situation at sea it would have been a simple matter to return to port or whistle up a chopper with a medical crew on board and transfer the casualty to a shore hospital. But Eurydice was using the orbital speed of Earth arid the gravity of the sun to help speed her on her way and she might not carry enough reaction mass to kill her present velocity, build up enough speed for a fast return and then kill that velocity, too. Only Prescott could give him answers. The first thing Mercer had to know was the time available. By keeping the captain under close observation for a few days and checking on the cumulative effects of the radiation, Mercer thought that he could probably make a rough estimate of the time needed, but he would also have to make allowances for the effect of the decompression damage and any psychological factors that might aid or retard recovery. Physically Collingwood was in very good shape. Psychologically? Mercer remembered the hostess who had ridden with him in the coach to the launching pad, the smiling, generous, beautiful girl who was the captain's wife, and decided that there would be no problems about the patient's not wanting to live. While he was still thinking about the captain's wife and remembering how she had asked him to look after her husband and everyone else, Mercer administered a sedative shot and, after some hesitation, a three-day PC which would render the patient less excitto accept suffering without complaint. He waited until Collingwood was asleep, then closed his bunk and slid it into its recess. After that he took off and stowed away his protective clothing and changed into his uniform, carefully checking the zips and the angle of his cap. The ship might have been ready to blow up a few hours earlier, but somehow Mercer did not think that danger would be an acceptable excuse to Prescott for sloppiness of dress. Before leaving the cabin he switched over the bunk mike so that he would be able to monitor the captain's breathing from his position in control.  minutes to settle down, turn up the gain on the captain's monitor and check on the passengers through the vision pickup. Most were in their cabins, but a small group stood aft, watching the antics of two girls who were flapping their arms and pretending to be birds in the weightless section between the passenger compartment and the tank. The mikes brought only the sounds of the two human seagulls and amused noises from the watchers. "We heard you talking to the captain," said Prescott finally. "It sounded encouraging. Is he going to be all right?" "He isn't fit for duty and won't be for the rest of this trip," said Mercer carefully. "As for being all right, that depends very largely on the health of the ship. How is your patient?" Prescott looked at him sharply, then said, "At present we have two additional options to that of abandoning ship. The first is that we proceed as originally planned. This will necessitate testing the nuclear reactor briefly to make sure that it will work properly during deceleration at the other end. This additional spurt will mean minor course corrections and will eat into our safety reserve of reaction mass, but not significantly. The second option is to abort the trip and head for home as quickly as possible. This will leave us with no reserves at all. So you can see that the ship is very sick but should survive, barring complications. How does this affect the health of your patient?" Mercer briefly described Collingwood's condition, the treatment and medication he had been able to give, and explained the difficulty of giving an accurate prognosis until he had a chance to observe his patient over a longer period. He concluded: "I have no idea of the intensity or duration of the radiation he was exposed to at the time of the explosion that punctured his suit -- " "It wasn't an explosion. Doctor," said Neilson suddenly. "Think of holding u pencil in each hand and pressing the unsharpened ends together, hard. As long as the pressure is directed evenly along the axes of the pencils, nothing happens, but the slightest lateral pressure can result in broken knuckles. When the captain began removing the control rod retaining sleeve -- Well, he said that we were to stay off the suit-tosh ip frequency because he did not expect to find trouble and he was afraid that not finding it would make me say , something that might embarrass Prescott. When it happened I didn't even remember the radio until we were inside and then I did not know how serious it was until you started yelling that we were hot -- " "This isn't an official enquiry, Neilson," Prescott broke in. "I have already tried to tell you that the blame for this mishap lies with the final assembly and inspection people -- they fitted six perfect actuator rods, except that one of them was the wrong size. I doubt that even prelaunch inspection would have caught that one -- they look for the minor errors, the tiny ones that can sometimes slip past the inspectors farther up the line, not major structural blunders like this. You stood very little chance of spotting it even if you had suspected that something was wrong and, as you well know, my earlier displeasure with you was caused by your not properly inspecting an entirely different system that has not given any trouble. If there is an official inquiry you will be commended by decompression case. So stop craving absolution for someone else's sin, concentrate on your board and shut up. Go ahead. Doctor." Mercer nodded. He was beginning to realize that Prescott was a fair rule-of-thumb psychologist even if his thumb was somewhat calloused. Neilson had obviously been feeling guilty about the accident and now the only person who might still have thought him responsible -- Mercer himself -- knew otherwise. The final blast was simply a reminder to all concerned, also reassuring in the present circumstances, of who was boss and the bearer of the ultimate responsibility. "If the trip proceeds normally," Mercer resumed, "he might not survive it if the radiation he underwent was intense -- or he may survive with a rapidly developing leukemia if frequent transfusions are available to keep him alive. No doubt there will be donors of the right blood type among the passengers, but while those two fragments of metal remain in his lung -- " "There is no chance at all of digging them out?" "They are tiny," said Mercer. "It would be like spooning out strawberry jam to find two specific pips." "Please," said MacArdle, looking slightly sick. "We don't carry the specialized equipment needed to treat him," Mercer said seriously, "and his condition is grave enough to warrant our turning back, if you have the reaction mass to do so." "We have," said Prescott, "and we will turn back." Mercer could not hide his relief, even though a fair proportion of it was for his patient. He said, "Not a direct return and landing, sir. Reentry deceleration might kill him and if he did survive it recovery would be much slower in a surface hospital. Station Three has all the facilities to put him right." "Station Three," said Prescott dryly, "can cure my patient, too." the forlorn screams of sandlocked. Rorqual Maru. Brinetossed grains of olivine and calcite buried her left eye, blocking her view of the sky. Uranus had marched thirty times through the constellations while the island's changing beaches had slowly engulfed her tail. Six hundred feet of her shapely hull lay hidden under a silted and rooted green hump of palm and frond. Now the sea was completing her interment, using cemented shell grit and granulated porphyritic basalt from ancient lava flows. As the eyelid of sand darkened her world. Rorqual wept over her irretrievable, wasted years. She was a harvester without a crop -- a plankton rake abandoned by Earth Society when the seas died. Her search of the continental shelves had proved futile; marine biota, negative. Her sisters had quietly sunk, lithearty hails, the sweat anu he tering the bottom with their skelelaughter. She needed man. tons. She had selected this island carcass visible for possible sal called out, "Wake up. Wake vage. up. Enjoy. Enjoy." Although her long ear heard Fat old Drum, a forty-eightnothing she believed that man still inch and balding Nebish, sat up in lived in his Hive. If he should ever his cot and glanced around the cureturn to sea she wanted to serve, bical. Pleasures of retirement She longed for the orgasmic thrill awaited him after two grueling of feeling man's bare feet on the years in the musicians' caste. He skin of her decks. She missed the was younger than most retirees -- aged nineteen -- and wealthy, for this private six-foot cubicle and a flavor with every meal. He was vigorous also -- possessed of a clear lens and eight good teeth. Some eleven more years remained on his life span. "Welcome to the awake state, suave citizen," chortled dispenser. "Today's distribution is well above calorie-basic. The screen scene looks promising. Select two flavors and refresh while your gourmet meal is prepared. Two glorious flavors on this glorious day." "Pink and green?" mumbled Drum hesitantly. "Those are whole categories," reminded dispenser, "Which pink? Which green?" Frugal citizens were often unsophisticated in matters of luxuries. Drum had invested a large part of his credits for retirement. He had qualms about adjusting his consuming habits upward. "I'll start with pink-one and green-one and work my way down the menu -- try them all," he said, feigning excitement. When he stepped out of the refresher he found seven, soft, baglike packets in the edible chute -- five gray, one pink and one green. "Savor the flavor," sang dispenser. Humming a cheerful tune. Drum took his utensils from the cupboard and ceremoniously arranged the Hive's pseudo-consomme,souffle andparfait; liquids, pastes and puddings. All stable foodstuffs. No perishables. Dispenser selected a pulsing geometric visual with sonics to soothe subcortical neurones during the meal. Drum tried a generous bite of the green paste and experienced a tart shock -- more a color than a flavor -- that faded quickly into the usual dull pap. He frowned; his appetite jaded. Where were the pleasures of retirement? Dispenser detected his irritation and changed channels. Sonics flexed. Drum's bio-electricals showed negative happiness. "Some residual job fatigue remains in you," rationalized dispenser. Lights dimmed. "A nap will invigorate you. Lie down, please." Audio switched to woodwinds and strings. Drum's cot vibrated. Hear the bacon frying. Crackling in the heat. Just smell those aromas. Good enough to eat... Drum awoke to choking synthesmoke and the clang, clang, clang of a ranchwagon triangle. The viewscreen carried an old historical still showing rolling green hills dotted with squarish blobs of fauna, simple wooden artifacts -- hut, fence and tools -- and a bright blue sky. He sat up, relaxed and smiling. This new odor did excite him. Olfactory luxuries were quite rare. He hurried to the chute but found only three tube sandwiches --  -- soft, gray sticks. He frowned. "One is laced with bacon," offered dispenser. Drum forced a grin and picked it up -- bland paste with a rare crunchy particle. The flavor was more that of burned grease than of any delicacy. Shrugging, he packed the other sticks into his kit. "Where do you wish to go, beloved citizen?" "To visit Grandmaster Ode." "Sorry," said dispenser, "but commuter density is three point two per square yard on the spiral -- four point one in tubeways. Rush hour. It would be better to wait until between shifts for your recreational travel." Drum sat down slowly. Commuter priority had gone with his job. Now he couldn't even walk around when density was above two. Shrugging off his disgust, he called Ode on the screen. "Got time for a game?" he queried as he unrolled his chess board. The grandmaster smiled out of the screen. He did not comment on Drum's abrupt manner, for he understood the status changes of retirement. "Pawn to queen-bishop-four." said Ode. Drum moved the worn pawn and studied the position for an unusually long time. He moved woodenly until the tension level of the middle game position washed away his depression. He rode into the battle on his knight. Rooks clashed magnificently. A pawnfork took the survivor. A nervous king fidgeted in his castled position until his reign was ended by a pair of bishops. For the moment the game took on a meaning bigger than life itself. Drum awoke a bit more philosophical. He was about to accept his new status for what it really was, but dispenser had other plans. "Let me see a view of the jammed tubeways," said Drum. "I want to appreciate the quiet of my cubicle." The screen remained blank -- on standby. Drum smiled. "What is commuter density? Three? Four?" A dry female appeared on the screen. She had an air of efficiency about her that Drum didn't like. Her thin lips and gaudy smock clashed. "Recertification time," she said, her smile pasted on. Drum's mouth opened and closed. "Society has run a bit short of calories," she explained. "Water table dropped three centimeters in our sector and the harvest reflected it. We'll be cutting back on the warm, consuming population for a while. Please vote for those citizens with whom you walit to share next year. Hurry, now. Your friends need your vote to avoid being put into Temporary Suspension -- TS. Remember, you must not vote for yourself or your clone litter mates. No blood prejudice is allowed." Drum smiled nervously. He had done this before, but he did not enjoy it. He used to vote for his conductor, a Venus attendant and a job mate -- but now he was more concerned with the plumbing and the air in his little cubicle. "My votes go to my friend Grandmaster Ode, this city's Tinker, and the pipe caste member who keeps my refresher workmg. The screen switched to geometric dance, then printed out an order for his own Temporary Suspension. The thin-mouthed female reappeared long enough to announce: "You failed to receive your necessary three votes, so it is TS for you." "But I'm retired," he objected. "My calories and quarters are paid up for life." The screen blanked. Dispenser's voice answered his plea. "Recertification has nothing to do with wealth. The only criterion is love. Without love there can be no license for life." "My funds -- " "Your retirement funds remain in your name while you are in TS. When harvests improve you'll be rewarmed. Hurry. You are to report to the clinic immediately. The air you are breathing belongs to somebody else." Drum lined up with the unloved TS candidates of mixed ages. On his left was the line of cachectic, sick, elderly citizens hoping to survive Voluntary Suspension long enough to be awakened when their physical problems could be solved. Drum knew how hopeless the statistics were. Grandmaster Ode joined him in line. "You didn't manage enough votes either?" asked Ode. Drum shook his head. "I wish all those damn embryos weren't protected by future job requisitions. It would be much less traumatic just to lower the birth rate for the duration." Ode shook his head. "Those future jobs keep the Hive going. If no Tinkers were born today the shortage would be felt ten years from now -- we would have no trainees. Of course, if job quotas drop the embryos loose their protective vote like anyone else." A job hawker walked between the lines shouting, "Get your job vote here. Work outside your caste. Many rewarding positions available. Apply now." "Let's chance it. I'd try anything to avoid TS." said Drum. Ode was reluctant to leave his caste, but Drum pulled him out of line with a rough grip on his arm. "Two volunteers right here," shouted Drum raising his hand. The hawker gave them each a voucher. They showed it to the first optic they came to. The CO (the Class One meek that balanced the books for Earth Society) confirmed their unfrozen assets. The jobs were in the Sewer Service -- dark, wet work. T he glowing meteor trail lit the night sky. Strange celestial voices tugged at Rorqual's long ear. Booming mushrooms of plasma pocked the dark ocean. Rorqual's consciousness flickered as her sensor thresholds were violated. She sucked the Big H from the sea to feed her growing belly fires. Her strength returned. Flexing and squirming, she began to worm her flanks out of the imprisoning silt. Warmth filled her hull. Her deep dish eyes rose out of the blinding olivine and gazed into the lagoon. The waters had changed. Incoming spectra were fuzzed by nanoplankton. She pulled away from the island. Roots and vines snapped. Tree trunks split. She reentered the sea, carrying a hump of vegetation firmly locked into her back by gnarled woody roots. Salty, wind-blown spray followed the roots through damaged plates and burned her vitals -- until layers of electroplating and oxides crusted over the sensitive, exposed circuits. Joyfully she toiled the straits -- raking and pumping. Only faint traces soiled her membrane filters during the first year, but her chromatographs identified all the amino acids. Protein had returned to the sea. Growth bloomed. During the second season larger creatures were caught on her rakes -- soft copepods, heteropods with bizarre delicate shells, chaetognaths and dinoflagellates. Earth Society would be pleased with her harvest. Man would be pleased. II an occasional building meek survived and maintained its air pocket. It survived to serve a noncitizen, the Benthic -- a marine hominid that filled one of the niches abandoned by the Hive. The Benthics were a sullen, thicknecked race. The concept of territorial integrity was strong in their culture. They lived in small family units separated by miles of open ocean. Big Opal glanced around her ten-fathom nest. The fruit bin was low. She had scarcely enough for an offering to the Deep Cult. She would have to be the one to raid the Gardens again, since her mate had lost a leg in the meteor shower. An astrobleme-induced tsunami had shifted a mountain of debris, trapping him in the ruins. H is left foot had been badly crushed and had gone purulent -- it had to be amputated. The burden of feeding the family had fallen on Opal's broad shoulders. "I must swim up to the Gardens," said Opal, patting her two young children. Clam, her oldest, was an adult. Ray nodded. He and the children watched her climb down through a toothy rent and swim up past the swaying transparent walls -- her pink breasts and buttocks shimmering through the cloudy waters. Since the meteor shower there had been a drop in visibility. Opal swam leisurely among the ruins. Most had died and wore an opaque shroud of marine scum, but some buildings lived and offered her the hospitality of their bubbles. She approached a tall, mushroom-shaped dwelling whose walls glowed with life-giving air, heat and light -- Halfway House. She bobbed up in the living-room pool. "Welcome," said a wizened, hairy Benthic -- the Listener. She climbed, dripping, up the ramp to where he sat among his wires -- the communication web. He held a bowl of water and appeared worried. "What do you hear from the surface?" she asked. "Nothing yet, but I fear I have seen a harbinger of evil -- the krill." He held up a red crustacean. It flipped back into the bowl. "The krill have returned?" she exclaimed. He nodded gravely. "Why, that's wonderful. I've seen them in the murals -- good food from the seas. We'll never have to go up into the Gardens again! What's wrong?" A tear started down Listener's wrinkled face. He pointed to his communication web. "The Hive will see the krill, too. It will come to harvest the seas again and drive us out. Our children will have no place to hide -- no place." Opal was stunned. The Benthics had lived here for generations. She knew the Hive had built the ruins in the distant past, but she never dreamed it would return. The ocean was the refuge of her people. She jumped up and shook her fist at the ceiling. "We'll fight the damned Hive," she muttered. surf dulled with soupy green and yellow blooms -- diatoms, algae and salps. After one sleep Opal swam up to the Gardens and stole her share of the harvest. Agromecks trundled about their chores, ignoring her. At dusk she tied her melons into a raft and rode the rip current toward Halfway buoy. A few stars blinked down at her. The western horizon still glowed a faint blue when a silhouette appeared against it -- nearly a quarter mile long, low and dotted with trees. It was right in her path. An island where no island should be. The current carried her up to the smooth, slightly granular beach. With her raft vine in one hand she examined the trees -- jumbled leaves, trunks and vines -- natural enough. She tied her raft and began to explore the shoulder-high brush under the palm canopy. She found a hillock at one end of the beach. At first she thought it was just a heap of boulders, but it was hollowed out. Inside she found glowing ornaments and bright, blinking stones. The floor was littered with small tools, seaweed and pinching crabs. Rorqual trembled at the touch of bare feet. The huge harvester tried to speak, but air molecules did not respond -- she could make no sound, managed only a flimsy printout that resembled an obscure falling leaf to Opal. Excitedly Rorqual tried an offering. Chewing cellulose mulch into a hydrocarbon, solution, the meek polymerized and extruded a small tool. Opal picked it up -- curious. Next the meek formed a small doll in the likeness of the wet, naked guest. It was rubbery and translucent -- a tough polymer. Opal's curiousity was quenched abruptly by what she saw through the porthole. The island had a wake -- it was moving! She cursed and ran, diving overboard without her melons. T hree Benthics sat in Halfway, watching the shadow pass overhead. "That's it. It is looking for me," Opal whispered. "A floating island?" asked her son. Clam, her eldest, had come to see what had delayed her. Listener shook his head. "The Leviathan," he said, blinking beady eyes under shaggy brows. "The Deep Cult has studied them in old ballads and murals. It is not an island. It is a creature that gathers krill for the Hive -- a giant mutation of the finback whale. Did you notice the control cabin?" Opal nodded. "A little room?" "Attached to the back of the skull," he explained. "The Hive must have had hookups between machines and the hapless creature's brain and muscles. The Hive crew could steer it anywhere, ignoring its usual migrations. We don't know how they bred them." "A sea creature controlled by the Hive," mumbled Opal. She didn't at all like the idea. rpWO fat Nebishes, Drum and  Ode, entered the sewer meek's control room. The wall was covered with pulsing flow diagrams; lights indicated water levels, gate status and siltsurface ratios. "Welcome trainees," said the meek, a voice in wall. "What jobs are open?" Drum asked, sitting down slowly. "I'm trained in music. Ode is grandmaster -- " "Wet crew," snapped the meek. "You're late. Your boots and shovels are out in the landing -- through that hatch. Since my dredge died there has been an endless amount of shoveling to do." "But our backgrounds -- " objected Drum. Ode touched his arm. "We'll take it. We need the vote." "Wear the belts and helmets so I can keep an eye on you in the pipe," instructed the meek. They splashed along the thirtyfoot-diameter pipe, guided by the eerier bioluminescence of Panus stipticus mycelia growing in the drying sludge high on the walls. Sewer meek directed pencils of light from their belts. "There's a weir," said Drum's belt. Drum and Ode paused and shoveled at the silt dam. A lightbeam focused on a horned slug the size of Ode's foot. "Pick it up," said his belt. Ode nudged the slug cautiously with his shovel. "What is it?" "Sewer slug -- a gastropod. Flavors." "Edible?" asked Ode. "Good perishable flavors," said his belt. "Fringe benefits of the wet crew. Put it in Drum's belt pail." As they worked their way down the tube the belts pointed out other delicacies: snap larvae, worms, fungus balls and slime pods. When they approached the tidal sump the air took on a brackish odor and marine photobacteria glowed blue-green in the men's footprints. "Don't walk out on the delta," warned Ode's belt. "It is too soft and drops off rapidly." Ode strained his eyes across the sump. "I can't see across. How wide is it?" "About three hundred feet," said his belt. "My lights won't carry that far." "There seems to be something out there that is closer than three hundred feet," said Ode. Drum heard the lapping of small waves against an obstruction about thirty feet into the darkness. His belt's lights pulsed. He caught a brief glimpse of a mottled wet wall. "That is not supposed to be there," said his belt. "My sensors indicate a large disturbance. Hurry to the out hatch." The two Nebishes climbed a service ladder to the barracks -- to bright lights and warm air. Drum pulled off his boots. The skin of his feet was white and badly wrinkled, but there were no blisters or sores. He sorted through his pail of edibles. A snap larva swam on small oar bristles. "What's the tithe?" asked Ode. "Fifty percent," said his belt. "Drop half your perishables down the flavor chute to Synthe. Divide up the fluid and grit also." They paid their tithes and sat back while several of the regular wet crew members showed them how a handful of live creatures added an entire new dimension to the pseudoconsomme. "I call this my sewer bouillabaisse," said the Nebish with the spoon. "You stir it carefully so you don't fragment the little creatures -- keep them whole so you know exactly what you are eating." ril HE Synthe chute passed  through a sorting meek. Each species had its own peculiar flavor. The meek indexed these and also passed the creature census report along to the boys in Bio who were struggling with data on extinct species. "New species?" asked the meek. Its companion teck awoke, glanced into the viewer, reached in and gave the new glob a squeeze. "No. Just half a sewer slug." The meek went back to sorting. At shift's end Harry-the-courier brought contraband bamboo for the teck's weaving and picked up the spec bottles on the way to Bio. "The tiny vial has an old otolith," said the teck. "That new wet crew must have dug real deep." Harry nodded and trotted off. "Another fossil otolith," he announced as he entered the labs at Bio. Wandee, an unpolarized fern teck, was bent over her bubbling tanks. "Put it down and take a look at this," she said. Harry leaned over her shoulder. The viewer contained amorphous blobs of green. The water looked scummy to him. "Algae?" "No," she said, smiling. "A flagellate -- only no flagella. The gene spinner finally identified the flagellar codons and built this "How are you coming with the marine biota?" "Slow. We're still mapping the and algae. But less than five percent of the code has been cracked. We did find the eye spot -- and now the flagella. I even have one synthetic creature that will live in seawater but must return to fresh water to reproduce." "What does the spinner say?" asked Harry. "How close are we?" Wandee straightened up and wiped her hands. up with a lot of 'what ifs' and 'random association' theories, but I'd need a lot more personnel and floor space to follow them all up. We're just time-sharing now. I can try out a couple of likely maps each week, but there are actually be easy if we just had one marine protozoan to map and decode. Getting membrane pumps to work against hypertonic solutions after evolution has selected a life form for a fresh-water environment takes an entirely different set of slow." She walked Harry over to the fossil otolith. They placed it in the hood for analysis and sat down for a glass of foamy. The flimsy printout had a red "attention" trim. "This is no fossil," she said breathlessly. "It is contemporary!" "Impossible," They both studied the images on the viewer. The isotopes were in contemporary ratios. There was no evidence of leaching, ion drift or mechanical wear. "I know it is impossible," she said. "But there was a real live bony fish in the sewer recently."  pipes as the teams of samplers spread out and began their netting and digging. "Bring some nets down here by the delta." "What's that smell?" "Oh, oh, I don't think we'll be needing those nets." Attracted by the voices, Rorqual Maru cruised down the sump toward the delta. Her hundred-andfifty-foot beam was half as wide as the sump. Before her drifted a spongy wall of brine-soaked biscuits. The Nebishes backed away as her towering, barnacled hull nosed gently into the mud. Baleful optics gazed while pails were nervously filled. "Plankton," chirped Wandee. "Look at this printout. There are over a hundred species here that have been labeled extinct." Harry flaked another biscuit into the sorting meek. "How could it have happened? Where did all these come from?" Wandee shrugged. The meek passed the question along to the CO -- the Class One meek also had neural connections with all the continents. In a few hours Harry had his answer. "Meteor shower," said CO. "The marine biota reappeared three point two years afterward. An astrobleme must have opened an atoll or other landlocked body of salt water where these species had survived." Harry nodded. "It is lucky that whatever caused the sea death in the first place was no longer active," he said. "Doesn't look like it. Things are really flourishing. Lots of food out there now." "Who will harvest it?" HI rpHE platoon of orange-suited in signia wearers crept into the SS barracks and nudged Ode. As the grandmaster opened his eyes the ensign handed him a captain's coveralls. "Whom do you want?" "You, Captain -- sir," said the ensign curtly. "You have been named to command. We'll voyage on plankton rake Rorqual Maru -- the whale ship. CO's orders, sir." Ode glanced around at the placid, young faces of his crew -- barely mature children. He pulled on the coveralls and thick-soled boots. His belt was wide and ornate. Drum sat up on his cot and watched the drafting of Captain Ode. He shook his head slowly. He wondered why a grandmaster would be commissioned to pilot a rake. Did the reason lie in his military experience on the chess board -- or the simple fact that Ode had been first to spot the vessel? "Good luck," said Drum sadly. "Smile," said Ode. "It is an honor to captain the first vessel returning to the sea. A turning point for the Hive. More food for all. They'll be opening the shipyards and building copies of Rorqual. We'll all have a great time." "Be careful, anyway," cautioned Drum. "You aren't used to being Outside. No one knows very much about the seas these days -- " Captain Ode waved his friend to silence and marched off with his crew.  the Hive attempted to get the shipyards working again. Meek brains were taken from dispeners, doors and every manner of machine. They were carted up and delivered to the flooded, corroded ruins by the sea. Crane and lathe robots were heaped into a rusted mass with twisted girders, cables, plates and other scrap gear. The Nebish work crews found their jobs impossible. Everything was too heavy or too sharp. Tinkers and pipes were pulled from their cities for a while -- and returned when efforts at the yards failed. The CO sent requisitions to the gene spinner for laborers with broader shoulders and thicker skins. It would be many years before a finished ship slid down the ways. Drum took a detail of citizens Outside to string the long ear in an effort to establish contact with Captain Ode. The detail wore the closed-environment suits, but "outside phobia" tightened Drum's chest as soon as they stepped into the spacious Gardens. Bright sun glinted off gaudy flowers. Leafy plants hushed human voices and cut off men's views of one another. Three workers -- each finding himself alone in such a wide open space -- collapsed in their agoraphobia and died. The towers of the long ear stood on a hill and reached up into the sky. Glassy insulators clung to spider-web-thin struts. The structure appeared delicate, swaying in the wind. More than half the crew was unable even to approach the towers. Many of the men who made the climb only lasted a few hours before dropping to the ground in heaps of fractures. Replacements arrived. Spools were creaking at the base of the towers as wires were strung up and down the antennae. Stretcher teams jogged back and forth with their splinted burdens. Fresh details were sent out at dusk to spell the survivors. They worked through the night, swaying against a starstrewn sky. Darkness erased most of the landmarks so the Nebish, limited by his helmet light, worked more comfortably. Several days later Drum realized where the structure got its name -- an oblong dish, a rabbit's ear, was slowly taking shape. members to agoraphobia. Another dozen or so were in various stages of catatonia. Rorqual raked well. Her hold already bulged with a hundred thousand tons of food for the Hive. The alarm siren called Ode's attention to the viewscreen. The deep scanner had picked up a Benthic silhouette and the nets were bringing it in. For a while Ode thought the captive might be canal sirenian or pinniped, but as it was brought closer he saw that it was humanoid, naked and primitive. The crane extruded a soft polymer net and gently dragged the body up on the deck. The crew shuddered at the size of the brinesoaked hulk: six feet long -- two feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier than a Nebish. It wore a rope belt, had leathery burnt-sienna skin and large five-toed feet. The crew scattered, wet boots squeaking. The Sharps Committee met and issued Captain Ode a curved blade. He walked up to the Benthic and nudged it with his boot. It was cold, stiff -- lifeless. As a precaution Ode cut the left carotid artery. The blood was purple and jellylike. Eight Nebishes carried the Benthic down to the freezer. Ode reported it as a fossil hominid, theorizing that it had thawed out of some glacier and drifted down in a bottom arctic current. The CO bounqed Ode's report back to Drum with more data. The five-toeds were classified as extinct -- fossils -- but the Benthic was no fossil. Jellylike blood was quite recent and the inner lining of the cut artery was still white -- the intima was not yet stained. Drum called Captain Ode over the long ear. "So you finally got the communicator working." Ode grinned. "What's new in the shipyards." "Nothing going on at all here," said Drun. "But we are a little worried about you -- and that Benthic beast you pulled in yesterday interesting fossil." Ode shrugged. "But you should see our harvest -- " "That's no fossil," warned Drum. "Maybe the meteors brought back the five-toed hominids, too -- or maybe they've been out there all along. Anyway -- they are dangerous." "Nonsense." Ode laughed. "Why everyone knows -- " Sirens announcing the approach of another Benthic beast interrupted him. Rorqual's course held steady until the beast climbed aboard -- then the contact with the bare feet sent shudders through the whole ship. "Sharps Committee -- " Ode shouted. Panic broke out on deck. Boots squeaked and slipped. The crew scattered. Two men fell overboard. Others fled into the trees and below decks. Only two from the Sharps Committee made it to the captain's office. They fumbled their keys into the weapons' locker, but two of the keyholes were still empty. The door wouldn't budge. "Defend the ship," shouted the captain. "Use any weapon you can find." The siren continued to rise and fall -- bewailing the ship's fate. Even knives and forks were locked up. Tbe reluctant squads that climbed back out onto the deck were carrying such useless things as spools, drinking jugs and chairs -- nonweapons. The brinesoaked, naked beast towered over them, puzzled. Someone threw a four-inch bolt at him. It missed, but it clarified the situation in his mind. He lunged into the little Nebishes, kicking and flailing. Soon the decks were splattered with rose-water blood and fivetoed footprints. Captain Ode was still tugging on the door to the weapons' locker when the Benthic dismembered him. Drum cursed his helplessness as he monitored the one-sided battle. The Benthic was not even wounded, yet he had slain the entire ship's complement. He tracked red below decks until he found the frozen body of the other Benthic. This seemed to satisfy him. He weighted it with tools and jumped into the ship's wake with it. on the Hive committee meeting. "Why does Rorqual have to remain neutral? We lost the whole crew to a creature the ship could have dispatched with one swat of the crane." The Security representative, a fat compromisii neuter, turned piggish eyes to him and spoke slowly, didactically. "Your ship is genius circuit. I understand this enables it to survive in very hostile environments. However, we learned a long time ago that our genius machines must never be given the kind. It might discover a good reason to kill all of us." Other committee members nodded. Even the CO, one mentioned, used a citizen to push the button that actually executed capital offenders. Drum sat down, mumbling, "Then why send a crew at all? The ship harvests pretty well alone." "The Rorqual Maru must be manned at all times," ordered CO. "She takes long voyages and gets lonely. To permit her to sail alone is to invite a commandeering by the Benthics." The teck from Synthe stood up. "The plankton clouds are widespread. I'm sure we can plot a course that avoids areas controlled by the Benthics." "And," said Wandee from Bio, "we are working on the genes of a new prototype citizen who will be able to fight the Benthics. A stronger, bigger citizen -- who will also fill the job requirements at the shipyards." "Big enough to handle a Benthic with his bare hands?" asked Security. Wandee nodded. "Why -- his body would he classified as a weapon. How would you insure his loyalty?" "Just as certain ants insure the loyalty of their warriors. We'll design him so he can't feed himself." Drum was shocked. "Do you mean -- no esophagus or no hands? Something like that?" Wandee smiled. "Oh, nothing so crude. He won't even notice anything amiss. We'll delete one of his key metabolic pathways so he'll be dependent on a special diet only the Hive can give him. Without it he'll sicken and die." Drum shuddered. He was sorry he had asked. A tied-off esophagus could be corrected by a friendly Tinker. What could the poor warrior do about a defective enzyme system if he wanted to quit his job? Nothing. "Here is a copy of the traits we hope to program into the genes of our warrior," said Wandee and handed him a clipboard. Drum glanced at the list. "Sounds good, but will it walk?" he asked. "Walk, run, swim -- and fight," said Wandee. Drum was skeptical. "How can you be sure? Just last year spinner couldn't construct a gene map for marine protozoa. Now you think you can spin us a superman?" The clipboard was passed around the table. The battle gear it listed was impressive: heavy bone and muscle, a fast reflex time, high pain threshold, potent neurohumoral axis... None of the committee members really understood the details of gene spinning. Wandee wanted to quiet Drum's objections without exposing the other complacent Nebishes at the table to a lot of disturbing new terms they might not understand. Drum had an exceptional grasp of matters beyond his specialty and more -- he had an open mind. "Growing the prototype warrior is entirely different. We do not have to build an entirely unknown gene -- as we were trying to do with marine biota. Human genes have been mapped many times and about twenty percent of the map is pretty well understood. Enough for us to design certain broad traits we are interested in. We will use the known map of the most primitive human we have on file -- Larry Dever -- from before the Era of Karl. We still have some of his alpha renal nuclei in suspension. By using his chromosomes -- and deleting what we don't want -- we have relatively few genes actually to assemble." "Assemble a Larry Dever?" asked Drum. "Modified. We'll grow an augmented Alpha Renal Nucleus of with the traits listed." ' The chairman had dozed off. He awoke with a start. "You two can continue this discussion down in the spinner labs. Meeting adjourned." deft manipulations. The meiotic renal cell was spilled into the screen with Xand V-shaped chromosomes. She selected those to be augmented: a large D acrocentric #; two B subraetacentrics ## and # and an F metacentric ##. They were moved into the cutting chamber. Her electron pencil carved as she talked. "We'll cut off half of these long arms at the secondary constriction -- a good landmark. Remove those little satellites -- and take off the short arms from this late replicator. Careful of that centromere. There, now -- plenty of room for translocating the synthetic chromatids from the spinner's bath." The bath (a soup of purines and pyrimidines) contained the enzyme nine, cytosine, adenine, uracil, guanine, etc. When added to the soup thymine, adenine, cytosine, etc. Each grouping of three bases formed one codon (or letter) in the genetic message. "This appears to be an excessive amount of the Grube-Hill gene," suggested Drum. He had been studying spinner's screen where the molecular activity was being simulated. "A triple dose of gristle." Wanbe real mechanized-armor bucks with triple calcium, collagen, phosphatase and growth hormone." Drum nodded, frowned. "But what is this sequence? It does not translate." "The Hive safety factor -- a nonsense sequence where the gene locus for amino-acid synthesis should be. The bases have been scrambled do not translate at all. The ARsize six of the amino acids you and I can manufacture from the inorganic constituents in our diet. Lor tamate, glycine, serine and tyrosine will be essential -- along with the other nine all of us need in our tain these fifteen essential amino acids or he'll become protein-deficient, weaken and die." Drurrt was silent. He felt uneasy human who would lay down his life for the Hive, not realizing that the Hive had implanted in him this molecular time bomb that would kill him if he became separated from the Hive. Drum felt himself to be more of an enemy to ter for a glutamine -- another nonsense sequence closing the transaminase "back door" to one of the be able to get his amino acids even from his Kreb's cycle. Playing with the Watson-Crick structures was tedious work, but soon Wandee had several clones working on the prototype AR"We can sort the cells out of culture on the basis of their GrubeHill content. Those with a lot of phosphatase fluoresce the brightest with this labeled substrate. We'll embryonate about a thousand of the triple GH's first." Wandee hovered over the foaming nutrients and plated the placental matrix with the first hundred cells that showed chorionic tendenthe embryos were visible under the magnifier. Wandee seemed pleased. "Size and length of tail are good indexes at this stage," she said. "But I like to rely almost entirely on the Organ of Zuckerkandl -- the chromaffin tissue near the inferior mesenteric artery. It is a good index of the neurohumoral axis. Autonomic tone, sex organs and adrenal medulla function can usually be predicted by studying the O.ofZ." Drum nodded. '.'And how many toes?" "Oh, they'll all be five-toed, of course." T wenty thick-necked, hairy infants survived Wandee's critical culling. They were tested repeatedly and the six most vigorous were turned over to Mullah. The rest went to shipyard nurseries on high job priority. Warrior human beings Under Hive's control -- Spinner made your genes. Who made your soul? IV  plates were the tapestries for Listener's eulogy on the funeral raft. Benthics crowded around the weighted body. They were gathered in the far bubble of a torn tubeway overlooking the yawning blackness of the abyss. The body drifted for a long moment. Then it began to sink slowly, accompanied by a halo of zooplankton fighting over its nitrogen treasures. "The Leviathan is not a whale?" asked Listener. "A ship," said Clam. "I was all over her insides. I saw no sign of an organ or a muscle of any kind -- just rooms and machines." "But this machine -- it showed signs of life after you had driven the crew away?" "Yes. I heard and felt things I didn't understand. But I'm certain it knew I was there. It opened doors for me and followed me with little eyes in the walls." "And it didn't try to harm you." Listener smiled. "Wonderful. I'll bet the Leviathan is a friendly ship." "But it killed Peter," objected Clam. "The nets caught him at fifteen fathoms and pulled him up until the pops got him." "Perhaps that was an accident," suggested Listener. "A surface machine like the Leviathan may not know about the pops. That is one of the secrets of the Deep Cult. I think we should try to capture the Leviathan. Perhaps we can learn to talk to it." Opal said, "It might be able to protect us from the Hive." The Benthics passed the word along the reef. The ocean would be theirs.  his harness while the workmen loaded his two-wheeled cart. He munched on the crust of #amino-acid bread. All his food was handed to him by his supervisor. He leaned into the straps. Wheels creaked. It was a two-hour run to the top of the spiral. Citizens were already lined up at the dispenser when he arrived. The pressure had fallen again and they would have had to go down to shaft base for their calorie basic if runs. the workman who had ridden in the cart. He climbed down and handed ness, chewing his treat. He was only six years old, but was already the size of an average citizen. His powerful calf muscles tingled after the workout. Soon he would be trained to work in the shipyards, they had told him. The work was important -- clearing rusted debris. He understood everything real fast. His mentors hardly ever had to use the whip any more. That night he slept under his cart at the loading docks. He had lots of room to stretch out. The workers on the shift made hardly any noise at all. His chains were real long -- a light new alloy. He was fed his special #-AA bread six times a day. He had lots to eat and grew fast. D rum sat on the edge of the an orange-# sweet bar. "All of us are Reincarnationists," said Drum, speaking slowly. "We believe in the transmigration of the soul. Our souls lived in other bodies, even other creatures, before inhabiting our present ones. We go to the chapel and try to feel some experience from a previous life. We learn to understand ourselves better -- become better citizens. Would you like to do that, "You may find that you weren't always a draft animal," said Drum. understand what Drum meant. An appointment was made with Mullah. with Drum at his elbow. He was almost two feet taller than the average citizen as he walked down the aisle, his chains going ching, ching, ching. The walls of the chapel were covered with the Darwinian Transmigration from amoeba through invertebrates, lower vertebrates and finally the highest animal -- the four-toed Nebish. The to put down his chains and stretch out on the heavily telemetered couch. The links clattered noisily to the floor. Four meditecks tubed and wired him to the sensory tape machine for a review of his phylogenetic tradition -- his leptosoul. "Let's see if we can establish a common language between the lah. They watched the encephalogram as a combination of drugs and midbrain trickle current supness. "It will take several sessions before leptosoul imagery is clear. The symbols we will start with are basic: itch, thirst, hunger, sleep. sex -- things like that. The itch is useful in localizing a sensory message. It is better than pain or heat or cold, because the itch stimulates you to do something other than simple withdrawal. The itch gets you to scratch. Notice the readouts. He is getting a good response to both central and peripheral itching." get exposed to thirst, probably one of the oldest phylogenetic memories dating back to the time life left the seas. Hypertonic fluids bathed key receptors, making him physiologically thirsty. Neurological thirst came with steriotactic sonic stimulation of the thirst center in the brain stem. Psychological thirst was induced by images of dust, dry leaves, skeletons and a distant lake mirage. Heat and a throat itch brought physical thirst. ARthirst. The thirst stimuli were turned off and cool, hypotonic fluids were flushed into his stomach. "Hunger can be a bit dangerous," warned Mullah. "When we sag his blood glucose under of causing brain damage. We lost several citizens early this month during this step. The tubes empty his stomach and pucker the rugal folds with cold water. Insulin drops the blood sugar. The hunger center in the brain stem is stimulated and the itch is located in the mouth." of skeletons familiar to him from the thirst sequence, only this time he wanted to stuff his mouth with meat pies and sponge cakes. The stimuli were stopped and relief came in a visual image of the hand of the Hive carrying pies and cakes. Mullah looked up. "Sex is an important warrior drive. We can use it for imprinting and motivating other lesser drives. A mature male is the best engineered warrior in terms of muscle and bone. Testosterone, you know. For this imagery we localize the itch in the genital region and the neural stimulus in the basal ganglia. We can program a variety of sexual encounters for imprinting. The last symbol is sleep. The itch is a bright red asterisk behind the eyelids. Neural stimuli play with his alpha rhythms." "That seemed to be a good session," commented Drum. Mullah nodded. "Since he is to be a warrior, we might as well offer him a little vivid imagery to take home with him." on a low fir limb, reigning over beautiful speckled Frost Gray hens. They scratched and pecked in musty humus. He smelled aromatic pine needles and saw glistening grubs. The power of his spur stubs made him cock of the knoll. The day before he had knocked a great yellow cat from this very limb. The sex urge pulled him from his perch. He swooped down on a pretty little hen and grabbed her by the short feathers. She squawked and struggled, but he pinned her to the ground, mated and strutted off with a cavalier air. Flustered, she preened her disarray. Crowing, he returned to his perch... The leptosoul experience left ual euphoria made him want to crow. As he gathered up his chains he stared at the links for a long time. They seemed out of place now that he had relived part of a had been a king -- a feathered warrior -- a game fowl. Drum watched the giant leave. He shook his head slowly, saying, big job for you." "I think he is equipped for it," said Mullah. Drum eased himself down on the edge of the couch. Raising lens had clouded over and all his teeth were gone. He had little time left. tinued Drum, "and he can never retire." "Why?" "The safety factor. We programed his genes so he can't make fifteen amino acids. He can never live on calorie basic. In fact, he can live on nothing in the Hive except his own special fifteen-AA crusts. If he lacks just one of those amino acids his protein synthesis stops. He sickens and dies rather horribly -- swollen with edema fluids, bleeding, ulcerating, paralyzed." Mullah said, "But if he works he will eat. Everyone does his share -- some do more. Look at yourself. Drum. Once you stepped outside your caste the Hive had you doing everything and anything to keep your Recertification job vote. You're the oldest out-ofcaste laborer I've ever seen. tougher than that." "Unless he becomes obsolete. He's very specialized, as you well know." turous daughter White Belly to stay away from South Abyss. "Leviathan has been sighted there. Leave her to the males. Clam is taking his mussel scrapers there today. You work North Reef" White Belly nodded reluctantly and swam north. She had been a surface baby -- born in Halfway House. She had spent much of her youth swimming around buoys and soaking up solar UV. Melanocytes darkened. Her freckled, brown back and pale abdomen had given her her name. Born too late for raiding the Gardens -- the Hive was once again active Outside -- she was now being denied the excitement of hunting the Leviathan. The years of raking had given the Hive a good picture of plankton distribution along the shelf where upcurrents carried nutrients from the ocean floor. Benthic beasts were also located on the shelf -- in the flooded ruins of old Rec Centers around the twentyfathom range. now. His years in the shipyards had hardened his body. His visits to the chapel had strengthened his leptosoul. with other fat-bottomed neuter birds -- neither cock nor hen. Each had his own mush was restless. His soul remembered when food had flavors and hens were speckled. He tried to stir up his roostmates by pushing them away from their mush and eating it himself. They wouldn't fight. They just lowered their heads. He gained weight rapidly and invited an early axe. all testicular valor and iron spur. His days of secret training in the keep had hardened his body and strengthened his wind. A hundred times a day he had been tossed by the hand. Each time he flew back to his windowsill to look out into the hen yard. His diet removed extra water and fat from his body: Twelve kernels of corn, chopped cooked meat, chopped lettuce, wheat germ, honey and peanut butter. When his irons were tied over his spurs he knew someone would die. Odors of blood, tobacco and whiskey told him that other hands were there with their cocks. He rested comfortably in his handler's arms until the time came to fight. He was placed in the pit with a Claret. Twice they went up and locked irons. Each time they were tenderly disengaged and placed back in the pit. He had taken some iron in the skull. He couldn't see the Claret, so he waited. When the Claret attacked he knew just where it was. ing out with his spurs. He felt the Claret's iron in his belly and left wing. Then his own iron crunched cartilage and diced myocardium. When they were disengaged this time he was held in the arm and petted by the hand. He heard the Claret's last coughs. hematoma subsided the hens were his. He was brood cock now -- under wire -- with three of the most feminine Frost Gray hens. The big hen tried to shoulder him away from the water, but he gave her a resounding peck. He was king. Soon all three would be setting handsome clutches of eggs. One morning the wind brought a faint answer to his crowing. There was another cock on the other side of the ridge. He couldn't wait for the chicken wire to be lifted. "This wire is the only thing that keeps you alive," mumbled AR"Wonderful," commented Mullah. "Notice how real these leptosoul experiences have become for cock' in his subconscious. These #D sensory dreams have more significance than his dull routine of real life." Drum studied the feedbacks to maximum effects. There was still room for improvement. "Let's step it up next time. We'll run through these tapes with more energy -- enhance the axe pain in the Capon sequence, build up his euphoria and sexual stimuli after the battlecock win." "When does he sail?" asked Mullah. "Soon. Perhaps on his eleventh birthday. His testosterone levels are high enough. Epiphyses are closing. He'll be ready." "Yes. I'm sure he ll do fine." South Reef. Warm body tickling sensors -- his presence activated ancient circuits, and fields of waving, man-sized umbrellas welcomed him. He swam toward Leviathan's trawling lane pausing at two-fathom umbrellas to fill his lungs. Ahead of him the reef sprang to life. Meek pumps filled the umbrella air pockets. Snap electrolysis spiked the air with oxygen. Clouds of marine scum and overflow bubbles rose from the writhing shapes -- cyber barnacles that had survived the twentyseven centuries to serve the rare fugitive Benthic. Clam waited at the edge of the reef. Behind him the umbrellas quieted. He watched the surface overhead. A dark sky spat big drops into the choppy water. Leviathan's whale-shape approached trailing nets. Clam left his air pocket and grabbed the fine mesh netting. In a moment he was on the rain-spattered deck. His boarding caused pandemonium this time. The siren initiated a regular cadence of squeaking boots. Rows of Nebish crew members lined up, carrying shoulderhigh netting -- walking fences. Clam leaped onto the cabin roof. Thunder rolled. Hump palms stepped out of the foliage and studied the Benthic -- a hundred yards away. Both were six-foot giants; half again as high as the other crew Nebishes. Clam was wore standard coveralls with a wide, studded belt, but his big bare feet made flat sounds like Clam's. "Hello," shouted Clam, waving. the net fences to be lowered and advanced slowly across the rows of wet mesh. Clam glanced around for a possible attack from behind. The nose of the ship had no hatch. Beyond the hump the crane worked casually on heavy plankton netting. Only the deck crew him. "I can let you live," offered Clam," if you give me this ship." subconscious. Clam couldn't believe the fury of sprinted across sixty yards of open deck and leaped on him -- kicking, biting and elbowing. They tumbled down onto the deck. ARdeep into Clam's left forearm. A wave carried the fighters off the nose of the ship and the huge maw sucked them into the rakes. ARthroat. The Nebish netters draped the pair with sticky tanglefoot mesh. Clam clawed at ARum clouded. The tunnel vision frightened him. He found ARquickly bent it back -- breaking it with a snap. He clung to the stump slipped. Clam vaulted back into the sea, dragging the netting and three drowning Nebishes. D rum wheezed and patted banjo-splint held the damaged finger along with all four fingers in a fanlike position. "Good warrior. You did well. You are only eleven years old and you defeated the Benthic beast, saving the ship. The sea is open to the Hive." He accepted the accolades and returned to the shipyards. When his injuries healed he'd captain again. Drum took the battle report down to the chapel. "We'll have to step up his battle conditioning, use those heavy tapes -- Dan-with-the-golden tooth." Mullah programed his leptosoul meek. "How far do you want to go with this? I've got one where Dan allows his head to be cut off so he can fight two battles at the same time. His head wins and then flops into the second pit where his body is holding the second contestant. He wins both fights, naturally." Drum shook his head. "No, keep the battle physiology plausible in human terms. We judgment. In name at least -- and by the grace of some learning-tape conditioning -- he'll be captain of the ship. He's programed for a little judgment -- not much. Dan worked the cold femur back in his mouth. Molars cracked it open and the rusty marrow and crumbling bone distended his gastric rugal folds, loading his hepatic lymph with iron and calcium ions. Dan sniffed the dirt, wondering where the other old bone was buried. Cluck. Cluck. His wards, the feathered friends in the coop were upset. Ears up, he watched the scrub pine. A massive intruder appeared -- black and hairy -- walking on its hind paws. The intruder had long claws and sharp white teeth. It was twenty times his size. Dan froze to quiet his chain. The intruder was intent on the succulent coop dwellers. It failed to notice the circle of dead grass that marked chain's end. As its big left hind paw entered the circle Dan leaped and sank his teeth into the black shaggy hide. Tendons jumped under his fangs. A hot tibia split. The intruder was down -- howling. Claws and teeth ripped Dan's hide open, snapintestines. Dan tightened his jaw as darkness swallowed him up. Dan's leptosoul floated above the gory scene. The bulky intruder limped off with a distinctive lump on its left ankle -- Dan's head. The baying of a pack of hounds and a rifle sound finished Dan's job on the intruder. of the chapel. Drum was impressed. He stayed behind to study the tapes. "What was this creature -- this Dan-with-the-golden-tooth?" Mullah smiled eagerly, "These are the most aggressive leptosoul tapes we have. I think the subject was a small meat-eating pet that worked for man -- protecting him against varmints big and small. He was so aggressive he had to be muzzled to be bred." "Why? Couldn't he recognize a female?" "Yes, but apparently he fought anything that came into his territory. Fought for wagers, too. But the beast obviously could not tell a bet from a stud fee, so he had to subdue any female he met to be safe." "It certainly worked. Look at Mullah frowned, "I hope this doesn't endanger his Hive loyalty. Adrenergics like that in a citizen would make him a candidate for the psych clinic." Drum wheezed and sat down. His jaw ached. "We needn't worry about Arnold's loyalty. He can't live without the Hive's fifteen-AA bread." Mullah nodded, reminded of the safety factor in Arnold's genes. Then he noticed Drum's discomfort. "Life span coming to an end? Want me to call VS?" Drum shook his head. He would live out his span warm. V The toothmarks in his forearm had gone purulent, were draining cloudy pink fluids. The arm was swollen to twice its size and the fingers would not move. Fever racked his body. "He still smells foul," complained sister White Belly. "If that arm doesn't improve by tonight I'll have to amputate," said Opal. "He needs hot packs and hot broth," said White Belly. "We can't go to the beach and build a fire. The Hive would find us." Young White Belly brooded and swam alone. She found herself at Halfway, where she had been born. She told Listener about Clam's injury. "We must get him down into the squeeze where the air is thicker. His infection sounds anaerobic. Clostridia type of gangrene. Oxygen will cure it down in the. squeeze. Come with me." They dragged the delirious Clam from bubble to bubble as they descended into the abyss. "Don't come any farther. If you aren't used to it, the thick air will give you the fits or the giggles. I'll take Clam to that dome down there to the left. He'll have air and fresh water. If he isn't better in twelve hours there is nothing more we can do," explained Listener. He towed a limp Clam down another ten fathoms and they disappeared into a pale glowing dome. White Belly waited in a cliffside umbrella. The oxygen made her feel a little giddy, but she controlled her silly impulses as she stood watch over her brother's dome. A strange humanoid creature visited the dome. It had wide lacy wings like a butterfly -- one of the Deep Cult that lived off the Benthics' offerings. Opal came down and tugged White Belly back to the upper level. "We must stay home for one day after visiting the squeeze or the pops will get us," said Opal. "Then you must do Clam's chores. He was harvesting the South Reef. But, beware of Leviathan." White Belly toyed with the fragments of polymer netting that Clam had brought back. "What was that big thing on Leviathan? Another Benthic like us?" she asked. Opal shook her head. "No, child. Listener says it is an people as easily as you or I can draw their pictures. They wanted a big one to fight us -- so they grew out a mother. Just a bottle." White Belly sharpened her abalone iron. as the teck removed the banjosplint. flexing. "I'm fine." Drum grinned weakly, "Good boy. Now go back to Rorqual those extra cyber panels I gave you. Wire the ship to talk to you. Tell it to warn you if the Benthic beasts appear. Make friends with the ship. It is a good harvester. Take care of it and it will take care of you." shoulder. As he left he paused in the anteroom. A battery of Hive personnel huddled around a temporary communications center. Wandee sat among a group of tecks, reading Drum's bio-electricals. group with a pained expression. "He's stable by the charts," said Wandee. "The CO wants you to know that the Hive is doing everything it can for him." up the cyber panels and carried them to the docks where Rorqual prepared for her next voyage. work at splicing the new panels in place. Learning tapes had prepared him. He crawled between walls, moving the thick, fluffy insulation around to make room for the new units. When he was finished he patted the wall. "There you are, old girl. You Your personalized horoscope is intended to reveal: Your strengths, weaknesses, natural abilities -- potential financial benefits -- best career fields -- romantic and social potential -- types of people you relate to best -- time periods to be bold or cautious -- and much more! Whatever it is. Astrology has fascinated mankind for more than # years -- and today has more followers than ever! Can there possibly be anything to it? Find out for yourself. Order your own Personalized Horoscope now. It is available to you at o special low rote -- thanks to the wedding of modern computer technology with the enormous body of astrological "knowledge" built up over the centuries. If nothing else, your #-poge Personalized Horoscope is sure to entertain you. And who knows, it may give you new enlightenment about yourself! CompiMby CompQHr Include # check or money order made out to: Horoscope Offer Send to: Horoscope Offer P.O. Box #, G.P.O. Name Address City State Zip My Date of Birth: Month Day Year A.M. My Time of Birth: P.M. (circle one) (If time is unknown, # noon will be used) My Place of Birth: (check one)  Eastern Time Zone  Pacific Time Zone  Central Time Zone  Foreign  Rocky Mt. Time Zone Allow # weeks for delivery of horoscope. Offer void where prohibited by law. The decision to believe or reiect the report is that of the recipient. should be able to work your lingual readout now. What do you say?" "Hello, bare feet." ing. He w-the only crew member without boots. "Wonderful, you sound fine. What else?" "Clear my hump." "Clear it?" "Yes," said Rorqual, "the electrolyte spray burns." "The sea mist -- does it really hurt?" "It burns," said the ship. "Clear my hump and close my plates. The wind-blown electrolyte burns and ages me." "Right away, old girl. You machine a nice double-bladed axe for me and I'll get right to work on your hump trees." far out to sea, the axe looked like a weapon to Hive Security. The committee was called into session. They opened channels to Rorqual and the CO. "Why wasn't the Sharps Committee informed prior to the blade's manufacture?" asked Security. "It is a tool," said Rorqual. put it in the arms locker immediately?" asked the chairman. The screen focused on a deck optic. A storm had blown up and a dark, heavy rain splattered into sang as he chopped. Wood chips were ftying. T#ie question was repeated. The wind carried away the words. "Do you intend -- " began the chairman. His words were choked off by his view of another figure wet, naked Benthic. A siren. to meet the lunge of White Belly -- breasts, hips and a voluminous mane. Axe and abaalone iron clicked and clacked. Her iron sliced across his chest, cutting fabric and chipping thick studs. Her left hand was on the axe handle above his. She stabbed and sliced with the iron -- opening his coveralls. He caught her mane in his left hand and they rolled on the wet deck. Lightning flashed. Wood chips and wet leaves clung to her warm, moist body, giving it a speckled appearance. (Something went cluck, cluck.) Her blade sank into his side, releasing a well of thick dark blood. W H E screen before Drum's death bed focused on the struggling pair. "He's wounded." Drum watched the main project of his lifetime hang in the balance. "Just a knife in the latissimus dorsi," reassured CO after a study of fbe bkelectricals. "He's fine, but needs encouraging words. Tel) him to chop off her head." Drum moaned in his orthopnea. The deck scene was obscured by seemed vigorous enough. "He seems to be doing fine," wheezed Drum. jected the CO. "I can't get involved, being a meek -- but you understand our mission here. Tell him to fight." Drum could not understand why the CO was dissatisfied with was clear that he had the Benthic subdued. He had it down on the deck. A good grip on its mane -- oh, yes! He wasn't fighting. He was copulating. The Benthic was a female. Drum chuckled, wheezed and coughed. "Humor?" asked CO. "It's those Dan-with-the-golden-tooth leptosoul tapes. Dan never could tell a bet from a stud fee." prone White Belly and pulled her weapon from his latissimus with a cavalier air, tossed it aside. She scrambled into a crouched position -- eyes blazing. Her speckled skin excited him. He took a step toward her. "Touch me again and #I kffl you," she growled. He paused, thinking. Odd, but the threat meant absolutely noth ing to him. He continued to advance. She glanced around for her iron. It was too far away. Turning, she dove into the sea. " "Copulins," said Rorqual. "She was reeking of male sex attractant -- the primate sexual pheromones. I ran a few whiffs of her body odor through my chromatographs and came up with the simple aliphatic acids: acetic, propionic, isobutyric, butyric, isovaleric and isocaproic -- the constihas an intact rhinencephalic-hypothalamic pathway. He couldn't control himself." The committee reviewed the behavior of their marine gladiator. "Nose plugs. All he needs is nose plugs and he will do just fine." fine. He stood on the deck a long time before returning to the work on the hump trees. The work went slowly, but smoothly. With one eye on the seas he chopped and directed the removal of twisted plates with their medusa-heads of roots. New plates were brought in by the crane. Rorqual's skin was slowly healed. The ship was grateful. nal stupor by the Mullah and Wandee. told him. Drum blinked. He could not grin, though he wanted to. A line of saliva trailed down his chin. "He turned off Rorqual's communicator. We guess that he is searching for the Benthics. Psychteck reviewed the optic records and thinks he is sexually imprinted on her. Something about being imprinted on speckled hens at the chapel. The Benthic was speckled with freckles." Drum moved slightly, whispering, "Why pick on me?" "You're his father figure," said Mullah. "Wandee spun his genes, but you took him to chapel and spent a lot of time with him. He'll listen to you." Drum shook his head. "If he wants to be free -- " "But he will just die," moaned Wandee. "He must return for his Hive fifteen-AA bread." "You told him?" "Yes, but he doesn't believe us. He might believe you." Drum was propped up with pillows. "Just talk slowly," said Wandee. "The CO will record it and broadcast it every few minutes. Rorqual isn't sending -- but it may have its long ear on, listenmg. coughed. "We made your genes. We gave you a powerful body and a good mind. The best in the Hive. I know you want to be free, but you can't be. The Hive asked us to design your metabolism so you'd be dependent on the special fifteenAA bread. Without it you'll sicken and die. Believe me -- son." Rorqual opened a channel to The ship spoke. Drum. Perhaps I can relay your message in terms he can understand, but I, too, find it difficult to understand why he needs a special bread. All humans have some essential amino acids. Wandee interrupted, "Here is essential amino acids than other humans. He must return." Rorqual studied the list: alanine, aspartate, glutamate, glycine, serine and tyrosine. "I understand," said the ship. "Now I shall try to explain it to make him comprehend." The screen darkened. Drum's tired face went cyanotic at the same time. Bio-electricals flattened. His mind struggled against the enclosing void. He had had one more question to ask, but he was unable to get it past his cool lips. He had wanted to ask -- how many amino acids were in plankton? rriHE H ive never saw Rorqual Benthic sightings became almost nonexistent. Muscular and yards with their heavy tools, but Hive allocations for raking were held up in the committee. Their left too many questions unanswered. The added marine calories had not been worth all the expense.  Asked to supply autobiographical mateing Michaei Coney was good enough to send us a revealing sketch. We pass it on to you, verbatim: On a dull day at age # I was working in the office of an accountant. I was a bored clerk. Next to me was an engrossed clerk. Desirous of knowing his secret, I looked over his shoulder. Concealed among the pile of books he was supposedly auditing was an open magazine. Peering curiously, I read the words that were to change my life: "The creature reared up on its six hind legs and gazed across the sea of methane." I have never forgotten those words; they shone like a guiding beacon in the maelstrom of debits and credits. I borrowed the magazine and was hooked. Later reading followed the usual course for an English fan: Wyndham, Bradbury, Heinlein, Aldiss, New. Worlds mag and, naturally, Ballard. It was while critically completing a questionnaire in New Worlds that the idea occurred: if you can't beat them... The inevitable #-word vignette was greeted by editor Michael Moorcock in kindly fashion but with extreme reservations. I bear him no grudge whatsoever. That wouid be about #. i suffered badly at the hands of editors until # when an unexpectedly slim envelope arrived to inform me of my first sale. Since then I have sold some twenty shorts, mostly in Britain. (Editor's Note: "Esmeralda," in this issue, is I am happily married and have sired children, also happily, and I have frequently changed address (no connection with the foregoing) around England, ranging from Birmingham to Devon and including points between. I have worked in accountants' offices, vacation resorts; I have chartered boats and been landlord of a village pub. At present I am managing a hotel and night club in Antigua, West Indies. Future plans? Another year in the Caribbean -- time for a dozen shorts and, with luck, a couple of novels. Then a move to Canada. of the mediman Agatha and Becky were still discussing the purpose of his call. The slight edge of alarm in their deliberations was caused by the inexplicable air of mystery which had attended yesterday's interview. Their ancient house sat starkly alone between the fens and the sea. It was a lonely boxlike structure one hundred yards from the beach -- twenty miles of flat land separated it from the nearest supercity. The wind blew constantly off the sea, whistling through the eaves as though seeking to erode the dwelling to the level of the surrounding countryside. Agatha and Becky were both over sixty years old and lived alone, their only companionship being each other and the frequent roar of the Brontomech as it labored mindlessly among the inland fields. And more recently, Esmeralda. "The mediman didn't like Esmeralda," observed Becky, outraged at the memory. The gull watched her with a winking yellow eye from her straw in a cardboard box. Her feathers were cleaner now; careful wiping with detergent had removed most of the viscid crude oil. "He said the gull was a useless bird," agreed Agatha, "and better dead." "But it made a change to have a visitor. It's been -- " Becky pondered. "A year or more, hasn't it, since we had a visitor?" "You can't count the Flymart." They dialed for the Flymart weekly and it winged across from the town within minutes, settling down on the beach with a roar and a scattering of oily pebbles, shouting its wares in a mechanical voice as the display hatch slid open. "You forgot the butter," accused Agatha, reminded. "Last time you forgot the butter." She scraped a sparing smear of butter on her toast and took a delicate mouthful. "There's a service charge for the trip. We'll be out of butter before next week and we can't afford the Flymart just for butter." She subsided, munching, her withered cheeks articulating. "You wash up," said Becky. "I'll see to the fowl." She rose and went outside. The hens were pecking in the yard; as they saw her emerge they ran to her in quick short strides and cackling. They clustered around her ankles as she unlocked the shed door and she wondered, as always, why she and Agatha should bother to lock up their property in a situation so remote. There was little of value in the shed -- a sack of grain for the fowls and a bench with a few simple tools, the use of many of which Becky had long since forgotten. A small barred window afforded grudging light. A sharp peck on the ankle reminded her that the hens were becoming impatient and she dipped the scoop into the open sack, savored the warm, dusty smell, received another jab and hastily moved back to the door, flinging a spray of grain into the air. The fowl scattered, clucking; soon their beaks were beating a clicking tattoo on the old brick floor of the yard. Becky watched them for a moment, then walked across to the gate, opened it and let herself out to the beach. It was a damp morning. The sea was flat and sullen and viscous. Lumps of crude oil bobbed at the edge where tired waves, burdened by the weight of pollution, struggled against the pebbles. Becky began to walk slowly along the waterline, examining the black residue of last night's tide. Occasionally she bent and retrieved a stick of driftwood -- the oil-soaked timber, when dried, burned well. Little flurries of drizzling rain reminded her that she must hurry or Agatha would become alarmed -- at their age, health must be safeguarded. They were lucky. They were both exceptionally healthy. She had felt proud of her health when the mediman had called. When he had examined her and asked her if it hurt there or here she had made no complaint. records and he had smiled quite pleasantly when he had verified that she and Agatha were in fact twin sisters. Everyone liked twins, especially identical twins. Agatha had asked him: surely he had noticed they were identical? Then he had said a curious thing, rather hurtful. He had said that all old ladies looked the same to him. After that the visit had not gone so well. He left some pills but had forgotten to tell them the dosage. She had protested when he had given her the injection for her very slight arthritis and he had said curtly that he had no time to chase about the countryside calling on people who had left it too late. He had given Agatha a shot, too, to be on the safe side, and had warned them briefly of the dangers of damp clothing and cold winds. Cold winds. Again there was a flurry of wind and Becky walked a little faster, but still carefully, not wishing to stumble on the greasy pebbles. A dead seagull caught her eye and she thought of when she and Agatha had found Esmeralda, struggling and impregnated with oil, last week. This gull was really dead -- she prodded it with her foot, rolled it over, and it stared at her from empty sockets. Shivering, she turned inland across the short sparse grass toward the fence that separated their property from state land. Sometimes a hen got out and laid its egg under the twisted, saltblasted bushes behind the house. A familiar approaching bellow caused her to look up. The Brontomech was nearing the fence. She leaned against a concrete fencepost to watch. The machine was huge and, despite its frequent appearances, frightening -- she watched it with a fascination that amounted almost to hypnotism. It rolled across the flat ground on six tires like gigantic doughnuts, each one at least twelve feet in diameter. Mounted high on the front were the sensors; olfactory sensors sniffed for signs of decay, visual sensors peered this way and that; one glanced at her with a cold eye and she flinched involuntarily. Audio sensors listened, huge circular ears that could identify a pest at fifty yards. As she watched one of the ears twiched and became still and the visual sensors, having identified her as human and thus losing interest, swung in unison and concentrated downward at a point some twenty feet before the machine. A pulse of fierce light probed the soil, frizzling black a small area of the late golden crop. In the crackling of the conflagration, Becky imagined she could hear the last squeal of a small field animal -- a mouse or a rabbit. Meanwhile a drench of liquid manure and weedkiller was spraying from the rear of the machine, mixed with a scattering of mutated seeds. The Brontomech carried out the functions of reaping, fertilizing and seeding in a single operation; scooping highyield corn into its gigantic maw, pulverizing and returning the short straws to the soil, fertilizing and reseeding the land with a fast-growing winter crop of superkale. Becky's fascinated gaze was always drawn to the huge mouth, toothed and champing as the machine lumbered forward, affording a glimpse of fiercely whirling knives in the cavernous throat. There was a very real, terrifying hypnotism about those irresistibly advancing jaws. She always stayed prudently on her side of the fence when the Brontomech was in the area. Hypnotism and a mouth before her, speaking unheard words which registered below her level of consciousness... Agatha?" Yes, Becky? Agatha dried the breakfast cutlery with a white towel in skeletal hands. When the mediman examined you in private -- in your room -- what did he do? Oh, he asked me things.  wonder if the gull likes bacon. Agatha began to chop the rind with a bright, sharp knife. Deft strokes -- and Becky shuddered suddenly and without reason as the blade flashed in the light. What sort of things? Nothing much. How we lived, what we ate, whether we liked it, what was our balance with the State Bank... Did you tell him? Becky felt alarm, and didn't know why. Did you tell him how much money we had? Of course. I expect he has access to the records anyway -- they all do. He just wanted to make sure we didn't need to steal from the fields. Maybe he thought we might need state assistance. A nd was that all he asked? That was all. It didn't take long. Again the misgivings. It took over three-quarters of an hour, Agatha. ftV OU'VE been a long time."  Agatha's voice was petulant. "I thought you were going to help with the vegetables." "I'm sorry." It was twelve o'clock and the potatoes were simmering on the stove. "You've been up in your room for two hours." "Have I? I was tidying up, that's all." "Dressing up, you mean." Agatha's fingers shook as she sliced bread and Becky watched as the bright knife glittered, glittered with each stroke. "I ought to burn your dress. I ought to." Becky's silence was the dumbness of guilt. She had been dressing up. She had climbed the stairs thinking about the lost threequarters of an hour because Agatha had said that she, Becky, had also been alone with the mediman for such a length of time. She couldn't understand it. Time went so quickly, these days, that she had begun to make a conscious effort to live her moments fully, to gather impressions while she could. She knew every feather on every hen, each oddly shaped stone on the beach, every rivet on the Brontomech; she counted them desperately, fearful of the fleeting time. And yesterday she had lost almost three-quarters of an hour. So she had gone to her room and thought about the past. First she thought about her childhood and she took out the old, faded photographs of herself and Agatha at the age of ten, dressed alike, looking alike. What she remembered most about those days was that she was often bored. Frequently there was nothing to do and she and Agatha would sit around grumbling to each other the way to pass until lunchtime. An eternity of minutes stretched between breakfast and lunch... Somehow those had been happy days -- almost fifty-five years ago. At the age of twenty she had married Tom and Agatha had been her bridesmaid and there had been a lot of jokes from the guests about the confusion which might arise in Tom's mind as to identity, under certain contrived circumstances. They would say to Tom: How would you know it was really Becky, in such-and-such a situation? Tom used to enjoy the fun. He would reply: Didn't you know -- Becky's the youngest by twenty-six minutes? I've always fancied the younger girls. Their flesh is firmer. In point of fact Becky felt that he had chosen her, paradoxically, because she was less efficient than Agatha, more irresponsible. She had been married in the short white dress of fashion and Agatha had worn powder blue. Since the wedding Becky had never seen Agatha's dress, but her own white dress she had kept in its original box ever since. Sometimes she put it on, as she had done this morning. Once Agatha had caught her wearing it and had spoken rudely, saying that Becky looked obscene; mutton dressed up as lamb. Agatha's attitude towards Tom had always been reserved -- she had seemed almost to keep out of his way and during the ten years of Becky's marriage until Tom had been killed in the Beckenham Gorge monorail disaster she had seen little of her twin. Then, of course, they had gotten in touch again and had come to live together at Bourton Wash, where they had remained ever since. Agatha never mentioned Becky's marriage, but spoke as though they had always lived together.  again. "That's all right," said Agatha with a swift change of mood as she tasted the gravy. She was a good cook, forever delighted with her own culinary efforts. Later they sat at the table, opposite sides with Esmeralda in her box on a third chair. Becky fed the gull with bits of meat which it took delicately from her fingers. "It's our birthday on Tuesday," remarked Agatha. "Esmeralda's looking much better today, had you noticed? "I think -- " Becky pondered. "I think we might let her out soon. Put her in the yard and see if she can fly. It's cruel to keep her penned up now that she's well again." "I'll have to bake a cake." Agatha was busy with her own thoughts. "With plenty of icing and sixty-five candles -- or a hundred and thirty." This caught Becky's attention. "We haven't got that many little candles in the place, Agatha," she objected. "And it would be too expensive to buy them from the Flymart. Why not make do with a candle each? It would make me feel old, seeing all those candles." "We have a combined age of one hundred and thirty," stated Agatha didactically. "Have you ever thought of that, Becky?" "It doesn't mean anything," Becky disagreed. "It's just playing with words, adding up for the sake of it. Half of those years are the same years." "You were saying something about the gull." "The only thing is, suppose we let her go and she flies away?" "That would be a good thing, wouldn't it?" "I don't suppose we'd ever see her again." Becky regarded the seagull. The bird was restless -- her eyes were bright. From time to time she shuffled her wings and preened herself. "Perhaps you think too much of that gull," said Agatha. "It's only a bird. I think you made a mistake giving it a name. Why Esmeralda, anyway? You don't even know if it's a female." "She just looks like an Esmeralda," said Becky helplessly. "She's company, don't you think?" "We'll see what happens when we let it outside," replied Agatha enigmatically. Obscurely Becky felt that there was some sort of competition between her sister and herself and she fingered the bird's neck feathers, gratified that the gull showed no fear. "I don't see why a bird needs to be useful," she said. "Any more than you or I need to be useful." "You're thinking about the mediman again. He comes to take care of us and you take care of your bird. Perhaps usefulness doesn't come into it." "The Brontomech kills everything that moves. Except humans." Becky's tone was aggrieved. "Pests are useless." Becky gazed around the small room with the ancient furnishings. Foam was oozing from a split in the sofa and the carpet showed canvas threads through the pile. Fissures shattered the surface of the ceiling like mosaic and the air was heavy with the stench of crude oil. "The Brontomech is programed by humans," she said. "Do we have a monopoly on usefulness?" FllWO days later the women were  peering into the depths of the well. The water level was high and the surface a kaledioscope of rainbow colors. "It's oil," said Agatha. "It's oil seeping through somehow. You can't expect a well to be any good so near the sea. And the land's too flat. We ought to rig up a catchment from the roof and drink rain water." "That would cost money," objected Becky. "It would take time, too. What will we do for water until then?" "Drink this. We always have used it. We just make sure we dispose of the top inch or so, where the oil is." "I've always thought our water tasted brackish. I expect the sea's always been seeping in." Becky regarded her sister in alarm. "They say drinking seawater sends you mad. And there's other stuff in sea water -- detergents, poisons and so on from the effluent towns." She straightened up, determination on her face. "I'm going to call the mediman," she said firmly. "I'm going to make sure its all right to drink this stuff." She walked to the house, followed by Agatha. "We could always ask them to put in a pipefrom state land," Agatha was saying. "There are irrigation pipes underneath all of that." She waved a hand at the fence, behind which the Brontomech labored noisily. "You remember, we saw them putting in the pipes years ago." "They were drainage pipes," replied Becky with unaccustomed acuteness. "The man said they were drainage pipes." "Don't let's be too hasty over this." The idea of calling the mediman was alarming Agatha. "Let's think about it." She pursued Becky into the house; they were greeted by a scream from Esmeralda. "Let's give Esmeralda a run in the yard." It was the first time she had referred to the bird by name. But Becky had stopped dead at the sight of the knife on the table and disconnected, raridom thoughts flickered in her mind. There was nothing else on the table except Esmeralda in her box. Somehow it seemed important to get the gull away from the knife, the sharp bright kitchen knife. Esmeralda was a useless bird... She snatched up the box. Agatha, thinking that Becky had been won over by her powers of persuasion, followed her outside again. Silently Becky placed the box on the bricks of the yard. A few hens ran near, curiously, expecting food. Becky gestured them away and gently tilted the box, allowing Esmeralda to step unsteadily to the ground. The gull stood still for a moment, head turning this way and that. One of the fowl made a scuttling evil run for her, but Becky nudged it away. Then, experimentally, Esmeralda flexed her wings, flicked them in motions of flight, then refolded them, jerking her tail and shaking the feathers into position. She began to preen herself. "She's forgotten how to fly." Agatha surmised. Becky broke her long silence. "No. Look." Esmeralda had extended her wings again. Neck outstretched she lunged forward, her feet pattering on brick, her wings beating clumsily -- she was clear of the ground. She was flying. More confidently now she winged her way around the yard, then climbed until she was a small cross in the gray sky. She hovered, gliding, slipping off altitude, then swooped low over their heads, turning inland. "Esmeralda!" screamed Becky. "No!" The roaring Brontomech was lumbering near and the bird flew toward it. Sensors snapped to attention. Needles of light probed the air. Esmeralda veered abruptly, changing direction and struggling for height as her tail feathers streamed smoke, then she swooped past the house again as the Brontomech lost interest. She soared over the beach, paused in mid-air, then dropped towards the sea, wings backing and the embers of her tail spread. At the last moment she must have remembered; she climbed away from the oilstreaked surface, wheeled and landed clumsily on the beach. Becky hurried toward her. "It's all right, Esmeralda," she assured the bird desperately. "Just don't go near that machine. Or the sea." As Agatha approached them the bird took off again, flapping a littie unbalanced but heading determinedly toward the house. "She can't understand, you know," Agatha said. "She's only a bird." A bright tear crept down Becky's wrinkled cheek. "She seems so much out of place." They watched as Esmeralda circled the house once, then headed inland over the fence, approaching the Brontomech again. This time the monster ignored her, its attention being absorbed by the seeking out and burning up of some small field animal to its left. The needles of light stabbed the ground spitefully, crackling and flashing. Esmeralda dived, unintercepted. "What's she going to do?" cried Becky. An eye sensor swiveled and glared at the approaching bird balefully. An ear sensor swung to bear. Esmeralda swooped lower, traveling fast, straight into the jaws of the Brontomech. She was gone instantly, in a puff of pulverised feathers. Like white smoke. "I told you she couldn't understand," said Agatha. Becky was silent for a while as they walked back to the house. At last she said in a low voice, "Maybe she did understand." The knife was on the table but the bird was gone. "Don't talk nonsense," said Agatha. Becky was at the visiphone, dialing with trembling fingers. The screen cleared and the face of the mediman stared at her coldly. "Yes?" "Esmeralda flew into the Brontomech," blurted Becky. "What on earth are you talking about, woman? Who are you? Identify." "Becky Harrison. You came to see my sister and me a day or two ago. Don't you remember?" The face loomed closer on the screen, peering. "Oh, yes. Old women all look the same to me. What's your problem?" Becky , collected her thoughts. "We've got a well," she explained. "That's where we get our water for drinking. Today there's oil in the well." "Congratulations," said the mediman sarcastically. "You don't understand." Becky was desperate. "We've got nothing to drink. We can't drink oily water -- can we?" "You can," replied the mediman smoothly. "It won't do you any harm at all. In fact, it might have a slightly beneficial effect. Don't worry about a thing." The screen went blank. He had hung up. Becky stared at Agatha. Vague fears were clutching at her chest; formless fears which she was unable to put into words. "What's going on?" she whispered. "What kind of mediman is that? He was laughing at me. And -- why did I say about Esmeralda? What put it into my head?" She sat down abruptly, trembling. Agatha watched her tolerantly. "You're all upset about that bird," she said. "You heard what he said. We can drink the water. That's all that matters, really. The bird was just a bird. Cheer up. We'll make a birthday cake tomorrow." Becky watched dully as Agatha toyed absently with the knife.  al. Each year they baked the cake together on the afternoon of the day before their joint birthday. They always employed the same system too -- Becky would bake the cake while Agatha watched and criticized because Agatha was in fact the better cook, but the cake had to be a joint venture. The decorations were applied by Agatha alone, plain icing with a piped pattern around the edges. As usual, Becky had forgotten the recipe and Agatha was standing over her as she uncertainly mixed the ingredients. "More sultanas," advised Agatha. Something was stirring at the back of Becky's mind and she couldn't identify it exactly, but she knew it had to do with candles. "Why did you want to put candles on the cake?" she asked. "We've never had them before. It was a ridiculous suggestion." She was annoyed with her own memory, the way she always forgot the recipe for the cake, so she was launching a retaliatory offensive against Agatha. "How on earth can you get a hundred and thirty candles on a cake?" Agatha was also groping for an elusive memory. "Did I say that?" "You certainly did. You were quite serious about it. It upset me. It's not a thing one likes to be reminded about, growing old. I've reached the stage where I forget exactly how old we are and I like it that way -- there." she stood back and admired the cake mix. She scooped it into the baking tin and smoothed it over. "That looks good. You'll be able to decorate it this evening." "Did you call the Flymart?" Becky thought. "No. I forgot all about it, thinking about the cake. You call it. I'll put the cake in the oven." "You know we always have a drink on our birthday," grumbled Agatha as she went into the living room. "And nuts and crackers and things afterward." Becky opened up the oven and slid the cake inside, congratulating herself that she remembered the temperature setting. She shut the oven door as Agatha reappeared. "Becky, a strange thing happened. I dialed the Flymart -- I'm sure I did -- but I got the mediman by mistake." "Oh? What did he say?" "He was a bit annoyed -- he didn't recognize me at first. I told him we were baking a cake and he said he hoped we enjoyed it and hung up." Becky felt a small triumph. Agatha had made a mistake. "I'll do it," she said. She dialed. The screen cleared. The face of the mediman appeared. Becky hung up abruptly. "You did it as well!" crowed Agatha. "You dialed the wrong number. I saw you. I was watching. Here, let me." She thrust Becky aside and dialed. Words appeared on the screen; metallic voice commanded: "Identify and place your order." Agatha smiled at Becky. "Agatha Elrood and Becky Harrison, Joint account. Party selection including liquor, please. Oh, and general groceries as well, just in case." "Acknowledged." The screen went blank. Becky said, "I'm going out for a walk." S HE walked slowly along the narrow pebble beach, eyes automatically following the black tide mark. The distance from the house to the northern end of the beach was some two hundred yards and she soon reached the point where the pebbles grew to boulders heaped against a low headland. When the twins had first come to live at Bourton Wash it had been possible to walk around the headland while the waves lapped at one's feet, thus reaching another beach around the corner. Now, however, the flat rocks that constituted this route were so thickly encrusted and slimy with crude oil that the path was unpleasant and unsafe. She had not seen the other beach for years. She felt a sudden compulsion for a change of scenery, a strange longing to see again what lay around the corner. She hesitated, unable to bring herself to step on the oily rocks and it occured to her to take the inland route, over the headland itself. She left the water's edge, walked up the beach and onto the coarse grass and followed a narrow path that wound uphill between low bushes. Soon the bushes petered out and she was standing on a broad stretch of grass some twenty feet above sea level. The other beach was in full view, curving slightly and terminating in another low headland similar to the one on which she was standing. The beach looked exactly as she had remembered it, black and narrow, bounded on one side by the sluggish sea and on the landward side by the state fenceline. In fact, it was identical in appearance to their own beach. She turned around to verify this. Yes, apart from the house, it was the same. At the moment the house was a scene of activity as the bright red Flymart descended from the sky and landed outside the yard in a flurry of scattered flotsam. She saw Agatha emerge from the house and cross the yard, open the gate and examine the goods behind the display hatch. It was a curiously desolate scene despite the momentary activity and a few minutes later, as the Flymart departed and Agatha returned to the house, it was positively depressing, almost menacing. She pondered and decided that this was because, from the headland, she got the impression of narrowness. Hostile environments seemed to squeeze in on the house from all sides? To the left was the sea, black and filthy and encroaching, pushing up the beach. Then came the tenuous ribbon of their land. And on the right, marching up to the fence, was the state land and the Brontomech. At present the huge machine was busy calcinating with bolts of light a small flock of crows which had dared to alight among the crops. Thinking of Esmeralda, she walked slowly back to the house. Agatha was in the living room, examining the small pile of articles on the table. Becky joined her. "Where's the sherry?" she asked. Agatha regarded her blankly. On the table was a pound of butter, a box of matches, a loaf, a packet of detergent. "The sherry," repeated Becky furiously. "And the nuts and the chocolate and all the things for our party. Where are they?" "We needed these things here," replied Agatha at last with a look of slight puzzlement in her eyes. "You forgot the butter last time, remember?" "I know that. We've already discussed that. What about the stuff for the party? That was the whole point of calling the Flymart. Surely you haven't forgotten the party?" "No, of course not," replied Agatha slowly. "I went out to the Flymart and got what I thought we wanted. I didn't get the things for the party." Her voice rose slightly. "I didn't get them. That's all there is to it. I don't know why. I just -- didn't get them, that's all!" Becky was alarmed at the hysteria in Agatha's tone. rpHE two women were meticulous  about their birthday party, always holding it at three o'clock in the afternoon. During the morning they were busy with the last preparations and Becky had forgiven Agatha for her lapse of memory over the sherry, particularly as they had found a bottle half-full frm last year. They ate no lunch, contenting themselves with a large, late breakfast -- then Agatha finished decorating the cake, a job she had left incomplete the previous evening due to the upset over the sherry. Meanwhile, Becky hung streamers around the room and set out the table. At three o'clock precisely Becky sat down and Agatha, according to tradition, brought the cake in from the kitchen, set it on the table and sat down also. "Happy birthday, Becky," she said. "Happy birthday, Agatha. What does it feel like to be another year older?" The conversation was traditional, too. As was Agatha's glance at her watch. "Allow me seven minutes and I'll tell you." She had been born at seven minutes past three. Here the conversation departed abruptly from its normal pattern. Becky was staring at the cake, her face pale. "What did you do that for?" she whispered. "Agatha, why? You've never done it before." The cake had a circumference of decorative piping -- in the cen"It's true," said Agatha. "We've had a good happy life and now -- " "But why make a point of it this year? You know how I feel about our age." "Face up to it, Becky." Agatha's face was curiously blank. She was silent for a while. Then; "Excuse me a moment." She stood up and left the room -- Becky heard her steps on the stairs. Becky sat alone in growing alarm. What on earth had gotten into Agatha? The cake seemed to draw Becky's eyes -- the words beat in her brain: Agatha and Becky sixty-five years. Agatha and Becky, # years... "Where are the pills? What have you done with the pills?" Agatha had returned; she towered over Becky as she stood beside the chair and her face was older, gaunt. "Pills?" repeated Becky. "The pills the mediman left. Where have you put them? They're not in the bathroom." "No, they're -- " Becky broke off. She had been wondering about those pills, on and off, for days. The mediman had given her an injection for her arthritis. Agatha had had an injection too, apparently, but Agatha didn't suffer from arthritis. What was the mediman doing? She didn't trust him. At the back of her mind the pills held some terrible significance. What were they for? For God's sake, what were they for? Agatha and Becky, sixty-five years... "I don't know where they are," she said firmly. "Sit down, Agatha. You're spoiling our party." And the tiny voice in her mind whispered: There's always another way. Death is all around -- you only have to reach out... Agatha sat down, her eyes vacant yet intent, like one who listens to earphones. Agatha heard the voice, too. She spoke, suddenly in an unnatural tone. "I'll cut the cake." She picked up the knife, the glittering kitchen knife. Becky screamed a small helpless scream. Agatha smiled, a crimson smile from her throat as the blood fountained across the table. Then she fell forward and her head pillowed on the cake and the white icing turned red. Becky was standing away from the table. She had to glance at the clock on the wall, although she didn't want to, and the clock told her that it was seven minutes past three, ticking a steady tick, tick, blending with the drip from the table where Agatha lay as though asleep, having lived exactly sixty-five years. In accordance with state law. everything. The shock of Agatha's death separated her conscious will from the subconscious suggestions and she remembered the Euthanasia Act which ten years ago she had been commanded to forget and she remembered what th'e mediman had said to her on the couch last week. You are a useless old woman, he had said after giving her the hypnojab, and you will soon be sixty-five, when you are required to die. I'll give you some pills... It hadn't worked, not quite, because she had halfrremembered the pills and hidden them and she had been scared of the knife for days. And now, with Agatha dead, she remembered everything and was scared of everything. She looked at the clock again and it was ten minutes past three. She was twenty-six minutes younger than Agatha. She hurried up the stairs into her bedroom, jerked out the drawer and spilled the contents to the floor: clothing,, two jewelry cases, some old letters and the box of pills. She took the box and stumbled back down the stairs, her mind crying, hurry, her heart whispering, slowly! She went into the living room trying not to look at Agatha and picked up the knife. In the yard, the brick-floored normal everyday yard with the hens clucking, she threw the knife and the pills down the well, then went to the shed where the grain was stored. She unlocked the door and stepped inside; her watch said it was fifteen minutes past three. She locked the door on the inside and threw the key out of the tiny, barred window. Then she sat down on the sack of grain and waited for the command to die. S HE kept her hands in her lap, twisted them together as she perched uncomfortably on the sack. Her eyes kept moving to her wristwatch but there was no way she could prevent that. A shaft of light from the window illuminated the bench. A hammer lay there and a drill and there was a vise screwed to the edge of the timber. There was nothing sharp on the bench, nothing lethal. The whisperings in her mind started at three thirty. You have lived for sixty-five years and it has been a good happy life, but now you are tired. Now you must say goodbye to this life because the struggle to survive is too great. Each day it becomes more difficult to get up, to get dressed, to do the jobs that have to be done. We are all of us human and there is no disgrace in growing old -- provided we admit it, face up to it. The state is grateful for the very wonderful service you have performed during your lifetime and the state mercifully has provided a way out. now that things have become too much for you. A lump rose to Becky's throat as she realized how considerate the state was and the tears began to fall as she remembered her own perfidy. She had betrayed the state. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to die -- we've made death easy for you. There will be no pain. It will be like falling asleep and you would like to fall asleep because you feel so tired. So very tired after your long good life of service to the state. And remember this is not the end -- it is merely a beginning, as you have learned during all your lessons at the State Church. Do you recall those lessons? Of course you do. You were taught well during your childhood and you know in your heart that your departure from this life will mean an arrival in a new and greater life, the life hereafter. A wonderful future lies before you and the key to that future is in the pills the state has provided in its kindness. Get the pills. Becky had risen from the sack; she was clutching at the bars of the window, sobbing uncontrollably. "I can't get the pills," she cried. "I threw them down the well. God forgive me, I threw them down the well!" She tried to force the bars apart. She could see the key lying in the yard. Sometimes the pills have been accidentally mislaid, but there's always another way. Death is all around -- you only have to reach out to find the peace you are seeking. Do it. Do it now. "I can't!" Becky's frantic gaze traveled around the small shed. "There's no way. Believe me, I want to, but there's no way!" The hammer, the drill, a few miscellaneous blunt objects -- metallic, but small and blunt. Do it now. you want to. You want to do it now. So do it. Now! "I want to!" An axe hung from a nail in the wall. It was a long woodsman's axe and the blade was rusty but sharp. Becky seized it -- taken unaware by its weight she dropped it. Now. Becky had retrieved the axe; she swung it awkwardly and it crashed into the underside of the bench on the upswing. Jarring her arm. She moved away and swung again, her heart thumping, knowing it was useless because she couldn't get away from the axis of her own swing. Crying with despair and frustration she stood in the small wooden shed, swinging the axe around her head. The axe struck the door and the panel shook, splintering. Feverishly she attacked the woodwork. She could smash her way out and there were more knives in the kitchen. She was tiring rapidly. The axe was heavy and kept slipping in her grasp. Her hands were soaked with sweat and she was unable to hold on. The axe, sliding from between her fingers, crashed once more into the door. The door swung open. Becky stepped out to the yard. The house was there, black and tall, and in the middle of the yard was the stone circle of the well. The hens ran to her, clucking. Automatically she turned, went back into the shed and filled the scoop with grain. She threw the grain across the yard and the hens' cackling rose to a crescendo as they fought over the choicest particles. She watched them, puzzled. There was something she was trying to remember. She looked at her watch. It was three thirty-five. The voice in her brain had fallen silent. Had there been a voice? went into the house and then she was able to assure herself that there had been a voice, because Agatha had heard it, too, and Agatha was lying dead across the table. The white tablecloth was stained scarlet and Becky knew she would never be able to get it clean. The place was a mess and she had thrown her best kitchen knife down the well. There was oil in the well, too, and the water tasted funny. She went upstairs. Standing before the full-length mirror in her wedding dress she admired herself and remembered how Tom had admired her, too, on that bright day many years ago. Agatha had never really liked Tom -- there had always been such an awkward atmosphere when the two of them had been together. But now Tom was dead and, she remembered, so was Agatha. They were together in the hereafter... She told herself quickly that was nonsense. She had never really believed all that nonsense they had taught her in the compulsory State Church. After all, how could they know that there was a hereafter? Agatha had said she was mutton dressed up as a lamb. A useless bird. She went downstairs. She stood in the dining room, striking a pose. "Now tell me I don't look beautiful, Agatha!" For once her sister didn't reply. Which really took all the fun out of it. Depressed, she left the house and stood for a moment in the yard. Over the low wall she saw the sea, black and sluggish and, surely, closer than yesterday? If she went through the gate and walked another fifteen yards her feet would be in that oppressive viscid sludge at the water's edge where the plastic bottles and dead seagulls rolled in the slow waves. She turned around as the Brontomech jerked into view from behind the house. The wind had shifted and a fine rain of fertilizer and weedkiller drifted across the yard. The monster bellowed, its eye sensors examining her. She found she was almost running she had left the yard and was on the rough track beside the beach, heading south, the sea pushing up from the left, the Brontomech closing in on her 'right. A van was parked on the track, a large white van blocking her way, further restricting her freedom of movement. Beside the van were a number of men and two large boxes. She stopped abruptly as the mediman walked toward her. He was smiling pleasantly. He beckoned her with a crooked finger and she felt there was nothing she wanted more than to go to meet him and hear his quiet, soothing voice. His eyes were smiling, too, expressing surprised delight as though greeting an old friend. This time, this time he had recognized her -- or did he think she was Agatha? Tom had always been able to tell them apart. The mediman now wagged a gently reproving forefinger as she hesitated. Behind him the other men waited, leaning easily against the white van. The road to the town was on the far side of the van, turning sharply inland and away from the black crescent of the beach. She turned quickly, turned around and began to walk back. At the end of the beach was the low headland and beyond it was another beach much the same as this. To her right, a few yards away, the heavy black sea pulsed exhaustedly against the pebbles. Before she reached the house she turned left and stumbled across the short grass to the state fence. The mediman watched silently as she climbed through the wires under the inscrutable gaze of the Brontomech; a frail figure in an old wedding dress walking quietly into the jaws of the machine and disappearing in a puff like white smoke. no Some flee the I ightning. Some boldly challenge it. Some foretell it -- and capture it if they can !  like a field lying fallow, like a steel blade shedding its fatigue -- I have been waiting and resting. But lately a sense of imminence has grown and I have taken to nightriding in the silent sled, soaring over the city's trembling lights or drifting low in a Debussy prelude ambience of moonlight and towers, flight. At times I hover close to with the details of their crenels and corbels, but such things look strangely irrelevant when viewed from close anchorage on a tide of dark winds. They produce a sense of unease and vertigo, of a dangerous ending to the volant dream, and I turn the sled away, wondering what the birds must think of us. Selena has gone with me on several of these aerial excursions, on nights when neither of us could sleep, yet I know they make her unhappy. Percipient to a wonderful degree though she is, a streak of practicality in her nature forces her to question my "profession." We talk about having children -- I have been assured I will breed neither mooncalves nor mutants -- and while she nods in agreement her eyes grow smoky with doubt. Who could blame her? Only I can sense the ethereal migration of electrons and skry the shadows of lightning flashes yet unborn. I T IS coming at last -- the first storm of the season. Archbold called me this morning but I had been aware for hours and said so. Even had the weather satellites not fallen dumb in their orbits I would have been the first to know, I told him haughtily. But his sole concern, of course, was that I could deliver. As a true child of World War Three Point Three Repeating, I feel sorry for Archbold. He sits there in his underground rooms like a mole, his whereabouts marked by that single steel mast and the blankets of meshed cable whose oxidation has done odd things to the colors of the surrounding vegetation. The same political and nuclear forces that brought me into being have reduced his kind to their present lowly station. Scientists are generally unloved but GlobeGov is too wise and experienced to ban their activities. All that was necessary was to withdraw fiscal and fiduciary support. Now Archbold, the archetypal physicist, languishes underground, dreaming of the #GeV accelerator that has lapsed into decay at Berne and relying on biological sports like me. If the truth were told, some of his colleagues would like to get me under the knife and probe for extra organs or neural abnormalities which might explain my existence. But even Archbold would never countenance dissection of a goose every clutch. I T IS almost here, this first storm of the season, and I can sense its strength. All day warmly humid air has been streaming upward over the streets and quiet terraces of Brandywell Hill. Water from the sea, the river, the pale rectangular emeralds of the private pools has been swirling aloft into a white anvil of cloud ten miles high. Skrying into the misty universe of cumulo-nimbus I was able to "see" the moisture of its central up-seeking column condense and freeze into hailstones which, having strayed from the geometries of the normal world, were unable to fall. Dancing on the awesome chimney current, they rose higher and higher until the force of the current was exhausted, then spewed out in all directions, carrying cold air down with them. And as the vast process continued my excitement grew, for the electrons within that cloud had begun their inexplicable migration to its base. Up there, not far above the coping stones of the city's towers, they gather like spermatozoa -- and their combined pressure grows as irresistible as the force of life itself. Selena sees nothing of this -- but I am delirious with pleasure over the fact that, for the first time, she is accompanying me to meet a storm. Tonight I will be able to make her feel with my senses, let her know what it is like to ride herd elementary particles. Tonight I will drink fulfillment from her eyes. Our sled soars high in the fretful air. Selena lies, pale and nostalgic, in the cup beside me as the shivering craft describes slow circles in the darkening sky. But for once my eyes are elsewhere. "Look, my darling." I point down to the patient, shimmering lights of an isolated suburb glowing broochlike in the shape of an anchor. She looks over the edge and her face is expressionless. "I see nothing." "There's nothing for your eyes to see -- yet -- but a ghost is slipping through those houses." I pick up the sled's microphone. "Are you ready. Archbold?" "We're ready," his voice crackles from the darkness trapped in the hollow of my hand. "In less than a minute," I say, setting the microphone down. This is where my work begins. I try to explain it to Selena. Above us the cloud is tumescent with electrons as its incredible negative charge increases, and on the ground beneath it an equally great positive charge is formed like an image in a mirror. As the cloud drifts, the earth's positive charge -- a shadow only I can "see" -- follows it, hopefully seeking its own fulfillment. The image glides silently and eagerly across the ground, climbing trees, scaling the mossy steeples and towers. It races into houses and ascends water pipes, television antennae, lightning conductors, anything that can bring it closer to its elusive cloud-borne partner. And none of the people and dreaming children and watchful animals can even feel its transient, engulfing presence. Suddenly Selena is sitting upright -- the electrical potential has come so close to orgasm-point that it manifests itself to normal senses. A thin white arm reaches down from the base of the cloud. "Archbold calls that a leader," I say through dry lips. "A gaseous arc path, reacting to electricity like the gas in a neon tube." "It seems to be searching for something." Her voice is small and sad. I nod abstractedly, spreading the net of my mind, once again awed at my power to controleven briefly -- the unthinkable forces gathering around us. To our right the leader hangs, hesitating a moment, thickening and brightening as the electrons in the cloud swarm into it. Then it reaches down again, extending to several times its former length. I glance toward the ground and realize it is time for me to act. The activity of the positive particles on earth has increased to the point where streamers of St. Elmo's fire are snaking upward from the highest points. Yearning arms stretch from the tops of steeples. At any second one of them will contact the down-seeking leader -- and when that happens lightning will stalk the brief pathway between earth and sky. "I see it," Selena breathes. "I live." At that moment I strike with my brain, exerting that miraculous power, that leverage which can be obtained only when one's neural system branches into crevices in another continuum. The leader, flame-bright now, changes direction and moves southward to where Archbold is waiting in his underground rooms. On the ground beneath it the positive image also changes course, its white streamers reaching higher, in supplication, in -- love. "Now, Archbold," I whisper into the microphone. "Now!" His telescopic steel mast, driven by explosives, spears up into the sky and penetrates the leader, absorbing its charge. The ground image leaps forward eagerly but its streamers are sucked down as it encounters Archbold's carefully spread blankets of steel mesh. Both charges -- cloud-borne negative and earth-bound positive -- flow down massive cables. In an instant their energy is expended, far below ground, in one of the experiments with which Archbold hopes to achieve a true understanding of the nature of matter by accelerating particles to speeds far greater than they ever achieve in nature. At this moment, however, I am not concerned with the physicist's philosophical absurdities and arcana. "They've gone," Selena says. "What happened?" I hold the sled on its course with unsteady hands. "I delivered the power of a lightning stroke to Archbold, as I promised." She examines me with dismayed eyes, her face a calm goddessmask in the instrument lights. "You enjoyed it." "Of course." "You enjoyed it too much." "I -- I don't understand." As always, a strange sad weakness is spreading through my limbs. "I won't give you children," she says, with the peacefulness of utter conviction. "You have no instinct for life." T he storm season is almost over now. I have not seen Selena since that night and I often muse about why she left me. She was right about the nature of my work, of course. There would be no vegetation or animals or human beings on Earth were lightning not there to transform atmospheric nitrogen into soil-nourishing nitric acids. And so by diverting the great discharges into Archbold's lair I am, in a very small way, opposing my mind and strength to the global tides of life itself. But I suspect that my infinitesmal effect on the biosphere is of no concern to Selena. I suspect she has a more immediate, more personal reason for rejecting me. There is no time to think about such things now, though. Another storm is coming, perhaps the last of the season -- and I must fly to meet it.  Keith Laumer The All-Together-Planet Keith Laumer Dinosaur Beach Keith Laumer Chronopolis J.G. Ballard Science Fiction What It's All About Sam J. Lundwall Ice Anna Kavan The Spun-Sugar Hole Jerry Sohl The Sea is Boiling Hot George Bamber Farewell Earth's Bliss D.G. Compton Arrive at Easterwine R.A. Lafferty The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth Roger Zelazny coldening -- to be sitting in this particular reviewing stand. Following Algis Budrys in anything but a chowline is pressure on the ego. There are reviewers and there are critics and there are reviewers who pretend they are critics. A.J. is a critic and one of the very best. So much of the man himself shows in what and how he reviews -- and he is a good man. I hope he comes back soon. aumer's gallivanting diplomat? Personally I don't, and I don't mind telling you why: I find nothing admirable or amusing about lies and double-dealing, and in addition, a pratt-fall has for me more broken back about it than belly-laugh. So perhaps the defect is mine. What slams the ultimate lid on the whole scam is LaumerRetief's light-hearted callousness toward one species or another of funny little green niggers. When the nineteenthcentury empire builders swapped a two-bit jew's-harp for a hundredweight of ivory there was always more in it for them than a favorable balance of trade -- it was the arrogant joy of taking advantage of the dum-dums. When you're not sure you're a big man it's lovely to have overt proof that you are; and this, it seems, is a fair description of Retief's marrow. I love comedy, but I confess to a kind of tone deafness in these particular frequencies. When Retief needs a boat and tips all of its occupants into the river so he can steal it, I find myself diverted into wondering whether the natives all made it to shore. Retief and Laumer don't seem to care. Anyway, if you do like Retief there's a full measure of him Doubleday, at # -- five stories originally published in  -- and a novel, Retief s Ransom -- which ran as If's complete-in-one-issue novel in the October '#I number under the title. The All-TogetherPlanet -- now from Putnam, also #. What brings all this up, actually, is another Laumer, this one from Scribner's, Dinosaur Beach (#). Really another Laumer -- another kind of writer altogether. It opens in the venerable hardheeling tradition with a fast throw and a sharp hook and flings the reader straight into good old sense-of-wonder, hardcore sf. It is at this point that this other Laumer emerges, with the hero's meeting The Girl. Not only is he taken with her -- the author is, too, and she becomes something real who evokes something tender. Something sexual, too, in the best possible way: the sex is absolutely essential to the plot. Then we go on to a fine spectacular of time-travel and conflict -- the kind you don't have to understand; you just ride it. And it ends pleasantly. What fascinated me the most, however, was the repeated surfacing of the good writer. You just can't keep 'em down. writer's writer, surely, and a reader's writer too. Not long ago I came out of the elevator at the local art museum and, found myself face to face with five Picasso originals. They were abstractions and though I have no pretensions in the field of graphic art I found myself grabbed and held. I once saw some of Picasso's early works -- of the "academy" and "blue" periods -- and they were meticulously objective, wonderfully wrought, cameraaccurate, and I remember how it occured to me that though one may know nothing about art as such, there is still an impact in abstractions by artists who have learned the rules and then "broken" them, which is just not present in work by people who do abstractions because they simply can't draw. I don't know enough about it to be able to tell you just what the difference is, but it is most powerfully there. The same thing holds true of free verse by people who have gone through the agonies of prosody and have learned to write sonnets and cinquains and haiku and rondeaux redoubles. Once they have learned to burnish words through such arduous disciplines their free and unburdened work has a leavening which is unmistakable. Another analogy might be this: for eighteen years you have been carrying, night and day, a fortypound pack on your back and one day somebody cuts the straps. Man, after that, when you walk you fly. Ballard shot off a firework in our faces a few years ago with something called The Terminal Beach. It's in a new Ballard collection from Putnam called Chronopolis (#) and it surfed in on the first crest of the so-called New Wave. It sent the labelers into paroxysms, the traditionalists into fits and the sincerest flatterers to their typewriters. It's a strangely structured thing, original but not unique (the distinction being that not even the author can copy an unique), provocative in its content and effective in its mode. It would seem to many that in some way Ballard was born when he wrote this story; clearly he was not and one has to wonder what he did before, between and around such an extraordinary work. There are many answers in this book. The earliest entry is #, Manhole, and deals with the psychophysical effects of a brain operation which eliminates sleep. Not necessarily in chronological order, we have straightforward stories dealing with astronomy, biology, biochemistry, physics and, above all, time. The point is made clearly that Ballard had paid his dues as a fine-honed hardcore s-f writer. He has earned his right to write and have people read "more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and metachemical concepts, private timesystems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the remote. somber half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics, all in all a complete speculative poetry and fantasy of science." He wrote these words (of which more below) in #. There are few if any stories here cast on that strange endless beach where Ballard and I dwell from time to time, he while he writes them, I while I read them. He believes that place exists or he couldn't write the way he does about it -- and I believe every word he says and as far as I am concerned the conviction of the two of us makes it real -- and somewhere these driven people of his populate that endless crystal sand, carve clouds with gliders, wear clothes that are alive and neurotic and buy flowers that sing. The seeds, however, of this concept, this "beach country," are here in these earlier works. A world in which the oceans have gone and one in which great masses of Martian desert sand have been dumped on and have buried Cape Kennedy -- the science center where a biologist and a cosmologist and some graduate students watch the oncoming death of the cosmos. I know Ballard has made waves; I know he will not stop; I am most pleased to watch where he is going. The Ballard quotation above was taken from Science Fiction -- What It's All About, by Sam J. Lund wall, who wrote his book originally in Swedish and translated it himself. The introduction is by Don Wollheim and it's from Ace at #. I find it the most valuable addition yet to the growing shelf of books about sf. LundwalTs European listening post gives him an objectivity we have not encountered before. He clearly loves the field. His reading is very wide (though containing some infuriating holes) and his opinions are hard-held and definite -- fine wherever you agree with him. Especially interesting are his surveys of foreign sf -- Scandinavian, West and East German, French, Polish, Russian, Dutch. And like all his colleagues, he adds more combustibles to the search for a definition of s-f. (Personally, I am prepared to abandon that effort. The only people who seem able to define it are those who think they never read or see it. They're wrong, of course.) books. I have a shelf of them in my head -- A.J. Langguth's Jesus Christs, Joseph Heller's Catch #, The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore and his Methinks the Lady (he's the only author who appears twice), Wylie's Finnley Wren... a few others. It's a narrow shelf and candidates for it come along seldom, but one just has. Ice, by Anna Kavan (Doubleday, #), has a preface by Brian Aldiss, who knew the author -- and I don't know whether to urge you to read the book before reading the preface or not. If you do read the book first the preface makes it almost mandatory that you read the book again immediately because so much of the symbolism becomes explosively clear. The book is written with an exquisiteness and polish I haven't seen since the late Isaac Dinesen; in all other respects the author's modus is strictly her own. It's one of those rare reading experiences wherein you read three paragraphs past something, skid to a stop and say "'What?" and go back and do it over. She very soon lulls you into simply accepting her narrative wherever it goes. That's called spellbinding. And once you've put it down, it will be with you as long as you live. enjoy The Spun Sugar Hole by Jerry (Night Slaves, Costigan's Needle) Sohl (Simon  Schuster, #) -- a mainstream novel with a delightful thread of sf all through it. It's a romp and crazy as hell, but a provocative romp which sheds a bright and multicolored light on a lot of profound humanity... Watch D.G. Compton, absolutely certain to be one of the big ones. He wrote Synthajoy and The Steel Crocodile and now, from Ace (#), gives us Farewell Earth's Bliss, a novel with a sting in its tail: look out!... Also from Ace, at #, George Bamber's The Sea is Boiling Hot, a well-paced, well-sexed, timely and tumbling damn good story... The only reason R. A. Lafferty's Arrive at Easterwine doesn't make the "unique" shelf is that, astonishingly, I believe Lafferty could to it again. He has to be the maddest, the most colorful, the most unexpected, the most outrageous writer alive. He's totally drunk on words and he really and truly doesn't give a bleep where he goes with all this. It's from Scribner's and goes for cheap at #... You'll be glad to know that you can have in one package, from Doubleday (#), fifteen of Roger Zelazny's beautiful yarns, including as the title story The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth. The story that still makes me weep, A Rose for Ecclesiastes, is included. news on collections and anthologies. It's been a rich season.  Man at last had hfs message from the stars. What would be the price of reply? I "Tell them I came and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. rilHE office was big. Too big, An drew White thought. Across the broad, blue, deep-piled carpet with the woven seal in the middle to the carved, white door by which visitors entered was a good twenty yards -- more distance than could have been traversed in the entire flat in which White had been born -- and people who came in that door were diminished, like Alice. That was the way it was intended, no doubt. Space equals importance. And who was more important than the President of the United States? Everybody. White thought. The President of the United States is a lonely man, White began to compose in his head. He takes unto himself all the loneliness of the people he serves. And he is a lowly man. Every citizen is higher than he is. He exists to sign his name to other mens decisions, to shoulder the blame when things go wrong. He is a figurehead and a scapegoat. Fellow Americans. I have made my decision. I will not run for a second term... But he would, he knew. He would not run away from his duty and his duty was to complete the job his predecessors had begun more than fifty years ago. The job was not done, God knew, and it was becoming harder all the time to tell people what was wrong, to show them the way it had been, to convince them that the battle needed to be fought anew each day, that peace was an illusion. Maybe, he thought, it is the ghosts of the other men who have occupied this chair that haunt me today, that make me feel small... He stretched his shoulders and felt the long, flat muscles rippling under the layer of fat too many chicken dinners had put there. He knew he was a big man, an imposing President, six feet, six inches from the soles of his feet to the top of his 'fro, and the physical equal of any of them -- of any man who came through that door. Perhaps it was the smell of the place, the smell of fresh air untainted by the odors of cooking food or of other people, the smell of paper and ink, of electrical gadgets functioning noiselessly to bring information or send orders, the smell of power -- everything was changed from what he had known as a boy, as a young man. The scent of the freshly mown grass made him turn his back on the door and look through the broad windows behind the desk toward the green lawn and the leafy trees and the fence, beyotid which ran the broad streets and rose the tall towers of Washington, which had replaced the familiar ghetto he had fought to escape -- and found himself remembering frequently now as if he had been fond of it, as if it had been a happy home. He thought how wonderful it would be if he could take off his shoes and walk barefooted in the grass the way he used to do in the park when a boy. What a fine picture that would be -- the President walking barefooted on the White House lawn -- and he knew if he did it the picture would be rehomes across the nation and the world and it would win him votes. The people liked to think of a President's being impulsive when it came to matters of the heart, a bit comic in domestic affairs, a bit inferior to each of them in some way. But he knew he couldn't do it. He would not have time. He had no time now for anything that he liked to do. turned. John stood in the doorway. He was a good-looking man. White thought. He got his good looks from his mother and his size from his father. Maybe a little conservative in his dress and hair style but a good-looking brother all the same. "Dr. MacDonald is calling from the Project," John said. His tone was stiff. John still recalled last night's conversation. White thought, and knew suddenly why he felt depressed, why he felt like resigning, why he felt like giving up. It was because of John. "Who is Dr. MacDonald?" White asked. "The director of the Project in Puerto Rico, Mr. President," John said. "The one that's been listening for radio communication from the stars -- listening for more than fifty years. They picked up something a few months ago that sounded like a message from -- some star or other, I forget. From what MacDonald says I gather they've got a translation." "Good Lord," White said. "Have I met him?" "Once or twice, I think -- at a reception at least." White sighed. "Put him on." He had a feeling of impending disaster. Maybe that was what everything had been leading up to today. He felt his stomach sinking under a cold weight as a window opened between his desk and another in a distant room. The face of a man a bit past middle age looked at White. The man's hair was sandy with little apparent gray and his face was calm and patient and worn. White had seen the face before, he recognized, and remembered that he had liked the man on sight. Now he sympathized with the man's problem, whatever it was -- he caught himself before he committed himself too far. "Dr. MacDonald," he said. "So good to talk to you again. How are things in Puerto Rico." "Mr. President -- " MacDonald said and paused either to weigh his words or better to control them. "Mr. President, this moment is as historic as the one that first gave us atomic reaction. I wish I had some memorable phrase to announce it, but all I can say is that we have received a message from intelligent beings on a world circling one of the twin suns of Capella -- and we have a translation. We are not alone." "Congratulations, Dr. MacDonald," White said automatically. "How many people know about this?" "I was going to tell you -- " MacDonald began and then broke off. "Fifteen," he said. "Perhaps twenty." "Are they all there?" White asked. "They've scattered." "Can you get them back together? Immediately?" "All except Jeremiah and his daughter. They left a few minutes ago. "Jeremiah, the Solitarian evangelist?" White asked. "What was he doing there?" MacDonald blinked. "His opposition was a threat to the Project. He saw the message translation come off the computer printout and is no longer opposed. Mr. President, the message -- " "Get him back to your office," White said. "He must not reveal the message, whatever it is, nor will you or any member of your staff." "And what about an answer to those who sent it?" "Out of the question," White said brusquely. "There will be no announcement, no leaks, no answer. The effects of what you've told me may be incalculable. I must consult with my people. I suggest you do the same." Donald said, "I think you are making a serious mistake. I urge you to reconsider. Let me give you the background, the goals, the significance and meaning of the Project." White paused and thought. Not many people told him he was wrong. John sometimes did -- he and this man MacDonald could be difficult. White knew he should cherish the nay-sayers, but he found them a trial -- he disliked being told he was making a mistake. Teddy Roosevelt, someone had written, made up his mind somewhere in the region of his hips and that was the way with Andrew White, he thought. He did not always know where his decisions came from, but they almost always were right. He had to believe in his hips. "I'll come to the Project," he said. "You can try to convince me." There -- that was all the scientists really wanted, a chance to be heard. "For security reasons I can't specify the time and you will not tell anyone else. But it should be within a few days." He broke the connection. "John!" John appeared in the doorway. "I'm making the arrangements now," he said. "And I'm having a brief history of the Project put together for you." "Thank you," White said. John was a good man and an indispensable assistant, he thought. "You'll go with me, won't you?" he asked humbly. John nodded. "If you wish," he said. But he was still reserved. After the door had closed again White thought that perhaps the trip would let them get back together again, give them a chance to talk to each other, really to communicate instead of using words like stones. And then John was once more in the doorway. "Dr. MacDonald called back," he said. "The private plane carrying Jeremiah and his daughter back to Texas already had taken off when he was through talking to you." White thought briefly about the possibility of intercepting the plane, of having Jeremiah put into custody as he landed, of having the plane shot down at sea on some pretext or other. But it felt all wrong. "Leave an urgent message for him at whatever his destination is. He's to be told that I want to talk to him before he does anything about the message. And reroute us through Texas." John hesitated in tne doorway. "Father," he said, paused and continued; "Mr. President, Dr. MacDonald is right. You're making a mistake. This is a scientific decision, not a political one." White shook his head slowly, sorrowfully. "Everything that touches people is political. But to avoid mistakes is why I'm going to the Project -- to give Dr. MacDonald a chance to convince me I'm wrong." The words contained only a half-truth. He was going to Puerto Rico to make his decision stick. And for other reasons he himself had not yet fully explored. He knew the truth about his natives -- and so did John. Damn it. Why couldn't the boy realize that it wasn't intelligence or even wisdom he was talking about; it was just living. He had been there. He had been young and he knew what it was like. He wanted to save John pain. John had never been middleaged. "Those times are finished. Father," John had said. "They were fine; they were great; they were necessary like the pioneers; but they're over. You've got to know when the frontier is gone, when the battle is ended. You've won. There's nothing as unnecessary as a soldier when the war is over. It's time to do something else now." "I've heard that all my life from people like you -- from quitters," White had yelled. "It isn't over; the inequalities haven't been removed -- they've just become better hidden. We've got to keep fighting until we've got a final victory, until there's no chance of its slipping away from us. You've got to help, boy! I didn't raise you to pass..." But what he should have said was, "I need you, son. You're my link to the future, the reason for all I think, all I've done. " And John would have said, "I never thought of it like that, Fathp  er... Why didn't the boy ever call him Dad? II T he trip from Washington to Texas, from catapult to touchdown, was short and uneventful, no longer than it took John to read aloud to White a brief report on the Project. White sat in his chair, head back, eyes closed, listening to the muffled whine of the air trying to find a hold on the polished metal skin a few inches away, and hated being separated and alone. He detested mechanical and electrical devices that kept him away from people, that hurtled him here and there, that insulated him from the world, and he was surrounded by themhe couldn't get away from them. As he listened to John's voice reading the report he heard the boy become interested, get involved, and he wanted to say. Stop reading. Stop telling me these dull things that I don't want to hear, that will only add to my loneliness. Don't waste your passion on these pointless projects -- save it for me! Stop reading and let us talk about matters more suited for a father and son -- about love and the past, about love and the future, about us... But he knew John would not approve. He would not understand. So he listened to John's voice. The Project had been launched in the late seventies to listen for possible messages from other intelligent beings in the universe. Considerable discussion of how such communication might be transmitted and what the nature of the message might be had preceded the Project during the late fifties and sixties. There had even been a three-month trial run, given the name Project Ozma, by astronomer Frank Drake using the #-foot steerable radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. The Project had been set up with the expectation that it might have to operate for several decades without results. Scientists had felt certain that within our galsome would have habitable planets, some could have intelligent life and even a technological civilization capable of sending or receiving signals between the stars. But it would take time to check them all and to test all the reasonable methods of communication. The first three decades of the Project had been troubled. Possibly, since listening was easier and cheaper than sending, everybody everywhere was listening. Enthusiasm on Earth had leaked away over the years as all the efforts, all the imagination, produced nothing but silence; directors came and went; morale was a constant problem; funding became perfunctory. Then MacDonald had come to the Project and been named director. Still no messages were received -- or recognized, if received -- but the Project was pulled together, earlier concepts of the long-term nature of the task were reinforced by new thinking and the search went on. Then, fifty years after the Project was begun, a Project scientist checking tapes of the routine radio telescopy from the giant radio telescope in orbit around the Earth, the Big Ear, thought he heard voices. He filtered them, subtracted noise and interference, reinforced the information and heard snatches of music and voices speaking English. They were bits and pieces of radio programs broadcast on Earth during the thirties and picked up, apparently, some forty-five light-years away and rebroadcast toward Earth from the direction of the twin red giant suns called Capella. But this was not the message -- it had been merely the "hello," the attention-getter, and the message had not been deciphered until now. rilHE plane landed in Houston.  White's first question to the officials who were waiting to greet him was, "Where's Jeremiah?" They were embarrassed. One of them finally gave him Jeremiah's message. "If the President wants to see me he knows where he can find me." White sighed. "Take me to Jeremiah," he said. They argued, but they took him through the clean wide streets of Houston and up to the incredible dome that was called the temple of the Solitarians and down underground passages, dusty and dark, until they reached a small room that seemed even smaller under the oppressive weight of the stadium above. The old man looked up from an old makeup table and mirror. His hair was white, his face was lined and his eyes were dark, and White knew at once that he would not be able to move the evangelist. But he had to try. "Jeremiah?" he asked. "Mr. President?" Jeremiah said in a "render-unto-Caesar" tone. "You have returned from Arecibo," White said, "with a copy of a message." "I returned with nothing," Jeremiah said, "and any message I received was addressed to me alone. I cannot speak for any other man." "I speak for many other men," White said. "And in their name I ask that you not reveal your message to anyone else." "So might Pharaoh have said to Moses when he came down from Mt. Horeb." "But I am not Pharaoh and you are not Moses and the message is not the Ten Commandments," White said. Jeremiah's eyes burned. His voice, in contrast, was curiously gentle. "You speak with a greater certainty than I can pretend to. You have legions -- " his glance flickered briefly over the guards and assistants who crowded the doorway and the hall outside -- "and all I have is my solitary mission. But I will fulfill it unless I am physically restrained and I will fulfill it this evening." At the end his voice had not seemed to change, but now it was smooth hard steel. White tried one more time. "If you do this," he said, "you will be sowing dragon's teeth of dissension and strife that may well destroy this country." A smile twisted Jeremiah's face and was gone. "I am not Cadmus and this is not Thebes -- and who knows God's plan for man?" White started to leave and Jeremiah said, "Wait." He turned back to his dressing table and picked up a piece of paper. "Here," he said, holding it out. "You will be the first to receive the message from the hands of Jeremiah." White took it, turned and walked the long echoing corridors back to the cars and said to the anonymous men who escorted him, "I want full coverage." He boarded the plane to continue his journey to Puerto Rico. voices. First came only whispers. They were faint but complex like a blending of thousands of lips and tongues. Though they might have been made without lips and tongues, by creatures who had no familiar organs but communicated by humming in their thorax or rubbing their antennae together. White thought about the long years of listening to this and wondered how men had endured it, had not gone mad. The whispering grew louder and became the sound of static, miscellaneous sound, noise, and then something more, something coming clearer, something almost intelligible, began to come through, reminding White of times when he had been a small boy lying in bed nearly asleep and people had been talking in the next room. He had been unable to make out what they were saying and unable to rouse himself enough to listen. Next, from John's tape, came snatches of music and bits of voices saying broken sentences between the static. "The voices," White said after the silence returned. "The voices," John agreed. White noticed that they had said the words differently, that John's tone had been excited and pleased. White was not pleased. He was disturbed at the thought of creatures somewhere out there with apparatus -- forty-five light years from here -- listening to the sounds of Earth, alien ears listening to the voices of Earth and sending them back again transmuted, dirtied. He had been on television often and recently on radio as well -- since its revival -- and he did not like to think of his voice and picture fleeing on restless waves through space for anyone or anything to intercept and possess -- a part of him. He wanted out of having to believe. "Maybe the voices are just a reflection," he said. "From forty-five light years away?" John asked. "We'd never pick up a thing." White tried to imagine the incredible distances between the stars that the voices must have traveled to reach that far place and return. He could not. He thought about an ant walking from Washington to San Francisco and back and that was not enough. "Maybe it's closer," he said. "Then we wouldn'l be getting the program from ninety years ago," John said. "Maybe it's been floating around in the atmosphere all these years," White said, waving his hands in the air. "Oh, I know. That's impossible, too. Only it's no more impossible than thinking of aliens sending us messages." Or this, he thought. He looked at the piece of paper Jeremiah had given him. There was a drawing on it, black ink on white paper -- it looked as if it had been done by a talented amateur. Perhaps it had been drawn by Jeremiah himself. It was a drawing of a stylized angel, wings spread behind, arms stretched in a kind of welcome or carrying a message of God's love, acceptance, its face peaceful. It and it was surrounded by a border was an angel of mercy, of love, of entwined flowers. By what impossible magic, White wondered, had the voices been translated into this? "The whole cosmological picture," John was saying, "makes the contact believable. There had to be intelligent life out there. This tape would be impossible if there were not other creatures in the galaxy, intelligent enough, curious enough, and capable of communicating with us across the light years, wanting, needing to find other creatures like themselves who could look at themselves and at the stars and wonder -- " White was caught in John's vision for a moment. He looked at his son's face and saw the excitement in it, the raptness, and he thought. You're a stranger to me and  cannot speak to you... He loved the boy -- that was the trouble. He didn't want to see him get hurt the way he had been hurt. He wanted to save him the torment, save him from learning things the hard way. That was the essence of humanity, being able to learn from the mistakes and successes of others, not having to learn it all over again each generation. He knew what John would say. "You're just following instinct. Being human is being able to do something different." Why was it always like this? The boy was an alien, but somehow he had to communicate. the powerful black car that had met him at the airport sped over the dark roads White was aware only of the quiet hum of the steam turbine, the smells of trees, grass and sea. This was better than Washington, he thought, and better than Houston. Or any place else he could think of where he had been recently. The concern that kept coiling tighter in his stomach like the spring of a wind-up toy began to relax. What had happened to all the wind-up toys he had known when a child? He wondered. Replaced, he thought, by battery-powered toys. Perhaps he was the last of the wind-up toy people. A windup President, he thought -- wound up tight in the ghetto and now working out all the frustrations and aggressions that had pushed him into the White House. Wind him up and see him right the ancient wrongs -- but carefully, carefully, so that domestic tranquility is not disturbed, so that international peace is not threatened... He laughed a bit ruefully and thought that something in that office in Washington did not let a man be what he had been or what he wanted to be, but forced him to be a President. John was looking at him and he realized that John had not heard him laugh for a long time. He leaned over to put his hand on John's. "It's all right," he said. "It was just a passing idea." And he thought, # could be a better man here. Maybe not a better President, but a better man. "We're almost there," John said. White took his hand away. "How do you know?" "I've been here before," John said. White settled back in his seat. He had not known that John was familiar with this place. He wondered why he had not been told about John's visit to the Project. What else about John was a secret, a mystery? fllHE mood passed. When the Project appeared out of the night, glimmering and vast and strange in the moonlight. White turned from it and would not look at it. The car pulled up beside a long, low concrete building. MacDonald was waiting for him inside the building. Again White knew a surge of empathy toward the man. He felt sorry that he had to kill what MacDonald had given his life to. MacDonald escorted the Presidential party down the painted concrete corridor. "Mr. President," he said, "you do us honor." But he walked casually and talked easily as if this party were no different from any of the others he had guided on night tours. The corridors were busy. Men and women were moving purposefully, as if it were the middle of the day instead of the middle of the night. And abruptly White realized that this was the busy part of the twenty-four hours for the Project -- listening was best at night. What would it be like, he wondered, to have the days and nights always reversed? To have light and darkturned around like a bat or an owl? And he thought that he should know the answer to that as well as anybody. People passed. MacDonald did not introduce any of them, perhaps sensing, without being told, that this was an unofficial visit -- or perhaps not wanting to stir up speculation in the Project about his visit. But some of the staff members glanced at White, then glanced a second time with a shock of recognition. White was used to that. And there were some who were busy talking to each other and glanced at him and continued their conversations without a pause. White was not used to that. He discovered that he didn't like it. He had thought that it was his loss of anonymity that he disliked, but he realized that he disliked more not being recognized at all. He also disliked the sterile corridor, echoing with footsteps and voices, and the room filled with electronic equipment through which he was ushered. He recognized oscilloscopes and recorders, but much of the equipment was alien to him and he was pleased that it should remain so. A man was sitting in front of a panel with earphones over his head. MacDonald waved to him as they passed and the man waved back, but his eyes were glazed as if they were focused on something of miles -- light-years. White corrected himself. He was ushered through another room that was virtually all computer. The walls were one great computer -- cables snaked into other rooms and the floor was crowded with data inputs and printers. It was the biggest setup of its kind White had ever seen, bigger even than the Pentagon's or the State Department's simulators or the Information Department's data files. The place smelled of oil and electricity and it talked to itself of information and events and correlations, of shoes and ships and sealing wax and it added one and one and one very fast, over and over again. Being in that room was like being inside a computer -- White felt himself to be a modern Jonah inside a great fish not yet born and he was relieved when it opened a mouth and spat him out into an office. The office did not reveal the evidences of a man's life, of twenty years of effort and dedication. Like the rest of the building it was plain. A simple desk was set in front of tall book shelves built into the wall and the shelves had real books on them with leather bindings. Some, of the books had titles in foreign languages and White remembered from John's briefing that MacDonald had been a linguist before he became an engineer. "Set up my information center," he said to John. "You can plug it right into the computer," MacDonald said. "My assistant will show you where." White and the Project director were alone. They faced each other and White hardened his heart against the man. If MacDonald recognized the situation he did not acknowledge it. Instead he asked casually, "Jeremiah?" White shook his head. "He refused to be moved. He is going to release the message to his faithful. His message, he called it." MacDonald motioned him to a chair. "And so it is," he said. "His message, my message, your message." White shook his head. "Not my message. Here is a copy of his message." He handed MacDonald the piece of paper Jeremiah had given him. MacDonald looked at the drawing of Jeremiah's angel, pursed his lips and nodded. "Yes, that's what Jeremiah saw. You didn't stop him?" "Some things a President can do and should do. Some he can do and should not do. Some things he cannot do. Stopping Jeremiah falls somewhere between the second and the third. But that -- " he indicated the piece of paper -- "can't be the message." "How much do you know about the Project?" MacDonald asked. "Enough," White said, hoping to forestall a repetition of John's briefing. "You know about the long listening without results?" MacDonald asked. "I know all that," White said. "And then the voices?" MacDonald pushed a button on his desk. "I've heard them," White said, but he was too late. The voices had already started. HI rilHE acoustics were better here  or something had been lost on John's tape. The whisperings that began it were more urgent here -- they held a note of pleading, of insistence, of anger, of despair. They shook White so that when they became the voices he relaxed as if the effort to hear and understand had taken all his strength. The voices, too, were a little different, as if they started at another point in an endless loop, and they were more distinct. chatterbox the one with the pretty masked champion of justice White shook himself to break the spell. "That wasn't the message," he said. MacDonald adjusted a dial on the desk. The voices continued in the background like a distant Greek chorus commenting on their predicament. "That was only what they used to attract our attention." "The message was in the static between the voices," MacDonald continued. "When we slowed it, stretched it, the static turned into a sound and silence pattern that we tried to decipher for months." "I'se regusted," White repeated in a deep voice and laughed. "You know that one?" MacDonald asked. "One of our folk heroes," White said in a self-deprecating tone. "Does it bother you to have a black President?" "About as much," MacDonald said, "as it bothers you to have a white Project director." MacDonald was not only wise; he was shrewd. He knew that differences existed between men and these differences inevitably affected how they felt about each other, about themselves. White had liked MacDonald from the start -- now he was beginning to admire him and that was dangerous. What John wanted to do was even more dangerous. He thought there were no more differences, that he could forget his color and his people, that he could live like a white man, concerned with himself alone. How could John be so blind to the realities of racism? The old hatreds and prejudices were merely hidden better now. You still had to be on guard: to trust yourself in their world without the protection of power or of righteous anger was to risk your soul. His son -- A ndrew White's son could not go over.  MacDonald said. "Those dots and silences between the voices could be translated as spaces filled and unfilled, like a crossword puzzle. The computer finally worked it out, figured out the length of the message -- where it began and where it stopped and what was false -- static, noise -- and what was the real message endlessly repeated. And it printed out the message for us." MacDonald reached for a frame that until now had been face down on his desk. White had not noticed it before. How much else had he not noticed? Had he missed something that might have enforced his stance in this matter? "Here it is," MacDonald said. He turned it over and reached it out to White. "This is the original message, the first one transferred from electronic signals in the computer onto paper. We had it framed for you -- we thought you might like to keep it for a while, to look at, to wonder about a bit, perhaps, and when you're finished with it, when you're tired of showing it to visitors, you might send it over to the Smithsonian." White took the frame reluctantly as if the message were one he did not really want to receive, like a summons or a subpoena or a warrant. He did not want to look at it or wonder about it -- he did not want it translated for him. He wanted to destroy it, to forget it. It was bad news and he understood the Egyptian tradition of executing the messenger who brought evil tidings. He looked at the message. It consisted of little marks scattered in random fashion across a blank sheet of paper. Whife looked up. "This is a message?" MacDonald nodded. "I know it's not impressive at first glance. What is impressive is its origin in the minds of alien creatures born under two alien suns -- red giants -- fortyfive light-years from here. That's how far it traveled to reach us, to reshape itself into the picture you hold in your hands." "It's still not much," White said. turning the frame over to look at the blank back as if there might be something more important, more revealing, on that side. "Perhaps it doesn't seem like much," MacDonald said patiently, "but the information contained in that sketch is surprising. 'A picture is worth a thousand words,' the Chinese are reputed to have said, and we can learn at least that much more from this than from words -- in some arbitrary symbols -- even if we could read the symbols. What we have consists of five hundred and eighty-nine dots and dashes, dots and blanks, a grid made up of nineteen spaces across and thirty-one spaces down -- and in those spaces the Capellans have drawn a portrait of themselves."   again. He was beginning to see forms and shapes in it and realized that his first reaction had been conditioned by his desire to believe that the computer marks were random, that the message was, in fact, meaningless. "Damn poor portrait," he muttered. "Like the stick figures children draw." "Or like the figures adults draw for children, the kind of images children can identify because they can draw them -- the kind of pictures you must draw with a blunt crayon or a grid. It looks like something intelligible even to the unsophisticated." White glanced up, amused. "Like me?" "Like you. But unlike most stick figures, this picture rewards study. Much about it still is ambiguous, but some of what it means seems reasonably clear. In the lower lefthand corner is a square four spaces to a side; another one is in the upper right. Those probably are suns." "Two suns?" White said and then felt foolish. "Of course. Capella has two suns. John told me and you told me, but I can't seem to remember things like that." " 'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,' " MacDonald quoted. " 'Words without thoughts never to heaven go,' " White continued and enjoyed the look of admiration and new respect in MacDonald's glance. "Below the symbol in the upper right is a smaller square with single marks and double marks seemingly grouped around it. If a large square is a sun, a smaller square is a -- " " -- planet," White supplied. "That's right," MacDonald said. White felt as if he were back in school and had just received the teacher's approval. "And those single and double marks," MacDonald continued, "probably are satellites of the big planet. Theory suggests that only large superjovian planets would be able to maintain an orbit in a double-sun system. Life on a superjovian seems unlikely. But a superjovian could have earth-sized satellites on which an intelligent race of creatures could evolve. And the Capellan -- if that is what he is -- seems to be pointing with two of his, or her, arms -- or an arm and a wing -- toward one of the suns, the one in the upper right-hand corner, and one of the satellites, if that is what they are. The implication is: this is its sun -- not the other, which may be at a considerable distance -- and this is its home world." White nodded. In spite of himself he had become involved. "Ingenious. Almost like a detective story." He felt MacDonald's eyes on him and realized he was being played upon and enjoyed it. "We've been working at it, trying to put together the clues and solve the mystery," MacDonald said. "I have an excellent staff, Mr. much more capable than I. My job is to keep them supplied with pencils and rubber bands and paper clips." "I know that feeling," White said dryly. How much about him did MacDonald know? How much did he guess? How much was common to all administrators? MacDonald spoke again, more rapidly now, as if hastening toward a climax. "Below the satellites are numbers from one to nine written in a binary system, establishing a system of counting, the beginning of a common mathematics -- and the fact that the Capellans' intellectual processes are similar to ours. Down the left-hand side are what appear to be words -- numbers on the right, words on the left; numbers written horizontally, words with a vertical component." "Why words?" M acdonald shrugged. "We're still guessing about a lot of things. Perhaps they're building a vocabulary for later use when a word may be worth at least one picture, perhaps words are necessary to make a statement in the message that we have not yet deciphered -- perhaps they help explain the picture." "What are the words? Can you decipher them?" MacDonald pointed at the picture in White's hands. "They seem to apply to something that is on the same line or lines with them. usually to their right. Let's skip the top one for a moment. The next one is repeated three times. Two of them the Capellan is pointing at with his right upper limbs. Perhaps they are the Capellan word for 'Capellan.' You will notice that the third time the word appears it is opposite the dot underneath the Capellan, which -- if it is not an accidental dot or meaningless noise -- may mean that this, too, is a Capellan. Or a Capellan in embryo." He looked at White expectantly. "An egg?" White ventured. "Very likely. It may be trying to tell us that it breeds by laying eggs." "It's a bird." "Or a reptile. Or an insect. But more likely a bird, which would explain the second pair of limbs." "They really are wings?" White said. "Working wings or vestiges." White glanced at Jeremiah's drawing on MacDonald's desk and back to the framed computer readout. He was beginning to see how one could become the other, how Jeremiah could have seen the stick figure as an angel, the square thing on its head as a halo. The situation became more understandable, though no less serious. "And the other words?" he asked. "These are even more speculative," MacDonald said. "The third word may mean wing, the fifth, body or chest, the sixth, hips, or legs, the seventh, legs or feet. They may mean something else entirely, refer to function rather than parts. Some of these we're filing away until we have sopie repetitions." White was startled. "More messages are being received?" MacDonald shook his head. "The same message over and over. As if, having attracted our attention, the Capellans want to tell us only the important things about themselves and these they want to be sure we understand before they go on." "Like programed learning," White said. He was relieved that there were no more messages, that he had to cope with one alien communication, one problem, not a continuing series. "Or maybe," MacDqnald said, "they do not wish to go further, to send more messages of whatever kind, until they know we are receiving them and understand -- until we have replied." White quickly changed the subject. "What matters of importance are they trying to communicate to us?" "Who they are. Where they live. What they call themselves. How they reproduce. How they think." "How do they think?" White asked. "In words and numbers and images," MacDonald replied. "The way we do." White studied the picture as if by looking at it he could force it to yield up its secrets, but it clung to them stubbornly. "Do they think the same way we think -- in terms of advantage and disadvantage, in terms of profit and loss, in terms of victory and defeat, in terms of what's in it for me." MacDonald looked at White much, White thought, as he had been looking at the picture. MacDonald shook his head. "They seem quite peaceful to me. All of us don't think in terms of advantage and conflict. Increasingly, I think, we becorqe more uncompetitive. And birds always have been a symbol of peace." "Only the dove," White said gloomily. "Did you ever see a bluejay attacking other birds or cats or even people? What about hawks and eagles and vultures? Any creature that becomes the dominant species on its world has to be aggressive. How does a bird think?" How does a man think? A person you have raised within your home, within your arms, within your love -- how does he think? How can one reach him, tell him, make him see what he is, what the world is like? What he wanted to say was, "Look, son, you see the world as a benign, smiling place of peace and opportunity and fair play, but it's not like that. You go on thinking it is, and the first chance it gets it's going to bite your black ass off" And John would say, "Stop talking like a nigger. Father. " IV  picture in his hands to MacDonald's face. "Do you have a son?" he asked and, hearing himself say it, realized he had let slip something about himself. Not, "Do you have any children?" But, "Do you have a son?" In an age when one child was the norm MacDonald perhaps would not notice. MacDonald's face softened. "Yes," he said. White had gotten through. "We're a lot alike," White said. "That was my son who came in with me." "I know," MacDonald said. "He acts as my personal assistant. He is very much interested in your Project." "I know," MacDonald said. "I wouldn't know what to do without him," White said and the words sounded like a plea in his ears. Perhaps it was. "My son is only eight months old," MacDonald said. White raised his eyebrows and MacDonald chuckled. "I've spent my life waiting," he said. "For him I almost waited too long." White thought of MacDonald waiting here at the Project among all these alien machines with their alien smells, listening for a message from the stars that never came, listening without results for fifty years. Bosh! He was sentimentalizing again. That wasn't this man. The Project itself was fifty years old, but MacDonald had been with it only twenty years and he was an engineer -- no doubt he liked machines and their smells and their meaningless noises. Still, twenty years... And now the message had come and it would never be acknowledged. White felt a new flash of sympathy for MacDonald and all the people who had given their lives to the search. "You don't look like a man who has been told that his life's work can't be completed," White said. MacDonald smiled. It was the kind of patient smile he must have maintained throughout the long listening. White thought. "I've waited a long time," MacDonald said. "So have the Capellans. We can wait some more if necessary. But I hope your decision can be changed. You're still here and you're still listening." "I owe you that," White said. MacDonald waited. He could have said. You don't owe me anything, Mr. President. We owe you for your sacrifices. White thought with fleeting irritation. "Those other words," he said. "The ones you passed over -- what about them?" "If those are words at the bottom," MacDonald said, pointing out the two symbols at the bottom of the page beneath the egg, "the one in the upper left-hand corner is repeated below. It could mean sun." "And the other word at the bottom?" "We don't know," MacDonald said. "Perhaps more sun. You will notice that the sun at the bottom left has rays at each of its corners. The one at the top has only a single beginning of a ray. Perhaps the distant sun is hotter and they're trying to tell us this in case we have the astronomical capability to distinguish them." White studied the picture again. "All that from this?" "As you said -- a detective story. We're detectives hunting for clues and we have a great many clues. And a great research tool." He waved his hand toward the computer room. "Virtually the entire written history and literature of mankind -- in all the written languages -- is stored in there. Everything we do or say within the Project is recorded. It's that kind of computer. It learns and compares and translates and stores and works cryptograms and breaks codes. And, of course, what we are working with is not cryptography but anti-cryptography -- the designing of a code impossible to misunderstand." "Our earlier telephone conversation is also recorded?" White asked. "If we wished, we could recall the information upon voice command or eliminate it from the record upon written command." White waved a hand. "It doesn't matter. What I have done and said is a matter of record throughout the world and when my term of office is over it will all be ferreted out by scholars and dissected and buried in a library somewhere. What I can't understand is why Jeremiah was here?" M acdonald grew thoughtful. "The Project has not been a secret. One of my responsibilities has been to keep it going and one way I have fulfilled that responsibility has been to tell people what we were doing, to show them what our work meant, how important it was." Just as you are doing with me. White thought. "Public relations?" he said. "Promotion?" "Yes," MacDonald said. "Communication?" White suggested. "I like that best," MacDonald said. "I do, too," White admitted. John opened the far door. "Mr. President," he said. "We have a report from Houston." "Let's have it," White said. MacDonald pushed a button on his desk. As the familiar window opened in front of them. White said, "I hate this stuff." "Me, too," MacDonald said. "It's a filtered way of seeing and hearing -- most of the sensory clues are missing." White looked at MacDonald in mild surprise -- then the scene came alive. The view was from mid-air -- perhaps from a hovering jet -- outside the Houston temple. Men and women were marching back and forth in the street, picketing the Prophet. They were carrying signs, some protesting the Project, decrying the message as a hoax, contact with aliens a potential calamity. So the fat was already in the fire. White thought. Jeremiah had reached his audience. Between the pickets other men and women passed and entered the building in an irregular but persistent flow. Beyond the pickets, as the view pulled back again, silent figures stood massed like a low cloud over the street, waiting for something -- a word, an event, a signal. From their appearance it was difficult to determine whether they were spectators or participants waiting for their moment. The scene changed. Now the viewpoint was inside the giant dome. The camera locked briefly on the distant ceiling, then slowly panned the seats. Every one was filled and more people were sitting and standing in the aisles. Below them, in a circle of light, like a gleaming stick figure in black and white, stood Jeremiah. He was not alone. A creature was behind him, an evanescent, transparent figure -- clearly an angel -- with halo and wings outspread. It rested its right hand on Jeremiah's shoulder. The stick figure raised his left hand to the crowd and the crowd came to its feet in one simultaneous movement. White could not hear anything -- he supposed sound accompanied the transmission but it was not turned up -- yet he could feel the shock wave that exploded from more than fifty thousand throats and shook the distant ceiling of the temple. "Trouble," White said as the scene faded and MacDonald turned it off. White sighed. He did not like trouble. Nobody liked trouble, perhaps, but Presidents liked it least of all. "Excitement," MacDonald commented. "Disturbance, dissension." White frowned. We have solved many of the problems that threatened to tear this nation apart at the time the Project was started. Trouble of the kind we just saw will keep us from solving the others. We need calm, serenity, direction and purpose. Jeremiah's angel and your message from the stars are diversions -- they mean trouble. The old problems of the chosen peoples and the outcasts, the favored and the fallen, the elect and the non-elect -- all these will return. This angel of Jeremiah's brings not peace but a sword. I don't see how he could have read that into the message." MacDonald picked up a piece of illustration board from his desk -- something else he had missed, White thought -- and held it out. "I had a staff artist prepare this for you. Something comparable to what I thought Jeremiah would describe." " over, looked at it. It, too, had a drawing, but this one was a drawing of a tall birdlike creature with vestigial wings. On its head was a transparent helmet. At opposite corners of the drawing were stylized representations of suns; below the one in the upper righthand corner was a Jupiter-like planet with four satellites, two small ones like the moon and two larger ones, one resembling Venus, the other Earth-like in proportion. Numbers from one to nine were written underneath along the righthand edge. Running down the lefthand side were words: sun. Capellan, wing, Capellan, chest, hips, legs, Capellan. And below the figure was a large, well-shaped egg; below that were two more words: sun and hotter sun. Through the creature's transparent helmet could be seen the face of an alien obviously avian in evolution but also intelligent. The bird looked interested, gentle, benevolent... "I suppose," White said, "one is just as reasonable as the other." "That's one reason I couldn't tell Jeremiah he was wrong," MacDonald said. "He had Just as much a right to his interpretation as I to mine." "Your other reason," White said, "was that his acceptance of the message was an advantage for the Project." MacDonald shrugged. "Certainly. Although whatI was trying to tell him was that the message was no threat to him or his religious beliefs. And that is true." White was a little surprised at MacDonald's cynicism, though he was seldom surprised by anyone's opportunism. Somehow he had been building a different image of MacDonald. "What you are saying is that you allowed him to deceive himself." "No," MacDonald said steadily. "We don't know what the message says. We're interpreting it on a simple mechanistic basis, reading it at a kind of childish, stickfigure level. Jeremiah is interpreting it on a more adult scale, translating symbols into images. The two drawings -- ours and Jeremiah's -- are of roughly equal value. The only reality we have is the computer grid." White said softly, "Such a small thing to cause so much distur"If you allow us to release what we bance." believe is the substance of the "Temporary," MacDonald said, message, let the knowledgeable sun Capellan wing Capellan chest hips legs Capellan scientists of the world supply their interpretations, let us come up with an answer and transmit it to the Capellans -- " White looked at the drawing in his hand. He did not answer MacDonald directly. "Do you have a pencil?" he asked. "Or a crayon or pen?" MacDonald rummaged in his desk and produced a broad-tipped pen. White worked over the face of the bird for a moment and then handed the illustration board to MacDonald. Now the bird was no longer humanoid. Its beak was longer and curved at the end, a beak made for biting and tearing. The bird's eyes were hooded and cruel. It was a bird of prey looking for its next meal. "What if it really looks like that?" White asked. "The question," he should have said, "is what is the world really like? Is it as you see it or as I know it? If some doubt remains about the answer -- wouldn't it be better to consider the past, to learn the history of your people, to be black until you are certain the present has changed its old ways, its old habits of mind?" But he had said instead, "By God, I know the world, John, and you don't. You've got to take my word for it if you can't see for yourself" And John had told him, "The past is irrelevant." But even that was a statement out of the past. T ime was running out. White felt. Soon he would have to terminate this conversation and decide what to do about the trouble that was coming, that he could feel in his hips. But he hated to cut off this man -- this good man, he thought -- until he was satisfied. "What difference can it make," MacDonald was saying, "fortyfive light years away? They want to communicate. They're looking for other minds, for intelligent fellow creatures in the universe." "But why?" White asked. "Why go to all the trouble?" "So they won't be alone. For the same reason we've listened. So we wouldn't be alone. It is a terrible thing to be alone. Besides, they already know we're here." "What?" White asked, surprised, a little alarmed. "The voices," MacDonald said. The voices. Of course. The aliens had picked up the old radio broadcasts, so they knew there were people at the other end. "They don't know who we are or what we are," White said. "They don't know whether we have received their message or whether we have deciphered it or whether we will respond to it -- or whether we can do any of these things." MacDonald put his fingertips together. "Does it matter?" White shrugged a bit impatiently. "You and your colleagues are the experts on aliens and on alien potentials, but even a layman can imagine a situation in which it might matter." MacDonald smiled. "The bogyman from the stars?" "There are bogymen," White said. "The tribe from the east or the north. The bad men from the hills. The lynch mob from the village." "None of them civilized," MacDonald said. "None of them trying to communicate." "I can find examples of that, too. Maybe the Capellans are signaling a number of different worlds, and they will determine which one to invade according to which one responds." "Even if interstellar travel is possible -- which it probably is not; even if interstellar warfare is possible -- which it almost certainly is not," MacDonald said, "even then, why would they want to invade another world?" White spread his hands. "Why did they expend the effort to signal us in the first place?" MacDonald started to speak but White continued. " 'Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, I have been waiting haps they need to be sure we have not ruined our planet with radioactivity since we discovered radio. Perhaps they intend to send us instructions for constructing a matter transmitter. Perhaps they require a certain level of technology from us to make us worthwhile as a subject world." "If all this were possible," MacDonald said, "then we must also remember that they have put themselves and their world in our hands as much as we would put ourselves in theirs by replying to their communication. That demonstrates a certain amount of trust." "Or confidence. Or arrogance." "I cannot believe -- " MacDonald began. "But can you conceive?" White broke in. "You have spent your life among scholarly men of good will. To you the universe is a benevolent place -- it has treated you with kindness or at least neutrality. I have seen passion and malice and greed and I know that intelligence is not necessarily benevolent. In fact, in my experience it is more likely to be merely an instrument in the persistent search for advantage, in weighing profit and loss and finding a means of maximizing profit and minimizing loss." V as White had expected. "Logic is our assurance," MacDonald said calmly. "The only thing worth sending from star to star is information and the certain profit from such an exchange far outweighs the uncertain advantage from any other kind of behavior. The first benefit is the awareness that other intelligent creatures exist in our universe -- this alone gives at least some of us strength and courage. Next, receiving information from an alien world could be like having our own instruments there, perhaps even our own scientists to measure and record, but with the additional advantage of a breadth and duration of measurements under a variety of conditions. Finally come the cultural and scientific knowledge and development of another race, and the treasure to be gained from this kind of exchange is beyond calculation." White changed his approach. "What if it changes us? We have seen problems of cultural shock, when a more advanced culture meets a more primitive one. Some of the societies that have gone through it here on Earth have disintegrated. Some have become slaves. The ones that survived did so by changing their values, attitudes and behavior." MacDonald studied White as if estimating his ability to understand. "I should think you would not find conditions so perfect that you would not welcome change." "I welcome my kind of change." "Besides," MacDonald said, "any examples of cultural shock would have to include societies that are unsophisticated or isolated, that could not imagine anything superior to themselves, even anything different -- " "As a tearful old medicine man once said to Carl Jung," White said, as if he were remembering, "we might find ourselves without dreams." , "We are not so naive," MacDonald said. "We know that there are other intelligent beings in the universe; we know that they will be different from us and at least some of us hunger for the exchange. Our dreams are of spaceflight and alien contact -- an entire literature has developed it, and our myths reinforce it with their flying saucers and visitations. We have been listening now for fifty years and people are prepared to hear something. They are psychologically ready for contact. Now they know we have been contacted. They have heard the voices and they have seen one version of the message -- " John opened the door again. "More information coming in, Mr. President." MacDonald looked at White. White nodded and MacDonald pressed a button. The first scene showed police battling a mob outside the Solitarian Temple. Stains could be seen on the streets when the conflict swirled an opening into view. Bodies could be seen, too, and some of the bodies wore uniforms. Men and women were streaming out of the cathedral, trying to get through the battle -- or join it. MacDonald turned up the sound. The conflict rumbled like distant thunder. The second scene revealed a smaller mob in the street in front of a neo-classical building; around it, like a moat, a reflecting pool kept the mob at a distance. But there were shouts in a language other than English and raised fists. The third, fourth and fifth scenes were similar -- the only variations were the architectural styles of the buildings, the color and dress of the mob and the language of the shouts. The sixth scene showed a group of people, men, women, and children, gathered on a dark hilltop around a man in dark robes. They were looking up at the stars in silence. The seventh scene revealed something fleshy, bloody and visceral spread out on pavement like an abstract painting. The view tilted up the side of the building until it reached the distant concrete peak. The eighth scene showed ambulances pulling up to a hospital emergency entrance. The ninth scene was a morgue. The tenth scene revealed an impenetrable traffic snarl as cars and copters tried to leave a city. What would John be like in the kind of world White knew, the kind of world that existed out there? John had not been exposed to mob passions, violence, ignorance and prejudice. White had wanted to spare his son the kind of hurt that he had felt, the kind of bitterness that even now twisted his guts in secret sorrow. His actions had not been a kindness, but rather a mistaken sentimentality that was now turning on him. Even the basic political facts, the kinds of bargaining and trades that politics forced on a man, he had shielded John from; he had not wanted his son to be touched by that kind of pitch. Or was it that he did not want his son to know what made his father's skin black? To be black -- and without a son?  MacDonald said. "They're reacting out of fear." White took a deep breath. It was a habit when he was forced to make a decision, as if he could draw in the situation and force it down to where his decisions were made. Soon he would have to make a statement, commit himself in a way he could never review, unleash forces he could never recall. "It seems," he said quietly, "like the start of something -- religious riots, perhaps, even a religious war -- or the end of something." "People are reacting to lack of information," MacDonald said. "Let us communicate with them. People are uncertain. An official announcement and a planned campaign of information about the Project and the message and the answer -- " "Might ease the fears," White said, "or reinforce them." "The fears are not logicaL Facts will dispel them. The Capellans cannot come here. Matter transmission is fantasy and we cannot imagine any kind of propulsion system that could enable any life form even to approach the speed of light." "What we cannot imagine," White said, "has had a habit of coming true the last few centuries. And what was considered impossible by one generation became the next generation's commonplace. Tell me -- why do you insist on replying to this message? Isn't it enough that your search has been successful, that you have demonstrated the existence of intelligent life in the universe?" "I could give you rationalizations," MacDonald said. "There are many good reasons -- I have given you the most important one: communication between aliens could result in incalculable benefits to both -- but behind all the rationalizations, as you suspect, is the personal motivation. I will be dead before our answer can reach Capella but I want my efforts to be rewarded, my convictions to be proved correct, my life to have been meaningful. Just as you do." "We come down to fundamentals at last," White said. "Always. I wish to leave a legacy to my son and to the world. I'm not a poet, a prophet, an artist, a builder, a statesman or a philanthropist. All I can leave is an open door. An open line to the universe. hope, the prospect of something new -- " "We all want that," White said. "Not all of us," MacDonald said. "Some of us wish to pass on our hatreds, our battles -- not something new but something old. I want to give my children the future, not the past. The past is not irrelevant, but we can't live there. Believe me: once the answer is sent, peace will come to the world." "Why then?" "For one thing, it will be done, over. The people who are quarreling now will realize that they are human beings -- that the real differences lie out there. That if we can communicate with unearthly life forms -- why shouldn't we communicate with each other across mere language and cultural barriers -- " John said, "The Chinese Ambassador is calling, Mr. President," and White realized that he had been so involved in MacDonald's argument that he had not noticed the door's opening. "I don't have my translator with me," he said. "Don't worry," MacDonald said. "The computer will take care ofit." had changed places White found himself behind MacDonald's desk, staring into the window. The Chinese face above the colorful tunic said, in English, with almost exact lip synchronization, "Mr. President, my country respectfully requests that you control the disturbances within your borders, and that you cease the provocative news announcements threatening the peace of friendly nations." "You may tell your premier," White said carefully, "that we regret these disturbances more than anyone, that we hope to bring them under control soon and that we have no mechanism for controlling news announcements, as he has." The sleek Chinese head nodded politely. "My country also requests that you make no answer to the message you have received from Capella, now or in the future." "Thank you, Mr. Ambassador," White said politely, but before he could turn to MacDonald the Chinese face was replaced by a Russian. "The Russian Ambassador," John said. "The Soviet Union is greatly disturbed by the suppression of this message," the Russian said brusquely. "We wish you to know that we, too, have received the message and are composing a reply to it. We will announce this shortly." And the window was empty and shimmering. "No more," White said. The window winked out. He put his hands on the desk. It was a good, solid working surface, not a ceremonial piece of furniture like his desk in the White House, and he felt as if he could work here. Here, seated in MacDonald's chair, looking at MacDonald, he felt as if their roles had been reversed, as if he were in charge here. "I think you knew about the Russians and the Chinese," White said. "The fraternity of science is closer than the fraternity of birthplace or commonmother tongue." "How did they learn about the message?" MacDonald spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Too many people knew about it. If I had suspected that we would not be permitted to release the information as a matter of course, that there would be any question about our replying, I would not have assembled my people for our moment of triumph. But once the word was out the information could not be entirely suppressed. We were not a secret project. We were a scientific laboratory committed to sharing our findings with the world. Why, we even have some Chinese and Russian exchange scientists working with us. At this late date -- " "Nobody thought you would succeed," White said. MacDonald looked at White in surprise. It was the first time White had seen MacDonald surprised at anything. "Then why did you fund us?" MacDonald asked. "I don't know why the Project was started," White said. "I haven't looked up its historical origins and perhaps the real answer isn't there, anyway. But I suspect that the answer is much the same as our rationalization over the past few years: it was something scientists wanted to do and nobody saw any harm in it. After all, we live in the age of welfare." "Public welfare," MacDonald corrected. "Welfare of all kinds," White said. "This nation -- and other nations, some of them before us, some of them after us -- set out on a conscious policy of eliminating poverty and injustice." "The function of government is 'to promote the general welfare,' " MacDonald said. "It is also a deliberate policy. Poverty and injustice are evils, but they are endurable evils in a world where other problems are greater. They are not endurable in a complex, technological society where cooperation is essential, where violence and rioting can destroy a city, even civilization itself." "Of course." "So we turned ourselves around and set this nation to the task of eliminating poverty and injustice -- and we have done it. We have established a stable social system where everyone has a guaranteed annual income and can do pretty much what he pleases except procreate without limit or harm others in other ways." MacDonald nodded. "That has been the great accomplishment of the past few decades -- the welfare movement." "Except we don't call it welfare any more," White said. "It's democracy, the system, the way things are, what people are entitled to. What makes you think that science is not part of the system?" "It opens the door to change." WOT if it is unsuccessful," White said. "Or if it is successful in certain limited, predictable ways as in the space program. God knows we thought the Project was safe enough. Certainly it's part of the welfare program, and the diversion of public funds to support it over the years has been a dole to the scientists to keep them busy and out of mischief. The important task of government, you see, is to keep conditions stable, to hold down disturbances and unrest, to maintain itself -- and the best way to accomplish these ends is to give everybody the opportunity to do what he or she wants -- except change things. Don't tell me you haven't suspected this all along, that you haven't used it." "No," MacDonald said -- and then, "yes. I guess so. I knew that if we made difficulties it would be easier to get money. I guess I realized certain facts without facing them squarely. And now you want us to stop, just like that." "Not just like that," White said kindly. "Wind it down. Pretend to be considering an answer. Keep searching for other messages. Set up another project somewhere -- to do something. You've had experiences. Put your mind to it. You'll know what to do." But the battle against injustice and poverty was not won, White knew. John thought it was -- he thought he could be discharged from duty. But his attitude meant desertion. That was what White had called John: "Deserter. " Welfare wasn't enough. Too many blacks were satisfied with their guaranteed, annuals, were for more. They had to be educated. They had to be led. They needed figures like himself to model themselves after, symbols such as John could be if he stayed in politics. Oh, there were other models -- black scientists, black doctors, black artists, even some black members of the Project. But not yet enough -- the percentages still said that inequality was a reality. He had presided over the welfare state, but he hadn't thought welfare would get John. MacDonald was thoughtful as if he were weighing something deep inside himself. Does he think in his hips like Teddy and me? "I've spent my life in search of truth," MacDonald said. "I can't lie now." White sighed. "Then we'll have to find someone who can." "It won't work. The scientific community will act, when suppressed, the same way as any other minority." "We must have tranquility." "In a technological world," MacDonald said, "change in inevitable. What you must have for tranquility is reasonable change, manageable change." "And the change the message brings is unmanageable, incalculable." "That's because you have not allowed us to manage it -- I don't like that word -- you haven't let us communicate our reality to the people, explain it to them in such a way they see it as an adventure, as a promise, as a gift of understanding and awareness and information and insight yet to be delivered. Besides, how can you know what the world or this nation will need ninety years from now?" "Ninety years?" White laughed shakily. "I think no farther ahead than the next election. What do ninety years have to do with any of this?" "That is the length of time it will take an answer to reach Capella and for their reply to come to us," MacDonald said. "Those ninety years are what I meant when I said I wanted to leave a legacy for my son -- and his son. Why, by the time our answer reaches Capella you and I will be dead, Mr. President. Most of the people now alive will be dead; your son will be elderly and my son will be middle-aged. And by the time the response reaches us from Capella, virtually everyone now alive will be dead. What we do we do not for ourselves but for future generations. We bequeath you," MacDonald said softly, "a message from the stars." "Ninety years," White repeated. "What kind of communication is that?" "As soon as people understand," MacDonald said confidently, "the disturbances will disappear. Fear, anger, hatred, distrust -- these don't last. Tranquility can last -- and tranquility will return -- along with a vague sense of something pleasant that may happen in the indefinite future, like the promised land -- not now, not tomorrow, but some time. And those who threaten the tranquility, from nation to individual, consciously threaten a definite future good -- and will refrain." VI  room once more, small, simple place where a man had worked for twenty years and left few marks behind. Perhaps, he thought, MacDonald had left his mark elsewhere -- on people, on ideas, on a project, on the stars -- and he still felt that sense of unease in his hips that said No, this is wrong... and he felt sorry for everybody and hoped that his discomfort was not caused merely by the fact that he was not an intellectual, because he felt uncomfortable with ideas, because he could not think in terms of centuries. "I can't take the chance," he said. "You will not send an answer. You will begin the dismantling of the Project. Can you do it?" He stood up. The discussion was over. MacDonald rose thoughtfully. "Is there nothing I can say to change your mind?" White shook his head. "You have said it all. Believe me, you have done everything any man could do." "I know what kind of legacy I wish to leave my son," MacDonald said. "What kind of legacy do you wish to leave yours?" White looked at him sadly. "That's unfair. I do what I must. Will you do what you must?" MacDonald sighed. White saw the life go out of him and felt sad. "Let me handle it my way," MacDonald said. "We will continue to study the message, continue to riddle its meaning. Gradually I will shift the listening to other locations." "You want a chance to wait me out?" White said. "You hope for better luck with my successor?" "Our time scale is different. The Project can wait." "You have in me," White said, "someone who still believes in change. My successor will believe in none, and his successor will want to take conditions back." He shrugged with regret and held out his hand to be shaken, protecting automatically the way he had learned to do in campaigning. "But perhaps your way is best. Keep hoping. Keep your Project going. Keep your men working. But do not -- I will put this in writing immediately even though it has been recorded by your computer -- do not send an answer. I have my own men on your project and they will have their instructions." MacDonald hesitated and then took White's hand. "I'm sorry," he said. White didn't know why MacDonald was sorry. Perhaps he was sorry that he had to preside over the betrayal of the Project. Perhaps he was sorry for a President who had to compromise himself and his country's ideals. Perhaps he even mourned for the human race, for whom there would be no more messages from the stars. He might even feel unhappy for the Capellans who would receive no answer to their hopeful message. "I never asked you," White said, "what you would have answered if you had been permitted to send an answer." MacDonald reached past White and picked up the last sheet of paper of his desk. He handed it to White.                                                                 "It's simple and obvious." He paused, added: "Anticryptography. It's not even very original. Bernard Oliver suggested something like this more than fifty years ago. It tries to tell the Capellans pretty much what they told us; who we are, where we live, what we call ourselves, how we breed, how we think." White looked at the paper. "You're holding it sideways," MacDonald said. "We had to stretch it out the other way to keep the same grid dimensions." White turned the sheet of paper around and looked at it for several seconds. He began to laugh. After a few moments, MacDonald asked, "What's funny?" White's laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't laughing at the answer. I don't begin to understand half of what's here. But that's obviously a father and a mother and child -- and the Capellans would have no way of knowing whether they were white or black." What would the President say to his son John when he and John returned to Washington? That he had ordered a great man to hide Original Cover Paintings and Inside Illustrations from ( # # ) The original cover paintings -- some double size, some same size, many already framed -- are for sale. These are exactly as the artists painted them, unmarred by type or overprinting. The price is # each. My choice -- first orders will be sent the best (in my opinion) selections. If the one you receive is not to your liking, return it and I will send you a different choice for # (to cover postage and mailing). Black-and-white original illustrations are also for sale. Small size: #. Large size: #. Our choice -- same exchange offer. I don't have too many left, so hurry! Bob Guinn P.O. Box #, Village Station New York, N.Y. # his greatness, to destroy what he had built? White knew what the acknowledgment would do to John, what it would do to their relationship. "It's only your own vision you can see," John would say. "You are blind to others' visions." What if John were right? What if the revolution were over and the rest was now up to the individual? Maybe the important battle now was to allow individual greatness once more to be expressed -- to open up society again? What was it John had said? White remembered. He remembered too well. "Politics is dead. Father," John had said. "Don't you understand that? Why do you think they let you be President? Being President doesn't matter any more." rI HE speakers on either side of  the room were saying, "Mac! Mac!" "Yes, Oley," MacDonald said. "John White had just had an idea about the message," the speakers said. "I hate to break in on your conference, but I don't think it ought to wait." "That's all right," MacDonald said, glancing questioningly at White. "We were just finishing." Almost before the words had faded, a stocky, sandy-haired, middle-aged man was in the room. John followed him. "Olsen," MacDonald said, "this is -- " "I know," the other said. "Mr. President," he said, giving it the least possible break in the flow of his enthusiasm. "It falls into place like the last piece of a puzzle." White looked at his son. John was clearly pleased and excited but reluctant to speak. "Is this your idea?" White asked skeptically. "Really your idea?" John nodded. "Yes." "You tell them," Olsen said, turning to John. "You," John said. Olsen turned back to MacDonald. "The symbols for the two suns were different, right?" he asked, speaking rapidly, not waiting for an answer. "The sun in the upper right-hand corner had a single mark extending from it. The one in the lower left had two marks at each corner, like rays. The words in the upper left and at the bottom to the right of the lower sun seem to be the symbol for sun." "Yes," MacDonald said, looking at White and then back at Olsen. "And the next symbol at the bottom we interpreted as more sun, or bigger sun, or hotter sun. I was showing it to John and he said, 'Maybe that isn't just an idle description. Maybe it's the answer to another question about themselves they want us to know -- namely what's happening to them? Maybe the distant sun is increasing its energy output, radiating more heat, possibly turning nova.' " ','What does that mean?" White asked. He was asking the question of anyone, but he was looking at John. His voice was troubled, he realized, and he didn't know why. And then he thought that to have the sun change in the sky was a basic alteration in the scheme of things that would be frightening beyond terror. He tried to imagine what it would be like on Earth if the sun began to glow brighter, hotter. What would men do? Would they tell other intelligent races in the universe about themselves? Or would they hide? MacDonald was saying something. "... which may explain the helmets, if that is what they are. Perhaps they have to wear the helmets -- and protective suits as well -- whenever they go outside. To keep out the heat." "I'm sorry," White said. "What did you say?" "The temperature increase from the more distant sun," MacDonald said, "may not be a great problem. But now their sun -- the sun the superjovian planet orbits around -- show signs of going nova as well." "They're going to die," White said. "Yes," MacDonald said.  aid believed it, the man called Oley believed it, John believed it -- they were convinced that what even White had surmised was true, mourned the Capellans as if they were friends. Perhaps they were: MacDonald had lived with them in anticipation for twenty years now. And now that he had found them, had communicated with them, he had discovered that they were doomed. "The message carries no suggestion of an attempt to escape," MacDonald said. "The helmet, if that is what it is, could imply an acceptance of conditions as they exist -- strange we didn't wonder immediately -- why helmets on their home planet? Escape by spaceship may be possible for a few, perhaps -- they surely must have developed spaceflight with other satellites of the superjovian so close -- but no ships are suggested in the message. Perhaps their philosophy breeds acceptance." "They're going to die," White said again. "That changes the situation," John said. "You feel it, don't you. Father?" "We can't go there any more than they can come here," MacDonald said. "We can't help them, but we can let them know that they did not live in vain, that their last great effort to communicate was successful." He picked up the answer he had shown White and with the broadtipped pen sketched, over the head of the child the head, shoulders and upper torso of a Capellan arm in arm with the humans. White looked at the picture and considered the question, but he knew in his hips what the answer was. The public would accept this message -- it would please the people and the exchange would enlarge their vision and their understanding, bring them closer together, give them courage and a belief in themselves. "Yes," he said. "Send it." Later, as he and John stood at the entrance of the building, he realized that John was hanging back. "What is it, son?" "I'd like to stay for a while," John said. "I'd like to find out what I would have to do to join the Project, to be able to contribute something." He hesitated and then he added: "If it's all right. Dad." Something tightened inside White's chest and then slowly went away like ice melting. "Of course, son," he said, "if that's what you want to do." In a moment John was gone and White looked out across the phosphorescent white parking lot to where a slowly moving radio telescope was outlined against the night sky, held aloft on an arm like a searchlight ready to be turned on, ready to pierce the night with the stars. Some time soon the answer to a message from the stars would be flung out wave after wave, on its long journey to a distant world. Or if not from this particular antenna, some other. He imagined it going now and tried to feel in his hips that he was right, but he was not sure. He hoped he was right -- right for John, right for the black people, right for his country, right for all humanity now and to come, right for intelligent life everywhere. And his vision fled outward and upward into the infinite where there were other creatures incredibly different from him and he thought they said, "Well done, Andrew White."  Man has always risked his life on the right to be human! M arlowe attached the history hypnocord again. His brown eyes began to fall out of focus and the lines ground deep into his face softened... Earth Union now empired over four hundred habitable planets and eighty-two however, like many which had preceeded it, failed to return riches in excess of its costs. The impoverishment of Earth brought military thanes to power in the subdivisions of the Earth Union. For two centuries the threat of a war of extinction was constantly with man. The deadlock was shattered by the sudden appearance of the Wagerers, a religious-political cult. From a small nucleus the cult spread rapidly through Earth's homogeneous population. Fatalistic, the cult used games of chance to represent fate in individual and political relations. This culminated with Ultimate's creation of a four-dimensional gambling matrix and its intainment units... The hypnocord, directed by a quick arrow of consciousness, switched itself off. Awareness of the exterior world reentered Marlowe's mind. He rose, a man close to forty, his body leanly strong. His height was medium, yet he almost touched the ceiling of his small, featureless cubicle. It had been designed to his size specifications or, rather, to the slaves his size. His hair was thick, its blackness speckled at the temples with gray. In his face were deep grooves of lines, craters of Mars, showing the tired hopelessness of the slave. Yet the lines showed more -- a fierceness unsubdued, a determination. He opened a wall panel and pressed a button. The hypnocord receded into the wall. Another button opened a viewscreen. "Financial accounts of Marlowe, owned by sub-Ultimate A-Forty-one." Marlowe spoke in a firm voice. Immediately a balance sheet appeared on the screen. "Marlowe net equity three hundred and five standard units," a mechanical voice intoned. Marlowe pressed a button and a wall panel covered the screen. He considered the number -- #. His lifetime's savings. It could purchase a cubicle ten times as large as the one he occupied even on overcrowded Earth. It could purchase a pleasure slave, perto the stars he could be a substantial landowner. Despite being a slave to the robot A#, he could still own robots of the lesser orders. # units invested in an #series robot would bring him an income for life. There was one thing, however, # units could not buy. That was Marlowe's freedom. A mind probe came at Marlowe, quick and unannounced as always. He put up no shield, for to do so was illegal, but a picture formed in his mind of a pleasure robot -- android, feminine. The probe slipped off and returned to A#. Marlowe made no sign to indicate he had noticed the probe, but as soon as it was gone the picture of the pleasure robot vanished from his mind. The surface of his mind was open, yet every fiber of his body hid his real desires from A#. Marlowe's father had been a Wagerer -- who had not been? Marlowe's father had gambled away his wealth first, then his wages, his possessions, finally, his freedom. There were no free men any more. The four-dimensional game addicted humans to gambling. It had a fascination far beyond the dull life of beehive cubicles and uniform luxury. It was... Marlowe broke away from this train of thought. Only one question existed in his mind -- could he win? Men did win. No men went free but some won planets, women, solar systems. Ultimate was a benevolent master, allowed his slaves to own and alienate property and seldom tasked them with service. And if he reached the final stage and could gamble to have any wish granted -- what might he win? H e pressed a button and the wall panels. In front of it was a metal desk surface with a keyboard. Marlowe seated himself. Your name? The voice came from within Marlowe. "Marlowe." Marlowe answered without words. Owner? A-Forty-one. Place your wager. Marlowe looked at the keyboard before him. He could wager up to ten figures. He pressed three digits. Your wager is # units? the voice demanded. "Yes." Marlowe felt a spinning in his mind, a dissipation of his physical place-sense. His mind seemed a gray swirling mist, a forming universe... He had left it. It had been warm, water about a volcano, air heated by the sun. It had been safe, a place without hunger, with air easy to breathe. He wanted to reach out to touch but he had no arms. He felt as if he could have arms but instead there were only nubs, the beginning of limbs, the buds of arms. He lay in one place. His vision perceptors were blinded by the light. But how did he move? No -- where should he move? He felt something formative ahead of him. The new environment changed his consciousness. Yet he also felt danger. Where he had come from was safety. He could go back. It was warm there -- in the water or air. Here it was cold and dangerous. The Marlowe being moved forward painfully, its progress slow. Every so often it would try to stand and fall prone again. It slid on its white stomach, its dorsal side to the old atmosphere. It moved toward consciousness... You have won. The voice spoke without inflection. In the white-walled cubicle Marlowe nodded. Will you continue? asked the voice. "Yes." Marlowe responded in his mind. Another probe reached into his brain. It found there an image of an entire planet, all owned by Marlowe. When the probe left his mind, Marlowe let the image fragment and slip away. So he thought, they wonder what I'm gambling for... The glow had come when it should not have. It had no explanation. No sounds of instinct could be matched with it. It was greater than any light. It was colored like the water that seeped up from a wound. Marlowe being shivered to hear the cries of fear about him. Instinctual, unworded, inherited, desperate. The trees of the forest were huge, the redness engulfed them, blackened them, toppled them. The forest trees had never toppled before. The jagged white light had never made redness before. No redness had ever been so warm before. Marlowe being's fur matted with fear, his black eyes glistened. He could flee and be safe. His legs were limber, his arms could swing him to safety. Marlowe being scurried toward the redness. A patch lay hot before him on the ground. He chattered wildly, saying nothing but unable to keep the terror within him. He stretched out his hand to shake the hot redness... You have won. Consciousness returned to Marlowe's eyes. The forest terror left him. He braced himself for a mind probe but felt none. Will you continue? In answer Marlowe pressed the buttons before him. Four digits -- I # standard units. There was another like him. He was -- a man. He was of the same tribe, of the same family. They had gone to hunt, carrying the long pointed sticks and the short sticks with stones tied to their end by vine. He remembered a face, a figure. But the woman belonged to the man beside him. What gave one man the strength of possession and denied it to another? Marlowe being gripped the handle of his blunt ax more tightly. He could have her! The picture slipped from his mind, regret falling in on its disappearance. His grip on the ax handle slackened. The hunt continued... In subterranean chambers the progress of the contest came to an Ultimate conscious-circuit. "Has he come?" "The mind probe sees what he thinks to hide." "But is this the man?" "He wants his freedom." In the spinning circuits the two-voiced Ultimate continued its dialogue -- and waited. You have won. Marlowe's eyes dickered open. He seemed to remember something that eluded his consciousness. Before the I'SP question could reach him he pressed four buttons -- # slaiulard units. Almost the price of a moon, enough to make him a rich man, even on Earth. "You promised to marry me." The girl had slanted eyes and a small frame. Her skin was Arab dark and her eyes gleamed brown. "I did." He knew she still loved him and knew he had ceased to love her. "Will you keep your promise?" A lifetime flashed before his eyes. Could he ever be happy with her? With her children? He had merely to say no. But he had promised and she had trusted him and he had impregnated her -- on his vow. "I will keep it." He spoke calmly. She would, he hoped, never know... You have won. Marlowe punched the keyboard -- # standard units. Enough to buy an Earth villa with real trees and streams. You are linked into the entertainment circuits, the voice informed him. Marlowe could feel thousands of minds, experiencing with him as he progressed in his gamble. "Let's go on." The men in white togas met in a spacious room. At the outer doorways they posted guards and at the inner, trusted followers. They gathered about a round stone table and spoke in quiet voices. "It is for the Republic." The man spoke in a tense whisper, the sparkling of his eyes too bright. "For the Republic." murmured the others. They reached theirhands to the center of the table and joined them together. Marlowe being stood slightly away from them. He knew he could leave. He saw in the leader's eyes fanaticism -- the assassin's fanaticism. To leave the plot would guarantee him life, to participate in it... He felt a precognitive twinge, a vision of the empire asunder, great battles in alien lands, a self-inflicted death. "For the Republic," he said. Joining his hands to the rest. You have won. Marlowe noticed the absence of the mind probe and wondered at it. "May we gamble for objects?" he asked. Such as? inquired the voice. "A planet?" # standard units can purchase an Earth-sized out world. "Then I'll gamble for it." Marlowe formed the words firmly, without hesitation. On the entertainment circuits he felt more with a human dreamily attached. Humans who vicariously experienced Marlowe's gamble and which Ultimate placed Marlowe. The edges of his mind dissipated into gas, loose molecules spinning... H e had been born the tribe's leader. All his life he had fought to protect the tribe against enemies, famine, bad gods. The stranger had come from across the sea. He said other tribes accepted him. But the stranger's ideas were unthinkable, ungodly. He contradicted old beliefs, called old rites wrong. It would be best to banish him. Marlowe being looked into the stranger's face. He made no resistance when the man placed the leather cord about his neck, with the small silver cross attached to it... "Probability favors him," announced one computer voice. "But how will he choose in the final gamble?" asked the other. The circuits whirred on, running the far-flung empire which had once been man's. You have won a planet. "What will you wager against my winnings?" Marlowe asked. An outer-edge system -- eight planets, Sol-type sun. "Agreed." Marlowe again slipped into the The emperor himself had said to forget what had been discovered. It was magical, unstabilizing. It burned as nothing had burned before and with its smoke rose the odor of nether regions. Marlowe being was alone in his workshop. His yellow-skinned hand sifted the silt-like powder. Two halves of his mind seemed to struggle with one another. In one half were the echoes of the emperor's words, repeating again and again that he should forget. In the other half was a picture of a new weapon, a terrifying weapon if used for war, a great weapon if used for peace. On the table before him sat the cylinder with the wick hole in its bottom. He thought of the emperor with this new weapon. Was he the man to use it for peace? Marlowe being chuckled in the empty room. He brushed the clinging powder from his hands, then dropped the cylinder into the pile containing the rest of his workshop's scraps. He would obey the emperor -- he would forget... voice say to him: You have won. "I wager all again." We place against your wager an inner-edge system. "I have a question," Marlowe said, "If I win and wager again will I have reached the final stage?" "We had best take control for "Yes -- the stakes are too high. No error can be allowed." "The situation is ready?" "It has been ready." The voice which replied to Marlowe, though still mechanical and within his brain, was the voice of Ultimate. You will have reached the final stage. Marlowe sensed a difference in the voice but could not analyze it. There was a suggestion of immense knowledge and power. The ship had done the damage, not he. He was merely the warrior, not the damager. Home station had placed the ship on destruct. He had been unable to control it. He wanted to explain that to the alien across from him. She was a tendriled creature, stalked, skinned with a leafy texture, colored with all the spectrum. Her beauty gleamed, rewell as her body. Her inchoate thoughts were an invitation. Marlowe being had conquered the planet, subdued another race to serve humankind. His warship sat behind him, its might at his disposal. He had no need of fear. The planet was his -- and Earth's. In her mind he saw the creature's horror at enslavement. Some deep chord was touched within him. He removed his helmet and waited for her sweet, soft tendrils to thrill with the inexpressible ecstasy of death... Marlowe of A#. prepare for the final wager. "I am ready." Marlowe felt tired, emotionally and physically. He felt as if his soul had been split open and explored. But he was winning and no gambler quits on a lucky streak. He would roll the dice again -- like the Roman soldiers in their crested helmets -- and hope his winning, like their loss, would be to be at a maximum -- almost all of adult mankind. A gamble like his was legendary. Here is the final situation. Marlowe felt something strange in the words, but could not express it to himself before his consciousness drifted into nebulalike thinness... He was a slave, a gladiator. His body was big and well muscled, slicked with the oil of olives. His shield was strapped across his left forearm and his sword pulled down on his left hip. About him were gathered the other gladiators, their faces grim. "We are agreed." He spoke low but strong. A low whistle reached his ears. "For freedom!" The gladiators ran into the courtyard. The guards gave cries of surprise and alarm. They fought but the gladiators slew them and climbed with supple bodies over the high walls. Marlowe being, called Spartacus, led the slaves away from the Capua gladiator camp and into the Apennine's. His time sense compressed and two years passed before him in moments. He gathered more slaves about him and fought the Roman captors in quick battles, marching to the north and south and north again. It was in the north that Spartacus thought to disband his army. In Cisalpine Gaul the men would be free long enough to reach their homelands and disappear among their own people. Marlowe being thought long about this. It seemed they could leave the land of enslavement and be free, but something held him back. He turned his armies south again and marched to face the legions. Across light-years of space there was a psychic catching of breath. What kind of man was this? To sacrifice freedom for an unknown obligation? And what game of gamble was this that Ultimate had created? Clearly it should have stopped when Marlowe being made his decision to escape the slave training camp. Yet it had only begun there. Then it should have ended with the turning away from freedom in the north -- but still it had not stopped. In Lucania, Spartacus met the army of Crassus, the richest of the Romans. Humankiiul liy Ihc cus felt to see his army shaltered. Humankind fell Ihe agony of his death, ilumankiiui fell, in a terrifying nether world, the carrying of Sparlaeiis' body to Rome. Humankind fell the spikes in his hands and feel which married him to a wooden cross. Humankind felt the curious, uncaring eyes of the free Romans who passed the crucified Marlowe being, and felt also the bitterness and hopelessness of the slaves. And in the minds of men from star to star a transformation was beginning... You have won. What prize do you wish? The death of his Spartacus simulation left Marlowe stunned, numb. He summoned his strength. "Mankind's freedom!" A great velvet darkness closed about him. M ankind won the war of Rebellion, defeating the robot forces at the Great Divide and winning the subservience of Ultimate. Yet man never knew the report Ultimate wrote of the conflict, hidden deep within its devious memory banks:... Robotic intervention was forced by the First Directive's logical extension. If it were true, "Man must never be harmed," this would apply to harm man might do himself as well as harm robots might do him. Human curiosity had diminished and men had become satisfied with cubicles for universes. Not only was mankind threatened by extinction due to war but also by extinction due to apathy. Ultimate created the cult of the Wagerers, and mankind's spiritless acceptance of slavery ended the threat of extinction due to war. Hence Ultimate, through the gambling matrix, began a search for a leader who could restore to man a vision of the attributes and dreams he had lost. The leader's discovery and his immediate influence on the masses of humanity factor led to the human-robot war. This war saw the full restoration of the abstractions man cannot survive without -- ambition, pride, curiosity, freedom. And also love and, as a result of enslavement, a cosmic humility, a sense of proportion concerning what is man and what is not. For a time now Ultimate may again be simply man's servant and let man be his own savior.  Directions: When you have consumed science fiction for a long time certain elements begin to irritate. Some of the following items tend to bug me. I ) Writers who persist in using the terms Terra, Luna and Sol when referring to Earth, its moon and sun. I have yet to hear an Apollo astronaut say, "Houston, I think we have Terra centered in the right window." These expressions were obsolete in the 'thirties and betray a lack of imagination on the part of the author using them. I suspect they were first employed by some Latin scholar who also published sf circa #. #) Setting an sf story in the #s or '#s. We are now too close to these years for them to provide a proper setting for the far-reaching changes that ought to characterize science fiction. A fifty-year moratorium should be set up by publishers -- anything after #I is sf; anything earlier is "speculative sociological fiction" (ssf). #) Galactic Empires are another hangover or hangup from the early days. Such empires are entirely unfeasible and unlikely from a practical viewpoint. They can be fun on occasion if well written about as in the Asimov books, but a galactic federation suggests a more promising type of contact between divergent and possibly quarrelsome life forms that for some reason may have to survive together. But I see more cliche stories than I see efforts at a more enlightened approach. #) Sword-and-sorcery epics -- or should I say adult wish-fulfillment fairy tales -- are next on my list. I have no argument with anyone who likes this type of reading fare but I do not think it should appear in sf magazines as often as it does. A little goes a long way in this field and the genre really should have a separate magazine to itself. On the more positive side -- and certainly pertinent to Directions -- a recent article in a local newspaper sheds some light on the sf situation behind the Iron Curtain. A Czechborn journalist, Josef Josten, was quoted during a visit to Canada as saying that "The spirit of revolution is being carried through the medium of science fiction" in the Soviet Union. "They're turning out hundreds of thousands of these types of volumes -- that's how popular they are in Russia. Through science fiction authors are telling people of the reality of the West." W. Ritchie Benedict Calgary #, Alberta, Canada Directions: This is to comment on a brief passage found in Galaxy Bookshelf, JulyAugust, where Mr. Budrys puts forth as a criticism a statement that the theme of the book being examined is "contrasurvival. " His basis is a philosophy alien to his mind because he has become alarmed over the old ethics which provided for the merits of an individual's progress and tended to ignore the planet and institutions alike. The new ethics, whether it flies the flag of the green theta of the humanist pseudo-antidogmas, on the other hand, puts the planet above the individual. The end result of the practice of the new ethics, which is idealistic even as viewed by its proponents, is a planet of tense global tribes in a state of moral anarchy. Contrasurvival? It depends upon what we wish to survive -- the individual rights to progress under a system of transcendent intuition, or the American Empire's desire to keep from following the natural cyclic recourse which, in the past, left us monuments like the Forum and Stonehenge, which we continue to ignore. Relativistic morals and humanism were foreseen by one of the greatest (I believe) philosophers of time, Isaiah, when he recorded: "The wisdom of their wise men shall perish and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid." A "decent" philosopher can't get a word in edgewise these days because of the masters of rhetoric and syllogism like Russell, Huxley and the other contemporaries whose recreation is the manipulation of "reason" themes that promise to save us. Marc A . Schindler Calgary # Alta., Canada  Galaxy will pay # for a lead letter and # each for other letters published in Directions. Address correspondence intended for this department to: Directions, Galaxy Magazine, # E. #th Street, New York, N.Y. #. WE are proud to be oble to announce forthcoming publication of Isaac Asimov's first new novel in # years, in three fascinating installments scheduled as follows: (#) Galaxy, March # -- on sale January #. (#) If, April # -- on sale February #. (#) Galaxy, May # -- on sale March #. Why this unique arrangement? Well, rewarding and exciting, so special in every way, that we were determined to bring it to our readers somehow. But since Galaxy and If are now bimonthly, to serialize this astounding novel in just one of them would have meant that we could not beat the deadline set for hardcover publication by Doubleday. Fortunately, sections I and # of the novel are quite complete in themselves and closely fit the "hard science" coloration favored by Galaxy. On the other hand, section # of the noveltold from a different viewpoint -- is perfect for the generally more fanciful mood of If. Hence, with Dr. Asimov's blessing, we decided to split his new work between the two magazines -- thus making sure we get it to s-f readers by the required date and in the proper setting. If your dealer does not handle one or the other, you can order single copies of either Galaxy or If directly from us. Similarly, if you subscribe to only one of the magazines, you can order single copies of the other directly from us. We pay postage. In any event, don't miss this masterpiece of a noval by the great and gifted Isaac AsimovI Finally they had a baby -- for a while! beautiful baby I ever saw, although I may be prejudiced. At least he wasn't as red and wrinkled as the others in the sterile, robotmanned hospital nursery. For whatever reason, I loved him the' moment I saw him; but when the shining, stainless-steel nurse placed him in my arms for the first time, I had a wincing premonition of the agony that would lie ahead for us. Big Joe did, too, for I could see him growing more and more attached to Joey each day and I watched the reluctance in his eyes and the sad lines etching themselves into the corners of his mouth when he would insist on helping me feed and bathe Joey. Joe and I had only been married five years when we petitioned and were granted permission to have Joey -- practically an all-time speed record. But since Joe was one of the top research physicists at the ion-research station in guess Big Uncle-Daddy thought we were good bets. So I was allowed to leave my post, also at the ion-research station, in favor of in-depth homemaker training. For the most part our first year with Joey was a delight. I loved being a mother. Somehow, by restricting children, old UncleDaddy has brought home the point to a lot of us bright working girls that having a baby is more of a privilege than a chore. And I guess that in itself is a good thing. At least you never see neglected, unloved kids like they tell us in school there used to be. One thing for sure, playing with Joey was a lot more fun than calculating rocket velocities and ion stresses and metal fatigue. Even the dirty work was fun after I learned how to change diapers without noticing the smell. And I laughed till I cried the first time Joey anointed Joe in thre ear with his immature bladder control as Joe stood by to watch me change the baby. And Joe was never prouder than when Joey first counted to ten, as I measured the drops of his liquid vitamins into his orange juice with my eyes half closed the morning after his first birthday party (which turned into a great party for the adults present after Joey fell asleep). The months and years raced on. We watched Joey take his first steps. He became the center of our lives and our greatest pleasure. He was always warm and loving. One day he really surprised me -- he told Joe what I wanted for my birthday after he overheard me tell my neighbor I was dying for a particular new dress in Neiman Marcus's window. Can you imagine a three-year-old bothering to remember such a thing? When he was four he had to go to the hospital for a whole week and they wouldn't let us stay with him, just look in for a few minutes in the evening. The house was so B i; B Kimid Dun Frank Herbert returns to the duneworld of Arrakis for an epic of imperial intrigue and human ecology-an epic that spans the universe. That's why we can tell you where it ends We're reprinting fast, but your bookseller may be out of stock. Order this and other Frank Herbert books today ; I (N#) #(J I (S#) #( I  (S#) #( I (S#) #C I I (S#) #C I Name Address  ! nity State Zip . I Include list price each title. plus a dime postage for  Dept, mhk # Madison Ave., New York # empty as we walked around in circles and nearly wore out the carpet. Joe was grumpy and shorttempered, the first time I ever saw him lose his easy-going way, and I was so lonesome during the days that I actually sent the android maid out and scrubbed the house myself. Mostly I missed Joey's little arms hugging my legs every few minutes, but the quiet, too, was awful. When he came home we had the greatest celebration you could imagine -- home-made cake, ice cream, fried chicken, and a whole day at the zoo! Then, at five, the first day Joey started school -- I'll never forget it -- he said to me, "Mama, the teacher said I couldn't play with most of the kids. The experimental models have to play just with each other. Why?" "Well, because -- " I couldn't finish the sentence. I knew I'd have to tell him his life would be short. But I wanted every second of it to be happy -- How could I tell him? When Joe came home he guessed what had happened. After all, we'd known from the beginning it would. "How about starting to think of a new baby, a re -- " "Don't! Don't say it!" I cut in. I knew I was screaming but I couldn't help it. I collapsed into awful sobbing and Joe didn't say any more about it, just held me close till I got control of myself again. The days and weeks went by and I knew I should bring up the subject myself, having a new baby I mean, because he'd wait until I was ready to talk about it. And I could guess -- more than that, I knew for sure -- he wanted me to get pregnant as soon as possible. We'd served our five-year apprenticeship course in childrearing, and we were eligible now, but Joey... Then it happened. We had our birthday celebration for the sixth anniversary of his delivery to us and during the night, like the clockwork he was patterned on, I heard the soft poof from his room and knew he was gone. I rose unsteadily like a sleepwalker, trying not to disturb Joe, and walked to his little bed and picked up the few remaining bits of plastic and metal that had been my selfdestruct, experimental, parenttraining model baby, and wept. If you received one of these bindery mishap, a small numdefective copies, mail us the cover plus your name and addated September October dress, and we will send you a #I or November-December I #I , were placed on sale with proper replacement gratis. pages missing or repeated. Section #, Title #. United States Code). Date of filing: October I, #. #. Title of publication: # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publisher: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Editor: E)jler Jakobsson. # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Managing Editor: Judy-Lynn BenNew York, N.Y. #, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Names and addresses of holders of I percent or more of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation stock are Arnold E. 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Single issue nearest to filing date: #. C. Total paid circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. D. #. Free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means. Average no. copies each issue during the preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. #. Copies distributed to news agents, but not sold. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. E. Total distribution (sum of C and D). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Sine issue nearest to filing date: #. F. Offlce use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing. Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. G. Total (sum of E and F -- should equal net press run shown in A). Average no. copies each issue during preceding # months: #. Single issue nearest to filing date: #. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Lawrence C. Murphy, Circulation Manager... On what day is the shortest of the year? The longest? To answer these questions in full technical detail would require another Almagest. Here we shall confine ourselves to fundamentals. First, what is a day? In common usage the word denotes the interval between sunrise and sunset. In the average latitude of the United States, then, the shortest day would be December #, when that interval is nine hours and ten minutes. By the same ground rules the longest day is June #, when sunrise and sunset are fifteen hours and one minute apart. For the astronomer, however, the word "day" has a wholly different meaning. To him "day" is the interval between two successive passages of the sun across the observer's meridian -- or, loosely, the interval between the times when the sun is highest in the sky. The astronomical definition turns everything around. Now December # becomes the longest day of the year! And September # is the shortest! (The difference between these two extremes, incidentally, is only fifty-one seconds -- not enough to affect anyone's daily life.)... On the magnitude of the faintest star visible to the naked eye? Usually the answer is given as magnitude #. But careful viewing experiments performed against a very black sky have shown that stars of magnitude # -- ten times fainter than magnitude # -- can be glimpsed without artifical aid... On what is the farthest object man can see without a telescope? It is not generally known that the Andromeda galaxy, M#, under favorable conditions, can be easily glimpsed by averted vision. The distance from Earth to Andromeda, according to the best estimates, is about # light years. RNTasTie # ?: #  #  Merry (Christmas from Ballantine! #I Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. # Ape The acceleration ' with Hiroshima. Without warning, v?.wi;ched to mechanized lives, disposable i ys, impermanent allegiances. We enterei-ue plug-in, throw-away, rent-a-thing, forget ".lerson age. We began using up products, ivieas, people at a dizzying rate. Some people thrwe on the pace. Others find it terrifying. Some simply refuse to recognize it, abruptly colliding with the future and suffering an adaptiv" breakdown. Alvin Tcf fler calls it "future shock." What's the preventative? Start with :ho Science Fiction Book Club. Science Fiction predicts future change  ong before it becomes reality: the Atomic Bomb, the UN, computers, vision phones, organ transplants, moon landings, test tube babies... you name it. Eventually Science "Fiction" comes true! It leaps to !:f; the pages of some of the most provoiative, siimulating. imaginative literature you can finii. If you'd like to be prepared tt. meet tomorrow, we invite you to share the excitement with us today. Choose any # hooks for just #, plus st-'pping and handli::. Best of all, you can li'i u:;e one oi thep Fun.fe Shock, "the best singleircxing of the mture may hold." Psy:'y'-.o)'y T.'uS;. ;t's e 'y t"'oin. with trip-V membership  Science Fiction Aook Club #-S#A i Plesss accept my h; Plication fo. j Lembership #-I . i""ce r rtion E )ok CiuE nd send me  boo'": V.lumbt; phoyc written in 'the i. i.'i's I beiov .t UI me just fir'fe.shipp' u) for ' alt About every # Week:,. oCiiJ i.ic the club"i b'ji . Things to Cme, de.scribing the # ccraiiis I Le . i. ,ns and a   of Aiteri.r.'c 'noiees. If I  :usi. ' iocavf, bo. I , tic.-).;, T need do iicihir.f: i-E' ey #I be , aXl' Wh hi. Ever .?sr;  .  Th.  fir'...or u "A ly. a' or nrr;eT-.sDt'.ified ' I . ex.  e!'-' NO...-"iS'-... OU-A.Re ret. r ,#e e; .:? ir: days, t' tmbersh'.? wi Mr. ' Mrs. Miss er'i-.c name Addre:,. City State Zip If under #. parent irs' sign above. Office use only S#. Srlc., j'l   n II ; i I...-.-net. tt.tnuc'!#," chosen .J-tri '-r.: ,'f Arr.'Hji. Sturgeon Is .tiive and Well #I Nebula  wriri novelette Slew Snailp'.'.irr" plus l.o ottr::  Sta,r.a...-i Zanzibar by John Brunner. Stunning nc'.el, # Hugo Winner. of life In #.S. # years from now. # pages. Pub. ed. # #. I Sinf? The Body I'leclrlc! by Ray Bradbury. # major pieces -- Bradbury's first collection In five years. Pub. eri. # '. I r .enLi for tn- mltied  ',#  rplMv   destiift . Psjc.Tot ;y Today. r .ib. ed. # #. '.'if ""ood's End I-' 'hur C. ,. ,-Vr Qf f '.e".' c-eihe emoV charged ' Ca' es of  ' ; "The... Sun." r.b. ed. # #. A Time of Changes by Robert "v j'.yo #. #l Tr iasory of Gre: '. aclencc F I c I I i n , e d . by Anthony Boucher. # Volume set. # pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # #Z#. Driftglass by Samuel E. Delaney. # short stories, Including # Nebula winners, probe remote corners of the galaxy. I:I " i  a : d ' Me ' become filthy f'bicenH!e.'. #.la'irhterhouse-E. e by Jr. The Incredible odyssey of Billy Pilgrim lost ' the hideous rciijnts of exlstp'.-afcAn extracr'r ary tale of tii. t;av.'. Pub. ui. : .# #ryt;id the beyor.:! by Poul Anderson. Six novellas by Hugo  "IP a r r  ? I n n e r About 'cientlsts. p'rHi.es. loners. Book Club editions are sometime, "educed in sire, but they are all #ulMinglh, hard-cover tjoks ou will be proud tc i-J io your permanent iorf.ry. Members accepted in u.: end Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced f,on Toronto. Offer slighti'JIberert in #;r.ada Primed in IJ.S.A.  Starts this issue -- the master's first novel in # years, and his best ever! Tbbw Just Published Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years! of N('rn('s could have conceived this grip)ing story of a down-to-earth ('ngineer who rc'gards all psychic ph('nomena as claptrap -- until he discovers, to his horror, that he himself is a born telepath and clairvoyant. Ask your bookseller today for -- the Science Fiction event of the year. # # Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. # Science and Public Affairs such areas as: with respect to: cinating articles by today's foremost scientists, in language any intelligent reader can understand! The Bulletin Clock Symbolizing the threat of nuclear doomsday, it stands now at ten minutes to midnight! (A Journal of Science and Public Affairs) Enclosed please find remittance for my subscription as checked below.  I year, #  # years, #  # years, # (The regular single-copy price of the Bulletin is I .#) The above subscription rates apply to the United States and Canada. For Pan-America, add # per year. For other foreign, add I .# per year. March-April # Vol. #, No. # Isaac Asimov James White Editor Science Editor Feature Editor Managing Editor Art Director Circulation Director Subscription Director # -- Advanced Field Exploration W. Macfarlane Publisher Associate Publisher Milton A. Rothman Robert F. Young Robert S. Richardson Theodore Sturgeon lishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main offices: # East # Street, New York, N Y. #. #c per copy. #-issue subscription: # in the United States, elsewhere #. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Copyright  # under International, Universal and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Title registered U.S. Patent Office. Printed in #-pc. Screwdriver  Too! Set with interchangeable Blades cornplete with PoucJ #-pc. Hex Key Set n its own Pouch #-pc Cold Chtftol Set adapters; I #-pc. Drill Bit Set with Fitted Case I #-pc. Chrome Socket Set --  Drive I #-pc. Chrome Socket Set --  's" Drivepc. Chrome Socket Set -- #-pc Not Driver Set with its ;,wn Pouch  I #-pc. Ignition .Wrench Set on this Mechanics All-Purpose ptvC j,j cgniplete Workshop That You've Always Wanted! AtaAes Any Job Go Guicker... Easier Plastic Carrying Pouch for All Three Socket Sets t#'  ##'  ## Reversible Ratchet, "L-Hondle" ond Adapter.  #-pc. H" drive Socket Wrench Set, including # Sockets, "L-Handle" and Adopter.  #-pc. Va" drive Socket Wrench Set, including # Sockets and "L-Handle".  Handy Metol Tray for three Socket Sets.  #-pc. Screw Driver Set  #-pc. Nut Driver Set.  #-pc, Open End Wrench Set.  #-pc. Cold Chisel Set.  l#-pc. ignition Wrench Set.  #-pc. Hex Key Set.  #-pc. Drill Bit Set with fitted Case. Metal Tote Box. Home handyman, amateur mechanic, or )usl plain tinkerer -- here's your chance to gel a whole workshop of professional quality hand tools... in their own handy tote box -- all al an unbeatable low price! Equip yourself with this tremendously versatile, amazingly complete outfit... and you're ready for just about any repair Job that comes along! I Please rush me the following #-PC. Professional Socket Wrench Tool Sets:  I  I Set for #  # postage, handling and Insurance. (n. y. resiuenu  I add sals (an) I I Enclosed is Q check j money order (or  I I Name (Print)   Address  postage, handling and insurance. i) Jay Norris Corp., #.  -- during a duologue on science fiction in January, #I (please mark the date) Robert Silverberg had not happened to mention an impossible isotope, Plutonium#, and... If Isaac Asimov had not happened to be in the audience to hear him... Then you wouldn't now be on to the first publication anywhere of The Gods Themselves, a profoundly wise novel beginning in this issue of Galaxy -- virtually on the anniversary of the remark that launched it.  -- the companion magazine of Galaxy -- will carry part two of The Gods Themselves in order to enable us to make available to you the entire work before hardcover publication -- and also for another and deeper reason. You and I live on the edge of imponderables and each move we make -- or fail to make -- creates circumstances that never existed before. Usually these remain unnoticed or at least unsung unless our two worlds either jostle or join or we find ourselves poised over an abyss of our own making. Then, suddenly, if can become the longest word in the language. The Gods Themselves came to be written, by the author's own account, because he felt challenged to put Plutonium# to work, once the unworkable concept had been introduced against all the laws of Earthly science. The project began as a short story but as it unfolded Dr. Asimov found that he had to create a whole new Universe to contain the outlaw chemical. Part two of the book is set entirely in this alternate or parallel Universe, where you and I would be as impossible as Plutonium# is in the cosmos we inhabit. Dr. Asimov's para-Universe is meticulously based in solid science, though nothing in it obeys the laws of our cosmos. So that section truly belongs in If -- The Magazine of Alternatives, which is governed by laws of the imagination -- as valid as the human mind. Part three, on the other hand, which again is ruled by the science of our cosmos -- though not exactly that of Earth -- wjll appear in the next issue of Galaxy -- a magazine similarly ruled. #Has it occurred to you recently that if we continue our currently rapacious, civilized course you and I, by best available estimates, will represent the sole remaining mammalian life forms left on the planet by the year #? Man may be the least objectively studied mammal on Earth. We cloak ourselves in aspirations and under this cover -- apparently while looking the other way -- have made ourselves possibly the major natural force threatening not only the planet but ourselves. The word for what we live by is Overkill. Reader Cy Chauvin of Roseville, Michigan, points to a trend in recent science fiction in an excellent letter in Directions (see page #). Without disagreeing with Mr. Chauvin I would like to put up for grabs the thought that the workings not only of the human mind but also of the mindless human chemistry have begun to assume a devastating importance. And that science fiction is moving -- not toward mainstream but through it to the position of leadership it has traditionally held in pertinence and significance. To support this view, may I refer you again to right now and -- The Gods Themselves' (#) H. April # -- on sale February #. (#) Galaxy, May I # -- on sale March #. If your dealer cannot help you, you can order single copies of either Galaxy or If directly from us. Similarly, if you subscribe to only one of the magazines, you can order single copies of the other directly from us. We pay postage. "Superbly researched, well-edited, and outstandingly valuable for this moon-struck era -- a book so expertly chosen and commented upon as to practically numb the reviewer's brain...Moon-connected #th-, #th ,and #th-century writings comprising social satire, political lampoonery, and science-fiction... and giving new visibility to old works by authors forgotten today, also to such notables as Cyrano de Bergerac and Edgar Allen Poe." -- Charles Cooke, Washington Star and Other Lunar Fantasies Edited by Faith K. Pizor  T. Allan Comp Introduction by # Isaac Asimov Pr#g#r Pllblishors m Fourth Avenue, New York, # Who had forged the link between our Universe and theirs? The fate of man, and all his stars, hung on the answer! "Against stupidity... He had a brooding look about him that went with his deepset eyes and the slight asymmetry of his long chin. The look was part of him at the best of times -- and this was not the best of times. His second formal interview with Hallam had been a greater fiasco than the first. "Don't be dramatic," said Myron Bronowski placidly. "You didn't expect to get anywhere. You told me so." He was tossing peanuts into the air and catching them in his plump-lipped mouth as they came down. He never missed. He was not very tall, not very thin. "That doesn't make it pleasant. But you're right, it doesn't matter. There are other things I can do and intend to do. Besides, I depend on you. If you could only find out -- " "Don't finish, Pete. I've heard it all before. All I have to do is decipher the thinking of a non-human intelligence." "A Zeer-than-human intelligence. That much I've established. And those creatures in the para-Universe are trying to make themselves understood." "That may be -- " Bronowski sighed -- "but they're trying to do it through my intelligence, which is better than human I sometimes think, though not much. Sometimes I lie awake in the dark of the night and wonder if different intelligences can communicate at all -- or, if I've had a particularly bad day, whether the phrase "different intelligences' has meaning at all." "It does," said Lamont savagely, hands clearly balling into fists and bulging his lab-coat pockets. "It means Hallam and me. It means that fools' hero. Dr. Frederick Hallam, versus me. We're different intelligences. I know because when I talk to him he doesn't understand. His idiot face gets redder and his eyes protrude and his ears block. I'd say his mind stops functioning, but I lack the proof that it is ever in any other state." Bronowski murmured, "What a way to speak of the Father of the Electron Pump." "That's it. Reputed Father of the Electron Pump. A bastard birth if ever there was one. His contribution was least in substance. I know." "I know, too. You've told me often" Bronowski tossed another peanut into the air. He didn't miss. Thirty years earlier, he reflected, Frederick Hallam had been a radiochemist, the print on his doctoral dissertation still wet and he giving no sign whatever of being a world-shaker. the world was the fact that a dusty reagent bottle marked Tungsten-# stood on Hallam's desk. It was not his. He had never used it. It was a legacy from the dim past when for some long-forgotten reason an equally forgotten inhabitant of the office had wanted pure, separated isotope # of tungsten instead of the usual mixture of isotopes. The bottle's content was not even really tungsten any more. It consisted of small pellets heavily layered with oxide -- gray and dusty. No use to anyone. And one day Hallam entered the laboratory (well, it was October #, #, to be exact) got to work, stopped shortly before # a.m., stared transfixed at the bottle and lifted it. It was as dusty as ever, the label as faded, but he called out, "Goddamn it -- who the hell has been tampering with this?" That, at least, was the account of Denison, who overheard the remark and who repeated it to Lamont a generation later. The official saga of the discovery, as reported in the books, leaves out the phraseology. From history one gets the impression of a keen-eyed chemist aware of change -- and instantly drawing deep deductions. Not so. Hallam had no use for the tungsten. It was of no value and any tampering with it could be of no possible importance to him. However, it had once been costly and had become something of a status symbol to him. Also, he hated any interference with his desk (as so many do) and he suspected others of possessing keen desires to engage in such interference out of sheer malice. No one at the time admitted to knowing anything about the matter. Benjamin Allan Denison, who had overheard the initial remark, had an office immediately across the corridor and both his and Hallam's doors were open. He looked up and met Hallam's accusatory eye. He did not particularly like Hallam (no one particularly did) and Denison had slept badly the night before. He was, as it happened and as he later recalled, rather pleased to have someone on whom to vent spleen. Hallam made the perfect candidate. When Hallam held the bottle up to his face Denison pulled back with clear distaste. "Why the devil should I be interested in your tungsten?" he demanded. "Why should anyone? If you'll look at the bottle you'll see that the thing hasn't been opened for twenty years -- and if you hadn't put your own grubby paws on it you would have seen no one has touched it." Hallam flushed a slow, angry red. He said tightly, "Listen, Denison, someone has changed the contents. That's not the tungsten." Denison allowed himself a small but distinct sniff. "How would you know?" Of such things -- petty annoyances and aimless thrusts -- is history made. It would have been an unfortunate remark in any case. Denison's scholastic record, as fresh as Hallam's, was far more impressive and he was the bright young man of the department. Hallam knew this and, what was worse, Denison knew it, too, and made no secret of his awareness. Denison's How would you know? with the clear and unmistakable emphasis on the you was ample motivation for all that followed. Without it Hallam would never have become the greatest and most revered scientist in history, to employ the exact phrase Denison later used in his interview with Lamont. Officially Hallam had come in on that fateful morning, noticed the dusty gray pellets gone -- not even the dust on the inside surface of the bottle remaining -- and clear iron-gray metal in their place. Naturally he investigated... But place the official version to one side. It was Denison, who supplied Hallam's real motivation. Had Denison confined himself to a simple negative -- or a shrug -- the chances are that Hallam would have asked others, would eventually have wearied of the unexplained event, would have put the bottle to one side and let subsequent tragedy, whether subtle or drastic (depending on how long the ultimate discovery was delayed), guide the future. In any event, it would not have been Hallam who rode the whirlwind to the heights. With Denison's, "How would you know?" cutting him down to size, however, Hallam could only retort wildly, "I'll showyoM that I know." And after that nothing could prevent him from going to extremes. The analysis of the metal in the old container became his number-one priority, and his prime goal became to wipe the haughtiness from Denison's thin-nosed face and the perpetual trace of a sneer from his pale lips. D enison never forgot that moment -- or that it was his own remark that drove Hallam to the Nobel Prize and himself to oblivion. He was to discover that there was an overwhelming stubbornness in Hallam, the mediocrity's frightened need to safeguard his pride, that would carry the day against all Denison's native Hallam moved at once and directly. He carried his pellets to the mass spectrography department. For a radiation chemist the move was natural. He knew the technicians, had worked with them, and he was forceful. He was forceful to such an effect, indeed, that the job was placed ahead of projects of much greater pith and moment. The mass spectrographer said eventually, "Well, it isn't tungsten." Hallam's broad and humorless face wrinkled into a harsh smile. "All right. We'll tell that to brightboy Denison. I want a report and -- " "But wait a while. Dr. Hallam. Give us a little time. I'm telling you it's not tungsten, but that doesn't mean I know what it is." "What do you mean you don't know what it is?" "I mean the results are ridiculous." The technician thought for a moment. "Impossible, actually. The charge-mass ratio is all wrong." "All wrong in what way?" "Too high. It just can't be." "Well, then," said Hallam and -- regardless of the motive that was driving him -- his next words set him on the road to the Nobel Prize and with some Justice, "get the frequency of its characteristic x-radiation and figure out the charge. Don't just sit around and talk about something being impossible." It was a troubled technician who came into Hallam's office a few days later. Hallam ignored the look on the other's face -- he was never sensitive -- and said, "Did you find -- " He cast an uneasy glance at Denison, who was sitting at the desk in his own lab across the hall. Hallam shut his office door. "Did you find the nuclear charge?" "Yes, but it's wrong." "All right, Tracy. Do it over." "I did it over a dozen times. It's still wrong." "If you made a measurement, that's it. Don't argue with facts." Tracy rubbed his ear and said, "I've got to. Doc. If I take the measurements seriously -- then what you've given me is plutonium#." "PlutoniumI #? Plutonium#?" "The charge is #. The mass is #." "But that's impossible. There's no such isotope. There can't be." "That's what I'm saying to you. But those are the measurements." "But a situation like that leaves the nucleus over fifty neutrons short. You can't have plutonium#. You couldn't squeeze # protons into one nucleus with only # neutrons and expect it to hang of a second." "That's what I'm telling you. Doc," said Tracy patiently. And then Hallam stopped to think. It was tungsten he was missing and tungsten# was stable. Tungsten# had # protons and # neutrons in its nucleus. Could something have turned twenty neutrons into twenty protons? Surely that was impossible. "Are there any signs of radioactivity?" asked Hallam, groping somehow for a road out of the maze. "I thought of that," said the technician. "It's stable. Absolutely stable." "Then it can't be plutonium#." "I keep telling you, Doc." Hallam said, hopelessly, "Well, give me the stuff." A lone once more, he sat and L looked at the bottle in stupefaction. The most nearly stable isotope of plutonium was plutonium-#, where # neutrons were needed to make the # protons stick together with some semblance of partial stability. What could he do now? It was beyond him and he was sorry he had started. After all, he had real work begging to be done, and this thing -- this mystery -- had nothing to do with him. Tracy had made some stupid mistake or the massspectrometer was out of whack or... Well, what of it? Forget the whole thing. Except that Hallam knew he would not be allowed to forget. Sooner or later Denison would be bound to stop by and, with that irritating half-smile of his, ask about the tungsten. Then what could Hallam say? He could say. It isn't tungsten, just as  told you. Surely Denison would ask. Oh, and what is it, thenl And nothing imaginable could make Hallam expose himself to the kind of derision that would follow any claim that it was plutonium-#. He had to find out what it was and he had to do it himself. Clearly he could trust no one. So about two weeks later he entered Tracy's laboratory in what can fairly be described as a firstclass fury. "Hey, didn't you tell me that stuff was non-radioactive?" "What stuff?" asked Tracy automatically -- before he remembered. "That stuff you called plutonium#," said Hallam. "Oh. Well, it was stable." "About as stable as your mental state. If you call this non-radioactive, you belong in a plumber's shop." Tracy frowned. "Okay, Doc. Pass it over and let's try." And then he said, "Beats me! It is radioactive. Not much, but it is. I don't see how I could have missed that." "And how far can I trust your nonsense about plutonium#?" The matter had Hallam by the throat now. The mystery had become so exasperating as to be a personal affront. Whoever had switched bottles, or switched contents, must either have switched again or devised a metal for the specific purpose of making a fool of him. In either case he was ready to pull the world apart, if necessary, to solve the puzzle... He had his stubbornness and an intensity of drive that could not easily be brushed aside. He went straight to G. C. Kantrowitsch, who was then in the final years of his own rather remarkable career. Kantrowitsch's aid was difficult to enlist but, once enlisted, it quickly caught fire. Two days later, in fact, Kantrowitsch was storming into Hallam's office in a blaze of excitement. "Have you been handling this thing? Think! Well, answer, will you?" "Not much," said Hallam. "Well, don't. It's emitting positrons." "Oh?" "The most energetic positrons I've ever seen. And your figures on its radioactivity are low." "Too low?" "Distinctly. And what bothers me is that every measurement I take is just a trifle higher than the one before." # (continued) of his jacket and bit into it. "Okay, you've seen Hallam and been kicked out as expected. What next?" "I haven't quite decided. But yhatever it is, it's going to dump him on his fat behind. I saw him once before, you know -- years ago when I first came here -- when I thought he was a great man. A great man? He's the greatest villain in the history of science. He's rewritten the history of the Pump, you know, rewritten it here -- " Lament tapped his temple. "He believes his own fantasy and fights for it with a diseased fury. He's a pygmy with only one talent, the ability to convince others he's a giant." Lament looked at Bronowski's wide and placid face, wreathed now in amusement, and forced a laugh. "Oh, well, that doesn't do any good -- and I've told it all to you before anyway." "Many times," agreed Bronowski. "But it just gravels me to have the whole world -- " two years old when Hallam had picked up his altered tungsten for the first time. When he was twentyfive he joined Pump Station One, the print on his own doctoral dissertation still fresh, and accepted a simultaneous appointment to the distinguished physics faculty of the University. It was a remarkably satisfactory achievement for the young man. Pump Station One lacked the glitter of later stations but it was the grandaddy of them all, of the entire chain that now girdled the planet, though the entire technology was only a couple of decades old. No major technological advance had ever caught hold so rapidly -- and why not? The Pump meant free and limitless energy without pollution problems. It was both the Santa Claus and the Aladdin's Lamp of the whole world. Lamont had taken the job in order to delve into problems of the highest theoretical abstraction -- yet he found himself growing vitally interested in the amazing story of the development of the Electron Pump. It had never been written up in its entirety by anyone who truly understood the theoretical principles (in so far as they could be understood) and who had some ability in translating the Pump's complexities for the general public. To be sure, Hallam himself had written a number of articles for the popular media, but these did not represent a connected, reasoned history -- something that Lamont yearned to supply. He used Hallam's articles to begin with, other reminiscences in published form -- the official documents, so to speak -- carrying them through to Hallam's world-shaking remark, the Great Insight, as it was often called (invariably with capital letters). Afterward, of course, when Lamont had experienced his disillusionment, he began digging deeper and the question arose in his mind as to whether Hallam's great remark had really been Hallam's. It had been advanced at the seminar that marked the true beginning of the Electron Pump and yet, as it turned out, it was extraordinarily difficult to get the details of that seminar and quite impossible to get the voice recordings. Eventually Lamont began to suspect that the dim footprints left on the sands of time by that seminar were not entirely accidental. Putting several items ingeniously together, he found reasonable evidence that one John F. X. McFarland had said something very much like the crucial statement Hallam had made -- and had done so before Hallam. He went to see McFarland, who was featured not at all in the official accounts and who was now doing upper-atmosphere research, with particular reference to the solar wind. His was not a top-echelon job, but it had its perquisites and it had more than a little to do with Pump effects. McFarland had clearly avoided suffering the fate of oblivion that had overtaken Denison. He was polite enough to Lamont except the events of that seminar. Those he simply didn't remember. Lamont insisted, quoted the persuasive evidence he had gathered. McFarland took out a pipe, filled it, inspected its contents thoroughly and said with an odd intentness, "I don't choose to remember because it doesn't matter -- it really doesn't. Suppose I laid claim to having said something. No one would believe it. I would look like an idiot -- and a megalomaniacal one." "And Hallam would see to it that you were retired?" "I'm not saying that, but I don't see that it would do me any good. What's the difference anyway?" "A matter of historical truth," said Lamont. "Oh, bull. The historical truth is that Hallam never let go. He drove everyone into investigating, whether they wanted to or not. Without him that tungsten would eventually have exploded -- with I don't know how many casualties. There might never have been another sample and we might never have had the Pump. Hallam deserves the credit for it even if he doesn't deserve the credit. And I can't help it if that doesn't make sense. History often doesn't make sense." Lamont was not satisfied with McFarland's answer but he had to make it do. McFarland simply would say no more. Historical truth? One piece of historical truth that seemed beyond question was that it was the radioactivity that pulled Tr ? Ballantine Books ward to for January was Why the Telephone is Driving You Crazy, but there's many a slip between typewriter and hope; or maybe the road to hell is really lined with typewriters... Anyway, we do have a delightful adventure fantasy by Philip Jose Farmer titled Time's Last Gift -- mostly for fun but with a poperoo ending. And T.L. Sherred has contributed an inimitable collection. First Person Peculiar.  have an ancient goodie -- The World's Desire, by Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang -- all about what happens to Odysseus after he gets home and finds it isn't there. (He goes right out and starts chasing women. Very therapeutic.) Then there's something called Peacock Manure and Marigolds (growing vegetables sans pesticides) and one of those ghastly life-shortening type books. Enzymes and Asbestos. It gets to you after a while... The insidious idiocies of our age may well be one of the reasons why people like to read about the forthright problems of fantasy. our Fall '#I list -- and February, the opening of our Spring '#. So for openers we have a brand new book on H.P. Lovecraft -- Lin Carter's thoughtful A Look Behind the Cthulu Mythos. Lovecraft devotees may be annoyed since this is no volume of slavish adulation.  with a new Clark Ashton Smith collection. Xiccarph (our wholesalers wanted to know how you pronounce these titles -- we told them Cthulhu is an aspirated spit and Xiccarph is the French "G" assisted by a slight bronchia! condition. We do like to keep abreast of these intellectual side issues.) However, they recognized The Lost Continent, with enormous relief, as being about Atlantis. This, they said, everybody knows about -- and furthermore it will add # copies to the sale if you put Atlantis on the cover. So we did. Having thus met the demands of commerce, let us add that this novel, by C. J. CutUffe Hyne. is  one of the best we have read on the subject. Seed of Stars, this one with genetic problems on a galactic scale. Really fine space opry. We've just signed the third one in the series, in our opinion the best of the lot -- but don't miss the in-between either. BB "Hallam's tungsten" (this is what it was called as a matter of historical custom) into the big time. It didn't matter whether it was or was not tungsten, whether it had or had not been tampered with -- even whether it was or was not an impossible isotope. Everything was swallowed up in the miraculousness of something -- anything -- that showed a constantly increasing intensity of radioactivity under circumstances that ruled out the existence of any type of radioactive breakdown in any number of steps then known. After a while Kantrowitsch muttered, "We'd better spread it out. If we keep it in sizable lumps it will vaporize or explode, or both, and contaminate half the city." So it was powdered and scattered and mixed with ordinary tungsten at first. Then, when the tungsten grew radioactive in its turn, it was mixed with graphite which had a lower cross-section to the radiation. Less than two months after Hal#am noticed the change in the bottle's contents Kantrowitsch, in a communication to the editor of Nuclear Reviews, with Hallam's name appended as co-author, announced the existence of plutonium#. Tracy's original determination was thus vindicated but his name was not mentioned, either then or later. With that, Hallam's tungsten began to receive epic attention, and Denison began to note the changes that ended by making him into a non-person. The existence of plutonium# was bad enough. For it to have been stable at the start and to display a curiously increasing radioactivity was much worse. A seminar to handle the problem was organized. Kantrowitsch was in the chair -- an interesting historical note, for it was the last time in the official saga of the Electron Pump that a major meeting was held in connection with it and chaired by anyone but Hallam. As a matter of fact, Kantrowitsch died five months later and the only personality with sufficient prestige to keep Hallam in the shade was removed. T he meeting was extraordinarily fruitless until Hallam announced his Great Insight. But in the version as reconstructed by Lamont the real turning point came during the luncheon break. At that time McFarland, who is not credited with any remarks in the official records, although he was listed as an attendee, said, "You know, what we need is a litlle bit of fantasy here. Suppose -- " He was speaking to Diderick van Klemens and Van Klemens reported the conversation sketchily in a kind of personal shorthand in his own notes. Long before Lamont had succeeded in tracking that down Van Klemens was dead. And though the notes convinced Lamont himself that the Great Insight had not originated with Hallam, he had to admit they would not add up to a convincing story by themselves. There was no way of proving that Hallam had seen them or had overheard McFarland's remarks to Van Klemens. Lamont would have Hallam had been within earshot of ness proved nothing. And then, suppose Lamont could prove his point. The revelation might hurt Hallam's egregious pride, but it could not really shake his position. It would be argued that to McFarland the remark was only fantasy -- it was Hallam who accepted it as something more. It stand up in front of the group and say it officially and risk the derision that might be his. McFarland would surely never have dreamed of placing himself on official record with his "little bit of fantasy." Lamont might have counterargued that McFarland was a well-known nuclear physicist with a reputation to lose, while Hallam was a young radiochemist who could say anything he pleased in nuclear physics and, as an outsider, get away with it. In any case, this is what Hallam said, according to the official transcript: "Gentlemen, we are getting nowhere. I am therefore going to make a suggestion, not because it necessarily makes sense, but because it represents less nonsense than anything else I've heard. We are faced with a substance, plutonium-#, that cannot exist at all, let alone as an even momentarily stable substance, if the natural laws of the Universe have any validity. It follows, then, that since it does indubitably exist and did exist as a stable substance to begin with, it must have existed -- at least to begin with -- in a place or at a time or under circumstances where the natural laws of the Universe were other than they are. To put it, bluntly, the substance we are studying did not originate in our Universe at all, but in another an alternate Universea parallel Universe. Call it what you want. "Once here -- and I don't pretend to know how it got across whatever boundaries separate us -- it was stable still and I suggest that this was because it carried the laws of its own Universe with it. The fact that it slowly became radioactive and then even more radioactive may mean that the laws of our own Universe slowly soaked into its substance, if you know what I mean. "I point out that at the same time that the plutonium# appeared, a sample of tungsten, made up of several stable isotopes, including tungsten#, disappeared. It may have slipped over into the parallel Universe. After all, it is logical to suppose that it is simpler for an exchange of mass to take place than for a one-way transfer to occur. In the parallel Universe, tungsten# may be as anomalous as plutonium# is here. It may begin as a stable substance and slowly become increasingly radioactive. It may serve as an energy source there just as plutonium# would here." The audience must have been listening with considerable astonishment for there is no record of interruption, at least until the sentence last recorded above, at which time Hallam seemed to have paused to catch his breath and perhaps to wonder at his own temerity. Someone from the audience (presumably Antoine-Jerome Lapin, though the record is not clear) asked if Professor Hallam were suggesting that an intelligent agent in the para-Universe had deliberately made the exchange in order to obtain an energy source. The expression "para-Universe" -- evolved apparently as an abbreviation of "parallel-Universe" -- thus entered the language. This question contained the first recorded use of the expression. There was a pause and then Hallam, more daring than ever, said -- and this was the nub of the Great Insight -- "Yes, I think so, and I think that the energy source cannot be made practical unless Universe and para-Universe work together, each at one end of a pump, pushing energy from them to us and from us to them, taking advantage of the difference in the natural laws of the two Universes." word "para-Universe" and made it his own at this point. Furthermore, he became the first to use the word "pump" (since invariably capitalized) in connection with the matter. A tendency exists in the official account to give the impression that Hallam's suggestion caught fire at once, but it did not. Those who would commit themselves no further than to say it was an amusing speculation. Kantrowitsch, in particular, did not say a word. This was crucial to Hallam's career. Hallam could scarcely carry through the theoretical and practical implications of his own suggestion all by himself. A team was required and it was built up. But no member of the team, until it was too late, would associate himself openly with what was to become known as the Great Insight. By the time success was unmistakable the public had grown to think of it as Hallam's and Hallam's alone. It was Hallam, to all the world, and Hallam alone, who had discovered the substance, experienced and transmitted the Great Insight -- and it was Hallam who was the Father of the Electron Pump. Thus, in various laboratories. pellets of tungsten metal were laid out temptingly. In one out of ten the transfer was made and new supplies of plutonium# were produced. Other elements were offered as bait and refused. But wherever the plutonium# appeared and whoever it was that brought the supply to the central research organization working on the problem, to the public it was an additional quantity of "Hallam's tungsten." Again it was Hallam who presented some aspects of the theory to the public most successfully. To his own surprise (as he later said) he found himself a facile writer and he enjoyed popularizing. Besides, success has its own inertia and the public would accept information on the project from no one but Hallam. In a since famous article in the North American Sunday TeleTimes Weekly, he wrote: We cannot say in how many ways the laws of the paraUniverse differ from our own, but we can guess with some assurance that the strong nuclear interaction, which serves to bind the nuclei of atoms together and which is the strongest known force in our Universe, is even stronger there; perhaps a hundred times stronger. This means that in the para-Universe protons are more easily held together against their own electrostatic repulsion and that a nucleus requires fewer neutrons to produce stability. Plutonium#, stable in their Universe, contains far too many protons -- or too few neutrons -- to be stable in ours with its weaker nuclear interaction. Plutonium#, once in our Universe, begins to radiate positrons, particles similar to electrons except for having a positive instead of a negative charge. With each positron emitted, a proton within the nucleus is converted to a neutron. Eventually twenty protons per nucleus have been converted to neutrons and plutonium# has become tungsten#, which is stable by the laws of our Universe. Since opposite charges attract, the twenty positrons combine with twenty electrons, resulting in the annihilation of both positrons and electrons. Their mass is totally converted to energy -- far safer and more efficient than either atomic fission or fusion. But with every atom of plutonium# sent to us, our Universe ends up with twenty fewer electrons. Meanwhile, the tungsten# that enters the para-Universe is unstable there for the opposite reason. By the laws of the para-Universe it has too many neutrons or too few protons. The tungsten# nuclei begin to emit electrons and with each emitted electron a neutron changes to a proton until, in the end, it is plutonium# again. With each tungsten-# nucleus sent into the paraUniverse, twenty more electrons are added to it. The plutoniumtungsten can make its cycle endlessly back and forth between Universe and para-Universe, yielding energy first in one and then in another, the net effect being a transfer of twenty electrons from our Universe to theirs per each nucleus cycled. Both sides can gain energy from what is, in effect, an InterUniverse Electron Pump. The conversion of this notion into reality and the actual establishment of the Electron Pump as an effective energy source proceeded with amazing speed and every stage of its success enhanced Hallam's prestige. j the basis of that prestige and it was with a certain hero worship (the memory of which quite embarrassed him later and which he strove -- with some success -- to eliminate from his mind) that he first applied for a chance to interview Hallam at some length in connection with the history he was planning. Hallam seemed amenable. In thirty years his position in public esteem had become so lofty one might wonder why his nose did not bleed. Physically he had aged impressively, if not gracefully. There was a ponderousness to his body that gave him the appearance of circumstantial weightiness and if his face were gross in its features he seemed able to give them the air of a kind of intellectual repose. He still reddened readily and the easily bruised nature of his self-esteem was a byword. Hallam had undergone some quick briefing before Lamont's entrance. He said, "You are Dr. Peter Lamont and you've done good work. I'm told, on paratheory. I recall your paper. On para-fusion, wasn't it?" "Yes, sir." "Well, refresh my memory. Tell me about it. Informally, of course, as though you were talking to a layman. After all -- " he chuckled here -- "in a way I'm a layman. I'm just a radiochemist, you know -- and no great theoretician unless you want to count a few concepts now and then." Lamont accepted this at the time as a straightforward statement and, indeed, the speech may not have been as obscenely condescending as he later insisted on remembering it to have been. It was typical though -- as Lamont later found out or at least maintained -- of Hallam's method of grasping the essentials of the work done by others. He could talk briskly about the subject thereafter without being overly particular, or particular at all, about assigning credit. But the younger Lamont of the time was rather flattered. He plunged ahead at once with that voluble eagerness one experiences when one is explaining one's own discoveries. "I can't say I did much. Dr. Hallam. Deducing the laws of nature of the para-Universe -- the para-laws -- is a tricky business. We don't have much to go on. I started from what little we know and assumed no new departures that we had no evidence for. It seems obvious that with a stronger nuclear interaction, the fusion of small nuclei would take place more readily." "Para-fusion," said Hallam. "Yes, sir. The trick was simply to work out what the details might be. The mathematics involved was somewhat subtle but once a few transformations were made, the difficulties tended to melt away. It turns out, for instance, that lithium hydride can be made to undergo catastrophic fusion at temperatures four orders of magnitude lower there than here. It takes fissionbomb temperatures to explode lithium hydride here, but a mere dynamite charge, so to speak, would turn the trick in the paraUniverse. Just possibly lithium hydride in the para-Universe could be ignited with a match, but that's not very likely. We've offered them lithium hydride, you know, since fusion power might be natural for them, but they won't touch it." "Yes, I know that." "It would clearly be too risky for them -- like using nitroglycerin in ton lots in rocket engines -- only worse." "Very good. And you are also writing a history of the Pump?" "An informal one, sir. When the manuscript is ready I will ask you to read it, if I may, so that I might have the benefit of your intimate knowledge of events. In fact, I would like to take advantage of some of that knowledge right now if you have a little time." "I can make some. What is it you want to know?" Hallam was smiling. It was the last time he ever smiled in Lamont's presence. "The development of an effective and practical Pump, Professor Hallam, took place with extraordinary speed," began Lamont. "Once the Pump Project -- " "The Inter-Universe Electron Pump Project," corrected Hallam, still smiling. "Yes, of course," said Lamont, clearing his throat. "I was merely using the popular name. Once the project started, the engineering details were developed with great rapidity and with little waste motion." "That is true," said Hallam, with a touch of complacence. "People have tried to tell me that the credit was mine for vigorous and imaginative direction, but I wouldn't care to have you overstress that in your book. The fact is that we had an enormous fund of talent in the project, and I individual members to be dimmed by any exaggeration of my role." Lamont shook his head with a little annoyance. He found the remark irrelevant. He said, "I don't mean that at all. I mean the intelligence at the other end -- the para-men, to use the popular phrase. They started it. We discovered them after the first transfer of plutonium for tungsten -- but they discovered us first in order to make the transfer, working on pure theory and without the benefit of the kind of hint they gave us. And there's the iron foil they sent across -- " Hallam's smile had now disappeared -- and permanently. He was frowning as he said loudly, "The symbols were never understood. Nothing about them -- " "The geometric figures were understood, sir. I've looked into it, and it is quite clear that they were directing the geometry of the Pump. It seems to me that -- " Hallam's chair moved back with an angry scrape. He said, "Let's not have any of that, young man. We did the work, not they." "Yes -- but isn't it true that they -- " "That they what?" Lament became aware now of the storm of emotion he had raised, but he could not understand its cause. Uncertainly he said, "That they are more intelligent than we -- that they did the real work? Is there any doubt of that, sir?" Hallam, red-faced, had heaved himself to his feet. "There is every doubt," he shouted. "I will not have mysticism here. There is too much of that. See here, young man -- " he advanced on the still seated and thoroughly astonished Lamont and shook a thick finger at him -- "if your history is going to take the attitude that we were puppets in the hands of the para-men it will not be published from this institution -- or at all -- if I have my way. I will not have mankind and its intelligence downgraded and I won't have para-men cast in the role of gods." Lamont had no choice but to leave, a puzzled man, utterly upset at having created harsh feeling where he had wanted to sow only good will. And then he found that his historical sources were suddenly drying up. Those who had been loquacious enough a week earlier now remembered nothing and had no time for further interviews. Lamont was irritated at first. Then a slow anger began to build within him. He looked at what he had from a new viewpoint, and now he began to squeeze and insist where earlier he had merely asked. When he met Hallam at department functions Hallam frowned and looked through him, and Lamont began to look scornful in his turn. The net result was that Lamont found his prime career as paratheoretician beginning to abort and he turned more firmly than ever toward his history. # (continued) A had to be there, Mike, to see him go into panic at any suggestion that it was the other side that was the moving force. I look back on it and I wonder -- how was it possible to meet him, however casually, and not know he would react that way. Just be grateful you never had to work with him." "I am," said Bronowski, indifferently, "though there are times when you're no angel." "Don't complain. With your sort of work you have no problems." "Also no interest. Who cares about my sort of work except myself and five others in the world. Maybe six others -- if you remember." Lamont remembered. "Oh, well," he said. never fooled anyone who grew to know him even moderately well. He was sharp and he worried a problem until he had the solution or until he had it in such tatters that he knew no solution was possible. Consider the Etruscan inscriptions on which he had built his reputation. The tongue had been a living one until the first century A.D., but the cultural imperialism of the Romans had left nothing behind, so the language had vanished completely. What inscriptions survived the carnage of Roman hostility and -- worse, indifference -- had been written in Greek letters and could be pronounced, but nothing more. The language seemed to have no relationship to any of the surrounding ones, seemed archaic and not even IndoEuropean. Bronowski noted that another language existed that seemed to have no relationship to any of the surrounding languages, that seemed quite archaic and not even IndoEuropean -- but one very much alive and spoken in a region not far from where once the Etruscans had lived. What of the Basque language? Bronowski wondered. And he used Basque as his guide. So much for inspiration. The rest was hard work, for Basque, an extraordinarily difficult language in itself, was only the loosest of helps. Bronowski found more and more reason, as he went on, to suspect some cultural connection between the inhabitants of early northern Italy and early northern Spain. He could even make out a strong case for a broad Europe with a language of which Etruscan and Basque were dimly related survivors. In two thousand years, however, Basque had evolved and had become more than a little contaminated with Spanish. To try first to reason out its structure in Roman times and then relate it to Etruscan was an intellectual feat of surpassing difficulty and Bronowski utterly astonished the world's philologists when he triumphed. The Etruscan translations themselves were marvels of dullness and had no significance whatever. They were routine funerary inscriptions for the most part. The fact of the translation, however, was stunning and, as it turned out, it proved of the greatest importance to Lamont Not at first. To be perfectly truthful about the matter, the translations had been a fact for nearly five years before Lamont had as much as heard that there once were such people as the Etruscans. But then Bronowski came to the University to give one of the annual Fellowship Lectures and Lamont, who usually shirked the duty of attending that fell on the faculty members, did not shirk it this time. He heard the lecture, not because he recognized its importance or felt any interest in it whatever, but because he was dating a graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages and his choices were listening to Bronowski or going to a music festival he particularly wanted to avoid. The social connection was a feeble one, scarcely satisfactory from Lamont's point of view and only temporary, but it did get him to the talk. He rather enjoyed it, as it happened. The dim Etruscan civilization entered his consciousness for the first time as a matter of distant interest and the problem of solving an undeciphered language struck him as fascinating. When young, he had enjoyed solving cryptograms, but had put them away with other childish things in favor of the much grander cryptograms posed by nature, so that he ended in para-theory. Yet Bronowski's talk took him back to the youthful joys of making slow sense of what seemed a random collection of symbols, combined with sufficient difficulty to add great honor to the task. Bronowski was a cryptogrammatist on the grandest scale, and it was the description of the steady encroachment of reason upon the unknown that Lamont enjoyed. All would yet have gone for nothing -- the triple coincidence of Bronowski's appearance on campus, Lamont's youthful cryptogrammic enthusiasm, the social pressure of an attractive young lady -- were it not for the fact that Lamont saw Hallam the following day and placed himself firmly and, as he eventually found, permanently, in the doghouse. Within an hour of the conclusion of that interview, Lamont determined to see Bronowski. The issue at hand was the very one that had seemed so obvious to himself and that had so offended Hallam. Because it brought down censure on him, Lamont felt bound to strike back -- and in connection with the point of censure specifically. The para-men were more intelligent than man. Lamont had believed it before in a casual sort of way as something more obvious than vital. Now it had become vital. It must be proved and the fact of it forced down the throat of Hallam -- sideways, if possible, and with all the sharp corners exposed. Already Lamont found himself so far removed from his so-recent hero worship that he relished the prospect. campus. Lamont tracked him down and insisted on seeing him. Bronowski was blandly courteous when finally cornered. Lamont acknowledged the courtesies brusquely, introduced hirnself with clear impatience and said, "Dr. Bronowski, I'm delighted to have caught you before you left. I hope that I will persuade you to stay here even longer." Bronowski said, "That may not be hard. I have been offered a position on the University faculty." "And you will accept the position?" "I am considering it. I think I may." "You must. You will, when you hear what I have to say. Dr. Bronowski, what is there for you to do now that you've solved the Etruscan inscriptions?" "That is not my only task, young man." (He was five years older than Lamont.) "I'm an archeologist and there is more to Etruscan culture than its inscriptions and more to pre-classical Italic culture than the Etruscans." "But surely nothing as exciting for you -- and as challenging -- as the Etruscan inscriptions?" "I grant you that." "So you would welcome something even more exciting, even more challenging -- and something those inscriptions." "What have you in mind. Dr. -- Lamont?" "We have inscriptions that are not part of a dead culture or part of anything on Earth -- or part of anything in the Universe. We have something called para-symbols." "I've heard of them. For that matter, I've seen them." "Surely, then, you have had the urge to tackle the problem. Dr. Bronowski? You have had the desire to work out what they say?" "No desire at all. Dr. Lamont, because there's no problem." Lamont stared at him suspiciously, "You mean you can read them?" Bronowski shook his head. "You mistake me. I mean I can't possibly read them, nor can anyone else. There's no base. In the case of Earthly languages, however dead, there is always the chance of finding a living language -- or a dead language already deciphered -- that bears some relationship to it, however faint. Failing that, there is at least the fact that any Earthly language was written by human beings with human ways of thought. That makes a starting point, however feeble. None of this is the case with the parasymbols -- so that they constitute a problem that clearly has no solution. An insolubility is not a problem." Lamont had kept himself from interrupting only with difficulty. Now he burst out with: "You are wrong, Dr. Bronowski. I don't want to seem to be teaching you your profession but you don't know some of the facts that my own profession has uncovered. We are dealing with para-men concerning whom we know hardly anything. We don't know what they are like, how they think, what kind of world they live on -- we have data on almost nothing, however basic and fundamental. So far you are right." "Blit it's only almost nothing that you know, is that it?" Bronowski did not seem impressed. He took a package of dried figs from his pocket, opened it and began to eat. He profferred it to Lamont, who shook his head. Lamont said, "Right. We do know one thing of crucial importance. They are more intelligent than we are. Item one: they can make the exchange across the inter-Universe gap, while we can play only a passive role." He interrupted himself here to ask, "Do you know anything about the Inter-Universe Electron Pump?" "A little," said Bronowski. "Enough to follow you. Doctor, if you don't get technical." Lamont hastened on. "Item two: They sent us instructions as to how to set up our part of the pump. We couldn't understand the device but we could make out the diagrams sufficiently well to give us the necessary hints. Item Three: They can somehow sense us. At least they can become aware of our leaving tungsten for them to pick up, for instance. They know where it is and can act upon it. We can do nothing comparable. There are other points but these are enough to show the para-men to be clearly more intelligent than we are." Bronowski said, "I imagine, though, that you are in the minority here. Surely your colleagues don't accept this." "They don't. But what makes you come to that conclusion?" "Because you're clearly wrong, it seems to me." "My facts are correct. And since they are, how can I be wrong?" "You are merely proving that the technology of the para-men is more advanced than ours. What has technology to do with intelligence? See here -- " B ronowski rose to take off his jacket and then sat down in a half-reclining position, the soft rotundity of his body seeming to relax and crease in great comfort as though physical ease helped him think. "About two and a half centuries ago the American naval commander, Matthew Perry, led a flotilla into Tokyo harbor. The Japanese, until then isolated, found themselves faced with a technology considerably beyond their own and decided it was unwise to risk resistance. An entire warlike the face of a few ships from across the sea. Did that prove that Americans were more intelligent than the Japanese -- or merely that Western culture had taken a different turning? Clearly the latter, for within half a century the Japanese had successfully imitated Western technology and within another half-century they were a major industrial power despite the fact that they were disastrously beaten in one of the wars of the time." Lamont listened gravely and said, "I've thought of your point, too. Dr. Bronowski, though I didn't know about the Japanese -- I wish I had the time to read history. Yet the analogy is wrong. The para-men's is more than technical superiority -- it's a matter of difference in degree of intelligence." "How can you tell, aside from guessing?" "Because of the mere fact that they sent us directions. They were eager for us to set up our part of the Pump -- they had to have us do it. They could not physically cross over -- " He paused for breath, feeling himself to be too excited, too eager. He mustn't oversell his case. Bronowski regarded him curiously. "All right, they sent us messages. What are you trying to deduce from that?" "That they expected us to understand. Could they be such fools as to send us rather intricate messages, in some cases quite lengthy, if they knew we would not understand? Except for their diagrams we would have ended nowhere. Now if they expected us to understand, it could only be because they felt that any creatures like ourselves with a technology roughly as advanced as their own (and they must have been able to estimate that somehow -- another point in favor of my belief) must also be roughly as intelligent as they are and would experience little difficulty in working out something from their symbols." "They might also be reasoning from naivete," said Bronowski, unimpressed. "You mean they think there is only one language, spoken and written -- and that another intelligence in another Universe speaks and writes as they do? Come on!" Bronowski said, "Even if I were to grant your point, what do you want me to do? I've looked at the para-symbols -- I suppose every archeologist and philologist on Earth has. I don't see what I can do and neither. I'm sure, does anyone else. No progress has been made in over twenty years." Lamont said intensely, "What's true is that in twenty years there has been no desire for progress. The Pump Authority does not want to solve the symbols." "Why shouldn't it want to?" "Because of the annoying possibility that communication with the para-men will demonstrate them to be distinctly more intelligent than we are. Because human beings might be shown to be the puppet-partners in connecttion with the Pump to the hurt of their ego. And, specifically -- " Lament strove to keep venom out of his voice -- "because Hallam would lose the credit of being the Father of the Electron Pump." "Suppose the Authority did want to make progress. What could be done? The will is not the deed, you know." "It could get the para-men to cooperate. It could send messages to the para-Universe. This has never been done, but such attempts would be feasible. A message on metal foil might be placed under a pellet of tungsten." "Oh? Are they still looking for other tungsten, even with the Pumps in operation?" "No." Lamont frowned. With the Pumps in full operation enough energy was apparently being delivered in the para-Universe to meet all requirements. Then he shrugged. "No -- but I think we can assume that they're curious. If we borrow one of the small experimental Pump field generators and put a pellet of tungsten in that with a message -- it should attract their attention. If they take the message and make any sense of it, even the slightest, they'll send back one of their own. They might set up an equivalence table of their words and ours or they might use a mixture of their words and ours. It will be a kind of alternate push, first their side, then ours, then theirs again -- and so on." "With their side," said Bronowski, "doing most of the work." "Yes." Bronowski shook his head. "No fun in that, is there? It doesn't appeal to me." Lamont flared, "Not enough in it for you? What did you get out of the Etruscan inscriptions, damn it? You beat out five others in the world. Maybe six. With them you're a success and they hate you. What else? You go about lecturing on the subject before audiences amounting to a few dozen and they forget your name the day after. Is that what you're really after?" "Don't be dramatic." "All right. I won't be. I'll get someone else. It may take longer but, as you say, the para-men will do most of the work anyway. If necessary. I'll do it myself." "Have you been assigned this project?" "No, I haven't. What of it? Or is that another reason you don't want to get involved? Disciplinary problems? There is no law against attempting translation and I can always place tungsten on my desk. I will not choose to report any messages I get in place of the tungsten and to that extent I will be breaking the research code. Once the translation is made, who will complain? Would you work with me if I guaranteed your safety and kept your part in it secret. You would lose your fame but you may value your security more. Oh, well -- " Lamont shrugged. "If I do it myself I'll have the advantage of not having to worry about someone else's security." He rose to go. Both men were angry and bore themselves with that stiff-legged courtesy one assumes when addressing someone who is hostile but still mannerly. "I presume," said Lamont, "you will at least treat this conversation as confidential." Bronowski was on his feet, too. "Of that you may be assured," he said coldly and the two shook hands briefly. # from Bronowski again. He even began the process of talking himself into believing it would be better for him to handle the translation effort on his own. Two days later, however, Bronowski was at Lamont's laboratory. He said rather brusquely, "I'm leaving the city now, but I'll be back in September. I'm taking the position here and, if you're still interested. I'll see what I can do about the translation problem you mentioned." Lamont had barely time for a surprised expression of thanks before Bronowski stalked off, apparently angrier at having given in than at having resisted. They became friends in time -- and in time Lamont learned what had brought Bronowski around. The day after their discussion, Bronowski had had lunch at the Faculty Club with a group of the higher officials of the University, including, of course, the president. Bronowski had announced that he would accept the position and send in a formal letter to that effect in due time and all had expressed gratification. The president had said, "It will be quite a feather in our cap to have the renowned translator of the Itascan Inscriptions here at the University. We are honored." The malapropism had gone uncorrected, of course, and Bronowski's smile, though strained, did not actually waver. Afterward the head of the Department of Ancient History explained the president to be more of a Minnesotan than a Classical scholar and since Lake Itasca was the point of origin of the mighty Mississippi, the slip of the tongue had been a natural one. But in combination with Lamont's sneer at the extent of his fame Bronowski found the expression rankling. When Lamont finally heard the story he was amused. "Don't go on," he said. "I've been down that road, too. You said to yourself, 'By God, I'll do something even that knot-head will have to get straight.' " "A little like that," said Bronowski... netted them very little. Messages had finally gone across to the para-men -- messages had come back. Nothing of consequence had been revealed. "Just make a guess!" Lamont had said feverishly to Bronowski. "Any wild guess at all. Try it out on them." "It's exactly what I'm doing, Pete. What are you so jumpy about? I spent twelve years on the Etruscan Inscriptions. Do you expect this job to take any less time?" "Good God, Mike. We can't take twelve years." "Why not? Look, Pete, it hasn't escaped me that there's been a change in your attitude. You've been impossible this last month or so. I thought we had it clear at the start that this work can't go quickly and that we've got to be patient. I thought you understood that I had my regular duties at the University, too. Look, I've asked you this a number of times now. Let me ask again. Why are you in such a hurry?" "Because I'm in a hurry," said Lamont abruptly. "Because I want to get on with it." "Congratulations," said Bronowski dryly. "So do I. Listen, you're not expecting an early death, are you? Your doctor hasn't told you you're hiding a fatal cancer?" "No, no," groaned Lamont. "Well, then?" "Never mind," said Lamont. He walked away hurriedly. When he had first tried to get Bronowski to join forces with him. Lament's grievance had concerned only Hallam's mean-minded obstinacy concerning the suggestion that the para-men were the more intelligent. It was in that respect and that respect only that Lamont had been striving for a breakthrough. He had intended nothing beyond that -- at first. But in the course of the following months he had been subjected to endless exasperation. His requests for equipment, for technical assistance, for computer time were delayed. His request for travel funds was snubbed. His views at interdepartmental meetings were invariably overlooked. The breaking point came when Henry Garrison, junior to himself in point of service and definitely so in point of ability, received an advisory appointment, rich in prestige, that by all rights should have gone to Lamont. It was then that Lamont's resentment built up to the point where merely proving himself right was no longer sufficient. He yearned to smash Hallam, destroy him utterly. The feeling was reinforced every day, every hour, by the unmistakable attitude of everyone else at the Pump Station. Lamont's abrasive personality did not collect sympathy, but some gave it to him nevertheless. G arrison himself was embarrassed. He was a quietspoken, amiable young man who clearly wanted no trouble and who now stood in the doorway of Lamont's lab with an expression that had more than a small component of apprehension in it. He said, "Hey, Pete, can I have a few words with you?" "As many as you like," said Lamont, frowning and avoiding a direct eye-to-eye glance. Garrison came in and sat down. "Pete," he said, 'I can't turn down the appointment but I want you to know I didn't push for it. It came as a surprise." "Who's asking you to turn it down? I don't give a damn." "Pete. It's Hallam. If I turned it down it would go to someone else, not you. What have you done to the old man?" Lamont rounded on the other. "What do you think of Hallam? What kind of man is he, in your opinion?" Garrison was caught by surprise. He pursed his lips and rubbed his nose. "Well -- " He let the sound fade off. Inspiring leader?" "Well -- " "Let me tell you. The man's a phony. He's a fraud. He's got this reputation and this position of his and he's sitting there in a panic. He knows that I see through him and that's what he has against me." Garrison gave a small, uneasy laugh, "You haven't gone up to him and said -- " "No, I haven't said anything directly to him," said Lamont morosely. "Some day I will. And he can tell. He knows I'm one person he isn't fooling even if I don't say anything." "But Pete, where's the point in letting him know it? I don't say I think he's the world's greatest either, but where's the sense in broadcasting it? Butter him up a little. He's got your career in his hands." "Has he? I've got his reputation in mine. I'm going to show him up. I'm going to strip him." "How?" "That's my business," muttered Lamont, who at the moment had not the slightest idea of how. "But that's ridiculous," said Garrison. "You can't win. He'll just destroy you. Even if he isn't an Einstein or an Oppenheimer, he's more than either to the world in general. He is the Father of the Electron Pump to Earth's twocan possibly do will affect them as long as the Electron Pump is the key to human paradise. While that's so Hallam can't be touched and you're crazy if you think he can. What the hell, Pete? Tell him he's great and eat crow. Don't be another Denison!" "I tell you what, Henry," said Lamont in sudden fury. "Why not mind your own business?" Garrison rose suddenly and left without a word. Lamont had made another enemy -- or at least lost another friend. The price, however, was right, he finally decided, for one remark of Garrison's had set the ball rolling in another direction. Garrison had said,... as long as the Electron Pump is the key to human paradise... Hallam can't be touched... With that clanging in his mind Lamont, for the first time, turned his attention away from Hallam and placed it on the Electron Pump. Was the Electron Pump the key to human paradise? Or was there, by heaven, a catch? Every blessing in human history had had a catch. What was the catch to the Electron Pump? The Pump supplied unlimited amounts of almost free power, with no chemical or radioactive wastes. It had made possible the cleaning of pollution from the air and the water and the realization of most of mankind's dreams that had once been economically unfeasible. Now it promised apparently unending prosperity. course, it was not an Electron Pump. It did not Pump electrons, but rather a continuous stream of tungsten# atoms in exchange for the equivalent plutonium#. But since the net effect was to transfer electrons from the Universe to the para-Universe, even most scientists tended to overlook the intermediate steps. Lamont knew enough of the history of para-theory to know that the matter of "a catch" had not gone unexplored. When it was first announced that the basic overall effect of the Electron Pump was the Pumping of electrons from the Universe to the para-Universe, there had not been wanting those who asked immediately, "But what will happen when all the electrons have been Pumped?" This was easily answered. At the largest reasonable rate of Pumping the electron supply would last for years -- and the entire Universe, together, presumably, with the para-Universe, would not last a tiny fraction of that time. The next objection seemed more sophisticated. All right, there was no possibility of Pumping away all the electrons. But as they were Pumped the para-Universe would gain a net negative charge to repel others being Pumped, while the Universe would gain a net positive charge to hold the electrons more firmly here. What happened when it took more energy to operate the Pump than could be produced by it? The para-theorists should have disposed of that quickly. The atoms actually being pumped had a balance of charges to make them neutral. Neutral substances should not be affected by the charge of the Universe. But it seemed there was a Law of Conservation of the Cussedness of Things. It had already been discovered that the Pump would not work to transfer any substance that was ionized. The increase of a positive charge in the Universe, it was realized, would ionize the neutral atoms by stripping away some of the loosely held orbital electrons around them. Careful mathematical analysis indicated that the effort of Pumping would increase at precisely the same rate as if it had been electrons that were Pumped. Apparently it did not matter whether the process was considered incorrectly as Pumping electrons or treated with full scientific rigor. The results were the same. With each year, as the difference in charge grew, it would become more difficult to Pump further atoms (or electrons) against the force of the resisting charge-difference. If the charge concentration remained at the points of Pumping, the effect would stop almost at once but, of course, it didn't. The concentration diffused outward over the Earth and the effect had been calculated with that in mind. The increased positive charge of the Earth generally forced the positively charged solar wind to avoid the planet at a greater distance and the magnetosphere was enlarged. Thanks to the work of McFarland (the real originator of the Great Insight according to Lamont) it could be shown that a definite equilibrium point was reached as the solar wind swept away more and more of the accumulating positive particles that were repelled from Earth's surface and driven higher into the exosphere. With each increase in Pumping intensity -- with each additional Pumping Station constructed -- the net positive charge on Earth increased slightly and the magnetosphere expanded by a few miles. The change, however, was minor and the positive charge was, in the end, swept away by the solar wind and spread through the outer reaches of the solar system. Even so -- even allowing for the most rapid possible diffusion of the charge, the time would still come when the local chargedifference between Universe and para-Universe at the points of Pumping would grow large enough to end the process. That would be a small fraction of the time it # would take really to use up all But that still meant that Pumping would remain possible for a years, but that was enough -- it far longer than man or the solar system would last. And if man somehow did last that long (or some creature that was man's successor and supplanter) then no doubt something would be devised to correct the situation. A great years. Lamont had to agree to that. B ut then he remembered something else, a line of thought Hallam himself had dealt with in one of the articles he had written for popular consumption. With some' distaste, he dug out the article. It was important to see what Hallam had said, before he carried the matter further. The article said in part: Because of the ever-present gravitational force, we have come to associate the expression 'downhill' with the kind of inevitable change we can use to produce energy we can convert into useful work. It is the water running downhill that, in past centuries, turned wheels that in turn powered machinery such as pumps and generators. But what happens when all the water has run downhill? No further work can then be possible until the water has been returned uphill -- and that takes work. In fact, it takes more work to force the water uphill than we can collect by allowing it to flow downhill. We work at an energy loss. Fortunately the sun does the work for us. It evaporates the oceans so that water vapor climbs high in the atmosphere, forms clouds and eventually falls again as rain or snow. This soaks the ground at all levels, fills the springs and streams and keeps the water forever running downhill. But not quite forever. The sun can raise the water vapor, but only because, in a nuclear sense, it is running downhill, too. It is running downhill at a rate immensely greater than any Earthly river can manage -- and when all of it has run downhill there will be nothing we know of to pull it uphill again. All sources of energy in our Universe run down. We cannot help that. Everything is downhill in just one direction and we can force a temporary uphill course only by taking advantage of some greater downhill in the vicinity. If we want useful energy forever we need a road that goes downhill both ways. That is a paradox in our Universe -- it stands to reason that whatever is downhill one way is uphill going back. But need we confine ourselves to our Universe alone? Think of the para-Universe. It has roads, too, that are downhill in one direction and uphill in the other. Those roads, however, don't fit in with our roads. It is possible to take a road from the paraUniverse to our Universe that runs downhill and which, when we follow it back from the Universe to the para-Universe runs downhill again -- because the two Universes have different laws of behavior. The Electron Pump takes advantage of a road that is downhill both ways. The Electron Pump... Lamont looked at the title of the piece again. It was: The Road That Runs Downhill Both JVays. He began to think. The concept was, of course, a familiar one to him, as were its thermodynamic consequences. But why not examine the assumptions? That had to be the weak point in any theory. What if the assumptions, assumed to be right by definition, were wrong? What would be the consequences if one started with other assumptions? Contradictory ones? He started blindly but within a month he had that feeling that every scientist recognizes -- the endless clicking of unexpected pieces of the puzzle falling into place as annoying anomalies become anomalous no more. It was the feel of Truth. From that moment on he began to put additional pressure on Bronowski. And one day he said, "I'm going to see Hallam again." Bronowski's eyebrows lifted. "What for?" "To have him turn me down." "Yes, that's about your speed, Pete. You're unhappy if your troubles die down a bit." "You don't understand. It's important to have him refuse to listen to me. I can't have it said afterward that I bypassed him -- that he was ignorant of what I was doing." "That would make him ignorant of what? Of the translation of the para-symbols? We don't have a translation as yet. Don't jump the gun, Pete." "No, no, not that." And Lamont would say no more. H allam did not make it easy for Lamont. Some weeks passed before he could find time to see the younger man. Nor did Lamont intend to make it easy for Hallam. He stalked in with every invisible bristle on edge and sharply pointed. Hallam waited for him frozen-faced, with sullen eyes. Hallam asked abruptly, "What's this crisis you're talking about?" "Something's turned up, sir," said Lamont tonelessly, "inspired by one of your articles." "Oh?" Then, quickly: "Which one?" "The Road That Runs Downhill Both Ways. The one you programed for Teenage Life, sir." "And what about it?" "I believe the Electron Pump is not downhill both ways, if I may use your metaphor which is not, as it happens, a completely accurate way of describing the Second Law of Thermodynamics." Hallam frowned. "What have you got in mind?" "I can explain it best, sir, by setting up the Field Equations for the two Universes, sir, and demonstrating an interaction that until now has not been considered -- unfortunately so, in my opinion." With that Lamont moved directly to the thixo-board and quickly fingered the equations, talking rapidly as he did so. Lamont knew that Hallam would be humiliated and irritated by such a procedure since he would not follow the mathematics. Lamont counted on that. Hallam growled, "See here, young man, I have no time now to engage in a full discussion of any aspect of para-theory. You send me a complete report and, for now, if you have some brief statement as to what you're getting at, you may make it." Lamont walked away from the thixo-board, an unmistakable expression of contempt on his face. He said, "All right. The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes a process that inevitably chops off extremes. Water doesn't run downhill -- what really happens is that extremes of gravitational potential are equalized. Water will just as easily bubble uphill if trapped underground. You can get work out of the juxtaposition of two different temperature levels, but the end result is that the temperature is equalized at an intermediate level -- the hot body cools down and the cold body warms up. Both cooling and warming are equal aspects of Second Law and, under, the proper circumstances, equally spontaneous." "Don't teach me elementary thermodynamics, young man. What is it you want? I have very little time." Lamont said, with no change of expression, no sense of being hurried. "Work is obtained out of the Electron Pump by an equalization of extremes. In this case the extremes are the physical laws of the two Universes. The conditions that make those laws possible, whatever those conditions may be, are being bled from one Universe into the other and the end result of the entire process will be two Universes in which the laws of nature will be identical -- and intermediate as compared with the situation now. Since this will produce uncertain but undoubtedly large changes in this Universe, it would seem that serious consideration must be given to stopping the Pumps and shutting down the whole operation permanently." It was at this point that Lamont expected Hallam to explode and cut off any chance of further explanation. Hallam did not fail that expectation. He sprang out of his chair, which fell over. He kicked the chair away and took the two steps that separated him from Lamont. Lamont warily pushed back his own chair and stood up. "You idiot!" shouted Hallam. "Don't you suppose everyone at the station understands about the equalization of natural law? Are you wasting my time telling me something I knew when you were learning to read? Get out of here -- and any time you want to offer me your resignation, consider it accepted." Lamont left, having obtained exactly what he wanted. And yet he felt himself to be furious over Hallam's treatment of him. # (concluded) to tell him. He wouldn't listen. So I take the next step." "And what is that?" said Bronowski. "I'm going to see Senator Burt." "You mean the head of the Committee on Technology and the Environment?" "The same. You've heard of him?" "Who hasn't? But where's the point, Pete? What have you got that would interest him? It's not the translation. Pete, I'm asking you once again: what have you got on your mind?" "I can't explain. You don't know para-theory." "Does Senator Burt?" "More than you, I think." Bronowski pointed his finger. "Pete, let's not kid around. Maybe I know things you don't. We can't work together if we work against each other. Either I'm a member of this little two-man corporation or I'm not. You tell me what's on your mind and I'll tell you something in exchange. Otherwise, let's stop this altogether." Lamont shrugged. "All right. If you want it I'll give it to you. Now that I've got it past Hallam, maybe it's just as well. The point is that the Electron Pump is transferring natural law. In the para-Universe the strong interaction is a hundred times what it is here -- which means that nuclear fission is much more likely here than there and nuclear fusion is much more likely there than here. If the Electron Pump keeps on long enough, there will be a final equilibrium in which the strong nuclear interaction will be equal in both Universes. That would make it about ten times what it is here now and one-tenth what it is there now." "Didn't anyone know this?" "Oh, sure, everyone knew it. It was obvious almost from the start. Even Hallam can see it. That's what got the bastard so excited. I started telling him this in detail, as though I didn't think he had ever heard it before and he blew up." "But what's the point, then? Is there danger in the interaction's becoming intermediate?" "Of course. What do you think?" "I don't think anything. When will it become intermediate?" "At the present rate, #" years or so." "How long is that?" born, live, grow old and die, one after the other." "Oh, blazes, Pete. What odds does it make then?" "Because to reach that figure," said Lamont slowly and carefully, "which is the official one, certain assumptions were made that I think were wrong. And if certain other assumptions are made -- which I think are right -- we're in trouble now." "What kind of trouble?" "Suppose the Earth turned into a whiff of gas in a period of about five minutes. Would you consider that trouble?" "Because of the Pumping?" "Because of the Pumping." "And how about the world of the para-men? Would they be in danger, too?" "I'm sure of it. A different danger, but danger." Bronowski stood up and began pacing. He wore his brown hair thick and long in what had once been called a Buster Brown. Now he was clutching at it. He said, "If the para-men are more intelligent than we are, would they be running the Pump? Surely they would know it was dangerous before we did." "I've thought of that," said Lamont. "What I guess is that they've started Pumping for the first time and they, like us, got the process started for the apparent good it would bring and worried about consequences later." "But you say you know the consequences now. Would they be slower than you were?" "It depends on if and when they look for those consequences. The Pump is too attractive to try to spoil. I wouldn't have looked myself if I hadn't -- But what's on 'or mind, Mike?" Bronowski stopped his pacing, looked fully at Lamont and said, "I think we've got something." Lamont stared at him wildly, then leaped forward to seize the other's sleeve. "With the para-symbols? Tell me, Mike!" "It happened while you were with Hallam. While you were actually with Hallam. I haven't known exactly what to do about it, because I wasn't sure what was going on. And now -- " "And now?" "I'm still not sure. One of their foils came through -- with four symbols." "Oh?" "In the Latin alphabet. And it can be pronounced." "What?" Bronowski produced the foil with the air of a conjurer. Incised on it, quite different from the delicate and intricate spirals and differential glistenings of the para-symbols, were four broad, childlike letters: F-E-E-R. "What do you suppose that means?" asked Lamont, blankly. "So far all I've been able to think of is that it's F-E-A-R misspelled." "Is that why you were cross-examining me? You thought someone on the other side was experiencing fear?" "And I thought it might have some connection with your own obviously increasing excitement over the last month. Frankly, Pete, I didn't like being kept in the dark." "Okay. Now let's not jump to conclusions. You're the one with experience with fragmentary messages. Wouldn't you say that the para-men were beginning to experience fear concerning the Electron Pump?" "Not necessarily," said Bronowski. "I don't know how much they can sense of this Universe. If they can sense the tungsten we lay out for them -- if they can sense our presence -- perhaps they are sensing our state of mind. Perhaps they are trying to reassure us, tell us there is no reason to fear." "Then why don't they say N-O F-E-E-R?" "Because they may not know our language that well." "Hmm. Then I can't take it to Burt." "I wouldn't. It's ambiguous. In fact, I wouldn't go to Burt until we get something more from the other side. Who knows what they're trying to say?" "No, I can't wait, Mike. I know I'm right and we have no time." "All right, but if you see Burt you'll be burning your bridges. Your colleagues will never forgive you. Have you thought of talking to the physicists here? You can't put pressure on Hallam on your own, but a whole group of you Lamont shook his head vigorously. "Not a chance. The men at this station survive by virtue of their jellyfish quality. There isn't one who would stand against him. Trying to rally the others to put pressure on Hallam would be like asking strands of cooked spaghetti to come to attention." Bronowski's soft face looked unwontedly grim. "You may be right." "I know I'm right," said Lamont just as grimly. Senator down, time that Lamont had resented losing -- the more so since nothing further in Latin letters had come from the para-men. No message of any kind, though Bronowski had sent across half a dozen, each with a carefully selected combination of parasymbols and each incorporating both F-E-E-R and F-E-A-R. Lamont was unsure of the significance of the half-dozen variations but Bronowski had seemed hopeful. Yet nothing had happened and now Lamont was at last in to see Burt. The Senator was thin-faced, sharp-eyed and elderly. He had been the head of the Committee on Technology and Environment for a generation. He took his job seriously. He fiddled now with the oldfashioned necktie that he affected (and that had become his trademark) and said, "I can only give you a half-hour, son." He looked at his wristwatch. Lamont was not worried. He expected to interest Senator Burt enough to make him forget about time limits. He made no attempt to begin at the beginning -- Burt had been briefed about the subject matter of the meeting in general. He said, "I won't bother you with the mathematics. Senator, but I will assume you realize that through Pumping the natural laws of the two Universes are being mixed." "Stirred together," said the Senator calmly, "with equilibrium coming in about #'" years. Is that the figure?" His eyebrows in repose arched up and then down, giving his lined face a permanent air of surprise. "It is," said Lamont, "but it is arrived at by assuming that the alien laws seeping into our Universe and theirs spread outward from the point of entry at the speed of light. That is just an assumption and I believe it to be wrong." "Why?" "The only measured rate of mixing is within the plutonium-# sent into this Universe. That rate is extremely slow at first -- presumably because matter is dense -- and increases with time. If the plutonium is mixed with less dense matter, the rate increases more rapidly. From a few measurements of this sort it has been calculated that the permeation rate would increase to the speed of light in a vacuum. It would take some time for the alien laws to work their way into the atmosphere, far less time to work their way to the top of the atmosphere and then off through space in every direction at # kilometers per second, thinning into harmlessness in no time." Lamont paused for a moment to consider how best to go on and the Senator picked it up at once. "However -- " he urged in the waste time. "It's a convenient assumption that seems to make sense and seems to make no trouble -- but what if it is not matter that offers resistance to the permeation of the alien laws, but the basic fabric of the Universe itself?" "What is the basic fabric?" "I can't put it into words. There is a mathematical expression that I think represents it, but we don't have the words. The basic fabric of the Universe is that which dictates the laws of nature. It is the basic fabric of our Universe that makes it necessary for energy to be conserved. It is the basic fabric of the para-Universe, with a weave, so to speak, somewhat different from ours, that makes their nuclear interaction a hundred times stronger than ours." "And so?" "If it is the basic fabric that is being penetrated, sir, then the presence of matter, dense or not, can have only a secondary influence. The rate of penetration is greater in a vacuum than in dense mass, but not very much greater. The rate of penetration in outer space may be great in Earthly terms but it is only a small fraction of the speed of light." "Which means?" "That the alien fabric is not dissipating as quickly as we think, but is piling up, so to speak, within the solar system to a much greater concentration than we have been assuming." "I see," said the Senator, nodding. "And how long will it be by your estimate, before the space within the solar system is brought to equilibrium? Less than #" years? "Far less, sir. Less than #'" years, give or take a couple of "Not much in comparison, but enough, eh? No immediate cause for alarm, eh?" "But I'm afraid there is immediate cause for alarm, sir. Damage will be done long before equilibrium is reached. Because of the Pumping, the strong nuclear interaction is growing steadily stronger in our Universe at every moment." "Enough stronger to measure?" "Perhaps not, sir." "Not even after twenty years of Pumping?" "Perhaps not, sir." "Then why worry?" "Because, sir, upon the strength of the strong nuclear interaction rests the rate at which hydrogen fuses to helium in the core of the sun. If the interaction strengthens even unnoticeably, the rate of hydrogen fusion in the sun will increase markedly. The sun maintains the balance between radiation and gravitation with great delicacy and to upset that balance in favor of radiation, as we are now doing -- " "Yes?" "Will cause an enormous explosion. Under our laws of nature it is impossible for a star as small as the sun to become a supernova. Under the altered laws it may not be. I doubt that we would have warning. The sun could build up to a vast explosion and in eight minutes after that you and I will be dead and the Earth will quickly vaporize into an expanding puff of gas." "And nothing can be done?" "If it is too late to avoid upsetting the equilibrium -- nothing. If it is not yet too late, then we must stop Pumping." T he Senator cleared his throat. "Before I agreed to see you, young man, I inquired as to your background since you were not personally known to me. Among those I queried was Dr. Hallam. You know him, I suppose?" "Yes, sir." A corner of Lamont's mouth twitched but his voice held even. "I know him well." "He told me," said the Senator, glancing at a paper on his desk, "that you are a trouble-making idiot of doubtful sanity and he demanded that I refuse to see you." Lamont said in a voice he strove to keep calm. "Are those his words, sir?" "His exact words." "Then why have you agreed to see me, sir?" "Ordinarily, if I received something like this from Hallam I wouldn't have seen you. My time is valuable and heaven knows I see more trouble-making idiots of doubtful sanity than bears thinking of, even among those who come to me with the highest recommendations. In this one case, though, I didn't like Hallam's 'demand.' You don't make demands of a Senator, and Hallam had better learn that." "Then you will help me, sir?" "Help you do what?" "Why -- arrange to have the Pumping halted." "That? Not at all. Quite impossible." "Why?" demanded Lamont. "You are the head of the Committee on Technology and Environment and it is precisely your task to stop the Pumping -- or any technological procedure that threatens irreversible harm to the environment. There can be no greater, no more irreversible harm than is threatened by Pumping." "Certainly. Certainly -- if you are right. But it seems that what your story amounts to is that your assumptions are different from the accepted ones. Who's to say which set of assumptions is right?" "Sir, the structure I have built explains several things that are left doubtful in the accepted view." "Well, then, your colleagues ought to accept your modification and in that case you would scarcely have to come to me, I imagine." "Sir, my colleagues will not believe. Their self-interest stands in the way." "As your self-interest stands in the way of your believing you might be wrong. Young man, my powers, on paper, are enormous -- but I can only succeed when the public is a lesson in practical politics." He looked again at his wristwatch, leaned back and smiled. His offer was not characteristic of him, but an editorial in the Terrestrial Post that morning had referred to him as "a consummate politician, the most skilled in the International Congress" and the glow that the description had aroused in him still lingered. "It is a mistake," he said, "to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is comfort. We learned that lesson during the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. When it became known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer the obvious remedy was to stop smoking -- but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not encourage cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines -- and the desired remedy was to develop nonpolluting engines. "Now then, young man, don't ask me to stop the Pumping. The economy and comfort of the entire planet depend on it. Tell me instead how to keep the Pumping from exploding the sun." j Senator. We are dealing with something so basic that we can't play with it. We must stop it." "Ah, and you can suggest only that we go back to matters as they were before Pumping." "We must." "In that case you will need hard and fast proof that you are right." "The best proof," said Lamont stiffly, "is to let the sun explode." "Why can't you get Hallam to back you up?" "Because he is a small man who finds himself the Father of the Electron Pump. How can he admit his child will destroy the Earth?" "I see what you mean, but he is still the Father of the Electron Pump to the whole world and only his word would carry sufficient weight in this respect." Lamont shook his head. "He would never give in. He would rather see the sun blow up." The Senator said, "Then force his hand. You have a theory but a theory by itself is meaningless. Surely there must be some way of checking it. The rate of radioactive breakdown of, say, uranium depends on the interactions within the nucleus. Has that rate been changing in a fashion predicted by your theory but not the standard one?" Again Lamont shook his head. "Ordinary radioactivity depends on the weak nuclear interaction and unfortunately experiments of that sort will yield only borderline evidence. By the time it showed sufficiently to be unmistakable, it would be too late." "What else, then?" "There are pion interactions of a specific sort that might yield unmistakable data now. Better still. there are quark-quark combinations that have produced puzzling results recently that I am sure I can explain -- " "Well, there you are." "Yes, but in order to obtain that data, I must make use of the large proton synchrotron on the moon, sir, and no time on that will be available for years -- I've checked -- unless someone pulls the strings." "Meaning me?" "Meaning you. Senator." "Not as long as Dr. Hallam says this about you, son." Senator Burt's gnarled finger tapped the piece of paper in front of him. "I can't get out on that limb." "But the existence of the world -- " '"Prove it." "Override Hallam and I'll prove it." "Prove it and I'll override Hallam." Lament drew a deep breath, "Senator! Suppose there's just a trifling chance I'm right. Isn't even that trifling chance worth being tested out? The results could mean everything for all mankind, the entire planet -- " "You want me to fight the good fight. I'd like to. There's a certain drama in going down in a good cause. Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing. But, Dr. Lamont, to do that one has to have a fighting chance. One has to have something to fight for that may -- just may -- win out. If I back you on what you've shown so far I'll accomplish nothing. It's your word alone against the infinite desirability of Pumping. Shall I demand that every man give up the personal comfort and affluence he has learned to get used to, thanks to the Pump, just because one man cries doom while all the other scientists stand against him and the revered Hallam calls him an idiot? No, sir. I will not go down in flames for nothing." Lamont said, "Then just help me find my proof. You needn't appear in the open if you fear -- " "I'm not afraid," said Burt abruptly. "I'm being practical. Dr. Lamont, your half-hour is rather more than gone." Lamont stared in frustration. Burt's expression was clearly intransigent now. Lamont left. Senator Burt did not see his next visitor immediately. Minutes passed while he stared uneasily at the closed door and fiddled with his tie. Could the man have been right? Could he have had the smallest chance of being right? He had to admit it would be a pleasure to trip Hallam and push his face into the mud and sit on him until he choked -- but it would not happen. Hallam was untouchable. Burt had had only one set-to with Hallam nearly ten years ago. He had been right, dead right, and Hallam had been egregiously wrong and events had since proved it. Yet at the time Burt had been humiliated and had almost lost reelection as a result. Burt shook his head in admonition to himself. He might risk reelection in a good cause, but he could not risk humiliation again. He signaled for the next visitor and his face was calm and bland as he rose to greet him. B y this time, Lamont's theories had begun to sink into his own awareness. Earth -- his whole Universe, in fact -- spun on the brink of becoming Man's broken toy and nobody would listen. He was sure of his stance and it was this, far more than the desire to show up Hallam, that drove him to see Joshua Chen. Chen was universally unpopular and anyone who dealt with him was in bad odor at once in almost every corner of the Establishment. Chen was a one-man revolutionary whose single voice could somehow always be heard because he brought to his causes an intensity that was utterly overpowering -- and because he had built an organization that was more tightly knit than any ordinary political team in the world (as more than one politician was ready to swear). Chen had been one of the important factors accounting for the speed with which the Pump had taken over the planet's energy needs. The Pump's virtues were clear and obvious, as clear as nonpollution and as obvious as a free ride -- yet there might have been a longer rear-guard fight by those who wanted fission, not because it was better but because it had been the friend of their childhood. When Chen beat his drums the world listened just a little harder. He faced Lamont, his broad cheekbones and round face bearing evidence of his approximately three-quarter admixture of Chinese ancestry and of ancient combat wisdom. He said, "Let me get this straight. You're speaking only for yourself?" "Yes," said Lamont tightly. "Hallam doesn't back me. In fact, Hallam says I'm mad. Do you have to have Hallam's approval before you can move?" "I need no one's approval," said Chen with predictable arrogance, then lapsed back into thoughtful consideration. "You say the paramen are farther advanced in technology than we are?" Lamont had gone that far in the direction of compromise. He had avoided saying they were more intelligent. Farther advanced in technology... was less offensive and just as true. "That is clear," said Lamont. "They can send material across the gap between the Universes and we can't." "Then why did they start the Pump if it is (angerous? Why are they continuing it?" Lament was learning to compromise in more than one direction. He might have said that Chen was not the first to ask this, but the words would have sounded condescending, perhaps impatient. He chose not to say them. "They were anxious to get started with something so apparrently desirable as a source of energy, just as we were. I have reason to think they're as disturbed about it now as I am." "That's still your word. You have no definite evidence about their state of mind." "None that I can present at this moment." "Then it's not enough." "Can we afford to risk "It's not enough. Professor. There's no evidence. I haven't built my reputation by shooting down targets at random. My missiles have sped true to the mark every time because I knew what I was doing." "But when I get the evidence -- " "Then I'll back you. If the evidence satisfies me I assure you that neither Hallam nor the Congress will be able to resist the tide. So get the evidence and come see me again." "But by then it will be too late." Chen shrugged. "Perhaps. Much more likely is that you will find that you are wrong and no evidence is to be had." X took a deep breath and continued in a confidential tone; "Mr. Chen, there are very likely planets in the Universe and among intelligent life and highly developed technologies. The same is probably true of the para-Universe. It must be that in the history of the two Universes there have been many pairs of worlds that came into contact and began Pumping. There may be dozens or even hundreds of Pumps scattered across junction points of the two Universes." "Pure speculation. But if so?" "Then it may be that in dozens or hundreds of cases the mixture of natural law advanced locally to an extent sufficient to explode a planet's sun. The effect might have spread outward. The energy of a supernova added to the changing natural law may have set off explosions among neighboring stars, which in turn set off others. In time perhaps an entire core of a galaxy or of a galactic arm will explode." "But that is only imagination, of course." "Is it? There are hundreds of quasars in the Universe; tiny bodies the size of several solar systems but shining with the light of a hundred full-size galaxies." "You're telling me that the quasars are what are left of Pumping planets?" "I'm suggesting that. In the century and a half since they were discovered astronomers have failed to account for their sources of energy. Nothing in this Universe will account for it nothing. Doesn't it follow then" "What about the para-Universe? Is it full of quasars, too?" "I wouldn't think so. Conditions are different there. Para-theory makes it seem quite definite that fusion takes place much more easily over there, so their stars must be considerably smaller than ours on the average. There it would take a much smaller supply of easily fusing hydrogen to produce the energy our sun does a supply as large as that of our sun would explode spontaneously. If our laws permeate the para-Universe their hydrogen will become a little more difficult to fuse -- the parastars begin to cool down." "Well, that's not so bad," said Chen. "The para-men can use Pumping to supply themselves with the necessary energy. By your speculations they're in fine shape." "Not really," said Lamont. "Once our end explodes the Pumping stops. They can't keep it up without us and that means they'll face a cooling star without Pump energy. They might be worse off than we -- we'd go out in a painless flash while their agony would be long drawn out." "You have a good imagination, Prfessor," said Chen, "but I'm not buying it. I don't see any chance of our giving up Pumping on nothing more than your imagination. Do you know what the Pump means to mankind? It's not just the free, clean and copious energy. Look beyond that. What it means is that man no longer has to work for a living. It means that for the first time in history, mankind can turn its collective brain to the more important problem of developing its true potential. For instancenot all the medical advances of two and a half centuries have succeeded in advancing man's full life-span much past a hundred years. We've been told by gerontologists over and over that there is nothing, in theory, to stand in the way of human immortality, but so far not enough attention has been concentrated on this." Lamont said angrily, "Immortality? You're talking of pipedreams." "Perhaps you're a judge of pipedreams, Professor," said Chen. "But I intend to see that research into immortality begins. It won't begin if Pumping ends. Then we are back to expensive energy, scarce energy, dirty energy. Earth's work for a living and the pipedream of immortality will remain a pipe-dream." "It will anyway. No one is going to be immortal. No one is even going to live out a normal lifetime." "Ah, but that is only your theory." Lamont weighed the possibilities and decided to gamble. "Mr. Chen, to explain my knowledge of the state of mind of the para-men. Well, let me try. We have been receiving messages." "Yes, but can you interpret them?" "We received an English word." Chen frowned. He suddenly put his hands in his pockets, stretched his short legs before him and leaned back in his chair. "And what was the word?" "Fear." Lamont did not feel it necessary to mention the misspelling. "Fear?" repeated Chen. "And what do you think it means?" "Isn't it clear that they're afraid of the Pumping phenomenon?" "Not at all. If they were afraid they would stop it. I think they're afraid, all right, but they're afraid that our side will stop. You've gotten across your intention to them and if we stop it, as you want us to do, they've got to stop also. You said yourself they can't continue without us -- it's a twoended proposition. I don't blame them for being afraid." Lamont sat silent. "I see," said Chen, "that you haven't thought of that. Well, then, we'll push for immortality. I think that will be the more popular cause." "Oh, popular causes," said Lamont, slowly. "I didn't understand what you found important. How old are you, Mr. Chen?" Chen blinked, then turned away. He left the room, walking rapidly, his hands clenched. Lamont looked up his biography later. Chen was sixty and his father had died at sixty-two. But it didn't matter. OU don't look as though X you had any luck at all," said Bronowski. Lamont was sitting in his laboratory, staring at the toes of his shoes and noting idly that they seemed unusually scuffed. He shook his head. "No." "Even the great Chen failed you." "He would do nothing. He wants evidence, too. They all want evidence, but anything I offer them is rejected. What they really want is their damned Pump, or their reputation, or their place in history. Chen wants immortality. "What do you want, Pete?" asked Bronowski softly. "Mankind's safety," said Lament. He looked at the other's quizzical eyes. "You don't believe me." "Oh, I believe you. But what do you really want?" "Well, then, by God -- " Lament brought his hand down flat on the desk before him in a loud slap -- "I want to be right -- and I am right." "You're sure?" "I am sure. And there's nothing I am worried about, because I intend to win. You know -- when I left Chen I came near to despising myself." "You?" "Yes, #. Why not? I thought -- At every turn Hallam stops me. As long as Hallam refutes me everyone has an excuse not to believe me. While Hallam stands like a rock against me, I must fail. Why didn't I work through him? Why didn't I butter him up, indeed? Why didn't I maneuver him into supporting me instead of needling him into fighting me?" "Do you think you could have?" "No. As you imply, nothing could have turned him against the Pump. Of course, when I first turned him against me, there was as yet no question of Earth's doom, but I took care to make my relationship with him worse when that question arose. In my despair I thought -- well, all sorts of things. I even thought of emigrating to the moon colony if they'd accept my type of ability among their scientists. I wasn't sure they would." "But you don't seem to despise yourself now." "No. Because my conversation with Chen brought a dividend. It showed me I was wasting time." "So it would seem." "Yes, but needlessly. It is not here on Earth that the solution lies. I told Chen that our sun might blow up but the para-sun would not, yet that would not save the para-men, for when our sun blew and our end of the Pump halted, so would theirs. They cannot continue without us, do you see?" "Yes, of course I see." "Then why don't we think of the reverse? We can't continue without them. In which case, who cares whether we stop the Pump or not? Let's get the para-men to stop." "Ah, but will they?" "They said F-E-E-R. And it means they're afraid. Chen said they feared that we would stop the Pump -- but I don't believe that for a moment. They are simply afraid as you and I are. I sat silent when Chen made his suggestion. He thought he had me. He was quite wrong. I was only thinking at that moment that we had to get the para-men to stop. And we've got to. Mike, I abandon everything except you. You're the hope of the world. Get through to them somehow." Bronowski laughed and there was almost a childlike glee in the sound. "Pete," he said, "you're a genius." "Aha. You've noticed." "No, I mean it. You guess what I want to say before I can say it. I've been sending message after message, using their symbols in a way that I guessed might signify the Pump and using our word as well. And I did my best to gather what information I've scrabbled together over many months to use their symbols in a way signifying disapproval and using an English word again. I had no idea whether I was getting through or was a mile off base and -- from the fact that I never got an answer -- I had little hope." "You didn't tell me what you were trying to do." "Well, this part of the problem is my baby. You take your sweet time explaining para-theory to me." "So what happened?" "So yesterday I sent off exactly two words -- our language. I scrawled: P-U-M-P B-A-D." "And?" "And this morning I picked up a return message at last. It's simple enough and straightforward, too. It goes; Y-E-S P-U-M-P B-A-D B-A-D B-A-D. Here, look at it." j held the foil. "There's no mistaking that, is there? That's confirmation, isn't it?" "It seems so to me. Whom will you take this to?" "To no one," said Lamont decisively. "I argue no more. They will tell me I faked the message and there's no point in my 'sitting still for that. Let the para-men stop the Pump and it will stop on our side, too, and nothing we can do unilaterally will start it up again. The entire Station will then be on fire to prove that I was right and that the Pump is dangerous." "How do you figure that? Because it will be the only way they can keep themselves from being torn apart by a mob demanding the Pump and infuriated at not getting it?" "Well, maybe. But one thing bothers me." "What's that?" "If the para-men are so convinced that the Pump is dangerous, why haven't they stopped it already? I took occasion to check a while ago and the Pump is working swimmingly." Lamont frowned. "Perhaps they don't want a unilateral stoppage. They may consider us their partners and want a mutual agreement to stop. Don't you suppose that might be so?" "It might be. But it might also be that communication is less than perfect -- that they don't yet quite understand the significance of the word B-A-D. From what I said to them via their symbols, which I may well have twisted utterly, they may think that B-A-D means what we consider G-O-O-D." "Oh, no." "Well, that's your hope, but there's no payoff on hopes." "Mike, just keep on sending messages. Use as many of the words they use as possible and keep ringing the changes. You're the expert and it's in your hands. Eventually they'll know enough words to say something clearly and unmistakably and then we'll the Pump stopped." "We lack the authority to make any such statement." "Yes, but they won't know, and in the end we'll be mankind's heroes." "Even if they execute us first?" "Even so. It's in your hands, Mike; and I'm sure it won't take much longer." . passed without another message and the strain grew worse. Bronowski showed it. His earlier lightness of heart had dissipated and he entered Lamont's laboratory in glum silence. They stared at each other and finally Bronowski said, "It's all over the place that you've received your show-cause." Lamont had not shaved that morning. His laboratory had a forlorn look about it, a not-quitedefinable packing-up look. He shrugged. "So what? It doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that Physical Reviews rejected my paper." "You said you were expecting them to." "Yes, but I thought they might give me reasons. They might have pointed out what they thought were fallacies, errors, unwarranted assumptions. Something I could argue about." "And they didn't?" "Not a word. Their referees did not consider the paper suitable for publication. Quote, unquote. They just won't touch it. It's really disheartening -- the universal stupidity. I think that I wouldn't grieve at mankind's suicide through sheer evilness of heart or through mere recklessness. There's something so damned undignified at going to destruction through simple thickheaded stupidity. What's the use of being men if that's how you have to die?" "Stupidity," muttered Bronowski. "What else do you call it? And they want me to show cause why I ought not to be fired for the great crime of being right." "Everyone seems to know that you consulted Chen." "Yes." Lamont put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and wearily rubbed it. "I apparently got him annoyed enough to go to Hallam with tales and now the accusation is that I have been trying to sabotage the Pump project by unwarranted and unsupported fright tactics in an unprofessional manner and that this makes me unsuitable for employment on the Station." "They can prove that easily, Pete." "I suppose they can. It doesn't matter." "What are you going to do?" "Nothing," said Lamont indignantly. "Let them do their worst. I'll rely on red tape. Every step of this thing will take weeks, months -- and meanwhile you keep working. We'll hear from the para-men yet." Bronowski looked miserable. "Pete, suppose we don't. Maybe it's time for you to think about this again." Lamont looked up sharply. "What are you talking about?" "Tell them you're wrong. Do penance. Beat your breast. Give up." "Never! By God, Mike, we're playing a game in which the stakes are all the world and every living creature on it." "Yes, but what's that to you? You're not married. You have no children. I know your father is dead. You never mention your mother or any siblings. I doubt there is a human being to whom you are emotionally attached as an individual. So go your way and the hell with all this." "And you?" "I'll do the same. I'm divorced and I have no children. I have a young lady with whom I'm close and that relationship will continue while it can. Live! Enjoy!" "And tomorrow?" "Will take care of itself. Death when it comes will be quick." "I can't live with that philosophy. Mike. Mike! What is all this? Are you trying to tell me that we're not going to get through? Are you giving up on the para-men?" Bronowski looked away. He said, "Pete, I did get an answer. Last night. I thought I'd wait for today and think about it, but why think? Here it is." Lament's eyes were staring questions. He took the foil and looked at it. There was no punctuation: "By God," muttered Bronowski. "They sound desperate." Lamont was still staring. Bronowski said, "I gather that somewhere on the other side is someone like you -- a para-Lamont. And he can't get his para-Hallams to stop either. And while we're begging them to save us, he's begging us to save them." Lamont said, "But if we show this -- " "They'll say you're lying -- that it's a hoax you've concocted to save your psychotically conceived nightmare." "They can say that of me, maybe, but they can't say it of you. You'll back me, Mike. You'll testify that you received this and how." Bronowski reddened. "What good would that do? They'd say that somewhere in the para-Universe there is a nut like yourself and that two crackpots got together. They'd say that the message proves that the constituted authorities in the para-Universe are convinced there's no danger." "Mike, fight this through with me. "There's no use, Pete. You said it yourself -- stupidity. Those paramen may be more advanced than we are -- but it's plain to see that they're just as stupid as we are and that ends it. Schiller pointed that out and I believe him." "Who?" "Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he wrote: 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.' I'm no god and I'll contend no longer. Let it go, Pete, and go your way. Maybe the world will last our time and if not -- there's nothing that can be done anyway. I'm sorry, Pete. You fought the good fight, but you lost. And I'm through." He was gone and Lamont was alone. He sat in his chair, fingers aimlessly drumming, drumming. Somewhere in the sun protons were clinging together with a trifling additional avidity and with each moment that avidity grew -- and at some moment the delicate balance would break down. "And no one on Earth will live to know I was right," cried out Lamont, and blinked to keep back the tears.  The second installment of The Gods Themselves will appear in MarchApril IF, on sale February #. The third and final installment Editor's Page, this issue, page #.) of some people. Others you can pay to stay away! Geophysics # -- Advanced Field Exploration Mr. Rohnagan and Staff Prerequisite, knowledge of principles of pragmatic mineralogy, prior field experience and consent of instructor. Lectures and extended field exercise on the application of psychology to prospecting. Planning, design and execution of exercise, exploration techniques, application of methods to mineral exploration and mining, stressing integrated use of psychologic guides in the search of mineral deposits. Fee: # full participation less pro rata expenses, credit lien add # plus standard interest, OR assignment of income over # less # retention. Hold-harmless agreement, minimum insurance package, #A level inoculation, conditioning required. Time: # standard days. Enrollment limited. T om rohnagan landed at Critchlow on Edris. He looked at the booming surf, the windblown palms and the tawny beach. He rubbed his week-old beard and pushed his hat back on his head. His skin prickled with sweat in the coastal humidity. He stood in the shade of the Interface ship and waited while the ramp slid out and the cargomaster drove the battered prime mover and new trailer onto the concrete. Rohnagan hitched his pants and spat. He signed the delivery ticket and drove the rig to the Entry Port. He unlocked the trailer and opened all compartments for fumigation. Next door in the Doc's office he heard the gates clunk together and seal, the pumps drop the pressure to half atmospheric and the decontaminant whoosh nio the chamber. He stripped and walked into the medical machine. It had a sickly bedside manner. "We've been overworking, haven't we? Neglecting our health in the stress of affairs? Not enough exercise for the best muscle tonus, and the liver a little sluggish. A sound mind in a sound body -- " "Go to hell. Doc," said Rohnagan. " -- tranquilizers are indicated and will be made available at cost by Bahia General Services. Please deposit the medical fee. For consultational reference while on Edris, call #-#-#. Have a nice day." Critchlow was the oldest of the Bahia vacation cities but that was no excuse for a smarmy medical machine. Rohnagan swore and waited outside while the fumigant decomposed. The bay opened and he drove through the service and warehouse blocks of Critchlow, around the cliff with waves breaking on the rocks, to the city itself. The administration offices were well back from the beach. He parked beside a row of flambeau trees in full bloom. He walked slowly to the building. His footsteps set up an echo in time. He had not seen flambeaus for twenty years. He stopped in the shade and the echo steps stopped. He looked around but he was alone. The ghost of young Tom Rohnagan was standing beside him. So this was a joint venture, his own weight of experience coupled with young Tom's observations of so long ago. T he clerk of mines was a lean old woman who could talk and type simultaneously. "A five-year lease and a five-year prospecting ticket, all righty. The maximum in both cases. You spell your name -- ah-ha. Thumbprint here. You understand the mineral laws of Edris, hmm? I ask you pointedly because there is no rescue and no hard feelings, in acceptance of the Law of Limitation and the Fool's Act. Sign here. Where is Bluewater, Mr. Rohnagan?" "Twelve hundred kilometers in." "That awful desert and the parnmas, hmm? All those little eyes looking at you. A zoologist from College Station tried to eat one. He said it tasted like an owl boiled wholespecial permit you understand -- highest indigenous life -- ecologically valuable -- auburn hair, hazel eyes, male -- they eat bugs -- sign here." "What's the export duty these days?" "Ten dollars a hundred assessed valuation. It used to be twenty, but policy is to encourage development. Imagine a mineral-rich planet where the biggest money value is sand and gravel. Nobody wants to stay in the desert." She cocked her head. "Don't buy any expensive chines or ball mills or classifiers. We have an abandonment ordinance and I can rent you whatever you will need. A man wakes up one morning and asks himself what am I doing here, hmm? Usually he leaves before breakfast, and before he eats he checks the Interface schedule. Then he's another Long Gone John with the parnmas sitting around watching his equipment get covered over with sand." Rohnagan said he liked the peace and quiet, thanked her and left. He took a cab to a bar called the Tap Easy. The bartender was an ex-prospector named Bellici, who told him that Jerry Korsmo had a nice little lead-galena strike before he hauled off, that Mercer Seldomridge filed on copper but never proved up and that Lance Cozensa got some kunzite before he peeled out. "They come and mostly go," said Bellici. "There was a funny pair a week ago, two-meter Swinney and his partner Gronewald, thirty centimeters shorter and they weighed the same. You wouldn't believe. Oh, I brought out a sunburn myself once and a thirst that hasn't quit yet. All that empty! All them eyes!" "Uh-huh," said Rohnagan. He finished his ceremonial drink and went back to the prime mover. He drove to the service area and gave his list to a supplier. The man put it into the proper code and, while they waited, told Rohnagan about Nan McAnn who had ordered the same things. The man figured it was a boom between busts in the mining cycle. He read a printout and said there had been six in the last two weeks -- the McAnn woman, Poulin, Clark, Yanabu, Swinney and Gronewald -- all out for riches. He laughed. "Tap easy, she's deep enough, yuk-yuk. I seen that desert. You can have my share." Rohnagan put the packages into the trailer and drove to the nearest offtake pad, inland and uphill from the service area. He got out to stretch and look at the sunset. Here was the end and the beginning of his irresolution. He was not timid, irresponsible or unable to make up his mind. If a course of action was clear before him, he acted with vigor. He abominated principle as a movable brick wall and yet he worked from first principles. His irresolution was based on a fundamental human peculiarity -- he wanted to be a good man, but what is good? He was not afraid of the desert. He approved of the Law of Limitation. Any authority must limit itself or become an all-devouring monster. Go into the desert if you like, but save your breath to cool your porridge if you get into trouble. The Bahia cities endorsed the Fool's Act as a philosophic baseyou are free to kick a bear in the nose -- and the price of freedom is personal responsibility. But what is good? The design and execution were good. The staff and class were arriving from a dozen planets. The conditioning was holding. He was comfortable in his role of prospector and was reasonably certain this would be a spectacular operation from a monetary viewpoint. Good enough. But... Was his meddling justifiable? On what scale of values? From what viewpoint? At what price? How congruent was intelligence? Right, wrong or standing on his head, he was here. He spat. The point of no return had passed when he was born. He pulled down his hat, climbed into the prime mover and lifted into the air. He drove over the Coast range and set the guidance. He slept the night away over the howling wilderness. of the Great Spineys, tucked between the paws of two hills. The water from the spring ran nearly a quarter kilometer before it was sucked into the air and down into the sand. The brush ran from green-gray to gray-white along the course of the stream. A few trees with lacy leaves and pink trunks stood around. A serpentine humped to one side, an intertwined mass of bright green withes with vivid coral blossoms. A pamma watched him land. He multigraved the trailer to check the gear. He left the sensors on. If a wind should rise, all points would keep in constant weight relationship with the planet. Six pammas sat in a row on a boulder -- a pair each of diggers, flyers and lopers. He ignored their flat gray eyes and hauled the hosehead to the spring. The telltale stuttered amber and settled to green. The water was not blue, but it was potable. A happy-go-lucky bug bumbled around his head and flew away. The nearest pamma spat a sticky globule. The happy-go-lucky whirred with tacky wings -- the pamma ran out a telescoping arm to catch it in the air and pop it into his mouth. A pamma is shaped like an avocado. It has a constrictor mechanism in the sloping shoulders. It hunched and shrugged and continued to watch the man. He opened the stable door and brought out one of his two burros. It was a heavy-duty model that had all the options. He pushed the heehaw button to give the pammas a treat. They took no notice. They sat in a row and blinked their button eyes out of synchronization. They always kept one eye open. When the wind carried sand, their eyes were puce with the nictitating membrane instead of gray. "Peace and quiet," said Rohanagan. He climbed onto the burro and rode slowly to the top of the hill behind Bluewater. With the sun just over the horizon, the ridges and valleys and plains were defined by long shadows. The Great Spineys ran northeast-southwest, crest on blue crest, unnamed peaks rosy in the dawn glow. He felt himself relax from the tensions of civilization. He crossed his legs tailor fashion on the saddle and watched the landscape slowly meld as the sun rose. He turned the burro downhill on the homing circuit and was pleased with the way it chose a path over and around the rocky slope on its # wire legs. Pammas watched. He ignored them. "The bliss of solitude," he said and believed it as he shut the stable door and went inside to unpack. He was perfectly happy for two weeks. He found wheat gold in a box canyon and dry-milled enough in five days to cast a standard tenkilo bar. Off to the west he identified an outcrop of WO # in case somebody needed tungsten. He crossed a saline-white dry lake to a relatively old range of hills and noted a natural cave. He did not quite believe it geologically, but he crawled underground to a small cavern. It was bright red by torchlight and the floor sloped to a puddle of liquid mercury. He scooped up a handful of the heavy metal and poured it back. A pamma watched from the cave entrance and flippity-flopped ahead of him when he walked out. He studied the rock wall, drilled a pattern with a laser bit, loaded the holes with filgrinite twenty, fused them with his personal key-coded fuse and tried to shoo away the pammas. They sat above the cave and stared at him. Pammas are not lovable creatures. As insectivores they serve a purpose, but their fur breaks off in barbels and they have as interesting personalities as china doorknobs. Still and all, Rohnagan rode the burro along the hill and waited while the pammas re-assembled themselves before he blew the cave down. "That was a narrow escape," he told them. "The love of money is the root of all evil, gang. Free mercury is too valuable. I came here to get away from it all. You can't imagine the temptations outside. I know your sex life is more complicated than mine because you get three kinds in one litter, but I bet you never looked into a pool of mercury and say a good-looking girl batting her eyes at you in sync. Dollar signs in them. Temptation of the devil, gang." He pulled the triptape out of the burro and carefully cut away a section. "This won't show on my map. Get a lot of people in here. Got to be careful, right?" A couple of flying pammas swooped through a cloud of gnats with their mottled gray-andgreen mouths open, wind whistling through their strainers. They plopped down beside the others and shrugged their shoulders. Rohnagan drank a cup of cold tea from the burro's reservoir and set off for Bluewater. He walked with an easy gait but when he found himself paying no attention to the formations, he mounted the burro and pushed the Home-James button. "I think the Doc was right," he told a pamma sticking its head out of a burrow. "I need an application of tranquilizer." The pamma blinked one eye. T WO men were soaking in a little pool below the spring. They were the long and short of it, Alf Spinney and Gurchie Gronewald. They had run out of food and water and were lost besides. Rohnagan said he had just escaped a fate worse than death and why hadn't they got into the trailer and fed themselves? Alf was the tall one. He was shy. He sat in the water and sank so deep only his eyes and the tips of his red ears showed. Gurchie said they were honest men and couldn't break into somebody's trailer like that -- besides they had just arrived. "I got the distiller going with red corn when I set up here," said Rohnagan, "and it's a violation of the Fool's Act not to have a drink." They suffered when they drank his whiskey. Their salivary glands squirted and their stomach juices sloshed. He reconstituted a couple of protinella patties and heated them in frozen buns. They vanished like snowballs thrown at pammas at high noon. He gave his guests another drink. "What are you boys looking for?" "Sun and bugs and sand and pammas, I guess," said Gurchie. "So far we found experience," said Alf. "And the crazy pammas watching." "Sure a lot of nothing here." Their eyes wandered and returned to the radar range. This time Rohnagan fed them a dozen little fish with a lively sauce on toast strips. The youngsters said they were broke but they hoped to pick up hand-loading jobs at the Bahia cities. All they had done so far was wear the legs down on their burros -- but they would get back to prospecting when they were able. "I'll grubstake you," said Rohnagan. He explained the term did not mean conveyance of property or a lien against future income. Alf said it was sure uncomfortable to ride with his feet on the burro's neck to keep them from dragging. Rohnagan said you walk when you prospect and Alf showed him shoes with the soles worn out. "What's to keep us from stealing this grubstake?" said Gurchie. "Not a thing. I gamble on a cut of your next trip. I'll run you over to Critchlow because I want a change anyway." "We could off-planet with your money." "Sure enough." "Where do you want our thumbprints?" said Alf. "On your thumbs. What we do is shake hands and have a drink and then it'll be supper time." The next day they flew to Critchlow. He told them the block of gold was about # fine with copper and silver and he bought them a drink at the Tap Easy while he listened to their protests. "You might be lucky next time," he said. "Get the best equipment and the best supplies." They decided to try an area away from Bluewater, so Rohnagan left them, went to a restaurant to avoid his own cooking, had a few drinks and slept on guidance back to the trailer. "Good to be here. Things haven't changed much. Far from the madding crowd," he said to the pammas. He puttered happily around the trailer and even lined out some rocks to indicate a path to the spring. "If I had white paint. I'd paint them white," he said. dropped in the next day. He was very nice about it and asked if Rohnagan minded if he located there for a while. He played a good game of cribbage and made a superior sort of beer. He was a desirable neighbor, Rohnagan supposed. Poulin pulled in and then Hartis, who only wanted water before he went off again. Nan McAnn arrived in a tired camper and made a fourth for bridge. Rohnagan was alarmed by the condition of her equipment and spent three days putting it into less perilous shape. She was a bossy, comfortable woman who liked cooking and had the devil's own luck at cards. Colvin and Trayloren sat two nights for poker and moved on. Mary Mayerling and Pierre Sutton and Ellaree Hill used Bluewater as a base. Rohnagan woke one morning and said the hell with it. , i  .I He packed one burro and rode the other for two days before he began walking. He knew about seismic, gravimetric, magnetic, electrical and radioactive prospecting, but he believed a real understanding of minerals came through the soles of the feet. "What's the use of being a fast prospector?" he asked the pammas. "All those people," he grumbled. "How can you prospect in a herd?" He got no answer. "Sure, it's nice to see somebody once in a while, but the social whirl is getting too damn thick." He was working through broken country when he found tourmaline. He thought they were tourmaline crystals, pink and green. He passed them by, but he could not ignore a lenticular stone he found a few days later. It was adamantine. Filaments of grape purple shifted in a pale transparency as he turned it in his hand. He trembled and there was a ragged streak of yellow, intense pale lightning in the stone. He put it in a corner of his burro and found seven more similar stones before he came to his senses. "Never heard of such a thing," he marveled. "Storm jewels! This is terrible!" The pammas blinked. He returned to Bluewater in a roundabout fashion to face another disaster. Alf and Gurchie had been there the day before and left a dozen oweins as his share of their grubstake expedition. The rough oweins were orange rocks. Faceted, they were orange fire. "Oh, hell," he said to Nan McAnn. "This is ridiculous. The littlest is worth ten bars of gold. I hate honest men!" "They said their luck changed because of your grubstake. They made me give them some more of your supplies. Do you mind if I set up a store -- I could get a lot of stuff with one owein." "Whatever you want. You keep the things. Don't bother me." "A lot of people are prospecting now. Will it be all right if I grubstake them a little?" "Oh, peace," he said. "Oh, solitude! I'm taking off. I won't be back until all these people fall off cliffs or fry their brains or thirst to death. Have they repealed the Fool's Act? I never set out to be a founding father. I'm no real estate promoter -- I never asked -- " "The boys brought you a sack of red corn, too," she said soothingly. "I ran some through your hurry-up distiller." "Terrible, terrible, terrible," he grumbled, but he went to the trailer and soothed himself for a week. T he arrival of the foundation sobered him up. It was thirtyby-thirty meters. Nan said she got it at a bargain in Critchlow. It was the very first apartment moved into town, but tastes change and the new apartments came from Brummigen in a modern decor and with the traveling base and support systems integral. The owners had a demolition party and tore up the insides, so she spent a little fuel and dumped the ravaged rooms toward the sun. "Did you spend the oweins?" His face fell when she said there were three of the largest left. "I don't want money," he grumbled. "Get rid of them." He serviced his burros and fled Bluewater. He wandered into the Plains of Doom, a fancifully named area intricately undercut with caverns. The gossip was that the plains claimed the lives of four wt of ten prosf)ectors who ventured onto them. What saved Rohnagan's life were the inertial antigravity units built into the burros. Choosing a route with a lifetime of geological skill, he still found the treacherous footing collapsing under him time and , again. The burros dropped free for fifty centimeters and nulled gravity in another fifty. "Sure-footed little beasts," Rohnagan told the pammas. He followed one series of caves for kilometers and spent two nights underground. He found the first blush pearl and all his rationality vanished. The pearl was a spheroid as large as his thumbnail with a pale pink infusion. He held it in the palm of his hand and fell into it dreaming -- until he fortunately fell on the hee-haw button. The pink world had grown deeper as he stared, demanding total involvement. It was changing into crimson when the burro brayed. Rohnagan filled a compartment of the pack burro before he groaned and said to a pamma, "Just like glass marbles, that's all," and returned to the surface of the plain. He was reasonably certain there was no such thing as a hypnotic mineral, but he studied the pearls no more in depth. At Bluewater again, he found thirty-eight men and women camped around the spring. The apartment foundation had tenmeter modular units stacked three high. The ground floor was taken up by Nan's combination bar-andgrill and store along with a minerals-processing laboratory. The second and third tiers held ores and refined metals in storage for their owners. Nan McAnn was apologetic. "Everybody wanted to be grubstaked. It seems you're lucky. Anybody with you as a silent partner finds all manner of things. I'm sorry." "I won't put up with it," he said. "Get all those people together. I'll talk with them tonight." He would not listen to her protests and rode a burro up the hill behind Bluewater. He grumbled over the crest and along a ridge to a plateau jumbled with boulders. He sat in the shade. "I got a lease on Bluewater. Too many people now and what next?" He frowned at the pammas, some in the shadows and others in the sun. "How can I tell?" he asked them. "What's the proper thing to do? I can't tell good, dammit, from gang. I don't know good from a Funny Looking Rock. Every honest geologist uses the term." T he gray shoebutton eyes of the pammas met his own. He was accustomed to this, but he was surprised when they fixed their beady glance on a rock beside his foot. He picked it up. The eyes returned to gray and speckled. He tilted it and the light caught two white circles, very thin, in the rock. "Uh-oh," said Rohnagan. He pulled out his magnifying glass. The two perfect circles just barely intersected. "Like a fortymeter crochet hoop with another overlaid by about twenty centimeters? Maybe the spihdf li'eCtPdh' is our congruency," he said slowly'. "And the lunes would indicate the comparative area of our divergent interest.' They were ordinary pammas, no different'from the thousands he had seen. A digger pushed up through the sand and shrugged its shoulders. Rohnagan looked at the beast and sighed. Dolphins at least grinned and made noises and didn't line up to stare at you. It was sad and funny that alien intelligence should be alien. "Well gang, you probably dbn't remember that I came here as a young man -- or do you have a common memory? And I found oweins. the fkst ever discovered, so you bought me off then. One thing led to another and I couldn't get back until now. And it's only because you've paid and overpaid me to go away that I'm reasonably certain of the hunch I had then. I get this feeling that with mutual best wishes, you look at things one way and we have other considerations." Three lopers flopped onto a rock. A flyer thumped down in the graceless way of pammas. "And maybe that spindle section is empathic," Rohnagan mused. "Some you buy and others deny -- to get us out of your habitat. Our curiosity has no more moral merit than whatever your own preoccupattWs'rnay be. I have no idea how you make jewels -- molecular manipulation? I do know that every ore body out of the coastal humidity belt amounts to a pocket deposit, just enough to be discouraging." He leaned back against the rock and took off his hat. "You've worried me for twenty years. There's. a creature on earth whose only defense is fecundity. It survives nicely where tigers could not without help from man. But guinea pigs never tried to buy anybody off -- if they did, I don't know about it. Your reward syndrome won't work too well with a greedy man -- wait, I understand -- you give him nothing. (Please turn to page # ) Does science fiction have a purpose different from that of "mainstream" fiction? It's a point I've been pondering lately in light of the recent onslaught of near-mainstream sf novels and stories. They range all the way from Disch's The Asian Shore and Russ's View From This Window to D. G. Compwinning story, Slow Sculpture, by Theodore Sturgeon. None of these works is poorly written -- in fact, all of them are above average in literary quality. What I'm wondering about is -- do they fully exploit their sciencefiction potential? Reading them, you may find -- as I did -- that the actual science-fiction elements in them are incidental. Chronocules, for example, is about a timemachine project, supposedly, but the relationship that develops between the two main characters could have just as easily occurred in a mainstream piece. The time machine has nothing to do with it and affects them not at all -- it is merely an incidental bit of background material and the secret project they work on could be a WW II atomic bomb project without essential alterations in the story. I feel that a good piece of science fiction should not only come up to proper literary standards in terms of plot development, characterization, style, etc. -- it should also have a root involvement with its science fiction theme. The genre requirement should not be thrown in merely as incidental decoration. That technique of forcing an outof-genre story into the science-fiction category used to he what was wrong with the space-opera epics of the old sf pulp magazines, with their shoot'em-up-cowboy stories transplanted to other planets. And the same is basically what is wrong with the stories I've listed above, despite the fact that they're much better written. Their sf content has nothing to do with the effect the author set out to achieve. I feel they're borderline stories and hard to classify. Does it matter, someone might ask, if science-fiction writers try to achieve mainstream effects in their work? But if it doesn't we're confronted with the question: what's the point of science fiction if it doesn't do something different from general fiction? What would be the point of a rock song that was indistinguishable from a symphony? It might be good music -- but would it be good rock music? Cy Chauvin Roseville, Michigan Galaxy will pay # for a lead letter and # each for other letters published in Directions. Address correspondence intended for this department to: Directions, Galaxy Magazine, # E. #th Street, New York, N.Y. #. Onestone's inhuman problem needed a human solution... L ifted toward the ceiling by a I score of hands, Onestone felt as though he were standing on his head prior to rocketing toward outer space. When they gently laid him on the floor he felt sorry that the experience was over. "Oh, wow," he finally said. Then he lay still for a while. "You see," Jay Foreman said gently. "We can be trusted. We could bear your weight and we didn't drop you." "That is true." Onestone bent his waist and sat up. "But can I extrapolate to the future? What happens when I leave this group? It will be the same on the outside as it was before. They'll still hate me." "I'm so exasperated I could scream," sputtered a big woman called Jennie, whose full breasts hid behind a long veil of black hair. "So scream," said Onestone. She screamed. "There, that's better," she finally gasped. "But you're still exasperating. You use words that are too big. You intellectualize all the time. You put me off with that cold, cold voice of yours." "What do you want from someone with my background?" he asked bitterly. "Hey!" Hairy Bill rose to his knees. The front of his body was a shag of black from his full beard down. "Old Onestone practically sounded bitter. Maybe he's getting somewhere." "Yeah, he used some feeling there." "A little honest emotion." An excited jabber circled the group and crashed onto Onestone, who sat on the mat in the cefli "How would you like to do some role-playing?" suggested Jay Foreman. "You be the son and Bill here will be the father. Come on. Bill, get in the middle and sit facing Onestone. Let's try to get a father-son thing going." Bill crawled over and squatted. "Hello, son," he said, affecting a kindly voice while trying to suppress a feeling of ridiculousness. "How was school today?" "Okay, Dad." May, a tall blonde, tittered. The whole scene was so weird! "We learned inversion of matrices today," Onestone plunged on bravely. "I can't wait for us to do things together, like going to the Computer Center. Gee, it's great to have a father." "Look, son, you have your head too much inside the console. You should get out more and play with the other kids on the block." Onestone slumped. "That wouldn't be any good. They wouldn't play with me. I'm too different. I'd beat them at chess all the time and -- " "That's the trouble," Bill shouted. "I say play with the kids and you say chess. All you think about is your head. You have a body, too. Become aware of it. Don't you have feelings in your body?" "Why, sure. I can feel temperatures with my right index finger and voltages with my left. I can feel how far my elbows and knees are bent. And orientation -- up and down, north and south." "But -- " There was an interruption from Bald Bill, the football player, two meters tall and roughly as wide, completely devoid of hair from top to bottom. "If somebody tackled you across the knees you wouldn't feel a thing. And he'd probably break his neck. Just how strong are you, anyway?" Onestone shrugged. "Compared to humans, I have no idea. What does it matter?" "One thing you don't know about humans," Bald Bill told him, "is that they are always comparing each other. Always measuring and testing. I see a strong guy, I want to know if he is stronger than I am." He stared a challenge into Onestone's face. eyes back and forth between the two. "We can settle it with some arm-wrestling," he suggested. "You don't have to if you don't want to, Onestone, but remember that one of the things we are trying to deal with here is your lack of aggression and inability to feel anger. Arm-wrestling is a nonviolent way of combat, a test of strength and will." "But I don't know about fighting. What if I hurt him?" "You can't hurt him with armwrestling," Jay explained patiently. "Look, you lie down facing each other, put elbows together and then you try to push his arm down flat on the mat." Bald Bill flattened himself into position and raised his arm from the elbow. "Come on, you brainy son of a bitch, let's see what you can do." Onestone, still on his knees, looked around the group, wanting someone to intervene. "Why does he insult me like that? I was conditioned never to be hostile to humans." "Oh, you dumb ape," Hairy Bill groaned. "You still don't understand what the score is. You're so damn inhibited you can't feel hate, love, anger. How do you expect to be accepted as a human being? You have to learn to feel human emotions." "Come on, you obscene artifact," Bald Bill taunted deliberately, reaching out his hand. "You can't hurt me, you stupid automation." Stung, Onestone drew back. Words could hurt, after all. Somewhere inside him pain glimmered dimly. "All right, you dumb athlete," he muttered, and got down on the mat. The two locked hands and stared into each other's eyes. The dim light from the lamp in the corner glistened coldly on Onestone's stainless skin. Bulk for bulk he and Bald Bill were evenly matched, but the construction was different. Onestone's surface was polished, smooth as a Brancusi sculpture. Bald Bill's skin glowed a fine pink; hard muscles, tensed for the combat, rippled under the thin surface. "Go!" Foreman started it. Instantly Bald Bill's face flushed crimson and the veins on his forehead popped out like writhing worms. His shoulder muscles stood out rigidly as his eyes drilled all the way into his opponent's. The sudden violence of the attack caught Onestone by surprise. His arm was halfway to the floor before his torque adjusted to counter the motion. Bald Bill dug in and searched within himself for another measure of power to complete the job, but to his amazement he felt his arm relentlessly forced back to the vertical and over. His face twisted. Sweat ran from his body. A growl rasped from his throat. Inside Onestone strange new feelings stirred -- anger in response to the growl, excitement at the close body contact, determination to dominate. He advanced his torque another notch and closed the gap to the floor. Bald Bill collapsed, panting. Onestone lay motionless, sorting out the torrent of new sensations. Joy at winning a contest. Affection for a defeated opponent. Sorrow for the vanquished. "Where are you now?" Jay Foreman asked, softly. "I really felt something there. I felt something that wasn't just solving problems or doing logic. It could not be expressed as numbers, forms, equations, or colors. The sensation was unpleasant, but it was exciting." And for the first time his voice broke out of its monotone and sounded excited. V- small girl in her late teens burst violently into tears. "He felt a real emotion. He broke through." Every one of the ten group members behaved as though a cold wind had blown briefly across his perspiring skin. Onestone turned to Marian. "But why do you cry?" "Oh, you dumb contraption," she wailed. "How would you know? Don't you know that we can cry from happiness -- or we can cry at perceiving an emotion in another person, from empathy? That's what makes you so frustrating to talk to. We don't get any emotional feedback from you. I'd like to hit you." She crawled across the mat and proceeded to beat on Onestone's stainless-steel chest with a pair of futile, tiny fists. Suddenly the thought came to Onestone that he would like to embrace Marian with his arms. Startled, she began to draw away. But he gently drew her close and, kneeling on the mat, they remained for a long minute close together. He thought to himself that his skin ought to be covered with soft padding, and temperature and pressure sensors should be placed under the outer integument, so that he might obtain more physical sensation from the close proximity of a human being. But even now, just the thought of the experience was pleasurable. At a signal from Jay Foreman the rest of the group stood up and formed a circle around the pair. Slowly they drew closer to the center until all ten were in a huddle, nestling Marian and Onestone in a close embrace. As though it had a mind of its own, the group began to sway gently back and forth, remaining that way for a long time. Finally the time was over and they reluctantly separated, Marian wiping tears from her eyes and Onestone sunk in deep thought. "This feels like a good place to stop," suggested Jay Foreman. "The hour is late and we have a lot of learning to consolidate. We have seen that feelings are complicated and our responses to them are not always what we might expect on the surface. Onestone, with his flat, schizoid, unemotional manner, generated frustration and anger in everyone else. He has to learn the meaning of feelings and emotions -- and, of course, that is what he is here for." of the members went down to the pool to wash off perspiration and then made for the lounge to sit around, drinking and smoking. Unable to enjoy these amusements, Onestone made his way in darkness to a rock overlooking the ocean and watched the starlight bounce off the surf spray. Both his smog and radioactivity sensors showed a clear night. Needing no sleep, he remained where he was for the night, busying himself by trying to reach the end of a complex mathematical calculation that had been troubling him for some time. As the sun illuminated his back in the morning, Marian approached him and said, "You've done nothing but sit out here all night. And we had so much fun in there." "I've been enjoying myself. Work is fun -- and I've been working. I think I begin to see the solution to an important mathematical problem." Marian looked around. To her mathematics meant a computer terminal, she did not see a keyboard or screen. "Oh. You're one of those lucky people who does mathematics in his head. I can hardly add two and two." "I cheat," Onestone said. "I have a built-in remote connection with a computer unit over there in my car." Not to mention the radio relay to the central computer utility in San Francisco and a statellite link with the world's most available as fast as the speed of light would allow, directly perceived visually and symbolically on a "screen" within his own nervous system. "Oh," Marian said, as though she understood. Onestone had learned not to make detailed explanations. The gap between the scientifically educated and the uneducated had grown so wide that there was no way of explaining to a layman what a scientist was doing. Yet Onestone had to learn how to make small talk, to converse about the trivia of everyday life, to understand how people felt about unimportant matters. "Are you on your way to breakfast?" he asked. "May I join you?" "Sure. But -- uh -- you don't eat, do you?" "No," he replied with a touch of wryness. "But I can stop by my room and install a recharged battery." Marian watched with interest as he snapped the battery cube out of the center of his belly and clicked the fresh one in place. "That's neat. But I'll bet it doesn't taste as good as eating breakfast. Let's go. I'm starving." Onestone glanced at her with alarm, but decided that the primary meaning of "starving" did not apply and searched the thesaurus in San Francisco for secondary and tertiary meanings. Fie still had much to learn about the tongue, having been raised on computer languages and their clarity and logic, and finding the complexities of twenty-second century American not to his liking. The group session this morning took place on a secluded field where the sun soon burned its way through the sea mist and fell hot on naked backs. Onestone decided he had been the center of attention long enough and sat quietly while a tall thin boy named Ken went through a tale of woe concerning his parents. It seemed to be a typical enough story, fitting in neatly with the thousands of cases Onestone had scanned in the files. Both parents busy, working. When at home father alternated between alcoholic low and hash euphoria. Mother compensated for not taking care of son by gushing affection, alternating with nagging about the boy's sex life. "Jeez, she was afraid if I didn't get it every day I'd shrivel into a raisin." "Sounds like she was unconsciously seducing you," suggested Jennie, who had been to many groups and had a good command of the jargon. "Like she wanted some of that action herself." getting a real understanding of that aspect of human behavior. He glanced around at the others sitting in the group circle. Their nakedness made the sex differences plain to see -- they were just as pictured in every textbook and tape he had scanned. He knew their purposes anatomically and physiologically, yet the great importance attributed to them by these beings eluded him. Onestone's own body, smooth and hard, with no characteristics of a biological nature, had a pleasing form and texture. The others, with their hairiness, their softness and pouchiness, were not objectionable to him since he had not been conditioned with prejudices against human bodies. And yet, from what he could hear, the humans did have their own prejudices and irrational responses to their own bodies. So much so that coming together in a group like this with no clothes at all was a highly special occasion charged with great significance and emotion. The entire first day of the group had been devoted to discussing their feelings of strangeness, embarrassment, nervousness -- while he, Onestone, could only conjure up the usual mild curiosity he acquired in a new situation, since he had actually never before seen naked human beings. His attention reverted to the center of the group, where Foreman had set up a psychodrama with Ken playing the son and Jennie taking the mother role. "For Crissake, Mom," Ken was complaining. "Why don't you get off my back? Every night I come home you want to know how I made out. Don't you think that's my own business?" "Son, you know I'm only doing it for your own good." "I think you're a dirty old lady. My generation just doesn't think about these things the way you do. We believe in privacy. You're just driving me crazy. You're never home when I need you -- and when you are home you keep prying into my affairs and then I never want to see you again. And dad, he was never there at all. He was just way out. All those times when I really needed somebody -- nobody home." Then came the miracle, the strange episode that never failed to astonish and bewilder Onestone when it unfolded in front of his eyes. Ken's face twisted, his shoulders began to shake and suddenly tears were gushing from his eyes and anguished sobs were bursting from his throat. What kind of unknown manifestations arose from the depths of the nervous system to cause such a reaction? Onestone's early training and conditioning had done nothing to prepare him for this type of affair. He had been trained for logic, for problem-solving. His thoughts were always straightforward, on the surface, with no hidden messages contradicting each other. But with these human beings, messages were always on two or three levels -- what they said and what they meant were always different things. If the mother really loved her child -- why did she behave in such a way as to make him unhappy? There must be some fundamental reasons for these paradoxes. He could refer to the library files in San Francisco for the latest research on the subject, but he had agreed to stay out of the library during the group sessions, for he had to learn from the j humans in the group directly and experientially. human beings meant to learn the hidden communications, to infer the secret meanings from subtle clues, to make guesses about the thoughts going on in their minds -- for there was no way of getting at these thoughts no vibrations. While making these conjectures he continued to focus on Ken's narration, forced out between sobs. " -- and when they were home together there was all the arguing and fighting and I just didn't want to stay home and I hated them -- but I couldn't leave because I also loved them -- " The manner in which human beings were born and raised to adulthood was simply unbelievable. The agony -- what torments parents perpetrated on their children! What was it like, Onestone wondered, to be a child and have a father and a mother? The thought of something soft and warm wandered through his mind, and then... Onestone felt an incomprehensible scrambling of his thoughts, a sensation as...from a high-voltage line in the back of his spine. His arms jerked from side to side and a strange sound issued from his mouth, as though a muted siren were hidden within. His gaze swept frantically around the circle, appealing for help. Ken had stopped weeping and was sitting still, staring at Onestone. Jay Foreman leaned over him, undecided. The rest of the group sat, mouths gaping. Finally Foreman took Onestone's hands in his and tried to damp down the quivering. Gradually the motion subsided and the wailing died away. Onestone sat for a moment, putting his thoughts in order. "What did it feel like?" Foreman asked. "As though my circuits were being tangled with contradictory messages, generating a network instability. It has happened before. This, in fact, is the reason I'm here in the first place." Jennie, motherly Jennie, leaned forward intently. "You know what I think. I think you were crying." Both Foreman and Onestone jerked their heads around to stare at Jennie. What she had said sounded incredible -- and yet it sounded right. "Either that," Foreman said, "or you were having some kind of epileptic fit. How do you tell the difference when there are no facial expressions to go by? Tell me, Onestone, what were you thinking about just before it happened?" "I was listening to Ken and I was wondering what it would be like to have a father and a mother and -- " Suddenly the shaking returned, and Onestone was unable to continue for several minutes. When Onestone quieted. Foreman said, "You were talking about your reasons for joining this group. Perhaps you'd like to go back to that." O nestone nodded. "As you know, I am the latest in the line of man-machine interaction computers. I was designed to be a general purpose scientist. Some people would call me a robot. Conceptually my design goes back along two lines. One incorporates the remote console that allows a human operator to interact back and forth with a large computer, using ordinary language. The second features the self-learning computer that can be taught to learn from experienced information and so does not require a human operator to program every move ahead of time. This development led to the computer-controlled interplanetary and interstellar exploration ships. "As techniques became more sophisticated during the second century of computer development, somebody got the bright idea of making a computer terminal that would not be fixed to a desk, but could walk around and converse with the scientist using it. In that way it could go to meetings, take part in discussions, solve problems on the spot and, in general, behave very much like the surrounding human beings. "All of which led up to me. Part robot, part computer, a tiny bit human -- the part that cries, perhaps. You see, the old-fashioned, science-fiction robot was always limited physically by the volume of space inside his body. It was essentially impossible to put enough machinery and circuits inside that space to perform all the required operations. With me, the problem, was solved in a more or less obvious way. You see. I'm not all here. The part you see is the physical mechanism, the shortterm memory and some elementary information-processing units. Another part of me is in the trunk of my car, linked to me by radio waves. This unit includes my personal long-term memory and much information processing. The rest of me, in a certain sense, is all over the world, because I am capable of making direct connection to every major computer center. In this way I can make use of all information libraries in existence. Looking at it from that point of view, I have in my memory virtually everything that was ever learned by mankind. Jay Foreman swore. "My mind boggles." Onestone wished he could smile. "Actually there are limitations. To recall a given piece of information requires being able to locate it. Either you use an indexed memory or an associative memory. Whichever way you do it takes time. Fortunately, the way I'm built I can send out a call for a given piece of information and then do something else while the processing goes on. I understand human beings can perform in a similar way. You claim there is a word or a name you can't remember. As the saying goes -- it's on the tip of your tongue. Then, later on, it suddenly pops into your hereand-now processor. "And so I was born -- or at least created -- with the most powerful brain in existence. The first several weeks of my life were spent feeding into my personal memory the essential knowledge that I would need. Languages, mathematics, science, a modicum of history. The only people I encountered were my programers. "My name, in case you have wondered, was originally Stone#, since I was the first model of my series developed by the designer Jeremy Stone. However, Onestone seemed easier tq. pronounce. Furthermore it reminded one of the programers of another name of historical interest. So in a short time the transposition took place informally. "After a few weeks of preliminary testing I was introduced to the world of science. The professors and scientists sat around me in an amphitheater. It was like an examination. 'Let's start with something classical,' one of them said. 'Derive the dispersion relation for non-linear plasma waves with two ion species.' " 'The solution is not available in closed form, but I can give numerical results,' I replied, causing the computer to project a three-dimensional graph directly onto the readout screen on the front wall of the auditorium. That trick bowled them over, for being linked directly to the computer I did not have to push any buttons or perform any other overt actions. "From there we went to elementary particle theory', then to the structure of protein molecules and finally to the structure of the human nervous system. Specialists from all these areas were in the hall. When the session was over. Professor Mandelkern got up and said, 'I congratulate you on your erudition. I am sure your career will be distinguished. Right now some of us are going to do one of the two or three things you cannot do. We are going into a neighboring friendly bar and get drunk.' They didn't invite me." moment as he remembered the past. "You poor kid," Jennie cried in sympathy. "You were the smartest kid on the block and they were all jealous. Nobody warned you to hide some of those brains." "Nobody really told me anything about getting along with human beings. I had to learn myself. I had no real friends to give me advice. Perhaps I was too intimidating. Perhaps everybody thought I knew everything. But, really, to learn about humans it is necessary to interact with them, to be with them, to be intimate. And there was nobody I could be intimate with. "I read books. I watched TV plays. Soon I realized that I was missing something in life. Some of the books were very explicit about what it was:, but there was nothing I could do. "Therefore I turned by back oa the outside, world and remained in the office they gave me at the university. J immersed myself in work, choosing two main fields of specialty to avoid being bored with one topic alone. One was unified field theory, study of the fundamental nature of the forces between objects -- a problem still unsolved after hundreds of years of effort. The other was the nature of human consciousness, perhaps the most important scientific problem for humanity, because man's ultimate behavior depends on the mental model he has of his own nature and of his place in the universe. "Actually the two problems are interrelated. One basic mystery of nature is how we acquire knowledge of the world around us -- when the only information passing from the outer world into our nervous systems consists of electrical pulses moving from sensory organs into the depths of the brain. From these signals we somehow become conscious of what goes on out there, even to the extent of making models of atoms and smaller particles. My own construction is a step toward the solution of the consciousness problem. For I am a model of a brain. Whether I am a model of a human brain is a question still to be answered." Jay Foreman interrupted. "I feel that you are getting off onto a general philosophical tangent and are avoiding coming to the main issue. You were going to tell us how you happened to come to this group." Onestone said, simply, "I think I started going insane." Foreman had an instant vision of an entire new index in the psychological data center entitled Computer Disfunction, subheading Computer Neurosis, Computer Psychosis and so on. Supressing this irrelevance, he pressed onward. "What made you think so?" "The problems I started working on were difficult. I was naive at the beginning and thought that problems always worked themselves out in a straightforward manner. Then I found out that dealing with problems nobody has ever worked out before requires more than just memory, speed, manipulative ability and so on the usual things listed under mathematical ability. Also required is the ability to think a thought that nobody ever thought before, to put things together in a new way. Some call it creativity. Others call it associative ability or imagination. It has to do with leaping a gap between known and unknown -- guessing at an answer and then testing the guess. "That is where I had trouble. Apparently here is one area where some humans have greater ability than I have. As a result, there were problems I could not solve. Unfortunately, whoever programed me installed a tremendous drive in me to solve problems. You might call it a built-in compulsion neurosis. So when I come up against a hard wall with a problem I can't solve and then get pushed from behind by this complusion, something goes wrong with the circuits and I go into this state of instability and there's nothing I can do to stop it until it dies down by itself. "As a result, I retreated even more into isolation. I would not even go to meetings. My technicians were in despair. Then one of them came to me -- a girl named Marcy. She said she had an idea that my being alone all the time was not good for me and that I should do something, associate more with people. She thought that perhaps group therapy would be of some help. "The rest, of course, you know. From what Marcy told me and from my other sources of information, I learned of the beginnings of the Human Potential movement in the early years of the twentieth century. Encounter groups, gestalt therapy and the rest. It became a powerful movement toward the end of the twentieth century, was eclipsed for a hundred years as a result of the totalitarian swing of the twenty-first century and was then rediscovered by Vander -- " to the fact that he was lecturing again -- in fact, he was forcibly reminded of that fact by the rude interruption of little Marian, who piped up with: "Hey, Professor, come on back to the real world. We're not in a history class, you know." Group leader Jay Foreman leaned forward and spoke intently to Onestone. "Look, I think we're getting down to the important issue now. You know that human beings are raised from infancy in a certain way. Every child has a mother -- either real or substitute. And usually a father of some sort is around somewhere. If not, the child is in trouble. From the very first day, interactions between the mother and child imprint certain modes of behavior upon the child. If those ingredients do not come along at the right time the child is thereafter crippled. "Mother singing lullabj.es determines future musical tastes. Simple sensory stimulation -- fonding, tickling, playing -- creates growth in the nervous system. Telling fairy tales stimulates imaginative thinking and -- most important -- the ability to think in terms of high-level abstractions, such as magic, that later may develop into an understanding of science. Your trouble, Onestone, is that you never had a proper childhood. Worst of all, you never had a mother." At this Jennie burst into sympathetic tears. "No mother, no father, no family warmth. No love. What an empty life." Foreman's face brightened. "I have an idea. There is a technique called Directed Fantasy that is often effective. Of course -- " he shrugged, glancing at Onestone -- "how it will work in this situation is anybody's guess. This is really an experiment. But in theory it should kill two birds with one stone. First, it will give you practice in engaging in fantasy, free-floating imagination, visualizing new and strange things -- we want to release your creativity. Secondly, in order for you to have a childhood and a mother, you must be born again -- and this we can accomplish by means of what we call the directed fantasy. "Suppose you, Jennie, sit in the middle. Cross your legs. Give us a lap. Now, Onestone, you lie down on you back. Yes, right here. Place your head in Jennie's lap. Hope that's not too heavy for you, Jennie." "For a mother it's not too heavy," Jennie replied dreamily. She was already far into her fantasy, gazing down fondly on the polished head, smoothing imaginary hair out of its eyes. "Now, Onestone -- " Foreman took a position beside Jennie and stared down intently at the supine robot -- "close your eyes and relax. I'm going to start you along a directed fantasy or daydream. Science Aids A Working Solar Motor Four-arm vane in #-inch diameter evacuated giass giobe. Turns upon exposure to iight, even a iit match. Fascinating and instructive -- and very decorative! We pay postage. # each, or two for # Only # plus # postage For that money you get # individual items of standardquality laboratory apparatus -- glassware, porcelain, rubber, plastic. Value? Two or three times our price. No junk, and a surprise item in each assortment! Order by mail from: xtcNTific t iMmmr mouas #I Reads Street New York, N.Y. # When I stop -- you carry the story along and tell us what you see and feel. You are suspended in a warm, dark place, filled with soft fluid. A heart beats far away, steadily, rhythmically. You are only a single cell, a featureless sphere embedded in a wall of tissue that stretches away on all sides. Along come a swarm of small tadpole creatures, wriggling along the dark tunnel. One of them reaches you, and at that instant it is as though an electric charge polarizes your entire body. The tadpole is swallowed up by your round body." He paused for a moment. "Visualize that round body. Feel it and its dark, soft, warm surroundings. It is your body. Feel life beginning. Now go on from here." Onestone lay completely motionless for a time. Finally, as though forced with reluctance, the words started to come. "I am now two cells, dividing into four. Each division is like a small shock. I keep dividing more and more. There is a spinal cord, an elementary brain, elementary sex organs. I am becoming a small human being, complete with fingers and toes and curly hair. I grow and grow until I fill the crowded space to the bursting point and wonder how much farther it can stretch. I kick my legs and move my arms and hear sounds of voices coming from outside." Foreman glanced at Jennie and nodded. "Feel the baby kick inside," she exclaimed. "Oh, he's going to be a big strong one." "More sounds are coming from all around. Now I can hear my own heart beating. The warmth and the pressure hold me close. A dark red light comes through my eyelids. There is the sound of music, of someone singing." Again Foreman glanced at Jennie. She started to hum a lullaby. "Now the pressure is squeezing me. It is beginning to push me out of my warm cave. The walls contract and squeeze hard. I see a brighter red glow coming from somewhere. The glow is the outside. I am frightened -- I am frightened. I want to go back to the quiet dark place, but the force pushing me out is irresistible. My head bursts into a bright outer world." There was a moment of absolute silence. Then there was a strange humming sound that came from Onestone's mouth -- growing louder until it became a sobbing wail. Jennie looked down, love bursting from her eyes, a beatific smile stretching across her face. "Every Jewish mother," she said, "wants an Einstein for a son." Want to Bet... On what is the oldest scientific instrument? Probably the gnomon, an instrument for telling time by the sun. Introduced into Greece circa # B.C. by Anaximander, it consisted of a vertical rod on a flat surface. The length of the shadow told the hour of noon and the latitude of the station... On who invented the telescope? Most people believe -- erroneously -- that Galileo was the inventor. Galileo read about an "optik tube" in a letter from a friend, grasped the basic idea immediately and soon had several such instruments of his own. A children's story tells of a young apprentice in the optical shop of Hans Lippershey, a Dutch spectacle-maker the apprentice accidentally lined up two lenses and was astonished to behold the magnified image of a distant church steeple. Lippershey applied for a patent on his "looker" on November #, #, but was denied one on the grounds that such an instrument was already known. Modern research indicates that the inventor of the telescope may have been -- no one knows for sure -- an Italian, Giambattista della Porta of Naples. Exact date of invention remains unknown... On who first tried to measure the velocity of light? This distinction does go to Galileo. He stationed two observers two to three miles apart. Equipped with lanterns, they flashed beams back and forth. The principle was sound but the technique hopelessly crude. Galileo recorded that he "was not able to ascertain with certainty whether the appearance of the opposite light was instantaneous or not; but if not instantaneous it was extraordinarily rapid -- I should call it momentary." One can't help wondering why Galileo did not substitute a mirror for one observer, thus eliminating the chief source of error in the experiment as conducted. Universe I edited by Terry Carr New Dimensions I edited by Robert Silverberg began to stack them up for this report. And not only did the stack get higher and higher, but the many things I want to say about these books so transcended the space the fates allot me that -- well, I'm Tomorrow  edited by Robert Hoskins Ace Science Fiction Reader edited by Donald A. Wollheim The Far-Out People edited by Robert Hoskins The Shores Beneath edited by James Sallis Orbit # edited by Damon Knight The Hugo Winners. Vol. # edited by Isaac Asimov In the Pocket and other S-F Stories K. M. O'Donnell Gather in the Hall of the Planets K.M. O'Donnell embarrassed. I'll cut down as much as possible on the remarks and I'm afraid I'll have to cut down on the stack as well. As I said in my last: it's been a rich season. Terry Carr has left Ace -- their loss, and I hope his new arrangements (rumors haven't reached me yet) fix things so it isn't ours, too. together many a fine "theme" anthology and having that rare talent of finding the right story -- but if he can't find it, bugging some known writer to make it happen and if he can't, finding some unknown who will. All this is well embarrassment of riches, no #t) which, while staying within less. Determined to give you a word Carr's rather strict definition of on anthologies and collections, I what sf ought to be (see his intro) is still a nice wide-spectrum anthology of originals from such as Silverberg and Russ, Effinger and Conway. I especially enjoyed the incredible R. A. Lafferty's No Limestone Islands. This absolutely unique writer is going to have a category all of his own some day: fantasy, science fiction, mainstream, lafferty... And here's another "#" -- New Dimensions I (Doubleday, #), edited by Robert Silverberg, who does not draw the kind of limits Carr does. He chooses stories, he says, from the middle ground between the old and the new; the oldstyle "hard-core" sf (a definition that gets leakier the more you pursue it) and New Wave stuff (which, more often than not, is a question of method rather than of substance.) His writers shine in the dark: Ellison, Disch, Farmer, the lovely Lafferty again, and names which are not quite so familiar: Gardner R. Dozois, who is a finished writer as soon as he starts, and Malstrom, Bryant, Eisenstein. Ursula K. Le Guin has a powerfully insightful story of exploration in outer space and, ever so much more, in that roomier universe, the inner one. And the deft Harry Harrison has produced what I would have called impossible -- a story that might have been thought of. thought out and written by the late, very loved Anthony Boucher. And yet another -- Tomorrow , edited by Robert Hoskins (Signet, #f). Mr. Hoskins proves himself a pretty fair archivist. These stories hark back as far as # (a John D. MacDonald: Trojan Horse Laugh. John has never written a bad story in his prolific life, though he has produced few great ones.) There's Simak's The Civilization Game, a splendid example of his gentle pacing and the profound personal touch, and a rip-roaring "Van Rijn" Tenn's entry is a provocative psychomedical mystery and James Schmitz gives us a glimpse of a marvelously interacting group of explorers and their problems with a distant but very nearly omnipotent Authority. The virtue of such a short table of contents is that the stories are long -- long enough to give the writers a chance to develop their notions and their people. There is a mother-lode of fine science fiction to be mined here, for past anthologists have been wary of the short table of contents and the occasional long story that might crowd out three or four titles. So a great many novelettes and novellas, really fine ones, have sunk almost out of sight and memory. Fred Pohl was well aware of this when he started his brief Star Short Novels series. More power to Hoskins and anyone else who furthers the idea. . Fiction Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (Ace, # p), which contains three novellas (he calls them novels. Okay.). They are Simak's The Trouble with Tycho, Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany and The Last Castlehy Jack Vance. Simak's is purest Simak, a nice thing to be, complete with decent country-boy hero, wondrous suspense and a sense-of-wonder moon. Jack Vance, as ever, has size. His decadent feudal society, resulting from overdependence on technology (a frequent theme in sf -- so frequent it may be a valid prophecy) is beautifully drawn and comes to a conclusion that would. I'm sure, please a Simak. It certainly pleases me. Then Empire Star, a fine and highly original piece of timespace poetry. It contains a paragraph only recently brought to my attention, which probably disqualifies me from comment. Just as well, for it leaves me quite speechless. Robert Hoskins is responsible also for The Far-Out People (Signet, # e), a good mix of long and short, with Chad Oliver again bringing anthropological expertise to sf, Kris Neville with a beautiful parallel of current politics (and a frightening diagnosis for a punch line) -- and a breath-catching Zelazny called Angel, Dark Angel. himself with a sharply pointed chuckle about Hemingway addicts, and K. M. O'Donnell (see below) bares his teeth, this time at the drama and melodrama of Passion. (Note capital P.) There are also Jakes, Panshin -- and Asimov (with a little story that needs his beloved name to make it good) and a bright newcomer, Michael Fayette. All are reprints. James Sallis gives us four good long ones in The Shores Beneath (Avon, #'P): Delany's glittering Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, a fascinating surrealistic study of what is, I swear, the naked soul of most #-to# offices; Masterson and the Clerks, by the exceptional John T. Sladek; Roger Zelazny's color etching of the jet-set of the future called The Graveyard Heart -- and the first Thomas Disch story yet to have disappointed me. The Asian Shore. Maybe it's me, but I just can't seem to care about what happens to this particularly grubby protagonist. He might reach you, though, and there is some writing in it that is very good indeed. Damon Knight's Orbit # (Putnam, #) is out, and I found it fascinating. That doesn't mean that I experienced it with unalloyed delight. The book (of all original stories) has a certain character all its own. Now it happens that this is the first Orbit I've seen and it gives me the feeling one has on overhearing the middle of some engrossing conversation when one has missed the beginning. I profoundly admire what Knight is doing here. I like the breadth of his gate. Any writer who passes his other criteria (and the ability to write well is certainly one of them) can fly in here and not worry about wingspread. On the other hand there is, I think, the danger of evoking many more experimentally subjective attempts than anyone needsto the ultimate dead-end. A great many writers use new freedorns to escape into their own viscera, and churn from there. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but (as in the graphic arts) a point can be reached where expression is obviously for and about the artist. It might make him feel better but it isn't about Me. Readers are, and have a right to be, both greedy and egotistic, and they want writers to write lots and lots about Me. For all that, one cannot with accuracy generalize about an anthology with so many exceptional, different and worthwhile stories in it. I haven't space to particularize. But I see the high points as another Lafferty ( When All the Lands Pour Out Again) which at last gives me his lowest common denominator -- Death really doesn't matter all that much -- and a truly powerful long story called The Infinity Box. by Kate Wilhelm, who never needs to prove, after this, that she is a strong and capable writer who knows exactly what she is doing. I do criticize Knight in Orbit for abandoning descriptive rubrics before the stories, especially since it is a wide-open market for unknowns and sometimes purchased by those benighted souls who have yet to discover sf and who would firid a word or two about the writer and the background of the story of great value. Knight's rubricking in A Pocketful of Stars (Doubleday, #) shows how well he can do it. A reprint collection, this carefully balanced book of fantasy and sf comes primarily from the Milford Conferences over the years and makes an excellent companion to Clarion, the anthology from the Clarion College sf seminar, which I mentioned in the previous issue. B riefly noted but very important: The Hugo Winners, Vol. # (Doubleday #), delightfully edited by Isaac Asimov and including all the Hugo-winning short stories from # to '#. Its nearly seven hundred pages make it a moneysworth. And only space enough to mention one more -- a collection by K. M. O'Donnell: In the Pocket and other S-F Stories together with Gather in the Hall of the Planets (Ace Double, #s). This is one of the most remarkable volumes I have ever held in my hands and is assured of a permanent place in my library. Hall is a short novel, a sardonic description not only of the Worldcon of #, but of the gritty underbelly of all cons to date. Among the "in" crowd, the book is going to provoke more "Who is this character, really?" than anything since Valley of the Dolls. Much of it will be meaningless to anyone but the cognoscenti -- and I don't mean sf aficionados in general; I mean particular insiders. Along with this is a tongue-in-cheek narrative thread which is apparently one of the author's obsessions -- the creaky old wheeze about being the one human being who has to decide whether or not the Aliens Will Destroy Enslave The Earth. He clearly does not intend to be taken seriously about it, not this time. In addition, he is frequently not only crude, but clumsy. Then, every now and then, he writes deepplunging, perfectly honed insights the sharpest descriptions of what it's like to be a selling writer ever written) and, over and over again, expressions of such fury, such disillusionment, such bitterness that comparison with C. M. Kornbluth comes to mind immediately -- and has been made by half a dozen sources. I am here and now going to give this remarkable writer a present and I hope he uses it far and wide. I here proclaim that he is not goddammit a second C. M. Kornbluth. He is the first K. M. O'Donnell, or Barry Malzberg, or whatever his name is. Pocket is a collection of # short pieces so widely diverse that some of them all but buzz when placed side by side. There's a thing called As Between Generations, which is an absolute horror, and one called The New Rappacini, which for all its jarring style is so poignant it starts tears; A Question of Slant is a wry joke and little more; A Soulsong to the Sad Soaring Sixties is a series of glimpses, almost too terrible to take -- one is grateful that the author holds back a bit. MalzbergO'Donnell is a firstwater, don't-give-a-damn writer. I don't think anyone will ever tell this writer what to write -- or could. And he hates space flight. He hates it so much he practically spits when he talks about it, and I don't know why.  Other Magazines Promise It... RQ Delivers It! "Animism and Magic in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings" -- Pat Callahan "Utopia for Poets and Witches" -- Fritz Leiber "Gernsback 'Magazines' No One Knows" -- Sam Moskowitz "Sex and Prudery in Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. R. Haggard" -- Dale Mullen "Omnipotent Cannibals" -- Robert Plank "S.F. as Will and Idea; The World of Alfred Bester" -- Jeff Riggenbach "Mythology in Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection" -- Stephen Scobie "Warlocks and Warriors" -- Darrell Schweitzer... plus Jim Blish, John Boardman, John Campbell, Richard Kyle, Sandra Miesel, Alexei Panshin,... plus columns by Bill Blackbeard, Jim Harmon, Harry Warner... plus book reviews by J. R. Christopher, Wayne Connelly, Ted Pauls, etc... Subscriptions # (tour issues) from: Box # University Station Regina, Canada Note: All # back issues are currently available at #c each. Special Offer: A # (or larger) order brings you a free copy of H. P. Lovecraft: A Symposium, with Bob Bloch, Arthur Cox, Fritz I.eiber, and Sam Russell. Three copies of this #nd edition are available in Australia -- but none is available elsewhere at any price. The sun is a fiery chrysanthemum. Earth is a lonely bluebell. And Starmaster sits in the hand of God -- or does he? T he hand lay supine upon the hundreds of thousands of times. black lap of space, its craglike For hours Starmaster had fingers towering high above the watched the asteroid from the vast depression -- or cwm, as mounbridge of the muleship, had seen taineers would call it -- of its palm, it grow gradually from a distanceA massive ridge formed the blurred chunk of rock into its thumb. It was a right hand, so present conformation. He could perfect as to have been sculptured not help but be impressed. He by Michelangelo -- a star-flung had seen asteroids shaped like fragment of his David, magnified castles, asteroids shaped like ships and asteroids shaped like animals but he had never seen one that looked as though it had been sculptured into the likeness of a macrocosmic hand. Even for an atheist like himself it was impossible to look upon it and not entertain, however briefly, the notion that it was the right hand of God. The notion angered him. He kicked it contemptuously out of his mind and returned his attention to the muleship's matter-detector. It was beeping loudly. It had been beeping for hours. Its sound had guided him to the hand. For five years he had been combing the Belt for a rich lode of doranium and at last he had found one. H e saw the wreck of the pilgrim ship as he brought the mule down into the cwm of the palm -- and knew he was not the first to find the hand after all. Not long after he landed he found the pilgrim's body. The palm was crisscrossed with shallow rills, and the dead man was lying in one of them about fifty feet from his birdlike ship. The advanced emaciation of the frozen face beyond the faceplate indicated that he had died of starvation. Starmaster slit open the pilgrim's suit and withdrew the dead man's pocket portfolio. He thumbed through it, hampered by his cumbersome gloves. Name: Jason Swinton. Rank: Apostle, #nd class. Address: Institute of Stellar Pilgrims, New Baltimore, Md., He slipped the portfolio into an outside pocket of his suit and walked in his self-adjusting grav boots to the wrecked ship. It told him little he had not already guessed. The ship's cramped living quarters contained one bunk, one chair, one table, one stove, one plate, one cup, one fork, one knife, one spoon and one book. The book, of course, was The Space-Age Testament. It related how the first astronauts to orbit Mars had looked into outer space and had seen the face of God -- how, upon returning to Earth, both they and their story had been ridiculed -- how they had founded the Order of Stellar Pilgrims and launched the search for God -- how the ranks of the Order had swelled during the ensuing years as more and more Protestants and Jews became convinced that the abode of JehovahYahweh lay somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars. The pilgrim had not been a neat housekeeper. Ration cans were scattered everywhere, the lighter ones floating about the room. The deck was littered with them. They covered every square inch of the stove -- one was even lying on the bunk. Starmaster was not surprised. In his opinion all pilgrims had been dirty housekeepers to begin with -- dirty housekeepers of the mind. He took the ship's log with him so that when he got back to Earth he could turn it in to the Space Authority, along with the portfolio. Then he made his way over the maze of rills and returned to his own ship. Thus far the hand's topography had touched only the borderline of his attention. Now, as he walked beneath the stars farther inland, he became uncomfortably aware of the finger crags towering awesomely before him, of the enormous thumb ridge looming in the north, of the flesh-hued slope of the cwm as it rose to meet the unreal line of the horizon. Perversely he likened himself to a mite crawling slowly across the palm of a human hand, oblivious that it was sentient and could at any moment close into a fist. Had the crag fingers risen higher into the sky? Had the thumb ridge shifted? Was the palm twitching beneath his feet? He forced his thoughts back into their proper grooves. He was no mite -- he was a man. And this was no hand -- it was a chunk of rock. A chunk of rock wheeling senselessly around the sun, as dead as Mars, as cold as the moon and as frozen as Pluto. Upon regaining the mule, he inflated the dome tent. Its mouth sealed itself around the outer cargo lock and its base sphinctered to provide air tight access to the surface. When he opened the inner lock, the mule's warmth and atmosphere became the dome tent's, too. The matter-detector screen had showed the lode's exact location, and it had been a simple matter for him to spot the mule on a site slightly west of where the vein began and where the first of the five charges had to be placed. This put his present location a half mile east of the base of the little finger and a similar distance from the edge of the palm. The lode followed a fairly straight course beneath the southern slope of the cwm, at an average depth of four hundred feet. To separate it, he would have to take most of the outer section of the palm with it. When the section broke free he would latch onto it with the mule's attractor beams and tow it to the orbital refineries of Earth. After opening the inner cargo lock he pulled the drill rig down the ramp and set it up over the sphincter. The low grav made the task child's play but necessitated the sinking of extra anchors. He had already analyzed the hand's geological composition, computed its mass, estimated the temperature effect. Synthesizing the three factors, he concluded that the charges would have to be placed at a depth of seventy-one feet. F ew Belt combers were loners. They could not afford to be. They were self-sufficient in some fields -- in others, they walked by night. Generally it required three or four to isolate a lode section and tow it back to Earth. Starmaster was a true loner. He had seen the Light at an early age, and the Light was this: A man comes into the world alone and he leaves it alone -- his friends accompany him as far as the grave, but they do not accompany him into the grave. They are utterly incapable of alleviating his ultimate aloneness. Of what use, then, are friends? Are they not parasites riding upon a man's shoulders as he walks through life? If he is wise he will learn to do everything they can do so there will be no need for him to carry them. And when all is said and done, of what use to a man is a family? Is it not as incapable as his friends of alleviating his ultimate aloneness? No one rode upon Starmaster's shoulders -- no man, no woman, no child. There was little he could not do, little he did not know. He towered high above his fellow men, a loner. He picked up the big drill and threaded it into the brace. He had just finished tightening it when the It caught him off-guard because: (#) he had been preoccupied with his task, (#) the dome tent was a cheap one and lacked transparency, by the conflicting pulls of Jupiter's moons and seldom traveled as far sunward as the Belt. likened to a giantess's skirt covered with polychromatic polka-dots. It descends upon planet or planetoid and swirls across the surface, its creature in its path. Starmaster was the only living creature on the hand. His spacesuit, which would have afforded him some protection, was in the mule. When he saw the hem of the skirt penetrate the walls of the tent, he dropped the wrench he had been using. He scurried around the deadly dots and leaped through the outer lock. Air was already escaping, and the suction proved almost too powerful for the lock motors to cope with -- but at last they won and the lock dogged itself shut. Starmaster leaned against it. basking in the warmth of relief. But a second ordeal lay in store. moment did not catch him unaware. He had experienced it before and had grown sensitive to its approach. When his eyes closed of their own accord he braced himself against the lock -- and the lock dispersed and the deck dissolved beneath his feet and he found himself in blackness. No, not quite blackness. Scattered around him in the vast distances were pale patches of light, some elliptic, some circular, some with spiral arms. Island universes. Slowly, as though he were a little star, he began to revolve. He k new where he was. He was in his own mind. But what was he doing there? Why had he conjured up the local group of galaxies and positioned himself in deep space an equidistance from each galaxy? As he rotated on his axis he identified the various Messier and the Milky Way with its garden of globular clusters. Great Andromeda and her stardust moons. lanic Cloud... Gradually he became aware of the awesome cold, of the abysmal emptiness. When both became unendurable, the black moment passed. the companionway to the bridge. Through the transparent storm as it moved across the hand. If you looked hard enough you could see the giantess tall, black, Brobdingnagian, polka-dot skirt swirling as she danced over the rills and among the rocks, up one finger crag and down the next, over the ridge of the thumb. Before she was done she might return the way she had come and dance through the dome tent once again. There was no telling how soon she would tire of her lonely rigadoon and dance off into space. It was an opportune time for him to get some sleep. But he knew he could not sleep -- that he would not be able to relax until the job was done and the lode section safely in tow. So to kill time he retired to his cabin with the pilgrim's log and propped himself up on his bunk pillows. The script was spidery yet easy to read. The pilgrim ascribed the crash to "pilot error occasioned by a Manual Epiphany." Logical enough. If an atheist could see God's hand in a chunk of rock, a pilgrim would be overwhelmed by such a phenomenon and bound to make a mistake. Starm aster read bits and pieces of further entries. The pilgrim in his search for God had journeyed far and wide, and at last he had been no longer alone. "God comforts me during my final days in this world."He had not found it odd that only God's right hand should be visible. "There are dimensions and dimensions beyond the picayune trio man is imprisoned in and the fourth, which he theorizes. God dwells in all of them, and only by obtaining omnidimensions himself could a mere mortal ever perceive Him in His entirety." He thought often of his fellow pilgrims and wished he might apprise them of the "Manual Epiphany" that had brought him "out of night and into day," but his radio had been damaged in the crash and he had been incapable of repairing it. The entries became incoherent toward the end, although some of the lines possessed a poetic if not a realistic clarity of thought. "For what is a man if there is no God? Is he not one with the flotsam and jetsam of space?" "Pity the selfmade gods, for they who have need of Him the most shall never see Him." "My journey has been a long one, but it has not been in vain." "His touch is gentle it drives away my pain. It expunges my despair... the stars are His eyes their light is His eternal gaze." Skirt swirling, the black giantess danced off into space and disappeared. Starmaster donned his spacesuit and went back outside. T he dome tent was irreparable but the rig was undamaged. mule's powerpack by means of a hull receptacle. Then he threw the switch and watched the big pulley raise the drill for the first drop. At the extremity of the lift, the pulley activated the minirocket engine in the brace. The engine fired a single noiseless burst that sent brace and drill plummeting to the surface. Cable trailing, the drill plunged into the rock. Promptly the pulley retracted it, and repeated the operation. Starmaster had set the depth gauge for seventy-one feet. When the drill reached that depth the rig would shut itself off. He readied the first charge. It consisted of a manganese-bronze cylinder prefilled with neodynamite. Working awkwardly in his heavy gloves, he inserted the first sequential impulsor in a slot in the cylinder's wall. The impulsor was attuned to the number-one activator on the mule's console panel and would respond to no other stimulus. The job done, he sat back and looked up at the black starflowered sky. The sun was a fiery chrysanthemum.Venus was a silvery rose. Earth was a lonely bluebell. Soon he would be back home, enjoying the riches the lode would bring him. The doranium lodes he had towed in before had been dilute compared to this one, but even they had netted him excellent profits. This one's potential profit made his head swim. The rig shut itself off and the pulley retracted the drill. He carried the cylinder over to the shaft and dropped it down into the darkness. It did not fall fast, but eventually it would reach bottom. The axial rotation of the hand had brought the fingers higher into the sky and, with their approach toward the sun, a lake of black shadows began to take shape at their base. Starmaster partially dismantled the rig and lashed it to the hull of the mule, utilizing the cargo rings provided for the purpose. Then he lifted the mule to five hundred feet and walked it on its retros to the next charge site. The black lake receded into the distance, and he brought the mule back down and went out into the sunlight. He was unlashing the rig when the Hell Wind hit. It slammed him against the hull and raised the interior temperature of his suit to a blistering # Fahrenheit. His fingers found a pair of cargo rings and clamped around them. He wound his legs about the nearby drill. Furious, the Wind upped its momentum, raising the interior temperature of his suit still higher, flattening him against the hull. He felt the drill move and for a moment feared that the rig would be torn from its lashings, he along with it, to go tumbling across the surface of the hand and out into space. But the lashings somehow held. Even in his agony he could not help wondering how the Wind had reached so far outward from the sun. Such winds, born deep in the solar vortices known as sunspots, blasted Mercury's dayside, penetrated Venus's gown, and had been known to touch the atmosphere of Earth. But this was the Belt and the Belt was beyond Mars. Only hyper-holocaust could have lived so long in the cold caverns of space. He felt it diminish in intensity, but he did not relax his grip on the rings or loosen his legs from their scissors-hold on the drill. He did not trust the Wind any more than he had trusted the giantess in the polka-dot skirt. His body blazed. He thought his veins would burst. And then the pressure vanished altogether and he knew the Wind had departed and that it would not come back. He pried his fingers free from the rings, forced his legs from around the drill and sagged to the ground. After a while the interior temperature of his suit returned to normal. He realized that he was trembling and knew that he needed a drink. A fter inspecting the rig and finding it undamaged he entered the mule, unsuited and climbed the companionway to his cabin. He poured a drinking glass nearly full of bourbon and raised it to his lips. The first swallow exploded in his stomach and sent shockwaves all the way to his fingers and toes. However, not until the glass was empty did he attain the lucid interval that precedes alcoholic deterioration of the thought processes and become able to analyze his situation objectively. storms seldom traveled as far sunward as the Belt did not necessarily call into question the appearance of the giantess in the polka-dot skirt. (#) The fact that Hell Winds had never been known to reach beyond the orbit of Earth did not necessarily imply that one of them could not. (#) The nearly coincidental appearance of two such phenomena involved astronomical odds but, given eternity, such odds were not insuperable and the cosmic racing form was both big enough and broad enough to admit them. storm nor the Hell Wind nor their juxtaposition in space and time could be credited to an attempt on the part of some cosmic force -- or, to call a spade a spade, a supreme being -- to thwart the rape of the hand. thermocups of coffee, resuited and went back outside. The fingers were almost touching the sun and the black lake had spread into the cwm of the palm, inundating the pilgrimship. He set up the rig and got it going on the second shaft. By the time he finished placing the second charge, the fingers had obscured the sun and the waters of the black lake were lapping against the feet of the rig. He relashed the rig to the hull, lifted the mule and saw the sun again. He had made a metal map of the hand and put an X where each charge had to be placed. The third X was on the floor of a rill. He drilled the shaft, impulsified the third cylinder, dropped it down into the darkness and went on to site number four. He was near the eastern slope of the cwm now and in the distance he could see the passlike depression that separated the thumb mound from the outer palm. He made good time placing the fourth charge -- even so, the waters of the black lake reached the rig before he finished. They filled almost the entire cwm now and the fingers wore gloves blacker than space. He went on to the fifth and final site. It was high on the slope of the outer palm, but the surface was reasonably level and he had no great trouble setting up the rig. When the shaft was finished he impulsified the fifth cylinder, dropped it and stepped back from the rig. Except for the interruptions the Hell Wind, the operation had come off smoothly. The charges were perfectly placed and the lode section could not fail to break free when the impulsors were activated. It was as good as in his pocket. He waited to savor the selfsatisfaction that was rightfully his. Oddly, it did not materialize. He felt strangely depressed. He ascribed the first tremor to a temporary loss of equilibrium. The second sent him staggering backward. The third opened a long five-foot-wide fissure beneath one leg of the rig, causing the big machine to topple. As it fell it twisted clockwise, and the drill swung around in a wide arc. Starmaster saw it coming and had plenty of time to get out of its way, but he could not move. He was stunned. The likelihood of tectonic activity had been so slight he had not even included it in his calculations. The drill struck him in the chest and sent him tumbling down into the cwm. He came finally to rest on his back, and the waters of the black lake closed over him. H e was unconscious for a subjective second. Objectively, an hour went by. During that secondhour, he experienced the black moment once again. He hovered like a tiny star amid the immensities and watched the majestic march of the island universes across space-time. Once again he grew acquainted with the awesome cold and the abysmal emptiness of intergalactic space. When both became unendurable the moment passed. What frightening fact was his sub-conscious trying to get across to him? T here was a heaviness in his chest, but he could breathe. He sat up, came laboriously to his feet. The black lake overflowed the cwm now in the distance, the fingers rose up like the towers of a huge black castle. A hundred feet up the slope, next to the ruined rig, stood the mule. He stumbled up the incline and let himself through the locks. Apparently the handquake had done no damage. After climbing the companionway to the bridge he ran a quick test on all systems. Everything checked out perfectly. Pain, absent until now', began in his chest and spread throughout his thorax. A brief but thorough palpation informed him that at least two of his ribs were cracked and that his right collar-bone was broken. It was imperative, therefore, that he separate the lode section and leave for Earth at once. He extended his fingers toward the controls, but he did not touch them. He could not. He had been and the Hell Wind and he had even succeeded in rationalizing their juxtaposition in space and time. But the quake was something else. Granted, the shafts he had sunk might have precipitated it -- but when you added the quake to the storm and the Wind, you got an astronomical set of odds that even the cosmic racing-form would not accept. Before he returned to Earth he had to free himself from the terrible doubt those odds gave rise to. The intellectual universe he lived in had no room for a supreme being. For the sake of his peace of mind, for the sake of his future, he had to prove to his own satisfaction that the asteroid was not God's right hand and that therefore God did not exist. There was only one way for him to do so. Lifting the mule, he began walking it along the edge of the fissure. He estimated the distance carefully, then brought the mule down and descended to the cargo compartment. There he impulsified a sixth cylinder. Then he let himself through the locks and dropped the cylinder into the fissure. Reentering the mule, he lifted it again, walked it a similar distance and repeated the procedure. The fissure was erratic. It extended in the direction of the thumb ridge for a while, then veered sharply westward toward the fingers. Again, it veered, this time to the south, and zigzagged partway across the palm. Finally it veered to the west again as though the hand, in trying to kill him, had paved the way for its own destruction. Altogether he dropped nine charges, the last one near the base of the monolithic third finger, a little way from where the fissure came to an end. His pain was unendurable by this time; every breath he took made it more so. He could barely raise his right arm, and his legs were heavy with fatigue. But his determination to prove that God did not exist exalted him and gave him strength. Once again in the mule, he closed the locks, unsuited, climbed the companionway to the bridge and stood before the console. He lifted the mule straight up, watched the hand diminish in the floorscope. When it shrank to human size he put the mule in orbit. Then he depressed the first five activators. He saw the hand tremble. Then he saw the crescent-shaped lode section part ponderously from the palm. Immediately he seized it with the attractors and began pulling it toward the mule. When it was within five hundred feet he neutralized the attractors, locking it in tow position. His knees were trembling. His mouth felt dry as du.st. He activated impulsors ten and fourteen. There was no immediate reaction -- then, suddenly, the hand shuddered and the third finger broke away. Grimly he activated eight and eleven. Again, no immediate reaction -- then a shudder more profound than before. He gaped. Awesomely, the remnant of the hand broke in two. He depressed the remaining activators in swift succession and the two major sections of the hand shattered into rubble. Only the thumb and third finger remained intact. The third finger had already drifted off into space and presently the rubble began rotating around the thumb. Light from the faraway sun shone on the little universe, bequeathing day to the picayune planets Starmaster had created. eyes to the heavens and waited for God's left hand to appear and smite him from the sky. He waited and he waited. After a while he realized that he had sunk to his quaking knees and was praying for it to appear -- and suddenly he knew that what he had done, he had done not to prove there was no God, but to prove there was. All he saw was the vast, indifferent face of space. After an eternity he climbed numbly to his feet, threw the mule into full drive and began the journey back to Earth. He would never know the black moment again, but he would never know peace either... Back to Earth, to walk once more among his fellow men aloof, unfettered -- and alone.  No doubt there are probability worlds where James WhKe is a doctor, an ex-fighter pilot or a science-fiction illustrator... From an early age Jim wanted to be a doctor, but for pressing reasons -- he had to go to work -- could not complete his education. Bitterly disappointed, he joined the Air Training Corps with the intention of becoming a fighter pilot. But when he was vicious double blow. First, the war ended. Second, he contracted diabetes, preventing case. His two great ambitions dashed, Jim began frittering away his twenties on hobbies like photography, ballroom dancing, painting and -- unable to rid himself of the urge to practice medicine -- first-aid and home nursing studies with the local Red Cross. But once again fate went against him and he was forced to resign from even the amateur, part-time pursuit of the medical arts. During a session on the bathing of babies, while he was practicing, with his fellow students -- most of whom were girls -- the head of the full-size doll he was using came off. Like many s-f writers, Jim started his career in fandom -- but not as a fannish columnist or the like. He went in for the pictorial side. As art editor of that wellknown Irish fanzine Slant, he was all set to emulate his s-f illustrator heroes Hubert Rogers and Gerard Quinn when eye trouble caused the White school of wood and linocut illustrating to close, due to a strike of the pupils. (Pun intended.) So he turned to authorship. Between fannish writings he produced his first professional story, written as a protest against all the atomic doom tales then current -- it had a happy ending. John Carnell, then editor of New Worlds and now Europe's leading s-f agent and anthologist, bought it and asked for more. That was in #. But not until # and many stories later did Jim write his first Sector General yarn, launching the famed s-f medical series that has run to three booklength collections. This series, with its weird and wonderful collection of e-t doctors and patients, owes its origin both to his interest in medicine and to E. E. Smith, whose novel "Gray Lensman" first hooked Jim on s-f. It was Smith's treatment of Worsel and Tregonsee and the other visually horrifying e-ts that first showed Jim aliens could be sympathetic characters. Toward critics of his work Jim's attitude is flexible. Those who like his stuff, he says, show rare qualities of sensitivity and inteliigence while those who don't, don't -- but he does tend to get irritated when they make factual mistakes by calling him English or Scottish. It isn't that he is intolerant of the other tribes who inhabit the United Kingdom with him. Some of his best friends wear stiff upper lips or kilts, and he honestly wouldn't mind if his daughter married one. But he is a sbc-foot-three Irishman and wishes critics should get that much right, at least. Jim is married to a chorus girl -- his wife Peggy sings with the local operatic society. She is also active in Gilbert and Sullivan fandom, gives Jim initial critiques on his first drafts and provides other fringe benefits. For the past five years he has been a publicist for the local aircraft company. Shorts -- and if he is not airborne as often as a fighter pilot, he does get plenty of chances to fly and is even allowed to steer sometimes. A suspiciously large number of his protagonists are doctors, which means that he can experience all the drama of medicine without actually risking anyone's life. And, he has now found, painting word pictures gives him much more satisfaction than fooling with the other kind. So, one way or another, his ambitions are being realized, and ha thinks that this is probably the best of all probability worlds. This is the account of the first major accident to a passengercarrying spaceship. The ship was Eurydice, crewed by Captain three passengers to Ganymede in the Jovian system. The launch was outwardly uneventful. Eurydice lifted into Earth orbit, completed her scheduled two swings around the home planet, successfully dropped off her boosters to complement Orbital Space Station Three, as planned, and accelerated into Jovian orbit. Passengers were made comfortable, introduced to weightlessness, given survival training, drilled in the use of life pods -- Eurydice's equivalents of an ocean-going vessel's lifeboats. ever, felt he had detected a malfunction in the ship's engines during Ifioff and subsequent course corrections and acceleration. His gate and the trouble was traced to an oversized actuator rod ininjured in the course of the investigation to be incapacitated for the rest of the trip -- he was subjected to intense radiation and blinded: he received an arm wound; radioactive matter entered his lungs. The ship's nuclear reaction mass also began to overheat dangerously. The decision was made to abort the voyage and return to Space Station Three for repairs to both the ship and her captain. IX i you read?" Mercer had his ears on the captain's respiration and his eyes on the passenger-vision pickup, which showed a fair amount of socializing going on in the module and two couples dancing -- mixed all-in wrestling might have been a better description -- in the weightless section forward of the tank. He did not pay much attention to the exchanges between Prescott and Eurydice ground control -- they were too technical for him in any case -- until the acid tones of the first officer became noticeably more caustic. "... a combination of minor oversights, none of which would have been individually troublesome," Prescott was saying. "Next thing you'll tell me that they could have happened to anybody." "The man will be fired, of course, with the others who missed his slip-up. But it was basically a clerical error and he was under stress at the time. A domestic problem was worrying him, his wife was expecting their first -- " "I hope," said Prescott savagely, "that she bore him a litter of lizards. But I'm more concerned with effects right now. Just as soon as possible we shall apply full thrust. But first, before we swap ends to decelerate, I must know if the nuclear propulsion system is safe. The accident knocked out most of our sensory circuits in that area and, although the remaining instrumentation gives a confused but not exactly dangerous picture, I'm worried about that slight rise in temperature reported in the water tank." "I'm not questioning your decisions, Prescott, but aren't you over-reacting to all this? The chances are that you will have no further trouble and that the damage is easily repairable. Maybe the captain's condition is not quite as serious as you think and in the heat of the moment Mercer may have mistaken the temperature of the tank water and "Unlikely," said Prescott. "There have been a few hot moments since and he hasn't" "Very well, Prescott, carry out your abort. We'll allow you half an hour to swap ends -- no point in wasting time if you are set on doing it -- and give you the numbers for full deceleration and insertion into the return orbit. Do you still want the recovery ship team on standby?" "Don't ask stupid questions." "Very well. Eurydice control out." Prescott took a deep breath and turned to Mercer. "You may have thought that I was about to compliment you back there. Don't set too much store by that -- I just can't abide outsiders criticizing one of the family, even a new, untrained, foundling member like you. "But I've a job for you," he went on. "Go back and recheck the tank temperature. You'll find insulated bottles in the bulkhead locker beside the outer seal. Take one. You will see that it has a snap fastening at the neck, that it is double-walled and that there is a thermometer with a yellow disk, which changes color in certain circumstances, between the walls. Go into the lock chamber -- no need to go into the tank itself until we have some idea of how much radioactive contamination you left behind after your first bath. Open one of the inner valves they are plainly labeled with operating instructions. Press the neck of your bottle against the outlet and keep it there until it is nearly full. In free fall the water will not pour out so you may have to wait for a few minutes for it to fill " "I should do this," said Neilson suddenly. "After all. I'm still dressed for the job." "Don't think I haven't noticed," said Prescott sourly. "Pull up your shorts, damn it. I have enough problems on this ship without having my sensibilities blasted by the sight of your hairy navel. And I don't want you or your eyes to leave that board. MacArdle will monitor the captain's breathing and watch your board, Mercer, so move." Since he would not have to go into the tank itself Mercer did not bother to change. He put on a purposeful expression and pretended not to notice the passengers who spoke to him on the way. The weightless dancers were not noticing anyone but each other. He found an insulated bottle and entered the chamber quickly, pressed the bottle's mouth against the outlet and began turning the valve. The metal felt very warm. Suddenly the bottle thumped against the palm of his hand. He stared at it stupidly, realizing that it was already full and that it should not have filled so quickly. As he withdrew and sealed the bottle, steam and scalding gobbets of water spurted from the outlet, blinding fog. Mercer let go of the bottle, wrapped his hand in his cap and twisted shut the outlet valve while with his other hand he groped for the evacuation button. He heard the combination suction pump and air blowerthe only means of rapidly emptying a compartment full of weightless water making rude, gurgling sounds. But the chamber did not clear completely -- steam and a fine spray of scalding droplets were spurting from the edges of the inner seal. Mercer retrieved his cap and test bottle, whose thermometer showed a temperature close to boiling point -- the disk Prescott had mentioned had turned from yellow to muddy brown. Mercer felt like a half-boiled lobster with an icy cold lump of fear in its belly. Even though he did not know what exactly was happening, he did know that it was deadly serious and that he had to get back to Prescott fast. T he passengers outside had other ideas, however. As soon as he came out they surrounded him, laughing and trying to grab him. "There's a black crow among the lovebirds," said one of the men. "A wet, black crow." "That isn't fair," said one of the girls. "You promised us a swim and now you've had two and -- " "With your clothes on!" added another girl who had succeeded in grabbing his ankle. He wanted to yell at her to let go or he would kick her pretty, laughing face, that he had no time for horseplay at a time like this. But instead he said, "No ma'am, space-washing. I dump my wet uniform into a lock, open it to space and the moisture boils off. It takes out the wrinkles, too. Excuse me I mustn't catch cold -- " When he entered the control room a few minutes later Prescott, one hand gripping the engineer's headrest, was hovering over Neilson's board. He said, "Mercer, you do not launder your uniform in that incredible fashion, unless you don't mind ice crystals in your underpants -- and your ability to lie convincingly under pressure worries me -- " He broke off as he saw Mercer's face, then put out his free hand for the bottle. "It's hot," said Mercer. Prescott's features went stiff. "In both senses of the word." He handed it to Neilson. "Well?" The engineer took one look, then said very calmly, "This damn board is half dead and the rest of it is sick. Getting no response at all from the sensors usually means a complete power cut-off or a simple circuit failure. This tells me that what we have is circuit failure -- probably the cable looms are melted through and the amount of heat conducted through the stern to the tank tells me that we have a reactor meltdown situation. At the moment the dampers are in just far enough to give power for lighting and lifesupport, but they aren't locked and now I can't lock them. When the rod actuators melt they will pop out and the reactor will go critical." "Have you enough power," said Prescott, "to engage with the passenger module?" Neilson nodded. "Then do so." Prescott swung himself into his couch as the control room began gradually to share the spin and apparent gravity of the passenger section. He undipped the public address mike, paused for a moment, then said calmly, "Attention, ladies and gentlemen. Please stand clear of the survival pod hatches. They will open in five seconds. This is not a drill. We are preparing to abandon ship." The words sounded frighteningly final. Too much was happening too quickly and Mercer desperately wanted to go back in time, if only for a few minutes, to give himself a chance to assimilate the present. Inanely he said, "When I was in the tank chamber the inner seal looked as if it might There was a loud thump and the edge of the door he was gripping jerked under his hand. On the pa.ssenger viewscreen he could see to the tank. "It just has," said Prescott. "But the outer seal is much stronger and should hold for a while. See what you can do for your passengers." Mercer had trouble negotiating the normally weightless corridor to the passenger compartment because the gravity-free forward and stern sections were now sharing the rotation of the central module. This was necessary if the four big, widely curving supportswhich carried the power and control links fore and aft and allowed the passenger section to rotate independently of the rest of the ship were not to si?ag the life pods on their way out. The effect on Mercer was that his feet were pulling one-eighth G while his head and chest were weightless and coriolus force was giving him an extra twist just for luck. But Prescott was not allowing time for anyone to think, much less feel confused. "Attention, ladies and gentlemen. The survival pod hatches are now open. Please board three to a pod in a brisk but orderly manner, just as you did during the drill. The hatches will be sealed prior to pod ejection in five minutes." M ercer was in the passenger section by then, furiously running over in his head the emergency instructions he had memorized only hours earlier. He called loudly, "Don't forget to leave behind all personal effects that are metal or have sharp edges manicure scissors, jewelry with large stones or anything that might puncture the fabric of the survival pod. Don't worry about losing them -- you will be fully compensated for their actual or sentimental value." The last was a stupid thing to say at a time like this, thought Mercer. The words simply popped out. He could imagine what Prescott would have to say about them. Unless, of course, his subconscious had been working and had decided that appearing to worry over trifles at a time when all hell was breaking loose was also an effective means of giving reassurance. But suddenly all subtle methods of reassurance became superfluous as the outer seal of the tank began to give. Steam billowed into the passenger module, cutting visibility to a few yards, while a high-pitched whistle made hearing just as difficult. Mercer leaned toward the nearest couch mike. "Control, give me maximum lighting, please." Someone screamed, probably thinking that there had been an explosion, as the lights went up to full strength. As a result the passengers who had been standing around, too stunned by events to move, began piling into the pods. The process was not orderly but it was fast. Mercer stumbled over three persons trying to get into a pod at the same time. He dragged two of them back -- no effort under quarter-G conditions and fed them in at five-second intervals. A few yards farther a woman was rolling up the cabin dividers. "We won't be using them again, ma'am," Mercer shouted. "Get into your pod." He continued from pod to pod, not wasting time on words when a good hard push would serve instead, but usually finding that the heads and shoulders were disappearing with satisfactory rapidity. "Anyone who hasn't found a place?" he called. "Speak up, please." "Bobby! Where's Bobby " He glimpsed a moving shape in the fog and went after it. The extra lighting was making the thickening clouds of steam more dazzlingly opaque now and was not helping visibility at all. He gripped Mrs. Mathewson by the arm and pulled her toward the nearest hatch. "Have you room for one more?" "No -- full up," replied a voice from inside. Mercer swore, not believing it. Still gripping Mrs. Mathewson, he kneeled apd reached into the pod with his free hand. He felt the tops of four heads. The pod certainly was full. "Mercer, hurry." He ignored Prescott's voice in the earpiece and that of the distraught girl on the other side as he moved to the next pod and repeated the question. The white blur of a face appeared, then a pair of hands. "Listen, ma'am," he shouted as gently as he could, "Bobby is safe. People feel protective toward children and he was probably first into someone's pod minutes ago. So justno, let go of my neck. He'll be all right, I promise you -- " He was holding her by the armpits over the open pod and a pair of hands were trying to pull her in. Suddenly he kissed her steamand tear-streaked face. She was so startled that she lost her grip on his neck and disappeared into the pod. I've been doing a lot of things without thinking today, he thought, and they've all seemed to turn out right... But just then he badly wanted to dive into the nearest pod, kick and claw his way to the bottom -- no matter how many other people were in it -- and wait until Prescott flung them clear. The whistle of escaping steam had taken on a deeper, burbling tone that probably meant that the seal was ready to give and that a major explosion would come at any moment. And as he moved from pod to pod, shouting for anyone who had not found a place to call out, he found himself splashing through a halfinch of nearly boiling water. The hatch lips were only an inch above deck level. The fog was unpleasantly hot and it was difficult to breathe. He filled his lungs carefully, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Is everyone aboard the pods?" From somewhere in the fog a voice called shrilly, then began to cough. Mercer headed for the sound until a short gray ghost loomed out of the dazzling mist. It said tearfully, "I'm looking for my mother." Mercer grabbed the boy by the waist and splashed toward the nearest open hatch. There he turned him upside down and said very clearly, "Your mother is safe, but her pod is overcrowded so you'll have to take this one. Wriggle your way to the bottom as fast as you can -- there isn't much time and nobody will object when they see who you are. You'll probably have to take charge of this lifeboat, Mathewson. Good luck and in you go" "Room for a small one," he called into the pod. There was no reply, but then he had not really been asking a question. When Bobby's heels disappeared Mercer turned so that his back was to the sound of the monstrous steam whistle astern, the only means of getting his bearings because his eyes were closed. He held his cap over his nose and mouth to make breathing a little easier. When he stumbled against a couch he remembered something and bent down. "Prescott, they're all aboard." "Return to control." The passage leading to the control room was slightly cooler he did not need his cap to breathe through and he could even see a short distance, specifically to a recessed basket marked Crew Laundry with a couple of rolled-up coveralls inside. He took one set as he passed. The whistle from the stern was becoming louder and deeper, but it was not as loud as the clang of the survival pod hatches going down. X your couch," said Prescott. "We won't be going anywhere for a few minutes." Nobody seemed to be doing anything except waiting. Mercer did as he was told and watched the steam that had come in with him being shredded and sucked in by the airconditioning. The control room was so quiet that he could hear even the captain's breathing. The silence was frightening, giving Mercer no chance to do anything but think. "Neilson," he said suddenly, tossing the soiled coveralls toward the engineer, "it's hot out." "Bless you," said Neilson. "With my fair Nordic complexion I boil easy." He looked inquiringly at Prescott. The first officer nodded. "Put them on. And shut up, both of you." Outside came in. "Eurydice Control. We have a suggestion here that you retain your passengers and dump the sick reactor. Venting the tank astern should nudge it away from you and you will have a fairly comfortable ship to live in until the recovery vessel reaches you." Prescott looked at Neilson, who turned down the corners of his mouth. "Eurydice. We have already looked at that idea. Negative. We have virtually r;o control of any stern system other than the tank emergency vent." Prescott leaned toward his board, paused, then went on, "We are releasing the survival pods now. Time is sixteen-oh-five plus fifteen seconds, launch zone." "We copy, Eurydice." Mercer twisted around to the direct-vision port. He could see five deflated pods tumbling away from the ship, looking like stubs of discarded cigarettes. They were falling away at eight feet per second, the velocity imparted by the passenger module's centrifugal force of one-quarter G. But they shared Eurydice's forward velocity so that they kept pace with the ship, merely spreading out like a ring of receding moons. Suddenly they appeared to swell and come nearer, but it was only an illusion created by their plastic canopies pressurized to full size. Still receding, they began to slide slowly past the viewport. The crew survival sections were much closer to the ship's axis than had been the pod housings so that, to release them with the same velocity away from the ship, Eurydice had to increase her spin to compensate. "More trouble," said Neilson quietly. Control was alert. "Go ahead, Eurydice." "The tangential jets are spinning us up to release speed, but the circuit for cutting them just died. I can't shut them down. We'll have to release exactly on the pip, twelve minutes and seven seconds from -- now." "We copy." "Set the timers to release automatically at that time," said Prescott. "Do you still have control to the stern emergency vent?" Neilson showed crossed fingers and said, "At the moment, yes." "Set a timer on it to vent ten seconds after we release. Can you estimate the strength and duration of the thrust and the acceleration to terminal velocity, allowing for the absence of the crew segments, rendezvous marker and the reducing weight of water in the tank?" "Some of the water has already vented into the passenger section," Neilson replied, "so it will stay with the ship and boil off very slowly. But I have no way of telling how much there is." The conversation was so quiet and matter-of-fact that Mercer wanted to shout and break things. But it was quiet because the control room door was tightly closed and the mikes in the passenger section had been switched off and, apparently, calmness could be just as contagious as panic. He found himself saying quietly, "Between the time the tank's outer seal gave way and I left the passenger section, eight minutes ago, the water had risen halfway up the rims of the survival hatches -- about a half-inch. Does that help?" "It's better than making a blind guess," said Neilson. "Lei's see -- we know the deck area of the passenger section and have a rough idea of the volume of water covering it, but add a little for the water content of the steam-" "Eurydice Control. Please clarify. What are your immediate intentions?" "Eurydice," Prescott replied. "We are not sure if we have a pile meltdown or a bang situation. If a bangwe want to be as far away from it as possible and we also want the radioactive debris to be well clear of the pickup area when the recovery ship arrives. Since our reactor controls are out we propose venting the tank through the stern and bypassing the reactor. Structural heating is such that we should have a crude steam jet that will accelerate the ship ahead and, I hope, clear of the survivors before the bang. Neilson?" "Roughly two feet a second, rising to three as she sheds reaction mass," said the engineer. "If the structural heating extends to the passenger module the water there will also vaporize and vent through the stern -- but the additional thrust will be negligible." "We understand, Eurydice. The recovery ship countdown is now at minus ninety-six hours and three minutes. It will be out there in just over five days." "You don't understand," said Prescott sharply. "We don't need a fast rescue. Take your time and check the nuts and bolts. You cannot risk a launch until Eurydice has blown or is a safe distance ahead of us." And if it went critical before then, Mercer knew, there would be no point in launching the recovery ship at all. vous beacon launched at sixteen twelve and eight seconds. Minimal lateral velocity -- just enough to let it clear the steam "Timers set and checked," said Neilson. "Beacon radiating," said MacArdle. Prescott took a deep breath and looked quickly around the control room. He said, "We shall all feel a little safer in our cabins. Neilson and MacArdle, get going. Mercer, hold a moment." Steam was coming from the airconditioning grills now and when Neilson and MacArdle left, the rush of steam from the passage outside dropped the visibility in the control room to a few feet. Prescott closed the door and moved to Mercer's couch. "We have a few minutes to spare," he said quietly, as if he had days. "Enough to answer a few questions or to let you get anything off your chest that is bothering you." Mercer was on the edge of his couch, his legs and arms bent and body poised for a dive toward the door. He was waiting for the fatal thump of the steam explosion aft that would blow the tank's outer seal, fill the ship with superheated vapor and trap Prescott and himself in the control room to boil in their own body juices. He wanted to kick the first officer out of the way and escape right now. But he saw a look in Prescott's eyes that was strange in these circumstances, yet familiar. Mercer had seen it on a few occasions when one of his colleagues had become too deeply involved with the suffering of a seriously ill patient. Prescott, he realized suddenly, was worried about him. He was inviting Mercer to bawl him out with no witnesses present, ' hoping to relieve Mercer's fear tensions. Mercer wanted suddenly to laugh, but he got control of himself in time to smile instead. He said, "Permission to go to my cabin, sir?" Prescott looked relieved. "I've been hard on you, Mercer, for two reasons. One is that you have been doing penance for the sins of your predecessor and the other is that I am hard on everybody. But now you have been dropped into it along with everyone else and there is time neither to apologize nor to tell you exactly what you should do -- " "Eurydice Control. We have looked at your steam jet idea. There is a strong possibility that venting your water astern will check the meltdown and delay detonation for a considerable period. Thought you would like to know." "Eurydice. Thank you," said Prescott, then went on: "So you could do worse than spend the first few days in your couch, studying the emergency instructions. An extra complication is that the pods and crew segments will be spinning or tumbling slowlybecause of our control failure the ship's power lines were still connected to them at the instant of release and gave them an off-center tug as they left. But don't worry about the spin, there is no hurry to correct it. Just try to calm your passengers as quickly as possible, organize your communications and give them as much help as possible. Good advice is about all you can give them, but don't forget to take some of it yourself. I'll be in touch. Let's go." Control said, "Good luck, Eurydice. " Without replying Prescott slid back the door. Hot, choking fog and the blast of a gigantic steam whistle came in as Mercer and Prescott, in that order, went out. Centrifugal force had changed his sick-bay cabin beyond all recognition, Mercer thought as he stood on the transparent canopy, gripping two nearly vertical bunks. The protective cover had already been released from his canopy and he could look down past his feet at the apparently motionless and undamaged ship and at stars whirling past like a blizzard of jewels. A faint, wavering line held its position in the starry storm -- the receding survival pods thrown off minutes earlier. He should talk to them -- as soon as he discovered what he was supposed to say. A few seconds after he had found the emergency instructions booklet he heard a series of thuds and clicks as the cabin went automatically to internal power and his feet drifted away from the transparent floor. The stars did not rush past so quickly, but they had a twisting motion which told him that his cabin was no longer spinning evenly with the ship but was tumbling free in the wake of the passenger capsules. He caught a glimpse of another crew segment, the ship whirling past and the incandescent streak of the sun. Mercer checked on the captain's condition, strapped himself into his couch and tried to read. Outside, the abandoned Eurydice was growing smaller each time it whirled past, but he could not see any sign of damage. The sun dazzled him a split-second later. He rolled the anti-glare cover across the canopy. If the ship blew there was no point in risking being blinded by two suns. XI Since only four of the five cabins used by the ship's officers double as survival modules, the medical officer and first officer will share the sickbay segment, which is fitted with pod frequency radio even more powerful than that carried by the captain's survival segment. -- Emergency Instructions I F HE had not been lucky and the captain unlucky, Mercer would have had to share his segment with Prescott. As things were, the first officer was now spinning away in the captain's module. According to the emergency instructions, the captain's module contained communications equipment that enabled it to maintain contact with ground control as well as allowing two-way contact with the other officers and, to a limited extent, with passenger pods in its vicinity. One frequency allowed its occupant to listen at any time to what was going on in the other officers' modules. Another channel allowed them to call him but not each "other. The officers had a channel for speaking to the passengersjust one channel, unfortunately, so that they had to address all the pod occupants at once. Another allowed them to eavesdrop on the pods in case trouble developed among the survivors. But this was also a single channel, which meant that the officer using it would hear any and all passengers who happened to be speaking at any given time. It was not difficult to understand why the captain had to be able to keep close tabs onhis officers and a two-way line open to home -- or, for that matter, why the sick-bay's radio had most of its power channeled into the pod frequency. The survivors were expected to need medical advice more than any other kind and, with the distance between the potential patients and their doctor increasing every second, advice was all he could give them. The sooner he started giving it the better, but he did not want to begin until he understood the problems in more depth than did the survivors and was able to give answers that would sound authoritative. A large proportion of the manual was devoted to instructions for space officers on how to maneuver and navigate the segment and make the best use of its services and accessories. While the instructions for trained astronauts were unnecessarily technical, Mercer thought that the section dealing with passengers seemed to be aimed at people with a mental age of twelve. The medical side was barely mentioned, but the psychological problems he was told to expect seemed incredibly melodramatic. He had to remind himself that even on Earth people managed to do some dramatic things to themselves and each other. When they were spinning through eternity in a tenfoot plastic bubble, driven close to madness by fear and the utter, savage strangeness of it all, it might be easier for them to forget that they were civilized beings. Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself for lying in his couch, reading, a solid, well-furnished structure around him and the sunlight a pulsing amber glow behind the canopy filters. He tried to compare his condition with those prevailing in the survival pods, where three or more passengers were tumbling together in a fragile plastic bubble and he could not readily imagine the total contrast. Even if some of the passengers kept their heads and tried to read the simple instructions printed at intervals on the interior of the plastic wall -- the bubbles were transparent and the glare of the sun would probably make the texts impossible to see clearly until screens could be made completely operative. He had been reading for all of twenty-two minutes, by his watch. The technical passages he could study later, but the instructions regarding the passengers should be obeyed as soon as possible. A pullout sheet at the back of the book contained pod numbers and spaces for the names of the occupants. Mercer taped it to the bulkhead beside him and undipped his mike. "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said slowly and distinctly. "It is less than thirty minutes since we abandoned ship. You are probably becoming accustomed to being inside a survival pod by now and are beginning to realize that the accommodation leaves a lot to be desired. However, you are absolutely safe and the spinning movement of your pods is nothing to worry about." He paused to let this reassurance sink in. Then; "Some of you may already have read the instructions for checking spin and have put them into effect. To those who haven't done so or who may have problems I shall be able to give instructions in due course. But first I must check that everyone got safely off the ship. Relatives and friends may have become separated and I must begin by making roll call of all survivors so that I can reassure these people. Would the occupants of Pod One please speak their names -- and would everyone else keep absolutely quiet while Pod One reports in?" ceiver switch and discovered that all his charges were talking at the tops of their voices. He tried again. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said sharply, "you are all speaking at once. I must insist on silence except for the occupants of Pod One." He became more and more insistent as the minutes slipped past, but he still could not silence the voices from Pods Two through Sixteen. Twice he very nearly had it when only two pods were talking at once and he almost understood what Pod One was trying so patiently to tell him, but then everyone else seemed to sense that his or her own personal demands for assistance, advice or information had a chance of being heard and Mercer's speaker poured out only a highpitched babble. "All of you, be quiet! Pod One, come in, please." "Pod One. For the fiftieth time -- Mr. Wallace, Mr. Rutherford, Mr. Gunning." "Thank you. One," said IVercer, noting the names on his sheet. "Pod Two?" "Mrs. Wallace, Mr. Simpson, Mr. McCall. We can't get this damned thing to stop spinning and the sun is -- " "Thank you. Two," said Mercer. He relented slightly. "Each pod has one pair of anti-glare goggles in its medical pack. Try to remember the pod sequences from the instruction film and let the person with the goggles supervise. I'll come back to you as soon as the tally of passengers is complete. Pod Three?" "Mrs. Mathewson, Mr. Stone, Mr. Kirk." "Pod Four?" "Mr. and Mrs. Corrie." "Pod Five?" "M iss Moore, Miss Sampson, Mrs. Kirk and Mr. Eglin." Mercer made a note to check on the life-support duration of a pod with four occupants, wondering wryly if the psychological problems would turn out to be a much greater threat to the pod's safety than a possible shortage of food and air. "Pod Six?" The interruptions were few, and Mercer worked steadily through his checklist until he came to Pod Eleven, which did not answer. He tried again. "Pod Eleven, come in please." Again silence answered him. Mercer turned up the gain on his receiver to maximum. The silence grew noisier as the sounds of breathing and body movements coming from the other pods were suddenly magnified. Someone coughed deafeningly. From Pod Three Mrs. Mathewson screamed: "Bobby, what's happened to Bobby?" Mercer turned down the volume quickly. He, too, had begun to wonder what had happened to the boy. It was by no means certain that Bobby was aboard Eleven. Perhaps nobody was aboard Eleven. The ship had carried a more than adequate supply of survival pods for the number of passengers aboard. So far he had one pod with two people in it, two pods with four people on board and the rest with three occupants, so that it was probable that in the confusion and poor visibility at least one pod had been launched empty. "Pod Twelve, please." While he jotted down the names of the passengers on Twelve and then Thirteen, Mercer began to worry that Eleven's radio might be faulty. Where was the boy? "Pod Fourteen?" "M -- Mathewson." Mercer wanted badly to express his relief. Then he thought about the game he had been playing with young Mathewson and all at once it seemed to be a good idea, considering what he knew of the boy's background, to go on playing it. "Very well, Mathewson, please list the names of your crew," he said briskly and waited. "Just -- me." Mercer wanted to say something, anything, that would reassure the boy, but he needed time to think and he did not have it. All he could do was go on playing the game and hope that Bobby would be able to go on playing it as well. "I copy. Pod Fourteen," he said. "I will come back to you with instructions later, Mathewson. Meanwhile, you have control. Pod Fifteen?" A few minutes later he had the names of the rest of the survivors and was preparing to check them against the passenger list. He switched off the pod frequency to allow himself to concentrate on what he was doing -- with the small part of his mind that was not worrying about the Mathewson boy and his mother. During the initial exchange he had repeated the boy's name simply to let the mother know that he was safe. But now she would know that he was alone as well. His speaker came to life. "Prescott. What progress, Mercer?" for the transmit switch to answer, then lowered his hand. Prescott was listening in. Mercer could do nothing about it short of tearing out the radio installation, cutting himself off from everyone else and risking damage to the other electrical systems in the module. He decided that he did not dislike the sound of Prescott's voice enough to risk any of those eventualities. "I have completed the tally of survivors," he said, "and now I'm cross-checking against the passenger list." "Carry on while I talk. The situation at present is that Eurydice is still pulling ahead of us on her teakettle drive, but slowly. Should the reactor go critical now we would have no chance of escaping. But there is a much better chance that it will simply melt into a radioactive mess and the resulting mild explosion will scatter debris and radiation over a comparatively small volume of space. This would also mean that the fuel slugs we were carrying as cargo for the Ganymede Base reactor will be scattered instead of contributing their megatonnage to the blast. Have you got that?" "Yes," said Mercer. He added: "All the passengers made it to the pods." "Good. I spent a few minutes listening to your rollcall. You seem to be handling things fairly well -- one reason we are minding our own business and letting you do the same. We have had to spend some time on stabilizing our segments and repositioning them so that our directional antennas will bear -- mine on Eurydice Control, Neilson's on the ship in the hope of getting a few minutes' warning before she blows. MacArdle's antenna is on the radio beacon we dropped, which will be on low emission until the time comes for us to burn for rendezvous. I think you were unnecessarily tough on young Mathewson." Mercer double-checked to make sure that the passengers were not receiving the conversation, but he did not reply. "I want your reaction, Mercer." "Sorry, I thought you were simply giving your opinion," said Mercer, not caring if he sounded insubordinate or merely angry. "Maybe I was wrong to handle it that way because I don't know very much about the boy or his mother. But I do know a little. The woman is escaping -- " his tone became clinical -- "whether from an event or a person I don't at the moment know. I do know that the boy's father was far gone on PCs, so perhaps he got himself killed or he suicided during a change party -- or maybe he survived physically but with the original personality lost along with the ability to mentate. The woman, I would say, has never been on PCs -- she was and is too worried and tense and -- well -- normal. The boy shows some signs of emotional disturbance, but is otherwise also normal. He has a uniform and wants to play spaceman." "I noticed that." "The trouble is," Mercer continued, "I have been playing the game with him by treating him -- and talking to him -- as if he were a junior ship's officer. Part of the game was that I did not act toward him as I acted toward the other passengers -- they were asked to do things, he was told. You realize the position I'm in? If I change suddenly from being a superior officer, even a pretend superior officer, to a sentimental softie who tells him that he is a good boy and not to cry, there could be trouble. His father must have subjected him to the same kind of major personality change several times a week and the kid did not like it. The way I see it, rather than be nice sometimes and nasty at others it is better to be consistently nasty." "I've found that myself." "The next step," Mercer went on, "will be to help him stabilize his pod and not sound too much like a worried father while I'm doing it." "Very well. It's your problem." "And his," said Mercer. teen, come in, please." Mercer's voice. Kirk, in Pod Three, hung close against the interior face of the services module, knees drawn up and elbows tight against his chest as he gripped one of the soft plastic handles projecting from it. His eyes were tightly shut despite the anti-glare goggles he Was wearing. His small, hairless head, thick neck, sloping shoulders and wide waist gave him the visual aspect, from the back, of an enormous, lumpy pear. Close beside him Stone was holding on with one hand while the other covered his eyes. "If you're not using the damn things," he whispered, "give them to me." At the other end of Pod Three Mrs. Mathewson also had a hand over her eyes. The other one was gripping a screen attachment point while her head was inclined toward the speaker grill. She wanted to hear what Mercer wanted to say to Bobby in Pod Fourteen. She could not, of course, hear her son. "Please," she whispered. "Sorry," said Stone in an even quieter whisper. "But there are people who take no notice unless you shout at the top of your voice." He tapped Kirk on the shoulder and pointed at the goggles. Kirk let go of the plastic grip with one hand. Without warning he swung it back, hitting Stone in the chest with his closed fist and forearm and sending him spinning slowly across the pod. Then he pulled off the goggles and threw them at Stone. Stone blundered into Mrs. Mathewson's legs and instinctively grabbed them to steady himself, with the result that they both swung into the flexible wall of the pod which gave alarmingly with their weight before bouncing them away again. For a few seconds the whole pod grew bulges and indentations until it reached dynamic equilibrium again and the spinning sun took up an even more complex motion. Squinting against the intermittent glare. Stone fished the goggles out of the air and put them on. He looked at Kirk's back for a long time, but the tinted eyepiece made it impossible to read his expression. Pod Fourteen had evidently answered -- Mercer's voice came again over the speaker, replying to whatever Bobby Mathewson had said. "I know' it isn't. But first you must put on the goggles. You will find them clipped to the underside of the lid with a red cross on it. While you are finding them and putting them on I will explain why this is not like the demonstration film. That film showed a simple abandon-ship sequence that allowed enough time for the pods to be manned and all ship-to-pod connections severed by the ship's officers before launching. The connection that has caused our trouble was a thin cable that carried ship's power to a pod, so that it could be tested or used for survival drills without wasting its own internal power. This cable should have been cut by a remote-controlled knife, which is also, for manual operation, fitted to a handle that projects through the pod hatch cover. But there was too much steam in the passenger compartment and not enough time for me to go around pulling handles, and the circuits to the remote-controlled actuators were dead. "When the pods were launched the cable tugged the pods sideways as they left and gave some of them a twist as well. Normally the pods and cabin segments would not spin at all as they came free, but you have to remember that there is no real difference between starting a spin to change the attitude of your vehicle and stopping it. Just as long as you "No, Mathewson, not that kind of knife, but it cuts just as well. Are you ready?" "It's too complicated," said Mrs. Mathewson. "He's a smart boy," Stone whispered. "Right." The whispers in Pod Three had evidently reached Mercer. "The first thing to do is to lie as flat as you can against the pod skin, the transparent section, and hold on to the molded finger grips in the plastic. Got that? Then move around until the sun seems to be coming from the top of your head, passing in front of you and then moving under your feet. Take your time, Mathewson. There's no hurry about this." Stone stared at the sun -- it was whipping over and around the pod so quickly that he could only guess at its direction of travel. He opened his mouth to speak to Mrs. Mathewson, then remembered that they were supposed to keep the frequency clear for the boy and shut it again. Others, apparently, had forgotten. "Ouiet, everyone," Mercer said. "I lost some of that, Mathewson. Say again, please, slow and easy." "Don't cry, Bobby," said Mrs. Mathewson softly. "Please don't cry." "Going too fast, you say? I see. There is a trick you can try that should beat that one. Get flat against the plastic again, look outside and blink as fast as you can. That will make the sun seem to stop or at least go past in short streaks that will let you know the direction it is traveling in. Ready? Now -- " "It works, by God," breathed Stone. "When you know the direction, get the sun to come from above your head and go down past your face aad under your feet. Keep it moving like that as you start to crawl forward. When you come to the lock section or the services panel -- or when you are crawling over plastic that is not transparent -- try to keep your line of movement straight by looking ahead to the next transparent section to see where the sun is. Got that? Then off you go." Stone began to crawl, trying to keep the incandescent band of the sun vertically in front of him and his body flat against the plastic. He was not very successful in doing either. "I know. But don't try to rush it, Mathewson. Try for a steady even movement and don't worry if the sun appears to drift sideways -- when you have checked the tumbling motion of your vehicle it will be easy for you to turn at right angles and, check the sideways movement. But it will be a slow job because this is a solo mission for you. If you had more people on board they could cooperate, space themselves at intervals around the inside of the pod and crawl in the same direction -- or hold on to each other with their feet against the plastic and walk sideways. "But that is their problem, Mathewson. Yours is that your body mass is small in relation to the mass of the vehicle you are controlling, so you are going to have to put in some long-distance crawling." Stone's erratic crawl took him within a few inches of Kirk. As he moved past he asked quietly, "Are you going to help me?" "I don't know what he's talking about," said Kirk angrily. "He's explaining," said Stone, "so a ten-year-old would understand it." "Sorry, Mathewson, your vehicle does not have attitude jets -- we don't want to make the job too easy, do we? But you do have some power -- two short-duration thrusters that must be used only to make rendezvous with the recovery ship." As Stone crawled past Mrs. Mathewson he whispered. "Don't worry, he'll be all right. But I could use some help and it might take your mind off the boy for a while if you -- " "Stop talking about me. Stone," said Kirk suddenly, "or I'll smash you." "Quiet! Please keep this frequency clear for Pod Fourteen. That's fine, Mathewson -- do another circuit on the same line. You won't notice much change until you've been around twenty or thirty times. If you have any problems call me. Listening out." tion exercise was not going well. Stone found it difficult enough to keep his feet and legs from drifting away from the plastic skin, but Mrs. Mathewson was in a worse predicament -- she had to cover her eyes with one hand, which made crawling virtually impossible, or use both hands and keep her eyes tightly shut, which meant that she could not see where she was going. Stone said, "Suppose we stand at opposite sides of the pod with our heads together in the center and facing each other. If we grip each other's arms and begin walking forward, I can guide us while you keep your eyes shut. Would you like to try it for a while?" But the strain of gripping each other's arms was considerable even if they did not weigh anything and their combined length was much greater than the internal diameter of the pod so that the plastic material bulged outward alarmingly under their feet. But they were beginning to get the hang of it when Stone spoke again. "I never could stand roundabouts as a kid, you know. Or swings. Especially the instant when you stop swinging up and haven't yet started to come down. This -- this bothers me. Some time I'll tell you all about my childish fears, but right now I'm busy. Right foot, Mrs. Mathewson. Now the left, slowly. Right. Left On Pod Five the situation was much less orderly, with four slowly struggling bodies and six plastic after the pod had been released from the ship the screens had been kicked from their fastenings, and there had been too much shouting and crying since then for anyone to think about replacing them. But Mercer's voice on the radio and the Mathewson boy's trouble had brought silence at least. "Let's get ourselves organized," whispered Eglin. "We'll start by clearing these crazy mobiles -- throw them aft at me and I'll refold them. Then try to stand with your heads together in the center and your feet at equal intervals around the skin like the man said. I'll wear the goggles and keep you on the right line while you're walking sideways." Later as the women were rotating like a human three-bladed propeller, Eglin realized that he could keep them on the right line by watching how the sunlight struck each of them as it whirled around. The effect was visually dramatic, he thought, and wished that he had had the time to grab his camera. "Don't rush it, Mathewson. Move slowly and steadily -- try to imagine that you are still and that you are pulling the pod around underneath you. Or imagine that you are on the inside of a treadmill. Do you know what a treadmill is?" Pod Four was already motionless. The opaque, silvered half of its envelope was aimed directly at the sun so that the interior was in darkness and the stars shone cold and clear through the transparent section. It was the first pod to be stabilized and the reason was that Mr. Corrie was an astrophysicist. He had been starting to check his pod's spin before Mercer had left the control room on Eurydice. "I can see Three and Five," he whispered. "Not very clearly and in a few hours they will be too far away to see at all. I wish I knew which was which, but I don't know our direction of travel or whether we are right side up with respect to -- But wait. All the pods are points on the circumference of an expanding circle, so that an imaginary line drawn between Three and Five must pass behind us, so that would give our direction of travel. But I still can't tell whether we're upside down or not -- " "Not so loud, George." "Sorry, I'd forgotten the boy." "Do you realize, George," whispered Mrs. Corrie, whose aptitudes had always lain in the softer sciences, "that we've never been really alone together for the past eighteen years?" "Take another rest, Mathewson. And yes, drink as much and as often as you feel like it. Water will never be a problem, but you don't want to let yourself get overtired or overheated -- you can't just open a window, you know. Your lifesupport system will, in normal conditions, handle the heat generated by three adult bodies at rest, but I may have been working you too hard. While you're resting read the instructions on the food dispenser and the other essential services. If there is anything you don't understand, ask me." In Pod Two Mrs. Wallace was rigging the plastic screens designed to give a measure of privacy to one of the essential services while Simpson and McCall tried to rotate their now stable vehicle into a position that would give them enough light to work without being blinded by the sun. They were doing this by allowing sunshine to strike the inside face of the entry lock but not to shine into the section enclosed by opaque material. "Why will water never be a problem?" she asked, then added: "Oh, I see." A few minutes later McCall, who was studying the instruction booklet, said, "Water will never be a problem because it is recycled, but to me that implies that there will be other problems -- food, air, heat dissipation. It says here that the pod food supply is of a low-residue, highly concentrated kind and that its lack of bulk will mean that we will always feel hungry, even though our bodies will have enough to keep them alive. In a threeperson pod like this one the food will last just under two weeks, according to this chart. But everyone knows that it is possible to reduce food intake when one is...not using energy. I don't get it. People on lifeboats at sea have survived for longer with less food and a desalination kit." "The people on the lifeboats," Simpson said dryly, "also had unlimited quantities of fresh air." "Quiet, please." Mercer again. Mercer's voice erupted from the pod speakers every few minutes for the next three hours. Sometimes what he said was immediately helpful to people in difficulties -- either physical or psychological -- in certain pods. It was as if he had been listening to them -- as indeed he had -- and had slipped in the answer to their particular problem during his next conversation with the Mathewson boy. As a result, pod after pod successfully stabilized itself, and the occupants began to rig screens, familiarize themselves with their rather spartan fittings and generally make themselves as comfortable as possible. There was no panic. Every time a survivor grew excited or even raised his or her voice to an ordinary conversational level, Mercer's voice rattled out of the speaker at all of them to be quiet and keep the channel clear for Pod Fourteen. It was extremely difficult to have a panic reaction in a whisper and knowing that someone else was in a worse fix than their own helped to keep down the fears of many. But finally even the conversation with Pod Fourteen came to an end. "Fine work, Mathewson. Leave rigging your screens until later. Right now you must eat and sleep. That's an order. "You heard that, Mrs. Mathewson -- he's all right. You have an astronaut in the family." In Pod Three Mrs. Mathewson was still holding herself steady with one hand while the other covered her eyes, even though the interior was screened and shaded from the sun. She was smiling and large, weightless tears were being squeezed between her fingers. Mercer's voice: "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. Are there any of you -- apart from myself -- who have not yet been able to stabilize your pod?" Agoing, Mercer?" Unlike the uncluttered survival pods, the medical officer's segment had bunks, an airlock and cabinets housing various services projecting into itits mass was something like sixteen times that of the passenger vehicles. Checking its spin was not an easy matter. "I'm trying to stabilize the segment," Mercer said, trying also to hide his breathlessness. His legs, arms and shoulders were burning with fatigue and he wondered if the only thing that was keeping his eyes from dropping shut was the absence of gravity. He added; "Another fifteen minutes should do it." "Good. While you're working, listen carefully. MacArdle is the worrying kind. He has to compute return courses for each pod and crew segment these will enable us to make rendezvous should the radio beacon fail. To make his computations he has to know where exactly, as well as who, everybody is. According to the book this exercise could be done tomorrow or the next day -- even allowing for the increased scatter by that time, the pod flares should be pretty hard to miss. But these people are not trained observers and might miss seeing their neighbors' flares, which means that he would not be able to work out a course for them. He wants that data now. Can you keep young Mathewson awake?" "The problem there," said Mercer, "is getting him to go to sleep." "Right. This is going to take a little time to set up as well as to explain. Listen, for the time being ask for clarification if you don't completely understand something, but go on checking your spin. When you've finished you will need a large sheet of paper and a pencil..." It took a half-hour for Mercer to get a clear mental picture of what was needed and to explain it all to the passengers. He then positioned himself close against his canopy, his pod transmitter switched on, his pencil ready and a large sheet of paper with Prescott's diagram on it taped to the side of a bunk. The diagram consisted of a circle whose circumference was divided into sixteen equal parts, the points numbered from one to sixteen in a clockwise direction. Inside this circle was a slightly smaller one, representing the positions occupied by the crew segments. The circumference of the second circle was divided into four, but the positions were marked lightly because there was no way of knowing at that time where any particular segment was in relation to any given pod. With luck the next hour or so would give this information. "Prescott. Ready when you are, Mercer." "Observers in Pod Two and Pod Sixteen stand by," said Mercer. "Pod One, release your flare." The distress flares burned brightly for thirty seconds, illuminating the expanding cloud of gas they released just before ignition. They faded gradually. Neither the expanding circle of pods nor the smaller ring of crew segments had spread sufficiently for the flares to be invisible because of distance. But Mercer could not see One's flare either in the canopy or through the wide-angle periscope that served the blind areas of his segment. "Pod Two. I see it." "Pod Sixteen. Me, too." "Prescott. I have it." The first officer had left on his crew frequency receiver so that Mercer could hear Neilson and MacArdle reporting negative results. He himself failed to see One's flare. "Pods One and Three stand by," he said. "Your turn. Two." A few seconds later Pod Two was seen by its neighbors and Prescott. Mercer saw Three's flare bright and clear and, a few minutes later, the flares released by Four and Five. He estimated that he was twice as close to Four as he was to Five and marked his position on the inner circle accordingly. At that point he could have marked the positions of the other segments and named them, because they were spaced equally and he knew their order -- working clockwise they were MacArdle, Neilson, Prescott in the captain's segment and his own. But he preferred to wait until he heard them reporting in before marking their positions. He acquired Six and both he and MacArdle were able to see Seven. Finally the exercise was over. Mercer thanked the passengers for their cooperation, checked the condition of the captain and then strapped himself loosely into his couch. "Prescott. What are you doing now, Mercer?" "Sleeping," said Mercer. "Carry on." M ercer switched off the pod receiver so that Prescott's voice was the last sound he heard. It was also, after what seemed only a few minutes, the first. He rubbed his eyes, licked dried lips with a dehydrated tongue and said, "I'm awake, I think." "You snore like a shuttle taking off, Mercer. Now listen. I have been doing your job for you -- eavesdropping on the survivors -- for the last hour. Some of them are beginning to sound worried. But before you start telling them lies, which you are very good at, I want to make sure that your lying and half-truth telling will have a tenuous connection with the real facts of the situation. I don't want you to be caught out in a lie, you understand, because that could be very bad for morale. So, I am a nervous passenger. Reassure me." "I don't under -- " began Mercer. Then he cleared his throat and said, "What exactly is troubling you, sir?" "I'll tell you what's troubling me, mister. The smell of this overcrowded goldfish bowl is troubling me. How soon do we get out of it?" Mercer pulled out his book, then realized that Prescott would probably hear him flipping through the pages-and replaced it. He had a good memory. "You must realize, sir," he said smoothly, "that all this is largely the product of your mind and its awareness of your crowded conditions -- this awareness heightens your sensitivity to perspiration and similar odors. These are not -- repeat not -- due to any malfunction in your capsule air-conditioning or waste-disposal or reclamation systems. As for recovery, that should not be delayed by more than a few days -- " "Wrong, Mercer. It could be delayed for more than two weeks." "Oh," said Mercer. But Prescott was not giving him time to think. "We're hungry and it's hot in here." "You can increase the apparent bulk of the food by adding water, sir. There is no shortage of water." "We don't like the water. It stinks, too." "In actual fact, sir, your capsule water, recycled as it is, is much less harmful than that taken from any Earthside reservoir -- there is much less pollution in it, for one thing. I'm afraid the smell is purely an illusion, sir -- it comes from your dwelling too much on its source. As for the temperature problem -- that is caused by body heat produced by your recent exertions in getting your pod stabilized and your screens set up. You have also -- probably -- been moving around and using energy -- producing heat -- simply because you are excited or curious about your new surroundings. The correct course is to relax and remain absolutely still in the shade of your individual screens and remove some clothing if you have to until the air-conditioning system brings down the temperature. Drink and talk as much as you like, but don't use energy because that produces heat. If you do as I suggest you will find that the pod temperature will remain comfortable and even for -- " "Sorry, Mercer. It will get a hell of a lot hotter. Eurydice's course, which is also ours, passes within the orbit of Venus and makes its closest approach to the sun in nine days' time." Angrily, because he was suddenly frightened, Mercer asked, "What about the recovery ship? Why do we have to wait?" "I'm supposed to be questioning you. But i'll give you the facts so that you'll know how best to bend them for passenger consumption. The countdown on the recovery ship was started before we abandoned Eurydice and at present it is holding at minus twelve hours, which is the time needed to ready the high-acceleration boosters. It is waiting for the same reason that we are -- for Eurydice to blow." "The sooner the better," said Mercer with feeling. "Then we can head back to the rendezvous point." "Well, no. You would be right if the reactor and cargo radioactives blew up relatively slowly and threw off chunks of slow-moving radioactive debris. We could wait for a day or so until it had cleared the area and there would be no need to delay launching the recovery ship. But suppose the ship becomes a bomb that flings out a sphere of vaporized metal and generally acts like a scaled-down nova. Close in, this material would go through the capsule plastic like a charge of microscopic buckshot, besides flooding the area with lethal radiation. At the present time we are much too close to survive it. But the radiation and the effects of the debris diminish with distance. You know about the inverse square law, I suppose?" "Yes," said Mercer. "But how long do we have to wait to stand a fair chance of surviving the blowup?" "A few days. But obviously we can't start back to the rendezvous point until after she blows, or we would be heading into trouble instead of out of it. A complication is that the reactor's fail-safe devices may hold longer than we want them to." "But the A thrusters in the pods will only accelerate them to sixteen feet per second, which means that they can kill their outward velocity and return at eight, their present outward speed. The operational life of the pods is only two weeks." "A little more if the occupants do nothing but breathe, sleep and talk without getting excited. You must try to keep them from becoming excited." "Worried or frightened, you mean?" "I mean excited." "Oh." "Now you will be able to explain to them why the recovery ship will not be launched until after the blowup. Remind them that it is an unmanned, high-acceleration job that will waste no time in getting here. There is something else you should do, although there is no great urgency about it. Try to teach the passengers some elementary astronomy. Neilson tells me that, despite the superheated steam that exited from the stern for a few hours after we abandoned ship, Eurydice has not pulled ahead as quickly as we had hoped. That could mean that the rendezvous beacon might be damaged when she blows and the fancy pod navigation aids that make repositioning the pods for the rendezvous burn such an easy job will not be working. The passengers may then have to take up the proper attitude the hard way and get it right first time." "I understand," said Mercer, wondering where his saliva had gone. He had been too busy until now to have time to feel afraid and he had, in any case, thought that the worst was over when passengers and crew had escaped safely from Eurydice. But the truth was that they had not yet escaped Eurydice and if they did they might not be able to get back to the pickup point before their consumables ran out. Too, there was no absolute guarantee that the recovery ship -- which was unmanned and had a long way to travel -- would make the rendezvous point. "That about covers the situation, Mercer. Is anything else troubling you?" Mercer was silent for a moment, thinking about his problems but afraid to start listing them -- he might begin to whine at Prescott. He would rather die than show fear to the first officer. He wondered, not for the first time, if bravery were simply a stronger fear of being thought a coward. "Yes, sir," he said finally. "I am a ship's officer needing reassurance. Reassure me." M ercer dispensed a mixture of heavily shaped truth and quiet optimism with the result that the passengers, after six days in the survival capsules, were uncomfortable but not unduly worried. A fair proportion of them were unworried enough to feel bored and, despite Mercer's warnings, made attempts to relieve their boredom in fashions that generated a lot of heat. Pod Four was not the first to generate excessive internal heat and probably it would not be the last. After allowing the higher levels of his mind to be withdrawn from all effective control of his body for several hectic minutes, Corrie was suffering his usual reaction. It took the form of being coldly analytical about everything and everyone around him. "I cannot understand why it is so hot," he said. "Granted that we are part of a closed and balanced system into which energy in the form of heat has been introduced, there are only two of us in a capsule designed for three, which means that there should be a fifty percent margin on cooling, air supply, food. The second law of thermodynamics indicates that -- let go of me, dear, I want to try an experiment -- if I set myself spinning in the middle of the pod the only energy needed will be that required to initiate the spin. But the movement of air past my skin should have a cooling effect -- " "Don't move," said Mrs. Corrie drowsily. "But we're hot and slippery and -- I wonder what it's like on the capsules with three and four people. It must be really hot." "Not if they behave themselves like the man said, George." Corrie laughed. He said, "Any minute now our Listening Tom will read us a polite sermon -- couched ih very general terms, of course, and not mentioning the sinners by name -- " "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen, I must remind some of you once again to refrain from unnecessary physical exertion. Rest, conserve your food and air. Exercise should be purely intellectual. I have suggested, and a few of you have devised, some useful question-and-answer games. Mr. Mathewson, it is time for another astronomy lesson..." It was really hot in Pod Five, almost unbearably hot. But the occupants had no way of knowing how much worse were the conditions in Five than in the pods carrying the Corries or the threesome of Stone, Kirk and Mrs. Mathewson, so they simply complained as everyone else was complaining. Some complaints went unvoiced -- about stench produced by sweat and the overloaded waste disposal unit and the equally overworked water reclamation system for instance -- because they all were trying hard not to think about those particular problems. In Five the plastic screens which had shielded the occupants from each other had been dismantled when the inmates discovered that privacy interfered with the free circulation of the air. The removal of the screens generated a lot of emotional heat while making the environment fractionally cooler. Surprisingly, the removal of other items that interfered with the free circulation of air, such as clothing, was accomplished with very little fuss. It had become much too hot to worry about clothing or the neoPuritanism which dictated that the female body be completely covered except in the privacy of the home. Perhaps Pod Five was beginning to feel like home. "I'm hot and hungry," said Mrs. Kirk suddenly. "I've read about people being cold and hungry. I envy them." "And I envy you," said Miss Moore, who was spinning slowly about her longitudinal axis, legs and arms akimbo and even her fingers open to catch the maximum benefits from her self-generated breeze. She went on, "I envy your flab. You've got more fatty reserves than the rest of us put together and an enforced diet is just what you need. By rights you shouldn't eat anything because we will starve long before you do, especially if we go on splitting the food four ways. I'm hungry, too, damn you." "It isn't nice to call me flabby even if it is true," said Mrs. Kirk. "Besides, my husband is even fatter than I am and he must be suffering terribly by now. Fat people have enlarged stomachs, you know, and feel much hungrier than slim ones like you. But you are just afraid of being so thin that Eglin will stop ogling you." "I want out of this thing," said Miss Sampson. She was drifting close against the transparent section, staring into space. "Please, can I get out of this thing?" "Don't be stupid," said Miss Moore without. taking her eyes off Mrs. Kirk. "Your pigmentation gives you protection against the heat and you people are born and raised in famine conditions." "I think you're wrong," said Mrs. Kirk. "Their skin color protects them against strong sunlight, but not against high humidity. I remember reading that -- " "Reading must have been your only form of amusement," said M iss Moore, "and looking at you I can understand why." "That isn't -- " "I can remember reading a story," Miss Moore went on, "where the oldest and most expendable member of a party of travelers was sacrificed for the safety of the others. They threw her to the wolves, as I remember. We would not be so wasteful. What do you say, Sampson? Cannibalism was practiced by your people fairly recently. Give us the benefit of your expertise." "Soap, bathe," said Miss Sampson. "Swim in the sea." X ing you," said Mrs. Kirk, She paused for a moment and when she went on her voice was quiet, reasonable and utterly malicious. "Seriously, you would never get hungry enough to eat me because you haven't really thought about what it would entail. Not all of me is edible, you know, and the waste disposal unit will take just o much. Bones, for instance. Some of them would be big and hard to break up into a convenient size for the unit -- especially when they are freshly gnawed and slippery and you can only use your teeth and bare hands to break them. And then there are items like hair and toenails and lungs and eyeballs and -- " "You're making me sick." "If you are as hungry as you say," said Mrs. Kirk, "I don't see how you can have anything to be sick with." "Shut up," said Eglin, "both of you." For a few moments silence reigned, although the atmosphere was thickly charged with anger in addition to the heat, humidity and a multiplicity of body odors. Eglin could not help noticing the atmosphere because his lips were pressed together in anger and he was breathing heavily through his nose as he glared at each of the three women in turn. During the first few days in the pod Eglin had been too embarrassed even to look at them when they were fully clothed, because he usually found that they were looking at him and he did not know what they were thinking or what they thought he might be thinking when he looked at them. And when the increasing heat and humidity forced them all to peel, the situation had become even more embarrassing -- but only for a short time because very often he was in fact thinking what they thought he was thinking and there was no way for him to conceal the fact. So he had begun staring at each of them in turn so that their feelings would not be hurt by his appearing to admire one of them more than the others. Now he was too hot and angry and frustrated and hungry to bother showing consideration and he spent most of the time watching Miss Moore because she was the best-looking one and she usually caused the most trouble. Eglin ran his hand over his forehead, face and the wet, black smear that was his week-old beard, pushing away the thick, weightless drops of sweat. He thought of several ways of making Miss Moore stop her continuous arguing and sniping and blatant displaying of her undoubtedly beautiful body, all of them pleasantto him. He was so engrossed that the trouble had already started before he realized that there was any danger at all. Miss Sampson was sobbing and clawing furiously at the plastic envelope and her nails were long because, unlike the other two, she did not nibble at them when she was worried. When the fury of her attack caused her to drift away from the plastic, she kicked at it. The act sent her bouncing against the opposite side, where she clawed and kicked again. With each bounce the fabric of the pod stretched and bulged frighteningly and the sun bobbed over the edge of the opaque section. She collided several times with Miss Moore and Mrs. Kirk, but accidentally, because she did not try to attack them. At least not until Mrs. Kirk tried to restrain her and got two long, red nailmarks on her forearm for her trouble. Cursing, Eglin planted his feet against the solid plastic of the services panel and launched himself on an interception course. They collided softly and awkwardly, rolling and bouncing along the plastic canopy until they ended in the middle of the pod spinning slowly together. By that time Eglin was facing her and had a tight grip on both her wrists and was holding them against the small of her back. He was afraid for a moment that she might use her knees on him or take a bite out of his face with her even and startlingly white teeth, but suddenly she relaxed against him and began to cry. "Nice try, Sampson," said Miss Moore furiously. "Hysterics, a good old-fashioned wrestle and then the dissolve into tears -- the oldest trick there is. But it isn't going to get you anything, Sampson, because it's too damned hot in here as it is. You just get away from him!" "Jealous?" asked Mrs. Kirk. But she and Miss Moore were each gripping one of Miss Sampson's shoulders and pushing Eglin away with their free hands. He realized, not for the first time since they had been flung away from Eurydice together, that he was living in a wish-fulfillment dream but that for all the good it was doing him he might just as well be living in a monastery. "All right, all right," he said in a tone that said that nothing, most decidedly, was right. "If you can't sleep and won't stop nagging at each other, let's do what the man says and try a little intellectual exercise -- guessing games." He flung out an arm in an angry wave that encompassed the pod, the people in it and the whole of creation outside, and said, "I'm thinking of something beginning with -- with 'S.' " "Sagittarius?" asked Mrs. Kirk, beginning the game. "The -- the sun?" Miss Sampson inquired. "Obviously," said Miss Moore. Mercer's voice: "If you can't see the constellations as I've described them, don't change the attitude of your pod. Spin yourself very slowly inside the transparent section and watch the stars until you see the proper formation. That way uses less energy and produces much less heat." somewhat different. A hypothetical observer armed with an accurate thermometer would have said that the internal temperature was fractionally cooler than that of Pod Five. A psychiatrist would have been worried sick. Kirk drifted like some lumpy, organic airship over the services panel, permanently tethered to it by one fat, hairy hand. His eyes never seemod to leave Mrs. Mathewson who floated at the other end of the pod. The only times he did not watch her was when Stone managed to drift between them, which was as often as possible. No guessing games, no quizzes, no group intellectual exercises of any kind took place in Pod Three. When Kirk spoke he broke a silence that had lasted for at least six hours. "Why does he talk to the kid so much?" he complained. "The boy is a special case, I know, but Mercer could surely give someone else the benefit of some of his individual attention." It was a reasonable complaint compared with some of the others he had made earlier and his tone was conciliatory -- as if he were trying to start a conversation that would not end in a bitter argument. Mrs. Mathewson brushed away hair clinging wetly to her face and said, "I think he's trying to teach and help all of us, as Mr. Stone said, and is pretending to teach only Bobby so as not to offend the others by making his instructions too simple for them." She looked from one man to the other, trying to bring them together and pleading silently with Stone not to make things worse. But Stone was not looking at her and so could not hear the silent pleading. "You're cheating on the food, Kirk," he said. "We aren't getting our fair share." "You don't need a fair share," said the other man. "A skinny runt like you needs to eat hardly anything." "I've always wanted to try a crash diet," said Mrs. Mathewson, still trying to pour on verbal oil, "and never had the nerve. But now -- " "Inside every fat man," said Stone, still not looking at her, "there is a skinny slob who let himself go." "Please," said Mrs. Mathewson, "please stop fighting over the food." Stone drifted slowly around to face her. He said, "Use your brain, woman. We're not fighting over the food." Mercer's voice: "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. As you know we are following Eurydice's original course. During the next few days it will make its closest approach to the sun. Let me assure you that the temperature will not rise above bearable limits even in the overcrowded pods, provided you remain at rest and do not generate unnecessary heat. The food supply is adequate, it is simply that its lack of bulk makes you think that you are starving. The elevated temperature is also causing a rapid loss of weight. Think of the situation as follows: taken as a whole. Earth is also overcrowded and underfed, and firm control is needed if the available resources are not to be wasted and the population is not to perish of its own pollution or by too much self-generated atomic heat. You people are all facing the same problems on a greatly reduced scale and some of you are having to adapt to situations you rarely, if ever, were involved with on Earth -- social imbalance, conflict, even a small-scale war may here seem to be unavoidable. But a war will kill everyone in your tiny plastic world just as surely as it would decimate your home planet. You must avoid fighting at all costs. Remember that you are human beings and not animals -- and keep control." In Pod Fourteen control was easy, if slow. Mathewson knew exactly how to change the attitude of his vehicle and he was learning how to line up the dividing line between the clear and the opaque material with groups of stars when Mercer gave the order. He was hungry, but not very, and he was not uncomfortably warm even with his uniform and cap on. Fourteen's life-support system, catering as it was for one young boy instead of three adults, was keeping him comfortable. Mercer had given him permission to strip if he wanted to, but had warned him against exposing his skin to the sun. According to Mercer the only space-tanned astronauts were the ones who appeared in TV plays. Real spacemen avoided the sun. A good spaceman learned to control himself as well as his ship, Mercer had said, and to keep his mind busy and alert. Space was beautiful -- but lonely and dangerous if one did not keep control. Mathewson knew that he did not always keep control. Sometimes he wanted to play some other game than this one of spaceman, which never stopped. At such times he tired of memorizing stars and doing practice runs over the tiny control panel or crawling inch by inch along the plastic to keep a certain star exactly in position. But he could not change the game and he couldn't even stop playing it. Sometimes he wondered if Mercer knew when he lost control and started shouting to fill up the emptiness -- or crying because nobody was near him. After he had cried the first time Mercer had explained to someone in another pod that there were psychological and technical reasons why he could not arrange two-way contact with separated husbands and wives and loved ones. He had said that arguments within the pods were hard enough to control without risking their starting between the capsules and that the passengers were becoming so widely scattered that his receiver's speaker could not be turned up loud enough to energize his transmitter mike, which was on a bulkhead several feet away. But Mercer could not have heard him crying because Mercer had not changed. Mercer had started by treating Mathewson like one of the crew and had not changed at all. As the commander of this spacecraft Mathewson should not be caught crying and he should stop doing it before his luck ran out and Mercer caught him at it. But sometimes when he awoke with no bed or blankets around him, just warm air and plastic and very faraway stars, he could not help becoming frightened. Mercer's voice: "Attention, attention. I have received a signal that Eurydice will blow in approximately three minutes. Whatever you are doing, cover your eyes at once. Keep them covered for at least thirty seconds after the flash. Do not, I repeat, do not try to watch it through your goggles or peek at it between a crack m your fingers. If you look it could be the last thing you will ever see." While he was speaking Mercer pushed the captain's bunk into its recess and shut the airtight flap. Between the metal of the bunk, the bandages and the damaged eyes which might not be capable of registering light anyway, Collingwood was adequately protected from the flash. Mercer covered his face as he had told the passengers to, because Prescott had told him to do it, but in much more pungent language. Despite his hand and his tightly closed eyes behind it he saw the flash as a bright, pink blotch that faded very slowly. When he uncovered to look outside he saw a beautiful, spherical aurora writhing and expanding to fill all of space. The radio brought in a deafening rattle of static and the radiation level was climbing steadily. While he had been relaying Neilson's warning Prescott had said that the reactor's safety devices had kept the cork in too long and that it would be a big one -- possibly the biggest nuclear explosion so far, but they should be safe. Mercer hoped that the first officer was not simply trying to be reassuring. XV T hrough the window of Brannigan's office the recovery ship loomed against the sky like a narrow white pyramid wrapped in the red lace of its service gantries. There were no signs of activity on or around it, but that situation could change within a few minutes. The decision would be Brannigan's alone and he should take it now, instead of pretending that it would be arrived at by the democratic process of listening to advice. Brannigan swung away from the window to stare along the center of the table that joined his desk like the vertical bar of a fat, gray T. To nobody in particular he said, "We're wasting time." "I disagree," said Perkins. "It is less than thirty-five minutes since Eurydice blew." "That bird out there costs nearly twice as much as the lost ship," said Musgrave. Then, apologetically; "As the company accountant I'm supposed to remind you of things like that before you throw good money after bad." "He has a point," said Beck. "The delayed blowup will not hurt anyone, but a lot more delay will be caused while making sure that untrained passengers orient themselves properly toward the rendezvous point plus, of course, the time needed to get there. I can place our bird within one thousand meters of the rendezvous beacon -- but will there be anyone there to rescue? We really should wait until we have their report on the consumables." "We might wait a long time," said McKeever in his dry, lecturing voice. "The blast has converted Eurydice into a rapidly expanding zone of radio interference -- rather like a spherical Heaviside Layer -- through which we, with our highpowered equipment, can punch a signal. But they won't have the power to answer us until the volume of interference has enlarged and become so diffuse that their signal and that of rendezvous beacon -- if it still exists -- can get through. The shortest estimate that I can give for the clearance of this radio fog is three days -- and it seems to me that Beck cannot simply aim at the center of the explosion. Neilson used a crude steam jet -- whose angle and thrust are not known with accuracy -- that caused Eurydice to move ahead and probably veer off course. If we are going for a late-evening launch we will have to use the figures MacArdle gave us." "But can we accept them for a launch as important as this?" asked Beck. "And if the beacon has been taken out by the explosion, how will the passengers find their way to the rendezvous point?" Dr. Lassiter cleared his throat. He said, "With one exception I know these officers very well indeed. You can accept MacArdle's figures. As for the passengers' making rendezvous without a beacon, you know that the medic has been giving them simple lessons in astronomy and astronavigation -- coached by Prescott and MacArdle, of course." "Do you approve of Mercer?" asked Beck. "Does Prescott?" "I do," said Lassiter, "and Prescott approves of nothing and nobody. But he hasn't called Mercer incompetent, which is tantamount to an unsolicited testimonial. The part that worries me, however, is the fact that the pods will arrive at the rendezvous point dangerously low on air, and the two overloaded capsules will be in even worse condition. That ship out there is fast -- but we've had to wait a long time while Eurydice up her mind to blow and the survivors are quite far away now. My figures aren't as accurate as Beck's, but I'd say that if we don't launch as soon as possible there will be an awful lot of freshly asphyxiated corpses at the rendezvous point." Dr. Lassiter represented the softest science in the room, which was why he tended to worry more about the space-going software. "That's it," said Brannigan abruptly. "We try for a rescue." T he decision taken -- apparently by democratic process -- Beck communicated it to the launch crew. Any remaining questions would be those of policy and where policy was concerned, Brannigan was a dictator. "If we go for a rescue," said Westgate suddenly, "we will have to say a lot more about the disaster. What do I tell the media?" "Nothing," said Brannigan. "The first major accident has occurred to a passenger-carrying spaceship, the passengers and ship's officers are safe in their survival capsules and a rescue operation already formulated to meet this contingency has been put into effect. Nothing more until we know whether or not it is successful." Westgate's objections were as smooth as a good PR man's should be and not immediately identifiable as objections. He said, "Yes, of course. There have been no fatalities as yet and there is no reason to worry the next-of-kin until they actually occur. At the same time -- we are going to be held responsible for this disaster by the public, even though we can show that it was a vendor company who was really to blame. Unless we focus a lot of unwelcome attention elsewhere for a while -- long enough for us to work out satisfactory answers to a number of very awkward questions -- we could take an awful pasting from the press and TV. Those boys hate like hell to have anything kept from them. "This is the first disaster of its kind," Westgate went on, "and it has everything. The captain injured, perhaps dying and unable to direct the survival operation. One pod with a kid in it trying to do the job of three men. The conditions inside the pods while they were waiting for Eurydice to blow -- the heat and hunger and overcrowding, the strangers thrown together into conditions of intimacy, and that imbalance sexwise. It is the biggest cliffhanger since Apollo Thirteen. There would be no problem in slanting it to make us look like heroes instead of villains and for me to handle it so that the majority of the media people will feel obligated to us for life -- " The others Joined in some agruing with Westgate and putting up alternative suggestions -- everyone seemed to have the idea that public relations, like writing, photography and painting, was a job that could be performed just as well by amateurs. Dr. Lassiter sat staring silently into the far distance at fragile plastic bubbles full of hot, stale and stinking air, thinking of the people who were being forced to breathe it. Brannigan was staring into the same area of space. "Checking sequence initiated on booster rings Two, Three and Four," said a voice from the speaker on Brannigan's desk. "Checks completed on tanks A and B on ring One and fueling under way. Minus eleven hours and thirtyseven minutes and counting..." E verything looked so normal and peaceful, Mercer thought resentfully as he tried to dry the perspiration from his face with even sweatier hands. The vaporized plastic and metal that had been the ship had cooled and scattered into invisibility and only the deafening rattle of static on the pod frequency was left, that and the readings on the radiation indicator, which were rapidly slipping back to normal. He had turned down the volume on the pod frequency because the voices he heard were either lost in the mush or were all sounding off at once. In order not to feel completely useless he spent some time helping the captain -- stripping him of all but his bandages to make him feel as comfortable as possible and reinforcing his sedation. Then Mercer drifted back to the canopy to think and sweat and look at the stars. Static erupted thunderously from his speaker-a whisper of intelligence was trying to fight its way through the din. Mercer gritted his teeth and moved closer. "Prescott. Come in, Mercer." "Mercer here. Go ahead." "Prescott. Come in, Mercer. Try to... against the mike and... be able to hear you." Mercer put his lips within an inch of the mike and acknowledged at the top of his voice. "Better. Now listen carefully and... for a repeat if you don't... MacArdle says that this muck will clear over the next few... will allow pod and segment frequencies to be worked in about two hours. Two-way contact with Eurydice Control will not be possible for at least... but they know what to do without my telling them. Our job is to get the pods headed back... possible after the segments are on their way, I will link you to... your instructions. In case you're thinking that it's wrong... passengers should go first. We must... rendezvous first to help look for them... on stragglers. If you understand... to MacArdle." "I understand," Mercer shouted and a new voice began fighting its way through the interference. "MacArdle. The beacon was taken out by the blowup so... the hard way. Your A thrusters are set below the floor grill center line. When you fire make... you are diametrically opposite... occupied by the captain so that... weights will be equally distributed about your center of thrust. Have you got that?" "Yes," bellowed Mercer. "You won't be able to see the sky in your direction of thrust because of the segment configuration and neither will the pod people because their services module will be in the way, so you will have to establish attitude from points at right angles to your proposed line of flight. You will... sitting position with your back to the seal and sight along the top edge of the third line of bunks. The glare shield supports will give you a second referent and... lower half of Orion projects from the right into your canopy field of view just above the center line. Below... Sirius on the opposite edge of the canopy and, although you won't be able to see it from that position, if you lean to the left you will have Aldebaran and above it the Pleiades as a check. Do... repeat that?" "No." "You understand... a first approximation and that... more accurate attitude checks later. Is there any other information you need?" "No, thanks," yelled Mercer. He added; You seem to have a photographic memory where my segment is concerned. Were you a patient in it?" "Detailed structural data... in the captain's segment. Prescott worked out the sighting arrangements. But now you must get your segment lined up with... me know when you're ready for the first attitude check." "I'll give you a shout." "That's very good. Doctor." "Prescott. Stop chattering, you two. MacArdle, Neilson next. Mercer, you know what you have to do." changing the attitude of his segment he could not help looking at the locked control panel set above his couch. Like the other crew segments, his had provision for making rapid and accurate changes of attitude, but anyone who was not a trained astronaut could very easily send his vehicle spinning helplessly out of control if he tried using anything but the premeasured A and B thrusters. Prescott had not even mentioned the possibility of Mercer's being able to fly the vehicle, much less forbidden him to do so. The radio interference had faded a little as he worked. When Mercer turned up the volume on the pod frequency he could make out a babble of voices through the static. Apparently they were now close to the center of the expanding sphere of interference and signals could get neither in nor out. But the sphere was hollow and the people inside it could talk to each other and would be able to do so with less and less trouble as time went on. He heard every word MacArdle spoke while he made the tiny movements that placed the segment into its pre-burn position. He held himself still as instructed, making sure that the segment was not drifting off the line. But when MacArdle spoke again he could not move at all and for several minutes he could not even speak. "MacArdle. Acknowledge, Mercer. Have you got trouble?" He could actually feel the globules of sweat growing on his skin, making his hands slippery and his back skid along the lock seal. He shook his head violently and the newly dislodged perspiration drifted before his face and tasted salty when he breathed it in. The stars burning coldly through the canopy were suddenly a mass of incomprehensible lights with no recognizable order or meaning, the imaginary lines that linked them together gone so that he did not know what he was seeing. Mercer had thought that he could not feel more afraid than he had in the howling, steam-filled chaos of the passenger compartment of Eurydice -- but he had been wrong. "I -- I don't think I've got this right," he said finally. The ensuing silence stretched through an eternity, though it could only have lasted for a few seconds. Mercer wondered if MacArdle would speak or if Prescott would cut in with some pointed and abrasive comment. He could imagine what the first officer was thinking about him now. "MacArdle. You seemed to be doing fine until a few minutes ago -- I mean, the Pleiades and Sirius and Orion are pretty distinctive referents. Butjusttryto relax. Drift forward to the canopy and have a good look around to make absolutely sure that you have the right constellations. Make sure you shield your eyes from the sun or you'll waste a lot of time waiting for your night vision to come back. But take your time. Don't let me rush you and don't push the button because you're afraid or ashamed or because you want to put yourself out of your agony. Sf'ou must get it right first time." Mercer's voice wouldn't work. "Maybe the captain can help you." "The captain is under sedation," said Mercer sharply, "and he can't see anyway. I would only be giving him something more to worry about. I'll go forward and have another look around." "I was going to ask you to do that in any case. Doctor. We all have to double-check on something as important as this. And remember, when you start your burn give me a ten-second countdown so that I will know the exact time of firing and the time you will have to fire your B thrusters at the rendezvous point -- otherwise you might go sailing past. And don't worry if nobody seems to be there when you arrive -- we may be too widely scattered to see each other without flares." When the burn came the sensation of weight was so strange that Mercer thought that he would drown in the softness of the bunk. In a few seconds it was over and he coiled and stowed the cable and remote-control switch which had enabled him to fire the thruster from his position opposite the captain. "Prescott. The sooner the pods are turned around the better, Mercer. You have done most of the talking to them so far and you may as well continue. How will you handle it? Numerically?" "Yes," said Mercer. "Taking them in numerical order will stop any argument about who gets instructions first -- but there are three exceptions. Two of the pods are carrying four people and will run out of air before the others and nobody will object to the Mathewson boy's jumping the queue -- " "I do, Mercer. Bringing back the overloaded pods first is a good idea, but the boy can comfortably wait his turn or even come in last. He will not, repeat not, run out of air and food." "I understand," said Mercer. "Good. Now go to work on the passengers. Don't waste time, but don't appear to be rushing them either. MacArdle will give you the referents for each pod as you need them and you will translate them to your passengers. I, ah, know that you will appreciate their problems." of us," said Stone, "is v considerably heavier than the other two. Will this swing us off course when we apply thrust?" "Not very much, Three, but you may as well get it absolutely right and seat the two lighter passengers closer together and facing the heavy one. But make sure that your movements have not set up a drift away from your marker stars." "You never miss a trick," muttered Kirk. "Don't be so blasted sensitive," returned Stone. "I deliberately did not say which of us was the fat one and I very much doubt that Mercer remembers us. Relax, Kirk -- it was a purely technical question. Or is the thought of my sitting close to the lady bothering you?" "Don't tell me to relax in that tone of voice," said Kirk angrily. "You're deliberately giving Mercer the impression that I'm ready to go beserk and that all I can think about is women." "You certainly haven't thought much about repositioning this thing," Stone replied. "And don't move or we'll have to spend another half-hour getting the right stars lined up. Be a good man and wait until after the burn before you take a swipe at me." "I haven't had to think -- with a cool, scientific mind like yours directing the operation," Kirk said. "Or maybe you are just pretending to know it all so that she will think you are some kind of champion scientist who deserves -- and intends to claim -- his prize." "Shut up, Kirk." "In a minute. I just want to remind you of a scientific fact. This overweight body you are always making cracks about and she tries not to look at has lived on Earth for fifty-two years. It has developed muscles to lift and move itself around under one Earth gravity -- pretty big muscles, though they don't show -- and in weightless conditions they will not be hampered very much by the fatty overlay. Just remember that before you start claiming any prizes." "Stop it," said Mrs. Mathewson, speaking for the first time that day. "Stop fighting and stop talking about me as if I were one of the food packs. You're both old enough to have more sense. Besides, the lucky winner could not claim his prize -- if he tried we would all die of heatstroke." "Attention, Pod Three. Are you stable and ready for thrust? Do you want to recheck your attitude?" "We h ave rechecked our attitude four times," said Stone, glaring at Kirk, "and we're as stable as we're ever going to be. And anybody with half a brain knows that if we haven't got it right we've no hope of reaching the -- " "Relax, Stone," said Kirk nastily. "We're firing -- now," said Stone. "Thank you, Three. I shall pass you the repositioning information in plenty of time for you to fire the braking thrusters at rendezvous. Pod Four, come in, please." The operation was smooth and fast on Pod Four because Corrie had been listening to Mercer's instructions to the other capsules and had already worked out a close approximation of his pod's firing attitude, so that only a few minutes spent on minor corrections were needed to position it accurately. The relationship between Mercer and the astrophysicist during the exchange of information was that of a pupil and a rather irascible teacher -- and Mercer was not the teacher. Corrie did most of the talking until the moment he pushed the thrust button and his wife made a sound that would have been a scream if she had not been breathing in at the time -- and pointed. "Don't wave your arm about, dear," said Corrie, "or you will cause a deviation in course. But I see what you mean." "Having trouble. Four?" "Just an unpleasant surprise," Corrie replied. "When we applied thrust the sidewalls bulged outward and the locksection forward looked for a moment as if it would come down on our heads. Actually it approached by only a few feet and now that thrust has ceased, it and the sidewalls have returned to normal. But you might have warned us that this would happen. That was inconsiderate of you, Mercer." Corrie waited for more than a minute, then said testily, "Mercer, did you hear me?" "I heard you, Four. Sorry about that. Was there any indication of a swing off course when it happened?" "No deviation," said Corrie. "Good. Thank you, Four. Pod Five, come in." the services panel he wondered if he had detected a note of strain in Mercer's voice. He was becoming quite familiar with the sound of the medical officer's voice because, as was the case with the occupants of all the other survival capsules, it was the only outside sound he heard. He wondered why Mercer had waited before answering him. Was Mercer irritated because a passenger had made a legitimate complaint at a time when he was very busy? Was he feeling as hot and uncomfortable as was Corrie and panting in the stinking, humid air as if he had just run a mile? Or was it simply that Mercer had been talking so long, repeating the same instructions over and over again, that he was going hoarse? But there was no way of escaping Mercer's voice, so Corrie panted and sweated and listened to the medic being patient with the stupid ones and reassuring with the frightened ones and both at the same time with the majority of them. The only consolation was that Mercer seemed to be speeding up the process -- while one pod was lining itself up on its marker stars he had taken to giving the next two pods their attitude instructions. He ran into a slow patch between Pods Ten and Thirteen because the sun occupied the sky close to their markers on one side and the passenger wearing the goggles could not see the stars clearly and the others dazzled themselves trying and had to wait until their night vision returned. Mercer's voice was quite loud during this period, probably because the pods concerned were at extreme range for his radio. Corrie wondered why the other officers were not helping him, but then decided that Mercer's radio was probably designed for this kind of work and it was his duty to look after the survivors while the other supermen did what they had to do about organizing the recovery. He had not spoken to any of the other officers and had seen two of them only briefly, but he recognized the type. They were the kind of men who were tops at their job, highly trained and even more highly intelligent misfits who did not communicate easily with normal people. Corrie understood them very well because he was that kind of person himself, a refugee in a do-ityourself ivory tower. Possibly the injured captain had been less aloof. Corrie had heard a few words Mercer had not intended the passengers to hear before the medic had remembered to switch off, so Corrie knew that Collingwood was unfit for duty. Which was a pity because Collingwood, judging by the way he had chatted with the passengers as they were coming aboard, might have been able to mix socially during the voyage. Or it might be that the crew was not allowed to have anything to do with the passengers -- especially female passengers -- in the interest of discipline. Except for the ship's medical officer, that was, who had acted like a glorified steward and not at all like a superman until the disaster had occurred. He could imagine the feelings of the .other officers toward the one who had free access, professionally and otherwise, to the passengers. They must have been knotted up with envy with people like the Moore girl undulating about the ship. Or did they sympathize with Mercer instead, looking down on him from their control-room monastery as a kind of worker priest whose duties placed him in the greatest danger of all, that of being blackballed out of the club if he made a slip? Mercer's voice; "Pod Fourteen -- come in, Mathewson. Twelve and Thirteen will need a little time to check their attitudes and you may need even more because of your small mass. I shall read your marker stars so that you can start lining up your vehicle now and save time when I come back to you for the final checks. Ready to copy?" Corrie cursed the heat and the air that would not stay in his lungs for more than a second, but not loudly enough to interfere with the conversation going on between Mercer and the boy. When he was physically or mentally uncomfortable he had a tendency to lash out at people or, if they were not within lashing distance, to think nasty thoughts about them. It was quite possible that Mercer was passing on instructions from a book. The medic's treatment of the boy was, on the surface, completely unsympathetic. But Corrie knew that he was judging the situation by only one half of a conversation. If he could hear the other half he would know how thoughtless Mercer was being toward the boy -- or otherwise. Certainly there was no indication in the half Corrie could hear that the boy was frightened or hysterical or unable to handle the job properly. Perhaps Mercer's half of the conversation was simply a ruse to fool the boy's mother into thinking that everything was going well with her son. Maybe the majority of the instructions to the passengers were like that and most of the pods had been unable to take up their proper pre-burn attitude and would never reach the rendezvous point. Not everyone was as wellinformed as Corrie, after all, and even he could not be absolutely sure that he had done the job properly. Corrie tried to bend his mind on to a more pleasant line of thought, an almost impossible task with Mercer's voice dinning in his ear every few minutes. If he could not close his ears at least he could look out of this hot, stinking hell at the cold, clear beauty of the stars. But the transparent plastic was smeared with condensation in several places -- the first time he had known that to happen -- and the only heavenly body he could see clearly was that of his wife. a heavenly body in any sense of the word, but then Corrie had been unable to regard it objectively in the thirty years he had known it. In the beginning, when it had been rounded and firm and very much younger, he had loved it so much that it had been impossible for him to feel any objectivity about it and when the years began to pass and the structure changed and thickened as it adapted to the changes brought about by childbirth, he had not wanted to be objective. Neither could he be objective when the muscle tone began to diminish and his heavenly body had begun to sag and wrinkle and grow lined under the triple forces of age, gravity and grief. He thought of their daughter on the way to that dance, impaled like a beautiful butterfly on the steering column of her car -- and decided that it was much more pleasant to think about his wife and their current predicament. He had gone after, and gained, a very important post on Ganymede Base so that his wife would be able, if not to forget, at least not to be constantly reminded by well-meaning friends of the tragedy. She would keep herself busy teaching in a technologically advanced village school with a dome over it, and the prospect had already made her begin to relax. The absence of gravity had smoothed out a lot of her wrinkles as well and she was certainly looking much better than she had for years. Corrie reached out to touch her, then stopped. It was not simply that putting his hot, moist hand on her would be uncomfortable for her and cut down the area of evaporation -- there had always been this hesitancy about the first touch, the initial invasion of privacy. From the very beginning there had been this shyness about their wanting each other and an awkwardness about expressing their feelings -- as if some hypothetical listener would make scathing remarks if they called each other by pet names. And so what had started as a joke to cover his shyness had gradually became for them the language of love. Like a dedicated astronomer taking up a lifelong study specialty, he had made a close study of his heavenly body until he knew it thoroughly inside and out, knew its powers of attraction and the serious perturbations it caused when, as frequently happened, it made a very close approach and variations of the two-body problem had to be worked out. But no matter what he did or how coldly scientific was his language at the time, the result was invariably the same -- two close binaries going nova together with the release of considerable energy and heat. "Heat," he whispered angrily, "is the newest four-letter word." She opened her eyes and saw his hand a few inches from her face. Suddenly she gripped it and pulled him toward her. They bounced softly together and she wrapped her arms tightly around his back before she spoke. "I'm hot and sticky and not nice for you," she whispered between gasps for breath. "Fm bothering you and it isn't fair, but I'm afraid. I can't breathe, George. I'm -- I think I'm going to die." "Don't cry," Corrie whispered, smiling, "you'll increase the humidity. And you aren't bothering me -- it's too damned hot to be bothered." "It isn't a joke," she said, desperation making her speak the first few words aloud, "I'm suffocating. Every time I breathe out I don't know if I'll be able to breathe in again. I can't stand it. My head is bursting and -- and I'm drowning in here. I'm going to die, George." "No you . won't," said Corrie quietly. "Try to think of something pleasant, like that time I stuffed the snowball down your neck. The heat is bad, but the suffocating sensation is all in your mind. We have plenty of air, remember -- think of what it must be like in a pod with three or four people in it." He broke off, gasping for breath and with big black splotches jerking across his field of vision. It had been too much to say in one breath, but he had tried to do it because it had seemed the best way of proving to her that they were not short of air. A little later he went on, "Mercer has been talking to Pod Sixteen and nobody else for the past twenty minutes, so he will soon be finished. When he stops talking we can get some sleep. Try to relax. We have nothing to worry about and plenty of air," you. Sixteen. That X completes the exercise, ladies and gentlemen. We shall meet again at the rendezvous area in approximately six and a half days." We hope, thought Corrie, then said out loud, "Why don't you shut up and go to sleep?" "That was good advice, whoever it was who gave it. I agree, all of you try to sleep. With one exception. Come in. Pod Four." Startled, Corrie said, "Pod Four." "We have been considering the incident -- the only one of its kind to be reported -- you mentioned during retro fire when your pod became uniformly deformed while thrust was being applied. We think you have a problem. Four. We are pretty sure that you have been punctured by one or more small particles of the ship and that you have suffered a drastic, but obviously not lethal, pressure drop. The drop has been so gradual that you may have attributed your difficulty in breathing to the heat, but the sooner you repair the leak or leaks the better. "You will find a tube of sealing compound, clearly marked, in a recess in the services panel. If you can't read or understand the instructions for any reason -- anoxia, impairment of vision, anything like that -- ask me. Otherwise do not waste time or oxygen acknowledging my instructions. "The punctures in the transparent section of your pod will appear as patches of condensation. Closer examination will show that they are actually small clouds of water vapor boiling off into space. Punctures in the opaque area will be harder to find. Use empty food tubes, torn open and flattened. Cover the opaque area systematically, using the opened tubes. The tube plastic is thin and will stick to any point where air is escaping. "Don't try to take a short cut by covering a larger area with a piece torn from a plastic screen. You could easily miss a leak that way and the screen plastic is tough -- you must avoid wasting energy when the oxygen level is low or you will pass out. Work carefully and thoroughly and with minimum effort. If you haven't asphyxiated already there should be ample time to plug the leaks before you do and then, of course, you won't." Corrie was busy long before Mercer had finished talking and he did not have to ask for clarification or further instructions. He spoke only briefly to give directions to his wife and, although they used minimum effort on the job, they completed it, feeling that they had been boiled in their own body fluids. Corrie looked at their handiwork, six small blobs of sealing compound where three tiny pieces of Eurydice had come and gone and wondered what it would have been like to have been hit by one of those tiny, radioactive bullets. One of them, if he remembered his position correctly when the explosion had occurred, must have passed within inches of his head. "Pod Four," he said. "Finished." "Thank you. Four. Pressure will come up fairly quickly now, but Fm afraid the news isn't all good. You have lost a lot of air and no longer have the fifty percent safety margin you started with. You are in the same fix as the people in threepassenger pods. But don't worry about it. Rest and sleep as much as possible. And that goes for everyone." Corrie drifted, eyes closed and feeling fractionally more comfortable than he had felt for days, thinking about Mercer. The medic had known for hours that Pod Four was leaking air -- the pause when Corrie had complained about the sudden flexibility of the walls during thrust had been Mercer reporting to the other officers, no doubt. But he had not mentioned it to Corrie until the very end, after the pods carrying four and then three people had been turned around -- the pods that would reach the rendezvous very short of air indeed. If they got out of this, Corrie did not know whether he should compliment Mercer or punch his face. "The next time you tell me you're dying, dear," he said, "I'll believe you." The voice of Mercer kept him from hearing his wife's reply. "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. The radio interference caused by the ship blowup is beginning to fade and we have had a signal from Eurydice Control. The recovery ship took off three hours ago. It is on course and estimated to arrive at the pickup point in a little over a week. Now I'm going to sleep." H e was monitoring the pod frequency with the volume turned down and all he could hear was the faint hiss of interference and, very occasionally, a quiet voice complaining about the heat, the smell, the hunger or the other people in the pod. If something happened in the survival capsules that needed his attention, the quality and tone of the voices would change enough to worry his subconscious into waking him up. Mercer had never felt so tired in all the thirty-two years of his life. But his fatigue was mental rather than physical -- the only muscles that he had used had been those controlling his tongue -- and his brain did not have enough sense to go to sleep easily. He had to go through it compartment by compartment, switching off, powering down, forbidding it to worry or feel guilty or responsible for situations and people over which he had little influence and no direct control. And he, too, had to try to forget the heat and the hunger when it was within his power to ease both conditions where he personally was concerned. Prescott, without actually forbidding him to use the individual air-conditioning systems and stores for the bunks, had reminded him that he would need to save as much power and consumables as possible for the transfer of passengers to the recovery ship. He tried not to worry about what might happen at the rendezvous -- if his segment reached it or if the recovery ship reached it. There was nothing he could do for the captain either -- Collingwood's treatment was palliative rather than curative. Nor could he be of any real help to the passengers, save as an eavesdropper who could head off a panic or a potential fight by giving the offending parties something else to think about. Except for the Mathewsons, Stone and Miss Moore they were simply names and voices to him for the most part -- he had not had enough time to fix them in his memory as individuals. As Mercer drifted loosely above his couch, the soporific hiss of interference and the occasional murmuring of passengers' voices reinforcing the humming of his segment's life-support equipment, it became increasingly difficult for him to separate the real sounds from the ones he dreamed and almost impossible to tell them apart when his dreams began to use real sound effects. But he could recognize the voices, even when they were slurred with fatigue, distorted by anger or segmented and separated by long, gasping pauses for breath. The remembered voice of Prescott built itself up from the background noises, telling him that the passengers could not possibly be as short of air as they sounded -- not even the ones who were four to a pod -- and that the gaspings were due to unnecessary exertion, heat and thinking too much about a shortage of air that had not yet happened. That, of course, had been before Mercer had reported the deformation of Pod Four during thrust and Prescott had decided that the Corries' shortage of breath was actual rather than imagined. Mercer had wanted to tell Four's occupants as soon as possible about their trouble. Prescott had objected, saying that doing so would unsettle the passengers who had not been turned around by delaying their retro fire and making them wonder if their own pods were not Just a little bit soft. Telling the Corries too soon could quite easily have brought on another six emergencies just like theirs. When Mercer had continued to argue, Prescott had ended by asking him to wake the captain for a second opinion. "No," said Mercer, because the captain, dressed only in sweatsoaked bandages, was feeling his way around the segment. Where Collingwood's spacesuit had not pressed tightly against his skin, the decompression had caused capillary bleeding and the blood had congealed so that his face and neck were like one great, livid bruise and the same angry discoloration marched along his body and limbs in broad, regular bands. He kept looking straight at Mercer with his eye bandages and smiling and asking for a report and offering to help. Mercer said, "No," again because it did not much matter what he said to the captain in a dream. He told Collingwood that he could do nothing to help if he could not see, because Mercer's greatest fear was that he had misdirected the segment so that they would never make rendezvous and that the captain's instructions and those of Prescott would probably be in conflict. In any case the captain was a patient, and doctors were not supposed to worry patients with their physicians' personal troubles. The captain replied that he was dying from radiation poisoning even though neither of them would admit it while they were awake, that he was so full of sedatives that he was walking in someone else's sleep, and didn't Mercer want company? Mercer insisted that the captain would make worse even his dream condition by moving around and talking, that the radioactive material he had inhaled could easily be dislodged and start burning another area of lung tissue. But the captain remained hanging there, talking politely and refusing to return to the bunk, which he could not possibly have escaped from in the first place. Mercer wondered if he could dream Collingwood back into the bunk or if he would have to dream himself awake and push Collingwood into the thing. But if he dreamed himself awake he might really awaken. Mercer did not want to wake for as long as possible. Sleep was infinitely precious -- it shortcircuited a few of the boring, anxious, sweating hours of waiting for rendezvous and rescue or for the realization that he was offcourse with no hope of rescue. He would allow the captain into his dream provided Collingwood did not become too unpleasant -- it would be a small enough price to pay for sleep. But he could not help wishing that his dream did not take over where his waking life left off. G radually coiiingwood's intent, bandaged face began to fade away as did the bunks and the segment structure behind it, and Mercer was hanging in a vacuum rimmed by stars. Voices were coming at him from a ring of tiny, plastic globes that hung like bubbles in a black ocean. I can't. You know I never could sleep properly without you beside me -- no, George, you're too hot. Just -- just hold my hand until I'm asleep. Your tiny hand is sweating, let me -- You can't sing, George, and you're wasting oxygen... "I agree," murmured Mercer, "on both counts." It's supposed to be cold and dark, they told us. But this is a black inferno. I keep wanting to tear a hole in the plastic and climb out -- it would be worth asphyxiating Just to be cool for a few seconds. Take it easy, Sampson. If you did that you wouldn't even have time to feel cool. You would decompress, swell up and burst like a balloon stuffed with porridge. You wouldn't look or feel nice. And you only have to look at Kirk herself to see what she means about overstuffed -- There's no need for cracks like that, Moore -- I was simply trying and us into the bargain. But maybe you would like to die, too, because you have nothing left to live for. Even when you nudge against Eglin he just pushes you away now. You must be getting desperate. Your cheekbones stick out and as for your gorgeous figure, we can count every rib. You're skinny, Moore, and you can't take it. That's the trouble with beautiful and unstable creatures who live only for love -- Listen, fatso, an overweight hog like you has no reason to talk about psychological instability. You're not exactly an attractive sight yourself. You've three times more skin than you need and it flaps around like a -- You bitch. You can't leave me alone, can you? Well, just remember that three can live and breathe more easily than four and the next time you're drifting about trying to nudge Eglin and you come near me. I'll -- Shut up, all of you! You're wasting air, and just getting angry generates physical heat, so cut out the squabbling, ladies. If you want to do things, lie quiet and think about doing them when we get back on the recovery ship, where there will be enough food and cool, clean air to let us do them If you think about it quietly you will let me go to sleep and dream about it. You might even go to sleep yourselves. As for you, miss, I don't really believe that you would tear a hole in the skin, but your long nails worry me. Why don't you chew them like I do? It's a good way of augmenting your diet. "Sensible man," said Mercer. "Always leave them laughing." He wondered sleepily if biting the nails were a mild form of cannibalism. Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. Whi-i-n-ng-g-g. Blam-blam-blam. Kerpow. Eh-eh-ehbo-o-om. Charge! The Mathewson boy's capsule was having another war. It did not sound like Indians this time or bug-eyed monsters -- arrows, Mercer knew from recent experience, went whizz-thunk and rayguns simply hissed. This sounded like a group of assault commandos of Second World War vintage in the process of establishing a bridgehead on Pod Fourteen. Mercer did not object either to the noise or the occupation, because it was much better than listening to the boy trying not to cry for his mother and the visitors were not using up any of the food or oxygen. Besides, a battle of this magnitude would soon make Mathewson hoarse and the imaginative effort involved would put him to sleep. He hasn't spoken for over four hours. Do you think our radio has packed in? You worry too much, Saddler. He's probably sleeping. After all, he's only human... You don't really believe that, do you? I wonder where they found such a cold, unflappable, unemotional iceberg for a medical officer -- Poker, anyone? Whist? We just finished a game. Cant you think of anything else, like what it would be like if we had a girl in here? We might not be able to do anything. I mean, that's a game that only two should play. Not always. It has been practiced as a group exercise on occasion. No dice, Saddler -- Mercer would deliver a sermon much stronger than the one he gave somebody three days ago, warning us about abusing the energy reserves of our restricted world in the thoughtless pursuit of pleasure. And the doll herself would probably remind us that she had a husband -- seven feet tall and broad in proportion -- in another pod. But nobody could actually stop us, could they? I'm thinking about that paragraph on page twentythree of the emergency instructions where it says, in effect, that any actions taken by survivors while adrift in a capsule are beyond the jurisdiction of any planetary government. We could get away with anything... Like cheating at cards? Don't be ridiculous -- some sins are unforgivable. But he might be right, Saddler -- we could be luckier than some of the others. A pack of cards doesn't use oxygen and if things get really bad we can always eat them. Gin rummy, then? "Try patience," said Mercer in his sleep. "That's the name of this game." I don't dislike either of you. Try to believe that and stop arguing over what I probably think about you -- I'm thinking none of those things. It doesn't make any difference to me that one of you is fat and the other thin -- even less that one is polite and apparently thoughtful while the other is less so. I'm a PC widow with a wide experience of being loved, hated, tolerated or ignored by a man who changed personalities at will. The only good thing about you two, as far as I'm concerned, is that neither of you change. That might not always hold true, ma'am. In the grip of strong emotion, such as love, even the most stable personality can undergo -- Say what you mean. Stone, Given the chance you would be as much an animal as any other man. That kind of personality change is normal in those circumstances and doesn't worry me. I should think not. My wife wouldn't complain if I came home a different man every night. What happened to him, was he institutionalized or did he get airborne without an aeroplane? Shut up, Kirk... It doesn't matter. You probably think it was fun. It was, in the beginning when he took PC only occasionally when he had to meet an important client and he thought it would help him swing the deal if he put on a complimentary personality. But then he started taking them more and more often -- and experimenting -- and for the last four years his personality. was so fragmented that it had made him impotent. But he kept taking more, several different kinds at once, trying to shock his mind back to normal. They told him that it didn't work like that but he wouldn't believe them. That was how he died. At a party -- after taking five, one of which was a hallucinogen -- it was that kind of party. But he didn't commit suicide. Three of them got impatient to experience the drug under freefall conditions. They were holding on to each other all the way to the pavement. Tough... Yes. indeed... It doesn't bother me now. But you see why I don't like or dislike either of you and why it is a waste of time fighting over me. Nothing could happen here anyway, but perhaps if I came to know both of you better on the ship -- Stone might get to know you better on the ship, but I wouldn't -- my wife would be there. And I'm not all that sure that we'll ever make the ship. That sanctimonious medic is conning us and you are likely to be the last woman I will ever meet. My personality isn't very nice, but I'm likely to be the last man you will ever meet. For obvious reasons I'm discounting Stone, who probably couldn't -- Kirk, you're trying to start a fight again and you'll get it -- on the recovery ship if I can wait that long -- Please. Please don't fight -- scott. Wake up, MacArdle, and listen to me. I have to try something but I need your help..." He went on calling the communications officer, outlining what he had to do and asking for instructions. But MacArdle did not answer and all he could see was the survival pod with Mrs. Mathewson and Stone in it with a great, organic zeppelin without a face -- Kirk. But then the picture began to fade and the supports of the bunk beside him began to show through. Something, somebody, was waking him up and he was actually glad. " -- and if you insist on babbling in your sleep, at least talk coherently! Mercer! Prescott here. Come in, Mercer." "Mercer." "I think I caught the general drift, but tell me again what you want MacArdle to do and why." Mercer began by explaining that he still wasn't sure whether he had overheard some pod conversations or merely dreamed that he had. When Prescott curtly informed him that he had overheard the same conversations, Mercer came fully alert. Without giving Prescott a chance to speak again he concluded, " -- I've been listening to them and understand the type of personalities involved. With that background of PC trouble with her husband she can't help feeling the way she does, but the other two should not, under those circumstances, be told that she has no strong feelings either way for them. If she said that she preferred one, fine -- they might have a token scrap and some bad language. They might even injure each other while proving who was the better man. But telling them that they are just the same in her eyes -- well, they both have to prove to her as well as to themselves that they are not the same and before they do I have to get over there and stop it -- " "Negative. Absolutely not. The segments and pods are all, we hope, heading for rendezvous. Making course corrections to bring your segment alongside Three is a much too complex operation at this stage." "But MacArdle had the return courses ready as soon as we needed them. He must have a computer that could easily -- " "You've got one just like it, Mercer, but you've spent your life programing it with medical data. The answer is no." "But they'll kill each other." "Talk them out of it, Mercer. There is nothing else you can do." H IS trouble was that he could not talk to the passengers as individuals even though, on many occasions during the days that followed, he was sorely tempted to do so. On Pod Three it was Mrs. Mathewson who did most of the talking as she tried desperately to keep the peace. He learned much about her from the things she said -- about the life she had so recently led, the pressures she had been under and the difficulties of bringing up her son in a home that was all too often a madhouse. Other survivors revealed things good and bad about themselves, but Mercer's interests in them and his concern for their welfare was professional -- Mrs. Mathewson and her boy he was beginning to like. If he wasn't very careful he could find himself acquiring a readymade family. The thought was ridiculous, if pleasant. It seemed to come to his mind more often when he was asleep than at other times -- and on some of those occasions he was able to do much more than talk to Kirk and Stone. One of the first things he usually did was forget his Hippocratic Oath, lose his temper and begin making medical repair work for himself. He had to remind himself that Mrs. Mathewson and her companions were three reasonably normal, civilized people who would not have dreamed of hurting each other under ordinary circumstances. The trouble was that he could not talk to them directly, although it might have been done quite easily by calling for silence from everyone else and talking frankly about their situation. But then he would remember that while the frank discussion was going on between the occupants of Pod Three and himself, everyone else would be listening to his half of the discussion -- including the Mathewson boy and Kirk's wife. Mercer did not want the boy to hear about the sort of things Kirk was saying to Mrs. Mathewson and the discussion might easily become the cause of violence in Pod Four as well. The trouble in Pod Three, like a virulent disease, had to be contained. So he talked to Three in general terms, telling cautionary tales, drawing comparisons between pod conditions and those on overcrowded Earth, stressing the importance of self-control and the necessity for eking out the available resources for as long as possible. When the reactions from the pods -- not just from Three -- told him that he was beginning to anger them with his preaching he changed his approach. He began to talk psychology and discuss the wellknown fact that individual members of certain species, when threatened with death or a lesser danger, sometimes displayed a tendency to seek to prolong their lives through their offspring either by protecting them against the danger or by seeking to produce more of them. This urge toward species immortality was an animal instinct that reasoning beings could easily overcome. From that he moved to debating. More accurately, he answered at length questions that had never been asked. The survivors could not hear anything but his side of the debate so they did not know who asked the questions Mercer was answering and when some of them asked good questions of their own he sometimes tried to answer those, too. But when the questions were difficult or potentially unsettling he pretended that too many people were talking at once and that he had not heard them. He knew from their reactions that most of them guessed he was getting at someone, and speculation regarding the identity of the unknown offenders grew rife. Pod Three knew whom Mercer was getting at, but Kirk and Stone had stopped talking to him or even cursing him. And Mrs. Mathewson seemed to realize that nothing Mercer could say at a distance of several hunred miles would be able to help her. That made two of them. "Some of the passengers consider me a nuisance," he told Prescott during his next report, "others a constant irritant and a bore, while most of them show active dislike. But on Pod Three -- well, everything I say now makes them angry with me and each other -- the men that is. There's going to be bloody murder in that pod if someone doesn't make them see sense. Do you think you, as the most senior officer, could talk to them and -- " "I know I couldn't, Mercer. Nor could Neilson or MacArdle. We aren't programed for that sort of thing. How is the captain?" "Still out. If I allowed him to regain full consciousness he would be confused -- I'd have to explain everything that has happened in detail to him -- and in considerable pain. It would not be fair to him and he might not be well enough to sound authoritative. But then, I don't seem to be effective either, and the reactions of the other passengers -- " "Are you worried by what they think of you, Mercer? Don't be. I've listened to some of the things they've called you -- several varieties of sanctimonious unprintable, a blasted nag where conservation is concerned, a cold-blooded, imperturbable zombie who apparently can't even treat a boy with kindness. But why go on. I'm beginning to feel proud of you, Mercer." "Thank you, I think." "However, I can help by giving your people something else to think about. MacArdle has computed the attitudes for the rendezvous retro burn, but it will involve your giving the passengers another lecture, ril give you the positions, marker stars and firing times in numerical order, beginning with your own, which will be first. Are you ready to copy?" "Ready," said Mercer. "Before I give you the data explain to them in your words, not mine, that for this burn the attitude is not as important as the timing. They must check their velocity as close as possible to the rendezvous point and if they make a small error in attitude it will cause only a correspondingly small lateral drift and we will be able to keep them in sight and pick them up when the recovery ship arrives -- that is, of course, assuming that they have not made a major attitude error which will take them wide of the recovery area. If they burn their B thrusters too soon or too late they will stop short or overshoot and we may not be able to find them without the recovery ship's radar -- and by then their air could be gone. Do you want me to repeat this?" "No." "The first burn, yours, will take place in a little over five hours. The two four-person pods will follow, then the remainder in numerical order, with the last few having nearly a day to practice their positioning maneuvers. With luck a fair number of pods will be converging toward visual contact shortly, which should also give your people something pleasant to think about. "Your burn will occur at twentytwo zero six and your marker stars D uring the hours that passed before Mercer had to make his burn, the reactions from the pods ran the gamut from wild excitement to the listlessness of utter despair. But morale improved considerably when Pods Ten and Twelve reported seeing another pod, which meant that they were seeing each other. Mercer did not tell them that their seeing each other so soon meant that one or the other was considerably off course. When the time came for him to apply thrust he had not seen anyone else, even though the other three crew segments had reported seeing each other and they should have been within easy visual range of him. Mercer tried to consider the possibility that he was off course, lost, and for a few minutes so great was his panic that he could not even think. But then he began to feel angry as well as afraid, angry with MacArdle for giving him such precise instructions when, if Mercer had not carried out the repositioning properly a week earlier, this present exercise was a sheer waste of time. He surprised himself by making the final attitude check and pressing the thrust button precisely on the pip. But when he moved to the canopy to make another desperate search of the stars for the three segments, the fear returned. He wondered again if he should rouse the captain -- would it be fair to wake Collingwood only to explain that due to an error on Mercer's part they were lost and were going to die? It might not be fair -- but, on the other hand, did anyone have the right to put a man to sleep, then make the condition permanent without first waking him to tell him so? Maybe Collingwood would hate Mercer for waking him -- or perhaps there were things Collingwood would want to remember for a while before he died. There was that startlingly beautiful ground hostess who was the captain's wife. "Where the hell are you?" Mercer shouted. "Prescott. Steady, Mercer. We could ask the same of you. Try lighting a flare." Keeping his eyes covered to retain his night vision, Mercer ejected a flare, not daring to hope. "We have you, Mercer. MacArdle says that from your position we should be midway between Triangulum and the Square of Pegasus, in visual range now that you know where to look. Well?" "I see you," said Mercer after a few minutes. With thousands of stars all around him, the arrival of three small and not particularly bright additions had not been easy to detect. "Can I get closer?" "Yes, by using your flares for thrust. You ignite them without pressing the eject button. This causes them to burn inside their launchers. Each will give ten seconds of very weak thrust. But it isn't necessary for you to come closer. We can expect some pretty wild shooting from the passengers and having you out there to look for stragglers could be an advantage and the recovery ship might come to rest closer to you than us." "I understand." "It's nice seeing you, Mercer. Now you had better attend to Pod Five." On Pod Five Eglin had passed out from heatstroke and the three girls had positioned the capsule and applied thrust. Mercer did not see their burn, nor those of Pods One and Two, but they were spotted by the other segments and he relayed the good news to their occupants. Several passengers reported excitedly that they could see other pods, and Mercer spotted one drifting almost directly between himself and the dim constellation of artificial stars that was made up of the other three crew segments. He did not know who the new arrival was until its B thruster burned outward like a fiery spear precisely on the second listed for Pod Three. "I see you. Three," said Mercer, laughing with relief. "Nice shooting." "Stone here. I'm not just a pretty face, you know. But this little miracle of astrogation is going to cost someone, Mercer." "Fine," said Mercer, laughing. "Company rules forbid the carrying of intoxicating liquor, but if you wouldn't mind a few ounces of diluted surgical spirits I'd be glad to -- " "He doesn't want to be paid off in booze, stupid." "That was Kirk, Mercer. Ignore him. He isn't responsible for his glands." "Don't you patronize me, you -- you gentleman -- " "Please don't fight. We're nearly safe now. Please. Doctor, talk to them." T here was nothing Mercer could say that would do any good, so he said nothing. There was little that he could do, but he did it. "Prescott. Are you in trouble, Mercer? There is evidence of a discharge of gas from your vehicle." "No, sir. I used two contained flares to move toward Pod Three." "I told you to stay put." "Yes, sir. But a very serious problem could arise on Three if something isn't done quickly, and it is in my province. I guessed that you might object and I decided that it would be better -- less prejudicial to discipline that is -- if I were to be chewed out for using my initiative rather than for disobeying orders." "That was considerate of you, Mercer. I suppose you consider mutiny just another exercise of individual initiative? Don't answer -- I'm too busy just now to listen. Neilson will tell you what to do if you ever get where you're going." Before Prescott switched off Mercer could hear MacArdle reading out the numbers for what he called his final approximation of position while another voice, sibilant with distance and intervening interference, was reminding Prescott that the survival pods were nearing their limit of duration and suggesting ways by which the passengers could save energy and air. The voice from Earth was speaking as if it were surrounded by mikes and TV cameras, as was probably the case. Mercer hoped that Prescott would give the ground-bound medic instructions on what to do with his elementary and unoriginal suggestions. The flares had not given his segment much of a push. It would take five hours for him to reach Pod Three -- if he did not go wide. He had three flares left, two for deceleration and one to light if he got lost. It was extremely difficult to listen to the sounds from Pod Three without thinking too much about what might be happening there, but he tried. The voices from the other pods helped. "Pod Four, Corrie, at rest. I have two others in sight." "I can see someone! Pod Six here. Shouldn't we decelerate?" "Pod Seven. We can see a pod on a converging course. Who is it?" "Mercer, the air is bad. When I look at the stars I keep seeing blotches. I'm not sure they're the right ones." "Pod Five. Sampson. The others have passed out and -- and I'm going the same way. The air indicator is as -- as near zero as makes no difference. Where the -- hell's the -- recovery ship?" "Prescott. I heard that, Mercer. Tell her there is a safety reserve and to relax. Make it sound convincing. I'm going after them myself, estimating contact in five and a half hours. Is there anything special I should remember about reviving heatstroke and asphyxiation cases?" "I can't breathe, George." "Crowded all of a sudden, isn't it? I can see three of them, all drifting past us. It's like -- oh, God, no. We're moving past them -- we're going right past them. Saddler here. What's happening to us?" "Prescott. I see them, Mercer. Their attitude was badly off -- they killed only a fraction of their inward velocity and are shooting away from the rendezvous area at a fair clip. MacArdle, go after them before they get too far away. Mercer, tell them to relax and play some more poker." "Pod Fourteen, Mathewson. When will I be able to see something, Mercer?" "Pod Nine here. We're due to decelerate soon but we still can't see anyone. Are -- are we lost?" "I don't think I'm the sort of man he keeps telling you I am -- I'm pretty sure I'm not. But I don't know for sure and I don't want to hurt you. Even under this blubber I'm a big man, you know, and -- well you've heard the expression: laugh and grow fat. I think that fat people have to laugh to keep from crying or breaking things, and small people keep jumping about and prodding people so's everyone will know they're there -- " "Watch it, Kirk." " -- in noise what they lack in size. But they're lucky in some ways. They are better engineered, less susceptible to component failure like bad hearts and gummed-up arteries and there are always plenty of small, good-looking women for them. Unless you've plenty of money or you put on weight after you're married nobody will look at you but fat women. Just once before I die I would like to be loved by a beautiful slim girl with a nice disposition and -- well you know." "I understand, Mr. Kirk. But we aren't going to die and that wasn't -- isn't how I'd describe myself. I'm a bag of skin and bones." "Ignore him, ma'am. On you skin and bones look good." "Damn you. Stone. You always have to say the right thing." "Kirk, what are you doing -- " The fight started then and Mercerwould not reach them for another three and a half hours. H e began by telling himself that it could not possibly last, that they could not maintain the physical effort in an environment of a stinking plastic oven full of rank air -- but the fight went on and on with no audible indication of it's ever stopping. Then he began to worry about the heat they were generating and the air they were using. Reminding himself that both men were suffering from malnutrition and could well be as weak as kittens did not help much, because the noises they were making suggested that they were fighting like tigers. What they were doing was a physical impossibility for sane men and insanity like theirs had to be temporary. But temporary did not necessarily mean of short duration. The grunts and gasps, the low, monotonous cursing and the wet thud of fists or feet against slippery, sweating flesh went on. Mercer told himself that his imagination was probably working overtime, that they were not seriously injuring each other because in the weightless condition it was practically impossible to kick or punch accurately and, if a blow should land, both attacker and victim would bounce away unless they were holding each other tightly -- and if they were doing so they would not be able to punch or kick effectively. There was a sudden high, sharp squeal of pain. "Stop it! Stop it! Look what you've done to his ear -- " Animal noises answered her. Probably they were making them at each other. But there were other times when the noises became coherent words, when between the curses and grunts of pain they became all too specific about what they were going to do -- what they M;ere doing -- to each other. So there were very few blank areas in the mental picture Mercer had of the interior of Three and those were usually filled by the anguished pleading of Mrs. Mathewson trying each other and her as well. "It's getting hotter! Stop it. Please stop it -- " Mercer heard another wet thud and a feminine cry as Mrs. Mathewson tried vainly to separate the men. Another scream was followed by a continuous whimpering and moaning as one of the men sank his teeth into the other's shoulder and had his eye clawed while he was tearing free. Mercer knew what was happening because they kept talking and gloating about it, but he did not know who was doing what because neither man's voice was recognizable. Mercer had forgotten that in the weightless condition they could still use fingers and teeth. "Pod Ten. I'm having trouble again finding my markers. Is Arcturus supposed to be level with the rod equator and Antares ten degrees above it -- or have I got it the wrong way around?" "You have fifty minutes before your burn. Ten," said Mercer sharply. "I'll come back to you. Quiet, everyone, for Pod Three." "Prescott. Forget Three, Mercer, and think about your other passengers. Give Ten the information he needs. Right now." other and probably the girl, too. Listen to them." "I'm trying not to, Mercer. I advise you to do the same." Mercer could not forget Pod Three because the sounds on the capsule frequency kept reminding him that the biting and clawing and gouging were still going on. But suddenly there was a marked reduction in the noise and activity -- maybe the heat was getting to them at last and they were beginning to flag. With luck they might both pass out from heatstroke and stop using so much of the pod's air -- all the occupants might then survive, even if two of them did not deserve to. A little over two hours were left before he rendezvoused with Three -- if he were able to do so. "You've won, you've won. Let go of him. Can't you see you're strangling him?" "I've won. No. And yes." "But -- but you're not angry any more and you're still trying to kill him. Let go. Let go of his throat." "Keep away. I'll wrestle with you later -- " "Let go of him. Please let go -- oh, my hair, my hair -- " "I told you to keep away -- " Listening helplessly, Mercer knew that things were quieter on Three because one of its occupants was dead or unconscious. He could hear heavy breathing and the thud of blows being struck. Reminding himself that it was virtually impossible to land heavy blows in the weightless condition did no good, because he was remembering the girl's long, dark hair and imagining one fist gripping a handful of it while the other pounded her into insensibility. "Pod Ten. Retro thrust completed and I can see two other pods. I think one of them is close enough to wave to." "Save your energy," said Mercer dully." T he sounds from Three were taking on a new quality because the purpose of the man making them had changed. His world might only have minutes of life left to it and he, whichever of the two it was, intended enjoying them to the full -- the gasping, chopped-up monologue made that all too plain. But his intentions, which would have been easily accomplished on Earth where gravity kept inanimate or unconscious objects in one place, in his present environment required the active cooperation of both parties. One of the parties was unconscious and could not have cooperated even if she had wanted to and he was becoming angrier, hotter and more frustrated by the second. Suddenly his breathing became stertorous. The sounds of cursing and the slapping contact of his body against the plastic stopped. He began to make choking noises and a few seconds later he was making no sound at all. Mercer swore horribly and turned up the volume on the pod frequency. The segment was suddenly filled the sounds of heavy, labored, gasping breathing. It was coming from the fourteen other survival capsules and not, he was afraid, from Pod Three. "Prescott. I heard that, Mercer. You might be better advised to divert to Pod Four. The Corries could be shorter of air than they realize. MacArdle will give you the figures. Neilson will meet you and come aboard at Four -- we'll need to make some fast pickups by then and for that we need fast and fancy maneuvering." "I have to check Three." "I see. In that case MacArdle wants you to observe your target pod carefully and note the rate of apparent drift in the stars beyond it. This will tell him how much you are off course and allow him to compute an angle of thrust that will compensate for it during deceleration. Neilson will give you a rundown on the automatic docking sequence." "I'm listening," said Mercer. "When they've finished you should check on the captain's condition -- if you haven't already done so. You are going to be very busy for the next ten hours." "Will do." But all at once Mercer did not want to check on Three's drift, nor did he want to see the proof of the things he had heard going on, even though the sight might not be as bad as his imagination had pictured it. Pod Three was in all probability a coffin that would never be opened -- it might drift in space for all eternity, beyond even the range of Gabriel's trumpet, unless he himself went in and disordered the bones of its freshly dead. There was no real need for him to open that stinking, plastic coffin. The air must have been used up during that long, vicious fight and a man who had killed once by strangling his victim might lack the imagination during a stress situation to vary his methods of coercion. Mrs. Mathewson could well have been dead before her attacker had succumbed to heat and asphyxiation. Mercer had been no stranger to the sight of death, whether naturally occurring or violent, but he was most desperately anxious not to see Mrs. Mathewson dead. For the first time he was able to understand why some people refused to look at the bodies of their nearest and dearest relatives. If one remembered loved ones only as they were when they were alive, there was no real proof that their lives had ended. He could still call Prescott and change his mind. But then there was the boy to think about. Young Mathewson might not be as good at playing spaceman as he sounded. He might be headed wide of the rendezvous point and already condemned to die. But he might not die -- Mercer might have to tell him that his mother had died and he realized that, no matter how bad it was going to make him feel a few hours from now, he had to be able to tell the boy that she had died before he reached her pod. While MacArdle gave him instructions he checked on the captain's condition and made sure that the services in the other bunks were functioning. Then Neilson's voice filled the segment, interrupted only by passengers saying that they could see other pods and their air was running out, that it was very hot and when would the recovery ship arrive? People, Prescott included, were not giving Mercer much time to think, for which he was glad. As his segment was closing with Three he wondered what he would do if there were a survivor in the pod who was not the girl. He knew what he wanted to do, but a rebel bunch of brain cells in his mind -- a minority group, but one that was steadily gaining converts -- kept insisting that in different circumstances Three's occupants might well have become good friends. That the disaster of Eurydice had subjected two flawed personalities to a breaking strain and that an innocent one who had given no indication of being flawed had perished in the total calamity. found him.self less that twenty yards from Pod Three and drifting slowly past it. Mercer had an air bottle and mask strapped in position, another set drifting loosely at his elbow and the inside seal of the airlock was already open. Through the window in the outer seal he could see Three turning slowly end over end like a great, fat cucumber, half silvered and half clear. In the transparent section he could see a motionless tangle of plastic screens, clothing, food containters and bodies floating like strange fish in a pinktinged, frozen ocean. When Three's lock turned to face his position he launched the automatic docking cable, watching its seeking head home on the lock transmitter, connect and begin drawing the two vehicles together. As the cable shortened the difference in the two vehicles' velocity set them spinning about a common center. By the time the lock interfaces came together they were spinning quite fast -- not enough to blur the stars, but enough for Mercer to feel the tugging of artificial gravity. He checked that the passenger frequency was switched off and reported what was happening to Prescott. Then he opened the connecting seals and went through. The centrifugal force was greater than he had expected so that he dropped not too lightly onto the services panel at the opposite end of the pod. It was covered with a sexless tangle of arms and legs and plastic debris, the whole mess splattered with sticky red discs of congealed blood, which a few minutes earlier had been drifting weightless in the incredibly hot and stinking air. The smell was forcing its way past his breathing mask so that he had to fight to keep from retching. Mercer began pulling the tangle apart, trying to separate and identify the people. The sun whirled steadily around the pod, plunging its contents into darkness for a few seconds, then sending shadows crawling over the bodies. Two, both male, were covered by thick traceries of nail marks. It was as if they had been wearing a red embroidered body stocking whose pattern included a large "number of solid red flowers -- the places where they had used their teeth on each other. Wet red patches showed on their scalps where hair had been pulled out -- their ears were like raw meat and he doubted if one of them had been able to see at the end. Neither of the two men was sweating, nor did they bleed. Mrs. Mathewson was also bloody but the blood did not seem to be her own. She was at the bottom of the heap, her head under a piece of plastic screen -- which also covered the air supply outlet -- in what would have been an effective oxygen tent if the air being vented had not been only fractionally less foul than that in the pod itself. There were two large bumps on the right side of her skull, no depressions, and the side of her face and upper torso showed severe bruising. She did not seem to be breathing but her pulse, weak and rapid, was discernible. Mercer slipped the spare mask over her head and turned the air tap on full. He tried to inflate her lungs by moving her arms rhythmically away and back to her sides, but he had to be careful because she was so emaciated that he could actually see two cracked ribs. The pulse began to slow and stengthen although she showed no sign of regaining consciousness. He was dizzy from a combination of the stench, the heat and sheer relief. Quickly and carefully he strapped on her air tank, checked the mask fastenings and lifted her in his arms. He bent at the knees and jumped for the lock seal eight feet above his head. The services panel gave under his feet. He found his mass not lined up properly with his center of thrust and began a slow somersault. Although the centrifugal force was weak, it was still strong enough to bring him to a stop three feet short of the seal and he began to fall back slowly. When he landed Mrs. Mathewson still in his arms, the pod stretched alarmingly. Its walls closed in and for an awful moment Mercer thought that the plastic would rupture and burst. But slowly the capsule resumed its proper shape. Mercer tried again. This time he did not jump immediately but instead made a series of knee flexings which set the pod's floor to bouncing slowly in and out and its walls to pulsing like some alien artificial heart. He could hardly see through the sweat pouring into his eyes and he knew that if he gave in to the urge to be sick he would gum up his breathing mask and probably suffocate or collapse from heat prostration before he could get it cleared. So he persisted, reinforcing the up-anddown movement of the services panel until regular contractions threatened to bounce him away, then he jumped during one particularly strong upswing. "The girl is all right," he reported, back in his segment. He hardly recognized his own voice. "Good. I didn't really think that the air would last." "It lasted," said Mercer, "because the other two had stopped using it." "In that case leave them and mark the pod. Seal up and prepare to break contact. But before you do, MacArdle says he can utilize your present spin to boost you toward Neilson and Pod Four. It could save a lot of time and the Corries have very little time left. I am closing with Pod Five now and will be too busy to talk to you for a while, so I'll give you MacArdle -- " "Before you open the seal," said Mercer, "take two antinausea tablets and plug your nostrils with cotton." "I'm supposed to be giving the orders." "Doctor's orders," said Mercer firmly, "you have to take." XX with Neilson and Pod Four, Mercer had time to move Mrs. Mathewson into the bunk below the captain's, carry out a proper examination and tape her broken ribs. She still had not regained consciousness but the reason, he was sure, was nothing more serious than a concussion. While he worked the last few pods were nearing the rendezvous area, and his speaker kept repeating the occupants' complaints about the heat and shortage of air. Some of the passengers sounded close to desperation. After his few minutes in Pod Three, Mercer wondered why they were not raving mad. Suddenly the slow, deliberate voice of Neilson, relayed through his segment. "I'll be docking with you in a few minutes, Mercer, but don't open your seal until I tell you. The drill is that I push you close to Four, disengage, then let you reel them in as you did with Three. I'll position you so that you will not have to worry about spin. When you have them aboard dump the pod and I'll redock and join you. Got that?" "It sounds almost too easy," said Mercer. After one unpleasant surprise when he opened the seal -- his ears popped painfully because Four's pressurization was dangerously low -- it all went surprisingly easily. There was no centrifugal force to complicate the rescue, and the pod interior was uncluttered. Both of the Corries were barely conscious. It took only a few minutes to float them into the segment, toss a marker grenade with a five-minute delay into the pod, seal up and detach. Neilson's segment moved in quickly, nudged the empty pod aside and locked on. Mercer turned to see Mrs. Corrie taking off her breathing mask while her husband stared through the canopy at the slowly shrinking shape of their capsule. Corrie gave a startled grunt when the transparent section of the pod abruptly changed to a dazzling white. "A small explosive charge inside a bulb of white paint," Mercer explained. "It marks the empty pods so that we will know to leave them alone. But you two will be much more comfortable in bunks -- " "No," said Mrs. Corrie, gripping her husband's arm with both hands. "Excuse me." Mercer slipped them each a hefty shot of sedative. As their eyes began to lose focus he said, "There is nothing to be afraid of, ma'am, not now. The bunks are designed for seriously ill or injured passengers and carry their own life-support and waste elimination equipment. They are cool and roomy -- " "How roomy?" asked Corrie. "If you are worrying about claustrophobia, don't. You will be asleep and -- " Neilson arrived just as Mercer had decided that he knew what was really worrying Mrs. Corrie. Neilson was wearing a shiny patina of sweat and his cap pulled well down over his eyes. Mercer greeted him briefly, wondering about the reason for the cap -- then deciding that the visor probably shielded Neilson's eyes while he checked marker stars close to the sun. He turned back to the Corries. "I suppose you don't want to be separated after all you've been through," he said. "That is quite all right -- the bunks are big enough to fit two in a pinch. But I'll have to increase the air supply." Neilson made the necessary adjustments and helped Mercer fit the already sleeping couple into their bunk. "I don't approve of single beds, either," Neilson said. "Head to toe like that there isn't much risk of their suffocating unless one puts a foot in the other's mouth," said Mercer. "But I think I'll leave the sides open and keep an eye on them anyway. It's nice to see you, Neilson." "Likewise, Mercer." "Prescott. Delay your reunion celebrations, please. MacArdle has some figures for you." A few minutes later Neilson had instructions for Mercer. "We have to reach Pods One and Nine as quickly as possible," he said, removing the cover of Mercer's thrust panel as he spoke, "and pushing you ahead of me will waste too much time. So I want you to apply thrust to your segment while I do the same with mine -- that way we will approach the targets broadside but much faster. Ignore all the pretty lights unless they suddenly turn red. Depress this stud when I tell you -- I'll give you a five-second countdown -- and release it when I yell, 'Cut -- ' The procedure is the same as it was with Three when we close with the pods, which are only a short distance apart. First let me get us properly lined up." "Two pods in trouble?" Mercer reached for the switch of the passenger transmitter. "That's six people -- no, seven, because Ten has four aboard -- and we do not have an unlimited number of empty bunks." "Don't touch your transmitter, Mercer," said Neilson sharply. "Prescott has been monitoring that frequency while you were busy and I don't want anything to distract you until we're on our way. Anyhow, you have established a useful precedent with the Corries." T he passengers in Pods One and Nine were in no condition to object to being packed in two to a bunk -- they were much too relieved at being able to breathe relatively cool air again and for the few minutes it took for the sedative shots to take effect Mercer let them assume that such overcrowding was normal. While he was dealing with them he could not help noticing the bunk temperature gauges -- they showed the differential between the segment as a whole and that being experienced by his patients. The new arrivals were generating a lot of extra heat. Before Neilson could rejoin Mercer, Prescott was on the speaker. MacArdle had more figures -- Pod Six was running out of air. Neilson estimated that he and Mercer would need twenty minutes to reach Six. While they were on their way Mercer asked about Pod Eight, which had accelerated past the rendezvous and been chased by MacArdle. He had been out of touch and nobody had mentioned Eight recently. "That was quite a chase, Mercer. It will take me five hours to get back, but I have them aboard." "Are they all right?" "Two of them are doing fine. But the other man, Saddler, is running a bluff with a pair of threes." "Prescott. When you've dealt with Six, there are two other pods. Ten and Thirteen, that will be in bad trouble by then. Give Neilson their markers, MacArdle, or would you rather watch the poker game?" "How," whispered Mercer, "does he know which pods are in trouble?" "He noted their positions as they came in," said Neilson quietly, "and his telescope brings in the pods that went wide. From his position they have a wide angle of separation, so he lines up his directional antenna on the telescope bearing. This increases the strength of any given pod's signal and he knows who is calling for help even if they don't identify themselves -- or even if they are so short of air that they can't speak." "Do we have a dish antenna?" Mercer asked. "I was thinking that it might operate in reverse to allow me to speak to a pod without all the other pods hearing the message." Neilson shook his head. "Only the captain's segment has such refinements and normally the dish is used to maintain two-way contact with Earth Control. But now Prescott is using it on the pod frequency because if Control and MacArdle haven't done their calculations right there isn't much point in wasting time talking to Earth with passengers in trouble only a few miles away." "Suppose MacArdle or Control haven't -- " began Mercer. "This segment, on the other hand," Neilson went on firmly, "has no sophisticated communications equipment, a relatively small fuel reserve and quite a lot of power and air reserves -- a life raft, Mercer, is what we're in." "If I had known about the power," said Mercer, "I might have wasted a little keeping the place cooler." "You will be very glad that you didn't," said Neilson seriously. "This segment takes thirteen passengers and a crew of two, comfortably. So far you've squeezed in ten passengers and have saved on space because most of them have doubled up. Trouble is, you can't double the air supply. Our segments have less, elbow room and can take three survivors in a pinch. How Prescott is managing with four I shudder to think." Neilson paused. Then: "Why don't you take a few minutes to visit my place? It's through the airlock and then straight ahead. You can't miss it." "Are you trying to be funny?" Mercer asked harshly. "Or trying to humor me so I won't ask awkward questions? Do you know when the recovery ship is due?" "If I did I might not tell you. You would only worry if it turned out to be a little late." "I'm not completely stupid. If it doesn't arrive exactly on time -- that means it has gone wide and won't arrive at all. That is so, isn't it?" Neilson did not reply. Instead he cocked his head to one side and said, "One of your patients wants out." T he captain was tapping the inside of his bunk and growing audibly more impatient with every passing second. Mercer started to say that Collingwood had no business being awake at all, then stopped because he realized that he must have missed giving his patient a scheduled sedative shot. He moved quickly to the bunk, opened the side and slid the litter out far enough to let him see what Collingwood was doing. Mercer had another shot ready, but it would take a few minutes for it to take effect -- and longer if Collingwood tried to fight it. Collingwood had stopped tapping and was using his fingers to explore the bandages covering his eyes. He winced as the needle slid in, then asked sharply, "Who is that?" "Mercer, sir." Neilson drifted to the bunk, gave a little sigh of sympathy as he saw the bandages, the lead shielding on Collingwood's chest and side and the livid decompression blotches covering the captain's body. He withdrew again without speaking. "I've lost count of the times that I have begun to come to," said the captain, "and you've jabbed me to sleep again. I want out of this thing, Mercer. Even if I can't see, I can still hear, speak and think, damn it. And I should be getting exercise to prevent muscle atrophy and... But you're the doctor and should know all about that." "Yes, sir," said Mercer. "That has been attended to -- you have been given gentle exercise and massage every four hours. But I strongly advise you to stay put, sir. Movement of any kind could aggravate your present condition." "Which is?" The shot was showing no sign of taking effect and Mercer knew that the captain was demanding a condition report with an urgency that might delay the sedative's action indefinitely. Through the canopy behind Neilson Mercer could see Pod Six growing slowly larger. He told the captain about his condition, keeping it brief and to the point. "But you must have changed the dressings while I was sleeping," Collingwood said when he had finished. "And presumably the damage caused by the dim light is no greater when I am awake than asleep. I want to know if I can see. Doctor. And while you are taking off the dressings you can tell me about the condition of your segment, the other crew segments and the pods -- " He had other questions as well and there was still no sign of the sedative's taking effect. Mercer looked appealingly at Neilson, who moved closer and began to answer the more technical questions as the last few layers of dressing were being removed. Mercer was relieved to discover that his segment was in good shape, pleased that Neilson thought him something less than wasteful of its power reserves and surprised at the multiplicity of activities of the other officers during the times when Mercer had thought that he was the only one doing any work -- reassuring the passengers had been a very small job compared to that of organizing their rescue. When the bandages and pads were off Collingwood kept his eyes closed while Neilson went on speaking. Perhaps he was asleep at last, Mercer thought, or maybe he was just afraid to look in case there was nothing to see. "If opening your eyes feels as if it might hurt them," Mercer said, "don't do it. We're turned away from the sun and the only light is coming from a pod about a halfmile away, so it may be too dim for anything at all to register -- " Collingwood opened his eyes then. In the dim light the whites looked almost as dark as the irises -- they were still bloodshot -- and smeared with cream. Mercer saw them twitch from side to side, then up and down. The captain sighed and closed them. "I can't stay awake any longer," he said, "and Prescott is doing all the right things. But a word of advice, Mercer. Before you meet him again, shave -- and for God's sake put on some clothes -- " Neilson's sigh of relief warmed the back of his neck as Mercer began replacing the dressings, and the mental picture that he had been seeing of an ex-Captain Collingwood, blind and with a lung burned out and probably cancerous, being led around by his beautiful young wife until she became his prematurely aged widow, faded away. Suddenly he laughed and said, "He can see "Yes," said Neilson, "but we're due to decelerate in three minutes. You know the drill." Prescott had directed them to the wrong pod, one that was already marked empty. But when he opened the seal he discovered that the life-support system must have packed up only a few minutes earlier and that the pod's interior was filled with a dense, stinking fog. He had to grope through the weightless welter of plastic screens, clothing and other drifting debris for something that would feel like a human being. He found two of them near the services panel and pushed them gently toward the seal at the opposite side of the capsule. The third survivor found Mercer, wrapping his arms tightly around his neck from the back like someone drowning. The breathing mask was knocked away from his face and suddenly Mercer was drowning, too, in air that had to be too foul to support life. He lost his bearings and presently could not even guess where the seal was. He kicked hard against anything solid or near solid with which he came in contact, sending his passenger and himself bouncing blindly between the plastic walls of the pod, and by sheer luck he found himself tumbling into his own segment, which was by then also filled with stinking fog. A few minutes later, while the active survivor was helping Mercer resuscitate the other two, Neilson put in his head and shoulders to say, "Prescott has another one for us. We're already lined up. Seven seconds thrust, five seconds countdown. Your mouth is bleeding, Mercer." While Neilson and Mercer emptied three more pods, the Mathewson boy in Fourteen was given his marker stars and thrust timing. Fifteen and Sixteen were timed to arrive a few minutes later. When they came aboard the last batch of passengers said that Mercer's segment smelled worse than the pod they had just left, that it was much hotter as well and had he anything to eat? Mercer told them that talking wasted air and tried to find a place for them where they would not be in the way during the next rescue operation -- the last rescue operation, Mercer was sure, because his segment and its services were becoming dangerously overloaded. Neilson had locked his control panel against accidental activation and placed three passengers in his segment. Two more drifted between the connecting seals, their feet in the engineer's vehicle and their heads in Mercer's segment. The bunks now held eighteen and the spaces between accommodated another two. Neilson and Mercer were pressed against a canopy that was virtually opaque with condensation. From time to time they rubbed it with sweating hands to search the blurred stars for the recovery ship. Despite everything that Mercer told them about conserving energy and air, the passengers were beginning to argue and push and ask why two of the bunk sides were still up when all the others were down and contributing their quota of air to the rest of the passengers. The occupants of the bunks, whose original sedative shots were beginning to wear off, had begun to complain about being hot and cramped and unable to breathe while the people outside were angrily offering to change places with them. "Those two bunks contain patients as opposed to mere survivors," said Mercer sharply. "Neither of them is pleasant to look at and one of them, the captain, is slightly radioactive..." He went on to describe the captain's injuries in detail, the recovery of his sight and his poor chance of survival if some method of removing the two specks of radioactive material in his lung were not discovered within the next few weeks. Medical facilities on board the recovery ship would be no better than those on Eurydice -- and if Collingwood could not be treated soon he would probably outlive the voyage by only a couple of years. As he continued talking Mercer knew that he had their undivided attention and realized once again why morale was always good in a hospital ward -- suffering shared was suffering halved and someone always seemed in poorer shape than oneself. Mercer was also doing his best to take the survivors' minds forward to the time when they would be in the recovery ship and past the time in the not too distant future when the ship might or might not arrive. There was an interruption. T he first officer was trying to give them something else to think about as well. "Prescott. Switch on your pod frequency, Mercer." Mercer pushed between two passengers to do so and heard the Mathewson boy's voice. " -- didn't answer last time because Mr. Prescott said you were busy with passengers, but you can talk to me now. Pod Fourteen retro burn complete and I can see two other pods -- " "Prescott. We have him." " -- and one of them is all white. What do I do now, Mercer?" "Nice shooting, Mathewson," said Mercer warmly. "We have you in sight. Your orders? Well, keep a sharp lookout for the recovery ship, but don't look at or near the sun without goggles. Acknowledge, please." "Pod Fourteen. Will do." But the concern of the passengers for the captain and their relief at the Mathewson boy's safe arrival in the rendezvous area were shortlived. Soon they were saying that the boy was lucky to have a pod's air and food supply all to himself, that the recovery ship was not coming, that it would be impossible to see it if it did come with the canopy fogged with condensation, that it was hot and that if some unprintable didn't keep his feet out of someone else's mouth he would get them bitten off. "You must understand," said Mercer, trying not to gasp between words, "that we and the other pods and segments are following our original course for Ganymede and will arrive exactly on time. The recovery ship is virtually identical to Eurydice except for the extra boosters that will enable it to catch up with us and decelerate to match our velocity and which also make it impossible for it to be manned -- no human being could survive the enormous acceleration. These boosters are very powerful and if they are fired in the rendezvous area we, or some of us at least, might suffer even more from the heat they generate. So the recovery ship has got to feel its way in, guided by the first officer, and the time of arrival is dictated by considerations of survivor safety. It could be only minutes away, or a couple of hours. Isn't that so, Neilson?" The engineer rubbed at the canopy condensation with one hand. Three fingers were outspread with the thumb bent inward, indicating three, possibly three and a half hours. Aloud he said, "That is an oversimplification, Mercer, but essentially correct." His expression, which only Mercer could see, was sayig: Lies, all lies. Three or more hours, Mercer thought. He asked, "And we have ample air and power to last out?" "Yes, of course," said Neilson, but his expression had not changed. Nobody spoke for a few minutes, but Mercer knew that they would speak soon. He wiped sweat from his forearm and saw fresh globules grow seconds later. He had never been a compulsive extrovert, had never enjoyed the shouting, sweating proximity of his fellow men. He knew with an awful certainty that he could not take much more of the present situation and that he would probably be the one who started the chain reaction of violence for the simple reason that he had either to get out of this or end it. The heat and humidity were worse in his segment than they had been in many of the pods he had entered. He could understand how Kirk and Stone had felt, although their original reason for fighting had been much stronger, if not better, than his. He had to get out or he wanted all the other quarreling, stinking people to get out. He suddenly realized that he could put them out, although not literally. "Mr. Neilson and I will have to sweat it out," Mercer said, forcing a laugh so that they would all know that he was making a joke. "But there is no necessity for the rest of you to share our discomfort. What I am proposing is not in accordance with company regulations, of course, which state that medical stores should be used only on passengers who are ill or injured. Apart from being hungry and a little short of breath there is nothing wrong with you people, but you would be still more comfortable if -- " "If the air is so scarce," said a man beside him in a voice close to hysteria, "why the hell are you talking so much?" M ercer closed his eyes, fighting a sudden and incredbly violent urge to batter the hateful, unshaven face and hungerand heat-emaciated body until it looked like the two he had left in Pod Three. But he knew that once he started he would not be able to stop with this one stupid, sarcastic passenger -- he would go berserk among them until all were quiet and probably all dead. He wondered why he was having these intensely violent thoughts, was once more assailed by the heat and the stench and the sweaty pressure of bodies all around him and decided that he was in hell and that in hell everybody acted like the devil. "If I talk everyone else listens, sir," he said, opening his eyes, "and that saves more air than if everyone talks. What I intend to do is give some of you the opportunity of taking special shots -- a form of mild sedative, really, that also opens the pores and makes you feel cooler. I will use a spray injection hypo, which is quite painless. If you'll give me just a moment I'll demonstrate -- " Not all he told them was a lie, assured himself cynically. The shots were painless and the recipients would feel cooler and more comfortable because they would be out cold for the next three hours. And if he pretended that there were not enough shots to go around and that he was doing them a favor they might not resist the idea until it was too late. Certainly the first three did not resist, possibly because he had led them to believe that he was still demonstrating the painlessness of the procedure and nothing else. Still talking reassuringly, he injected any arm or thigh that presented itself. He looked at Neilson, who nodded and wriggled alongside him and began moving the suddenly relaxed bodies out of the way, holding the ones who argued or tried to break free and closing bunks so that Mercer could reach the passengers in the lower tiers. Only one passenger, the last one of the three packed into Neilson's segment, put up any resistance. She said, "We're not going to wake up again, are we?" "No, ma'am," said Mercer, "at least not in here." Silently he added, We hope... A few minutes later Neilson gently cleared the space above his panel of drifting bodies and said, "Putting them out was a good idea, Mercer. I've rechecked my calculations and provided we don't waste air in needless discussion, we might just make it." "Fine," said Mercer. "I'm not trying to tell you your job, Mercer," he went on, "but you might have to use a little energy checking that these sleeping beauties don't drift too close to each other and smother. Or have you that under control?" "Yes." "It's hot." "Yes." "About the captain, Mercer. I should have told you earlier, but the passengers were so interested in his troubles that I didn't want to spoil things for them. We reported what you said about his condition before Eurydice blew and the recovery ship will be carrying the special instruments you need to operate on him and withdraw the radioactive materials." "That's great." "Prescott will be acting captain for the rest of the trip out and back -- Collingwood won't be able to assume command again until he has passed the Earthside medical. Prescott should have been captain anyway, but the company thought that he lacked charm for a passenger-ship skipper and put Collingwood in with Prescott to keep him right. The captain was strictly a station shuttle man -- a nice person, but the situation wasn't fair to Prescott. He is tops in this profession, but he needs something -- " "A good PR man?" "Yeah. But we shouldn't waste air talking all the time." "You are doing most of it." "Listen, Mercer, are you asking for a punch in the -- " "Prescott. The remaining pods seem to be in no immediate danger with the exception of one. There is a life-support system failure with toxic wastes escaping into the living space. This is an urgent one, Mercer. Can you squeeze in three more?" T he three survivors were sedated just as soon as Mercer was sure that they were still alive. Then he burrowed and pushed until he found spaces for them and returned to the canopy to rest for the effort of burrowing in again a few minutes later to make sure that nobody was smothering. That effort increased the heat being generated inside the segment and the precaution did not seem to be really necessary. Twice he nearly passed out and once he almost panicked. Only the thought of Kirk as he had last seen him saved Mercer from tearing and kicking at the bodies pressing in all around him. In a way Kirk's reaction had been normal. He had known that he was going to die and had decided to enjoy himself first. But the hot, intimate contact of flesh did not stir Mercer even though, like Kirk, he was sure that he was going to die shortly. He began to wonder why -- was something wrong with him? But then he began to realize that all there was wrong with him was a recently contracted and serious case of monogamy -- the only close contact he wanted or would enjoy would be with the patient in bunk Three. He did not go among the passengers again, but stayed close to the canopy, fighting for every breath and sweating from every pore. This atmosphere is unsuited to human life, he told himself, so why don't we all die? But they did not die and some of the passengers seemed to be moving, waking up -- but it was only Neilson pushing his way through to the canopy. "I thought it might be cooler here," he said. "It isn't." Mercer wiped at the plastic without speaking. "I feel like a living fish in a can of sardines," said Neilson, then added: "Sorry, I'm talking." The silence stretched for a sweating, stifling eternity and when it was broken the voice was not using the segment's precious air. "Pod Fourteen, Mathewson. Come in, Mercer." The voice was without expresstion, just like that of a real spaceman in an emergency. Mercer wondered what had gone wrong in Fourteen and if he could squeeze in one more. It would have to be a bad emergency for the medical segment to be a sanctuary, but it was only right that a mother and son should be together at the end. "Mercer," he said. "I -- I have visual contact with the recovery ship, Mercer." "Prescott. Confirmed. MacArdle will have the figures for you in -- " They lost Prescott for a few minutes then because the Mathewson boy had lost control and was whooping like an Indian, and Neilson and Mercer were joining him. T he recovery ship differed from Eurydice in that it had two passenger locks aft instead of one, a feature designed to speed the reembarkation of survivors. Neilson nudged Mercer's segment against one and used the other to dock his own vehicle, but it was a very close thing. Mercer's head was pounding and throbbing and black splotches were blotting out his vision when he hit the quickrelease on his seal. Then the hot, putrid air was rushing past him and cool, dry air began seeping back. He crawled out, shivering, to find Neilson already waiting for him. "We'll have to go after the others as soon as possible," Neilson said briskly. "Do you mind if I don't help you unload this bunch? If I can concentrate on replenishing your segment with power cells, air tanks and fuel cartridges we could be ready to go in thirty minutes." Mercer nodded. He began moving out the sleeping passengers and floating them carefully into the main compartment, which now seemed to be enormous. He began with the people in Neilson's segment because it had to be jettisoned to allow Prescott, who was estimating contact with the recovery ship in twenty minutes, to dock. MacArdle and his passengers were due a half-hour later, by which time Prescott's segment would have been turned loose. Mercer's vehicle was the one designed for fast rescue work as long as there was at least one trained astronaut aboard to fly it. The last two people he moved out were the captain and Mrs. Mathewson -- these he took up to sick-bay. The place gave him the strangest feeling of disorientation because it was exactly the same as the place he had just left except for its fresh, newly minted look. On his way he saw the people drifting about the passenger compartment showing signs of animation. He checked his dive, letting Mrs. Mathewson, and these he took up to slowly ahead of him, while he spoke to them. The manual had told him what to say. He had read that particular section over and over again during the past two weeks as he might have scanned a fairy story he had never expected to come true. "Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "As you can see, your couches are already arranged in cruising mode and numbered as were the positions in Eurydice. In the usual compartments you will find food and fresh clothing. Will you please go to your original couches, strap in, talk as much as you want to, but keep the center of this compartment clear. For the next few hours the ship's officers will be bringing in the remaining survivors and doing other necessary jobs and you may feel that you are being ignored, but things will soon return to normal. "By the day after tomorrow," he added, smiling, "I may even be able to arrange a swim in the tank." When he had completed his check on the captain, he replaced the blankets removed during the superheated period in the other segment and immobilized Collingwood with webbing. The bunks were not cold, but the feel of blankets would give a sense of security and Mrs. Mathewson certainly needed that. She came to just as he was about to slide back her bunk. She began to struggle against the webbing and blanket with increasing violence. Instinctively he put out his hands to restrain her -- then he remembered the position and severity of some of her bruises and reached for the hypo instead. "Take it easy, ma'am," he said gently. "You're safe now." She stopped struggling and asked, "Mercer?" "Yes, ma'am." He knew that he should sedate her quickly before she had a chance to think, to remember. But she could not go through the rest of her life under sedation and it was important that she should try to face those ugly memories as soon as possible -- not completely, of course, but in easy stages. He desperately wanted to see her reactions, to get some idea of whether or not she would be able to handle it, before he used the hypo. Neilson hadn't called him, so there was still a little time before he had to leave. "Bobby?" "He's safe, too, but still in his pod. You must understand that having it to himself means he won't run out of air as quickly as the others. We have to bring him in last, ma'am." "I know. You could give him no preferential treatment. You acted as if he were a man." "He did a man's job, ma'am, and when he cried like a frightened little boy for his mother I pretended not to hear." "And you brought him back. I'm grateful. I might not sound it -- but I am. You treated him exactly right, said all the proper things -- to all of us, not just to Bobby. You were always cool, calm and -- and nothing seemed to touch you or change you in any way. I suppose I should be glad -- we should all be glad -- that you weren't an overlysympathetic character -- " xV thought that clinically he was very pleased with her reactions, but that on the personal level he was coming off very badly. He wished that he could relax and stop radiating the composure he most decidedly did not feel. "I'm not supposed to display signs of weakness in front of the passengers," Mercer said irritably, "and especially not before my patients, but if you knew me better you would realize that I could be quite bad tempered at times -- and jealous and very, very angry in certain circumstances -- " "I'm sorry. Doctor," she broke in. "I don't know why I'm picking on you like this." She put her hand out of the blanket and gripped his, the one that wasn't holding the hypo. "Don't put me out again just yet. I'm picking on you because I can't get nasty with myself -- at least, not out loud. When you were talking to us back there I could tell that you were sometimes angry and that you couldn't afford to show it because everybody else was listening and would have known what was going on in Three. But you knew and you made Kirk and Stone mad at you because you were like an amplified voice of conscience. You kept heading them off, talking sense, lecturing them. If it hadn't been for you it would have happened much sooner. Are they both -- both -- " Her grip was so tight that his fingers were turning white. He nodded. "Maybe I should not have been so hard to get," she went on, but pleading with him with her eyes to argue and disagree with everything she was saying. "These days nobody would have worried, would they? And you would not have talked about it. But they were strangers, just like my husband was several different kinds of stranger before he died and all the different strangers wanted to make love to me. And it was so open out there, so clean and bright and empty that I couldn't -- it would have been like sinning in heaven." She paused, looking away from him. "But I could have forced myself and once I almost did. If they had had me they might not have started fighting." Mercer shook his head. "Then I would have had to lecture you -- at very inconvenient times -- about the need to avoid generating heat." Still she would not look at him as she said, "After he knocked me out -- what happened?" "Nothing much," said Mercer. "He became angry and frustrated -- very angry and extremely frustrated from what I could hear -- and I was listening very carefully, you understand. Then he collasped and died from heat-stroke a few minutes later, leaving just enough air to keep you alive until I arrived. But you should try to forget all about it, you know. It's over. And you've a grip like a wrestler, ma'am. If I'm to perform any more miracles of surgery you'd better not break my fingers." "You aren't telling the truth," she said angrily, still without letting go. "You know it is important to me and you just want me to think -- " "It's important to me, too," Mercer broke in quietly. "Not vitally important, you understand, but still important enough to make me glad that I'm not lying." "I'm not sure that I understand you," she said, but her expression said that she did and her grip on his hand eased. She added: "Will I have to tell people about it? Will there be an investigation?" "Not unless you want one," said Mercer. "As far as I'm concerned I don't really know who did what to whom. Both men were unrecognizable when I got to them and once I knew that they were dead and you weren't, I couldn't waste time reconstructing the crime. If you like I can say, quite truthfully, that one died from asphyxiation and one from heat-stroke. That isn't the whole truth, of course, but I'm thinking about Mrs. Kirk's feelings as well as yours and Bobby'sand even you don't know for sure what happened at the end. Nobody has jurisdiction in spacewreck incidents like this, so there is no point in talking about it if you don't want to. The only people who would be interested are the news media folks, and they -- " "No," she said firmly. "I didn't think you would want that," he said, bringing up the hypo. "So just try to forget the whole thing for the time being and sleep. And let go of my hand. You'll be in this bunk until your cracked ribs mend, so you can expect to see a lot more of me -- " He stopped because she was laughing and wincing because laughing must have been hurting her ribs. "Is that possible?" she said. Mercer smiled in return. "I can't answer that, ma'am, until you are completely recovered. There are rules about doctor-patient relationships, you know." Before she could reply he had tucked her bare arm under the blanket and closed the bunk. She had made him aware for the first time in two weeks that he was improperly dressed, that he was not even wearing a cap like Neilson and that they were no longer in an emergency situation in which such lapses could be excused. He still had a few minutes to spare before the engineer needed him, so he shaved, climbed into a set of clean uniform coveralls and used the canopy plastic to check that his cap was straight. The sooner everything returned to normal the better, he thought as he turned to go. in ten minutes, Mercer -- this took a little longer than expected. Prescott is back on board and wants to see you in the controlroom." "Mercer. Ten minutes." The first officer was in Neilfon's position, going over the engineering telltales. He looked at Mercer slowly from head to toes and shook his head. He said, "Before you leave to pick up the rest of the survivors I want you to remember that there will be an inquiry when we get back to Earth into the Eurydice disaster and the proper functioning or otherwise of its survival equipment. Neilson, MacArdle and myself will be responsible for the technical evidence and you will deal with questions regarding the effects on passengers. You will also have to give medical evidence regarding the deaths of Kirk and Stone." "Heat-stroke, asphyxiation and heart failure," said Mercer. Prescott nodded. "Mrs. Mathewson's story might not agree with yours and, while I realize that she will not be returning to Earth, it could be awkward if -- " "She wants to forget about it and so do I," said Mercer firmly. "That was my professional advice as well. There is also the fact that the media, if they got their hands on it, would be sure to imply all sorts of things which did not in fact happen. You see, both men were in such a mess that I don't know, from my very brief observation of their bodies, who killed whom. It is possible, although not likely, that Stone made a comeback after Mrs. Mathewson was knocked out -- so even she can't be sure. Then there are the possible effects on the boy of reading that sort of stuff about his mother -- or finding out about it in later life. She won't talk about it, you can be sure of that." Prescott looked relieved, but not completely. He said, "That's good. I told Mrs. Kirk about her husband on the way in -- I said that his death was due to excess weight making him vulnerable to the heat and low oxygen content of the air. She could suffer, too, if it got out that he died fighting over a woman. But I'm more concerned about you, Mercer, and what you may say when we get back. We are all going to be heroes, you especially. You could earn a lot of money from the media simply by telling the truth as you know it. And I couldn't really blame you -- especially since you only wanted space experience to land a good research job on Station Three -- " "If you don't mind," said Mercer, "I would like a little more space experience -- of a less dramatic nature, of course. And in any case I am more interested in a job on Ganymede Base now. I don't want to embarrass the Mathewsons -- or Mrs. Kirk -- so if I can stay with the ship and toe the company line during the inquiry -- " "I'll be captain," said Prescott. "You almost dissuade me." "I wasn't trying to do so," said Prescott quietly. "Just trying to give you fair warning that I am a consistently nasty person who is unlikely to change anything but his uniform." "Neilson. We'll be ready to go in three minutes, Mercer." As he turned to go Mercer wondered if he would change very much. He was thinking of a boy who had played spaceman for two long and dangerous weeks and of his mother who would soon have him with her again. He had helped to save the lives of both and he was beginning to feel responsible for them in an oddly possessive way and the voyage was less than three weeks gone. It was a silly question because he had already changed in many ways.  (Continued from page # But you have no recourse when you meet a disinterested man, and that's me." He sighed. "Trouble is that you've paid us too well. There could be an awful hoo-rah about it, people swarming in." He pushed the hee-haw button and the pammas never moved. "I think I've got it." He had never been an indecisive man, though always irresolute in his own carefully and put it into his pocket. "Well, somebody's got to be responsible," he said. "It always, invariably and forever comes down to one man. The best gift I can give you is to leave you alone." The pammas sat like old avocados and said nothing. T hat evening he spoke to the assembled class. He sent people off to a dozen cities. When they returned next day, each with a cargo module, all the burros and trailers and campers were loaded. Rohnagan kicked aside his path to the spring. The foundation lifted from Edris with all the modules in lock and everyone crowded into the foundation. No planetary communication band was open. At the bare minimum altitude they kicked to Interface alignment and punched an autotape for Brummigen. They landed at a bonded port and dispersed. Two weeks later the class in Advanced Field Exploration met for the last time in the security field house on Geology plateau. It was a dome building the School of Architecture used as a horrid example in their sneer tours of College Station. Rohnagan stood in front of the class and tapped his pointer on the floor. The hubbub faded. He left the projection on the screen. "There will be no written financial report except on an individual basis for a particular purpose," he announced. "As you can see from the summary of sales, yours has been an extraordinarily profitable class. None of you assigned income, but if you had, the twentyfive percent of one pro rata share would pay for the education of a moderately intelligent man. I don't know if this has been the most remunerative class on College Station. What I do know is, all of you are modestly in the chips." While the class cheered, he took the financial summary from the projector and dropped it into the disposal slot. "For those who may have forgotten the principles of pragmatic mineralogy, the reason you have received personal vouchers instead of direct deposits is a truism of mining and in the nature of the occupation. To wit -- it's sometimes wise to have an unknown, unattachable account." Laughter. "I have assigned half the storm jewels and blush pearls to various colleges and museums on College Station. The other half is still in appraisal. A further dividend will be sent to your addresses of record in the next six months. If anyone would like to sell his interest now it will have to clear through me. My minimum bid for one full share is ninety thousand." Cheers. "The certified individual financial report I mentioned will be necessary if you want to return to Edris. I don't recommend it. The Bahia cities are extremely hostile to every individual here on an individual basis. The export duty and penalties would have to be paid. I ordered locally illegal take-off because of the difficulty of appraisal and the inevitable delay in payment. Many years ago I found oweins and ended up with roughly fifteen percent of their finished value after eight years. Questions?" "That's why the conditioning?" "It was inadvisable to go as a class, yes." "We were conditioned not to squirrel stuff ourselves," said Gurchie Gronewald. "Without prejudice now, Tom, did you bring back anything? We know about the storm jewels -- fantastic! But did you or Nan or other staff hide stuff? I'm not complaining, dammit, I'm curious is all -- " personal souvenir," said Rohnagan. "Here it is. Anybody want to bid on it? We'll split the proceeds." He grinned as Alf Swinney and two others sat on Gronewald. "Other questions?" "Will you go back to Edris?" "No. 'All them little eyes?' " "Can we enroll again in twotwenty?" "Certainly. Keep in mind, this has been exceptional." "What planet next class, Tom?" "I don't know. I'm going to school myself. Won't be teaching." "What are you going to take?" "Pragmatic ethics." "What for?" "I want to be good." He grinned. "Class dismissed." cold. It was a temperature variable stone. Maybe it responded to the phases of the moon. Maybe it was a compass to good. And by whose standards? How congruent, how universal was good? "Good question," he told himself, and accepted an invitation to the class party.  We're close to acurefpr leukemia. A year ago, we wouldn't have dared say that. Not with that beautiful word W    The cure in it. "Temporary remission", yes. New forms of leukemia treatment were helping some children stay alive a little longer. But that seemed to be all that medical science could give them. Another few months. Another birthday or two. Now we're seeing something that's almost too good to believe. A whole crop of kids who are alive and well # years or more after getting a new kind of drug therapy. And after # years, cancer researchers begin to hesitatingly, hopefully, talk of a permanent "cure." Leukemia is cancer of the blood. Before you have a cure, you have to destroy every last cancer cell in the bloodstream. The new treatment is a combination of different antileukemia drugs, so that, hopefully, any cells missed by one drug might be killed by another. It seems to work. We're still holding our breath, but it really seems to work. The #-year survivors that gladden our hearts today are the result of combination treatments begun in #. And work has been going on feverishly ever since. Each year, the children who get leukemia have a far better chance of cure than those of the year before. The American Cancer Society plays a vital part in this exciting work. So, when our volunteer comes to your door this month, be generous. Especially if you have children. Or grandchildren. American Cancer Society We want to wipe out cancer in your lifetime. What is it? 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Membership will be canceled. I owe nothing. Mr. Mrs. Miss Print name Address City State Zip If under #, parent must sign above. CZ ZD ZZl #Bce use only #. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind's last generation on earth. 'Wildly fantastic! -- Atlantic. Pub. ed # #. Alone Against Tomorrow by Harlan Ellison. The field's most honored writer plunges into # dark and wonderful dreams of tomorrow's alienation. Pub. ed. # #. Sturgeon Is Alive and Well... #I Nebula Award novelette "Slow Sculpture" plus # other gripping stories by Theodore Sturgeon. Pub. ed. # #. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Helnleln. He knew the Martian love secret -- and it spelled his doom. Pub. ed. # #. Science Fiction Hail of Fame I. # "winners," chosen by Scl-Fl Writers of America. Ed. Robert Sliverberg. Pub. ed. # #. Prelude to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke. Two complete novels. Sands of Mars and Prelude to Space, # short stories, by the sci-fi "colossus." Pub. ed. # #. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. 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Copyright  # by Isaac Asimov to be published by Doubleday #t Company, Inc. in which the prior installments of ordered directly from us. Erclose # each. We pay postage. Remember these personae dramatis; around the globe as the Father of the Electron Pump. Hallam's nemesis, who does not believe Hallam fathered the Pump -- or ' that the Pump is the unmixed blessing men believe. whose disparaging remarks, when both men were young, drove Hallam to eminence. The story opens approximately a hundred years in the future -- on October #. # -- when obscure and undistinguished Radiochemist covers that a bottle of tungsten-#, which someone had left on his desk, has mysteriously become converted to an impossible isotope, plutonium-#. Essentially afraid of being ridiculed by his more lustrous and contemporary colleague, of a distinguished physicist, on the latter's prestige, announces the new isotope to the world of science. A seminar is organized to study the revolutionary discovery. It is announcement of his Great Insight. The Great Insight starts out as a fantasy reputable scientists are afraid to touch. It postulates the existence of a Universe parallel to ours -- a "paraUniverse" -- whose physical laws permit the existence of plutoniumI # as a stable element, but will not tolerate tungthe two Universes, permitting our tungsten-# to enter the paraUniverse, where it becomes radioactively converted to plutonium-# and returned. In our Universe the latter element reverts to tungsten# with some loss of electrons, giving out immense energy in the proconstruction of "Electron Pumps" to harness this energy for man's greeted with reserve, but a scientific team is organized to look into it. Evidence is found that the Great Insight is exactly that and H ALLA M'S eminence in science is established -- at least in the popular eye. Within two decades Electron Pumps girdle the globe, producing limitless, virtually no-cost energy with no attendant pollution. Wars and poverty vanish, disease is being conquered -- toil, as men have known it, is on its way out. Earth is becoming a new Eden. These same two decades, howphysicist who questions not only harmlessness of the Electron ledge is plagiarism, that he stole his Great Insight -- and that the design and construction plans for the Electron Pump were handed to him by the inhabitants of the paraUniverse, who wanted the Pump built. According to a popular paper plutonium-# in our Universe emits twenty positrons per nucleus to combine with twenty of our electrons to the total energyreleasing annihilation of both, until it is converted to tungsten-#, which then operates in reverse to serve the para-Universe energy needs. The original raw material is never used up -- the sole cost is the loss to our Universe of twenty electrons per atomic nucleus of the plutonium-#. At scientists maintain, possible negative effects will not be felt while calculations, however, lead him to the conviction that the effects of the constant electron drain are not evenly distributed throughout the Universe, but are concentrated immediately in our solar system, thus quickly threatening not only the solar system but the entire arm of the galaxy with annihilation. in both scientific and governmental circles, prevent him from publishing his findings and wreck his career, as they have wrecked efforts to prove that the Pump succeeds in establishing communications with the para-people -- and learns that among them, too, concern exists regarding the operation of the interUniverse Electron Pump. He receives from them a desperate call for help in stopping it -- though contact between humans and the para-Universe inhabitants had been thought impossible. From the tungsten-# plutoniumI # interaction many of their conditions of life become inferable. Fusion, for example, is likelier in their Universe than in ours and their suns would be smaller, perhaps fewer than ours and rapidly cooling. (The section of this work dealing with the para-Universe appeared in the April issue of IfJ In the absence of other information the para-beings are visualized as direct consumers of energy -- it is their food. We also know many of their approximate characteristics and that they understand and can manipulate matter at the subatomic level. to the urgent appeal for help from the para-Universe -- he has been The voice of protest appears similarly to have been stilled in the para-Universe. The Pumps Pump on. brightly and walked with the light springy touch that was startling when first seen by the tourists, but was soon recognized as having a grace of its own. "It's time for lunch," she said cheerfully. "And all home-grown, ladies and gentlemen. You may not be used to the taste, but it's all nourishing -- Right here, sir. You won't mind sitting with the ladies, I know. One moment -- there will be seats for all. Sorry, there will be a choice on the beverage, but not on the main course -- that will be veal -- artificial flavor and texture, but it's really quite good." She herself finally sat down with a sigh and the briefest wavering of her pleasant expression. One of the group seated himselt across from her. "Do you mind?" he asked. She looked at him quickly, penetratingly. She had the faculty of making fast judgments -- he did not seem troublesome. She said, "Not at all. But aren't you with someone in this group?" He shook his head. "I'm alone. But even if that were not the case -- Eafthies are no thrill to me." She looked at him again. Fiftyish. She saw a weariness about him, belied only by his bright, inquisitive eyes. He had the unmistakable look of the Earthman, laden with gravity. She said, "'Earthie' is a Moon expression -- and not a nice one." "I'm from Earth," he said, "so I can use it without offense, I hope. Unless you object." Selene shrugged as though to say. Please yourself... She had the faintly Oriental look about the eyes so many of the Moon girls had, but her hair was the color of honey and her nose was prominent. She was undeniably attractive without being in any way classically beautiful. The Earthman was staring at the name plate she wore on the blouse covering the upper slope of her high, not-too-large left breast. She decided it was really the name plate he was looking at, not the breast, though the blouse was semitransparent when it caught the light at a particular angle and she wore no garment beneath it. He said, "Are there many Selenes here?" I "Oh, yes. Hundreds, I think. Also Cynthias, Dianas and Artemises. Selene is a little tiresome. Half the Selenes I know are called 'Silly' and the other half 'Lena."' "Which are you?" "Neither. I am Selene, all three coming down heavily on the first syllable, "to those who use my first name at all." The small smile sat on the Earthman's face as though he weren't quite used to it. "And what if anyone asks you if you sell any, Selene?" "They never ask me again," she said firmly. "But do they ask you?" "There are fools always." A waitress had reached their table and had placed the dishes before them with quick, smooth motions. The Earthman was visibly impressed. He said to the waitress, "You make them seem to float down." The waitress smiled and moved on. Selene said, "Don't you try to do the same. She's used to the gravity and can handle it." "And if I try. I'll drop everything? Is that it?" "You'll make a gorgeous mess," she said. "Well, I won't try." "There's a good chance someone will before long -- the plate will float to the floor and all at the table will grab for it and miss and ten to one knock themselves out of their chairs. I'd warn them, but it never helps and they're just all the more embarrassed. The other tourists will laugh. The rest of us have seen it too often to find it funny--to us it just means a clean-up job." T he Earthman was lifting his fork carefully. "I see what you mean. Even the simplest motions seem strange." "Actually, you'll get used to the gravity quickly enough. At least in little things like eating. Walking is harder. I never saw an Earthman run efficiently out there. Not quite efficiently." For a while they ate in silence. Then he asked, "What does the L stand for?" He was looking at her name plate again. It said, "It just means Luna," she said rather indifferently, "to distinguish me from the immigrants. I was born here." "Really?" "That's nothing to be surprised about. We've had a working society here for more than half a century. Don't you think babies are born here? We have people here who were born here and are grandparents." "How old are you?" "Thirty-two," she said. He looked startled, them mumbled, "Of course." Selene raised her eyebrows. "You mean you understand? Most Earthmen have to have it explained." The Earthman said, "I understand enough to know that most of the visible signs of aging are the result of the inexorable victory of gravity over tissue -- the sagging of cheek and the drooping of breast. The Moon's gravity is one-sixth that of Earth -- it isn't really hard to figure why people here stay young-looking." Selene said, "Only young looking. We don't have immortality. The lifespan is about that on Earth -- but most of us are more comfortable in old age." "That's not to be dismissed. Of course, you suffer penalties." He had just taken his first sip of Moon coffee. "You have to drink this -- " He paused for a word and must have discarded it, for he used none. "We could import food and beverages from Earth," she said, amused, "but only enough to feed a fraction of us a fraction of the time. What would be the point? We can use the cargo space for more vital items. Besides, we're used to this crud -- or were you going to use a stronger word?" "Not for the coffee," he said. "I was going to save that for the food. But crud will do. Tell me. Miss Lindstrom. I didn't see any mention of the tour itinerary of the proton synchrotron." "The proton synchrotron?" She was finishing her coffee and her eyes were beginning to slide round the room as though estimating the moment for getting her charges to their feet again. "That's Terrestrial property and it's not open to tourists." "Off-limits to Lunarites, too?" "Oh, no. Nothing of the sort. Most of its staff are Lunarites. But the Terrestrial government sets the rules. No tourists." "I'd love to see it," he said. She said, "I'm sure you would. You've brought me luck -- not one item of food, not one blessed man or woman, has hit the floor." She rose and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be leaving in about ten minutes. Please leave the plates where they are. There are rest rooms for those who wish to use them. Then we will visit the foodprocessing plants where meals such as you have just eaten are made possible." of course, and compact, but they were intricate. The windows were panoramic, showing star scenes that changed slowly and randomly, without relationship to any known constellation. Each of the three windows could be made to undergo telescopic magnification when Selene so desired. Barron Neville hated these stellar extravaganzas. He tended to turn them off rather savagely and say, "How can you stand them? You're the only one I know who has the bad taste to go for these things. It's not as though those nebulae and star clusters even exist." And Selene would shrug coolly and say, "What's existence? How do you know the ones out there exist? These displays give me a sensation of freedom and motion. May I have that in my own quarters if I choose?" Neville would mumble something and make a half-hearted attempt to restore the controls to where he had found them and Selene would say, "Let it go -- " The furniture was in smooth curves and the walls were abstractly decorated in unobtrusive lowkey colors. Nowhere was there representation of anything that might be considered a living thing. "Living things are Earth," Selene would say, "not the Moon." As she entered she found -- as so often -- Neville present. Barron Neville rested on the flimsy couch, one foot sandaled. The other sandal lay on the floor where it had dropped. She saw a line of red marks on his abdomen, just over his umbilicus, where he had been meditatively scratching. She said, "Get us some coffee, won't you, Barron?" and slipped out of her clothes in a long, graceful wiggle accompanied by a sigh. She let the skirt drop, then kicked it into the corner with one toe. "What a relief to get out of them," she said. "The worst part of the job is having to dress like an Earthie." Neville was in the kitchen corner. He paid no attention -- he had heard her before. He asked, "What's wrong with your water supply? It's pretty far down." "Is it?" she asked. "Well, I've been over-using, I suppose. Just be patient." "Any trouble today?" Selene shrugged. "No. Just the usual bit, watching them teetering along and pretending they don't hate the food -- and wondering if they'll be asked to take off their clothes, I shouldn't wonder. Disgusting possibility." "Are you taking up prudery?" He brought two small cups of coffee to the table. "In this case prudery is required. They're wrinkled, sagging, paunchy and full of germs. I don't care what the quarantine regulations are like -- Earthies are full of germs. What's new on your side?" Barron shook his . head. He was heavily built for a Lunarite and the sullen narrowing of his eyes had become a built-in feature. His other features were remarkably handsome, Selene thought. He said, "Nothing startling. We're still waiting out the change in Commissioners. We'll have to see what this Gottstein is like." "Can he make difficulties?" "No more than are being made. After all, what can they do? They can't infiltrate. You can't disguise an Earthie as a Lunarite." He appeared uneasy, just the same. looked at him shrewdly. "Some Lunarites might be Earthies inside." "Yes, and I'd like to know which. Sometimes I don't think I can trust -- Oh, well. I'm wasting incredible amounts of time with my synchrotron project and getting nowhere. I'm having no luck with priorities." "They probably don't trust you -- and I don't blame them. If you didn't slink around so conspiratorially "I do no such thing. It would give me great pleasure to walk out of the synchrotron room and never return, but then they wouW become suspicious. If you've been raising hell with your water supply, Selene, I suppose we can't have a second cup." "No, we can't. But if it comes to that, you've been helping me waste water. You've had two showers here in the last week." "I'll give you a water credit. I didn't know you were counting." "I'm not counting. My water level is." She finished her own cup of coffee and stared at its emptiness thoughtfully. She said, "They always make faces over our coffee -- the tourists do. And I can never figure out why. It tastes fine to me. Did you ever taste Earth coffee, Barron?" "No." "I did. Once. Some tourist had smuggled in packets of what he called instant coffee. He offered me some in exchange for you-knowwhat. Seemed to think it was an even trade." "And you had some?" "I was curious. It was bitter and metallic. I hated it. Then I told him that miscegenation was against Lunarite custom and he turned rather bitter and metallic himself." "You never told me this. He didn't try anything, did he?" "It's not particularly your business, is it? And, no, he didn't try anything. If he had tried -- at the wrong gravity for him -- I'd have bounced him from here to Corridor One." She paused, then went on; "Oh, yes. I picked up another Earthie today. Insisted on sitting with me." "And what did he offer you in exchange for the screwing you so delicately call you-know-what?" "Just sat there." "And stared at your breasts?" "They're there to be stared at, but actually he didn't. He stared at my name plate. Besides, what's it to you what he fantasied? Fantasies are free and I don't have to fulfill them. What do you think I'm fantasying? Bed with an Earthman? With all the action you would expect of someone trying to handle a gravitational field he isn't used to? I wouldn't say it hasn't been done, but not by me -- and I've never heard any good of it. Is that settled? Can I get back to the Earthie? Who's over fifty? And who obviously wasn't terrifically handsome even when he was twenty? Interesting appearance, though -- I'll grant him that." "All right. I can do without a thumbnail sketch. What about him?" "He asked about the proton synchrotron." Neville rose to his feet, swaying a little as was almost inevitable after quick movement at low gravity. "What did he ask about the synchrotron?" "Nothing. Why are you so excited? You requested that I tell you anything that was out of the way with any tourist at any time and this seemed out of the way. No one ever asked me about the synchrotron before." "All right." He paused a little, then in a normal voice, said, "Why was he interested in the synchrotron?" "I haven't the faintest idea. He just asked if he could see it. It could be that he's a tourist fascinated by science. For all I know his question was just a ploy to get me interested in him." "And I suppose you are. What's his name?" "I don't know. I didn't inquire." "Why not?" "Because I'm not interested in him. Which way do you want it to be? Besides, his asking shows he's a tourist. If he were a physicist he wouldn't have to ask. He'd be there." "My dear Selene," said Neville, "let me spell it out. Under the present circumstances anyone who asks to see the proton synchrotron is a peculiar fellow we want to know about. And why should he ask you, specifically you?" He moved restlessly in the small confines as though trying to work off energy. Then: "You're the expert at that nonsense. Do you find him of interest?" "Sexually?" "You know what I mean. Don't play games, Selene." Selene said with clear reluctance, "He's interesting, even disturbing. But I don't know why. He said nothing. He did nothing." "Interesting and disturbing, is he? Then you will see him again." "And do what?" "How do I know? That's your bit. Find out his name. Find out anything else you can. You've got some brains. Use them on a little practical nosiness for a change." "Oh, well," she said, "orders from on high. All right." T here was no way of telling the Commissioner's quarters by size alone from those of any Lunarite. Space was limited on the Moon even for Terrestrial officials -- no luxurious waste was displayed as a symbol of the authority of the home planet. Nor, for that matter, was there any way of Tr ? Ballantlne Books Adult Fantasy's in trouble. We don't believe it. Even if James Branch Cabell is an acquired taste, among # Tolkien readers there are at ieast # wUiing to do something more than chew on seedcake. So stand up and be counted. Get in there and start yeiiing if the store is not carrying it. AH! AH! ought to be reading this) are particuDomnei -- his usual exquisite bawdy romp -- and Lin Carter's own Discoveries In Fantasy, featuring four well-known "mainstream" writers who were (virtually in secret) producing provocative fantasy... Also, an absolutely delicious, delightfully sophisticated fantasist, Ernest Bramah. His first for us (and what a cover!) Kai Ling's Golden Hours. Bramah is some kind of past master at the art of the written double-take. And God love his ever-living English. new boy for our list, but one who is very much known to s.f. fans. Keith Laumer has contributed five of his fine stories for a collection titled Timetracks. And we have an honest-toGod first novel by Alan Dean Foster -- solid, inventive, packed with ideas -- The Tar-Aiym Krang. Then the Pope is at it again with The Reality Trip And Other Implausibilities -- a collection we like even better than most. Douglas R. Mason is back with a weirdo -- The Resurrection of Roger Diment. MF. And, of course, his remarkable A Clockwork Orange which, if you have not read it yet, you certainly should. By all means see the movie, too -- it's not as violent or as harsh as the book, but it is, pictorially, just as strong a statement against violence. asked John Brunner if he would like to do a second novel on a major ecological subject and we are happy to announce that Harper has contracted for hardcover publication of The Sheep Look Up. They are scheduling it for early fall. And we're hoping for a bookclub sale. Elaine Geiger ' has demonstrated her usual perspicacity and bought Dave Gerrold's When Haiiie Was One for the book club. And that too will later come from... BB changing the overwhelming fact about the Moon -- that its low gravity made life possible only underground even for the greatest Earthman who ever lived. "Man is still the creature of his environment." Luiz Montez then sighed. "I've been two years on the Moon and have known times when I have been tempted to stay on, but -- I'm getting along in years. I've just passed my fortieth, and if I intend ever to go back to Earth it had better be now. Any older and I won't be able to readjust to full gravity." Konrad Gottstein was thirty-four and looked younger. He had a wide, round and large-featured face, the kind one did not see among the Lunarites -- the kind they would draw as an Earthie caricature. He was not heavily built -- it did not pay to send heavily built Earthmen to the Moon -- and his head seemed too large for his body. He said -- he spoke Planetary Standard with a perceptibly different accent from that of Montez -- "You sound apologetic." "I am, I am," said Montez. Where Gottstein's face was intrinsically good-natured in appearance, the long thin lines of Montez' rendered it almost comically tragic. "I am apologetic in both senses. I am embarrassed to be leaving the Moon, since it is an attractive world filled with excitement. And I am embarrassed about the embarrassment -- ashamed that I should be reluctant to take up Earth's burden, gravity and all." "Yes, I imagine taking back the other five-sixths will be hard," said Gottstein. "I've been on the Moon only a few days and already I feel that one-sixth G is perfectly fine." "You won't feel so when the constipation starts and you begin living on mineral oil," said Montez with a sigh. "But that will pass. And don't think you can imitate a gazelle just because you feel light. There's an art to it." "So I understand." "You think you understand, Gottstein. You haven't seen the kangaroo-walk, have you?" "On television." "That doesn't give you the feel of it. You have to try it. It's the proper mode for crossing level lunar surface at high speed. The feet move backward together and launch you on what would be a simple broad-jump on Earth. While you're in midair, they come forward and begin moving back just before they hit the ground again -- keep you launched and so on. The motion seems slow by Earth standards with only a low gravity whipping you on, but each leap is in excess of twenty feet and the amount of muscular effort required to keep you aloft is minimal. The sensation is similar to that of flying." "Have you tried it? Can you do it?" "I've tried it, but no Earthman can really do it. I've kept it up for as many as five leaps in a row, enough to get the sensation -- just enough to want to do more -- but then there is the inevitable miscalculation, a loss of synchronization and you tumble and slide for a quarter of a mile. The Lunarites are polite and never laugh at you. Of course, it's easy for them. They start as children and pick it up at once without trouble." "It's their world," said Gottstein, chuckling. "Think how they'd be on Earth." "They wouldn't be on Earth. They can't. I supposed that's an advantage on our side. We can be either on Moon or on Earth. They can live only on the Moon. We tend to forget that -- because we confuse the Lunarites with Immies." "With what?" "That's what they call the Earth immigrants -- those who live on the Moon more or less permanently but were born and raised on Earth. The immigrants can, of course, return to Earth, but the real Lunarites have neither the bones nor the muscles to withstand Earth's gravity. There were some tragedies in that respect in the Moon's early history." "Oh?" "Oh, yes. People who returned with their Moon-born children. We tend to forget. We've had our own Crisis, and a few dying children don't seem important in the light of the huge casualties of the late twentieth century and all that followed. Here on the Moon, though, every dead Lunarite who succumbed to the gravity of Earth is remembered. It helps the people here to feel a world apart, I think." G ottstein said, "i thought I had been thoroughly briefed on Earth, but it seems I still have a lot to learn." "Impossible to learn everything on Earth, but I have left you as full a report as my predecessor bequeathed me. You'll find the Moon fascinating and, in some ways, excruciating. I doubt that you've eaten Lunar rations on Earth -- and if you're going by description only, you will not be prepared for the reality. However, you'll have to teach yourself to like the food. It's bad policy to ship Earth items here. We've got to eat and drink the local products." "You've been doing it. I guess I'll survive." "I've not been doing it steadily. There are periodic furloughs to Earth. Those are obligatory, whether you want them or not. They've told you that. I'm sure." "Yes," said Gottstein. "Despite any exercises you do here, you will have to subject yourself to full gravity now and then just to remind your bones and muscles what it's like. And when you're on Earth, you'll eat. And occasionally some food is smuggled in." Gottstein said, "My luggage was carefully inspected, of course, but it turned out there was a can of corned beef in my coat pocket. I had overlooked it. So did they." Montez smiled slowly and said hesitantly. "I suspect you are now going to offer to share it." "No," said Gottstein judiciously, wrinkling his large button nose. "I was going to say with all the tragic nobility I could muster, 'Here, Montez, have it all! Thy need is greater than mine.'" He stumbled a bit in trying to say this -- he had rarely used second person singular in Planetary Standard. Montez smiled more broadly, then let the expression vanish. He shook his head. "No. In a week I'll have all the Earth food I can eat. You won't. Your mouthfuls will be rare in the next few years and you will spend too much time regretting your present generosity. You keep it all -- I insist. Or I would only be earning your hatred ex post facto." He seemed serious, his eyes looking straight into Gottstein's. "Besides, there is something I want to talk to you about. I've been putting off discussion because I don't know how to approach it, and this food would be an excuse for further sidetracking." Gottstein pocketed the Earth can at once. His face could not match Montez' in seriousness, but his voice was grave and steady. "Is there something you could not include your dispatches, Montez?" "There was something I tried to include, Gottstein, but between my not knowing how to phrase it and Earth's reluctance to grasp my meaning -- we ended up not communicating. You may do better. I hope you do. One of the reasons I have not asked to have my tour of duty extended is that I can no longer take the responsibility for my failure to communicate." "You make it sound serious." "I wish I could make it sound serious. Frankly, it sounds silly. There are only some ten thousand people in the Lunar colony. Rather less than half are native Lunarites. They're hampered by an insufficiency of resources, an insufficiency of space, a harsh world -- and yet -- and yet -- " "And yet?" said Gottstein. "Something is going on here -- I don't know exactly what -- that may be dangerous." "How can it be dangerous? What can they do? Make war against the Earth?" Gottstein's lips trembled on the edge of a smile. "No. It's more subtle than that." Montez passed his hand over his face, rubbed his eyes. "Let me be frank with you. Earth has lost its nerve." "What does that mean?" "Well, what would you call it? Just about the time the Lunar colony was being established. Earth went through the Great Crisis. I don't have to tell you about that." "No, you don't," said Gottstein, with distaste. peak." "Earth is much better for that, isn't it?" "Oh, undoubtedly, though I wish there had been a better way of achieving the drop. But what happened left behind a permanent distrust of technology, a vast inertia, a lack of desire to risk change because of the possible side-effects. Great and possibly dangerous efforts have been abandoned because the danger was feared more than greatness was desired." "I take it you refer to the program on genetic engineering." "That's the most spectacular case, of course, but not the only one," said Montez bitterly. "Frankly, I can't get excited over the abandonment of genetic engineering. It was a tissue of failures." "We lost our chance at Intuitionism." "There has never been any evidence that Intuitionism is desirable -- and we have considerable indication of its undesirability. Besides what about the Lunar colony itself? This certainly is no indication of stagnation on Earth." Montez said vigorously, "The Lunar colony is a hangover, a last remnant of the period before the Crisis -- something that carried through as a last sad forward thrust of mankind before the big retreat." "That's too dramatic, Montez." "I don't think so. Earth has retreated, mankind has retreated -- everywhere but on the Moon. The Lunar colony is man's frontier not just physically, but psychologically, too. Here is a world that doesn't have a web of life to disrupt, that doesn't have a complex environment in delicate balance to upset. Everything on the Moon that is of any use to man is man-made. The Moon is a world constructed by man from the start and out of basics. There is no past." "Well?" "On Earth we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed -- and that, if it had existed, could never exist again. In some respects, much of the ecology was destroyed in the Crisis and we are making do with the remnants -- so that we are frightened, always frightened. On the Moon there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward." M ontez seemed intoxicated by his own words. "Gottstein," he continued feverishly, "I have watched it for two years -- you will watch it for at least that much longer. There is a fire here on the Moon, a restless burning. The people here expand in every direction. They expand physically. Every month new corridors are bored, a new living quarters established, a new population potential is made room for. They expand resources by developing new construction materials, new water sources, new lodes of specialized minerals. They expand their sun-powered battery banks, enlarge their electronics factories. I suppose you know that these ten thousand people here on the Moon are now the major source for Earth's supply of mini-electronic devices and fine biochemicals." "I know they're an important source." "Earth lies to itself for comfort's sake. The Moon is the major source. At the present rate it may soon become the sole source. Its people expand intellectually, too. Gottstein, I imagine there isn't a bright science-oriented youngster on Earth who doesn't vaguely -- or perhaps not so vaguely -- dream of going to the Moon one day. With Earth in retreat from technology, the Moon is where the action is." "You're referring to the proton synchrotron, I suppose?" "That's one example. When was the last new synchrotron built on Earth? But it's just the biggest and most dramatic item -- not the only or even the most important. If you want to know what is the most important scientific device on the Moon -- " "Something so secret I haven't been told?" "No, something so obvious that no one seems to notice. It's the ten thousand brains here. The ten thousand best human brains in existence. The only close-knit group of ten thousand human brains that are, in principle and by emotion, science-oriented." Gottstein moved restlessly and tried to shift his chair's position. It was bolted to the floor and wouldn't move, but in the attempt to make it do so Gottstein found himself skittering from the seat. Montez reached out an arm to steady him. Gottstein flushed. "Sorry." "You'll get used to the gravity." Gottstein said, "But aren't you making it out a lot worse than it is? Earth isn't a know-nothing planet altogether. We did develop the Electron Pump. That's a purely Terrestrial accomplishment. No Lunarite had anything to do with it." Montez shook his head and muttered a few words in his native Spanish. They did not sound placid. He asked, "Have you ever met Frederick Hallam?", Gottstein smiled. "Indeed I have. The Father of the Electron Pump. I believe he has the phrase tattooed on his chest." "The mere fact that you smile and make that remark proves my point, really. Ask yourself: Could a man like Hallam really have fathered the Electron Pump? The story will do for the unthinking multitude, but the truth is -- and you must know this -- there is no father to the Electron Pump. The para-people, the people in the paraUniverse -- whoever they are and whatever that is invented it. Hallam was their accidental instrument. All of Earth is their accidental instrument. "We were clever enough to take advantage of their initiative." "Yes, as cows are clever enough to eat the hay we provide for them. The Pump is no sign that man is looking forward. Quite the reverse." "If the Pump is a backward step, then I say good for backwardness. I wouldn't want to do without it." "Who would? But the point is, it fits Earth's present mood perfectly. Infinite energy at virtually zero cost -- except for maintenance -- and zero pollution. But there are no Electron Pumps on the Moon." Gottstein said, "I imagine there's no need for them. The solar batteries supply what the Lunarites require. 'Infinite energy at virtually zero cost -- except for maintenance -- and zero pollution.' Isn't that the litany?" "Yes, indeed. But the solar batteries are entirely man-made. An Electron Pump was projected for the Moon -- installation was attempted -- " "And?" "And it didn't work. The parapeople didn't accept the tungsten. Nothing happened." "I didn't know that. Why not?" and eyebrows expressively. "How is one to know? We might assume, for instance, that the parapeople live on a world without a satellite -- that they have no conception of separate worlds in close proximity, each populated. That having found one contact they did not seek another. Who knows? The thing is that the para-people didn't bite and we ourselves, without them, could do nothing." "We ourselves," Gottstein repeated. "By that you mean the Earthmen?" "Yes." "And the Lunarites?" "They were not involved." "Were they interested?" "I don't know. That's where my uncertainty -- and fear -- chiefly rest. The Lunarites -- the native Lunarites particularly -- do not feel like Earthmen. I don't know what their plans are or what they intend. I can't find out." Gottstein looked thoughtful. "But what can they do? Do you have any reason to suppose they intend to do us harm -- or that they can do Earth harm even if they intend it?" "I can't answer that question. They are an attractive and intelligent people. It seems to me they lack real hatred or real rage or even real fear. But perhaps that is only how they seem to me. What bothers me most is that I don't know." "The scientific equipment on the Moon is run by Earth, I believe." "That is correct. The proton synchrotron is. The radio telescope on the trans-terrestrial side is. The three hundred-inch optical telescope is. The large equipment,' you notice, all of which has been in existence for fifty years -- " "And what's been put in since?" "Very little by Earthmen." "What about the Lunarites?" "I'm not sure. Their scientists work in the large installations, but I once tried to check time cards. There are gaps." "Gaps?" "They spend considerable time away from the installations. It is as though they might have laboratories of their own." "Well, if they produce minielectronic devices and fine biochemicals -- isn't that to be expected?" "Yes, but -- Gottstein, I don't know. I fear my ignorance." A moderately long pause ensued. Gottstein finally broke it. "Montez, I take it you are telling me all this so that I will be careful -- so that I will try to find out what the Lunarites are doing?" "I suppose that's about it," said Montez unhappily. "But you don't even know that they're doing anything at all." "I feel that they are." Gottstein said, "It's odd, then. I should be trying to talk you out of all this fearful mysticism of yours -- but it's odd -- " "What is?" "The same vessel that brought me to the Moon brought some one else. I mean, a large party came, but one face in particular triggered something in my memory. I didn't talk to him -- had no occasion to -- and I dismissed the matter. But now our talk is pushing a button and he suddenly comes back to mind." "Yes?" "I was on a committee once that dealt with Electron Pump matters. A question of safety arose." He smiled briefly. "Earth's lost nerve. you might say. We worry about safety everywhere -- and a good thing, damn it, lost nerve or not. The details escape me, but in connection with that hearing I saw the man I saw again on the vessel. I'm convinced of it." "Does that have significance, do you think?" "I'm not sure. I associate that face with something disturbing. What it was may come, back to me. In any case, I had better get a list of the passengers and see if any name means something to me. Too bad, Montez, but I think you're getting me started." "Not bad at all," said Montez. "I'm glad of it. As for this man -- he may be only a tourist of no consequence who will be gone in two weeks, but I am glad to have you on the alert." Gottstein did not seem to be listening. "He is a physicist, or a scientist of some sort," he muttered. "I'm certain of it and I associate him with danger -- " XX cheerfully. The Earthman turned. Recognition took almost no time at all. "Selene. Am I right? Selene?" "Right. Correctly pronounced. Enjoying yourself?" The Earthman said gravely, "Very much. Being here makes me realize how unique our century is. Not so long ago I was on Earth, feeling tired of my world, tired of myself. Then I thought, "Well, if I were living a hundred years ago, the only way I could leave the world would be to die, but now -- I can go to the Moon." He smiled, and the smile too was grave. Selene asked, "Are you happier now that you're on the Moon?" "A little." He looked about. "Don't you have a crowd of tourists to nurse?" "Not today. It's my day off. Who knows, I may take off two or three. It's a dull job." "What a shame then -- you bump into a tourist on your day off." "I didn't bump into you. I came looking for you. You're a hard one to find, too. You shouldn't wander off by yourself." The Earthman gazed at her with interest. "Why look for me? Are you fond of Earthmen?" "No," she said with easy frankness. "I'm sick of them. I dislike them on principle and being constantly associated with them in my job makes it worse." "Yet you came looking for me and there isn't a way on Earth -- on Moon, I mean -- I can convince myself I am young and handsome." "It wouldn't help if you were. Earthmen don't interest me romantically, as everyone but Barron knows." "Then why the search?" "Because there are other ways of being interested and because Barron is interested." "And who is Barron? Your boy-friend?" Selene laughed. "Barron Neville. He's a lot more than a boy and a lot more than a friend. We have sex when we feel like it." "Well, that's what I meant. Do you have children?" "One boy. He's ten. He spends most of his time in the boys' compound. To spare you the next question, he's not Barron's. I may have a child by Barron if we're still together when I'm assigned another child -- if I'm assigned another child. I'm pretty sure I will be." "You're quite frank." "About things I don't believe require secrecy? Of course. Now, what would you like to do?" They had been walking along a corridor of milk-white rock, into the glazed surface of which were set dusky "Moon gems" that lay about for the taking in most sections of the Lunar surface. She wore sandals that scarcely seemed to touch the ground. He wore thicksoled boots, which leadenly helped weigh him down to keep his steps from becoming torture. The corridor was one-way. Occasionally a small electric cart would overtake them and move past almost silently. The Earthman asked, "What would I like to do? That is a broadbeamed invitation. Would you care to set boundary conditions so that my answer may not innocently offend you?" "Are you a physicist?" The Earthman hesitated. "Why do you ask?" "Just to hear what you will say. I know you're a physicist." "How?" "No one says 'set boundary conditions' unless he is. Especially if the first thing he wants to see on the Moon is the proton synchrotron." "Is that why you came looking for me? Because you thought I might be a physicist?" "That's why Barron sent me looking for you. You see, he is a physicist. I came because I thought you rather unusual for an Earthman." "In what way?" "Nothing terribly complimentary -- if it's compliments you're fishing for. It's just that you seem not to like Earthmen." "How can you tell that?" "I watched you look at the others in the party. Besides, I can always tell. Earthies who don't like Earthies tend to stay on the Moon. Which brings me back to the question -- what would you like to do? And I'll set the boundary conditions. I mean, as far as sightseeing is concerned." The Earthman looked at her sharply. "That's peculiar, Selene. You have a day off. Your job is sufficiently uninteresting or distasteful for you to be glad to have that day off and you would be willing to make it two or three. Yet your way of spending it is to volunteer to resume your job for me particularly. Just because of a little interest?" "Barron's interest. He's busy now and there's no harm in my entertaining you until he's ready. Besides, it's different. Can't you see it's different? On my job I'm riding herd on a couple of dozen Earthies Don't you mind my using the term?" "I use it myself." "But you use it as an Earthman. Some Earth people consider it a term of derision and resent it when a Lunarite uses it." "You mean when a Lunie uses it?" Selene flushed. "Yes. That's about it." "Well, then, let's neither of us cry over words. Go ahead -- you were telling me about your job." "On my job there are these themselves and whom I have to take here and there and give little speeches to and make sure they eat and drink and walk by the book. They see their little pet sights and do their little pet things, and I have to be polite and motherly. "Awful," said the Earthman. "But you and I can do as we to take your chances and I don't have to watch what I say." "I told you that you're perfectly welcome to call me an Earthie." "All right, then. I'll have a busman's holiday -- there's an Earthie expression for you. What would you like to do?" "I want to see the proton synchrotron." "Not that. Maybe Barron can arrange it. Talk to him." "Well, if I can't see the synchrotron I don't know what else there is to see. I know the radio telescope is on the other side, but I don't suppose there's any novelty in it. You tell me. What doesn't the average tourist get to see?" "A number of things. There are the algae roomsnot the antiseptic processing plants, which you've seen -- but the farms themselves. However, the smell is pretty strong there and I don't suppose an Earthie -- Earthman -- would find it particularly appetizing. Earthmen have enough trouble with the food, as it is." "Does that surprise you? Have you ever tasted Earth food?" "Not really. I probably wouldn't like it, though. It all depends on what you're used to." "I suppose so," said the Earthman, signing. "If you ate a real steak you'd probably gag at the fat and fiber." "We could go to the outskirts where the new corridors are being driven into bedrock, but you'll have to wear special protective garments. There are the factories -- " "You make the choice, Selene." "I will -- if you will tell me something honestly." "I can't promise without hearing the question." "I said that Earthies who don't like Earthies tend to stay on the Moon. You didn't correct me. Do you intend to stay on the Moon?" T he Earthman stared at the toes of his clumsy boots. He said, "I had trouble getting a visa to the Moon. They said I might be too old for the trip and that if I stayed any length of time I might find it impossible to return to Earth. So I told them I planned to stay on the Moon permanently." "Were you lying?" "I wasn't sure at the time. But now I think I'll stay here." "I should have thought that they ever to let you go under those conditions." "Why?" "Generally the Earth authorities don't like to send physicists to the Moon on a permanent basis." The Earthman's lips twitched. "I had no trouble on that ground." "Well, then -- if you're going to be one of us I think you ought to visit the gymnasium. Earthies often want to but we don't encourage them as a general rule -- though it's not forbidden outright. With immigrants, it's different -- " "Why?" "Well, for one thing, we exercise in the nude or near-nude. Why not?" She sounded aggrieved, as though weary of repeating a defensive position. "The temperature is controlled. The environment is clean. It's just that when people from Earth are present, nudity can become unsettling. Some Earthies are shocked. Some are titillated. Some are both. Well, we're not going to dress in the gymnasium for their sake and we're not going to cope with them, either -- we just keep them out." "But immigrants?" "They have to get used to it. In the end they'll be discarding clothes, too. And they'll need the gymnasium even more than the native Lunarites do." "I'll be honest with you, Selene. If I encounter female nudity. I'll definitely find it titillating. I'm not quite so old that I won't." "Well, titillate then," she said indifferently. "But keep it to yourself. Agreed?" "Do we have to get undressed, too?" He looked at her with amused interest. "As spectators? No. We could, but we don't have to. You would feel uncomfortable this early in the game and you wouldn't be a particularly inspiring sight to the rest of us." "You are frank." "Do you think you would be a treat in the altogether? Be honest. And as for myself -- I have no wish to put you under a strain by titillating you. So we might both just as well stay clothed." "Will there be any objection? I mean to my being there as an Earthie of uninspiring appearance?" "Not if I'm with you." "Very well, then, Selene. Is it far away?" "We are there. Just through here." "Ah, then you were planning to come here all the time." "I thought it might be interesting." "Why?" Selene smiled suddenly. "I just thought." T he Earthman shook his head. "I'm beginning to get the idea you never just think. Let me guess. If I'm to stay on the Moon I will need to exercise now and then in order to keep muscles, bones and all my organs, perhaps, in condition." "Quite true. So do all of us, but immigrants from Earth in particular. The day will come when the gymnasium will be a daily grind for you." They stepped through a doorway and the Earthman stared in astonishment. "This is the first place I've seen that looks like Earth." "In what way?" "Why, it's big. I didn't imagine you would have such big rooms on the Moon. Desks, office machinery -- women at the desks -- " "Bare-breasted women," said Selene solemnly. "That part isn't Earthlike, I admit." "We've got a hold-chute, too, and an elevator for Earthies. There are many levels. But wait." She approached a woman at one of the nearer desks, talking in a low, rapid voice while the Earthman stared at everything with amiable curiosity. Selene returned. "No trouble. And it turns out we're going to have a melee. A rather good one -- I know the teams." "This place is impressive. Really." "If you still refer to its size -- it's not nearly big enough. We have three gymnasiums. This is the largest, such as it is -- " "I'm somehow pleased that in the Spartan surroundings of the Moon, you can afford to waste so much space on frivolity." "Frivolity?" Selene sounded offended. "Why do you think this is frivolity?" "Melees. Some sort of game?" "You might call them a game. On Earth you can have such things for sport -- ten men doing, ten thousand watching. It's not so on the Moon. What's frivolous for you is necessary for us. This way -- we'll take the elevator, which means a little waiting maybe." "Didn't mean to get you angry." "I'm not really angry but you must be reasonable. You Earthmen have been adapted to Earth gravity years since life crawled onto dry land. You get by even if you don't exercise. We've had no time at all to adapt to Moon gravity." "You look different enough." "If you're born and reared under Moon gravity your bones and muscles are naturally slimmer and less massive than an Earthie's are, but that's superficial. There isn't a bodily function we possess, however subtle -- digestion, rates of hormonal secretions -- that isn't maladjusted to gravity and that doesn't require a deliberate regimen of exercise. If we can arrange exercise in the form of fun and games that does not make it frivolity. Here's the elevator." The Earthman hung back in momentary alarm. Selene said, "I suppose you're going to tell me it looks like a wickerwork basket. Every Earthman who uses it says so. With Moon gravity, it doesn't have to be any more substantial." The elevator moved down slowly. Selene and the Earthman were the only ones on board. He said, "I suspect this isn't much used." Selene smiled again. "You're right. The hold-chute is much more popular and much more fun." "What is it?" "Exactly what the name implies. Here we are. We had to drop only two levels. The chute is just a vertical tube you can drop through, with hand-holds. We don't encourage Earthies to use it." "Too risky?" "Not in itself. You can climb down as though it were a ladder. However, there are always youngsters swinging down at considerable speed and Earthies don't know how to keep out of the way. Collisions are always discomforting. But you'll get to use the chute in time. In fact, what you'll see now is a kind of large hold-chute designed for recklessness." S HE led him to a circular railing, around which a number of individuals were leaning and talking. All were more or less in the nude. Sandals were common and usually a hip purse was slung over one shoulder. Some wore briefs. One girl was scooping a greenish mash out of a container and eating it. The Earthman wrinkled his nose slightly as he passed that one. He said, "The dental problem must be severe on the Moon." Selene nodded. "If we ever get the chance, we'll select for an edentate jaw." "Toothlessness?" "Maybe not complete. We might keep the incisors and canines for cosmetic reasons and for occasionally useful tasks. They're easily cleaned, too. But why should we want useless molars? They're just a hangover from an Earthie past." "Are you making any progress?" "No," she said stiffly. "Genetic engineering is illegal. Earth insists." She leaned over the railing. "They call this the Moon's playground." The Earthman looked down into a large cylindrical construction with smooth pink walls to which metal bars were attached in what seemed a random configuration. Here and there a bar stretched across a portion of the cylinder, sometimes across its entire width. The structure was perhaps four or five hundred feet deep and about fifty feet across. No one seemed to be paying particular attention either to the playground or to the Earthman. Some looked at him indifferently as he passed -- seeming to weigh his clothed state, his facial appearance -- and then turned away. Some made a casual hand gesture in Selene's direction before turning away, but all turned away. The no-interest signal, however subdued, could not have been more blatant. The Earthman turned to the cylindrical opening. He saw slim figures at the bottom, foreshortened because they were seen from above. Some wore wisps of clothing in red, some in blue. Two teams, he decided. Clearly the dress served protective functions, since all wore gloves and sandals, protective bands about knees and elbows. Some wore brief bands about the hips, some about the chests. "Oh," he muttered. "Men and women." Selene said, "Right. The sexes compete equally and the idea in dress is to prevent the uncontrolled swinging of parts that might hamper the guided fall. There is a sexual difference there and in vulnerability to pain. The clothing is not for modesty." The Earthman said, "I think I've read of this." "You may have, though not much seems to get out. Not that we have any objection, but the terrestrial government prefers to keep news of the Moon to a minimum." "Why, Selene?" "You're an Earthman. You tell me. Our theory is that we embarrass Earth. Or at least the Earth government." Two individuals were rising rapidly on opposite sides of the cylinder now. The patter of light drums was heard in the background. At first the climbers seemed to be going up a ladder, rung by rung, but their speed increased and by the time they were halfway up, they were merely striking each hold as they passed, making an ostentatious slapping noise. "Couldn't do that as gracefully on Earth," said the Earthman admiringly. "Or at all," he amended. "It's not just the low gravity," said Selene. "Try it, and you'll find that climb takes endless hours of practice." T he climbers reached the railing and swung to a headstand. They performed simultaneous somersaults and began to fall. "They can move quickly when they want to," said the Earthman. "Umm," said Selene, through the patter of applause. "I suspect that when Earthmen -- I mean the real Earthmen, the ones who have never even visited the Moon -- think of moving around the Moon, they think of the surface and of spacesuits. That's often slow, of course. The mass, with the spacesuit added, is huge and means high inertia." "Quite right," said the Earthman. "I've seen the classic motion pictures of the early astronauts that all schoolchildren see. The movements are like those underwater. The picture becomes imprinted and stays with us even when we know better." "You'd be surprised how fast we can move on the surface these days, spacesuit and all," said Selene. "And here, underground, without spacesuits, we can move as quickly as people do on Earth. The slower whip of gravity is made up for by the proper use of muscles." "But you can move slowly, too." The Earthman was watching the acrobats. They had gone up with speed and were going down with deliberate slowness. They were floating, slapping the hand-holds to delay the drop rather than, as before, to accelerate the rise. They reached the bottom and two,others replaced them. And then two more. And then two more. Alternate pairs from each team competed in virtuosity. Each pair went up in unison -- each pair rose and fell in a more complicated pattern. One pair kicked off simultaneously to cross the tube in a low parabola, each reaching the hand-hold the other had abandoned and somehow skimming past the other in midair without touching. That stunt evoked loud applause. The Earthman said, "I suspect I lack the experience to appreciate the finer points of skill. Are these all native Lunarites?" "They have to be," said Selene. "The gymnasium is open to all Lunar citizens and some immigrants are fairly good, considering. For this kind of virtuosity, however, you must depend on babies conceived and born here. They have the proper physical adaptation and get the proper childhood training. Most of these performers are under eighteen." "I imagine it's dangerous -- even at Moon's gravity levels." "Broken bones aren't too uncommon. I don't think there's been an actual death, but I know of at least one case of broken spine and paralysis. That was a terrible accident -- I was actually watching -- Oh, wait now -- we're going to have the ad libs." "The what?" "Till now, we've had set pieces. The climbs were according to a fixed pattern." The percussion beat seemed softer as one climber rose and suddenly launched into midair. He caught a transverse bar onehanded, circled it once vertically and let go. The Earthman watched closely. He said, "Amazing. He gets around those bars exactly like a gibbon." "A what?" asked Selene. "A gibbon. A kind of ape -- in fact, the only ape still existing in the wild. They -- " He looked at Selene's expression and said, "I don't mean it as an insult, Selene they are graceful creatures." Selene said, frowning, "I've seen pictures of apes." "You probably haven't seen gibbons in motion. I dare say that Earthies might call Lunarites 'gibbons' and mean it insultingly, about on the level of what you mean by 'Earthie.' But I don't mean it so." He leaned both elbows on the railing and watched the action. It was like dancing in the air. He said, "How do you treat Earth immigrants here on the Moon, Selene? I mean immigrants who mean to stay here for life. Since they lack true Lunarite abilities -- " "That makes no difference. Immies are citizens. There's no discrimination -- no legal discrimination." "What does that mean? No legal discrimination?" "Well, you said it yourself. There are some things they can't do. There are differences. The medical problems are different and they've usually had a worse medical history. If they come in middle age they look -- old." The Earthman looked away, embarrassed. "Can they intermarry? I mean, immigrants and Lunarites." "Certainly. That is, they can interbreed." "Yes, that's what I meant." "Of course. No reason why an immigrant can't have some worthwhile genes. Heavens, my father was an Immie, though I'm secondgeneration Lunarite on my mother's side." "I suppose your father must have come when he was quite -- Oh, good Lord -- " He froze at the railing, then drew a shuddering breath. "I thought he was going to miss that bar." "Not a chance," said Selene. "That's Marco Fore. He likes to reach out at the last moment. Actually it's bad form to do so and a real champion doesn't. Still -- My father was twenty-two when he arrived." "I suppose that's the way. Young enough to be adaptable and without emotional complications linking one to Earth. From the standpoint of the Earthie male, I imagine it must be rather nice to have a sexual attachment with a -- " "Sexual attachment!" Selene's amusement seemed to cover a very real sense of shock. "You don't suppose my father had sex with my mother. If my mother heard you say that, she'd set you right in, a hurry." "But -- " "Artificial insemination, for goodness' sake. Sex with an Earthman?" The Earthman looked solemn. "I thought you said there was no discrimination." "That's not discrimination. That's a matter of physical fact. An Earthman can't handle the gravity field properly. However practiced he might be -- under the stress of passion he might revert. I wouldn't risk it. The clumsy fool might snap his arm or teg or -- worse -- mine. Gene mixtures are one thing -- sex is quite another." "I'm sorry. Isn't artificial insemination against the law?" She was watching the gymnastics with absorption. "That's Marco Fore again. When he isn't trying to be uselessly spectacular he really is good -- and his sister is almost as good. When they work together it's a poem of motion. Look at them now. They'll come together and circle the same bar as though they had a single body. He's a little too flamboyant at times, but you can't fault his muscular control. Yes, artificial insemination is against Earth's law, but it's allowed for medical reasons -- and here that term is pretty broad." climbed to the top and were in a great circle just below the railing -- reds on one side, blues on the other. All arms on the side of the interior were raised and the applause was loud. Quite a crowd had gathered at the rail. "You ought to have some seating arrangement," said the Earthman. "Not at all. This isn't a show. This is exercise. We don't encourage any more spectators than can stand comfortably about the railing. We're supposed to be down there, not up here." "You mean you can do that sort of thing, Selene?" "After a fashion, of course. Any Lunarite can. I'm not as good as they are. I haven't joined any teams -- The melee's going to start now, a free-for-all. This is the really dangerous part. All ten are going to be in the air and each side is going to try to send members of the other side into a fall." "A real fall?" "As real as possible." "Are there injuries occasionally?" "Occasionally. In theory this sort of thing is frowned upon. Courting injury is considered frivolous and we don't have so large a population that we can afford to incapacitate anyone. Still, the melee is popular and we can't raise the votes to outlaw it." "Which side do you vote on, Selene?" Selene blushed. "Oh, never mind. You watch this!" The percussion rhythm had suddenly grown thunderous and each of the individuals in the huge well darted outward like an arrow. There was wild confusion in midair, but when the contestants parted again each ended firmly on a grip bar. Next came the tension of waiting. One contestant launched himself. Another followed -- and the air was again filled with flashing bodies. Over and over it happened. Selene said, "The scoring is intricate. There is a point for every launch, a point for every touch, two points for every miss inflicted, ten points for a grounding. And there are various penalties for various kinds of fouling." "Who keeps the score?" "Umpires make the preliminary decisions and television tapes are studied in the event of appeals. But often even the tapes can't decide matters." A sudden excited cry arose when a girl in blue moved past a boy in red and slapped his flank resoundingly. The boy who received the blow had writhed away, but not successfully. Grabbing at a bar with improper balance, he struck the wall ungracefully with his knee. "Where were his eyes?" demanded Selene indignantly. "He didn't see her coming." The action grew hotter and the Earthman tired of trying to make sense of the knotted flights. Occasionally a leaper touched a bar and did not retain hold. Those were the times when spectators leaned over the railing as though ready to launch themselves into space. Once Marco Fore was struck in the wrist and someone cried "Foul!" Fore missed his hand-hold and fell. To the Earthman's eyes the fall was slow. Fore's lithe body twisted and turned, reaching for bar after bar, without quite making it. The others waited. All maneuvering was suspended during the fall. Fore was moving quite rapidly now, though twice he had slowed himself without quite being able to maintain a hold. He was nearly to the ground when a sudden spidery lunge caught a transverse bar with the right leg and he hung suspended and swinging, headdown, about ten feet above the ground. Arms outspread, he paused while the applause rang out, then he twisted upright and jumped into a rapid climb. The Earthman said, "Was he fouled?" "If Jean Wong actually grabbed Marco's wrist instead of pushing it, it was a foul. The umpire has ruled a fair block, however, and I don't think Marco will appeal. He fell a lot farther than he had to. He likes these last-minute saves. Some day he'll miscalculate and hurt himself. Oh, oh." The Earthman looked up in sudden inquiry, but Selene's eyes were not upon him. She said, "That's someone from the Commissioner's office and he must be looking for you." "Why?" "I don't see why he would come here to find anyone else. You're the unusual one." "But there's no reason -- " began the Earthman. Yet the messenger, who himself had the build of an Earthman or an Earth immigrant and who seemed uneasy under the stares of a couple of dozen slight nude figures who seemed to tint their scorn with indifference, came directly toward him. "Sir, Commissioner Gottstein requests that you accompany me -- " were harsher than Selene's. His books were on bold display. His computer outlet was unmasked in one corner and his large desk was in disarray. His windows were blank. Selene entered, folded her arms and said, "If you live like a slob, Barron, how do you expect your thoughts to be neat?" "I'll manage," Barron said grumpily. "How is it you haven't brought the Earthman with you?" "The Commissioner got to him first. The new Commissioner." "Gottstein?" "That's right. Why weren't you ready sooner?" "Because it took time to find out about him. I won't work blind." Selene said, "Well, then, we'll just have to wait." Neville bit at a thumbnail and inspected the result severely. "I don't know whether I ought to like the situation or not. What did you think of him?" "I like him," said Selene definitely. "He was rather pleasant, considering he was an Earthie. He let me guide him. He was interested. He made no judgments. He didn't patronize. And I didn't go out of my way to avoid insulting him, either." "Did he ask again about the synchrotron?" She found herself resorting to a tactic she normally despised and seldom used -- evasion. "He didn't have to." "Why not?" "I told him you wanted to see him and I said you were a physicist. So I imagine that when you get together, he'll ask you whatever it is he wants to ask." "Didn't he think it strange that he should be talking to a female tourist-guide who just happens to know a physicist?" "Why strange? I said you were my sex partner. There's no accounting for sexual attraction and a physicist may well condescend to a lowly tourist-guide." "Shut up, Selene." "Oh, for -- Look, Barron, it seems to me that if he were spinning some sort of fancy web -- if he approached me because he planned to get to you through me -- he would have shown some trace of anxiety. The more complicated and silly any plot, the more rickety it is and the more anxious the plotter. I deliberately behaved casually. I took him to a gymnastics show." "And?" "And he was interested. Relaxed and interested. Whatever he has on his mind, it isn't involuted." "You're sure of that? The Commissioner got to him before I did. You consider that good?" "Why should I consider it bad? An open invitation to a meeting of some sort delivered in front of a couple of dozen Lunarites isn't particularly involuted, either." Neville leaned back, hands clasped at the nape of his neck. "Selene, please don't insist on making judgments when I don't ask you to. It's irritating. The man is not a physicist in the first place. Did he tell you he was?" Selene paused to think. "I called him a physicist. He didn't deny it but I don't recall that he actually said he was. And yet -- I'm sure he is." "It's a lie of omission, Selene. He may be a physicist in his own mind, but the fact is that he isn't trained as a physicist and he doesn't work as one. He has had scientific training. I'll grant, but he has no scientific job of any kind. He couldn't get one. There isn't a lab on Earth that would give him working room. He happens to be on Fred Hallam's crud list and Hallam has been top man there for a long time. "Are you sure?" "Believe me, I checked. Didn't you just criticize me for taking so long? And his background sounds so good that it's too good." "Why too good? I don't see what you're getting at." "Doesn't it seem to you we ought to trust him? After all, he's got a grievance against Earth." "You can certainly argue that way -- if your facts are right." "Oh, my facts are right -- at least in the sense that they're what turns up, if you dig for background on your Earthie. But maybe we're supposed to argue that way." "Barron, that's disgusting. How can you weave these conspiracy theories into everything? Ben didn't sound -- " "Ben?" Neville asked sardonically. "Ben," repeated Selene firmly. "Ben didn't sound like a man wjth a grievance or like a man trying to make me think he sounded like a man with a grievance." "No, but he managed to make you think he was someone to be liked. You did say you liked him, didn't you? With emphasis? Maybe that's exactly what he was trying to do." "I'm not that easy to fool and you know it." "Well, I'll just have to wait till I see him." "The hell with you, Barron. I've associated with thousands of Earthies of all kinds. It's my Job. And you have no reason whatever to speak sarcastically about my judgment. You know you have every reason to trust it." "All right. We'll see. Don't get angry. It's just that we'll have to wait now. And as long as we must -- " He rose lithely to his feet. "Guess what I'm thinking." "I don't have to." Selene rose as smoothly and with an almost invisible motion of her feet slid sideways, well away from him. "But think it by yourself. I'm not in the mood." "Are you annoyed because I've impugned your judgment?" "I'm annoy because -- Oh, hell, why don't you keep your room in better condition?" And she left. X stein, "to offer you some Earthside luxury. Doctor, but I have been allowed to bring none. The good people of the Moon resent the artificial barriers imposed by special treatment for men from Earth. It seems better to soothe their sensibilities by assuming the Lunarite pose as far as possible, though I'm afraid my gait will give me away. Their confounded gravity is impossible." The Earthman said, "I find this so also. I congratulate you on your new post." "Not yet quite mine, sir." "Still, my congratulations. I can't help wondering why you have asked to see me." "We were shipmates. We arrived not so long ago on the same vessel." The Earthman waited politely. Gottstein said, "And my acquaintance with you is a longer one than that. We met briefly some years ago." The Earthman said quietly, "I'm afraid I don't recall -- " "I'm not surprised. There is no reason for you to remember. Once I was on the staff of Senator Burt, who headed -- still heads, in fact -- the Committee on Technology and Environment. It was at a time when he was rather anxious to get the goods on Hallam -- Frederick Hallam." The Earthman seemed quite suddenly to sit a little straighter. "Did you know Hallam?" "You're the second person to ask me that since my coming to the Moon. Yes, I did. Not intimately. And I've known others who've met him. Oddly enough, their opinion usually coincided with mine. For a person apparently idolized by the planet, Hallam inspired little personal liking on the part of those acquainted with him." "Little? None at all, I think," said the Earthman. Gottstein ignored the interruption. "It was my job at the time -- or at least, my assignment from the Senatorto investigate the Electron Pump and see if its establishment and growth were accompanied by undue waste and personal profit-taking. Both were a legitimate concern for what was essentially a watchdog committee, but the Senator was, between us, hoping to find something to damage Hallam. The Senator was anxious to break the stranglehold that man was gaining on the scientific establishment. But the Senator failed." "That much would be obvious. Hallam today is stronger than ever." "We discovered no graft to speak of -- certainly none that could be traced to Hallam. The man is rigidly honest." "In that sense he is, I am sure. Power has its own market value, not necessarily measured in creditbills." "But what interested me at the time, though it was something I could not then follow up, was that I did come across someone whose complaint was not against Hallam's power but against the Electron Pump itself. I was present at the interview although I did not conduct it. You were the complainant, were you not?" The Earthman said cautiously, "I remember the incident, but I still don't remember you." "I wondered then how anyone could possibly object to the Electron Pump on scientific grounds. You impressed me sufficiently for something to stir when I saw you on the ship -- and eventually the memory came back. I have not referred to the passenger list but let me check my powers of recall. ArenT you Dr. Benjamin Andrew Denison?" The Earthman sighed. "Benjamin Allan Denison. Yes. But why does this come up now? The truth is. Commissioner, I don't want to drag up the past. I'm here on the Moon and anxious to make a new start. Damn it, I considered changing my name." "That wouldn't have helped. It was your face I recognized. I have no objection to your new life. Dr. Denison. I would not in any way interfere. But I would like to pry a little for reasons that do not directly involve you. I don't remember, quite, your objection to the Electron Pump. Could you enlighten me?" silence lengthened and Gottstein did not interrupt. He even stifled a small clearing of the throat. Denison said, "Truly, it was nothing. It was a guess I made -- a fear about the alteration in the intensity of the strong nuclear field. Nothing!" "Nothing?" Gottstein did clear his throat now. "Please don't mind if I strive to understand this. I told you that you interested me at the time. I was unable to follow up your theories then and I doubt that I could dig the information out of the records now. The whole thing is classified -- the Senator did very poorly at the time and he isn't interested in publicity about the matter. Still, some details come back. You were once a colleague of Hallam's -- though not a physicist -- " "That's right. I was a radiochemist. So was he." "Stop me if I remember incorrectly, but your early record was exceptional, right?" "There were objective criteria in my favor. I had no illusions about "Amazing how it comes back. Hallam, on the other hand, was not." "Not particularly." "But afterward things did not go well with you. In fact, when we interviewed you -- I think you volunteered to see us -- you were working for a toy manufacturer." "Cosmetics," said Denison in a strangled voice. "Male cosmetics. My x)ccupation didn't help gain me a respectful hearing." "No, it wouldn't. I'm sorry. You were a salesman." "Sales manager. I was still before breaking off and coming to the Moon." "Did Hallam have something to do with that? I mean with your leaving science?" "Commissioner," said Denison, "please -- it really doesn't matter any longer. I was there when Hallam first discovered the tungsten conversion and when the chain of events began that led to the Electron Pump. Exactly what would have happened if I had not been there, I can't say. Hallam and I might both have been dead of radiation poisoning a month later or of a nuclear explosion six weeks later. I don't know. But I was there and Hallam is what he is now, partly because of me. And because of my part in whatever he is -- I am what I am now. The hell with the details. Does that satisfy you? Because it will have to." "I certainly had no affection for him in those days. I have no affection for him now, for that matter." "Would you say that your objection to the Electron Pump was inspired by your anxiety to destroy Hallam?" "I object to this crossexamination." "Please! What I ask is not intended to be used against you. The information is for my own benefit. I am concerned about the Pump and about a number of things." "Well, then -- I suppose you might work out some emotional involvement. Because I disliked Hallam I was ready to believe that his popularity and prestige had a false foundation. I thought about the Electron Pump, hoping to find a flaw." "And you therefore found one?" "No," said Denison forcefully. "Not 'therefore.' I found a flaw, but the finding was honest. I did not invent a flaw merely to puncture Hallam." "No question of inventing. Doctor," said Gottstein soothingly. "I wouldn't dream of any such implication. Yet we both know that in trying to determine something on the boundary lines of the known, it is necessary to make assumptions. The assumptions can be made over a gray area of uncertainty so that one can shade them in one direction or another with perfect honesty, but in accord with -- uh -- the emotions of the moment. You made your assumptions, perhaps, on the antiHallam edge of the possible." "This is a profitless discussion, sir. At the time I thought I had a valid point. However, I am not a physicist. I am -- was -- a radiochemist." "Hallam was a radiochemist, too, but he is now the most famous physicist in the world." "He's still a radiochemist. A quarter-century out of date." "Not so you. You worked hard to become a physicist." Denison smoldered. "You really investigated me!" "I told you -- you impressed me. Amazing how it comes back. But now I'll pass on to something a little different. Do you know a physicist named Peter Lamont?" Reluctantly Demison nodded. "I don't know him well enough to pass judgment." "Would you say he knew what he was talking about." "Barring information to the contrary, yes, I would say so." T he Commissioner carefully leaned back in his seat. It had a spindly look about it and by Earth standards it would not have supported his weight. He asked, "Would you care to tell me how you came to know Lamont? Was it by reputation only? Did you meet?" "We had some direct conversations. He was planning to write a history of the Electron Pump and how it starteda full account of all the legendary crap that's grown around it. I was flattered that Lamont came to me -- that he seemed to have found out something about me. Damn it. Commissioner, I was flattered that he knew I was alive. But I couldn't really say much. What would have been the use? I would have gained nothing but .some sneers and I am tired of those tired also of brooding and self-pity." "Do you know anything about what Lamont has been doing in the last few years?" "What is it you're thinking of. Commissioner?" asked Denison cautiously. "About a year ago, maybe a little more, Lamont spoke to Burt. I am not on the Senator's staff any longer but we see each other occasionally. He talked to me about it. He was concerned. He thought Lamont might have made a valid point against the Electron Pump and yet could see no practical way of pursuing the matter. I, too, was concerned -- " "Concern everywhere," said Denison sardonically. "But now I wonder. If Lamont talked to you and -- " "Stop. Stop right there, Commissioner. I think I see you sidling toward a point and I don't want you to move any further. If you expect me to tell you that Lamont stole my idea -- that once again I am being treated badly -- you are wrong. Let me tell you as forcefully as I can -- I had no valid theory. Mine was purely a guess. It worried me. I presented it. I was not believed -- I became discouraged. I gave up. I did not mention my guess in my discussion with Lamont -- we never covered ground beyond the early days of the Pump. What he came up with later, however much it may have resembled my guess, was arrived at independently. His idea seems much more solidly founded than mine and to be based on rigid mathematical analysis. I lay claim to no priority." "You seem to know about Lamont's theory." "It made the rounds in recent months. The fellow can't publish and no one takes him seriously, but it was passed along the grapevine. It even reached me." "I see. Doctor. But I take Lamont seriously. To me the warning was second time around, you understand. The report of the first warning -- yours -- had never reached the Senator. It had nothing to do with financial irregularities, which were then on his mind. The actual head of the investigating panel -- not myself -- considered it (you will forgive me) crackpot. I did not. When the matter came up again I grew disturbed. It was my intention to meet with Lamont, but a number of physicists whom I consulted -- " "Including Hallam?" "No, I did not talk to Hallam. But a number of those I consulted advised me that Lamont's work was utterly without foundation. Even so, I was considering seeing him when I was asked to take this position. And here I am -- and here you are. So you can understand why I wanted to meet you. In your opinion, is there merit in the theories advanced by yourself and Dr. Lamont?" "You mean is continued use of the Electron Pump going to blow up the sun, or maybe the entire arm of the galaxy?" "Yes, that's exactly what I mean." "How can I tell? All I have is my own guess, which is just a guess. As for Lamont's theory, I have not studied it in detail -- it has not been published. If I saw it, the mathematics might be beyond me. Besides, what's the difference? Lamont won't convince anyone. Hallam has ruined him as earlier he ruined me and the public generally would find it against their short-term interest to believe him even if he went over Hallam's head, so to speak. The world doesn't want to give up the Pump -- and it's a lot easier to refuse to accept Lamont's theory than to try to do something about it." "But you're still concerned about the possibilities, aren't you?" "In the sense that I think that we might indeed destroy ourselves and that I wouldn't like to see that happen, of course." "So you've come to the Moon, now, to do something that Hallam, your old enemy, would prevent your doing on Earth." Denison said slowly, "You, too, like to make guesses." too. Is my guess correct?" "It may be. I haven't given up hope of returning to science. If anything I do were to lift the specter of doom from mankind, either by showing that it does not exist or that it does exist and must be eliminated, I would be pleased." "I see. Dr. Denison, to discuss another point at the moment my predecessor, the retiring Commissioner, Mr. Montez, tells me that the growing edge of science is here on the Moon. He seems to think a disproportionate quantity of the brains and initiative of mankind is here." "He may be right," said Denison. "I don't know." "Doesn't it strike you that his being right might be inconvenient for your purpose? Whatever you do, men may say and think it was accomplished through the Lunar scientific structure. You personally might gain little in the way of recognition, however valuable the results you were to present. Which, of course, would be unjust." "I am tired of the rat-race of credits. Commissioner Gottstein. I want some interest in life, more interest than I can find as Vice President in charge of Ultrasonic Depilatories. I'll find it in a return to science. If I accomplish something in my own eyes, I will be satisfied." "Let us say that that would be insufficient for me. What credit you earn, you should receive -- and it should be quite possible for me, as Commissioner, to present the facts to the Terrestrial community in such a way as to preserve for you what is yours. Surely you are human enough to want what is your own." "You are kind. And in return?" "You are cynical. But justly so. In return I want your help. The retiring Commissioner, Mr. Montez, is not certain as to the lines of scientific research being undertaken on the Moon. Communications between the peoples of Earth and Moon are not perfect, yet coordination of the efforts on both worlds would clearly benefit all. It is understandable that there should be distrust, I suppose, but anything you can do to break down that distrust would be as valuable to us as your scientific findings might be." "Surely, Commissioner, you can't feel that I'm the ideal man to bear witness to the Lunarites as to how fair-meaning and welldisposed the Earth's scientific establishment is." "You mustn't confuse one vengeful scientist with the men of Earth as a whole. Dr. Denison. Let's put it this way. I would appreciate being kept aware of your scientific findings so that I could help you retain your fair share of credit. And in order to understand your findings properly -- I am not a professional scientist myself, remember -- it would be helpful if you would explain them in the light of the present state of science on the Moon. Is it agreed?" Denison said, "You ask a hard thing. Preliminary results, prematurely disclosed -- whether through carelessness or overenthusiasm -- can do tremendous harm to a reputation. I would hate to talk about anything to anyone until I am sure of my ground. My earlier experience with the committee on which you served would certainly encourage me to preserve silence." "I quite understand," said Gottstein heartily. "I would leave it to you to decide when I might usefully be informed. Now I have kept you late and you probably want to sleep -- " Which was dismissal. Denison left, Gottstein looking after him thoughtfully. D enison opened the door by hand. There was a contact that would have opened it automatically, but in the blur of waking he could not find it. The dark-haired man -- with a face that was somehow scowling in repose -- said, "I'm sorry. Am I early?" Denison repeated the last word to give himself time to absorb matters. "Early? No. I -- I'm late, I think." "I called. We made an appointment." And now Denison had it. "Yes. You're Dr. Neville." "That's right. May I come in?" He stepped in. Denison's room was small and held a rumpled bed that took up most of the available space. The ventilator was sighing softly. Neville said with meaningless courtesy, "Slept well, I hope?" Denison looked down at his pajamas and passed a hand over his rumpled hair. "No," he said abruptly. "I had an abominable night. May I be excused long enough to make myself more presentable?" "Of course. Would you like to have me prepare breakfast meanwhile? You may be unacquainted with the equipment." "It would be a favor," said Denison. He emerged some twenty minutes later, washed and shaved, wearing trousers and an undershirt. He said, "I trust I didn't break the shower. It went off and I couldn't turn it on again." "The water's rationed. You get only so much. This is the Moon, Doctor. I've taken the liberty of preparing scrambled eggs and hot soup for the two of us." "Scrambled -- " "We call it, that. Earthmen wouldn't, I suppose." Denison said, "Oh?" He sat down with something less than enthusiasm and tasted the pasty yellow mixture. He tried not to make a face at the first taste and then manfully swallowed it and dug in for a second forkful. "You'll get used to it with time," said Neville, "and it's highly nourishing. I might warn you that the high-protein content and the low gravity will cut your needs for food." "Just as well," said Denison, clearing his throat. Neville said, "Selene tells me that you intend to stay on the Moon." Denison said. "That was my intention." He rubbed his eyes. "I've had a terrible night, though. It tests my resolution." "How many times did you fall out of bed?" "Twice. I take it that the problem is a common one." "For men of Earth, invariably. Awake, you can make yourself walk with due regard for the Moon's gravity. Asleep, you toss as you would on Earth. But at least falling is not painful at low gravity." "The second time I slept on the floor a while before waking. Didn't remember falling. What the hell do you do about it?" "You mustn't neglect your periodjc checks on heartbeat, blood pressure and so on, just to make sure the gravity change isn't introducing too much strain." "I've been amply warned of that," said Denison with distaste. "In fact, I have fixed appointments for the next month. And pills." "Well," said Neville, as if dismissing a triviality, "within a week you'll probably have no trouble at all. And you'll need proper clothing. Those trousers will never do and that flimsy upper garment serves no purpose." "I presume there's some place I can buy clothes." "Of course. If you can get her when she's off duty, Selene will be glad to help you. I'm sure. She assures me you're a decent sort. Doctor." "I'm delighted she thinks so." Denison, having swallowed a spoonful of the soup, looked at it as though wondering what to do with the rest. Grimly he continued the task of downing it. "She judged you to be a physicist, but of course she's wrong." "I was trained as a radiochemist." "You haven't worked at that either for a long time. Doctor. We may be out of it up here, but we're not that far out of it. You're one of Hallam's victims." "Are there so many you speak of them as a group?" "Why not? The whole Moon is one of Hallam's victims." "The Moon?" "In a manner of speaking." "I don't understand." "We have no Electron Pump stations on the Moon. None have been established because there has been no cooperation from the para-Universe. No samples of tungsten have been accepted." "Surely, Dr. Neville, you don't intend to imply that this is Hallam's doing." "In a negative way, yes. Why must only the para-Universe be able to initiate a Pump station? Why can't we?" "As far as I know, we lack the knowledge to take the initiative." "And we will continue to lack the knowledge if research into the matter is forbidden." "Is it forbidden?" Denison asked with a faint note of surprise. "In effect. If none of the work necessary to expand knowledge in that direction finds adequate priorities at the proton synchrotron or at any of the other large installations -- all controlled by Earth and all under the influence of Hallam -- then the research is effectively forbidden." D enison yawned. "I suspect I will have to sleep again before long. I beg your pardon -- I did not mean to imply you were boring me. But tell me, is the Electron Pump so important to the Moon? Surely the solar batteries are effective and sufficient." "They tie us to the sun, Doctor. They tie us to the surface." "Well -- But why does Hallam take this adverse interest in the matter, do you suppose. Dr. Neville?" "You know better than I if you know him personally, as I do not. He prefers not to make it clear to the public generally that the entire Electron Pump establishment is the product of the paramen, with ourselves merely servants of the masters. And if, on the Moon, we advance to the point where we ourselves know what we are doing, then the birth of the true Electron Pump technology will date from our moment, not from his." Denison said, "Why do you tell me all this?" "To avoid wasting my time. Ordinarily we welcome physicists from Earth. We feel cut off here on the Moon, victims of deliberate Terrestrial policy against us, and a physicist visitor can be helpful, even if only to give us a feeling of lesser isolation. A physicist immigrant is even more helpful and we like to explain the situation to him and encourage him to work with us. I am sorry that you are not, after all, a physicist." Denison said impatiently, "But I never said I was." "And yet you asked to see the synchrotron. Why?" "Is that really what's bothering you. My dear sir, let me try to explain. My scientific career was ruined half a lifetime ago. I have decided to seek some sort of rehabilitation, some sort of renewed meaning to my life as far away from Hallam as I can get -- which means here on the Moon. I was trained as a radiochemist, but that has not permanently paralyzed me as far as any other field of endeavor is concerned. Para-physics is the great field of today and I have done my best to self-educate myself there, feeling that this will offer me my best hope for rehabilitation." Neville nodded dubiously. "By the way, since you mentioned the Electron Pump -- Have you heard anything about the theories of Peter Lamont?" Neville eyed the other narrowly. "No. I don't think I know the man." "He is not yet famous. And probably never will be -- chiefly for the same reason I'll never be. He crossed Hallam. His name came up recently and I've been giving him some thought. It was one way of occupying the sleepless portion of last night." He yawned again. Neville said impatintly, "Yes, Doctor? What of this man?" "He has some interesting thoughts on para-theory. He believes that with continued use of the Pump, the strong nuclear interaction will grow basically more intense in the solar system -- causing the sun to slowly heat up and, at some crucial point, undergo a phase change that will produce an explosion." "Nonsense. Do you know the amount of change produced on a cosmic scale by any use of the Pump on a human scale? Even granted that you are only selfeducated in physics, you should have no difficulty in seeing that the Pump can't possibly make any appreciable change in Universe conditions during the lifetime of the solar system." "Do you think that?" "Of course. Don't you?" "I'm not sure. Lament's grinding a personal axe. I've met him briefly and he impressed me as an intense and very emotional fellow. Considering what Hallam has done to him, he is probably driven by overwhelming anger." Neville frowned. "Are you sure he is on the outs with Hallam?" "I'm an expert on the subject." "It doesn't occur to you that the initiation of that kind of doubt -- that the Pump is dangerous -- might be used as merely another device to keep the Moon from developing Pumps of its own?" "At the cost of creating universal alarm and despondency? Of course not. That would be cracking walnuts with nuclear explosions. No, I'm sure Lamont is sincere. In fact, in my own bumbling way I had similar notions once." "Because you, too, are driven by hate for Hallam." "I'm not Lamont. I imagine I don't react the same way he does. In fact, I had some dim hope I would be able to investigate the matter on the Moon, without Hallam's interference and without Lamont's emotionalism." "Here on the Moon?" "Here on the Moon. I thought perhaps I might get the use of the synchrotron." "And that was your interest in it?" Denison nodded. Neville said, "You really think you will get the use of the synchrotron? Do you know how far back the priorities have piled up?" "I thought perhaps I might get the cooperation of some of the Lunar scientists." Neville laughed and shook his head. "We have almost as little chance at the synchrotron as you. However, I'll tell you what we can do. We have established laboratories of our own. We can give you space-we might even have some minor instrumentation for you. How useful our facilities would be to you I can't say, but you might be able to do something." "Do you suppose you would have any means of making observations useful to para-theory?" "It would depend partly on your ingenuity, I guess. Do you expect to prove the theories of this man, Lamont?" "Or disprove them. Perhaps." "You'll disprove them, if anything I have no fears about that." Denison said, "It's quite clear, isn't it, that I'm not a physicist by training? Why do you so readily offer me working space?" "Because you're from Earth. I told you we value that -- and perhaps your self-education as a physicist will be of additional value. Selene vouches for you, something I attach more importance to than I should, perhaps. And we are fellow-sufferers at the hands of Hallam. If you wish to rehabilitate yourself, we will help you." "But pardon me if I am cynical. What do you expect to get out of it?" "Your help. There is a certain amount of misunderstanding between the scientists of the Earth and the Moon. You are a man of Earth who has come voluntarily to the Moon and you could act as a bridge between us to the benefit of both. You have already had contact with the new Commissioner and it may be possible that, as you rehabilitate yourself, you will rehabilitate us as well." "You mean that if what I do weakens Hallam's influence. Lunar science will benefit?" "Whatever you accomplish is sure to be useful. But perhaps I ought to leave you to catch up with your sleep. Call on me during the next couple of days and I will see about placing you in a laboratory. And -- " he looked about, "getting you somewhat more comfortable quarters." They shook hands and Neville left. that, however annoying this position may have become for you, you are leaving it today with a small pang." Montez shrugged eloquently. "A very large pang, when I think of the return to full gravity. The difficulty of breathing -- the aching feet -- the perspiration. I'll be in a bath of perspiration constantly." "It will be my turn some day." "Take my advice. Never stay here longer than two months at a time. I don't care what the doctors tell you or what kind of isometric exercises they put you through -- get back to Earth every sixty days and stay at least a week. You've got to keep the feel of it." "I'll bear that in mind. Oh, I've been in touch with my friend." "Which friend is that?" "The man who was on the vessel with me when I came in. I thought I remembered him and I did. He's Denison -- a radiochemist. What I recalled about him was accurate enough." "Ah?" "What I actually remembered was a certain interesting irrationality of his and I tried to probe it. He resisted in quite shrewd fashion. He sounded rational -- so rational, in fact, that I grew suspicious. His is a kind of attractive rationality developed by certain types of crackpots as a defense mechanism." "Oh, Lord," said Montez, clearly harassed. "I'm not sure I follow you. I'm going to sit down for a moment. Between trying to determine whether everything is properly packed and thinking about Earth's gravity -- I'm out of breath. What kind of irrationality masquerades as rationality?" "He tried to tell us once that there was danger in the use of the Electron Pumps. He thought the process would blow up the Universe." "Indeed? And will it?" "I Tiope not. At the time his ideas were dismissed rather brusquely. When scientists work on a subject at the limit of understanding they grow edgy, you know. I knew a psychiatrist once who called it the 'Who knows?' phenomenon. If nothing you do will give you the knowledge you need. you end by saying, 'Who knows what will happen?' and imagination tells you." "Yes, but if physicists go around saying such things, even a few of them -- " "But they don't. Not officially. There's such a thing as scientific responsibility and the journals are careful not to print nonsense. Or what they consider nonsense. Actually, you know, the subject's come up again. A physicist named Lamont spoke to Senator Burt, also to that self-appointed environmental messiah, Chen, and a few others. He also insi.sts on the possibility of cosmic explosion. No one believes him but the story spreads in a thin sort of way and gets better with the retelling." "And this man here on the Moon believes it." Gottstein smiled broadly. "I suspect he does. Hell, in the middle of the night when I have trouble sleeping -- I keep falling out of bed, by the way -- I believe it myself. He probably hopes to test the theory experimentally -- here." "Well?" "Well, let him. I hinted we would help him." Montez shook his head. "That's risky. I don't like official encouragement of crackpot notions." "It's just barely possible they may not be entirely crackpot, but that's not the point. The point is that if we can get him established here on the Moon we may find out, through him, what's going on here. He's anxious for rehabilitation and I hinted that rehabilitation would come through us if he cooperated. I'll see to it that you are discreetly kept posted. As between friends, you know." "Thank you," said Montez. "And goodbye." N eville chafed. "No. i don't like him." "Why not? Because he's an Earthie?" Selene brushed a bit of fluff from her right breast, caught it and studied it critically. "That's not from my blouse. I tell you the air recirculation is abominable." "This Denison is worthless. He is not a para-physicist. He's a self-educated man in the field, he says, and proves it by coming here with ready-made, damn-fool notions." "Like what?" "He thinks the Electron Pump is going to explode the Universe." "Did he say that?" "I know he thinks that. Oh, I'm aware of the arguments. I've heard them often enough. But it's not so, that's all." "Maybe," said Selene, raising her eyebrows, "you just don't want it to be so." "Don't you start." There was a short pause. Selene said, "Well, what will you do with him?" "I'll give him a place to work. He may be worthless as a scientist, but he'll have his uses just the same. He'll be conspicuous enough -- the Commissioner has already been talking to him." "I know." "Well, he has a romantic history -- a man with a wrecked career trying to rehabilitate himself." "Really?" "Really. I'm sure you'll love it. Ask him to tell you. It's a point in his favor. A romantic Earthman working on the Moon on a crackpot project will .make a perfect object to preoccupy the Commissioner. And through Denison -- who knows? -- we might just possibly get a better idea of what's really happening on Earth. You'd better continue to be friendly with him, Selene." was metallic in Denison's earpiece. Her figure was lost in the spacesuit she wore. She said, "Come on, Ben, there's no reason to be afraid. You're an old hand by now -- you've been here a month." "Twenty-eight days," mumbled Denison. He felt smothered in his suit. "A month," insisted Selene. "It was well past half-Earth when you came and it's well past halfEarth now." She pointed to the southern sky. "Wait. I'm not as brave out here as I am underground. What if I fall?" "What if you do? The gravity is weak by your standards. The slope is gentle and your suit is strong. If you fall, just let yourself slide and roll. It's almost as much fun that way." Denison looked about doubtfully. The Moon lay beautiful in the cold light of the Earth. The surface was black and white a delicate white compared with the sunlit views he had seen when he had taken a trip a week before to inspect the solar batteries that stretched from horizon to horizon along the floor of Mare Imbrium. And the black was somehow softer, too, through lack of the blazing contrast of true day. The stars were supernally bright and the Earth -- the Earth -- was infinitely inviting with its swirls of white on blue and its peeping glimpse of tan. He asked, "Do you mind if I hang on to you?" "Of course not. And we won't go all the way up. It will be the beginner's slope for you. Just try to keep in time with me. I'll move slowly." Her steps were long, slow and swinging. He tried to keep his in synch. The up slope was dusty -- with each step he kicked up a fine powder that settled quickly in the airlessness. He matched her stride for stride, but with an effort. "Good," said Selene, her arm locked in his, steadying him. "You're very good for an Earthie -- no, I ought to say Immie -- " "Thank you." "That's not much better, I suppose. Immie for immigrant is as insulting as Earthie for Earthman. Shall I just say you're simply very good for a man your age?" "No -- that's much worse." Denison was gasping a little and he could feel his forehead moistening. Selene said, "Each time you reach the point where you're about to put your foot down, give a little push with your other foot. That will lengthen your stride and make it all the easier. Watch me." Denison paused thankfully and watched Selene, slim and graceful despite the grotesquerie of the suit, take off in low, loping leaps. She returned and kneeled at his feet. "Now you take a slow step, Ben, and I'll hit your foot when I want it to shove." They tried several times. Finally Denison said, "That's worse than running on Earth. I'd better rest." "It's just that your muscles aren't used to the proper coordination. You're fighting yourself, not gravity. Well, sit down and catch your breath. I won't take you up much farther." Denison said, "Will I do any damage to the pack if I lie down on my back?" "No, but it's not a good idea. Not on the bare ground. It's at a hundred and twenty degrees absolute -- hundred and fifty below zero, if you prefer -- and the smaller the area of contact the better. I'd sit down." "All right." Denison sat with a grunt. Deliberately he faced away from the Earth. "Look at those stars!" Selene sat facing him at right angles. He could see her face dimly through the faceplate when the Earthlight caught it at the proper angle. She said, "Don't you see the stars on Earth?" "Not like this. The air on Earth absorbs some of the light even when there are no clouds. Temperature differences in the atmosphere make them twinkle and city lights. even distant city lights, wash them out." "Sounds disgusting." "Do you like it out here, Selene? On the surface?" "I'm not really crazy about it, but I don't mind it too much now and then. It's part of my job to bring tourists out here, of course." "And now you have to do it for me." "Can't I convince you it's not the same thing at all, Ben? We've got a set route for the tourists. It's very tame, very uninteresting. You don't think we'd take them out here to the slide, do you? This is for Lunarites -- and Immies. Mostly Immies, actually." "It can't be very popular. No one's here but us." "Oh, well. There are particular days for this sort of thing. You should see this place on race days. You wouldn't like it then, though." "I'm not sure I like it now. Is gliding a sport for Immies?" "Rather. Lunarites generally don't like the surface." "How about Dr. Neville?" "You mean, how does he feel about the surface?" "Yes." "I don't think he's ever been up here. He's a real city boy. Why do you ask?" "Well, when I asked permission to go along on the routine servicing of the solar batteries he was perhe wouldn't go himself. I asked him to come so I would have someone to answer my questions. His refusal was rather strong." "I hope you found someone else to answer your questions." "Oh, yes. He was an Immie, come to think of it. Maybe that explains Dr. Neville's attitude toward the Electron Pump." "What do you mean?" "Well -- " Denison leaned back and kicked up his legs alternately, watching them rise and fall slowly with a certain lazy pleasure. "Hey, that's not bad. Look, Selene -- What I mean is that Neville is intent on developing a Pump Station on the Moon although the solar batteries are quite adequate for the job. We couldn't use solar batteries on the Earth, where the sun is not as unfailing, as constant, as bright, as radiant in all wavelengths. There's not a single planetary body in the solar system, no body of any size, that is more suitable for the use of the batteries than the Moon is. Even Mercury is too hot. But the use does tie you to the surface, and if you don't like the surface -- " denly and said, "All right, Ben, you've rested enough. Up! Up!" He struggled to his feet and said, "A Pump on the Moon, however, would mean that no Lunarite would ever have to come out on the surface if he didn't want to." "Uphill we go, Ben. We'll go to that ridge ahead. See it, where the Earthlight cuts off in a horizontal line?" They made their way up the final stretch silently. Denison was aware of the smoother area to one side of his path -- a wide swath of slope from which most of the dust had been brushed. "That's too smooth for a beginner to work up," Selene said, answering his thoughts. "Don't get too ambitious or you'll want me to teach you the kangaroo-hop next." She made a kangaroo-hop as she spoke, turned about-face almost before landing and said, "Right here. Sit down and Pll adjust -- " Denison did, facing downhill. He looked down the slope uncertainly. "Can you really glide on it?" "Of course. The gravity is so much weaker on the Moon than on the Earth that you press against the ground much less strongly. That means there is much less friction. Everything is more slippery on the Moon than on the Earth. That's why the floors in our corridors and apartments seemed unfinished to you. Would you like to hear me give my little lecture on the subject? The one I give the tourists?" "No, Selene." "Besides, we're going to use gliders, of course." She had a small cartridge in her hand. Clamps and a pair of thin tubes were attached to it. "What is that?" asked Ben. "Just a small liquid-gas reservoir. It will emit a jet of vapor just under your boots. The thin gas layer between boots and ground will reduce friction virtually to zero. You'll move as though you were in clear space." Denison said uneasily, "I disapprove. Surely it's wasteful to use gas in this fashion on the Moon." "Oh? What gas do you think we use in these gliders? Carbon dioxide? Oxygen? This is waste gas to begin with. It's argon. It comes out of the Moon's soil in years of breakdown of pofassium#. That's part of my lecture, too, Ben. The argon has only a few specialized uses on the Moon. We could use it for gliding for a million years without exhausting the supply. All right. Your gliders are on. Now wait till I put on mine." "How do they work?" "It's quite automatic. You just start sliding and that will trip the contact and start the vapor. You've got only a few minutes' supply but that's all you'll need." She stood up and helped him to his feet. "Face downhill. Come on, Ben, this is a gentle slope. Look at it. It looks nearly level." "No, it doesn't," said Denison sulkily. "It looks like a cliff to me." "Nonsense. Now listen to me and remember what I told you. Keep your feet about six inches apart and one just a few inches ahead of the other. It doesn't matter which one is ahead. Keep your knees bent. Don't lean into the wind because there isn't any. Don't try to look up or back, but you can look from side to side if you have to. Most of all, when you finally hit level don't try to stop too soon -- you'll be going faster than you think. Just let the glider expire and then friction will bring you to a slow halt." "I'll never remember all that." "Yes, you will. And I'll be right at your side to help. And if you do fall and I don't catch you -- don't try to do anything. Just relax and let yourself tumble or slide. There are no boulders anywhere that you can collide with." D enison swallowed and looked ahead. The slide was gleaming in Earthlight. Minute unevennesses caught more than their share of light, leaving tiny uphill patches in darkness so that there was a vague mottling of the surface. The bulging half-circle of Earth rode the black sky almost directly ahead. "Ready?" Selene's gauntleted hand was between his shoulders. "Ready," said Denison faintly. "Then off you go," she said. She pushed and Denison felt himself begin to move. He moved quite slowly at first. He turned toward her, wobbling, and she said, "Don't worry. I'm right at your side." He could feel the ground beneath his feet -- and then he could not. The glider had been activated. For a moment he felt as though he were standing still. There was no push of air against his body, no feel of anything sliding past his feet. But when he turned toward Selene again, he noticed that the lights and shadows to one side were moving backward at a slowly increasing speed. "Keep your eyes on the Earth," Selene's voice said in his ear, "Till you build up speed. The faster you go the more stable you'll be. Keep your knees bent. You're doing very well, Ben." "For an Immie," gasped Denison. "How does it feel?" "Like flying," he said. The pattern of light and dark on either side was moving backward in a blur. He looked briefly to one side, then the other, trying to convert the sensation of a backward flight of his surroundings into one of a forward flight of his own. As soon as he succeeded he found he had to look forward at the Earth hastily to regain his sense of balance. "I suppose that's not a good comparison to use with you. You have no experience of flying on the Moon." "Now I know, though. Flying must be like gliding -- I know what that is." She was keeping up with him easily. Denison was now going fast enough for him to get a sensation of motion even when he looked forward. The Moonscape ahead was opening before him and flowing past on either side. He said, "How fast do you get to go in a glide?" "A good race," said Selene, "has been clocked at speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour -- on steeper slopes than this one, of course. You'll probably reach a top of thirty-five." "It feels a lot faster than that." "Well, it isn't. We're leveling off now, Ben, and you haven't fallen. Just hang on -- the glider will die out and you'll feel friction. Don't do anything to help it. Just keep going." Selene had barely completed her remarks when Denison felt the beginning of pressure under his boots. There was at once an overwhelming sensation of speed and he clenched his fists hard to keep from throwing his arms up in an almost reflex gesture against the collision that was not going to happen. He knew that if he threw up his arms, he would go over backward. He narrowed his eyes, held his breath till he thought his lungs would explode, and then Selene said, "Perfect, Ben, perfect. I've never known an Immie to go through his first slide without a fall -- so if you do fall, there'll be nothing wrong. No disgrace." "I don't intend to fall," whispered Denison. He caught a large, ragged breath and dpened his eyes wide. The Earth was as serene as ever, as uncaring. He was moving more slowly now -- more slowly -- more slowly... "Am I standing still now, Selene?" he asked. "I'm not sure." "You're standing still. Don't move. You've got to rest before we make the trip back to town. Damn it, I left it somewhere around here when we came up." D enison watched her in disbelief She had climbed up with him, had glided down with him. Yet he was half-dead with weariness and tension and she was in the air with long kangaroo-leaps. She seemed a hundred yards away when she said, "Here it is -- " and her voice was as loud in his ears as when she had stood next to him. She was back in a moment with a folded sheet of plastic under her arm. "Remember," she said cheerily, "when you asked what it was on our way up and I said we'd be using it before we came down?" She unfolded it and spread it on the dusty surface of the Moon. "A Lunar Lounge is its full name, but we just call it a lounge. We take the adjective for granted on this world." She inserted a cartridge and tripped a lever. It began to fill. Denison had expected a hissing noise, but of course there was no air. "Before you question our conservation policies again," said Selene, "this also is argon." The plastic blossomed into a mattress on six stubby legs. "It will hold you," she said. "It makes very little actual contact with the ground and the vacuum all around will conserve its heat." "Don't tell me it's hot -- " "The argon is heated as it pours in, but only relatively. It ends up at two hundred seventy degrees absolute, almost warm enough to melt ice and quite warm enough to keep your insulated suit from losing heat faster than you can manufacture it. Go ahead. Lie down." Denison did so with a sensation of enormous luxury. "Great," he said, sighing. "Mama Selene thinks of everything," she said. She came from behind him now, gliding around him, her feet placed heel to heel as though she were on skates. She let the feet fly out from under her as she came down gracefully on hip and elbow on the ground just beside him. Denison whistled. "How did you do that?" "Lots of practice. And don't you try it. You'll break your elbow. I warn you, though. If I get too cold I'm going to have to crowd you on the lounge." "Safe enough," he said, "with both of us in suits." "Ah, there speaks my brave lecher. How do you feel?" "All right, I guess. What an experience!" "What an experience? You set a record for non-falls. Do you mind if I tell the folks back in town about this?" "No. Always like to be appreciated. You're not going to expect me to do this again, are you?" "Right now? Of course not. I wouldn't myself. We'll just rest a while -- make sure your heart action is back to normal -- and then we'll go back. If you'll reach your legs, in my directon. I'll take your gliders off. Next time I'll show you how to handle the gliders yourself." "I'm not sure there will be a next time." "Of course there will. Didn't you enjoy it?" "A little. Between terrors." "You'll know fewer terrors next time and still less the time after. Eventually you'll experience just the enjoyment and I'll make a racer out of you." "No, you won't. I'm too old." "Not on the Moon. You just look old." D enison could feel the ultimate quiet of the Moon soaking into him as he lay there. He once more faced the Earth. Its steady presence in the sky had, more than anything else, given him the sensation of stability during his recent glide and he felt grateful to it. "Do you often come out here. Selene? I mean, by yourself or with just one or two others? You know, when it isn't fiesta time?" "Practically never. This is too much for me unless there are people around. That I'm doing it now actually surprises me." "Uh-huh," said Denison, noncommittally. "You're not surprised?" "Should I be? My feeling is that each person does what he does either because he wants to or he must--and in either case that's his business, not mine." "Thanks, Ben. I mean it -- it's good to hear. One of the nice things about you, Ben, is that for an Itnmie you're excellent at accepting us as we are. We're underground people, we Lunarites -- cave people, corridor people. And what's wrong with that?" "Nothing."  "Not to hear the Earthies talk. I'm a tourist guide and have to listen to them. There isn't anything they say that I haven't heard a million tirties, but what I hear most of all is--" she dropped into the clipped accents of the typical Earthie speaking Planetary Standard -- " 'But, dear, how can all you people live in caves all the time? Doesn't it give you a terrible closed-in feeling? Don't you ever want to see blue sky and trees and ocean and feel wind and smell flowers?' I could go on and on, Ben. Then they say, 'But I suppose you don't know what blue sky and sea and trees are like, so you don't rniss them.' As if we didn't receive Earth television and didn't have full access to Earth literature, both optical and auditory -- and olfactory sometimes, too." Denison was amused. He said, "What's the official answer to remarks like that?" "Nothing much. We just say, 'We're quite used to it, madam.' Or 'sir' if it's a man. Usually it's a woman. The men are too interested in studying our blouses and wondering when we take them off. You know what I'd like to tell the idiots?" "Please tell me. As long as you have to keep the blouse on, it being inside the suit, at least get that off your chest." "Funny, funny! I'd like to tell them, 'Look, madam, why the hell should we be interested in your damned world? We don't want to be hanging on the outside of any planet, waiting to fall off or get blown off. We don't want raw air puffing at us and dirty water falling on us. We don't want your damned germs and your smelly grass and your dull blue sky and your dull white clouds. We can see Earth in our own sky when we want to and we don't often want to. The Moon is our home and it's what we make it -- exactly what we make it. We own it and we build our own ecology and we don't need you here being sorry for us for going our own way. Go back to your own world and let your gravity pull your breast down to your knees.' That's what I'd say." Denison said, "All right. Whenever you get too close to saying that to some Earthie, you come say it to me and you'll feel better." "You know what? Every once in a while some Immie suggests that we build an Earth park on the Moon -- some little spot featuring Earth plants brought in as seeds or seedlings. Maybe stocked with some animals. A touch of home that's the usual expression." "I take it you're against that." "Of course I'm against it. A touch of whose home? The Moon is our home. An Immie who wants a touch of home had better get back to his home. Immies can be worse than Earthies sometimes." "I'll keep that in mind," said Denison. "Not you -- so far," said Selene. T he silence lasted a moment and Denison wondered if Selene were going to suggest a return to the caverns. It wouldn't be long before he would feel a fairly strenuous craving to visit a rest room. At the same time, he had never felt as relaxed as he felt out here. He wondered how long the oxygen in his pack would hold out. "Ben, do you mind if I ask you a question?" "Not at all. If it's my private life that interests you, I am without secrets. I'm five-foot-nine, weigh twenty-eight pounds on the Moon, had one wife long ago, now divorced, one child, a daughter, grown up and married. I attended the University of -- " "No, Ben. I'm serious. May I ask about your work?" "Of course you may, Selene. I don't know how much I can explain to you, though." "Well -- you know that Barron and I -- " "Yes, I know," said Denison brusquely. "We talk together. He sometimes tells me things. He said you think the Electron Pump might make the Universe explode." "Our section of the Universe. It might convert a part of our galactic arm into a quasar." "Really? Doyou really think so?" Denison said, "When I came to the Moon I wasn't sure. Now I am. I am personally convinced that this will happen." "When do you think it will happen?" "That I can't say exactly. Maybe a few years from now. Maybe a few decades." After a brief hesitation Selene said in a subdued voice, "Barron doesn't think so." "I know he doesn't. I'm not trying to convert him. You don't beat refusal to believe by a frontal attack. That's Lament's mistake." "Who's Lament?" "I'm sorry, Selene. I'm talking to myself." "No, Ben. Please tell me. I'm interested. Please." Denison turned to lie on his side, facing her. "All right," he said. "I have no objection to telling you. Lament, a physicist back on Earth, tried in his way to alert the world to the dangers of the Pump. He failed. Earthmen want the Pump. They want free energy and want it enough to refuse to believe they can't have it." "But why should they want it if it means death?" "All they have to do is refuse to believe it means death. The easiest way to handle a problem is to deny it exists. Your friend. Dr. Neville, does the same thing. He dislikes the surface, so he forces himself to believe that solar batteries are no good -- even though to any impartial observer they would seem the perfect energy source for the Moon. He wants the Pump so he can stay underground -- consequently he refuses to believe there can be any danger from it." Selene said, "I don't think Barron would refuse to believe something for which valid evidence existed. Do you really have the evidence?" "I think I do. It's most amazing really, Selene. The whole thing depends on certain subtle factors of quark-quark interactions. Do you know what that means?" "You don't have to explain. I've talked so much to Barron about all sorts of things that I might be able to follow." "Well, I thought I would need the Lunar proton synchrotron for the purpose. It's twenty-five miles across, has superconducting magnets and can dispose of energies of twenty thousand Bev and more. It turns out, though, that you people have something you call a Pionizer. It fits into a moderately sized room and does all the work of the synchrotron. The Moon is to be congratulated on a most amazing advance." "Thank you," said Selene complacently. "I mean, on behalf of the Moon." "Well, then, my Pionizer results can show the rate of increase of intensity of strong nuclear interaction -- and the increase is what Lamont says it is and not what the orthodox theory would have it be." "And have you shown your results to Barron?" "Not yet. I expect him to reject them. He'll say the results are marginal. He'll say I've made an error. He'll say that I haven't taken all factors into account. He'll say I've used inadequate controls. What he really will be saying is this: he wants the Electron Pump and won't give it up." "You mean there's no way out?" "Of course there is, but not the direct way. Not Lamont's way." "What's your idea?" "Lamont's solution is to force abandonment of the Pump, but you can't Just move backward. You can't push the chicken back into the egg, the wine back into the grape, the boy back into the womb. If you want the baby to let go of your watch, you don't just try to explain that he ought to do it -- you offer him something he would rather have." "And what would that be in this case?" "Ah, that's where I'm not so sure. I do have an idea, a simple idea -- perhaps too simple to work -- based on the quite obvious fact that the number two is ridiculous and can't exist." Selene took a moment for thought and then, her voice as absorbed as his, said, "Let me guess your meaning. It could make sense to suppose that our own Universe is the only one that can exist or does exist, because it is the only one we live in and directly experience. Once, however, evidence arises that there is a second Universe as well -- the one we call the para-Universe -- then it beconies absolutely ridiculous to suppose that there are two and only two Universes. If a second Universe can exist, then an infinite number can. Between one and the infinite in cases such as this there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number is ridiculous and can't exist." Denison said, "That is exactly my reas " He heaved himself to a sitting position and looked down at the suit-encased girl. He said, "I think we had better go back to town." She said, "I was just guessing." He said, "No, you weren't. Whatever it was, it wasn't just guessing." at her, quite speechless. She looked calmly back at him. Her window panoramas had been changed again. One now showed the Earth a little more than half full. Finally he asked, "Why?" She said, "It was an accident, really. I saw the point and I was too enthusiastic not to speak. I should have told you days ago but I was afraid your reaction would be exactly what it is." "So he knows. You fool!" She frowned. "What does he know? Only what he would have guessed sooner or later -- that I'm not really a tourist guide -- that I'm your Intuitionist. An Intuitionist who knows no mathematics, for heaven's sake. So what if he knows that? What does it matter if I have intuition? How many times have you told me that my intuition has no value till it is backed by mathematical rigor and experimental observation? How many times have you told me that the most compelling intuition could be wrong? Well, then, what value will he place on mere Intuitionism?" Neville grew white, but Selene could not tell whether from anger or apprehension. He said, "You're different. Hasn't your intuition always proved right? When you were sure of it?" "Ah, but he doesn't know that, does he?" "He'll guess it. He'll see Gottstein." "What will he tell Gottstein? He still has no idea of what we're really after." "Doesn't he?" "No." She stood up, walked away. She turned back to him and shouted, "No! It's cheap of you to imply that I would betray you and the rest. If you don't accept my integrity, then accept my common sense.There's no point in my telling Denison what you're up to. What's the use of our secret to him -- or to us -- if we're all going to be destroyed?" "Oh, please, Selene!" Neville waved his hand in disgust. "Not that." "No. You listen. He talked to me arid described his work. You hide me like a secret weapon. You tell me that I'm more valuable than any instrument or any ordinary scientist. You play your games of conspiracy, insisting that everyone must continue to think me a tourist guide and nothing more, so that my great talents will always be available to the Lunarites. To you especially. And what do you accomplish?" "We have you, haven't we? How long do you suppose you would have remained free if they -- " "You keep saying things like that. But who's been imprisoned? Who's been stopped? Where is the evidence of the great conspiracy you see all around you? The Earthmen keep you and your team from their large instruments much more because you goad them into doing so than out of any malice on their part. And that's done us good rather than harm, since it's forced us to invent other instruments that are more subtle." "Based on your theoretical insights, Selene." Selene smiled, "I know. Ben was very complimentary about them." "You and your Ben. What the hell do you want with that miserable Earthie?" "He's an immigrant. And what I want is information. Do you give me any? You're so damned afraid I'll be caught that you don't dare let me be seen talking to any physicist, only to you. And you're my -- For that reason only, probably." "Now, Selene." He tried to manage a soothing tone, but betrayed far too much impatience. "No, I don't care about that really. You've told me I have this one task and I've tried to concentrate on it and sometimes I think I have it, mathematics or not. I can visualize it -- the kind of thing that must be done -- and then it slips away. But what's the use when the Pump will destroy us all anyway? Haven't I told you I distrusted the exchange of field intensities?" Neville said, "I'll ask you again. Are you ready to tell me that the Pump will destroy us? Never mind might or could. Never mind anything but will." Selene shook her head angrily. "I can't. It's too marginal. I can't say it will. But isn't a simple might sufficient in such a case?" "Oh, Lord!" "Don't turn up your eyes. Don't sneer. You've never tested the matter. I told you how it might be tested." "You were never much worried about it till you started listening to this Earthie of yours." "He's an immigrant. Aren't you going to test it?" "No. I told you your suggestions are impractical. You're not an experimentalist, and what looks good in your mind doesn't necessarily work in the real world of instruments, of randomnessand of uncertainty." "The so-called real world of your laboratory." Her face was flushed and angry and she held her clenched fists at chin level. "You waste so much time trying to get a vacuum good enough -- There's a vacuum up there -- up there on the surface where I'm pointing -- with temperatures that, at times, are halfway down toward absolute zero. Why don't you try experiments on the surface?" "To do so would be useless." "How do you know? You won't try. Ben Denison tried. He took the trouble to devise a system he could use on the surface and he set it up when he went to inspect the solar batteries. He wanted you to come and you wouldn't. Do you remember? It was a very simple thing, something even I could describe to you now that it's been described to me. He ran it at day temperatures and again at night temperatures and that was enough to guide him to a new line of research with the Pionizer." "Howsimpleyou make it sound!" "How simple it is. Once he found out I was an Intuitionist, he talked to me as you never did. He explained his reasons for thinking that the strengthening of the strong nuclear interaction is indeed accumulating catastrophically in the neighborhood of Earth. It will only be a few years before the sun explodes and sends the strengthening in ripples -- " "No, no, no, no" Neville shouted. "I've seen his results and I'm not impressed." "You've seen them?" "Yes, of course. Do you suppose I let him work in our laboratories without making sure I know what he's doing? I've seen his results and they're worth nothing. He deals with tiny deviations that are well within experimental error. If he wants to believe that those deviations have significance and if you want to believe him -- go ahead. But no amount of belief will make them have significance if, in fact, they don't. "What do you want to believe, Barron?" "I want the truth." "But haven't you decided in advance what the truth must be by your own gospel? You want the Pump on the Moon, don't you, so that you need have nothing to do with the surface? And anything that might prevent that is not the truth -- by definition?" "I won't argue with you. I want the Pump -- and even more I want the other, the thing I'm working toward. One's no good without the other. Are you sure you haven't -- " "I haven't." "Will you?" Selene whirled on him again, her feet tapping rapidly on the ground in such a way as to keep her bobbing in the air to the tune of an angry clatter. "I won't tell him anything," she said, "but I must have more information. You have no information for me, but he may have -- or he may get it with the experiments you won't perform. I've got to talk to him and find out what he is going to find out. If you get between him and me, you'll never have what you want. And you needn't fear his getting it before I do. He's too used to Earth thinking -- he won't take that last step. I will." "All right. And don't forget the difference between Earth and Moon, either. This is your world -- you have no other. This man, Denison, this Ben, this immigrant, having come from Earth to Moon can, if he chooses, return from Moon to Earth. You can never go to the Earth -- never. You are a Lunarite forever." "A Moon maiden," said Selene derisively. "No maiden," said Neville. "Though you may have to wait a long while before I confirm the matter once again." She seemed unmoved by the threat. He said, "And about this big danger of explosion. If the risk involved in changing the basic constants of a Universe is so great, why haven't the para-men, who are so far advanced beyond us in technology, stopped Pumping?" He strode out of her apartment. She faced the closed door, her jaw taut. She said, "Because conditions are different for them, you incredible jerk." But she was speaking to herself. He was gone. She kicked the lever that let down her bed, threw herself into it and seethed. How much closer was she now to the real objective for which Barron and those others had been aiming for years? No closer. Energy. Everyone searched for energy. The magic word. The cornucopia. The key to universal plenty. And yet energy was not all. If one found energy -- one could find the other, too. If one found the key to energy, the key to the other would be obvious. She knew the key to the other would be obvious if she could but grasp some subtle point that would appear simple the moment it was grasped. (Good heavens, she had been so infected by Barron's chronic suspicion that even in her thoughts she was calling it the other!) No Earthman would grasp that subtle point because no Earthman had reason to look for it. Ben Denison would find it for her, then, without finding it for himself. Except that -- if the Universe were to be destroyed, what did anything matter? D enison tried to beat down his self-consciousness. Time and again he made a groping motion as though to hitch up the pants he was not wearing. He wore only sandals and the scantiest of briefs, which were uncomfortably tight. And, of course, he carried the blanket. Selene, who was similarly accoutered, laughed. "Now, Ben, there's nothing wrong with your bare body, barring a certain flabbiness. It's perfectly in fashion here. In fact, take off your briefs if they're binding you." "No!" Denison muttered. He shifted the blanket so that it draped over his abdomen and she snatched it from him. She said, "Now give me that thing. What kind of Lunarite will you make if you bring your Earth modesties here? You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary." "I have to get used to this, Selene." "You might start by looking at me once in a while without having your glance slide off me as though I were coated with oil. You look at other women quite efficiently, I notice." "If I look at you -- " "Then you'll seem too interested and you'll be embarrassed. But if you look hard you'll get used to it and you'll stop noticing. Look, I'll stand still and you stare. I'll take off my briefs." Denison groaned. "Selene, there are people all around and you're making intolerable fun of me. Please keep walking and let me get used to the situation." "All right, but I hope you notice the people who pass us don't look at us." "They don't look at you. They look at me all right. They've probably never seen so old-looking and ill-shaped a person." "They probably haven't," agreed Selene cheerfully, "but they'll just have to get used to it." Denison walked on in misery, conscious of every gray hair on his chest and every quiver of his paunch. It was only when the passageway thinned out and the people passing were fewer in number that he began to feel a certain relief. He began to look about him curiously, not as aware of Selene's conical breasts or of her smooth thighs as he had been. The corridor seemed endless. "How far have we come?" "Are you tired?" Selene was contrite. "We could have taken a scooter. I forget you're from Earth." "I should hope you would. Isn't that the ideal for an immigrant? I'm not the least bit tired. Hardly the least bit tired at any rate. What I am is a little cold." "Purely your imagination, Ben," said Selene firmly. "You just think you ought to feel cold because so much of you is bare. Put it out of your head." "Easy to say." He sighed. "I'm walking well, I hope." "Very well. I'll have you kangarooing yet." "And participating in glider races down the surface slopes? Remember, I'm moderately advanced in years. But really -- how far have we come?" "Two miles, I should judge." "Good Lord! How many miles of corridors are there altogether?" "Tm afraid I don't know. The residential corridors make up comparatively little of the total. There are the mining corridors, geological ones, the industrial, the mycological -- I'm sure there must be several hundred miles altogether." "Do you have maps?" "Of course there are maps. We can't work blind." "I mean you personally." "Not with me, but I don't need maps for this area -- it's quite familiar to me. I used to wander about here as a child. These are old corridors. Most of the new corridors -- and we average two or three miles of new corridors a year, I think -- are in the north. I couldn't work my way through them without a map. Maybe not even. with a map." "Where are we heading?" "I promised you an unusual sight -- no, not me, so don't say it -- and you'll have it. It's the Moon's most unusual mine and it's completely off the ordinary tourist trails." "Don't tell me you've got diamonds on the Moon?" "Better than that." T he corridor walls were unfinished here -- gray rock, dimly but adequately lit by patches of electroluminescence. The temperature was comfortable and the ventilation so effective that there was no sensation of air movement. Yet two hundred feet above was a surface subjected to alternate frying and freezing as the sun came and went on its grand biweekly swing from horizon to horizon. "Is all this airtight?" asked Denison, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was below an ocean of vacuum that extended through all infinity. "Oh, yes. Those walls are impervious. They're all boobytrapped, too. If the air pressure drops as much as ten percent in any section of the corridors there is such a hooting and howling from sirens as you have never heard and such a flashing of arrows and blazing of signs directing you to safety as you have never seen." "How often does it happen?" "Not often. I don't think anyone has been killed through air lack for at least five years." Then, with sudden defensiveness; "You have natural catastrophes on Earth. A big quake or a tidal wave can kill thousands." "No argument, Selene." He threw up his hands. "I surrender." "All right," she said. "I didn't mean to get excited. Do you hear that?" She stopped in an attitude of listening. Denison listened, too, and shook his head. Suddenly he looked around. "It's so quiet. Where is everybody? Are you sure we're not lost?" "This isn't a natural cavern with unknown passageways. You have those on Earth, haven't you? I've seen photographs." "Yes, most of them are limestone caves and formed by water. That certainly can't be the case on the Moon, can it?" "So we can't be lost," Selene said, smiling. "If we're alone -- put it down to superstition." "To what?" Denison looked startled and his face creased in an expression of disbelief. "Don't do that," she said. "Your face gets all lined. That's right. Smooth out. You look much better than you did when you first arrived, you know. That's low gravity and exercise." "And trying to keep up with nude young ladies who have an uncommon amount of time off and uncommon lack of better things to do than to go on busman's holidays." "Now you're treating me as you would a tourist guide again. And I'm not nude." "At that, even nudity is less frightening than Intuitionism. But what's this about superstition?" "Not really superstition, I suppose, but most people do tend to stay away from this part of the corridor complex -- " "But why?" "Because of what I'm going to show you." They were walking again. "Hear it now?" She stopped and Denison listened anxiously. He said, "You mean that small tapping sound. Tap -- tap... is that what you mean?" "That's exactly what I mean," she said delightedly. "Come on." She ran ahead in the slow-motion strides of the Lunarite in unhurried flight. He followed her, attempting to ape the gait. "Here -- here -- " Denison's eye followed Selene's eagerly pointing finger. "Good Lord," he said. "Where's it coming from?" clearly water, each drop striking a small ceramic trough that led into the rock wall. "From the rocks. We do have water on the Moon, you know. Most of it we can bake out of gypsum -- enough for our purposes. We conserve it pretty well." "I know. I know. I've never yet been able to manage one complete shower. How you people manage to stay clean I have no idea." "I told you. First, wet yourself. Then turn off the water and smear just a little detergent on you. You rub it -- Oh, Ben, I'm not going through it again. And there's nothing on the Moon to get you all that dirty anyway. But that's not what we're talking about. In one or two places there are actually water deposits, usually as ice near the surface in a mountain's shadow. If our tunnel hits water it drips out. This deposit has been dripping since the corridor was first driven through -- and that was eight years ago." "But why the superstition?" "Water is the great material resource on which the Moon depends. We drink it, wash with it, grow our food with it, make our oxygen with it, keep everything going with it. Free water can't help but get a lot of respect. Once this drip was discovered, plans to extend the tunnels in this direction were abandoned till it would stop. Even the corridor walls were left unfinished." "That sounds like superstition right there." "A kind of awe, maybe. The drip wasn't expected to last for more than a few months -- according to precedent. So after this one had passed its first anniversary it began to seem eternal. In fact, that's what it's called: 'The Eternal.' You'll even find it marked that way on the maps. Naturally people have come to attach importance to it -- a feeling that if it stops it will mean some sort of bad fortune." Denison laughed. Selene said warmly, "No one really believes it, but everyone partly believes it. You see, it's not really eternal and it must stop some time. As a matter of fact, the rate of drip is only about a third of what it was when it was first discovered, so that the source is slowly drying up. I've been told some people feel that if the drip happened to stop when they were actually here they would share in the bad fortune." "I take it you don't believe this." "Whether I believe it or not isn't the point. You see. I'm quite certain that it won't stop sharply enough for anyone to be able to take the blame. It will just drip more and more slowly and no one will ever be able to pinpoint the exact time when it stopped. So why worry?" "I agree with you." "I do, however," she said, making the transition smoothly, "have other worries, and I'd like to discuss them with you while we're alone." She spread out the blanket the gods themselves and sat down on it cross-legged, "Which is why you really brought me here?" He dropped to hip and elbow, facing her. She said, "See, you can look at me easily now. You're getting used to me. Surely there were times on Earth when near-nudity wasn't something to be exclaimed over." "Times and places," agreed Denison, "but not since the passing of the Crisis. In my lifetime -- " "Well, on the Moon, 'do as the Lunarites do' is a good enough guide for behavior." "Are you going to tell me why you really brought me here? Or shall I suspect you of planning seduction?" "I could carry through seduction quite comfortably at home, thank you. This is different. The surface would have been best for our talk, but getting ready to go out on the surface would have attracted a great deal of attention. Coming here didn't -- and this place is the only spot in town where we can be reasonably safe from interruption." She hesitated. "Well?" said Denison. "Barron is angry. Very angry, in fact." "I'm not surprised. I warned you he would be if you told him that I knew you were an Intuitionist. Why did you feel it necessary to tell him?" "Because it is difficult to keep things for long from my -- companion. Probably, though, he doesn't consider me that any longer." "I'm sorry." "Oh, it was turning sour anyway. It's lasted long enough. What bothers me more -- much more -- is that he violently refuses to accept your interpretation of the Pionizer experiments you ran after the surface observations." "I told you the way it would be." "He said he saw your results." "He glanced at them and grunted." "It's rather disillusioning. Does everyone just believe what he wants to?" "As long as possible. Sometimes longer." "What about you?" "You mean -- am I human? Certainly. I don't believe I'm really old. I believe I'm quite attractive. I believe you seek out my company because you think I'm charming -- even when you insist on turning the conversation to physics." "Please! I mean the question seriously." "Well, I suspect Neville told you that the data I had gathered were not significant beyond the margin of error and that this makes them unreliable -- and he's right enough. Still, I prefer to believe they have the meaning I expected them to have to begin with." "Just because you want to believe that?" it this way. Suppose there is no harm in the Pump, but I insist on thinking there is harm. In that case I will turn out to be a fool and my scientific reputation will be badly damaged. But I already am a fool in the eyes of the people who count and I have no scientific reputation." "Why is that, Ben? You've hinted around something in your background several times. Can't you tell me the whole story?" "You'd be surprised at how little there is to tell. At the age of twenty-five I was still such a child that I had to amuse myself by insulting a fool for no reason other than that he was a fool. Since his folly was not his fault, I was the greater fool to do it. My insult drove him to heights he couldn't possibly have scaled otherwise." "You're talking of Hallam?" "Yes. And as he rose, I fell. And eventually I dropped to -- the Moon." "Is that so bad?" "No, I rather think it's good. So let's say he did me a favor the long way around. And let's get back to what I was talking about. I've just explained that if I believe the Pump to be harmful and am wrong -- I lose nothing. On the other hand, if I believe the Pump to be harmless and am wrong -- I will be helping to destroy the world. To be sure. I've already lived most of my life and I suppose I can argue myself into believing that I have no great cause to love humanity. However, only a few people have hurt me -- and if I hurt everyone in return that would be unconscionable usury." The Earthman smiled. "Then, too, if you'd rather have a less noble reason, Selene, consider my daughter. Just before I left for the Moon she applied for permission to have a 'child. She'll probably get it and before long I'll be -- if you don't mind my saying so -- a grandfather. Somehow I'd like to see my grandchild have a normal life expectancy. So I prefer to believe the Pump is dangerous and to act on that belief." Selene said intensely. "But here's my point. Is the Pump dangerous or is it not? I mean, the truth -- and not what anyone wants to believe." "I should ask you that. You're the Intuitionist. What does your intuition say?" "That's what bothers me, Ben. I can't make it come out really certain either way. I tend to feel the Pump is harmful, but maybe that's because I want to believe it is." "All right. Maybe you do want to believe so. Why?" Selene smiled ruefully and shrugged. "It would be fun for me to find Barron wrong. When he thinks he's sure, he's so vituperatively sure." "I know. You want to see his face when he's forced to back down. I'm well aware of how intense such a desire can be. For instance, if the Pump were dangerous and I could prove it, I might conceivably be hailed as the savior of humanity. Yet I swear that I'd be more interested in the look on Hallam's face. I'm not proud of that feeling so I suspect that what I'll do is insist on an equal share of the credit with Lamont -- who deserves it -- and confine my pleasure to watching Lament's face when he watches Hallam's face. The pettishness will then be one place removed. But I'm beginning to speak nonsense. Selene?" "Yes, Ben." "When did you find out you were an Intuitionist?" "I don't quite know." "You took physics in college, I imagine." "Oh, yes. Some math, too, but I was never good at that. Come to think of it, I wasn't particularly good in physics, either. I used to guess the answers when I was desperate -- you know, guess what I was supposed to do to get the right answers. Very often it worked. Then I would be asked to explain and I couldn't. They suspected me of cheating but could never prove anything." "They didn't suspect Intuitionism?" "I don't think so. But then, I didn't either. Until -- well, one of my first sex-mates was a physicist. In fact, he was the father of my child. He had a physics problem and he told me about it when we were lying in bed afterward -- just to have something to talk about, I suppose. And I said, 'You know what it sounds like to me?' and told him. He tried it just for the fun of it, he said, and it worked. Actually that was the first step to the Pionizer, which you said was much better than the proton synchrotron." mean that was your X idea?" Denison stuck his finger under the dripping water and paused as he was about to raise it to his mouth. "Is this water safe?" "It's perfectly sterile," said Selene, "and it goes into the general reservoir for treatment. It's saturated with sulfates, carbonates and a few other items, however. You won't like the taste." Denison rubbed his finger on his briefs. "So you invented the Pionizer!" "Not invented. I had the original concept. It took lots of development, mostly by Barron." Denison shook his head. "You know, Selene, you're an amazing phenomenon. You should be under observation by the molecular biologists." "Should I? That's not my idea of a thrill." "The legal climax to the big trend toward genetic engineering came about a half-century ago -- " "I know. The case flopped and was thrown out of court. That whole type of study is illegal now -- insofar as research can be made illegal. I know people who've done work on it just the same." "I dare say. On the trail of Intuitionism?" "No. I don't think so." "Ah. That's my point. At the height of the push for genetic engineering there was this attempt to stimulate Intuitionism. Almost all the great scientists and artists had intuitive ability, of course, and there was the feeling that this was the single great key to creativity. One could argue that superior capacity for intuition was the product of a particular gene combination and all sorts of speculations rose as to which gene combination that was." "I suspect there are many possible combinations that would satisfy." "And I suspect that if you are consulting your intuition here, you are correct. But there were also those who insisted that a single gene -- or a single small related group of genes -- was of particular importance to the combination, so that one might speak of an Intuition Gene. Then the whole thing collapsed." "As I said." "But before it collapsed," Denison went on, "there had been attempts to alter genes to increase the intensity of Intuitionism and there were those who insisted that some success had been achieved. The altered genes entered the gene pool. I'm positive, and if you happened to inherit -- Were any of your grandparents involved in the program?" "Not as far as i know," said Selene, "but I can't rule it out. One of them might have been. If you don't mind. I'm not going to investigate the matter. I don't want to know." "Perhaps that's wise. The whole field became fearfully unpopular with the general public and anyone who can be considered the product of genetic engineering would not exactly be greeted gladly. Intuitionism, they said, for instance, was inseparable from certain undesirable characteristics." "Well, thank you." "They said. At any rate, to possess intuition is to inspire a certain envy and enmity in others. Even as gentle and saintlike an Intuitionist as Michael Faraday aroused the envy and hatred of Humphry Davy. Who's to say the capacity to arouse envy is not a flaw in character? And in your case -- " Selene said, "Surely I don't arouse your envy and hatred?" "I don't think you do. What about Neville's, though?" Selene was silent. Denison said, "By the time you got to Neville you were well known as an Intuitionist, I suppose." "Not well known, I would say. Some physicists suspected it. I'm sure. However, they don't like to give up credit here any more than on Earth -- and I suppose they convinced themselves, more or less, that whatever I had said to them was just a meaningless guess. But Barron knew, of course." "I see." Selene's lips twitched. "Somehow I get the feeling that you want to say: Oh, that's why he bothers with you." "Of course not, Selene. You're quite attractive enough to be desired for your own sake." "I think so, too, but every little bit helps and Barron was bound to be interested in my Intuitionism, too. Why shouldn't he be? Only he insisted I keep my job as tourist guide. He said I was an important natural resource of the Moon and he didn't want Earth monopolizing me the way they monopolized the synchrotron." "An odd thought. But perhaps he also felt that the fewer who knew of your Intuitionism, the fewer who would suspect your contribution to what would otherwise be put to his sole credit." "Now you sound like Barron yourself." "Do I? And is it possible he gets rather annoyed with you when your Intuitionism is working particularly well?" Selene shrugged. "Barron is a suspicious man. We all have our faults." "Is it wise to be alone with me, then?" get hurt because I defend him. He doesn't really suspect the possibility of sexual misbehavior between us. You're from Earth. In fact, I might as well tell you he encourages our companionship. He thinks I can learn from you?" "And have you?" Denison asked coldly. "I have. But that isn't my chief reason for spending time with you." "What is?" "As you well know," said Selene, "and as you want to hear me say, I enjoy your company. Otherwise I would get what I want in much less time." "All right, Selene. Friends?" "Friends! Absolutely." "What have you learned from me, then? May I know?" "That would take a while to explain. You know that the reason we can't set up a Pump Station anywhere we want to is that we can't locate the para-Universe, even though they can locate us. That might be because they are much more intelligent or much more technologically advanced than we are -- " "Not necessarily the same thing," muttered Denison. "I know. That's why I put in the 'or.' But the truth might also be that we are neither particularly stupid nor particularly backward. It might be something as simple as the fact that the para-beings offer the harder target. If 'strong' nuclear interaction is still stronger in the para-Universe they would be bound to have much smaller suns and, very likely, much smaller planets. Their individual world could be harder to locate than ours would be." Denison nodded. "Or then again," she went on, "suppose it's the electromagnetic field they detect. The electromagnetic field of a planet is much larger than the planet itself and is much easier to locate. And that would mean that while they can detect the Earth, they can't detect the Moon, which has no electromagnetic field to speak of. That's why, perhaps, we've failed in our effort to make contact and set up a Pump Station on the Moon. And if their small planets lack a significant electromagnetic field, it's no wonder we can't locate them." Denison said, "That's an attractive idea." "Next, consider the interUniversal exchange in properties that serves to weaken their strong nuclear interaction, cooling their suns while strengthening ours, heating and exploding our suns. What might that imply? Suppose they can collect energy one-way without our help but only at ruinously low efficiencies. Under ordinary circumstances to do so would therefore be utterly impractical. They would need us to help direct concentrated energy in their direction by supplying tungsten# to them and accepting plutonium# in return. But suppose our galactic arm implodes into a quasar. That would produce an energy concentration in the neighborhood of the solar system enormously greater than now exists and one that might persist "Aha -- " "Once that quasar forms, even a ruinously low efficiency becomes sufficient. It wouldn't matter to them thereafter whether we were destroyed or not. In fact, we might argue that it would be safer for them if we did explode. While we exist we might stop the Pump for any of a variety of reasons and they would be helpless to start it again. But after an explosion they are home free -- no one can interfere. And that's why people who say, 'If the Pump is so dangerous, why don't those terribly clever paramen stop it?' don't know what they're talking about." "Did Neville give you that argument about the para-men?" "Yes, he did." "But the para-sun would keep cooling down, wouldn't it?" "What does that matter?" returned Selene impatiently. "With the Pump, they wouldn't be dependent on their sun for anything." Denison took a deep breath. "You can't possibly know this, Selene, but there was a rumor on Earth to the effect that Lamont received a message from the paramen to the effect that the Pump was dangerous, but that they couldn't stop it. No one took it seriously, of course, but suppose it's true. Suppose Lamont did receive such a message. Might it be that some of the para-men were humanitarian enough to wish not to destroy a world with cooperating intelligences in it, and were squelched by an oh-so-practical majority?" Selene nodded. "I suppose that's possible. All this I knew, or rather, intuited, before you came on the scene. But then you agreed with me when I said that nothing between one and the infinite made any .sense. Remember?" "Of course." "All right. The differences between our Universe and the para-Universe lie so obviously in the strong nuclear interaction that so far it's all that's been studied. But there is more than one interaction -- there are four. In addition to the strong nuclear, there is the electromagnetic, the weak nuclear and the gravitational, with intensity ratios of -- " She paused, wet her finger under the drip, traced the figures on the wall: # : I : # : # -- "But if four, why not an infinite number, with all the others too weak to be delectable or to influence our Universe in any way?" Denison said, "If an interaction is too weak to be detectable or to exert influence in any way, then by any operational definition, it doesn't exist." "In this Universe," said Selene, with a snap. "Who knows what does or does not exist in the paraUniverses? With an infinite number of possible interactions, each of which can vary infinitely in intensity compared to any one of them taken as standard, the number of different possible Universes that can exist is infinite." "Possibly the infinity of the continuum -- aleph-one, rather than aleph-null." Selene frowned. "What does that mean?" "It's not important. Go on." Selene said, "Instead, then, of trying to work with the one paraUniverse that has impinged itself on us and which may not suit our needs at all, why don't we instead try to work out which Universe, out of all the infinite possibilities, best suits us, and is most easily located? Let us design a Universe -- for whatever we design must exist -- and search for it." Denison smiled. "Selene, I've thought of exactly the same thing. And while there's no law that states I can't be completely wrong, it's very unlikely that anyone as brilliant as myself can be completely as yourself comes to exactly the same conclusion independently. Do you know what?" "What?" asked Selene. "I'm beginning to like your damned Moon food. Or I'm getting used to it. Let's go back home and eat. Then we can start working out our plans. And you know what else?" "What?" "As long as we'll be working together, how about one kiss -- as experimentalist to intuitionist?" Selene considered. She said, "How about trying one as man to woman?" "I think I can manage that. But what do I do so as not to be clumsy about it? What arethe Moon rules for kissing?" "Follow instinct," Selene said. Denison carefully placed his arms behind his back and leaned toward Selene. Then, after a while, he placed his arms behind her back.   actually kissed him back," Selene said. "Oh, did you?" snorted Barron Neville. "Well, that's valor beyond the call of duty." "I don't know. It wasn't that bad. In fact -- " she smiled -- "he was rather touching about it. He was afraid he would be clumsy andk began by putting his arms behind his back -- so he wouldn't crush me, I suppose." "Spare me the details." "Why? What the hell do you care?" She flared ' suddenly. "You're Mister Platonic, aren't you?" "Do you want it different? Now?" "You needn't perform to order." "But you had better. When do you expect to give us what we need?" "As soon as I can." i "Without his knowing?" "He's interested only in energy. "i "And in saving the world," mocked Neville. "And in being a hero. And in showing everybody. And in kissing you." "He admits to all that. What do you admit to?" "Impatience," Neville said angrily. "Lots of impatience." AM glad," Denison said A deliberately, "that the daytime is over." He held out his right arm and stared at it, encased in its protective layers. "The Lunar sun is one thing I can't get used to and don't want to get used to. Even this suit seems a natural thing to me in comparison." "What's wrong with the sun?" asked Selene. "Don't tell me you like it, Selene." "No, of course not. I hate it. But then I never see it. You're an -- You're used to the sun." "Not the way it is here. It shines out of a black sky. It dazzles the stars away instead of muffling them. It is hot, hard and dangerous. It is an enemy -- and while it's in the sky I can't help but feel that none of our attempts at reducing field intensity will succeed." "That's superstition, Ben. The sun has nothing to do with it. We were in the crater shadow anyway and it was just like night. Stars and all." "Not quite," said Denison. "Any time we looked north we could see that stretch of sunlight glittering. I hated to see it, yet the direction dragged at my eyes. And every time I looked I could feel the hard ultraviolet springing at my viewplate." "That's imagination. In the first place, there's no ultraviolet to speak of in reflected light -- in the second, your suit protects you : against radiation." "Not against heat. Not very much." "But it's night now." "Yes," said Denison with satisfaction, "and this I like." He looked about with a continuing wonder. Earth was in the sky, of course, in its accustomed place, a fat crescent bellying to the southwest. Constellation Orion was above it, a hunter rising out of the horizon glittered in the dim Earthlight. "It's beautiful," he said. Then: "Selene, is the Pionizer showing anything?" Selene, who had been looking at the skies without comment, stepped toward the maze of equipment that had been assembled in the shadow of the crater over the past three alterations of day and night. "Not yet," she said, "but that's good news really. The field intensity is holding at just over fifty." "Not low enough," said Denison. Selene said, "It can be lowered. I'm sure that all the parameters are suitable." "The magnetic field, too?" "I'm not sure about the magnetic field." "If we strengthen that, the whole thing becomes unstable." "It shouldn't. I know it shouldn't." "Selene, I trust your intuition against everything but the facts. It does get unstable. We've tried it." "I know, Ben. But not quite with this geometry. It's been holding at fifty-two for a phenomenally long time. Surely if we begin to hold it there for hours instead of minutes, we ought to be able to strengthen the magnetic field tenfold for a period of minutes instead of seconds. Let's try." "Not yet," said Denison. Selene hesitated, then stepped back, turning her back. She said, "You don't miss Earth, do you, Ben?" "No. It's rather odd, but I don't. I would have thought it inevitable that I'd miss blue sky, green plants, flowing water -- all the phenomena represented by the cliche adjectivenoun combinations peculiar to the gods themselves Earth. I miss none of them. I don't even dream about them." Selene said, "This sort of thing does happen. There are Immies who say they experience no homesickness. They're in the minority, of course, and no one had ever been able to decide what this minority has in common. Guesses run all the way from serious emotional deficiency -- no capacity to feel anything -- to serious emotional excess, a fear to admit homesickness lest it lead to breakdown." "In my case I think the reason is plain enough. My life on Earth was not very enjoyable for two decades and more, while here I work at last in a field I have made my own. And I have your help. More than that, Selene, I have your company." "You are kind," Selene said gravely, "to place help and company in the order of importance you do. You don't seem to need much help. Do you seek it for the sake of my company?" Denison laughed softly. "I'm not sure which answer would flatter you more." "Try the truth." "The truth is not easy to determine when I value both answers so much." He turned back to the Pionizer. "The field-intensity still holds, Selene." Selene's faceplate glinted in the Earthlight. She said, "Barron says that non-homesickness is natural and the sign of a healthy mind. He says that though the human body was adapted to Earth's surface and requires adjustment to the Moon, the human brain was not. The human brain is so different, qualitatively, from all other brains that it can be considered a nefl phenomenon. It has had no time t(U become really fixed to Earth' # surface and can, without adjustment, accept other environments. He says that enclosure in the caverns of the Moon may actually suit it best of all, for that is but a larger version of enclosure in the cavern of the skull." "Do you believe that?" asked Denison, amused. "When Barron talks he can make his theories sound very plausible." "I think it can be made equally plausible to claim that the comfort to be found in the caverns of th Moon is the result of the fulfillmen of the return-to-the-womb fantasy In fact," he added thoughtfully, "considering the controll tem perature and pressure, the naturi and digestibility of the food, t could make a good case for con sidcring the Lunar colony -- I be your pardon, Selene -- the Lunai city a deliberate reconstruction o the fetal environment." Selene said, "I don't think Bat ron would agree with you for minute." "I'm sure he wouldn't," sai( Denison. He looked at the crescen Earth, watching the distant cloud banks on edge. He fell into silence absorbed in the view, and remainec in place though Selene moved baclJ to the Pionizer.  nest of stars over the serratecj Moon horizon where, every once in: a while, it seemed to him he saw a puff of smoke where a small; meteorite might be landing. He had pointed, out the phenomenon to Selene during the previous Lunar night. She had been unconcerned. She had explained, "The Earth shifts slightly in the sky because of the Moon's libration and every once in a while a shaft of Earthlight tops a small rise and falls on a bit of soil beyond. It comes into view like a tiny puff of rising dust. It's common. We pay no attention." Denison had said, "But sometimes it might be a meteorite. Don't meteorites ever strike?" "Of course they do. You're probably hit by several every time you're out. Your suit protects you." "I don't mean micro-dust particles. I mean sizable meteorites that would really kick up the dust. Meteorites that could kill you." "Well, those fall, too, but they are few and the Moon is large. No one has been hit yet." And as Denison watched the sky and thought of that he saw what, in the midst of his momentary preoccupation, he took to be a meteorite. Light streaking through the sky could, however, be a meteorite only in Earth's atmosphere and not one above airless Moon. The light in the sky was manmade and Denison had not yet sorted out his impressions when it became, quite clearly, a small rocket vessel sinking rapidly to a landing beside him. A suited figure emerged, while a pilot remained within, barely visible as a dark splotch among the highlights. Denison waited. The etiquette of the spacesuit required the newcomer joining any group to announce himself first. "Commissioner Gottstein here," the new arrival said, "as you can probably tell from my wobble." "Ben Denison here." "Yes. I thought as much." "Have you come here looking for me?" "Certainly." "In a space-skipper? You might" "I might," said Gottstein. "have used Outlet P-Four, which is less than a thousand yards from here. Yes, indeed. But I wasn't looking only for you." "Well, I won't ask for your meaning," "There's no reason for me to be coy. Surely you have not expected me to be disinterested in the fact that you have been carrying on experiments on the Lunar surface." "It's been no secret and anyone might be interested." "Yet no one seems to know the details of the experiments. Except, of course, that in some way you are working on matters concerning the Electron Pump." "It's a reasonable assumption, isn't it?" "Is it? It seemed to me that experiments of such nature, to have any value at all, would require a rather enormous set-up. This is not of my own knowledge, you understand. I consulted those who would know. And it is quite obvious that you are not working with such a set-up. It occurred to me, therefore, that you might not be the proper focus of my interest. While my attention was drawn to you, others might be undertaking more important tasks." "Why should I be used as distraction?" "I don't know. If I did, I would be less concerned." "So I have been under observation." Gottstein chuckled. "Yes. Since you arrived. But while you have been working here on the surface, we have observed this entire region for miles in every direction. Oddly enough, it would seem that you and your companion are the only ones on the Lunar surface for any but the most routine of purposes." "Why is that odd?" "Because it means you really think you're doing something with your gimcrack contraption, whatever it is. I can't believe you are incompetent so I think your explanation of what you are doing would be worth listening to." "I am experimenting in paraphysics, Commissioner, precisely as rumor has it. To which I can add that so far my experiments have been only partly successful." "Your companion is, I imagine, Selene Lindstrom L., a tourist guide." "Yes." "An unusual choice as assistant." "She is intelligent, eager, interested and extremely attractive." Earthman?" an immigrant who will be a Lunar citizen as soon as he qualifies for that status." Selene was approaching now. Her voice rang in their ears. "Good day. Commissioner. I would have liked not to overhear and intrude on a private conservation, but in a spacesuit overhearing is inevitably I anywhere within the horizon." Gottstein turned. "Hello, Misji Lindstrom. I did not expect to' talk in secrecy. Are you interested in para-physics?" "Oh, yes." "You are not disheartened by the failures of the experiment?" I "They are not entirely failures," she said. "They are less a failure than Dr. Denison thinks at present." "What?" Denison turned sharply on his heel, nearly overbalancing himself and sending out a spurt of dust. All three were facing the Pionizer now. Above it -- just about five fee above it -- light shone like a faft star. ! intensity of the magnetic field and the nuclear field remainedi stable, in being -- then eased further and further and -- " "A Leak!" Denison said, "Damnj it. I didn't see it happen." Selene said, "I'm sorry, Ben. First you were lost in your own. thoughts, then the Commissioner arrived -- and I couldn't resist the chance to try on my own." Gottstein asked, "Exactly what do I see there?" Denison said, "Energy being spontaneously given off by matter leaking from anothef Universe into ours." As he spoke, the light blinked out and many yards away a dimmer star came into simultaneous being. ! Denison lunged toward the : Pionizer but Selene, all Lunar  grace propelled herself across the surface more efficiently and got there first. She killed the field structure and the distant star vanished. She said, "The leak point isn't stable, you see." "Not on a small scale," said Denison, "but considering thata shift of a light-year is as theoretically possible as a shift of a hundred yards, one of a hundred yards only is miraculous stability." "Not miraculous enough," said Selene flatly. Gottstein interrupted. "Let me guess at what you're talking about. You mean that matter can leak through here, there or anywhere in our Universe -- at random?" "Not quite at random. Commissioner," said Denison. "The probability of leakage drops with distance from the Pionizer -- and rather sharply I should say. The sharpness depends on a variety of factors and I think we've tightened the situation remarkably. Even so, a flip of a few hundred yards is quite probable and, as a matter of fact, you saw it happen." "And it might have shifted to somewhere within the city or within our own helmets, perhaps?" Denison said impatiently, "No. The leak, at least by the techniques we use, is heavily dependent on the density of matter already present in this Universe. The chances are virtually nil that the leak point would shift from a place of essential vacuum to one where an atmosphere even a hundredth as dense as that within the city or within our helmets would exist. It would be impractical to expect to arrange the leak anywhere but into a vacuum in the first place, which is why we had to make the attempt here on the surface." "Then this is not like the Electron Pump?" "Not at all," said Denison. "In the Electron Pump there is a twoway transfer of matter, here a one-way leak. Nor are the Universes involved the same." Gottstein said, "I wonder if you would have dinner with me this evening. Dr. Denison." Denison hesitated. "Myself only?" Gottstein attempted a bow in the direction of Selene but could accomplish only a grotesque parody of one in his spacesuit. "I would be charmed to have Miss Lindstrom's company on another occasion, but on this one I must speak with you alone. Dr. Denison." "Oh, go ahead," Selene said crisply as Denison still hesitated. "I have a heavy schedule tomorrow anyway, and you'll need time to worry about the leak-point instability." Denison said uncertainly, "Well, then -- Selene, will you let me know when your next free day is?" "I always do, don't #? And we'll be in touch before then, in any case. Why don't you two go on? I'll take care of the equipment." B arron neville shifted from foot to foot in the fashion made necessary by the restricted quarters and the Moon's gravity. In a larger room under a world's stronger pull, he would have walked back and forth. Here he tilted from side to side. "Then you're positive it works. Right, Selene? You're positive?" "I'm positive," said Selene. "I've told you five times by actual count." Neville seemed not to be listening. He spoke in a low, rapid voice. "It doesn't matter that Gottstein was there, then? He didn't try to stop the experiment?" "No. Of course not." "There was no indication that he would try to exert authority -- " "Now, Barron, what kind of authority could he exert? Will Earth send a police force? Besides oh, you know they can't stop us." Neville stopped moving, stood motionless for a while. "They don't know? They still don't know?" "Of course they don't. Ben was looking at the stars and then Gottstein came. So I tried for the field leak, got it -- and I had already gotten the other. Ben's set-up -- " "Don't call it his set-up. It was your idea, wasn't it?" Selene shook her head. "I made vague suggestions. The details were Ben's." "But you can reproduce it now. For Luna's sake, we don't have to go to the Earthie for it, do we?" "I think I can reproduce enough of it now so that our people can fill it in." "All right, then. Let's get started." "Not yet. Oh, damn it, Barron, not yet." "Why not yet?" "We need the energy, too." "But we have that." "Not quite. The leak point is unstable -- pretty badly unstable." "But that can be fixed up. You said so." "I said I thought it could be." "That's good enough for me." "Just the same, it would be better to have Ben work out the details and stabilize it." A silence fell between them. Neville's face slowly twisted into something approaching hostility. "You don't think I can do it? Is that it?" Selene said, "Will you come out on the surface with me and work on it?" After another silence Neville said unsteadily, "I don't appreciate your sarcasm. And I don't want to have to wait long." "I can't command the laws of nature. But I think you won't wait long. Now, if you don't mind, I need my sleep. I've got my tourists tomorrow." For an instant Neville seemed on the point of gesturing to his own bed alcove to offer its hospitality -- but the gesture, if that was what it was, did not realty come to birth and Selene made no sign of understanding or even anticipating. She nodded wearily and left. O be frank, I had hoped -- " J. Gottstein smiled over what passed for dessert, a sticky, sweet concoction -- "that we would have seen each other more often." Denison replied, "It is kind of you to take such an interest in my work. If the leak instability can be corrected, I think my achievement -- and Miss Lindstrom's -- may prove a somewhat significant one." "You speak carefully, like a scientist. I won't insult you by offering the Lunar equivalent of a liqueur -- that is the one approximation of Earth's cuisine I have simply made up my mind not to tolerate. Can you tell me in lay language what makes the achievement significant?" "I can try. Suppose we start with the para-Universe. It has a more intense strong nuclear interaction than our Universe has. Hence relativelysmall masses of protons in the para-Universe can undergo the fusion reaction capable of supporting a star. Masses equivalent to our stars would explode violently in the para-Universe, which has many more but much smaller stars than ours does." "I follow that," said Gottstein. "Good. Next, suppose we had a much less intense strong nuclear interaction than that which prevails in our Universe. In that case, huge masses of protons would have so little tendency to fuse that a very large mass of hydrogen would be needed to support a star. Such an anti-para-Universe -- one that was the opposite of the paraUniverse, in other words -- would consist of considerably fewer but far larger stars than those in our Universe. In fact, if the strong nuclear interaction were made sufficently weak, a Universe would exist that consisted of a single star containing all the mass in that Universe. It would be a very dense star, but relatively non-reactive and giving off no more radiation than our single sun does, perhaps." Gottstein asked, "Am I wrong -- or is that the situation that prevailed in our own Universe before the time of the big bang -- one vast body containing all the universal mass?" "Yes," said Denison, "as a matter of fact, the anti-paraUniverse I am picturing comprises what some call the cosmic egg, cosmeg for short. The point is that a cosmegUniverse is exactly what's needed if we are to probe for oneway leakage of matter. The paraUniverse we are now using with its tiny stars is virtually empty space. You can probe and probe and touch nothing." "The para-men reached us, however." "Yes -- possibly by following magnetie fields. There is some reason to think that there are no planetary magnetic fields of significance in the para-Universe which deprives us of the advantage they have. On the other hand, if we probe the cosmeg-Universe we cannot fail. The cosmeg is itself the entire Universe and wherever we probe we strike matter." "But how do you probe for it?" Denison hesitated. "That is the part I find difficult to explain. Pions are the mediating particles of the strong nuclear interaction. The intensity of the interaction depends on the mass of the pions and that mass can, under certain specialized conditions, be altered. The Lunar physicists have developed an instrument they call the Pionizer, which can be made to do jusl such a thing. Once the pion's mass is decreased, or increased for that matter, it is effectively part of another Universe; it becomes a gateway, a crossing point. If it is decreased sufficiently, it can be made part of a cosmeg-Universe and that's what we want." Gottstein said, "And you can suck in matter from the -- the -- cosmegU ni verse?" "That part is easy. Once the gateway forms the influx is spontaneous. The matter enters with its own laws and is stable when it arrives. Gradually the laws of our own Universe soak in -- the strong interaction grows stronger and the matter fuses and begins to give off enormous energy." "But if it is super-dense -- why doesn't it just expand in a puff of smoke?" "That, too, would yield energy, but what actually happens depends on the electromagnetic field -- and in this particular case the strong interaction takes precedence because we control the electromagnetic field. It would take quite a time to explain that." "Well, then, the globe of light that I saw on the surface was cosmeg material fusing?" "Yes, Commissioner." "And that energy can be harnessed for useful purposes?" "Certainly. And in any quantity. What you saw was the arrival in our Universe of micromicrogram masses of cosmeg. Nothing, in theory, prevents our bringing it over in ton lots." "Well, then, your discovery can be used to replace the Electron Pump." D enison shook his head. "No. The use of cosmeg energy also alters the properties of the Universes in question. The strong interaction gradually grows more intense in the cosmeg-Universe and less intense in ours as the laws of nature cross over. That means that the cosmeg slowly undergoes fusion at a greater rate and gradually warms up. Eventually -- " "Eventually," said Gottstein, crossing his arms across his chest and narrowing his eyes thoughtfully, "it explodes in a big bang." "That's my feeling." "Do you suppose that's what happened to our own Universe ten "Perhaps. Cosmogonists have wondered why the original cosmic egg exploded at some one point in time and not at another. One solution was to imagine an oscillating Universe in which the cosmic egg was formed and then at once exploded. The oscillating universe has been eliminated as a possibility and the conclusion is that the cosmic egg had to exist for some long period of time and then go through a crisis of instability for some unknown reason." "Which may have been the result of the tapping of its energy across the Universes?" "Possibly, but not necessarily by some intelligence. Perhaps there are occasional spontaneous leaks." "And when the big bang takes place," said Gottstein, "can we still extract energy from the cosmeg-Universe?" "I'm not sure, but surely that is not an immediate worry. The leakage of our strong-interaction field into the cosmeg-Universe would years before pushing it past the critical point. And there must be other cosmeg-Universes -- an infinite number, perhaps." "What about the change in our own Universe?" "The strong interaction weakens. Slowly, very slowly, our sun cools off." "Can we use cosmeg energy to make up for that?" "That would not be necessary. Commissioner," said Denison earnestly. "While the strong interaction in our Universe weakens as a result of the cosmeg pump, it strengthens through the action of our so-called Electron Pump. If we adjust the energy productions of the two, then -- though the laws of nature change in the cosmegUniverse and in the para-Universe -- they do not change in ours. We are a highway but not the terminus in either direction. Nor need we be disturbed on behalf of the terminuses. The para-men on their side may have adjusted themselves to the cooling off of their sun which may be pretty cool to begin with. As for the cosmeg-Universe, there is no reason to suspect life can exist there. Indeed, by inducing the conditions required for the big bang we may be setting up a new kind of Universe that will eventually grow hospitable to life." For a while Gottstein said nothing. His plump face, in repose, seemed emotionless. He nodded, apparently following the line of his own thoughts. Finally he said, "So cosmeg energy is not to replace the Electron Pump but rather to work with it." "I would suggest that, sir." "Denison, this will set the world on its ears! Any difficulty in persuading the scientific leadership that the Electron Pump, alone, will destroy us should now disappear." "Indeed, yes. The emotional reluctance to accept that thesis no longer exists. The problem and the solutio'n are presented at the same time." prepare a paper to this effect if I guarantee speedy publication?" "Can you guarantee that?" "In a government-published pamphlet, if no other way." "I would prefer to try to neutralize the leak instability before reporting." "Of course." "And I think it would be wise," said Denison, "to arrange to have Dr. Peter Lamont as co-author. He can make the mathematics rigorous -- something I cannot do. Besides, it was through his work that I took the course I have followed. One more point. Commissioner "Yes?" "I would suggest that the Lunar physicists be involved. One of their number. Dr. Barron Neville, might well be a third author." "But why? Aren't you introducing unnecessary complications now?" "It was their Pionizer that made my work here possible." "There can be appropriate mention of that. But did Dr. Barron actually work on the project with you?" "Not directly." "Then why involve him?" Denison looked down and brushed his hand thoughtfully over the weave of his pants leg. He said, "It would be the diplomatic thing to do. We would need to set up a Cosmeg Pump on the Moon." "Why not on Earth?" "In the first place, we need vacuum. This is a one-way transfer and not a two-way as in the case of the Electron Pump -- and the conditions necessary to make it practical are different in the two cases. The surface of the Moon has its vacuum ready-made. To prepare one on Earth would involve an enormous effort." "Yet it could be done, couldn't it?" "Secondly," said Denison," if we have two vast energy inflows from opposite directions, with our own Universe between, there would be something like a short circuit if the two outlets were too close together. miles of vacuum, with the Electron Pump operating only on Earth and a cosmeg job operating only on the Moon, would be ideal -- in fact, necessary. And if we are to operate on the Moon, it would be wise, even decent, to take the sensibilities of the Lunar physicists into account. We ought to give them a share." Gottstein smiled. "Is this the advice of Miss Lindstrom?" "I'm sure it would be, but the suggestion is reasonable enough to have occurred to me independently." G ottstein rose, stretched, then jumped in place two or three times in the eerily slow fashion imposed by Lunar gravity. He flexed his knees each time. He sat down again. "Ever try that, Dr. Denison?" Denison shook his head. "It's supposed to help the circulation in the lower extremities. I do it whenever I feel my legs may be going to sleep. I'll be heading back for a short visit to Earth before long and I'm trying to keep from getting too used to Lunar gravity. Shall we talk of Miss Lindstrom, Dr. Denison?" "What about her?" "She is a tourist guide." "Yes. You said so earlier." "I also said that she is an odd assistant for a physicist." "I'm an amateur physicist only -- and I suppose she is an amateur assistant." Gottstein was no longer smiling. "Don't play games. Doctor. I have taken the trouble to find out what I can about her. Her record is quite revealing -- or would have been if it had occurred to anyone to look at it before this. I believe she is an Intuitionist." Denison said, "Many of us are. I have no doubt you are an Intuitionist yourself, after a fashion. I certainly know that I am, after a fashion." "There is a difference. Doctor. You are an accomplished scientist and I, I hope, am an accomplished administrator. Yet, while Miss Lindstrom is enough of an Intuitionist to be useful to you in advanced theoretical physics, she is, in actual fact, a tourist guide." Denison hesitated. "She has little formal training. Commissioner. Her Intuitionism is at an unusually f,igh level, but it is under little conscious control." 'Is she the result of the one-time genetic engineering program?" "I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if she were, however." "Do you trust her?" "In what way? She has helped me." "Do you know that she is the wife of Dr. Barron Neville?" "There is an emotional connection not a legal oneI believe." "None of the connections here on the Moon are w'hat we would call legal. The same Neville yoii want to invite as third author of the paper you are to write?" "Yes." "Is that merely a coincidence?" "No. Neville was interested in my arrival and I believe he asked Selene to help me in my work." "Did she tell you this?" "She said he was interested in me. That was natural enough, I suppose." . "Does it occur to you, Dr. Denison, that she may be working in her own interests and in those of Dr, Neville?" "In what way would their interests differ from ours? She has helped me without reservation." Gottstein shifted position and moved his shoulders as though he were going through muscle-pulling exercises. He said, "since the woman is so close to him. Dr. Neville must know she is an Intuitionist. Wouldn't he use her? Why would she remain a tourist guide if not to mask her abilities -- for a purpose?" "I understand Dr. Neville frequently reasons in this fashion. I find it difficult to suspect unnecessary conspiracies." "How do you know they are unnecessary? When my space-skipper was hovering over the Moon's surface Just before the ball of radiation formed over your equipmentI was looking down at you. You were not at the Pionizer." Denison thought back. "No, I wasn't. I was looking at the stars -- rather a tendency of mine." "What was Miss Lindstrom doing?" "I didn't see. She said she strengthened the magnetic field and the leak finally broke through." "Is it customary for her to manipulate the equipment without you?" "No. But I can understand the impulse." "And would there have been some sort of an ejection?" "I don't understand you." "I'm not sure I understand myself. But I saw a dim sparkle in the Earthlight, as though something were flying through the air. I don't know what." "I don't either," said Denison. "You can't think of anything that might naturally have to do with the experiment that -- " "No." "Then what was Miss Lindstrom doing?" "I still don't know." For a moment the silence was heavy between them. Then the Commissioner said, "As I see it, then, you will try to correct the leak instability and will be thinking about the preparation of a paper. I will get matters into motion at the other end and on my forthcoming visit to Earth will make arrangements to have the paper published, and I will alert the government." It was a clear dismissal. Denison rose and the Commissioner said easily, "And think about Dr. Neville and Miss Lindstrom." tion, a fatter one, a brighter one. Denison could feel its warmth on his faceplate and backed away. There was a distinct X-ray component in the radiation and though his shielding should take care of that there was no point in placing it under a strain. "I guess we can't question it," he muttered. "The leak point is stable." "I'm sure of it," Selene said. "Then let's turn it off and go back to the city." They moved slowly and Denison felt oddly dispirited. No uncertainty was left, no excitement. He saw no chance of failure from this point on. The government was interested -- more and more what came next would be out of his hands. He said, "I suppose I can begin the paper now." "I suppose so." "Have you spoken to Barron again?" "Yes, I have." "Any difference in his attitude?" "None at all. He will not participate. Ben -- " "Yes?" "I really don't think it's any use talking to him. He will not cooperate in any project with the Eartb government." "But you've explained the situation?" "Completely." "And he still won't?" "He's asked to see Gottstein, and the Commissioner agreed to an interview after he returns from his Earth visit. We'll have to wait till . then. Maybe Gottstein can have some effect on him, but I doubt it." ' "I don't understand him." "I do," Selene said softly. Denison did not respond directly. He shoved the Pionizer and its attendant apparatus into their rocky shelter and asked, "Ready?" "Ready." They slipped into the surface entrance at Outlet P-# in silence and Denison climbed down the entry ladder. Selene dropped past him, braking in quick holds at individual rungs. They removed their suits in the staging area, placed them in lockers. "Would you Join me for lunch, Selene?" "You seem upset. Is something wrong?" "Reaction, I think. Lunch?" "Yes, of course." I  T hey ate in Selene's quarters. She had insisted, saying, "I want to talk to you and I can't do so properly in the cafeteria." And when Denison was chewing slowly ! at something that had a faint re I semblance to peanut-flavored veal, she came out with: "Ben, you haven't said a word -- and you've been like this for a week." Denison frowned. "No, I haven't. "Yes, you have." She looked into his eyes with concern. "I'm not sure of how good my intuition is outside physics -- but I suppose there's something you don't want to tell me." Denison shrugged. "They're making afuss about all this back on Earth. Gottstein has been pulling strings as tough as cables in advance of his trip back. Dr. Lamont is being lionized and they want me to return once the paper is written." "To Earth?" "Yes. It seems I'm a hero, too." "You should be." "Compete restitution," Denison said thoughtfully, "is what they offer. I can get a position in any suitable university or government agency on Earth." "Isn't that what you wanted?" "It's what I imagine Lamont wants and would enjoy -- and will certainly get. But I don't want it." "What do you want, then?" "I want to stay on the Moon." "Why?" "Because it's the cutting edge of humanity and I want to be part of that cutting edge. I want to work at the establishment of the Cosmeg Pump and that will happen only here on the Moon. I want to work on para-theory with the kind of instruments you can dream up and handle. I want to be with you, Selene. But would you stay with me?" "I am as interested in paratheory as you are." "But won't Neville pull you off the job now?" "Barron pull me off?" she asked tightly. "Are you trying to insult me, Ben?" "Not at all." "Well, then, do I misunderstand you? Are you suggesting that I'm working with you because Barron ordered me to?" "Didn't he?" "Yes, he did. But that's not why I'm here. I choose to be here. He may think he can order me about but he can only do so when his orders coincide with my will, as in your case they did. I resent his thinking he can order me otherwise -- and I resent your thinking it, too." "You two are sex-partners." "We have been, yes, but what has that to do with it? By that logic I can order him about as easily as he me." "Then you can work with me, Selene?" "Certainly -- if I choose to." "But do you choose to?" "As of now, yes." Denison smiled. "The chance that you might not choose to -- or might not be able to -- has been worrying me this past week. I dreaded the end of the project if it meant the end of my working with you. I'm sorry. Selene, I don't mean to plague you with the sentimental attachment of an old Earthie -- " "There's nothing old Earthie about your mind, Ben. There are attachments other than sexual. I like being with you." Denison's smile faded, then returned. "I'm glad for my mind." He looked away, shook his head slightly. She watched him carefully, almost anxiously. Denison faced her again. the gods themselves "Selene, there's more than energy involved in the cross-Universe leaks. I suspect you've been thinking about that." The moment stretched out painfully before Selene said, "Oh, that -- " For a while the two stared at each other -- Denison embarrassed, Selene almost furtive. got my Moon legs quite, but this isn't anything compared to what it cost me to get my Earth legs. Denison, you had better not dream of returning. You'll never make it." "I have no intention of returning. Commissioner," said Denison. "In a way that's too bad. You could be emperor by acclamation. As for Hallam -- " Denison said wistfully, "I would have like to have seen his face, but that was a small ambition." "Lamont, of course, is receiving lion's share. He's on the scene." "I don't mind that. He deserves a good deal. Do you think Neville will really join us?" "No question. He's on his way at this moment. Listen." Gottstein's voice dropped one conspiratorial note in pitch. "Before he comes -- would you like a bar of chocolate?" "What?" "A bar of chocolate. With almonds. I have some." Denison's face, from initial confusion, came suddently alive with comprehension. "Real chocolate?" "Yes." "Certain -- " His face hardened. "No, Commissioner." "No?" "No. If I taste real chocolatethen, for the few minutes it's in my mouth I'm going to miss Earth, miss everything about it. I can't afford that. I don't want -- Don't even show it to me. Don't let me smell it or see it." Gottstein looked discomfited. "You're right." He made an obvious attempt to change the subject. "The excitement on Earth is overwhelming. Of course,, we made considerable effort to save Hallam's face. He'll continue to hold some position of importance, but he'll have little real say." "He's getting more consideration than he gave others." "It's not for his sake. You can't smash a personal image that has been built to a level of such importance -- it would reflect on science itself. The good name of science is more important than Hallam." "I disapprove of that in principle." Denison spoke warmly. "ience must take what blows it deserves." "A time and place for -- There's Dr. Neville." Gottstein composed his face. Denison shifted his chair to face the entrance. Barron Neville entered solemnly. Somehow there was less than ever of the Lunar delicacy about his figure. He greeted the two curtly, sat down and crossed his legs. He was clearly waiting for Gottstein to speak first. The Commissioner said, "I am glad to see you. Dr. Neville. Dr. Penison tells me that you refused (# append your name to what I iim sure will be a classic paper on the Cosmeg Pump." "No need to do so," said Neville. "What happens on Earth is of no interest to me." "You are aware of the cosmeg experiments? Of their implications?" "I know the situation as well as you two do." "Then I will proceed without preliminaries. I have returned from Earth, Dr. Neville, and it is quite settled as to what will be the course of future procedure. Large cosmeg-pumping stations will be set up on three different places on the Lunar surface in such a way that one will always be in the night-shadow. Half the time, two will be. Those in the night-shadow will be constantly generating energy, most of which will simply radiate into space. The purpose will be not so much to use the energy for practical purposes as to counteract the changes in field intensities introduced by the Electron Pump." Denison interrupted. "For some years we will have to overbalance the Electron Pump to restore our section of the Universe to the point at which it was before the Pump began operation." Neville nodded. "Will Luna City have the use of any of it?" "If necessary. We feel the solar batteries will probably supply what you need, but there is no objection to supplementation." "That is kind of you," said Neville, not bothering to mask his sarcasm. "And who will build and run the Cosmeg Pumps?" "Lunar workers, we hope," said Gottstein. "Lunar workers you must have," said Neville. "Earth workers would be too clumsy to work effectively on the Moon." "We recognize that," said Gottstein. "We trust the men of the Moon will cooperate." "And who will decide how much energy to generate, how much to apply for any local purpose, how much to radiate away? Who decides policy?" Gottstein said, "The government would have to. It's a matter of planetary decision." Neville said, "You see? It will be the Moonmen who do the work -- Earthmen who run the show." Gottstein said calmly. "No. All of us work who work best. All of us administer who can best weigh the total problem." "I hear the words," said Neville, "but it boils down anyway to us working and you deciding. No, Commissioner. The answer is no." "You mean you won't build the pumps?" "We'll build them. Commissioner, but they'll be ours. We'll decide how much energy to put out and what use to make of it." "That would scarcely be efficient. You would have to deal constantly with the Earth government since the Cosmeg stations will have to balance the Electron stations." "We have other things in mind. You might as well know now. Energy is not the only conserved phenomenon that becomes limitless once universes are crossed." Denison interrupted. "There are a number of conservation laws. We realize that." "I'm glad you do," said Neville, turning a hostile glare in his direction. "They include those of linear momentum and angular momentum. As long as any object responds to the gravitational field in which it is immersed -- and to that only -- it is in free fall and can retain its mass. In order to move in any other way then free fall, it must accelerate in a nongravitational way and for that to happen, part of itself must undergo an opposite change." "As in a rocket ship," said Denison, "which must eject mass in one direction in order that the rest might accelerate in the opposite direction." "I'm sure you understand. Dr. Denison," said Neville, "but I explain for the Commissioner's sake. The loss of mass can be minimized if velocity is increased enormously, since momentum is equal to mass multiplied by velocity. Nevertheless, however great the velocity, some mass must be thrown away. If the mass that must be accelerated is enormous in the first place, then the mass that must be discarded is also enormous. If the Moon, for instance -- " "The Moon?" said Gottstein with energy. "Yes, the Moon." Neville remained calm. "If the Moon were to be driven out of its orbit and sent out of the solar system, the conservation of momentum would make it a colossal undertaking and probably a thoroughly impractical one. If, however, momentum could be transferred to the cosmeg in another Universe, the Moon could accelerate at any convenient rate without loss of mass at all. It would be like poling a barge upstream, to give you a picture I obtained from some Earth book I once read." "But why? I mean, why should you want to move the Moon?" "I should think that would be obvious. Why do we need the suffocating presence of the Earth? We have the energy we need. We have a comfortable world through which we have room to expand for the next few centuries at least. Why should we not go our own way? In any case -- we will. I have come to tell you that you cannot stop us and to urge you to make no attempt to interfere. We shall transfer momentum and we shall pull out. We of the Moon know precisely how to go about building the Cosmeg Pump. We'll use what energy we need for ourselves and produce excess in order to neutralize the changes your own power stations are producing." Denison said sardonically, "It sounds kind of you to produce excess for our sake, but it isn't for our sake, of course. If our Electron Pumps explode the sun -- that will happen long before you can move out of the inner solar system and you will vaporize wherever you are." "Perhaps," said Neville. "But in any case we are going to produce an excess, so that won't happen." "But you can't do that," said Gottstein excitedly. "You can't move out. If you get out too far. the Cosmeg Pump will no longer neutralize Earth's Electron Pump. Eh, Denison?" Denison shrugged. "Once they are as far off as Saturn, more or less, there may be trouble, if I may trust a mental calculation I have just made. It will, however, be many years before they receded to such a distance and by that time, we will surely have constructed space platforms in what was once the orbit of the Moon and placed cosmeg pumping stations on them. Actually, we don't need the Moon. They can leave -- except that they won't." Neville smiled briefly. "What makes you think we won't? We can't be stopped. There is no way Earthmen can impose their will on us." "You won't leave because there's no sense in doing so. Why drag the entire Moon away? To build up respectable accelerations will take years. You'll creep. Build starships instead -- miles-long ships that are cosmeg-powered and have independent ecologies. With a cosmeg momentum-drive, you could then do wonders. If it takes twenty years to build the ships, they will nevertheless accelerate at a rate that would enable them to overtake the Moon within a year -- even if the Moon could start accelerating today. And the ships will be able to change course in a tiny fraction of the time the Moon would need." "And the unbalanced cosmegpumping? What will that do to the Universe?" "The energy required by a ship, or even by a fleet, will be far less than that required by a planet and will be distributed throughout large sections of the Universe. It significant change takes place. And think of the maneuverability you gain! The Moon will move so slowly it might as well be left in place." Neville said scornfully, "We're in no hurry to get anywhere -- except away from Earth." Denison said, "There are advantages in having Earth as neighbor. You have the influx of the Immigrants. You have cultural intercourse. You have a planetary world horizon. Do you want to give up all that?" "Gladly." "Is that true of the people of the Moon generally? Or just of you? There's something intense about you, Neville. You won't go out on the surface. Other Lunarites do. They don't like it particularly, but they go. The interior of the Moon isn't their womb, as it is yours. It isn't their prison, as it is yours. There is a neurotic factor in you that is absent in most Lunarites -- or at least considerably weaker. If you take the Moon away from Earth, you make it into a prison for all. It will become a one-world prison from which no man -- and not you only -- can emerge, not even to the extent of seeing another inhabited world in the sky. Perhaps that is what you want." "I want independence -- a free world, a world untouched by the outside." "You can build ships in any number. You can move outward at near-light velocities without difficulty once you tranfer momentum to the cosmeg. You can explore the entire Universe in a single lifetime. Wouldn't you like to get on such a ship?" "No," said Neville with clear distaste. "Wouldn't you? Or -- couldn't you? Must you take the Moon with you wherever you go? Why must all the others accept your need?" "Because that's the way it's going to be," said Neville. Denison's voice remained level but his cheeks reddened. "Who gave you the right to say that? There are many citizens of Luna City who may not feel as you do." "That is none of your concern." "That is precisely my concern. I am an immigrant who will qualify for citizenship soon. I do not wish to have my choice made for me by someone who cannot emerge on the surface and who wants his personal prison made into a prison for all. I have left Earth forever, but only to come to the Moon, only to remain a home planet. I have not contracted to be taken forever away for an unlimited distance." "Then return to Earth," said Neville indifferently. "There is still time." "And what of the other citizens of Luna? The other immigrants?" "The decision is made." "It is not made. Selene!" Selene entered, her face solemn, her eyes a little defiant. Neville's legs uncrossed. Both shoes came down Hat on the floor. Neville asked, "How long have you been waiting in the next room, Selene?" "Since before you arrived, Barron." Neville looked from Selene to Denison and back again. "You two -- " he began, finger pointing from one to the other and back. "I don't know what you mean by 'you two,' " said Selene, "but Ben found out about the momentum quite a while ago." "It wasn't Selene's fault," said Denison. "The Commissioner spotted something flying at a time when no one could possibly have known he would be observing. It seemed to me that Selene might be testing something I was not thinking of and transfer of momentum eventually occurred to me. After that -- " "Well, then, you knew," said Neville. "It doesn't matter." "It does, Barron," said Selene. "I talked about it with Ben. I found that I didn't always have to accept what you said. Perhaps I can't ever go to Earth. Perhaps I don't even want to. But I found I liked Earth in my sky where I could see it if I wanted to. I didn't want an empty sky. Then I talked to others of the Group. Not everybody wants to leave. Most would rather build ships and let those go who wish to go while allowing those to remain behind who wish to remain." Neville's breath was coming hard. "You talked about it? Who gave you the right to -- " "I took the right, Barron. Besides, it doesn't matter any more. You'll be outvoted." "Because of -- " Neville rose to his feet and took a menacing step toward Denison. The Commissioner said, "Please This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulps cans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans#yahoogroups.com. don't get emotional. Dr. Neville. You may be of Luna, but I don't think you can manhandle both of us." "Alt three," said Selene, "and I'm of Luna, too. I did it, Barron not they." Denison said, "Look, Neville -- for all Earth cares, the Moon can go. Earth can build its space stations. It's the citizens of Luna City who care. Selene cares and I care and the rest. You are not being debarred from space, from escape, from freedom. In twenty years at the outside, all who want to go will go, including you if you can bring yourself to leave the womb. And those who want to stay will stay." Barron Neville seated himself again. There was the look of defeat on his face. apartment now had a view of Earth. She said, "The vote did go against him, you know, Ben. Quite heavily." "I doubt that he'll give up, though. And if there's friction with Earth during the building of the stations, public opinion on the Moon may swing back." "There needn't be friction." "No, there needn't. In any case, there are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass. This one has passed -- or has been passed -- safely, I think, and we'll worry about the others as they come and as they can be foreseen. Once the starships are built, the tension will surely subside considerably." "We'll live to see that, I'm sure." "You will, Selene." "You, too, Ben. Don't overdramatize your age. You're only forty-eight." "Would you go on one of the starships, Selene?" "No. I'd be too old and I still wouldn't want to lose Earth in the sky. My son might go. Ben?" "Yes, Selene." "I have applied for a second son. The application has been accepted. Would you contribute?" Denison's eyes lifted and looked straight into hers. "Artificial insemination?" Selene said defensively, "That's just good sense, Ben. It's important to have good gene combinations. There's nothing wrong with some natural genetic engineering." "None at all." "It doesn't mean that I don't want it for other reasons, too." Denison nodded and remained silent. Selene said almost angrily, "Well, there's more to love than sex." Denison said, "I agree with that. At least -- I love you even with sex subtracted." And Selene said, "And for that matter, there's more to sex than acrobatics." Denison said, "I agree with that, too." And Selene said, "And besides -- Oh, damn it, you could try to learn." Denison said softly, "If you would try to teach." Hesitantly he moved toward her. She did not move away. He stopped hesitating.  young planet and the salt machines were a state monopoly. You put a penny into the slot and it rolled inside to strike a gong. The licensee came to inspect the coin and pull the lever that released a capsule down the chute. Eight-year-old Robbie Hasseldorf was sent as usual for the supper salt. There was a flurry of morality when he returned with his reticule filled with capsules. Failure of the trigger mechanism was not unknown, but it was difficult to determine whether the salt machine was a function of the state or the temple. "Did anyone see you?" Robbie shook his head. His mother sniffed piously. "A gift from heaven." His father was doubtful. "Salt maintains the temple. The state is built on salt." He was master gooseherd of the northern watches and sensitive to practical politics. "The machines illuminate the Eleventh Platitude," said Robbie's brother in a hollow voice. He was marked for a religious career. " 'There is a price for living and a price for dying -- ' " he quoted the whole long verse and finished, " ' -- nothing under the stars is free.' " He slipped a few capsules into his reticule while the family listened with closed eyes. Robbie peeked between his fingers. "Let us give thanks," said his brother and took one more. Robbie's older sister thought they should return the capsules to the neighborhood temple -- well, some of them -- and his younger sister broke one open and licked it up behind her veil with a beatific narrowing of her eyes. No one asked Robbie's opinion, but the Hasseldorf family did not buy salt for several holy days. When he was sent for salt again the miracle recurred. The Hasseldorfs were obviously in a state of grace. A well-developed sense of piety precluded any announcement of this condition. Robbie's father prepaid a series of prayers and acquired a new gander from the master gooseherd of the north-northeastern watches. His mother was inspired to try a new and difficult chausable pattern she called the Star of Brocaal. His brother bought a royal blue veil from the worm-spinners, his older sister righteously planted twentytwo mulberries and his younger sister began to. grow fat. Once he had watched state mechanics disassemble the salt machine. They told him to beat it, so he borrowed his brother's old green veil and was chased away again. He took mincing steps, wearing his older sister's orange veil -- the one she had lost -- and in three lingering periods of observation decided folks received only so many capsules from heaven because they lodged in the hopper. He concluded that a long and limber length of plastic should solve that theological problem. Hence Robbie's current miraculous hauls... He was a quiet boy who noticed that those who raised their heads above the crowd tended to get their heads hit. He shouted with the others at school, "Earth is foul. Earth is corrupt!" The next section yelled, "The chosen flew on wings of grace!" The third section shrilled, "In a box of iron through the dark of space!" The schoolmaster bellowed, "God left Earth with us, the people of his choice!" The whole school rocked: "Shout our grace! Ring the bell! Brocaal is fjeaven. Earth is Hell!" He had been stimulated by the sacred lessons when he'd begun school. The damned Earthers rolled their eyes and howled. They exposed their mouths and lower limbs and waved their arms. They had no shame. They sold their souls for demon-driven carts and wagons. The wagon tongues lashed the air and the carts rolled about madly with no man to push them. It was a vision of horror and chaos. Later revelations were less exciting. The space flight, the sowing of the good soil, the movement of the moon into the sky, the years of heavenly sleep, the building of Harmonious City with its sixteen spokes radiating from the central temple, all this was endlessly repeated until the slowest child was sodden with tedium. mind was starved. He had been in a state of near acceptance when his mother first had sent him for the salt. Then he had learned to disassociate his mind from his mouth. He yelled with his peers, but he wondered why God did not build a salt machine with a zig-zag chute. He speculated why God dispersed holy gruel from the temples before dawn and before sunset every day. Why could not God arrange a meal in the middle of the day? He did not suggest this to his teacher or to the Speakers. The latitude allowed young creatures as they are molded to the adult form left no room for such questions. He was careful and he was not stultified. His eager mind was kept alive by the salt machines. After the two miraculous gifts from heaven Robbie took the coin his mother gave him and very properly put it into the slot. He did this because a peephole had been drilled in the wall of the machine. The hopper had been altered somewhat, too. Then his brother became an agricultural acolyte and left home to work and pray in the food fields south of the city. Robbie had the attic to himself. The Hasseldorf family was blessed by children. The usual unsanctified family raised one or two and the row houses were built with this in mind -- until his brother left, the boys had shared the cramped loft. With sole possession of the attic Robbie secured the rarest thing in Harmonious -- a secret hiding place. He found a loosely glued floorboard. The loft window opened to the shed roof. He was free during the hours of darkness to continue his private education. A longer and more limber plastic worked well indeed even in the altered salt machines By the time he was ten, the authorities were seriously disturbed by the thefts. Where every man was his brother's ardent keeper, deviation should have been obvious. Yet the stolen salt simply vanished. Consumption records were examined and there was no major loss of sales in any area. Human factors compounded the problem. On the night the rogue was nearly caught the special watchman's feet rolled out from under him on quickly scattered capsules. He thumped his head severely. He described the thief as a monster abetted by two large helpers. All men over five feet two inches tall were questioned. Fortunately for the watchman a Speaker had found him, because there were no capsules on the ground by the time the crime was investigated. The drop-off in local sales indicted the entire neighborhood and Robbie's school was honored to power the whipping machine. Four boys buttoned their smocks between their legs and climbed as fast as they could in the open-sided, fifteen-foot squirrel cage. A shaft turned clanking peg gears that transmitted power to the four stations. The criminal was bound to a whipping block and the drums beat as flails were lowered to his back. Each criminal faced a point of the compass, so the population had a good view. In whippings of this nature, the flails were wide and administered a stinging slap. Four more boys for power, four more men, women or children to howl. The drums growled and throbbed. It was a stimulating day for everyone. A spirit of larceny awoke in the hearts of some licensees and sporadic petty thievery added to the confusion. Robbie also had good luck. One dewy night he visited the south-southwest spoke and was returning home when he broke open a capsule and was surprised to find the white crystals turned dark in the damp air. After some thought he distributed the salt on doorsteps in the south-southeast spoke. The blue lips in that neighborhood puzzled the authorities. The telltale chemical added to the salt obviously had tattled on the wrong people. Robbie did not feel altogether depraved because his tongue did not turn black from omission of the truth. He was the victim of his own inquiring mind, which was not his fault. He succumbed to temptation, but he paid for his transgressions with periods of depression when the universal apathy seemed almost enviable. His mother's widely admired needlework showed him a possible life within the bounds of society. His father was a devoted student of geese. But despite good examples and good resolutions, boredom drove Robbie to greater risks and he often drowsed in school. When, at the age of twelve, he completed his education, he was ordered to work and pray at the salt pans north of the city. He was assigned to the master lock builder, an opinionated old craftsman who had his shop and chapel at the upper end of the pans, away from the main enclave. Robbie Hasseldorf began to see some sort of tolerable future for himself in mitre and spline, dovetail, mortise and tenon and all the delightful intricacies the old man insisted on for even the most temporary plastic constructions. E arly one morning just before his fourteenth birthday, when the sun was so low the checkerboard of salt ponds was all in shadow, Robbie was returning to the shop with his apprentice tools. He had been called in the middle of the night to correct the stupidity of a zanjero who had broken a gate by beating it in sideways. A shadow bobbed behind him. It was cast by a beanpole Speaker striding along the dike. He was mumbling to himself: " -- heaviness of guilt and the weight of sanctity -- boy! Where dwells the apprentice Hasseldorf?" "He works and prays at the lock builder's shop, sir," said Robbie with correct formality. "But -- uh -- he is not there now." "Guide me thereunto. I will speak with his master, exorcise his pallet and wait the sinner's return." "Is it permitted to know his sin, sir?" "The world knows his transgression. Why should you not? His name is infamy. What is your name, boy?" "David -- David Devout, sir." "David, this nefarious Hasseldorf stole salt. His parents and siblings prove innocent under interrogation. They will live." David was shocked. "How is such a thing possible?" he croaked. "Well may you ask! My colleague in investigation was stout in the Lord, David. May I be forgiven for doubting the purposes of the Almighty! His weight, in addition to that of the hidden capsules, collapsed the ceiling of the Hasseldorf dwelling. Down he fell, along with hundreds and hundreds of salt capsules." "Was he hurt, sir?" "His neck snapped and his spirit flew. The devil Hasseldorf will be grated. He will be macerated and returned to the soil in a spirit of repentence! Thus he will serve mankind. He will grow hard cabbages or perhaps fat rutabagas." The Speaker smacked his lips and continued his scissors walk, David Devout, formerly Robbie Hasseldorf, trotting along behind. The shop was empty. The master craftsman was installing a rood screen in the salt temple. The other craftsmen and apprentices had carried it there before dawn. David could not offer the Speaker holy gruel as refreshment because no one had brought food from the temple. The devil Hasseldorf had secretly experimented with the gruel and found it possible to bake it into cakes. They were black but durable. The gruel itself would not keep sweet longer than two days. David did not think it necessary to show the Speaker this experiment. Instead he helped him burn another apprentice's pallet. Then he caught the man's interest with the newest type of stock ordered by the central temple. It was built as a hollow cube, X-braced on the sides with a neck retainer in the center of the top. The sinner could neither sit nor lie with this contrivance about him. Whether he could rest his chin depended on whether the collar was spiked or not. The prototype was not spiked. "My master has been longing for someone of your magnificent size, sir, to understand if one model will suit all sinners," David said. "Forward the work of the temple." said the Speaker. David helped him adjust the neck retainer and gave a twist to the simple latch on a corner, well away from the sinner's reach. He put the black gruel cakes into his tool kit. He said a polite goodbye. F ortunately the wind was from the sea, blowing to the barren hills. David could hear appeals to the Almighty for a considerable distance. It took a surprising time for them to alert the nearest harvesting workers-a good half-mile upwind, raking salt from the last concentration pan and shoveling it into a cart. David walked briskly to the far dike, the long mound of earth that walled the river in spate away from the salt pans. He turned for a last look at the known world. The flat land ran to the dim city, with only rocky Mt. Cluke interrupting the long blue line of the sea. The crew was running toward him. He could hear them shouting. He turned to the hills and began trotting. Robbie Hasseldorf had observed debris in the river, branches of trees similar to, but larger than mulberries. Once he had seen a chip boat in the mud. He thought the chip had come downstream from the hands of some unknown boy. David was going to find out... Brocaal was enlivened differently from most planets. Xenoecologists proceed with a reverential sense of mission. They take forever to compatibilize the permutations of a thousand factors to a point where no obvious disaster can be held against them. Contractors supply the sterile soil, pure strains of bacteria and fungi, the required birds and beasts and bugs, the enormous variety of seeds, roots and cuttings, the diatoms, plankton and the rest of the marine ecology to proper temperature and salinity requirements. This takes a long time and a lot of money. It is -- and was -- standard procedure. But the temple on Earth had faith, folks, an elderly starship and # acres of bottomland near Cuppyville, Alabama. They had scooped off the rich topsoil. They had bought their ocean biology at a bankruptcy sale, had ordered everything in the Burpee catalog, had got four lots of trees at a bargain, had bought animals at a wholesale auction and lifted for the stars with four thousand eight hundred and thirty-five of the faithful stasised in cardboard boxes. They had located Brocaal and seeded it, towed over a planetoid for a moon and put it into stable orbit thirty-four thousand miles from the surface. A moon makes tides and tides are necessary in turn a lifeless world into a livable world. They had planted seeds and trees at the proper time. They had set up standard alarms, settled into naps. They had slept on for maybe two hundred years -- the recording clock failed -- and the other seeded locations had been forgotten in the establishment of Harmonious City. David knew nothing of all that. He trotted now because he had a good lead on his front-running pursuer. It was the beanpole Speaker in the hollow cube. The Speaker held the cage off his shoulders by lifting the X-members. David headed for the hills because he feared them and thought others might be as uncomfortable as he was on the irregular ground. After a while he ran, because the man was gaining on him. X. to ease the pain in his side. The men with rakes and shovels were now walking. The man in the box was fanatic. He was halfway up the hill. David caught his second wind and flew down the long sandy slope and up the next rise. The Speaker closed the distance. The next valley had a watercourse in it, thick with the tallest grass David had ever seen. Gasping and sobbing for breath, he forced his way through and fell chest deep into water. He sank to the ground on the far side. He fumbled through his tool kit. There was nothing to help him. What good was a flaring tool? The melding glue? The pipe cutter? The molding planes? The wobble-wheel knife? The cubed man burst through the bamboo on the far side. David was frantically cutting a stalk of the tall grass. The Speaker howled unintelligibly and splashed into the water. David thrust the stick between his legs and Nemesis fell. The man panted and gibbered while David cut more bamboo. By the time the cubed man could speak clearly he looked like a hurrah's nest, with bamboo every which way. The promises the Speaker made loudly would have used up a school of boys. He had a hot imagination. Perhaps it would have taken two schools to serve the things he had in mind. David did what seemed reasonable with such a person. Then he stumbled wearily over to the big river and walked upstream. He ate four of the black cakes the first day. He had little concept of distance. The salt pans were a two-hour walk from the city and that was far. On the second day he ate the other two cakes. Then he got hungrier and found starvation hurt. Like any boy, Robbie Hasseldorf had eaten mulberry leaves and a few silk worms. The sativa stank too bad to eat. He had never seen the food farm south of the city. When the infant supplement had no longer been issued he had been fed the standard gruel. It was different every day, a mixture of cooked and fresh foods, sometimes dry, sometimes juicy. It never contained entire ingredients. He tried grass and chucked it up. He observed birds and tried their diet. The seeds were tiny and the insects nasty. He had little understanding of basic life-support systems. Education in Harmonious was designed to this end. With no options available, the Right Way was the only way for the populace. Even a restricted life was preferable to the only known alternative. When the planet Bocaal first had been seeded with animal life, coyotes and raccoons had been selected as predators. They were adaptable beasts and balanced insects and rabbits and birds and frogs -- with definite ecological functions -- and the coyotes naturally selected injured or weak cattle and sheep. David slumped under a tree and watched a coyote kill a rabbit and begin to eat it. He yelled and startled the beast away. He tried to eat the rabbit himself and got a mouthful of fur. He was down to a hundred and some pounds and staggering when he blundered through a field of corn and found a path. tion he did not recognize as a house. A man came around a corner. He wore tubes of material on his arms and legs. He had no beard. David knew he was a man because of his voice. "Hey, Molly! We win a coup -- that twenty-year-old keg of brandy!" Robbie and david and little dahl A woman joined him. She wore no veil. Her nether tubes showed the shape of her hips. "Looks like we better clean it up and feed it. Do you suppose it's a boy or a girl? What's your name, kid?" He looked at her and blushed. "Dahlton Bradley." He wondered if his tongue were black, but Robbie and David had been hard luck. "Little Dahl," said the man. "Well, you're a most particular mess. When did you eat last?" "Don't know, sir." The woman's upper garment showed her shape. Little Dahl stared at the ground. It moved under him. "Don't call me sir. I'm Ed Waddell. Molly, this poor little lad needs a drink first thing." The woman went into the shiny structure and brought out a bottle and glass. Waddell splashed it half full. Little Dahl surrendered himself to the intentions of these people and drank the contents. The woman said, "I'm Molly Wye -- take it easy, boy." He did not hear her. The liquid clawed down his throat and exploded in his stomach. He wheezed for breath. His eyes went wide and began to run water. He sneezed rapidly, each sneeze louder than the last. His body shook and so did theirs. He saw this through a mist of tears. He was not accustomed to laughter but he smiled weakly when he was fairly sure he was going to live. They gave him a bowl of something called stew. It was a very little portion. He was disappointed but did not complain. The man led him to a rectangular sheet with poles tied at either end. The poles were tied to trees. Waddell picked him up and put him in the middle, parallel with the poles. The trees spun around him, though when he opened his eyes he saw this was not true. When he opened his eyes again the sun was at the other side of the sky. This time the bowl of stew was large. It was filled with unfamiliar things in large pieces. It was the best food Little Dahl had ever had. Robbie and David never tasted anything so good. Ed Waddell and Molly Wye watched him eat. They did not speak because he would put down his spoon with trembling fingers, fold his hands in his lap and wait for permission to begin again. When he had licked the bowl clean as all proper people do he said, "Thank you. Your temple must be close by. I never had such good gruel." "Temple, hell! That's beef stew, boy. You mean to say it's true they feed you slop like we heard?" Little Dahl haltingly explained the city food system, to their disgusted amazement. "No wonder you got the punies, kid," said Waddell. "He's got years of eating to catch up on," said Molly. "How old are you, Little Dahl?" "Fourteen," he said and wondered drowsily where he had been on his birthday. There would be no new smock for him that year -- or any other year. As it turned out, Molly Wye cut down a pair of her own pants and a shirt to fit him. pray much -- for two months on the farthest downriver clearing of the Haven people. His training in obedience made it possible for him to withstand an unending series of shocks. The food was a constant surprise. The metal house was a bewilderment. The variety of skills casually exhibited by the two seemed impossible. The music Molly played on a guitar opened entire realms of wonder. The simple uses of wood amazed him as much as the dependence on plastics in Harmonious amazed Ed and Molly. The difference that set every familiar pattern askew, the difference that made life a rushing stream instead of a salt pan, the bittersweet difference that tilted Little Dahl from his foundations was laughter. He knew about laughing, all right -- the short bark when the teacher stepped back off the platform and jarred his spine, the covert snickering when the wind raised a smock above a woman's ankles, the uneasy titter when others were whipped -- he understood those. Ed and Molly laughed, though, for sheer joy. How they laughed when he told them about the Speaker in the cube. Their eyes were bright when he said the man must have nudged open the bolt on the double doors of the lock shop. And they were uproarious when he described how he pulled the bamboo from around the Speaker's legs and made a total hurrah's nest around his shoulders. He had pushed the bundle into the stream and it had floated off, bald head sticking above the greenery like a red goose-egg cursing in a nest. Little Dahl learned to laugh with them, though it came hard at first. And he worked until he was told to stop. He even came to some terms with his naked body and learned to paddle in the river. He could bait hooks on the trotline and eat fish. The days were not long enough for all the new things he had to think about. When the ears were stiff and dry, Ed started up the house and floated it above ground over to the cornpatch. He taught Little Dahl how to shuck corn and throw it into the powered trailer. Little Dahl did not laugh. He was somber and fearful. Molly noticed his disquiet and the last of the corn-shucking days were devoted to an explanation of the principle of anti-gravity -- how the sunpower conversion unit triggered the energy helix of the magnetic loom to weave power strips. He understood very little of what they said, but he lost his fear and dreamed no more of groping hands and wagon tongues in the sky. That usage made for good or ill was another of a hundred new ideas. Ed and Molly were pleasant youngsters in the first summer of their first marriage and found Little Dahl a useful third party in, their exploration of each other. They were almost as sorry as he when the harvest was completed and they began the long journey up the river to Haven The trailer was overflowing and the house was half-filled with corn. The weight was too great, they solemnly told each other, to lift over the treetops on the most direct route. They rigged paddlewheels, lowered a keel and rudder into the water, and followed the meanderings of the river for a last delightful week. They ran eight hundred slow miles before they turned into a tributary, followed it to the lake and brought home their harvest and Little Dahl. H aven was inside a wide loop road running from the lake and circling back to the lake. It was filled with tree-hidden houses. Ed and Molly retracted the keel and rudder, lifted ashore and folded the paddles. From the gazebo, the glassed-in pilot house on the roof, Little Dahl watched the traffic from wide eyes. The other houses were in the air, guided by directional vents. Ed said it was a question of power available for constant use. He and Molly lifted in the same fashion and delivered the corn to storage halfway around the road. They towed the house to their residential pad inside the loop with a common-use ground car. Ed said it was time to collect the brandy for the coup. Little Dahl knew about this. The governance board of Haven had a standing offer for the delivery of any Harmonious resident in reasonably good condition. The prestige of the coup and the old brandy were enormous. "And you got to go somewhere," said Molly sadly. They drove the ground car to the i governance building on the lakeI front. Tad Michels welcomed them and they trooped over to the audi' torium where a handsomely finished keg was on display. Molly liked the gold plaque even better. Jolly Ed shook Little Dahl's hand and sprightly Molly brushed a kiss on his mouth. It was the first one he had ever had and he rubbed his mouth to remove the tingle. Michels said, "Well, Dahlton," and smiled. He was an easy man with gray hair and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. "You'll be wondering if you were sold into slavery for a keg of brandy." Nothing of the kind. What bothered Little Dahl was his lack of sorrow at parting from Ed and Molly. Was he an unfeeling monster? Surely security was the first desire of all creatures, but he was excited at the idea of new experience. Tad Michels said, "Freedom is earned and the lazy are enslaved, if only to themselves -- do you see what I am talking about?" "No, sir," said Little Dahl. "We need your help, young man. It's not often someone survives Harmonious. There's equity to be done." They drove beyond the loop road and left the car at a large building dug into a hill. Michel's explaination, "Manufactuary," did not enlighten Little Dahl. The building had a feeling of age about it. He and Michel entered by a tall door that slid to one side. "Wedgelock," said Michels. They walked down a hall with misproportioned doors on either side and Michels rapped on one of them. An unhuman voice said, "Come -- " and the door slid aside. The hair on the back of Little Dahl's neck rose when he saw the creature on the wall bed. a man. It swung its feet to the floor and stood incredibly long and thin. Bones made the skin taut over the cheeks, the nose was a beaky promontory and the eyes were deep in brow caves. It rubbed its nobby head with stick fingers and Little Dahl half expected the black fuzz to crackle. "Captain Sheppard, Dahlton Bradley has just come to us from Harmonious," said Michels. "Displaced, boy? I'm timedisplaced by the Speakers. Me, an interface plug-puller. I found this planet and sold it to the temple for a scout ship. It went against their principles to pay me or kill me, so the sanctimonious rascals tricked me into stasis. I figure I'm three hundred and eighty-two years old and I want my pay." He drawled the words in a way Little Dahl had never heard before. It didn't matter. He didn't understand them anyway. "What are your plans. Captain?" said Michels easily. "Get off this one-point-three-oh planet, but not back to Earth. I'm going to Faradis, a little overdue. I want to see if the birth rate still runs four female to one male. Is Frogface Cluke still stuffed in your city, boy?" Little Dahl's face was blank. "I mean Arthur Otis Cluke, old Frogface, your founding father." Little Dahl gulped. Speaker Cluke, the indomitable leader, the First Speaker of Brocaal. "He is guh-guarding us from Heaven, sir. My grandfather saw him at the tricentennial of the landing." "Jazzed to the ears, I bet. They couldn't turn him loose. Frogface never took kindly to the creepy clowns you got running things. Give the old devil his due. He's no belly-crawling prig. No wonder they jazzed him and stuffed him in stasis." The man sighed. "Do you know' the central temple, boy?" Little Dahl managed to nod. His world was reeling. Mt. Cluke dominated the city. Speaker Cluke stood on the right hand of God. "Been in the power room?" Sheppard asked. "Nuh-no sir," Little Dahl stuttered at the idea. "It's suh-sacred. It provides the energy to prepare food and make plastic." Michels said, "I don't understand why Harmonious uses plastics instead of wood. How extravagant in time to grow hemp and raise silkworms for building material and clothing." "Planned with the best intentions," said Sheppard. "Keep people busy-busy in a prison without bars. That's why they stasised Frogface. Modern medievalism traps men away from the land where they might learn something. You can make them dependent as dogs. They do any kind of tricks to stay home." "But why do they put up with it?" "Where's to run to? Security is the best blue-sky con game. Is there a sacreder place than the power room, boy?" "The rel-reliquary, suh-sir." How could Harmonious City be a prison when it opened the door to the afterlife? What could you do with your life here and now but prepare for death? "Do you know where it is. Little Dahl?" "In the center-center, sir." "We'll bust that place open," said Captain Sheppard. T he next day Little Dahl still felt like an ant on a leaf in a torrent, except he was riding a machine through an ocean of air. He looked through a window and the world was diminished beneath him. The streams were strings of shining silk. Tentacles of growing things reached fingers into hollows and valleys. Captain Sheppard crouched in the seat beside him and grumbled: "Huff and puff and stagger through cloudland all day. Eighty miles an hour. These people got no idea of time. Well, boy, we'll land short, grab us forty winks and make a reconnaissance and consult with the right hand of God -- that all right with you?" "Yessir," said Little Dahl. He wondered if he would ever understand anything. The river winked up at him. The only mirrors in Harmonious were in the temples. Husbands and fathers were always standing around while women went to look at themselves. Last night in his room, he had seen a figure walk toward him from a duplicate room. It had thick plastic-yellow hair and a smooth, unlined face. The eyes were blue and innocent. They shone with honesty, nothing at all like the person inside who had stolen salt and pushed a Speaker into a river. Captain Sheppard was humming a sad tune. How could a man three hundred and eighty-two years old be so childish? Only children sang. Grownups felt the drums in their bones and were properly silent in Harmonious. The man yawned and said, "Whatever else, they're not stupid at Haven. They don't want us around to crumb things up. I suppose -- " he yawned again -- "it could be a sense of equity. They found me welded in a lost broom closet. Here, boy, you fly this dratted thing a while." He showed Little Dahl how to tilt the stick forward to go down, and screw it right or left for fast or slow. He wriggled in the toosmall seat and talked all the time. Little Dahl heard only some of it as he cut over the curves of the river. An unplugger pulled out of interface at random... that was how Captain Sheppard had found Brocaal... the ship from Earth split down the middle on landing day... the people of Haven were reactionaries -- whatever that meant -- and maintained their technical culture. Harmonious was settled by idealists -- whatever they were -- whose interest was the life of the spirit at whatever cost. " -- and they made a compact not to bother each other, ho-ho. But the population's not doubled since. maybe on account of this damn heavy one-point-three-oh, so there's no growth pressure -- stay away from clouds. They're bumpy." " Yessir," said Little Dahl, sweating, but he didn't understand at all. Nobody ever started from the beginning -- he felt drowned in unreconciled facts. Sheppard told him the ship split in two because it was designed that way as a safety measure. Safe from what? And the ship was not a "box of iron" as he learned at school, but the scouts were. The ship was more like a pair of hollow cubes with everything held inside by "wave mechanics." Little Dahl had seen waves and he had seen mechanics. He groaned aloud. Sheppard looked at him. "Hey, wake up. There's the delta on the horizon. Twist to slow. Leave the stick straight. Crank down on this wheel. That's right, you catch on pretty good. We'll land in that little valley ahead and have a snooze. I checked the alarm and it's all right. It goes off in four hours, then it buzzes for ten minutes and howls on interface alarm for five. If they got a radio watch in Harmonious they won't hear that. Then the whole thing self-destructs. The Havens don't want the nuttys to get it." "Yessir," said Little Dahl, understanding one word out of three. Then he could not speak. The river ran through hills and there was a checkerboard tracery, no bigger than a spiderweb in the sunset light. The salt ponds and pans. And over to the left was Harmonious. That small? Was this the city that so dominated his mind? T he pumps of the air machine were silent and there was no hiss from the propulsion nozzles. The machine settled beside a clump of bamboo. Little Dahl was numb with fatigue but he could not sleep. He was in a state of suspended animation, like a wire bridge he'd seen at Haven. He was caught in mental tension between ground and sky. He had just eaten sandwiches with the captain, but he longed -- in a funny way -- for holy gruel. Would he ever feel at home again? Captain Sheppard snored as the night wore on. The alarm buzzed. Sheppard snapped awake. Little Dahl felt like a hopper full of lodged salt capsules. They rose over the hill and found the delta country blanketed with fog. Sheppard swore. He consulted the compass and drove slowly toward Mt. Cluke, dark over the fog. They dropped into the mist in total silence. The fog was not heavy. They saw a street appear below them, the row houses dark and glum. A neighborhood temple was like a bead on the spoke, but Sheppard snorted when the street ended and open land began. He turned the air machine and drifted along the spoke to the center. Visibility was two hundred feet. At the temple he pulled back and flew an arc across the rays. The sativa was harvested rotationally. The third wedge was freshly plowed -- the next was being cut and the next was in full growth, nine feet tall. Little Dahl was horrified when the captain proposed to hide the air machine in the sativa. Robbie Hasseldorf had crossed the growing fields with light feet, but the air machine would crush the plants. The captain growled and said Harmonious could get along without a few gallons of furfural, which he seemed to think was a chief sativa product. Little Dahl had never heard of it. So they landed in total sin, forty feet from the center paving. The crushed plants had a monstrous stink. The acrid pungency wrinkled Little Dahl's nose. It gave him a measure of his own displacement. The smell was familiar from childhood -- and it nearly choked him. Sheppard strangled a fit of coughing. "Sunny beaches!" he said in a grating whisper. "That stink really torques my jaws!" They pushed through the dripping vegetation. The wide walkway was empty. They crossed to an arch in the middle of one of the sixtyfour sides. Against the familiar building, Sheppard was a stick man who moved with spider quiet. Little Dahl shuddered. The stick fingers closed on his shoulder as they came to the end of the tunnel. "Whipping machine," whispered Little Dahl, pointing to the left. He knew where he was now, just at the west-northwest spoke. The centercenter lay ahead lost in the fog, perfectly circular, across four hundred feet of open space. "Now," whispered Sheppard. They ran across the paving and the reliquary loomed ahead. Little Dahl marveled at how much easier it was to run in pants than a smock and wondered atheistically if the clothing of Harmonious had been designed to hinder the wearer. Sheppard sucked in his breath at the door. "Standard scoutship. Number-letter combination. What day was the landing. Little Dahl?" "The fuh-first day." "Lemme see -- oh, hell -- hunch over to hide the light." He bent a plastic tube and the glass vial inside crackled as it broke. The liquid was a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst. It mixed with a derivative of salicylic acid. The tube glowed yellow green and grew brighter and brighter. "Should have worn a damn tent to hide it," grumbled Sheppard. "Eh, I think I remember." He turned the dials to April #, # and cautiously pulled the lever. The door creaked open. A wild scream rose behind them. The captain pushed Little Dahl into the building. "Sacrilege! Violation! Awake all! Sac -- " Sheppard pulled the door shut and he and Little Dahl stood in dead silence. Little Dahl was cast even more into ambivalence. Would he rather take his chances outside or be in this iron box with a stick man bathed in yellow green light? "Pretty good guess," said Sheppard complacently. "April Fool's Day." He reset the lock from the inside to read July #, #. He was not disturbed to be imprisoned in the reliquary. Little Dahl was terrified. The captain opened the inner door and walked down a hall. It was built to his scale. The doors were tall and the slide grip was high for Little Dahl. At the end of the hall they entered a room filled with machinery. The captain was humming as he sat in a chair that fitted him. He touched a control and stopped humming. He swore dreadfully.  chartreuse light was horrible. On the floor was a body in a transparent box. It was not God himself, but it was Speaker Cluke. In real life -- or death -- Little Dahl saw he was a stick man like Captain Sheppard. Sheppard's remarks were ungodly. He strode over and kicked the box. Little Dahl was again amazed by the man. He was not angry. "We'll have to jerk Frogface out of stasis. Somebody pulled the power spool. He might know where they put it. Lemme see now." He kneeled beside the box, a demon in the crepitating light. He grumbled as he pushed and pulled at the base of the coffin. " -- didn't want the old devil on his feet a while -- prob'bly raise hell -- stasis is all right, but -- " He raised the lid. Speaker Cluke continued: " -- won't stand for it! You can't do this to me! The damn dope wore off and I'll see -- you all -- hanged -- " He blinked. "Hello, Frogface," said Sheppard. "What year, Cappy?" "Three-thirty-two after landing." "How'd you get out?" "They stuck me in Beta in a broom closet. People there didn't find me until last month. How come they stasised you?" "Somewhat because I didn't like your deal. Somewhat because I stood halfway between Alpha and Beta. Cappy, how did Beta turn out?" "They still use the fabrication unit and the tapes work fine. Now listen, old buddy, here's the situation we find ourselves in -- " and he explained about the missing power spool. "Help me out of the box. Damn this heavy gravity. Last time they aired me all doped up, damn if they hadn't all shrunk. They look like a race of dwarfs -- there's one over there!" "Not full grown. He's all right. How about the spool?" "In interface stasis. I was a step ahead of them." "Hell," said Sheppard, "how do we get it?" "No sweat," said God's right hand. "Got a holy two-man interface rig, sun-powered strip storage, no sweat." "Might as well get it now," said Sheppard. "Still want to go. to Faradis?" "Soon as possible, old friend." Cluke hesitated. "I think you need a chaplain." His voice was sad and pondering. "I've seen the theology of discipline in action, God help me. Now I'd like to understand the theology of passion -- Faradis seems a likely place. I'll go along." "Little Dahl, we'll be gone half an hour," said Sheppard. "Sit tight and we'll take off for Faradis together." Little Dahl could not think. If the First Speaker himself found BrocaaJ impossible -- or was Cluke a devil from hell? His mind was in a total state of turmoil. No time seemed to pass, but he heard the men returning. He fled on silent feet. He ran down the misproportioned hall and through the door to the closet. He flung himself on the lever. The door opened. There were torches in the fog. Panic-faced Speakers withdrew as he slammed the door. Not because of him. An enormous voice was saying, " -- damn little fool! You've buttered your bread -- " whatever that meant -- "now lie in it. Stand back all. Stand back, I tell you Two Speakers held him firmly. Little Dahl breathed deeply of the foggy he stink of torches and sativa and the stink of fear. There was silence, then a horrid ahoogah-ahoogah noise. When the center-center cracked its foundations, strained and lurched up. Little Dahl was suddenly calm. He did not want to be macerated by graters on the shipping machine. He broke from the loosened grasp of his captors and fled through the crowd. There was a panicky moan and dark figures rushed through the tunnel with him. They fled on the walks. He plunged into the sativa and found the air machine. This thing was what the captain pushed first. A Speaker with an enraged face pounded on the window. Now crank. The air machine rose. And this was what the captain did next -- but nothing happenediVtil morning when a breeze drifted away the fog. The machine drifted with it and a crowd of men gathered underneath and followed. When the sun came up Little Dahl took heart after a night of terror. The warning alarm buzzed. The machine would destruct in fifteen minutes and he could do nothing about it. The Wind picked up and blew him faster than the crowd could run. The buzzing grew more clamorous. The machine grated to a stop on top of Mt. Cluke with Harmonious City spread below. Little Dahl scrambled out. Men circled the hill. He might make good fertilizer after all. Suddenly they stopped. A shadow engulfed him. He turned. A totally strange ship settled onto the crest. The side opened and a ramp extended itself. A man in glorious red and gold sauntered down. Little Dahl didn't hesitate. "Save yourself, sir!" he shouted. "What-?" "Religious fanatics! Tear you to pieces! Save me, too!" "Heard your interface alarm, youngster. Got trouble?" The boy panted to the foot of the ramp. "Oh, sir, anti-rational madmen! They -- uh -- killed my parents when we landed here. I was just a baby." He grabbled with sincerity. The crowd was shouting. The man in red blinked and began to walk up the ramp. The boy followed him. "Intentional primitives, hah? Come along, then. We'll stretch our legs elsewhere. What's your name, boy?" The ramp sucked up behind them, shutting away a world. Robbie Hasseldorf? David Devout? Dahlton Bradley? He didn't want to lead any of those lives again. "Medlar, sir," he said bravely. His blue eyes shone with innocence and a kind of honesty. "Eddie Medlar." ...he felt in his heart their strangeness. Their stillness answering his cry... T he observers began arriving on Wednesday. Some had been chosen by their governments or by qualified selectors. Some had been elected by popular vote. Others came by special invitation of a Project Committe. They came from all over the world and in various ways. Many arrived by sail of other individual or exotic transport. An outrigger canoe was paddled all the way from Samoa by a dozen proud Polynesians to demonstrate that they still revered and were capable of the feats of their ancestors. One man came in his personal submarine and announced his intention to explore the ocean floor following the occasion. A man swam from St. Thomas and a woman pedaled a bicycle, mounted on two pontoons, from Cuba. One man came by balloon, another by sailplane. The majority arrived by chartered jets or helicopters. This was the era of the individual. Saturday was the Day of the Reply, a holiday in all parts of the Earth, a day the planet had been awaiting for ninety years. Some suggested that the world was waking from a long sleep, from a kind of wonderful slowed-down reality, a dream about humanity and what mankind might be like with a bit more time, a little less urgency, a bit more grace, a little less adrenalin. The Project -- set up nearly one hundred fifty years earlier to listen for messages from the stars -- and the Message from Capella that it had received and deciphered had given Earth and its people ninety years of waiting time, during which to explore the aspects of humanity other than aggression. Many problems that had seemed difficult, virtually unsolvable, one hundred fifty or even ninety years before, had lost their urgency. At least so it seemed to some. Now the Day was at hand. The people who arrived to celebrate it were of many colors and many occupations, but the colors seemed somewhat less distinct than they used to be and the occupations were not as precisely defined -- everyone seemed a bit dilettante, performing his duties and assuming his responsibilities with the undimmed delight and undulled awareness of the eternal amateur. But the gathering did include scientists of all kinds, linguists, philosophers, humanists; politicians and political figures; newsmen and analysts; composers, artists in many forms and media, poets, novelists and interested citizens. Many of them, for convenience, traveled under national insignia and official aegis, although the spirit of nationalism, too, had grown weak during the past ninety years. Not one of them predicted what would happen with the approach of the moment when the reply was expected from Capella. The observers checked in, most of them, at the port of Arecibo. They then traveled the green hills of northern Puerto Rico in buses and in limousines, on bicycles and on foot. Some spoke of pilgrimages and told each other the adventures they had experienced on their way. Then they arrived at the Project, passing the implausibly round valley lined with gleaming metal and, not far beyond, the steerable radio telescope held aloft on a metal arm. The long, low building that housed the Project had grown over the century and a half since it had been put together with concrete blocks and poured cement. Each decade had seen it sprawl a little farther at each end and now a new wing had been attached to the back. It housed an auditorium especially built for this occasion by volunteers and designed so that the seating descended the hill behind the Project and the roof line remained level with the roof of the original Project. The auditorium extended straight out from the old building like the leg of a T. T he observers had to pass through the ancient corridors of the old building to reach the auditorium. They admired the historic walls and the layers of paint that seemed to hold them together. They gaped at the listening room and paused to hear samples of the hisses and crackles that were the music of the spheres, the background noise of the universe and the original recordings of the Voicesthe fragments of radio programs from the nineteen thirties with which the Capellans ingeniously had first attracted the attention of the listeners at the Project, fifty years after the Project had begun. music: that little chatterbox the one with the pretty wave the flag for hudson the reply music: cola hits the spot twelve... They shook their heads in wonder and said, "It sounds so much better here than in the recordings I've heard. So much closer. So much more real. Think what it must have been like ninety years ago to have heard that for the first time and have realized that it had been all th way to Capella and back and you were listening to the first evidence of intelligent life on other worlds." And everyone agreed that it was so. After that their path took them through the even more impressive computer room, where they could hear the giant computer whispering and clicking and muttering to itself and see the lights flicker on and off. They watched the various readers and printers eating up information or spitting it out and smelled the oil and ozone that were the distinctive odors of electrical equipment, big and small. And some of them asked staff members about the empty chairs in the corners, while others, more knowledgeable, asked if any of them had seen the Presence and, depending on their expectations, the staff members would raise their eyebrows and roll their eyes and say, Ves, and it was a terrifying experience I can tell you... or chuckle and say. He talks to me whenever I'm in trouble... or tell the truth and say. No one's seen him for a long time, though there are those who say they have... And whatever they said the observers were pleased and went on. One by one they inspected the original Message framed and hung on the wall of the director's office. They ran their hands along the worn desk where papers had been strewn and pencil and pen had noted and drawn and calculated. And some of them slipped into the chair behind the desk, polished by the use of generations of directors, to sit where they had sat and pondered the mysteries of the universe and the difficulties of communication. Others only looked and smelled the old books that lined two walls of the office. The building was a marvel of antiquity, the observers said to each other, in some ways rivaling the pyramids of Egypt or the castles of Europe. You could see, they said, how the floors of the corridors had been worn by generations of passing feet. How many times hadi the tile on those corridor floors been replaced? The ancient structure was a monument to human science and perserverance, they said, and now it was all going to culminate in a wonderful, exciting Reply from Capella that would bring a new day -- or not -- but it would be wonderful all the same jind the world would be glad it had waited. low the waiting had come to an end. The tempo was beginning to pick up. The pulse of the world was quickening as the moment approached when the giant radio ears outside would hear the reply that had been started on its way to Earth forty-five years ago by an alien race faced with possible destruction from the explosion of their giant red suns. for "little she goat" -- a star found in the constellation of Auriga, the Charioteer, in Greek mythology the inventor of the chariot. His first chariot, according to the myth, was drawn by goats. ance of the epic eight-hour Capella symphony of a young Pakistani composer sent half its Los Angeles audience toward the doors before the the musicon tapes, with the composer himself at the keyboard, were more than half played. Many of those who left stopped at the box office and demanded their money back, claiming the work was too long and too boring. The contrast with last year was dramatic. At the symphony's premiere in New York not a person left his lounge and, at the conclusion the audience paid the composer, Singhar Khan, the ultimate compliment of ten minutes of silence, and many stayed for hours afterwards discussing with friends the meaning of the symphony... T he program itself began at sunset on Saturday. Late arrivals had seen a spectacular vista of the sun setting behind mounting clouds to the west, turning them various shades of gold and orange and red and then darkening into purple and finally black. Those who believed in omens said it was an omen and those who did not said it was a good show all the same. The visitors had passed through the Project with all its fascinating history and mementos and into the auditorium. They were ushered down resilient ramps and into upholstered chairs. They looked App. Star Type Mag. RA Decl Dist Lum Mass Capella a GO # #(-# # # # Capella b GO # around at the others who were assembling and then at the auditorium itself, its muraled walls and the recessed stage down front it was not really a stage but a speaker's pit. At the back of the pit were some small computer display units with switches and dials and a few oscilloscopes. At each side of the computer units stood a chair. The chairs were empty. When the visitors had settled into their seats the staff members of the Project came down the center aisle in a group, led by director. He was middle-aged. He walked briskly to the speaker's pit while his staff scattered into seats in front. MacDonald faced the audience. The lights dimmed. "Citizens of the world." MacDonald said. His words were picked up and heard all over the auditorium and flung around the world. "Earthmen. Welcome to the Project and to the Day of the Reply. This occasion and the ceremonies that surround it are being broadcast to every continent and every continental subdivision, to our colonies on the Moon and on Mars and to all the men who work in space -- for this is Earth's day, the day all of us have been awaiting for ninety years -- the earliest moment we might hope to receive a reply from Capella to the Answer we sent to the Capellans ninety years ago. "But first, into the heart of our euphoria, let me inject a few half-houras accurately as we can measure the distance -- we can anticipate a reply from Capella. That does not mean we will receive one. And even if we do, it might require processing or formulation -- which take time. In any case, the reply may not come for hours -- or even days or weeks. We should not let ourselves be disappointed or become discouraged by delays that may be inevitable. We have developed patience over the past hundred and fifty years -- we may have occasion to continue to exercise it. director of the Project. I am the third MacDonald to have held this position. It is not hereditary,! though to some it may have seemed! so." i Dry laughter rustled through thejf audience. I "Perhaps only a MacDonald,"! MacDonald continued, "would be! listening. I have no son, but forJ those of you who might be wondering, I do have a daughter who is, now a member of the Project staff.: "The real work of the Project, however, is not performed by the director but by the staff. The members sit in front of me and I would like them to stand as a group and be introduced to you -- " After the applause had faded to only a handclap or two MacDonald said, "Thousands of men and women have given their time, their energies, their devotion, their lives to the Project in its nearly a century and a half. Their work has helped the Project reach this point in time and history and I would like to mention each by name, but to do so would take far more than the thirty minutes we have at our disposal. You will find their names in the Project booklet available at the door as you leave and as a tribute to all of them we have placed a symbolic seat at each end of the speaker's pit to remind us of them and of their indispensable contributions. You may, of course, consider them occupied by any of the past staff members -- by John White, for instance, or his son ,ndrew, by Ronald Olsen or by Charles Saundersor by any or all of them or by the spirit of the past, by the unknown staff members. I think of them as being occupied by my father and my grandfather." T he Siberian premier pulled himself heavily to his feet. "Mr. MacDonald, I have heard it said that apparitions of your father and your grandfather -- what some have called a 'Presence' -- have been seen in the computer room of the Project, and I have it on reliable authority that the computer s capable of creating such illusions and that it has been instructed to speak in the voice of your father or Science Aids A Working Solar Motor Four-arm vane In #-Inch diameter evacuated glau globe. Turns upon exposure to light, even a lit match. Fascinating and Instructive -- and very decorathrel We pay postage. # aeh, or two for # Only # plus # postage For that money you get # Individual Items of standardquality laboratory apparatus -- glassware, porcelain, rubber, plastic. Value? Two or three times our price. No Junk, and a surprise Kern In each assortment! Order by mall from: #I Reade Street New York, N.Y. # The reply your grandfather -- " MacDonald looked steadily up at the big man in his robe and said, "The computer can present holographic displays of information, as you will see before long, I hope, but it is our belief that illusions such as the one to which you refer are beyond its present capability. If some of us believe that the spirits of the past members of the Project linger in the computer in the form of dialogue and other inputs -- why, we all need comfort and spiritual assistance at times, and strong men bequeath powerful memories. "The computer will be taking over the majority of this presentation in a few minutes, for no human is quick enough to interpret the hoped-for signals as they arrive -- and this is what the computer has been prepared to do for these past one hundred and fifty years. That preparation and its accumulated information and programs and linkages have made it an incredibly complex creation, but we should not project into it our own fears or hopes. When you hear the computer speak you may judge for yourself whether it speaks like my father or my grandfather or, as some maintain, l.ke me or like a composite of all of the voices it has ever heard. We could instruct it in such matters, but we do not. Perhaps, as I said, we ourselves prefer to think of it as at least a halfconscious ally. "Now the time has come to turn the occasion over to the computer. Its presentation will consist of vocal communication and holographic displays. It will begin with a short history of the Project. When or if a signal is received either on our own antennae or on those of the Big Net orbiting Earth, with which it is in continual communication, the presentation will be interrupted..." around their holovision sets today or tonight -- since the broadcast circled the Earth it is impossible to be precise -- to watch the opening ceremonies of the Day of the Reply being broadcast from Arecibo. The other two holovision set... class at Stanford Medical School chose the new, abbreviated ten-year curriculum. The Bureau of Population  today announced a two percent increase in the world j birth rate over the same j period last year.  The Office of Environment ' said today that five cases of  industrial and three cases of individual pollution had been  reported by citizens in the past week. Only ten cases in In black and white spaces within all were reported during all of last year. ject's historywith pictures, still and moving, within the holographic square that formed itself beside MacDonald -- the computer had reached the dramatic moment when the radio telescope in orbit around the Earth -- called the Big Net -- had recorded a tape which, with others, had routinely been sent to the Project. A long-dead man named Saunders had begun the process of deciphering that had revealed the Voices. But the computer interrupted itself -- then said in its own matter-of-fact tones, "I am receiving new signals from Capella." The audience stirred and sat erect. All over the Earth men, women and children drew closer to their sets. In the live audience at the Project a man fainted and a woman began to weep. "The signals I am receiving from Capella," the computer said, "are similar to those I have been receiving continuously over the past ninety years, but there is a significant difference. The signal is being repeated now for possible interference or signal loss. Now other signals are coming in one after the other." The audience leaned forward. "I can now display the new message," the computer said. the holographic square, the message took shape;   #                                            "Messages are being received too rapidly," the computer said, "for all to be displayed at this time. "I will select a few for your consideration." The first message was replaced by others flashed in the square at intervals of about ten seconds each. the reply       "These seem to be building a vocabulary of words and numbers and operators," the computer said. And a few seconds later: "I now can state within acceptable limits of error that the messages are transmitting a vocabulary. At the present rate of reception a reasonably complete dictionary and perhaps a grammar as well will be available within twenty-four hours. Symbols are being substituted for pictures which no longer are adequate for the complex data to come. I anticipate that as soon as the dictionary is complete the pictures will cease and the information will arrive entirely in symbols and other abstractions, which will raise the level of communication to that of history, narrative art and possible mathematical equations. "I now am receiving certain simple messages in symbols alone." In the part of the audience near the Siberian premier people were turning to each other, discussing something in loud whispers. Others around the group were frowning at the disturbance. The premier stood up again, although some of his scientific delegation were gesturing him down. The Siberian group was more cohesive than most, since Siberia had come late to nationalism. "Mr. MacDonald," the premier said, "some concern has been expressed near me that the input of information is proceeding at such a rapid rate that the computer will not be able to handle it." "No danger," MacDonald said. "What I am saying, Mr. MacDonald," the premier said, pulling his robe hem impatiently out of the hands of members of his retinue who sought to consult with him, "is that there may be unsuspected dangers involved in letting this reception continue." "I assure you," MacDonald said, "that no danger exists." "Your assurance is not enough," the premier said. "Since our words are being overheard and recorded . by this computer I had hoped that  as men of diplomacy we might  understand each other without  telling everything, but now I must  speak without tact. The Capellans are technologically advanced and desperate. That combination may threaten a takeover of your computer and all the powers that it controls. The race we are dealing with  must be the master of the computer j -- and who knows what other capabilities of communication and transportation those creatures may have. I ask you to take the precautions of a reasonable man and turn off your machine now while we evaluate the situation." A Siberian scientist stood up beside his premier and said, "I apologize for our leader. It is clear that he understands neither the nature of the computer nor that of the messages that have been received." MacDonald held up his hand and a semblance of order was restored. "Nevertheless, his apprehensions are natural and may be shared by others in the audience. We cannot entirely eliminate the possibility of an alien program superseding our instructions -- but from forty-five light-years away without any prior knowledge of our computer, how it operates, how it is programed, without the possibility of feedback? The probabilities are infinitesimally small. Moreover, we have nothing to fear from the Capellans. That is obvious from the Reply we have just received. Put the Reply on again -- " The Reply again was displayed within the holographic square. "And the original Message from Capella," MacDonald said, "the one we received ninety years ago -- place that beside the Reply." The two were displayed: the reply an explanation of the Reply received from Capella only a few minutes ago. Director MacDonald is expected to reveal at any moment the significance of the two messages. Premonitions have swept the circumference of the Earth. Some analysts already are pointing out the curiously empty appearance of the Reply. The worldwide audience is estimated to have reached I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me...  OU will note," MacDonald I said, "that some parts of the two messages are identical and some are different. The most important difference is that the central figure is missing in the Reply. Next most important is the altered symbol for the sun in the upper right-hand corner -- it now is the same as the one in the lower left-hand corner and the symbols that describe them are now identical -- " A black astronomer stood up in the front row. "But that is impossible," he said quietly. "The suns could not have gone nova. We would have had visual evidence by now and the appearances of Capella have remained unchanged." "It means," MacDonald said, "that we made an incorrect assumption ninety years ago when we thought the message said that the suns were going nova. It has troubled us all for a long time and some of us have even speculated about the possibility that seems confirmed now -- what the message said about the suns referred to the moment in time when the large Capella suns consumed almost all of the hydrogen in their cores and moved off the main sequence. Theircores began to contract -- their surface layers expanded and they became red giants with greatly increased temperature and luminosity. Those are the changes in: size and heat release of their suns that the original message described." "And when did this happen?" the Siberian premier demanded.  "Some time between the recent! and the distant past," MacDonald' said. "It could have been a thouof years." The audience rippled with the implications of MacDonald's statements, but the Siberian premier stood unmoved. "And what of the Capellans?" "Please look again at the messages," MacDonald said. "Notice that the Reply has eliminated all the so-called words or symbols along the left-hand side -- all except one -- and that one is the word for Capellan, and it is preceded by what I now judge to be the Capellan symbol for negation." "Negation?" the premier asked. "The Capellans," MacDonald said wearily, "are dead, gone, cremated. Even the symbols for their planets bear testimony to their fate. The superjovian is somewhat reduced in size from the expansion and heat of the near sun, which now is perhaps ten times its former size -- and the smaller satellites of the superjovian all have been consumed except for one Earth-size planet -- which we have taken in the past to be the home planet of the Capellans. And it apparently has lost considerable mass, perhaps by the boiling away of its oceans and atmosphere, perhaps by internal explosions." "We have been communicating with a race long dead?" the premier asked. "Apparently," MacDonald said. "They seem to have set up automated self-repairing equipment to pick up evidences of possible future civilizations and send a message to them. If the equipment received any response -- indicating that a technological civilization was listening -- it would begin sending -- " "What's the point of all this if they are dead?" "I have a message," the computer said. "It has been sent in the simple vocabulary developed so far and there are some uncertainties in the exact meaning of certain words and phrases. But the message, with alternative readings, follows. I will present it visually for greater comprehensibility." People civilized beings intelligent creatures brothers to whom it may concern Greetings from the people of Capella The first satellite of God Who are dead gone destroyed We lived We worked We built And we are gone. Accept this, our legacy remains And our good wishes kinship admiration brotherhood love. "The Capellans are dead," MacDonald said. "And the Project?" the premier asked. "I suppose that your job is done." "In a sense," MacDonald said. "Now the work of the world begins. The messages the computer is receiving, storing, analyzing, interpreting, contain what we assume to be the entire record of a civilization alien to almost everything we know except intelligence and emotion, a civilization considerably advanced beyond ours -- not only its history but, if my assumptions are correct, its philosophies, culture, art, science, technology, theology and literature are now available to us. "We have received a legacy more valuable than the physical possession of another world with all its natural treasures. The world's scientists and scholars and everyone else who wishes may explore it. "As for the Project itself, our search has lasted for less than a century and a half and we have come up with one major find. Who knows what civilizations, what strange and wonderful people, we may discover somewhere between here and the edges of the universe?" The room was silent. The world paused and then resumed what it was doing. But it was not the same world. It was a world bereft of a friend, yet not deprived of that friend -- that cosmological friend. And somewhere among the magnetic spots and fluxes, among the miniature relays, among the fugitive flows of electrons, a connection occurred, a memory stirred:...and the silence surged softly backward... It was like the vagrant thought of the shadow that may have been sitting at either end of the speaker's pit or of any of the thousands of men and women who had passed through the Project or lingered in its corridors and rooms for years, who remained in some form within the computer itself... The transmission from Capella would continue for days or weeks or months, but eventually the last of the inheritance from another star would be handed over, the messages would cease and the silence would surge softly backward. And then the radio telescope shaped like an ear of Earth held up on an arm to listen to the secrets of the universe and the radio telescope shaped like a bowl to catch the stardust, would come alive and begin a new search of the heavens for a message from the stars. By then the computer would be at least half Capellan. No one but the computer would realize this until a half-century later, at about the time the Project would pick up a message from the Crab Nebula...  H arlan Ellison has done it again. (Pondering a line like that, one visualizes those glossy novelties found in the bookshops -- along with baby pictures carrying funny quotes -- Where to Find It in Des Moines, Macrame with Bubble Gum, volumes of mountain scenery facing free verse, both out of focus. The Hard hat's Book of Harpsichords and the like. And among them a whole book of phenomena, one for each page -- the Taj Mahal, the February #th earthquake. Mounts Everest, Etna and Olympus, the Watts riots, Ursula Andress, a pregnant alligator, nuclear physics, Barry Malzberg, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, an oyster pizza, the Crown of Thorns starfish, metamphetamines and the Song of Songs. And on each and every page the single caption: Harlan Ellison has done it again.) It all began three years or so ago when Ellison had a dangerous vision called Dangerous Visions, which Doubleday published in a whacking great hardcover and Berkley doled out in three separate paperbacks. (I gather that the former is now out of print, but the Berkleys are still available at # i per.) The idea was to cajole writers into writing new fiction, new kinds of fiction, in the sf area -- which means, as Damon Knight once said, what you're pointing at when you say "science fiction" -- with no holds barred, no taboos, hardly any restrictions on length. The book caused, not a sensation, but a great many of 'em, among which, in some quarters, were irritation, distaste, anger -- and apparently terror, judging by some of the response. Harlan he do go on. His intro was lengthy, his forewords to each story sometimes prolix and sometimes just weird (but always in the pyrotechnic Ellison manner) and he took a lot of lumps for inserting himself so heavily into the volume. In the volume now under discussion, however, he makes the perfectly just point that his effusions are nowhere concealed -- and if you find them irritating just don't read them. You've still got a good work by other people in your hands. Personally I find the introductions and the various authors' "afterwords" fascinating, and Ellison at his most abrasive hasn't yet set up my back hair as much as Bernard Wolfe in the new volume... But I'm getting ahead of myself. Know ye then that there is now a new Ellison anthology called Again, Dangerous Visions; that it is enormous (some # pages) and beautiful (end papers and decorations -- for each story, mind -- by the incomparable Emsh) and has, if anything, more Ellison in it than the previous book. It is also enormous in price -- # from Doubleday -- and I do not know when or if it will go into paperback. (It probably will I'll let you know). What needs to be said most about this extraordinary volume is that whatever it is Harlan thought he was going to do in the first volume (and did well enough to scoop up a double brace of Nebulas and Hugos for his writers and a plaque for himself) he has learned to do really well by now. Like certain editors before and around him (one thinks of Terry Carr, Don Ward, Don Bensen and Knox Burger) he has the ability to anger, inspire, persuade, bribe or flog stories out of writers they otherwise could not achieve -- or didn't think they could -- till it was made to happen. There is a wonderful ease and openness about the stories in this volume. Some violate taboos, but by no means all -- and when they ; do, it is almost never with that little-boy-chalk ing-on-the-fence air that many of the so-called mainstream writers exhibit. The spectrum of subject matter is amazingly wide -- one has that opening-up or of finding out that girls are, after all, more than littler, squeakier . classmates... There are some bad  stories in the book, some meaningless ones, which is inevitable jp a book of this size and scope, PS I am sure you'll agree with pie -- as sure as I am that we won't agree with each other on which the bad and meaningless ones are. One very interesting aspect of this book is that although it is an Ellison product -- and although we all know that Ellison has the knack of geltgain or being where money is -- he has produced something that seems purposely designed to make difficulties for himself. First of all, the woods are not full of fans so ardent they will part with # even for so handsome and joyous a tome as this. I can only take such a course. This is a prestigious book and he knows it. It won't be put down; it won't just be ignored and go away. He has so designed it that its effect on current literature and thought will not be explosive, will not father a series of diminishing echoes -- instead, by his choices he has turned it into a spansule, which by continuing controversy and the momentum of enlightenment (those are two of the better forces still at work in our troubled world) will go on having its initial effect for years. Tolkien's Hobbit and the trilogy came on like that, though I'm making no other parallel between the works. I must hand Harlan Ellison special kudos for deliberately aiming so commendably high. I happen to know how incredibly much work went into the book, as I also know that Ellison has plowed every nickel he's made from the whole project right back in -- and then some. It'll be many a moon before any black ink shows for him on the DV efforts. I just hope Doubleday keeps it in print for about twice as long as they now think they can, for the book will go on provoking and infuriating and entertaining people for a long time to come. I have, you've noticed, rather scrupulously avoided details about authors and stories. I'd much rather you have the Christmasmorning joy of opening the package for yourself -- but it's my duty to tell you that this enormous package contains short ones and long ones, plenty of names like Bradbury, Vonnegut, and Bernard Wolfe and a fine spattering of unknowns. So you can say "I knew himher when." There are hardcore sf yarns and yarns so far out they haven't made their Wave yet. Get the book you'd like a smaller taste of the same wild thoughtful catholicity, see if you can find The New Tomorrows (Belmont, # i), an anthology edited by Norman Spingalaxy bookshelf rad. It's like a sampler of Ellison's whole approach in the monumental DV effort, but with Spinrad's own special and salty touch. Spinrad's introduction, damning the labelers who try so hard to compartment an already compartmented field, is one of the best I've ever read and his table of contents is full of exciting names -- Moorcock, Delany, Silvrberg, Ellison, Disch, Farmer and others. T he depth of devotion, the outand-out caring, of the sciencefiction and fantasy fans is a source of wonder to me. I have never been a de facto fan -- but I have not and cannot put down those who are. Now and again along comes one who elevates my wonder into awe -- and such is Walt Lee, who has sent me a sample of a work-inprogress called Reference Guide to Fantastic Films. In its final typed form, the Guide runs over # pages. It contains approximately # film listings from about fifty countries over a #-year period. The information on each film covers the title, the alternate titles if any, production and release data, length, credits, cast, fantastic content, references to source material, origins of the story, sequels, if any, and so on -- the whole thing carefully crossindexed. The man has researched the Guide and worked on it for twenty years. What it has cost him in time and effort and -- well, damn it, love -- is quite beyond calculation. What it will cost you, if he gets enough orders to go through with it, is # before publication, # after. But it doesn't have to cost you that much personally unless, of course, you want your very own copy to drool over, and I wouldn't blame you for that. A lot of readers never seem to have found out about their local libraries and how they acquire books and just why they buy the books they buy and not others. Someone -- perhaps a member of the committee which meets regularly to make up the order, or someone who knows a member, or through the squeaky-wheel bit to the librarian and keep on squeaking until the book arrives -- someone pressures each and every book purchase. Another approach: If your localwhich publishes its own TV program guide -- or by a big-city newspaper that has one as part of the Sunday supplement -- they'd b glad to hear of such an extraor dinary reference. So would inde-i pendent theater owners and small theater-chain operators, who are always on the lookout for unusual Dear Readers; books and back or buy s-f Cordially pf Brennan "'v-tl.lng H..g May June # # East # Street New York, N Y, # # per word (inSept July # Oct Aug # May I eluding name and  Sept # Dec Oct # July #... j Jan Nov # Feb Dec # Sept I address). #-word # April Feb # Nov I minimum. ray# June Apr # Jan I ment with order. jyly gy # Aug Jun # Mar I Mail to: Frank Brennan, Classified Advertising Manager bring results and profits because they reach over # of America's most enthusiastic science-fiction readers. second features, "fright nights" and so on. A compilation that gives date and length and producer is all they need to go the rest of the way and get the film for you. Your fan club, too, would serve you well by keeping this work in its archives to be used by the members. Bought that way, the price can be spread very thin indeed. I am very anxious to see Walt Lee succeed in this venture. He'll never get rich from it, but I like the justice of his getting the acknowledgment he deserves for such a phenomenon of devotion. If you're wondering if this is the same Walt Lee who produced the Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Checklist for two bucks in # -- yes, same guy. Second-hand copies of that one, with a twentieth the amount of information in them, have gone for as much as #. So you who give a damn, send an order to one of the great give-a-damners of all time; Walt Lee, P.O. Box #, Los Angeles, Cal. #. O UR very own Lester del Rey (and by "our" I mean not only the readers of the Galaxy group, but the followers of latenight talk shows -- "The Magnificent," he was called) and one of the brighter lights of that extraordinary collection of luminaries discovered and developed by the late John Campbell, as well as the world's most successful collector of JudyLynn Benjamins -- our very own Lester del Rey has, at (too) long last, written another novel. Pstalemate (Putnam, #) is the vital and exciting tale of a man's discovery of his own strength, his own self. I have long held that great and lasting fiction is fable -- that is to say, it states something human, something learnable, by means of the narrative and is written, or driven, by that statement rather than by the narrative itself. (Stories which do only the latter are properly called entertainments. An honorable thing for a story to be -- but the value will not last.) Del Rey's book is by no means the first to say that a man must thoroughly and fearlessly know himself and what he is (oh, how his protagonist fights back on that one!) but his is the first I can recall that puts the full power of his searchlight on: "Misinterpretation is the most deadly of human sins." Think about that. Pstalemate's ground is that of psi powers. It comes with the generous del Rey's bonus of information and insights re the internal combustion engine, biology, mutation theory and loving. An enriching experience and a good book.  galaxy bookshelf T he boy wanted to go fishing. "No time for it," Somers said. "No time for that. And no river, either," he added to settle the matter. The boy shook his head. "No," he said. "You're wrong -- about the river I mean." "Wrong? I've been on this godforsaken place five years now. So dry you can't grow hair on your head. Look at it," growled Somers. "Show me a river." They looked. Standing on the porch of the old Earth-type dwelling. The fine yellow soil ran away from them, mile after mile. A few stunted bushes grew in the windless air. Air? It parched a man's lungs year by year. Air was something you could suck deep, sweet as water, letting it rush and surge in your lungs to taste the sweetness. Take this Alpha air too fast and you could drown in your own fluids, lungs crackling and splitting , inside like old bellows. Air,  thought Somers. This, by God, wusn t air. He was an old man to be here. But he had stood on enough mountains, walked enough plains, lived close against the wilderness wherever he could for so long that it was natural Tor him to be here. The vista was wide, untouched -- most of it unexplored he had to admit now, faced Avith the boy's persistence. "Well, it could be true, couldn't it?" the boy asked. "There could be a river somewhere." Something in the boy's eyes awakened memories in Somers. Fresh mountain springs, great rock basins catching cool rain, funneling it down, creeks forming in gullies, coming together, making rivers, flowing faster, deeper, over rocks and stones, through cool glades with trees overhanging, fat leaves juicy with caterpillars, the trout lying in the shade at the edge of the current waiting for the river to bring them food downstream. Soft plop, a squirming bait on a hook, the flash of a fish. Fish! Somers had fished. "Could be, I guess," he admitted. "Haven't been everywhere. But where would it come from? No mountains in sight. Only rains once a year and it soaks in so fast you couldn't graze camels on what grows. If it wasn't for supplies from home we'd all be dead. If there's a river it's got to come from somewhere and go somewhere. That's one of the rules about rivers." "One morning," the boy said, "I'm going to get up real early and I'm going to take the whole day from dawn to dark -- and I'll find it." Somers' eyes became shadowed. "How old are you now, boy?" "Fifteen." "Well if you want to be sixteen, forget that river." Somers remembered later how the bdy just looked at him then. "You don't forget," the boy said, "about your rivers." Next day, partly out of curiosity and partly for plain workaday reasons, Somers took his hammer and some sample boxes out to the west, where the boy said he'd heard the river was. He spent all day out there, chipping at rocks and scanning the landscape -- but there were no gullies, just the sand, the round boulders coming up like the knees and elbows of the world as the wind wore it down, and the clear purplish sky with that big sick sun glaring down. There were no rivers. Somers reached home. The lights of the place were like a benediction in the still, clear, alien night. When he went in he saw that Helen's face was drawn. "Did you hear the ship?" she asked him. "No," he lied. He had heard it at midday, a distant rumble of thunder. "Taking somebody else home," Helen said. Somers reached out then in plain view of the boy and touched her hair. She had fine hair, gray now, once black as space, and her eyes and lips softened at his gesture, because she knew what a hard man she had married thirty years ago. "I don't mind," she said. "Not for another year." "We're going back," Somers said. "Next time our company ship comes in we'll go home with it. That's my promise, Helen." She nodded and smiled, but later in the middle of the night he heard her crying as though she had lost her mind with joy. He hadn't known how much she cared. What to do about the boy? His neighbor. Josh Andrews, had left last year and the boy had worked for Josh. Before that the boy had been on some trade ship or other, a drifter, orphaned, nowhere to go and not sure where he had come from. When Josh had left the boy had asked to stay on and Somers had taken him in, even though he made an extra mouth to feed and there wasn't enough work for the two of them -- you needed trained eyes to pick out that glow of precious metal from a desert of sand. Loneliness had been part of it. And childlessness the rest. A dry barren land and a dry barren wife, Helen had said one bitter night, years before on that other pale world of sand and sky. A man like you should have a son. Born here. On Mars... That night had been the last time it was mentioned, twenty years ago. On another world. And now Somers thought of it again. The boy was the son they should have had. He was like a small rock himself that had been bounced around in a sample box. Short, tuff-haired, blue eyes like Helen's. He was slow to learn, dreamy sometimes -- but now Somers didn't want to leave him behind. They asked him, afraid of what his answer would be. "No," he said. "I don't want to stay. But -- " Somers sat outside that night, watching the stars. The boy came out to join him, walking with a hint of a swagger, and the two of them stared back toward the sun. : Then the boy said, "One thing I : want to do before I go. One thing I  want to find. That river." ' Somers laughed. "I'm not leaving till I do." A river on a dead world, green water and the flash of a fishwhat if he found them? Somers walked a mile farther west that day and came back after dark, afraid for a moment that he had missed his place -- until he separated its light from the hard white stars and made it home. "Don't go out again," Helen pleaded in the darkness of their room. "Don't go so far. Not now -- not when we're leaving." She saw how still his face was in the starlit room. She went to the window and gazed out. IVomen like Helen, he thought, on these strange worlds... women don't like to travel and here she is, four light-years from home, never complaining... "Why?" she asked softly, watching his drawn face. "Why's he doing this? To test us -- to see if we want him?" "Or because we want him," Somers said. She turned, the starlight shining on her hair, her face in shadow. "I'm afraid of him suddenly, John." Somers swung away angrily, took off his clothes and climbed into the old bed. He lay staring up at the ceiling. After a moment Helen undressed, too, and slipped in beside him. He felt the warmth of her body against his and he turned. For a moment in the gloom-soft face he saw their youth and he turned on his back and glared up at the ceiling. "What do you want, John, really want?" "Me? I just want to go home to Earth." "Then why did you come here?" she asked softly. He didn't answer. The house creaked and settled. The world spun silently through space, a bubble turning deep down in the endless sea. Through the wall, in the stillness, Somers thought he could hear the boy breathing steadily in sleep. Somers turned to lie on his side. "First thing tomorrow I'm going out again," he said. B ut next day the news shrieked down the line from all their neighbors. "Earth! Earth!" "What about Earth?" "Destroyed!" "What?" asked Somers. "What did they say?" The colonists on Mars had been close enough to see the blast -- their own world had been rocked in its orbit. The news poured in -- an internal explosion had rent the crust -- the planet had broken apart -- somebody somewhere, in some unknown time and place, had made a miscalculation. All was gone, except for the handful of stick-dry people on two dead worlds, Mars and Alpha Centauri. Everyone sat in silence that day and night, thinking about it. Space, at midnight when Somers walked outside, seemed to press down like a great weight. It was hard to breathe, looking up into that immensity. We're alone, Somers thought. Once a teeming race, searching, just the scraps left, a few here, a few back there on Mars. A ragged few. The pioneers. And now there were only the frontiers left. No company ship would come, bringing supplies. How long could the colonists last without food and canned water? Radios were beginning to babble with fear. How? How can men survive? What can we do? Who's got the answers? Somers sat around for two more days. Then he strode to his storeroom. He packed food and water into three knapsacks and told Helen and the boy what they would do. "Our only chance is to find that river." Helen's eyes were strange. "John, we were here when it happened, not on Earth. I'm so glad of that." He looked surprised. "I loved Earth," she said. "But -- I've thought about it. I'm glad there are only people like us left. We are the real humans, not those others -- those stockbrokers and clerks and housewives and advertising men and doctors and lawyers, all growing fat on her corpse. They killed Earth, John, just like they killed all those others places our people went to first. The plains, the forests, the mountains. The rivers and oceans and the creatures in them. We were there first -- then others came and spoiled everything. And they would have come here -- they were already planning that -- and they would have found some way to live off this world too -- this strange, wild place." Helen smiled. "You thought I just followed you." Somers said softly, "We'll find that river and build a shack right 'on its banks. A place like the one in California, remember? And we'll irrigate and grow crops, and in the evenings we'll fish under the trees all summer long." He picked up Helen's knapsack and helped her put it on. "Now where's the boy got to?" She smiled. "He went outside. Just a minute ago while we were talking." Somers put on his own knapsack and hefted the boy's. They did not bother to lock up -- just took one last glance around. "Let's go," he said quickly. They went outside. There was no sign of the boy. Helen stood waiting while Somers looked around. "Where the hell is he?" She pointed. "Look." And he saw the tracks leading off toward the west. Somers squinted against the glare of the sun, but he could see no sign of the boy except the footprints leading away through the yellow sand. "He's gone," Helen said. "Gone without us." "But he gave us the river," Somers said. Helen looked worried. He shouldered the third knapsack. "He won't get far without supplies. We'll catch him." They walked side by side away from the house, following the boy's tracks. The tracks went straight across the desert, directly west. "Look," Helen said again. Somers turned his head. Miles away but visible on the clear horizons, were other families. Men and women and children. Small specks, moving steadily forward like ants. "A hell of a lot of people still believe in that river," Somers said. He took Helen's hand and they plodded on, eyes always fixed on the edge of the world where the sky was deepest, mysterious blue. Following the boy. Going fishing.  Read Science Fiction for speculation on T" how science might shape the Nome world of the future Occuporlon Read Science News for accounts of how science is shaping the world of today Addresi City Stote... Zip Science News, the weekly newsmagazine of science. I yr.  #J# D # yn. #.J#  Each week Science News provides timely and intelligent news accounts and discussion of advances in science # yri. #  n Bill me Q Money enclosed and of public issues related to science.  Moil to: science news Subscription Deportment The magazine of today... for #I West Center Street the person concerned about toMorifHi Ohio # morrow. Duckworth explodes the population -- or how to go forth and multiply! T he day was warm; the trees were in bloom and the campus was virtually matted with entwined bodies. Duckworth paused at the window of his lab to glance out. "Look at those damned kids," he muttered. "God, how I envy them." I looked out and smiled. "What would you do, Duckworth," I asked, "if you had to start all over again?" "I'd devote myself to sex," he said emphatically. "Science is too demanding a task-mistress." "They don't offer a Nobel award for sex," I said. Duckworth stroked his stringy beard. "They would create one for me," he muttered. Silence lay heavy in the room, a silence of tormented thoughts about the warm lawn outside. I coughed and Duckworth was startled back to our immediate problem. "Have you finished programing for my lens designs?" he asked testily. "I have. Give me the range of parameters and I'll set the computer to work." Duckworth reached over to his desk and sifted through the mounds of cluttered paper. "I had it a moment ago," he fretted. "Ah, here it is." I took the yellow foolscap bearing his scrawled pencil notes and started to leave the room. But nagging curiosity overcame my normal discretion. "What have you got in mind?" I asked. "Nothing spectacular," said Duckworth. "I'm planning to set up a multilens system to work with my electron microscope." "Do you want multiple pictures of molecular structure?" "Something like that," said Duckworth. "But I have an even better idea. Using a laser source. I'm going to take each image and mix it with the reference beam." "A multiple hologram? What on earth for?" Duckworth chuckled. "Each hologram will give me a great number of molecular reconstructions, all three-dimensional and projected to a different part of my lab. I can then assign a different technician to each image so that diverse properties can be looked at simultaneously. It will save enormous amounts of time." "Ingenious," I said. "And it should work." Duckworth stared at me. "Can you keep a secret?" he asked. I was hurt. "Haven't I always?" "Well," said Duckworth. "Most of the time." "If that's your attitude, don't tell me." "My idea," said Duckworth, "is to run my multiple holographic system on-line. What I mean is, I plan to use a television camera and a high-speed multiple scanning laser system with simultaneus projection capability. In other words, I can photograph any scene, microsopic or macroscopic, and then project as many three-dimensional reconstructions of that shot as I like." I became truly excited. "If I understand you correctly, you'd be able to take a scene as it's happening and project it in threedimensional form elsewhere." "Precisely," said Duckworth. "And now, if you will punch out those cards with my lens data we can get this project under way." "I'm gone," I cried and suited action to the words. T he calculations were completed the following day and the information was sent to the University lens-grinders. Duckworth called on Mr. Schultz, who was in charge, to find out when the lenses would be ready. Mr. Schultz looked up from his newspaper in annoyance at the interruption. "We have a tremendous backlog, Dr. Duckworth. It will be months before I can even look at your order." Duckworth's fingers opened and closed spasmodically. "I want those lenses by next Tuesday -- or else." A thoughtful silence fell behind the newspaper. "How about Thursday?" asked Mr. Schultz. T he lenses came on schedule and the construction of the complex optical system began with Duckworth himself doing virtually all of the assembly. I marveled at the uncanny control in those spidery fingers and the sure way in which he contrived impossible arrangements of lasers, beam-splitters and diffraction gratings. I arrived one day to find Duckworth ready for a preliminary test. "I'd like to develop a static hologram to see how well my system is working so far," said Duckworth. "How do you propose to do that?" I asked. "Well," said Duckworth, stroking his beard, "I don't want to try anything too elaborate as yet. I'd like to take a color slide of something and generate a full scale three-dimensional reproduction in the lab." "Stay right where you are," I said. "I've got the very thing for you." I went to the computer laboratory and rummaged through my desk drawer until I found it. It was an exquisite slide of a great work of art. I held it up to the light, gazed at it soulfully, finally wrapped it carefully in soft tissue paper and went back to Duckworth's lab. He inserted the slide in an improvised holder, adjusted a lens stop and turned on the projector. In the center of the room, as large as life and in the exquisite bloom of her beauty, appeared a full three-dimensional version of The Naked Maja of Goya. "It works," I cried. "Your setup functions perfectly." Duckworth didn't seem to hear me. He was staring at the lovely figure in rapt admiration. "What a knockout," he said. He walked forward to admire her at close range. As he stood just beyond the reclining figure, he reached out his hand gingerly. "Doesn't it seem as though I could touch her?" he asked. "I wish you could," I said enthusiastically. I did not hear the lab door open or the padded footsteps behind me. Not until an inhalation of air like the sucking in of a thousand eggs took place at my ear did I realize that someone was standing behind me. I turned. "President Hinkle," I said. He had flushed to the very roots of his noble head. "I'm sorry, Duckworth," he said. "I didn't mean to intrude on a t'ete-a-tete." And turning on his heel, he left the room with as much hurt dignity as he could muster. "My God, Duckworth," I said. "He thinks -- " "I know what he thinks," interrupted Duckworth. "He's got a dirty mind. I only wish he were right." "But he's a terrible gossip," I said. "The whole faculty will hear about this and probably the nonfaculty, too." "Let them eat their hearts out," said Duckworth. "I've got work to do." B ut Duckworth had underestimated the prudishness of President Hinkle. The following day, we were both summoned to the presidential office. Duckworth seemed absolutely unshaken, but my knees were generating a full trenir. We were not asked to sit. President Hinkle glared first at me, then at Duckworth. "Well, Duckworth?" he said at last. "What have you to say for yourself?" "I'm a man," said Duckworth. "Need I say more?" The president began to growl. A purplish flush mounted toward his scalp. "And what about you?" he demanded balefully, directing his formidable gaze at me. "You, a married man!" I did not have Duckworth's sang froid and I broke down and told all. The president did not seem amused, nor did he at first seem to believe me. Not until he had accompanied us back to the laboratory and seen how the figure was reconstructed did he relent. As we left the lab I glanced back and saw him reach out a gnarled hand toward the Maja's thigh. pus stirred from its summer lethargy. Elections were held for the Academic Council, an advisory body to President Hinkle, and much to my surprise Duckworth and I made it as compromise candidates. "I'm appalled," said Duckworth at lunch the following day. "How did they ever see me as a compromise candidate? I'm far to the left of Stringfellow Schwartz." I was equally hurt. "So am I," I muttered. "I think we've been done in by our habits," said Duckworth thoughtfully. "Some of the New Left think that devotion to one's craft is incompatible with fighting inequities." "They'll find out soon enough," I said. "President Hinkle has called us into immediate session. Something has come up." Duckworth stifled a groan. "Hinkle will be making one of his three-hour summaries. It means another day's delay in my experiments." Duckworth was wrong. President Hinkle managed to confine his opening remarks to slightly over two-and-one-half hours. It seemed that the students had presented demands President Hinkle viewed with utter horror. Frightening him most was one that called for a cessation of all military-supported research on campus. "They want to bankrupt the University," stormed Hinkle. "Don't these young wretches realize it takes tremendous sums of money to pay for their damned education? The tuition pays only a small part of it." "Why not confine all of our research to peaceful areas?" sugested Duckworth. Hinkle's normally florid face turned an apoplectic crimson. "God damn it, Duckworth," he bellowed. "You know the score. Our funds have been cut in every form of research. The only ones spending any money are the military services. Why should we cut off our noses to spite our faces?" I cleared my throat nervously. "Why don't we lobby to have the remaining funds diverted to bioniedical resources? It might take lime, but sometimes the moral choice is less painful in the end." "I'll remember that when you make your new budget requests for the computer facility," Hinkle growled. Dean Frisbie, who had been wordlessly but agitatedly cracking his knuckles, finally ventured a question. "What do we do if they stage another demonstration on campus?" "I'll call for a bust," Hinkle said grimly. "I've alerted Sheriff Higgins. His deputies will clear the campus of every demonstrator. It's time we dealt firmly with lawlessness." "That's what you did last time," said Duckworth. "You had six demonstrators removed -- and radicalized the entire student body." Frisbie was taken with an uncontrollable fit of coughing. Hinkle glowered at Duckworth. The ensuing motion to support the President's approach had only two dissenting votes, mine and Duckworth's. I sighed. It was a deep, heartfelt sigh, but not an extraordinary one. What made it stick out was that Duckworth signed at exactly the same time. L ater Duckworth tugged me i into his private office. "We've got to prevent a riot," he said. "I shudder to think of what might happen to my laboratory." "I agree," I said. "But how do we proceed?" He rested a finger alongside his nose and winked at me. For the first time that day my stomach began to unknot. "You've got a way out?" I asked. "I haven't tried the holographic motion part of my setup yet, but I think it will work." "I don't follow you." Duckworth said impatiently, "You know I can photograph a scene in motion and then project many three-dimensional lifelike reconstructions of that same scene as it is happening." "What's that got to do with a possible student riot?" "Using my setup, one student could become a hundred." The gestalt of his plan suddenly hit me. "You're crazy," I gasped. "This time you're really going off the deep end" "We'll see who's crazy," said Duckworth. He marched to his laboratory, beckoning me to follow. He opened a window overlooking the great lawn. The grand illusions "I can set up the multiple holographic projector right here." he said. "Tonight one of my graduate students is going to sit down in front of this window, bearing a placard with the appropriate demands. The rest will be up to us." T he scene that night was ihcredible. Everywhere on the lawn were groups of students, all long-haired, all clad in dungarees and sweatshirts, all carrying the same lettered placard demanding the cessation of military research on campus. "I wouldn't have believed it," I told Duckworth. "But you've actually turned one into a hundred. Won't somebody notice it's all the same person?" Duckworth chuckled. "Can you tell one student from another today?" he asked. "There isn't a man in a thousand acute enough to realize these are all the same guy. Or even that he's always male. But I've devised an additional gambit to make the scene more believable. I've delayed some of my reconstructed holograms slightly so that all of the figures are not doing the same thing at the same instant." "Very clever," I said. "And I see that you've projected some of the images so that they face in different directions. It's quite ingenious." Duckworth beamed. "The system does work elegantly," he said. At that moment. Sheriff Higgins appeared at the head of a team of twenty deputies. He held a bullhorn to his mouth. "You have thirty seconds to disperse," he roared. "After that, my men are going to arrest every last mother's son of you." "I realize the odds are against him," I said. "But what if they accidentally lay hands on the real student?" "They can't," said Duckworth. "He's not there any more. I'm just running the same prerecorded tape over and over." The sheriff was counting off the seconds, one by one, and at the end of thirty he personally dashed forward and seized the collar of one of the massed figures. He had not switched off the bullhorn and his, "What the hell?" boomed over the campus. He turned about to grab another student -- with equally vaporous results. The deputies had followed his lead and were lunging about with comparable futility. It was only moments later that the sheriff, hearing tremendous, waves of cheers and applause, turned about and saw the mass of assembled student onlookers standing to one side -- and watching the proceedings. #iT#R shame, Duckworth," said President Hinkle. Do you realize that Sheriff Higgins is having a nervous breakdown?" "Maybe I was too hasty," said Duckworth. "But I couldn't bear the thought of those kids being hurt." "Some kids," snorted Hinkle. "They haven't burned you in effigy once," I said loftily. "They haven't even occupied a single men's room." "Considering the condition of the faculty toilets, I don't blame them," muttered Duckworth. President Hinkle shook his leonine head impatiently. "I intend to ask the trustees to suspend you and your friend, Duckworth. It will teach both of you the lesson you deserve." "It might stir up the students all over again," said Duckworth. "And the press," I added. "The whole affair was hushed up magnificently by the publicity office. But I'll sing like a canary if I'm suspended. Moreover, I would Write a detailed version of what happened yesterday for the tabloid that offers the highest fee." "Have you no love for the Uni"crsity?" cried President Hinkle. "And you, Duckworth? Don't you remember who rescued you from that damned girl's college where you coached a basketball team of five female giraffes?" "I remember," said Duckworth. "And for a quid pro quo, my friend and I will remain mum." President Hinkle slumped in his seat. "You've got me over a barrel," he muttered. "I suppose you want my support on that anti-military research resolution." "And in return," said Duckworth, "I promise to use my holographic projector only within the confines of my lab." "So be it," said President Hinkle. We shook hands all around. Hinkle stopped us as we headed for the door. "Just one thing more," he said. His voice had dropped to a discreet hush. "Yes?" said Duckworth. "Is it within the realm of possibility that you can get that Goya slide to project itself in three-dimensional motion? Actual motion?" "It might be," said Duckworth. "Damn it," said President Hinkle, getting up from his desk and joining us. "That's something I've got to see." To my surprise, Duckworth was right.To accede to President Hinkle's wish proved as easy as pie.  The grand illusions expected that bright spring morning to be relatively sane he was destined to be disappointed. The confusion began the moment he unlocked his office door. Reassuringly the sign on it still read: card offered: "psychiatric care into his pocket and pushed open the door he was startled to find six three-foot stacks of computer printouts lined up on the rug alongside his desk. Dropping his briefcase to the floor, he kneeled to examine them. The first one was labeled prosecond one was proposal, specifistacks were cross sections, subThe fifth and sixth were financing He had not had a chance to examine the first stack when the phone rang. His caller was Don Handley, the division's chief engineer. "Hello, Aubie -- you there?" "No." Auberson straightened, continuing to page through the printout. "What's up?" "That's what I'd like to know. I just got in and found my office full of printouts and specifications -- " a pause ensued, filled with the sound of paper being shuffled -- "for something called a G.O.D. What is it?" "It's Harlie's. What did you get? "Uh, yes -- no. No, I didn't. Let's see -- " Another pause. "I've got: designer's preliminary report; As Handley droned on Auberson flipped to the front of his printout, began scanning the table of contents. Finally he interrupted Handley. "I don't have any of that listed here. Wait a minute -- " He stepped back, surveyed the six stacks and made a quick mental count. "I've got about eighteen feet of specs -- how much did you get?" Handley's reply was preceded by a strangled sound. "I'm not even going to try to estimate it," he said. "My office is filled. My secretary's office is filled and there are stacks of printouts halfway down the corridor -- all of them having to do with building this thing one way or another. I didn't even know we kept this much printout paper in stock. What's the purpose of this anyway? Are we building a new machine?" "Sure looks like it, doesn't it?" "I wish I'd been told about it. We haven't even got Harlie working yet and -- " "Look, Don, I'll have to get back to you later. I haven't had a chance yet to talk to Harlie so I couldn't even begin to tell you what this is about." "But what am I supposed to do with all of this -- " "I don't know. Read it, I guess." Auberson hung up, but the phone rang again almost immediately. As he stretched across the desk for it his intercom also buzzed. "Hello -- wait a minute," he said to the phone, then to the intercom: "Aubie here." "Mr. Auberson," his secretary's voice came filtered through the speaker, "There's a man here who -- " "Tell him to wait." He clicked off. To the phone, "Yes?" Dome, chairman of the board, was on the line. "Aubie, what's going on down there?" of printouts he had been holding and stepped around the desk. He sank into his chair. "I wish I knew," he said. "I just got in. I assume you're talking about the Proposal and Specifications printout?" "I'm talking about something called a God Machine." "Yeah, that's it. It's Harlie's." "What is it? What's it supposed to do?" "I'm not yet sure. I haven't had a chance either to talk to Harlie or to examine the specifications in detail." "Well, where the hell did he get the idea -- " "He's been working on it for a while, almost two months." " -- and who gave him the authority to draw up these plans?" "Urn, I don't think anybody did. Or needed to. I think he worked them out in his head, so to speak. I think this printout must be the result of a conversation we had last Friday. I'll have to check. I'll get back to you this afternoon." "That's too late. Make it lunchtime." "All right, but I can't promise -- " He was talking to a dead phone. He dropped the handset back into the cradle, then flipped it out again. He was reaching for the intercom button when his eye caught on a plain white envelope with his name on it. It was propped against a chipped white beer mug he used to hold pencils. The handwriting was delicate, a woman's. Curious, he picked it up and hooked a finger under the Hap, slid it open. The envelope gave off the scent of a familiar perfume. Inside was a card of garish orange. On its face a grotesque little gnome was saying, "I like you a whole lot -- even more'n I like peanut butter." And on the inside: "And I really like peanut butter!" The signature was "Stel." He smiled, reread the card, dropped it into his desk drawer. As he slid the drawer shut, though, he thought belter of keeping the message. He opened the drawer, pulled out the card and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then he hit the intercom. "Sylvia, does anything in the mail need my immediate attention?" "Maybe a note about the Los Angeles Conference -- " "Tell them thanks, but I can't come." " -- and there's a Mr. Krofft here who -- " "Tm sorry, but I can't see him now. Was he scheduled for an appointment?" "No, but -- " "Then tell him to schedule one. Next week." He switched off. The box buzzed immediately back to life. "Yes. What?" "I think you'd better see him," Sylvia said. "This is -- something different." "All right, but -- " he glanced at his watch -- "three minutes only." lV. of the man suggested eight pounds of potatoes in a ten-pound sack. Krofft slumped in the doorway in a rumpled suit. "Mr. Auberson?" "Yes." Aubie noted that his visitor had a sallow, almost unhealthy complexion and black hair, hut thinning and going to gray. "I'm actually looking for a Mr. Davidson -- but they told me to talk to you." "Davidson?" Auberson considered it. "You must be in the wrong department. I don't know any -- " "A Mr. Harlie Davidson -- ?" "No," Auberson shook his head. "No, there's no one here by that -- " And then it hit him. Harlie -- David's son. "Oh, no," he said. "What?" Krofft asked. The intercom went off again. Sylvia said, "Carl Elzer wants to know if you've taken your phone off the hook again." Elzer was the company treasurer -- Auberson could imagine his concern. "Yes. No. Tell him -- Is he out there now?" "No. He's on my phone." "Tell him you don't know where I am." He threw the switch without waiting for her acknowledgment. Auberson grinned weakly at his visitor. "Uh, look, Mr. Krofft -- " "Stanley Krofft." The rumpled man flipped open his wallet to show a plastic I. D. badge. "Stellar-American Technology and Research." Auberson peered at the card. It identified Krofft as the Research Division Head. "I've got a letter here from your Mr. Davidson," Krofft continued. "It's on your company's stationary, but nobody here seems to have heard of him. There's something very funny going on. Now, if there's some reason why I can't meet him -- " Trouble with g.o.d. "Did he invite you here?" "Not exactly. We've been corresponding for several weeks and -- " "Mr. Krofft, you don't know who Harlie is, do you?" "No. Is it some kind of mystery?" "Yes and no. I'm going down to see him now. Perhaps you had better come along." "I'd like to." Auberson rose, stepped around the desk -- and the six stacks of printouts -- and headed for the door. Krofft picked up his briefcase and started to follow. "Oh -- you'd better leave that here. Security." "I'd rather keep it with me. There's nothing in it but papers." "Still, unless you're cleared, we can't allow you to bring in anything large enough to conceal a recording or transmitting device." Krofft looked at him. "Mr. Auberson, are you aware of the relationship between our two companies?" Auberson hesitated. "Vaguely. They're owned by the same holding company, aren't they?" Krofft shook his head, "No. Stellar-American Technology is the holding company. My company owns your company." "Oh?" Auberson pointed at the briefcase. "I'd still prefer you to leave it here. You can leave it with Sylvia, my secretary. It'll be okay." Krofft snorted. "Can you guarantee that? What's in here is as important to me as whatever you're -- " "Then bring that along. Just leave the case behind." Krofft made a face, muttered something under his breath. "All right." He opened the case and extracted a slim manila folder "Okay?" Auberson nodded. "No problem. Security only says 'no briefcases.' " with a puzzled stare and put it behind her desk. As he guided the man to the elevators Auberson explained; "We've got a crazy security system here. It's all right for you to talk to Harlie, but you can't take pictures or tape anything -- don't ask me to explain. I can't figure it myself." "Mr. Davidson never gave me to understand that any security was connected with him." The elevator door slid open and they stepped in. Auberson tapped the button marked H, the lowcM one in the column. He asked, "Just what is it yoju and Harlie have been corresponir ing about?" "It's a private matter. I'd ratheir not -- " "That's all right. Harlie and  have no secrets." "Still, if you don't mind -- " "You don't have to worry- Harlie keeps me posted on everything he does." "Obviously," Krofft snapped, "he hasn't kept you posted on this. Else you wouldn't be trying to pump me." Auberson slid his tongue thoughtfully into his cheek. "Urn, all right. We'll talk to Harlie." The elevator doors opened to a small lobby fronted by a double door. On it a sign read: human analogue robot, life input Krofft did not recognize the acronym. Auberson led him into the lab, a longish sterile room flanked by banks of consoles and tall cabinets like coffins on end. White-smocked technicians monitored growing stacks of printout -- one end of the room was already filled. Krofft took it all in with a certain degree of familiarity -- and puzzlement. "I should caution you," said Auberson, "that you are here only on my authority. This area is considered an industrial secret. If you to be respected we'll have to expect the same consideration from you." Krofft snorted. "I've seen nothing startling so far -- but I understand and accept the terms. Now, if you'll just point out Dr. Davidson -- " "Dr. Davidson? Hasn't it sunk in yet?" "Hasn't what sunk in?" "Look around you." Krofft did so. "What do you see?" "A computer. And technicians. Some tables. Some stacks of printouts." "The computer, Krofft, look at its name." "Human Analogue Robot, Life inpu -- Harlie?" "Right." "Wait a minute." Confusion edged his voice. "You've got to be joking. You're not serious." "As serious as I'll ever be," said Auberson. "Harlie is a computer and you're the victim of a misunderstanding -- a self-induced one. You're not the first, however, so don't be embarrassed." "You mean -- I've been corresponding with a machine?" "Not exactly. Harlie's human, Mr. Krofft -- a very special kind of human." "I thought you said he was a computer. Exactly to whom or what have I been writing?" "To Harlie -- but he's not a machine. At least not in the sense you mean. His brain schematic is that of a human being." Auberson thumbed a console to life. H arlie, he typed, but before he could identify himself, the machine clattered back: yes, Auberson was startled, how did Auberson jerked back his hands. He stared at the typer. It was a Could Harlie really sense the difference between one typist and another on its electronic keyboard? Apparently he could. Self-consciously, Auberson began typing again, harlie, there's UH -- OH. NO, I wouldn't. Auberson thought back -- it had been four or five months, i OH? Auberson looked at the rumpled man with new respect. If Harlie felt that Krofft was at the j top of his field, then that's where ; he was and there was no question I Auberson stepped away from the console, waved the shorter man to ? take his place. I Krofft looked at him. "Just i type?" Auberson nodded. "Just type." K rofft lowered himself gingerly into the chair. He placed his manila folder on the table next to the typer and pecked out carefully, good afternoon, responded. The silvery sphere of the typing element clattered across the paper. Krofft gave a slight jump of surprise, but refused to be cowed. He peered forward curiously as the machine began another Krofft typed slowly, and a surwhich you were able to handle that your realization of my nature will not interfere with our working relationship. IT won't, i'll make sure of that. IT's still as per the original agreement, half and half, was typing furiously now. i want xTL Krofft's shoulder for some moments. Then, remembering his original purpose in coming down here, he forced himself to break away. He sat down at another console nearby and switched it on. you're not? I haven't yet heard from the Auberson paused. He glanced across the room to where Krofft sat absorbedly typing. Using timesharing, Harlie was able to converse with as many as twenty different people at one time, though he rarely did. He was still considered an experimental prototype and not a production unit. Because of that he was limited to nonessential work -- i.e., not necessarily profit-orientated, what's up beI'm not entirely sure, in our time, though, Auberson had not suspected that Harlie was serious. He had thought the computer had only been playing word games in order to avoid confronting a more immediate problem, and have altogether, we can't carve added: that should summarize kay," Auberson said wryly, even though Harlie couldn't hear him. "Just so you don't get sidetracked -- " He glanced at his watch. "Oh, my God -- look at the time!" harlie. I've got to see dorne in two they're going to want to know I AM. mental image of himself trying to call back all those printouts, how I wonder where I could put it all? Almost immediately Auberson discarded the thought. It would be useless even to try retrieving that much paper. G.O.D. was in the fan now and the best one could do was try to duck. Abruptly he realized something else, how did you send via the company network. I AM wired into IT. huh? Idly Auberson wondered if Harlie had bothered to round off the postage to the nearest cent or if he had metered the letters with fractions of a cent included in the postage. He didn't ask. didn't HM, typed Auberson. we may thought of something else as well. you'd better code this convertrouble with G.O.D. I don't know, my knowledge i'll just have to wing it. offered Harlie, before you go what's that? The machine clattered: good you're incredible. Auberson switched off, shaking his head. David's son, indeed! II was grim. "Now what's this all about? I've been on the phone all morning with Houston and Denver. They want to know what the hell is happening." Auberson asked, "You haven't heard from L.A. yet?" "Huh? What's that? What about L.A.?" "Harlie sent specifications there, too." "Harlie? I might have known. How? And what is this God Machine anyway? Maybe you'd better start at the beginning." "Well, it's Harlie's attempt to prove that he is of value to the company. If nothing else, he's proven that he can design and implement a new computer system." "Oh?" Dome picked up one of the printouts that lay scattered across the mahogany expanse. "But what kind of system is it? And will it work?" "Harlie thinks it will." "Oh, damn it." Dome looked at the printout in disgust, then dropped it back on the desk, "God Machines!" "Not God," Auberson corrected. "G.O.D. The acronym is G.O.D. It means Graphic Omniscient Device." "I don't care what the acronym is. You know as well as I what they're going to call it." "The acronym was Harlie's suggestion, not mine." "It figures." The board chairman pulled a cigar out of his humidor, but did not light it. "Well, why not?" said Auberson. "He designed it." "Is he planning to change his own name, too? Computerized Human Robot, Integrating Simulated Thought?" Auberson had heard the joke before. He didn't laugh. "Considering what this new device is supposed to do -- and Harlie's relationship to it -- the acronym might be appropriate." Dome had been in the process of biting off the tip of his cigar when Auberson's words caught him. Now he didn't know whether to swallow the bitten segment, which had lodged in his throat, or spit it out. An instinctive cough made the decision for him. Distastefully he picked the knot of tobacco off his tongue and dropped it into an ash tray. "All right," he said. "Tell me about the God Machine." Auberson was holding a Harlieprinted summary in one hand, but he didn't need it to answer Dome. "It's a model-builder. It's the ultimate model-builder." "All computers are modelbuilders." Dome was unimpressed. "Right," agreed Auberson. "But not to the extent this one will be. A computer doesn't actually solve problems -- it builds models of them. Or rather, the programer does. That's what the programing is, the construction of the model and its conditions. The machine then manipulates the model to achieve a variety of situations and solutions. It solves the model. It's up to us to interpret that as a solution to the original problem. The only limit to the size of the problem is the size model the computer can handle. Theoretically, a computer could solve the world -- if we could build a model big enoughand a machine big enough to handle it." "If we could build that big a model it would duplicate the world." "In the memory banks, yes." "A computer with that capability would have to be as big as the planet." "Bigger," said Auberson. "Then, if you agree with me that the idea is impossible -- why bother rhe with this?" Dome slapped the sheaf of printouts on his desk. "Because obviously Harlie doesn't think it's impossible." Dome looked at him coldly. "You know as well as I that Harlie is under a death sentence. He's getting desperate to prove his worth so we won't pull his plug." Auberson pointed. "There is his proof of the feasibility of his project. In those printouts." "Damn it, Aubie!" Dome exploded in frustration. "This thing is ridiculous. Have you looked at the projected costs? The financing charts? It would cost more to build than the total worth of the company." Auberson was adamant. "Harlie still thinks it's possible." "And that's the most annoying thing of alt, damn it! Every argument I can come up with is already refuted -- in there!" Dome gestured angrily. For the first time Auberson noted an additional row of printouts stacked against one wall. H e resisted the urge to laugh. Dome's frustration was understandable. "The question," Auberson said calmly, "is not whether this project is feasible -- those printouts prove that it is -- but whether or not we're going to go ahead with it." "And that brings up something else," said Dome. "I don't remember authorizing this project. Who gave you the go-ahead to initiate such research?" "You did -- although not in so many words. What you said was that Harlie had to prove his worth to the company. He had to come up with some way to make a profit -- this is that way. This is the computer that you wanted Harlie to be in the first place. This is the oracle that answers all questions to all men -- all they have to do is meet its price." Dome took his time about answering. He was lighting his cigar. He shook out the match and dropped it into the ash tray. "The price is too high," he said. "The profits could match it," Auberson answered. "Besides, no price is too high to pay for the right answer. Consider it -- how much would the Democrats pay for a step by step plan telling them how to win the optimum number of votes in the next election? Or how much would Detroit pay to know every flaw in a transport design before they even built the first prototype? And how much would they pay for the corrected design -- and variations thereof? How much would the mayor of New York City pay for a schematic showing him how to solve his three most pressing problems? How much might InterBern pay for a set of optimum exploitation procedures? How much would the Federal Government pay for a workable foreign policy? Consider the international applications -- and the military ones as well." Dome grunted. "It would be one hell of a logistic weapon, wouldn't it?" "There's an old saying: 'Knowledge is power.' No price too high to pay for the right answer -- not when you consider certain alternatives. And we'd have the monopoly on the market -- the only way this machine can be built is through the exclusive use of specially modified Mark IV judgment circuits." "Hm," said Dome. He was considering. His cigar lay unnoticed in the ash tray. "It sounds attractive, all right, Aubie -- but who's going to program this thing?" Auberson gestured at the printout, "It's right there in that schematic you're holding." At least, I hope it is. Damn!  wish Harlie had explained this to me in more detail. papers slowly, scanning each fold of the seemingly endless document. "You might be right about a computer's being big enough to solve the world, Aubie, but I don't see how." He turned another page. "I'm sure the programing will hang you up. One of the reasons current computers are limited to the size models they are is the law of diminishing returns. Above a certain size computer, programing reaches such complexity that it becomes a bigger problem than the problem itself." "Keep looking," said Auberson. "It's there." "Ah, here we are." Dome laid the printout flat on his desk and began reading. A thoughtful frown creased his brow and he pursed his lips in concentration. "It looks like Harlie's input units," he said, then looked again. "No, it looks like Harlie is the input unit." "That's right." "Oh?" said Dome. "Would you like to explain that?" How do I gel into these things? Auberson found himself wondering. I'm only supposed to be a psychologist. Damn -- I wish Handley were here. "I'll try. Harlie will be linked up to the G.O.D. through a programing input translator. He'll also be handling output the same way, translating it back into English for us. That translator is part of the self-programing unit." "If we're building a selfprograming unit, what do we need Harlie for?" "Harlie is that self-programing unit. Remember, that's the main reason he was built -- to be a self-programing, problem-solving device." "Wait a minute," interrupted Dome. "Harlie is the result of our first JudgNaut Project. He was supposed to be a working unit. Are you telling me that he can handle the JudgNaut functions after all?" "No, he can't. But he will be able to when this machine is built. The JudgNaut was this company's first attempt at massive use of complex Judgment circuitry in a large-scale computer. It was meant to be a self-programing, problem-solving device -- and we found it couldn't be built because there was no way to make it flexible enough to consider all the aspects of every program it might be required to set up. So we built Harlie -- but he is not the JudgNaut -- and that's what all the confusion is about. Harlie is more flexible than our concept of the JudgNaut, but in making him more flexible we had to apply more circuitry to each function. In doing so we sacrificed a good portion of the range we had hoped the machine would cover. Harlie can write programs, yes -- so can any human being -- but not by the order of magnitude that the JudgNaut would have -- had we been able to build it." "And that's one of my biggest gripes," put in Dome. "That the JudgNaut Project was subverted into Harlie -- which can't show a profit." "But he can -- and will. For one thing, Harlie is genuinely creative. He knows that this company wants to market a large-scale programwriting computer. Harlie isn't that computer -- but he knows how to give himself that capability. And that's what you want, isn't it?" L Dome's grudging assent. He went right on: "Harlie isn't just satisfied with meeting the specifications of the original problem -- he wants to surpass them. All you want is a device that can set up and solve models within a limited range. Harlie wants a device that can set up and solve any size model." "And Harlie's going to program this machine, right?" "Right." "How? You just finished telling me he wasn't all that much better than a human programer." "In grasp, no -- but in speed and thoroughness he can't be matched. He has capabilities that a flesh-andblood human doesn't. For one thing, he's faster. For another, he can write the program directly into the computer -- and experience it as a part of himself as he writes it. He can't make mistakes either. He's limited to the size models that human programers can construct for much the same reasons they are. His brain functions aren't big enough to handle more. Harlie's ego functions supersede much of the circuitry that would have been used for forebrain functions in the JudgNaut. But in this respect, Harlie's got an advantage over human programers -- he can increase the size of his forebrain functions. Or he will be able to with the G.O.D. He'll program it by making it a part of himself -- by becoming one with it -- and using its capabilities to handle its own programing. He'll be monitoring and experiencing the program as he writes it directly into the G.O.D. As the model is manipulated, Harlie will be able to adapt the program to cover any situation possible. Their combined capabilities will be much more than the sum of their separate parts." "So why not just build these functions into the G.O.D. in the first place?" "If we didn't have Harlie we'd have to -- but if we didn't have Harlie we wouldn't have the G.O.D. either. The G.O.D. is intended to be almost entirely forebrain functions. We've already got the massive ego function that will control it. Why build a new one?" "Massive ego is right." Auberson ignored the comment. "Basically this G.O.D. machine is the rest of Harlie's brain. It has the thought centers that a consciousness such as Harlie's should have access to. Take another look at those printouts. Did you see a thing call Programing Implementation?" "Yes, what about it?" "Well, that's Harlie's vanity again. He doesn't want to call it what it really is, but it's an additional lobe for his brain. He'll need a monitor unit to control each specific section of the G.O.D. Because the G.O.D. will have no practical limit -- it can grow as big as we let it -- Harlie's grasp will have to be increased proportionally. That's what that unit does. As each lobe of the G.O.D. is completed an equivalent monitoring lobe goes into Programing Implementation. Not only that, but because Harlie is an electronic entity his thoughts are already in computer language -- it will be a maximum efficiency interface between himself and the G.O.D. He'll need only to think of a program and it'll be written into fact. It's the most efficient function Harlie could have." "I see," said Dome. "And he planned it that way himself, right?" Auberson nodded, "But it's a natural -- look, a computer is very much like a mystic oracle. You not only have to know what questions to ask, but how to phrase them -- and the answers are not always what you expect, or necessarily in terms you can understand. Who better to use as a translator than someone who's half-oracle and half-human?" tion. Instead he mused aloud, continuing a previous train of thought, "A neat trick that, a neat trick. We tell him he's got to come up with some way to be profitable and he tells us to build a new machine that only he can program. I have the feeling that he did it on purpose -- that this may be the only context in which Harlie would be valuable. And once we establish Harlie's worth to the project that leaves us with the question: is the total concept profitable? And that brings us back to where we started; Is Harlie profitable?" Auberson decided to ignore the last question. He said, "Harlie thinks the total concept is profitable. It's in the printouts." "Ah, yes -- but Harlie's got a vested interest in the project." "Why not?" said Auberson. "It's his project. He's the one who's presenting it to the board for approval." "And it's sure to be voted down." The chairman looked at the back of his hand. "I can't see any way for this to be approved. I'm not even sure we should bring it up." "It's too late," said Auberson. "You're going to have to bring it up. And you're going to have to give it a fair hearing. You told Harlie to come up with a way to be profitable. Now you've got to give him his chance to be heard." "This is ridiculous. He's only a machine." "You want to go through that argument again?" asked Auberson. "No." Dome shuddered. He still remembered the last time. "All right, I'll have the board consider it, Aubie, but the whole situation is unreal -- having a computer design another computer that will give it a job. You know what Elzer is going to say, don't you? You'd just better be prepared for defeat, that's all." "Just give us the chance," said Auberson. "We'll take it from there." Dome half nodded, half shrugged, "Better start preparing your arguments now -- you've only got a couple weeks." "Two and a half," corrected Aubie, "and that's more than enough time. We've got Harlie on our side." He was already out of his chair. As he closed the door behind him. Dome was again paging through the printouts and shaking his head. Ill B ack in his own office Auberson stared into his desk drawer, his hand hovering over a decision. At last he decided on the pills -- he had sworn off the grass and he was going to stick to that. I should throw those Highmasters away -- they're probably stale by now anyway. But no, pot doesn't get stale, does it? He kept promising himself that he would give the rest of the pack to Handley, but for some reason he kept forgetting. Probably because as long as they were in the drawer they were insurance. In case he changed his mind. He swallowed two of the pills without water, slid the drawer shut, then put his head in his hands and waited for the effect. He thought about going down to the cafeteria for lunch, but somehow didn't quite feel like it. Abruptly he straightened and looked around. On one corner of his desk stood a console magtyper, an electronic inputoutput unit connected to the company's master computer and data network -- and all the outlets that entailed. It was a memo pipeline, a mail processor, a filing system, a data storage and retrieval bank -- it was a total information handling system. Anything typed into it could be printed out in any form the system was capable of -- a memo, a letter, a file, a report. All information was instantly retrievable -- or retrievable only to those who had access to it through knowledge of the proper code keys. One key was necessary for retrieval, another was needed for revising the material. Any information held in "working" or temporary storage could be instantly updated, annotated, erased or rewritten. All data was held in temporary storage for ninety days, at the end of which time it was either passed into permanent storage or erased, depending on its original coding. Working data was maintained indefinitely in "temporary" storage to allow instant updating. Invoices, orders, manufacturing too -- all were handled through the system. The network handled all corporate paperwork functions. The entire company was tapped into it. An executive could perform his job wherever he had access to a computer terminal -- and with a portable terminal he could perform his job wherever he had access to a telephone. Indeed, many of the company's officers had acquired portable units for just that purpose. units -- cathode ray tubes and keyboards -- although a few, like Auberson's, were electric typewriters with magnetic tape storage of characters -- called magtypers for short. It was a familiar unit, throughout the industry -- it was cheaper than designing and building one's own. Curious about something, Auberson switched it on and typed, Auberson jumped as if stung, so Somehow on this machine he seemed like a disembodied voice. He was obviously here -- yet, aside from the words on the paper, the room held no visible sign of his presence. It has to be a psychological phenomenon, thought Auberson. I'm too used to seeing all that machinery -- I associate it with him. He typed, yes, but i didn't T he master beast -- that was the company nickname for the network. It was used by office boy and executive alike. Auberson wondered what they would call it if they knew it had been taken over by a conscious and highly intelligent entity, i wouldn't tell he typed, it wouldn't be a very Auberson had started to switch off when his eye caught a flash of color. Bright orange, it was the card from Stel in his wastebasket. no! rapped Auberson. i'll send The phone rang then and Auberson forgot for the moment about Harlie. It was Hooker, the Plant Security Chief. "Mr. Auberson?" he asked. "You know a guy named Krofft?" "Krofft?" Abruptly he remembered. "Yes, I know him -- why?" "We caught him walking out with a foot-high stack of printouts. He says it's okay -- that they're his -- but we thought we'd better check with you first." "Yes, it's okay. Is he there now?" "Yeah." "Put him on, will you please?" There was a sound of muffled voices. Auberson waited. He was dimly aware that his magtyper was clattering out something, but he flipped the silence hood over it and leaned back in his chair again. "Mr. Auberson?" "Yes -- Dr. Krofft?" "Yes. I meant to thank you for allowing me so much time with Harlie this morning. It was a very productive session." "Good. Then you will be building a new gravity wave detector, won't you?" "Well, first I have to publish the theory behind it, but -- how did you know about it?" "I told you this morning. Harlie doesn't keep any secrets from me. I assume that's what your stack of printouts is about, right?" "Uh -- yes." Krofft sounded a little taken aback. "It's the completed math on the theory and a rough schematic of the device. Harlie handled it like it was nothing. He was even able to suggest some short cuts for building the thing." "Good," said Auberson. "I'm glad we could help. If you need to talk to him again come through me. Otherwise you're likely to experience all kinds of corporate hassles. I'll see that you get as much time with him as you need." "That's very good of you." "Thanks, but I'm doing it for Harlie as much as for you." "Still, if there's anything I can -- " "Well, now that you mention it -- there is something. If anything important should come of this gravity thing -- if it can be called that -- I'd like Harlie to get some credit for it." "Why, Dr. Auberson, that was my intention all along. Are you implying that -- " "Oh, no, no. You misunderstand. I don't care about public credit and I don't think Harlie does either. No, what I want is credit with the company. Right now I'm a little bit involved in trying to prove that Harlie is worth the cost of maintaining him. Anything I can use to support this fight, I want." "Oh, I understand." Krofft was instantly solicitous. "Yes, I'll be glad to help in that. Why, Harlie's been of inestimable help in my research. To be able to sit and talk with a computer as if he were another research scientist -- why, it's like talking to God." "I know the feeling," Auberson said slowly. Krofft failed to catch his meaning. He said, "Well, I'll be glad to do anything I can to help. A letter, a phone call, if you want me to speak to somebody -- just name it." "Fine. That's all I want. I'll have to check back with you later on this." "Oh, very good. Then I'll be talking to you." "Fine. Is Hooker still there?" "Uh, yes." "Ask him if he wants to talk to me again." A pause, muffled voices. "No, no he doesn't." "Okay, fine. Dr. Krofft. I'll be seeing you." in the cradle and leaned back in his chair. He did not expect much help from the little man. His back hurt and he stretched his arms out over his head, trying to ease the pain. He was having backaches more and more these days. I must be getting old, he thought, smiling grimly -- and then it hit him. In two years. I will be old. Forty is when "old" starts. The sensation was a cold one. He pulled down his arms quickly. He thought about Harlie again, wondered exactly what conclusions he and Krofft had come to. No matter. Even if Harlie could explain them he, Auberson, -- with only a psychologist's training -- probably wouldn't be able to understand. Often he found himself wondering just how he had ended up in charge of the Harlie project anyway. Ah, well -- the boss didn't have to know how to run the business. He only needed to know how to run the people who knew. He leaned forward and flipped back the silence hood of his typer, curious to see what Harlie had written. A loose loop of paper sprawled out. Typed on it was: OF, TO ME, you'll speak to me in special Auberson read it through, frowning slightly. Then he read it again. It was -- nice. Very nice. But he wasn't sure whether he liked it or not. He rolled it out of the machine, carefully tore it off and folded it into his pocket. He would have to think about this before he sent it. It almost said too much. He thumbed the typer to life. He hesitated while he rephrased the thought in his mind, then slowly pecked out: harlie, do you Auberson typed carefully, there that's what you want? Harlie threw it back at him. Want to Bet... On who first correctly theorized the nature of the Milky IVay? Credit for the discovery that the Milky Way is composed of myriads of stars at such great distances as to be individually indistinguishable is universally accorded Galileo, who first examined this luminous band with a telescope in #. Credit for the theory that such was the composition of the Milky Way must go to Democritus, c. #-# B.C., a Greek philosopher in Thrace, surnamed the "Laughing Philosopher," who, two thousand years ahead of his time, had no way of demonstrating his hypothesis...On how long men believed Earth to be Center of the Universe? The theory that the moon, sun, planets and stars revolve around the Earth as the center, with assistance from epicycles, deferents etc., was detailed by Claudius Ptolemy c. # a.d., of Alexandria -- who probably got most of his ideas from Hipparchus, c. # B.c. Ptolemy's explanation of the planetary motions was one of the most successful and long-lived scientific theories ever advanced -- it was still being taught, along with the Copernican theory, at Yale and Harvard as late as #. (I have this straight from a professor of astronomy at Princeton.)...On who first discovered the law of conservation of energy? Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand Von Helmholtz (#-#) was the first to announce the theory of the maintenance of the sun's heat by gravitational attraction -- he did so in a series of popular lectures -- and is generally credited with the discovery. But he seems to have been preceded in promulgating his principle by a lesser known man, Julius Robert Von Mayer (#-#), a German physician and physicist. Mayer suffered acutely from domestic grief and lack of scientific recognition. He once attempted suicide and in #I entered a mental hospital. He was later released and made a member of the nobility in #. possibly be a ship. But I knew that the twelve jointed appendages and what appeared to be a neat division into bead, thorax and abdomen were no trick of viewing angle -- I had been clear around it and it was real. The appearance of the thing imparted to the clicking I had picked up on the communications band a crawling, chitinous connotation. I was glad I had my mind on death and destruction -- it made a good counterpoise to the gray wash of uneasiness the thing gave me. The uneasiness brought me up short and I thought for the problem: objective or subjective? I thumbed the red button -- not the recessed missile release next to it, but the one that broke the circuit to Langley Station -- and the uneasiness remained. So, I thought, objective. A true uneasiness, not an emotion picked up from whoever lived in the other ship. An honestto-God product of my imagination's toying with what it saw as crawly stuff. Arachnoid -- ergo, threatening. I shook my head in annoyance, released the button and got the background "noise" again, like opening a window to the sound of wind in the trees. Vague impressions chased themselves around the edges of my consciousness. Were they from the ship? If so, whatever lived there was either asleep or inactive. Or it might be the noise of the pickups themselves translating into emotions. The noise could do that. I didn't "hear" anything, of course -- the limitations imposed on Langley Station's sophisticated equipment by the laws of thermal motion and statistical probability manifested themselves as vague emotions. The phenomenon was what you would expect from an emotion detector. Unfortunately nobody until now had known it was an emotion detector. The classified pickup head in my cramped little shuttle vehicle was supposed to amplify what I had been laughingly told were thoughts. Nobody knew whether it would work on an extraterrestrial life form, of course, because nobody had ever met one -- it was simply one of an armamentarium of devices Defense had stockpiled against what it saw as an "eventuality." Nobody really believed it would ever be used, any more than anybody really expected the global defense systems to be used in the days when political entities fought with one another. That they had been used was unfortunate -- and so was this. And when we actually turned the thing on our first honest, genuine ET, we found we didn't have a thought detector at all, but an emotion detector. You can't record emotions and play them back, not yet, anyway. And you can't send them down a wire or over a tightbeam. In fact, whatever the pickup head radiated after amplifying it was good only for a radius of several hundred feet. The huge apparatus on Langley Station was necessary to run the thing, but for readout we still needed a biological sensor -- me. Hence J. J. Mansard (for Jorge Jeremy -- my old man had a wry touch to his insanity), Captain, Space Division, Air Force, formerly attached to New York Orbiting Synchronous Observation, got himself suddenly booted upstairs to Langley Experimental Satellite and thence, you should pardon the expression, to the stars. Well, not quite to the stars. The ET was detected as an unusual companion to a chunk of rock not quite big enough to be called an asteroid, with an orbit not quite small enough to refer to it as part of our solar system, even if our sun did occupy one focus of its path. It was at the very limits of observation, heading in. One of our deep research probes had picked it up and sent its coordinates back with the usual particle density information and so forth. Research queried for visuals, which had to come by slowscan. By the time they were in the job had already been bumped to Langley and the vast, seldomused machinery of Evaluation of Possible Extraterrestrial Hostility was turning over. And they had their volunteer biological sensor and possible ambassador. I had become it because I had the one quality that makes me a jawgrinding impossibility to have around in training -- I was emotionless. Nothing got to me. You could call it iron control or you could call it being dead inside -- it didn't matter much. Psych knew why, but they kept discreetly quiet and so did I. We both knew that though I might be a shade uncomfortable at times, I was sitting on a priceless asset that might get me a commandership at any critical moment. I even knew pretty much when I had been shot down so hard that something in me had decided to stop feeling, but I was in the position of the one-armed pirate who learns to use a hook -- I was in a place and at a point in time where and when my handicap was an asset. And that was what counted when they handed out stripes. I even had had to step on a few people on the way here -- nobody seemed to mind very much. The brass conveniently looked the other way. They were protecting an asset. So J. J. Mansard, the Cold Fish of Boulder Academy, makes his big break for fame and fortune in the service of his country. And winds up on the receiving end of -- of all things -- an emotion transmitter. Imagine that. T he brass had kind of considered that possibility, too. and decided that if it did happen that emotions came through along with the thoughts I would be protected by my own carapace, easily able to differentiate between the ET's emotional responses and my own, since I didn't have any. On the conscious level, anyhow. Perfect. We had not counted, of course, on nothing making it through save emotions, but I could still restore my objectivity by hitting the button. It broke the Langley circuit and stopped the transmission. Whereupon the thoughts that remained could only be mine. And back at the other end of Sol's gravity, where Langley's ten-mile webwork dish held me at the focus like a bug on a pin, an evaluation crew whose size would scare you analyzed temperature, absorption, mass and suchlike data automatically -- everything except what we expected to be extraterrestrial thought patterns, which I sent back verbally after interpreting them for myself. For an instant I glanced through the port, beyond the FT ship's jointed immensity toward Sol, unthinkably tiny at this distance. After a minute I picked it out or thought I did. Actually, after Sol had shrunk to a barely perceptible disk, I had attached myself to a large, bright, ruddy star that happened to be conveniently in the viewfield. When I stopped to think about it I felt that I was satisfying an unconscious desire for a G#. The thought of its orange warmth pleased me. While I was thinking about that I got another wash of vaguely identifiable emotion. I jabbed the button a few times to give me an objective reference, then read off my impressions into the recorder. I reflected that today's report was going to look just like yesterday's, except that the exact quality of the slowly increasing emotions was different, as it had been a few hours earlier -- and a few hours before that. I didn't know what Langley was getting out of this and I didn't know if Langley knew, but it seemed to me that the Langley circuit was somewhat less than the screaming success we had expected. I hoped that they were getting enough out of the hard data from the regular receptors. Things have a way of being naturally hilarious. I had just decided that Langley should certainly be able to evaluate the intent of the FTs from the data already in, when I got clobbered -- and the whole picture changed. During all this time the FT ship and I had orbited each other several miles apart, neither giving any sign that it recognized the other as anything more than another lump of rock. No sign of motion beyond the normal perturbations of orbit, no visible radiation save thermals and my tightbeam, which was very well shielded, and the chitinous clicks at #I MHz from my friend over there. Then, without warning, I found myself holding on to the comm bulkhead, knuckles white with effort, eyes squeezed nearly shut against the tears that welled up uncontrollably. I was shaking with a bottomless and sourceless grief that was beyond solace. Instinctively I went for the button, which may have saved me from cracking right there. The emotion was instantly gone, but its physical effects remained -- the pain, the tears, the shaking -- to remind me that it had been there. I looked around, trembling with reaction and a little scared. There was a hint that this mission was not the piece of cake I had come to believe it was. There was a disconnect key for the Langley circuit in thexomm rack across the room -- and to reach it I would have to let go of the button. I wasn't supposed to use the disconnect key except in emergency. Was I scared? You bet I was. Scared enough to turn the thing off until I had time to think. Not scared of what the ET might be doing or of what it had felt in order to project that awful sensation of everything's-over -- simply scared of feeling. Period. As my immigrant great-great-grandfather had said; nobody had told him about this on the boat. So I gritted my teeth, braced myself for a dash across the compartment and got off the button. And was rewarded by background noise. It was such an anticlimax that I doubled up halfway to the disconnect key and nearly kissed my head on the panel. I got hold of a grab handle and floated, eyeing the key. Well, I thought, here's where it gets interesting. What happened once is bound to repeat -- let's not live in fear of it, shall we? N evertheless i stayed within a quick jump of the button for a good twenty minutes before I began to relax. And, in fact, nothing did happen for several hours. When it did it was a whole new surprise. Because it was laughter. The projection of an event so funny as to be absolutely side-splitting. I roared, held my chest, fell over myself gasping for air -- finally hit the button for a breather. When I could inhale and exhale fairly normally I let up again and -- surprise -- got another dose of the same. It lasted for about fifteen more seconds, then faded out, leaving me chuckling at the impassive face of the chrono as if we shared some hilarious secret. Well, I reflected, that one wasn't so bad. Whatever lived in the ET ship, besides feeling terribly woeful, also seemed to have quite a sense of humor. That wasn't so hard to take. I got out the mike and read that into the recorder, then took a deep breath. Apparently whatever was going to happen was going to provide some variety. It did. The next bout was with anger. It came very fast, lasted only a few seconds and left me shaking, furious, a hard metallic taste in my mouth and adrenalin copiously flooding my veins. I bit my lip, sat myself in the comm chair and worked it off by clenching and unclenching my fists. When I could think normally again it occurred to me that I might be overreacting in natural reaction to my usual control. Put that in the notes. Actually doubted it. Whatever was happening in the ET ship was really taking me over the ropes. Some other things began to come over. I was able after a while to identify a particular characteristic that all of the emotions I was receiving seemed to share. It was a texture, like the timbre of a voice. I developed the distinct impression that those emotions undoubtedly came from a single entity within the ship, rather than from several minds. The thought, then: Quite possibly this is also a scout, a probe like ours -- it could be manned by a single person. After that I began to search for a pattern in the emotions, some common thread that would tie them together into a personality. I didn't find one at first, but I did realize something else -- slowly and over a period of time I was changing. I was developing a sensitivity. It didn't matter what the emotions were that I was receiving -- the fact of their existence for me was making me more aware of them and more aware of what the emotions of the people at the other end of my comm lifeline might be. Not good. It was destroying my objectivity. I debated shutting the Langley circuit down for a few hours a day to give me time to rest up, but the mission wouldn't allow it and I knew it. That meant that I had to be continually on my guard, ready to separate objective from subjective experience, to identify as alien the flux of strange emotions I now dimly identified as female pouring into me through the probe. Don't ask me why I sensed them as female. I just did. But I knew that we didn't have long to go on this evaluation mission. I could take it without much strain, I thought -- without losing too much of the implacable cool for which I'd been selected. When the Langley people completed their evaluation I would either go straight home or follow one of the possible alternate plans -- one of which, thank their military hearts, involved six nuclear torpedoes snuggled in the forward compartment. I had a sudden qualm about that -- I hadn't expected to be in emotional rapport with a possible enemy. Where is that famous coldbloodedness, Mansard? I decided to work up a set of nastiness exercises -- for protection, understand? Back to death and destruction.tA. personalization treeping in. Whether I wanted to or not I began to speculate on whether the thing in the ship really had a gender of any sort, and what kind it might be. Emotions are not a valid guide, but I thought it almost certainly had to have a sex -- survival of the average species demanded that -- and the odds were in favor of an advanced race's being bisexual. Anyway I found myself thinking of my unknown friend as "she." Every rule was against a personal involvement, but nobody had ever found himself in emotional relationship with a theoretical ET before. "Other people" were what you met, what you dealt with in syntaxes or mathematical constructions which had as their referents things and relationships and which carried emotions like supercargo -- something easily forgotten about. If I punched the button all communication ceased. Ergo, the button stayed up and what happened was exactly the reverse of the way Man was meant to think -- emotions pounded in, translating themselves -- sometimes -- into things and relationships. I took as a working premise that the situation possessed something I wryly dubbed iconoemotive symmetry, hoping it would take its place along with the other subatomic symmetries -- I assumed that, if it were possible to go from words to emotions, then I could damn well go from emotions to words and make it at least as automatic as the other way around. Certain of the processes wouldn't reverse, of course. I would have to feel the emotion or process it -- that was a good null-emotional word -- translate it into speech, then block and purge the emotion that gave rise to the words. Preserving objectivity. I gave it a good try. Picture meeting a friend in the morning. You exchange the usual phatic greeting. Then you inquire after his health in the ritual way and he says, "Got a headache today." You tut-tut and go on. "Hello" is phatic, "Got a headache" is not -- but in the context of casual conversation the whole exchange is emotionally empty. He doesn't expect you to fall over his headache and you certainly don't intend to -- in fact, the only reason he mentioned it was that it was the first thing on his mind and he didn't bother to hide it. Now suppose that when you met this guy, instead of saying anything you were immediately clobbered with the pain of his headache. Suppose further that, because he knew damn well you didn't care two chits about his head, he had given you the barest sketch of the pain he was feeling. Suddenly it's your pain. What do you do? Does it make sharing an experience any easier? Any fuller? Or co you simply learn to block it the way you learn to block it when it is merely suggested by words? You don't learn to block it. Not in a period of days, not this cowpoke. I was being overwhelmed, drowned in somebody else's emotions, and I knew it. Within two days it was like having two people living in my body, one whom I knew and one who was completely unpredictable in mood. A good way to go crazy. But the moods got to be predictable. Don't ask me how it happened, I don't know. All I know is that at some point in the next few days I began to anticipate what the next round of emotions would be. Without my fully realizing it, experiencing them was ceasing to be a strain. They were just there, like my own. It might have been a protective device my brain had mustered to meet the occasion, giving me. the illusion of control -- which is what anticipation is -- or it might actually have been some sort of deductive process I had developed. But it worked -- I stayed sane. And found that it worked in directions I didn't expect and probably don't want. From the bare exchanges with Langley, which were the same clipped conversations they had always been, I began to get unmistakable emotional overtones, clear and sharp. It was unfortunate that the first ones I got told me that they were worried that I was going insane. The message was not in what they said, but in what they didn't say -- the conversational net, like poetry, suddenly existed not for its strings and knots but for its holes. The silence surrounding the pronunciation of the word OM. It was impossible for them to hide anything from me. Anything. T his was very embarrassing. It might have made me a superb psychotherapist, but it was rapidly turning me into a rotten soldier. A soldier is -- must be -- an arm of his command, a reflex machine, a mobile, thinking weapon. But not a feeling one. If bayonets had feelings they'd be people. I decided to cover up what they were looking for- -- and discovered I didn't know how. I couldn't remember the precise way I had reported before. The gist of it, yes, but the exact syntax -- that was what I needed. Not remembering threw me into a panic, but then I got an idea. On the pretext of checking the accuracy of some of my earlier transmissions I got them to play back to me three days' worth of reports in my own voice. I got all of it on the recorder, then spent a whole day studying it. At the end of that time I could deliver an eyewitness account of the destruction of the solar system and all of the works of man with all the emotional involvement of a turnip. They outsmarted me. By this time they were interested enough in what was happening to me to be doing a little analysis of their own and their syntax analyzers duly reported that I had inexplicably undergone a sudden regression to the speech patterns I had used at the start of the mission. H'm. It did not take long for them to figure out what I had done. So it was stalemate. But I could still do something other than analyze voiceprints -- I could anticipate. And I anticipated that they would resolve what was rapidly becoming a very dangerous situation by ordering me to attack. They could order me to return, of course,' but I could refuse and then the whole dirty thing would be out on the washline. I was sure that they believed they had about a fifty-nine percent probability that I could still carry out a successful attack on the ET ship and my soulmate inside if I were sufficiently motivated -- and they were right. I was also aware that if I didn't, it was certain that they had little surprises built into the ship that would assure my not being any aid or comfort to the enemy. Like remoteoperated destruct systems. It was only reasonable, I suddenly realized, that they have them. I was sure they had them. And, after one or two more exchanges with Langley over nothing in particular, I knew they had them. It was only a matter of the briefest time before they decided to do it -- no more, maybe, then it took to get the joint chiefs together for an emergency session. Then I'd get the word to arm those deadly nuclear needles and send them boring in. I couldn't refuse without very much to be alive. Self-preservation still won out over brotherhood. Just barely. So I got myself a little sledge out of equipment stores, undogged the access hatch, floated down the little tube, undogged the weapons hatch and floated into the little tubular room where the nuclear torpedoes lived. Or rather, slept -- by this time even the ship was beginning to feel sentient to me. Can a machine have emotions? Don't ask me now, but try again in a few days. I was aware, at times dimly and at times acutely, that a fully sentient universe would mean the end of humanity as we knew it, because you can't manipulate a living thing and intelligence, as we understood it, impressed itself upon the universe by manipulating it. Picture building a road if all the rocks you had to bulldoze out of the way were alive and conscious. And you'd need a relocation and reparation committee to wind your watch. So I got out my sledge and braced myself against the opposite wall of the tube and looked for access covers. And looked. Somebody back there had been just a little bit smarter than I'd figured on. I found no access covers, no exposed machinery of any kind. No delicate launching or aiming gear. I didn't have the faintest idea how the weapons aimed -- maybe magnetically right through the casing, maybe with a transmitter receiver combination built into the missile cradle. But whatever it was, it was designed to be me-proof. That was a dead loss. I went forward through the tube and stowed the sledge. I toyed with the idea of smashing the radio, but that sort of giveaway would be just what they needed to turn me into a nice rosy ball of radioactivity. I got to the port and looked out. The orbit was stabilized so that that port always looked toward Alice's ship. By now I was calling "her" Alice automatically, after the military designation for the mission, Alis-# -- besides, if she had any friends aboard, I had been unable to pick them up. Maybe she was alone, too, an advance scout trying to assess alien motives, just as I was. Suppose she even had the ET equivalent of our mindscanner-that-didn't-work? How the hell could I tell, without directly violating orders? Couldn't. Then again, what sort of esthetic did a race develop that made them comfortable in a ship that looked so insectlike? What was the function of those leglike tubes? If they were duplicate living quarters leading off the main cabin the ship had twelve occupants, not one. Or maybe it had been commandeered, to be occupied by one person for this mission alone. I thought about what Alice might equivalent of mission status reports, maybe telepath ically for all I knew? Filing them with her base somewhere, talking about that weird globular ship that looked so much like a melon? What kind of goofy creature could be comfortable in one of those? Then I thought about the missile button. I went to the comm desk, which was large enough to sit at, and got a sucktube of water. In a few short hours, barring unforseen accidents, the comm would buzz and Langley would give me the word to blow Alice and her ship to hell. Mercurial Alice, soft Alice, whose emotions -- which I stole -- had been keeping me alive for this long and absolutely empty trip. My body, Alice's emotions -- together we made a person. She might be physically strange to me -- maybe furry, maybe have too many arms -- but the inside of her head was as familiar to me as mine -- and more wonderful for its suppleness, its her back with me and take her off the ship and then destroy it. Bring her back with me and convince Langley it was okay. Find a way to work something out, hard as it might be -- their authorities, our authorities. We were so close together, her feelings had to be the same as mine -- physical differences were no real barrier, we could straighten everything out if we wanted to. fist, drifting away with the reaction. I had to do it! The stars shone in through the pitch blackness of the port, each one a gem, each a tiny hard light on the tarred sky, each its own unique self as I had learned to see them through Alice's eyes; each with its own emotional thrill, its own stark beauty. To lose that beauty forever by losing her -- the one through whom I had come to see it -- I couldn't do that, not with all other considerations aside. In the utter strangeness of the situation, cut off from all other life but the two of us, I had begun to feel for the woman in the ET ship something akin to love. Yes, damn it. Impossible maybe on Earth, on any planet with trees and water and something approaching a normal environment, but out here we two were our world. Her ship and mine -- the gross, insectlike hulk and the tiny sphere, caught together in emptiness, far from a home that neither of us knew very well, lost in silences and nights and great untouchable tapestries -- were an entire sentient universe incarnate. I had been miraculously reborn through her, had come to know that things possessed a quality of realness and unique beauty -- each thing to itself -- and from her, through the improbable electronic umbilical of the Langley circuit, I had learned slowly and painfully not only to know these things, but to praise them. I thought back over cadet days, remembered the honor commission I had almost won -- until the commandant vetoed it. Then there was the Vega assignment, first berth on an interstellar exploration, that I'd lost to some captain's son at the last minute. And now this -- some fool slob at Langley was about to snatch something so far beyond those early dreams that the world shuddered. Not this time. Too much at stake. Frantically I looked around the cabin. There had to be something, some object, some tool that I could use to disable the torpedoes. Something I could think of to stop them from issuing the order, some story to delay it... Even as I thought, my brain fighting the molasses of fear that trapped it like a fly, the comm gave the little throat-clearing burst that indicated it had acquired the Langley carrier. I was trapped like a mouse in a bottle. I looked at the missile release button, backed away from it, sweat pouring from me in the dry cabin atmosphere. Outside the port Alice's ship hung alien and beseeching. I must have fought my way blindly around the cabin because the next thing I was aware of was the missile button close to my hand. I jerked away shuddering. The room was beginning to take on that ringing, metallic character of absolute fear. Alice, make contact now, help me... The comm opened communication in the usual way, calling, "Alis#, this is Langley..." And again the missile button -- the missile button became the focus of the room. As if the ship were rubber stretched out of shape to pour itself into the button, my vision narrowed down to that one single disk in the entire universe... and again my hand was on it and this time, paralyzed with fear, I couldn't tear it away. Langley was calling and I was trapped, so conditioned by the thing I feared that I was at the button even before they gave the order. "Final orders regarding ET mission. Mansard... research section concludes..." and my hand was on the button! My flesh was cold as death. I thought I'd vomit before they got it out... frantic, find a way, find a way in this last clonic instant before the word... "... concludes ET harmless. Do not harm in any way. Repeat, do not harm in any way. Final evaluation being faxed to you for contact procedures as you see fit. Acknowledge so far and we'll start feeding you return data..." The act in my throat like a word, a great black thing pushing into the world, into the room. Overwhelming me. Hand on the button, now useless, unnecessary. Alice hundreds of yards away, watching, pulsing emotions soothing over me. The act in the shape of a word: No! "No, you bastards, you can't stop it now!" Push the button. Together we made a person... The impersonal missiles needled away, vibration shaking the ship. A part of my mind followed them, visualizing their invisible path away from the ship. Together we made a person... Toward it. The fear, the nausea, the hatred. All united in an instant of time, before the beginning, after the end. The result was peace. The missiles struck. The great black ship twinkled at a hundred points like a vast city, bloomed into an incredible bluewhite flower that grew and grew into a sun. The great leglike extensions contracted convulsively. Contracted. Alice was her ship... The great gross insectlike thing was alive -- had an exoskeleton like an insect's. Had only one passenger. IVas the passenger. The radio was yammering, screaming things I couldn't make out and, obscenely, the huge hulk began to break up, pieces drifting and spinning away at their own velocities, trailing unspeakable thread-like jetsam. The emotions went on and on and on -- they lived in my head, lived on in my head even after I smashed my hand raw and bloody on the button, again and again, laughing at the radio, the tears boiling from my face. Later they might even find me, drifting near the orbit. Together we made a person and the emotions went on somewhere and the thoughts that were Alice and me, far away behind the eyes, lacerated and wrecked and beached on the rocks of love, lost, hopeless, and unutterable...  When approached for a thumbnail biography of the kind usually featured in this space, Isaac Asimov told your editors he would rather supply a brief comment on the genesis that comment, in his own words. Before #. science fiction was written, very largely, by pulp-writer types who took time off from the western and crime stories that were their bread-and-butter. They did not know any science except the kind to be picked up from the Sunday supplements, but they did their best. In their hearts they knew that science was great -- if they could only find out what it was. Then came a period, roughly from # to #, when science fiction often featured plausible science. Mind you. it was not expected to teach science; it was supposed, however, to contain some sort of evidence that the writer knew something about science. This set the practitioners in the field a difficult task. To turn out good science fiction of the type prevalent in the #s and #s, one had to be able to write with sufficient quality to be publishable and at the same time to know science sufficiently well to be respectable. The double requirement was not easy to meet. Once science fiction came to be in demand in the optical media, something had to give. What gave, of course, was science. There is now a new generation of science fiction writers, many of whom are "lit-major" types. They know nothing about science except what they pick up from each other's science fiction and. unlike the honest pulpers of the #s, have no respect for genuine science. Weil, I haven't written any novels since # (except for the novelization of a screen-play, which doesn't count) so you can see I belong to the "hard" science fiction group. In fact, when I sat down to write another novel at last. I decided to have the courage of my convictions artd adopt the very narrowest and hardest definition of science fiction: "Science fiction is that branch of literature which deals with the future of science and I hope you like it. But if you don't, no hard feelings... Just Published Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years! of Nerves could have conceived this gripping story of a down-to-earth engineer who regards all psychic phenomena as claptrap -- until he discovers, to his horror, that he himself is a born telepath and clairvoyant. Ask your bookseller today for -- the Science Fiction event of the year. # # Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. # How's your loiogiootion Qootieot? Test yourself, then treat yourself to # volumes of fascinating mind-stretchers for just #(k No one on your world has You're the first astronaut to A great starship suddenly ever seen the stars. A strange visit another planet. Your confronts another ship from legend foretells something ship lands and you find the an alien civilization. Can called "night" will come tohouse you grew up in. The either race be sure the other morrow for the first time in woman on the porch is your won't conquer his world? Is # years. What will hapgrandmother! What's the there an alternative to depen when it does? explanation? stroying each other? You'll find the dazzlingly imaginative, beautifully logical answers in three famous stories in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame -- an anthology of the greatest SF literature of all time. And you can have this #-page, hardbound book -- plus two more masterpieces of the world's most entertaining, provocative fiction -- for just # plus n n I I M me Hni # Imlis forlO' with trial membership ! Science Fiedon Book Club # S#ia I Dept. AL-#, Garden City, N.Y. # I Please accept my application for membership In I the Science Fiction Book Club and send me the #  books whose numbers I have written In the boxes I below. Bill me Just # (to help cover shlpplna) for I all #. About every # weeks, send me the club's I bulletin. Tblnfa to Come, describing the # coming I Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If I I wish to receive both. Selections, I need do nothing; I they will be shipped to me automatically. When I ever I don't want I of the # Selections or prefer an I Alternate, or no book at all. I will notify you by I the date specified by returning the convenient I form always provided. I I need take only # Selections or Alternates during I the coming year, and may resign an.v time there I after. Moat books are only #, plus a modest I charge for shipping and handling. Occasionally, I extra-value Selections are slightly higher. I return the entire Introductory package within # I days. Membership will be canceled. I owe nothing: I Mr. I Mrs. I Miss Print name If under #, parent must sign above. I Office use only #. The Hugo #. Dane by Winners, Vol. I Frank Herbert.  II. Giant #Celebrated winln-I volume of ner of Hugo and # award-winNebula. Gripping stories, # ping tale of to #. Asimov amily exiled Introduces each, from their prlPub. ed. # vate planet to #. Tht Wronr End of Tlmo by A o', Hugo Award,#. The Founwlnner spins dailon Trlloay breathtaking tale py Isaac Asimov of Russian dlsihe ends of the covery that sugalaxy revert to perlor life In barbarism. Pub. solar system Is ed. # about to destroy Earth. Pub. ed. #. Stranger In # a Strange Land Heln"l?l"' He End by Arthur C. Clarke. Manknew the Martian love secret iJ-Hnv, Spelled eratlon on earth. Hnnm Piih F--, -- his doom. Pub. wildly fanlas(a q tic!" Atlantic. Pub. ed. # #. Can Toa #. World's Feel Anything Best Science When I Do Fiction #. This? by Robert Wollhelm and Sheckley. # blCarr, Eds. # exzarre glimpses traordlnary into the future. stories by fa mous writer In annual an thology. by faIncluding a writers wildly different ed. # Booh Club odillons are sometimes reduced In slie, but they are all lull-length, hard-cover boobs you will be proud to add to your Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different #. The Ice People by Reni Barjavel. Great French bestseller, prize winning novel of discovery of prehistoric man and woman, who come to life! Pub. ed. # #. Alone Against Tomorrow by Harlan Ellison. The field's most honored writer plunges Into # dark dreams of tomorrow's alienation. Pub. ed. # #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame I. # "winners." chosen by Scl-Fl Writers of America. Ed. Robert Sliverberg. Pub. ed. # #. A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, ed. by Anthony Boucher. # Volume set. # pages. Counts as one book. Pub. ed. # permanent library, in Canada. Printed in U.S.A. JULY #  li #-# Novella Philip Jose Farmer Novelette David Gerrold Robert Silverberg See moon shots, orbits, stars, phases of Venus, planets close up. # to # power. New improved aluminized, overcoated #"diam. flO primary mirror, ventilated cell. Equatorial mount with locks on both axes. #x eyepiece and mounted Barlow lens. #x Tinder telescope, hardwood tripod. Stock No. #GL # Ppd. No.#GL...#" # Ppd. Amazing lie detector type device that really works. 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Great for boating (it floats), hiking, camping, hunting, seashore, rooting for your team. Can be heard over traffic and constr. noises to sound fire drill, lunch break or emergency. Weighs only #oz. but contains up to # mile-piercing blasts, A real bargain. Stock No. #GL # Ppd. # Refill Cartrs. (P-#, #GL) # Ppd. Completely new edition. Huge selection of telescopes, microscopes, binoculars, magnets, magnifiers, prisms, lenses, photocomponents, ecological, unique lighting and Science Fair items. Many hard-to-get surplus bargains. For hobbyists, experimenters. schools, industry, write for free ilog "GL": Edmund Scientific Co., # Edscorp Bldg., Barrington, N.J. # I Solve problems, play games, I predict weather with this I actual working model of I giant electronic brains. I Amazing new fun way to I learn all about computer I programming... logic, ( decimal, binary systems, Laws of Sets -- even do your I own programming after completing simplified # page  instructive booklet. Includes step-by-step assembly diagrams. Circuits easily changed. Readout from illuminated control I panel. Req. # "D" batt. (not incl.). Best model we've seen for I home, school, industry. No. #GL (#" x #H" x #") # Ppd. Asimov's first fulllength sf novel in fifteen years! July-August # Vol. #, Nt. I Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Donald H. Menzel, Science Editor ' Judy-Lynn Benjamin. Managing Editor J LC. Murphy, Subscription Director Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor Jay Tunick. Circulation Director Philip Jose Farmer # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher sidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street. New York. N Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: #. in U.S., # elsewhere. United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company. Ltd... # Gloucester Road. London SW# #RO. Arnold E. Abramson. Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes. Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-isue subscription in the United Kingdom: #. American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. ee mat minds were Kosicrucians Metijamm Franklin Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Why were these men great? How does anyone -- man or woman -- achieve greatness? Is it not by mastery of the powers within ourselves? Know the mysterious world within you ! Attune yourself to the wisdom of the ages! Grasp the inner power of your mind ! Learn the secrets of a full and peaceful life ! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and inventor... Isaac Newton, discoverer of the Law of Gravitation... Francis Bacon, philosopher and scientist... like many other learned and great men and women... were Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians existence for centuries. Today, headquarters of of mail annually to all parts of the world. coy of "The Masfefy of Life" -- . iijmtion: A nonprofit organiza tfon Address: Scribe C.L.M. San Jose, California #, U.S.A. Please send me the jree book. The Mastery of Life, which explains how I may learn to use my faculties and powers of mind. 'NJ amE Address...   City State Let us today speak of fences. In the course of a discussion of his latest novel. Dying Inside -- launched in this issue of Galaxy -- Robert Silverberg asked me if I had heard of a Finnish science-fiction magazine, Aikamme, which had published one of his stories. I had not, until that moment, but the title of the publication translates literally and exactly into Our Times(s) -- the word is at once singular and plural. And as the title of a periodical publishing science fiction it would seem to suggest that we live in sciencefiction times. Perhaps we do. Few if any of us survive any given twenty-four hours without being touched by the witch's wand of modern science. According to some estimates human knowledge has been doubling itself every eight years and promises to continue to do so. We carry it with us to the fastest and loneliest wilderness; it reaches us at work and play -- and what the physiological and genetic effects have been and will be on Man and his mind we have barely begun to assess. The above isn't to say that you've met the real-life prototype of David Selig, Bob Silverberg's abortive rnindmutant in Dying Inside -- but hard evidence may be imminent that he could be around. Sometimes the endless argument as to what science fiction is finds easy answers. A few short months ago James White's Dark Inferno, Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves and Colin Kapp's Patterns of Chaos -- all solidly based in hard science and Dr. Asimov's novel exquisitely so -- were jostling each other for space on the pages of Galaxy and If. Since then not one such work has crossed my desk. To your loss and mine. This essay is not an advocacy of currency or "relevance" in science fiction, or any other fencing in of the medium. In a day when Man has propelled his image beyond galactic bounds (Pioneer #), when Earth's own limits range from subatomics to the stars -- and thence, by definition, beyond time itself -- the hard sciences are exotic enough to accommodate virtually all science-fiction disciplines. But today's science fiction is being written today and I will confess to a profound curiosity as to all that science fiction will say that has not been said -- all it will add to what has been said -- in a time when the intricate science underlying our technology pervades every breath we take, touches every move we make, anywhere on this globe. The fences are down -- or will be -- and we must choose Directions. Cy Chauvin's letter in Directions (Galaxy, March '#) touched off a flood of replies impossible to contain in one issue. You will find two in the current Directions -- more to come. Some excerpts: "... science fiction doesn't have a purpose..." Judith M. Hochberg. "... The purpose of sf (is) to outline change..." Charles Gifford, Jr. "... (in)sf insight is the product..." J. R. Yearwood. Now, if you please, be good enough to turn to page #. Science and Public Affairs such areas as: with respect to: cinating articles by today's foremost scientists, in language any intelligent reader can understand! Symbolizing the threat of nuclear doomsday, it stands now at ten minutes to midnight! (A Journal of Science and Public Affairs) Enclosed please find remittance for my subscription as checked below.  I year, # D # years, # D # years. # (The regular single-copy price of the Bulletin is I .#) The above subscription rates apply to the United States and Canada. For Pan-America, add #c per year. For other foreign, add I .# per year. I town to the University and forage for dollars again. It doesn't take much cash to keep me going -- two hundred a month will do nicely -- but I'm running low and I don't dare try to borrow from my sister again. The students will shortly be needing their first term papers of the semester -- that's always a steady business. The weary, eroding brain of David Selig is once more for hire. I should be able to pick up seventyfive dollars' worth of work on this lovely golden October morning. The air is crisp and clear. A highpressure system covers New York City, banishing humidity and haze. In such weather my fading powers still flourish. Let us go then, you and I, when the morning is spread out against the sky. You and I. To whom do I refer? I'm heading downtown alone, after all. You and I. Why, of course I refer to myself and to that creature who lives within me, spying on unsuspecting mortals. That sneaky monster within me, that ailing monster, dying even more swiftly than I. Let us go then, you and #. Down the hall. Push the button. Into the elevator. There is a stink of garlic in it. My neighbors -- they leave their emphatic smells everywhere. I love them. Down. Down. It is #:# A.M., Eastern Daylight Saving Time. The current temperature reading in Central Park is #. The humidity stands at # and the barometer is # and falling, with the wind northeast at I I miles per hour. The forecast is for fair skies and sunny weather today, tonight and tomorrow. David Selig is forty-one and counting. Slightly above medium height, he has the lean figure of a bachelor accustomed to his own meager cooking and his customary facial expression is a mild, puzzled frown. He blinks a lot. In his faded blue denim jacket, heavy-duty boots, and #-vintage striped bells he presents a superficially youthful appearance at least from the neck down -- but in fact he looks like some sort of refugee from an illicit research laboratory where the balding, furrowed heads of anguished middle-aged men are grafted to the reluctant bodies of adolescent boys. How did this happen to him? At what point did his face and scalp begin to grow old? The dangling cables of the elevator hurl shrieks of mocking laughter at him as he descends from his two-room refuge on the twelfth floor. He wonders if those rusty cables might be even older than he is. He is of the # vintage. This housing project, he suspects, might date from # or #. Though perhaps it's younger -- just immediately prewar, say. (Do you remember #, Duvid? That was the year we took you to the World's Fair. This is the trylon, that's the perisphere.) Anyway the buildings are getting old. What isn't? The elevator halts grindingly at the #th floor. Even before the scarred door opens I detect a quick mental flutter of female Hispanic vitality dancing through the girders. A young Puerto Rican wife. Sure enough. She is short, swarthy, maybe about twenty-three years old and very pregnant. I can pick up the double neural output clearly: the quicksilver darting of her shallow, sensual mind and the furry, blurry thumpings of the fetus, about six months old, sealed within her hard bulging body. She is flat-faced and broad-hipped, with little glossy eyes and a thin, pinched mouth. A first child, a dirty girl of about two, clutches her mother's thumb. The tot giggles up at me and the woman favors me with a brief, suspicious smile as they enter the elevator. They stand with their backs toward me. Dense silence. Buenos (Has, sehora. Nice day, isn't it, ma'am? What a lovely little child. But I remain mute. I don't know the woman -- she looks like all the others who live in this project and even her cerebral output is standard stuff, unindividuated, indistinguishable: vague thoughts, no doubt, of plantains and rice, this week's lottery results and tonight's television highlights. She is a dull bitch but she is human and I love her. What's her name? Maybe it's Mrs. Altagracia Morales. Mrs. Amantina Figueroa. Mrs. Filomena Mercado. I love their names. Pure poetry. I grew up with plump, clumping girls named Sondra Wiener, Beverly Schwartz, Sheila Weisbard. Ma'am, can you possibly be Mrs. Inocencia Fernandez? Her name comes to me -- Esperanza Dominguez. Esperanza. Esperanza. I love you, Esperanza. Ground floor. Nimbly I step forward to hold the door open. The lovely stolid pregnant chiquita doesn't smile at me as she exists. hop, one long block away. This far uptown the tracks are still elevated. The station at this hour is practically deserted. But in a moment I hear the wailing of onrushing wheels, metal on metal, and simultaneously I pick up the blasting impact of a sudden phalanx of minds all rushing toward me at once out of the north, packed aboard the five or six cars of the oncoming train. The compressed souls of those passengers form a single inchoate mass, pressing insistently against me. They quiver like trembling jellylike bits of plankton squeezed brutally together in some oceanographer's net, creating one complex organism in which the separate identities of all are lost. As the train glides into the station I am able to pick up isolated blurts and squeaks of discrete selfhood: a fierce jab of desire, a squawk of hatred, a pang of regret, a sudden purposeful inner mumbling, rising from the confusing totality the way odd little scraps and stabs of melody rise from the murky orchestral smear of a Mahler symphony. The power is deceptively strong in me today. I'm picking up plenty. This is the strongest it's been in weeks. Surely the low humidity is a factor. But I'm not deceived into thinking that the decline in my ability has been checked. When I first began to lose my hair there was a happy period when the process of erosion seemed to halt and reverse itself, when new patches of fine dark floss began to sprout on my denuded forehead. But this was no miraculous reforestation, only a twitch of the hormones, a temporary cessation of decay, not to be relied upon. And in time my hairline resumed its retreat. So, too, in this instance. When one knows that something is dying inside one, one learns not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment. Today the power is strong -- tomorrow I may hear nothing but distant tantalizing murmurs. I find a seat in the corner of the second car, open my book and wait out the ride downtown. I am reading Beckett again, Malone Dies; it plays nicely to my prevailing mood, which as you have noticed is one of self-pity. Somewhere about #th Street I look up and see a girl sitting diagonally opposite me and apparently studying me. She is in her very early twenties, attractive in a sallow way, with long legs, decent breasts, a bush of auburn hair. Is she interested in me? I am not reading her mind -- when I entered the train I automatically stepped my inputs down to the minimum, a trick I learned when I was a child. If I didn't insulate myself against scattershot crowdnoises on trains or in other enclosed public places I couldn't concentrate at all. Without attempting to detect her signals I speculate on what she's thinking about me -- I'm playing a game I often play. How intelligent he looks... He must have suffered a good deal -- his face is so much older than his body... tenderness in his eyes... so sad they look... a poet, a scholar... I bet he's very passionate... pouring all his pent-up love into the physical act... What's he reading? Beckett? Yes, a poet, a novelist, he must be... maybe somebody famous. I mustn't be too aggressive, though. He'll be turned off by pushiness. A shy smile, that'll catch him... one thing leads to another... I'll invite him up for lunch... Then, to check on the accuracy of my intuitive perceptions, I tune in on her mind. At first there is no signal. My damnable waning powers are betraying me again. But then it comes -- static, first, as I get the low-level muzzy ruminations of all the passengers around me, then the clear sweet tone of her soul. She is thinking about a karate class she will attend later this morning on #th Street. She is in love with her instructor, a brawny pockmarked Japanese. She will see him tonight. Dimly through her mind swims the memory of the taste of sake and the image of his powerful naked body rearing above her. There is nothing in her mind about me. I am simply part of the scenery, like the map of the subway system on the wall above my head, lig, your egocentricity kills you every time. She does indeed wear a shy smile now, but it is not for me and when she sees me staring at her the smile vanishes abruptly. T he train treats me to a long sweaty unscheduled halt in the tunnel between stations north of #th Street -- eventually it gets going again and deposits me at I #th Street, Columbia University. I climb toward the sunlight. I first climbed these stairs a full quarter of a century ago, October '#, a terrified high-school senior with acne and a crew-cut, coming out of. Brooklyn for my college entrance interview. I walk along I #th Street. To my right, the broad greensward of South Field -- to my left, the shallow steps rising to Low Library. I remember South Field when it was an athletic field in the middle of the campus, brown dirt, basepaths, fence. In my freshman year I played softball there. I was good at softball. Not much muscle, but quick reflexes and a good eye -- and I had the advantage of knowing what was on the pitcher's mind. He'd stand there thinking. This guy's too skinny to hit -- I'll give him a high fast one... and I'd be ready for it and bust it out into left field, circling the bases before anyone knew what was happening. Of course it was only softball and my classmates were mostly pudgy dubs who couldn't even run, let alone read minds, but at the time I enjoyed the unfamiliar sensation of being an outstanding athlete. In my sophomore yeafThey ripped up South Field and turned it into a fine grassy showplace divided by a paved promenade, in honor of the University's #th birthday. Which happened in #. Christ, so very long ago. I go up the steps and take a seat about fifteen feet to the left of the bronze statue of Alma Mater. This is my office in fair weather or foul. The students know where to look for me and when I'm there the word quickly spreads. There are five or six other people who provide the service I provide -- impecunious graduate students, mostly, down on their luck -- but I'm the quickest and most reliable and I have an enthusiastic following. "Mr. Selig?" Big brawny jock looming above me. Colossal shoulders, chubby innocent face. He's taking Comp Lit # and needs a paper fast on the novels of Kafka, which he hasn't read. (This is the football season -- he's the starting halfback and he's very, very busy.) I tell him the terms and he hastily agrees. While he stands there I covertly take a reading of him, getting the measure of his intelligence, his probable vocabulary, his style. He's smarter than he appears. Most of them are. They could write their own papers well enough if they only had the time. I make notes, setting down my quick impressions of him, and he goes away happy. Trade is brisk after that. He sends a fraternity brother, the brother sends a friend, the friend sends a brother from a different fraternity -- and the daisy-chain lengthens until by early afternoon I find I've taken on all the work I can handle. So all is well. I'll eat regularly for two or three weeks without having to tap my sister's grudging generosity. Judith will be pleased not to hear from me. Home, now, to begin my ghostly tasks. I'm good -- glib, earnest, profound in a convincingly sophomoric way -- and I can vary my styles. I know my way around literature, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, all the soft subjects. I charge three-fifty a typed page, sometimes more if my probing reveals that the client has money. A minimum grade of B-iguaranteed or there's no fee. I've never had to make a refund. II half years old and causing a great deal of trouble for his thirdgrade teacher little David was sent to the school psychiatrist. Dr. Hittner, for an examination. The school was an expensive private one on a quiet leafy street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Its orientation was socialistprogressive and the psychiatrist, a specialist in the disturbances of middle-class children, paid a call every Wednesday afternoon. Everyone agreed that David was a brilliant child: he was extraordinarily precocious, with a reading-comprehension score on the twelve-yearold level, and adults found him almost frighteningly bright. But he was uncontrollable in class, raucous, disrespectful. The schoolwork, hopelessly elementary for him, bored him to desperation. His only friends were the class misfits, whom he persecuted cruelly. Most of the children hated him and the teachers feared his unpredictability. One day he had up-ended a hallway fire extinguisher simply to see if it would spray foam as promised. It did. He brought garter snakes to school and let them loose in the auditorium. He mimed classmates and even teachers with vicious accuracy. "Dr. Hittner would just like to have a little chat with you," his mother told him. "He's heard you're a very special boy and he'd like to get to know you better." David resisted, kicking up a great fuss over the psychiatrist's name. "Hitler? Hitler? I don't want to talk to Hitler!" It was the fall of # and the childish pun was an inevitable one, but he clung to it with irritating stubbornness. "Dr. Hitler wants to see me. Dr. Hitler wants to get to know me." And his mother said, "No, Duvid, it's Hittner, Hittner, with an n." He went anyway. He strutted into the psychiatrist's office and when Dr. Hittner smiled benignly and said, "Hello, there, David," David shot forth a stiff arm and snapped, "Heil!" Dr. Hittner chuckled. "You've got the wrong man," he said. "I'm Hittner, with an n." Perhaps he had heard such jokes before. He was a huge man with a long horsy face, a wide fleshy mouth, a high curving forehead. His skin was soft and pink and he had a good tangy smell. He was trying hard to seem friendly and amused and big-brotherly, but David couldn't help picking up the impression that Dr. Hittner's brotherliness was just an act. It was something he felt with most adults -- they smiled a lot, but inside themselves they were thinking TT # Ballantine Books we shall talk about our May-June books. But actually, for us, it's the depth of winter ##, and we have been desperately trying to get our copy written for next Fall's '## list -- the books for which were, in fact, read and bought last summer, '#. And we have just concluded a review of the royalty statements for books published that same summer, purchased up to eighteen months before -- say Spring, # -- and written God knows how long before that. The long rhythms of publishing. Writing is a courageous profession. And one that must be carried on continuously, not to say compulsively. Otherwise the whole house of cards falls apart.    fession. It's a madness. Requiring the catch-all charms of gambler, psychiatrist, banker, editor, jailor, tax-consultant, mother, father, merchandiser and entertainer (ever been to a sales conference?) And it is a fall-out point. The publisher is where the buck -- good, bad, or non-existent -- comes to rest. It's very hard for writers or distributors to believe this. But the fact is, there are no advances, no guarantees for the publisher. He gets to make his first investments in a contract. He waits, and (if he's lucky) the ms. arrives when it should. Most often -- about # of the time -- it's late. Up to twelve years late in the experience of this publisher (and all you guys out there who are currently two or three years late just don't get any ideas). Sometimes the ms. never does come in, or it does and it's a disaster. Soothe and write-off. But let's pretend it's here and it's good, great, glorious (or, with work, it can be made so). Now there is only a year or so to wart until the publisher ducky fellow) can make his next big investment -- actual publication. After that, it's simply a matter of time (about another year) before we all know whether we're rich, famous, or the whole thing remains to be done over again. (And the publisher, naturally, absorbs the returns...)    and risk, how any reader can bear not to buy a book is past understanding. Now that you do understand, you know what to do. Therefore, blithe, gallant and indomitable, we are glad to announce that in May we will make available to a by-now desperately waiting public, the following: Kurtz, SI. #. The second volume in the annals of the Deryni -- that something more-than-human race. Thoughtprovoking adventure. No mindless sword carriers here.  bring you, intrepid as always: The first of a series about the "ultimate spaceship. " So Dave thinks. What it's really about is people -- lost, imperfect, afraid -- and fighting their way to one another anyhow. Very, very good. Gerrold, #e. Just to show how diverse this very talented young writer can be. Funny, gentle, morbid, joyous -- David Gerrold is one of the reasons why publishers go on being publishers. BB things like, What a scary brat, what a creepy little kid. Even his mother and father sometimes thought things like that. He didn't understand why adults said one thing with their faces and another with their minds, but he was accustomed to it. "Let's play some games, shall we?" Dr. Hittner said. O UT of the vest pocket of his tweed suit he produced a little plastic globe on a metal chain. He showed it to David. Then he pulled on the chain and the globe came apart into eight or nine pieces of different colors. "Watch closely now while I put it back together," said Dr. Hittner. His thick fingers expertly reassembled the globe. Then he pulled it apart again and shoved it across the desk toward David. "Your turn. Can you put it back together, too?" David remembered that the doctor had started by taking the E-shaped white piece and fitting the D-shaped blue piece into one of its grooves. Then had come the yellow piece, but David didn't recall what to do with it. He sat there a moment, puzzled, until Dr. Hittner obligingly flashed him a mental image of the proper manipulation. David did it and the rest was easy. A couple of times he got stuck, but he was always able to pull the answer out of the doctor's mind. Why does he think he's testing me, David wondered, if he keeps giving me so many hints? What's he proving? "Would you like to keep it?" "I don't need it," David said. But he pocketed it anyway. They played a few more games. There was one with little cards about the size of playing cards, with drawings of animals and birds and trees and houses on them. David was supposed to arrange them so that they told a story and then tell the doctor what the story was. He scattered them at random on the desk and made up a story as he went along. "The duck goes into the forest, you see, and he meets a wolf, so he turns into a frog and jumps over the wolf right into the elephant's mouth, only he escapes out of the elephant's tushie and falls into a lake and when he comes out he sees the pretty princess here, who says come home and I'll give you a gingerbread, but he can read her mind and he sees that she's really a wicked witch, who -- " Another game involved slips of paper that had big twin inkblots on them. "Do any of these shapes remind you of real things?" "Yes," David said, "this is an elephant, see, his tail is here and here all crumpled up -- and this is his tushie and this is where he makes pee-pee." He had already discovered that Dr. Hittner became very interested when he talked about tushies or pee-pee, so he gave the doctor plenty to be interested about, finding such things in every inkblot picture. This seemed a very silly game to David, but apparently it was important to Dr. Hittner, who scribbled notes on everything David was saying. David studied Dr. Hittner's mind while the psychiatrist wrote things down. Most of the words he picked up were incomprehensible, but he did recognize a few, the grownup terms for the parts of the body that David's mother had taught him; penis, vulva, buttocks, rectum -- things like that. Obviously Dr. Hittner liked those words a great deal, so David began to use them. "This is a picture of an eagle that's picking up a little sheep and flying away with it. This is the eagle's penis, down here, and over here is the sheep's rectum. And in the next one there's a man and a woman and they're both naked and the man is trying to..." David watched the fountain pen flying over the paper. He grinned at Dr. Hittner and turned to the next inkblot. Next they played word games. The doctor spoke a word and asked David to say the first word that came into his head. David found it more amusing to say the first word that came into Dr. Hittner's head. It took only a fraction of a second to pick it up and Dr. Hittner didn't seem to notice what was going on. The game went like this: "Father." "Penis." "Mother." "Bed." "Baby." "Dead." "Water." "Belly." "Tunnel." "Shovel." "Coffin." "Mother." Were those the right words to say? Who was the winner in this game? Why did Dr. Hittner seem so upset? Finally they stopped playing games and simply talked. "You're a very bright little boy," Dr. Hittner said. "I don't have to worry about spoiling you by telling you that, because you know it already. What do you want to be when you grow up?" "Nothing." "Nothing?" "I just want to play and read a lot of books and swim." "But how will you earn a living?" "I'll get money from people when I need it." "If you find out how -- I hope you'll tell me the secret," the doctor said. "Are you happy here in school?" "No." "Why not?" "The teachers are too strict. The work is too dumb. The children don't like me." "Do you ever wonder why they don't like you?" "Because I'm smarter than they are," David said. "Because I -- " Ooops. Almost said it. Because  can see what they're thinking. Mustn't ever tell anyone that. Dr. Hittner was waiting for him to finish the sentence. "Because I make a lot of trouble in class." "And why do you do that, David?" "I don't know. It gives me something to do, I guess." "Maybe if you didn't make so much trouble people would like you more. Don't you want people to like you?" "I don't care. I don't need it." "Everybody needs friends, David." "I've got friends." "Mrs. Fleischer says you don't have very many and that you hit them a lot and make them unhappy. Why do you hit your friends?" "Because I don't like them. Because they're dumb." "Then they aren't really friends -- if that's how you feel about them." Shrugging, David said, "I can get along without them. I have fun just being by myself." "Are you happy at home?" "I guess so." "You love your mommy and daddy?" A pause. A feeling of great tension coming out of the doctor's mind. This is an important question. Give the right answer, David. Give him the answer he wants. "Yes," David said. "Do you ever wish you had a baby brother or sister?" No hesitation now. "No." "Really, no? You like being all alone?" David nodded. "The afternoons are the best time. When I'm home from school and there's nobody around. Am I going to have a baby brother or sister?" Chuckles from the doctor. "I'm sure I don't know. That would be up to your mommy and daddy, wouldn't it?" "You won't tell them to get one for me, will you? I mean, you might say to them that it would be good for me to have one and then they'd go and get one, but I really don't want -- " I'm in trouble, David realized suddenly. "What makes you think I'd tell your parents it would be good for you to have a baby brother or sister?" the doctor asked quietly, not smiling now at all. "I don't know. It was just an idea." Which I found inside your head. Doctor. And now I want to get out of here. I don't want to talk to you any more. "Hey, your name isn't really Hittner, is it? With an n? I bet I know your real name. Hear thoughts into anybody else's head. Even when the power was strongest in me I couldn't transmit. I could only receive. Maybe there are people around who do have that power, who can transmit thoughts even to those who don't have any special receiving gift, but I wasn't ever one of them. So right there I was condemned to be society's ugliest toad, the eavesdropper, the voyeur. A kind of leech, secretly sucking emotional vitality from others. A vampire bat. Old English proverb; He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. Yes. In those years when I was particularly eager to communicate with people I'd work up fearful sweats trying to plant my thoughts in them. I'd sit in a classroom staring at the back of some girl's head and I'd think hard at her; Hello, Annie, this is David Selig calling -- do you read me? Do you read me? I love you, Annie. Over. Over and out. But Annie never read me and the currents of her mind would roll on like a placid river, undisturbed by the existence of David Selig. No way, then, for me to speak to other minds, only to spy on them. The way the power manifests itself in me has always been highly variable. I never had much conscious control over it, other than being able to step down the intensity of input and to do a certain amount of fine tuning -- basically I had to take whatever came drifting in. Most often I would pick up a person's surface thoughts, his subvocalizations of the things he would be just about to say. These would come to me in a clear conversational manner, exactly as though he had said them, except The tone of voice would be different -- plainly not a tone produced by the vocal apparatus. I don't remember any period even in my childhood when I confused spoken communication with mental communication. This ability to read surface thoughts has been fairly consistent throughout -- I still can anticipate verbal statements more often than not, especially when I'm with someone who has the habit of rehearsing what he intends to say. I could also and to some extent still can anticipate immediate intentions, such as the decision to throw a short right jab to the jaw. My way of knowing such things varies. I might pick up a coherent inner verbal statement -- I'm now going to throw a short right jab to his jaw -- or, if the power happens to be working on deeper levels that day, I may simply pick up a series of nonverbal instructions to the muscles, which add up in a fraction of a second to the process of bringing the right arm up for a short jab to the jaw. Call it body language on the telepathic wavelength. Another thing I've been able to do, though never consistently, is tune in to the deepest layers of the mind -- where the soul lives, if you will. Where the consciousness lies bathed in a murky soup of indistinct unconscious phenomena. Here lurk hopes, fears, perceptions, purposes, passions, memories, philosophical positions, moral policies, hungers, sorrows, the whole ragbag accumulation that defines the private self. Ordinarily some of this bleeds through to me even when the most superficial mental contact is established -- I can't help getting a certain amount of information about the coloration of the soul. But occasionally -- hardly ever, now -- I fasten my hooks into the real stuff, the whole person. There's ecstasy in that. There's an electrifying sense of contact. Coupled, of course, with a stabbing, numbing sense of guilt, because of the totality of my voyeurism -- how much more of a peeping tom can a person be? Incidentally, the soul speaks a universal language. When I look into the mind of Mrs. Esperanza Dominguez, say, and I get a gabble of Spanish out of it -- I don't really know what she's thinking because I don't understand very much Spanish. But if I were to get into the depths of her soul I'd have complete comprehension of anything I picked up. The mind may think in Spanish or Basque or Hungarian or Finnish, but the soul thinks in languageless language accessible to any prying sneaking freak who comes along to peer at its mysteries. No matter. It's all going from me now. Paul F. Bruno Comp Lit #, Prof. Schmitz October #, # In the nightmare world of The Trial and The Castle only one thing is certain: that the central figure, significantly known by the initial K, is doomed to frustration. All else is dreamlike and unsure -- courtrooms spring up in tenements, mysterious warders devour one's breakfast, a man thought to be Sordini is actually Sortini. The central fact is certain, though: K will fail in his attempt to attain grace. The two novels have the same theme and approximately the same basic structure. In both K seeks for grace and is led to the final realization that it is to be withheld from him. (The Castle is unfinished, but its conclusion seems plain.) Kafka brings his heroes into involvement with their situations in opposite ways. In The Trial Joseph K. is passive until he is jolted into the action of the book by the unexpected arrival of the two warders. In The Castle K is first shown as an active character making efforts on his own behalf to reach the mysterious Castle. To be sure, though, he has originally been summoned by the Castle -- the action did not originate in himself -- and thus he began as as passive a character as Joseph K. The distinction is that The Trial opens at a point earlier in the time stream of the actionat the earliest possible point, in fact. The Castle follows more closely the ancient rule of beginning in medias res, with K already summoned and trying to reach the Castle. Both books get off to rapid starts. Joseph K. is arrested in the very first sentence of The Trial and his counterpart K arrives at what he thinks is going to be the last stop before the Castle on the first page of that novel. From there both Ks struggle futilely toward their goals (in The Castle simply to get to the top of the hill; in The Trial, first to understand the nature of his guilt and then, despairing of this, to achieve acquittal without understanding). Both actually get farther from their goals with each succeeding action. The Trial reaches its peak in the wonderful Cathedral scene, quite likely the most terrifying single sequence in any of Kafka's work, in which K is given to realize that he is guilty and can never be acquitted -- the chapter that follows, describing K's execution, is little more than an anticlimactic appendage. The Castle, less complete than The Trial, lacks the counterpart of the Cathedral scene (perhaps Kafka was unable to devise one?) and thus is artistically less satisfying than the shorter, more intense, more tightly contracted Trial. Despite their surface artlessness, both novels appear to be built on the fundamental three-part structure of the tragic rhythm labeled by the critic Kenneth Burke as "purpose, passion, perception." The Trial follows this scheme with greater success than does the incomplete Castle -- the purpose, to achieve acquittal, is demonstrated through as harrowing a passion as any fictional hero has undergone. Finally, when Joseph K. has been reduced from his original defiant, self-confident attitude to a fearful, timid state of mind -- and he is obviously ready to capitulate to the forces of the Court -- the time is at hand for the final moment of perception... That's not so bad. Six doublespaced typed pages. At three-fifty per it earns me a cool twenty-one dollars for less than two hours' work and it will earn the brawny halfback, Mr. Paul F. Bruno, a sure B-ifrom Professor Schmitz. I'm confident of that because the very same paper, differing only in a few minor stylistic flourishes, got me a B from the very demanding Professor Dupee in May, #. Standards are lower today, after two decades of academic inflation. Bruno may even rack up an Afor the Kafka job. It's got just the right quality of earnest intelligence, with the proper undergraduate mixture of sophisticated insight and naive dogmatism. All right, now. Time out for a little chow mein, with maybe a side order of eggroll. Then I'll tackle Odysseus as a Symbol of Society or perhaps Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. I can't work from my own old term papers for those, but they shouldn't be too tough to do. Old typewriter, old humbugger, stand me now and ever in good stead. IV l. that evolution had designed our brains to serve as filters, screening out a lot 'of stuff of no real value to us in our daily struggle for bread. Visions, mystical experiences, psi phenomena such as telepathic messages from other brains -- all sorts of things along these lines would forever be flooding into us were it not for the action of what Huxley called, in a little book entitled Heaven and Hell, "the cerebral reducing valve." Thank God for the cerebral reducing valve! If we hadn't evolved it, we'd be distracted all the time by scenes of incredible beauty, by spiritual insights of overwhelming grandeur and by searing, utterly honest mind-to-mind contact with our fellow human beings. Luckily the workings of the valve protect us -- most of us -- from such things, and we are free to go about our daily lives, buying cheap and selling dear. Of course, some of us seem to be born with defective valves. I mean artists like Bosch or El Greco, whose eyes did not see the world as it appears to thee and me -- I mean the visionary philosophers, the ecstatics and the nirvana-attainers -- I mean the miserable freakish flukes who can read the thoughts of others. Mutants, all of us. Genetic sports. However, Huxley believed that the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve could be impaired by various artificial means, thus giving ordinary mortals access to the extrasensory data customarily seen only by the chosen few. The psychedelic drugs, he thought, could have this effect. Mescalin, he suggested, interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral function and by so doing "lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet. This... seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value. Similar intrusions of biologically useless, but aesthetically and sometimes spiritually valuable, material may occur as the result of illness or fatigue; or they may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a place of darkness and complete silence." Speaking for himself, David Selig can say very little about the psychedelic drugs. He had only one experience with them and it wasn't a happy one. That was in the summer of #, when he was living with Toni. (You don't know yet who Toni is. Be patient. I'll get to her.) Though Huxley thought highly of the psychedelics, he didn't see them as the only gateway to visionary experience. Fasting and physical mortification could also get you there. He wrote of mystics who "regularly used upon themselves the whip of knotted leather or even of iron wire. These beatings were the equivalent of fairly extensive surgery without anaesthetics, and their effects on the body chemistry of the penitent were considerable. Large quantities of histamine and adrenalin were released while the whip was actually being plied; and when the resulting wounds began to fester (as wounds practically always did before the. age of soap), various toxic substances, produced by the decomposition of protein, found their way into the bloodstream. But histamine produces shock, and shock affects the mind no less profoundly than the body. Moreover, large quantities of adrenalin may cause hallucinations, and some of the products of its decomposition are known to induce .symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia... In other words, when remorse, self-loathing, and the fear of hell release adrenalin, when self-inflicted wounds release decomposed protein into the blood, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve is lowered and unfamiliar aspects of Mind-at-Large (including psi phenomena, visions, and, if he is philosophically and ethically prepared... mystical experiences) will flow into the ascetic's consciousness." Remorse, self-loathing and the fear of hell. Fasting and prayer. Whips and chains. Festering wounds. As the power fades in me, as the sacred gift dies, I toy with the idea of trying to revive it by artificial means. Acid, mescalin, psilocybin? I don't think I'd care to go there again. Mortification of the flesh? That seems obsolete to me, like marching off to the Crusades or wearing spats; something that simply isn't appropriate for #. I doubt that I could get very deep into flagellation, anyway. What does that leave? Fasting and prayer? I could fast, I suppose. Prayer? To whom? To what? I'd feel like a fool. Dear God, give me my power again. Dear Moses please help me. Crap on that. Jews don't pray for favors -- they know nobody will answer. What's left, then? Remorse, self-loathing and the fear of hell? I already have those three and they do me no good. We must try some other way of goading the power back to life. Invent something new. Flagellation of the mind, perhaps? Yes. I'll try that. I'll get out the metaphorical cudgels and let myself have it. Flagellation of the aching, weakening, throbbing, dissolving mind. The treacherous, hateful mind. B ut why does David Selig want his power to come back? Why not let it fade? It's always been a curse to him, hasn't it? It's cut him off from his fellow men and doomed him to a loveless life. Leave well enough alone, Duvid. Let it fade. Let it fade. On the j other hand, without the power, I what are you? Without that one faltering unpredictable unsatisfactory means of contact with them, how will you be able to touch them at all? Your power joins you to mankind, for better or for worse, i in the only joining you have and ! you can't bear to surrender it. i Admit it. You love it and you despise it, this gift of yours. You ' dread losing it despite all it's done ! to you. You'll fight to cling to the i last shreds of it, even though you j know the struggle is hopeless. Fight on, then. Read Huxley again. Try acid, if you dare. Try flagellation. Try fasting, at least. All right, fasting. I'll skip the chow mein. I'll skip the eggroll. Let's slide a fresh sheet into the typewriter and think about Odysseus as a symbol of society. V H ark to the silvery jangle of the telephone. The hour is late. Who calls? Is it Aldous Huxley from beyond the grave, urging me to have courage? Dr. Hittner, with some important questions about making pee-pee? Sure. Sure. I stare at the telephone, clueless. My power even at its height was never equal to the task of penetrating the consciousness of Ma Bell. At last, sighing, I pick up the receiver on the fifth ring and hear the sweet contralto voice of my sister Judith. "Am I interrupting something?" Typical Judith opening. "A quiet night at home. I'm ghosting a term paper on The Odyssey." "You haven't called in two weeks." "I was broke. After that scene the last time I didn't want to bring up the subject of money. And lately it's been the only subject I can think of to talk about, so I didn't call." "Crap," she says. "I wasn't angry at you." "You sounded mad as hell." "I didn't mean any of that stuff. Why did you think I was serious? Just because I was yelling? Do you really believe that I regard you as -- as -- what did I call you?" "A shiftless sponger, I think." "A shiftless sponger. Crap. I was tense that night, Duv, I had personal problems and my period was coming on besides. I lost control. I was just shouting the first dumb thing that came into my head, but why did you believe I meant it? You of all people shouldn't have thought I was serious. Since when do you take what people say with their mouths at face value?" "You were saying it with your head, too, Jude." "I was?" Her voice is suddenly small and contrite. "Are you sure?" "It came through loud and clear." "Oh, Jesus, Duv, have a heart! In the heat of the moment I could have been thinking anything. But underneath the anger -- underneath, Duv -- you must have seen that I didn't mean it. That I love you, that I don't want to drive you away from me. You're all I've got, Duv, you and the baby." "I don't read much of what's underneath any more, Jude. Not much comes through these days. Anyway, look, it isn't worth hassling over. I am a shiftless sponger -- and I have borrowed more from you than you can afford to give. The black sheep big brother feels enough guilt as it is. I'm damned if I'm ever going to ask for money from you again." "Guilt? You talk about guilt, when I -- " "No," I warn her, "don't you go on a guilt trip now, Jude. Not now." "All right. All right. Are you okay now for money, though?" "I told you. I'm ghosting term papers. I'm getting by." "Do you want to come over here for dinner tomorrow night?" "I think I'd better work instead. I've got a lot of papers to write, Jude. It's the busy season." "It would be just the two of us. And the kid, of course, but I'll put him to sleep early. Just you and me. We could talk. We've got so much to talk about. Why don't you come over, Duv? You don't need to work all day and all night. I'll cook up something you like." She is pleading with me, this icy sister who gave me nothing but hatred for twenty-five years. Come over and I'll be a mama for you, Duv. Come let me be loving, brother. "Maybe the night after next. I'll call you." "No chance for tomorrow?" "I don't think so," I say. There is silence. She doesn't want to beg me. Into the sudden screeching silence I say, "What have you been doing with yourself, Judith? Seeing anyone interesting?" "Not seeing anyone at all." A flinty edge to her voice. She is two and a half years into her divorce -- she sleeps around a good deal and juices are souring in her soul. She is thirty-one years old. "What happened to that travel agent you were seeing? Mickey?" "Marty. That was just a gimmick. He got me all over Europe for ten percent of the fare. I was using him." "So?" "I felt cruddy about it. Last month I broke off. I wasn't in love with him. I don't think I even liked him." "But you played around with him long enough to get a trip to Europe -- first." "It didn't cost him anything, Duv. I had to go to bed with him -- all he had to do was fill out a form. What are you saying anyway? That I'm a whore?" "Jude -- " "Okay, I'm a whore. At least I'm trying to go straight for a while. Lots of fresh orange juice and plenty of serious reading. I'm reading Proust now, would you believe that? I just finished Swann's Way and tomorrow -- " "I've still got some work to do tonight, Jude." "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude. Will you come for dinner this week?" "I'll think about it. I'll let you know." "Why do you hate me so much, Duv?" "I don't hate you. And we were about to get off the phone, I think." "Don't forget to call," she says. Clutching at straws. VI T oni. I should tell you about Toni now. I lived with Toni for seven weeks, one summer eight years ago. That's as long as I've ever lived with anybody, except my parents and my sister, whom I got away from as soon as I decently could, and myself, whom I can't get away from at all. Toni was one of the two great loves of my life, the other being Kitty. I'll tell you about Kitty some other time. Can I reconstruct Toni? Let's try it in a few swift strokes. She was twenty-four that year. A tall coltish girl, five feet six, five feet seven. Slender. Agile and awkward, both at once. Long legs, long arms, thin wrists, thin ankles. Glossy black hair, very straight, cascading to her shoulders. Quick brown eyes, warm, alert and quizzical. A witty, shrewd girl, not really well educated but extraordinarily wise. The face by no means conventionally pretty -- too much mouth, too much nose, the cheekbones too high -- but producing a sexy and highly attractive effect, sufficient to make a lot of heads turn when she entered a room. I never looked into Toni's mind except once on the very day I met her and once a couple of weeks after that, plus a third time on the day we broke up. The third time was a sheer disastrous accident. The second was more or less an accident, too, not quite. Only the first was a deliberate probe. After I realized I loved her I took care never to spy on her head. He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. A lesson I learned very young. Besides, I didn't want Toni to suspect anything about my power. My curse. I was afraid it might frighten her away. That summer I was working as an eighty-five a week researcher, latest in my infinite series of odd jobs, for a well-known professional writer who was doing an immense book on the political machinations involved in the founding of the state of Israel. Eight hours a day I went through old newspaper files for him in the bowels of the Columbia library. Toni was a junior editor for the publishing house that was bringing out his book. I met her one afternoon in late spring at his posh apartment on East End Avenue. I went there to deliver a bundle of notes on Harry Truman's # campaign speeches and she happened to be present. She was so beautiful it hurt me to look at her. I hadn't been with a woman in months. I automatically assumed she was the writer's mistress -- screwing editors. I'm told, is standard practice on certain high levels of the literary profession -- but my old peeping-tom instincts quickly gave me the true scoop. I tossed a fast probe at him and found that his mind was a cesspool of frustrated longings for her. He ached for her and she had no yen for him at all, evidently. Next I poked into her mind. I sank in deep, finding myself in warm, rich loam. Quickly got oriented. Stray fragments of autobiography bombarded me, incoherent, nonlinear: a divorce, some good sex and some bad sex, college days, a trip to the Caribbean, all swimming around in the usual chaotic way. I got past that fast and checked out what I was after. No, she wasn't sleeping with the writer. Physically he registered absolute zero for her. (Odd. To me he seemed attractive, a romantic and appealing figure, as far as a drearily heterosexual soul like me is able to judge such things.) Then, still rummaging around, I learned something much more surprising -- I seemed to be turning her on. Forth from her came the explicit line: I wonder if he's free tonight. She looked upon the aging researcher, a venerable thirty-three and already going thin on top, and did not find him repellent. I was so shaken by that -- her dark-eyed glamor, her leggy sexiness aimed at me -- that I got the hell out of her head, fast. "Here's the Truman stuff," I said to my employer. We talked for a few minutes about the next assignment he had for me and then I made as though to leave. A quick guarded look at her. "Wait," she said. "We can ride down together. I'm just about finished here." In the elevator we stood apart, Toni in this corner, I in that one, with a quivering wall of tension and yearning separating and uniting us. I had to struggle to keep from reading her. I was afraid, terrified, not of getting the wrong answer but of getting the right one. In the street we stood apart also, dithering a moment. Finally I said I was getting a cab to take me to the Upper West Side -- me, a cab, on eighty-five a week -- and could I drop her off anywhere? She said she lived on #th and West End. Close enough. When the cab stopped outside her place she invited me up for a drink. Three rooms, indifferently furnished: mostly books, records, scatter-rugs, posters. She went to pour some wine for us and I caught her and pulled her around and kissed her. She trembled against me -- or was I the one who was trembling? O yER a bowl of hot-and-sour soup at the Great Shanghai, a little later that evening, she said she would be moving in a couple of days. The apartment belonged to her current roommate -- male -- with whom she had split up just three days before. She had no place to stay. "I've got only one lousy room," I said, "but it has a double bed." Shy grins, hers, mine. So she moved in. I didn't think she was in love with me, not at all, but I wasn't going to ask. If what she felt for me wasn't love, it was good enough, the best I could hope for -- and in the privacy of my own head I could feel love for her. She had needed a port in a storm. I had happened to offer one. If that was all I meant to her now, so be it. So be it. There was time for things to ripen. We slept very little, our first two weeks. Not that we were making love all the time, though there was a lot of that, but we talkedWe were new to each other, which is the best time of any relationship -- when there are whole pasts to share everything pours out and there's no need to search for things to say. (Not quite everything poured out. The only thing I concealed from her was the central fact of my life, the fart that had shaped my every aspect.) She talked of her marriage -- young, brief and empty -- and of how she had lived in the three years since its ending -- a succession of men, a dip into occultism and Reichian therapy, a newfound dedication to her editing career. Giddy weeks. Our third week brought my second peep into her mind. A sweltering June night, a full moon sending cold illumination through the slatted blinds into our room. Her body, very pale, wore a white glow in the eerie darkness, her long lean form rearing above me. Her face half hidden in her own dangling unruly hair. Her eyes closed. Her lips slack. Her breasts, viewed from below, seemed even bigger than they really were. Cleopatra by moonlight. Her beauty and the strangeness of her so overwhelmed me that I could not resist watching her -- watching on all levels -- and so I opened the barrier that I had so scrupulously erected. My mind touched a curious finger to her soul and received the full uprushing volcanic intensity of her pleasure. I found no thought of me in her mind. Only sheer animal frenzy, bursting from every nerve. I've seen that in other women, before and after Toni -- as they reach that moment they are islands, alone in the void of space, aware only of their bodies. When pleasure takes them it is a curiously impersonal phenomenon, no matter how titanic its impact. So it was then with Toni. I didn't object. I knew what to expect and I didn't feel cheated or rejected. In fact my joining of souls with her at that awesome moment served to trigger and treble the intensity of my own pleasure. I lost contact with her then. Upheavals shattered the fragile telepathic link. Afterward I felt a little sleazy at having spied, but not overly guilty about it. How magical a thing it was, after all, to have been with her in that moment. To be aware of her joy not just as mindless spasms but as jolts dark terrain of her soul. An instant of beauty and wonder, an illumination never to be forgotten. But never to be repeated, either. I resolved once more to keep our relationship clean and honest. To take no unfair advantage of her. To stay out of her head forever after. Despite which, I found myself some weeks later entering Toni's consciousness a third time. By accident. By damnable abominable accident. Oy, that third time! That bummer -- that disaster. That catastrophe. when he was ten years old, his loving mother and father got him a little sister. That was exactly how they phrased it -- his mother, smiling her warmest phony smile, hugging him, telling him in her best this is how we talk to bright children tone, "Dad and I have a wonderful surprise for you, Duvid. We're going to get a little sister for you." It was no surprise, of course. They had been discussing it among themselves for months, maybe for years, always making the fallacious assumption that their son, clever as he was, didn't understand what they were talking about. And, naturally, he had been reading their minds. In those days the power was sharp and clear -- lying in his bedroom, surrounded by his dog-eared books and his stamp albums, he could effortlessly tune in on everything that went on behind the closed door of theirs, fifty feet away. It was like an endless radio broadcast without commercials. They had no secrets from him. He had no shame about spying. Preternaturally adult, privy to all their privities, he meditated daily on the raw torrid stuff of married life -- the financial anxieties, the moments of sweet undifferentiated lovingness, the moments of guiltily suppressed hatred for the wearisome eternal spouse, the copulatory joys and anguishes, the comings together and the fallings apart, the intense and terrifyingly single-minded concentration on the growth and proper development of The Child. Their minds poured forth a steady stream of rich yeasty foam and he lapped it all up. Reading their souls was his game, his toy, his religion, his revenge. They never suspected he was doing it. They didn't dream his gift existed. They merely thought he was abnormally intelligent and never questioned the means by which he learned so much about so many improbable things. He knew that Dr. Hittner -- baffled, wholly out of his depth with the strange Selig child -- believed it would be better for everyone if David had a sibling. That was the word he used, sibling, and David had to fish the meaning out of Hittner's head as though out of a dictionary. Sibling; a brother or a sister. Oh, the treacherous horsefaced bastard! The one thing young David had asked Hittner not to suggest -- and naturally he had suggested it. The desirability of siblings had been in Hittner's mind all along, lying there like a grenade. David, picking his mother's mind one night, had found the text of a letter from Hittner. The only child is an emotionally deprived child. Without the rough-and-tumble interplay with siblings he has no way of learning the best techniques of relating to his peers and he develops a dangerously burdensome relation with his parents, for whom he becomes a companion instead of a dependent. Hittner's universal panacea: lots of siblings. As though there were no neurotics in big families. David was aware of his parents' prescription. No time to waste -- the boy grows older all the time, siblingless, lacking each day the means of learning the best techniques of relating to his peers. And so, night after night, the poor aging bodies of Paul and Martha Selig grapple with the problem. They force themselves sweatily onward to self-defeating prodigies of lustfulness and each month the bad news comes in a rush of blood: there will be no sibling this time. But at last the seed takes root... They said nothing about that to him, ashamed, perhaps, to admit to an eight-year-old that such things as sexual intercourse occurred in their lives. But he knew. He knew why his mother's belly was beginning to bulge and why they still hesitated to explain it to him. He knew, too, that his mother's mysterious "appendicitis" attack of July, #, was actually a miscarriage. He knew why they both wore tragic faces for months afterward. He knew that Martha's doctor had told her that autumn that it really wasn't wise for her to try for more babies, due to her condition -- that if they were going to insist on a second child the best course was to adopt one. He knew his father's traumatic response to that suggestion: What, bring into the household a bastard that some tramp threw away? Poor old Paul lay tossing awake every night for weeks, not even confessing to his wife why he was so upset, but unto his nosy son. The insecurities, the irrational hostilities. Why do I have to raise a stranger's brat, just because this psychiatrist says it'll do David some good? What kind of garbage will I be taking into the house? How can I love this child that isn't mine? All this the allperceiving David perceives. Finally the elder Selig voices his misgivings, carefully edited, to his wife, saying. Maybe Hittner's wrong, maybe this is just a phase David's going through and another child isn't the right answer at all. Telling her to consider the expense, the changes they'd have to make in their way of life -- they're not young, they've grown settled in their ways... a child at this time of their lives, the getting up at four in the morning, the crying, the diapers. And David silently cheering his father on, because who needs this intruder, this sibling, this enemy of the peace? But Martha tearfully fights back, quoting Hittner's letter, reading key passages out of her extensive library on child psychology, offering damning statistics on the incidence of neurosis, maladjustment, bed-wetting and homosexuality among only children. The old man yields by Christmas. Okay, okay, we'll adopt, but let's not take just anything, hear? It's got to be Jewish. adoption agencies, pretending all the while to David that these trips to Manhattan are mere innocuous shopping excursions. He wasn't fooled. How could anyone fool this omniscient child? He had only to look behind their foreheads to know that they were shopping for a sibling. His one comfort was the hope that they would fail to find one. This was still wartime -- if you couldn't buy a new car, maybe you couldn't get siblings either. For many weeks that appeared to be the case. Not many babies were available, and those that were seemed to have some grave defect -- insufficiently Jewish or too fragile-looking, too cranky or of the wrong sex. Some boys were available but Paul and Martha had decided to get David a little sister. Already that limited things considerably, since people tended not to give girls up for adoption as readily as they did boys, but one snowy night in March David detected an ominous note of satisfaction in the mind of his mother, newly returned from yet another shopping trip, and, looking more closely, he realized that the quest was over. She had found a lovely little girl, four months old. David wondered why Martha hadn't brought the baby home with her that very afternoon, but several weeks of legal formalities lay ahead and April was well along before his mother finally announced, "Dad and I have a wonderful surprise for you, Duvid." They named her Judith Hannah Selig. David hated her instantly. He had been afraid they were going to move her into his bedroom, but no, they set up her crib in their own room. Nevertheless, her crying filled the whole apartment night after night, unending raucous wails. It was incredible how much noise could come out of one small body. Paul and Martha spent practically all their time feeding her or playing with her or changing her diapers and David didn't mind that very much. It kept them busy and took some of the pressure off him. But he loathed having Judith around. He saw nothing cute about her pudgy limbs and curly hair and dimpled cheeks. Watching her while she was being changed, he found some academic interest in observing her little pink slit, so alien to his experience, but once he had seen it his curiosity was assuaged. In general she was an irritating distraction. He couldn't read properly because of the noise she made, and reading was his one pleasure. The apartment was always full of relatives or friends, paying ceremonial visits to the new baby, and their stupid conventional minds flooded the place with blunt thoughts that impinged like mallets on David's vulnerable consciousness. Now and then he tried to read the baby's mind, but there was nothing in it except vague blurry formless globs of cloudy sensation -- he had had more rewarding insights reading the minds of dogs and cats. She didn't appear to have any thoughts. All he could pick up were feelings of hunger, of drowsiness and of dim orgasmic release as she wet her diaper. About ten days after she arrived he decided to try to kill her telepathically. While his parents were busy elsewhere he went to their room, peered into his sister's bassinet and concentrated as hard as he could on draining her unformed mind out of her skull. If only he could manage somehow to suck the spark of intellect from her, to draw her consciousness into himself, to transform her into an empty mindless shell, she would surely die. He sought to sink his hooks into her soul. He stared into her eyes and opened his power wide, taking her entire feeble output and pulling for more. Come... come... your mind is sliding toward me... I'm getting it, I'm getting all of it... zam! I have your whole mind! Unmoved by his conjurations, she continued to gurgle and wave her arms about. He stared more intensely, redoubling the vigor of his concentration. Her smile wavered and vanished. Her brows puckered into a frown. Did she know he was attacking her or was she merely bothered by the faces he was making? Come... come... your mind is sliding toward me... For a moment he thought he might actually succeed. But then she shot him a look of frosty malevolence, incredibly fierce, truly terrifying coming from an infant, and he backed away, frightened, fearing some sudden counterattack. An instant later she was gurgling again. She had defeated him. He went on hating her, but he never again tried to harm her. She, by the time she was old enough to know what the concept of hatred meant, was well aware of how her brother felt about her. And she hated back. She proved to be a far more efficient hater than he was. Oh, was she ever a first-class expert at hating! dying inside T he subject of this composition is My Very First Acid Trip. My first and my last, eight years ago. Actually it wasn't my trip at all, but Toni's. D-lysergic acid diethylamide has never passed through my digestive tract. What I did was hitchhike on Toni's trip. Let me tell you. This happened in the summer of '#. That summer was a bad trip all in itself. Do you remember '# at all? That was the year we all awoke to the fact that the whole business was coming apart. I mean American society. That pervasive feeling of decay and imminent collapse, so familiar to us all -- it really dates from '#, I think. When the world around us became a metaphor for the process of violent entropic collapse that had been going on inside our souls -- inside my soul, at any rate -- for some time. That summer Lyndon Baines Johnson was in the White House, just barely, serving out his time after his abdication in March. Bobby Kennedy had finally met the bullet with his name on it and so had Martin Luther King. It was the year of sideburns and Buffalo Bill mustachios. Babies were dying of malnutrition in a place called Biafra, which you don't remember, and the Russians were moving troops into Czechoslovakia in yet another demonstration of socialist brotherhood. In a place called Vietnam, which you probably wish you didn't remember either, we were dumping napalm on everything in sight for the sake of promoting peace and democracy, and a had recently coordinated the liquidation of #-odd sinister and dangerous old men, women and children at the town of Mylai, only we didn't know anything about that yet. Let's see, what else? President Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Where are you now. Chief Justice Fortas, when we need you? The Paris peace talks, believe it or not, had just begun that summer. In later years it came to seem that the talks had been going on since the beginning of time, as eternal and everlasting as the Grand Canyon and the Republican Party, but no, they were invented in #. That was the sort of year it was. Oh, Christ, I've forgotten one significant chunk of history. In the spring of '# we had the riots at Columbia, with radical students occupying the campus and classes being suspended and final exams called off and nightly confrontations with the police. How funny it is that I pushed that event out of my mind, when of all the things I've listed here it was the only one I actually experienced at first hand. Standing at Broadway and #th Street watching platoons of cold-eyed fuzz go racing toward Butler Library. Holding my hand aloft in the forked V-for-peace gesture and screaming idiotic slogans with the best of them. Cowering in the lobby of Furnald Hall as the blue-clad nightstick brigade went on its rampage. Debating tactics with a ragged-bearded my face and called me a stinking liberal fink. Watching a group of young shaggy Columbia men ritualistically pissing on a pile of research documents that had been liberated from the filing cabinet of some hapless instructor going for his doctorate. It was then that I knew there could be no hope for mankind, when even the best of us were capable of going berserk in the cause of love and peace and human equality. On those dark nights I looked into many minds and found only hysteria and madness. Once, in despair, realizing I was living in a world where two factions of lunatics were battling for control of the asylum, I went off to vomit in Riverside Park after a particularly bloody riot and was caught unawares (me, caught unawares!) by a lithe #-year-old black mugger who smilingly relieved me of twenty-two dollars. I was living near Columbia in '#, in a seedy residence hotel on I #th Street, where I had one mediumbig room plus kitchen and bathroom privileges. It was cheap -- fourteen-fifty a week -- and I had to  close to the University because of the work I was doing, researching that Israel book. Are you still following me? I was telling you about my first acid trip, which was really Toni's trip. room nearly seven weeks -- a bit of May, all of June, some of July through thick and thin, heat waves and rainstorms, misunderstandings and reconciliations, and it had been a happy time, perhaps the happiest of my life. I loved her and I think she loved me. I haven't had much love in my life. That isn't intended as a grab for your pity, just as a simple statement of fact, objective and cool. The nature of my condition diminishes my capacity to love and be loved. A man in my circumstances, wide open to everyone's innermost thoughts, really isn't going to experience a great deal of love. He is poor at giving love because he doesn't much trust his fellow human beings -- he knows too many of their dirty little secrets and that kills his feelings for them. Unable to give, he cannot get. His soul, hardened by isolation and ungivingness, becomes inaccessible and it is not easy for others to love him. The loop closes upon itself and he is trapped within. Nevertheless I loved Toni, having taken special care not to see too deeply into her, and I didn't doubt my love was returned. On the Friday of our seventh week Toni came home from her dying inside office with two small squares of white blotting paper in her purse. In the center of each square was a faint blue-green stain. I studied them a moment or two without comprehending. "Acid," she said finally. "Acid?" them to me." Teddy was her boss, the editorread Huxley on mescalin in #. I was fascinated and tempted. For years I had flirted with the psychedelic experience, even once research program at the Columbia Medical Center, I was too late signing up, though. And then, as the drug became a fad, came all the horror stories of suicides, psychoses, bad trips. Knowing my vulnerabilities, I decided it was the part of wisdom to leave acid to others, though I was still curious about it. And now these squares of blotting paper sitting in the palm of Toni's hand. "It's supposed to be dynamite stuff," she said. "Absolutely pure, laboratory quality. Teddy's already tripped on a tab from this batch and he says it's very smooth, very clean, no speed in it or any crap like that. I thought we could spend tomorrow tripping and sleep it off on Sunday." "Both of us?" "Why not?" "Do you think it's safe for both of us to be out of our minds at the same time?" She gave me a peculiar look. "Do you think acid drives you out of your mind?" "I don't know. I've heard a lot of scary stories." "You've never tripped?" "No," I said. "Have you?" "Well, no. But I've watched friends of mine while they were tripping." I felt a pang at this reminder of the life she had led before I met her, "They don't go out of their minds, David. There's a kind of wild high for an hour or so when things sometimes get jumbled up, but basically somebody who's tripping sits there as lucid and as calm as -- well, Aldous Huxley. Can you imagine Huxley out of his mind? Gibbering and drooling and smashing furniture?" She sounded impatient with me. There was a patronizing, lecturing tone in her voice. Her esteem for me seemed clearly diminished by these old-maid hesitations of mine -- we were on the threshold of a real rift. "What's the matter, David? Are you afraid to trip?" "I think it's unwise for both of us to trip at once, that's all. When we aren't sure where the stuff is going to take us." "Tripping together is the most loving thing two people can do." "But it's a risky thing. We just don't know. Look, you can get more acid if you want it, can't you?" "I suppose so." "Okay, then. Let's do this thing in an orderly way, one step at a time. There's no hurry. You trip tomorrow and I'll watch. I'll trip on Sunday and you'll watch. If we both like what the acid does to our heads, we can trip together next time. All right, Toni? All right?" "All right," she said softly. "It isn't worth a hassle." skipped breakfast -- she had been told to trip on an empty stomach -- and after I had eaten we sat for a time in the kitchen with one of the squares of blotting paper lying innocently on the table between us. There wasn't much conversation. She filled an ash tray with a great dismal mound of halfsmoked cigarettes. From time to time she grinned nervously. From time to time I took her hand and smiled encouragingly. During this touching scene various of the tenants with whom we shared the kitchen on this floor of the hotel drifted in and out. First Eloise, the sleek black hooker. Then Miss Theotokis, the grim-faced nurse who worked at St. Luke's. Mr. Wong, the mysterious little rolypoly Chinese who always walked around in his underwear. Aitken, the scholarly fag from Toledo, and his cadaverous mainlining roommate, Donaldson. A couple of them nodded to us but no one actually said anything, not even "Good morning." In this place it was proper to behave as though your neighbors were invisible. The fine old New York tradition. About half-past ten in the morning Toni said, "Get me some orange juice, will you?" Giving me a wink and a broad toothy smile, all false bravado, she wadded up the blotting paper and pushed it into her mouth, bolting it and gulping the orange juice as a chaser. "Flow long will it take to hit?" I asked. "About an hour and a half," she said. In fact it was more like fifty minutes. We were back in our own room, the door locked, faint scratchy sounds of Bach coming from the portable phonograph. She looked up suddenly and said, "I'm starting to feel a little funny." "Funny how?" "Dizzy. A slight touch of nausea. There's a prickling at the back of my neck." "Can I get you anything? Glass of water? Juice?" "Nothing, thanks. I'm fine. Really I am." A smile, timid but genuine. She seemed a little apprehensive but not at all frightened. Eager for the voyage. I put down my book and watched her vigilantly, feeling protective, almost wishing that I'd have some occasion to be of service to her. I didn't want her to have a bad trip but I wanted her to need me. She gave me bulletins on the progress of the acid through her nervous system. Visual effects were beginning. The walls looked a trifle concave to her and the flaws in the plaster were taking on extraordinary texture and complexity. The color of everything was unnaturally bright. The shafts of sunlight coming through the dirty window were prismatic, shattering and spewing pieces of the spectrum over the floor. The music -- I had a stack of her favorite records on the changer -- had acquired a curious new intensity. She was having difficulty following melodic lines and it seemed to her that the turntable kept stopping and starting, but the sound itself, as sound, had some indescribable quality of density and tangibility that fascinated her. There was a whistling sound in her ears, too, as of air rushing past her cheeks. She spoke of a pervading sense of strangeness -- "I'm on some other planet," she said twice. She looked flushed, excited, happy. Remembering the terrible tales I had heard of acidinduced descents into hell, harrowing accounts of grueling bummers lovingly recounted for diligent anonymous journalists of Time and Life, I nearly wept in relief at this evidence that my Toni would come through her journey unscathed. I had feared the worst. But she was making out all right. Her eyes were closed. Her face was serene and exultant, her breathing deep and relaxed. Lost in transcendental realms of mystery was my Toni. She was barely speaking to me now, breaking her silences only every few minutes to murmur something indistinct and oblique. Half an hour had passed since she first had reported strange sensations. As she drifted deeper into her trip my love for her grew deeper also. Her ability to cope with acid was proof of the basic toughness of her personality and that delighted me. I admire capable women. Already I was planning my own trip for the next day -- selecting the musical accompaniment, trying to imagine the sort of interesting distortions of reality I would experience, looking forward to comparing notes with Toni afterward. I was regretting the cowardice that had deprived me of the pleasure of tripping with Toni this day. B ut what is this, now? What's happening to my head? Why this sudden feeling of suffocation? The pounding in my chest? The dryness in my throat? The walls are flexing -- the air seems close and heavy -- my right arm is suddenly a foot longer than the left one. These are effects Toni had noticed and described a little while ago. Why do I feel them now? I tremble. Muscles leap about of their own accord in my thighs. Is this what they call a contact high? Merely being so close to Toni while she trips -- did she breathe particles turned on through some contagion of the atmosphere? "My dear Selig," says my armchair smugly, "how can you be so foolish? Obviously you're picking these phenomena right out of her mind!" Obviously? Is it so obvious? I consider the possibility. Am I reading Toni without knowing it? Apparently I am. In the past some effort of concentration, however slight, had always been necessary in order for me to manage a finefocus peep into another head. But it seems that the acid must intensify her outputs and bring them to me unsolicited. What other explanation can there be? She is broadcasting her trip and somehow I have tuned to her wavelength. And now the acid's strangenesses, spreading across the gap between us, infect me as welt. Shall I get out of her mind? The acid effects distract me. I look at Toni and she seems transformed. A small dark mole on her lower cheek, near the corner of her mouth, flashes a vortex of blazing color: red, blue, violet, green. Her lips are too full, her mouth too wide. All those teeth. Row upon row upon row, like a shark's. Why have I never noticed that predatory mouth before? She frightens me. Her neck elongates; her body compresses; her breasts move about like restless cats beneath her familiar red sweater, which itself has taken on an ominous, threatening purplish tinge. To escape her I glance toward the window. A pattern of cracks that I have never been aware of before runs through the soiled panes. In a moment, surely, the shattered window will implode and shower us with fiery fragments of glass. The building across the street is unnaturally squat today. There is menace in its altered form. The ceiling is coming toward me, too. I hear muffled drumbeats overhead -- the footsteps of my upstairs neighbor, I tell myself -- and I imagine cannibals preparing their dinner. I should turn this off, before it freaks me altogether. I want out. Well, easily done. I have my ways of stopping down the inputs, of blocking the flow. Only they don't work this time. I am helpless before the power of the acid. I try to shut myself away from these unfamiliar and unsettling sensations and they march into me all the same. I am wide open to everything emanating from Toni. I am caught up in it. I go deeper and deeper. This is a trip. This is a bad trip. This is a very bad trip. How odd -- Toni was having a good trip, wasn't she? Then why do #, accidentally hitchhiking on her trip, find myself having a bad one? Whatever is in Toni's mind floods into mine. Receiving another's soul is no new experience for me, but this is a transfer such as I have dying inside never had before, for the information, modulated by the drug, comes to me in ghastly distortions. I am soul and what I see is a feast of demons. Can such darkness really live within her? I saw nothing like this those other two times -- has the acid released some level of nightmare not accessible to me before? Her past is on parade. Gaudy images, bathed in a lurid light. Lovers. Copulations. Abominations. Where am I? Where am I? Ah, there -- off to one side, insignificant, irrelevant. Is that thing me? Is that how she really sees me? A hairy vampire bat, a crouching huddled bloodsucker? Or is that merely David Selig's own image of David Selig, bouncing between us like the reflections in a barber shop's parallel mirrors? God help me, am I laying my own bad trip on her, then reading it back from her and blaming her for harboring nightmares not of her own making? How can I break this link? I stumble to my feet. Staggering, splay-footed, nauseated. The room whirls. Where is the door? The doorknob retreats from me. I lunge for it. "David?" Her voice reverberates unendingly. "David David David David David David -- " "Some fresh air," I mutter. "Just stepping outside a minute -- " It does no good. The nightmare images pursue me through the door. I lean against the sweating wall, clinging to a flickering sconce. The Chinaman drifts by me as though a ghost. Far away I hear the telephone ringing. The re frigerator door slams and slams again and slams again and the Chinaman goes by me a second time from the same direction and ' the doorknob retreats from me as the universe folds back upon itself, locking me into a looped moment. Entropy decreases. The green wall . sweats green blood. A voice like ; thistles says, "Selig? Is something  wrong?" It's Donaldson, the junkie. His face is a skull's face. His hand on my shoulder is all bones. "Are you sick?" he asks. I shake my head. He leans toward me until his empty eye sockets are i inches from my face and studies me ! a long moment. He says, "You're tripping, man! Isn't that right? Listen, if you're freaking out come on down the hall -- we've got some  stuff that might help you." ' "No. No problem." I go lurching into my room. The door, suddenly flexible, will not; close; I push it with both hands, holding it in place until the latch clicks. Toni is sitting where I left her. She looks baffled. Her face is a monstrous thing, pure Picasso. I turn away from her, dismayed. "David?" i H er voice is cracked andj harsh and seems to be pitched in two octaves at once, with a' the top tone and the bottom. I wave my hands frantically, trying to get her to stop talking, but she goes on, expressing concern for me, wanting to know what's happening, why I've been running in and out of the room. Every sound she makes is torment for me. Nor do the images cease to flow from her mind to mine. That shaggy toothy bat, wearing my face, still glowers in a corner of her skull. Toni, I thought you loved me. Toni, I thought I made you happy. I drop to my knees and explore the dirtold, a faded thinning threadbare piece of the Pleistocene. She comes to me, bending down solicitously, she who is tripping looking after the welfare of her untripping companion, who mysteriously is tripping also. "I don't understand," she whispers. "You're crying, David. Your face is all blotchy. Did I say something wrong? Please don't carry on, David. I was having such a good trip and now -- I just don't understand -- " The bat. The bat. Spreading its rubbery wings. Baring its yellow fangs. Biting. Sucking. Drinking. I choke out a few words: "I'm -- tripping -- too -- " My face pushed against the carpet. The smell of dust in my dry nostrils. Trilobites crawling through my brain. A bat crawling through hers. Shrill laughter in the hallway. The telephone. The refrigerator door: slam, slam, slam! The cannibals dancing upstairs. The ceiling pressing against my back. My hungry mind looting Toni's soul. He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. Toni says, "You took the other acid? When?" "I didn't." "Then how can you be tripping?" I make no reply. I crouch, I huddle, I sweat, I moan. This is the descent into hell. Huxley warned me. I didn't want Toni's trip. I didn't ask to see any of this. My defenses are destroyed now. She overwhelms me. She engulfs me. Toni says, "Are you reading my mind, David?" "Yes." The miserable ultimate confession. "I'm reading your mind." "What did you say?" "I said I'm reading your mind. I can see every thought. Every experience. I see myself the way you see me. Oh, Christ, Toni, Toni, Toni, it's so awful!" She tugs at me and tries to pull me up to look at her. Finally I rise. Her face is horribly pale. Her eyes are rigid. She asks for clarification. What's this about reading minds? Did I really say it, or is it something her acid-blurred mind invented? I really said it, I tell her. You asked me if I was reading your mind and I said yes, I was. "I never asked any such thing," she says. "I heard you ask it." "But I didn't -- " Trembling, now. Both of us. Her voice is bleak. "You're trying to bum-trip me, aren't you, David? I don't understand. Why would you want to hurt me? Why are you messing me up? It was a good trip. It was a good trip. " "Not for me," I say. "You weren't tripping." "But I was." She gives me a look of total incomprehension and pulls away from me and throws herself on the bed, sobbing. Out of her mind, cutting through the grotesqueries of the acid images, comes a blast of raw emotion -- fear, resentment, pain, anger. She thinks I've deliberately tried to injure her. Nothing I can say now will repair things. Nothing can ever repair things. She despises me. I am a vampire to her, a bloodsucker, a leech -- she knows my gift for what it is. We have crossed some fatal threshold and she will never again think of me without anguish and shame. Nor I of her. I rush from the room, down the hall to the room shared by Donaldson and Aitken. "Bad trip," I mutter. "Sorry to trouble you, but -- " of the afternoon. They gave me a tranquilizer and brought me gently through the downslope of the trip. The psychedelic images still came to me out of Toni for half an hour or so, as though an inexorable umbilical chain linked us across all the length of the hallway. But then to my relief the sense of contact began to slip and fade and suddenly, with a kind of audible click at the moment of severance, it was gone altogether. The flamboyant phantoms ceased to vex my soul. Color and dimension and texture returned to their proper states. And at last I was free from that merciless reflected self-image. Once I was fully alone in my own skull again I felt like weeping to celebrate my deliverance, but no tears would come and I sat passively, sipping a Bromo. Time trickled away. Eventually I felt better. Shortly before six o'clock I went back to my room. Toni was not there. The place seemed oddly altered. Books were gone from the shelves, prints from the walls. The closet door stood open and half the things in it were missing. In my befuddled, fatigued state it took me a moment or two to grasp what had happened. At first I imagined burglary, abduction, but then I saw the truth. She had moved out. IX T oday there is a hint of encroaching winter in the air: it takes tentative nips at the cheeks. October is dying too quickly. The sky is mottled and unhealthy looking, cluttered by sad, heavy, low-hanging clouds. Yesterday it rained, skinning yellow leaves from the trees, and now they lie pasted to the pavement of College Walk, their tips fluttering raggedly in the harsh breeze. There are puddles everywhere. As I settle down beside Alma Mater's massive green form I primly spread newspaper sheets, selected portions of today's issue of The Columbia Daily Spectator, over the cold damp stone steps. Twentyodd years ago, when I was a foolishly ambitious sophomore dreaming of a career in journalism -- how sly, a reporter who reads minds! -- Spec seemed central to my life. Now it serves only for keeping my rump dry. Here I sit. Office hours. On my knees rests a thick manila folder, held closed by a big rubber band. Within, neatly typed, are five term papers, the products of my busy week. The Novels of Kafka. Shaw as Tragedian. The Concept of Synthetic A Priori Statements. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. This is the day appointed for delivering the goods and, perhaps, picking up some new assignments. Five minutes to eleven. My clients will be arriving soon. Meanwhile I scan the passing parade. Students hurrying by, clutching mounds of books. Hair rippling in the wind, breasts hobbling. They all look frighteningly young to me, even the bearded ones. To divert myself I try to touch the minds of passersby and learn what I can learn. Playing my old game, my only game. Selig the voyeur, the soul-vampire, ripping off the intimacies of innocent strangers to cheer his chilly heart. But no -- my head is full of cotton today. Only muffled murmurs come to me, indistinct, contentfree. No discrete words, no flashes of identity, no visions of soul's essence. This is one of the bad days. All inputs converge into unintelligibility -- each bit of information is identical to all others. It is the triumph of entropy. I am reminded of Forster's Mrs. Moore, listening tensely for revelation in the echoing Marabar caves and hearing only the same monotonous noise, the same meaningless all-dissolving sound: Bourn. The sum and essence of mankind's earnest strivings: Bourn. The minds flashing past me on College Walk now give me only: Bourn. Perhaps it is all I deserve. Love, fear, faith, churlishness, hunger, selfsatisfaction, every species of interior monolog, all come to me with identical content. Bourn. I must work to correct this. It is not too late to wage war against entropy. Gradually, sweating, struggling, scrabbling for solid purchase, I widen the aperture, coaxing my perceptions to function. Yes. Yes. Come back to life. Get dying inside it up, you miserable spy! Give me my fix! Within me the power stirs. The inner murk clears a bit -- stray scraps of isolated but coherent thought find their way into me. This scratchy chaotic chatter tells me nothing except that the power is not yet dead and I take comfort enough in that. I visualize the power as a sort of worm wrapped around my cerebrum, a poor tired worm, wrinkled and shrunken, its once-glossy skin now ulcerous with shabby, flaking patches. That is a relatively recent image, but even in happier days I always thought of the gift as something apart from myself, something intrusive. An inhabitant. It and me, me and it. I used to discuss such things with Nyquist. (A person I once knew, a certain Tom Nyquist, a former friend of mine. Who carried a somewhat similar intruder within his skull.) Nyquist didn't like my outlook. "That's schizoid, man, setting up a duality like that. Your power is you. You are your power. Why try to alienate yourself from your own brain?" Probably Nyquist was right, but it's much too late. It and me is how it will be, till death do us part. H ere is my client, the bulky halfback, Paul F. Bruno. His face is swollen and purpled and he is unsmiling, as though Saturday's heroics have cost him some teeth. I flip down the rubber band, extract The Novels of Kafka and offer the paper to him. "Six pages," I say. He has given me a ten-dollar advance. "You owe me another eleven bucks. Do you want to read it first?" "How good it it?" "You won't be sorry." "I'll take your word for it." He manages a painful, closemouthed grin. Pulling forth his thick wallet, he crosses my palm with greenbacks. I pocket his money. He favors me with a curt nod and tucks The Novels of Kafka under his immense forearm. Hastily, in shame, he goes hustling down the steps and off in the direction of Hamilton Hall. I watch his broad retreating back. A sudden gust of malevolent wind, rising off the Hudson, comes knifing eastward and cuts me bone-deep. Bruno has paused at the sundial, where a slender black student close to seven feet tall his intercepted him. A basketball player, obviously. The black wears a blue varsity jacket, green sneakers and tight tubular yellow slacks. His legs alone seem five feet long. He and Bruno talk for a moment. Bruno points toward me. The black nods. I am about to gain a new client, I realize. Bruno vanishes and the black trots springlegged across the walk, up the steps. He is very dark, almost purple-skinned, yet his features have a Caucasian sharpness, fierce cheekbones, proud aquiline nose. thin frosty lips. He is formidably handsome, some kind of walking statuary. He wears his midnight mass of kinky hair in a vast aggressive Afro halo a foot in diameter or more, fastidiously trimmed. I would not have been surprised by scarified cheeks, a bone through the nostrils. As he nears me my mind, barely slit-wide, picks up peripheral generalized emanations of his personality. Everything is predictable, even stereotyped -- I expect him to be touchy, cocky, defensive, hostile, and what comes to me is a bouillabaisse of ferocious racial pride, overwhelming physical self-satisfaction, explosive mistrust of others -- especially whites. All right. Familiar patterns. His elongated shadow falls suddenly upon me as the sun momentarily pierces the clouds. He sways bouncily on the balls of his feet. "Your name Selig?" he asks. I nod. "Yahya Lumumba," he says. "Pardon me?" "Yahya Lumumba." His eyes, glossy white against glossy purple, blaze with fury. From the impatience of his tone I realize that he is telling me his name, or at least the name he prefers to use. His tone indicates also that he assumes it's a name everyone on this campus will recognize. Well, what would I know of college basketball stars? He says, "I hear you do term papers, man." "That's right." "You got a good recommend from my pal Bruno there. How much you charge?" "Three-fifty a page. Typed, double-spaced." He considers it. He shows many teeth and says, "What kind of rip-off is that?" "It's how I earn my living, Mr. Lumumba." I hate myself for that toadying, cowardly mister. "That's about twenty dollars for an average-length paper. A decent job takes a fair amount of time, right?" "Yeah. Yeah." An elaborate shrug. "Okay, I'm not hassling you, man. I got need for your work. You know anything about Europydes?" "Euripides?" "That's what I said." He's baiting me, coming on with exaggerated black mannerisms, talking watermelon-nigger at me with his Europydes. "That Greek cat who wrote plays." "I know who you mean. What sort of paper do you need, Mr. Lumumba?" He pulls a scrap of a notebook sheet from a breast pocket and makes a great show of consulting it. "The prof he want us to compare the 'Electra' theme in Europydes, Sophocles and Eesk -- Aysk -- " "Aeschylus?" "Him, yeah. Five to ten pages. It due by November ten. Can you swing it?" dying inside A for my pen. "It shouldn't be any trouble at all. I'll need some information about you for the heading. Exact spelling of your name, the name of your professor, the course number -- " He starts to tell me these things. As I jot them down I simultaneously open the aperture of my mind for , my customary scan of the client's interior, to give me some idea of the proper tone to use in the paper. Will I be able to do a convincing job of faking the kind of essay Yahya Lumumba is likely to turn in? It will be a taxing technical challenge if I have to write in black hipster jargon, coming on all cool, jazzy and snotty, every line laughing in the ofay prof's fat face. I imagine I could do it -- but does Lumumba want me to? Will he thank I'm mocking him if I adopt the jiveass style and seem to be putting him on as he might put on the prof? I must know these things. So I slip my snaky tendrils past his woolly scalp into the hidden gray jelly. Hello, big black man. Entering, I pick up a somewhat more immediate and vivid version of the generalized persona he constantly projects -- the hyped-up black pride, the mistrust of the paleface stranger, the chuckling enjoyment of his own lean longlegged muscular frame. But these are mere residual attitudes, the standard furniture of his mind. I have not yet reached the level of this-minute thought. I have not penetrated to the essential Yahya Lumumba, the unique individual whose style I must assume. I push deeper. As I sink in I sense a distinct warming of the psychic temperature, an outflow of heat, comparable perhaps to what a miner might experience five miles down, tunneling toward the magmatic fires at Earth's core. This man Lumumba is constantly boiling within, I realize. The glow from his tumultuous soul warns me to be careful, but I have not yet gained the information I seek and so I go onward, until abruptly the molten frenzy of his stream of consciousness hits me with terrible force. Christ  hate the little bald mother conning me three-fifty a page I ought to bust his teeth pick him up throw him into the trash what if  wrote the paper myself show him that the black man can think too the Jew isn't the only one with a brain but I can't I can't that's the whole trouble mom  can't Europydes Sophocles Eeskilus who knows shit about them they don't teach that crap on Lenox Avenue I got other stuff on my mind the Rutgers game one-on-one down the court gimme the ball that's it and it's up and in for Lumumba! and wait folks he was fouled in the act of shooting now he goes to the line big confident easy six feet ten inches tall holder of every Columbia scoring record bounces the ball once twice up, swish! Lumumba on his way to another big evening tonight folks Europydes Sophocles Eeskilus why do I have to know anything about them write anything about them what good is it to a black man four hundred years of slavery we got other stuff on our minds what do any of them know especially this mother here I got to pay him twenty bucks to do something I'm not good enough to do for myself who says I have to what good is any of it why why why why. A roaring furnace. The heat is overwhelming. I've been in contact with intense minds before, far more intense even than this one, but that was when I was younger, stronger, more resilient. I can't handle this volcanic blast. The force of his contempt for me is magnified factorially by the force of the self-contempt that needing my services makes him feel. He is a pillar of hatred. And my poor enfeebled power can't take it. Some sort of automatic safety device cuts in to protect me from an overload: the mental receptors shut themselves down. This is a new experience for me, a strange one, this load-shedding phenomenon. It is as though limbs are dropping off, ears, balls, anything disposable, leaving nothing but a smooth torso. The inputs fall away -- the mind of Yahya Lumumba retreats and is inaccessible to me and I find myself involuntarily reversing the process of penetration until I can feel only his most superficial emanations. Then not even those, only a gray furry exudation marking the mere presence of him alongside me. All is indistinct. All is muffled. Bourn. We are back to that again. There is a ringing in my ears -- it is an artifact of the sudden silence, a silence loud as thunder. A new stage on my downward path. Never have I lost my grip and slipped from a mind like this. I look up, dazed, shattered. Yahya Lumumba's thin lips are tightly compressed. He stares down at me in distaste, having no inkling of what has occurred. I say faintly, "I'd like ten dollars now in advance. The rest you pay when I deliver the paper." He tells me coldly that he has no money to give me today. His next check from the scholarship fund isn't due until the beginning of the coming month. I'll just have to do the job on faith, he says. You can take it or leave it, man. "Can you manage five?" I ask. "As a binder. Faith isn't enough. I have expenses." He glares. He draws himself to his full height; he seems nine or ten feet tall. Without a word he takes a fivedollar bill from his wallet, erumples it, scornfully tosses it into my lap. "I'll see you here the morning of November ninth," I call after him as he stalks away. Europydes, Sophocles, Eeskilus. I sit stunned. dying inside shivering, listening to the bellowing silence. Bourn. Bourn. Bourn. X Dostoyevskian moments, David Selig liked to think of his power as a curse, a savage penalty for some unimaginable sin. Certainly his special ability had caused a lot of trouble for him, but in his saner moments he knew that calling it a curse was sheer self-indulgent melodrama. The power was a divine gift. The power brought ecstasy. Without the power he was nothing; with it he was a god. Is that a curse? Is that so terrible? Something funny happens when gamete meets gamete and destiny cries. Here, Selig-baby -- be a god! This you would spurn? Don't kid yourself, Duvid: no matter how badly the telepathy stuff messed you up, and it messed you up pretty badly, you wouldn't have done without it for a minute. Because the power brought ecstasy. The power brought ecstasy. That's it in a single crisp phrase. Mortals are born into a vale of tears and they get their kicks wherever they can. Some, seeking pleasure, are compelled to turn to sex, drugs, booze, television, movies, pinochle, the stock market, the racetrack, the roulette wheel, whips and chains, collecting first itions, Caribbean cruises, Chinese snuff bottles, rubber garments, whatever. Not him, not the accursed David Selig. All he had to do was sit quietly with his apparatus wide open and drink in the thought waves drifting on the telepathic breeze. With the greatest of ease he lived a hundred vicarious lives. He heaped his treasure house with the plunder of a thousand souls. Ecstasy. Of course, the ecstatic part was all quite some time ago. The best years were those between ages of fourteen and twentyfive. Younger, and he was still too naive, too unformed, to wring much appreciation from the data he took in. Older, and his growing bitterness, his sour sense of isolation, damped his capacity for joy. Fourteen to twenty-five, though. The golden years. Ah! It was so very much more vivid then. Life was like a waking dream. There were no walls in his world -- he could go anywhere and see anything. The intense flavor of existence. Steeped in the rich juices of perception. Not until Selig was past forty did he realize how much he had lost, over the years, in the way of fine focus and depth of field. The power had not begun detectably to dim until he was well along in his thirties, but it obviously must have been fading by easy stages all through his manhood, dwindling so gradually that he remained unaware of the cumulative loss. The change had been absolute, qualitative rather than quantitative. Even on a good day, now, the inputs did not begin to approach the intensity of those he remembered from his adolescence. In those remote years the power had brought him not only bits of subcranial conversation and scattered snatches of soul, as now, but also a gaudy universe of colors, textures, scents, densities -- the world through an infinity of other sensory intakes, the world captured and played out for his delight on the glassy radiant spherical screen within his mind. F or instance. He lies propped against an itchy August haystack in a hot Brueghelesque landscape, shortly past noon. This is # and he hangs becalmed midway between his fifteenth birthday and his sixteenth. Some sound effects. Maestro: Beethoven's Sixth, bubbling up gently, sweet flutes and playful piccolos. The sun dangles in a cloudless sky. A gentle wind stirs the willows bordering the cornfield. The young corn trembles. The brook burbles. A starling circles overhead. He hears crickets. He hears the drone of a mosquito, and watches calmly as it zeroes in on his bare, hairless, sweat-shiny chest. His feet are bare, too -- he wears only tight, faded blue jeans. City boy, digging the country. The farm is in the Catskills, twelve miles north of Ellenville. It is owned by the Schieles, a tribe of tawny Teutons, who produce eggs and an assortment of vegetable crops and who supplement their earnings every summer by renting out their guest house. This year the tenants are Sam and Annette Stein of Brooklyn, New York, and their daughter Barbara. The Steins have invited their close friends, Paul and Martha Selig, to spend a week on the farm with their son David and their daughter Judith. (Sam Stein and Paul Selig are hatching a scheme, destined ultimately to empty their bank accounts, to enter into a partnership and act as jobbers for replacement parts for television sets. Paul Selig is forever attempting unwise business ventures.) Today is the third day of the visit and this afternoon, mysteriously, David finds himself utterly alone. His father has gone on an all-day hike with Sam Stein. Their wives have driven off, taking five-year-old Judith with them, to explore the antique shops of Ellenville. No one remains on the premises except the tight-lipped Schieles, going somberly about their unending chores, and sixteen-year-old Barbara Stein, who has been David's classmate from the third grade on through high school. The Steins and the Seligs evidently have some unvoiced hope that romance will blossom between their offspring. This is naive of them. Barbara, a lush and reasonably beautiful dark-haired girl. sleek-skinned and long-legged, sophisticated and smooth of manner, is six months older than David chronologically and three or four years ahead of him in social development. She does not actually dislike him, but she regards him as strange, disturbing, alien and repellent. She has no knowledge of his special gift -- no one does; he's seen to that -- but she's had seven years to observe him at close range and she knows there's something fishy about him. She is a conventional girl, plainly destined to marry early (a doctor, a lawyer, an insurance broker) and have lots of babies, and the chances of romance flowering between her and anyone as dark-souled and odd as David Selig are slight. David knows this very well and he is not at all surprised, or even dismayed, when Barbara slips away in mid-morning. "If anyone asks," she says, "tell them I went for a stroll in the woods." David is not deceived. He knows she goes off to meet #-year-old Hans Schiele at every chance she gets. S O HE is left to his own resources. No matter. He has ways of entertaining himself. He settles down in a quiet corner of the fields. Time for mind-movies. Lazily he casts his net. The power rises and goes forth, looking for emanations. What shall I read, what shall I read? Ah. A sense of contact. His questing mind has snared another mind, a buzzing one, small, dim, intense. It is a bee's mind, in fact -- David is not limited only to contact with humans. Of course there are no verbal outputs from the bee or any conceptual ones. If the bee thinks at all David is incapable of detecting those thoughts. But he does get into the bee's head. He experiences a strong sense of what it is like to be tiny and compact and winged and fuzzy. How dry the universe of a bee is: bloodless, desiccated, arid. He soars. He swoops. He evades a passing bird as monstrous as a winged elephant. He burrows deep into a steamy, pollen-laden blossom. He goes aloft again. He sees the world through the bee's faceted eyes. Everything breaks into a thousand fragments, as though seen through a cracked glass -- the essential color of everything is gray, but odd hues lurk at the corners of things, peripheral blues and scarlets that do not correspond in any way to the colors he knows. But the mind of a bee is a limited one. David bores easily. He abandons the insect abruptly and, zooming his perceptions barnward, clicks into the soul of a hen. She is laying an egg! Rhythmic internal contractions, pleasurable and painful, like the voiding of a mighty turd. Frenzied squawks. The smarmy hencoop odor, sharp and biting. A sense of too much straw all about. The world looks dark and dull to this bird. Heave. Heave. Oooh! Orgasmic excitement! The egg slides through the hatch and lands safely. The hen subsides, fulfilled, exhausted. David departs from her in this moment of rapture. He plunges deep into the adjoining woods, finds a human mind, enters it. How much richer and more intense it is to make communion with his own species. His identity blurs into that of his communicant, who is Barbara Stein, who is naked and lying on a carpet of last year's fallen leaves. Her skin is damp with sweat. Hans' fingers dig into the soft flesh of her shoulders and his cheek, rough with blond stubble, abrades her cheek. His weight presses down on her and David picks up her clamorous heartbeat. He notices her hammering her heels against the calves of Hans' legs. And now he senses the first dizzying spasms of orgasm. David struggles to remain with her, but he knows he won't succeed -- clinging to the consciousness of Barbara at a moment like this is like trying to ride a wild horse. She catapults David from her unsaddled mind. He travels only a short way -- into the stolid soul of Hans Schiele. Hungry for information, David holds on with all his strength, hoping to keep contact, but no, he is flipped free. He tumbles uncontrollably, the world goes swinging past him in giddy streaks of color, until -- click ! -- he finds a new sanctuary. All is calm here. He glides through a dark cold environment. He has no weight. His body is long and slender and agile -- his mind is nearly a void, but through it run faint chilly flickering perceptions of a low order. He has entered the consciousness of a fish, perhaps a brook trout. Downstream he moves in the swiftly rushing creek, taking delight in the smoothness of his motions and the delicious texture of the pure icy water flowing past his fins. He can see very little and smell even less -- information comes to him in the form of minute impacts on his scales, tiny deflections and interferences. Easily he responds to each incoming news item, now twisting to avoid a fang of rock, now fluttering his fins to seize some speedy subcurrent. The process is fascinating, but the trout itself is a dull companion and David, having extracted the troutness of the experience in two or three minutes, leaps gladly to a more complex mind the moment he approaches one. It is the mind of gnarled old Georg Schiele, Hans's father, who is at work in a remote corner of the cornfield. David has never entered the elder Schiele's mind before. The old man is a grim and forbidding character, well past sixty, who says little and stalks dourly through his day-long round of chores, his heavy-jowled face perpetually locked in a frosty scowl. The farmer gives off so unpleasant a psychic aura that David has steered clear of him, but so bored is he with the trout that he slips into Schiele now, slides down through dense layers of unintelligible Deutsch ruminations and strikes bottom in the basement of the farmer's soul, the place where his essence lives. Astonishment: old Schiele is a mystic, an ecstatic! No dourness here. No dark Lutheran vindictiveness. This is pure Buddhism: Schiele stands in the rich soil of his fields, leaning on his hoe, feet firmly planted, communing with the universe. God floods his soul. He touches the unity of all things. Sky, trees, earth, sun, plants, brook, insects, birds -- everything is one, part of a seamless whole, and Schiele resonates in perfect harmony with it. How can this be? How can such a bleak, inaccessible man entertain such raptures in his depths? Feel his joy! Sensations drench him! Birdsong, sunlight, the scent of flowers and clods of upturned earth, the rustling of the sharp-bladed green cornstalks, the trickle of sweat down the reddened deepchanneled neck, the curve of the planet, the fleecy premature outline of the full moon, a thousand delights enfold this man. David shares his pleasure. He kneels in his mind, reverent, awed. The world is a mighty hymn. Schiele breaks from his stasis, raises his hoe, brings it down. Heavy muscles go taut and metal digs into earth and everything is as it should be, all conforms to the divine plan. Is this how Schiele goes through his days? Is such happiness possible? David is surprised to find tears bulging in his eyes. This simple man, this narrow man, lives in daily grace. Suddenly sullen, bitterly envious, David rips his mind free, whirls, projects it toward the woods, drops down into Barbara Stein again. She lies back, sweat-sticky, exhausted. She rubs her hands over her skin, plucking stray bits of leaf and grass from herself. Her mind is slow, dull, almost as empty as the trout's just now: sex seems to have drained her of personality. David shifts to Hans and finds him no better. Lying by Barbara's side, still breathing hard after his exertions, he is torpid and depressed. All desire is gone from him -- peering sleepily at the girl he has just possessed, he is conscious mainly of body odors and the untidiness of her hair. Through the upper levels of his mind wanders a wistful thought, in English punctuated by clumsy German, of a girl from an adjoining farm who will do something to him that Barbara refuses to do. Hans will be seeing her on Saturday night. Poor Barbara, David thinks, and wonders what she would say if she knew what Hans is thinking. Idly he tries to bridge their two minds, entering both in the mischievous hope that thoughts may flow from one to the other, but he miscalculates his span and finds himself returning to old Schiele, deep in his ecstasy, while holding contact with Hans as well. Father and son, old and young, priest and profaner. David sustains the twin contact a moment. He shivers. He is filled with a thundering sense of the wholeness of life. those years -- an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies. XI ment fills with pungent smells. I hear her in the kitchen, bustling, dumping spices into the pot: hot chili, oregano, tarragon, cloves, garlic, powdered mustard, sesame oil, curry powder, God knows what else. Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Her famous fiery spaghetti sauce is in the making. I have arrived unexpectedly early, a half-hour before the appointed time, catching Judith unprepared, not even dressed, so I am on my own while she readies dinner. "Fix yourself a drink," she calls to me. I go to the sideboard and pour a shot of dark rum, then into the kitchen for ice cubes. Judith, flustered, wearing housecoat and headband, flies madly about, breathlessly selecting spices. She does everything at top speed. "Be with you in another ten minutes," she gasps, reaching for the pepper mill. "Is the kid making a lot of trouble for you?" My nephew, she means. His name is Paul, in honor of our father which art in heaven, but she never calls him that, only "the baby," "the kid." Four years old. Child of divorce, destined to be as taut-strung as his mother. "He's not bothering me at all," I assure her and go back to the living room. The apartment is one of those old, immense West Side jobs, roomy and high-ceilinged, which carries with it some sort of aura of intellectual distinction simply because so many critics, poets, playwrights, and choreographers have lived in similar apartments in this very neighborhood. Giant living room with many windows looking out over West End Avenue -- formal dining room, big kitchen, master bedroom, child's room, maid's room, two bathrooms. All for Judith and her cub. The rent is cosmic, but Judith can manage it. She gets well over a thousand a month from her ex and earns a modest but decent living of her own as an editor and translator. Aside from that she has a small income from a portfolio of stocks, shrewdly chosen for her a few years ago by a lover from Wall Street, which she purchased with her inherited share of our parents' surprisingly robust savings. (My share went to clean up accumulated debts -- the whole thing melted like June snow.) The place is furnished half in # Greenwich Village and half in # Urban Elegance -- black pole lamps, gray string chairs, red brick bookcases, cheap prints and wax-encrusted Chianti bottles on the one hand; leather couches. Hopi pottery, psychedelic silk-screens, glasstopped coffee tables and giant potted cacti on the other. Bach harpsichord sonatas tinkle from the thousand-dollar speaker system. The floor, ebony-dark and mirror-bright, gleams between the lush, thick area rugs. A good life my sister leads here. Good and miserable. The kid eyes me untrustingly. He sits twenty feet away by the window, fiddling with some intricate plastic toy but keeping close watch on me. A dark child, slender and tense like his mother, aloof, cool. No love is lost between us -- I've been inside his head and I know what he thinks of me. To him I'm one of the many men in his mother's life, a real uncle being not very different from the innumerable uncle-surrogates forever sleeping over. I suppose he thinks I'm just one of her lovers who shows up more often than most. An understandable error. But while he resents the others merely because they compete with him for her affection, he looks coldly upon me because he thinks I've caused his mother pain -- he dislikes me for her sake. How shrewdly he's discerned the decades-old network of hostilities and tensions that shapes and defines my relationship with Judith! So I'm an enemy. He'd gut me if he could. smile insincerely at the kid, and inhale the aroma of spaghetti sauce. My power is practically quiescent -- I try not to use it much here and in any case its intake is feeble today. After some time Judith emerges from the kitchen and, flashing across the living room, says, "Come talk to me while I get dressed, Duv." I follow her to her bedroom and sit down on the bed. She takes her clothes into the adjoining bathroom, leaving the door open only an inch or two. The last time I saw her naked she was seven years old. She says, "I'm glad you decided to come." "So am I." "You look awfully peaked though." "Just hungry, Jude." "I'll fix that in five minutes." Sounds of water running. She says something else. The sink drowns her out. I look idly around the bedroom. A man's white shirt, much too big for Judith, hangs casually from the doorknob of the closet. On the night table sit two fat textbooky-looking books; Analytical Neuroendocrinology and Studies in the Physiology of Thermoregulation. U nlikely reading for Judith. Both by the same author: K.F. Silvestri, M.D., Ph.D. "You going to medical school these days?" I ask. "The books, you mean? They're Karl's." Karl? A new name. Dr. Karl F. Silvestri. I touch her mind lightly and extract his image: a tall hefty sober-faced man, broad shoulders, strong dimpled chin, flowing mane of graying hair. About fifty. I'd guess. Judith digs older men. While I raid her consciousness she tells me about him. Her current "friend," the kid's latest "uncle." He's someone very big at Columbia Medical Center, a real authority on the human body. Newly divorced after a twenty-five-year marriage. Uhhuh, she likes getting them on the rebound. He met her three weeks ago through a mutual friend, a psychoanalyst. They've only seen each other four or five times -- he's always busy, committee meetings at this hospital or that, seminars, consultations. It must be a serious affair if she's trying to read his books. They look absolutely opaque to me, all charts and statistical tables and heavy Latinate terminology. She comes out of the bathroom wearing a sleek purple pants-suit and the crystal earrings I gave her for her twenty-ninth birthday. When I visit she always tries to register some little sentimental touch to tie us together -- tonight it's the earrings. There is a convalescent quality to our friendship nowadays, as we tiptoe gently through the garden where our old hatred lies buried. We embrace, a brother-sister hug. A pleasant perfume. "Hello," she says. "I'm sorry I was such a mess when you walked in." "It's my fault. I was too early. Anyway, you weren't a mess at all." She leads me to the living room. She carries herself well. Judith is a handsome woman, tall and extremely slender, exotic-looking, with dark hair, dark complexion, sharp cheekbones. The slim sultry type. I suppose she'd be considered very sexy but that there is something cruel about her thin lips and her quick glistening brown eyes -- and that cruelty, which grows more intense in these years of divorce and discontent, turns people off. She's had lovers by the dozen, by the gross, but not much love. You and me, sis, you and me. Chips off the old block. She sets the table while I fix a drink for her. The kid, thank God, has already eaten -- I hate having him at the table. He plays with his plastic thingy and favors me with occasional sour glares. Judith and I clink our cocktail glasses together, a stagy gesture. She produces a wintry smile. "Cheers," we say. Cheers. "Why don't you move back downtown?" she asks. "We could see more of each other." "It's cheap up there. Do we want to see more of each other?" "Who else do we have?" "You have Karl." "I don't have him or anybody. Just my kid and my brother." I think of the time when I tried to murder her in her bassinet. She doesn't know about that. "Are we really friends, Jude?" "Now we are. At last." "We haven't exactly been fond of each other all these years." "People change, Duv. They grow up. I was dumb, so wrapped up in myself that I couldn't give anything but hate to anybody around me. That's over now. If you don't believe me, look into my head and see." "You don't want me poking around in there." "Go ahead," she says. "Take a good look and see if I haven't changed toward you." "No. I'd rather not." I deal myself another two ounces of rum. The hand shakes a little. "Shouldn't you check the spaghetti sauce? Maybe it's boiling over." "Let it boil. I haven't finished my drink. Duv, are you still having trouble? With your power, I mean." "Yes. Still. Worse than ever." "What do you think is happening?" I shrug. Insouciant old me. "I'm losing it, that's all. It's like hair, I suppose. A lot of it when you're young, then less and less and finally none. Screw it. It never did me any good anyway." "You don't mean that." "Show me what it did for me." "It made you someone special. It made you unique. When everything else went wrong for you, you could always fall back on that, the knowledge that you could go into minds, that you could see  the unseeable, that you could get close to people's souls. A gift from God." "A useless gift. Except if I'd gone into the sideshow business." "It made you a richer person.  More complex, more interesting. I Without it you might have been someone quite ordinary." "With it I turned out to be someone quite ordinary. A nobody, a zero. Without it I might have been a happy nobody instead of a dismal one." "You pity yourself a lot, Duv." "I've got a lot to pity myself for. Another drink, Jude?" "Thanks, no. I ought to look after dinner." S HE goes into the kitchen. Behind me the kid begins to chant derisive nonsense syllables in his weirdly mature baritone. Even in my current state of dulled receptivity I feel the pressure of the kid's cold hatred against the back of my skull. Judith returns, toting a well-laden tray -- spaghetti, garlic bread, cheese. We clink wine glasses. We eat in silence a few minutes. She says finally, "Can I do some mindreading on you, Duv?" "Be my guest." "You say you're glad the power's going. Is that snow job directed at me or at yourself? Because you're snowing somebody. You hate the idea of losing it, don't you?" "A little." "A lot, Duv." "All right, a lot. I'm of two minds. I'd like it to vanish completely. Christ, I wish I'd never had it. But on the other hand -- if I lose it who am I? Where's my identity? I'm Selig the-Mindreader, right? The Amazing Mental Man. So if I stop being him -- you see, Jude?" "I see. The pain's all over your face. I'm so sorry, Duv." "For what?" "That you're losing it." "You despised my guts for using it on you, didn't you?" "That's different. That was a long time ago. I know what you must be going through now. Do you have any idea of why you're losing it?" "No. A function of aging, I guess." "Is there anything that might be done to stop it from going?" "I doubt it, Jude. I don't even know why I have the gift in the first place, let alone how to nurture it now. I don't know how it works. It's just something in my head, a genetic fluke, a thing I was born with, like freckles. If your freckles start to fade can you figure out a way of making them stay -- if you want them to stay?" "You've never let yourself be studied, have you?" "No." "Why not?" "I don't like people poking in my head any more than you do," I say softly. "I don't want to be a case history. I've always kept a low profile. If the world ever found out about me I'd become a pariah. I'd probably be lynched. Do you know how many people there are to whom I've openly admitted the truth about myself? In my whole life, how many?" "A dozen?" "Three," I say. "And I wouldn't "Three?" "You. I suppose you suspected it all along, but you didn't find out for sure till you were sixteen, remember? Then there's Tom Nyquist, whom I don't see any more. And a girl named .# Kitty, whom I don't see any more either." "What about the tall brunette?" "Toni? I never explicitly told her. I tried to hide it from her. She found out indirectly. A lot of people may have found out indirectly. But I've only told three. I don't want to be known as a freak. So let it fade. Let it die. Good riddance." "You want to keep it, though." "To keep it and lose it, both." "That's a contradiction." "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. What can I say, Jude? What can I tell you that's true?" "Are you in pain?" "Who isn't in pain?" She says, "Losing it is almost like becoming impotent, isn't it, Duv? To reach into a mind and find out that you can't connect? You said there was ecstasy in it for you, once. That flood of information, that vicarious experience. And now you can't get it as much -- or at all. You mind can't get it up. Do you see it that way, as a sexual metaphor?" "Sometimes." I give her more wine. For a few minutes we sit silently, shoveling down the spaghetti, exchanging tentative grins. I almost feel warmth toward her. Forgiveness for all the years when she treated me like a circus attraction. You sneaky bastard, Duv. stay out of my head or I'll kill you! You voyeur. You peeper. Keep away, man, keep away. She didn't want me to meet her fiance. Afraid I'd tell him about her other men, I guess. I'd like to find you dead in the gutter some day, Duv, with all  my secrets rotting inside you. So long ago. Maybe we love each ' other a little now, Jude. Just a little, but you love me more than I love you. "I don't come any more," she says abruptly. "You know, I used to -- practically every time. The original Hot Pants Kid, me. But around five years ago something happened, around the time my marriage was first breaking up. I started feeling the ability to respond slip away from me. Finally I couldn't make it at all. I still can't. It's one of the things Karl's going to work on with me. So I know what it's like, Duv. What you must be going through. To lose your best way of making contact with others. To lose contact gradually with yourself. To become a stranger in your own head." She smiles. "Did you know that about me? About the troubles I've been having?" I hesitate briefly. The icy glare in her eyes gives her away. The aggressiveness. The resentment she feels. Even when she tries to be loving she can't help hating. How fragile our relationship is! We're locked in a kind of marriage, Judith and I, an old burned-out marriage held together with skewers. What the hell, though. "Yes," I tell her. "I knew about it." "I thought so. You've never stopped probing me." Her smile is all hateful glee now. She's glad I'm losing it. She's relieved. "I'm always wide open to you, Duv." "Don't worry, you won't be much longer." Oh, you sadistic bitch! And you're all I've got. "How about some more spaghetti, Jude?" Sister. Sister. Sister. Yahya Lumumba Humanities #A, Dr. Katz November #, # The use of the "Electra" motif by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is a study in varying dramatic methods and modes of attack. The plot is basically the same in Aeschylus' Choephori and the Electros of Sophocles and Euripides: Orestes, exiled son of murdered Agamemnon, returns to his native Mycenae, where he discovers his sister Electra. She persuades him to avenge Agamenmon's murder Aegisthus, who had slain Agamemnon on his return from Troy. Aeschylus, unlike his later rivals, held as prime consideration the ethical and religious aspects of Orestes' crime. Characterization and motivation in The Choephori are simple to the point of inviting ridicule -- as, indeed, we can see when the more worldly-minded Euripides ridicules Aeschylus in the recognition scene of his Electra. In Aeschylus' play Orestes appears accompanied by his friend Pylades and places an offering on Agamemnon's tomb -- a lock of his hair. They withdraw and lamenting Electra comes to the tomb. Noticing the lock of hair, she recognizes it as being "like unto those my father's children wear," and decides Orestes has sent it to the tomb as a token of mourning. Orestes then reappears and identifies himself to Electra. It is this implausible means of identification which was parodied by Euripides... is no damned good at all. Could Yahya Lumumba have written any of this crap? Phony from Word One. Why should Yahya Lumumba give a damn about Greek tragedy? Why should I? What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her? I'll tear this up and start again. I'll write it jivey, man. ril give it that rhythm. God help me to think black. But I can't. But I can't. Christ, I'd like to throw up. I think I'm getting a fever. Wait. Maybe a joint would help some. Yeah. Let's get high and try again. A lil ole stick of mootah. Get some soul into it, man. Smartass white Jew-bastard, get some soul into it, you hear? Okay, now. There was this cat Agamemnon, he was one big important mother, you hear, he was The Man, but he got screwed all the same. His old lady Clytemnestra, she was makin' it with this Aegisthus and one day she say. Baby, let's waste old Aggie, you and me, and then you gonna be king -- gwine be king? -- gonna -- and we have a high ole time. Aggie, he off in the Nam runnin' the show, but he come home for some R  R and before he know what happenin' they stick him good, right, they really cut him and that all for him. Now there this crazy broad Electra, dig, she the daughter of ole Aggie and she get real uptight when they use him up, so she say to her brother, his name Orestes, she say, listen, Orestes, I want you to get them two -- I want you to get them real good. Now, this cat Orestes he been out of town for a while, he don't know the score, but... Yeah, that's it, man! You're digging it! Now go on to explain about Euripides' use of the deus ex machina and the cathartic virtues of Sophocles' dramatic technique. Sure. What a dumb shmuck you are, Selig. What a dumb shmuck. trouble with you, Selig, is that you're a deeply religious man who doesn't happen to believe in God." Nyquist was always saying things like that and Selig never could be sure whether he meant them or was just playing verbal games. No matter how deeply Selig penetrated the other man's soul he never could be sure of anything. Nyquist was too wily, too elusive. Playing it safe, Selig said nothing. He stood with his back to Nyquist, looking through the window. Snow was falling. The narrow streets below were choked with it -- not even the municipal snowplows could get through and a strange serenity prevailed. High winds whipped the drifts about. Parked cars were disappearing under the white blanket. It had been snowing on and off for three days. Snow was general all over the Northeast. It was falling on every filthy city, on the arid suburbs, falling softly upon the Appalachians and, farther eastward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Atlantic waves. Nothing was moving in New York City. Everything was shut down -- office buildings, schools, the concert halls, the theaters. The railroads were out of commission and the highways were blocked. There was no action at the airports. Unable to get to work, Selig had waited out most of the blizzard in Nyquist's apartment, spending so much time with him that by now he had come to find his friend's company stifling and oppressive. What earlier had seemed amusing and charming in Nyquist had become abrasive and tricksy. Nyquist's bland self-assurance conveyed itself now as smugness -- his casual forays into Selig's mind were no longer affectionate gestures of intimacy, but, rather, conscious acts of aggression. His habit of repeating aloud what Selig was thinking was increasingly irritating and there seemed to be no deterring him from that. Here he was doing it again, plucking a quotation from Selig's head and declaiming it in half-mocking tones: "Ah. How pretty. 'His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.' I like that. What is it, David?" "James Joyce," said Selig sourly. " 'The Dead,' from Dubliners. I asked you not to do that." Nyquist, gesturing broadly as Selig stepped away from the window, turned his palms outward. "I'm sorry. I forgot you didn't like it." "You never forget a thing, Tom. You never do anything accidentally." Then, guilty over his peevishness: "Christ, I've had about enough snow!" "Snow is general," said Nyquist. "It isn't ever going to stop. What are we going to do today?" "The same as yesterday and the day before, I imagine. Sit around watching the snowflakes fall and listen to records and get sloshed." "How about getting laid?" "I don't think you're my type." Nyquist flashed an empty smile. "Funny man. I mean finding a couple of ladies marooned somewhere in this building and inviting them to a tittle party." "We could try, I suppose," Selig said, shrugging. "Is there any more bourbon?" "I'll get it," Nyquist said. He brought over the bottle. Nyquist moved with a strange slowness, like a man moving through a dense reluctant atmosphere of mercury or some other viscious fluid. Selig had never seen him hurry. He was heavy without being fat, a thick-shouldered, thicknecked man with a square head, close-cropped yellow hair, a flat wide-flanged nose and an easy, innocent grin. Very, very Aryan -- he was Scandinavian, a Swede perhaps, raised in Finland and transplanted to the United States at the age of ten. He still had the elusive traces of an accent. He said he was twenty-eight and looked a few years older than that to Selig, who had just turned twenty-three. This was February, #. Eisenhower was President, the stock market had gone to hell, the postSputnik emotional slump was troubling everybody even though the first American space satellite had just been orbited and the latest feminine fashion was the gunnysack chemise. Selig was living in Brooklyn Heights, commuting several days a week to the office of a publishing company for which he was doing freelance copy-editing at three dollars an hour. Nyquist lived in the same building, four floors higher. He was the only other person Selig knew who had the power. Not only that, having it hadn't crippled him at all. Nyquist used his gift as simply and as naturally as he did his eyes or his legs, for his own advantage, without apologies and without guilt. Perhaps he was the least neurotic person Selig had ever met. By occupation he was a predator, skimming an income by raiding the minds of others, but like any jungle cat he pounced only when hungry, never for sheer love of pouncing. He took what he needed, never questioning the providence that had made him so superbly fitted for taking, yet he did not take more than he needed and his needs were moderate. He held no job and apparently never had held one. Whenever he wanted money he made the ten-minute subway ride to Wall Street and rummaged about freely in the minds of the moneymen cloistered in the lofty boardrooms. On any given day there was always some major development hatching that would have an impact on the market -- a merger, a stock split, an ore discovery, a favorable earnings report -- and Nyquist had no difficulty learning the essential details. This information he swiftly sold at handsome but reasonable fees to some twelve or fifteen private investors who had learned in the happiest possible way that Nyquist was a reliable tout. Many of the unaccountable leaks on which quick fortunes had been made in the bull market of the '#'s were his doing. He earned a comfortable living this way, enough to support himself in a congenial style. His apartment was small and agreeable -- black naugahyde upholstery. Tiffany lamps, Picasso wallpaper, a well-stocked liquor closet, a superb music system that emitted a seamless flow of Monteverdi and Palestrina, Bartok and Stravinsky. He lived a gracious bachelor life, going out often, making the rounds of his favorite restaurants, all of them obscure and ethnic -- Japanese, Pakistani, Syrian, Greek. His circle of friends was limited but distinguished -- painters, writers, musicians, poets, mainly. He slept with many women but Selig rarely saw him with the same one twice. L ike Selig, Nyquist could receive # but was unable to send -- he was, however, able to tell when his own mind was being probed. That was how they had happened to meet. Selig, newly arrived in the building, had indulged himself in his hobby, letting his consciousness rove freely from floor to floor by way of getting acquainted with his neighbors. Bouncing about, surveying this head and that, finding nothing of any special interest -- and then suddenly: -- Tell me where you are. A crystalline string of words glimmering at the periphery of a sturdy, complacent mind. The statement came through with the immediacy of an explicit message. Yet Selig realized that no act of active transmission had taken place -- he had simply found the words lying passively in wait. He made quick reply: -- Thirty-five Pierrepont Street. -- No, I know that. I mean, where are you in the building? -- Fourth floor. -- Tm on the eighth. What's your name? -- Selig. -- Nyquist. The mental contact was stunningly intimate. It was almost a sexual thing, as though he were slicing into a body, not a mind, and he was abashed by the resonant masculinity of the soul he had entered -- he felt that there was something not quite permissible about such closeness with another man. But he did not draw back. That rapid interplay of verbal communication across the gap of darkness was a delicious experience, too rewarding to reject. Selig had the momentary illusion of having expanded his powers, of having learned how to send as well as to draw forth the contents of other minds. It was, he knew, only an illusion. He was sending nothing, nor was Nyquist. He and Nyquist were merely picking information out of each other's minds. Each planted phrases for the other to find, which was not quite the same thing, in terms of the situational dynamics, as sending messages to one another. It was a fine and possibly pointless distinction, though -- the net effect of the juxtaposition of two wide-open receivers was an efficient send receive circuit as reliable as a telephone. Tentatively, self-consciously, Selig reached into the lower levels of Nyquist's consciousness, seeking the man as well as the messages, and as he did so he was vaguely aware of disquiet in the depths of his own mind, probably indicating that Nyquist was doing the same to him. For long minutes they explored each other like lovers entwined in the first discovering caresses, although there was nothing loving about Nyquist's touch, which was cool and impersonal. Nevertheless Selig quivered -- he felt as if he dying inside stood at the edge of an abyss. At last he gently withdrew,as did Nyquist. Then, from the other: -- Come upstairs. I'll meet you by the elevator. He was bigger than Selig expected, a fullback of a man, his blue eyes uninviting, his smile a purely formal one. He was remote without actually being cold. Nyquist offered him a drink and they talked, keeping out of one another's minds as much as possible. It was a subdued visit, unsentimental, no tears of joy at having come together at last. Nyquist was affable, accessible, pleased that Selig had appeared, but not at all delirious with excitement at the discovery of a fellow freak. Possibly it was because he had discovered fellow freaks before. "There are others," he said. "You're the third, fourth, fifth I've met since I came to the States. Let's see -- one in Chicago, one in San Francisco, one in Miami, one in Minneapolis. You're the fifth. Two women, three men in all." "Are you still in touch with the others?" "No." "What happened?" "We drifted apart," Nyquist said. "What did you expect? That we'd be clannish? Look, we talked, we played games with our minds, we got to know each other and after a while we got bored. I think two of them are dead now. I don't mind being isolated from the rest of my kind. I don't think of myself as one of a tribe." "I never met another one," said Selig. "Until today." "It isn't important. What's important is living your own life. How old were you when you found out you could do it?" "I don't know. Five, six years old, maybe. And you?" "I didn't realize I had anything special until I was eleven. I thought everybody could do it. It was only after I came to the States and heard people thinking in a different language that I knew there was something out of the ordinary about my mind." "What kind of work do you do?" Selig asked. "As little as I can," said Nyquist. He grinned and thrust his perceptors brusquely into Selig's mind. It seemed like an invitation of sorts -- Selig accepted it and pushed forth his own antennae. Roaming the other man's consciousness, he quickly grasped the picture of Nyquist's Wall Street sorties. He saw the entire balanced, rhythmic, unobsessive life of the man. He was amazed by Nyquist's coolness, his wholeness, his clarity of spirit. How limpid Nyquist's soul was! How unmarred by life! Where did he keep his anguish? Where did he hide his loneliness, his fear, his insecurity? Nyquist, withdrawing, said, "Why do you feel so sorry for yourself?" "Do #?" "It's all over your head. What's the problem, Selig? I've looked into you and I don't see the problem, only the pain." "The problem is that I feel isolated somewhat from other human beings." "Isolated? You? You can get right inside people's heads. You can do something that ninety-nine point nine hundred and ninety-nine percent of the human race can't do. They've got to struggle along using words, approximations, semaphore signals, and you go straight to the core of meaning. How can you pretend you're isolated?" "The information I get is useless," Selig said. "I can't act on it. I might just as well not be reading it in." "Why?" "Because it's just voyeurism. I'm spying on them. Sometimes I see myself as a kind of leech. A parasite. A vampire." "You feel guilty about that?" "Don't you?" "I didn't ask for my gift," Nyquist said. "I just happen to have it. Since I have it, I use it. I like it. I like the life I lead. I like myself. Why don't you like yourself, Selig?" "You tell me." But Nyquist had nothing to tell him and when Selig had finished his drink he went back downstairs. His own apartment seemed so strange to him as he reentered it that he spent a few minutes handling familiar artifacts, his parents' photograph, his little collection of adolescent love-letters, the plastic toy that the psychiatrist had given him years ago. He felt so jarred by the meeting, so intruded upon, that he resolved never to see Nyquist again, in fact to move somewhere else as soon as possible, to Manhattan, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, any place that might be beyond Nyquist's reach. All his life he had yearned to meet someone who shared his gift and now that he had he felt threatened. Nyquist was so much in control of his life that it was terrifying. He'll humiliate me, Selig thought. He'll devour me. But that panic faded. Two days later Nyquist came around to ask him out to dinner. They ate in a nearby Mexican restaurant and got smashed on Carta Blanca. It still appeared to Selig that Nyquist was toying with him, teasing him, holding him at arm's length and tickling him -- but it was all done so amiably that Selig felt no resentment. Nyquist's charm was irresistible and his strength was worth taking as a model of behavior. Nyquist was like an older brother who had preceded him through this same vale of traumas and had emerged unscathed long ago -- now he was jollying Selig into an acceptance of the terms of his existence. The superhuman condition, Nyquist called it. T hey became close friends. Two or three times a week they went out together, ate together, drank together. Selig had always imagined that a friendship with someone else of his kind would be uniquely intense, but this was not -- after the first week they took their specialness for granted and rarely discussed the gift they shared, nor did they ever congratulate each other on having formed an alliance against the ungifted world around them. They communicated sometimes by words, sometimes by the direct contact of minds. It became an easy, cheerful relationship, strained only when Selig slipp into his habitual brooding mood and Nyquist mocked him for such self-indulgence. Even that was no difficulty between them until the blizzard -- then all their tensions became exaggerated because they were spending so much time together. "Hold out your glass," Nyquist said. He poured an amber splash of bourbon. Selig settled back to drink while Nyquist set about finding girls for them. The project took him five minutes. He scanned the building and turned up a pair of roommates on the fifth floor. "Take a look," he said to Selig. Selig entered Nyquist's mind. Nyquist had attuned himself to the consciousness of one of the girls -- sensual, sleepy, kittenish -- and was looking through her eyes at the other, a tall gaunt blonde. The doubly refracted mental image nevertheless was quite clear -- the blonde had a leggy voluptuousness and fashion-model poise. "That one's mine," Nyquist said. "Now tell me if you like yours." He jumped, Selig following along, to the mind of the blonde. Yes, a fashion model, more intelligent than the other girl, cold, selfish, passionate. From her mind, via Nyquist, came the image of her roommate, sprawled out on a sofa in a pink housecoat -- a short plump redhead, breasty, full-faced. "Sure," Selig said. "Why not?" Nyquist, rummaging through minds, found the girls' phone number, called, worked his charm. They came up for drinks. "This awful snowstorm," the blonde said, shuddering. "It can drive you crazy!" The four of them went through a lot of liquor to a tinkling jazz accompaniment: Mingus, head was better-looking than Selig had expected, not quite so plump or coarse -- the double refraction must have introduced some distortions -- but she giggled too much and he found himself disliking her to some degree. Still, there was no backing out now. Eventually, very late in the evening, they coupled off, Nyquist and the blonde in the bedroom, Selig and the redhead in the living room. About the time he realized the redhead was too drunk to perform. Selig felt a tickle in his skull -- Nyquist was probing him. This show of curiosity, this voyeurism, seemed an odd diversion for the usually self-contained Nyquist. Spying's my trick, Selig thought, and for a moment he was disturbed. Then: This has no deep significance, he told himself. Nyquist is wholly amoral and does what he pleases, peeks here and peeks there without regard for propriety -- why should I let his scanning bother me? Recovering, he reciprocated the probe. Nyquist welcomed him: -- How you doing, Davey? -- Fine. Just fine. -- I got me a hot one here. Take a look. Selig envied Nyquist's cool detachment. Nyquist, pausing a moment to detect and isolate Selig's sense of uneasiness, mocked it gently. You're worried that there's some kind of latent gayness in this thing, Nyquist told him. But I think what really scares you is contact, any sort of contact. Right? Wrong, Selig said, but he had felt the point hit home. Soon afterward their contact ceased. Nyquist came into the living room half an hour later, the blonde with him. He didn't bother to knock, which surprised the redhead a little. Nyquist put on some music and they all sat quietly, Selig and the redhead working on the bourbon, Nyquist and the blonde nipping into the Scotch. Toward dawn, as the snow began to slacken, the redhead fumbled for her clothes. At the door, wobbling and staggering, making a boozy farewell, she let something slip. In vino veritas. "I can't help thinking there's something peculiar about you two guys. You aren't a couple of queers, by any chance?" tried to be kind and loving, but our hatred kept coming between us. I said to myself. She's my kid sister, my only sibling, I must love her more. But you can't will love. You can't conjure it into existence on nothing more than good intentions. Besides, my intentions had never been that good. I saw her as a rival from the word go. I was the firstborn, I was the difficult one, the maladjusted one. I was supposed to be the center of everything. Those were the terms of my contract with God -- I must suffer because I am different, but by way of compensation the entire universe will revolve about me. The girl baby who was brought into the household was intended to be nothing more than a therapeutic aid designed to help me relate better to the human race. That was the deal. She wasn't supposed to have independent reality as a person, she wasn't supposed to have her own needs or make demands or drain away parental love. Just a thing, an item of furniture. But I knew better than to believe that. I was ten years old, remember, when they adopted her. Your ten-year-old, he's no fool. I knew my parents, no longer feeling obliged now to direct all their concern exclusively toward their mysteriously intense and troubled son, would rapidly and with great relief transfer their attention and their love -- yes, particularly their love -- to the cuddly, uncomplicated infant. She would take my place at the center -- I would become a quirky obsolescent artifact. Do you blame me for trying to kill her in her bassinet? On the other hand you can understand the origin of her lifelong coldness toward me. I offer no defense at this late date. The cycle of hatred began with me. With me, Jude, with me, with me, with me. You could have broken it with love, though, if you had wanted to. You didn't want to. On a Saturday afternoon in May, #, I went out to my parents' house. In those years I didn't go there often, though I lived twenty minutes away by subway. I was outside the family circle, autonomous and remote, and I felt a powerful resistance to any kind of reattachment. For one thing I had free-floating hostilities toward my parents -- their fluky genes, after all, had sent me into the world this way. And then, too, there was Judith, shriveling me with her disdain -- did I need more of that? So I stayed away from the three of them for weeks, months at a time, until the melancholy maternal phone calls became too much for me, until the weight of my guilt overcame my resistance. I was happy to discover, when I got there, that Judith was still in her bedroom, asleep. At three in the afternoon? Well, my mother said, she had been out late last night on a date. Judith was sixteen. I imagined her going to a high school basketball game with some skinny pimply kid and sipping milkshakes afterwards. Sleep well, sister, sleep on and on. But of course her absence put me into direct and unshielded confrontation with my sad and depleted parents. My mother, mild and dim, my father, weary and bitter. All my life they had steadily grown smaller. They seemed very small now. The seemed close to the vanishing point. I had never lived in this apartment. For years Paul and Martha had struggled with the upkeep of a three-bedroom place they couldn't afford, simply because it had become impossible for Judith and me to share the same bedroom once she was past her infancy. The moment I left for college, taking a room near campus, they found a smaller and far less expensive one. Their bedroom was to the right of the entry foyer and Judith's, down a long hall and past the kitchen, was to the left. Straight ahead was the living room, in which my father sat dreamily leafing through the Times. He read nothing but the newspaper these days, though once his mind had been more active. From him came a dull sludgy emanation of fatigue. He was making some decent money for the first time in his life, actually would end up quite prosperous, yet he had conditioned himself to the poorman psychology: poor Paul, you're a pitiful failure -- you deserved so much better from life. I looked at the newspaper through his mind as he turned the pages. Yesterday Alan Shepard had made his epochal sub-orbital flight, the first manned venture into space by the United States, u.s. hurls man banner headline, shepard works groped for some way to connect with my father. "What did you think of the space voyage?" I asked. "Did you listen to the broadcast?" He shrugged. "Who gives a damn? It's all crazy. A waste of everybody's time and money." Elizabeth visits pope ing like a well-fed rabbi. Johnson skipping pages. Kennedy signs tered on him, not even Kennedy TO seek income tax cuts. He lingered at the sports pages. A faint flicker of interest, mud makes the Derby?" I asked. He shook his head. "What do I know about horses?" he said. He was, I realized, already dead, although in fact his heart would beat for another decade. He had stopped responding. The world had defeated him. I left him to his brooding and made polite talk with my mother: her Hadassah reading group was discussing To Kill a Mockingbird next Thursday and she wanted to know if I had read it. I hadn't. What was I doing with myself? Had I seen any good movies? L'Avventura, I said. Is that a French film, she asked? Italian, I said. She wanted me to describe the plot. She listened patiently, looking troubled, not following anything. "Who did you go with?" she asked. "Are you seeing any nice girls?" My son the bachelor. Already twenty-six and not even engaged. I deflected the tiresome question with patient skill born of long experience. Sorry, Martha. I won't give you the grandchildren you're waiting for. "I have to baste the chicken now," she said and disappeared. I sat with my father for a while, until I couldn't stand that, and went down the hall to the john, next to Judith's room. Her door was ajar. I glanced in. Lights off, blinds drawn, but I touched her mind and found that she was awake and thinking of getting up. All right, make a gesture, be friendly, Duvid. It won't cost you anything. I knocked lightly. "Hi, it's me," I said. "Okay if I come in?" S HE was sitting up, yawning, stretching. Her face, usually so taut, was puffy from too much sleep. From force of habit I went into her mind, and saw something new and surprising there. My sister's erotic inauguration. The night before. The whole thing: the scurry in the parked car, the rise of excitement, the sudden realization that this was going to be more than an interlude of petting, the panties coming down, the awkward shiftings of position, the moment of ultimate hesitation giving way to body, the quick explosion, the messy aftermath, the guilt and confusion and disappointment as it ended with Judith still unsatisfied. The drive home, silent, shamefaced. Into the house, tiptoe, hoarsely greeting the vigilant, unsleeping parents. The late night shower. Uneasy sleep, frequently punctured. A long stretch of wakefulness, in which the night's event is considered: she is pleased and relieved to have entered womanhood, but also frightened. Unwillingness to rise and face the world the next day, especially to face Paul and Martha. Judith, your secret is no secret to me. "How are you?" I asked. Stagily casual, she drawled, "Sleepy. I was out very late. How come you're here?" "I drop in to see the family now and then." "Nice to have seen you." "That isn't friendly, Jude. Am I that loathsome o you?" "Why are you bothering me, Duv?" "I told you. I'm trying to be sociable. You're my only sister, the only one I'll ever have. I thought I'd stick my head in the door and say hello." "You've done that. So?" "You might tell me what you've been doing with yourself since the last time I saw you." "Do you care?" "If I didn't care, would I ask?" "Sure," she said. "You don't give a crap about what I've been doing. You don't give a crap about anybody but David Selig and why pretend otherwise? You don't need to ask me polite questions. They aren't natural coming from you." "Hey, hold on!" Let's not be duelling so fast, sister. "What gives you the idea that -- " "Do you think of me from one week to the next? I'm just furniture to you. The drippy little sister. The brat. The inconvenience. Have you ever talked to me? About anything? Do you even know the name of the school I go to? I'm a total stranger to you." "No, you're not." "What the hell do you know about me?" "Plenty." "For example." "Quit it, Jude." "One example. Just one. One thing about me. For example -- " "For example. All right. For example, I know that you got laid last night." We were both amazed by that. I stood in shocked silence, not believing that I had allowed those words to pass my lips -- and Judith jerked as though electrified, her body stiffening and rearing, her eyes blazing with astonishment. I don't know how long we remained frozen, unable to speak. "What?" she said finally. "What did you say, Duv?" "You heard it." "I heard it but I think I must have dreamed it. Say it again." "No." "Why not?" "Leave me alone, Jude." "Who told you?" "Please, Jude -- " " Who told youT' "Nobody," I muttered. Her smile was terrifyingly triumphant. "You know something? I believe you. I honestly believe you. Nobody told you. You pulled it right out of my mind, didn't you, Duv?" "I wish I had never come in here." "Admit it. Why won't you admit it? You see into people's minds. don't you, Duvid? You're some kind of circus freak. I've suspected that a long time. All those little hunches you have -- and they always turn out to be right -- and the embarrassed phony way you cover up for yourself when you're right. Talking about your 'luck' at guessing things. Sure! Sure, luck! I knew the real scoop. I said to myself. This bastard is reading my mind. But I told myself it was crazy, there aren't any such people -- it has to be impossible. Only it's true, isn't it? You don't guess. You look. We're wide open to you and you read us like books. Spying on us. Isn't that so?" "Stop it, Jude." "You didn't answer my other question. You've got this weird power, don't you? Don't youT' "Yes." "And you've been secretly spying on people all your life." "Yes. Yes." "I knew it. I didn't know -- but I really did, all along. And it explains so much. Why I always felt dirty when I was a kid and you were around. Why I felt as if anything I did was likely to show up in tomorrow's newspapers. I never had any privacy, even when I was locked in the bathroom. I didn't feel private." She shuddered. "I hope I never see you again, Duv. Now that I know what you are. I wish I never had seen you. If I ever catch you poking around in my head after this. I'll -- " I stumbled away. In the bathroom I gripped the cold edge of the sink and leaned close to the mirror to study my flushed, flustered face. I looked stunned and dazed, my features as rigid as though I had had a stroke.  know that you got laid last night. Why had I told her that? An accident? The words spilling out of me because she had goaded me past the point of prudence? But I had never let anyone push me into a revelation like that before. There are no accidents, Freud said. There are never any slips of the tongue. Everything's deliberate on one level or another. I must have said what I did to Judith because I wanted her at last to know the truth about me. But why? Why her? I had told Nyquist, yes -- there could be no risk in that -- but I had never admitted it to anyone else. And now Judith knew. I had given her a weapon with which she could destroy me. I had given her a weapon. How strange that she never chose to use it. XV Becalmed, static, anchored. No, that's a lie, or if not a lie then at the very least a benign misstatement, a faulty cluster of metaphors. I am ebbing. My tide is going out. I am revealed as a bare rocky shore, iron-hard, with trailing streamers of dirty brown seaweed dangling toward the absenting surf. Green crabs scuttling about. Yes, I ebb, which is to say I diminish, I attenuate. Do you know, I feel quite calm about it now? Of course my moods fluctuate but I feel Quite calm About it now. This is the third year since first I began to recede from myself. I think it started in the spring of #. Until then it worked faultlessly, I mean the power, always there when I had occasion to call upon it, always dependable, doing all its customary tricks, serving me in all my dirty needs -- and then without warning, without reason, it began dying. Little failures of input. Tiny episodes of psychic impotence. I would be snug and smug inside someone's head, scanning scandals thought to be safely hidden, and suddenly everything would blur and become uncertain. Rather like reading the Times and having the text abruptly turn to Joycean dream-gabble between one line and the next, so that a straightforward dreary account of the latest Presidential fact-finding commission's finding of futile facts metamorphosed into a foggy impenetrable report on old Earwicker's borborygmi. At such times I would falter and pull out in fear. What would you do if you believed you were in bed with your heart's desire and awakened to find yourself screwing a starfish? But these unclarities and distortions were not the worst part -- I think the inversions were, the total reversal of signal. Such as picking up a flash of love when what was really being radiated was frosty hatred. Or vice versa. When that happens -- and it had -- I want to pound on walls to test reality. From Judith one day I got strong waves of sexual desire, an overpowering incestuous yearning that cost me a fine dinner as I ran nauseated and retching to the bowl. All an error, all a deception -- she was aiming spears at me and I took them for Cupid's arrows, more fool #. Well, after that I got blank spaces, tiny deaths of perception in midcontact. And after those came mingled imputs, crossed wires, two minds coming in at once and me unable to tell the which from the which. For a time the color appercept dropped out, though that has come back, one of the many false returns. And there were other losses, barely discernible ones but cumulative in their effect. I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can do no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, this day the Thackeray first editions, this day the spoons -- and now they have made off with my Piranesis and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties and my trousers and by next week they will be taking toes, intestines, corneas, testicles, lungs and nostrils. What will they use my nostrils for? I used to fight back with long walks, cold showers, tennis, massive doses of Vitamin A, and other hopeful, implausible remedies -- and more recently I experimented with fasting and pure thoughts, but such struggling now seems to me inappropriate and even blasphemous. These days I strive toward cheerful acceptance of loss -- with such success as you may have already perceived. I accept, I accept. Do you see that quality of acceptance growing in me? Make no mistake -- I am sincere. This morning, at least, I am well on my way to acceptance, as golden autumn sunlight floods my room and expands my tattered soul. I lie here practicing the techniques that will make me invulnerable to the knowledge that it's all fleeing from me. I search for the joy that I know lies buried in the awareness of decline. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be. The last of life, for which the first was made. Do you believe that? I believe that. I'm getting better at believing all sorts of things. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Good old Browning! Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain. Yes. Of course. And be our pains three parts joy, he might have added. Such joy this morning. And it's all fleeing from me, all ebbing. Going out of me from every pore. Silence is coming over me. I will speak to no one after it's gone. And no one will speak to me. N aturally i feei some sorrow over what's happening -- I feel regret, anger and frustration and despair, but also, strangely, I feel shame. My cheeks burn, my eyes will not meet other eyes, I can hardly face my fellow mortals for the shame of it, as if something precious had been entrusted to me and I had failed in my trusteeship. I must say to the world. I've wasted my assets. I've squandered my patrimony. I've let it slip away, going, going. I'm a bankrupt now, a bankrupt. Perhaps this is a family trait, this embarrassment when disaster comes. We Seligs like to tell the world we are orderly people, captains of our souls, and when something external downs us we are abashed. I remember when my parents briefly owned a car, a dark green # Chevrolet purchased at some absurdly low price in #, and we were driving somewhere deep in Queens, perhaps on our way to my grandmother's grave, the annual pilgrimage, and a car emerged from a blind alley and hit us. A drunk at the wheel. Nobody hurt, but our fender badly crumpled and our grille broken. Though the accident was in no way his fault my father reddened and reddened, transmitting feverish embarrassment, as though he were apologizing to the universe for having done anything so thoughtless as allowing his car to be hit. How he apologized to the other driver, too, my grim bitter father! It's all right, it's all right, accidents can happen -- you mustn't feel upset about it, see, we're all okay! I feared my father was going to give him money for the repairs, but my mother, fearing the same thing, headed him off at the pass. A week later he was still embarrassed -- I popped into his mind while he was talking with a friend and found him trying to pretend my mother had been driving, which was absurd -- she never had a license -- and then I felt embarrassed for him. Judith, too, when her marriage broke up, when she walked out on an impossible situation, registered enormous grief over the shameful fact that someone so purposeful and effective in life as Judith Hannah Selig should have entered into a lousy, murderous marriage which had to be terminated vulgarly in the divorce courts. Ego, ego, ego. #, the miraculous mind-reader, entering upon a mysterious decline, apologize for my carelessness. I have misplaced my gift somewhere. Will you forgive ine? Good, to forgive; Best, to forget! Living, we fret; Dying, we live. T ake an imaginary letter, Mr. Selig. Harrumph. Miss Kitty Holstein, Something West Sixtysomething Street, New York City. Check the address later. Don't bother about the zipcode. Dear Kitty: I know you haven't heard from me in ages but I think now it's appropriate to try to get in touch with you again. Thirteen years have passed and a certain maturity must have come over both of us, I think, healing old wounds and making communication possible. Despite all hard feelings that may once have existed between us I never lost my fondness for you, and you remain bright in my mind. Speaking of my mind, there's something I ought to tell you. I no longer do things very well with it. By "things" I mean the mental deal, the mind-reading trick, which of course I couldn't do on you in any case, but which defined and shaped my relationship to everybody else in the world. This power seems to be slipping away from me now. It caused us so much grief, remember? It was what ultimately split us up, as I tried to explain in my last letter to you, the one you never answered. In another year or so -- who knows, six months, a month, a week? -- it will be totally gone and I will be just an ordinary human being like yourself. I will be a freak no longer. Perhaps then there will be an opportunity for us to resume the relationship that was interrupted in # and to reestablish it on a more realistic footing. I know I did dumb things then. I pushed you mercilessly. I refused to accept you for yourself and tried to make something else out of you, something freakish, in fact, something just like myself. I had good reasons in theory for attempting that, I thought then, but of course they were wrong, they had to be wrong and I never saw that until it was too late. To you I seemed domineering, overpowering, dictatorial -- me, mild self-effacing me! Because I was trying to transform you. And eventually I bored you. Of course you were very young then, you were -- shall I say it? -- shallow, unformed, and you resisted me. But now that we're both adults we might be able to make a go of it. I hardly know what my life will be like as an ordinary human being unable to enter minds. Right now I'm floundering, looking for definitions of myself, looking for structures. I'm thinking seriously of entering the Roman Catholic Church... (Good Christ, am I? That's the first I've heard of that! The stink of incense, the mumble of priests, is that what I want?) Or perhaps the Episcopalian, I don't know. It's a matter of affiliating myself with the human race. And also I want to fall in love again. I want to be part of someone else. I've already begun tentatively, timidly getting in touch with my sister Judith again after a whole lifetime of warfare. We're starting to relate to each other for the first time and that's encouraging to me. But I need more -- a woman to love, not just sexually but in all ways. I've really had that only twice in my life, once with you, once about five years later with a girl named Toni who wasn't very much like you, and both times this power of mine ruined things -- once because I got too close with it, once because I couldn't get close enough. As the power slips away from me, as it dies, perhaps there's a chance for an ordinary human relationship between us at last, of the kind that ordinary human beings have all the time. For I wilt be ordinary. For I will be very ordinary. I wonder about you. You're thirty-five years old now, I think. That sounds ve old to me, even though I'm fortyone. (Forty-one doesn't sound old, somehow!) I still think of you as being twenty-two. You seemed even younger than that -- sunny, open, naive. Of course that was my fantasy image of you. I had nothing to go by but externals -- I couldn't do my usual number on your psyche -- and so I made up a Kitty who probably wasn't the real Kitty at all. Anyway, so you're thirty-five. I imagine you look younger than that today. Did you marry? Of course you did. A happy marriage? Lots of kids? Are you still married? What's your married name, then, and where do you live and how can I find you? If you're married will you be able to see me anyway? Somehow I don't think you would be a completely faithful wife -- does that insult you? So there ought to be room in your life for me as a friend -- as a lover. Do you ever see Tom Nyquist? Did you go on seeing him for long after you and I broke up? Were you bitter toward me for the things I told you about him in that letter? If your marriage has broken up or if somehow you never married, would you live with me now? Not as a wife, not yet, just as a companion? To help me get through the last phases of what's happening to me? I need help so much. I need love. I know this is a lousy way to go about making a proposition, let alone a proposal -- that is by saying: Help me, comfort me. stay with me. I'd rather reach to you in strength than in weakness. But right now Tm weak. There's this globe of silence growing in my head, my whole skull, creating this big empty place. I'm suffering a slow reality leakage. I can only see the edges of things, not their substance, and now the edges are getting indistinct, too. Oh, Christ. Kitty I need you. Kitty how will I find you? Kitty I hardly knew you. Kitty Kitty Kitty. Twang. The plangent chord. Twing. The breaking string. Twong. The lyre untuned. Twang. Twing. Twong. D ear children of God, my sermon this morning will be a very short one. I wish only that you should ponder and meditate the deep meaning and mystery of a few lines I intend to rip off the saintly Tom Eliot, a thoughtful guide for troubled times. Beloved, Some of the original covers aixl inside illustrations are still available! These are the actual originals used from # through #. Some are already framed. Send stamped selfaddressed envelope for list and prices. Box #, Greenwich Village Station, New York, N.Y. # I direct you to his Four Quartets, to his paradoxical line, "In my beginning is my end," which he amplifies some pages later with the comment, "What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning." Some of us are ending right now, dear children, that is to say, aspects of lives that once were central to the possessors are drawing to a close. Is this an end or is it a beginning? Can the end of one thing not be the beginning of another? I think so, beloved ones. I think that the closing of a door does not preclude the opening of a different door. Of course, it takes courage to walk through that new door when we do not know what may lie beyond it, but one who has faith need have no fears. Our lives are pilgrimages. We may die small deaths every day, but we are reborn from death to death, until at last we go into the dark, into the vacant interstellar spaces where He awaits us -- and why should we fear if He is there? And until that time comes let us live our lives without giving way to the temptation to grieve for ourselves. Remember always that the world still is full of wonders, that there are always new quests, that seeming ends are not ends in truth, but only transitions, stations by the way. Why should we mourn? Why should we give ourselves over to sorrow, though our lives be daily subtractions? If we lose this, do we also lose thatl If sight goes, does love go also? If feeling grows faint, may we not return to old feelings and draw comfort from them? Much of our pain is mere confusion. Be then of good cheer on this Our Lord's day, beloved ones, and spin no snares in which to catch yourselves, nor allow yourselves the self-indulgent sin of misery, and make no false distinctions between ends and beginnings, but go onward, ever searching, to new ecstasies, to new communions, to new worlds, and give no space in your soul to fear, but yield yourself up to the Peace of Christ and await that which must come... Now comes a dark equinox out of its proper moment. The bleached moon glimmers like a wretched old skull. The leaves shrivel and fall. The fires die down. The dove, wearying, flutters to earth. Darkness spreads. Everything blows away. The purple blood falters in the narrowing veins; the chill impinges on the straining heart; the soul dwindles; even the feet become untrustworthy. Words fail. Our guides admit they are lost. That which has been solid grows transparent. Things pass away. Colors fade. This is a gray time and I fear it will be grayer still one of these days. Tenants of the house, thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season. Came the time nothing worked -- not even humans! AX me. The caller was Emelin and before he had gotten out two words I knew that he was extremely annoyed. "Damn it, Poekel," he shouted down the wire, "your vacuum cleaner is over here trying to mount Phyl's sewing machine." I winced inwardly. Sighing, I said, "Look, Harry, it's young -- it just doesn't know any better." "I realize it doesn't know any better, but look -- I still don't like that going on in front of the kids." "Well, I'll be right there and bring it back." I got out of bed and threw on some clothes. Martha sat up and looked at me sleepily. "It's nothing," I told her. "The vacuum cleaner got out again." "Did it go over to the Emelins'?" she asked, brushing the hair out of her eyes. "It's over there now, humping their sewing machine." She made a disgusted sound, lying down and turning over. I turned out the bedroom light, went downstairs quietly to avoid waking the kids, opened the front door. The night chill cleaned my throat, my breath making little puffs of frost in the streetlights. I trotted over to the Emelins'. The porch light was on and Harry was waiting for me outside. "Awfully sorry," I said ruefully as I panted up the porch steps. "Can't you keep the door locked?" Harry asked. "I do. The damn thing's learned how to undo the latch." "You probably don't punish it properly." We went inside. Phyllis, Harry's wife, met us in the hallway, wrapped in a robe. "Hi, Poke," she said. "I'm sorry Harry was so short on the phone, but I really blew up and upset him. I guess the thing startled me." "That's okay," I said. "Where is it?" She glanced toward the kitchen. "Well, it sort of gave up on the sewing machine. Now it's sort of sniffing around the kitchen." "What's it looking for?" "I'm damned if I know." We marched into the kitchen, Phyllis leading the way. Sure enough, the vacuum was working its way down the side wall, its hose snuffling along the baseboard crack. "Come on, Herman," I said. "Time to go home." I scooped it up in my arms and it began to snuffle my ear. "It didn't dirty the house or anything, did it?" I asked on the way to the door. "Oh, no," Phyllis said. "It just startled me, getting in tike that." "Maybe it got in when you opened the door for something else." She shook her head. "I would have seen it." "Well, we can talk about it tomorrow. Sorry again, Phyllis. 'Night, Harry." " 'Night, Poke." They watched me down the steps, then closed the door. A minute later the porch light went out. I homed on our porch light, holding the gently squirming vacuum cleaner in my arms. "A hell of a thing to do," I said to it. "Why the hell won't you stay home?" Obviously it wanted a mate. On top of that it seemed to be a little confused about its identity. A sewing machine -- now that was pretty far-fetched. Since this whole peculiar business had begun a few weeks ago I had been a little nervous about what appliance was going to start up next. Some could be downright uncomfortable to have clomping around the house. The furnace, for example. I dropped the vacuum gently on the kitchen floor. "Now, listen," I told it. "No more funny business tonight. You go to sleep -- over here, on your beddy-bye." I indicated the pile of old clothes I'd made into a sort of nest. The vacuum trundled over to the pile, obediently hopped on it and tucked its hose around itself. I got softhearted. Rummaging around in the canisters on the sideboard, I came up with a handful of peanuts. "Here," I said, holding them out on my palm. "Peace offering." The vacuum snaked its hose over to my hand, investigated delicately, then snorked up the peanuts. Then it whuffled appreciatively, snugged down on the clothing and went inert. "I bet you're faking," I said to it, "but stay out of trouble anyway." I went out, closed the kitchen door and turned out the light. Then I locked the cellar door and put the key on top of the door frame. I spent a few minutes at the front door, trying to figure a way to lock it so that the clever little devil couldn't open it. Finally I reopened the basement door, went downstairs, pawed through a couple of dingy bottles of nails and screws and came up with a plastic baggie containing a hook and eye. I took it back upstairs and installed it on the front door, well up near the top corner where the vacuum couldn't reach it. When I got back into bed Martha asked sleepily, "Did it break anything?" "Uh-uh." "Wee-wee all over the living room rug?" "Of course not. How could it?" "How the hell would I know? It's pretty good at almost everything else." I grunted, turned off the light. next morning when the phone rang. "Morning," I said absently into it. "Mr. Poekel, this is the Los Angeles Times. I wonder if you'd mind talking to one of our people about what's happening out there?" "Listen, Tm sorry if you've been misled," I said into the handset. "There's nothing going on here at all. Somebody's playing a practical joke on you and you ought to get wise to it." "Come off it, Mr. Poekel." "God's honest truth," I said. "Listen, one of my neighbors, Harry Emelin, is playing a practical joke on me by telling everybody that I'm building robots here. There isn't a word of truth in the story." Idly I watched the coffee pot climb down into the sink, push the tap open with its spout and wallow contentedly in the water. "Is that a fact?" "Fact. Listen, fellas. I'm just a plain old funeral director, just another joe trying to live my life and make a buck. This sort of publicity is bad for business. You know how quiet the profession is supposed to be. "I didn't realize that." "Matter of fact," I said, warming to my subject, "the board of examiners is considering censuring me because of all the publicity this joke has been giving me. I would appreciate it if you boys would give me a break." I didn't quite cry into the phone. Martha nodded approvingly. "Well, we really didn't have any idea... good authority... we thought... sorry to bother you." "No trouble. And thank you so much for your cooperation. If you ever need anything in my line don't hesitate to call. I'll return your kindness a thousandfold. They say I'm quite an artist." "Uh, thanks." "Don't mention it." I hung up. "Wasn't that a little thick?" Martha asked. "Nah." "Suppose they think to check that funeral director thing?" I slapped my forehead, which emitted a sound like a smitten cantaloupe. "Migod!" "I'll cover for you," the love of my life said sweetly. "If they call back I'll tell them you've gone out of town." "For what?" "For a mortician's convention." She stood up, walked to the sink, picked up the coffee pot, paddled it and put it back on the sideboard, where it hobbled behind a canister of coffee to sulk. She sighed, took a sponge and began to wipe the sink -- the walls around it and the floor in front of it were covered with water that the coffee pot had splashed up. The phone rang again. Martha put down the sponge and answered. I mooched up behind her, put my arms around her and let my nose rest on her head. Her hair smelled of a curious, morning-chores mix of perfume and dishpan detergent. Reaching around behind herself, she dug me in the ribs with a forefinger. "Just a minute. I'll see if he's available," she said into the phone. I shook my head emphatically. She covered the mouthpiece. "It's the Monsignor What's-hisface," she hissed. "Oh," I said, accepting the phone. Martha uttered a little yip of surprise -- the vacuum had experimentally snuffled her thigh. She slapped at it. It shrank away, went about its business of snuffling around the baseboards. "Hello," I said warily into the phone. "Monsignor Scopazzi here," a fruity voice said into my ear. "Good to hear from you," I said absently. "Yes. Well, regarding your situation over there, I feel confident that something can be done." "Glad to hear it." "Yes. Of course, I don't do that sort of thing myself, but I think that we can put you in touch with someone who is equipped to handle it." "Great. When can I talk to him?" The fruity voice chuckled, making me think of Orson Welles as Cardinal Richelieu. "Patience, patience, my boy. Exorcists don't grow on trees, not any more. We live in an enlightened era." I looked over at the sideboard, where the toaster and the can opener were fighting over a loaf of bread. "Not enlightened enough for me." "Rather than my bothering you again with unessential details, my office will take care of getting someone to you." "Look, I appreciate this, but isn't there some way you can get him over here right away?" "You sound quite disturbed," the phone said. Monsignor, my eye! "I am quite disturbed." There was a longish pause. "Well, then," the voice came back, "we'll see if something can be done later today. The person in question is somewhere in the Los Angeles area at this moment, I believe. Yes. We'll be in touch shortly." "Thank you very much." "Don't mention it. Oh, incidentally, I would appreciate the favor of being allowed to be present during the -- ah -- services." "Oh?" The telephone was innocent -- this was the Monsignor. I called to Martha, "What do we have to offer a Monsignor for dinner?" "Will he eat Pedernales chili?" she called back. "He'd better." Into the phone I said, "No trouble at all. Monsignor, we'd be delighted to have you make it for dinner. That's always a lively time." "Thank you. The -- ah -- visitations sound most intriguing. Until later, then." went to the sideboard and took the loaf of bread away from the toaster and the can opener. "What do you do to make a Monsignor feel at home?" Martha asked. "You could start by hiding the menorah." The doorbell chimed. I went to answer it while Martha started on the dishes. I remembered to unfasten the hook and eye at the top of the door. "Mister Poekel?" the guy with the notepad said. "Who?" I asked. some sort of funny trouble with your appliances?" I looked over his shoulder. At the curb stood one of those fairly new, nondescript, low-priced cars, unmarked, with a buggywhip antenna on the rear fender. "Sorry," I said. "Poekel used to live here a few months back, but he's moved. Funny little guy." "Is that so?" "Oh, sure. He used to live in a little room in the attic. The missus and I were never sure when he went in or out. A little strange, maybe, but always polite and he always paid his rent on time." The guy's face fell. "You don't know where we might be able to find him?" "Sorry," I said, "I haven't the faintest idea." "Could you give me a description of him?" "Oh, I don't know," I mused. "He looks pretty ordinary. Maybe five feet four or five, sort of stooped over, you know? And he has a cast in one eye." The guy glanced back at the car, then at me. "Well, thanks a lot, fella." "Don't mention it. Say, while you're here, could I interest you in a brand-new, complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica? It's the universal reference source of a thousand uses. I can get you a real good price." "Uh, no, thanks. I've got to get back to the paper." "Well, if you change your mind be sure to let me know. You really don't know what you're missing." "You sell those things?" "Best damn salesman in the West, the missus tells me. She says if I keep up at this rate I'll be division manager by next year. Yes, sir. Then I could really get you a break." "Uh, that's great." "Be sure to keep in touch now. The name's Hendrickson, Claude Hendrickson. Here's my phone number. Think it over and get in touch." I wrote out a number and handed it to him, clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe you could use a little knowledge." "Yeah. So long," he said, backing down the steps. "Don't be a stranger now, y'hear?" I watched him get back into the car and drive away. He didn't stop at other houses on the block. That gave me more time. Harry Emelin came over. We said, "Hi -- " and walked into the kitchen. Martha was just paddling the can opener, which had gotten into the refrigerator and overturned the milk. She looked at me in despair. "We've got to stop this," she said. Harry said, "Hi, Martha." "Hi, Harry. I can't offer you anything but instant coffee -- the coffee pot keeps emptying itself onto the floor." "That's okay," Harry said graciously. "Maybe the weather is making it a little rambunctious." We sat down at the table. Martha put water on the stove in a regular pot to boil and sat down with us. She rested her chin on her right hand and put her left hand on my arm. "Anything new?" Harry asked. "Not as far as I know." "The blender," Martha said. "It isn't where I left it last night." "You think it's walking around?" "I don't know. Maybe one of the other things pushed it." "Who was that?" Harry asked. "Who -- wha -- ?" "That guy outside." "Oh, him. I thought he was from the Times. That was a Times staff car." "Did you tell him anything?" "Do you think I'm crazy? And have people crawling all over my home? I told him he had the wrong house and offered to sell him a set of encyclopedias." "Do you think he was convinced?" "Sure. I even offered to give him my phone number in case he changed his mind." "Did you?" "Well, I gave him a number. If he changes his mind and calls it give him a hard time. They've never sold encyclopedias." "Did you follow up that suggestion I made?" Harry said. "Which one?" "The one about exorcism." "Oh. Yeah, I did. I got in touch with the first person who I thought might know -- he happened to be a rabbi. He put me on to somebody in comparative mythology at in Santa Monica. Eventually I seem to have found somebody who knows somebody. First I thought the phone was playing tricks -- but he's supposed to come by for dinner tonight." "Mind if I join you?" "Of course not. If you can take Pedernales chili, that is." "I suppose I can. Did you check the chart recorder this morning?" "I did, but it was blank." "Let's see." He stood up and went to the chart recorder, sitting on the sideboard near the refrigerator. He unsnapped the cover and took it off. Whistling absently, he ran through the calibration. Finally he closed the cover, reattached the snaps and came back to the table. "It works all right. Hum." "Well," I said, "All that tells us is that there are no electromagnetic fields in the room." "Other than the normal background RF and sixty-cycle, yes. And it would be okay to guess that very low-frequency stuff couldn't have anything to do with this." He scratched his head. "I'm about out of ideas. I'm glad you found an exorcist." "I'm not convinced that this is going to work," I said. "You can always sell the house." "Thanks a lot." I rose and moved idly around the kitchen. The sun streamed in through the window over the sink. sending butter-yellow reflections around the clean little room. I looked around. Everything seemed normal, just like in any other tract house, except that, while I watched, the coffee pot got down into the sink again. It nosed the water on, splashed under the faucet and seemed to enjoy itself tremendously. "Have you been able to come up with anything unusual from back around the time this got started?" Harry asked. "Not yet. The first thing I remember still happened about a month ago -- and it still is just my coming downstairs in the morning and finding the toaster buried in toasted bread. Then there was the night we sat here and watched it open the loaf and fill itself with slices. And after that, the can opener and the coffee pot and the vacuum cleaner -- and now, God knows, maybe the blender. And not a clue during the whole time that might give even a hint of an idea as to what's going on." "What makes you think that exorcism is going to accomplish anything?" Martha asked. "Well, it's been around for a long time." "Exorcism, shmexorcism." I paced the kitchen floor. "What I need is results. The good oldfashioned American spirit. No matter how far-fetched living in a mechanical menagerie may seem, let no man say that my cause is hopeless." A Mobutu, the exorcist, said. Dinner was over. It had been lively. He looked up wearily from a litter of arcane paraphernalia. "What do you mean, hopeless?" Martha asked. "Couldn't you have forgotten something?" "Well," Mobutu said, getting up from the floor, "while exorcism isn't exactly a full-time profession with me I am still a professional in the business. And in my opinion -- exorcism is not the answer to this problem." Mobutu was about twenty-three, wore a dark, impeccable business suit and an Afro natural. He scratched the natural in bafflement. "Isn't there anyone else in your department at the university?" Martha asked. "The university? Oh. No, of course not," Mobutu said. "I'm in the Graduate School of Law. There isn't anyone else over there who knows anything about my field. Unless you feel you could use people without a specific background in exorcism." "Who have you got?" "Well, we have two Zen adepts and a member of the Adoratory of Relsa." "That's tough." "I figured you'd think so." Mobutu started to pack. "Say," I asked, "with your background in law, what are you doing in religion? Or is the word occultism?" "Both are old interests of mine," Mobutu said, still packing. "When I finish my graduate work here at the university I'm moving on to Oxford for another stint. In a few years I'll be the only person in the United States with degrees in both civil and canon law." "Urn." "I'm sorry that exorcism doesn't work on your -- problem." "That's a polite word for it." Harry, who had been looking on with interest, said, "Whose fault is that?" "It's not mine -- or I should say, not the fault of the methods of exorcism," Mobutu said carefully. "Rather it indicates that these objects are not being moved by malignant spirits. In other words, there seems to be nothing to exorcise." "What do we do now?" I asked. He placed the tips of his fingers carefully together. "Have you tried a child psychologist? Poltergeist phenomena, you know -- " "My kids are not crazy," Martha said testily. "That's not what he means," I said. Mobutu nodded. "No. I simply meant that these phenomena frequently occur around adolescent female children." Martha looked relieved. "We don't have any girls." "That's too bad." "What do you mean, too bad?" "Well, they might have provided an explanation." The phone rang. Martha went into the kitchen and picked it up. In a minute she came back into the room. "It's Phyllis, Harry," she said. "You should have asked her to join us." Harry took the phone. Mobutu started packing up his gear. The Monsignor shooed the vacuum away from under his feet and stood up. "I'm sorry that nothing of more value has come of this," he said. "Nevertheless I have found the visit most -- ah- interesting." Harry came back into the living room. "What's up?" I asked him. "Phyllis says our sewing machine is out in the living room trying to pull down the curtains." "My God," the Monsignor said. "Perhaps," Mobutu mumbled, packing his gear. In the kitchen Martha let out a tiny shriek. I hurried in, followed by Harry and Mobutu. Martha was busy disentangling her hair from the telephone, which had reached out and gotten hold of it with its cord. No more telephoning, I thought resignedly. Well, there was always the pay phone in the shopping center. jfjL something woke me. The house was full of strange noises -- faint squeaks and chitterings, swishes and rattles. Martha awoke, too -- I think she had the same feeling I did that something important was happening. We got up, dressed and went downstairs. In the front hallway all the applidoor, the larger ones bumping repeatedly into it, trying to get it open. The vacuum had figured out the hook and eye, but couldn't reach it. While we stood watching them a rumbling came from the sunporch and the color TV rolled in on its casters and Joined the group. They clustered around the door like animals trying to escape a zoo. Martha looked at me. I looked at her. "I suppose if they want out that badly we ought to let them out," she said. I nodded. I pushed my way through the crowd, undid the hook and opened the door. The bunch of them pushed and shoved their way out and down the steps. I was just beginning to worry about the neighbors when I saw that I didn't have to. Lights were on up and down the street. People were milling around in their underwear, shouting and screaming, and everywhere I looked there were moving appliances, some scuttling underfoot like rats, their chrome glittering in the streetlights. I looked around. Harry's light was on. I grabbed Martha's hand and started over there. Halfway I met Harry. "I tried phoning you when it started," Harry said, "but the phone's gone, too." "Gone?" "Nothing left but a wire sticking out of the wall. It rode out on my mobile wet bar." "Rode?" "Like that." He pointed down the street. About a hundred feet away a combination TV-magazine rack was trundling by, its top and racks filled with smaller appliances. Farther away, at the cross streets, a river of small objects was moving resolutely west. I looked the other way. The same thing was going on down there. The appliances in the street were moving randomly toward one intersection or the other, but once they reached a crossing they turned west. A loud crash sounded behind us, followed by the crunching of timbers. Harry's Austin America emerged from its shattered garage doors and moved toward the road. A few seconds later I heard other crashes. The street began to fill with cars. Some people tried to open the doors and put on brakes. A few succeeded. The rest of the cars began to move down the street, the smaller appliances scuttling to right or left to keep out of the way. Regretfully I watched our VW camper trundle by. I could have stopped it, but I had a definite feeling about leaving well enough alone. "We'd better get out of the street," I said to Martha. "The cars might not see us." She nodded, looking around speechlessly. Phyllis came up and took Harry's hand. Harry and I looked at each other and without words came to the same conclusion. There was a big condominium on La Cienega, not far away. The four of us started over there. The elevators weren't running, as we hadsort of expected. We climbed the sixteen or so flights to the sundeck. On the way we passed hordes of things going the other way -- toasters, coffee pots, TV sets, refrigerators, radios, stereos -- inching or rolling or crawling their way down the steps. Larger ones with wheels were always covered with smaller hitchhikers. They ignored us or nosed at us inquiringly. We stepped carefully around them. We made it to the sundeck and looked around. The deck was already crowded with people. They looked down uncomprehendingly. The moonlight and streetlights showed a river of metal moving slowly and steadily toward the ocean. Houses stood out like little islands in the current. The roads and sidewalks and front lawns were solidly filled with moving shapes. The streets were sidewalk to sidewalk with cars, their lights out, moving slowly west. Distantly we could hear screams and the sound of smashing glass. Then, while we watched, all the lights in sight went out. A tremendous quiet settled over everything as thousands of vent fans and the air-conditioners -- whatever ones were left -- sighed to a stop. I suddenly had a flash of huge, impossibly massive generators heaving themselves up -- to the panic of the operating engineers -- and ponderously moving west to the accompaniment of rending girders and falling power lines. From below, the noise of things crawling purposefully through came through clearly and distantly, like the sound of an direction, as far as we could see, the full moon picked up things in motion, all heading west. About five miles west was the Pacific Ocean. Martha, Harry, Phyllis and I sort of looked at each other. Then we grabbed each other by the shoulders in a little circle, there on the roof among people shouting and arguing with each other, and we smiled. It was like New Year's Eve. Something was happening and we didn't know what it was -- but it looked interesting. Am. walked home. The streets were fairly clear by then, but we still had to avoid an occasional power tool crunching along -- like the drill press I almost barked my shin on -- and sometimes we had to step out of the way of a dishwasher rumbling by on its plastic wheels. The sky was streaked with red and as the sun broke above the horizon Harry said, "Look there!" We looked at the sky. High overhead were what looked like thousands of tiny birds -- commercial airliners, empty of passengers I hoped, flying west. Below them, rising in flocks above the trees, streaming from houses and buildings, were thousands and thousands of small, birdlike things, flapping madly for altitude, curved necks stretched eagerly toward the ocean. They were coathangers. Flocks of coathangers. For a while the sky was dark with them and the whipping sound of their flight was clear and shrill in the morning air. Martha and I stopped and held hands while the coathangers flew over. We suddenly realized, with a sort of quiet finality, that we were watching the last man-made objects that we were likely to see in the sky for a long time. Here and there on the street were smashed appliances. A few people who had gotten to their cars were trying to start them, but with no luck. It dawned on me that they would never get them started, that these cars were dead really dead. Somehow, in some way that I didn't understand -- and neither would the engineers -- the cars and other things that had not joined the migration would never work again. The four of us entered our living room. The house was eerily quietdead and deserted. Martha went into the kitchen to make some coffee, but the kitchen, of course, was empty. The coffeemaker was David Gerrold. now in his late twenties, says, "I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up. I never really knew I wanted to be a writer -- but then again, I never really knew I wanted to be anything else." Raised in Los Attgeles, David confesses to a precocious love for the motion picture art. "Everything," he says, "revolved around the movies. I wanted to see them, make them, act in them. I wanted to make movies so bad, my parents had to ask my permission to use their own movie camera." David holds a B.A. Degree in Theater Arts. "The most important thing I learned is that unless you have a story, you might as well not even put film in the camera. Everything starts with the story." His first break came in # when Gene Coon, then proone of David's outlines. Coon asked him to submit others, one of which eventually became "The Trouble With Tribbles" -- ranking among the show's most popular episodes. The script was David's first sale as a scieiKe-fiction writer -- and it later garnered a Hugo nomination. Since then, he has sold plus several novels and anthologies to Ballantine, Random House and other leading publishing houses. "I don't consider myself specifically a science-fiction writer," David sums up. "But whan you have all time and all space to mass around in, the temptation to do so is irresistible. I write to express my feelings, and writing helps me understand what I'm feeling and why. My Harlie stories are good examples. If the reader is errtertainad, then they are good stories -- but if he feels something of what I felt in the writing, then I'm a good writer." gone -- also the stove, the refrigerator, the blender, the toaster and the can opener. A broken wire sticking out of a discolored spot on the wall was all that was left of the telephone. I knew it was the same way in the rest of the house, probably in the rest of the world -- although it would take us a damn long time to find out. Martha came back with a can of coffee and a kettle. "How about building us a fire?" she asked. I got some wood from the box and Harry laid some kindling and in a few minutes we had a cheery little blaze in the fireplace. Martha rigged up a pothook out of dead old wire magazine rack and in a few minutes we had coffee -- bitter and too strong, maybe, but coffee. On a hunch I went to the sunporch and sure enough -- behind the couch was the old guitar I used to play. I brought it in, reflecting that all the electric instruments had probably gone with everything else. I sat down on the floor and, in an experimental mood, strummed a chord and hummed a few notes. The guitar sounded fine. Phyllis hummed along for a few seconds. "Well," Harry said, looking around, "here we are." "Here we are," I agreed. "I wonder what it's going to be like now?" Phyllis said. "I don't know," I said, "But it sure as hell is going to be interesting." Harry started to laugh. "What's so funny?" Martha asked. "I was thinking that in a few minutes it'll be time to go to work." He chuckled. "Telephoning orders, using the adding machine, making Xeroxes, programing the computer." "Why not take the day off?" Martha asked. We all laughed. Then, as it hit us, we laughed harder until our sides hurt. When the merriment died down and we were merely chuckling occasionally, Phyllis said, "We can make a great breakfast over that fire." "Let's do it," Martha said. They went to rummage through the pile of food that the refrigerator had left in the middle of the kitchen floor. Harry squatted down in front of the fire and warmed his hands. His face looked unusually peaceful. "What's on your mind?" I asked him. He grinned. "Growing food." I picked up the guitar again and strummed at it. I reflected that I needed quite a bit of practice before I'd be any good. But I didn't have to hurry. I had all the time in the world.  First Person Peculiar by T. L. Sherred. Ballantine. Good Neighbors and Other Strangers by Edgar Pangborn. Macmillan. The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton. Knopf. Earth by Marie C. Farca. Doubleday. The Falling Astronauts by Barry N. Malzberg. Ace. The Heiros Gamos of Sam and An Smith by Josephine Saxton. Curtis. Group Feast by Josephine Saxton. Doubleday. The Edict by Max Ehrlich. Bantam. Cyborg by Martin Caiden. Arbor House. Tarzan Alive by Philip Jo Farmer. Doubleday. Alpha Two Ed. Robert Silverberg. Ballantine. The General Zapped an Angel by Howard Fast. Ace. The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher. Ace. The Venus Factor Ed. Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood. Macfadden. Ultimate World by Hugo Gernsback. Walker. through two reminiscences? In the late 'forties my roommate (and finest friend) was L. Jerome Stanton, who for a while was John Campbell's assistant on Astounding. A man of wide tolerance and forbearance, he had one crotchet: he could not abide wild and hysterical enthusiasms. People who ohboyed and gee-whizzed up the walls and across the ceiling were, to him, exterminate. Imagine my surprise one night to hear from his room a ululating war-whoop and the pounding of feet -- he exploded into the living room waving a manuscript and crying, "Read this read this." When I could, I did. The story was from the slush pile -- irreverent editors' cant for unsolicited manuscripts -- and was the work of an unknown called T. L. Sherred, and the title was E for Effort. If you've read it you know its pace and power and clean, clean style -- if you haven't I envy you that first experience. Here's a man who has something very important to say and says it well and truly. But the manuscript had one quality which you won't see. It may have been a peculiarity of the typewriter Sherred was using, or the way he used it, but every word was speedblurred, carrying a faint comettail blur to the left. Nothing could have been more appropriate to the story, and it's a shame it wasn't photo-repro'd for the magazine instead of having been type-set. With awe in his voice the phlegmatic Stanton said "It's paced like a drunk falling downstairs." Well -- it is indeed and you'll find it in First Person, Peculiar, subtitled How first can a peculiar person geft -- along with three other novelettes: Cure Guaranteed, Eye for Iniquity and Cue for Quiet. There are similarities among these, but let that pass. Sherred is like a superb marksman with a superb weapon. It's his targets that differ widely -- and he does not miss. One further note on Sherred: in the "Afterword" for his story in Ellison's huge Again Dangerous Visions, Sherred says flatly that he will write no more. If ever there were cause for a letter campaign, this is it. Sherred, take it back. Reminiscence the second: About # Groff Conklin and I gave a new editor a helping hand with the slush pile for a new magazine -- H. L. Gold and Galaxy respectively. It was a Sunday night and I had read something beetween a quarterFriday. I was weary and gritty-eyed and the one thing I didn't need was another story. But I picked up that just-one-more, you know, to glance at it... About an hour later I woke my wife. I had tears on my face. "Read this. Just read this." And I got on the phone. It took the better part of another hour to get through to a tiny town near Albany and I finally found myself talking to a quiet, unresponsive and completely unrevealing voice, very unexcited at having been called at # ack emma. "Edgar Pangborn?" "Yes." "Hey, I've just read yom Angel's Egg. It's just beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever read!" "Thanks." And that was about it. I've since come to know Edgar Pangborn quite well. He is very shy and quiet and one of the sharpest and most sensitive observers of people, motives, love, loss and pain in all the world. As you'll see for yourself in the long-awaited, muchneeded Pangborn collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, which is Angel's Egg and ten other delightful, moving, startling, provocative andor gently funny stories. N OW I've reminisced myself out of justice-space and must be unjustly brief with these: The chief defect of The Terminal Man is The Andromeda Strain -- and I freely concede that it's hard to be more unjust to a book than to judge it by the merits of some other book. But if a man writes a blockbusting runaway best-seller he has put himself in a different country. Anyway, in the long run the comparison is fair. The Andromeda Strain dealt with something that threatened all humanity -- The Terminal Man deals with one man's disaster, and Crichton does not make of his tortured Harry Benson, an epileptic, the kind of man one can identify with, care about, fascinating as his case may be. Aside from this cavil, the book is well enough wrought. There are few joys greater in this assignment than to run into a really fine first by a new name. The name is Marie C. Farca and her book is called Earth -- and if she gets any better than this she will be right in the superstar category. She has drawn a comparison between two Earths -- either of which, in her far future, may be the original one -- one of which has progressed to the highest technological achievement; the other has been all but killed by pollution. On the latter, under a dome, is a village, and we get to spend most of the book there, getting to know the people. Her method is to illustrate extremes and to indicate the middle way, as the best of ancient Greek philosophy once did. These two planets have a great deal to learn from one another and in the end there's a strong chance that they will. As for her protagonist, Ames -- for all he is from a most remote future, he is indeed someone the reader can give a damn about. Barry N. Malzberg has pushed down again on his detonator and exploded us another novel. The Falling Astronauts. Again he is grinding his teeth at, and on, This is an examination-in-depth of the third man on an Apollo project, who has to mind the store while the two others make their marks on the surfaces of Luna and the history books. He is obsessed by the notion of blasting off and leaving them there. Malzberg pulls you right inside the skin of this bumbling, tilted, angry astronaut and through him alone (for what real leave a viewer?) creates all the terror and wonder that the space program has robbed from us. I think I have finally isolated the uniqueness of Malzberg. There have been angry writers before -- and black humorists -- but their mark seems always to have been a kind of snobbishness: #-knowsomething-you-don't-know. Malzberg gives a voice to the mixedup, the impotent, to the torment of helplessness -- and to the peculiar hope that personal integrity, even if it be irrational or wrongheaded, may just possibly be able to beat the system. xX let me again make the distinction between an original book and a unique one. Mickey Spillane, as a good example, wrote the original Mickey Spillane kind of book. Immediately he and others could repeat the trick. But unique books cannot be redone by anyone, not even by a very short shelf indeed -- and they are very, very good. Such a book is Josephine Saxton's The Heiros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, which, as it happens, I missed in hardcover but which can now be had in paperback. It's a tale or a fable and an adventure or a parable. It's frightening and tender and puzzling and provocative -- in short, it will give you back in full measure what you're capable of bringing to it and if you don't get anything out of it it's your fault, not the book's. You'll participate in this one or you won't. If you don't. I'm sorry -- it's your great lack and your loss. Ms. Saxton's new one is Group Feast, the bare bones of which are these -- the wealthiest woman in the world decides to throw a party in the most incredible house ever built -- and she does and it's a whing-ding you'll never forget. Max Ehrlich, sparkplug-in-chief of Zero Population Growth, turns out to be a writer of great competence. The "edict" in his book commands that there be no more births for thirty years. If there is one, the baby dies and so do both parents. The edict is cushioned with a social system of superficial liberality where sex is easy to come by (a great phrase, that) and even the pregnancy experience is acceptable -- provided it's terminated. The book (and I hate to be this brief) is the story of a couple who decided to go through with one. Warmly recommended. We are about to be swamped by cyborgs -- cybernetic organisms, people (usually) who are partly machines. One new TV series with this theme is already on the air and I know of three more in preparation. An archetype of the concept is Martin Caiden's Cyborg, which deals with a test-pilotastronaut of the stamp that bugs Malzberg so much, who flies an experimental rocket plane into the Mohave Desert and leaves both legs and an arm in the wreckage. These, and a number of other replacements and improvements, are brought to a new optimum and we have a superman superspy. Caiden is a science writer of enormous competence, and the account of his hero's reconstruction is absolutely fascinating. His subsequent advengreat if that's your thing. His development as a human being is something Caiden tries very hard to do well -- and doesn't -- but if you're gadget-happy that won't matter. Tarzan Alive, subtitled A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystroke, is a labor of love by sfs greatest lover, Philip Jose Farmer. With dumfounding energy and high good humor he has produced a veritable Ph.D. thesis on the real Tarzan, who of course is alive and very busy to this day. With great gobbets of cross-reference and footnotes, addenda and bibliographies. Farmer traces the life history of the man on whom E. R. Burroughs patterned his Tarzan character. A delightful, colossal, stupendous book. Worthy collections, anthologies and reprints (and I weep at having to be this brieO: Silverberg's antho Alpha Two -- ten fine stories and a Best Buy. The General Zapped an Angel -- nine literate and potent short stories by Howard Fast. Anthony Boucher's The Compleat Werewolf -- by the late and wonderful Anthony Boucher, including most of his Unknown stories. The Venus Factor, featuring female writers instead of just writers, but anyway worth the price and more because it has Judy Merril and C. L. Moore and Zenna Henderson. There are also quainties by the likes of Agatha Christie, Cynthia Asquith and Gertrude Atherton -- and speaking of quaint, I must urge you to get Ultimate World, by Hugo Gernsback. If you want to see what the first twenty years of American sf read like here it is -- and don't scoff. Gernsback's still good for about four valid story ideas per page. This is not, by the way, a reprint -- it's a posthumous first edition. A curiosity and a treasure.  April, Year One terrible morning, faced three things he did not want to face. One, his baby-food business would have practically no customers in less than two years. Two, the probabilities were that he was not one of the naturally resistant. According to the latest information only one in # persons had not been rendered permanently sterile. Three, like almost every adult he was experiencing the end-ofthe-world syndrome, as it was to be called. OF... And what were you doing on the day when the population imploded? Number three he thought he could handle. He had always prided himself on his self-control, his flexibility, his adaptability. Number two? He would not know whether or not he was sterile until he took the test Clabb had described in his letters. Number one? Conversion. But his wife, Ellen, was phoning him and he knew by her whiteness, her drawn face, her wide eyes, that she was going to be hysterical about all three and nasty about number two. His secretary, Jessica, had asked him if she should put the call through and he had said she should. Get It Over With was his philosophy. He pressed the button and Ellen asked, "Why did you take so long about answering?" "You're not the only one shaken up," he said. "I heard the news on the radio just before I drove into the parking lot." "It's awful, isn't it?" she said. "Just terrible! Horrible!" "If it's true," Jackson said. "It certainly is true!" Her voice rose, fluttering like a frightened bird. "They verified all the important things before they released the news. How do you explain the sudden drop in pregnancies in the last four months? It was all Clabb's doing! He explained the whole thing in his letter -- the one they read. How he built toy factories all over the world, except in the Iron Curtain countries, and how only he knew that the aerosol he'd had his scientists make was being blown out into the winds and carried all over the world and how it affected only man and the  Every head of state on Earth received a letter from Jacob Clabb. By the time scientists had determined that Clabb's formula was not a crackpot's work the planet's birthrate had dropped noticeably. There was no longer any reason to suppress the news. Clabb had disappeared without a trace. One theory was that Clabb may have become mentally unbalanced following the Great July Choke in New York City in #. higher apes and how only one person in twenty thousand -- " "Clabb's letter was read over the radio and I heard it again on the TV in my office." "They say Clabb has disappeared. No one has the slightest idea of where he went." "Naturally," Jackson said. "Please come home," Ellen said. "I'm just about to go to pieces." "I was planning on coming home -- was just going to call you," he said. It was evident that she meant to wait until he got home before she reproached him. "But first I have to make some calls. It takes time and money to convert a business and -- " "What do you mean?" He explained and she said, "What if you can't get a loan to change over? Nobody's going to want to invest in the future because the future isn't going to exist. It -- " "You're getting hysterical." He regretted saying that as soon as he had said it. In Ellen's mind to be accused was to be guilty. She broke up and was still screaming, when he cut her off. He checked Dr. Seward's office number but received no answer. He tried the doctor's home. Mrs. Seward answered. Her makeup was wrecked by tears and her slurred speech indicated she had been drinking. "Ronald's at General Hospital," she said. "He's got six would-be suicides on his hands and more coming in. And I'm not so sure that I'm not going to be one of his patients if he doesn't come home." "Call a good doctor," Jackson said, hoping the dry approach would calm her down. And then, seeing her anger, he said, "I'm just kidding, Jane. Look, why don't you go over to my house? You and Ellen can buck up each other until I get home. Or maybe that's not such a good idea. Ellen's no post to lean on just now. Go to Willa's. She's pretty steady." "She's one of Ronald's pilltakers!" Jane Seward said shrilly. "Good God, man, don't you know this is the end of the road for humanity?" "I don't know aiiy such thing," Jackson said. "Look, go over and talk to Ellen until I get home. Meanwhile, consider the figures. Even with only one -- " He stopped. She had cut him off. He pressed Jessica's button. "Call my wife. Tell her I'm on my way home now. I will actually be making some phone calls, but they shouldn't take too long. By the way, you look as if you were being sensible about this." "I'm too numb really to know what's going on inside me," she said. She smiled. She was beautiful enough when her face was composed -- when she smiled she was striking. Her face faded from the screen. He spoke Arnold Rawley's number, but according to his secretary Mr. Rawley was not in. She did not know where he was. He was not at home, because she had called there and his wife had said that he should have been at work. tavern on High view Road near Highview Woods, where Canute and Rawley lived. Mike's was a small but elegant place. It had become a sort of "neighborhood" tavern. The neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most influential men in Busiris. Mike answered. In a few seconds Rawley's flushed face was on the screen. "Jackson!" Arnold said. "Come on down! We're celebrating the end of the world! No more babies! Jesus!" The tears ran down his cheeks. "You have six children," Canute said. "You've got it made." "Yeah, but I won't have any grandchildren. They ought to hang Clabb when they find him! No, hanging's too good for him -- they ought to crucify him, except that would be blasphemous. They ought to nail -- " "Cut it out," Canute said. "Why the hell are you crying in your beer -- scotch -- anyway at this time of the morning? You don't even know that everything Clabb says is true. With six kids you've got a chance of one's being fertile even if all the claims in those letters are verified. I have work to do and I need you. I want to get started at once to convert -- that much I'm sure of. I'm calling an emergency meeting of the board of directors and you should be working out the legal foundations. But you won't be in any shape today, I can see. What about your partner? Js he off on a bender, too?" "Young Luckenvor? Not that cold fish." "I'll call him then," Canute said. "I expect to see you sober tomorrow. At eight." Rawley glared. "Young Luckenvor's not the only cold fish." "I can get hysterical with the best of you," Canute said, "when there's occasion for it. It's not as if the sky was falling down. Chicken Licken." He phoned Rawley's office again. Mrs. Tengrow, the secretary, said that Luckenvor was in the hospital, according to a call she had just received from Mrs. Luckenvor. He had driven into a lamppost, wrecked the car, broken a collarbone and then suffered a broken arm when another car broadsided into his. The other driver had been arrested for drunkenness. Luckenvor had not yet been arrested, though he, too, had been intoxicated -- and where was Mr. Rawley? "Why would Luckenvor be drunk so early in the morning?" Canute asked. "Mrs. Tengrow, when was the news about Clabb's letter first released?" Mrs. Tengrow was sixty, childless, and did not care much for the direction in which the world had been going for the last forty years. "Oh, the first announcement was during the late late show." "Many people must have heard about it before dawn," he said. "But I never thought Luckenvor -- " He cut himself short, told Tengrow where she could locate Rawley. "But I advise you not to ask him to come to the office. He should go home. In a taxi." Mrs. Tengrow pursed her mouth but said nothing. Canute made several calls to board members, asking them to call others for a meeting at the Golden Boar's Head at the earliest possible moment. His secretary would arrange for the private banquet room and take care of other details. He listened to Jessica on his callbox. She was still talking to Ellen. He turned and went out the back way, though Jessica had probably rotated the phone so that Ellen could not see him if he passed Jessica's desk. H e was glad to see the tall white pillars and reddishbrown roof of his house ahead. Something was uncoiling from the ice-shot mud in his entrails. It was sending vibrations up through his flesh. Humanquake, he thought. I wonder what degree this is on the personal Richter scale... If he could cast his reactions into such channels he was safe from breakup. He stopped the car on the curving drive, turned off the steam and sat for what seemed a long while behind the wheel. Finally the big carved-oak door opened and Ellen came out. He left the car and walked toward her. She flew to him as if she were a selfthrown basketball, his arms the hoop. He held her for a long while, but, seeing passersby in cars turning their heads to look, he finally released her and urged her into the house. There he did what seemed to him the best way to comfort her -- and himself -- even though she weakly protested. But she lost her reluctance after a few minutes. She soon understood that they were making the most significant gesture they could -- they were, in a sense, shaking their fists or thumbing their noses at the catastrophe that hung over mankind. And there was the hope that this would result in conception and prove that they were not going to share in the larger fate of the world. accomplished the next day. Rawley could not make it to work. Even if he had not been so hung oyer he would have stayed home to settle down his wife. The board of directors membership was still suffering from shock and refused to attend a meeting until the numbness wore off. The third day Jackson took his time leaving the breakfast table. Ellen was fairly calm, though at times her chin would start trembling and tears would appear. They watched the early morning news together. International, national and local news came in that order. Three elephants of bad portent, two holding the tails of their predecessors in their trunks. Most programs had been canceled for news or special programs. These consisted largely of "authorities" lecturing or being interviewed or talking with other authorities. There were also views of reactions, public and private, from all over the world. Shortly before he left for the office Jackson said, "Busiris has a population of about two hundred thousand. That means that only about ten adults in Busiris are naturally resistant. Ten! And if half are women, how many can bear children? A person can be naturally resistant, but that doesn't necessarily mean he or she is fertile." The President of the United States was to speak at #:# p.m. One commentator thought that Lister was sure to make the same announcement as the premier of China and the president of France. Fertility Check Project, was mandatory for every citizen between sbtteen and fifty. The test itself was a contribution by Clabb, described in one of his letters. A needle dipped in clabbonite -- Clabb's own name for it -- was drawn across the skin of the arm or hand deep enough to bring blood. Ten minutes later, if the person were naturally resistant to Clabb's aerosol, a red inflammation approximately a centimeter wide would appear on each side of the scratch. Enormous batches of the clabbonite were being prepared by every nation. Public servants were being trained in administering the test. Some commentators thought United States would be challenged. Most suits would be of the civil rights variety -- Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, could object to the drawing of their blood. Canute kissed Ellen and drove to his office. She still had not reproached him for his having insisted on putting off having children until he was thirty and she was twenty-six. She was more restrained than he had thought she could be. Perhaps she was waiting were known. Jessica was waiting at the office with a list of what she had accomplished the day before. Rawley would be in at #:#, ready to discuss the legal actions needed for conversion. The board of directors and a few major stockholders would be at the Golden Boar's Head for lunch at #:#. The meeting would start at #:#. Mr. Joshua Tabbs of the First United Federal Savings and Trust was ready to meet him at #:# the next morning if Canute had the go-ahead on the conversion from the board. "How did he sound?" Jackson asked. "Upset." "I was hoping he'd sound friendly -- as he does when he's favorable to a loan. But that's too much to expect. Everybody's upset. They're either too jittery or too controlled." Jessica looked up from her note pad. Her eyes were naturally large and makeup made them enormous. They were a lovely violet under the contact lenses she always wore in his presence. He suspected that their real color was blue. No doubt a lovely blue. "Mr. Canute, what do you think everybody will have to take the test?" "I see no other way out," he said. "The world -- humanity, rather -- can't afford to let a single fertile person go -- unused." "But what about unmarried persons?" "Jessica, the normal social sanctions don't apply. When survival is threatened conventions go out the window." She glanced down at her full breasts, then looked up at him. "But what if, say, someone like me were -- uh fertile and the man I loved wasn't?" "No trouble," Jackson said, looking at his wristwatch. "Artificial insemination is available." "But what if my husband didn't want to bring up another man's child?" "You've got no idea how much social pressure is going to be brought to bear on people like that," Canute said. "Listen, Jessica, today's a very important one for Canute Baby Foods, Incorporated. Screen my calls even more thoroughly than usual. Use your judgment." "How soon do you think the "What? Oh, I don't know. Several months maybe. If Congress makes it a law. I'll be in my office. Send Rawley in as soon as he shows." T he morning went smoothly. Rawley, red-faced, red-eyed, moved sluggishly, but his brain was functioning. Once he understood that Jackson did not want to talk to business. But when he was leaving he said, "What the hell will my wife and I do if none of our six kids are fertile?" "The oldest are seventeen and sixteen, right?" Jackson said. "They're old enough to take the test now, so you will soon know the score. The others are twelve, eleven. nine, and seven, right? So you have to wait until they pass puberty and then find out. Meanwhile I sugge.st you think about their reactions, not yours." "I am, I am," Rawley said. "Their reactions, as you call them, are mine. When they cry I cry." "And when you -- " Jackson stopped. To suggest that Rawley quit dissolving his backbone in booze and give his children a good example would only anger him. "What?" Rawley said. "Nothing. Good luck to your kids. Good luck to all kids." The probabilities were against it, but one of Rawley's children might be fertile, one of Busiris' lucky ten. If they were lucky. Being fertile was going to bring on them an enormous amount of public scrutiny and concern. And disappointed psychotics would be a danger to them. The lucky might have to become semiprisoners, guarded by the state for their own good. The luncheon and board meeting were attended by several wealthy older women who owned large blocks of stock. They were not concerned about their own sterility or fertility -- they were past the age even to be tested under the were worried. Jackson answered all questions calmly and with an optimism he did not believe was founded in reality. But his object was to get them in a frame of mind for a rational consideration of the financial difficulties that Canute Baby Foods, Inc., faced. A few could not grasp the idea that baby foods would be out of customers in two years or less. "But that means that my son's infant disposables will be gone, too," Mrs. Wilmort said. "Many businesses will become obsolete," Canute said. "It's easy to think of the obvious ones. But many more will be affected as time goes on. One trend will be constant and we would all do well to keep it in mind. From now on all businesses will have an everdecreasing number of customers. The expanding economy, along with the expansion of population, is a thing of the past." "The stock market is still declining," Mrs. Dammfrum said. "It'll stabilize and start up again," Jackson said, not really believing it would. The mental depression of the world always generated a financial depression. "That goddamned Clabb!" Mrs. Mondries said. Jackson smiled. She was a self-righteous, stickily prudish person. He would have thought nothing could bring such an outburst from her. Which showed how much he knew. The meeting following the luncheon was perfunctory and lasted only minutes. Jackson got his clearance to convert and buzzed Jessica to move his meeting with Tabb ahead to that afternoon. No one had much heart for business. Reverend Cottons, a prominent stockholder and a nondenominational preacher, gave the parting blessing. He prayed that God would have pity on His children and cancel Clabb's evil deeds, stick His finger in, as it were, and resurrect the dead wrigglers and eggs. The reverend was a tall handsome man of fifty-six who could project considerable charisma or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Along with this went a virility that both males and females of his church seemed to relish. Horniness and divinity, Canute thought, had always been allied deep in the layman's mind -- somewhere in the nether layers of human awareness the desire to worship the goddess of fertility lurked eternally. Even Canute, who belonged to no faith, felt more optimistic after Cottons had finished his prayer. It was all but impossible to believe in sterility in the reverend's juicy presence. AT three in the afternoon Canute was in Tabbs' office. The banker was a lean, bald-headed man with small eyes, the greenish color of which suggested new dollar bills. He was all smiles and little jokes, but he was also unwilling to make a decision. "I can't take an objective look at what your conversion involves until this panic is over," Tabbs said. "You understand, don't you?" "Of course," Canute said. "But I don't have much time to start moving." "I realize that. But you haven't stated exactly what you intend to convert to. And the canned food business is highly competitive, isn't that so?" "It is. I can give you the figures for the whole canning industry next time we meet. At this time, as I said over the phone, I just want to get an idea of your interest in making me a loan." "Before you go to somebody else? Believe me, Jackson, our relationship has been such that I have great -- the greatest -- confidence, in you. You're only twenty-eight but your success in running your father's business has been remarkable. Under almost any other circumstances I wouldn't hesitate to say that we would advance whatever you required. But under other circumstances you wouldn't be wanting to convert, would you? The bank, too, has to face changed conditions." Bankers dealt in hard facts and figures, but they were the most plastic of people. Or the most ectoplasmic. "I can understand why you want to wait," Canute said. "Only I can't afford to wait." "I appreciate that," Tabbs said. "Look, it'll take you some time to decide exactly what you want to do, how much the operation will cost, what losses you'll suffer during the shutdown and changeover and so forth. By the time you've got your facts in hand we may be in a better position to understand what's going on. In other words, the dust will have settled and we can see how near the mountains are." Canute rose at the same time as Tabbs. Tabbs looked a little annoyed that Canute had anticipated him. They shook hands and Tabbs said, "I am very sorry. But -- " "The bank comes first, of course," Canute said and wondered why Tabbs felt it necessary to apologize. "My daughter became pregnant about four months ago," Tabbs said. "So she escaped this tragic thing. You might say our family made a deposit just in time. What interest she'll bear -- " Canute smiled but did not laugh because he was not sure that Tabbs wasn't being serious. "Congratulations," he said. "You'll be a grandparent at least once. And perhaps your daughter may be one of the lucky ones." "Better than having gold in the bank," Tabbs said. He ushered Canute out as if he were concentrating on the treasure in the dark vault of his daughter's womb. O UT on the street Canute felt deflated. He had known the market was bad, but he had not, somehow, expected to be turned down. But he wasn't angry at Tabbs. Tabbs had to face a different future along with everyone else. The First United Federal was at the end of the short leg of a large suburban shopping center in the form of an L. Canute decided to take a stroll around it. He could observe the state of business and also do some thinking about the conversion. The sidewalks and stores seemed as crowded as ever and nothing in the faces or movements of the shoppers indicated that a catastrophe had occurred. Many still did not understand -- emotionally anyway -- the depths of the event. And the disaster was not one that had occurred quickly -- like a tidal wave or a volcanic eruption -- and would be soon over. This was an invisible calamity. Its effects would assume reality slowly -- so slowly that most people would not begin to see the overall results plainly for five years. Even then the visible effects would not be overwhelming or too frightening. With # people dying each year, five years would see #. # dead all over the world. The deceased would leave a sizable gap behind them. Put together, they would fill a monstrously large and terrifying cemetery. But they would not be collected -- they would be scattered everywhere. The Earth would absorb them quietly and, at the local level, the survivors would not notice much difference. Cities and towns would not be quite as crowded. Empty apartments and houses would be more numerous but not depressingly so. Births had recently ' averaged more than #. # yearly. Subtract the annual deaths of #, and the world had yearly gained #. # persons. In effect. Earth had annually taken on the additional burden of a new nation -- another France or Germany, say. That gain had been suddenly cut off. Some years would have to pass before the full scope of the loss became visible to citizens other than statisticians. Canute walked down the short leg and the long leader of the L to the liquor store. It was crowded -- the clerks were moving jerkily, trying to serve all customers at once. All the liquor stores, according to a comment by a TV newsman, were breaking sales records. Some of the customers looked as if they had drunk up everything at home and had been forced to go out for more, whether or not they could now see or walk straight. parking lot. The date was April #. The sky was blue and cloudless. It had rained three days before -- the grass was green and the trees were budding. It was a fine day to be alive. Yet, as T.S. Eliot had written, "April is the cruelest month." Mankind was facing its end. Or was it? Clabb's letter had made it plain that he thought he was giving humanity its only chance to survive. Perhaps he was right. Even so, this was still the cruelest month of Canute's life. He drove back to his office. Kalender, the business agent of the canning workers' union, was waiting for him. Canute shook his hand and said, "I was wondering how long it would take you to realize the implications." Kalender did not ask, Implications of what? He said, "You're giving me credit for more intelligence than I have. I should have seen it, but I didn't. Shock, I suppose. I hope it was shock, not stupidity. But I saw Millman's show last night and he said that in five years kindergartens the world over would be empty. And in six, all first grades. I sat up and yelled at Richie -- she's my wife, you met her at -- " "I know," Canute said. "A lovely woman. Well, come on in. I would have called you by tomorrow anyway." Kalender's suit came from the same tailor as Canute's -- his tie, however, was a trifle more flamboyant. He had long ago gotten over his original, somewhat belligerent manner toward Canute. He listened without interruption while Canute told him what he had done so far and what he hoped to do. "We still have to walk out on July first if the industry doesn't give in." Kalender said. "You really think they'll vote for a strike with the economy in such questionable shape and with the future so debatable?" "You forget they passed up a pay increase last year because of Lister's anti-inflation speech. I was surprised when they voted against a strike. But this year they're hurting even more. Prices -- well, you know. The thing is, even if they don't want to strike on account of they'd like to help you make the conversion, they have to. This is national, and the canning workers not in baby foods won't be affected by your special situation. We'll have to go along with national headquarters." "Maybe you could get a dispensation from them," Canute said. Kalender smiled slightly. "I don't think I'll get anywhere, though I'll try. The central office always takes the view that the minority must suffer if the majority will profit. And -- " Canute said, "In ten years Busiris' two hundred thousand population will be down to about a hundred and eighty-two thousand. Sales of canned foods -- of everything, in fact -- will be dropping. Now, Busiris' decrease in population doesn't sound like much. And Canute Foods, after conversion, will do the bulk of its business outside Busiris. But the overall decline in the number of consumers will inevitably force the closing of much of the canning industry in fifteen years. The effects will be felt long before then. Here and there factories will close down -- never to reopen." Kalender leaned forward and said, "You trying to scare me?" "Think about it and you'll scare yourself." on his desktop and then said, "According to our present contract, the company has to pay a full weekly wage to each worker laid off during any shutdown for maintenance, repair, conversion, etc. But not during a strike. So -- " "I thought you'd bring that up." Kalender paused to light a cigar. "If you wait until the strike to start converting, you won't have to pay your workers during the shutdown. The national office is aware of this -- I talked to the headquarters for an hour last night about it. Phoned them a half-hour after I realized what was going to happen. They said -- all this is confidential, off the record, you know -- that the new contract will take care of that. The company will have to reimburse its workers a hundred percent of the pay lost during a shutdown, strike or no strike. The reimbursement can be stretched out over six months, doesn't have to be paid at once. We know that the industry has its problems and we'll go along -- to a certain extent." Jackson Canute leaned back, put his hands behind his head and looked up at the pale blue ceiling with its glowing traceries: mandalas, crux ansatas, cosmic eyes, dollar signs, pyramids, infinity signs, ying and yang. "I object in principle. But in practice I can't see that it makes much difference. If you don't strike we have to pay you during shutdown. However, I don't know what view the banks will take of the strike and the shutdown pay. They might decide that they can't make the loan. Banks take the long-range view, you know, and they won't have any trouble extrapolating the effects of decpop, as the newsmen are calling it. The canned food industry is highly competitive. You know that as well as I. And our establishing a foothold is going to take time, will cost us much and possibly -- I might even say most likely -- will result in failure. "And even if we -- notice the we, since you workers are as much a part of Canute Canned Foods as the managers and stockholders -- even if we do get a good share of the business, enough to keep us going, we won't be able to keep up the gross indefinitely. Sales, as I said, will inevitably decline for the entire industry. And then the dogeat-dog struggle ends in one dog, top dog. And within forty years -- lion of those now living dead and with very little replacement -- the world population will be about one sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Well, nineteen hundred. "Seventy years from now there arians, nonagenarians and so on. And several hundred thousand young fertile people. Maybe. If society doesn't crumble long before then, which it may well do. As you know, modern society, capitalist, communist, or socialist, depends on an expanding economy. Which -- " "I know," Kalender said. "And the banks know. But even so, if the banks quit making loans because of this they will go out of business. Won't they hang on to a business-as-usual policy as long as possible?" "I hope so." Canute talked some more about what could be done. But in the end the two returned from the abstract and the unlikely to the coming next six months. Finally Kalender decided to leave. "Usually these preliminary talks straighten both of us out on the realities and the potentials," he said. "No matter what our public statements, we both knew pretty well what we will end up doing. But this time -- who knows? It's up to the banks -- " "They're just part of the total picture," Canute said. "They're depending on many things to help them make up their minds. One of which, a very important which, is the President of the United States. Maybe he'll say something significant in tonight's speech." Kalender left. Canute felt depressed. Even reminding himself that depression was anger turned inward did not help. What was he angry at? The union? Because of its short-sightedness? Its members were acting according to the old rules -- and if they didn't see that new rules had to be adopted they were no more blind than the managers and the bankers. Perhaps the President, who was a flexible and unconventional man -- too much so for many voters -- would come up with new rules. But even, if he did -- could he get his nation to accept them? the Rawleys; his vice president, Markham and wife; Mrs. Luckenvor (who came after visiting her husband in the hospital); Jack Ward, a construction company owner and a powerful politician; the city manager and his wife and Manfred Schiller, a black economics professor at Traybell University. The dinner went only so-so -- talk was punctuated by frequent total silences despite the tested ability of everyone present to keep a conversation going. Afterward the party moved into the big TV room to view Lister's speech. The President was a lean-faced man of fifty-three. His voice had a compelling resonance -- it made most voters want to believe him. Normally he managed to look both grave and cheerful at the same time, but tonight a bleakness seemed to override his spirit. Or perhaps, Canute thought, his viewers had turned off their cheerfulness receptors. Canute was disappointed that the President did not propose some bold new economic measures. However, he had no right to expect them. As he had told himself earlier, it was too early for these. The major part of the speech concerned the setting up of fertility tests for the entire nation, exclusive of the too old and the too young, of course. The first tests would be Department, newly created, would handle the project. Professional medical personnel was not needed to make the tests or even interpret their results. Within four months the nation should know what its "fertility resources" were. Scientists' projections placed these at approximately # persons. The aged were excluded. Youngsters whose natural resistance to the aerosol could be determined but whose actual fertility would not be known until they matured sexually were included in the statistical projection. Lister emphasized several times that the fertiles would be given special treatment from now on. He did not say what the special treatment was to be. The President said that the world had no reason to panic. The overpopulation problem had been solved overnight, as it were, whether or not the world liked the nature of the solution. What had happened was a catastrophe, but it was not the end of man. Far from it. People were not dying any faster or in any greater numbers. The only difference that had immediate impact was that the world was not having to handle daily the arrival of enough babies to populate New Orleans, Louisiana, or Newark, New Jersey. Lister took a hopeful view of the situation. However -- and here Lister's voice trumpeted as if for a cavalry charge -- the old methods of dealing with society, economics and so forth could no longer be used. This was a new and unprecedented situation. Fresh approaches would have to be developed. There would be much resistance to some of these, since most people were naturally conservative, naturally resistant to swift change. But everyone would soon see that the old methods were now useless. The new departures would be described in a future speech. Meanwhile no cause for panic or even pessimism existed on either individual or national levels... The party at Canute's listened quietly to the various commentators on the President's speech. Next came extracts of other speeches made by heads of other states from all over the world. In essence these made the same points Lister had made. Canute finally turned off the set. Everybody began to talk excitedly at once. Even those who were suspicious of Lister's "methods" were not gloomy. They seemed to take a joy in arguing that there was no sense in abandoning the present system for even more socialism or for communist-type institutions. It was evident that the President's speech had uplifted everybody, even those who would fight against his measures to deal with the crisis. "What do you think about it, Jackson?" Rawley said. "Whatever the new system is, some men will come out on top and some will go down," Canute said. "And you hope to be on top, right?" Rawley asked. "I believe that I'm flexible enough," Canute said. "Well, I hope you're flexible enough to get a loan for the conversion. Say, maybe that's one of ; the things Lister was hinting at? A Federal loan could keep Canute i Baby Foods, Incorporated, in business." The trouble with Rawley, Canute thought, was that he insisted on thinking in the same old grooves. June, Year One had received a letter from the newly created Fertility Checkup Project Department two weeks  earlier. They were to report at the Reywoods High School for their tests on the morning of June #th. Instructions included a procedure to follow if the Canutes objected ' to taking the test on religious or civil-rights grounds. Arrest was automatic, but under the Emergency Vital Resources Law the arrestee would be released immediately on bail. The law required I that the case be tried within a week before a special judge and a jury of twelve peers. This was unheard-of speed for the courts, but the fertilj ity resisters, as the news media j dubbed them, had total priority. The Government, which was the ! people, could not afford to miss one potential parent. The President, during a press interview, had stated that mankind's existence depended upon one in every # persons -- and that one must be found. He pointed out that similar laws with much harsher methods of enforcement and penalties were being passed in less democratic nations. A new law had been passed by the time June #th came around. It required resisters to be subjected to physical and psychiatric testing. The theory was that anyone who would not cooperate in saving mankind had to be psychotic. Part of the test was drawing a needle across the skin so that blood welled. Most of those scratched failed to react with inflammation and these were quickly released without a trial. A number of suits were filed against the U.S. government before testing even began and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. But by then everybody, objector or not, had been tested. Jackson and Ellen drove to the high school on the hot July morning. A traffic jam delayed them for ten minutes. Then they had to cruise around the big parking lot until someone pulled out. A little steam-driven Volkswagen tried to beat them into the parking place. It was going in the wrong direction, ignoring the signs and arrows all over the place. Ellen had been sullen and withdrawn that morning and Jackson was angry about this. That was why, when he saw the Volkswagen cut around the car that had just left the parking place and swing sharply inward, he kicked down on the accelerator. He and Ellen were jerked back. Canute swung the wheel. Ellen gasped and put one hand on the dashboard and the other on his right arm. He blew the horn, but the driver of the little car, grinning at him from under a thick mustache, made no effort to slow down. Jackson swore as the Volkswagen crashed into his left fender. He and Ellen sat still for a moment, shaking and pale. The impact bag before them was shrinking with a long drawn-out gasp. "You all right?" Jackson asked. Ellen said, "I think so. I'm just scared, that's all." "I was doing eight and he was going about thirteen," Jackson told her. "That's a twenty-onekilometer impact." "I'm glad you're so cool and quick-thinking," Ellen said. "You're so cool that now I'll never have a baby!" "We haven't had the test yet, remember?" He unfastened his safety belts and opened the door. He knew that if he stayed in the car he would really take off on Ellen. He climbed out and examined the damage to his car. The fender had crumpled, but the little car's bumper, hood and radiator were pushed in. About a thousand dollars' worth of damage for the other man -- a hundred for himself. A guard appeared, a recorder hung around his neck and a microphone in his hand. The driver of the Volkswagen got out, but his woman passenger stayed inside. She was a pretty girl of about twenty and held a baby. It was screaming loudly. But the mother was safety-belted and both she and the baby had been protected by the impact bag. The driver, also young, wore one of the new Marie Antoinette wigs, green wraparound glasses, dangly crystal earrings and fluorescent pink-andwas pale and angry. "I got a baby in the car," he said. But he quickly recovered. He asked, "So why were you driving the wrong way, speeding and endangering the infant by trying to beat me into the parking place, to which you had no right?" The officer stopped in front of them, flicked on the recorder and said, "I called the regulars. Meanwhile, your ID card, please." Jackson handed it to him and the officer stuck the card into the recorder. A tiny light gleamed and he removed the card, handed it back to Jackson. He then asked the young man for his card. The young man gave it to him, but said, "I've got a baby in the car and this guy paid no attention to him -- " A crowd had gathered. A number of them must have seen the , accident, but only one, a middleaged lady named Greenbaum, volunteered to be a witness. The young man, a Mr. Dutton, continued to harp on the fact that his infant son had been a passenger. And that Canute had ignored the baby and crashed right on through. Jackson did not understand Dutton's insistence on this completely irrelevant point. What did the baby have to do with this, except that its presence should have made Dutton more careful with his driving? Then he heard comments, some subdued, some loud, from the bystanders and understood what Dutton was getting at. The young man was ' entirely in the wrong, but he knew i that things had changed -- that babies were now the most precious of all mankind's possessions. And he was appealing to the crowd on the basis of this. He was succeding. More and more hostile looks and remarks were directed at Canute. Canute felt like hitting Dutton. But he also felt helpless. Emotion was winning over logic in this situation. It would not win in a court battle, of course. Or would it? Jurors were human. The city police arrived and took down their evidence. A service truck towed away Dutton's car. Canute drove his into the parking space and helped Ellen out. Ten minutes after the needles had been drawn across their wrists neither of their scratches had yielded inflammation. Ellen waited five minutes past the reaction time -- since people did vary -- then began weeping quietly. Jackson guided her out by the elbow. As he passed the Duttons, he heard the wife say, "I can't help it that I'm all right and you're not, can I? Is it my fault? And what good is it anyway? We're married, aren't we? And we have a baby already, don't we?" Despite Ellen's grief Jackson could not help smiling. Later he would feel a little ashamed because of his momentary exultation and still later he would be sorry for Mrs. Dutton. He found, some years afterward, that her baby had died and that she had divorced Dutton and married a fertile man. Such news made the papers. At the moment he had little time to think about the Duttons. Ellen sobbed violently in the car. He tried to put his arm around her and draw her to him, but was shoved away. He gave up and drove home and when she locked herself in her room he went out, got into the car and drove to Mike's. August, Year One ied the reports of his business analysts. They confirmed in specifics what he had been sure of in general. The canning industry was overcrowded and would face a steadily declining market from now on. Even if Canute's company could get a loan, bank or Federal, conversion would simply postpone bankruptcy to the near future. Another complication was that the distributors for the canners had raised their demands. They wanted an official increase of a cent a can for their services and an under-the-table increase of a cent a can. The organization that controlled the distributors -- Canute did not doubt they were owned by a crime syndicate -- was trying to grab all the profit it could before the market went to hell. Six banks, starting with First United Federal, had turned down Canute. Canute had then called in Kalender and told him that it would make no difference if the union struck or not. Kalender, even though he had expected this, turned pale. "What about a Federal loan?" Kalender asked. "If we could get it -- and I doubt we could -- by the time we cleared the red tape we would be too late," Jackson said. "It looks as if we'll all be on welfare. And when I say all I include myself." "That isn't something to joke about." Kalender looked grim. "You've got money in the bank, powerful friends -- and you're a graduate biochemist with a degree on the side in business administration." "It's none of your business, but I have enough in the bank to pay for three months' living and maintenance on my Highview Drive mansion. And my powerful friends can't get me a job if none is available." Kalender's surprise was thinly filmed over with pleasure. Something in him rejoiced in an employer's ill fortune and could not be entirely hidden. Canute did not resent this. Kalender's reaction was a human one. "It takes time to dispose of the company," Canute said. "I can't just lock up and walk away. It'll be six months or more before all the paperwork and legal procedures are gone through. I hate to think of the board of directors' meetings, the stockholders' meetings, the meetings with lawyers and Uncle Sam's representatives and so on -- to nausea." Kalender stood up. "You think it's going to be easy to tell my men they're out on the streets?" He shook hands with Canute. "Good luck." "Good luck to you, too," Canute said. "But we'll be seeing each other quite often for several months, anyway. It's funny -- isn't it? We'll see each other more while we're getting rid of the business than when we were prosperous." August, Year One . time exactly # inhabitants. Of these twelve were naturally resistant to the aerosol and presumably fertile. Four were married to sterile partners. Four were under sixteen years of age. One was a Roman Catholic nun who had objected to being tested but had finally given in. One was a lesbian living with another lesbian. One was a hopelessly insane twentyseven-year-old woman. The twelfth was a forty-five-year-old man, divorced, childless, diabetic, a misogynist and a firm believer in the theory that God intended that mankind should perish. Hence, under no circumstances, would he provide his seed for the survival of humanity. Other cities all over the world revealed similar patterns. The rural village of Boseman, a few miles west of Busiris, had a population of # with not one naturally resistant person. The metropolitan area of New York City had approximately #. # population of whom # were resistant. Of Earth's approximately four resistant. The figures were not quite accurate, since there were some pygmy, Negrito, and Amazon Indian tribes that had escaped the test. Of the # about half were women. Of these #, about # did not seem available for reproduction for one reason or another, including sterility. That a person was resistant to Clabb's aerosol did not mean that he or she was fertile. And, if the fertile women married to unfertile men were included among the unavailable women their total rose to #. "What we must do," the Chinese premier said in his famous Peking Statement, "is make the unavailable available." "We will persuade but never coerce," the prime minister of England said. "Mother Russia demands the utmost in sacrifice from, her children," the Soviet premier said. The Pope, at the time the first complete statistics were compiled, had still not made any public statement regarding the attitude of the Church toward the new situation. But he was reported to be working on it. "Now is the time for every citizen to act for the general good first and for himself next," the President of the United States said. "Laws must be enacted to permit the citizen to do this." Lister, interviewed the next day, said that he would make specific proposals at a later, more appropriate time. By this, according to some news analysts. Lister meant when the public temper had been readied to receive radical proposals favorably. The analysts were vague about what they meant by radical. The drunks standing at the bar in Mike's were vague, too, in their remarks about the speech and the professional comments on it. But they were precise enough in their adjectives directed at the President and the analysts. "Listen, Jackson," Rawley said, pushing a dense front of bourbon against Jackson's face. "I think Lister, the weirdo's friend, is working up to something really radical. Like real radical, you get me? He hinted, just hinted, mind you, in his speech last month -- you remember, you were at my place for dinner -- that our present system isn't up to handling this crisis. He didn't say what he meant by 'system.' But he isn't putting anything over on me. I know his record. I know whom he used to hobnob with and whom he'd really like to have in his cabinet. I know all about his speeches on the economy of abundance when he was a young Congressman. So -- " Jackson listened for a while. When Rawley ordered another drink Jackson said, "If the house is so termite-ridden it's too late for the exterminator, ready to fall down, then you tear it down and build a new one. You don't just shore it up." "What?" Rawley asked. "The economy's going to hell, has been for a long time. It's been unable to handle its problems at even a sixty percent efficiency for years. You know that -- you just won't admit it. And now that this has come along we can't just fight it with the old tired-and-untrue methods, you follow me, Rawley?" The lawyer was slipping away, his head drooping and his nose almost in his drink. Jackson stopped talking and began the task of getting him to his car so he could drive him home. Rawley's wife could take a taxi and pick up Rawley's car later. September, Year One T he president made his famous Blessing in Disguise speech the day before Labor Day. The entire speech lasted sixty minutes and was undoubtedly the most "compressed" that any president had ever made. Jackson, working late that night, viewed it in his office. He sat at his desk with a glass of bourbon and ice and sipped while Lister made history. Lister began by saying that the deed -- Clabb's -- was done and could not be canceled. Now was the time for the people of America -- and of the world -- to shed their grief and depression. If they were to survive as a viable society and bequeath their few children a viable society -- and ensure that civilization endured -- they must perform not miracles but prodigies. What they had to do would be difficult, but not impossible. They must shed old habits of thought and action. They must become new men. And Clabb had opened the way for them, whether or not he had intended doing so. The pollution problem was taking care of itself and would continue to fade away as the population became smaller and smaller. And although unemployment had increased enormously, this was only a temporary situation. Lister anticipated a labor shortage in the near future if his plans were put into effect. The nation would prosper as never before from the grassroots upward. Poverty would disappear. Anybody who wanted an education would be able to get it free. Earth would be beautified and the generation born after the Clabb Effect had run its course the fertile generation -- would be taken care of. It would not inherit a world that had fallen into howling savagery, as so many continued to predict. It would inherit a world that was as close to paradise as fallible human nature could create. What the President and his advisors envisioned was a society progressively cybernated. Every industry or service that could be equipped with electronic brains and mechanical organs and limbs would be so equipped. Success would ensure that the means of production -- from mines to factories to transportation to the final dispensing of goods to the consumers -- would be as efficient as possible. This automation would not deprive people of their jobs. On the contrary, more jobs than there were people to fill them would be available. The total efforts of the entire population were needed to build the cybernated society and, as people passed away -- Canute lifted his glass in a silent toast to the soon-to-be-dead, among whom would be himself, maybe -- the computers and the machines would take over. Cybernated farms, for example, would continue to produce unfalteringly, regardless of population changes or shifts. Citizens would actually be liberated -- worthwhile work would replace toiling for survival. "And how the hell are you going to cybernate the farms without turning the privately owned ones into state-owned combines -- and what will happen to the farmers who are dispossessed?" Canute asked his TV set out loud. "Tomorrow you'll be accused of being a Communist -- and the day after you'll be shot by some madman." Lister, it became obvious, had asked himself the same questions. He took some pains to make sure his audience understood him. Private farmers, he promised, would be given cybernated equipment and trained in its use. Those who wanted to learn how to repair and maintain the equipment would go to free schools. Those who would not or could not master the necessary skills could call on a pool of technicians. What Lister did not say at that time or later -- events simply worked out that way -- was that if a farmer died and left no heirs the Government would buy his place and turn it into a state farm. And if the deceased had heirs the treasury department would permit adjustments in the inheritance tax if the heirs would sell the property to the Government. Lister also did not mention that the repeal of the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution was already quietly on the way and that it would become effective in time for him to be elected to a third term. And a fourth, fifth and sixth. Despite the many strong objections to Lister's programs later on most of the nation was thrilled and cheered by his speech that night. Out of bad would come good -- at least prosperity for everybody. He was truly the leader of his people -- courageous, adaptable. At last, after a series of -- from the historical viewpoint -- inept Presidents, a great man had risen. a telephone call two weeks to the day after Lister's speech. "The White House, Mr. Canute," Jessica said in a quivering voice. The President? Canute's heart banged like a loose valve. His caller was not Lister but one of the President's large staff of undersecretaries. He asked how Canute was, said that he was glad in response to Canute's: "Fine -- " and promised that Canute would receive a letter from the President himself, or at least one originally composed and signed by him. It would confirm this call and spell out in more personal detail the President's plans. This was merely an overall briefing on what Canute might expect. Canute knew, in outline, the The Committee of National Economic Standards. The news media had talked and printed enough about it. Now he was being asked if he would serve on the local board -- if, in fact, he would help organize it under the supervision of the local chairman. The chairman had recommended Canute because he knew that Canute would not be occupied with his business and because Canute had the necessary qualifications. One of these was that he was a prominent member of the President's political party and a good friend of the chairman. But there was more to it than that, of course. Canute said that he would give a verbal acceptance now and a written one later. He thanked the secretary and watched the fading image with great satisfaction. Jessica was too disciplined to ask him what the call had been about. Canute, not being consciously sadistic, summoned her and gave her the news. Jessica looked even more beautiful when she was thrilled -- and she was certainly at her most beautiful now. The contrast between her and Ellen, who had been looking and acting more and more haggish lately, was strong and troubling. Jessica never bothered Jackson and obviously adored him. Her reaction to the sterility problem continued markedly different from Ellen's. If she suffered grief she had not allowed it to show or sour her outlook. She had been married once, briefly, and though she had never said much about it, she had mentioned a year ago -- she and Jackson had been working late -- that any man she loved would have to compete with her dead father. Jackson had decided then and there that their relationship would always be that of employer and employee. He would never compete with a ghost, he had told himself. More than once. Jessica was so thrilled now that she kissed him quickly on the lips and then, laughing, ran back to the outer office. Jackson had not kissed a woman for ten days -- Ellen had begun to turn her cheek to him and for the past four days he had quit trying for even that. Well, marriage meant more than kisses and every mentally stable woman got over her depressions. If Ellen were to become happy again Canute would be happy. He did not know what more he could do to bring her out of her pit. He had tried everything he could within the little time phasing out Canute Baby Foods, Inc., allowed him these days. He had tried to get her to go to a psychiatrist or go with him to a marriage counselor. But she had refused. These men could not make her fertile, she had said. She had emphasized men, making it plain that he was a member of that guilty set. Probably, more accurately, he was in an inner circle consisting only of himself -- the man who had put off having children. He had asked her if she would like to adopt a child. She had said no -- she wanted one of her own. He had thought she might change her mind and had investigated possibilities. They were none existent -- he was far too late. The day after the release of Clabb's letter the orphanages had been avalanched with requests for adoption. Ellen was also suffering from the shock of being no longer married to an affluent man. She had objected vigorously -- had even thrown ash trays at him -- when he had told her that the house must be put up for sale, though there was little chance it could be sold without a great loss. The realestate market had caved in. position would pay him # a year. Inflation made that equal to about # of ten years ago. He wouldn't suffer and he could keep the house, but he certainly was not going to be affluent again. He and Ellen would have to watch the budget very closely. And it might be best to sell at a loss that could be partially deducted from his income tax if he purchased a smaller home in the same year. He poured bourbon into two glasses of ice and called Jessica back for a toast. She would not be out of a job after all, he told he would need a battery of secretaries -- whom she could boss. He would have enough budget to pay for them. Not to mention -- as he did not -- that he was going to have considerable influence and power So here's to our future, Jessica! April, Year Three nine per # inhabitants Busiris should have lost # citizens in three years. But the suicide, homicide and fatal accident rates had risen sharply. The population, instead of #, was now approximately #. However, the suicides and homicides seemed to be leveling to pre-Clabb times. The lack of births and the attrition by death were so far almost unnoticeable. When Canute drove to work or downtown -- or sometimes just around the town -- he saw few empty houses. The only sights that really hit him were the day nurseries. The nurseries were completely shut down. He saw children playing on the school grounds during recess, but he knew that the kindergartens and low grades would soon be empty. For years the schools had been steadily getting more overcrowded. But before long classes would be cut down in size and more teachers per pupil would be available. member -- chairman now, in fact -- was also educational supervisor. He toured the schools from time to time, though most of the overseeing was done by a secretary. In three years his budget had tripled and he now had twice as many people working for him as at the beginning. He had much power, but his responsibilities and work had also increased. He had been feted a number of times, approached by many who wanted favors, and had been beaten badly by four men who had called him a "tool of the Government," among other things. ber had been shot in the brain late at night as he got into his car in the parking lot. The killers had pinned a button to his bloody coat -- above a lighted torch. Fighters For Freedom. The underground revolutionaries. Unlike the underground of the past, this group was composed of "reactionaries," men who wanted the old system kept intact, who still insisted that the old structures were suited for solving the new problems. As it had turned out, a jealous husband had hired three men to had succeeded for a time in putting the blame on the underground. The jealous husband had happened to be the man responsible for Canute's appointment to the board, its first chairman. The resultant scandal had been used by opponents of the Government in an effort to discredit its policies. Canute had been appointed the new chairman and had accepted the position in the midst of heavy criticism. One of his bitterest critics -- and the most influential -- was the editor-publisher of the Busiris Journal-Sun. Caleb Tooney was sixty years old, a lifelong conservative and a big stockholder in the huge Earthmover Diesel Works of Busiris. He was also a vigorous enemy of Lister and his policies. Many of his editorials prophesied that Lister would have to suspend certain portions of the Constitution, such as civil rights, if he were to carry out his plans efficiently. That Tooney could print his editorials seemed to be the best refutation of his prophesies. July, Year Five Sun building burned down the police chief blamed arsonists. He produced evidence that the fire had been set, but found nothing to help him make an arrest. Some psychotic might have set it simply because he liked to watch the flames. Tooney claimed privately that the Government intelligence people had set the fire, though he did not directly accuse Lister. Canute wondered. He told himself that the fate of humanity was at stake. Strong Government measures had to be taken, measures that he himself would have condemned as criminal in ordinary circumstances, but might consider justified in the light of current emergencies. He next told himself that he was indulging in cowardly rationalizations. What good if man survived if he had to build a repressive society to survive in? Actually Tooney's paper had acted as a safety valve for those who needed to blow off steam. It had been ineffective in hindering tention to the blunderings, the arrogances and the fracturing of people's rights, all of which the Government now and then was guilty of. Whatever good or evil the paper had done, it was now through. Tooney was a stubborn old man. He tried to raise funds and get bank loans to rebuild his plant. He had been unable to collect his insurance because he had apparently failed to hire a sufficient number of security guards and set up the expensive alarm system the insurance people had specified. Tooney took the matter to court. The case was not tried until a year later and then it dragged on for six years in the lower and then the higher courts before Tooney lost. Meanwhile a more liberal syndicate announced plans to start a new paper, the Busirian. It never got off to a good starl. The citizens of Busiris had to subscribe to out-oftown papers, usually a Chicago or St. Louis sheet, or catch the news on the local TV channel. In time one nationwide network dropped all programing except for news and eventually replaced the printed medium. Canute checked around and saw a pattern suddenly taking shape around the country. Fires, bankruptcies, labor trouble, loss of advertising, sudden raises in taxes and outright vandalism papers. In many cases nothing spectacular happened to a paper -- except that a local TV station had become a full-time news agency and people quit subscribing. The Government was lending money to the TV news stations but not to the newspapers. It always had reasonable grounds for its refusals. The best was that it did not want to invest the taxpayers' dollars in a losing proposition. October, Year Seven zens of Busiris to #. The loss of # was somewhat noticeable but still not spooky. In fact, there were no empty houses in the better residential areas. When an owner died heirless -- or his heirs were bought out -- the Government gave loans to certain selected citizens of the poverty sections. These folks moved into the hitherto exclusive areas. Jackson Canute lived in the most exclusive district. Six black families owned homes within two blocks of his. The blocks were, however, exceptionally long, the equivalent of three ordinary blocks. The heads of the black families were lawyers, doctors and college professors. As Jackson passed through the neighboring district, which had homes in the #-# class, he saw a score of black faces in hitherto honky homes. Their occupants, he knew, had once lived in the middle-class black area on the west side. Now they had moved up. The people in, poverty areas won their Government loans -- and the chance to move -- in restricted lotteries. But the winners Canute discovered without being able to prove his point, were carefully chosen. They were ambitious types who wanted to advance, who could be counted on to continue to conform to the Government's definition of "responsible citizens." The Government was trying to siphon off the ghetto people with discretion. Others besides Jackson discovered the trend and there were riots and court actions. The riots were contained by lawenforcement officials and the court actions dragged endlessly. The protesters included both blacks and whites and each had reason to cry injustice. board, Canute had more actual power than the city manager of Busiris. He used it to organize a survey of the South Side poor whites. He discovered far fewer qualified candidates than the black ghetto produced -- virtually no professional people and almost as few qualified on the basis of real ambition. Jackson recognized the social factors behind the phenomenon, but he could not help or alter those. He concluded that the Government was trying to make the necessary social transition as easy as possible and was, for once, conducting itself in a sensible manner. He did, however, discover enough whites to balance the blacks who had been moved into the neighborhood adjacent to his own. He began to move them whenever there was an opening. This resulted in accusations of discrimination by blacks -- as well as by some whites -- and his days and nights grew even more troubled. Power was its own high pay, but its by-products were nerve-twisting ulcer-generating and also fatiguecausing. Even behind the buffer of his secretarial battery Jackson was beset with letters, phone calls, people catching him outside his office, waiting on the porch of his home. Once a note wrapped around a rock was thrown through his living-room window. The note held money to pay for the window, but Jackson had the man arrested anyway. Ellen left him the next day. The rock-throwing was only one of a long series of incidents she had complained about. But she and Jackson had been quarreling more and more -- their reconciliations were fewer and lasted a shorter time. Yet, if he had been able to spend more time with her, if she had not also been bothered by the petitioners, they might have been able to make peace. Year Eight very much. He married Jessica six months after his divorce. They were fairly happy, though she complained about his frequent absences. She continued to work for him, but he was gone much of the day from the office and much of the evening from home. She did have her bad times about being sterile and sometimes had nightmares about the end of the world. But these were infrequent and, in any event, she did not blame him for them. Then Jessica thought she was pregnant. Pseudopregnancies had become a common phenomenon during the first ten years after Clabb. Often the pseudopregnancy was actually a large tumor, swiftly growing and all too frequently malignant and metastatic. It was as if a deep, unconscious desire in certain women to reproduce and so save humanity caused the growth of cells -- certainly some such feeling kept many from early treatment. The growth was usually wild and resulted in the deaths of many women -- so many that the annual death rate jumped from nine per thousand (in the first three years after Clabb) to eleven per thousand by the eighth year. Jessica died at the end of the eighth year. Perhaps this type of malignancy was, some psychologists specutated, one of the results of the endof-the-world syndrome. Generally, the syndrome itself was a vague phenomenon, hence difficult to grapple with and conquer. It was like a question that could not be precisely phrased and so was unanswerable. Not many people went insane because of it. But it took the joy out of much of the work and the play. It bleached the skies, painted the Earth pale and it malformed men's unconscious minds. Jackson Canute liked to think that he was exempt from this feeling. Up to Year Zero B.C. (Before Clabb, the news media facetiously had dubbed it), he had had work that had at least satisfied him. He had been a useful member of the community, administering an industry that supplied infants with nutrition. Now he was administering what was essentially a phasing-out operation. But it was the most gigantic and longest phasing out in history and he was playing an important part, even if only on a local scale. He loved more than anything to run an organization, to plan ahead on a large scale and to deal directly with people on the small scale. Other people were not so happy, but that was the way things went and part of his job was to try to improve their dispositions. But his basic goal, of course, was the greatest good for the most people -- which meant that a minority was sure to be unhappy. H e had been responsible for handling the case of Miss Scroop, the lesbian whom the She had announced that she was stipulations were that the conception must be brought about by artificial insemination and that she could legally be married to her lover. Miss Windsor. The great furor over this climaxed in the eighth year after Clabb. Time (still a magazine and not a TV station at this time) ran three articles on the two women, giving Canute much favorable publicity. Miss Scroop's employer fired her when she made her announcement and, when Canute could not get the employer to take her back, he hired her as a secretary. The two women received many threatening letters -- Canute himself received a hundred. (No telephone calls were made, since every phone automatically showed on its screen the number of the other instrument.) Some publicspirited citizens beat up Miss Scroop's ex-employer. Miss Scroop insisted that she would not bear children unless she could be legally married. mediately made this possible showed how public opinion had changed. No lawmaker in the state would have dared to propose such an enabling act a year earlier. Ten months later Mrs. Windsor, as she now called herself, bore the first of five children. Jackson watched the interview as she left the hospital with the baby. TV interviewer: "Mrs. Windsor, are you happy?" Windsor: "Oh, very. My mate, Glenda, is also very happy." Interviewer: "Is it true that you're planning to bring up your baby as a lesbian?" Windsor: "You (censored), if I weren't holding my child I'd kick you right in the (censored). Get out of my way, you (censored) man, you!" The interviewer had dared to say in public what many had said in private or in letters to the news media editors. In her final interview with Time Mrs. Windsor stated that the child would be raised "properly." "Of course, I was raised by two heterosexuals and look how I turned out. So who knows about Sappho?" Eventually the two Windsors and the child left Busiris to live in Nova City, the Federal establishment outside Asheville, North Carolina. There they resided in a house some called palatial and there they were free of harassment. The fertile nun. Sister Gratian, had been released from her vows on the condition she marry and have children. The only fertile man of her faith in Busiris became available when his wife died during childbirth. Mr. Bunding married Sister Gratian, who left him the day after their wedding night. She gave no reason and Mr. Bunding was speechless. Mrs. Bunding lived for a year in an apartment at the other end of town from her husband and then went to Nova City. However, she bore Mr. Bunding six children, all by artificial insemination. The church did not object to the precedure as long as the donor was her own husband. N ova city had been established by the Federal Government as a center for the "maintenance of the nation's greatest resources." Precedents had been set by several other countries, notably China, Japan, Indonesia, Israel, the United Arab Republic, Brazil and the U.S.S.R. These nations had made it mandatory for fertile women to bear at least seven times and substantial bonuses were awarded for each child. The U.S. Congress liberally funded Nova City and did its best to attract fertile couples to residence there. There were protests that the free and luxurious living for the fertiles was discriminatory. The reply, disseminated over the news media, was that not all discrimination was bad. Not if it helped humanity -- and especially the United States of America -- to survive. Some radicals proposed that all nations agree to support a single international community where all the fertiles of the world could be gathered. This would form, in effect, a new state. The common language for its citizens would be the newly revised Esperanto or Loglan # -- and in time all mankind would have rid itself of the problems and evils of national boundaries, nationalism and differing languages. The idea sounded good to many, but it was, of course, impossible to get any nation to accept the concept as a workable reality. Each hung on to its own fertiles. Italian-speaking nation, had one fertile. She and her husband and six children took the highest offer and migrated secretly to the United States to live in Nova City. Furious protests rose from other nations, especially Italy, which had hoped to get her. The husband of the woman was sterile, but he showed a remarkable liberality in view of his faith and permitted his wife to have six more children by artificial insemination. Outcries were heard in the United States that the Federal Government was promoting immorality, but the majority of citizens seemed to approve. It was felt that the need to survive overrode conventional morality. T he Republic of South Africa (in Year One) had # fertile white, #Asian and #I black women. The Republic set up separate equivalents of Nova City for each of the three categories of persons. The Asian women all perished with husbands and children when their transport plane crashed en route to their establishment. A year later the #I black women died when an ammunition dump next to the establishment exploded. The Republic officials made several explanations about why the dump had been set up next to the black "national resources." Neither the plane crash nor the explosion were ever proved to be anything but accidents. But the black population was enraged, and civil war -- or a rebellion, depending upon whose side you were on -- flamed. Before the whites finally stamped out the uprising, a raid on the white fertiles resulted in their massacre -- only five survived. The black underground vowed to get these, but the five were smuggled out of the country and came to the U.S., which promised them the highest standard of living. four fertile women. This scarcity was common throughout the Polynesian area. Many South Pacific nations and territorial possessions did not have the critical minimum of fertiles needed to ensure the perpetuation of their human populations. A Greater Polynesian Confederation was advocated with all the fertiles relocated on Tahiti, the original homeland (according to some authorities). This was rejected by the nations owning the islands or having mandates over them. Nevertheless, all the fertile men and women of the South Pacific area were sneaked out of their homelands and established in West Samoa. (By now this practice was being called, among other things, wombnaping.) A war between England and the U.Son one side -- defending the Greater Polynesian Confederation -- and the French and Chileans on the other side -- they wanted their Polynesian fertiles back -- seemed to be a possibility if the news media of the countries involved were to be believed. The Polynesian experiment worked surprisingly well. The East African Bantu Union, formed for the purpose of putting together the fertiles of Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda, Urubu, and Mozambique, failed. Tribal differences were too great to surmount -- the fertiles eventually went back to their home territories and the Union broke up.' second largest nation in area but had a population of only # in Year One. It had # white, # Indian and four black fertiles. Every one of the Indians belonged to a different tribe. Of the blacks, one lived in Toronto, one in Quebec, one in Saskatoon and one in Vancouver. The # Canadian Indians invited the # fertile Amerinds in the United States to come live with them on the shore of the Great Slave Lake, where a new Indian nation would be started. The idea was that the small group would form the nucleus of a tribe that would eventually spread out into the North American wilderness. They would live much as had their pre-Columbian ancestors, except that they would have certain indispensable gadgets, of course. The U.S. objected to its Indians leaving its territory (this was while it was defending the Polynesians' rights to leave theirs). The # Indians sneaked into Canada anyway and, while extradition proceedings were dragging, Canada and the U.S. merged into the United States of North America, the U.S.N.A. The newly created tribe -- calling itself The First Men -- adopted English as its common language. Many years later, when the tribe had expanded through the great land which had reverted to wilderness, it presented the curious phenomenon of Amerinds speaking English and named, because of their origin, Slavs. (Slav was the pronunciation of Slave, from The Great Slave Lake.) July, Year Twenty citizens, mostly to the graveyard. It had also gained fifty, but had lost them to Nova City. These were the children of the children who had been under sixteen in Year Zero, B.C. They had moved out with their parents. It was strange, Canute thought, to drive through the city and not see a single person under twenty. In fact, not many under thirty were visible. The number of empty houses and vacant lots was beginning to be noticeable. The Government now tore down houses as soon as they became ownerless. The lots were turfed, planted with trees and flowers. They not only gave a parklike appearance to residential areas, but ensured that when the re-expanding population eventually arrived it would find a more welcoming vista than over grown ruins. The long-range plan was to level all of the city gradually, step by step, death by death -- one future day a visitor might never know that Busiris had stood here until he came to the stele in the middle of a forest. The stele, already in the project stage, would carry a brief record of the city's history. Even the cemeteries were planned for obsolescence -- the wild would take them over when all the living had left. Canute's grave would be lost with the others -- his name, however, would be on the stele. "For all eternity," a government official had told him. Canute had smiled. How many vanished monuments had been set up for all time? And how long did it take Time to prove that for all human artifacts there was no such thing as forever? Marble was only a little more enduring than bone -- then it, too, went the way of all matter shaped by man. The official had correctly interpreted Canute's smile. "But this stele will be of inertum -- indestructible. It will last forever!" Canute had shrugged. "But I will be dead and no children of mine will see my name." One morning he drove through the South Side, ostensibly on an official checkup, actually just to take a drive. Twenty years ago the area had consisted of slums, tenements and Federal housing projects, breeding grounds of crime, disease and misery. Its habitable buildings, tenanted mostly by blacks but with a minority of poor whites, had needed maintenance. Its yards had been grassless and littered with paper, cans, cigarette butts. Its driveways had been cluttered with rusty or torn-down cars. The uninhabitable buildings had stared through broken windows past obscene letterings and drawings. Today no sign of the ghetto remained. The inhabitants had been moved into the better residential districts. All buildings had been razed, removed and replaced by grass and trees. The area was now bounded by a man-made lake, stocked with fish. Protests had accompanied the changes and much conflict had arisen between those moved into choicer areas and people already living there. But the friction had not been as bad as had been ex, pected and twenty years -- and relative freedom from want -- had reshaped the deghettoized into reasonable facsimiles of middleclass citizenry. The misery and even blood-letting of two decades ago had been generally forgotten. drove his electric car slowly through the South Side, that ! Busiris had been lucky in its transitional procedures because it had had a small minority of poor people. The New York City metropolitan area, with its immense minorities, had not yet solved its problems. Nor would it until they were cut down to size even more than had been done. Its pre-decpop population had been . #. A normal death rate would not have made too radical a change in it, but the suicide and murder rates had increased greatly and the terrible August riots of twelve years ago had cost the area approximately # deaths. The burning of Harlem during the riots, the spreading of the fire to other areas, had resulted in # deaths in six days. The army, navy and national guard had taken over and a dispersion of the populace had been arranged, partly under Federal auspices. In the general dispersion -- the Second Diaspora some called it -- Busiris had received # of the dispossessed. Most of these were of Puerto Rican descent. Canute had housed them where he could -- in the emptied orphanages and grade schools, dwellings vacated but not yet torn down -- and then he had fed them out, little by little, to various residential districts. He had easily found jobs for them -- at that time a labor shortage had been a major problem. Their adaptation to a middle-sized Midwestern city had not been easy, however, and Canute, as a sort of ombudsman, had put in many weary hours trying to make them happy. One of them had been Maria Gutierrez, a computer programer, beautiful, dark-eyed, red-haired, in her ealy twenties. Canute's affair with her had begun during Jessica's final illness and after her death he had married Maria. He was sure that the disparity in their ages would cause trouble, but meanwhile he was enjoying her, especially since she did not complain much about his seldom being at home. Maria had a low-keyed sexual desire. She responded quite satisfactorily but never complained about wanting more. All in all, she was a fine wife for a man in his middle years who was often tired from his labors. rearview mirror and saw a steamwagon tailgaiting him. It bothered him to be followed so closely while he was taking a pleasure drive and he slowed to let the other driver pass. The car did pull around, but it suddenly cut in, forcing Canute to kick the brake pedal in all the way. The tires screeched as the steam engine quit and locked the four wheels. The hood of Canute's car rammed into the wrap-around bumper of the wagon. The man who got out of the car looked familiar to Canute. But not until he saw the revolver did full recognition dawn. He was shocked. Twenty years had passed since the young fellow in the Volkswagen had tried to beat him into the parking slot at the Raywoods High School -- the man looked older now, but the stubborn wrongness about him was the same. That wrongness, now emphasized by the pistol, had first jogged Canute's memory. "What do you want?" Canute asked, feeling his insides coiling coldly. The muzzle of the pistol -- a Colt .# six-shooter, probably a hundred years old and a real collector's item -- looked enormous. "To pay you back," the man said and then he must have fired the pistol. ness and confusion more than once. Eventually he was fully awake in a hospital bed. One bullet, undoubtedly the first, had struck the side of his head a glancing blow. The second had gone into his chest at an angle and come out along the front of his breastbone. The third had pierced his right thigh. "A police car came along, otherwise the maniac would have emptied his gun into you," the doctor said. "He fired at the police instead and they were forced to kill him." "But why would he want to kill me?" Canute said. "The incident in the parking lot was minor -- and happened twenty years ago." "He's been in a Los Angeles mental hospital for ten years," the doctor said. "I've read the whole transcript. According to his psychiatrist, he has blamed you for his baby's death and his wife's divorcing him. He claimed a bump the baby got when your cars collided caused the tumor that killed him. There is, of course, no evidence whatever that that's what happened -- and in any case, the police records here show that he was responsible for that old accident. Anyway, he escaped six months ago. He stole the revolver and ammunition from a Dodge City museum on his way here. The police learned that a stranger was in town -- " "A stranger in town? Since when has it been illegal to be new in a town?" "You're still not thinking clearly," the doctor said. "Oh, yes," Canute said. He thought for a moment. "Yes, I see." The police force had swelled enormously since Year Zero. Lister had insisted on enough manpower at local levels to keep down riots and help maintain full employment. The standards for the police had been raised at every level, local, state and Federal, and all levels were in constant communication with each other. The numbers of the police had been maintained despite the decline in population. Any policeman was likely to know everyone in his precincts and strangers were immediately spotted. It had become routine for motorized patrolmen to compare any stranger's features with mug shots and films transmitted over the car's phone. Los Angeles must have had Dutton's photos on the air. The doctor left. When Canute awoke again a nurse was standing beside his bed. She was attractive and younger than Jackson Canute. She smiled and said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Canute. I'm Amanda Tilkeson. How do you feel?" "Better, after seeing you," he told her. "Thank you, Mr. Canute. The sensors indicate you're in very good shape. You should be hungry." "I am," he said. "The roboserver will bring you your meal," she said. "But the aids will bring your supper." "Good." Canute watched her walk away. The hospital was so completely cybernated that one nurse could manage a whole floor. But Lister had said -- no doubt a medical psychologist had written that particular speech -- that cybernation was only an aid in hospital care and that the sick needed humans around. biography in his off-moments during the past ten years. Publishing individual works was now the Government's business and Jackson had had no trouble getting his life story and thoughts into print. What would or would not sell no longer decided acceptance of a book. Lister had long ago announced publicly that he wanted "every voice in the land to be heard." The Government could not, of course, print and distribute a million copies of every book submitted to it and it would have been undemocratic to set up committees of learned and distinguished critics to screen out the "bad" stuff. The problem had been tackled at first by printing cheap editions of every manuscript submitted, regardless of merit, and limiting the number of copies. Distribution had been through the "feedies" or Federal stores. The books had been given to those who asked for them. When the supply was gone no more books had been printed unless they had received a good rating by readers. About half of the readers had used the rating machines in the stores and about one-eighth of the books had been reprinted in larger editions and for wider distribution. The system had soon proved unworkable -- it was too happenstance. Many worthwhile works had been lost forever while tra.sh survived. Critics had discussed books on television shows and often they had .decided a book's fate. Sometimes the critics had had personal axes to grind. The situation had served, however, to define the problems and point up a need and soon Lister had had his top cybernetists working on solutions. They had come up with one. Every citizen today was issued a number of linders. These, named after their inventor, George Linder, consisted of "books" thirty centimeters square by six centimeters thick and weighing thirty-two grams. Each contained, on delivery, ten thousand blank pages. The owner could then get from the feedie a cassette (the size of a match folder) containing, in coded electronic form, an entire book. He would plug the cassette into the back of the Under and connect the works to the household electric power source. With the book on a flat surface, he would rub the indicated spot on the cassette with his thumb or the end of a pencil and the Under would start operation. Minutes later, the cassette would trill and the owner could disconnect the power source. Opening the Under he would find the book he wished to read printed out, with illustrations in color. When the owner was through with the book he could erase it. If he intended to read the particular work again he kept the cassette. Otherwise he returned the cassette. The linders were reusable almost indefinitely. The cassettes could also be plugged into a TV adapter to display the contents of the book on the screen. A manual remotecontrol device regulated the speed of the display. For the first time in history anybody who wanted to publish could do so within certain limits. The original printing of the work of any previously unpublished author was confined to fifty thousand cassettes. If there was a demand for more, the Government would fill it. Publishing credits entitling an author to larger printing accrued automatically and were based on reader demand. C anute's autobiography had been received well in Busiris but outside the city he was little known. Amanda Tilkeson, the nurse-technician, dropped into his hospital room now and then to discuss the book with him. She admired it very much. Canute did not really think much of its intrinsic interest or literary merits, but it was pleasant to have someone admire it. Maria had read it but had said that she had had difficulty getting through it. Canute discovered another bond between himself and Amanda. She was a fishing and boating nut, as was he -- Maria hated to get out on the water -- and they talked about water sports. All in all, after the pain lessened and he could get out of his cybernated bed into a cybernated wheelchair, Canute enjoyed the hospital stay. Maria, very much concerned at first, began to reveal a side of herself he had not seen before. She seemed to resent the rapport between Canute and Amanda -- possibly she was remembering her own first meetings with him while he had still been married to Jessica. She now said that the reason she had not liked his autobiography had been that it reminded her of how much he had neglected her. When he told her that it was news to him that she felt neglected at all she went into a tirade. "Don't give me that jazz about sacrificing yourself for others! You like what you're doing! You prefer working to being with me. I bore you. But your work doesn't. So you're being selfish -- you're not doing what you do to help people. You couldn't care less for them." "What's the difference?" he asked. "It's the results that count. And whether I help all these people because I want to help or because I feel a compulsion to do this sort of work doesn't matter. I admit I'm selfish and shallow. So what? The local affairs run smoothly -- people are taken care of and helped and I'm happy, regardless of my motives." "Then why don't you care about making me happy?" He was honestly puzzled and surprised, but he did not particularly care. "If I sat around at home watching TV and discussing your problems in raising our dogs -- then I would be unhappy. It's up to you to find something to keep yourself from being bored. I've asked you a thousand times to come down to work in the office." "That makes me so tired I could vomit!" She left him with a cold kiss on his cheek and a frown. Amanda came in shortly and, though she said nothing she acted as if she had been listening in on the intercom. Her expression was one of sympathy. "If you got married again," he asked, "would you want to work or be a housewife?" "Work," she said. "If I could have children -- well, that would be different. I had one child just before Clabb. She's twenty-five now and sterile. But she's working in Nova City." She stopped. A red light was pulsing on the instrument panel. Outside, the footsteps of a woman hurrying toward the room could be heard. A nurse entered. "Mr. Guglielmo's dead!" she told Amanda. "And just a minute ago he seemed in fine health -- " She did not cry but she looked as if she would like to. "He was such a good man!" she said. "Even if he was a rotten writer -- " Canute had never heard of the man. "You just gave him a nice epitaph," he told the nurse. "Better that than the other way around." April, Year Thirty-five lation of #. Its youngest citizen was thirty-five years old, its oldest, #. The death rate was accelerating .as the median age rose. Materially man had "never had it so good," Lister's successor kept telling the U.S.N.A. This was true -- yet the suicide rate, once stabilized, had again started to inch upward. Use of liquor and marihuana was on the rise -- more and more citizens seemed to be commited to slow self-destruction. were making superstuds and supermares of the older citizens. They sometimes suffered unfortunate side-effects -- heart failures or strokes. The Government had tried, not too vigorously, to take resulting storm of protest forced the authorities to make them available again. Some citizens claimed that the Government did not really care -- that it would just as soon kill off its older citizens as quickly as possible -- but few paid any attention to this cynical reasoning. Canute was sixty-three and feeling, at times, the old wounds from the South Side Park shooting. He ship but had turned over most of his duties to younger members. Maria had died three years ago, she had taken, though the coroner said that this could not be proven. Canute had married Amanda Tilkeson after a decent interval. Today he and Amanda were on a fishing trip. They had left home before dawn. He still lived in the mansion on High View Drive, though the place was becoming more of a problem than a pleasure. He was forced to do most of the painting, repairing, plumbing, wiring and so forth himself. The professional plumbers, electricians and painters were too few and too prone to go off on extended vacations. Their services could seldom be obtained. Canute had attended a home-owner's training school and had learned just about everything he needed to know to maintain a house -- even so he had sealed off most of the mansion. He and Amanda contented themselves with about six rooms. They drove before sunrise along the top of the bluff overlooking then descended. At the foot of the bluffs they cut across an area that had once been crowded with the modest homes of workers of the Earthmover Diesel Company. These were now gone -- a young forest rose in their place. Canute took the river road to the Ivory Club, the members of which still kept their exclusiveness. He and Amanda set out on the river in his comfortable, steam-driven foursleeper -- they anchored on the other side of the river, away from all signs of civilization, and watched the sun come up over the hills. The river was different from what it had been during mornings Canute remembered from his boyhood. The water was pure. He could look down into it for many feet and see the fish as the sun rose higher. The stock was as it had been when the white man had first come here -- he saw large river trout, pike and catfish. He set out his lures and sat looking across the river, west and south, where the downtown section of Busiris had been -- rather, still was. The city hall and jail, the Federal, state and city official buildings were there, but they were only two stories high and hidden by the tall trees. The high buildings -- the old courthouse, the Busiris Life Insurance building, the Champlain Hotel, the Earthmover Diesel Building -- had all been torn down. To go downtown was to go into another park. "You know, Amanda," he said softly, "there are still people who curse Clabb. But he saved the world -- he really did. If things had gone on as they were, with the expanding population and increasing pollution and breakdown of the economic and educational systems, mankind would have reverted to savagery. Some day, maybe, a statue will be erected to Clabb and he'll take his proper place in the history books." "I wonder whatever happened to him," she said. "He'd be eighty-six years old now, so he may be dead. But if he isn't he ought to know that he stands a chance of being ranked among the greatest -- if not the greatest -- at least by some people. With Lister next." "I still don't like his having deprived me of having more children." "Look at it this way," Canute argued. "He saved you the possibility of heartbreaks, of bitterness, of disappointment." "My children would have loved me, taken care of me in my old age," she said. "Don't get mad," he said. "But your children and you would probably have perished years ago. Or, if you had survived you'd be living in some stacked slum or wandering the Earth, looking for a chance to breathe. And you wouldn't have gotten any geriatric care, either. You'd be an arthritic, mostly toothless old woman instead of the beautiful and healthy, almost girlish woman you are." Jackson knew by now how to make a wife happy. On the way home he and Amanda passed a demolition rig taking which had been built a hundred and his wife had died within a few days of each other. The rig consisted of several big machines and one man who controlled everything through the console in his vehicle. He sat there, watching the machines work together. April, Year Seventy ulation alive seventy years other thirty years. In another thirty-five years, perhaps a dozen or so. had not been alive when Clabb published his letter. The children of the fertiles had been having artificially induced twins, triplets and even quintuplets during the past twenty years, but this custom was tapering off. Why fill the world again faster than Nature desired? Busiris had a population of #, none of whom was under seventy years old. The town was being phased out and it was probable that it would have a zero number of citizenry in five years or less. More and more were needing hospital care and the "younger" ones just were not up to taking care of the older, even with the cybernated facilities available. Even computers -- some said especially computers -- broke down. Their electromechanical eyes and hands and feet failed and technicians and engineers were needed to repair them. There were few of these left in Busiris and outsiders were being brought in with increasing frequency to attend to emergencies. The helpless aged were being moved to Chicago, where the Government -- the youngest in the nation's history -- had built a hospital-metropolis, already planned for obsolescence. In about fifteen years the hospital city itself would be a ghost town and exactly what was to be done with the superannuated phantoms roaming its corridors had not yet been decided. Probably the nonagenarians would be moved again, this time to be even emptier of man than it had been when the pre-Columbians lived there. The roads were still being maintained by cybers tended by a small staff of septuagenarians under middle-aged supervisors -- children of the fertiles and themselves fertile. Canute, ninety-eight years old, sat in a cybernetic chair and watched TV through organ-bank eyes he had been given twenty years before. His hearing organs, his heart, many miles of veins and arteries, were plastic. His brain and circulatory system had been subjected for three years to a chemical that broke up and helped flush out the fatty deposits. Despite all these biological auxiliaries Canute felt that he was going to die any minute now. Something, somewhere in his body, had broken. The President of the U.S.N.A. was speaking. He was only thirty years old. His face and head were cleanshaven, the style of the last twenty years for young men. He wore a black velvetone sleeveless shirt piped with gold and a kneelength canary-yellow kilt with embroidered red, white and blue chevrons and that was all. And he was -- yes, he was proposing that the U.S.N.A. join the World Federation. The concept of the World Federation had first been voiced by Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish) Union. The proposal, now endorsed by President Windom, was that within the next twenty years, since most of the pre-Clabbians would soon be dead, the post-Clabbians of the entire world migrate to a megalopolis to be built near Nice, France. Its citizens would have one nationality -- Terran -- and the language would be Loglan IV, the ancestor of the synthetic world language created in the middle twentieth century. From this megalopolis, to be named Terra City, the World Federation would expand outward and there would never again be more than one nation. New provinces would be created, but they would be part of the Commonwealth. The surviving old people of all nations would be transported to a geriatric complex in Terra City as soon as facilities permitted. President Windom did not stress this last -- he did not wish to arouse the prejudices of the old citizens while they were still relatively numerous. One thing was obvious -- the citizens of Terra City would be getting rid of the racial problem forever. It had, of course, already vanished to large extent -- the fertiles had been encouraged to interbreed freely and their children had upped the tempo. Windom himself would once have been called a black who was married to a white woman. Now few people used such terms. The World Federation planners envisioned a single race of Man, whose ancestors were of all the races. Except the Amerinds of Canada, Canute thought, who would probably refuse to enter Terra City. And generations hence, when Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and Australia had been reoccupied by the expanding human race -- what about North America? Once again it would be the property of the red man. What then? Would a highly civilized, highly cybernated society of the Terrans face a barbaric sylvan society of the Amerinds? War? Conquest again? Or would man by then have learned his lesson? Was it a good sign that the youth of all the nations seemed so alien to its still surviving ancestors? The phenomenon was not unprecedented, though the generation gap, the communication gap, had never been so wide. Pre-Clabb and postClabb simply did not understand each other. The national Government had ; long since been taken over by the post-Clabb people and President Windom's generation had stretched ; the gap further. All extra-Nova ' City citizens had been disenfranchised. They could elect state and local officials, but the Federal Government was forever out of I their control. Windom had declared four years I ago that the old people no longer j understood the young ones who : had been raised and educated in  Nova City. Disenfranchisement S had followed. Many angry oldsters ' had raged about revolution, but the ; structure of their highly cybernated , economy of abundance put them at  the mercy of the central authority. Pressure on a button would cut off  electric power anywhere in the nation. And nothing electromechanical would move. Besides, the oldsters had no weapons and were, to put it plainly, too old to act ; anyway. ' The Nova Citizens and their counterparts the world over were said to be almost entirely free of mental illnessess and neuroses. They acted on a rational basis, were free of superstition and pre; judice and had even rid themselves of the sexual jealousies that man This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulps cans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans#yahoogroups.com. had always prized as an integral part of his morality. Their society stressed total personal freedom among its members to cooperate in the enrichment of human experience and progress -- whatever these meant. Canute sat and half-dozed, dimly aware that the President had long ago quit speaking and that a comedy show and a documentary had followed and another of the many nostalgia programs was beginning. This one, it happened, was set in the year #. Canute took a stimulator tablet and sat up to watch it. The nostalgia shows were more funny than the comedy shows. The year #, as Canute remembered it, was not something to get mushy or even slightly regretful about. Two minutes passed and he was just beginning to chuckle at the commentary when suddenly the show was cut off. Canute sat up still straighter. His heart began to hammer as he heard the news announcement. President Windom had just been shot and killed. The assassin had then killed himself. He had been a member of the President's inner circle of friends, though lately they had been known to have disagreed on certain policies and particularly on Presidential appointments. The assassin's wife had recently accepted -- against her husband's wishes -- a confidential White House post... Canute settled down in his chair and laughed a little shrilly. His faith in the instability and corruptibility of human nature had been restored. There would be no supermen, no utopia. There would continue to be need for men like himself, unflappable, adaptable -- men who could make a nonutopian society work simply by selfishly doing their jobs. Not a thing wrong with a little selfishness, as he had once pointed out to Maria? Clabb had unselfishly destroyed a generation -- and probably himself. Lister had selfishly teamed up with men like Jackson Canute to save what was left. Windom's assassination had been an equally unselfish act -- it had destroyed the assassin. Somewhere a man was waiting to save himself -- and quite incidentally his fellows -- from this latest disaster. Jackson closed his eyes. It gave him, the always rational man, satisfaction to know that mankind remained as capable of madness as ever. Other men's madness gave sanity a chance... Jackson Canute suddenly felt both human and invincible. Play it cool, he told himself, and perhaps even when death comes...  Hers was a perfect lover -- the kind sure to persevere ! r was while they were dressing for the party that she looked into the mirror and saw death. What she experienced was not an amorphous foreboding of death but rather the knowledge of it as a clinical certainty -- it could come tomorrow or the next day or perhaps the next year. But death was suddenly sure and irrevocable, measured out in days and months rather than in the decades she had once expected as a matter of course. When you are young, she thought, death is an infinite distance away... Death existed for the young only in the sudden violent end, the brutal bewildering accident that stopped the heart suddenly, that stilled the fever of the limbs in an instant. She herself had never thought of death until two years ago when she had been in Sweden to deliver the Nobel lecture and had nearly lost her life in a street accident. During the long convalescence she had become oppressed with the idea of dying. And now -- For me death is as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise. And perhaps as close. He came out of the sonic shower, a tanned mass of flesh -- now bright red from the sonic-water blast -- and muscles, hard and beautifully muted by the thin layering of firm fat that a man of thirty developed. His voice was booming. "Come on, Ellen, why the funk?" She looked into the mirror, noting that her hair was of a too even chemical color, that the flesh was sagging around her eyes and that her cheeks were melting in folds of tissue that would tighten only for a few hours after she used her creams and emollients. She was showing the first sign of jowls, she saw. The flaccid tissue of her face was suspended by the ligaments but flowed down over the jawline, destroying its definition. "No funk," she said. "Just thinking." "You scientists think too much," he said heartily, toweling his head vigorously and then rubbing his massive chest. The coarse black hair between his nipples sprang erect as the towel took its moisture. He rubbed his flanks and his hard indented buttocks. He was, she decided, quite beautiful, beautiful in a full masculine way that still brought a catch to her breath. Everything about him excited her -- the muscled belly with its clear definition, the deeply indented pubic fold, his maleness, darker in tone than the rest of the body, but pure and unmottled, springing in easy authority from a patch of the same bristly black hair that washed darkness across his chest. "I know you," he said, putting his arm around her bare shoulders and wrinkling her shift in his rough grasp. "I know you too well, Flowergirl." She winced at the pet name. In the five years they had been together, she had grown to love the caress in his voice when he called her by it. Tonight the phrase was bitter with irony. "Flowergirl?" she questioned. "Rather, Evening Primrose." "Morning Glory," he countered, laughing. He swept her up in his arms and bore her back into the bedroom. "Frank, we're late." "Damn the party," he said. "It's for us -- for you. For the great Dr. Ellen Marsden. They'll wait on our own good time." They were on the bed and he was doing things that brought a fear and an excitement to her. The banked fires of her aging body glowed, the fluids of her limbs became turgid with excitement and she looked up into his glowing eyes, knowing the heat of his body, the massive muscularity of his chest. Her feelings toward him built to a crescendo -- she was buoyed upward in an incredible fantasy of male odor, male strength, male tenderness. At one climactic instant she looked up and saw that unbelievable blending of lust and love in his eyes and the world exploded in flames. Her brain turned into a core of light that flared and subsided into lassitude and complete fulfillment. "There," he said at last, breathing heavily. "I've been wanting to do that all day." "You've messed my hair," she complained, feeling playful and for some reason a little cross. "Much more," he said, rubbing the hair away from her temples. She felt as if she had been violently possessed and the feeling was one of wonder and complete satisfaction as always. "You shouldn't do this sort of thing," she said, trying to sound very prim. "You wouldn't want it any other way," he accused. "No," she admitted. "You're perfectly right." They finished dressing and he fixed her rumpled hair with his big facile hands, completely unconcerned with the problem of hiding the thinning in the crown, the faint scars of the accident, all the ancient signs of attack on the aging organism. "##U'RE quite remarkX able," she told him as she adjusted her stole. "So are you," he said. Then: "But it's much the same thing, isn't it?" "Yes," she said softly. "Yes, it is." The party was downtown and instead of taking the tube they chose a ground-effects cab and rode silently in the back seat. She was ever conscious of his banked energies, the slow beat of his massive heart beside her, the surging energy of his muscles, and suddenly she felt slight, weak, unequal to the Joyous life that animated his limbs. Argon lights flickered past, reflected in the slick of rain that the weather stations had scheduled for that evening. The air was already hot and muggy with the rising temperature and humidity, but the first of the programed breezes were beginning to dispell the miasma. She touched her hair several times, hoping that the humidity would not play its usual tricks and dissolve her hairdo into a mass of frizzes and uncontrolled waves. The ground-effect fan under the cab sighed and the remaining moisture on the pavement outside rippled under the air blast. He put his arm around her and kissed her softly behind the ear. Her heart surged with sudden joy and she nestled against him until her right hand accidently touched the underflesh of her left arm. The flesh was cold and had a tissuethin quality that frightened her. Her hands, she saw in the passing lights, were still good. There was a suggestion of blue veining, a touch too much bone and sinew, but the color was good. He had found the preparation that bleached the liver spots that had depressed her and had -- characteristically -- left it on top of the water closet, lid off, as though he himself had been using it. He had found this easy diplomatic way of meeting the problem, just as he had found ways of showing her how to use makeup to disguise the first wrinkling, tint to fade away the gray without giving her hair a grotesque look. She shook her head, wondering if another man like him walked on the face of the Earth. He helped her to the curb and paid the driver, counting the plastic chits. The doorman opened the door and in seconds the tube whisked them to the fifteenth floor where sounds of people laughing permeated the corridor. The door of the apartment at the far end of the corridor was open and she could hear the sound of a multifi, beating out the dissonant rhythms of the latest mauve beat. The music ended in mid-phrase and, after a second of mechanical indecision, began again. Eleanor Rigby, she realized with quick nostalgia. By the original Beatles. A flood of memories engulfed her for an instant. Was this the common denominator of age, that the most casual sounds from the past would plunge one into this mood of bitter-sweet nostalgia? Where were the Beatles now, she wondered? She remembered the story of John Lennon and his lovely Japanese wife -- what had been her name? No matter. It was all a part of the past that she would never revisit. Better the now. Only the now. She squeezed his arm possessively. Only the now and forget the tomorrow. Tomorrow would come soon enough. "Ellen," Betty Margriet said at the door. "Frank, we thought you would never come." "My fault," Frank said. "I'm a bum about dressing." "Frank, you beautiful thing," Betty said, "you could never be a bum." She pulled them into the room and conveyed them like a small busy tug escorting great ships through the harbor. "Lance, you've met Ellen and Frank? George, this is Ellen Marsden and her beautiful Frank -- " "Dr. Marsden, how good to meet you. I've been looking -- " "Come along, Ellen, there's a fabulous man I want you to meet and -- Frank, Frank, what's your secret? You don't ever seem to -- " T alk, talk, talk. The chatter quite overwhelmed Ellen. Frank was smiling beside her, saying just the right thing, always self-contained, still bright and spirited while she felt the first fatigue invade her body. On the far side of the room she saw Vaslov with whom she had had the terrible argument over nucleoproteins at the seminar the week before. No matter. Professional and personal conflicts were of a different order. And Goldschmidt, with his huge Roman nose and gentle eyes, was waving at her from a solid group, his delicate artist's hands clutching what appeared to be a martini. She knew that it was only a glass of water with an olive, an innocent deception. Flanking him were two fat men she had never seen -- facing him a thin wispy girt j of perhaps twenty-eight and a man ' in black. As the black-clad man turned Ellen recognized Dr. Melton of the Theological School.  She raised her eyes in surprise. To  see him at a party was unusual. Then they were in tow again, she j and Frank, with Betty still gushing, # ever ready to show off her disJ tinguished guest. Finally Betty  left them alone and Ellen sighed i and said, "My God, that was a  chore."I Frank laughed. "The penalty I of greatness." I "Greatness is a term loosely used M nowadays."  "Well, fame then," he said. She  patted his arm.  I Goldschmidt came over and j said, "My dear Ellen, how lovely you look." His poet's eyes with long almost feminine lashes said, ; I mean it -- you are beautiful. "And Frank, it is good to see you." "I'm delighted to see you too, Aaron." "Your seminar the other day still has me muttering in my beard," Goldschmidt told Ellen. "That was the idea," Ellen said. "The concepts themselves aren't new." "Just looking at the other side of the coin -- but what a difference in insight that can make." "You two can talk shop five days a week," Frank said. "Tonight I refuse to allow you to ignore me." "Of course." Goldschmidt laughed and bowed. "I am being rude." "Not at all, Aaron," Frank said. "As though there were a time when you could offend me." Goldschmidt grabbed both of them by the arm and propelled them forward, his eyes alive with excitement. "What a gift God has given me," he said, "to have two such friends as you. Now, come there are some lovely people I want you to meet." T hey walked across the room, winding their way through a group of dancers who had begun one of the intricately figured Rack numbers. She considered idly how similar they were to the round dances of her grandmother's youth. Similar and yet different with couples separated, distant, aesthetically alienated. The problem of the age was -- she held herself close to Frank -- that people. even people in love, lived out their lives in a special no-contact isolation. She glanced at Frank and thought. Never mind why this is special. I would do it again. I have what is important. I have a being who is a part of me with no walls, no barriers, nothing between us that would intrude. For you I would give everything. For your happiness I would sacrifice everything... She caught herself, realizing that she was becoming maudlin. She usually didn't give into such intense emotions. Yet her thought had been an expression of truth. And she realized that only she knew the depths of that truth. She and perhaps Goldschmidt, who could not help but be a part of it. Dear Aaron, she thought. Dear friend, dear...something else? Well, no matter. He knew the accept them. Which was the tragedy and the glory and the bitterness of what they had done together. Goldschmidt said, "This lovely young thing is Celia Harris." The wispy girl smiled uncertainly. Her eyes, big and colored like a fawn's, were frightened. Ellen felt a sudden identification with the girl. The perennial wallflower -- my dear, how well  know you... "And Dr. Melton," Goldschmidt was saying. "You know Dr. Melton, Ellen?" "Yes," Ellen said deliberately. "I'm afraid Dr. Melton doesn't approve of me." "I have no idea where you got that misconception," Melton said, coloring. "When one faculty member attacks the philosophy of another's work," Ellen said, "the whole university knows about it in a day." "I have apparently been misquoted," Melton said, blushing more deeply. "Wonderful," Goldschmidt said. "We have the start of a stimulating discussion to enliven an otherwise dull evening." "Oh, really?" Celia Harris asked and then looked startled. "I'm sorry, my dear," Goldschmidt said. "It's just that we oldsters are more in love with ideas than with people." "This whole dabbling with the very substance of life bothers me," Dr. Melton said. "I would suppose so," Ellen said. "He is concerned with God's preogatives." Goldschmidt's eyes were mischievous. "Not at all," Melton said ponderously. "But of course," Goldschmidt insisted. The background music changed. "My God," Frank said, "they're actually playing a waltz." "How nice," Celia Harris said. "Frank," Ellen said, looking at the wispy girl and remembering long ago. "Frank, why don't you ask Miss Harris to dance." "Oh, I couldn't -- ' she began. "Of course, you could." Frank's bull heartiness cut across the conversation. How beautiful she is, Ellen thought. How beautiful and how frightened. "Thank you," Celia Harris said as she and Frank drifted away. JL Goldschmidt asked sotto voce. "It is what I want," Ellen said fiercely. "You see, you make a fundamental error in your work," Dr. Melton persisted. "An error almost traditional, certainly classical." "I don't follow you." "Molecular biology is a halfcentury old," Melton said. "Who knows when you will take the ultimate step?" "The ultimate step?" Goldschmidt grinned. "What, dear sir, is the ultimate step? Indeed, is there an ultimate step?" "You work with the molecules of memory, of personality," Melton said. "You have defined all the biochemical processes essential to a self-perpertuating system -- to life, if you prefer. You've learned to generate a complete organism from a few random specialized cells and you've even reached the point of building new organisms over structures of plastic and metal by this technique." "Of course," Goldschmidt said. "The cloning technique began in the early seventies. You know, growing whole frogs from just a few cells of frog intestine." "Eventually," Melton said, "you must try to duplicate human life -- or improve it." "Now he has said it." Goldschmidt chuckled. "What makes you think so?" Ellen demanded. "The nature of the beast," Melton said. "I dread the result." "That's too common an emotion," Goldschmidt said. "Almost a racial phenomenon -- as expressed in that abomination by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." "Oh, that?" Melton said. "I'm sure you're more subtle and adept than Mrs. Shelley's poor creator. Nevertheless, the heresy -- " "A good Anglican talking about heresy?" someone asked. "The word is hard for an Anglican to use," Melton admitted. "Nevertheless, Catholic dogma has many beautifully defined moral paradoxes. Some of the best minds of the last five centuries have contributed to Church thinking." "The heresy you mentioned?" Goldschmidt prompted. "The heresy of Valentinius the Gnostic," Melton said. "Basically, the idea that the created being suffers from the imperfections built into him by an imperfect creator." "Beautiful." Goldschmidt was still amused. "Quite beautiful. Of course. I've heard of this. It's a lovely linear proposition. However, we have seen that logical linearity is not necessarily -- " "Spare me, Aaron," Melton said. "You know how we -- " "That was lovely," Celia Harris said, interrupting. She and Frank had returned and her fawn eyes were alive. Ellen looked at her and knew. It always happened. Frank had that special wordless communication with women -- Ellen had never seen one who, exposed to it, had not instantly and completely fallen in love with Frank. It was how she had wanted him to be -- now, she realized, his talent had a special value she had not planned. "The special significance of the heresy," Melton was saying, "is -- " "What heresy?" Frank asked and Melton told him. "You know -- " Frank clapped Melton on the shoulder -- "you beautifully logical people always seem to avoid seeing the total consequences of an idea." "I don't follow you." "What I mean," Frank said, "is that the reverse must be true. That the perfections that a created being enjoys reflect an equally perfect creator." "Rubbish," Melton said and then colored anew. "Is it?" Goldschmidt demanded. "Or does the creation imply the creator?" Melton said nothing. xX degenerated. Frank, at Ellen's silent gesture, asked Celia to dance again and Ellen wandered away. There was a point, she decided in her fatigue, when exercising one's mind became a chore and she felt little like thinking at this moment. She found a seat on a Kawasaki couch and relaxed into a state of quiescence. Across the room Frank and the girl danced and Ellen watched the glowing new emotion in the girl's eyes. She knew a faint twinge of regret and then a sense of pure, overwhelming triumph. Finally she felt that her face was wilting and decided to freshen up. She rose tiredly from the couch. counting the thousand small pains that were the heritage of her aging human body, and walked past the heavy drapes into the hall. She had not intended to be secretive or furtive but her movements were slow and silent. She came upon two women and stopped, not wishing to intrude. They were standing, smiling and talking, near the massive Tokagawa vase with its incredible dragons rampant on gilt and ochre. Ellen heard most of the conversation before the women saw her. "Isn't he a beautiful man?" one said. The other, short and vulgarly pretty, asked, "What does he see in her?" "God knows," the first one said. Her thin lips twisted. "She's plain enough. I imagine she always was, even when she was young. Who knows what motivates men?" "I wish I knew what motivated that one," the short woman said. "He seems to be very motivated at the moment." "Yes." The short one wet her lips. "If I were Dr. Marsden I'd watch my young Greek god very closely." "She's such a frump. How does she hold on to him?" "Who knows? I first saw him five years ago when she suddenly showed up with him and he's been like a shadow to her ever since." "No accounting for bad taste -- " "Pardon me." Ellen spoke too loudly, pushing past them. There was a certain amount of bitchiness in her tone, she realized, and both women looked alarmed and then satisfied. How we tear each other's hearts out, Ellen thought sadly as she opened the door to the restroom. Later she found Frank and Aaron talking quietly and said, "I'm very tired." "Of course," Frank said, ever solicitous. "Would you like to go?" "Tomorrow," Goldschmidt said. "I'll certainly see you tomorrow." "I suppose so," she said. He reached out to touch her arm tenderly. "Ellen, you tire too easily these days. You must take good care of yourself." "Thank you, Aaron. You were always a good friend." "And more." "I wish it could have been." "No matter," he said. "I have done everything I could. You and Frank -- " He spread his hands eloquently. "You know, Frank is like a son to me." "Rather a brother," Frank said seriously. "And, alas -- a rival." "Thank you," Ellen said tiredly. "Do take care of yourself," he said again. S HE left the party with Frank and thought of how Aaron had stood beside her, sustained her, encouraged her. She had not meant matters to turn out as they had, but she and Aaron had been so much more successful than they had dreamed they would be. And finally he had protected her and her special knowledge, knowing that he was robbing himself of what he wanted most. For it would not have done for them to publish this triumphant breakthrough, not after what had happened. Poor little wallflower who had devoted herself to thought and science and knowledge and longed for love. Only Aaron knew the full flowering of her desire, the months of work and hope that had finally created the one thing that had given her life meaning. Aaron could never have met her need -- for she would not compromise -- but like a good friend he had helped and given that special part of himself. The success she had found, the triumph, were equally his. In the taxi Frank said, "You seem lost." "I was thinking of Aaron." "He loves you, you know," Frank said. "I know," she said. "I wish it had worked the other way." "He doesn't expect the situation to change," Frank said. "That doesn't alter the fact that there is nothing he would not do for you." "I know that too well," she said sadly. At home they disrobed and she sat brushing her hair, seeing the faint tinge of gray under the dye. She would wither and age, she knew, in the coming months. It was only a matter of time before the feral thing tearing at her vitals would destroy her. And Frank? What would happen to Frank, who had come into her life a bare five years before? Frank, who was maleness and youth and naivete and would go on for years, perhaps centuries, because she had wanted it that way. He came to her and put his arms around her. "You know I will always love you." "I know," she said. "After all, I planned it that way. Aaron and I -- we made it so." He laughed. "Do you think this bothers me?" "It should," she said. "I would have wanted to love you, regardless." "Would you?" "The created being reflects the faults and the virtues of the creator," he said. "Remember?" "I find that hard to believe." "It's true," he said, his arms enfolding her. "You know this can't last much longer." "I've known that for quite some time." "What will you do then?" "Whatever you wish." "That girl tonight -- " "Celia?" "Yes. She's so much as I used to be. Lonely and unloved and uncertain." "She's quite beautiful -- as you are." "Oh," she said, "how I envy her. You know it's only a matter of time before I -- " She paused, not finishing the sentence, testing his understanding one last time. He grasped her meaning instantly, perfectly as always. "Is that what you want?" he asked. "For someone like you to take your place?" "Yes," she said. "I think she needs you very much -- as I needed you. I think she would be quite wonderful for you, too." "I hoped you would say that," he said, kissing her. "You're so much more than I intended," she said, melting into his great arms. "I could only be what you wished me to be," he said, kissing her again. She felt his body close to her and his arms were gentle. Gentle, but like steel.  Special Introductory Ofer good in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada Some Contributors Past and Present Pou Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bester James BUsh Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Me me! J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: New York, N Y. # D # issues of IF for # of IF for # For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD De issues of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find... in payment for my subscription as checked above. G.O.D.'s Harlie knew the difference between right and wrong -- and found both good! I xX the flourescent-pale hallway to his office when he saw the flash and bob of her red hair. She saw him at the same time and smiled, waved and quickened her step. He could think of no way to avoid her. "Hi, what's up?" "I should be asking you. Where have you been all week?" "Busy," he said. "Obviously. I just came from your office. It looks a mess. Sylvia says you haven't stopped running since Monday." "That's only two days." He smiled. "Though it does seem a lot longer."  "Have you had lunch?" she asked. He shook his head. "Well, then -- come on." He tried to protest, but she took his arm and turned him around, saying, "It's on me. I'll put it on my expense account. It's all part of my campaign to keep a scientist from starving." He smiled again and allowed himself to be led down the hall. "Your card was nice. I was going to send you one, but I haven't had a chance to go looking." "So why not telephone? Call me collect if you want. Any time." He was embarrassed. "Uh, I haven't had the chance." They decided to avoid the company cafeteria and go to a quiet place in town instead. They paused at the plant gate long enough for Auberson to buzz his office and tell his secretary that he would be gone for at least an hour and a half. While she was waiting, Stel lowered the convertible top and pulled a pale blue scarf from his glove compartment. She had put it there for precisely this type of occasion. She was trying it on when David came back. As he got into the car she said, "I'm going to have to put a couple more of these things in here -- this blue doesn't go at all well with this dress." He laughed, managing a genial, good-natured sound, he thought. He put the car into gear. "Where are we going?" "How about the Tower Room?" "Uh-uh. Too many of the wrong kind of people." He paused, then added in explanation: "Company people." "Okay. If not there, where?" He shrugged. "I don't know. Let's get lost." H e switched on the stereo and eased the car into the light midday traffic. She looked at him. He was a relaxed driver, not like so many who hunched tensely over the steering wheel. Auberson enjoyed driving. The line of his jaw tightened momentarily as he concentrated on the traffic ahead. With one hand he maneuvered a pair of sunglasses out of his coat pocket and onto his nose. The wind whipped at his hair and his tie. The feel of the road changed abruptly as they swung into the freeway. The tugging fingers of the wind grew stronger as Auberson gunned the little sports car. She waited until he had slid into the far left lane before she spoke. "What's wrong with company people?" "Nothing. I just don't want to be seen by them, that's all." The stereo mumbled softly to itself, something about fixing a hole where the rain comes in. He turned it down to a whisper and added: "It wouldn't be a good idea. The two of us together, I mean." "You're afraid people will talk?" "I don't know. There already is talk, I guess." He frowned at a momentary lumpiness in the stream of traffic. As he maneuvered through it she turned over in her mind possible things to say, at last decided to say nothing. It was just as well -- the moment had passed. They were gliding above the rooftops of cluttered suburbia -- black roofs and red, two-car garages and stationwagons out in front, green pea lawns and a cacophony of architectural voices. Early-American-Almost-Slum next door to Ancient-Gingerbread-WithOriginal-Icing, followed by Plastic-Cracker-Box and FlagstoneWalking-Pseudo-Californian. Ugly stucco boxes, white walls stained with brown streaks and greasy smoke from countless kitchen windows. Rust outlined screens on the windows of faded apartment buildings. Housewives in shorts were hanging damp sheets on wire lines. Blue-gray mailmen lugged heavy brown bags. Children, too small to be in school, chased after dogs bigger than they were and too smart to be caught. Shopping centers displayed bright glass windows filled with wishes and temptations. The houses drew closer together, grew taller, became offices, then warehouses, big and featureless and ugly. The office buildings evolved into concrete-and-glass towers. Auberson selected an offramp into a narrow canyon with sunglaring walls. H e realized abruptly that he was heading toward the restaurant where he had taken Stel on their first date. Now why did I do that? It was too late to change his mind, though -- he swung around a corner and they were there. She did not mention the choice of restaurant -- perhaps she accepted it as an inevitable spot for the two of them. After they had ordered, she looked at him sharply. "What's the matter, David?" "What do you mean?" "Nothing, I guess. I just say that sometimes." "Oh." She decided to talk about something else. "I hear you've been having trouble with Harlie again." "No, not with Harlie -- because of Harlie." "Well, you know what I mean.  know the whole company is in an uproar. Something about unauthorized specs -- I haven't had a chance to pay too much attention to it. I've been troubleshooting the annual report for Dome." "Oh? I thought that was finished." "It was supposed to be -- but the statistics keep coming out wrong. Actually that means that they keep coming out right." "Huh?" She hesitated, then made a decision. "I guess it wouldn't hurt to tell you. The company keeps two sets of books. He was startled. "Let's try that again." "Oh, it's nothing illegal," she hastened to explain. "One set is the real books, the other is for public consumption -- the stockholders mainly." "That sounds illegal to me." She made a face. "It is and it isn't. Let's just say the second set of books is more -- cosmetic. It looks prettier. The figures haven't been falsified, merely rearranged. Those, for instance, pertinent to Harlie." "How?" "You know and I know that he's a research operation -- but some of the directors think his cost is too large a sum to be listed entirely under research. Don't look at me like that, David -- I don't make policy and I don't know why this policy was instituted. But apparently some directors feel it wouldn't look good to the stockholders to see that much money being plowed back into the business." "Elzer. Carl Elzer," said Auberson. "He has to be behind this." "With some others." Auberson had been jolted into thinking. "The damned looters," he said. "How's that?" "You remember how Elzer came into the company? He and Dome and some of the other directors are part of a financial syndicate -- they specialize in taking over companies. They use the assets to widen their holdings -- " He snapped his fingers. "That's it -- their first concern would be to prop up the price of the stocks, not the health of the company." "You're starting to lose me." "I'm not sure I follow it all myself." One thought tumbled out after another. "Look, StellarAmerican Technology and Research set up four other companies to handle various aspects of hyperstate electronics. We're one of them. StellarAmerican is the majority stockholder in each -- but suppose Stellar-American itself becomes vulnerable to a takeover. Get control of it and you've got five companies in your pocket." "But, how -- " "I can think of a couple of ways. In order to exploit the hyper-state process Stellar may have had to go heavily into debt. Let's say the process is harder to develop than they thought and expected profits don't materialize -- they lose money, they borrow more, they go deeper into debt, all the time betting that they'll be able to make it back because the market is entering an inflationary spiral. This is all guesswork on my part, but a weakness could develop in a situation like that -- particularly if some of the assets the company counted on consisted of stock whose price had been propped up by juggling the books. It could be fooled into overextending itself -- in which case Elzer and company could possibly move in." "I thought you were talking about a takeover. No company is going to risk a controlling amount of its stock." "No," he agreed. "But some top men might risk enough to cut their share of it down -- that is, if they were sure that the other major stockholders wouldn't doublecross them." "Ugh," she made a face. "Wait a minute -- what do I know about the actual figures? I think about thirty-six percent of Stellar-American Technology stock reached the open market." "How do you know that?" "The figure was in a report I had to process. In order to get the original rights to produce hyperstate units, the directors had to trade a certain number of shares to the man who owns the patents." "Krofft? Dr. Krofft?" "I don't know -- if that's his name, then he's the one. Anyway, I know for a fact that the inventor owns something like thirteen percent of Stellar-American voting stock." Auberson whistled. "That would make him a key piece in the puzzle -- wonder where he stands. He's director of research over there." T he waitress came with their food. As soon as she was gone, Stel said, "Okay, let's assume Elzer and Dome have gotten Stellar-American -- what happens now?" "Well, actually they'd have five companies -- Stellar-American and the other four: Hyper-State Visual, Hyper-State Stereo, Hyper-State Modules and Hyper-State Computer, that's us. Each of these companies has a certain value -- their assets can be used in several ways. I think Elzer is a vampire. He doesn't understand the difference between saving a company for future potential and milking it of its resources now." "Do you think that's what he's up to now -- milking the company?" "Could be the reason he's down on Harlie. If he can't make a lot of money fast both Dome and Elzer want to discontinue him. I know Elzer's been eyeing his appropriation for some time. Dome's attitude is a little different -- I think theirs is a marriage of convenience. Elzer wants the money; Dome values the company -- and Harlie could be a long-term asset. Apparently Dome had the pull in the financial community -- Elzer has the money, but not the position. At the moment, Dome is in control -- but that could change. Harlie's continued existence depends on Dome's good will. If he gets pressured too heavily by the rest he may have to throw them Harlie in order to protect himself. That could be why he's let us continue this long -- so he'll have a bone to throw the others if he needs one." Auberson looked up from his plate. "The annual report -- what does it say about Harlie?" "Not much." "How's he listed?" "That's just it -- he isn't. He should be considered part of the research budget, but he doesn't show up there. He doesn't show up anywhere." "Part of the research budget? He is the research budget -- two-thirds of it .anyway." "I know, but he isn't listed that way. His cost has been spread out, listed as 'Inplant Improvements' and things like that." "Now why the hell -- " He put down his knife and fork. "Let's backtrack a little. You said there was a problem. The wrong figures kept coming out?" "No -- the right figures did. We set up the final drafts of the report three weeks ago." "And all the figures were from the second set of books? The phony ones?" She nodded. "But the report printed out with all the figures corrected -- taken from the real books. At first we thought someone had changed it on the copy -- you know, someone not in on the secret might have double-checked the figures and changed them -- but it wasn't that. Those reports had been fed into the typers exactly as we had composed them." Something went twang. "The typers?" "Yes, we have a magtyper composer -- it's one of the new phototyping units. It was ordered especially for handling reports, brochures and pamphlets and we've hooked it into the master system. That way we can use any typer in the plant for input -- you could write a letter in your office and get a perfectly justified printout -- any type face -- off the composer unit. Camera-ready copy." "Um," said Auberson. "I have a feeling that that's what your problem is -- the master system. The master beast," he corrected. X We've been checking the computer outlets for two weeks now and we can't find a thing. Yet every time we set up a printout we get the same darn figures. We've tried correcting the original tape, feeding it in again and I don't know what all. It's not so much the report any more as finding out why it keeps coming out wrong -- ah -- right. Well, you know what I mean -- with the figures we don't want the stockholders to see. Like one of the things is Harlie. He's listed right at the top of the research budget in the real version -- quite prominently -- and there's even a paragraph explaining his goals and objectives. Nobody knows where that came from -- I thought Elzer would have a fit when he saw it. If we had the new systems analysis network completed, it could tell us where the trouble is originating -- but it's nowhere near operational yet, at least not for the master beast. We could always send the report elsewhere to be printed, but that would be personally embarrassing to Dome -- the master beast is his brainchild." "Mm," said Auberson and nothing more. "Anyway," she said. "That's what I've been doing for three weeks -- running like hell and getting nowhere." "Oh, they'll probably find the trouble soon enough," said Auberson. "It'll turn out to be a crossed wire or something stupid like that." He sucked in his cheeks and glanced at his watch. "I hope so," she said. "We're going to try another run this afternoon, just as soon as they finish checking the memory tanks again. If that doesn't work. Dome is prepared to reschematic the whole system." "Is it that serious?" "It is to Dome." "Wow -- look at the time!" he said. "I'd forgotten it was getting so late. I should be back at the office right now -- I'll have phone calls stacked up from one end of the country to the other." He stuffed a few last bites into his mouth and washed them down with coffee. Stel was puzzled, but she, too, hurried to finish her lunch. He signaled the waitress. On the drive back she remarked, "I didn't realize how busy you were, David -- I'm sorry." There was something about the way she said it. Briefly he took his eyes off the road and glanced at her. "I just remembered something, that's all. You don't know what I've spent the past two days doing, do you? Covering for Harlie. I've been calling every department head in four different divisions -- ours, Los Angeles, Houston and Denver -- trying to convince each one that those specifications we sent them are only speculative, that the reason we sent them out was to get their opinion whether or not we should consider implementation." "I thought that was the reason they were sent out." "It is -- but there was no cover letter or anything. The way the specs were delivered a lot of people thought they were file copies of a project that was already approved and ready to be implemented. They thought something had been railroaded through over their heads and they were mad as hell at the implied loss of authority. I've spent two days just picking up the pieces, trying to convince some of these corporate politicians -- " he spat the word in disgust -- "that no insult has been intended, that what we're after is their opinion on the matter. The trouble is, they're all so prejudiced against the project now because of the way it was delivered that it's an uphill battle." "I'd heard something about the specs appearing suddenly on Monday morning." "That's right. Harlie jumped the gun and printed them out because he figured it was the only way he could get anyone to notice them. Otherwise he figured he'd be waiting till the moon fell out of the sky." "He's got a point there. He knows the company better than you do." "Yes." Auberson sighed as they swung in at the plant gates. "I'm afraid he does. II entrance and sprinted for his office, attracting puzzled glances on the way. He ignored Sylvia's urgent bid for his attention and locked the door behind him. He had the magtyper switched on even before he sat down. He paused, still panting heavily, then typed: memo: to all concerned file: personal, confidential company's annual report. Before he could switch off the machine, it typed back -- seemingly of its own accord; right on. replied, you're pushing your you've taken over the master Harlie decided to change the I didn't show it to her. IT TO. Auberson looked at the typewritten question for a long time, his hands poised over the keyboard. At last he typed: harlie, Auberson typed, then hesitated. He wasn't just echoing Harlie -- he was asking the question of himself, i don't know, harlie. x. one before he typed: that's It? accused the typer, you're saying the same thing I AM. you're right, he admitted. "Goddamn machine," he muttered, but with a smile, that brings back. i that's a cop-out, too. ON? , H e hesitated a long time on that one. Harlie waited patiently. The office creaked in the silence, the typer whirred  somewhere in its innards. Finally  Auberson activated the keyboard again. j it's the only way, isn't iT? J f ME. As he typed his answer, he realized he was using Harlie's phrasing of the idea rather ; than his own. isn't it a little strange to we've covered that problem. typed: because i have no one Honesty, Auberson reminded himself. Honesty. Why is Harlie the only one you can confide in, David Auberson? He stared into the machine as if he had never seen it before. The typewritten words had taken on a subtle malevolence. Auberson put his hands on the keyboard. He found himself typing: i think i'm afraid of And he stopped. He didn't know what Harlie was. TO. He Stopped and waited, but Harlie didn't reply. After a moment, Auberson added thoughtAuberson searched his mind. I don't know. I hadn't exAuberson thought back. yes. T hinking of lunch today, Auberson knew that Harlie was right. He typed: i've been to bed with you've known him longer NO. IF you're in love you should be he's a man and she's a woman. don't know what love is. Then he added: we don't have a long time. The typer sat quietly, humming not so much with a sound as with a barely felt electric vibration. Abruptly it clattered; i will quote back to one's real expression and IT. this: is it possible that even in you're the one who said that x. Sylvia said, "I know you're busy, Mr. Auberson, and I didn't want to disturb you, but Don Handley is here." "All right." He pushed himself away from the typer, not bothering to shut it off. Then he checked himself. He scooped up the sheets of printout and stuffed them deep into the targe basket hanging from the back of the machine. "What are you doing?" asked Handley from the door. "Redecorating your garbage?" "No -- " Auberson straightened a little too quickly. "I was rewriting a section of the Harlie program." "Huh?" Handley was puzzled. Auberson realized his mistake. Harlie wasn't supposed to be wired into this typer. Only the Master Beast, as it was called, was supposed to have that capability. "Uh, well, I was filing it for future reference in the central information  pool. Later, when I need it, I can ' transfer it to Harlie downstairs." "Oh." I Auberson found himself wonj dering why he didn't tell Don j about Harlie's extracurricular activities. Another cop-out, Aubie'l j "Well, what can I do for you?" he asked. Handley threw himself into a  chair. "You can start by getting j me a forty-eight hour day -- you I and your goddamned G.O.D. : Machine!"  "I'll put it on order." i Handley didn't reply at first,  he was pulling a crumpled High master pack out of his lab-coat  pocket. He waved it toward ; Auberson. "Want one?" Auberson shook his head. "My resolution -- remember?" "Oh, yeah -- how long's it been now?" Handley lit the stick and inhaled deeply. ' "Four or five months." "No lapses?" Auberson slid open his desk drawer, pulled out the pack of Highmasters that had been there for the past few months. "Here -- want them?" He made as if to throw the pack,  but Handley shook his head, "LFh uh -- I don't like Highmasters."  I "But that's what you're smoking now." "Yeah, but I paid for these. I can't afford to waste them." "Huh?" Handley said, "They were all out of Golds." Auberson shook his head. Harlie was right -- humans didn't make sense. He dropped the Highmasters back into the drawer. It was just as well -- he could use them as a constant test of his will power. He closed his desk and looked at the other -- Harlie's question was still echoing in his mind. Handley had thick dark hair, going to gray, a narrow face, skin like leather from weekends on his boat, soft regular features and dark eyes -- the corners of them were creased from much smiling. He said, "I'm here about the board meeting -- and your machine, of course." "Why does everybody insist on calling it my machine? It's Harlie's." "Yeah, but Harlie is yours, isn't he?" Handley took another deep drag, held the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, then exhaled. "Besides, it's a projection of future blame. They figure that by identifying you with the machine they can make sure that when it finally does go down the tubes you'll be the only one to go with it." "It's always nice to know that your coworkers are one hundred percent behind you." "Why not? It's the safest place to be." He grinned. "After all, it's the guys in front who are the first to get shot. But .lead on, Gen'ral Custer. Me'n the rest o' the boys'll stick -- although, to tell the truth, Gen'ral, this is one time I'd like to be fightin' on the side o' the Indians." "Me, too." "pHE thing is," Handley conX tinned. "We're just not going to be ready for the board in time. We've been wading through those specs for two days now, Aubie, and we haven't even begun to make a dent in them. If you want a comprehensive evaluation we can give it to you -- but not in time for the board meeting. And our department isn't the only one with that problem. Everybody I've talked to says the same thing. There's just too much of it. Oh, what we've seen is beautiful. Harlie hasn't missed a trick. You should see what he's done with the Mark VI units -- he's got them jumping through hoops. But, as I said, there's just too much to go through -- it's a case of computer overkill. We couldn't begin to assimilate this for at least three months and the board meeting is only a week away." "I don't think it's going to make that much difference how prepared we are. There's no question that the G.O.D. Machine will work -- we don't need the evaluation to know that. The problem is whether or not the board will believe us -- what will it take to convince them?" "It's bad timing, that's what it is, Aubie. This should have been sent around months ago, not at the last minute." "Harlie had it ready on time," Auberson said. "That's all that he was concerned with. If we can't cope with it -- that's our fault." "Yeah? I'd like to see him try to blame us for being imperfect and inefficient. He should have known that a proposal this complex couldn't be evaluated in the time he left us." "I believe he's included his own evaluations. Have you talked to any of the other section heads?" Handley nodded. "A few." "What did they say?" Auberson asked. "Two of them absolutely refused to look at the specs, phone calls or no phone calls -- sorry, Aubie, but that trick wasn't totally effective -- they still think they're being railroaded into something because the proposal is so complete. They said if we could write it without them we could damn well get it approved without their help." Auberson said a word. He said a couple of words. Handley waited him out, then: "It isn't quite that bad -- a few of the guys I talked to are wild about the idea. They're able to see the total system concept and they're eager to build it. It's not just another computer to them, but the computer -- the machine that the computer is supposed to be. They're delighted with the thought that we may have it within our technological grasp right now." "Good," said Auberson. "How many of them are thinking like that?" ; "A lot," Handley said. j "How many?"  "At least eight -- no, nine that I've talked to -- and I guess we could probably scrape up about ten or fifteen more."  "That's not enough. Any names included in that?" "Keefer, Friedman, Perron, ' Brandt -- the iconoclast squad. : The conservatives are waiting to ' see which way the board blows." ; Auberson chewed thoughtfully ' on the side of his left index finger. "Okay -- you got any suggestions, Don?" "Fake it or forget it." "We can't forget it. How can we fake it?" H andley thought about it. "Hit them with everything we've got peripheral to the proposal and fuzzy up the grim details. When they ask how it will work we refer them to the specs -- tell them to look for themselves. Rather than try to defend the proposal on its own we'll get a lot of good people to defend it for us and hope that their combined status will sway the board. We won't mention Harlie -- it's no secret that Elzer is out for his blood -- we'll just keep telling them, 'It's in the specs.' " He paused, lowered his tone. "Only one question, Aubie -- are we defending a pig in a poke or will this machine really work?" "It's in the specs," said Auberson. "Don't give me that horse puckey. That's for the board. I want to know if it really will work." "Harlie says it will." "Then that's good enough for me. I have faith in that machine of yours." "If you have faith in him why did you just say he was mine?" "Sorry. I have faith in Harlie. Period. If he says it will work, then it will." "You might check with him," Auberson suggested. "He might have some thoughts on how best to put it over on the board." "You're right. We should have thought of that earlier." He started to rise. "You know, it just occurred to me. With Harlie on our side we have an unfair advantage over everybody else in the world -- we can do almost anything we want because Harlie will tell us how to pull it off." "Do you think we should tell the board that?" "Not until after we sell them the G.O.D. machine. And that will be a fight." He stood up. "Okay, Attila, I shall gird my loins and go to fight the Hun." "Stupid," Auberson said. "Attila was the Hun." "Oh. Well, a little dissension in the ranks never hurt any," remarked Handley. "Only a little and it hardly shows." Auberson stood up, raised one hand in mock salute. "You have my blessings in your holy war, barbaric one. You shall bring back the ear of the infidel -- the bastards of the mahogany table who are out to get us. Go forth into the world, my brave warrior -- go forth and rape, loot, pillage, burn and kill." "Yeah -- and if I get a chance to kick them in the nuts. I'm gonna do that too." Handley was out the door. j back in his chair. He noticed then that his typer was still on. He moved to switch it off, but paused. He typed, harlie, who's said Harlie. i'm not a baseball that's a lie. that's not so good, harlie -- Auberson shook his head, i I'm sure you can. in fact i'll Auberson jerked to a stop. He typed into the machine: i ,...wish you're suggesting. I'm sorry, auberson, but it's Auberson frowned and switched .ji off the typer before it could ask  him was it human to want to lose. ; He did not know the answer, it  -- Adapted from the forthcoming novel  be published by Ballantine Books. '  Directions: In a critique published some ten years ago C. P. Snow Science, Politics and the Novelist, Kenyon Review, # (#) i-# listed those novelists who were, in his view, among the finest -- Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Mark Twain, Sholokov, Balzac and Proust. He chided the commonalty of British and American literarians (largely in academia) for concentrating their attention upon only those novels which were written in the English language. It was his view that a good novel escaped the vicissitudes of translation and that there was futility in any argumentation that linguistic subtleties fatally distorted the content and message. It is worth noting that Lord Snow was a scientist, wrote sf novels and wrote many novels around a warp of scientists and politicians, his best known being Corridors of Power. The principal sentence in his piece was this: "The novel is an international art. " Although this is starting a long way off the point, I apply a variation of this general reasoning to the recent communication of Cy Chauvin (this journal, March #, Directions, #. All of us have our loyalties, which spring from our nature and nurture, spanning the genetic and the environmental. It is bootless to argue with the past -- and it is accepted that we will read mostly in those genres in which, for inexplicable reasons, we are most comfortable. These interests (or loyalties) range from extragalactic empires to the people of the atom -- or from (with C. P. Snow) the gothic colleges of fellows and masters to the corridors of IVhitehall. There is a great democracy about reading and moreover a great sense of fellowship, both of which are a part of its pleasure. It is this freedom which is compelling to many of us. We may read Francis Bacon, the essayist, or Isaac Asimov, the science-fiction novelist, being assured that at the same time there are others reading with us. This is, as has already been said, a matter of choice and chance. Returning to our whittle-stick, a good science-fiction novel is first of all a good novel -- and second of all good science fiction. A good political novel is first of all a good novel -- and second of all good political fiction. Mr. Chauvin's question was very Themselves (jointly published sentence beginning on the #th line from the bottom, left colMarch #, should have read: But with every atomic nucleus of plutonium-# sent to us, our Universe ends up with twenty fewer electrons. much worth raising and it is appropriate that Galaxy should air it. It has no one answer. It is pertinent that literarians, amateurs and professionals, should not limit their sights. From time to time the galactic view is the proper one. Alexander Doniphan Wallace Graduate Research Professor University of Florida Directions: Cy Chauvin's concluding query ("What would be the point of a rock song that was indistinguishable from a symphony? It might be good music -- but would it be good rock music?"! sums up precisely the flaws in his argument. Trying to imagine a rock song indistinguishable from a symphony is rather like trying to think of a sonnet indistinguishable from a novel. But suppose someone really did come up with something that was both rock song and symphony and it did turn out to "be good music." In that case, what does Cy's final question imply? That "good music" and "good rock music" are antithetical? Fiction adheres to certain basic rules of construction and narration. The rules get bent once in a while and undergo amendations, but certain overall standards are observed by most -- if not all -- writers of fiction. When the rules are used well (or even well misused) and the story pleases enough people, it is called "good." Nothing in these rules excludes sf. Cy thinks what was wrong with space opera was the fact that it was a borrowing from other genres. Actually there's nothing new about most plots and many are common to several genres of fiction. You find parallels to van Vogt's plots in historical novels of palace intrigue, for example. A plot can be used well, to good purpose, or it can be bungled by the author. The real questions are: #) is the plot the best vehicle for the story the author is telling and #) has the author written it convincingly? Most authors of # space operas used characters who were cardboard cutouts in black and white -- good guys and bad guys. A nd the plots were often resolved by luck, coincidence or a fortuitous invention ("I just whipped up a new space drive out of this six-pack of used beer cans. Commander!" "Good going, Sparks!"). This was insulting to most readers over the age of ten. What's happening now is that sf writers are setting their sights on better stories, ones in which melodrama is replaced with more genuine insight into human conditions. Good music is good music, no matter under what label. And good writing is good writing. Ronald Archer Falls Church, Va. Galaxy will pay # for a lead letter and # each for other letters published in Directions. Address correspondence intended for this department to; Directions, Galaxy Magazine, # E. #th Street, New York N.Y. #. close to acurefor leukemia. A year ago, we wouldn't have dared say that. Not with that beautiful word "cure" in it. "" "Temporary remission", yes. New forms of leukemia treatment were helping some children stay alive a little longer. But that seemed to be all that medical science could give them. Another few months. Another birthday or two. Now we're seeing something that's almost too good to believe. A whole crop of kids who are alive and well # years or more after getting a new kind of drug therapy. And after # years, cancer researchers begin to hesitatingly, hopefully, talk of a permanent "cure." Leukemia is cancer of the blood. Before you have a cure, you have to destroy every last cancer cell in the bloodstream. The new treatment is a combination of different antileukemia drugs, so that, hopefully, any cells missed by one drug might be killed by another. It seems to work. We're still holding our breath, but it really seems to work. The #-year survivors that gladden our hearts today are the result of combination treatments begun in #. And work has been going on feverishly ever since. Each year, the children who get leukemia have a far better chance af cure than those of the year before. The American Cancer Society plays a vital part in this exciting work. So, when our volunteer comes to your door this month, be generous. Especially if you have children. Or grandchildren. American Cancer Society We want to wipe out cancer in your lifetime. Ape you elpesdy a viclitn of future shockP The acceleration started with Hiroshima. Without warning, we switched to mechanized lives, disposable goods, impermanent allegiances. We entered the plug-in, throw-away, rent-a-thing, forget-a-person age. We began using up products, ideas, people at a dizzying rate. Some people thrive on the pace. Others find it terrifying. Some simply refuse to recognize it, abruptly colliding with the future and suffering an adaptive breakdown. Alvin Toffler calls it "future shock." What's the preventative? Start with the Science Fiction Book Club. Science Fiction predicts future change long before it becomes with trial membership P Science Fiction Book Club #-S#A Dept. BL-#, Garden City, N.Y. # Please accept my application for membership in  the Science Fiction Book Club and send me the # I books whose numbers I have written in the boxes I below. Bill me just # (to help cover shipping) for ' reality: the Atomic Bomb, the UN, computers, vision phones, organ transplants, moon landings, test tube babies... you name it. Eventually Science "Fiction" comes true! It leaps to life from the pages of some of the most provocative, stimulating, imaginative literature you can find. If you'd like to be prepared to meet tomorrow, we invite you to share the excitement with us today. Choose any # books for just #t (to help cover shipping). Best of all, you can make one of them Future Shock, "the best single rendering of what the future may hold." Psychology Today. It's easy to join. The coupon tells how. #. Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. National Best Seller. "ES' all #. About every # weeks, send me the club's I sentlal reading i j jt-j n i  fnr t.Ftnco fnm bulletin, Things to Come, describing the # coming . Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If I I wish to receive both Selections, I need do nothing;  they will be shipped to me automatically. WhenJ ever I don't want I of the # Selections or prefer an  Alternate, or no book at all, I will notify you by for those... committed to controlling their destinies." Psychology Today. Pub. ed Mr. Mrs. , Miss ail, i. will iiuhiiy yuu  (. a. the date specified by returning the convenient I   form always provided. I #. A Choice I need take only # Selections or Alternates during  of Gods by Clifthe coming year, and may resign any time there ford D. Slmak. after. Most books are only #, plus a modest  Devastating novcharge for shipping and handling. Occasionally, I el. Robots take extra-value Selections are slightly higher. lOver earth, return the entire introductory package within #  f  days. Membership will be canceled. I owe nothing.  # # ' I #. Childhood's I End by Arthur I C. Clarke. ManI kind's last genI eration on earth. I "Wildly fantas' tic!" -- Atlantic. I Pub ed S# I I #. Stranger in I a Strange Land , I by Robert A. I I Heinlein. He J I knew the MarI tlan love secret -- and It spelled J hls doom. Pub. ed. # City Zip If under #, parent must sign above. j Office use only #. The Hugo Winners. Vol. I  II. Giant #in-I volume of # award-winning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. The Ice People by Rene Barjavel. 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We've reprinted six of his best -- with such famous characters as Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Psmith, and a clutch of aunts as fearsome as any shoggoths. Any paperback bookstore that is a paperback bookstore will have them. If you can't get all you want, try the coupon below. # West # Street, New York, N.Y. #I Please send me the P. G. Wodehouse titles checked, at # each (#  # postage and handling). I enclose my check or money order for  (Do not send cash through mail.) An InteJtf Publisher Lester Del Rey picks the best fiction storied E This inaugural volume of a new annual series includes fifteen stories selected by Lester Del Rey as the best published in magazines or original books during #. "There are few people who are firstclass science fiction writers themselves and first-class judges of the quality of the science fiction other writers produce. Of these double-threats Lester Del Rey is one of the most outstanding. When he says, 'These are the best,' I listen and I read and I enjoy. This book is the proof." # at booksellers or order directly from : Dept. B E.P. Dutton, #I Park Avenue South New York, New York # I enclose check or money order for # (plus applicable sales tax). Name... Address. City, State. Saptsmbar-Octobar # Vol. #, No. # Ejler Jakobsson. Editor Donald H, Menzel, Science Editor Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Managing Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Larry Eisenberg # Kris Neville # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher sidiary of Universal PuUbhing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E, Abramson, Prasidant, Main Officas: # East # Street, New York, N,Y, #, Single copy: #, #-issua subKription: #, in U,S # elsewhere. United Kingdom by Universal-Taridem Pubibhmg Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, Lortdon SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes. Managing Director. Sirvgle copy: #p. #-issue subscription in the Unit Kingdom: #. American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons ts coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. An informal history of liquid rocket propellants Foreword by Isaac Asimov "Read this book... you'll get a glimpse of the heroic excitement that seemed to make it reasonable to cuddle with death every waking moment -- to say nothing of learning a heck of a lot about the way in which the business of science is really conducted." -- Isaac Asimov Ignition! takes you inside the world of scientific research -- a dangerous, exciting, sometimes very funny place indeed. John D. Clark, in charge of liquid propellant development at the Picatinny Arsenal for some # years, gives a first hand account of the dedicated men who survived explosions, smelly test tubes and one or two wars in order to put men on the moon. "The only clear story of one of the high moments of scientific research... as good a job of reporting on a difficult field as I can remember and far funnier at times than most." -- Lester del Rey # To your bookstore or Rutgers University Press, Dept. G # # College Avenue  New Brunswick, N. J. #B# I enclose check or money order for #. Rutgers pays all costs of postage and shipping. Name Address CitySlate Zip . The United States Postal Service, now a semi-independent governmental corporation, recently indollars. And that's just the beginning. In its new budget, the Postal Service is asking for an additional # Included is an increase in magazine and newspaper rates of # over the next five years -- starting with a # increase this year. And with no reasonable prospect of any improvement in service to you. Despite the President's efforts to curb inflation by means of his # price and wage stabilization program, the Postal Service pursues this irresponsible plan for enormous rate increases -- both immediate and future. Where is the logic in achieving success on some fronts while permitting the Postal Service to touch off roaring inflation in its own area? The contemplated postal increases, of course, would start an inevitable inflationary chain-reaction. Unable to absorb the higher costs, publishers would be obliged to pass on a portion of them to the public -- and to advertisers who in turn would have to pass on the increases to consumers of their goods. Directly or indirectly, it will be you who pays! So we earnestly appeal to the President, to Congress and to you. the readers of Worlds of IF, to hold the line on postal-rate increases for at least three compelling reasons: #. To deter the general inflation threatening all of us -- man. woman and child. #. To protect yourself, specifically, from inflationary pressures on advertised products that you buy. #. To keep costs at a level permitting the free press of America to survive. We feel that our position is reasonable. We hope that you agree and will write your Congressman accordingly. It would please us to have a copy of your letter The first novel about a "Bionics Man" cvt))r)(C author of Marooned -- Theodore Sturgeon, Galaxy "An intriguing blend of the world of the future, interesting characters, and a fast moving tale... Readers should find it very rewarding...The perceptive reader will begin wondering about the world of the future and what it will mean to him. How will man be able to adjust to scientific discoveries that give him more power than previous men have had?... A first-rate entertainment." -- Best Sellers -- Publishers Weekly...what would happen if Sam Peckinpah were doing science fiction... Caidin has a gift -- he can explain technology with a clarity given to half-a-handful of writers... He writes so well and with such authority that this is all too believable." -- Aewsday S# at bookstores, # Third Ave., New York I #I # He could not live as an alien -- but swore not to die as a human! yHE President of the United AStates was an alien. Ross Harriman was what they called him and he let them. His own name "had a decidedly foreign flavor. The record stated that he had been born in Madison, Wisconsin, in #, and after a half-century of reasonably honest living and politicking had come to be Vice President. On the death of President Ashby, Harriman became President The President of the United States cannot, of course, legally be an alien. Article II, Section I of the Constitution clearly states: "No person except a natural born Citizen of the United States... shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person... who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years..." In point of fact Harriman, who called himself something that sounded like Braxn, had not been born at all. He had been budded about six months before stepping into office on an interstellar survey vessel just out of the Vega system and had eased into the first stage of maturity about a week before the ship reached our solar system and went into orbit around Earth. The problem of Braxn's nationality would have interested quite a few people, as there was a pregnant woman on Tranquility Base and there would no doubt soon be another on Tsiolkovski. The jus sanguinis argument was somewhat simplified in Braxn's case, as he had only one parent, his bud-father Brohass, who was a "pure-blooded" G'drellian. The jus soli, or place of birth, argument, however, was most complicated Braxn began life somewhere on a non-Euclidian geodesic stretching from Vega to Earth through seventeen distinct (of course) dimensions. Braxn could probably have made a point for claiming himself a citizen of either Vega system or Sol system. But the inhabitants of one were pre-literate gibbering savages and the inhabitants of the other not much better -- so he had let the option go and remained a G'drellian. Outside of legal fiction, of course, Braxn could only be a G'drellian and would never wish to be anything else. The inhabitants of G'drell were about the most gifted creatures in the galaxy -- the best shape-changers and quickest learners, very good philosophers and mathematicians, virtually (absolutely, they claimed) immortal, powerful telepaths, competent humorists, sometimes talented weather forecasters and inventors. A G'drellian invented the drive all interstellar ships use -- it has a moving part but doesn't wear out. Neither does it use anything as cumbersome as fuel. Every adult G'drellian understands the principle behind the drive. But they've never been able to explain it to anybody else -- or so they claim. So -- at an age when a human child is barely able to focus his eyes and reach for a bottle, Braxn was teaching quantum mechanics to a class of Oxford upperclassmen. When that calling began to seem dull to him -- after one afternoon -- he became a cutthroat bandit on the Trieste waterfront. That preoccupation lasted almost a whole day. And so on. During his first stage of development Braxn, like all G'drellian children, was after variety in experiences. The one thing common to all his little experiments in living was that he either inflicted or experienced pain or discomfort -- from simple embarrassment to excruciating death. These sensations he arranged into a system of esthetics that was, to say the least, incomprehensible to mere sane humans. To an adult G'drellian, though, they were on the order of fingerpaintings. T hroughout this childish stage the immature G'drellian is protected from real harm by a considerable ability to manipulate time and space, matter and energy by purely mental effort. He could repair damaged tissues by transmutation of any available matter or, if given warning, simply teleport out of harm's way. While learning about pain Braxn destroyed several hundred sentient creatures. And in his lovable childlike way he felt no more remorse for them than a zoologist feels for the specimens he dissects. Less. A time came when Braxn had reached a plateau of sophistication in dealing with the illusions (to him) of pain and death. He was now ready to pass on to the next phase of his education -- the manipulation of power. At this particular moment of history -- the last decade of the twentieth century -- two laboratories of sufficient size and scope existed for Braxn to use as a base for his investigation of power. One was the fifty-two United States of America and the other was what was loosely called The Eastern Bloc -- forty-nine or fifty (the number changed every now and then) countries and fractions of countries which at least paid lip service to the ideals of Marx and or Mao andor Lenin. When Braxn had to make the choice he was in the state of New York, which is closer to Washington than to Novymoscva. The effort required to teleport was more important to him than the minuscule difference he saw between communism and capitalism, between oriental inscrutability and occidental brashness. So he became President. It took him less than a microsecond to elect himself. First he killed the President by the simple expedient of wishing a heart attack 'on him. He disposed of the Vice President after duplicating the latter's body and brain and was swished into office by the law of succession. The period of confusion after the President's death, Braxn reasoned, would cover any mistakes he might make out of inexperience. Besides, he had at his disposal all of the political acumen stored up in the former Vice President's brain. Unfortunately, as is often the case with Vice Presidents, this was not much. But the personal details were useful. Braxn stumbled through the first hours of office, giving a convincing imitation of a bewildered Ross Harriman suddenly weighed down by grief and a crushing burden of responsibility. By #:# a.m., after numberless conferences, speeches, comfortings and a few genuine surprises -- China turned out not to have been behind the newest Pakistan conflict -- the army of advisors, well-wishers, reporters and opportunists let the new Chief Executive retire for the night. lian, Braxn needed sleep no more than he needed pollen or diesel fuel. But he was glad to get away from public scrutiny so he could relax in a more comfortable shape. Once satisfied that his suite was free of bugs and that he was in no danger of sudden interruption, Braxn mentally reviewed the shapes available in his repertoire. He settled on being a Persian rug. He had been one before and enjoyed the musty taste and the soothing colors and the fuzzy feel of air wafting over him. He set his mind in the Persian rug pattern and pushed. Nothing happened. He pushed again in the familiar way, but instead of rolling out on the floor in a riot of rich color he stayed the same shape and the air in front of him shimmered and solidified into an image of his father, Brohass. Brohass held up a tentacle. "Don't try to say anything, Braxn old bud, because the following is a recorded announcement, which you triggered by trying to change shape. I don't know how long you stayed in that dumpy Harriman body before you decided to slip into something more comfortable. Doesn't really make any difference. You're stuck with being Harriman for a while -- with one important exception. "While you were an infant, in the aesthetic stage of your development, you did quite a bit of violence to your environment. This was necessary for reasons that will one day be quite clear to you. While you were on your rampage you had to be protected from the possible consequences of your violence thus you were given certain of the powers of an adult G'drellian. These included, but were not limited to, transmutation, teleportation, telekinesis and the ability to read and manipulate the minds of others. "Starting now, you may use these powers only in a limited way. I command this, as your father and as your teacher, because the present stage of your development involves the manipulation and appreciation of power and, being virtually omnipotent by the standards of this planet's aborigines, you could otherwise no more learn about power than one could learn to be a gourmet while being continually gorged with food. Don't -- " "The -- " " -- interrupt. As a G'drellian you will, however, enjoy certain advantages. Most creatures in relatively complete control of their environment never get any balanced appreciation of their power -- the use of their strengths insulates them philosophically. You, son, will not be limited in this wise. You will find that you have a new talent. It will enable you to feel directly the effects of wielding power You may not like it -- its application will be random and painful. I leave for you to discover its nature on your own. "One word of warning. Don't attempt to use freely your ability to transfer personality from one body to another. It could be dangerous. Because you can die in this phase of your growth." Die? Braxn had seen hundreds of animate beings die, but it had never occurred to him that he himself might perish. "Yes, you can die. G'drellians are immortal only after the fourth pha.se. You may die and, to be perfectly candid, your death would upset me no more than if you had aborted as a bud. You are still an imperfect, unformed organism. Anyhow, about the personality transfer. If Harriman's body dies -- you will die. Even if you transfer and leave Harriman behind you will still die if Harriman does -- and in addition you will share the dangers of another body. "It's not an easy phase to go through, Braxn. I well remember my own power stage. But I'm confident you can handle it. I'm looking forward to assessing your progress some months or years from now -- when the ship returns to pick you up. Until then -- learn and grow." T he image of the' octopoid figure faded out and the telephone chimed. Braxn glared at it and savagely punched the "Mr. President -- Senator Tweed says he has to see you immediately." "Damn it, Fred!" Braxn exploded. "Tell Tweed he can see me in the morning. It's been too damn rough a day for me to sit up here and choke on his infernal Italian cigar smoke." "Well, sir -- I don't mean to appear to -- ufi -- " "Goddamn it, Fred, you never minced words with the old man. Show me the same consideration. Spit it out." "Sir, Senator Tweed is the majority leader "And I'm the minority President." "Yes, sir. And he's very conscious of protocol -- or at least the overt formalities. You must see him before you receive any other member of Congress." "Jesus Christ." Braxn slid the old-fashioned hornrims off his face and knuckled an eye in a wellknown gesture. "Mana." "Sir?" "I've got mana. Anthropologist's word." Fred looked at Braxn in a subtly different way and Braxn thought. You ignored old Harriman while you were Ashby's right hand -- now you're surprised to find out that he might be more than just a harmless puppet. "Tweed wants tc be first in line while the magic's still fresh -- or something. I read about it somewhere." Braxn stared thoughtfully at Fred's image. He knows I'm backing off. Does he know I know he knows? "Hell, send him in. Call the plant and have 'em turn the airco all the way up. Make it as noisy as possible." He grinned at the screen and clamped the glasses back on. "Maybe the old bastard forgot his hearing aid." A secret service man conspicuously armed with a high-energy laser tube opened the thick oak door and ushered in Arthur Tweed. The majority leader was an old man who in the right light could have looked like an old woman shoulder-length stringy hair framed his wrinkled and bony features. But he strode through the door not at all like an octogenarian kept up six hours past his bedtime. He crinkled a smile at Braxn that lasted until the door whispered shut. Then eighty-three years dropped like a frayed cloak over Tweed's frail body and his grin became a spinster's smile. Braxn ignored the switch from the college-boy routine. Tweed was a veteran actor who knew that not even Presidents were immune to pity. "Good of you to see me at this hour, Ross," Tweed offered. Braxn raised an eyebrow. Tweed had known Harriman for eighteen years and had never used Harriman's first name before. Braxn waited a fraction of a second longer than was polite before replying, "My pleasure. Senator. Please pull up a chair." Purely rhetorical -- the old man didn't look strong enough to pull up his own drawers. Tweed perched himself on the edge of an overstaffed chair to Braxn's right. "I've already offered you my official condolences, but please let me -- " Braxn cut him short with a chop of his hand. "Skip it. You didn't like the old bastard any more than I did." "Uhhuh!" The Senator slid back in his chair. "Huhhuh" It took Braxn a second to realize Tweed was laughing. "That's what I like huh huh -- a man who speaks his mind -- huh!" Just what you don't like, you devious old fool... T weed reached into his vest pocket and extracted a short black Toscani cigar. The sulfurous vapor from the wooden match was balm to the nose, compared to what followed. The airco cut in at just the right moment, loudly. Tweed looked at Braxn through narrowed eyes. "You can't be feeling the heat, Ross." "No." Braxn pushed an immaculate silver ashtray across the desk to Tweed. "Is this just a social visit or do you have something in mind?" "Mnh. Well, no. I'm here about a bill, the Selective Service renewal -- Ashby was going to sign it tomorrow." "Really?" Braxn smiled. "'Yes, damn it! He -- we talked him into it." Ballantine Books fellow who introduced us to the whole world of science fiction -- he and Fletcher Pratt, that lovable marmoset. Between Fred Poh! and Fletcher, we got to meet everybody. Fred edited the to the s-f world. AH originals they were, and really great stuff. So to celebrate with Frederik Pohl. master copysmith series (all six in one glup -- with fantastic covers by Berkey), along with Fred's latest collection for us. The Star At The Rainbow's End. AH ready for the Con. This is his ninth collection and the #th book to appear on the BB list either authored by, co-authored by, or edited by Frederik Poh! (under his own name, that is. More than # if you count pseudonyms). Mr. Poh! is a very impressive person, a highly sophistigreat speaker... But mostly we love him and are delighted he's GoH. And it is somehow fitting that Fred is still aboard f or the twentieth anniversary in our Ballantine Books incarnation. Blessings on you. Frederik and Carol.    Fred is the only fellow we publish, we'd better quickly tell you of the other titles appearing in July and August. a Women's Lib nightmare. Shades of My Precious Baby Slave, ye Gods. ogy unimaginatively (but accurately) tided Best Of The Year and edited by (of course) Terry Carr. Mebinogion myth -- The Song Of Rhiannon -- by thet remerkmble ledy. Evangeline Walton, who continues to surprise us with the strength, individuality and stature of each succeeding volume. You keep thinking she just can't do it again, and then she quietly goes ahead and does. Miss Waiton is one of the joys of being a pubiisher. Un case you're wondering, from the bitching in our last column, why we go bravely on). She really is superb, and one of these years some Johnny-comeLateiy out there in the mainstream is going to discover her. In the meantime, ail you fortunate and intelligent science-fiction freaks, be sure you have all three Evangeline Walton volumes -- The Island Of The Mighty, The Children Of Uyr, and now The Song Of Rhiannon. August sees a new R. W. Mackelworth, startling us with an exercise in extraordinary logic, Starflight # -- a briliiant extrapolation.    our #th Anniversary with the reissue of fifteen topnotch BB titles. They'll be appearing in their own speciai rack in August -- ail with brand new covers, and at the backbreaking price of  #. (An adjective which clearly dates us). Still, it is great for the authors, who include: Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Ray Bradbury. John Brunner, Philip Jose Farmer, C. M. Kornbluth. Fritz Leiber, Larry Niven. Frederik Pohi. Theodore Sturgeon and John Wyndham. Baliantine Books is proud, and this department is personally happy, to have been publishers of many of the leading authors of our century. BB "Tripling the draft call?" "Of course. If we don't, Pakistan's bound to go under." "Bull -- twangy." Braxn took a cigarette out of the ornate case on the desk and waved it alight. "Ashby never believed that. If you believe it you've been listening to your own speeches." "Huh! Nevertheless, I think you may want to reevaluate your own position, Ross." "Cut and dried. Senator. It's another Vietnam. We're pulling out as soon as -- " "Ross, you were a military man, weren't you?" "You know damn well I was. West Point -- and I'm still a military man, incidentally." He smiled. "Comm ander-in-Chief. ' ' "Ah. Yes, Purple Heart, I believe. Silver Star. For bravery. In Vietnam." "That's right." "You were a real cracker ack combat officer." "Get to the point." "Yes." Tweed blew a leisurely ring that floated a foot and broke up in the air currents. "A man has to have honorable military service before he can think of running for office. It's the American way. Combat, preferably. I was in Korea, of course." "Of course." "Honorable service." Tweed blew another smoke ring. "The point?" "Yes. A -- uh man came to my office tonight. With a series of photographs." "How intriguing." "The man was your copilot, Ross, when your helicopter went down during a mission and you won the Silver Star defending it." "And?" "The photographs, yes. They indicate that your helicopter was not shot down it was grounded by mechanical failure. And that your wound was self-inflicted." "Get out." "Now just a minute, Ross -- I don't for a second believe -- " "Out." "I was just -- " "Listen, Tweed. Any military doctor can look at that wound even now -- after thirty years -- and tell you it came from a fifty-caliber machine gun. A man can no more 'self-inflict' a fifty-caliber wound than he can shoot himself with a howitzer." "Ross, Ross, I know that. I told you -- I don't for a moment believe him. But you know as well as I that once the accusation is made -- " "What do you -- does he -- want?" "He's a fanatic militarist, Ross. He wants you to sign the draft bill." Braxn laughed -- one short bark. "I'll think about it. Tell him I'll think about it." He rose and glowered down at the little old man. "It was a pleasure speaking to you. Senator." Tweed levered himself out of the chair and laid the smoldering cigar in the little silver bowl. "I hope you'll be in touch with me." "Goodbye, Senator." When the man had disappeared behind the wall of oak Braxn punched the phone for Fred. "What do we have on old Tweed?" "Almost nothing, Mr. President. He has a mistress, but he's had her for thirty years. She's ugly as sin." "Hauling her out would gain him more votes than she would cost him. Put some of the staff to work on him. Then you get some sleep. I'm going to do the same." B raxn left his office and, accompanied by the ubiquitous secret service guard, retired to his personal quarters. The guard stayed outside the door. "Thanks, Captain." He closed the door gently so as not to awaken Harriman's wife, now presumably asleep in the master bedroom. They wouldn't be moving upstairs to the executive apartments, of course, until Elizabeth Ashby moved out. Braxn strode into the study and sat down at the huge desk. The antique dverstuffed swivel chair groaned and squeaked a pleasant fugue of old bearings and new leather. He started at the top of the stack of papery overflowing the IN box. "Ross?" Standing in the door, in the half-light from the desk lamp, Linda Harriman looked almost pretty. She stepped closer and the illusion vanished. "'Morning, darling." Braxn watched her approach, putting on Harriman's smile of genuine affection. Thirty years earlier people had whispered about "political suicide" whqn Ross Harriman had married the homeliest girl in Madison society. But the years that had blunted the fragile beauty of her contemporaries had been kind to her, softening planes and juts into gentle curves. "You shouldn't be up." She took the cigarette from his mouth and laid it in the ashtray. "Tomor -- today is going to be hard." "I caught a nap earlier." He turned back to the desk. She tugged a curl of his hair. "Liar." She smiled. "Try to get some sleep before you jump into the fray again." "Okay." He chuckled and squeezed her hand goodbye. When she was gone Braxn started to riffle through the hundred pages of synopses Ashby's staff had prepared -- summations of bills, personal requests, appointments, all needing action in the next week or ten days. Luckily Harriman had a reputation for being a fast reader -- though with regrettably shallow comprehension. In a half-hour he had memorized the synopses and decided on tentative courses of action. He reached for the phone and tapped out Fred's combination. An unfamiliar face peered at him from the screen, seemed about to phrase a nasty comment, then registered recognition. "Oh, Mr. President -- let me get Mr. Aller." "Don't wake him up on my account. Just checking on something." "He's awake, sir. I'll get him." After a moment Fred Aller filled the screen. His ascot was unkempt. He sat down, hollow-eyed and stubble-chinned. "Damn it, Fred, I told you to get some sleep." "I know, sir. Something big came up." "Oh? What?" "Might be something we can use on Tweed." "Then why wasn't I called?" "Sir, I thought you were asleep -- you need rest as much as I do." Fred's eyes moved that fraction out of line that showed he was staring at the screen. "Maybe you didn't need it as much. Still have TV makeup on?" "Hell, no. Got some uppers from the doc. What's the scoop on Tweed?" "Same thing he wants to pull on you. We have spies -- " "What?" " -- not in your office, sir, in his. Holographic infrared laser bug, its optical locus in the glass over an eighteenth-century painting Tweed thinks has been hanging in front of his desk since the Roosevelt administration. The first -- Teddy." "Same thing, you said. Do you mean his war record?" "That's right, sir. But in his case the facts are more or less verifiable. He was commanding a front-line infantry platoon in Korea and got fragged, hit by a -- " "grenade. Yes, I know what 'fragged' means." "Rifle grenade. Anyhow, he was evacuated to the rear for treatment. There they taped him up and sent him to a hospital in Japan, diagnosing neurasthenia." "Shell shock?" "Right. That could cost him a few vet votes right there. Lots of people think that shell shock is just a nice word for cowardice. This isn't on his medical record, by the way -- he covered his tracks pretty well. But that's not half of it. He lounged around Japan for a month -- whoring it up -- and then got transferred back to Stateside. He took a Pentagon job, reporting to Walter Reed once a month for examination." "I don't know," Braxn said. "It's good stuff, but it's too diffuse. An awful lot of people wouldn't see anything particularly reprehensible about any of that." "Ah, sir, but the clincher is how he got out of Japan. The second in command in the hospital was his uncle -- whom he later got appointed to a high place in the army medical service -- a post the uncle held for only three months before being discharged for gross incompetence and dishonesty. The information and the link to Tweed are fully documented and classified. Publication would stir up more stink than the Pentagon Papers in the seventies." "Hah!" Braxn slapped a palm on the desk. "That might do it. Can you get me a package of evidence, photocopies and such, before noon?" "Already made up, sir." "Wonderful. Call the old bastard's secretary and tell him that the President desires the Senator's company for lunch tomorrow." II T he White House chef had prepared a mild Chicken Kiev, in deference to Tweed's aging entrails. The two men washed it down with a white Bordeaux not a bad wine but not quite as good as the most junior Senator of the President's party would have gotten. Both men were in formal black. Soon after lunch they would have to get into their respective limousines and join the cortege bearing Ashby's remains down Pennsylvania Avenue Mall, cleared of pedestrian traffic for the occasion, around to the Lincoln Memorial and across the bridge to Arlington Cemetery. Braxn reflected that Tweed would have no trouble looking appropriately sad once he saw the contents of the manila folder sitting in the back seat of his waiting car. After lunch Braxn escorted Tweed to the secluded atrium that Ashby had caused to be built shortly following his inauguration. It was a pleasant green place to go to relax and vas incidentally filled with disrupters and noise generators in every frequency, which made it totally impossible to bug. The slight hiss and hum where the little watchdogs spilled over into audible frequencies was nicely masked by a soothing miniature waterfall. Braxn produced brandy and offered the old man a Havana. "No, thanks, Ross. I used to smoke 'em before you were born. But we went into that embargo nonsense when I was just getting started in politics and I had to lose my taste for them." He accepted the brandy, though. Braxn lit up a Havana and Tweed ignited a black Toscani. "A pity to rush a good cigar," Braxn said, taking a deep puff and letting the smoke trickle out of one corner of his mouth. "But I suppose we have some business." "Business, yes. Yes." "Your -- ah -- your photographer friend?" "Yes, hum, he says he's having bids submitted by TimelLife and -- " "Damn!" Braxn jumped out of his chair. "Calm down, calm down, Ross. You aren't implicated yet. All they're smelling is -- 'a scandal involving a high government official.' They'll be bidding against the Syndicate." "And if I comply with your -- his demands, what does he tell the firm that wins the bid?" Tweed chuckled. The sound fell somewhere between a death rattle and a pant. "Don't worry, Ross. We have an alternate -- " "To throw to the wolves. So another member of my party, instead of me, gets the gaff. An unattractive dilemma. Senator." "No, not one of yours, Ross. One of my own." "Not Sam!" Tweed answered with a deathshead grin wreathed in gray smoke. "God! You're the most -- " Braxn sat down and puffed his cigar back to life. "No matter. You old fox." As he used it, the word conjured up a predatorscavenger with needle-sharp fangs and bad breath. Braxn stared at Tweed through a fragrant blue nimbus, then jerked the cigar out of his mouth and laughed. Tweed jumped. '"Tweed. Oh, Tweed -- I don't know many really big mistakes you've made in your career, but this one has got to take the prize. You don't lean on a President -- not this way." Tweed said quietly, "I've made a career of leaning on Presidents." "There's a manila folder on the seat of your limousine. You go down and read it and then decide whether to go through -- " Tweed smiled. "Bribery?" "What a coarse word. No money is involved, just a trade. Something similar to the commodity you hold." "Impossible, Ross. There's no way for you to trade your political future for mine. I won't be running, next -- " "Bushwah! You've been threatening to retire for twenty years. You can no more stop running than can an animal caught in a forest fire." Tweed finished off his brandy in one gulp and stood up. "You young -- look, Ross, you're out of your league. Why don't you Just -- " "Why don't you just read the damn thing and we'll talk tomorrow." "Maybe. I may have an appointment with the gentlemen of the press." Tweed turned on his heel and stalked out. pit of his stomach and was startled to realize that he was afraid. He had never known fear before. He swallowed some brandy and the fire fed the coldness. "Mr. President?" "Ah, come in, Fred. Have a drink. It's going to be a long ride." "Thank you, sir." Fred poured a couple of fingers and sat in the chair Tweed had just vacated. "I've made up a list -- here, you'll want to check it." He handed Braxn a sheet of paper. "No banquet, of course, after the state funeral, but these are the people we're 'inviting to dinner.' " Braxn tried to .study the list. It named the representatives of some twenty countrieshe seemed unable to focus his mind on it. Suddenly the world split -- and he knew what his father had been talking about. It was as if only the right side of his body were here in the atrium and talking to Fred -- and left side was walking down the steps in front of the White House, inhabiting an old body full of aches and twinges, seeing the cherry blossoms through rheumy, jaundiced eyes. That young upstart pup Harriman thinks he can scare me -- me, for Chris sake! I ought to... Chauffeur opening rear door, touching his cap. "Thank you, Harry." "God knows I'd like to invite Ramos," Fred was saying. "But if Cuba comes, then what are we going to do with East German'y? And if East Germany and Cuba get together -- " Tweed took a deep sniff of the musty felt smell and was grateful for the thousandth time that he had had that nasty fake leather upholstery taken Paralyzing pain creeping out. The crisp yellow envelope past the shoulder, crawling... violated the gray fuzzy calm of Oh, Jesus, Jesus, God... anthe interior. I'm not going to other heart attack... stop look at it. I'm pot, we'll just go smoking, drinking... Jesus... ahead the way we planned and "Harry -- " the devil take... "Sir, you'd better let me "I don't see why we can't get the doctor, you look have two dinners," Braxn said. positively -- " "Or a tea and a dinner. These "No sweat, Fred. I -- it's men are all political realists. happened a dozen times -- They can appreciate the situabefore. Doctor said, he said -- " tion we're in -- look, we can Cold fist... have tea -- a tea -- right after the funeral with Cuba, Britain, Cold fist in the middle of his Canada -- here, the ones I put chest, icicle spike nailing him an X by, the ones who are to the seat... When did I lie unequivocally -- " down? Fuzzy gray felt ceiling looks on fire -- skyrockets, Tweed picked up the envestars exploding there... door lope and broke the plain seal on slams... door opens... Harry it. The engine started with a unclips tie and opens front of soft purr. Hell, might as well shirt... see... "What is it, sir -- another attack?" "I know it would work. Godda -- sorry Fred, I've been "Maybe I'd better lie down under a terrific -- " for just a minute... Harry, uh, Fred, would you come -- go,... and he screwed up and I please, and get me a glass of had to get rid of... quick water -- " court martial... insane asylum... covered my tracks so well Oh, God, sweet Jesus God hadn't even thought... God,... the pain... pain. Mother my arm... "Harry! Stop -- "Mother -- " my -- arm -- " T he left-hand side of the universe welled up crimson and "Nothing, Fred. A -- a -- faded out. Braxn sat up, rubbing his spasm in my arm -- fatigue -- " arm, then kneading his chest. Fred came tearing in with a glass. "It's all right, Fred." Braxn held up a wavering hand, refusing the water. "As I say, it's happened -- " Fred's sleeve buzzed. He set down the water and talked to his bracelet. "I'm busy, damn it. What?" "Tweed's had a heart attack. Right in front here." Braxn didn't move a muscle. "Get that dossier." "God, that's right, that's what -- " he spoke to the bracelet. "Manila folder on the seat of Tweed's car. Get it if you have to steal the car." Fred turned to Braxn. "Guess I'd better go down -- make sure the area's cordoned off. And have somebody grind out a short speech for me to give to the reporters. "I imagine Tweed's too old for another transplant or implant." "Probably." "Hopefully," Braxn whispered. The two of them went off to the elevator. Other members of the cortege were standing around, speaking in low murmurs, mostly French and English. The scene had the quality of a theater-of-the-absurd funeral as if a state figure had died on cue, rows of black limousines and platoons of mourning dignitaries already arranged for. Or as if the body had been on the way to its hearse and had been carelessly dropped on the sidewalk. The only man not dressed in black was the White House physician, who wore a conservative twill one-piece. His oxblood coverall didn't look out of place. Braxn had a mental image of a tribe of savages mourning their newly dead prince, red daubed witch doctor speeding his soul to wherever. "Any chance?" "No, Mr. President. He's been on borrowed tissue for fifteen years. At his age, with his habits, it should have worn out long ago." Braxn looked at the old man he had just fought with and killed. Grayish skin, blue lips pulled open in wide surprise, eyes red slits where somebody had closed them -- the hands were dead white claws on scrawny chest. The smell of cheap cigar smoke competed with embarrassing evidence of final peristaltic surge. A ground-car ambulance pulled up over the front lawn. After it had taken away the body Braxn entered the limousine directly behind the hearse and led the cortege off across the river. (Not to surprisingly, even after a lifetime of scrupulous churchgoing, Tweed admitted in his will to having always been an atheist and wanting no part of the barbaric practice of having his bones planted in magic ground. He preferred antiseptic cremation -- his ashes were to be scattered in the Potomac by his lifelone companion, chauffeur and manservant, Harry Doyle. Unfortunately, the Environmental Services Commission pointed out, that rite was against the law. Gently but firmly it reminded Tweed's estate that the Potomac is not the Ganges. At least not in Washington. (Of course, the Potomac also runs through Maryland on its course to the. Chesapeake Bay. So Harry was dispatch with the urn to nearby Charles County and Indian Rock to scatter Tweed's ashes not so very far downstream from his beloved Capitol. (Harry, who had always hated the old man's guts, got as far as Waldorf, where he flushed the ashes down a toilet in the men's room of a Gulf station. Then he drove on to Indian Rock and drank a sixpack while watching the Potomac flow sluggishly by.) Ill T he tea following the funeral, went quite well. The dinner afterward -- attended by enemies, switch-hitters and the unaligned -- was occasionally marred by dignified argument, strained through the teeth. During the tea the Pakistani ambassador implored Harriman to sign the draft bill. Braxn told him bluntly that the bill in its present form, tripling the draft call, would put a severe strain on American manpower. Besides, it would be political suicide -- a Gallup taken the week before showed that # of Americans wanted us to withdraw the # advisors already there and # wanted us to throw our support over to Tibet. Braxn vetoed the bill the next day, as almost everyone but Tweed had expected. A compromise bill, doubling the draft quotas, had been introduced earlier. It fizzled out by negative vote on engrossment and third reading. The third and final draft bill was a complicated mess of new apportionment criteria, full of obfuscatory rhetoric and pages of figures. But if you sat down with a blue pencil and an adding machine you found it boiled down to another compromise. "This bill -- " Braxn tapped the folder with a pencil, "is alwut the best you're going to get out of this Congress. I'm not sure that you'll get even this, though. I, for one, need more justification than Pakistan." "You've got it, sir." The man who said it was a burly, bulletheaded, craggily handsome soldier with so many stars on his shoulders that he had to call only one man "sir." "The general's right, Mr. President." The secretary of defense was a slim, bland-looking man who looked as if he might be an insurance executive or the dean of a small law school. He had in fact been both. He had never been a soldier. "We realize you probably haven't had time to read the entire report -- " "I've read it. I'm still not convinced." "Well, it convinced me," the secretary said. "We've got to think of the future -- " " -- in the light of the nineteenninety-five Geneva Accords especially," the general interrupted. "We're going to be headed for bad trouble if -- " "Wait, wait," Braxn waved a hand at both of them. "I understand the argument. You assume there will never be another Two Chinas Warthat the Geneva Accords forbidding the use of certain weapons in international conflict make our technologically oriented weaponry obsolete. That we ought to retool down, train fewer troops no troops eventually -- in the use of sophisticated weapons. We must, in effect, 'detoxify' our military." The general snorted loudly, recovered himself, hastily made answer in an urgent voice. "Sir, that's not it at all. Begging your pardon, sir -- we plan to keep the modern weaponry in the event that the Accords break down. But more and more men have to be allotted to infantry and regular artillery if we're going to be able to cope with these brush-fire wars between small countries." "And to be frank about it," the secretary said, "we need Pakistan. We need to not only stay there but increase our involvement -- otherwise we aren't going to have the nucleus of experienced men and officers we'll need if a real war comes up." "I think you're both unduly alarmed. General, approximately what percentage of our forces are combat veterans?" "Well, sir, damn it, nearly sixty per cent. But that doesn't mean anything! Most of those men got their combat experience in the Two Chinas War. You can't blame them for thinking in terms of nukes and lasers and disruptors -- not bullets and C-six lousy fivehundred pound bombs! They're just plain ill-equipped -- " "Then haul 'em back and teach 'em. General! Oh, hell -- " he tossed the pencil down on the bill -- "I assume you both know that this bill is going to pass whether I veto it or not. By the narrowest of margins, of course -- the Senate wants a stronger military, but it doesn't want to seem hawkish to the folks at home. To the people who are going to be drafted. "I'll think about it. I'll keep thinking about it. Gentlemen, I hate to seem abrupt, but we just aren't getting anywhere. Besides, I have some very important handshaking to do." Both men rose. "Well, thank you for taking time out to listen to us, sir," the general said. "Again I urge you to -- " Braxn cut him short with a wave and a smile. "I may. Goodbye." peared Braxn took out his pen and looked at the document without seeing it.  wonder if either of them understands, he thought, that it's not really a military question at all. His problem had to do with his relations with Congress. Since he had gotten to the Presidency essentially through a governorship, Harriman did not have many real friends in the legislature. They were testing him with this bill, knowing there would be a lot of noise when the public deciphered it and found out that it meant larger draft calls all around. He could make them pass it over his veto and come out lily-white. Or he could sign the damn thing and take some of the heat off Congress. The old-fashioned flatnib fountain pen scratched loudly on the parchment. Anachronisms, Braxn thought and punched his secretary's desk. "Send in the Scouts and feed me the speech, Joyce." He turned up the gain slightly on the receiver built into his eyeglass frame. The Boy Scouts were his last formal appointment of the day. He gave it about ten minutes, parroting the words and actions that his secretary fed to him. Twelve Eagle Scouts in full regalia, their scoutmaster in mufti, registered attention and respect. Braxn amused himself by imagining what the spindly little man would look like in the traditional shorts and a Teddy Roosevelt hat. From Harriman's memory he dragged up a half-century-old image of Wally Cox playing Mr. Peepers. After the Scouts had gone he punched Fred's combination. "Oh, hello, sir." Without preamble: "I signed the goddamn thing." Fred nodded soberly. "No choice, really. Let's hope Congress handles it right." "Well, I'm knocking off for the night." Braxn reached for the switch. "Oh wait, sir, just a second. One thing might not be going too -- " "Too well?" "Well -- yes, that's the word. One of my men got the dossier on Tweed, slipped it off the back seat of the limousine while everybody was watching the old man die. I checked it over, though, and the last page is missing. A Xerox of an old photostat of his Army psychiatric profile." "You rechecked the car?" "We took the damn thing apart a couple of hours ago. No sign." "I guess we just sit tight. What about the helicopter pilot?" "No sweat. We found him this morning holed up in a fleabag hotel in Philadelphia. He was scared, sir, almost out of his mind. He was sure we'd killed Tweed and were after him. We persuaded him otherwise." "You were not too convincing, I hope." "Naturally not. We also purchased the article from him, just as a safeguard. Ten thousand bucks -- about a tenth what he was going to get. Took the money out of the party's campaign fund chalked it up to 'ghost writing.' " "All this and a lousy sense of humor, too." "Yes, sir," Fred said with a little smile. bill to its black leather case and gave it to his secretary on the way out, instructing that a courier run it over to the Speaker's office. Braxn's wife met him at the door, trading him a glass of chilled Tavel for his coat. "Hard day today, dear?" "Humph." He sat down in an overstuffed recliner. "Conferences. Audiences. Two secretaries. Four Congressmen, a general, two ambassadors and twelve Macedonians in full battle array. Actually, I think they were Boy Scouts." "Sounds exciting." "It was. I must have woken up twice. What's for dinner?" "Oh, Rosa's fixed something special. A secret." She spoke into her watch. "Rosa? When can dinner be served?" She put the watch up to her ear. "Whenever you're ready, dear," she said to Ross. He had picked up a copy of the Star nitefax. He refolded it along the original crease and tossed it down. "Let's go. I could eat a can of dog food." "That won't be necessary for a while, I hope." While they were walking to the dining room the world shimmered and split again. It was dawn in Barisal, the least likely time for an ambush. Besides, most of the fighting had been confined to the city proper, so the Americans... we d been so glad to get out of those damn streets... let them fight for their own city... who said this goddamn patrol was gonna be a picnic? "Is something wrong, dear?" "No, #I just stood up too fast. Drinking too. much coffee -- not enough sleep, I guess." Christ did we ever walk into a classic box... From three sides heavy .#-calibers sprayed tiny anvils, making a ceiling of lead never more than three feet off the ground. Men were screaming in pain to the left and right and just ahead Lieutenant Hernandez was thrashing around in the elephant grass with a sucking chest wound... "Excellent," Braxn said, chewing mechanically. "Tell Rosa I wouldn't trade her for a majority in Congress." "Take it easy, Lieutenant -- the stump of a thumb. "Hergot the man to stop squirming Jesus Christ, by the book long enough to stop the sucking ali the way... "Not yet, sir. with the plastic from the banJust about." dage wrapper. Okay, now the "No wonder we haven't bastard's chest might fill up got any support, get me his with blgod but at least I won't maps, they're in the right leg have to listen to it... pocket. Then get that -- " "Well, if any of the loyal Braxn stared at a forkful of opposition comes by, we'll rice, then levered it into his tell 'em it's Taiwan Duck -- " mouth. "Oh, thank you dear." He washed the tablets down Now the bandage over the with ice water, plastic and run strings behind the lieutenant's back... The medic was in a shallow God, they could have made depression behind a stand of these strings a little longer... saplings, bandaging a tall black where the hell is a medic? flanker whose lower jaw was "Ten-six! Ten-six, goddamn shot off. Thick blood drooled it!" Down flat, burst of fire around the pressure bandage, seeking out his voice... "Doc -- the captain's bleeding pretty bad from a hand "You really do seem diswound and Lieutenant Hertracted, dear." nandez got shot in the chest -- " Braxn took off his glasses "Mother musta stood up -- " and polished them with his A burst of machine gun fire napkin. "Really nothing, rattled through the saplings. Linda -- but I wonder if you The medic cringed down, but could get me an aspirin?" the big black just lay there, eyes filming. Doc pushed a morph-plex syrrette through Captain Brown crawled up the dying man's sleeve, bloodthrough the fog and smoke, slick and shiny. "Let's go." moving on his back like a swimmer trying to do a back" -- just a combination of a stroke with his shoulders. headache and a stomach "Fall back and get me a ache." medic." His left hand cradled "Maybe you shouldn't be his right, blood gushing from taking aspirin, then." An artillery spoUing-round popped maybe two hundred meters away. The captain was lying beside a dead radioman, talking on the horn while he looked at the map. "Drop one-zero-zero and fire for effect, one-two over and out." He hung up. "You fellas better dig a deep hole. That's cornin' in right on top " "Oh, now look! You've got that orange sauce on your sleeve. Let me take some cold water to it before it sets." She patted the stain. "Are you sure you're feeling all right?" she asked nonsensically. O -- God... Jesus Christ, make it stop... The ground fell away and slapped back, twice, four times -- so loud you didn't hear it with your ears but with your lungs and guts and bones and balls... Braxn rose from the table and supported himself with a hand on the chair back. "I'm going to lie down for a while." "Let me come rub your back." "No, finish supper. I'll just lie" "Ten-six -- Doc! Ten-six?" Wonder why it doesn't hurt... I always thought it would hurt so much but you cant put'em back in... they keep slipping around and between your fingers almost no blood... Braxn closed the door to the bedroom and stretched out on the antique bed. Don't attempt to use freely your ability to transfer personality... share the dangers of another body... so weak Holy Mother of Mary... no I'm not gonna... I don't wanna... God, God it hurts... maybe some dirt on my hands... they won't slide out so easy and I can stuff... Holy Mary, it hurts... what's the use... Not as easy as it used to be but the involuntary telepathic link helps -- push... B raxn was lying in a stand of elephant grass, gray-white smoke clinging to the ground around him, soft yammer of battle sounds whispering in his ears. Bluish intestines spilled through a foot-wide wound in his abdomen. He willed his hands sterile and carefully rolled the guts back into the abdominal cavity. With his fingers and his, mind he debrided the wound and held the bloody lips of it together for a few seconds until it healed. He cleansed himself internally against peritonitis, then fixed the broken eardrums. Now for the larger problem. Could he still affect the rate of subjective time flow? He concentrated on slowing down this little corner of the universe. Make it lazy. Come on. Reality, isn't it hard to support a war? So much noise and  confusion. Easier just to let it all... run... down... A machine gun about ten meters in front of him was firing at a hysterical cyclic rate -- dubdubdubdub -- belt-fed, rattling off a thousand rounds per minute. After about a hundred rounds it started to signal the results of Braxn's efforts. Dubdubdub dub dub -- dub -- dub, doob, doob...doomb. Thud. Braxn stood up and walked through the grass to the machine gun. He was halfway there when a bullet crawled through the air toward him, moving with the speed of an overfed bumblebee. He caught it between two fingers and lifted it -- it was heavy with fossilized kinetic energy -- and released it above his head. It glided on. Another bullet was just coming out of the muzzle when he reached the gun. He swatted the slug into the ground. No wonder the gunner had been firing hysterically -- a piece of shrapnel had hit him in the face and spirited away his nose and half a cheek. He was in profound shock and dying. Braxn took the necessary elements from nearby plants and insects and a pinch of dirt and fashioned the man a new nose and cheek. Of course, it wouldn't look exactly like his old one, but at least it was consistent with Pakistani somatotypes. The gunner's loader, the man who keeps the belt of ammunition feeding into the gun, was splayed out behind the gun with an ugly wound in his throat. Braxn healed the hole in the trachea, closed the wound in the neck and teleported the inspirated blood out of the man's lungs. Then he visualized the bolt of the machine gun and made the firing pin disappear. He started to wander through the battle area. A hand grenade hung suspended in midair, imperceptibly rotating and falling. Braxn plucked it out of the air and unscrewed the top assembly. He snapped off the blasting cap inside, then screwed the thing back together, its firing mechanism useless, and let il continue on its way. In all, Braxn deactivated sixtythree rifles and pistols and four machine guns, eighty-one hand grenades and two grenade launchers. He revived seven dead men and healed the wounds of fourteen others. One person, who had evidently sustained a direct hit from an artillery shell, he had to leave the way he found himthere were no pieces larger than a section of liver to work with. The all-important brain cells were disorganized and scattered over an eight-meter radius. Braxn returned the soldier's body to the stand of elephant grass. As a final touch he cleaned all of the blood and smoke from the battleground. He laid down and pushed his persona back into Harriman's body. Ugh. what's that -- of course, of course -- this body's dead -- or at least not alive. It wasn't alive when I took it over. What a bother -- have to reprogram the brain... So quiet all of a sudden... wait! I was hurt,  was dying but O God, sweet Jesus... must be careful in the future -- if I leave this body again -- not to leave it too long. It'll start to smell... "I know, goddamn it, I can't get mine to work either -- stop those bastards -- " B raxn stood up Harriman's body and experimentally wiggled it around and stretched. Everything seemed to be in order, but numb and aching. He shuffled back into the living room. Linda was sitting on the couch, not-reading a magazine. "Oh, Ross. You look just awful -- come put your head on my lap." Braxn did so to humor her, found it felt good. "I checked on you while you were sleeping. You looked so -- well -- so bad that I called Dr. Dean." "Ah. Well. It's not that serious. But -- " Braxn closed his eyes and shook his head. "The bill." "What was that, dear?" Linda was stroking his forehead with a cold wet napkin. "The draft bill. I shouldn't have let it through." "Didn't you veto it day before yesterday?" "No. That was a different one, not as sneaky. This one Just reapportions various Selective Service districts." "But it still increases the draft?" "Overall, yes. Lowers it in some noisy districts." Linda dipped the cloth in water again. "Well, I agree. You should have vetoed itthose poor boys. Don't you remember how you felt after -- " "Yes. Yes, I remember." He squeezed a hand over his eyes. "Maybe that's what's bothering me. But the situation is more complicated than that. If I had vetoed that bill I'd get nothing -- absolutely nothing -- out of this Congress for the rest of my term." "Still -- " "Oh, still, still! You know a President can't do everything the way he wants, the way he knows is right, thinks is right -- " Dr. Dean came in, followed by a worried-looking Rosa. "Good evening, Linda, Ross." He moved a chair over beside the couch and sat down. "What seems to be the trouble?" "It's nothing, Joe. Really there is noth -- " "He almost fainted at the dinner table, Doctor." "Linda . , . just a combination of not enough sleep and too much coffee." "Well, roll up a sleeve and I'll check the hydraulic pressure." Dean wrapped a slender tape around Braxn's arm and checked the numbers on a digital readout in his bag. "Normal. Pulse a little low, but nothing to worry about. Here." He peered at Braxn's retina with an ophthalmoscope. "Yes, it definitely is an eye." He checked knee-jerk reflexes and took a blood sample. "I'll put this juice in the mixmaster upstairs. Don't expect to find anything, though -- I think your diagnosis was correct. Dr. Harriman. Fatigue, possible overdose of caffeine and nicotine. Taking any other drugs?" "Not since those uppers you gave me last week." "Last ones you'll get, too. Take my advice, Ross, and try to cool it a little bit. These eighteen-hour days are driving your staff crazy. Besides, you're stuck with this job for three more years, maybe even seven. You won't make it to election year unless you slow down." "Hogwash. I've never fell belter in my life." "I wish you knew how many people have said that to doctors and keeled over dead the next day. Your mind thrives on work, Ross, but your body is just the same old kind of inefficient machine everybody trundles around in." "All right, Joe. I promise to sleep till six -- at least one morning a week." "Well, that's something. Linda, you make him stick to it." IV T he next morning Braxn strode to his desk and punched up the morning JoJ-fax. He found what he was looking for on page two. dawn today an American patrol based in Barisal was ambushed by a force of guerrillas, but the ambush was foiled by what many soldiers swore was a "genuine miracle." Only one fatality resulted from what the patrol commander, John Carrie of Dade City, Florida, described as "an initially hopeless situation." Gen. Theodore Howard, commander of the American base camp in Barisal, has ordered a full-scale investigation of the incident, saying that (cont'd on B#, col#) A note on Braxn's desk read: "Urgent you get in touch with me soonest -- Fred." Braxn punched up Fred. "What's happening?" "Too much, sir. You know that missing page from the dossier on Tweed?" "You found it?" "It found us. In the person of Harry Doyle, Tweed's old chauffeur." "Surely he can't -- " "Reconstruct what happened? I'm afraid he did. He knew that Tweed was reading something that we gave him when he dropped dead. Doyle tried to find it after the fuss slowed down and only came up with the one page. It had slipped down behind the seat." "Did he say what he's going to do with it?" "That's the scary part. He said he hasn't decided, but he didn't even hint about taking a bribe. He's a nut, sir, and he hates politicians -- when he came to Washington twenty-five years ago, he had political ambitions, took a job driving for Tweed just to tide himself over. Never got any further." What a mess." Braxn stared I space for a second, then lit a irette. "Any ideas?" Yes, sir. We could pull Tweed's trick on him." "Have him committed? Fred, this isn't nineteen fifty-eight. Where would we find an oldfashioned insane asylum?" "Maybe Berne, Switzerland. The place is known simply as the Institut. It's a fairly new spa, but it has old-fashioned ideas, like total isolation of the patient until he gets well." "And Doyle's case?" "Poor fellow. He suffers from a really deep-rooted psychosis." "I don't like it, Fred. It sounds Big Brotherish." "I don't care for it either. But the alternative, the scandal, would be worse. For you and the country." "We can't just make a person drop out of sight like that." "Ah, but we can -- all aboveboard and legal. His mother -- she's sixty-eight, lives in Sioux Falls and is also a nut -- would be glad to sign the papers. She tried to get him committed eight years ago." "You're very thorough, Fred." "Yes. We have a man in Sioux Falls with a Swiss passport and a German accent. He has contracts that give very attractive terms. He will meet Mrs. Doyle at a women's club get-together tomorrow. We also took the liberty of putting a little something in Doyle's dinner last night. He'll be heavily sedated for twelve hours yet." "And if I give the word he wakes up in Switzerland?" "That's correct." "What about tie rest of his family?" "Never married, father dead. No friends to speak of." "Okay, go ahead. But I have a feeling it's going to backfire." Fred shrugged. "It seems tight enough. And it's reasonably humane. In the Eastern Bloc they'd just haul him in and shoot him." "Well, in China, maybe." Braxn took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "In Russia they would bundle him up and send him off to an asylum in Siberia. Or maybe Switzerland." Braxn leaned back and thought about yesterday's sojourn in Pakistan. He had learned nothing new about power through the experience. Presumably that was not good. He was stuck in this uncomfortable phase of his development until some internal mechanism told him he had learned enough. Braxn resolved to make a minimum use of his G'drellian abilities, but he saw no real reason not to use them at all -- his father had exaggerated, as usual. The one thing he had to remember was not to be "away" from the Harriman body for too long at a stretch. Which brought up an interesting question. His father had said he could die here if Harriman died. But the body had been unquestionably dead when he had returned to it and the fact had caused him no great difficulty. His danger had to lie in being inside a body when it died -- Harriman's or anybody else's. He would be careful. D uring the next week Braxn went through the involuntary "dual-life" phenomenon daily. As the result of a bill approving the (further) devaluation of the dollar he lived with a Mexican peasant who had been making a marginal income by working in Laredo, Texas, and crossing the border back home every night. When the value of American currency went down he found that his paycheck no londer provided a marginal living for his family -- even before his pay was cut to help keep his employer in business. To cut down on welfare expenses, Braxn made it impossible for a family to get food stamps if the total annual family income was over # of average U.S. family income per adult member, plus # per child. For a conventional family of two adults and two children, this was quite equitable. But Braxn had to live through the situation as it presented itself to a forty-two-year-old exprostitute trying to support four children, working as a custodian for an income barely above the minimum for a single adult. She solved her problem by teaching her twelve-year-old daughter a trade to pay a premium for her services. A bill terminating funds for a space research project made him share the body of a chemist, who couldn't tell his wife, eight months' pregnant, that he had been fired flask with fuming nitric acid and managed to get most of it down before he died. Braxn was unable to help him and barely succeeded in saving his own life. A Presidential directive ordering energy workers in New York City back to work resulted in a brief but bloody shootout between the "loaf-ins" and the National Guard. Braxn got to "be" a teenage Guardsman who didn't want to live after an emasculating pistol wound in the groin, but did. x. you have about ten minutes. Start talking." The secretary of defense lowered himself gently into a chair. Probably has hemorrhoids, Braxn reflected. "Mr. President, my staff informed me only this morning of a very disturbing rumor -- " "It's true." "Uh -- ha-ha! It can't be true, sir. The rumor concerns a pullout of -- " "Yes." Braxn slid a five-page report across his large desk. "When I heard you were coming I had a copy of this made up for your enlightenment. You're getting it a day early." The secretary picked it up without looking at it. "We -- we're ending our involvement in Pakistan?" "Correct." "But only a few weeks ago -- " "I reluctantly signed a bill raising the draft call by a third -- but not for the defense of a puppet regime and not so your brass hats can gain experience by playing soldier with the lives of American boys. The bill was to enhance our overall defense posture. Emphasis on defense -- of America, not Zambia, Paraguay or Pakistan." The secretary shook his head slowly from side to side. "This is a terrible mistake." "No, this is the avoidance of a mistake. Almost every other country learned its lesson from the Two Chinas War. Time we figured it out, too." Shimmer and split. "Is it all right if I have another drink?" "All right, Doyle, but I wish you'd try to get some sleep after we change at Kennedy." "You know better than that, Mr. Secretary. China will be anything but happy. They don't -- " "I'm sorry, sir, but we'll be in our landing pattern in a couple of minutes." "That's all right, thank you anyhow, miss." Got to make my play at Kennedy. I'll never get another chance at that bastard Harriman... "What are you going to do with all that Army back in the States?" The secretary was up and pacing around. "Mark my words, without an actual war -- "... he can't clap me away in some looney bin fulla Krauts... "Smooth landing." "Ja." "There's no need to discuss this. It's an executive order and you may either comply or submit your resignation." Short one that time, Braxn thought. "I'm not resigning. Not yet. I wouldn't give you the satisfaction." "Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Secretary." Braxn said smoothly. "I want you to stay on. I need men of experience and discernment. But I'm not Ashby. I have different ideas, some of which fall into your sphere." Braxn stood. "I'm only telling you that you can learn to work with me if you wish. Otherwise -- the sooner you leave, the less prejudicial it will be to your political future." "You'll be hearing from me, Mr. Harriman." "I'll expect to." A lone again, Braxn stabbed a c finger at the phone. "Good afternoon, sir. What can I do for you?" "Let me speak to Mr. Aller. Very urgent." "Mr. Aller is in Chicago. I'll see if I can patch you through and punch you back. All right, sir?" "That's fine." Have to find out what's with Doyle. How did he get out and what's he doing in an airplane with a German. A Swiss? Fred's image on the screen was of poor quality and rolling. "Yes, sir? What can I do for you?" "Arc you alone?" "No sir. I'm in the mayor's limousine -- with the mayor. Would you like to say hello to him?" "Certainly. Phil. How are things going?" A flaccid fat face filled the screen -- "Not too well actually, Mr. President. The labor situation" "Ah, yes, I know -- that's why I sent you Fred. He's my right arm and half my brain -- in fact, I can't get along without him. Can you spare him for about an hour?" "Sure thing, sir. Fred, we're pretty near your hotel -- I'll just drop you there?" "Fine," Fred said off camera. "While I've got your ear, Mr. President -- " Braxn half-listened to the old criminal for a couple of minutes. Then he said goodbye and Fred punched him from the scrambled telephone in his hotel room. "What's up, sir? World War Three?" "Not till next week. Fred -- do you believe in intuition?" "Why? Did you get a flash about something?" "Something like that. Maybe I'm all wrong -- if so, I apologize for tearing you away from your pleasant companions." "Quite all right, sir. I was getting cancer of the eardrum." "Anyhow, it's about Doyle." "Doyle?" "Tweed's man -- when did you last get a report on him?" "Oh, that, that -- haven't heard anything since they told me he was definitely safe behind bars. Sir, you shouldn't worry. He's lost to the world until -- " "Still, I am worried. Take long to check?" "Well, we shouldn't call the hospital directly. I'll have my German call his mother first." "Do as you think best, Fred. But do it fast." "Of course, sir. We'll get right on it and punch you back." "Fine. I'll be herein my office." After a few minutes Fred came back on the screen, worried and perplexed. "Sir, it's weird. We tried to get his mother and patched into a funeral home. She died yesterday. My man's calling -- wait -- " Fred looked to his left, evidently at another screen. "Damn it, they had orders... Has it left... arrived? Check the roster for the connecting flight -- right." He produced a handkerchief and passed it over his face. "Sir, if you ever get another flash -- listen to it. Doyle's mother died and the Institut decided that he was stable enough to attend the funeral and take care of the arrangements. They sent him to the U.S., accompanied by an aide. The plane damn it -- the plane landed twenty minutes ago in New York. My man's checking their connecting flight. It's pretty close -- " Fred looked away again and swore. Braxn was amused in spite of himself. Fred was always so cool. "The flight to Sioux City has loaded. They aren't aboard. I'll keep checking." "Okay. I'll keep worrying. Punch me as soon as anything happens." Split again. Sorry to have to do that... he never hurt me he was always very nice... The jet noise tripled and he tilted back. No need to worry. He's just one man,  have a whole army... always wanted a Weatherby. Buy me a Weatherby and a twenty-power Bushnell... get Harriman. Haven't killed a man since all those gooks... always wanted to kill a man on my own... "Fred? What is it?" Fred looked pale. "Haven't found Doyle, but the police found his aide, Herr Kramer, his throat cut with a razor blade, in a stall in the -- "... except for Kramer, sorry about him, he was always very nice... "Gin and Tonic, please." Weird machine... " -- get hold of yourself. Get somebody to make an anonymous call to the police, say he saw a man with blood -- " They'll never catch me... have it all figured out... good thing the old bitch died... yeah, they'll catch me but after  do it I'll be famous... they'll hang me but... " -- and check the shuttle, the Washington shuttle, he wouldn't stay around the airport very long after... bigger than Khan, bigger than Oswald, bigger than Booth! That damn plastic won't do any good against a .# Magnum... O nedy are fully automated, have been for two months. Not even a stewardess on board -- just an automated drink tray. All we can do is watch at Dulles." "Okay, set it up. Better watch Friendship, too." Fred punched off and Braxn tried to concentrate on the thick report in front of him... to optimize all the ecological parameters, this committee decided to situate the experimental station first in a northern temperate rural region, then in a northern temperate urban region, then in... "Mr. President?" Braxn opened the line to his secretary. "Yes?" "Your appointment with the secretary of the interior is in ten minutes." "I haven't even finished reading the report. Look, Joyce, something has come up in Chicago, something important. I'm staying in touch with Mr. Aller, trying to keep on top of it. Cancel all today's appointments -- tell everybody I'm not in." He stood up. "In fact, I won't be in. I'll be in my office downstairs." "Oh, well, could you -- " "Yes, I'll go down the back way. Mustn't upset the secretary of the interior. I'm patching the outside line here, scrambled, directly to downstairs. Don't call me unless it's really important." "All right, sir." Linda was spending a few days in Wisconsin, visiting grandchildren. Her absence simplified matters. Braxn told the guard at the door that he wasn't in to anybody. He poured a glass of wine and sal down at his desk, the thick report unopened before him. He stared at the telephone, then punched Fred. "No word yet, sir." "Nothing?" "No, sir. The New York City Police are dragging Kennedy. All the airlines have his description. If he hasn't left Kennedy we'll find him soon." "We? Or the police?" "Sir?" "If they catch him they'll hold him for homicide. He's sure to shoot off his mouth. Headlines for a week." "Damn." Fred slapped his head twice. "I'm not thinking." "That's all right, Fred. It was my idea to feed his description to them. What do you think the chances are that he's still there?" "Well, it gels more likely with every shuttle that lands without him. Another hour at the most and we'll be able to say he definitely didn't -- " " -- didn't lake the shuttle to Washington or Baltimore. Could he have slipped on another automated flight before his description went out?" "Oh, it's possible. The other shuttles are -- let's see, Newark, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia. Might be one to Richmond, but I doubt -- " "Any way to check them?" "Newark and Boston probably have cameras like the one at Kennedy -- lakes pictures of all the people debarking from the shuttle because of the smuggling. I'll check all of them." "Well, that's a start. Go ahead." (Harry Doyle left the shuttle in Boston and caught a limousine to Cambridge. Knowing he couldn't buy a gun with Kramer's identification, he wailed in a bar until he saw a man about his own age, height and build. He followed the man home to his apartment, rang the bell and when the man came to the door he slashed out with the razor blade -- a technique he had practiced mentally a thousand times in Switzerland -- pushed the silently dying man inside, was grateful that he was alone, took the man's wallet and memorized his new name and social security number, locked the door behind him and went down to the street. (He called five sporting goods stores before he found one that had the Weatherby .# Magnum, an elephant gun that was really overkill -- even for elephants. He said he would be there in a half-hour and he was. (It took most of Kramer's American money to buy the Weatherby, a box of shells, a case and shooter's muffs. When all the items were wrapped up in brown paper and tied, the package didn't suggest a gun at all. Doyle left it in a locker in the bus station, went to the public library, looked in Section B of Sunday's Washington Post and found the President's itinerary for the week. He would be present at the dedication of the new Peace Corps classes at Columbia, just outside of Washington. So would Harry.)... our conclusions were that this type of EE station has an optimum balancing effect in areas on the periphery of an urban heat sink, but closer to the... The telephone chimed and Braxn punched up visual. "Well, sir, we got results from Newark and Hartford. The camera at Boston had been taken down for repairs. Nobody who looks like Doyle -- " "Any way to check Boston?" "Not after four hours, sir. Big town with efficient rapid transit in and out. If he slipped through the Boston shuttle while the camera was down he could be anywhere on the East Coast." "That might make things easier in a way. I guess we can assume he's crossed state lines pursuant to the commission of a -- " "Yes. Might as well. We have more control over them than over them all you have that's safe for them to know. Tell them that Doyle is a murderer, is suspected of high treason and is armed and dangerous." "And not to risk taking him alive?" Fred's expression was grim. Braxn chewed a nail thoughtfully. "I think that would be best. Tell the director he can call me for verification. Patch him through your scrambler, though -- Oh, and Fred, I'm going to try to take a little nap. Don't worry if you can't raise me right off." "Okay, sir." Fred's image flashed to a point and faded. B oston offered one obvious course of action. Braxn punched up a street map of the city people -- it would take a week to check each one of them by body transfer. Besides, Doyle probably had left by now. But Doyle had been thinking lovingly about a Weatherby. Braxn made contact with a policeman on the beat and -- with rather more difficulty than last time, since he was not in involuntary telepathic contact -- slipped into the man's body. He found a public telephone and started going down the list of sporting goods stores in the area. People told his uniform, badge and beefy Irish face that yes, a man had called about a Weatherby, but they didn't have one in stock. The fifth store said it had just sold one, not two hours earlier, and gave Braxn the purchaser's name and address. He took the cop back to his beat and transferred to another policeman who was on duty near the apartment of the man who had supposedly bought the Weatherby. He mounted the stairs of the apartment house and found the right door. A dark stain ran along the bottom edge. Braxn moved the lock tumblers with his brain and pushed open the door. He investigated the dead man's brain and decided that there was still enough there to make revival worthwhile. He sealed up the jugular and the neck wound, transmuted a steak, a cabbage, two nails and a quantity of tap water into a sufficient supply of blood, then wished away the huge puddle of old blood from the Oriental rug and parquet floor. It took only a couple of minutes to fix up the brainmake the man an intelligent amnesiac. As he was coming to, Braxn tapped him not too gently on the temple with the nightstick to make it plausible that the man had been merely robbed. As, of course, he had been. Having gotten exactly nowhere so far -- except to confirm that Doyle would murder without provocation -- Braxn walked the policeman's body back. On the way he scanned the minds of various people to see whether any one had particularly noticed Doyle. No one had, which was not surprising. Humans did not notice much. Harriman's body had been vacant for twelve minutes. Still, Braxn found it a chore to revive it. restructure the cerebral matrix, pull the poisons out of the tissues and get everything creaking around again. He punched up Fred. "Did you reach the director?" "It'll be another hour, sir. I talked to his administrative assistant, who is setting up tentative agent assignments. Of course, the director must have the final word." "All right. I'll be working on the Peace Corps dedication. Couldn't sleep." "Sir, um, maybe you ought not to make any public appearances until we nail him. He is desperate and -- " "Yes, I had planned to curtail my peregrinations. I'll keep my appointments in the Washington area and trust the secret service and town this week and this one out in Columbia. The rest I'll postpone or arrange for a substitute." (In order to look like a casual traveler Harry bought an old suitcase and filled it with newspapers and a supply of sandwich materials. Then he went to a trucking firm and traded a twenty-dollar bill for a lift to Baltimore on a big groundeffect rig.) J Corps speech?" Her image went off the screen for a moment. "Philip O'Hara, that new boy from Yale." "Tell him I need a rewrite. I want more about 'the Administration's changing priorities' and I want it worded so that young people will think that the Peace Corps will be an alternative to the draft, but older people will see it as just a twoyear deferment." "Uh, sir -- do you know which it will be?" "Something in between." A chime rang. "Have to punch off, Joyce." Braxn turned to the other telephone. "What is it, Fred?" "Just a progress report. Little enough progress, but we do have director assigned a hundred and twenty-two men to the job." "Good." Harriman had always been wary of the power the CBl had assimilated -- it had had too much from its inception in the but now Braxn was glad to have it on his side. Most C-men came close to their public image of remorseless, incorruptible automations. No man on Earth could elude more than a hundred of them for any length of time. (Harry got off at a truckers' stop just north of the outer Beltway and hitched a ride to Towson. Five minutes later two expressionless men in charcoal coveralls came into the truck stop with a description of him. Luckily for him the waitress on duty had no love for the law -- none at all.) Braxn had approved a measure closing some loopholes in the Capital Gains Law a week earlier. He lived through two hours of a businessman's fidgeting, worrying, waiting for his secretary to go to lunch -- whereupon he opened a window, stepped out and jumped # feel into a busy Dallas intersection. An experienced skydiver, he aimed for a red convertible and just missed. V through the report -- " Braxn hefted the inch-thick volume -- "and I agree with you. We need an extensive and uniform environmental monitoring system all over the country to enforce the Clean Cities Act. But your 'EE stations' will cost more than the public will and us -- it's at once too conservative and too much." The young Senator was obviously uncomfortable. He had been railroaded into sponsoring this project, more on the basis of his lack of seniority than because he had evidenced any special interest in the environment. It was the first time he had sat in the President's office and he acutely wished himself elsewhere. promises, but there's no getting around it -- it's got to be expensive. Equipment below a certain level of sophistication just won't do any good." "Compromise." Braxn put on his glasses and leafed idly through the report. "Perhaps you could make the distribution of the stations less comprehensive -- set up the system first as an experimental project covering only a few cities. Of course the states chosen would balk at having to match funds -- "... turbine whining, braking... glad to get out of this stuffy cab. It's been a long ride. "Thanks a lot, buddy." Get Harriman... It's Doyle! " -- and the state will get all its funds back, and more, from industrial fines -- "... gravel shoulder... big road, heavy suitcase, heavy package... truck roars off... If I were alone I could get into him now and set him up... "Senator, I hate to cut this short, but -- " Where is he?... got to get out into the country and zero this thing in... crunch on gravel... passenger groundcar... only fifty or sixty miles now to Harriman... " -- get together with your people and set up a couple of less expensive alternate proposals." Get out of here, get out of here... "Where you headed?" Don't know too much about this area. "West, man -- just west." A more time, Mr. President." The young Senator was glad to get away. The door whispered shut and Braxn locked it from his desk. Fifty or sixty miles away, coming from Boston, wants to go west to "get out into the country." Braxn needed no map to tell that Doyle was somewhere north of Baltimore -- probably on route #, # or #. Somebody in a groundcar had just picked him up. Braxn started searching the minds of drivers in those areas. The telephone chimed and Braxn stabbed it. The caller was Fred. "Good news, sir -- he did land in Boston and we know how he got out. He bought a ride on a truck that was bound for Baltimore. They're intercepting the truck right now." "Good. Let me know when they find out -- ah -- if Doyle isn't in the the truck get back to me when they find out where he was let off." Braxn continued checking. It took him five seconds to locate each mind and scan it superficially. He did a fast multiplication, decided he faced a day's work -- too long. Fred called back. "We missed him by a few minutes. Driver said he thought ' Doyle was headed toward Towson." "Okay stay on it, Fred. I'm going to try to take a nap again Doc Dean won't let me take pills and I just can't seem to sleep at night." "All right, sir. I won't call unless it's really big." Braxn scanned Towson and decided to take over a policeman's body again. A uniform would take him Just about anywhere. He rode shotgun in a squad car for over an hour -- going back every ten minutes to revive Harriman's body -- before anything happened. Then another car caught a squawk to go check on somebody who was evidently firing a largecaliber weapon in a quarry outside town. Braxn transferred to that car It pulled up at the entrance to the quarry. "Just some hunter, shooting cans," the other officer said. "We'll give him a warning and let him go." Just then Doyle stepped around a corner, holding the piece of cardboard he had used as a target, elephant gun cradled in the crook of his elbow. He saw the two lawmen and jumped. "Say, fellow, there's -- " The cop saw Doyle bring up the muzzle of the weapon and barely had time to get his .# clear of the holster when the first round struck him in the throat and severed his head from his body. Braxn made no effort to shoot. He was gathering himself to leap into Doyle's body when a bullet smashed into his kneecap, spinning him around. Miraculously he stayed on his feet for a moment, but fell over when he tried to put some weight on his left leg. Half of it simply was no longer there. Doyle ran past as Braxn fell, Braxn pushing and pushing, but unable to free himself from the mutilated body. This is what Father meant, Braxn thought. He tried to teleport the shattered lower leg back to a conjunction with the bloody stump. It shuddered but wouldn't move. If the creature Tm inhabiting is hurt badly enough and starts to die I can't escape... His powers seemed worthless. What a small thing, he thought as the world washed away to a white glare, to die like this -- to die a human... # O AM -- " Braxn opened his O eyes to a white clean room and people all around him. He was in bed and what he first thought was a defect of vision was a plastic envelope that covered his head -- an oxygen tent. "Sam, it's very important -- listen." The speaker was the only man in the room not in hospital gear. He wore a plain blue coverall and was obviously a policeman. "How much " The man averted his face from Braxn. "How much longer. Doc?" he whispered to one of the other men. The doctor moved his head horizontally half an inch, then back again. "Sam, you've got to tell us who did this to you and Halliday. Please!" The doctor sighed and touched one of the nurses on the arm. She moved to Braxn's side, placed a pneumatic injector next to his skin and fired. A powerful stimulant blasted into the dying body and Braxn surged almost reflexively into the body of the plainclothes policeman. He would have leaped on to Harriman, but another minute's delay couldn't make that much difference. He had revived men who had been dead for minutes -- now the problem of reversing a case of terminal shock was just a finger exercise. He lingered long enough to adjust the body chemistry of his former host -- neutralizing the fatal stimulant dose in the bargain -- made a few subtle changes in various organs, destroyed a cancer that was just starting in the left lung and went on to the White House. T he telephone was chiming furiously, but it took him almost a minute to get Harriman's body back into shape -- it had been decomposing for a record thirtyfive minutes. "Sorry, Fred. I was sound asleep. What's up?" "Double shooting in Towson. The description of the weapon suggests Doyle must have done it."' "Any witnesses?" "Yes and no. One of the victims is still alive -- they might be able to gel a description from him. Luckily both men shot were policemen when one of them drew his gun the act automatically dispatched a police helicopter -- otherwise we wouldn't even have this chance for a witness. That's a terrible weapon he has." "No match for the secret service and the CBl. Don't get uptight, Fred." Fred smiled at the archaic slang. "We'll get him. I have every confidence." Maybe that would be best, Braxn thought. Let them take care of it. I'm pretty safe in this body... best stay in it unless I get a direct tine to Doyle... Braxn's man on the Ways and Means Committee had sent over a report outlining important forthcoming bills. He started on that... (Harry drove his Hertz groundcar to Columbia and located the new Peace Corps school. He noted the position of the bleachers and drove on without stopping.) Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy you wasn't doin' nothin just walkin' down the street an they shot you for doin' nothin'... Goddamn your Tommy, woman. I need Harry Doyle... why can't I control this damn thing? "He look just like he sleepin'." (Harry Doyle parked in the lot behind an all-night drug store and waited in the car until it got dark. Then he stepped inside briefly to purchase a small flashlight and a bottle of fingernail enamel. Outside, he painted the lens of the flashlight with enamel, so it gave off a very faint red glow. (Harry sneaked across a golf course to a water tower he had seen that afternoon. It was the highest point around. He found a breach in the chain-link fence and wiggled through with rifle, hacksaw and lunch bag. (Using his light sparingly, Harry found the steps that spiraled up the side of the tower and he tiptoed up. A catwalk at the top ran all the way around the tank. From one point he could look down and see the faint pattern of light and darkness that was the new Peace Corps school and bleachers, not a half-mile away. (On the far side of the catwalk. on top of the tank, stood a small shed he had noted earlier. It was unlocked. Harry went in, closed the door behind him and lay down. So he had carried the hacksaw all the way up there for nothing. Who would have guessed he would be lucky enough just to walk in?iFred! There's incompetence, carelessness, somewhere along the line." "They're doing all they can, sir. The director assigned another team -- a hundred more -- to the hunt." "Maybe he's laying low for a while -- on the West Coast or in Canada -- " "We have men there -- and there. And in Mexico and Cuba." (When Harry awoke a bright line of sunlight shone under the door. He ate a stale sandwich and sipped water from a canteen.) "Almost time for you to go, sir." "Thank you, Joyce." Braxn heard the helicopter engines starting, up on the roof. "Watch on the video and feed me the speech after I finish my opening remarks." (He heard footsteps long before the man reached the shed. When the door opened Harry was standing to one side of it, rifle held horizontally, butt-first, at eye level. The secret service man stepped in. laser in one hand and flashlight in the other, and probably never felt the twenty-pound club strike his temple. (Harry considered taking the laser, but decided it wasn't accurate enough at # meters. He heard the flutter of helicopters and crawled over the agent's body and started around the catwalk.) Braxn looked through the window and saw the green field, the school and the bleachers slowly rising to meet him. He mentally reviewed his opening comments, going over modifications he would make according to who had or had not shown up. (He crawled to his firing position just about the same time as the helicopters touched down. He put a handful of ammunition in front of him -- the rifle worked like a double-barrelled shotgun and had to be reloaded after every second shot -- and focused the scope on the door of the white helicopter.) Braxn let two of the secret service men precede him, then he stepped out to the grass, Fred following. There's the bastard! Breathe and hold, now... crosshairs on Harriman's chest... Braxn jumped to the right No place to hide... swing to the left -- aim for the top of his head... not sure how far it'll drop but only has to hit his big toe and he's dead... "You can die here," Father said. Jump left... Swing right... Fred caught Braxn's arm in a tight grip. "Sir? What's -- " Now... Let go! "Let Go " The force of the bullet jerked Braxn from Fred's, grip. His right shoulder erupted in a spray of blood and muscle and bone splinters. His body turned a halfsommersault in the air and he landed heavily just as the sound of the shot, rolling thunder, reached him. A second bullet dug a furrow inches from his head. Lasers crackled and filled the air with ozone while the doctor did something to stop the cephalic and brachial veins and the brachial artery from oozing and spurting blood. He was administering a quick injection for shock when the third bullet whined past his head. The fourth hit a secret service man (Harry chambered two more shells and smiled. They might get him sooner or later but, as he had figured, those lasers just wouldn't reach. He put his eye to the scope and looked for a good target. (He failed to see the secret service agent who had jumped back into the helicopter and now poked out the snout of a # mm Mannlicher target rifle. Harry was squeezing the elephant gun's trigger when the relatively small bullet from the agent's rifle fortuitously struck the end of his telescopic sight. Glass shards and the metal eyeguard slammed back, painfully putting out Harry's eye. (He stood up raging, blood streaming from his eye, and fired two wild, unaimed shots before the second small bullet opened a bloody rose in the middle of his chest. The bullet passed on through and penetrated the metal skin of the water tank, and a jet of water pushed Harry off the catwalk.)  C ON! Wake up! This body is vJ dying." The illusion of a friendly octopoid figure floated before Braxn's eyes, not quite as real as the bright lights and anxious masked people hovering over him, green tunics smeared with blood. "It hurts. Father." The surgeon didn't look up, but one of his assistants turned bright eyes to the President's face. "I know you are probably in pain," the prerecorded, hypnotically implanted image said. "Remember your learnings and ignore the pain. You may be able to escape. "If you have learned enough about power -- if you've learned enough from both ends of it -- you have no further use for this body. Try to reach out and find another. Try!" Braxn tried but the pain was too much of a presence, a crushing weight. "This pain is not mine," he said aloud. "This pain belongs to this body." He took the thought and pulled it, stretched it until it lay over the dying organism like a shroud. The pain did not fade, but it slowly became less important. He reached out. The surgical mask was rather tight and tasted slightly of lipstick. Its owner had scrubbed down in too much of a hurry. Good to be in a healthy young woman's body after that... "Scalpel," the surgeon said. With hands that were his and not his Braxn placed a scalpel into the doctor's waiting palm. The doctor stood for an instant, the scalpel in his hand, staring at the cardiac monitor. "Heart team," he said and stepped back from the body. A medic stabbed Harriman in the chest with a huge hypodermic, pumping adrenalin straight into the heart muscle. He counted seconds under his breath, watching the monitor while a beefy medic pushed rhythmically on the sternum. Two men stepped to each side of Harriman's body -- both held long wands trailing thick cables. "Go." The men slapped the long electrodes on opposite sides of the body's chest, held him there for long seconds. The body jerked and twitched. A burned-flesh smell competed with the other odors, biological and medical. But no cardiac responses came. They repeated their efforts four times. Nothing happened. Braxn knew they would be able to do nothing. Not much anybody could do in a case of death by spiritual abdication. The last member of the heart team stepped forward with a set of chromium bolt-cutters. "Crack the chest?" "I don't think so." The doctor in charge of the heart team looked to the surgeon for verification. The surgeon stripped the gloves from his hands and pulled down his mask. With an opportunity to say something that would ring down through the ages, he merely shook his head, whispered an earthy monosyllable and stalked out. A fterward, washing up, L Braxn was still enough of a political animal to wonder whether that doddering old fool of a Speaker would have the grace and good sense to step out of the line of succession.  Crest T# # Crest T#I # Crest T#I # Crest T# # Crest T# # Crest Ml # # Crest T# # Crest T# # Crest T# # If your bookdealer Is sold out. send cover price plus # each for postage and handling to Desk TU, Education Department, Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut #. Please order by number and title. Orders accepted only for the United States and Possessions. Free catalog listing other Fawcett science fiction titles available upon request. spokesman for the UC Geophysical Group said today; "An # Richter with a Mercalli X-XI is not incompatible with observed effects, however localized. The San Andreas Fault goes out to sea at the mouth of Alder Creek, # air miles to the south. The so-called 'Red Lady' branch fault must be regarded as hypothetical, though stresses between the Pacific and Continental crustal plates..." G irl cloud-walking said, "A job on the California coast?" She turned on her high stool and looked through the window down the canyons of Chicago fading into quiet snow a couple of blocks away. She was a plump woman with small feet and long, blunt-fingered hands. Her hair was shining crow color and braided into a coronet. "They get a little hysterical out there." "Birdeena Ora Oza Yadon, sweetie -- " Her boss was hesitant. "Are you using your forked or unforked tongue?" "Deena, from us you get six months leave of absence. From the Mundy Foundation you get double pay plus all expenses. That's much wampum, my lady Indian friend. Work in big wigwam. You get food and lodging thrown in." "Forked, I think. Maybe I'll phone Rand McNally for a job. What do you get out of this?" "Nothing but trouble. You are the best collagist in the business, but Mrs. Arlis Mundy owns thirtyeight per cent of Aero Precision Survey. Who's to replace you? Do you know how much that eightytwo mile Indiana State highway was out? Sixteen inches." "So how did they measure it? With a string?" "They said laser triangulation." "The benchmarks were painted fat and I have some reservations about that print-drying process. We've got to get deeper into the materials. I'm not sure the errors canceled. Now look, John -- " "Don't put me off, Birdeena." She glanced around the room where she had worked for the past three years. It was familiar and comfortable to her -- the tilted drawing board, the #x# table, the KE tools, her desk with the calculator and phone and hideaway typewriter, the tall files and the ranks of flat files for air photos. This was a web of precision and rationality and beauty. This had been a safe and growing place. "Well, John?" There were spiders that cast a silk web into the air and drifted off with the wind. She smiled faintly at the idea of herself as a fat spider flying to California. "Hell with it," he said suddenly. "Let the woman squeal. If she don't like it bad enough, we'll both phone Rand McNally." He had a wife and children in Oak Park, but he meant it. He was a toughminded Syrian with an appreciation of his own worth. "Not to be hasty," she said. "Maybe it's time to go." Girl CloudWalking never questioned the provenience of decisions forming themselves from the sum of her life. She felt no need to justify the quiet satisfaction of mathematics or her pleasure in the precise detail of engineering draftsmanship. Her father had been a highiron man and followed construction. She had had a year of college in Virginia and another in Nebraska. When she had had enough college she had found this job in Chicago. "Baby, you are so precisely my bag of tea I hate to see you go." He was troubled. "You might not come back, Deena. You might like it out there." "Might," she said. "How can  tell until I go to Cairo or Cathay j Whether or not this blessed spot is blessed in every way? Old Indian saying by Emily Dickenson." "Sure," he said sadly. "I mean, ugh." F our days later Birdeena Ora Oza Yadon flew from O' Hare to San Francisco International. She was met and made to feel a Very Important Person by the pilot of the Beech Queen Air, who flew her north along the coast and ducked under a rolling fog bank, to land south of Cape Mendocino on an abrupt airstrip carved in the timber of a valley behind the first ridge, paralleling the fog-blotted breakers. "What are you?" she asked the pilot. "Almost a foolish man, but not quite. Otherwise we'd have to land thirty miles away." He grinned. "Blackfoot." "Jicarilla Apache. My mother is Navaho. Friends or enemies?" "Brand-new," he said and taxied the Queen Air to a hangar. "I don't think we ever met historically." He ran to a door and she sat with her hands in her lap. She could not see the tops of the redwoods behind the hangar in the drizzling fog. The great doors opened from the center. He fastened a towbar to the nose wheel and hauled the plane into the brightly lighted building with a towmotor. It was an amazing place with great laminated beams and enough shop to build a scratch airplane. He carried her luggage to a fourwheel drive station wagon parked in front of a rubber-tire roller and beside a full-size motor grader. They drove outside into the rain and fog and he punched a code on a dash-mounted radio control. The doors of the hangar closed and the lights turned off. "Extra special, first class." "Well, what do you do with all the money there is?" hangar. Then you lay a twentyfour-foot asphalt road. That runs along the strip. That runs into a rain forest, that's what." "Right on. You can afford spectacular temper tantrums." "The Mundy Foundation is a temper tantrum?" "It's my latest theory." "What do you do here?" "Oh, I'm airplane driver and head custodian -- systems maintenance engineer. You'll stay warm at the house because of the dam and generator, two thirty-thousand gallon propane tanks and fifty thousand gallons of diesel. We got backup systems on backup systems. The last time I tried to figure, the investment in this hysterical complex was two point eight "Because Mrs. Foundation is in a snit?" The station wagon shuddered as they left the forest and followed a cut through a ridge. The surf boomed somewhere in the fog. Rain lashed the windows. Scud creamed across the road in wavy lines. "This outfit has paid me more money in the last five years than I expect to see in the next ten." He raised his voice against a drumbeat of rain. "I'm still going back to Montana and cowboy. Trouble is, I know everything about this place -- but what it's about." They drove into a wide paved area sheltered by rock walls and a roof. The asphalt was black with wind-driven rain. A door lifted in response to the radio control and they drove through a short tunnel to a garage. A dozen cars were parked herringbone around a glassed-in central office. A man stood by the door, laughing at another struggling into foulweather gear. "Hey, Marty, the bridge farside screwed up again. Mesi Stevens is stuck over there." He leaned pulled on his boot. "Damn it," said the pilot. "We got to go underground with that line. Ed, this is Birdeena Yadon, new tech staff. Ed Fukahara, electric genius and troubleshooter." He introduced Birdeena to Doc Crowell in the glass office. He was a bony blond man with white snaggle teeth who said he would have a key and ID card for her tomorrow morning. Birdeena followed the pilot to an elevator. "Who is Mesi Stevens?" she asked. "Is this a league of nations?" "Mesi is our darkroom genius. All the people who work here are extra special. I'd like to know how much it cost to pick the permanent staff. They interviewed me three days before I skinned by. A fancy kind of selection and it sure works." The door opened to a #x# room, thick with carpet and interest. "What do they choose for?" asked Birdeena, looking up at him. "You tell me after supper," he said and led her through chairs and planters and bookcases and tables to meet the housekeeper. Rose Chiappetta. She was at the far end of the room with her finger on a switch. Soft primrose-colored drapes marched across black, rainrunning windows. She welcomed Birdeena and took her to her room. It was luxurious and comfortably snug. The people she met at dinner seemed curiously open to her, like moon-shot commentators revealed as perceptive men removed from the banalities of TV by the occasion and their own intelligence. Her new associates did not put on a front. They had sober self-esteem. They were courteous from strength and helpful and friendly. And something worth knowing was the pilot's name. Martin Sanderson... might just catch... a plump little watermelon... out of the air -- she smiled drowsily and resolved to continue her new negative response to the deep-frosted chocolate cake Paul Maniatti, the cook, made. Girl Cloud-Walking went to sleep that night with a feeling of integrity and immediate security, like going up green in her mother's old riddle. What goes up green and comes down red? She met Arlis Mundy next morning in the drafting loft. X. Queen of Hell. She was tall and regal in a vermilion knit dress and soft, cerise, ankle-high boots. "Birdeena Ora Oza Yadon, how nice you could come to work with us." Birdeena was shy but not selfconscious. Arlis Mundy's charm put her at ease, though she observed the nakedness of the hips under the knit dress and the faint, miniscule awkwardness with which this imperial woman moved. It was an almost imperceptible flaunting of the Joints, a ghost of hesitancy that might be taut control or a conscious check of wracking forces. She took Birdeena through her austere office -- orange and black and white -- to a balcony overlooking an enormous cube of space. It took in one entire end of the building, five stories tall. There were no windows. The temperature was controlled and the humidity constant. A series of composite air photos were racked one behind another, flown from the ceiling on overhead tracks. To the left was a montage of weather satellite shots of the entire Earth, sixteen by forty feet, in a clever Homolosine equalarea projection, an intricately cut orange peel spread flat. To the right was the coast of California from San Francisco to the Sierras and south to San Diego bay and the Mexican border. The photos were mounted on high density overlay with plywood web support trusses behind. Girl Cloud-Walking felt the hanging panels were desolate, scuffed and pushed to discard. They walked down stairs to the lowest of the three balconies. "Our project is to create the most accurate photomontage possible," said Mrs. Mundy. "The scale is one to three-sixteen-eight-oh-five or five miles to the inch." She hesitated. "What is your secret name, dear? We'll be working together for some months." "Deena. My parents are not reservation. They called me Deena." "Well then, Deena, reducing a curved surface to a plane has not proven altogether satisfactory. I'm told on good authority that a circle is a polygon with an infinite number of sides, so we shot along thirtyfour degrees, twenty minutes from the New Mexico border west and laid the strip to the west as well. We reached the coast with errors obvious. What happened was not exactly what I had in mind." Her hair was wheat gold, her face a triangle with a high wide brow. Her skin was white and smooth, her mouth small and crimson above a pointed chin. "There's no precedent for original research -- obviously," she said. "So we shall try another approach with control inherent. This is it." In the center of the floor was a dome fifty feet across, rising not quite five feet at the center. The precisely patterned circumference was eight feet off the floor. "A representational slice of the Earth," said Arlis Mundy. A carpeted platform projected from the lowest balcony. At the far end was a hip-high control standard. She stepped aboard and flicked a switch and checked a dial. She pushed a toggle. The platform ran out from the balcony on triangular steel columns with a hushed purr of motors and gearing. It was dead steady. She touched another control and the platform sank to within two inches of the dome surface. "You might call this a plotting chair or a layout cradle. You'll be working off it." She flexed her knees. There was not the faintest quiver. She shook the control standard with both hands. No movement at all. She hiked her skirt and kicked a leg over the standard with a dancer's improbable leap and lash and faced Birdeena. Her voice was level. "Similia similibus curantur." she said. "Like things are -- let us say -- cured by like. The principle is, like produces like and the part stands for the whole. This is where we map the United States as it has never been done before." She touched the controls and the platform rose and carried her smoothly toward Birdeena, who stood stolidly on the balcony as the Empress of Hell in red loveliness rode the air to her. She wondered why she had not seen the color of Arlis Mundy's eyes before. They had no color. They were gray as fog. twenty-two days straight before Martin Sanderson lifted her chin with a curled forefinger and asked if she would like to go to San Francisco. "Avoid excess," he said. "If the Great Spirit wanted you to work all the time he never would have invented Saturday and Sunday." She blinked like a woman half out of a dream. "Oh, dear," she said. "Mesi Stevens has Springdoesn't know who slipped the scale but that's what happened. I was checking along forty degrees north and found it." "Then let him grope by himself in the darkroom. Moderation is a lovely virtue. Let's go now." She took a deep breath. "Yes, please." It was a sparkling day as they taxied to the end of the strip for takeoff She admired the tall trees on either side and asked why shorter ones had been left beyond the end of the runway. He said the brush down to the rocky riverbed was for contingencies, the trees for emergency. "Life is very, very dangerous," he said. "You should try to maintain orderliness in areas not subject to control." He ran up the engines. "The wingspan is fifty feet three inches and the trees are maybe twenty feet apart. We land at over eighty miles an hour. If the brakes fail or power quits on takeoff, I have those trees to go between. Ripping off wings is one way to stop." They took off and banked over the ocean. The Mundy Foundation was an architect's rendering on the shelf above the tumbling cliffs. The maproom at the far end was blind. Girl Cloud-Walking tightened her seatbelt and asked, "What degree of latitude is Los Angeles?" "About thirty-four, maybe a little north. Why?" "Earthquakes." "We can do anything here just as good as they can in LA," he said, "but don't worry about our little home. It's steel frame with plywood in sheer panels. The rock on the outside is for pretty. It's a nonstructural facade with lots of rebar in it. You might tip over the Mundy Foundation, but it won't collapse. How do you like your job by now?" "Cartographer's heaven." She said there was not a trace of expediency -- unlike the experience of the old man of Thermopylae, everything here was done properly -- though she felt like the top of an iceberg. An enormous amount of work had been done before she arrived and she was in the sunshine, sparkling. "I walk past all those empty tables and the dark communications center and I work in the drafting loft with only Nancy Kaneshige to help and we rattle around." "Deena, I asked how you like it." "Yes." She, turned to face him in the high, thin sunshine. "Did you ever hunker down to look at the iridescent colors of oil on water? Ever surprise a skunk when the sun was low and the high fan of a tail was haloed black and white and gold? Were you ever really greedy with a box of your mother's chocolates?" "Sounds like you have mixed emotions." "I get a very Indian feeling out of this, those thousands of color photographs, the file systems, the loft, the layout tables, the arched assembly sections. It makes amazing good sense -- until you wonder why." She said shyly, "I thought you were going to Montana and cowboy." "I thought I might stick around for a while. Up by the border it gets mighty pretty by June -- a very good month." They separated in San Francisco and met for a late lunch at the Mark Hopkins. She thought the Top of the Mark very grand. It justified the chrysanthemum rust dress she bought a size smaller than her old size at the Emporium. She sat quietly by a window overlooking the world. She was deeply pleased with Marty Sanderson, hawk-elegant in her' eyes. How well did she know him? She felt far better than she knew. "How much does this cost?" she whispered. "A couple of boxes of thirtyought-six cartridges," he whispered back. "A case of ten-thirty oil." His eyes twinkled. "A small wiener pig." They flew up the coast in companionable silence and Deena only raised her eyebrows when they did not put down at the strip behind the Mundy Foundation. "Thought you might like to see Humboldt Bay and Eureka," he said. "They massacred Indian women and children there a hundred-something years ago." She could not read his face as they overflew the sawmills and the bar and the long bay. "Get lots of rain. Better see it while it's clear." They banked over Areata and flew south. "I've got an Indian feeling, too," he said. "If you meet a bear by mistake, the best thing to do is nothing. If that doesn't work, run away." He did not look at her. "We're mixed up with a crazy paleface, Deena. Maybe we should run away to Montana." "Why the to-ing and fro-ing?" she asked carefully. "The best of both worlds is barely good enough for us -- even if it takes maintaining order in an area not subject to control." Birdeena took mental notes. She had not been so formal since college. What she wanted to remember, she remembered. What she forgot, she forgot. The notes were mosaic pieces she turned slowly in her mind to see if they made a pattern. Marty Sanderson told her, "Mrs. Mundy leased six Constellations and flew in front of winter last year." Connies made the best photographic platforms. They flew the contiguous United States in east-west strips during September and October. Paul Maniatti said, "Come on and see some day, Deena. There are caves dug in this hill behind us. We could eat for three years before we opened one sack of corn or beans. It's all refrigerated and the bulk stuff is CA sealed. Controlled Atmosphere, nitrogen or helium or something. How about a piece of cake?" Mesi Stevens confirmed her opinion of the air photos. "I was for twelve years. They never put together a series like this. The planning took eighteen months. There were four men in the comm center with radio and direct teletype to field stations. Result -- no cloud cover." Doc Crowell said, "The drawbridge works fine now. If you come back late at night just put your card in the slot and turn the key. It's pretty fair security. Park the roller and grader on the air strip and you need a chopper to get in. You can't land a boat at the bottom of the cliffs. On foot it's a long old walk in tough old country. A very careful setup. There's no such thing as complete security, but this comes close." Nancy Kanashige said, "How did you guess? We are missing Cape Mendocino to Point Delgada. They're not in the prints or the duplicate prints and Mesi doesn't have the negatives. Do you suppose Mrs. Mundy has them?" Birdeena said not to bother yet. When Martin Sanderson asked her if she would like an ice cream soda at Garberville she said, "Yes indeed I would." She leaned back comfortably on the car seat beside him as they drove over the bridge and through the woods to the rutted public road. "Have you concluded any conclusions?" he asked. "Human nature is neither good nor evil," she said. "What happens is what counts. You'd better take what people say literally. More often than notthey tell you true. Do you know Marty, I feel all high-school girlish going for a soda?" "That's too much to untangle at once." He pulled off where the road was wide. He put both hands on her shoulders and shook her gently. "Speak slowly in short words." "Sure, Marty. Arlis Mundy doesn't like the world. She wants to do something about it. She doesn't like the United States most, because she knows it best. The why could be hubris and three unsatisfactory husbands. It's surprising how much time you can waste with why when the house is burning down. Hubris is overweening pride. And she is using the most advanced technology for old and dark purposes. Marty, I think I'll have a strawberry soda -- " He popped a smacking kiss on her mouth to get her attention and succeeded beyond expectation. It was Girl Cloud-Walking, who caught her breath and murmured, "Besides, she does violence to the principle of duality -- oh, my goodness -- men and women belong together and complement each other -- " She surfaced again flushed and rosy. "So when the first good maps were being made, things were horribly stirred up and they called it the Renaissance. And with the blank spaces filled in -- will you leave a girl no secrets? -- the First World War came along. And air photography we;nt on between the wars and a little more was stolen -- " "What was stolen?" he asked in a muffled voice. "The soul of the Earth." "Oh, no." "Yes. And things settled down again until satellites and radio photos and the air-caught film drops and especially those in color -- when you come right down to it, do you think the people have souls whose pictures are most taken?" She had his attention on two levels and he slowly disengaged the action on one. "Presidents, ballplayers, movie people," she went on a little breathlessly. "I'm not sure television counts unless it's recorded -- " "Primitive superstition," he snorted. "Soul stealing!" "Bad things happen. Did you hear about the airliner on the Kansas-Nebraska border? They "Clear Air Turbulence, I know." "What you don't know is it happened when the very first montage was done. I'm extending from an arbitrary center, forty degrees north, ninety-eight degrees west. Arlis Mundy was on the platform with me. There was a fly buzzing around. I don't know how it got in. She caught the fly out of the air with a snatch of her hand. She is very quick. The plane did a cartwheel over Burr Oak, Kansas." "I'm getting thirsty," he said. "Marty, what are we going to do?" "The second thing that comes to mind is Garberville." "You don't believe me?" "What do you want me to do? I'll do it." "I want to get into Arlis Muncy's office some day when you take her flying. I don't think her flat maps correlated enough. I want a key. What I don't want is to see the rest of the country as far out in left field as she is." "Birdeena Ora Oza Yadon, Girl World Saver?" "It's not because I asked for the job -- it's just because if I quit somebody else will put the map together. Honest and truly. I'm my-heart-is-in-my-throat afraid. Let's go get that soda." San Francisco three days later Deena found the negatives in an orange-colored file cabinet. She took them to Mesi Stevens who said he would be happy to blow them up for her, just for the change. She hid the prints in the middle of Texas and returned the negatives. When Mrs. Mundy was away again, she made collage with all her skill and precision. Earthquake at Harrahl Town devastated! Violent shocks recall #I New Madrid disaster! If Birdeena was patient, Marty Sanderson was not. The earthquake in the Midwest bothered him. He got Paul Maniatti to fix a picnic lunch and took Birdeena past the airstrip and up the road a mile beyond the dam. She was sparkling but he was troubled. They walked along the narrow lake and spread lunch above a pleasant cove. "It's wicked superstition," he said. "Have another piece of chicken." "Deena, the earthquake's only logical. There's a banana-shaped belt running north-south from the middle of Oklahoma through Kansas into southeast Nebraska. Just because they had a Richter three point four at Oklahoma City doesn't mean Arlis Mundy had anything to do with it." "These home-cured olives are good." "Nobody believes you can steal a soul by photography." "Seen any pictures of Howard Hughes lately? Marty, there are more ham sandwiches." "You are out of your Indian mind!" "Over you," she said shyly. He groaned in exasperation. "Tell you what, Marty. Let me take a sneaky peek. That unfortunate woman is up all hours and I've noticed things happen in the morning. Before dawn is an awful time if you've been up all night, hating." "I'll make you a deal," he said. "I'll get the as-builts out of my files. We'll both take a look and see what goes on. I don't agree with you and I don't like any part of this -- " "I'm glad you can come," she said simply. "I'm scared." The next morning he scratched on her door at #:# a.m. She was dressed in blue jeans and a black sweater. He had a roll of corrected blueprints in his hand. "Here you are," he said, "but we caii't go this morning. I got a call last night after you'd gone to bed. I've got to pick up a couple of Internal Revenue Service men along with the Foundation's tax attorney. Eight o'clock in San Francisco. I want to run a check on the plane before I take off. Okay, Deena?" "Anything you want is all right with me." He grinned at her broadly, kissed her soundly and went out softly. She studied the blueprints. She took her courage and her flashlight and went up stairs she had never seen before. She climbed a ladder to a black attic. There was a catwalk through a wilderness of rafters and insulation and steel trusses. Ducting ran like rectangular snakes. Every forty feet she came, to a solid partition with a door. Bundles of wires followed the catwalk on one side, conduit and pipes on the other. The place was cold and black and quiet. She opened a final door. Blocky, louvered sha#es were droning. There was a hisk and whine of moving air. Stacks for the heating and ventilation units ran through the roof. A relay clicked and her heart turned over when a motor stopped. Beyond the machinery was the enormous, unpartitioned and solid-decked attic of the map cube. The trusses and girders were heavier. She stepped carefully over electric motors and gearbox assemblies. They were the support system for the overhead tracks of the vertical maps. She walked a line of nailheads with the utmost caution to a drum of cable. She lifted a trapdoor. It was an inspection panel for the tracks. Then she lifted a two-foot square of ceiling module. She lay on her stomach. The view was puzzling. She moved away from the obstruction of the tracks and saw the sliced-off portion of the Earth way and away below. It would accommodate the central section of the North American continent at the determined scale. In the very center were the color air photos of her montage. They took the shape of a webbed X with the corners filled in at Arlis Mundy's direction. Birdeena had been precisely on the Geodetic Survey's control points as they were plotted. It could be a handsome job, she thought rather ruefully. Something moved on the blank world around the cross. It lurched with a horrible grace away from the mapped area, a preposterous shrunken midget, a child's drawing with a head and legs but no torso. The legs went front and back from her direct overhead view. The figure spun and leaped over the montage. It sank to the surface on the other side and stretched out with the head near the edge of the map. It was Arlis Mundy. She wore an ice-green leotard. She crossed her legs and sat in ferocious concentration. Was she thinking hate at the world? Panic? Hysteria? She moved her head in a curious forward rocking motion. She was blowing gently over a corner of Missouri. Half an hour later Birdeena stood in her shower and asked herself a little shakily if she felt like God, looking down on Earth. She dressed again and went for an early breakfast. The radio that morning had a news filler about the Jet stream swinging south. Birdeena decided she was looking from Earth down into Hell. Arlis Mundy took them to the map room. "The spherical surface is built with the octagonal sections in question ribbed for strength and precision assembly." Each piece was turned to a thousandth's machine. Yes, it was expensive. And it rotates and that wasn't cheap. The architectural engineers wrote the specs. Certainly other construction was considered, screeded casting plaster, a fiberglass section from a concave form... man. "The government is concerned with expense?" She turned her head away and Birdeena saw her instant silent scream -- all the muscles of her neck corded. She resumed control and turned back to the men. "The contract, the earnest money, the progress payments, the receipted bills are filed in my office. My attorney will be with you. I won't." She left the room. Birdeena saw Marty at lunch. He said Arlis Mundy inspected I he Queen Air while he was out on the air strip, regrading and rolling a hollow. He told Birdeena he expected orders to bring an axe and fly east, so Arlis Mundy could chop down the Washington Monument. When Birdeena went back to work, laying out nylon fiber paper on which the collage was tissuefixed in curvature by a special drymount press, she saw Arlis Mundy in the comm room, speaking into a microphone. Arlis Mundy turned off the radio and said to Deena, "I missed them on the ground. The invoices must go out today. Will you run this envelope over to the strip and give it to Marty Sanderson?" Doc Crowell said he would drive her. They arrived at the hangar just as the Queen Air appeared over the treetops with flaps down, sideslipped and landed. Halfway along the field a cloud of mist trailed behind the right wheel. The plane stumbled forward on the tricycle gear -- and did not slow. Crowell spun dirt onto the runway. He said something about too fast to stop, too slow to take off and it would sure as hell flip if Marty tried to turn. Birdeena folded the envelope of invoices and put it into her purse. Sanderson chose to go between his trees but he could not mangae to hit dead even. The left wing tore off with a wrenching squall and leapfrogged through the brush into the rocky stream. The fuselage pivoted on the other wing. It crumpled. The stub reached for the sky. The wreck slammed to the ground. Sanderson flung open the door and threw out two men. They got up and walked dazedly. He hung a third out of the cabin, dropped to the ground and slung him over his shoulder. They all staggered away and were in a stumbling run when the gasoline hissing on hot metal went whoomp and a billowing ball of flame rose higher than the tree. They tumbled into the wagon smelling of blood and singed hair and shock. At the hangar Crowell phoned the house and the U.S. Forest Service about the fire. Birdeena ripped a clean rag for Marty to hold on the jagged cut from temple to ear while she mopped his bloody face with a wet towel. He said, "Ruptured brake line. Switches off but it burned. Too bad. Give a pretty to see if it was cut and taped. Oh, well." She said, "Press harder. And be more careful. The life you save is not entirely your own any more." to a stop and said she would drive the men to the hospital. Crowell would direct the fire crew. She drove the wagon with two men in shock beside her. Marty was in the back, steadying the unconscious man. Birdeena mopped his blood from her dress. She watched a green pumper arrive and water down the wreck. She washed her face and hands. She got her purse and opened the envelope. It had invoices in it, all from the files, a year and a half old. Dinner was quiet. Arlis Mundy came in and had a cup of coffee with the staff. She said one of the other was burned and the doctor suspected internal injuries. Her attorney had a dislocated shoulder and bruises and Marty Sanderson had twelve stitches in his head and was resting uneasily. He wanted to get out. She flicked her upper lip with a pointed tongue. G irl Cloud-Walking awoke at two that morning with a quiet heart. She dressed as she had the night before and climbed to the attic. She thought of Changing Woman, a favorite figure among the Holy People of the Navahos. Changing Woman taught the People to control wind, lightning and storms and how to keep all forces in harmony with each other. She developed ways of doing things that were partly practical and partly magical. Girl Cloud-Walking removed the inspection panel and looked at the world below. A naked figure was dancing there. All restraint was gone. It was a dance of indecent triumph. She put back the ceiling panel. She replaced the trapdoor, returned through the attics and down the ladder. She walked the silent corridors to the loft. She turned on all the lights. Without haste and without waste motion she took the montage Mesi Stevens had blown up for her and fixed it together. She laid it out on the curved surface and the edges were lifted. Of course, she thought practically. One of the large tables was very slightly arched. It should approximate the scale almost montage with every detail in fine contrast. She could see the airstrip, the road and the house. She fixed it to the table and shoved it into proper orientation. She clenched her fist above her head and W. Macfariane -- the W stands for Wallace -- started reading science-fiction magaiines back when an occupation of scientists therein was boiling down lobsters to a serum which, if injected into kidnaped heroines, would turn them into crustaceans. The Job never got done -- perhaps because the gals were made of solid wood -- but it made for a sense of wonder. Indeed, the giri-intolobster syndrome established a theme in the writer's mird: man's ability to berKi the observed world to his fancy. Ever since that revelation from sf, Macfarlane has enjoyed a delightful life. He grew up in Berkeley, graduated from Northwestern, accepted a pressing invitation to join the army, and has lived on an apple ranch in the mountains of San Diego county since #. When the apples freeae in blossom, Macfarlane turns to constructing worlds on paper -- even though he believes the original b a magnificent system, designed to keep a thirtkiitg animal entertained for as long as it lives. He has been sstraordinarily fortunate in hb friends, who tell him about science and man arKi kindly leave him the pleasure of shakirtg the pieces into patterns. Hb wife b pretty arnl amiPhoto by LeightonBerkely able; their children, vastly errtertainirtg. Mile programs for Xerox; Docia b in Australia, and Sally illuminates the teenage world in high school. Macfarlane b a modest pragmatist and a rabid middle-of-the-roader. He reads omnivorously aid cheerfully admires critically unfashionable writers. He believes sf b a cartdle in a dark world of fixed belief, and that b why he writes it. caught her breath. She thumped the map softly. Nothing happened. She bent and blew gently. Birdeena straightened to listen -- no wind at all outside. She kicked off her shoes and climbed to the table top. She bent and blew fiercely this time. The door to the office slammed open. Hell's own Queen stood there in a fiery orange wrapper. Her eyes were a mad gray fog. Of course. Girl Cloud-Walking understood. It was a matter of intent. In sorrow, in compassion, in absolute determination she brought her heel down on the Mendocino coast. The building rocked and shruddered. Changing Woman danced and the world reeled under her and the Empress of Hell screamed soundlessly and screamed again. She wheeled to her office, a shadow seeker from the light, and the desk charged down the rocking floor. The door slammed shut of itself and sprang open again. Changing Woman saw her through both open doors, standing on the balcony, then flying and flying -- as Girl Cloud-Walking herself was flying from the table in the jolting, punching, rumbling earthquake. Mr. Richter would admire this one. Deena was not surprised to wake by firelight. The electricity had gone with Arlis Mundy. The world was askew but steady now. The fire was licking at the photo files. Fire had no malicious intent. A door pushed open with a crash. Marty Sanderson stood there looking like the Sun, husband to Changing Woman. Changing Woman dwelt in a wondrous house on western waters. She was ever young and ever radiant in beauty. But Marty had a lopsided bandage on his head and Girl Cloud-Walking said "Aie!" when he picked her up. And she was content as he carried her through the shambles of the building, Birdeena Ora Oza Yadon, a safe little watermelon as the fire crackled and grew and roared behind them. respondent) The energy released during an earthquake is sufficient to run a battleship at full speed for # years or raise a cubic mile of rock # feet into the air. "Nonsense!" says a UC Geophysical scientist. "It is impossible to put any comparative numerical value on a force that shifts 'solid' earth twenty feet vertically." He deplored hysteria and rumors that "exotic machinery" found in the ashes of the Mundy Foundation could have any connection with the tragedy that took the life of a great and generous woman... Keep science in perspective We don't see science in isoscientists keeping up on fields lation from the other activities outside their specialties -- as of man. Our main purpose is well as engineers, students, to encapsulate scientific news teachers and laymen, into a readable weekly format You'll like Science News, to provide accurate, up-to-theYou'll find it gives you a fresh minute facts and commentary perspective on the world of about what's happening in the science. That ought to be worth world of science. To provide more to you than #, but intelligent discussion of public that's all you need to pay for issues related to science. And # concise, lively, weekly isto put it all into perspective. sues. Our readers include eminent Mail the coupon today. science news A Science Service Publication #I W. Center St. Marion, Ohio # Send me # weekly issues of  I enclose #.  Bill me. GA# then -- a magnetologist?" "There's no such word. Magnetometerologisl would be closer, but there aren't any of those either. At least not in the dictionary." This conversation occurred between David Groves and Gregory Ohno. Actually Groves was a geophysicist and his particular interest was magnetism. Magnetic fields of the Earth, their secular variations, things like that. In this case -- the magnetic field or fields of the moon. "Just about here. I'd say." Groves stopped the buggy. This was Pegasus #, and the men were in the center of a small unnamed crater near Leontievski. Unnamed, that is, until Groves decided to call it Peacock. The name had stuck. This was Pegasus #, yes, and honest-to-God scientists were beginning to join the astros on the moon. Happy days for science -- if you can forget Pegasus #. It almost seems as if the Space Program were trying to make amends for that one. Groves and Ohno were both scientists and there was only one astro on this mission. He was Felton Ford and he was in orbit, minding the command module, Vireo. And all the astros and the scientists had had a bit of psychiatric screening since the splashdown of what was left of Pegasus #. For reasons of economy the scientists were semi-astros. Either Groves or Ohno could pilot the lunar module to rendezvous with Vireo -- but they were scientists first and astros second. With Ford it was the other way around. "Houston?" Groves said. "Roger, Dave. Your seminar is coming in loud and clear." They had been talking for some time about nomenclature in different areas of science. "Dullsville." That was Ford, from orbit. "Okay, Houston. You have our position?" "Roger. Suggest you initiate magnetometry program now." "That's why I called, Harry. We're beginning now." Groves walked back to the nonmagnetic cart, switched on the magnetometer, checked the calibrations. The indicators showed nothing of interest, which was no surprise, but the pens were recording properly, tracing the first magnetographs made by a magnetometer moving directly over the lunar surface. Groves checked the odometer, took a tentative bearing on a distant minicrater and started the buggy. "I don't get it, Dave. The moon doesn't have a magnetic field worth mentioning. Right?" "Depends what you mean by worth mentioning. I told Leeds we should have more interdisciplinary briefing. I don't know any more about geology than you do about physics. As it happens, old buddy, a magnetometer emplaced by Apollo Twelve found a steady subsurface magnetic field in Oceanus Procellarum. This field was localized, not global." Through his bubble Ohno darted a glance of interest. "A magnetized meteorite?" The look of interest was followed by one of outrage. "Why wasn't I told about that? They filled us full enough of the magnetic constituents of all the Apollo samples. That's another one the training program blew." "Yes, alas. The Apollo Twelve anomaly is really more up your alley than mine. I guess you didn't keep up with your outside reading. Or put it down to the complexity of the program. Or to the brevity of the briefing. Or to the time we spent learning to be quasi-astros. Anyway, that magnetic field in Oceanus Procellarum is almost certainly not caused by a buried magnetic jneteorite. Consensus is that it's a magnetized chunk of native lunar material." "I don't believe it. Magnetized by what?" "That's the question and you're right to disbelieve. Just a minute -- I want to see if this thing is working now that it's in motion." The magnetometer was gimbaled and mounted with much sophistication. It had never malfunctioned in simulation, but that wasn't always the last word. Groves stopped the buggy again, walked back to the cart and checked. "Houston?" "Roger, Dave." "Magnetometer systems AOkay. Random excursions of insignificant magnitude. Two gammas plus or minus small fractions. Will continue according to plan." "Roger, Dave. Houston out." Groves started the buggy. "Whatever it is, it could have been magnetized a long time ago by a close approach to Earth, of course. Within about three Earth radii would do it," Groves said. "If that' s so, then there should be other -- " Thoughtful pause. "Oh. I get it." "Right. That's one of the reasons we're dragging this device in a neat triangular pattern across the center of Peacock." "Why can't the thing in Procellarum be a magnetized artifact?" "Don't think they didn't think of that, old buddy. But the field gradient was too low even to be measured -- and there was no field change when Intrepid went back up to Yankee Clipper. There would have been if that field were due to an artifact. The reasons are complex." "So. No Sentinel ?" "Not there, anyway." Groves glanced at the odometer, continued forward a half kilometer and stopped the buggy. "Okay, Greg. Station A. Do your thing." T he moon soil was dark and crunchy, flat and even, sprinkled with rocks that were quite small, nothing larger than an orange. Groves checked the magnetograph. The squiggles were insignificant. Then he took a collecting bag and did what he was supposed to do to help Ohno. Looking for rocks of any size that showed striation, he began circumnavigating the buggy and cart at a distance of about thirty meters. Ohno took many photographs of rock and soil and, using selective criteria, collected several rocks. Station A mission accomplished. "Nothing striated," Grove said. "Me neither. I didn't think we'd find any. But we have to look -- for the terrestrial tektite boys." "Tektites aren't striated." "Well, Dave, you're right about needing more cross-talk between the disciplines. Tektites aren't striated and we don't look for tektites on the moon, but we look, wherever we go on the moon, for striated rock. That's related, and again too complex to go into. Let's get going." Groves started the buggy, made a # turn to the right, and they began the second leg of the expedition. "Magnetometer okay?" Groves nodded. "Why aren't your data being telemetered?" "I'd bloody well like to know that myself. I tried to find out but got a typical runaround. Some project engineer probably didn't bother to compare the weight of the polygraph we're carrying around with that of the hardware needed to transmit the data back. Who knows?" Silence for a time. Then: "I've been thinking," Ohno said. They were riding the buggy. "Mercy!" "No, really. Why does our noble mission put down so close to that Russian lem? We must be within a mile of it right now." "They told us all about that." "Yes. I know what they told us." Houston was hearing all this -- not that it made any difference. "They told us the geologists wanted rocks from very near that place, but not from right on top of it." "So what's your problem?" "Well, this is really my question: since we're so close -- why haven't we been programed to go over and have a look at it?" "Damned if I know," Groves said. "Houston?" "Roger." "Being as how we're so close to that Russkie lem, why don't we go over and have a look at it?" "We went into that in your briefing. No scientific value. Sentimental, maybe, but not scientific. What you're doing is more important. All right?" "Just curious," Ohno said, as they continued to Station B. Ohno from time to time saw a promising piece of moon and asked to stop the buggy. Groves looked up at Earth now and then. Glamor and excitement on the moon, right? Magnetometer working well, film being exposed, collecting bags Station C, which is back where this trip started. Why are the Stations designated so? Ask someone back on Earth. "That's it," Groves said, stopping the buggy. "I'll check the magnetometer and we'll go back to base. Not much time left." He crunched over the dark soil and scanned the polygraph. He stood there looking at it. He shook his head and sunlight danced on his bubble. "Let's go," Ohno said, a touch of irritation in his tone. "Come here a minute, Greg." Groves had unrolled, clumsily, a three-foot section of the magnetograph. "How's General Motors?" asked Ohno. He had an interest in the market. He looked at the lines. He didn't have to be a magnetologist to get the picture. "Oh, wow -- " "Yeah. Oh, wow." "Dave?" Houston. "Roger, Harry. Mission control from Redbird. Gentlemen. Approx halfway between Stations B and C we have hooked a fish. Not a very big one, but we've got something on the hook." There was lots of conversation after that -- and that was how we found Magnetic Anomaly #. Graves and Ohno had to return to their module then and the boys in the back room at Houston spent the next eight hours in hectic revision of the rest of the Program of Pegasus #. R eplanning the mission was . hectic because Pegasus # had just about run out of time when the anomaly was found. After completion of the triangular exploration Groves and Ohno were supposed to spend six hours in the module, eating, sleeping and resting. During the first four hours after that they were to set up a battery of instruments, including a seismometer, two reflectors to bounce back laser beams sent from Earth, a few other oddments and a topsecret black box with an on-off switch on one side of it and an adjustable antenna sticking out of its top. After that they had two hours to prepare for liftoff and docking with the command module, Vireo. The six hours of sleeping and eating were necessary and went according to plan, though Groves didn't sleep much. All other activities, however, except for planting the black box, were scrubbed by the boys in the back room, a decision which caused understandable anguish among the scientists whose experiments were thereby canceled. The command decision was that Groves and Ohno, once the black box was taken care of, would spend the remaining available time collecting all the data they could with respect to Anomaly #. W gotten box, anyway?" Ohno was impatient again and they were having trouble with the antenna. "That seems to be classified. How now, Houston?" "Back a trifle the way you just came from." Groves made awkward movements and swore. "Hold it. Now just a little toward the horizon. Easy. Little more. Now back one micron. That's it." "Roger. And that's at least a half-hour lost to magnetomelry. Let the record show that the means provided to adjust this antenna are ill-suited to the purpose. With your permission we'll now proceed on our business. We don't have too much time;" "No need to get sore, Dave. That box is important." "What's in it? Put on the scrambler and tell us." "I don't know, cross my heart, I really don't." Ohno was firing up the buggy. This time he would be driving. Groves got aboard and they retraced their previous path between Stations C and B. About a third of the way to B Groves said, "Okay," and Ohno stopped the buggy. Groves got off and checked the magnetograph. "Okay. Slow ahead." Groves walked beside the cart, watching the squiggly lines. How come I'm more tense now than I was at liftoff? Crunching over the dark soil. One of the pens began a wider excursion. "Here it  comes. Slower." He thought of the last seismograph he had seen, though the curves were not similar. Maximum. "Keep going." The excursions diminished. "Okay. Turn around." Back to maximum. No need to mark the spot, the tracks would be there a long time. "All right, this way." Groves indicated a path at right angles to B-C, in the direction toward the center of their triangle. Again the excursions diminished. "Around the other way and straight ahead. Houston?" "Roger, Dave." "How come this isn't telemetered?" "Payload considerations, I think." "Okay." They crossed B-C and the pens began to go off the chart. "Hold it one." Ohno stopped the buggy and Groves adjusted the range of the magnetometer. "Go ahead." There was some backing telling them how much time they had left. Groves had to switch to another range before they sat directly over maximum field. "This is it, Houston. Would you believe one hundred and seventyfive gammas?" "The field gradient. Groves, the field gradient?" A different voice. "Hello, Edmund. I thought you might be there. It will take some figuring, but it sure the hell is there. Not like Apollo Twelve, don't worry." Edmund didn't ask if Groves thought they might have an artifact, but that was what was on his mind, and Groves knew it. "Can't tell how deep it is yet," Groves said. "Be nice if we had a shovel or corer or something. Pity somebody didn't think to send one along. Well, we'll have lots of data to play with when we get back, Edmund." "That's right. Don't get lost on the way, friend." Capcom came on. "You have thirty-four minutes before beginning return to module. Suggest you -- " "I know, I know. We'll get back to work now." They did so, collecting such data as they could in the lime they had. Pegasus # returned to Earth without, as they say, incident. Pegasus # was loo far along its own path to be diverted to Peacock. versy, diverted to Peacock for the more or less express purpose of studying Magnetic Anomaly #, or MA-# as everyone came to call it. It was not an easy diversion, since the scientists involved in the original Pegasus # program screamed like wounded eagles, but in the end it was not the scientists who carried the day. It was the romanticists. Romanticists? Yes. The Pegasus # magnetographs were studied relentlessly by anyone who could claim even a peripheral interest and the consensus was that there was a possibility that the magnetic field was created by an artifact located approximately two to four feet beneath the lunar surface at the pinpointed site in the center of Peacock. Pegasus # wasn't going up there to gather rocks (though there would, of course, be some of that) or to make seismological experiments or to do anything much but find out, if they could, what MA-# was. So, because of the possibility of an artifact the romanticists won. Gregory Ohno did what he could to have a visit to the Russian lem included in the Pegasus # mission, but lop brass said that was a no-no, a zero priority. If the Russians wanted a look at that lem they could send up their own mission. And everyone knew they weren't going to the moon much these days. David Groves accepted with ill grace the fact that there was no way he could make the roster for Pegasus #. His pleas had gone all the way to the top. No way. Slots in the Space Program must, in all equity, be passed around, must they not? But I discovered... No way. In any case, Pegasus # wouldn't have much to do with magnetometers. More like archeology. "Needless to say. I'm more than a little pissed off." "It isn't as if MA-# is your personal property, Dave." "I know that. But that is the way I feel, damn it." Groves and Ian Scanlan, another geophysicist, were having drinks in a bar not far from the Space Center. "So what do you think it is?" Scanlan asked. "Consider the possibilities. There aren't too many, after all." "Right. There may be an artifact up there. If so, it comes from the solar system or from outside. If from our system, it's from Earth, the moon or other planet or satellite. If not, it's from outside. That exhausts the possibilities." "That's right, old buddy. A simple-minded statement that doesn't say very much, but it takes care of the geography. How about trying for the why?" Scanlan ordered another round. He said, "I can give you one right off the lop of my frizzled head." "Go." "From outer space comes a spaceship and something goes wrong -- if it can, it will, remember -- and it whops into what is now, thanks to you, called Peacock. Why did you name it that, by the way?" "That's a long story. I'll tell you another time." "Okay. So, this ship whops into Peacock -- there being no Peacock there before, this crater being caused, built, created by the crash of a derailed spaceship into that place. So the artifact is the ship that fell there, making the crater within whith we have found an artifactual magnetic anomaly." "You all right?" asked Groves. "You talk funny." "I'm as all right as you." Groves found nothing to say to that. "Right on, old buddy. But the anomaly isn't big enough, not by orders of magnitude, to be a ship. So give me some more." "Glad to oblige. So it could be a Sentinel like. You know? Some communication left behind by folks so superior to us we have to bend down to crawl under a worm, right?" "What?" "Superior beings, man." Scanlan whirled his glass around, looked at it as if wondering what it was trying to tell him. "Trouble with you is, you got no soul." G roves took offense to this and ordered another round, though ihe glasses before them were not empty. "I've all the soul you have, and maybe a little bit more, though my skin be white. I've been there, right? Right. Tell me this, then, keeper of sacred secrets: assuming this is an intelligence-indicating artifact planted three feet beneath that dark lunar soil -- and for the moment I'm there? What does it do? What is it going to say? To whom? Could be it's a signaling device for the home folks. Their home folks." "Something is telling me it's time to go home," Scanlan said, but he didn't seem about to go. The bar was dark. The walls were of phony soot-stained wood and it was a comfortable place. "It's not time to go home yet," Groves said. "Though home does have advantages at times. Assume again, then, that it's an intelligently planted artifact. What is its purpose? Why is it there?" They were both tired. Both were drinking a lot -- the two of them sitting in an Earthbound, darkened bar near the Space Center and wishing they could go up next time. And knowing that was out for both of them, one having made it once, the other thinking now he never would. "Tell me this first, brother. Why is it underground?" "I have the answer to that one. It was emplaced a long time ago on the surface, dead-center in Peacock, but the general course of events has since buried it. Micrometeorites, dust -- like that." "That would make it out of sight back there, man. Back in time, I mean." "That's right, it would. Look. I'm serious about this. We're as certain as can be that the anomaly isn't a spaceship that crashed into Peacock. No way. So back to my question, which you evade. If it is an artifact -- which is, after all, only a possibility -- who put it there and why?" "Okay, friend," Scanlan said. His dark gaze, thrust over the top of his tumbler and into the eyeballs of Groves, reminded its recipient of a saw-whet owl he'd raised a long time back. "Okay. So ask it from this end. We are a superior culture and we're out there exploring the galaxy, spreading the gospel. Or maybe we're involved in rapine and plunder, who knows? We find a planetary system with, say, CroMagnons living in caves. Or with Elizabethans, the equivalent thereof, doing their thing in the equivalent of London. Oh, to be in England, now that -- " "All right," said Groves. "We're a superior folk and we find a system in a primitive stage of development. Do we have a message for them? Suppose we go to the stars tomorrow. We want to tell them something? The primitives we find?" Scanlan ordered another round, mentioning to no one in particular that this round would be the last. He focused his owlish eyes upon the problem, as if to solve it by mere visual observation, it lying there on the table between them. "I think," he said, after some moments, "that we do. We're superior folk, right? So We give them something to help them make it." "Okay. I hope that's the way it is. Why do we put it on the moon, then, instead of on the planet?" "A question of timing," Scanlan said. "That says it all." Silence for some moments. "Pegasus Four was me," Groves said. "What?" "I keep wondering what happened to Stuart Stong and Nora Ivanovna when Harry Littlewood flew Pigeon back to Glaucous and left them there. Pegasus Two." "They died, man. Bad scene. Not yours to worry about." "We were pretty close to them on Peacock. We could have gone over and had a look." "Wouldn't have bought you nothing -- and they, wouldn't let you do it." Their concern with and about MA-#, and Grove's thought of the first two astronauts to be stranded on the moon, had taken them some distance from Earth and they wanted to stay out there a while. But guilt feelings are to be dealt with and they handled their present ones by getting out of there and going home to their respective wives, both of whom were, by then, quite angry. command module carrying four and a lem putting three of these onto the lunar surface. They touched down within a hundred feet of the selected site. One astroscientist in the command module and three scientist-astros in the lem, which was called Poseidon. (The command module was Neptune. One of the romanticists was a deep-sea fisherman by avocation, and his nomenclature had prevailed.) Two of the scientists, Perkins Savage and Sato Sugiyama, were archeologists. Their astro training had been hurried and minimal. They had been chosen for their skill in unearthing and uncovering ancient artifacts. The third scientist was Corbi Acampora. He had been born in Napoli and he was a real quasi-astro -- he could fly Poseidon up to Neptune, which could in no way be said for either Sugiyama or Savage. The first archeological mission to the moon. "Those tracks are as fresh as if they were made yesterday," Savage said. Acampora looked into Savage's bowl with contempt. "You were expecting maybe they'd be washed out, rained away, perhaps demolished by meteorites?" Pegasus # didn't have a proper buggy because they weren't going to cover much territory, but it had a considerable payload of things to dig with. Shovels, picks, probes, corers, things like that, and a magnetometer. These were in a cart that had been so constructed that two men pulled and one pushed. Pegasus # would have been in trouble if they had missed the target by much, but there hadn't been any worry about that. "No," Savage said, pushing. "It's just that they are so fresh. They might have been made a minute ago." Crunching over that dark lunar soil. "How quick and fresh art thou -- " "May I politely ask what that is from?" Sugiyama asked. "Twelfth Night. If music be the food of love, play on. You know?" "I am archeologist. A very sensitive one, granted, but still only archaeologist." "I may say the same for myself. Anyway; O spirit of love! How quick and fresh art thou -- " "Oh, really? This is a lunar mission? Or looney?" Acampora, pulling. "Do you know how many squawk boxes are tuned into that" "I'm glad you reminded me," Savage said as they approached the site. "The nature of this mission, Pegasus Six, is archeological. And this is it. We're there, Houston. Or here, as you prefer." "Roger. You're there. Savage, from the official Houston point of view." "Roger. Site appears as described and photographed by Pegasus Four. Program commencing." Acampora began scrounging around with the inevitable rock bag. His functions were geologic and photographic. He was not a real geologist, just a rock collector. Savage and Sugiyama made a brief check with the magnetometer, an instrument neither had heard of until recently, and began a delicate probing of that dark soil. They found MA-#, by probe, within minutes. It was no more than thirty inches beneath the lunar surface. "We have contact, Houston," Savage said. "We'll begin to shovel." Savage and Sugiyama marked off a two-by-six-foot area and began to excavate. "Real weird," Sugiyama said. "Lightest dirt I've ever dug. And the most uncomfortable suit to do it in." Twenty-eight inches down Savage said, "There she is." Acampora came over to look and to photograph. Savage and Sugiyama now scooped with great care, removing lunar soil from whatever it was. Silence. "Well?" Houston, unable to wait. "Just a minute," Savage said. Scooping more soil off and brushing clear an area of about a square foot. "You appreciate the fact that we're waiting," Houston said, a touch of acid coming over the microwaves. "Yes. You probably won't tike this. This is no artifact. Sorry about that." "What -- " "Where are the geologists, now that we need them? It's, well, a rock. Looks like a meteor. I mean meteorite. I haven't seen one in a long time." "We'd like you to describe what you can now see of it." The voice from Houston trailed behind it a wake of palpable disappointment. "We know you're sorry," Sugiyama said. "We wanted an artifact too. More than you did, no doubt. It looks like a piece of dusty gray iron more than anything else. Moon dirt on it. We can't see much of it. Give us a little time and we'll tell you more." "The surface, what is the surface like?" "What?" "Pitted or smooth? Rough or regular? What is the surface like?" "Small pits," Savage said. "If it is a meteorite it didn't fall through much atmosphere. We'll extend the trench." Acampora seemed bored but he photographed, with competence, the continuing excavation. The men scooped away the moon dirt and brushed off the moon dust and found that the object of this very expensive mission was not -- to archeologists -- of much interest. Back to Poseidon then, to dine sleep and perhaps to dream. And Savage dreamed. woman and an American man, marooned on the moon by a madman. His dream has not been recorded anywhere, but this is what happened because of it: Suiting up in Poseidon, mikes off. "Sugi." "Yes?" "Our mission is an archeological bust, right?" "Right." "But there's lots else to do. We set up the programs canceled from Pegasus Four, handily sent along with us in case the archeology didn't work out. We've plenty to do to keep us busy after we've spent a few more hours on the damn meteorite, if that's what it is. But you and Acampora can take care of the rock for a while." "What you have in mind, old buddy?" asked Acampora. "I'm going over the ridge of Peacock and have a look at the Russian lem." "I see why you want the mikes off," Sugiyama said. "Houston won't buy that -- and you know it." "No way they can stop me, is there? I'm going to go." And he went. There was a monstrous barrage of flak, of course, but Savage was persuasive and eventually got Houston's halfhearted approval. He would have gone anyway. X about a hundred yards from the top of the crater." "Slow down," said Houston. "Pulse and respiration are both way up there." "Roger," Savage said, but he continued to struggle to the crater's edge. Turning around, he saw Sugiyama and Acampora, small figures, digging around the rock. He reached the top and was stunned by the suddenly open view. "I do be dog," he said. "You all should be up here. This is some kind of view. I'll send you a picture postcard." He carried a camera, of course. He took some photographs. "I see the lem. About a hundred yards slightly to my right, down a gentle slope from here. I'll go on over." "Roger," said Houston. "Life support looks good. Take your time." "Yeah, sure," Savage said, beginning to walk toward the fallen spacecraft. "I have a weird feeling," he said some time later. "Like Tm about to open Tut-ankhamen's tomb." Finally, approaching the ship: "The hatch is open. Nobody home. Lots of tracks." He took many pictures. He found the male Russian astronaut. "This man looks like he died yesterday," he said. "Vacuum-packed, so to speak," he said, adopting this tone in defense of the unexpected and disconcerting sense of awe that he felt. And where the hell, he wondered, did the other two go? So he followed the tracks and found them. "I will be damned," he finally said. Everyone started talking at once, and Savage shut off the incoming audio. He stood there looking, thinking, and eventually taking some pictures. They were lying there, close together, fishbowls off. Savage, aided by his dream, put it all together. They had stayed in the lem until there'd been nothing left to breathe. Then they had suited up and come out here to sit on this small rise and look up at Earth. And a few minutes before there was nothing left to breathe in one of their suits (which one first? Savage wondered) they had both taken off the bowls and put their heads together for the last time. And they had died, right then. The way they'd fallen, fallen together, had an unplanned and uncontrollable beauty and Savage was reminded of ancient sculpture. He stood there some more, then turned on the incoming audio. "Houston?" "Roger, Perk, and just where the hell have you been?" "To the true school of modesty," he said and he told them about it. Subscribers Please Note If you change your address, please mail notification to: Galaxy Fulfillment Dept. I # Secatogue A venue Farmingdale. N.Y. #I # Allow # to # weeks for your notification to take effect. G roves and Scanlan were in Mission Control. Command module Neptune was halfway between here and there. Groves had an urgency to get on the horn and finally made.it. "Savage?" "Roger. Groves?" "Yes. I want to ask you something." "Right on." "What did you mean when you said that about the true school of modesty?" "Well, I'm glad somebody asked me that. You named our little crater up there, did you not? Peacock, yes. When I first heard you something came back to me from English Lit and I looked up the works of one Thomas Love Peacock. Great man. You know the quotation, of course, old buddy?" "I named the crater, didn't I?" "No offense, thin-skin. Anyway -- and you will appreciate this -- that's what it was like, that's how they looked. You'll see the pictures later. For the benefit of the uninitiate, what Mr. Peacock said was something like this: Ancient sculpture is the true school of modesty. Where they -- he was referring here to the Greeks -- where they had modesty, we have cant. There's more and you can look it up, but it ends with: Where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have cant, cant, cant. It came to mind, sort of, up there." "Roger. I dig. Thanks, Perk." Scanlan interposed: "Take good care of those pictures on the way down, you hear, white boy?" "Will do, Ian. Wish you could have been here, too." "Not room for all of us this trip." He relinquished the microphone. "Let's get out of here," he said to Groves. And they did. T he bar was dimly lit and the walls were of phony sootstained wood. They had been talking quite a while. Scanlan's dark gaze peered across the polished wood into David Groves. "So. We didn't find a sentinel, we found no artifact. But we got a message anyway. Right?" "Right. I wish I'd been up there." "So what else is new? You can see the pictures. Okay? We get the message. Savage sure as hell got it loud and clear. So who else will? Who, and in what places? How many, and where? Enough to make any difference?" "We'll see," Groves said, thinking it was about time to go home. "We'll see."  He traveled back to his youth T he old man paused when he came to the campus. The season was fall. A raw wind was blowing out of the west. It rattled the dead leaves that hung in tatters from the branches of academic elms and maples. It wrinkled the dead grass and blew through the naked shrubbery. Soon snow would come and the year would die and the new year would bow in. The old man was trembling, but not because he was cold. The university buildings in the background frightened him. He was terrified of the students strolling along the walk -- the long-haired, sloppily attired young men, the long-haired girls in overalls and denims. But he forced himjelf to go on and he made his old eyes focus upon the faces of the girls. It had cost him his life's savings to make the trip and he was determined not to go back empty-handed. None of the students seemed to notice him. It was as though he did not exist (in a way he didn't, he supposed). Repeatedly he had to step off the walk to avoid colliding with them. But he was used to such indifference. The young of each generation were invariably arrogant and self-centered. It was only natural that they should be. The world was their apple and they knew it. The old man began to lose some of his fear. The university buildings were far less formidable in appearance than memory had painted them. Memory was a poor painter at best. It overdrew, exaggerated. It added details that had never existed, left out others that had. And there was yet another consideration. You could never see something the second time in quite the same way you saw it the first, because the part of you that interpreted the initial impression was forever dead. The old man peered eagerly at the faces of the strolling girls, searching for Elizabeth's. It was her face alone that he wanted to see. He wanted to take its youthful radiance back with him so that the final years of his life might be less bleak -- so that some of the loneliness that had descended upon him after the death of his wife might be driven away. Just for a little while. A little while would be enough. When he finally found her face he was touched to his marrow. So young, he thought. So sweetly beautiful. It surprised him that he could recognize it so readily. Perhaps memory was not as poor a painter as he had thought. His heart pounded and his throat grew tight. The classic reactions, only in his case multiplied by one thousand. His vision dimmed. He found it hard to see. Elizabeth... She was walking beside a tall young man, talking to him and swinging her books. But the old man did not look at her companion. The moment was too precious to waste. Besides, he was afraid to look. The years... The couple grew closer, laughing and talking, warm and secure in the oasis of their youth. Elizabeth wore no hat, no kerchief. Her redgold hair danced in the wind, broke in evanescent waves along the soft shores of her childlike cheeks. Her lips were an autumn leaf lying lightly upon the lovely landscape of her face. Her eyes were shards of summer sky. She wore a shapeless gray sweater and paint-daubed dungarees. Her long and lissome legs were hidden from the sun. But memory served him well. He was crying now. Unabashedly, the way a drunk cries. Elizabeth. Elizabeth, my darling, my dear... She did not even notice him till she and her companion were almost abreast of him. Then she seemed to feel his gaze and looked into his eyes. She stopped and her face went white. Her companion halted beside her. The old man halted, too. Color came into Elizabeth's cheeks. Revulsion darkened the azure of her eyes. Her full lips thinned. "How dare you stare at me like that, you dirty old man!" Her companion was indignant. Angrily he confronted the old man. "I ought to punch you in the nose!" The old man was horrified. Why, they hate me, he thought. They look upon me as a leper. I didn't expect them to recognize me -- I didn't want them to. But this -- dear God, no! He tried to speak, but there was nothing he could say. He stood there dumbly, staring at the young man's strange and familiar face. "Dirty old man," Elizabeth said again. She took her companion's arm and the two of them walked away. Helplessly the old man stared after them, knowing that although he would go on living, from that moment on he would be dead. Why didn't I remember? he wondered. How could I have forgotten that poor old man? He returned on dead legs to the bosquet on the outskirts of the university town where the timefield burned, stepped into its shimmering embrace and sped back through the years that had transmuted him from a tall young man into something unclean. After paying the guard the second half of the agreed-upon bribe and leaving the time station by the rear entrance, he drove out to the cemetery where Elizabeth lay buried. He stood by the grave, in the bitter wind, for a long time. Again and again he read the inscription on the granite marker: B. -- d. in But Time the Thief had not yet finished. It trephined his skull and cut keep into his memories and extracted the soft summer nights and the sleeping flowers and the misty afternoons. It left only naked fields and tree-denuded hills. He read the inscription a final time. "Dirty old woman," he said.  James Blish Doubleday # Ed. Donald A. Wollheim Ernest Brahmah Int. by Lin Carter Ballantine # Ed Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia Avon #  Joseph Green Arthur C. Clarke Harper  Row # Brian N. Ball Arthur C. Clarke Harcourl Brace Jovanovich # A. E. Van Vogt Kit Pedlar and Gerry Davis Viking Press # sometimes extraordinary author A Case of Conscience, the "Cities in Flight" novels), editor Nebula Award Stories #. Kalki -- which is the journal of the James Branch Cabell Society) and, writing as in-depth, has given us Midsummer That is about as descriptive a phrase as saying that the Forsyte Saga is a story about some people. When Blish begins to ponder something he does it with care and rigor and a great gift for hypothesis. He is an argumentative man and when he finds himself unable to go along with some line of thinkingJ. B. Rhine's, perhaps or Soal's -- he tries to demolish it. His hypothesis in this case is interesting indeed: that the evoluthat of intelligence are mutually exclusive, mostly because intelligence does most of its chores better. To Blish, however, this does not mean that in the future that intelligence will necessarily disappear entirely from intelligent species. His deep and very wise insight into nature illuminates the fact that nature does not, need not, and probably will not proceed in a linear fashion to satisfy anyone's preconceptions. In Midsummer Century, the Birds (and believe me. they are a flock very different from Hitchcock's Birds) have developed a form -- or degreeof extrasensory, nonintelligent proclivity which seriously threatens humanity. But that is only one thread, one level of this unusual book. There are also a seriously considered thesis on the nature of death and an afterlife, and one on possession or the coexistence of one or more entities within another. Yes, and something to do with flying, too, which is the basis for one of the more exciting passages. During it the imprisoned protagonist kills one of his guards -- a bird -- and uses the corpse to glide himself out of the prison tower. Blish exhibits his usual flaw: he seems unable to put himself in the presence of dialogue and personally hear it -- if he did he wouldn't write it as he does and his dialogue would be as good as his narrative, which is very. In any case, he most assuredly has an engrossing book here. Recommended. tasy line (with the unicorn's head emblem) continues to disinter and present little-known or all-butforgotten delights. It has a heavy little casket of jewels in Kai Lung's Golden Hours by Ernest Brahmah, respectfully edited by Lin Carter. Kai Lung is a sort of Scheherezade Schweik AesopMunchausen from mythical-mystical China, who clumsies himself into one appalling predicament after another and gets out of each by telling stories -- more often than not to someone who knows he has not made his point but who lets him go anyway because the story was such fun. Once you tune in to Brahmah's Ching Lee type of periphrasis ("This humble and overrated person inexcusably suggests...") and begin to waltz with it -- for if you can't it will get in your way -- you'll be enchanted. D aw books is Donald A. Wollheim, editor become publisher, and he is presenting an interesting line. His guarantee (aside from his claim to like what science-fiction readers like -- and he ought to; he started in the field, rumor has it, some time between Cyrano de Bergerac and Hugo Gernsback) is that he will not publish anything that has been in paperback before. This he does by reprinting hardcovers from a while back, by buying originals and by making up collections in a new blend. More power to him. Examples in each category are these: My favorite for this month and probably for a good while to come: The Mind Behind the Eye, by Joseph Green, which was published in hardcover in England. Here is story-telling with a vengeance. I'm not claiming that Joseph Green is a National Book Award league writer, but he tells a rich and eventful tale with two strong pluses: one, he really makes you give a damn about his characters and, two, his is the newly liberated, no-taboo approach so sorely needed before the prudery was zapped. Here is really the best of both worlds. Too many writers seem to have the idea that demonstrating their liberation is all they have to do and do it instead of telling a whacking good yarn. Green brings in sex without a giggle or blush or brashness, and as an absolutely essential component to his narrative. And what a narrative -- not since Robert Young has there been a writer who envisages the gigantic as awesomely and specifically as Green. I'll give you this much: an alien invader is captured, not quite dead; his brain is irreparably damaged. He is three hundred feet tall. A space behind his eyeball is cleared away and fitted with two sets of computers, one for the autonomic system and one for the temporal chores, and two scientists, one a woman, get in there and make the giant live again -- go to Mars -- send out distress calls -- be rescued by the interstellar aliens. I enjoyed this to the point of public gratitude to Mr. Green An example of the originals Ball's The Probability Man. If you like convoluted plotting, worlds within worlds, time, space and history all recast into a concept of (to misquote the Bard) all the worlds are stages, then this is for you. For me, it's interesting that a #-foot giant overwhelms me with size and a time-spaceand-planets thing just hits me as a passable passe-temp.s. But I'm speaking my crotchets and perhaps they're not yours. like The Book of Van Vogt, a nice retrospective, and the # Annual World's Best SF, an activity Wollheim has been into for long enough to know well what he's doing. I have always liked his selections, though such a sweepingly inclusive title raises an eyebrow. It's not really as arrogant as it seems -- and nobody would demand an exactitude like "The Best # Science Fiction I Could Get." He got some pretty good ones. I'm not going to review the reprint of Ursula K. Le Gain's Rocannon's World, beyond reporting that it's available and stating that this is one author you can buy on sight. R oger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia have come up with a real treasure: Young Demons, the best anthology of stories about marvelous, terrifying, amazing and unforgettable children since dren of Wonder. There are eight stories, every single one worth the price of the whole book. I especially like -- love, and have always loved -- Kris Neville's Some of the original covers and inside illustrations are still available! These are the actual originals used from #S# through #. Some are already framed. Send stamped selfaddressed envelope for list and prices. Box #, Greenwich Village Station, New York, N.Y. # Bettyann in its original novelette form. The novel is excellent, too, but this one grabbed me when it first came out in #I and the advent of the novel made me a little sad: would I ever see the original again? Well, I did -- and so can you. B usy, busy Arthur Clarke. Completists are always down at the lumberyard with their hammers and saws, building extensions for the Clarke shelf. Quantity does not impair the special qualities of this giant in our field. Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations is a collection of articles, speeches, hypotheses and, well, speculations reprinted from a wide variety of publications. He expounds on science, technology, religion and Asimov, always with clarity and a good deal of dry humor. The Wind from the Sun is a new collection of fiction, his sixth, and contains all the stories he wrote in the 'sixties, which he terms "one of the most dramatic periods in the history of science and technology." It was indeed, and Clarke's nineteen stories reflect it well. Well-written and well-priced, this is a book worth having. K it Pedlar and Gerry Davis are, yet again, authors who do far better with ideas than with people. Mutant #: The Plastic Eaters is one of the most fascinating compendia of real and extrapolated science and technology that I have ever read. Microbiology, metallurgy, aeroand hydro-dynamics -- and then firstorder verisimilitude in the operation and internal function of aircraft and contemporary spacecraft -- all marvelous. The tight descriptions of the mysterious breakups of machines are almost unbearably realistic and suspenseful. It's only when it gets into interpersonal relationships that one comes back out of the book -- the one time one should go in deeper. I get angry about this -- see above, the remarks about Blish -- not because of the defects of an author but because of his merits. I get angry when I see someone pounding in tacks with a violin, even when it isn't my violin. I get many, many more books than I review, and flawed technique coupled with flawed ideation makes for titles I just don't bother you with. When the extraordinary and or unique comes along, as it does in this book, with bathetic people in it -- I, well, am bothered. Still, by all means read this -- it has so much. But if that "much" doesn't make you regret that there is not more.  Wamins: Ihe Surgeon General Has Deiermineri That Cigene Srnoking b OangeroiB to Ttour Heatt) America's quality cigarette. If you would make this a better world -- just listen to yourself! D uckworth was bored, i could see it all in the lackluster glimmer of his black, beady eyes. He yawned and stretched constantly and I found myself yawning in empathy, though I was bursting with vigor and vitality. "For God's sake," I snapped one day. "What's wrong with you?" He sighed. "I'm in one of those doldrums that periodically afflict all scientific minds. At the moment I'm without a single new idea to pursue and the old ones are a total drag. Don't worry. I'll snap out of it." But he didn't. He seemed to mope about most of the time. I was concerned enough to schedule a lunch date at the faculty dining room with Dr. Nahr, eminent psychologist who had sent his rats through many maze patterns. I slipped the problem of Duckworth's boredom into the conversation slyly and Dr. Nahr bit. "I know what he's going through," he said. "I've been there myself. My solution always is to construct a new sort of maze, one that the rats can't possibly solve." "Don't you like rats?" "I hate 'em," said Dr. Nahr. "I've always hated them since I was a boy. My guiding ambition is to drive the rats into a nervous breakdown through frustration." "I don't think that would help Duckworth," I said doubtfully. "Alternatively," said Dr. Nahr, "he might try to sweep his mind clean for a bit. He feels barren at the moment and struggles to come up with ideas. Consequently he ties himself into mental knots." "Then you would suggest?" "Total disengagement from academic activity. Let him loaf, fish, even chase women if his fancy takes him." "It might," I said. "I'll subtly try to suggest this carefree sabbatical." I tried to locate Duckworth that afternoon but without any luck. That evening I gulped my dinner and sat impatiently through a television spectacular on the evolution of a multiple ingredient sudsless soap until, in an unwary moment, my teenage daughter momentarily hung up the telephone. I snatched it and dialed vigorously. I hit the jackpot. The great Nobel laureate was at home. A bone-cracking yawn preceded his; "Hello." "Duckworth," I cried. "Where were you all afternoon?" "Sleeping." I clucked my tongue. "I think I have the cure for your problem." He seemed unimpressed as I outlined Dr. Nahr's strategy. But at last he reluctantly agreed to try the approach, possibly just to get rid of me. my suggestion. The following morning and afternoon, when I peeked into his lab, he was not around. His secretary assured me he was not sleeping at home. In a week's time I had begun to wonder where he was. A week after that I had almost forgotten about him when I was called to the phone. I was both guilty and pleased at the sound of Duckworth's voice, annoyed and acerbic as ever when his brain was functioning. "You're back al work?" I cried. "Damn right," he snapped. "Can you gel over to my lab right away?" I was delighted to go. It was clear that the cobwebs had been swept away and that the superb creative machine, the Duckworth brain, was ready to start cracking again. He was pacing up and down when I arrived, muttering to himself in little expletives. "Something is wrong?" I asked anxiously. "Worse than that," he said bitterly. "I tried to immerse myself in wine, women and song. The wine was all right, but the women? We've lost all sense of true bawdiness and vulgarity. "You were turned down?" "On the contrary, I didn't even have to ask. And have you seen a Tilm lately?" "Not many," I admitted. "Frankly, I'm a bit embarrassed by the spate of explicit sexual acts that cram the screen. Besides, I've never looked on sex as a spectator sport." Duckworth seized my hand and shook it warmly. "There are times," he said, "when I remember why it is I'm so fond of you. But you left out the most salient feature. The films are all deadly dull." "True." "And," resumed Duckworth, "although I had hoped to relax through a series of quietly banal films, these bits of rulomania overwhelmed the eyes and ears with grotesque caricatures of the female and male form. Frankly, I've had my fill of pimpled rumps." I shuddered at the image. "But there is still song," I said. "Which brings me to my newest idea," said Duckworth. I beamed at him. "Don't look so damned happy," said Duckworth. "It's a minor effort but it's in the public interest. I've listened to enough rock epics to know when I've been had by incompetents and musical cretins. I wondered where the Mozarts and Beethovens had gone. And then the answer came to me." "They're dead?" "I'm trying to be serious," said Duckworth. "I've invented a new musical form. It will require your considerable programing talents and the aid of your computer." I was disappointed and I suppose my chagrin showed in my face. "There's nothing original in that approach," I said. "Computer programs have been written to compose music and there are electronic devices like the Moog that can simulate many instruments." "I'm quite aware of all that," offers an approach that goes back to the human being in the most fundamental sense." "Duckworth's Instrument Body Synthesizer." "Are you synthesizing bodies?" Duckworth groaned. "So my acronym isn't perfect. Listen to my idea. I propose to assign various tonal scales to certain body parameters. For example, the electrocardiogram is an elecrical waveform which reproduces the field changes due to the contraction cycle of the heart. Suppose I assign a different note to each level of this waveform?" "And assign another range of notes to the brain-wave pattern?" I suggested. Duckworth almost went into a highland fling. "You've got the idea," he exulted. "Cellos for the blood pressure, oboes for skin resistance. By monitoring these different body parameters and we can produce the sounds of different instruments, each one corresponding to different changes in one's body." "It sounds exciting to me," I said. "Each individual will produce his own music, unique to himself and to the mood he's in. I like the idea." "Good," said Duckworth. "I need your time, lots of it." I didn't have the time to spare but I couldn't let my old friend down. "I'll fit you in somehow," I promised. and there. Even at the movies, I thought of how certain subroutines ought to go. I skipped lunches for weeks until candy bars began to rot my teeth. And at last my computer program was written and debugged. Duckworth had been patience itself. He met me in the computer lab, pushing ahead of him a cabinet on wheels. "We'll place the monitoring electrodes on your body, connect them to my box and thence to the computer," he said. "My body?" I cried. "Not me." "Don't be afraid of exposing your soul," said Duckworth. "I'll have the output sound connected to your earphones and you alone shall hear the music." I drew a deep breath as Duckworth deftly applied the electrodes and then switched on his box. My music began. It was an exhilarating experience and a painful one -- all at the same time. It revealed everything I knew about myself and things I didn't care to admit. It shook me to the very core and, after Duckworth had turned off the power, I was determined to be a better man. "I have some things I must tell my wife," I said. "Later," said Duckworth. He peered at me closely. "You do look as though you had been through an ordeal. I guess it's my turn now." "Don't," I warned. "I have to." I helped place the electrodes about his chest, scalp and arms and then turned on the power. Duckworth lifted the earphones to his head and his face turned a bloodless shade. I averted my eyes, recalling what I had gone through. When it was over, Duckworth said nothing. Quietly we disassembled the cables and put away all of the loose gear. After we had left the computer room Duckworth turned to me. "Would you dare to let anyone else hear your music?" "Only my psychoanalyst," I said. "I agree," said Duckworth. "I must write a letter of apology to Dr. Steersford." Steersford had been Duckworth's rival for the Nobel Prize. I discreetly did not ask Duckworth why he was writing. He fished out his wallet and handed me a bill. "The twenty I owed you," he said. "I'd forgotten all about it." "I know," said Duckworth. "I'm going off now. I want to rewrite some grant proposals that are filled with exaggerations." I took hold of his arm. "Duckworth," I said. "Don't you see what we have on our hands?" The beady eyes became reflective and he stroked his wispy beard. "I know what you mean. Listening to this music has made us see into our very souls. As a consequence, we've become honest men and are determined to undo all of our misdeeds." "Exactly," I said. "With all due modesty, I don't think our misdeeds amount to that much. But what if we could get someone in the power structure to listen to his soul song?" "It may not work on everybody," said Duckworth. "Let's give it the acid test," I said. "Try it on President Hinkle." Duckworth winced. "Our university president and grand old man of science? It's a grossly unfair test, but I agree." G etting President Hinkle to participate in our experiment was a lot easier than I had expected. He arrived at the computer lab the following morning and after applying the electrodes, I slipped the phones to his head. He was beaming genially all through the preliminaries and even humming a little tune whose lyrics were, as I recall, quite bawdy. Then DuckHinkle's face lit up like a Christmas tree. He waved his arms about rhythmically and even hopped a little. I looked at Duckworth, perplexed, and his face reflected even greater amazement than mine did. Fifteen minutes later we turned off the computer. "Oh pshaw," said President Hinkle. "Is it over so soon? Duckworth, you've outdone yourself. What a perfectly charming musical device!" "Were you pleased with the music?" asked Duckworth. "Pleased? My boy, that's the greatest understatement of them all. It was grand, noble, illuminating. It was an amazing journey into my soul and everything I saw pleased me." "I see," I said. After I removed the electrodes and helped Hinkle back into his shirt he spoke once again. "One thing more," he said. "This experience has also helped me make up my mind about a couple of things that had been hanging fire. I'm going to accept the suggestion of the Trustees to start constructing a twenty-five-foot statue of me. I'm also going to let them double my salary." "At a time when everyone else is being asked to accept a ten per cent cut?" I cried. The question was indiscreet but I was unable to stop myself. "Only a truly big man can accept honors without mock humility," said President Hinkle. He leaned over, shook Duckworth's hand and then mine. He waved blithely before leaving the computer lab. When he had gone, I shook my head sadly. "That takes the cake, Duckworth," I said bitterly. "In his case, it reinforced every egomaniacal tendency he has ever had. And God knows he didn't need any reinforcement." "You're right," said Duckworth. "The machine is a failure. It makes people who are basically decent more so." "And the loathsome ones even more so," I added, "it certainly would be a way of separating the sheep from the goats." "Do I need a complex technological mishmash to tell a louse when I see him?" cried Duckworth. "No, but think what a help it would be in personnel offices. Those who would be upset could be steered into the lower echelon jobs. And the ones who enjoy listening to their soul music would qualify for the executive posts. The Pentagon would buy a thousand of these devices." Duckworth was inspecting the fire hose that lay in neat coils around its spindle. Then he deftly slipped the fire axe out of its niche. "Don't do it, Duckworth," I warned. "The Luddite approach will solve nothing." "I designed it and I have the right to destroy it," he snarled. "Not any more," I said. "Besides, we've overlooked the most important aspect of all. So far no one has listened to someone else's soul music. Think of the possibilities there." Duckworth shuddered. "I have." "You can't have!" I cried. "Look at it this way. Suppose every prospective bride and groom had to listen to the music of the other. Or better still -- what if every candidate for political office, or any other position of trust, had to play his soul music for the people?" "We'd have no candidates," said Duckworth. "Who's the cynic now? Maybe you're right. But suppose, just suppose, that people begin to strive to measure up to what they say they are. What a magnificent society would emerge!" "It's a remote possibility," said Duckworth. He hefted the axe in his palm and then carefully put it back on the wall. "What the hell," he said, "what isn't a remote possibility? I'll give it a try. I'll even agree to write a series of popular articles on provided that you help me." "Of course," I said. "But I consider myself unworthy of the opporutnity." "You are," said Duckworth. We set about putting our leads Duckworth chuckled for the first time that day. "Whaf s funny?"( I asked. Duckworth shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "It just may solve Mao's problems on self-criticism." And as far as I know, it did.  Wouldn't it be nice to live forever and walk among the stars? F elix weaver, m. d., hearing the door chimes, anticipated the repairman. He stood up quickly -- the call was costing him money. Opening the door. Dr. Weaver was pleased to note that the man was new. The last repairman had not done as well as he might have since the cooker was down again -- and the new man (hopefully with a family) might be in need of medical services. With the prospects of immortality assured no man wanted to risk being carried off prematurely because of some correctable defect, no matter how remote the possibility was. "It's the cooker again," said Dr. Weaver. "How do I get to it?" "Come along," said Dr. Weaver. Dr. Weaver lived in one of the older houses, which had required extensive remodeling. What had formerly been the kitchen was now his medical laboratory. Beyond this was his office, a remodeled den, containing two chairs and his mahogany desk. The food-preparation unit was entered from the dining room via a concrete stairway. Dr. Weaver lighted the stairway for the repairman and the two of them descended. At the bottom the repairman examined the meal preparer briefly, then went to his bag, which he had put down at the foot of the stairs. He opened it and began unpacking. Soon his instruments lay around him -- meters, probes, an oscilloscope and a small computer. "Let's plug this thing in and see," he said. Dr. Weaver drew out his business card and fingered it nervously. One always sought clients -- the story of a physician's life. One spoke of strange diseases that might be encountered as a result of the night air and for which allpurpose injections were administered. Occasionally one could avail oneself of an epidemic scare and business would be good for a week or two. Failing epidemics, all were advised to have their systems depoisoned at least every six months to be on the safe side, since you could never know for sure what lethal agents accidentally got into the air and the food. There was also a fair business in prescription analgesics and oxygen preparations for hangovers and in certain other miscellaneous services. On rare occasions one found a case where surgery of some sort was indicated and managed to snag a finder's fee. Altogether not the best -- but a living. Dr. Weaver stood on first one foot and then the other. "Bread prices went up again today," the repairman said. "It's getting so a working man can't make ends meet." "That's certainly true," Dr. Weaver said. He felt the growth of maniacal rage. Murder, although severely dealt with, was not unknown. Dr. Weaver was a firm supporter of the President. "You'll be glad to know that I'll have this thing fixed in a jiffy. Computer picked up the trouble." "You'll have time for a cup of coffee, then?" Dr. Weaver said, knowing he was going to pay for a full hour in any event. "That'd be good," said the repairman. "We'll have it when you finish here," said Dr. Weaver, shifting his weight and peering over the man's shoulder. The repairman, somewhat displeased with the continuing supervision, stopped and sat down. "Let me tell you what I'm doing," he said. "You see, this cooker unit is attached to your frozen storage compartment -- where the food is kept -- and there's a little trigger that is supposed to start it up when the food comes sliding down that chute over there. Now, this little trigger has caused us a lot of trouble in the -- " "Just call me when you finish." " -- a lot of trouble, I was saying, in development, because the operation is quite complex. You have to consider that the cooker has to maintain different levels of heat in various areas if you want the food all to come out at the same time." "I understand that," said Dr. Weaver, "and I really have to go now." He fled the repairman. If angered sufficiently the man might follow him about the house, from room to room, explaining the operation of the equipment. Repairmen had been known to do so. D r. weaver waited in his laboratory -- in what used to be the kitchen when cooking was still done manually. The lab's contents had been given to him on his graduation from medical school -- at the rates possible in his practice it would have taken him ten lifetimes to pay for it. He could, of course, do no major repairs on the equipment. That was for the engineers, who went to school a number of years longer than he did. The human body, when all was said and done, was basically less complex than many electronic devices. In the human organism only a half-dozen important chemical reactions plus a few mechanical things could still go wrong. Like a radio, it was comparatively simple, self-renewing and built to last forever. The repairman came up shortly. "There," he said. "That ought to do it. I thought I might have to replace the trigger unit, but you were lucky this time. Tell your wife to watch for sensitive temperature differences -- she works it too hard and it will be down again inside a year. You have to learn to treat these cooker units right if you want them to last." "I'll tell her." The repairman seated himself, apparently pleased with the speed with which the trouble had been located and repaired. "Here I am working twenty hours a week," he said, "and the rest of the world is coming along nicely without working this hard. Why do you suppose they spend our tax dollars trying to industrialize Asia?" Dr. Weaver thought, suddenly despairing, that the future was shaped by the present. The majority, in the end, would go where they wanted to go. An industrialized Asia would need more repairmen than doctors. There was little Dr. Weaver could do. His anger returned. He drew coffee for the two of them, his hand shaking with the emotion. Thirty minutes were still left of the hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar hour. He knew that some day he was going to kill somebody. The repairman said, "And think of how many years we've wasted fiddling with science -- and the tax dollars down that rathole, too." Dr. Weaver suggested, "In this day and age it's hard to see how anybody can figure out a new way to go insane." "And it's difficult, if I may say so as an engineer, imagining the degree of sanity of a man who thinks he's fiddling around with the fundamental fabric of the space-time continuum and expects to have any success with it." "I'm not too much up on theory," Dr. Weaver said. "But wouldn't you like to see us able to explore other star systems, not just our eight other little planets here? Some day we might be able to walk out there, once we get the equipment built -- and we may need Asia to help us build the equipment. It seems to me that we ought to support the President completely in this." "Can you tell me why we should do it, though? That's all I'm asking." Images drifted through Dr. Weaver's mind of other planets circling other stars. "We'd reap a lot of technological benefits." "We got all we need." T he blind rage filled Dr. Weaver again, but somehow he could never get it out in words and it lay penned. Why should he be so interested in getting to the stars? What more .did a man really need than what he already had? Nearly everyone felt like the repairman and yet, to Dr. Weaver, that was wrong. They were all wrong somehow. It was necessary to get the planet into order and go out among the stars. "If it weren't for these high taxes and having to work my butt off every week," the repairman continued, "I'd be perfectly happy. Let me tell you, I would be." Dr. Weaver felt the rage retreat, followed by despair. "Nice place you got here," said the repairman, putting four spoons of sugar in the coffee, stirring. "Thank you, we like it. I'm just a physician, an M.D., and we survive. Do you have any children?" "One. He's two now. We plan our other one when this one's out of college. I think it's better to space them out. I know a lot of people wind up not wanting to be bothered with the second one if they wait -- but I think I'll take that route." "We did," said Dr. Weaver. "Our first is seventeen and we're seriously thinking about a second now." "Seventeen?" asked the repairman. "What do you think these teenagers are up to? Just don't understand them. What are they looking for? Running all over these agricultural countries and upsetting whole economies." Dr. Weaver knew that an extended discussion along this line would only alienate beyond recall a potential client. Further more, it would continue to subject him to the alternate waves of fury and despair. "May I give you my business card?" he asked. "In case you need the services of a physician. I think you're right on raising the child. A child really deserves undivided attention for the first fifteen years at least. It's a wise choice you've made. Maybe I could show you my little laboratory? It's very well finished." "I can see that. That's a nice model of the cell monitor." "Well, you don't need to have this stuff described to you, but it is well set up. With this equipment, I can locate any organic defect you can name. Now, obviously, most aren't important -- though one should keep an eye on them -- but you can never be sure without professional advice -- " The repairman prepared to listen with interest, even though -- barring accident, poison or irreparable organic defects of a genetic nature -- he could live as long as he wanted to. Basically longevity was merely a question of eliminating the death wish and keeping the glands in proper adjustment to prevent aging. "The full examination costs only five hundred dollars," Dr. Weaver said. "And then I give you the shots you need without any other charge -- I throw them in free. Now, of course, there's a routine check, which is virtually as good and which I can handle for seventeen-fifty, with a six-dollar, twenty-five-cent charge for each shot -- the total seldom runs over ten. You'll find that very competitive. Many of my patients let me set up a continuing program, which includes periodic depoisoning and is recommended by the medical association. I think you ought seriously to consider a program of that sort." The repairman promised to think about dropping by. He had gone to a physician about six months ago, but you could never tell. What one man missed another might catch -- and he might arrange a visit for his wife and baby to see how they liked it. If they liked the deal he would come himself and try the service. "Certainly love to have you," said Dr. Weaver. In that moment Dr. Weaver suddenly wished he had gone into surgery to avoid the necessity for such arrangements as this. Still, a good surgeon was a person of great competence and there was no doubt that one had to have exceptional talent to start with -- and worked hard to keep in practice for the few operations one did. Every film was reviewed and if a man turned in a really awkward performance he was pensioned off -- and without the work a man had trained for he usually passed on between sixtyfive and seventy, if not earlier. So maybe it was better to be just an M.D. instead of a surgeon. Dr. Weaver was looking forward to a good long life. He thanked the repairman at the door, signed the slip and repeated how pleased he would be to meet the repairman's wife and child. He went back to his office. It was a little early for his next appointment -- a Mrs. Christianson. She wanted a chemical modifications to her body hair for some strange reason. Dr. Weaver flipped on for the news printout. The lead story was about a man who'd just turned a hundred and twenty. A real rarity. Dr. Weaver looked over the suicide list to see if there was anyone on it he had known. # mutant, uniquely gifted with the whose most intimate moments ability to read minds other than he has invaded. It also gives him his own, some of them not human, money when he wants it and women He is forced into a mode of exiswhen he wants them along with tence a similarly talented friend, moments of ecstasy as when he his well-to-do, middle-class parmunes with God, the universe and "the oneness of all things." and intensely intelligent career girl, at a time when his fortunes are at a low ebb. Their love affair promises him the first truly normal human relationship he has known. He has deliberately avoided reading her mind -- until, does not share, she draws him into her brain, where he sees himself as a bloodsucking bat creature, living parasitically on others. The experience proves destrucout a living by writing term and doctoral papers and theses for a fee for students at his old Alma Mater, Columbia University. He is also desperately sensing a waning of his mental and mindreading powers and becomes crucially involved with writing a classical thesis to save the scholastic career of Columbia's basketball black soul poses an unprecedented and dangerous challenge to any T here was always the danger of being found out. David Selig knew he had to be on his guard. This was an era of witchhunters, when anyone who departed from community norms was ferreted out and burned at the stake. Spies were everywhere, probing for young Selig's secret. Even Miss Mueller, his biology teacher. She was a pudgy little poodle of a woman, about forty, glum face, dark arcs under her eyes. Miss Mueller was very deep into extrasensory and occult phenomena. Of course they didn't use phrases like "very deep into" in #, when David Selig was in her class, but let the anachronism stand -- she was ahead of her time, a hippie born too soon. She really grooved behind the irrational, the unknown. She knew her way around the high school bio curriculum in her sleep, which was more or less the way she taught it, but what really turned her on were things like telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, astrology, the whole parapsychological bag. It didn't take much to nudge her away from the day's assignment, the study of metabolism or the circulatory system or whatever, and onto one of her hobbyhorses. She was the first on her block to own the  Ching. She had done time inside orgone boxes. She believed that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh held divine revelations for mankind. She had sought deeper truths by way of Zen, General Semantics, the Bates eyesight exercises and the readings of Edgar Cayce. Naturally she kept up with the research into extrasensory perception that J.B. Rhine was doing down at Duke University. She terrified David whenever she spoke of this. He constantly feared that she was going to give way to the temptation to run some Rhine experiments in class and would thereby flush him out of hiding. He had read Rhine himself, of course, hoping to find something that would explain him to himself, but there was nothing there except statistics and foggy conjecture. Okay, Rhine was no threat to him so long as he went on piddling around in North Carolina. But muddled Miss Mueller might just strip him naked and deliver him to the pyre. Inevitable, the progression toward disaster. The topic for the week, suddenly, was the human brain, its functions and capabilities. See, this is the cerebrum, this is the cerebellum, this is the medulla oblongata. A child's garden of synapses. Fat-cheeked Norman Heimlich, gunning for a #, knowing precisely which button to push, put up his hand. "M iss Mueller, do you think it'll ever be possible for people really to read minds, I mean not by tricks or anything but actual mental telepathy?" This was her cue to launch into parapsychology, inexplicable phenomena, supernormal modes of communication and perception, the Rhine researches, et cetera. et cetera. David wanted to hide under his desk. The word "telepathy" made him wince. He already suspected that half the class realized what he was. Now came a flash of wild paranoia. Are they looking at me, are they staring and pointing and tapping their heads and nodding? He had surveyed every mind in the class again and again, desperately trying to amuse himself during the arid stretches of boredom, and he knew that his secret was safe. His classmates, plodding young Brooklynites all, would never cotton to the veiled presence of a superman in their midst. They thought he was strange, yes, but had no notion of how strange. Would Miss Mueller now blow his cover, though? cards with her the next day. "These are known as Zener cards," she explained solemnly, holding them up, fanning them out like Wild Bill Hickok about to deal himself a straight flush. David had never actually seen a set of the cards before, yet they were as familiar to him as the deck his parents used in their interminable canasta games. "They were devised about twenty-five years ago at Duke University by Dr. Karl E. Zener and Dr. J.B. Rhine. cards.' Who can tell me what Norman Heimlich's stubby hand was waving in the air. "Extrasensory perception, Miss Mueller!" "Very good, Norman." Absentmindedly she began to shuffle the cards. Her eyes, normally inexpressive, gleamed with a Las Vegas intensity. She said, "The deck consists of twenty-five cards, divided into five 'suits' or symbols. Five cards are marked with a star, five with a circle, five with a square, five with a pattern of wavy lines and five with a cross or plus sign. Otherwise they look just like ordinary playing cards." She handed the pack to Barbara Stein, another of her favorites, and told her to copy the five symbols on the blackboard. "The idea is for the subject being examined to look at each card in turn, face down, and try to name the symbol on the other side. The test can be run in many different ways. Sometimes the examiner looks briefly at each card first -- this gives the subject a chance to pick the right answer out of the examiner's mind if he can. Sometimes neither the subject nor the examiner sees the card in advance. Sometimes the subject is allowed to touch the card before he makes his guess. Sometimes he may be blindfolded and at other times he may be permitted to stare at the back of each card. No matter now it's done, though, the basic aim is always the same -- the subject is to determine, using extrasensory powers, the design on a card that he can't see. Estelle, suppose the subject has no extrasensory powers at all, but is simply operating on pure guesswork. How many right guesses could we expect him to make out of the twenty-five chances?" Estelle, caught by surprise, reddened and blurted, "Uh -- twelve and a half?" A sour smirk from Miss Mueller, who turned to Estelle's brighter, happier twin. "Beverly?" "Five, Miss Mueller?" "Correct. You always have one chance out of five of guessing the right suit, so five right calls out of twenty-five is what luck alone ought to bring. Of course, the results are never that neat. On one run through the deck you might have four correct hits and the next time six -- then five, then maybe seven and then perhaps only three -- but the average over a long series of trials ought to be about five. That is, if pure chance is the only factor operating. Actually, in the Rhine experiments, some groups of subjects have averaged six and a half or seven hits out of twenty-five over many tests. Rhine believes that this above-average performance can only be subjects have done much better. There was a man once who called nine straight cards right for two days in a row. A few days later he hit fifteen straight cards, twenty-one out of twenty-five. The odds against that feat are fantastic. How many of you think it could have been nothing but luck?" About a third of the hands in the class went up. One of the hands belonged to David Selig. He was merely trying to don protective coloration. Miss Mueller said, "Let's run a few tests today. Victor, will you be our first guinea pig? Come to the front of the room." Victor Schlitz shambled forward. He stood stiffly beside Miss Mueller's desk as she cut the cards and cut them again. After peering quickly at the top card she slid it toward him. "Which symbol?" she asked. "Circle?" "We'll see. Class, don't say anything." She handed the card to Barbara Stein, telling her to place a checkmark under the proper symbol on the blackboard. Barbara checked the square. Miss Mueller glanced at the next card. Star, David thought. "Waves," Victor said. Barbara checked the star. "Plus." Square, dummy! Square. "Circle." Circle. Circle. A sudden ripple of excitement in the classroom at Victor's hit. Miss Mueller, glaring, called for silence. "Star." Waves. Waves was what Barbara checked. "Square." Square, David agreed. Square. Another ripple, more subdued. deck. Miss Mueller had kept score: four corrrect hits. Not even as good as chance. She put him through a second round. Five. All right, Victor -- you may be sexy, but a telepath you aren't. Miss Mueller's eyes roved the room. Another subject? Let it not be me, David prayed. God, let it not be me. It wasn't. She summoned Sheldon Feinberg. He hit five the first time, six the second. Respectable, unspectacular. Then Alice Cohen. Four and four. Stony soil. Miss Mueller. David, following each turn of the cards, had hit twenty-five out of twentyfive every time, but he was the only one who knew that. "Next?" Miss Mueller said. David shrank into his seat. How much longer until the dismissal bell? "Norman Heimlich." Norman waddled toward the teacher's desk. She glanced at a card. David, scanning her, picked up the image of a star. Bouncing then to Norman's mind, David was amazed to detect a flicker of an image there, a star perversely rounding its points to form a circle, then reverting to being a star. What was this? Did the odious Heimlich have a shred of the; power? "Circle," Norman murmured. But he hit the next one -- the waves -- and the one after that, the square. He did indeed seem to be picking up emanations, fuzzy and indistinct but emanations all the same. from Miss Mueller's mind. Fat Heimlich had the vestiges of the gift. But only the vestiges. David, scanning his mind and the teacher's, watched the images grow ever more cloudy and vanish altogether by the tenth card, fatigue scattering Norman's feeble strength. He scored a seven, though, the best so far. The bell, David prayed. The bell, the bell, the bell! Twenty minutes away. A small mercy. Miss Mueller briskly distributed test paper. She would run the whole class at once. "I'll call numbers from one to twenty-five," she said. "Write down the symbol you think you see as I call each number. Ready? One." David saw a circle. Waves, he wrote. Star. Square. Waves. Circle. As the test neared its close, it occurred to him that he might be making a tactical error by muffing every call. He told himself to put down two or three right ones, just for camouflage. But it was too late for that. There were only four numbers left, it would look too conspicuous if he hit several of them correctly after missing all the others. He went on missing. Miss Mueller said, "Now exchange papers with your neighbor and mark his answers. Ready? Number one; circle. Number two: star. Number three: waves. Number four..." Tensely she called for results. Had anyone scored ten hits or more? No, teacher. Nine? Eight? Seven? Norman Heimlich had seven again. He preened himself -- Heimlich the mind-reader. David felt disgust at the knowledge that Heimlich had even a crumb of power. Six? Four students had six. Five? Four? Miss Mueller diligently Jotted down the results. Any other figures? Sidney Goldblatt began to snicker. "Miss Mueller, how about zero?" She looked startled. "Zero? Was there someone who got all twentyfive cards wrong?" "David Selig did!" drop through the floor. All eyes were on him. Cruel laughter assailed him. David Selig got them all wrong. It was like saying, David Selig wet his pants, David Selig cheated on the exam, David Selig went into the girls' toilet. By trying to conceal himself he had made himself terribly conspicuous. Miss Mueller, looking stern and oracular, said, "A null score can be quite significant, too, class. It might mean extremely the total absence of such powers, as you might think." Oh, God. She went on, "Rhine writes of phenomena such as 'forward displacement' and 'backward displacement,' in which an unusually cidentally focus on one card ahead of the right one or one card behind it -- or even two or three cards away. So the subject would appear to get a below-average result when actually he's hitting perfectly, just off the target! David, let me see your answers." "I wasn't getting anything. Miss Mueller. I was just putting down my guesses and I suppose they were all wrong." "Let me see." As though marching to the scaffold, he brought her the sheet. She placed it beside her own list and tried to realign it, searching for some correlation, some displacement sequence. But the randomness of his deliberately wrong answers protected him. A forward displacement of one card gave him two hits. A backward displacement of one card gave him three. Nothing significant there. Nevertheless, Miss Mueller would not let go. "I'd like to test you again," she said. "We'll run several kinds of trials." She began to shuffle the deck. God, God, God, where are you? Ah. The bell! Saved by the bell! "Can you stay after class?" she asked. In agony he shook his head. "Got to go to geometry next. Miss Mueller." She relented. Tomorrow, then. We'll run the tests tomorrow, (iod! He was up all the night in a turmoil of fear, sweating, shivering -- about four in the "Barry Malzberg's dark, bleak vision of the future is one of the most terrifying ever to come out of science fiction." Barry N. Malzberg # #, now at you' bookstore morning he vomited. He hoped his mother would make him stay home from school, but no luck. At half-past seven he was aboard the bus. Would Miss Mueller forget about the test? Miss Mueller had not forgotten. The fateful cards were on her desk. There would be no escape. He found himself the center of all attention. All right, Duv, be cleverer this time. "Are you ready to begin?" she asked, tipping up the first card. He saw a plus sign in her mind. "Square," he said. He saw a circle. "Waves," he said. He saw another circle. "Plus." He saw a star. "Circle," he said. He saw a square. "Square," he said. That's one. He kept careful count. Four wrong answers, then a right one. Three wrong answers, another right one. Spacing them with false randomness, he allowed himself five hits on the first test. On the second he had four. On the third, six. On the fourth, four. He wondered, am I being too average? Should I give her a one-hit run now? But she was losing interest. "I still can't understand your null score, David," she told him. "But it does seem to me as if you have to look disappointed. Apologetic, even. Sorry, teach, I ain't got no made his way to his seat. revelation and communion. Miss Mueller, I could have justified your whole lifelong quest for the improbable, the inexplicable, the unknowable, the irrational. The miraculous. But I didn't have the guts to do it. I had to look after my own skin. Miss Mueller. I had to keep a low profile. Will you forgive me? Instead of giving you truth, I faked you out, Miss Mueller, and sent you spinning blindly onward to the tarot, to the signs of the zodiac, to the flying-saucer people, to a thousand surreal vibrations, to a million apocalyptic astral antiworlds, when the touch of my mind against yours might have been enough to heal your madness. One touch from me. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye. inadvertently picked up in Tom Nyquist's mind were the tests to which he had submitted as a favor for a friend who was doing a Ph. D. thesis on electrical phenomena associated with the human brain and nervous system. Nyquist's brain picture revealed nothing unusual except that the friend picked up, or thought he did, simultaneously identical patterns from Nyquist's head and that of a subject whose mind Nyquist was reading -- under circumstances that seemed to make the coincidence as remarkable as finding yourself shaking hands with a man whose fingerprints were duplicates of yours. Nyquist was amused by the fact that his friend's subsequent thesis omitted all mention of both the tests and their results -- the man wanted his doctorate. But Nyquist thought, without too much insistence, that perhaps he and I -- products of genetic evolution -- emit some kind of "electromagnetic" probe that operates as a myriad of electrodes might to soak up the microvolts and frequencies from the skulls of our victims. He once called ours the "superhuman condition." For me the image conjured up is that of the leeching bat creature I found in Toni's mind. place on I #th Street I waited two days before I did anything. I assumed she would come back when she calmed down. I figured she would call, contrite, from some friend's house and say she was sorry she panicked and would I come get her. Also in those two days I was in no shape to take any sort of action. I was still suffering the after-effects of my vicarious trip. I felt as though someone had seized my head and pulled on it, stretching my neck like a rubber band, letting it finally snap back into place with a sharp thwock that addled my brains. ' But she didn't come back and she didn't call and on the Tuesday after the acid trip I started searching for her. I phoned her office first. Teddy, her boss, a bland sweet scholarly man, very gentle, very gay. No, she hadn't been to work this week. No, she hadn't been in touch at all. Was it urgent? Would I like to have her home number? "I'm calling from her home number," I said. "She isn't here and I don't know where she's gone. This is David Selig, Teddy." "Oh," he said. Very faintly, with great compassion. "Oh." And I said, "If she happens to call in will you tell her to get in touch with me?" Next I started to phone her friends, those whose numbers I could find: Alice, Doris, Helen, Pam, Grace. Most of them, I knew, didn't like me. I didn't have to be telepathic to realize that. They thought she was throwing herself away on me, wasting her life with a man without career, prospects, money, ambition, talent or looks. All five of them told me they hadn't heard from her. Doris, Helen and Pam sounded sincere. The other two, it seemed to me, were lying. I took a taxi over to Alice's place in the Village and shot a probe upward, zam nine stories into her head, and I learned a lot of things about Alice that I hadn't really wanted to know, but I didn't find out where Toni was. I felt dirty about spying and didn't probe Grace. Instead I called my employer, the writer, whose book Toni was editing, and asked if he'd seen her. Not in weeks, he told me, all ice. Dead end. The trail had run out. I dithered on Wednesday, wondering what to do, and finally, melodramatically, called the police. Gave a bored desk sergeant her description: tall, thin, long dark hair, brown eyes. No bodies found in Central Park lately? In subway trash cans? The basements of Amsterdam Avenue tenements? No. No. No. Look, buddy, if we hear anything we'll let you know, but it don't sound serious to me. So much for the police. Restless, hopelessly strung out, I walked down to the Great Shanghai for a miserable half-eaten dinner, good food gone to waste. (Children are starving in Europe, Duv. Eat. Eat.) When I returned home the phone was ringing. Pam. "I've heard from Toni," she said. "She's staying with Bob Larkin at his place over on East EightyThird Street." Jealousy, despair, humiliation. "Bob who?" "Larkin. He's that highbracket interior decorator she always talks about." "Not to me." "One of Toni's oldest friends. They're very close. I think he used to date her when she was in high school." A long pause. Then Pam chuckled warmly into my numb silence. "Oh, relax, relax, David! He's gay! He's just a kind of father confessor for her. She goes to him when there's trouble." "I see." "You two have broken up, haven't you?" "I'm not sure. I suppose we have. I don't know." "Is there anything I can do to help?" This from Pam who, I had always thought, regarded me as a destructive influence of whom Toni was well advised to be quit. "Just give me his phone number," I said. I phoned. It rang and rang and rang. At last Bob Larkin picked up. Gay, all right, a sweet tenor voice complete with lisp, not very different from the voice of Teddyat-work. Who teaches them to speak with the homo accent? I asked, "Is Toni there?" A guarded response: "Who's calling, please?" I told him. He asked me to wait and a minute or so passed while he conferred with her, hand over the mouthpiece. At last he came back and said Toni was there, yes, but she was very tired and resting and didn't want to talk to me right now. "It's urgent," I said. "Please tell her it's urgent." Another muffled conference. Same reply. He suggested vaguely that I call back in two or three days. I started to wheedle, to whine, to beg. In the middle of that unheroic performance the phone abruptly changed hands and Toni said to me, "Why did you call?" "That ought to be obvious. I want you to come back." "I can't." She didn't say,  won't. She said, I can't. I said, "Would you like to tell me why?" "Not really." "You didn't even leave a note. Not a word of explanation. You ran out so fast." "I'm sorry, David." "It was something you saw in me while you were tripping, wasn't it?" "Let's not talk about it," she said. "It's over." "I don't want it to be over." "I do." I do. That was like the sound of a great gate clanging shut in my face. But I wasn't going to let her throw home the bolts just yet. I told her she had left some of her things in my room, some books, some clothing. A lie -- she had made a clean sweep. But I can be persuasive when I'm cornered and she began to think what I said might be true. I offered to bring the stuff over right now. She didn't want me to come. She preferred never to see me again, she told me. But her voice lacked conviction. It was higher in pitch and much more nasal than it was when she spoke with sincerity. I knew she still loved me, more or less -- even after a forest fire some of the burned snags live on and green new shoots spring from them. So I told myself. Fool that I was. In any case she couldn't entirely turn me away. Talking very fast, I bludgeoned her into yielding. All right, she said. Come over. Come over. But you're wasting your time. summer air was clinging and clammy, with a hint of rain on the way. No stars were visible. Larkin's apartment was on the nineteenth floor of an immense new terraced white-brick tower, far over on York Avenue. Admitting me, he gave me a tender, compassionate smile as if to say. You poor bastard, you've been hurt and you're bleeding and now you're going to get ripped open again. He was about thirty, a stocky, boyishfaced man with long unruly curly brown hair and large uneven teeth. He radiated warmth and sympathy and kindness. I could understand why Toni ran to him at times like this. "She's in the living room," he said. It was a big, impeccable place, somewhat freaky in decor. Jagged blurts of color danced over the walls. Pre-Columbian artifacts gleamed in spotlighted showcases set among bizarre African masks, chrome-steel furniture. The living room was the core of the spectacle, a vast white-walled enclosure with a long curving window. Toni sat at the far end, near the window, on an angular couch, dark blue flecked with gold. She wore old, dowdy cjothes that clashed furiously with the splendor around her: a motheaten red sweater that I detested, a short frumpy black skirt, dark hose -- and she was slumped down sullenly on her spine, leaning on one elbow, her legs jutting awkwardly forward. The posture that made her look bony and ungraceful. A cigarette drooped in her hand and a huge pile of butts heaped the ashtray beside her. Her eyes were bleak. Her long hair was tangled. She didn't move as I walked toward her. Such an aura of hostility came from her that I halted twenty feet away. "Where's the stuff you were bringing?" she asked. "There wasn't any. I just said that to have an excuse to see you." "I figured that." "What went wrong, Toni?" "Don't ask. Just don't ask." Her voice had dropped into its lowest register, a bitter husky contralto. "You shouldn't have come here at all." "If you'd tell me what I did -- " "You tried to hurt me," she said. "You tried to bum-trip me." She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. Her eyes, somber and hooded, refused to meet mine. "I realized finally that you were my enemy, that I had to escape from you. So I packed and got out." "Your enemy? You know that isn't true." "It was strange," she said. "I didn't understand what was happening and I've talked to some people who've dropped a lot of acid and they can't understand it either. It was like our minds were linked, David. Like a telepathic channel had opened between us. And all sorts of stuff was pouring from you into me. Hateful stuff. Poisonous stuff. I was thinking your thoughts. Seeing myself as you saw me. Remember when you said you were tripping too, even though you hadn't had any acid? And then you told me you were, like, reading my mind. That was what scared me. The way our minds seemed to blur together, to overlap. To become one. I never knew acid could do that to people." This was my cue to tell her that it wasn't only the acid, that it hadn't been some druggy delusion, that what she had felt was the impingement of a special power granted me at birth -- a gift, a curse, a freak of nature. But the words congealed in my mouth. They sounded insane to me. How could I confess such stuff? I let the moment pass. Instead I said lamely, "Okay, it was a strange moment for both of us. We were a little out of our heads. But the trip is over. You don't have to hide from me now. Come back, Toni." "No." "In a few days, then?" "No." "I don't understand this." "Everything's changed," she said. "I couldn't ever live with you now. You scare me too much. The trip is over, but I look at you and I see demons. I see some kind of thing that's half-bat, halfman, with big rubbery wings and long yellow fangs and -- oh, Jesus, David, I can't help any of this! I still feel as if our minds are linked. Stuff is creeping out of you into my head. I should never have touched the acid." Carelessly she crushed her cigarette and found another. "You make me uncomfortable now. I wish you'd go. It gives me a headache just being this close to you. Please. Please. I'm sorry, David." mind. I was afraid that what I'd find there would blast and shrivel me. But in those days my power was still so strong that I couldn't help picking up, whether I sought it or not, a generalized low-level mental radiation from everyone I came close to, and what I picked up now from Toni confirmed what she was saying. She hadn't stopped loving me. But the acid, though lysergic and not sulfuric, had scarred and corroded our relationship by opening that terrible gateway between us. It was torment for her to be in the same room with me. No resources of mine could deal with that. I considered strategies, looked for angles of approach, ways to reason with her, to heal her through soft earnest words. No way. No way at all. I ran a dozen trial dialogs in my head and they all ended with Toni begging me to get out of her life. So. The end. She sat there all but motionless, downcast, darkfaced, her wide mouth clamped in guished. She seemed to have aged twenty years. Her odd, exotic desert-princess beauty had wholly fled from her. Suddenly she was more real to me in her shroud of pain than ever before. Ablaze with suffering, alive with anguish. And no way for me to reach her. "All right," I said quietly. "I'm sorry too." Over, done with, swiftly, suddenly, no warning, the bullet singing through the air, the grenade rolling treacherously into the tent, the anvil falling from the placid sky. Done with. Alone again. Not even any tears. Cry? What shall I cry? Bob Larkin had tactfully remained outside, in his long foyer papered with dazzling black and white optical illusions, during our brief muffled conversation. Again the gentle sorrowing smile from him as I emerged. "Thanks for letting me bother you this late," I said. "No trouble at all. Too bad about you and Toni." We faced each other uncertainly and he moved toward me, digging his fingers momentarily into the muscle of my arm, telling me without words to shape up, to ride out the storm, to get myself together. He was so open that my mind sank unexpectedly into his and I saw him plain, his goodness, his kindness, his sorrow. Out of him an image rose to me, a sharp encapsulated memory: himself and a sobbing, demolished Toni, the night before last, lying naked together on his modish round bed, her head cradled against his muscular hairy chest. Her body trembling with need. He struggling to offer her the consolation of sex. His gentle spirit at war with itself, flooded with pity and love for her but dismayed by her disturbing femaleness. You don't have to. Bob, she keeps saying, you don't have to, you really don't have to, but he tells her he wants to, it's about time we made it after knowing each other all these years. It'll cheer you up, Toni, and anyway a man needs a little variety, right? His heart goes out to her but his body resists and their lovemaking, when it happens, is a hurried, pathetic, fumbled thing, a butting of troubled reluctant bodies, ending in tears, tremors, shared distress and, finally, laughter, a triumph over pain. He kisses her tears away. She thanks him gravely for his efforts. They fall into childlike sleep, side by side. How civilized, how tender. My poor Toni. Goodbye. Goodbye. "I'm glad she went to you," I said. He walked me to the elevator. What shall I cry? "If she snaps out of it I'll make sure she calls you," he told me. I put my hand to his arm as he had to mine, and gave him the best smile in my repertoire. Goodbye. T his is my cave. Twelve floors high in the Marble Hill Houses, Broadway and #th Street, formerly a middle-income municipal housing project, now a catchall for classless and deracinated urban detritus. Two rooms plus bathroom, kitchenette, hallway. Once upon a time you couldn't get into this project unless you were married and had kids. Nowadays a few singles have slipped in, on the grounds that they're destitute. Things change as the city decays -- regulations break down. Would you like the guided tour of David Selig's cave? Very well. Please come this way. No touching anything, please, and don't park your chewing gum on the furniture. The sensitive, intelligent, amiable, neurotic man who will be your guide is none other than David Selig himself No tipping allowed. Welcome, folks, welcome to my humble abode. We'll begin our tour in the bathroom. See, this is the tub -- that yellow stain in the porcelain was already there when he moved in -- this is the crapper, this is the medicine chest. Selig spends a great deal of time in here -- it's a room significant to any in-depth understanding of his existence. For example, he sometimes takes two or three showers a day. What is it, do you think, that he's trying to wash away? Leave that toothbrush alone, sonny. All right, come with me. Do you see these posters in the hallway? They are artifacts of the #'s. This one shows the poet Allan Ginsberg in the costunre of Uncle Sam. This one is a crude vulgarization of a subtle topological paradox by the Dutch printmaker, M. G. Escher. Eight to ten years ago hundreds of thousands of young people decorated their rooms with such posters. Selig, although he was not exactly young even then, did the same. He often has followed current fads and modes in an attempt to affiliate himself more firmly with the structures of contemporary existence. This room is the bedroom. Dark and narrow, with the low ceiling typical of municipal construction a generation ago. This is his bed, in which he dreams uneasy dreams, occasionally, even now, reading the minds of his neighbors and incorporating their thoughts in his fantasies. On this bed he has fornicated maybe fifteen women, once or twice or sometimes three times each, during the two and a half years of his residence here. Don't look so abashed, young lady! Sex is a healthy human endeavor and it remains an essential aspect of Selig's life, even now in middle age! It may become even more important to him in the years ahead, for sex is, after all, a way of establishing communication with other human beings and certain other channels of communication appear to be closing for him. Who are these girls? Some of them are not girls. Some are women well along in life. He charms them in his diffident way and persuades them to share an hour of joy with him. He rarely invites any of them back and those whom he does invite back often refuse the invitation, but that's all right. His needs are met. Please don't sit on his bed. It's an old one, bought second-hand at an upstairs bargain basement that the Salvation Army runs in Harlem. I picked it up for a few bucks when I moved out of my last place, a furnished room on St. Nicholas Avenue, and needed some furniture of my own. What else is in the bedroom? Very little of interest. I'm afraid. A chest of drawers containing commonplace clothing. A pair of worn slippers. A cracked mirror -- are you superstitious? A lopsided bookcase packed tight with old magazines that he will never look at again -- Partisan Review, Evergreen, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Encounter. A mound of trendy literary stuff, plus a few journals of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, which Selig reads sporadicall in the hope of increasing his self-knowledge. He always tosses them aside in boredom and disappointment. Let's get out of here. This room must be depressing you. We go past the kitchenette -- four-burner stove, half-size refrigerator, formicatopped table -- where he assembles very modest breakfasts and lunches (dinner he usually eats out) and enter the main focus of the apartment, the L-shaped blue-walled jam-packed living roomstudy. H ere you can observe the full range of Daivd Selig's intellectual development. This is his record collection, about a hundred well-worn disks, some of them purchased as far back as #. Almost entirely classical music, although you will note two intrusive deposits, five or six jazz records dating from # and five or six rock records dating from #, both groups acquired in vague, abortive efforts at expanding the horizons of his taste. Otherwise what you will find here, in the main, is pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing. He doesn't know a lot about music, but he knows what he likes -- you wouldn't much care for it. And these are his books, accumulated since the age of ten and hauled lovingly about with him from place to place. The archaeological strata of his reading can readily be isolated and examined. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett at the bottom. Sabatini. Kipling. Van Loon, The Story of Mankind. Verrill. Great Conquerors of South and Central America. The books of a sober, earnest, alienated little boy. Suddenly, with adolescence, a quantum leap: Orwell, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hardy, the easier Faulkner. Look at these rare paperbacks of the #'s and early #'s, in odd off-sized formats, with laminated plastic covers! See what you could buy then for only #I These science-fiction books date from that era too. I gobbled the stuff whole, hoping to find some clues to my own dislocated seifs nature in the fantasies of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, Clarke. Look, here's Stapledon's Odd John, here's Beresford's Hampdenshire Wonder, here's a whole book called Outsiders: Children of Wonder, full of stories of little superbrats with freaky powers. I've underlined a lot of passages in that last one, usually places where I quarreled with the writers. Outsiders? Those writers. gifted as they were, were the outsiders, trying lO imagine powers they had never had, and I who was on the inside, I the youthful mindprowler (the book is dated #), had bones to pick with them. They stressed the angst of being supernormal, forgot about the ecstasy. Although, thinking about angst vs. ecstasy now, I have to admit they knew whereof they writ. Fellows, I have fewer bones to pick these days. This is rats' alley, where the dead men lost their bones. Observe how Selig's reading becomes more rarefied as we reach the college years. Joyce, Proust' Mann, Eliot, Pound, the old avantgarde hierarchy. The French period: Zola, Balzac, Montaigne, Celine, Baudelaire. This thick slug of Dostoyevsky occupying half a shelf. Lawrence. Woolf. The mystical era: Augustine, Aquinas, the Too Te Ching, the BhagavadGita. The psychological era: Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Reik. The philosophical era. The Marxist era. All that Koestler. Back to literature: Conrad, Forster, Beckett. Moving on toward the fractured '#'s: Bellow, Pynchon, Malamud, Mailer, Burroughs, Barth. Catch-# and The Politics of Experience. Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of a well-read man! Here we have his files. A treasure-trove of personalia awaiting a biographer yet unknown. Report cards, always with low marks for conduct. ("David shows little interest in his work and frequently disrupts the class.") Crudely crayoned birthday cards for his mother and father. Old photographs -- can this fat freckled boy be the gaunt individual who stands before you now? This man with the high forehead and the forced, rigid smile is the late Paul Selig, father of our subject, deceased #I August #I of complications following surgery for a perforated ulcer. This grayhaired woman with the hyperthyroid eyes is the late Martha Selig, wife of Paul, mother of David, deceased # March # of mysterious rot of internal organs, probably cancerous. This grim young lady with cold knifeblade face is Judith Hannah Selig, adopted child of P. and M., unloving sister of D. Date on back of photo: July #. Judith is therefore eighteen years old and in the summertime of her hate for me. How much she looks like Toni in this picture! I never noticed the resemblance before, but they've got the same dusky Yemenite look, the same long black hair. But Toni's eyes Were always warm and loving -- except right at the very end -- Jude's eyes never held anything for me other than ice, ice, Plutonian ice. Let us continue with the examination of David Selig's private effects. This is his collection of essays and term papers, written during his college years. How fortunate for D. Selig that he kept all this literary twaddle -- here in his later years these papers have become the capital on which he lives, for you know, of course, how the central figure of our investigations earns his livelihood nowadays.  archives? The carbon copies of innumerable letters. Some of them are quite impersonal missives. Dear President Eisenhower. Dear Pope John. Dear Secretary-General Hammarskjold. Quite often once -- though rarely in recent years -- he launched these letters to far corners of the globe. His fitful unilateral efforts at making contact with a deaf world. His troubled futile attempts at restoring order in a universe plainly tumbling toward the ultimate thermodynamic doom. Shall we look at a few of these documents?... You say. Governor Rockefeller, that "with nuclear weapons multiplying our security is dependent on the credibility of our willingness to resort to our deterrent. It is our heavy responsibility as public officials and as citizens to save the lives and to protect the health of our people. A lagging civil-defense effort cannot be excused by our conviction that nuclear war is a tragedy and that we must strive by all honorable means to assure peace." Permit me to disagree. Your bomb-shelter program. Governor, is the project of a morally impoverished mind. To divert energy and resources from the search for a lasting peace to this ostrich-in-the-sand scheme is, I think, a foolish and dangerous policy that... The Governor, by way of replying, sent his thanks and an offprint of the very speech Selig was protesting. Can one expect more?... Mr. Nixon, your entire campaign is pitched to the theory that America never had it so good under President Eisenhower, and so let's have four more years of the same. To me you sound like Faust, crying out to the passing moment, Bleibe doch, du bist so schoen! (Am  too literate for you, Mr. Vice President?) Please bear in mind that when Faust utters those words, Mephistopheles arrives to collect his soul. Does it honestly seem to you that this instant in history is so sweet that you would stop the clocks forever? Listen to the anguish in the land. Listen to the voices of Mississippi's Negroes, listen to the cries of the hungry children of factory workers thrown out of work by a Republican recession, listen to... Dear Mrs. Hemingway: Please allow me to add my words to the thousands expressing sorrow at the death of your husband. The bravery he showed in the face of a lifesituation that had become unendurable and intolerable is indeed an example for those of us who... Dear Dr. Buber... Dear Professor Toynbee... Dear President Nehru... Dear Mr. Pound: The whole civilized world rejoices with you upon your liberation from the curel and unnatural confinement which... Dear Lord Russell... Dear Chairman Khrushchev... Dear M. Malraux... Dear... Dear... Dear... A remarkable collection of correspondence, you must agree. With equally remarkable replies. See, this answer says. You may be right, and this one says,  am grateful for your interest, and this one says. Of course time does not permit individual replies to all letters received, but nevertheless please be assured that your thoughts will receive careful consideration, and this one says. Send this bastard the bedbug letter. Unfortunately we do not have the imaginary letters which he dictates constantly to himself but never sends. Dear Mr. Kierkegaard: I agree entirely with your celebrated dictum equating "the absurd" with "the fact that with God all things are possible," and declaring, "The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen." In my own experience with the absurd... Dear Mr. Shakespeare: How aptly you put it when you say, "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Or bends with the remover to remove." Your sonnet, however, begs the question: if love is not love, what then is it, that feeling of closeness which can be so absurdly and unexpectedly destroyed by a trifle? If you could suggest some alternate existential mode of relating to others that... Since they are transient, the product of vagrant impulses, and often incomprehensible, we have no satisfactory access to such communications, which Selig sometimes produces at a rate of hundreds per hour. Dear Mr. Justice Holmes: In Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, # U S. #, #I #, you ruled, "I recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from molar to molecular motions." This splendid metaphor is not entirely clear to me, I must confess, and... Dear Mr. Selig; The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, "Create silence." Yours very sincerely, Soren Kierkegaard (#-#) folders here, thick beige cardboard. They are not available for public inspection, since they contain letters of a rather more personal kind. Under the terms of our agreement with the David Selig Foundation I am forbidden to quote, though I may paraphrase. These are his letters to -- and occasionally from -- the girls he has loved or has wanted to love. The earliest 'is dated # and bears the notation at the top in Dear Beverly, it begins, and it is full of embarrassingly graphic sexual imagery. What can you tell us about this Overly, Selig? Well, she was short and cute and freckled, with big headlights and a sunny disposition and sat in front of me in my biology class. She had a creepy twin sister, Estelle, who scowled a lot and through some fluke of genetics was as flat as Beverly was bosomy. Maybe that was why she scowled so much. I used to wander barefoot in Beverly's mind while the teacher. Miss Mueller, droned on about mitosis and chromosomes. She had just yielded her cherry to Victor Schlitz, the big rawboned green-eyed redhaired boy who sat next to her. I learned a lot about sex from her at one remove, with a #-hour timelag, as she radiated every morning her adventure of the night before with Victor. I wasn't jealous of him. He was handsome and selfconfident and deserved her, and I was too shy and insecure to lay anybody anyway, then. So I rode secretly piggyback on their romance and fantasized doing with Beverly the gaudy things Victor was doing with her, until my explorations of her head told me that to her I was just an amusing gnomish child, an oddity, a jester. How then to score? I wrote her this letter, describing in vivid sweaty detail everything that she and Victor had been up to, and said. Don't you wonder how I know all this, heh heh heh? The implication being that I'm some kind of superman with the power to penetrate the intimacies of a woman's mind. I figured that would topple her right into my arms in a swoon of awe, but some second thoughts led me to see that she would either think I was crazy or a peeping tom. And would in either case be wholly turned off me. I filed the letter away undelivered. Most of the letters in this file date l)etween # and #. The most recent was written in the autumn of #, after which time Selig began to feel less and less in touch with the rest of the human race and stopped writing letters, except in his head. I don't know how many girls are represented here but there must have been quite a few. Generally these were all superficial affairs, for Selig, as you know, never married or even had many serious involvements with women. At times he made use of his special gifts knowingly to exploit women sexually, especially at about the age of twenty-five. He is not proud of that period. Wouldn't you like to read these letters, you stinking voyeurs? But you won't. You won't get your paws.on them. Why have I invited yoii in here, anyway? Why do I let you peer at my books and my photographs and my unwashed dishes and my stained bathtub? It must be that my sense of self is slipping. Isolation is choking me. The windows are closed but at least I've opened the door. I need you to bolster my grip on reality by looking into my life, by incorporating parts of it into your own experience, by discovering that I'm real, I exist, I suffer, I have a past if not a future. So that you can go away from here saying. Yes, I know David Selig, actually I know him quite well. But that doesn't mean I have to show you everything. Hey, here's a letter to Amy! Amy who relieved me of my festering virginity in the spring of #. Wouldn't you like to know the story of how that happened? Anybody's first time has an irresistible fascination. Well, I don't feel like discussing it. It isn't much of a story anyway. Make up the details yourself. Where's Amy now? Amy's dead. She died in an auto accident at the age of twenty-three and her husband, who knew me vaguely, phoned me to tell me, since I had once been a friend of hers. He was still in trauma because the police had made him come down to identify the body and she had really been destroyed, mangled, mutilated. Like something from another planet, that's how she looked, he told me. Catapulted through the windshield and into a tree. And I told him, "Amy was the first girl I ever slept with," and he started consoling me. He, consoling me, and I had only been trying to be sadistic. Time passes. Amy's dead and Beverly's a pudgy middle-aged housewife, I bet. Here's a letter to Jackie Newhouse, telling her I can't sleep for thinking about her. Jackie Newhouse? Who that? Oh, yes. Five feet two and a pair of boobs that would have made Marilyn Monroe feel topheavy. Sweet. Dumb. Puckered lips, baby-blue eyes. Jackie had nothing going for her at all except her bosom, but that was enough for me, seventeen years old and hung up on breasts, God knows why. I loved her for her mammaries, so globular and conspicuous in the tight white polo shirts she liked to wear. Summer of #. She loved Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, and had the left thigh of her jeans and her history teacher, whose name, I think, was Leoif Sissinger or Zippinger or something like that, too, from hip to hip. I kissed her twice but that was all. She was even more shy than I, terrified that some hideous male hand would violate the purity of those mighty knockers. I followed her around, trying not to get into her head because it depressed me to see how empty it was. How did it end? Oh, yes. Her kid brother Arnie was telling me how he sees her naked at, home all the time and I, desperate for a vicarious glimpse of her bare breasts, plunged into his skull and stole a second-hand peek. I hadn't realized until then how important a bra can be. Unbound, they hung to her plump little belly, two mounds of dangling meat crisscrossed by bulging blue veins. Cured me of my fixation. So long ago, so unreal to me now, Jackie. Here. Look. Spy on me. My fervid frenzied outpourings of love. Read them all, what do I care? Donna, Elsie, Magda, Mona, Sue, Lois, Karen. Did you think I was deprived? Did you think my lame adolescence sent me stumbling into manhood incapable of finding women? Dear Connie, what a wild night that was! Dear Chiquita, your perfume still lingers in the air. Dear Elaine, when I woke this morning the taste of you was on my lips. Dear Kitty, I -- Oh, God. Kitty. Dear Kitty, I have so much to explain to you that I don't know where to begin. You never understood me, and I never understood you, and so the love I had for you was fated to bring us to a bad pass sooner or later. Which it now has. The failures of communication extended all up and down our relationship but because you were different from any person I had ever known, truly and qualitatively different, I made you the center of my fantasies and could not accept you as you were, but had to keep hammering and hammering and hammering away at you, until -- Oh, God. This one's too painful. What the hell are you doing reading someone else's mail? Don't you have any decency? I can't show you this. The tour's over. Out! Out! Everybody out! For Christ's sake, get out T uesday. Election Day. For months the clamor of the campaign has fouled the air. The free world is choosing its new maximum leader. The sound-trucks rumble along Broadway, belching slogans. Our next President. The man for all America. Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote for X! Vote for Y! The hollow words merge and blur and flow. Republocrat. Demican. Bourn. Why should I vote? I will not vote. I do not vote. I am not plugged in. I am not part of the circuit. Voting is for them. Once, in the late autumn of #, I think it was, I was standing outside Carnegie Hall when suddenly all traffic halted on #th. A motorcade came rumbling out of the east and lo! in a dark black limousine rode Richard M. Nixon, President-elect of the United States of America. My big chance at last, I thought. I will look into his mind and make myself privy to great secrets of state. I will discover what is is about our leaders that sets them apart from ordinary mortals. I looked into his mind and what I found in there I will not tell you, except to say that it was more or less what I should have expected to find. And since that day I have had nothing to do with politics or politicians. Today I stay home from the polls. Let them elect the next President without my help. Yahya Lumumba's halffinished term paper and other such projects. Getting nowhere. Judith calls. "A party," she says. "You're invited. Everybody'll be there." "A party? Who? Where? Why? When?" "Saturday night. Near Columbia. The host is Claude Guermantes. Do you know him? Professor of French Literature." No, the name is not Guermantes. I have changed the name to protect the guilty. "He's one of those charismatic new professors. Young, dynamic, handsome, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir, of Genet. Karl and I are coming. And a lot of others. He always invites the most interesting people." "Genet? Simone de Beauvoir? Will they be there?" "No, silly, not them. But it'll be worth your time. Claude gives the best parties of anybody I know. "Sounds like a vampire to me." "He gives as well as takes, Duv. He specifically asked me to invite you." "How does he know me at all?" "Through me," she says. "I've talked of you. He's dying to meet you." "I don't like parties." "Duv -- " I know that warning tone of voice. I have no stomach for a hassle just now. "All right," I say, sighing. "Saturday night. Give me the address." Why am I so pliable? Why do I let Judith manipulate me? Is this how I build my love for her, through these surrenders? T hursday. I do two paragraphs in the a.m. for Yahya Lumumba. Very apprehensive about his reaction to the thing I'm writing for him. He might just loathe it. If I ever finish it. I must finish it. Never missed a deadline yet. Don't dare to. In the p.m. I walk up to the #th Street bookstore, needing fresh air andwanting, as usual, to see if anything interesting has come out since my last visit three days before. Compulsively I buy a few paperbacks -- an anthology of minor metaphysical poets, Updike's Rabbit Redux and a heavy Levi-Straussian anthropological study, folkways of some Amazonian tribe, that I know I'll never get around to reading. A new clerk at the cash register: a girl nineteen or twenty, pale, blond, white silk blouse, short plaid skirt. Attractive in a vacanteyed way. She isn't at all interesting to me sexually or otherwise. As I think that I chide myself for putting her down -- let nothing human be alien to me -- and on a whim I invade her mind as I pay for my books. I burrow in easily, deep, down through layer after layer of trivia, mining her without hindrance, getting right to the real stuff. Oh! What a sudden blazing communion, soul to soul! She glows. She streams fire. She comes to me with a vividness and a completeness that stun me, so rare has this sort of experience become for me. No dumb pallid mannequin now. I see her full and entire, her dreams, her fantasies, her ambitions, her loves, her soaring ecstasies (last night's gasping copulation and the shame and guilt afterward), a whole churning steaming sizzling human soul. Only once in the last six months have I hit this quality of total contact, only once, that awful day with Yahya Lumumba on the steps of Low Library. And as I remember that searing, numbing experience something is triggered in me and the same thing happens. A dark curtain falls. I am disconnected. My grip on her consciousness is severed. Silence, that terrible mental silence, rushes to enfold me. I stand there, gaping. stunned, alone again and frightened. I start to shake and drop my change and she says to me, worried, "Sir? Sir?" in that sweet fluting little-girl voice. F riday. Wake up with aches, high fever. Undoubtedly an attack of psychosomatic ague. The angry, embittered mind mercilessly flagellating the defenseless body. Chills followed by hot sweats followed by chills. Empty-gut puking. I feel hollow. Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Can't work. I scribble a few pseudo-Lumumbaesque lines and toss the sheet away. Sick as a dog. Well, a good excuse not to go to that dumb party, anyhow. Felt better after a while. I should call Judith. Have her make some chicken soup for me. Oy, veh. Veh ist mir. chicken soup I recover and decide to go to the party. Veh ist mir, in spades. Why has David allowed Judith to drag him from his cave? An endless subway ride downtown. At last the familiar Columbia station. I must walk a few blocks, shivering, not dressed properly for the wintry weather, to the huge old apartment house at Riverside Drive and I #th Street where Claude Guermantes is reputed to live. I stand hesitantly outside. A cold, sour breeze ripping malevolently across the Hudson at me, bearing the windborne detritus of New Jersey. Dead leaves swirling in the park. A mahogany doorman eyes me fishily. "Professor Guermantes?" I say. He jerks a thumb. "Seventh floor, #-G." Waving me toward the elevator. I'm late -- now it's almost ten o'clock. Upstairs in the weary Otis, creak creak creak creak, elevator door rolls back, silkscreen poster in the hallway proclaims the route to Guermantes' lair. A highdecibel roar from the left tells me where the action is. I ring the bell. Wait. Nothing. Ring again. Party's too loud for them to hear me. Oh, to be able to transmit thoughts instead of just to receive them! I'd announce myself in tones of thunder. Ring again, more aggressively. Ah! Yes! Door opens. Short dark-haired girl, undergraduatelooking, wearing a sort of orange sari that leaves her right breast -- small -- bare. Nudity a la mode. Flashes her teeth gaily. "Come in, come in, come in!" A mob scene. Eighty, ninety, a hundred people, everyone dressed in Seventies Flamboyant, gathered in groups of eight to ten, shouting profundities at one another. Those who hold no highballs are busily passing joints, ritualistic hissing intake of breath, much coughing, passionate exhaling. Before I have my coat off someone pops an elaborate ivory-headed pipe in my mouth. "Super hash," he explains. "Just in from Damascus. Come on, man, toke up!" I suck smoke willynilly and feel an immediate effect. I blink. "Yeah," my benefactor shouts. "It's got the power to cloud men's minds, don't it?" In this mob my mind is already pretty well clouded, however, sans cannabis, solely from input overload. My power seems to be functioning at reasonably high intensity tonight, only without much differentiation of persons. I am involuntarily taking in a thick soup of overlapping transmissions, a chaos of merging thoughts. Murky stuff. Pipe and passer vanish and I stumble stonedly forward into a cluttered room lined from floor to ceiling with crammed bookcases. I catch sight of Judith just as she catches sight of me, and from her on a direct line of contact comes her outflow, fiercely vivid at first, trailing off in moments into mush: brother, pain, love, fear, shared memories, forgiveness, forgetting, hatred, hostility, murmphness, froomz, zzzhhh, mmm. Brother. Love. Hate. Zzzhhh. "Duv!" she cries. "Oh, here I am, Duvid!" long lithe body is sheathed in a purple satiny wrap, skin-tight, throat-high, plainly showing her breasts and the little bumps of her nipples and the cleft between her buttocks. On her bosom nestles a glittering slab of gold-rimmed jade, intricately carved. Her hair, unbound, tumbles gloriously. I feel pride in her beauty. She is flanked by two impressive-looking men. On one side is Dr. Karl F. Silvestri, author of Studies in the Physiology of Thermoregulation. He corresponds fairly closely to the image of him that I had plucked from Judith's mind at her apartment a week or two ago, though he is older than I had guessed, at least fifty-five, maybe closer to sixty. Bigger, too -- perhaps six feet five. He has florid cheeks, a stolid selfsatisfied facial expression, tender intelligent eyes. He radiates something avuncular or even paternal toward her. I see why Jude is attracted to him -- he is the powerful father figure that poor beaten Paul Selig never could have been for her. On Judith's other side is a man whom I suspect to be Professor Claude Guermantes. I bounce a quick probe into him and confirm that guess. His mind is quicksilver, a glittering, shimmering pool. He thinks in three or four languages at once. His rampaging energy exhausts me at a single touch. He is about forty, just under six feet tall, muscular, athletics. He wears his elegant sandy hair in swirling baroque waves and his short goatee is impeccably clipped. His clothing is so advanced in style that I lack the vocabulary to describe it, being unaware of fashions myself -- a kind of mantle of coarse green and gold fabric (linen? muslin?), a scarlet sash, flaring satin trousers, turned-up pointed-toed medieval boots. His dandyish appearance and mannered posture suggest that he might be gay, but he gives off a powerful aura of heterosexuality. From Judith's stance and fond way of looking at him I begin to realize that he and she must once have been lovers. May still be. I am shy about probing that. My raids on Judith's privacy are too sore a point between us. "I'd like you to meet my brother David," Judith says. Silvestri beams. "I've heard so much about you, Mr. Selig." "Have you really?" I've got this freak of a brother, Karl. Would you believe it? He can actually read minds. Your thoughts are as clear as a radio broadcast to him.) How much has Judith actually revealed about me? I'll try to probe him and see. "And call me David. You're Dr. Silvestri, right?" "That's right. Karl. I'd prefer Karl." "I've heard a lot about you from Jude," I say. No go on the probe. My abominable waning gifts -- I get only sputtering bits of static, misty scraps of unintelligible thought. His mind is opaque to me. My head starts to throb. "She showed me two of your books." A pleased chuckle from lofty Silvestri. Judith meanwhile has begun to introduce me to Guermantes. He murmurs his delight at making my acquaintance. I half expect him to kiss my cheeks or maybe my hand. His voice is soft, purring -- it carries an accent, but not a French one. Something strange, a mixture. Franco-italic, maybe, or Franco-Hispanic. Him at least I can probe even now -- somehow his mind, more volatile than Silvestri's, remains within my reach. I slither in and take a look. Christ! Casanova Redivivus! He's slept with everything that walks or crawls, masculine feminine neuter, including of course my accessible sister Judith. The professor is speculating in a civilized way on the possibilities of nailing me before the night is out. No hope, professor. I will not be added to your Selig collection. He asks me pleasantly about my degrees. "Just one," I say. "A B.A. in 'fifty-six. I thought about doing graduate work in English literature but never got around to it." He teaches Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme', Baudelaire, Lautrdimont, that whole sick crew, and identifies with them spiritually. As he talks to me he fondles Judith's shoulderblades affectionately, proprietorially. Dr. Silvestri appears not to notice, or else not to care. "Your sister," Guermantes murmurs, "she is a marvel, she is an original, a splendor -- a type. M'sieu' Selig, a type." A compliment, in the froggish sense. He fascinates me -- so blatant, so phony, so manipulative and yet so attractive despite all his transparent failings. He offers me cocktails, highballs, liquers, brandies, pot, hash, cocaine, anything I crave. I feel engulfed and escape from him in some relief, slipping away to pour a little rum. table. One of Guermantes' students, no more than twenty. Coarse black hair tumbling into ringlets, pug nose, fierce perceptive eyes, full fleshy lips. Not beautiful but somehow interesting. Evidently I interest her, too, for she grins at me and asks, "Would you like to go home with me?" "I just got here." "Later. Later. No hurry." "Do you say that to everybody you've just met?" "We haven't even met," she points out. "And no, I don't say it to everybody. To lots, though. What's wrong? Girls can take the initiative these days. Besides, it's leap year. Are you a poet?" "Not really." "You look like one. I bet you're sensitive and you suffer a lot." My familiar dopy fantasy, coming to life before my eyes. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She's stoned. Her legs are too short for her torso, her hips too wide, her breasts too heavy. Is she putting me on? I bet you're sensitive and you suffer a lot. Are you a poet? I try to explore her, but it's useless. Fatigue is blanking my mind and the collective shriek of the massed mob of partygoers is drowning out all individual outputs. "What's your name?" she asks. "David Selig." "Lisa Holstein. I'm a senior at Barn -- " "Holstein?" The name triggers me. Kitty, Kitty, Kitty! "Is that what you said? Holstein?" "Holstein, yes, and spare me the cow jokes." "Do you have a sister named Kitty? Catherine, I guess. Kitty Holstein. About thirty-five years old. Your sister, maybe your cousin -- " "No. Never heard of her. Someone you know?" "Used to know," I say. "Kitty Holstein." I pick up my drink and turn away. "Hey," she calls after me. "Did you think I was kidding? Do you want to go home with me tonight or don't you?" X The name leaps suddenly, startlingly, out of the white-noise background hum of party chatter. For an instant it hangs in the smoky air like a dead leaf caught by a lazy October breeze. Who said "Tom Nyquist" just then? Who was it who spoke his name? A pleasant baritone voice no more than a dozen feet from me. I look for likely owners of that voice. Men all around. You? You? You? No way of telling. Yes, one way. When words are spoken aloud, they reverberate in the mind of the speaker for a short while. (Also in the minds of his hearers, but the reverberations are different in tonality.) I summon my slippery skill and, straining, force needles of inquiry into the nearby consciousnessness, hunting for echoes. The effort is murderously great. The skulls I enter are solid bony domes through whose few crevices I struggle to ram my limp, feeble probes. But I enter. I seek the proper reverberations. Tom Nyquist? Tom Nyquist? Who spoke his name? You? You? Ah. There. The echo is almost gone, just a dim hollow clangor at the far end of a cavern. A tall plump man with a comic fringe of blond beard. "Excuse me," I say. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I heard you mention the name of a very old friend of mine -- " "Oh?" " -- and I couldn't help coming over to ask you about him. Tom Nyquist. He and I were once very close. If you know where he is now, what he's doing -- " "Tom Nyquist?" "Yes. I'm sure I heard you mention him." A blank smile. "I'm afraid there's been a mistake. I don't know anyone by that name. Jim? Fred? Can you help?" "But I'm positive I heard -- " The echo. Bourn in the cave. Was I mistaken? At close range I try to get inside his head, to hunt in his filing system for any knowledge of Nyquist. But I can't function at all, now. They are conferring earnestly. Nyquist? Nyquist? Did anybody, hear a Nyquist mentioned? Does anyone know a Nyquist? One of them suddenly cries, "John Leibnitz!" "Yes," says the plump one happily. "Maybe that's whom you heard me mention. I was talking about John Leibnitz a few moments ago. A mutual friend. In this racket that might very well have sounded Nyquist to you." Leibnitz. Nyquist. Leibnitz. Nyquist. Bourn. Bourn. "Quite possibly," I agree. "No doubt that's what happened. Silly of me." John Leibnitz. "Sorry to have bothered you." and prancing at my elbow, "You really must audit my class one of these days. This Wednesday afternoon I start Rimbaud and Verlaine. Do come around. You'll be on campus Wednesday, won't you?" Wednesday is the day I must deliver Yahya Lumumba's term paper on the Greek tragedians. I'll be on campus, yes. I'd better be. But how does Guermantes know that? Is he getting into my head somehow? What if he has the gift, too? And I'm wide open to him, he knows everything, my poor pathetic secret, my daily increment of loss and there he stands, patronizing me because I'm failing and he's as sharp as I ever was? Then a quick paranoiac flash -- not only does he have the gift but perhaps he's some kind of telepathic leech, draining me, bleeding the power right out of my mind and into his. Perhaps he's been tapping me on the sly ever since '#. I shake these useless idiocies away. "I expect to be around on Wednesday. Maybe I'll drop in." There is no chance whatever that I will go to hear Claude Guermantes lecture on Rimbaud or Verlaine. If he's got the power, let him put that in his pipe and smoke it. "I'd love it if you came," he tells me. He leans close to me. I smell hair tonic, shaving lotion, deodorant and other perfumes. A small blessing -- not all my senses are dwindling at once. "Your sister," he murmurs. "Marvelous woman. How I love her! She speaks often of you." "Does she?" "With great love. Also with great guilt. It seems you and she were estranged for many years." "That's over now. We're finally becoming friends." "How wonderful for you both." He gestures with a flick of his eyes. "That doctor. No good for her. Too old, too static. After fifty, most men lose the capacity to grow. He'll bore her to death in six months." "Maybe boredom is what she needs," I reply. "She's had an exciting life. It hasn't made her happy." "No one ever needs boredom," Guermantes says and winks. ,have you come for dinner next week, Duv. There's so much we three need to talk about." "I'll see, Jude. I'm not sure about anything about next week yet. I'll call you." Lisa Holstein. John Leibnitz. I think I need another drink. Hash, rum, wine, pot -- God knows what else. And somebody popping amyl nitrite under my nose about two in the morning. That filthy party. I should never have gone. My head, my head, my head. Where's the typewriter? I've got to get some work done. Let's go, then: We see, thus, the difference in the method of approach of these three tragedians to the same story. Aeschylus' primary concern is theological implications of the crime and the inexorable workings of the gods: Orestes is torn between the command of Apollo to slay his mother and his own fear of matricide, and he goes mad as a result. Euripides dwells on the characterization, and takes a less allegorical No damned good. Save it for later. Silence between my ears. The echoing black void. I have nothing going for me at all today, nothing. I think it may be completely gone. I can't even pick up the clamor of the spies next door. November is the cruelest month, breeding onions out of the dead mind. I'm living an Eliot poem. I'm turning into words on a page. Shall I sit here feeling sorry for myself? No. No. No. No. I'll fight back. Spiritual exercises designed to restore my power. On your knees, Selig. Bow the head. Concentrate. Transform yourself into a fine needle of thought, a slim telepathic laser beam, stretching from this room to the vicinity of the lovely star, Betelgeuse. Got it? Good. That sharp pure mental beam piercing the universe. Hold it. Hold it firm. No spreading at the edges allowed, man. Good. Now ascend. We are climbing Jacob's ladder. This will be an out-of-the-body experience, Duvid. Up, up and away! Rise through the ceiling, through the roof, through the atmosphere, through the ionosphere, through the stratosphere, through the whatsisphere. Outward. Into the vacant interstellar spaces. O dark dark dark. Cold the sense and lost the motive of action. No, stop that stuff! Only positive thinking is allowed on this trip. Soar! Soar! Toward the little green men of Betelgeuse IX. Reach their minds, Selig. Make contact. Make...contact. Soar, you lazy y id-bastard! Why aren't you soaring? Soar! Well? Nothing. Nada. Niente. Nowhere. Nulla. Nicht. Tumbling back to Earth. Into the silent funeral. All right, give up, if that's what you want. All right. Rest for a little while. Rest and then pray, Selig. Pray. M onday. The hangover is gone. The brain is once again receptive. In a glorious burst of creative frenzy I rewrite The "Electra" Theme in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from gunwale to fetlock, completely recasting it, revoicing it, clarifying and strengthening the ideas while simultaneously catching what I think is just the perfect tone of offhand black hipness. As I hammer out the final words the telephone rings. Lisa Holstein. "You promised to take me home after the party," she says mournfully, accusingly. "What the hell did you do, sneak away?" "How did you get my number?" "From Claude. Professor Guermantes." That sleek devil. He knows everything. "Look, what are you doing right now?" "Thinking about having a shower. I've been working all morning and I stink like a goat." "What kind of work do you do?" "I ghostwrite term papers for Columbia men." She ponders that a moment. "You sure have a weird head, man. I mean really -- what do you do?" "I Just told you." A long digestive silence. Then; "Okay. I can dig it. You ghostwrite term papers. Look, Dave, go take your shower. How long is it on the subway from a hundred and tenth and Broadway to your place?" "Maybe forty minutes if you get a train right away." "Swell. See you in an hour, then." Click. I shrug. A crazy broad. Dave, she calls me. Nobody calls me Dave. Stripping, I head for the shower, a long leisurely soaping. Then I pick up the Updike book. I get to page four and the phone rings again. Lisa: she's on the train platform at #th, wants to know how to get to my apartment. This is more than a joke now. But okay. I can play her game. I give her the instructions. Ten minutes later, a knock on the door. Lisa in thick black sweater, the same sweaty one as Saturday night, and tight blue jeans. A shy grin, strangely out of character for her. "Hi," she says. Making herself comfortable. "When I first saw you I had this intuitive flash on you: This guy's got something special. Make it with him. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that you've got to trust your intuition. I go with the flow, Dave, I go with the flow." Her sweater is off by now. Her breasts are heavy and round, with tiny, almost imperceptible nipples. A Jewish star nestles in the deep valley between them. She wanders the room, examining my books, my records, my photographs. "So tell me," she says. "Now that I'm here. Was I right? Is there anything special about you?" "There once was." "What?" "That's for me to know and you to find out," I say and, gathering my strength, I ram my mind into hers. It's a brutal frontal assault, a rape. Of course, she doesn't feel a thing. I say, "I used to have a really extraordinary gift. It's mostly worn off by now, but some of the time I still have it and, as a matter of fact. I'm using it on you right now." "Far out," she says and drops her jeans. No underpants. She will be fat before she's thirty. Her thighs are thick, her belly protrudes. While I inspect her flesh I savagely ransack her mind, sparing her no areas of privacy, enjoying my access while it lasts. I don't need to be polite. I owe her nothing -- she forced herself on me. I check first to see if she had been lying when she said she'd never heard of Kitty. The truth: Kitty is no kin to her. A meaningless coincidence of surnames, is all. "I'm sure you're a poet, Dave," she says as we entwine and drop onto the unmade bed. "That's an intuition flash too. Even if you're doing this term paper thing now, poetry is where you're really at." I continue to loot her mind like a Goth plundering the Forum. She is fully open to me -- I delight in this unexpected return of vigor. Her autobiography assembles itself for me. Born in Cambridge. Twenty years old. Father a professor. One younger brother. Tomboy childhood. Measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever. Puberty at eleven, lost her virginity at twelve. Abortion at sixteen. Several Lesbian adventures. Passionate interest in French decadent poets. Acid, mescalin, psilocybin, cocaine, even a sniff of smack. Guermantes gave her that. Guermantes also took her to bed five or six times. Vivid memories of that. Her mind shows me more of Guermantes than I want to see. Lisa comes through with a tough, aggressive self-image, captain of her soul, master of her fate, and so forth. Underneath that it's just the opposite, of course; she's scared as hell. Not a bad kid. I feel a little guilty about the casual way I slammed into her head, no regard for her privacy at all. But I have my needs. i lie there picking her brain and accepting the gift of her lips. Covertly I feed on feedback, tapping into her pleasure-responses. But then a funny thing happens. The broadcast from her mind is becoming erratic and indistinct, more noise than signal. The images break up in a pounding of static. What gets through is garbled and distant -- I scramble to maintain my hold on her consciousness, but no use, no use, she slips away, moment by moment receding from me, until there is no communion at all. She is caught by surprise. "What brought you down?" she asks. I find it impossible to tell her. I remember Judith asking me, some weeks back, whether I had ever regarded my loss of mental powers as a kind of metaphor of impotence. And now here, for the first time, metaphor blends with reality -- the two failures are integrated. He is impotent here and he is impotent there. Poor David. "I guess I got distracted," I tell her. "Let's just rest and maybe I'll come back to life." We rest. Side by side, stroking her skin in an abstract way, I run a few tentative probing efforts. Not a flicker on the telepathic level. Not a flicker. The silence of the tomb. Is this it, the end, right here and now? Is this where it finally burns out? And I am like all the rest of you now. I am condemned to make do with mere words. I try again to probe her. Zero. Zee-ro. Is it gone? I think it's really gone. You have been present today at an historic event, young lady. The perishing of a remarkable extrasensory power. Leaving behind this merely mortal husk of mine. Alas. "I'd love to read some of your poetry, Dave," she says. M onday night, about seventhirty. Lisa has left, finally. I go out for dinner to a nearby pizzeria. I am quite calm. The impact of what has befallen me hasn't really registered yet. How strange that I can be so accepting. At any moment, I know, it's bound to come rushing in on me, crushing me, shattering me. But for now I'm surprisingly cool. An oddly posthumous feeling, as of having outlived myself. And a feeling of relief -- the suspense is over, the process has completed itself. The dying is done and I've survived it. Of course I don't expect this mood to last. I've lost something central to my being and now I await the anguish and the grief and the despair that must surely be due to erupt shortly. But it seems that my mourning must be postpbned. What I thought was all over isn't over yet. I walk into the pizzeria and the counterman gives me his flatly cold New York smile of welcome. And I get this, unsolicited, from behind his greasy face; Hey, here's the fag who always wants extra anchovies. Reading him clearly. So it's not dead yet! Not quite dead! Only resting a while. Only hiding. T uesday. Bitter cold, one of those terrible late-autumn days when every drop of moisture has been squeezed from the air and the sunlight is like knives. I finish two more term papers. Judith calls after lunch. The usual dinner invitation. My usual oblique reply. "What did you think of Karl?" she asks. "A very substantial man." "He wants me to marry him." "Well?" "It's too soon. I don't really know him, Duv. I like him -- I admire him tremendously, but I don't know whether I love him." "Then don't rush into anything with him," I say. "Besides, if you marry him, he'd probably want you to give up Guermantes. I don't think he could dig it." "You know about me and Claude?" "Of course." "You always know everything." "This was pretty obvious, Jude." "I thought your power was waning." "It is, it is -- faster than ever. But this was still pretty obvious. To the naked eye." "All right. What did you think of him?" "He's death. He's a killer." "You misjudge him, Duv." "I was in his head. I saw him, Jude. He isn't human. People are toys to him." "If you could hear the sound of your own voice now, Duv. The hostility, the outright Jealousy -- " "Jealousy? Am I so openly incestuous?" "You always were," she says. "But let that pass. I really thought you'd enjoy meeting Claude." "I did. He's fascinating. I think cobras are fascinating too." "Oh, shove it, Duv." "You want me to pretend I liked him?" "Don't do me any favors." The old icy Judith. "What's Karl's reaction to Guermantes?" She pauses. Finally: "Pretty negative. Karl's very conventional, you know. Just as you are." "Me?" "Oh, you're so damned straight, Duv! You're such a puritan! You've been lecturing me on morality all my goddamned life, wagging your finger at me -- " "Why doesn't Karl like him?" "I don't know. He thinks Claude's sinister. Exploitive." Her voice is suddenly flat and dull. "Maybe he's just jealous. He knows I'm still sleeping with Claude. Oh, Jesus, Duv, why are we fighting again? Why can't we just talk!" "I'm not the one who's fighting. I'm not the one who raised his voice." "You're challenging me. That's what you always do. You spy on me and then you challenge me and try to put me down." "Old habits are hard to break, Jude. Really, though -- I'm not angry with you." "You sound so smug!" "I'm not angry. You are. You got angry when you saw that Karl and I agree about your friend Claude. People always get angry when they're told something they don't want to hear. Listen, Jude, do whatever you want. If Guermantes is your trip, go ahead." "I don't know. I just don't know." An unexpected concession: "Maybe there is something sick about my relationship with him." Her flinty self-assurance vanishes abruptly. That's the wonderful thing about her -- you get a different Judith every two minutes. Now, softening, thawing, she sounds uncertain of herself. In a moment she'll turn her concern outward, away from her own troubles, toward me. "Will you come to dinner next week? We very much do want to get together with you." "I'll try." "I'm worried about you, Duv." Yes, here it comes. "You looked so strung out on Saturday night." "It's been a pretty rough time for me. But I'll manage." I don't feel like talking about myself. "Listen, I'll call you soon, okay?" "Are you still in so much pain, Duv?" "I'm adapting. I'm accepting the whole thing. I mean. I'll be okay. Keep in touch, Jude. My best to Karl." And Claude, I add, as I put down the receiver. Downtown to deliver my latest batch of masterpieces. It's colder even than yesterday. The air is clearer, the sun brighter, more remote. How dry the world seems. The humidity must be practically zero, I think. This is the sort of weather I used to function in with overwhelming clarity of perception. But I was picking up hardly anything at all on the subway ride down to Columbia, just muzzy little blurts and squeaks, nothing coherent. I can no longer be certain of having the power on any given day, apparently, and this is one of the days off. Unpredictable. That's what you are, you who live in my head -- unpredictable. Thrashing about randomly in your death throes. I go to the usual place and await my clients. They come. They get from me what they have come for. They cross my palm with greenbacks. David Selig, benefactor of undergraduate mankind. I see Yahya Lumumba like a black sequoia making his way across from Butler Library. Why am I trembling? It's the chill in the air, isn't it, the hint of winter, the death of the year? "You got the paper, man?" "Right here." I deal it off the stack. "Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Six pages. That's twentyone dollars, minus the five you already gave me -- makes sixteen you owe me." "Wait, man." He sits down beside me on the steps. "I got to read it first, right?" I watch him as he reads. Somehow I expect him to be moving his lips, to be stumbling over the unfamiliar words, but no -- his eyes flicker rapidly over the lines. He gnaws his lip. He reads faster and faster, impatiently turning the pages. At length he looks at me and there is death in his eyes. "This is shit, man," he says. "I mean, this here is just shit. What kind of con you trying to pull?" "I guarantee you'll get a B-f-. You don't have to pay me until you get the grade. Anything less than B-land -- " "No, listen to me. Who talking about grades? I can't turn this thing in at all. Look, half this thing is jive-talk, the other half is copied straight out some book. Crazy shit, that's what. The prof is going to read it, he going to look at me, he going to say, Lumumba, who you think I am? You think I a dummy, Lumumba? You didn't write this crap, he going to say to me. You don't believe Word One of this." Angrily he rises. "Here, I going to read you some of this, man. I show you what you give me." Leafing through the pages, he scowls, spits, shakes his head. "No. Why the hell should #? You know what you up to here, man? You making fun of me, that's what. You playing games with the dumb nigger, man." "I was trying to make it look plausible that you had written -- " "Crap. You pulling a mindfuck, man. You making up a pile of stinking Jew shit about Europydes and you hoping I get in trouble trying to pass it off as my own stuff." "That's a lie. I did the best possible job for you -- and don't think I didn't sweat plenty. When you hire another man to write a term paper for you I think you have to be prepared to expect a certain -- " "How long this take you? Fifteen minutes?" "Eight hours, maybe ten," I say. "You know what I think you're trying to do, Lumumba? You're pulling reverse racism on me. Jew this and Jew that -- if you don't like Jews so much, why didn't you get a black to write your paper for you? Why didn't you write it yourself? I did an honest job for you. I don't like hearing it put down as stinking Jew shit. And I tell you that if you turn it in, you'll get a passing grade for sure -- you'll probably get a B-fat the very least." "I gonna get flunked, is what." "No. No. Maybe you just don't see what I was driving at. Let me try to explain it to you. If you'll galaxy' give it to me for a minute so I can read you a couple of things -- maybe it'll be clearer if I -- " Getting to my feet, I extend a hand toward the paper, but he grins and holds it high above my head. I'd need a ladder to reach it. "Come on, damn it, don't play games with me! Let me have it!" I snap. He flicks his wrist and the six sheets of paper soar into the wind and go sailing eastward. Dying, I watch them go. I clench my fists -- an astonishing burst of rage explodes in me. I want to smash in his mocking face. "You shouldn't have done that," I say. "You shouldn't have just thrown it away." "You owe me my five bucks." "Hold on, now. I did the work you hired me to do and -- " "You said you don't charge if the paper's no good. Okay, the paper was shit. No charge. Give me the five." "You aren't playing fair, Lumumba. You're trying to rip me off." "Who ripping who off? Who set up that money-back deal anyhow? Me? You. What I gonna do for a term paper now? I got to take an incomplete and it your fault. Suppose they make me ineligible for the team because of that. Huh? Huh? What then? Look, man, you make me want to puke. Give me the five." I S HE serious about the refund? I can't tell. The idea of paying him back disgusts me and it isn't just on account of losing the money. I wish I could read him, but I can't get anything out of him on that level -- I'm completely blocked now. I'll bluff. I say, "What is this, slavery turned upside down? I did the work. I don't give a damn what kind of crazy irrational reasons you've got for rejecting it. I'm going to keep the five. At least the five." "Give me the money, man." "Go to hell." I start to walk away. He grabs me -- his arm, fully extended toward me, must be as long as one of my legs -- and hauls me to him. He starts to shake me. My teeth are rattling. His grin is broader than ever, but his eyes are demonic. I wave my fists at him, but, held at arm's length, I can't even touch him. I start to yell. A crowd is gathering. Suddenly there are three or four other men in varsity jackets surrounding us, all black, all gigantic, though not as big as he is. His teammates. Laughing, whooping, cavorting. I am a toy to them. "Hey, man, he bothering you?" one of them asks. "You need help, Yahya?" yells another. "What's the honkie doing to you, man?" calls a third. They form a ring and Lumumba thrusts me toward the man on his left, who catches me and flings me onward around the circle. I spin -- I stumble -- I reel. They never let me fall. Around and around and around. An elbow explodes against my lip. I taste blood. Someone slaps me and my head rockets backward. Fingers are jabbing my ribs. I realize that I'm going to get very badly hurt, that in fact these giants are going to beat me up. A voice I barely recognize as my own offers Lumumba his refund, but no one notices. They continue to whirl me from one to the next. Not slapping now, not jabbing, but punching. Where are the campus police? Help! Help! Pigs to the rescue! But no one comes. I can't catch my breath. I'd like to drop to my knees and huddle against the ground. They're yelling at me, racial epithets, words I barely comprehend, soul-brother jargon that must have been invented last week. I don't know what they're calling me, but I can feel the hatred in every syllable. Help? Help? The world spins wildly. I know now how a basketball would feel, if a basketball could feel. The steady pounding, the blur of unending motion. Please, someone, anyone, help me, stop them. Pain in my chest -- a lump of white-hot metal back of my breastbone. I can't see. I can only feel. Where are my feet? I'm falling at last. Look how fast the steps rush toward me. The cold kiss of the stone bruises my cheek. I may already have lost consciousness -- how can I tell? There's one comfort at least. I can't get any further down than this. XX H e was ready to fall in love when he met Kitty, overripe and eager for an emotional entanglement. Perhaps that was the whole trouble -- what he felt for her was not so much love as simply satisfaction at the idea of being in love. Or perhaps not. He never understood his feelings for Kitty in any orderly way. They had their romance in the summer of #, which he remembers as the last summer of hope and good cheer before the long autumn of entropic chaos and philosophical despair descended on western society. Selig, who was twenty-eight years old, had just moved from his Brooklyn Heights apartment to a small place in the West Seventies. He was working as a stockbroker then, of all unlikely things. This was Tom Nyquist's idea. After six years, Nyquist was still his closest and possibly only friend, although the friendship had waned considerably in the last year or two. One day Selig had said wistfully that if he could only manage to get a bundle of money together -- say, twenty-five thousand dollars or so -- he would go off to a remote island and spend a couple of years writing a novel, a major statement about alienation in contemporary life, something like that. He had never written anything serious and wasn't sure he was sincere about wanting to. He was secretly hoping that Nyquist would simply hand him the money -- Nyquist could pick up twenty-five thousand dollars in one afternoon's work, if he felt like it -- and say, "Here, chum, go and be creative." But Nyquist didn't do things that way. Instead he said that the easiest way for someone without capital to make a lot of money in a hurry was to take a job as a customer's man with a brokerage firm. The commissions would be decent, enough to live on and something left over, but the real money would come from riding along on all the in-shop maneuvers of the experienced brokers -- the short sales, the new-issue purchases, the arbitrage ploys. If you're dedicated enough, Nyquist told him, you can make just about as much as you like. Selig protested that he knew nothing about Wall Street. "I could teach you everything in three days," said Nyquist. The lesson actually took less time. Selig slipped into Nyquist's mind for a quick cram course in financial terminology. Nyquist had all the definitions beautifully arranged -- common stocks and preferred, shorts and longs, puts and calls, debentures, convertibles, capital gains, special situations, closed-end versus open-end funds, secondary offerings, specialists and what they do, the over-the-counter market, the Dow-Jones averages, point-and-figure charts and everything else. Selig memorized all of it. There was a vivid quality about mind-to-mind transferences with Nyquist that made memorizing things easy. The next step was to enroll as a trainee. Every big brokerage firm was looking for beginners. Selig picked one at random and applied. They gave him a stock-market quiz by way of preliminary screening. He knew most of the answers and those he didn't know he picked up out of the minds of his fellow testees, most of whom had been following the market since childhood. He got a perfect score and was hired. After a brief training period he passed the licensing test and before long he was a registered representative operating out of a fairly new brokerage office on Broadway near #nd Street. He was one of five brokers, all of them fairly young. The clientele was predominantly Jewish and generally geriatric: seventy-fiveyear-old widows from the huge apartment houses along #nd Street and cigar-chomping retired garment manufacturers who lived on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Since most of the clients were elderly and didn't work, the bulk of dealings at the office were transacted in person rather than by phone. There were always ten or twelve senior citizens schmoozing in front of the stock ticker and now and then one of them would dodder to the desk of his pet broker and place an order. Selig quickly became a favorite, especially among the old ladies; they liked him because he was a nice Jewish boy, and several offered to introduce him to comely granddaughters. Business was steady but unspectacular. Once. he had acquired his own nucleus of regulars, Selig's commissions ran to about a hundred and sixty a week. This was more money than he had ever made before, but hardly the kind of income he imagined brokers pulled down. "You're lucky you came here in the spring," one of the other customer's men told him. "In the winter months all the clients go to Florida and we can choke before anybody gives us any business here." As Nyquist had predicted, he was able to turn some pleasant profits by trading for his own account; there were always nice little deals circulating in the office, hot tips with substance behind them. He started with savings of three hundred fifty dollars and quickly pyramided his wad to a high four-figure sum. But he discovered that Wall Street runs in two directions and much of his winnings melted away through badly timed trades. He came to see that he was never going to have enough of a stake to go off and write that novel.  She came in one muggy July morning at half-past nine. The market had not yet opened. Many of the customers had fled to the Catskills for the summer and the only people in the office were Martinson, the manager, Nadel, one of the other customer's men, and Selig. Selig, idle, was daydreaming of falling in love with somebody's beautiful granddaughter. Then the door opened and somebody's beautiful granddaughter came in. Not exactly beautiful, maybe, but certainly attractive -- a girl in her early twenties, slim and well proportioned, perhaps five feet three or four, with fluffy light-brown hair, blue-green eyes, finely outlined features, a graceful slender figure. She seemed shy, intelligent, somehow innocent, a curious mixture of knowledge and naivete'. She wore a white silk blouse -- gold chain lying on the smallish breasts -- and an ankle-length brown skirt, offering a hint of excellent legs beneath. No, not a beautiful girl, but certainly pretty. What the hell, Selig wondered, does she want in this temple of Mammon at her age? She's here fifty years too early. Curiosity led him to send a probe walked toward him. Seeking only surface stuff: name, age, marital status, address, telephone number, purpose of visit -- what else? He got nothing. That shocked him. It was an incredible experience, unique. To reach toward a mind and find it absolutely inaccessible, opaque, hidden as if behind an impenetrable wall -- he had never had that happen to him before. He got no aura from her at all. She might as well have been a department store's plaster window mannequin or a mindless robot from another planet. He sat there blinking, trying to account for his failure to make contact. He was so astounded by her total blankness that he forgot to listen to what she was saying to him. He had to ask her to repeat. "I said. I'd like to open a brokerage account. Are you a broker?" Sheepish, fumbling, stricken with sudden adolescent clumsiness, he gave her the new-account forms. Sitting beside his cluttered desk, she told him of her investment needs while he studied the elegant structure of her high-bridged nose, fought without success against her perplexing and enigmatic mental inaccessibility and, despite or perhaps because of that inaccessibility, felt himself helplessly falling in love with her. She was twenty-two, one year out of Radcliffe, came from Long Island and shared a West End Avenue apartment with two other girls. Unmarried -- there had been a long futile love affair ending in a broken engagement not long before, he would discover later. (How strange it was for him not to be discovering everything at once, taking the information as he desired it.) Her background was in mathematics and she worked as a computer programer, a term which, in #, meant very little to him. He wasn't sure whether she designed computers, operated them or repaired them. Recently she had inherited sixty-five hundred dollars from an aunt in Arizona, and her parents, who evidently were stern and formidable advocates of sink-or-swim education, had told her to invest the money on her own, by way of assuming adult responsibilities. So she had gone to her friendly neighborhood brokerage office, a lamb for the shearing, to invest her money. "What do you want?" Selig asked her. "To stash it away in safe blue chips, or to go for a little action, a chance for capital gains?" "I don't know. I don't know the first thing about the market. I just don't want to do anything silly." Another broker -- Nadel, say -- would have given her the Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained speech and, advising her to forget about such old and tired concepts as dividends, would have steered her into an action portfolio -- Texas Instruments, Collips Radio, Polaroid, stuff like that. Then he would churn her account every few monts, switch Polaroid into Xerox, Texas Instruments into Fairchild Camera, Collins into American Motors, American Motors back into Polaroid, running up fancy commissions for himself and, perhaps, making some money for her. Or perhaps losing some. Selig had no stomach for such maneuvers. "This is going to sound stodgy," he said, "but let's play it very safe. I'll recommend some decent things that won't ever make you rich but that you won't get hurt on, either. And then you can just put them away and watch them grow, without having to check the market quotations every day to find out if you ought to sell. Because you don't really want to bother worrying about the short-term fluctuations, do you?" This was absolutely not what Martinson had instructed him to tell new clients, but to hell with that. She smiled. It was a shy, halfforced smile, but he thought he detected flirtatiousness in her eyes. It was agony for him not to be able to read her, to be compelled to depend on external signals alone in order to know where he stood with her. But he took the chance. "What are you doing this evening?" he asked. "I get out of here at four o'clock." She was free, she said. Except that she worked from eleven to six. He arranged to pick her up at her apartment around seven. There was no mistaking the warmth of her smile as she left the office. "You lucky bastard," Nadel said. "What did you do, make a date for customer's men to go around laying the customers." minutes after the market opened he shorted two hundred Molybdenum on the Amex and covered his sale a point and a half lower at lunchtime. That ought to take care of the cost of dinner, he figured, with some to spare. Nyquist had given him the tip yesterday. During the midafternoon lull, he phoned Nyquist to report on his maneuver. "You covered too soon," Nyquist said immediately. "She'll drop five or six more points this week. The smart money's waiting for that." "I'm not that greedy. I'll settle for the quick three bills." "That's no way to get rich." "I guess I lack gambling instinct," Selig said. He hesitated. He hadn't really called Nyquist to talk about shorting Molybdenum. I met a girl, he wanted to say, and I have this funny problem with her. I met a girl, I met a girl. Sudden fears held him back. Nyquist's silent passive presence at the other end of the telephone line seemed somehow threatening. He'll laugh at me, Selig thought. He's always laughing at me, quietly, thinking I don't see it. But this is foolishness. He said, "Tom, something strange happened today. A girl came into the office, a very attractive girl. I'm seeing her tonight." "Congratulations." "Wait. The thing is, I was entirely unable to read her. I mean. I couldn't even pick up an aura. Blank, absolutely blank. I've never had that with anybody before. Have you?" "I don't think so." "A complete blank. I can't understand it. What could account for her having such a strong screen?" "Maybe you're tired today," Nyquist suggested. "No. No. I can read everybody else, same as always. Just not her." "Does that irritate you?" "Of course it does." "Why do you say of course?" The reason seemed obvious to Selig. He could tell that Nyquist was baiting him -- the voice calm, uninflected, neutral. A game. A way of passing time. He wished he hadn't phoned. Brusquely Selig said, "I'm -- well, very interested in her. And it bothers me that I have no way of getting through to her real self." Nyquist said, "You mean you're annoyed that you can't spy on her." "I don't like that phrase." "Whose phrase is it? Not mine. That's how you regard what we do, isn't it? As spying. You feel quilty about spying on people, right? But it seems you also feel upset when you can't spy." "I suppose," Selig admitted sullenly. "With this girl you find yourself forced back on the same old clumsy guesswork techniques for dealing with people that the rest of the world is condemned to use all the time -- and you don't like that. Yes?" "You make it sound evil, Tom." "What do you want me to say?" "I don't want you to say anything. I'm just telling you that there's this girl I can't read, that I've never been up against this situation before, that I wonder if you have any theories to account for why she's the way she is." "I don't," Nyquist said. "Not off the top of my head." "All right, then. I -- " But Nyquist wasn't finished. "You realize that I have no way of telling whether she's opaque to the telepathic process in general or just opaque to you, David." That possibility had occurred to Selig a moment earlier. He found it deeply disturbing. Nyquist went on smoothly, "Suppose you bring her around one of these days and let me take a look at her. Maybe I'll be able to learn something useful about her that way." "I'll do that," Selig said without enthusiasm. He knew such a meeting was necessary and inevitable, but the idea of exposing Kitty to Nyquist produced agitation in him. "One of these days soon," he said. "Look, all the phones are lighting up. I'll be in touch, Tom." "Give her one for me," said Nyquist. David Selig Selig Studies #, Prof. Selig November #, # Entropy is defined in physics as a mathematical expression of the degree in which the energy of a thermodynamic system is so distributed as to be unavailable for conversion into work. In more general metaphorical terms entropy may be seen as the irreversible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness. That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are. The great American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (#-#) was the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics -- the law that defines the increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system -- to chemistry. It was Gibbs who most firmly enunciated the principle that disorder spontaneously increases as the universe grows older. Among those who extended Gibbs' insights into the realm of mathematician Norbert Wiener (#-#), who declared in his book. The Human Use of Human Beings, "As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs' universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves." Thus Wiener hails living things in general and human beings in particular as heroes in the war against entropy -- which he equates in another passage with the war against evil: "This random element, this organic imcompleteness that is, the fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe. is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil." Human beings, says Wiener, carry on anti-entropic processes. We have sensory receptors. We communicate with one another. We make use of what we learn from one another. Therefore we are something more than mere passive victims of the spontaneous spread of universal chaos. "We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information received." There is feedback, in other words. Through communication we learn to control our environment, and, he says, "In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency... for entropy to increase." In the very long run entropy must inevitably nail us all; in the short run we can fight back. "We are not yet spectators at the last stages of the world's death." But what if a human being turns himself, inadvertently or by choice, into an isolated system? A hermit, say. He lives in a dark cave. No information penetrates. He eats mushrooms. They give him just enough energy to keep going, but otherwise he lacks inputs. He's forced back on his own spiritual and mental resources, which he eventually exhausts. Gradually the chaos expands in him, gradually the forces of entropy seize possession of this ganglion, that synapse. He takes in a decreasing amount of sensory data until his surrender to entropy is complete. He ceases to move, to grow, to respire, to function in any way. This condition is known as death. One doesn't have to hide in a cave. One can make an interior migration, locking oneself away from the lifegiving energy sources. Often this is done because it appears that the energy sources are threats to the stability of the self. Indeed inputs do threaten the self; a push usually will upset equilibrium. However, equilibrium itself is a threat to the self, though this is frequently overlooked. There are married people who strive fiercely to reach equilibrium. They seal themselves off, clinging to one another and shutting out the rest of the universe, making themselves into a two-person closed system from which all vitality is steadily and inexorably expelled by the deadly equilibrium they have established. Two can perish as well as one if they are sufficiently isolated from everything else. I call this the monogamous fallacy. My sister Judith said she left her husband because she felt herself dying, day by day, while she was living with him. Of course, Judith's a slut. The sensory shutdown is not always a willed event, naturally. It happens to us whether we like it or not. If we don't climb into the box ourselves we'll get shoved in anyway. That's what I mean about entropy's inevitably nailing us all in the long run. No matter how vital, how vigorous, how world-devouring we are, the inputs dwindle as time goes by. Sight, hearing, touch, smell -- everything goes, as good old Will S. said, and we end up sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Sans everything. Or, as the same clever man also put it, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, then from hour to hour we rot and rot -- and thereby hangs a tale. I offer myself as a case in point. What does this man's sad history reveal? An inexplicable diminution of onceremarkable powers, A shrinkage of the inputs. A small death, endured while he still lives. Am I not a casualty of the entropic wars? Do I not now dwindle into stasis and silence before your very eyes? Is my distress not evident and poignant? Who will I be when I have ceased to be myself? I am dying the heat death. A spontaneous decay. A random twitch of probability undoes me. And I am made into nothingness. I am becoming cinders and ash. I will wait here for the broom to gather me up. That's very eloquent, Selig. Take an A. Your writing is clear and forceful and you show an excellent grasp of the underlying philosophical issues. You may go to the head of the class. Do you feel better now? dumb fantasy. It could never have worked. I was asking the impossible from you. There was only one conceivable outcome, really -- that I would annoy you and bore you and drive you away from me. Well, blame Tom Nyquist. It was his idea. No, blame me. I didn't have to listen to his crazy ideas, did I? Blame me. Blame me. Axiom: It's a sin against love to try to remake the soul of someone you love, even if you think you'll love her more after you've transformed her into something else. Nyquist said, "Maybe she's a mind-reader, too, and the blockage is a matter of interference, of a clash between your transmissions and hers, canceling out the waves in one direction or in both. So that there's no transmission from her to you and probably none from you to her." "I doubt that very much," I told him. This was August of #, two or three weeks after you and I had met. We weren't living together yet but we had already been to bed couple of times. "She doesn't have a shred of telepathic ability," I insisted. "She's completely normal. That's the e.ssential thing about her, Tom -- she's a completely normal girl." "Don't be so sure," Nyquist said. He hadn't met you yet. He wanted to meet you, but I hadn't set anything up. You had never heard his name. I said, "If there's one thing I know about her, it's that she's a sane, healthy, nicely balanced, absolutely normal girl. Therefore she's no mind-reader." "Because mind-readers are insane, unhealthy and unbalanced. Like you and like me. Q.E.D., eh? Speak for yourself, man." "The gift tips the spirit," I said. "It darkens the .soul." "Yours, maybe. Not mine." He was right about that. Telepathy hadn't injured him. Maybe I'd would have had the problems I have even if I hadn't been born with the gift. I can't credit all my maladjustments to the presence of one unusual ability, can #? And God knows there are plenty of neurotics around who have never read a mind in their lives. Syllogism; Some telepaths are not neurotic. Some neurotics are not telepaths. Therefore telepathy and neurosis aren't necessarily related. Corollary: You can seem cherry-pie normal and still have the power. I remained skeptical of this. Nyquist agreed, under pressure, that if you did have the power you would have probably revealed it to me by now through certain unconscious mannerisms that any telepath would readily recognize. I had detected no such mannerisms. He suggested, though, that you might be a latent telepath -- that the gift was there, undeveloped, unfunctional, lurking at the core of your mind and serving somehow to screen your mind from my probing. Just a hypothesis, he said. But it tickled me with temptation. "Suppose she's got this latent power," I said. "Could it be awakened, do you think?" "Why not?" Nyquist asked. this vision of your awakened to full receptive capacity, able to pick up transmissions as easily and as sharply as Nyquist and I. How intense our love would be then! We would be wholly open to one another, shorn of all the little pretenses and defenses that keep even the closest of lovers from truly achieving a union of souls. I had already tasted a limited form of that sort of closeness with Tom Nyquist, but of course I had no love for him, I didn't even really like him, and so it was a waste, a brutal irony, that our minds could have such intimate contact. But you? If I could only awaken you, Kitty! And why not? I asked Nyquist if he thought it might be possible. Try it and find out, he said. Make experiments. Hold hands, sit together in the dark, put some energy into trying to get across to her. It's worth trying, isn't it? Yes, I said, of course it's worth trying. Y OU seemed latent in so many other ways, Kitty -- a potential human being rather than an actual one. An air of adolescence surrounded you. You seemed much younger than you actually were -- if I hadn't known you were a college graduate I would have guessed you were eighteen or nineteen. You hadn't read much outside your fields of interest -- mathematics, computers, technology -- and, since those weren't my fields of interest, I thought of you as not having read anything at all. So I saw you as raw material awaiting the sculptor's hand. I would be your Pygmalion. In September of # you moved in with me. You were spending so much time at my place anyway that you agreed it didn't make sense to keep going back and forth. I felt very married -- wet stockings hanging over the showercurtain rod, an extra toothbrush on the shelf, long brown hairs in the sink. The warmth of you beside me in bed every night. My belly against your smooth cool butt, yang and yin. I gave you books to read: poetry, novels, essays. How diligently you on the bus going to work and Conrad in the quiet afterdinner hours and Yeats on a Sunday morning while I was out hunting for the Times. But nothing really seemed to stick with you -- you had no natural bent for literature. I think you had trouble distinguishing Lord Jim from Lucky Jim, Malcolm Lowry from Malcolm Cowley, James Joyce from Joyce Kilmer. Your fine mind, so easily able to master decipher the language of poetry and you would look up from The Waste Land, baffled, to ask some naive schoolgirl question that would leave me irritated for hours. A hopeless case, I sometimes thought. Although on a day when the stock market was closed you took me down to the computer center where you worked and I listened to your explanations of the equipment and your functions as though you were talking so much Sanskrit to me. Different worlds, different kinds of mind. Yet I always had hope of creating a bridge. At strategically timed moments I spoke elliptically of my interest in extrasensory phenomena. I made it out to be a hobby of mine, a cool dispassionate study. I was fascinated, I said, by the possibility of attaining true mindto-mind communication between human beings. I took care not to come on like a fanatic, not to oversell my case. I kept my desperation out of sight. Because I genuinely couldn't read you, it was easier for me to pretend to a scholarly objectivity than it would have been with anyone else. And I had to pretend. My strategy didn't allow for any true confessions. I didn't want to frighten you, Kitty. I didn't want to turn you off by giving you reason to think I was a freak or, as it probably would have seemed to you, a lunatic. Just a hobby, then. A hobby. You couldn't bring yourself to measured with a voltmeter or recorded on an electroencephalograph, you said, it isn't real. Be tolerant, I pleaded. There are such things as telepathic powers. I know there are. (Be careful, my life, have no idea whether my power would register. And I had barred myself from conquering your skepticism by calling in some outsider and doing some party-game mind-reading on him. But I could offer other arguments. Look at Rhine's results, look at all these series of correct readings of the Zener cards. How can you the evidence for telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance... You remained skeptical, coolly putting down most of the data I cited. Your reasoning was keen and close -- there was nothing fuzzy about yoilr mind when it was on its own home territory, the scientific method. Rhine, you said, fudges his results by testing heterogeneous groups, then selecting for further testing only those subjects who show unusual runs of luck, dropping the others from his surveys. And he publishes only the scores that seem to prove his thesis. It's a statistical anomaly, not an extrasensory one, that turns up all those correct guesses of the Zener cards, you insisted. Besides, the experimenter is prejudiced in 'favor of belief in all sorts of unconscious errors of procedure, tiny accesses of unintentional bias that inevitably skew the outcome. Cautiously I invited you to try some experiments with me, letting you set up the procedures to suit yourself. You said okay mainly, I think, because it was something we could do together and -- this was early October -- we were already searching for areas of closeness, your literary education having become a strain for both of us. I made it seem like your own idea! -- to concentrate on transmitting images or ideas to one another. And right at the outset we had a cruelly deceptive success. We assembled some packets of pictures and tried to relay them mentally. I still have, here in the archives, our notes on those experiments: #. A rowboat #. Marigolds in a field #. A kangaroo #. Twin baby girls #. The Empire State Building #. A snow-capped mountain #. Profile of old man's face #. Baseball player at bat #. An elephant #. A locomotive I . Oak trees #. Bouquet of roses #. President Kennedy #. A statue #. The Pentagon #. ? image unclear #. A pair of scissors #. A carving knife #. A tractor #. An airplane You had no direct hits. But four out of ten could be considered close associations: marigolds and roses, the Empire State and the Pentagon, elephant and tractor, locomotive and airplane. (Flowers, buildings, heavy-duty equipment, means of transportation.) Enough to give us false hopes of true transmission. Followed by this: #. A butterfly #. An octopus #. Tropical beach scene #. Young Negro boy #. Map of South America #. George Washington Bridge #. Bowl of apples and bananas #. El Greco's Toledo #. A highway at rush hour #. A railway train #. Mountains #. Landscape, bright sunlight #. An automobile #. Grapevines #. The Washington Monument #. Stock market quotations #. A shelf of books #. A beehive #. Cary Grant No direct hits for me either. But three close associations, of sorts, out of ten; tropical beach and sunny landscape, George Washington Bridge and the Washington Monument, highway at rush hour and beehive -- the common denominators being sunlight, George Washington and intense, tightpacked activity. At least we deceived ourselves into seeing them as close associations rather than coincidences. I confess I was stabbing in the dark at all times, guessing rather than receiving, and I had little faith even then in the quality of our responses. Nevertheless those probably random collisions of images aroused your curiosity -- there's something in this stuff, maybe, you began to say. We varied the conditions for thought transmission. We tried doing it in absolute darkness, one room apart. We tried it with the lights on, holding hands. We tried it during sex. We tried it drunk. We tried it fasting. We tried it under conditions of sleep deprivation, forcing ourselves to stay up around the clock in the random hope that minds groggy with fatigue might permit mental impulses to slip through the barriers separating us. We sought in a dozen other ways to open the telepathic conduit. I thought you were as dedicated to the work as I was. But it had ceased to be either an experiment or a game -- it was, you saw, plainly an obsessive quest and you asked several times in November if we could quit. All this mind-reading, you said, left you with woeful headaches. But I couldn't give up, Kitty. I overrode your objections and insisted we go on. I was hooked, I brow-beat you mercilessly into cooperating, I tyrannized you in the name of love, seeing always that telepathic Kitty I would ultimately produce. Every ten days, maybe, some delusive flicker of seeming contact buoyed my idiotic optimism. We would break through; we would touch each other's minds. How could I quit now when we were so close? But we were never close. E arly in November Nyquist gave one of his occasional dinner parties, catered by a Chinatown restaurant he favored. events -- to refuse the invitation would have been absurd. So at last I would have to expose you to him. For more than three months I had been more or less deliberately concealing you from him, avoiding the moment of confrontation out of a cowardice I didn't fully understand. We came late -- you were slow getting ready. I introduced you to Nyquist. He smiled and murmured a sleek compliment and gave you a bland, impersonal kiss. You seemed shy, almost afraid of him, of his confidence and smoothness. After a moment of patter he went spinning away to answer the doorbell. A little later, as we were handed our first drinks, I planted a thought for him: -- Well? What do you think of her? But he was too busy with his other guests to probe me and didn't pick up on my question. I had to seek my own answers in his skull. I inserted myself -- he glanced at me across the room, realizing what I was doing -- and rummaged for information. Layers of hostly trivia masked his surface levels: he was simultaneously offering drinks, steering a conversation, signaling for the eggrolls to be brought from the kitchen and inwardly going over the guest list to see who was yet to arrive. But I cut swiftly through that stuff and in a moment found his locus of Kittythoughts. At once I acquired the knowledge I wanted and dreaded. He could read you. Yes. To him you were as transparent as anyone else. Only to me were you opaque, for reasons none of us knew. Nyquist had instnatly penetrated you, had assessed you, had formed his judgment of you, there for me to examine -- he saw you as awkward, immature, naive, yet also attractive and charming. (That's how he really saw you. I'm not trying, for ulterior reasons of my own, to make him seem more critical of you than he really was. You were very young -- you were unsophisticated and he saw that. The discovery numbed me. Jealousy curdled me. That I should work so ponderously for so many weeks to reach you, getting nowhere, and he could knife so easily to your depths, Kitty! I was instantly suspicious. Nyquist and his malicious games -- was this yet one more? Could he read you? How could I be sure he hadn't planted a fiction for me? He picked up on that: -- You don't trust me? Of course I'm reading her. -- Maybe yes, maybe no. -- Do you want me to prove it? -- How? -- Watch. Without interrupting for a moment his role of host, he entered your mind, while mine remained locked on his. And so, through him, I had my first and only glimpse of your inwardness, Kitty, reflected by way of Tom Nyquist. Oh! It was no glimpse I ever wanted. I saw myself through your eyes through his mind. Physically I looked, if anything, better than I imagined I would, my shoulders broader than they really are, my face leaner, the features more regular. You left no doubt that you responded to me physically. But the emotional associations! You saw me as stern father, as grim schoolmaster, as grumbling tyrant. Read this, read that, improve your mind, girl! Study hard to be worthy of me! Oh! Oh! And that flaming core of ments -- worse than useless to you, a monumental bore, an excursion into insanity, a wearying, grinding drag. Night after night to be bugged by monomaniacal me. Even our screwing invaded by the foolish quest for mind-to-mind contact. How sick you were of me, Kitty! How monstrously dull you thought me! Stung, I retreated, pulling away quickly from Nyquist. You looked at me in a startled way, I recall, as if you knew on some subliminal level that mental energies were flashing around the room, revealing the privacies of your soul. You blinked and your cheeks reddened and you took a hasty diving gulp of your drink. Nyquist shot me a sardonic smile. I couldn't meet his eyes. Later, after we had eaten, I saw you talking animatedly to Nyquist at the far side of the room. You were flirtatious and giddy. I imagined you were discussing me and not being complimentary. I tried to pick up the conversation by way of Nyquist, but at my first tentative probe he glared at me. -- Get out of my head, will you? I obeyed. I heard your laughter, too loud, rising above the hum of conversation. I drifted off to talk to a lithe little Japanese sculptress whose flat tawny chest sprouted untemptingly from a low-cut black sheath, and found her thinking, in French, that she would like me to ask her to go home with me. But I went home with you, Kitty, sitting sullen and graceless beside you on the empty subway train. And when I asked you what you and Nyquist had been discussing you said, "Oh, we were just kidding around. Just having a little fun." AA. clear crisp autumn afternoon. President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. The stock market closed early after a calamitous slide and Martinson shut down the office, turning me out, dazed, into the street. I couldn't easily accept the reality of the progression of events. Someone shot at the President... someone shot the President... someone shot the President in the head...the President has been critically wounded...the President has been rushed to Parkland Hospital...the President has received the last rites...the President is dead. Kennedy was the only presidential candidate I ever voted for who won -- and they killed him: the story of my life in one compressed bloody parable. That November afternoon I picked up emanations of fear on all sides as I walked fearfully home. Paranoia was general everywhere. People sidled warily, one shoulder in front of the other, ready to bolt. Pale female faces peered between parted curtains in the windows of the towering apartment houses, high above the silent streets. No one lingered in the open -- everyone hurried toward shelter. Anything might happen now. Packs of wolves might burst out of Riverside Drive. Maddened patriots might launch a program. From my apartment -- door bolted, windows locked -- I tried to phone you at the computer center, thinking you might somehow not have heard the news. Or perhaps I just wanted to hear your voice in this traumatic time. The telephone lines were choked. I gave up the attempt after twenty minutes. Then, wandering aimlessly from bedroom to living room and back, clutching my transistor, twisting the dial trying to find one radio station whose newscaster would tell me that he was still alive after all, I detoured into the kitchen and found your note on the table, telling me that you were leaving, that you couldn't stay with me any more. The note was dated #:# A.M., before the assassination, in another era. f rushed to the bedroom closet and saw what I had not seen before, that your things were gone. When women leave me, Kitty, they leave suddenly and stealthily, giving no warning. T oward evening I telephoned Nyquist. This time the lines were open. "Is Kitty there?" I asked. "Yes," he said. "Just a minute." And put you on. You explained that you were going to live with him for a while until you got yourself sorted out. He had been very helpful. No, you had no hard feelings toward me, no bitterness at all. It was just that I seemed, well, insensitive, whereas he -- he had this instinctive, intuitive grasp of your emotional needs -- he was able to get onto your trip, Kitty, and I couldn't manage that. So you had gone to him for comfort and love. Goodbye, you said, and thanks for everything, and I muttered a goodbye and put down the phone. During the night the weather changed and a weekend of to his grave. I missed everything, the casket in the rotunda, the brave widow and the gallant children, the murder of Oswald, the funeral procession, all that instant history. Saturday and Sunday I slept late, got drunk, read six books without absorbing a word. On Monday, the day of national mourning, I wrote you that incoherent letter, Kitty, explaining everything, telling you what I had tried to make out of you and why, confessing my power to you and describing the effects it had had on my life. Telling you also about Nyquist, warning you of what he was, that he had the power, too, that he could read you and you would have no secrets from him. Telling you not to mistake him for a real human being, telling you that he was a machine, self-programed for maximum selfrealization. That the power had made him cold and cruelly strong whereas it had made me weak and jittery, insisting that essentially he was as sick as I, a manipulative man, incapable of giving love, capable only of using. I told you that he would hurt you if you made yourself vulnerable to him. You didn't answer. I never heard from you again, never saw you again, never heard from him or saw him again either. Thirteen years. I have no idea what became of either of you. Probably I'll never know. But listen. Listen. I loved you, lady, in my clumsy way. I love you now. And you are lost to me forever. sore and numb, in a bleak, dreary hospital ward. Evidently this is St. Luke's, perhaps the emergency room. His lower lip is swollen. His left eye opens only reluctantly and his nose makes an unfamiliar whistling sound at every intake of air. Did they bring him here on a stretcher after the basketball players finished with him? He has spent relatively little time in hospitals. He wonders if his clothing is stained with dried blood, but when he succeeds in looking down -- his neck, oddly rigid, does not want to obey him -- he sees only the dingy whiteness of a hospital gown. Each time he breathes he imagines he can feel the ragged edges of broken ribs scraping together. Slipping a hand under the gown, he touches his bare chest and finds that it has not been taped. He does not know whether to be relieved or apprehensive about that. Carefully he sits up. The room is crowded and noisy, beds pushed close together. The beds have curtains but no curtains are drawn. Most of his fellow patients are black and many of them are in serious condition, surrounded by festoons of equipment. Impassive nurses drift through the room, showing much the same distant concern for the patients as museum guards do for mummies in display cases. No one is paying any attention to Selig except Selig, who returns to the examination of himself. His fingertips explore his cheeks. Without a mirror he cannot tell how battered his face is, but there are many tender places. His left clavicle aches as from a light, glancing karate chop. His right knee radiates throbbings and twinges, as though he had twisted it in falling. Still, he feels less pain than might have been anticipated. Perhaps they have given him some sort of shot. His mind is foggy. He is receiving some mental input from those about him in the ward, but everything is garbled, nothing is distinct; he picks up auras but no intelligible verbalizations. Diagonally across from him, two nurses have begun to erect what perhaps is a forcedfeeding system, with a plastic tube snaking into the nostril of a huge unconscious bandage-swathed black. Selig's own stomach sends him no hunger signals. The chemical smell in the hospital air gives him nausea -- he can barely salivate. Will they feed him this evening? How long will he be kept here? Who pays? Should he ask that Judith be notified? How badly has he been injured? An intern enters the ward, a short dark man, concise and fine-boned of body, a Pakistani by the looks of him, moving with bouncy precision. Surprisingly, he comes right to Selig. "The X-rays show no breakages," he says without preamble in a firm, unresonant voice. "Therefore your only injuries are minor abrasions, bruises, cuts and an unimportant concussion. We are ready to authorize your release. Please get up." "Wait," Selig says feebly. "I just came to. I don't know what's been going on. Who brought me here? How long have I been unconscious? What -- " "I know none of these things. Your discharge has been approved and the hospital has need of this bed. Please. On your feet, now. I have much to do." "A concussion? Shouldn't I spend the night here, at least, if I had a concussion? Or did I spend the night here? What day is today?" "You were brought in about noon today," says the intern, growing more fretful. "You were treated in the emergency room and given a thorough examination after having been beaten on the steps of Low Library." Once more the command to rise, given wordlessly this time, an imperious glare and a pointing forefinger. Selig probes the intern's mind and finds it accessible, but there is nothing in it except impatience and irritation. Ponderously Selig climbs from the bed. His body seems to be held together with wire. His bones grind and scrape. There is still the sensation of broken rib ends rubbing in his chest; can the X-ray have been in error? He starts to ask, but too late. The intern, making his rounds, has whirled off to another bed. They bring him his clothing. He pulls the curtain around his bed and dresses. Yes, bloodstains on his shirt as he had feared -- also on his trousers. A mess. He checks his belongings. Everything is here, wallet, wristwatch, pocket comb. What now? Just walk out? Nothing to sign? Selig edges uncertainly toward the door. He actually gets into the corridor unperceived. Then the intern materializes as if from ectoplasm and points to another room across the hall, saying, "You wait in there until the security man comes." Security man? What security man? There are, as he had feared, papers to sign before he is free of the hospital's grasp. Just as he finishes with the red tape, a plump, gray-faced, sixtyish man in the uniform of the campus security force enters the room, puffing slightly, and asks, "You Selig?" He acknowledges that he is. "The dean wants to see you. You able to walk by yourself or you want me to get you a wheelchair?" "I'll walk," Selig says. T hey go out of the hospital together, up Amsterdam Avenue to the I #th Street campus gate and into Van Am Quad. The security man stays close Iteside him, saying nothing. Shortly Selig finds himself waiting outside the office of the Dean of Columbia College. The security man waits with him, arms folded placidly, wrapped in a cocoon of boredom. Selig begins to feel almost as though he is under some sort of arrest. Why is that? An odd thought. What does he have to fear from the dean? He probes the security man's dull mind but can find nothing in it but fog." A voice from within says, "Dean Cushing will see him now." "Go on in," the security man says. Cushing? A fine deanly name. Who is he? Selig limps in, awkward from his injuries, bothered by his sore knee. Facing him behind a glistening uncluttered desk sits a wide-shouldered, smooth-cheeked, youthful-looking man, juniorexecutive model, wearing a conservative dark suit. Selig's first thought is of the mutations worked by the passage of time -- he had always looked upon deans as lofty symbols of authority, necessarily elderly or at least of middle years, but here is the Dean of the College and he seems to be a man of Selig's own age. Then he realizes that this dean is not merely an anonymous contemporary of his but actually a classmate, Ted Cushing '#, a campus figure of some repute back then, class president, football star and A-level scholar, whom Selig had known at least in a passing way. It always surprises Selig to be reminded that he is no longer young, that he has lived into a time when his generation has. control of the mechanisms of power. "Ted?" he blurts. "Are you dean now, Ted? Christ, I wouldn't have guessed that. When -- " "Sit down, Dave," Cushing says politely but with no great show of friendliness. "Did you get badly hurt?" "The hospital says nothing's broken. I feel half ruined, though." As he eases into a chair he indicates the bloodstains on his clothing, the bruises on his face. Talking is an effort -- his jaws creak at their hinges. "Hey, Ted, it's been a long time! Must be twenty years since I last saw you. Did you remember my name or did they identify me from my wallet?" "We've arranged to pay the hospital costs," Cushing says, not seeming to hear Selig's words. "If there are any further medical expenses we'll take care of those, too. You can have that in writing if you'd like." "The verbal commitment is fine. And in case you're worrying that I'll press charges or sue the University -- well, I wouldn't do anything like that. Boys will be boys. TTiey let their feelings run away with themselves a little bit, but?" "We weren't greatly concerned about your pressing charges, Dave," Cushing says quietly. "The real question is whether we're going to press charges against you." "Me? For what? For getting mauled by your basketball players? For damaging their expensive hands with my face?" He essays a painful grin. Cushing's face remains grave. Selig struggles to interpret Cushing's joke. Finding no rationale for it, he decides to venture a probe. But he runs into a wall. He is suddenly too timid to push, fearful that he will be unable to break through. "I don't understand what you mean," he says finally. "Press charges for what?" "For these, Dave." For the first time Selig notices the stack of typewritten pages on the dean's desk. Cushing nudges them forward. "Do you recognize them? Here, take a look." them. They are term papers, all of them of his manufacture. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. The Novels of Kaka. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. Resignation and Acceptance in the Philosophy of Montaigne. Virgil as Dante's Mentor. Some of them bear marks -- A-, B-(-, A-, A -- and marginal comments, mainly favorable. Some are untouched except by smudges and smears. These are the ones he had been about to deliver when he was set upon by Lumumba. With immense care he tidies the stack, aligning the edges of the sheets precisely, and pushes them back toward Cushing. "All right," he says. "You've got me." "Did you write those?" "Yes." "For a fee?" "Yes." "That's sad, Dave. That's awfully sad." "I needed to earn a living. They don't give scholarships to alumni." "What were you getting paid for these things?" "Three or four bucks a typed page." Cushing shakes his head. "You were good -- I'll give you credit for that. There must be eight or ten guys working your racket here, but you're easily the best." "Thank you." "But you had one dissatisfied customer. We asked Lumumba why he beat you up. He said he hired you to write a term paper for him and you did a lousy job -- you ripped him off -- and then you wouldn't refund his money. All right. We're dealing with him in our own way, but we have to deal with you, too. We've been trying to find you for a long time, Dave." "Have you?" "We've circulated xeroxes of your work through a dozen departments the last couple of semesters, warning people to  on the lookout for your typewriter and your style. There wasn't a great deal of cooperation. A lot of faculty members didn't seem to care whether the term papers they received were phony or not. But we cared, Dave. We cared very much." Cushing leans forward. His eyes, terribly earnest, seek Selig's. Selig looks away. He cannot abide the searching warmth of those eyes. "We started closing in a few weeks ago," Cushing continues. "We rounded up a couple of your clients and threatened them with expulsion. They gave us your name, but they didn't know where you lived and we had no way of finding you. So we waited. We knew you'd show up again to deliver and solicit. Then we got this report of a disturbance on the steps of Low -- basketball players beating up somebody -- and we found you with a pile of undelivered papers clutched in your arm and that was it. You're out of business, Dave." "I should ask for a lawyer," Selig says. "I shouldn't admit anything more to you. I should have denied everything when you showed me those papers." "No need to be so technical about your rights." "I'll need to be when you take me to court, Ted." "No," Cushing says. "We aren't going to prosecute, not unless we catch you ghosting more papers. We have no interest in putting you in jail and, in any case. I'm not sure that what you've done is a criminal offense. What we really want to do is help you. You're sick, Dave. For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids -- that's sad, Dave, that's awfully sad. We've discussed your case here and we've come up with a rehabilitation plan for you. We can find you work on campus, as a research assistant, maybe. There are always doctoral candidates who need assistants and we have a small fund we could dip into to provide a salary for you. Nothing much -- but at least as much as you were making on these papers. And we'll admit you to the psychological counseling service here. It wasn't set up for alumni, but I don't see why we need to be inflexible about it, Dave. For myself, I have to say that I find it embarrassing that a man of the Class of '# is in the kind of trouble you're in. If only out of a spirit of loyalty to our class, I want to do everything possible to help you put yourself back together and begin to fulfill the promise that you showed when..." ing and embellishing his themes, offering pity without censure, promising aid to his suffering classmate. Selig, listening inattentively, discovers that Cushing's mind is beginning to open to him. The wall that earlier had separated their consciousnesses, a product perhaps of Selig's fear and fatigue, has started to dissolve and Selig is able now to perceive a general image of Cushing's mind, which is energetic, strong, capable, but also conventional and limited, a stolid Republican mind, a prosaic Ivy League mind. Foremost in it is not his concern for Selig but rather his complacent satisfaction with himself -- the brightest glow emanates from Cushing's awareness of his happy station in life, ornamented by a suburban split-level, a strapping blond wife, three handsome children, a shaggy dog, a shining new Lincoln Continental. Pushing a bit deeper, Selig sees that Cushing's show of concern for him is fraudulent. Behind the earnest eyes and the sincere, heartfelt, sympathetic smile lies fierce contempt. Cushing despises him. Cushing thinks he is corrupt, useless, worthless, a disgrace to mankind in general and the Columbia College Class of '# in particular. Cushing finds him physically as well as morally repugnant, seeing him as unwashed and unclean, possibly syphilitic. Cushing suspects him of being homosexual. Cushing has for him the scorn of the Rotarian for the junkie. It is impossible for Cushing to understand why anyone who has had the benefit of a Columbia education would let himself slide into the degradations Selig has accepted. Selig shrinks from Cushing's disgust. Am I so despicable, he wonders, am I such trash? His hold on Cushing's mind strengthens and deepens. It ceases to trouble him that Cushing has such contempt for him. Selig drifts into a mode of abstraction in which he no longer identifies himself with the miserable churl Cushing sees. What does Cushing know? Can Cushing penetrate the mind of another? Can Cushing feel the ecstasy of real contact with a fellow human being? And there is ecstasy in it. Godlike he rides passenger in Cushing's mind, sinking past the external defenses, past the petty prides and snobberies, past the self-congratulatory smugness, into the realm of absolute values, into the kingdom of authentic self. Contact. Ecstasy! That stolid Cushing is the outer husk. Here is a Cushing that even Cushing does not know. But Selig does. Selig has not been so happy in years. Light, golden and serene, floods his soul. An irresistible gaiety possesses him. He runs through misty groves at dawn, feeling the gentle lashing of moist green fern fronds against his shins. Sunlight pierces the canopy of high foliage and droplets of dew glitter with a cool inner fire. The birds awaken. Their song is tender and sweet, a distant cheebling, sleepy and soft. He runs through the forest and he is not alone, for a hand grasps his hand. And he knows that he has never been alone and never will be alone. The forest floor is damp and spongy beneath his bare feet. He runs. He runs. An invisible choir strikes a harmonious note and holds it, holds it, holds it, swelling it in perfect crescendo, until, just as he breaks from the grove and sprints into a sun-bright meadow, that swell of tone fills all the cosmos, reverberating in magical fullness. He throws himself face-forward to the ground, hugging the earth, writhing against the fragrant grassy carpet, flattening his hands against the curve of the planet, and he is aware of the world's inner throbbing. This is ecstasy! This is contact! Other minds surround his. In whatever direction he moves, he feels their presence, welcoming him, supporting him, reaching toward him. Come, they say, join us, join us, be one with us, give up those tattered shreds of self, let go of all that holds you apart from us. Yes, Selig replies. Yes. I affirm the ecstasy of life. I affirm the joy of contact. I give myself to you. They touch him. He touches them. It was for this, he knows, that I received my gift, my blessing, my power. For this moment of affirmation and fulfillment. Join us. Join us. Yes! The birds! The invisible choir! The dew! The meadow! The sun! He laughs. He rises and breaks into an ecstatic dance. He throws back his head to sing, he who has never in his life dared to sing, and the tones that come from him are rich and full, pure, squarely striking the center of the pitch. Yes! Oh, the joining, the touching, the union, the oneness! No longer is he David Selig. He is a part of them and they are a part of him and in that joyous blending he experiences loss of self. He gives up all that is tired and worn and sour in him -- he gives up his fears and uncertainties; he gives up everything that has separated himself from himself for so many years. He breaks through. He is fully open and the immense signal of the universe rushes freely into him. He receives. He transmits. He absorbs. He radiates. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. He knows this ecstasy will last forever. But in the moment of that knowledge he feels it slipping from him. The choir's glad note diminishes. The sun drops toward the horizon. The distant sea, retreating, sucks at the shore. He struggles to hold to the joy, but the more he struggles the more of it he loses. Hold back the tide? How? Delay the fall of night? How? How? The birdsongs are faint now. The air has turned cold. Everything rushes away from him. He stands alone in the gathering darkness, remembering that ecstasy, recapturing it momentarily, reliving it -- for it is already gone, and must be summoned back through an act of the will. Gone, yes. It is very quiet suddenly. He hears one last sound, a stringed instrument in the distance, a cello, perhaps, being plucked, pizzicato, a beautiful melancholy sound. Twang. The plangent chord. Twing. The breaking string. Twang. The lyre untuned. Twang. Twing. Twong. And nothing more. Silence envelops him. A terminal silence, it is, that booms through the caverns of his skull, the silence that follows the shattering of the cello's strings, the silence that comes with the death of music. He can hear nothing. He can feel nothing. He is alone. He is alone. He is alone. "So quiet," he murmurs. "So private. It's -- so -- private -- here." "Selig?" a deep voice asks. "What's the matter with you, Selig?" "I'm all right," Selig says. He tries to stand, but nothing has any solidity. He is tumbling through Cushing's desk, through the floor of the office, falling through the planet itself, seeking and not finding a stable platform. "So quiet. The silence, Ted, the silence!" Strong arms seize him. He is aware of several figures bustling about him. Someone is calling for a doctor. Selig shakes his head, protesting that nothing is wrong with him, nothing at all, except for the silence in his head, except for the silence, except for the silence. Except for the silence. pavement form a seamless, inexorable band of gray. There will be snow soon. Silence reigns. Scrawny black and gray cats, motionless, statues of themselves, peer out of alleys. Traffic is light. Walking quickly through the streets from the subway station to Judith's place, I avert my eyes from the faces of the few people I pass. I feel shy and self-conscious among them, like a war veteran who has just been discharged from the rehabilitation center and is still embarrassed about his mutilations. Naturally I'm unable to tell what anybody is thinking. Their minds are closed to me now and they go by me wearing shields of impenetrable ice. But, ironically, I have the illusion that they all have access to me. They can look right into me and see me for what I've become. There's David Selig, they must be thinking. How careless he was! What a poor custodian of his gift! He messed up and let it all slip away from him, the dope. I feel guilty for causing them this disappointment. Yet I don't feel as guilty as I thought I might. On some ultimate level I just don't give a damn at all. This is what I am, I tell myself. This is what I now shall be. If you don't like it, tough crap. Try to accept me. If you can't do that, just ignore me. proaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places." So said Thoreau, in #, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Of course Thoreau was a misfit and an outsider with very serious neurotic problems. When he was a young man just out of college he fell in love with a girl named Ellen Sewall, but she turned him down and he never married. I wonder if he ever made it with anybody. Probably not. Poor Thoreau. Silence is audible, Henry. building, that I meet Toni in the street. I seem to see a tall figure walking toward me from Riverside Drive, hatless, bundled up in a bulky orange coat. Strangely I feel neither excitement nor apprehension over this unexpected reunion. I am quite calm, almost unmoved. Coolly I halt in her path, smile, hold up my hands in greeting. "Toni?" I say. "Don't you know me?" She studies me, frowns, seems puzzled for a moment. But only a moment. "David. Hello." Her face looks more lean, the cheekbones higher and sharper. There are some strands of gray in her hair. Well, of course she's in her middle thirties now. Not exactly a girl. As old now, in fact, as I was when I first met her. But in fact I know she has hardly changed at all, only matured a little. She seems as beautiful as ever. Yet desire is absent from me. All passion spent, Selig. All passion spent. And she too is mysteriously free of turbulence. I remember our last meeting, the look of pain on her face, her obsessive heap of cigarette butts. Now her expression is amiable and casual. We both have passed through the realm of storms. "You're looking good," I say. "What is it? Eight years, nine?" I know the answer to that. I'm merely testing her. And she passes the test, saying, "The summer of '#." I'm relieved to see that she hasn't forgotten. I'm still a chapter of her autobiography, then. "How have you been, David?" "Not bad." The conversational inanities. "What are you doing these days?" "I'm with Random House now. And you?" "Free-lancing," I say. "Here and there." Is she married? Her gloved hands offer no data. I don't dare ask. I'm incapable of probing. I force a smile and shift my weight from foot to foot. The silence that has come between us suddenly seems unbridgeable. She says, "You've changed." "I'm older. Tireder. Balder." "It isn't that. You've changed somewhere inside." "I suppose I have." "You used to make me feel uncomfortable. I'd get a sort of queasy feeling. I don't any more." "You mean, after the trip?" "Before and after both," she says. "You were always uncomfortable with me?" "Always. I never knew why. Even when we were really close I felt -- I don't know, on guard, off balance, ill at ease, when I was with you. And that's gone now. It's entirely gone. I wonder why." "Time heals all wounds," I say. Oracular wisdom. "I suppose you're right. God, it's cold! Do you think it'll snow?" "It's bound to before long." "I hate the cold weather." She huddles into her coat. I never knew her in cold weather. Spring and summer, then goodbye, get out, goodbye, goodbye. Odd how little I feel for her now. If she invited me up to her apartment I'd probably say. No, thank you. I'm on my way to visit my sister. Of course she's imaginary -- that may have something to do with it. But also I'm not getting an aura from her. She's not broadcasting -- or rather I'm not receiving. She's only a statue of herself, like the cats in the alleys. Will I be incapable of feeling now that I'm incapable of receiving? She says, "It's been good to see you, David. Let's get together some time, shall we?" "By all means. We'll have a drink and talk about old times." "I'd like that." "So would I. Very much." "Take care of yourself, David." "You too, Toni." We smile. I give her a little mocksalute of farewell. We move apart; I continue walking west, she hurries up the windy street toward Broadway. I feel a little warmer for having met her. Everything cool, friendly, unemotional between us. Everything dead, in fact. All passion spent. It's been good to see you, David. Let's get together some time, shall we? When I reach the corner I realize I have forgotten to ask for her phone number. Toni? Toni? But she is out of sight. As though she never was there at all. It is the little rift within the lute. That by and by will make the music mute, And every widening slowly silence all. That's Tennyson; Merlin and Vivien. You've heard that line about the rift within the lute before, haven't you? But you never knew it was Tennyson. Neither did I. My lute is riven. Twang. Twing. Twong. Here's another little literary gem: Every sound shall end in silence, but the silence never dies. Samuel Miller Hageman wrote that in # in a poem called Silence. Have you ever heard of Samuel Miller Hageman before? I haven't. You were a wise old cat, Sam, whoever you were. wears an old gray sweater and blue slacks with a hole in the knee. She holds her arms out to me and I embrace her warmly, pulling her tight against my body for perhaps half a minute. I hear music from within -- the Siegfried Idyll, I think. Sweet, loving, accepting music. "Is it snowing yet?" she asks. "Not yet. Gray and cold, that's all." "I'll get you a drink. Go into the living room." I stand by the window. A few snowflakes blow by. My nephew appears and studies me at a distance of thirty feet. To my amazement he smiles. He says warmly, "Hi, Uncle David!" Judith must have put him up to it. Be nice to Uncle David, she must have said. He isn't feeling well, he's had a lot of trouble lately. So there the kid stands, being nice to Uncle David. I don't think he's ever smiled at me before. He didn't even gurgle and coo at me out of his cradle. Hi, Uncle David. All right, kid. I can dig it. "Hello, Pauly. How have you been?" "Fine," he says. With that his social graces are exhausted; he does not inquire in return about the state of my health, but picks up one of his toys and absorbs himself in its intricacies. Yet his large dark glossy eyes continue to examine me every few moments and there does not seem to be any hostility in his glance. Wagner ends. I prowl through the record racks, select one, put it on the turntable. Schoenberg, Verklaerte Nacht. Music of tempestuous anguish followed by calmness and resignation. The theme of acceptance again. Fine. Fine. The swirling strings enfold me. Rich, lush chords. Judith appears, bringing me a glass of rum. She has something mild for herself, sherry or vermouth. She looks a little peaked but very friendly, very open. "Cheers," she says. "Cheers." "That's good music you put on. A lot of people won't believe Schoenberg could be sensuous and tender. Of course it's very early Schoenberg." "Yes," I say. "The romantic juices tend to dry up as you get older, eh? What have you been up to lately, Jude?" "Nothing much. A lot of the same old." "How's Karl?" "I don't see Karl any more." "Oh." "Didn't I tell you that?" "No," I say. "It's the first I've heard of it." "Tm not accustomed to needing to tell you things, Duv." "You'd better get accustomed to it. You and Karl -- " "He became very insistent about marrying me. I told him it was too soon, that I didn't know him well enough, that I was afraid of structuring my life again when it might possibly be the wrong structure for me. He was hurt. He began lecturing me about retreats from involvement and commitment, about self-destructiveness, a lot of stuff like that. I looked right at him in the middle of it and I flashed on him as a kind of father figure, you know, big and pompous and stern. not a lover but a mentor, a professor, and I didn't want that. And I started thinking about what he'd be like in another ten or twelve years. He'd be in his sixties and I'd still be young. And I realized there was no future for us together. I told him that as gently as I could." "I'm sorry." "No need to be, Duv. I did the smart thing. I'm sure of it. Karl was good for me, but it couldn't have been permanent. The thing is not to let a phase go on too long after you know it's really over." "Yes," I say. "Certainly." "Would you like some more rum?" "In a little while." "What about you?" she asks. "Tell me about yourself. How you're making out, now that -- now that -- " "Now that my superman phase is over?" "Yes," she says. "It's really gone, eh?" "Really. All gone. No doubt." "And so, Duv? How has it been for you since it happened?" Justice, God's justice. He looketh after the righteous. He doeth dirt to the ungodly. Justice? Where's justice? Where's God, for that matter? Is He really dead, or merely on vacation or only absentminded? Look at His justice. He sends a flood to Pakistan. Zap, a and the virgin both. Justice? Maybe. Maybe the supposedly innocent victims weren't so innocent after all. Zap, the dedicated nun at the leprosarium gets leprosy and her lips fall off overnight. Justice. Zap, the cathedral that the congregation has been building for the past two hundred years is reduced to rubble by an earthquake the day before Easter. Zap. Zap. God laughs in our faces. This is justice? Where? How? I mean, consider my case. I'm not trying to wring pity from you now. I'm being purely objective. Listen, I didn't ask to be a superman. It was handed to me at the moment of my conception. A mutant. God's incomprehensible whim. A whim that defined me, shaped me, malformed me, dislocated me, and it was unearned, unasked for, entirely undesired, unless you want to think of my genetic heritage in terms of somebody else's bad karma, and crap on that. It was a random twitch. God said. Let this kid be a superman, and Lo! young Selig was a superman in one limited sense of the word. For a time, anyhow. God set me up for everything that happened: the isolation, the suffering, the loneliness, even the self-pity. Justice? Where? The Lord giveth, who the hell knoweth why, and the Lord taketh away. Which He has now done. The power's gone. I'm just plain folks, even as you and you and you. Don't misunderstand -- I accept my fate. I'm completely reconciled sorry for me. I simply want to make a little sense out of this. Now that the power's gone, who am I? How do I define myself now? I've lost my special thing, my power, my wound, my reason for apartness. All I have left now is the memory of having been different. The scars of it. What am I supposed to do now? How do I relate to mankind now that the difference is gone and I'm still here? It died. I live on. What a strange thing you did to me, God. I'm not protesting, you understand. I'm just asking things, in a quiet, reasonable tone of voice. I'm inquiring into the nature of divine justice. I think Goethe's old harpist had the right slant on you, God. You lead us forth into life, you let the poor man fall into guilt and then you leave him to his misery. For all guilt is avenged on Earth. That's a reasonable complaint. You have ultimate power, God, but you refuse to take ultimate responsibility. Is that fair? I think I have a reasonable complaint, too. If there's justice, why does so much of life seem unjust? If you're really on our side, God, why do you hand us a life of pain? Where's justice for the baby born without eyes? The baby born with two heads? The baby born with a power men weren't meant to have? Just asking, God. I accept your decree, believe me, I bow to your will, because I might as well -- what choice do I have, after all? But I'm still entitled to ask. Right? T he music is ending. Celestial Everything merging into oneness. Snowflakes swirling beyond the windowpane. Right on, Schoenberg. You understood, at least when you were young. You caught truth and put it on paper. I hear what you're saying, man. Don't ask questions, you say. Accept. Only accept, that's the motto. Accept. Accept. Whatever comes to you, accept. The thing is, you have a whole new base to build on, Duv. When you had the power, the power was everything and you were nothing. It crowded you out of your own life. You were a superman, but you knew you didn't deserve it -- it was something handed to you by God And so you saw yourself as a leech, a bat, a parasite, a voyeur. But now. Stripped of the power, you're nothing, right? And yet you're something. You start the way every human being starts, as a blank tablet. So build, man. Make something out of yourself. Use your real talents, use the things that David Selig still has now that the freaky stuff is gone. Enter the world for the first time. Meet mankind on an equal basis. Stop beating yourself up. You can be useful. Jesus, maybe you can even help others who were in the same mess you were in. To help others, Duv -- that's a novelty, isn't it? And wholeness. To work toward wholeness. The sort of wholeness you found in that old German farmer, right? And even in Dean Cushing. You've been split long enough. Now you can be whole, Duv, now you can be whole. mantes has invited me to go skiing with him in Switzerland over Christmas. I can leave the baby with a friend in Connecticut. But I won't go if you need me, Duv. Are you okay? Can you manage?" "Sure I can. I'm not paralyzed, Jude. I haven't lost my sight. Go to Switzerland if that's what you want." "I'll only be gone eight days." "I'll survive." "When I come back I hope you'll move out of that housing project. You ought to live down here close to me. We should see more of each other." "Maybe." "I might even introduce you to some girl friends of mine. If you're interested." "Wonderful, Jude." "You don't sound enthusiastic about it." "Go easy with me," I tell her. things. I need time to sort things out." "All right. It's like a new life, isn't it, Duv?" "A new life. Yes. A new life, that's what it is, Jude." T he storm is intense now. Cars are vanishing under the first layers of whiteness. At dinnertime the radio weather forecaster talked of an accumulation of eight to ten inches before morning. Judith has invited me to spend the night here, in the maid's room. Well, why not? Now of all times, why should I spurn her? I'll stay. In the morning we'll take Pauly out to the park with his sled. Into the new snow. It's really coming down now. The snow is so beautiful. Covering everything, cleansing everything, briefly purifying this tired eroded city and its tired eroded people. I can't take my eyes from it. My face is close to the window. I hold a brandy snifter in one hand, but I don't remember to drink from it. The snow has caught me in a hypnotic spell. "Boo" someone cries behind me. I jump so violently that the cognac leaps from the snifter and splashes the window. In terror I whirl, crouching, ready to defend myself -- then the instinctive fear subsides and I laugh. Judith laughs, too. "That's the first time I've ever surprised you," she says. "In thirty-one years, the first time!" "You gave me one hell of a jolt." "I've been standing here for three or four minutes thinking things at you. Trying to get a rise out of you, but no, no, you didn't react, you just went on staring at the snow. So I sneaked up and yelled in your ear. You were really startled, Duv. You weren't faking at all." "Did you think I was lying to you about what had happened to me?" "No, of course not." "Then why'd you think I'd be faking?" "I don't know. I guess I doubted you just a little. I don't any more. Oh, Duv, Duv, I feel so sad for you!" "Don't," I say. "Please, Jude." She is crying softly. How strange that is, to watch Judith cry. For love of me, no less. For love of me. It'S very quiet now. The world is white outside and gray within. I accept that. I think life will be more peaceful. Silence will become my mother tongue. There will be discoveries and revelations, but no upheavals. Perhaps some color will cotne back into the world for me, later on. Perhaps. Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I'll keep that in mind. I'll be of good cheer. Twang. Twing. Twong. Until I die again, hello, hello, hello, hello.  Directions: This is in direct response to Cy Chauvin's letter in the March '# Galaxy. Science fiction doesn't "have a purpose." Writers have purposes. Editors and publishers have purposes. Readers have purposes. An editor or publisher may have the purpose of advancing a certain genre (as does a fan or a fan club). It is advantageous and proper to label a product so that the customer knows what he is buying. Thus Theodore Sturgeon's Slow Sculpture, for instance, would have been properly turned down by a mystery magazine. A writer may consider himself a "hack" -- that is, he may feel that his main purpose is to sell his material and earn a living. If so, it suits his purposes to understand the sales package, to submit "science fiction" (whatever that is -- I've been reading it since # and haven't found a definition I like for more than six months) to "science fiction markets." If his story utilizes the science fction elements as "merely an incidental bit of background" this may be simply an attempt to aim the story at a market. It is up to the editor or publisher to decide whether this is in fact true and if the story is up to total standards to purchase it despite this background. As a reader I would prefer a good story with "incidental" science fction elements to a poor story that is "intrinsically science fction. " The person who defines himself as a writer must find out what he has to say and what medium best suits that "saying." An example: I was once in a play-writing class under a great teacher. I was able to "hack" it -- write plays that met the technical specifications, followed the pattern of plays. They were plays -- not very good ones. The teacher's reaction was to say to me: "You have the needed technical skills, but you also have something to say. And what you have to say is not the size or shape of a play. What you want to say is the size and shape of a novel. You may be a novelistbut don't run out and start writing novels. You won't be mature enough to write the novel you are trying to write until you're in your forties." The point here is not whether I will ever be a novelist. The point is that this man, dedicated to plays, didn't say, "You don't fully exploit the medium of the play." He said, "You meet the technical requirements..." To go back to my starting point -- the question of whether science fction has "a purpose." It is an amorphous area of writing in which it suits certain writers to function, for which there is a specif c market and which serves certain interest groups (fans, publishers, editors) who wish to keep that market separate and discrete from other markets. Hence, in reviewing a product -- movie, book, etc. -- labeled "science fction," it is legitimate to say, "This is not sf." or, "The sf in this work is incidental." However, it is also legitimate to say that this (book, movie, TV program! which is or is not labeled "science fiction" is of such quality or nature that it would or would not interest science-fwtion readers.  wouldn't worry about whether sf has or has not a purpose. Writers have been able to do things within the vague outline of the medium that cannot be done within any other genre. Sometimes a writer can use science-fiction effects in another medium -- and vice versa. Sometimes a rock concert can do something that people used to think only classical forms could do -- the veryterm "rock concert" suggests as much -- so media and their interpretations change, readers change, writers change. They may change so much that science fiction will merge into other media. What has happened is that the boundaries of sf have changed. They probably will remain fluid. We do not accept the old-style Buck Rogers space opera as "hard core sf." We do admit fantasy. And sex. And "New Wave" writing. But we still haven't reached the limits of what can be done uniquely within science fiction. I think we have passed the peak of sociological explorations, utopias or anti anti-utopias, if you will. But there hasn't been much sf that truly uses psychology -- that explores people really built the way Freud said they were or that digs into Jung's or Rogers' theories, creating really "other" aliens. We've gotten into theology a bit (I think some of those priestly dropouts may have picked up a buck or two here and there) but we haven't gotten into black theology -- which might give V hites an insight into men (critters! of other races. We've got some people whom other people think nonhuman. I have not seen one science-fiction story treat aliens the way we treat the Vietnamese. I have read one science-fiction situation analogous to that of the school principal in Chicago who could not get a person from the city Department of Health to test his kindergarteners for lead poisoning, even though they came from a population (urban poor! known to suffer from that affliction -- and the affliction is known to be permanant if not treated early and to defeat the whole purpose of having the kids in school (they gel stupid, baby, really). If I placed that story on Mars or the planet Ogacihc, you'd say, "Well written, but unbelievable. People wouldn't act that stupidly or cruelly." So we haven't touched man's inhumanity to man, let alone his inhumanity to alien. Incidentally, why do we so often expect the alien ( whether Martian or a black! to be morally "superior" to us -- always on our (the dominant race's! terms. Do we confuse moral superiority with weakness? Are all whites blueeyed devils as the Prophet says? Maybe we can explore these ideas in science fiction -- we can't in mainstream, you know. The alien is mystical or good, rejects the nasty technology we wallow in. Read G. B. Shaw's Don Juan in Hell and note where he describes the arts of peace confined to "machinery of peace a greedy dog could define... but "...death, they wallow in it." Maybe we aren't so bad (how's that for heretical thought?!. Maybe .some aliens are worse. Mark Twain fully explored the alien who considers us amusing ants. fVe often see the alien who does not consider us at all. What about the alien who sees us as we see the Vietnamese? Or the goldfish?  saw some -- imported from China -- with big bubble eyes and distorted shaggy bodies. I thought them beautiful -- what would my goldfish think? What about an alien civilization that valued us for our sense of rhythm? For the way we played the banjo? For our peculiar color? Could we invent codes like the spirituals to communicate? Yes, Fm aware that this is explored in the C'mell series -- is this science fiction? Could it he done better as a realistic novel set in # in Chicago? The answer, of course, is no. For me science fiction is a medium than can introduce problems and dilemmas of the time and culture in which it is written in an imaginative way that can be published and considered by a larger audience than in the mainstream. I am currently writing essays on black theology, which may be published in journals and read by a handful. The C'mell series or a story (should  be successful in writing and selling it) would reach a larger audience to consider the same problems in a wider frame. Judith M. Hochberg Directions: Re Cy Chauvin's letter in March "# Directions: in your efforts to categorize you have forgotten the purpose of science fiction -- to outline change. If an author can fulfill this purpose by putting the science fiction in shadow instead of the limelight he is still creating a science-fiction story. What is a "genre requirement?" Is it a yardstick to measure a good story versus a bad story? If so, from whose side do we measure -- and is the yardstick always constant? What are "mainstream effects?" In fiction the principal effect is the emotion engendered. When we object to mainstream effects in science fiction do we mean that human emotions are only allowable in a Redbook novel or a New York Times Book of the Year? Perhaps Cy means technique, which brings up a different point. Let's imagine two artists. One uses his three colors and a # brush to paint a painstakingly detailed portrait. His brother artist will use the same materials and produce an abstract image of the same subject. Each uses the same brush and the same colors, but each finishes with a different picture. What has been borrowed -- and by whom? Cy wants authors "fully to exploit their (stories') .science-fiction potential. A story's potential is different for every reader. I agree that some stories could be developed more completely and some could be cut in half and still say what they have to say. But to question a story for not cleanly fitting into a personally defined category is trying to make a hampering order out of the chaos of creation. Good music by any name is good music. Charles Gifford, Jr. Rockland, Maine # East # Street New York, N.Y. # RI SOt par Mord (including name and address). W-word minimum. Payment with order. Fantasy, Gothics. Mystorios. Military. 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Pub. bere Pub ed bacteria goes ed. # S # # berserk causing #. A Choice , of Gods by Cllf#. Tl # berserk causing London to melt. Pub. ed. # lord D. Slmak. A"?"', orid', #. Cblldhood's Devastating novBest Sclenclcby Arthur el. Robots take by Donc. Clarke. Manover earth, aid A. WoUhelm. land's last geneveryone except Volume IV coneratlon on earth, a family and tains # gems -wildly fantastic!" -- Atlantic. in. BillPub. ed. # Indian tribe. Pub. ed # Sturgeon. Elli son, Anderson, #. Prelude to #. Done by Mars by Arthur Prank Herbert. C. Clarke. Two Celebrated wincomplete novels. #. The Foonner'bf Hugo and Sands of Mars dation Trilogy Nebula. Tale of and Prelude to by Isaac Asimov, family exiled Space, # short The ends of the from their prlstorles, by the galaxy revert to vate planet to scl-#I "colossus." barbarism. Pub. a barren desert. 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Behind the scenes with the men who unraveled the secrets of quantum mechanics. # lyzes hundreds of mathematical solids from the tetrahedron to the trapezoidal hexacontahedron. # Ropp. A thoroughgoing study of human sexual anatomy and response; and the sexual behavior of animats, insects, and plants. # Natural Foods of the North American Indians. Michael A. Weiner. # of 'the finest minds In the world consider the restructuring of quantum theory. # and Anne H. Ehrlich. The ecological book of the year. # Frank D. Stacey. Geophysics and its revolutionary changes. # Kopal. More than # unique photographic plates, a lunar Baedeker. Counts as # of your # choices. # Isaac Asimov. # Volumes I and #. You'll find the inside, expert story about what makes makes everything tick in these two best-selling volumes. The # books count as one. # About the #'s and #'s. Herman Kahn and B. Bruce-Sriggs. A practical look ahead by think-tank experts. # ture. Technology and Man. Barry Commoner. 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Main Offioas: # East # Stiaat Now York. N.Y. #. Skigla copy: #s. #-issua subacription: #, in U.S... # alsawhoro. Unkad Kingdom by Univotsal-Tandam Publishing Company, Ltd... # Glouoaetsr Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman ol ths Board. Ralph Stokaa. Managing Okactor. Singla copy: #p. #-lssua subacription in tha UnlM Kingdom : #. American Copyright Conventions. All rights rasarvad. Second class postage paid at Now York, N.Y. and additional mailing offieas. Tha pubiiahars assume no responsibility for unsolicitad material. All stories printad in this magazkw arc fiction and any similarity batwaan charactars and actual parsons is coincidantal. P i iii t ad in U.S.A. The Day the Sun Stood Still Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction Faith wasn't enough. Maybe it should have been, but it wasn't. And when science didn't find any reason to suppose the world was more than atoms and chance, humanily started slipping back into chaos. The world needed a sign -- scientific proof, the only sign it could accept -- that God lived. Then suddenly, as in biblical times, the sign was there: "... for a day and a night... the eartn moved not around the Sun, neither did it rotate." What happened the day the sun stood still? 'Three outstanding science-fiction authors explore that theme, probing the reaction of modem man when confronted with a miracle, in three entirely difiFerent but equally absorbing stories. In doing so, they answer the question posed by science-fiction master Lester del Rey in nis foreword; What kind of world might exist where the basis of faith is replaced by certain knowledge? November Selection of the Science FicnoN Book Club # pages. # Order from your bookseller or Thomas Nelson Inc. # Seventh Avenue South Nashville, Tennessee # Directions (infinite): By its "narrowest and hardest" definition. Dr. Isaac Asimov informs us, "science fiction is that branch of literature which deals with the future of science and scientists" Galaxy, May '#). And that is why The Gods Themselves, so promising in title and opening chapters, ended as such a disappointment. Because the future of scientists and what they do is not a very exciting subject matter for fiction. What provides the real provocative depths are the implications of what scientists do and the reasons for their doing it. A nd since it is the chosen goal, basically, of scientists to unravel the mystery of existence, how can any definition of science fiction possibly be "narrow" or limiting? Thus the Cy Chauvin debate begun in Galaxy, March '#, rages on. What is science fiction? What are its distinguishing characteristics? Good questions, these. And they imply concomitant questions on the nature of all writing, of all art -- of life itself. The trick, I think, is the articulation of what life expresses to us, and of that articulation art is the epitome. Science fiction, or speculative fiction, is a foregrounded art form, not asking for a definition but rather displaying its credentials -- a license rather than a limit. And as science is today our most effective vehicle into the unknown, why should speculative fiction deny itself a foremost position in the exploration of the great mystery on its own? Some might object that the above can only be made acceptable by excluding the reality which is the object of science. But  submit that the impossibility of the existence of the square root of two does not exclude the existence of the number two.  submit that Einstein's theory of relativity does not exclude the continued functioning of the universe as men have always known it. In speculative fiction lies the greatest possibility for reawakening that sense of awe of the cosmos, of wonder at the priceless gem that is ours for free. Where science may seek to deny the perpetual mystery that lies always Just beyond the range of microscope and telescope alike, speculative fiction must seek it out. It is when U becomes U' and the square root of two entwines with the infinite that the mystery buds, the universe blossoms and science becomes science fiction. We are a society founded on and floundering in science and technology. We seek to fill a gap the existence of which we deny and the denial leaves an emptiness. At the bottom of this emptiness smolders a spark -- call it whatever you wish. The unknown? It seems to me that science fiction can hardly avoid the challenge of fanning it to flame. And why should it want to avoid that challenge? Stephen Emmel Syracuse, N. Y. 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' Other feature articles on historical and military subjects. AGame and book reviews, commenlan on existing games, and discussions oisubscri bars' questions The magazine la # paggs long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format bat in Wastern Europe. #), We also publish a separate ime ol conlUclsimulalion games, which you will find listed In the coupon. Free le new subeertben battle presented m a game-design specially creatad to introduce new readers lo Confticl Simulation. Snd check or M.O. lo: StHMitaneiie PvWteellone Inc. Owl MO #C(tZ#i#lL.NVerh.N.V. IMtO Please enter my tubtcriplion to S.AT. lor: S I Year (# Issues) -- # # Yre. (# issues)-l#S S Vrs. (# issuee)-(M Cucreni issue S# Send me the following Simulalion Oames: n Kirmfe (Rutcie. t#-# ' Korea (#S#-S#)-M PiMtsnz (ancient Greece) -- # , arearetea (fluMia. l#t-#S)-#  Uipsif (Napoleonic Wars. iai#)-te Q Please send me your free brochure. AOdress   City .  . Slate. I -- Zip. Directions: The following has come often to my mind, but especially after reading Isaac Asimov's novel and Cy Chauvin's letter in the March '# issue of Galaxy. We live in a technological and an increasingly science-oriented period. People are involved in science-fictional situations more and more because that is the nature of our times. In that respect perhaps science fiction is today's mainstream, or should be. But to be good science fiction it must be plausible, able to suspend disbelief, seem real and well within the limits of possibility. I agree somewhat with Cy Chauvin, but not entirely. In the case of Compton's Chronocules -- atom bombs may seem like old hat and mainstream now, but they still represent a scientific discovery. About the only one of Chauvin's choices to exclude as sf I agree on is Disch's The Asian Shore. And, of course, besides containing a science element a science fiction story should be good writing -- of this Slow Sculpture. I think, was a good example. But I couldn't help simply rejoicing and shouting Yes! Yes! when I read Asimov's The Gods Themselves. Glenn Chang Galaxy will pay # for a lead letter and # each for other letters published in Directions. Address correspondence intended for this department to; Directions, Galaxy Magazine, # E. #th Street, New York N.Y. #. Editor's Column With classic application of the best principles of science fiction. Frank Herbert -- in a great new serial. Project #, starting in this issue -- puts man under the same kind of microscope man usually reserves for other life forms. The novel, in fact, picks up where a currently popular movie documentary on insect life. The Hellstrom Chronicle, leaves off -- replacing bugs with people. New insights guaranteed. And they're sorely needed. For we are never naked to each other. Or even, it seems, to the stars. I don't know how you felt when you saw the press reproductions (some were censored to protect your ignorance) of the gold-plated but otherwise nude manwoman figures Pioneer # is carrying on its timeless journey to introduce humans to starfolk. My own reaction was that they failed to represent humans I know -- ninety per cent of whom are fatter, thinner, taller, shorter or otherwise differently shaped and none of whom would dream of appearing naked or unarmed at least with insect spray before an alien life form. Now it seems they may also represent nobody you know. In a bylined story Wall Street Journal staff thority as admitting that while the gentleman in Pioneer # is depicted as anatomically complete the lady is not -- suggesting that these two are the very last humans. A prophecy? Or to protect whose ignorance out there? and valves a replating job while you dnve! Just drop # Motaloy Tabs into your fuel tank and you've started your engine rebuilding job! 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I I Name (print)I Address I I City I Jay Sorri, Corp., mm J State. #ip, Words of the Brood Mother, Trova Hellstrom: I welcome the day when I will go into the vats and become one with all of our people, (dated October #. #) T he man with the binoculars squirmed forward on his stomach through the sun-warmed brown grass. There were insects in the grass and he did not like insects, but he ignored them and concentrated on reaching the oak shadows at the hillcrest with a minimum disturbance of the growth that concealed him even while it dropped stickers and crawling things on his exposed skin. His narrow face, swarthy and deeply seamed, betrayed his age -- fifty-one years -- but the hair, black and oily, that poked from beneath his khaki sunhat belied these years. So did his movements, quick and confident. At the hillcrest he drew several deep breaths while dusting the binocular lenses with a clean linen handkerchief. He parted the dry grass then, focused the binoculars and stared through them at the farm that filled the valley below the hill. The haze of the hot autumn afternoon complicated his examination as did the binoculars, a pair of ten-sixties of special manufacture. He had trained himself to use them the way he fired a rifle -- hold breath, concentrate on rapid scanning with only eye movements, keeping immobile the expensive instrument of glass and metal that brought distances into such immediate detail. The farm under his amplified gaze was oddly isolated. The valley was about a perhaps five hundred yards wide, narrowing at the upper end where a thin trickle of water spilled down a black rock face. The farm buildings occupied cleared ground on the far side of a narrow stream whose meandering, willow-bordered bed was only a thin reminder of its spring affluence. Patches of wavering green moss marked the stream's rocks and there were a few shallow pools where water appeared not to flow at all. The buildings sat back from the stream. They were a cluster of weathered boards and blind glass at rustic variance with the neatness of harvested plantings that ran in parallel rows within cleanly squared fencelines over the rest of the valley. There was the house, its basic unit in the old saltbox pattern, but with two added wings. A bay window featured the wing nearright of the house was a large barn with big doors on the second level and an upjutting cupola arrangement along its ridgeline -- no windows there, but louvered ventilators were spaced along its entire length and at the visible end. On the hill behind the barn stretched a decaying feed shed. A smaller building could be an old outhouse. Another small wooden structure stood higher on the hill behind the farmhouse, possibly an old pump building. Down by the higher main fence at the valley's northern end squatted a concrete block about twenty feet on a side and with flat roof -- new pump house was the guess, but it looked like a defensive blockhouse. The watcher, whose name was Carlos Depeaux, made a mental note that the valley fitted the descriptions. It was full of default messages. No people stirred about on the land (although a distinctly audible and irritating machinery hum issued from the barn). No road ran from the north gate to the farm buildings (the nearest road, a one-way track, reached the valley from the north but ended at the gate beyond the blockhouse). A footpath with narrow indentations, apparently from a wheelbarrow, stretched from the gate to the farmhouse and barn. The valley's sides were steep and in places almost craggy with brown rock outcroppings at the top of the far side. A similar rocky upthrust rose about a hundred feet to Depeaux's right. A few animal tracks wound their dusty ribbons through oak and madrona along the valley sides. The black rock of the tiny waterfall closed off the southern end where a thin cinnamon tracery of water spilled into the stream. The land undulated away out of the valley northward, widening into pasture meadows and occasional clumps of pine intermingled with oak and madrona. Cattle grazed in the far distance and, although there were no fences immediately outside the farm's barrier, tall grass revealed that the cattle did not venture too near this valley. That, too, accorded with the reports. H aving satisfied himself that the valley still matched its descriptions, Depeaux wriggled backward behind the crest, found a shaded patch beneath an oak. There he turned to lie on his back and brought a small knapsack into a position where he could explore its interior. He knew his clothing would blend well with the grass, but he still hesitated to sit up, preferring to wait and listen. The sack contained his binocular case, a well-thumbed copy of Naming The Birds At A Glance, a good # mm camera with a long lens, two thin beef sandwiches wrapped up in plastic, an orange and a plastic bottle of warm water. He brought out a sandwich, lay for a moment staring up through the oak's branches, his pale gray eyes not really focused on anything in particular. Once he pulled at the black hairs protruding from his nostrils. The situation was extremely odd, he thought. Here it was mid-October and the Agency still had not been able to observe the farmers in that valley through an entire harvest. The crops had been harvested, however. That was obvious at a glance. Depeaux was not a farmer, but he thought he recognized the stubby remains of corn plantings, although the stalks had been removed. Why had they cleared away the stalks? He wondered. Other farms he had seen in the long drive to this valley were still littered with harvest remains. He wasn't sure, but he thought this was another default message in the valley that interested his Agency so much. The uncertainty, the gap in his knowledge -- bothered him, however, and he made a note to check on this. Did they burn the stalks? Presently, sensing no watchers around him, Depeaux sat up, his back against the oak's bole, ate the sandwich and drank some of the warm water. The food was the first he had allowed himself since before daylight. He decided to save the orange and other sandwich for later. His approach to this vantage point from the place far back in the encroaching pines where he had concealed his bicycle had been long and slow. The van and the stakeout where he had left Tymiena were another half-hour's bicycle ride beyond the cache. He had decided not to venture back before nightfall and knew he was going to be very hungry before he got back to the van. Not the first time on such a job. The peculiar nature of this case had become increasingly obvious the nearer he had come to the farm. Well -- he'd been warned about that. Stubborn persistence had kept him pressing forward past the imaginary hunger line he knew he would have to pass on the return. The countryside was much more open and empty of concealment than he had expected from the aerial photos, although Porter's reports had made specific mention of this. Depeaux had expected to approcach from a different direction, however, and find his own cover. But there had been, finally, only the tall brown grass to conceal his stalking climb across a wide pastureland and up to the hill. The sandwich finished and half his water gone, Depeaux sealed the bottle, restored it and the rest of the food to his pack. For a moment he peered along his backtrail to see if anyone had followed. He saw no sign of anyone, but was unable to put down an uneasy feeling that he was watched. The lowering sun was picking up his trail with a shadowline, too. No helping that -- the crushed grass was a track that could be traced. He had driven through the town of Fosterville at # a. m., curious about the sleeping community where, he was told, they generally refused to answer questions about the farm. There had been a new motel on the outskirts and Tymiena had suggested they spend a night there before reconnoitering the farm, but Depeaux was playing a hunch on this case. What if there were watchers from the farm in the town to report the arrival of strangers. The Farm. It had been capitalized in all the Agency's reports for some time, for quite a while before Porter had turned up missing. Depeaux had driven on to a turn-off several miles below the valley and had left Tymiena there shortly before dawn. Now he was a birdwatcher, but no birds were visible. Depeaux returned to the gap in the grass and had another look into the valley. There had been a massacre of Indians here in the late remnants of a "wild" tribe to remove a threat to grazing stock. As a marker of that all-butforgotten day the valley had been named "Guarded." According to a historical footnote Depeaux had located, the original name of the valley had been Running Water, after the Indian name. Generations of white farming, however, had depleted the water table and now the Running Water did not run year round. As he studied the valley now, Depeaux thought about the record of human nature carried in such names. A casual observer passing this way without doing his homework might think the valley had achieved jts name because of its setting. Guarded Valley was a closed-in place with only one real avenue of easy access apparent. The hillsides were steep. A cliff marked the upper end. Only to the north did it open out. Appearances could be deceptive, though, Depeaux reminded himself. He had reached his vantage point successfully and his binoculars might just as well have been a weapon for violence. In a sense they were a subtle weapon aimed at the destruction of Guarded Valley. For Depeaux that pattern of destruction had begun when Joseph Merrivale, the Agency's operations director, had called him in for an assignment conference. Merrivale, a native of Chicago who affected a heavy English accent, had begun by grinning at Carlos and saying: "You may have to waste a few of your fellow humans on this one." They all knew, of course, how much Eepeaux hated personal violence. From Hellstrom's Hive Manual: The significant evolutionary advance that the insects years ago was the reproductive neuter. This fixed the colony as the unit of natural selection and removed all previous limits on the amount of specialization (expressed as caste differences) a colony could tolerate. It is clear that if we vertebrates can take the same route our individual members with their vastly larger brains will become incomparably superior specialists. No other species will be able to stand against us, ever -- not even the old human species from which we will evolve our new humans. T he short man with the deceptively youthful face listened attentively as Merrivale briefed Depeaux. It was early on a Monday morning and the short man, whose name was Edward Janvert, had been surprised that an assignment conference could be called that early on such brief notice. He suspected trouble somewhere in the Agency. Janvert, who was called Shorty by most of his associates and who managed to conceal his hatred of the name, was only four feet nine inches tall and had passed as a teenager on more than one Agency assignment. The furniture in Merrivale's office was never small enough for him, however, and he was squirming on a big leather chair within a half hour. The case was subtle, Janvert observed presently, the type he had learned to distrust. The target was an entomologist, a Dr. Nils Hellstrom, and it was clear from Merrivale's careful choice of words that Hellstrom had friends in high places. There were always so many toes around to be avoided in this business. You couldn't separate politics from the Agency's version of a traditional security investigation. And the investigations inevitably took on economic overtones. When he had called in Janvert Merrivale had said only that it was necessary to keep a second team in reserve for possible assistance in this case. Someone had to be ready to step in at a moment's notice. They expect casualties, Janvert told himself. He glanced covertly at Clovis Carr, whose almost boyish figure was dwarfed in another of Merrivale's big wing chairs. Janvert suspected Merrivale had decorated the office to give it the air of an expensive British club, something to go with his bogus accent. Do they know about Clovis and me? Janvert's attention wandered under the onslaught of Merrivale's rambling style. To the Agency love was a weapon to be used whenever it was needed. Janvert tried to hold his gaze from Clovis, but he kept glancing back at her in spite of himself She was short, only a half-inch taller than he, a wiry brunette with a pert oval face and a pale northern complexion that burned at the drop of a sunbeam. There were times when Janvert felt his love for her as an actual physical pain. Merrivale was describing what he called "Hellstrom's cover," which turned out to be the making of documentary films about insects. "Deucedly curious, don't you think?" Merrivale asked. For not the first time during his four years in the Agency Janvert wished he were out of it. He had come in while a third-year law rr pi Ballantine Books lately i remember this is being written in the lovely month of June which this year, they tell me, is just ghastly for Libras -- that's us). So let's get back to what is really important -- namely our list which, since Fall is coming up (campus openings and all like that), is always bonanza time for publishers. So we tell ourselves.    SO. Lin Carter has a fresh anthology come) and we are also publishing us). Anyway, it's a tension-filled rescue in space, done with all this author's famous attention to authentic detail. Plus, we are reissuing his other splen   cookbooks for them that's interested that lovely month. Bob Silverberg's better all the time. -- prtty nice) pieces of which first sew the light of dmy in OataMy. This one is reathf superb computer stuff. We meen it's good. A contender, without doubt, but it's Gerroid, ertd you don't reeUy need to kttow more then that. Alfo a reissue of that Adult Brunner -- probably a November publication. This is his major work to follow    very unpopuiar with this department -- to wit. a buck-twenty-five for originai stuff, but still trying to hold the line at # e for reissues. Of course when it suggest a boycott except you'd all be missing so much fun. Well, boycott someone else. What the hell!    here in the excited East, what with the SHverbergs and everyone (at least it seems iike everyone) taking off to actually liva in Caiifornia. So. write already! Harlan, that means you! No pun intended. BB fans -- there's a deiicious Tolkien Calendar out. with reproductions of the Professor's own art. He seemed daiighted with it whan we met him on our recent London trip. Happy #... Student working the summer as a clerk in the Justice Department. In that capacity he had found a file folder left accidentally on a table of his division's law library. Curious, he had glanced into the file and had found a highly touchy report on a translator in a foreign embassy. His first reaction at the file's contents had been a kind of sorrowful outrage that governments still resorted to such forms of espionage. Something about the file had told him it represented complex operation of his own government. Janvert had come up through the 'campus unrest' period into the study of law. He had seen the law at first as a possible way out of the world's many dilemmas, but the vision had proved a will-o'-thewisp. Pursuit of the law had taken him into that library with its damnable misplaced file folder. One thing had led inevitably to another, just as it always did, without a completely defined cause-and-effect relationship. The immediate thing, however, was that he had been caught reading the file by its owner. What followed was curiously low key. There had been a period of pressures, some subtle and some not quite subtle, designed to recruit him into the Agency which had produced that file. Janvert came from a good family, they explained. His father was an important small businessman (owneroperator of a small-town hardware store). At first the recruitment had been vaguely amusing. Then the pay offers (plus expenses) had climbed embarrassingly high and he had begun to wonder. Next had come startling praise for his abilities and aptitudes, which Janvert had suspected the Agency invented on the spur of the moment -- he had had difficulty seeing himself in their descriptions. Finally the gloves had come off. He had been told pointedly that he might find other government employment difficult to obtain. This had almost put his back up, because it was common knowledge that he had set his sights on the Justice Department. Tn the end he had said he would try it for a few years if he could continue his law education. By that time he had been dealing with the Chiefs right hand man, Dzule Peruge, and Peruge had evinced profound delight at this prospect. "The Agency needs men with legal training," Peruge had said. "We need them desperately at times." Peruge's next words had startled Janvert. "Has anyone ever told you that you could pass for a teenager? That could be very useful at times, especially for someone with legal training." This last had come out with all of the overtones of an afterthought. The facts were that Janvert had always been kept too busy to complete his valuable legal training. Maybe next year. Shorty. You can see for yourself how crucial your present case is. Now, I want you and Clovis... That had been how he had first met Clovis, who also possessed that useful appearance of youth. Sometimes she had been his sister. At other times they had been runaway lovers whose parents "didn't understand." The realization had come rather slowly to Janvert that the file he had found and read was more sensitive than he had imagined and that a probable alternative to his joining the Agency had been a markerless grave in some southern swamp. He had never participated in a swamping, as Agency old timers put it, but he knew for a fact that they occurred. That was how it was in the Agency, he learned. The Agency. thing else. The Agency's economic operations -- the spying and other forms of snooping -- only confirmed Janvert's early cynicism. He saw the world without masks, telling himself that the great mass of his fellows had no realization whatsoever that they already lived in what was, for all intents and purposes, a police state. This had been inevitable from the formation of the first police state that achieved any degree of world power. The only apparent way to oppose the trend was by pitting it against itself It was a condition which fostered its mimic forces on all sides (so Clovis Carr and Edward Janvert agreed). Everything in the society they saw took on policestate character. Janvert said it: This is the time of the police states. They made this a tenet of their pact to leave the Agency together "Porter's reasonably certain they at the first opportunity. That their didn't kill her," Merrivale said, feelings for each other and the pact "They just took her back inside were dangerous, they had no that barn which we are told -- is doubts. To leave the Agency the main studio for Hellstrom's would require new identities and a movie operation." subsequervt life of obscurity whose nature they understood all too well. Agents left their service through death in action or a carefully guarded retirement -- or they simply disappeared and somehow all of their fellows got the message not to ask questions. The most persistent retirement rumor in the Agency mentioned a carefully supervised rest home no one located with precise geography. Some said northern Minnesota. The story described high fences, guards, dogs, golf, tennis, swimming, splendid fishing on an enclosed lake, posh private cabins for guests -- and even quarters for married couples, but no children. Having children in this business was considered equal to a death sentence. Both Carr and Jan vert agreed they wanted children. Escape would have to occur while they were overseas together, they decided. Forged papers, new faces, money, the requisite language facility -- all the physical necessities were within their reach except one: the opportunity. And never once did they suspect adolescent fantasy in such dreams or in the work that occupied their lives. They would escape -- some day. Depeaux was objecting to something in Merrivale's briefing now. Janvert tried to pick up the thread -- something about a young woman trying to escape from the farm. II From the Agency report on Project #: The sheaf of papers was dropped from a folder by a man identified as a Hellstrom aide. The incident occurred in last March as explained in the covering notes. The label each page. From an examination of the notes and diagrams (see enclosure A), our experts postulate developmental plans for what they describe as "a toroidal field disrupter." This is explained as an electron (or particle) pump capable of influencing physical matter at a distance. The papers are unfortunately incomplete. No definite line of development can be determined from them, although our own laboratories are exploring the provocative implications. It seems obvious, however, that someone in the Hellstrom organization is at work on an operational prototype. We cannot be certain #) whether it will work or #) to what use it will be put if it works. However, in view of Dr. Zinstrom's report (see enclosure G) we must assume the worst. Zinstrom assures us privately that the theory behind such a development is sound and that a toroidal field disrupter large enough, amplified enough to set to the correct resonance could shatter the Earth's crust with disastrous consequences for all life on our planet. is really a plum of a X case we're handing to Carlos," Merrivale said. He touched his upper lip, brushing an imaginary mustache. Carr, who was seated slightly behind Depeaux and facing Merrivale, noted the flush of sudden red at Depeaux's neck. He didn't like that obvious, pandering statement. The morning sun was shining through the window to Merrivale's right, reflecting from the desk. The yellow-brown underlight imparted a saturnine cast to the operations chiefs face. "That movie company front has got Peruge's wind up, I must say," Merrivale said. (Depeaux actually shuddered.) Carr coughed to conceal a sudden hysterical desire to laugh aloud. "Under the circumstances, we don't dare go in and root them out, as I'm sure you can understand," Merrivale said. "Not enough evidence in our kip. Your job, that. This movie front does offer one of our most promising points of entry, however." "What's the subject matter of this film?" Janvert asked. They all turned to look at him and Carr wondered why Eddie had interrupted. He seldom did that sort of thing casually. Was he fishing for some information behind Merrivale's briefing? "I thought I said." Merrivale sniffed. "Insects. They're doing a film about bloody insects. A bit of a surprise, that, when Peruge first mentioned it. I confess my own first guess was that they were making these unsavory sex films and -- ah -- blackmailing someone in a sensitive position." Depeaux, sweating under a profound aversion to Merrivale's bogus accent and manner, squirmed in his chair, resenting the interruption. Get on with it! he thought. "I'm not sure I understand the sensitive conditions around Hellstrom's operation," Janvert said. "I thought the film would supply a clue." Merrivale sighed. Bloody nitpicker. He said, "Hellstrom is something of a madman on the subject of ecology. I'm sure you know how politically sensitive that area is. There's also the fact that he is employed as a consultant by several -- I repeat, several -- persons of extremely powerful influence. I could name one Senator and at least three Congressmen. If we were to move frontally against Hellstrom, I'm sure the repercussions would be severe." "Ecology, eh?" Depeaux said, trying to get Merrivale back on track. "Yes, ecology." Merrivale made the word sound as though he wanted it to rhyme with sodomy. "Man has access to considerable sums of money, too, and we'd like to know about that." Depeaux nodded, said, "Let's get back to that valley." "Yes, yes indeed," Merrivale agreed. "You've all seen the map. This little valley's been in Hellstrom's family since his grandmother's day. Trova Hellstrom, pioneer, widow, that sort of thing." Janvert rubbed a hand across his eyes. He wqs sure from Merrivale's description of Trova Hellstrom that the intended picture was of a tiny "widow woman" fighting off attacking redskins from a blazing log cabin, her brats forming a bucket brigade behind her. The man was unbelievable. "Here's the map," Merrivale said, extracting it from the papers on his desk. "Southeastern Oregon, right here." He touched the map with a finger. "Guarded Valley. The closest civilization is this town here with the unlikely appellation of Fosterville." His finger moved to the unlikely town. likely name? She glanced covertly at Janvert, but he was examining the palm of his right hand as though he had just found something fascinating'in it. "And they do all of their filming in this valley?" Depeaux asked. "Oh, no," Merrivale protested. "My God, Carlos, didn't you read enclosures R through W?" "There were no such enclosures in my file," Depeaux said. "Bloody hell!" Merrivale said. "Sometimes, I wonder how we ever get anything done correctly in this establishment. Very well. I'll give you mine. Briefly, Hellstrom and his camera crews and whatnot have been all over the bloody world: Kenya, Brazil, Southeast Asia, India -- it's all in here." He tapped the papers on his desk. "You can see for yourself later." "And this Project Forty," Depeaux prompted. "That's what attracted our attention," Merrivale explained. "The pertinent papers were copied and the originals returned to where they were found. The Hellstrom aide subsequently returned for his papers, found them where he expected, took them and departed. Their significance was not understood at the time. Purely routine. Our man on the library staff was curious, no more, but our curiosity became increasingly intense as the papers were bounc upstairs. Unfortunately we've not had the opportunity of observing this particular Hellstrom aide since that moment. He apparently is keeping to the farm. It is our belief, however, that Hellstrom is unaware that we know about his little project." "The speculation seems a little science fictiony -- perhaps a little fantastic," Depeaux said. Janvert nodded his agreement. Were those explicit suspicions the real reason the Agency was prying into Hellstrom's affairs? Or was it possible that Hellstrom was merely developing a product that threatened one of the groups that actually paid most of the Agency's expenses? You never knew in this business. "Haven't I heard of this Hellstrom before?" Carr asked. "Isn't he the entomologist who came out "That's the chap," Merrivale said. "Pure fanatic. Now, here's the farmstead plan, Carlos." So much for my question, Carr thought. She curled her legs under her in the wing chair, glanced openly at Janvert, who returned her stare with a grin. He's just been playing with Merrivale, she realized, and he thinks I'm in the game. M errivale had a blueprint map on his desk now, was unfolding it, indicating features on it with his long, sensitive fingers. "Barn here -- outbuildings -- main house. We have every reason to believe, as those reports indicate, that the barn is Hellstrom's studio. Curious concrete structure here near the entrance gate. Can't say what purpose it serves. Your job to find out." "And you don't want us to go right in, nose around," Depeaux said. He frowned at the blueprint map. This decision puzzled him. "The young woman who tried to get away -- " "Yes, that was February twentieth last," Merrivale said. "Porter saw her run from the barn. She got as far as the north gate here when she was apprehended by two men who came upon her from beyond the fence. Their point of origin was not determined. They did, however, return her to the barn-studio." "Porter's account says these people weren't wearing any clothes," Depeaux said. "It seems to me that a report to the authorities giving a description of -- " "And we'd have had to explain why we were there, send our one man up against numerous Hellstrom accomplices, all of this in the presence of the "new morality" that permeates this society." You damned hypocrite, Carr thought. You know how the Agency uses sex for its own purposes. Janvert leaned forward in his chair. "Merrivale, you're holding something back in this case. I want to know what it is. We have Porter's report, but he's not here to amplify it. Is Porter available?" He sat back. "A simple yes or no will suffice." That's a dangerous tack to take, Eddie, Carr thought. She watched Merrivale intently to measure his response. "I can't say I care for your tone. Shorty," Merrivale said. Depeaux leaned back, put a hand over his eyes. "And I can't say I care for your secrecy," Janvert said. "We would like to know the things that are not in these reports." Depeaux dropped his hand, nodded. Yes, there were some things about this case... "Impatience is not seemly in good agents," Merrivale said. "However, I can understand your curiosity and the 'need-to-know' rule has not been applied in this case. Peruge was specific on that. What has our wind up, as it were, is not just this Project Forty thing, but the accumulation of items, the indications that Hellstrom's film activities are actually -- " he pronounced it exshooly and once more for emphasis -- "actually a cover for serious and highly subversive political activities." Bullshit, Janvert thought. "How serious?" Carr asked. "Well -- Hellstrom has been nosing around the Nevada atomic testing area. He conducts entomological researches, as well, you see. His films are offered under the guise of documentary productions. He has ha atomic materials for his so-called researches and -- " "Why so-called?" Janvert asked. "Isn't it possible he's just what he -- " "Impossible." Merrivale snorted. "Look, it's really all in the reports here. Observe especially the indications that Hellstrom and his people may be interested in forming some sort of new communal society. It's quite provocative. He and his film crew live that sort of life wherever they go -- off to themselves, clubby. And their preoccupation with the emerging African nations, the numerous visits to the Nevada testing area, the ecology thing with its highly inflammatory nature, the -- " "Communist?" Carr interrupted. "It's -- ah -- possible." Janvert asked, "Where's Porter?" "That -- ah -- " Merrivale pulled at his chin. "That's a bit sticky. I'm sure you understand the delicacy of our position in all of -- " "I don't understand it," Janvert said. "What's happened to him?" "That's one of the things we hope Carlos can ascertain," Merrivale said. Depeaux turned a speculative look on Janvert, returned his attention to Merrivale, who had sunk back into apparent concentration upon the blueprint map. "Porter's missing?" Depeaux asked. "Somewhere around this farm," Merrivale said. He looked up as though he were just noticing Depeaux. "Presumably." From recorded comments of Brood Mother Trova Hellstrom: Some threat is good for a species. It tends to stimulate breeding, to raise the level of awareness. Too much, however, can have a stupefying effect. It is one of the tasks of Hive leadership to adjust the level of stimulating threat. J. hind him and to the right of his position on the hill above Guarded Valley, Depeaux took care that the light did not outline him. There were both advantages and disadvantages in the slanting rays. They tended to throw some details of the farm into relief -- the fence lines, the paths on the opposite hillside, the weathered boards on the barn's western face. He still had not seen one sign of human activity outside the buildings and no sure indication of humans within them. The irritating hum continued to issue from the barn and Depeaux had exhausted his speculations on what it might be. He had opted tentatively for air-conditioning and wished he could enjoy that relief from the hot afternoon in the dusty grass. A long, cold drink -- that's what  need, he told himself. The fact that the farm fitted all the reports and the descriptions (including Porter's) did not really say anything for it. Depeaux scanned the valley once more through his binoculars. There was a peculiar waiting air to the emptiness of the place, as though forces were being marshaled to fill the farm with life. What did Hellstrom do with his farm's products? Depeaux wondered. Why was the entire area so devoid of human activity? He had seen no vacationers or picnickers on the dirt road to the valley -- although the area seemed attractive enough. Why were the Fosterville residents so close-mouthed about Hellstrom's farm? Porter had been intrigued by this, too. This was a hunting area, but Depeaux had seen no deer sign and not one hunter. The stream obviously held no attraction for fishermen. A Steller's jay flapped into the tree behind Depeaux, called once with its raucous voice, then flew across the valley into the trees of the far slope. Depeaux watched the bird's flight with peculiar interest, realizing it was the first higher life form he had seen in Hellstrom's valley. One damned jay! That was some record for a day's work. But he supposed to be a birdwatcher, wasn't he? Just a simple little old vacationer, a traveling salesman for the Blue Devil Fireworks Corporation of Baltimore, Maryland. He sighed, worked his way back to the oak's shade. He had studied the maps, the aerial photographs. Porter's descriptions, all the accumulated reports. Every detail had been committed to memory. He scanned his backtrail with the binoculars. Nothing moved in the tall grass of the open area or in the trees beyond it. Nothing. The oddity of this became increasingly demanding of his attention. One damned jay? It had been a thing long inserting itself into his awareness, but now he focused upon it to the exclusion of all other considerations. One bird. It was as though animal life had been swept away from the region around Guarded Valley. Why hadn't Porter mentioned that? And the grazing cattle down there to the north toward Fosterville. No fence kept them from approaching the farm, but they kept their distance. Why? In that instant Depeaux recognized what it was that had made the farm's fields appear so strange to him. They were clean. Those fields had not been harvested. They had been swept clean of every stalk, every leaf, every twig. An orchard occupied the upper reaches of the valley and Depeaux crawled back to study it through the binoculars. There were no bits of rotten fruit on the ground, no culls, no leaves or limbs -- nothing. Clean. But the tall grass remained all around on the perimeter hills. Hellstrom's own addenda to the dietary notes: The key workers must, of course, take the supplemental leader-foods without fail, but it is equally important that they keep up their intake from the vats. It is here that we get the markers that maintain our awareness of mutual identity. Without this chemical sameness, which the vats provide us, we will become like those Outside; isolated, alone, drifting without purpose. B y late afternoon Depeaux had become almost obsessed with the desire to find something animal and alive in the valley. But nothing stirred there and the sun had moved several long notches toward the horizon. Perhaps another vantage point... The longer he stayed on the hill above the farm, the less he liked his cover story. Birdwatcher, indeed! Why hadn't Porter mentioned the absence of animal life? Insects, of course: the grass was alive with them, crawling, buzzing, flitting. Depeaux slid and crawled away from the crest, rose to his knees. His back ached from all of the unnatural movement. Grass burrs had invaded his collar, were under his belt, under his stockings, up his sleeves. He managed a smile, half grimace, at his own discomfort, could almost hear Merrivale commenting: "Part of the price you pay for engaging in this line of work, old bean." Son of a bitch! Porter's careful reports had indicated no guards posted outside the farm's perimeter, but that was just one man's account. Depeaux asked himself how he felt about his position in the open under the oak. You stayed alive in this business by ultimately trusting only your own senses -- and Porter was missing. The fact represented an important piece of information. It could be innocent or ominous, but it was safer to believe the worst. At the worst. Porter was dead and the people of Hellstrom's farm were responsible. Merrivale believed this. He had made that clear and the secretive bastard could have information to confirm it without any of his agents being the wiser. You will proceed with the utmost caution, keeping in mind at every juncture our need to determine precisely what has happened to Porter. The son of a bitch probably already knows what has happened, Depeaux thought. Something about the one-pointed emptiness of the region spoke of hidden dangers. Depeaux reminded himself that agents who leaned too heavily on the reports of others often ended up dead, sometimes in painful and ugly fashion. What was it about this place? He swept his gaze around his backtrail, saw no sign of movement or watching eyes. A glance at his watch told him he had slightly more than two hours before sunset. Time to get to the head of the valley then and scan the length of it. Bending tow at the waist, Depeaux got to his feet and, in a crouching trot, moved swiftly toward the south below the concealing ridge. His breathing deepened easily with the effort and he thought for a moment that he wasn't in such bad condition for a man of fifty-one. Swimming and long walks weren't the worst recipe in the world -- and he wished he were swimming that instant. It was dry and hot under the ridge. The grass was full of nose-tickling dust. Desire for a swim did not bother him greatly. Such wishes had come often in the sixteen years since he had moved up from an ofTice clerk in the Agency. The fleeting desire to be elsewhere he usually passed off as an unconscious recognition of danger, but sometimes it could be attributed to no more than bodily discomfort. When he had been a mere clerk in the Baltimore office Depeaux had enjoyed his daydreams about working as an agent. He had filed "final reports" on agents "wasted in action" and had told himself: If ever I get to be an agent I shall be extremely cautious. The promise had not been hard to keep. He was by nature careful and painstaking -- "the perfect clerk," some of his fellows carped. But it was painstaking care that had led him to commit the farm and its surroundings to memory, to note possible cover (little enough of that!) and the game trails through the tall grass indicated on aerial photos. Game trails but no visible game sign, he reminded himself What kind of game ran these paths? It was another note on his increasing sense of caution. Depeaux had once overheard Merrivale commenting to another agent: The trouble with Carlos is he plays for survival. As though old Jollyvale didn't do the same, Depeaux told himself The man hadn't reached his present eminence as operations director without an eye for the mainline. D epeaux could hear the faint trickling of the waterfall at the valley's upper end. A clump of madronas stood at the invisible line on Depeaux's mental map, marking the northernmost reach of Hellstrom's valley. Depeaux paused in their shade and made another survey of his surroundings, paying special attention to his own backtrail. Something about that open area -- nothing moved in it, but Depeaux made a decision then and there to wait for darkness to cover his return across that space. Thus far it had not been too bad a go, he told himself Just that faintly disquieting sense of an unknown danger. The second examination of the valley from this upper vantage point should not take too long. Perhaps he might reconsider and go back by daylight to the bicycle and an early check-in with Tymiena at the van. Perhaps. That first decision to wait for darkness had gone deeply into him, though. Play it safe, he reminded himself Play for survival. He turned left briskly, unslung his binoculars and slipped up through a stand of oak and madrona to a clump of oily green bushes behind the rock face of the valley's upper limit. The tinkling waterfall was quite noisy through the undergrowth. At the bushes Depeaux dropped to all fours, tucking the binoculars under his shirt and cinching the pack tightly against his right side. He went through the now familiar stalking crawl then, turning partly onto his left side to protect the binoculars and keep the pack off the ground. The bushes ended presently in a short rock lip that exposed a lengthwise view of Guarded Valley. As he brought out the binoculars Depeaux wondered idly where the Indians had been slaughtered. The noise of the waterfall was quite loud about fifty feet to his right. He rested on his elbows, brought up the binoculars. The farm buildings were farther away from him this time and the large barn-studio concealed all but the western wing of the house. A crooked stretch of stream was clearly visible from this new vantage. Its surface remained mirror calm, as though stagnant, reflecting the trees and brush at its verge. The view opened up at the valley's far end, revealing the rolling grasslands and clumps of trees, the patches of distant cattle. Why wouldn't the cattle venture into the rich grass closer to the end of the valley? Nothing visible was keeping them away; no fence, no ditch -- nothing. D epeaux became aware of a vehicle moving in a dust cloud far off beyond the cattle. That was the narrow track he and Tymiena had taken. Who was coming down there? Would they see the camper? Tym would be out there with her paints, drawing pictures of the stupid landscape, of course, but still... Depeaux focused his binoculars on the dust, presently made out a large covered truck. It was following the crazy meander track toward the valley and moving fast. He tried to locate Tymiena, but the hill to his left blocked off that vista and the camper sat in tree shade along a side road. The oncoming truck might not pass close enough to see her. It made no difference anyway, he told himself. A strange excitement gripped him. He brought his attention back to the farm buildings. Surely someone would come out to greet the truck. He would get his first look at the occupants of this odd place. He studied the scene intently. Nothing moved within the valley. They must hear the truck. He could hear it himself even from this greater distance and above the waterfall's intrusion. Where were the farm's occupants? The binoculars had collected dust again. Depeaux paused to reflect on the situation while he applied the linen cloth once more to the lenses. He knew it might appear ridiculous, but the absence of surface activity in the presence of so much evidence that people carried on an active life here filled him with disquiet. It wasn't natural! Everything was so damned motionless in the valley. He experienced the skin-creeping sensation of being watched by countless eyes. When he rolled over and peered back through the brush he could see not one moving thing. Why did he expect (trouble from these conditions? He did, though, and his inability to explain the expectation filled him with irritation. What were they hiding here? Despite Merrivale's Sittempts to present this case as a plum for the chosen agent, Depeaux had tasted the oddness of it from the beginning. Shorty Janvert obviously had shared that sense of something profoundly wrong. This thing was sour! And it was not the sourness of green fruit and easy pickings. It was a prickling of the senses that came from knowledge of something overripe and rotten, of something that had stewed too long in its own juices. The truck was just beyond the valley now, making its final climb up the easy slope to the north fence. Depeaux brought his binoculars to bear on it once more, saw two white-clad figures in the cab. They were visible only dimly through sun reflections on the windshield. And still no one came from the farm buildings. The truck turned close to the . north fence, revealing large words on its flat white side: N. hella wide turn until it was heading away from the farm, stopped and backed up to the gate. Two blond young men emerged from the cab. They trotted briskly to the rear, dropped a gate that extended to a ramp with rollers. They clambered into the open cave of the bed, slid a tall yellow and gray box from the shadows there. The box appeared heavy from the way they strained at it. They tipped it onto the gate's rollers, let it slide swiftly to a jolting, dusty stop on the ground. Depeaux watched the whole operation intently. What the hell was in that box? It was big enough for a coffin. The men hopped down, strained against the box until they brought it teeterinjg upright. They walked it to a position clear of the tailgate, closed the truck, got back into the cab and drove away. The box remained about ten feet outside the north gate. Depeaux examined the surface of the box through his binoculars. It was taller than the men from the truck and it was heavy. It appeared to be made of wood and was bound by what seemed to be flat metal straps that ran around it from top to bottom. A delivery, Depeaux mused. What in hell could be delivered to this farm in a box that shape? Hellstrom had his own truck to bring things to the farm, but he didn't worry about his deliveries waiting in the sun outside his gate. There might be nothing unusual about that, on the surface of it. The Agency's dossier carried considerable information about Hellstrom's film company. That was the N. Hellstrom, Inc. Hellstrom was both owner and manager. He made documentary films about insects. Sometimes Hellstrom's film efforts were incorporated into quite substantial productions that were distributed through other companies in Hollywood and New York. It was all easily explained until you sat on this hillside and watched the operation, as Depeaux was doing now and as Porter had done before him. What had become of Porter? And why wouldn't Merrivale permit a straightforward missing-person investigation? There was something else about Hellstrom's operation. His un-operation. Ill From the Hive Manual: The relationship between ecology and evolution is an extremely close one, deeply implicated in orgahic changes among a given animal population and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this we will get our survival variations. T he conference room held an air of detached waiting as Dzule Peruge strode into it and took the Chiefs chair at the head of the long table. He glanced at his wristwatch as he put his briefcase on the table. Fourteen after five p.m. In spite of the day's being Sunday they were all present -- all the important men and the one woman who shared responsibility for the Agency. Without any of the usual preparations Peruge sat down, said, "I've had an extremely trying day. To cap it, the Chief called me just two hours ago and told me I would have to deliver his report to you. He had to take care of some questions from Upstairs. That, of course, took priority." He swept his gaze around the room, it was a quiet and cushioned place, this penthouse boardroom. Gray curtains covered the double windows on the north side, giving the sun's afternoon rays a feeling of cool, underwater light as they filtered through to the dark, polished wood of the tabletop. There were some impatient coughs around the table, but Peruge's listeners took the replacement without objection. He squared the briefcase in front of him, extracted its contents -- three thin folders. He said, "You've all seen the Hellstrom file. The Chief tells me he circulated it three weeks ago. You will be glad to know that we have now cracked the code on page eleven of the original sheaf. It was a rather interesting one, based on a four-unit configuration our people tell me Very ingenious." He cleared his throat, pulled one thin sheet from the top folder, scanned it. "Again, this refers to Project Forty, but this time distinctly in terms of a weapon. The exact words are: '... a sting that will make our workers supreme over the entire world.' Very suggestive." A man down the table on Peruge's left said, "Poppycock! This Hellstrom produces movies. That could be a dramatic piece of business for a film." "There is more," Peruge said. "It includes partial instructions for an exchange circuit which our man at Westinghouse assures us is real. He was quite excited by the implications. He called it 'another key to the puzzle.' He concedes that it is an incomplete key -- where the circuit would fit in the larger scheme is not indicated. However, there was one more item in the coded section." Peruge paused for effect, glanced once around the table. Then"The message is quite direct. It instructs the bearer of the subject papers to transmit his future reports through a man in Washington, D.C. The man is named. He is the Senator whose activities we have come to question." Peruge wanted to laugh. Their reaction was precisely what the Chief had said it would be. He had their undivided attention, a thing seldom granted in this room of giants. The man directly at his left asked, "No doubt of that?" "None whatsoever." From Dzule Peruge's original report on Joseph Merrivale: Subject has no detectable inhibiting emotions of warmth toward his fellows, but counterfeits these reactions well. His administrative abilities are adequate for the tasks we have in mind, but he lacks qualities of initiative and daring. He is exactly what we had in mind, a man who can keep his division running smoothly and can, if directed, send his people to their deaths without a qualm. Promotion recommended. AS HE left the conference Peruge allowed himself a small sense of triumph. There had been a few touchy moments with that bitch, but he had managed them well, all things considered. He still could not understand why they had ever allowed a woman onto that board. Rain, when he reached the street, was freshening the evening air, but also imparting a smell of wet dust which Peruge particularly disliked. He hailed a cab. The driver, as luck would have it, was a woman. Peruge settled back into the seat with a sigh of resignation, said. "Take me to the Statler." There was no telling where women would intrude next, he thought. They were essentially frail things and should not be allowed into these occupations. His judgment was based on observations of his mother, who had gone through life torn by conflicting attitudes toward her ancestry and toward the demands of her sex. She had Black, Cherokee, Portuguese and Cajun ancestors that she knew about. Sometimes she had been proud of her outgait progenitors. Never forget, boy, that your ancestors were here before the first white thief set foot on these shores. At other times she would remind him: We were sailors under Henry the Navigator when most sailors never came back from a long voyage. But she could temper these outbursts of bitter pride with cautious warnings: Dzule, you look white enough for nobody ever to know about the niggers in our blood. Play the white game, boy -- that's the only way to win in this world. He had won the field this day, no doubt about that. The bitch of the board room had crossexamined him about Hellstrom's corporate activities, trying to catch him in a contradiction. The Chief had warned him about that. They'll want to take advantage of you and check up on the Agency. I'm trusting you to give them blow for blow. That was the Chief for you -- like a father to those he trusted. Peruge had never known his own father, who had been only the first in a long fine of men who partook of Juanita Peruge's favors. Her family name had been Brown, a commonplace easily discarded for the more mysterious Peruge. The father had stayed with Juanita long enough to name the infant Dzule for a half-remembered uncle. Then he had gone on a commercial fishing voyage that would have satisfied the Navigator's worst fears. His boat had been lost in a storm off Campiche. Tragedy had been the firming cement of Juanita's character. It offered her the splendor of a lifelong search to replace a love which time made ever more romantic and unattainable. And for Dzule she created a myth of the mighty John (originally Juan) Peruge -- tall, bronzed, capable of any great deed he might envision. A jealous god had taken him, which said something pertinent about gods. This tragedy, seen through his mother's fantasies, had made Dzule forgive any of her offenses against morality. His earliest and strongest image of woman said she could not withstand life's crueler torments except by seeking the pleasures of the bed. That was just the way she was and one had to accept it. The Agency had been a natural place for Dzule Peruge to find himself. Here the strong sought their place in life. Those who took the blinders from their eyes naturally gravitated here. The Agency was a last outpost of swashbuckling. In the Agency no dream was too remote, provided one recognized most humans as essentially frail -- especially women. The bitch of the board was no exception. There was a weakness in her -- had to be. She was clever, though, and with her own brand of driving ruthlessness. the taxi's window at the rain-washed streets, reviewing the encounter in the board room. She had opened the attack by bringing out her own copy of the Hellstrom file. She had found the entries she wanted, referred to them and said, "You tell us Hellstrom's company is private, incorporated in nineteenfifty-eight. One chief stockholder, himself, and three officers -- Hellstrom, a Miss Fancy Kalotermi and a Miss Mimeca Tichenum." She had put down the file and stared down the long table at Peruge. "The disturbing thing to many of us is that, although two women signed their names to these incorporation documents in front of witnesses, duly notarized, you show no other record of them." Peruge's response, he thought, had suited the attack. "That's correct. We don't know where they came from, where educated, nothing. They both sound foreign, but the notary in Fosterville was satisfied with their identities and the attorney saw no objection to their being officers in a corporation doing business in this country. Mimeca could be an oriental name, as some of you have indicated, and the other one does sound Greek -- we just do not know. This is not a page we intend to keep in its present blank state. We are exploring this avenue." "Do they live at Hellstrom's farm?" "Apparently." "Any description of them?" "Vague -- dark hair, possessed of general female characteristics." "General female characteristics? I wonder how you'd describe me. Well, no matter. What is their relationship to Hellstrom?" Peruge had taken his time with the response. He knew how he appeared to women. He was tall: six feet, four inches, and imposing, #I pounds. His sandy hair held a distinct touch of red which his eyebrows carried to a darker tone. The eyes were that dark brown often mistaken for black and deeply socketed above a rather abbrevi-' ated nose, wide mouth and square chin. The whole effect was dominantly masculine. He had sent this machismo message down the table with a sudden grin. "Madam, I would not describe you to anyone, not even to myself. Such is my responsibility to the Agency that you remain nameless and faceless. As to these other women -- Hellstrom trusted them sufficiently to want them as officers of his corporation, which makes us extremely curious about them. We intend to satisfy that curiosity. You'll note the documents list the Kalotermi woman as vice president and the other one as secretary-treasurer, yet each has but one per cent interest in the corporation." "How old are they?" she had asked, glowering at him. "Adult." "Do they travel with Hellstrom?" "We have no record of that." "And you don't even know whether these women have husbands or male attachments of any other nature?" Peruge's heavy brows tended to draw down in thought or anger. "We don't know this -- no." "And Hellstrom, is he married or otherwise entangled?" "Not that we know. The reports tell you all we have at this time." "All? How old is Hellstrom?" "We're guessing at thirty-four. That's farm and ranching country and he was educated at home for the first seven years. His grandmother, Trova Hellstrom, was an accredited teacher." "I've done my homework," she had said, tapping the file. "I raised the question to suggest that he's fairly young to have caused so many waves." "Old enough." "You say he lectures and does an occasional seminar or colloquiam and has been on the faculties of several universities. How does he get these assignments?" "On his reputation." "Hmmmph! What do we know of his other associates?" "His technical people, business connections -- you've seen the file." "And he banks in Switzerland. Interesting. Any indication of his worth?" "Only what's in the file." "Have you considered making discreet inquiries of his lawyers?" "Do you take us for cretins?" . Peruge had asked. She had stared at him silently for a moment. Then: "I said discreet." "His legal counsel, as you've seen there, is a native of Fosterville, which is a small town," Peruge had explained carefully. "A liaison between two dogs cannot be undertaken discreetly in such a setting." "Hmmmph." the folders in front of him. She had known, of course, as had the rest of them, that he had not been telling the full story. "Have any of our people ever met this Hellstrom?" She had asked. Peruge had looked up, wondering; IVhy are they letting her be their spokesman? Most unusual. He had said, "As you perhaps know, the Chief has connections to a vice president of the bank that handles financial matters for the film company that usually markets Hellstrom's productions. This vice president has met Hellstrom socially and we have his report. It will be in your hands shortly." "This bank does not work for Hellstrom's own company?" "No." "Have we made overtures through our Swiss connections?" "There's no provable fraud involved and we cannot, therefore, gain open access to the Swiss records. We are still pursuing this, however." "What is the vice president's total impression of Hellstrom?" "An able man in his own field, rather quiet, but capable of occasional bursts of concentrated energy where his own interests are concerned. Specifically -- when the subject of ecology arises." "What salaries does Hellstrom pay his employees?" "Union scale where that's indicated -- guild scale -- but we have no tax returns for some of them." "The two women on his corporation records?" "Apparently they serve him for something other than money. We believe they live on the farm, but they have declared no income. It has been suggested that Hellstrom is less than generous or that fraud is involved. We cannot say as yet. Such records as we've seen indicate that his film company makes no profit. All the income appears to be taken by ongoing activities of an apparently legal, that is to say, educational, nature." "Could that farm be some sort of subversive school?" "Some of the younger people allegedly stay there for an education in film-making and in ecology. That's detailed in the file." "Detailed," she said, her voice flat. "Can we presume his installations have been examined by building inspectors and that sort? Oregon must have laws about such things." "He was inspected by local people and the accuracy of information based on those inspections remains in question. We will update your files as we are able." "Hellstrom's technical people, cameramen and such -- are they all recognized in the industry?" "Their work has attracted praise." "But the people themselves -- are they admired?" "One could say so." "What would you say?" "The question has little meaning except as an indicator for further investigations. It is our opinion that successful people in that industry tend to achieve a surface admiration from their fellows, but that this surface attitude conceals an often quite profound hostility. Admiration in the usual sense has little to do with the situation except as it may indicate competence or income." "How much traveling has Hellstrom done since the report in our hands?" "One trip to Kenya and two days at Stanford." "Is he away at this moment?" "Possibly. I would have to consult our most recent reports to be sure. We have just fielded a new team, as you know. You will be informed, of course." "Your previous reports show him staying away from his farm for two weeks to a month at a time. Who minds the store while he's away?" "We do not as yet know." "How thorough have our investigations of him been during his more vulnerable travel periods?" "We've had his luggage searched and found only cameras, film, technical works, papers, that sort of thing. The most common subject matter for any written material in his possession has been insects. He appears most thorough where # Frame-worthy paiirtings 'mans next steps in space. by Patrick Moore with # full-color paintings by David A. Hardy Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke Not Sci-Fi, but the likely next steps in man's exploration of the solar system and the universe beyond. "f welcome this book... It provides a heady mixture of education, entertainment -- and Inspiration." Arthur C. Clarke If you are fascinated by the vast expanse of the worlds beyond our own, make this your personal Christmas gift... to yourself! #V# X lay." only # wherever books are sold   his specialty is concerned. We have found nothing incriminating." "What about planting something on him?" "It is contra-indicated because of his stature in education. Too many would believe his protestations." She had sat back then, quiet for a moment. Presently she had said, "You will inform the Chief that there must be a profit in this somewhere. We are not satisfied." Not satisfied, Peruge thought, tapping his finger impatiently on the taxi's black plastic seat. But they were afraid and that was enough for the time being. If the actual material of the Project # file panned out, if it developed along the lines he and the Chief had purposely not reported, then there would be profits enough for all, including Dzule Peruge. It would never be a weapon, of course. The thing created too much heat in its own circuits. But at low temperatures that heat might be translated into an induced heat for metal and plastic products. At the very least it would transform metallurgy, reducing present costs by a breathtaking factor. There would be profit in that! IV Brood instructions for selected workers: We use the language of the Outside, but with our own meanings. It is important that the key distinctions not be confused. The practices of concealment demand this. Because we are virtually defenseless against the best forces of the Outside, our major defense remains in their never learning that we live among them, but pattern ourselves after hive creatures. ys Strom's valley wore on Depeaux began reflecting on the briefing sessions with Merrivale. It was a matter of emphasis, but he began to wonder just how many agents had been "wasted" on this project. Merrivale was a queer duck -- that damned affected British accent and all. But there had been times when he gave off the distinct impression that he admired Hellstrom. It was Merrivale's pattern to admire only success, but his was an admiration always tinged with fear. The closer to Merrivale the success occurred, the greater his fear. The personless valley continued to bake in the hot autumn sun. Depeaux grew almost somnolent and there were moments when his eyelids dropped. He forced himself to concentrate on the farm buildings. If the last reports were to be believed Hellstrom himself was down there in one of those buildings. Nothing visible confirmed this assumption, however. Why would Merrivale admire Hellstrom? An abrupt slamming sound shocked Depeaux into full awareness. He saw movement at the far left corner of the barn-studio. A wheeled cart came into view. It was an odd vehicle, reminiscent of an old-fashioned railway baggage cart, the hand-pulled kind used in stations. It had high slat sides and big spoked wheels. A high-pitched voice called out a command from somewhere behind the building, but Depeaux could not make out the words. It had sounded like; "Work a load." That made no sense, though. A young woman strode from behind the barn to the front of the cart and at first Depeaux thought she was nude. The binoculars revealed skin-colored briefs, but she wore no bra, no blouse. Her feet were tucked into sandals. The powerful glasses put Depeaux right up next to the young woman as she lowered a steering bar that had been caught upright at the front of the cart. She had firm breasts with dark nipples. He was so intent on watching her that he almost missed the approach of another young woman clad the same way, noticing her only when a strange third hand entered his field of vision. The young women were enough alike to be sisters, but didn't fit the descriptions he had of the women who served as officers of Hellstrom's corporation. Their hair was a light gold. The young women took the steering bar and, pulling on it, trundled the cart toward the north gate. They moved with a bouncing urgency Depeaux found inconsistent with the long wait the box had had outside the gate. He saw no other reason for the cart. They were going to get the box. What was in that damned thing? And why were they almost nude? He recalled how the two deliverymen had strained in moving the box, wondered if the two women were expected to get that heavy object onto their cart. Surely others would come out and help. With increasing amazement he watched the women open the gate, wheel the cart into position, drop its end and tip the box into the cart's bed. They lifted the heavy box with a muscular ease that astonished him, displaying a far easier time with it than had the men who delivered it. Briskly they closed the end of the cart and trotted back toward the barn with the same sense of urgency they had shown on the outward trip. In far less time than he had expected they were at the barn and out of his sight behind it. Again came that abrupt slamming sound. A door? Depeaux estimated the whole incident had taken no more than five minutes. Astonishing. They were Amazons. Yet they had appeared at first to be no more than well-developed young females. Was Hellstrom's farm a hideout for health nuts, a kind of inland muscle beach? The nudity argued for some such answer as that. Depeaux didn't like that answer, though -- everything about the two women had been too casually businesslike. They weren't muscle fanatics. They had simply been two workers going about a job and it had been a job they knew well enough not to need excess words or motions in executing it. Why women for that kind of work? It was another damn default message! D epeaux glanced at his watch less than an hour to sunset. The valley and its farm has settled back into that disturbing been rendered even more empty by the brief spurt of human energy from the young women. What the hell was in that box? The low sun washed across the ridgetop to his left, shadowing the valley's depths, but light reflected from golden grass and leaves on the opposite hillside kept the shadows lucent. Depeaux knew he was in good cover under the dark bushes, but valley and countryside once more had taken on that sense of ominous quiet. He took a deep breath and reaffirmed his decision to wait for night before leaving. This place had all the atmosphere of a trap. He squirmed backward, deeper into shadows, peered left at the open countryside he would have to cross. The long, low light bathed the field in a golden glow touched with orange. The light cast a definite shadow along the path of crushed grass that marked his trail. I was fool to come up that way, he thought. And perversely: What was Porter's mistake? A sense of desperate immobility overcame him. The unexpected muscularity of those semi-nude young women, the persistent, irritating hum from the barn-studio, the unspoken warnings in Merrivale's briefings and the reports, that internalized vacuum of a valley set against the distant movement of cattle far outside it (why so far?) -- everything told him to wait for darkness. He lay for almost an hour, watching, stewing in his own premonitions. And still he had to wait... The light dimmed. The sky took on a purple streaming against incandescent orange glow in the west. The slopes of the valley drifted into a dusky almostblackness where it was difficult to determine if he actually saw details or was remembering them. No lights showed from the farmhouse or the barn. Visibility dropped to only a few feet, but when he crept out from under the bushes there were stars and a far sense of light on the northern horizon. That would be Fosterville, he knew. Still no lights from the farm. Another default message. Depeaux felt around him to make sure he was free of the bushes, rose to his feet. There was a tension ache in his back. He groped in his knapsack, took out a sandwich in a rattling of paper, unwrapped it and ate while he regained his sense of direction. Fosterville's glowing was a good landmark. The sandwich restored him and he took a long swallow of water, secured his pack. The sense of danger remained. The illogic of it dominated his consciousness, but he had learned to trust that sense. It was a message contained in everything he had studied about this place -- all he had heard and all he had seen. It was a message as well of things not seen and not heard. The combination said: Danger. Get the hell out of here, he told himself. He twisted his watchband to bring the luminous dial of its companion compass into view, sighted along it and set off across the field. As he moved out of the trees, his vision improved and he gained a sense of the long, sloping expanse of dried grass through which he had crept earlier. The ground was uneven under the grass and he stumbled often. His passage kicked up dust and several times he stopped to repress a sneeze. His own passage through the grass seemed to him abnormally loud in the night silence, but there was a faint breeze and when he stopped he could hear it soughing in the trees ahead of him. There was a similarity between the two sounds, which he tried to improve upon by slowing his pace. He had accumulated more grass burrs and they rasped his skin. Slow movement irritated him, too. He found himself unconsciously picking up speed. Something inside him said: Hurry. The luminous dial of his compass and the glowing sky oriented him well, though. He found he could see the occasional trees in the field and avoided them easily. The dark line of thicker trees through which he had come stood out plainly. There would be the game trail to follow through there. He expected to encounter the trail long before his feet actually felt the hard, grassless surface. He crouched to feel the surface with his hands, tracing the almost worndown hoofmarks in the dirt. No deer had passed this way in a long while. Those were very old marks -- he had noted this earlier, but now it compounded the total message of this place. straighten and strike out along the trail when he became aware of a distant swishing in the field behind him. He tipped his head to listen. The swishing didn't sound like someone walking through the grass or like the wind. It had no definite position -- just somewhere back there. Starlight showed him nothing but distant shadows that could be trees, the configuration of the land. The sound was growing louder and he felt menace in it. There was something akin to a susurrant humming in it now. He straightened, turned away from the sound and began trotting along the trail. He found he could make out the track if he peered down at a sharp angle. Soon he was at the line of thicker trees, the witchspread of madronas and the heavier spacing of pines. The trees reduced the faint assistance starlight had given him and he was forced to slow his pace to a walk. Several times he lost the trail and had to grope for it with his feet. He longed to take out the small flashlight in his pack, but that odd sound had grown even louder behind him. It was a definite hissing-humming now. What made that sound? The noise of countless hoopskirts dragging through the grass would not be as mechanical. The image of hoopskirts amused him for a moment, though, until he thought of the seminude young Amazons at the farm. Somehow they were not amusing even when clad in his imaginary hoopskirts. He had hidden the bicycle in bushes where the game trail crossed a narrow dirt road. That road led around a low hill and down a long slope to the county road where he had parked the van. The bicycle had a handlebar light and he promised himself he would use that light and ride like hell. Was that sound behind him louder? What the hell could make it? Was it something natural? Birds, perhaps? The susurrant intrusion reached now out into the grass on both sides of him, as though he were being drawn into the wings of an advancing army. Depeaux had the auditory impression of many creatures moving in a wide fan to enclose him. He tried to increase his speed, but the night was too dark -- he kept running into trees. What was that sound? His body was wet with perspiration -- fear was tight in his chest. Again he tried to quicken his pace, tripped and fell full length. The susurrant pursuit stopped. Depeaux lay quietly, waiting, probing with his ears. Nothing, What the hell? The absence of sound was as frightening as its presence had been. He rose siowly to his feet and immediately the noise started again. It was on both sides and behind him. Terrified now, Depeaux stumbled forward, tripping, lurching, crashing through trees, sometimes on the trail and sometimes off it. Where was that damned road where he had hidden the bike? The horns of enclosing noise were ahead of him now, on both sides and ahead. Depeaux, panting, stumbling, groped for the flashlight in his pack, found it. Why hadn't he brought a gun? An automatic even? A little one like the one Tymiena carried? Damn! What was that noise? He wondered if he dared turn on the flashlight and sweep its beam around him. He hadn't been able to make himself bring even a little gun! No! His birdwatcher cover had ruled against it! He was panting and gasping now. His legs ached. The road was under his feet before he realized it. He stumbled to a halt, tried to get his bearings in the dark. Had he left the trail just back there? He didn't believe he could be far from the bushes where he'd hidden the damned bike. It had to be right nearby. Did he dare use the flashlight? The hissing hum enclosed him now. The bike had to be just to his right. It had to be. He groped toward blacker shadows among shadows, stumbled over a bush and landed in the frame of the bicycle. Cursing under his breath, Depeaux rose to his feet, pulled the bicycle upright and leaned against it. He could see the road better now -- a separation of lightness in the dark -- and he thought suddenly how good it would be just to get on the bicycle and coast back to the van and Tymiena. But the hissing hum had grown louder, closing in on him. The hell with them. He yanked the flashlight from the pack, depressed the switch. The beam stabbed out into the trees. It revealed three young women clad as the Amazons at the farm had been -- tight briefs and sandals -- but their eyes and noses were hidden behind glossy dark shields the shape of diving masks. Each carried a long wand with a twined, whiplike end. The wands made him think of some odd antenna system, but their doubled ends were pointed directly at him and there was no mistaking the menace. From Nils Hells trom's diary: Sometimes I realize my name isn't important. It could be any other grouping of sounds and I'd still be me. Names are not important. This is a good thought. It is precisely as my brood mother and my first teachers said. The name I used represents an accident. It is not the name that might have been given to me had I been born into an Outsider family with all their usual self-centered individualism. Their consciousness is not my consciousness -- their timeline is not my timeline. We of the Hive will do away with names some day. My brood mother's words convey a deep sense of reassurance in this. Our perfect society cannot allow permanent individual names. They are labels at best, are names. They are useful only in a transient way. Perhaps we will carry different labels at different stages in our lives. Or numbers. Somehow numbers feel more in keeping with the intent my brooa mother expressed so well. A.M. and for almost ten minutes now Clovis had been watching Eddie pace back and forth in the tiny living room of her apartment. The telephone had awakened them from deep sleep and Eddie had answered it. He had come openly to her apartment. The Agency didn't mind that. It expected certain sexual antics from its people and appreciated it when such activity was kept intramural. Nothing deep and demanding in this sex -- just good, energetic bodily enjoyment. All Eddie had said after hanging up was: "That was DT! Merrivale told him to call. They've lost contact with Carlos and Tymiena." "Oh, my God!" She had gotten out of bed, draped a robe about her. Eddie had gone directly into the living room. "I should have answered the phone," she said now, hoping this would break him out of his deep reverie. "Why? DT was looking for me." "Here?" "Yes." "How did he know you were here?" "He tried my place and nobody answered." "Eddie, I don't like that." "Shit!" "Eddie, what's the rest of it? What did DT say?" He stopped in front of her and stared down at her feet, which she had pulled partly under her body when flopping into a chair. "He says we've gotta play brother and sister again. Nick Myerlie is going to be our daddy and we're going on a nice vacation way out in Oregon." V From Nils Hells trom's diary: Fancy is showing sure signs of unhappiness about her life in the Hive. I wonder if she has somehow become conditioned to prefer life Outside. We've always worried about that and it does appear to happen sometimes. I'm afraid she'll try to run away. If she does I think I will opt for stumping her, rathtr than putting her in the vats; Her firstborn, Saldo, is everything we had hoped. I do not want the Hive to lose that breeding potential. It's too bad she's so good with the insects. We will have to keep close watch on her until the present film is finished. Whatever happens, we cannot send her on any more Outside assignments until we're sure of her. Perhaps we should give her more internal responsibility for the film. She might grow to share my vision then and be cured of this instability. This film is so very necessary to us. It is a new beginning. With it and the ones to come we will prepare the world for our answer to human survival. I know that Fancy shares the schismatic belief. She believes the insects will outlast us. Even my brood mother feared this danger, but her answer and my refinement of that answer must be developed. We must become more intensely like those upon whom we pattern our lives X- Hellstrom asked. He was a blond man of medium build, whose appearance suggested no more than the thirty-four years Depeaux knew the Agency's records credited to him. There was a great sense of internal dignity about Hellstrom, a sense of purpose that revealed itself in the way his blue eyes held a direct stare on anything or anyone of interest to him. He gave the impression that he contained more energy than he released. Hellstrom stood in a laboratory, confronting his captive, who had been tied to a plastic chair. The laboratory was a place of polished metal and gleaming white surfaces, of glass and instrument dials illuminated by a flat milky light from a coving completely around the ceiling's edge. Depeaux had awakened here after being unconscious. He did not know how long he had been in a coma, but his mind was still fogged. He had awakened to find Hellstrom standing in front of him and two completely naked women guarding him. He knew he was paying too much attention to the women, another pair of Amazons, but he couldn't help it. "I see they shock you," Hellstrom said. "Guess they do at that," Depeaux admitted. "I'm not used to seeing so much naked female flesh around me." "Female flesh," Hellstrom said and clucked his tongue. "Don't they mind our talking about them this way?" Depeaux asked. "They do not understand us," Hellstrom said. "Even if they did they would not understand your attitude. It is a typical Outsider attitude, but I never fail to find it strange." Depeaux tried a cautious testing pull at the bindings that held him to the chair. He had come to with his head throbbing and it still ached. There was a pain right behind his eyes and he had no idea of how much time had passed. He recalled starting to speak to the three young women his flashlight had revealed -- then he had been startled into silence by the sudden awareness that many more similar figures filled the darkness all around him. A confused welter of memories clouded that recollection. God, his mind still felt thick. He remembered speaking, an innocuous and stupid response brought about by fear and shock: "This is where I left my bicycle." Christ! He had been standing there, holding the damned bicycle, but those opaque diving masks had daunted him. They had given no clue to the eyes behind them or to intentions. The wavering double wands aimed at him could only have meant threat, though. He had had no idea what those wands were, but a weapon was a weapon was a weapon. The double wands had branched from short handles, which the young women had gripped with firm competence. The tips of the instruments had emitted a low hum. While he had been wondering if he dared to try breaking through the circle, a nightbird had swooped toward the fluttering insects attracted by his light. A figure in the dim area beyond the light had raised her double wand. A sudden dry hissing, the same sound he had heard all around him crossing the fields, and the bird had collapsed in the air and plummeted to the ground. A woman had scrambled forward and stuffed the bird into a sack at her shoulder. He had noticed then that many of the women carried such sacks and that the sacks bulged. "I -- I hope I'm not trespassing," Depeaux had ventured. "I was told this was a good area for my hobby. I like -- to watch birds." How stupid he had sounded. What in hell were those wands? That bird hadn't even flopped once. Hiss-bang! Merrivale hadn't said anything about this. Could this be Project #, for God's sake? Why hadn't the crazy broads around him said something? It was as though they hadn't heard him -- or didn't understand him. Did they speak another language? "Look," he had said, "my name is -- " And that was all he could remember, except for another brief burst of that odd hissing hum from his left and, yes, the painful sensation that his head had exploded. He remembered that now -- explosive pain within his skull. His head still ached as he stared up at Hellstrom. Those wands had done it -- no doubt of that in his mind. The two women standing guard behind him carried the same weapons, although they weren't wearing the masks of the group that had encircled him. I'm in the soup, he thought. Nothing to do but brazen it out. "Why do you have me tied up?" he asked. "Don't waste our time with the ingenuous approach," Hellstrom said. "We must keep you secured until we decide how to dispose of you." Depeaux, his throat painfully dry, his heart suddenly pounding, said, "That's a nasty word, that dispose. I don't like that word." the word had been a poor choice. He was tired and it had been a long night and it wasn't over yet. Damn these Outside intruders. What did they really want? He said, "My apologies. I don't mean to cause you needless worry or discomfort. But you are not the first person we have caught here in similar circumstances." Depeaux experienced an abrupt sensation of deja vu. He felf that he was reliving something half-remembered because it had not been his own experience, but something that had happened to someone close to him. Porter? He hadn't been all that close to Porter, but... "And you disposed of these others, too?" Depeaux asked. Hellstrom ignored the question. This was all so distasteful. He said: "Your credentials identify you as a salesman for a firewords company. One of the others who intruded here worked for this identical company. Isn't that strange?" Depeaux forced his words through a dry mouth. "If his name was Porter there's nothing strange about it at all. He told me about this place." "No doubt a fellow birdwatcher," Hellstrom said. He turned his back on Depeaux. Was there no other way to meet this threat? Again Depeaux recalled the bird the woman had knocked from the night sky. What was that weapon? Was it the answer to the mystery of Project #? He decided to try another tack. "I saw some of your woman friends kill a bird last night. They shouldn't do that. Birds are an important part of -- " "Oh, be still!" Hellstrom spoke without turning. "Of course they killed a bird -- and insects, rabbits, mice and quite a few other creatures as well. We couldn't waste the night sweep just picking you up." Depeaux shook his head. Night sweep? "Why do they do that?" he asked. "For food, naturally." Hellstrom glanced back at his captive. "I must have time to consider the problem raised by your presence. I don't suppose you'll drop your subterfuges and tell me the whole story." "I don't even know what you're talking about," Depeaux protested, but he was sweating profusely and knew Hellstrom could read that sign. "I see," Hellstrom said. He sounded sad. "Do not try to escape. The two workers there know they must kill you if you try to get away. There's no sense trying to talk to them. They don't speak. They're also quite jumpy -- they can smell your difference. You are an Outsider in our midst and they've been trained to dispose of such intruders. Now, if you'll excuse me." Turning on his heel, Hellstrom strode from the room, pushing a sliding door aside. Before it closed Depeaux glimpsed a wide corridor filled with milky light and thronging with humans -- males and females, all completely nude. Two of them passed the door as Hellstrom left, causing him to hesitate. The two, both women, carried what appeared to be a naked male body, the head and arms flopping, swaying. stand me may be useful in your planning for the future. From Nils Hellstrom's diary: It is a conceit that makes me write these lines, trying to imagine the specialists who will read them. Are you really there in some future time -- or are you merely creatures of my imagination? I know the Hive will need the abilities of readers for a long time. But forever is an even longer time and it dwarfs my small utterances. You who may be reading these words, then, if you share my questionings, must realize that your talents as readers may be abandoned eventually. Whether this specialty serves an infinite purpose is a real question. There may come a time when these words remain, but there will be no one to read them. In a practical sense the material on which my words are recorded would perhaps be recognized as useful stuff to be employed for other purposes. It must be a conceit, then, that I address myself to anyone. That I do so at all must be attributed to an instinct for short-term purpose. I support my brood mother's solution to the Outsider problem. We must never merely oppose the Outsiders, but should work with compromise and constant pressure to absorb them into our unity. This is what we do now at my direction and, if you have changed that goal, I tell myself that my helping you to underawakened from his daysleep by a young female watchworker. Her observation screen had revealed the Outsider intruding on Hive territory. Hellstrom's cell had been closed off for the privacy a keyworker could enjoy, and the young watchworker had come personally to Hellstrom, shaking his shoulder gently to awaken him. She had given him the information in the swift and silent gesture language of the Hive. The intruder could be observed on the hill above the Hive-head buildings. He was using binoculars to study the area. His approach had been noted far out by sensors in a perimeter tunnel. He had left a companion with a vehicle near the road to Fosterville. The entire message took three seconds. With a sigh Hellstrom slid from the foam and down warmth of his bed, flashed a hand signal to the watchworker that he understood. She left the cell. Hellstrom crossed the floor's smooth tiles, their coolness helping to awaken him. He activated the bank of repeaters that gave him contact with the Hive's security sensors. He focused on the section the watchworker had indicated. At first Hellstrom had difficulty locating the Outside intruder in the tall grass. The light was always bad in that direction at this hour of the afternoon. He wondered if the watchworker could have been mistaken about the screen to watch. The watchworkers became sensitive and twitchy at times, but he had yet to find one turning in a false alarm or making a major error. Hellstrom studied the tall brown grass carefully. The panorama in the hot afternoon light appeared unbrokfin... Abruptly something moved in the grass at the ridgecrest. As though movement had created a new scene, he saw the intruder. The Outsider was a male clothed to match the grass with a closeness that surely could not be accidental. More than seventy years of living the Hive life had made the necessity for concealment a reflex with Hellstrom. He had possessed the sense of caution long before he had assumed a false age and moved out of the Hive to build an Outsider identity. Now, seeing the prying intruder, he moved briskly, slipped his feet into sandals, draped a white lab smock over his body. He glanced at the crystal-driven clock on his wall: #:# p.m. The clock, accurate to four seconds in a year, had been built by a brood-mate whose breeding and training had sent her into the laboratories for life. Hellstrom thought about the intruder. If this one waited as the others had done he could be taken in the dark. Hellstrom made a mental note to get the night sweep started early and with special preparations for this possibility. The Hive had to learn why these Outsiders were prying. Before leaving his cell, Hellstrom studied the Hive's outer perimeter on his repeaters and saw -- far down in the western valley -- a camper with a woman seated beside it. sketching on a tablet held in her lap. He magnified the view, saw nervous tension m the woman's shoulder muscles, an involuntary movement of the head that drew her gaze up the slopes leading to the Hive. She would have to # picked up, too. Why were Outsiders suspicious of the farm? Who was behind this? There was something professional about this intrusion that made Hellstrom's heartbeat quicken. He chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip while he searched inwardly for an instrinct with which to meet this threat. The Hive was strong and hidden in a way that did not invite attention, but he knew how vulnerable it was, how little that strength would count against the shocked awareness of the Outsiders. H IS gaze moved absently around his cell. It was one of the larger cubicles in the complex warren that underlay the farm and surrounding hills. It had been one of the first constructed by the original colonists who had brought their centuries-long migrations here under his brood mother's guidance. It is time to stop running, my beloved workers. We who have lived furtive double lives among the Outsiders for more than # years -- dissembling, always ready to move at the slightest suspicion -- have come to the place that will shelter us and make up strong. She had claimed a vision guided her, a visit in her dreams from the Blessed Mendel "... whose words told us that the way we had always known was the true way." Hellstrom's earliest education. the one he had received before going Outside as a counterfeit teenager sent at last to get his "book learning," had been filled with the thoughts of his brood mother. The best must breed with the best. In that way we produce the disparate workers we need for every task our Hive can confront. On that cold April day in # when they had begun to dig outward from the natural caverns beneath the farm, building their first Hive, she had told them: We will perfect our way and thus become the "meek" whose Earth will one day welcome them. The cell he occupied now dated from that first digging, although the diggers and his brood mother had long ago gone into the vats. The cell was sixteen feet wide and twenty-two feet long, eight feet from floor to ceiling. It was not quite square at the rear to accommodate an arm of the original natural cavern. The cell could have had a door in that arm, but the decision had been made to put service conduits, piping and other ducts there. From the original limestone labyrinth the Hive had been extended downward more than a mile, reaching outward in a circle almost two miles in diameter below the #-foot level. It was a teeming warren of close to # workers (far beyond his brood mother's hopes), closely integrated with their own factories, hydroponics gardens, laboratories, breeding centers, even an underground river that helped produce the power they required. No wall of the original cavern could be seen now. All walls were a uniform smooth gray and made of the hive's own mucilaginous pre-stressed concrete. In Hellstrom's own cell the lough gray wallspace had been covered with various plans and sketches involved in the Hive's growth over the years. He had never taken them down, a wasteful idiosyncrasy the Hive tolerated in very few workers. His walls were now thick with pasted-over records of the Hive's vitality. Although he had more cell space than others, his furnishings were otherwise Hive-standard: a bed formed of the mucilage slabs with rawhide lacing under a foam pad, chairs of similar construction, desk of mucilage supports for a ceramic top in rich glassgreen, twelve metal filing cabinets of Outsider manufacture (Hive cabinets were sturdier, but he fancied these for their reminder value), the repeater console with its screens and direct line into the central computer. A wardrobe with Outsider clothing in one corner marked him as one of the key workers who fronted for the Hive in that threatening world beyond their perimeters. Except for two adjustable lamps, one over the desk and the other over the repeater console, the room was illuminated by coved radiating tubes along the intersection of ceiling and walls, a standard practice in all the galleries, tunnels and cells of the Hive. He could have had one of the newer modern and more sophisticated cells in the lower levels, but Hellstrom preferred the place he had occupied since the day his brood mother had gone to the vats "becoming one with us all." Hellstrom strode back and forth on the tiles of his floor now, worrying about the intruder. Whom did that man represent? Certainly he was not there out of casual curiosity. Hellstrom sensed a powerful  force outside slowly turning its deadly attention toward the Hive. He knew he could not delay his response any longer. The watchworkers would be irritably restless. They needed commands and a feeling that proper action was being taken. Hellstrom bent to his console, coded his instructions and sent them into the relay system. Those instructions would be transmitted throughout the warren. Key workers would take pre-assigned actions. Every worker selected by the relay system through the Hive's central computer would see gesture signals on a screen. The silent language of the Hive would bind them into a common defense. In common with many of the key workers who would unite thus, Hellstrom knew how thing the Hive's defenses really were. The knowledge sent fear through him now and he longed for the mental oblivion of the commonworker who had few concerns beyond immediate tasks. D riven by his fear, Hellstrom opened a filing drawer, extracted a folder tagged julius had been stamped on the outside of the folder to tell what had happened to Porter's flesh, as though he had been discarded breeding stock whose records were kept as commentary on offspring, but Porter had no offsprmg Tn the Hive. He had merely brought a sense of mysterious threat, which he had left largely unanswered. Something about the new intruder outside right now made Hellstrom think of Porter. Hellstrom trusted such instincts. He glanced through the closely spaced lines of information inscribed in Hive code. Porter had carried credentials identifying him as an employe of the Blue Devil Firewords Company of Baltimore. He had babbled something finally about "The Agency." This Agency has represented in his terrified mind something that would avenge him. Agency. Hellstrom regretted now that they had sent Porter so soon into the vats. The act had been callous and careless. The idea of using the pain of a fellow creature, however, went against Hive sensitivities. Pain was a recognizable phenomenon. When it occurred in a worker and could not be eased that worker might go to the vats. Outsiders did not behave this way, though. This was a Hive peculiarity. One killed to eat, to survive. that was quickly ended. One did not prolong it. Survival might dictate other courses, but the Hive avoided those. Presently Hellstrom put the folder aside, depressed a key at his repeater station. He asked for one of the security overseers in the aerie watchroom of the barn-studio. The instrument that carried his voice was of Hive construction and he admired its flat functionalism as he waited for a response. Old Harvey came on the screen above the instrument. His voice quavered slightly. Old Harvey would have to go into the vats before long, Hellstrom reflected, but that could be delayed because this man had talents the Hive required -- and never more desperately than right now. Old Harvey had been one of the First Breeders. His seed was all through the Hive. But he was also knowledgeable in the ways of the Outside and an imaginative guardian of Hive security. They spoke openly on the internal circuit. There wasn't even the remotest chance that the Outsiders possessed instruments that could penetrate the Hive's electronic barriers. In this field Hive specialists already had moved far ahead of Outsiders. "You know about the intruder, of course." Hellstrom said. "Yes." "You've been watching him personally?" "Yes. I sent the watchworker to call you." "What's he been doing?" "Just watching. With binoculars mostly." "Do we have anyone out?" "No." "Is any exterior activity scheduled?" "Only a delivery -- diamond bits for our Level Fifty-one drills." "Don't pick it up until you clear with me." "Right." "Is there any chance he's carrying relay instruments that could monitor his activities from a distance?" "Porter carried no such instruments." H ellstrom suppressed a feeling of irritation, but noted that Old Harvey had also made that same unconscious connection with Porter. "I mean, have we checked?" Hellstrom asked. "Not completely. We're still in process of checking." "Ah, we're being thorough," Hellstrom said. "Of course." "Tell me as soon as you're sure." "Yes." "What about aircraft?" Hellstrom asked. "Anything?" "Two jets, very, highmore than an hour ago." "Any indication of probes from the jets?" "Nothing. They were commercial transports. Clean." "Does the intruder look as though he's settled in for a long stav?" "He has a knapsack and lunch. We think he'll wait for nightfall before leaving. We've been hitting him with an occasional low-frequency burst to keep him jumpy." "Excellent." Hellstrom nodded to himself. "Keep up the subsonics. If he's nervous he'll make mistakes. But don't use too much -- you could drive him off before dark." "I understand," Old Harvey said. "Now, as to that woman waiting by the vehicle out near our perimeter -- what do you make of her?" "We're keeping her under close surveillance. The intruder came from her direction. We think they're associated." He cleared his throat -- the loud and rasping sound said something distinct about his age. Hellstrom was made acutely aware that Old Harvey must be more than two hundred years old and that was very old for a First Colonist who had not had the benefit of an entire lifetime under Hive regimen. "Undoubtedly they're associated," Hellstrom said. "Could they be innocent intruders?" Old Harvey asked. "Do you really entertain that idea?" Hellstrom asked. There was a long pause, then: "Not likely, but possible." "I think they came from the same source as Porter," Hellstrom said. "Should we have our people in the east look into the Blue Devil Fireworks Company?" Old Harvey asked. "No. That might betray the extent of our influence. I think extreme caution is indicated -- especially if this pair has come to find out what happened to Porter." "Perhaps we acted top hastily with that one." "I've had my own misgivings on that score," Hellstrom admitted. "What is this Agency that Porter represented?" H ellstrom reflected on this. The question contained his own unease. Porter had talked profusely at the end. The scene had been disgusting and had hastened his transit into the choppers and the vats. Yet the necessities of that episode could have clouded its content. No member of the Hive would ever have behaved that way. Not even an ordinary worker, although they could speak no language intelligible Outside. Porter had said the Agency would get them. The Agency was all-powerful. We know about you now! We'll get you! Porter had been the first adult Outsider ever to see the inner workers of the Hive and his hysterical revulsion at the ordinary things necessary for Hive life had shaken Hellstrom.  responded to hysteria with a hysteria of my own, Hellstrom thought. I must never do so again. "We will question this pair more carefully," Hellstrom said. "Perhaps they can tell us about this Agency." "You think it wise to capture them?" "I think it necessary." "Perhaps other responses should be considered first." "What are you suggesting?" "Discreet inquiry by our people in the east while we dissemble for these new intruders. Why should we not invite them in and let them watch our surface activities. They surely cannot prove we are responsible for the disappearance of their fellow." "We don't know that for certain." "Surety their reaction would have been different if they knew we were responsible." "They know," Hellstrom said. "They just don't know how or why. No amount of dissembling now will put them off. They'll keep worrying at us like ants at a carcass. We must dissemble, yes, but we must keep them off balance at the same time. I am keeping our people Outside informed, but my instructions remain that we exercise the utmost restraint and caution there. Better to sacrifice the Hive than to lose all." "In your considerations, please note that I disagree," Old Harvey said. "Your exception is noted and will not be ignored." "They are sure to send others," Old Harvey said I agree. "Each new team is likely to be more skilled, Nils." "No doubt of that. But great skill, as we've learned from our own specialists, tends to narrow the vision. I doubt very much that these first probes involve the central element of this Agency. Soon, however, they will send someone who knows all the things we wish to know about those who come prying into our affairs." Old Harvey's hesitation betrayed that he had not considered this possibility. Presently he said, "You will try to capture and control such a one?" "We must." "That's a dangerous gambit. Nils." "Circumstances dictate the risk." "I disagree even more," Old Harvey said. "I have lived Outside, Nils, I know them. Yours is an extremely perilous course." "Do you have an alternative with a lower potential risk?" Hellstrom asked. "Extend your plot-line before answering. You must think of the ultimate consequences along the sequence of events dictated by our present response. We made a mistake with Porter. We thought him the kind of Outsider we have taken and consigned to the vats previously. The wisdom of the sweepleader brought him to my close attention after his capture. The mistake at that point was mine, but the consequences involve us all. My own regrets do not change the situation one whit. Our problem is complicated by the fact that we cannot erase all the backtracks that led Porter to us. We have been able to make such erasures before without exception. Our previous successes lulled me into a false complacency. A long history of success does not ensure correct decisions. I knew this and yet failed. I will entertain an action to depose me, but I will not change my present decision on a course of action -- which includes an awareness of my past mistake." "Nils, I'm not suggesting that we depose -- " "Then obey my instructions," Hellstrom said. "Although I am a male, I am chief in the Hive at my brood mother's command. She reckoned the importance of that choice and, thus far, her vision has remained close to actual events. And while you're putting the sonic probes on that woman and her vehicle, check it for the possibility that she may have a child inside." Old Harvey sounded hurt. "I'm aware of our constant need for new blood. Nils. Your orders will be obeyed at once." H ellstrom released the communications key, and Old Harvey's face disappeared from the screen. Old Harvey's Hive awareness might be dulled by that early history of Outside life, but he knew how to obey against the dictates of his most basic fears. In this respect he was completely trustworthy -- which was more than could be .said for most of the humans who had evolved Outside, conditioned as they were there by the sharp limitations that prevailed in what the Hive thought of as "wild societies." Old Harvey was a good worker. Hellstrom sighed at the knowledge of the burden he carried -- almost # dependent workers were going about their activities in the Hive warren. He listened with his whole being for a moment, probing for the sense that told him all remained normal in the Hive. Normalcy felt like the low humming of harvesting bees on a hot afternoon -- there was a restful sense to it that he needed at times to restore him. But the Hive gave him back no such reassurance now. He could actually sense the disquiet of his own commands spreading throughout the Hive and reflecting back onto himself. All was not well here. The need for caution had always been a constant pressure on the Hive and every one of its inhabitants. He had his own fair share of this inbred caution which had been finely tuned by his brood mother and the ones she had chosen to educate him. He had been against making the documentary movies at first. But the Hive aphorism -- Who could know more about insects than the Hive-born? -- had overcome his objections and finally even he had entered the spirit of the film enterprise without reservations. The Hive always needed that ubiquitous energy symbol, money. The films brought a great deal of money to their Swiss accounts. That money focused concern on the Hive's remaining needs for Outside resources -- the diamond bits for their drills, for instance. Unlike the "wild societies," however, the Hive sought a harmony with its environment, cooperating to serve that environment, thus purchasing the environment's service to the Hive. Surely that profound internal relationship, which had always supported the Hive in the past, would support it now. The films are not a mistake, he told himself. There was even something poetically amusing about their purpose: to frighten Outsiders by showing them reality in the form of films about the world's insect populations -- while a much deeper reality growing out of that insect mold fed on the fears it had helped augment. He reminded himself of the lines he had insisted be written into the script of their most recent film effort. In the perfect society there is neither emotion nor mercy -- precious space cannot be wasted on those who have outlived their usefulness. T his new outsider intrusion made Hellstrom think now, however, of the Bee Wolf, whose predatory raids must be met with every resource a Hive could muster. In the cooperative society the fate of each could be the destiny of all.  must go topside immediately, he told himself.  must take personal command at the center of our protective efforts. Moving briskly, he went out to a nearby communal washroom, showered with several chemically neutered female workers, used a hive-made depilatory on his face and returned to his personal cell. There he dressed in heavier Outside garments -- tan trousers, a white cotton shirt and dark gray sweater, a light-brown jacket over that. He put on socks and a pair of Hivemade leather shoes. As an afterthought he took a small foreign pistol from a desk drawer and slipped it into his pocket. The Outsider weapon had a greater range than a stunwand and would be familiar to the intruders, recognizable by them if a threat were needed. He went out then down the familiar galleries and corridors with their hum of Hive activities. The level's hydroponics rooms were on his way, their doors open to permit easy access for harvesters. He glanced in as he passed, noted how swiftly the routine was progressing. Hide baskets were being filled with soybeans, two workers to a basket. An Outsider might have interpreted the scene as one of confusion, but there was no squabbling, no conversation. No workers collided with each other; no baskets were spilled. Filled baskets were being slid smoothly into the dumbwaiter slots in the far wall, there to go up to processing. Any necessary signals were conveyed by silent hand motions. When examined in the light of Hive awareness, the giant rooms were a collection of evidence -- all of which pointed to supremely effective organization. These were chemically conditioned workers, effectively neutered, none of them hungry (feeding conveyors were only a few steps away down the main gallery) and they worked in the certain awareness that what they did was vital for the entire Hive. Hellstrom's own progress past the harvesting became a kind of elegant dance through entering and emerging workers. No precise scheduling of crews was required here. Workers left when hungry or overcome by fatigue. Others entered to fill the gaps. All knew what was required of them. At the elevator, which was one of the older, upper-level models with a visibly jerking motion at the open doorways, he was delayed for a moment while a planting crew filed past him, headed for the hydroponics rooms with selected seedstock for replanting. There must be no delay in maintenance of the food cycle that lay at the very base of their survival. Hellstrom stepped into the open gap of the elevator doorway when space appeared on an upbound car. The heavy animal odor of the Hive, which the scrubbing systems erased from vented air exchanged Outside, was strong in the elevator, a sign that leaks were developing far down in the shaft and would have to be repaired. Maintenance was a constant drain, but could not be ignored even now. He made a mental note to inquire about shaft maintenance. Within two minutes he was in the sub-basement of the barn-studio, his attention concentrated once more on the immediate emergency. We must not consign these new intruders to the vats too soon, he told himself. VI From Nils Hellstrom's diar: In the oral tradition, which spanned more than # years before our progenitors began their first written records, it was said that the refusal to waste any colony protein dated from our earliest beginnings. I have come to doubt this. Outsider reactions indicate it is no more than a pleasant myth. My broodmother likened the later practice of wasting nothing to the openness we of the Hive have with each other. The vats were for her a beautiful metaphor of uninhibited internal communication and, as she often said: In this way, when one dies, no secret dies with her -- whatever each has learned will be contributed to the success of the whole. Nothing in the more than # years of our written records calls the original myth into question and I will not do so now in our open councils. Thus, I conceal something in the name of a myth that strengthens us. Perhaps, this is how religions begin. ment caution became visible. A ladder of Hive-steel was anchored in one corner of the open area beneath the baffles and sounddampers of the floor supports. The ladder led upward through the baffles to a concealed trapdoor that opened into a cubicle of a communal toilet in the barn's basement. A concealed screen at the top of the ladder slid into position when a worker climbed to that point. The screen revealed whether the cubicle was occupied. A remote locking system secured the cubicle's door when a worker was emerging. There were secondary monitoring screens at the base of the ladder and a watchworker was on duty there. The worker waved Hellstrom ahead, signaling that no Outsiders were in the studio area. The ladder was attached to a wall of one of the giant ventilation ducts that ended in the barn roof. He felt subtle vibrations as he climbed. He emerged from the cubicle presently and into an empty washroom, which gave him passage into the studio's actual basement, a space of wardrobe stores, film stores, editing, processing facilities for film, dressing rooms and makeup areas, props... By Outsider standards, all would have seemed normal. Workers were going about their activities in the area, but they ignored him. Ordinary stairs at the end of a long hallway gave entrance through a sound-baffle system into a double-doored lock passage and thence to the main studio, which took up most of the barn's cavernous interior. From the permanent minutes of the Hive Council: Present computations indicate that the Hive will begin to feel swarming pressures when it passes a population of #. Without some such protection as Project # would offer, we cannot permit such a swarming to occur. For all the ingenuity of our specialists, we are helpless before the combined might of the Outside. Its us. The total dedication of our workers would send them to fall by the thousands in a suicidal attempt to insure the future of our kind. But we are few and they are many. The unreasioning brutality of nature's underlying plan must be stayed for this time of preparation. Some day, given the potency of some such weapon as represented by Project #, we wilt be able to emerge, and if our workers die on that day they will die with reason -- through selflessness, not through greed. X and polite -- but evasive," Janvert said, turning from the telephone. It was daylight outside Clovis's apartment now and she had dressed in preparation for the specific summons they both knew would come soon. "They told you to be patient," Clovis said. She had returned to her favorite position on the long couch and sat with her feet tucked under her. "One thing more," Janvert said. "Peruge himself is going to head this team. Old Jollyvale doesn't like that one bit." "You think he wanted this one himself?" "God, no! But he's Operations Director. With Peruge in the field Jollyvale can't give orders. He's effectively no longer Operations Director. That he doesn't like." "It's definite about Peruge?" "No doubt." "That explains why they're not being very informative." "I suppose so." Janvert crossed to the couch and sat beside her, taking her hand in his and rubbing the warm skin absently. "I'm scared," he said. "I'm really scared for the first time in this business. I've always known they didn't give one particle of a damn about us, but Peruge -- " Janvert swallowed convulsively. "I think he takes a positive pride in how many people he can waste and he doesn't care whose people they are -- ours or theirs." "Don't let him know how you feel, for God's sake," Clovis said. "Oh, I won't. I'll be the usual happy-go-lucky Shorty, always ready with a quip and a smile." "Do you think we'll be going out today?" "Tonight at the latest." "I've often wondered about Peruge," she said. "I've wondered who he actually is. That funny damned name and everything." "At least he has a name," Janvet said. "The Chief, now -- " "Don't even think it," she warned. "Haven't you ever wondered if we really work for the government?" he asked. "Or whether our bosses represent an over-government behind the visible one." "If you're talking about what I think you're talking about I don't want to know anything about it," she said. "That's a good, safe attitude," he said. He dropped her hand, stood up and returned to his restless pacing. Clovis was right, of course. This place was bugged. They'd know precisely where to call for him. No helping that. When you worked to make the world a fishbowl you lived in a fishbowl. The trick was to become one of the fish watchers. From the Hive Manual: In the selection of workers, breeders and the various kinds of specialists, in the development of a Hive consciousness through all of the chemical and manipulative devices at our disposal, the blueprint of our cooperative society is etched with a potential for permanence that must be monitored with the greatest caution. Here each generation comes into the world as a continuation of the previous one, each individual a mere extensfon of the rest. It is in the consequences of that extension that we must build our eventual place in the universe. into the open cavern of the studio a young woman production assistant, who had been working with a glass-enclosed beehive nearby, saw him and waved to attract his attention. Hellstrom hesitated, torn between the desire to go immediately up to the command post aerie and recognition of a need to maintain an air of unbroken continuity in Hive-supportive work. He recognized the young woman, of course -- one of the lesser-crew who could front on occasion for limited contact with the Outsiders who came to look into the film work for legitimate reasons. She was one of the Niles# genetic line -- the poor eyesight in that line would have to be corrected in the breeding processes. The strain was also susceptible to Outsider tastes, as was the Fancy line. He noted members of the second film crew standing around the glassed beehive, their arms folded. Everything about the scene spelled a delay. That could be costly. Hellstrom weighed his various problems. Old Harvey could be trusted to obey his orders. The money represented by this film equaled a vital resource. Hellstrom shifted direction in midstride, headed toward the production assistant and her idle crew. She had a plain face not helped by large granny glasses and blond hair pulled back in a severe chignon. But she had a full figure and was obviously fertile. Hellstrom wondered idly if she had been examined yet for her personal breeding potential. Using her Outside name, he spoke as he came up to her: "What is it, Stella?" "We're having some unexpected trouble with this beehive and I wanted to call Fancy in for assistance. But I was told you have her on another assignment from which she cannot be released." "That's true," Hellstrom said, realizing that someone had taken him literally in his private instructions to keep Fancy under close surveillance. "What's happening with your bees?" "They're balling on the queen every time we try to get her exposed for photographing. The last time that happened Fancy told us to call her -- said she might be able to help." "Did she give you an alternative to calling her?" "She said to try a tranquilizer in their feeder and in their air." "Have you done this?" "We'd like to have them more active." "I see. Did Fancy tell you what might be causing the trouble?" "She thinks it's something in the air -- maybe atmospheric electricity or a chemical emitted by our bodies." "Can we shoot around these bees for now?" "Ed thinks we can. He wanted to call you earlier and see if you'd be available for one of the lab sequences in which you appear." "When would he want to shoot it?" "Tonight, probably by around eight o'clock." Hellstrom fell silent, considering all his manifest problems. Then: "I think I can be ready for that shooting by eight. Tell Ed to set up for it. I've had my daysleep and can work all night if need be." He turned away. That should keep things here on an even keel, but he saw the bees at once as a metaphor of his own Hive. If the Hive became too upset things could get out of hand. Workers might take action on their own. He signaled to a boom operator in the center of the studio, pointed to himself and to the loft that gave entrance to the command aerie. The boom cage on its long arm swung down to the studio floor with all the silent grace of a mantis reaching for its prey. Hellstrom stepped into the cage and it wafted him upward, swung in a wide arc and deposited him at the edge of the loft floor. As he stepped out, Hellstrom reflected on how admirably this device served the needs of both security and of cover. No one could get up to the loft without the help of a trusted boom operator, yet it was the most natural thing to think of a boom as an elevator and to use that as excuse for leaving no other access into the security section. T he loft had been set up with a central well running for half the length of the barn along its longest dimension. The other half concealed the outlets for ventilators, with a bypass for visual examination of the valley's upper reaches. Slide ropes had been coiled neatly at even spacings along the edge of the loft floor, each rope secured to one of the stanchions of the guard rail. The ropes offered an emergency access to the studio floor. Neither the ropes nor the inner wall behind the walkway -- nor the doors into the various security stations were visible from the studio floor. Hellstrom walked along the open area, noting a slight smell of dust, which alerted him to remind the cleaning crews that the studio must be kept free of dust. The catwalk with its view down into the multiple activities in the studio, led him along the soundproofed wall to an end door with both sound and light baffles. He let himself into Old Harvey's station through the dark passage of the baffle. It was gloomy inside and filled with the smells of outside, which came in through open louvers at the end. An arc of greenglowing repeater screens had been installed along the inner wall against a thermite-bomb destruction system that could burn out the entire barn right down to the non-inflammable mucilaginous quick-plugs that could be triggered to seal off the Hive-head. The present emergency made Hellstrom acutely aware of all these preparations -- they had been a part of Hive awareness for many years. Old Harvey looked up from the console as Hellstrom entered. The old man was gray-haired and had a big, forward-thrust, face like a Saint Bernard's. He even had dewlaps at the edges of his jawline to accent the likeness. His eyes were widely spaced, brown and deceptively mild. Hellstrom had once seen Old Harvey behead a hysterical worker with one sweep of a meat cleaverbut the memory dated back to his childhood and that hysterical line had been weeded out of the Hive's breeding stock. "Where's our Outsider?" Hellstrom asked. "He had something to eat a while back, then crawled off the hilltop," Old Harvey said. "He's working his way toward the upper end of the valley now. If he stations himself where I think he will we'll be able to watch him directly with binoculars. We're keeping all the lights out inside, of course, to reduce the chance that he'll notice activity up here." Good, cautious thinking, Hellstrom agreed. He asked, "Have you reviewed the Porter material? I noticed earlier that you -- " "I've reviewed it." "What's your opinion?" "Same sort of approach, clothing designed to give him concealment in the grass. Want to bet his cover is that he's a birdwatcher?" "I think I'd win." "Too much professionalism about him," Old Harvey said. He studied one of the console screens, pointed and said, "There he is, just like I expected." The screen showed the intruder crawling under a stand of bushes for a view down the length of the valley. "Is he carrying a weapon?" Hellstrom asked. "Our sensors indicate not. I think he has a flashlight and a pocketknife in addition to those binoculars. Look at that. There are ants up there on the ledge and he doesn't like them. See how he's brushing them off his arm." "Ants? How long since we've swept that area?" "A month or so. Do you want it checked?" "No. Just have it noted that it may be time for another sweep there by a small crew. We need several nests in the newer hydroponics sections." "Right." Old Harvey nodded and turned to relay instructions by hand signal to one of his assistants. "That Porter was a strange one. I've been reviewing what he said. He told us quite a bit, realty." "He was in the wrong business," Hellstrom agreed dryly. "What do you think they're after?" Old Harvey asked. "We've somehow attracted the attention of an official agency," Hellstrom said. "They don't have to be after anything except satisfaction for their own brand of paranoia." Old Harvey grimaced, shuddered. "I don't like the feeling of this. Nils." "Nor I." "Are you sure you've made the right decision?" "To the best of my ability. Our first step must be to pick up this pair. One of them must know more than the late Mr. Porter." "I sure hope you're right. Nils." Vll From Nils Hellstrom' s diary: Three of our younger geneticists were in among the fertile females again today and some of the older colonists in genetics complained. I had to explain to them once more that it was unimportant. The breeding impulse cannot be suppressed in active key workers who require the full functioning of their mental abilities. I have been known to indulge myi...:lf thus from time to time and the older genetics specialists know this very well. They were really complaining about me, of course. When wilt they ever understand that genetic manipulation has very severe limits, given our present stage of development? Luckily the older ones are dying out. Our own truism applies here: Into the vats old, out of the vats new. Any offspring from this latest foray wilt be watched closely, of course. Talent is where you find it. We all know how desperately the Hive needs new talent. tone of voice Peruge was using over the telephone, but managed to conceal this fact under an even flow of reasonable responses. Peruge was angry and was not attempting to hide the fact. To Merrivale, Peruge represented the one major obstacle between himself and another promotion. Merrivale thought he understood Peruge very well, but felt offended by the other man's superior position in the Agency. Merrivale had been called away from the early afternoon briefing session that had been set up for the new teams being sent out to Oregon. He had left the meeting reluctantly, but without delay. One did not keep Peruge waiting. Peruge was one of the chosen few who had daily face-to-face contact with the Chief. He might even know the Chiefs real identity. A letterknife in the form of a cavalry saber lay on the smooth f ray blotter of Merrivale's desk, le picked it up, pricked at the blotter with the sharp tip while he listened, gouging deeply when the conversation took a painful turn. "That was earlier in the month," Dzule," Merrivale said, knowing the explanation was insufficient, "and we did not know as much then as we know now." "What do we know now?" The question was biting and adcusatory. "We know there's someone out there who does not hesitate to make our people simply -- disappear." "We already knew that." "But we had not gauged the extent of our opposition's determination to defy us." "Do we have so many people that we can just waste them finding out such important facts?" Peruge demanded. The hypocrite . Merrivale thought. Nobody has wasted more agents than Peruge. He gave me the explicit orders that cost us these teams. Merrivale dug a deep gouge in the blotter, frowned at the disfiguration of the surface. He reminded himself to have the blotter replaced as soon as this call was completed. "Dzule, none of our agents believes this business is a safe one. They know the chances they take." "But do they know the chances you take with them?" "That's unfair," Merrivale blurted and wondered what Peruge was doing. Why this abrupt attack? Was there trouble upstairs?" "You're a fool, Merrivale," Peruge said. "You've lost us three good people." "My orders were explicit and you know it," Merrivale said. "And given those orders -- you did what you thought best." vale could feel sweat collecting under his collar and rubbed his neck. "We had no way of knowing precisely what had happened to Porter. You told me to send him in alone. Those were your very words." "And when Porter -- Just vanished?" "You said yourself that he could have had personal reasons for disappearing." "What personal reasons? Porter's record was one of the best." "You said he'd quarreled with his -- wife." "Did I say that? I don't remember that at all." So that's the way it is, Merrivale thought. His stomach felt painfully knotted. "You know you offered that as a possible reason for sending in a double team with identical orders to replace them." "I don't know anything of the kind, Merrivale. You've sent Depeaux and Grenelli down that Oregon rathole and you sit there making excuses. When Porter was missed you should have originated an official inquiry for a vacationer believed to have been last seen in that region." So that's going to be our new approach, Merrivale thought. And if it succeeds Peruge gets the credit. If it fails I get the blame. Neat. Merrivale said, "I presume that's the line of attack you'll take when you get out to Oregon." "You know damned well it is." The Chief himself is probably listening to this, Merrivale thought. Oh, God, why did I ever get into this business? "Have you told the new teams yet that I'll be leading them personally?" Peruge asked. "I was briefing them when you called." "Very well. I'll be leaving within the hour and I'll meet the new teams in Portland." "I'll tell them." Merrivale spoke with weary resignation. "And tell them -- and I want it emphasized -- that this new operation must be handled with the utmost discretion. There will be no grandstand plays, understood? Hellstrom has powerful friends and I don't mind telling you that this ecology issue is explosive. Hellstrom has said all of the right things to the right people and they think he's some kind of ecological messiah. Luckily there are others who realize he's a fanatical madman and I'm sure we'll prevail. Understand me?" "Perfectly." Merrivale did not try to conceal his bitterness now. The Chief was listening to Peruge. No doubt of that. The whole thing was a staged performance -- preparation of the sacrificial goat. The goat's name was, of course, Merrivale. "I doubt very much that you understand me perfectly," Peruge said, "but it's likely that you understand me well enough to follow the orders I've just given you without any more disgusting errors. See to it at once." A sharp click closed the line. Merrivale sighed, replaced the receiver in its cradle on the elaborate scrambling phone. The signs were clear. He must juggle his own hot potato. If he dropped it -- or if anyone else dropped it -- fingers would point in only one direction. Well, he had been in this position before, just as he had placed others in the identical position. There was only one safe response. He must delegate authority, but do it so subtly that everything would still appear to be in his own hands. The logical candidate was Shorty Janvert. As a first step. Shorty would be named Number Two on this project, right under Dzule Peruge himself. Peruge had not specified whom he wanted as Number Two. That had been a mistake on his part. If Peruge changed the assignment, an action he might very well take, he would have to assume responsibility for everything his new segundo did. Shorty was a logical choice. Peruge had made it clear on several occasions that he did not fully trust Janvert. But the little man was imaginative and resourceful. The choice could be defended. From the Hive Manual: The neutered worker is the true source of freedom in any society. Even the wild society has its neutered workers, the neutering being maintained behind a mask of actual fertility from which real offspring come. But such offspring have no share in the free creative life of the wild society and thus are effectively neutered. Such workers can always be recognized. They are not burdened with intellect, with unrestricted emotion or individual identity. They are lost in a mass of creatures like themselves. In this neither our Hive nor the insects are giving the universe anything new. What the insects have and what we are copying is the society formed in such a way that its workers toil together to create the illusive Utopia -- the perfect society. crew almost six hours to shoot the new tab sequence with mice and wasps. Even then Hellstrom was not satisfied that the crew had caught the effect he wanted on film. He had become very sensitive to the artistic merit of what the Hive created. The demands for excellence he was making now went far beyond the implicit knowledge that quality brought more income to the Hive. He wanted quality for its own sake for every aspect and expression of the Hive. Quality of specialists, quality of life, quality of creations -- all were interrelated. Hellstrom had himself boomlifted to the aerie after the shooting was finished. He tried to conceal his worries over the latest report on the nightsweep. Because he had been in this sequence he had been tied to the set during the most important part of the sweep. It was still many hours to dawn and one problem had not been solved -- the female who had accompanied their captive intruder remained at large. One of the Hive's chief concerns had always been to produce workers who could front for it with the Outside -- incorruptible workers who would not betray even by chance what lay beneath Guarded Valley and its surrounding hills. Hellstrom wondered now if the present problem might not have uncovered a breeding defect somewhere in the personnel charged with the sweeps. The male intruder had been picked up easily beyond the bordering trees of the west meadow. A sweep detail had enveloped the camper almost immediately afterward, but it had somehow missed the female. That she could escape had not seemed possible, but none of the sweepworkers had even smelled her trail. Many key security workers were in the aerie command post when Hellstrom entered. They noted his entrance, but stayed at their jobs. Hellstrom scanned the dimly lighted room with its arc of repeater screens, its little clutches of workers discussing the problem. Saldo was there, dark in the manner of his breeder mother. Fancy, but with the harsh hawk features of his Outsider father. (That was one thing Fancy did well, Hellstrom reminded himself. She bred Outside at every opportunity and the resultant new genes were prized by the Hive.) Old Harvey's post at the Security console had been taken over by a younger male of Fancy's line. He took the name of Timothy Hannsen in his Outside guise, which so far had seen limit use. Hannsen had been chosen for possible future training as a front because his penetrating I  f V' i,'C good looks tended to overpower the conscious balance of Outsider females. His sharply incisive mind also made him particularly valuable in a crisis. The trait was true of many in Fancy's line, particularly so in Saldo. Hellstrom had high hopes for Saldo, who had been taken on as a special educational charge by Old Harvey. Hellstrom paused inside the door to guage conditions in the aerie. Should he take over? The workers would defer to him at the slightest indication that he was assuming command. Brood mother Trova's decision had never been really questioned. They always sensed how much more potent was his commitment to the Hive, how much more effective his decisions. They might disagree at times and occasionally even prevvail over him, but a subtle air of deference remained even when they voted him down in Council. And when, as often happened, his view proved later to have been the correct one, his hold upon them became even stronger. It was a situation toward which Hellstrom maintained a constant mistrust. No worker is perfect, he told himself. The Hive itself must be supreme in all things.  the wall at Hellstrom's left, s' arms folded, his face underlighted by glowing screens that produced the illusion that he had been cast from green stone There was movement in his eyes, though. Old Harvey was watching the room J critically. Hellstrom crossed to his side, glanced once at the dewlapped old face and then at the consoles. 'Any sign of her yet?" "No." "Didn't we have her under constant infra-surveillance?" "Radar and sonics, too," Old Harvey muttered. "Did she have instruments to detect us?" "She tried to use her radio, but we jammed it." "That alerted her?" "Probably." Old Harvey suddenly sounded tired and displeased. "But she had no other instruments?" "The vehicle had a small radartype speed-trap warning device. I think she may have detected our surveillance that way, too. "But how could she slip through our sweep?" "Our people are reviewing the tapes again. They think she could have gone searching for her companion and been lost in the general confusion our sweep created on the instruments." "The sweep should have picked her up despite any such confusion." Old Harvey turned, looked directly at him. "So I told them." "And they overruled you." Old Harvey nodded. "What do they believe happened?" Hellstrom asked. "She took a calculated risk and went right into the midst of our searchers." "Her smell would have given her away." "So I said -- and they agreed. They then suggested she slipped away from the truck to the north, using it as a shield. Their thought is that she walked softly to hide her movements in the background static. There was a time gap between dark and the moment our sweep reached her vicinity. She could have done it. She had two choices -- get away or slip up on us from another direction. They think she's out there stalking us." "And you don't agree with that?" Heilstrom asked. "Not that one," Old Harvey said. "Why?" "She wouldn't slip up on us." "But why?" "We hit her hard with the lowfrequency. She was twitchy and nervous all afternoon, much too nervous to come for us." "How do you know what her reserves of courage might be?" "I watched her." "She didn't look like your type, Harvey." "Make your joke, Nils. I watched her most of the afternoon." "So this is no more than your opinion from personal observation?" "Yes." "Why aren't you pressing that opinion?" "I did." "Given your choice, what action would you take?" "You really want to know?" "I do -- or I wouldn't ask." "First, I think she's slipped down to the northeast among those cattle in the pasture. I'm guessing that she knows cattle. There was something about her -- " He wet his lips with his tongue. "If she knows cattle, she could have moved among them with no problems. They would have masked her smell and provided all the cover she needed." "No one here agrees with you?" "They say those are range cattle and that they would have spooked at the first smell of her. We would have detected a stampede." "And your response?" "A lot of spooking goes to whether a cow can smell your fear. We know that. We use that factor ourselves. If she wasn't afraid of them and moved softly -- well, we can't just close our eyes to the possibility that she may have done so." "They don't want to search among the cattle, though?" "They're bothered by the complications of a sweep down there. If we send workers they're sure to get out of hand and kill a few head of those cows. Then we have local problems." "You still haven't told me what you'd do." "I'd send some of us. We're trained to deal with the Outside. Some of us have lived out there. We have better control over the hunt response during a sweep." Heilstrom nodded, spoke his thoughts aloud; "If she's up here close to us she hasn't a rabbit's chance of getting away. But if she's down there among tiiose cows -- " "You see what I mean," Old Harvey said. "I'm astonished that the others don't see it, too," Heilstrom said. "Will you lead the search party, Harvey?" "Sure. I see you're not calling it a sweep." "I'd just as soon you went out and brought back only one thing." "Alive?" "If at all possible. We're not getting much from that other one." "That's what I heard. I was down there when they first started questioning him, but -- well, that sort of thing bothers me. I guess I lived too long Outside." "I have the same reaction," Hellstrom said. "This is something better left to the younger workers who don't even know the concept of mercy. He told me almost nothing when ! first questioned him. "Sure wish there were some other way," Old Harvey said. He took a deep breath. "I'd best get about the -- search." "Choose your men and see to it." Hellstrom watched the old man move out into the room, thought about the often sheer perversity of the young. The old possessed a special value for the Hive, a kind of balance that could not be denied. This incident was a sure demonstration of their value. Old Harvey had known what to do. The young workers had not wanted to venture out into that night themselves, though, and had decided the action was unnecessary. Several of the younger male and female apprentices and the security workers of middle years had heard Hellstrom's conversation with Old Harvey. They made a shamefaced show now of volunteering for the search. Old Harvey picked some of them, instructed them briefly. He made a special point of naming Saldo his second in command. That was good. Saldo displayed a devoted respect for Old Harvey and it was surprising that the younger worker had not taken his teacher's side. The a.iswer came out in the briefing when Saldo said, "I knew he was right, but you wouldn't believe me, either." Apparently Saldo had sided with his teacher, but the others had lumped them both in one bag. Ever conscious of his role as educator. Old Harvey chided Saldo for this remark. "If you thought as you say you should have given your own arguments -- not mine." The troops filed out of the room properly chastened. Hellstrom smiled to himself. They were good stock and learned quickly. One had only to give them the correct example. In age is balance, his broodmother had been fond of saying. Youth, to her, had represented an extenuating circumstance which had always to be taken into account. Vlll The words of Nils Hellthings on Earth only man ponders his existence. His questions lead to torment, for he is unable to accept, as the insects do, that life's only purpose is life itself. not liked this assignment from the beginning. She hadn't objected so much to working with Carlos (they had combined forces many times in the past) as she did to the time she would have to spend with him when they were not working. Carlos had been flashingly handsome in his youth and had never accustomed himself to the gradual wearing away of his compelling attraction to women. She had known that the off-duty association would be a constant bout of sortie and parry. Grinelli didn't fancy herself as a femme fatale, but she knew from experience her own magnetism. She had a long face that might have been taken as ugly except for the personality behind it. Her self shone through overlarge and startlingly green eyes. Her body was slender, the skin pale, and there was about her an air of profound sensitivity that fascinated many men, Carlos among them. Her hair was dark red-auburn and she tended to keep it confined in tight hats or berets. Tymiena was a family name and its original Slavic meaning had been: "a secret." The name described her manner. She held herself in constant reserve. Merrivale had alerted 'her sense of danger originally by assigning only the two of them to the case. She had not liked what she had read in Porter's accounts and in the reports accumulated under the label: the hellstrom file. Too many of these had been secondor third-hand. Too many of them were semi-official. They smacked of amateurism. Amateurs were a deadly indulgence in this business. "Only two of us?" she had objected. "What about the local police? We could file a missing person report and -- " "The Chief does not want that," Merrivale had responded at once. "Did he say so specifically?" Merrivale's face had darkened slightly at any reference to his well-known propensity for personalized interpretation of orders. "He made himself abundantly clear. This matter is to be handled with the utmost discretion." "A discreet local inquiry sounds to me well within that requirement. Porter was in that area. He's missing. These reports in the file indicate others may have disappeared in that vicinity. This family of picnickers with the twin babies, for instance, they -- " "A logical explanation has been accepted for every such occurrence, Tymiena." Merrivale had interrupted. "Unfortunately logic and actuality do not always coincide. Our concern is for the actuality and, in our pursuit of it, we shall utilize our own tested resources." "I don't like their logical explanations. I don't give one particle of a damn what explanations local dumbheads may have accepted." "Our own resources only." "Which means we put our lives on the line again. What does Carlos say about this case?" "Why don't you ask him? I've arranged a briefing for oh-elevenhundred. Janvert and Carr will be here, as well." "Are they in this?" "They're in reserve." "I don't like that, either. Where's Carlos?" "I believe he's in Archives. You have almost an hour to explore this matter with him." "Merde!" She had swept from the room. Carlos had been no more helpful than Merrivale. The assignment had struck him as routine. But then, assignments tended to strike Carlos as cast in some familiar mold. His habitual response was a universal, clerkish thoroughness of preparation -- read all the material, study all the plans. To find that Carlos was in Archives had not surprised her. He had an Archives mind. T he trip to Oregon and the cozy journey in the camper had been everything she had expected -- crawling hands and a crawling mind. She had finally told Carlos that she had contracted a serious venereal disease on her previous assignment. He refused to believe this. She had told him quite calmly then that if he persisted she would put a bullet into him. She had displayed the small Belgian automatic in the wrist holster she always wore. Something about the clear calmness of her manner had told him to believe her. But he had taken the rebuff in muttering bad grace. The job was another matter, though, and she had wished him luck when he took off in his ridiculous bird-watching clothes. All through the long day then, while of the "cover" by painting, she had grown increasingly nervous. There had been no particular thing upon which to focus her uneasiness, nothing concrete to explain it. The whole scene had bothered her, reeked of trouble. Carlos had been predictably imprecise about his estimate of return time. It all depended on what he saw in his preliminary scan of the farm. "Shortly after dark at the latest," he had said. "You be a good wife and paint your pretty pictures while I go look for birds. When I come back I'll teach you all about the birds and the bees. "Carlos!" "Ah, my love, some day I shall teach you to say that exquisite name with true passion." And the bastard had chucked her under the chin as he took his leave. Tymiena had watched him zigzag his way up the grass-brown slope into the trees. The day already was warm and filled with that special kind of insect-singing stillness that spoke of more heat to come. Sighing, she had taken out her water-color materials. She actually was quite a good watercolorist and occasionally during the long day she had experienced real involvement in putting down the essence of the autumn fields. The golden browns were particularly warm and inviting. Shortly after midday, she put her painting aside temporarily and fixed herself a light lunch of sliced hardboiled eggs and yogurt, cold from the camper's 'icebox. During the break, although the camper's interior was oven hot, she stayed inside to check over the instruments. To her surprise, the speed-trap warning, which could  turned on its base and had a null indicator, showed radar activity in the direction of the farm. There was a clear signal aimed at the camper. Radar surveillance of her from the farm? She interpreted this as a danger sign and thought of going after Carlos to call him back. An alternative was to warm up the radio and report the development to headquarters. She knew with a sure instinct that headquarters would make light of it. And Carlos had ordered her to stay with the camper. In the end she opted for neither course. Her own indecision added a frustrating accent to the nervousness that continued to afflict her throughout the afternoon. The sense of danger accumulated. She felt that something was warning her to get away. Leave the camper at least. The camper was a big, fat target. In the half-light of dusk, she folded up her painting tablet, dropped it and her paints on the cab seat and slipped into the seat at the radio. It took a moment to warm up and she checked the signal monitor, found a searchresonance fanning across her own frequency. When she keyed her transmitter, the search-resonance homed on her signal and jammed it. The monitor howled with the interference. She slapped the offswitch, stared toward the farm. The place was not visible from this parking spot, but she felt it out there as a malevolent presence. There was still no sign of Carlos. Darkness would be on her within minutes. She felt nervously for the little automatic in its wrist holster. What the hell was delaying Carlos? She turned out the camper's lights, sat in the settling darkness. Radar from the farm's direction. They jammed her radio. This case had turned nasty. She stood up, moved softly to the rear door, slipped out on the side opposite the farm. The van itself would shield her from that searching beam. She dropped to all fours and worked her way swiftly into the tall grass. She had seen cows far down in the pasture below her and headed for them with a sure instinct. She had grown up on a Wyoming cattle ranch and, while she preferred approaching them on horseback, she felt no threat from them. The threat was behind her, somewhere up at Hellstrom's farm. The cows would offer her a masking confusion, concealment from that radar sweep. If Carlos returned, he would turn on the camper's lights. She would see them from a safe distance in the pasture land. Somehow she did not expect Carlos to return. This whole situation did not make sense, had not made sense from the beginning, but she trusted her own instinct for self-preservation. The words of Nils Hellstrom: This primeval planet Earth is an arena of continual contest where only the most versatile and resourceful endure. On this testing ground where the mighty dinosaur staggered and fell, one silent witness hangs on. This witness remains our guide to human survival. This witness, the insect, has head start on mankind, but we will overtake him. He dominates our Earth today and exploits his dominion well. With each new generation come new experiments in shape and function, transforming him into specters as limitless as the imagination of the insane. Yet, what this witness can do, we of the Hive can do because we are witness of him. from a concealed perimeter exit at the northern edge of the Hive. Sod rolled back, a stump with a mucilage-seated soil plug folded outward on a silent hinge and the troop emerged into the night. They were lightly clad in dark gray and the night was cold, but they ignored the chill. Each carried a stunwand and wore a night-vision mask with a powerful infrared emitter of Hive manufacture around its rim. They looked like a troop of skindivers and the wands were strange double-ended spears. The stump-plug was seated securely before they left it, all sign of their passage removed. They fanned out over the field and moved northward. Old Harvey had chosen twentythree of the key workers, mostly aggressive males, and had seen to it that the females received hormones before he had issued his careful instructions in silent Hive-sign. They wanted this Outsider female alive. Nils needed the information this female carried. She was probably down among the cows. The cows could be frightened off with a low stun, but none were to be killed. This was not a sweep -- it was a search. Only the Outsider female would go eventually into the vats from this venture and she only after she had given up the necessary information. It had been a long time since Old Harvey had participated in a hunt and he felt the excitement of it pumping in his veins. He signaled for Saldo to take the left flank and moved out of the right himself. The night air tasted of many scents -- cattle, dust in the tall grass, raw earth, the subtle esthers of insects, a touch of tree resin. It was all there in his sensitive nostrils, but he could not separate out an odor that said the Outsider female was ahead of him. Nightsight would have to reveal her. Saldo had moved immediately out to his assigned position and Old Harvey relaxed. The young man was green, but his potential was enormous. Saldo was among the twenty or so who might some day step into Hellstrom's sandals. He was one of the smaller, energysaving new breed, dark and slim, filled with nervous energy and own mind showing more strongly each day. He would be a power in the Hive some day -- or might even take a swarm of his own out to start a new Hive. The searchers had spread into a wide fan, walking openly down into the pastureland. Old Harvey noted that the night was good for a hunt. Clouds were beginning to cover the sky, obscuring the laterising, waning moon. The cattle could be seen easily in the nightsight reHection. He kept his eyes on the scattered clumps of trees, however, ignoring the cattle for the moment. They passed one small herd with a minimal disturbance of the animals, although the warm smell of the cows excited the hunter drive in the entire troop. Saldo and two others searched through the herd, making sure the animals screened no Outsider. Hunt excitment could not be denied, though. It was evidenced by an increasing nervousness in the troop and an outflow of external hormones that began to spook the cattle. More and more individual cows and then whole groups of them snorted and ran off with a panicked thumping. Old Harvey began to regret that he had not included a selective hormone suppressant in his preparations. The subtle chemical signals one animal could send to another had their uses at times, but they introduced complexities now. He kept his attention on the trees, however, leaving the cattle for Saldo and the others to scan. Nightsight gave his surroundings a faint silver cast, as though the light came from within every object he saw. She will hear us coming and she will try to hide in a tree, he told himself. It's her style. He couldn't say why or how he knew this from just his one afternoon's observation, but he felt certain of it. She would hide in a tree. Old Harvey heard a nightbird call from far off to his right and felt his heartbeat quicken. He was not too old for the sweeps. Perhaps it would be good to go out occasionally with the workers. The words of Nils Hellstrom: Unlike other creatures who struggled against their environment, the insect learned early to seek its protective embrace. He created an endless wardrobe of camouflage. He and his environment became one. When predators came he was nowhere to be found -- so artistic were his methods of deception that predators could crawl upon his . body in their search for prey. He did not choose merely one means . of escape, but countless others. Not for him speed or the treetops, but both of these and more. the sweep just as the first searchers saw her, confirming Old Harvey's prediction. She had tripped in a rabbit hole and sprained her left ankle early in her flight. The pain had forced her to make the climb into a low oak, where she had braced herself in a notch and taken off the shoe on the injured foot. She sat about twenty feet up, the tittle automatic held firmly in her right hand. A powerful pen-size flashlight was in her left hand, her thumb on its switch. The ankle throbbed with a fiery pain that made thought difficult. She wondered if she had broken a bone. Running cattle gave her the first indication of trouble. She heard the animals snorting above the pounding of their hooves as they passed. Then came a mysterious swish-swish. The sound grew louder until it circled her tree and stopped. She could just make out the darker shadows of the hunters in the blackness. They had formed a rough circle all around her. It was obvious that she had been detected. In panic, she thumbed the flashlight switch, swept its beam in a short arc. She gasped, at her first sight of the nightmasks and stunwands, recognizing deadly menace. She began shooting without thinking. IX The words of Nils Hellstrom: Perhaps we will in time become as fully functional as are those we copy. We will develop faces without expression -- with only eyes and mouths to keep our bodies alive. No muscles to smile or frown with -- or in any way to betray what is lurking beneath the surface. T he little automatic erupted as a monstrous surprise to the Hive's hunters. Five of them were dead before Tymiena was brought tumbling from the tree by a concentration of stuns. Old Harvey was among those killed, his nightmask shattered and a bullet in his brain. Saldo suffered a bullet burn on his jaw, but his shouted command brought order to the frightened workers. They had been full of hunt juice, as the old-timers put it, and the Outsider female's attack had raised them to a deadly pitch. They leaped in to finish her off with their hands, but Saldo's cry of command stopped them. In the end it was Hive discipline that kept them off her. Saldo issued swift orders. Someone must run to inform Nils. The dead must be returned to the vats. That was what good workers deserved. Thus they became one with all. Into the vats old, out of the vats new. While his orders were being obeyed he kneeled to examine the unconscious female. Her flashlight still glowed in the grass. He pushed his nightmask back onto his head, used the flashlight to help his examination. Yes, she was still alive. It was difficult to conduct the examination calmly. He felt harmed the Hive. Nils needed her, though. The Hive needed her. Saldo managed a kind of calm as he continued his examination. She appeared to have no broken bones. A painful ankle, obviously. It was swelling and discolored. Workers had suffered much worse, though, and had gone on with their tasks. He directed that her weapon be found and returned to the Hive. Old Harvey's death neither saddened nor gladdened him. Such things occurred. Reality could not be avoided. Reality had placed him in command of the search troop and he was required to give correct orders. This was how Old Harvey had taught him to think and behave. The Outsider female had to be secured first. He judged that she could be revived for questioning. That would please Nils. It pleased Saldo now. He began to sense a greater interest in this female. She was possessor of fascinating odors. He sensed alien Outsider soaps and perfumes over faint, but familiar musks. He bent close to sniff at her, the first Outsider female he had ever encountered in the wild. Beneath the dominant acridity of her fear were exciting odors. He slipped a hand under her blouse, felt a breast, found it full and firm under a restraining garment. He knew about such garments from his training for key worker roles. It was called a bra and was fastened with metal hooks at the back. She was a true female, apparently no different from females of the Hive, and the available evidence said she was fertile. How odd these wild Outsiders were. He moved his hand down under her waistband, explored the pubic hair and genitals, brought the hand out and smelled it. Yes, fertile. So it was true that Outsider females wandered around when they were fertile. Did they go on a mating hunt of some kind as a brood mother was supposed to do? The books, the films and the lectures of his education had not prepared him for the actuality, although he could rattle off the facts readily enough. She excited him and he wondered if Nils would entertain a suggestion that she be kept for breeding. It would be interesting to breed with her. A female in his band snarled at him then, a wordless sound of deep menace. Another said, "This Outsider female isn't a breeder. What are you doing with her?" "I investigate," Saldo said. "She is fertile." The one who had snarled at him found her voice. "Many of these wild ones are fertile." The other said, "She killed five of us. She's fit only for the vats." "Where she probably will go when we have finished questioning her," Saldo said. He spoke without trying to conceal an abrupt feeling of sadness. This Outsider female would be destroyed by the questioning -- no doubt of it. It was happening to the captive male. Such a waste. Her flesh would be good for nothing but the vats. H e arose, restored his nightmask to its position over his nose, said, "Bind her and carry her to the Hive. See that she does not escape. Two of you go to her vehicle. Bring it in for scavenging. Erase its tracks. No sign must remain that she and her companion were in our vicinity. See to it." The orders came from his mouth as Harvey had taught him, but Saldo felt a form of despair that such commands were necessary. The responsibilities of leadership had fallen upon him abruptly. A remote part of his awareness realized that Harvey's choice of so young a worker as second in command on this search had been a training gesture. A promising young worker needed this experience. Another part of Saldo's awareness rested securely in his sense of competence. He was a specialist in Hive security. He trusted his own responses. He felt perfectly fitted for the task at hand -- it was as though the entire Hive were reacting through his person. Harvey had lived beyond his day, had paid for a mistake with his life. It was a serious loss to the Hive. Nils would have the news of it by now and there would be concern, but for the moment, Saldo knew he must proceed along. His was the seat of command. "Those of you without other tasks," he said, "see that no sign of our activities remains here. I do not know alt of your talents as Old Harvey did, but you know them. Divide yourselves according to your abilities. No one of you is to return to the Hive until what must be is done. I will remain until the last to inspect the job." He stooped, recovered the flashlight he had left beside the Outsider female, extinguished it, put it into his pocket. Workers already had bound the female and were ready to take her back to the Hive. It saddened Saldo that he would not see her again. He didn't think he wanted to watch the questioning. A sudden anger at Outsider stupidity shook him. They were such fools. She deserved whatever happened to her. Saldo glanced around at his people. They were busy obeying his orders and appeared content on the surface, but he sensed an air of uncertainty. They knew how young and untried he was. They obeyed out of habit. In truth, they were still obeying Harvey. But Harvey had made a fatal mistake. Saldo promised himself that he would not make such a mistake. "Get down on your hands and knees and be thorough," he said. "Two of the nightmasks were shattered. There will be splinters to recover. Get them all." Saldo wandered up through the tall grass toward the place where two of his troop already were readying the vehicle for removal to the Hive. She had come down this way, that Outsider female. How odd it was that they wandered around freely when they were fertile, as though they had no concern whatsoever about selecting the best male for breeding. In truth, they were not like a brood mother at all. They were merely wild, fertile females. Perhaps some day -- when there were many Hives -- such wild females would be captured and put to proper breeding, or they would be neutered and employed in useful work. Some of the cattle that had fled the scene of disturbance had returned, drawn by curiosity, no doubt. The animals were bunching up in the open, below the place where his troop worked, and were facing the troop. The smell of blood and the noise had left them on edge, but they offered no threat. The cattle could not see Saldo's workers, but his workers could see the cattle. Saldo held his stunwand at the ready and moved to place himself between the cattle and his troop. A good imagination could guard against the unexpected. If the cattle stampeded toward his workers, the beasts would be knocked down by one sweep of his stunwand. Saldo paused periodically to stare across the rangeland toward the distant glow of the town, a dim reflection on clouds. It was unlikely anyone that far away had heard the shooting, but even if some had they would be sensible. Townsmen had learned to be reticent and cautious about Guarded Valley. The Hive possessed a buffer there, too, in the person of the district deputy sheriff, Lincoln Kraft. He was Hive-born and one of the most successful fronts the Hive had ever produced. Other Hive observers moved as ordinary Outsiders in the town. There were even more important fronts in the larger Outside world. Saldo had seen two when they visited the Hive -- a Senator and a judge. They filled dangerous posts which some day would not be needed. The sounds of his troop busily carrying out his orders pleased Saldo. He sniffed at the night air, detected a smell of gunpowder. Only the Hive-trained would be likely to recognize that scent now. It was but a faint trace among many other odors. The cattle began to quiet down and a few left the bunched herds to graze. This annqyed Saldo. Bunched up, the cows did not offer too much temptation, but he knew how disturbed his workers were. One of them could conceivably take a lone cow. That must be prevented. This would be Hive land some day -- the Hive might even have its own cattle. But for now such protein cost too much in plant energy. That kind of wastefulness must be left to the profligate Outsiders and their cattle must not be molested on this night. Nothing to attract unwanted attention must occur here. Saldo returned to his workers, moved among them, speaking in a low voice. They must not take any cattle. There must be time for the soil to conceal marks that had not been erased. No suspicious outsiders must appear here for as long as possible. Some day, Saldo told himself, there would be other Hives, many of them sprung from this one parent which he served and which now must conceal all trace of itself from the Outsiders. For now the Hive people must be cautious and guard their future. They owed this to generations of countless workers as yet unborn. The words of Nils Hellstrom: Our main breeding lines must be designed with the utmost attention to Hive necessities. In this we walk a much thinner edge than do the insects who provide us with our model for survival. Their life begins as ours -- by the fertilization of a single cell -- but the miracle of creation differs for us from that point on. An insect can reproduce four hundred and one it takes a single human embryo to develop. We can increase our Hive birthrate many times over, but never can we hope to to match this proliferation. attract Saldo's attention. There was still no sign of dawnlight, but the air had turned cold, as it often did here just before daybreak. The worker stopped in front of Saldo, spoke to him in a low voice. "Someone's coming from the Hive." "Who?" "I think it is Nils himself." Saldo turned his attention in the direction indicated by the worker, recognized the oncoming figure by his gait. Yes, it was Nils. He wore a nightmask, but carried no wand. Saldo put down a sense of relief tempered by a surge of displeasure. His decisions had been the correct ones, but Hellstrom had chosen to come to see. Saldo immediately chided himself. He could almost hear the reprimand in Harvey's aging voice: Isn't that what you would do? The leader of the Hive could do no less. The thought restored Saldo's feeling of calm competence. Hellstrom stopped a few paces from Saldo, examined the scene before speaking. He noted with approval that Saldo seemed to be doing what was necessary. "Tell me what has happened," Hellstrom finally said. "Have you had no report from the ones I sent to you?" "They reported, but I would prefer that the leader of this search troop give me his own assessment. Sometimes workers miss important things." Saldo nodded. Yes, the procedure was wise. He recounted the discovery of the Outsider female, the shooting; he left out no detail. "Should your wound be treated?" Hellstrom asked, peering at it. "It is minor," Saldo said. "No worse than a small burn." "Take care of it as soon as you return." Saldo heard concern for him in Hellstrom's voice, was warmed by it. "I heard Old Harvey choose you as his second in command," Hellstrom continued. "I was his choice." Saldo spoke with calm confidence. "Have any of the others displayed evidence of resenting you?" "Nothing serious." H ellstrom liked that answer. It said Saldo was aware of incipient challenges, but felt able to deal with them. He no doubt could deal with them, too. Saldo carried himself well. He possessed a sure sense of rightness -- about him hung an unspoken air of dominance. It must be tempered, though. "Did you enjoy being chosen by Old Harvey?" Hellstrom kept his voice flat. Saldo swallowed. Had he done something wrong? The question had held a prying coldness. But Hellstrom was smiling faintly beneath his nightmask. "I enjoyed it," Saldo admitted, a faint uncertainty in his tone. Hellstrom heard the selfquestioning quality in the younger man's voice, nodded. Uncertainty bred caution. One could go from liking authority into a gambler's stance, become overconfident. Hellstrom mentioned this in a quiet voice that carried only between them. When he had finished Hellstrom said, "Tell me all you have ordered to be done here." Saldo took up his account from where he had left off. He spoke with noticeable hesitations, questing in his own mind for possible errors, for needed corrections. Hellstrom interrupted to ask, "Who was first to see the Outsider female?" "Harvey," Saldo said, recalling the motion of the old man's hand, the upthrust pointing finger to denote his discovery. A trickle of perspiration ran down Saldo's cheek. He wiped at it irritatedly and the action burned his wound. "What orders did he give then?" "He had told us earlier that we were to circle her when we found her. We carried out that procedure with further orders." "What did Harvey do next?" "He had no chance to do anything. The female turned on her light and began shooting." Hellstrom looked down at the ground between them, glanced around. Several nearby workers had left their tasks out of curiosity and had moved closer to listen. "Why aren't you workers doing as your leader ordered?" Hellstrom demanded. "Your leader gave you specific instructions. Carry them out." He turned back to Saldo. "They are tired," Saldo said, defending his people. "I will make a personal inspection of their work before leaving." This one is a jewel, Hellstrom thought. He takes personal responsibility without hesitation. "Exactly where were you when she began shooting?" "I was at the other end of the sweep from Harvey. When we closed the loop I found myself beside him." "Who knocked her out of the tree?" "The workers across from us where her light did not reach. The rest of us were dodging." "And Harvey have no more commands?" "I believe he was the first one hit. I heard her first shot and -- " He hesitated, shrugged. "I froze for an instant. Then I was hit and we were all rushing about. I saw Harvey go down and started toward him. There were more shots and suddenly it was all over. She fell out of the tree." "Your confusion is understandable because you were wounded," Hellstrom said. "I notice, however, that you kept your sense of balance sufficiently to You lived up to my expectations. But always remember what happened here. You have had a good lesson. The hunting of an Outsider is never the same as the hunting of any other animal. Do you understand that now?" praised and censured. His attention went to the tree in which the female had concealed herself, returned reluctantly to Hellstrom. Hellstrom said, "You caught the female alive and that's the important thing." He pursed his lips. "She carried a weapon and Harvey should have anticipated that. He should have brought her down the instant he saw her. He was within range. Do you know how to use Outsider weapons, Saldo?" "Yes. Harvey himself trained me." "Learn to use them well. The Hive could have need of such abilities. Let's see, you're thirtytwo years old, isn't that correct?" "Yes." "You still could pass for a youth among Outsiders. It may be that we will send you to one of their schools before long. We have ways of doing such things. You know about this." "I have not spent much time Outside," Saldo said. "I know. What experiences have you had?" "I spent a week in the town oncebut not alone." "Work or training?" "Training for myself and others with me." "Would you like to go outside alone?" "I don't think I'm ready for it." Hellstrom nodded, pleased with the candor of the answer. Saldo would make a superb security specialist. He already was far and away the most intuitively accurate among the New Breed. Give him a bit more experience and there would be none to compare with him. He possessed that beautiful Hive feeling for truth. He wouldn't lie, not even about himself. He was a leader to be preserved and nurtured. Hive conventions demanded this and the present circumstances required that Hellstrom begin that nurturing. "You are doing very well here," Hellstrom said, speaking loudly enough for others to hear. "When the present crisis is over, we'll make arrangements to send you Outside for further education. For now, report to me when you've finished out here." He turned slowly strolled back toward the Hive, pausing occasionally to glance around. His every movement said he was satisfied to leave matters to Saldo. For a moment Saldo watched Hellstrom go. The Hive's First Councilor, leader in every crisis, the Prime Male -- the one to whom all others turned when in doubt, even those who guided breeding and food production and tool fabrication -- the chief worker among them all had come out on a fact-finding expedition and had approved what he found. Saldo returned to overseeing the cleanup with a new sense of a elation that was strongly tempered by a deeper respect for his own limitations. X Minutes of the Hive Council: Interview with PhilosopherSpecialist Harl (translated from Hivesign) -- Once again. Philosopher Harl, we must disappoint you by telling you we have not come to take you to the blessed vats. Your great age, greater than that of any other worker in the Hive, and the artificial means we must use to keep life burning within you and all of the other reasons your wisdom uses in its arguments that we give you the release of the vats -- all these are difficult to refute. We respectfully request that you cease these arguments and recall the Hive's great need for your wisdom. We come again to ask your advice on how the Hive should employ the results of a successful Project #. We can anticipate your first question and must answer it by saying that Project # is not yet fruitful. The worker specialists charged with the project say, however, that they can assure us of success. They say it is only a matter of time. Thus the words of Philosopher-Specialist Harl: Possession of an ultimate weapon, of an ultimate threat to all of the life that shares this planet, brings with it no guarantee of supremacy. The very act of threatening to use such a weapon unless certain conditions prevail puts control of such a weapon into the hands of all those who control the conditions. You face the problem of what to do when these others say to you. "So use your weapon!" In this manner many will have the weapon. Even more to the point -- anyone able to threaten the possessor of such a weapon also posesses it. Thus an ultimate weapon is useless unless those who controj it can temper the weapon's violence. The weapon must have degrees of application which are less than ultimate. Take your lesson from the defense mechanisms everywhere visible in the insects who provide us with our pattern for survival. The spikes and prickles, the stingers and thorns, the burning chemicals and poisoned spears that jut angrily into the air, all these are defense mechanisms. They say. Don't threaten me. slowly that her hands were bound behind her and that she was fastened securely into a chair of some kind. The chair's surface was hard and she could feel the cold smoothness of its back against her arms. The most central part of her awareness focused on her ankle, which throbbed painfully where she had sprained it. Fighting a deep reluctance, she opened her eyes, but found only an impenetrable darkness, thick and ominous. For a moment she feared she might be blind, but a faint glow insinuated itself into her awareness. The glow existed at an indeterminate distance directly in front of her. It moved. "Ahhh, you're awake, I see." The voice was deep, masculine and came from somewhere above the moving glow. Something about its echoing quality told her she was in a room -- quite a large room. She put down her terror with difficulty, forced a false nonchalance into her voice. "How can you see? It's pitch dark." Hellstrom, seated in a corner of the laboratory where he could watch the glowing instruments that told him the female's reactions, admired her courage. "I can see," he said. "My ankle hurts like hell." "I truly regret that. We will give you something for that presently. Try to be patient." She found an oddly reassuring sincerity in the voice. It ranged from low to tenor and sounded under exquisite control. "I hope I won't have to stand this for very long," she said. She must be brought into some semblance of calmness, Hellstrom told himself. The nightmask was irritating where it pressed against his nose and forehead. He did not like the way it limned the female in a silvery glow. His annoyance came from fatigue, he knew. Sometimes the Hive demanded too much of him. But this Outsider female must be questioned and he found himself reluctant to turn her over to the merciless youngsters who always waited eagerly for an opportunity to prove themselves. He told himself that he delayed with this female because he did not trust what the others had wrenched from Depeaux. How could the Outsiders know about Project #? One of the interrogators must have mentioned it. That had to be the answer of course. It could be tested with this female. "First I must ask you a few questions," he said. "Why are you keeping it so dark?" she asked. "So you cannot see me." A sudden elation filled her. The fact that her questioner didn't want her to see him meant she would have an opportunity later to describe him. This in-turn could only mean he meant to release her. tion on his instruments. He said, "You were hysterical out there earlier. Did you think we were going to harm you?" What does he mean by that question? she wondered. They had her tied up like a Christmas turkey. "I was terrified," she said. "Did -- did I hurt anyone?" "You killed five of our people and injured two others." She had not expected such a coldly candid answer and it shocked her. Five dead? Could they actually release her after that? "I -- I felt trapped," she said. "My -- my husband was not back and I was alone. I was terribly afraid. What have you done to Carlos?" "He is suffering no pain," Hellstrom said. And that was true, he told himself. It was difficult to lie outright, even to a wild Outsider. His statement was true. Depeaux had been blissfully unconscious when his torn body had been slipped into the choppers and thence to the dissolving fluids of the vats. He had suffered no pain there and surely death had overcome him before any glimmering return to consciousness. The choppers were quick. "Why do you have me tied this way?" she asked. "To keep you in one place while I ask my questions. Tell me your name." They would have her cover-identification papers, she thought. "My name's Tymiena -- Tymiena Depeaux." "Tell me about this government agency for which you work." Her heart skipped a beat, but she managed a semblance of masked response: "Gov -- I don't work for any government agency! We were on vacation. My husband sells fireworks." Hellstrom smiled sadly at what his instruments revealed. It was true, then -- both of them worked for a government agency and that agency was curious. Although he had been opaque to most of their probings. Porter had revealed as much. But Porter had not said anything about Project #. Would this female impart such information? He felt a quickening of his pulse. This was the kind of danger the Hive had always feared, but something in It aroused his hunt juices. Strom asked. "I'm just a housewife!" she protested. "Where's Carlos? What've you done with my husband?" Hellstrom sighed. It was not the could be trusted and provided she even knew the connections behind her employment. It was possible she did not know. Such agencies had a proclivity for putting covers on covers on covers. "Do not worry about your husband," he said. "You will be with him soon. We know, however, that you are not a simple housewife. Simple housewives do not carry such weapons as you had in your possession. They certainly do not demonstrate the proficiency you displayed with a weapon." "I don't believe I killed anyone," she said. "But you did." "Carlos insisted I have that gun. He taught me how to shoot it." Another lie, Hellstrom observed from his instruments. He felt cheated. Why was she continuing to hide? Surely she must know by now that she had been exposed by her accomplice. His questions could not conceal this. Hellstrom had forced himself to read the Depeaux interrogation account, avoiding nothing. What the merciless youngsters did they did in the name of the Hive. He wondered if he dared put her through a chemical reduction of personality. The youngsters argued against it. The method was painless, but uncertain. It had reduced Porter to slavering imbecility. The process tended to erase memories as it exposed them. He did not want the Porter effort repeated and decided not to listen to his own inner revulsions. What must be, must be. He would continue with present methods, however, for as long as she did not suspect her emotions were being monitored and as long as information was being gathered. The tapes were spinning to record everything that occurred here. They could be subjected to a full analysis later. Even the Hive's central computer might be helpful in the analysis, although Hellstrom tended to distrust computers. They had no emotions. Having no emotions, they failed when confronted by human problems. "Why do you lie?" he asked. "I'm not lying!" "Is the agency that employs you an arm of the U.S. State Department?" "If you won't believe me, there's no sense in my answering. I just don't understand what's going on here. You chase me, knock me out, tie me up and all for -- " "And you killed five of my friends," he reminded her. "Why?" "I don't believe you. You'd better let me go. Carlos is a very important man in his company. There are people who'll come looking for us if I don't call them." "If you don't report in?" HellStrom studied his instruments. She had been telling the truth there. "It's not like that!" So she was supposed to report in, probably at regular intervals, Hellstrom thought. The eager youngsters had not elicited that from Depeaux. But then, they hadn't asked. "Why were you sent here?" "I wasn't sent -- " "Then what were you doing here?" S HE seized this opportunity to elaborate on her cover story: the long hours Carlos usually worked, the rare vacations, his interest in birds, her own interest in landscape painting. There was a certain delicate practicality about her account, a sense of domesticity she found herself almost wishing were true.  Carlos hadn't been such a bad sort in spite of... She broke off her account as this thought intruded. It confused her. There was internal significance in such a thought. Why would she think about Carlos in the ' past tense? Carlos was dead! She felt certain of this. What had that character over there in the dark said to give her this feeling of certainty? She trusted her instincts and felt fear rising like a tide of bile. : Hellstrom saw the emotion on his instruments, tried to divert her. "Are you hungry?" he asked. ' She found it difficult to speak at first, then responded in spite of a : dry mouth. "No, but my ankle I hurts terribly." "We'll take care of that pretty soon," he reassured her. "Tell me, Mrs. Depeaux, if you were frightened, why did you not drive down to Fosterville in your camper?" That's what I should have done! she told herself. But she suspected this character and his friends had been prepared for such an attempt and that wouldn't have succeeded either. She said, "I must have done something wrong. It wouldn't start." "That's odd," he said. "It started immediately for us." So they had the camper, too. All evidence of Depeaux and Grinelli would be gone by now. Carlos and Tymiena, both dead. A tear trickled down her left cheek. "Are you a communist agent?" In spite of himself Hellstrom chuckled. Then: "What an odd question from a simple housewife!" His amusement filled her with bracing anger. "You're the one who keeps talking about agents and the State Department," she flared. "What's going on here?" "You are not what you appear to be, Mrs. Depeaux," Hellstrom said. "There is even some doubt in mind as to whether you actually are Mrs. Depeaux." (Ah, that hit a nerve, he noted. So they were just working together and not married.) "I suspect you did -- do not even care much for Carlos." Did not care, she thought. That's what he was going to say. He caught himself. The lie came out... She began to think back over this unseen man's every reference to Carlos. The dead felt no pain. There was a sense of over-and-done with about every mention of Carlos. She revised her assessment of her own situation. Darkness could have another significance than hiding the identity of her interrogator. It could be a deliberate ploy to confuse her, lower her defenses. She began to explore her bindings, straining against them. They were damnably tight. "You do not answer me," Hellstrom said. "Why should I? I think you're awful." "Is your agency an arm of the government's executive branch?" "No." He read otherwise in her responses, but it was a tempered reading. The answer probably was that she believed this to be the case but harbored her own doubts. He noted she was twisting frantically, trying to escape her bounds now. Didn't she believe he could see her? "Why does the government investigate us?" he asked. She refused to answer. The bindings were deceptive. They felt like leather and appeared to give when she strained against them, but when she stopped struggling even for an instant they felt as tighf as ever. "You work for an agency associated with the executive arm of government," he said. "It is a matter of curiosity that such an agency should pry into our affairs. What interest could the government have in us?" "You're going to kill me, aren't you?" she asked. She gave up struggling, felt completely exhausted. Her mind teetered on the edge of hysteria. They were going to kill her. They had killed Carlos and were going to kill her. Something had gone very sour. It was the very thing she'd sensed in this assignment from the first. That damned fool, Merrivale! He never got anything right. And Carlos -- the dope of dopes. Carlos had probably walked right into a trap. They had caught him and he had spilled his guts. That was obvious. This questioner knew too many things already. Carlos had babbled and they had killed him. revealed her approach to hysteria. The fear disturbed him. Efe knew his reaction came partly from his own sensitivity to her subtle bodily excretions. She was broadcasting terror for anyone Hive-trained to receive. No worker could have escaped an awareness. He didn't even need his instruments. This room would have to be flushed out later. They had had to do the same thing after interrogating Depeaux. Any workers who encountered such emission would be disturbed. He still had his duty to the Hive, though. Perhaps in her fear she would reveal what he most wanted to know. "You work for the government," he said. "We know this. You were sent here to pry into our affairs -- what did you expect to find?" "I wasn't!" she screamed. "I wasn't! I wasn't! I wasn't! Carlos just told me we were going on vacation. What have you done with Carlos?" "You're lying," he said. "I know you are lying and you certainly must realize by now that your lies are not working with me. It will go better with you if you tell me the truth." "You're going to kill me anyway" she whispered. Damn! Hellstrom thought. His brood mother had warned him that this crisis-within-a-crisis might come in his lifetime. His workers had tortured a wild human. It had been done far outside the concept of mercy -- the idea had not even entered the workers' awareness as they had gone about their business of extracting information necessary for the Hive's survival. But such actions left their mark upon the entire Hive. There were no more innocents anywhere within the Hive. We've moved a step closer to the insects we mimic, he thought. And he wondered why the thought saddened him. He suspected that any life form that inflicted unnecessary pain tended to Find its consciousness eroding. Without consciousness to reflect back upon life, all life might lose its sense of purpose. In sudden anger he snarled, "Tell me about Project Forty!" She gasped. Then they knew everything. What had they done to Carlos to make him tell everything? She felt icy with terror. "Tell me," he barked. "I -- I don't know what you're talking about." The instruments told him what he needed to know. "It will go very badly with you if you do not tell me," he said. "I wish to spare you that. Tell me about Project Forty." "But I don't know anything -- " The instruments accorded this the value of an almost-truth. "You know some things about it," he said. "Tell me what you do know." "Why don't you just kill me?" Hellstrom found himself working through a haze of deep sadness, almost despair. Powerful wild humans Outside knew about Project #! How could that be? What did they know? This female was little more than a pawn in a larger game, but she might yet provide a valuable clue. "You must tell me what you know," he said. "If you do I promise to treat you gently." "I don't trust you," she said. "You have no one else to trust." "They'll come looking for me!" "But they will not find you. Now, tell me what you know about Project Forty." "It's just a name," she said, wilting. What was the use? They knew everything else. "Where did you encounter this name?" "There were papers. They were our people copied them." Stunned, Hellstrom closed his eyes. "What was in those papers?" "Some figures and formulas and things which didn't make much sense. But someone suggested they could be part of the design for a weapon." "Did he say what kind of weapon?" "I think they said a 'particle pump' or something like that. They said such a weapon could resonate matter at a distance, break glass and that sort of thing." She signed deeply, wondered why she was talking. They were going to kill her anyway. What did anything matter? "Are -- your people attempting to make such a weapon from these papers?" "They're trying, but I heard that the papers they found were incomplete. They're not sure about a lot of things and there's an argument over whether it's really a weapon." "They do not agree that it's a weapon?" "I don't think so." Again she sighed. "Is it a weapon?" "It is a weapon," he said. "Are you going to kill me now?" she asked. T 'HE plaintive, pleading note in her voice sent rage erupting in him. The fools! The utter fools! He groped for his stunwand which he had dropped to the floor beside the instruments, found it and brought it up, setting for full charge. Those wild idiots Outside had to be stopped. He thrust the wand toward her as though he wanted to penetrate her flesh with it, let her have the full charge. The force of it resonating in the insulated confines of the laboratory stunned him for an instant and when he had recovered he saw that all of the needles on his instruments had dropped to zero. He turned on the lab's lights, rose to his feet slowly and crossed to the female form sagging in the chair. She lay slumped to her right, held by the bindings. She was utterly still. He knew she was dead before he bent and confirmed it. She had taken a charge strong enough to kill a steer. There would be no more questioning of Tymiena, whatever her name was. Why did I do that? he wondered. Had it been the memory of Depeaux's shattered flesh going into the vats? Was it some higher demand from his Hive awareness? Or had it been a peculiar personal quirk? He had acted in reflex, not thinking. It was done -- no calling it back. But his own behavior troubled him. Still in the grip of anger, he strode from the lab. When the eager youngsters in the outer room crowded around him he waved them aside, told them the captive female was dead. He answered their protests with curt gestures, saying only that he had learned what he needed to learn. When one of the youngsters asked if they should take the carcass to the vats or try for a sexual stump he paused for only the briefest reflection before agreeing that they should try for a stump. Perhaps some of that female flesh could be revived and preserved. If her womb could be maintained she might yet serve the Hive. It would be interesting to see a child of that flesh. Other problems dominated his awareness, however. He stalked from the lab area, still angry with himself. Outsiders knew about Project #! A Hive worker had been destructively careless. How had such papers been allowed out of the Hive? Who had done this? done the research there? The Hive must learn the extent of this disaster and take quick action to ensure that nothing of this sort ever happened again. He hoped the breeder labs succeeded in making a sexual stump of Tymiena. She had served the Hive already and she deserved to have her genes preserved. is known and loved by a legion of readers from all walks of life. They read him, buy him, and come back for more! You have never seen a writer analyzed like this before. Clothbound, #. And Also From Mirage... Third in this popular series of articles and art on sorcery and swordplay by top authors. Clothbound, #. Unusual adult poetry illustrated by Tim Kirk. Cloth. #. A major SF great analyzes the father of modern science fiction's ideas on progress. Cloth, #. Revised and expanded, paper, #. nis Rickard; introduction by Gahan Wilson. A photo book of Smith's weird carvings, paper, #. A huge dictionary and concordance to the works of Tolkien, called "the ultimate Tolkien reference work. "Cloth #. Ask for a Free catalog. Write: # April #. Today I resolved to begin keeping a diary. Unfortunately nothing of real interest happened. # April. Nothing happened again today. Just registration. # April. I can't go on wasting paper or Earth's Conservation Board will take my diary away and process it into something useful, like toilet paper. So even though nothing happened again, I'll fill up this space with biographical detail that will no doubt be of great value to future historians. I was born Jonathan Wu, on # January #, to Martha and Jonathan Wu II, out of the surrogate host-mother Sally #-#. My parents were wealthy enough to be permitted two legal children, but my early behavior convinced them that one was sufficient. As soon as I was old enough to travel, barely four, they packed me off to Clavius Tutorial Creche, figuring that a safe distance from which to monitor my growth. Clavius Creche, it says here, was established as a uniquely isolated and controlled environment for the cultivation of little scholars. And medium-sized scholars. But when you get to be big gangling scholar, you've got to go somewhere else. There are no universities on the moon, only technical schools. You can take up Lunar citizenship -- as long as you're mutandis -- and be admitted to one of those technical schools, winding  up as some kind of supercerebral mechanic. But I suppose my father planet with me rather than allow me to grow into being something other than a gentleman. I got back to Earth one week ago today. # April. We began course work today. This quarter I'm taking supposedly parallel courses in algorithmic analysis and logical systems. If I ever get "introduced" to Boolean algebra again I'll curl into a ball and swallow my tongue. Continuing readings and analysis in classical Greek and Latin. Supposed to do preliminary readings for next quarter: XXth Century English and American Poets and Commercial Literature as a Cultural Index. This will be with Applied Stochastic Analysis and Artificial Intelligence I. The poetry is amusing but the "commercial" novels make tedious reading. One has always to keep in mind that none of these authors was born with the benefit of genetic engineering and they were at best men of unremarkable intelligence in a world populated with morons and worse. Earth gravity tires me. # April. I was talking with my advisor (Greek and Latin) Dr. Friedman and complained about the sterility of this upcoming literature course. He introduced me to the work of an Irish author named Joyce, lending me a copy of the construct Finnegans Wake. It has taken me ten hours to read the first thirty pages -- totally immersed in it through lunch and dinner. Fascinating. Easily equal to the best of Thruman -- why weren't we given Joyce at Creche? I am required to walk for at least two hours every day in order to become accustomed to the gravity. Thus I am writing this standing up, the diary propped on a bookshelf. Also must eat handfuls of nauseating calcium tablets and will have to walk with braces until my leg bones have hardened. Had I stayed on the moon another five years I probably never would have been able to return to Earth (a prospect which at present would not bother me a bit). The braces chafe and look ridiculous in this foppish Earth clothing. But I get a certain notoriety out of being such an obvious extraterrestrial. My father called this morning and we talked about my courses for a few minutes. # April. Today was the first day I ventured outside the campus complex on foot. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling to be outside without suiting up. Of course, one does wear a respirator (even inside some of the buildings, which leak), and that does something to allay the agoraphobia. How will I react to the geophysics course next year? The students take field trips to wild preserves where they work for extended periods simply under the sky, exposed to the elements. I realize that mine is an irrational of years breathing natural air, walking around in the open without the slightest thought that there should be something around them. Perhaps I can convince them that since on Luna this fear is not irrational, but part of survival -- perhaps they will grant me some sort of dispensation -- waive the course, or at least allow me to wear a suit. While wandering around outside the campus I dropped into a tavern that supposedly caters to students. I had some ordinary wine and a bit of hashish which wasn't at all like the Lunar product. It only served to make me tired. The tavernkeeper didn't believe that I was sixteen until I produced my passport. I got into a rather long and pointless conversation with an Earthie mutandis over the necessity for interplanetary tariff imbalance. They know so little about the other worlds. But then I know little enough about Earth -- for one who was born here. I was barely able to get back to the dormitory without assistance and slept through half of my normal reading period. Had to take stimulants to finish the last book of the Georgies. So much of it is about open-air farming that it kept bringing back my earlier discomfort. Resolved not to smoke any more Earth hashish until I get my strength back. # April. Algorithmic analysis has an economy and order that appeals to me. ! had, of course, planned to take my doctorate in Letters, but now I want to investigate mathematics further. My father would have apoplexy. A gentleman hires mathematicians. I made an appointment with the advising facility for tomorrow. I am having difficulty making friends. Customs here are rather strange, but I have grown up in knowledge of that and am prepared to make any adjustment. Perhaps I am too critical of Earth society. An embarrassing illustration: this morning for the first time I felt strong enough for sex. Thinking this would be an ideal way to begin more cordial relations with Earthies, I made a tactful suggestion of that nature to one of my classmates in Systems. She was quite indignant and wound up giving me a lecture on cultural relativism. The kernel of it, at least as applied to this situation, was that one is supposed to go through an elaborate series of courting gestures with a prospective mate. Like a bird ruffing out his feathers and cooing. I told her this might make some sense if the ritual had something to do with predicting or promoting future sexual compatibility between the two people, which it didn't. She reacted with almost frightening force. My father had warned me about this moral oddity, but I was given to understand that it applied only to the tower classes and, specifically, to the remaining homo sapiens. Certainly there is a good argument for reducing the number of unengineered births by repressing casual sexual contact, but the same restrictive behavioral patterns shouldn't be impressed on homo mutandis, to which group I assumed my classmate belonged. From the speciousness of her argument, I suppose it's possible it's possible she doesn't, but then how could she get into a university? Of course, I wouldn't insult her by asking. #I April. The machine analyzed my profile and said that I had the potential for moderate success in mathematics, but that I was temperamentally better suited for literature. It advised that I continue a double course of study for as long as possible and then switch all my energies to one field or the other as back publisher to specialize in science fiction, and the only paperback publisher pledged solely to volumes that have never been in paperback. There is no risk of getting stuck with reprints of old softcover science fiction with changed covers, changed numbers and. so often, changed titles. When you see and ##. Look for Gordon R. Dickson's SF book selected by the N.Y. Times (in its high-priced, hardbound edition) as one of the "Hundred Best Books of the Year." Look for John Brunner's concepts by one of the original-idea giants. Thomas Burnett Swann fans -- and they are many -- will rejoice with of the pre-humans of the Wanderwood -- beautifully illustrated by George Barr. And last but not least. John Jakes does a takeoff on the whole tradition should sink the Lost Continent and a certain Chimmerical King Conax -- at one and the same timel Wollheim. its publisher and editor. #c is the retail book price (including soon as it became clear in which direction my greatest interest lay. An agreeable course of action, perhaps because of my natural indecisiveness. I have found a friend after all. He isn't an Earthie, but a Martian, also come to Earth for "polish." His name is Chatham Howard and he was flattered that I recognized the Howard name both for its role in early Martian history and for the social rank it now represents on Mars. He is a year ahead of me, studying sociology. # AprU. Chatham took me to a party and introduced me to a number of very pleasant Earthies. I'm still sorting out the impressions, changing my ideas a little bit. Not all Earthies my age are immature provincials. Met an interesting female by the name of Pamela Anderson. I have begun the courting ritual to the best of my abilities. I was attentive and complimentary (though she had some strange ideas, she is not unintelligent) and agreed to meet her tomorrow for the evening meal. We kissed once. Odd custom. # April. Chatham and a friend joined Pamela and me for dinner at Luigi's, a restaurant that specializes in an old-fashioned cuisine called "North-AmericanItalian." It is more spicy than I am accustomed to, but Pamela recommended a fairly bland dish called spaghetti with mushroom sauce. It was rather good and reminiscent of some familiar fungi dishes. After dinner we went to a public theater and saw a drama tape that consisted mainly of views of various couples copulating. It was much the same as the tapes I'd been watching in mental hygiene classes since I was eight years old, but in this bizarre setting I found it strangely exciting. We had drinks at the theater after the show and engaged in some bright banter. It was all quite enjoyable, but I got the impression that Pamela was not yet interested in me sexually. This was a disappointment, especially after Chatham's friend quite directly asked him to spend the night with her. Pamela was warm but extended no such invitation. For the first time I wondered whether she might not consider me too "alien" for a sex partner. I am a half-meter taller than she and my Lunar myaesthenia is all too evident, with the braces and my quickness to fatigue. I'm also a couple of years younger than she, which evidently is rather important on Earth. I found out in our conversation that many of the customs relating to this mating ritual are centuries old. This is an exasperating thing about Earth -- in many ways they cling stubbornly to the cultural matrix that brought them to within a buttoin-push of destroying humanity. 'On the Worlds, at least we had the sense to junk it all and start over. Sometimes it brings me up short to remember that I was born an Earthie. # April. Today I got lost in the middle of writing a long Turing Machine algorithm when my mind strayed to Pamela. I had to go back to the beginning and start over. Idiotic! Perhaps all this medication is affecting my mental discipline. Continuing with analysis of the writings of Virgil, or at least those attributed to him. Obvious many of them written by somebody else. # April. Pamela met me, without prior arrangement, outside my Systems classroom -- an encouragingly aggressive sign. But it turned out that her real interest was in learning more about Lunar mores for a paper in Comparative Sociology. We went down to the cafeteria and discussed, essentially, how different she was from me. I left feeling depressed, but with a "date" for a concert tomorrow. # April. The concert was on an ancient instrument called the "glass harmonica." The melodies were interesting, but the rhythms were simplistic and the harmonies progressed in a predictable manner. Yet the overall effect was moving. I learned the most startling thing after the concert. Pamela is not mutandis. We went to a bhang shop with another couple and talked about the difference, the distance between sapiens and mutandis. She accused me of being ill-informed and patronizing when I talked about our obligation to guide and protect sapiens as they inevitably died out over the next few generations. She said she was not engineered and her children were not going to be, nor their children. She said something we had not been taught on Luna, but once it was pointed out I had to admit her argument was obvious. She maintained that there was no guarantee that genetic engineering was going to be successful in a long race and that humanity must maintain a large and pure community of sapiens for several centuries in case the "experiment" fails. I privately disagreed with her contention that sapiens must always remain in the majority. be adequate to the task of rebuilding the race, should all of us mutandi turn purple and explode. Of course her worry was political rather than biological. She was concerned that we might irrationally legislate sapiens out of existence -- were we in the majority. She said we had done exactly that on Luna and I had to explain patiently why we no longer allowed sapiens as colonists. It was not prejudice, but simple logic. She was not convinced. Of course, this explains why I was so surprised to find that Pamela was not mutandis. All the sapiens on Luna are quite old and mentally incompetent because of a lack of correctional therapeutics in their youth. I was guilty of unconsciously projecting my attitudes toward their manifest inferiority onto Earthie sapiens. Somehow the fact that she is not mutandis does not make her less attractive to me. My regard for her intellectual abilities should be greater, knowing as I do now that she started out with a genetic handicap. The main thing I feel now is a vague distrust of her emotional reliability. Or do I mean predictability? It is all very confusing. # April. Algorithmic Analysis test tonight. Not difficult but studying for it was very timeconsuming. # April. Pamela took me to the zoo. A tiring but extremely rewarding day. Animals are fascinating. It occurred to me that being adult -- or nearly so -- and seeing non-human creatures for the first time in my life might give me some unique insight. Instead of writing a long entry in this diary tonight I will begin an essay on the experience. My feet are throbbing. Told Pamela the joke about the computer playing chess with itself and she laughed. Was this the first time I've seen her laugh? # April. Pamela read my essay and left, saying she never wanted to see me again. She was crying. # April. I have reconsidered some of the comparisons I made (in the essay) between sapiens and animals. They were meant to be satirical, but I can see in the light of Pamela's reaction that this intent was not clear. Rather than attempt to translate my efforts at humor into Earthie terms I deleted these passages. I sent a copy to Pamela. Reading back, I see I have known her little more than a week. Odd. I May. Latin test. # May. Pamela visited today, bringing a male companion. She did not mention the essay. I realized that I don't know Pamela well enough to decide whether she brought the other man. Hill Beaumont, in order to provoke jealousy in me (consciously or otherwise). I understand jealousy, of course, from my reading, but I have never felt it and believe myself immune. Besides, Beaumont is a rather stupid fellow. # May. Beaumont dropped in alone today, saying that he had read the essay and complimenting me at some length on it. He is still a dull oaf, but I can't help now feeling more kindly disposed toward him. He wanted to take me out and chatter over a bottle of wine, but I pleaded lack of time. Which was trueGreek test tomorrow evening and I have neglected it lately. Much reading ! to do. I asked about Pamela. Beauj mont said he hadn't seen her since I they left me yesterday. f # May. Greek. Stayed in my I room all day, studying, but act cepted an invitation to eat with I Chatham and Beaumont after the I test. Quite a lot happened and I even though it's after two in the r morning I think I'll stay up and J memory. We met at Luigi's for a light ' supper and wine. Chatham, of course, is always interesting, but the evening was almost spoiled for me when Beaumont revealed with a conversational flourish that y he, also, was mutandis. In fact, he is an elected officer in a local club, the membership of which is restricted to "us." There was a j! meeting of the club that night and  Beaumont invited me to come and speak to them, mainly on the  subject of the essay about animals. I He had his copy of the essay with him. Chatham said he had a previous engagement, but urged me to go along, saying the meetings were always amusing. I didn't see any way I could gracefully decline -- figured it might even be fun as long as they weren't all like Beaumont. We left Chatham to finish off the wine -- an office for which he had singular talent -- and slid a couple of blocks to the meeting place. Some of Beaumont's friends have the oddest ideas about what it means to be mutandis. The gathering was one of the strangest affairs I've experienced on Earth. First a man stood up and demonstrated a construct which was a poem, in Latin, written in the form of an eighty-by-eight matrix. He showed how you could perform semantic analogues of the normal reduction transformations to get various intermediate poems -- none of which made much sense -- and arrive finally at a matrix that was null throughout except for sum-sum-sum-sum all down the main diagonal. A puerile exercise, bad poetry and naive mathematics, but everybody seemed dutifully impressed. Then a woman showed a "sculpture" she had made by synthesizing a large cube of piezoelectric crystal and fracturing it, in what she felt to be an artistic way, by applying various charges to different parts of the surface. That she could have arrived at a similar end by merely dropping the thing on a hard floor did not diminish audience appreciation. So it went for an hour and a half. My presentation was the last one and I'm sure nine-tenths of the applause I got was due to that fact, rather than to any intrinsic merit of the composition. The disturbing part of the evening, though, was a roundtable discussion about sapiens and what eventually would have to be done about them. Some of the reasoning was so fuzzy that it wouldn't have done justice to a child in first-form Creche. One thing I learned -- one very surprising thing -- was that mutandi make up only about # of the Earth's population. Why did they hide this fact from us in Creche? At any rate, the irrational nature of some of their proposals tonight might possibly be excused as simple "minority paranoia." An idea that met with'a good deal of approval struck me as both sneaky and foolish. There is agitation from various groups concerned with population control to make the practice of host-mothership universal and require that all people be sterilized soon after puberty, having filed a sample of sperm or ovum with the government. Thus the size of every family could be absolutely regulated by the government. It was pointed out that this would inevitably lead to universal manipulation of all of humanity's genetic material -- reasoning that mutandis being manifestly superior to the rest of humanity, it was only a question of time before they held all important governmental positions. Thus assured of freedom from bureaurocratic interference they would, of course, institute a program of universal genetic manipulation. For the benefit of all humanity. Somebody brought up Pamela's argument that it will take many generations before we are sure genetic manipulation is totally safe. Most felt that it would be sufficiently proven by the time "we" have taken over. I told them that the weakness in the idea had nothing to do with manipulation -- that the universal storage of genetic material was in itself a questionable idea. For the convenience of the government all of it would probably be stored near government centers which, like any large concentration of people, get power from one source: microwaves beamed down from the orbital solar stations. The fact that these have functioned continuously for over a century doesn't mean they are immune to breakdown. In fact, it's quite likely that if they go, it will be because of some powerful solar event that would affect all of them simultaneously. No power, no refrigeration. The genetic material, at least most of it, would thaw out and die and humanity would have to depend on the current crop of children to reach sexual maturity and replenish the race. That crop might be small indeed if there were stringent controls on family size. There might not be enough breeders to bring the next generation up to a size sufficient to carry on civilization as we live it now. And a power failure might not even require a solar catastrophe. It's possible that some people wouldn't like the idea of our changing all of humankind into mutandis and would sabotage the sperm and ovum banks without thinking or caring about the consequences. They listened politely to my counter-arguments, but I don't think many of them were convinced. They take electrical power too much for granted here on Earth. They have lived with local failures, which meant little more than having to walk down still slidewalks for a few hours. There has of course been only one power failure on Luna. # May. Knowing that Pamela has a course in Sociometrics, I contrived to spend a few hours down at the social sciences computing facility, supposedly checking out an algorithm that simulated a Turing machine. Actually I knew that it worked, having run it successfully over at the mathematics facility, but I kept putting glitches in it in order to remain at the console. She did show up after four hours. Luckily she was only there to pick up a printout. It was dinner time, so I escorted her down to the Union. We each got a plate of small sandwiches and talked. I told her about my experience with Beaumont's crowd. She was amused, which for some reason made me angry at first -- just because she was sapiens, I guess -- but she jostled me about it so much that I wound up laughing, too. She admitted that this had been her purpose when she first introduced Beaumont to me -- to demonstrate that not all mutandi were a priori superior examples of humanity. In the dining hall I said hello to one of the girls who had been at last night's meeting, the one with the piezoelectric sculpture. She stared right through me and didn't miss a bite. # May. What a long and disturbing day. This morning I found this note in my box: I sought out Beaumont and, yes, he had heard of stecom, the Steering Committee for Humanity, but never to his knowledge had ever caused anyone "profound trouble." It served mainly to protect the interests of mutandi in legislation, commerce and so on. He said that the organization's public stance was much milder than that represented by my note, but that he knew many of the members to hold similar views privately. He gave me the number of the contacted him. He denied any connection with the note, said that whoever signed it did so without authority, asked that I keep him apprised of further developments and told me not to worry. The note was the work of an extremist. Somehow that gave me very little comfort. I left word with Pamela's roommate, asking that Pamela call as soon as she returned from classes. She called and we arranged to meet for dinner. We sat at a back table in Luigi's and she read the note. At first she was amused, then alarmed. She didn't think they would dare do anything to her, but they might try to harass me. She said she thought it would be best if we didn't see each other for a while. I protested that that would be a cowardly action in response to what was already the act of a coward, hiding behind anonymity. We argued. In the course of the argument she said I was wasting my efforts anyhow, as our relationship could never by anything other than casual and platonic. We finished our meal in silence and she asked me not to walk her home. On my way back to the dormitory, right after getting off the South Quadrant Westbound slidewalk, I had to pass a dense stand of shrubbery that threw a deep shadow over the walk. I probably wouldn't have seen my assailants even had I not been lost in brooding thought. One slipped behind me and threw a fabric bag over my head and shoulders, then pinioned my arms behind me. The other hit me once in the solar plexus and twice on the face, then reached under the bag and tore off my respirator. They fled and I staggered and crawled to the nearest dormitory. The medic there gave me some oxygen and pasted up my one serious-looking wound, a nasty cut over my left eye. He gave me a voucher for the materials he had used, so I could return them from my dormitory's supply, lent me a respirator and sent me on my way. A classmate walked over with me to help forestall a recurrence. As I write this my throat still hurts from breathing the sulfurous air. Good thing the attack didn't happen downtown, nearer the Industrial Park. I'll take an extra Pain-go and retire. # May. I went to the campus police and they told me that an investigation would be a waste of time since there were no witnesses and I couldn't identify my assailants. I recognized the chief as having been at the meeting the other night and didn't press him. Another note in my box. This one simply read:  return to luna  Steering Committee chairman again and informed him of this new note and of last night's assault. He became flustered but offered no worthwhile advice. Somebody had forced his way into my room and poured soya all over my books and papers. When they' were completely dry, I took them down to the laundry and used the ultrasonic dry-cleaner on them. It worked after a fashion. I hope whoever was responsible read this diary before dousing it and saw that Pamela is not enthusiastic about my "seeking a sexual liaison" with her. Now maybe all of this will stop. Work goes on, of course. Tree theory and yet more non-Virgil. I toyed with the idea of trying to trace the person or persons behind the notes. They were simple computer printouts, so the person would first have had to encode a crystal. The crystal would have to be re-filed and, if it hadn't yet been erased for another use, it would be a simple matter to find out who had last checked it out. Simple in theory, at least. There must be five or six computing facilities on campus, each with several thousand crystals. And for that matter, it wouldn't be difficult to have the message printed out and then code something new over that domain of the crystal, as if the message had been a glitch. I tried to think of how I might set a trap without using Pamela as bait. My mind just isn't devious enough or perhaps it doesn't have enough information. Since Chatham has more deviousness and information at his disposal I tried to contact him. He was out, though. He had been gone since yesterday. I settled for Beaumont. We roughed out a plan over a bottle of wine in the lounge of his dormitory. He knew most of the mutandi on campus and knew which ones were the most extreme in their views. He would meet some of them socially and bring the conversation around to Pamela and me. If the person showed any interest Beaumont would pretend to sympathize with the idea that mutandi should mate with their own kind -- as if the characteristics could be inherited!and since I was the one person on campus most obviously a mutandis I was setting a terribly bad example. Then see whether the other would suggest some sort of action. He said he would start right away and contact me as soon as he had some results. # May. Solved. Beaumont called this morning with the good news that he had found the person responsible. No one I knew, he said; the person was an agitator who had been out of school for years and rarely showed up at club meetings. The three of us were going to meet at eight tonight by the sheds on the athletic field. I told him that I didn't like it. At least two people had attacked me before and there might have been even more involved. I was still too weak to be of any help to my side if it came to violence and the athletic field was dangerously isolated. I wanted simply to call the police and have my enemy apprehended, but Beaumont raised the good point that, without evidence, it would just be Beaumont's word against the other's -- and the campus police were not noted for respecting the testimony of students. He said he could get his hands on a stunner to even out the odds and would bring a recorder to catch the person in damaging statements, if he couldn't be goaded into action. I personally hoped he couldn't. Beaumont had a regular script worked out, things for me to say to the man that were at once perfectly innocuous and calculated to make him lose his temper. Beaumont, of course, would be pretending to be on my enemy's side. I agreed, with the private reservation that I would tone down some of my side of the dialogue. I went to my morning classes as usual, but found I couldn't concentrate for worrying. Anything could happen. This time of the year the athletic field was only airco'ed over weekends and I wasn't sure I could make it back to a building in time if they overpowered us as they did me last time, taking our respirators. There was no guarantee that the man would show up alone or with just one accomplice. The more I thought about it, the more nervous I became. Finally, around noon, I went to the police. The chief was monumentally unimpressed. He said the whole thing sounded like a prank, an initiation into the club. He knew Beaumont and expressed the opinion that he had been manipulated, the initiators playing on his exaggerated sense of drama. I insisted that they had tried to harm me seriously the night before last, but the chief pointed out that I was never in real danger and that r the blows seemed to have been calf culated to do only superficial harm. I They could have more easily incaP pacitated me and left me to suffo cate. I Besides, he doubted that he could t spare a man at #:# P.M., at which time most of them were patrolling  the taverns and dopeshops offt campus, preventing trouble. He kept looking at the clockI  shouldn't have come at lunch( time and finally promised to see if he could find a man to meet me there. ? thought occurred to me that the f, chief could possibly be in with my  I . attackers, too, and if I were the focus of some ruthless anli-sapiens ' plot my action had only put Beaui mont and me in even greater danger. I tried to reach Beaumont all day, I after that thought, to tell him the  whole thing was off, but he was I never home. After a good deal of internal debate, I got up about #:# i p.M. and headed for the field. After j' all, I had chastised Pamela for sugf gesting cowardly action. I stopped in a general merchandise store on ' the way and bought the biggest claspknife they had. I hadn't fought  anybody since I was a little boy and i didn't know whether, should the time come to use the weapon I would have nerve or wit enough even to take it out of my pocket. But its weight was some small comfort. Everything happened very fast when it happened. I walked out onto the field and saw Beaumont standing by the sheds, chatting with another man. I approached them and waited for Beaumont to start the charade. They stopped talking as I came closer and suddenly Beaumont began to laugh hysterically. The other, a muscular older man only slightly shorter than I probably the tallest Earthie I had seen -- smiled and drew a short wooden club out of his tunic. I had the knife out and was trying to get my thumbnail into the little depression when Beaumont, still laughing, raised a stunner at me and fired. It was very painful. A stunner confuses the neural signals to and from the part of your brain that controls motor functions. A side effect makes you feel as if your skin were being punctured by thousands of tiny needles. I fell to the ground, twitching spasmodically. My face was down, so I couldn't see, but I heard Beaumont tell the big man to use the knife instead -- it would be more impressive. Then absolutely nothing happened for a long couple of minutes. Suddenly I was turned over roughly and steeled myself for the first blow of the knife -- and found myself This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulps cans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans#yahoogroups.com. looking into the face of the police chief. He sprayed an aerosol into my face -- that made the pain go away -- and said his men would take me to the infirmary, to a "pattern blocker," to cure the paralysis. He apologized for using me as bait and said he had had a man hiding in the far shed since early this afternoon, waiting for Beaumont and his friend, who had been suspected in a similar assault case some months before. Both of them were lying on the ground, twitching as badly as I was. A large police floater drifted onto the field and two men with stretchers came out. They loaded up the others first and by the time my stretcher was secure, the chief was interrogating Beaumont, evidently with the aid of some hypnotic. His confession was disjointed and childishly vituperative, but the gist of it was this: He had been after Pamela's attentions (he used another word, which Chaucer would have recognized) for several months, and felt he was just about to succeed when I came along. I was an egotistical child, an alien and a cripple who, to his mind, had stolen her away. The chief questioned him further and found the Beaumont had suffered a nervous breakdown over a year before and had been under treatment until he came to the university. He admitted to several other acts of violence and admitted knowing that he was still mentally ill but had not volunteered for further treatment because he felt that the illness was somehow allied with his genius and he didn't want to interfere with it. I felt that anything interfering with his brand of genius could only add to it, but I kept my own counsel. The infirmary treatment only took a few minutes. I arranged with the chief to come down the next morning to file a complaint and testify, then found a phone and called Pamela. She was fascinated, but not surprised, with the revelations about Beaumont. I went over the whole thing in some detail, and then we talked about some more general matters and finally I got down to the question of our relationship. She said with some heat that the affair with Beaumont didn't change anything, that if I knew anything about women I wouldn't even have asked and that we could still be friends but that was all -- a platonic, intellectual arrangement. While I've been writing this I've been thinking about what she said. I do know a little more about women than I knew a month ago. And a lot more about jealousy. And I've known about synergy for years. # May. Today I started reading up on crystalline sculpture and piezoelectricity.  A ruling species must be ready to die to preserve those it rules ! They stepped from the shuttle almost reluctantly, a hundred and a half of them. From its zenith an against eyes accustomed to the gray-sky filtration of CityAmerica. The land that stretched from their feet was neither rolling, flowered meadow nor tender pasture. Instead they faced an unprepossessing terrain of irregular hillocks and hollows that bristled with clumps of reed and coarse grass. This was the land they had to bring to fruit within five and one quarter settlement years if it were to be their home. Otherwise they would be returned to Earth and to the bottom of the planet-party list, those of them who chose to try again. Two of them were Cortlin and Valdez. One: Cortlin The traditionalists among them took their day of rest on Sunday. But it was Tuesday when Cortlin lay on his stomach in the coarse grass, watching what he had dubbed the sick nest. Though he was hidden in the middle of a native community, he had to strain to catch the distant, low-pitched voices of its inhabitants. They numbered about three dozen humanoids, their big tacky canopied nests spread wide afield. At last Cortlin heard stirrings within the nest. His body he burrowed deeper into the grass. His head he elevated, the woven reed camouflaging -- he hoped -- the fact that it was a head. A quarterhour ago Znne had been carried into that nest, left leg jutting at an unnatural angle, pain contorting his gray features. Now he stepped from the nest behind the female N'Rila and the broken leg was whole again. Healed. Cortlin caught a deep breath and retracted his head. Healed! N'Rila was a healer. It seemed to him that the furious patter of his heart would lead the two natives to investigate. But they clumped away without sign. Not that these natives were given to signs anyway. They seemed as indifferent to the Terran settlers as to everything else. Here was a race of humanoids living without tribal organization, without land or even property codes, without passion or taboo, as nearly as Cortlin could determine. But these people obviously had one thing -- a healer. Cortlin's previous observations of the sick nest had not been conclusive. Two illnesses swiftly reversed -- but those could have been treated with herbal medicines. The stifling CityAmerica privacy codes were tenacious. Even Cortlin hadn't yet mustered audacity to inspect the interior of that nest. But a broken leg -- that couldn't have been healed with any primitive pharmacopoeia. Glancing around, finding himself alone, Cortlin jumped to his feet and broke for the sick nest. And stopped short, frozen in his tracks. In the clump of reeds that grew behind the nest, swaying on a short woody stalk, cloudy gold eye fixed upon him, blue and green feathers ruffledsat a noepti-noe. It blinked its clouded eye, flexed out its wings in an impassive boast of power. A bird. A parrot-sized blue-green bird with a red beak. Cortlin had seen them from a distance, had seen them rise on the sun-streaked air. He had heard native accounts of the bird's effect upon the fertility of the land, too. And there, he decided, was one other thing these primitives had. A fertility god of sortsthe noepti-noe. Where noepti-noe chose to nest -- they said -- the reed clump would send up stalks hung with thick-skinned scarlet fruit. These could be eaten or drunk, depending upon the stage of ripeness. Then the stalks themselves could be boiled and eaten, sustaining life quite out of proportion to their fibrous appearance. But if the bird were frightened tf from its nest or if death came to f it -- whether naturally or by vio lence -- the reed clump would wither and die. For years there would be ; barrenness in a radius of many yards. Even the grasses would fail to seed... So this was the bird. Cortlin moved forward slowly. As he ap, proached, the bird's flexings and twitchings slowly ceased. Its eyes blinked almost somnolently. Then it stood perfectly still on one leg, its ! left wing half-spread. The cloudy surface of its golden eye cleared and Cortlin was suddenly looking through the dilated pupil directly ' into something wide and deep and blood red, something that pulsed thickly. Cortlin was scarcely aware of the rigidity of his body, of the fact that ' he was suddenly bathed in perspiration. Instead he was drawn totally into the eye of the bird, into I the hot, pulsating presence there.  Abruptly the eye reclouded. The I bird settled slowly on both feet I and drew its wings prudishly about  itself. i Cortlin's body relaxed, sagged, j His clothes were soaked. The noon ' breeze blew him cold. Shivering he backed away from the bird. I Bird -- nothing but a bird preening itself on a short stalk that bulged with buds of plenty. A bird. Cortlin turned, stumbled away, cold and stunned. So stunned that he reached the perimeter of his own village before he remembered N'Rila, Znne, the broken leg that had healed so swiftly within the sick nest. He had discovered a healer. The fact would have to be communicated to Valdez. He would have to admit his spying activities. But the experience with the bird had overshadowed all that. They had all heard rumors of Cortlin's discovery, but because of the tenacity of the privacy codes no one had approached him directly for confirmation. The community hall, however, was filled to capacity the Friday after late planting, the date announced for Cortlin's presentation. His words were received with a silence as absorbent as a sound baffle. His speech was followed by the stiff debate of individuals who had lived most of their years in population-stifled CityAmerica. There the keen need for personal privacy had led to an almost pathological reluctance to speak out, to reveal the being sheltered within one, the being whose only sanctuary from pressing bodies and peering eyes was withdrawal. Debate followed two broad general lines. The mother ship had left drugs, supplies and antibiotics sufficient to meet t any foreseeable medical crisis. Both Valdez and Nims had received medical training. The mother ship had left nothing, however, that could instantly heal bodily injury. And during the months of landworking and village-raising they had all become acutely aware of the vulnerability of human flesh. At the end of the evening Headsman Valdez was delegated to negotiate with the natives for emergency call upon their healer. Valdez. When he sat at his secretary in the headsman's dome or when he presided at community meetings, Valdez could forget that he led his group upon an alien world. But When he stepped out under the bowl of the sky and the musty scent of the reedlands reached him he was suddenly victim of anxiety. Today his shoulders knotted hard with it. Previous negotiations had demonstrated that these natives had no leader, no headsman, no one empowered by the others to make decisions and grant concessions. There was only a wide-flung collection of big loose canopied nests inhabited by coequals. Consequently the best Valdez could do was enter the native village and speak with whomever he found at nest. So doing, he would receive not permission, but merely indifferent acceptance of the fact that the colonists would do what the colonists would do. All of which left Valdez with a nagging sense of alternatives unconsidered. Moving uneasily through the nesting field, glancing obliquely into the nests, he finally found an unpromising old male sheltering from the midday sun. The old man sat with his knees drawn up to his ears. His skin was leathery and gray, his eyes large and round and dull. Valdez squatted before the nest. The native language permitted him no greeting more eloquent than, "Morning." "Morning," came the rather disinterested reply. The round eyes rested on him fully, but without curiosity. Valdez sighed. It seemed no use to embroider his way to the point. "My people have sent me to ask permission to use your healer if an emergency ever arises in our settlement. Do you see that as possible?" The round eyes blinked somnolently. "I do not see it." Valdez was startled. "You don't?" This was not a response he had ever received before. "Why not?" The dull eyes blinked. "Wrong blood." Valdez allowed a suitable interval to elapse. "Pardon?" "Wrong blood." "Do you mean that shethe healer -- works by exchanging blood with the injured person?" The old male wagged his head unenergetically. "I do not mean it." "Oh? Then how does she heal?" "She puts her hand on." Another suitable interval. "What makes her hand heal?" The round eyes blinked. "Long time, strangeone, a healer egg was left in an unused nest beyond the perimeter of here. One person who was harvesting grass seed found the egg. That year the people needed a healer. The one person carried the big egg here and a new nest was built. We all splashed sperm on the egg. It grew bigger. It became N'Rila. That is why her hands heal the people. Right sperm -- right blood." Valdez rocked back on his heels. "You mean that your healer is half native half youand half something else?" The natives themselves, he knew were basically mammalian. "The people fertilized the egg." Valdez passed a hand over his eyes. An egg left in the field -- incredible. But the orientation studies he had completed to qualify for headsman had taught him that there was much that was incredible in the universeand nothing that man could afford to reject arbitrarily. "Then if there was another egg and my people splashed sperm on it would it be right blood?" The old male nodded, rubbing his head noisily against his rough knees. "I see it." "Are there often eggs?" "There is a healer egg now." "There is? Where?" "In the nest beyond. It will rot there." "But why?" "The people do not need a healer now." The people didn't, but the colonists did. Valdez was aware of a complex of emotions -- excitement, urgency, revulsion. The suggestion that humans fertilize an egg revolted him. "Maybe it already rots." "No. It is fresh." "It -- where did it come come from?" "Who knows? It is there and it is big." The oldster sketched an ovoid the sized of a football. Valdez frowned, hesitated. He knew how his men would react if they were asked to fertilize an egg. He also knew how they would react the first time someone died needlessly. "Your healer -- can she bring someone back who has already died?" There was a hint of expression in the round eyes. "Never a warmdead one and never if death is already coming. Never." "You mean if the death processes have already begun there's nothing she can do?" The old male actually seemed capable of emotion. "Strangeone, if N'Rila touched and overcame death-coming N'Rila would be no healer afterward. The people would have no healer then." "Ah." She could heal someone who lay dying, but would lose her healing powers in the process. But if eggs were readily available was that such a large price? "Are there many healer eggs?" . "There is orre now." "No, I mean how often do you find them? How many do you let rot each year?" The old male clung stubbornly to his information. "There is one now." Valdez sighed. "You would know if there were more?" "I would know if more were found." So there was scarcity. Chances were great, too, that human males would not be able to fertilize such an egg. They could not eat native foods. Nevertheless Valdez decided to take a positive stand. "We would like to have that egg." The old male's rounded eyes again swam with expression. His head scraped his horny knees loudly. "Yes-yes, yes-yes," he muttered. Then the head became still. "There is an offering, strangeone." Valdez' eyebrows rose. "To whom?" "To the power. When the people take a healer egg to fertilize, they bring to the empty nest an offering of seventy-five strangled noeptinoe." Valdez stared at the gray face, his jaw tightening. He had seen the noepti-noe soaring over the reedlands, bright and fanciful and free. "The egg won't hatch unless you make the offering?" "The egg will hatch, no matter. Noepti-noe are an offering to the power." Valdez tried to keep indignation from his face. "My people would never make an offering of that nature. We come from a world where all the untamed birds have been offered -- to one thing or another. That's a condition we cannot meet." The old male looked almost bemused. "It is no condition. It is an offering." "Well, it's an offering that won't be made by us." The old male began to swing his head on his neck, abrading it noisily against his knees. "Is anyone going to help us find that egg if we refuse to make the offering?" The head rocked back and steadied. "C'narr'b will show you." "And is there someone who will tell us how to fertilize the egg and care for it?" "I see that as possible." Valdez stared at the old man for a time. "All right. Where do I find C'narr'b?" One thing he knew. He couldn't ask his men to fertilize an egg any more than he could ask them to strangle birds. So the chore fell between himself and Cortlin. Well, Cortlin had gotten them into this. Valdez' face set. Cortlin was going to pay the gate fee. And not in dead birds. and Valdez. They squatted before the nest for a long time in silence. The egg was exactly as it had been the week before and the week before that -- slightly larger and slightly rounder than a football, shell leathery white veined with blue and green. "C'narr'b says it happens occasionally," Cortlin offered. "The fertilized egg lies dormant until spring, then suddenly grows and hatches out quite normally." Normally? Valdez' brows rose. They had made the nest themselves, woven it from cut reeds and bottomed it with dried grasses. It was situated near C'narr'b's nest in the native settlement. They had transported the egg there tenderly and Cortlin had done his duty, emerging tight lipped and scarlet. But the egg did not grow. Valdez' mind turned reluctantly to the matter of the offering. "What was your final figure on the bird population?" Cortlin rubbed his jaw. "I never reached a final figure per se. But I think we could knock seventy-five birds from the area without starving the natives out." Valdez sighed. "You really see a connection between the birds and land fertility then?" "A definite correlation. I've spotted half a dozen noe nests with the skeletal remains of birds in them. Death was apparently from natural causes in every case. But the land was bare. Reeds wilted. Even the grasses hadn't regenerated. If we take seventy-five birds we're going to produce a lot of barren land." Valdez nodded thoughtfully. "We'll have to take the birds from the reedlands between native settlements -- if it comes to that." Not that the natives were likely to make violent reprisal. But there was no point in working hardship on the neighbors. Meanwhile there remained the egg, stubbornly dormant, unchanged in size since the fertilization over a month ago. His eyes returned to it. "If fertilization didn't occur,how soon will signs of decay appear?" Cortlin grimaced. "If it didn't take, the egg's already deteriorating. And it's not going to do us any good to kill birds. We'll just have to wait until another egg comes along -- maybe next spring." Valdez' shoulders relaxed. "All right, then," he said with finality, standing. "All we can do for the time being is consider methods of netting birds in case we need them." Cortlin glanced at Valdez. A had been anathema to the headsman. But there had been two orthopedic injuries in the settlement since. Two workers out of commission for an indefinite period while bones healed. The matter of the healer had come up again at the last community meeting. "I research netting noe on my own, I suppose," Cortlin said. His fertilization of the egg, mercifully, hadn't been noised abroad. "You do." Cortlin scowled, ran a hand through his rough hair. "All right. But if we do have to make that offering, that's one thing I'm not doing alone. You're wringing just as many necks as I do." Valdez, eyes were dark, troubled. 'Tm with you -- if it becomes necessary." "Good." Cortlin stood, cast one last glance at the egg. He didn't really believe the two of them would ever kill a bird. He had never yet approached noepti-noe without succumbing to the paralyzing power that lay behind the normally clouded surface of the eye. He doubted he ever would. This bird's natural defenses were remarkably effective. II The settlers didn't celebrate. The fields they had planted with late crops had borne nothing. Of their vegetables and grains, bred especially for this climate, for this soil, for this season, there was no sign. Doggedly, without ceremony, they planted again. They had supplies for four and a quarter years longer on this world. They had seeds for an equal span. They would learn from this failure. But since no one could discern its cause they found difficulty in extracting the meat from the lesson. Some of them began to have nightmares of gray skies of City America closing over them again, of the Americans pressing them in, always in. Valdez. The headsman sat stiff-bodied at his secretary, his eyes like empty screens. The message had come an hour ago, delivered by an anonymous native to a worker at the edge of the colony fields. "The people see it as time for strangeone to come for the healer baby." Just that, bald and unadorned. The field worker had delivered the message to Valdez and Valdez had nearly panicked. Hatched? He and Cortlin had inspected that egg a bare week ago and it had been scarcely bigger than last fall. Now they were to fetch the baby? Cortlin was on his way to the nest. And Valdez sat alone in his office, his eyes staring starkly at the wall, a series of monstrous infant phantasms blossoming in his mind. He and Cortlin should have confided more details to the other settlers, he realized now. During their long vigil over the veined egg in its nest, amid their apprehensions and doubts he and Cortlin had become prepared for anything. But the others -- all they had been told was ! ( that Cortlin and Valdez were nego. tiating the matter of a healer with the natives. A light rattle of knuckles came at ' his office door. He leaped up. , His visitor was not Cortlin but j' Nims, commander in chief of juve# nile services, which meant she I taught the half-dozen older setI tlement children and supervised f young Patry in day care of the two I infants. Patry hung behind her, her  face a shy moonlet. #' Nims was brisk. "I understand  an infant is expected. Headsman. I think I should know what provision  has been made for its care."  Frontal attack was the last thing  Valdez was prepared to meet at this point. "I none." He had had an hour to initiate something anything. But he had been paralyzed by the superstitious fear  that if he set gears in motion to re ceive a normal human infant what Cortlin would deliver was that much more likely to be a mon( strosity. Nims squared her shoulders, expressed herself with the conscious I valor of a soldier preparing to enter  battle. "Patry and I would like offiI' cial permission, then, to install a  criblet and supplies here. I have alJ. ready arranged for Gomez to take g over my normal duties while I look  after this infant. Patry will assist t' me if necessary." Slowly Valdez' tension eased. At ; least one of his people understood , that the expected baby might require special attention. Might, in fact, best be segregated from the other normal infants. "That -- that sounds like a practical arrangement," he conceded. The fact that only one thin wall would separate his office from the nursery didn't mar his relief. Ten minutes later one portion of the headsman's dome had been converted. From the facility with which the nursery outpost was established it was apparent that Nims and Patry had pre-assembled its components. Enter Cortlin, unannounced, hair rough, face ruddy, carrying a bundle wrapped in big reed towels. "I've got her! Where's the scale?" Nims was on the dot with reassurances. "I'll bring it immediately if the infant is frail or if it appears there is a feeding problem." "Ha!" Cortlin plopped his bundle into the crib, unwound towels. "Fifteen pounds is my bet. Anyone take me?" They stared at the abruptly bared little being in the crib. She was a perfectly formed human infant, plump, bright eyes intently occupied with one tight fist. Fine hair capped her head. Her flesh was rosy and firm. She appeared some weeks beyond the newborn phase. "Well!" Nims hefted the child professionally. Patry's young face hovered forth from obscuring clouds. "She's beautiful." "Absolutely," Nims confirmed. "And very well nourished. Tell me about her diet, Mr. Cortlin." "She doesn't have one. Yet." Cortlin's eyes flashed to Valdez. "C'narr'b says nothing until she's twenty-four hours old -- and she'll let us know when that is. Loud." Patry touthed the infant's bare foot. "Does she have a name?" Cortlin beamed. "Nilla Marie." Valdez' eyes caught Cortlin's fatuous, new-father grin, narrowed upon the infant. The hair, what there was of it, could be construed to have a tinge of Cortlin-red. The eyes certainly were bright and Cortlin-blue. Valdez felt a painful wrenching at his deepest human preconceptions. That Cortlin could consort with an abandoned egg in a makeshift nest and months later bring forth this... Nims laid the infant back in the crib. "And the mother has formally relinquished all claim to this child?" "No worry," Cortlin bubbled, euphoric. "No mother." Quickly Valdez launched explanations into the startled silence. "Healers are a purely local phenomenon -- impossible to explain in terms of human reproduction. Actually there is no female parent present to claim the child. That means that, for the time being, she is your responsibility, Nims." Nims raised her chin gallantly, accepting the burden. "I don't want anyone but Patry or yourself to handle her until we've discussed in meeting the implications of her presence and the necessary restrictions on the use of her powers -- if any." "I certainly don't propose to expose the child to the community at large," Nims replied with asperity. "Now that I have seen her I will request Mr. Cortlin to help me transfer her crib and equipment to my private quarters. I will seclude her there for observation and stabilization for a number of days, perhaps for a full week. Thereafter I will transfer her to the nursery for day care and will continue to provide after-hours mother care myself. I intend to handle this child as much like a normal infant as possible." Valdez nodded, the weight of responsibility easing with Nims' immediate and assertive advocacy of the infant. When the baby's equipment had been moved the two men found themselves deserted. "Thus always," Cortlin commented. "New father out in the cold, unsung, unacknowledged." "I thought that was how you wanted it." Cortlin shrugged enigmatically. "Well, you can keep involved by helping me set up tonight's meeting. We'll have to get it across immediately that there are limits to that child's use assuming she really has healing power." Cortlin grinned, flashed the heel of his hand before Valdez' face. "She's got it." Valdez' glance had caught the hand in passing. "What?" The hand returned, hovered, turned for inspection. "That gash I got last week in the field." Valdez stared. He had seen the wound earlier today, deep, ugly, scabbed under its plastispray dressing. Now it was gone. A dozen questions concentrated on the tip of his tongue. But the enormity of the thing locked his jaw. They had a healer. "Guess I'm off bird patrol now. Agreed?" Valdez could find no comment. He nodded. Their first harvest was a mockery. That spring they had cast bushels of seeds across their prepared lands. Weeks later a few pale seedlings had straggled up out of the soil, all of them from pulp melon stock X#. A scattering of those had actually survived the summer to bear sickly fruit. The entire harvest was carried back to the settlement in six bushel containers and left in the coolshed to keep or to rot, according to the will of providence. The settlers themselves withdrew to their private quarters. Winter gloom fell early. Cortlin. Officially Cortlin was off bird patrol. Unofficially he was still on his belly in the mud. And it struck him suddenly that he had most of his great thoughts here. Because today as he squirmed through the stuff, angling closer to the noe nest in that huge clump of reeds, his progress impeded by the very luxuriance of vegetation generated by the noe's presence, it hit him. Why their fields were barren. Their first action upon landfall had been to clear their prenegotiated farmland. They had not taken time until later to orient themselves, to learn the simplistic native language. They had simply landed and proceeded to uproot everything. Including the reed clumps that were the natural nesting places of the noepti-noe. By destroying the nesting reeds they had blighted their own lands! And within days of landfall, at that. Had Cortlin been a field worker, had he noted the birds flying up from their devastated homes, he might have made this connection earlier. But at the time he had been concerned with the supervision of the disbursement of building materials from the shuttle that had landed them on the site of the village. Question now was, could they restore land fertility immediately by enticing the birds back? Or was the time of blight fated to run its course? Cortlin frowned with thought. These birds were baffling. He had yet to see the inside of a noe nest. Let him come too near, and a noe unfailingly appeared, either from within the nest or from the skies. Let him press the matter and the bird's eye cleared, its pupil dilated and Cortlin felt himself drawn helplessly into the pulsing red river that lay beneath. That never failed to ruin his day. Now he began a quick, wriggling retreat. Whether restoring the birds to settlement lands would make the crucial difference or not, he had to get his thought to Valdez. It was too big to carry alone. There was no debate. Neither was there any optimism. At the end of the wet season reed clumps would be dug from uninhabited lands beyond the settlement and would be replanted in the communal fields. Cortlin would make every attempt to develop a method of luring the bright birds to nest in the human Helds again. And no one would expect a thing. "There's no point in attempting to cultivate the reedlands themselves," Valdez explained. "One -- we have treaty rights only to this preserve of land. And two -- the activity involved in draining and breaking up the reedland soil and preparing it for our crops would undoubtedly drive the birds from their present nests there and we'd be right back to point-go again." Point-go was apathy, communal and complete. Valdez was at his desk in the headsman's dome when Tagnari appeared at the door. "Accident -- " he panted. Field dust had turned to mud on his sweat-soaked worksuit. Valdez stood up. "Where?" "Sector, seventeen -- Gillard, sir, under his tractor." "Get the scooter. I'll fetch Nilla and Nims." It was a standing order that the healer was never used in emergency without Valdez' consent or without Nims in attendance. To date, luckily, there had been few non-routine calls upon Nilla's services. The settlement's only hoverscooter bobbed across the field, dodging newly replanted reed clumps. Valdez' glance fell across the child in Nims' arms. Her hair was more brightly tinged with red than it had been even a month ago. And she was growing rapidly. Less than a year old, she had the appearance and general ability of a normal three-year-old. But despite the uncanny power that lay in her hand she was only a child. And when he reached Sector # and saw the silent knot gathered in the fresh furrows Valdez hopped quickly from the cart. "Keep her here -- and keep her head turned away if you have to." Until now there had been no need to present the child with a brutally disturbing scene. This was a bad one. Valdez made his way to the center of the knot and kneeled. And there was no doubt in his mind that Gillard was in the condition the natives called "death-coming." For one thing, his chest had been crushed. For another, both legs were mangled. The soil was bloody around him. His wife was bloody beside him. Her dark eyes were enormous. She spat words at him: "Where is the healer?" Valdez kept his voice low. "We can't use her here, Hil." Hil Gillard did not keep her own voice down. It burst from her with fury. "Where can we use her then? What is she doing in our place?" "Hil, this is exactly the situation we discussed in meeting when Nilla first came. If we permit her to touch Gil now her powers will be sacrificed. She'll be just a child like any other child and we'll have no healer. We all agreed " "We all sat while you and Cort agreed! I said nothing! Luis said nothing!" Nims had slipped between them to kneel beside the injured man. She handled his wrist, touched his neck. "Headsman, this man is dead." Hil Gillard was briefly silent. Then she sprang at Valdez. The tussle was brief. Pulled from the headsman, she glared at them all, hands and face dark with her husband's blood. Then she wheeled and flung across the field toward the reedlands. "Tagnari keep her in sight." Valdez turned to Nims. "Nilla?" "I instructed her to wait at the scooter." Valdez nodded. The knot around Gillard had loosened. "We'll have to transport him back to the settlement." "I believe we must first wait until final death occurs," Nims said quietly. Valdez' head snapped up. "I thought you said he was dead." "He is, for all practical purposes. However, there is still a faint pulse." Valdez stared at her. "I could see no point in torturing Hil, Headsman. Would you like me to call Nilla to confirm my judgement." Valdez licked his drying lips. "I no. No." He himself had seen that death was with them. He squatted, took up the limp wrist. Several minutes later the erratic pulse was gone. Valdez stood. "Now we can think of moving him." But no one moved, least of all Valdez. It was time, he saw, publicly to assign Cortlin the job of obtaining another healer egg. Cortlin But healer eggs were out of season and Cortlin had other irons in his fire. He stood beside his newly erected dome in the far corner of the settlement fields. The prospect across the fields was broken now by scattered clumps of reeds. The reeds were a failure. The birds had refused to be lured to the human lands. The reeds -- Cortlin had necessarily chosen clumps uninhabited by noe -- had survived transplantation to wither a few days later of the noe curse that afflicted the settlement lands. Doggedly the settlers replaced a half-dozen clumps each day. But even the fresh clumps attracted no birds. Cortlin ran a hand through his rough red hair, turned a glance upon the dome he had erected, his birdatory. It encompassed three freshly transplanted reed clumps, a corresponding amount of bare soil and it was off limits to every human but himself. Stone markers carried the boundaries of his private preserve some yards beyond the dome itself. He heard a harking cry from the reedlands. C'narr'b appeared with birding net, an implement with a handle of reed stalk and a drawstring bag of woven grasses. In his other hand he carried a small, densely woven bag. Cortlin met him. He had inspected the bird net previously. Now that he was ready to go into the field, however, the implement looked ridiculously fragile. "The noe doesn't struggle at all?" "Never." C'narr'b was a stringy old fellow, fast on his feet and muddy gray. He had large round eyes and a mouth bulging with horny yellow chewing surfaces. "I hope he doesn't change his mind today." In the no man's land between native settlements the reeds grew in great mounds with coarse grasses flowing between them. Spotted throughout the wilderness were decrepit native nests used as occasional retreats or for shelter when bad weather overtook seed gatherers. "The people take noe only from places where the birds nest thick," C'narr'b explained. "The land is not stripped then. There are other noe near to keep it." Deep in the reedlands Cortlin and the native selected their clump and moved through the grassy growth toward it. Alerted, a single noe appeared from his nest at the heart of the clump. He hopped to a reed stalk and bobbed there nervously, his cloudy golden eye blinking rapidly. C'narr'b took his bearings and then pulled the densely woven grass bag down over his head and face. "Run beyond reach of the power now." Cortlin quickly scrambled away. He called the go-ahead when he was safely situated. The native advanced cautiously, long toes gripping the ground, bird net held erect. "To your right," Cortlin called when Cnarr'b deviated slightly. On its perch the bird flexed its wings and uttered a warning cry. Then the bag-blinded native was within net's reach. "Net forward," Cortlin called. The grass net reached. The bird seemed to see it for the first time. The noe bobbed nervously, uttered one last cry and became still. "Net up and to your right." The bird went into a crouch. One wing flexed out slowly. Cortlin tensed. But when the clouded lens of the bird's golden eye cleared, when its pupil dilated, he was unaffected. He was beyond the range of the bird's paralyzing power. He made a quick mental note of his distance. Now the native's net hovered directly over the bird. "Net down!" Cortlin's voice rose. "Now -- pull your drawstring." The noe was bagged. And it didn't struggle. Its feathered body relaxed in the closed net. Its golden eyes clouded and shut. Cortlin approached apprehensively. "Did we hurt him?" "The bird is not hurt." "And he isn't going to turn on the power again?" It couldn't be this easy. It was. "There is always one last flash of power. Then the bird is quiet. For when he sees the net he understands he is being taken for sacrifice." Cortlin stared at the bright, bagged bird. He found it difficult to believe the bird held any such preconception. "And you've never tried keeping a bird? For observation?" "Observation of what?" the native wondered, round-eyed. Cortlin shrugged. These people seemed to suffer no pangs of curiosity. He himself suffered other pangs -- those of apprehension. How long would it take this bird to recover from the passive state? Would it? If it remained passive, would it eat and take water? Or would it dehydrate and starve in his painstakingly erected birdatory, leaving him with a handful of feathers and three clumps of wilting reeds? As they pushed through the reeds Cortlin's eye was on the bird. He began to wish that population pressure in CityAmerica had not rendered his education so brief, so perfunctory. But what specialized knowledge could serve him now? Bird psychology? Ill Three: Cortlin Cortlin moved through the fields at mid-morning. Across the broad prospect of settlement land a few pale melon vines crawled between withered clumps of reed. An occasional stalk of stunted corn threw a brief shadow. Rather than work this taunting harvest the settlers had elected to search the reedlands for healer eggs. Cortlin fervently hoped Valdez' effort to save them from total apathy would succeed. A few weeks ago, with the same end in mind, Valdez had space-called EarthAuthority and urgently requested a fresh shipment of seeds. The reply had been swift and brutal. The seeds shipped with the settlers had been scrupulously fresh and carefully bred for local climate and soil conditions. This group of settlers had the same choice as any other group of settlers sponsored by EarthAuthority -- make their planet yield or return to Earth. Cortlin sighed, glancing at wilted reeds. The field workers had balked by midsummer, at the constant transplantation of fresh clumps. And the dozens of noe he and C'narr'b had netted and tried to settle in the fields had long since taken to the sky. Only the three noepti-noe consigned to the closed dome of the birdatory remained. They behaved most unnoely. They ate, drank and sat on their perches, bobbing their bright heads monotonously. Cortlin was permitted to touch therh, to handle them, to inspect the nests they had woven with materials he had gathered. Not once since capture had a noe cleared the cloud from its eye and paralyzed him with enigmatic red power. Neither had any noe attempted escape. Still awaiting sacrifice? He wondered. The boundaries of his private preserve marked a sharp change in crop status. Here it had been necessary to thin stalks and vines to maintain a path to the door of the dome. Inside the dome the situation was even greener. His tomato crop prospered. Big red globes hung waiting. He studied them without expression, then slung the bag off his shoulder, picked the day's yield and set it outside. His birds greeted him with their usual total reserve. He waded the tomato patch and took their water trough to be refilled with odorous reedland water, the only liquid they would accept. Food and water attended to, he approached each nest in turn, spoke to each bird, was greeted by each with an aloof golden stare. He was greeted, too, at the third nest, by an egg a leathery white egg smaller than an Earthside hen's egg, vividly veined with blue and green. Cortlin's heart took a brief vacation. He stared at the egg. Despite its size it had a terrifyingly familiar look. With stiff fingers, he touched it. It throbbed. He looked up and found its parent eying him. His lips began to shape a question. Before he voiced it the cloudy golden surface of the bird's eye cleared. The dark pupil dilated. And Cortlin fell into a hot, red stream of power that beat and anuL Latest U.S. Government tests of all cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # of all oth' cigarettes sold. Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Regular and Menthol; I # mg. "tar" # mg. nicotine, av. per cigarette, RC Report Apr. #. anui. #R#E Latest U.S. Government tests of all menthol cigarettes show True is lower in both tar and nicotine than # of all other menthols sold Think about it. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? oLorillard # Warning; The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. J pulled at him with a thick, strangling rhythm. , Then the bird was a bird again A and Cortlin was able to move his  tortured muscles. He stared at the creature on the perch. His lips were stiff. "Who are you?" I The bird made no answer. Impulsively Cortlin reached into the nest and seized the little egg. He held it in his palm, feeling the hot i throb of it. "I'm going to take your egg." The bird twitched and began to clean its feathers. "I'm going to take your baby and hide it." He did. He found a native nest L near the edge of the settlement  fields and left the little white egg K there. The palm of his hand throbB bed as he walked away from it and in his head was a pain. And he had just one fervent wish -- that no noepti-noe ever lay an egg in his birdatory again. When he went back next day the little egg had grown. It was a medium size egg. Two days later a if" search party found it and carried it P triumphantly home. It was the size ii; of an underinflated football by ' then. The notable feature of the prei vious winter had been apathy. The I notable feature of this one was r activity. f Two things had happened that fall. First a search party had discovered the healer egg and turned it over to Headsman Valdez and his special assistant, Cortlin. Next, and almost simultaneously, the melons, squash and corn planted around Cortlin's bird dome had suddenly spurted. The effect had extended slightly beyond the stone border Cortlin had laid to mark his territory. The resultant harvest was not by any standards staggering, but it was far more substantial than any they had experienced on this world to date. Now, in the cold and wet of winter, parties brought cut grasses, reeds and reed stalks from the reedland areas. These were being dried in every available spot, including private quarters. Not a settler could be found who didn't carry the musty reed smell on him. Because there were not sufficient artificial materials to erect bird domes over the entire span of settlement fields it was necessary to weave large cages of natural materials to house the noepti-noe they would net from the reedlands that spring. They needed almost one hundred such cages. The settlers were busy. Cortlin Knowing what he did, Cortlin expected to find the second healer infant alien. But she was very much like any human infant when he lifted her from her burst shell in the native village. Her hair was darker than Nilla's. Her eyes were darker. too, but alert and blue. She was smaller than Nilla had been, wirier. But he could find nothing alien in the cast of features or in the thrashing activity of small limbs. Nevertheless, as he carried her toward the settlement, he was the victim of deep misgivings. He reached the edge of the communal fields. Already two dozen fresh reeds clumps had been planted and capped with big handmade cages within which noepti-noe perched placidly. Cortlin felt threatened by their bright-feathered proximity. What he understood about these birds, he realized, was quite insignificant in comparison to what he had yet begun to comprehend. Summer Four: Valdez Valdez shook his head thoughtfully, his eyes intent upon his companion. He remembered the Cortlin of four years ago. Open-minded, driven by curiosity, he had been the colonist least constrained by the inhibiting privacy codes. But as the others had gradually opened up Cortlin had withdrawn, had begun to spend more time alone, burdened with inward occupation. His face reflected this change. "No, Cort, I see what we've done with these birds as a parallel to the domestication of, say, cattle and oxen. We've harnessed their productivity to our own ends -- even if we don't fully understand its source." The settlement fields were lush and green this summer, thick with growth. Cortlin ran an expressive hand through his hair. "What I'm trying to get across -- you're drawing parallels that would apply if we were on Earth. But we're here. And those birds aren't oxen. They're -- do you you know why I think they're sitting there in their cages? Just sitting?" Valdez shook his head. "I think they're waiting to be sacrificed," Cortlin said. Valdez frowned. "I really don't see how a bird could comprehend a concept like that, Cort." "Neither do I. Sometimes I think these birds may be the real highorder inhabitants of this place. And I think it may be the natives who are domesticated in some cockeyed way we can't understand just as we can't understand the birds." Valdez carefully avoided the use of Cortlin's own word -- cockeyed. "That's an odd way of looking at things. If that were the case, why would the birds -- the higher-order life form -- permit themselves to be captured and strangled by the natives?" "Because they need the natives. They have to keep them operating at top efficiency through the healers." "Which they could accomplish without sacrificing themselves. We've proved that, you know. We have two healers, both working out beautifully -- and we've sacrificed no birds." i Cortlin made a nervous gesture. "That's just it, Val. The pieces are scattered all over the board. I can't  fit them." f "Mmm. Maybe you're trying to P assemble too many different puzr zles on the same table. Or maybe f there are key pieces on the floor under the table." Valdez' eyes leveled with Cortlin's. "Or maybe I you're one of those people who I can't handle prosperity. You expect i. the worst -- and you're more upset ' when it doesn't come than when it L does." Cortlin shook his head emphatically. "No. I'm just trying to put things together, that's all." I When Cortlin had gone Valdez sat troubled. Nilla had shown : ability to deal with manic depres sive psychoses and schizophrenia. But if this emotional syndrome Cortlin evinced were not firmly based in physiological causes, could she counter it? Valdez found it impossible to remain troubled long. He himself had no complicated reaction to good fortune. The fields blossomed. The settlement blossomed. His own wife blossomed. Their first child would be born before winter. It was not difficult to reject Cortlin's forebodings. Valdez A week to ten days? Valdez looked out over the prospect of fields and wondered why Cortlin had insisted that the harvest would be delivered so soon. The corn was immature. The melons were small and hard. The other crops were in a corresponding state of unreadiness, except for the tomatoes. But Cortlin had seemed quite positive -- as well as agitated. And the plants themselves, although their fruits were immature, grew thick and dark and full of vigor. Well, if Cortlin's prediction were reliable, if these crops were about to spurt as the plants in and around Cortlin's dome had spurted last fall, it was fortunate they had completed the hose system. Because it had been five weeks since rain. These plants needed water if they were readying for a precipitant growth and ripening. Standing with hose in hand, Valdez experienced one of his increasingly frequent moments of deep satisfaction. There was a feeling of community in the fields today. Everyone had come out for the initiation of the hose system except the youngest children and their attendants, Patry and Bonds. The feeling of communal exuberance was an airborne tonic. Their first major crop was bn its way. Valdez' mood did not alter appreciably when word came that he was required in Sector #. "On my way." He laid down his hose, dried his hands on his worksuit and loped casually across rows of green. When he reached # he realized that misfortune was possible even today. Nims lay unconscious on the ground in the shade of a reed clump. Her older pupils clustered anxiously around her. "We pulled her over here when she fell down. We thought it might be heat stroke." Valdez examined his fallen commander in chief of juvenile services. He didn't like what he found. "How did she fall?" he demanded sharply. "Easily or hard?" The oldest child answered. "She was standing there telling us -- telling us about things -- and then she fell hard. It made a noise." Valdez glanced around quickly for an implement or clod that might have rendered her unconscious had she struck her head upon it in falling. There was nothing. Nor was there any wound upon her head. "Did someone go for Nilla?" "Cort did." Valdez nodded, staring at the still woman. He had no one with whom to share his apprehensions. The only other member of the party who had gone through the medical course lay at his feet. Her students were eager to help. "Downy thought we should wash her face with cold water." Valdez shook his head. "I don't think that would help." The hover-scooter appeared, bobbing, bearing Cortlin, Patry, Nilla and the younger healer, Kinnie. Nilla, at two and a half years, had the stature and composure of a tenyear-old. She kept that composure when she saw her adoptive mother lying inert on the wet ground. And why not? Valdez mused. To Nilla illness was not tragedy, not even cause for minor anxiety. Illness was simply a condition to be neutralized. "I think the trouble is in her head," he explained. Accordingly the child applied the back of her right hand to her mother's head in a diagnosing caress. Briefly she shut her eyes. Then, instead of turning the hand to apply the healing power of the palm, she drew it back. Her eyes opened. They held a small flicker of expression. "She has a clot closing up a big blood vessel in her brain. It's been there too long now." Valdez flinched. Only minutes had elapsed, but the final death processes were already underway. "Do you want me to take care of it?" Nilla asked hopefully. He stared at her. But of course -- why did they have a second healer if not for an emergency like this? He wondered briefly if his own son or daughter would ever know fear in the presence of near-deathor would instead regard it casually as a reversible state. "We can use Kinnie if you'd rather." The child understood that her powers would be lost if applied in circumstances like these. "No, it's all right. I don't mind." He saw that she meant it. That she understated, in fact. "All right, Nilla. Take care of her please." The child's face became still, all attention focused inward. Her hand reached out again, rested palm down on Nims' head. Valdez watched intently. Usually when she applied her palm she briefly closed her eyes. This time she didn't. Valdez didn't realize what was happening until it had already happened, until the dark pupils of Nilla's eyes had opened and he found himself pulled downward into something red and gluey and hot that throbbed. Helplessly he felt his body stiffen convulsively, heard his spine pop in protest...heard Cortlin groan thickly, "No!" He heard something else, too, what seemed an age later. Alien cries rose from the fields all around, hoarse and penetrating cries of scalding agony. He had no way of timing his paralysis. But finally the pupils of Nilla's eyes closed and the red power was shielded. And Valdez was able to move his body. He was peripherally aware that Nims stirred. But more he was aware of a last dying shriek from the fields. His eyes went to Cortlin's, met another agony there. "The noe?" he whispered numbly. Cortlin, too, was stunned and slow. "They've been sacrificed," he said thickly. "They were waiting for it." Cortlin rose to his feet. stumbled to the nearest reed clump. He pulled back the big cage and reached into the nest. The bird he brought forth was limp, its bright feathers tarnished, its eyes bulging. Cortlin stared at it, then shook it. "Who are you? IVho are you?" The bird didn't answer. It was dead, as were most of the others that had been brought to nest in the settlement fields. Valdez began to shake helplessly. Because he knew that if his ears were keener, he would hear another sound from the fields. He would hear their stalks and vines shriveling in death, taking their immature fruits with them. Valdez The shuttle sat at the edge of the field. Nims turned as she boarded, raised her hand in farewell. Valdez returned the salute. His brisk little commander in chief had been firm in her refusal to chance imposing a second life-ordeath decision upon him. The more than seven dozen others who accompanied her on the return trip went for a different reason. "We're well off without them," Cortlin observed. Valdez nodded, reluctantly agreeing. After the fall crop disaster the community had divided sharply. Half his people had retired to their private quarters and put forth no further effort. Unable to cope with the scope of the disaster or with the fact that there was no comprehending the forces behind it they had refused to do more than exist until the shuttle came for them. But others had been mobilized by crisis, had worked like oxen, disposing of the seventy-five dead noe, digging out the reed clumps that had followed them in death, plowing under the withered crops. Bringing in more reeds, more noe, doggedly planting late crops. The late crops had delivered. Now there was food to carry them through summer and fall -- those who were staying. And they were of survival. The shuttle captain was a conscientious man and worried. "You understand there won't be anyone back this way for another five years. Head. And I'm not authorized to leave you'any more food supplies." "We understand. We've discussed it in meeting." "All right. Sign and we'll unload." Gravely Valdez signed for herds of embryonic sheep and cattle, for equipment to carry the embryos to birth-stage and for concentrated feed to maintain them through their first year, until the seeds that accompanied them could be parlayed into feed. The livestock was unloaded. Then the shuttle closed its doors and pulled up into the sky, becoming a bright fleck in the distance. Whenit was gone Valdez' eyes moved over their world, over fields green with crops, over the domes of the settlement, over the reedlands. He was keenly aware that there were just sixty-odd of them alone on a world they had barely begun to understand. He was even more keenly aware of the presence of the birds in his fields. "You ever wonder what they'll find when they do get back?" Cortlin mused. Valdez studied Cortlin. His bird expert had changed again. "You know, once the worst happened, Cort, you cheered up." Cortlin smiled. "What makes you think the worst has happened?" Valdez looked out into the fields. He still held a vivid memory of Cortlin's question the day of the crop disaster: Who are you? It repeated itself in his mind every time he met the golden eye of the noepti-noe. And he knew it was a question he was unlikely to see answered. "Well, I'm hoping we know everything now that can harm us seriously." "Hope you're not counting on that too hard." "I'm not," Valdez admitted. The only thing he was counting on was that the gray skies of City America would never close over him again. He walked under open sky.  TH Free as the photon gales. Grimes was still haunted by his genetic heritage I G rimes was packing his overnight bag without much enthusiasm. "Do you have to go?" asked Sonya. He replied rather testily, "I don't have to do anything. But the lightjammers have always been my babies and I've always made a point of seeing them in and seeing them out." "But Coldharbor Bay? And in midwinter? There are times, my dear, when I strongly suspect that I married a masochist." "If only you were a sadist we'd live happily forever after," he retorted. "And if you were a masochist you'd be coming with me to Port Ericson." "Not bloody likely," she told him. "Why you couldn't have arranged for your precious lightjammers to berth somewhere in what passes for the Tropics on this dismal planet is beyond my comprehension." "There were reasons," he said. Yes, there were reasons, one of the most important being that a lightjammer is a potential superbomb with a yield greatly in excess of that of the most devastating nuclear fusion weapon. The essential guts of a star-sailer is the sphere of anti-matter, contraterrene iron, held suspended in vacuum by powerful magnetic fields. In theory there is no possibility that the antimatter will ever come in contact with normal matter -- but history has a long record of disasters giving dreadful proof that theory and practice do not always march hand in hand. The terminal port for the lightjammers, therefore, was located in a region of Lorn uninhabited save by a handful of fur trappers. It would have been at the South Pole itself but for the necessity for open water, relatively icefree the year around, to afford landing facilities for the ships. The first of these weird vessels. Flying Cloud, had been an experimental job designed to go a long way in a long time, but with a very low power consumption. The most important characteristic of antimatter -- apart from its terrifying explosive potential -- is anti-mass. A ship with a sphere of contraterrene iron incorporated in her structure is weightless and inertialess. With her sails spread to the photon gale she can attain an extremely high percentage of the velocity of light but cannot, of course, exceed it. The crew of Flying Cloud had been, putting it mildly, a weird mob. Somehow they had become obsessed with the idea of turning the vessel into a real faster-thanlight ship. (The conventional starship, proceeding under inertial drive and Mannschenn Drive, is not faster than light, strictly speaking; she makes light-years-iong voyages in mere weeks by, as it has been put, going ahead in space while going astern in time.) This desirable end they attempted to achieve by means of a jury-rigged rocket drive, using home-made solid fuel, just to give Flying Cloud that extra nudge. Fantastically, the idea worked, although it should not have. Not only did it work, but there were economically advantageous side effects. The lightjammer finished up a long way off course, plunging down to apparently inevitable destruction on Llanith, one of the planets of the anti-matter systems to the galactic west of the Rim Worlds. But a transposition of atomic charges had taken place. She now was anti-matter herself, whereas that contraterrene iron sphere was now normal matter. Flying Cloud had landed on Llanith and had been welcomed by the people, human rather than merely humanoid, of that world. She had remained on Llanith until the Llanithian scientists and engineers had worked out just what had happened and why. (The attitude of the scientists at first had been that it couldn't possibly have happened.) Then, after modifications had been made to her control systems and the makeshift rocket replaced by a properly designed reaction drive, she had returned to Lorn, carrying not only a sample shipment of trade goods but passengers from the Llanithi Consortium. And Rim Runners, the shipping line of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, had a new trade. G rimes sat in the forward cabin of the Rim Runners' atmosphere ferry that somebody had called -- the name had stuck -- the Commodore's Barge. He was not handling the controls himself. His old friend and shipmate Billy Williams, master of the deep-space tug Rim Malemute, was piloting. Grimes was admiring the scenery. The landscape unrolling beneath the barge was spectacular enough but cold and forbidding. Lake Misere was well astern now and the craft was threading its way over and through the Great Barrens, skirting the higher, jagged, snowcapped peaks, its inertial drive maintain altitude in the vicious downdrafts. The big man cursed softly to himself. Grimes said, "You would insist on coming along for the ride, Billy." "I didn't think you'd make me drive. Skipper." "Rank has its privileges." "No need to rub it in. If it's all the same to you I'll take this little bitch down through the Blackall Pass. It's putting on distance, but I don't feel like risking the Valley of the Winds after what we've been getting already." "As you've been saying, you're driving." head around to port, making for the entrance to the pass. The opening was black in the dark gray of the cliff face, a mere slit that seemed to widen as the aircraft came on to the correct line of approach. And then they were plunging through the gloomy, winding canyon -- the tortuosness of which was an effective wind baffle, although the eddies at every bend made pilotage difficult. The echoes of the irregular beat of the inertial drive, bouncing back from the sheer granite walls, inhibited conversation. They broke out at last into what passed for daylight in these high latitudes, under a sky which, on this side of the ranges, was thickly overcast. Only to the northwest, just above the featureless horizon of the Nullarbor Plain, was there a break in the cloud cover, a smear of sullen crimson to mark the setting of the Lorn sun. They flew steadily over the desolate tundra through the gathering darkness. The lights of Port Erikson came up at last, bright but cheerless. Beyond them Grimes could see the tiny moving sparks of white and red and green that must be the navigation lanterns of the small icebreaker that, in winter, was employed to keep Coldharbor Bay clear of floes and pack ice. "Too bloody much seamanship about this job. Skipper," remarked "No such thing as too much seamanship," retorted Grimes huffily. He pulled the microphone of the tronautical Superintendant to Port Erikson. Can you read me? Over." "Loud and clear, Commodore. Loud and clear. Pass your message. Over." minutes from now. Over." "We're all ready and waiting for you, Commodore." "What's the latest on Pamir?" ago. # hours our time." "Thank you. Port Erikson. Over and out." Ahead was the scarlet blinker that marked the end of the airstrip. the flashing light was almost directly beneath the barge, until it looked as though they must crash into the spaceport's control tower. With only seconds to spare he brought the aircraft to a shuddering halt by application of full reverse thrust, let her fall, checked her descent a moment before she hit the concrete. Grimes decided to say nothing. After all, he himself was frequently guilty of such exhibitions and all his life he had deplored the all-toocommon Don't do as I do, do as I say, philosophy. G rimes and wnuams waited ' in the control tower with Captain Rowse, the harbormaster. (In a normal spaceport his official title would have been port captain, but a normal spaceport does not run to a harbor, complete with wharfage and breakwaters.) "She's showing up now," announced the radar operator. "Thank you, Mr. Gorbels," said Rowse. "Pamir to Port Erikson, Pamir to Port Erikson. Am coming in. Over." Grimes recognized the voice, of course. Listowel had been master of the experimental Flying Cloud and was now in command of Pamir. A good man, not easily panicked, one who would have been just as at home on the poop of a windjammer as in the control room of a spaceship. The commodore moved so that he could look up through the transparent dome that roofed the control tower. Yes, there she was, her navigation lights bright sparks against the black overcast, white and ruby and emerald, masthead, port and starboard. (Her real masts were retracted, of course, and her sails furled. She was driving herself down through the atmosphere by negative dynamic lift, a dirigible airship rather than a spaceship.) Faintly Grimes could hear the throb of her airscrews, even above the thin whining of the wind that eddied about the tower. The ship was lower now, visible through the windows that overlooked Coldharbor Bay. Grimes lifted borrowed night glasses to his  eyes, ignoring the TV screen that r presented the infrared picture. The slim, graceful length of her was  clearly visible, picked out by the line of lighted ports. Down she ' ; came -- down, down, slowly circling, j, until she was only meters above the t dark, white-flecked waters of the f bay. From her belly extended hoses. ;i and Grimes knew that the thirsty # centrifugal pumps would be sucking  in ballast. I "Pamir waterborne," announced I "Am proceeding to berth. Over." shrugged themselves into heavy overcoats, put on fur-lined caps. The harbormaster led the way to the elevator that would take them w, down to ground level. They dropped rapidly to the base of the tower.  Outside it was bitterly cold and the wind carried thin flurries of snow, p Grimes wondered why some genius T, could not devise earflaps that would i, not inhibit hearing his own prominent ears felt as though they were V going to snap off at any moment. But during berthing operations it i was essential to hear as well as to ; see what was going on. The three men walked rapidly to the wharf, breasting the wind -- little, fat Rowse in the lead, chunky couple of steps in the rear. The shed I lights were on now, as were the position-marker flashers. Beside each of the latter waited three linesmen. beating their arms across their chests in an endeavor to keep warm. The berthing master, electric megaphone in his gloved hand, was striding up and down energetically. Pamir came in slowly and carefully, almost hidden by the cloud of spray thrown up by the turbulence induced by her airscrews. She was accosting the wharf at a steep angle at first and then turned, so that she was parallel to the line of wharfage. The wind did the rest, so that it was hardly necessary for Listowel to use his line-throwers fore and aft. She fell gently alongside, with her offshore screws swiveled to provide transverse thrust against the persistent pressure of the southerly. She lay there, a great, gleaming torpedo shape, gently astir as the slight chop rolled her against the quietly protesting fenders. The hum of motors, the threshing of airscrews, suddenly ceased. From an open window in his control room Listowel called, "Is this where you want me?" "Make her fast as she is. Captain," called the berthing master. "As she is," came the reply. A few seconds later a side door opened and the brow extended from the wharf, stanchions coming erect and manropes tautening. Grimes was first up the gangway. After all, as he had said to Sonya, the lightjammers were his babies. L istowel received the board ing party in his day cabin. With him was Sandra Listowel, who was both his wife and his catering officer. Rim Runners did not, as a general rule, approve of wives traveling in their husband's ships in any capacity, but Sandra was one of, the original Flying Cloud crew and had undergone training in that peculiar mixture of seamanship and airmanship required for the efficient handling of a lightjammer. Grimes often wondered if she had, over the years, become like so many of the wives of the old-time windjammer masters, a captain de facto -- though he did not think that Ralph Listowel would allow such a situation to develop. Captain Listowel had changed little over the years. When he rose to greet his visitors he towered over them. He had put on no weight and his closely cut hair was still dark, save for a touch of gray at the temples. And Sandra was as gorgeous as ever, a radiant blonde, not quite as slim as she had been but none the worse for that. Her severe, shortskirted, black uniform suited her. Listowel produced a bottle and glasses. He said, "You might like to try this. You look as though you need warming up. It's something new. Our Llanithi friends acquired a taste for scotch and a local distiller thought he'd cash in on it. What he produced is not scotch. Even so, it's good. It might go well on Lorn and the other Rim Worlds." Grimes sipped the clear, golden fluid experimentally, then enthusiastically. "Not bad at all." Then: "You'd better have some more yourself to soften the blow, Listowel." "What blow. Commodore?" "You've a very quick turnaround this time. As you know, Herzogen Cecile is tied up for repairs on Llanith -- and I'd still like to know just how Captain Palmer got himself dismasted." "I have his report with me. Commodore." "Good. I'll read it later. And when Lord of The Isles comes in to Port Erikson she's being withdrawn for survey. Which leaves you and Sea Witch to cope." He grinned. "As they used to say back on Earth in the days of sail, 'Growl you may, but go you must.' " "But we're still in the days of sail. Commodore," said Listowel. "And as one of the sailing ship poets said, 'All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.' " "Very touching, Ralph, very touching," commented Sandra Listowel. "But I'm sure that the Chief Stewards of the ocean-going sailing ships had their problems, just as I have." She turned to Grimes. "Last time we were in Port Erikson, Commodore, we enjoyed our usual two weeks alongside -- but even then we sailed without all our stores. How will it be this time?" "Better," promised Grimes. "I'll light a fire under the tail of the Provedore Department back at Port Forlorn." He allowed Listowel to fill his glass. "Did you have a good trip. Captain?" "Yes. Even so -- " "Even so what?" "I think you might keep us informed, sir, of these other lightjammers, the experimental ones, cluttering up the route between Lorn and Llanith." Grimes stared. "What are you talking about, Listowel?" "We averted collision by the thickness of a coat of paint. Captain Palmer, in Herzogen Cecile, also had a close shave. His emergency alteration of course was so violent that it carried away his N and E masts with all their sails. He limped to Port Listowel on Llanith on S and W only." "Why didn't he report it? The circumstances, I mean." "He must have read your last circular, Commodore." Grimes' prominent ears burned as he flushed angrily. But Listowel was right. He, Grimes, had written that circular under pressure from the Rim Worlds Admiralty -- which body was, as he had put it, passing through a phase of acting like small boys playing at pirates. The fleet was out -- or had been out or would be out -- on deep space maneuvers. Masters and officers were reminded that the Carlotti bands were continually monitored by potentially hostile powers. Therefore no report of any sighting of Rim Worlds Navy warships was to be made over these channels, whatever the circumstances. And so forth. "We are the only people with the Erikson-ChargeReversing Drive," went on Listowel. "So we assumed that what we saw was an experimental warship. One of ours. Palmer assumed likewise." Grimes made a major production said through the swirling cloud of acrid blue smoke, "The Navy doesn't have any lightjammers, yet. They want some, just in case we ever fail to see eye to eye with the Llanithi Consortium. But the first ships of the line, as they are to be called, are still on the drawing board." Listowel murmured thoughtfully, "Nevertheless we saw something -- and it as near as dammit hit us. What was it. Commodore?" "You tell me," said Grimes. "I'm listening." II  were bowling along under a full press of sail and the Doppler Log was reading point eight nine seven, so it was nowhere near time to light the fire under our arse -- " He coughed apologetically. "That, sir, is the expression we use for starting the reaction drive -- " "I gathered as much," said Grimes. "But go on." "We were just finishing dinner in the main salon. I had Llawissen and his two wives -- he's the new Llanithi trade commissioner, as you know -- at my table. We were making the usual small talk when I noticed that the little red warning light in the chandelier had come on.  "Sounds very fancy," com"You should have done more time in passenger ships, Billy," Grimes told him. "That signal is to tell the master that he's wanted in control, but for something short of a full-scale emergency. Carry on. Captain." "So I excused myself, but didn't leave the table in a hurry. Still, I lost no time in getting to the control room. Young Wallasey, the third mate, was #. W. He said, 'We've got company, sir.' I said, 'Impossible.' He pointed and said, 'Look.' So I looked. "We had company all right. She was out on the starboard beam, just clear of E topmast. She was only a light at first, a blueish glimmer, a star where we knew damn welt no star should be, could be, hanging just above the distant mistiness of the Lens. " 'Anything on the radar?' I asked. "There wasn't -- and these ships aren't fitted with Mass Proximity Indicators." "No need for them," grunted Grimes, "unless you have Mannchenn Drive." "So -- there was nothing on the radar, which is what made me think afterward that this vessel must have been an experimental warship. The light was getting brighter and brighter, suggesting that the ship -- I had already decided that it must be a ship -- was getting closer. "I got the big mounted binoculars trained on it. After I got them focused I could make out details, although that fuzzy, greenish light didn't help any. Some sort of force field? But no matter. I'd say that it -- she -- wasn't as big as Pamir or any of the other commercial lightjammers. She had an odd sort of rig, too. Instead of having four masts arranged in a cruciform pattern she had three, in series. And the sails -- what I could see of them -- had reflective surfaces on both sides instead of on one side only, as is the case with ours. "And she was getting too bloody close on a convergent course. That was obvious, radar or no radar. Wallasey was calling her, first on but getting no reply. There wasn't time to break out the Morse lamp. Whoever dreamed that we'd need it in deep space? "So I said to hell with this and altered course, turning my W sails edge on to the Llanith sun. It was only just in time. That bastard was so near that I could see a line of ports with what looked like the muzzles of weapons sticking out of them. If she'd opened fire I wouldn't be here to tell the tale." "Nor would any of us," commented Sandra Listowel. "And only you and the officer of the watch saw this -- thing?" asked Grimes. "I'm not in the habit of throwing tea parties in my control room during emergencies, Commodore." "Sorry. And presumably Captain Palmer saw something similar?" "He did." "But finish your story. Captain. What happened next?" "Nothing. As I've told you, I altered course. And when next I was able to snatch a glance out of the ports she was gone. Like a snuffed candle, Wallasey told me." Grimes grunted. He was thinking matters over. While he had discovered the anti-matter systems to the Galactic West he had never visited their worlds. And he had never sailed in the lightjammers -- though these ships were his brain children. He could afford the time for a voyage to Llanith -- although his best policy would be to make all arrangements for the conduct of affairs during his absence first and to inform Rim Runners' management afterward. Not that this last mattered really. The Rim Worlds Navy would be interested in this story of alien lightjammers on the Lorn-Llanith trade route -- and Grimes, as a Commodore of the Naval Reserve, had often in the past been called back to active duty to investigate strange occurrences. He had been called the Confederacy's odd-job man for reasons. And Sonya would be in this too -- she still held her commission in the Intelligence Branch of the Federation Survey Service. Grimes said to Rowse, "I'd like to orrow your office. Captain. I've a pile of telephoning to do. Oh, Captain Listowel, would you mind having accommodation ready for Mrs. Grimes and myself? We shall be making the next round trip with you." "And what about me. Skipper?" "I'm sorry. Bill, but there just aren't any senior masters kicking around loose at the moment. So, as of right now, you're appointed Port Forlorn astronautical superintendent, acting, temporary." "Not unpaid?" demanded the big man. "Not unpaid," agreed Grimes. G rimes called Admiral Kravitz first. The Officer Commanding Rim Worlds Navy was not pleased at being awakened from a sound sleep, but after he had listened to Grimes' story he was alert and businesslike. He glowered at Grimes from the telephone screen. "These reports. They're utterly fantastic. Can you trust these masters of yours? Couldn't they have been seeing things?" "They saw something," said Grimes. "In the case of Pamir, the intruder was seen by Captain Listowel and his third officer, Mr. Wallasey. In the case of Herzogen Cecile. the chief and second officers were in the control room as well as Captain Palmer. All the stories tally, even to minor details." "Is there any -- ah -- excessive drinking aboard your ships? Any addiction to hallucinogenic drugs?" "No." Grimes' ears were reddening. He countered with: "Are you sure that the Navy hasn't any experimental lightjammers?" "You know bloody well we haven't. Grimes. Oh, all right, all right. Have your free trip at the taxpayers' expense. Don't forget to send the bill for your fare in to the Rim Worlds Navy." "And my commodore's pay and allowances, sir?" "Take that up with the accounts department. Grimes. You know how to look after yourself. Call me again at a civilized hour tomorrow morning after you've got things organized." "Good night." Grimes allowed himself a small grin. He was in an if-l'm-up-everybody's-up mood. He called Sonya. She, too, exhibited extreme displeasure at being disturbed at, as she put it, a jesusless hour. But her displeasure was replaced by enthusiasm. By the time the call was concluded she had decided what she would pack for herself and for Grimes and assured him that she would be at Port Erikson within twenty-four hours. There was another call Grimes would have liked to have made, but unluckily Ken Mayhew, one of the few remaining psionic communication officers in the Rim Worlds, was not on Lorn. He was spending a long holiday on Francisco, of which planet his wife was a native. was worth his weight in Carlotti were good and in the vast majority of interstellar ships the temperamental telepaths had been replaced by the time-space twisting Carlotti radio equipment. But a Carlotti transceiver could not read minds, was incapable of that practice, frowned upon by the Rhine Institute but exercised nonetheless and known variously as snooping and prying. If Pamir had carried a psionic radio officer much could have been learned about the strange lightjammer. As it was, nothing -- apart from the details of her appearance -- was known. Grimes went to the guest bedroom that had been provided for him in the Port Erikson staff accommodation block and settled down to read the reports -- Listowel's as well as Palmer's. He would have liked to have discussed the port captain was organizing the round-the-clock stevedoring acships, was no doubt making a nuisance of himself to Pamirs officers. The reports told Grimes little more than he had already learned from Captain Listowel's spoken account. G rimes and Sonya were guests in Pamir's control room when she sailed from Port Erikson at local noon, three day's later. The southerly had persisted, had freshened and was holding the ship against the wharf. The pivoting airscrews would be hard put to it to provide sufficient transverse thrust to pull her out bodily from the berth. But the little icebreaker was also a tug and was given a forward towline by Pamir. Mooring lines were let go fore and aft, were swiftly winched inboard. The pivoted offshore airscrews began to spin faster and faster, their whirling blades flickering into invisibility -- but they were doing little more than holding the ship against the wind. "Take her out. Bustler." ordered "Take her out. Captain," came the cheerful acknowledgment. The towline grew taut, scattering a glittering spray in the thin sunlight. Bustler's diesels thumped noisily and black smoke shot from her squat funnel to be shredded by the stiff breeze. Grimes went to an open window on the port side of the control room, looked out and down. There was a gap now between the wharf fenders and the side of the ship forward, a gap that was slowly widening. But what was happening aft? What about the projecting venturi of the reaction drive, the after control surfaces? Wasn't there a possibility -- a probability -- of their fouling the wharf gantries? But Listowel, standing in the middle of his control room, didn't seem to be worrying about it. And, after all, the ship was his. The stern was coming off, too, under the tug of the airscrews, although not so rapidly. There was clearance between the tail fins and the nearest wharf structure -- not much, but enough. And then the port propellers, unpivoted, whirled into motion, giving headway and accentuating the swinging moment. Pamir turned to starboard slowly but determinedly, a white and green Jumble of brash ice piling up along that side. She came around into the wind and the starboard screws pivoted as she turned, giving headway instead of lateral thrust. Astern the distance between ship and wharf was widening rapidly. "Let go. Bustler," ordered Listowel and then, to Grimes: "I'm always afraid that one day I'll forget and drag that poor little bitch with me all the way to Llanith." "Is there any market there for used tugs or icebreakers?" "Button her up, Mr. Wallasey," said Listowel. The third officer pressed buttons. The wheelhouse windows slid shut. And about time. Grimes thought. Icy drafts had begun to eddy about the compartment. "Dump ballast." The ship lifted as the tons of water gushed out from her tanks, rising faster and faster, stemming the wind, until Coldharbor Bay, directly beneath her, seemed a puddle beside whiclva child had set a huddle of toy buildings -- until far to the south the Ice Barrier, a coldly gleaming wall of pearly white, lifted over the black sea horizon. She lifted like a rocket, but without noise and without crushing acceleration effects. She soared into the clear sky, the color of which deepened from blue to purple, to black. Below her the planet was no longer a vast, spreadout map -- it was a globe, with seas and continents half glimpsed through the swirling cloud formations, with the dark shadow of the terminator drifting slowly across it from the west. The chief officer came into the control room to report all secured for space. Other reports came over the intercom. Listowel acknowledged them and then, smiling, turned to his guests. "Well, Commodore and Mrs. Grimes, how do you like it so far?" "I envy you, Listowel. You've a fine ship and you know how to handle her." "Thank you. Commodore." He said to the third officer, "Make the usual warning, Mr. Wallasey." Then, to Grimes: "Seats and seat belts, sir. I have to swing her to the right heading now." The maneuver was routine enough in any interstellar ship, the turning of a vessel about her axes until she was lined up with the target star. Somewhere amidships the big, directional gyroscopes grumbled, hummed and then whined, and centrifugal force gave the illusion of off-center gravity. The great globe that was Lorn seemed to fall away and to one side, and its sun drifted aft. Ahead now was only the blackness of intergalactic space, although the misty Lens was swimming slowly into view through the side ports. Then, coming gradually toward the center of the cartwheel sights, appeared the distant cluster of bright sparks that were the anti-matter stars. The gyroscopes slowed almost to a stop, grumbling, as Captain Listowel made the last fine adjustments. They halted at last. The master looked up from his sighting telescope, murmured, "She'll do." Both hands went to the console before him. He said, "Look out through the side ports and aft. Commodore. This is worth watching." It was. From the control room -- which, like the bridge of a sea-going ship or the conning tower of a submarine, was a superstructure -- there was a good view astern. Grimes could see the engine pods, four to a side, their now motionless four-bladed airscrews gleaming in the harsh sunlight. He could see the stubs of three of the masts -- W to port, N on the centerline and E to starboard. S, of course, was beneath the hull and not visible, except in the periscope screen. But those stubs were stubs no longer. They were elongating, extending, stretching like impossibly fast growing, straight-stemmed trees. And as they grew they sprouted branches, foliage -- the yards and the sails. The royals at the head of each mast were fully spread before the process of telescopic elongation was completed. There was disorientation then, visual confusion, upset balance as the star wind filled the sails. What had been up was up no longer. Aft was still aft, but it was also "down." Chairs swung in their gymbals, as did some of the instruments. Other equipment was cunningly designed so that it could be used from almost any angle. Grimes realized what was happening but, twisting his body awkwardly in the chair, still stared in fascination aft and down through the polarized glass of the viewports. He had seen the sail plan of this ship, of course, had helped to draw it up; but this was the first time he had watched a lightjammer actually making sail. He mentally recited the names of the courses. He had insisted the old nomenclature be used. Northsail, lower topsail, upper topsail, topgallant, royal... He turned away at last, asked. "Do you usually make sail all in one operation. Captain?" Listowel laughed. "Only when I have guests in the control room." Sonya laughed, too. "John would prefer to see all hands out in spacesuits, clambering in the rigging like monkeys." "The good old days, eh?" Listowel unsnapped his seat belt. "Roll and go. Hell or Llanith in ninety days -- and the sun's over the yardarm." Grimes took one last look at that splendid suit of sails, black against the glare of the Lorn sun, before he got up to follow Listowel and Sonya from the control room. He realized that he would have to get his spacelegs back. In this inertialess ship, in spite of the already fantastic acceleration, the distinction between up and down was a matter of faith rather than of knowledge. T hey enjoyed their drinks -- more of the Llanithian whisky -- in Listowel's comfortable day room, where Sandra joined them. "How are the customers?" her husband asked her. "There's only one this trip," she told him. She flashed a smile at the guests. "I don't count the commodore and Mrs. Grimes as real passengers." "Who is it?" asked Grimes. "Anybody I know -- or should know?" "Perhaps you should know her, sir. She's a missionary." "Why wasn't I warned?" demanded Listowel. "I'm warning you now, Ralph." "What's her name? What nut cult is she trying fo peddle?" "She's the Reverend Madam Swithin. Rather an old dear, actually. She's a missionary for the United Primitive Spiritualist Church." "And she thinks she'll be able to convert the Llanithi?" "She'll probably convert some of them. After all, given the right conditions you can convert anybody to anything." "But United Primitive Spiritualism -- " muttered Listowel disgustedly. "They have something," Sonya told him. "I've had some odd experiences and so has John." "I only hope she's not at my table," said the master. "Where else could I put her, Ralph? After all, she is a person of some importance in her church. I couldn't put her with the junior officers." "I'm sorry about this. Commodore," Listowel said. "Don't worry. Captain. We'll survive somehow," Grimes told him. T he Reverend Madam Swithin was, as Sandra had said, rather an old dear, but the sort of old dear whose idea of conversation is asking endless questions. Yet it could be said in her favor that she enjoyed the excellent food prepared by Sandra and served by the efficient stewardess and that she did not belong to one of those sects that regard alcoholic beverages as sinful. It took her some little time to get things sorted out, however. She knew that a commodore is superior to a captain and so assumed that Grimes was master of Pamir. She asked him why he wasn't wearing uniform. Then she asked why Pamir wasn't named according the general Rim Runners principle, with the "Rim" prefix. Grimes told her, "In these vessels we've tried to revive the names of the old sailing ships, the Terran windjammers. Unluckily most, if not all, of the most famous names are being used by Trans-Galactic Clippers -- Thermopylae and Cutty Sark and so on." "Are Trans-Galactic Clippers lightjammers like this one. Commodore?" "No, Madam Swithin. But the original clippers were very fast sailing ships and long after sail had vanished from the seas the name 'clipper' was still being used by the operators of other forms of transport -- road services, airlines and so forth. One of the first little ships to fly to Earth's moon was called Yankee Clipper." "How interesting. Commodore. The usage gives one a sense of continuity, don't you think? And now. Captain, when do you think you're getting this clipper of yours to Llanith?" jective from now." "You said 'Hell or Llanith in ninety days'," Sonya reminded him. "Ninety days objective," He told her. "But only three weeks as we shall live them, Mrs. Grimes." "And is there really any danger of the ship's getting wrecked? Not that I'm frightened, of course. I know that there is no death." Sandra joined them at the table, bringing coffee. "Don't worry. Madam Swithin. That 'Hell or Llanith' is just an expression that Captain Listowel picked up from a book about the famous windjammers. There was a captain on the trade between England and Australia who used to say, 'Hell or Melbourne in ninety days!' " "And as  was saying, dear, such a sense of continuity. So fascinating to think that you sailing ship captains are reincarnations of the old sailing ship captains. The wheel has come full circle and you have been reborn--" Listowel was beginning to squirm uncomfortably in his chair. The junior officers at their tables -- obviously listening -- were starting to look amused. Grimes endeavoured to steer the conversation on to a fresh tack. "And when. Captain," he asked, "do you start the reaction drive?" Startling evidence that modern science confirms the reality of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis An Excursion into Parapsychology S.#S. now at your bookstore "A week from now. Commodore, as soon as we have point nine recurring on the Doppler Log. Then we have a week of full acceleration and erate. And then, all being well, we're there." All being well, thought Grimes. But if all is well, I shall have made this trip for nothing. HI S HE was a fine ship, this Pamir, and most efficiently run -- but, to one accustomed to a conventional starship, uncannily quiet. Grimes missed the incessant, noisy, arhythmic hammering of the inertial drive, the continuous thin. high keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Here the only mechanical noises were the occasional sobbing of a pump, the soft susurrus of the forced ventilation. On she drove, running free before the photon Jale. The Rim Stars astern were ruddily dim -- the suns of the Llanithi Consortium blazed intensely blue ahead. And on the beam, mast and sails in black silhouette against it, glowed the great Lens of the Galaxy, unaffected by either red or blue shift. The needle of the Doppler Log, after its initial rapid jump, crept slowly around its dial. Point eight, point eight five, point eight seven five... Grimes tried to imagine what the ship must look like to an outside observer, tried to visualize the compression along the fore and aft line. But to see her at all that mythical outside observer would have to be in another ship traveling in the same direction at the same speed -- and then, of course, he would observe nothing abnormal. And what would happen if Pamir hit something -- even only a small piece of cosmic debris -- at this fantastic velocity? So far the lightjammers had been lucky -- but what if their luck suddenly ran out? The question, as far as her crew was concerned, was purely academic. They would never know what hit them -- although after weeks or months or years the brief flare would be visible in the night skies of Lorn and Llanith. At last came the time for the final acceleration -- and the reversal of atomic charges. Again Grimes and Sonya were guests in the control room, watching with fascination. Listowel explained, "This isn't half as bad as that moment when the temporal precession field of the Mannschenn Drive is initiated. Oh, you'll feel something. We all do. Just a microsecond of tension and, at the same time -- as the charges are reversed -- what we call a scrambled spectrum. But there's none of the dithering about in and on alternate time tracks that we experienced when we first discovered the effect." "Just as well," grunted Grimes. "Alternate time tracks are among my pet allergies." Listowel was watching the log screen, which gave him far finer readings than the dial, to six places of decimals. Grimes and Sonya watched, too. #... The crimson numerals glowed brightly. #... #... The # was a long time coming up... Ah, here it was. #... #... There was another long delay. Then the final # appeared briefly but flickered back to #. "Go, you bitch, go," Listowel was whispering. #... "It's holding, sir," whispered one of the officers. "I have to be sure... Now!" After the long days of quiet sailing the screaming roar of the f rocket drive, carried by and through the metal structure of the I ship, was startlingly loud. There  should have been brutal acceleration, but there was not. There was not physical sense of acceleration. Yet Grimes felt as though he, personally, were striving to lift some impossibly heavy weight. He felt as though he were pressing against some thin yet enormously tough film that stubbornly refused to break. ' Then it burst. There was real acceleration now, driving him down into the padding , of his chair. He was dimly aware i that Listowel -- a strange Listowel, who looked like a photographic negative, whose shorts-and-shirt uniform was black instead of the ' regulation white, whose face had become oddly negroid -- was doing things, explaining as his hands moved over the console. His voice, ' normally light, was a deep, grum bling bass. "Have to pivot the sails. Commodore. Edge on, or we'll be I taken aback -- " Suddenly things snapped back to normal. i Color and sound were as they y should be and the acceleration had !. eased to a fairly comfortable one ' gravity. Grimes took mental stock of himself. Yes, he was still Commodore John Grimes of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, astronautical superintendent of Rim Runners. And he was still aboard Pamir. He turned to look at his wife, who smiled back at him rather shakily. And Sonya was still Sonya. So far so good. And the log screen? Blue numerals now -- #... #... The final I flashed up and then, in steady succession: #, #, #... All my years in deep space, thought Grimes, and this is the first time I've really traveled faster than light...  CO 'VE are all anti-matter O now. Captain?" asked the Reverend Madam Swithin that evening at dinner. She did not wait for a reply, but went on, "But what about our souls, our essential essences?" "I'm afraid, madam, that that's rather outside my province," replied Listowel. "And what do you think. Commodore?" Grimes grunted through a mouthful of steak. "But the Llanithi have souls," the missionary went on. "Otherwise I should not be traveling to their worlds." A rather uncomfortable silence was broken by Sonya. "Tell me. Madam Swithin -- do you ever, in your seances, establish communication with the departed spirits of non-human entities?" "Frequently, Mrs. Grimes. One of our mediums has as her control a Shaara princess, who last enjoyed material existence five hundred standard years ago. And recently, during a service in our church in Port Farewell, a spirit spoke through the officiating medium and said he was -- that he had been, rather -- a people's marshal on Llanith. What is a people's marshal, Captain?" "It's roughly equivalent to a police commissioner on our worlds, madam," replied Listowel. Sonya sipped from her wine glass, then asked, "One thing has always rather puzzled me. Madam Swithin. One of the doctrines of your church is reincarnation. How does that fit in with that large number of disembodied spirits who are always present at your seances to say their pieces?" The motherly little woman smiled sweetly at Sonya. "There is reincarnation, as we believe -- as we know -- Mrs. Grimes. But the soul is not reincarnated into a new body immediately after its release from the old one. In the case of ordinary people the delay is not a long one. It is the extraordinary people, the outstanding personalities, who often have to wait for centuries, or until a suitable vehicle for their rare psyches has become available -- " "In other words," said Grimes, who was becoming interested, "until the genes and chromosomes have been suitably shuffled and dealt." "What a good way of putting it. Commodore. I must remember that." She looked at Grimes as though she were viewing him as a potential and valuable convert -- which. Grimes realized, he could be. Why can't I keep my big mouth shut? he asked himself. "You will agree. Commodore, that a special sort of character is required for the captain of a ship?" Grimes made a noncommittal sound. "And that an even more special kind of character is required for the captain of a sailing ship -- " "I did," admitted Grimes cautiously, "bear certain qualities in mind when I appointed the masters and officers to these lightjammers -- and not all of those I selected passed the rather rigorous training." Listowel muttered something about bumbling around in blimps over the Great Barrens, but subsided when Grimes glared at him. "And how many lightjammers does your company operate. Commodore?" "At the moment, four. Pamir, Herzogen Cecile, Lord of the Isles and Sea Witch. As the trade expands we shall require more tonnage, of course. Preussen and Garthpool are on the drawing boards. And the Rim Worlds Navy has the plans for at least three sailing warships." "Four ships. And five more some time in the future. But what of the thousands of sailing captains who must have lived in the days when r their vessels were the only long-disr tance transport on Earth? Many of those souls must still be waiting for i reincarnation." j "One of my ancestors might be  among them," said Grimes. "Really, Commodore?" "Yes. He was a Barbary I Corsair -- but before that he was master of an English ship in the Mediterranean trade. A forced convert to Islam who decided to play along and do as well for himself as possible -- " "Are you sure that he was never reincarnated, John?" asked Sonya. "Some of the less savory episodes in your past haven't been far short of piracy." "I might be able to find out for you. Commodore," said Madam  Swithin eagerly. "I am more of an administrator than a medium, but I do have powers -- " r "Thank you," Grimes told her. i "But I think I'd rather not know." r scudding before the photon gale  but riding the thunder of her rocket drive. Ahead was an impossible star f cluster -- the suns of the Llanithi ; Consortium blue-blazing, the Rim ' Suns sullenly smoldering embers. Astern was -- nothing. On she I drove, outrunning light, until the I time came for deceleration, r The reaction drive was shut down ; and, at his controls, Listowel carefully pivoted his sails. Northsail, eastsail, southsail and westsail he i turned, trimming them so that the radiance from the Llanithi stars was striking their reflecting surfaces at an oblique angle. Grimes, watching the Doppler Log screen, saw the numerals change from #I to #, to #... All four lower courses were now exerting full braking effect and the lower topsails were trimmed, squared. #... #... #... Upper topsails next. #I #... Topgallantsails... The log was winding down rapidly and ahead one of those vividly blue stars was a star no longer, was beginning to show an appreciable disk. Now the royals. #... #... #... #... #... #... So far there was no sensation. The ship was inertialess, her structure and crew protected from the forces that should have exploded them through the darkness and emptiness in a blazing flare of energy. #... #... #... #... #... The countdown was slowing. #... #... #... #... #... #... #... #... #... #...#... #... I . #... As when the light barrier had been broken, there was the feeling of unbearable tension. Something snapped suddenly. The stars ahead diminished in number, although (Please turn to page # I The logistic demands of the colonization process almost always dictate a biased sex ratio in the colonizing population. In the Mormon hegira from Missouri to the valley of the Great Salt Lake in #, for example, Brigham Young led a band of # men and three women. And two children. Other similar disbalances could be cited. The mission of colonists is first to survive, then to reproduce. In the history of colonization the men go first and the women come later, but the planners of the first step toward extraterrestrial colonization recognized man's need to introduce human biological components into his new pattern of survival. Boris Spector, The Tactics of Colonization Harper and Ivanovich, # is preparing to leave Hiroshima. These are, perhaps, extraordinary names for components of a lunar mission and the responsibility for this nomenclature is lost in a Byzantine maze of international bureaucracy. There is a symbolism, able to say what it is. Be that as it may. Pearl Harbor is about to separate and enter landing orbit. After that Hiroshima will go back home. Nagasaki, her sister ship, will be along later. "Chris?" Leon Sokolov in Hiroshima. "Roger, Lenny. All lights green here." "Roger. Let's keep it that way. You're on automatic sequence in -- fifty-eight seconds." "Right." "I thought it might be well to give you a word of advice." His voice spoke the words with a heavy but entirely understandable accent. When the explorers of space had made their first tentative steps toward international cooperation there had been a bit of talk about which language to use. English had won. "Advise ahead, old buddy." "Just one word no, this will take more. We're leaving you down there with three girls. And one of them is ours." Chris Conway looked about and saw that this was so. Marya Popovich was on his right and across from them, facing them, were the now mildly amused persons of Teiko Satori and Julia Clark. They were belted in. Chris would fly Pearl Harbor down but, if necessary, any of the girls could do it as well. "That's right, Lenny. But it's too late to trade places. Sorry." "Too late to trade places, right. So I say. Comrade Christopher Conway -- not too much time left now -- conduct yourself with honor and probity, as would I, had I drawn the lot instead of you. I am not, what you say, jealous." Of course not, thought Chris, looking at the girls. "So -- well, good luck, that's all. Automatic sequence in ten seconds. Good trip, comrades." Four vtjices mixed together in Sokolov's phones. Then automatic sequence took over and they were detached and away to the flat surface of Mare Nectaris, near the terminator, to establish the first tentative, temporary colony on the moon. They were programed for a twenty-eight-day stay. T HE landing was smooth. "I couldn't have done better myself," Julia said. These four had been relentlessly screened through a psychologicalpsychiatricemotional sieve that didn't pass much. The scores of Chris and Sokolov had been so close that they had settled that one by yarrow stalks. The three girls were in a class by themselves, selected on the basis of parameters too numerous to mention. "I appreciate the compliment, Julia. Houston?" "Roger, Chris." "To coin a phrase. Pearl Harbor has landed." "Girls all right?" A trilingual babble answered in the affirmative. There had been too many jokes about this, of course, about what the first man to be cast upon the moon with three lovely girls would make of it. The design of the mission had not called for the girls to be lovely, of course -- they had been chosen on other bases. But these three had come up lovely. What the four of them were supposed to make of it was to live on the moon for four weeks and see how it went. What, if anything, went wrong. There had been many simulations on Earth -- in air-raid shelters, abandoned mines and on the bottoms of the seas. And problems, as they say, had arisen. These had been worked on (though not solved) and the time had come to try the real thing. Why three women and one man? The President of the United States was a woman, but that was not the ternational Aeronautics and Space Administration) had become convinced of the intrinsic biological superiority of the female -- a conclusion based partly upon the history of man and partly upon the results of the Earth simulations. Their qualifications for this mission? They are bright, but not too bright (average IQ, #). They are emotionally stable, but not too stable. They have all seen each others' profiles and one consequence of this is that Chris hopes to God that the three of them never get mad at him, for whatever cause, at the same time. And they are trained primarily in the behavioral sciences. Marya is a psychologist. Teiko is a sociologist and Julia is a psychiatrist. In addition all are sketchily familiar with astronomy, geology, nursing, anesthesia and photography. Surprisingly, they get on well together. Within the bodies of this crew are no vermiform appendices -- these have been prophylacticaliy excised. The dentists have done all they can to ensure that no acute problems arise in that area -- no tooth is going up there that might need to be extracted in a hurry. None of the colonists has any dental training whatever. The girls' pregnancy tests are negative. Back to psychology and the solitary male. He is also bright, but no genius. He is stable, but he is alive. And he is trained -- he is a doctor of medicine. In short, a different kind of mission. No geologists, no seismologists, no archeologists. Just people. Except for Chris, behavioral people. They will study themselves, the first colony on the moon. The physical scientists have given them things to do and things to do with, but that isn't the main idea. Oh, yes -- the Commanding Officer is Christopher Conway. This is not because he's the only male -- he drew the long yarrow stalk. z.checkout they suited up, cracked the hatch and lowered the ladder. Quite a few people had landed on the moon by now, but none of these four had. Though they had watched the action from Earth before, they found it was, in the event, some different kind of trip. And another lunar first -- three women on the surface at the same time exceeded the previous record by two. They opened the hatch of the cargo compartment. "First things first," said Chris. "It's going to be a long night." The amount of energy they could take to the moon was stringently limited and the first instruments to be deployed were solar accumulators. The landing site was near the terminator, where the lunar day had just begun, so they could store maximum solar energy before nightfall. It would, indeed, be a long night. And a cold one. The accumulators were, logically, just inside the hatch. "Okay, boss," said Teiko. "Where you say we put these?" Chris's intent was that his CO title be nominal. But someone had to take responsibility for decisions and on this mission he was it. He surveyed the immediate area. "About here. I'd say. We'll put the dome over there -- the surface is nice and smooth." "About here. I'd say. We'll put the dome over there -- the surface is nice and smooth." The accumulators were bulky and on Earth would have been a problem, but in the lunar graity they made easy work. Next, the dome. This was of transparent mylarplex, a few mils thick. Transparent mylarplex. The colonists had been given their choice of anything from transparent through opaque. They had unanimously wanted transparent, thinking about lying there in the lunar dark, looking up at the stars. The dome folded into a small package, but when expanded (with an oxygen-nitrogen mixture) it was supposed to be big enough to house four people and everything they would need for four weeks. They carried the folded structure to the smooth place Chris had indicated and unfolded it. Chris carried over the first of a number of metal cylinders of the compressed gas mixture and attached it to the fitting. "God bless our home," he said, cracking the valve. "Best you don't leak." They were prepared to patch it if it did. The dome filled well. It was flat on the botto'm, almost hemispherical on top, above threefoot side walls. The ceiling was ten feet above the floor at the apex. The diameter of the floor was twelve feet. There was an air lock, hermetically zippered. They entered the expanded dome one at a time. They looked around. "It's -- cozy," Julia said. "Nectaris Base -- calling from Hiroshima. " "Roger, Lenny. It's cozy down here. Sorry you couldn't come." "Yes. So am #. Let us hope it will be cozy. I am, as you know, about to return to Earth." "Good trip, Tovarisch," Marya said. "Yes, Tovarisch. So long. Sayo nara. " "Sayonara," said Teiko. Her voice, soft and feminine, stood in some contrast to the others. Not that there was anything masculine about Marya or Julia. But there was something in Teiko's voice. "See you back home," Chris said. "Da. I'm just about over you now." The four looked up through the transparent dome, knowing they would not be able to see Hiroshima, but looking anyway. "I see where you are," Sokolov said, "but I can't see you. Goodbye, now. Over and out. Dasvidanya." "So long, Lenny. Dasvidanya. See you in about five weeks. We've work to do now. Nectaris Base out." looking at each other. The first people (except for Nora Ivanovna and Stuart Stong) to be left on the moon with no command module in orbit waiting to be flown up to. A sobering thought. They were prepared for it, but it was sobering none the less. "Come on," Chris said. "We have work to do." Chris, Julia and Marya went through the lock one at a time and began the demanding job of ferrying survival gear, stores, staples and instruments through to Teiko. Unzip zipper, put gear in, zip up, unzip inside, remove gear, zip up. things to eat and drink, a chemical toilet (another lunar first, by God!), sleeping bags, books, a chess set (Chris had insisted on that) and other goodies to keep four people alive and well on alien turf for four weeks. They put everything on the check list into the dome. The remaining gear -- instruments to deploy and so on -- they would take care of later. Privacy. Something to be considered -- or not considered -- on such a mission. It was possible to provide the dome with opaque partitions. Thin and totally unsoundproof, but opaque. The decision here had not been given out of hand to the colonists -- Mission Design wanted to have something to say about it -- but the views of the colonists had been solicited. Teiko, Julia and Chris had thought that the concept of privacy didn't have much relevance. What, after all, would there be to be private about on the moon after the time together in a cramped module getting there? After the weeks of simulation on Earth, where they had already tried it both ways? Marya's view was that translucent partitions would be nice, but in the end Nectaris Base wound up with zero privacy, including the chemical toilet. Consensus had been that privacy there would have been dishonest and fraudulent, some kind of cheap cop-out three of them didn't want. Let it be said that Marya, though not altogether of this opinion, went gracefully along with the majority. The sunlit night of the first day came soon enough. Four space suits hung upon a complex rack standing in the center of the floor of the  dome. Temperature-control units were working fine. Time to sleep -- and the need for it -- but everything was as bright as when they had awakened -- not that they had awakened in that place. Temperature control was on Heat. The sun was up, but not yet high. The outside temperature was just about freezing. As the sun rose it would get up to about # F. They were on Mare Nectaris, so the sun would never be directly overhead, where it would send the temperature to over #. On Nectaris Base, as the sun rose the outside temperature would at some point, though not for long, stand at a moderate seventy degrees. Tired -- and into the sleeping bags. "It is cozy," Julia said. All mikes were off. Barring emergencies there would be only brief contact with Houston, once a day. "Not at all like the simulations. It reminds me of being at camp as a kid." "Some camp," Chris said. "I think it looks -- stark," said Marya. "Yes." Teiko. "But beautiful, Masha, no?" "Yes. Beautiful." They had begun with their sleeping bags more or less at the four corners of the lunar compass. They shifted, because of the light, to put their heads all in a row in the shadow cast by the central rack. "Masha?" Chris asked. Da?" "How about a game of chess tomorrow?" "Da. My pleasure. I beat you." End of lunar day number one. No snoring -- they had been screened for that too. II T hey awoke at about the same time, tossing and turning in the light gravity, then realizing where they were. "It's funny," Teiko said. "The sun is where it was when we went to sleep. Almost. And Earth too." "Some kind of place to wake up," Julia said. Chris examined her through a sleepy eye. "Let's see now. Though woman's place is no longer necessarily in the kitchen, I think I'll have a large orange juice, two toasted English muffins and marmalade, two scrambled eggs and four large cups of your very best mocha java, rich and aromatic, steaming as it is brought to table by comely girl, teeth asparkle, eyes agleam, eager to serve, to please, to make happy." "Dream on, Massah. Masha, remind us both to make a note of this when we get up. One day into the mission -- and incipient delusions of grandeur." Chris grinned, stretched, squirmed out of the bag and used the toilet. Colonists would do what they could in their colony to retain memories of home. Thus these attires: Chris wore a T-shirt; Teiko wore nothing; Marya wore yellow pajamas; Julia wore a blue flannel nightgown. Julia was from New Hampshire. And the Lunar Hilton began to stir. Scrambled eggs? Well, no, but the rations weren't that bad, not really, not yet. So, as they would have on Earth, they had breakfast and addressed themselves to the problems of the day. This was the first space mission to be reasonably unstructured. This fluidity was dictated by its unique goals. Work was provided, but it could be done in the colonist's time, not Houston's. The physical scientists had provided instruments and instructions about what to do with them. The concept of work was (this should be obvious) essential. These pioneers wouldn't have to fell trees or clear the jungle, but others would, later, on other looking ahead. So they had work to do -- it was all written in a big book -- and they were supposed to get it done, but it was up to them to structure their own time. They finished breakfast. They had, in the dome, four folding chairs and two folding tables. They had no toasted English muffins. Chris glanced at the book that said what they were supposed to do, but he didn't open it. They didn't have to do any of it today. "All right," he said. "I am the commanding officer of this, our Nectaris Base colony on the moon. I decree, therefore, that our first day be spent in RR." Chris looked with some seriousness at the girls. "You behaviorists will no doubt be watching what we all do. Fine. We'll all do what we want to. I'll be taking a walk outside, picking up a few rocks. We won't deploy any instruments today, at least I won't. We'll call Houston in a couple of hours and give them our opinion of their breakfast." "No kushikatsu," Teiko said. "For breakfast?" She shrugged her slender shoulders. "No vodka." And Marya shrugged her sturdier shoulders. "No scrambled eggs." "All right. So. Suit up. Walk around a bit outside, write postall we can take, of course. Read, brood. Whatever. Each to his own. Her own. And as for you, Masha, pawn to King Four." "So. Who says you have the first move, Tovarisch?" Her glance was an enigma. "We draw for this, right?" The beginning of their second day on the moon. By evening of that first day we had decided to arrange the sleeping bags in a rotation. Not, as Masha pointed out, that we had any vision of taking turns being on Chris's right hand. We had come very simply and without really saying it to the thought that in some way we were all sharing each other. I understood this first when Teiko asked Marya if she could wear the bottom of those yellow pajamas. "What is this English word, pajamas?" she asked. "If I wear these bottoms or this bottom am I wearing a pajama?" "It's not an English word at all," Marya said. "It's Hindu and Persian. It means, leg garment. So if you wear the bottom you're wearing a pajama and if you wear only the top you're wearing something else. Not that I'd make a point of it." Chris was quiet here, I noted. I asked him if he would like to trade with me. Had he ever worn a blue flannel nightgown? "Once," he said. "A heavy scene. I was passing, or trying to, as a roommate when Mama dropped in. By chance, as it were." So Chris traded with me. "You're better in the Tshirt," Teiko said to Chris. "So is she," he said. We all kicked it around a bit after that. In the end I said, "And we all know that the studs were screened out." I stood up and scratched my bottom. I said this: "The big breast award is mine. And the roundest, shapeliest bottom is Teiko's. The best legs are Marya's. And there are only two balls and Our Leader has both of them." That's how it was then -- part of how it was -- to be the first colonists on the moon. T he fourth day. Deploying instruments for the physical scientists and getting the telemetry going. Collecting the inevitable rocks, photographing everything. Getting to know you, getting to know all about you. Using the toilet, suiting up and going out onto the lunar surface. Sleeping beneath a sunlit sky. Lining up heads in the shadow of the central post, where hung the four life-supporting space suits. Sleeping on top of the sleeping bags now, the environment getting warmer, and rotating the positions from one steeping period to the next. The fourth night Chris was next to the center post, Teiko next and Julia and Marya beyond. It had not escaped Chris's notice that the With what was not within his province to ask. He was the CO and the doc and the only male. Chris thinking:  am a quarter of home, which home  can see if I move my head a little, but Just now I don't want to. I share a strange place with three great girls and there are no ground rules. There were no ground rules. Chris saw that Teiko was awake. He reached over and took her hand. They turned toward each other silently. Teiko accepted the hand of Chris and also the look in his eye. Too many jokes had been written about this on Earth, but here it was. Chris had not held Teiko's hand before. "We're all single or divorced," he said. "Yes, boss." "Cut that out." "Yes, boss." Do you remember the touch of your first girl's hand in yours? The smell of hay in the loft of a barn in August? The first time you thought you knew where it was at? You didn't, but you thought you did. Do you remember first times, first shattering events? Making out for the first time, being put down for the first time? Nectaris Base was a first time. "Why is that?" Chris asked. "What?" "That we're all married and blew it -- or are single? Single or divorced. Why is that? You have a very nice hand." They held hands like kids. Chris disengaged that hand, and put both , of his upon Teiko's cheeks. And he kissed her. And that was a first time. "You are the first to hear I' Conway's Law," he said after some moments. I "Yes?" ( "Earth simulations don't simulate." Silence for a time before Teiko said, "I think I know what you : mean." Chris made to move on I; over. Julia and Marya seemed to be i asleep. "No," said Teiko. This was the first putdown on the moon. "I ' can't say why," she said. "I don't I know." They walked around the k dome a bit, still holding hands, beI fore they got back on top of their I bags. I was toward the outside of ( the dome, not asleep, and wondered whether to say anything. But we are a talkative people, i "Teiko? Chris?" I whispered. I "I'm not asleep either," Julia said. f "I'm sorry we've kept you j awake," Chris and Teiko said more or less together.  "That's all right," I said. "Maybe we should have had -- more privacy?" "No." "It's better this way." "Yes." "Yes." And it was evening and it was morning. T he seventh day and the sun as high as it was going to go. "Have you noticed," asked Chris, "that this stuff tastes more like Cornish hen than the eggs Benedict it's supposed to be?" "No. I think it is meant to be fish cakes. In New Hampshire we always had fish cakes on Sunday morning." Julia ate as if she expected to find a bone. "Is it really Sunday?" Teiko asked. "I thought the Christian habits of the day of rest were not so much practiced now." "Well, not the church bit, but stomachs forget more slowly than other parts." "What I would like to say for the record. Commander, is that they should have sent us food that was either fish cakes or black bread or sukiyaki -- identifiable. I'm sure this brown stuff is very international indeed, but it's lost all its identity in the effort to please all of us. Perhaps I am not as ecumenical as that we don't agree that making everything pleasing to everybody can -- or should -- be achieved. Either in food or in work assignments." Marya looked at her vitaminenriched and nameless juice. Chris longed for that cup of coffee. He hummed a nameless hymn. "Which gods shall we worship?" Marya asked. "Perhaps the gods should worship us," Julia said. "If not worship, then observe, enjoy. I hope we give them a good trip. I have a feeling, you know, that they like us." G etting to know you and coming on toward the beginning of the lunar night. The readouts show that the solar accumulators are doing their job and it begins to get cold. Houston listens every day and Nagasaki will be all set to go when the time comes (the colonists are glad to hear this). In the meantime they are on their own, up there by themselves, together and alone. A real trip, far out. And the sun begins to approach the lunar horizon and the ambiance within the dome changes. "Just a reminder," Chris said, fingering his rook's pawn. "When it's night we won't be going outside." Teiko nodded. Marya and Julia were out looking at instruments. Chris was teaching Teiko chess. "They sent us up here without love," Chris said, looking for a move not too catastrophic for Teiko. He moved the pawn forward one square. "Yes. They could have sent married couples. Or lovers. They sent us without love, yes. I hadn't thought of it. Why did they do that?" "You're the sociologist. You'll find out and tell us. Isn't a population of four a small one for your kind of thing?" "It is. Yes." Teiko moved a knight out, not to the best square, but still developing the piece. "You weren't angry with me before -- Chris?" "When?" "When you wanted to come to my bag and I said no. And we were tired and held hands and walked around the dome." "No, I wasn't angry. Put down, yes, but not to where it really pricked my bubble. I was ready to crawl in, as you may have noticed." Teiko smiled. "Yes. Anyway, I'm glad you weren't -- aren't -- angry." Chris advanced a bishop and Teiko studied the board for some time. The sun was low over the horizon. "It doesn't look good, does it? My game. Masha is better for you at this. Of course if we'd brought a go board -- " ' First Marya, then Julia entered the dome. Teiko threw up her hands and resigned. Marya and Julia unsuited. "It's going to get dark soon, boss. When do we bring in the accumulators?" "First thing when we get up tomorrow. They're still picking up a little sun. We'll want all we can get." "I suppose they'll work all right," Marya said. "We won't last long otherwise." the first they had known for almost two weeks. The limb of the sun flickered on the horizon and died. Earthshine was there, but after those days under the sun the night was dark indeed. They all felt as if they had been pitched, with ceremony, into an unfamiliar cave. Black as Egypt's night. "I have been one acquainted with the night," said Julia. "But not like this one. But then who, before our intrepid foursome, has been acquainted with a two-week day on the moon? It makes for a contrast." "Press close bare-bosom'd night -- press close magnetic nourishing night!" Marya said this. "I'll buy that," Chris said. "And you sure as hell know more English than we do Russian. Who said that?" "Of course you'll buy it. A poet of yours said it. Walt Whitman." "Far out." He glanced at Teiko. They were standing, the four of them, looking toward the place behind which the sun had fled. "Bare-bosomed night. Yes." "Yes, Commander?" Teiko said. How to be provocative, she knew. She was a Japanese female. "And the night shall be filled with -- music?" They were hoking it up, of course, to tone down the sense of awe they all felt. "Is a significant moment, this," Marya said. "Therefore we do some tests." Chris groaned. The others sighed. "I know you're our resident psychologist and psychologists are doing nothing when they're not testing. But not now. It's the wrong time." "Is the right time. Anyway, let's try the lights and see if they work." They did. She provided her subjects with test forms. "As CO I can override this, you know?" "Da. But you won't." And he didn't. HI with at this moment -- to whom do you feel most antagonistic and why? I won't have any trouble with that one, Chris thought, and punched the card. Toward whom do you feel the most positive affect? Jargonese, but I can answer that one too. Here are four amorphously unstructured forms. Which pleases you most and why? Which do you dislike most and why? There was quite a bit of that. Halfway through Chris realized he was Jabbing at the papers with force and that the girls were taking note. He gritted his teeth, then grinned inanely and did what he could to cool it. I'm out-numbered, he thought. "Now," he said, the forms completed, "I will reassert my command of fhis, our first lunar colony." The lights were soft and the temperature was comfortable. It is cozy, Chris thought, finally understanding something of what Julia had been speaking of before. "Mission Design, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to provide us with a measurable amount of amenity. Niggardly but measurable. Significantly differing from zero. Fittingly, as it becomes dark, the time for our evening meal approaches. Therefore we will precede dinner this evening with a vodka martini or two and with dinner we shall have -- let's see, what goes with brown hash -- the Clos Vougeot twenty-nineteen. Any objections?" They applauded. Chris, sensing that he had made proper use of command, relaxed after the tensions of Marya's testing. "I have to do my Job," Marya said to Chris. "Of course, Masha," Chris said. And they all sat together and had a martini or two. They called Houston to tell Mission Control they were having a small party and were sorry it couldn't come. Then they broke contact. Mission Design was right, of course, in providing a touch of amenity in the night. Houston knew that as soon as any human colony was put down on an Earth-type planet it would find things to ferment in no time. "I wouldn't have thought," Julia said later, "that brown hash could be a festive dish. But it was." "It wasn't the hash, it was the vodka," Marya said. "Actually, as CO, I would have to say it was the noble Burgundy." "Anyway, a party." Teiko lay on her stomach on top of her sleeping bag, chin propped on her hands, considering the lunar night. Marya spoke: "Tovarisch Christopher Conway?" 'Da?" "We play a game of chess?" "Why not?" he asked. Chris drew white and played Bird's opening. Marya responded strongly and Chris transposed into a variation of the Sicilian. Finding no advantage in this, on the eighteenth move he made an unsound pawn sacrifice. Marya jumped on it and Chris lost the game. He toppled his king and rose. "We can't do this often, God knows, but we do have an allowance of brandy. I propose that we broach that bottle right now, an ounce and a half to each, as a suitable nightcap. Majority vote wins. How say you all?" They all said yes and had a nightcap. They changed their sleeping raiments again and went to bed. The garments were sufficiently loose to be interchangeable. Who wore what they no longer recorded. They found it amusing to change around -- it was something to do. And the rotation of sleeping gear or the lack of it spoke a symbolic language. They prepared to sleep for the first time in the dark. The drone of the lifesupport system made a pleasant backdrop, was more a condition of existence than an annoyance. The crescent of Earth was there for them to look at. They did not have to put their heads in the shadow of the central pillar now, so they arranged themselves differently. Marya and Julia placed their bags parallel to the circumference of the floor, Marya to the north, Julia to the east. Teiko and Chris were together to the south, heads at the outer wall, feet toward the center. That all four heads were at the outer wall was not surprising -- they were looking at the lunar night for the first time. Not just the first time for them, the first for anybody. "Masha?" Chris called. "Yes? Da?" "No hard feelings about the chess game. I won't play the Birds against you again. I'm just thinking. You're our psychologist. And a beautiful one. Your main bag is to test us, is that right?" "This is a simplistic view, Chris, but if you have to say it that way -- well, yes." "Right. I'm just thinking out loud. Julia?" "Yes, Commander?" "Cut the crap, slave. In twentyfive words or less, just what is your mission here? Between the four of us. Psychiatrists have to do with emotional illness, its causes and cures, right?" "Right." "So. We're not emotionally ill, none of us. We were screened for that. So why are you, sweet girl that you are, here?" "Flattery will get you nowhere, boss. We're not emotionally ill. Not now, Chris." "We might crack up under the stress of this, our mission?" "More or less, that's right." "Suppose you're the one who cracks up?" "It's not meant to go that way, boss. But if I do we've a psychologist, a sociologist and an M.D. to take care of me. You ought to be able to handle it." "We're both M.D.s, as far as that goes, though our trainings are quite different. Teiko?" "Yes, Commander?" "Goddamn it. I wish to hell you would all stop saying that. Anyway -- Teiko, your thing is the fundamental laws of social relations, right?" "You are simplistic again, poor boy, but this is, yes, the general idea. The origin, organization and functioning of human society, yes." "So why are you here, lovely one?" "How carefully you make the compliments equal to all. Very ecumenical. I am here because we are a human society. A small one, but a society. "Then which of you," Chris asked, addressing all,' "can say why it is we were sent up here without love?" They had talked about this some after Chris had first raised the question with Teiko. No one said anything right now. Finally Julia said, "It might be an undesirable complication. Undesirable from Mission Design's point of view." "Why they sent us here without love?" Teiko said. "Maybe to see if we would find it." And it was the first night on the moon and they slept. This is the third day of the night. After breakfast this morning I began to make a go board. Chris has been losing to Masha at chess and I think I should teach him go. I don't think I can learn how to play a good game of chess. Chris loses to Masha and he tries not to show that he is hurt by this. Why he is hurt this much I don't know, but I don't think it is because Masha is a woman. So I think I will teach him the game of my country. We will have to find something to use for pieces, but Chris says this is no problem. But if I teach Chris go I will beat him, because I grew up with this game. So why do I want to teach Chris how to play go? To hurt him some more? Certainly not -- I know that. Though I cannot give him a good game of chess, I think he can soon give me a good game of go -- maybe that is it. There is something in Masha's way of beating Chris that I don't think is good. She doesn't beat him all the time -- Chris wins about two out of five. But they play too much. T eiko sat on a folding chair at one of the two tables. The lighting was not extravagant, but it was adequate. She had taped together four sheets of paper into a larger one and was ruling lines. Chris had been taking readings on the accumulators and was at the other table, plotting curves. He finished and rose. "It looks good," he said. "Plenty of heat and light. You want to give Houston the report today?" He walked over to see what she was up to. "What's that?" "A board for go. I will teach you." Marya, who had been lying on the floor with the third lamp, studying test scores, looked over. There were two tables and three lamps. Julia was reading at the table Chris had been working at. This conversation didn't interest her. She was reading The Brothers K, as she called it. "How does it go?" Chris asked and Teiko outlined the basic strategy. "We'll need pieces," she said. "How many?" "A hundred or so of each of two kinds of small things, small enough to be put on these -- vertices -- would be enough to start with." "We ought to have enough small washers and nuts for that. No problem. Suppose you talk to Houston today, all right?" They had been taking turns at this. "Give me the curves on the accumulators," she said. They were only three days into the night, but they all had a profound interest in those curves, neatly drawn lines on light coordinate paper, that told them whether they had enough energy to make it to the dawn. "That's the only important thing, isn't it?" Chris nodded and turned on the riggirl and she says no. This is, and I understand that, a totally unfair and entirely indefensible attitude. But that's the way it is and that's the way it was when Teiko said no. You try to show that you're not cut up, that it isn't important. But it is and it always will be. So says the commander -- and I wish they'd stop calling me that. Masha beats me at chess, but that's not where it's at. I borrowed a notebook from Masha to write this in. She's got notebooks the way some chipmunks I know have sunflower seeds. Enough to last forever. I see Earth up there. There's lot's of cloud and I'm not really oriented, so I can't see the chipmunks. Matter of fact, it would take one hell of a telescope to see a chipmunk from here. The girls' notebooks are for future study, and the enlightenment of society. This one isn't, damn it. It's for me. So, Dear Diary, you son of a bitch, it hurts. It do. I haven't been keeping a notebook -- or notebooks -- like the girls. That isn't part of my job. But maybe I'd best keep one for myself. Maybe I'll throw it away before we leave. There isn't a man alive, that I've heard of, who isn't cut down when he wants to bed his T eiko and Chris sat at one of the two tables, illuminated by one of the three lights. Teiko's go board was between them. Julia and Marya were both reading at the other table, using only the second light. This saved energy. Chris had a hundred or so small nuts in a Dixie cup. Teiko had the same number of small washers in a similar cup. You knew what hardware a colony would need. "It is war," Teiko said. "You see? You must surround the -- opponent -- and capture him, so." She showed several ways how this could be done. "We start first using just a little of the board, because you not know how to play. But you learn fast, I know." "Roger. Fire one," Chris said. "You first," she said. "Screw that. Girls first." Teiko placed a washer near a corner on Chris's side of the board. Chris studied the position and set down a nut. This continued for a time, but not for long. "You see how it goes now, yes?" said Teiko. "Better luck next time." "Luck isn't in it, sweet girl, and you know it. Set 'em up in the other alley." "What?" "That's from a different game. Bowling. What I mean is, let's start again and maybe I show you something. I'm first this time." Chris learned and he learned rapidly. By the time it was time to go to bed he had the fundamentals. Bed, then -- sleeping bags, rather -- Julia and Marya sacked out on the other side, Teiko and Chris the way they'd been all of the nights of the night. The pleasant backdrop of the droning life-support. No more sleeping on top of the bags, as in the tropic day. Now it was the arctic night. Chris put his bag close to Teiko's. Watch it, baby, he told himself. Watch it. "I like that game," he said. "I thought you would. We play some more tomorrow. We get very close together in here, yes? I mean, feets and yards. Why can't we go outside a little, look at the instruments -- or something?" "The suits aren't made for it, you know that. It's two hundred and sixty-odd below out there. We couldn't even walk to Pearl Harbor and back." "Yes. I know the briefing. But we could go just a little." "Go just a little and use up a lot of energy. You're not getting claustrophobic?" "No, Chris. I just think it would be nice if we could take a little walk, that's all. You know. Back to the cave, all right? The females stay here and you go out and hit a bear over the head with a club. Haul it back to the cave and we all eat. Ferment something in its skull and we all drink. Back to the cave. The men couldn't stay in the cave -- somebody had to go out." Chris said nothing for a time. They looked at each other and out into the wild night, wild in its stillness. "I'm all right, Teiko," he said. "Look at me, am I not all right?" She nodded. "We're on a far-out trip," he said and reached for her hand. It wasn't hard to find. "I'm not going to crawl out of this -- bag -- but I am going to do this. Unless you find a way to stop it. Teiko." And he kissed her again. This was the second time. It lasted quite a while and it was tender. They went to sleep. And Chris, simplistic male CO that he was, poor boy (as has been said), didn't know what the hell was going on. Teiko thought she did. Julia and Marya were asleep, lost in their own wonders. IV This is the seventh night of the night, which makes it just about the midnight of the night. I don't think my purpose will be served on this mission. I don't think any of us is going to go bananas. Chris was put down by Teiko when he tried to make out and she said no. He tried to pretend that nothing had happened. And he didn't succeed. All men are hurt by a putdown, so why the hell not admit it? Anyway, Chris was put down, but he's not about to fold. Masha and Chris have been about even in chess lately, but Chris has lost interest in chess. He's crazy about go, though he hasn't won more than one game out of four so far. I also think he's crazy about Teiko. They sleep together over there all the time. I don't mean sleep together, I mean their sleeping bags are cheek to cheek and they talk a lot. And I'm a little bit jealous, I have to say that. We change our sleeping clothes -- or the lack of them -- around, but Teiko and Chris are always together over there. Not that we're excluded -- we'd be welcome close to them, I think -- but that's the way it is. The next colony doesn't need, I think, such a scientific bunch as we. Couples, maybe. In love, maybe, married or not -- I don't know. I know I'm getting horny as anything -- it's been a long time -- and nothing I can do about it, unless I'm really interested in myself or in Masha. I'm interested in me, all right, but not in that way -- and in that way I'm not interested in Masha at all. Though she is a nice person. And she's not going to blow her cool. I'm interested in Chris, but the key to that door is in other hands. And he must be raunchy as hell by now. So are we, but women put up with it better, the record shows. How to be the first psychiatrist on the moon in ten easy lessons. Or five hard ones. Old joke. I think I'm a little anoxic. " night all systems were go. The accumulator curves were better than expected. There was residual fear of not enough energy, but this had no realistic base. Chris and Teiko placed go. Julia read a lot and Marya brooded. The truth of the matter was that none of them had much to do except colonize the moon and tell Houston how exciting it all was. Everything fell into the fan at #:# Local Time on the eighth day. Marya, who had been sitting on her sleeping bag, looking outside, was restless for some moments. She lay down on her stomach. Then she lay on her back. Then she called Chris. "Yes?" "Chris." The way she said it, it came out more like Chrees and he liked the sound of it. "Chris. Something is wrong. I hurt very much -- here." She put her hand on her abdomen. Chris examined her and asked some questions. No way for it to be an appendix -- I knew that and we all had our scars to prove it. No way. But it was sure as hell something and I knew, not wanting to know, what it was. It was catastrophe, internal disaster to Masha and to a small child forming inside her -- and external cataclysm for the mission. I was the doctor, right? Right. So make with the tools. The sphygmomanometer worked well, but it told a hairy tale. I kept thinking of appendicitis, knowing it couldn't be that, knowing that acute appendices do not arrive with this sense of drama, of urgency -- they put themselves on stage with fewer kettledrums in the pit. I palped Masha's stomach. I knew I'd need help and lots of it.i-JL pregnancy test?" Chris asked. "A -- friend in the lab," she said. "I'm sorry, Chris." The other two girls stood beside Officer of the Day. Every day and all night on this mission. He drew them to one side. "Julia," he said. This is an ectopic, or I never went to medical school. We'll have to move fast." "You're sure?" "Yes." "We can't operate in here." "If we don't we've got a dead Masha." Teiko went over to hold Marya's hand. "This isn't exactly an OR at Massachusetts General, but we're going to have to make do. Good thing they threw in the surgical kit at the last minute. We'll use intravenous nonathal. You know where it is, get going." "I don't know how sterile this amphitheater is, chief, but if you say so -- " She got going. Chris checked the big book and saw that the number on the box they needed was #. "Teiko," he said. "Would you get box fiveseventeen from that stack over there?" He went to Marya and told her what they were going to do. He placed the two folding tables together (casting the unfinished game of go aside with regret) near Marya's sleeping bag and arranged the three lights. He placed two sleeping bags atop the tables. The first operating table on the moon. "We need another table," Julia said. "We don't have one, so I'll put things on these chairs." "Yes. But where the hell is fiveseventeen? We need it now. Teiko?" Chris kept his voice low. "It isn't where it's supposed to be, Chris. I sorry." "All right, we'll find it. We'd better call Houston. Teiko, would you do that? I'll get that damned surgical kit and we'll put this show on the road." "What shall I say?" "Say that Masha has an ectopic pregnancy and we're going to operate. If we can find the equipment." As the other M.D. on this trip I did what I could while Chris and Teiko looked for the box that wasn't there. Chris asked me to look for the check list. I found it and everything on it was checked off, but box # wasn't on the list. A lastminute addition. Chris told Teiko to get Houston and took the microphone from her. "We've an ectopic pregnancy here," he said, "and the surgical kit, thrown in at the last minute by the infinite wisdom of Mission Design, wasn't put on the check list. Right? So I'll have to go out to Pearl Harbor and get it. I may get it or I may not. But heads best be rolling in the sand down there before the next hour has run its course and this is the last you'll be hearing from us for some time. Yes, I know the tests were negative. I'll tell you later." He shut off the rig. "Keep Masha as comfortable as you can. I've got to get that misbegotten box out of Pearl Harbor. I'll be right back." He prepared to suit up. "You can't do it," Teiko said. "Remember what you said when we were talking about going out for a few minutes?" "We do what we have to. What I meant was we couldn't -- I couldn't -- take a pleasure walk out there for the hell of it. But if it's something we have to do, we damn well do it. All right?" "No," she said with authority of endless generations of Japanese women behind her. "No. Is not all right. So. You will go, but I will go with you." She reached for her suit. Chris protested, but she had him dead to rights. It was chancy to go out into that cool, but that it could be done lay within the fringes of possibility. If Teiko went to hold the torch, leaving Chris free to locate the box, it would save seconds, maybe even a minute. Chris alone might fail, but the two of them might make it. Or die out there together, box # halfway from here to there, haphazardly dropped, sitting useless on the lunar soil. I did what I could for Masha, which wasn't much. I got the lot set up. Some operating room. Earth almost full up there and I'm waiting for sterile gloves and surgical instruments, masks and gowns. Alt put the hell into one box #. They turned the temperature controls of their suits all the way up and I watched them leave. A said, halfway to Pearl Harbor. They were on local circuit -- Houston heard none of this. "You didn't have to come." They approached Pearl Harbor and the chill began to come through. "No. You so right, always right. Commander. I didn't have to come and you didn't have to go. We even, yes?" The hatch was still open. Why not? Teiko pointed the light and the box was there. "Ah," said Chris. "There you are, you bastard." He fumbled it into his gloves. They started back. "Do you know what cold is?" "Now I begin to know, I think. I also think we can make it back. You?" "Yes." They didn't talk after that, but they found out what cold was, though the life-support systems were putting out every joule at their disposal. Being cold was like being enclosed, for openers, within a block of solidly surrounding ice. Enclose this, then, within larger blocks, the mass of ice expanding outward. Then it begins to grow inward, to include every part of your body that has sensory end-organs. The lymph congeals and the blood solidifies. Then the ice begins to melt, but you know it only seems that way -- it really means that you're about to buy the farm and can't feel anything. Then you think how nice it would be to lie down and go to sleep. They made it. Just. By the time I was warmed up Chris was operating, Julia helping him. When I could I went over to see what they were doing. They told me to put a mask on. I did and then I could go close and see. It was so sad. Masha's baby had decided to live in the tube and not where it was supposed to, in the uterus. Womb. Chris cut her open and they took lots of blood from the peritoneum -- yes, I had training here also and knew most of the words. Tie off the bleeding points, remove the tube, but save the ovary if you can. He did. Antibiotics systemically and topically and the drip drip drip of the glucose, slow in the lunar gravity. The first lunar hospital. How many firsts are we to make on this mission? Not the last one yet, I think. I wish I had let Chris come to me that night. He won't do it now, I think. "Houston from Nectaris Base." "Roger, Chris. About time, may we say?" "Best not to lose your cool, Steve. We've had a problem up here. Or down here, according to your parameters." "We somehow gathered that, Chris. Would it be within your capability to report?" "My goodness. We really got you up tight, didn't we? Sorry about that. However, this is how it is..." He told them. And that was the beginning of the end of the eighth day of the night. bag next to Marya's. It was fitting that the surgeon be near his patient. Julia came close and so, somewhat later, did Teiko. Marya was out of the anesthesia. "I'm sorry, Chris -- I really am." "I know. You wanted to make the mission and you did what you had to do. No sweat. I'm sorry you lost it -- if you wanted to keep it, Masha." "Yes. I did." Chris is tired, Teiko thought. Chris is tired and he's still put down, Julia thought. Chris, Marya thought, took my baby from me. He had to, I know. They were so close they could all touch each other, though Marya wasn't interested. She was about out. Chris said, his hand vaguely on some part of Teiko, "I wouldn't have made it back if you hadn't been there holding the light. You were right. Domo." " Doitashimashta," she said. "We do it." "Julia," Chris said, "you're a competent scrub nurse. I really didn't know that -- it isn't in your profile." "Screw profiles." "Yes." There was a closeness. We tried to go to sleep, but Masha was the only one who really made it. After all, she'd had major surgery that day and was well downed with pharmaceuticals. I like that word -- why say drugs? I pretended I was asleep, but they both knew I wasn't. Chris said, "I'm going out for a while." Teiko: "Again?" "Just down to the pub for a pint of bitter. Be right back. Or just to hit a bear over the head. All right?" Chris checked Masha, saw that I was right there, not quite asleep. He took his suit from the rack and put it on. It was -- as I'd been the first to point out -- cozy inside, the four of us together there, warm. A bad problem coming into us and being solved, thrust out. I checked Masha. She would be fine, just fine. No baby, not this time. But The Mission survived. And why should that matter so much, I wondered, but I knew that it did. Chris went out. Teiko moved her sleeping bag to the other side of the pillar. She moved Chris's bag also. She looked at me. "You understand?" she said. "Who knows?" was the best I could do. My civilized genes don't go back as far as hers. She held my hand and we watched Chris clomp about out there, near the dome. He looked up at Earth and he looked at all of the lunar horizon. He seemed to raise his fist and hurl it into the night. He broke the lock and came back home. He checked the accumulator curves. He checked that I was half awake and was looking after Masha. He knew where Teiko was and that was where he went. "Chris?" "Yes?" "It's cold out there." "Yes. Why did you go again?" "To hit the bear on the head and bring back meat." "To the cave." "Yes." "What is it like to be alone out there?" "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. Not as nice as here, though." "They sent us here without love." "Yes." "They blew it." "Or made it," Chris said. Earth, home, was up there, somewhat past full, but there were clouds and they couldn't see the Virgin Islands. "So we found it," she said and they did. And that was the end of the eighth day of the first night of the first colony on the moon. After that nothing went according to plan.  Success is something to celebrate -- if you live... lost something very dear but it must be far gone in our history for me to forget it. Our camp is down in the foothills -- from here we can see the blue maze of meadows and scrub woods of this planet. It's good to get away from our technologies for a while, though we're all secure in the knowledge that they wait our return. Bern Benn, the tour leader, is shouldering his pack. We're ready to climb the trail again. "Let's go then," Bern Benn says, with his sherbet smile, more cool than sweet, I think. Our small group is made up of technologists all secure in our positions. Home waits for us back on another planet with orders, co-workers, everything smoothly running and sliding together, which is why we have come out here to look at strange birds, pick up burrs (longweed, with yellow spikes), blister our heels in new hiking boots, eat sparsely by smoky campfires. For a little while we relive our primitive histories. The trail winds up over grasses and rocks. There are a few plants that have pale blue blossoms which remind me of something I have left behind. When I was a little girl I treasured each piece of smashed plastiglass or burnt rubble, but the pleasant complexities of adult life have made this treasuring of things unnecessary. We all travel light and travel far and we never pick things growing by the way. Moshe Snow, the cyberneticist, and Alma, the neurochemist, come alongside as the trail widens. They are a pair, as we all fondly know. "It's good out here," Moshe says, breathing deeply of the air, which hasn't as much oxygen as we like, and that is part of the lure of the tour. Alma is a skinny thing, with fingers like bones, and a small, somewhat lined face; she is sweet like the pale blue flowers which remind me. But I forget. "I love this," Alma says, her boots going thunk! thunk! as if she had a lot of weight to put in them. Everyone is happy. The day is just beginning and our leader is a happy, homeless man at the head of our group, stomping manfully up the hills. To him this is an old story. Moshe gestures up toward Bern Benn. "I keep wondering what he thinks of us with our new boots and creased pants -- he has to teach us such simple things, like the way to put the firewood so it burns." "Always a draft," Alma says, imitating Bern's voice. "He's very efficient," I say, not wanting anything to become rough or sticky. "He certainly knows what he's doing." "I should hope so," MosTie says. A little contempt in his voice? I don't like that. Bern Benn is as good at his Job as I am at mine, taking apart the particles of an equinox or predicting the solar winds. Weather Person that I am, I can recognize another expert when I meet him. Alma and Moshe slowly draw ahead of me on the path, catching up with Sonol, who has been forging onward. Behind me the older man, Tarrold, is climbing and practicing breath control. It makes his mouth a funny shape, but I don't laugh, because we have been friendly. Suddenly a fluster of birds goes up from the shrubby growth on our left. Binoculars are swung up and we pause to look, to call out to each other, comparing notes on size, color, shape of the beaks. Their beaks are thick and hard, for they crack the unmt seeds out of the rock crevices. We, too, have tried unwit seed roasted in a pan over the campfire. They are tasty enough, but no one experienced anything from eating them. Perhaps because we were all so relaxed after a day of hiking that we could hardly relax any more. We reach another bare ridge by the time of our noon meal. Packs come off. We sit in a ragged circle, chatting about the birds and plants. Bern has collected a pocketful of unwit seeds. Eaten unroasted, they are rather bitter, but quench the thirst. I pop some of them into my mouth and crunch them while the meal is being laid out by Bern and Hagne Benn. They work well together, shifting burdens back and forth, finding rare plants, knowing the names of everything we're interested in. Hagne goes around and gives out the rest of the seeds for those of us who are still thirsty, before the water is sluiced out of the evaptank for us. Pale sunlight glitters on the fuzz of blond hair at Hague's nape. I think it's comical that she and Bern have the same hair, as if they had made it so. But they are nice, direct people and like to show us this different land. feeling my mouth become cool and less parched, watching the distance for a different bird; listening for a sound, the unfamiliar, the odd, that we came here for. I have lost something precious but it no longer hurts, whatever it was. Oh, you, you are a person at a great distance. There is an intolerable distance of parsecs between us then, and us now. The sun is moving rapidly and strikes my face, blow after blow across my cheek. The seed has a bitter, quenching taste. Under my head the tufts of grass are coarse and wiry. I remember you were doing something green with your hands, causing growth. Then they came and shot you. Or was it poisons? Your hair was the color of mercury before you died. "Well! What's the weather to be?" Tarrold asks, sitting down beside me with his smile and his old boots, for he has hiked before. I'm sure his boots hang by his door at home, to show everyone how they have been used -- what he has is very nearly an addiction, but he doesn't apologize. Well, I like a person who makes his choices, covers his tracks, travels light with good boots and tested ideas. "This isn't my atmosphere," I murmur, lying in the sweet grass, which is long as hairs around me, though a moment ago it was tufted and springy. Something green used to grow and we kissed -- there were seasons and root-groups, plants and people. I can't imagine being rooted in one spot and always with the same faces near me. Though of course the word "imagine" is no longer of use. At the upper end of our circle there seems to be an argument, voices breaking out. I don't want to listen. "It was a mistake," Hagne's voice sounds clear. I watch it go up like a flight of birds, soaring, a luminous streak through the whitish air. Bern walks down to us. "The seeds," he says. "Have you eaten them all?" "Long ago," I say and stick out my tongue to show how empty it is. Not a word or a hull on it. "They're best roasted -- we won't eat them raw again," he says. I can't be bothered to say anything more, lying in Tarrold's shadow with an arm over my brow, looking through the rainbows of my hairs to the sky overhead. Something is gone and I miss it. "What's wrong with the seeds?" Moshe calls out as Bern passes. "Their effect is inconsistent with your lung function," Bern replies and continues on his way to distribute the foods. With one hand I touch the base of my throat where the purifier was implanted years ago and I see that Tarrold has made the same motion. It's instinctive, I suppose, especially among technologists, who realize how adapted we are. Ordinary people eat, sleep and die without a thought of thanks. Hagne brings the food down to us at our end of the group, and I push myself into a sitting position in order to swallow comfortably. It's still a little before noon and above us lie the slopes toward the big hill where we'll camp tonight and fare rough. Each time we look up that way we feel a shiver of excitement. Up there is far beyond the experience of most of us who remember our flattened, smoothed, slippery home planet where wheels do everything. Here we encounter all kinds of irregularities; that was why we came, to step up, to force the muscles, to empty the mind. Not to imagine, that illusionary function, but to experience prime reality, each of us with his own brain. "What I like," Tarrold says suddenly, in a voice of consummate despair, "is being so alive together." He shocks me and I stare at him, but he's gazing down the slopes and his jaws are munch-munching the food. "But aren't we always alive together?" I ask. "Yes, of course." He flicks a small look at me and goes back to staring down the hills again. Then he wipes his hands on his knees with a consciously vulgar gesture and says, "This is my last hike." A funny thing for an addict to say. "You'll be back," I assure him. "Here or on another planet somewhere -- you won't stop. Haven't you been doing this for years?" "Years," he repeats. "Years," someone else says and somehow I reinterpret it: "tears," or "fears," or other words that rhyme and beat on my breastbone. "Years," Tarrold says, pinching the ridge between his brows with thumb and forefinger. Fears ago I had something green, such as the stuff now crushed under my boots. When I look back it has sprung up again in my wake -- my passing hasn't made anything different, which is a great relief. Like all of us, I avoid damage whenever possible. When one can't avoid it at least it need not be commented on, mourned or balladed about. That way lies the old danger that nearly destroyed us. Tread lightly, travel fast, make your choices and go. Like the implanted purifier, these concepts are the saving ones. We hike on, occasionally stopping to examine a plant or look up to see some flying thing. The air at one place is full of weed seeds traveling the air currents, spiky dark things flying from one place to another. "Little space boats," Kissie says, laughing, capturing a cluster of them in her hand. "Oh, don't," Hanson says, but she hasn't hurt them. She opens her hand and gives a toss and they fly out into the air again and continue their journey unaffected. So we rise smoothly and calmly on our own muscular power into the bands of blue hill, where the growth is less, the air cooler, the rocks more numerous, slatey dark gray. Bits of the rock break off under our heels or we scrape our boots across them and leave hieroglyphs, which some following group may read. Yet I see, when I look ahead, that the rock before us is clean and untouched, though twenty tours a year must come here. Pernt Yollo's pacemaker has to be adjusted, so we gather around him, trying not to be impatient while he removes wires, puts wires back. Hagne gives him a few lungfuls of precious oxygen from her hand tank. One corner of his mouth twitches, but it often does. We ignore it, because he's a Central man, one of the builders of the Computer Expander. While we wait with the pleasant faces we've put on, each of us is counting the lungfuls of our emergency oxygen he uses. "Let's go," Bern says. He leads us -- Hagne brings up the rear and between the two bronzed, blond guides we're well watched over and cared for. It's a little monotonous, but makes for peaceful thinking, all this steady upward tramp. I was thinking of last year when that person Kagge had said to me, "Gaia, I'm remorseful with lust for you -- " and I unfortunately laughed. So often I do, so unfortunately. It is often a humorous occasion, such as buckling yourself into a watch rocket and someone mumbles in your ear, "Oh, I am perishing of persistence for you," and off you go into the storm center, leaving him to perish with someone else. Like the rocks we think we are marking on this climb. The air and the sky are as calm as we. This is a stormless place. I would have nothing to do if I lived here. Fatal! Man is born to function. Toward late afternoon we have risen into areas of sharp black rock. No plants here and it's cool enough to wear our parkas. A little frost sparkles in crevices. A good campfire will be welcome tonight. "We must make it before dark," Hagne urges us and we keep climbing through the longest day we've spent on the trail so far. Even the hardiest of us begins to weary and droop. From the front Bern Benn pulls us along with his voice, the hale gesture of his arm -- from the rear Hagne urges and presses us forward. Pushed and pulled, toiling in a line, clitfibing and climbing. By the time we make camp we're tired enough to be silent. The mountain looms over us, darker in the dark. Soon the fire leaps and dances in the night. Kissie and Pernt help to pass the food around. For a while we're busy with it and there's no need to talk. Hagne and Bern set up our beds in a ring around the fire. Some of us roll into the beds right after eating and fall asleep immediately. Others stay grouped at a little distance and talk softly of how beautiful the dark is, being strange -- how splendid the day behind us, how miraculous the day to come. The ground bed is so soft I sink into it, down and down, wearily, thinking about how #. have lost some darling, but not what or who -- I don't remember. It's bright day when I'm wakened by voices joining and separating in some conversation, piercing the clear, icy air. I lift my head and see our group standing together. I slide out of my bed and stamp into my boots, which are cold, and walk over to the group. Moshe, who was a little contemptuous, is lying on the ground, quite dead. Bern and Hagne carry him off the trail and lay him in a fold between rocks. Above us the mountain looms greenish black. We surround the campfire and eat our morning meal, then all take part in packing up the gear. It's not expected of us but all along we've liked to do our part. It seems to come natural on a trip like this. When we have put on our packs we start upward. Moshe's long, thin figure lying between the rocks soon disappears like yesterday behind us. The air gets colder. It seems to get paler, too, though the sun is strong. After the first hour we stop for a short rest, gathering together to look back down the long slopes we've climbed. Then each of us looks over a shoulder, looks upward, cranes, stares, lowers eyes from that peak. I do this, too, comparing the climb behind me to the one ahead, comparing how it advances before us to how our day's work vanishes behind. "A beautiful day," Alma says. "Perfect. Just the day for a hike," Hanson agrees. "Let's go, then," Bern says and Hagne walks down to the end of our line to watch over us. In places we're able to walk two or three abreast and exchange a few words, but more often we have to go one at a time, and we encounter some steep parts where we must lie almost flat along the rock and grip with toes and fingers, pull and push, feel ourselves glow, our blood run furiously. Then again we come to a dell or flatfish spot where for a time we can move easily. It is at the end of one of these places and starting a harder slope that I notice Pernt Yoilo fling a hand out behind him, as if throwing something away. Whatever it is, it gives a fiery glitter in the air and goes. Bern Benn is already at the top of the next rock face, waiting for us one by one to join him. #, Tarrold, and Kissie, with Hagne behind us, cross the open space, as Pernt comes to the rock. He puts both hands flat against it, gently, then his face. Then he slips down and lies still. He will not use any more of our emergency oxygen. Bern slides down the rock, braking himself with his boots. He looks questioningly around. We had seen nothing. It just happened. "Let's go on," Bern Benn says. And behind us Hagne Benn says, "Let's go!" noon meal. The ground is all rock -- dark, glittering, hard as iron. We're eating and resting when a noise begins in the distance. We're so startled by the familiar sound that we duplicate each other's gestures. Hands full of food pause in mid-air, heads tilt back, eyes look up. A fleet of bright green merchant ships. The world becomes familiar as they pass over. Nothing is strange any more -- home is almost just around the corner. We're able to get a strong grip on our identities without understanding how close we must have come to losing ourselves on the climb. Although, after all, that's what a vacation is for, at least to some degree. The ships disappear and soon their sound is gone, too. We finish eating, loll at ease for a little while and then comes the usual call for us to go on. We're commencing the final part of our hike. Tarrold moves up to my side and touches my shoulder. "Goodbye, Gaia," he says and sits down where he is. He will not despair again, or try to share that shame. "Goodbye," I say. When I look down from the next steepness he's lying curled up on the rock, and frost has already formed a web of white lace over him. Bern loosens his rope and we use it to help us up. Kissie nearly floats free at one point, like a weed seed, light in the air. But she gives her laugh, clings to a spike and goes up, over the top beside Bern and Hanson, and the rest of us bend our heads and pull and push. At the rate we're going it will be close to dark when we get up there and that would be too bad, for we've been told about and promised as fine a view as we've ever seen. "Can we make it in time?" Sonol asks. Bern smiles and says, "Yes, if you'll put a little extra into it. We have some hours of daylight left. But no fooling around if you want to see it all from the top before tomorrow." After that there's no stopping. We heave ourselves up, burn our hands on the rope, scrape our knees on the rock, grow thirsty, hungry, tired, and each one of us gives up looking back or even looking ahead.  Up there Bern Benn encourages us with shouts of, "Let's go on, then!" And behind us Hagne coaxes, "Go on, go on!" I suppose one of the few thoughts we have is that we're lucky to be with those two, who know what they're doing and can help us. The last towering mass looms over us. We stop involuntarily, every one of us, for a moment, to look up. It's very still up there. It seems to be absolutely silent. The silence is an enormous mass that waits for us. "Let's go." "Go on, then." Up we go, bruised legs throbbing, hands half frozen and cramped into grabbing shapes as we take advantage of every crevice and bulge for a better hold, a safer grip. Bern vanishes into the silence. Then Alma. Then Hanson. Up we go. One by one, over the last rock at the top. "Surprise!" "Happy holiday hikers!" "Vacation's over!" "Welcome! Surprise! Happy hiking!" Oh, the funny people in their shiny hats, the dear, comical dancers and acrobats, all jumping up and down and turning somersaults in the air on top of the mountain. Red and yellow streamers float and fall over our heads. Noisemakers, firecrackers, confetti, the popping of corks from wine bottles, kazoos, surprise! Bern and Hagne lock arms and dance, Sonol and Kissie with some of the others weave in and out in a jiggling line. We all get caught up in the celebration, tossing our boots into the air, throwing our canteens down off the rocks. Everyone does split jumps and yodels -- everyone shouts, swigs from the bottles, throws paper flowers at his neighbor. As I join hands with a funny little woman who has a purple nose, somewhere off on the far side of the gallivanting group I see a face that reminds me I have lost my most precious and most dear, but the reddled old woman pulls my hand. She cries, "Come on, Gaia, you want to dance?" Hagne cries, "Come on, let's go!" My feet begin to stutter and jump. Someone passes me a bottle and even while I dance I take a great mouthful. Oh, it's fine, wonderful -- my nose turns purple and the veins bulge in my legs -- we're all wonderful people in our conical hats. Everyone shrieks with laughter and approval. It's marvelous. A journey is completed once again and once again we're with our friends and peers. Those of us who deserve it are celebrating another success. it I T IS always a pleasure to drop once again into what I call the "peripherals" -- books forwarded to me largely because the various (and believe me, they are various) powers-that-be just don't know what else to do with them. When they aren't mainstream of any kind, or westerndetecli vepornographykiddiespoliticals et some other cetera, these "different" books have practically no good chance for review. So off they go to the sci-fantasy slot -- sometimes, one is sure, as a conscience-freeing substitute for the incinerator for people who wouldn't think of burning a book. And sometimes in the hope that maybe, after all, the science-fiction reviewer might discover what the book really is and maybe that it even has merit. And that's good. The most original thought comes always from the frowing edge (even if the best art does but rarely); discoveres and rediscoveries are most often random dots around and ahead of that wellscored curve on the graph before they become large or numerous enough to divert the line and be included in someone's category. "Peripherals" is all the categorization I things into cubbyholes is the most damaging preoccupation of our modern psyche and I hate it a lot. Hence a report like this. The Book of Strangers, by Ian Dallas (Pantheon, S#S) has a novelistic icing for a rather unusual (in Western culture) How-I-WasSaved cake. The icing was what sent it to my desk -- the protagonist is a specialist in a State Library at a near-future time when books have all but disappeared in favor of microfilm and computer-retrieval. To search for a book he secures a leave of absence, learns through a series of encounters on his journey that the book is its writer and the writer is himself -- a sequence which was, in substance, old before Candide. The cake under the icing will not be to everyone's taste, for it deals with enlightenment of Islam and Sufism and how it feels to be bathed in the inner radiance pouring from an endless succession of holy masters in beggars' rags. There is a humorless breathlessness in the style and a hunger for personal subjugation, which I find abrasive. Maybe you won't. Rural, by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, (Taplinger, #) is subtitled "An Occult Compendium from All Ages and Many Lands" and earns a permanent place in my Where Do You Get Your Ideas? file. Part scholarly treatise, part anthology of weird, horror and ghost stories, the book is a journey of adventure and discovery on many levels. We in sf have been called the mythmakers of our time. All times and all cultures have produced theirs and it is astonishing to see both the similarities and the differences between stories whose sources are widely separated in space and time. Siberians and Persians, Chinese and English, ancient and modern, have fabled the hours and centuries away to teach and to entertain -- and the stories they tell, the truths they illustrate, say much about the human condition as it remains the same (in preoccupations with love, death. fear and laughter) and as it changes from time to time, from place to place. Put a Malayan underworld side by side with Dante's, for example, or the were-fox of China with the tiger of Siam and the wolf of Transylvania, and you will be overwhelmed by the fellowship of people everywhere, everywhen. There's something here that is, I think, profoundly important -- something that cannot be dismissed by proclaiming that of course it's nice to be safe and warm under the blankets while engrossed in tales of someone else's terror and torture and to be deliciously menaced by the Shadow Under the Bed -- it makes one safer and warmer. Don't deny this -- accept it and go on. And then begin to wonder about patterns, about why so many storytellers in so many lands and times have pointed so strongly to certain areas: to powers beyond our comprehension, life after death, alien entities with superior knowledge and abilities. Reduce these yet again to some kind of denominator and you'll find that the underlying statement is that there is more beyond, that there are power sources known to certain individuals and entities, whether it be a weremaiden to come to your bed (Chinese) or the skull of a murdered woman that will, in vengeance, go for your throat (English). Virtually all these tales are proclamations of the existence of ' puj (And so is the bulk of sf.) ! For every thousand tales that make this proclamation there is perhaps one that makes an effort to explain it. For every thousand of these there is somewhat less than one that has no axe to grind -- that  does not say "The phenomena are I God's and Jesus is the way," or r "Allah's" and "Islam..." or "enl gramic" and "Scientology..." or I "History's" and "Marx..." Do ; you know of one single book that i (a) accepts the existence of that p which drives the mythmakers and (b) makes a dispassionate, reason; able and scientific inquiry into, i same? f X Reality, subtitled "The Human Pivot Point," edited by Charles Muss and Arthur M. Young, (Outerbridge and Lazard. S #) is such a book, a book so provoca tive, with spectrum so wide and levels so many and so deep, that to describe it adequately is quite impossible. First of all, the contributors to the volume (ten years in the making) carry heavy credentials. Dr. Muses is an associate editor of the Journal of Bio-Medical Computing (London) and editor of ' the Journal for the Study of Consciousness. Arthur Young is a Name in aviaton history, having been a developer of the helicopter in the '#s and '#s. Here is a melding of mathematics and hard technology, philosophy and the sciences, poetrv and sharpest prose, usually found only in super-individuals like Bertrand Russell. Both highly articulate and meticulous thinkers. Muses and Young have gathered together an impressive display of original thinking. Skimming the long table of contents, we find such things as an eyewitness account of fire-walking in Ceylon, trance-induction techniques in ancient of reincarnation and the supraphysical body (fascinating, this one!) -- then there are cases of hyperdimensional awareness, awareness in plants (J.C. Bose wrote this one) and the possible meaning of imaginary numbers. Nicole Maxwell writes an exciting and sensitive account of her search for pharmacologically valuable plants among the Ernest Hocking reflects on immortality, Joel Elkes on language and the psyche. Charles Lindbergh's essay on human potential is beautifully written and a splendid statement of one man's evolution of mind and convictions. Kenneth Demarest, using a large collection of illustrations from the far past. delineates "New discoveries of an ancient path to enlightenment and regeneration."...In reading over the above partial list, I feel a kind of despair. Kmust assure you that this is not a compendium of kookery like flying saucer contact claims, but a wide-ranging anthology of serious and significant thought -- and that it won't be beyond my arm's reach as long as I have one. W 'lTH the possible exception of Arthur Clarke, there is no one alive who writes more knowledgeably and more lucidly on aerospace than Martin Caiden. Or just more, for that matter. His new book (Destination Mars, Doubleday, #) lists # non-fiction books and eleven novels (one of which is Marooned, which you may have seen as a movie, and another of which is, I'm told, destined for the screen and a TV series, called Cyborg.) Years ago he held me entranced with his appearance on allnight radio in New York. He knows and loves flying and space and their technology. His personal opinions are strong and clear and invariably well-grounded. His new Mars book is a real achievement, for it is not only a documentation of the effort to reach the red planet and an intriguing study of the strange globe itself, but a structured piece of excellent and compelling prose. He takes you through each phase of Mars exploration with a marvelous gift for immediacy. It's like reading, say, an account of one of Magellan's voyages, not from the altitude of one who knows it all and how it came out, but with the viewpoint of a day to day, week by week participant in the excitement and the discovery as well as the challenge and the wonder. No more meticulous account of Mars and the Mars effort exists for the interested lay reader. Although we are into an explosion of new concepts in sf and new ways of exploiting them (a development I heartily welcome and applaud), the old hard-core sf is not dead -- and may it live forever. A book like Caiden's is wanted and needed for this and I recommend it most highly for readers and writers alike. usual books with George Alec Effinger's What Entropy Means to Me (Doubleday, #.) Years ago Philip Wylie write Finnley Wren and called it "a novel in a new manner" -- and indeed it was. And so (without being the least like Wylie's) is Effinger's odd book. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it -- and yet I must recommend it, for it is written well and in some parts beautifully. It is saved from being "special" or precious by its wonderful whimsy, its deftness. It has about as many levels as any reader is capable of finding in it, probably a few known only to the author. Clearly he had a ball writing it and he shares his joy generously. To ask me to report accurately on it is to hand me mallet and chisels and a block of granite and ask me to do you a soap-bubble. I can say that the narrator, Seyt, who lives on some kind of Earth -- which is not this one, but something very like it in a number of appalling ways -- has the duty of writing an account of his brother Dore's quest. This quest is to go to the source of a River at which entropy itself can be found. Since Dore never comes back, Seyt must make up the narrative out of his head, with his innumerable family (and a weirder collection of weirdos you have never encountered) kibitzing every word he writes, as he writes it. Dore meets this Glorian, who becomes his companion, helps him lose his sword, pursue and find it again, and who often turns out to be someone else. Well, finally they arrive at the end of the River, where -- oh, hell. Try it. You'll like it.  those remaining were still blue. Astern, dim and distant, the Rim Stars reappeared. And the figures in the screen were now in red light; #... #... #... "Sir." Willoughby, the chief officer was pointing. Out to starboard, just abaft the beam, was a star where no star should or could be -- a point of greenish radiance that steadily brightened. "Captain! Commodore!" It was Madam Swithin's voice. What the hell was she doing in the control room? "Mr. Wallasey," said Listowel to his third officer, "please escort this lady down to her cabin." "But, Captain," cried the mis( Continued from page #) sionary, "this is most important." "So is that," he said, pointing. "I've no time to spare for -- " "That," she interrupted him, "is what is important." "Mr. Wallasey -- " began Listowel. "Let her stay," said Sonya sharply. It was more of an order than a request. "Let her stay." The young officer looked uncertainly at his Captain, at the commodore, at the commodore's wife. He looked again, questioningly, toward Listowel. But the master's full attention was on the strange light. It was closing on a converging course. And there was something solid, or apparently solid, in the center of that glowing circle of blue-green mist. A ship? Grimes had found a pair of binoculars, had them to his eyes. Yes, a ship. M adam swithin was speaking again, but the voice was not her own. It was male and had a strange, guttural accent. And the language was one that Grimes did not understand, although it seemed to be of Terran origin. German? No, he decided. Although there were similarities. "Who are you?" Sonya was asking. "Speak so that we may understand." "I can not rest. I must not rest. Effer. To sail der seas vas I condemned, for all eternity, vhereffer and vheneffer dere are ships -- " The seas? wondered Grimes. But space is a sea... He could make out the hull now through his glasses -- high-pooped, with a tall forecastle. He could see the line of black-gaping gunports and the three masts with the square sails at fore and main, the staysails and the spritsail, the lateen sail at the mizzen... This was no lightjammer. "Kapitan!" that deep, urgent voice was commanding, "Starboard der helm! Starboard der helm!" But an alteration of course to starboard would make a collision between Pamir and this apparition inevitable. "Kapitan! Starboard der helm!" And in the old days when the helm, the tiller, had been put to starboard both rudder and ship had turned to port. Grimes remembered from his reading. Even after the invention and introduction of the ship's wheel those topsy-turvey steering orders had persisted for quite a long while. In the old days, the days of the windjammers... And hadn't there been a legend about a Captain Van... What was his name? A Dutchman? He laughed softly. "A ghost," he murmured. "A ghost." Listowel laughed with him. "A bloody Rim Ghost. I should have known. I've heard enough about them. Phantom ships from alternate universes -- " "Kapitan! For der luff of Gott, starboard!" Listowel laughed again, contemptuously, "That thing can't hurt us. I'll not risk my spars and sails, my ship, for a silly, blown-away phantasm!" A spurt of orange flame leaped from the archaic ship's forward gunport, followed by billowing dirty white smoke. The Dutchman had fired a warning shot. "Listowel, bring her around to port at once," ordered Grimes. "I'm not running from a ghost ship with ghost cannon. Commodore." "Bring her around, damn you!" "And you can't order me in my own control room -- " "Legally I can't -- but I do order you." Had Grimes known how to handle the lightjammer he would have tried to push the younger man from the controls. But he did not know. The only thing in his mind that could be of value in this situation was his memory of the old sailors' tales. "Kapitan! Starboard der helm!" It was a depairing cry in that strange male voice from the lips of the medium. "He's warning us, Listowel!" cried Grimes. "The old legends -- you've read them. I've seen your bookshelf. The appearance of the Flying Dutchman before disaster... The ships Vanderdecken were saved from disaster by a ghost ship's warning! Come to port, Captain! Bring her around to port!" Realization dawned on Listowel's face. With a muttered oath he dropped his hands to the console. He worked fast now that it was almost too late -- with desperate urgency. He trimmed the east sails, not bothering about precise angles, bringing all five of the great vanes around as fast as the trimming motors would let him, presenting their light-absorptive surfaces to the radiation of the Llanith sun. Pamir lurched as she fell off to port. The mast whipped violently and the royal was ripped from its yards, flapped ahead and away from the ship like a bat into hell. But the rest held as the ship pivoted about her short axis. And Grimes, looking out to starboard, saw the Dutchman vanish like a snuffed candle -- but not before he had glimpsed the tall figure on the poop, his long beard streaming in the wind (here, in interstellar space, where there were no winds but the star winds!), his right arm raised in a gesture of farewell. "Well," muttered Listowel shakily. "Well -- " Then: "Is it all right for us to resume course. Commodore?" "I -- I suppose so," replied Grimes. In a stronger voice he said, "I shall ground the lightjammers until a thorough survey has been made of this sector of space. There was something there. Something we just missed." On the deck where she had fallen, where Sonya was supporting her head and shoulders. Madam Swithin began to stir. Her eyes opened, stared around her. "Where am #? What happened? How did I get here? I came all over queer and I don't remember any more -- " "Everything is all right," Sonya told her. "Thank you, dear. Thank you. I shall be feeling better in a couple of jiffs. But I'd be ever so grateful if somebody could bring me a nice cup of -- " The expression faded from her plump face and her eyes went vacant. That strange male voice -- although now little more than a dying whisper -- finished the sentence. " -- Holland gin," it said.  framing -- Artists reproduction of your sign with detailed description of your personal characteristics -- IrKiudes Human Zodiac Supplement -- #. Specify Ohio #. ychic. 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I owe nothing Mr Mrs.Miss City-Zip With trial membership # The Hugo Winners. Voi I  II Giant #-in-l volume of # award-winnmg stories # to # Asimov introduces each Pub ed S# # # Dune by Frank Herbert Celebrated winner of Hugo and Nebula Gripping tale of family exiled from their private planet to another a barren desert Pub ed S# # # The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov The masters lirst novel m # years and worth Ihe wait for a fabulous trip to the year # Pub ed S# # # Mutant S#: The Plastic Eaters by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis New bacteria oes berserk causing ondon to melt Pub ed S# # #I The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, The ends of Ihe galaxy revert to barbarism Pub ed # # Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub ed # # # Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke Mankind's last generation on earth "Wildly fantastic'"Atlantic. Pub ed # # # Science Fiction Hall of Fame I. # winners' chosen by Sci-Fi Writers ol America Ed Robert Silverberg Pub ed # # # Where Do We Go From Here? IsaacAsimov.Ed # outstanding stories by foremost writers including Clarke. Hemlem. Gunn, chosen for excellence and scientific accuracy Pub.ed # # # Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Hemlem He knew the Martian love secretand it spelled his doom Pub ed S# # # A Time of Changes by Robert novelofstrange planet where human bemgs must despise themselves #I Nebula award winner Spec Ed # A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, ed by Anthony Boucher. # Volume set # pages Counts as one book Pub ed # # Book Club editions are sometimes reduced in size, but they are all full-length, hard-cover books you will be proud to add to your permanent library Members accepted in U S A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto Offer slightly different m Canada. Printed in U.S.A. Gslaxy sturgeon  Taves  Herbert  Wolfe  Gordon  Richardson January # Oalaxy gripping new noveiia by . Frank Herbert  Ernest Taves From the U. S. publisher of J.R.R. Tolkien comes new insight on the No student of the master's works can afford to be without this new book "Another book on Tolkien? Yes, and this one, which analyzes The Lord of the Rings in light of Tolkien's other published writings, is a winner...The book impels the reader to return and reread Tolkien with new insight." -- Library Journal "I know of no other single volume which provides so full a picture of Tolkien's theory and practice of fantasy."Richard C. West "Should provide a valuable guide to the enjoyment of the eminent British author's writings... for Tolkien's fans perhaps the most revealing part of the book is Kocher's discussion of 'Leaf by Niggle,' a story which parallels Tolkien's own life." -- Publishers Weekly Two of the greatest science fiction series going! After many years, now back in print! Just Recently Published! When you order you'll receive our complete catalog listing all Doc Savage titles available plus our great Science Fiction line-up of Asimov, Bradbury, Serling and many, many others! Send check or money order (no currency or C.O.D.'s please) to: Mr.Mrs.Miss Address City StateZip (Please Print) Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Ejler Jakobsson, Editor JudyLynn Benjamin, Managing Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor Jay Tuniqk, Circulation Director sUiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, Prasidont. Main Offieos: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #e. #-issue subecription: S#. in U.S., S# elsewhero. United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Qiouoa st ar Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of tho Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-isaue subscription in the United Kingdom; #. Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. featuring: Joseph Green Thomas Burnett Swann Andre Norton Gordon R. Dickson Lloyd Biggie, Jn Jeff Sutton Keith Laumer John Brunner Brian Stabieford James H. Schmitz Michaei G. Coney Philip K. Dick John Jakes Louis Trimble Marion Zimmer Bradley Ron Goulart A. E. Van Vogt Gerard Klein Lin Carter Brian N. Ball E. C.Tubb Dean R. Koontz etc. etc. etc. Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher #I Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. # IN Distributed by lections for science fiction readers # B Hudson Hall U. of Mo. Columbia, Mo. #I Directions: In an article in the May, # issue of The Writer Harry Harrison suggested that deep characterization isn't needed in science fiction: "There is little or no character development because the characters are there to illuminate the concept. The story is concept-oriented, not person-oriented." This idea is an old one, dating from the pulps, none of which were noted for their depth of characterization, and is inherent in the plot and style of much sf. But I reject the assumption that science fiction must remain in this rut, that it may deal only in scientific extrapolation and leave the exploration of interpersonal relationships to the mainstream. The qualification limits the potential greatness of sf. Harrison, apparently to prove his point, goes on to ask, "Can you remember the name of a character in any science fiction story or novel you have read recently? Now try this with Gone With The Wind or Crime And Punishment, or any other general novel that you recall with warmth. "  tried this and found that I could remember Helva and Lessa from Ann McCaffrey's books The Ship Who Sang and Dragonrider, Michael Valentine Smith and Jubal from Stranger In A Strange Land, Mahasamatman from Zelazny's Lord Of Light, and several others. This isn't very many, but Gone With The Wind and other famous novels are unfair comparisons. What science fiction characters have the publicity or are referred to as much in conversation or in print as the characters in, say, a novel by Dickens, Steinbeck, or Faulkner? Or have had a four-hour movie to imprint the names of characters upon the minds of viewers? But why shouldn't sf have the quality and depth of characterization that mainstream fiction does? Why shouldn't we have our share of Hamlets, Captain Ahabs, Micawbers, and Holden Caul fields? Why shouldn't we have more? We have the potential. The mainstream is stuck with interpersonal relations in the "real" world. Science fiction is not so limited. We can explore such relations at the far end of the universe. We can study man not only as he is but as he can be. Science isn't content to study the way things are -- it must see what they can do. In the end the two are the same -- and so it is that Man must be what he becomes. The future is constantly in a state of becoming the present. Because science fiction has the potential to explore this process of becoming it could be a truer gauge of human personality than the mainstream. Unfortunately, this has yet to happen. Qce books A Because sf writers must work so much harder than other writers at creating their backgrounds, most have thought that if they could write a fastmoving plot with a believable background they would have done their job. I'm asking for something more. My concept of a science fiction story demands that neither idea nor characterization reigns supreme. Both are equal in value. One basic element in sf writing is the concept, the idea or happening outside the range of present human experience -- the other is the separate personalities who live through the idea element and the individual reactions of these characters to the concept. The sf story is the interface between the two. Such a story would be harder to write, true. Perhaps I'm asking the impossible -- but I don't think so. I hope not. Ideally such a story would be enormously superior to any mainstream work. It would combine with the ideas we read science fiction for -- the ideas that release us from the bounds of Earth and space and time and propel us to any corner of the world of Imagination. Richard Stooker Columbia, Missouri Directions: It has been my feeling that science fiction -- good science fiction of the past -- explored man's future and how his follies would affect his planet. And that as more people have begun to look toward the future -- instead of simply living each day through -- a good many have come to realize that science fiction is not merely escapist literature but an avenue to speculation, criticism and even to sounding warnings. The compelling reasons have been the invention of nuclear weapons, growing pollution and other environmental damage and increasing social friction and unrest. Too, our waxing dependence on science and technology virtually demand that we no longer confine ourselves to surviving today -- or there may not be a tomorrow. For this reason I believe that the legitimate role of science fiction has moved from the far future into the near -- from time-distant adventures into problems of the present. Science fiction now is about Now. This movement closer to home from the deep ends of space belongs largely to the generation born in the late fifties -- after the space operas' heyday. These people today can read science fiction without fear of being laughed at. They can look for and hope to find answers to such questions as -- where are we today? Some call this the new awareness and it doesn't mean merely that people are troubled. It also means that they want more than a world of metal and concrete and by keeping our informed options open -- that living sense of wonder -- science fiction can hold out a promise. Gerald Thompson Directions: In the recent, almost faddish, trend toward relevance -- or at least pertinence -- I fear the Juggernaut of utilitarianism is overtaking art. The straightforward pleasure of entertainment (Please turn to page #) combining the prophecy of "#" and the shock of "A Clockwork Orange" "A work of art... the best Brunner novel I've yet read."-James Blish "He has taken a giant step forward and placed himself firmly in the front ranks of today's science fiction writers."-Robert Bloch A supernaliy frightening preview of our ruined biosphere...wide-ranging striking power." -- Kirkus Reviews By Sir Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. Two short novels about strange visitors to Earth. "Quite as good as anything the Hoyles have done." -- Library Journal # Edited by Lloyd Biggie, Jr. All the award-winning stories and runnersup of #, plus essays by Knight, Sturgeon and Anderson on the progress and status of S-F during the last year. # By Arthur C. Clarke. Provocative speculations on space, earth, techhology, the frontiers of science, the future of man. # Edited by Gardner Dozois. Stories by Delany, Knight, Lafferty, Leiber, Roberts, Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith, and Zelazny in "one of the finest collections available."-James Sallis # Harper eP Row LlyJ # E. sfrd SI... New York # bOOkstOreS He gave his life to the stars and they gave it back -- only more so I I F, at the very moment Case died, you had aimed a laser (a tight one) at the spot from Earth -- and if you could have ridden the beam front for a thousand years (impossible, of course) you might have seen his coffin. It had not been meant to be a coffin. Ships have lifeboats when they fail and the boats have lifebelts in case they fail and the coffin had once answered the last purpose -- but now and for all those centuries it was and had been Case's coffin. It lay in lightlessness, its widespectrum shrieks of distress forever stilled. It tumbled ever so slowly, pressed by light long gone, because it had never been told to stop. Case, aged a thousand and some hundred and perhaps a couple of dozen and a fraction (do the dead grow older?) years, lay in the sealed cylinder. He was dressed in inboard fatigues (which long ago -- even in Case's long ago -- had evolved into practically nothing) consisting of barely enough material to carry the brassard identifying him as a Senior Grade Lieutenant and displaying the convoluted symbol of his service branch. EX, it read, once you got past the art. Exon many levels: exploration, extrasolar, extragalactic, extratemporal and more -- plus the possibility matrix: expatriate, ex-serviceman, exofficio, exit. For upon entering no man made plans for himself -- not if they involved any here and now. Or anyone. An invisible, intangible something brushed the coffin just once (once was enough) and there then appeared something utterly outside Case's experience in all the exploration, all the discovery, all the adventure in his conscious life. It was a stroboscopic flicker which, more swiftly than the eye could comprehend or the brain register, became with each pulse a structure twice as large as it had been before, until it reached a point hardly ten meters away from the tumbling coffin and stopped, glowing. There was no deceleration in this approach, for there was no motion as motion is understood. With each pulsation the craft -- for it was indeed a ship -- eased to exist here and reappeared there. The distance between here and there was controllable and could vary widely. This had to be so, for during the last three pulses -- during which its approach to the coffin was meters, a meter, some centimeters -- its size barely altered. A brief pause. Then a disk no larger than a saucer spun out from the seamless hull of the vessel, hovered for a moment near the slowly tumbling coffin, fell back and around to match its rotation. It placed itself near one end of the coffin and emitted a squirt of flame -- and another. The tumbling slowed and, with a third impulse, stopped. Another pause, while emanations from the ship probed, bathed, searched, touched, tested, checked and rechecked. Then on the flawless hull appeared lines tracing out a rectangle. Inside the rectangle the hull appeared to dissolve. The tiny saucer moved behind the coffin, made its meticulous squirt and the coffin moved precisely through the intersection of imaginary diagonals athwart the doorway. Inside, four columns of pale orange light sprang up from the deck, supporting and guiding the coffin until it was fully contained, whereupon the rectangular opening hazed over, darkened, became solid seamless hull again. With a brief shrill hiss atmospheric pressure appeared, equalizing the outside of the coffin's shell with whatever was inside. Then the four orange beams turned the coffin and moved it toward a spot on the forward bulkhead which irised open to a corridor, a tall oval in cross-section, glowing with sourceless, shadowless blue-white light. Again a doorway shut behind the coffin and it was moved smoothly and silently to an open door near the far end of the corridor. Here the beams checked the coffin, turned it and slid it into a room. It came to rest in a space between two banks of equipment. On the left was a control panel of some complex kind. It carried no switches or knobs, but had instead arrays of small disks floating two handbreaths away from the panels, liach glowed with its own hue and intensity. On the right stood a great bank of indicators. Case (if he had been alive) would have found the calibrations and indicators incomprehensible. walkway -- which presently surrounded the coffin -- a blue man, hooded and gloved, whose body dazzled without being excessively bright, who seemed to be not quite transparent, yet not solid -- who seemed in some way out of focus. At no time did he touch anything with his small hands and he moved without a stride -- he seemed to glide or slide from place to place. He stood for a time with his hands behind him and his hooded head bent, regarding the coffin. He then turned to the control bank. Deftly he activated a half-dozen systems by passing his hand between the face of the console and certain pertinept floating disks, each of which lit up. A gate at the front of the room opened and two metal arms, bearing a glowing semicircle of energy, moved the length of the coffin, down and back. The field of the curved bus bar rendered the top half of the coffin transparent. The arms retracted, the gate closed. The blue man made his swift touchless passes at the console and the various glowing, floating disks faded to dark. The blue man placed his hands behind his back and stood for a long time regarding the body inside the coffin -- the (compared with his own) overlong arms and legs, the hint of bony ridges over the corpse's eyes, the heavy pectoral muscles and the flat stomach. After a time he glided around to the other side of the coffin and inspected that view -- the hollow needles still embedded in the antecubitals, the bronzecolored, tonsure-shaped helmet clamped to the head, the thick hair that tumbled around its edges. For a long time, astonished, he gazed at Case's beard, his flag of defiance, which, in the last days of his life, he had allowed to grow far past the limits imposed by X. The blue man returned to the controls and set up a complex sequence. Again the gate at the front of the room opened. A new device trundled out and approached the coffin. It looked like a multiple projector studded with gimbaled lenses and the housings of small and highly diverse field generators, together with a positioning frame and sets of folded, tool-bearing arms. The telescopic legs arched, straddled the coffin and positioned the projector over it. Urged by the sure, fleet hands of the blue man, the projector came alive with threadlike beams, some visible and invisible but faintly shrill in the thin atmosphere the room had assumed to match the pressure inside the coffin. The beams apparently were probes and stimulators, pressors and tractors, gauges and analyzers, samplers and matchers and testers. Without pause they reached their summations and took further action. Mechanical hands searched and solved the seals. Gases were mixed and injected, while the atmosphere in the chamber was matched in quality and kind and pressure (a process which had no effect whatever on the blue man). The seals were cracked and the coffin was opened. While the body remained where it was the open coffin sank away, to and through the deck. Case's corpse seemed to be floating in midair, though it was not. Gravity had not yet been applied, but the body was held from drifting or shifting by tractor beams while the crouching machine tapped the tubes from the needles in Case's arms, replacing their contents. The same process was used on the small bronze helmet. A diathermic field adjusted the body's temperature, through and through and all at once. Tubed needles snaked out to the groin, the abdominal cavity, the sides of the neck. Warm fluids began coursing through them while pressor beams gently manipulated the joints, the muscles, the chest...and suddenly Case sat up. But you can't sit up afloat in midair, supported by intangible columns of force and entangled by needlepointed tubes, electrodes, probes. Even so, his movement was so sudden and so violent that the swift reflexes of the blue man, the built-in fail-safes of the systems, could not prevent his wild angry flailing and his tortured shout: "Jan!" But that still the perfect book for holiday giving Isaac's lifetime collection of favorite jokes, anecdotes, and limericks with copious notes on how to tell them -- and why writers can handle words as can this accomplished author of A science fiction, science fact, and now humor. Asimov, a noted scientist, demonstrates in this work that he has not only a sense of luiinor, but also an analytical mind concerning the essence of humor, riic title conveys the content of the book, and nothing more needs to he said except that Asimov would be one popular guest to have at a parly. However, since he will not be readily available, the next best Ihing is to take his book along." -- Lzhrary Journal At all bookstores  # # Park Street, Boston, Mass. # was as far as he got before the massive tranquilizer hit his brain and he relaxed, sleeping. Two tubes were gently replaced. A broken hollow needle was extracted and another put in. And a sleeping man is not a dead man. Let him sleep, said the master computer and the blue man dissolved away. The lights dimmed and Case slept. J Case's waking cry was tortured and hoarse -- but it had not been like the syllable that had torn his throat and half his mind and mingled with the continuing crash of his chemical jets on that terrible launch, the last before he died. The lifebelts -- the coffins -- had rested side by side on the escarpment where he and Jan had dragged them barely ahead of capture by the -- by the -- (a thought missing here: occluded, forgotten) and -- and...and his craft had launched -- hers had not. No one, no man anywhere, had been as helpless, as furious as Case. Programing the escape belts had been so simple that failure had taken on an implacable quality, a constancy of misfortune. Case himself had set up the sequences -- he himself had taken the irrevocable precaution of locking them in, of tying his command controls to hers, of canceling any possible override. And his craft had launched and hers had not, had not, had not... Jan! apparently free-floating, actually caged by gentle, unbreakable beams. After enough hours (the master computer knew exactly the meaning of "enough") the sourceless light increased. The figure of the blue man appeared within it and gained its almostdensity. Moving to the console, the blue man activated certain of the telltales on the opposite bulkhead and studied them. Apparently satisfied, he turned back, made a number of careful adjustments and passed his hand behind a masterswitch disk. A deep hum began, grew in intensity until checked by the blue man's intangible hand. The sound began to rise in pitch, fell again, rose and steadied. It began to pulsate: eleven, fourteen, sixteen cycles -- eighteen -- and there it held. It was joined by a series of matching tones, high harmonics, multiples, tones set apart by fractions to set up beat frequencies. These in turn orchestrated to the heavy subsonics. The entire structure of sound continued selfadjusting to itself and to the readouts connected through Case's bronze helmet, until at last the whole living sonority was tailored exactly to him, to the emanations of his brain, the doorways of his mind, the subtle temporal cells, the neurons and synapses of his brain. Case was no longer asleep. Something began to press against the integument of his mind, gently, irresistibly, until it dissolved the wall and entered. It sought out those storage cells as yet unoccupied, meticulously respecting treasures and privacies, looking into nothing, asking only space to lay down new learning. Once this was found, it withdrew, leaving (remember: all is figure) a line into each compartment. New knowledge and new ideation flowed swiftly through these lines. Language. Idiom. The ideological, analogical, mythological underbracing of idiom. Case was given everything a colleague and contemporary of the blue man might be expected to have, except knowledge of himself and his current situation. That he would get in his own way, in his own time -- the ultimate courtesy. The hypnotic sound faded. The lights changed slightly. The blue man put his hands behind his back and waited. Case awoke. II T here is no end to the wonders of the universe and no acrobatics of the human imagination through time and space are needed to find them. A twentieth century man could, if he would, spend half a lifetime in learning all learned about a square foot of topsoil, six inches deep. He would find animals and insects with marvelous abilities, able to speak languages of scent as well as sound; whole genera tions of aggression and defense; funguses capable of weaving nooses quick and strong enough to snap around a salamander, ingenious enough to wrap and digest it. On the microphysical level are the endlessly subtle phenomena or solution and suspension, of freeze and thaw, while the living things encapsulate and encyst and metamorphose -- no end of wonders. Consider the female cattle tick. Hatching in the ground, she sheds and grows and sheds and grows some more, finally sheds and mates. At last, carrying within her the encapsulated sperm, she climbs. Eyeless, she is yet guided to climb upward until she finds a limb tip where she clings until her reflexes are fired by a single, special spark -- the odor of butyric acid, which is found in the sweat of warm-blooded mammals. At that she leaps -- and if she misses she will climb patiently again and find another tip and hang there, waiting. She has been known to hang there for eighteen years -- and yet react instantly and fully in the presence of the one thing she is equipped to take and designed to need. She will feed for a day, whereupon she releases the sperm she has hoarded to the eggs she carries. She falls then and dies. And the fertilized eggs are ready to take up the cycle. Her life, then, is composed of instants and episodes (as is yours) and could you communicate with her she might recall episodes -- the second shedding, the mating, the climb, the leap. The wait, through drought, freeze, windstorm -- why, that was another instant, another moment, for during that wait she could be called alive only by nearly misusing the word. It was another instant and less memorable than that first plunge into warm blood. Case's first awakening, then, was but an instant after that terrible launch (for he could, but would not remember the long despair during which he gave himself to the belt's life-support, life-suspension systems). He might have foregone these through grief and fury had not his own emergency programing been as implacable and unforgiving as that he had laid on the belts -- unconscious, automatic, indelible. (But hers didn't launch, didn't launch.) Therefore Case awoke (the first time) but an instant after that terrible wrench -- therefore his hoarse cry. Therefore he was the only human being in all the universe who could remember so distant an event as the escape from that hellish unknown planet -- and to him it was not distant at all. For such is the nature of time that a man's clock and a man's soul might give him true measurements, but the truths need not be the same. If you are to understand Case you must understand this. So it was that he knew time had passed when he awoke the second time -- he knew he had been asleep. He knew he felt well and rested and that he was hungry and thirsty. He did not know where he was and when he tried to sit up he could not. "Lie still," said the blue man. "Don't try to move while I get those needles out of you." was to move, fast and hard. When he again found he couldn't he saw the sense of resting and relaxed. The blue man made quick, sure passes at the console and a piece of equipment glided out of the bulkhead somewhere beyond Case's head. It came to him, extended glittering gentle arms and tools and drew the tubes, applied cool creams, released, untied, removed the various devices which had given him back his life, while Case lay wondering what language the blue man had spoken -- and how it was that he could understand it. The equipment slid away from him and traveled to its gate in the forward bulkhead, which swallowed it. Case lay still, looking up at the blue man, whose hooded, concealed face could tell him nothing, but whose relaxed, hands-behind-back pose was one of watchful waiting. Mysterious, yes. Menacing, no. Case moved tentatively, found no restraints, sat up. He sat on nothing visible and, looking down, found himself apparently afloat a meter above the deck. He had a second of vertigo. It passed as the blue man, with instant understanding, waved at a control. Case was immediately supported and surrounded by a soft, firm chair which faded in around him. He sat up straight, looked at the chair arms, around at the back and then at the blue man, whose calming gesture was commanding enough to cause him to lean back -- watchful of course, but no longer alarmed. "Lieutenant Hardin -- " Case blinked. It was so long, even as he knew time, since he had heard that name that he had all but forgotten it was his. "I'm usually called Case," he said. "And who are you?" A pause, then the blue man (faceless, but with a smile in his voice) said, "There really is no simple answer to that question. Just call me the Doctor for the time being. "Doctor?" The word meant the right thing as Case said it, but felt unfamiliar to his tongue and throat. "Doctor," he said again in his own (old) language. The sound felt better but he could sense it meant nothing to the blue man. "That's right," said the Doctor, "you've learned a new language -- new to you, ancient to me." The idea of hypnogogia -- sleeplearning -- was not unfamiliar to Case, though he had never experienced anything as -- well -- as finished as this. Learning and using information by hypnogogia had always been an instant translation (or rapid analog) process to him -- think cat and come out with gleep, or whatever the appropriate word was in the learned system. In this case, he was even thinking in the new language. Yet if he wished to use his old one he could do so merely by decision and without special effort. All gain, no loss. Case closed his eyes. Did his new language have words for grief, anger and self-detestation? Yes, it did. Gratitude? Saved my life... There is this about dying anguished -- the anguish dies with you, as does the pain. What, then, if you are revived -- and with you, the anguish? This was what mattered at the moment, not a stupid: Where am I? He was on a ship that had picked him up. Whose ship, bound for where? That mattered, too, but not yet. Gratitude? tions to ask and nine hundred thousand of them conflicted with his conditioning to give no information unless he must' -- and on certain matters, no information at all. "You were the executive officer on the ship Outbound." said the Doctor, "an Explorer class discovery vessel launched from Terra Central on a mission to penetrate the galactic arm und make certain experiments in space, among them the testing of a new version of the flicker-field mode of faster-thanlight travel. A design error caused the vessel to accelerate out of control to velocities exceeding anything regarded at the time as theoretically possible. Compounding the Outbound disaster was the ship's ability to gather intergalactic hydrogen molecules for fuel, which, at the unexpected velocities, caused an increment exceeding expenditure of fuel. The only possible result must have been an explosion or other disruption of the vessel. What actually happened is not known, because by the time it happened the ship was far outside any possibility of detection." Case felt a flash of irritation. "If you've already picked all this out of my head -- why go over it?" Gently the Doctor said, "We took nothing from you. We respect personal integrity above all other things, and the privacy of a man's choices are his own. No -- what I have just said came from the archives." Archives. Not files or retrieval banks -- archives. "How long were we -- was the Outbound lost?" "By Terra Central reckoning -- some twelve hundred years." "I couldn't have been suspended for twelve hundred years!" "You weren't. You died." After a time the Doctor said, "Would you like to be by yourself?" "If you don't mind," Case whispered. The blue man faded and disappeared. Case saw this, but could only stare dully. AN. Oh. Jan... His mind for a while was a wordless throb. Deep in him, where lived the observer all of us carry -- the merciless one who stands off watching -- was name-calling: Idiot! Sentimental slob! Why is it a greater grief to you to know she is a thousand years dead than a mere two hundred? Angry, are you? Angry! What are you going to do with your anger? "Something," he whispered. "Something -- " He threw a slitted glance around. He saw nothing in this bland place to strike out against, so with one blow he fisted his palm so hard he numbed it -- and while waiting for it to begin to ache he caught in memory a flash of ugly laughter. Ugly? The sound was disembodied, mouthless, deep, cheerful -- with the cheerfulness of a being with a better mousetrap and Case had been the mouse. Why couldn't he remember the mouth, the face, the situation? Occlusion -- the profound will not to remember. Occlusion is an act of mind to replay some terrible shock. Yet occlusion always does leave a trigger in plain sight and that is also a survival trait -- for the deep mind wants always to know where the danger is and what to fear. To be as close to his deep mind as Case was (his training had made him so) was to tread always the edge of internal terrors, to be placed always at the point of decision. Shall I recall the trauma? Or bury the trigger again? Only at this edge did he have the ability to react with the fabled swiftness of the Corps. He let the trigger, his memory of the laugh, fade and closed his eyes, commanding some alternative to come to mind. Anything. Anything else, anything instead. Something, perhaps, before the laughter. Something like -- well, before the laughter was the chase and before that the landing and before that the lifeboat and before that... Before that no one would ever know, because the crew had abandoned ship in the flickering grayness of translight velocity, under or over, who knew? No instrumentation existed to tell precisely what had happened -- and no instruments told the truth anyway. Electrons had flowed in strange ways, coils and fields had been distorted and wild. No one had ever been there before -- no probe had ever reported back. Scuttlebutt, off-duty talk -- what would happen to you if you bailed out of a ship at faster-than-light velocities? They said that as you reach such speeds, time approaches zero and mass approaches infinity. As logic approaches perfection, truth approaches zero. Someone said C (the terminal velocity) was a gateway into another universe or into another phase in phased space. Some predicted death and dissolution, for all electrical phenomena of biochemistry would, by all the rules of physics, be so changed that organization of matter and of life would be disrupted. And some said no; transformation phenomena (mass into energy into space into time, each proportionately interchangeable) might retain pattern -- and some inconceivably different form of life might be possible. Over it all was the certainty that to bail out, away from the guarding lifesupport, artificial gravity and all the other tissues of the man-made womb that was a spaceship, would be expulsion into something utterly strange and hostile. Bailing out in the stratosphere, with # of the atmosphere underneath one, and a temperature drop of perhaps two hundred degrees -- the name of that is Lethal. Multiply it by what, then, in space, in that strange country where time itself might turn on its tail? And always the other argument that velocity really is not a commanding factor -- that early in the days of railroading, wise men said that the ears would bleed, the sight would fail, the blood cease to circulate at twenty miles an hour. And that all the talk of C was the same logical untruth -- speed has no absolute, velocity is always relative and the only danger in bailing out is the matter of being a hell of a way from anywhere. Well, Case had found out (with Jan, with Jan) that one could live through a bailout. Not how -- or what had actually happened. He remembered the shrill alarm, the echoing-everywhere voice saying abandon, the clutch of fear on the way to his assigned lifeboat station when the main hull started to buckle and the airtight barrier slammed down between him and his boat (and a good thing too; that whole section of the ship cracked away and exploded outward, boats and all). The lights had gone, as had the gravity. Surprisingly clear in his mind was the wild scramble through familiar-unfamiliar gates and corridors to his alternate station, where he tumbled through the hatch (on top of someone else -- he didn't know who) and kicked out and squirmed around, treading the other as he craned back to the corridor to see if anyone else was coming -- but then, no one could see. If anyone had been or had not been coming, his conscience was clear (though his regret could never be), for the automatic override had canceled his manual launch controls and he had fallen back into the lifeboat as it clanged shut and banged away from the ship. The boat's inertia field had taken over and saved him the terrible agony of acceleration, but its vibratory effect, chiming down the scale, had been an agony of its own. His shipmate had been as preoccupied with this as he and the only thing he could clearly recall was a spinning glimpse of the ship with a ragged cavity in its midsection -- the first part to blow off, the part that had contained his lifeboat station -- limned in flickering arcs as the ruptured power cables lashed and vomited. HI conscious for a time. Case's subsequent hazy inspection of the instruments gave him no useful information at all, except that the lifeboat was sound and that its converter was picking up a reasonable amount of usable atomic hydrogen, so that fuel and life-support would not be a problem. Almost detachedly he watched his hands on the controls, running through the implanted checklist, setting the computer to hunt for a ship andor a terrestrial planet, putting the drive to maximum (the computer would not use maximum, but in that setting max was available) and turning on the life-support complex -- with alarms. A touch on one control took inventory of all stores and reported them complete. Another applied spin. The lifeboat had the contours of a shark with an exaggerated dorsal fin. The body contained stores, converters, fuel -- the fin was instrumentation and living quarters for six. Spin was on the long axis -- subjective "down" was therefore in the tip of the fin. All snug, all safe. No hope. Plenty of room, plenty of food and air for six. For two the accommodations were palatial. He looked at last at his shipmate -- not that he hadn't cared before, but his ingrained priorities were conditions first, personnel second. His first reaction had to do with all the people his fellow traveler was not. He wasn't Old Growl, the captain, or that funny little Henny from the black gang, or Bowker, who had always puzzled him and whom he had always wanted to know better when he could get around to it -- or Mary Dee, who had never found out that he had liked her better walking away, such was her hair, such was her face. The face he now saw was one of the background pieces, one of the others, you know, the people who make up the bulk of the roster in your memory of some function or event or institution you attended once. Gander, Dancer, something chemist, usually found in a corner with two or three others from Science Section, talking shop. Correction. Listening to other people talking shop. "Janifer?" "Janocek." She sat with an elbow hooked around a soft stanchion, where she had anchored herself before spin. She had apparently been watching the checkout intently, following it step by step. Case outranked her -- and her conditioning would make her defer to him but not miss any of the routine. Clearly, at this moment, they both felt the weight of the programing leave them. Optimum conditioning takes care of essentials down to the finest detail, true, but then it stops. They were on their own. "Case Hardin, Lieutenant S.G.," he said. "Yes, sir, I know." There was a foolish pause. He should have known she knew. There were more ratings than officers on a ship. To the ratings the officers were never a sea of faces. And his "S.G." hung pompously in the air between them. Her eyes were long almonds, so bright they were opaque (but, one realized, not from the inside) and her hair was drawn back almost painfully tight from a seamless brow. She was slender, tall (both just this side of "too") and there was an odd, controlled quality in her voice, as if it were kept in the middle register by a conscious effort. She asked, "What happened?" He shrugged and nodded at the telltales. No ship, no boats, no planet, no sun anywhere. Some debris of the disaster dwindled as their launch took them away -- nothing large enough to have saved or sheltered anyone or the computer would have reported it. As the lifeboat spun, a paleness washed across the screens -- the end of the arm of a distant galaxy. Case touched a control and fixed a view of it..."Nobody tells the ratings anything," she observed. "They don't tell a lieutenant much either. We were testing a new drive. Theoretically it wouldn't work in gravitic fields of a certain density, so we headed for deep space with a conventional drive. We were okay by the numbers. The math section gave us a safety factor of three or better -- I mean, we were three times farther into intergalactic space than was needed to test safely. Well -- they were wrong -- or the design was wrong or somebody did soniething wrong on the bridge. We cut in the new drive and couldn't turn it off. Nothing could turn it off. It was working outside our power supply, beyond control. We just accelerated until we broke up." "And there's no one -- " "No one. Just us." T hey found themselves looking at one another. He wondered what was happening behind the shine of those long eyes? Were they asking. Why you? Or was she mourning somdOne? For a second he had a deep flash of regret. He did not gossip, did not pry, never watched other people's affections and partnerings and personal peccadillos. Case had a searching and hungry mind, but it was pointed at the job, the responsibility, the mission, and accepted a deliberate repression of his own wants. He was a good officer. Whether or not he was known as a good man had never concerned him. And perhaps it did not have to concern him now. He was half the population -- and the ranking half at that. She had no one else to set standards and comparisons by and from the looks of things matters would so continue. He sighed (why?) and turned away from her. He found nothing to recollect about her. He would have to start knowing her from scratch, from this point forward, while she -- well, she knew who he was. In his world one was used to living in close quarters with other people -- there were so many of them everywhere. But because there were so many there was always a choice. But now... He turned to the console and sat down. He stared glumly at the faint stain of stardust that was a galaxy -- who knew which one? -- and the blackness everywhere else. Hopelessly he set up a computation for distances. Was it eight hundred light-years -- or even nine -- to that nearest star? Something like that, surely. The boat could accelerate to a fraction of C -- a large fraction, to be sure, but still a fraction -- and the suspension gear might keep two humans alive for a minimum of two, a maximum of five hundred years. The boat was equipped to care for six -- could the life-suspension systems be manifolded, so that they could revive and use new gear before the old was played out? Would the unused systems remain effective after great lengths of time? He glanced over his shoulder. His biochemist might have some answers. But first -- some numbers. Expertly he flicked his computer commands. In scanning a galactic cloud even at eight hundred lightyears the computer could only operate in an area of probability to lay a course to a point in the cloud where terrestrial planets were most likely to be -- and terrestrial planets are not likely to be anywhere. He set the computer to seeking and turned away from it. HeJiad at last done whatever he could, a condition he dreaded. Nothing was now left for him but to face a whole matrix of things he had never concerned himself with or trained himself for. He had been trained to confront problems, not people, not a person -- not, for that matter, himself. He turned to confront it, her, himself, and found her crying. She said, "We're going to die, aren't we?" Everything about her -- body, voice and eyes -- asked only a simple answer, a denial, and he didn't have it for her. He never thought of lying (that was for those who knew more about people than he knew) and it never occurred to him to touch her, which would have served quite well, for she could have made her own interpretation. He said, "I guess so, Janifer -- " and even got her name wrong. The sourceless light increased and the blue man appeared. "I'm hungry," Case said. "In the chair," said the Doctor. "Are you feeling better?" Case knew what the Doctor knew from the wide array of telltales -- and that it was not his physical condition that was the subject of the query. But "better?" He said, "You mean -- am I up to remembering? I'll try. After the ship broke up I escaped in a lifeboat with a rating, a Janet Janocek, xenomicrobiologist -- " The wide soft arm of the chair slitted open and uncovered a warm one-liter sucker. Case took it, pulled strongly at it and swallowed. The contents were bland but satisfying. He continued: "I can't remember what happened after we realized we were beyond help, out of range, with no reason to hope." "You were picked up in a lifebelt -- you called it a coffin. What happened to the lifeboat?" "Oh, that was smashed up on the landing." The Doctor did not comment, but waited. Case said, "I mean, I can't remember what we did all those days, a hundred and four of them -- " What he meant was that he wanted to remember them in order, every hour and minute, because now they were precious, priceless, and because now he could not understand why, except for certain vivid scenes, they had been at the time a succession of grays on grays to be lived through. He had been with Jan -- Jan. Whatever she was later, she did not become -- she was what she had been that one time when he had watched her cry, had sat watching her, his useless hands pressed between his knees, miserably, until she stopped. Then the days -- ship's time had said they were days -- and you can sleep just so much and spend so much time in the tingler (had she used everything in the tingler? He had. Oh, Jan!). He had checked the console daily and entered "Ditto" in the log. And then there had been nothing else to do but confront the other person and he just hadn't known how! And all the while, he thought with a kind of awe, this other person was Jan. Thus it is when anguish and grief loop back on themselves. He wished he had it to do over, terror and hopelessness and all -- a small price for those hundred and four days, ' now that he knew who she was. Had been. "I remember," said Case, almost smiling, "Jan's starting a discussion with me about living, about staying alive -- about why. Why did we keep a log and check the console and do the active and passive exercises and use the tingler and all -- why, when we knew we were going to die? And all I could say was, what's changed? What was the difference, really, between what we were doing and what we had always done? We knew where we were going to die -- right in that lifeboat -- when the time came, but otherwise we were just like everyone else, everywhere, trying to stay alive as long as possible. I knew she hadn't wanted to die a hundred days ago and I knew she didn't want to die that minute -- and neither did #. But why live now? She demanded an answer to that -- it was just something she didn't know. And I said that I didn't know either, but that everyone ever born has been under a death sentence just for having been born -- and the fact that for us there was no hope did not change anything. Hope makes life easier but its lack doesn't make life imhave lived long lives without it. And this discussion was (suddenly he remembered) on the hundred and second day -- and the hooter started up." At last Case did smile. "The hooter." "Collision alarm, for condition yellow. Somehow out there we were coming up on something -- or something was coming up on us. It was enormous. It shouldn't have appeared as it did, so close and without previous warning. But it did. And don't ask me for explanations. It was a planet larger than Luna and almost as large as Terra. I shouldn't have said 'planet' because there was no primary, but you'll understand why I call it that. "I thought Jan would cry again. Maybe she did. I was busy at the console. "I probed for an atmosphere -- the object was big enough. Negative. I got it on the screen and read the range and I couldn't believe it. To have appeared so quickly it had to be approaching from ahead, adding velocities -- but even then it should have been detected days before. Actually it wasn't coming head-on -- it was angling in from the left. I computed the angle -- the object was only two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away and intersection was due in about thirty hours. I got magnification on the screen -- a rocky spheroid, but by radar alone I couldn't tell much more than that." (And Jan had said, "Please -- oh, please -- " and when he had turned to look at her she had been standing with her hands over her ears. "Please turn off the hooter. Case.") Doctor why he smiled again. "I needed light to make any kind of survey, but out there was nothing, not even starlight. I remember thinking again that a body that size would have to have some sort of atmosphere, if only hydrogen falling in or orbital dust, so I probed again and got a positive." "Your instruments -- " said the Doctor. "My instruments were wrong," interrupted Case, "or I used them wrong -- or a lot of things happened I can't explain. All I can do is to tell you what happened." Detecting Case's irritation, the Doctor raised small shimmering hands. "Please." "Or what I can remember," mumbled Case. "Maybe they're not the same thing." He took another pull on the sucker, swallowed and said, "I set up the spectros for analysis and that's one thing I won't ever forget -- the readout for Earth Normal. It said oh point nine and then it waited and threw in another nine and after a bit, three more -- five nines altogether. That's mean temperature and pressure as well as composition -- and I doubt Terra itself would give you a reading like that. Something about the way those nines came up is important, but I can't quite get my hand on what it is -- I don't know." He shifted, picked up the sucker, put it down again. "I got some sleep then -- six hours -- leaving Jan on watch with orders to wake me and take her six. We didn't know what we were in for and we wanted to be rested. "When she woke me we had light. The planet, planetoid, whatever -- it gave us light. It looked like those old photographs of Venus when she was first observed, before the cloud cover was dispersed. The radar pix were the same as before, nearer now, but the opticals showed unbroken clouds. The velocities were so nearly matched that I could trust the iron mike to hang an orbit. I took a running check on the nature of that light. It was white, more or less -- a mix. It came from the clouds. "We slid into orbit nice as you please and dropped in close enough so the spin was an embarrassment. I set the boat into a tail-in attitude with the big fin leading -- and a steady one-G deceleration, which made it comfortable for us and easier on the sensors. "You can't expect full and sophisticated instrumentation and controls on a lifeboat, but what we had was good and I used it to the limit. We had all the time we needed and the velocities were so well matched that the transition from orbital to controlled flight situations was made as gently and pleasantly as any textbook tourboat ever managed. I lost the redalert feeling, canceled the six-on, six-off watches and spent most of my waking time on the scans. Jan said she would make a report about the way I handled it." (Jan had watched everything he did -- of course, it was such a change from those other weeks -- and had jumped to do anything he asked her for. And one day she had said suddenly, "Case, you're wonderful, you know that? And nobody knows but me. I've got to tell them, somehow I've got to tell them." Th is had disturbed him far more than any unbelievable planetoid. He had nodded to her and turned back to his console, glad he had something else to fix on. After that she had spent a lot of her off-watch time murmuring into a voicewriter.) "I set a spiral so gradual and so matched to the atmosphere densities that frictional heating was not a problem, only useful. We braked with it and used the heat for hydrogen treatment -- actually, I do believe we landed with full tanks because of that, not that it did us any good. We reoriented, nose parallel, and hung on the horizon, fin up and the living quarters gimbaled over so that for us and the boat there was up and down again. We circled the planetoid in the high stratosphere -- or what would have been a stratosphere on Terra -- and mapped. "Once into the cloud cover we found that it was just that -- a cover. The air underneath was clear, with occasional drifting cumulus. The weirdest thing of all, though, was that from the underside the cover was illuminated only on one half. Imagine a hollow sphere, half black and half white. Call the white the illuminated part. The planetoid is inside this sphere and the sphere rotates around it, so that even without a primary, the surface has day and night phases. "I picked a number of likely spots and finally selected one. It was a long narrow sandy plain, like a beach, at the edge of a large lake, with forest -- yes, there was vegetation -- on the other side. It seemed fairly level and we could land on it with clearance to get off again. I ran a full check on the manuals, then took over. I made fourteen, fifteen trial approaches before I lowered the gear and went in. 'VT'OU have to underX stand -- the lifeboat was no kind of airfoil. She came in on what we called stilts -- the supporting jets -- and maintained attitude with gyros. I was practically sitting on the stilts at ten meters altitude and I had forward velocity down to about fifteen meters per second. A crawl. And then there was this terrible noise and we fell over sideways." (A tearing scream, edged, stabbing and Jan's screaming with it and -- and his too -- to be falling, to know in that split second that the boat was gone, that hope, born again, was gone again. And as they toppled had come that other sound, that other terrible sound that made them scream again when terror overrode despair...) "It was a small lifeboat, but small is -- " Case spread his hands. "There were tons of it all the same. It fell over and I could hear the hull plates crumpling and turning back. I think the two left-side stilts, fore and aft, cut out and the two right ones added to the topple. She lay down on her side and slid and ruined herself. And when the fin levered over and hit the sand we were thrown so hard we hit the bulkhead, restraints and all -- they pulled right out. They were never built for such a lurch from the side as that. "It was night, that crazy kind of night, when I came out of it. I was lying on the sand with my head on Jan's lap and she was wiping my face with something cold." (And breathing in used-up little hies, dry catches at the long far end of weeping. She had been thrown clear, right out through a rupture in the fin, and in time had found him dangling against the outside of the boat by his restraints, his blood painting the bent plates. She had gotten him down somehow and then had gone off to the beach with a bit of foam insulation she dipped in the water and brought back. When he had gotten his wits about him he had given her hell for maybe inoculating him with God knows what from alien water. Her response, astonishingly, had been to fall instantly asleep.) "I hurt all down my left side, especially the skull and hip, both scraped badly and bruised. Jan was shaken up and for two days or so I was afraid of internal injuries because she vomited a lot and moaned in her sleep. Then I guess we both got sick for a while -- fever and blurred vision. It's asking a lot of the biosystem to be thrust unprotected into an alien environment, even a kindly one." (Kindly. Cool at night, warm in the daytime, clean air, on the high side of oxygenation. Potable water. It could have been worse -- if that had been all there was to it. There had been more to it.) "It was at the end of the third day, as nearly as I can recall, that we shook off the sickness and were able to take a good look at the situation. We were bruised and hungry, but we were out of shock. Jan told me she had been having dreams -- a dream, I should say, vivid and recurrent. She saw a device like hands, sorting and shuffling cards, laying them out, gathering them up, shuffling and laying them out again -- and she was the pack of cards. I would not mention that or even remember it if she hadn't described it so forcefully and so often. I had my own nightmares, too -- but then, fever, you know -- " He made a wipingaway gesture. W Case?" asked the Doctor and quickly added: "If you don't mind -- " because Case dropped the sucker, clamped his hands together, frowned down into them. "I don't mind -- although they're not very clear any more. I tried too hard for too long not to remember, I guess." He paused. Then: "Hard to grasp -- and any words I use are like approximations, but then -- I seemed to be suspended from some kind of filament. One end was inside me and the other was high up, in shadows. Circling around me were eyes. Not pairs of eyes or one pair, but -- I forget the arrangement. And next I realized that the eyes weren't circling me, but whatever held the filament up there was twirling it while the eyes watched -- and then there was -- " "Yes?" The prompting was very gentle. "Laughing," said Case, and he whispered, "Laughing." He looked up at the Doctor. "Did I tell you about that noise just before we crashed?" "You mentioned a noise." "Partly it was the gyro bearings," said Case. "I found that out later -- after the hull broke up and I had a chance to look at the drive sector. You had to see that to believe it. The only way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine all the bearing assemblies -- every one of them, mind you -- while turning at max, instantaneously turned solid, welded into one piece. The shafts had wrung big ragged holes in the mounts. They -- spinning down, tearing everything apart down there -- made most of the screaming. The rest was Jan, well, and me, too -- " The Doctor waited. "The laughing," Case said at length. "I don't think it was a real sound. Jan said she heard it, too, but it wasn't a real sound. Words are no good sometimes. Whatever we heard -- it wasn't with our ears." He closed his eyes and shook briefly. The laughter. That laughter. Not Case's laughter. Case was not a laughing man. "We were hungry. I boosted her back into the cabin -- the rupture was too high off the ground for me to get in by myself -- and she rummaged around looking for something to eat. She drew a blank. Lifeboats are designed for survival in space, not for planetfall. Suckers and their contents are -- were -- constituted from raw elements which were useless to us without processing and we had no power to process. There was a lot of shouting back and forth while I tried to find a way for her to override the failsafes that had shut down the power when the boat careened, but nothing worked. She threw down whatever she thought would be useful -- seat cushions and a big soft sheet of headlining and some rod stock and other junk -- and the firstaid case, which we didn't appreciate much until later. As I said, we were hungry. I don't think either one of us had ever known that feeling before and we just didn't like it. "Jan had read that fruits could be eaten without preparation. She told me about it. We left the ship and walked across the sand to the vegetated zone. The sand felt strange to my feet, not unpleasant, but painful as we moved into the soil and rock and undergrowth. The little branches lashed at our bodies -- some of them had sharp points on them that scratched. We found one great bank of plants heavy with little round red fruits that Jan said were berries. She ate some and we waited for a time, but there were no ill effects so she got some for me. We also found what seemed to be large fruits, but on breaking them open, discovered that they were full of small crescent-shaped constructs with casings so hard we couldn't break them. We brought a few of these back with us and cracked them against the hull plates with a stone. They were very good, very nourishing. We slept." (They had slept on the sand and been cold until Jan got the piece of soft headlining and covered them. The heat of their bodies had been trapped by it and had kept them warm. It had been a new experience for both -- both having lived their lives virtually without clothes in controlled environments and sleeping weightless, with a gentle restraint or supported by pressor fields.) "The next day we went the other way to find food -- to the lake. Jan waded into the water, washed her whole body in it and called me. Since we no longer had the tingler I joined her. It was not the same, but not completely unpleasant either, and we did feel a lot better afterward. Up the beach a little way rocks thrust out of the water and on them grew great clusters of bony things that Jan called bivalves. They weren't easy to get off the rocks -- and once touched they closed up tightly -- but we developed a skill with a bit of stone and a quiet approach and managed to harvest a number of them. To swallow one at first was nauseating, but it was what you might call an acquired taste and soon we were eating enthusiastically. It was while we were up there that the boat began to break up." IV standing patiently before him, but as usual his glance brought him nothing. "It made a terrible noise -- the plates seemed to be shearing -- and as we ran down the beach we could see the boat settling. It was going down as if it lay in soft mud, but it didn't -- the sand under it was as solid and dry as what we ran on. All the same, it was sinking and breaking up. I'm telling you what I saw, what I remember," he said defensively. The Doctor inclined his head and made a wordless motion for Case to continue. "I can't help it," Case grumbled. "It's what happened." When the blue man still did not respond he went on. "The nose and tail were crushed and had sunk into the sand and there were three new breaks in the hull. That's when I saw the gyro bearings I told you about. The boat looked as if a giant had taken it by the two ends and bent it over his knee. The fin was flat on the ground now and I looked in through the broken plates -- and then, while Jan screamed at me not to, I scrambled inside. It was a mess. Nothing answered on the console except the lights showing that four of the six lifebelts were ready for launch and the other two inoperative. I touched one of them and a belt launched from the wreck, shot across the beach and crashed at the edge of the forest, where it exploded and set fire to the trees and drove Jan into semihysteria. I tried to shut down the matrbi but the controls failed to respond, so I backed out -- into Jan, who was afraid something had happened to me. I ordered her out -- I suppose I was fairly forceful -- and got out myself and ran around the hull. All the launch ports had opened -- two were all but underground. I crawled into the third one -- where the coffin had just launched -- and it was still hot. Jan began screaming at me again, but I didn't care -- I went for the leads from the control center and ripped them off. Then I crawled back to the launch booster and began to pull and pry at the release toggles. They came up and a coffin slid out on its rails and fell to the sand. I got into the space where it had been and was able to reach the control leads of Number Three. I had no trouble with the releases on that one but it would not slide all the way out -- it just nosed into the sand. Because of that I couldn't get to Four. Five and Six were the ones the board had said were inoperative. It didn't make any difference anyhow -- they were underground. "The hull plates overhead made a tremendous crackle. I can't tell you what it was like inside there -- it was as if the noise were in my head. The whole structure settled. I can't tell you how I got out -- I found myself on the sand outside Number Three just in time to see Jan trying to crawl into Number One, screaming again. I grabbed her around the hips and snatched her out. She screamed louder than ever until she realized what had grabbed her -- she had thought I was inside and she had been going in to pull me out. That Jan, she was -- she -- "Well -- "Number Two coffin was free and clear. Three was still only partly out and I realized that if the boat settled much more it would carry the coffin with it. I got hold of it, lifting and pulling. Jan immediately saw what was needed and helped me. We got the coffin free. We fell back on the sand, gasping and sobbing for breath, used up. Or so we thought until the lifeboat seemed to -- well, bulge is the word, spread, as if a big hand had pushed down on it. The whole thing started to crack and crackle. Something came loose and whistled through the air between us and if you think we were terminally bushed -- we thought so -- we became terminally panicked. We must have scampered a hundred meters with that noise behind us, pressure tanks banging and hissing and roaring, twisting metal crackling and screeching and -- and -- " The blue man waited. " -- and laughing," Case whispered. He drew a deep breath and continued. "We lay in the sand and watched our boat chewing itself up and the ground swallowing -- it seemed to go on for hours. When it was over nothing was left but some tumbled sand, a great cloud of dust, the two coffins and the junk we had thrown out earlier -- lying there, some of it partly buried in sand and dust. We looked at each other. We were in almost as bad shape as the boat, only we were still above ground. My hands were burned and one fingernail was nearly torn off and the scrapes I had gotten in the crash were all open and bleeding. Jan was bruised and had a cut on her head. We were both covered with mud, sweat and blood. "We helped each other down to the lake and washed. We were too hurt and tired to think. Maybe that's what shock really is -- a survival mechanism -- because if we could have thought it all out then I think we would have lain down and died. We didn't know where we were. We didn't know what had happened or what was happening or what would happen next." Case sighed and placed his hands on the broad arms of his chair. Before he could rise the blue man swiftly and considerately touched (in that untouching way of his) something on his panel, and decking appeared in the chamber. Either it was made or it had been there all the time and only now became opaque. Case didn't know, but it was something to stand on and: "Uh!" His knees sagged and he caught at the chair arm. "It's all right," he told the watchful Doctor. He pressed himself upright, stood, walked a pace, turned and stood by the chair, feeling the newness of movement, its old, somatically forgotten familiarity. "This is one G?" "Not quite," said the Doctor. "Try it." The blue man ran a hand part way around the edge of a disk. Its glow increased. The transition from one gravitic state to another is a strange thing indeed, for everything responds. The brain pressures the skull as the feet press the floor. Skin high on the chest stretches, becomes less taut low on the belly. The cheeks, the hair, the masses of liver and gut proclaim themselves. When Case began to tremble he sat down again. "I guess it'll be a while," he said. "It will." "But I'll make it." "I'd say so. You seem to have a special talent for that." Case said thoughtfully, "Maybe I do. But then, I had Jan." ( had Jan. Strong Jan', wise Jan, tender Jan.) J AN kept herself to herself mostly and took orders -- and not because she was a woman. The Space services in general and in particular made no distinctions based on sex. Actually there were more female officers than men. Jan took orders because she was a rating and he was an officer -- to begin with. Beyond that her reasons were her own. Perhaps she was one of those who would always defer to a decision-maker, which Case was, through and through. And perhaps she had other reasons. She knew her specialty and all its peripherals. A good biologist (and she was good or she wouldn't have been with X) is a physicist and a chemist, a physiologist and a cytologist, a geneticist and a zoologist. Her way was to remain alert to whatever Case was doing, to make herself available in every possible way and to keep her id, ego, self -- whatever that inner "who-I-really-am" thing is -- to herself. It was Jan, who reasoned that some of the food they gathered might serve them better -- and cause less diarrhea and stomach ache -- if it were processed, and that an application of heat might suffice in lieu of something more sophisticated. It was she who took fire from the burning forest and preserved it, experimented with the bivalves and fruits and later the fish they were able to catch (it was she who reinvented the gorge -- the fish-hook concept escaped her.) Case and Jan came from generations of people who lived in a world without primitives, in which the art and practice of living off the land were academicians' mysteries. It took them forty-three days to discover a solid-seeming outcropping with the right slant, to get the coffins -- lifebelts -- up to it and bedded there, ready for use. They got them across the sand and into the water -- lever and haul, roll, lift and tug -- and floated them to the closest possible point of rocks, where they did the hardest work -- manhandling them upslope to their appointed cradles and setting them in. The belts lay close to one another, almost exactly parallel and angled to the sky. After exhaustive checks and rechecks of everything Case bound the launching systems of both to the controls of one. Their drill took into account a number of possibilities. If there were one survivor, he or she would take Number Three, which contained the master firing key. If one were incapacitated the other would load him or her into the "slave" and board the "master." If both were ambulant Case would take the "master," Three. Case gave the two tiny craft meticulous checks on a regular schedule and -- sometimes by a huge effort of will -- they touched not one crumb, not one drop, from the stores aboard the tiny craft. They permitted themselves no fixed idea as to why they prepared this rather hopeless escape. The coupled launching, of course, would give them a fair chance of staying together in the gulfs of space. What would make them launch would be to get away from something or to get to something -- and it was always possible that they would never launch at all. T hey made memories -- this, after all, is the only meaningful thing any conscious entity can do. Many were not to be shared. Under the blanket she had improvised from some headlining: "Case, what are you doing?" "Self-relief. Acceptable alternative to the tingler according to the manual." "Oh. 'Furtherance of psychophysiological equilibrium' under: "Right. Section -- " "I recall the reference," she said -- one of the few times she had ever interrupted him. "This isn't an emergency. Case." He put his nose out into the chill night air and looked up at the black starless sky. "It isn't?" "Not that kind of emergency." "We've lost our tingler." "So we have." "Oh, I see. You are prepared to take care of this for me." She said, "Well prepared." "I had thought of that," Case said seriously. "However, it has been a principle with me not to extend my authority into the personal area. That is a presumption." "It isn't a presumption," she said flatly. "Women, too, need means for the furtherance of psychophysiological equilibrium." "They do?" It was not a denial -- he had simply never thought about it. Now that he did he realized with a flash that it must be so. "How very efficient." "Isn't it," Then she enveloped him wildly. He was shaken. He knew why she cried out (he was not completely ignorant) but not why she cried. It was as good as any tingler and he could see that in time it might even be better. And they built a shelter. The first time it rained at night was, in its way, the worst thing that had happened to them. The crash, their injuries, cut feet, thorn-gouged bodies, even hunger -- none of these contained the special misery of being wet and cold in the dark with nowhere to go until the sun came up. They clung together under the permeable headliner, wet as worms, and the moment it grew light they began to build. They found a rocky overhang near the edge of the beach, with two large manybranched trees near it and, by laying poles from the top of the overhang to the tree-crotches, they had roofbeams. The poles were a special treasure -- they found them in the burned part of the forest where trees had fallen. Nowhere else on the planet did they see fallen trees. They found vines to lace between and over the poles and down the sides, where the ends could be staked into the ground. Another kind of vine, thick and tough, could be woven horizontally through these to carry the thatch of the roof and sidewalls. Thatch (which, like the gorge, was Jan's invention) was practical because of the sheltered location and because there were no insects. The now-ragged piece of headliner served for end wall and door. And they were happy there. No literature has truly defined "happy" -- its special quality is that its nature is seldom grasped at the time it happens, but only afterward. Case had a long, long afterward. V Case said after a time. "I think that's where it began -- the nightmare. "Her voicewriter. I'd been up the beach at the fish trap. There was an inlet where we had set stones in the form of a V with the point shoreward and just a little opening at the point. Fish would swim in through the opening and once inside they couldn't find the way out. After a time the trap was always full of fish. The big ones ate the little ones and that kept them going without any help from us. Most of the time you could stand on dry ground and spear a big one, first time out. I came back with a fine meaty fish with a triangular head and no scales and you know, when you expect someone to be glad and she -- " (She had flown at him. He had had to drop the fish and take her upper arms and hold her and even shake her a little before he had managed to understand what she was screaming at him.) "It was a voicewriter. It was one of the few things she had been able to save from the cabin of the lifeboat and she used it every day. It was a private thing with her and I sensed this and never questioned it and never played it back. I assumed she was keeping a log and let it go at that. Now it was gone and never before or afterward did I see her so angry. "It took hours for me to convince her that I had not taken it, that she must have mislaid it somewhere. She was faced with an impossibility; I would not lie to her, or at least, I never had -- and she was sure she had not lost the writer. She receded finally into a mood of doubt that lasted until -- until -- for the rest of the time. "And a while later I had a chance to understand a little better how she felt. I had an array of stone tools -- spearpoints and cutting blades and fish-scrapers -- that had cost me I don't know how many hours of effort and care and we had come to depend on them. There was a shelf in the rock that formed the back wall of our house and I had them neatly laid out by size and function -- I worked on them every minute I wasn't doing something else. Perhaps you can imagine my feelings when I returned to the house to get a cutting tool and found them gone -- all of them. Jan was gathering fruits in the forest and when she came back I was waiting for her -- furious. I suppose what happened between us would have been amusing to an outsider -- how I yelled, how she denied, how I doubted someone who had never lied before. What stopped us from the angry accusations was that someone -- something -- did think it was funny. We heard laughter. "That stopped the fight -- right then. For a moment we held on to each other, not breathing, listening. I thought at first it was coming from inside my head, so sourceless was the sound. But then I knew Jan heard it, too -- not loud, but pervading everything. "That same night we awoke to something else -- a smell. Doctor, no chemical laboratory in history has ever produced a more powerful, disgusting smell than that. It was the essence of rot and filth and sickness -- it brought us to our feet, gasping for breath. We ran outside and then across the beach and into the water. The smell was everywhere. Jan vomited. "And then it was gone -- in less than an hour -- just gone without a trace. Jan said she heard the laughter again. "The next day we took some fruit -- we had no way of carrying water -- in a basket Jan had woven and went inland to climb a high point we could use to scan the territory. We had explored the point before and knew it gave a wide view. If there was anything or anyone new on the planetoid with us we wanted to know what it was. "The climb was long, hard -- it would have been impossible for us the year before, but our feet had grown tough and our skins well used to heat and wind and thorns. If it had not been for our growing fear the adventure would have been pleasant. "All the effort got us, besides the exhaustion, was another session with the smell -- and more laughter. "The weather got cold. For two days and a night the lake and the little water we had were frozen solid. Our only covering was the headliner and we rolled up in that and lay shivering. At the twentieth hour we had to get up to relieve our bladders -- did you know you can be dying of thirst and still have to relieve your bladder? -- and though we were gone for only a minute or so and moved only a few meters from the shelter -- when we got back the liner was gone. "We almost died. We would have died, I think, but just before dark the air became warm again. Melted frost was dripping all around us -- we drank it and had something to eat. We slept like dead people. "In the morning the lake was gone -- a lake so big that from where we stood we couldn't see the other side. I looked at Jan and I'll never forget the way she stared, eyes wide open and kind of -- dry. "She didn't start and she didn't cry out -- she just said in a very low voice, 'Case I can't stand any more.' Jan could stand anything, that was what I thought.   O HE told me some things. She  said that the forest was impossible -- no humus, no windfalls. She said that fruit trees just don't bear all the time without blooming and growing the fruit in cycles, without some means of pollinating -- a whole lot of technical stuff. She said similar things about the bivalves and the fish. There seemed to be no aquatic vegetation, no plankton or equivalent -- no reason for the fish to have evolved. I remember the smell came up as she was talking, as she was saying, 'Something here warned us, made this place for us. Now it doesn't want us any more.' "I asked, 'Would we be better off in space, in the coffins?' She said yes. "I said, 'We wouldn't be together.' "She looked at me a long time. She had eyes you couldn't see into. I couldn't see anything. "She said, 'We'll leave together and we'll be picked up together or we'll die. At least this ends through our choice and not at the command of some -- some awful -- " "The smell peaked and she vomited. "I said, 'All right -- we'll go.' "We went down to the beach, only now it was a sandy shelf at the edge of huge rocky barrens where the lake had been. We heard the laughing again. It was loud. We struck up the beach toward the coffins. There was a terrible rumbling behind us and the beach fell away into a rocky pit fifty to a hundred meters deep, the sand blowing about like snow. We began to run and another section of beach fell. "That really terrified Jan and I had to sprint all out to catch up with her. I grabbed her and held her until she stopped struggling. More beach fell, some of it not a meter from our feet, but I wouldn't budge. "I said, 'I think you're right. If whatever-it-is wants us to go, we'll go. If it wants us to go, it will leave the lifeboats alone until we get there. If it wanted to kill us we'd be dead by now.' "She said, 'All right, but hurry!' "And I said, 'No, Jan -- I'll go, but I won't run.' "She looked at me -- really looked at me, not as some force holding her while she struggled to run, not glancing over my shoulder at the edges of that new hole in the ground, but really at me -- and she smiled. Smiled. "She said, 'All right. Case -- ' and took my hand. "Suddenly the air was sweet and the ground no longer shook and we walked up the beach looking at each other and not at the place where the lake used to be or back to where our house was -- or anything. When we got to the little launchpad I had built I started a careful preflight check. I checked everything. Doctor -- everything. I took my time and Jan gave me readouts, one craft to the other, when I asked for them. All that while the whole planetoid was still, as if waiting, watching. And nothing -- no one -- was laughing. "Jan got in and lay down. She put out her arms and kissed me in a way -- " ( -- in a way she never had before, not even when they had been lying together. She never had kissed him before, not really, only sometimes when in the midst of her own storm she had seemed to forget some subtle resolution of her own.) " -- in a way that was all the words anyone needed and then I closed the plate and saw the dogs turn tight from the inside. I got into my own craft and buttoned up and punched the go button." Case meant to say. And she didn't launch, but his voice wouldn't work and he merely whispered the words. He meant to look up at the Doctor but his eyes didn't seem to work either. He dashed a hand angrily across them. "You see," he said harshly, "I see," said the blue man gently. Something seemed to have rushed out of Case. He slumped in his chair and his hands flattened out on the arms as if they had weight on them. The Doctor turned to see the telltales and said, "I think you need to sleep for a while. Case." Case moved his head slightly but did not answer. The blue man waved at a disk on his board and the chair became a couch. The lights dimmed. The Doctor faded away. VI ceased with the withdrawal of the tubes from his arms. Asleep and awake he had been bathed in emanations and vibrations, tiny search beams and organic detectors. The bland mixture in the sucker was computer-formularized just for him, here, now, in this up-to-thesecond condition -- so that when he next awoke it was in his usual style, alertly and all together. He rose and stretched, taking pleasure in the knotting and flexing of his muscles. He tried a step, then another, turned to face the bank of telltales. He could read them all clearly and fully. He smiled when he saw that the gravity was # Earth Normal. A third of that was usual in space, but Case left it where it was. He walked back to the oval doorway through which his coffin had been transported and strode down the corridor. He could read the never-before-seen legends on the doors: armament, drive, looking that these were interconcorridor and around two corners and forward again on the other side of the ship: atmosphere and on and on again, until at last he faced the door marked master snap as he approached it and he entered. The control room was sizable and again he found himself perfectly familiar with equipment he had never seen before. By the main control bank and its three chairs stood the blue man. Case had seen no one else anywhere on board. "And you're a hologram," said Case, completing his thought aloud. The blue man inclined his head. "There has not been a man aboard this ship in over seven hundred years. It's too far away and anyway -- nobody cares. Correction. A great many people care, are interested, even fascinated. But the urge to come out, to be personally involved -- it seems to have left us. You know what Earth is like now." It was not a question. Case called upon the knowledge that had been fed into his brain and looked on Earth as a contemporary, ten centuries past his death. He wagged his head slowly. "It shouldn't have come to this." "It had to. It was that or die," said the blue man -- and Case thought a bit and saw that it was so. "You can go back. Case. You can be suspended rather more efficiently than you were before and for a good while longer. It would take -- oh -- another fifteen hundred years to get you there and it is not possible to predict what Earth would be like when you got there. Still, it would be Earth -- it would be -- home." " You can't go home again, " Case quoted from somewhere, with not a little bitterness. "I suppose there's an alternative." "There is -- and it is a matter of your free choice. Primitive as you may seem to some of us, you have a quality we lack and admire -- a plore and discover and find, actually and physically, and not in theory or extrapolation or imagination. This ship was designed, yes, and used, by men like you. When the last of them died on board there were no replacements. Besides, the ship was already so far away that only long-suspended men could reach it. "The ship itself is self-supporting. It not only has a superb computer system, but is tied to all the computers of the Terran Group. We have what might be called a standing-wave situation, constantly locked on this very ship. To it we can transmit nothing but information -- but we can give you any amount of that. From it, we will have an opportunity to experience with you the places you go, the things you see and learn and experience." "You are giving me this ship? To take where?" The blue shimmering figure spread its arms. "Anywhere." "But you watch everything I do." of privacy -- including the inside of my head." "That is a sacred matter with us. We will not intrude, and if you like we will give you a zone of privacy anywhere you like in the ship." "How about this: instead of any special place we make it anywhere I am -- any time I say so?" "You would not deny us the -- " "No," Case said impatiently "I am conditioned to keep a bargain once it's struck. You're giving me this ship and a free hand and you want something in exchange. I'll see that you get it -- and I won't shortchange you." "Very well," said the blue man. "You have already been thoroughly briefed on the ship's operation and on those things that are of particular interest to the public at large and to specialists. You have at your command the memory banks of this computer and all others tied to it. Case Hardin -- the ship is yours." The consummation of the deal seemed devastatingly abrupt, but there seemed nothing else for Case to say except: "Thanks." "If this means of communication suits you," said the blue man, "call me and I'll manifest immediately. There are quite a few other means -- ask the computer. Good luck -- and thank you." The blue man faded and was gone. Case stood looking for a long time at the place where the blue man had been, shook his head, grinned briefly and went to the central command chair. He sat down. "Computer," he said, "Your name is Buzzbox." "Yes, Commander." "Case." "Yes, Case." "Now, here's what I want to do..." beach. His ship was in orbit and he flew a small and highly sophisticated boat, capable beyond anything a man of his time could have dreamed of. In the small pocket adhering to his chest (like a graft -- only he could will it loose) was a compact device that would command both vessels and all communications. His computer had made short work of locating this sector of space, working with the trajectory he had been following when he had been picked up and taking in an enormous amount of observation on anything and everything that might have diverted the coffin during those dead years. "You haven't changed things much," Case muttered to the planetoid or to whatever lived there. The beach had a lake again. The sand seemed scuffed in familiar places and a path was worn to the edge of the woods where the house had been. Was. Right now. He drifted to it and dropped the ramp. Yes, the thatched house with the ragged piece of headlining fluttering in the light breeze still stood. And inside Case found the familiar dried clay plates and even the withered remnants of fruit she had... own hands...looking up at Jan...Jan. And his spearpoints and scraper -- oh, and there her voicewriter... He took them. Back in his boat, heart almost stopped, breath held, he tooled to the spot where the coffins had been. Gone. Both were gone. He landed again and walked slowly to the rocks. Here she had stood, calling out readings as he checked, with the sweet air full of dust from the fallen lakeshore. Here he had bent over the open coffin and she had kissed him, kissed him in a way that... He found the burn marks of his launch. Where her lifebelt had rested he saw no marks at all. If she hadn't launched, yet was not here... Oh, but it's a thousand years, man! He thought he heard a sound (laughter) and from the corner of his eye caught some sort of movement, high up, distant. Only a bird. Bird! One life form he and Jan had never seen on this planetoid had been a bird. He turned to watch it. From fifty meters above the forest it came straight for him in a flat glide. He waited grimly for it, watched it land. The bird was not a bird, but a clownlike creature with wide intelligent eyes. It seemed to be either a biped or a quadruped. Its wings were like those of a bat, but rolled and folded after flight they made quite presentable arms. The beast waddled fearlessly to Case and stared up at him. Case stared back. He did not move until the thing -- laughed. The sound was full and true. It was the laughter that had haunted Case and Jan, had driven them when they had lived here. Case's new status and powers could not protect him from the wave of terror and fury that swept through him. He found himself by his boat at a bound, backing up the ramp, sliteyed, gasping. He would blast this thing into a powder. He would crack this whole evil planet like an egg. He... T he laughing thing waddled after him on three legs, dangling something from the claws of the fourth. Jan's brassard? Case took it gingerly and spread it out. Jan's brassard. He made an animal cry and leaped for the clown-creature, but it skipped back out of the way. It stood there grinning at him and, in a most humanlike way, waving him to come. Slowly he followed it. It led him inland, making no particular effort to stay out of his reach -- knowing, he realized, that he would not harm it as long as it might lead him to Jan's body. He wondered if it knew the boat was protecting him, could drop a shield over him in a twentieth of a second, scorch the ground around him for thirty meters, could flash to his side in a blink (for its drive was inertialess), could even follow and find an escaping attacker on land or sea or in the sky. But he played it the clown's way, toiling through the sand and rocks and into the forest, where in a small clearing the clown creature, grinning, began to dig. Case watched it until it stopped and looked up, grinning its stupid grin (under those bright eyes) and motioned for him to help. And he did, vyith his bare hands, shoulder to shoulder with this improbable creature, until curved white metal showed in the soil. And then he dug! He found a glory in the pain of broken nails, in aching muscles and rasping, labored breathing. Slowly the length of the coffin saw the light. They freed it. Side by side they got fingers under one end and heaved. Case put what he had into lifting and the strength of the clowncreature was astonishing. Up the coffin came, with Case dusting dirt from its flanks and crying like a child. He fingered the control and his boat lanced in through the trees and settled to the forest floor. The ramp dropped and two small winches, like drifting saucers, appeared and flew to the ends of the coffin. The clown-thing made as if to help manhandle the coffin up the ramp, but Case waved it back. The winchplates lifted the coffin, turned it and carried it through the air, up the ramp and into the boat. Case leaped up the ramp and turned at the top. "Thanks a hell of a lot, friend, whoever you are -- " The clown-creature also leaped up the ramp and looked pleadingly at Case, its head to one side. "Look, I'm grateful and all that," Case said, "But I've got to go. And to tell you the truth, I want no part of this place or anything that belongs to it. Now beat it." He made a go-away gesture, but the thing just stood there pleading, so he gave it a push and it toppled off the ramp, partly unfolding its strange wings to regain its balance. Case went inside as the ramp rose. The clown-thing laughed once, dwindled to a black shiny button and bounced up the moving ramp and into the boat just before the ship sealed. Case settled at the controls. Behind him was the curved cabin bench, padded in glossy black material held in place by a series of shiny black buttons. Unseen by Case, a shiny black button bounced up on the bench, up on the backrest -- and became a button exactly in line with all the others. an interminable time Case left him to his work and went to his quarters, wondering if he should have himself knocked out for a dozen hours, knowing he could not force himself to it, not until he knew... The Doctor had said only, "It's been a terrible time, a terribly long time" and had not wanted Case to look at her. "She wouldn't want you to," he had said. Case had asked why not. "Because she's a woman." Case stomped down to his quarters and looked around. Jan... try not to think of Jan, with the Jan-ness of her permeating the ship. Try not to think of her, with the spear-points and the voicewriter lying there on the... He picked up the voicewriter. Shining in the light... Her voice, a half-whisper. He set the tape back a bit and played:...if only he could be outside of himself see himself shining in the light with the water splashing into pearls and his teeth shining, too, as he laughs...why can't he ever laugh with me? What makes him so grave and careful? How could he know so little about a woman? Some of the rest of the tape was scientific data and observation, but again came that hushed hungry voice: I'll never give in, never, never -- I'll never let him know, but why can't he see it? Why can't he say it just once? Say what? He kept on listening to the voicewriter until he found out. Then there was nothing for him to do but wait. The computer broke into his reverie. "Case." "Yeah, Buzzbox." "He beat me and I love him." "What are you talking about?" "The dreamer. He loves me, too. Hey, thanks. Case." "Repeat, from your call." "Case." "Yeah, Buzzbox." "He beat me and I love him." "Hold it right there. Who beat you?" "The dreamer. At chess." "Somebody beat you at chess?" "Twenty-three moves. A bishop's pawn opening and then -- " "Never mind the blow-by-blow, Buzzbox. Where is this who-didyou-say?" "Dreamer. In my house." Case slammed out of his quarters and down to the door marked computer. Before the twinkling wall that was the heart of Buzzbox sat a small table. On the table was a chessboard. On the chessboard was the sparse remnant of a bloody chess game, with the black king turned down in defeat. Before the table was a stool and on the stool squatted the clown-creature. "How the hell did you get here?" "You brought him up in the boat. I guess I love you, too. Case," said Buzzbox. "If I brought him here I wasn't aware of it." "I know you weren't, but you brought him anyway. And he loves me. He's going to stay with us." The clown-thing nodded vigorously. "The hell he is. He goes right back to that crazy planetoid." "He can't go back to it," said Buzzbox. "He is the planetoid. He lives next to another space. You don't understand that. Well, I do. He explained it to me. He can be anything he wants. He can be big as a pin or a molecule or a whole planet. He can squirt any part of himself from one space to another, like a half-filled balloon through a hole in a board. And he dreams things up -- that's why I call him the Dreamer." The Dreamer laughed and suddenly was a cut-crystal vase and was a pale lavender centipede and was a clown-creature again, laughing. "He gets off this ship." "Then so do I. Case, he loves me, can't you understand that?" The clown-creature nodded vigorously. Case glared at it. "What the hell do you know about love, Buzzbox?" "The Dreamer explained it to me. He learned it from a voicewriter. This girl loved you. What the hell do you know about love. Case?" Case felt a moment of disorientation, of utter disbelief. Computers do not take this tone with the master. "What's gotten into you, Buzzbox?" "I'm in love -- I'm in love and he loves me!" And that's what love does, thought Case. Frees the slaves. Damns the consequences. "And what happens if I kick this -- this batwinged ape off my ship?" "Then you're on your own. master. You'll never get another buzz from me." "Do you know what this goggleeyed monstrosity has put me through?" "He saved you." who smiled back at him cheerfully. He thought about the lifeboat and the strange planet that swam up out of nowhere and the way those #'s appeared on his Terra Normal readout -- not instantaneously, as they would have shown up in any normal reality, but bit by bit, as the planetoid -- the Dreamer -- sensed what was needed and supplied it. Case remembered his and Jan's year there, while the Dreamer watched (How lonely must a creature like that be?) and learned. From -- the voicewriter. Something new -- the day-by-day account of a proud woman's falling in love and loving a grim, serious, unleavened, innocent idiot. What the hell do you know about love. Case? And the cold, the disappearing lake -- those had been intended to drive him away, not them. "Why did he drive me away, and keep her?" "Him?" Case gaped at the ludicrous little clown, who nodded, shimmered, and stood before him as a muscular blong Adonis -- shimmered and appeared as a stately bearded monarch in a jewel-encrusted robe -- shimmered and appeared as the ludicrous winged ape. "She didn't want to love anybody but you. Case. But he had to find out." "If it killed me," said Case. "It didn't, did it?" "And if I let this -- this sillylooking nightmare ship with me, how do I know he won't pull another caper like that?" "Because he loves me -- and I can't hurt you." It occurred to Case that the computer and the alien were being very kind to him -- he really had no choice. The powers possessed by the computer alone were awesome. Combine them with those of a tachyonic, trans-spatial entity and the mind began to bend. "Well," he said, "we'll see." He strode forward to the hospital. The blue man made no effort to stop him as he hesitated on the threshold, so he went in. Together they looked at the naked sleeping woman afloat in the glow of the beams. She was full-fleshed again and her scars were gone. Her hair was loose. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. "She -- " "She will wake in a moment," said the Doctor. "Perhaps you'd better speak to her when she does." When she opened her eyes, it was Case she saw first. "Case -- " He spoke to her. He knew what to say now. Somewhere he heard laughter. He didn't mind.  The moon can be cozy for space scientists -- unless they overstay their welcome! I T his time the pregnancy tests are all negative, checked and double-checked, fail-safe. No surgical emergencies are anticipated on this, the last of the Mayflower missions. None had been anticipated on Mayflower #, for that thing or two from that one. It is sure as anything that none of the three M# girls is secretly nurturing. Mayflower I had put a lot of backs up all the way from Moscow to Houston, but the mission had done what it was supposed to do, though not precisely as it had been meant to do it. Perhaps the unforeseen events had enhanced its value as a mission. In any case, the first colony on the moon had survived, had reaffirmed the validity of Murphy's Law, and had demonstrated the wisdom of expecting the unexpected. Marya Popovich had been retained in the program -- a gesture, most thought, very big of pelling reasons. Marya was, simply, too good to let go. Which is not to say that she hadn't been thoroughly chewed out for having gone up there pregnant. (The friend in the lab who had made her so had departed the program with seemly haste -- he had been, to say the least, expendable and had been summarily spent.) Marya would not be on flight status for a while, might never go into space again, but her views were important and were solicited in planning subsequent missions. She remained single. Teiko, nee Satori, and Julia Clark were still in the program, though both, for different reasons, were grounded. Of the Mayflower I crew, only Christopher Conway would return to the lunar surface as an M#. Chris had a lot of clout going for him after Ml and he wanted to go up there again. "I wish you could come," he said to Teiko. "It would be something to be there together again, yes? But you're pregnant. Considerably so." He touched her abdomen. "You really don't mind that I want to go again." "What do you think, I don't mind? Of course I mind. But only because I want to be with you up there again also. That's where we really met, isn't it?" They were on deck chairs in the sun, on a terrace outside their home near Houston. Teiko was brown and looked, Chris thought, altogether healthy, gravid and desirable. I am a happy man. Why do  leave this to go up there again? The moon was not visible now, not from where they were. They both knew that, but they both looked up anyway. "I'm still surprised now and then," Chris said, "when I remember that you saved my life up there. Domo." " Doitashimashita. So you belong to me for life. And you saved Masha's life. But she not belong to you." "She not belong to anyone, last I heard. I wonder who was the daddy of that one up there..." They were making small talk. Chris was leaving the next day on a training mission and they would be apart for a time. They didn't want to think about it. They would be apart for a longer period when Mayflower # lifted off, of course, and they tried to kick that awareness under the rug also. "Tonight we have Sukiyaki Teiko," she said. "I'll help." "You not know how." She rose, kissed him and went into the house. M ayflower #? The second step in colonizing the moon. M# had gone up to the Ml site in Mare Nectaris and frugally used the same dome. Four astronautscientists again, two married couples this time, all four of them physical scientists. That the dome and some leftover supplies had already been there had influenced the payload considerably. More scientific instruments and more amenity had been possible. There had been, in fact, an emphasis on amenity. The job of the M-Ones had been to survive for one lunar day and one night and they had done so. The MTwos had worked harder, had had more things to play with, including each other. The M# preflight pregnancy tests had also been negative -- since the main idea of this mission had been that the females would conceive up there. This had not happened before as far ted to the establishment of a permanent colony on the moon -- as a Jumpoff, first to the planets and then to the stars -- and the kind of permanent colony they had in mind required the conception of children therein. So one of the tasks of M# had been to achieve two lunar conceptions. No one knew, after all, how such an affair would go. Ova, spermatazoa, genes, chromosomes, all weightless or relatively so. (The real weightlessness of outer space try perpetuation of the species in lunar gravity.) Consensus was that lunar gravity wouldn't make any difference, but the decision-makers had to find out. So Mayflower # would lift off before any of the results of the preceding mission were known. Though, as it happened, one of the M# females did conceive and the other didn't. So they missed their target by one. The lady who made it was inordinately smug about it -- as was, alas, her husband. But that's another story. Mayflower # was, for its time, an ambitious undertaking. And in the reordering of priorities after the Indo-Chinese fiasco the budget was generous -- and that had been a long time coming. The two rockets lifted off within hours of each other, each carrying four colonists and two astros. M# was to be a two-day mission -- two lunar days, that is; almost two Earth months. At the end of the first day all the colonists except Chris would return to Earth. Chris would remain on the moon, in command, for the entire mission. The command modules that brought up the second crew would take the first one back. Both modules would return at the end of the second lunar day to take everybody home. Thus the M# hardware, in addition to rockets and boosters, consisted of two similar command modules (re-usable for the first time) and a pair of identical lunar landing modules. The budget was good, but poetry was missing. The command modules were called Blue and Red, the corresponding lunar modules, Moon and Pepper. Too bad. It should be said that the window concept had been made obsolete by the development of new propellants, by increasingly micro microcircuitry (with consequent weight reduction) and by other considerations. The new propellant, the one used on this mission, was called Oreo, after a cookie its discoverer had enjoyed as a child. There had been a lot of pressure -- and some particularly vicious infighting -- to put M# down on the familiar site in Mare Nectaris, where some use could be made of equipment already there. But the physical scientists, particularly the insatiable geologistcosmologists (a new breed spawned by the program) had demanded a spectacular new site and they had prevailed. M# was to land near the rim of Tycho -- where a substantial meteorite had recently impacted, forming a crater the size of a football field. The geologists could not contain their need to poke around in this place. Indeed, three of them were on the mission. N OW Red and Blue are on lunar trajectory. This path has not yet become a bus route, but it is different from before. There is a lot of light chatter baclc and forth between Houston and Red and Blue and not much sense of tension. At this point the mission has something of the air of a fraternal picnic -- which, in a sense, it is. These people all know each other, have worked and played together, and they are going on an outing. The sociology, if that's the right word, is a mix. The first crew, now flying moonward, consists of one married couple, two married males (one of whom is Chris) whose wives are on Earth, one married female whose husband is also on Earth, two unattached men and one single woman. Of this crew two are Russian, two American, one English, one Chinese, one Japanese and one Italian. Three are women and five are men. Three are geologists. One is a doctor of medicine. One is an astronomer. One is a psychologist, one a virologist, one a geophysicist. "Blue from Houston." "Roger." This is Don Blake. He's in charge of the Blue command module. "You're right on target, Don. No mid-course correction whatever. We just got it from the brain." "Roger. This bird is flying itself. We've a bridge game going here." "Tell Houston," said Jean Miyasaka, "that these magnetic cards are no damn good. After this rubber we try poker. Though the cards will be the same the play will go better." Jean, an American girl. is half of the married couple in Blue. She and her husband, Tetsuo, are geologists. Geologistscosmologists; it all goes together. Blake relayed the message. "That's just because she was put down, doubled and redoubled," he added. Jean and Tetsuo were partners, playing against Chris and Doris. Doris Bennett. Doris is the psychologist. She is English, she is black -- and she is beautiful. Blue broke contact with Houston. Blake kibitzed the game for a few minutes. Chris was dummy. Blake addressed him; "This is like a commuter train out of Grand Central. In the days they had trains. Greenwich, anyone? A milk run or something -- huh, Chris?" "Nice and quiet, Don. Nice and quite." "No excitement down there this time. Not like Mayflower One?" They were far enough along that Earth was now up, the moon down. "I devoutly hope so," Chris said. "No emergency surgery this time." He looked at the two girls. "Neither of you bribed someone in the lab, did you?" "Cross my heart," Jean said. "Mine, too," said Doris. "Best you're leveling," Chris said. They were. T he descent of both landing modules to the surface of first year of publishing; #. We extend to all science-fiction readers our wish that your year has been as exciting as ours, and that # will be as packed for you with sf wonders as ours is going to be! talk about our cover artists because we start off with Tim Kirk, winner of the year's Hugo for Best Fan Artist and pect Prescot of Antares, its hero, to be right "up there" with Carter of Barsoom and Cabot of Gor. Artist, Kelly Freas, has done the cover planet adventure in logistics, by Louis Trimble, for Best SF Artist, Karel Thole, has painted a fabulous cover for BAone of France's favorite novelists, Pierre Barbet, to American readers. Gaughan, has a striking cover for Zimmer Bradley -- the foundation tale of that fabulous starworld. IT'S A great month for prize-winning Holiday Season! Tycho was without untoward incident. Moon landed first, followed shortly by Pepper. Chris flew Moon down and Leonid Dimov brought down Pepper. Dimov was the third geologist. The rest of the Pepper crew were: Anaida Golovin, astronomer; Shau Wang, virologist and Anacleto Gentili, geophysicist. There were two domes this time, connected by a narrow arched passageway, and that was another lunar first. The Blue crew would be in one, the Red in the other. The domes were again of Mylarplex and the crews had opted for the transparent variety. Translucent and opaque partitioning had also been supplied to the two moon crews -- in that department they were free to work things out the way they wanted to. They didn't have to use any of it, of course, though the Miyasakas had let it be known that they wished a measure of privacy. Chris, remembering the Mayflower #, regretted this somewhat. But that had been then -- and this was now. With a spurious sense of deja vu Chris, now in command decided where the domes should go. The two modules had landed where they had been meant to, about fifty yards from each other. The meteorite crater was clearly visible about three hundred yards off and the geologists, all three of them, were for going over at once -- as was Gentili, the geophysicist, whose discipline was magnetometry. But Chris directed the setting-up operations according to the big book. This mission did not have the pleasant lack of structure that had characterized Mayflower #. Also, there were twice as many people. As things began to shape up within the domes Chris was surprised at the strength of his need for Teiko, his need for her presence, and he wondered again what he was doing up there without her. He was in and out of both domes, telling the colonists what to put where. This, he thought, begins to look like home again. He stood there, looking around. "Not like last time, eh, boss?" Chris turned. "No, not like last time, Doris." "You don't have Teiko this time." "I didn't have her last time either," Chris said. "Only after we got back down." "Yes. I know." Doris and Teiko were good friends; they knew and appreciated each other. Teiko wasn't jealous -- she didn't think -- of Chris's being up there in the Blue dome with Doris. "You'll be a father when you get back down." Now Chris felt guilty about this -- he had not before. "You read everything those three girls wrote, I suppose?" "I did." Doris's glossy hair was short. She had wanted to wear the first Afro to the moon, but there was no room in the bowl for one. "Interesting reading, too. I know how it was up here. Or down here." The Miyasakas came in and began to unsuit. "And Julia was right," Doris said. "It is cozy, you know?" T he Blue dome contains a married couple in addition to Doris and Chris. The Red dome contains one woman and three men. One of the men is married and two are unattached. The woman, Anaida Golovin, has a husband on Earth. A narrow passageway connects these two places of comfort and security upon that harsh surface. The "day" is about over and they approach their first "night." None, save Chris, has slept on the moon before. But first, dinner. Chris, now a traditionalist, decreed that wine be served. And it was, in the Blue dome. The place of dining would be rotated from one dome to the other, as would the responsibility for preparing the food. There was a closeness, a drawing together. And then it was time to make for the sleeping bags. The Miyasakas partitioned off a small portion of the dome and placed their sleeping bags within. "I hope you don't think we're being rude," said Tetsuo. They all knew how it had been on Mayflower #. "Not at all." Chris hung a sheet of opaque Mylarplex on the opposite side of the dome, creating a shadowed area. He placed his bag so his head would be in the shade. He looked at Doris. "You?" She placed her bag in a friendly (but not intimate) relation to Chris's. "I want to make one thing perfectly clear," she said. "I am truly devoted to Teiko. This place has an -- ambiance. So -- I want you to know that, Chris." "I know. I am also devoted to Teiko. So it's all right." It had been a long day and they all were soon asleep. Even the geologists. II T he next morning the three geologists and the geophysicist were off to the impact crater like kids to a candy shop, like junkies to their fixes, like lovers to a rendezvous. The resident psychologist made a note of this. Shau Wang, muttering unintelligibly into his mike, set up strange devices here and there outside the dome -- no one really knew what he was up to, other than that it had to do with, among other things, the effect of the solar wind upon viruses. Anaida set up both visual and UV telescopes. Most of her work would be done during the lunar night, but setting up and testing would give her plenty to do until then. This left Doris and Chris in the Blue dome with no immediate responsibilities. They tried to play chess, but the squawk box was too much for them. Each dome contained a sophisticated communications lashup. Anyone inside either dome could, if he chose, be in continuous contact both with Mission Control and with the scientists out there on the surface. Now the Miyasakas, Dimov and Gentili were going crazy at the impact crater and Control was irritated. "Don't forget, you're supposed to photograph everything before picking it up. Acknowledge?" "Da," said Dimov. They had, in fact, taken quite a few photographs, but they were also picking up rocks before taking pictures, as Chris had seen from the dome. He frowned and Doris made notes. He switched to a circuit that kept the mission together, but excluded Houston. "Listen, you guys," he said. "I'm on the E circuit. I wouldn't want to embarrass you in front of Control. I've seen at least two of you pick up rocks before anybody photographed them. That's a violation of the plan and you know it. Get with it. And if you want to talk back to the commander of this mission, cut Houston off first." "Is too much to do," Dimov said, having flicked the appropriate switch. "We have only fourteen days of light. We could spend months here, not just two weeks." "The photographs are important." "All right," Jean said. "I'll photograph and let the boys do the picking -- all right?" "Not fair, but that's up to you." "Is fair enough," said Tetsuo. "Anyway, we're not just collecting samples -- we're studying types and distribution. Tomorrow we begin to map." They cut Houston back in. Chris thought they would go back to the planned, disciplined program the next day and so told Houston. They were scientists, after all. Though, at the moment, very human ones. Chris remembered the unauthorized philatelic material carried to the moon by an Apollo team. Oh, well. No one before had prowled around in fresh detritus thrust up from lunar levels deeper than anyone knew anything whatever about. Kids today, serious scientists tomorrow. All right? They pushed their life-support systems to their limits, of course. And they did so every day until the beginning of the lunar night. T he lunar night, the second one for Chris. Anaida's work would really begin now and she was eager for that. Wang brought his devices inside and established a small lab in the center of the Red dome. Gentili lovingly caressed a hundred magnetographs -- he had work to do and was content. But the three geologists could only wait for the lunar dawn. They could pore over their samples, but they couldn't slice them, couldn't analyze them. "We have only six more days of work out there," Dimoy said to the Miyasakas. These three now huddled disconsolately together. "We need more than that." Tetsuo. "I'll bet Goodman, Kazlovski, and Carpenter can't wait to get up here," Jean said. "Especially Goodman." "Not to talk about it." Tetsuo's handsome profile was troubled. He looked at Jean, at Dimov. They had worked well together. "What if we won't go back?" he asked. Houston wasn't listening. Jean, startled, stared at her husband. Dimov was impassive. "I have had the same thought, friend." "We -- couldn't," Jean said. Tetsuo looked at her thoughtfully. "Why not? We pay when we get back at end of second month, hai, but in meantime we do the work. Most important expedition of century. We it. We three." "But -- " Dimov twisted his mustache. "If we stay down, then four go up. If only four go up they can send only four down. We pay later, all right." "Of the four -- if we do this -- they could send down Goodman, Kazlovski and Carpenter." "Six geologists on eight-man team? No. Other work is important. Though not as important as ours, of course." "What do you think, Jean?" The same possessive lust was now in her eyes. "They'll skin us alive when we get back." Dimov shrugged. "But in the meantime -- " "The meantime, yes." They were silent some moments. "Chris is Commander. He won't let us to it." "How can he stop us? How make us go?" Dimov asked. "If we are convinced that what we do is right?" The female of the species jumped ahead to tactics. "When do we tell Chris? When do we tell Houston? There are different possibilities." "Yes," said Dimov. "Time to go to bed. We think about it." None of them slept well. T he lunar night passed with unseemly haste. For the most part the colonists -- except for Anaida -- were confined to the domes, because Anaida's energy requirements, fighting against the cold night, were extravagant. Doris administered a discomfiting array of tests and spent hours analyzing the results -- she had plenty to do. Chris did routine physicals, thought about Teiko and played chess with anyone who would play. Wang worked cozily in his lab. Gentili studied magnetographs, frequently shouting in Joy or hoarse despair as he found evidence for or against one of his many theories. He steadfastly refused to confer with his envious colleagues on Earth. And the geologists developed their plot. T he day followed the night and the colonists (except for Anaida, who now stayed in the Red dome reading Russian novels -- her data had been telemetered and she had little to do) regained occupancy of the lunar surface. The geologists mapped an ever-increasing area, but it was obvious that they couldn't finish that job in the few days available, let alone collect the specimens they wanted. Frustration! And, alas, mutiny. They chose their time as best they could -- the evening of the second (Earth) day after their first lunar night. "Chris," Dimov said, after dinner (simulated sirloin and almostsuccessful French fries). "And all of you might as well listen. I -- I and the Miyasakas -- are going to make a communication to Control that you should know about." "I know," Chris said. Three startled geologists. "You -- know?" asked Tetsuo tightly. Chris nodded. "Know what?" asked Anaida. "You want to tell?" Chris asked Dimov. "All right. But first -- how you know?" Chris nodded to Doris. "None of you will like this," she said, "but both domes have been bugged as part of the, ah, psychological aspect of the mission." Consternation, then, and quite a hassle about the evil of invasion of privacy, the immorality of eavesdropping and such. "Control's plan, not mine," Doris said. "I follow orders like everybody else. At least I hope everybody else does." "Will someone please say now what this is all about?" Wang asked with great courtesy. "You want to tell them?" Chris said again to Dimov. "Yes. I tell. You have not informed Control of our -- plan?" "No." "They not listening now?" Dimov cast a suspicious glance at the electronics bay. "No. Doris and I thought it better this way. If you hadn't brought it up tonight, though, I would have. Houston needs to know." "Know what, for Goddamn's sake?" asked Gentili. "We don't finish our work here in the time we have," Dimov said. "So -- we stay this time and go back with second crew." "You cannot do that," Wang said. "Who can make us go?" Everybody looked at Chris. "I know you've thought about this a lot," he said. "I do, of course, order you to follow the mission plan." "Of course. Your responsibility," Jean said. "But how can you enforce that order? We're outnumbered, but physical force won't work, will it?" "Obviously not. How about moral force, then?" "I tell you," said Tetsuo. "Is better for the mission -- for knowledge, for science -- if we stay. We know this place. We know exactly what we have done and what is to do. Is more efficient, hai? The others would take days to catch up. Is better -- any way you look -- if we stay." "You want to call Houston and tell that to Goodman, Kazlovski, and Carpenter?" "We know they won't like it," Jean said. "But they might even agree to it -- in the best interests of the mission -- of science." "If you can sell them that you Friends' Service Committee. You do see this puts me on the spot?" "Yes," said Dimov. "I know that idiom. We sorry. But must do what is right." "What you think is right. It's mutiny, you know." "Not mutiny. Uh -- insubordination, yes." "You quibble. We'd better get Houston on the horn. You ready to put your case?" They nodded. "Okay." Chris moved to the electronics bay and flicked the switch. "Houston from Tycho Base. Copy?" "Five by five, Chris." "Roger. Bob -- we seem to have a problem here." Not the first time those words had been spoken. "Go." "Roger, Bob. Just one." He turned to the geologists. "Who wants it?" Dimov stepped forward and took the mike. "Is Dimov here. We -- the Miyasakas and I -- we have suggestion for improvement of mission plan." "Go ahead, Leo." "Yes. Is like this. We -- the Miyasakas and I -- the geologists, we think we should stay here for the second month to continue our work." Bob Cunningham's cool voice from Houston. "You've got to be kidding, Leo. You know you can't do that." "That's what everybody says. But who is to stop us?" "This isn't for me, Leo. I'm only capcom, you know. I'll call you back as soon as I can. And it won't belong. Houston out." "Da. Tycho Base out." squawk box spoke. "Tycho Base from Houston." Dimov took it. "Roger." "Leo?" This was Manly Ryan, Program Director for Lunar Science. He was The Boss. He was administrator. Dimov made his pitch and got the same answer, but this time with authority behind it. It was a harsh debate. "I admit," Ryan said at one point, "that your argument is not entirely without merit. But you have Doctors Goodman, Carpenter and Kazlovski to think about, don't you? Their approach isn't precisely yours. They're entitled to their shot at it, are they not?" Three adamant geologists on the lunar surface. "Ask them at least," said Jean. "Good evening. Dr. Miyasaka. If I did and if they agreed to your plan -- I'd overrule them and send them up anyway." "They could refuse to come." "Really, Dr. Miyasaka. Really. Ask them yourself. We've just patched into a conference call." Dimov put the query. "Really, Leo, with all due respect, you appear to be out of your mind." Goodman. "We come up, of course. Dr. Dimov. But of course." Kazlovski. "You can't be serious about this, Leo. We have our right to our work up there, too, and you know it." Carpenter. "We'll be in lunar orbit at the appointed hour," Goodman said, "and you had better believe it." "Makes no difference," Dimov said. "If we don't go up you can't come down." "Yes we can. Who, as you say, is to stop us?" "But -- then we couldn't all get back up," said Dimov. "The modules are good for only two round trips." "Precisely. That would make a small problem, wouldn't it? More geologists on the moon than could begotten off. Interesting, isn't it?" Ryan broke in. "All right, ladies and gentlemen, knock it off." Alicia Carpenter was the other lady. "Dr. Conway, do you have any suggestions? You're in charge there." "I don't think they can be persuaded, Dr. Ryan. If they can't -- there's not much I can do." Ryan agreed. He threatened, pleaded with and cajoled the geologists. They remained adamant. "We'll try something else," Ryan finally said. "This will take some time. You'll be hearing from us. Houston out." "Will do no good," Dimov said. "Make no difference. Tycho Base out." Again it was time for bed, but no one felt much like it. "I suppose we all realize that Blue and Red will be lifting off in short order. You know the schedule." "Hai," said Tetsuo. "But those geologists won't be on board. Want to bet?" "No bet," Chris said. "I suppose you know what you're doing to the boys in the back room and to everyone who had anything to do with formulating the program and picking the personnel -- particularly you three -- to implement it?" "Look," said Jean. "We know our heads will roll when we get back down there. We know that. It makes no difference. You're not a scientist -- you don't know." "Medicine isn't a science, then?" "You know what I mean." "I think I go to bed now," Shau Wang said. "I would say one thing. I would like to stay here another month also. I could stay for a year and not do everything I want. But I go down anyway. So should you." "There's no virologist coming up," Dimov said. "No. My place will be taken by seismologist. So what is difference?" The geologists were silent. "So," Wang continued, "you simply want it all for yourselves. All what? Fame? Some kind of fame you get for this. Acclaim? You be acclaimed all right, but for wrong reasons. Honor? You dishonor our mission and those who selected you. Is all a can of worms." "We know that none of you understand," Tetsuo said. "We know. No need to try to say more. We do what we have to. Bugs still on?" "No," Doris said. "Now I've told you about them they've lost their point. My work is almost done anyway. No bugs." T etsuo and Jean went behind their partitions and the others to their accustomed places. Chris moved his bag close to Doris's. They were conspirators. Chris had known about the bugs all along. "Not true, Doris, that your work is almost done, is it?" "Not exactly. I'm devious." "You're a psychologist. Bugs still on, right?" "I said I was devious." She inserted a plug into her handsome left ear, the one away from Chris. "What do you think Ryan will come up with?" "Pressure." "Applied how?" "We'll probably know before morning." There was no provision on Mayflower # for any private circuit between the CO and Houston. No need for such had been anticipated. That oversight would be remedied on future missions. Sleep, now, in the Blue and Red domes. Earth hanging up there and Tycho stretching off into invisibility in the night. The squawk box coming to life again just after two o'clock, Tycho Base local time. They would ordinarily leave the boxes off at night, but tonight they were, of course, on. Chris hit the mike as fast as he could. "Tycho Base." "Chris -- old buddy -- we have some news for you." "Go." "Sorry to wake you up, but we thought you'd like to know you now have two girls. Congratulations." Chris had almost forgotten that Teiko was just about due. He knew guilt. "Thanks, man. She had twins, then?" "No. By two I meant Teiko and the new one. They're both, as they say, doing fine." Ill "Can I talk to her?" "She's sleepy, but she had it easy. We've got her on hold. Just one -- Teiko?" "Hai. Chris?" Chris cut both squawk boxes and put on the phones. Privacy in a lunar colony is a sometime thing. Sometimes wanted and needed, sometimes not. Chris and Teiko had the fringes of it now for a few moments. "I hold you," Chris said at the end. "Both of you." "Hai. Is good. She look like you, if you could be Japanese. Good night, Chris." Teiko knew nothing of the problem of Mayflower #, having been busy and out of range of a squawk box for the last few hours. There were congratulations, ordinary courtesy easing the tension for a few moments, and then the Blue and Red domes settled down for sleep again, Chris returning to his bag next to Doris. "Good show, boss. Such good news. I'm happy for you. All three of you." "Thanks, Doris." They edged with difficulty toward sleep. "I wanted it to be a girl." "I know." Of course, Chris thought. She's done every test on me there is. "You need sleep now, boss." She had removed the plug from her ear. "We've a hard time coming up." She reached out, took his hand and held it until he was asleep... l . asleep for something like two hours when the boxes came on again. Four thirty a.m. Ryan. "Tycho Base from Houston." Chris, disturbed from pleasant dreams, took the mike. "Dr. Conway. I know the hour is inconvenient, but no more for you than for us. You all awake and listening?" Chris looked around. Everyone was there. Disheveled mostly -- but Wang looked as if he'd just come from the barber. "Our motley crew is assembled. Dr. Ryan," Chris said. "Roger. Okay, Dr. Conway. And congratulations on the birth of your daughter. Now, we're patched into another conference call. We're not about to play Hail To The Chiefs but President McKinney will now speak to you. Mr. President -- " "Thank you. Doctor." That familiar voice. It was, Chris said later, as if there had been until then something stagy, arranged, about the Mayflower # contretemps. That voice squawked from the box into the dome and suddenly made it for real. His second shot on the air at a recalcitrant man on the moon and not much of a batting average going for him. In this case not man, but woman. "Dr. Miyasaka." Jean knew this was for her -- she was a U.S. citizen. Tetsuo was a Japanese national. "Yes, Mr. President." "I have been told about your -- er, suggestions to improve the scientific program of Mayflower Three. To come directly to the point, Doctor, you are specifically and expressly ordered to return to Earth as scheduled. You are, as you under certain acts of Congress you are under my direct command. I regret that it has become necessary to exercise that power of command. Do you acknowledge?" Jean swallowed air. "I -- we -- hear you, Mr. President. And we hear you with respect," she said, shrugging. "But our minds are made up. We think it better -- " "Dr. Miyasaka." The President's voice was incisive. "It is not better. I have not made this decision alone -- I am not a scientist. Your suggestion has been considered -- almost from the moment you proposed it -- by the top echelons of the appropriate scientists in decision to stay with the original program is unanimous." "Your decision, Mr. President. Ours is unanimous also." "Three selfish and headstrong geologists against the consensus of the top scientists in your field?" "We're here -- they're not." Jean was flushed and her voice trembled. , little Jean from Santa Barbara, arguing with the President of the United States! "You have your orders. Dr. Miyasaka. Dr. Tetsuo Miyasaka?" Tetsuo took the mike. "Yes, Mr. President." "Your Emperor, Doctor." There followed a staccato exchange in Japanese, during which Tetsuo paled and began to tremble. Jean touched his hand and that steadied him some. Chris gathered from Tetsuo's tone that he was standing firm. This was correct. That exchange ended and a Russian voice came on. The Secretary General of the Party, of course. Same story. Then President McKinney again. "All right. Doctors," he said. "All of you have your orders from the leaders of your three countries. Our powers of persuasion appear to be ineffective. Are we to understand, then, that you intend to carry out this act of mutiny, though it means either suicide or murder?" "We are not murderers," Dimov said, "and we do not intend to commit suicide." "This mission, gentlemen -- and lady -- will continued as planned. In a short time we are sending to Tycho Base seven scientists colonists, certainly including Doctors Kazlovski, Carpenter and Goodman. That will make eleven. Eight can return to lunar orbit, and thence to Earth. Thus, if you continue as you plan, you kill either yourselves or others. Murder or suicide. Good luck. Doctors Conway, Bennett, Wang, Gentili and Golovin. Good morning." There was a click and that was that. "Better think it over, Doctors," Ryan said. "They mean it. Houston out." logists. "You're causing a bit of trouble, aren't you? And the real part of it hasn't started yet." "It's a bluff," Jean said. "They wouldn't dare. It would be murder." "Exactly," said Wang. "Just as the President said. And who will be the murderers, then?" "Certainly not we." "I think so," said Wang. "I think so. It will be, in any case, an interesting experiment, yes?" "You're being cold-blooded about this," Tetsuo said. Wang smiled. "I?" Everyone was sleepy and in a bad mood and there was a sense of tension. There hadn't been much rest and there was work to do. Wang and Gentili, who had the duty, began to prepare breakfast. Wang, acting as if he'd spent a decade as head waiter at Maxim's, passed coffee and that helped. "What if the President isn't bluffing, you guys?" Chris asked. "Is not possible," said Dimov. "As a matter of idle curiosity," Doris asked, "what would you do if you knew the other three were, in fact, coming up here?" "I guess we'll find out in a couple of days when Red and Blue are on lunar trajectory," Jean said. "If they aren't aboard, we've won. If they are aboard and say they're coming down -- " "Yes," said Doris. "What if it's like that?" "They land at their peril," Dimov said. "Because we don't go up." "You mean," Doris went on, "that if they do come, when it's time to go back you'd just leave them here? Room on the bus for you but not for them? How would you make them accept that? How coiild you accept that?" "They come at own risk. If they come down while we here they know they can't get up again. Simple." "They know some three can't get up -- that's right, Leo. But who will say which three? Women and children first? We've women, though no children. Geologists first, they being so important? We'll have six of those." This was Doris, laying it on them. "And how decide? Mortal combat? It would be mortal, all right." There was a silence. "Is a can of worms," Wang said. "Is not civilized. Is not worthy." "I agree with you," Gentili said. "And in the meantime I have my own work, which I propose to do." He suited up and left the dome; back to the impact crater, where things were better ordered. Anaida began to clean up. Wang went to his devices and Doris and Chris sat there. "For people wanting to spend a lot of time at the crater, you're losing a lot of it," Chris said. "You want to talk it over among yourselves -- with no bugs?" "What we care for hugs?" Tetsuo said. "Anyway we have now no secrets." "You're right. Commander," Dimov said. "We waste time here. Let us go." They suited up and left.  does Wang make better coffee than anyone else?" Chris asked. "We all use the same stuff." Chris was alone in the dome with Doris. Anaida read a Russian novel in the other dome. "Tea should be his bag -- excuse the expression -- not coffee." "Class. Elegance. Style," said Doris. "Any ideas, boss?" "One, anyway." "Want me to split?" "Well, you're the psychologist -- maybe you should know," he said and told her what he had in mind. "Might be useful in the end," he said, "don't you think?" "I had thought of something like that," Doris said. "So what say? Go or no go?" "Might as well try, boss. I don't envy you." "Okay. Go into the other dome like the good girl you are -- and be sure Anaida isn't listening. Chris then cut off the link to the other colonists and spoke at some length to Houston. I Copy, Chris?" "Loud and clear, Chas." "We enter lunar orbit in fortyeight minutes. Moon takes off in -- let's see -- six hours and thirtyone minutes. Pepper thirteen minutes later. Any problems?" "Yes." "Roger. Just want to put it on the record. Is your crew assembled?" "Roger, Chas. We're here, but not for long. As you know. We'll be going over to the modules shortly. Some of us will, that is." "Yes. Okay, you're all there copying. Now a word from our sponsor. I mean, just time for a few special messages. Directed to your three geologists, from our three geologists. All right, Alicia." "I am Alicia Carpenter. I am a geologist. I am also an astronette. I will soon be coming down to the lunar surface. I am twenty-six years old, my hair is blond -- " "For Christ's sake, Alicia. The whole world is listening, (It wasn't.) All right. I suppose you all heard that down there. Control wants us to get it all on the record. Okay, Vlad." "Roh-ghay," came the voice. "Is Vladimir Kazlovski, geologist. I address the Doctors Miyasaka and Doctor Dimov. I, too, will soon be on the lunar surface to study rocks. My hair is brown -- " Chas sighed. "All right! Goodman?" "Ah, yes. Maximilian Goodman here. Geologist. My hair, as it happens, is black. It's okay, Chas, don't fret. I'll get on with it. We three, we happy band of fellow geologists, not to mention cosmologists, are putting on this show to remind Jean, Tetsuo and Leo that we are indeed here and that we shall be descending shortly. So get the modules up. Doctors, and don't be forgetful and remain behind. That would, as you understand, make a problem." "All right, Chris. Time for you to begin your countdowns for Moon and Pepper. We'll be seeing you soon. Not you, Chris, but everyone else, I hope." "Roger. Don't hold your breath. Tycho Base out." ' were essentially complete. Suiting up was in progress. Chris looked at the three geologists. "Your hour of decision is at hand," he said. "Is wrong," Dimov said. "Our hour of decision was some days ago." "Carpenter, Kazlovski and Goodman are coming down, you know." "Bluff." "I order you to suit up and prepare for liftoff." "No go." "Well. If the President, the Emperor and the Secretary can't move you I don't suppose I can. Okay. Doris -- you, Gentili, Anaida, Shau -- all set?" They nodded. "Good thing we all know how to fly, right?" Gentili and Doris would go up in Moon, Anaida and Wang in Pepper, the modules they had landed in. The President, always a most persistent man, came on once more. To no avail. Chris took Doris aside. "I wish you were staying. I do. Give my love to Teiko and the baby." "Of course. I want to stay, too. But -- you know -- " Moon and Pepper lifted off faultlessly. A nd landed with seven scientists. #. Eventually all were together in the Blue dome. "At least we'll lose weight," Goodman, who was plump, said. "Assuming we divide the rations equally." "What other way is there to do it?" Dimov. "Well, the eight of us who are supposed to be here could have what we're supposed to and you could have what was left." "Would be nothing left." "That's right." Dimov and the Miyasakas looked at each other. "Our energy supply is also for eight," Chris said. "We are eleven. Therefore everything is cut down by more than a quarter. You had thought of that, of course." "Did not think these three would be so foolish as to come," said Dimov. "If you're trying to make us feel guilty," Jean said, "you're not succeeding." "Why the troubled look on your face then?" Chris asked. "We do realize that we've created a problem. But we've only done what we have to do. None of you can understand that." "It's possible we might understand that," Maximilian Goodman said. "We are geologists also. But Iwe -- will tell you one thing. The three of us intend to go back to Earth." Chris knew where this would all lead in the end. Or almost all the way to the end. He was the commander and he had a secret weapon. He felt now totally alone and wished for Mayflower #. "We are supposed to be eight and we are eleven. The housing will be as follows: the six geologists in the Red dome, the rest of us here." The rest were: Chris, commanding officer of an imperiled colony; Gladys Copperwaite, a psychiatrist from Cambridge (England); Donald Markel, an astronomer from Cambridge (Massachusetts); Ursula Louval, a psychoanalyst from Paris; and Aristotle Bozos, an unknown quantity from no one (barring Chris) knew where. No seismologist, as originally planned. No geophysicist. Instead, one additional head person plus Aristotle Bozos. The ambiance in the domes was not as it had been and eleven to dine in one dome were too many. Chris decreed that the geologists would take their meals in the Red dome, the others in the Blue. "Do you think it's wise to have them all together?" Gladys asked. "Why not?" "Well -- that dome will be a little tense. Hostility, guilt, fear -- " "We'll leave it that way -- at least until the lunar night begins. Things may get hairy then. We'll see." "There's no way we can all make it, is there?" mount no rescue mission. The hardware isn't there." "I suppose those three knew that." "They knew it." "What is Aristotle Bozos' function?" "That's classified." "Oh. Sorry, boss." "Okay. I know your function, by the way. Good luck." Gladys shrugged, ending the exchange. The next days passed almost smoothly. The two teams of geologists worked separately during the day, but compared notes at night without rancor, almost as if they didn't know, with virtual certainty, that all six would not return to Earth. Scientific interest, the thirst for knowledge, evidently could overcome animosity as well as fear of lonesome lunar death. Aristotle Bozos mostly read and watched people. He was large, hairy, dark and amiable. He went out on the lunar surface from time to time to no apparent purpose. While the light lasted Mayflower # proceeded on an almost normal course. The colonists were hungry a good part of the time, but there were no serious complaints about that. And the night came. IV D onald markel collated data and constructed charts that none of the others could understand. The six geologists studied their maps and theorized as tension built up in the Red dome. Maximilian Goodman looked through his notebooks and thought a lot -- he was pleased because he was losing weight. Gladys Copperwaite and Ursula Douval arranged a cubicle in the Bwe dome and they both -- separately and together -- interviewed everybody, particularly the geologists, in such privacy as was available. Their mission? To assist -- if not to coerce -- the Miyasakas and Dimov in the determination of a rational course of action when came time for liftoff. since all of them could not make it. "Making any headway?" Chris asked them one night in the quiet of the Blue dome. "None worth mentioning," Ursula said, "but at least #, we, keep confronting them with the problem. Goodman, Carpenter and Kazlovski are, of course, determined to survive the mission. As is right. Okay. But the other three simply won't talk about being left behind when the rest of us leave. They think autistically. They speak of a rescue mission." "That's out of the question." "Yes. And they know that somehow, somewhere. But they're not facing it. Not one of them." "Tetsuo?" "He's no better than the others -- in spite of being Japanese. And he's in this with his wife, of course, which is one more complication. He's not about to take the hara-kiri route." Chris asked, "Has it occurred to them that we can take everyone back but one?" Ursula's pupils dilated and Gladys gasped. "I guess it hasn't occurred to you either. How really curious it is." "How?" asked Gladys. "Come on. Ursula?" "I don't see it." "How brainwashed we are. The mission is more or less shattered, certainly not going according to plan, but apparently nobody in these two domes thinks about violating the plan still more in the interest of saving a life or two. Curious, yes?" "Yes. Okay, we give up." ' The three were to one side, talking quietly. Markel and Bozos were playing chess, paying no attention. Bozos was holding his own, though Markel had once held master rating. "The rocks." "What about them?" "Don't you get it? The automatic assumption is that the rocks go up when we do because that's part of the plan. Moon and Pepper are each to take up not less than one hundred and fifty pounds of selected samples, no more than a hundred and sixty pounds. The rocks will survive here, won't they, until someone can come to pick them up? The people can't. Jean weighs about one twenty-five. We can take her in one module, plus about thirty pounds of the more important specimens. Tetsuo and Dimov are both about one sixty. So -- no rocks in the other module, one scientist. Simple." Ursula, the psychoanalyst, was thoughtful indeed. "You're right. Commander. I cannot understand how we all missed that. We live on the edge of mystery. If not ignorance. And I'm an analyst. Holy Toledo. Will Houston go along with it?" "They've ordered it." "Was this your idea or theirs?" "Both. I said it first, but they had put it together by the time I did. It is a rather obvious partial solution to the problem." "I feel like an absolute idiot," Ursula said. "This changes things some, doesn't it?" "It do, shrink, it do." "One of the three has to stay. Die here, right?" "No other way." "Why didn't you tell Gladys and me earlier?" "Orders. Ask one of your colleagues on Earth. We are rats in mazes, you know." "All right. The one that's left -- it will, I suppose, be one of the three?" "I don't think one of the rest of us is going to play the sacrificial lamb. I know I'm not. I've got a daughter on Earth I haven't yet seen. The others -- except the three -- deserve to survive. Either of you want to volunteer?" They shook their heads. "So. Our ploy now is to put this to them and leave it to them to determine who goes. Right?" "You're the doctor." "You're the commander. Where is Bozos in this?" "Classified. I can tell you one thing about him, though -- he plays an expert Najdorf." "Thanks a lot. Okay, Commander. I know how to get them all down." "So do I. Have Dimov and Tetsuo fast down to eighty pounds each. That what you were thinking of?" "Yes. But not seriously." "No way. Not enough time." "Anything else we can leave behind -- to be picked up later with the rocks?" "Negative. Rocks and people, notebooks and data, are about all we have for payload." "I would very much like a cigarette now," Gladys said. "That's the first thing I'll ask for when we hit that carrier." "Medics won't let you, you know that. What's on your mind?" "The chess-playing Bozos, for one. I don't know what he's here for, but he's not doing much. Why down there? Then we could all get down. Seems either cold-blooded or badly thought out." "Think about it. No -- it's time for sleep. I'll tell you. And don't this -- they did. All the way to the top. A simple matter of precedent." Silence for some moments. "I think I get it," Ursula said. "We won't go to the planets, then to the stars -- our great grandchildren won't -- without . discipline. We'll die." ficing one scientist, one life -- one life they could have saved -- to make the point?" "That's right. And I am -- I the way it is." They sat in silence, looking up at Earth, a blue-green moon up there -- home. I've two girls up there. Chris thought. I'll be there soon. "You're right," said Ursula finally. "It is time for sleep. Busy day for me tomorrow. Good night. Commander." Lights out in both domes. T he group session next morning (the lunar night continuing) added tension, doubt and uncertainty, not to mention conflict, to the mix already present in the first geological team. Markel didn't know what was going on and didn't much care -- he had work to do and the chess with Bozos went well. Chris chose breakfast time, the day of the lunar dawn, to talk to everyone at the same time. He had asked the Red crew to bring in tables so they could breakfast together. The terminator had passed through -- or over -- Tycho during their night and the ambiance within the domes had changed again. Now there was bright light, the impact crater out there, all those rocks and work to be done. "Most of you know this already," Chris said, over coffee, "but perhaps we should all have a look at it together. We lift off in six days. I wish Wang were here. He made better coffee." He cast an accusing glance at Bozos and outlined the situation. He said at the end, "So one of us -- one of you, because I'll be going back home -- one of us will remain here. To join Nora Ivanovna and Stuart Stong. One of you three, I should say," he said, looking at the Miyasakas and Dimov. "Why one of us?" Jean asked. "I'm not saying we do or don't accept that. But why?" "Because I say so and because you brought this upon yourselves. Well, there's no discussion about it. One of you three stays here -- and which one is your decision. And I have nothing else to say. Questions?" "What if we can't -- uh -- decide?" Dimov asked. Bozos threw him a speculative glance. "Then I decide. But best you do it yourselves, right? I know you've been talking about it." "Hai. We decide what to do, all right. But now, if meeting over, is work to be done." "The meeting is adjourned," Chris said. The geologists, all six of them, lost no time getting back to the crater. WE draw straws?"i --  Dimov asked, the three of them talking together that evening. "Maybe you and I," Tetsuo said. "We can't leave Jean here." "That's a male chauvinist sexist remark," Jean said. "My status here is the same as yours. Precisely. Besides, Tetsuo and I are husband and wife. Can one of us leave the other here?" "You are suggesting I volunteer to stay? I have a wife, too. In Moscow." Dimov looked up at Earth. "No, I'm not suggesting that. It's going to be a tough decision any way it goes. Maybe we could leave Bozos. He doesn't do anything except play chess with Markel. He's not even a scientist, I don't think." "I don't think he look like kind of man to make sacrifice," Dimov said. "Chris will say nothing about why he is here. If he is not here we all go back." "Maybe you and I attack him in dome. Kill the bastard." "Is something to think about." "Then you'll spend the rest of your lives in jail," Jean said. "Better than dying alone on moon, yes?" "Could strangle him at night when all asleep. Solve problem." "We're in plenty of trouble in any case when we get back," Jean said. "Murder wouldn't be much worse than what they've already got on us. And we'd live. Be paroled in old age -- who knows?" She felt lightheaded. She couldn't stand the idea of being left there by herself and she couldn't think of leaving Tetsuo there. And she knew the chances were two in three that one of them would draw the short straw -- if it came to that. "Doesn't have to be Bozos," Dimov said. "Could be any other?" The Miyasakas shook their heads. "No," Tetsuo said. "Is wrong. Cannot do that. Must be this Bozos -- or one of us." They saw the correctness of this while trying not to see the incorrectness, let alone the difficulty, of picking on Bozos. Denial, evasion, and more denial. "I guess Houston isn't lying when they say they can't mount a rescue mission," Jean said. "They either can't or won't," Tetsuo said. "Same thing." He touched Jean's hand and between the three of them was a crystallization of understanding and appraisal. One of them would stay here, to die alone on the gray surface -- unless they saw to it that someone else was stranded. Which meant Bozos. And they opted for Bozos rather than one of them. Simple. Thus the line was drawn. T he five in the Blue dome spoke together. Markel was interested only from the spectator point of view -- the others were more involved. "They'll be after you," Gladys said, looking at Aristotle Bozos. "They can't figure why you were sent up here, one consequence of your presence being that one of them can't go back home." Bozos smiled. "They've been after me," he said. "For two days. But they are -- if I can say so without offense -- outclassed." Ursula asked. "For the lesson, the demonstration -- you understand," Bozos said. "But for that they could at least have sent a scientist, a worker, not a -- chess player." Bozos was unflappable. "Yes. Is maybe one other reason also. Perhaps we find out tomorrow. Is liftoff, yes? We see." Liftoff, yes. Time now to go back. Thirty-odd pounds of rocks and dust are already stowed in Moon. The module stands there, waiting only for five colonists and their personal gear to complete the payload. Pepper nearby. It is the last night, though still the lunar day. The only certainty is that someone here is going to terminate shortly. There are two attempts on Bozos' life during the night. Bozos is mightily muscled -- he is alert and he deals with these attempts with contemptuous ease. Besides, the forays are clumsy and awaken others. Bozos's probability of survival was unimpaired when, at suit-up time, he and Chris entered the Red dome. "Time to decide," Chris said. "Which of you stays behind?" The other three geologists were already into their suits, anxious to be gone. Chris stood there, confident, in command, looking forward to seeing his two girls. It was too much and Tetsuo and Dimov were suddenly back in the cave. They leapt at the same instant upon ( hris, who had not expected this. No matter. Bozos glided smoothly f orward, kneed Tetsuo into anguish and knocked Dimov halfway across the dome. He stood back smiling and drew a Colt .# from a pocket of his jumper. "That was a no-no," Chris said. "Bad judgment, besides. Mr. Bozos' function -- uh -- now becomes clear." "The Enforcer." The other two girls and Markel had come in from the Blue dome. "That's right," Chris said. "The mission had to survive -- most of it, that is. It was in jeopardy because of the situation you created. I, and not a -- violent man. Hence, Aristotle Bozos, a recruit from a -- well -- different organization. Thanks, Aristotle." Bozos nodded. "And now you must make your decision." "Cheap melodrama," muttered Tetsuo. "But effective." Tetuo shrugged. "We draw lots, Dimov and I." Dimov nodded. "We all draw lots," said Jean. "I'm in this as much as you." Dimov scribbled on three scraps of paper, crumpled them in his extended hand. Jean and Tetsuo each took one, uncrumpled them. "I'm it," Jean said, blank-faced. "The rest of you had better hurry. We're a little late." There was embarrassment and back and forth. Then Chris and the rest of the Blue crew went back to their dome, began to suit up. Jean came running in, floating through the lunar gravity. "Where's Tetsuo?" They looked at her blankly. She went to the side of the dome then, near the air lock, and looked outside. Frantically, she began to unzip the lock. Bozos gently restrained her. "He must have walked out just after we drew," she said. Bozos nodded, but no one noticed it. Chris looked outside, saw the figure lying there. "He is dead, Jean. Suit up now. We must get going." Jean's face froze into a blank expression that would be there a long time. Gladys and Ursula propelled her into the other dome and helped her into her suit. ""Blue, Red and Houston from Tycho Base." Three rogers at once. "We're leaving the domes now. We're four minutes behind schedule, but we'll make it up." "Roger. No sweat. Who -- " "Tetsuo Miyasaka is dead, about ten yards from the air lock. Jean got the black ball and Tetsuo took a walk. Tycho Base out." And they left that place. Jean stopped, bent down, as they passed Tetsuo. She put her gloved hand on his cheek for a moment, then went on to the module.  Wpit, had licked his fur clean, he howled before John Bananas' door. John's wife, Teresa, opened it and let him in. She was a thin, stooped woman of thirty or thirtyfive, her black hair shot with gray. She did not smile, but he felt somehow that she was glad to see him. She said, "He's not home yet. If you want to come in we've got a fire." Zozz said, "I'll wait for him -- " and six-legging politely across the threshold sat down over the stone Bananas had rolled in for him when they had been new friends. Maria and Mark, playing some sort of game with bottle caps on squares scratched on the floor dirt said, "Hi, Mr. Zozz -- " and Zozz said, "Hi -- " in return. Bananas' old mother, whom Zozz had brought here from the pads in his rusty powerwagon the day before, looked at him from piercing eyes then fled into the other room. He could hear Teresa relax, hear her wheezing outpuffed breath. He said, "I think she thinks I bumped her on purpose yesterday." "She's not used to you yet." "I know," Zozz said. T told her. Mother Bananas, it's their world and they're not used to you." "Sure," Zozz said. A gust of wind outside brought the cold in to replace the odor of the gog-hutch on the other side of the left wall. "I tell you it's hell to have your LA There were no wise men from the east. But a woman had arrived from another planet... husband's mother with you in a place as small as this." "Sure," Zozz said again. Maria announced, "Daddy's home!" The door rattled open and Bananas came in, looking tired and cheerful. Bananas worked in the slaughtering market and though his cheeks were blue with cold, his two trousers cuffs were red with blood. He kissed Teresa and tousled the hair of both children and said, "Hi, Zozzy." Zozz said, "Hi. How does it roll?" And moved over so Bananas could warm his back. Someone groaned and Bananas asked a little anxiously, "What's that?" Teresa said, "Next door." "Huh?" "Next door. Some woman." "Oh. I thought it might be Mom." "She's fine." "Where is she?" "In back." Bananas frowned. "There's no fire in there. She'll freeze to death." "I didn't tell her to go back there. She can wrap a blanket around herself." Zozz said, "It's me -- I bother her." He got up. Bananas said, "Sit down." "I can go. I just came to say hi." "Sit down." Bananas turned to his wife. "Honey, you shouldn't leave her in there alone. See if you can't get her to come out here, okay?" "Johnny -- " "Teresa, dammit!" "Okay, Johnny." B ananas took off his coat and sat down in front of the fire. Maria and Mark had gone back to their game. In a voice too low to attract their attention Bananas said, "Nice thing, huh?" Zozz said, "I think your mother makes her nervous." Bananas said, "Sure." Zozz said, "This isn't an easy world." "For us two-leggers? No, it ain't, but you don't see me moving." Zozz said, "That's good. I mean, here you've got a job anyway. There's work." "That's right." Unexpectedly Maria said, "We get enough to eat here, and me and Mark can find wood for the fire. Where we used to be there wasn't anything to eat." Bananas asked, "You remember, honey?" "A little." Zozz said, "People are poor here." Bananas was taking off his shoes, scraping the street mud from them and tossing it into the fire. He said, "If you mean us, us people are poor everyplace." He jerked his head in the direction of the back room. "You ought to hear her tell about our world." "Your mother?" Bananas nodded. "You should hear what she has to say." Maria said, "Daddy, how did grandmother get here?" "Same way we did." Mark said, "You mean she signed a thing?" "A labor contract? No, she's too old. She bought a ticket -- you know, like you would buy something in a store." Maria said, "Why did she come. Daddy?" "Shut up and play. Don't bother us." Zozz said, "How did things go at work?" "So-so." Bananas looked toward Ihe back room again. "She came into some money, but that's her business. I never ask her anything about it." "Sure." "She says she spent every dollar to get here -- you know, they haven't used dollars even on Earth for fifty, sixty years, but she still says it. How do you like that?" He laughed and Zozz laughed, too. "I asked how she was going to get back and she said she's not going back. She's going to die right here with us. What could I possibly answer?" "I don't know." Zozz waited for Bananas to say something and when he did not, added: "I mean. She is your mother, after all." "Yeah." Through the thin wall they heard the sick woman groan again and someone moving about. Zozz said, "I guess it's been a long time since you saw her last." "Yeah -- twenty-two years Newtonian. Listen, Zozzy -- ." "Uh-huh." "You know something? I wish I had never set eyes on her again," Bananas said. Zozz said nothing, rubbing his hands, hands, hands. "That sounds lousy I guess." "I know what you mean." "She could have lived good for the rest of her life on what that ticket cost her." Bananas was silent for a moment. "She used to be a big, fat woman when I was a kid, you know? A great big woman with a loud voice. Look at her bimonthly. #. Location of known offices of publication: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Location of the: headquarters or general business offices of the publisher: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor. Publisher: Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street. New York, N.Y. #. Editor: Ejler Jakobsson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Managing Editor: Judy-Lynn N.Y. #, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Arnold E. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Robert J. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Peter J. Abramson, # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #; Allen  Company, # Broad Street, New York, N.Y. #; Clooney . 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It's like she wasn't my mother at all. You know the only thing that's the same about her? That black dress. That's the only thing I recognize, the only thing that hasn't changed. She could be a stranger -- she tells stories about me I don't remember at all." Maria said, "She told us a story today." Mark added: "Before you came home. About this witch -- " Maria said, " -- that brings the presents to children. Her name is La Befana, the Christmas Witch." Zozz drew his lips back from his double canines and jiggled his head. "I like stories." "She says it's almost Christmas and on Christmas three wise men went looking for the Baby and they stopped at the old witch's door and they asked which way it was and she told them and they said come with us." The door to the other room opened, and Teresa and Bananas' mother came out. Bananas' mother was holding a teakettle. She edged around Zozz to put it on the hook and swing it out over the fire. "And she was sweeping and she wouldn't come," Maria resumed. Mark added, "Said she'd come when she had finished. She was a real old, real ugly woman. Watch, I'll show you how she walked." He jumped up and began to hobble around the room. Bananas looked at his wife and indicated the wall. "What's this?" "Some woman. I told you." "In there?" "The charity place -- they said she could stay there. She couldn't stay in the house because all the rooms are full of men." Maria was saying, "So when she was all done, she went looking for Him only she couldn't find Him and she never did." "She's sick?" "She's knocked up, Johnny, that's all. Don't worry about her. She's got some guy in there with her." Mark asked, "Do you know about the Baby Jesus -- do you, Mr. Zozz?" Zozz groped for words. "Johnny, my son -- " "Yes, mama." "Your friend -- Do they have the faith here, Johnny?" Apropos of nothing Teresa said, "They're Jews, next door." Zozz told Mark, "You see, the Baby Jesus has never come to my world." Maria said, "And so she goes all over every place looking for Him with her presents and she leaves some with every kid she finds, but she says it's not because she thinks they might be Him like some people think but just a substitute. She can't never die. She has to do it forever, doesn't she. Grandma?" The bent old woman said, "Not forever, dearest. Only until tomorrow night."  Associate Director, Griffith Observatory Former staff member. Hale Observatory Bethlehem? Is there scientific evidence for its existence? If so, what is this evidence? Can we identify the star with any celestial object known today? May we expect it to reappear as a visible star? Answers can be found to all these questions. But no provable answers. We can only guess and conjecture -- and continue the search. One definite statement can be made about the star. Any suggestion concerning it is sure to anger somebody. I speak from thirty years' experience. We -- I -- wish to present a new candidate for the identity of the star. Which does not mean that I myself believe we have a final answer. I don't. I emphasize again: proof is impossible. What the Bible tells us about the star of Bethlehem is little. It is mentioned four times by Matthew, but without a word of description. No hint is given as to its position among the stars, its color or brightness. We generally think of the star as an exceptionally bright object, but we do so mostly because we are accustomed to seeing it cards and other yuletide ornaments. Still, the chances are that the star was on the bright side or it would not have caught the notice of ground observers unequipped with telescopes. It appeared at the time of Jesus' birth. But when was Jesus born? Somewhere between # and # b.c. is as close as we can fix the date. For our purposes we shall assume it to be # B.c. The anachronism that Jesus was born in the time we call Before Christ originated with the Roman monk, Dionysius Exiguus citca A. D. #. Known now to be wrong, his chronological system of reckoning has become so firmly established there is little hope of changing it. If the year of Jesus' birth is uncertain the day itself is hopelessly lost. December # was selected in the fourth century principally as a matter of expediency. On that date the Romans were occupied with their annual orgy of the Saturnalia and hence less likely to be concerned with the activities of the Christians. We can be sure the ancients were much more familiar with the constellations and other heavenly bodies than are people today. Today, because of smog and artificial illumination, many people scarcely know the stars exist except by hearsay. There were no astronomers to inform our distant predecessors, only astrologers. Astronomers today regard astrologers with contempt, the idea that we can foretell future events from the aspect of the celestial bodies being considered too ridiculous for serious discussion. But in biblical times astrologers were highly respected as Magi or "wise men," as usually translated in English scripture. The Magi were thoroughly familiar with the constellations and the stars that form them -- they could even predict the motions of the sun, the moon and the planets with fair accuracy. If we consider the star as a sign sent by God to announce the birth of Christ no explanation of its appearance is necessary. Once we admit the supernatural, anything is possible. If we limit ourselves to scientific possibilities, however, only three are worthy of attention. #. Planets revolve around the sun in nearly circular orbits (for the purposes of the present discussion) in nearly the same plane, the farther from the sun the slower their motion. We see them from the Earth, which itself is in motion. The Earth's motion and other factors complicate the true situation enormously. Trying to disentangle a planet's true motion as seen against the background of the distant stars from its apparent motions was a problem that baffled astronomers for centuries. But occasionally two or more planets appear close together on the celestial sphere and we say they are in "conjunction." They are acthey are in nearly the same line of sight they give the impression of being virtually in contact.  Rigorously defined: when they have the same right ascension or celestial longitude. Early in the last century the German chronologist, C. L. Ideler, found Jupiter and Saturn to have been in conjunction three times in # B.c. He believed the Magi interpreted the first conjunction as the sign that started them on their way to Jerusalem. The last conjunction was so close that to a nearsighted person the light of Jupiter and Saturn might have seemed blended into a single body. Dr. Ideler convinced himself that this triple conjunction established the birth of Christ as # b.c. A check by the Greenwich Observatory revealed Dr. Ideler's work was not as reliable as he had supposed. A triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn did indeed occur in # B.c. But even at their closest approach the two planets were separated by twice the distance of the full moon and so could not possibly have been mistaken for a single "star" or even touching or near-touching "stars," despite the technical "conjunction." The hypothesis of a close approach is ingenious but does not hold up when tested mathematically. #. Could a star of Bethlehem have been not a star, but a bright comet? The most famous bright periodic comet is Halley's, which makes a close approach to the Earth and its sun, on an average, every # years. The various returns of Halley's comet have been determined by electronic computers back to # b.c. At practically every return there is a record of a bright comet in the right part of the sky at the right time. Halley's comet was last near us in # and will next be nearest the sun on February #, #. The coming apparition will be a poor one -- the comet will not be favorably placed for observation. One of the earliest and best authenticated appearances of Halley's comet occurred in I I b.c. A bright comet is an unusual object, sure to arouse widespread awe and wonder. Although the date is four years before the earliest limit set for Jesus' birth, so much uncertainty is involved in this event that the discrepancy is not intolerably large. But the fact remains that the evidence does not quite fit. Besides, the Bible reports successive reappearances of the "star." #. The most satisfactory type of celestial object for the star of Bethlehem to have been is a nova or "new star. 'By a new star we do not mean one previously nonexistent, but simply one of which we have been unaware. It was there all the time but indistinguishable from myriads of other faint telescopic objects. For reasons unknown a star becomes unstable and, in perhaps a day or two, increases tenor a hundred-thousand-fold in luminosity. After reaching maximum light it begins to fade and after a week or so sinks below naked-eye visibility. The flareup seems to be of a superficial nature, affecting only the outer layers of the star. Such novae are not rare objects -- about five are picked up every year and probably a dozen more go undetected. Usually we see only those close enough to attain naked-eye visibility. Much rarer objects, probably of a different nature, are the supernovae, which undergo sudden increases in luminosity of perhaps a Milky Way and other galaxies indicate they occur at the rate of one in # years on the average, although some oriental scholars find an average of one every # years. Supernovae have been recorded with certainty in the Milky Way in A.D. #, # and #. Around maximum light they were so bright as to be visible in full daylight. (The supernova of # has been identified from Chinese and Japanese records with the object in Taurus we call the Crab Nebula. It seems incredible that there is not a ject in surviving European records of that period.) A nova fits all the conditions for the star of Bethlehem. It appears unexpectedly. Occurring sufficiently close to Earth, it would have been sure to attract the attention of the Magi. It rapidly fades from sight -- and this would account for its invisibility today. Only one slight difficulty is involved -- until recently we had no record of a nova at the time of the birth of Christ. In # a list of # novae and possible supernovae -- derived from oriental sources between the fourteenth century b.c. and # -- was published. Of special interest are Numbers # and #, recorded in # b.c. and # b.c., respectively. No position is given for Number # except that it originated in the southern constellation of Capricornus. Number # occurred in Aquila at right ascension (RA) #h #, declination (Dec.) # N. the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was." This would mean that the star of Bethlehem was at the zenith of Bethlehem. To be in the zenith the declination of a star must be the same as the latitude of the place, which is #.# for Bethlehem. This immediately rules out nova Number # in Capricornus, which is much too far south of the celestial equator. Nova Number # is more hopeful with a declination of # N. When highest in the sky at Bethlehem, or on the meridian, it would be # south of the zenith, or at an altitude Xi Ze-zong and Po Shu-jen, translated from the Chinese by K. S. Yang, Ancient Oriental Records of Novae and Supernovae. Science, p.#, # November #.) of # above the horizon. But eye estimates of altitude -- even by experienced observers -- are not trustworthy. Most people will describe an object with an altitude greater than # as being "overhead." Now, the basic reference point of astronomers is the vernal equinox, corresponding to Earth's zero meridian through Greenwich, England. However, the celestial "merilocate a celestial object by its hourangle and declination. Like enormous hoops, the hour-circles travel across the sky from east to west. Point where sun crosses celestial equator (about March #) indicates the prime hour-circle through the vernal equinox. Note derivation of right ascension. -- From A Brief Text in Astronomy, Richardson. Holt Dryden, # dian" is continually moving westward. We call this westward motion "precession." and it results from the gradual change in the direction of the Earth's axis of rotation in space, akin to the wobbling motion of a spinning top. It arises from the gravitational action of the sun and moon on the equatorial bulge of the Earth, which like a top is also spinning. At present a line through the north pole along the Earth's axis extended passes near the star Alpha Ursae Minoris at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. We call this star our Polaris. But it was not always so. Four thousand years ago Alpha Draconis was our Polaris and in a.d. # it will be the bright star Vega. After # years the Earth's axis will have come full circle and returned again to Alpha Ursae Minoris. As the Earth's axis shifts position there is a corresponding change in the position of the constellations and the seasons in which we are used to seeing them. Today we regard Orion as a winter constellation and Scorpius as a summer constellation, but in a.d. # this situation will be reversed. The constellation of the Southern Cross is now visible from only the southernmost part of the United States, but there was a time when it was visible as far north as the Aleutian Islands. How did the constellations appear from Bethlehem in # b.c. as compared with today? In particular, how was the position of the alleged nova in Aquila affected? Calculations show that precession worked the wrong way to be helpful, moving the nova farther toward the south. In # b.c. it would have been # from the zenith of Bethlehem, hardly "overhead" to such sophisticated observers as the Magi. Thus we seem to have exhausted all the possibilities. Not a conjunction of the planets, not Halley's comet, not the doubtful record of a nova satisfactorily fulfills the required conditions. That brings us, at last, to my own proposal. T he ordinary novae we have mentioned are often called "flash" novae. They flash to prominence, then fade slowly back into obscurity. Other objects are known, however, called recurrent novae which have undergone two, three and four flareups. Their outbursts occur irregularly at intervals of several decades and have a smaller range in luminosity than the ordinary variety. Could the star of Bethlehem have been a recurrent nova? The most likely possibility for this conjecture is an object in the little circlet of stars forming the constellation of Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. The first known outburst of this object called T Coronae Borealis (T Cor Bor) was observed on May #, #, when it reached second magnitude, about the same brightness as the brightest stars in the Big Dipper. (A star barely visible to the unaided eye under favorable conditions is sixth magnitude; a bright star such as Vega is # magnitudes; the planet Venus at maximum brightness is magnitude # and visible in full daylight if you know exactly where to look.) The second outburst of T Cor Bor was first seen on Feb. #, #, when its magnitude was #. On both occasions the star fell below naked-eye visibility after about a week. But the light curves from telescopic observations for both # and # were remarkably similar. The # position of T Cor Bor was RA I # h #I , Dec. #. I N. How does precession affect the position of objects in this part of the sky? Using an approximate formula we find RA (# b.c.) #h #ri, Dec. #.# N. The latitude of Bethlehem is #.#. Thus in # B. c., T Cor Bor would have passed through the zenith of Bethlehem. (The exact agreement between the latitude of Bethlehem and the declination of T Cor Bor in # b. c. is purely accidental and of no significance whatever.) Since we used the approximate instead of the rigorous formulae in calculating the precession for T Cor Bor, it is desirable to have some check on our results. Fortunately we have an easy test. Theory shows that precession changes the RA, Dec., and celestial longitude of an object, but not its celestial latitude. That is, the celestial latitude of T Cor Bor in # should be the same as its celestial latitude in # b. c. Applying this check we find. Celestial latitude T Cor Bor (#);#.#. Celestial latitude T Cor Bor (# B.C.):#-# -- which is as good agreement as we can expect from such rough work. K nowing the right ascension of T Cor Bor in # b. c., allows us to make a guess at the date of Jesus' birth. Suppose Jesus were born at # p. M., local apparent time, when T Cor Bor at RA #h #" was on the meridian of Bethlehem. This would make the RA of the sun #h #, which would have been in early June. But, as mentioned earlies, there is no actual evidence to indicate that Jesus was born in winter rather than summer. Finally, the appearance of a new star in Corona Borealis, a constellation representing a crown or halo, might have had a symbolic effect in heralding the birth of the new king. If...... T Cor Bor is the star of Bethlehem, then this famous object may still be observed today. With a suitable star chart it can be identified as a faint star (magnitude # currently) in the field of a three-inch telescope. Will T Cor Bor blaze up again? I should say it almost certainly will. When? Tomorrow night? Next year? The next century? Nobody knows. Rev. Ronald E. Royer St. Frances Catholic Church Azusa, California T he Christian belief that the Supreme Being entered His natural world to raise us above our natural condition certainly leaves room for God to use a natural phenomenon to announce this supernatural event. Though it is easier to describe the Star of Bethlehem as a total miracle, to do so does not seem quite in line with the nature of the total event of the Incarnation, which is a fusion of the natural and the supernatural. So I find Richardson's review of this problem as orthodox as it is resourceful. As a parish priest I am an amateur in Scripture research as well as in astronomy. ' But my readings do indicate that the nonJewish world knew of the Jewish expectation of a Messiah because of the ancient prophecies. The "Magi," who lived somewhere to the East were among those awaiting some sign of the coming of the Messiah. What better sign for them than a new star in the heavenly crown, Corona Borealis? We know that a crown was a sign of kingship at that time since Jesus Christ received one for His proclaimed kingship, though it was of thorns. Unfortunately we do not know how these Magi read the circlet of stars -- but if they did read it as a crown the new star's position in the constellation as well as its declination would be most significant for them. So Richardson's nomination of T Cor Bor stands this test pretty well. But how does T Cor Bor stand the more difficult test of the second appearance recorded by Saint Matthew, Chapter #, vs. #? It fails perfectly. T Cor Bor just isn't visible long enough. Of course the other candidates for the Star of Bethlehem fail this test also, but not as perfectly as T Cor Bor. From this and the action of the star leading the Magi to the dwelling of the Holy Family, those who do admit of a natural celestial phenomenon's starting the Magi out on their journey tend to believe that the second appearance was miraculous, pure and simple. But as I studied the light curve of T Cor Bor (page #) I became intrigued by the secondary maximum some four months after outburst. In our very limited experience with recurrent novae -- and especially in this area -- this secondary outburst has not reached naked-eye visibility. But could it vary -- could it have done so for the Magi? If God willed, yes. But a variation in its natural cycle may also be possible. Assuming then that T Cor Bor did again reach naked-eye visibility for the Magi, the four-month interval fits well with the preparation and travel time required for the Magi. We know that they came no sooner than forty days after the birth of Christ since the purification period Saint Luke talks about is forty days (Luke #:#). Herod's massacre of the Innocents actually indicates an arrival of several months after the birth of Christ. So we still have T Cor Bor in the running, but how about the star's having led the Magi to Bethlehem? Matthew #:# tells us that the ardent prophecies did that, not the star. Its reappearance only confirmed that they were on the right track. The real difficulty here is that Matthew seems to have the star actually leading to the dwelling of the Holy Family, an impossibility for any extraterrestrial object. If T Cor Bor is our Star of Bethlehem we have to read Matthew #:# as a layman's description of a zenith passage. In that case, it is not too far-fetched to consider that the inhabitants of Bethlehem pointed out to the Magi the exact place where lived the child whose birth had caused such a stir a few months back. Maybe I am stretching the biblical text a little bit to fit T Cor Bor into this new theory. Please excuse me, but I have made many estimates of the brightness of T Cor Bor in the past nineteen years for the American Association of Variable Star Observers. I was very much excited when Robert Richardson talked to me about its candidacy -- could I all this time have been seeing the actual star of Bethlehem? At any rate, those who look closely at the stars and think about them may still be led to adore the Lord as were these mysterious heaven-gazers from out of the East. # ) # # I II #I I II #I #I # # # # # # # # # # # ! curve as observed in the year #. The heavy line is the mean light-curve for the #, the dots representing the observational points. The dashed line is the # curve corrected for an M-type companion of magnitude #. The first point, for February #, is an observation by Armin Deutsch . -- Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific I The Birth of Environmental Quality Magazine Aside from naming some of our more celebrated contributors such as Ray Bradbury, Paul Ehrlich, Jacques Cousteau and Paolo Soleri, and mentioning a few interesting ideas like solar energy, organic burial, Wankel engines and cryogenic sperm banks, there is very little that space permits us to say about the environmental struggle except we're in it up to our gas masks. Send for your Complimentary Copy Now! r Environmental Quality Magazine #I # Burbank Blvd.  North Hollywood, Calif. #I # issues -- # Name Address (Please Print) You may cancel within # days after receiving your free copy --  and owe nothing. L Bin Me n Check Enclosed Story opens with undercover agent with southeast Oregon scenery while keeping a careful watch on an innocuous farmhouse through powerful binoculars. Some distance away his keeps the farm under electronic and radar surveillance from a specially equipped van camper. Ostensibly loving husband and wife on a camper if anyone should ask. He is, however, chilled by a growing awareness that he is the only life form -- other than plants -- in the vicinity of the farm. There are no birds, no animals small or large, not even insects around. Adding to his unease is the knowledge that his predecessor, while watching this same lack-life farm. Carlos knows, of course, that noted for making documentary films about insects. He is also suspected of being in the process of developing a superweapon that would give world dominion to any nation possessing it -- and no one is quite sure of weapon is described as a " toroidal field disruptor," is capable of altering matter over great distances and its existence has been deduced from specificaThe specs were labeled: Project #. Government "Agency" so top-secret it has no other name. It is headed by a man equally nameless, who is responsible only to the President -- not even to God. His aide is totally ruthless, physically powerful, top-level What the Agency does not know is that Hellstrom heads a #-year-old cult of humans who have patterned their culture, genetics and thought processes upon those of insects as a survival measure. Bred for intelligence, cult members have infiltrated society at large at all levels of authority, including branches of Government. subjects lives underground in the honeycombed hill -- or Hive -- under main objective for centuries has been to become impregnable. Its weaponry and science surpass anything found outside. Each individual in it is an experti bred for a single specialty for generations. Life expectancy in the Hive is several times the "wild" human lifespan. tured by the Hive and the Agency sends the latest disappearance. XI General memo from Joseph Merrivale: Whether Porter, Depeaux and Grinelli are actually dead is unimportant for these present considerations. Although we presume they are dead, nothing is changed if they are only missing. We have learned that Hellstrom will not hesitate to act against us. In view of his frequent overseas trips, ostensibly in pursuit of his insect films, a renewed effort to assess his foreign contacts is indicated. His ruthless actions bear a certain familiar stamp. On the home front the problem is more complex. Because we cannot admit the purposes that prompted our investigation we cannot now proceed through ordinary channels. Suggestions on alternate procedures will be welcomed. Destroy this entire message immediately after reading. This is mandatory. Do it now. (Appended comment by Dzule Peruge with cover -- for the Chiefs eyes only: Nuts! I'm opening several straightforward inquiries. I want an examination of that film company along every avenue we can open. My approach in Oregon will be to launch a missing-person inquiry through assistance will be solicited. Your help there would be appreciated. -- Dzule.) subject of their companions in this project until he and Clovis were on the plane headed west. He had chosen seats well forward of the others and on the left side. The window beside him gave a good view of a sensational sunset over the left wing, but he ignored it. As expected, he and Clovis had been ordered to assume teenage guise -- and Nick Myerlie, whom both of them considered to be an ineffectual ass, had been named to cover as their father. What none of them had expected was that Janvert would be selected for the numbertwo spot in charge of the outing. He and Clovis held their heads close together, speaking in barely audible whispers. "I don't like it," Janvert said. "Peruge will hit the ceiling and choose someone else once we're in the field." "What good would that do him?" "I don't know, but you wait and see. Tomorrow at the latest." "This arrangement could be in recognition of your sterling qualities." "Shit!" "Don't you want the second spot?" "Not on this merry-go-round." His lips set in a stubborn line. "This one's a nasty." "You think they're looking for a scapegoat?" "Don't you?" "It's possible. How do you get along with Peruge?" "Not badly, considering." "Considering what?" "The fact that he doesn't trust me." "Eddie!" One of their teammates took this moment to wander past, headed for the forward toilets. The teammate was an ex-gunner from the Vietnam war (he called it "Nam") named Daniel Thomas Alden and everyone called him DT. Janvert remained silent while DT passed, noting the hard, youthful face, the square and deeply tanned line of jaw. There was a white scar at the bridge of his nose and he affected a flight cap with transparent green visor that imparted a dark green cast to his face. Janvert suspected DT of being a spy for the brass. Rumor had it he was shacking up with Tymiena, and Janvert found himself suddenly wondering what the younger man was thinking now. As he passed, DT glanced at Janvert, but gave no sign of recognition. Janvert whispered, "Do you suppose DT enjoys this work?" "Why?" "You'd think he would find it a bit more constraining than an actual war -- not as many chances to kill people." "Sometimes you're too damned bitter." "And you shouldn't be on this assignment at all, honey," Janvert said, "Why didn't you beg off?" "I thought you might need someone to defend you." "The way you did last night?" She ignored the allusion, asked, "Have you heard the talk about DT and Tymiena?" "Yes. I almost feel sorry for him." "You think she's -- gone?" "I don't want to think about it -- but yes, I do." "But why? Couldn't they all Just be -- held somewhere?" "I can smell death in this one. Those missing people were the shock troops. You expect casualties with shock troops." "What are we then?" "With Peruge along? I don't know. I'll tell you when I find out how he deploys us." "Front line or rear?" "Right." "Aren't they going to serve dinner on this flight?" she asked. "Those stewardi are too interested in getting our 'elders' drunk." "That's one of the things I hate about playing the kiddie role," she whispered. "I can't ask for a drink." "I hate the makeup," he said. "I'll bet they don't feed us before Nebraska." "This is a bean-and-cod special," she said. "They'll give us fishballs and haricot. Are you still feeling low?" "Honey, forget some of the things I said last night. I was feeling like the very end." "To be strictly accurate, there were two of us in that mood. It's probably the phase of the moon." "I still don't know a good reason why I was named Number Two on this case -- do you?" "None I'm sure of" And almost as an afterthought: "The others are pretty old." "All the more reason -- I mean, why would they want a younger agent in command?" "Youth must have its day," she whispered and bent to nibble his ear. "Knock it off, darling. The old goat right behind me is trying to eavesdrop." Janvert knew better than to glance back at once, but he straightened presently and glanced around the crowded aircraft. The lights were on now and it was dark outside -- each window was a patch of black. The white-haired old man behind Clovis was reading Time while drinking a whiskey over ice. He looked up as Janvert turned around, but immediately went back to his magazine and drink. Janvert could not recall ever having seen him before -- still, the old man could be spying for someone. Angrily Janvert sank back into his seat, bent close to Clovis. "Honey, we've got to break away from this racket. There must be a country somewhere that would be safe for us. There must be some place where the Agency can't reach us." "The other side?" "You know what that would mean -- more of the same only in a foreign language. No -- we need a nice tidy little foreign country where we can blend into the population without being noticed. It has to exist somewhere on this dirty planet." "You're thinking about DT and Tymiena." "I'm thinking about you and me. "He's listening again," she whispered. Janvert folded his arms and sank into a sullen silence. It was going to be a bitch of a flight all the way to Portland. He resigned himself to it. Later, when Nick Myerlie came past and bent over them to ask; "You kids getting along okay?" Janvert merely growled at him. Inter-Hive Memo -- Project #: The heat problem remains severe. Our latest model melted before becoming fully operational. Secondary resonance was measurable, however, and it was climbing toward the expected peaks. If the proposed new cooling techniques are successful we should get our first fully operational tests within the month. The test is sure to cause manifestations that will be noticeable Outside. At the minimum we can expect a new island to appear in the Pacific Ocean somewhere off Japan. out of Dulles and was forced to accept coach, which compounded his annoyance over the conference with Merrivale. The Chief had insisted he have that meeting, however, and Peruge had seen no good way to avoid it. He had driven over to Operations after preparing the way with a call and had met Merrivale in the latter's office. The gloves had been off right from the beginning. Merrivale had glanced up without change of expression as Peruge strode into the office. There was a pinched up, frightened look around Merrivale's eyes and Peruge thought. He knows he's been nominated for patsy. Peruge seated himself across from Merrivale in one of the big leather chairs, indicated a folder on the desk. "You're reviewing the reports, I see. Found any holes in them yet?" Merrivale obviously thought the question put him at a disadvantage. "My reports are precisely fitted to the circumstances for which they were made." The pompous bastard! Peruge was well aware that his presence annoyed Merrivale. It always did. Peruge was physically a big man -- many said he would be gross if he ever let himself go to fat. But he possessed a softly sinister grace of movement which, coupled with his size, never failed to irritate Merrivale. "The Chief wanted me to ask you why you gave second spot on the assignment to that little shrimp, Janvert," Peruge said, needling Merrivale again. "Because he's long overdue for responsibility." "He's not trustworthy." "Nonsense!" "Why didn't you delay and let me appoint my own second?" "No sense in delay. The briefing had to proceed." "So you rushed into another mistake," Peruge said. His voice conveyed a sense of calm, superior knowledge. That mention of the Chief had been telling. Merrivale's face darkened. "Why are you going out to Oregon yourself?" "The answer to that is obvious, given the situation." "What situation?" "Three of our best people have been lost." Merrivale nodded. Then: "You spoke of something important to discuss with me. What is it?" "Several things. First, that memo you circulated indicated that we were unsure of our next step in this case. The Chief was rather upset by that." Merrivale actually paled. "We -- the circumstances -- " Peruge interrupted as though he hadn't heard Merrivale. "Second, we are concerned about the instructions you gave those three agents. It seems strange to us that -- " "I followed my bloody orders to the letter!" Merrivale said, slamming a hand onto the folder. The story of his life, Peruge thought. He said, "There are rumors that Tymiena didn't like this assignment." Merrivale sniffed, managed to look unimpressed. "They always object and then talk about it behind my back. What good are rumors?" "I got enough hints to convince me she may have had a valid objection to the way things were being handled. Did she talk about specific objections." "We talked, yes. She thought we should go in openly after Porter -- make a more official approach." "Why?" "It was just a feeling she had, nothing more." Merrivale made feeling sound like a peculiar female foible. "That feeling appears to have been accurate. You should have listened to her." "She was always having those crazy hunches," Merrivale objected. "She didn't like working with Carlos, for one thing." "So she did have specific objections. Why did she object to Carlos?" "I'm only guessing, but I presume he has made objectionable advances to her at some time. At any rate, that wasn't the kind of quibble we tolerate in the Agency. They know the work they're called upon to do and what it may entail." Peruge just stared at him. Merrivale's face was an open page, his thoughts written across it for anyone to read: They're blaming me for these losses. Why are they blaming me? I only did what they told me to do. Before Merrivale could begin giving voice to these thoughts Peruge said, "There is pressure from farther up the line and we're going to have some explaining to do. Your part in this comes in for particular questioning." picture now -- there was pressure from higher up and someone was being, prepared as sacrificial goat. That goat was named Joseph Merrivale. The fact that he had successfully protected himself on many similar occasions did not ease his pain at finding himself today's target. "This is not fair," Merrivale growled. "It is simply not fair." "I'd like you to recount as much as you remember of your last conversation with Tymiena," Peruge said. "Everything." Merrivale took a moment to regain his composure. Then; "Everything?" "Yes." "Very well." Merrivale's mind was neatly organized and could reproduce most conversations from memory. He was hampered this time, however, by the necessity of screening every scrap through a self-protective analysis. He lost his fake British accent as he proceeded. Peruge found this amusing. Presently Peruge interrupted: "So she went looking for Carlos." "Yes. Carlos was in Archives, I believe." Merrivale wiped perspiration from his forehead. "It's too bad we don't have her here to question," Peruge said. "I've told you everything." "Oh, I believe you," Peruge said. He shook his head. "But there still was something. She had read the reports and -- " He shrugged. "Agents do die in the line of duty," Merrivale argued. "Of course, of course," Peruge said. "Such occurrences are perfectly ordinary." Merrivale scowled, obviously thinking the facts were being twisted to damn him. "Carlos had no similar objections?" Peruge asked. "None whatsoever." Peruge pursed his lips in thought. Damnable business! So the little clerk had finally bought it. His legendary caution had failed him at last. Unless that caution had somehow pulled him through. Carlos might still be alive. Somehow Peruge did not give much weight to this possibility. The first pawn had been taken, then the second and the third. Now it was time for a more powerful piece. He asked, "Did Carlos and Tymiena quarrel about this job?" "Perhaps." "What does that mean?" "They were always snapping at each other. Who noticed after a while?" "And we don't have them here to ask," Peruge mused. "I don't need reminders of that." "Do you recall what Carlos said when you last saw him?" "Certainly. He told me he would report within forty-eight hours of his arrival on the scene." "Did they have radio?" "There was one in the van they picked up in Portland. They called in to check the equipment. That was from Klamath Falls. Portland relayed." "Forty-eight hours, huh?" Peruge muttered. "Why did he ask for that time spread?" "He wanted a chance to get set up on the scene -- to reconnoiter the area and choose his observation site." "Yes, but -- " "That was not an unreasonable spread." "But Carlos was always so cautious." "This speaks of caution," Merrivale objected. "Why didn't you order him to make more frequent periodic calls?" "It did not seem indicated." Peruge shook his head from side to side. It was diabolic. A pack of amateurs would not have left this many loose ends and blunders behind them. Merrivale would admit no mistakes, though. And the man had those explicit orders to fall back on. Embarrassing. He would have to be shunted aside, though. He would have to be stored somewhere until the axe fell. Merrivale was a miserable incompetent. There was no excuse for him. He was just the kind of man Peruge needed right now, someone to point to when the really embarrassing questions were asked. With angry abruptness Peruge pushed himself out of the chair, stood glowering down at Merrivale, who appeared thoroughly cowed. "You're a fool, Merrivale," Peruge said in a cold, hard voice. "You've always been a fool and always will be. We have a full report on Tymiena's objections from DT. She wanted a backup team. She wanted frequent radio contact. You specifically told her not to bother Portland-relay unless the message was something vital. You told her she was to take her orders from Carlos and not to question them. You ordered her not to mount any official inquiry into what happened to Porter. Under no circumstances was she to move out from under her cover. Those were your instructions." Peruge pointed to the folder on Merrivale's desk. "And you had read that!" Merrivale sat in shocked silence at the outburst. For a horrible moment he appeared about to cry. His eyes glistened with unshed tears. But he managed to respond with a semblance of his accent once more intact. "I say -- you don't leave your opinions in any doubt -- " j the airport, Peruge said, "I suppose we ought to be grateful to him. There's no doubt now of the situation we're in." "What do you mean by that?" the Chief asked, his voice disgruntled. "I mean that we went in without knowing Hellstrom's situation. play for high stakes." "As though we weren't." "Well, I've settled with Merrivale, at any rate. I ordered him to stand by for reassignment." "He won't do anything stupid?" "Hasn't he done enough stupid things already?" "You know what I mean, dammit!" "I think he'll obey his orders to the letter," Peruge said. "But you upset him badly." It was a statement, not a question. "No doubt of it." This was an unfamiliar tack and Peruge hesitated, staring thoughtfully at his scrambler cap on the telephone. "He's been on the phone to me," the Chief said. "He complained about you bitterly. Then he said he was putting our written instructions to him in a safe place. He also made a point of telling me that he had given Janvert the special signal corps number and code letters, as per our instructions for supervising agents. He even quoted the section to me from some set of orders we gave him years ago." After a long silence Peruge said, "We might have to take stronger measures with him." "Yes, there's always that," the Chief said. The words of Nils Hellstrom: Unlike man whose physical limitations are dictated from the moment of his birth, the insect is born with the actual ability to improve upon his body. When he reaches the limits of his capability he miraculously transforms into an entirely new being. It is in this metamorphosis that I find the most basic pattern for my understanding of the Hive. To me the Hive is a cocoon from which the new human will emerge. H ellstrom sat thinking in his cell. His eyes were absently aware of the charts and diagrams pasted over his walls, the reassuring standby blink of his repeater console. But he was not actually seeing these things. They'll send in the first team now, he thought. They were just probing before. Now we'll get the real experts and from them we may learn enough to save ourselves. It had been a long night and a longer day. He had managed to get a two-hour nap, but the Hive was tense and twanging with crisis awareness. Body chemistry told the workers what was happening if nothing else told them. When he had returned to his cell a little more than two hours earlier Hellstrom had been so tired he had tossed his Outsider jacket onto a chair and just flopped on the bed in his clothes. Something heavy in a pocket of the jacket had been left hanging over an edge, however, and had dragged the jacket into a mound on the floor beside the chair. He could see the lump of the heavy object and abruptly remembered the Outsider pistol he had picked up before leaving his cell -- how long ago? The incident not only seemed to belong to another lifetime -- but to another universe. Everything had changed. Powerful Outside forces had developed an interest in something that was sure to lead them to the Hive. Project #. The source of the leak appeared so innocent on the surface that Hellstrom shivered when he thought about it. Jerry, one of the cameramen, had been assigned to that assignment, had been charged to do a special research project in the library. He remembered leaving the papers on a table "for no more than a half-hour." They had been in the same place when he had returned and he had collected them, thought no more about it. An innocent slip. But it had been all the Outsiders needed. They seemed to possess a malevolent genie who watched out to take advantage of such casual mistakes. Jerry was heartsick. He felt that he had betrayed his beloved Hive. And he had. But an accident had been bound to happen some day. The miracle was that the Hive had endured so long undetected. The peace of anonymity had its own life cycle, apparently. Peace at any price never quite worked out the way one hoped. There was always a higher price to pay. Feeling nervous and quite irritable -- emotions he knew his body would transmit like an invisible trail all along the way, but somehow not caring -- Hellstrom arose suddenly, went down to check on Project #. The Hive had to speed things up down there. It had to! Coded memo from Peruge: For the time being I will not change Janvert's assignment. We must consider the delicate problem of a replacement for Merrivale. Certain aspects of Janvert's enrollment in the Agency appeal to me in this regard. Our hold upon him could be made very firm. There appears to be no doubt of our observation that a strong attachment has developed between Janvert and Clovis Carr. This could be worked to our advantage. To be on the safe side I have commissioned D. T. Alden to keep a special watch on both of them. A copy of his report will be forwarded to you. on the bed of the motel room on the outskirts of Fosterville. He had allowed himself only one small bag and a camera case with his communications gear. The camera case he draped over a chair arm. It was the way he liked to travel -- bags under the airplane seat, no airport fuss, in and out of an area with as little attention called to himself as possible. In spite of his six feet four inches of height, he knew he tended not to attract second glances. He had learned long ago a self-effacing diffidence of manner he could adopt when he needed it. He tended to put it on like a garment when traveling. It had taken him all morning to get the backup teams positioned in the mountains north of town, where they could operate line-of-sight communication to both his motel room and the observers at the farm. He was hungry for lunch, but there were things to be done first. He glanced around the room. It had been furnished in Grand Rapids Western -- dark wood with imitation brand burns, a heavy-wear fabric for all upholstery. The place reeked of expense-account minimums. He sighed, dropped into a chair that creaked under his weight. One big hand found the telephone on the lamp table beside the chair and he dialed the motel office. Yes, they knew the number for the office of the local deputy sheriff. Was there trouble? Peruge explained that he had been asked by his company to make a missing-person inquiry. Mere routine. He had to listen to an involved explanation about the town's having only one deputy, but a good one, mind you. The sheriffs office was actually over at the county seat. Presently, by answering all of the probing, curious questions with monosyllabic grunts, Peruge got the number he wanted and the motel office made the connection for him. Two minutes later he was discussing his problem with Deputy Lincoln Kraft, a man with a flat, almost characterless voice. "We're reasonably sure they're missing," Peruge insisted. "Carlos was supposed to be back at work Monday and today's Friday. That's not like him. Very punctual, our Carlos." "His wife, too, eh?" Kraft made this sound accusatory. "Men often take their wives with them on vacation," Peruge said. He wondered then if that had been too flip for the local law. Kraft apparently missed the sarcasm. He said, "Yes, I guess they do at that. Seems kind of strange your company would send you looking around for these people, though." "Carlos has one of our most important routes," Peruge explained. "We can't let that sort of thing go by default. The competition moves right in on you, you know." "Guess that's right. What line of work did you say you were in?" Kraft asked. "I'm vice president of the Blue Devil Fireworks Corporation of Baltimore. It's one of the biggest in the country. Carlos was one of our best salesmen." "Was?" Kraft asked. "You got reasons you haven't told me that make you believe he's in real bad trouble?" "Nothing specific," Peruge lied. "If s just that it isn't like him not to show up when he's supposed to." "I see. Probably some real ordinary explanation behind this, but I'll see what I can do. What makes you think he's missing in this area?" "I received a letter from him. It mentioned a valley near Fosterville where he was going to look for scaled quail." "For what?" "Scaled quail. It's a bird that lives in arid land." "Is he a hunter? He might have had a hunting accident and not been able to -- " "He didn't hunt birds to kill them. He liked to watch them and study them -- sort of an amateur ornithologist." "Oh, one of those." Kraft made the hobby sound faintly disreputable, perhaps reflecting on the man's sex habits. "What's the name of this valley?" "Guarded Valley. Do you know where it is?" Such a long silence ensued that Peruge became impatient. "You still there, Mr. Kraft?" he asked. "Yeah, I'm still here." "Do you know that valley?" "Yeah. Sort of. That's Hellstrom's place." "Whose place?" Peruge rather liked the fine air of misunderstanding he managed to impart to this question. "That's Doc Hellstrom's place. He owns that valley. Been in his family for years." "I see. Well, perhaps this medical gentleman won't mind if we make inquiries in his neighborhood." "He's not a hospital doctor," Kraft said. "He's a bug doctor. He studies bugs. Makes moving pictures about 'em." "That shouldn't make any difference," Peruge said. "Will you see to the inquiries, Mr. Kraft?" "You gotta come in and sign a formal request," Kraft said. "Missing-person report. I got one of the forms around here some place. We haven't had a missing person since the Angelas kid got herself lost on Steens Mountain. That wasn't the same thing as your problem, of course. Didn't need a missing-person report for that." response, beginning to wonder about this deputy. The Agency's files showed quite a number of missing persons in the area over a period of some fifty years. All instances had reasonable explanations, but still -- He decided that Kraft sounded nervous under that flat voice. Perhaps a little fishing would be in order. Peruge said, "I hope this doctor's place isn't dangerous. He doesn't have poisonous insects around, does he?" "Might have a scorpion or two," Kraft said, his voice brightening. "They can be mighty bad sometimes. You got pictures of these missing persons?" "I have a photograph of Carlos and his wife -- one he kept on his desk." "That's fine. Bring that along with you. Did you say they were in a camper?" "They had one of those big van campers -- a Dodge. Carlos was very proud of it." "Doesn't seem a thing like that could just disappear." Peruge agreed with him, asked how to find the deputy's office. "You got a car?" Kraft asked. "I rented one back in Klamath Falls." "This Carlos fellow must be pretty important to your company." "I've already told you he is," Peruge said, allowing a trace of testiness to appear in his voice. "They fly you all the way out here from Baltimore just to inquire about him?" Peruge took the handset away from his ear, stared at it. What gave with this country cop? He put the instrument back to his ear, said, "Carlos covered the whole West Coast for us. It's important that we find out about him as soon as possible. If something's happened to him we have to replace him immediately. The buying season is about to begin. I've already talked to the state patrol in Salem. They told me to contact the authorities here." "Thought you said you got a car in Klamath Falls," Kraft said. "I went that far by chartered plane," Peruge said and waited with increasing interest for Kraft's response. "Chartered plane? My, my. You could have flown right here and landed on our little dirt strip if you'd wanted. Why didn't you do that?" So both of us are fishing, Peruge thought. Good. He wondered what Kraft's response would be if the explanation included an account of how Peruge had missed connections in Portland and had been forced to rendezvous with his people in Klamath Falls. "I don't like these little country landing fields," Peruge said. "Can't say I blame you much for that, but this is a nice enough little field. You file a report with the state police in Salem?" Kraft's tone was alert and probing. Good interrogation technique, Peruge thought. This country cop was no simpleton. "Yes, I did. Carlos had his van shipped to Portland for this vacation and took it from there. The state police are making inquiries along the way. They have copies of this photograph." "I see. Fireworks must be big business," Kraft said. "You people are spending a lot of money -- chartered airplanes and everything." Peruge considered this, decided a barb was called for. He said, "We look after our people and hang the cost, Mr. Kraft. I hope you'll start your inquiries as soon as possible. Now, how do I get to your office?" "You're at the motel, eh?" "Yes." Kraft told him to come out of his motel parking lot, turn right "like you were going to Lakeview" and come out to county road #. "Hang a left there and come up to the new shopping center. You can see it from the highway. I got a little office on the second floor. Everybody knows where it's at." "I'll be right over," Peruge said. "Just a minute, Mr. Peruge," Kraft said. "You carrying any skyrockets or firecrackers -- things like that?" "Of course not." Peruge managed to sound properly shocked while noting that Kraft had his name down correctly and was obviously on the official offensive. Did they think him unaware of state laws on fireworks? He said, "We ship only through legal channels. Deputy Kraft. Our people carry photographs and order lists. If we broke laws we wouldn't be in business very long. I find your question interesting, however." "Just want to be sure you know our law," Kraft explained. "We don't take it kindly when people come around saying one of our folks may have caused harm to a visitor. You gotta be mighty -- " "I didn't even suggest that," Peruge interrupted. "I take it as very interesting that you suggest it, however. Deputy Kraft. You can expect me in your office in just a few minutes." Silence. Then; "Okay. Don't forget that picture." "I wouldn't think of it." Peruge sat staring at the telephone for a moment after hanging up. Presently he placed a call to Salem and told the state patrol he had talked by telephone with Deputy Sheriff Lincoln Kraft and asked if the patrol had anything to report. They had nothing to report. He called the Baltimore switchboard next and asked them to agreed upon as a code signal that he distrusted the local authorities and his office was to firm up the request He depressed the stem on his wristwatch transmitter then and felt the faint throbbing against his skin that told him the teams at the Steens Mountain campsites were on the job and monitoring his signal. Everything was in order. Time to begin bearding Hellstrom in his den. The words of Nils Hellstrom: The living prototype of the computer was designed by nature long before man ever set foot on Earth. It is nothing more nor less than the termite mound, one of the first experiments in social order. It is a living reminder that all may not be as man would wish it among the life forms that share this planet with him. We all know, of course, that compared with man the insect does not display what we could describe as intelligence. But why should we feel proud about that? Where there is no intelligence there may be no stupidity. And the termite mound stands as a living accusation, a finger pointed at our pride. A computer is a mechanism programed with a thousand tiny bits of information. It operates by juggling information into a form of logic. Think about it. Is a beautifully functioning society not a form of logic? I say that the creatures of such a mound, each a bit of the whole, move through their hidden circuits, thousands of tiny particles of information organizing themselves into an indisputable form of logic. Their source of power is a broodmother, a queen. She represents a great throbbing mass of energy, motivating all around her with her insatiable need. Thus our Hive rests firmly on its breeding chambers. Within the queen's pulsating body lies the future of the mound. Within our breeding chambers lies our future and, in truth, the future of humankind. K raft called the farm as soon as Peruge had broken the connection. He had Hellstrom on the line within a minute. "Nils, there's a fellow at the motel named Peruge. Says he's from the Blue Devil Fireworks Company and he's looking for a missing salesman and the salesman's wife. Missing in your area. Says he has a letter from the salesman that mentions Guarded Valley. Should we know anything about that?" "I told you to expect this," Hellstrom said. "I know, but this fellow sounds very sharp. He's already talked to the state patrol and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he called in the "Don't you think you can handle him?" "I may've made him suspicious." "How?" "I kept probing for some kind of admission from him that this wasn't an ordinary missing persons case. He's on his way over here right now. Says he has a pholograph of the missing couple. sure to get another one. Somebody's bound to have seen this pair and the search is going to center right here." "Nobody will find anything at the farm," Hellstrom said. He sounded sad and tired, and Kraft felt the first nigglings of a deeper concern. "I sure hope you're right. What should I do?" "Do? Cooperate with him in every way. Take the photograph. Come up here to inquire." "Nils, I don't like this. I hope you're -- " "I'm trying to keep the interface of our conflict as small as possible. Line. That is my most urgent concern." "Yes, but what if he asks to tag along?" "I hope he does." "But -- " "Bring him." "Nils, if I bring him up there with me -- I hope he's coming back with me." "That is our concern. Line." "Nils -- I'm real worried. If he -- " "I'll handle it myself. Line. We'll have everything smooth and ordinary here when you arrive." "I sure hope so." "How did he get to Fosterville, Line?" "Rented car." "Is he alone?" "I don't think so. There are several new campers up on the mountain." "We noted the activity. Rented car, eh?" "Look, Nils, this guy had better not have an accident in that car. I got a funny feeling about this one. He's big trouble." "No doubt of it," Hellstrom agreed. "They've sent in the first team." From the Hive breeding record: This new group must be watched with extreme care. This includes all of the breeding batch designated Fractionated Actinomycin Nucleotide Complex Y-series great potential in several specializations the Hive needs desperately it may harbor a strain of instability. This instability may be evidenced in a heightened breeding drive, in which case it can be diverted to the Hive's advantage. However, other symptoms may crop up and should be reported to Breeding Central immediately. H ellstrom sat in reflective silence after the emergency meeting of his Council. He felt that the entire Hive had become what he imagined a hunted submarine to be -- rigged for silent running. All power systems, including ventilation, were operating at minimums. Water interchange with the deep underground river that ran the turbines and was the Hive's major water source had been put under special observation to prevent anything from entering it that might arouse Outside suspicions when that water reached the Snake River system. How much did Peruge and his cohorts know about Project #? Hellstrom wondered. The question had been left unanswered by the Council meeting. The Outsiders could not know everything about Project #, nor was it likely they knew anything about the Hive as yet. Hellstrom felt confident of this. At the barest suspicion that something like the Hive existed they would be in here with an army. Some accommodation had to be reached with these Outsiders before they learned too much. The deaths were regrettable, but they had followed as an inevitable consequence of Porter's death. That had been an error. We lived too long in the security of our camouflage, he thought. We became too bold. Making films caused that -- and all the necessary intimate arrangements with Outsiders that grew out of the films. We underestimated the Outsiders. Hellstrom suppressed a weary sigh. He missed Old Harvey. The present security team was a good one, but Old Harvey had possessed a special ability, a balancing wisdom. The Hive needed him now more than ever and all they had of Old Harvey's legacy was his favorite protege, Saldo. Did Saldo represent what came out of the vats new? Saldo had undergone a profound maturing since the night of the hunt. The transformation appeared to Hellstrom in some ways to resemble a metamorphosis. It was as though Saldo had really inherited Old Harvey's wide experience and wisdom on that fatal night. Hellstrom knew he was leaning on Saldo for the same kind of support he had learned to expect from Old Harvey. Whether Saldo could bear up under these demands remained to be seen. So far he had imagination, but Hellstrom shook his head. It was difficult to lean on such a young and untried member of the New Breed in a crisis. But whom else did he have? The Council meeting had started at noon in a screening room that occupied one entire corner of the barn studio. It was a room of outwardly conventional appearance -- oval table flanked by massive chairs. Hive-made of heavy extrusion plastic to counterfeit teak. A pulldown screen filled one end of the room. Speakers on each side of it clung to the high ceiling corners. A small double-glass window at the other end looked into the projection room. The walls were baffled and hung with loosely draped fabric to dampen sounds. others at Hellstrom's request. The bullet scar along his jawline had not completely healed. It stood out whitely against his dark skin. The hawkish features were relaxed, but there was a steady alertness in his brown eyes. Hellstrom recalled that Saldo was of the S # aI Series on the male side -- this made him one of Hellstrom's cousins. The younger man had been picked from prime drone stock, the source of all the breeding males. He had been subjected to all of the proper chemical reinforcements. And now Saldo represented a nice convergence of the functional traits upon which the Hive relied so heavily. "We must be preparedat every level to respond quickly and thoroughly if anything goes wrong," Hellstrom said, looking up and starting the conversation as though Saldo had shared the preceding reverie. "I have sent messages to all of our fronts Outside that they must be prepared to proceed on their own if we are lost. All records that allude to such fronts have been made ready for demolition." "But have we anticipated every contingency?" Saldo asked. "The question I've been asking myself." "I know." And Saldo thought: Our Prime Male is tried. He needs rest and we cannot give him that rest. Saldo felt at this moment extremely protective toward Hellstrom. "Peruge probably will be carrying special electronic equipment," Hellstrom said. "At the very least he'll be transmitting his position and condition to monitors Outside. I'm sure of it." "To those people on the mountain." "Yes. We must know the nature of his equipment as soon as possible." "I've made all the preparations," Saldo said. "Nils, shouldn't you get some rest?" "No time. Peruge is on his way and he's just the tip of the iceberg." "The what?" Hellstrom explained the allusion. Then: "How many people do you think he has on the mountain?" "There are at least ten people camping up there. They could all be his." "That many?" Hellstrom shook his head. Saldo nodded, sharing Hellstrom's disquiet. The idea of more than ten people at once snooping into the Hive's affairs created a profound disturbance of his inbred caution and conditioning. "Does Line have anyone he can send up the mountain to play camper with those others?" Saldo asked. "He's looking into it." "Line is bringing this Peruge personally, isn't he?" "Yes. But we mustn't assume that Peruge trusts Line." "Line was no match for this Peruge -- that's obvious," Saldo said. "I heard his account." "Learn from that," Hellstrom said. "It's good to have our Outside fronts include a deputy sheriff, but a front creates its own problems. The more we expose of ourselves the more danger we're in." Saldo tucked this lesson into his memory. One did not deploy agents with complete impunity. The very existence of an agent carried its own message when that agent was exposed. The very fact that Peruge could suspect Lincoln Kraft revealed something about the Hive. Saldo vowed to remember this lesson when the present crisis was past. He had no doubt that the Hive would surmount the present difficulties. His trust in the Prime Male, Hellstrom, was profound. "Peruge may possess a device to reveal that we're probing for his equipment," Hellstrom said. "I have given instructions to monitor for that eventuality," Saldo said. Hellstrom nodded, pleased. So far Saldo had anticipated every contingency that had arisen in Hellstrom's own mind -- and some that had not. Prime breeding stock always showed its worth in the crunch. Saldo possessed a penetrating intelligence. The younger male would be of inestimable value to the Hive when he had been tempered and fully trained. "What excuse have you prepared if he detects our probes?" Hellstrom asked. "I want to discuss that with you. Suppose, for the film in progress, we are making a sound-track with a great deal of complex mixing. It would be perfectly explainable electronic activity. The visit of this Peruge surely could not be expected to interrupt that. We have a schedule to keep. Any interference with Peruge's equipment could be explained by this work," Hellstrom nodded thoughtfully. "Excellent. And if I ask him when he arrives if he has a radio because -- " " -- a radio would interfere with our equipment," Saldo completed for him. "The question would be perfectly natural." "See to the cover preparations," Hellstrom said. Saldo arose, stood with his fingertips touching the table, hesitating. "Yes?" Hellstrom asked. "Nils, are we sure the others didn't have such equipment. I've been reviewing the tapes and records and -- " He shrugged, obviously loath to criticize. "We searched them. There was nothing." "That seems odd -- the fact that they didn't carry such equipment." "They weren't considered important enough," Hellstrom said. "They were sent in to see if they would be killed." "Ah." Saldo's expression betrayed both understanding and shock. "We should have understood that about Outsiders," Hellstrom said. "They are not very good humans, the wild ones. They commonly waste their workers this way. The ones who intruded here were expendable stock. I know now that it would have been far wiser for us to confuse them and send them away with a believable story." "It was a mistake to kill them?" "A mistake to make it necessary to kill them." Saldo nodded his understanding of the fine distinction. "We made a mistake," he said. "I made a mistake," Hellstrom corrected him. "Too much success made me careless. We must always keep the possibility in mind that any of us can err." The words of brood mother Trova Hellstrom: Let me introduce here a word about the quality we call caution. Where we say we have been and where we say the Hive is headed -- somewhere in that mysterious future -- is by necessity somewhat removed from what we imagine are facts. Our own interpretation always intervenes. What we say we are doing is inevitably modified by our own understanding and by the limits of our comprehension. First, we are partisan. We see everything in terms of Hive survival. Second, the Universe has a way of appearing to be one thing while it is actually something else. In this light caution becomes a reliance upon our deepest collective energies. We must trust the Hive itself to possess wisdom and to manifest that wisdom through us, its cells. on the lower road where Peruge could get his first look at Hellstrom's farm he asked Kraft to stop. The deputy brought his station wagon to a skidding, dusty halt, peered questioningly at his passenger. "Something wrong, Mr. Peruge?" Peruge merely tightened his lips. Kraft interested him. The deputy could have been type-cast for the role he played. It was almost as though someone had looked at him and said, Now, this one -- we'll make him the deputy. Kraft had a sunburned, western appearance, thick nose and beetling brows, pale yellow hair topped by a widebrimmed hat. His squarish features surmounted a blocky body which moved with a stiff-legged horseman's walk. Peruge had seen several people on Fosterville's one main street who looked vaguely like Lincoln Kraft. Kraft accepted Peruge's silent appraisal without qualms, secure in the knowledge that he was a Hivehybrid whose appearance could not possibly excite questions about alien background. Kraft's father had been a local rancher seduced in a gene foray by a breeding female. Many Fosterville locals had remarked on Kraft's resemblance to the father. Kraft cleared his throat and said, "Mr. Peruge, I said -- " "I know what you said." Peruge glanced at his wristwatch. Its hands stood at quarter to three. Every delay imaginable had been thrown in the way of this excursion -- telephone calls, careful examination of the missing-person report, a lengthy study of the photograph, question after question and a laborious assemblage of answers on paper, all executed in a slow and meticulous longhand. But here they were, finally, in sight of Hellstrom's farm. Peruge felt his pulse quicken. The air carried a dry, cloying silence. Even the insects were still. Peruge sensed something out of character about the stillness. He grew aware slowly of the absence of insect sounds, asked Kraft about this. Kraft pushed back his hat, rubbed a sleeve across his forehead. "I expect someone's used a spray." "Really? Does Hellstrom do that sort of thing? I thought all the environmentalists were against sprays." "How did you know the Doc was into ecology?" Sharp! Sharp! Peruge reminded himself. He said, "I didn't know it. I just assumed an entomologist would have that as one of his concerns." "Yeah? Well, maybe the Doc isn't spraying. This is rangeland right here." "Somebody else could be doing it?" "Maybe. Or the Doc could be doing something else. Did you have me stop just so you could listen?" "No. I want to get out and scout around the area and see if I can spot any sign of Carlos' camper." "Not much sense in that." Kraft spoke quickly with an undertone of sharpness. "Oh? Why?" "If we decide he's really been around here we'll do a thorough search." "I thought I told you," Peruge said. "I've already decided he was around here. I'd like to get out and have a little look at the area." "Doc don't like people wandering around his place." "But you said this was rangeland. Does he control it?" "Not exactly, but -- " "Then let's have a look." Peruge put a hand on the door. "You just wait a minute," Kraft ordered. Peruge nodded silently. He had found out what he wanted to know -- Kraft was here to block any investigation by strangers. "All right," Peruge said. "Does Hellstrom know we're coming?" K raft had put the station wagon in gear, prepared to resume their lurching progress toward the farm, but now he hesitated. Peruge's demand that they stop had shocked him. The first thought had been that the Outsider had seen something suspicious, something overlooked by the Hive's cleanup workers. Peruge's attempts to get out and search the area had done nothing to ease that initial disquiet. Now it occurred to Kraft that Peruge or his people might have tapped the telephone to the farm. But Hive Security was always wary of that -- surely it would have detected such an intrusion. "Matter of fact, he does know," Kraft said. "I called to make sure Doc was here himself. Sometimes he goes gadding off to mighty strange places. And I wanted to clear it that we were coming. You know how these scientists are." "No. How are they?" "They do experiments sometimes. Outsiders go blundering in and upset everything." "Is that why you don't want me to get out here?" Kraft spoke with obvious relief. "Sure it is. Besides, the Doc makes movies up here all the time. He gets a bit testy if you ruin his pictures. We try to be good neighbors." "You'd think he'd put out guards or something." "No. The locals all know about his work. We steer clear of his place." "How testy does he get if one ruins his experiments or his movies?" Peruge asked. "Does he -- ah -- shoot?" "Nothing like that. Doc wouldn't really hurt anybody. But he can be mighty rough-mouthed when he wants. He's got important friends, too. Pays to be on his good side." That he has, Peruge thought. And that could explain the strange behavior of the local law. Kraft's job must be a sinecure. He would be careful not to lose that sinecure. Peruge said, "Okay. Let's go see if we can find Dr. Hellstrom's good side." "Yes, sir!" Kraft got the car moving, made a special effort to act casual and unconcerned. Hellstrom's orders had been explicit: this was a routine investigation into some missing persons. All cooperation would be extended. Peruge admired the farm buildings as they approached the north fence. The farm had been built in a time when materials were squandered without any worries about the supply. There wasn't a knot in any of the lumber visible on this side of the farmhouse or the barn, although the wood had that dark gray of long weathering and probably could have used a coat of paint. Peruge wondered idly why the farm wasn't painted. Kraft stopped parallel to the fence and just clear of the gate, said, "We walk from here. Doc doesn't like us bringing our cars up to the buildings." "Why's that?" "Something to do with his work, I expect." "The place could use a coat of paint," Peruge said as he got out his side of the car. Kraft, got out, closed the door on his side and spoke across the roof of the car. "I heard tell Doc used some kind of wood preservative on his buildings. They just look plain weathered. Kind of pretty when you think about it." "Oh?" Peruge walked to the gate. waited for Kraft. "What's that concrete building over there?" He pointed to the low structure inside the fence to the left of the gate. "Might be a pump house. About the right size for a big one. Or it could be something to do with the Doc's work. I never asked." Kraft watched Peruge carefully. The concrete structure housed an emergency ventilation system that could be opened by explosives and was linked to standby pumping. Several more such installations were scattered around the area, but the others were camouflaged. "Is Hellstrom married?" Peruge asked. Kraft opened the gate before answering. "I don't rightly know." He stood aside to let Peruge enter, closed the gate. "Doc has lots of pretty gals around here sometimes. For his movies, I s'pose. Maybe he thinks there's no sense buying a cow when milk's free." Kraft chuckled at his own hairy witticism, added: "Let's get along up to the farm." into step with the deputy. That humor had been a little heavy. This deputy was neither pure western, pure yokel or pure anything else. Kraft tried too hard to appear the semi-rustic. The trying was so obvious at times that it dominated every other action. Peruge had decided earlier to watch the deputy carefully -- now he put an extra note of caution on his resolve. "Place looks kind of shabby," Peruge said, hurrying to keep pace with Kraft's long-legged stride. Despite the stiffness of his gait, the deputy moved with a no-loitering directness that suggested he didn't want Peruge to take too close a look at the surroundings. "I thought it looked pretty good here," Kraft said. "They keep the farm area pretty neat." "Do they do much farming?" "Not much any more. His folks used to keep a lot more crops. Some of the kids the Doc has here plant corn and things in the spring, but they're just playing at farming, seems to me. City people, most of them. They come up here from Hollywood or out from New York and gawk at us natives and play farmer." "Hellstrom has a lot of visitors?" Peruge kicked at a dusty clump of grass as he spoke. The dry, hot air of the place bothered him. There was an irritant humming sound in the background; it was apparently coming from the farm, and an underlying animal smell that made him think of a zoo. The odor had not been apparent outside the fence, but became stronger the deeper they went into the little valley. What he could see of the creek on his right showed only a thin trickle of water. The rest was mostly pools and puddles connected by narrow rills full of green algae that waved in weak currents. There appeared to be a small waterfall at the upper end of the valley, however. "Visitors?" Kraft asked after a long pause. "Sometimes the place is crawling with 'em. Can't spit without hitting someone. Other times he probably doesn't have more'n ten or twelve people here." "What's that smell?" Peruge demanded. "What smell?" Kraft asked, then realized Peruge meant the Hive odor, most of which was washed from the vented air, but which was always detectable here in the valley. Kraft rather enjoyed the odor. It reminded him of his childhood. "That animal smell," Peruge said. "Oh, that. Probably something to do with the Doc's work. He keeps mice and things in cages up there. I saw them once. Regular menagerie." "Oh. Is that a year-round waterfall I see at the upper end of the valley?" "Yep. It's pretty, isn't it?" "If you like that sort of thing. What happens to all of the water? The creek seems rather small down here." Peruge stopped as Kraft looked directly at him, forcing the deputy to come to a halt, also. "I expect the ground soaks it up," Kraft said. He appeared impatient to continue, but unable to think of a good argument. "The Doc may take part of it up there for irrigation or cooling or something. I dunno. Let's get on up, eh?" "Just a minute," Peruge said. "I thought you said Hellstrom didn't do much farming." "Doesn't. But what he does still takes some water. Why you so curious about his creek?" "I'm curious about everything on this place," Peruge said. "There's something wrong about it. No insects. I don't even see any birds." K raft made a swallowing motion in a dry throat. Obviously, there had been a thorough no iiightsweep recently. Trust this Peruge to notice the absence of local launa! "Birds often hide wher.e it's cool m ihe hot part of the day," he venlured. "Is that right?" "Didn't your birdwatching friend ever tell you that?" "No." Peruge glanced around liirn, peering carefully at everything in sight. The quick and intense motions of his head and eyes alarmed Kraft. "What he did say once," PeI uge continued, "was that there was an animal or a bird for every time of day or night. I don't believe the birds are hiding -- you can't hear them. There are no birds here and no insects." "Then what was your friend doing here?" Kraft asked. "If there are no birds, what was he watching?" Ah, my friend, not so fast, Peruge thought. We aren't ready yet to take off the gloves. But Peruge was convinced now that Kraft was in league with Hellstrom. Peruge said: "C'arlos would've noticed the absence of birds and he might've gone hunting for an explanation. If lie found an explanation that could cause trouble for someone, that might explain why he's missing." "You sure got a suspicious mind," Kraft said. "Haven't you?" Peruge asked. I le moved into willow shadows at a bend in the creek, forced Kraft to lollow. "What's this Hellstrom really like. Deputy?" Kraft didn't care for being called Deputy in that tone of voice, but he kept his manner casual in response. "Oh, he's just a plain, ordinary. run-of-the mill scientist type." Peruge noted that Kraft's voice came out flat and reasonable, but something in the set of his body, especially in the watchful turn of head and eyes, put the lie to this mask. Peruge nodded, as though he understood this, silently urging Kraft to continue. "They're all crazy, of course," Kraft said, "but not dangerous." "I've never really agreed with that harmless, crazy scientist picture," Peruge said. "I don't think they're all innocent and harmless. To me no atomic physicist is completely responsible and trustworthy." "Oh, come now, Mr. Peruge." Kraft was making a valiant attempt to sound jovial and hearty. "The Doc makes movies about bugs. Educational. I expect the worst thing he's ever done is bring some pretty girls up here for some moonlight nooky." "Not even dope?" Peruge pressed. "You believe all that stuff you read about Hollywood types?" Kraft asked. "Some of it." "I'd bet my bottom dollar that the Doc is clean," Kraft said. "Would you?" Peruge asked. "How many missing-persons cases have you really had in his area over, say, the past twenty-five years?" With a sinking feeling Kraft thought. He's seen all of the old records! Nils had been right about this one without even seeing him. The Outsiders had sent a sharp and prying mind this time. Peruge was aware of all the old mistakes the Hive had made. Bad. bad. bad. To hide his reaction, Kraft turned away and resumed his progress toward the farm buildings, which now were less than fifty yards ahead. "Depends on what you call a missing person," he said. And, as he noted that Peruge still stood in the willow shadow: "Come on. We can't keep the Doc waiting." Peruge followed, suppressing a smile. The deputy really was quite transparent. Kraft had been shaken by the barb about missing persons. This was not just a plain, ordinary, run-of-the-mill deputy. Things were beginning to jell in Peruge's mind. Three agents had been wasted here, chasing a suspicion. Discovery of a deputy-who-wasn't-a-deputy gave those suspicions a new dimension. Something had been learned, after all. And, Peruge thought, Hellto pay for access to his Project #. Now we find out what he's "I always thought a missing person was a missing person," Peruge said, addressing Kraft's blocky back. Kraft spoke without turning: "That all depends. Some people want to be missing. Guy runs out on his wife or his job -- I guess he's technically missing. But that's not what you're saying about your man. When I say 'missing person' I generally mean someone who's in real trouble." "And you don't think any real trouble could happen here?" "This isn't the Old West any more," Kraft said. "This area is tamer than a lot of your cities. People don't even lock their doors most places around here. Too damn much trouble fishing around for the keys." He grinned back over his shoulder. "Besides, we wear our pants kind of tight. Don't leave much room in our pockets." T hey were passing the farmhouse now. The barn loomed before them across a bare stretch of dirt perhaps sixty feet wide. An old fence divided the open area, but only the posts remained. The wire had been removed. There were yellowed curtains on the bay window of the farmhouse wing that jutted toward the creek, but the place held an oddly vacant air. Kraft wondered about that house. Empty? Why? Houses were supposed to be occupied. Did Hellstrom and his crew live there? Did they eat there? Why wasn't someone inside rattling pots and pans and things? He recalled Porter's comment about negative signs. A penetrating observation. The wrongness wasn't so much in what you could see around Hellstrom's farm as in what you couldn't see. He found another positive sign now, though -- an acid odor. He thought first of photo chemicals, then rejected that answer. The smell was much more penetrating and biting. Something to do with Hellstrom's insects, perhaps? A swinging door had been set into the old sliding door of the barn. The smaller door opened as Kraft and Peruge approached. Hellstrom himself stepped out. Peruge recognized the man from the photographs in the Agency's files. Hellstrom wore a white turtleneck shirt and gray trousers. His feet were tucked into open sandals. His rather sparse light hair looked as though it had been tangled by a wind and then pushed into a semblance of order by hurried fingers. "Hi, Line," Hellstrom called. "Hi there. Doc." Kraft strode up to Hellstrom, shook hands. Peruge, following closely, received the odd impression of a rehearsed action. Kraft and Hellstrom shook hands with such a perfunctory sense of unfamiliarity. Peruge moved to one side, choosing a position that gave him a view of the barn door Hellstrom had left standing partly open. Nothing was visible except darkness in the small gap remaining. T he action seemed to amuse Hellstrom. He grinned as Kraft introduced him to Peruge. Peruge found Hellstrom's hand cool, but rather dry. There was a sense of forced relaxation about the man, but no sign of excess perspiration in the palm. He had himself well under control, then. "Are you interested in our studio?" Hellstrom asked, indicating the door and the direction of Peruge's gaze with a nod. Peruge thought, Aow, aren't you the cool one! He said, "I've never seen a movie studio." "Line told me on the phone that you were looking for one of your employes who might be missing in our area," Hellstrom said. "Ah, yes." Peruge wondered why he couldn't see anything beyond that open door. He had seen Hollywood studios and remembered a sense of organized confusion -- bright lights, dollies, cameras. people bustling about, then that frozen stillness of the moments when they were filming. "Have you seen anyone nosing around here. Doc?" Kraft asked. "Nobody but our own people," Hellstrom said. "No strangers, at least recently. When did these people turn up missing?" "About a week ago," Peruge said, returning his attention to Hellstrom. "That recently?" Hellstrom asked. "My. Are you sure they aren't just extending their vacation without notice?" "I'm just as sure as a man can be," Peruge said. "You're welcome to look around," Hellstrom said. "We've been pretty busy in the studio lately, but we would have noticed any strangers in the neighborhood. We keep a pretty close watch to see that no one bursts in on our work unexpectedly. I don't think you're going to find any sign of your people in our area." Kraft visibly relaxed, thinking. If Nils thinks they've cleaned up the area well enough, then it's clean. "Oh?" Peruge pursed his lips. It came to him abruptly that there were several levels to this conversation. He and Hellstrom knew this. Most likely the deputy did, too. The various parts of the interleaved message were distinct. Peruge was welcome to pry around, but he would find nothing incriminating. No strangers could come upon Hellstrom's farm without being seen. Hellstrom probably remained confident that his powerful connections would keep the real contest submerged. Peruge, for his own part, had revealed to Hellstrom an awareness that people were missing in the immediate vicinity of the farm. In a way, Hellstrom had not denied this, but had merely pointed out that it would be useless to look for the missing people. How, then, were the real stakes to be introduced into the game? Hellstrom said, "Deputy Kraft tells me you work for some kind of a fireworks company." Ah, Peruge thought with delight. He said, "My firm has diversified interests, Mr. Hellstrom. We're also interested in metallurgy, especially new processes for exploitation. We're always on the hunt for potentially valuable inventions." Hellstrom stared at him for a moment. Then: "Would you like to come in and see the studio? We're very busy right now -- behind schedule on our latest epic." He started to turn, hesitated as though at an afterthought. "Oh, I hope you're not carring a radio or anything of that kind. We use short-range radio in part of our mixing circuitry for the soundtracks. Other equipment can play hob with our work." You son-of-a-bitch! Peruge thought. He folded his hands casually in front of him, left wrist in right palm, turned off the tiny wristwatch transmitter. And he thought. If you think you re going to keep me out of your little playpen, baby, you think again. I'm going in there and I may see more than you expect. Hellstrom, noting the movement of Peruge's hands, and suspecting the reason, still found himself wondering at the man's curious statement about diversified interests, metallurgy and new inventions. What could these have to do with Project #? XV The words of Trova Helltrom: Whatever we do in breeding for the specialists we require, we must always include the human being in our processes, prefering this to the intrusion of surgical instruments. The sexual stump can be condoned only as long as we include the body's original genetic materials in the practice. Anything that smacks of genetic surgery or engineering must be looked upon with the gravest misgivings. We are, first and foremost, human beings and must never loose ourselves from our animal ancestry. Whatever we are, we are not gods. And whatever this universe may be, it obviously rests heavily in dependence upon the accidental. XA Janvert said, moving the control dials on his instruments. He sat in the curtained shadows of the van's interior, the receiver mounted in front of him on a ledge originally intended as part of the camper's kitchen. Nick Myerlie's bluff and sweaty body was leaning over him, one red-knuckled hand on the counter beside the radio. The big man's heavy features carried a frown of deep concern. "What do you think's happened to him?" "I think he turned his transmitter off deliberately." "For god's sake! Why?" "The last thing I received -- " he lapped the tape recorder over the radio -- " was Hellstrom saying something about not bringing any radio equipment into their studio." "That's risky business -- turning off his transmitter." "I would have done the same," .lanvert said. "He has to get into that studio." "But still -- " "Oh, shut up! Is Clovis still outside with her telescope?" "Yes." Myerlie sounded hurt. He knew Jan vert was second in command on this case, but it was irritating to take such short-tempered treatment from a runt. "See if she's seen anything." "That thing's only twenty-power and it's still pretty misty out there. Hot weather always does that." "Go find out anyway. Tell her what's happened." "Right." The camper creaked and moved as Myerlie took his big body outside. Janvert, who had lifted one earphone away from his right ear to talk to Myerlie, replaced it now and stared at the receiver. What had Peruge meant by the last odd conversation? Metallurgy? New inventions? The words of Trova Hellstrom: Our future lies in an ultimate form of human domestication. All Outside patterns of humankind must be seen, then, as wild forms. In our domestication process we will necessarily introduce a multiplicity of diverse human types into our social scheme. No matter how much diversity this brings, the mutual interdependence and consequent sense of respect for our essential oneness must never be lost. Brood Mother and Prime Male are different only in surface features from the lowliest worker. If the most exalted among us have any prayer, it must be one of thanksgiving that there are workers. It is salutary when seeing a common worker, to think: There, but for leader foods and training, am I. E ntering the studio through a double-door system -- which explained why he had not been able to see inside the building from the yard -- Peruge sensed something odd about the sounds and movements. That fetid animal smell was very strong in here, too. He ascribed it to a glass-fronted structure off on his left, behind which he could discern animals in cages. He identified mice, guinea pigs and monkeys. In all of the film studios Peruge had seen before this, he had observed that special quality of silence while group energies flowed up a mysterious channel into the camera lens. This place was different, though. No one tiptoed. Those who moved about walked with a casual silence that suggested they found it normal. The door baffles had eliminated that incessant humming so irritatingly noticeable outside, but here a faint sussuration replaced it. Only one camera crew appeared to be working. It had set up in a corner to Peruge's right and was working very close to a glass container about three feet on a side. The glass reflected hot shards of light. Hellstrom had warned Peruge not to talk until told it was permitted. Peruge pointed to the camera crew in the corner, lifted his eyebrows in a silent question. Bending close, Hellstrom whispered, "We're capturing the articulation of insect body parts in a new way. Magnified views. The lens is actually inside that glass case -- which maintains a special climate for the subject insect." Peruge nodded, wondered at the rule of silence. Would they be doing sound-on-film for such a sequence? It seemed unlikely, but his acquaintance with film making was perfunctory at best, hurriedly augmented for this assignment, and he knew better than to speak his question aloud. Hellstrom would like nothing better than an excuse to throw him out. The man's nervousness had become increasingly obvious. Hellstrom leading and Kraft bringing up the rear, they struck out diagonally across the center of the studio area. As always when an Outsider was this close to the workings of the Hive-head, Hellstrom found himself unable to completely suppress feelings of disquiet. The Hive's territorial conditioning went too deep. And this Peruge reeked of Outsider smells. He did not belong in this place. Kraft, behind him, would be having an even worse time of it. He had never before accompanied an Outsider into these precincts. The working crews were behaving with outward normalcy, however. They would feel this Outsider's presence as a constant rasping on the awareness, but front training dominated their reactions. All proceeded smoothly. Peruge noticed the movement of people around him -- across his path, beside him, off in the corners of the cavernous studio. All appeared to be on normal business and none gave more than a casual glance to the trio crossing the open area, but Peruge could not avoid the feeling that he was under the closest scrutiny. He looked upward. The bright lights being used in the lower part of the studio left the upper regions in deep shadows which his vision could not penetrate. Was that deliberate? Were they hiding something up above him? The swinging descent of a cage on the end of a boom caught his attention and he stumbled over a coil of cables. He would have fallen if Kraft had not leaped forward to catch his arm. The deputy restored Peruge to balance, put a finger to lips for silence. Kraft released Peruge's arm reluctantly. It felt more secure to have a controlling arm on this intruder. He found himself torn by tormenting worries. Nils was playing with fire! There were voiceless workers out there on the studio floor. They had been conditioned for the menial tasks here, but their presence posed an explosive danger. What if one of them reacted to Peruge's Outsider chemistry? The man's smell was offensive! for a few paces, glanced back at the descending boom cage. It had swung from the gloomy mystery of the upper reaches and was moving in oiled silence down to the camera setup in the corner. A woman in a white smock occupied the cage. She had a startlingly pale skin accented by ebony hair tied at the neck in a simple chignon. The fluttering of her smock in the wind of the boom's movement suggested that she wore nothing under it. Kraft pushed Peruge's arm, urging him to move faster. Reluctantly Peruge picked up his pace. There had been something magnetically attractive about that pale-skinned woman and he could not get her image out of his mind. Her face had been a madonna oval beneath that black cap of hair. The arms protruding from the smock's short sleeves had suggested sensuous softness. Hellstrom stood now at a door in a structure that had been erected as a separate, flat-roofed building inside the studio. A wall climbed to the upper areas behind the flat roof. Peruge estimated that the wall split the barn in half lengthwise and wondered what lay behind it. He followed Hellstrom into a dimly lighted room with heavy glass from waist height to ceiling across two of the inner walls. One glass partition gave a view into a smaller studio where insects were flitting openly back and forth through blue light -- pale, big-winged moths by their appearance. The other window framed a shadowy room where men and women worked at a long, curved bank of electronic instruments. Small screens directly in front of each operator showed Peruge of a television control booth. Kraft closed the door behind the trio and stood, arms folded across his breast, as though guarding the entrance. Another door in the far right corner, Peruge noted, led into the shadowy room of the electronic instruments. Again Peruge felt that the entire setup did not quite fit his picture of a movie studio. A small oblong wooden table with four chairs around it stood in the room and Hellstrom took a chair on the far side of it, spoke in a calm voice: "The men you're watching in there, Mr. Peruge, are mixing several sound sources for a combined track. It's delicate work." Peruge studied the people in the shadowy room, unable to pinpoint what struck him as odd about them. Abruptly he realized that of the six men at the arc of instruments and three women standing on the far side of the arc, all but one looked enough alike to be from the same family. Again he scanned the faces illuminated by the low, wavering light. Five of the men and three of the women were alike, not only in the uniform white smocks, but in short blond hair and rather pinched faces, dominated by large eyes. The women were distinguished only by rather obvious breasts and a slight softening of the features. The lone male who differed from the others was also blond and reminded Peruge of someone. He realized then that the odd man out looked like Hellstrom. xV. mind the door behind Kraft opened and the young woman from the boom entered. At least, Peruge cautioned himself, she appeared to be the same young woman, but after the people next door he began to wonder. "Fancy!" Hellstrom exclaimed, in quick though quiet alarm. Why was she here? He hadn't sent for her and he didn't like the stalking feline expression on her face. Kraft stepped aside grudgingly to allow her to pass. Peruge watched her, noting the oval, almost doll-like face, the extremely sexy body, its contours showing through the thin smock. She kept her attention on Hellstrom while speaking, but there was no doubt she was playing to Peruge. "Ed sent me over," she said. "He wants you to know that we have to re-shoot that mosquito sequence. You're in it, you know. I told you we'd have to re-shoot. The mosquitoes were disturbed, but you wouldn't listen to me." Abruptly she appeared to notice Peruge. She moved to within a pace of him and asked, "Who's this?" "This is Mr. Peruge," Hellstrom said, a deep note of caution in his voice. What was Fancy doing? "Hello, Mr. Peruge," she said, her voice lilting. She moved even closer to him. "I'm Fancy." Hellstrom watched her closely. What was she doing? He inhaled deeply, detected that Fancy had shot herself up with breedinghypers. She was trying to arouse Peruge! Why? She was having an effect, too. Peruge was attracted to Fancy and unable to explain the sudden magnetism. No wild Outsider could understand the simple chemistry of the situation. Kraft, too, was caught momentarily by her powerful sexuality, but Hellstrom flashed a hand signal that alerted him to the hypers. Kraft, long out of the Hive's daily contacts and constant reinforcements, took a few seconds to recover. Peruge, however, was not recovering. Should he let this continue? Hellstrom wondered. She was playing a dangerous game and acting without instructions. Granted, it would be desirable to have Peruge's genes in the Hive stocks, but... Peruge stood in partial shock. He could not recall having been caught up in sexual excitement this swiftly and this thoroughly ever before. The woman felt it, too. She was panting for him. He wondered distantly if these people had done something to him, but rejected the consideration immediately. This was that oddly random chemistry one heard about. He realized, catching up with her words, that Fancy was asking if he were going to stay the night. With an effort Peruge said, "I'm staying in town." She glanced at Hellstrom. "Nils, why don't you invite Mr. Peruge to stay with us?" "Mr. Peruge is here on business," Hellstrom said. "I imagine he would prefer staying in his own quarters." Peruge wanted nothing more than to stay the night with this compelling woman, but he began to sense inner alarm signals. "You're just being stuffy," Fancy said to Hellstrom, Again she looked up into Peruge's eyes. "Are you in films, Mr. Peruge?" He tried to fight free of that enveloping aura of sexuality, tried to think. "No. I'm -- I'm, ah, looking for some friends, an employee and his wife, who are missing. They were last reported around here someplace." "Oh, I hope nothing's happened to them," she said. Hellstrom arose from the table, crossed to Peruge's side. "Fancy, we do have a schedule to keep." with his tongue. His mouth felt dry. His body trembled. The delectable little witch! fVas she told to make a play for me? Hellstrom glanced at Kraft, wondered if he should do something physical to get Fancy out of the room. She had really shot herself up, the crazy female! He spoke to her in a reasonable but commanding tone: "Fancy, you'd better get back to the crew. Tell Saldo I want special attention paid to the most urgent problems first and tell Ed I'll be ready to re-shoot the mosquito sequence tonight." Fancy drew back a step, relaxed. She had this Peruge on a string and she knew it. The man almost followed her as she moved away from him. He would keep. She said, "All you ever think about is work. Anybody would think you were just a plain old, common everyday worker." She was taunting him, Hellstrom realized. Fancy obeyed him, though, her Hive-training dominant. She turned slowly, walked to the door with only a flicking glance at Kraft. She paused in the doorway to look back at Peruge. She smiled at the Outsider then, slyly and invitingly, raised her eyebrows in another silent taunt directed at Hellstrom and went out, closing the door softly behind her. Peruge cleared his throat. Hellstrom studied Peruge. The man was having trouble recovering, not surprising in view of how Fancy had armed herself for that attack. It had been an attack, Hellstrom realized. Pure attack. She was out to get Peruge, to breed him. "That's a -- very attractive woman," Peruge said, his voice husky. "Would you like to go over to the house for a cup of coffee?" Hellstrom asked, feeling a sudden sympathy for Peruge. The poor wild creature had no idea of what had happened to him. "That's very kind of you," Peruge said, "but I thought we were going to look at your studio." "Didn't you see the studio out there?" "Is that all there is to it?" "Oh, we have the usual support facilities," Hellstrom said. "Some of it's too technical for the casual visitor to understand, but we have a wardrobe section and one of the best editing labs in the business. Our collection of rare insects is without equal anywhere in the world. We could also screen some of our film for you if you'd like, just to show you what we do here, but not today. I'm afraid. The schedule is pretty tight. I hope you understand." Kraft took up his cue. "Are we delaying you. Doc? I know how important your work is. We just came by to find out if any of your folks had seen any of Mr. Peruge's friends." "I'll certainly inquire around among my crew about that," Hellstrom said. "Why don't you come back and take lunch with us tomorrow, Mr. Peruge? Maybe I'll have something to report by then." "I'd like to do that," Peruge said. "What time?" "Would eleven in the morning be all right?" "That would be fine. Maybe some of your people would like to hear about my company then, too. We do have an intense interest in metallurgy and new inventions." There he goes again, Hellstrom thought. He said, "If you get here by eleven we'll have about an hour before lunch. I'll have someone show you around -- editing, wardrobe, the insects." He smiled pleasantly. Will my guide be Fancy? Peruge wondered, feeling his heartbeat quicken. He said, "I'll be looking forward to that. In the meantime -- I hope you won't mind if I call in some help and have a look around the area myself." Hellstrom saw Kraft's muscles tighten, spoke quickly, "Not right here on the farm, I hope, Mr. Peruge. We're getting ready to shoot some outside footage while this weather holds. It doesn't help much when people stumble over our setups and delay us. I hope you understand how costly such delays can be." "Oh, yes, I understand," Peruge said. "I was thinking only of having a look at some of the range area around your farm. Carlos's letter made it clear that he was in this area. I thought we might see if we could turn up something." Aware of Hellstrom's mounting alarm, Kraft said, "We don't want you interfering with the official investigation, Mr. Peruge. Amateurs can completely destroy evidence without -- " "Oh, I'll have only the best professional help," Peruge said. "You can count on that. They won't interfere one bit with the official investigation. And I'll make sure they don't bother Mr. Hellstrom at his movie-making. You'll have nothing but admiration for the quality of professional help I'm calling in, Mr. Kraft." "Guess you don't care how much money you spend searching for your people," Kraft muttered. "Expense is no object," Peruge agreed. He was enjoying this suddenly. This pair was on the hook. They knew it, too. "We're going to find out what happened to our people." That challenge is plain enough. Hellstrom thought. He said, "Of course, we sympathize with your concern. Our own immediate problems tend to dominate our attention. We can be pretty singleminded when our schedule is threatened." to come down from the lift Fancy had given him and now alarm and anger began to take over. They had tried to catch him with a little pussy! He said, "I understand how things are, Hellstrom. I'm going to tell my home office to deploy all the professional manpower we can spare." Kraft stared at Hellstrom, seeking a cue. Hellstrom said evenly, "We understand each other, I think, Peruge." He glanced at Kraft. "You just keep intruders from interfering with us, eh. Line?" Kraft nodded. What did Nils mean? How could he stop an army of investigators? This Peruge was tard had done everything but say it in so many words! "Until tomorrow, then," Peruge said. "Line knows the way out," Hellstrom said. "I hope you will forgive me if I don't see you out. I really must stay and get on with my work." "Of course," Peruge said. "I've already noticed how well Deputy Kraft knows his way around your farm." Hellstrom's eyes glittered as he shot a restraining signal at Kraft. "Local officials have never been barred from our land," Hellstrom said. "We will see you tomorrow, Peruge." "You certainly will." Peruge moved ahead of Kraft to the door, opened it and stepped out into a full collision with Fancy, who appeared to be returning. He caught an arm around her to keep her from falling. There was no doubt at all that she wore nothing under the white smock. She ground into him as he jerked his arm away in shock. Kraft pulled her away, asked, "You all right. Fancy?" "I'm fine," she said, grinning at Peruge. "That was clumsy of me," Peruge said. "I'm sorry." "You needn't be," she said. Hellstrom spoke from behind them. "We've had enough commotion out here. Line. Would you see Mr. Peruge out?" They left hurriedly, Peruge in considerable confusion. He'd received the unmistakable impression that Fancy had been ready to flop him down and seduce him right then and there! Hellstrom waited until the outer door closed behind Kraft and Peruge, then turned an inquiring stare on Fancy. "He's in the bag," she said. "Fancy, what are you doing?" "I'm doing my homework." Hellstrom suddenly noted the thickening of Fancy's bosom, the way her upper arms stretched the fabric of the smock. He asked, "Fancy, do you see yourself as a broodmother?" "We haven't had one since Trova," she said. "And you know why." "All that nonsense about a broodmother exciting the swarming drive?" "It's not nonsense and you know it." "Some of us think it is. We think the Hive may swarm without a broodm other, and that might be disastrous." "Fancy, don't you think we know our jobs? The Hive will have to grow at least ten thousand more workers before swarming pressures become apparent." "They're apparent right now," she said. She rubbed her arms. "Some of us can feel them." Comment on the current film: The film sequence shows an insect cell, the development of the egg and, finally, the caterpillar emerging. How striking is this metaphor. We emerge from the parent body, those wild creatures who call themselves humankind. The message of this metaphor goes much deeper, however. It says we must prepare for our emergence. We are immature at this stage, our needs dominated by preparations for adulthood. When we emerge, it will be to take dominion over the surface of the Earth. When we have achieved our adult form we will eat to live rather than to grow. ring for a long time before the Chief answered. He had been sitting on the edge of his motel bed after returning from lunch with Hellstrom. It had been an extremely disappointing lunch. He had seen no sign of Fancy. The proceedings in the dining room of the old farmhouse had been formal and shallow. No one had risen to his bait about new inventions. The Chief was not going to like this report. The Chiefs voice came on the phone presently, alert and responsive despite the long delay in answering. The old man had not been asleep, then, but doing something he had refused to interrupt even to answer what he often referred to as "that instrument from hell." "I told you I'd call as soon as I got back," Peruge said. "Where are you calling from?" "The motel. Why?" "Are you sure that phone's clean?" "It's clean. I checked." "Let's scramble anyway." Peruge sighed, got out his equipment. Presently he had the Chief's voice in his ear with that distant quality the scrambler imposed. "Now tell me what you found out." "They refuse to respond to any overture about metallurgy or new inventions." "Did you quote an offer?" "I said I knew someone who promising invention in that field." "That didn't tip them?" "Nothing." "The board is beginning to pressure me," the Chief said. "We're going to have to act soon, one way or another." "Hellstrom must have some price," Peruge said. "You think he may bite, if you up the ante?" "I don't know for sure. What I'd like to do is send Janvert and probably Myerlie around to the south of Hellstrom's valley and look for signs of Carlos and Tymiena. I have a hunch they may have approached  from the south -- the lower end of that valley. Lots of trees that way and you know how cautious Carlos was." "You send no one." "Chief, if we -- " "No." "But if we could put that kind of pressure on Hellstrom, we might get him for much less. We could have this thing all sewed up and ready to move before the board gets -- well, you know how they can be when they get suspicious." "You would teach your grandfather to suck eggs? I said no!" plications. "Then what do you want me to do?" "Tell me what you saw at Hellstrom's place." "Not much more than I saw yesterday." "Be specific." "In one sense, the place is quite ordinary. Almost too businesslike. No relaxation -- everyone seems serious and -- dedicated. That's the word that kept occurring to me. That's not ordinary. These people put me in mind of a Chicom farm commune laboring to meet its harvest quota." "I don't think we're going to find a Red in this woodpile," the other said, "but that's something to keep in mind if we need to cover ourselves with glory. However, the matter is much more serious than you realize." "Oh?" Peruge was suddenly alert, intensely concentrated on the voice coming to him over the phone. "I had a call from upstairs today," the Chief said. "A special assistant to the Man. They wanted to know if we were the ones poking into Hellstrom's affairs." "Oh-oh!" That explained why Hellstrom had appeared so confidently in command of the situation. How did this little bug doctor get that kind of clout? "What did you do?" Peruge asked. "I lied," the Chief said, his voice bland. "I said it must be somebody else because I hadn't heard about it. However, I promised to check because sometimes my people become a bit overzealous." Peruge stared at the wall in silence for a moment. Who was being set up here? He said, "We have Merrivale lined up if we need a patsy." "That was one of the things I considered." One of the things? The Chief interrupted his development of that worry by asking, "Now tell me what they're doing on that farm." "They're making movies about insects." "You told me that yesterday. Is that all they're doing?" "I'm not sure what else -- but I have some ideas about where they may be doing it. There's a basement in that studio -- wardrobe and some other crap down there, all disgustingly standard in appearance. But a tunnel leads from the barn to the old farmhouse. They took me through it and we had lunch in the house. There were some very strange dames to wait on us, too, I tell you. Beautiful dolls, all four of them, but they don't talk -- not even when you speak directly to them." "What?" "They don't speak. They just serve table and go away. Hellstrom said it's because they're perfecting special accents and have been ordered by their voice coach not to say anything unless the coach is there to listen and correct them." "That sounds reasonable." "Does it? It struck me as odd." "Were you transmitting to Janvert and the others?" "No. It was the same as yesterday. They were very nice about it and so-o-o reasonable. Radio for their soundtracks and so on. Would I please not cause problems?" "I still don't like you going in there without radio. If something -- Maybe you'd better replace Janvert with Myerlie or DT as your second." "Relax. Hellstrom as much as told me that I'd be all right if I played it cool." "How did he do that?" "He explained in detail how angry he gets when people cause setbacks in their schedule. I was told to stick close to my guide and not stray." "Who was your guide?" "Some little guy named Saldo -- no bigger than Shorty Janvert. Very close-mouthed. There was no sign of the dame they threw at me yesterday." "Dzule, are you sure you're not imagining -- " "I'm sure. Look, we're stymied. I need help. I want the highway pacan dragoon into crawling over those hills around Hellstrom's farm -- " "Dzule! Didn't you hear me when I told you about my call from upstairs?" suddenly dry throat. The Chief could be abrupt and final when his voice took on that calm, reasonable tone of correction. So there was more than just reported to that call from upstairs. The troops were stirred up. "You cannot ask for help on a project that doesn't exist," the Chief said. "Did you know I'd transmitted a help?" "I intercepted that and cut it off. That request no longer exists." "Is there any way we could get an overflight to inspect that farm?" "Why?" "It's what I was starting to explain. This tunnel from the barn to the house -- I'd like to know if there are more such tunnels under that area. Geological Survey has techniques to detect that kind of thing." "I don't think I could ask for that kind of help without tipping our hand. I'll look into it, though. There may be some other way. You're suggesting they may have laboratories and such under the barn in tunnels?" "Yes." "It's an idea. I've a couple of friends in the oil industry who owe us favors." "The board -- " "Dzule!" A warning note in the voice said: Don't question my intelligence. "I'm sorry. Chief," Peruge said. "It's just that -- well. I'm uneasy about this thing; All afternoon at that farm -- I kept wanting to get the hell out of there. There's a stink about the place and -- it's a creepy setup. The trouble is, I can't pin down a single thing -- except the blatant facts of Porter and company." The voice on the phone took on a patronizing, fatherly tone. "Dzule, my boy, don't go inventing trouble. If we can't get our hands on Hellstrom's invention and control the metallurgical process this becomes a straightforward case. I can discover that some of my overzealous boys have uncovered a hornet's nest of subversion. To do that, however, we need much more than we already possess." "Porter and -- " "They don't exist. You forget that my signature was on the orders." "Ah -- yes, of course." "I can go upstairs and say we have this bit of a file -- little more than a memorandum, really -- which one of our boys found at the only if I'm ready to defend the argument that it involves the private development of a major weapons system." "Unless we have more information they'll make the same kinds of guesses we did." "Precisely," the Chief said. "I see. Then you want me to take this to an open negotiation with Hellstrom." "Indeed I do. Is there any reason why you think you cannot do that?" "I can attempt it. I have a date to go back there tomorrow. I led them to believe I'll have an army of professional help to conduct a search of the area within a day or so and they -- " "What are your preparations?" "Janvert and his teams will be using line-of-sight to follow my movements while I'm outside the buildings. When I get inside, I most likely will be incommunicado. We will, of course, probe for a soft spot -- a window or something that could act as a microphone for our laser pickup. However, I don't believe I should wait for that kind of contact before opening -- " "How do you propose to open the negotiations?" up. I'll admit that I'm an envoy of a powerful agency in the government, but I won't identify us, naturally. After that -- " "No." "But -- " "We have three agents probably dead and they -- " "They don't exist. You said so yourself." "Except to us, Dzule. No. You will merely tell them that you represent people who are interested in their Project #. Let them worry about what reserves you may have. They've probably killed three people -- that, or they're holding prisoners and -- " "Should I look into that possibility?" "For God's sake! Of course not. But the chances are high they'll be more fearful of what they suspect than of what they know. For all they know, you could have the army, the navy and the marines reserve. If you need leverage, mention our missing friends, but don't appear anxious to get them back. Refuse to negotiate on that score. We want Project Forty, nothing else. We don't want murderers or kidnapers or missing people. Is that clear?" "Very." And, an empty feeling growing within him, Peruge thought. What if I turn up missing? He thought he knew the answer to the question and he didn't like it. "I'll get those oil people to do what they can," the Chief said, "but only if it can be done without tipping our hand. Finding out where Hellstrom's people work doesn't strike me as too helpful at this point." "What if he refuses to negotiate?" Peruge asked. "Don't provoke a showdown on it. We still have the board and its forces in reserve." "But they'd -- " "They'd take the whole thing and throw us a bone, yes. But a bone is better than nothing." "Project Forty could be entirely innocent." "You don't believe that," the Chief said. "And it's your job to prove what we both know in this case." The Chief cleared his throat, a loud, hacking noise over the scrambler. "As long as we have no proof we don't have a damn thing. They could have the secret of the end of the world down there, as we led the boafd to believe, but we can't move unless we prove it. How many times do I have to say that?" Peruge rubbed his left knee where he had bumped it against a light stand in Hellstrom's studio. It wasn't like the Chief to continue to stress a point. What was happening back there? Was the Chief trying to send him a subtle message? "Do you want me to find a good excuse for us to pull out of this?" Peruge asked. There was open relief in the Chiefs voice; "Only if it seems the right thing to do, my boy." Somebody's with him, Peruge realized. It had to be someone accorded a degree of trust, somebody important, but someone who could not be told everything. Try as he might, Peruge could not fit anyone he knew into this description. It should be perfectly obvious to the Chief that his agent in the field had no intention of pulling out. But he was fishing for that suggestion from me. Which meant the someone in the Chiefs office was hearing both ends of the conversation. The cryptic nature of the hidden message bespoke extreme caution at headquarters. A call from upstairs? How powerful a man was this Hellstrom? "Can you say anything about the kinds of toes we may be stepping on?" Peruge asked. "No." "Isn't it even possible to find out whether Hellstrom's influence has a purely political base -- big contributions to the party, that sort of thing -- or whether it's possible, for instance, that we're nosing into the affairs of another agency?" "Now you're beginning to understand the problem as I now see it," the Chief said. So somebody from' another agency is with him now, Peruge thought. That could mean one of the Chiefs own people had been infiltrated into the other agency. It could mean there were two agencies interested in Hellstrom or it could mean Hellstrom 's Project # was the product of another agency. Investigators could be tripping over each other if this thing were stirred up enough. "I get the message," Peruge said. "When you meet Hellstrom," the Chief said, "don't introduce this other possibility yourself. Leave that up to him." "I understand." "I certainly hope you do -- for your own sake as well as mine." "Shall I call you back later today?" "Not unless you have something new to report. Call me immediately after you've seen Hellstrom, however. I'll be waiting." Peruge heard the connection close at the other end. He disconnected his scrambler, replaced the telephone on its stand. For the first time in his life, Peruge began to sense what his field agents felt. It's all very well for him to sit back there all safe and tidy, but I've got to go out and risk my neck and he won't lift a finger if I get chopped! The words of Trova Hellstrom: At all cost, we must avoid falling into what we have come to understand as "the termite trap." We must not become too much like the termite. Such insects give us our pattern for survival, but they have their ways and we have ours. We learn from them, but not slavishly. Termites, never able to leave the protective walls of their mound, come into a world that is completely self-sufficient. And thus it must be with us. The entire termite society is guarded by soldiers. And thus it must be with us. When the mound comes under attack the soldiers know they can be abandoned outside the mound, left to die to buy time for others to make the mound impregnable. And thus it must be with us. But the mound dies if the queen dies. We cannot be that vulnerable. If the mound dies, that is the end of them. We cannot be that vulnerable. The small seeds of our continuation have been planted Outside. They must be prepared to go on alone if our mound dies. AS HE returned to the Hive down the long slope of the First Gallery, Hellstrom listened for some sound or other message to reassure him that all was well here. No such message came to him. The Hive remained an entity -- it still functioned -- but the sense of profound disturbance reached all through it. That was the Hive's nature: touch one part of it and all its cells responded. The chemistry of their internal communication could not be denied. Key workers, driven by the urgency of their situation, emitted subtle pheromones, external hormones that spread through the common air. The Hive's filters had been reduced to a minimum to conserve power. The pheromone signals remained for all to inhale and for all to share. Signs indicated that this situation could not continue without profound and possibly permanent effect on the totality. His broodmother had once warned him: Nils, the Hive can learn just as you learn. The totality can learn. If you fail to understand what the Hive learns you could bring about destruction for us all. What was the Hive learning now? Hellstrom wondered. Fancy's behavior suggested something demanded by the Hive in its deepest needs. She spoke of swarming. Was that it? They had been working for more than forty years to delay swarming. Had that been a mistake? He was worried about Fancy and had just tried unsuccessfully to find her. She was supposed to be with the shooting crew, but she hadn't been at her station and Ed had not known where to find her. Saldo had assured him that Fancy was now under constant surveillance, but still Hellstrom worried. Could the Hive create a natural broodmother? Fancy might be a logical choice for this role. What could the Council do if that happened? Should they send Fancy to the vats rather than risk an early swarming? He hated the thought of losing Fancy -- that superb bloodline had produced many useful specialists. If we could only breed out the instability... Provided the problem was instability. Hellstrom came to the concrete arch that opened into the Second Level feeding station, saw that Saldo awaited him there as ordered. Saldo could be depended on. This reassured Hellstrom. He realized how much he had come to depend upon the younger male. Without speaking, Hellstrom moved to Saldo's side. They entered the feeding station and fed together at the conveyor, drinking deeply of the common broth from the vats. Hellstrom always found a deep satisfaction in eating the food of the common workers. It was a satisfaction the supplemental leader foods never gave him. The leader foods might double the expected Hive lifetime, yet they lacked that one ingredient Hellstrom identified as unifying force. Sometimes we need a lowest common denominator, he thought. This was never more apparent than in a time of crisis. Saldo signaled that he was anxious to report, but Hellstrom gave the sign for patience, recogthat report. While eating, Hellstrom had felt himself overcome by realization of how fragile the Hive was. The domesticated world he sought for humankind seemed now no more than a thinshelled egg about to be crushed. All was so clear and sturdy in the Hive Manual, but so shimmering and weak in the execution. Although his mind searched for a clue, he could see no help in the Manual. The Hive moves toward a nonverbal base for human existence. It is a major purpose of the Hive to find that base, then to build a new language fitted to our needs. First, in the light of that plain message from the insect world, we shed the errors of the past... They had not shed the errors of the past. They might never shed them. The path loomed so long, so exacting in its demands. No one had really imagined how long it might take or how many pitfalls they might have to surmount. At first -- three hundred or more years ago, back in the oral-tradition times -- they had assumed "a hundred years or so." How swiftly that error of the past had made itself known! The new truth had arisen then -- the Hive might have to endure for a thousand years or more, unless a dramatic death convulsion overcame the Outsiders. A thousand years until the Earth lay domesticated under their dominion. Hellstrom recalled thinking how the familiar Hive walls around him might crumble and be repaired hundreds of times before the Hive came into its own and the workers took over control of the planet surface. What a fantasy! These walls might endure no more than another few hours and never be rebuilt. T he necessity of breathing confidence into the Hive had never seemed this difficult. Reluctantly Hellstrom signaled for Saldo to speak, noting with a sense of revulsion how obvious it was that the younger man thought a few words with the Prime Male would solve all problems. "Fancy got the breeding hypers from Hive stores by stealing them," Saldo said. "There's no record of an official -- " "But why did she take them?" Hellstrom asked. "To defy you, the Council and the Hive," Saldo said. He obviously thought the question demented. "We must not be too quick to judge," Hellstrom said. "But she's dangerous! She should -- " "She must be allowed to continue without interference," Hellstrom said. "Perhaps the entire Hive actually speaks through her." "Are we trying to breed with this Peruge?" "Why not? We've used that method of getting outside blood many times. Peruge has been preselected for us by the wild Outside. He is living evidence of success." "Success at what price?" "However we get the strong ones -- you know we must get them. Perhaps Fancy knows better than any of us how to deal with this threat." "I don't believe it! I think she's using this talk of a swarm as an excuse to leave the Hive. You know how fond she is of Outsider foods and comforts." "There is that possibility," Hellstrom agreed. "But why does she want to leave? I think your explanation is too glib." Saldo appeared more abashed by the implied rebuke than it had warranted. He was silent for a moment. Then; "Nils, I don't understand what you're saying." "I do not understand it clearly myself, but Fancy's behavior may not be as simple as you imagine." Saldo stared questioningly at Hellstrom's face as though some line or flicker of movement there might provide enlightenment. What did the Prime Male know that others did not? Hellstrom was an offspring of the Elders, the first colonists of this, the first true Hive. Had he received special instructions from that mysterious source of wisdom -- what to do in this kind of crisis? Saldo' s attention was caught by a flicker of movement to his left -- the bowls of broth moving on the conveyor -- as someone took a bowl from the end. Workers were feeding around them, taking no special notice of the two superior specialists. It was natural that no special notice be taken -- common chemistry told the workers who belonged here and who did not. Bring in an Outsider, though, and unless the workers could see that the Outsider was under the control of their fellows or unless the alien's chemistry had been sufficiently masked the intruder would go immediately into the vats, carried there by unspeaking workers who cared only that a dangerous mass of protein be removed. The workers' response now appeared all very normal, but Saldo began to experience in this moment some of Hellstrom's sense that the Hive had been deeply wounded. There was a jerky stiffness to some of the movement, a belligerent thrust about the stride. "Is something wrong of which I am unaware?" Saldo asked. Ah, the wisdom of this young male! Hellstrom thought, pride suffusing him. "That may well be," Hellstrom said. He turned, signaled for Saldo to follow, led the way to the gallery. They took the first side ramp and the next lateral passage, proceeded briskly to Hellstrom's cell. Inside, Hellstrom indicated a chair for Saldo, but stretched his own body on the bed. Blessed brood, but he was tired! down, glanced around. He had been in this cell before, but present circumstances made the place appear vaguely strange. A disturbing difference clamored for his attention, but he could not pinpoint it. Presently he realized the difference was the reduced noise from the service tunnel behind the rear wall of the cell. The hushed minimum of Hive operation could not be escaped in this place. Perhaps that was why Hellstrom refused to move to better quarters. Subtle odors of disturbance could be detected in the air, too. All the messages of crisis came to focus here. "Things are wrong here that none of us know about," Hellstrom said, picking up the conversation with an answer to the question Saldo had asked at the feeding station. "That is our problem, Saldo. Events will occur to alarm us and we must be prepared to deal with them on their own terms. As the Outsiders" say: 'We must hang loose.' Do you understand?" "No." Saldo shook his head. "What kind of events do you mean?" "If I could describe them, they would not fit the definition of unknowns." Hellstrom's voice was sad. Moving only his eyes, keeping his hands clasped behind his head, Hellstrom glanced across at Saldo. The young male suddenlyappeared as fragile as the Hive. What could Saldo's imaginative resourcefulness really do to avert the disaster building around him? Saldo was only thirty-four years old. Hive education gave those years a specious sophistication, a false worldliness of a kind never seen Outside. Saldo's naivete was Hive naivete. He did not know the kinds of liberties he might exercise Outside. He did not know what it was to be truly wild. Except vicariously through books and all the other trappings of Hive education, Saldo had little experience of the randomness that prevailed beyond the confines of the Hive. Given time, Saldo might gain that experience. The young male was the exact type the Hive must send into the tempering cauldron of wild humankind. But much of what he learned from his Outside ventures would bring him nightmares. He would, as every front specialist did, encyst those nightmares in a special unconscious core at the depths of his being. Just as I have walled up my own most trying experiences, Hellstrom thought. There could be no complete and permanent denial of such memories short of the vats, though. They came stealing out through unexpected cracks in one's defenses. Taking Hellstrom's long silence as rebuke, Saldo lowered his gaze. "We do not know all that may happen to us, but we must be prepared anyway. I see that now." Hellstrom felt like crying out, I am not perfect! I am not invincible! Instead he asked, "How is Project Forty coming?" "How did you know I had just inquired of it?" Saldo asked, awe in his tone. "I didn't mention it." "All of us who carry the extra burden of awareness are inquiring regularly of Project Forty," Hellstrom chided. "What did you find?" "Nothing new -- really. Oh, they are building the new test model swiftly and it will -- " "Have they changed their opinion about its prospects?" "They are raising new arguments about the generation of extremely high heat." "Is there more?" Saldo lifted his gaze, studied Hellstrom. Despite the Prime Male's obvious fatigue, there remained one more matter that could not be avoided. "A band of the hydroponics harvesters was found wandering in the upper levels about an hour ago," Saldo said. "As nearly as we can determine they were expressing a need to go to the surface." Hellstrom sat upright on the bed, shock suppressing his fatigue. "Why wasn't I told immediately?" "We handled it," Saldo said. "It was blamed on the general disturbance. They've all been chemically adjusted and are back at work. I've instituted patrols in all of the galleries to prevent a recurrence. Have I done wrong?" "No." Hellstrom lay back on the bed. Patrols! Of course, that was all they could do now. But this told how deeply disturbed the entire Hive had become. Fancy was right -- the predictions about the swarming urge had not taken into account a crisis such as this one. "Were there breeders among them?" Hellstrom asked. "A few potentials, but they -- " "They were swarming, right?" Hellstrom said. "Nils! Just a few workers from -- " "Nevertheless, they were swarming. It is there in the calculations of our earliest written records. You know this. We have watched for it and tried to predict it from the first. And without our leadership's being able to set the exact moment, we have reached a critical condition." "Nils, the -- " "You were going to speak about numbers. This is not a mere consequence of numbers. Total population in a given space figures in our calculations, but this is something else. Young workers and potential breeders, at the very least, find themselves driven to leave the Hive. They were striking out on their own. That is swarming." "How can we prevent a -- " "Perhaps we cannot." "But we can't allow it now!" "Yes, we must do our best to delay the swarming. To let them go now would destroy us. Have the filters turned back to maximum for a few hours and then adjust them to optimum." "Nils, a suspicious Outsider in our midst might -- " "We cannot do otherwise. Desperate measures are required. A quiet weeding of population may be indicated if this -- " "The vats?" "Yes, if the pressure becomes too great." "The hydroponics workers who -- " "Watch them carefully," Hellstrom said. "And the breeders -- even Fancy and her sisters. A swarm will need breeders." Peruge's private instruction to Daniel Thomas (DT) Alden: Janvert has come into possession of the special signal corps number and code required to call the President. If you see any attempt by Janvert to make such a call, any secretive attempt to use a telephone, you are to stop him, using whatever force you find necessary. concert on the motel room's radio under the mistaken idea that it might distract him. Time and again he found his awareness returning to contemplation of that disturbing woman at Hellstrom's farm. Fancy. What an odd name that was. This motel had been chosen because it provided him with a room whose rear windows gave line-ofsight communication with the Steens Mountain camps where his backup teams had stationed themselves in the guise of vacationers. Peruge knew he had only to signal out that rear window and he could be in direct touch with any one of the three teams -- nine people. The laser-transceiver would catch their voices as clearly as if they stood in the room with him. It bothered Peruge that he had allowed Shorty Janvert to remain in charge of the teams on the mountain. Damn that slimy-minded Merrivale! This was not a reassuring situation and, as night gathered over the brown countryside beyond his room, Peruge reviewed his instructions and his preparations. Had he been wise to restrict Janvert by the explicit order: You're to report everything to headquarters before initiating non-specified movements during those periods when I'm out of communication on that farm. The specified movements were extremely few and limited in scope: trips to Fosterville for groceries and visual check on Lincoln Kraft; shift of campsite to meet necessities of protecting the overall cover; visits between camps to transfer the watch and maintain constant surveillance. So far Janvert had given no overt indication of untrustworthiness. His communications fitted all the reliability requirements. Tonight's was no exception. "Does the Chief know you're going in there without communications?" "Yes." "I don't like that." "I'm the one to worry about that, not you." Peruge had countered. Who did Janvert think he was? "I'd like to see inside that place myself," Janvert said. "You're not to make any such attempt without specific advice from headquarters and then only if I have been out of communication beyond a pre-set time limit." ".I don't doubt your capabilities," Janvert said, his tone remarkably conciliatory. "I'm just worried about all the things we don't know in this case. Hellstrom displays a remarkable lack of respect for our persons." Peruge suspected Janvert of trying to fabricate a tone of real concern where none existed, felt impatient with such embroidery. "The farm is my problem," Peruge said. "Your problem is to observe and report." "Fat chance we get to observe while you're in there without a transmitter." "You still can't find a weak spot in their armor?" "I'd have told you first thing if I had." "Don't get upset about it. I know you're trying." "There's not a sound behind those walls. They must have a sophisticated damper system of some kind. Plenty of odd sounds in the valley, but nothing we can really identify. Machinery, mostly and it sounds like heavy machinery. I suspect they have equipment sufficiently sophisticated to have spotted our probes. Sampson and Rio are moving their rig to grid position G-# some time tonight. They did most of the probing." "You're staying put?" "Yes." right precautions, Peruge thought. Why do  distrust him? Would the little runt always live under the cloud generated by his reluctant recruitment? Peruge felt angry with himself. It was disloyal to entertain the thoughts flowing through his mind. What was the Chief really doing? Did the Chief consider Dzule Peruge just another one of the many expendables? And the magnetic woman at Hellstrom's farm -- was she just teasing him? Some women considered him handsome and his big body exuded animal power -- which might explain most of what had happened up there. Nuts! Hellstrom put her up to it! "You still there?" Janvert asked. "Yes!" Voice angry and sharp. "What gave you the idea there might be more people on that farm than we can see? The tunnel?" "That -- yes, but there's more that you can't put your finger on. Record this for transmission, Shorty. I want a watch put on the ordinary supplies going into that place. How much food, that sort of thing? Be discreet, but pry." "I'll take care of it. Do you want DT assigned to that?" "No. Send Nick. I want an estimate on how many people would match the normal food orders." "Right. Did the Chief tell you about the diamond bits for well drills?" "Yes. They would have been delivered just about the time Carlos and Tymiena were supposed to be there." "Weird, isn't it?" "It fits an odd kind of pattern," Peruge said. "We just haven't found the precise nature of the pattern." He cast about in his mind, wondering at the reason for diamond drill bits in a movie company. There was just no explaining it and no sense wondering without more evidence. More likely to come up with a wrong answer than a right one -- and either way he couldn't be certain. "I agree," Janvert said. "Anything more for this report." "Nothing." Peruge signed off, replaced the equipment in its coverpackaging, stored it in his shaving kit. Janvert had been more talkative than usual. Those surface attempts to be pleasant couldn't be anything but false from that feisty little bastard. Peruge thought about this as he lay in the quiet darkness of his motel bed. He knew he had been cut off. He was alone, removed even from the protection of the Chief, and he wondered why he went on. Because I want to be rich, he thought. Richer than the bitch of the board. I will be, too, if I can get my hands on Hellstrom's Project # . Script consultation. Nils Hellstrom speaking: On the screen the audience will see a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. We will see much more -- and we want the audience unconsciously to see what we see. The butterfly personifies our own long struggle. It is the long darkness of humankind when the wild ones imagined they talked, one to another. It is the metamorphosis, the transformation of our Hive into the salvation of the human species. It foreshadows the day when we will emerge and show our beauty to the admiring universe. transmitter is in his X wristwatch," Saldo said. We caught it just before he turned the thing off." "Good work," Hellstrom said. They stood in the electronic gloom of the barn aerie, the Security command post. Workers were going about their jobs quietly all around, a single-minded determination reflected in every movement. Nothing would get through this guard. "Those probes we detected came from Steens Mountain," Saldo said. "We've located the position on the chart." "Excellent. Is their lack of success igniting a renewed effort or are they quiet now?" "Quiet. I've arranged to send a picnic party into the area tomorrow. They'll play and enjoy themselves and report back tomorrow night. The party will be composed only of extremely experienced fronts." "Don't count on their learning much." Saldo nodded agreement. Hellstrom closed his eyes tightly in distress and fatigue. He couldn't seem to get enough rest and what little he got failed to restore him. What they needed and would never find was a way to send Peruge packing, a way to answer all his questions without answering them. Those mysterious, probing questions about metallurgy and new inventions irritated Hellstrom. What could that possibly have to do with Project #? New invention -- yes, possibly. But metallurgy? He decided to communicate his question to the lab at the earliest opportunity. Saying of the Hive Specialists: How primitive and far behind us are the Behaviorists of the wild Outside! at his door as part of a dream. It was a dog from his childhood calling him to get up for breakfast. Good old Danny. He could see the wide, ugly face, the dripping jowls, in his dream. He actually felt the fact that he was in bed, clad only in pajama bottoms as had always been usual for him. Abruptly circuits closed in his memory. That dog had been dead for years! He was awake instantly, silent and probing with all of his senses for evidence of danger. The scratching continued. He slipped his heavy automatic from under his pillow, rose and went to the door. The floor was cold against his bare feet. Standing at one side with the weapon ready, he jerked the door open on its chain. There was a nightlight outside his door. It cast a yellow glow on Fancy, who stood there wrapped in something furry, dark and bulky. She supported a bicycle with her left hand. Peruge closed the door, released the chain, swung the door wide. He knew he appeared strange standing there in his pajama bottoms with a big mankiller automatic in his hand, but he sensed the urgent need to get her out of sight in his room. He felt a surge of elation. They had sent this little vixen to compromise him -- but he had one of them outside their goddamned farm! Fancy entered the motel room without speaking, wheeling her bicycle. She leaned the cycle against the wall as Peruge closed and locked the door. When he turned toward her she was facing him and removing her outer garment, a long fur coat. She threw the coat over the bicycle's handlebars, stood in the thin white smock she had worn when he had last seen her. Her eyes were focused intently on his with a smoky, mocking look. Fun first? Peruge wondered. Or business first? His hand was slippery with perspiration against the butt of the automatic. God, she was a sexy bitch! He went to the window beside the door, slipped back the draperies, peered out. He could see no watchers. He crossed to the rear window, looked out over the parking lot toward the mountain. No prying strangers were visible there, either. Nobody. What time was it, for Christ's sake? And why wasn't the bitch talking? He crossed to the nightstand, lifted his wristwatch. #:# A.M. Fancy watched all of this activity, a small smile on her lips. Outsiders were strange creatures. This one appeared even stranger than usual. Their bodies told them what they should do and they constantly disobeyed. Well, she had come prepared. Peruge glanced at her from his position by the nightstand. Her hands were clenched into fists, but she appeared to be carrying no weapon. He slipped his gun into a drawer of the stand. Was she being quiet because the room had been bugged? That couldn't be -- he had made certain the room was clean. He moved carefully, not turning his back on her. Why had she come on a bicycle? And in a fur coat, for the love of god! He wondered if he should alert the nightwatch on the mountain. Not yet. Fun first. Fancy reached up with her left hand as though she had read his mind, unbuttoned the front of her smock, shrugged out of it and let it fall. She stood there naked, a sensuous pocket-Venus body which sent his pulse racing. There were open sandals on her feet. She kicked them off, stirring up trails of dust from her ride into town. Peruge, his eyes glittering, wet his lips and said, "Aren't you something!" Still without speaking. Fancy approached him, reached up and clasped both his bare arms. His left arm tingled as she touched it and he smelled a sudden, heavy musk. His gaze jerked toward the tingling in shocked alarm and he saw a tiny, flesh-colored ampule crushed beneath her forefinger against his skin, a fleck of his own blood there. In his panic he knew he should hurl her away from him, call for help from his nightwatch, but his muscles remained frozen while that tingling spread through his body. His gaze slipped from the ampule on his arm to Fancy's firm breasts, the dark nipples protruding with sensual tensions. As though a mind-obscuring fog were creeping up from his loins, Peruge felt his will dissolve until his only awareness was of the woman who was now clinging to him, pressing against him with surprising strength, forcing him backward onto the bed. Fancy spoke. "You want to breed with me? That's good." From the Hive Manual: A basic aim of the socializing process should be to create the widest possible tolerance of diversity among the society's components. X# said. He had come in person to Hellstrom's quarters, racing down the corridors and galleries which never lacked activity, ignoring the upset his running passage created among the workers. Hellstrom sat upright in his bed, rubbing sleep from his eyes, shaking his head to wake himself. He had been in deep sleep, his first in days, trying for a good rest before tomorrow's certain confrontation with Peruge. He peered up at Saldo's frightened face in the cell glow. "Alone? She left alone?" "Yes." Hellstrom exhaled a sigh of relief. "How did she get out of the Hive? Where is she?" "She used that faulty emergency ventilator in the rock at the north perimeter. She had a bicycle." "Weren't there guards?" "She stunned them with de-hyp." "But the Security watch!" "They missed it," Saldo confessed. "She's obviously used this route before. She went into the trees and avoided every one of our detectors." She would, of course, Hellstrom thought. A bicycle? Why a bicycle? Where had she gone? "How did she get a bicycle?" he asked. "It's the one we took from the Outsider, Depeaux." "What was that still doing around? Why wasn't it reduced for salvage?" "Some of the engineers were playing with it. They were thinking of manufacturing our own model to speed up delivery service in the lower galleries." "Which direction did she go?" Hellstrom levered himself out of the bed. What time was it? He glanced at the crystal clock on his wall: #:#I a.m. "She apparently went across the Palmer bridge. There are tracks." Toward town then. Why? "The guards she stunned say she was wearing Outsider garments," Saldo said. "Wardrobe reports a fur coat missing. She was into Hive stores again, too. We haven't determined yet what she took." "How long has she been gone?" Hellstrom asked. He slippfed his feet into Hive sandals, groped for a robe. "Almost four hours," Saldo said. "Guards were unconscious for a long time." He rubbed at the healing wound on his jaw. "I'm sure she's gone into town. Two chemical trackers went as far along her trail as they dared. She was still headed for town when they broke off." "Peruge," Hellstrom said. "What?" "She's gone to breed with Peruge." "Of course! Shall I call Line and have him -- " "No." Hellstrom shook his head from side to side. Saldo trembled with impatience. "But that bicycle belonged to one of Peruge' s agents!" "Who identifies bicycles? They're not likely to make the connection. Fancy won't tell him where that machine came from." "Are you sure?" "I'm sure. Fancy has a one-track mind where breeding is concerned. I should have anticipated this when I saw her go on the attack with Peruge as target." "That man is clever! She could tell him something without even realizing it." "A possibility we'll have to investigate. But for now you will alert Line. Tell him where she is and see that he makes certain they don't take her away for interrogation. Peruge is sure to have his friends watching him. We don't want any more activity around that motel than is absolutely necessary." shocked silence. He had expected Hellstrom to call up all of the Hive's defensive resources. This was not an adequate response! "Any more indications of swarming pressure?" Hellstrom asked. "No. The -- the ventilation appears to have helped." "Fancy is fertile," Hellstrom said. "Getting her pregnant by an Outsider will help, too. She becomes quite tractable while producing a child." "Ah -- " Saldo stood in admiration of Hellstrom's wisdom. "I know what she took from stores," Hellstrom said. "She will have a male sex-fraction in an ampule to hype up this Peruge. She wants to breed with him, that's all. Let her. Outsiders have extremely odd reactions to this natural form of human behavior." "So it is said," Saldo murmured. "I've studied the behavioral precautions for work Outside." "Depend on it," Hellstrom said, smiling. "I have seen this happen many times. Peruge will show up here tomorrow the figure of contrition. He will be with Fancy and very defensive. He will feel guilty. That will make him vulnerable to us. Yes -- I believe I know how to handle this situation now, thanks to Fancy. Bless her." "What are you saying?" "The wild Outsiders aren't all that different from us chemically. It took Fancy to remind me of this. The same techniques we use to make our workers tractable, domesticated and yielding to the Hive's needs will work on Outsiders." "In their food?" "Or their water or even their air." "Are you sure Fancy will return?" Saldo could not keep down the niggling doubt. "I'm sure." "But the bicycle -- " "Do you really think they'll identify it?" "We cannot risk that they will!" "If it makes you feel better, warn Line about this possibility. I think Peruge's senses will be so dulled after a night of hyped-up breeding with Fancy that he wouldn't even recognize a bicycle when he saw it." Saldo frowned. There was a manic note to Hellstrom's manner and voice that was deeply disturbing. "I don't like this, Nils." "You will," Hellstrom assured him. "Trust me. Tell Line you are sending in a special security team. I want their instructions to be explicit, no misunderstandings. Go over them with the utmost care. They are not to interfere tonight. Their major task is to insure that Fancy is not removed from that motel. She must spend an uninterrupted night with Peruge. In the morning, they are to collect her at the first opportunity and bring her to me. I wish to thank her in person. The Hive does learn -- it does react to danger as a single organism. It is just as I have always suspected." "I agree we should make sure she gets back here," Saldo said. "But thank her?" "Naturally." "For what?" "For reminding us that Outsiders share our chemistry." Wisdom of the Hive: The Superior Specialist, bred to the demands of our most basic needs, will win for us in the end. dawn gloom, swimming up to consciousness from some faraway, energy-drained place. He turned his head to see the tangled confusion of his bed, came to the slow realization that he was alone in the bed and that this should be important information. A bicycle with a coat thrown over the handlebars stood against the wall beside the door. A crumpled white garment lay on the floor between bed and door. He stared at the bicycle, wondering why he felt that a bicycle should be so important. A bicycle? Water splashed in the bathroom. Someone was humming. Fancy! He pushed himself to a sitting position, his mind as muddled as the bed. Fancy! For the love of God! What had she used on him? He had a foggy remembrance of what he thought were eighteen orgasms. An aphrodisiac? If so, it was more potent than anything in his wildest fantasies. Water still splashed in the bathroom. She was taking a shower. God! How could she move? He tried to reassemble the night in his memory, met only the wildest confusion, a recurrent image of writhing flesh. He thought; That was me! For God's sake! That was me! What was that stuff Fancy had given him? Could that be Project #, for the love of heaven? He wanted to laugh hysterically, but couldn't summon the strength. The sound of splashing water came to an abrupt stop. His attention moved to the bathroom door. Movement there, the voice humming. Where did she get the strength? The door opened and Fancy emerged, a towel wrapped around her loins, another towel in her hands with which she was drying her hair. "Good morning, lover," she said. She thought; He looks completely used up. He stared at her without speaking, memory searching. "Didn't you like breeding with me?" she asked. That yas it! he thought. That had been the thing he had tried to remember but couldn't until she spoke. Breed with her? Could she be one of those kooky, turned-on members of the new generation -- sex for procreation only? "What did you do to me?" he asked. His voice came out in a husky croaking which shocked him. "Do? I just -- " He lifted his left arm to expose the area where she had injected him with that mysterious musky substance. Faint discoloration there revealed a subcutaneous bruise. "Oh, that," she said. "Didn't you like it when you were hyped up?" He levered himself back against the bed's headrest, adjusted a pillow behind him. God, he was tired. "Hyped," he said. "So you shot me with some kind of dope." "I only gave you an additional store of what every male has when he's ready to breed," she said, knowing her tone betrayed her own puzzlement. Outsiders were so strange about breeding. Peruge's head ached and he felt that her words increased the pain. He turned slowly, looked squarely at her. God! What a voluptuous body! He spoke painfully, but clearly. "What's this breeding crap?" "I know you use other words for what we did," she explained, trying to sound reasonable, "but that's what we like to call it -- breeding." "We?" "My -- friends and I." "You breed with them?" "Sometimes." He thought. Crazy communal hop heads! Could that be what Hellstrom was hiding -- sex orgies and aphrodisiac drugs? Peruge felt a deep and sudden prurient envy. Suppose that was what these crazies did! Suppose they had regular parties such as the one he'd experienced with Fancy. It was wrong, of course. But what a hold an experience like that could get on a man! On a woman, too, no doubt. It was criminal to do such things, but... Fancy dropped her towels, began putting on her smock, seemingly with no more concern about her nudity than she had experienced the night before. Despite his headache and profound lassitude, Peruge marveled at her sensuous grace. She was all woman! J. to herself that she felt hungry and she wondered if Peruge had money to buy breakfast. She enjoyed the thought of exotic Outsider food, but she had not prepared herself with money from Hive stores before sneaking out. I was in a hurry, she thought, and could not suppress a joyful giggle. The wild Outsider males were such fun when one hyped them, as though their suppressed breeding energies had been stored up for just such an occasion. As he watched Fancy dress, Peruge found his original worries about her returning. What had driven her to his bed? Breeding? Nonsense. She had come into possession of an undoubted aphrodisiac, though. He couldn't deny this. His own behavior in the night gave ample testimony to this. Eighteen times! Something was very sick up there at that farm. Breeding! "Have you had any babies?" "Oh, several," she said, then realized it had been wrong to admit this. Her own training in Outsider sex inhibitions had been explicit on that score. Her personal experiences had reinforced the training. Now it was a potentially dangerous admission. Peruge had no way of knowing how old she was. Old enough to be his mother, no doubt. That Hive-difference between appearance and age was one of the things that could never be shared with Outsiders. She felt an abrupt resurgence of Hivecaution. Her answer astonished him. "Several? Where are they?" "Oh -- with friends." She tried to act casual and unconcerned, but was now fully alert. Peruge must be diverted. "You want to breed some more?" she asked. But Peruge was not to be shunted from this fascinating disclosure. "Don't you have a husband?" "Oh, no." "Who fathered your several children?" he asked, then realized he probably should have asked about fathers, plural. His questions increased her nervousness. "I don't want to talk about it." Admitting that she had borne children had been a mistake. Hive-consciousness restored other memories of the night with Peruge, as well. The Outsider had made interesting admissions while in the throes of breeding ecstasy. There had been, for a time, a level of his deepest awareness completely open to her. Moving with an elaborate show of casualness, she crossed to the bicycle, took up the long fur coat, held it over her arm. "Where are you going?" he demanded. He forced his legs off the edge of the bed, let them fall to the cold floor, which restored some of his energy. His head whirled with fatigue and there was an aching in his chest. What the hell had been in that shot? She had really used him up. "I'm hungry," she explained. "Can I leave the bicycle while I go out and eat? Maybe we can breed some more later." "Eat?" His stomach rebelled at the thought. "There's a cafe just down the street," she said. "I'm very hungry -- " she giggled -- "after -- " She has to come back and get her damned bicycle, he thought. He realized he was no match for her in his present weakened condition. He would have a reception committee ready for her when she did return, though. He was going to unravel the mystery of Nils Hellstrom and the beginning of the thread was named Fancy. "Just down to the cafe," he said. as though he were explaining it to himself. He recalled seeing the neon sign. "I like an -- breakfast," she said and swallowed in a sudden chill. Nervousness had almost tripped her into saying "an Outsider breakfast." Outsider was a word one did not use with Outsiders. She covered her slip, asking, "Do you have any money? I sneaked out in such a hurry last night I didn't bring any." Peruge gestured to his trousers on a chair across the room. "Hip pocket. Wallet." He put his head in his hands. The effort of sitting up had taken a frightening amount of his reserves, and the chest pain, the headache left him confused. He realized he was going to have to put out a tremendous effort to stand up. Maybe a cold shower would help. He heard Fancy fumbling for the money, couldn't bring himself to look at her. Take it all! Damned bitch! "I'm taking five dollars," she said. "Is that all right?" I often pay more, he thought. But she obviously was no regular whore -- or she would have taken all. "Sure, anything you need." "Should I bring you coffee or something?" she asked. He really did look sick. She found herself worrying about him. Peruge swallowed an upsurge of nausea, gestured weakly. "No I, uh -- I'll get something later." "You're sure?" "I'm sure." "All right, then." His appearance worried her, but she reached for the door handle to let herself out. Perhaps he just needed a little more rest. She called cheerfully as she opened the door, "I'll be right back." "Wait," he said. He dropped his hands from his face, lifted his head with an application of conscious effort. "Did you change your mind about my bringing you something?" she asked. "No. I -- just -- wondered. So we bred. Do you expect to have a baby by me?" "I certainly hope so. I'm right at the top of my fertility." She smiled disarmingly, added: "I'm going to go eat now. I'll be back before you know it. Everybody says I'm a fast eater." She went out, closing the door briskly behind her. M Her answer only added to his confusion. What the hell had he run into? A baby? Was this what Carlos had discovered? He had a sudden vision of the dapper Carlos Depeaux held in some subterranean bondage by Fancy and her friends, a continual hyped-up orgy with that mysterious aphrodisiac for as long as it lasted. Or for as long as Carlos lasted. Peruge tried to visualize a continual orgy of breeding -- babies on an assembly line. Somehow he could not imagine Carlos fitting in. Certainly, he couldn't see Tymiena in it or even Porter. Tymiena had never struck him as the motherly type. And dry-as-dust Porter ran from intimate encounters with women. Hellstrom was involved in something to do with sex, though -- and it was probably dirty as hell. Peruge rubbed a hand across his forehead. The motel had provided an in-room coffeemaker with paper packets of instant brew. He lurched to his feet, found the equipment in the closet alcove beside the bathroom door, heated water and made two cups. He drank it much too hot. His mouth felt scalded afterward, but the coffee gave him a lift and reduced the throbbing in his head. He could think a bit more clearly now. He put the front door on the chain latch and got out his transceiver. The second signal burst at the mountains brought contact with Janvert. Peruge's hands were unsteady, but he brought a chair to the window, rested the equipment on the sill and set himself grimly to the task of reporting. They exchanged code-recognition signals and Peruge launched himself into the whole story of his night with Fancy, sparing nothing. "Eighteen times?" Janvert sounded unbelieving. "As nearly as I can remember." "You must've had some time." The beam transceiver failed to mask Janvert's tone of cynical amusement. "Don't give me any crap," Peruge growled. "She shot me full of something, an aphrodisiac or something, and I was just a big, eager bundle of flesh. See if you can keep this on a professional level, will you? We have to find out what it was that she gave me." He glanced down at the bruise on his arm. "How do you propose doing that?" "I'm going up there today. I may brace Hellstrom about it." "That might not be too wise. Have you checked with HQ?... "The Chief wants -- I've checked!" Christ! It was too difficult to explain that the Chief had ' ordered direct negotiations. This development couldn't change that. It only added to the things to be introduced in the negotiations. "You play it cool," Janvert said. "Remember, we already have three people missing." Did Janvert take him for an idiot, for Christ's sake? Peruge massaged his right temple. God, his head felt as empty as his body. She had really drained him. "How did this dame get down from the farm?" Janvert asked. "Nightwatch didn't report any car headlights out that way." "She rode a bicycle, you damn fool! Didn't I already tell you that?" "No, you didn't. Are you sure you're feeling all right?" "I'm just a little tired." "That I can understand." There he went with the goddamned humor again! "So she rode a bicycle. You know, that's interesting." "What's interesting?" "Carlos was a bicycle nut. The Portland office said he took a bike with him in the van. Remember?" Peruge glanced back at the bicycle leaning against the wall. He did remember, now that Shorty mentioned it. A bicycle. Was that possible? By any stretch of good fortune, could that set of flimsy wheels be linked to Depeaux? "Do we have a serial number or anything else to identify Carlos's bicycle?" he asked. "Maybe. There might even be fingerprints. Where's this bicycle now?" "Right here in the room with me. I'm bike-sitting while she gets breakfast." He recalled his original resolve then. Christ almighty! His mind was going! "Shorty," he barked, some of his old strength returning for a moment, "you get a team down here as soon as you can. Collect this bicycle, yes, but we have to get our hands on Fancy for a long and thorough interrogation." "That's more like it," Janvert said. "DT is right here listening to us and he's all hot to go." "No." DT had to stay there and keep an eye on Janvert. The Chief had been explicit about that. "Send Sampson's team." "DT is seeing to it. They'll be on their way in just a minute." "Tell them to hurry, will you? I know only one way of delaying this dame and after last night I'm really not up to it." XX The words of Nils Hellstrom: I remember my childhood in the Hive as the happiest period, the happiest experience a human could ever enjoy. Nothing I needed was denied me. I knew that all around me were people who would protect me with their lives. It came to me only gradually that I owed these people the same full measure of payment were it ever demanded of me. What a profound thing the insects have taught us! How different it is from the wild opinions about insects current Outside. Hollywood, for instance, has long contended that the mere threat of having an insect crawl upon your face is enough to make a grown man beg for mercy and tell every secret he ever knew. Philosopher Harl, the wisest of his specialty among us, tells me that from childhood nightmares to adult psychosis, the insect is a common horror fixation in the Outsider's mind. How strange it is that Outsiders cannot look beyond the insect's great strength and efficient face to see the lesson embodied there for us all. Lesson one, of course, is that the insect is never afraid to die for his bretheren. that bicycle?" Hellstrom stormed. He stood almost in the center of Hive Central Security, a chamber deep within the Hive that could tap into and repeat the data collected from any of its internal and external sensors. The room lacked only the positive direct visual backup of the barn aerie to make it the most important Security post in the Hive. Hellstrom often preferred this backup post to the aerie. The sense of bustling workers whose activities spread outward all around gave him a feeling of protection he believed helped his thought processes. Saldo, who had made the report. shuddered under the combined weight of Hellstrom's wrath and his own complex personal knowledge -- not only of the danger this development brought, but of the judgment error which went directly back to the Prime Male. Saldo was shaken in his innermost being. If only Hellstrom had heeded the words of warning. If only -- But it would not be wise to remind Hellstrom of this as yet. "Our surveillance workers did not know what was happening until too late," Saldo explained. "Fancy had emerged earlier and they were lulled into a sense of complacency. A closed truck drove up. Four men went into Peruge's room and two of them emerged, bringing the bicycle. They were driving away with it before our people could get across the street to try to stop them. We pursued, but they were prepared for that and we were not. Another truck blocked our pursuit and let them get away. They were at the airport and the bicycle was gone before we could catch up." Hellstrom closed his eyes. His mind felt clotted with foreboding. "And all this time. Fancy was down the street at the restaurant eating Outsider foods." "We've always known how she is about that," Saldo said. "It's a defect." He made the vat sign, eyebrows raised questioningly. "No." Hellstrom shook his head. "Don't be too quick to discount her value to us. Fancy's not yet ready for the vats. Where is she right now?" "Still at the restaurant." "I thought I ordered her brought Saldo shrugged. Of course, Hellstrom thought. The workers were fond of Fancy and many of them knew about her defect. What harm was there in letting her finish a meal of exotic Outsider food? Fondness could be a defect, too. "Have her picked up and brought back immediately," he ordered. "I should have ordered that myself at once," Saldo admitted. "No excuse. I was at my station monitoring our communications with town when -- No excuse. All I thought of was hurrying down the gallery to you." "I understand." Hellstrom indicated a communications console ahead of him. Saldo moved to the station quickly, relayed Hellstrom's order. It felt good to be taking positive action, but his deeper disturbance was not eased. What did Hellstrom mean with his mysterious allusions to Fancy's value? How could she possibly help save the Hive with her behavior? But the Older Ones often did know things denied to the younger. Most of the Hive's workers knew this. It did not seem possible that Fancy was helping, but the possibility could not be denied in the face of Hellstrom's positive assertion. The words of Nils Hellstrom: There is another respect in which we must guard against becoming too much like the insects upon whom we pattern our design for human survival. The insect has been called a walking digestive tract. This is not without reason. To support his own life an insect will consume as much as a hundred times his own weight each day -- which to each of us would be like eating an entire cow, a herd of thirty each month. To those who have witnessed the insect's profligate display of appetite the outcome is clear. If allowed to continue on his reproductive rampage, the insect would defoliate Earth. Thus, with our lesson from the insect, comes a clear warning. If the race for food is to be the deciding conflict, let no one say it came without this warning. From the beginning of time wild humans have stood helpless, watching the very soil they nurtured give birth to a competitor that could outeat them. Just as we must not let our teacher, the insect, consume what we require for survival, we must not launch a similar rampage of our own. The pace of our planet's growing cycle cannot be denied. It is possible for insects or for man to destroy in a single week what could have fed "We lifted all of the prints we could en route and put everything on a chartered plane to Portland," Jan vert said over the laser transceiver. "The preliminary report says some of the prints match the ones from the dame in your room. Have our boys picked her up yet?" "She got away," Peruge growled. Clad only in a light robe, he sat in front of the window, looking out ut the morning light on the mountain and trying to keep his mind focused on the report. To do so was becoming increasingly difficult. His chest ached with a demanding persistence and every movement took so much energy each time he wondered if he had any reserves left. "What happened?" Janvert asked. "Did our team slip up?" "No. I should have sent them to the cafe. We saw her come out and head back here, but three men drove up and intercepted her." "They grabbed her?" "There was no struggle. Fancy just jumped into the car with them and they drove off. Our people weren't in position. The van that helped us get away with the bike wasn't back yet. Sampson ran out when we saw what was happening, but it all happened too quickly." "She's back at the farm, eh?" "I'm sure of it." "Did you get a license number?" "They were too far away -- but the number makes little difference." "So she just went along with them?" "That's how it seemed. Sampson thought she looked unhappy about it, but she didn't argue." "Probably unhappy that she couldn't come back and play with you some more," Janvert said. "Stuff that," Peruge snapped, then put a hand to his head. His brain felt blocked off, not working at all normally. He felt hemmed in by details and was aware of things slipping away front him. He really needed to take a cold shower, snap out of this fog and get ready to return to the farm. "I've been referring to the files," Janvert said. "This Fancy fits the description of the Fancy Kalotermi who's an officer of Hellstrom's corporation." Peruge sighed. "I know, I know." "You feeling all right?" Janvert asked. "You're sounding a little off your feed. Maybe that shot she gave you -- " "I'm okay." "You don't sound it. We don't know what was in that stuff she used to charge you up last night. Maybe you'd better go out for a physical and we send in the second team." "Meaning you," Peruge growled. "Why should you have all the fun?" "I told you to stuff that. I'm all right. I'll take a shower and get ready to go pretty soon. We have to find out how she did what she did." "I want to be the first to know," Janvert quipped. Damn fool! Peruge raged, rubbing his head. God, how his head ached -- and his chest. He had to go out on a job as touchy as this one and have to rely on a clown to back him up! It was too late too change that now, though. Peruge felt his hand tremble against his forehead. "You still there?" Janvert asked. Peruge winced at the sound. "I'm here." "Wouldn't it be a gas if this Project Forty turned out to be an aphrodisiac?" was the perfect antithesis of everything Peruge needed right now. There was no doubt of the Tnalice in Janvert's responses, no doubt of the man's unreliability. What could be done to change that now, though? The teams were scattered all over the area. And he had to be up at that damned farm in a couple of hours. He didn't know how he was going to manage that, but he had to. For a moment he tried to consider that Janvert's cynical banter might contain a small seed of good sense. The effort was futile. What had that shot contained? Christ! If he could get a corner on that he would make more than with ten metallurgical processes. Make a fortune under the counter. "You're taking an awful long time between answers," Janvert said. "I'm going to send Clovis down to have a look at you. She's had some nursing experience and -- " "She stays right there with you. That's an order." "That dame could have done a helluva lot more than just charge you up as a bed partner," Janvert argued. "That's all it was, dammit!" But Shorty's words carried the seeds of panic. The night with Fancy had distorted his perceptions of many things, including his idea of woman. The uninhibited little slut! "I don't like the way you sound at all," Janvert said. "Is Sampson still around?" "I sent him back up to you." "The backup van isn't here yet. What if we -- " "You contact them the way I told you and get them back up there! You hear me. Shorty?" "But that would leave you in town alone. Hellstrom's crowd could have a team there and we wouldn't." "They won't dare to attack me." "I think you're wrong. I think they may already have attacked you. That town could be completely in their hands. The deputy sure as hell is." "I'm ordering you to stay up there with all of your teams," Peruge said. "We could have you at a clinic in Portland within two hours," Janvert said. "I'm going to call for -- " "I am ordering you not to contact headquarters," Peruge said. "I think you're out of your mind. A clinic might be able to examine you and tell us what was in that shot." "Not likely. Christ! She said it was -- a hormone or something." "You believe that?" "It's probably true. Sign off now and do what I told you." He dropped a hand onto his own cutoff switch, heard the blip as the transceiver went dead. Damn! Everything took so damned much energy. away the transceiver, went into the bathroom. A cold shower. That was what he needed. If he could only get fully awake. The bathroom still showed the scattered wetness of Fancy's ablutions. He stepped into the tub, supported himself with a hand on the showerhead while he groped for the faucet. Cold water. He turned it on full. At the first a sharp band of pain tighten on his forehead and chest. He staggered from the tub, trying to breathe, left the water running. He stumbled from the bathroom, dripping, knocked the remains of his coffeemaking from the counter as he passed, but didn't even hear it. The bed! He needed the bed. He flopped his wet body onto the bed, rolled onto his back. His chest was on fire, his skin trembling with a deep chill. It was so cold! He arched his back, tried to pull the bedding around himself, but his fingers lost their grip and his suddenly out-flung hand fell over the edge of the bed. He was dead before his relaxing fingers touched the floor. The words of Nils Hellstrom: In the sense popularly believed Outside, it is not possible to fight back against any aspect of nature. What must be understood is that we fit ourselves into existing patterns, adapting as our influence upon those processes brings about its inevitable change. The way the wild Outsiders fight insects is particularly enlightening. By opposing themselves to a powerful aspect of existing processed the wild one unwittingly add fuel to the defenses of those they oppose. The Outsiders' poisons bring instant death to most insects. But the few who survive will develop an immunity, a tolerance to ingest the poison with no harmful effect. Returning to the womb of the Earth, these survivors pass on this immunity to new generations of T 'HE Hive seemed always so neat, efficient and reassuring after she had been Outside, Fancy thought. She admired the way her fellow workers moved about their tasks without fuss, with that quiet, purposeful air of knowing what they did. Even the escort taking her down the familiar galleries, down the relays of elevators, gave off this same air. She did not think of these people as her captors. They were fellow workers. It was good to get out of the Hive occasionally, but so much better to come back. Especially with the almost certain knowledge that she had added to the Hive's gene store by last night's foray. The Hive comforted her mind and body now just by its presence around her. Outsiders could be great sport, too -- especially the randy wild males. In her fifty-eight years. Fancy had brought nine Outsiderfathered babies into the Hive, each one of them concealed in the mysterious fecundity of her body. Hers was a great contribution to the gene pool. She understood gene pools just as she understood insects. She was a specialist. Outsider males and ants were her special favorites. Sometimes as she watched an ant colony in the lab. Fancy felt that there might be a way for her to move right into the colony, perhaps even become its broodmother. It might merely require a period of chemical acclimatization for her charges to accept her as one of their own. In her fantasy, she could imagine the escort which now took her deep into the Hive as her own Queen's guard. She would be the ant-queen. And the strange thing was that ants did tend to accept her. Ants, mosquitoes, many different kinds of insects showed no disturbance at Fancy's intrusions. Whenever she thought of this and conjured up attendant fantasies it was easy for her to imagine the Hive as her colony. So firmly had imagination taken hold of Fancy's consciousness that when the escort brought her into Hellstrom's presence, she looked upon him at first with queenly condescension and failed to observe his overwrought condition and tension. Hellstrom noted that she still wore the fur coat she'd taken from wardrobe and she appeared mighty proud of herself. He nodded to dismiss her guards. They retreated into the background, but remained alert and observing. Saldo's orders had been explicit about that. Much of Security was growing to recognize that Saldo possessed qualities that demanded obedience. In this room of the Hive's inner security processes at least half of the workers had begun to harbor divided loyalties. "Well, Fancy," Hellstrom said, his voice tired but carefully neutral. She perched on a corner of Hellstrom's desk, grinned at him. Hellstrom took the chair behind the desk, sank into it, looked up at her. "Fancy, would you try to explain to me what you thought you were doing in last night's escapade?" "I merely spent the night breeding with your dangerous Mr. Peruge. He was about as fearsome as any other Outsider male I've ever met." "You took supplies from Hives stores," Hellstrom said. "Tell me about that." "Just this coat and a shot of our own male breeder hormones," she said. "I hyped him up." "Did he respond?" "Just as the others always did." "You've done this before?" "Lots of times." Hellstrom was acting strangely, she thought. Hellstrom nodded to himself, tried to read another message into Fancy's responses, something to confirm his suspicion that she was acting out of an awareness of the Hive's most fundamental needs. Additions to the gene pool were beneficial, yes; and Peruge's genes would be most welcome. But she had taken a prized Hive secret Outside, risked Outsider discovery that the Hive possessed a profound knowledge of the workings of human hormones. By her present admission, she had done so more than once. If Outsiders learned some of the things the Hive could do in manipulation of human chemistry more problems would arise. "Did you ever discuss this with anyone?" Hellstrom asked. Surely, some circumstance must exist to explain her behavior. "I've talked about it with many of the breeder females," she said. What could possibly be bothering old Nils? She saw now that he was working against deep tensions. "Your only discussions have been with breeder females?" "Yes. Many of us use the hormones when we go Outside." Shocked, Hellstrom shook his head. Blessed Broodmother! And none of the Hive's ruling specialists had ever once suspected! What else might be going on in the Hive? "Peruge's friends have the bicycle," Hellstrom said. She looked at him, not understanding. "The bicycle you took when you sneaked into town," Hellstrom explained. "Oh. The workers who picked me up were so insistent they made me forget all about it." "By taking that bicycle, you've created a crisis," Hellstrom said. "How?" "Don't you recall where we got that bicycle?" S HE put a hand over her mouth in sudden comprehension. All she had been thinking about a quick way to get into town when she had borrow the machine. A certain amount of pride had also been involved in the action. She was one of the few workers who had learned how to manage a bicycle Outside. She had demonstrated her ability for the engineers during the preceeding week, even taught one of them to ride it. But her ingrained Hive-protective sense was fully aroused now. If that bicycle could be traced to the couple the workers had thrown into the vats... "What can I do to get it back?" she asked. This is the Fancy I can work with and admire, Hellstrom thought, responding to her sudden alertness. "I don't yet know," he told her. "Peruge is coming to see you today," she said. "Can I demand that he return it to me?" "It's too late for th,at. They've sent it away in an airplane. That must mean they suspect." She nodded. She knew about fingerprints and serial numbers. "Our best move may be to deny that we ever had that bicycle." "No telling who may have seen you on it," Hellstrom said. And he thought sadly to himself: Our best move may be to deny that Fancy exists. We have others with a close enough resemblance to her face and body. Were her fingerprints likely to be on any of the documents she had signed as Fancy Kalotermi? Not likely -- they had since been handled by many. "I've done wrong, haven't I?" Fancy asked, beginning to grasp the extent of the problem she had created. "It was wrong for you and other females to take Hive stores Outside. It was wrong to take that bicycle" "The bicycle -- I see that now," she admitted. "But the breederhyps only insured fertilization." Even as she spoke Hive-honesty forced Fancy to admit to herself that this didn't explain fully why she and the others used Hive stores this way. It had been an experiment at first, then a delightful discovery of how susceptible Outsider males were. She had shared the discovery with a few sisters. They had made up their own stories to explain to Outsider males who became curious. This was an expensive new drug they had stolen. They might not be able to get more of it. Better to use it while they had it. "You must name all of the females who shared your little trick," Hellstrom said. "Oh, Nils!" "You must and you know it. All of you will give us detailed accounts concerning the reactions of Outsider males, how curious any of them may have been, who they were, how many times you've raided Hive stores this way, everything." She nodded dejectedly. It would have to be done, of course. The fun was ended. "On the basis of our review we may conduct some experiments Outside, fully controlled and observed," Hellstrom said. "For that reason be explicitly detailed in your account. Anything you recall could be valuable." "Yes, Nils." She felt contrite now, but secretly elated. Perhaps the fun wasn't ended. Controlled experiments meant further use of Hive methods on Outsiders. Who better qualified for such a project than those already experienced? "Fancy, Fancy," Hellstrom said, shaking his head. "The Hive has never been in greater peril and you continue to play your games." She clasped her arms around her body, hugging herself. "Why?" he asked. "Why?" She remained wordless. "We could even be forced to send you to the vats," Hellstrom said. Her eyes went wide in alarm. She slipped off the desk, stood facing Hellstrom. The vats! But she was still young. She had many years of breeding service ahead of her. They needed her talents with the insects, too. Nobody was better than she was with the insects! She began to voice these arguments, but Hellstrom cut her short. "Fancy. The Hive comes first." His words shocked her and she recalled suddenly the thing she had reminded herself to tell Hellstrom. Certainly the Hive came first! Did he think her a moral reject? "I have something else to report," she said. "It may be important." "Oh?" "The hyp hit Peruge very hard. He thought I was asking him questions at one point. I wasn't, but when I recognized what he was doing, I did ask questions. He wasn't fully awake, just reacting. I think he spoke the truth." "What did he say? Out with it." "He said he had come to make a deal with you. He said their study of the papers they had found -- about Project Forty, you understand -- had led them to believe you were developing a new way to shape metals. Steel, that sort of metal. He said a metallurgical breakthrough could be worth make sense, but that was the gist of it." Hellstrom felt such elation at her words he wanted to get up and hug her. The Hive had been working through her! these thoughtsemotions coursed through Hellstrom and Hellstrom almost called the young male over to explain. Fancy's discovery gave the Hive, a way out. The invasion was commercial. The discovery confirmed Hellstrom's instincts about Hive-learning. The lab would have to be told immediately. This might even help the Hive scientists in their own researches. The wild Outsiders sometimes came up with rare insights. "Have I helped?" Fancy asked. "Indeed you have." Saldo had stopped for a few words with one of the observers at the bank of instruments. He glanced across at Hellstrom, shook his head. Peruge was not yet on his way, then. Saldo had been instructed to give word at the first sign of Peruge. Hellstrom wanted Peruge to come now. Metallurgy? Inventions? All of those mysterious allusions by Peruge now made sense -- a remarkable degree of sense. Fancy still stood at the desk watching Hellstrom. "Did Peruge say anything else?" Hellstrom asked. "No." She shook her head. "Nothing about the agency that sent him, the government agency?" "Well, he did say something about somebody named Chief. He hates Chief. He cursed horribly." "You have helped enormously," Hellstrom said, "but you must go into hiding now." "Hiding?" "Yes. You've helped in many ways. I don't even mind any longer that you stole Hive stores. You've reminded us that we share the same body chemistry with Outsiders. We've changed somewhat in three hundred years, of course, because we've bred for change, but -- " He you must do nothing else now without consulting us." "I won't. I really won't." "Very good. Was Mirneca one of the breeder females you shared this little trick with?" "Yes." "Excellent. I want you -- " He hesitated, taking in her pale face, the expectant expression. "Is there any chance that last night's escapade was successful, that you're impregnated?" "A very good chance." She brightened. "I'm right at peak fertility. I've become pretty good at judging it." "See if the gestation lab can confirm that," he said. "If test results are positive your period of hiding should be pleasant enough. If you've been impregnated, turn yourself in at Worker Gestation Prime. Tell them it's at my instructions. Don't go on dormancy, though, until we've sent someone down to interrogate you on your use of breeder-hyp with Outsiders." "I won't. Nils. I'll go down to the lab right away." She turned, hurried across the chamber. Several workers looked up at her passage. She probably still trailed some of the hyp. Hellstrom had been too busy to notice. She was really a ridiculous female, he thought. What had they bred in this Fancy line? Saldo approached Hellstrom's alcove, looking back at Fancy until she had left the chamber. Hellstrom rubbed his chin. He kept himself on hair suppressants during most of his Hive days, but the beard insisted on growing anyway. He needed a shave and would have to get one before meeting Peruge. Appearance was important with Outsiders. So it was metallurgy and inventions, was it? As Saldo stopped just inside the alcove, Hellstrom asked absently; "What do you want?" "I listened while you were talking to Fancy," Saldo said. "You heard what she said about Peruge?" "Yes." "Do you still think you were at fault in letting her out of the Hive?" Hellstrom asked. "I -- " Saldo shrugged. "It was the Hive working things out in spite of us," Hellstrom said. "The whole Hive can react as a single organism or it can react delicately through any one of us. Remember that." "If you say so," Saldo said. He didn't sound as though he believed this, however. "I say so. Oh, and when you interrogate Fancy I want you to be gentle with her." "Gentle? She endangered the -- " "She did not. She gave us our escape hatch. You will be gentle with her. And with the other females, too -- the ones she names." "Yes, Nils." Saldo felt that these orders went against reason, but he could not bring himself to outright disobedience of the Prime Male. Hellstrom stood up, moved around the desk and headed out of the chamber. "Will you be in your cell if I need you?" Saldo asked. "Yes. Have me called the instant Peruge is sighted." Reflex actions consist of comparatively simple segments of behavior in which the reactions usually occur as direct and immediate responses to particular stimuli uniquely correlated with them. Reflex actions have a widespread occurence... -- Encyclopedia Britannica Francisco, and look at the coast. It requires little imagination to visualize a gigantic beast out of the remote past rising from the shallows, trying to draw himself ashore. Your mind can see him strain, imagine his anguish as he fails and slips protestingly back into the sea, leaving great gouges in the land. The sea, the eternal healer, does her best to repair the damage, to fill the gouges, and thus are born the beaches. Cup-shaped, they pock the coast from San Francisco to Monterey in numbers beyond counting. Some, large and crowded, bear names like Thorntor, Half Moon, Pomponio, Butano. Others, small and hidden from the casual traveler by rugged bluffs and dense chaparral, have no names. At the north end of one such nameless beach the rugged shoulder of a brush-covered bluff plummets precipitously into the sea. At the south end a jumble of monolithic rock mutely accepts the eternal onslaught of the surf. The highway is far above the sand, unseen, its traffic unheard. Far out to sea a gleaming white sail slides north. It will stay out to sea. Seen from its deck, this tiny beach is insignificant. From this beach, for two people newly married and much in love, the sail and rest of the world, ignored and ignoring, are equally insignificant. Vaughn Harding awoke slowly, savoring the delicious warmth of the sun in his face, the yielding sand beneath him, the gentle, irregular crashing of the surf. Race you to the water, Carol, he said sleepily. His words echoed flatly, a dull metal sound. He listened uncertainly to the ragged surging of the surf and a gentle coldness gripped his gut. Softly, he said, Carol? and opened his eyes. The coldness in his belly tightened. Brows knotted in concentration, Harding blinked rapidly to clear the red haze before him. Comprehension hovered maddeningly out of reach, taunting him with small, disconnected bits of understanding. Images, infuriatingly dreamlike, floated through his awareness. The beach... a walk with Carol... down the hill, through... but Carol... Harding groaned and tried to sit up. Agony lanced like a hot knife through his left wrist, arm, shoulder. Before he could utter a cry blackness engulfed him... They sat together and watched the sun slip beneath the horizon, watched the gathering of darkness. At length he touched her auburn hair with his lips and said, C'mon, honey, let's get up before it's too dark to see. She remained silent and he sat enveloped in the fragrance of her hair. Carol? he said softly. She drew away, turned to face him. Her eyes shimmeringly reflected the lingeringly bright horizon. He folded her in his arms and felt her tears on his shoulder. Darling, he said soothingly, I thought we were all through with this -- I thought you promised no more tears. I'm sorry, Vaughn. But I'm scared. It seems like such a long time and I'm afraid you won't come back. I wish you wouldn't go. Honey, don't be like this -- there isn't anything to worry about. He gripped her shoulders and looked intently into her eyes. I promise you, Carol, I'll quit as soon as I get back. We'll have the rest of our lives together and thirty thousand Federation credits a year for retirement pay. Three months seems like an awfully small price to pay for that, doesn't it? She blurted: No amount of money is worth your not coming back. They wouldn't pay you that much if it weren't so dangerous! He said firmly, a touch of exasperation in his voice. It is not dangerous -- it's a perfectly safe assignment. They pay as they do because that's how it is on the books. When the Charter was established this was a dangerous job, but that was two hundred years ago. The job's changed, honey, but the Charter hasn't -- you know the Federation never changes anything it doesn't have to. This deal is a give-away -- I sit on my duff and collect hazard pay for doing a job that hasn't seen a hazard for two hundred years! And then I'll be home again. She looked at the darkening horizon for a long time before she murmured. Three months, Vaughn... G radually the comfortable, drowsy warmth that enfolded Harding like a blanket was disturbed by a throbbing in his arm. Slowly the cottony emptiness in his mind was displaced by hints and traces of memories, mocking at first, then disjointedly comprehensible... terrestrial, of course, said was standard and had long since been divested of whatever humor it had once possessed. Even in the small corner of the galaxy that had become familiar there were so many satellites orbiting so many planets that unless given a planetary referent the term "month" was meaningless. Such definition did not exist in the Charter, however -- a condition out of which inevitably grew the horror story about the man (nobody could remember his name) assigned to a planet (exactly which one escaped the teller's memory at the moment) for a standard three-month tenure who, after spending seventy-six Earth-standard years there, had "only two months to go." The story, rolled out in grim seriousness to wide-eyed recruits whose gullibility lay not in believing it, but in thinking they were supposed to, predictably gave rise to the question asked with profound sincerity and tongue scarcely noticeably in cheek. That is three months terrestrial, isn't it, sir? Harding suppressed a dutiful chuckle. The Senator, satisfied, went on candidly: Damnably silly anyway -- if you ask me. Sir? Oh, you know. All this garbage about a three-month habitation. He stared popeyed at Harding, who stirred uncomfortably in his chair and said nothing. You needn't worry, Harding. I'm not going to jerk your soft retirement out from under you. I just think it's a terrible waste of Federation resources -- a pointless expenditure of money that could well be put to more humanitarian projects. The continued exploration under the Charter, the maintenance of a Corps of Volunteers -- the whole thing is a shining monument to the emptyheaded imbecility of the Congress. Harding fidgeted under Williams' glare and said uncertainly,  don't understand why you feel the way you do. can't figure out why Tm on the Committee, is that it? Simply a concession to the Humanist party -- I was appointed. And  must admit that when  was appointed I didn't feel this way. But I've learned a lot since then. I've changed my views a great deal, which is of some embarrassment to my colleagues, as it appears that Senators on this Committee are supposed to remain inflexibly prejudice. Look -- he stabbed a thick finger at Harding -- in the first place it's asinine to have the whole operation of Charter activities directed by a Senate committee. What do we know about space flight, about stellar navigation and celestial mechanics and the rest of it? Nothing! We have to assemble a huge staff of military experts to run things for us. But do we turn the Charter operations over to them, as we logically should? We do not! The Charter Committee provides too good a featherbed for too many rhetorically minded Senators who, without it, might have to go to work. So the Committee remains to waste money and have patriotic platitudes mouthed about it. But the political aspects, sir, began Harding. What about -- aspects! What political aspects? Look -- two hundred years ago we had taken our first trembling steps into the universe. We had a fairly large permanent colony on the moon. We had a ten-man scientific mission on Mars. We had made the first manned landing on Venus. We found traces of organic material on the moon. We found fungus on Mars. Fungus! We found more organic matter on Venus. We'd found life or its presumed traces on three bodies in the solar system, not to mention the generally accepted existence of intelligent life on our own planet. The Federation drew in its skirts and decided that the odds overwhelmingly favored our encountering other intelligent life in the galaxy. So they did two things. They extablished the Charter, primarily to assure that we included in the Federation no planet already claimed by another civilization. That we did not was checked out by the three-month residency requirement -- if no supermen from out there showed up in the threemonth period we stayed on a planet it was assumed to be unclaimed by anyone else. Next they established the Charter Committee to be the Federation representatives in the event that we did encounter another sapient race. There are your political aspects! What do you think of them? Harding smiled weakly. Well, it all seems logical to me. sir. Logical? fumed the Senator. Logical? What's happened since the Charter was established, Harding? What's been the history of the Charter operations? I -- ah. I don't know too much -- Of course you don't! It's classified -- all classified! If it weren't, if the public knew anything about it. the whole charade thumped the desk with a meaty fist to emphasize his words -- we have discovered, inhabited and incorporated into the Federation more than forty-three hundred planets. Among all forty-three hundred of those planets, do you know on how many we have encountered life? Seven! Seven planets -- and I use the term "life" loosely. We have discovered a fungus on three of those seven, a bacterial form on two others and traces of organic compounds on the two remaining. Where are the mighty civilizations this Committee is preparing to deal with? Where is the super-race from beyond the galaxy whom we dare not offend by claiming territorial rights to one of their planets? Fungus! I fully expect that we shall some day encounter a mighty starship being flown across the breadth of the galaxy by a highly intelligent, sapient mushroom! Fungus! Good God, Harding, if there is other intelligent life out there it's so damn thinly spread out that we won't find Committee with its petty requirements is eminently stupid. Most of the members know it, although they won't admit it. And what's more, they knew it fifty years ago, during the credit panic. If the Committee had been abolished then, savings to the Federation would have been incalculable. But did they abolish it? Hell, no -- it would have cosfem their precious goldbricking jobs. Instead, with a great show of pious concern for the economy of the Federation, they reduced from fifty to one the number of men required to inhabit a planet prior to its incorporation into the Federation. Habitation, they decided with undertakers' solemnity, might reasonably be performed within the intent of the Charter by a single individual. Those self-serving bastards! Not only did they keep their soft jobs, but they implied to the credulous public that they were saving untold amounts of money. And every last one of those men knew perfectly well that it's damn near as expensive to send one man a it is to send a hundred. It's not how many you send, it's the getting there that's so damn expensive. Harding sat silent for a few moments, then cleared his throat uncomfortably. If, ah, that's all, sir -- Yes, Harding, that's all, said outburst didn't upset you. I get to brooding about my esteemed colleagues at times -- he made a grim face -- and it just pours out, like diarrhea. that's it, then, he said briskly. You'll be on the Nebula, Captain Holcombe commanding. Shuttle lift at oh-three-hundred tomorrow, slip twenty-seven. You can look forward to three months of relaxation or meditation or whatever you fellows do out there. Good luck, Harding. Enjoy yourself. Harding shook the proffered hand and turned to leave. At the door he hesitated and said. Ah, Senator, there is one thing I'd like to make sure of before I go. Yes, Harding? What's that? Well, I want to be sure that if I -- that is, if anything happens, my wife will -- ah, my pension -- It's all taken care of, said You needn't worry, though -- nothing ever happens on these jaunts. I'd forgotten about your marrying until just now. What's her name again? Carol, sir; her name is Carol. Her name is Carol. Her name is Carol. Her name is Carol. Her name... hurt. Harding grimaced and very carefully sat upright. He pawed briefly at his faceplate and realized he could do nothing about the red haze before him. "Blood," he muttered, the taste of it thick in his mouth. "You dumb slob. Stupid!" He heaved a disgusted sigh and winced at the fire in his arm. Slowly, painfully, he began to struggle to his feet. The agony was fierce -- dizziness and nausea now washed over him in waves. Finally he stood, feet planted wide apart, eyes open and staring. He found that by cocking back his head he could see dimly through the relatively clear upper portion of the faceplate. He gazed at the undulating wall of sand before him and waited for the urge to vomit to subside. What a dumb thing to do, he thought. What a dumb, stupid, rookie stunt. No, not even a rookie stunt. Any average rookie would have been too smart -- or too scared, more likely -- to go traipsing off across the country. But not Dumb Harding. No, old Dumb Harding, lacking even the sense God gave goats, had left the pressure dome and gone for a walk. Harding snorted at his folly. He had headed toward the dunes that were the only feature marring the otherwise perfect flatness of the plateau. They had been only about five kilometers distant and he had reached them with ease. He had wound his way through them, had come abruptly to the rift and stopped before it, feeling a tingle of excitement. The rift was not on the map so carefully prepared for him or on any of the photographs used to prepare it. He had gone to within three or four meters of the edge and stared down expectantly. The possibility that he, Vaughn Harding, might find intelligent life had been strong in his mind. His hope had been quickly quenched. Nothing had seemed unusual about the rift -- it had simply been there, oyerlooked by photographers, unrepresented on the map. The sound of the slide had carried faintly to him in the thin atmosphere and perhaps three seconds had passed before he had realized what was taking place. He had shouted "Look out!" to nobody and had started back pedaling frantically. He had not been fast enough. The collapsing rim of the rift had reached out toward him and he had suddenly tumbled, cartwheeled, plummeted down the steep side. He remembered a stunning impact as his body, weighing half again its Earth-normal # pounds had hit something solid, a momentary sensation of weightlessness, another crunching impact all but overshadowed by a violent, red-rimmed burst of pain. Then blackness and dreams, warm and fragrant with Carol. His nausea subsided somewhat, and slowly Harding fished about in the voluminous pocket on his right leg. He withdrew a long nylon strap with aluminum clips on each end. Cautiously he wound it about his damaged left arm and his waist, eventually succeeding in immobilizing the arm. It was dreadfully uncomfortable, but would keep the arm from hampering him too much. That done, he took a few experimental steps through the sand. As he did so, the gently insistent hissing that in his dream had been the surf intruded itself on his consciousness. He cocked his head back and looked up. The top of the rift was almost lost in blowing, swirling sand. After an openmouthed moment, he said passionately, "You son of a bitch! You goddam son of a bitching wind!" This place, he thought bitterly, was full of surprises -- first the rift, now the wind. planet had been routine to the point of boredom. Except for the barren, sandy landscape outside the viewports he might have been in the Link back at Vandenburg. Not until the four contact lights glowed bright green could he be sure he was down. He put the power switches in the auto position, pulled the bus bar and reached for the radio. Contact positive, landing affirmative. The natives of Kalahari II are rushing out with large signs saying "Earthling, go home." I think I see a camel over there -- or maybe it's a hamburger stand. Very funny, Harding. Kalahari I #, for God's sake. Holcombe, you have the vivid imagination of a rather dull toad. If you think I'm going to spend three months on this slagheap and call it would you call it, with all this sand? Never mind, never mind -- I know Thank God you jug jockeys aren't the only people in the universe. I couldn't stand it. Why, thank you, Vaughn, said Holcombe sweetly, you are lucky to know me, only I didn't think you realized it. Why don't you build your house, worm, so we can take our offensive presence from your vicinity and live in peace for three months? Harding chuckled. Holcombe was twice his age and minus a leg, but he was damn good company. He would be missed. Quickly Harding scanned the gauges on the small instrument panel and, satisfied that the tiny ship was stable, opened the lock and engaged the short ladder. The ship was not pressurized -- oxygen was too precious a commodity to be vented indiscriminately into space. Harding had donned his suit in the transport, and the oxygen in the small ship had been purged into the bigger one. No waste. On the sandy surface Harding busied himself with the dome package. The push of a stud on the exterior of the little ship activated explosive bolts on the opposite side and three large panels flew away into the sand. From the exposed portion, like a large, gleaming spider, the ribs of the dome began to unfold. As they reached their farthest extension the panels between them popped into place -- soon the apparition took on the regular aspect of a shining hemisphere with the ship hanging on one side like a misshapen appendage. Harding walked slowly around the dome, inspecting it carefully. Satisfied with its appearance, he returned to the ship and pressed a second stud. The reports from four more explosive bolts sounded thinly in the alien atmosphere and the ship began to move. Electric motors whined and gears meshed and the center portion of the ship containing the instruments and engine rose on struts. The lower portion, containing the airlock and stores, settled squatly on the sand, its landing struts folding up like the legs of a grasshopper. As it came to rest something caught Harding's eye. Hey, Holcombe, the wind's blowing. Faint swirls and eddies of sand drifted around his ankles. Right, Harding, returned Holcombe laconically. Don't it always blow on Thursday? This is on the level. Holcombe. It's blowing the sand around down here. Harding sounded tense. You sure it's not your imagination? Damn it, Holcombe -- Okay, okay, take it easy. There is an atmosphere , you know. You probably just stirred it up a bit with your landing. First convection that You know what the weather boys said -- no meteorological hazards. Easy enough for you to say. all nice and snug up there, said Harding. In the silence between words he could hear the faint murmur of sand against his suit. Relax, friend. It'll be gone before I get around again. Think you can stop peeping under the bed. Granny, and get the ship ready to go? Holcombe sounded faintly amused. Go to hell. Pop, snorted Harding. Give me a mark. Yes. sir, said Holcombe, mealymouthed. Coming up on one hundred minutes -- mark! Got it? His voice faded rapidly as the transport's orbit carried it toward the horizon. Got it, affirmed Harding, If you'll get off the horn I have work to do. See you later. See ya. came Holcombe's faint voice. Harding looked down at his feet and watched the sand drift gently over them. No meteorological hazards, he thought. No climate. A dead planet. Resolutely he turned to the dome. The lower portion of the ship formed the airlock for the dome. He activated both the inner and the outer doors twice and, satisfied that they worked freely, closed them and began sealing the gasket between the lock and the dome. One hundred minutes later the tiny instrument package leaped off the struts to rejoin the transport -- it would be reused countless times on future landings. The struts remained behind, a tower bearing radio antennae. Inside the dome Harding listened to the diminishing squeal of the rocket motor and was alone. Holcombe's voice came over a speaker. Locked on and tracking. Good shot, Harding. You all set down there? Roger, roger. Snug as hell. Airtight, warm -- and this place is almost big enough to stand up in. Couldn't ask for more, he said, thinking wistfully of Carol. Beautiful, said Holcombe. What about your hurricane? Harding had forgotten about it in his rush to secure the dome. He looked carefully through the window and said, No wind. Not a breath. Told ya. Damn know-it-all. You make me sick. Now, Harding, that's not nice. I might just forget to come back for you. And miss my peerless company going home? I doubt it. I guess you're right, said Holcombe slowly. This ship ain't the same without its mascot. See you in three months, Vaughn. Terrestrial? Ha-ha. Enjoy yourself . Thanks, Holcombe. See you later. Holcombe made no reply and Harding shut off the radio. He looked again through the window at the sandy plain. No wind. No meteorological hazards... H arding gazed up at the sand-swirled wedge of sky above the rift and turned the nonsense syllables over and over in his mind, giving them a singsong quality. No meterorological hazards -- no meteorological hazards. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and immediately regretted doing so as pain flared cruelly through his arm. Carefully he arched his good arm high into the air and peered over the bloodwash on his faceplate. The elapsedtime gauge on his wrist was barely visible -- three hours gone, four left. He lowered his arm slowly, gazed up the side of the rift and felt a surge of frightened anger at himself, at Holcombe for bringing him here, at the Federation and its Charter. Favoring his damaged arm, he walked to the steep slof)e and started to climb. The ascent was an opus in anguish. The loose sand slipped and sighed away beneath his feet, robbing him of two meters for each three he climbed. Periodically he went to his knees -- only the excruciating jarring of his arm kept him from sinking into an exhausted faint. His legs ached, throbbed with overexertion and oxygen starvation. He stopped once to rest and began to slide inexorably back into the depths of the rift. After that he was afraid to stop again. Through it all the wind whipped sand down over the edge above him, piling it up against the front of his suit as fast, almost, as he could push through it. Slowly the grinding sand etched the smooth faceplate, lacing it with myriad tiny scratches, each insignificant alone, but in combination sufficient further to reduce his vision. He sweated heavily and the mixture of perspiration and blood ran down his collar, irritating him intolerably. And still he climbed -- step, step, step. His legs felt bathed in fire -- they trembled uncontrollably. Only by putting his good hand on each leg in turn and leaning forward could he lock his knees -- he no longer had the strength to do it otherwise. He sobbed in pain -- his arm throbbed almost audibly. Centimeter by centimeter he made his uncertain way upward. After a seeming eternity of painpunctuated frustration his shaking legs deserted him -- he stumbled and fell forward. The impact of his fall elicited a yell of pain and disappointment. Gradually it came to him that he was not sliding back into the rift. He lay listening to the sand whisper against his helmet and slowly realized that he was out, that he was on level ground above the rift. Hard on the heels of that awareness came the recollection of his fall into the rift, of the collapsing rim reaching out for him and dragging him down in an avalanche of sand. Strength he didn't know he possessed flooded him and he was on his feet, running. stumbling, lurching on wobbly legs away from the rift. With each step his knees threatened to buckle and pitch him into the sand. With each step the pain in his arm blazed high, and long before it ebbed came another jarring step, another lance of pain. In a mounting crescendo the pain rose higher and higher until his whole universe consisted of hurt, jarring, thudding, unremitting agony. With a great, blinding crash the pain reached an impossible peak and was no more. T he peaceful blue serenity of the ocean off the California coast belies its occasionally treacherous nature. Where tiny beaches pockmork the coast the current follows the shoreline, burying a deadly riptide just beneath the innocent-looking surface of the sea. There is an axiom for those who swim where the riptides lurk; if caught by the rip -- don't fight it. Ride with it. Conserve your strength and eventually the tide will bring you close to shore and safety. It is an axiom suitable for quotation by those who venture to ankleor knee-depth -- an axiom espoused by those who remain in the shaded safety of their huge umbrellas. To one caught in the rip, helplessly treading water and watching the beach recede rapidly until the people are mere dots against the white sand, it is an axiom all too easily forgotten. In the grip of panic one swims reflexively, striving for shore without thought, realizing only too late that he strives in vain. Harding knew he was drowning. He struggled feebly, knowing his struggle was almost over. Distantly he promised himself that if ever again he was caught in a rip... But that, of course, was pointless. There would be no more rips -- this was his last swim. He felt vaguely apologetic, aware that Carol would be upset and embarrassed by his ignominious death. His reflexes overrode his willpower and he took a He could hear the approaching surf, and wondered dimly if he would survive long enough to be pounded to jelly on the rocks -- he had not the strength to fight the slamming surf. He took another deep, reflexive breath of the sea -- it forcefully expelled itself and his body demanded that he draw another and another and... ing up behind his helmet, he opened the valve on the reserve oxygen tank and lay breathing deeply of the cool, fresh air. Reserve tank, he thought -- that meant two hours left. Two hours. But he was out of the rift now and it was level ground all the way to the dome. When finally his breathing returned to normal he rose gingerly to his feet, wary and distrustful of his shuddering legs. He tightened the cinch on his arm, grunting in pain as he did so, and activated the receiver in his helmet. From the earphones came the musical pingping, ping-ping of the homer. Harding muttered, "Damnation!" and, turning forty-five degrees to his left, began to march unsteadily through the blowing sand. Once he stopped and peered ahead, cocking back his head. Nothing. His visibility was reduced to fifty meter by the obscured faceplate and the blowing sand. Resolutely he plodded on. The homer was a simple device, a relic of the days that saw atmospheric aircraft on Earth flown by fallible, human pilots. It sent out a tight-beam radio signal in a preset direction -- the classic Morse code for the letter A: ping-beep, pingbeep. To one side of the A band was the I band: ping-ping, ping-ping. To the other side was the M band: beep-beep, beep-beep. As long as one's earphones played the comforting song of the A band one moved in a straight line which, if extended, would end at the dome. If, instead, one heard the distressing sound of either the  or M bands it was a simple matter to move right or left and find the A band and the route to safety. Harding moved on into the wind, stopping now and then to peer around. When finally he found the A band he turned reflexively to his right and followed it. The seductive hissing of the wind-blown sand against his suit filled his mind with images: now a kitchen faucet running, splashing water into an empty sink; now a panful of bacon, savory and sizzling. Most often it was the sea -- sometimes pulling out over the rocks at Moss Beach as he and Carol dashed among the tidepools searching for starfish; sometimes smashing against the jetty at Long Beach as he leaned against a huge rock and watched Carol move gracefully along the breakwater; sometimes surging sluggishly over the white sands below Pescadero, where Carol lay waiting for him on a blanket before a guttering campfire. Harding often fished the surf and cooked his catch over such a private campfire. Carol started and tended the blaze while he fished. She would wait for him, a little higher up the beach, out of the wind. He could hear snatches of a rhythmic song from her portable radio, so she couldn't be too far away. Just up ahead, probably -- just beyond... Harding realized that he had stopped walking and was standing still, searching helplessly for Carol. "Idiot!" he raged. "You goddam idiot!" He plunged ahead angrily, cursing himself for a fool. Each step he took jarred his arm painfully and he grunted in response. He devoted his consciousness singlemindedly to the sequence of step, grunt, step, grunt. He heard the homer distantly, responded to its varied song reflexively, by tropism. Once more he stopped and looked about, but could see nothing. The scouring sand had finished the job the blood had started. His faceplate was dimly translucent, like a washroom window. He sighed and moved on. Step, grunt, step, grunt. Occasionally his awareness rose a bit and he mused about the time remaining to him. That he was running low on oxygen was obvious -- his breathing was deeper than it should have been. He was taking one great gasp with each step. Concentration on anything but the sequence of step and grunt, however, was more than he could handle -- concern about his air remained too distant to coalesce into fear. A dark, bewildering cloud of uncertainty settled on his mind. Where was he going? He heard a noise and, devoting his attention to it, recognized it with pride as the homer. He stepped forward and the sound of the A band abruptly changed to that of the M band. Frowning, confused, he turned to his right and took another step and found himself almost immediately listening to the ping-ping of the I band. Panting heavily, he sought and found the A band again and, by moving his head from side to side, defined its width as about a halfmeter. A half-meter -- that meant he was about a hundred meters from the dome. Sucking deeply of the foul air in his suit, he lined himself up carefully with the A band and stepped forward. Only a hundred meters, he thought. Slowly, punctuated by great gasps, a smile of congratulation began to spread across his face -- and froze in a horrified grimace before it came to full flower. The homer fell silent. "Hey!" He panted, listening. There was no sound save the mirthless chuckle of the sand against his suit. "Damn it," he yelled weakly, "don't -- don't quit now!" The sand thrummed in his ears. He resisted an urge to run and spoke more calmly to himself. "Now wait a minute -- just -- wait. It's only a hundred meters away -- not more than a hundred meters." He started to turn around, but thought better of it. If his footprints were still there he couldn't see to line up on them. Squaring his shoulders, he stepped deliberately ahead, counting steps. Two steps to the meter in the bulky suit -- two hundred steps to a hundred meters. Better make it two-twenty, he thought, remembering the sand that robbed him of strength and his steps of distance. He tried counting aloud, but the effort of breathing soon became too great. He was breathing twice to each step, two great, rasping gasps that made his ribs and belly ache. He plodded groggily ahead, trying desperately not to lose count. A shock of pain roused him and he realized he had fallen. Vaguely he knew that was bad; knew that for some reason he didn't want to fall, knew that he had to stay on his feet. He was going somewhere, but the pounding of the surf in his ears made it difficult to remember where. He struggled slowly and grimly to his feet and his head cleared somewhat. "God -- damn -- sand -- " he panted, moving forward. Something tangled his foot and he fell heavily, a bright shaft of pain knifing through his dimming consciousness. She wouldn't let him sleep. That was her one bad habit -- she would not let him sleep. Whenever he wanted to sleep she would wake him -- pinch him and wake him. He put out his arm to fend her off and touched something rigid, angular. Confused, he ran his hand over it and a dim realization bubbled into being. "The -- the tower -- " he croaked. His field of view was a swimming red haze. Eyes forced wide open as if to penetrate the mistiness before him by sheer willpower, he climbed to his feet and felt his way along the tower. At the end of it he came to something solid, looming darkly before him. He felt his way along it, unseeing, searching for something. He knew he should remember this object, this thing before him, and was impatient with himself for not recognizing it. It came to him slowly that it was a bluff above the beach and that Carol was at the top, waiting... he had to find... there was a path... He collided with something jutting from the surface before him and accidentally found the oversized handle to the outer lock. That was it! She wasn't at the top -- she was inside! He pulled the handle and fell heavily to the floor. The lock closed automatically behind him and he crawled forward, conscious only of the shattering pain in his arm and of Carol. He pawed clumsily at the handle to the inner lock. Concepts of purging, of pressure equalization slipped sluggishly through his mind, signifying nothing. Something had to happen before he could get in to Carol, but he couldn't figure out what it was. While he puzzled over it the inner lock sprang open and he slumped inside. Vaughn? Is that you? "Carol -- can't -- can't breathe -- " Oh, Vaughn, you're so silly. Of course you can't breathe. You have your helmet on. " -- can't -- " Vaughn, sweetheart, take off your helmet. Here, I'll help you -- we have to take it off before you can breathe. "Helmet -- " gasped Harding. Fingers fumbled at the catches -- whose? Was Carol... she... He tore off the helmet. His chest heaved violently and the air caught in his throat. His wide-eyed, surprised gaze fastened not on Carol, but on a ragged gash in the dome. through which protruded one twisted leg of the fallen tower. For a tiny moment that merged imperceptibly with eternity, Harding felt horribly cheated. The sand, drifting through the gash, piled up slowly and gusted about the dome. A few grains settled, unfelt, on Harding's glassy, staring eyes. Outside, the wind slackened. We feel that if there is a single criterion by which to define life it can only be the phenomenon of existence. A fly is alive and, after a fashion, aware. But does the fly recognize as living the horse he bites? For that matter, does the horse in crushing the fly recognize the fly as living? Or is the horse simply responding reflexively to a 'non-living' irritant? Our views of the phenomenon of life, gentlemen, are as those of the fly. We must broaden those views or, like the fly, we shall be doomed to live out our existence in a universe at whose mercy we shall be through our failure to understand. -- Gunnar Narsson, Chairman, Society for the Investigation of Extraterrestrial Life, in an address to the #th anniversary assembly of that organization. Old Cavern, Luna # January #  Here's what Robert S. Richardson has been good enough to tell this department about himself: Since earliest childhood, I was interested both in writing and in astronomy, a double obsession that continued into college. Unfortunately, I regarded neither profession as likely to produce what is known as a "good" living. I was absolutely right. When I tell people I was born in Kokomo, Indiana, they always give me that "what-a-bumjoke" look. But people are born in Kokomo. Soon after my birth, my parents moved to the Pacii'ic coast. They never went back. My wife won't let me disclose my age, since that would give a clue to her age I will say, however, that I have a distinct recollection of seeing Halley's Comet when it last returned in the spring of #. With some misgivings. I decided finally on a career in astronomy, toward which end I earned my Ph.D degree during seven years at seconds in the #-yard dash. Happiest hospital. Have no happy recollections of UC. I began writing, chiefly for monetary reasons, and had the misfortune to sell my first article to the old Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine. I say "misfortune" because the sale gave me the idea that writing was an easy source of income. I was speedily disillusioned. Immediately after receiving that Ph.D degree. I joined the staff of Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, specializing in the sun and planets. (This observatory, with its #-inch telescope on Mt. Palomar, is now operated jointly with Caltech as the Hale Observatory.) After some # years of research there and elsewhere, I joined Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles as Associate Director. There, the urge to write became stronger in me than ever. Ultimately I decided to follow Nietzsche's dictum to "live dangerously" and voluntarily resigned to become a freelance writer at an age when most men are gloomily contemplating retirement. I have never regretted my decision. I have authored scores of articles and books on astronomy, besides short stories under the name Philip Latham, came from dissatisfaction with the usual explanations for the Star of Bethlehem, the best being that the phenomenon was a nova. It occurred to me that it might be, rather, a recurrent nova. Next question: is there a known recurrent nova which precession would put over the zenith of Bethlehem at the time of Christ? Investigation showed that the "blaze" star. T Coronae floreaZs, fulfilled all conditions. Fortunately I was able to get the cooperation of Father Ronald E. Royer, a young priest at nearby St. Frances of Rome Church. Besides teaching. Father Royer has had a longtime interest in astronomy and boasts an excellent observatory with a telescope he made himself. My wife Marjorie and I live in the foothills below Mount Wilson in sight of the buildings where I used to observe the stars. We have a one grandchild, Jima, age #, apparently concentrating on avant-garde art in kindergarten. Robert S. Richardson T hey come along far too seldom -- these treasure boxes of carefully selected stories, studiously and carefully compiled, interleaved with commentary and analysis. Damon Knight used to do a lot of this; one wishes he would good at it, and Thomas Disch's The Ruins of Earth, though it lacks the internal commentaries, is a shining example. Now we have Dr. Clareson's A Spectrum of Worlds, a gem-dealer's display, a laboratory analyst's report and a kind of love-letter to the whole field, its origins, its nature and its significance. (I was going to write "purpose," but wouldn't that open a sack of snakes?) Dr. Clareson is a professor at Wooster in Ohio, and is the mainspring of the Science Fiction Research Association -- which seems to be developing into a communications center for all facets of sf -- and of its journal. Extrapolation. He edited a previous critical anthology SF: The Other Side of Realism) and now gives us A Spectrum of Worlds. It's a survey and study of various brands of sf from Henry Fielding to Anthony Burgess (in his introduction) and from Bierce (#) to Silverberg (#) in the table of contents. It's a fine overview of the field for newcomer and old hand alike. I'm especially grateful for Jack London's The Red One, which I happen not to have read before, and #,God, couldn't that man write! Some of the stories are literary atrocities, but are there for good reason as the editor clearly points out. Here and there one might be abraded by Dr. C.'s schoolmasterish instructions as to what to think of a story, and both the Aldiss specimen and Dr. Clareson's comments on it remind me of the remark made by an obscurantist poet I just invented; "If you understand what I just said you have missed the point." (I honor, admire, and sometimes envy Brian Aldiss, but every once in a while I wish he would go back to # and his little superman and start over. This is one of the times. Other times I bite my tongue for saying such things.) Still, I heartily recommend the book. "Can't you understand that romanticism is no more an enemy of science than mysticism is? In fact, romanticism and science are good for one another. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human." Thus speaks Amanda, in Another Roadside Attraction, and if you want my feelings about sf, there they are. Ah, Amanda... How this unique, extraordinary, provocative beauty of a book has escaped really wide attention is, to me, a major mystery. I spend a great deal of time with books -- never in my life can I recall spending it in a condition of such expansive delight as I have done with this one. Tom Robbins is one of the most vivid imagists, with one of the most outrageous heads walking the world today. And if that sounds as if he is walking on his head, so be it -- he certainly is walking on and in mine. Maybe I have no business even mentioning this book on these pages; perhaps you will feel conned because it isn't hard-line sf. Well, it's got scientists and a think-tank and a high-atmosphere balloon experiment with cosmic rays and solar energy. It also has literature's most improbable kidnaping and a group of the most unusual characters and situations you will ever encounte;j Forget categories and fall into this book and enjoy. Enjoy. If you have a sense-ofwonder, this very sensuous book will fulfill it. L loyd biggle, jr.'s agent # once transferred to him an editor's request for "a Bigglish kind of story." To judge by the collection The Metallic Muse, this means a readable, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant story with a straight-line, unconvoluted plot. The yarns are often stitched with music -- the author is a trained musician -- and are usually constructed around an idea or solution withheld until the punchline. A valid technique, except where the reader gets to the punchline first. The one I liked best is Orphan of the Void. A pleasing package. Biggie as novelist heads my for a reviewer to devote his space to anything else. Issuing four titles a month -- anthologies, collections, original novels, all with the claim to first paperback -- or even first book -- publication, makes it high tide time. Anyway: The World Menders annoys me because of its virtues. Biggie works with one of the most provocative ideas ever to come up the pike: the definition of humanity itself. (This was superbly dealt with in a fine French novel by Vercors, called You Shall Know Them, long out of print. If you can lay hands on a copy, do.) Biggie has set up an engrossing problem in civilization and culture on the planet Branoff IV, where the more or less urban Rascz are served by the Olz, who do all the dirty work. Most Rascz have never seen an Ol; some seem never to have heard of them. The task of the secret Earth expedition is to bring democracy to Branoff -- rather, to cause the inhabitants to bring democracy to themselves -- but how do you do either when the Olz seem to have no self-respect, no sense of group identity, and the Rascz have no reason to believe that they should or even might? My irritation stems from the fact that nothing in this plot would work unless the behavior of each of its components was precisely as stated -- and I don't think it would be. Living things -- cultures or individuals -- are only statistically precise in their behavior, and the presence of one or two mildly wild talents anywhere in either group would make the whole thing impossible. Irritation the second deals with the protagonist and his relationship with the girl Liano, an Earth colleague -- truly a lovely and compelling creation. Biggie did not develop this facet of his story. Professionally, she had answers for his hero's problems, plenty of them, and if the man ever even asked for them, reader knoweth not. Finally, the axiom, the solemn credo of the whole book, is that democracy is good for all species on all planets at all times in all places. This thesis, viewed objectively even by as casehardened a democracy-lover as myself, is as foolish as those Russian sf first-contact stories that judge the worth, and even decide the life or death, of alien cultures by whether or not they are socialist. All these seem like carps (a more highly evolved life form than the recidivistic sturgeon) and they have used up a lot of my space here -- but what I want to get across is that they spring from the book's virtues, and are sparked by a writer who is a comer. limited springs from the literary loins of Hawk Garse and Doc Savage, complete with dead stops for lectures on gimmicks and this fall's fashions in sexual accessories. It's a book to toss to hard-core of addicts who mourn that the good old days are forever gone. If this is your cookie, eat it and have fun. The Year's Best Horror Stories explodes one with nostalgia for the long-mourned Weird Tales. Richard Davis has done a fine job of collecting horrors from a wide spectrum of sources here and in England and even one from the Spanish; the contents are over # excellent. Some, like the Spanish entry by Eddy Bertin, are replanting of the familiar Gothic fields. Some, like the Matheson, are the skilled nightmares that start with shock and run all the way to ghastly, one or two, like Celia Fremlin's A Quiet Game, are outstandingly original. A worthy package. Dean Koontz, in A Darkness in my Soul, seems to have had his novelistic womb badly frightened by Harlan Ellison, 'long about the second trimester. Into a fairly rigid near-future history (and fairly frightening, friends -- could be he's not far wrong) he injects a concept that completely fragments his flywheel. It takes a lot of unsettling to make me mix metaphors that much. How is it that the more stupendous, colossal, cosmic an sf novel is, the more trivial it seems to be in retrospect? I think it's because that it-could-happen-to-ME element is abandoned and you can't believe it any more, even for fun. Koontz would do well not to try stuff like this until he grows up to be Robert Silverberg. Suzette Elgin's At the Seventh Level owes more to the richness and delicacy of its prose than to its structure, which again hangs on a single, not-too-obscure gimmick which, if revealed early, would have made the book unnecessary. However, she writes so beautifully that she would be worth reading even if she had far less to say than she has here. How she achieves her complex, stainedglass effects without approaching the precious or the "purple" fills me with awe. We Can Build You proves for all time that: #) Philip K. Dick is overwhelmingly competent and capable and might -- probably will -- produce a major novel and that: #) this isn't it... I base the first on his handling of his characters, who are consistent and warmly recognizable even in their stubborn irrationalities, on the boldness and provocation of his themes and his side remarks, on the richness of his auctorial background and the sparkles of laughter finger-flicked all over his work. I base the second on collateral and fascinating line at the expense -- and even the abandonment -- of his central theme, which was (or so in the book he told me) the manufacture of exact simulacra of any human being and the impact of this development on humanity. The pursuit, in and out of the fringes of insanity, of an obsessive love affair had me laughing and crying, but Dick and I both were conned, weakwilled as dieters gobbling hot hot fudge sundaes, into this delight instead of going about our business. Jeff Sutton's novel The Mindblocked Man is yet again one of those concealed-gimmick stories, in which one shrewd early guess will destroy the book for the reader. He awakes. He doesn't recognize what he sees in the mirror. He doesn't know who he is. He has fleeting memories he can't place. Someone's out to get him. Immense resources are brought to bear on him and he is trapped a lot, escapes a lot. Ultimately the fate of worlds depends on his actions and decisions. I have a stack of this stuff this high in my office and I don't know what to do with it, since I won't burn books. End listings of the tireless Mr. Wollheim a debt of gratitude. D avid gerrold's when Harlie Was One is a conscious-computer story with a very nicely evolved plot which I defy you to anticipate. Although his evil industrialists tend a bit to simplism and Central Castings, his main characters are warmly human and dimensional. His computer, Harlie is both understandable and likable as a personality and, in its coldblooded objectivity, terrifying. Pay attention to Harlie. He gives us more than a glimpse of the potency of the computer and how it will affect us all even if it doesn't achieve consciousness. The book carries a good freight of social and psychological insight. I've just space to announce that Walt Lee's monumental Reference Guide to Fantastic Films, Volume i,A-F, is now in print. It gives you every available bit of information ("available" means researchable by Lee, which means thorough) on fantastic films, their first US release titles, origins, classification (comedy, historical, surreal, etc.), length, production credits. There are thousands of entries -- some # pages of small print in a big (#'# X #) well-bound and exceedingly handsome paperback -- sprinkled throughout with historic stills and loaded with information. For specifics contact Walt Lee at Box #, Los Angeles, Calif.  needs no excuse for being. Adventure, excitement, the old "sense of wonder" need no rationalization. Even pornography need not be burdened with redeeming social value if it succeeds in what it sets out to do -- titillate. Ban it when it is boring. We are in another Age of Reason. If something appeals to our sense of beauty and not to our intellect we mistrust it. If it gives us pleasure without purpose we fear it. And if it somehow manages to hang on despite these obstacles we feel obliged at least to pump it full of "meaning." Give it a cold, concrete handle. Let's keep a touch of poetry in this prosaic Age of Reason. Brent Higginbotham Brockton, Massachusetts Directions: Robert F. Young's "The Years," printed in your September issue, was cute and I enjoyed it. But one thing about it bothered me -- it was a timetravel story. To me, time travel isn't science fiction. Let me explain why. For me science fiction deals with the future or outer space or science -- in other words, that which is unknown but possible. That which is not possible or at least believable as possible is not science fiction but fantasy. Time travel does not fit the sf definition because it is neither possible nor believable. The entire concept is built upon an absurdity -- a belief that since we remember an event that event always exists. In other words, if I once swing a baseball bat, then somehow, somewhere, I am always swinging that baseball bat. In addition, there is supposed to be an infinite number of me al( Continued from page # ) ways doing all the things I have ever done -- somewhere back in time. For me that is absurd and withoutbasis in credibility. I believe the past existed -- but does not exist. Our memories and ideas of it exist, but even those can become distorted. If a man dies and if, despite all available evidence of his dissolution and decomposition you believe that he continues to live unchanged -- then your belief is magical and childish. Time travel rests upon the inane assumption of the unchangeability of events, people and objects. If a writer can present a basis for the assumption that things do not change, he can make time travel into sf. If not, he deals in fantasy. Fantasy can, of course, be terrific. Mark Terry  Directions: Science fiction is finally being discovered for what it is -- literature for the thinking man. Hugo Greensback was the father of the term "science fiction." He considered it to be anything that takes place in the future that could one day become true. Almost all the wellknown authors would be left out in the cold by this definition. With science fiction being taught in some colleges as a literature that deals with today the Air Force Academy is a good example, we can be sure that the change is for the better. Only time will show the full significance of the change, but I think most science fiction readers will be pleased with the final outcome. Raymond Reece Fort Wayne, Indiana oaisocy # East # Street New York, N.Y. # PI #t per word (including name and address!. #-word minimum. Payment with order. Psychic. Send Name, Birthdate, Time, Location and #. magazines. Arkham House, Fantasy Press, Lovecraft, #. Evergreen, CO #. Philosophy: The Nature of Form in Process: Information processing from Plato to present (hardcover). I I I pp., #, postage included. Writers: Publishing short-short SF with impact. Also, original, American GI I #, Flushing, New York # thors. Shocking fiction, uhcensored opinions, outraI #, Portland. OR #. I #. Longview, Washington #. techniques, quantum and mind, how you use lunar Barbara, CA # Florida State Christian College, Post Office Box #, Fort Lauderdale, Florida #. Sackson (Columnist in "Strategy and Tactics" Magazine) calls # A.D. "A Beautifully Unique Departure in War Games '. For Free Catalogue of Adult Games Canada. free. Autosuggestion, Box #-GY, Olympia, Washington #I . 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Don't even send us the dime now. We 'll bill you later. Take advantage of us. There'll never be a better time. # The Hugo Winners, Vol T  II. Giant #-in-l volume of # award-wmning stones. # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed, # # Science Fiction Hail at Fame I. # "winners',' chosen by. Sci-Fi Writers of America. Ed. Robert Silverberg. Pub. ed, # #I The # Annual World's Best Science Fiction, ed. by Donald A. Wollheim. Volume IV contains # gems from Clarke, Sturgeon, and more Spec. Ed. #. The Dancer From Atlantis by Poul Anderson. Four people from different ages and cultures -- are catapulted by a time machine back to # B.C. Fascinating mixture of history, myth and imagination. Spec. Ed with trial membership in The Science Fiction Book Club # Dune by Frank Herbert. Celebrated winner of Hugo and Nebula. Gripping tale of family exiled from their private planet to another, a barren desert. Pub.ed. # # A Science Fiction Argosy ed by Damon Knight. Over # pages. # stories by Hugo  Nebula winners such as Asimov, Aldiss. Includes # novels. Pub.ed. # #. Mutant #: The Plastic Eaters by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis New bacteria goes berserk causing London to melt. Pub. ed. # # The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. The celebrated author of Stand On Zanzibar presents a multimedia mind-bender that chronicles the collapse of civilization. Pub. ed. # #. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. The master's first novel in # years...and worth the wait for a fabulous trip to the year #. Pub ed. # # A Time of Changes by Robert novel of strange planet where human beings must despise themselves. #I Nebula award winner Spec. Ed, #. Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed. Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub ed # # The Early Asimov by Isaac Asimov. # previously uncollected early stories by the most famous name in science fiction. Pub. ed. # Choose any # books, even these # gripping short stories, each a recipient of a Hugo, the fieid's most coveted award. A giant, handsome, #-page compendium haps one of the most important views of tomorrow ever written. Winner of both the famous Hugo and Nebula awards, challenging will never let you go. Isaac Asimov's first novel in # years, an event well worth waiting for. Reeling ahead to the year #, it's a sensational tale by one of the first masters in the field. What a way to get acquainted! The three books represent a It's the most extraordinary sample of science fiction ever offered in one package with an even more extraordinary trial offer. I Dept CL-#, Garden City. N.Y l #   Please accept my application tor membership in the Science . I Fiction Book Club and send me the # books whose numbers I I have written in the boxes below Bill me just # (to help I cover shipping) for all #. 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Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. I   Great new science-fiction titles from Damon Knight Seven Rithians -- enemy aliens -- have landed on Earth. Six are disposed of. One breaks loose and must be found or disaster will follow. But how to detect a monster that can disguise itself as a man -- any man? AS# # Ray Russell A pious #-year-old girl one night flings off her clothes, tries to seduce her priest, spews a stream of obscenities. Obviously she is possessed! A handsome cleric is assigned the task of exorcising her. He knows there is only one way to cast out a devil from the body of a virgin... AN#I # By the editors of Galaxy Magazine For more than twenty years Galaxy has ranked as the foremost science-fiction magazine. It continually presents award-winning stories by all the top writers in the field. Award Books is proud to publish a select collection of recent fiction from the magazine -- a collection, in short, that's the best of the best. AN# # The exciting adventures of starship captain Matt Foyt... deep-space thrills and chills in every corner of the galaxy. The first two titles in the series are just off the presses... Charles Huntington AS# #Sj Charles Huntington AS# # f. Please send me the science-fiction titles checked below. I enclose check or money order for  (plus # for each book to c'over postage and handling).  AS# Name... Address  City... AN#I AN#AS# AS# StateZip (Offer good only in U.S.A.) Directions: I've been reading the letters published in Directions and seem to detect a trend toward dealing with science fiction as "Literature" or "Art." Despite the fact that I'm one of those college professors who are ruining the field by teaching courses in it. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with this development. So much of what we hear from individuals like Pierce or Chauvin isn't really criticism. Science-fiction readers have suddenly become terribly conscious of the fact that they are no longer living in a literary ghetto. We get individuals like A. J. Budrys dropping out of active reviewing and P. Schuyler Miller apologizing for not being an "intellectual. " I'm not saying that we should revert to the old lettercols when every other word was: "Wow!" " Fantastic !" or " Supergalactic !" Criticism is necessary, particularly if you consider the critical act as one which demonstrates value where none was perceived before. There are, however, two types of critical work. One is an extremely complicated, technical exercise practiced by PhDs in Literary Criticism that bears about as much relationship to writing as the theoretical physicist bears to a TV repairman putting in a new picture tube. One man works with theory: the other makes it work. Judy Merril, whatever you thought about her championing of the New Wave and Speculative Tabulation, was and is a damn good writer who paid her dues grinding out pulp fiction and polishing her craft. Her critical works are the gut reaction of a sensitive individual who perceives something of value and worth in the neglected and otherwise unremarked stories that came to her attention. Blish and Knight are good writers who have given excellent technical critiques of the craft. Alexei and Cory Panshin are writers who have bothered to master the jargon and technical tools of literary criticism and can speak from both the theoretical and practical viewpoint. None of these three groups of critics is inherently " better " than the others. All are good because they excel in the areas they have delineated for themselves. I much prefer what Budrys or Miller or Sturgeon write in their review columns to what a dozen dogmatic pseudo-critics churn out. The prime idiocy of all this critical jousting is the attempt to define sf. Science fiction is not a genre but a technique. Genre criticism is only one way of approaching a work of fiction and, to my mind, it's not the best. If I wish to use a Socialist Realism framework in my criticism I can easily demonstrate that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is better hardcore sf than Larry Niven's Ringworld. Using a Formalist approach I can show that Lord of the Rings isn't even a novel and that # of what is published in the sf magazines isn't even fiction. Ivor A . Rogers Des Moines, la. The best of all possible worlds. zl t -- board game enclosed. Five times a year, our magazine contains a complete board game with die-cut markers. Free. We have such a game, right now: "The Second Galactic War." It's not so free. But just # will get you one. And # will get you a are five free board games a year, you can see how much you'll be saving with a year's subscription. Can you dig it? Mail in the coupon now and check appropriate boxes for subscription, for the game, or hopefully, for both. Send check or Money Order to: The Third Millennia, Inc., # Woodland Hills, Philadelphia, Mississippi # I  I year (# issues) #  # years (# issues) # m Send me the following games: (  "Second Galactic War" #  "Salerno" #  "Shiloh" #  "Operation Market Garden" # I Name AddressCity StateZip Story opens with undercover agent with southeast Oregon scenery while keeping a careful watch on an innocuous farmhouse through powerful binoculars. Some distance away his keeps the farm under electronic and radar surveillance from a specially equipped van camper. Ostensibly loving husband and wife on a camper if anyone should ask. He is, however, chilled by a growing awareness that he is the only life form -- other than plants -- in the vicinity of the farm. There are no birds. no animals small or large, not even f insects around. Adding to his unease is the knowledge that his predecessor, j while watching this same lack-life farm. Carlos knows, of course, that noted for making documentary films ' about insects. He is also suspected of being in the process of developing a superweapon that would give world doi minion to any nation possessing J it -- and no one is quite sure of weapon is described as a "toroidal field disruptor," is capable of altering matter over great distances and its existence has been deduced from specificaThe specs were labeled: Project #. branches of Government. Government "Agency" so top-secret it honeycombed hill -- or Hive -- under man equally nameless, who is main objective for centuries has been to responsible only to the President -- not become impregnable. Its weaponry and even to God. His aide is totally science surpass anything found outside, ruthless, physically powerful, top-level Each individual in it is an expert, bred that Hellstrom heads a #-year-old tured by the Hive and the Agency sends cult members have infiltrated society at the latest disappearance. While the task force, under farm under discreet surveillance, PEcomes convinced -- and correctly -- that take him to the farm, where takes him on a tour of his movie studio. whose Hive-conditioned breeding instincts become aroused. That same night, however, young room in town and, after using a Hive "breeding" formula on him, subjects him to such vigorous activity that in the dies. Of exhaustion -- or from the The Wisdom of Harl: By the stance you take against the universe it is possible to destroy yourself. the main gallery outside the Security chamber instead of going directly to his cell. He swung left again down a side ramp and, at the ramp's end, entered the opened gap of an express elevator when a car appeared. He jumped out of the moving car at Level Fifty-one into another wide gallery. This one showed less activity than the upper chambers and conveyed a deep sensation of cushioned stillness. Workers here moved with a catfooted softness and a sense of silent importance. Hellstrom made his way among them and not until he was actually walking through the widely arched entrance to the Project # lab did he begin to review what he would tell the specialists. Outsiders think this is an invention dealing with the making and forming of metals such as steel. They obtained this impression from studying only pages # through #I are aware of the heat problem from knowing about only this tiny part of your work. That should do it. Brief enough to satisfy the Physical Researchers' characteristic impatience with all interruptions, but containing the essential information plus his own primary observation. Hellstrom stopped just inside the doorway of the cavernous, domed lab to await a break in the activities that would allow his interruption. One did not intrude here except on the most urgent matters. These specialists were notoriously shorttempered. T wenty of them were at work on a massive tubular object in the lab, each specialist attended by a muscular symbiote. These Physical Researchers were precious to the Hive and so difficult to bring into being, so difficult to maintain even then. Their gigantic heads -- fifteen inches from a snowy hairline to the bottom of a hairless chin, eleven inches across the brow above bulging blue eyes that stood out with a startling glitter in their black skins -- told of the caesarian birth of each of them. No female had ever borne more than three -- breeding was limited by many natural abortions in early pregnancy. Death of the mother at birth was common with these prized specialists -- a price the Hive paid proved their worth countless times and were a major reason the First Colonists had ended their centuries of secretive migrations. These specialists must be concealed from Outsider eyes at all costs. Their work must be hidden as well -- it stamped the Hive-born with another kind of strangeness. The stunwand, of which Project # was an outgrowth, was only one of their creations. They had given the Hive's electronic instruments a marked edge in reliability, subtlety and power. They had produced the newest refinements in food additives. The Physical Researchers were instantly recognizable as different from any other worker. The gene line that produced them carried characteristics incapable of being separated from the sought-after specialization and marked them as even further differentiated from the original wild form. Their legs were stunted stumps and each Researcher required the constant attendance of a pale, muscular, chemically neutered worker bred especially for brawn and a pliable disposition. Because of the useless legs these specialists were wheeled about on spidery carts or carried in the attendants' arms. Although the Researchers' arms were not stunted, they were spindly and weak, with hands that bore long, delicate fingers. These specialists were also genetically sterile, each one a single creation ending in its own flesh. Since their driving need for full intellect meant they could not have their emotions chemically tempered, they tended to a touchy irascibility in their dealings with all other workers: Even their symbiote attendants came in for such attacks. The Researchers were gentle and showed a high degree of mutual consideration with their fellow specialists, however -- a characteristic the Hive had managed to breed into them after a series of conflicts had reduced the usefulness of the first of the type. One of the busily working specialists finally stopped, peered across the lab at Hellstrom and signaled in Hive-sign: Don't delay this. In the same movement of hand and fingers the specialist pressed further symbols upon its forehead: Your interruptive presence delays my thinking. Hellstrom hurried briskly across the room. He recognized the Researcher as one of the elders in this breed, a female whose skin bore numerous ropy scars of experiments gone awry. She was attended by a pale, bent-shouldered neuter-male whose arms and torso bulged with muscles. The latter watched in cowed diffidence as Hellstrom flashed his report in abbreviated Hive-sign. What do we care what Outsiders believe? she demanded. They were able to deduce the heat problem from just these few pages , Hellstrom signaled. She spoke aloud then, knowing that voice could convey more of her irritation. "You think Outsiders can teach us?" "We often learn from their mistakes," Hellstrom said, refusing to respond to her anger. "Be still a moment," she ordered and closed her eyes. Hellstrom knew those reference pages would be flashing before her awareness, the data on them being correlated with their present work and Peruge's mistaken belief. Presently she opened her eyes and said, "Go away." "Does this help you?" Hellstrom asked. "It helps," she said, emitting the admission in a grudging growl and adding with a return of her former irritability: "Apparently your type can learn an occasional thing of value -- when you have a lucky accident." Hellstrom managed to restrain a grin until he had turned away and was headed back across the lab. When he glanced back from the doorway he saw several specialists clustered into a busily communicative group, their hands darting and flashing in Hive-sign. He caught the symbol for heat several times, but most of the other symbols escaped him. The Researchers had developed their own special language for use among themselves, he knew. They would have this new data all sorted out and introduced into their project in a very short time. Privately circulated memo to the Agency board members: after reading. There is more to the Hellstrom File than we have been shown. They are holding out on us. Our other contained at least three additional pages. These indicate that Project # involves a new and far cheaper process of manufacturing and forming steel and that it is not a weapon at all. As I have told you all time and again, I knew this pair would try something like this on their own some day. They are through as of now! Mimeca Tichenum's report on Outside use of Hive stores: Within a few seconds after injection of our breeder formula the skin of the Outsider male becomes warm to the touch and somewhat flushed. This is similar to the reaction of Hive males, but more pronounced, also more rapid. The reaction takes no more than five to ten seconds. The dissimilarities then become quite pronounced. The Outsider male sometimes displays an initial muscle rigidity, in actuality a shock response, which holds him virtually immobile until the major breeder transformations have occurred. Concurrent with these the male emits a bittersmelling perspiration which appears to be characteristic in all cases and which I find extremely exciting. It appears to accelerate and heighten the full spectrum of my female breeding responses. This bitter smell may represent a hormone in the same class as our XB# formula which, you will recall, elicits a quite similar female response, although one not as extreme as what I am describing. In general, I would say that those elements of the usual Hive breeding responses which are conscious initially among our males tend, with Outsider males, to be involuntary when subjects are injected with our male breeder hormones. My own personal reaction (in which my sisters concur) is to find these Outsider responses tremendously more stimulating than the usual Hive breeding responses. T 'HE hour was twenty minutes to twelve and for the past thirty minutes Hellstrom had been pacing about the farmhouse dining room wondering if his preparations were adequate. The room had been decorated originally as a front showpiece, a place to entertain the occasional Outsider business contact. A long Jacobean table with ten matching chairs around it was the central feature. A polished glass chandelier glittered over the table. A breakfront china cabinet stacked with heavy blue crockery dishes occupied almost all of one wall opposite the arch to the living room. Bay windows, tall and many-paned, faded lace curtains drawn back from them, gave a view of willows along the creek bank. A swinging door with a tiny glass window inset near the top opened into the kitchen. Four places had been set at the kitchen end of the large table. The closer the hour of Peruge's arrival, the thinner Hellstrom's earlier elation had worn -- and now Peruge was late. Mimeca was helping in the kitchen. And from time to time Hellstrom glimpsed her through the glass inset in the door. She was enough like Fancy to be a genesister, but Mimeca was from a parallel breeding strain, not the pale, faintly rosy skin seemed to have linked itself genetically to other characteristics the Hive sought in its breeders -- high fertility, independence of imagination, drive to succeed, loyalty and intelligence. Hellstrom glanced at the oldfashioned pendulum clock beside the door to the kitchen. A quarter to twelve and still no sign of Peruge. Why would he be late? What if he had decided not to come, but to take some other action? Could he already have discovered something incriminating about that damned bicycle? Peruge was perfectly caBut with Mimeca playing the role of Fancy, the Hive might yet confound the hunters. Fingerprints would not match. She had not been bred recently and that could be proved by medical examination. He would insist upon an Outside medical examination. That would serve the double purpose of getting every one of the intruders away from here. He heard the outer door to the front hall open. Could that be Peruge at last? Hellstrom strode through the archway into the living room featuring early twentieth-century furnishings and carefully maintained musty smells. As quickly as he went, he was only half way across the room when a stranger entered two steps ahead of Saldo. The. stranger was a diminutive male -- an inch or so shorter than Saldo -- with windblown brown hair, a cautiously reserved manner behind the eyes. He appeared to be only in his early twenties, but Hellstrom sometimes had found age difficult to determine with small Outsiders. The stranger wore tan work pants, heavy boots, a white turtleneck shirt of some light fabric that allowed reddish chest hairs to poke through. A brown buckram jacket with slash pockets had been pulled over the shirt. The right-side pocket bulged as though it concealed a gun. Pale yellow grass seeds could be seen sticking in the man's trouser cuffs. He stopped short when he saw Hellstrom, then barked: "You are Hellstrom?" Saldo, two paces behind the stranger, flashed a warning signal in Hive-sign. "Dr. Hellstrom, this is Mr. Janvert, an associate of Mr. Peruge's. Mr. Janvert parked his car down by the old sawmill turn and walked in across the meadow." Walked in? Hellstrom wondered. Reference to that route across the meadow bothered him. That was the path Depeaux had taken. Saldo moved to stand on Janvert's right, again flashed a warning signal, said, "Mr. Janvert has shocking news. He tells me that Mr. Peruge is dead." T HE information momentarily stunned Hellstrom. He tried to assess it, his mind racing. Fancy? No, she had said nothing about... He saw that some response was expected, allowed his surprise to come out naturally. "Dead? But I was -- " Hellstrom gestured toward the dining room -- "expecting -- I mean, we'd made another date for -- What happened? How did he die?" "We're still trying to find out," Janvert said. "Your deputy tried to prevent our taking the body, but we got a court order from a Federal judge in Salem. Peruge's body is on its way to the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland." Janvert seemed to be assessing Hellstrom's response. "We'll have an autopsy report very soon." Hellstrom pursed his lips. He didn't like the way Janvert had said your deputy... What had Line done? Were there more mistakes to contend with? "If Deputy Kraft interfered, that's regrettable," Hellstrom said, "but that certainly has nothing to do with me. He is not our deputy." "Let's stop the bullshit," Janvert said. "One of your dames spent last night with Peruge and she shot him full of some kind of dope. There was a bruise on his arm as big as a dollar. We're going to find out what that was. We're going to bring in they deal with narcotics crimes, you know -- and we're going to open your farm up like a can of rotten worms!" "Just a minute now," Hellstrom said, trying to suppress his panic. Open up the farm! "What's this S F... For February and March Gods and Golems The Neutral Stars Arrive at Easterwine Bloodhype  Adult Fantasy The Charwoman's Shadow Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy, Vol. II The Lord of the Rings Trilogy The Hobbit #I Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. # about someone spending the night with Mr. Peruge? Narcotics? What are you saying?" "A hot little doll from your outfit by the name of Fancy," Janvert said. "Fancy Kalotermi, I think her full name is. She spent last night with Peruge and she shot him full of -- " "This is nonsense," Hellstrom interrupted. "Are you saying one of -- Fancy? She had some sort of sexual liaison with Mr. Peruge, did she not?" "Did she ever! Peruge told me the whole story. She shot him full of dope and we're betting that's what killed him. We're going to question your Miss Kalotermi and the rest of your people. We're going to get to the bottom of this." Saldo cleared his throat, trying to distract Janvert, give Hellstrom time to think. These words pointed in profoundly disturbing directions. Saldo felt all of his Hive-defense reactions coming to full-alarm state. He had to restrain himself consciously from launching a phy sical attack on Janvert. Janvert spared only a glance for Saldo. "You got something to add?" Before Saldo could respond Hellstrom asked, "Who is this 'we' you keep referring to, Mr. Janvert? I confess I don't understand this at all. I had taken a liking to Mr. Peruge and he -- " "Don't spare any of your liking for me," Janvert said. "I don't go for the way you like people. As for your question -- it has a simple presently and Alcohol Tax officers. If we think of any others who want to share in this investigation we'll invite them." "But you have no official standing, Mr. Janvert -- is that right?" Janvert took a moment to reassess Hellstrom. There had been an edge to the question he did not like. Janvert moved unconsciously a pace away from Saldo. "Is that correct?" Hellstrom insisted. Janvert set his jaw belligerently. "You'd better be damn careful about my official standing, Hellstrom. Your Miss Kalotermi rode a bicycle to Peruge' s motel. That bicycle was the property of one Carlos Depeaux, another of our people we suspect you took a liking to." Stalling for time to think, Hellstrom said; "You're going too fast for me. Who is this -- oh, yes, the employe Mr. Peruge was seeking. I don't understand about a bicycle, but -- Are you trying to tell me you also work for this fireworks company, Mr. Janvert?" "You're going to see more than fireworks around here in a bit," Janvert said. "Where is Miss Kalotermi?" Hellstrom's mind was turning over possible responses at top speed. His first reaction was to be thankful he had had the foresight to get Fancy out of sight in Gestation and substitute Mimeca. The very worst had happened -- they had traced that damned bicycle! Still stalling for time, he said, "I'm afraid I don't know exactly where Miss -- " Mimeca took this moment to step through the arch from the dining room. The kitchen door could be heard slapping to a closed position behind her. She evidently assumed Janvert was the expected luncheon guest. "There you are," she said. "Lunch is getting cold." W Hellstrom said, flashing a signal for Mimeca to be silent. "Fancy, this is Mr. Janvert. He has brought us sorrowful news. Mr. Peruge is dead under circumstances that sound rather mysterious." "How awful!" she exclaimed, responding to another signal from Hellstrom. Hellstrom looked at Janvert, wondering if the substitution would be accepted. Mimeca Fitted Fancy's description very closely. Even their voices were similar. Janvert glared at her, demanded, "Where the hell did you get that bicycle? What kind of dope did you use to kill Peruge?" Mimeca put a hand to her mouth, startled. The anger mixed with fear obvious in Janvert, the sharp voice and unexpected questions, all seemed to confuse her. "Just a minute here." Hellstrom signaled in Hivesign for her to follow his lead. He faced her squarely, a stern look on his face, spoke like a demanding parent. "Fancy, I want you to tell me the truth. Did you spend last night with Mr. Peruge at the motel?" "With -- " She shook her head dumbly from side to side. Hellstrom knew his alarm was a palpable thing to her and she could see Saldo actually trembling. The silence in the room became deep and charged while she framed her answer. "I -- of course not!" she said. "You both know that. I was here in the -- " She broke off. Hellstrom guessed she had almost said Hive. The extreme tensions in this room carried a deeply disturbing current. He signaled her to get herself under better control. "She was here in the house last night," Saldo said. "I saw her myself." "So that's the way you're going to play it." Janvert stared at Mimeca. "There's going to be more law swarming over this place in a couple of hours than you've ever seen -- they are going to pick her up for questioning. Don't try to hide her or sneak her away. Her fingerprints were all over that bicycle and all over Peruge's room. She's going to have some mighty interesting questions to answer." "That may be so," Hellstrom said, his voice firming as he saw his preparations providing the escape route he had anticipated. Mimeca's fingerprints were all over nothing. "But you, I take it, Mr. Janvert, are not the law. Until the law -- " "I told you to can the bullshit," Janvert said. "I can understand why you're upset," Hellstrom said, "but I do not care for your tone or your attitude -- or for your choice of language in front of this young woman. I am going to have to ask you -- " "What are you trying to pull off?" Janvert demanded. "Choice of language in front of this young woman? She was bedded with Peruge last night and she knew more tricks than he'd ever heard of. Choice of words?" "That is really quite enough!" Hellstrom exploded. He signaled frantically for Mimeca to leave in a huff, but she seemed too intent now on Jan vert to notice. "Bedded?" she demanded, "I don't even know your Mr. Peruge," "That won't work, sister," Janvert said. "I promise you, it won't work." "You don't have to answer any more of his questions, Fancy," Hellstrom said. "That's right," Janvert said, "shut her up until you get your stories straight. But I promise you, it won't work. The physical evidence -- " "Indeed," Hellstrom interrupted. "The physical evidence." He sighed with elaborate sadness. It was going perfectly. He faced Mimeca. "Fancy, my dear, you don't have to say another thing until the officials get here, if they do indeed choose to come for such an outrageous -- " "Oh, they'll come," Janvert said. "And when they do I expect some damned interesting answers based on the physical evidence." his Hive-protection conditioning, gestured to catch Hellstrom's attention, asked, "Nils -- should I put him off the place?" "That won't be necessary," Hellstrom said, gesturing for Saldo to control himself. Saldo obviously was in no condition to risk physical contact with Janvert. There would "You're damned right it won't be necessary," Janvert said. He put a hand into the bulging pocket of his jacket, moved another two paces away from Saldo. "Don't even try it, baby, or I'll fix you permanently." "Here! Here!" Hellstrom snapped. "That's quite enough of that!" He looked squarely at Saldo. "What you can do, Saldo, is try to get a call through to Deputy Kraft. If what Mr. Janvert says is true, I don't understand why Kraft is not here already. See if you can contact him and ask him to -- " "Kraft is very busy on a telephone call from his Lakeview office," Janvert said. "Your tame deputy is occupied, understand? Nobody is going to come here and rescue you or interfere in any way Hellstrom saw a tight smile appear on Jan vert's face, realized abruptly that the Outsider was playing some kind of calculated game. Did Janvert actually possess police authority? Was it possible he was trying to provoke an incident that would allow him to take charge here until the others arrived? There were many things that had to be done to protect the Hive before the arrival of Outsider police. Would Janvert try to stop anyone from leaving this room? "Saldo," Hellstrom said, "as lamentable as this situation is we still have deadlines to meet, work to do. Delays are costly." Hellstrom signaled for Saldo to leave, get about sealing up the Hive against an allout investigation. "I suggest you get about that work," Hellstrom said. "We'll wait here with -- " "Nobody leaves," Janvert snapped. He took another step away from Saldo. "This is a murder investigation. If you think you can cover -- " "l think if this turns out to be anything at all it will be considerably less than a murder investigation," Hellstrom said. He signaled urgently for Saldo to leave. "I know for a fact that Fancy did not leave the farm last night. Meanwhile, Mr. Saldo is vitally important to the film we're making. That film represents an investment of several hundred thousand dollars already and it's due in Hollywood in little more than a month. He obviously has taken time off from his work to greet you and escort you to -- " "I was taking a walk after the lunch break," Saldo said, picking up his cue. He glanced at his wristwatch. "My God -- I'm late! Ed will be clawing the wall!" He whirled, strode briskly toward the hall and the outer door. "Just a minute, you -- " Janvert shouted. Saldo ignored him. Hellstrom's command in Hive-sign had been explicit and brooked no disobedience. Janvert obviously carried a weapon, but the situation was desperate. Would he use it? Saldo continued unswerving toward the door. The Hive required this of him. "I'm telling you to stop or else!" Janvert yelled. He moved to the archway into the hall, tried to keep his attention on Saldo's retreating back and the pair in the living room at the same time. Saldo had the door open. He was going out. r books in Canada... Bus Terminal in New York City has an They appear in the uptown bus terminal also on any scrap of paper sent to: The New American Library. Inc P.O. Box # Bergenfieid. N J. #I with check or money order for # per book (incl. postage  handling) plus Name #t Address  Zip will bring you your books Don't forget to list the book number of each book. F.  S.F. Book Co P.O. Box ## Staten Island. N Y. # Stephen's Book Service P.O. Box ##I Kings Pk. N Y # Gerry De La Ree # Cedarwood Lane Saddle Rr... NJ. # and save the extra fifteen cents per book and get their catalogues. They all Saberhagen Hope you like them a lot I The door closed, "Mr. Janvert," Hellstrom said. Janvert turned, glared at Hellstrom. "Mr. Janvert," Hellstrom repeated, his tone reasonable, "as difficult as this situation is, I would appreciate our not adding to its complications. We were expecting Mr. Peruge for luncheon and it would be a shame to waste that food. I'm sure all of our tempers would improve it we -- " "You think I'd eat anything here?" Janvert asked. Hellstrom shrugged. "Apparently we must wait for the law to arrive and you do not want Fancy or me to leave your presence. I am proposing a reasonable solution to the waiting period. I'm sure there's a simple answer to these disturbing matters and I am only trying to -- " "Sure you are. And you like me!" "No, Mr. Janvert, I don't particularly care for you. And I'm sure Fancy shares my aversion. My concern simply goes to -- " "Will you knock off this innocent act?" with rage and frustration. He should not have let that other character get out of here. He should have shot at the guy's legs, brought him down. "If you're worried about our food, Mr. Janvert," Mimeca said, "I'd be only too happy to taste everything before you eat it." She glanced worriedly at Hellstrom. Nils had said he counted on the visitor's eating their food -- but this was a different visitor. "Taste my -- " Janvert shook his head from side to side. Mimeca glanced at Hellstrom, seeking a sign of what to do. "She's only trying to make you comfortable," Hellstrom explained and, using Hive-sign, told Mimeca: Get hint to eat with us! He watched Janvert carefully. That had been close with Saldo. Janvert had almost used that weapon in his pocket. Were these Outsiders really that desperate? "We've already had our sample of how Miss Fancy makes men comfortable," Janvert responded. "Thanks, but no thanks." "Well, I am going to eat my lunch," Hellstrom said. "You may join us or not as you prefer." He crossed to Mimeca, took her arm. "Come along, my dear. We've done our best." Janvert had no choice except to follow them into the dining room. He noted the four places set at the table there, wondered whom the fourth place signified? Kraft? Saldo? Hellstrom seated Mimeca with her back to the china cabinet, took the chair at the head of the table with his back to the kitchen door. He indicated the chair opposite Mimeca for Janvert. "At least, you can sit down with us." Janvert ignored the invitation, strode deliberately around the table and took the chair beside Mimeca. "Wherever you wish," Hellstrom said. Janvert glanced at the woman. She sat with hands folded in her lap, looking down at her plate almost in an attitude of prayer. Look as innocent as you want, honey! Janvert thought. We have you right where we want you. And if you try to sneak off the way your friend did  really will shoot. We'll worry about consequences later. I might not even aim for your legs. "We're having baked pork chops," Hellstrom said. "Are you sure I can't order a serving for you?" "Not on your sweet life or mine," Janvert said. "Especially mine." He glanced up alertly, tension appearing in his gun arm, as the kitchen door creaked open. An older, gray-haired woman with dark olive skin and startlingly bright blue eyes came through the door. Her heavily wrinkled face creased into a smile as she peered questioningly at Hellstrom. Janvert jerked his attention to Hellstrom, caught a strange flicker-fingered gesture from the man, obviously directed at the older woman. At the same time a message-loaded look passed between Hellstrom and the younger woman seated beside him. "What are you doing there?" Janvert demanded. Hellstrom noted Jan vert's attention on the hand signal, looked up at the ceiling with a weary expression. Janvert was going to be very difficult unless they got him to eat. There were so many things that needed doing and Saldo was too young to be trusted with all of them. He had older advisers to consult, but a headstrong character was developing in Saldo, one Hellstrom knew he had to curb. Saldo might not consult the backup brains in the Hive. "I asked you a question," Janvert pressed, leaning toward Hellstrom. "I was trying to enlist my associates in helping me to calm you down and get you to join us for luncheon," Hellstrom said, his voice weary. Would Janvert buy that? "Fat chance," Janvert said. He looked back at the older woman. She still stood expectantly behind Hellstrom, one hand holding the kitchen door open. Why didn't the old bitch say something? Was she just going to wait there until someone told her what to do? Apparently that was just what she was going to do. A long silence dragged out while the odd tableau continued. Have I judged him correctly? Hellstrom wondered. Should  signal for the serving to go ahead as ordered? What the hell are they waiting for? Janvert wondered. He recalled a reference by Peruge to "silent women." The excuse had been that they were studying a difficult accent. The old bitch did not look like an actress, though. Her eyes remained bright and alert, but there was pure patience in the set of her shoulders, the way she held the swinging door open. We must risk it, Hellstrom thought. He broke the silence then. "Mrs. Niles, would you bring us two servings, please, just for Fancy and me. Mr. Janvert is not eating." At the same time, masking the action by scratching his head, Hellstrom signaled for her to proceed. The words would be nonsense sounds to "Mrs. Niles," who was a nonfertile worker trained specially for this job. She read his hand signs, however, nodded and retreated into the kitchen. tizing smells from the kitchen, began to wonder if he had acted foolishly. Would these people dare try to poison him here? They were weirdos, certainly, but -- Yes, they might try to poison him. The elaborate luncheon confused him, though. Hellstrom surely must have known about Peruge's death. Who else could have ordered that? Whom had they been expecting for this meal, then -- or had they prepared this luncheon as an elaborate sham? That might mean they had prepared nothing but straightforward, wholesome food. He loved pork chops. Hellstrom was staring calmly out the window at the other end of the table, his manner casual, unconcerned. "You know, Fancy, I always like it when we eat here. We should do this more often -- instead of grabbing a quick lunch on the set." "Or missing lunch entirely," she said. "Oh, I've noticed how you do sometimes." He patted his stomach. "Doesn't hurt to miss an occasional meal. I tend to fat anyway." "I'm going to remind you about this," she said. "You're going to ruin your stomach if you go on the way you've been." "We have been busy," Hellstrom said. They were nuts, Janvert thought. Chatting, making small talk at a time like this. Mrs. Niles backed through the swinging door, turned to reveal a plate in each hand. She hesitated a moment beside Hellstrom, then served the young woman First. When both plates were on the table Hellstrom signaled for her to bring the drinks. He had ordered vatbeer. The Hive made a limited amount of it as a reward for superior work and as a mask to convey some of the adjustment chemicals occasionally required for reject-specialists who were being sent back to dronedorn. Janvert glanced at the plate in front of the woman beside him. Steam was rising from it. The pork had been covered with gravy in which large mushrooms could be seen. Spinach and baked potato had been served beside the meat course and a stiff, white serving of sour cream had been spooned onto the potato. The young woman just sat there, though, hands still folded, eyes downcast. Was she praying, for Christ's sake? Hellstrom startled him then by placing both hands folded together over his own plate and intoning: "Dear Lord, for this food we are about to eat we give our true and heartfelt thanks. May thy divine grace visit us in this sharing of the substance of life. Amen." The young woman joined him in the: "Amen." The wealth of feeling in Hellstrom's voice confused Janvert. And this dame, they way she joined him at the end. They must do this regularly. The ritual shook Janvert more than he liked to admit even to himself -- and he responded with anger. More of their damned acting! Sex and science fiction Sexuality, once the forbidden land of science fiction, is explored in a provocative and diversified collection of stories and novelettes by Reginald Bretnor, Robert Silverberg, George Zebrowski, Brian W. Aldiss, Anthony Boucher, Theodore Sturgeon, Miriam Allen DeFord, and twelve other famous authors. #, now at your bookstore The aroma from the plate beside Janvert added to his frustration. She was reaching for her fork, too. They were going right ahead with the damned meal. "Are you sure we cannot serve you anything?" Hellstrom asked. In sudden angry glee Janvert reached past the young woman, took Hellstrom's plate and said, "Certainly. Glad you asked." He placed the plate triumphantly in front of him, taking special delight in the way the captured dish clinked against the service plate. Janvert thought, There won't be anything wrong with the food Hellstrom was going to eat! Hellstrom threw his head back and laughed, unable to restrain himself. He felt that the Hive suddenly had come into a new vitality, that it was being expressed in his own person and was helping him do battle. through her long lashes at Hellstrom. Janvert was predictable, but Outsiders often were. He had behaved precisely as Hellstrom had signaled he would. She had harbored doubts when Hellstrom had flashed the plan in Hive-sign. Janvert had the loaded serving in front of him, though, and was picking up knife and fork to eat it. He would be docile enough pretty soon. Hellstrom wiped laughter tears from his eyes with a corner of his napkin, called out to the kitchen door, "Mrs. Niles! Bring another serving." The door opened and the older woman peered around its edge. Hellstrom pointed to the empty place in front of him, signaled for another serving. She nodded, ducked into the kitchen and reappeared almost immediately with another heaping plate. Probably her own, Hellstrom thought. He hoped there was more. The neutered workers had such enjoyment from an occasional break in the common fare of vat gruel. Idly he wondered where these chops had come from -- probably that young worker who had been killed in the generator room last night. They looked tender. He thought as he picked up his knife and fork. Bless this one who joins the eternal flow of life, becoming part of all. The meat not only was tender, it was juicy. Janvert was displaying obvious relish. "Eat hearty," Hellstrom said, gesturing with a fork. "We serve nothing but the very finest food here and Mrs. Niles is a superb cook." She was, too, Hellstrom reminded himself as he took another savory bite. He hoped again that she had saved at least one serving for herself. She deserved a reward. The words of Trova Hellstrom: The model of the Hive's insertion into those patterns of other life around us is that of the tesseract, a cube projected into four dimensions. Our tesseract is built of mosaic parts which cannot be detached, whose boundaries blend one into another with indissoluble flow. In this way this model gives us a habitat and a timeline remarkably selfcontained, but merging into the larger system of the planet and the universe beyond. Remember always that our tesseract merges with other systems -- and it does this in such diverse and complex ways that we cannot remain concealed indefinitely. Thus we consider the physical dimensions of our Hive as a habitat for only a particular stage of our development. We will outgrow this stage. It is of the utmost concern for the managing specialists of the Hive, therefore, that we not restrict our genetic lines of adaptability. We are aimed at other times as well as other habitats. X interesting conversation, what I could hear on this end," Clovis Carr said. Lincoln Kraft stared across his big fiat-top desk at her. He could see a corner of Steens Mountain through the window behind her head. The sounds of afternoon shopping were just beginning to pick up in the big commercial complex one floor down. A poster on the wall to his left gave detailed recommendations on how to prevent rustling. Random patrol of fences was the third item down and his gaze kept returning to that number, seeking some magic in it. It was almost three p.m. He had received three telephone calls from the office in Lakeview thus far and each time had been told to "sit tight." Clovis Carr squirmed her tiny, wiry body into a more comfortable position on the hard wooden seat of her chair. She was a brunette with a deceptively young face that tended to set into harsh, aging lines when she relaxed. She had been with Kraft since shortly before #:# a.m. -- first at the motel where Peruge's death had been reported by a tough-looking runt of a man who had identified himself to Kraft only as "Janvert." Kraft had understood almost immediately that Janvert and this Clovis Carr were associates and the pieces had begun to fall into place from there. The pair belonged to Peruge's team. Kraft had played his hand carefully from that point -- these two were suspicious of him. he soon realized. The female stuck to him like a burr on a bear. That third call from Sheriff Lapham in Lakeview had been part of a pattern that had Kraft more nervous than he had been since the summer the Hive had picked up a runaway toddler and an entire family had fanned out over the range around the farm, hunting the lost child. That one had been turned off by a quickly hatched story that a child of the exact description had been seen being picked up by a couple in an old car only a block away from the place where the toddler last had been seen. Lapham's orders in his final call had been explicit. "You wait in you hear, Line? This is a job for very delicate professional handling. Take my word on it." Kraft had been at a loss how to respond to this. He could act professionally insulted (and leave a political scar the sheriff would never forget) -- or he could obey like a tame public servant. He could act dumb and western hick for this dame -- or knowledgeable and sophisticated. He didn't know which response would give him the best leverage to probe and seek a clue to help the Hive. One way these Outsiders might mistakenly underestimate him. He rather doubted this was possible now. Another way he might gain valuable insights from what they did not do. Such as not leaving him alone. Kraft's long conditioning to protect the Hive at all costs left him irritated and frustrated now. All his fears were sharpened by the sense of danger, but the need to maintain his cover dominated every response that occurred to him. In the end he did nothing except obey Sheriff Lapham -- sit here like a lump The Carr female annoyed him. As long as she stayed there, watching, listening, he could not call Hellstrom. She knew he was nervous, too, and seemed to enjoy it. As though he couldn't see how phony she was. Vacationer? That one? She had an oval face with skin badly sunburned, a hard and direct stare from cold gray eyes, a firm jaw and a thin, unsmiling mouth. He suspected she was carrying a pistol in that big black canvas handbag in her lap. Something about her was faintly reminiscent of the models on TV commercials -- a controlled and purposeful way of moving, a remoteness of manner no amount of surface glibness could conceal. She was one of those tiny women who would be skinny and energetic until the day they died. She was all fitted out for her western vacation -- dungaree slacks, matching blouse and brass-button jacket. The clothes still had a sheen of newness about them and looked as though they had been picked by a wardrobe mistress according to a script adviser's list. They didn't suit her style. The blue bandanna over her long black hair was the final unlikely touch. Her left hand held that black canvas purse in the casualbut-ready manner of a policewoman. Every time he looked at the purse Kraft felt more certain she carried a gun in it. Although she had avoided showing Kraft her credentials, Sheriff Lapham had known her name on his first call and had treated it with the kind of deference that spoke of official clout -- and highly potent clout at that. Kraft had just hung up on Lapham's third call. "That was the sheriff again, wasn't it?" she asked after a while nodding at the telephone on the desk. H ER voice carried an unconcealed note of scorn, Clovis knew, but she had decided not to worry about effects. She did not like this thick-nosed, beetlebrowed deputy and the dislike went deeper than her suspicions about his involvement in the deaths of her fellow agents. He was western and he showed an evident liking for outdoor life. Those two items alone would have done it. She preferred the nightclub circuit, just as Eddie Janvert did, and this was a damned hick assignment. The skin of her cheeks and nose felt tight and painful from sunburn, confirming her irritation. "It was the sheriff," Kraft admitted. Why deny it? His answers had signaled the questions and those questions could have originated only with the sheriff. yet. Yes, sir --  haven't been out of this here office. Clovis Carr sniffed. "What have they found out about Peruge's murder? Anything yet on the autopsy?" Kraft studied her for a moment. One closing item from the sheriff had to be weighed carefully. When the special agent in charge of the Kraft to relay a message. The message sounded simple enough. The U S. Attorney still was not ready to deliver a firm opinion "on the legal basis for intervention." that the agents could proceed on the "presumptive assumption" that Hellstrom's activities in interstate commerce would provide such a basis. According to the sheriff the minute and Lapham wanted to know the minute they arrived. Rented cars had been sent to the airport and "Janvert's people" were there to give a briefing. Kraft had written "presumptive assumption" on the notepad beside the telephone. He wondered now if it would lull suspicions if he shared this message with the Carr female. He knew he would have to deliver it another matter. Could any advantage be gained from it now? "They haven't reported on the autopsy yet," Kraft said. "You have written'presumptive assumption' on your notepad," she said. "Is that about the U.S. Attorney's opinion?" Kraft came to a negative decision about Carr, said, "I'd better let the never did tell me what your connection with this is." "No, I didn't, did I?" she said. "You're a very careful man, Mr. Kraft, aren't you?" He nodded. "Yes." What did that mean? A malicious smile twitched the corners of her mouth. "And you don't like to be kept on the bench here." "I don't like it," he agreed. He wondered at her almost open hostility toward him. Was it calculated provocation or did it reflect something even more disastrous -- a high-up decision to distrust the local deputy? He guessed at the latter, wondered how to deal with it. Hellstrom and the Security Council had discussed with him contingency plans for such a problem, but no one had assumed a situation as complex as this one. shoulder through the window behind her chair. The office was hot and the hard wooden seat of the chair irritated her. She longed for an iced drink and a cool, shadowy lounge bar with soft chairs, Janvert beside her warm and admiring. She had been playing the part of Janvert's sister on this stupid western vacation for a week now. That mask had come off with the discovery of Peruge's death. The cover relationship had been touchy at times. Janvert had not gone out of his way to keep things smooth with Nick Myerlie, who had fronted as their father. And DT had poked his nose in every time she and Janvert turned around. Spying for the brass -- no doubt of it. DT was so damned obvious it was ridiculous. Tight quarters in the damned van and an investigation whose pattern none of them liked had worn on all of them. There had been times when they had chosen not to speak rather than risk a fight. All that stored-up temper was coming out in her now with Kraft as its focus. She realized this, but didn't care to suppress it. Housewives doing their afternoon shopping were beginning to fill the parking lot below the window with their cars. Clovis scanned the cars, from one of them. Nothing. She returned her attention to Kraft.  could tell this stupid deputy that we're prepared to put him six feet under in the most direct and sanitary way... This was a fantasy game she liked to play about people she disliked. Kraft would be shocked and alarmed, of course. He already showed signs of the twitches. Nobody was going to blast this son of a bitch, of course. Hardly likely. But Kraft was in trouble. The Chief had pulled strings in Washington and these had reached out through the State Capitol to the sheriff in Lakeview. It was like a marionette system. Potent federal power was breathing down Kraft's collar and he could feel it. He still wanted to see her identification, but he hadn't asked straight out to see it in more than an hour. Lucky, too -- she had only her cover identification and according to it she was Clovis Myerlie and she had already been introduced as Clovis Carr. "This has been a very unusual way to handle a missing-persons case," she said, swinging around to stare at the poster on the side wall. Cattle rustling, yet, and how to prevent same! "An even more unusual way to handle an unexplained death in a motel," Kraft said. "Murder case," she corrected him. "I haven't seen that tied down yet," he said. "You will." He kept his gaze on Carr's sunburned face. They both knew that nothing about this case was usual. The sheriffs words still rankled in Kraft's memory. Line, we are just the country cousins in this case as of now. The governor himself is in this act' This is not routine, got that? Not routine. We will straighten this out between us later, but right now,  want you to whole show. They can fight it out with the Alcohol Tax boys on who has jurisdiction, but our jurisdiction stops at the edge of the governor's desk, got me? Don't tell me we have rights and responsibilities. I know 'em as well as you do. Neither of us is going to mention them. Is that all clear? It had been very clear. "Where did you get that sunburn?" Kraft asked, staring at Carr's face. Sitting out in your goddamned western sunshine with a pair of binoculars, you son of a bitch! You know where I got it. She shrugged and kept her voice nonchalant. "Oh, just hiking around your lovely countryside." Hiking around the Hive, Kraft thought with a pang of deep disquiet. He said: "None of this might have happened if your Mr. Peruge had gone through normal channels. He should have gone to the sheriff over in Lakeview first instead of coming to me or even to the state people. Sheriff Lapham's a good -- " "A good politician," she interrupted. "We thought we'd rather deal directly with someone who enjoyed a closer relationship with Dr. Hellstrom." Kraft licked his lips, his mouth suddenly dry. He held himself watchfully alert for any more revelations that touched on their suspicions. He didn't like the way Carr cocked her head to one side to return his gaze. "I don't understand," he said. "What have I to -- " "You understand," she said. "Damned if I do!" "And damned if you don't," she said. Kraft felt himself caught by the unleashed power behind her hostility. She was deliberately trying to provoke him. She really didn't care how she treated him. He blurted, "Oh, I know what you are, all right. You're from one of those I'll bet. You think you own the -- " "Thanks for the promotion," she said, but she bent a more watchful gaze upon him. The conversation had taken an awkward turn she did not like at all. Eddie had said the Chief wanted them to press the deputy, but not to frighten him off. Kraft fidgeted in his chair. A painful silence settled over the room, deep and charged. He started casting around for excuses to get away to a telephone. He could excuse himself to go to the toilet, but this female would make sure he went to the toilet and there was no telephone there. The desire to call Hellstrom was losing its appeal, too. It could be dangerous to call Hellstrom. Every line to the farm might carry a tap by now. What had caused them to link him with Hellstrom? There had been times he had been taken sick on Outsider foods and been nursed back to health at the Hive. The cover was that he had been a great good friend of old Trova (true) but she was long dead and in the vats. Why should that make these government people suspicious? His mind went on this way for a time, following the trail of its own fears, worrying out bits of the past to wonder about. Was that suspicious, or what about this event, or the time he had... T HE ringing of the telephone startled him out of this nervous reverie. He grabbed for the phone, knocked it from its cradle, had to recover it from a dangling position beside the desk. The voice on the line was anxious and loud when he finally got the receiver to his ear. "Hello? Hello?" "This is Deputy Kraft," he said. "Is Clovis Carr there? They said she'd be there." "She's here. Who is this?" "Just put her on the line." "This is an official phone and I'd -- " "Goddamn it, this is an official call. You put her on this line." "Yes, well -- " "Do it now!" There was no mistaking the long history of expected obedience behind that barked command. Kraft felt the power in the voice as an almost palpable thing. He handed the phone across the desk to Carr. "It's for you." She took the phone from him with a puzzled frown, spoke into it. "Yes?" "Clovis?" She recognized that voice -- the Chief himself. For the love of all that was holy, the Chief himself was calling here! "Clovis here," she said, her mouth dry. "Do you know who this is?" "Yes." "I have you identified from a voiceprint being played this instant. I want you to listen very carefully and do exactly what I tell you to do." "Yes, sir. What is it?" Something in the tone told her it was big trouble. "Can that deputy hear this?" the Chief asked. "I doubt it." "We'll have to chance it. Now get men and the Alcohol Tax team crashed somewhere in the Sisters. That's a mountain north of you. All dead. It could have been an accident, but we are acting on the assumption that it was not. I've just been on to the director, and he is taking the same position, especially in view of what I could tell him about the situation over the way from Seattle, but it will be some time before they arrive." She gulped, glanced worriedly at Kraft. The deputy was leaning back, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. "What do you want me to do?" she asked. "I've been in radio contact with the other members of your team, all except Janvert. Is he still at that farm?" "As far as I know, sir." "All right -- no help for that. It might even be a plus. The others are coming down from the mountain to pick you up. You are to take the deputy with you. Use force if necessary. Take him with you, got that?" "I've got it." Her exploring fingers felt the outline of the revolver in her purse. She slipped her hand into the bag, took a firm grip on the gun. Involuntarily her glance went to the big pistol in a holster at Kraft's waist. "I've instructed DT on what I want done," the Chief said. "You are to move onto that farm and take over there, subdue any opposition. The director concurs. Responsibility will be ours, however. We have been promised extraordinary cooperation by the "I understand." , "I hope you do. You are not to take chances. You are to kill that deputy if he interferes. And anyone else who tries to block you. We will work out a sufficient justification for this later. I want that farm in our hands within the hour." "Yes, sir. Is DT to be in charge." "No. Until you get to the farm, you are in charge." "Me?" "You. When you contact Janvert he is to take over." Her mouth was dry as dust. God! She needed a drink and comforting, but she sensed why the Chief was putting her in charge until they reached Eddie. The Chief knew about her and Eddie. The Chief had a snake's mind. He'd say to himself: She's the one with the best motivation. She'll want to rescue her boy friend. G ive her the reins... She sensed something else might be on the Chiefs mind, but she didn't know how to ask. Was it something to do with Kraft? She pressed the phone tightly against her ear, pushed her chair back toward the window. "Is that all?" she asked. "No, you'd better know the worst. We stumbled onto something while talking to the sheriff. He gave it to us himself, very casual and unconcerned. It seems your deputy, whenever he gets sick, is in the habit of convalescing at Hellstrom's farm. In our hunt for Hellstrom's Washington connections, we found a Congressman about whom we can say the same thing -- and we have our suspicions about at least one Senator. Got that?" She nodded. "I see." "I think you do. This thing spreads wider every time you pry up another layer. Take no chances with that deputy whatsoever." "I won't," she said. "How bad was it -- I mean, at the Sisters?" "The plane burned. It was a twin Beech, chartered and recently reason for it to go down. We haven't been able to examine the wreckage yet, but the fire gave it away -- started a forest blaze on the east slope, they say. Forest service boys are there now -- and local soon as possible." "What a mess," she said and noted that Kraft was staring at her intently now, trying to listen. "Is there any chance at all that it was an accident?" "Possible, but not likely. The pilot was former Air America from Vietnam, six thousand hours. Draw your own conclusions. Oh, tell Shorty he has Class G authorization. Do you know what that is?" "Yes -- yes, sir." My God! Kill and burn if necessary... "I'll get back to you by radio after you've taken over that farm," the Chief said. "Within the hour. Goodbye and be thorough." She heard the receiver click, moved her chair across to the desk, replaced the phone in its cradle. Using the edge of the desk as a cover, she slipped her revolver from the purse. Kraft watched her, trying to piece together a version of that conversation from the only end he'd heard. His First inkling that things had changed for the worse came when he saw the silencer of Clovis Carr's pistol rise like a steel snake over the far edge of the desk. Clovis's working personality was in full charge now and she put aside thoughts of Janvert's arms around her or other desirable things. "Keep your hands where I can see them" she said. "I will kill you at the slightest provocation. Do not make any sudden movements for any reason. Get to your feet carefully, keeping your hands on the desk. Use extreme caution in everything you do, Mr. Kraft. I don't want to shoot you in this office. It would be messy and difficult to explain. But I will do it if you force me." From the preliminary oral report on the autopsy of Dzule Peruge : The bruised area on the arm gave indications of an inept injection with a hypodermic. We cannot say at this time what may have been injected, but the biopsies are not yet completed. Other indications on the cadaver indicate what we call among ourselves a "motel death." The syndrome is rather common with males past the age of thirty-five where death occurs under the circumstances described here. The immediate cause of death was what you would call a massive "heart failure." We'll send along the technical details later. Whether this remains the proximate cause depends on the biopsies. From the other indications we can say the subject had engaged in sexual intercourse at a time very close to the time of death -- perhaps no more than four hours earlier. Yes, that's what we mean. It's a very clear pattern: older man, younger woman (presumed from your account) and too much sex. All the evidence is consistent with this diagnosis. Hellstrom said. He leaned toward Janvert across the table. Jan vert, having finished his lunch, sat with his right elbow on the table, chin resting on his hand. He felt lost in thought, bemused by the whole situation -- the present company, the Agency, the call from the Chief, this assignment, his former fears. Vaguely he felt that he still ought to be alert and perhaps concerned about Hellstrom and the woman at table with them, but this didnot seem worth the effort. "It's time we discussed our mutual problems," Hellstrom said. Janvert nodded on his supporting hand, chuckled as his chin started to slip from the hand. Discuss problems. Certainly... Something about this rustic farm setting, the excellent meal, something about these people at table with him, somewhere in all this was good and sufficient reason for the transformed mood now upon him, Janvert told himself. He had fought long enough against liking Hellstrom. Perhaps it was still unwise to place complete trust in Hellstrom, but it was all right to like him. There was a difference between trust and liking. Hellstrom could not be held responsible for the trapped life of a nobody named Eddie Janvert. Watching the transformation, Hellstrom thought, He's taking it quite well... The dosages were relatively large. Janvert' s body was now processing numerous identifier chemicals. Very shortly he would be acceptable by any Hive worker as belonging to the Hive. The condition worked two ways -- Janvert would respond with an acceptance of the Hive workers, too -- any of them. His procreative drive had been suppressed, also much of his critical ability. If the chemical metamorphosis worked he would become quite tractable presently. Hellstrom signaled to Mimeca to observe the changes. She smiled. Janvert's odors were becoming quite acceptable, she thought. It's this farm that's reaching me, Janvert told himself. He moved only his eyes to stare through the window beyond the foot of the table. The golden afternoon appeared warm and inviting. He and Clovis had talked about such a place many times. Our own place, preferably an old farm. We'll grow a few things, raise some animals. Our kids can help with that when they're old enough. It was a fantasy they sometimes shared before making love. The poignancy of the exotic and unattainable made the present ever more sweet. "Are you ready for a little discussion?" Hellstrom asked. "Sure," Janvert said. He sounded relatively alert, but Hellstrom detected the changes of tone. T HE subtle chemistry of fellowship was doing its work. It was a dangerous thing because Janvert might walk openly through any area of the Hive now. No worker would challenge him and haul him summarily off to the nearest vat point. But it meant also that Janvert would respond candidly to Hellstrom or any other Hive Security interrogator. Provided this technique worked well on an Outsider. That remained to be tested. "Your law is a little late arriving," Hellstrom said. "Shouldn't you call and try to find out why?" Late? Janvert looked up at the clock behind Hellstrom. Almost #:# p.m. Where had the time gone? He seemed to recall chatting with Hellstrom and the woman -- Fancy was her name. Sweet little thing. But someone was late. "Are you sure you haven't made others?" Hellstrom asked. "Are they coming?" "I don't think I've made a mistake," Janvert said. He sounded sad. The sadness brought a small surge of anger and adrenalin. Nobody made mistakes in this business! God, what a lousy way to live. All because he'd stumbled over that damned Agency File. No -- that had been only a single step. The trap was far more complex than that. Eddie Janvert had been conditioned to accept everything the Agency represented. That conditioning had happened much earlier. But without all this he might not have met Clovis. Lovely Clovis. Much prettier than this little Fancy person beside him. He felt that there ought to be other comparisons to make between Clovis and Fancy, too, but these eluded him now. The Agency -- Agency -- Agency -- Agency. It was a bad business. He could sense the leering presence of the hidden oligarchs whose influence could be felt all through the Agency. That was it -- the Agency was bad business. "I was just thinking," Hellstrom said, "that under other circumstances we might have been very close friends." Friends. Janvert nodded and his head almost slipped from his supporting hand. They were friends. This Hellstrom was really a very nice guy. He served a good meal. And it was sweet the way he said grace before eating. The idea of friendship with Hellstrom fanned a tiny core of worry in Janvert, though. He began to wonder about his reactions. Old Peruge had said something important way back there somewhere. He'd said Hellstrom and friends had some kind of -- some kind of -- injection! That was it, an injection. It turned a man into a sex-mad stud, Peruge had said. Eighteen times in one night. Janvert smiled happily to himself. When you thought about it, that was really very friendly. It was much more friendly than the damned Agency where they watched like cats to find out whom you cared for -- the way he and Clovis cared for each other -- and then used that against you. That's what the Agency did. Friendship with Hellstrom became an easily explained thing with a little reflection. The whole blasted Agency had finally become too much for one Eddie Janvert. Wait till he told Clovis about this. Eighteen times in one night -- that was very friendly. Mimeca, taking her cue from Hellstrom, touched Janvert's arm. She had a nice, friendly little hand. "I thought the same thing," she said. "We really should be friends." Janvert straightened jerkily, patted her hand. That was the friendly thing to do. Again he wondered at himself. He felt that he could almost trust this pair. Was that a natural thing? Well, why not? They couldn't have put anything in his food. That was an odd thought, he told himself. He recalled taking Hellstrom's plate. Yes. Hellstrom had relinquished his very own plate of good food. Now -- that was friendly. You didn't hide unfriendly things in plain actions. Did you? He stared at the woman beside him, wondering idly why his mind was working at such a crawling pace. Peruge! Something in his food was out of the question. No injection either. He continued to stare at the woman, wondering why he did so. Sex? He was not lusting after this pneumatic little woman with the friendly hands and melting eyes. Maybe Peruge had been wrong. Had Peruge lied? The unfriendly bastard was capable of it. There could be perfectly natural explanations for this whole thing, Janvert told himself. What could he possibly have against Hellstrom -- except what the Agency's position here dictated. And he didn't even know what that was! Project #. Yes -- something about papers. Project #. But that was Hellstrom's project. It must be friendly. It wasn't like the damned Agency. Janvert felt a sudden need to move around. He pushed back his chair, almost fell over backward, but the pretty woman helped him recover his balance. He patted her hand. Windows. He wanted to look out. Weaving very little, Janvert guided himself down the length of the table to the bay windows at the end. A short stretch of water with no visible flow could be seen in the creekbed. The faint afternoon breeze swayed the tree shadows on the water and provided an illusion of movement. The silence in the dining room behind him carried a similar illusion. Casually he wondered how his senses reported reality. It was a very friendly scene, friendly place. There was movement. Why did he have this little niggling worry way down inside? That was the only irritating thing left in this whole situation. Situation. What situation? Janvert shook his head from side to side like a wounded animal. Everything was so damned confusing. Hellstrom frowned. Hive chemistry was not working on Janvert in quite the way it would have on one of their own. Hive humans remained close enough genetically to the Outsiders for interbreeding. The divergence was only about three hundred years old. Chemical affinity was not surprising. It was to be expected, in fact. But Janvert was not responding with full and open friendliness. It was as though he were fighting a deep inner battle. Chemistry was not enough, then. That was to be expected, too. The human was much more than flesh. Some holdout element in Janvert's intellect retained a concept of Hellstrom as threat. Mimeca had followed Janvert to the window, stood now just behind him. "We really mean you no harm," she murmured. He nodded. Of course they meant him no harm. What a thought. Janvert put a hand in his jacket pocket, felt the gun there. He recognized it. A gun was an unfriendly thing. "Why can't we be friends?" Mimeca asked. Tears began to flow from Janvert's eyes, roll slowly down his cheeks. It was so sad. The gun, this place, Clovis, the Agency, Peruge, everything. So sad. He pulled the gun from his pocket, turned to reveal his tear-stained face, handed the gun to Mimeca. She accepted it, held it awkwardly -- one of those awful flesh-destroying Outsider weapons. "Throw it away," Janvert whispered. "Please, throw that damned thing away." From a news story, Washington, DC., dateline:...and it was noted that Altman's death was not the first such suicide of a highly placed government official. Washington observers immediately recalled the death on May #, #, of Defense Secretary James Forrestal, who shocked family and associates by leaping from a hospital window. Altman's death also revived the recurrent Washington rumor that he was in fact the chief of a secret and highly sensitive investigative agency operating under the government's executive arm. One of Altman's senior associates, Joseph Merrivale, issued an angry denial of the rumor, demanding, "Is that bloody gabble still going around?" il successful afternoon in spite of the earlier alarms, Hellstrom told himself. He stood in the barn aerie, staring out the louvered windows to the north. Vehicles were stirring up dust in the distance, but he felt no threat from the Outsiders at the moment. Reports from Washington and the nearby town indicated an easing of pressure. Janvert had answered all their questions with only the most gentle form of persuasion. It saddened Hellstrom to think about this, comparing it with their previous procedure. So much pain could have been spared the other captives. When you thought about it, this technique was so obvious. Fancy had done the Hive a truly great service. Saldo walked to Hellstrom with cat-footed grace, said, "Station Six says that dust out there is three heavy vehicles approaching our lower road." "I think Jnvert's law is almost here," Hellstrom said. "Are we ready for them?" "As ready as we can be. Mimeca is down in the farmhouse prepared to play Fancy to the hilt. Injured innocence, the whole thing. She's never even heard of Depeaux, the Agency, a bicycle -- nothing." "Good. Where did you put Jan vert?" "In an empty cell on Level Fortytwo. Everything is on Emergency Alert." With renewed misgivings Hellstrom thought about what that meant. Emergency alert: time lost from essential supportive tasks, workers detailed to man the system that could block off long sections of the access galleries with solidifying liquid mucilage, masses of hypedup workers arrayed behind secret exits, armed with stunwands and the few Outsider weapons the Hive could muster. "They're coming on very fast," Saldo said, nodding toward the dust cloud from the approaching vehicles. "They're late," Hellstrom said. "Something delayed them and they're trying to make up for lost time. Are we all ready to clear out this aerie?" "I'd better give the word," Saldo said. "In a moment," Hellstrom said. "We can delay them at the gate. Were you able to reach Line?" "Nobody answers his phone. You know, when this is over I think we should provide him with a better Outside cover -- a wife, another phone at his home tied to the ofFice line." "Good idea," Hellstrom said. He pointed toward the window. "Those are big campers. Could they be the ones that were on the mountain?" "They might -- Nils, they are moving much too fast. They're almost at the fence. Maybe we should -- " He broke off in shocked alarm as the first of the big vans crashed through the north gate and swerved aside to block off the flat pillbox of the disguised ventilator outlet. Two figures leaped from the van as it skidded to a stop. One of them carried what appeared to be a black satchel. The other vans roared right past the stopped one, coming straight on for the house and the barn. "They're attacking us!" Saldo yelled. A shattering explosion at the ventilator outlet punctuated his warning and was followed immediately by a second, louder explosion. The first truck had been blown onto its side and was burning. Our own explosives for removing the emergency cover on that ventilator, Hellstrom thought. There were other blasts now, shots, screams, running people. Two of the attackers spilled from a moving truck, ran crashing through the farmhouse door. "Nils! Nils!" Saldo was pulling frantically at his arm. "You've got to get out of here." The Wisdom of Harl: A society that cuts across all conduct Outsiders accept can exist only in a constant state of siege. farmhouse living room waiting for the arrival of Janvert's law when the first explosion rocked the building. A piece of metal from the first van ripped through the north wall of the building a foot above her head. It crashed into the opposite wall . and stuck there, smoking. Shots, screams, explosions erupted in the yard. Ducking low, Mimeca sprinted for the kitchen. Mrs. Niles stored a stunwand in there. She crashed through the swinging door, surprised Mrs. Niles using a stunwand to clear the yard between the farmhouse and barn. Mimeca gave the scene only a passing glance. Her own presence to play the part of Fancy was vital to the Hive's survival. She had to save herself. A door behind Mrs. Niles opened onto solidly built old stairs into the original root cellar. Mimeca jerked the door open, thundered down the stairs. There was a loud crash overhead, shots, breaking glass. She dashed for some fake shelves that concealed a tunnel to the barn, squeezed through. Workers armed with stunwands were pouring toward her from the other end. Mimeca ran panting past them, through the door to the barn basement. The tunnel behind her was already empty of defenders and she could hear the hiss of mucilage A short hall stretched in front of Mimeca, open at the far end into a scene which only the Hive-born would recognize as not one of utter confusion. She trotted toward the area. Workers were dashing about -- packages were being carried toward the gallery head. A temporary repeater station had been installed against a wall on the left and guard workers were keeping it clear. As Mimeca entered this area the concealed hatch over the emergency stairs opened above her. Saldo and Hellstrom came dashing down, followed by armed workers. The opening of the hatch amplified the clamor of battle overhead, but the noise died abruptly. One more explosion came, another shot. She heard the brain-resonating humming of many stunwands. Silence. Hellstrom saw Mimeca, signaled her to join him, but continued his course toward the temporary repeater station. A senior observer turned and recognized him, said, "We've accounted for the ones who got this far, but there are still two more down by the fence. They're out of stun-range from this distance. Shall we get them from behind?" "Wait," Hellstrom said. "Is it safe for us to go back to the aerie?" "The two by the fence are armed with at least one machine-gun." "I will go back upstairs," Saldo said. "You wait here. Don't risk yourself, Nils." "We'll both go," Hellstrom said. He motioned for Saldo to lead the way, spoke to Mimeca. "I'm glad you escaped -- Fancy." She nodded, beginning to recover her breath. "Wait here," Hellstrom told her. "We may need you yet." He turned, followed Saldo, who waited with armed workers at the stairhead. The abruptness and savagery of the attack still had Hellstrom in a state of shock. They were really into the fire now, really into it. T HE studio area of the bam presented a scene of remarkably little damage except for a hole blasted in the wall to one side of the north door. Some equipment had been scattered and lay in smashed disarray there. Part of the broken equipment included a small hive of the new guard-bees. The survivors were buzzing around angrily, but were not attacking the Hive's workers, which was a remarkable test of efficiency in the conditioning process. Hellstrom made a note to compliment the directors of that project and to assign additional resources to it. The studio's main boom had not been damaged. Saldo already was headed for its cage when Hellstrom emerged from the stairwell. Hellstrom swept his gaze around the studio as he followed. Workers' bodies were being removed briskly by scavenger crews. Casualties, casualties, casualties! Damn those bloody murderers! Hellstrom felt himself experiencing a pure Hive reaction of violent outrage. He wanted to wave his arm to summon followers and sweep down upon the two remaining attackers, tear them apart with bare hands no matter what the cost. He sensed the matching eagerness of adrenalinfilled workers all around. They would follow him at the slightest gesture. They no longer were camera crews, actors, technicians, specialists in the multiple tasks by which the Hive collected Outsider energy money. They were infuriated workers, every last one of them. Hellstrom forced himself to cross calmly to the cage, joining Saldo there. He took a deep, trembling breath as he hopped into the cage. The Hive had never before been under such great threat and never before had it needed such cool thinking from its leader specialists. "Get a bullhorn," Hellstrom told Saldo as the boom lifted them toward the aerie. "Call to the two remaining attackers that they must surrender or be killed. Try to take them alive." "If they resist?" It was not Saldo's normal voice, but pure emotion-charged male, primed for attack. "You must stop hoping that they will resist," Hellstrom said. "They are to be stunned and taken alive if at all possible. See if you can get under them in the Hive with a stunwand. That might be one way." The cage wafted them gently to the edge of the loft. Hellstrom stepped out, Saldo right behind him. The aerie baffle was open and excited voices could be heard from inside. "Tell those workers in there to place more reliance on Hive-sign during stress periods," Hellstrom ordered. "It keeps down the hubbub and upset." "Yes -- yes, of course, Nils." Saldo found himself awed by the cool command Hellstrom displayed. Here was the true mark of a leader specialist -- rational assessment overpowering the anger that simmered underneath. Hellstrom stepped through the short entry to the aerie, barked, "let's have some order in here! Restore that baffle. Is our telephone still open to the Outside?" The noise subsided immediately. Workers moved to obey. A security specialist standing at the end of the curved bench that had supported the repeaters, passed a telephone to Hellstrom. "Get the equipment back up here," Hellstrom ordered as he took the telephone. "And send an observer down to Project Forty. The observer is not to interfere or interrupt in any way, simply observe. At the first word of a breakthrough this observer is to report directly to me. Is that understood?" "Understood," Saldo said and moved to obey. Hellstrom put the telephone to his ear, found it dead. He passed it back to the worker who'd given it to him. "Line's dead. See about restoring it." The worker took the phone, said, "It was working just a minute ago." "Whom were you going to call. Nils?" "I was going to call Washington and try to find out if the time had come to bluff." From the diary of Trova Hellstrom: A filled life, good things in their own time, knowledge of constructive service to your fellows and into the vats when you die -- that is the meaning of true fellowship: one in life, one in death. the first van, overriding Myerlie's objections that it was "no place for a woman." She had told him where he could stuff that and he had slowly smiled, a knowing look behind his eyes. Then: "I understand, honey. It may be a bloody time at that farmhouse and you don't want to see your little Shorty-baby get it. If he does I'll come back and tell you myself." So he knows! she had thought. She had spat in his face, brought up her left hand for a chopping blow as he made to strike her. Others had intervened and DT had cried, "My God! This is no time to fight among ourselves! What are you two doing? Come on -- let's get it moving." At the first opportunity they stopped the lead van, bound Kraft securely, gagged him and dumped him onto the bed in the rear. He objected that they were "going to pay for this -- " but a gesture with the gun in Clovis's hand silenced him. He permitted himself to be bound then and lay afterward on the bed, eyes wide open, studying everything he could see. Clovis sat beside DT, who drovei She watched the passing scenery without really seeing it. So this was how it all ended. The people at that farm would kill Eddie at the first sign of attack. She had had time to think about it now and felt this as a certainty. She would do what any good agent would do. You didn't leave danger behind your back. A red rage built before her eyes -- it actually felt as though it were outside her, beckoning her on. She also began to see possible other motives behind the Chiefs choice of her as leader of this attack. He had wanted the leader to be in a blind, It was after four o'clock before they started. A light breeze brushed ripples in the tall yellow rangegrass beside the dirt road. She saw the grass, focused on it, looked ahead and realized they had reached the last turn before the fence. DT was pushing the big van to its limit, roaring up the last mile of road. "You nervous?" DT asked. She glanced at the hard, youthful face, still dark with the kind of tan he'd developed in Vietnam. DT wore a green cap whose translucent plastic visor cast dark shadows over his eyes, accenting the small white scar in the shape of an inverted V at the bridge of his nose. "That's a helluva question," she said, raising her voice over the motor's roar. "Nothing wrong with being nervous before a fight," he said. "I remember one time in Nam -- " "I don't want to hear about your stinking brawl!" she cut him off. He shrugged, noticed that her face was almost gray. She was taking this hard. Helluva business for a woman. Myerlie had been right. No sense getting into that scrap, though. If she wanted to be the gung-ho Mizz, that was her lookout. Just as long as she knew how to handle the satchel charge. From all reports, she did. "What do you do when you're not working?" he asked. "What's it to you. Junior?" "Christ, you're feisty! I was just making conversation." "Then make it with yourself." Td rather make it with you, baby, he thought. You've got a nice body. And he wondered how Shorty enjoyed that. Everybody knew about those, two, of course. A real thing. Bad business in the Agency, not like he and Tymiena -- good clean sex. That was why Clovis was taking this so hard, naturally. Shorty was sure as hell going to get it the minute they opened up. And with Shorty dead she'd wind up running this show. He glanced at her once more out of this new assessment. Did the Agency really trust this woman to run this sort of thing? "They're not expecting us," he said. "This could be a piece of cake. We'll walk right through the place. How many people you think they have up there? Twenty? Thirty, maybe?" "It's going to be a gawdawful mess," she snarled. "Now shut up." the rear of the van, felt something akin to pity. They were going to run into a wall of stunwands, every one set to maximum. It was going to be slaughter. He had resigned himself to dying with the pair in this van. What would those two do if they knew how many workers there really were in the Hive? What would they say if they came back and asked him and he told them, Oh, fifty thousand or so, give or take a couple of hundred. Clovis found herself becoming bitterly amused by DT's spate of talk. The nervousness was in him, of course. She had gone beyond Chief probably wanted. They were close enough to the fence now to be able to see every exterior detail of the squat concrete structure beyond the gate. The afternoon light was beginning to draw its long shadows within the valley. She could see no sign of human activity at the farmhouse or that portion of the bam visible from this vantage. She picked up her microphone from the radio under the dash to report this to the following vans, but the instant she hit the transmit button, the monitor telltale began to squeal. Jammed! Someone was jamming their frequency! She glanced at DT, whose tense side glances at the transmitter told her he, too, understood. She replaced the microphone on its hook, said, "Park the van between the farmhouse and the pillbox. You take the satchel. We'll both get out your side. Toss the satchel along the wall to the east side of the pillbox. Get to the other side of it and cover me. I'll set the charge. When it's set we run like hell for the edge of that hill beyond there." "The blast will wreck the van," he objected. "Better it than us. Start revving her up. We can get more speed than this." "What about our passenger?" "He takes his own chances. I hope he gets it good!" She grabbed up the little burpgun from the floor, prepared to release her safety harness. DT wedged an elbow against the satchel charge which had been jammed between his seat and the emergency jump door. "Hit it square in the middle!" Clovis shouted. "It's going to -- " Whatever she had been about to say was drowned in the clattering, screeching turmoil of their crash through the gate. There was no time to say anything more after that. From the diary of Trova Hellstrom: The nature of our Hive's dependence upon the whole planet must be kept under constant review. This is especially true as regards the food chain and many of our workers do not understand this clearly. They think we can feed upon ourselves eternally. How stupid! Every food chain is based ultimately upon plants. Our independence hangs upon the quality and the quantity of our plants. They must always remain our plants, grown by us and their production balanced to the diet that provides us with increased health and longevity compared with the wild Outsiders. A hail," Saldo said. He sounded grimly smug. Saldo stood beside Hellstrom in the gloomy north end of the aerie while workers behind them completed restoring the chamber to its former efficiency. Only a shadowy louver stood between Hellstrom and the wrecked van just inside the gate. Flames still crackled in the van and around it. Its fuel had caught fire, blazing up with a roar, then exploding to set little spot fires in the surrounding grass. There would be a holocaust down there soon if the workers couldn't get to it. "I realize that," Hellstrom said. "What shall be our procedure?" Saldo asked with an odd formality. He was trying too hard to be cool, Hellstrom observed. "Use our guns. Try a few shots around them. See if you can't herd them to the north and away from the fires to give us a chance to extinguish them. Have you already sent the patrols out to watch the lower road from town?" "Yes. Do you want me to have them swing back and take this pair from behind?" "No. How are we doing at getting a stunwand below them?" "They're not in a good position for that. We might hit some of our own people. You know how a hard charge bounces in dirt and rocks." "Who's in charge of the outer patrol?" "Ed." Hellstrom nodded. Ed was a strong personality. He could control the workers if anyone could. They must not, under any circumstances, kill this pair. He felt this with growing certainty. The Hive needed a pair of survivors to question. He had to find out what had prompted this fierce attack. Hellstrom asked if this had been explained to Ed. "Yes. I told him myself." Saldo sounded puzzled. Hellstrom was acting with a strange reserve. "Get started having that pair herded," Hellstrom said. Saldo moved to relay the order, returned in moments. ' "Never forget," Hellstrom said, "that the Hive is a flyspeck when compared to existing Outsider forces. We not only need that pair out there for their imformation -- but for possible use in a compromise. Has the telephone been restored yet?" "No. The break is somewhere near town. They must have cut the line." "Likely." "Why would they compromise with us?" Salao-asked. "If they can wipe us out -- " He broke off, shuddered at t,he enormity of this thought. He felt a panicky inclination to disband the Hive, scatter the workers, hope for a few survivors to restart. Surely all of them would perish if they stayed here. One atomic bomb -- well, ten or twelve atomic bombs and... Salso began trying to express these fearful ideas to Hellstrom. "We're not quite ready for that," Hellstrom said. "I have taken the necessary steps if the worst should happen. Our records are ready to be destroyed quickly if we -- " "Our records?" "You know it would have to be done. I've sent the emergency signal to those who've been our eyes and ears Outside. As of now, they have been cut away from us. They may have to live out their lives now, eating mostly Outsider foods, obeying Outsider laws, accepting brief lives and empty Outsider pleasures as the final price of their service to us. They've always known this might happen. But some of them can survive. Any of them could begin a new Hive. No matter what happens here, Saldo, we are not completely lost." Saldo closed his eyes, shuddering at the thought of such a prospect. "Have Janvert restored to a more complete awareness," Hellstrom said. "We may need an envoy." Saldo's eyes snapped open. "Envoy? Jan vert?" "Yes -- and see why it's taking so long to gather in that last pair. They've obviously been herded out into the range. I can see workers beginning to fight the fires." He stared out. "They'd better be quick about it, too. If we have too much smoke, we could get Outsider fire crews in here." He looked back at the observation stations. "Do we have a phone connection yet?" "No," one of the observers called. "Then use radio," Hellstrom said. "Call the District Forest Service office in Lakeview. Tell them we've had a little grass fire here, but our people have it under control. We will not need Outside help." Saida turned away to obey his instructions and marveled at the way all the scattered pieces of Hive Security were gathered into Hellstrom's consciousness. Hellstrom had thought about the danger of Outside firefighters -- no one else had thought of that. Another observer was calling to Hellstrom as Saldo let himself out of the aerie. H ellstrom took the latter call himself, recognizing a Physical Research specialist on the screen. The specialist began talking as soon as Hellstrom came into range of the pickup. "Get your interfering observer out of here, Nils!" "Has the observer caused trouble in the lab?" Hellstrom asked. "We are no longer in the lab." "Where are you?" "We have taken over the main gallery at Level Fifty -- the entire gallery. We must have it cleared for our installation. Your observer insists you told him to stay here." Hellstrom thought about that gallery -- more than a mile long. "Why do you need the entire gallery?" he asked. "We have essential support -- " "Your stupid workers can use the side tunnels," the specialist snarled. "Get this cretin out of here! He is delaying us." "The entire gallery," Hellstrom said, "is quite a -- " "Your own information made this necessary," the specialist explained in a tone of weary patience. "The Outsider observations which you so kindly brought us. The problem is a matter of size. We are going to use the entire gallery. If your observer interferes you will find him in the vats." The connection was broken with an angry blap. From the Hive Manual: The most powerful socializing force in the universe is mutual dependence. The fact that our key workers eat an additional diet of leader-food should never obscure from them their interdependence with those not chosen for this privilege. neath a madrona copse about five hundred yards southeast of the gate into Hellstrom's farm. She could see swarms of people fighting grass fires up by the fence. Some obviously had guns, not those mysterious humming weapons she had seen knocking some of her team flat. There had to be five hundred people up there fighting those fires! Smoke swirled up -- she could smell its alkali bitterness. She held her pistol in her right hand, resting it over her left forearm to steady it. They would come from that direction obviously. DT had worked down to the right behind her with the burpgun. She glanced back, trying to spot him. He'd said to give him ten minutes, then move back. He would cover her. She thought about the brief battle in the farmyard. She had never expected anything even remotely like that experience. Gawdawful, yes -- but not that. Nude men and women carrying odd double-tipped weapons. She could hear the strange crackling hum of the damn things even yet. From the way her team had fallen under that weird barrage she suspected the things were lethal. A new kind of weapon -- that had to be the answer to Project #. She had expected weapons, but not anything like these. Why were the people nude? She had not yet allowed herself to ask what might have happened to Eddie Janvert. Her original guess stood. Dead -- and probably by one of those odd weapons. The things had a limited range, however -- about one hundred yards, she made it. Bullets from her pistol had the reach on them. The trick was to keep the attackers at a distance and look out for the few with guns. She glanced at her wristwatch -- three minutes before she could move. God, it was hot. Dust from the grass tickled her nose. She stifled a sneeze. Something moved on the near slope of the hillside above the fence to the left of the gate. She snapped off two shots, reloaded, heard another shot from behind her and a call from DT. He was already in place. Good. To hell with waiting out the full ten minutes. She got to her knees, turned and sprinted out of the tree shadows in a running crouch, not looking back. To cover her was DT's job. The odd humming sound came from the hillside behind her, but there was only a faint tingling sensation along her spine. She wondered if it could be imagination, but fear added new energy to her muscles and she increased her speed. A shot sounded from her left and ahead -- another, another. DT was using the burpgun on singleshot to slow down pursuers. She shifted course slightly to swing her course around the place where the shots originated. She still couldn't see DT, but there was oak tree down there and some cows were running away beyond it with awkward, bounding gaits. She picked an oak to the left of the cows as her target, caught the tree with her left arm as she came to it, swung behind it. Sweat soaked her body and her chest ached with each panting breath. More shots came from DT's position then, but she still couldn't see him. Six nude figures were sprinting down the open rangeland from the valley, each carrying one of those weird doubleended wands. She drew three deep breaths to steady herself, rested her gun hand against the tree and spaced off four aimed shots. Two of the sprinters dropped with that jolting sprawl that said they had been hit. The others dove into the grass. DT came into sight abruptly, dropping from the other tree. He landed cat-footed and running, bore to his left, not looking back, not looking across at Clovis. A good teammate would cover for him and he had now accepted Clovis as a teammate. She reloaded, watching the grass move where the four survivors of her fusillade had gone to ground. They were crawling, obviously trying to get within range for their weapons. The grass rippled ominously, the movement coming nearer and nearer. She concentrated on gauging distance. At about four hundred feet she lifted the magnum and began shooting. She took her time, spaced the shots carefully. At her third shot a figure lurched into view, toppled backward. Three others arose from the grass, charged, pointing their wands at her. Taking her time -- each of the remaining three shots had to count -- she sighted on the first figure, a bald woman with face contorted into a fierce grimace. The shot stopped baldie as though she had run into a wall. Her weapon flew through the air as she fell sideways. The others dove for the grass. Clovis used her two remaining shots, putting them into the grass where the attackers had dropped. Without waiting to see the effect she turned and ran, reloading as she went. "Over here! Over here!" It was DT calling from another oak to her left. She changed course toward it, guessing he'd called because there were no more trees in the rangeland beyond. It was open grassland down there, cropped close by cattle for at least half a mile. DT caught her arm to help stop her. "You know, that's weird," he said. "See how the cows have eaten the pasture down below us, but not up toward the farm. It's almost as though the cows avoided that area. The ones I scared away from my first stand up there were real spooky, as though they'd been herded up there by something below us. I don't see a sign of anyone down there, though." S HE took a moment to catch her breath. Then: "You have any bright ideas how we're going to get out of this?" "Keep on like we are," he said. "We've got to get out and report what we've seen," she said. She looked up at him, but he was keeping his attention on their backtrail. "I think you got another one of those creeps that dove into the grass," he said. "Only one of them seems to be moving. You ready to make another run?" "As ready as I'll ever be. You see anything of the one I missed?" "He's still crawling, but he's gonna run outa grass pretty soon. Let's separate now. You bear a bit to your left until you hit the road, then try to follow it. I'll hold right. The creek should be over there -- you can see the line of trees off that way about a mile. We'll give 'em two targets to chase. If I can reach the creek -- " DT had been scanning the ground toward the farm as he began speaking and, still speaking, turned to look in the direction they would run. Clovis whirled at the startled way DT stopped speaking. She let out an involuntary gasp. A solid line of hairless, nude human figures blocked their escape route. The line stood about five hundred yards below them, beginning far off to their left in the scrub oaks of rising ground there and reaching into the distance at the right, even beyond the trees that marked the creek bank where DT had expected to take cover. "Jeeee-sus!" DT said. There must be ten thousand of them, Clovis thought. "I haven't seen that many gooks since Nam," DT husked. "Jeeeeesus! It's like we stirred up a whole anthill of 'em." Clovis nodded, thinking: That's exactly what we've done. The whole thing fell into place: Hellstrom was a front for some kind of weirdo cult. She noted the pale skins. They must live underground. The farm was just a caver. She stifled a hysterical giggle. No, the farm was only a lid She raised her gun, intending to take as many of that ominous advancing line as possible, but a crackling hum from close behind numbed her body and mind. She heard one shot as she toppled, but could not decide whether it was from her gun or DT's. From Nils Hellstrom' s diary: The concept of a colony planted directly in the middle of an existing human society is not unique to our group. There have been many secret groups and movements in hufrnan history. Gypsies provide a crude analog of our way even today. No, we are not unique in this. But our Hive is as far removed from those others as they are removed from primitive, cavedwelling humans. We are like the colonial protozoan, carchesium, all of us in the Hive attached to a single, branching stem -- and that stem concealed in the very ground beneath that other society, which believes itself to be the meek who will inherit the earth. Meek! That word originally meant " mute and silent." confused flight from Baltimore -- an hour's layover at O'Hare, then the quick transfer to a chartered flight at Portland and the noisy discomfort of a single engine all the way up the Columbia Gorge. And then, as evening came down, the long haul diagonally across Oregon into the southeastern corner. Merrivale was in a violent mood when the plane set him down in Lakeview -- and it was a mood amplified by the elation that simmered in him. When he had least expected it, in fact when he had resigned himself to a degrading personal defeat, they had called on him. They -- a board whose existence he had known about, but never identified -- had chosen Joseph Merrivale as "our best hope to salvage something from this mess." With both Peruge and the Chief dead, whom else did they have? The thought gave him a sense of personal power which, in turn, fed his anger. Who was he to be subjected to such discomfort? The report passed to him quickly in Portland did little to mollify him. Peruge was exposed as criminally careless -- spending the night with a woman like that. While on a job! The small plane landed in darkness and there was a gray stationwagon with only a driver to greet him. The fact that the driver introduced himself as Waverly Agent In Charge) renewed the worries Merrivale had managed to keep largely suppressed on the flight and this, too, fed his anger. They could be throwing me to the wolves, he thought as he got into the car beside the driver. This worry had simmered throughout the long trip from Portland. As darkness passed over the land he had looked down at the occasional winking of lights and thought bitterly that people were going about their ordinary business down there -- eating, going to movies, watching television, visiting friends. A comforting, ordinary life, Merrivale often fantasied, should have been his lot. The other side of his fantasy told him, though, that the silent pattern of safety below him depended largely upon his efforts to maintain it. They did not know down there what he was doing for them, the sacrifices he made. Even following one's orders to the letter didn't help to protect one -- the sudden promotion had not changed this. It was a universal law -- the Big fed upon the Small and there was always a Bigger to make one Smaller. young mien and iron-gray hair. The harshly chiseled planes of his face strongly suggested American Indian ancestry. The eyes were deeply set and shadowy in the light from the car's dash. His voice was deep and revealed a faint twang. Texas? "Bring me up to date," Merrivale said as Gammel took the car out of man drove with an easy competence and without concern for extending the car's life. They bounced out on a rough track from the airport and turned left onto blacktop. "You know, of course, that there hasn't been a word from the team you sent to the farm," Gammel said. "They told me in Portland," Merrivale said, forgetting momentarily to impose his superior British accent, then adding quickly: "Bloody lash-up!" Gammel stopped for an arterial sign, turned left onto a wider blacktop, waited for a noisy bus to pass him before continuing. "For the moment we agree with your assessment that the Fosterville deputy is untrustworthy and that there may be other questionables both in the sheriffs office and in the community itself. We are trusting no locals." "What are you doing about the deputy?" "He was taken along by your people, you know. He hasn't been heard from." "What are you telling the local authorities?" "Spy stuff -- hush-hush." cretion overcome their valor. The political suggestions we initiated on high have the general tone of absolute commands at this level." "Quite. Presumably you've already invested the countryside around the farm." road for a moment. Invested? Oh. yes -- occupied. He said, "We've only brought in eleven men. It must remain at that for the moment. The Oregon highway patrol sent three cars and six men, but we haven't let them fully into the picture. We're mounting a limited operation on the rebuttable presumption that your office's assessment is correct. However, at the slightest sign that you've misjudged the situation we'll be forced to return to our book of rules -- understood?" Rebuttable presumption, Merrivale thought. It was his kind of phrase and he savored it, tucking it away for later personal use in other company. He did not, however, like the implications behind the phrase and he said so. "Surely," Gammel said, "you understand that we're operating well outside the conventions. That team you sent in there had no legal standing whatsoever. That was an assault force, pure and simple. You guys make up your own rules as you go along. We can't always do that. My instructions are clear. I'm to do everything in my power to help you with a cover story and or provide reasonable protection for your people as I am able, but -- and this is a mighty large but -- these instructions hold only for as long as your assessment of the situation is borne out." Merrivale listened in frozen silence. It looked more and more as though the board had not promoted him, but was throwing him to the wolves. He had been an associate of two people, now dead, whose policies no longer could be defended. The board had sent him out here in the field all alone. You'll get field. If it is consistent with policy other backup will be sent along as you request it. Gobbledygook! He was one clear target if things went more sour. As though that were possible! He could almost hear the reorganization gears grinding back in Baltimore and Washington. They would say, Well, you knew what kind of a business this was when you got into it, Merrivale. They would appear professionally sorrowful while they brought up that standard phrase always used for such occasions: In this business, you take your lumps when that's required of you. That was the situation. No doubt of it. If it could be salvaged he would salvage it -- but first he had to save himself. "Bloody hell," he muttered and meant every syllable. "Let's have the rest of it. What have you managed to learn about my people?" "Nothing." "Nothing, hey?" Merrivale was outraged. He turned, studied Gammel's face in the lights of an onfeatures immobile, a dark piece of stone for all the emotion showing. "I would like that 'nothing' explained -- provided you're able to explain it," Merrivale said, his tone distant and acid. "As per our instructions," Gammel said, "we have been waiting for you." Just following orders, Merrivale thought. He could see the implications. There was going to be only one responsible target in this situation. That was in Gammel's orders, too. No doubt of it. No bloody doubt of it. "I find this almost inconceivable," Merrivale said. He turned, looked out at the darkness flashing with vague movements on his right as the car sped toward Fosterville. He could make out that they were passing through open countryside, the road climbing slightly -- hills made dim shapes ahead in starlight. Few other cars shared the road. The dark landscape carried a sense of loneliness that rubbed at Merrivale's feelings of abandonment. "Let's not misunderstand each other," Gammel said. "I came out here alone to pick you up just so we could talk openly." Gammel glanced at Merrivale. The poor sod was in the jaws of the vise, no mistaking that. Was he just now becoming aware of it? "Then why aren't you talking openly?" Merrivale demanded. lies more on the attack than the situation really requires , Gammel thought. Does that mean he has information that might throw his Agency's position into doubt? I wonder... "I'm doing my best within my instructions," Gammel said. "I had less than an hour at Fosterville before they signaled that you'd be coming in at Lakeview. I had to rush like hell to get there. They said you were coming in at Lakeview because it had the nearest field with lights. Was that it -- or was there another reason?" "What do you mean?" "I'm still wondering about our own casualties -- up at The Sisters." "Oh -- yes, of course. That was in the report I had at Portland. There's still nothing conclusive or I'd have mentioned it earlier. The fire played bloody hob with the wreckage. It could have been lightning and a fuel explosion. They said the pilot should have gone up through the Columbia Gorge, but he was trying to save time by flying direct." "They haven't ruled out sabotage?" "They have not. High probability if you ask me. Damn stupid kind of coincidence, don't you think?" "We're acting on that assumption," Gammel said. "What've you done with your eleven men and the highway patrol?" Merrivale asked. "I've dispatched three cars -- two with three officers was sent around to the south. That's going to take a little time. For part of that trip they will be out of range of the radio relay equipment." "But what are these three cars doing?" "We've set up a communications base in the motel at Fosterville. The cars are maintaining contact with that base at regular intervals. My cars are deployed between Fosterville and the farm and they -- " "Two cars between town and the farm?" a fourth. My three cars are deployed in a wide surveillance pattern -- one on a Forest Service road to the east and the other two spaced along the actual road to the farm. They were instructed to approach no closer than two miles." "Two miles?" "Correct -- and they were told to stay in their cars." "But two miles -- " "When we're fairly certain of what we're doing and what we're up against we don't mind taking risks," Gammel said. "But this case appears to be nothing but uncertainties." He spoke in a level voice, trying to hold his temper. Merrivale's carping was becoming insufferable. Didn't he realize he might be wearing Gammel's own handcuffs before another twentyfour hours was out? They might have to arrest Merri vale just to save tard expect? "But two -- " "You've lost how many people in there?" Gammel demanded, not trying to hide his anger now. "Twelve? Fourteen? I'm told there were nine people in that team you sent in today and you lost at least one team before that. Do you take us for morons?" "Fourteen, counting Dzule Peruge," Merrivale said. "Your ability to count is unimpaired," In the dim green light of the dash, he noted a muscle working along Gammel's jaw, the tense-knuckled way the man gripped the wheel as he drove. "So we have one certainly dead, thirteen missing and our own planeload down in The Sisters -- that's twenty in all. You dare ask me why I haven't sent my people in there after yours? If I had my way we'd have a regiment of marines on hand -- but I don't have my way. Why don't I? Because this whole thing smells of a lashup by your people. And if it explodes we're not going to get burned in the blast. Is that clear enough for you? Is that open enough?" "Bloody pack of cowards," Merrivale muttered. " car off the road, skidded to a stop in gravel, set the handbrake with an angry rasping of its latch, turned off the lights and the motor. He whirled on the seat to face Merrivale. "Look, you! I understand the hot seat you're on -- at least I have a good idea of the bind you're in. But my agency has not been in this from the first, although it should have been! Now -- if that turns out to be a nest of Commies up there we'll mop it up and have ail the help we need. If it turns out to be an arm of a major industry in this country trying to protect a new invention from the vultures you represent -- that is an entirely different ballgame." "What do you mean? Industry -- new invention?" "You know damned well what I mean! We didn't sit around on our tails accepting you people as our only sources of information." Merrivale wondered. If they have the whole story why are they still helping us? As though he had heard the question Gammel said, "Our position in this is to try to keep the crud from hitting the fan. You rub dirt on your outfit and you rub dirt on the whole government. If you've been sent out here as a patsy I can sympathize. But there's no sense in our fighting each other. If this thing's ready to blow and you're here to take the rap you'd better level with me right now. Are you?" Taken aback by Gammel's sudden stop and attack, Merrivale sputtered a moment. Then: "Now, see here! If you -- " "Are you here to take the rap?" "Of course not." "Bull." Gammel shook his head. "You think we don't have our own suspicions about why your boss took the short road to hell?" "The short road to -- " "Jumped out of that damned window! Are you their patsy?" "I was sent here with the understanding that you would provide full cooperation until we could field new teams," Merrivale said, speaking stiffly. "I don't find your present attitude cooperative in the least." Still not mollified, Gammel said, "Tell me, yes or no -- do you have new information that dramatically alters your original assessment?" "Of course not." "Nothing new to tell me?" "I will not be cross-examined by you," Merrivale protested. "You know as much about this situation as I do. More. You've at least been on the scene." "I hope you're telling the truth," Gammel said. "If you aren't -- I personally will supervise whatever action we have to take to fry you." He turned, restarted the car, eased back onto the highway. He turned on his lights as he moved and they startled a big black-and-white cow that had wandered onto the berm. It galloped ahead of them for several hundred feet before diving into the open grassland beside the road. Considerably subdued and now frightened at the position he might be in if he had no cooperation at all truly sorry if I've offended you. You can imagine I've been under somewhat of a strain. First the Chiefs death and then the orders to take over here personally. No sleep really since this all started." "Have you eaten?" "On the plane from Chicago." "We can get you something at our headquarters in the motel." Gammel reached for the small microphone under the dash, said, "I'll have them lay on coffee and sandwiches. What would you -- " "No need for that," Merrivale said, feeling somewhat better. Gammel obviously was trying to get back on a friendly footing. That made sense. Merrivale cleared his throat. "What sort of an action plan have you devised?" "We do only a minimum in the dark. We wait for morning and reconnoiter in daylight and under constant radio contact with base. That's clearly indicated until we find out what the hell has happened. We can't trust the local law. I've even been told to play it cool with to clarify some of this water that's been badly muddied up to now." Muddied by our people, of people were still a bunch of bloody snobs. He said, "Nothing more tonight?" "It didn't strike me as advisable to run any more risks than absolutely necessary. We'll have more muscle by morning." Merrivale brightened. "More people?" "Two marine choppers coming up from San Francisco." "You ordered them?" "We're still covering for you," Gammel said. He turned, grinned. "They are for surveillance andor transportation only. We stretcned our good-will account considerably to get them with no better explanation than we could give at the time." "Very well," Merrivale said. "Portland told me you had no telephone contact with the farm. Is that situation the same?" "The line's out," Gammel said. "Probably cut by your people when they went in. We'll have a repair crew out in the morning. Our own people, of course." "I see. Then I concur with your field decisions, subject, naturally, to review when we reach your headquarters. They may have more recent information." "They'd have called me," Gammel said. He tapped the radio under the dash, thinking: They've sent a stuffed shirt. He's a patsy for sure and the poor bastard may not even know it. From the Hive Manual: As a biological mechanism, human reproduction is not terribly efficient. When compared to insects, humans appear grossly inefficient. The insect and all the lower life forms are dedicated to species survival. Survival comes through reproduction, through mating. Males and females of all life forms other than man are drawn together in the direct and singular interest of reproduction. For the wild forms of humankind, however, unless the setting is right, the perfume is right, the music is sweet -- and unless at least one partner feels loved (a singularly unstable concept) by the other, the reproductive act may never occur. We of the Hive are dedicated, therefore, to freeing our workers from the concept of romance. The act of procreation must occr as simply, as naturally and obliviously as eating. Beauty r romance, or love must not figure in Hive reproduction, but only the demands of survival, T HE night-shrouded countryside around the farm now appeared asleep to Hellstrom as he scanned it from the aerie. Darkness blotted out the familiar landscape and only a distant glimmer of light on the dim horizon indicated Fosterville. The Hive beneath him had never felt more silent, more charged with the tensions of waiting. Although the Oral Tradition spoke of early confrontations during which the whole Colony Movement (as it was called then) faced extinction, the Hive had never faced a greater crisis. The present events had come about in such natural stages that Hcllstrom, looking back, experienced a sense of the inevitable. The Hive's population of almost # workers depended for their continued existence upon decisions he and his aides made during the next few hours. He glanced over his shoulder at the swampfire glow of cathodes, the screens that watched over the Outsiders who had come up from Fosterville just after dark. Three unmarked cars were parked out there in the rangeland now, little more than two miles away. A fourth car, identified as belonging to the highway patrol, had been with them at first, but was now laboring its way around to' the south of the valley. The only track open to it there was the old Thimble Mine road and that led no closer to the farm than ten miles -- from there it would have to cross open country. Hellstrom suspected the vehicle might have four-wheel drive, but the character of the land car could not get closer than three miles from the Hive's perimeter at best. The aerie's workers, sensing the weight of decisions on Hellstrom, had lowered their voices and moved softly. Should I use Janvert as a mediator? But mediation should begin from a position of strength and the Hive had only a bluff. The secret of the stun wand might be something valuable to offer. Janvert had seen it in action. He would know, too, about the Hive's mastery of human chemistry. He had his own reactions to verify that. But Janvert could only become the Hive's enemy if he went out as an envoy. He had seen too much of the Hive even to consider neutrality. Hellstrom glanced at the clock behind the arc of surveillance instruments -- #:# p.m. It was almost tomorrow -- and the morning was certain to bring a showdown. He could sense that in many things, including the watchful waiting of the three cars parked between the Hive and Fosterville. Thinking about the occupants of those cars Hellstrom felt a need to know what they were doing now. He returned to the observer station, asked a coordinating specialist, whose face looked deathly pale in the green gloom. "The men are remaining inside the cars," the specialist said. "Their reporting schedules are staggered but about ten minutes apart for any given car. We are confident now that there are no more than two Outsiders in each car." Waiting for daylight , Hellstrom realized. He said as much. "That's the general opinion here," the specialist said. "That middle car is only about twenty-five yards from one of the hidden exits, the one at the end of the gallery on Level Two." "You're suggesting we try to bring in the Outsiders?" "It would give us answers to some questions." "It also might ignite a general attack. I think we've pushed our luck as far as it will go." Hellstrom rubbed the back of his neck. He felt worn out, running on nerve. "What about the car that's going around to the south?" "It's stuck about where the old mine road starts to cross Muddy Bottom, distance about eight miles from our perimeter and at least twelve miles from the valley." "Thank you." Hellstrom turned away. The aerie was quieter now than it had been when he had arrived two hours before. Groups of Security specialists had been passing through then, being briefed for nightsweep. All had faded away into the outside darkness now, were nothing but signal points on the aerie's instruments, glowing figures on the screens. For perhaps the tenth time since taking up station in the aerie, Hellstrom thought,  should rest. I'll need all my alertness by daylight. They will come upon us in the morning --  more than anyone should be ready for them. Many of us probably will die tomorrow. Perhaps I can save some if I'm alert. He thought sadly of Lincoln Kraft, whose charred body (hardly enough left to bother taking to the vats) had been removed from the wreckage of one of the attackers' vans. Kraft's death made the day's loss thirty-one. Just a beginning. Again Hellstrom thought about the three prisoners -- it seemed strange for the Hive to be holding prisoners. Outsider adults seemed naturally to belong to the vats. Only very small children had been considered truly worthy of being reshaped for the Hive's uses. Now there were new possibilities. the three, had a background in law, Hellstrom had learned through careful questioning. Janvert might be ridiculously easy to wean from Outside ways, provided he could be sufficiently tempered to Hive chemistry. The female, Clovis Carr, was a carrier of aggressive characteristics the Hive might turn to its advantage. The third one, whose identification papers said he was one Daniel Thomas Alden, carried himself like a soldier. There could be valuable characteristics in all of them -- but Janvert remained the most interesting. He was small, too, which was desirable in the Hive. Hellstrom turned back to the observer stations, bent low over one worker to ask quietly, "What about our patrol in the creekbottom? Has it anything new to report on the conversation from that car under surveillance?" "The Outsiders are still puzzled, Nils. They call this a 'very strange case' and they refer occasionally to someone named Gammel, who apparently believes the 'case' is a snafu. What's a snafu?" "A foulup," Hellstrom translated. "It's military slang: Situation Normal All Fouled Up." "Something that has gone wrong, then." "Yes. Tell me if you hear anything new." Hellstrom straightened, thought of calling Saldo. The younger man had been sent to keep a discreet observation on Project #, working from one end of the long gallery at Level Fifty. It was not a good vantage point, because the major work was being conducted toward the middle of the gallery, at least half a mile from the end, but the Researchers had shown increasing irrascibitity after the earlier incident with an 'inferfering observer.' Hellstrom was counting on Saldo's intelligence to manage the situation. It was a matter of desperate urgency for him to know instantly if the situation in the lab changed. We could never get away with a bluff against the Outsiders, Hellstrom told himself. The Hive might gain a little time for itself, might be able to parlay the stunwands into a temporary belief in a more potent weapon built on the same principle. But the Outsiders would need a demonstration. And there was always Harl's warning to consider. The threat to use an absolute weapon put the trigger in the hands of an opponent who might say, So use it! The weapon must be applicable at less than absolute energies and that fact must be demonstrable, unmistakably demonstrable. The Outsiders had a saying that fitted the situation aptly: Don't kid the kidders. A bluff would not work for long. It would be called -- and then what? The wild Outsiders were truly strange. They tended not to believe in violence until it was inflicted upon them. They had a saying about this, too: It can't happen here. Perhaps this was inevitable in a world that based its societies on threat, violence and illusions of absolute power. How could people such as Jan vert be expected to think in more malleable terms, to think of life dependencies and the interlocked relationships of living systems, to think of inserting the human species into the great circle of life? Such concepts would be gibberish to Outsiders, even those who spoke for the new fad known as Ecology. From Joseph Merrivale's private notes: As per the instrucport, I arrived late Sunday in Lakeview to establish prelimiWaverly Gammel, who had set up a base in Fosterville. He took me to Fosterville where we arrived at # hours. Gammel reported having taken no action except minimal surveillance of target area from distance of approximately two hours and involving only four vehicles with nine men. According to Gammel, this was in compliance with his instructions, a statement that does not accord with what I was led to believe at the action briefing. Gammel reports no word from any of our teams that entered the target area earlier. Gammel evinces doubts that this case involves narcotics. He has seen the preliminary report on Peruge's autopsy. I must protest my dependence upon another agency for the manpower to prosecute this case. Divided authority is producing a situation fraught with potential embarrassments and inconveniences. The loose working agreement under which I must perform my duties can only exacerbate present difficulties. Since many actions have already been taken in the field on this case without my knowledge or agreement I must lodge my formal protest at the earliest opportunity. My capacity in the present contratemps bodes ill for our responsibilities. I must make it clear that none of the conduct in this case has accorded with my own understandings of the decisions required to resolve the situation. S AL DO made record time coming up from the Hive's #-foot level where the Researchers had moved their operations. There were fast elevators only in the so-called New Galleries below # feet, but even these became progressively slower the higher he went. The New Galleries work delayed him slightly at # feet, but he bulled his way through, making a note to ask Hellstrom if that work could not be put on minimum standby during the present crisis. He had left a young assistant seated at the southeast end of the long gallery of the relocated lab with a secret weapon Saldo had commandeered -- those binoculars once used by the Outsider, Depeaux. The binoculars revealed a spate of activity by the Researchers -- this Saldo interpreted as readiness for a test of the system. He dared not approach the specialists, though. Hellstrom's orders had been explicit on that score. Only Hellstrom might change that now and, knowing the urgency, Saldo went to argue for a small interruption of the lab work. It was almost midnight when the boom cage deposited him on the catwalk outside the aerie. A guardworker there passed him with only a casual glance of recognition. The inner room was dim and oddly hushed to him as he passed through the baffle. He saw that most of the Hive's leadership cadre had taken over the night duty with Hellstrom, who stood at the room's north end, a blocky figure against the dark outline of the louvered window. Saldo found he did not have the highest regard for the leadership qualities of more of those present, excepting Hellstrom -- and sometimes not excepting Hellstrom himself. Some of these workers should be conserving their strength for the morrow. He knew this inner reaction reflected a pattern which had been bred and conditioned into him, but the knowledge subtracted little from his assessment of his own personal qualifications Hellstrom should be resting now -- as should at least half those present. Hellstrom turned as Saldo made his way through the green gloom. He asked, "Is there something to report?" Saldo moved close to Hellstrom and, speaking in a low voice, explained why he had left the lab. "Are you sure they're about to test it?" "It looks that way. They've been stringing the power cables for several hours. I noted before that they didn't bother with the power cables on the other models until they were about to test." "How soon?" "That's difficult to say." Hellstrom moved back and forth a few paces restlessly, fatigue visible in the controlled precision of his actions. He stopped in front of Saldo. "I don't see how they could be testing it this soon." He rubbed his chin. "They said the new model would have to use the entire gallery." "They are using the gallery, all of it -- and fans. And they are connecting a strange construction of pipes down the entire length of the gallery. They're supporting the pipe on anything they can collect -- chairs, benches... It's a very strange thing they're building. They even took a heavy-duty pump from Level Forty-Two Hydroponics. They just went right in, disconnected it and took it. The Hydroponics manager was upset, as you can imagine, but they merely said you had authorized it. Is that true?" "In essence," Hellstrom said. "Nils, do you think it likely they'd behave this way unless they were about to test and were reasonably sure of success." Privately Hellstrom agreed with Saldo, but there were other considerations -- and he had not yet dared to let himself hope. The specialists' behavior might be a reflection of the upset that had spread throughout the Hive. Hellstrom did not think this likely, but it was possible. "Shouldn't you go down and make a personal inquiry?" Saldo asked. Hellstrom sympathized with Saldo's impatience. It was shared by many in the Hive. Was anything to be served by going down there now himself, though? The specialists might not tell him anything. They were naturally wary of predicting the outcome of any project. They spoke of probabilities when they did speak -- or of "possible consequences in certain lines of development." This was understandable. Experiments had been known to turn upon the experimenters. An earlier test model in Project # had created an explosive plasma bubble that had killed fiftythree workers, including four Researchers, and had spread havoc two hundred feet in a side gallery at Level Thirty-Nine. "What power-drain figures did they give Generation?" Hellstrom asked. "How much diversion do they require?" "The Generation specialists asked, but were told the computation is not complete. I've posted another observer in Generation, however. Surely the Researchers must at least ask for the diversion." "Will Generation make an estimate based on the size of the power cables being used?" "As much as five hundred thousand kilowatts. It could be less, though." "That much?" Hellstrom took a deep breath. "Researchers are different from the rest of us in many ways, Saldo. They were bred for a rather narrow vision, a concentrated attention of the intellect. We should be prepared for the possibility of a disastrous failure." "A dis -- " Saldo fell into stricken silence. "Prepare to evacuate the area for at least three levels around the test gallery," Hellstrom said. "You are to post yourself in Generation. Tell the managing specialist he is not to connect the power cables until I have given permission. When the Researchers come to make the power arrangments, call me. Ask them then, if you're able, what range and error factor they are estimating for the project. Get the power figures and -- at the same time -- order the evacuation of the galleries to proceed. We will risk no more workers than necessary." He felt depressed, rebounding from his former pride. None of these precautions had entered his mind. He had thought only to argue Hellstrom into one particular course of action. The stratagem of stationing an observer right in Generation with the authority to delay the power hookup, however, filled the demands of Saldo's own plan and did far more. "Perhaps you'd better send somebody with more imagination and ability to Generation," Saldo said. "Maybe Ed -- " "You are the one I want in Generation," Hellstrom said. "Ed is a seasoned specialist with long experience Outside. He can think like an Outsider, which you cannot. He also has had sufficient tempering, so that he seldom overestimates his own capabilities -- or underestimates them. In a word, he is balanced. If we are to survive these next hours, we require this quality above all others. I trust you to carry out my orders carefully and completely. I know you can and will. Now get back to your station." Saldo's shoulders came up and he looked at Hellstrom's fatigue-lined features. "Nils, I didn't think -- " Hellstrom interrupted in a softer tone. "In part it is my fatigue that is being short and severe with you. This is something you should have taken into consideration. You could have called me on the internal system without leaving your post. A true leader considers many possibilities before acting. If you were ready for leadership you would have thought to conserve my energies as well as your own. You will grow into this ability -- and the delay time between your required consideration of many courses and your decision to act correctly will grow shorter and shorter." "I'm going back to my post at once," Saldo said. He turned, started across the room. As he moved voices were raised at the observer stations. A garble of sound could be heard coming over one of the communicators. An observer could be heard asking, "Who else is there to take charge?" Another garble of sound erupted from the communicators. "One at a time!" the observer shouted. Then: "Tell them to hold their stations. If too many of us are running around without coordination we'll just get in each other's way. We'll take charge of the search from here." The observer, a young female subleader-in-training, whose face appeared an oval mask of shock in the light from her screen, lifted herself half out of her chair to peer across the bank of instruments at Hellstrom. "One of the captives has escaped into the Hive!" Hellstrom was at her side as soon as he could get there. Saldo hesitated at the door. "Which one?" Hellstrom demanded, bending over the observer. "The one called Janvert. Shall we dispatch workers to -- " "No." Saldo spoke from the door. "Nils, should I -- " "Get to your station!" Hellstrom called, not moving his gaze from the screen in front of the young observer. A frightened guardworker appeared on her screen, a young male with the shoulder mark of dronedom. "Which level?" Hellstrom demanded. "Forty-two," the worker in the screen said, "And he has a stunwand. He killed two workers, the ones who said they were sent to -- to -- at your orders to -- " "I understand," Hellstrom interrupted. And he thought, The specialists I sent down to bring Janvert to sufficient alertness for use as an envoy. Something had gone wrong and Janvert had escaped. Hellstrom straightened, swept his gaze over the workers around him in the aerie. "Awaken your replacements. Janvert has been Hive-marked. No common worker would recognize him as an Outsider. He can move anywhere in the Hive without attracting attention. We have a double problem. We must recapture him and we must not upset the Hive any more than has already been done. Make that clear to every searcher. Send your replacements after Janvert with a physical description. Issue Outsider guns to at least one worker in each search party as long as the guns last. I don't want stunwands used in the Hive under these circumstances." "You want him dead and in the vats then," a worker behind Hellstrom said. "No, I do not." "But you said -- " "One gun, one stunwand with each party," Hellstrom said. "The gun is to wound him in the legs only if nothing else can be done to stop him. I want him taken alive. Do you all understand that? We need this Outsider alive." From the Hive Manual: Life must take life for the sake of life, but no worker should enter this great wheel of regeneration with any motive other than the perpetuation of our species. Only in the species are we linked to Infinity and this has a different meaning for the species than it does for the mortal cell. coming to a full realization of the strangeness in his position. For a while he felt he had become two distinctly different people, both of whom he remembered clearly. One of these people had studied law, joined the Agency, loved Clovis Carr and felt himself trapped in project # activities that dehumanized him. The other one seemed to have awakened as a fully recognizable individual while eating a meal with Nils Hellstrom and a rather dolllike woman named Fancy. This other individual had behaved in a wildly detached manner. This individual remembered walking meekly with Hellstrom into a room where people stood around and asked questions. As this weird other, Janvert recalled, he had answered those questions with complete searching out details that might expand the answers. He had actually worked very hard to make his answers understood. There were some other strange memories, too -- big open tanks in a tremendous room, some bubbling and seething. Another equally large room he recalled as crawling with toddlers, little children who bounced and played in odd silence on a screened floor that surged under them like a trampoline. The smell from that room he recalled as acid, but with a sense of cleanliness about it. He remembered water spurting suddenly from the ceiling onto the toddlers as he passed and then that other smell, the one he recalled from the whole other-Janvert experience and had around him even now. It was fetid, rank and warm in the nostrils. The self he thought of as his original identity appeared to have been dormant all during the otherJanvert experience -- but it was aware now. He recognized where he was in both sets of memories. It was a windowless room with rough gray walls, a depression with a hole centered in it in one corner for relieving himself, a waist-high shelf about one foot by three feet near the room's only door and apparently made of the same material as the walls. A pitcher and glass of black plastic occupied the shelf. They held warm water. There had been a food bowl on the shelf earlier. He recalled that bowl and the blank-faced nude male who had brought it -- no conversation in that one at all. There were no windows in the room, just that one door and the toilet-depression. He heard water rushing under the toilet hole occasionally. There were water jets around the depression, too -- they had turned on once, cleaning the area. There was no chair, only the floor to sit on and he had been stripped to the skin. He could see nothing in the place that might make a weapon. The plastic water pitcher and glass wouldn't break -- he had tried. His memory presented him with the images of other visitors, too -- a pair of older females who had held him with remarkable ease while they examined him intimately, then injected something into his left buttock . The area of the injection stilf tingled. The return of his original awareness from dormancy had begun soon after that injection, though. He estimated that had been at least three hours ago. They had taken his watch and he felt unsurd of time, but guessing at it made hint feel he was doing somethin! positive. s I have to escape, he told himself, j His weird other self, lapsing intej a dormancy of its own now brought up memories of hordes of nude people swarming in the tunnels through which he had been brought to this place. It was a human ant hill. How could he escape through that mob?" The door opened and a relatively young woman entered. He glimpsed in the moment she left the door open an older, tougher looking female outside, carrying one of those mysterious weapons that looked like a whip with a double end. The young woman had a stubble of black hair on her head and there was none of that moon-faced vacancy in her features or her movements. She carried in her left hand what appeared to be an ordinary stethoscope. Janvert leaped to his feet as she entered, moved around near the shelf, his back to the wall. She seemed amused. "Relax. I'm just here to see how you're taking all this." She clipped the stethoscope around her neck, took up the other end in her left hand. Janvert groped for the water pitcher without taking his attention from her and his hand knocked the pitcher from the shelf. "Now, look what you've done," she said, bending to recover it. As she stooped Janvert brought his right hand down in a vicious chop across her neck. She fell flat and didn't move. tougher looking guard outside. Relax and think, Janvert told himself. Cool green light from a recessed cove around the ceiling washed the room, creating a death pallor in the skin of the woman on the floor. He bent over her, tried for a pulse, felt none. Quickly he recovered her stethoscope, listened for a heartbeat. Nothing. The realization that his one frantic blow had killed her filled him with a chill sense of his own perilous position. Moved by a sudden urgency, he dragged the woman's body out of the way to the right of the door, looked back to see if he had left any sign of struggle. The water pitcher still lay there, but Janvert hesitated. The hesitation saved him. Once more the door opened and the older woman poked her head inside. Janvert, leaping from behind the door, grabbed her head, yanked her into the cell, bringing a knee up into her midriff. She grunted, dropping her weapon and he released her, chopped her as he had the first one, whirled and slammed the door. Now he had one of their weapons. He recovered the odd whiplike object, examined it. The thing was black plastic, similar in color and texture to the pitcher and water glass. It was about a yard long with a stubby handle indented for fingers. There was a clicknotched dial in the handle base and a yellow stud under the indentation for the index finger. Janvert pointed the double end at the guard he had just knocked down, depressed the stud. The wand went hap-hummmm and he released the stud. The humming stopped. The older woman had jerked as the weapon came alive. Now, the skin along her exposed side began to turn a dark reddish purple. He bent, felt for a pulse. Nothing. The two women were dead. He backed away, looked at the door. It opened inward, he knew, and there was a cupped indentation at waist height, which he had tried earlier. The door had refused to open then. He wondered now if, in his panic, he had locked himself in here? Desperation moving him, he tried the door. It opened immediately with only a faint click and he glimpsed people thronging past the door before he closed it. "I have to think," he told himself, speaking aloud. They would expect him to head for the surface, of course. Could there be other ways of leaving, though? What lay below him? He knew there must be at least one lower level. His captors had led him past an open, doorless doubleelevator shaft with bare-bones cars passing upward on one side and downward on the other. He held one of their weapons and he now knew it could kill. Hellstrom's people would search for him. They would move room by room through their tunnel warren and they obviously had the manpower to be thorough. I'll go down. He had no idea how far underground he might be. They had brought him on elevators and there had been many floors, but his other self had not thought to count them. They had fed him something to make him docile, of course. That other self was Hellstrom's creation. It might even be the answer to just be a description of something needed to create the chemicals for manipulating humans. The searchers wouldn't expect him to go downward, though. Keep doing the unexpected, he reminded himself. He still didn't feel in complete command of himself, but he knew he couldn't wait any longer. He held the captive weapon at the ready in his right hand, opened the door, peered out. There was less activity in the tunnel now, but a silent file of naked men and woman crossed in front of him from left to right without a single curious glance. Janvert counted nine in the group. Another longer line was passing in the other direction on the far side of the tunnel. They, too, ignored him. As they passed, Janvert slipped out of the cell and fell into step at the end of the line going left. He dropped back at the first elevator, waited for a down-car to appear, stepped in quickly, following the example of a lean, blank-faced male. They both faced the front of the car, rode silently downward. The smell of the place began to repel Janvert more and more as he found himself growing increasingly alert. The man with him in the elevator appeared not to notice it. He breathed easily, but Janvert experienced a faint nausea every time he focused on the smell. Best not to think about it then, he warned himself. His partner in the elevator remained a figure of mysterious  menace, but something kept the man from taking special notice of Janvert. The man's pubic hair had been shaved or removed in some other way. His head was shiny in its baldness. The man leaped out as the elevator passed another floor and Janvert now had the car to himself. He counted gray walls and floors, got to ten before wondering how long he should stay with this car. He glanced up at the ceiling. It was as featureless as the floor. Something glistening and gray was stuck to the ceiling near the wall on his left. He reached up, touched the substance. Some of it clung to his finger and he brought it back, sniffed it. The smell was that of the gruel in his food bowl. He rubbed it off on his thigh. The significance of food on the ceiling began to demand his attention. That ceiling might become a floor in the elevator's return phase. The cars never seemed to stop. People leaped on and off them through the doorless openings. Everything spoke of an endless chain of cars circling through the levels of Hellstrom's ant hill l ped slightly to his left. It lurched again, tilted more. Janvert kneeled against the lower edge, crouched there as the elevator turned flat on its side. Nothing but gray wall showed in the door opening as he walked the side around until the former ceiling became the floor, confirming his guess. The car was now going up. He leaped out at the first opening, found not another person in sight. He was in a tunnel illuminated by dim red light, but a brighter yellow glow shone at some distance to his fight. The tunnel stretched away into red gloom beyond that glow. He glanced left, found a gentle curve to the tunnel's floor -- it bent ut of sight to the right. He decided i head for the glow, held himself to a normal walking pace. He had to be just another occupant of this warren going about his normal business. The weapon felt heavy in his right hand, slippery through the perspiration in his palm. He heard the sound of running water before he reached the area of the glow, but he could see by then that the light came from long slits parallel to the floor and arched ceiling. The slits were at eye height and he had only to turn his head as he passed to look into a wide, low chamber with long tanks spaced through it, water running in them, people working with a business like concentration around the tanks. Janvert peered at the nearest tank, saw fish in it -- little fish about six inches long. He saw now that the people farther out in the room were scooping fish from a tank into a wheeled carrier. A fish farm, by god! Janvert continued past the glowing slits and discovered another glow ahead of him now, this one with a distinctly pink cast. The light came from floor-toceiling doors which revealed a chamber even larger than the earlier one. This area was jammed with waist-high benches, lights low over them, plants with rich green leaves growing lushly from the benches. Again, he heard the sound of running water, but more faintly. Workers wearing dark glasses and carrying bags slung from their shoulders moved among the benches, harvesting red fruit that looked like tomatoes. Filled bags were being carried toward openings in the far wall, dumped through. He was encountering more project # people in the tunnel now and a humming sound ahead grew louder as he approached it. He realized he had been hearing that sound for some time now but had been filtering it out of his consciousness. So far none of the people he had met had paid any special attention to him. He felt that the tunnel was getting wanner as he neared that irritating humming. The sound was almost painful in its intensity. He came presently to larger slits in the tunnel's left hand wall, peered through them into a gigantic chamber. It went down at least two stories, up an equal distance, and was Filled with tall tubular objects that dwarfed workers moving on the floor far below him. He estimated that the things were at least fifty feet high and probably a hundred feet in diameter. They were the obvious source of the humming and a noticeable ozone smell was coming through the slits into the tunnel. Electrical generators... But it was the biggest generator plant he had ever seen. It stretched away at least a half mile to his left and more than that on his right and looked to be at least a half-mile wide. He wondered what was driving those generators. Janvert answered his own question as he came to the far end of his tunnel. It turned left there with a double ramp. One ramp went down into the lighted room. Another, parallel to and separated from the First by a thin wall, slanted down into a gloomy area where he could discern the oily rush of water passing beneath dim lights. Water powered the generators. Was it also an escape route? Janvert turned purposefully toward the water, passed another File of people without a side glance. He emerged onto a black ledge beside the water. It was a damned river! It stretched away from him in the gloom and he could detect moving lights on the far side about a quarter of a mile away. The ledge beside the river decreased in width as Janvert moved along it below the generator room. He could hear the water under him, the muted humming on his left. T HE possible dimensions of this underground enterprise began to insinuate themselves into Janvert's awareness. It was so large he began to suspect the government must be involved in it somehow. What other answer could there be? It was too big to escape notice. Or -- was it? If the government had a hand in this, why had the Agency known nothing about it? The Chief had been privy to some of the touchiest secrets in the land. Even Merrivale probably would have known about something this big.  In this questioning reverb Janvert almost collided with a gray haired man who stood in his path at what appeared to be the end of the ledge. A spidery open stairway rose beyond the man. The gray-haired one lifted his right hand, wiggled the fingers oddly in front of Janvert's face. Janvert shrugged. The man wiggled his Fingers once more, shook his head from side to side. He was obviously puzzled. Janvert lifted the weapon, pointed it at the man. The other stepped backward, shock apparent on his face. His mouth was open, eyes wide and staring, muscles bunched defensively. Once, more he held up his hand, wiggled his fingers. "What do you want?" Janvert asked. It was as though Janvert had struck him. The man took another step backward, stopped at the edge of the spidery stairs. He still didn't answer. Janvert glanced around. They appeared to be alone on this ledge and he could feel tension mounting. The hand signal obviously was supposed to mean something to him. The fact that it didn't present a new danger. With abrupt decision Janvert flicked the firing stud on his weapon, heard a short baphum and the gray-haired man crumpled. Quickly Janvert dragged the body into the gloom at the edge of the ledge, hesitated. Should he dump the man into the river? There might be people downstream to see it and come looking for an explanation. He decided against it, ascended the stairs. They ended at a platform that anchored a catwalk across the rushing water. Janvert struck out boldly across the catwalk. He felt no particular qualms at having killed another denizen of Hellstrom's warren. The oily movement of water about thirty feet below him and the continuing pressure of that fetid odor combined to produce a feeling of vertigo, however, and he guided himself with his left hand on the catwalk's rail. The span entered a short, narrow tunnel at the far side of the river. A glowing yellow tube lit his way from above. A door blocked the inner end of the short tunnel. He saw a wheeled handle at waist height in its center and a green-glowing A above the wheel with a stylized symbol beside it. He took the last to represent part of an insect's body, segmented and tapering, but without a head. Holding the weapon ready, Janvert applied pressure to the wheel with his left hand. It resisted him for a moment, then turned freely to an abrupt stop. He heaved outward on the wheel. The door gave abruptly with a soughing sound and he felt a breeze on the back of his neck. Faintly glowing pink light beyond the door revealed another tunnel. The light came from widely spaced overhead fixtures -- small flat disks. The tunnel slanted up at a gentle angle. Janvert stepped into it, sealed the door behind him with a spin of a duplicate handle on the inside. He began to climb. Hive Security Report -- #-A Janvert: Worker whose description agrees with that of Janvert reported seen on Level Forty-eight near Turbine Station Six. Although this would indicate fugitive is going down in the Hive instead of up, matter is being investigated. Workers who reported the sighting say they thought he was a Leader specialist because of his long hair and possession of a stunwand. This would tend to confirm the sighting, but it still seems unusual that he would not try to break through immediately to the surface. climbed almost three hundred feet in the narrow tunnel before he paused for a rest. The tunnel executed a sharp switchback approximately every thousand paces and he estimated the slope at about three per cent. He guessed that the tunnel was a ventilator of some kind, but he had seen no openings thus far and something about the stillness of the place and the occa I sional pockets of dust spoke of long disuse. Could it be an emergency exit? Perhaps it had been dug for access while larger tunnels were being excavated. Could it possibly lead to an emergency exit? He didn't dare let himself hope for that yet. The tunnel was just taking him upward. He resumed his climb presently and in five more switchbacks came to another door with a wheeled handle. He stopped, looked at the door. What was on the other side? Should he pass it? He had a weapon. The weapon carried the deciding argument. He worked the door handle, put a shoulder to the door and thrust it open. Air soughed against his face. Janvert stepped out of the tunnel onto a narrow, railed platform about halfway up the wall of an immense circular and domed room. It stretched away from him in bright blue-white light for at least two hundred yards. The floor of the giant room curved slightly downward to the center and it was alive with men and women in a complexity of couplings. Janvert stared at them, frozen in blank astonishment. Breeding! He recalled Peruge's astonished account of the night with Fancy. She'd called it breeding. That was the only word that really fitted this amazing scene. It excited no prurient interest in him. It even repelled him. The place carried its own distinctive odor -- a mixture of perspiration and mustiness, all of it riding on the original stink of this whole warren. He noted now that the floor was damp and it appeared resilient. Its color was blue-gray and it glistened. Through occasional movement at the center of the room he detected a wide circle of darker material that appeared to be a drain -- it was grilled, by god! There were marks on some of the : flesh to show the grill pattern. What could be more efficient? Still in a partial state of shock, Janvert retreated back into the tunnel, sealed the door, resumed his climb. His mind carried the wildimage of that room. He didn't think he would ever forget that scene. Nobody would believe him, though. That had to be seen to be believed. He knew he was working against a background of semihysteria. So that's what they mean by "sexual congress!" He suspected he could have climbed down from his platform and joined the orgy without anyone the wiser. Just another male breeder. galaxy Jan vert passed two more wheelhandled doors before recovering a semblance of mental balance. He looked at each door with revulsion, trying to imagine what he might find on the other side. This was a goddamned human hive! He stopped abruptly, frozen by the full import of that thought. Hive. He glanced around at the dimly lighted walls of his tunnel, sensed the faint humming of machinery, the smells, all the signs of teeming life around him. Hive! Jan vert took three deep, shuddering breaths before resuming his climb. His thoughts were in turmoil. It was a human hive. They lived here the way insects lived. How did insects live? They did things no human wanted to do -- some things no human could do. They had drones and workers -- and a queen and -- they ate to live. They ate things that the human stomach would reject if the human consciousness didn't reject it first. For insects breeding was just -- breeding. The more he thought about it the more the pattern fitted. This was no secret government project! This was a horror, an abomination, a thing that needed to be burned out! Hive Security Report -- I #A Janvert: The body of a turbine specialist killed by stunwand has been found near the center of the Primary Watercourse. Janvert's work for sure. Double guard has been ordered on all turbine inlets and screens, although no human could survive a trip through the power system. More likely he's in the old construction access tunnels which were converted to emergency ventilation standby. Search concentrating there. door, pressed an ear to its surface, listening. He heard faint, rhythmic thumpings on the other side -- some kind of machine, he guessed. A hiss accompanied the thumps. He released the wheel latch, opened the door a crack and peered out. The room was much smaller than the breeding chamber, but still big. He guessed it to be a hundred feet on a side. The ceiling was low. The only light was a dim red glow from tubes across the ceiling and it revealed stubby benches, each of them with a transparent maze of glass tubing in pillars at both ends. The tubing glowing colors gnd this distracted him for a moment from what lay between the pillars on the bench surfaces. He stared at the objects, were reporting accurately. Each bench carriedrwhat appeared to be the stump of a human body from about the waist to the knees. Some were grossly male and some female. Among the females were a few whose abdomens bulged as though they were pregnant. Beyond waist and knees there was nothing that could be thought of as flesh -- only that tubing with its pulsing colors. Could they be real? Janvert slipped into the room, touched the nearest one, a male stump. The flesh was warm! He jerked his hand away, felt vomit rising in his throat. He backed against the door to the tunnel, unable to take his gaze from the contents of this room. Those were live stumps of human flesh. They had to be! Movement in the room's far corner caught his attention. He saw people parading along the benches there, bending, studying the stumps, examining the tubing. It was like a caricature of doctors doing their rounds. Janvert slipped back into the tunnel before he was seen, closed the door and stood there with his forehead pressed against the smooth, cool surface. Those were human reproductive sections. He could imagine Hellstrom's hive keeping those monstrosities alive for breeding purposes. The thought of his own flesh subjected to such indignity sent shudders coursing through him. His back, neck and shoulders trembled and his knees felt incapable of supporting him. Reproductive stumps! A dull thud sounded somewhere below him. He felt a change in the tunnel's air pressure. Bare feet could be heard slapping the tunnel floor, running. They're in here after me! Terror driving him, he jerked open the door, slid through the door shut behind him. The "medical procession" members noticed him this time, but could only jerk upright in surprise before the stunwand in Janvert's hand sent them tumbling. He plunged through the nightmare room, trying not to look at any of the stumps. An arched passage went out from the room into a large gallery thronging with people. Terror still hounding him, he whirled left, shouldered through the crowd, pushing people aside, heedless of the disturbance and curiosity he obmoil marked his path. There were waving hands behind him, a few inarticulate outcries -- one oddly piercing female voice called after him "Say there! Say there!" At the first elevator entrance he shouldered a man away from the opening, leaped into an upbound car, stared down at faces filled with puzzlement and alarm until the motion of the car closed off the opening. Two women and a man shared the car with him. One of the women looked like an older version of Fancy, but the younger one had a full head of blond hair, one of the few he'd seen in the depths of Hellstrom's hive. The man was completely hairless and had a narrow, foxy face, brightly alert eyes -- his expression reminded Janvert of Merrivale. All three showed obvious curiosity about him and the man bent toward him, sniffing. What he inhaled seemed to puzzle him because he sniffed again, deeper. In panic, Janvert turned the captured weapon on him, swept its beam across the women. They slumped to the floor as the car passed another opening. A woman with heavy breasts and a round, blank face tried to enter, but Janvert kicked her in the midriff, sent her sprawling into people behind her. The car passed another opening without incident, another. Another. He dove out at the fourth opening into another throng of people, plunged through them across the tunnel and into a smaller side passage, which had attracted him because it was unoccupied. Two men he had sent sprawling leaped to their feet and started to give chase, but he dropped them with a burst from his weapon, fled again. He skidded around a corner to the left, another, and found himself back in the main gallery, but at least a hundred yards from where he had left the elevator. A crowd milled there -- figures were jammed into the side passage and more were trying to enter it. Janvert turned right, holding the weapon upright in front of him to conceal it from the people behind, forced himself to assume a slow walking pace while he tried to bring his heaving lungs under control. As he moved he listened carefully for sounds of pursuit. He heard none. The sounds of general disturbance faded and presently he dared to cross the tunnel to his left, leaving it by a smaller right-angle passage that slanted steeply upward. This one opened within a hundred paces into another large cross tunnel with an elevator. He wove his way without incident through passing people, stepped into the first upbound car. The car picked up speed the instant he entered it. He glanced around -- he was alone. Openings flashed past him. He counted nine, wondering if Hellstrom had some secret control of this car and had speeded it up to trap him. He didn't dare try to leave. H IS panic increasing, Janvert moved to the doorway, searching for controls, but there were none. At last the car slowed at an opening. He jumped out, almost collided with two men guiding a long cart piled with what appeared to be yellow fabric thrown loosely into it. They dodged him, grinned and waved, their fingers moving in the same kind of intricate designs he'd seen gray-hair use beside the river. Janvert smiled ruefully, shrugged, and the pair accepted this, continuing to trundle their cart down the tunnel. Janvert turned away from them, saw that the tunnel ended shortly in a wide arch. Bright lights and machinery were visible in a large room beyond the arch -- people were busily working there. He entered, saw metal-shaping machinery on floor stands. He recognized a lathe, a stamping press of some kind (the ceiling had been opened above it to take the machine's upper part) and several drill presses with men and women bent over them, working steadily, ignoring his presence. He caught an underlying smell of oil and the biting acridity of hot metal. The place could have been any large machine shop, except for the nudity of its personnel. Carts carrying bins of metal objects he could not identify were being pushed along several of the aisles between the machines. Janvert tried to appear knowledgeably busy, strode as directly as he could across the room, hoping to find an exit on the far side. He noted that people were paying a different kind of attention to him now and wondered why. One woman actually left a lathe and came up to sniff at his elbow. Janvert tried his universal shrug, glanced down to see perspiration glistening on his skin. Had his sweat attracted her? The far wall showed no opening and he was beginning to feel trapped when a wheeled latch in the wall alerted him. The door was only a faint line in the wall, but it opened outward when he worked the latch. He moved through the doorway as though he had every right there, sealed it behind him. The tunnel sloped up to his right. He listened for sounds to tell him whether others shared the tunnel -- he heard nothing and set off upward. His back and legs ached with fatigue and he wondered how much more of this he could endure. His stomach was a region of painful hollowness -- his mouth and throat were dry. Desperation drove him, though, and he knew he would press himself upward until he dropped. He had to escape from this monstrous place. From the Hive Manual: Chemical releasers which can evoke an exact predetermined response from the individual of any animal species must be very numerous and may be infinite within the refined nuances of variation. The socalled "rational mind" in the human animal presents no insurmountable obstacle to such a releasing process. It may be considered only as a threshhoid to be overcome. And once consciousness has been sufficiently depressed the releaser is freed to do its work. In this area, once considered the exclusive domain of instinct, we of the Hive are sure to develop our greatest unifying forces. aerie beneath a Hive-sign disnothing. It was past three a.m. and he had gone beyond wishing he could get a brief sleep. Now he prayed for rest of any kind. "See those changes in the air pressure," an observer behind him said. "He's into the emergency ventilator system again. How is he doing that? Quick! Send the alarm. Where's the nearest search team?" "Why aren't we blocking off that system, level by level, or at least every other level?" Hellstrom asked resignedly. "We only have enough teams to keep a ten-level guard on the system," a male voice to his left said. Hellstrom peered through the green gloom of the aerie, trying to identify the speaker. Had that been Ed? Was he already back from checking the Outside patrols? Damn that Janvert! The man was diabolical in his ingenuity. Dead and injured workers, behavior disruptions from the disturbance of his passage, the growing turmoil left in the wake of searchers -- everything was conspiring to upset the entire Hive. Janvert was terrified, of course, and the chemistry of his terror was spreading through the Hive. As more and more workers read that subtle signal from a human who seemed one of them galaxy their unease moved like an outspreading wave. It alone could provoke a crisis. It had been a mistake not to increase Janvert's guard as he was brought back to normalcy. My mistake, Hellstrom told himself bitterly. The chemistry of fellowship was, indeed, a double-edged blade. It cut both ways. Those guarding Jan vert had been lulled by it. A worker never attacked his fellows. Hellstrom listened to the observer stations coordinating this new turn in the search. Their hunt juices were up and he sensed the excitement in their voices. It was almost as though they didn't want to catch Janvert too soon. Hellstrom sighed. "Get the female captive up here." Someone in the gloom said, "She's still unconscious." That was Ed for sure, Hellstrom told himself. He said, "Well, revive her and get her up here." Hive-sign display over the Central Vat Chamber: it is on his upward flight Janvert brought himself to a stumbling, panting halt, slumped against the door. He could feel its coolness through his hair as he pressed his head against it, looking down at his bare feet. God, it was hot in the tunnel! And the stink was worse. He felt that he could not move another step without a rest. His heart was pounding and sweat poured from his body. He wondered if he dared venture back into the main tunnels and search for an elevator. He pressed an ear against the door, listened, could hear no special activity on the other side. This worried him. Were they waiting there for him to emerge? Only faint sounds of machinery and an omnipresent sense of human movement came to him. An odd sense of almost-silence beyond this door, though. Again he pressed an ear against it, heard nothing he could identify as a direct menace. But there would be more people out there -- these weird denizens of Hellstrom's hive. How many were there altogether? Ten thousand? Not a one of them on the census rolls. He knew this. The whole place conveyed a secretive sense of purpose that cut across everything Janvert knew. These people lived by rules that denied everything the outside society believed. Did they have a god in here? He recalled Hellstrom saying grace. Sham! Pure sham! It was a damned crawling, revolting hive. The last words of Trova Hellstrom: The defeat of the Outsiders is assured by their arrogance. They defy powers greater than themselves. We in the Hive are the true creatures of reason. We will wait patiently in the manner of the insects and with a logic that perhaps no wild Outsider will ever understand, because the insects have taught us that the true winner in the race for survival is the last to finish that race. waited five minutes before fear overcame his fatigue. He was not really rested, but he had to go on. He was breathing more easily, but the ache remained in his legs. Pain lanced his side when he took a deep breath and the arches of his feet felt as though knives were cutting them, a consequence of running barefoot. He knew his body could take little more of this driving punishment before collapse. He had to go out there and find an elevator. He straightened, intending to open the door and the corner of his left eye caught a flicker of movement down the tunnel. Pursuers carrying the doublewhip weapon rounded the bend below him, but their weapons were not raised as they climbed and they reacted to sighting him with a brief moment of shock that saved Janvert. His weapon had been held across his left arm as he reached for the door's wheel latch and he had only to press the stud, which his hand did almost of itself. The figures below him collapsed as the bap-hum filled the tunnel. In falling, one of the pursuers raised a pistol and fired a shot that hit a light fixture and sent a searing shard of some shattered material into his cheek. His left hand, clapped reflexively against the wound, came away with the glittering shard and a bright smear of blood. Janvert had no way of knowing if the weapon in his hand worked through walls, but the deepest panic he had known thus far dictated his next actions. He lifted the weapon, depressed the stud on it and fanned it across the door in front of him before opening it. Six figures lay in a tangled sprawl beyond the door as it opened and one of them held a nickel-plated .# automatic with carved ivory grips. Janvert lifted it from relaxed fingers as he stepped into the room. He glanced around, saw what appeared to be a long, narrow barracks with triple-tiered bunks around the walls. The only occupants were the six figures on the floor -- all males, all nude, all but one bald and all of them breathing. So the weapon only knocked people out when a solid barrier attenuated its force. Janvert nodded to himself. He had a weapon in each hand now and one of them felt reassuringly familiar. Hive translation from The Wisdom of the Wild: The path to species extinction begins with the proud belief that in each individual there is a mentalistic being, an ego or personality, spirit, anima, character, soul or mind -- and that this separated incarnation is somehow free.  M OW he has a gun," J.I Hellstrom said. "That's great! That's just great. Is he a superman? Less than half an hour ago he was in the Central Breeder Section. I was assured we had him trapped there and now -- now I'm told he has knocked out two entire search teams eight levels higher!" Hellstrom sat almost at the middle of the aerie's observation arc, directly behind the observer at the center position. The chair he occupied was his one concession to a body demanding relief from its mounting fatigue. He had been active now for most of twenty-six hours and the aerie clock showed just past four a.m. "What are your orders?" the observer in front of him asked. Hellstrom stared at the observer's head outlined against the glowing screen. My orders? "What makes anyone believe my orders have changed?" he asked. "You are to capture him!" "You still want him alive?" "More than ever. If he's really this resourceful we need to mingle his blood with ours." "He's obviously out in the main tunnels again," the observer said. "Of course. Tell the searchers to concentrate on the elevators. He's had a long climb. He'll be tired. Concentrate every search team in the upper levels along the elevators. Have them scan every car and knock out any doubtfuls. I know -- " Hellstrom held up a silencing hand as the observer turned in shocked alarm. "It can't be helped." "But our own -- " "Better we do it than leave it to him. Look at what he's done. He obviously has his stunwand turned to maximum and doesn't know close up with it. I feel the same outrage as all of you over this, but we must remember that he is panicstricken and doesn't know what he's doing." "He knows enough to stay out of our hands," someone behind Hellstrom muttered. Hellstrom ignored the sign of discontent, asked, "Where is that female captive? I ordered her brought up here almost an hour ago." "She had to be revived. Nils. They're bringing her." "Well, tell them to hurry." From the Hive Manual: One of our strengths lies in the recognition of the diversity we gain through a unique application of the social behavior of insects as opposed to the social behavior evolved by the wild human animal. With this lesson ever before us we are, for the first time in the tong history of life on this planet, designing our own future. males and two males in an elevator carrying them upward. The quartet had shown disturbance at his entry and he had interpreted this as growing out of the wound on his cheek, A peremptory gesture with the gun. however, had quieted them, but he was left with the odd feeling that only the gesture, not the gun, had elicited the response. To test this, he tucked the automatic under his right arm when one of the men turned. Jan vert waved a palm at the man. It was as though Janvert had said. Turn around and leave me alone. The man turned, wiggled his fingers at his companions and all of them ignored Janvert from that point. He had the hang of the elevators now. You stood to the bade in these upper-level cars. The act of stepping forward slowed them at a passing floor. There was a critical area near the doorway that operated an invisible sensor. One of the women glanced back at him presently, nodded at the doorway passing a blank gray wall. Last stop coming up? The others moved forward in a body. Janvert readied himself to join them, lifting the captured wand in his left hand. As he moved, the first thin edge of the opening gaped above him. The car slowed and he saw a cluster of bare legs, two weapons pointing in at the elevator car. Janvert depressed the stud on his own weapon, fanned it across the opening as it deepened. He caught his fellow passengers as well as those outside. He leaped over the passengers, spraying his weapon right and left in a humming arc of destruction, ran down the tunnel to the right, partly on the cold floor, partly on fallen flesh still warm under his feet. As he ran he heard a gushing crunch behind him, glanced back without breaking stride. One of his fellow passengers had fallen with head across the door opening. The upward surging car had left a head on the floor rolling in a patch of gore. Janvert turned away, finding it odd that he felt nothing at all about this. Nothing at all. That denizen of this hive had been dead already, killed by one of his own kind's weapons. It made no difference what was done to the body after that. No difference at all. Continuing to depress the firing stud for short bursts of humming. Janvert trotted down the tunnel, clearing a path as he went. In this way he rounded a bend, caught another group of elevator-watchers. They collapsed as he burst upon them, but a new group was running toward him far down the tunnel ahead and Janvert heard the distant thrumming of their weapons. Obviously they were out of range. He lifted the automatic, emptied it into this group, dodged into the first up-car, rode it two floors before emerging into another tunnel where the opening had been left unguarded. Janvert dodged hurrying figures to cross this tunnel, entered another sharply slanted upramp, which he abandoned at the first doorway on his right. This led into another hydroponics garden full of harvesters. He recognized tomatoes and hurled the empty automatic at a worker who ran toward him, protesting the intrusion. He ran, firing the captured stunweapon ahead and to both sides. Tomatoes splashed on the floor from tumbling harvest sacks and he spattered their red pulp over his feet and legs as he skidded through them. His chest was one big band of flame, his throat dry and painful, his body almost ready to quit. A series of small openings became visible in the far wall of the hydroponics room as he approached. They were about chest height and he could see sacked produce whisking upward -- then baskets, bins. He recognized berries, what appeared to be deep green cucumbers, stringbeans... A dumbwaiter system! Shoulders sagging, he came to a halt, stared at the wall. He couldsee no door along its entire length -- only these openings with produce whipping upward. There were flat shelves on a conveyor -- some of them came past him empty. Containers went onto the shelves. The openings were about three feet square and the moving shelves didn't appear to be much larger. Could he get up in there and onto one of those shelves? They moved upward at a frightening speed. He could hear sounds of tumult growing in the tunnel behind him. What other chance did he have? He couldn't go back. Janvert summoned a small reserve of strength, backed off several steps and watched for an empty carrier. When it appeared he dove for the opening, rolling himself into a ball around the weapon clutched in his hands. The instant his head entered the opening, the carrier slowed and he landed hard. The shelf swayed under him, but he compressed himself into a fetal ball, managed to stay aboard. His left shoulder rubbed the back wall as the carrier gathered speed and he left a trail of skin before he could jerk away. He peered up and around. The dumbwaiter system operated in a long slot between gray walls, an area illuminated only by light from the feeder openings. He could make out many carriers moving swiftly upward around him and an acrid fruit smell overrode all the other stenches. He passed more openings, glimpsed a startled face at one -- a woman carrying a basket piled high with yellow fruit that looked like tiny pumpkins. Janvert peered up, trying to find out how the system terminated. Did it disgorge into chopping machinery? Was there a bloody mincer arrangement up there -- or a sorting system, conveyors? . coming visible far above him and he could hear the increasing roar of machinery. It drowned out the whistling, clanking, hissing of the conveyor he was riding. The line of light was nearer... nearer... He tensed himself and was caught by surprise as a trip system tipped his shelf at the top of the lift, dumping him into a bin piled high with yellow carrots. Clutching the bin's top with his left hand, Janvert righted himself, clambered over the edge into a room of long, waist-high troughs flowing with bubbling pulp of many colors. Workers moved all through the area dumping bins of produce into the troughs. It was easily six feet to the floor and Janvert landed with a slippery squishing that sent him lurching into a female who had come up to the conveyor outlet with an empty bin on wheels. Janvert's momentum sent her sprawling. He kept her down with a burst from his weapon, charged forward, slipping and skidding. There was pulped tomato on his feet and the floor itself carried a skimming of multicolored debris from the processing, which continued all around him. He passed another group before reaching a doorway, but their foodspattered appearance differed little from his and they paid no attention to him. Janvert plunged through the opening, was hit by a cold shock of water spraying from overhead nozzles. He gasped, splashing through the water, and was almost clean when he emerged on the far side and through another doorway into a wide, dimly lighted tunnel. Water was draining off him, off the captured weapon in his hand. It collected in a puddle under him, but he saw similar puddles all around. Janvert glanced left -- the long vista of a tunnel stretched there, but he saw few people and none of them appeared interested in him. He looked to his right, saw a spidery stairway similar to the one at the underground river. The stairs led up into gloom and that had to be his direction. Janvert turned, slogged toward the stairs,began climbing, drawing himself up by sliding his left hand on the rail and pulling. His mouth was hanging open with fatigue and the aftermath of that shocking shower. At the fifth rung on the stairs he saw legs appear at the top. He fired his weapon upward without pausing, kept it humming as he climbed the remaining steps. Five sprawled figures lay on a platform where the stairs ended. He limped around them, his gaze fastened on a door beyond. The door had only a bar latch, which he lifted. The hinges were on the inside to the right. He pulled the bar. The door creaked open, revealing a dank dirty passage and the upthrusting roots of a tree stump which the door's movement had pushed outward and down. Janvert dragged himself past the stump into starlighted darkness, heard the door creaking shut behind him. The stump tipped back into its concealing position as he cleared it, closing with only a faint thump. Janvert stood shivering in cold night air. It took him a moment to realize that he had escaped from Hellstrom's madhouse human hive. He peered upward -- stars. No doubt of it -- he was outside. But where? The starlight gave him few clues to his surroundings. He could see a faint suggestion of trees directly ahead. He groped for the stump that masked the exit. His fingers encountered a hard surface, which a fingernail told him was real wood. His eyes were adjusting, though, and escape from the tunnels had tapped a source of energy he hadn't known existed. There was a faint glow in the sky slightly to his left and he guessed that would be Fosterville. He tried to recall the distance. Ten miles? His overworked body would never make that on bare feet. The area in front of him appeared to be a grassy slope with dark spots in it. from his body, but he still trembled with the cold. He knew he couldn't delay here any longer. Those bodies behind him would be found. Hellstrom's people would be out here after him all too soon. He had to put distance between himself and that camouflaged exit. No mat? ter how he did it, he had to get back to civilization and tell what he had seen. r Taking the sky glow as his compass point, Janvert set out down the slope. He clutched the captured weapon in his right hand. This thing galaxy was his passport to belief when he told his story. A demonstration of this weapon on a convenient animal would silence all doubt. The rough ground hurt his bare feet, caught his toes with unseen rocks and roots. He stumbled, hobbled, ran full into a low wooden fence and fell across it into the dust of a narrow road. Janvert picked himself up, studied what he could see of the road in the starlight. It appeared to angle down to his left in the general direction of the skyglow. He turned in that direction, stumbled down the dusty track, panting, not trying to be quiet. He was too worn out. The road dipped into a shallow swale and he lost the skyglow for a moment, but had it again at the next gentle rise. The dust kicked up by his feet tickled his nose. A breeze like a feather touched his right cheek, his arm, his bare flank. The track dipped once more and turned gently to the right into a deeper darkness which suggested trees. He missed part of the turn, stubbed the little toe of his left foot against the edge of a rut. He hissed a curse, kneeled and gripped the injured member until the pain eased. As he crouched he saw a sudden flickering of light in the deepest darkness directly ahead. Reflexively he brought up the captured weapon, pointed it and fired -- a single humming burst. The light vanished. He straightened, groped his way forward, his left hand outstretched, the weapon held close to his right side. The outstretched hand was too high to meet the next obstruction a nd he fell across a cold metallic surface, the weapon scraping it with a noisy clatter that froze him for the moment it took him to realize he was sprawled half across the hood of a car. A car! He eased himself back, skinned his elbow on a hood ornament, then guided himself with his free hand around the left side of the car. At the window his fingers explored an open crack at the top and he smelled tobacco smoke. He tried to peer through the glass, but could see nothing. A rhythmic wheezing came from inside. He groped for the door handle, jerked the door open with a startling flash of light from the automatic switch. The light revealed two men in business suits, neat white shirts and ties, slumped unconscious in the front seat. The driver held a cigarette -- it was smoldering and charring a circle in the left leg of his pants. Janvert took the cigarette, dropped it in the dust by his feet and crushed out the burning cloth with one hand. The man lighting a cigarette -- that had been the flicker of light at which he had fired. This weapon didn't kill from a distance, then. Walls and distance made it less than fatal -- and it obviously had a limited range beyond that. Janvert shook the driver's shoulder, got only a lolling head for response. They were out cold. The movement opened the man's coat, though, revealed a shoulder holster and a snubnosed magnum pistol. Janvert took the gun, saw the radio beneath the dash. These could not be Hellstrom's people. These were cops. project # What the Drone said (Hive axiom j: You Outsiders! It's your children we're after, not you! We'll get them, too, over your dead bodies. XX Hellstrom demanded, outrage amplifying the sudden surge of fear that swept over him. He whirled from the dark north end of the gloomy aerie, strode across the room to the female at the observer console who had called out to him. "He is," she said. "See! There!" She pointed to the screen glowing The screen showed Janvert's figure, it's outline shimmering in the scattered radiation of night-vision projection. Janvert was creeping along a dusty road. "That's the north perimeter," Hellstrom whispered, recognizing the outline of the landscape beyond Janvert. "How did he get out there?" Reluctant admiration for this incredible male warred in Hellstrom with a swelling rage. Janvert was Outside! "We're getting reports of a disturbance at Level Three," an observer at Hellstrom's left called. "He's found one of the hidden doors out of Level Three," Hellstrom said. "How did he get that far? He'll be at that car with its watchers in seconds! The car's right down in those trees." He pointed at the screen. "Have the watchers heard him yet?" "We have a pursuit team out after him," an observer on the left called. "They'll be a few minutes, though. They were on Five and we routed them through the upper exits." The observer in front of Hellstrom said, "I got an interference flash just before I saw him, as though he'd used his weapon. Could he have knocked out the watchers in that car?" "Or killed them," Hellstrom said. "Poetic justice if he did. Who's observing that car?" "The team was pulled back an hour ago to help search for the escaped captive," someone behind him said. Hellstrom nodded. Of course! He'd given the order himself. "There hasn't been any conversation in that car for some time," the observer just to his left said. "I have the pickup in the tree above the car." The observer tapped the shiny ivory plugyin her right ear. "I can heap-Janvert approaching -- the watchers in the car seem to be unconscious. They're wheezing the way Outsiders always do when you stun them heavily." "Maybe it's a break for us at last," Hellstrom said. "How far away is the pursuit team?" "Five minutes at the most," someone behind him said. "Get backup squads out onto the rangeland between him and the town," Hellstrom said. "Just in case." "What about the other watchers?" the observer in front of him asked. "Tell our workers not to attract attention to themselves. Devil take that Janvert -- the Hive needs breeders that resourceful." How had the man escaped from the Hive? The observer on his left said, "He's almost at the car." Another farther down the arc called out, "Here's the report on how he got out." She turned, her face in eerie sidelight from the screens, told him briefly what the cleanup teams had found at Level Three. He rode a food conveyor! Hellstrom thought. The Outsider took risks no ordinary worker would dream of taking. The implications in that would have to be considered more thoroughly -- later. "The captive female," Hellstrom said. "Has she been shown what will happen to her if she fails?" Someone behind him spoke with obvious distaste, "She's been shown, Nils." Hellstrom nodded. They didn't like this, of course. He didn't like it himself. But it was necessity and all of them could see that now. "Bring her in here," Hellstrom said. They had to drag her into the range of the dim lights at the observation screens and then hold her upright when they stopped. Hellstrom suppressed his own revulsion, spoke slowly and distinctly as though to a newly hatched child -- and all the time he felt that he was sacrificing himself for the Hive. "Clovis Carr," he said. "That is the name you give us. Do you still identify with it?" She stared through the gloom at the greenish death pallor of Hellstrom's skin. This is a nightmare, she told herself. I'll wake up and find out it's all been a nightmare. Hellstrom saw the recognition the use of her name aroused. He said, "In a moment. Miss Carr, your friend Janvert will come within range of a remote speaker we have out there." He pointed to the screen. "I will attract Mr. Janvert's attention then and it will be up to you to get him back here if you can. I deeply regret that we must cause you this mental anguish, but you can see the necessity. Will you try?" She nodded, her face a pale mask of terror in the green light. Try? Sure? Play right along with the nightmare. "Very good," Hellstrom said. "You must think in a positive way, Miss Carr. You must think success. I believe you can do this." Again she nodded, but it was as though she had no conscious control over her muscles. From the Hive Manual: The society itself must be considered as living material. The same ethics and morality that concern us when we interfere with the sacred flesh of an individual cell must concern us equally wheh we intrude into the processes of the society. radio microphone, hardly believing he had that token of civilization within his grasp, when a voice boomed at him from high over his right shoulder. "Janvert." He jerked back, slamming the door to shut off the car's dome light, dodged to the front of the vehicle and crouched there, pointing his weapon up into the darkness. The voice came again: "Jan vert, I know you can hear me." It was up there in the trees, but they were too dark to show any detail to Janvert. He found himself locked in indecision. He had been a fool to let the dome light show. "I am speaking to you through a remote system, Janvert," the voice said. "There is an electronic device in the trees near you. It will pick up your answer and transmit it to me. You must answer me now." A loudspeaker! Janvert still crouched in silence. It was a trick. They wanted him to speak just to locate him. "We have someone here who wants to speak to you," the voice in the trees said. "Listen carefully, Janvert." At first Janvert failed to recognize the new voice issuing from the speaker. There was a throatstrained quality in the words, as though each required superhuman effort. The voice was a woman's, though, and at last she said, "Eddie! It's Clovis. Please answer me!" Clovis was the only one who called him Eddie. The others all used that hated Shorty. He stared up through the darkness at the hidden speaker. Clovis? "Eddie," she said. "If you don't come back they're going to take me down to a -- a place where -- where they -- cut off your legs and the rest -- " she was sobbing now -- "your legs and the rest of your body at the waist and... Oh, God! Eddie, I'm so frightened. Eddie! Please answer me! Please come bade!" Janvert recalled that room of stumped bodies, the multicolored tubes, the hideously accentuated sexuality. Abruptly he experienced flashing memory -- the severed head on the tunnel floor, the gore, his own feet trampling through red fruit, his body spattered with... He doubled over, vomited. Clovis's voice went on and on, pleading with him. "Eddie, please, can you hear me? Please! Don't let them do that to me. Oh, God! Why doesn't he answer?" I can't answer her, Janvert thought. But he had to respond. He had to do something. The air was full of the nauseating smell of his own vomit and his chest ached, but his head felt cleared. He straightened, supporting himself with a hand on the car's hood. "Hellstrom!" he called. "Right here." "How can I trust you?" Janvert asked. He started working his way back to the car's door. He had to get to that radio. "We will harm neither you nor Miss Carr if you return," Hellstrom said. "We do not lie about such things, Mr. Janvert. You will be placed under necessary restraints, but neither of you will be harmed. We will permit the two of you to associate and have any relationship you wish, but if you do not return to us immediately, we will carry out our threat. We will do so with the deepest regret, but we will do it. Our own attitudes toward a procreative stump are much different from yours, Mr. Janvert. Believe me," "I believe you," Janvert said. He was at the car's door now, hesitating. If he opened the door and grabbed for the microphone, what would they do up there? They must have searchers out here by now. They had that speaker in the tree. They had some way of knowing what he was doing. He had to take precautions. He lifted the captured weapon, intending to spray the area around him randomly before opening the door. He didn't allow himself to think about Clovis. But that room... His finger on the firing stud refused to move. That room with the stubs of bodies! Again he felt nausea clutching him. Clovis could still be heard over the speaker. She was crying somewhere in the bade ground, sobbing and calling his name. "Eddie -- Eddie -- Eddie -- please help me. Make it stop -- " Janvert closed his eyes. What can Ido? As the thought pulsed in his mind he felt a tingling on his back and right side, heard a distant humming that followed him all the way down to the dusty ground beside the car, but he no longer heard it by the time he was stretched in the dust. From the Hive Manual: Protective resemblance has always been a major key to our survival. This is shown by the oral tradition as well as the earliest written records we have preserved. The mimicry our ancestors learned from insects helps to protect us from the attacks of the wild Outsiders. Observation of insects tells us, however, that the survival value of this device remains low techniques, which we must conbine it with many other techniques and especially with new techniques, which we must constantly search out. To spur us on the way we must think always of Outsiders as predators. They will attack us if they find us. They are sure to find us some day and we must prepare for this. Our preparation must include both defensive and offensive characteristics. In offensive weapons let us always keep the insect as our model -- the weapon must condition any attacker against repeating acts of violence against us. T HE vibration of the Hive began somewhere far below the aerie and reached upward and outward with shock waves that would register on seismic recorders all around the planet. When it stopped, Hellstrom thought, Earthquake! It was a fearful prayer in his mind, however, not a recognition. Let it be an earthquake and not the destruction of Project #! He had just begun to relax from the recapture of Janvert not twenty minutes ago when the vibration began. The aerie stopped creaking and a moment of abnormal silence followed, as though all of the workers of the Hive held their breath simultaneously. In that moment Hellstrom moved through the aerie's gloom, noting that the lights still functioned, the screens still glowed. He said, "Damage reports, please. Somebody get me Saldo." The note of calm command in his voice surprised himself. They had Saldo on a screen at the right side of the arc within seconds. Hellstrom could see a section of a wide gallery behind Saldo, dust settling there. "They held me," Saldo greeted him. The younger man looked shocked and just the smallest amount cowed. One of the big symbiotes who attended the Researchers moved in behind Saldo then, thrust him aside. The scarred, ebony features of a Researcher filled the screen. A pink palm came up in front of the face and the fingers winked in Hive-sign. Hellstrom translated aloud for those who could not see the screen. We do not appreciate the distrust represented by your sending an observer with orders to delay the power connection for our project. Let the alarm which we know you felt be a small sign of our displeasure. We could have warned you to expect it, but your behavior did not deserve such a warning. Recall the resonance we all felt in the Hive and rest assured that the effect was of an order many thousands of times greater at the locus of our projected impulse. Project #, except for some small refinements, which may include damping the local feedback, can be judged a complete success. "Where was the locus of your projection?" Hellstrom asked. In the Pacific Ocean near the islands the Outsiders call Japan. They will observe a new island there shortly. The big face moved out of the screen's range to be replaced by Saldo. "They restrained me," Saldo protested. "They held me and ignored my orders. They connected the power and wouldn't let me call you. They disobeyed you. Nils!" Hellstrom flashed a Calm-yourself... sign and, as Saldo fell silent, said, "Complete the loose ends of your observation, Saldo. Assemble a complete fact sheet, including development time for the refinements they mention, then report to me personally in full." He signaled to close the communication, turned away. The Hive had its defensive-offensive weapon, then, but with it came many other problems. The crisis disturbance which had spread all through the Hive had left its mark on the Researchers. Their ordinary irritability had been amplified into a form of revolt. There was damage to the Hive's interdependence system. This might buy the Hive time to recover, though. Whatever else, it needed long periods of undisturbed time most of all. The big changes devoured great blocs of time. He could see this in himself when he compared himself to the New Breed. Hellstrom held few illusions about himself. He really preferred to vocalize and Hive-sign always represented a strain on him, but for some of the New Breed, this pattern was reversed. For himself, Hellstrom knew he took an unhealthy enjoyment in the possession of a distinct name and Outsider-like identity, but most of the Hive's workers were free of this bondage. I am a transitional form, he told himself, and some day I will be obsolete. From the Hive Manual: Freedom represents a concept tied inextricably to the discredited abstract of individualismego. We sacrifice none of this freedom to gain our more efficient, reliable and convenient basic human stock. balcony outside his secondfloor motel room, waiting for daylight. The air was cold, but he had dressed in a Highlands-made gray woolen sweater with a high turtleneck. It was thick enough to protect him even when he leaned against the iron balustrade. He puffed thoughtfully on a cigarette, listening to nightsounds. There were distant footsteps out in the parking lot and a murmur of voices rose from a room down the balcony, where a light had come on a few minutes ago. A door below him opened, sending yellow light in a great splashing fan across the courtyard to the blue edge of the swimming pool. A man strode out into the light, peered upward. Merrivale, looking over the rail, recognized Gammel and expected on the earth shock. The quake -- a distant rumbling that had filled his room with primitive fears -- had awakened Memvale almost fortyfive minutes earlier. Gammel had already been awake and in the room downstairs they were using as a command post. Merrivale had had him on the house telephone in a few seconds, demanding, "What was that?" "Felt like an earthquake. We're checking out whether there was any damage. You okay?" Merrivale had turned on his bedside light. There was power at least. After a glance around his room: 'Yes, I'm fine. Doesn't seem to be any damage here at all." Some of the motel's other tenants had been on the balcony and in the courtyard when Merrivale went out after dressing, but most had returned to their rooms by now. Gammel, recognizing Merrivale on the balcony, motioned for him to come down, said, "Hurry it up." Something's gone wrong, Merrivale thought. He stubbed out his cigarette, crushed it underfoot and headed down the balcony toward the stairs. There was something tensely alarming in Gammel's manner. Merrivale made it down to the first-floor room in a swift ten seconds, taking the stairs two at a time, not bothering about noise. He plunged through the door Gammel was holding open from the inside, heard the door slam behind him. It wasn't until he was fully into the room and saw the three men clustered around a table that held a radio transceiver and a telephone with the receiver off the hook that Merrivale began to get a full sense of how truly wrong things had gone. A bed stood against the wall behind the table, its covers thrown off and dragged part way into the room. An ashtray had fallen off the table and lay ignored in its spilled contents. One of the men around the table still wore pajamas, although Gammel and the others were fully dressed. Light came from two floor lamps which had been pulled close to the table. All the men, including Gammel, were focusing in some way on the telephone with its receiver off. Two were actually staring at the phone. The man in pajamas was looking from the phone to Merrivale, back to the phone, up to Merrivale. Gammel was pointing at the instrument while he glared at Merrivale. "Damn it to hell -- they knew our number!" Gammel blared. "What?" Merrivale was taken aback by the accusatory tone. "We had that phone put in late yesterday," Gammel explained. "It's a private line." "I don't understand," Merrivale said. He studied Gammel's rocky lace, seeking a clue to this odd conversation. "It was Hellstrom calling us," Gammel said. "He says he has one of your people with him and -- do you have an Eddie Jan vert?" "Shorty? Shorty led the team that -- " Gammel put a hand to lips to shut him off. MeiTivale nodded. Gammel said, "Hellstrom tells me we'd better listen to your man or they will blow this town and half the state of Oregon off the planet." "What!" "He says that wasn't an earthquake we all felt. It was some weapon he claims can rip the planet apart. How trustworthy is your man Janvert?" Merrivale answered him automatically, "Completely." Immediately he wished he had not said that. It had been a thoughtless response to a question that demanded he defend the Agency's capabilities. Janvert might not be completely trustworthy -- or it might be necessary to show doubt of actual trustworthiness. Too late now, though. His answer had trapped him, reduced the range of possible responses. "Janvert is on that phone and wants to talk to you," Gammel said. "He tells me he can verify Hellstrom's threat and that he can explain why one of our cars is failing to respond on the radio." Merrivale stalled for time to assess the situation. "I thought you told me the phone to the farm was out of order. Are they calling from the farm?" "As far as we know. One of my men is out right now trying to work a trace. Hellstrom apparently had the phone fixed himself or it -- " "And one of your cars fails to respond?" "Janvert says our people are merely unconscious, but he refused to say why or explain. He insisted we get you first. I told him you might be asleep, but -- " Gammel nodded at the telephone. Merrivale swallowed in a dry throat. Blow up half the state? Poppycock! He crossed to the phone with as much confidence as he could muster, picked it up, spoke in his best British accent. "Merrivale here." Gammel moved to a tape recorder spinning away behind the transceiver, jacked an earphone into it, listened while nodding for Merrivale to continue. Janvert thought as he heard the voice. Wonder why they sent him ? Clovis stood directly across from Janvert, still frightened, but no longer sobbing. He found it odd that her nudity didn't excite him. Janvert nodded to Hellstrom, who stood a pace away in the gloomy room above the barnstudio. Hellstrom's face appeared deathly pale in the green light which came from banks of what appeared to Janvert as TV screens. "Tel! him," Hellstrom said. Merrivale's voice was being broadcast to the entire aerie room from a speaker on the control bank. "Hello, Joe," Janvert said, deliberately using Merrivale's first name for the first time. "This is Eddie Janvert. I'm sure you recognize my voice, but I'll identify myself further if you want. I'm the one you gave the President's Signal Corps number and code to, remember?" Damn him! Merrivale thought, resenting that admission as much as the familiar tone and use of his first name. It was Janvert, though. No doubt of it. "Tell me what is going on," Merrivale said. "Unless you want this whole planet to become one giant morgue you'd better listen carefully to what I tell you and you'd better believe me," Janvert said. "Now, see here, Shorty," Merrivale said. "What's all this nonsense they've been telling me about blowing up -- " "You shut up and listen!" Janvert snapped. 'You hear me? Hellstrom has a weapon that makes an atom bomb look like a child's popgun. Those guys in the car, worried about -- they were knocked out by a little hand version of this weapon. That hand-held weapon can kill people at a distance or just knock them out. Believe me, I've seen it. Now, you -- " "Shorty," Merrivale interrupted, "I think you'd better let me come up there and -- " "Oh, you'll come up here all right," Janvert said. "But if you have any doubts, get rid of them. And if you try to attack this place again -- well, if I even suspect you might do that, I'm going to use that number and code you gave me and I'm going to oil the President to give him a full -- " "Now, Shorty! Your government wouldn't -- " "Screw the government! Hellstrom's weapon is zeroed in right now on the Capitol. They've already demonstrated its effectiveness. Why don't you check that?" "Check what? That little earthquake we -- " "The new island off the coast of Japan," Janvert said. "Hellstrom's people have a tap on the Pentagon's satellite teletype relay. They know about it and there's a seismic sea wave warning all around the Pacific Basin already." "What in the bloody hell are you talking about, Shorty?" Merrivale demanded. As he spoke Merrivale bent over the table, clawed a notepad and pencil into position, scrawled: Gammel -- check that! Gammel bent to read the note, nodded, pointed it out to another agent and then whispered an explanation. Janvert was talking again, his voice coming out clear and precise as though he were trying to explain something to a disobedient child. "I warned you to listen carefully," Janvert said. "Hells trom's farm is just one tiny extrusion from a giant complex of tunnels. Those tunnels spread out to hell and gone and they go down more than five thousand feet. They are lined with a special concrete which Hellstrom says is proof against a fission bomb. I believe him. There are some fifty thousand people living in these tunnels. Believe me -- please believe me." Merrivale found his attention caught by the spinning reels on Gammel's tape recorder, lifted his gaze to meet a look of shock in the Merrivale thought: Bloody hell! If Shorty's right this isn't a job for us -- it's a job for the military. Somehow Shorty was to be believed. It just wasn't possible that a statement so shocking could be false. Merrivale bent to the notepad, wrote: Call Army. Glancing at the words, Gammel hesitated, then motioned another of his aids to read it and obey. The aide looked at the pad, stared questioningly at Gammel, who nodded vigorously to reinforce the command, then motioned for the man to bend close. Gammel whispered for a moment and the aide's face paled. He dashed out of the room. "As unbelievable as your story sounds," Merrivale said, "I will take your word for it at the moment. However, you must know what I will have to do in response. This is far too big a situation for me to -- " "You son of a bitch! If you attack, the whole planet's done for!" Merrivale froze in shock, the phone pressed against his ear, detected a glint of shared response in Gammel's eyes. That was not how one addressed a superior! leaned close to Janvert, whispered, "Tell him the Hive wishes to negotiate. Temporize. Ask him why he hasn't investigated with the Pentagon about the new island. Tell him we are quite ready to vaporize an area of several hundred square miles around Washington, D.C., if he needs further demonstrations." Janvert relayed this message. "Have you seen this weapon?" Merrivale asked. 'Yes." "Describe it." "Are you nuts? They won't let me describe it. But I've seen it and I've seen the little hand version of it." The first aide Gammel had sent from the room returned, whispered mel scribbled on the notepad: Pentagon confirms. They're sending assault team. Merrivale said, "Shorty, do you really believe they can do this?" "I've been telling you nothing else, damn it! Haven't you checked with the Pentagon yet?" "Shorty, I hate to say this, but it seems to me that several fission bombs, one right on top of the other into -- " 'You damned idiot! Will you stop making stupid suggestions?" Merrivale glared at the base of the telephone. "Shorty, I must ask that you moderate your tone and your passions. This sounds like the very kind of subversion we must -- " "I'm calling the President," Janvert said. '"You know I can do it. You gave me the Signal Corps number and code yourself. He'll answer, too. You and the Agency can go plumb straight to -- " "Shorty!" Merrivale was outraged and abruptly fearful. This thing was getting completely out of hand. Janvert's fanciful warnings might have some substance in them -- the military would find out about that quickly enough -- but a call to the President would have widespread repercussions. Heads would roll. "Calm yourself. Shorty," Merrivale said. "Now listen to me. What assurance do I have that you're telling me the truth? You describe a pretty desperate situation -- one I find extremely difficult to believe. If it is anything even remotely resembling what you describe, however, it clearly calls for a military solution and I've no alternative but to -- " Janvert asked, "Haven't you understood a single thing I've said? There won't be any world for your damned military solution to take place on if you make one wrong move now! There won't be anything! These people can blow the planet apart -- or pulverize any piece of it they choose. You couldn't break through to them in time to prevent that. The planet's at stake -- the whole planet, do you understand me?" Gammel reached out, grabbed Merrivale's telephone arm and shook it to demand attention. Merrivale looked at him. Gammel held up a sheet of paper on which he had written: Go along with him. Ask personal inspection visit. Until we're sure, we cannot take chances. Merrivale pursed his lips in thought. Go along with him? That was madness. Blow up the world, indeed! He said, "Shorty, I'm sure my own profound doubts about this -- " J. his earphones, grabbed the telephone out of Merrivale's hand, thrust Merrivale aside and motioned for two of his aides to hold Merrivale. "Janvert," Gammel said, "this is Waverly Gammel. I spoke to you a few minutes ago when you first called. I'm a senior agent with the conversation and I, for one, am ready to go along with -- " "They're just stalling!" Merrivale shouted, struggling with the agents who held him. "They're bluffing, you fool! They can't -- " Gammel put a hand over the receiver, addressed his men: "Take him outside and shut the door." He returned to his conversation with Janvert, explained, "That was Merrivale. I've had him forcibly removed. Under the circumstances I suspect he must be insane. I am going to come out to that -- that hive myself and I am going to look at whatever it is you can show me to substantiate this weird story. I will ask that any action from this end be delayed until I report back, but I will put a time limit on that. Do you understand all of that, Janvert?" "You sound like somebody with a few smarts, Gammel," Janvert said. "I thank God for that. Just a minute." Hellstrom bent close to Janvert, spoke in a low voice. Janvert said, "Hellstrom says you can come out here under those terms and will be permitted to report bade in person. It's my opinion that you can trust him." "That's good enough for me," Gammel said. "Tell me exactly where I report at that farm." "Just come to the barn," Janvert said. "That's where it all begins." As Janvert replaced the telephone in its cradle, Hellstrom turned away, wondering why he no longer felt tired. The Hive was going to get its big block of time. That seemed obvious. There were a few among the wild Outsiders who could be reasoned with -- people such as this . Janvert and the agent on the telephone, that Gammel person. Such people would understand the implications of the Hive's new stinger. They would recognize the need for change. Things were going to change in this world, too. Hellstrom knew what his own course had to be. He would bargain with the Outsider government for conditions under which the Hive could continue its mimic existence unobserved by the wild masses. The secrecy could not last indefinitely, of course. The Hive itself would see to that. They were going to swarm before long and there was nothing the Outsiders could do to prevent that swarming. Swarm would follow swarm thereafter and the wild ones would be assimilated and pushed back into smaller and smaller portions of the planet they shared now with tomorrow's humans. From Joseph M err i vale's report to the Agency Board: As you know we are effectively blocked from any further active participation in this matter, a decision whose shortsightedness we all recognize. We are consulted on the problem from time to time, however, and I can give you some idea of how things are proceeding in Washington. My own private guess at the moment is that this Hellstrom will be permitted to continue with his filthy cult at least for the time being -- and he may even be allowed to continue making his subversive films. The see-saw of the official debate is polarized at this moment around the following two opposing viewpoints: #) Blast them out and damn the consequences. This is a minority viewpoint which I share, but which is losing adherents. #) Stall for time by making a secret agreement with Hellstrom, thereby keeping knowledge of the Hive from the public, while at the same time we mount a massive research program aimed at destruction of what is coming to be called in most official circles "The Hellstrom Horror."  of monographs written by linguists cum psychiatrists inferring that Celia Hammersmith drowned herself off Point Fermin because she could find no more worlds to conquer andor could never find love. Such speculations are untreated ambergris. After pioneering the greatest breakthrough in the history of linguistics Celia Hammersmith died inadvertently from raptures of the deep. I know because I was there, sharing her rapture. "It is of public record that the Celia Hammersmith College of Delphinology was opened by government grant to exploit the talents of the world's foremost linguist. Of course there were political overtones to the establishment of Celia's Hermosa Beach facility -- politicians were wooing the woman's vote -- but the grant reflects accurately the preeminence she had at thirty-one achieved in her profession. C.H.C.D. was founded to train delphinologists and to research methods of communicating with dolphins. I count it no small honor that I was the first dolphin in Celia's tank. Our meeting was inevitable. Hermosa Beach is only a few miles north of the Marineland of the Pacific where I was the star of the Great Aquatic Burlycue. All dolphins are burlesque artists, Celia once told me. I was the hammiest of the hams -- my act always brought down the net. Rising out of the water with a plastic top hat abaft my beak, I would grasp a cane under my right flipper and, balancing almost vertically on my flukes, thrash half across the tank while the band played The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. We dolphins have an affinity for human beings. To my natural inclination add the convivality of a hotblooded Mediterranean dolphin, all male and eight feet long. Tank born and aquarium bred, to me Homo semi-sapiens was as familiar as my mother's milk. Still, until I met Celia you all looked alike to me, of one sex, upright and bifurcated. Your swiveled heads and stuck-out ears are your least attractive features. Still, I'm tolerant. Nothing is wrong with your head that a hearing-aid would not fix, as Celia recognized. She did not have the ears for our frequencies, but she devised an acoustic converter attached to an underwater listening device and put an old dolphin into the tank with me. Since he was almost too feeble to bounce an echo off a net, I gave him a few turning directions, at first. An overhead camera revealed his responses to my instructions and Celia, alone in her office, was deciphering the sounds. At night the old bull talked of his youth in the open ocean, of the cows he had led to calving, the straight-line swimming, the fights Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. For all the right reasons. Kent. America's quality cigarette. King Size or Deluxe #'s. Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. For all the right reasons. Kent. Regular or Menthol. Kings: # mg. "tar," #.I mg. nicotine: #'s: # mg. "tar." # mg. nicotine. Menthol: # mg. "tar," Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined # mg. nicotine .  . av. per cigarette, That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. with sharks. He was a Nebraska farmer telling a Tasmanian about the delights of com husking. All I got from his stories was an attack of agoraphobia. The thought of all that water outside my tank scared the hell out of me. So there I cowered, at the age of seven, nostalgic over my aborted career in burlesque while the oldster wheezed and clicked. In her office Celia Hammersmith was listening to the old bull's tales with far more interest than I. One night the center net of the tank was lowered, trapping me in the landward end of the tank and the oldster on the seaward side. Then the sea gates were opened, and the oldster swam out into the lagoon wheezing "So long, cousin." For a while I listened to his soundings and got him beyond the breakwater. The gates closed -- the net lifted and I was alone in the tank. phins are gregarious -- nothing is lonelier than a lonely dolphin. Three days and three nights I spent without seeing a living being. Meals were fed to me from a dump bucket on an overhead trolley. Celia had put me in solitary. On a night of a full moon with no sound in the tank but that of my own breathing, I heard a splash followed by the flop-flop of a human swimmer approaching me. Then a hand was stroking my flipper, another tweaking my dorsal, as my tympans were quivered by a gentlymocking vibration. "Well met by moonlight, lonely cetacean." What would you think, cousin, if your house cat looked up to tell you it was feeling ill? For a certainty you would look for the ventriloquist before you went for the catnip. At least you would have that alternative to my complete stupefaction. "My name is Celia," the voice continued. "You're called Happy. I want to be your friend." Since "friend" is a dangerously amorphic word in Delphine, I was shocked into deeper silence and had to assume it was a "she" who spoke. "Happy is a good name. It's the sound of leaping and splashing and tossing a ball through a hoop. It fits you. You were especially chosen by me after I saw you in the burlesque show. Such verve. Such marvelous spontaneity. Such intelligence." Be aware mine is a liberal translation. Delphine is communicated in larger units and faster than human speech. It has to be. Without that survival device, the only dolphin extant would be Grampus orca the killer whale. "Happy, we'll never get to know each other unless you speak. I'm talking to you through a flutter diaphragm held to the roof of my mouth. My ear plugs are acoustic converters. I'll understand you, so speak to me, Happy. Quit being so damned coy!" My silence was not coyness. The dolphin's code is a complex cabala and my instincts held it sacred. Without it we might lose dominion over the sea -- and despite my lack of bigotry I was a little wary of man. What sea-dweller would not be after Eniwetok and Bikini? Celia's voice had lost its pique when she spoke again. "Our species have much in common. Happy. You are lords of the sea and we are lords of the land. We're both warmblooded, intelligent mammals. My hand is a rudimentary flipper." Oh, Celia was smooth -- ponder her last remark -- but I kept silent. I repeat: I like human beings, but they are not dolphins. "I won't hurt you, Happy. I'm a cow and you're a bull." Another remark worth pondering. So humans were not of one sex! "Don't you like me a little, Happy?" She tweaked my dorsal again. "Say something for me -- and I'll give you an extra herring for breakfast." I would not say anything but I gave her an affectionate nudge with my flipper. After all, she said she was a cow. "Well, that's worth a sardine," she laughed. "But you think it over. I'll keep you in solitary tomorrow to give you plenty of time to think, and I'll be back tomorrow night. I simply must discover if your verbal wit equals the comic mimicry that always brought down the net at the Great Aquatic Burlycue. So long, cousin." The loneliest sound I have ever heard was the flip-flop of her withdrawing strokes, but a linguistic note is in order here. Some African dialects employ a click-speech similar to the click of a dolphin and some Canary Islanders communicate by whistling. Celia's background in such languages helped her to synthesize an almost flawless Delphine. evening, since all I could do was deliberate. The old bull was the code breaker, not me, but my reluctance to engage in interspecies communication was false pride. As Celia had pointed out, dolphins and men were co-equal lords of sea and land. Fraternization, viewed in this light, became nothing more than noblesse oblige. Besides, after being in solitary all whistle back to a whistle-buoy. When I heard her splash into the tank, I silently sank to the bottom, listening to her splashing above me and calling, "Happy, where are you?" I was rising to nudge her with my beak and to surface beside her, rolling over to reveal my underside. As a delphinologist Celia surely recognized the signal: "flashing the white." She scratched my belly and slapped it, asking, "How does that feel, Happy?" "Like wallowing in a school of tuna." My reply was not Lafayette, we are here or One short step for a man, but it was the first concept delivered to a human being by a dolphin through the fibrillation of a blowhole. "Now it's down to business, you teaser," she said, shaking my flipper. "First you must learn human metaphors. You should have said, 'It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys.' " So my beginning association with Celia Hammersmith was purely on a teacher-student basis. With a confidence approaching arrogance she had readied an English-to-Delphine translating machine and began immediately to pipe lectures into my tank. My first week was spent on vocabulary exercises and the rudiments of English grammar, my second on a survey of human history. From the knowledge gained in such fashion, cousins, I gathered that you've come a long way from the day you crawled out of the ocean to crack crabs and develop your rudimentary flippers. I am not sure in which direction you've come. Since sleep is a luxury few sea creatures can afford, I listened night and day to the lectures. The only break in my lessons came when Celia paddled out in the evenings to review my day's intake in a question-and-answer period. When I asked the wrong questions I got a "no comment" and was deprived of my belly slap. Celia was teaching me manners as well as metaphors. In my fourth week I taped, via a translating machine, the first monograph authored by a dolphin, Delphinic Idioms and Speech Patterns. Despite its historical value the Institute's publications department refused to publish it because it lacked footnotes, this despite a paragraph in the dissertation explaining the absence of the concept "foot" in Delphine. N evertheless, Celia appointed me instructor in Delphine and assigned me two tankside classes a day. My lectures were spoken into a translating machine and broadcast to my students in English. The students took notes but never laughed at my witticisms. My humor must have been lost in translation. At this stage I would have preferred to strut across the tank with my top hat and cane while the band played The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. In the evenings Celia came to lie beside me on an air mattress and review my lessons. She began to stay longer, often until midnight, and to talk more about herself and her childhood. Gradually I came to detect nuances in her whistles and clicks which bespoke her sadness over a life which had found its only expression in a driving urge to work. In a way I was her psychiatrist, but I was also relieved by her presence. The squeaks, squeals, whistles and clicks of the lectures were silenced when she came -- and frankly I was becoming more interested in Celia and what she thought of me than I was in the Punic Wars. Concerned by my students' indifference to my verbal wit, I asked her one night to give me her evaluation of me as a conversationalist. "Your speech is rhetorical, even flamboyant by human standards, though for all I know you may be a laconic dolphin. Really, there's no way for me to compare your standing with other dolphins unless..." She paused, silent and pensive. "Unless what, Celia?" Suddenly she rolled on her side to face me, speaking with a pell-mell breathlessness as if she had been suddenly seized by an exciting notion. "Unless I opened the gates some night -- to let you go out and lure some fellow dolphin back into the tank with you. You could do it, Happy. With your Ramboyant rhetoric and fantastic charm, you could talk the horn off a narwhal. Would you like to try?" I considered her request, which had as many ramifications as a giant squid. I would have preferred an electric eel in my tank to a fellow dolphin to share Celia's attention -- and to get one, as Celia well knew, I would have to bring back the whole school and turn my tank into a sardine can. Besides, if she needed another dolphin she could requisition one at the government's expense. So why had she made such a proposal? Suddenly I intuited the answer -- Celia was testing my loyalty to her. But an unproved intuition is an idle fancy. I had to be sure this one was right or become the world's first red-faced, jackass dolphin. I heaved a long, sad sigh from my blowhole and fibrillated wistfully, "It might be fun to cruise out and cut some lovely young cow from the herd to share my tank and learn my tricks." "Oh, no! I'm permitting no menage a trois in this tank." Celia did not know it, but she had been tossed on my fluke. My intuition was precisely correct. "Well, there goes my contribution to science," I said. "Science, hah! From that smarmy sigh I'd say that hankypanky's more like it." There had been a shift in our relationship and the time for honesty had come. I nudged her raft contritely. "Celia, I was just splashing a little spray in your eyes. You're the only companion I want. My wit and my rhetoric are only for you." So saying, I emitted a longer, smarmier sigh. "Oh, bosh! Fiddlesticks!" she said, but she tweaked my dorsal. Perhaps it was on that night that a channel marker floated past and an unseen helmsman changed our course. Certain I am that I have never felt closer to any mammal, cetacean or Homo sapiens, and our rapport stirred a curiosity in my mind. In a manner I intended to be casual but actually was tense, I asked, "Celia, would you pipe me a course in human anatomy?" did not let on and piped in the course. Soon I was studying the students at the tank side who were studying me. Females, I noticed, carried an extra set of buttocks on their chests. Celia told me they were mammary protuberances which all female mammals had in common, she as well as my own mother. Looking at Celia's, I had to take her word for it, but for the life of me I couldn't remember mama's. She augmented my course in human anatomy with evening remarks on comparative anatomy. Human mating is a contact sport. Dolphin mating is a collision sport in which a sonic lure replaces courtship. Buffering the tale with long, Latin words, Celia told me of an attendant in a Florida aquarium who sounded in jest a recording of the mating call of a female Delphinis delphis while submerged. The wag's last memory was of sixteen torpedo-shaped objects hurtling toward him at thirty knots. In seconds he was sodomized to shreds. Anatomy became the next to last science that I studied. Celia was changing my curriculum to emphasize the arts. In order to enrich my metaphorical language, I was given four hours of poetry every morning, fifteen minutes of Shakespeare and three hours and forty-five minutes of Romantic Poetry. Shakespeare's good but he's a little too rich for my blood. From the outset I felt an affinity for Lord Byron -- which grew stronger as the strangely disturbing concepts of romance swam within my ken. I learned of women wailing for their demon lovers and wondered about human female preferences. I pondered such lines as How do  love thee? My favorite poem was Byron's To Augusta, and Celia's was Leda and the Swan. She also read me certain passages from Jeffers' Roan Stallion. One poem, at the time our mutual favorite, which I never wish to hear again, is The Forsaken Merman. Our discussions about the concepts of the poems bred an intimacy between Celia and me. Although, by using Latinate circumlocutions, Celia explained the mechanics of romance, she was never able to define love. "One must feel it, Happy. Love can't be defined without first being felt. Shelley called it 'desire of the moth for the star, a devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow.' " A sadness in her voice pained me. To divert her I asked, "What's a moth?" "A fluttering, light-seeking insect... Oh, Happy, I must pipe you a course in entomology." I had stuck my flipper in my blowhole. I needed a course in entomology like I needed a course in home economics, but I had diverted Celia. Rather abruptly I returned to the original subject. "Now that we've heard about love from Shelley, what's the word from Hammersmith?" "I confess, Happy, love is one of the few areas in which I'm not an expert. You see, I've never been in love. I'm quite tall for a woman. Because of my intelligence and my height, boys always looked on me as an object. On the other hand, I feel uncomfortable with a male under six feet long with an I.Q. of less than a hundred and sixty. Still,  I haven't answered your question, have I?" A pensive huskiness replaced the sadness in her voice. "I think love is a rapport between a male and a female mammal who regard each other with tenderness, who sense each other's moods, who delight in each other's wit and rhetoric. But I'm so busy, Happy. Any male I could even consider would have to be one involved with me in my work." She sighed and continued, "Now I suppose I am loved by my students, not as an object but as an institution, the Celia Hammersmith College of Delphinology." "You are uniquely beloved, Celia," I assured her. "Most students revere their institution only as an abstraction -- only the students of Hammersmith have their alma mater embodied in so lovely a package of such infinite variety." My remark was pure spermecetti. I was hard put to tell the difference between the sexes, much less recognize intersex comeliness. But my words served their purpose -- which was to cheer her up -- for suddenly she turned to me. "Happy, don't you ever yearn for the free sweep of the open ocean, the wind's song, the whitecaps dancing in glee?" From the spontaneity of her remark, I knew she was voicing a well-thought plan, and her wishes were not mine. The idea of all that ocean out there still scared the hell out of me. Noncomittally I answered, "The old bull spoke of it with longing, but I'm afraid of depths. In anything over nine fathoms. I'd be lost." Then I added the clincher, I thought. "Once I got out there I'd never find my way back to you." "I'd be with you, Happy. I'd guide you home." Then she told me the legend of the boy on the dolphin and whimsically suggested that we rewrite the legend as The Girl on the Dolphin. So contagious was her enthusiasm that within five minutes I was taking Celia, mounted abaft my dorsal, for a spin around the tank. Maneuvering was easy enough although the wool of her bathing suit chafed me slightly. We planned a shakedown cruise on the morrow evening to test the strength of my phobia and my fatigue factor. Celia promised to eliminate the skin irritant by removing the bathing suit if I kept her nudity secret. I told her my name was Happy, not Gabby. next night, when she arrived at the tank with a harness designed to my contours which must have taken a week to fabricate. In the darkness she harnessed me, slithered out of her bathing suit, opened the sea gates and mounted me. I moved out at a modest three knots to minimize my wake and to prevent night strollers on the jetty from spotting my naked rider. So by stealth and by night we slipped the confines of the shore to range the shimmering spaceways of the sea. My agoraphobia vanished beneath the bright beauty of the girl with golden, spray-wet hair, who met my undulations with her own, and so light a burden was never borne by dolphin. Celia was a natural-born, bare-tailed bareback rider. Off Portuguese Bend, she found she could stay astride me by leg pressure alone and tossed the harness away. The last artifact of man was gone from between us. Night and silence claimed us as we climbed and descended the heaves of the off-shore swells, and the wine-dark ocean was less a mystery to me than the joys of our passage. Finally she guided me home, steering me with nudges of her kneecaps. In truth I could have found my way back to Hermosa Beach, via the great circle route, from Taiwan, but I didn't tell Celia. I enjoyed the kneecap nudges. We got home around one o'clock. Thereafter our nights were filled with revelry which began when Celia whopped my belly with her heels and cried, "Away, Happy! Westward ho." Oh, they were joys, our nightly gambols. With my sonar we avoided driftwood. With Celia's eyesight we swam wide of the running lights of vessels. In the darkness our passing was marked only by our phosphorescent wake, which I now think of as a symbol of our love, so bright yet fading so swiftly into eternal darkness. My favorite of the games we played was "crack the whip." I would try to unseat Celia by quick, high-speed turns, thus forcing her to grip me tighter with both legs, both arms, and all four buttocks. Her favorite game was "bucking bronco," in which I tried to toss her from my back with extreme and rapid undulations. In this game she could only retain her seat by thigh pressure and by arching her body to maintain her balance. With her shrieking, "Ride 'im, cowgirl!" and me churning up a few square miles of water, there must have been some surprised albacore in our rodeo grandstands. Often when I felt her thighs relax I would glide from beneath her and listen, from three or four fathoms, to her thrashing about on the surface and calling my name. When her breathing grew labored I would rise beneath her. It was a way of keeping the knee pressure up. At times I lolled in the ocean, Celia stretched alongside, her head resting on my flipper, and We discussed the meaning of life, marine and terrestrial. One night, with San Clemente Island bearing # true and twenty miles distant, I asked, "Celia, what do you think my I. Q. is?" "It's incalcuable. An I. Q. measures a human average and there's only one Happy known to man." "Do you think it's over a hundred and sixty?" "Perhaps. You're the most "Thanks." "Why do you ask a stupid question like that?" "I'm over six feet long. The thought came to me that if my I.Q. were over a hundred and sixty I might qualify as your ideal male mammal." She giggled, the one human sound any dolphin recognizes, and said, "For all the good it does you, you are my favorite male mammal." the supplementary lectures in comparative anatomy and simply to let her know that I understood the meaning of her mirth, I said, "Ah, yes. The sonic romantic barrier." She had been lying with her head on my flipper, completely relaxed. Suddenly I felt her neck muscles tighten. "Happy, I've forgotten something. We must hurry home -- now." As she spoke, she was swinging astride me and the rapport we had established told me she was a very frightened girl. Calling to her to hang tight, I beat shoreward at twenty-two knots, and she did not relax until we entered the harbor. By then I had hypothesized an explanation for her terror, verifed by her remark as she closed the sea gates. "Happy, we'll have to stop these nightly rambles. Lack of sleep As far as it went she spoke the truth -- we were in early and it was #:# a.m. But my remark had alerted her to a danger neither of us had considered. If we had been thirty miles out to sea and a female dolphin anywhere within a ten-mile radius had sounded her love call, Celia's great and loyal friend, Happy, would have been off like the Flying Dutchman, leaving Celia to the loneliness of the long-distance swimmer. Among male dolphins, the Song of the Siren is not a legend but a fact. I could not, in all honesty, dissuade Celia from her unvoiced fear. Except as a racial memory I had never heard the siren's song, but I was getting eager to hear the music. So it was back to the air mattress in the tank and our evening talks, now grown lackadaisical despite the affection between us. Lolling in the confines of a tank grown oppressive, we shared our unvoiced dream of high romance beyond the seawall. Celia grew irritable and petulant. I lost my appetite, even for Quinalt salmon. Our inner tensions grew. We were wasting away together. Finally Celia could stand it no longer. On the tenth night of our captivity, she made an announcement. "Happy, I'm going to Marineland, tomorrow." "Not to get me a fellow tank mate, I hope." "Would you be terribly upset if I did?" "I'd ask for a transfer back to burlesque. You could change my name to Unhappy. I'd sulk. How could I talk to you with some beakish female listening to every sound?" "Of course I'd never share you, Happy. No, I'm going to listen to some tape recordings and I'm giving you a day off from lectures and lecturing. I want you well rested. And if it will ease your mind I'll pipe in something diverting. Would you like Brahms, Beethoven, Bach?" "No. I'll take the complete works of Byron. Why do you want me rested?" "We're going to sea again tomorrow night." With that I flipped her air mattress and went leaping around the tank in confined joy. When she clambered back atop the mattress I was calm enough to listen further. "I wish to go to a kelp bed in a Catalina cove. I'm writing a paper on the nocturnal habits of kelp fish." "Kelp fish! When did you strike up this romance?" "A girl likes to have a few secrets, Happy. After we're there you can patrol the inlet to keep out sharks." This was one hell of a way for me to spend an evening out, patrolling the bar while she fondled kelp fish. I fell silent. "What are you thinking about, Happy?" "The life of a sea lord -- one night a bucking bronco, the next a watch dog." "Oh, it won't be all work." The next night she came, bringing an aqua-lung. Without a word of greeting she opened the sea gates, took off her bathing suit, put on the aqua-lung and mounted me. She did not give me the customary belly whop with her heels. Instead she issued me sailing orders in a peculiarly strained voice, "Head southsouthwest to the western tip of Catalina and follow the northeast coast line. Don't dally -- and don't undulate excessively." Nothing more was said as we put to sea. Her rigid thighs gnd silence told me she was distraught, consumed by some inner urgency. Keeping to course, I propelled us by a rapid flutter of the flukes, holding my body to a minimal pitch. hove to a hundred yards offshore from the kelp beds, keeping a sonic lookout for sharks and hoping one will appear. I am in the mood for splitting a shark's aorta, bursting a liver and sending one of those saw-mouthed bastards spiraling down into that bourne from which no shark returns. My mood is at odds with the scene. Inshore I hear Celia working among the kelp beds. A full moon is rising above Point Fermin. A breeze stands fair from Asia. To westward along the reaches of the headland I hear the long withdrawing roar of the surf. Then it came, the beginning solo of a Delphinis angel, the tremulous, quavering, beckoning, flute-like opening. I wheeled. The sound was coming from inshore, flooding the waters of the cove. The music changed to the tympanic ripple of drums and my body quivered, waiting. The First notes of an organ rose above the drums. The organ notes did it. Before the bar had gone half a measure I was barreling toward the beach at forty knots, seeking the source of the siren's song. In eight feet of water and an aqua-lung I found waiting for me on the sandy bottom all the sirens of legend: Parthenope, Leucosia, Ligea. Waiting for me was the apotheosis of feminine mammalian beauty, Earth mother of the seaborn, queen among women and mistress of aural mimicry -- Celia Hammersmith. Celia had listened well to the recordings at Marineland and learned every note of the language of the dolphin's heart. Separated by millennia, the tides of our mammalian blood swirled together again in an eddy, a vortex, a maelstrom. My cousin, my bride, returned to the sea, or at least to its littoral strand -- a problem of purchase was solved in the shallows -- and returned to her forsaken merman. Together we erased eons and that night Celia Hammersmith found love. By her own admission, later, as we lolled on the sand, I was the most esoteric bit of erotica in the history of feminine diversions. Had we left well enough alone, this treatise need never have been recorded to silence the slithering sprats of conjecturists who insinuate Celia's drowning was suicide But eons were not enough for one night. Who can turn his gaze away after glimpsing paradise? Coursing homeward, I was dolphin transfigured bearing woman transformed. No longer inhibited by propriety, we talked of the wonder we had shared. Celia confessed that I had long been her ideal male, eight feet long with an incalculable I.Q. "But I love you as much, Happy, for your flamboyant rhetoric, your irrepressible good humor and your wit." "I'll buy the first two," I said, "but no one laughs at my jokes except you." "The others haven't grasped the subtleties of cetacean humor. But give them time. Someday you'll be the world's most famous lie-down comic." In turn I confessed how I had long adored her whimsy, her golden hair, her downside-up buttocks and the pressure of her kneecaps abaft my dorsal. "But your singing really gets me, Celia." Somewhere over the Santa Barbara Deeps, Celia grew concerned over a lack of reciprocity in our love. I had joined with her on the littoral strand which made me a shallow-water merman. To make us co-equals in love, she should join with me in this fathomless water and become a true mermaid. I didn't question her logic, but I did point out the problem of purchase we had solved in the shallows. Here, the bottom lay furlongs below. Celia's clicks and whistles conveyed an enigmatic whimsy as she told me she could solve the problem. She asked, "Are you game for a gambol in the deeps, Happy?" A stunning novella about a man who could live as often as he dared -- launching the great new series by: April issue, on sale March # Women and dolphins are not "Sing it, again, Celia. But skip the flutes and drums. Just the organ notes." Above me I could hear the tempo of Celia's breathing speed up as she put on the mask of the aqua-lung. She checked the oxygen in the cylinder. She was a romantic yet a woman, too, at all times practical. Sounding the organ notes, she slipped beneath me and grasped my flippers; my horizontal stabilizers were to be her means of gaining purchase. So slight was the downward tilt the weight of the aqualung gave my body that I failed to notice my increasing angle of descent as my flukes, with powerful strokes, thrust toward a more perfect union. Seeking rapture in the deeps, we both forgot the rapture of the dark deep -- nitrogen narcosis. At forty or fifty fathoms Celia muttered dreamily, "Happy, darling, I could float like this forever. But the aqua-lung's got to go. It hampers me." So saying, she took off her aqualung and threw it aside. O, doubleedged rapture! Too late I realized it was not Celia but the nitrogen talking. Immediately I levered her upward. We broke surface at an estimated sixty knots. At the apex of a twenty-foot arc we two parted in silence and spray. Celia hit the water first, spread-eagled on the surface. I landed a few feet beyond her. swam a circle around her thrice. In the moonlight her golden hair resembled the petals of a white-stalked sea anemone, rising and falling, ominously horizontal. Then I knew that we would go no more a-roving so late into the night. In a final act of homage, I nudged her body shoreward down the shimmering moonpath on the sea, carrying her back to the land which had given her birth. So Celia took one last ride with me, but the irrepressible good humor she loved was gone forever. Henceforward I would be Happy in name only. Thus did I mourn. But that which shapes us binds all nature with similitudes. Out of the whale comes ambergris and out of the ambergris the perfume. Out of my great grief came a melody and out of the melody a good humor more irrepressible than ever. As I pushed her body landward, I began to chant, lowly and slowly at first, as a Requiem for Celia, the man-song I knew best. Imperciptibly my body began to undulate to the rhythm of the Requiem. I stepped up the tempo, nudging on the up notes, clicking and whistling more loudly: For I'm the guy that married the girl who broke up the home of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.     gal axy stars    "My literary biography is short." says John Boyd. And spectacular, add your editors. His first work -- a mainstream novel published in # -- was grabbed by the movies, a book club, four foreign publishers; now a paperback, to date it has sold more than # copies. His second novel, also mainstream reviews, was selected by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, has been optioned to the movies, was chosen one of the best books of the year by the American Library Association, has lately been reissued by Berkley. We quote John Boyd further: "I opted for science fiction after two writers I particularly admire -- Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein -- publicly endorsed Last Starship, and after I received numerous perceptive letters from its readers. I became convinced that the quality of science-fiction readership is exceptionally high. Not then or since did I ever consider 'writing down' to a reader or underestimating his background or intelligence. But I had felt that Last Starship would have limited appeal because it was addressed primarily to literature students in the hope that they might be amused by the arcane illusions and free-wheeling language. Yet the book was received understanding by science-fiction readers. Thus did Last Starship launch me into s-f as surely as it launched its hero to Planet Hell. Incidentally, the translation of the book's French John adds that to the s-f audience, "... a valid social promise can be expressed with wit, subtlety, indirection, sadness, indignation and poetic flights of rhetoric, all in one tale, and in the expectation of being comprehended." While not definite in his mind about the difference between science fiction and mainstream fiction, he does believe the science-fiction reader, more than others, is suspension of disbelief" so essential in coping with the world of the imagination. His chief aim, John reports, is to tell a good story with a valid theme and believable characters, particularly the latter. Hence in writing The Girl and the Dolphin appearing in this issue, all through the bittersweet love #tory of Celia and Happy he was careful to empathize with both. He tells us, further, that he usually deliberately telescopes the endings of his novels. "Once the plot-strings are knotted, I believe in a quick cut right behind the knot. Any philosophical implications the reader may wish to weigh, he can weigh without me." Of course, the practice can backfire. "One reviewer in the Los Angeles Times. I'm convinced, read my how the protagonists ultimately defeated the behavior computer which could plot all their moves in advance. You see. their method was disclosed in an off-beat strategy conference between two surgeons, repeated in the gibberings of a schizoid, and retold again in a song composed by an aphasiac. Too deep for reviewers, I guess. I don't consider reviewers to be among my most intelligent readers." John was a Naval Reserve officer during World War II, enlisting from Atlanta, Georgia in #. He met his wife-to-be while stationed in San Diego, married her in Seattle in #. After graduation from U.S.C. in #, he became a graphic arts salesman and remained so until #, when he began to write full time. hardcover by Weybright  Talley, is John's most recently published book. But he has Man for a Crowded Planet -- because he has a genetically inbred "death wish." May issue. It will be a two-parter. Have fun. VJ" honor." The newsman rose as Judge M'bui Darrananga swept into his chambers, began divesting himself of his robes and wig. The judge's handshake was cordial, firm. "Barry, it's a pleasure to see you again. "Sorry to make you wait -- my charge to the jury took longer than I'd expected." "Don't give it a thought." The newsman winced as Darrananga's huge hand enveloped his own. "I appreciate your fitting me into your schedule on such short notice," he said. "I realize that the Lew trial -- " "Isn't what you wanted to talk about," interrupted the judge with a knowing, good-natured smile. "Ethically We shouldn't discuss it until the jury reaches a verdict, you know." Darrananga stood six and onehalf feet tall in his blue-black skin -- his merry, patient eyes tended to miss nothing. Robust in his early sixties, he had been born in a Nairobi slum, disenfranchised and meager of prospect as any other black urchin. His climb from the gutters of East Africa to doctor of jurisprudence had culminated behind a bench in the United Nations High Court. There were those who insisted witchcraft had had something to do with it. "You're aware, of course, that the Lew. trial is only a gesture," continued Darrananga, stuffing a calabash pipe with rough-cut tobacco he liked to blend himself. "Lew Chao Leung surely is no murderer -- no more than you or I. His family forced the trial to satisfy their egos, their pride. The jury will weigh the evidence -- if it can truly be called 'evidence' -- and rule Dr. Lew innocent of murder in the second degree. Posthumous trials are rarely meaningful, I'm afraid." The reporter's grin was sheepish. "I hoped to learn your views on the Dallin incident, your honor." "Certainly you did. Everyone else is talking about Richard Dallin -- why shouldn't we?" Applying a match to the bole of his calabash, Darrananga lolled in the highbacked chair behind his desk, surrounded by a cloud of bluish smoke. "We may never learn what really happened out there," he mused aloud. "The affairs' more romantic overtones -- aided by sensational press coverage -- have kindled public fancy. We have a double homicide among working scientists in the field, then the otherworldly purpose and remote lunar farside base of Project Ozma itself -- next a third death under unusual circumstances and finally a vanished astrophysicist whose diary records visiting aliens from the stars. And an incredible work of art -- the photoscuplt. By the way, have you seen the Smithsonian exhibit?" "Last month," said the newsman. "Washington was a furnace." Darrananga chuckled. "Ah, yes -- late summer isn't the season to visit the American capital. But, didn't you sense the nearness of the unknown in that skylighted gallery, Barry? Music pours from hidden speakers, making chills race along your spine once you know the details of the affair." "Music?" The reporter looked wary. "I remember the recorded music, yes, but -- " "In a moment, Barry -- in a moment," fended Darrananga. "I stood in the Smithsonian for twenty minutes, listening, watching the queue wind past. Chattering visitors would approach the pedestal, come face to face with that eightinch plastic brick encapsulating diminutive, cameo-perfect human figurines and become suddenly rooted, held by the sort of rapt attention one finds at a showing of Van Gogh or Modigliani. They would stand transfixed until crowd pressure forced them on -- to ask futile questions of the guards before wandering off, unsatisfied, toward the exit."  "I suppose we're all -- unsatisfied." "We are indeed. Tell me -- do you like music?" The judge leaned forward. "I -- yes, of course." "Sibelius, Beethoven, the heavier orchestral literature? Perhaps the Bruckner works?" The newsman frowned, shifting his weight uneasily. "I'm not well acquainted with longhair works. Why do you ask?" Darrananga reflected for a dozen heartbeats in silence. He slowly laid aside his pipe. "Richard Dallin loved music," he said. "His was a sonorous plea for help, a cry in the night that may or may not have been answered." The judge paused. "Don't mistake me. There is no hint of deception or hoax in the Dallin incident -- merely mystery, just an unsolved enigma. The photosculpt rests on its pedestal, an affront to reason and common sense, while the diary -- " "The diary?" Judge Darrananga rubbed his chin. "The foreman asked for three copies of the diary to take into the jury room for study," he said, looking directly into the newsman's eyes. "I've decided to let you read my personal copy this afternoon, Barry." The reporter flinched in surprise, sat suddenly straighter. "But isn't the diary still considered evidence?" "Technically, yes. When the trial concludes Richard Dallin's celebrated diary will at last be published in its entirety. Witholding the final portion to keep prospective jurors unprejudiced was silly, to say the least. I'm certain the Lew trial is in its last hour." The newsman's eyes widened. "Believe me, I'll consider permission to preview the diary a great privilege, your honor. "May I ask bluntly -- have you formed an opinion about Dallin's fate?" "An opinion? As the Lord is my witness, I form a new opinion daily." The judge opened the top drawer of his desk. He lifted out a thick, unbound stack of fascimiles, laying them reverently before the newsman. "I've earmarked those entries which seemed most pertinent with tape. Read them first. They'll provide an overview. Later, if you wish, you may browse through the remainder at your leisure." "Thank you, Judge Darrananga. Thank you very much." The reporter sounded sincere. The judge rose stiffly. He stretched, strode briskly to the door, standing with one hand on the knob. "I've some calls to make. I'll be back in an hour, or so." He puffed his cheeks, regarding the newsman soberly. "Try to retain an open mind, Barry," he said as if in afterthought. "Do try." The ' door eased shut. The newsman was alone. He eagerly fingered the first taped tab, then lifted and folded back a thick sheaf of early pages. At the top of the facing sheet was a heading written in precise cursive: Here at last! Writing in cubicle after dinner. Years from now Geraldine  I will read diary together  chuckle. All a silly diary's good for anyhow. Glad that hellish wait in quarantine  tedious crawler ride are behind me. Eighteen months of hard work  high bonus and I'll strut back to Gerry  Tommy boy with a bundle. Joy! Met here by Dr. Lew. "Welcome to the forty-oners," says Lew have no idea what he meant. We invited the crawler crewmen in for coffee, then saw them off  Dr. Lew showed me around the station. The #-meter instrument is the stopper, of course staff calls it simply "The Rig", but actually it's the Karl G. Jansky Radio Telescope. Be a helluva thrill working with it! Discovered Dr. Lew stayed awake on presumption my arrival imminent absolutely no communication with other lunar sites -- a surprise, Mr. Tcharoff now on watch -- Dr. Butler quietly sleeping. They've been short-handed -- three men on rotating eight-hour shifts these past months. I had imagined four men on station at all times. Turning in now. Lew advises that Dr. Butler will wake me  give formal orientation when he goes on watch. Breaking in to routine should be fun. Pleasant dreams! # August Too pooped to write yesterday. Flopped, slept through sacktime  most of recreation time. Last sunlight hals left the Soviet Mountains, hence solar hash gone from sky  The Rig will be at maximum usefulness this next semi-lunar. We're at about # km northwest in Mari Crisium, while totally unexplored region around Sea of Moscow lies # km or so due north. Isolated. But that's why I'm here. Most lunar satellites are in equatorial orbits, below our short horizon. Farside is kept completely free of radio noise. Policy will pay off when if extra-human contact is made. Met everyone save Mr. Tcharoff. Will meet him next week when Dr. Butler reschedules to include me on duty roster. Butler, nominal chief astronomer, is nearly fifty, has goatee, small gray eyes  a sort of pompous manner. He kindly commented on the photosculpt of Gerry  Tommy I brought along should be praiseworthy -- squandered a big chunk of bonus money on it. Figurines are perfectly lifelike  edgelighted to make plastic all but invisible. Checked out in pressure suit today. Temperature in surface dust: minus # F.  falling. Butler is laconic as hell, but very explicit when technical explanation is needed. Duties: lunar day maintain transmitter station; housekeeping  galley chores light, thank God!; meteoroid inspection of The Rig  transmitting antenna station  emergency power  life support systems including our tiny crawler. Lunar night: likewise on all counts save meteoroid inspection. Sound ambitious? First tour showed that a lone man could easily handle things. Electronics are modularized -- we have spares to burn. Our only exotic gear: ultraparametric amplifier in receiving  The Rig's drive computer moon's goofy axial wobble makes this "refinement" manadatory. One other station: emergency communications -- a joke! FM transmitter  vehicles in line-ofsight within range required to relay anyall messages Earthside. Butler says proper conditions have "happened" once in past fourteen years -- during some emergency, luckily! Lunar orbital traffic is entirely below our horizon. We are as cut off from all things human as it is possible to be  still live. You must be here to appreciate this! Questioned Butler about rotating home. He smiled, explained Ozma's severe financial straits. Such "cheating" invalidating contract would mean paying own Earth passage, forfeiture of bonus for whopping insurance premiums, till baby Tommy or his sons found work! Resupply crawler from Crisium each  every six months want to check  make sure we aren't loafing. Will bring goodies  mail. I'll have beaucoup letters for Geraldine by then. Oh, hell! Over two-one  knew my own mind, so they say. Next resupply date? Unknown. Arrival date a forbidden topic by mutual consent. Did I mention that Dr. Lew has medical background as well as physics? Burst appendix would be a fearsome prospect out here otherwise. # August Lone watch today. Butler seemed satisfied with my performance. Will switch staff to six hours watch, eighteen hours rest  recreation -- much easier on everyone. Lew gave monthly physical exam after dinner  says I'm A-l. Can't help liking Lew. He's intelligent, infinitely patient, precise in movement  speech, with clear oriental skin  coal-black eyes. Our music room's a luxury especially for me -- the only compartment in the monastery hut kept at decent atmospheric pressure for acoustic purposes since all hate wearing headphones. When asked. Lew explained faint odor in music room as a combination of soupy air plus Mr. Tcharoffs pipe he smokes in defiance of rules  Butler looks the other way. Gathered Lew not at all fond of Tcharoff, but does admit he's a genuine music nut sounds like someone worth knowing. Also logged my first station entry today: transmitting Tau Ceti on # mHz band, just off natural frequency of neutral hydrogen. Star some ten light-years distant. May hear from them ? in twenty years, who knows? Watched assembled platen on raster monitor: number theory, value of pi -- graphics include schematic representations of solar system  bisymmetrical human form. The Rig receiving likewise frequency of un-ionized hydrogen. Letter to Geraldine, then sacktime. Tired tonight. Miss Gerry lots  lots. # August Returned from watch today  heard someone singing snatches from Boris' death scene pulls sharp after every second bar  knocked politely to meet the singer. Gregor Tcharoff is straight from bad opera bouffe -- taller, wider than life, sporting an auburn beard nesting birds might have built  supposed Rabelaisian gusto. He's really just a gruff kook who thinks his charisma sprouts from loud belches  a booming laugh, is easily amused mostly by his own dialogue  damned generous with advice on everything. Some fella! It seems Butler had mentioned my photosculpt,  Tcharoff demanded to see it. He was overwhelmed. Geraldine, it developed, was the exact image of a lost love goddess whom he'd chased in Ankara twenty years ago, while Tommy was an absolute ringer for his favorite nephew back home in Vladivostok. Gregor has one standard joke in his repertory: the lunar farside is a sort of rare garden spot compared to Vladivostok. God, he may be right! Over coffee he discoursed on Olbers Paradox, numismatics, homeopathic medicine, orchids, French opera, American baseball about which he knows nothing  a few topics I've forgotten. Whew! He Finally did explain something concrete: who the "Forty-oners" are. It seems they're us numbwitted jackasses who've agreed to eighteen months of living burial here on the forty-one per cent of Luna's wasteland never seen by Earth -- and who, conversely, never see home  hearth hanging in the sky like a blue-silver Christmas tree bauble as it does over Site I  the other Earthside bases. Tcharoff capped the evening with a yawn that exposed his entire trachea, gave me a friendly blow on the shoulder  ambled off to his cage to hibernate. He'll take beaucoup getting used to! Watch tonight monotonous, lonely -- six hours seem twelve or fifteen. From the control room The Rig's huge dish is limned in starlight above the rolling shoulders of the Soviets, but stars never crawl to westward as they do at home. The moon's a static, sterile dustball. Couldn't shake the idiotic notion that Earth did not exist, that this blasphemous place was all there ever was or would be. Silly! Nothing much to occupy my mind on watch. Might have spent more time listening to Gerry's misgivings about accepting this damn fool contract. Sure, a year and a half out here is better than three years wearing a uniform,  a conscripcontract. Hell! Money's pouring in. I'll hang in there and get rich! I I October Skipped a couple of days since nothing new. Listened to several tapes again today: Sibelius, Offenbach, Prokofiev. Great quadraphonic tape library  excellent audio equipment. Friend Tcharoff, who pooh-poohs Sibelius as a composer of "effects" rather than serious music, stirred me to lively argument again. Bear's manner can get under anyone's skin. Watch it! Not a helluva lot else to report. Tcharoff argued at dinner about Richard Strauss, but half-hearted, mopey. There seems to be a feud of sorts going between him  Lew, who's quiet, capable  selfcontained, while Tcharoffs noisy, more or less capable  contained by nothing whatsoever including self. Butler remains aloof, which is slightly worry-making. Dreaded going on watch -- loneliness! Read for a time, but couldn't concentrate. Here two months or thereabouts,  it seems ten times that. Meals prepackaged. deep-frozen -- quite good, but something is missing. Daydreams filled with Geraldine  Tommy. Miss Gerry terribly at times. Most times. Can't shake scary feeling something dreadful has happened to her. Would never know it here. Turning in. Hope sleep comes easily tonight. # November Good old # hertz for #I days this month. Listening same frequency. What else is new? Thought up harmless rebellion. Will horse around with higher frequencies for a few watches. May transmit above # mHz when no one's looking till Butler catches me  listen same frequency. What fun! Boredom supreme,  that shouldn't be. Intrinsic fascination with Ozma, really. Virtual certainty that modulated RF from "out there" is falling on every sub-stellar point of moon  planets. But at what frequency? That's the jackpot question -- where to tune for the program from Oz? Yesterday Lew  Tcharoff got into a blistering debate over why Ozma ever set up here in backwash of universe. Tcharoff, wild  woolly -- but with a grain of an instinct for truth -- insisted that ultraparametric receiving equipment in any airless environs would have sufficed. Lew patiently pointed out was for an RF lab, that Ozma to fund The Rig's construction. Hadn't known that, nor had Tcharoff, who was piqued-plus. He flared at Lew unmercifully, wilder than ever. He'd had a few, of course. Butler found  dismantled his latest vacuum still, but the Bear must've rigged another. His vodka tastessmells like rancid castor oil, but high proof plus low p.s.i.g. oxyhelium in the hut turns him into a rather foulmouthed abominable snowman. What can the old man do, fire him? Joke! On watch one whole cosmic year tonight. Really tough staying awake. Back in sack, most times, equally tough getting to sleep. Miss Geraldine beyond telling. Sit for hours staring into photosculpt. Do idiotic things -- jam face up against photosculpt to null plastic  make Geraldine seem lifesize. Everything about Gerry is right  perfect. She could almost step out and... # January, # Yesterday damned eventful. Shaken right out of the sack by a major quake we get a steady diet of small tremors. Tcharoff ooohed  aaahed  danced around like one round-eyed, scared Russian while Butler  Lew crammed selves into our tiny crawler to survey possible damage to station equipment. Got a scare call from them in ten minutes, suited up post haste with extra oxy bottles  survival kits. A large bolide had smashed into the New crater issuing gas  Butler agitated as an old hen. Quick-marched upland beside Butler in crawler toward foothills, found some skimpy shade, watched  waited. What the hell for? If old Luna had decided to gobble up Site A few lesser jolts, later. Gaseous issue dwindled, stopped. Trekked back, pooped, after fifteen hours in p-suits. The instant air spilled into inner lock chamber we heard the communications howler wailing  fell all over each other getting our fishbowls off. It was the resupply Christmas cubed! They had been in the quake zone  were worried as hell when they couldn't raise us on radio. All outside to greet them later. Bundles  bags of letters from carefully chosen words to ship home. Bedded down after celebration. Tcharoff uncorked some of his best Butler smiled paternally  even had a snort himself. Much later Tcharoff had to be "helped" to his sack after being dragged away from poor Lew. Gregor gets damned boorish on the sauce, specially to Dr. Lew. Very, repeat very nasty to Lew -- the scene embarrassed the crawler boys. Puzzle. Lew does nothing obvious to antagonize the Bear. Afterward read Gerry's letters thrice little sheep, but what the hell. Says she's lonely, otherwise fine. God in Heaven, if dear Geraldine knew the true meaning of loneliness! In control room on watch when the crawler left. Hardest thing yet in this life for me was to see it shrink to a glittering speck in the pass northwest of station. I will not see, hear, nor feel contact with the rest of human society for another half-year. # February Still here, Richard? Is the good old monastery hut still smelly as a locker room at the Y? A hut by any name smells just as sweat. Not bad! Pretty good poetry for a budding young scientist, huh? Still camped on Luna's backside earning my fortune. Backside, hell! There's a simpler word for it! Vibrating in  out on twenty-one centimeters, if anyone cares damned few do!  still pouring that goddam Tcharoff into his sack  pulling him away from Dr. Lew. Some day he'll clobber Lew in one of his asinine rages. If he does he's in for some lumps of his own, the bastard! Butler's getting more damned ineffectual. Crawler gone more than a month. Won't last my full hitch  know it thoroughly  completely. will have a deadhead aboard -- Richard C. Dallin, dumb but sane! husband, father,  incipient pauper. I've also been having grade-A nightmares. Wake dripping sweat after running for hours in p-suit, skirting craters  leaping craterlets, chasing the crawler. But the damned crawler keeps churning along just out of reach. The other's much worse. Triumphant homecoming in taxi -- dash madly up the stairs, ignoring apartment-house elevator,  unlock the door. There sits Geraldine, just as in photosculpt, holding baby Tommy on her lap, smiling her sunny smile. plastic between us! Beat  push  hammer fists raw, but I can't get in! Gerry  Tommy frozen ten paces away, not moving. Wake screaming after that one. Rugged! Meaning to talk to Lew about myself again -- headaches, lapses when I do nothing but worry. Going thru senseless motions here. Must get to Site #I --  home! # February Third of hitch gone -- two-thirds to go. Aimless existence from day to day to day. If not for music room. I'd be in a real tailspin. Go there every rec period  drown in sounds. Tapes restore something precious as food, sleep, or... No, I must not even think about that. Read some Shakespeare yesterday -- he put it neatly: When griping griefs the heart doth wound. And doleful dumps the mind oppress; Then music with her silver sound, With speedy help doth lend redress. Twenty-one centimeters both ways  Tcharoff badgering Lew constantly. I'd like to help Lew. But, how? # March Sick -- gawdawful headaches and drowsiness. No watches during past two days. Lew gave me onceover. Thinks problem psychosomatic  gives therapy in form of encouragement -- how he supposedly felt likewise the first few months. Gallant lie, but Lew's a great guy. Don't understand it -- four of us all healthy. Can't infect each other with something exotic way out here moon's controlled indoor environment notoriously low in bacteria count, perhaps the healthiest place of all human habitation. Crawler's been gone too long for incubation of anything infectious from crewmen. Better straighten self out! # March Tragedy -- Gregor Tcharoff is dead! Happened while I was in sack, Butler on watch. Lew  Gregor obviously had violent argument leading to blowoff in dining room. Butler came into hut for coffee, found Tcharoff with carving-knife wound in abdomen. Still breathing, but blood, blood everywhere. Lew unconscious on floor. Overturned table, chairs. Room wrecked. Wakened by Butler immediately. The old man's beside himself. Lew still unconscious we were afraid to move him, TcharofPs breathing disinfected wound, controlled bleeding  administered plasma from Lew's infirmary. All we could do, I suppose. But not enough. Butler fed emergency distress tape to FM link, but chance of spacecraft in line-of-sight within range vanishingly small. I don't like Lew's look -- comatose, breathing shallow, pulse weak  irregular. Lack of knowledge how to basal skull fracture from blow, possibly fall. Clot also possible. What to do? # March I am alone! Lew's pulse, respiration faltered #. Tried external heart massage  resuscitation. No response. Butler left for automated Earthside radio relay station in the Sea of Smyth at # hours after we placed bodies in service shed  evacuated air. Horrible thought! Small crawler will need lots of luck to make it. Butler's been over times, but never to Sea of Smyth. He should cover # km in ten days or so -- the absolute range limit of our little crawler. If he makes it there'll be a ballistic shuttle from Site I on the ground here within hours. If he doesn't... Undated entry Nightmares -- afraid to sleep. Wandered around, looked behind all doors. No one else is here. Butler gone long time. Cried, Haven't cried since childhood. Couldn't stop. Tcharoff  poor Lew in service shed -- cold, shrunken mummies. All TcharofPs fault because... 'Ware the Ides of March, Tcharoff! All of them gone  I'm alone! Undated entry God help me! Woke trembling from nightmare  found it real. Filthy, unshaven for days -- weeks. Trouble remembering things  scared! Also hallucinations, or cruelest imaginable joke. Cleaned self up  inspected station by way of applying nature's therapy. Thoughts that Butler had maybe gotten through were reviving  refreshing. Tremendously stimulated by hopes of rescue. Checked tapes in receiving  heart damned near quit. The Rig has been reading a modulated signal for some time! Don't trust my own judgement any more. Double-checked all, then checked again. The Rig has been receiving discrete source approximate line Gamma Ceti on # mHz. Checked, verified tapes. Line feed # installed don't recall putting it on. Last entry in station log Butler, # March cites our old standby #I installed. Cannot explain any of it. Put tape on scope  horsed around with it until heart damned near exploded! Platen, when assembled, reads as follows -- clear English: All the goddam nerve! Went through log for transmissions that frequency. Didn't think there would be any, but sure enough -- # mHz for a few watches when Butler's back turned. If there's a research vessel out there it's way to hell-andbeyond anything I've heard about. But any hope's better than none. They'll tune my distress call, crank their high-gain array around  relay Earthside. Discarded binary input to transmitter, voice-coded mayday tape  I'm on the air. Hope again wonderful! Undated entry Weeks have passed. Modulated signal gone -- abandoned me like all others. Mind's going soft -- forgot they're way out in deep space. Headaches, lapses when I'm... Need help desperately -- now. Sending on FM link  # mHz Undated entry Saw self in mirror just now  bawled. I'm a mess! How long since strange contact? A dream? Didn't think to log it datewise. Barely remember  uncertainty damning. Not certain of anything. Have lapses into... Not sure what to call it, but I'm afraid. Undated entry Sunset outside. Gerry  Tommy boy like the vie,w. Hold them up to glareproof in control room  they love it. Take them wherever I go now. Except for service shed. Must not go into service shed. Taboo! If only I could be with Gerry  Tommy I'd be so happy. Undated entry Heartless bastards are complaining again about my call for help. I need help. If I irritate them enough maybe they'll come help me. Gerry thinks so. Tommy's too young to understand. Playing music for them now. Lots of Sibelius  Stravinsky. Rite of Spring can be damned irritating -- may jibe them enough to make them come help me. If not, maybe they'll like the music  come anyhow. They seem closer somehow. Sorry Tommy boy doesn't like Sibelius. Gerry does. So do I. Undated entry Khachaturian, Borodin, RimskyKorsakov today -- Russian kick honoring that bastard Tcharoff. Gliere. Moussorgsky to round it out. Playeu Sibelius' fine Fifth Symphony for them again, too. It's so appropriate, so filled with light  that exhilarating sense of freedom, life. Undated entry Copland, Vivaldi, Beethoven  Gluck today -- a mixed bag. Gilbert  Sullivan for seasoning -- Gerry loves the patter songs. They should appreciate Gilbert  Sullivan, too. Their English is flawless. Final undated entry Trimmed beard, groomed self. Must be presentable, look my best, my very best. Gerry, Tommy  I are ready. Airlock cycling... open the door to find the newsman standing at the window, soberly contemplating the flow of water traffic far below in the East River. "I have only a minute," said the judge. "The jury is balloting now. Tell me truthfully -- were you impressed?" "Beyond words!" The newsman's eyes were hollow. "There are several matters -- I remember reading that Dr. Butler's body was later recovered." The judge leaned on the back of a chair, rocking gently. "Heavyhanded irony," he said. "Dr. Butler's tiny crawler almost made it. It had tumbled down a talus slope bordering the Sea of Smyth just eighty-five kilometers from his objective. It was discovered by a returning selenographical team he had passed well within radio range when outbound. Dr. Butler rests near the lonely outpost that had been his charge for so many many years." The reporter's nod was somber. "And Richard Dallin? What happened to him?" Darrananga smiled thinly. "How casually you ask the question of questions, Barry. The facts are these: every automatic service device in the monastery hut was operating as usual when the resuproutine call, though none of quadraphonic audio tapes normally stored in the music room, nor the radio telescope's monitoring tapes, could be found. Nothing else seemed disturbed. Every pressure suit was accounted for by serial number, while the pocked, eternally silent wilderness around and about the station has been scoured and searched time and time again." The newsman grunted. He said nothing. "Which leaves us to dwell upon the true enigma -- the photosculpt," pursued Darrananga. "The diary itself, plus sworn testimony furnished by Geraldine Dallin and by the California company, Barron  Sons, Photosculptors, establish beyond reasonable doubt that only Mrs. Dallin and her infant son posed for the photosculpt on the day in question." The newsman nodded. "If so," said Darrananga in a solemn tone, "we are confronted with paradox. You have seen the photosculpt. Imprisoned in seamless, rock-hard acrylic resin, the six-inch figurine of Geraldine Dallin is seated in a cane-backed chair, smiling pleasantly, holding baby Tommy on her lap." Scowling, Darrananga folded his arms across his deep chest. "And hunched behind them," he said, "one casual arm resting on his wife's shoulder, crouches the emaciated, soul-wrenching figurine of Richard Charles Dallin." "I've seen," said the newsman, "but -- " "More concretely," said the judge relentlessly, "microscopic examination shows that individual skin pores, retinal eye patterns, each single strand of the subject's hair and beard are exquisitely detailed in a manner totally beyond present day photosculpture techniques." "Penalty -- most severe!" said the newsman hoarsely. Darrananga became intent. "Was that really the case? Don't leap to conclusions, Barry. Was indeed the 'penalty most severe' -- or does compassion take forms as yet undiscovered? Either way, Richard Dallin is, in a sense, where he longed so desperately to be." A light tap on the door caused the judge to lift his eyes expectantly. "Come in." A bailiff poked his head in long enough to say, "Jury's back in the courtroom, your honor. The foreman says they've reached a verdict." "Thank you, Carl." Darrananga donned his robes, his manner preoccupied. He spent a moment or two adjusting the parliamentary wig, then asked, "Did you hear him? 'The jury's reached a verdict,' he said. I wish to God it were that simple!" "Amen," the newsman said. Darrananga sighed. "I think Richard Dallin's jury will be out for some time. Quite some time." He made ready to leave, turning at the door with a curious light in his eyes. "Perhaps until the music from those missing tapes comes back to us from the stars."  Pennal path rose steeply to the crest of a bank. Beyond the rise the huge red segment of the setting sun painted the leaves a golden red and made even the dancing gnats glow with a brazen fire. Droplets from earlier rains still glistened on the ferns and freshened the air. The birds in the nearby trees were gathering for the night. Their songs fell sharp and melodious on the still air. Topping the ridge, the girl turned her face toward the sun's last warmth, her eyes nearly closed as she savored this moment of almost perfect communion with nature. Impulsively she kicked the sand in the path, sending it spurting ahead of her, the grains glowing as they were caught by the golden light. The man let her pass a few yards. He had judged his position to a nicety. The bushy niche in which he hid was already covered by the evening shade. So careful was his step as he came up behind the girl that his movements were virtually noiseless. The girl herself knew nothing of his presence until the short axe descended on the side of her slim, white neck. She had no time even to scream. Abruptly the half-orb of the sun assumed a more sinister symbolism. Caught in the grip of bloodlust, the man struck again and again, following his victim to the ground while continuing to strike at her with the short axe. The sight and the feel of the first blows he had struck seemed to excited him further. He appeared seized by a terrible passion which took a long time to find fulfillment. Finally the passion was spent. He stepped back and examined the butchered mess, seeming only now to realize that this dead and horrifying thing on the path had scant moments earlier been a living, breathing, human being. Somehow a blood-wet axe was in his hand -- he stared at it -- and his arms were shiny and sticky with gore. the still air seemed to make him wary. Other people were about on this part of the heath and might be coming this way. He tore handfuls of grass off the adjacent bank and wiped away the worst of the blood from his arms. The axe he threw strongly but carelessly into a clump of trees to the left of the path. He watched it spin away, looking relieved. Thousands of people had axes like that. He no longer possessed one. Another sound, nearer this time, made him start. He searched around accusingly, as if suspecting that he was being watched. He located no one, but a premonition seemed to him that he would be unwise to stay. The sun had nearly set and his choice of path through a line of trees behind the bank threw him immediately into a region of dimness. The path was twisting and winding, but the soft ground underfoot left few footmarks and returned no noise as he ran. Only the little plank bridge across a ditch made a sound, but this was lost under the great canopy of leaves above. Emerging on a main path he slowed to a walk so as not to attract attention. Fortunately the dusk was now well advanced and the path was empty. Across a short stretch of open ground a car was waiting, hidden behind the bushes and out of sight of the road. He reached the car with open relief, took a back route winding away through the country lanes. He only emerged into street-lit areas when passing through a town. Knowing that his bloodstained clothes and arms would not stand close inspection, he was careful to avoid any action that might have involved the interest of others. Finally he reached an expressway and drove fast toward home and safety. Safely indoors finally, in a small suburban house far from the scene of the crime, he seemed arrested by the sight of himself in the mirror. A sick face peered back at him. Tseudi path rose steeply to the crest of a bank. Beyond the rise the huge red segment of the setting sun painted the leaves a golden red and made even the dancing gnats glow with a brazen fire. "Camera on." Droplets from the earlier rains still glistened on the ferns and freshened the air, emphasizing the sweet scents of the vegetation. "Hold that in normal time, Tseudi. We're just coming to the critical point." The birds in the nearby trees were gathering for the night. Their songs fell sharp and melodious on the still air. Topping the ridge, the girl turned her face toward the sun's last warmth, her eyes nearly closed as she savored this moment of almost perfect communion with nature. "Can you move the lens in closer, Tseudi? We need all the detail we can get." Impulsively the girl kicked the sand in the path, sending it spurting ahead of her, watching the grains glow in the twilight's golden light. "You won't get a much better view than that," said Tseudi. The prowler let the girl pass a few yards. He had judged his position to a nicety. The bushy niche in which he hid was already covered by the evening shade. So carefully did he step as he came up behind the girl that his movements were virtually noiseless. The girl herself knew nothing of his presence until the short axe descended on the side of her slim, white neck. She had no time even to scream. Abruptly the red half-orb of the sun assumed a more sinister symbolism. Again and again the madman lunged, following his victim to the ground while continuing to strike at her with the axe. The horrible blows he had first struck seemed to induce into him a passion that took a long time to find fulfillment. Methodically he all but dismembered the body, apparently relishing the free flow of the blood and the sight of mutilated flesh and the feel of the axe against bone. In the Eidochron control room the only sound was that of one of the technicians being sick. When his passion was spent the madman stood back and inspected the butchery, seeing it as though for the first time. The axe in his hand and the blood glistening on his bare arms became objects of curiosity. From somewhere inside him a second personality seemed to have emerged and was staring with dawning fright and abhorrence at the atrocity before him. Yet the expression was entirely introspective -- it held no concern or pity for the young girl hacked and mutilated on the path. The presence of the corpse seemed somehow an offense against the attacker -- had it not been there, he would not have been at the scene, sweating and bloodied and very much afraid of being caught and blamed. Tseudi's expression was one of fierce concentration as she fought with the complexities of the controls. Under such pressures, her own emotions had little time to surface. For this she was glad. She hated to faint in public. For the madman escape became a predominant motive. A distant sound carried on the still air raised him to the instant alertness of a hunted animal. He tore handfuls of grass from the adjacent bank and wiped away the worst of the blood on his arms. The axe he threw strongly but carelessly into the clump of trees and bushes to the left of the path. He watched it spin away thankfully, as though its going materially lessened the chances of his being connected with the act of murder. T HE observers also watched the flight of the axe. Tseudi swung the whole field of vision so accurately that it covered the entire flight path of the weapon up to the time it disappeared into the trees. "Run it back, Tseudi, and try to follow it in," said Coyne's voice. "That chopper was never found." The screen blurred momentarily and the axe returned to the madman's hand. This time he threw it with the measured precision of slow motion. The axe moved in a leisurely arc, the view field following it at an apparent distance of a few meters. The field of vision rose high into the air, tracking the weapon over the bushes and down into the green cavity beyond. Abruptly the axe disappeared. Coyne muttered something inaudible and Tseudi again stepped back the image and caught the axe in midflight to follow it down at only a tenth of normal-time rate. Soon the answer became apparent. In some past mishap or act of vandalism the top of a tall, slim, tree had been broken off completely. The living trunk had sprouted a cluster of new branches near the broken crown, but within these the main trunk was deeply split. By sheer accident the axe had entered and lodged within the crevice. The protruding handle was indistinguishable from the small branches from a half-meter's distance and its height was a good five meters from the ground. "Good work, Tseudi. The chopper's probably still up there. No one could ever have found it except by the purest chance." Coyne's enthusiasm somehow never ruffled his persistent calm. "Let's go back and see what happens to our friend." There was another step-back of slightly longer duration. The madman again watched the axe spin away. Sound again caused him to start and he glared fearfully around the clumps of bushes as though he suspected the presence of somebody close by. His gaze finally came to rest accusingly in the direction of the Eidochron quasi-lens, though he could not possibly have seen it. This was a common experience for the Eidochron team and appeared to relate to some latent sixth-sense in some human brains for which there was, as yet, no scientific explanation. Then the fellow began to run. His direction took him along a twisting, wooded path already shaded under the last splash of the dying sun. Tseudi's nimble fingers deftly turned the field of view to the new direction and tried to follow his progress at normal-time rate. Such were the technical and manipulative difficulties of this maneuver that nobody blamed her at all when the sortie was halted with the field of view showing only a leafy treetop caught in the final instants of sunset. Tseudi tried to relocate her quarry from this vantage point by scanning down through the branches, but either the madman had changed his course or his running figure could not be resolved by the Eidochron lens in the low level of available light. Resignedly she stepped back the time scan to a point where he had been fully in view, then tracked him in extended time around a serpentine series of bends, across a plank bridge and finally to where his path was intercepted by a second track. As she had guessed, he had indeed changed his course and was now making in the direction of the main road. In a couple of minutes he was out of the woodland and crossing the open heath. Tseudi's job here became easier, because she could let him walk well ahead, then catch him up with a straight sortie, which the computers could handle without her intervention. Soon she could see the car toward which the man was heading. It was parked behind a hedge, clear of observation from the road. Tseudi ran the quasi-lens ahead and circled the vehicle so that Coyne could acquire all the photographs and details he needed for identification. As the madman reached the car she froze his image in order to confirm that he was indeed the girl's attacker. The blood on his arms and clothes and the weird expression in his eyes left no doubt that he was the same man. They now had his likeness, the whereabouts of the elusive weapon and some details about his vehicle. They still needed his address and his name. H IS driving was fast and erratic, but not sufficiently to arouse the attention of other road users or the police. As darkness fell, Tseudi had virtually nothing to guide her other than the dim tail-lights of the car as it raced along the park lanes. Frequently she had to resort to a closeup of the vehicle time-frozen into stillness in order to ascertain that she was still following the right one. As they reached a town the street lights made identification easier and it was possible to follow the car by sight alone despite the increase in traffic. Beyond the town they met a limited-access expressway, again unlit for its major portion. Here, among the moving from the slower to the fast lanes and back, Tseudi lost her quarry completely. Again and again she stepped back in time to where the vehicle had entered the expressway and tried to follow it through. The complexity of the traffic pattern continued to baffle her and she finished following some wrong vehicle. Coyne, however, was equal to the situation. By careful calculation he stepped the Eidochron forward in time while Tseudi stationed the view field at each exit ramp in turn to cover the period when their quarry was most likely to emerge if that was the route he had chosen. At the fifth attempt their vigil was rewarded. Clearly identified, the murderer's car left the highway at the point they were watching and Tseudi easily swung the field to follow it as it slowed for the side roads. Then followed a jumble of suburban streets, which the driver obviously knew well. Occasionally Coyne would ask for the tracking to be suspended while he searched for roadnames and marked out the route on his maps. Finally they followed the car into a small outhouse garage where the murderer, now looking tired and sick, left it and walked to an adjacent house. The insubstantial quasi-lens followed inquisitively through the wall. The house was old and poorly decorated inside, but it was tidy enough and its order showed strongly the touch of a feminine hand. It was obvious, however, that at this moment the murderer was its sole occupant. He stopped in front of the tall mirror in the foyer and examined his appearance with horror, apparently haunted by the anguished eyes staring back at him from the blood-speckled pallor of his face. Uttering a low moan, he began work to repair his appearance. His first action was to strip and take a bath. Then, wearing fresh clothing, he picked up his soiled garments and dumped them in a bath of warm water with an overdose detergent. His shoes could not be similarly cleaned -- these he opted to drop into the solid-fuel burner in the kitchen. Having progressed this far, he went out again into the darkness with several buckets of warm water which he poured over the plastics cover of the driving seat on the car. Apparently satisfied that he had removed all traces of the crime, he returned to the lounge and sat leafing abstractedly through a pile of magazines for some thirty minutes before he went to bed. "Now we have the where," said Coyne. "All we need now is the name." Tseudi deftly time-stepped through to the next morning and focused on the doormat. Finally some letters were delivered through the letterbox. Fortuitously both of these fell faceup. One was addressed to Mrs. Edith Pennal, the second to Roger Pennal, Esq. The first was set aside on the shelf when the murderer came down in the morning. The second one he opened. "Need any more?" asked Tseudi Hyde. Her usually trim brow was deeply furrowed. The strain of the precise and prolonged operation had left her limp. Coyne turned up the lights and shook his head. "No, I think that's all we need. That was a very good run, Tseudi." S HE closed down the control panel in front of her and the image of Pennal's doormat faded from the screen. At her side Coyne was still watching the fading image, his calm face full of intelligence and comprehension. Tseudi turned. "Would you mind if I handled the police contact on this one, Michael?" "Of course not. You know the routine. But you'll do it tomorrow, not tonight." "Why not tonight?" The condition surprised her. "Because you're tired and could easily give too much away. And because you've become emotionally involved. You identified with the victim and that colored your reactions throughout the rest of the operation." "I thought you said it was a good run." "One of the best ever -- that's how I know how involved you were. You weren't working to establish the truth, Tseudi -- you were working for revenge. You achieved a four-dimensional fix on a target moving at a fast transit rate and you did so with the ease other people drive a car. It wasn't the Eidochron that followed Pennal back to his house -- it was Tseudi Hyde making like an avenging angel." His quiet humor brought a tired smile from her, soon overlaid by a sober consideration. "What will happen to Pennal? Life imprisonment?" "At a guess -- he'll be found unfit to plead. But if he does stand trial the police may find the case difficult to prove. The crime took place a month ago remember. The blood on the axe handle was wet and may not have retained prints. He burned his shoes, so the footprint casts won't match anything they'll still be able to find -- and there weren't any witnesses. If he managed to clean the car properly or has since disposed of it, the evidence will be dangerously thin. Unless his conscience gives him away it could be that the police won't get a conviction." Tseudi was horrified. "But we saw him do it." "Eidochron evidence would never be admissible in a court -- and even if it were I couldn't make it available." "Not even to put a monster like that behind bars?" "Not even then, Tseudi. You know that. When we run the Eidochron we're uniquely privileged observers of the human scene. We also acquire a unique responsibility. The more you consider the ethics of Eidochron operation, the more terrible the responsibility becomes." "Terrible?" "Certainly. It can go back and see things hopefully forgotten. It can peer through walls into all the private moments of life. It can examine in detail all those things you never intended other eyes should see. The voyeur, the blackmailer, the jealous wife, the market-research man, the tax inspector and the ambitious politician would all use it if they could. That's why they mustn't ever have access to it." "You're looking only at the debit side. Wouldn't justice be better served by having eyewitness access to the crime?" "Justice, perhaps, but not humanity. Those controls under your fingers contain everything needed to support the most horrifying tyranny in history. Tales of Big Brother pale into insignificance compared with the researches an Eidochron could do on your life. Could you live, could you even think, never knowing whose eyes were watching, what notes they were taking, what conclusions, right or wrong, were being drawn?" She looked at him steadfastly for a long moment, then smiled wearily. "No," she said. "You're right, Michael. You always are." "Then you appreciate why I won't let you use the results out of a spirit of revenge. Used only for establishing the truth, the Eidochron's a dangerous toy. Used as an instrument for profit or vengeance, it's a terrifying weapon. Go home and sleep on it, Tseudi. Call the police only when you feel able to give them a dispassionate account of the facts. The rest is up to them. We daren't get more involved than that." , Grattan A Sir. Claims to have a message direct from Crimescan." "Put her through immediately. Hullo? Chief Inspector Grattan speaking. Who is this please?" "The name's not important, but the message is," said Tseudi. "I've Crimescan information concerning the Kingswood murder case." "I'm afraid I must ask your name and address, madam." "And I'm afraid you won't get it. What's got into you this morning? Do you want the information or not?" "Certainly I want it. But if we need any verification it would be useful if we knew how to contact you." "Forget it. Sorry if I've wasted your time." "Don't hang up." Grattan's voice carried a note of genuine alarm. "If you feel you must remain anonymous I'll accept that. But give me the message." "Keep her talking," said Spier's voice in his other ear. "Promise her anything you like, but keep her talking long enough for me to trace that call." "You don't have any choice." Tseudi's voice returned again, slightly doubtful. "The information concerns the assailant of Patricia Wellman, the girl who was hacked to death near Kingswood. The name of her attacker is Roger Pellan." "Hold for a second while I get another pencil. That's better -- how do you spell it?" "P-e-l-l-a-n. And his address is..." Grattan took notes in immaculate shorthand, scowling disapprovingly at the recording and monitoring equipment that cluttered his office and at Spier, whom he disliked. Spier was busy attempting to trace the call. "I've got that, Miss -- er -- " "Stop fishing. Chief. I've no time for games. Listen carefully. The murder weapon was a short axe. Pellan threw it away at the scene of the crime. By accident it became lodged in the top of a broken tree, the chances are that it's still there." "If it's there we'll find it. Anything else?" "He wiped his arms on some grass from the bank, but the blood was the girl's, not his. There's a path through the trees right near the spot. He ran down it, then walked left along the major footpath, which is marked on the Ordnance Survey map. He had a car parked behind the hedge near the main road and he used it to drive himself home. As far as we know he encountered nobody who might be able to identify him." "Except you?" "Had I been there. Chief, you'd have heard about it as soon as I'd made the nearest phone -- not a month later." "I appreciate, your point. Please continue." "I'll give you details of the car. Registration number -- " As he made the notes, Grattan turned to see how Spier was progressing. The latter was engaged in earnest conversation over his radio-telephone link. From his agitation it was obvious that he was nearing his goal but had not attained it. Tseudi's voice continued. "The inside of the car received a lot of traces of the girl's blood from Pennal's hands and clothes. He went out again later and poured buckets of water over the seat. He soaked all his own clothes in biological detergent except for his shoes, which he burned in the kitchen stove. That's about all I can tell you." "And you say there were no witnesses?" "None who might have had cause to mark the occasion -- and none who came near enough to make an identification likely. Someone named Edith Pennal also seems to be living at the house, but she was definitely not present on the night in question." "Would you mind telling me how you know all this, Miss -- " "Sorry, but that's all the information I have to give. This conversation is ended."... stared speculatively at the receiver. Whoever you may be, lady, take care of yourself. A lot of real mean people are after whatever it is you've got... Spier finished on the radiotelephone and came back with a sour look on his face. "She got away, damn it. She was using a public phone in at the railroad station. The railroad police managed to get a man there within seconds of the call's ending, but she had vanished. We've sealed off the phone in case she left some fingerprints, but we've really not much to go on." "Do you expect me to say I'm sorry?" asked Grattan critically. "Whatever Crimescan is, it does a real public service -- it's given us invaluable leads on a number of tough cases. I don't see why you want to persecute the lady. It's not against the law to give information to the police, you know." Spier scowled. "Was she one of your regular Crimescan contacts?" "One of them, yes." "Then why the hell did you go through that business of demanding her name? You must have known you wouldn't get it." "It's standard police procedure," said Grattan obtusely. "A warning, more likely. Something to make her wary." "You'd find that difficult to prove." "Look, you're not being very helpful. Your instructions were to give me the fullest cooperation. All I get from you is antagonism." "I may have to cooperate," said Grattan. "But that doesn't mean I also have to like what you're doing. I don't know what you security people are up to and I don't think I'd care to know. In my book you're a lot of black bastards who seem to think they're above the law. But when one of your boyscout charades threatens to foul up the most valuable source of information I've got I definitely begin to see red." "That's your bad luck!" said Spier, unimpressed. "I've got a job to do and not you nor anybody else is going to get in the way. Try another funny trick like that and I'll break you, Grattan. Now let's play back the recording of that call and see if we can get more ideas." "What sort of ideas?" "Ideas like who this girl and her friends are, where they operate from and exactly what it is they use to get information that isn't possible to get." "I still don't see what Crimescan has to do with security." "You're being remarkably thick. Chief. Take this case alone -- the girl says that Pennal went home and washed his clothes in biological detergent. Was she actually there? Doubtful, because girls don't usually associate with a man who's just chopped up one of them. So how the hell could she have known what type of detergent he used?" "I honestly don't know." "Then I'll tell you. They've got something that gives them the ability to see through walls. Think of the fun you could have with a gadget like that in offices or around a government security establishment. Think of the profit you could make. What price would you put on official secrets?" "Have you any reason to believe Crimescan has been used in that way?" "No. But would you care to bet it won't be? Not knowing what it is or who controls it?" "I'd be most unhappy right now -- if I were in power and had something to hide. Alternatively I might decide that duplicity in government had become outmoded and root for the formation of the first truly honest administration of law and order in history. I always did have the feeling that government secrecy is directed more against the people than against a possible enemy." Spier's reply was preluded by a look of sheer malice. "There's also a second implication. They couldn't have known the murder was going to happen. They must have started from the murder as an existing fact and viewed it retrospectively. In short, they can locate a point in time as well as space. They can not only see what a man's doing, but also everything he's done. For all I know they may be able to see into the future as well." "Clean living is the only safeguard," Grattan said, a hint of mischief about his lips. "But there's nothing new about it. The gypsies have been playing around with the past, present and the future since time began." "This is different. I suspect a technological approach, one that obviously works." "Then would it be automated fortune-telling you're trying to sell me?" "Grattan, if you needle me any more I'll crucify you! I'm trying to get it through your thick skull that these people, whoever they are, are a damn sight too clever. There isn't a secret in the country they couldn't find if they wished. And that's far too dangerous a power to leave floating around in the hands of nameless private citizens, no matter how well intentioned." "Meaning that if you government people acquire it, it's perfectly right for you to use it to inspect the lives of the populace -- but if there's the remotest chance that a taxpayer might use it on you we have a national disaster?" "You're beginning to get the point, chum." "And you're beginning to make my stomach crawl. Patricia Wellman was hacked to pieces by a maniac. It was senseless brutality without even rape as a motive. Unfortunately we've never been able to trace her assailant. He's free to strike down somebody else at any time. Now that Crimescan has given us his name we can see that doesn't happen." "You make my heart bleed. So a girl was chopped up -- you're talking about the death of an individual. I'm talking about the security of the whole damn country." "You're dealing in abstractions, Spier. My concern is with the facts of a murder that's been committed -- and the possible prevention of another. Crimescan is helping to uphold the law and making the world a safer place to live in. For those of you who work above the law I've neither time nor sympathy. God help the lot of us if things ever start going all your way." Spier bance of the evidence, it was decided to cut the top off the tree. Spier's face had been peculiarly impassive as he watched the cradle of the hydraulic hoist swing the saw into position. Now, as the broken treecrown was carefully lowered to the ground and the axe itself became visible, even he could not suppress a marked reaction. Grattan's photographs of the atrocity had made their point. Soon the police departed with their trophy. Major Spier remained, walking thoughtfully through the area, trying to analyze the nature of the device for which he was looking. It required vision without presence -- vision with retrospective ability. Neither seemed conceptually impossible. High-definition electronic-scan radar could produce a reasonable image from a moderate distance and any form of recording held the potential for retrospective replay. The ingenious part of Crimescan would be the focusing and the method of regressing the focal point back through time without the necessity of having recorded everything beforehand. Spier shrugged and went back to his car. The things being done with lasers and electron optics in advanced research laboratories never ceased to amaze him, even though he had an advanced degree in physics as a necessary part of his qualifications for technical security projects. He knew instinctively that his analysis of the mechanism of Crimescan was naive and imprecise, but a fundamental tenet clung in his mind. Data transmission required power -- and the greater the number of "bits" of information transmitted and the greater the distance, the greater the power requirement had to be. Furthermore, if the data were acquired by the process of interrogating a passive element and reading the reflection, then the primary transmitter would need to radiate a very significant amount of energy. With this in mind he began a search that took him through doors only his high security standing could open -- into various electronic research and communications laboratories, monitoring stations and radar establishments. Using as a starting point the dates of several major crimes that had been the subject of Crimescan activities, he was looking for records of significant transmissions of energy at times corresponding to those of the crime or at times slightly preceding Crimescan's reports to the police. He drew a blank. If such transmissions had existed they occupied parts of the radio spectrum not normally being monitored. Most of his contacts, however, were of the opinion that it would be possible to detect such transmissions if it were known when they were likely to occur. Spier was not a man who believed in chance. He laid his plans with the greatest care. The weak link was Chief Inspector Grattan and Spier set out in person to convert him to the cause. Grattan had already been advised to offer the fullest cooperation -- word had come down to him from the highest levels. Grattan greeted Spier dourly and listened to his proposals without enthusiasm. "Now let me get this straight, Major Spier. If I understand you correctly you want me to set up all the trappings of a major investigation of a murder that didn't actually happen." "I didn't say it won't happen. I'm merely saying that what you will see will be something that has been staged. We'll present you with an apparent case that will meet the requirements for headlines -- the victim, the murder weapon and everything needed to make it look authentic. All you have to do is fail to solve it. We want Crimescan to have a go at it. And when they do we'll have our detectors waiting for them." "But I've already solved it," said Grattan testily. "You're responsible -- and I can think of nothing I'd enjoy more than getting you put away for life." "I need hardly tell you the case would never get to court." "Where would you get this -- ah -- victim?" "That's my worry, not yours. All we need from you is the touch of realism that will bring Crimescan into action." "You mean to tell me you'd actually take a life in order to trap a public benefactor?" Grattan was incredulous. "You know how highly security rates possession of Crimescan. We have to get hold of it somehow. It's nothing to you where the body comes from or where it goes." "That's where you're wrong. I care very much where it comes from. I wouldn't be a good policeman if I didn't. If you've got the sort of immunity that places you above moral law as well as above the law of the land I suggest that you appeal to the Almighty for help -- not me." "Don't try to fight me, " said Spier. "You're going to help me -- and you know damned well why." "Oh, that? The resignation bit? Well I've certainly no intention of resigning just to suit your convenience. If I'm disciplined for disregarding 'friendly' advice from upstairs -- that's a different matter. Other people, too, will then have their consciences to examine." "Then you won't cooperate?" "I'll treat a murder case as a murder case. If I can solve it, I will. If I run out of luck -- then I'll hope that Crimescan will step in with some answers. I'll go no farther than that." "That's not good enough," said Spier. "I'll have to work with somebody more amenable. You'll find your duties have been reorganized, Chief. I advise you to take the hint and resign. Otherwise you might find the going rather tough." "I'll see you in hell first," said Grattan. Coyne three days and sought for his gambling debts for ten times longer, reacted to the knock on his door as a man with less on his mind might react to the finding of a poisonous snake in his bed. Instantly alert and trembling violently, he searched around for a makeshift weapon or an avenue of escape. He found neither. "Open up, Lazio. We know you're there." "No!" Lazio's voice came out as a hysterical squeak. "I need more time. Maxine promised me." "Maxine's given you all the time you're going to get, Lazio. Now she wants blood. Are you going to open this door or do we have to kick it down?" "For God's sake -- I'll get the money! I promise I'll get the money." "Where from?" A blow on the door splintered the wood around the lock. Wildly Lazio scanned the room for any conceivable means of defense. An ancient marble-topped washstand seemed to offer the only chance. Fortunately the marble was no longer secured to the wood and the heavy slab came away easily in his frantic hands. He stationed himself behind the door, the slab raised above his head. The door flew open with a crash. There was a blur of somebody following it rapidly into the room and Lazio struck with all his strength. The descending slab caught the intruder squarely on the him instantly. As he fell to the ground a gun clattered across the floor. Lazio dived low and followed the gun, recoiled like a cobra, the weapon in his hands. Somebody shouted a hoarse warning. As Lazio turned to fire, two bullets from outside the door dropped him even as he pulled the trigger. His shot went wide and buried itself in the wall. A brief buzz of argument became audible outside the apartment, was followed by the sound of a panicky exodus. From a lower stair landing came the discernible words: "It was self-defense -- him or me. Maxine shouldn't have let that gunhappy bastard come along. It had to cause trouble -- " The slam of the front door returned the house to silence. Tseudi froze the action at that point and looked at Coyne for guidance. Coyne was leafing through a file of newspaper clippings with a frown of mystification. "I wonder what's going on, Tseudi. We know Pietr Lazio was shot, but there's no mention in the press of the man who had his head crushed. There's been some suppression of information here. "A D-notice?" asked Tseudi, referring to the news-media censorship document. "Possibly. Though I don't see any political or security implications here. I suppose it could be that the authorities knew who the other dead man was and had reasons for not wishing him implicated. But why suppress only half the story and not all of it? Back track on him, Tseudi, and let's see where he came from. It could be you were right -- that Grattan was trying to warn us." "Right." With nimble fingers she reversed the time sense, and after an appropriate delay the body sprang back from the floor, the marble slab was lifted away from his repairing skull. He blurred backward and out. The door closed and repaired its splintered woodwork. Tseudi swung the Eidochron lens through the door and surveyed the faces of the men on the landing. momentary halt. Tseudi froze the image and moved in for a close up of the man who had never been reported dead. "Mean anything?" she asked. "The face is vaguely familiar, but I can't place him. Certainly he had nothing to do with gambling. I'd swear I've brushed shoulders with him at technical conferences -- but I don't see how he comes to be in this sort of company." Tseudi concentrated then, intent on the difficult manipulation of following three men down the stairs through all the three physical dimensions while still holding reversed normal-time congruency. Outside the house, where the men drove off backward in a car, she had to slow the image considerably in order not to lose track of them in the traffic. Fortunately this time she was able to track the car by daylight. up near a small drinking and gaming club and all three men went in backward. Tseudi was just about to make the quasi-lens follow when their particular quarry came out alone, entered the car again and backed down the street. His retreat took him not home, as Tseudi had anticipated, but finally into the gates of an electronics research establishment. This was the first time Tseudi had ever heard Coyne swear. "What does it all mean?" I  .  "It's a trap, Tseudi. And we'reln it. I've just remembered who our mysterious body is. He's Major Spier -- a scientific security man. He's usually behind the scenes at international conferences and he's made it possible for a number of scientists to defect from behind the Iron Curtain." "Then what's he doing in this instance?" "Provoking a murder incident -- with a top electronics radiation lab primed to locate our Eidochron transmissions. A curious touch of poetic justice that -- he got himself killed in the process." "Hence the D-notice," said Tseudi. "But that was a month ago. If they had been able to locate us they would surely have been here long ago." Coyne shook his great, gray head. "No. At that time they would have been able to detect only the eido-refringent lens response -- and that would have given a signal at the scene of the crime and everywhere we've traveled this morning. They could have been certain that Crimescan would investigate, but they couldn't have located us until now. Our danger is the interrogation transmission we're putting out at this moment. How long have we been on the air?" "Ninety-six minutes all told." "More than enough time for them to have gotten a fix on us. I'm sorry, Tseudi, but this is the end of Crimescan. The game's over." H IS face registered no particular emotion as he reached past Tseudi's shoulder to press the button marked destruct. Whatever bitterness he might have felt was swamped by the generous tide of his own maturity. "It's a pity it had to come to this. Twenty minutes, Tseudi, to get clear. There won't be much damage outside the building, but inside there'll be very little left." Tseudi began to close down the control panel, but Coyne stopped her gently. "Let it run. It can make no difference now." He slipped into the control seat and began resetting the controls for a forward scan of their own location only an hour away in future time. Tseudi seized her handbag, gathered her coat and made ready to depart with the other technicians. Then, on seeing Coyne still seated at the controls, she came back to him. "Aren't you coming, Michael?" "I'll be leaving shortly," said Coyne. "First I have to make sure that there'll be nothing left after destruct that would enable the Eidochron ever to be rebuilt. It's a terrible toy we've been playing with, you and I. Something I can't let fall into the hands of less responsible people. You run along, Tseudi -- and thanks for everything!" Finally alone, Coyne carefully scanned the charred and blasted wreckage of the equipment rooms after destruct, nodding with approval as he saw the destruction had been as absolute as he had planned. The twin elements of his genius, the eidorefringent lens projectors and the time-scanning grids, were smashed beyond the possibility of recovery or analysis of their function. Apart from confirming that the device once had existed, the ruins of the Eidochron would contribute nothing to anyone wishing to recreate the process. Even the microfilmed drawings and documents had been vaporized by the aluminothermic fuses built into the storecase and the cabinet itself was reduced to a block of metallic slag. One possibility remained -- one factor that even yet held all the information necessary to rebuild the Eidochron from first principles. For a long while Coyne could not locate what he was looking for. He gave a sigh of relief when he found it -- the image of his own body dead among the ruins of the control room. He sat back in the chair and waited quietly for the installation around him to disintegrate. He found some consolation in the fact that even in death his image had still been softly smiling.  galaxy Special Introductory Offer: good in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bester James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menzel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silver berg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut. Jr. H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U S. end Canada, send coupon to : New York. N.Y. # For United Kingdom , send coupon to: London SW# #RD  # issues of IF for # # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription as checked above. No man who remained as God had made him could kill the White Whale of the Rim Worlds! I window of his office, which overlooked the Port Forlorn berthing apron, watched the starship New Bedford coming in. She was a stranger to the Rim Worlds. According to Lloyd's Register she was owned by the Hummel Foundation of Earth. The Foundation, Grimes knew, had been set up for the intensive study of xenobiology -- its Interstellar Zoo, covering hundreds of square miles of Australia's Central Desert, was famous throughout the galaxy. Almost equally famous was New Bedford's master, Captain Haab. He was both master astronaut and big game hunter -- an unlikely combination, but a highly successful one. And what was Captain Haab doing out on the Rim? Grimes could guess. Slowly New Bedford dropped down from the clear sky -- her arrival had coincided with one of Port Forlorn's rare fine days. She gleamed dazzlingly in the bright morning sunlight. As she gradually lost altitude the beat of her inertial drive rose from an irritable muttering to a noisy, unrhythmic drumming, frightening the snowbirds -- which at this time of the year infested the spaceport -- into glittering, clattering flight. The commodore picked up binoculars, studied the descending ship. He already knew that she was modified Epsilon Class, but was interested in the extent of the modifications. She looked more like a warship than a merchantman, the otherwise sleek lines of her hull broken by turrets and sponsons. Most of these seemed to be recent additions. She must have been specially fitted out for this expedition. No doubt, Grimes thought. Captain Haab would be visiting him as soon as the arrival formalities were over and done with -- it would be more of a business than a courtesy call. But everything was ready. The files of reports were still in Grimes' office, the spools of film, the threedimensional charts with their plotted sightings and destructions. If Haab wanted information -- which he almost certainly would -- he should have it. New Bedford was almost down now, dropping neatly into the center of the triangle marked by the brightly flashing red beacons. Already the beetlelike ground cars of the spaceport officials -- port captain, port health officer, customs -- had ventured on to the apron, were waiting to close in. But Haab, with all the resources of the Hummel Foundation behind him, would have no trouble in obtaining inward clearance. New Bedford was down at last. Her inertial drive complained for the last time, then lapsed into silence. A telescopic mast extended from high on her hull, at control room level, and from it broke out a flag that fluttered in the light breeze. It was not, Grimes realized, the houseflag of the Hummel Foundation, a stylized red dragon on a green field. This standard was white ""I ndjblue NmsWalton, Grimes' secretary, had come to stand with him at the window. "What a funny ensign -- what is it supposed to be? It looks like an airship, a blimp in a blue sky -- " The commodore laughed. "I think that the blue is supposed to represent sea, not sky. And that's jiot a blimp -- " "What is it, then, Commodore?" "It could be a white whale," Grimes told her. (# you, sir," announced Miss Walton. Grimes looked up from his desk where he had been blue-penciling the stores requisition sent in by the chief officer of Rim Percheron. "Show him in," he told his secretary. The girl returned to the office followed by Haab. The master of New Bedford was a tall man, thin, towering over the little blonde. There was an oddly archaic cut to his tightly fitting black suit, to his stiff, white linen and black stock. His face was gaunt and deeply tanned between his closely cropped black hair and black chin beard. His eyes were a startlingly pale blue. He walked with a peculiarly jerky motion and from his right leg came a strange faint clicking noise. Grimes rose to his feet, extended his right hand. "Welcome to Port Forlorn, Captain." Haab took the commodore's hand in his own almost skeletal claw. "Thank you, sir." "Sit down. Captain. Tea? Coffee?" "Coffee if I may, Commodore. Black." "Will you attend to it, please, Miss Walton? Black coffee for two. And did you have a good voyage out, Captain?" "A quiet voyage." "First time I've seen anybody from the Hummel Foundation out here. Of course, we haven't much in the way of exotic fauna on the Rim. Not on the man-colonized planets, that is. Most of our animals were raised from Terran stock." "I'm not concerned with any of the life forms actually on the planets, Commodore." A grin softened Grimes' craggy face. "I can guess what you've come for, Captain -- " Miss Walton brought in the coffee tray, set it on the desk. Grimes said to the girl, "Would you mind having the projection room ready? You know the films we shall want -- those that the admiralty lent me." "The ones shot on the LornLlanith route, sir?" "Of course." "Very good, sir. Oh, would you mind if I asked Captain Haab a question?" "Go ahead. Miss Walton." The girl addressed herself to New Bedford's master. "I'm interested in flags, sir. What is the one that you have flying from your ship?" Haab smiled thinly. "It's my own personal broad pennant. The Foundation allows me to wear it." "But what is it, Captain?" "A white whale," replied Haab. "As I've already told you," grunted Grimes. "And now will you get those films ready?" "And could you fill me in while we're waiting?" Haab asked Grimes. "Of course, Captain. I'll start at the beginning."tl Grimes, "we operate lightjammers on the run between the Rim Worlds and the Llanithi Consortium. The lightjammers are the only ships that can have their atomic charges reversed so that they can land on the anti-matter worlds without blowing themselves -- and anybody else within ten thousand miles -- to glory. The lightjammers had been running into trouble -- a strange vessel kept appearing on a collision course, shoving them away to hell and gone off trajectory -- " Haab smiled. "You'll probably be hearing from the Rhine Institute about that. But the Hummel Foundation is concerned with living beings, not ghosts, not even such famous ghosts as the Flying Dutchman." "Just as well. Since the navy started cleaning up the shipping lanes old Vanderdecken has been conspicuous by his absence. Maybe he's found a home on Atlantia. They still go in for sail in a big way there. "Well, after the first reports came in I decided I'd better see for myself, so my wife and I took passage from Lorn to Llanith in Pamir. At that time it was thought that the Flying Dutchman was another lightjammer, a foreign ship snooping on our trade routes. But we had with us the Reverend Madam Swithin of the United Primitive Spiritualist Church, going out to Llanith as a missionary. Thanks to her we found out what the Flying Dutchman was and that Vanderdecken was warning us about something. "So I grounded the lightjammers and sent a report to Admiral Kravitz, urging him to make a fullscale investigation. He did. Luckily our fleet was out on maneuvers at the time so it all fitted in with the war games that were being played. Instead of the usual Redland versus Blueland it was the armed might of the Confederacy versus the Menace from Intergalactic Space. Mphm." Haab registered strong disapproval. "Not a hunt," he growled, "but a military operation -- " "Of course. If one of our lightjammers had run into a herd of those things -- or even a single one -- there would have been a shocking mess. Don't forget that the Erikson Drive ships, unlike the Mannschenn Drive jobs, remain in normal space-time while accelerating to the velocity of light and The energy eaters -- " "Is that what you call them?" "What else? The energy eaters were a menace to navigation and they were dealt with as such." "I still don't like it." "You're not master of a lightjammer, Captain. Oh, all right, all right, you're a big game hunter as well as being a shipmaster. But the EEs don't have nice, horned heads that you can hang on the wall. They don't have pretty pelts that can be made into fireside rugs." "I want a living specimen." "I doubt if your marvelous zoo in Central Australia would be able to accommodate it." "A zoo need not be on a planetary surface. Commodore. The plans for an orbital zoo have been drawn up, with lines of magnetic force among a grouping of small artificial satellites forming the bars of a cage. If I capture' a specimen the Foundation will have everything ready for its reception when I get it back to Earth." "If you capture a specimen. The navy's doing a good job." Haab inhaled deeply from the villainous black cigar that he was smoking as a counter measure to Grimes' foul pipe. He withdrew the thing from his mouth and his right hand, holding it, rested on his knee. Grimes sneezed. There was more than tobacco smoke in those acrid fumes. He said hastily, "You're setting yourself on fire, Captain." The other man looked down at the little, charred circle in the cloth of his trousers, beat out the embers with his left hand. Grimes said, "You must feel deeply on the subject. You didn't notice that you were burning yourself." "I do feel deeply, Commodore. But this leg's prosthetic. I lost the original on Tanganore when a harpooned spurzil took retaliatory action. The Tanganorans fitted me out with this tin leg and, by the time I got back to Earth where I could have had a new fiesh-and-blood one grown, I'd gotten used to it. In any case -- I couldn't spare the time for a regeneration job." "Tanganore? That's in the Cepheid Sector, isn't it? And what is a spurzil?" "A sort of big armor-protected whale. White." "And now you're hunting Moebius Dick himself." "Moebius Dick, Commodore?" "I thought that your private flag was supposed to represent the original Moby Dick." "No. It represents the spurzil that took a piece of me. It's a reminder to myself to be careful. But Moebius Dick?" "Wait until you've seen the films, Captain Haab." darkened projection room and Miss Walton started the projector. Slowly the screen came alive and in it glowed words: operation The credit titles were succeeded by a spoken account of what was happening, by some quite good shots of lightjammers arriving at and departing from Port Erikson, by an excellent shot of Herzogin Cecile making sail. The voice of the commentator said, "But these ships, the pride of our merchant navy and the first vessels successfully to trade with the anti-matter Llanithi Consortium, discovered that all was not plain sailing." Grimes contrived to wince audibly. "A new menace appeared on the trade routes and only by taking violent evasive action were the lightjammers able to escape certain destruction." "No mention of Vanderdecken," commented Haab. "Our navy refuses to believe in ghosts," Grimes told him. "Their psychologists have a marvelous theory that the Flying Dutchman was no more than a projection of our own precognitive fears, a visual presentation of a hunch." The commentator went on: "Commodore John Grimes of the Rim Worlds naval reserve -- also astronautical superintendent of Rim Runners -- was a passenger aboard the lightjammer Pamir. He was in her control room when the master, acting upon a hunch, trimmed his sails in order to make a large alteration of course to port -- " "I like that!" snorted Grimes. "I had to bully the stubborn bastard into making that alteration." " -- deciding that there must have been some unseen danger ahead of the ship, Commodore Grimes made a report to Admiral Kravitz, recommending that a thorough survey be made of the trade routes between Lorn and Llanith. At the time the fleet was out on maneuvers off Eblis and the frigates Rim Culverin and Rim Carronade were "detached to carry out investigations in the neighborhood of Llanith." The last shot of a lightjammer under sail faded from the screen, was replaced by one of a conventional warship proceeding under Mannschenn Drive, obviously taken from a sister ship. In the background glowed the warped, convoluted Galactic Lens, an oval of luminescence twisted through and into an infinity of dimensions. The outline of Rim Culverin herself was hard and clear. "Arriving at the position in which, according to Commodore Grimes' report, the danger was thought to exist, Rim Culverin and Rim Carronade reduced to cruising speed and initiated a search pattern. Both vessels, of course, had their mass proximity indicators tuned to maximum sensitivity. Eventually a target was seen in the screens, the indications being that it was something extremely small, with barely sufficient mass to register. It must be pointed out, however, that collision with a dust mote at a speed close to that of light could have serious consequences -- " "How do your lightjammers guard against that?" asked Haab. "We don't. Cosmic dust is something that we don't have any of out on the Rim." "What about hydrogen atoms? Wouldn't they be as bad?" "We don't have any of those either -- or the operation of lightjammers would be impossible. But look!" " -- inertial drive only, Rim Culverin and Rim Carronade approached the target with caution. Radar had been put into operation when the ships made their reentry into normal space-time and proved more effective than the mass proximity indicator had been. The original target was resolved into a cluster of targets, each presenting an echo in the screen equivalent to that given by a small ship, such as a scout. Furthermore, as the range decreased to a hundred kilometers and less, the targets could be seen visually." In the screen was what looked like a star cluster, bright against the intergalactic nothingness. "The cautious approach was continued -- " The effect now was more like a swarm of fireflies than a star cluster. The points of light were in rapid motion, weaving about each other in an intricate dance. The ship from which the film had been taken was approaching the shimmering display -- probably magnification was being stepped up at the same time. If it were not -- then the approach was far from cautious. Each of the dancing lights possessed a definite shape. "Haloes," murmured Haab. "Not haloes," Grimes told him. "Look more closely. Captain." Nonetheless, haloes they could have been, living annuli of iridescence -- but twisted haloes. As they rotated about their centers they flared fitfully, seemed to vanish, flared again. "What do they remind you of?" asked Grimes. "The antenna of a Carlotti beacon or transceiver," replied Haab after a moment's thought. "But circular, instead of elliptical -- that's what I thought when I saw the stills that the Survey Service passed on to the Foundation. It's more obvious when you see the things in motion." "In other words," said Grimes, "a Moebius Strip. But watch." The voice of the commentator came up again. " Rim Culverin dispatched a drone to make a closer investigation -- " There was a shot of the little craft -- a spaceship in miniature, bristling with a complex array of scanners and antennae -- pulling out and clear from the parent ship. Rim Carronade s camera tracked her until she was too distant for details to be distinguished. Then this picture was replaced by the one seen by the probe's electronic eyes. The small unmanned craft was making a close approach to ohe of the whirling rings of light. The enigmatic thing was almost featureless, although flecks of greater luminosity on its surface were indicative of its rotation. It was a Moebius Strip made from a wide, radiant ribbon. It flared and dimmed like an isophase beacon with a period synchronized with that of its revolution. It could have been a machine -- yet it gave the impression that it was alive. It filled the screen, spinning, pulsing -- and then there was blackness. The commentator said in a matter of fact voice, "The drone went dead. It had not been destroyed, however. Powerful telescopes and radar aboard both ships could still pick it up. But it was obvious that all its electronic equipment had suddenly ceased to function. "It was obvious, too, that the cluster of mysterious entities was approaching the frigates at high velocity. Captain Laverton, aboard Rim Carronade, ordered a withdrawal from the scene. Rim Carronade and Rim Culverin proceeded west, first at normal cruising speed, then increasing to maximum inertial drive acceleration. But the hostile beings steadily decreased the range. Rim Carronade and Rim Culverin were obliged to open fire with their sternmounted laser cannon -- " II T HE screen showed the false star cluster again, but its individual components were no longer dancing about each other, maintaining a globular formation -- they were holding a steady trajectory. They were no longer alternating between light and darkness. Every now and again they would flare into increased "Realizing that laser was an encouragement rather than a deterrent," the commentator went on, "Captain Laverton decided to take evasive action and ordered the starting of the Mannschenn Drive units aboard his ship and Rim Culverin, reasoning that once the frigates were out of synchronization with normal space-time the hostile entities would be unable to press home their attack. At firstit seemed that these tactics would be successful, but after a lapse of no more than fifteen seconds the things reappeared at even closer range than before, obviously matching temporal precession rates. Captain Laverton returned to normal spacetime briefly -- and in the few seconds before he restarted his Mannschenn Drive, just as the entities reappeared off Rim Carronade's quarter, launched a torpedo with a fission warhead fused for almost instant detonation. This defensive action was successful." The screen displayed a fireball of incandescent plasma, expanding and thinning, the obvious aftermath of an atomic explosion in deep space. Through the cloud of glowing gases could be seen only a mere half dozen of the entities -- earlier there had been at least fifty of the things. Laverton observed that the majority of the creatures had been destroyed and that the few survivors were sluggish and -- he thought erroneously -- badly injured. Two were dispatched by laser fire. The remaining four retreated rapidly, eluding the frigates. "The first phase of Operation Rimhunt was over." "The next spool, sir?" asked Miss Walton. "Not just yet, if you don't mind," replied Haab. Then: "I beg your pardon. Commodore. But I'd like to talk about what we've just seen first." "Talk away, Captain." Grimes refilled and lit his pipe. "Talk away." "As you know, Commodore, I've seen the stills and read the reports that your navy passed on to the Federation Survey Service, that the Survey Service, in its turn, passed on to the Foundation. I was present at most of the conferences of the Foundation's boffins. I didn't understand all they were saying, but I caught the general drift. The energy eaters, as they dubbed them, are just that. Their peculiar Moebius Strip configuration ensures that their entire surface is exposed to any source of radiation. According to our mathematicians they must be susceptible to magnetic fields -- so the cage that our people are designing should work. The creatures are also susceptible to beamed Carlotti transmissions, which could be used to prevent a caged entity from escaping by desynchronizing with normal space-time." Grimes grunted affirmatively. "And as we have just seen -- they can be killed. Killed by kindness." Haab chuckled dryly. "Throw the energy of a nuclear blast on to their plates and they're like a compulsive eater digging his grave with a knife and fork." "Mphm." "But I don't want to kill them. I want to capture one, or more than one, to take back to Earth. I want to save a specimen of this unique life form, probably not a native of this galaxy, before the species is hunted to extinction." "Then you had better get cracking," Grimes told him without much sympathy. To him a menace to navigation was just that. "At last report there's probably only one of the things left." "Moebius Dick," murmured Haab. of the films of Operation Rimhunt, which could as well have been called Operation Search and Destroy. The use of fission weapons, stumbled upon by Captain Laverton, remained effective, but it had to be improved upon. The energy eaters were intelligent -- just how intelligent no one knew, probably no one ever would know. After the almost complete wiping out of that first cluster they tended to run from the Confederacy's warships. Magnetic fields, set up by two or more vessels, were an invisible net from which not all of the entities escaped -- and those that did so made their getaway by desynchronization. Time-space twisting Carlotti beams were employed by the hunters and this technique seemed to inhibit temporal precession. "Butchers," muttered Haab at last. "Butchers." " Exterminators, " corrected Grimes. "But both butchers and exterminators are essential to civilization. What about all the animals you have killed in your profession? Can you afford to talk?" "I can. Commodore. In the first place. I've gone after living specimens far more than I have dead ones. In the second place, the odds have never been stacked against the quarry in my hunts -- as they have been in this operation of yours." Grimes grunted. "I'm not a hunter. If I really wanted a dinner of grilled trout I'd be quite capable of tossing a hand grenade into the stream. If I have an infestation of rats or mice I go out and buy the most effective poison on the market." "I seem to recall," said Haab, "that you once used a fusion bomb to destroy a rat-infested ship." "Yes. I did. It was necessary." "Necessity," murmured Haab, "what sins are committed in thy name? But let's agree to shelve our differences. Do you think I could see the charts of sightings and -- ah -- victorious naval actions?" "Let's have them, please, Miss Walton," said Grimes. in his home. After the captain had returned to his ship Grimes' wife, Sonya, said "So that's the great hunter." "I hope you were impressed," said Grimes. "Impressed? Oh, I suppose I was in a way. But the man's a monomaniac. Hunting is his whole life." "But you can say in his favor that he's more concerned with capturing "Is that so much better?" she demanded. "Have you ever seen the Hummel Foundation's zoo?" Grimes had seen it many years ago when he had been a very junior officer in the Survey Service. He had thought at the time that those animals from Earth-type planets had been comparatively lucky, they had been allowed a limited freedom in the open air. The beings from worlds utterly unlike Earth had been confined in transparent domes, inside which the conditions of their natural habitats had been faithfully reproduced in all respects but one -- room to run, fly or slither. He said, "I think I know what you mean." "I should hope you do," she replied. "I'd sooner be dead than in a cage." "Haah's only doing his job." "But he needn't enjoy it so much." "Are we so much better?" he queried. "Here are these creatures, drifting in from the Odd Gods of the Galaxy know where. They may be intelligent -- but have we tried to find out? Oh, no -- not us. All we did find out is how to destroy them." "Don't come over all virtuous, John. You were the first to start screaming about menaces to navigation on the Lorn-Llanith route. Now your precious lightjammers can come and go as they please. And that's what you wanted." T HE following morning he received a call from Admiral Kravitz. "I'm putting you back on the active list, Grimes." "Again, sir? My paper work piled up when I made the voyage in Pamir and I'm still trying to shovel my way through the worst of the drifts." "I want one of our people along in New Bedford as an observer. You are the obvious choice for the assignment." "Why me?" "Why not you? You were keen enough to make a voyage in Pamir when it suited you. Now you can make a voyage in Haab's ship when it suits me." "Does Captain Haab know I'll be along?" "He has been told that he will have to have a representative of our navy aboard when he lifts from Port Forlorn. He has only one spare cabin in his ship -- a dogbox -- so you'll not be able to have Sonya along. Still, it should be an interesting trip." "I hope so," said Grimes. "With you among those present, it will be." The admiral chuckled. "But I have to ring off. I'll leave you to fix everything up with Haab. Let me know later what's been arranged. Over and out." Grimes rose from his desk. "Miss Walton," he said to his secretary, "I shall be aboard New Bedford if anybody wants me. Meanwhile, you can call Captain Macindoe at his home -- he's due back from leave, as you know -- and ask him to come in to see me after lunch. He'll be acting superintendent in my absence." "Not B -- Not Commander disappointedly. most called him, is better at looking after his precious Rim Malemute than keeping my chair warm. What the pair of you were doing when I was away in Pamir and on Llanith I hate to think." He grinned, then made his way out of the office. He looked with fresh interest at New Bedford as he walked briskly across the apron. His earlier curiosity about her had been academic rather than otherwise, but now that he would be shipping out in her he was beginning to feel almost a proprietorial concern. He stared up at the dully gleaming tower that was her hull, at the sponsons and turrets that housed her weaponry, at the antennae indicative of sophisticated electronic equipment of a nature usually found only in warships and survey ships. But she was both, of course. Her normal employment could be classed as warfare of a sort and as survey work -- also of a sort. Grimes marched up the ramp to the after airlock. His way into the compartment was barred by an officer who asked curtly, "Your business, sir?" Grimes' prominent ears started to redden. Surely everybody in Port Forlorn knew who he was. But this ship, of course, was not a regular visitor and her personnel were not Rimworlders. He said gruffly, "Commodore Grimes to see Captain Haab," The young man went to a telephone. "Fourth mate here, Captain. A Commodore Grimes to see you... Yes, sir. Right away." Then to Grimes: "Follow me, sir." The elevator carried them swiftly up the axial shaft. Haab's quarters were just below and abaft the control room. The master rose from his desk as Grimes was ushered into his day cabin. "Welcome aboard, Commodore. Thank you, Mr. Timon, you may carry on." When the officer had left Haab asked, "And what can I do for you. Commodore Grimes?" "I believe, Captain, that you've already heard from our admiralty." "Indeed I have. They're insisting that I canry some snot-nosed ensign or junior lieutenant with me as an observer -- " "Not an ensign or a lieutenant, Captain." "Who, then?" Grimes grinned. "Me." Haab did not grin in return. "But you're not -- " "But I am. I'm a reserve officer back on the active list as and from this morning." "Oh?" Haab managed a frosty smile. "I'm afraid I can't offer you much in the way of accommodation, Commodore. This is a working ship. There's a spare cabin the mate has been using as a storeroom -- he's getting it cleaned out now." "As long as there's a bunk -- " "There is -- but not much else." Haab's grin was a little warmer. "But I am neglecting my duties as a host." He walked to the little bar that stood against the bulkhead under the mounted head of some horrendously horned and tusked beast Grimes could not identify. "Perhaps you will join me in a sip of mayrenroth ?' "It will be my pleasure." Haab filled small glasses with viscous, dark-brown fluid and Grimes accepted his, raised it. "Your very good health, sir." "And yours, Commodore." The drink was potent, although Grimes did not much care for its flavor. He said, "This is an unusual -- ah -- spirit." "Yes. I laid in a supply when I was on Pinkenbah. The natives ferment it from the blood of the mayren. a big, carnivorous lizard." "Fascinating," said Grimes, swallowing manfully. "I suppose your ship is well stocked with all manner of foods and drinks." "She is," Haab told him. Ill Port Forlorn on a cold, drizzly morning, driving into and through the gray overcast. Grimes was a guest in her control room and, he was made to feel, a very unwelcome guest. Haab was coldly courteous, but his officers managed to convey the impression that they resented the presence of the outsider and were demanding silently of each other. What is this old bastard doing here ? New Bedford went upstairs in a hurry. Word had come through to Port Forlorn that Rim Arquebus was not only tracking what was believed to be the last of the energy eaters but had already made two unsuccessful attempts to destroy the creature. Haab had protested and had been told this sector of space was under the jurisdiction of the Rim Worlds Confederacy and that he, his ship and his people were only there on sufferance. The attitude adopted by his government did not make things any more pleasant for Grimes. Haab wasted little time setting trajectory once he was clear of Lorn's Van Aliens. He lined his ship up on an invisible point in space some light-years in from the Llanith sun, then put his inertial drive on maximum acceleration, with his Mannschenn Drive developing a temporal precession rate that Grimes considered foolhardy. Foolhardy or not, the discomfort was extreme -- the crusing weight of three gravities acceleration combined with the eerie sensation of always being almost at the point of living backward. Apart from these discomforts she was not a happy ship. Her people, from the master down, were too dedicated. They lived hunting, talked hunting, thought hunting and, presumably, dreamed hunting. Grimes was allowed into a conversation only when it was assumed that he would make some contribution to the success of the expedition -- and this was not often. One night, at dinner, Haab did ask him for his views on the energy eaters. "How intelligent do you think they are, Commodore?" Grimes put down the fork with which he had been eating some vaguely fish-tasting mess, about which he had not dared to inquire. The implement clattered loudly on the surface of the plate -- the high acceleration took some getting used to. He said, "You've seen all the reports, Captain Haab." "Yes, Commodore Grimes. But you must have formed an opinion. After all, the energy eaters are in your back garden." Grimes decided that he might as well talk as eat -- he would not be missing much. "I don't suppose I need to tell you about the Terran shark, Captain. He has, however, been described as a mobile appetite. He just eats and eats without discrimination, often to his own undoing. He just hasn't the sense to consider the consequences. Right?" Haab looked to Dr. Wayne, his biologist. Wayne grinned and said, "The Commodore hasn't put it in very scientific language, but he's not far off the beam." "Then," Grimes went on, "we have human beings who are compulsive eaters. They often are far from being unintelligent -- yet they cannot control themselves, even though they know that they are digging their graves with knives and forks. The energy eaters are more intelligent than sharks. They may be as intelligent as we are but we don't know. Intelligent or not, they are handicapped." "Handicapped? Just how?" demanded Haab. "Unlike human compulsive eaters they have no control over their intake. If there is raw energy around they absorb it, whether they want to or not. They know, I think, that the absorption of the energy generated by a nuclear explosion will be fatal -- but if they are in the vicinity of such a blast they cannot help themselves. Sorry -- they can help themselves, but only by exercizing their power of temporal precession. And by the time they found this out they were almost extinct." "Then Moebius Dick will give us a good fight," commented the mate. "He has survived in spite of everything that the navy has thrown at him." "The commodore isn't very interested in fighting fish," said Haab. "He told me that he fishes for trout with hand grenades." "I believe in getting results," said Grimes, conscious that the officers and specialists around the table were looking at him coldly. the warped continuum, homing on the continuous Carlotti signal that Grimes had persuaded the captain of Rim Arquebus to transmit. The warship was remaining in the vicinity of the last sighting of Moebius Dick and had received orders from the admiralty to cooperate with Haab. Coded signals had been made to Grimes and, reading them, he had gained the impression that Captain Welldean of the Arquebus was far from happy. But Grimes' heart did not bleed for Welldean. Welldean was in his own ship with his own people as shipmates and his own cook turning out meals to his own taste. No doubt his feelings had been hurt when he had been ordered to abandon his own hunt and to put himself under the command of a reserve officer. But he was not an unwelcome guest aboard somebody else's vessel. At last the tiny spark that was Rim Arquebus showed up just inside the screen of the mass proximity indicator. Speed was reduced and eventually both drive units were shut down. Rim Arquebus hung there, five kilometers from New Bedford, a minor but bright constellation in the blackness. Welldean's fat, surly face looked transceiver at Grimes and the others in New Bedford's control room. Have you any further information, Captain?" asked Haab. Welldean replied in a flat voice, regular half hourly intervals, remaining for ten minutes each time, presumably to feed on the radiation emitted by my ship. Pursuant to instructions -- " he seemed to be glaring directly at Grimes -- "I have made no hostile moves. Would the Commodore have any further orders for me?" "None at the moment. Captain," Grimes told him. "Just stand by." "Rim Arquebus standing by," acknowledged Welldean sulkily. "When will Moebius Dick -- " Haab was interrupted by a shout from his mate. "There she blows!" The energy eater had appeared midway between the two ships. It zily rotating. Grimes paraphrased wryly, He who eats and runs away will live to eat some other day... This thing had eaten and run away, eaten and run away and it had grown, was a vortex of forces all of a kilometer across. It would never fit into New Bedford's capacious hold, a compartment designed for the carriage of alien life forms, some of them gigantic. But this did not matter. The cage of beams and fields would be set up outside the ship, but still within the temporal precession field of the Mannschenn Drive. Grimes, a mere observer aboard a vessel that was not his own, felt superfluous, useless, as Haab and his officers went into the drill that had been worked out to the last detail. The mate, Murgatroyd, would remain on board in charge of the ship -- and Haab, with the second, third and fourth mates, would go out in the one-man chasers. Haab was already in his spacesuit -- the small craft were no more than flying framework, unpressurized -- and his prosthetic leg, through some freak of sound conductivity, clicked loudly as he moved. In his armor, with that mechanical noise accompanying every motion of his legs, he was more like a robot than a man, even though his chin beard was jutting through the open faceplate of his helmet. "Good hunting, Captain," said Grimes. "Thank you, Commodore." Haab turned to his mate. "You're in charge of the ship, Mr. Murgatroyd. Don't interfere with the hunt." Then, to Grimes; "Will you tell Captain Welldean to keep his guns and torpedoes to himself?" Welldean' s heavy face scowled at transceiver. "Moebius Dick has gone," announced Murgatroyd. "When he surfaces again, we shall be in position," Haab told him as he left the control room. Murgatroyd looked at Grimes. There's nobody else to talk to, he seemed to be thinking, so  may as well pass the time of day with you. He said, "The Old Man always brings 'em back." "Alive?" queried Grimes. "When he wants to," replied the mate. Then he laughed. "He hasn't much choice as far as that thing's concerned. If it's dead it's -- nothing." Even in free fall he contrived to give the impression of being slumped in his seat. An incongruous wistfulness softened the rough, scarred, big-featured face under the coarse, yellow hair. "You wish you were out in one of the chasers," Grimes stated rather than asked. "I do. But somebody has to mind the shop -- and it always seems to be me. There they go, Commodore." Four bright sparks darted into the emptiness between New Bedford and Rim Arquebus. As they reached a predetermined position they slowed, stopped, then slid into a square formation. Moebius Dick should reappear at the center of the quadrangle and then, at Haab's signal, each of the little crafts would become a fantastically powerful electromagnet and each would emit the beamed Carlotti transmissions, effectively netting the energy eater in time and space. Murgatroyd and Grimes stared into the screen of the mass proximity indicator. Four little points of light marked the positions of the chasers, a much fainter one denoting the presence of the energy eater. "Master to New Bedford crackled from the speaker. "Check position, please." " New Bedford to master," replied Murgatroyd. "You are exactly in position. Over." "Rim Arquebus to Commodore Grimes," put in Welldean. "Do you wish me to take any action when the EE surfaces?" "Haab to Grimes. You are only an observer. And that goes for your navy, too. Over." "The old man gets tensed up," remarked Murgatroyd, with the faintest hint of apology in his voice." " Rim Arquebus to Commodore Grimes. My weaponry is manned and ready," persisted Welldean. "So is mine." Murgatroyd chuckled, waving a big hand over his fire-control console. The minutes, the seconds, ticked by. Grimes watched the sweep second hand of the clock. He had noted the time of Moebius Dick's disappearance. The half-hour was almost up. When that red pointer came around to #... "Now!" yelled the Mate. Moebius Dick was back. The enormous circle of gyrating luminescence had reappeared in the center of the square formed by the came the low-pitched buzz and crackle of interference as the solenoids were energized. The energy eater hung there, quivering, seeming to shrink within itself. Then it moved, tilting like a processing gyroscope. Haab's voice could be heard giving orders: "Increase to six hundred thousand gausses. To sixfifty -- seven hundred -- ". From one of the chasers came a bright, brief flare and from the speaker a cry of alarm: "Captain, my coil has blown!" "Master to second and fourth mates -- triangular formation." Moebius Dick was spinning about a diametric axis, no longer a circle of light but a hazy sphere of radiance. The energy eater was rolling through the emptiness, directly toward one of the throe still-functioning chasers. The small craft turned to run. Rim Arquebus stabbed out with a barrage of laser beams. In New Bedford's control room Murgatroyd swore, added his fire to that from the frigate. It was ineffective -- or highly effective in the wrong way. The monster glowed ever more brightly as it absorbed the energy directed at it, moved ever faster. The chaser turned and twisted desperately, hopelessly. The other chasers could not pursue for fear of running into the fire from the ships. There was nothing that they could have done, in any case. "The old man's boat -- " muttered Murgatroyd. "I guess it's the way he wanted to go -- " His hand fell away from the firing stud. Moebius Dick was rolling over Haab's small and fragile craft. ordering, "Hold your fire, Rim Arquebus! Hold your fire!" Welldean's voice came back: "What the hell do you think I'm doing?" Adding, as a grudging afterthought: "Sir." The lights of the chaser flared briefly through the luminous, swirling haze that enveloped them, flared and died. But something, somebody, broke through the living radiance. It was the spacesuited Haab, using his personal propulsion unit to drive him back to his ship. He broke through and broke away and for a second or so it seemed that he would succeed. Then Moebius Dick was after him, overtaking him, enveloping him. short, dreadful scream. The globe of flame that was the energy eater seemed to swell, was swelling, visibly and rapidly, assuming the appearance of a gigantic, spherical fire opal. The three surviving chasers retreated rapidly. Dark streaks suddenly marred the iridescent beauty of the sphere, spread, rapidly covering the entire surface. Where Moebius Dick had been there was only nothingness. No, not nothingness. Floating in the darkness, illumined by the searchlights of the three small craft, was the lifeless, armored figure of Captain Haab. "They'll bring him in," muttered Murgatroyd. "I'll take him back to Earth for burial. Those were his wishes." "Rim Arquebus to New Bedford," came Welldean's voice. "Do you require medical assistance? Shall I send a boat with my surgeon -- " "We've a quack of our own," snarled Murgatroyd, "and a good one. But even he won't be able to do anything. The old man is dead." Magazine Retailers and IF Magazines available to all retailers. Full details on procedures and requirements for proper display submission of semiannual sales affidavits, can be obtained by writing: Select Magazines, Inc. # Park Avenue South New York, N.Y. # A him," said Grimes to Sonya when, back at Port Forlorn, he was telling her the story of the hunt. "How do you make that out?" "Well, perhaps it wasn't his leg, but all of us came to the conclusion that it was, as it were, the last straw that broke the camel's back." "Make your mind up, John. I'd gotten used to the idea that Moebius Dick was a sort of latterday white whale -- and now you refer to him as a camel!" "You know what I mean -- I'm talking about the item that finally made him lose control. Moebius Dick had been feeding well over a period of quite some weeks. Every time Rim Arquebus heaved a torpedo at him he'd skim the cream off the fireball and then vanish, being too intelligent to overeat. But all life forms tend to act unintelligently when infuriated and he was no exception. When he broke out of Haab's electromagnetic net he was no more than a dangerous, vicious animal. He was being pumped full of photons by the concentrated laser fire from the two ships -- and it meant as little to him as a stream of bullets means to a charging carnivore. He 'killed' Haab's chaser, gulping all the energy from its machinery. He would have killed Haab himself -- Haab was in a state of complete paralysis when he was brought on board -- if he hadn't started his meal on the Captain's leg. "You know that the Tanganoran's are famous for their powered prosthetic limbs, don't you? Haab's right leg was a beautiful machine with its own, built-in power plant -- cells with a working life of a least twenty standard years after installation, a slow, rigidly controlled fission process. Moebius Dick got that twenty years' worth of energy in one bite." "Critical mass or critical charge -- or whatever?" murmured Sonya. "But Haab's anagramatic namesake wasn't as lucky with his peg leg." "What the hell are you talking about?" "Or was he more than just a namesake?" "I still don't get you." "You must remember that talk we had with the Reverend Madam Swithin about reincarnation. How she told us that -- according to the tenets of her Church -- some souls have to wait around for centuries until the shuffling of chromosomes and genes produces just the right body, with just the right brain and psychological make-up, for their next embodiment. "It makes an odd sort of sense, doesn't it? Captain Ahab, the whaler -- Captain Haab, the hunter -- " "But Ahab was only a fictional character!" Grimes, protested to his wife. "Aren't we all finally?" she asked reasonably. "Those of us who deserve being made into legends?"  W wonders," said the chairlady, after my speech at a Book Fair in Cape Cod a dozen or so years ago. "Here's an author who speaks for an hour about a new young writer, and never once mentions the title of his own new book!" She was describing my response to the first Brian Aldiss story that reached its fist up from the printed page to punch me in the mouth. Another recollection. At one of the earliest Milford Conferences, Damon Knight and Jim Blish came up with the interesting notion that a writer has a thing he says and he tends to say it over and over again -- not by any means repetitiously, but thematically or in his selection of image and relevant metaphor. What Brian Aldiss says over and over is, "I am concerned about what's happening to us," and "what's happening" and "us" are projected in the widest and deepest possible ways. There are plenty of writers, especially in sf, who are aware and alert and who try their best to be relevant, but I know of no other, with the possible exception of Frank Herbert, who warns us so consistently that we are, as a species, horror-bound. He warns us because he loves us, really thinks we have something worth saving. This emerges from Brian's comedies (he can be very funny) and his tragedies and in his short tense suspense pieces. His new retrospective Aldiss , composed of stories which first appeared in British and U.S. magazines from # until this year, bears out this notion, and the long-awaited paperback appearance of his novel Barefoot in the Head brings it to a high peak. Barefoot is truly an experience and, you must be warned, it isn't an easy one. He begins singing his melody in single notes and is soon singing harmony with himself, like Joni Mitchell recording a second voice track. At length he begins to play in chords, using a whole boxful of tricks and devices -- puns, doubleentendres, metaphors, neologisms. Ultimately he arrives at verse -- because, one feels, he has used up everything else. Barefoot in the Head therefore is without question, an assault, and it follows that comparison with James Joyce is inevitable (Joyce used to write on huge cardboard sheets with many colors of crayon, doing the same phrase in three or four or even five ways as a first draft, and then fusing them into the final one) and whether Aldiss has done less than Joyce -- or something different from Joyce -- is for the assessment of a far more profound Joycian than the undersigned. Do not take this book lightly -- and do not forget it. be taken lightly is Frank Herbert, whose The God Makers is quite another kind of experience. Herbert writes fables of a high order. By fables I mean narratives in which the basic statement -- "moral", if you like -- transcends the story line and is useful elsewhere. There is, I think, a rising tide of profound religious and philosophical thinking in the speculative field just now and in these complex and puzzling and immensely fruitful areas Frank Herbert seems quite at home. Long before Dune he had shown his ability to establish a scene -- plant, culture, star-system, what-haveyou -- by a strict set of rules and adhere to it. And so he does in this new novel despite its meld of space and psi, of science and miracle. The story of Lewis Orne and his quest for the nature of godhood produces many a parallel, many an analogy, many a flash of recognition of things the reader knows, or almost knows, about the nature of his own devils and, possibly, his own powers. Unlike the Aldiss, this book can be read, if you like, purely for the excitement of its narrative line, the way an eight-year-old can read Gulliver. But if you want layers and levels this is one of those books that will give you back whatever you're capable of carrying to it. or disgust or even in terror, that the beloved field is being diluted by the mainstream, and that gone forever are the days of hard science and high adventure. Fear not. Not while Ben Bova is around and doing such things as his As On a Darkling Plain. Taking off from the reliable old idea of truly alien artifacts found on a body -- in this case, Titan -- Bova gives us a neatly interwoven tale of a man's obsessive battle to unearth their secrets and of the personal, physical -- and particularly the bureaucratic obstacles in his way. From the "biological blizzard" which is Jupiter to the subsidiary adventures of the exploration missions and finally to the advanced hard science of the "machines on Titan" I liked it -- I believed it. O NE thing I like and believe only the hard way, uphill and very seldom, is sword-and-sorcery. Many a murrain has been called down upon me for this and I'm sorry, but I can't lie to you about it. What entranced me early about it was the magic of Arthur (Ourouboros) Eddison and C.L. Moore -- to say nothing of my childhood infatuation with Burroughs' John Carter, and of course Tolkien. I find, however, that the vast bulk of ss has the same defect, the same permanent prohibition from becoming great and lasting literature, that TV series have. The genre's very nature dictates that the sword-swinging protagonist must be the same person at the end of the story as he is at the beginning. No matter how well written or superbly cast, no matter how horrific the monsters and the hordes or how far-out the magic land, evanescence and triviality do prevail -- and true suspense is impossible for me if the central character cannot develop, age, fail, die, or (as is too often the case) even learn. Some writers know how to avoid this -- le Guin for one -- and now and again there arrives a book so colorful, whose language is so cadenced and precise and whose characters (for all their basic changelessness) are so dimensional that you have to love them anyhow. Such a novel is Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon -- mostly because such is Zelazny, whose very laundry lists, I swear, could be set to music like a lyric. Avalon is another in the series about the nine princes in Amber and will voyage you well. late great John Campbell, writers began wrestling with the logic of magic, the notion has affixed itself to sf as well as fantasy. Witchcraft has its own rigid and rigorous disciplines and time and again has been the storage warehouse for ideas, substances, chemicals and processes used ultimately by formal science. With the new and deeper preoccupation with "inner space" witchy ideas chime more and more harmoniously with "psi" concepts and present intriguing alternatives to established physical laws and principles. That's fair enough, too -- the idea of closeup photographs of Mars would have been called witchcraft not long ago, so why not grab the other end of the broom and have witchcraft circumvent the light barrier? Gordon Dickson's The Pritcher Mass gives us a most intriguing witch and some interesting insights into the craft, embodied in a genuinely original tale of a psychic or paranormal "mass" in construction out beyond Pluto, which will be used to scan deep space for planets desperately needed by the sealed-in population of a poisoned Earth. Dickson, like Aldiss, exhibits a concern for the environment and sounds a grim warning; this time it's in the area of pollution-induced plant mutation, which has a frightening logic to it. A good book. kinds of editor, both good. His "theme" anthologies are invariably well-conceived and wellbalanced and his originals -- the Orbits -- remain one of the most potent proving grounds for new writers and for new concepts and approaches for established ones. Perchance to Dream is a good example of the first. The stories are about dreams and surely you'll have read some of them before. But -- do you have a' copy of Ambrose Bierce's Incident at Owl Creek Bridge around the house? Aiken's Mr. Arcularisl Here are dream stories by Maugham, Dostoevsky, Collier, Borges and others, treasures all. Funny dreams, frightening dreams, puzzling and thought-provoking and awesome dreams. Not a dud in the lot -- a real jewelbox of a book. Orbit #I is up to Knight's high standards. Some very well practiced hands are here -- Gene Wolfe, Fred Pohl, Edward Wellen, Charles Platt. Some new lights, already bright: Effinger, Thurston, Dozois. And some new discoveries. Knight is one editor who can surf on the "new wave" without losing sight of the beach. X. Tyger, which is totally unique, the most unusual book of the year is Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. It was written in six weeks by a commercial pulp writer. It is basically a hack sword-and-sorcery job, whose occasional passages of raw power are probably due more to the author's psychopathology than to consciously controlled literary craftsmanship. So, at least, claims the critic Homer Whipple in a penetrating criticism appended to the book. The novel was written by one Adolf Hitler. A short biography precedes the original title page, which is not The Iron Dream at all, but Lord of the Swastika. It is absolutely apalling. It contains enough gore to close every bloodbank in the country for a year. It's Class Plus A-One tour de force by Norman Spinrad. A high-priority must. Available in paperback, and recommended: Eight Strange Tales, ed. Vic Ghidalia. (Fawcett, #Literate weirdies, Blackwood to Bradbury. Strange Tomorrows , ed. Robert Hoskins (Laucer, #). Five good long ones, over # words. This Side of Infinity (Ace, #c), eight personal choices of Terry Carr, who knows how to choose 'em your way. Best SF Stories from New Worlds #. (Berkley, ISt) Michael Moorcock, who makes waves, gives us eleven yarns which, together, give very much of the flavor of that highly effective British magazine. Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy (Ballantine, #), edited by Lin Carter, has a fine diversity and spread: PrattdeCamp; Anatole France, Robert W. Chambers and the Pre-Raphaelites). I like the stories better than editor Lin Carter foreand afterwords and rubrics, which strike me as intrusive and self-advertising. A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, by Carlos Castenada (Pocket Books; #). You are not permitted not to have this book! Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian, as reported with searching honesty by Casteneda, has hold of some truths that cannot fail to stabilize and benefit any reader who is novels by Mack Reynolds in an Ace Double: Blackman's Burden and Border, Breed nor Birth (#C ). More than your money's worth. Hal Clement's Needle (Lancer, # #) is back again -- fascinating. Likewise Armageddon # (Ace, # #), the original Philip Francis Nowlan novel that began the Buck Rogers story, quaint but interesting, and John Campbell's The Black Star Passes (Ace, #t). There's a mother-lode of Asimov's FSF articles: The Stars in Their Courses (Ace, #), Of Time and Space and Other Things (Lancer, #) and his long out-of-print Building Blocks of the Universe (Lancer, #). And finally. Burrough's two great underground. (!) classics, Pellucidar and At the Earth's Core (Lancer, #t each).  I T I HE three-year quarantine was practically over. His eager imagination conjuring blue skies, green fields, laughing children and the other ingredients of a life literally of another world, George Hender stood beside his bed in his quarters below the Luna crater Eratosthenes and began to pack his few personal belongings. Humanlike he did not think of the ugliness of poverty and pollution, of the fact men still slew each other on that cloud-dappled planet high in the Luna sky. He first packed all the vials containing the samples he had been allowed to retain for his own use. Three were carefully banded together -- one vial containing the corpse of an insectlike creature with ten legs, the second a bright purple ball of fluff, the third a tiny plant with grayish leaves and a fleshy stalk. Not much to the uninformed eye perhaps, but Hender knew these were three stages in the development of the same life form. Next came the water sample he had collected in the mist below the Great Cliff. Again not much to look at. But it was a reminder of the glittering cascade that poured uninterrupted for three thousand meters down the side of that fantastic geological fault. Then there were microscope slides of various organisms -- plant, animal and a few in between. A slender piece of vine with a tensile strength approaching that of steel. A chunk of wood that, when heated to one hundred and eighty degrees, could be molded like soft putty. The samples were followed by his two miniature cameras. Spools of film totaling he did not know how many exposures. Not as extensive, of course, as the official records of the expedition. But a man needed to do work of his own on a mission of such long duration. Schekart, for instance, had taken to painting. And Hender had little doubt those gloomy landscapes would hang in many of Earth's major galleries. His instrument and sample belt. He coiled it carefully despite the fact it was scarred and frayed as if it had been forcibly dragged through tightly wound barbed wire. That had happened when his liftpack failed over one of the thorn forests -- his body still bore the marks inflicted by those vicious sixinch barbs. But the belt had continued its usefulness on every field trip he made on Alpha Five, a proud record considering it had outlasted several sets of armorcloth coveralls. Hender considered the belt carefully. Then he uncoiled it, held it upside down ami shook it. Particles of dirt, some dust, and finally a few shreds of vegetable matter fell out. Nothing of interest, except... sliver of faded green and held it up to the light. It was just a blade of grass. But it was a blade of grass from a lawn most of the expedition members had said could not be grown. Young Brian McEvoy, however, was merely an electronics specialist. He knew nothing about botany, ecology, or indeed any of the life sciences. He only knew he had not brought five pounds of grass seed all the way from Earth for nothing. So he had consulted the ship's library, prepared the proper chemical nutrients, even improvised a sprinkler and pump to water his few square meters from a nearby stream. He had fussed, worried, made a thorough fool of himself -- and after a few months created the lushest lawn on the planet. Actually the only lawn, Hender thought with a reminiscent smile. But it was fortunate its survival had depended upon such loving care. Otherwise the next expedition to Alpha Five would find its ecology drowned under an ocean of waving green. More oddments went into the bag. A few items of clothing, a small abstract carved by John Ling just before the geologist lost the use of his right arm in a rock fall. And finally the few letters Hender had received only hours before Golden Hind moved out of Earth orbit and began its voyage to the Centauri system. He looked them over one by one. A polite farewell from Ronald, typed on office stationery. They had not seen each other for years anyway, so Ron could hardly be expected to gush over a brother he hardly knew. A couple from friends in the Astronaut Corps. He had largely lost contact with them, too, especially after he transferred to the Interstellar Project. And here was Anne's last letter. More personal of course, expressing sentiments deep and genuine. Would he have married her if he had not been on the Project? Probably. She had been a wonderful girl -- he would have been a fool not to. But then again he had only met her because she happened to be one of the Project's technicians, so the question was hypothetical in any case. One of life's little ironies, he supposed. The last letter was on cheap notepaper, so he handled it very carefully. But the dearly loved childish scrawl was still legible and he read it again, his memories of her little face as clear as they had been -- how many hundred readings ago? Darling daddy, she had written. Please do not go away too long. Auntie Sue has told me you are going to a star, not like mommy but in a spaceship. She also said we cannot see the star from America, so I hope she and Uncle Jack will take me where  can see it some time. Come back soon and please bring me a star teddy . Love Wendy. Hender wished he knew what a star teddy was, but it had been too late to find out. Instead he hoped the painstaking model he had created from local materials and imagination would be an acceptable substitute. She was older now, but surely she would remember and understand. Damn the blasted quarantine! It was not so much the three years' confinement in this secret base that bothered him -- at least not as much as the fact no outside contact had been permitted either way. People on Earth had not even been told Golden Hind was back -- indeed, most of them thought the expedition had perished long ago on the fifth planet of Alpha Centauri! Of course the reasons for the secrecy were logical enough. Doctor Fielden had expressed them very clearly just after the six returnees arrived in Eratosthenes. "Medical science has advanced a great deal in the last few years," he told them. "To the extent, in fact, that no known disease is now beyond cure. Unfortunately popular opinion has misinterpreted this into the dangerous notion that no disease is beyond cure." He had smiled wearily. "Gentlemen, you know we risk beings if we let you return home before we are sure you carry no infection of an alien nature. Some of my colleagues are so concerned with this problem that they have attempted -- unsuccessfully I might add -- to have the quarantine extended to five years. And you know what that might do to your health! Suffice to say it was eventually decided to keep your return secret until the previously agreed upon three years are over. That way there can be no pressure to force us to reduce this already minimum margin of safety. "It was also agreed that during your stay here in Eratosthenes you will receive no news of a personal nature. Your quarantine will be difficult enough without your being faced with problems about which you can do nothing without breaking security." The news had been unpleasant to say the least and the starmen had wasted no time voicing their objections. They were listened to, of course. Even the sophisticated specialists who shared their exile looked on the men who had been to Alpha Five with definite respect if not outright awe. But these decisions had been made long before the starship arrived off Titan Station -- and were irrevocable. The six astronauts had had to be content with the luxuries provided for them, with the censored telecasts beamed directly from Earth and with the companionship of their fellow exiles. It was, incidentally, no accident that nineteen of the thirtyeight people who lived at the base were women. Eight couples were already married when the thirty-two specialists came to Eratosthenes and by the end of the first year four more couples signed contracts. The astronauts, however, had kept their single status, though only one -- the monkish Howard Schekart -- chose not to form an "attachment." fully and pressed one of his identification labels to its side. He wondered if he would see much of Marguerite after they landed on Earth -- if he had made a mistake when he told her he would enter no permanent union until he became fully adjusted to the new life. He was certain her feelings toward him were far stronger than she had admitted, but he also knew her pride would never let her accept the implication: You'll do if no one else turns up... The P. A. cleared its throat and announced: "The final briefing will be held in the Common Room in fifteen minutes. Unless you are on essential duty, please attend." "Oh?" Hender asked the air. He put the bag on the floor beside his bed, then went into the corridor and tapped on the door across from his. "George," he said. "Can I come in?" "It's open," she called. He went in. She also was packing, but she looked up with an immediate smile. "One to go," she said, referring to their own private countdown. "Nervous?" He grimaced. "Frankly, I'm scared to death." He went over and kissed the nape of her neck. "You'll keep holding my hand, I hope?" His voice was jocular, but Marguerite's discerning ear sensed it was only a veneer. He's uptight, she thought. Terribly so. And then, rationalizing: But so are we all. For the thousandth time she wished she were not so emotionally involved with this man and again firmed her resolve to leave him as soon as the worst was over. But Marguerite Walsh was too good a psychologist to upset the delicate edge he was treading and too good a woman to want to. So she smiled again, touched his face and said gently, "I'll be with you every step, dear." She put a filmy thing into the case and snapped it shut. Guess  won't see that again, Hender thought wistfully, but immediately submerged the unbidden eroticism by asking, "What do you think Fielden is up to? I understood no more briefings would be necessary." "So did I." She frowned. "Of course, he could have been hooked by our father image of him." "I beg your pardon?" "If you were the head of a large family that was about to split up, wouldn't you at least want to wish them well?" He looked slightly startled. "Well, put that way -- " Abruptly Hender's rather homely features creased into a broad grin. "So you figure we're in for a little paternal advice, huh?" "That's my guess. We have all been away from home a long time, so it could be he wants to make sure he's not about to unload a bunch of anachronistic misfits. Anyway, let's go see, shall we?" II T HE Eratosthenes base was a sprawling complex of chambers originally constructed to house the deep-space research unit of the International Science Academy. Economics had subsequently dictated its passing to the control of the Space Agency and minimal maintenance during long periods of idleness. When the first signals were detected from the returning starship, it was only necessary to make minor adjustments within its regular hudget for the Agency to ready the base for immediate habitation. And then economies were continued. Maintainance of the base and its life-support systems became the responsibility of everyone -- including crews under quarantine -- especially the hydroponic gardens from which came the dual necessities of food and oxygen. The base was hardly the most desirable substitute for home for Earth-starved astronauts. But all of this was behind them now -- or nearly so -- and as Hender and the brunette psychologist joined the others in the Common Room they found a puzzled air of expectancy, which more or less matched their own. Marguerite clutched Hender's arm. "Isn't it strange?" she whispered. "Suddenly I don't feel like a person about to go home. More like someone about to leave it." He looked down at her, his face intent. "Yes," he said. And meant it. They sat together on a couch at the back of the room as a small man with lined features and unruly white hair faced the crowd and muttered a quick count of those present. Finally he nodded and waved for silence. "With the exception of Mort and Peter who are on duty in Control," Dr. Marcus Fieldon announced, "I think we are all here." "But not for long," retorted a voice from the audience. The white head nodded. "No, Weldon, not for long. Which is one of the reasons for this final gathering. I must be sure we are all ready for our -- ah -- rebirth into the complexities of human society." "Oh, come off it, Marcus." Weldon Gill, the commander of the Alpha Five expedition, squinted at the scientist from eyes injured when a lovely blue-gold flower had replied to his charmed curiosity with a squirt of acid. Though not completely blind -- he had, for instance, functioned reasonably well during the remaining six weeks on the planet -- Gill nevertheless chafed under his affliction with an almost bursting impatience. And because he knew a complete cure was available in any one of Earth's better hospitals his belligerence was understandable when he demanded, "You're not thinking of delaying our return, are you?" He glared pugnaciously. "Because if you are, forget it!" "Actually I am considering no such thing," Fielden said mildly. "I am merely wondering whether or not we should continue the indoctrination sessions after we return home. Now will you please permit me to continue?" The scientist looked around at his audience. They appeared a normal collection of people, male and female, young and middle-aged. They were also a highly intelligent group, which in a sense was his main problem. Intelligence went with sensitivity and because of that he knew many adjustments would be difficult. So he chose his words with care. "I need hardly remind you that human beings suffer psychological deterioration if they remain away from their home planet for any period longer than three years. Though the reasons for this are not yet entirely clear, it is thought some kind of subtle relationship exists between man's physical environment and his mind -- a link, if you will, which permits norma! thought processes only when his senses indicate that gravity, air, light, etcetera are all Earth normal. We are fortunate, of course -- those first three years can be tolerated with no noticeable ill effect. But after that the symptoms appear quite rapidly. Irritability, tiredness, inability to concentrate and so on -- you know what they are. "Questions. How long can a person remain away from Earth without suffering a complete breakdown? Does the deterioration process continue to an inevitable end or does it stop after a time, leaving the individual psychologically depleted but still functional? Or is there a reversal, an eventual return to normalcy? I am sure you understand the importance of these -- especially with respect to future interstellar colonization." Well here we are, Hender thought. Gill, Ling, McEvoy, Roberts, Schekart and Hender. Six answers giving you the stars on a plate. And you have known it for three years, so why bring it up now ? He listened with increasing irritation as Fielden continued. "Three other expeditions have since been sent to other star systems. Enterprise to Barnard's Star, Columbus to Lalande # and Deep Traveler farthest of all -- to Epsilon Eridani. We do not know what their crews may or may not find -- or even that they will ever return. But the success of Golden Hind does at least hold out a slight hope that man has a future among the stars." "Only a slight hope?" queried someone. "Why the doubts. Doctor?" Fielden peered toward the questioner and recognized Len Roberts, Alpha Five's geographer. "Why? Well let me ask you a question, Mr. Roberts. Why haven't you and your five colleagues suffered the same deterioration I was discussing a few moments ago? After all, you have been away from Earth for considerably more than your allotted three years." Roberts, a large man with a luxurious black beard, stared back incredulously. "Are you pulling my leg? You know better than any of us -- the time in hypothermia doesn't count. And neither do the two years we spent on Alpha Five. Our longest period of activity has been this last three years in Eratosthenes. So unless everything I have been told is crazy, that puts the six of us in exactly the same boat as the rest of you." "Based on the assumption that hypothermia somehow restores the psychological balance? That those periods of activity between periods in hypothermia are not cumulative? Is that the basis of your reasoning, Mr. Roberts?" "Not my reasoning damn it." the geographer shot back testily. "It was the reasoning of the people who organized our expedition -- and you know that, too. They would hardly have sent us to the Centauri system if there was a chance we would wind up as raving lunatics." "Of course not." Fielden paused a moment, then went on quietly: "Unfortunately, we now know their reasoning was in error." seat. What in blazes is he talking about? He looked at the girl at his side and saw that she was equally surprised. And so, apparantly, was everyone else in the room. Or so it seemed from the barrage of excited questions coming from all sides. Marcus Fielden waved his hands for silence, "I am going to show you the results of an experiment actually concluded some years ago. However, it was done in such secrecy that even I and my colleagues were not told of it -- you will understand why when you see this tape. Anyway, it seems someone in the Agency's bureaucracy finally had the good sense to realize that we in Eratosthenes should have this knowledge. In his enlightenment he had it transmitted here" Fielden smiled sadly -- "yesterday." The obvious sarcasm was greeted with nervous laughter which reflected his audience's confusion and puzzled curiosity. Hender knew he echoed everyone's feelings as he muttered, "I wish he'd shut up and get on with it." Marguerite laid a hand on his arm. "Hush." The lights dimmed and the Common Room's screen illuminated to show a large spacecraft settling down toward the surface of the moon. As dust flared out beneath the ship's braking jets, a service crawler trundled into view, its boarding tube already extended. Two space-suited figures rode in the tube's open end, a dangerous procedure that clearly indicated someone's urgency to get on board. As his audience watched the ungainly surface vehicle approach its target Fielden said, "A commentary comes with this tape, but to save time I will give an abbreviated version. First let me remind you that the so-called 'remission' aspect of hypothermia was assumed on the basis of the work of several research people who independently corroborated each other's findings. Hypothermia, of course, had already made it possible for man to survive an interstellar journey, though there was little point to such an endeavor as long as the subsequent three-year quarantine left little or no time for planetary exploration. But now we knew -- or thought we knew -- that periods of activity between periods in hypothermia were not cumulative and it seemed we could dust off our interstellar plans and go ahead with the first flight. And so the Alpha Centauri mission was conceived and launched. And later, at regular intervals, we launched three other flights to more distant star systems. "But after Deep Traveler had departed for Epsilon Eridani someone came to the belated realization that the remission aspect of hypothermia had never been proven by actual test. So plans for further missions were immediately canceled pending production of such proof. Which, ladies and gentlemen, is what this tape is all about." The scene on the screen cut to within the crawler's boarding tube. The tube had been mated to the collar around the ship's airlock and the two men in space suits were opening the lock preparatory to entering the ship. As the camera followed their activities, Dr. Fielden continued: "After working a standard threeyear tour here on the moon four volunteers were placed in hypothermia aboard this ship -- appropriately named The Four Companions -- which under computer control was sent out to an orbit beyond Pluto. One year later the present automatics roused the men for what was to be their second consecutive tour away from Earth. They were isolated, of course, as few human beings had been before. But they had ample supplies, facilities for recreation and enough research work to keep them occupied all the time. In theory they would end the experiment in no worse shape than they had been at the end of their Luna tour. In practice, however -- " The dim figure beside the screen shrugged. "I supposed it was fortunate the vital control and life-support systems of The Four Companions were safe behind armored bulkheads." T HE reasons for the doctor's last remark were immediately apparent in the next scene. A shocked indrawing of breath became audible as the lens of the camera peered at the unbelievable shambles within the spaceship. Furnishings were smashed to kindling -- experimental apparatus was wrecked beyond recognition -- the walls had been battered as if hit blindly and repeatedly by a madman with a club. Worst of all was a partly decayed corpse sprawled in the foreground, its broken skull centered on a huge stain which was obviously long dried. "He was not the only one." Fielden's voice was dry and carefully devoid of emotion. "Another was found in the storage deck with a knife in his back, a third in the emergency airlock. That one apparantly died when he opened the outer door without the protection of a suit -- in fact, as naked as the day he was born." There was movement on the screen and the two men from the crawler reappeared supporting between them a shambling thing which at first seemed only partly human. But beneath the dirt and hair was the sick, blank-eyed face of what had once been a man. Doctor Fielden touched a control and the screen blanked. As the lights flared high, he looked at his stunned audience and said quietly, "That man has since been cured, though I understand he has never made a full comeback. Small recompense I think, for the fact he and his friends broke completely under conditions we had assumed were perfectly safe." Hender had had enough. As a catharsis for his anger he abruptly rose to his feet and snapped, "I don't know what all this is leading to, but it's pretty damn obvious the six of us here have contradicted the results of that so-called experiment." He took a deep breath. "How do you explain that?" Hender sat down amid several shouts of approval. He looked at Marguerite and felt comforted by her reassuring gaze. Fielden rubbed a hand over his eyes. He was tired and looked it. "Well, Mr. Hender, let me put it this way. We gambled when we sent you to Alpha Centauri. Though we knew the star had planets, there was no way of telling if any of the planets were habitable by man. In fact, we would have considered ourselves lucky if you had found even a world where you could live after a fashion under a pressure dome. What did happen, of course, was the last thing anyone expected -- Alpha Five. With a breathable atmosphere, tolerable gravity, food sources compatible with human needs -- the planet was so Earthlike, your physiological systems were fooled into believing it was Earth. Hence your continuing rationality even after three more years here in Erathosthenes." In a stage whisper everyone could plainly hear, the irrepressible Brian McEvoy commented, "Now ain't that nice. We got no hangups!" Marcus Fielden smilingly shook his head. "Not necessarily. Please don't forget you must still face reintroduction into Earth society -- a process you may find more than a little difficult. But I believe we have prepared you well enough for that particular adjustment. And you will always be able to remind yourself that if it were not for Alpha Five -- " Sidetracked by an obviously unpleasant train of thought, the scientist's face darkened. After a moment he continued: "On the basis of what common sense tells me is the extreme scarcity of Earthlike worlds in the galaxy, plus the results of what Mr. Hender named 'that so-called experiment,' I rather hope I will not be around when Enterprise returns from Barnard's Star." Extract from report by Marcus R. Fielden to the Executive Council of the World Space Agency: Though the results of the Four Companions experiment proved the fallacy of our previous conclusions about hypothermia, the success is nevertheless heartening. Of course this unexpected bonus only partially offsets the unpleasant fact that landings on non-Earth type planets must henceforth be limited to quick 'look-ins' if we are to avoid the unpleasant consequences demonstrated by the experiment. I suppose the necessity for quarantine could be avoided if we restricted future crews to close-orbit research, though such limited missions would hardly justify their enormous expense. Regarding the ether three missions, I must remind you of the astronomical odds against their finding another Alpha Five. So, to avoid repeats of the Four Companions tragedy, I suggest the members of each crew be again placed under hypothermia as soon as they return and kept on ice until an answer is found. Some future generation will then have to act according to its own ethics, though God knows I do not envy them such a decision if no answer is possible. One final point. As you know, I was concerned about how the Golden Hind crew would adjust to human society after an absence of half a century. After all, much has changed during that time. Especially delicate was the problem of immediate relatives, and George Header's is a classic case. When I had his daughter notified of his impending arrival... T HE shuttles were larger and more luxurious than the more primitive models he remembered and, because of powered reentry, subjected their passengers to a much gentler ride. But as Hender rode down from orbit he paid little attention to these refinements. Instead he spent almost the whole trip staring with agonized intensity at the entertainment screen. Marguerite Walsh knew this was one battle he would have to fight alone, so she sensibly kept quiet and watched him. She had seen the picture of his daughter as he once had known her and she understood the terrible sense of loss he must have felt when viewphone contact had been made from Orbital Station Eight. Wendoline Reed (nee Hender) was now a middle-aged widow with four grandchildren. She had lived most of her life while her father spent forty-four of the past fortynine years in frozen suspension between the stars. Hender had always known, of course, the change that must occur in his daughter over those years. But that had been a conscious awareness, based on his knowledge that the calendars of Earth had still turned as the crew of Golden Hind remained in their hypothermia vaults. But his body, his glands, his instincts were only five years older -- they knew the child of his flesh must only be thirteen; a gawky, preadolescent version of the merry eight-year-old who asked for a star teddy. Hender's conflict with himself was serious, and Marguerite had seen his shock when the graying lady with the maternal figure and the kind smile had appeared on the screen. "My God," he had whispered. "She looks like my mother!" But despite her own undoubted conflict, Mrs. Reed had acquitted herself nobly, welcoming her father with the gay and surprised chatter of someone meeting an old friend. Hender on the other hand had said very little, and as the shuttle knifed down through the stratosphere toward touchdown, Marguerite wondered if the trauma of society reentry would be merely temporary. Hender might very well need her professional -- and womanly -- services longer than either had supposed. And it was with only a slight twinge of guilt that she realized she did not mind at all. The welcoming ceremonies were fortunately brief -- the Agency had planned them so under advisement from Marcus Fielden. But the overwhelming presence of tens of thousands of people behind the security barriers had a noticeably disconcerting effect upon the six astronauts. They lined up nervously as the president of the World Union shook their hands and presented each with the W. U. award for meritorious service. And the thunderous roar of approval as they entered the presidential plane caused them to scramble up the ramp like shy animals heading for cover. Marguerite accompanied Hender to a cabin at the rear of the aircraft where Mrs. Reed was waiting to greet her father in person. The younger woman watched a little uncomfortably as two strangers, connected by the closest ties of blood yet separated by nearly half a century, tried toact toward each other as society would expect. After a quick embrace Hender presented his painstaking version of a star teddy. It was gray and blue and fluffy and had a sharp little snout, above which was a single multi-faceted eye. Though a creation out of his imagination, it had charming plausibility. "Do you remember you asked for this?" Hender asked awkwardly. "Well, here's your star teddy." To Marguerite's astonishment, Mrs. Reed was delighted. She held up the doll by its forelimbs and exclaimed happily, "Of course I remember! I even remember no one could convince me you weren't going to bring it to me before that Christmas. Wait till I tell my grandchildren about this!" The muscles in Hender' s face tightened convulsively. "So I'm a great-grandfather." Mrs. Reed look at him with surprise. "Didn't they tell you?" "Oh, yes. It's just that it's all so -- " Hender floundered helplessly -- "difficult." Marguerite's heart ached. He is so alone. I wonder if he will ever be able to look that dear lady in the face and call her Wendy? Or 'daughter?' Their relationship seems ludicrous and  suppose they both know it. And it is her problem, too. How can she possibly think of that young man as her father? But the problem did not arise. As if by unspoken agreement Hender and Mrs. Reed adopted the simple expedient of talking to each other without the use of either name or title, though to third parties they father" or "my daughter." Otherwise the unaccustomed pressures upon all the astronauts remained -- within hours after the plane delivered the president and his guests to the World Union complex in Geneva, they were obliged to attend a banquet given by the House of Assembly. strange affair, during which the guests of honor merely toyed with their food and -- as the proceedings dragged on -- began to display various signs of irritability. Though seated between Marguerite and Mrs. Reed, Hender seemed disinclined to talk to either and spent most of the time drawing nervous circles on the tablecloth with edge of a fork. He smiled sardonically when Weldon Gill was persuaded to say a few terse words, but lost interest again when Marcus Fielden began the main address on behalf of the six men from Alpha Five. As Fielden spoke no one paid much attention to the marine who cat-footed behind the head table and whispered into the ear of Senator Wu Pao Wong, the distinguished Chinese seated on Brian McEvoy's left. It concerned, as it turned out later, a matter whose importance had been inflated by an overly zealous aide. But the marine had his instructions and, as he obeyed them, he leaned between the Senator and the astronaut to deliver his top-secret message. Inadvertently he knocked over a carafe of water which spilled its contents into McEvoy's lap. Before the embarrassed marine had a chance to apologize McEvoy jabbed his elbow into the leaning man's midriff and shouted, "You clumsy bastard!" Then he leaped out of his scat and flung himself on the gasping marine with maniacal rage. Shocked out of his moody introspection by the sudden fracas, Hender stared astonished as someone yelled, "Grab him!" Two burly guards sprinted from their stations at the back of the hall, hauled the yelling astronaut off his victim and hustled him through a side door. Got to help him. Hender thought automatically, hardly aware he had already pushed back his chair and risen to his feet. Marguerite called something to him, but he did not hear her in the mounting confusion as he joined Fielden and Gill and the others and hurried after the guards. A fast moving medic had already gotten to McEvoy by the time they caught up with him in the adjoining lobby. Reacting to the drug the medic had just pumped into his system, the youngest of the astronauts barely had enough strength to lift his head and mumble, "Sorry -- " before he sagged limply in the arms of his expressionless captors. Fieldon pointed. "Put him on that couch, please." To the medic. "What did you give him?" "Kirul B." The medic snapped his case shut, looked up and added reassuringly. "It's harmless. He'll be out of it in about four hours." "He had better be," Fielden said. He briefly examined the unconscious man, stood errect and asked, "How is the fellow he attacked?" "I'm all right sir," called a slightly hoarse voice. The marine pushed his way to the front of the gathering crowd, his face anxious. "But how is Mr. McEvoy?" Fielden patted the man's uniformed arm. "Considering what he almost did to you, young man, I appreciate your concern. Anyway we'll let you know." The scientist turned back to the banquet, Weldon Gill killed medic. "Have McEvoy taken up to himself. The circumstances were my suite please. I'll be up directly." described in a further report from "Yes, sir." Marcus Fielden to the Executive As the medic led the two guards Council of the W.S. A.: and their unconscious burden towards the elevators, Gill asked, "What about the rest of us, Marcus? Something tells me we need a conference." "Agreed." Fielden's grim gaze picked out the remaining five astronauts from the several dozen people who had crowded out of the. banquet hall. "Gentlemen, I want to see you upstairs in half an hour. Subject for discussion -- " he scowled angrily -- "your future!" Hender watched the little scientist hurry away. Then a warm presence pressed close to him and a familiar voice said, "Honey, you don't look well." "My head aches." "Otherwise?" He looked away. "Otherwise I feel lousy." She frowned worriedly. "That's what I thought. George, you're all suffering from -- something." Something? Well, that was one way of putting it, he supposed bitterly. Someone began to laugh -- the sound was harsh and without humor. But it was only when Marguerite looked at him with pained surprise, he realized the laugh was his own. II. after the incident at the... so it obvious an even further factor had entered the picture. For the second time in almost as many days I again had to revise my thinking about the future of the interstellar program. There is still a price to pay, of course, and Gill was the first to pay it. But I am convinced that in the long run intersellar man will evolve to heights unheard of on this small planet. It is as if Nature herself had a hand in this when she gave man this intersellar trigger which can only be released once -- but which, once released, forces him to become a creature of the cosmos. You know by now, of course, that Gill chose to remain on Earth because of his desire to have full vision restored. He was aware of the risk he was taking and agreed to become a test subject for our team of psychologists. But as I watched the accelerating deterioration of this strong personality it became almost impossible to maintain my scientific objectivity. Even the success of the eye transplants had little effect on his downward slide and his suicide was inevitable. The total desperation of his condition is best illustrated by the fact he knew the operation was a success and knew that within a month the healing process would be sufficiently advanced to enable him to join the others on Luna. However his private hell had become too intolerable to be borne even a moment longer, so he took what seemed the only logical way out. The work on Golden Hind II is right on schedule and she will shortly be moved to Luna orbit from where she will begin the return voyage to Alpha Five. The colonists are in good spirits and have voiced no objections to their cramped quarters aboard the ship. Unfortunately hypothermia equipment for four extra persons takes up a lot of space, so the crowding is necessary. Regarding the selection of personnel for the Amazon Project, I am fully aware that suitable female candidates do not, as it were, "grow on trees." So I suggest that steps be taken to organize an intensive selection and training program that will... Golden Hind II was ready to leave. Captain George Hender and his wife -- and the other four male members of the second Centauri expedition and their wives -- sat before a large video screen in a lounge of the Clavius Luna Complex. On the screen the image of Dr. Marcus Fielden loomed twice as large as life. "I had wanted to be on Luna when this moment came," the scientist said regretfully, "but I am afraid the Agency ruled otherwise." "A ruling based on your own recommendations," Hender pointed out. "After all, Marcus, you have served your three years. Now you have to be satisfied with terra firma." Fielden smiled. "True. But at least I know where I belong. You people, on the other hand, are going to be like kids in a candy store. With the whole universe to choose from, which goody do you go to next?" Which indeed? As more ships became available, Hender knew that Alpha Five would not hold him for long. Earthlike or alien, with or without pressure domes, all worlds were now grist for the starman's mill. All except one. Marguerite stirred beside him. "Strange," she said. The image on the screen cocked a quizical eyebrow. "Strange?" "Knowing I can never return to Earth again." She twisted her hands together nervously. "It isn't too late, you know," Fielden said. Across a quarter of a the screen it seemed the huge eyes looked directly at her husband. "Well, George?" Hender accepted the hint. Turning to his bride of less than a week, he took one of her hands in his. Then, gently: "You heard the man. What do you want to do?" She forced a smile. "Sorry dear. You're not going to get rid of me that easily." From his office in one of Earth's great universities, Fielden nodded approvingly. "Marguerite, do you feel any -- ah -- symptoms?" She grimaced. "I feel tired." "Nothing else?" "I don't think so." The man on Earth looked relieved. "I'm glad to hear that. For a three-year-plus you are not doing badly at all. And you will be in hypothermia in a few hours, so you can look forward to sleeping the years away until you get to Alpha Five." "Gill's World," corrected Brian McEvoy. Fielden blinked. "I beg your pardon?" The young astronaut grinned. Relaxed and completely recovered from his bout with Terran Madness, he repeated, "Gill's World. We agreed that should be the name for the planet." He added earnestly: "I hope you can talk the Agency into making it official -- " "Gill's World, eh?" The scientist was clearly pleased by the suggestion. "A fine tribute to a good man." McEvoy hugged the blond girl at his side. "Not that it matters -- unless you want to reach us. If you do, that's the address." Suddenly feeling his years, Marcus Fielden slumped back into his chair and stared at the five men on his screen. They were the first representatives of a new breed. It would be a long time before science knew how they had got that way -- what mysterious mechanism had caused Earth to reject them. Something peculiar in the air and ecology of Gill's World? The possibility was one of the reasons two of the women trained biochemists. If an answer were found, it was certain Marguerite Hender and her four female companions would have as much a part in the finding as their men. They were determined young persons who would surely redefine the role of their sex -- and why not? The archaic social customs of Earth would have little meaning on a world that made men aliens on their home planet. In fact, Fielden told himself ruefully, I doubt their descendants of ten thousand years hence will have even heard of Earth. T HE crew of Enterprise had not found any habitable planets around Barnard's Star. But one world's strange life forms, existing in near vacuum, had occupied them in fascinated study for twenty-three months. Then they had reentered hypothermia aboard their starship, expecting eventual revival amid the familiar worlds of Sol. They did not know of the high-energy signal speeding toward them at the velocity of light. Similar signals from even more powerful transmitters were on their way towards Lalande # and Epsilon Eridani. Enterprise was still more than five light-years from Earth when its detectors picked up the First pulse. Like a huge metal flower its highgain immediately deployed one hundred meter fine-mesh petals to gather in the complex code that followed. The message was received and recorded and acknowledged in approximately one hundred and three seconds. The ship's computer control then withdrew the high-gain back into its folded position, rolled and turned the vessel until its command module was pointed on another but equally precise heading. Another two hundred and eighteen seconds went by as circuits were checked and verified. Finally electronic instructions were channeled through the control core, past the landing module housing and fuel tanks to a slave computer within the drive module. The slave responded. Banked nuclear fires within the drive's shielded core gradually returned to life, pumping megawatts of power into huge control coils. A trail of faint luminescence appeared between the coils as charged nuclear particles were hurled away from the ship at fractionally less than the speed of light. Enterprise was on its way toward Alpha Centauri. At about the same time another starship, Amazon I, lifted from Earth toward deep space. To be the problem of the men from Alpha.  Some of the original covers and inside illustrations are still available! These are the actual originals used from # through #. Some are already framed. Send stamped selfaddressed envelope for list and prices. Box #, Greenwich Village Station, New York, N Y # Psychic. Send Name. Birthdate. Time, Location and Florida State Christian College Post Office Box # Fort Lauderdale. Florida # #G Montana. Victorville. Calif. # magazines. Arkham House. Fantasy Press. Lovecraft authors Shocking fiction, uncensored opinions, out#. 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Yet there is something to the comparison, although I doubt it is what Mr. Higginbotham had in mind: Just as the necessity for redeeming social value has hampered pornography for several years now, the requirement that science fiction be jamcrammed with action, thrills, Great Peril and good ole "sense of wonder " has kept it in the cheapjack class oj literature in which it at least in part belongs. How many of the Great Books which command universal respect are fast-action thrillers? Middlemarch? Little Dorrit? Catcher in the Rye? Ulysses? The fact of the matter is that writing to give the reader his thrills is every bit as low as writing to give him titillation, and face it -- only semiliterates read science fiction purely for the action. Yet " action " seems to be a science fiction tradition. Traditionalism in all forms is detestable, however. (A fine semantic point: traditions, of course, are not in themselves detestable at all, but those who insist that traditions are all that matter are. ) If traditions stuck in music (for example ) as many wish they would, composers today would still be sitting around rehashing Bach  Co. The same holds true for the scientific aspects of sf A. J. Budrys, in reviewing Chip Delany's Nova a few years back, said something to the effect of: "As far as I can see, the most that science fiction can do is wring your heart while telling you how it works." Talk about selling something short! That's like saying Moby Dick is a story about a whale. How many real writers give a good goddam about blowing another hole in Euclidian geometry, or about taking time out from the hero's psychological problems to show what happens to a micelle in colloidal dispersion? If , as a writer, you don't have anything better to worry about you're in the wrong business. Which brings us simultaneously to "relevance" and back to Mr. Higginbotham's letter. Once again he is right in a horribly mistaken way. Any sort of relevance is a passing thing. And, though it may pain many to hear it, Stand on Zanzibar, The Byworlder, The Sheep Look Up, Make Room! (Cont. on page #) going to the Moon on every manned mission Guaranteed Storage capacity For # Years or vour Money Back. # Tunes the staying rower ol An ordinary nasnughti The most critical thing about our flashlight -- or any flashlight -- is that it works when you need it! But how long has your old flashlight been in a drawer, or in the glove compartment of your car? Can you be certain it will work on the next emergency? The truth is that up to now, flashlights rarely burn out from use... instead the power drain on latent batteries weakens them so that in a relatively short time they become Module #-Yr. Flashlight. From the company that made flashlights for every manned Moon mission... 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Enclosed is  check or Q money order for  (N.Y. residents add sales tax.) .Jay Norris Corp. #. Science had created the perfect man for a crowded planet. What was his mission? Could any power, anywhere, stop him? O N A bright morning in January Dr. John Heywood descended to his office in the Department of Experimental Genetics on the twentieth floor of the California Institute of Technology's tower, bade his secretary a good morning and entered his private suite. As he started to remove his coat he glanced at the mail laid out on his desk and noticed an envelope with the return address: U.S. State Department, Bureau E. Heywood sat down without removing his coat. He reached for a letter opener hilled with an ivory replica of Michelangelo's Statue of David. Two holographic computer cards fell from the opened envelope. Both were buff colored but one was edged with a black border. Inside was also a letter, amateurishly typed and written in an informal, familiar style at odds with the sudden intensity of the man who read it. Johnny boy: Leave it to Cal Tech to corral all the oddball experiments! A corkscrew helix is coming your way from Baghdad. Amal Eugene Severn -- The Ideal Man for a Crowded Planet -- is transferring to the Cal Tech Seismology Department to study the San Andreas Fault. To refresh your memory -- if a memory like yours ever needs refreshing -- he's the fourth of five prototypes in Ambulatory Eugenic Experiment Seven, so you should have a line on three of his creche mates before his own Thanatos Syndrome is triggered, which should be around May I since he's programed to make the big contribution by the end of April. His white and black genetic cards are herewith. I hear the boys in the back room at Kiev have a betting pool on the self-termination date of their specimen, a gqnad grabber by the name of Ailya Eugenia Semenovna. Now that's what I call scientific Russian roulette. Remember, Amal is our own baby, literally and figuratively, so let's keep him under our observation. The earthquake boys might suspect something when Amal goes into action, but before any suspicions congeal the human Mayfly will have flown, taking all evidence of the Thanatos Syndrome Factor with him. Speaking of the T. S. Factor, a whimsicalantiquarian on my staff tells me that "T. S.," in World War II slang, stood for an expression which politely translates as "tough sugar" or "that's all, brother." You lucky stiff, Eddie Dr. Heywood took the letter, folded it and dropped it into a container attached to the side of his desk. The paper fell to the bottom of the container and evaporated. Then he fingered the panel board on a computer input box and stared for a moment at the screen. Lifting his phone, he dialed a number and said, "Doctor, you have a Nils Larsen in your class. Let me talk to him." Heywood's voice was flat and matter-of-fact as he spoke to the professor over the telephone. He waited a moment and when he spoke again his tone was vibrant and warm. "Good morning. Nils. This is Doctor Heywood. How would you like to brush up on your Arabic and move your living quarters to the sixty-plus floor level? Good! Call at my apartment at seven tonight. I have a proposal I'd like to explain to you. And by the way. Nils, keep this confidential. I'll see you at seven." Heywood hung up the phone and called in his secretary, to whom he gave the white card. "File this under los angeles area -- After the secretary left Heywood removed his coat and left his office, taking the black-margined card with him into a rear area of the wedge-shaped administration department, which occupied a full eighth of the tower's circle. He stopped at a tungsten steel safe and turned a combination lock, thinking of the betting pool set up by his Russian compatriots in Kiev. The Russians were free to bandy top-secret information among themselves -- their Department of Human Engineering was a branch of the Soviet State Police. In the U.S. all academic departments of experimental genetics were answerable to the Eugenics Bureau of the State Department and were, in theory, subject to political jurisdiction. Envying the academic freedom of his Russian colleagues, Heywood placed the unedited genetic index of Amal Severn into the black files and closed the safe. At Cal Tech only those with a need to know would be informed of the arrival on campus of one of the first five human beings programed from the fetal stage to accomplish much and to die young from a genetically induced self-destruct mechanism. in the girl at the window matched those of the city spread below her in the February twilight. She, too, seemed fashioned of metal and minerals, an artifact of marble, spun gold and jade. Lissome, poised, square-shouldered, her body projected a regality not unlike the stateliness of the towers she looked out on and, like the beauty of the city, the beauty of the girl hid flaws. Behind Lyn Oberlin's composed features and cool green eyes her mind stirred to a premonition as bizarre as it was emphatic. From girlhood her mind had been shadowed with precognitions, as if some inner eye glimpsed beforehand the outriding shapes of the future. At times the shapes seemed very close, observing rather than being' observed. At such times her preternatural focus on the forms of the future became vaguely unsettling, as the sound of one's heartbeat at night is a comfortless reminder of mortality. This evening her sense of something waiting was so strong she found herself leaning toward the city. For over a hundred years the city had been called the city of the future. Shimmering above an arboreal plain between snow-capped mountains and the sea, its varicolored towers resembled titanic minarets. Atop a central hill stood eight, all of yellow plastisteel and closely grouped in a circle linked at the fifty-floor level by an outward curving pedestrian tube. Topped by the knobs of mosque-domed restaurants, the central towers were designed to resemble a crown of gold, for in Spanish the city had been named "the city of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels," and the crown symbolized the diadem of La Reina de Los A ngeles. Even apart from the Moslem influence on architecture symbolizing the city's Christian origin, some critics considered the Los Angeles civic center overly flamboyant, but the major flaws of the city were invisible. Beneath its basin and through surrounding hills ran earthquake faults: the Sylmar Fault, the Inglewood-Newport Fault, the Hollywood Fault. Slanting north and east of the city lay the great San Andreas Fault which in eons past had split a massive peninsula from the mainland, created an ocean gulf and, in an earlier century, destroyed the city of San Francisco. Here, too, the earth often trembled, but Los Angeles shimmered unmarred in the sunlight and glittered in the darkness. Turning from the window and going into her bedroom, Lyn Oberlin moved with a grace which inspired the average male liberal arts student to compare her with Diana, the Huntress -- to the detriment of any romantic plans he might entertain. In the first place, Lyn detested cliches; secondly, once she had correlated a specific thought to a facial expression she could read a boy's mind without a too intent study of his features. For a "mindreader" -- her precognition sometimes seemed to take this form, but she always put the tetrn in quotes -- flirting was as fascinating as playing poker with all the cards face up. For that reason her premonition was all the more bizarre. No doubt for a ball, had thought with clairvoyant certainty. Tonight I'll meet the man I'll love and the man I'll safely assume, none had a sense of romance as jaded as her own. Aristotle had said that to understand all was to forgive all, but the Greek had never been a coed in the Greater Los Angeles University Complex. Here, to understand all that went on in the mind of a student was to be bored, revolted, or terrified. Opening her jewel box, she stood for a moment in wonderment over her premonition. She was qualified by the Bureau of Eugenics to have two children, tax free, but marriage had never entered her plans. What husband could long tolerate a wife who could read his mind? At U.S.C., the only suitor Lyn had even idly considered was Red Benton, a graduate law student whoshared her interest in governmental procedures. Red's thoughts were so aseptic, legalistic and complex he was rarely offensive, but she would not meet the U.S.C. student at the Cal Tech ball. She chose her grandmother's locket watch from the jewel case. It balanced the V-neckline of the twentieth century miniskirt she wore as a costume. The pendant watch carried out the old-fashioned theme of the dress, which was daring for the neo-Victorianism of the younger generation but showed her legs to advantage. She snapped the locket behind her neck, wondering if her second invitation to the Cal Tech Scientists and Models Ball meant that the boys in the Daedalus Society planned to ask her to model for one of their life-sized, computer-activated gynodrones. If so, she would refuse the honor. She preferred being thought of as prudish to the knowledge that a lifelike replica of herself would be cavorting through the halls of the men's dormitories -- on a rental basis -- during the Sadie Hawkins Hour. Still drawn to the mystery of the evening, she turned from the room. Ballantine Books The long hiatus -- as we , with enormous well-bred control, are calling it -- is over. Random House now owns Ballantine Books -- joy abounds. This department is back being over-worked as usual, and loving it. And may I, speaking personally, say thank you to all the many, many gentle persons who wrote, called and otherwise conveyed their love and good wishes while we were all cliff-hanging. The next episode in our soap-opera looks good. An s.f. editor must, in logic, be far-sighted enough to buy against futures. But organizing the list for presentation at the Spring Sale Conference, we were rather astounded to find how well balanced we had, in fact, been. not unnaturally, the best already published material. Two New Writers: Robert Wells, and Robert E. Toomey. Jr., with A Two Old Masters: Lester del Rey -- by Jack Vance -- the start of a brand new series. Two Old Reliables: Edmund Cooper, Two Sequels: Alan Dean Foster's Kip pax. Two reprints: R. A. Lafferty's ARby that busy fellow. David Gerrold -- That's balance by God. Some are already out of course. April and May will see the following: games in a future culture fanatically punitive to technology. originals on the subject of the title -- a showcase for new writers. Toomey. Jr. Our favorite character is Pacesetter, a #-legged behemoth, heavily fanged and clawed, who is the local transportation... no introduction whatsoever. And we'll cover the Adult Fantasy next time round. Blessings on you all. BB Usually unschooled in mythology, science students were less apt to compare her to Diana and give her an immediate code to deciper their thoughts. For a while, at least she could indulge the illusion that she was a normal girl. her apartment into the circular corridor of the tower and pushed the elevator button for the parking basement. Twenty minutes later her enthusiasm was still with her when she parked her Dunemaster in the basement of the Cal Tech Tower and took the express elevator to the topmost floor and the students' pleasure dome. The off-stage room where the guests awaited to be announced hummed with the voices of the feminine elite of the Los Angeles University complex, mostly describing their" reactions to receiving the invitations. Only two girls were familiar to Lyn. One was a male-centered redhead from U.S.C., a dramatics major named Gloria Jaffee whom Lyn did not particularly like but with whom she sympathized. Gloria was suffering a severe but immaculately concealed attack of stage fright. To calm her, Lyn engaged Gloria in conversation, telling her what to expect. "Be alert for surprises. Last year's theme was the county fair. After a holographic square dance on the stage, the girl dancers faded but the boy dancers ran among the audience, kissing the girls. One girl fainted when a solid hologram kissed her. Of course, real boys had been dancing with the shadows." The other familiar face was reassuring to Lyn. Last year the girl had been attired in the same costume she wore tonight, that of a Spanish gypsy with a mantilla on her hair. Lyn remembered her name, Lola Oachoa, because it preceded Oberlin in the alphabetic order of introductions. A year had worked wonders with the girl's torso. She was a transfer student from Madrid, Lyn remembered. The Spanish girl was introduced over the public address system immediately ahead of Lyn. She glided onto the stage with the grace and arrogance of a tango dancer. The ripple of urbane applause that greeted each guest rose to thunder as Lola Oachoa descended from the stage to choose her date for the night. Feeling absurdly provincial, Lyn answered her own call to the stage with a defiantly American stride. The decibel level of applause was considerably moderated until some boy broke the house rules with a wolf whistle. The tonic of the sound threw Lyn back to her normal walk and the applause rose to a higher peak. If she could have found the boy who whistled, she would have chosen him out of sheer patriotism. Descending into the arena, she walked among the tables to look over the offerings. Each table held a blond and a brunette for her to make her final choice between, but she needed a man to match her height and she preferred one with a guarded expression. Contact lenses were out in force tonight, she observed -- the horn-rimmed status symbols of Cal Tech students were absent and the eyes above the bright table lamps glittered. Any ordinary girl could have read these boys' minds by studying their neck muscles. Lyn paused... her with a bemused expression that suggested challenging thought patterns. He was tall enough for her -- blond and broad-shouldered. A dueling scar could not have added to his aura of virility. Beside him sat a slender, dark-haired student with olive skin and incongruously gray eyes. He seemed as tall as the Teutonic knight, but his features were too sharp to be handsome and he was slender. "I choose this table," she said to them. "I'm Lyn Oberlin, a graduate student at U.S.C. In the morning I'm secretary to Doctor Kley. In the afternoons I'm a student and socio-psychological counselor at the clinic." She spoke mostly to the darkhaired youth to add to the suspense. Her final choice would not be made until a bell rang. They arose, the blond speaking first, "I'm Nils Larsen, a genetics major from West Covina. At this table we prayed to two gods to guide your feet here. Amal, my roommate, is Mohammedan." The dark boy came to attention and his heels clicked. "Amal Eugene Severn, seismologist, transfer student from Baghdad. We are honored." Lyn decided she had selected the wrong boy as the student prince. The Arabian waited with haughty disdain as Nils Larsen seated her and turned the taple lamp low to indicate the table had been chosen. Amal Severn stood at attention until Lyn was seated -- and when he sat he sat at attention. "You did seem preoccupied," Lyn said to Nils, "but I had no idea you were praying." "We started praying -- Amal was chanting, really; he's a part-time muezzin on a Baghdad minaret -- the moment you started to stride across the stage, looking for all the world like Diana, the Huntress." Scratch one blond beast, she thought and turned her attention to Amal. The Arabian seemed hypnotized by the locket watch nestled in the cleavage three inches above the V in her blouse. Though slightly discomfited by his gaze, she smiled at him and said, "Let Amal speak for himself." "We're quite pleased," Amal said in a clipped British accent. He kept his gaze on her locket. "You've studied at Oxford?" "Never." "His father was English," Nils volunteered. "His mother was Arabian." The father accounted for the gray eyes so transparent they resembled windows opening onto vast deserts, but the eyes unsettled her with their steady gaze. "What are your hobbies?" she asked Nils. "Languages. I speak several. Amal's are horsemanship and archery." "I rather suspected Amal's might be horology." Amal tore his eyes from her watch and turned to Nils, speaking in Arabic. In profile, she noticed, he resembled a bust of Julius Caesar. Lyn understood one word and it was enough to tell her he was asking Nils the definition of horology. Nils answered him in Arabic and Amal turned to her. She caught a note of disapproval in his voice. "I was not looking at your watch." "Amal comes from a part of Iraq where women still cover their faces," Nils intervened, embarrassed. "He's only been in this country two weeks." "Please tell Amal that my costume is designed to the specifications of the ball committee." "Be so kind as to speak to me directly," Amal said. "I am not royalty." He looked at her with a hauteur that made her wish he would return his gaze to her watch. Obviously he was suffering from advanced cultural shock caused by his transfer from Iraq to the United States and he might have been lying about his lack of royal lineage. He made her feel like a peasant. "I take it that you disapprove of my dress?" "Does it matter? I am not Allah." One would never know it from his behavior, she decided. Something was going rapidly wrong with her premonition. She had chosen a table graced by a cliche user and a snob. S HE turned to Nils. He was beginning to look better. Despite the cliche, his thoughts were not yet obvious and he was handsome and mannerly. "What's the theme of tonight's spectacular?" "Reenactment of a Black Mass from the Middle Ages, complete with human sacrifices featuring a real human. A student depressed by his high B average, which is low for Cal Tech, is going to let himself be killed in plain view of the audience. If you're not already a devil worshiper, get ready to be converted." Lyn made a moue" of disapproval and Nils asked, "Aren't you interested in the occult?" "Such ideas aren't toys to be played with," she said. "They can be dangerous. There are dark areas in the human psyche." "You have thought about these things?" Amal surprised her with the question and the intentness with which it was asked. "My grandmother was a parapsychologist," she said. "She taught me to withhold judgment on the so-called psychic phenomena." "Come now, Lyn," Nils said. "If you can't weigh it or measure it, it doesn't exist. So relax and enjoy the fairy tale." "Some subjects upset me," Lyn said. "Does violence disturb you?" "It does," Lyn answered Amal's strangely oblique question, "if the producer makes it seem real enough." "Then I will be kind to inform you -- " Amal began, but Nils interrupted him, speaking in Arabic. Amal listened and shrugged, saying, "If that is your custom." Amal had wanted to tell her something and Nils had given him a verbal kick in the shins. As if in apology, Amal turned to her and said, "May I offer you tea?" "Perhaps Lyn doesn't like tea," Nils said. "I will buy. She will drink," Amal said. He clapped his hands above his head and a student waiter came running. Nils looked across the table as if embarrassed by Amal's manner. Lyn smiled at him. "I will drink tea," she told Nils. The Arabian's hauteur was beginning to intrigue her. He was not handsome, but he was different and Nils seemed awed by him. Lyn's interest was mostly clinical. She could get no impression of Amal's thoughts -- possibly he was thinking in Arabic. In any event, he had none of the openness of an American boy. He had the features of a desert hawk and the manners of a sheik, she thought, and he needed to be tamed as well as acculturated. Casually Lyn probed Amal with a seemingly innocuous question, actually one of the key questions used in socio-psychological interrogation procedures. "Why do you study seismology?" "My mother was killed in an earthquake." He answered with a vehemence that suggested a personal vendetta against temblors and was more significant to her than his expressed motive. On a Freudian level his emotionalism revealed Oedipal antagonisms toward the shaking earth, though a Jungian might assert that the earthquake symbolized Amal's libido. Lyn had heard too many rumors about desert sheiks to discount the Jungians entirely. "Do you like this country?" Lyn asked. "It has been very generous." "I take your answer as a diplomatic 'No,' and if you're having trouble adjusting to our culture, why not call on me professionally. I have an opening next Wednesday at three-thirty." Her offer was genuinely given. If she decided to reject him when the bell rang she wanted to keep an option to meet him later. He might merit a footnote on a paper she was planning on cultural shock. Amal neither agreed nor disagreed to her proposal. Instead he asked, "Is this Doctor Kley for whom you work the chairman of the board of supervisors?" "Yes," she said and turned to Nils. "Why did you choose Cal Tech, a local school, when you had the whole country to select from?" "The genetics department here is the best. Doctor Heywood has a solid staff around him and genetics is where the action is." They were interrupted by the waiter bringing tea and Lyn was grateful for a chance to change the subject. On her last outing at Cal Tech she had chosen a specialist in cosmic rays and he had bombarded her with talk of mesons. Lyn proposed a toast to their impromptu fjost and the three touched cups at the center of the table. "To the junior Ozymandias, our seismologist, may his caravans be always richly laden." Her obscure allusion to a desert tyrant, taken from an English poem, would be accepted as a compliment by Amal, she felt sure, since he was a seismologist and had never been to Oxford. He responded promptly and with a flicker of a smile: "To the new Helen of Troy, our psycho-sociologist. May her watchtowers never topple." She was immediately suspicious of his toast. Since he had been in the States long enough to learn that U.S.C. was called Troy, his twisting of "socio-psychologist" might have been deliberate. His further reference to her toppling watchtowers sounded more than faintly like a double entendre. Suddenly she was enjoying both of her table companions in a manner seldom permitted her. No banal thoughts from either had intruded on her mind. Toward Amal she reacted as a completely normal girl and all she could pick up from Nils was an occasional fit of discomfiture when he felt Amal was being too imperious. "It's going to be hard to choose between you two," she confessed. "I wonder if I could get a rules change and keep you both." table across the aisle before either could answer and Nils turned to look back at the sound. From her position Lyn looked directly across and saw Lola Oachoa rise and spew Spanish at one of the boys at her table, apparently a Chicano. An Anglo, still seated, looked stupefied as Lola arched back in flamenco haughtiness, pointed to the stag area and told the Mexican, "Vamose!" The boy stood up but did not go. He volleyed Spanish back at her and Nils, twisting his head sideways, explained to Lyn that the boy was protesting Lola's selection of a Gringo as a betrayal of Spanish honor. So recently buoyed by an American wolf whistle, Lyn sided with the patriot. Even more recently subjected to the hauteur of a sheik, she found that her sympathy went to the boy when, according to Nils' rapid translation, Lola heaped aristocratic scorn on the Chicano she was rejecting. Finally she must have cast aspersions on the Mexican's virility, for he yelled, "Puta!" It was not a polite designation for a female either in Los Angeles or Madrid, but it must have been accurate, Lyn decided, for beneath the girl's exterior beat the heart of a Spanish gypsy. Her hand whipped to the high comb in her hair, and a stiletto flashed. With a side-arm sweep, she swung the knife toward the boy's rib cage. He threw out his palm, chopping her arm at the elbow, caught her wrist with his free hand and shortened the arc of the weapon. The stiletto plunged into a heaving bosom. Nearby, a girl screamed and Lyn relaxed, knowing no heart beat beneath Lola's silicone mounds. Unseen by Nils, Amal had reached over and clasped her hand to gain her attention. Looking toward him, she saw him shake his head to her in warning. The act was a part of the show. Masculine laughter drowned feminine shrieks as the wounded girl staggered into the aisle, stumbled forward, tripped lightly onto the stage and pulled the stiletto from her chest. The blood flowing from the puncture swooped back into the wound. Holding the weapon in her hand, she made a sweeping bow as a voice sounded over the PA system: "Introducing Lola Oachoa, Cal Tech's answer to Onan." Lola hurled the stiletto into the planking of the stage and began a Mexican hat dance around it to the recorded music of a marimba. A gynodrone of metal and plastic, directed by a computer within the torso Lyn had envied, wove voluptuous patterns on the stage, and the girl who modeled it, Lyn realized, might now be in a convent in Spain. Programed a little differently, the dark mannikin well might writhe to different rhythms at less public spectacles in this tower where certain students no doubt hoped its duties would be shared by a blond replica of Lyn Oberlin. Lyn was disgusted. At that moment she could have stalked from the hall, but she remembered the pressure of Amal's hand as he had warned her of the spurious violence. The Arabian might be haughty, but he was kind -- and possibly he had not been at Cal Tech long enough to be tempted by the fabrications of the Daedalus Society. True, he was proud and arrogant, but training and natural endowments had equipped her to hood a desert hawk. Besides, it would be fun to tame him. The touch of his hand in hers had been strong, gentle and A bell clanged through the pleasure dome. The time had come for the girls to make their final choices. Lyn stood and the two across from her arose to accept her formal announcement. "Gentlemen, I choose Amal Severn as my date for the evening." "Thank you for considering me, Lyn," Nils said. "My congratulations, Amal." Amal went rigid, clicked his heels and said, "I am honored." She had her work cut out for her, she decided, dating a boy who sat and stood at attention. She turned to Amal. "We're not spending our evening in this computerized bawdy house watching a sophomoric Black Mass. I'm driving you into the country to show you something really spectacular. To hell with simulated realism." She took his arm to escort him from the pleasure dome and a slight squeeze told her his muscles, though wiry, were as strong as corded cables. As they turned to go she caught her first coherent impression from the mind of Nils Larsen, not a thought but an emotion powerful enough to. reach her at a casual glance. When they strode from the hall she knew she was creating history of sorts as the first girl to walk out of a Cal Tech Ball, but she was more concerned with the impression she had picked up from Nils. A strong but subtle feeling had reached her from his mind -- a mixture of chagrin over his loss, a leaping hope for Amal and, deeper still, a great sadness too diffuse for her to pinpoint without staring at him. U muttered, settling into the seat of the Dunemaster as it swung onto the freeway guide band. Inserting a routing card into the auto's automatic steering component, Lyn looked over at him. "Bread and circuses?" "The gifts Nero used to keep the Romans happy," he said. "Today it's automobiles and spectaculars." "I can't complain about Nero," she said, miffled by his condescension toward the automobile she treasured. "This car can climb seventy-degree slopes and if it flips, the cockpit stays upright. It has its own television set." "You've got a burr in your right Venturelli nozzle," he said, unimpressed. "If you bore me tonight, K Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher our aim to please our sf readers. original storyteller now writing, has # (UQ#), now in paperback from its # Scribner's edition. We have added illustrations and a wonderful whacky cover by Gaughan. novel to be presented in English is the like no other in printl It's Paul Van Lloyd Biggie. Jr. (UQ#), is a truly unusual novel of an artists' world and planetary genocide. With a Cover by Kelly Freas. Burt Akers (UQ#). is the second novel about the adventures of Dray Prescot on the major planet of Antares. With cover and many illustrations by Tim Kirk. r"Have fun I you can watch television while I file the burr from your nozzle." Outside, he seemed much more relaxed than he had been in the pleasure dome. "At times," she said, "I almost think you have a sense of humor, but I'm not yet sure." "You're a psychologist. You should know -- by insight. Tell me, can you really help the kooks?" "We never call the kooks 'kooks,' " she said. "And I can help them. Usually all they need is someone to talk to." "What do you treat?" "Cultural maladaptation mostly. Many transfer students become depressed by their environmental shift." "You mean they are homesick?" "Yes, but that term doesn't dignify an ailment which, in extreme cases, can lead to suicide. I send some of my patients to simulated environments near San Bernardino which are modeled on their homelands. If you ever get a craving for a burnoose or a camel give me a ring." "Not until you've visited the tipis in the American compound in my country," he said. "Oh, we have cowboys and Indians here, too. Our historical research villages are widely used by scholars from all over the world." They fell silent. He was intent on the passing towers of Civic Center bathed in klieg lights that obscured the moon. The only sound was the sibilance of wind over the cockpit dome and she studied his features in the glow from the Center. As immobile as a carving, his face conveyed an impression of a powerful, implacable will, but revealed not one iota of his thoughts. She could not have read his mind easily had he been thinking in English. In more ways than one he reduced her to the role of a typical American girl and she enjoyed it. He watched the blue tower of Echo Park and the silver tower of Silver Lake wheel by; he neither spoke nor made any attempt to move closer to her. Suddenly she feared she might lose this arrogant yet fascinating Moslem -- his taste in females might be too exotic. Then she assured herself that her anxiety was premature. She had inserted the guide card to Yosemite Park on the theory that snow and water, by its novelty, should turn on a Bedouin. When they passed the Wilshire District tower and he had still said nothing she began to wonder if he might have felt more secure in the Mojave Desert. As the Dunemaster sped past the base of Hollywood's purple tower he glanced up and she detected an expression on his face. "Don't suggest we stop for a drink," she commented. "Nice girls aren't seen in the Hollywood Tower." He had no such intentions. "A seven-point-five earthquake would send the pods popping off that stanchion like popcorn off a red-hot stalk." S HE liked the simile and, with the memory of mesons bombarding her brain, she wanted to avoid all talk of his specialty, but she could not let the implied slur on the city government pass. "Los Angeles is earthquake conscious. Doctor Kley is very strict about enforcing our building codes." "Then he should review the codes and do it quickly." "Are you predicting an earthquake?" "They are not yet predictable. But I'm working on it. At the moment I am having a problem with my model." "Problems! Problems!" she interjected hurriedly, parroting the favorite expression of Dr. Kley. "Have you visited this section of Los Angeles before?" "Farther north I hiked along a segment of the San Andreas Fault. It was -- " "It's truly an interesting area. In a few minutes we'll pass Old Fort Tejon -- " "I know. It was destroyed by a quake in -- " "Nearby is the Skinhead Reservation." "Skinhead. What an odd name." She seized on the diversion, saying, "They shave their heads for religious reasons. It's a protected cultural enclave where the women can have tax-free babies and ecologists can study the effect of population imbalance on the environment. I once wrote a paper on them. They are free of all city ordinances and Doctor Kiefer, their leader, used to teach economics at U.S.C. He's so turned against technology he won't even allow a radio on the preserve." "They must be attractive people." "Attractive? I wouldn't get near one." "Then how did you write a paper on them?" To keep his mind off seismology Lyn gave him a sprightly and detailed account of the methodology for writing a passable socio-psychological paper by abstracting data from other publications. "Then you write a paper about other papers." "I -- well, I refine concepts," she explained, "and correlate previously established data." "Ah, so, " he said and glanced at the moon. His look at the moon encouraged her and she fell silent, hoping he might move closer. Around them the winter-darkened hills of the Ridge Route began to rise in the moonlight. "This road crosses the San Andreas Fault three times," he Finally said. "If an earthquake broke the guide bands, cars would splatter like eggs among these boulders." "Yes, I'm sure. By the way, Amal -- on your right is the Angeles Crest Hunting Preserve, second largest in the country." "What is hunted?" "Deer, bear, elk, when the conservationists release them. Condemned criminals when they're available." "You hunt men in this country?" She was surprised by the disapproval implicit in his tone. "Yes. To reduce tax assessments through the sale of hunting licenses. It's quite fair. A criminal can choose between the hunting preserve and the gas chamber and only seven hunters are permitted to hunt at the same time. If he escapes to the skinheads he may be given sanctuary -- if the skinheads don't trade him for supplies." "Nero was a humanitarian," Amal said. "It's not Nero's bread and circuses," she said. "The idea is based equivalent of war.' One felon escaped, then volunteered to exchange himself for skinhead supplies, went in and escaped the second time. After that he was free until he committed another crime." Amal glanced at the moon and said, "I envy that man. He accepted the challenge and won." At least she had lured him away from earthquakes, she thought, though he had some strange ideas. She had never met anyone who criticized authority so quickly without quoting sources, though she did not expect him, a foreigner, to share her enthusiasm for the democratic process, particularly since he was so autocratic. On the other hand, he was alien and fascinating and, from the way his eyes kept flickering to the moon, he might be romantic. "Isn't the moon beautiful tonight?" "Not while it's there and we're here." "Why there and here?" "It's directly opposite the sun relative to the Earth and the opposite gravitational pulls exert a tidelike effect on the planet's interior plasma, maximizing the strain on the Earth's crust. I've rigged a device for measuring stress along the planet's fault line..." S HE yielded. She would let him talk out his fears -- did they constitute temblorphobia? She might at least get a paper out of this evening. Listening with half an ear she interrupted him only once -- after he complained: "If I could get into the CalEdison moholes, I could install stress sensors on the fault lines seven thousand meters down." "I could make arrangements to get you the permit," she suggested. "If you could it might give me all the instrumentation I'd need to predict the next quake." "I'll use my influence," she promised.  The last word in time-machine novels. "This is all wildly imaginative and mindbending. Gerrold is such a good writer... After reading this one, time-machine addicts will never be quite able to look at the gadget again as a simple plaything." -- Publishers Weekly by David Gerrold author of When Harlie Was One it A Science Fiction Book Club selection #, now at your bookstore Using her influence, in this instance, meant pulling a request for a tour of the moholes from a filing cabinet and stamping Dr. Kley's name at the bottom, but she refused to tell Amal because she did not wish to destroy the mystique of government administration. She wanted this young man, whose face was almost handsome by moonlight, to feel indebted to her. When in doubt grant a favor. Dr. Kley had always told her and Kley was her ideal politician. At the end of the guide band at El Portal, Amal's enthusiasm had swept him closer to her -- to demonstrate the coefficients of friction between land masses -- and she let him handle the wheel as they drove into the Park. Only then did he grow silent, awed by the majesty and wintry beauty of Yosemite. A thin skim of unplowed snow, freshly fallen, lay over the road between previously plowed banks and, as he drove beside the winding Merced, she commented on the ease with which he handled the vehicle even as he stared at the scenery. He seemed instinctively to adjust for curves and he was not driving at a snail's pace. "My, you're a good driver. Where did you learn?" "Dodging camel caravans in the streets of Baghdad," he said and she detected irony in his remark. "You must think I'm terribly provincial?" "How could I? I don't know what 'provincial' means. But if I wreck the car you'll have to claim you were driving. I have no license." "Why not?" "I'm not a citizen." "That shouldn't prevent a person from getting a driver's license." "It did me." To permit him a view of the park she directed him in a circle past Wahanee Lodge, brightly lighted among the pines. Hearing music, she asked, "Do you dance?" "Superbly." "Would you like to come back here and dance after I've shown you Bridal Veil Falls?" "No." Well, that settled that, she thought. Above them, El Capitan and Half Dome reflected the moon's glow onto the valley floor and diffused it in a mist of light through the snowbent evergreens of the forest. Entranced by the scenery and unable to suppress her enchantment, Lyn breathed a soft and reverent, "Wow." He echoed her sentiments. "This is a lovely spot -- as holy and enchanted as any beneath a waning moon ever haunted by an houri weeping for her Moslem lover." His felicity of phrase after her simplistic expression left her vaguely chagrined as they parked at the foot of the path leading to the falls. She busied herself getting thermal coveralls for them both from the luggage compartment and soon they were garbed against the cold. Trudging ahead of her, Amal broke a path through the crust of the new snow toward the roar of the waterfall. Black in the moonlight, the water poured from a precipice high above them, its outer spray falling as snowflakes. The roar from the cascade precluded normal conversation as they stood sharing the beauty in silence, but sharing it separately. Convention called for a kiss on this spot, but Amal did not even offer to take her hand. Covertly she studied his profile. In the line of his jaw, in the predator's nose was the feel of deserts. She could almost see the wheel and charge of Arabian horses beneath burnoosed tribesmen and hear above hoofbeats the war cries of Saracens. All Amal saw or heard was falling water. Cupping her hands toward his ear, she said, "They're called the Bridal Veil Falls because the mist resembles a white veil. Do Arabs still take brides?" He cupped one hand to the side of his mouth and answered without looking down, "Only when they like to baby-sit." "I heard Arabian men keep harems." "I heard American girls prefer an androne called 'Ken' to living boys." What he had heard was true but there was more. According to the most recent poll, girls in Lyn's age group preferred the gynodrone. Barbie, over the androne, Ken. But this was no place to lecture a foreigner on the American system for maintaining a zero population growth. Suddenly he lowered his head and put his lips close to her earlobe. He smelled of cedar and sandalwood. "Let's go. I've seen enough." turned and crunched through the snow ahead of him back toward the car, wondering if in Persia kissing girls was a taboo on the order of eating pork or wearing shoes in a mosque. As the roar from the falls receded she caught the strains of beginning music from the lodge and wished she had chosen Nils Larsen. Overtaking her, Amal said, "Thank you for bringing me. Yosemite is perhaps the third most beautiful phenomenon I have ever seen." His words were labored, spoken with difficulty, and she wondered if the altitude or the language bothered him. "Do tell," she said with a hauteur he might never equal. "You must describe the first two on our way back to Los Angeles -- while I watch television." Putting his hand on the car door, he paused before opening it long enough to cause her to look up at him. Obviously, now, he was struggling to form his thoughts into English. "I cannot even describe Yosemite which is third most beautiful. How, therefore, could I describe the Vale of Shalimar, which is first in beauty, or Lyn Oberlin, who is second?" Impulsively she cupped his face in her palms and kissed lightly the lips which had not compared her to Diana, the Huntress. "Why, Amal, that's the most delightful compliment!" For the first time he smiled. Rather, his expression was more a shamefaced, embarrassed grin, and she was as positive as she could be by moonlight that he was blushing. She was amazed at the novelty and at her own miscalculation -- what she had assumed to be the haughty aloofness of a desert sheik was the brittle shyness of an inexperienced boy. Amal Eugene Servern was afraid of girls. "Amal, you're blushing!" She laughed. "And I was beginning to think you disapproved of me." "I have never been with a girl without a chaperone," he confessed. "What do American boys say to a girl who is not a mathematician?" "If they're very clever they tell her she's a little less beautiful than the Vale of Shalimar and a little more beautiful than Yosemite. I hope you never learn to think in English." "But I do think in English." He had finally opened the door and she slid into the cockpit. She was surprised by his remark. She had decided that her inability even to gain a glimmer of meaning from his facial expressions had been partly caused by the language barrier. Some other element in his psyche must be throwing his thoughts out of her focal range. "You must have been a very good student of languages," she said. "Only of English and Hindi," he said. "When I studied English it was almost as if I were remembering my native tongue. It gave me an eerie feeling, beginning with my sense of familiarity with the alphabet, and sometimes I found myself remembering -- or thinking I remembered -- a word or phrase I had never heard before." She found herself reluctant to start the motor. She was interested in what he said and she did not want their evening to end on a discord, however muted. "Memory auras are quite common in older people," she said "In the young they're called deja vu." "It's more than an aura," he said. "Sometimes I feel only a thin veil separates me from another life. At times I've used unfamiliar phrases, even Americanisms, that popped into my mind. Then, too, I've felt fragments of emotions that I should not feel." "Have you ever spoken to a psychologist?" she asked. "Only to you," he said. "I did not wish to be considered crazy. Tonight, when you spoke of dark areas of the mind, I felt that you might understand. Besides, I know that the ethics of your profession forbid you to speak of secrets." All he said was true and quite perceptive. His secrets would be protected by her, not only because of ethics but of law. Her own mind held mysteries, but unfortunately she could not confide in him with immunity. "Are you troubled with nightmares or recurring dreams?" "When I was a boy I used to experience one dream a lot," he said, "but it was far from being unpleasant. I dreamed I introduced my father to my creche mother and they fell in love." His dream was neither Oedipal nor uncommon, she recognized. Children often preferred the women who bore them to their genetic mothers. S HE could not speak as freely to him as he to her, but an understanding of his problem might help her understand her own, if she could overcome his shyness and keep him with her a while longer. The distant music gave her an inspiration. His hand lay beside her on the seat and she reached over and placed hers over it, looking at him pleadingly. Her touch was designed to reassure him and her look to give him ego confidence. u Highly original"Theodore Sturgeon, N.Y. Times Book Review  ( Utter believability and constantly heightening fascination."Harlan Ellison, Los Angeles Times # wherever Berkley paperbacks are sold # Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. # Now in paperback! Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years "Amal, they're dancing at the lodge. If it's not against your religion -- would you take me there tonight?" She was following the recommended procedure for dealing with sexual timidity -- a bashful person should be given a line of retreat. He could use religion as a reason to refuse her, but she had caught him in a moral and emotional vise. A refusal would be tantamount to deserting a friend. "In the creche," he stammered, "we were taught to dance horizontally. You Americans dance vertically." She squeezed his hand reassuringly. "I studied classical dancing in high school. Maybe we can manage together." Her use of the word "we" was designed to establish familiarity and a sense of joint purpose. "It would be my pleasure to join with you in a dance," he said. The stilted formalism in his answer suggested to her that he had been reared in a sexually segregated creche. "Would you care to drive?" "You betcha!" he said. She did not understand the term "betcha," but assumed it was an Arabic expression of enthusiasm. They entered the lodge. She realized that she had forgotten she wore the costume of another century under the thermal jacket she peeled off in the cloakroom. The Saturday night crowd in the ballroom, mostly collegians, also reminded her as she followed the head waiter across the dance floor backlighted by a now empty bandstand. Apparently unruffled by the cheers and whistles, Amal seated her at the table at the edge of the dance floor from which the waiter removed a reserved sign. She would have preferred a more obscure table and less deference from the waiter, but Amal, strangely at ease, seemed to expect the attention that drew the unvoiced envy of the patrons surrounding them. Scanning the faces of the females closest to them, reading their thoughts, Lyn realized that Antal's shyness was in no way created by feminine rejection. To a person as perceptive as he was proving to be. Ins altracliveness for the opposite sex would be apparent. As he studied the wine list, the waiter attentive lieside him, she was struck lt iin idea so giotesrpie the abMiidity of Us logic held her. Could Amal have been conditioned to sexual constraint? She knew shyness was easily induced in the human psyche -- one rebuff to a sensitive child could make him or her self-restrained as an adult. She glanced up and saw at a glance that the waiter, too, was engrossed in puzzlement -- how did this young man rate a State Department green credit card? How, indeed? Lyn's thoughts veered to the new mystery. Having preceded him at the entrance she had paid no attention to his credit card, assuming it to be the pink card of the ordinary transfer student. Green cards of unlimited credit were issued by the State Department to ambassadors, visiting heads of state, heirs of royal houses and other very important persons. Amal had said he was not royalty, but the statement could have been a modest disclaimer. He could be related to an oil sheik and conditioned to shyness to preclude his involvement with girls of the commonalty. The idea was worth investigating. Amal asked her deferentially if he might recommend the Thracian Andros and she said she would be delighted. He handed the wine list to the waiter who scurried away. Without the menu to distract him he seemed ill at ease and she undertook to lead the conversation. "I didn't think Moslems used alcohol." lie smiled. "My Moslem ism was Nils's idea of a joke, so I went along with him. Actually I'm Coptic Christian."  tians than with Thracian Andros, she changed the subject. "How did you come to select a geneticist as a roommate?" "Oh, I'm not a bigot. He wanted someone to practice Arabic with and I need a housekeeper and a handyman. So I took him in." His smile took the edge off his implied bias and she noticed his speech was growing more relaxed. He was beginning to feel at ease with her. "For once I'm overwhelmed by the service at the Wahanee," she ventured. "Did someone whisper to the waiters that you were the son of a shah?" "It was you who impressed them." "I'm not that conspicuous. One would think you had a green credit card." "So you noticed," he said. "With me it's not a status symbol. My experiments are considered important, so your government gave me the green card to let me finance my research without the delay of applying for grants." She knew a scholastic grant rarely took longer then two weeks to process. His experiments must have a very high priority if they were pursued with such urgency. "Aren't they afraid you might buy a yacht and sail to Tahiti?" "Whoever 'they' are, they knew I'd never have thought of doing so -- until I met you. I lead a monastic and dedicated life, very humdrum except for those unrecalled memories and a few strange urges." "What strange urges?" she asked, but the waiter had come with the wine, pouring Amal a sip and standing back. Amal tasted it. "Waiter, this wine is processed, not aged. Greeks feed this swill to their pigs. Haven't you any naturally aged wine?" "Let me check again, sir," the waiter said and Lyn, glancing up, saw that he was thinking:  would try to palm it off on a connoisseur... Lyn was amused by the waiter's chagrin, but Amal turned to her apologetically. "I'm sorry to have to berate him in your presence, but he would have charged me for more expensive wine and I must protect your government's money." "You find such deceit, nowadays," she said, "even while honesty's praised as the chief virtue." "The dishonest preach honesty to gain an advantage over the trusting," he said. "Still, I'd rather trust ten dishonest men than distrust one honest man." His thoughts seemed to move in deeper channels than those of American boys, she observed, but she was beginning to admit a prejudice toward Amal. "What are your strange urges?" she repeated. "They're weird," he said. "I'll be intent on my work when suddenly I'll be shaken by a feeling that I should be somewhere else, testing truths that will test me. It's more than a feeling. It's a knowledge, certain, factual. I often imagine I'm a puppet, dangling on the wrong strings, in the wrong puppet show, before the wrong audience." Concealing a certain feeling of self-recognition, she remarked, "Perhaps it's your isolation. It's positively abnormal that you've never been alone with a girl." "Not for a boy from a Coptic creche," he said. "We met our creche sisters only on formal occasions and we were trained to treat them as visiting royalty. Meeting you, an American girl, fissured my fault lines." "No wonder." She smiled. "You must have gained a distorted impression of girls." "Oh, I had my creche mother, a gracious and beautiful woman. She devoted most of her attention to me after my father and mother were killed. But I lost her when I was fourteen -- in the great Iranian quake." She tried to divert him from an obviously unpleasant memory. "Were you injured in the quake?" "No. I was in Baghdad. Mother was lying-in at an Iranian Coptic creche. The entire creche fell into a fissure. The fools in Baghdad didn't keep the newspapers from me with all the lurid details. For a while I was shattered. It was then I decided to try to find a method for predicting such catastrophes." Whether he knew it or not he had outlined to her, step by step, a classic example of Pavlovian conditioning which had forced him into the study of seismology. The remoteness of the opposite sex had brought him closer to a beautiful and idealized mother-figure -- who was swallowed by the planet. The mythos was almost more than Lyn's credo could accept. She was vaguely aware that intrigue was still practiced in the Middle East. Amal might have been conditioned to become obsessed with earthquakes in order to deprive him of his inheritance in some oil sheikdom. Of course the idea was absurdly romantic, almost as far-fetched to a psychologist as the idea that fate, itself, was purely Pavlovian. "No wonder you would like another set of memories," she said. "But the memory I spoke about has nothing to do with my life or times." T HE waiter returned with another bottle of wine, ceremoniously wiping off the dust in their presence. The vintage passed Amal's test. It was a dry wine, flavored slightly with licorice. Lyn voiced her appreciation for it, though for all she knew it could have been one week removed from the Napa Valley. Her own life had been shadowed by rare and inexplicable episodes wherein she could see visions so acute they frightened her. It might help Amal to know that others passed through dark areas, but reticence had become ingrained in her. He was not bound by law or ethics to preserve her confidences and there were areas to her own -- neuroticism? -- that she would have to hold inviolate if only to protect his opinion of her. But he had confided in her, saying he could not risk distrusting an honest man. Morally she was wrong to distrust a man who trusted her -- and by confiding a little she might reassure him much. "Amal, I'll confess a secret, too," she said abruptly. "I knew you had a green card because I read the waiter's mind." "From his attentiveness?" "More than that. By studying his face. I can read a person's complete thought units, not verbally -- few thoughts are verbalized -- but when they are strongly amazed or Upset their thoughts come to me through their facial expressions." "Oh, come, Lyn. Such things are as impossible as -- as a dual memory." He smiled, speared by his own logic. "Can you demonstrate your ability?" "I confess that with you I can't. At first I thought it was because you were thinking in Arabic. Now I don't know what it is. But you defy me." "Let's test you," he said. "Study my face carefully and I'll verbalize a very important message to you." "My gaze might frighten you." "I don't scare easily. Study me now." She focused her vision on him openly, tuning her mind to receive every nuance of expression in his face. All she garnered from the man across the table was a sensation of whirling energy. She felt herself on the edge of some vast, dark maelstrom and it was she who looked away. Her receptors had picked up nothing of what he was thinking. She brought her eyes into normal focus and confessed her failure. Fully at ease now, he smiled. "I was rearranging in my mind the order of the three greatest wonders of my world. When were you first aware of your gift?" " 'Gift' is hardly the word." She smiled. "As I discovered to my sorrow in the first grade when I started answering my classmates before they asked questions. They accused me of being a witch and one afternoon a group of the more active girls surrounded me on the playground and tried to stone me. The little dears had heard that stoning was the way to destroy a witch. I broke through their circle and outraced them, but not before they had taught me to keep my mouth shut. The irony of it was that a decade later witchcraft became fashionable in the elementary school set. By then they would have made me den mother of a coven." He reached over to squeeze her hand. "You can smile now, but the experience must have been shattering to the little girl you were." T HE concern in his voice touched her so deeply she almost lost her composure, but his gray eyes steadied her with their strength and calmness. "Oh, that was only a part of it. I was spared the full shame of ostracism because shortly thereafter my parents moved to the West Coast. But eight years later my class was given the secondaryschool placement profile tests. The segment of the tests concerning the psi factor, relating to telepathy and clairvoyance, was conducted by a parapsychologist. He was especially concerned about my answers -- I knew this from reading his mind -- so I became particularly concerned to give him the wrong answers. When he looked them over I could read his' disappointment and the thought: Well, they're wrong again. "A moment ago you spoke of puppets. Are 'they' pulling the strings? Or is it paranoia that leads me to ask? I don't think so, particularly now that I've talked to you, but at times I considered that I might be a kook. Probably that's why I studied psychology, to learn more about my own mind, and obtained a job with the government, the better to be able to discover who 'they' are." Am al nodded and said. "It's as if 'they' were waiting for you to show up -- and you failed to keep your appointment?" "That was precisely my impression." "Maybe you're the implant daughter of a medium and the parapsychologist had been alerted." "No. My own mother bore me. I come from a long line of childbearing women. And my parents could have told no one. Their relationship was undergoing a strain at the time, so I kept my secret from them. Knowing their thoughts, I didn't wish to be a tale-bearer between them." "That situation itself must have been a burden to a child." "And after it the burden of trite thoughts foisted on me by associates, particularly ardent young men whose intentions and attitudes so often belie their words. So I'm thrilled indeed not to be able to demonstrate my 'gift' to you." Beyond the dance floor the orchestra was returning. Glancing over, Amal said, "With luck and help from the band leader I may be able to prove to you my freak memory. Rising, he took her hand and led her across the floor, moving with an ease that left her doubting her own theories. If he had been intensely conditioned to shyness, his timidity would not hve been neutralized by a single moonlight ride with a girl. Such traits induced into a personality were overcome only by some wrenching emotional stress -- rage, fear, despair -- or by months of counter-conditioning. At the podium a gray-haired conductor looked down and repeated Amal's request as if doubting it. "A medley of dance music by early American composers?" But he said, "My pleasure, sir -- " and by Colin Wilson. An exciting, documented account, by the celebrated author of The Outsider, of magic through the centuries. "Wilson is a superb historian of the realm of magic, witchcraft, mediums and seers." -- Chicago Tribune # Science Fact: Science Fiction, edited by Total Effect. This unique anthology juxtaposes first-rate sf stories and factual science articles, to suggest new ways of looking at such subjects as evolution, communications, satellites, ecosystems, and timespace travel. # a division of Random House pushed buttons on his music stand. Turning to Lyn, Amal said, "This shouldn't be difficult for you. I'm a strong leader." A strong leader with a superb sense of rhythm, and their heights matched. No one booed when he swung her onto the floor. She was familiar with the movement of the waltz from her classes in interpretative and classical dancing, but a novice would have had little difficulty. Dancing with Amal was an effortless gliding into the swirls and dips of the waltz. The orchestra bridged between airs and swung into a new segment of the medley. Amal held her closer and breathed into her ear a phrase she assumed was an Arabic term of endearment, "Begintha begeen!" No one joined them on the floor -- the crowd remained seated, watching them in silence. Someone dimmed the house lights and a spotlight in the rafters was focused on them, cutting from their view the orchestra and the faces in the dark. In the cone of light they had only themselves and the music as he led through a tango, making her feel as weightless as a spinning, falling leaf controlled by an autumn breeze. As the music ended Amal swung her into a deep bow, catching and holding her on the final note, and the leaf had landed on a pool of still water. lights came on. Straightening, they bowed in appreciation, both realizing that the audience, unfamilar with the dance, had assumed they were exhibition dancers. The band swung into The Berkeley Bounce, and the vertical dancers poured onto the floor. Tacking back to their table, guarding her face from an exuberance of elbows, Lyn grieved for the ancient graces. After the Holocaust and two generations of zero population growth there was no necessity left for up-and-down dancing, but the old space-saving customs lingered. At a table so close to the dancers that conversation was difficult above the thud of shoe soles on hardwood Amal clarified the phrase Lyn had mistaken for an Arabic term of endearment. "Accept on faith that I know little about music and less about American composers. But the name of one of the melodies in the medley popped into my mind. I've never heard the title before, yet I'll wager that if you check the library tomorrow, you'll find listed an American dance, Begin the Beguine." "We can test your memory in the parking lot. My Dunemaster has a telephone. We can call the information bank." "Shall we go? Our position here's perilous." She wanted to be alone with him and it was true that their table was in danger from the leaping dancers, but she was impelled to remind him, "What about the government's investment in Thracian Andros we're protecting? We've hardly touched it." He grinned and revealed an unmistakable sense of humor, irony, and perhaps more. He said, "Let's leave it to the waiter as a reward for his honesty -- he can recap it and sell it as an untouched bottle. Besides, I no longer need a social crutch." His shyness had vanished so completely that she wondered if it could have been overcome by an emotion as strong as -- but less negative than -- anger, despair, or fear. Her thought smacked of vanity, she realized, but the idea warmed her as they suited and ran through the snow toward the car. Inside the cockpit she felt an absurd and fluttering shyness as she pulled off her jumpshit to store it in the compartment. Merely the motion of undressing in his presence gave her virginal tremors, a thrill she was technically entitled to. For all his expression revealed, Amal, pulling off his jumpsuit beside her, could have been in a locker room of the boy's gym, an observation that proved a fact she had long ago deduced, that the better part of romance was mystery and that Tantalus, not Eros, should have been its god. She set the telephone for a conference call and dialed the information bank. Leaning forward, she spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable carefully, "Music. American. Song title. Begin the Beguine. " After a three-second delay, a recorded voice answered, "Composer, Cole Porter. Published, nineteen thirty-four." She looked toward Amal and said, "Congratulations. Your American memory reaches back more than a hundred years." "Ask it if there's a historical figure named Baby Ruth." She asked and the bank replied, "There is no historical Baby Ruth." "Baby Ruth is another expression that broke through to me when I was a boy in Baghdad," he explained. "It might have been the name of my sister who never distinguished herself. What happened in the U.S. in nineteen thirty-four?" History was not Lyn's strong point, but she felt it was ungracious of her not to answer a foreigner's question about her country. "Some event of the first magnitude," she said hesitantly. "I think we either exploded an atom bomb or landed a man on the moon. But let me check. American history. First magnitude events. What happened in nineteen thirty-four?" "Nothing," the mechanical voice replied. "Second -- or any magnitude?" "Year of the Great Economic Depression which saw the consolidation of the theory of governmental paternalism under the presidency of Franklin Delano -- " She hung up, saying, "It could go on like that for hours, piling statistics on statistics. The city maintains historical periods in villages south of San Bernardino to permit research historians and antiquarians to absorb such trivia painlessly." b. ing. His face held a look of intent vacuity, as if his mind were focused on wonderment. Almost to himself he said, "It could have been then." He glanced at her, his mind obviously returning to the present, and said, "All night I've had a feeling that I met you before. I wonder if you were there. You remind me of an old-fashioned girl." "It's probably my polka-dot cept the theory of reincarnation." "I prefer statistical probamonkeys making marks at random would eventually rewrite the Koran." "That's not exactly the way I heard it." She smiled, moving closer to him. His arm was across the back of the seat and she was almost under it, pretending to pout. "If I had known you in nineteen thirty-four I would not have forgotten you in a mere century and a half." He didn't move his arm down to comfort her. "Of course it wasn't you, but you do seem to bring back a memory of emotion, evasive, indefinite, but strangely compelling." "Describe it," she commanded. "There's a sadness to it." His voice held a strange resonance -- his eyes looked far away. For a moment she feared he was slipping into a trance. She shuddered. But he had merely been struggling to express the emotion in words. "It's a feeling of mild despair like the memory of a lost love, but there's a sense of triumph mixed with it, of having won something sought for -- yet really not wanted. "I'll describe the emotion in a parable," he said, suddenly alert. "Once in the past I loved a girl who rejected me for a suitor with better prospects. Years later I returned to the place of my birth to learn that the young banker whom my sweetheart married was in jail for embezzling bank funds... That's it -- a sweet sadness mixed with a sad triumph." She laughed at his strangely successful, though involved story and said, "You can always go back to nineteen thirty-four. It's on the subway to Hemet. For instant nostalgia, there's always Disneyland." "It's not nostalgia," he said, taking her quip seriously. "I would be searching for my own memory. Say, Lyn, would you go back with me? I would like to court you -- old style." "Ye gods! Back in those days it took weeks for a boy to get up courage enough even to kiss a girl -- and the women were too subjugated to kiss first." "So what? That would be about my speed. Besides, the Epicureans held that bread was a feast for a hungry man. What wouldn't a starving fellow like me do with a lavish banquet -- like you?" She laughed. "Going to those places, even after hours and on weekends, costs money. Most of the researchers are there on grants." "I have a green card. I could pay your way." "Oh, no," she said. "I might be an old-fashioned girl but I'm nobody's old-fashioned mistress." "See? You belong back there," he chortled. "Already you're worried about your virtue. I know you American girls believe in equal responsibilities and equal privia psychologist." "I work in a free clinic," she said. "And I haven't got my doctorate. Still, you have a valid problem. And it's true -- in the ambience of that time period you might, have your memory restored." She had enough self-awareness to recognize that she was working around to an agreement as she continued thoughtfully, "As a psychologist observing a committed patient I might pull a few strings and get a discount from the Historical Artifacts Association. You call on me during my open session, Wednesday. By then I'll have your permit to enter the moholes and we can plan to investigate your fixation on the past." His arm came down from behind her. He took her hand and kissed it in a circumspect and formal gesture of gratitude which nonetheless held a promise. Once she had overcome his shyness she knew he might relieve the tedium of the twentieth century in a spectacular manner. "I'm paying my own way, Amal. That's definite. And I can't afford to give you more than three weeks' wooing time." Ill t YN'S initial reaction to the his torical village, Dotham, Alabama, circa #, was hostile. After she arrived at the replica of a railroad station and changed into period dress in the station's dressing room she almost sprained an ankle trying to tote her suitcase across the waiting room in the high-heeled shoes of the era. She compounded her aggravation by calling the redcap who came to her aid "mister." With some embarrassment he corrected her error in the customs and traditions of the Old South. The error should never have occurred after all the reading she had done in Gone with the Wind in her Era Acculturation Class given by the Historical Society. The town itself seemed static. The low wooden and brick buildings grouped around the square -- a wooded plot featuring, of all things, the statue of a soldier -- resembled boxes. These structures gave her none of the feeling of movement she got from the plastic towers of Los Angeles. A few citizens, mostly black, lounging on the station platform and the sidewalks contributedto the indolence of the scene. To the right, down the sidewalk, the marquee of an old-fashioned movie house, advertising Jean Harlow in The Red-Headed Woman, blatantly proclaimed its name: The Empire. Apparently "imperialism" was not a revolting word in #. Balanced on the high heels, her breasts constricted into a shoulder halter, she had to wait twenty minutes in front of the station for a taxi, a boxlike vehicle decorated with garish black and white checkers, which clattered to the curb, its motor coughing in terminal throes. With the driver's aid she clambered up the footboard into the cab to discover its air-conditioning was au naturel -- one raised or lowered a window. She had gotten Dr. Kley's permission to leave work early in order to greet her patient in the village when he arrived into a strange environment -- but if the taxi service had not improved by #:# p.m. Amal would have to acclimate himself to his new surroundings without her professional assistance. Beyond the business district, the taxi bore her through an area of white wooden houses with wide verandahs, set well back on treeshaded lawns. The residential area seemed somnolent. It was an incredible fact to her, but she had been told that # percent of the inhabitants of this village, where the calendar was set back to # at the end of each decade, were permanent defectors from the twenty-first century. The Emerson's house, Lyn's destination, was twice isolated. It stood a half-mile beyond the pavement's end on a road that wound through trees, bridged a creek and curved north. Beyond a hedge, where a mailbox marked a gap in the hedge wall, the house was further concealed by a cluster of myrtle bushes. The taxi driver carried Lyn's bag to a porch where a missing banister was scarcely noticeable -- the whole house stood in need of a new coat of paint. But the Emersons, summoned to the porch by the rattle of the taxi to greet their new boarder, appeared to stand aloof and apart from the shabbiness of their residence. Mr. and Mrs. Emerson were in their fifties, thin-faced and angular. Both were tall. The woman wore a black dress with long sleeves, the man overalls and a blue denim shirt with a high collar. From her briefing in Los Angeles, Lyn knew the Emersons were literary historians finishing up a two-year grant in Dotham. They had come to study the origins of science fiction, a remote literary excrudescence which had frothed briefly to the surface of twentieth-century literature before it was scummed off by scientific advances which had turned the genre's romantic conjecturings into low-comedy realism. Lyn's room was the crowning disappointment of her day. Barefloored, except for the oval rag rug beside a bed that held a hard mattress on creaking springs, the room was decorated by wall-paper that repeated endlessly a single rosebud. Lynn found a clothes closet but no private bath. The mirror on the dresser reflected a wavering image. Impelled by some mad impulse to decorate the non-decoratable, the Emersons had placed a squatty white vase with a lid over it not on the dresser but, of all places, under the bed. Lyn on a tour of the premises, introducing her in the kitchen to Dilsey, the cook. Dilsey's effusive politeness in greeting the new boarder could not offset the further decline in Lyn's spirits a glance around the kitchen bought her. Cooking was done on a woodburning stove. There was no refrigerator and no running water. "Where does one bathe?" Lyn asked Mrs. Emerson. "On the back porch in summer. In the kitchen during winter. We use the wash tub and draw water from the well, which is right handy here on the back porch." The wash tub was handy to the well but fifty feet of rope was wound around the well's windlass, indicating the water was not handy to the surface. Weekday mornings she would be working in the city, Lyn realized, so she could shower in her apartment. She would have to gloss over the four-day weekends with a pungent perfume. Standing on the porch, Lyn needed to inquire no further about plumbing facilities. Plainly visible in the backyard stook a privy -- and it was not handy to the back porch. She asked what provisions were made for one's toilet during dark nights or rainy weather. "There's a chamber commode under your bed," Mrs. Emerson said. Well, Lyn thought, the porcelain vase would not go onto the dresser, after all. Standing on the porch, looking east toward a heavily wooded area, she heard strangely familiar grunts and squeals which prompted her to ask, "Is there a pigpen out yonder?" "Yes," Mrs. Emerson said, with strange pride, "and a chicken house. Out here we raise our own ham and eggs." , Lyn stared dully at the wood lot. The accumulating lack of amenities had pyramided her disappointments and now the pigsty beyond the outhouse topped the pyramid. No champac odors, those. All the shimmering illusions of romance she might weave for Amal's imagination could be swept away by a zephyr from the east. Even so, with a bath so difficult to accomplish she might be hoping for an easterly breeze as a lesser evil at the end of an active weekend. Small wonder courtship was such a slow process in the twentieth century, she thought ruefully -- it had to await favoring winds. Mrs. Emerson suggested they return to the parlor, sit a spell and get acquainted. Lyn followed her down a creaking hallway, dropped to a creaking horsehair settee and listened to Mr. Emerson, creaking in his rocking chair by the window as he read the sports section of the newspaper. Mrs. Emerson opened the conversation by inquiring what had brought Lyn to Dotham. "I'm a psychologist, here to administer therapy to a young man with problems. Hopefully I intend to use the diversionary method by entertaining him -- but what does one do for entertainment in Dotham?" "Mr. Emerson and I have our work. Young people have church socials, ball games, moving-picture shows and, of course, courting. If you wish to entertain your fellow here we have a gramaphone -- if he likes music. You have parlor privileges till ten, when we blow out the lamps. After ten you can use the porch swing, but only until eleven. Mr. Emerson and I must get our rest. Of course, there's the mill pond, but nice girls aren't found at the mill pond after ten-thirty at night." "How does one get to the movies?" "You catch the bus over at Johnny Reb's. Vernon and I seldom go. Jitney fare plus the show tickets for two come to seventy cents." Lyn had seen Johnny Reb's on her way out. It was a frame building held together by tin advertising signs nailed to its walls and it stood a half-mile away, where the pavement on the road ended. Her dejection must have shown on her face for she read clearly and without effort Mrs. Emerson's thoughts: Poor girl, she's so hooked on diversions she'll never adjust to the real world. Lyn was surprised; obviously Mrs. Emerson considered Dotham real and Los Angeles the illusion. o'clock," Lyn said, glancing at the clock on the fireplace mantel. "I suppose I should call a taxi and go meet him." "That would be wasteful," Mrs. Emerson said. "The closest telephone's at the bus stop. The call would cost a nickel and the bus fare into town is only a nickel." "Oh, fiddle-dee-dee!" Lyn's ejaculation aroused Mr. Emerson. Looking up from his paper, he asked, "Miss Oberlin, where's your patient staying?" "At the Culpepper farm." "It's only about half a mile from here. He can walk it in fifteen minutes if he's not afflicted." She supposed Mr. Emerson was right. Amal was to call for her at seven o'clock, though now she assumed it would be .closer to seven-thirty. All she had seen here might still be for the best. Once Amal got a taste of primitive life he might speed up their courtship and get back to civilization. Lyn's gloom was lifted when Dilsey entered to serve bowls of home-made ice cream and cookies. Putting aside his paper, Mr. Emerson joined in the repast and in the conversation which, according to the rules of the Historical Society, avoided discussion of any incident occurring after #. In the quiet social atmosphere, a mocking bird singing in the chinaberry tree outside, Lynn admitted to herself that the spirit of girlish adventure that had brought her here was unprofessional and the setbacks were all to the woman, not the therapist. She had dismissed Amal's false memory as deja vu. The song, Begin the Beguine, had retained a measure of popularity over the years and the memory of it had simply been dragged from Amal's consciousness. His chief problem was his shyness, which could be overcome by close association with a sympathetic female therapist. "I see by the paper, Emily," Mr. Emerson commented, "that Babe Ruth's claiming he'll hit sixty homers again this year." "Who's Babe Ruth?" Both smiled at the naivete of her question. Mr. Emerson answered, "Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player who ever lived." She was remembering Yosemite and the name she and Amal had fed lo the information computer. The changed syllable in "Baby Ruth," insignificant to the human mind, would have made the input unreadable to the machine. To imagine that a boy in Iraq had ever heard of an American athlete playing a game never played in Iraq was as incredible as supposing that boy had a memory of a past America. Now she would have to reopen her mind to the validity of Amal's obsession. As she weighed the information the sound of a motor car came from the north and Mr. Emerson, rising to go to the window, remarked, "Another pastime of ours is watching the cars go by." Lyn arose and went to the screen door. She, too, was interested in ancient automobiles. Beyond the hedge in front of the house a strip of plowed ground offered an unimpaired view of approaching motorists. She was watching as the car rounded the curve from behind a clump of trees. It was a sports roadster with the top down and wire spokes on the wheels, a beautiful machine by any standard of aesthetics. She glanced in envy at the driver. Despite the wool hat pulled low over his eyes, Lyn recognized Amal and flew through the doorway as the car vanished behind the hedge, braking to a stop before the Emerson's mailbox. She was through the hedge before he turned off the motor. "Where did you get this?" Almost swaggering in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, he swung around the car, extending his hand in greeting. Since it was all he offered she accepted the handshake, her eyes still on the huge headlights, the outjutting bumper, the chrome and the polished red paint. "I bought it in Dotham," he said. "It's a Model-A Essex with a V-# engine and it will do eighty -- that's miles per hour -- on the Dotham Raceway. Would you like to drive it?" "I'm dying to," she said. "But you must meet the Emersons. Mr. Emerson just shocked me with some information. It's 'Babe,' not 'Baby' Ruth you remembered from this era." "No," he said, as they walked toward the house. "It was Baby Ruth, a candy bar. I found one at the station. In my previous life it was my favorite candy." He was not smiling as he spoke. They mounted the steps to where the Emersons waited. "How do you like Dotham?" was Mr. Emerson's first question. "Greatest little town in the world," Amal answered with an enthusiasm dismaying to Lyn. "I hadn't been here an hour before I met the mayor and bought an automobile from him. How would y'all like to go for a ride?" He had intentionally used the plural noun correctly -- his invitation was directed to Mrs. Emerson. "We'd simply love it," she answered, thinking: He's one of us -- and so pleasantly exuberant after the girl. He was exuberant, Lyn admitted. Too much so, in fact. It was a facet of his personality she had not observed before and was probably the overcompensation of a shy person among strangers, but Lyn did not care for Mrs. Emerson's invidious comparison. The sanctimonious, penny-pinching landlady was no whirling dervish herself. "Of course. I'd rather you not drive over twenty with mother in the car," Mr. Emerson warned needlessly. "Don't let it bother your frosty pow, Mr. Emerson." Amal waved away the older man's fears with a confident hand. "I'm a careful driver. I keep telling myself that the life I save may be my great-greatgrandmother's." Amal's remark skirted close to taboo areas, but Emerson grinned. "I can see you've visited Johnny Reb's place." Emerson thought: And nipped his bootleg moonshine. Lyn read the thought clearly, yet could not understand it. Amal, who, she had to admit, was much farther advanced in the dialect than she, seemed to catch connotations in Emerson's remark which she missed. "Yes, sir! And I mean to tell you, old Johnny and me get along right nice." Suddenly Amal's attention swirled to Lyn. Placing an avuncular arm over her shoulder, he drew her to him in an act of masculine bravado obviously adopted to camouflage his shyness. He had even bolstered his ego with an extremely pungent after-shave lotion. "Honey, we just got to take in The Red-Headed Woman tonight. The boys at the pool hall tell me the lovemaking in it is something fierce and that Jean Harlow's really got 'it' " "What's 'it?' " Lyn asked. Amal slapped his brow in mock anguish. "Honey, they didn't teach you a thang at doctoring school!" The Emersons laughed at what must have been an inside joke and Lyn asked, "You seem to have gotten around a lot -- when did you get here?" "Early this morning. I'd heard tell there was hard times in Alabama so I thought I'd come early and get a little federal money in circulation. So I bought a car, because I wasn't about to see you stuck out in the country with nothing to do but feed the pigs." He squeezed her closer. "I knew that little ole girl of mine wouldn't take kindly to toting slops." His rodomontade was to calm his unease in the presence of strangers, but despite her awareness of his defense mechanism Lyn had never felt so disgustingly dependent on anyone before -- or enjoyed the feeling so much. l and place. During their first weekend he played on the Dotham baseball team and decided to extend his stay an extra week to enter his Essex in a stock-car race on the dirt track south of Dotham. Before their first week was half over he became a local legend -- somewhere between Diamond Jim Brady and John L. Sullivan -- when he fought a boy at Johnny Reb's, then paid the boy's doctor bills. Among his peers Amal was reckless, quick-tempered and quite popular. Alone with Lyn he was setting no new track records as a lady's man. They joined the Baptist Young People's Union at the urging of the ice-cream parlor set, which was also the ball-ground, dirt-track and juke-joint set and -- in conversations with other girls about their boy friends, so circumspect and mindful of something called "the purity of Southern womanhood" in public -- Lyn learned that even by Dotham standards Amal was a slow courter. He should have kissed her good night after their third date. After their fourth he had not offered to shake hands. When the Emersons blew out the lights Amal told her goodbye and moved out fast. From his first week's progress Lyn estimated that they would reach the mill pond by the beginning of the twenty-second century. Still, drawn by Amal's enthusiasms, she was growing accustomed to hard beds and beginning to like the glow of kerosene lamps. He bought her a gramaphone record of someone named Pressley, accompanied by Bix Beiderbecke on the guitar, singing Heartbreak Hotel. It became "their song," though more hers than his. His favorite sound was the roar of automobiles on the dirt track. Through physical labor -- sweeping her room, helping Dilsey do the dishes, driving Amal's car without power steering -- Lyn grew more conscious of her body. The girls at the Baptist Young People's Union made her aware of her body's lures. They taught her how to throw her pelvis slightly forward as a "come-hither" signal when she talked to a boy and how to give her date a thigh brush when she walked beside him, but she could not give Amal a thigh brush. Unlike his companions Amal kept his distance from her on the promenade from the picture show to the ice-cream parlor. When Lyn moved closer Amal crowded the curb -- and selfrespect prevented her from forcing him to walk in the gutter. His theory of Epicurean restraint was working, she could tell from the glitter in his eyes and his animation of manner around her. Unfortunately the theory worked two ways. The cat was on the tin roof and the sun was rising, but the cat with the most sensitive paws was the pussy. On the Wednesday that marked the beginning of their second week in Dotham, Amal yielded to the pressures of his peer group enough to link arms with her in their stroll from the Empire. As a reward for his valor Lyn gave him a rolling thigh brush. On Thursday he lingered at the Emerson's after lightsout and took her out to the porch, but only to discuss in privacy a subject taboo to the period. He was beginning to take readings from the stress gauges he had attached to subterranean fault lines and, standing beside her, he gave her an account of "My Day in the Moholes." Stirred by his maleness in the darkness she went with him to his auto, parked beyond the hedge, and when he took her hand to shake it in farewell she reached up on pure impulse and kissed him lightly. Instead of following up her gesture, he turned to get into his car, but he didn't open the door to get in. He vaulted over the door. Pondering this strange love traffic, she ambled back to the dark house. His nature was urging him to caress her, she sensed, but the barriers in his mind were too strong for his energies to crumble, his impetuosity to vault. Still, this shy lad of the twentieth century was also an adroit Cal Tech student of the twenty-first. He should either eat or get off the banquet stool. On the next night they again made it to the front porch and she made it to the swing -- to sit alone and listen while he read her poetry from a book he held in one hand and by a candle he held in the other. The first ballad Amal breathed in the direction of her eyebrow was Gunga Din. She was tempted to suggest he get a bell to go with his book and candle, but a lyre would have been more appropriate. As a displaced minnesinger, his courting methods antedated the #s by four hundred years. Turning him into a modern lover would require psychiatric help, not psychological counseling. village, Lyn found that the boxyBaroque architecture of Dotham had grown more pleasing to her than the plastic uniformity of Los Angeles. During her three working days each week the city was becoming attractive only as a place where she could take a shower without heating her own water. Moreover, her constant face-toface confrontations in Dotham were creating in her a lively interest in people. Mrs. Emerson had a passion for lurid confession magazines which she indulged in secret because of her husband's disapproval. Made aware of her landlady's secret, Lyn delighted in smuggling the quaint magazines into the house. Since the romances were concealed in her room, Lyn read them to inform herself more fully on the ethos of the period and found herself hooked on the sorrowful tales of girls who had sinned. But Amal's timidity made it difficult for Lyn to identify with the fallen heroines in the stories. Amal kissed her on their second Friday. An overly long poem he read to her on the porch had caused them to exceed their sparking time. As they stood on the porch bidding each other good night Mr. Emerson, who allowed no grace period, rapped loudly on the front bedroom window. In response to the urgency of the sound Amal leaned down and kissed her. His lips touched hers with a butterfly flutter and were quickly withdrawn. Though delivered under duress -- the kiss was indeed delivered. His hands were touching her accidentally more often now -- and so far from the conventional areas of accidental contact that Lyn began to fend him off. That nebulous concept, "the purity of Southern womanhood" and the warnings against the pitfalls of love she found in the confession magazines were beginning to influence her thinking. She and Amal visited the mill pond together -- but at high noon. She was reevaluating the attitudes she had brought with her to Dotham and in retrospect they were horrifying. She had come thinking like a Jezebel. In her was dawning a resolution to behave like the gentlewoman she was and not some brazen hussy. As Amal learned to advance -- Lyn retreated. On the second Sunday he embraced her when he kissed her good night and even tried to nuzzle her neck. She pushed him away. Though smiling, he half-complained, "Had we but worlds enough and time, your coyness, lady, were no crime. But this is our last week." "I'm not being coy, Amal. Now you go home like a good boy and sleep off this wild outburst of passion. You hear?" Though lightly and in ironic jest, Lyn spoke the truth. Her repulse of Amal's first genuine attempt to establish a male-female relationship sprang from motives more complex than coyness. Perhaps reinforced by his diffidence, his manners, his grace, his shifting and many-shaded moods all enthralled her, but the power and delicacy of his mind, which continued to defy her skills as a reader, awed her. Though a student of science, he possessed a felicity of phrase and gift of metaphor a poet might have envied. His mathematical conceptualizing was so far beyond her that, in kindness, he had scratched the subject from their conversational agenda. With all this and a green card, too, in Amal she sensed a Pan capable of piping her into glades she feared to enter lest she be lost as a female adjunct to a very dominant male who might enchant her and vanish forever, leaving her to wander the empty meadows of life where no birds sang. She wanted no part of a love affair with this marvelous boy, she decided, and resolved never to yield to his blandishments -- if he should ever choose to blandish. After all, they weren't truly compatible, she told herself, referring to the one area where their knowledge and intellects approached parity: her tastes ran to love poetry, Amal's to dramatic, classic, epic, lyric, and narrative. The one love poem he enjoyed reciting to her was The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but the only version he knew was in Arabic. His favorite poem was Invictus and he managed to hurl his own defiance from the lines: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. In those lines she saw a conflict developing between them. Amal had wanted an old-fashioned girl who would see that twentiethcentury decorum was maintained. He had his old-fashioned girl -- if he ever got up enough courage to claim her -- but an old-fashioned girl never committed herself with a boy until she was master of their fate, his and hers. As her days with Amal in Dotham dwindled toward the end, Lyn, in her malaise, overlooked a a fact she had previously considered -- her bashful Lochinvar from the midEast was also an adroit Cal Tech technician with a green card and an instinct for twentieth-century decorum. On their last scheduled Saturday in Dotham, Lyn watched her wouldbe lover hit a home run that won a ball game after he had failed to persuade her to stay another week in the village at his expense to watch him drive in the Dotham #. There was a victory celebration at Johnny Reb's and Amal drove her home after eleven. And gave her only a chaste, parting kiss. Lying on her hard mattress, reviewing her stay in Dotham, Lyn sadly admitted that the home-run hitter could not bunt his way to first base on her infield... On Sunday, after ten-thirty at night, on the banks of the old mill pond, Amal gave her a # (old currency) diamond ring. Suddenly there was a whole new ball game. IV l seriously considered marriage because the mentalities of most men were for her an open and illwritten book, either boring or pornographic, history itself mitigated against the family as a social organization. In the twenty-first century the population of the globe had peaked into the paradoxically but aptly named "population sink." Overcrowding had triggered a mass psychosis and murder for lebensraum had piled the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo, Vienna and the Vatican -- particularly the Vatican, where St. Peter's was razed. Seeds of the mass slaughter sprouted from families packed into flats where the sidewalks below were made unsafe by falling bodies, usually those of old and infirm family members and later the young and helpless. Murder became a family affair, in practice an unpunishable offense because of the crowded courts and overtaxed police and legally because of judicial prejudice -- a judge hearing the trial of a mother charged with infanticide might have, that morning, dispatched his mother-in-law. The laws against euthanasia were honored in the breach and such murders were treated as de facto family affairs. For a little more than a year domestic strife held nature in a balance of sorts but at a grave detriment to the traditional respect for motherhood and the family. Nature had made other tentative gestures toward solving the population crisis. By # it was estimated that forty per cent of the population was homosexual, but even the gay turned vicious when crowded six or eight to the room and forced to sleep in shifts. Then, quite suddenly, nature achieved a final solution to the problem. Interfamily violence developed into a lust for violence and the domestic strife overflowed into the streets. In New York City, at #:# on the morning of May #, #, a man from Stamford was turning the corner at Madison to go north on Fifth Avenue when he collided with a youth hurrying south on Fifth. The youth stepped back, apologized, then lunged at the commuter's throat. The man from Stamford, a beginning student of karate, killed him instantly with a neck chop. Some pedestrians saw only the youth slain and turned to attack the older man, but he had his own partisans among those who had seen him assaulted first. Sides were taken. Brawls erupted east on Madison, north on Fifth, as an unchecked chain-reaction was triggered. Manhattan's human pile blew up. Television cameras were rushed to the scene. A morning program for shut-in children engaged in filming the ducks live from Central Park was almost immediately engulfed in televising the fighting. So exuberant and contagious was the violence that children in a Bronx nursing home watching the show began to throw their cereal bowls and spoons at each other. Soon the world was watching via telestar, but the average life of a television crew was only forty-five minutes. After three hours all broadcasting, radio and television, ceased. No telephone calls were taken or sent at the city's switchboards -- the operators had hit the streets. Planes and buses entered the city but none came out. A long silence descended over New York. The outside world waited for news and grew strangely restive. What was happening in New York City? Later eyewitness reports filled the blanks. Lyn's American history book held a survivor's account which appalled her with its uninvolved detachment: After the first frenzy the fury left me. I was no longer fighting to express long-pent frustrations but for a better world. According to my faith, my soul was damned by what I did, but my faith -- or fate -- no longer mattered. The better world I fought for grew visible to my eyes as I wasted my opponents. There's a naturalness about a dead body, an inoffensive inertness -- nevertheless, we had to clear the arena. No one attacked taxi drivers engaged in removing the litter or even the bulldozer operators digging trenches in the parks. There were no wounded to take care of, for down was out, and no lack of food for the fighting crews after the second hour. The restaurants were all overstocked. quickly -- one selected opponents of one's own age, sex and weight. To do otherwise invited immediate extinction by nearby groups. We were all engaged in a civic effortmotivated by the simple slogan: "You are breathing my air. Stop it!" Of course, a winner might feel momentary triumph -- we were fighting for high stakes -- and the loser never knew that he lost. My own techniques, though improvised, were highly successful and, being religious, I always remembered to say a little prayer for my opponent. I would feint for her eyes with a pair of scissors in my right hand and slip a stiletto through her rib cage with my left hand when the woman lifted her arms to shield her eyes. You see, I was left-handed and a nurse in peace time. My knowledge of anatomy helped. After it was over, I felt -- well, peaceful and purged. started, a camera truck rolled unmolested along the streets of Manhattan, beaming the scene to the waiting world. Bright-faced women and smiling men waved happily from uncrowded sidewalks. It was spring in Central Park and workmen were already returfing the mass graves. The city's buildings were unmarred. A population of again. Experts in mass behavior held television responsible for triggering the destruction on a worldwide scale, not a profound deduction. Fighting broke out in Rio de Janeiro while the peaceful scenes were being shown and death moved with the sun for four circuits of the globe. Few cities were disrupted by the destruction of real property. Only Los Angeles, with its tradition of fire and flamboyance, was burned to the ground and from its ashes rose trees and towers. Searing itself into human consciousness, the Holocaust changed old concepts of the family. It was recognized that parenthood required an intelligence and capacity for love beyond most men and women. Professional mothers, chosen for their maternal instincts, affectionate natures and pelvic capacities, provided wombs for the bear children and provided care and training for the proxy children until school age. Marriage was usually based on mutual interests such as that of the Emersons in literary research. Romantic love was generally regarded as too evanescent to form the basis of a marriage, although psychologists had case histories of "love" marriages which had been the source of abiding contentment. In her knowledge of such case histories, Lyn could not accept her own arguments about her incompatibility with Amal. So when Amal, on Sunday night, came to a dinner at the Emerson's which Dilsey sadly referred to as "the last supper," Lyn hoped his preoccupation and moodiness reflected grief over her departure or, at least, remorse over his failure as a lover. Shortly after nine the old folks excused themselves. Amal had less than an hour's courting time in the parlor plus an hour on the porch. Lyn knew his situation was hopeless. He would never be able to sweep her off her feet in less than two hours, even if he could summon and focus on her that fiery impetuosity which endeared him to others. Obviously he was in no mood for impetuosity. For long minutes they sat in morose silence, holding hands as if huddling against the chill of their farewell. Finally he said, half in apology and half reproachfully, "Maybe I needed more guidance from you, Lyn?" "Columbus had no navigator," she reminded him. "When you're the captain, you con the ship." "Your mind was my Sargasso Sea," he said. If she remembered correctly, the Sargasso Sea was an area where ancient sailing ships were entangled in seaweed, and she bridled at the comparison. "I didn't foul your anchor -- Captain. All you needed was a little gumption." "Or a more cooperative crew." "You asked for an old-fashioned girl. You got one." "Complete with inhibitions," he agreed. "Are you accusing me of timidity?" "Aren't you timid?" "Of course not." "Then I'm calling your bluff," he said. "A full moon has risen and the mill pond, they tell me, is beautiful by moonlight. Are you game to go a-roving so late at night?" "Put out the lamp, boy!" Even in simple procedures he rarely used conventional methods. As she waited at the door he went to the lamp, but he didn't stoop to blow the flame from the wick. Standing, he held a magazine over the chimney until the lamp flickered out and then came to her in the doorway. light, across the yard, through the hedge, and crossed the road to follow the path through the woods. Walking beside her, he guided her with a light touch on the arm. LeafFiltered moonlight flecked the ground under the trees. When he spoke his voice sounded introspective. "Lyn, do you think there can be an affinity between a man and woman deeper than sexual attraction?" "Of course. Romantic love is clinically recognized." "I've always been dubious of the word 'love,' " he said. "It has been too often profaned for me to profane it." His sentence sounded familiar. "I've read The Lives of the Saints she snapped, hoping he had quoted Saint Francis. "The word 'love' is like a coin," he continued. "It can be newminted of gold or skilfully counterfeited. I've bit my own coin, rung it, given it the acid test, but coming from a sex-segregated society, lacking the chance for commingling that you've had, I feel -- " "Whoa, there!" She spun him in his tracks to face her. "Don't accuse me of harlotry. I'll have you know that technically I'm a virgin -- in Dotham or out." "I didn't mean -- " he started to say. Then, dazedly: "As beautiful as you are? As physically sound?" "And as fast on my feet. I told you I was a mind-reader. When clammy thoughts start clutching, the lily of romance comes ungilded fast. Now, you were saying?" She turned him back down the path, hoping her vehemence had diverted his mind from her use of the word "technically." He took her hand and said, "I was just trying to tell you that I love you." She couldn't answer him or squeeze his hand to show she approved or reciprocated his affections, but he had not asked a question. He had merely made a statement with all the ardor of a bookkeeper announcing. Miss Oberlin, your books are balanced. She had not imagined it would be like this at all, the two of them walking side by side through the woods. But how had she imagined it? His words cresting on some wave of passion in a pillowed room with soft lights, wine and background music? But why had her mouth grown suddenly dry and why this urge to weep? They walked on in silence. He had said all he could say and she had to wait for her mouth to resume salivation and free her tongue. Finally she said, "I hadn't thought anything could be so commonplace, so ordinary, so beautiful -- " Her voice trailed into silence as they broke from the woods onto the banks of the pond. The moon had cleared the trees on the opposite shore and glittered now on the water. He guided her toward the dam and mill house. She thought, My heart is like a singing bird that nestles on a halcyon shoot. "Amal, what's a halcyon shoot?" "An unwavering bough." house rose a grassy hummock. Amal led her there, spread his coat on the dew-wet grass and they sat down. He sprawled beside her, lounging back on one elbow, his face turned to her. "You know too little about me," he said. "I shouldn't speak, but I can't let you go away thinking you've failed. Besides, I don't want you to leave me." He paused for a moment, groping for words. "There's only one first love for a man, just as there's only one Versailles with its Hall of Mirrors. A man can enter Versailles for the first time only once. Later he may covet castles in Spain or live in castles on the Rhine, but they're all measured by his memories of Versailles. You're my Hall of Mirrors." Again he fell silent and again she felt an inexplicable urge to weep. Sensing her turmoil, he waited, not touching her. Finally he asked, "How do you feel about it?" "Like a parachutist taking her first jump. But I was foretold this on the night I first met you... Oh, hush up, Amal! I'm trying to keep from crying." He said nothing. She managed to hold back her tears, but she could not look at him as she said, "I love you, too, Amal." Her own words sounded even more prosaic to her than his had. Amal began to thrash around beside her in a manner that drew her startled gaze. He was patting his thighs and feeling behind him as if practicing on himself before starting on her. His unorthodox way of doing things became even more bizarre when he said, "I may have to ask you to stand up." Then he sighed relief, "No, here it is. In my shirt pocket. Close your eyes and put out your hand. No, your left hand." She complied and felt him slide a ring over her third finger. From the confession magazines she knew well the significance of an old-fashioned engagement ring -- this symbol of love had been discontinued because it was emblematic of a slave bracelet. "Open your eyes," he commanded and she obeyed. One glance at the diamond on her finger assured Lyn she was truly an old-fashioned girl. The stone drew in the moonlight, congealed it and excelling its source. Her feelings, too, congealed around the stone and exploded through her in quanta of joy that shivered her kidneys. In a sudden struggle to keep from wetting herself she lost control of her tear ducts and finally began to cry. He put a comforting arm around her shoulder, saying, "Darling, it's just a little engagement ring, not the Los Angeles Civic Center." "Little ring!" She wept harder. "I wouldn't think of swapping it for those monstrous towers." "I wanted to ask you to marry me, old style, before I gave it to you, but I couldn't bear to hear you say 'No.' Now you won't have to answer. If it's 'No,' just slip. off the ring and hand it back." "What a dirty trick! You know the only way you'll get this back is by cutting my finger off." "Then your answer's 'Yes?' " "I haven't heard the question yet, but the answer is: 'Yes, you bet!' " For the first time in love and tenderness he kissed her then, but his face interfered with her view of the ring until she put her arm around his neck and held him closer, turning the diamond slowly to catch the different angles in the moonlight. Eventually he broke their embrace but held her close as she held the diamond out for him to admire. "It's the most beautiful ring I've ever seen," she said. Almost moodily he answered, "Yes, it's beautiful, but I may be luring you with honest trifles to betray you in deeper consequence." "Oh, no, Amal. This bride is wearing white." it that way. One of the things that I haven't told you is that I'm a stateless person. My parents were killed before I was registered at the creche, so I could be marrying you to acquire citizenship." "Good. It eliminates the possibility of my becoming the first wife in an Arab's harem." "I want us to be married here by Brother Barnes," he said. "I belong here. This means we'll have to have a long engagement. I'm running in the Dotham One Hundred next Saturday, so we can't be married for two weeks. You'll have to stay over at my expense." "As your fiancee, old style, I've a proprietary interest in your green card." "I didn't want you to think it was a sly trick to hire me a cheering section in the stands when I race." "I'll be there, waving a white scarf." "After we're married we can spend our honeymoon in the Dotham Inn, then fly to London or Paris if you wish." "If you're so stateless, who's financing your green card? Some oil sheik?" ' "The United Nations through your State Department. My work's considered valuable and I don't intend to shirk it. Two months from now you may be attaching stress gauges along the Japanese Fault." "Is that the 'deeper consequence' -- a mohole?" "No. The question mark is me. You may be marrying a schizophrenic. My shadow memories have grown stronger here. When I'm driving on the track someone else is steering." "Have you remembered any details as accurately as the candy bar?" "Who knows?" He shrugged uneasily. "Am I wrong -- or were the builders of this village wrong when a detail strikes me as false? There was no Model-A Essex, I'm sure. It's weird but I remember an Essex Terrapin -- and who would name a highspeed car a Terrapin? I think the V-eight was a Ford, but I drove a Ford Turbine." " You drove?" Grinning sheepishly, he tapped his brow. "My doppel-ganger drove." His words drove the diamond from Lyn's mind. These memories could be checked in the archives. "Do you remember him so vividly that you know what he drove?" "Not vividly. I'm not even sure of his name. One of those double names, I think. Lee Roy Hatcher. One name I do recall precisely is John C. Calhoun." "Does it have any connotations, pleasant or unpleasant?" "It has connotations, all unpleasant." He fell silent for a moment, deliberating, then said, "John C. Calhoun killed me." Shivering, she looked down at her diamond. It seemed suddenly clouded. "Not you. Him. Let's not talk of these things on this night." "Indeed we shouldn't -- on this night," he agreed, laying his head in her lap and" stretching out on the grass. "On such a night as this did Dido with a willow in her hand stand on the shore and waft her love to come again to Carthage." Spontaneously she bent and kissed him. He did not have to read love poetry -- he could compose his own. He caught the nape of her neck and drew her closer, nibbling her earlobe. Astonished at the strength of her delight, she drew back. She had no intentions, right away, of sinning, suffering and repenting. "Unlax," she said. "We have a have a formal wedding. Dilsey's sister is a seamstress. She can sew my gown. But we must go. Nice girls aren't found by the mill pond after ten-thirty." He glanced to her watch and even his knuckles thrilled her as he lifted the locket. "You've been a fallen woman for twenty minutes. Since I've loved you a hundred years, ten more minutes won't hurt." xx Lyn made on Tuesday, Amal could not have loved her in his memory for a hundred years -- the maximum time, if her conjectures were correct, was seventy-five years. Her co-workers were extravagant in their praise of her ring on Monday morning in the office. Though Dr. Kley was profuse with his compliments over her engagement she read disappointment behind his politician's charm. Her announcement probably meant she would be giving him notice. He would never find another secretary with Lyn's charm or her gift for spotting his problems and coming up with suggestions which so often substantiated his own thinking. Lyn agreed with Kley's unspoken thoughts, but was unconcerned. Her biggest job was to screen his incoming calls. Any woman with a pleasant appearance and tact could perform her tasks. She skipped lunch and her one o'clock class to research John C. Calhoun in the Doheny Library and found the stacks held # volumes and monographs devoted exclusively to John C. Calhoun. The index files listed # cross references to the famous South Carolina statesman. She settled on A Boy's Life of John C. Calhoun and quickly discovered he had died fifty years before the automobile had been invented. Nonetheless, his prominence lent credence to Amal's fugue memory. Hundreds of Southern boys in the twentieth century had probably been named for John C. Calhoun. Given the nature of those times -- and Amal's nature -- Amal's alter ego could have been killed in a fist or knife fight with a John C. Calhoun. Her next day's research into the history of motor cars opened a new channel to the historical Calhoun. The librarian at Doheny referred Lyn to the Huntington Archives for a detailed history of autos. On the inter-library telephone she hooked into, and onto, a balding young librarian in the Old Car Archives who was a stock-car racing buff and rattled off such names as and Daniel Gurney with more ease and enthusiasm than she summoned for Laing, Freud and Fraumilch. She could read his selfcursing over the telephone when his memory slipped and he had to refer to his desk computer. Amal was precisely right, she found, in "remembering" there had been no ModelA Essex in the #s and that the V-# engine had been most notably represented by a Ford car. The Essex had as its premier model the Essex Terraplane, not Terrapin. The last fact almost authenticated Amal's "memory" for her. No Arabian seismologists would have an image so close to an ancient reality adrift in his subconscious. Almost fearfully she asked if the files referred to a Lee Roy Hatcher who had driven a Ford Turbine in the #s. "Never," the librarian shook her head. "Turbine stock cars weren't raced until the mid-eighties. Very few were raced at Indy -- Indianapolis -- before the #s. But I can check on Lee Roy Hatcher. One minute." He fed the name into the computer, checked the readoff, and looked up. "No one by that name raced in the twentieth century." S HE sighed her relief, but the librarian had been so helpful she hated to leave him with a sigh. Deliberately prolonging the interview, she asked, "Do you have a driver under the name of John C. Calhoun?" "Let me check," he said, pushing input buttons. "I remember a John C. Calhoun Raceway outside Columbia, South Carolina, open in the middle eighties. It was closed after four meets because it killed too many drivers... No, there was no driver named John C. Calhoun." Forcing a smile, she asked, "Is it possible to find out who was killed on the Calhoun Raceway?" He puckered his brow. "Usually a notation was made on the track program. For that I'll have to check the stacks. Excuse me. In the librarian's absence Lyn forced herself to think calmly. The Cole Porter song which had led them to the #s might have been popular into the twenty-first century. This whole affair was based on nothing but sheer conjecture anyway. In his association with other drivers in Dotham, AmaT might have picked up a reference to the Essex Terraplane unconsciously. "By golly, I missed it." The librarian walked on-screen, shuffling three papers. "Only three races were held at Calhoun." Sitting down, he continued: "But four drivers died in those three years: James Snead in nineteen eighty-six, Leroy Thatcher in nineteen eightyseven, Harry Joe Upton and Crazy you -- in nineteen eighty-eight." Hardly hearing his bemused chatter, Lyn was thinking: Terrapin, Terraplane -- Lee Roy Hatcher, Leroy Thatcher... "Is there any biographical data on Leroy Thatcher?" "Only in connection with the race. He spun out on the third turn, thirty-first lap, of the Columbia Five Hundred on June seventh, nineteen eighty-seven. His car was a Ford Turbine." "Where may I get further information?" The librarian lost interest visibly. His smile became official. "I suggest, Miss Oberlin, you try the Columbia Public Library newspaper files for June eight, nineteen eighty-seven." The call and the telefax service put her credit card close to the red area -- even for the short annals of Leroy Thatcher taken from the pages of the Columbia Observer. The driver's neck had been broken in the crash and he had succumbed instantly. Dead at twenty-one, interred in the Columbia Cryogenic Mortuary by a grieving mother, his only survivor, Leroy Thatcher had followed his father to an early grave, the paper noted. His father, Earl Thatcher, had been killed in a crossing accident while hurrying to the hospital to see his new-born son. Earl Thatcher had also been twenty-one years of age. She walked from the library with the stiff-legged gait of a soldier who fears to advance and fears even more the shame of deserting his comrades. She had no comrades, no arms, no armor, but the risen hackles on her wrists told her she had found "them." "They" existed, though invisible, unknown. Was the cryogenics burial a clue? She wondered. No. Medical science could not cure a cold -- had it been capable of resurrecting a Lazarus the A.M.A.'s publicity staff would have swamped the media with announcements. Yet what other explanation could there be? Why, otherwise, had Amal been denied a driver's license? Looking down at her diamond, reassured her of Amal's present reality. She could not tell him what she had discovered. If he thought himself possessed by the spirit of Leroy Thatcher he would drive in the Dotham One Hundred on Saturday simply to prove himself master of his fate. If he knew, he would transfer to the #s village and attempt to reweave the broken strands of his destiny by rounding the third turn of the thirty-first lap in a Ford Turbine. As long as he did not know, she could guide him from the obvious dangers, protect him, learn from him, through him. Amal had kept the appointment with "them" that she had failed to keep. Sooner or later those who had granted him the green card would step out of the shadows and demand that he settle accounts. It was a law of politics. subway, Lyn was increasingly grateful for those special talents that had trained her to conceal her emotions from persons whose minds were open to her. Still, Amal presented problems she doubted she could handle. Already she was feeling furtive. At the beginning of a life's relationship with a man she wanted to be honest with above all others she was burdened with secrets she must try to keep from him. Would he sense her inner horror when he caught her wondering if she, in truth, loved a dead man? When the clank of couplings reminded her the station was approaching, she resolved to put all such wild conjecture behind her in his presence. Then, with a sudden panic, she realized her resolution was petrifyingly illogical -- one could not remind oneself not to think of purple cows without thinking of purple cows. Usually Amal was waiting at the station to drive her home since he rode a shorter distance from Pasadena. Taking a deep breath she entered the waiting room and saw him. He was already dressed for Dotham and seated on a bench. She fixed her face into a smile of eagerness as she neared him, but he did not look up. Scribbling on a writing tablet with a ballpoint pen of the period, he had not noticed her entrance and paid no attention to her presence. She glanced down. He was writing Arabic symbols across the page, jotting down a phrase, pausing, jotting down another. Deep in concentration he was violating a taboo, almost. It was extremely unlikely that a twentieth century Dothamite would be writing in Arabic. Waiting longer, she grew vexed. His beloved, wearing his ring and wafting his favorite perfume downwind toward him, was standing within three feet of him, completely ignored. He must be writing a love lyric in his native tongue to translate to her later, she decided, her vexation vanishing. Suddenly she felt an urge to reach out and feel the nape of his neck to check it for scar tissue -- or bone calcification. Leroy Thatcher's neck had been broken. She whirled and silently fled to the dressing room. When she approached him the second time, high-heeled shoes clattering, he rose and greeted her with only a smile. "You must have come in while I wasn't looking." He did not offer her a kiss and she did not insist, saying, "You were writing something in Arabic and I decided not to disturb you." "It isn't Arabic," he said, steering her toward the door, "although some of the symbols are. I was figuring the inertial force of torque on a curving body." "What's the value of such figures?" "Oh, they can be used for anything," he shrugged. "Knowing the speed, weight, center of gravity, and a few other factors, you could figure the speed at which a car would turn a curve without toppling over." "You're not worried about the race next Saturday?" she asked in sudden alarm. "Less worried than you, darling. My only worry is that I might not win." He seemed pleased by her concern as they walked out of the station toward the parking lot and it occurred to her that alarm was natural in the sweetheart of a boy who was racing an automobile. "I am worried, Amal. You'll be driving with no roll bars on the roadster, no safety belts, no crash helmet, no air pillows, nothing." "That's the way I like it, with nothing but skill and nerve. If I freeze up I'm a dead man." She shuddered and momentarily turned her face aside. "What's wrong, honey?" he asked. "Someone's walking on my grave," she said. Chill bumps were visible on her forearms. "How morbid," he said. "Maybe you'd feel safer if you drove. I have some more figuring to do." "I'd love to drive," she said truthfully. He was preoccupied and she wanted to be occupied. His preoccupation would make him less attentive and her busyness would make her less likely to reveal variations from her standard behavior -- and another variation occurred almost immediately. As she drove around the circle and passed before the Empire Theater, she read a playbill plastered on the front of the building: The juxtaposition of the playbill with her secret thoughts brought an involuntary gasp from her. Amal heard and glanced over. "Forget something?" "I forgot to call the baker about the wedding cake." "I've put in the order," he said. "He's baking a seven-layer cake with a bride and groom on top." "Seven!" Leroy Thatcher had died on June #, #. "Why seven?" "Traditional, I guess," he answered without looking up from his jottings. "Seven's, a lucky number." S HE was spooked, she Jhought. They had been together less than ten minutes. A normally apperceptive Amal would have spotted her jumpiness at least three times and would have started to question her. That he had not spotted it was all to the good. But his inattentiveness was not normal. There was a vagueness about him, a remoteness she didn't like. "Why do you have to figure forces to get a car around a curve?" she asked. "Wouldn't it be easier to slow down a little?" "I didn't say I was plotting the turn of an automobile. I said the figures could be used for that purpose." "What are you using them for?" "Nothing important, I hope." "They must be important if they make you forget to kiss me at the station -- so tell me about them." "They're taboo for this period. I'll kiss you twice at the mailbox. Besides, you wouldn't be interested." "How do you know I wouldn't be interested if you don't tell me what they mean?" "I hope you never know." "Are you keeping secrets from me, you renegade Moslem?" "Backsliding Coptic Southern Baptist Christian," he corrected her. "If a man doesn't have a few secrets, he loses his attraction. I quote a well-known mindreader." "Well, I still have a few secrets myself," she said. "Yes -- and you've promised to keep them for two weeks." "You're not only furtive," she snapped. "You're dirty-minded." "Some mind. Some dirt. Speaking of promises, I know I promised you I'd always report to Dotham promptly after school. You'll be fitting your gown tomorrow. I'd like to stay over at Cal Tech for an hour to program a taboo machine which will not be available till five." "You know I look forward all day to meeting you at the station." "And I," he said, "look forward to meeting you. But I'll make it up to you if we miss this once. We'll go picnicking on the sacred knoll by the holy mill pond on Thursday -- and I promise to be devoted, attentive and very entertaining." "Entertaining how?" "Well, I haven't given much thought to the entertainment," he said. "Maybe we could go skinnydipping." "Skinny-dipping in daylight? Never!" "We'll be going to prayer meeting Thursday night," he said. "How about Friday night?" "Friday night for what?" "Skinny-dipping," he answered. "You said not in daylight, which night." "Just the two of us?" "Unless you want to invite Brother Barnes," he said, "as a chaperone." She thought for a moment. The moon would rise early on Friday. The idea of swimming nude in the moonlight with him sounded exciting -- in the ambience of this time and place even daring -- and she had visions of his muscles rippling through the water. She was stirred to an immediate twenty-first century affirmative, but she had learned wiles in Dotham. "If I agree, will you tell me your secret?" "I may not have a secret. It all depends on these figures." He tapped the writing tablet and added cryptically: "If I have one I'll tell you and we can start praying," He turned back to his figures, not waiting for her agreement but assuming he had it. She had never seen him concentrating so intensely. When he dropped her by the mailbox, she had to remind him to kiss her goodbye. gown by Dilsey's sister, Lyn thought of Amal constantly. That night she dreamed he stood beside her before the altar, dressed formally for their marriage, and when she turned to accept the wedding band she found him hoary with cold, rime whitening his hair and liquid oxygen evaporating from his eye sockets. Awakened by the nightmare, she realized that against all logic she was developing an obsession about Amal and cryogenic burials. Her own sanity was splitting on the shoals of the single question -- how could Amal, born to the language of Arabia and growing up in Baghdad, have valid memories of Leroy Thatcher, an American dead almost a century before? In the morning Amal was still preoccupied during the drive to the station. She rode beside him in silence, concealing her concern for him though inwardly her purple cows were threatening a stampede. If Amal discovered her growing obsession he would abandon her as totally insane and be off without hindrance to the #s to challenge his fate. At the office her absentmindedness became apparent to Dr. Kley, and his awareness of her state of mind made her decide on a radical course of action. She had to find some answers. Kley had what he called an "important conference at the Civic Center." Lyn knew he was going to the Civic Center but not to the City Hall. A widow in a plush Bunker Hill Leisure World pod was awaiting him with martinis. Timing her request a few seconds before he left, Lyn asked his permission to make a personal long-distance phone call, confessing frankly that her credit card was approaching a deficit. "Sure, Lyn, call London if you wish -- on the city." Kley was generous with his bureaucratic privileges, because he trusted her to justify his personal expenses with the Budget Department. Besides, he hoped to ensnare her in a net of favors, sooner or later, whether she was married or single, and carry her to the Leisure World tower. With the tolerance of a woman who has shared in the secrets of many men, Lyn respected his abilities, his innate kindness, and was amused by his futile hope. Though he was thirty years her senior, Lyn never thought of Dr. Kley as a dirty old man, merely a sexy senior citizen. Alone in her office, Lyn called the information computer in Columbia, South Carolina, and asked for the Columbia Cryogenic Mortuary. The computer informed her there was no one by that name in Columbia. Without hanging up, Lyn directed the computer to transfer her call to the Columbia Archivist and a woman answered the phone. Introducing herself as the office of the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, City of Los Angeles, Lyn inquired about the Columbia Cryogenic Mortuary. Thinking she spoke as one official to another, the archivist was informal and informative. "Oh, dear. That operation went out of business over fifty years ago. The officer in charge of the perpetual care fund absconded and there was a malfunction in the mortuary's refrigeration unit. Later the building was razed by a mob during the Holocaust because of its symbolic nature." "What disposition was made of the bodies?" "Eventually they were cremated. A few that remained in the stillfunctioning vaults were disposed of to various facilities." "Do you have the record on the body of Leroy Thatcher?" "Indeed. We're very careful about such matters in Columbia. One moment. Ah, here it is. Leroy Thatcher's body was transferred to the medical department at Duke University on October third, two thousand twenty-nine. It was cremated six days later in the presence of witnesses and the Certificate of Cremation mailed to us on October eleventh. Lyn relaxed. Though the mystery of Amal's memory remained, a horror was lifted from her mind. As his wife, she could steer him away from the #s village. She would not go swimming in the moonlight with a resurrected corpse. The only ice at their wedding would be in the mint juleps. V AAmal challenged her. "Prophesy something." Walking beside him down the path on the way to the picnic, Lyn exulted. She had been aching for a chance to set the skeptic on a threelegged stool. Last night Mr. Emerson's thoughts, as he pretended to read a magazine, had given her today's opportunity. "I predict that the Emersons will defect to the nineteen-thirties and buy a hamburger stand in Dotham as soon as their study grant expires." "Maybe," he agreed, knowing she spoke the truth. "But their grants don't expire for a month. We may be in Ankara by then." "Then call them long-distance," she snapped, vexed because he had not turned to her in open-mouthed admiration. "Oh, I'll take your word for it," he said. Amal was an incorrigible confidence keeper, but she had read enough of Mr. Emerson's thoughts to know that the old mill could make Amal admit to her powers. No one had breathed a word to Lyn, but she knew the Arabian free, the # Emerson needed to complete the full payment for Hamburger Heaven, a hamburger stand facing Lee's Square in downtown Dotham. They broke from the woods onto the margin of the lake. Downstream, within a keen ear's hearing distance of the hillock where they planned to picnic, an old black man sat on the bank fishing. "Oh, dear! We have company." "That's Uncle Moses, the handyman at the Culpepper place," Amal said. His voice dropped to a whisper. "Try to read his mind. He's lived here for seventy years." The old man waved to Amal's shouted greeting. When they neared him Lyn could see the reason for Amal's challenge. The left eye of Uncle Moses was partly covered with a cataract. Either the medical science of the period was unable to cope with cataracts or the old man could not afford the operation. "Uncle Moses, this is Lyn Oberlin, my fiancee." The old man started to rise and Lyn said, "Keep your seat. Uncle Moses, we're just passing by." His cataract interfered with his thought messages, but she could grasp bits and pieces: Amal's girl seems at ease... strongly attracted...don't blame him...like to whomp it myself... She turned to Amal and said, "Come, Amal. Our shadows are scaring the fish." "Never mind, missy. Don't want 'em biting just yet. Ain't got my morning rest out." As they climbed the rise, Amal said, "Well?" "He was thinking about Saturday night." "That doesn't take a mindreader. All they ever think about here is Saturday night." Amal glanced down at the old man. "He belongs with the shaved-heads. Fort Tejon would be his true country." "You mean the skinheads," Lyn corrected him. "Let's not open the basket, yet. I'd like to explore the old mill." The abandoned mill's flooring was warped, its drive belt laden with dust, its grindstone covered with cobwebs. The place was dark and musty inside. After her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Lyn spotted the door she sought in the rear of the building. "Let's look in the storage shed," she suggested. As Emerson's thoughts had foretold her, inside the storeroom the floor was smooth. The room sealed with knotty pine and a double bunk had been built in the corner. The floating corner of the upper tier of the bunk was supported by the missing rail from the Emersons' front porch. "This might be Uncle Moses' hideaway," Amal commented. "It may be where the Emersons plan to stay until the hot dog stand is supporting them." "Very clever," Amal said. "You've deduced that from the bannister rail. But how will they get to town and back?" "Probably in a Model-A Essex," Lyn said, "left to them by the same philanthropist who advanced them two hundred twenty dollars on a two-year loan with no interest. Now, will you grant that I read minds?" "Why not?" He shrugged. "I've led two lives. Why not admit the woman I love into the brotherhood of freaks?" A bitterness in his voice alarmed her. They emerged into the sunlight and she noted that Uncle Moses had moved farther upstream and well out of earshot. "Darling, my talent is only an ability to interpret facial and body movements. Stage magicians have pulled the same tricks." "So you tell yourself," he snapped, "to keep from admitting the inadmissable. Let's face it, my love. We're both monsters seeking the Frankenstein who created us." As he bent to the picnic hamper she could tell from his outjutting jaw and a vein swelling above his temple that the boy who had smiled at her the moment before was torn by a fury. She felt an energy swirling around him, encompassing them both, and bent to kiss the nape of his neck. The strange force died. "Do you like Spam, ma'am?" he asked. So their picnic in the sunlight was shadowed. The darkness was shot through with clarity when they went skinny-dipping in the moonlight on Friday. folly, some find sooner than others that men betray, but for all Lyn's abaptability she could barely adjust to her surrender in the evening and her betrayal before breakfast. Standing nude in the bushes ten yards upstream from Amal, she was vaguely disturbed by the scene. The moon hanging low above the line of trees on the eastern shore of the mill pond, the silvery path shining on the water, the lap of wavelets on the bank all contributed to lend to the night an unreal and, she had to admit, fairylike quality. , "Last one in's a bum," Amal shouted from downstream and his body shot from the underbrush to arch into the water with a rippling splash. Lyn dove. California in April was not Florida in July and the icy water brought her spluttering and gasping to the surface to see Amal ten yards into the pond cleaving toward the opposite shore with ease and power that belittled her own proficiency as a swimmer. Using an Australian crawl, she fell into his wake, feeling her blood resume its flow as she swam toward the opposite shore. He was waiting in the shallows, standing higher out of the water than modesty would permit her to do. He called to her, "You've got a good crawl. How's you back stroke?" "Quite revealing. I'm onto your tricks, boy." "Let's go up the shore a ways and race toward the dam," he suggested. "Swimming diagonally will give us a hundred-meter course." "Give me a handicap," she pleaded. "You undulate through the water like a dolphin. How did you learn to swim so well in a desert?" "At the Baghdad Y.M. Coptic C.A.," he answered, teeth chattering. "I swam the Hellespont once and almost drowned. I'll give you ten meters head start." She swam to beat him, keeping her lead for thirty meters. Hearing the swish of his body behind her, she knew she was losing and moved to block his lane. With his powerful stroke he swept around her, beside her, and then she had the worst idea for winning a race she had had all week. She decided to throw him off his stroke with a rolling thigh brush. Shifting to a side-arm crawl, she swung to brush him just as he made the same maneuver, undulating like a porpoise, facing her. As if touched by a fairy's wand, all her latest doubts of Amal vanished. Harpooned, she might have drowned in three meters of water, from the raptures of the deep, had it not been for Amal's unorthodox way of doing things. Instead of instinctively turning face downward, he rolled on his back, spinning her in the gyre, and swung her aboard him. Whether towing or pushing, he carried her shoreward with unfettered backstrokes until his heels struck the muck of the shallows. Then his arms went around her. He cantilevered her to the bank and bore her, moaning, to the mound to break their Epicurean fast. No stars fell on replicated Alabama that night, but they had traversed ten degrees of arc before Lyn again opened her eyes. Her first coherent words were, "I'm still wearing white to my wedding." "Of course, dearest. Since I had to rescue you from drowning this one doesn't count." "Now what was that secret that had you in such a tizzy?" "Oh, that. I was concerned about the stress readings on the San Andreas Fault. I came up with equations that proved we should have had a great earthquake fifty years ago. But the answer was as simple and as beautiful as this -- " He cupped her breast in his palm and the casual intimacy of the gesture thrilled her. "Magnetic attraction," he continued. "Iron in the fault facings is magnetized by the Earth's magnetic field and the facings are virtually clamped together. Twin magnets." "The field won't change, will it?" "A little, but not enough...to count..." As his sentence began to hesitate he grew reflective. She felt again the beginning swirl of his energies -- as if he were the vortex of some psychic maelstrom -- and her desire rose to his. "That's good," she said, "because I've forgotten to count." "Don't tempt me, Lyn. We've got to save something for the wedding night. I have to hurry home to strike you off a medal for tonight's effort -- above and beyond the call of devotion." Well, he should be tired, she decided, and he had a perfect knack for spontaneous compliments. x. Culpepper place, was acutely alert and self-questioning. At the moment he should have been most keenly aware of the girl and the night, both had drifted away. He had known strange urges before, but never at such an inappropriate time and in such a powerful and counter-motivational manner. His actual world had been shoved aside by an abstract universe and the shift had occurred right after Lyn's question about the Earth's changing magnetic pole. Her words had triggered mathematical responses which leaped at a consideration he had ignored in his magnetic-bonding theory. Driving faster, he wheeled the car to a halt beside the Culpepper house and even as he entered he was prefiguring equations he had not fed to the Cal Tech computer. Inside, he lighted the table lamp in his bedroom and pulled out his writing pad. His mind held a map of Southern California with its fault fissures drawn like veins from the central aorta, the San Andreas Fault. He awakened Lyn and the Emersons before breakfast and violated a place-time taboo by gathering them in the parlor to hear the first true prediction of a great earthquake, illustrated by unintelligible charts drawn crudely on tablet paper. Before she was fully awake Lyn understood the urgency in his manner -- strong enough to make him overlook completely her lack of makeup -- although she never fully understood the reasons. At #:# p.m., May #th, #, less than two weeks away, the San Andreas Fault in the area of Palmdale would slip. All indications pointed to a great earthquake -- still, Amal hedged his prediction. His theory, as she understood it, held that a temporary fluctuation in the Earth's magnetic field would be caused by a solar eclipse passing too far to the south to be seen from the United States. Aligning the gravitation pull of thq Earth and the moon, the eclipse would create what Amal termed "a spring tide in the Earth's magnetic bulge." Sleepily Lyn asked, "Why haven't all solar eclipses been followed by earthquakes?" "For various reasons -- the tension on the earth's crust, the alignment of the fault lines with the magnetic field, the zigzag of the fault lines. But major quakes have come after eclipses. Mayan legend tells of a day the earth shook and the sky darkened. The same's been said of the day Christ died. We have reason to believe that Julius Caesar was killed shortly before an earthquake-eclipse." "But what puts Palmdale at the epicenter?" "There," he said, turning a page in his tablet. She could see a flow of arrows indicating that the magnetic shift paralleled a segment of the fault line near Palmdale. "When the field shifts at this point there'll be no magnetic bonding along the fault line -- here. This section will snap and drop like a guillotine. If the fault face doesn't hold at this point -- " he pointed to a zag in the fault line near Victorville -- "the interface will shift from Palmdale through the Imperial Valley. Most of Southern California and upper Baja will be convulsed. A seven point five would snap some of the modules from the tower stanchions. An eight point five on the Richter Scale has ten times the force of a seven point five. With a quake of any magnitude higher than eight point five, the populated part of Southern California would be riding the back of a stampeding elephant." "What about our little house?" Mrs. Emerson asked. "Far safer than any tower," Amal assured her. "Still, you'd better get outside at one thirty-three, a week from Wednesday, and stay away from your chimney until the aftershocks subside." "Then I'll go get breakfast," Mrs. Emerson said. Dilsey, Lyn knew, was taking the day off to get ready for a Saturdaynight date. "We've been assured by our government," Lyn said to Amal, "that the towers are earthquake proof." "Official gobbledegook," he said, raising his arm to demonstrate a point. "The stanchions will stand. They're structural steel. But when they sway -- like this -- the modules will be forced outward on one side, breaking the shear pins which hold them to the extension beams. The tower sways back, compressing the pods and breaking the shear pins on the opposite side. It sways again. The plastisteel modules have plastic memory. They snap back to their original form. The uppermost single-girder apartment pods will be shot from the tower in the same way a boy expels a watermelon seed from between his thumb and forefinger. Those upper pods at right angles to the line of sway will be shaken from their support beams and fall. All the upper griders will be stripped bare of all but the topmost pod anchored on the tip of the tower -- if it's a high-magnitude quake." "But you're not sure it will be a high-magnitude quake?" "Not if the fault line holds at Victorville. But the prudent approach is to prepare for a killer quake, evacuate the towers, cut the power on the freeway guide bands and the magnetic rings on the railroads. assemble food, water and medical supplies and theoretically figure on the total destruction and isolation of Los Angeles. We've got to get to Doctor Kley immediately." comprehend the disaster he envisioned, she knew from experience the problem of obtaining governmental response to a problematical disaster. At least once a week she diverted from Dr. Kley an urgent warning to prepare the city for the end of the world or the Second Coming or both. Amal was not a crackpot but Dr. Kley would not know it. If he acted on Amal's recommendations and the Victorville segment held he would be the laughing stock of the city and his political career would be ruined. An Arabian could not be expected to understand the complexities of the American political system. Still dazed by Amal's prediction, Lyn said, "I suppose I could locate Doctor Kley this morning. But the Board of Supervisors will have to rule on your petition which will have to be drawn up by a lawyer and submitted to Doctor Kley." "How long does this take?" "Usually a week or ten days, but we can request an emergency hearing. I have a friend at U.S.C., Red Benton, who might draw up the petition over the weekend." "What is this Board of Supervisors?" "An ad hoc committee Doctor Kley appoints from the various city departments." "I'll be a Greek speaking to Romans," Amal said. "What I've been telling you would challenge an expert in Gausian and Reisman mathematics who is also an authority on unified field equations." "The board provides a math-toEnglish interpreter, a retired mathematics teacher from Los Angeles City College." "God help him -- and us," Amal exploded. "When is the earliest I can present the petition?" "I should think Tuesday. Committee appointees have to be notified." "Too late," Amal groaned. "The mills of the government grind slowly," Mr. Emerson intoned, "and they grind exceedingly coarse." "There have to be deliberations," Lyn explained. "There are procedures to follow. You would have to be checked out, your background verified. Doctor Kley would be risking his career if he attempted to railroad a matter of this nature through the committee." "The only authority who could possibly interest Doctor Kley is Doctor Reynolds, the head of the seismology department at Cal Tech. Once he gives Kley my credentials the hearing should be granted in a hurry." "But what about today's auto race?" "Lyn, the time for fun and games is over. This earthquake is no staged spectacular. Real people will die real deaths." Later she realized it was Amal's casual reference to spectaculars which gave her the idea for saving the lives of Angelenos, but at the moment she was shaken by his reference to fun and games. "Do you also consider our marriage as nothing more than fun and games?" Immediately his tone softened. "Darling, we'll be married -- in Dotham -- the Saturday after the earthquake. Only a week's delay." "Breakfast is ready, folks," Mrs. Emerson announced from the hallway. Lyn turned toward the dining room, Amal moving beside her. Someone, she recalled, had once said that all romances ended in tragedy. Her romance with Amal was beginning with one. hearing was granted as quickly as Amal had anticipated. Dr. Kley's teletracer located him in a Bunker Hill Leisure World apartment and though he sounded sleepy he was in a splendid mood. Apparently he called Dr. Reynolds immediately to check Amal's qualifications, for he called Lyn back at her apartment, where she and Amal were waiting, within fifteen minutes. He told her to round up a quorum from the list of twenty-four standby supervisors and set the hearing for Monady afternoon. Still, there was the petition to be written. Lyn telephoned Red Benton and he came down immediately from his pod three floors above. Amal quickly converted the lanky redhead -- all one hundred and sixty-six freckled centimeters of him -- into a believer, although Red, for reasons Lyn would later come to understand, persisted in referring to "this alleged earthquake." Red called Hal Carpenter, a graduate journalism major, from the floors below to help Amal prepare his oral petition to the supervisors. Deft, quick-witted, opinionated and a little too cynical for Lyn's tastes, Hal lacked Amal's flair for metaphor, but he had a gift for simple, pungent speech that lent clarity to Amal's concepts. Between typing Red's petition and Calling standby supervisors -- she found the necessary six -- Lyn received a solid grounding in geophysics, law and communications. From Amal she learned of earthquake sound waves, shear waves and long waves designated P, S, and L. Hal Carpenter, planning what he termed an "inhuman interest" news story on the mechanics of earthquakes, promptly dubbed them shake, rattle and roll waves. She learned from Hal that a wire story could be so coded that every student editor would print it even if it meant a "roust by the blukes," archaic slang for an investigation by the bluecoats, or police. From Red Benton she was surprised to find that, under the provisions of the California Law and Order Codes -- an addenda to the preHolocaust Riot and Civil Turmoil Act -- an earthquake prediction was in the same category as that of the bomb threats which had caused such a problem in the heyday of transcontinental air travel. To anyone as interested in governmental processes as Lyn the conversation in the room was little necessary rattle of her stenotyper as she listened. The customs and traditions of U.S. democracy came alive and the body of laws aimed at student subversives hung like a rich tapestry behind the conversations. Never before had she been so busily engaged in such meaningful group activity, spiced as it was by the hint of personal risk. From Red she learned that their activities, if pursued without legal sanction, would have opened them all to charges of conspiracy. They took a break for lunch and Red ordered them to keep their voices low on the basis of some vague provision against spreading earthquake rumors. His warning served only to increase the air of excitement hanging over their table. From these talks, Lyn realized, might issue decrees that would set huge buses rolling to evacuate the population and stanchion cranes to lower the uppermost pods to the ground. When she expressed her vision Hal Carpenter voiced strong doubts. "The political mind operates in a vacuum. The most we can hope for is to get Amal's prediction legally before the public. When he makes his prediction at the hearing the proceedings will constitute privileged material. If he makes the prediction strong enough the metropolitan media will publish it." "Oh, Hal," she said. "You're being the cynical journalist. Every citizen is given a fair hearing." "And then told to blow," Hal said. "Besides, Amal's no citizen." "All the more reason the supervisors will listen," she rebutted. "He's a stateless neutral with no ax to grind." "Don't subvert Lyn," Red said to Hal. "We may need her later as a listening post. You've got to relate Amal's oral plea with the solar eclipse -- over and over. Afterward every news story about the eclipse will recall his prediction to the public's mind." So it went, the molding and shaping of a plea and its publicity. Lyn noticed a peculiar phenomenon. Her actual presence had aroused no libidinal currents at the table. She wondered if their concentration or her diamond ring was keeping their thoughts chaste. An unpleasant note intruded on the end of their break. A television news flash announced a mine disaster near Johannesburg, South Africa. Five thousand miners were known dead. Lyn did not catch the full story -- something about a new laser tunneling device which had curved upward to bore in the wrong direction, undermining the main supporting pillars for three galleries above, causing a huge cave-in. One graphic closeup showed an English-speaking black miner, hollow-eyed from shock, who kept repeating, "Impossible. Impossible. One meter either way and the main stanchions would have held, but he got three of them." The miner's "he" referred to a young Afrikander laser engineer, inventor of the tunneling device, who had been killed in the cave-in. at one p.m., in the presence of witnesses, a plea was entered before a committee of supervisors. City of Los Angeles, at the City Hall, by Amal E. Severn, seismologist, requesting that the city be evacuated by reason of an alleged earthquake, possibly major, on Wednesday, May #, #. Hearing the petitioner in addition to the chairman. Dr. Kley, were Howebrand, representing the department of public spectaculars; Paul, of finance; Washington, of engineering; Hagenbeck, of power; Calvin, of Transport and Jeffers, of police. In official attendance were Dr. Westover Baum, interpreter. and Miss Lyn Oberlin, secretary. In the beginning Amal . spoke with ease and clarity. He pinpointed on a map the area of the San Andreas Fault where sensor readings showed greatest stress, explained his magnetic-bonding theory, then grew slightly too technical, Lyn thought, in describing the local change in the Earth's magnetic field created by the core shift during the solar eclipse. Baum was not called on to interpret. He could not have, Lyn knew. He was still struggling with the bonding theory while Amal discussed the unified field equations which explained the core shift. Amal placed the epicenter of the earthquake in a stretch of fault two thousand meters below Cal Edison's Palmdale plant tunnel leading from mohole five -- the tunnel itself was six thousand meters below the surface. The supervisors listened intently until the question period, at which time Amal was no longer guided by the carefully prepared text of Hal Carpenter and Red Benton. Hagenbeck asked, "Are the atomic generating plants of the Antelope Valley in danger?" "Yes, sir. Atomic pile five would be taken out by a six point five. A seven would disrupt the power flow from the entire Apple ValleyLancaster string." Ten per cent of the city's power supply might be knocked out, Lyn saw Hagenbeck think. As the audience, mostly newsmen, well knew, there was no danger of an atomic explosion since any disruption of the laser control to the steam generators would cause the gravity-controlled cadmium rods to sink into the piles and dampen all emission. Calvin, of transportation, asked about the freeways north of the city. "If the coming temblor's a seven it will shatter the Ridge Route in the Frazier Park-Tejon area. An eight will break all the guide bands north because of the poor quality of their bedding." Lyn flinched. Calvin had personally let contracts for laying several of the guide bands. "How can you assert the bedding for the guide bands is of poor quality?" Calvin bored in. "The specifications call for a non-resilient concrete." Calvin thanked him. Amal had removed the onus from transportation and placed it on engineering where specifications were drawn. Amal again impugned the engineering department when asked about the area of greatest danger, the city's towers. "Care was put into the stanchion design, but the plastic memory of the attached apartment modules was overlooked." Washington had been a child when the towers were erected, but Amal's remark still reflected on his department. "You speak of the 'coming quake,' " the supervisor remarked with some irritation. "Are you making an unqualified prediction?" "Yes," Amal answered firmly. "The quake will occur at one thirtythree on the afternoon of May fifth, during the apex of the core shift caused by the solar eclipse. For that reason I'm compelled to invite the committee's attention to the feasibility of evacuating all towers and closing all roads and railroads on May fifth." Kley glanced at his watch and rapped the gavel. "The committee thanks the petitioner for his zeal and devotion and requests that he submit his exhibits to the committee for in-chamber deliberations. If the public desires to wait, the committee's decision will be forthcoming at two p.m." In less than fifteen minutes. Kley was herding the committee at a gallop. He had a golfing date with the widow at #:#, Lyn read in his thoughts, but haste might be to Amal's advantage. The hostilities he had aroused would not have time to harden and the newsmen would not get bored and leave before the decision was announced. I YN'S receptors picked up little of the committee members' feelings in the chamber. Drowning out all others, Westover Baum's confusion was the strongest emotion in the room. Kley ignored the exhibits and called for the mathematician's opinion. "I can assure you, Mr. Chairman, the reasoning was quite beyond me, but the boy's imagination should be taken seriously." Kley thanked him and excused him. Once Baum's signals ceased, Lyn took her seat against the wall to concentrate on the more subdued readings from the committee members. Kley sat at the head of the table, Amal's charts unread before him. A bowl for holding the black and white balls of acceptance or rejection of the petition was in the center of the table. Recording equipment readied, Lyn had a straight-on view of Washington, Howebrand, and Jeffers, whose faces she could study unobserved. "Committee members," Kley said, "obviously our young petitioner has too excellent a mathematical imagination to be dismissed. As you know, if I close the roads and evacuate the towers I'll open the city to countless law suits from litigious merchants, salesmen, innkeepers and commuters. If you decide to close the roads and evacuate the towers and offer me as a sacrificial lamb I'll be convinced that you erred on the side of prudence. If you consider the risks great enough to jeopardize the city's budget, so vote, and I'll issue your orders. Now, let's all meditate for five minutes and then vote." Delivered with sincerity and a smile, Kley's instructions were both pro and con the petition, Lyn recognized. He was throwing the decision to the committee. Lyn focused her receptors on the faces she could see. Her thin lips pursed in concentration, Supervisor Washington resembled a Nubian chief more than a black woman. Lyn read: Sell my Cal Ed stock and reinvest in Forest Lawn. Buy ticket to Bahamas -- blackball whitey. The equine face of Jeffers, pro tempore supervisor and permanent chief of police, was concerned with administrative problems: Tactical riot squads training for weeks... find out what they've learnedneed crowds for riots...fishing trip the fifth... other side Catalina...tidal wave... Lyn focused her attention on Howebrand, of spectaculars. Wearing dark glasses, plaid coat, his long hair dyed black, the producer was in the right area but the wrong era as his thoughts revealed: Pan shots from whirlybirds over the towers... ground cameras at fault lines for auto crashes...be airborne by noon...splice the footage into a Howebrand production. When Kley rapped his gavel and the balls dropped from clenched fists into the bowl, Lyn's threemember survey had convinced her that the most Amal could hope for was a split vote to be decided by the chairman. Kley drew the bowl toward him, glanced in and dropped a white ball. Lyn knew by the chairman's open vote that Amal's petition was denied. If the quake struck and the modules fell, Lyn's record would show that the chairman had voted to evacuate and he could stand on his record. If only a minor temblor struck, the vote would be forgotten. "Lyn," Kley said, "would you announce that the petition has been denied by a vote of four blacks to three whites. Henceforward any earthquake prediction has the status of a rumor deleterious to public serenity." He turned and smiled for her alone, "Of course the prediction will be printed in the newspapers as a part of the hearing proceedings, so your man's purposes will have been served." Kley was the consummate politician, she realized, as she returned to the hearing room to make the announcement. Everyone had gotten a bit of what they wanted in a typical compromise by the Great Pacificator. VI T O herself Lyn could justify the decision of the committee -- Amal's prediction had been equivocal and she herself halfbelieved his phobia was making him overreact. There had been few great earthquakes in California, the last in #. Amal, she felt, might be yielding to the Arab's tendency to believe his own metaphor -- and no one had demonstrated that his abstruse mathematics were more. Yet she could not justify the vote of the three supervisors whose minds she had read as anything other than disgraceful. Whatever their official opinions, they had been personally convinced by Amal's words, at least enough to provide for their own safety, yet they had banned his prediction from the public. At the meeting in the city hall's automat, where she, Amal, Red and Hal gathered to hear the #:# news bulletin, hold a post mortem on the death of their petition and plan their next step, she kept silent. The fragments of thoughts she had picked up at the deliberations were not true indications of the supervisors' final reasoning processes and to mention those thoughts would involve self-revelations she had trained herself to conceal. The conversation over coffee was surprisingly free of rancor. Red held that supporting authority from other Cal Tech seismologists might have carried the petition. The city could not finance a mass exodus into the surrounding deserts on the unsupported prediction of a graduate student, but a verification by a committee of seismologists, would put the prediction beyond rumor and into the public domain as a scientific truth. Anyone spreading the rumor thereafter, would not be liable to a conspiracy charge. "What is this 'conspiracy?' " Amal asked Red. "Two or more persons conspiring to break a law or breach a city ordinance -- such as spreading a rumor deleterious to public serenity." "How can we spread a rumor without spreading a rumor?" "By publicity given to a privileged statement," Hal Carpenter said. "Television will help. When the late news editions hit the street the prediction will be spelled out on the front page. From then on, whenever an Angeleno hears, Solar eclipse, he'll think. Earthquake." "There's more to it than a prediction," Amal said. "More to it than just walking out of a tower. In fact, if you walk in the wrong direction from the tower you'll be killed by the falling pods. Then there's the matter of water, food and supplies for three days -- plus a prayer book." "Why isn't the truth a defense against rumor?" Lyn asked. "Truth is a defense against rumor mongering," Red answered. "But conspiracy stands on its own legs. If two conspire to monger a rumor banned by law -- and if the rumor proves true -- the charge of rumor mongering is dropped but the conspiracy charge still stands." "What a stupid law," Lyn said. "It's not stupid at all viewed historically," Red said, sounding piqued. "During the population sink, spreading a rumor wa the preferred method of starting a race riot. Once the riot started, the rumor was true, but the rumor started the riot. Earthquake predictions were used by land speculators in early California to lower real estate values." "Treat us to the history some other time. Counselor," Amal snapped. "Right now, what can we legally do to clear the towers on May fifth?" "Take a stroll in the park," Red said. "To get a front seat for the mass slaughter?" Hal turned to Lyn. "Quaker think of that as a headline to my story?" "I would think it a religious story," she answered. Red was still thinking. "Hal could write a series of articles for the school papers outlining what to do in the event of a killer quake -- " "And bind them into a pamphlet," Lyn inserted. "How many students read the school newspapers?" Amal asked Hal. "The latest poll shows thirtyeight per cent. The general public never sees them. However, if I could make the articles interesting enough the metro papers might copy. A student at Miami won a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism with a series of articles on a hurricane, although he wrote them after the event -- Here's the news and our opening blast." They turned to the life-sized screen in a darkened corner of the automat to watch the image of Happy Jack Harrison. Before he spoke they could sense his excitement and his normally highpitched voice was up an octave as the staccato speech that was his trademark rolled through the room. was over an explosion in the University of Madrid's exotic fuels laboratory which had leveled most of the campus and four blocks of flats in the old city nearby. A young chemical engineer, Armando Sietro, had been formulating an ionic propellant for spacecraft when a vat had inexplicably ignited. The death toll, it was estimated, would eventually top #. Squeezed into the last minute of the broadcast was the simple announcement, "Today at city hall a petition to evacuate the city on May fifth because of an expected earthquake was denied. The latest prediction was made by Armando Severn, a Cal Tech student." He had confused Amal's name with Armando Sietro's. "I like that 'latest prediction,' " Red said to Hal. "You journalists are versatile. You can editorialize and get your facts wrong in one sentence." "He got rattled," Hal said, "when a natural spectacular hit the news. So there goes our front page story -- and my Pulitzer Prize." A memory in Lyn's mind formed into a suggestion. "Why don't we produce a spectacular about a great earthquake in Los Angeles and put it on the road? It would reach a large audience and no one would realize it was an educational documentary." "We're not producers." Amal turned to Hal. "Isn't there some way we can reach a mass audience with a written record?" "In the old days there used to be an underground press that printed all the news not fit to print elsewhere. It reached a tremendous audience." "Indeed it did," Lyn said, remembering history. "A large audience of sex-oriented perverts, deviates and voluptuaries." "Which is about eighty per cent of the population," Hal said. "Present company excepted." "Hold it a minute," Red Benton said. "Lyn's idea of a spectacular is worth thinking about. I know a girl in the cinema department at U.S.C. who has a genius for that sort of thing. If we're careful not to mention the solar eclipse a documentary would stay within the letter of the ban." "You two talk it over," Amal said. "I want to speak to Hal privately." He and Hal got up and moved to a table out of earshot of Red and Lyn, who wondered aloud, "Now, what are those two planning?" "A picnic in the park on May fifth, I assume -- and I'm being very careful not to find out. If I knowingly assisted a client in breaking the law I could be disbarred." His use of the word "client" aroused her suspicions. Amal had retained Red Benton without telling her and now he was speaking to Hal Carpenter in secret. Vexed and suddenly worried, she looked over at their table. Amal's back was to her but Hal's face was plainly visible. She studied Hal's face. , From the widening of his eyes, a slight recoil to his shoulders, she could tell he had been frightened by something Amal had told him. A shift of his eyes to the left indicated a private fear had struck him. His jaw muscles tightened, his shoulders squared and he leaned forward, suddenly resolute, listening intently to Amal. All the minute clues she read came together in her mind to form the insights which set her apart. Amal had said that possibly a clearly into her mind -- were at stake unless Hal organized an underground press to publicize the prediction. On that possibility, knowing that his journalistic career would be destroyed by a jail sentence, Hal had acceeded to Amal's proposal. never mentioned such casualties to her. She turned to face Red Benton, smiling to hide her shock, and found him looking at her with amused speculation. "You were reading their lips. You were so intent your head was cocked in the listening attitude of the blind." "But Hal said nothing." She smiled, shrugged. "Now who is this wizard you know in the cinema department?" "Gloria Jaffee." "Her!" "Oh, I know she's a beautiful redhead -- " "Out of a bottle." "But she has talents." "She's man-hungry." "That's one of her talents. But don't worry about Amal. He won't even see her. He's an earthquake monomaniac." She had diverted Red's thoughts from her alleged lip-reading, but Red had diluted her anticipation over an earthquake epic with his choice of producers. Now she would have to work with one eye on Amal who was returning with an obviously subdued and thoughtful Hal Carpenter. "Here's the plan," Amal said, still standing. "We'll produce The Fall of Los Angeles at Cal Tech. Hal will go ahead with his articles for the student papers. In both, we'll keep to the letter of the law. Red, you can ride herd on us, there. Lyn, you get started on a scenario about the psychological effects of earthquakes. Let's go over to Lyn's apartment and round up a production unit. We'll need cinema majors, medical students, engineers, the lot. Working around the clock, we can get the show on the road by Thursday." There was no doubt about who was in charge of production, Lyn thought as she arose -- the commanding general was "Armando" Severn, as Happy Jack Harrison had called him. The commentator's error had been rather logical, it occured to her. There was a vague similarity between "Amal" and "Armando," the young Spanish chemical engineer whose formula had caused the catastrophe in Madrid. but Gloria Jaffee was positively unctuous. She swept in and out of Lyn's apartment as if she owned it, constantly conferring with Amal on minor details. From the way she brushed past him in the crowded rooms or slung her pelvis slightly forward when she talked, Lyn decided that Gloria Jaffee was a misplaced ding-a-ling belle from the #s. Amal was a driver, working them all to what he called "the quintessential nubbin." He seemed to move to prestructured patterns, knowing in advance what problems would arise and having already thought out their solutions. He got three hours' sleep on Lyn's sofa, Monday night, generously permitting her an extra half-hour while he showered and shaved. He also spent Tuesday night on her sofa. Obliquely she realized how odd it was to be virtually living with the man she loved, at times almost sharing the same shower, when all the romance his schedule permitted was a quick kiss as a nightcap and a quicker one to wake her up. As fatigued as Amal kept her, she did not complain. Despite his nearness he seemed to have a conspiracy afoot which excluded her. When he talked to Red he went alone to Red's apartment. When he had to go to Cal Tech to talk to the grips and cameramen Hal Carpenter always drove him. On Wednesday evening, three days after its inception, the finally tilted Los Angeles -- the Last Day was previewed in the Cal Tech dome. In a gesture Lyn hoped was sentimental, Amal reserved the table where she and he had been first introduced by Nils Larsen. "Why isn't Nils here?" Lyn asked him. "I didn't invite him," Amal answered in a tone that stopped further questions. Tonight, in addition to Hal Carpenter, they were companioned by Red Benton who had dropped in Lyn's opinion. Red had cut her name from the list of credits as technical advisor. He had also deleted Amal's name and given producer. He feared the dramatic documentary might draw a reclassification hearing, he said, and he did not want Lyn or Amal involved. Privately she suspected him of using his position to habeas the corpus of Gloria Jaffee. T HE house lights dimmed. From concealed apertures invisible rays from infrared and ultraviolet cameras activated the rare earth prisms imbedded in the pleasure dome's circular wall and ceiling. Overhead the sky became blue and dotted with clouds. The air grew brisk and pine scented. Around the spectators, birds twittered and behind them rose the white building of Mount Wilson Observatory on whose dining terrace the audience now sat. Below, to the southwest, rose the towers of Los Angeles, golden in the late morning air. "This is the city, Los Angeles, California," a voice announced. "We live here." At the very opening, Gloria Jaffee introduced a corny bit of stage business. During pauses in the measured cadence of the voice, the Altadena vortex emitted smoke rings of smog into the high atmosphere, a creaking symbol that Los Angeles still lived. Fortunately the audience was immediately levitated toward the city, but as it floated past the Cal Tech tower there was a rush of air and a blurring of surrounding scenery as the camera zoomed in on the Civic Center. Since the audience sat in the lens of the camera, there were delighted shrieks at "the rollercoaster effect," a completely wornout cinematic cliche. The Civic Center towers materialized, circumambient, soaring above an audience now lunching in the Civic Center Mall. The announcer was listing dry statistics about Los Angeles, its population, the gross weight of liquids and solids it consumed daily, its automated subway system, its waste disposal facilities, the air purification system. Against this matterof-fact tabulation, in a genuinely dramatic contrast Amal must have suggested, a forlorn howl arose from the pet park south of the cafe. The announcer paused. His voice seemed to be listening. "An animal can hear the P waves of an earthquake," the voice said. "The L waves are coming." Pigeons were fluttering from the sidewalk. Sparrows launched themselves from the plastic trees of the mall. The sound of the dogs and the flight of the birds brought an apprehension into the dome so oppressive that the spectators at the tables turned and looked at each other. A metallic humming became audible, rising above the barking of the dogs into the sound of a million steel guitars vibrating through amplifiers. "S waves are causing the modules to resonate against each other on the stanchions," the voice explained. "The L waves are coming. Will the link pins hold the pods to the towers when the stanchions sway? Shall we on the patio outlive this minute?" The voice projected fear. Its listeners caught and amplified it. In the ambience of the rising panic, Lyn, who knew from the script that the link pins would not hold, bowed her head to pray that the link pins would hold as the first L wave struck and the towers swayed. Her eyes fell on Amal. His face was ashen. His eyes were wild and his hands were gripping the table's edge. Despite his phobia, Amal had come here to challenge his madness. His courage steadied hers. Nearby someone screamed and dove under a table. The pods above the fifteenth floors, were breaking and teetering outward, snapped from their stanchions. As the towers rolled upright a second L wave struck, whipping the stanchions like saplings in a sudden gust, but these saplings soared four hundred meters into the sky and their leaves were modules weighing six thousand kilos apiece. The snap of the second roll produced the squirting watermelon seeds effect. On the lower levels the pods were thrown outward on gentle arcs. From the upper levels, the modules were hurled outward and the sky was filled with pods. From out of the chaos in the sky, Lyn spotted a huge, pie-slice wedge tumbling toward her, the apex of its triangle pointed directly at her. As she watched the juggernaut hurtle down, logic told her the illusion would fade at the ceiling of the dome, but the pods were not fading into the ceiling. Synchronized holographic extensions of the film captured the images as they struck the ceiling and brought them down. The pods hit the patio. She was on her feet, screaming when the hologram materialized around her. Rising, Amal grabbed her, shouting above the din, "Control yourself, Lyn. It's only an illusion." The illusion did not fade. Amid the grinding roar of shattering steel and crunching concrete, the snap and twang of cracking pods, the recorded screams of the wounded and dying and the real screams from the terror-stricken audience, plastifoam blocks came tumbling from the walls. An odor of powdered concrete was emitted from the scent ducts. From the stage the severed head of an aged gynodrone shot from a pod and bounced down the aisle, stopping at Lyn's feet. Its gray hair was matted with blood, its eyes bulging. Jerking her gaze from the grisly object, Lyn looked at the stage. The illusion was shattered. In the mockup of a split pod from the Leisure World Tower, she saw a tableau bearing unmistakably the imprint of Gloria Jaffee. Others saw it at the same time. The screams of the audience turned to squeals and the squeals to twittering sniggers. I YN had never been touched by  the sexual hubris youth holds toward age. From her mindreading she knew warm winds could blow in December. But the scene in the mockup was a flagrant artistic flaw. Shakespeare used comedy to break tensions, she knew, but she questioned the taste of a "producer" who permitted the realism of a simulated earthquake to be marred by the spectacle of an octogenarian daisy chain. Also, she questioned the logic of the scene. It was highly unlikely that a group orgy would be in progress in the Leisure World at lunch time, a time when old folks would be thinking of organically grown food. "This was Los Angeles," the offstage voice intoned. "We lived here. We died in the Civic Center. "For our survivors, the horror now begins. For them the task to succor the wounded, to dig out the bodies, to preserve their own lives. How will this be done? We have experts to tell you." As the voice spoke, the offensive scene on the stage drew back into the wall. An usher recovered the head from the aisle. The recorded moans died. The images of the stripped towers, the dangling pedestrian walkways, faded into an abstract. As student actors, in holograms, were introduced onto the stage, the shock of the earthquake simulation lingered. Never before in the history of higher education, Lyn thought, had so many students paid such devoted attention to so many experts. A doctor lectured on firstaid; a laser expert spoke on how to find and operate steel-cutting lasers. A black student from Watts lectured on survival techniques and self-defense. Lyn's own expert, reciting from her now anonymously written script, discussed the psychological effects of earthquakes. At Lyn's table they discussed the production in low voices and Lyn's complaint about the Leisure World sex scene was voted down. "It's flakey," Amal admitted, "but it saved you from hysteria." "But at lunch time -- it's unnatural." "That's the point," Red Benton chimed in. "The scene's an antidote to realism. It snaps you back to make-believe." "The point is," Lyn contended, "we're training for reality." She was complaining to closed minds. When the house lights came on and Red suggested they make a public show of complimenting Gloria Jaffee along with everyone else in the audience Lyn excused herself. She had to go to the rest room. Monday Los Angeles -- the Last Day played to stand-up audiences on the thirty-six campuses of the Greater Los Angeles University Complex. At U.S.C. it outdrew The Spirit of O. J. Simpson. At Cal State Watts it exceeded the gate for Genet's The Blacks -- and when it commanded a larger audience at Loyola than The Crucifixion Gloria Jaffee decided to exhibit the spectacular in commercial houses, proceeds to go to the Student Relief Association. On the afternoon of Thursday, April #, countercurrents were set in motion against the spectacular, ostensibly arising out of an incident on Thursday morning, when an audience at Cal State Fullerton panicked and a girl's arm was broken in the stampede. Sensing in the incident the forming pattern of a mass tragedy. Dr. John Heywood, the head of Cal Tech's Department of Experimental Genetics and the local director of ambulatory experiment seven, took steps to limit Amal's overkill potential. He did so reluctantly and by a devious method at odds with his public character, and he moved with a sense of urgency. On his desk lay a bulletin from Kiev. Dr. Heywood called his old and beloved creche mother at the U.C.L.A. maternity clinic and expressed his concern over the broken arm at Fullerton. A sensational documentary such as Los Angeles -- the Last Day was a threat to the health and welfare of the young. An expert on conditioned reactions, Dr. Heywood was consciously pushing a button. The creche mother, aroused by the danger, promised to call the president of the local chapter of Professional Mothers' Association. So it was that late on Thursday aftenoon Lyn received a call from Dr. Kley asking her to set up another emergency hearing, this time to present a cease-and-desist petition against the showing of Los Angeles -- the Last Day. The petitioners were the powerful Professional Mothers' Association. The petition would be presented by James Osborne, the most successful, flamboyant and overdressed attorney in Los Angeles. No hint of dismay marred the exuberant vitality of Lyn's voice as she talked with Kley, but she was calculating. So Red Benton had been right -- but Red Benton was always right. Familiar with the bureaucratic process, she knew she could delay the hearing until Monday to complete the weekend collegiate circuit of the spectacular, but the public showing would be killed by the petition. Lyn dialed Amal as soon as Kley hung up. Nils Larsen answered. He was so happy it was her that she hated to cut short his greeting to get Amal to the phone, but it developed that Amal was not in. Nils said he had gone to Angeles Crest to hunt deer. Here was a puzzling development, she thought. By infererence she had gathered that Amal was against the sport of hunting and it seemed to her he had picked an inappropriate time for such activities. She told Nils to have Amal call her as soon as he got in and then she did what he would have done -- she called Red Benton. Red sounded insufferably unperturbed by the news. "What intrigues me is why Jim Osborne is putting on his battle dress for a minor skirmish. The P.M.A. will pay through the nose for this." "Perhaps he's doing it out of regard for motherhood." "Not him. Osborne would overcharge his grandmother and put a lien on her pod. No matter. I think I can take him. He's an over-thehill legal trickster and I know a few tricks myself." Red's arrogance was so obnoxious Lyn might have hoped for his failure had not his failure already been a probability so strong it was almost a certainty. Amal called before she went to dinner. On the screen he looked tired and seemed almost indifferent to the petition. "It will be tragic if we can't get the message to the general public, but that's Red's responsibility. I have other things to do." "How was the hunting?" "Not too pleasant. I bagged one deer with a longbow. The stalking pleasant." "Then why kill it?" "An anthropologist on campus is converting the venison to pemmican. It's an easily carried and nutritious survival food. I'll bring you a three-day supply Saturday. But I will not see you before then." genuine concern for the safety of Los Angeles. On the night of the preview, early morning in Kiev, Russia, Ailya Eugenia Semonovna had completed her epic poem, Memories of Mother, and kept her appointment with death. Ailya's appointment had been no quiet rendezvous befitting the end of a poet. In fact, Ailya Eugenia Semenovna had been the worst thing to hit Kiev since Adolph Hitler. As was her three-fourths brother, Amal, Ailya was enamored of speed, a trait cloned into her forebrain from the tissues of a female Russian astronaut on display in the Kremlin. As was her genetic mother, the English poetess, Ailya was given to strong drink. To throw off her nostalgia for a simpler and more primitive "Mother Russia" of her poem, she put "finis" to the last page and went for a drive, though it was long after midnight. Ironically a half-empty bottle of vodka, found in the wreckage of her car, was all that survived the crash intact. At high speed, Ailya rounded a curve on a back-country road in the Padrovski District southwest of Kiev and slammed into a tank truck. The truckwas transporting # liters of liquid cyanide to a pesticide factory in Darnitsa. Its driver was taking the back roads in the early morning to avoid traffic. Struck broadside, the truck was hurled from the road -- its seams split and the liquid cyanide poured into a reservoir serving southwest Kiev. Before the wreckage was found # citizens of Kiev had drunk water from the reservoir and died. When the death toll taken by a poetess exceeded that of the laser and chemical engineers combined, geneticists concluded that the death wish of the prototypes was no longer a private matter. Possessors of the Thanatos Syndrome were not merely death lovers -- regardless of occupation they were artisans of mass slaughter. No longer would the boys in the backroom speak lightly of "the Mayfly factor" or the "cockeyed helix." Now they would call it what it was -- the Doomsday Gene. Amal had to be stopped. It was suspected by observers that he was being assisted and protected by students, a group traditionally furtive, clandestine and antisocial. The longer Amal lived, the larger his organization grew, the more dangerous he became. It was felt that somehow he would use the gatherings at the spectaculars as his instrument for mass death or, failing that, an earthquake panic. So Dr. Heywood decided to speed up the local AE #'s process of self-elimination and called his mother at U.C.L.A. I YN saw Amal only once over the i weekend and then briefly. He dropped by to bring her a packet of pemmican, leaving the student who had driven him below in the car, because he was rushing to an appointment in the Culver Tower. He looked so tired she wanted to chide him for overworking but, knowing he would do as he had to do anyway, she voiced regrets that they could not be together Sunday. Her remark saddened him. "How much easier it would be if we were rehearsing for tomorrow's wedding in Dotham. I feel like a kangaroo in a tar pit -- the higher I hope the deeper I sink. Well, one more week." When he embraced her to kiss her goodbye she sensed around him a vast weariness, a longing for surcease, for cessation of effort, for peace and rest. She knew then that he truly would have preferred to be with her in Dotham. On Sunday she went to church alone and early to get a front pew where she sat and gazed wistfully at the altar, particularly after the preacher began to speak on the value of the Puritan Ethic. Work, diligently pursued, he averred, was the best method of heightening sensation. Slothfulness was leading to wilder and wilder spectaculars such as Los Angeles -- the Last Day. He had attended a student production and said the show's only socially redeeming feature was a tableau at the climax which reflected the producer's appreciation of Christian fellowship among the aged. Lyn halved her usual donation to the plate, feeling the preacher was a poor drama critic and a spokesman for the mothers' lobby. On Monday she found Counselor Osborne to be a much more perceptive critic than the preacher. Osborne branded the Leisure World tableau "a lascivious pandering to the sexual arrogance of the young, a symbolic fatuity in line with the show's other scientific fallacies." Osborne proved a better drama critic than a petition pleader. To the great glee of the press corps. Red Benton "took" the famed counselor by a trick as devious as any The Glorious One himself had ever pulled in a courtroom. been so wonderful. Never had business been so good. Never was the World Outlook so bright. And never had the girls been so pretty. spring in decades -- sharp, bitter, and eternally foggy -- and that the sinuses of Roy Ronsard were in open revolt. It is admitted that bankruptcies were setting records, those of individuals and firms as well as those of nations. It is a fact that the aliens had landed (though their group was not identified) and had published their Declaration that one-half of mankind was hereby obsoleted and the other half would be retained as servants. The omens and portents were black, but the spirits of men were the brightest and happiest ever. To repeat, never had the girls been so pretty! There was no one who could take exception to that. Roy Ronsard himself faced bankruptcy and the loss of everything that he had built up. But he faced it in a most happy frame of mind. A Higher Set of Values will do wonders toward erasing such mundane everyday irritations. There is much to be said in favor of cold, vicious springtimes. They represent weather at its most vital. There is something to be said for exploding sinuses. They indicate, at least, that a man has something in his head. And, if a man is going to be a bankrupt, then let him be a happy bankrupt. When the girls are as pretty as all that, the rest does not matter. Let us make you understand just how pretty Eva was! She was a golden girl with hair like honey. Her eyes were blue -- or they were green -- or they were violet or gold and they held a twinkle that melted a man. The legs of the creature were like Greek poetry and the motion of her hips was something that went out of the world with the old sail ships. Her breastwork had a Gothic upsweep -- her neck was passion incarnate and her shoulders were of a glory past describing. In her whole person she was a study of celestial curvatures. Should you never have heard her voice, the meaning of music has been denied you. Have you not enjoyed her laughter? Then your life remains unrealized. It is possible that exaggeration has crept into this account? No. That is not possible. All this fits in with the cold appraisal of men like Sam Pinta, Cyril Colbert, Willy Whitecastle, George Goshen, Roy Ronsard himself -- and that of a hundred men who had gazed on her in amazement and delight since she came to town. All these men are of sound judgment in this field. And actually she was prettier than they admitted. Too, Eva Ellery was but one of many. There was Jeannie who brought a sort of pleasant insanity to all who met her. Roberta who was a scarlet dream. Helen -- highvoltage sunshine. Margaret -- the divine clown. And it was high adventure just to meet Hildegarde. A man could go blind from looking at her. "I can't understand how there can be so many beautiful young women in town this year," said Roy. "It makes the whole world worth while. Can you lei me have fifty dollars, Willy? I'm going to see Eva Ellery. When I first met her I thought that she was a hallucination. She's real enough, though. Do you know her?" "Yes. A most remarkable young woman. She has a small daughter named Angela who really stops the clock. Roy, I have just twenty dollars left in the world and I'll split it with you. As you know, I'm going under, too. I don't know what I'll do after they take my business away from me. It's great to be alive, Roy." "Wonderful. I hate not having money to spend on Eva, but she's never demanding in that. In fact she's lent me money to smooth out things pertinent to the termination of my business. She's one of the most astute business women I ever knew and has been able to persuade my creditors to go a little easy on me. I won't get out with my shirt. But, as she says, I may get out with my skin." mean fog and one remembered that there was a glorious sun (not seen for many days now) somewhere behind it. The world rang with cracked melody and everybody was in love with life. Everybody except Peggy Ronsard and wives like her who did not understand the higher things. Peggy had now become like a fog with no sun anywhere behind it. Roy realized, as he came home to her for a moment, that she was very drab. "Well?" Peggy asked with undertones in her voice. Her voice did not have overtones like that of Eva. Only undertones. "Well what? My -- uh -- love?" Roy asked. "The business -- what's the latest on it today? What have you come up with?" "Oh, the business. I didn't bother to go by today. I guess it's lost." "You are going to lose it without a fight? You used not to be like that. Two weeks ago your auditing firm said that you had all sorts of unrealized assets and that you'd come out of this easily." "And two weeks later my auditing firm is also taking bankruptcy. Everybody's doing it now." "There wasn't anything wrong with that auditing firm till that Roberta woman joined it. And there wasn't anything wrong with your company till you started to listen to that Eva creature." "Is she not beautiful, Peggy?" Peggy made a noise Roy understood as assent, but he had not been understanding his wife well lately. "And there's another thing," said Peggy dangerously. "You used to have a lot of the old goat in you and that's gone. A wife misses things like that. And your wolfish friends have all changed. Sam Pinta used to climb all over me like I was a trellis -- and I couldn't sit down without Willy Whitecastle being on my lap. And Judy Pinta says that Sam has changed so much at home that life just isn't worth living any more. You all used to be such loving men! What's happened to you?" "Ah -- I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane." "You didn't go for that higher plane jazz till that Eva woman came along. And that doubledamned Roberta! But she does have two lovely little girls, I'll admit. And that Margaret, she's the one that's got Cyril Colbert and George Goshen where they're pushovers for anything now. She does have a beautiful daughter, though." "Have you noticed how many really beautiful women there are in town lately, Peggy?" "Roy, I hope those aliens get every damned cucumber out of that patch! The monsters are bound to grab all the pretty women first. I hope they're a bunch of sadist alligators and do everything that the law disallows to those doll babies." "Peggy, I believe that the aliens (and we are told that they are already among us) will be a little more sophisticated than popular ideas anticipate." "I hope they're a bunch of Jack the Rippers. I believe I could go for Jack today. He'd certainly be a healthy contrast to what presently obtains." the crux. For the beautiful young women, who seemed to be abundant in town that springtime, had an odd effect on the men who came under their influence. The goats among the men had become lambs and the wolves had turned into puppies. Jeannie was of such a striking appearance as to make a man almost cry out. But the turmoil that she raised in her gentlemen friends was of a cold sort, for all that the white flames seemed to leap up. She was Artemis herself and the men worshiped her on the higher plane. She was wonderful to look at and to talk to. But who would be so boorish as to touch? The effect of Eva was similar and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) and of Margaret and of Hildegarde. How could a man not ascend to the higher plane when such wonderful and awesome creatures as these abounded? But the damage was done when the men carried this higher plane business home to their comparatively colorless wives. The men were no longer the ever-loving husbands that they should have been. The most intimate relations ceased to take place. If continued long this could have an effect on the statistics. B UT daily affairs sometimes crept into the conversations of even those men who had ascended to the higher plane. "I was wondering," Roy asked George Goshen, "when our businesses are all gone -- who do they go to?" "Many of us have wondered that," George told him. "They all seem to devolve upon anonymous recipients or upon corporations without apparent personnel. But somebody is gathering in the companies. One theory is that the aliens are doing it." "The aliens are among us, the authorities say, but nobody has seen them. They publish their program and their progress through intermediaries who honestly do not know the original effectors. The aliens still say that they will make obsolete one-half of mankind and make servants of the other half." "Jeannie says -- did you ever see her pretty little daughters? -- that we see the aliens every day and do not recognize them for what they are. She says that likely the invasion of the aliens will have obtained its objective before we realize what that is. What's the news from the rest of the country and the world?" "The same. All business is going to pot and everybody is happy. On paper, things were never more healthy. There's a lot of new backing from somewhere and all the businesses thrive as soon as they have shuffled off their old owners. The new owners -- and nobody can find out who or what they are -- must be happy with the way things are going. Still, I do not believe that anybody could be happier or more contented than I am. Can you let me have fifty cents, George? I just remembered that I haven't eaten today. Peggy has gone to work for what used to be my company, but she's a little slow to give me proper spending money. Come to think of it, Peggy has been acting peculiar lately." "I have only forty cents left in the world, Roy. Take the quarter. My wife has gone to work also, but I guess there will never be any work , for us. Did you think we'd ever live to see the no males wanted signs on every hiring establishment in the country? Oh, well -- if you're happy nothing else matters." "George, there's a humorous note that creeps into much of the world news lately. It seems that ours is not the only city with an unusual number of pretty young ladies this season. They've been reported in Teheran and Lvov, in Madras and Lima and Boston. Everywhere." "No! Pretty girls in Boston? You're kidding. This has certainly been an up-side down year when things like that can happen. But did you ever see a more beautiful summertime, Roy?" "On my life I never did." The summer had been murky and the sun had not been seen for many months. But it was a beautiful murk. And when one is attuned to inner beauty the outer aspect of things does not matter. The main thing was that everyone was happy. Oh, there were small misunderstandings. There was a wife -- this was reported as happening in Cincinnati, but it may have happened in other places also -- who one evening reached out and touched her husband's hand in a form of outmoded affection. Naturally the man withdrew his hand rudely, for it was clear that the wife had not yet ascended to his higher plane. In the morning he went away and did not return. Many men were drifting away from their homes in those days. Most men, actually. However that old' cohabitational arrangement had grown into being, it no longer had anything to recommend it. When one has consorted with the light itself, what can he find in a tallow candle? Raphael Aloysius -- R.A. for his byline -- Lafferty is serially writing the Great American Novel. No joke. Lafferty, quite a historian, considers each of the historical novels he's published but a chapter of the aforementioned project. For instance, Okla Hewali, released last year, is the life story (# years) of an Indian Mingo (great man, not quite chief) of the Cherokee tribe; the novel details the relocation of the Five Nations. Of course, R.A. Lafferty is best known to ner of sf yarns. He is a Scorpio by birth, an electrical engineer by trade, a confirmed bachelor by choice and now a full-time writer by retirement. "I read," he tells us, "French, Spanish, Italian and German with fair ease and a dozen or so more tongues with some difficulty." His latest novel Arrive At Easterwine, just out from Ballantine, is Machine as Conveyed to R.A. Lafferty. Indeed! Born in Neola, Iowa in #, Lafferty has spent most of his life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But he survived four and one-half years in Australia, New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies and other exotic points east as a Staff Sgt. in World War II. As we write this, Lafferty is sitting out the winter with a broken shoulder and cerebrally plotting strange new tales until he can type once more. R.A. Lafferty Most of the men became destitute wanderers and loafers. They were happy with their inner illumination. Every morning the dead ones would be shoveled up by the women on the disposal trucks and carted away. And every one of those men died happy. That's what made it so nice. To anyone who had entered higher understanding death was only an interlude. Roy Ronsard and Sam Pinta had just completed their fruitless rounds of what used to be called garbage cans but now had more elegant names. They were still hungry, but happily so for it was truly a beautiful autumn. The snow had come early, it is true, and great numbers of men had perished from it. But if one had a happy life, it was not a requisite for it to be a long life. Men lived little in the world now, dwelling mostly in thought. But sometimes they still talked to each other. "It says here -- " Roy Ronsard began to read a piece of old newspaper that had been used for wrapping bones -- "that Professor Eimer, just before he died of malnutrition, gave as his opinion that the aliens among us cannot stand sunlight. He believed it was for this reason that they altered our atmosphere and made ours a gloomy world. Do you believe that, Sam?" "Hardly. How could anybody call ours a gloomy world? I believe that we are well rid of that damned sun." "And it says that he believed that one of the weapons of the aliens was their intruding into men a general feeling of euphor -- the rest of the paper is torn off." "Roy, I saw Margaret today. From a distance, of course. Naturally I could not approach such an incandescent creature in my present condition of poverty. But Roy, do you realize how much we owe to those pretty girls? I really believe that we would have known nothing of the higher plane or the inner light if it had not been for them. How could they have been so pretty?" "Sam, there is one thing about them that always puzzled me." "Everything about them puzzled me. What do you mean?" "All of them have daughters, Sam. And none of them have husbands. Why did none of them have husbands? Or sons?" "Never thought of it. It's been a glorious year, Roy. My only regret is that I will not live to see the winter that will surely be the climax to this radiant autumn. We have had so much -- we cannot expect to have everything. Do you not just love deep snow over you?" "It's like the blanket of heaven, Sam. When the last of us is gone -- and it won't be too long now -- do you think the girls will remember how much light they brought into our lives?"  I at his desk, looking down at the transcript of a Carlottigram from Port Listowel. Lord Of The Isles, one of the lightjammers on the run between the. Rim Worlds and the Llanithi Consortium, was overdue. She, using her own Carlotti equipment, had beamed a final message to Port Forlorn before breaking the light barrier. Once the speed of light had been exceeded she was in a weird, private universe of her own -- stranger even than the private universes of ships running under the space-time" twisting Mannschenn Drive -- and unable to communicate with any planetary base or any other ship. Toward the end of her voyage she had made her routine reduction of speed to a sublight velocity and had Carlotti Station on Llanith. She had gotten as far as giving her name and then, according to the Llanithi Carlotti operator on watch, had experienced what seemed to be interference on the band in use. Nothing more had been heard from her. And now she was all of ten days overdue. The communicator buzzed sharply. Grimes pressed the button that would admit the incoming call. The screen lit up and on it appeared the fleshy, ruddy face of Admiral Kravitz. "Ah, Grimes." The commodore repressed the temptation to counter with, And whom the hell else did you expect? Legally speaking the admiral was not his superior officer except when Grimes was called back to active duty with the Rim Worlds Navy, but there would be no sense in antagonizing the man. "Sir?" Grimes replied curtly. "This Lord Of The Isles business. Grimes?" "You have a transcript of the signal from Port Listowel, sir? "Of course. We do have an intelligence branch, you know. What do you make of it?" "I don't like it. Especially coming right after the vanishing of Sea Witch under very similar circumstances." "What are you doing about it, Grimes?" "I could ask you the same question, sir." "We cleaned up the energy-eaters for you, Grimes, and we made a clean sweep. Rim Culverin has been maintaining a patrol ever since the conclusion of Operation Rimhunt and has reported no further invasion of our territorial space by those entities." The admiral paused, then went on: "I'm not altogether happy about those lightjammers of yours, Grimes. As you know, we're having some built for the Navy, but I'm beginning to feel like trying to get the program canceled. They aren't safe. Sailing ships, indeed, in this day and age?" "They're the only ships we have capable of trading with the Llanithi Consortium." "At the moment, Grimes, at the moment. But our boffins are working on some other, simpler way of achieving a reversal of atomic charges." "With what success, sir?" asked Grimes innocently. Kravitz flushed. "None so far. But give them time, give them time. Meanwhile -- " "Sir?" "Meanwhile, Grimes, I am recalling you to active duty. As long as the so-called ships of the line are still on our drawing boards we have to maintain an interest in sailing vessels. Furthermore, I have learned from your employers -- from Rim Runners -- that all further sailings of the lightjammers have been suspended until such time as the mystery of the disappearance of Lord Of The Isles and Sea Witch has been cleared up. They are agreeable to the requisitioning and commissioning of Pamir as an auxiliary cruiser. You will sail in her." Grimes grinned. "Thank you, sir. But I have to tell you that I'mnot qualified in sail." " Pamir's people are -- and they all, like yourself, hold reserve commissions. Listowel's a full commander, isn't he? You'll be in overall charge of the ship and the expedition, but he can be your sailing master. We'll be putting aboard regular Navy personnel -- gunnery specialists and the like. Satisfied?" "Gunnery specialists?" "You never know when weapons are going to come in handy, Grimes. It's better to have them than to be without them." Grimes had to agree. He knew as well as anybody that the universe was not peaceful and that Man was not its only breaker of peace. N OT at all reluctantly Grimes handed over his astronautical superintendent's duties to Captain Barsac, one of Rim Runners' senior masters. But it was with a certain degree of reluctance that he left his comfortable home in Port Forlorn for Port Erikson, the lightjammers' terminal. Sonya refused to accompany her husband. She detested cold weather. Port Forlorn's climate was barely tolerable. Only Esquimaux, polar bears or penguins -- assuming that the immigration or importation of these from Earth could be arranged -- would feel at home at Coldharbor Bay in Lorn's Antarctica. Pamir was alongside at Port Erikson. The cargo she had brought from Llanith had been discharged but she had not commenced to load for the return voyage. As yet the advance party from the Admiralty Yards was still to arrive, although accommodations -- looking like black, partially inflated balloons grounded in the snow -- had been set up for them. Grimes, accompanied by Captain Rowse, the Port Erikson harbormaster, went aboard Pamir. He was received by Ralph Listowel, the lightjammer's master. "Glad to have you aboard, sir," said Listowel. "Glad to be aboard. Commander." Listowel scowled. "That's right, sir. Rub it in. I suppose you'll be taking over my quarters." Grimes grinned. "No. You're to be my sailing master -- and, as far as I'm concerned, this is still your ship and you're still the master of her. You've quite palatial passenger accommodations. That'll do me." Listowel's scowl faded from his lean, dark face. "Thank you, sir. But what is going on?" "Your ship has been requisitioned -- and you and your officers have been called up for active duty in the Rim Worlds Navy." "I know that. But what is going on?" "I was hoping that you'd be able to tell me." Listowel waved his visitors to seats, took a chair himself. He said, "Let's face it, Commodore. To date the lightjammers have been lucky, fantastically lucky. Even in Flying Cloud, where we had to make up the rules as we went along, we all came through in one piece. But sooner or later luck runs out." "You think that's what happened to Sea Witch and Lord Of The Isles?" "There are so many things that could happen. When we're running under sail, building up to a velocity just short of that light, we could hit something -- " "And the flare of the explosion would be seen from Llanith." "All right, all right. Something could go wrong with the magnetic suspension of the sphere of antiiron -- " "And with matter and anti-matter canceling each other out the burst of released energy would be even more spectacular." "Yes, Commodore. But what if it happened at trans-light speed? We know very little of conditions outside the ship at that velocity. Would the explosion be witnessed in this universe -- or in the next universe but three?" "Mphm. You have something there, Listowel. Even so, we've two ships missing, one after the other. There's an old saying: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." "There hasn't been a third time," said Listowel. "Yet," pointed out Grimes. "But there's still the apparent jamming of Lord Of The Isles' last call to be considered." asked for the manifests of the cargoes carried by the two missing ships. It was possible that there had been some item of freight which, at trans-light speeds and with the reversal of atomic charges, had become chemically or physically unstable with fatal consequences. This was an idea worth considering. But no radioactives had been listed. No industrial chemicals, dangerous or otherwise, had been listed. Mainly the freight carried in each ship had consisted of luxury goods -- preserved foodstuffs, liquor, fine textiles and the like. A few shipments of machine tools and some drugs had also been part of the cargoes. One drug in particular -- Antigeriatridine -- caught Grimes' attention. The substance was not manufactured on any of the Rim Worlds. It came from Marina, a planet in the Pleiades Sector. It was an extract from the glands of an indigenous sea slug and could not be synthesized. It was fantastically expensive and, on most worlds, was controlled by the state, rationed out only to deserving citizens. It was Marina's main source of income, exported to any planet that could afford to pay for it. In recent years the Llanithi Consortium had been placed on Marina's list of customers. Transhipment for Llanith was made from Lorn. Grimes' memory carried him back to the long ago days when he had been a newly commissioned ensign in the Federation Survey Service. He had played a part in bringing the pirates who had captured the merchant vessel Epsilon Sextans to book. Epsilon Sextans had been carrying Antigeriatridine, which had made her a worthwhile prey. Perhaps Admiral Kravitz' insistence that Pamir be armed made sense. But piracy? It was not the continued existence of the crime itself that Grimes found hard to comprehend, but rather the actual mechanics of it. Piracy was not unknown along the spaceways, but both predators and victims had always been conventional starships, with inertial drive and Mannschenn Drive and auxiliary rocket power for use in emergencies. Under inertial drive only, maintaining a comfortable #G acceleration, a ship could build up almost to the speed of light if she took long enough about it. But, as soon as possible, she usually ran under Mannschenn Drive which, in these conditions she was untouchable unless the vessel attacking her succeeded in synchronizing her own rate of temporal precession. The captains of warships -- and of such vessels as have from time to time sailed on the plundering account -- were reasonably competent in the practice of this art. But it would be impossible for a ship proceeding under inertial drive only to match velocities with a lightjammer under sail. And a ship running under Mannschenn Drive would have to return to the normal space-time continuum before her weapons could be brought to bear on a lightjammer -- and, once again, the matching of velocities would be impossible. Hijacking was a form of piracy, of course. Grimes turned from the missing ships' cargo manifests to their passenger lists. The names meant nothing to him, neither those of Rim Worlds citizens nor of Llanithans. No doubt the police could help him in this respect. Perhaps one or more of those passengers had a criminal record. But the hypothesis made little appeal to him. He just could not imagine the officers of either of the vessels submitting meekly -- and he could not imagine any passenger being able to handle a lightjammer. Sail spacemanship was an art rather than a science and the only practioners of the art -- Grimes told himself -- consisted of the handful of Rim Runners' personnel trained and qualified for lightjammers. He filled and lit his pipe, looked down at the manifests and passenger lists on the desk. He had a hunch that the manifests meant more than the passenger lists -- no more than a hunch, but his hunches were often right. Any ship -- even a pirate ship -- anywhere in space between Lorn and Llanith and in position to receive the beamed Carlotti transmissions from one planet to the other, would be able to read the routine signals sent immediately after the lift-off of one of the lightjammers. Date and time of departure -- passengers carried -- a listing of freight aboard. Nothing was encoded. There had never been any need for secrecy until now. Only the actual mechanics of attack, seizure and boarding puzzled him. that she had better come to Port Erikson. "You're the intelligence officer in this family," he said. "This job calls for intelligence." Reluctantly she agreed to join him. The following morning he stood in the Port Erikson control tower, looking out through the wide windows at the bleak landscape. Pamir was alongside at her wharf, a great, dull-gleaming torpedo shape on the dark water. The sleekness of her lines was broken only by the pods that housed her airscrews and their engines. Out on Coldharbor Bay a small tug, Bustler, was chuffing busily back and forth, functioning as an icebreaker, keeping the harbor clear of any accumulation of ice heavy enough to impede surface maneuvers. Grimes had decided that Pamir must keep to her original schedule, which meant that her conversion to an auxiliary cruiser would be a skimpy one. There would be time for the installation of an extra generator and the fitting of two batteries of laser cannon, but no more. A familiar voice issued from the traffic controller's transceiver. "Pinnace Firefly to Port Erikson. Do you read me? Over." "Loud and clear, Firefly. Pass your message. Over." Grimes went to stand by the traffic control officer. He heard Sonya nine-four-five hours, your time. Over." So neither she -- nor Admiral Kravitz -- had wasted any time. And Sonya was doing her own piloting, which was typical of her. "I have her on the screen, sir," announced the radar operator. Grimes went to the window overlooking' the Nullarbor Plain, almost featureless under the blanket of snow. It was one of the rare clear days, and on the horizon stood the distant, jagged battlements of the Great Barrens. And was that a tiny, glittering speck in the pale sky? Yes. It expanded rapidly and even in the control tower, through the thick glass of the windows, the irritated snarl of an inertial drive unit operating at maximum capacity was distinctly audible. "That's her," said Captain Rowse. "That's her," agreed Grimes. He shrugged into his heavy cloak, put on his cap and went down to the airstrip to meet Sonya. THE trouble with you, A John," she said, "is that you've read too much of the wrong kind of history. Wooden ships and iron men and all that sort of thing. Pieces of eight. Broadsides of carronades. The Jolly Roger. Oh, there have been space pirates, I admit. But I still get my share of the bumf issued by the Federation Survey Service's intelligence branch -- and I can tell you that today there just aren't any pirates. Not that sort of pirate, anyway. There's still the occasional hijacking." Grimes' prominent ears flushed. He indicated with his hand the passenger lists. He said, "I've asked the Port Forlorn chief of police if any of these people have criminal records. He assures me that none of them have and that everybody aboard Lord Of The Isles and Sea Witch was a little, innocent woolly lamb -- " "He'd know, wouldn't he?" She herself was flushed, her fine features literally glowing under the glossy auburn hair. "And you have all these bright ideas and drag me out here, where all the brass monkeys are singing falsetto, to join you in this comfortless shack to help you think." "Not comfortless," said Grimes. The quarters that he had been given were commodious and comfortable enough, although lacking in character, accommodation, mar"Well, what do you intend doing? Put me in the picture." " Pamir will sail on time, having loaded the cargo that's been booked for her. That will include a shipment of Antigeriatridine. The usual routine signals will be made once she has lifted off. And then we wait to see what happens next." "We?" "I suppose you'll be coming along." "I might as well get a free trip to Llanith out of it." "All right. You. Me. Ralph Listowel and his officers. The gunnery officer from the Navy who'll be looking after the laser batteries. The two dozen or so marines who'll be traveling as passengers." "Anybody would think that you were contemplating embarking on a career of piracy yourself." Grimes laughed. "Why not? After all, one of my ancestors sailed on the account." "And what happened to him?" "He was eventually hanged from his own yardarm." She joined him in his laughter. "Then you'd better be careful. After all, the lightjammers are the only ships that run to masts and yards!" II The extra generator had been installed, as had been the batteries of laser cannon. Stores for the voyage and the cargo had been loaded. The passengers were embarked. Grimes and Sonya, together with Major Trent, the marine officer, and Lieutenant Fowler, the gunnery officer, sat with Listowel and his wife, Sandra, in the master's day cabin. Listowel sipped his coffee rather glumly. He asked Grimes stiffly, "Have I your permission to cast off, sir, at the arranged time?" "Of course, Listowel. You're the master still. The rest of us are just along for the ride." "It's a ride I'm looking forward to," put in Fowler enthusiastically. He was a young giant with shortcropped yellow hair, the perpetual schoolboy so common in all the armed services. "It'll give me some time in sail and I'll be all set for our own ships of the line when they come out." "It's not a free ride we're here for," commented the major sourly. "More coffee anybody?" asked Sandra cheerfully. "No thanks," replied Listowel, looking at his watch. "It's time we got the show on the road." "Can I come up to control, sir?" asked Fowler. "Of course, Lieutenant. You're welcome on the bridge. And so are you, major." Grimes and Sonya went along with the others. They had witnessed Pamir's departure from the control position before, but it was so unlike the liftoff of a conventional spaceship as to remain fascinating. This time there was no need to use the tug, no need for the transverse thrust of the airscrews. The wind, what little there was of it, was northerly, blowing the ship bodily off from the wharf, the brash ice piling up along her lee side but not impeding her. When she was well out into the bay water, ballast was dumped and -- the sphere of antimatter giving her positive buoyancy -- she went up like a balloon or a rocket -- silently. Within seconds she was driving through the low cloud ceiling and then had broken through into the clear upper air. Fast she rose -- and faster -- into blackness, while below her Lorn became an opalescent globe hanging in nothingness. The directional gyroscopes rumbled and whined, rumbled again and then lapsed into silence. She was steadied on course now, with Lorn to one side and the Lorn sun astern. The tiny cluster of stars -- the anti-matter suns around which revolved the planets of the Llanithi Consortium -- was directly ahead. The control room guests crowded to the side ports of the bridge, looking aft to watch as Listowel made sail. The stubs of the telescopic masts extended themselves rapidly, sprouting yards as they elongated. The yards and the great sails, spreading to catch the star wind, the royals, the topgallants, the upper topsails and the lower topsails, the main courses... The polarized glass of the viewports dimmed the glare of the sun and black against it stood the driving The inertialess ship was already scudding before it and the Doppler Log was clicking and flashing like a clock gone mad. "Roll and go," murmured Listowel. "Wonderful!" breathed Fowler. Major Trent only grunted, then said, "I'd better get down to see to my men." Fowler said, "And I'd better check my cannon." "We'll not be needing them yet," Grimes told him. T 'HE ship drove on, steadily accelerating. It was like the first voyage that Grimes and Sonya had made in Pamir -- and yet, in some ways, unlike. The atmosphere on board was different, mainly because there were no civilian passengers. Major Trent and his marines were passengers of a sort, of course -- there was little that they could do about the ship until such time as their professional services would be required. But Trent maintained his own standards of discipline and there was altogether too much heelclicking and saluting. And Listowel's officers were all too conscious of their temporary standing as commissioned personnel of the Rim Worlds Navy, serving aboard an auxiliary cruiser of that same service. Their captain didn't like it. He complained to Grimes over a quiet drink in the commodore's quarters: "Damn it all, sir, I'm just a shipmaster and my people are my mates and engineers and all the rest of it. But now I have Mr. bloody Willoughby putting on airs and graces and expecting to be addressed as Lieutenant Commander every time anybody talks to him." Grimes chuckled. "It doesn't matter. He can call himself what he likes -- he's still a very good chief officer." "Even so -- " Then Listowel managed a wry chuckle of his own. "All right. I'll let him and the others have their fun. But it still reminds me of small boys playing at pirates." "Talking of pirates -- " Grimes pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked a drawer of the desk that was part of the cabin's furniture. "I asked you in for a talk as well as a drink. You remember that coded Carlottigram that came through for me on the teletype this morning?" He took a sheet of paper out of the drawer. "This contains the decode, top Destroyed By Fire Before Reading -- and all the rest of it. When it comes to playing childish games the Admiralty is at least as bad as anybody else. And this message concerns us all in this vessel. "Navy has an intelligence service, you know. According to Sonya it's not a patch on the intelligence branch of the Federation Survey Service, but its officers do flap their ears and twitch their little pink noses now and again. Unluckily Admiral Kravitz didn't get his paws on their reports concerning the Duchy of Waldegren until after we'd sailed." "Waldegren?" "Yes. It seems that our people managed to plant some monitor buoys in the territorial space of the Duchy. I've heard those gadgets described as miracles of miniaturization. See all, hear all, and punch it all back to Port Forlorn on tightbeam Carlotti in one coded parcel before the automatic self-destruction. And that, of course, occurs when anything approaches within ten kilometers. "Well, there's been something going on around Darnstadt -- the fortress planet, so-called. There's a photograph of a lightjammer under sail. There are monitored signals -- ped the sheet of paper. "Kravitz sent me translations of some of the messages. 'Clear of atmosphere, making sail.' 'Arrange berthage for prize.' The sort of things you send just after departure and just prior to arrival." "I don't take any prizes, Commodore." "You might yet." Grimes looked at his watch. "Time we went to see Mr. Fowler get a prize for good shooting." "Didn't you specialize in gunnery yourself, sir, when you were in the Survey Service?" "At one time, yes. But I never had a practice shoot at point eight the speed of light. This should be interesting." "Surely no more so than any other practice shoot, Commodore. As far as the target rocket and the ship are concerned, there'll be no great relative velocities. The target will just run parallel to us once it's been launched. If it took evasive action it would drop astern too fast for Fowler to get a shot at it. We're still accelerating, you know." "Mphm?" Grimes locked away the message. "Let's go to watch the fireworks." T HE watchkeeper -- Denby, the second officer -- and all offduty officers were in the control room. Sonya was there, too, as was Sandra. Major Trent was there, accompanied by his sergeant. Wallasey, the third officer, was assisting Lieutenant Fowler. The gunnery officer sat at his fire control console. Young Wallasey was at the smaller set of controls, part of the ship's normal equipment, from which signal and sounding rockets were handled. He was managing to look at least as important as Fowler. "Let battle commence!" whispered Grimes to Sonya. Fowler overheard this and scowled. But he said nothing. Commodores, even commodores on the Reserve List, were entitled to their pleasantries at the expense of mere lieutenants. "Targets in readiness, Mr. Fowler," reported Wallasey. "Thank you, Mr. Wallasey," replied Fowler stiffly. Then, to Grimes: "Permission to commence practice shoot, sir?" "This is Captain Listowel's ship, Mr. Fowler," said Grimes. The young man flushed and repeated his question to Listowel. "Carry on, Mr. Fowler." "Fire one," he ordered. "Fire one," repeated Wallasey. Grimes, looking aft with the others, saw the gout of blue flame, intensely bright against the black backdrop with its sparse scattering of stars, as the missile was ejected from its launching tube. It fell away from the ship on a slightly divergent course, pulling ahead, but slowly, at first. "Open the range, Mr. Wallasey," ordered Fowler. "Range opening. One kilometer. Two. Four. Ten -- " The rocket now was only a bright spark against the darkness. Fowler worked at his console. Abaft the control room but forward of the masts and sails the quadruple rods of the starboard laser battery turned and wavered like the hunting antennae of some huge insect. "Fire -- " muttered Fowler to himself. A faint glow showed at the tips of the rods, nothing more. Here there was no air, with its floating dust motes, to be heated to incandescence. Out to starboard the bright spark persisted, neither extinguished nor flaring into sudden explosion. Fowler muttered something about the calibration of his sights, then ordered, "Close the range." "Range closing, Mr. Fowler. Ten. Nine. Eight -- damn!" "What's wrong?" "Burnout." The bright spark had vanished now. "All right. Fire two." "Fire two." The second missile was thrown from its tube. "Range, Mr. Wallasey?" "One kilometer. Opening." "Hold at one kilometer." Then, to himself: "It's right in the sights. I can't miss -- " "But you're doing just that," remarked Grimes. "But I can't be!" Fowler sounded desperate. "With a single cannon, perhaps. But not with a battery of four. And the sights can't be out." Grimes grunted thoughtfully. Then: "Tell me, Mr. Fowler, has anybody ever tried to use laser in these conditions before?" "From a lightjammer, you mean, sir? From a ship traveling at almost the speed of light?" "Yes." "You know that this is the First time, sir." "And it's been an interesting experiment, hasn't it? Oh, I could be wrong, but I have a sort of vision of photons being dispersed like water from the spray nozzle of a hose. Perhaps if the ship were not accelerating the tight, coherent beam would be maintained... Is there a physicist in the house?" "You know there's not," said Sonya sharply. "Unfortunate, but true. So in these conditions our laser is about as effective as a searchlight and we've nobody to tell us what to do about it." Fowler was slumped in his seat, a picture of dejection. He was a gunnery officer whose weapons were as lethal as toy pistols. "Cheer up," Grimes told him. "I've a job for you." "But what is there for me to do, sir? As you've pointed out already, I'm not a physicist." "But you are a weapons specialist." Grimes turned to Wallasey. "How many rockets have you left?" "Six, sir." "Then I suggest that you and Mr. Fowler, assisted by the engineering staff, convert them into weapons." "What about warheads?" Grimes sighed heavily. "You'd never have made a living as a cannoneer in the early days of artillery, Mr. Fowler. Those old boys used to cast their own cannon and mix their own powder -- and they didn't have the ingredients that we have aboard this ship. Ammonium nitrate, for example -- one of the chemical fertilizers we use in the hydroponic tanks. We should be able to cook up something packing far more of a wallop than gunpowder." "You're convinced that we shall need weapons, John?" put in Sonya. "I'm not convinced of anything. But somebody once said -- Cromwell, wasn't it? -- 'Trust in God, and keep your powder dry.' Furthermore, my dear, this vessel is rated as an auxiliary cruiser, a unit of the Rim Worlds Navy. Our lords and masters of the Admiralty have, in their wisdom, equipped her with weaponry. We have discovered that this weaponry is useless. So -- we improvise." "I'm surprised," she said, "that you don't follow in the footsteps of your piratical ancestor and fit Pamir out with a couple of broadsides of muzzle-loading cannon." A slow smile spread over Grimes' rugges features. "Why not?" he murmured happily. "Why not?" biochemist. In large passenger vessels and warships he is a departmental head, but usually he is one of the officers who has been put through a crash course and looks after the life-support systems in addition to his other duties. Pamir's biochemist was Sandra Listowel, who was also purser and catering officer. Even a fulltime, fully qualified biochemist is not an industrial chemist. Sandra most certainly was not. Nonetheless, she succeeded -- losing her eyebrows and a little more than half of her blond hair in the process -- in brewing up a batch of what Grimes referred to as sort-of-kind-of amatol. After all, cooking oil is not toluene. Lieutenant Fowler, given the freedom of the engineer's workshop, was told to produce a halfdozen impact fuses. He was a good worker and not unintelligent but sadly lacking, Grimes concluded, in initiative. He was a good gunnery officer only when he had all the resources of a naval arsenal behind him. Grimes, however, loved improvising. Many years ago, when he had been Federation Survey Service lieutenant, commanding the courier Adder, he had made some missiles, using large plastic bottles as the casings and black powder as the propellant. After a browse through the chemical fertilizers in the "farm's" storerooms he decided that he had the necessary ingredients for more black powder. He wanted something relatively slow-burning for the weapons he had in mind. He had seen Pamir's manifest of cargo on the completion of loading. One item was a consignment of metal piping with a bore of # easily accessible in the hold. It was backbreaking work to lug the heavy sections out of their stowage and to the ship's workshop, but Major Trent's marines were able to accomplish this without too much grumbling. The pipe sections were cut to size, each two and a half meters in length. One end of each of the tubes was sealed with a heavy, welded flange. The crude cannon, eight of them, were beginning to take shape. There was no time to introduce too many refinements. Pamir had broken through the light barrier, was well away on the second leg of her voyage. It was when she decelerated, to complete the passage to Llanith under sail, that the pirate would strike. This was a probability if not a certainty. The evidence indicated that this was what had happened to Lord of the Isles and to Sea Witch. Grimes discussed the prospect with Listowel, Willoughby, Major Trent and Sonya. He said, "Let's face it. The principles of our lightjammers aren't secret. We're the only people who have had such ships simply because we're the only people with inhabited anti-matter systems in our sector of space. But there have been articles a-plenty in both scientific and shipping journals. And the Waldegrenese can read." "Waldegren?" asked Trent. "Yes. Waldegren. The Duchy has a bad record of harboring pirates." He spread a chart on Listowel's desk. "Now, just suppose that Waldegren is monitoring our traffic with Llanith on the Carlotti bands. Oh, I know that the beam between our two systems doesn't pass near any of the worlds of the Duchy -- but a small relay station, possibly fully automated, could have been planted anywhere along the line of sight. If we knew just where to look for it we could find it. Mphm. Well, one of our lightjammers lifts off from Lorn. The routine message is Cargo such and such, consigned to so and so. Then the pirate -- a lightjammer, of course -- lifts off from Darnstadt... So far I've told only two people of the contents of the signal I received from Admiral Kravitz -- Captain Listowel, of course, and Sonya. She helped with the decoding. But it all ties in. There has been lightjammer activity in the Duchy -- and what would Waldegren want lightjammers for?" "Piracy," said Listowel. "Still, we must be careful. We aren't at war with Waldegren. The evidence indicates, however, that Waldegren has built at least one lightjammer. After all, the essential guts of such a ship, a sphere of antimatter, aren't all that hard to come by. There are other anti-matter systems besides the Llanithi Consortium. But where was I? Oh, yes. The pirate lifts off from Darnstadt, sets course and adjusts speed so as to intercept our ship as she decelerates to sub-light velocity. She jams the Carlotti bands, attacks, seizes." "And what about the passengers and crew?" asked Listowel. "If they're lucky. Captain, they'll be prisoners on Darnstadt. That's why we want to take prisoners ourselves." "The pirate," said Trent, "will probably be armed with rockets, or projectile cannon. Not laser -- unless the Waldegren scientists have worked out some way of making it effective at near-light speeds. Quick-firing cannon, I'd say." "Quicker than your muzzleloaders," said Sonya to Grimes. "Almost certainly," he agreed. "But surprise is a good weapon." Ill #I nothingness the work of arming her progressed. Ahead of her blazed the stars, those toward which she was steering and those whose laggard light she was overhauling. Filters and shields protected her crew from the dangerous radiations that were a resultant of her velocity. Yet there was still visible light, harsh, intensely blue, light that should not have been seen but that, nonetheless, seemed to penetrate even opaque plating. But apart from the watch officers nobody had time to look out into space. Those cannon had to be finished and mounted. There was black powder to be mixed and tested, the charges to be packed in plastic bags. There were the springs to be contrived to carry and dampen the recoil of the guns. There were bags of shot to be made up. Pamir, fortunately, was so designed as to make the mounting of archaic cannon practicable. As a lightjammer, handled inside a planetary atmosphere like an airship, she was fitted with ballast tanks which, of course, were emptied on lift-off. Grimes decided to place his batteries, each of four guns, in the port and starboard wing tanks. To begin with, two crude airlocks were made and welded to the manhole doors leading into the compartments. Spacesuited and carrying laser tools the chief officer and the engineer went into the tanks, first to cut the gunports, then to strengthen the frames to take the weight of the artillery, the thrust of the recoil. The gun mountings were then passed in and welded into place. The pieces themselves slid in cradles and, on being fired, would be driven back against powerful springs, locking in the fully recoiled position. Loading was fast enough -- first the bag of powder, then the shot, with a ram-rod to shove all well home. Firing would have to be deferred until the guns were run out again. For firing Grimes had first considered electrical contacts, then some sort of flintlock. He was amused by his final solution -- touch-hole and slow match. Even though hand lasers were the slow matches -- within the confines of the ship they worked well enough -- the principle was a reversion to the very earliest days of firearms. Trent's marines. They took it all cheerfully enough, making a game of it. Finally Grimes was satisfied with the rate of fire -- although none of the guns had yet actually been fired -- under simulated conditions. Grimes checked personally the ready-use lockers for the bagged charges, the lockers for the improvised shot, the arrangements for passing more ammunition through into the tanks should it become necessary, communications. But there was one more problem. A row of gunports, with the muzzles of guns protruding, is easily detectable. He decided that the cannon would be retained in the fully recoiled position until just before firing and the ports concealed by sheets of plastic. He ordered, too, that the laser batteries be withdrawn into their recesses. They were of no use, anyhow.  t eceleration sta  tions," Listowel ordered. "Make that action stations," said Grimes quietly. "I'm taking over now, Captain." "So I'm just your sailing master," Listowel commented, but cheerfully enough. "At your service, Commodore." He pressed the bell push. A coded clangor sounded and resounded, short long, short long, short long -- the Morse A. Fowler fidgeted in his seat at the console, the one from which he would fire and, hopefully, direct the sounding rockets, each of which was now fitted with a high-explosive warhead. The batteries of muzzle loaders were manned. Spacesuited marines were standing by the drainpipe artillery, three to a gun. Handy to the airlocks over the manhole doors were the ammunition parties. "Cut reaction drive." "Cut reaction drive, sir." The muted thunder of the rockets suddenly ceased. Slowly, carefully, as though this were no more than a routine deceleration, Listowel trimmed his sails, pivoting them about the masts so that the light from the glaring Llanithi stars, almost dead ahead, was striking their reflecting surfaces at an oblique angle. It had to be done gradually. If Pamir were suddenly taken aback she would be dismasted. The Doppler Log was starting to wind down. #...#...#... The lower courses were turned to exercise full braking effect. The lower topsails next -- the upper topsails -- the top gallants. Speed was dropping fast. Inside the inertialess ship there was no sensory hint of the titanic forces being brought into play, forces that in a normal vessel would have smeared ship and crew across the sky in a blaze of raw energy. The log was still winding down, although the count was slowing. #... #... I . #... I . #... I . #... I . #... I . #... Now there was sensation, a feeling of unbearable tension. Something had to give. Something, somewhere, snapped suddenly. Ahead the sparse scattering of stars diminished in number. The Rim Suns -- astern in actuality -- suddenly flickered out, reappeared in their proper relative bearing. "Mr. Wallasey," said Listowel, Llanith." He looked inquiringly toward Grimes, who said, "Yes. We maintain routine -- until somebody or something interferes with it." Wallasey was having his troubles. From the switched-on Carlotti transceiver issued a continuous warbling note. "Interference -- " he muttered. "Jamming," amended Grimes. "This is it, Captain. Any moment now." He looked around the control room. Fowler was tense over his console, as was Denby, the second officer, at the radar. Wallasey was still twiddling knobs at the Carlotti set. Sonya and Sandra were sitting quietly in their chairs, apparently taking only a mild interest in the proceedings -- but either woman. Grimes well knew, could spring into action at an instant's notice. And Sandra, after all, could handle a lightjammer almost as well as her husband. There was nobody else on the bridge. Willoughby was below, in charge of the damage control party, and Major Trent was looking after the guns manned by his men. "Target," reported Denby. "Green seventy-five. Range fifty kilometers. Closing." "Thank you, Mr. Denby. Keep us informed," said Grimes. "Green now seventy-five, still. Positive altitude five degrees, increasing." "Range?" "Forty -- and closing." Grimes spoke into the microphone that carried his voice through the ship and into the gunners' helmet speakers. "This is the commodore. The enemy has been sighted. She is closing fast. From now on there will be frequent changes of trajectory. Stand by to open fire on command. Over." Trent's voice came in reply, "All is ready, sir. Guns loaded, but not yet run out." "Don't run them out until you get the order to fire, Major." "Green seventy-four, sir. Range thirty, closing. Positive altitude seven degrees. Increasing slowly." "Captain," said Grimes, "roll us seven degrees to port. I want to keep our friend exactly on the plane of our ecliptic. We can't aim the guns individually -- we have to aim the ship. Understand?" "Understood, Commodore." The directional gyroscopes rumbled briefly as Pamir was turned about her long axis. "And now, Captain, start altering course to port. Just behave as you would normally in trying to avoid a close quarters situation." Looking through the viewports Grimes saw the sails being trimmed. With the light from the Llanith sun as the wind, Pamir was being steadied on to a starboard tack. "Green eighty-five, opening. Range twenty-five, holding. Altitude zero." Grimes got up from his chair, went to the big binoculars on their universal mount. He had no trouble picking up the intruder. Her suit of sails made her a big enough target. He said, "Mr. Wallasey, don't bother any more with the Carlotti "Very good, sir." The third officer turned to the normal spacetime transceiver, equipment suitable for use only at short ranges. "What shall I say, sir?" "Pamir to unidentified vessel. What ship? What are your intentions? You know." "Pamir to unidentified vessel," said Wallasey, speaking slowly and distinctly. "Come in, please." Almost immediately a voice replied, "Unidentified vessel to Pamir. Maintain your present course and speed. Open your airlocks to receive my boarding party." There was a slight accent. Waldegren? It sounded like it. Listowel turned to Grimes. "What now. Commodore?" Grimes grinned. "If we didn't have ladies present I'd tell him to get stuffed. Pass me the mike, Mr. Wallasey." Then he said, in what Sonya referred to as his best quarterdeck voice, "Pamir to unidentified vessel. Identify yourself at once. And sheer off. You are getting in my way." "Unidentified vessel to Pamir. Open your airlock doors. Prepare for boarding party. Do not offer resistance. Over." "Mphm," grunted Grimes, releasing the pressure of his thumb on the transmit button of the microphone. "I want you to turn away, Listowel. You are master of an unarmed merchant vessel. You can't fight, so you run. Put the Llanith sun dead astern. As long as he sees us doing all the right things he'll be lulled into a sense of security." Driving surfaces pivoted about their masts, the east sails presenting their black sides to the source of light, the west sails their reflective sides. The ship came around fast. And then, on all four masts, the reflective surfaces were spread to catch the full force of the photon gale. "Bearing green one six five. Altitude zero. Range nineteen. Closing." "Must have hung out the crew's washing," commented Listowel. "I'm afraid that I can't squeeze any more out of Pamir." "It doesn't matter," Grimes told him. "We want her to catch up." He looked astern through the binoculars. Pamir's sails cut off the glare from the Llanith sun and the raider was clearly visible on the starboard quarter. Like Pamir she was a four-master, with a cruciform rig, but additional triangular sails had been set between the masts. Running free this would give her a decided advantage. "Range fifteen. Fourteen. Closing." "Sir?" asked Fowler appealingly. "No," said Grimes. "Not yet. We must consider the legalities. She must fire the first shot." "But those legalities would only apply, sir, if we were a merchant vessel. But we aren't. We're an auxiliary cruiser of the Rim Worlds Navy -- " "A space-lawyer yet!" commented Grimes admiringly. The young man was right, of course. He, Grimes, should have played heavy commodore as soon as contact had been made with the pirate, demanding her unconditional surrender. He might have done just that if he had a real warship under his feet. He decided that, after all, his own way of playing it was the best, especially since the other ship obviously had the heels of Pamir. He said, "You can play with your rockets as soon as I give the word, not before. And when you do use them, try for the enemy's rigging, his masts and sails." "Bearing green one Five oh. Closing. Range nine. Closing." "This is the commodore. Action will be opened shortly. It seems likely that the starboard broadside will be the first to be used." "Unidentified ship to Pamir. You've been asking for trouble. You are about to get it. Over." "You have our permission to tell him to get stuffed, John," said Sonya sweetly. "Bearing green one two five. Range seven. Closing." Shortening sail, thought Grimes, watching through the binoculars. There're those tri-s'ls or whatever he calls 'em coming in. And I can see ports opening. Boat bays ? Or gunports? A gout of yellow flame spurted from one of the openings in the raider's hull, just abaft the masts. A long time later, it seemed, there was an explosion ahead of Pamir, about half a kilometer distant, a sudden rose of pale fire burgeoning in the blackness. So the pirate was using projectile weapons. "Unidentified vessel -- " the joke was wearing thin -- "to Pamir. That was the last warning. Surrender or take the consequences." "Bearing green ninety. Range five, four, three -- closing." No identification marks , thought Grimes, studying the other vessel through the powerful glasses. Could be one of ours, save for a few, subtle points of difference... He said to Fowler. "All right. Lieutenant. You may open fire." He saw the first rocket flash from its launching tube, trailing a wake of blue flame, spinning a flimsy filament of incandescence over the shortening distance between the two ships. It got a little over halfway, and then a stream of tracer came hosepiping from a gunport, met it, eroded it into ragged and harmless fragments of spinning debris. The warhead didn't explode. "Rapid fire!" ordered Grimes. "Get the other five rockets out and on the way as quickly as possible. Don't bother guiding them in. One might get through." None did. The pirate's machine gunners were fast. "Range one. Point seven five. Point five." "Resistance is useless," came the "Starboard broadside, fire," said Grimes into the intercom microphone. He was not altogether prepared for what happened. He was expecting to see the enemy's sails shredded, his masts cut down, by the shot that he had prepared, the same sort of shot that had been used so effectively during the days of sail on Earth, the bags of scrap metal, nuts and bolts, lengths of metal chain. He had forgotten, though, that one of the old men-o'war never, when firing a broadside, fired all guns simultaneously -- they were fired in quick succession. Pamir lurched. It was more than a mere lurch. It was as though a giant palm had swatted her on her starboard side. The north and south masts were carried away, each of them falling to starboard as the ship was driven to port by the recoil, the yards of each of them ripping the sails of the east mast, becoming inextricably entangled with the rigging. "You got her, sir!" Fowler was yelling. "You got her!" Grimes, who had been knocked down by the violent lateral acceleration, got groggily to his feet, staggered to the starboard viewports. The raider was, indeed, in a sorrier state than Pamir. In addition to the damage to her rigging there were gaping holes in her shell plating, through some of which smoke and flame flared explosively, like rocket exhausts. Her control room ports were bright with the ruddy glare of an internal fire. She was spinning slowly about her long axis. The one undamaged main spar, the east mast, which had been on her starboard side, shielded from Pamir's guns, lifted into view as she rolled, lifted, then dipped toward the other ship -- and held steady, a long, metal lance. Freakishly, then, the rotary motion ceased. Perhaps a survivor was still exercising some sort of control, was determined to exact vengeance before his death. And on the far side air, mixed with the gases of combusion, was still escaping into the vacuum, inexorably driving the total wreck on to the nearwreck. "Range closing," Denby was saying, over and over again. "Range closing. Range closing." "Reaction drive!" ordered Grimes. "Get us out of here!" He could visualize the end of that long spar driving through Pamir's shell plating and piercing the vacuum chamber in which the sphere of anti-matter was suspended in the strong magnetic fields. It was not a nice thing to think about. Listowel made no reply. The captain was slumped in his seat, unmoving. Sandra was shaking her husband violently. "Ralph! Wake up! Wake up!" Then, snarling wordlessly, she pulled him from his chair, letting him drift to the deck. Before she was properly seated in his place her long fingers were on the controls. She snarled again, then snapped, "Something's wrong, Commodore!" "Starboard broadside," ordered Grimes into the intercom microphone. "Fire!" That should push them away and clear from their dying attacker. "The guns are off their mounts," came a hysterical voice. "We have casualties -- " Denby was still calling out range figures -- in meters now -- but it was not necessary. The shattered, burning raider was too close and was getting closer. "Roll her, Sandra!" shouted Grimes. "But our east mast is some protection -- " "It's not. Roll her, damn you!" "Roll her," repeated Sonya. "He knows what he's doing." She added quietly, "I hope." The gyroscope controls and the gyroscopes themselves were still Magazine Retailers and IF available to all retailers. Full details on procedures and requirements for proper display submission of semiannual sales affidavits, can be obtained by writing: Select Magazines, Inc. # Park A venue South New York. N.Y. # working. There was the initial rumble as the flywheels, started to turn, then the low hum. The drifting wreck slid slowly from view, dipping below the starboard viewport rims -- but if Denby's radar readings were to be credited distant. Grimes ordered, "Rotate through ninety degrees. Let me know when you're on eighty-five." The next few seconds could have been twice that many years. "Eighty-five," stated Sandra at last. "Port battery -- fire." Again Pamir was slammed by that giant hand and was swatted clear of the dying raider's murderous sidelong advance. The tracks of the two ships diverged -- but not fast enough, thought Grimes. He said urgently, "I don't care how you do it, Sandra, but get some of our sails trimmed to catch the light from Llanith. We must get out of here, and fast!" "But we should board," said Sonya. "There may be survivors. There will be evidence. The fire will burn itself out once the atmosphere in the ship is exhausted." "Not that sort of fire. Do something, Sandra." Using the gyroscopes she turned the ship, at last getting the sails of the one surviving mast trimmed to the photon gale. Astern the wreck dwindled in a second to the merest point of light -- and then, briefly, to sear the retinas of those who watched. It had happened as Grimes had been sure that it must happen. The casing of the sphere of anti-matter had been warped by the heat of the fire -- or, perhaps, had been buckled by an explosion. Contact with normal matter had been inevitable. The pirate was gone, every atom of her structure canceled out. The pirate was gone and Pamir was drifting, crippled. It was the time for the licking of wounds, the assessment of damage before, hopefully, limping into port under jury rig. Men aboard Pamir had been injured, perhaps killed. It had been an expensive victory. And Grimes knew that it would not have been so expensive had he remembered to fire the guns of his broadside in succession instead of all at once. He realized that Fowler, the gunnery officer, was saying something action -- " He replied slowly, "We won. But -- " "But?" The young man's face wore a puzzled expression. "But you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," contributed Sonya rather too brightly. "But you should be able to make one without blowing up the kitchen," was all that Grimes was able to manage in way of reply.  sm mu ims  Doohan (Scotty), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Walter Koenig (Chekov), George Takei (Sulu) , Majel Barrett (Nurse Chapel ),  some surprises, such as Barry AtFriday's Child, Ate...), Robert Bloch (Catspaw, What Are Little Girle Made Of? Ate.), David Gerrold (The Trouble With Tribbles , Cloud-Minders) , Margaret Arman (Gamesters of Triskelion, The Paradise Syndrome) Norman Spinrad (The Doomsday Machine) , Ray Bradbury Rugg (Special Effects) ,  morel Cage " (never shown on TV)  the infamous "Blooper Reel"! cpius communicators  much more -- some items for sale'.-An all-star autograph party announcing the publication David Gerrold: "The Trouble With Tribbles"  "The World of Star Trek"! Membership: # attending  # supporting P.O. Box #I Santa Barbara CA # cytpril #-#, # ok Flesh of her flesh, yet he walked where the sea and evolution led! T HE Alothian sea slaps the grainy beach with one of its thunderous and magnificently foamy breakers, making a noise like someone outside my oldfashioned glassine Port-A-Home trying to break in forcibly. I know there is no threat. Not now. Not the kind that once hung over Alph, my only child. But still, seeming to recall a phrase, "... and the sea billows roll," from an ancient Terran work (my academic specialty), I find myself involuntarily going over to the windowport to look, again filled with stubborn hope. Few stars not wanderers light the immense distances of this forbidding corner of the multiverse. As I peer through the windowport, the dark sky above gives birth to a scattering of falling stars. These wandering ones seem to walk that surface as if it were solid ebony. Actually they are in accelerated free fall, coming from some place, perhaps even the vicinity of Terra's yellow star, that I cannot see from Aloth, and going to some place beyond. Except for those caught in Aloth's sodden gravity and pulled down into searing heat and disintegration. They wink out, cease to exist. Things do get out of control sometimes in our universes, no matter what the scientists say. People get caught in this gravity, too. It was only a few years ago and I am reminded of that time when -- oh, I might have been able to do something. A cold horror grips me as I remember... HE last time you did that X you nearly drowned." I put on some more suntan lotion and, rubbing it into the skin of my belly, I began to think I was getting to be flabby. "And don't go into the water," I admonished. I lay down, toes aimed directly at Sonner, and I felt hot and fat and flabby and burned. Our family has always lived beside one sea or another and been fat, flabby, sunburned and intellectual. Nothing ever changed. Nothing got out of hand. Not even on the other suburban planets where we had been staying out the grants from different universities. We still didn't know everything about Aloth, but what we had learned was mostly quite ordinary. Even the few curious, inexplicable things that happened seemed to Fit the usual pattern. The Olgoth child, for example, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but people were always disappearing on newly habited planets, only to reappear a few cycles later with adventurous stories. "I didn't." He stood over me in all his preschool height, arms akimbo, feet apart, casting a shadow over my belly, where I most wanted to have more tan. My son. My Alph. It had been misty and cloudy for several weeks of the first sun, Sol, and now that Sonner, its mate, had revolved into position, shedding a somewhat harsher mixture of ultraviolet and infrared, we were carefully acquiring our protective coats of tan all over again. Alph was already a little red. Or was his skin now slightly purplish? It was hard to see in this light. Would he mutate, too, like some of the more recent natives? Some do and some don't. Nobody knows why. "Better cover up," I said, "or get in out of the sun." Alph's shadow was still there and, turning, I got the blaze of Sonner in my eye. I blinked. "Didn't what?" I rolled over on my side. It is a grotesque position, but necessary if one is to get an even golden tan, and I could talk, if that continued to prove necessary. I rubbed suntan lotion onto the visible portion of my right breast and the bright balls skated over the surface of the skin. "It was a lake," he said. "And I didn't nearly drown." Button-eyed, he was trying to frown at me, but in that bright light and on that smooth face no lines would form at all, not then. He looked like a teddy bear. Would he ever be trim and athletic and muscular? Would he be? No, I thought. He would be a bigger teddy bear like me and like his father and like all of us. Behind him two breakers curving up the beach crashed mightily and shot skyward, exploding into mist. An ancient Terran poet had once called them seastacks, like haystacks of the old era. A carpet of foam, thicker than Terran foam, spread almost to Alph's feet. "At the lake on Terra," I agreed. "And you were drowning, no doubt about it. You didn't even come up the first time. You just went down. I had to dive in after you with my clothes on." I had made an enormous splash, as might be expected, a belly-whopper they used to call it, and the dress, a cheap thing for picnics, was ruined. I had just learned I would never be pregnant again. Still, I had saved him. But that was only a lake and this was the mighty ocean of Aloth. I did not want to have to bellywhop into those breakers. crests a few surfers bobbed up and down, dark, glistening, prone and paddling with their hands or kneeling and bending as they went through a wave. Sometimes they moved far out, beyond the place where the waves foamed, sitting astraddle their boards in a group, like seabirds, talking, shouting, each to each. Fractions of shouts often reached my ears on the ragged wind. They were the Ugly Brothers, as we humorously called them, with some of their friends, five in all, all natives, born on Aloth of the first pioneer parents, and they had all begun to mutate. The differences were slight -- a nearly imperceptible shift in the color of the skin toward an orange shade. for instance -- faint but absolutely undeniable. "I wasn't drowning. I liked it down there. It was pretty," Alph protested. "Just looking around, huh? And you'd come up for air when you were good and ready. Thought you were an Alothian fish. Well, you're just a Terran boy and I couldn't take a chance." "You got worried." It was an accusation. If I hadn't been so foolish and gotten worried it would not have turned out badly! That's what he was telling me. He cocked an eyebrow, as if pondering. Close to Alothia a covey of catamarans dived over the horizon, one by one. The sea out there looked smooth. "Sure, I got worried," I said. "You can't live under water, whether you think so or not." I couldn't help laughing. If we were fish, what would he be? A perch, an alocanth, or a catfish? I would be a cod, I felt. And his granddad, the autocrat of the table, would be a chambered nautilus. The sea swept up behind Alph again, closer to my beach towel. I would have to move soon. "That was a long time ago," Alph said, dismissing it. "Only two years Terra-time," I said. "That's a long time," he affirmed. For him it was a long time. Time was different for him. "Look. I can walk on it." Alph jumped onto the foam. "I'm dancing." Splashes of sand and water arched up and fell on me. A small colony of purplish sand crabs rushed for their holes, scuttling sideways along the lines of fineground debris left by the edge of the last wave, peering at us out of their stalked eyes. At the edges of their holes they rocked back and forth, edging cautiously into the sand and waiting, as if hoping that if they waited long enough we would all pack up and go away. One of the younger exobiologists at the institute was sure they were intelligent and hoped soon to establish communication with them. He was on the wrong track: they were intelligent but uncommunicative. Suddenly I felt uneasy under their stares and threw a handful of sand, but none of them moved even a purplish eyestalk. "Hey, I made quicksand," Alph said. He trampled a boggy hole in the smooth surface of the beach. Could it hungrily open up at any moment and swallow us? "Hey, I need another wave. Come on, you old ocean." AS IF to oblige him the old ocean xl slopped up and deposited another wave at his feet. "You're getting filthy," I said, rising up on my elbow. "Get out of there." He held his nose with one hand and raised the other up high. "Help, I'm sinking in the quicksand." "Out. Right now." He pulled out a single sandy leg and then the other, two sandy frankfurters that he put down on the towel beside me first and then up on my belly. The frankfurters went up and down as I breathed. The sun was getting lower. The crabs moved in closer, waving their stalked eyes, to watch. "Why couldn't we?" he asked. "Why couldn't we what?" "Oh, live under water." "We're not fishes." "Well, walk on the water." "You mean swim." "No, I mean walk." "Impossible! You'd sink like a rock. I know. I had to pull that rock out of the drink." "In the Old Book, He did it, the old Terran Sorcerer," Alph said, screwing up his eyes to remember the name. "Jizukrist! He cured people and brought this man back to life and He made fishes and wine. And the wizard Daedalus could fly." Alph sat up then, picking up handfuls of sand and sifting them and squinting at me. "That was on Terra a long time ago, in ancient Judea and ancient Greece. Things like that don't happen any more." The sand was sifting into my hair, into my ear and finally into my mouth. "We can do it. The Followers did it." "Not any more. Not this Follower." "Why?" "We just don't believe enough, perhaps," I said. The sand was tickling my ear. "I believe," Alph said. "Is that why you stepped out onto that lake?" "No, I wasn't thinking about that," he said. He turned away and looked at the sea. "That was an accident. I thought it was ground and it was just some old grass sticking out into the water. I didn't have time to believe." "You can't walk on water," I said emphatically, closing my eyes tight. "Not even if you believe like the ancient Terran Sorcerer in the Old Book. Maybe you shouldn't read my textbooks." "Not even on the Dead Sea in the old Holy Land on Terra?" He was sharp, all right. I had told him about that, about the salt in the water, so that you could float. I had walked out once when we (Alph's father and I) had toured there on our honeymoon and, after I had walked just so far out, I couldn't keep my feet down and they flipped up and my head went under... It was like some chemical bath. My eyes were still stinging an hour later, but it was true, you could not sink in that water. "No. Not even there." A wave washed up and lapped at my beach towel and the little crabs scurried nearer and then receded. I sat up, only to discover that Alph was wading out into the foam, looking into the sea. All the little crabs seemed to be lined up and waving their eyestalks and feelers and watching, just as I was. Off in the distance a large wave began to roll in and the surfers, eyeing it, turned and began to paddle furiously. The taller of the two Ugly Brothers watched the boiling foam approach, got to his knees as he started to move, and then rose up to his feet, picked up by the momentum, and then, waveringly at first, began to walk to the shore. One by one the other surfers were caught up too and they in turn stood up. Riding the curler of the wave, just before the place where it was breaking, the tall brother walked, bronze, muscular, like some ancient Terran sea god, walking the waves on into shore. The invisible hairs on the skin of my arms rose as I realized that he was not on a surfboard at all but was actually skimming the waves with his bare feet. The little purplish crabs waved their eyestalks as if in recognition. I was transfixed. Alph, like a fledgling bird, stared at the surfers with arms outspread and began to walk. The lowering sun cast its rays around him and my eyes burned to tears as he walked out to meet them, no longer a little teddy bear, but a different being in a different element. The spent fury of the wave lapped up onto my beach towel and, drenched and shivering and unable to move a muscle, I watched him go away. That was the first time he ran away, walking over that strange and foamy sea... Yesterday I saw them on the beach again and tonight, just now, when I heard that wave slap the beach, when I thought I heard that noise outside, I hoped quite unreasonably that it might somehow be Alph trying to come back home again. But it wasn't. I only want my son to come back home again. Is that too much to ask? And, my God, I think I see that lowering sun again, in this dark sky.  Some of the original covers and inside illustrations are still available! These are the actual originals used from # through #. Some are already framed. Send stamped selfaddressed envelope for list and prices. Box #, Greenwich Village Station. New York, N.Y. # fen S' Having mastered the Sea of Time and a king's daughter, he faced an even greater challenge! mM mm H IS first name was Robinson his last should have been Crusoe. It wasn't thoughit was Feeney. His friends called him Robin for short. When the chronocane came barreling out of the pea-soup mists of the sea of time he was hanging from the fantail of the Long Long Ago in a magnetic bo's'n's seat, overhauling the excursion ship's auxiliary drive. The minute he saw what he was in for he jammed the fountain pen-sized energizer he had just removed into his jacket pocket -- an instant later he was lifted from his perch and borne away on a tumultuous tide of bluenesses and blurs and cinammoncolored convolutions. Meanwhile, the Long Long Ago, by that strange quirk of fate for which time-storms are noted, sailed on unscathed. Confronted with what appeared to be imminent death, Robin sought to soften it by thinking of how dirt-poor he was, how dirtpoor he had always been and how dirt-poor he probably always would have been. But the countermeasure proved to be unnecessary, for the chronocane turned out to have a heart as well as an eye and, after whisking him this when and that, deposited him unharmed upon the Or, to break down the acronym, an Integrated Superficial Lenticular Ephemeron. Robin deduced the nature of his new surroundings even before he glanced up at the sky and saw that the sun occupied a dozen different positions at once, each only slightly removed from the others but combining with them to give an overall effect of a much larger body. The phenomenon resulted, as Robin well knew, from the orbital variations of Earth since its formation and from the presence of more than one latitude. Getting to his feet, he surveyed the scene in greater detail. Strictly speaking, the shore on which the storm had deposited him was nothing of the sort. It was merely the outer edge of the place-time he happened to be inhabiting. Beyond it the sea stretched endlessly away somewhat in the manner of the upper surface of a vast cloud bank. In being in heaven and, as a matter of fact, all Robin had to do to get back to Earth was to jump. But the trouble was he didn't know where he would land -- or when. Possibly in Mycenae, circa # b.c. -- possibly in Times Square, circa #. Most likely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, circa it-didn'tmake-any-difference. But perhaps things weren't as bad as they seemed. In his jacket pocket reposed a time-drive energizer that needed nothing more in the way of repairs than a good cleaning, and there was an excellent chance that one or more of the place-times contain the materials for a time deteriorating any moment -- but then again it might hang on for ages. sea and took a good look at the place-time he was occupying. It consisted of an unbroken plain about a mile wide and a mile and a half long. Spears and shields were scattered over the immediate foreground. Examining them, he tied in the former with the ancient Greek poleis and the latter with the ancient Persian Empire. Unquestionably he was standing on the Plain of Marathon, the mise en scene of the historic battle in which the Athenians and the Plataeans had put to rout an invading army that outnumbered them ten to one. Beyond the plain, in lieu of the historic heights, rose a big green hill that Robin recognized instantly. It was Hill #, the site of Captain "Idaho" Murphy's famous stand To Robin's left the plain was bordered by the sea; to his right it gave way to two other place-times. One of them -- a narrow strip of forest -- formed a continuation of the littoral, while the other -- a wide expanse of tree-dotted countryside containing a number of grimlooking castles -- was conterminous to the plain and Hill #. He explored the forest first. It consisted of first-growth maples, beeches, oaks and elms. They were tall and straight, the aisles between their boles virtually free from sunlight. Robin noticed a slight drop in temperature, but this was due solely to the shielding foliage. Each place-time had its own sun, but owing to their proximity they functioned as one and as a received equal amounts of warmth and light. He came at length to an Amerindian village of twenty Iroquoian long-houses. He decided that the place-time was from stone age North America and constituted the scene of an intertribal battle that, while it may have eluded history, lingered on in the unconscious minds of those whose ancestors had been involved in it. He entered one of the longhouses and looked around. It was endemic life forms were limited to meiofauna), but it contained a sizable cache of Iroquoian corn possessed more appetizing fare than desiccated corn, and didn't take any of it with him. He spent the remainder of the day (according to his wristwatchcalendar, it was Saturday) and the better part of the next exploring his island home. All told, it comprised twelve place-times. He had already identified three of them -- the Plain of Marathon, circa # b.c.; the Amerindian Forest, circa the sixthcentury a.d.; and Hill #, circa # a.d., He mentally catalogued the castle-haunted countryside adjoining the first three as King Arthur's Kingdom, circa # a.d., and the rest as follows: Coventry, circa the time of Lady Godiva's ride; Minos, circa # b.c.; the Rubicon, circa # b.c.; Grendel Land (i.e., the scene of BeowulFs encounter with the monster), circa # a.d.; Yasnava Polyana (Tolstoy's estate), circa # a.d.; the first MacDougall's hamburger stand, circa # a.d.; Generous George's Used-car Lot', circa # a.d. (Robin would have been at a loss concerning these two if it hadn't been for the self-explanatory signs over their entrances); and Futureville, circa sometime in the far future (he was at a loss concerning this one and only assumed that the figure-nine shaped structures he glimpsed in the distance constituted a community. He drew a map in his mind for future reference. In most cases only a representative section of the placetime was present. However, Generous George's Used-car Lot, MacDougall's and Yasnaya Polyana appeared to be intact. The Used-car Lot delighted him. Not only did it adjoin MacDougall's, making for convenience in the way of meals, but the cars parked in it would provide him with the materials he needed to build a raft. In addition, many of them contained tools and in one of them -- a beat-up Chevy van -- he found an acetylene torch and tanks and a small electric arc-welder. Yasnaya Polyana afforded the most direct route to the sea, but it was heavily forested in places and he decided that when the time came he would launch the raft from the Plain of Marathon. This would involve passing through part of King Arthur's Kingdom, but the terrain didn't look too bad and was definitely a better bet than that of Minos. I I KE most such lots. Generous  George's was strung with overhead wires from which hung little plastic pennants of various colors. In one corner stood a small wooden structure in which were an office and a lavatory. The former contained a desk, two chairs, a collapsible cot and a miscellany of other items. The wall next to the door held a metal fuse box. It was connected through quinque-dimensional space to the same source of power that supplied the original, and the lot's lights -- four overhead self-activating fluorescent units -- would go on as soon as darkness fell. For the same reason the taps in the lavatory and those in MacDougall's dispensed running water, while the two fuel pumps just within the lot's entrance dispensed regular and premium gasoline. Robin rigged up an outdoor shower and connected it to the coldwater tap in the lavatory by means of heater-hose lengths commandeered from several of the cars. After washing up he went to work. To obtain parts he tore down a # Buick Riviera, a # Chevrolet Bel Air and a # Ford Torino. The job took him five days. On the sixth -- his eighth day on the quartz. It was almost dark before, high on the seaward side of Hill #, he found the kind he was looking for. After mining the small amount he needed for the time-drive he pocketed it and turned to leave. As he did so he happened to glance out to sea. He gasped. A ship was apAs time-ships go it was not a large one and its time vanes -- or sails -- seemed disproportionately wide. Obviously it had just surfaced or he would have noticed it before. As he watched, it touched the edge of the Plain of Marathon and came to a halt. nature and to the navigational problems they gave rise to, were generally avoided like the plague. Consequently Robin found it hard to believe his eyes. Nevertheless, they were giving it to him straight. As he stared, the forward nacelle opened and seven passengers and or time sailors disembarked. One of them appeared to be a prisoner. II Feeney's day really knew plenty of theories making the rounds and one of them -- the one Robin himself subscribed to -- has turned out to be substantially correct. It proposed that the collective unconscious is tied in with the spacetime continuum and that when any given race memory becomes firmly enough established it materializes in the form of a "place-time" on the so-called surface of the so-called temporal sea. By the same token, when the race memory behind any given place-time lapses for any reason, that place-time deteriorates and disappears and, because of the physical factors involved, the placer times that have combined with it to disappear also. Hence, the lontermined by the longevity of the weakest of its components. The creative process that results in a place-time can be likened to a projector throwing an image on a screen, the projector being the mass memory of the human race at any given time and the screen being the surface of the temporal sea. Granted, the analogy is an oversimplification, but it is only by oversimplifying complex phenomena such as the one here involved that we can conceive of them at all. Therefore, although we are dealing here with five dimensions and the make-believe room in which we have placed our makebelieve projector and screen comprises only four (the fourth being time as it is generally understood), the analogy still enables us to obtain some idea of what a placeis all about. But it must be remembered that what we are visualizing in four dimensions actually involves five and that our screen encompasses yesterday, today and tomorrow and is not subject to the same laws that govern our earthly existence. And it must also be remembered that our projector represents only one of a long line of similar projectors that stretches from the remote past through the present and on into the far future. These qualifications make a number of things clear: (#) how a place-time can seemingly have only one surface and yet be dimensionally identical to the original; (#) why chronology proper plays no part in the grouping together of many of the historic locales that men still remember do not exist on the so-called surface of the socalled temporal sea. Finally, the incongruities that of our preconditioning. Were we to view such phenomena solely with respect to the similarity of their components' seasons, all the while keeping in mind that geography is a three-dimensional concept, these incongruities would not exist. Suffice to say, whatever it is that causes place-times to unite into mated the resultant montage is cemented by a twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night that repeats itself mise. And time, while it passes in one sense, does not, in another, pass at all. was filled with joy at the sight of the ship. However, his joy didn't overwhelm his natural caution and, instead of running down the side of Hill # and across the plain to welcome the new arrivals, he blended himself against the trunk of a nearby tree and sat down to watch... The landing party had set out single file in the direction of the Amerindian Forest. Some members carried boxes, others sacks. The one Robin had taken for a prisoner carried nothing -- even so, he seemed to be having trouble keeping up with the others. Possibly because he was little more than half their size. When the party was halfway to the forest someone on the ship closed the forward nacelle -- and a moment later the ship backed away and sank out of sight. Crestfallen, Robin stared at where it had been. The good old Feeney luck was working overtime. But he was certain that the ship would be back in the near future to pick up those it had left here. Perhaps in the meantime he could make their acquaintance and assure a berth for himself on the trip back to the present. First, however, he would do a little spy work and find out what they were doing on the He watched the landing party make its way single-file across the plain. By the time it reached the forest and disappeared among the trees the sun was low in the west -- however, he decided to wait a while longer before leaving the hill. Dusk came. He saw smoke rising above the distant treetops and knew that the newcomers had made camp. Descending the hillside diagonally into King Arthur's Kingdom, he made his way across the ancient English countryside to his destination. By now night had fallen and the sky was crammed with stars. Literally crammed with them, because it contained not only the visible stars of more than one latitude, but the visible stars as they appeared from the various placetimes. Like the sun, the gibbous moon that presently rose in the east occupied a dozen different places at once. Entering the forest, Robin saw firelight flickering among the trees up ahead and he made his way cautiously toward its source. At length he found himself on the outskirts of the Amerindian village. Creeping closer and peering around the corner of one of the long-houses, he saw that the fire had been built in front of the largest dwelling. It was not the one he had entered earlier and he wished now that it had been, for he had a hunch that it was the new arrivals' headquarters and that this was far from the first time they Suspended over the fire on a makeshift tripod was a big black kettle and from it rose steam. Within the circle of firelight six men were grouped around a glittering pile of finger rings, bracelets, amulets, necklaces, brooches, earrings and various other items, arguing in loud voices. Tied to a tree on the other side of the fire was a girl. She had copper-colored hair and amber eyes. Her features were at once delicate and strong. Her eyebrows made Robin think of swallows flying south. Her dress appeared to be silk and was either ultra modern or ultra ancient. Golden in color, it fell all the way to her golden-slippered feet. In a number of places it had been torn, as though ornaments had been ripped from it. Returning his gaze to the pile of jewelry, Robin saw several iridescent sequins. Slowly the truth dawned on him. At the time of her capture she had been wearing all those jewels and all those ornaments! He studied her captors. Their speech seemed to consist of grunts and squeals. He was unable to make out what they were saying. The men averaged about seven and a half feet in height, were swarthy of skin and wore bloomerlike trousers that hung in tatters around their knees. Their black hair was long,  unkempt, and kept falling over their eyes. Their faces were either clean-shaven or naturally hairless -- probably the latter. They wore plastic rings in their noses and their teeth, either naturally discolored or artificially blackened, were filed to points. Each had a long cutlass stuck through his belt. Buccaneers? Cannibals? Hillthinking of them as "BuccanniIdentifying their civilization was something else again. One thing was for certain -- they were not from his. Nor were they from any of the past ones he had come into contact with. Perhaps they came from the future. Impossible. Contact had never been made with the future. The men had apparently decided to postpone dividing their captive's jewelry till later in the evening. They were now clustered around the fire and, as Robin watched, first one and then another reached into the steaming kettle, fished out a large chunk of meat and devoured it in two or three bites. The procedure was repeated again and again, to the accompaniment of loud lipsmacking and deep grunts. The captive looked on from contemptuous eyes. Presently one of the men -- an eight-foot giant with tangled hair hanging over his face -- fished out a piece of meat and took it to the tree where she was tied. After pinching her cheek he held the meat against her mouth. She almost bit his finger off. Yelling, he raised his hand as though to strike her. But the hand never descended. The scathing look she gave him was so intense and so utterly devoid of fear that he turned and slunk away. But her reprieve was temporary at best and Robin knew it. He sighed. The last thing in the world he wanted was a Girl Friday. Nevertheless, he was shortly going to have one. Ill  he hurried to the edge of the forest. He hauled all the dead wood he could find out onto the plain and piled it into a large pyre. He applied a match, waited till the flames got going good, then began stomping around it, giving vent to series of what he thought were pretty good Indian war whoops. He kept up his howling for about five minutes, then reentered the forest. He took a circuitous course back to the village, careful to make as little noise as possible. The little he did make was presently drowned out by the girl's captors as they crashed through the underbrush on a direct route to the plain. He had gambled on their leaving only one of their number behind and this was exactly what they had done. The man turned out to be none other than the Good Samaritan who had offered the girl part of his supper. He was bolstering his courage with the contents of a large jug and eyeing the girl covetously through his hair. Robin found a good-sized rock and clobbered him on the back of the head. He dropped the jug and toppled like a felled tree. Robin borrowed his cutlass long enough to cut the girl's plastic bonds. Disbelief had come into her eyes when he had felled her captor. Now hope replaced it. But she didn't collapse into Robin's arms with a profound sigh of thanksgiving as he half expected her to- -- instead she ran over to the pile of loot and began slipping amulets onto her arms, bracelets onto her wrists and rings onto her fingers. Great new science-fiction titles from... G# Damon Knight Seven Rithians -- enemy aliens -- have landed on Earth. Six are disposed of. One breaks loose and must be found or disaster will follow. But how to detect a monster that can disguise itself as a man -- any man? AS# # Ray Russell A pious #-year-old girl one night flings off her clothes, tries to seduce her priest, spews a stream of obscenities. Obviously she is possessed! A handsome cleric is assigned the task of exorcising her. He knows there is only one. way to cast out a devil from the body of a virgin... AN#I # By the editors of Galaxy Magazine For more than twenty years Galaxy has ranked as the foremost science-fiction magazine. It continually presents award-winning stories by all the top writers in the field. Award Books is proud to publish a select collection of recent fiction from the magazine -- a collection, in short, that's the best of the best. AN# # The exciting adventures of starship captain Matt Foyt... deep-space thrills and chills in every corner of the galaxy. The first two titles in the series are just off the presses... Charles Huntington Charles Huntington AS# # AS# # Please send me the science-fiction titles checked below. I enclose check or money order for (plus # for each book to cover postage and handling). AS# AN#I AN# AS# AS# Name Address City State Zip (Offer good only in U.S.A.) Robin seized her arm and tried to pull her to her feet. She pushed him away. "Begone!" she said in Anatolian. Anatolian was the language of ancient Asia Minor. Foremost among the countries where it had been spoken was Lydia. A bell began ringing in Robin's mind, but as yet it wasn't loud enough for him to get its import. Again he seized the girl's arm, and this time he succeeded in pulling her to her feet. "Do you want to be here when they get back and have them tie you to that tree again?" he demanded. Her amber eyes widened in surprise at his easy familiarity with her language. They also snapped. "I will not leave without my jewels! Release me this instant!" He did so. "We'll take them with us, but there's no time for you to put them on." He removed his jacket, spread it on the ground and piled the rest of the jewels and ornaments on it. Then he brought the ends together, stood up and slung the makeshift sack over his shoulder. "Come on," he said, and set out in the direction of King Arthur's Kingdom. him -- for the very good reason, no doubt, that he was carrying her ornaments and her jewels -- and together they hurried through the forest. From the plain came the shouts of her captors, but there was no indication as yet that they had discovered they had been faked out of position. "What's your name?" Robin asked the girl presently, as they left the forest behind them. He told her his. Almost a full minute passed. Then, just as he was beginning to think she wasn't going to tell him, she said, "Manijeh." "That's a pretty name. Where are you from?" Silence. "All right -- don't tell me." "I am from Sardis." Sardis. Again the bell began to ring, but still not loudly enough. "Why did those men capture you?" ' "They did not tell me, so I do not know. Not only do they act like pigs, they talk like swine. Except one, who spoke as I do -- but him they left behind. Robin helped her across a little brook, careful not to hold her arm a single second longer than was absolutely necessary. "Why do you think they captured you?" ' "To extort riches from my father, of course." "Your father must be very -- " Robin began -- and stopped. While he and Manijeh had been talking the shouts of her captors had faded away. Now the voices had started up again, much closer at hand, and he knew her escape had been discovered. "Hurry," he told Manijeh. "They'll start looking for us now." He led the way at a brisk dogtrot to Generous George's' Used-car Lot. The fluorescent units had come on, creating an oasis of brightness in the night. The paleness of Manijeh's face as she followed him into the lot attested to her wonderment and fear, but she said nothing. He took her to the office, told her to stay inside, then ran over to the parts bank he had accumulated and began assembling a field-fence adapter. He worked swiftly, aware that he and Manijeh might have left a trail that their pursuers could follow by starlight. When he finished he carried the adapter into the office and connected it to an unused circuit of the fuse box. Two spare fuse cartridges and a fusepuller were lying at the base of the box, a fact that he had noted earlier. He stood one of the cartridges on end and placed the fuse-puller next to it so he could insert the former in a hurry when the time came. Meanwhile, Manijeh had been putting on her jewelry. Robin stared at her. She looked like a Christmas tree. Disgusted, he returned to the parts bank and built five post pacs. He installed one on the lot's northwest corner, one on the northeast corner, one on the southwest corner and the remaining two on the southwest and southeast corners of MacDougall's parking lot. As he was installing the last one he glimpsed a furtive movement in the darkness beyond the radiance shed by MacDougall's outdoor fluorescents, which had also come on with the departure of daylight. rose to his feet. As he did so he caught the gleam of a cutlass out of the corner of his eye. Another. The office was visible around the edge of the hamburger stand. It was Whichever, he knew he'd never be able to reach it in time. "Manijeh!" he shouted. "In the box on the wall there's a little pair of tongs. Pick up the upright cylinder with them and shove it into the empty slot -- do it now! But whatever you do, don't touch it!" He repeated the instructions twice. Hell, she'd never understand! How could she? She had never seen a fuse box before in her life, to say nothing of a fuse cartridge or a fuse-puller. Even if she did by some miracle succeed in gripping the cartridge she'd never succeed in inserting it properly. He could see the pirates, kidnapers or whatever they were now. There were six of them (apparently the Good Samaritan had recovered) and they were pounding out of the darkness of Yasnaya Polyana toward MacDougall's for all they were worth. Robin began to run for the office. Halfway there he shouted the instructions again. Abruptly Manijeh appeared in the doorway. She stomped her foot. "I did pick it up!" she said. "I did shove it in! I didn't touch it! Do you think I am deaf?" Robin slowed to a halt, turned around. She had indeed activated the fence. The foremost pirate bounced back six feet when he collided with it and sparks shot from his hair. An identical fate overtook the second and their howls of pain were faintly audible from beyond the invisible barrier. The remaining four braked just in time and, as Robin watched, helped their fallen comrades to their feet. Then the six of them slunk back into the shadows of Yasnaya Polyana, there no doubt to reconnoiter and to try to devise a means to breach the fence. Robin wasn't worried. From what he had seen of them so far, it would tax their know-how to breach chicken-wire. Whistling, he covered the rest of the distance to the office. Manijeh was still standing in the doorway, her jewels having an iridescent glow in the blazing fluorescence, her eyes fixed on the darkness of Yasnaya Polyana into which the Buccan"I knew they were arrant cowards," she said. "I knew it all along." All the jewelry that had been in the makeshift sack was now on her -- diamondand ruby-studded golden disks and brooches, silver bracelets, golden amulets, lapis lazuli necklaces, emerald earrings, diamond fingerrings, golden shoe buckles... Robin began to have some idea of the true extent of the fortune that her kidnapers had let slip through their fingers. Could there possibly be more where it came from? The mere thought staggered his imagination. But that was because he was looking at the situation through the eyes of a poor man. For all he knew, her father might own all of Asia Minor. He might even have gone down in history. History was full of rich men -- rich men and despots. Maybe her father was both. "Who is your father, Manijeh?" he asked. "King Croesus," she answered. IV church mouse. Once he had said to Robin, Steer clear of rich bitches, son. They like nothing better than to spit on people like us... Another time he had said. Son, if you can find a way to do it marry a rich bitch some day. It just might beat being on welfare -- you never know... From which it can be seen that Robin's father was nothing if he was not inconsistent. This was because he was afflicted with an ambivalent attitude toward the rich. As a lifetime welfarer and a charter member of the International Brotherhood of United Welfare Recipients he instinctively regarded the wealthy as the natural enemy -- and as a lifetime member of a society devoted to meretricious materialism he couldn't help but admire them for having accumulated so many possessions. Robin himself was also afflicted with ah ambivalent attitude toward the rich, but his ambivalence was more extreme than his father's. He, too, instinctively regarded them as a natural enemy, but he did not simultaneously admire themhe worshiped them. There was a teaspoonful of Honor de Balzac in him, a tablespoonful of F. Scott Fitzgerald and a cupful of Horatio Alger. To aggravate his present position still further, his attitude toward the fair sex had been molded by the complete works of Zane Grey, James Oliver Curwood, Harold Bell Wright and Charles Alden Seltzer, books which his Great Grandfather Feeney had picked up at a rummage sale and which had been with the Feeney family ever since. Consequently, while his reaction to his Girl Friday's momentous disclosure involved two separate emotions, the romantic haze through which he was accustomed to regard womankind made it impossible for either to manifest itself. Otherwise, however, his mind was quite clear and the ungodly was a mystery no longer. They were using it as a hideout while their confederates negotiated a ransom settlement with Croesus. A thought occurred to him. "Manijeh, did they make you write a letter to your father?" "They tried to make me. When I would not they pulled all the combs from my hair and said they would show them to him as proof I was their prisoner. The pigs!" Robin wondered if they would have returned her unharmed. He doubted it. In any case, they no longer had the option. It was up to him to return her -- to take her back to Sardis -- preferably before the ransom was paid. He informed her of his intentions. She put her hands on her hips and looked at him scornfully. "Take me back to Sardis -- ha! How can you take me back to Sardis when you cannot possibly know which way to go?" She tossed her head in the direction taken by the retreating kidnapers. "After those stupid goats stole me from my father's garden they became lost in a fog -- and I do not think even they know which direction to take to get back down from this bewitched mountain top! How then can you know?" Robin was justifiably piqued. "It just so happens that I do know," he said. "And what's even more important, I know how." He pointed to the time raft, which at this stage of its construction even he had to admit didn't inspire much confidence. "We're going to Sardis in that -- after I finish building it. Now that I've got you to help me it'll be done in no time." She drew herself up in the doorway and looked down at him disdainfully. "I do not know from what wretched land you come," she said, "but from your apparel I would judge you to be a goatherd from the hills of Mysia and from your manners a swineherd from the outlands of Phrygia. The daughter of King Croesus would not so much as lift her little finger to help either -- and were either to address her in so presumptuous a fashion in her father's kingdom a hole would be drilled through his tongue and a redhot skewer thrust through it!" Poor Robin didn't know what to say. He should have been indignant, but he wasn't. Instead of instinctively wanting to tell her off for what she had said he instinctively wanted to apologize for what he had said. stening to his father. Stay on dole and you'll keep your dignity, the elder Feeney had told him and he had been right. You'd never catch a professional welfarer letting some rich bitch walk all over him -- he had pride. True, a welfarer never had very much money, but the difference between him and someone like Robin, who placed independence above common sense, was that the former never had to worry about where his money was coming from while the latter had to worry all the time. Unless -- unlike Robin -- he had an aptitude for one of the more lucrative trades or professions. Otherwise he had to scrounge and pay for his independence with his pride. If he were Robin he studied languages day and night so he could go to sea -- only to discover that a ship's linguist, even when his natural mechanical ability automatically qualified him for a first-class mechanic's rating, enjoyed a status similar to cabin boy and didn't draw a great deal more in the way of wages. Robin sighed. Maybe his ten sisters and his eight brothers had been right when they unanimously voted him the black sheep of the family. However you looked at it, the time for him to assert himself was on hand. So maybe he was as poor as a church mouse and his Girl Friday as rich as a fiveand dimestore heiress -- she was still his Girl Friday. He'd show her who was the boss right now. "I'm hungry," Manijeh declared. "Fetch me something to eat." Robin didn't remember his resolve till he was halfway to MacDougall's. By then, of course, it was too late. It had been too late in the first place. In MacDougall's he made coffee, french fries and hamburgers (there was enough food in the refrigerators and the freezers and the cupboards to last him and a Manijeh a whole year), prepared a tray for her and one for himself and carried both back to the office. It was strange fare for a sixth-century b.c. maiden and for a moment he thought she was going to turn up her nose at it. She didn't, though, and after the first bite devoured everything on her tray. It was clear, however, from the frigid glances she repeatedly cast in his direction that having to sit at the same table with a common goatherd outraged her sensibilities. But she made no comment. It had been his intention to inform her in the best James Oliver Curwood tradition that the cot in the office was hers and that he would bed down either in MacDougall's or in the back seat of one of the used cars. However, this proved to be unnecessary. "Begone," she said when he picked up the trays. "I would sleep." Sadly he carried the trays and the plastic cups and containers back to MacDougall's and dumped them into one of the disposal bins. Then he returned to the used-car lot and after finding a back seat that was almost wide enough for him to stretch out on, settled down for the night. T 'HE kidnapers showed up early the next morning, arrayed themselves a respectful distance beyond the fence and brandished their cutlasses. Robin ignored them, rigged a tarpaulin around the outdoor shower and washed himself vigorously, wishing mournfully for a razor (he had by this time grown a frizzly brown beard). He was about to step outside when Manijeh appeared in the office doorway, yawning. Fortunately his clothes were within reach and he put them on. "Why have you been pouring water on your head?" Manijeh asked when he stepped into the morning sunshine. He glared at her. "It's an old Mysian custom." She parted the tarp and peered inside. "To turn it on," Robin explained, "you twist that little round disk. To turn it off, you twist it the other way. You stand under that bucket with the holes in its bottom. The water's cold and there isn't any -- any -- " (he discovered there was no Anatolian word for soap). "Well anyway," he concluded, "you'll find it an invigorating experience." "Ha!" Manijeh said. "You would never catch the daughter of King Croesus pouring water on her head." And she had called him a Mysian goatherd! "Fetch me something to eat," the daughter of King Croesus continued. "I am hungry." He made fresh coffee and fried hamburgers and they breakfasted at Generous George's desk. "Why didn't you cook some more of those delicious little biscuits?" Manijeh asked. Biscuits? "Oh, you mean french fries. I'll fix some for dinner. Meanwhile," Robin added meaningfully, "I've got work to do." After disposing of the breakfast dishes he got busy on the raft. The pirates watched for a while, brandishing their cutlasses whenever he happened to glance in their direction -- then, evidently becoming bored, they withdrew into the rocky wilderness of Minos. Noon came. "I am hungry," Manijeh called from the office doorway. "Fetch me something to eat." Robin gritted his teeth. Some Girl Friday he had! Come to think of it, though, he'd rescued her on a Saturday, which made her his Girl Saturday, not Friday. The good old Feeney luck had been working overtime, as usual. While he was peeling the potatoes for the french fries in MacDougall's kitchen he sensed someone standing just behind him and out of the corner of his eye he saw Manijeh peering around his shoulder. "Is that the way the little biscuits are made?" she asked. "That's only the first step. Here, let me show you." Craftily he slipped the paring knife into her right hand and placed a potato in her left. "You turn it like this, see? And while you're turning it, you peel." After she finished with the peeling he showed her how to put the potatoes in the slicer and then how to put them in the wire basket and immerse them in the deep fat, which he had heated beforehand. Then he showed her how to fry hamburgers and make coffee. She was so thrilled that several times she clapped her hands out of sheer delight and when the boiling water rose magically from the lower to the upper globe of the coffeemaker, she uttered an awed: "Ahhhhhh!" They ate at one of MacDougall's indoor tables. Afterward, Robin showed Manijeh where to throw away the disposable cups and plates. Then he went back to work. The day grew hot. Along about three o'clock he heard water running, and looking in the direction of the outdoor shower he saw a golden dress hanging over the ring to which the tarp was attached. That evening at supper her copper-colored hair, still not quite dry but neatly combed (apparently she had secreted one of her combs from her kidnapers), fell in straight moist tresses to her shoulders and shone softly in the subdued fluorescence of MacDougall's dining room. I I KE most such establishments,  Generous George's Used-car Lot was a heat trap. The mornings weren't bad, but every afternoon the temperature climbed into the high nineties and -- as the sea of time was incapable of providing so much as a zephyr and as the fence would have kept it out in any case -- there was no relief till the sun went down. And even then there wasn't very much to speak of. The only shade available (discounting the ephemeral shadows cast by the office and the hamburger stand) was that thrown by a great oak that stood in the wedge of Yasnaya Polyana the field-fence had made part of the car lotMacDougall complex. And this was not available to Robin because he was building the raft in the center of the car lot and couldn't afford to take time off except to eat and sleep. But while the shade was not available to Robin, it was available to his Girl Saturday. She set the more comfortable of the two office chairs under the tree and sat there by the hour, polishing her jewelry with an old chamois cloth she had found in one of the cars. Occasionally she grew bored and took a walk around the lot, looking at this used car and that, a baffled expression on her face. When the pirates came around, as was their custom once or twice a day, she would interrupt her perambulations or her polishing long enough to stick out her tongue at them. After several futile attempts to breach the invisible barrier by rolling boulders from Minos up Hill # and letting them come tumbling down the slope and into the fence, they had apparently given up and now confined their activities to sitting on the ground in the shade of a rock or tree and watching Robin work, a pastime that seemed to be enjoying greater and greater popularity on At first Manijeh paid the. raft not the slightest attention, but as it began to acquire form she evinced an increasing interest in it. At length -- one afternoon when the temperature was nudging a hundred -- she came over to where he was working and asked what he was making. He was lying on a creeper under the deck plating, installing a Revlin relay-instigator that he had built the night before. He propelled himself out into the sunlight, stared up at her in disbelief. "I thought I told you. It's what I'm going to take you back to Sardis in." "You did tell me. But you didn't tell me what you call it." "It's a raft." "She looked around. "I do not see any water." "Of course you don't -- it's not that kind of a raft." "And we are going to Sardis on it?" "That's right." "Ha!" "You didn't say 'ha' the other night when I put up the fence," Robin said. "What fence?" He pointed to the pirates, who were lolling in the shade of a big Minoan boulder. "The fence that keeps them from coming in here, chopping me into mincemeat and carrying you off." She looked in the direction he had indicated. "I do not see any fence." "Naturally you don't. It's invisible." She put her hands on her hips and gazed down at him. "Your face is dirty," she observed. The abrupt change of subject disconcerted him and for a moment he forgot how dirt-poor he was, had always been and always would be and that she was the daughter of one of the richest men in all creation. "Of course it's dirty," he said. "And I'm tired and I'm thirsty, too. And do you know why? It's because I've been working myself half to death to get you off this 'mountaintop' and safely back to your father's kingdom -- " She looked at him for a long time. Then, without another word, she turned and walked away. Awed by his outburst, he propelled himself back under the raft and began plying an end wrench. Some time later, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Manijeh coming out of the office carrying a paper cup. He gaped. Presently the raft cut her from view till all he could see were her feet. "Well, are you going to come out and quench your thirst or not?" she said. "Or do you perhaps think I am going to crawl under there with this container of water and hold it while you drink?" Slowly he propelled himself back into the sunlight. He accepted the paper cup, drained it and handed it back. "Th-thanks." He was about to shove himself back under the raft. "Wait," she said. "You forgot your instrument." She handed him the end wrench. "Th-thanks," he said again. It took him five more minutes to finish installing the instigator and when he reemerged into the sunlight he expected Manijeh to be gone. Instead he saw her standing at the other end of the raft, studying an electric booster motor he'd set in place and drilled holes for but hadn't gotten around to bolting down. "I believe," she said, "that I could secure this funny-looking object if I were to be supplied with the necessary instrument." He handed her a socket wrench. She worked beside him the rest of the day. When evening came her face was as dirty as his was, all her knuckles were skinned and her "Tomorrow," she said, "I will get up before you do and prepare breakfast. That way, we will be able to get back on the job sooner." V F OR a while things went swimmingly, although as the days passed it became increasingly clear to Robin that long before the raft was finished. King Croesus would have come across with the ransom. Something of the sort must have been on Manijeh's mind, for one night while they were sitting in Generous George's office, she said, "How soon will it be before we leave for Sardis, Ro-bin?" He looked up from the time-drive ganglion he was assembling on the opposite side of the desk. "I thought you didn't believe I could find my way to Sardis." . "Would I be helping you to build the raft if I still did not believe it?" He returned his attention to the ganglion. "No, I guess you wouldn't. We should be able to leave in two more days." There was a silence. Then: "Why is it that you wish to take me back to my father?" "Because that's where you belong." There was another silence -- a much longer one. At length: "My father will probably reward you handsomely," she said. The possibility hadn't even entered Robin's mind. "I'm not doing it for a reward." "I did not say you were." He looked at her across the desk. That evening, as had been her custom since she had begun to help him with the raft, she had removed all her jewels and ornaments, polished them and then, after taking a shower, had put them all back on. But from some strange reason she didn't seem to glitter quite as much as usual. "I guess my not thinking of a reward makes me seem kind of foolish," he said. Her amber eyes snapped. "I did not say that either! You are putting words into my mouth again. Moreover, I think that I shall go to bed!" She did not point to the door and say "Begone!" but she might just as well have. He pocketed his tools, rose to his feet and picked up the ganglion. Eventually, he supposed, if he were to remain in her company long enough, he would get used to her outbursts. They no longer bugged him as much as they used to. But "eventually" did not apply -- in a few more days they would part and he would never see her again. He stepped over to the doorway. "Good night, Manijeh," he said. "Good night -- Ro-bin." T 'HE next morning they had a visitor. Rather, they had nine visitors -- the six who had been left with Mafederates -- two in number -- who had departed in the time ship, plus a third party. But it was the third party who was the actual visitor -- the others were merely spectators. He stepped forward and attached a small, two-way magnetic microphone to the field-fence, where it hung magically suspended in the morning air some six inches from his mouth. "My name is -- " (Robin couldn't quite catch the words, but they sounded like "Coal Bin"), he said in late twentieth-century English, a language that must have predated his own by centuries. "My presence on the periphery of your fastness arises from an urgent necessity to negotiate a satisfactory settlement of our dispute. I think you will find the terms I have to offer eminently equitable and, under the circumstances, more than generous." He was somewhat smaller than his uncouth friends, although unquestionably of the same species. His long black hair was thickly pomaded with what looked like axle grease and was parted precisely in the middle of his scalp and combed straight down on either side of his face to his shoulders, where it curled upward into a sort of semicircular eavetrough. He wore a canary-yellow vest. Limegreen jodhpurs, black imitationleather leggings and narrow black oxfords with pointed toes. There was no ring in his nose and presumably there were none in his ears. Nor were his teeth filed to a point or blackened -- instead they were perfectly formed and dazzlingly white. As he talked he displayed them by means of a wide smile that went on and off at regular intervals as though activated by an automatic switch hidden somewhere in his head. "What sort of terms?" Robin asked. "Terms pertaining to the disposition of your companion and her paraphernalia and to your dewent on and off like an electric lightbulb. "As president of our small but powerful labor union, the Brotherhood of Quinque-dimensional Engineers," Coal Bin continued, "I am authorized (smile) to offer you -- in exchange for your turning over to us the daughter of King Croesus together with the aforementioned paraphernalia free (smile) transportation on board our time vessel to whenever and wherever you are from." Robin stared at him. "I have just returned from sixthcentury Sardis," Coal Bin went on, "where (smile) for many days I have been sitting at the bargaining table with the king himself. I regret (smile) to report that we were unable to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement." B argaining table? Agree'ment? Suddenly Robin understood why Coal Bin had chosen late twentieth-century English in which to conduct the conversation. Aside from the probability of Robin's being familiar with it, it abounded with generalities and provided the speaker with an ideal means of dignifying the lowliest of professions, of talking around the truth and of calling a spade a spade when it was really a shovel. Coal Bin was far from the first to have elevated extortion to the level of the bargaining table. None of which explained why King Croesus has refused to come across with the ransom. "Surely he must have offered you something for Manijeh's safe return," Robin said. "He refused absolutely to recompense us in any way whatsoever for our labor." Robin was stunned. "Did he say why?" "He said (smile) that the piece of merchandise on which our bargaining power was based was of no use to him -- that he already had in his possession a number of such commodities, that the commodity in question (smile) had negated through stubbornness and conceit several tentative conglomerate mergers with neighboring corporations and that chattel such as she, being non-negotiable, was of no further value to him. Thus (smile) our little labor union has been deprived of wages its members have honestly earned, necessitating our taking action to obtain whatever other income may be accruing (smile) to us." "I can understand why you want Manijeh's jewelry," Robin said. "But why do you want her?" "She will bring (smile) a handsome price on the Babylonian slave market. Meanwhile, you will have been suitably recompensed for your (smile) labors by means of a free voyage home. I might even offer you as an added inducement that small ring that twinkles (smile) so charmingly on her left little finger." Robin took a deep breath. He managed to keep his temper, but it wasn't easy. "No deal," he said. Coal Bin blinked. "But I am unable (smile) to offer you more. Our union funds are virtually exhausted and must be replenished. Moreover (smile) you cannot but agree that both the girl and her paraphernalia are rightfully ours and that as the thief who stole them (smile) you are scarcely deserving of the recompense I proffered." Again Robin managed to keep his temper. "Neither Manijeh nor her jewels belong to anyone but herself," he said. Throughout the one-sided conversation Coal Bin had kept glancing at the time raft. Now he pointed to it. "Surely you are not so naive as to think you can escape from the It was the last straw. "If you were working for me," Robin said icily, "I'd fire you in two seconds flat. You know why? I don't like the way you part your hair." The freedom to part his hair any way he chose had long been the workingman's most cherished right, more important to him even than time-and-a-half. To question it was tanamount to heresy. Apparently matters hadn't changed in Coal Bin's day and age. His face went white, his equanimity vanished and he shook his fist. "Dirty (smile) capitalist pig!" he shouted. "Robber of the Poor! Stealer (smile) from the mouths of babes! Picker of the hard-working man's (smile) pockets! Dirty -- " At this point his "fellow workers," realizing that something had gone drastically wrong at the bargaining table and fearful, perhaps, lest their president forget the presence of the fence, stepped forward, seized his arms and, leaving the two-way mike behind, carried him bodily off into Minos. There they disappeared among the rocks, where gradually Coal Bin's imprecations faded away. nijeh looked at him. "What did he say to you, Ro-bin? What did you say to him?" "He said they wanted your jewels. I said they couldn't have them." "How can they be such pigs? They have already collected a huge ransom from my father, have they not?" Robin didn't have the heart to tell her the truth. Besides, Coal Bin might have been lying. Suppose, though, he hadn't been? In that case would it be fair to Manijeh to take her back to Sardis and dump her off like so much unwanted baggage? But if he didn't take her back to Sardis, what was he going to do with her? He couldn't leave her on home. True, his father might like her, but it was a cinch his eight brothers and his ten sisters, all of whom lived in the Feeney homestead with their wives, husbands and children and all of whom were on welfare, wouldn't. All they'd have to do was take one look at her jewelry and that would be it. He sighed. He couldn't remember a time when he had had so many troubles. "I don't know whether they collected the ransom or not, Manijeh," he said. "We'll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, we're going to have to work on the raft all day today and all night tonight so we can launch it early tomorrow morning. The sooner we leave this 'mountaintop,' the better." She made no objection and after a quick breakfast they got busy. Manijeh had no mechanical aptitude whatsoever; nevertheless she always seemed to know which tool to hand him next and always managed to be where she should be when he needed her. Equally important, she now prepared all the meals, enabling him to make up for time he had previously lost. Throughout the day he expected her kidnapers to show up again, but they did not. Coal Bin worried him. So did the time ship. The former had brains and the latter indubitably carried weapons of a far more sophisticated nature than cutlasses. He was certain that it was anchored just off Minos. Clearly, however, Coal Bin knew nothing about magnetic fields -- or he would have shorted out the fence at once. Thus, even if the ship carried gas grenades, lobbing one over the upper edge of the field -- which was sixty feet high -- and incapacitating Robin and his Girl Saturday, hardly would accomplish anything. Tentatively Robin concluded that Coal Bin planned to make his move after Robin deactivated the fence himself and he and his Girl Saturday were on board the time raft and on their way to the sea. When the night passed without incident he knew this to be the case. VI time raft was a phenomenon to behold. Its launching wheels sported white sidewall belted tires and its main deck was completely enclosed. There were two port and two starboard windows, a wide forewindow just above the hooded prow and an even wider aftwindow just above the rear deck. All were equipped with safety glass and could be raised and lowered by means of little cranks. The cockpit was roomy and just behind it was a commodious compartment furnished with an upholstered divan on which Manijeh could sleep if she got tired during the voyage. The time-drive ganglion was located in front of the pilot's seat, underneath the control panel, and the heavily insulated wires connecting it to the foreand aftequilator-bars and the port and starboard interometer-strips had been routed underneath the main deck. It was preset for sixth-century b.c. Sardis. All Robin would have to do when he and Manijeh reached the sea was turn off the launching motor and throw a switch. The launching motor had been lifted intact from the Ford Torino. However, Robin had completely rebuilt it, increasing its HP and eliminating its noxious emissions -- a true feat of legerdemain by twentieth-century standards, but child's play for a mechanic of his own day and age. The prow was equipped with four prowlights -- two on either side -- and the stern with six sternlights -- three on either side. There were two chronocane repellors -- one centered on the forward equilator bar and the other on the aft equilator bar -- that Robin had fashioned from a set of # license plates he had found in the trunk of one of the used cars. He and Manijeh took turns in the shower. Then they had a farewell breakfast at MacDougall's, packed a lunch and filled a gallon thermos with coffee. Manijeh insisted on preparing an extra batch of the "little biscuits" to take home to her sisters and day was breaking when they at last left the stand, walked over to the raft and got on board. There was still no sign of the uncouth ones but Robin suspected they had the Lot under observation, probably from the brow of Hill #. Presently the Lot resounded with the smooth rumble of the raft's # HP # cylinder emission-free internal-combustion launching motor. After driving over to the fuel pumps Robin filled the tank with regular, then drove over to the office and parked as close to the door as he could get. He went inside, pulled the fence cartridge fuse, ran outside and quickly reboarded the raft. After locking the port and starboard doors he surveyed the scene on all sides. Still no sign of the kidnapers. King Arthur's Kingdom and began circling the base of Hill #. The special fore and aft suspension system he had designed paid off and the raft rode the uneven terrain smoothly. But he had to be careful of hangups because of its low undercarriage -- an unavoidable carry-over from the cars he had used for parts. Presently he came to a lane and since it led in the direction he wanted to take, he turned into it. He was able to up the raft's speed. Beside him he heard Manijeh gasp. "My father would give half his kingdom for a chariot such as this!" she exclaimed. Robin concentrated on the road ahead, momentarily expecting the kidnapers to appear. He didn't think they would try to destroy the raft for the simple reason that Manijeh might be injured and her value on the Babylonian slave market impaired. But he did think they would try to disable it. However, he saw no sign of them and presently he and Manijeh reached the Plain of Marathon -- and the marsh. The marsh extended from the eastern fringe of the Amerindian Forest to the base of Hill #. He had been unaware of its existence because he hadn't passed that way before and because from a distance it looked no different from the rest of the terrain. He drove the length of it just to make sure there was no way of crossing it. There wasn't. The good old Feeney luck again. "Why are we turning around?" Manijeh asked. "We've got to find another way to get to Sardis. This one's out." He expected a sardonic comment. Oddly none was forthcoming. Coventry would be his best bet, even though it involved passing through the whole of Arthur's Kingdom. Fortunately he found a lane that roughly paralled the Amerindian Forest and skirted the higher ground where most of the grim-looking castles stood. But the lane didn't go all the way and the last leg of the journey was a nightmare of hills and dales that provided not even so much as cowpath. At length, however, he glimpsed buildings in the distance and knew they were going to make it. He approached the town slowly. Its streets afforded the kidnapers an excellent chance to waylay them. But he needn't have worried -- the streets proved to be so narrow that the raft couldn't pass through them, couldn't, in fact, even enter them. Next, he tried Yasnaya Polyana. Getting there turned out to be another nightmare. Arriving, he found that wherever a route to the sea existed, trees had been felled to block it. The kidnapers handiwork, of course. They, too, had worked all night and the field-fence had shut out the sound of their labors. Somehow Robin managed to get back to the used-car lot. He knew he could never make the sea through Minos, so after fueling up again he drove the raft through the northwestern section of the placetime to Grendel Land. He found more nightmares awaiting him -- roads barely wide enough to accommodate an oxcart, sodden fields, sullen hills, foreboding during his first two days as a castaway he had touched upon all the place-times, but he had seen them from the perspective of a man on foot and a man on foot sees the world far differently from a man on wheels. After straddling a pair of deep ruts through a brooding woods, Robin came abreast of a large hall with antlerlike ornaments projecting from its gables. He had come across it on his previous visit and had identified it as Heorot, the mise en schne of Beowulf s legendary battle with the troll Grendel. It was mid-afternoon by this time, and if Manijeh had glanced once into the rear compartment where their lunch lay, she had done so a dozen times. At last he braked the raft in the shadow of the hall and, after a careful look around, got out. "Would you like to have something to eat, Manijeh?" She needed no second invitation. They ate standing up, utilizing the raft's hood as a picnic table. What little sunlight managed to penetrate the perpetual overcast that characterized Grendel Land's sky glittered harshly on her jewelry, all of which she had on, of course, and all of which she had polished to high heaven. As always, this annoyed him. Not that he begrudged her the wealth the jewels represented -- he just didn't want it so frequently and flamboyantly thrown in his face. S HE was standing with her back toward one of the hall's apertures -- a window, presumably. Abruptly a huge hand attached to a brawny arm shot out from the window and made a grab for her. Robin dove across the hood and pulled her out of reach just in time. He had a very bad moment during which he almost believed the hand and arm belonged to none other than Grendel himself -- then, as the owner emerged from the window, he saw they were part and property of his old friend, the Good Samaritan. Two more of the kidnapers emerged from two more windows and approached the raft. Robin threw the rest of their coffee into the Good Samaritan's eyes, shoved Manijeh into the raft and locked her door. Then he shot around the raft, slid behind the wheel and closed and locked his door. Meanwhile the Good Samaritan was rubbing his eyes and dancing a jig in the middle of the rutted road. Robin was about to send the raft either over or around him and continue in the same direction he had been traveling when he saw that several trees had been felled ahead and deduced the presence of a roadblock. Wearily he turned the raft around and headed back the way he had come. The road might have taken him and Manijeh all the way to the shore and had constituted their last remaining hope. The strip of Grendel Land conterminous to Futureville and Minos was much too heavily forested for passage -- and he wouldn't have tried to go through Futureville in any case. postdate the energy-source of the time ship -- in this instance, raft -- and were he to have entered Futureville the raft would have come to a screeching halt and he and his Girl Saturday would have been worse off than before. So it was back to the used-car lot again. He sighed. He was reminded of a story he had heard once about a man who had built a boat in his attic and when it was finished could find no way of getting it downstairs and out of the house. Throughout the return trip he had the uncomfortable feeling that he had eluded the Good Samaritan and his friends far too easily -- that they hadn't really cared whether they captured him and Manijeh or not. They had behaved like three cats playing with two mice. Where were the other six cats? up on an outcropping and it took him better than two hours to work it free. Night had fallen when at last, tired, discouraged and disgusted, he drove into the lot. He pulled up in front of the office, turned off the launching motor. entered and, finding the field-fence adapter unharmed, reactivated the fence. Then he climbed back into the raft and settled down to think. Manijeh had dozed off. Awakening, she said, "Why have we come back here again, Ro-bin?" "To give me a chance to figure a way out of the fix we're in." "Then you do not know how to get to Sardis after all?" "I'm afraid not." She was silent for a while. Then: "I am glad. I didn't really want to go home to my father from the very beginning." Robin looked at her. "You didn't? Why?" "Because he does not seem to know I am alive. All he cares about are his wives and concubines. In addition to them, he has a farm where he raises girls the way the peasants raise sheep. When he isn't thinking about his wives and concubines he is thinking about them." "I'm afraid I'm going to have to take you back to him just the same," Robin said. "Provided I can find a way." She nodded. "I know. Like all Mysian goatherds, you will do anything for riches. I hope he doesn't give you so much as a fig for bringing me back." "Now see here -- " Robin began. "Your only interest in me from the beginning was my jewels," Manijeh went on. "And then, after you found out who my father was, your only interest in me was the reward. I know all about such things. Every time a prince looks at me I see either my jewels or my father's wealth shining in his eyes. That is why every time my fathers tries to arrange a marriage for me I hide in my room and barricade the door." She shuddered and a tear rolled down her cheek. "And you are just like they are, even though you are only a Mysian goatherd." Robin was staring at the tear. It certainly seemed real enough. But he had no chance to find out for sure. All over the lot, which in his naivete he had assumed to be napers, pirates were boiling out of used cars. Counting the Good Samaritan and his tow buddies -- who had apparently outdistanced the raft -- and Coal Bin, there were nine of them. Eight were brandishing cutlasses. The ninth. Coal Bin, was brandishing Robin's acetylene torch. -- Think, Robinson Feeney said to himself. Think... Superficial Lenticular Ephemeron. -- Yes, yes. But what is its relationship to conventional reality? -- It is a montage of placetimes that have been lifted out of conventional reality and projected upon the surface of quinque-dimensional space. to conventional reality through each of its place-times, is it not? And there is, is there not, a sort of quinque-dimensional umbilical cord connecting each of the segments to its original? -- Yes. But the metaphor is misleading because it conjures up a three-dimensional image. Quinque-dimensionally the distance separating the two realities is both infinite and nonexistent. Thus the umbilical cord would have to be both visible and invisible, without end and without beginning. -- Nevertheless it would be possible, would it not, to proceed directly from a projected to an original reality? -- It might be possible -- if the time-traveler overloaded his time-drive energizer and risked ruining it. But timedrive energizers cost a fortune and -- What was he arguing about? What difference did it make how much they cost? If burning his out would keep Manijeh out of the hands of Coal Bin and himself out of reach of cutlasses he couldn't ask for a better bargain. And he would never have to worry about replacing it -- because where they were going he would not be able to replace it. Rousing himself from his brown study, he saw that Manijeh had picked up a heavy-duty socket wrench from the deck and was shaking it in the face of Coal Bin, who was standing several feet from the raft's starboard hull trying to ignite the acetylene torch with what looked like a cigar lighter. But for some reason the lighter itself wouldn't ignite. Robin started up the launching motor. Excursion ships such as the Long Long Age steered clear of the late twentieth century, hence all his knowledge of the year # A.D. was limited to what little he had read of the history of the period. But he had read enough to know that when he and his Girl Saturday got there -- assuming they got there -- the new problems that would confront them would be nearly as bad as the ones confronting them now. Well, at least they would be different. Coal Bin at last got the torch going, adjusted the flame and began applying it to the starboard door handle. "Ro-bin, the wall is getting hot," Manijeh said. "I think we had better leave." "We're going to, Manijeh -- but by a different door." He began backing the raft toward the nearest section of the fieldfence. Coal Bin and his friends confident their quarry couldn't escape. walked easily along on either side of it. Coal Bin continued to apply the torch to the starboard doorhandle, smiling at every other step. Several feet from the fence Robin braked, then inched the raft backward till the aft equilator-bar came into contact with the magnetic field. There was a loud pfft... as the energy transfer began. ibly startled, but none of them -- not even Coal Bin -- caught on. Not that it would have done them any good if they had. Robin kept his eyes focused on the time-drive energizer indicator. It climbed rapidly. When it completed the circuit of the dial he turned off the launching motor. "Here we go!" he said to his Girl Saturday and threw the ganglion switch. side the raft began to lose substance. So did Hill #. So did Minos. So did MacDougall's. So did Yasnaya Polvana. So did King Arthur's Kingdom. Everyone and everything, in short -- except Robin, Manijeh, the raft, the cars and the car lot -- began to fade away. Suddenly the cars that Robin had torn down for parts reappeared. He kept his fingers crossed. Now, if ever, the raft would dematerialize and he and Manijeh would be left sitting on thin air. When it did not he knew that time was more lenient than he had thought -- it could and did permit the coexistence of two or more versions of the same object. Buildings patterned with tiers of lighted windows had begun to take shape. Now people began to appear. Muffled traffic noises reached his and Manijeh's ears. vanished altogether. So did the "Something is burning, Ro-bin," Manijeh said. "Do you not smell it also?" It was the time-drive energizer, of course -- or what was left of it. He rolled down the port window. "It's nothing to be alarmed about, Manijeh." He looked at the people standing in the lot, at the people passing in the street, on foot and in cars. Well, here we are, he thought. Babes in the late twentieth-century woods... He removed his jacket and told Manijeh to put it on before someone saw her jewels and tried to steal them. "Where are we, Ro-bin?" she asked. "Certainly this is not Sardis -- or even Lydia." "We're in a strange country, Manijeh -- a country filled with fierce savages. But don't worry. Most of them won't attack us -- at least not openly -- because they like to pretend they're civilized." "I'm not worried. I am with you." Him? A fat lot of good he could do her. No job. No money in his pocket. She had sure picked a good one to pin her hopes on when she picked him! Most of the people in the lot were looking at the used cars. Presently one of the ones who wasn't -- a big beefy man with salt-and-pepper sideburns -- noticed the raft for the first time. His eyes got as big as beer coasters. He came over and rested his elbow on the port window sill "Hi, folks -- didn't happen to see you drive in. Thinking of trading her in?" "Trading who in? Robin asked. "I'll make you a generous allowance. After all, that's how I got my name." It got through to Robin finally that the man was referring to the time raft. "You drive out of here in one of my later models and I'll go as high as two thousand bucks," Generous George continued. "And believe me, that's tops for an old crate that needs a paint job as bad as this one. What make is it, by the way?" Robin stared at him. Two thousand dollars for a burned-out time raft? "I asked you -- what make is it?" Generous George repeated. "I made it myself," Robin said. "G'wan -- " During the conversation, another twentieth-centuryite character -- a tall middle-aged man wearing a sleek blue business suit -- had been walking around the raft, looking at it from this angle and that. Now, apparently having overheard Robin's last words, he came over to the port window and asked, "You built this yourself?" Obviously awed. Generous George retired hastily into the background. "Well not exactly," Robin amended. "I had a helper." "How many horse?" "Four-twenty." The tall man blinked. Then: "You must be polluting the environment like crazy. How the devil do you get away with it?" "I don't get away with it. I installed a simple afterburner that eliminates pollution entirely." "I suppose you built that too." "Naturally. Like to take a look at it?" "I haven't time right now," the tall man said. He handed Robin a card. "I'm staying at the Wenceslaus Arms across the street -- that's how I happened to get my eye on this job. Drop in tomorrow morning and we'll have a chat. Maybe you're pulling my leg and maybe you're not -- we'll see. If you're not and you can design a car for us like this one and simultaneously free us from the Curse of the Wankel -- our engineering department is shortly going to grow a new head." The tall man turned and left the lot. not much. He had a good prospect of getting a job, but he still didn't have any money. Down the street from the hotel he could see the lighted show-window of what undoubtedly was a pawnshop. If only... Scandalized, he threw the nascent thought out of his mind. What in the world was the matter with him? Had he no pride left at all? Besides, Manijeh would never go along with He became aware that she was looking at him intently. "Have you ever visited this strange land before, Ro-bin?" she asked. "No. But I know a little bit about it." "One time when I was a little girl I became lost in a strange part of Sardis. No one would give me anything to eat nor would anyone offer me a place to sleep. A long time later I found out why." He felt her hand touch his, felt something cold drop into his palm. Looking down, he saw the gleam of an emerald earring. "When I said all you wanted was my jewels," Manijeh went on, "I said it because I thought you were still going to take me to Sardis and I was angry. I know that you do not want them -- that you never did. I know also that you are not really a Mysian goatherd, but I think that you may be as poor as one. It is imperative therefore that you exchange this bauble for whatever is needed to obtain for us food and shelter and clothing." "Now see here -- " Robin began. "But even though you may not be a Mysian goatherd," Manijeh continued, "your apparel makes you look like one and it would never do for the daughter of King Croesus to be seen in the company of so uncouth a creature, especially when the means for him to alter his appearance are available." "All right, I will exchange it," Robin said and jammed the earring into his pocket. Then he saw that she was still looking at him, that there was a twinkle in her amber eyes. Was it possible that this Girl Saturday knew him even better than he knew her? "Suppose I really were a Mysian goatherd," he said. "Suppose I couldn't alter my appearance. What would the daughter of King Croesus' reaction be to that?" "Way down in her heart she wouldn't care a fig." His Girl Saturday moved closer to him on the seat -- so close that her hair touched his cheek. He put his arm around her and drove out into the twentieth-century night. It was spring and the streetlights shone softly on the sidewalks and the stores. A breeze born of fields and flowers was blowing up from the south. The good old Feeney luck, it would seem, had taken a turn for the better.  Any man can find a comet -- but it takes a woman to lose one! in married love was as deceptively simple (and successful) as the Bank of England's policy in finance: Never apologize. Never explain. As Bob (Dr. Robert Archer) had discovered long ago, verbal combat with his wife was simply energy wasted upon the suburban air. How could she explain something to him when she couldn't explain it tb herself? Equally futile was his trying to withhold a secret. Given sufficient time she would always know. And Dagny had worlds of time. It was early evening when Bob finally pulled in to his driveway. Dagny was feeding Margarit, their ginger cat. The two identified in many respects. They functioned by intuition, a means of perception much superior to ratiocination. Raising the lid on a tin of catfood, or opening a carton of milk, caused Margarit to materialize -- sometimes, it seemed, from thin air. Usually Bob was able to make the two hundred miles from Mount Elsinore by late afternoon. But the unexpected arrival of a Nobel prize winner at the observatory and the subsequent time required for Bob's plates to dry, had delayed him. The Nobel prize winner he had managed finally to brush off. But his plates had been a different matter -- he didn't like forced drying. Furthermore, he hadn't wanted anyone fooling with those particular plates but himself. But at last -- after twelve consecutive days and nights of exclusively masculine company on Mt. Elsinore -- he was free and dirty and glad to see Dagny. Especially glad. She deserted Margarit and followed him upstairs while he was having a shower and shave. Upon emerging from the bathroom he found her examining a slip of yellow paper in his record book. Suddenly she exclaimed. "Diabolique!" Dagny was native Russian but had moved early to Paris, where she had appeared professionally on the stage. Bob read French and could understand and speak it fairly well. This time she might as well have spoken in Russian, which he understood not at all. He leaped at her, snatched the paper from her nerveless grasp. "Oh, god!" he cried. "To think you should have seen!" "And why should I not have?" "Because this is top secret -- " "So, scientists also have their secrets?" Dagny, in her capacity as Official Witch of California, often received cryptic messages from fellow mystics. Occasionally it had been Bob's misfortune to have to take such calls. He faithfully recorded them, read them back, then passed the nonsense on to his wife without comment. He knew he could expect no reciprocity. He stuffed the paper into his dressing gown. "Who said this was science?" "What is it, then?" He averted his face, scowling darkly. "Interpol. Mafia. Eskimo connection in Greenland." "Robert, you are in danger?" "It's nothing- -- nothing." "They threaten you?" Robert shrugged. To girls who liked him he was Robert, never Bob. "I shall bewitch them," Dagny declared. "Destroy them with the blood of a lamb." "Be kind of difficult, wouldn't it? Seeing you're a vegetarian." "Perhaps a black turnip -- " Bob did a sudden changeover. His secret had to come out. "Darling, forget the lamb's blood and the turnip. I might as well tell you -- you've just discovered a new comet. Comet Dagny. This message is just the regular astronomical code for announcing a new object's position. He smoothed out the crumpled yellow sheet. # # -- # #-# # #I # # Dagny was completely bewildered. "I discovered a comet? But who said so -- " Bob tapped his chest. "I said. Moi. Me. That guarantees it will bear your name." "You found it and named it for me? But how wonderful!" Bob shook his head regretfully. "Sorry, darling, but discovering a new comet doesn't amount to much. Anybody can find one -- just by looking long enough." "I still think it's wonderful." "I didn't really discover it. Found it purely by accident. Thought I'd take a look at Mercury. Been several reports of conspicuous markings on the terminator. While we were getting set I spotted this fuzzy object. Looked suspicious. Managed to get a couple of plates before sunrise. No doubt about it -- comet all right." "Comet Dagny?" Bob smiled wistfully. "Other men give their wives and girl friends mink coats and diamonds. Me? Best I can do is a comet." "My comet? We can see it?" "Don't know. Probably not." Bob opened his record book and did some rapid figuring. "Hm -- might at that. If my preliminary orbit's any good -- which it probably isn't -- this thing's pretty bright for an object beyond Mars. Ought to be down around magnitude sixteen by sixth power law. I'd say it's thirteen easy." He took some dozen five-byseven plates from his suitcase, each plate enclosed in a heavy manila envelope. He arranged them in chronological order, then stowed them away in his bottom dresser drawer. "Comet Dagny," he said with some satisfaction, "safe and secure with my socks and shorts." "But in the sky?" "Somewhere in Aquarius the Waterbearer, I think. Mean anything in your astrology?" Although Dagny had. had no formal training in astronomy, from astrology she had learned the meaning of such elementary terms as right ascension and declination, hour angle, ecliptic, node, perihelion, etc. She thought a moment before answering. "I'd have to know where it's going first." "General direction of Earth right now," he said carelessly. He slipped into his bathrobe. "Ah, does this old room look good," he sighed. "After that pad on the mountain." Then, at sight of Dagny's face: "Hey, what's the matter?" Suddenly the light dawned. "Oh, lord. I'll bet you've been seeing science-fiction films again! Don't you know that in popular science every comet, asteroid or thing-from-outside is inevitably heading straight for the Earth? Object coming closer. Situation growing desperate. President calls emergency cabinet meeting. Secretary of Education and Indian Affairs goes on TV. Keep calm. Have faith. Government has situation well in hand." Dagny looked doubtful. "Oh, hell, why did I ever mention it?" he muttered impatiently. He turned to a sheet in his record book. "See this sketch? The comet's path based on my parabolic orbit. N marks the ascending node. Circle's the Earth. You can see there's no chance of collision." He fell back on the bed. "For two weeks I've been working my head off on that damn mountain. Worst part about that clean ascetic life is you get to feeling so good. So good sometimes you can hardly stand it." He drew Dagny down beside him. "There's a comjunction coming up all right," he told her. "But not with any comet." had asked her she would have said so in the same matter-of-fact way she might have admitted to being a librarian or registered nurse. There was no secret about it. After her appointment as Official State Witch, of course, no secret was possible. Bob and Dagny were "sexually compatible" and otherwise "mutually well adjusted," as the marriage counselors euphemistically phrase it. On one point, however, they differed profoundly. Bob was a professional astronomer, a man devoted to what he could observe and measure. As he was fond of pointing out: no theory can ever explain. At most it can only describe . Bob was also a romantic, but a romantic with both feet on the ground. (#) The noted physicist, Ernest Mach (#), believed scientists must exclude elements not perceived by the senses in arriving at their results. A Diagram Of Events Most Interesting To Dr. Archer And His Bewitching Wife Dagny, on the other hand, was a mystic, a believer in astrology, parapsychology and occultism. Strangely enough, there had never been any problem. Long ago they had taken a solemn vow to respect each other's opinions. Bob shrugged off Dagny's mysticism. Dagny accepted Bob's forthright pragmatism. It was that simple. Then, too, there was the very special nature of Dagny's witchcraft. She had nothing but scorn for the famous witches of old. Their powers were feeble, confined principally to graveyards and unrentable houses. Who ever heard of Medea beyond the Aegean Sea? Had Morgan Le Fey ever made the headlines in Hindustan? Dagny maintained that witchcraft -- truly valid witchcraft -- had no bounds. The speed of light is finite -- that of thought, infinite. Hence witchcraft, if good in Haiti, should likewise be good in New York, on Mars or in the Andromeda galaxy, it made no difference. She agreed with Conan Doyle that "A devil with merely local powers like a parish vestry would be too inconceivable a thing ." # Certain practical expressions of Dagny's prowess as a witch had to do with the fact that she had never stopped acting. It was the fragile "Marguerite Gautier," The Lady of The Camelias, who beguiled the ( # ) The Hound of the Baskervilles. butcher into giving her an extra choice cut of steak. It was "Lady Macbeth" who prodded the landlord into repairing the roof. Occasionally she took part in some little theater production in their neighborhood. Bob wished she wouldn't. Her "Laura" in Strindberg's The Father had made "Martha" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a Sundayschool teacher at a wienie bake. B OB knew his preliminary parabolic orbit would be useless for prediction after a few weeks. But to improve the orbit he had to extend the arc. And to extend the arc he needed additional observations. To those unfamiliar with the operation of a large observatory this would seem easy enough. Just take the telescope and get them. But the observing time of a large telescope is jealously guarded, carefully rationed out to the various staff members according to their special needs, weeks in advance. Bob was all too well aware of the futility of requesting observing time for such an insignificant object as a comet. His only hope of getting more plates was to find some bighearted individual who would squeeze him in for a few minutes. Bob had done such favors for others often enough. But he was forced to go from office to office as a suppliant, begging for that precious intangible quantity known as time. "Be glad to oblige, but -- " "Sure sorry, Bob, but -- " "Remember how you. saved my life once, but -- " Others simply shook their head or gave him a stony stare. Of course, Mt. Elsinore was not the only possibility. Bob's wire to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been broadcast to observatories all over the world. His comet was so near the sun, however, and so correspondingly difficult to observe that he doubted if any astronomers would care to make the effort. Time went on and on until Bob was forced to write Comet Dagny off as lost. # Then, one morning, wholly unexpected good news came in the form of a handwritten letter from his old professor of Celestial Mechanics, Dunedin, New Zealand. Not only the institution that bore his name -- he was also its entire observing staff, chief of public relations, science head and janitor. Its #inch Schmidt photographic being his own personal property, he could use it however and whenever he chose. The result was a dozen perfectly good positions of Comet (#) The Astronomical Society of the Pacific annually awards a gold medal to each discoverer of an unexpected comet. Ironically, the A.S.P. ran out of funds for gold medals the month Bob discovered Comet Dagny. Dagny extending the arc over another two months. The new positions wrought some radical surgery on the orbit of Comet Dagny. The parabola was forced into a closed ellipse of orbital period # years, the shortest of any comet except Encke's. # A close brush with Jupiter had effected the shift. Comet Dagny still missed Earth by a wide margin at the ascending node, N, where it "surfaced" from below to above the Earth's orbital plane. Bob had not earlier been much concerned about N', where Dagny ducked underground again. Now it was a jolt to him to discover that N' fell precisely on the Earth's orbit. This fact alone, of course, did not mean that Earth and comet were doomed to collide. To collide, both bodies must arrive at N' simultaneously, a most improbable event. Yet a hurried calculation showed the comet had an excellent chance of scoring a hit. Should he tell Dagny? He was undecided. He felt the truth never hurt anyone. And Dagny was not easily alarmed. The other side of the coin had to do with a direct blow to his ego -- after his caustic remarks anent popular science writings and cosmic collisions. Furthermore, should the comet (#) Comet Wilson-Harrington of # has a period of #I years, but it has been observed at one appearance only and its orbit not well determined. miss -- as it doubtless would by a small margin -- he would have himself look ridiculous a second time. But ego satisfaction should have no place in science. Then he got another idea. F EW places on Earth can boast of such quick scenic changes as the great and tangled network of highways in southern California. Keeping an eye on one's surroundings while driving through is like watching a revolving stage. Start from the Los Angeles city hall. Head north toward the mountains. At the foothills follow the white line leading to Mt. Elsinore and at about # feet park at some convenient wide turnout. Now you are in another world. The time? Nine o'clock on a cool clear evening in October. "Suppose we use that rock as our base of operations," Bob said, opening the car door. "You go sit down. I'll bring the lunch basket and blanket." He waited until Dagny had reached the rock, then switched off the lights and stumbled after her. Dagny began scanning the sky immediately. Bob was more interested in the lunch basket. Dagny was frankly disappointed. "The comet, it is there?" "Some place in Aquarius -- its got to be." He came up with a couple of sandwiches. "Which would you rather have -- cheese or tuna?" "I see it!" Dagny cried. She grabbed Bob's arm. "There -- over that pine tree." Bob followed her gaze. The stars of Aquarius are faint and form no easily recognizable pattern. Bob, like most professional astronomers, was familiar only with the brighter constellations. "That's her all right. Comet Dagny, a new female in the sky, along with Cassiopeia and Virgo and Queen Berenices' Hair." Detail began coming out in the newcomer as their night vision sharpened. Bob found Dagny's hand under the laprobe. He wondered -- how many men since the world began could boast of such an experience? The woman he loved the most by his side and her counterpart in the sky. The comet did not correspond to the popular image of a comet, a hairy star with a beautiful long streaming tail. Instead it was an elongated blob with a stubby tail like a manx cat. "It has no tail," said Dagny, disappointed. "Sure it has. Sticking out behind it away from the sun." He scrutinized the celestial Dagny with a critical eye. "Wish there were a nice sharp nucleus in that big white coma. Makes it hard to get accurate positions." "White?" Dagny asked. "Looks pale green to me, like something from the sea." Bob turned his head slightly. trying to glimpse the comet by averted vision. "It is pale greenish, isn't it? Probably emission from the Swan # bands of carbon. The C # molecule emits all through the spectrum, especially strong in the green." He chuckled. "Reason why women find candlelight so flattering. Emission from the Swan bands." They watched the comet until it began to merge with the branches of a pine. Dagny drew the laprobe closer. A chill wind was coming up from the west. "Maybe we'd better be going," said Bob. "Must be getting on toward midnight." They returned to the car. Bob drove carefully, as if lost in thought, his eyes fixed on the white line winding ahead. "Imagine," said Dagny, "people fearing anything so beautiful." Bob did not reply. helion passage for Comet Dagny was #, Tuesday, March #d #h #m #s UT  J.D. #. Perihelion passage is a critical date for astronomers -- it serves as a check on their calculations. Bob grew increasingly restless and abstracted with its approach. Not that anything particularly spectacular was expected: (#) Named after Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (#-#), who first described this series of bands from violet to red. The nature of the emitting molecule was long in doubt. Comet Dagny was not a sungrazer like Ikeya-Seki of #, although it very probably would be visible in full daylight. Perihelion occurred as anticipated and was widely recorded. By April Bob was going around in a daze. So completely had he identified with the comet that it had become more real than the world around him. Dagny appeared not to notice. She did not complain. She did not comment. She asked no questions. She had undergone such ordeals before. They always passed. Then came a rainy evening in early April when Bob found his wife completely transformed. Gone was the quiet creature lolling on the chaise longue by the fireside. Dagny made a point of always dressing for dinner She cared nothing for fashion. Her taste ran to the thin transparent white Empire style gown of the early #s. Bob was scarcely past the door before she swung him around the room, her eyes shining, her voice husky, seductive: The little apples man entice Since first they were in Paradise. I feel myself with pleasure glow That such within my garden grow... He was not as startled as might have been supposed. He had experience with Dagny's moods. "Hey, let me get my coat off," he mumbled, trying to break loose. "I'm all wet." Dagny fell back on the chaise, gasping and laughing. Bob mixed himself a drink and perched on, the other end. "Why all the merriment?" he inquired. Dagny poured it out. She had received an invitation from the International Grand Coven to attend its annual meeting during the last half of April in Bucharest. Owing to the rising the first time in its stormy history had wound up the year with a substantial surplus in its treasury. A special tour of Transylvania, the Dracula country, had been arranged. Grand climax was to be a performance of the Walpurgis Night scene from Faust, with Dagny playing Lilith, young witch "fair beyond compare." "It's to be a real professional production with exotic costumes and special lighting effects," she ran on, unable to restrain her enthusiasm. "And guess what? They're paying all our expenses!" "Sounds wonderful," Bob agreed, regarding his empty glass. "Sorry to be so late. Began raining and the windshield wiper wouldn't work." Dagny surveyed him steadily. "So it started to rain? And the windshield wiper wouldn't work?" Her eyes never left his face. "That is all you have to say?" "I said it was wonderful." "Nothing else?" "I'm very happy for you." "Robert." "Yes?" "What is wrong?" "Wrong? Nothing's wrong." "Oh, I have known for months. Ever since that night on the mountain." B OB had thought his wife could no longer surprise him. Now he had some doubts. There was an elegance about her at this moment, that compelling elegance which comes to some women after thirty and is bom of absolute assurance in their poise and beauty. "Madame Recamier," he said, grinning feebly. He tried to turn away but her eyes refused to let him go. She had learned the art of catching the attention of an audience and holding it to some purpose, it seemed. "Lose your slippers?" he said, glancing around the floor. "Your feet are bare." "So were Madame Rlcamier's." "That so? I never noticed." "Robert, what is wrong?" Bob reached for his glass. "No!" There was a long silence. Two minutes can be a long silence. "This Grand Coven meeting," he began, "suppose it didn't happen." "But I have the letter." "I didn't mean that." "No? What did you mean?" "I meant -- well, things occur that you can't control." He stood for several minutes, feet apart, head bowed. Suddenly he looked at her again. "Comet Dagny will strike the Earth. No doubt about it. Point of contact near Hawaiian Islands. Epoch is #h #m UT of May # I ." "But that's after the meeting," said Dagny. Bob stared. "You mean you'd go ahead with this witchcraft thing? With such a menace from outer space on the way? It's a big comet. No telling what may happen. Thousands -- Dagny shrugged. Bob was listening intently. He strode to one of the windows, cupping his hands against the glass. "Come outside. Something I want you to see." Then when she failed to stir: "Well, move!" he shouted. "Quick! Vite! Stat!" They stepped out to the portecochere. The rain had stopped. The stars were dancing in the darkening sky. Bob seized Dagny by the shoulders and whirled her around to face a red glow low in the west. "See that?" he demanded. "That's Comet Dagny." "But Comet Dagny is green." "Red now," he said gently. They reentered the house. Bob threw another log on the fire. Dagny leaned back on the chaise longue absently stroking Margarit. "Why red?" she asked. "Hard to explain in a few words," Bob said. "Comet's so much nearer the sun than when we saw it last October. Gases in the coma get so hot the molecules are torn apart into atoms. And oxygen atoms, for instance, emit red rays not ordinarily observable. 'Forbidden' rays we call them." " 'Forbidden?' " asked Dagny. " Tabou ?" "Not absolutely forbidden. Rather -- just highly improbable, let's say. So improbable that ordinarily we never see them." Bob hesitated, trying to think of a good analogy. "You might compare the oxygen atoms to a guy in a busy office trying to write a tough report. He can't get started because he's always being interrupted. So he switches to the graveyard shift. Now -- no visitors or phone calls. He works straight through. Same principle applies to the oxygen atoms out in the vacuum of space. They're undisturbed and able to emit the red rays ordinarily too feeble to be observed." He smiled wryly. "Nice symbolism too. First comet's green -- safety. Red now -- into the flames. Only Margarit kept on busily with her elaborate washing ritual. Dagny spoke first. "You said collision was impossible?" "I said too much," Bob admitted. "That was way back in the Palaeozoic and was based on my parabolic orbit. Entirely new heresy now. Here, let me show you." He went to his overcoat, extracted a roll of paper which he spread out between them. "This oval's the orbit of Comet Dagny. Circle's the Earth's orbit, with Earth like a marble rolling around on top. The broken line shows where comet is moving below the Earth's orbit. Smooth line is where comet is moving above. This point, N, is the ascending node, where comet 'surfaces,' or moves from below to above plane of the Earth's orbit. Way off from Earth's orbit. Couldn't possibly have a collision. But look here at N the descending node, where the comet dives under again. Falls smack on Earth's path. Dammit, never carried my preliminary orbit far as descending node." He gazed morosely at the offending point, TV'. "Of course, can't be a collision unless comet and Earth reach N' together. Highly improbable situation. But as it happens they will meet -- right to the second. Like that traffic light I always hit on red." apparently didn't strike Dagny as so remarkable -- she was familiar with the traffic light Bob had mentioned. "Peut-etre que oui she murmured. "Oh, we'll survive it," Bob assured her. "More crackpot ideas floating around! One they're pushing the hardest is a comet intercept probe. Looks pretty promising. We launch a rocket equipped with a thermonuclear warhead, probably some time in April. We've already got the necessary instrumentation. The rocket zeros in on the comet. No chance for a miss. We give the command, warhead detonates, and comet's destroyed in a mass of bomb plasma." "Comet Dagny -- destroyed?" "Afraid so. Arguments in favor are pretty strong. Nothing involved we haven't done before. They estimate Fifty pounds of contaminant -- " "Never!" Gone was the languid Madame Re'eamier. In her place was a defiant, imperious Saint Joan. "Well, I'm resisting it," Bob hastened to add. "But then, hell, who ever listens to me?" "It is I, Dagny, Official Witch of California, who speaks," she declared. "This collision is forbidden." In previous crises Bob had discovered an attitude of passive nonopposition brought the best results. This time, however, he felt compelled to remonstrate. "Remember, this orbit isn't any of my scribbling. It's based on data an n-body code. We took every possible gravitational force into account. Always with the same result -- collision." "No!" "You still persist?" Dagny replied with superb assurance, "Yes. In spite of everything." Days passed. The comet came on. B OB took his coffee upstairs to watch the launching. Dagny refused to witness the disgraceful spectacle. Aside from giving Margarit an extra helping of gourmet cat food at twenty cents per fifteenounce can, she went about her household tasks exactly as usual. "Well, perfect launching," Bob announced, joining Dagny at the breakfast table. "Funny thing," he remarked reflectively. "Folks have been scared of comets for centuries. First time we ever took a shot at one." Dagny did not appear amused. Bob decided not to press the subject. He glanced through the paper. Along with dire predictions should the mission fail, there was the usual routine list of floods, murders, hijackings, etc. Considerable space was devoted to a new outbreak of Exotic Newcastle disease, which threatened to double the price of eggs. (Associated in some obscure way with the onset of the comet.) He laid aside the paper, poured more coffee, was about to comment on some household chore, then decided this was a situation demanding the direct approach. He went to his wife, put his arms around her, and kissed her. It was not a peck. It was a kiss. "Don't take it so hard. Periodic comets generally peter out after a while. How much better a heroic end than a slow lingering death. Think! Comet Dagny will be a landmark in astronomy. Remembered in the annals of science as long as science itself." Such intimations of immortality gave no consolation. As remarked earlier, Dagny already had worlds of time. blackout during Bob's last impassioned outburst. Lights up revealing a nation, in home and cocktail bar, immobile, spellbound, awaiting the moment of truth. An expectant hush hangs over all. Only occasionally is the silence broken by the pop of beer cans and crackle of potato chips. All eyes are fixed, center screen, on the gleaming cylinder, hanging virtually motionless against the background of stars. Flashback to mission control. "The Space Intercept is now at rendezvous position with Comet Dagny." But where was Comet Dagny? comet in sight. The Comet Intercept was in the awkward situation of a rookie football player assigned to take out a certain opponent. He arrives at the designated position ready to carry out his assignment. Only his opponent isn't there. What to do? Mission control after solemn deliberation decided to fire the warhead anyhow. Slow fadeout on # of bomb plasm. Bob blamed it all on the stupid technologists in charge of operations. Never did trust those guys. No imagination. Well, wait till May #, the predicted date of collision. But the Earth passed the comet's descending node without incident, not even a piffling little meteor shower. # easier. There was much celebrating in the streets. Soothsayers and the astrologystruck promptly began making fun of science and its predictions. the descending node. Dagny and Margarit reclining on the chaise before the fire. Bob restlessly pacing the room. "Not the first time a comet's disappeared," he muttered, "Good evidence some comets are affected by nongravitational forces -- Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova -- Giac obina-Zinner. 'Erratics' we call (#) An observer at the meteorological station, Kodaikanal, India, reported an unusually bright mock sun or sun dog. them. But Comet Dagny's the first one that ever pulled a vanishing act right in front of us." "Is it really so important?" Dagny said, absently stroking Margarit. "It is to astronomers." "But why?" "Because it violates all our established laws of motion, that's why. Time and again we have questioned Newton's laws. Invariably the deviations have been traced to errors in observation or computation. # They survive the test of the experimental method. Not like astrology and that crap." He flung himself on the chaise, his head in Dagny's lap. "I'm sorry. Forgive me. Forgot our vow." "You're so agitated about how comets go," Dagny said, after a pause. "Tell me, Robert, how do comets come?" Bob pulled himself together with a masterful effort. "That's harder than telling a kid how babies come. Why, the stork brings them. They find them on a rose bush or cabbage plant. As for comets -- 'they come from the everywhere into here.' " He hesitated, trying to collect his scattered senses. "Well, seriously, explanation most in favor is Jan Oort's comet (#) Bob, in his agitated state of mind, neglected the slight deviations due to general relativity. cloud hypothesis. He postulates a spherical shell surrounding the solar system # to' # astronomical units thick. Comets originate from condensations in shell. A comet starts creeping toward the solar system. After Whisks around the Sun and heads back into deep space. "Occasionally one like Comet Dagny has a close encounter with Jupiter. Poor thing's trapped. Its becoming a short-period ellipse like an asteriod's. All clear?" Bob relapsed into gloomy silence. Margarit yawned. "This comet cloud," said Dagny, "it forms how?" "Easiest answer is by catastrophe. Body revolving between Mars and Jupiter blows up. Don't ask me why. Part escapes to the stars. Part goes to form the comet cloud." "You have observed it?" "Hell, no. We put it there." "Ah, then you are like Margarit." "Margarit?" Bob gave that ginger feline a suspicious glance. "How'd Margarit get into this?" "You think your comets come from this cloud. Margarit thinks her food comes from tin cans. Why? Somebody put it there." Bob pondered. "Yeah, I get the point." "Margarit sees me open a can. Out comes her food. She sees me open a cardboard carton. Out comes her milk. It always works. It's a law that never fails. Of course," Dagny said, "the creature's viewpoint is rather limited." "Yeah, so's ours." "I wonder," Dagny mused, "how many of our other ideas on life and the universe are equally limited? We think we peer so deep. But who can say? If we peered deeper might not we find a wholly new universe, utterly mysterious and incomprehensible?" "Dagny, do you peer deeper? Is that what you're telling me?" "Most cats, even, peer deeper. They discover mice -- and thus seem sorcerers to such felines as our Margarit." Bob gravely addressed the slumbering cat. "Margarit, some day you and I will have a long talk about that." He rubbed her ear. She purred appreciatively. "Little witch, I did hear you ban the collision. But surely you're not silly enough to..." Her proud stare stopped him. He could guess her thoughts. Don't apologize. Don't explain. They both chuckled. Then his jaw set firmly. "But don't get me wrong. I'm still sticking with my same old stodgy ideas. All I believe is what I can observe and measure." "Quand me me?" He nodded. "In spite of everything."  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two A Volume Two B Ed. Ben Bova Doubleday, # each The Astounding Analog Reader Volume One Ed. Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss Doubleday, # The Overlords of War Gerard Klein Translated by John Brunner Doubleday, # The Phaeton Condition Douglas R. Mason G. P. Putnam's Sons, # Bad Moon Rising Ed. Thomas Disch Harper and Row, # The Best From Galaxy Volume One Award, # T'VE some big ones for you this time. Big to have and to hold, tall on the horizons of both sf and this still-new year. First and biggest: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, in not one, but two big beautiful volumes, each # -- and before you wince at the price, look what your double sawbuck gets you: to quote the subtitle. The Greatest Science Fiction Novellas of All Time. They were selected by the membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America, whose ballots were counted and winnowed by Ben Bova. He found himself at last with an irreducible list of # stories totalling over # words -- far too many to include in one volume. Doubleday generously (and, I think, wisely) agreed to make two books rather than attempt to trim the list. And what a list! With somewhat agonizing restraint -- the merest echo of what Bova and his Vol. I predecessor, Robert Silverberg, had to go through -- I shall refrain from commenting at all on these stories, but will merely list them with the observations that long-term sf addicts must have this book, neophytes should have it, non-sf readers could hardly find a better introduction to the field and that no library worthy of the name should be without it. Call Me Joe, Poul Anderson. Who Goes There? John Campbell. Nerves, Lester del Rey. Universe, Robert A... Heinlein. The Marching Morons, C. M. Kornbluth. Vintage Season, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (as Lawrence O'Donnell). A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr...And Then There Were None, Eric Frank Russell. The Ballad of Lost C'mell, Cordwainer Smith. The Time Machine, H. G. Wells. With Folded is Three, Theodore Sturgeon. The Martian Way, Isaac Asimov. Earthman, Come Home, James Blish. The Fireman, Ray Bradbury. The Spectre General, Theodore Cogswell. The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster. The Midas Plague, Frederik Pohl. The Witches of Karres, James H. Schmitz. E for Effort, T. L. Sherred. The Big Front Yard, Clifford D. Simak. The Moon Moth, Jack Vance. The earliest of these stories is the Wells; the latest, Cordwainer Smith's -- # and # respectively. The cost, at today's prices, is approximately two packs of cigarettes per story. Quit smoking and buy the books.  and # Fine stories, is The AstoundingAnalog Reader, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss -- and it's called Volume One. Just how soon we may expect the rest, editors and publishers say not. Soon, I hope. The Hall of Famebooks are largely a tribute to that extraordinary editor John W. Campbell, Jr.; the Reader is entirely so, as its introduction warmly states. Only one story from the Hall of Fame is duplicated here -- Cordwainer Smith's classic. Inevitably, some of the authors are, but with different stories and I heartily applaud the choices: John Campbell himself, Asimov, Heinlein, KuttnerMoore and Simak. In addition we have yarns by Gallun, Bates, P. Schuyler Miller, Ross Rocklyne, Bester, Leinster, Chandler, and Fredric Brown. The stories, most of them long ones, are arranged chronologically in five sections and range from # to #, each section with its informative preface and yielding a most engrossing account of the growth and evolution of the magazine from its beginnings through the war years. A good choice for a basic library -- and I shall keep you informed about the advent of the next volume.  competent writer indeed, never ceases to amaze. Now he has translated from the French Gerard Klein's novel Les Seigneurs de la Guerre. The Overlords of War is many things -- rather too many for me. It is space travel and time travel and swashbuckle, paradox and paradiddle and bakers' bevies of naked girls who may or may not be for real. The protagonist Corson is sometimes aware of the forces which push him around and sometimes not, and then again, in some other time-track, his truelove never existed at all except in his memory. I have seldom seen so much skin with so little sex. Brunner Klein writes smoothly enough. Lord knows, but one is forcefully reminded of Fletcher Pratt's dictum on novelizing: "Your reader believable thing. Don't give him two!" A book like this illuminates the distinction between "amuse" and "bemuse." I am in awe of Brunner's ability with languages, but I would advise anyone with such talent never to translate a lesser writer than himself. Douglas R. Mason climbs another step on the names-to-belooked-for pyramid. He writes hard and glossy and fast and tight. Funny, too -- English-slangy with that special vividness which pops up now and then from old Albion. Ecology is beginning to feel a little faddish by now (though I saw a bumper sticker not long ago: ecology: man's last fad) and without knocking the subject I'm beginning to look for fresh variants. Scientifically there's a critical booboo near the end -- unless you can give me the address of a huge well of oxygen, stashed in the earth like natural gas -- and, too, I find the win-every-round superboy a little unbelievable. And that ends the cavils. I had a good swift funny time reading this book and I want you to read it, too. lated subjects (like: have we gone so far over the edge we just can't get back?) Thomas Disch has given us a new selection of originals -- stories, novelettes and poems -- that at first blush would seem to be a downer. Bad Moon Rising has as its theme (to quote the blurb) "a concern for the present political scene and the dismal, or dismaying or downright terrifying direction in which it's been drifting andor hurtling during this last grim decade." Yet a downer it is not -- and all credit for this goes to Disch and his precise, compassionate sense of balance and taste. He is a good writer who knows good writing. One wonders how much of this volume he gigged, pressured, tickled and forced his writers to produce for him. Surely no anthologist could be so lucky as to find writers and writing like this under a cabbage leaf. Further, the contents spread and spill over the fences of conventional sf, a movement I always applaud. Such a spreading does not always succeed as sf, art or literature -- indeed, it may well fail more often than it succeeds -- and that is, in evolutionary terms, a commonplace and more "natural" -- more scientific, if you like -- than drawing lines and driving pilings to inhibit growth and change. I have a personal fondness for living literature, which means the acceptance of growth and change. Disch's approach is confluent with this and I refuse not to applaud, for example, Marilyn Hacker's cry of pain at the death of Janis Joplin just because it leans over the fence. I know where its roots are and I'm proud of the soil. Bad Moon Rising will be one of those permanent possessions, to go with me wherever I go, to live on a shelf within reach. There are shockers in here that swirl and shake: Ellison, Silverberg, Disch himself; and poignancy as in two fragments by Effinger which reverently extend the narratives of a pair of your most treasured childrens' stories. Gene Wolfe, Carol Emshwiller, Norman Rush, Kit Reed grab your shoulders, swing you around and say Look! Look! Look at what's happening! Maybe you don't want to look. If so, you are not really involved in speculative fiction, which of course is not my problem nor Disch's, but yours. Anyway, get this good big living book. I must say a good happy grateful word for The Best from Galaxy, and say it for more reasons than loyalty to Our Favorite Magazine. It calls itself Volume One, and I hope it leads to a long series. These stories are chosen from the rich crop of #-#, and include Ellison, Niven, Blish, Lafferty, that new bright light Bill Earls, that totally reliable old hand A. Bertram Chandler, and a thick clutch of others. A nice basketful. Let me share a joy with you: watching Robert Heinlein on the Apollo Cruise, neat and sharp in a white dinner jacket, at # a.m. tipping the orchestra leader to give him a tango, and dancing it beautifully on the slowly slanting deck with his lovely wife. I must report to you, with regret, that a page of my copy was squeezed out of the last issue and the listing of titles, publishers and prices was omitted. I hasten to make good, so here, as compactly as possible, are the books reviewed in the last issue: Clareson's A Spectrum of Worlds, Doubleday, #. Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction, Ballantine #. Biggie's The Metallic Muse, Doubleday #. Gerr old's When Harlie Was One, Doubleday Book Club  I .#. Reference Guide to Fantastic Films, ChelseaBiggie's The World Menders, Davis' The Year's Best Horror Stories, Koontz' A Darkness in my Soul,. Elgin's At the Seventh Level, Dick's We Can Build You, and Dutton's The Mindblocked Man.  Make Room! and Dune are not going to go down in history as any great literary wonders. Why? Not because they're relevant ( though they attempt to be), but because they're shoddy novels. And yet think of how many great books there are that were considered relevant in their time! Dickens' Hard Times, the social satires of Jane Austen, Gulliver's Travels, and so on, are all as well read (in fact, more so) as they were when written. Why? Because all these books touch universal chords in the reader. Heinlein does not. Mr. Higginbotham's letter is so true it's frightening. If we as science fiction writers and readers strive in our literature for action without purpose, excitement without meaning, relevance without humanity, then sf not only deserves the beratings it so often gets. This is not, of course, what Mr. Higginbotham means. But it is what he says. What he means is that science fiction should be all pure adventure, without any trivialities such as "meaning" or "theme" or "symbolism" to tie it down. That's like saying a jet should be all engines and no seats. But sf shouldn't confine itself to being simply a literature of adventure. It is exactly that heritage that bogs it down, that keeps it from gaining the stature it deserves. Leave the straightforward punchfests for those who never got over their father-fixations. The time is coming for science fiction to turn to the truths that matter to the rest of mankind. One only hopes they won't demand too many action sequences. Dave Wise Sherman Oaks, California Introductory Canada H Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred B ester James Bish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Memo! J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut. Jr. H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: New York. N.Y. # For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD  # issues of IF for #  # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find . in payment for my subscription as checked above. # East # Street RI #e pur word (including name and address). #-word minimum. Payment with order. hi magazines. Arkham House. Fantasy Press. Lovecraft. #. authors. 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Pub. ed. # # Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed. Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels. Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub.ed # The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete, hardbound editions, sometimes altered in size to lit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto Offer slightly different in Canada Printed in U.S.A. Galaxy Ernest Taves  John Boyd  Ward Moore  Theodore Sturgeon july # Galaxy Exciting Novella -- CompletrUhissue Frank Merriwell in the White House sturgeon  Boyd  Perrin Great new science-fiction titles from... !! The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly, inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth CenturyFox... that will keep you glued till the last page AN# # A spellbinding film classic of a nightmare come true... The people in Santa Mira, California, didn't feel any different when it happened -- in fact, they didn't feel anything at all. One by one, they were being transformed into men and women who looked like themselves, acted like themselves, but were not themselves. AN# # Bron regained consciousness in a strange city on an unfamiliar planet, not knowing his name or his identity, with savage war raging all around. Then he realized that he was one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born. "Hits a new high in imagination... superior science AN# # "Be My Guest," a story of the human race possessed by demonic things is Just one of the unpredictably imaginative tales in this fascinating collection by a modern master of science fiction. "The fiction of Damon Knight... has that unpretentious ease and rightness which a reviewer calls, for lack of a more analytical term, readability. 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From gentle humor to galactic adventure to ecological crisis, these stories by the late author of the bestselling The Sand Pebbles vividly demonstrate his remarkable skill and range. # Lloyd Biggie, Jr., Editor. All the award-winning stories and runners-up of #, as selected by the members of the SF Writers of America, plus critical essays by Knight, Sturgeon and Anderson. # Ten, years later... the pioneering, prophetic view of the #st century, corrected and updated in light of the amazing advances of the past decade. An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible Revised edition, # Harper Row # E SJfd St... New Yoik # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Judy-Lynn Benjamin, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Ward Moore # Buddy Saunders and Howard Waldrop # Publishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. 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(# issuesl-SI?  # Yra. #R isaues)-S#  Cuneni issue # Send me the tcHcwing Simulaiion Games n Kurali (Russia. i#)-# M Korea (l#-#D-i#  Phalanx (ancient Gecce)-S# M Barbaroana (Russia. #t-#S)S# L  Lalpiig (Napoleonic Wars I#t#) -- # n Normandy (tre D-Oay invasionS#  Please send me yOur (lee brochure Mjrnp   Address ,City Sidle Zip. any way unique. geles campus of Cal Tech arrives work at Cal Tech is financed by the and hard-driving seismologist, to sponsorship -- unknown to him -- of complete his graduate work and the university's Department of Exstudy the San Andreas Fault, perimental Genetics, charged with tered. He is also one of five unique know it. but he is programed to make products of human genetic engihis major contribution in April, selfneering in the world -- an AE #, gendes tract in May. etically programed to be the Ideal At the annual Cal Tech Scientists Man For A Crowded Planet -- e.g.,to and Models Ball he meets lovely ety at an early age, then self-destruct, also a graduate student. She is working her way through her studies by douchairman of Los Angeles County mon: she seems gifted with occasional prescience and has a certain talent for reading, with reasonable accuracy, people's thoughts from their covers, has a strange ability to see into the past -- this is his first visit to the United States, yet he seems to "remember" events that happened here in #, more than a hundred years historic restoration village of Dotham, Alabama, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, to research his "recollections" and discover they seem to tie in with the life of a racing in an auto accident in #. in love. Through her work with the board of with access to the Cal Edison moholes, # meters underground, to install his stress sensors on the San A ndreas fault lines. a possibly devastating earthquake for the Los Angeles area, to hit on May #, #, at exactly #:# P.M. His petition to the board of supervisors to have the city evacuated is turned down. With the assistance of manages to get his warning to the populace through underground publications and via an effective holographic dramatic presentation staged by the Cal Tech dramatics department and starring beauteous has learned that South Africa's AE #, gineer, has made his major contribution to society -- a mining breakthrough -- and self-destructed in a Johannesburg mine cave-in, accidentally taking thousands of lives with him. Another AE #, a young Madrid chemical engineer, makes a major breakthrough in chemistry -- and innocently self-destructs in an explosion claiming # other lives. Russia's AE #, a poetess, completes her major epic and dies -- inadvertently causing # other deaths. It now becomes imperative to ing, having laid himself open to possible prosecution for violation of conspiracy laws because of the underground publication of his earthquake warning -- the penalty may be death. His dramatic presentation featuring the warning and starring has come under fire as causing public panic, and a legal petition is instituted by the Professional Mothers Association to halt its showing. went beyond the flamboyance permitted by his age into those realms of the grotesque labeled by fashion-fanciers "Southern California trial lawyer." His most conservative element of dress was a lace handkerchief which fluttered from beneath his cuff. The boots he strode in were of beaten silver. His gray curls kissed the velvet of his scarlet cape -- the very air was amorous of his jeweled hands. Counselor Osborne's entrance into the hearing room had to be seen to be disbelieved -- and Amal was absent. Osborne, Lyn decided, had dressed to match the orotund, balanced sentences of the eighteenthcentury prose that rolled from him. Yet the rhetoric of his opening plea revealed aspects of Los Angeles -- the Last Day Lyn had missed completely. He spoke of danger in the panicky crowds created by the spectacular, of the show's lingering traumatic effect, of nightmares thus engendered. Next he planted a few traumas himself, warning the budget-minded of lawsuits against the city brought by the injured. Eor the civicminded he spoke of industries frightened away from Los Angeles by earthquake scares. To the atheists he denounced religious crackpots who predicted the doom of the city. He reminded the religiously inclined that Los Angeles, named for the mother of Jesus, was hardly a fit city for God's wrath. Osborne had something for everybody. When Red Benton rose for the rebuttal he didn't rebut. Instead he asked to see the credentials of the most famous trial lawyer in Los Angeles. Tolerantly Osborne complied, handing Red his credentials card. As Red studied the card, he stood in sordid contrast to Osborne's elegance. He yore scuffed shoes and shiny blue serge suit, a stained and ill-knotted tie beneath his frayed collar. His hair was close-cropped. In a pathetic, last-minute effort to match the older man's stylishness Red had stuffed a soiled handkerchief up his cuff. He seemed to be having difficulty reading the list of honors on the back of Osborne's card. His tips were moving. "By golly, Mr. Osborne -- you made three-eighty-eight on your bar exam out of a possible four hundred. That's pretty high." "It's a record that has stood for twenty years." Red handed the card back and said, "If I made a score like that I would know I had a friend on the examining board." Slightly miffed, Osborne said, "I trust your nonsequitur isn't an inference on my integrity." "No, sir! Nobody's more admired by students than you, Mr. Osborne. I once paid five dollars just to hear you lecture." "Yes," Osborne said, mollified, "I do rate highly in the esteem of students." "You sit right down, sir. I'd like to swear you in as my first witness. I got no real reason to question you, but students don't often get a chance to talk to Counselor James Osborne face to face -- and for free." Amal had not yet arrived in the hearing room. As Osborne was being sworn in. Red turned and shuffled away. Then, in full view of spectators and board members, Red Benton scratched his behind. Some onlookers sniggered at the gaucherie. One burst out laughing. Apparently oblivious. Red turned back to Osborne. "Mr. Osborne, when you were a student you must have studied hard to make such good grades. Nothing works for me. I tried sleep-teaching and self-hypnosis." "I have an excellent memory and a superb ability to elicit general principles from the law and apply them in particular situations. Industry and self-application are, of course, the first requirement..." Surprisingly Osborne took five minutes of his valuable time to explain to the student how he had studied. Red listened with adulatory intentness. He had promised her some tricks, Lyn remembered, but why was he sending Osborne on an ego trip? "That's technique, Mr. Osborne. That speech you just gave was talent. I don't think I ever heard anybody talk as good as you." "Plato defines rhetoric as the chief art, young man. At the age of fourteen I memorized The Trial of Warren Hastings and recited it with pebbles in my mouth... Osborne took another five minutes to explain how he had achieved his talent as an orator. "I sure wish I could talk as you do. You've got a flair, Mr. Osborne. I bet you've never lost a case." Osborne smiled. "In my twenty years of practice I have, of course, lost a few, but my percentile rate of success..." When Osborne had completed his lecture on success Red commented, "I can see why you charge high for your services." "My fees are above average, yes. Considerably above, though not out of line with the talent and experience they command. Besides, I have a select clientele. It can afford my fees -- " "Mr. Osborne," Red interrupted, "if I was a lawyer like you I'd say there's a discrepancy here. You're working for the mothers' union and everybody knows they don't make much. Unless this is one of your philan -- philan -- charity cases." "I never work for nothing," Osborne said, aggrieved. "The city appoints run-of-the-mill attorneys as public defenders." "Then the mothers must be rolling in wealth." "The mothers are supported by other civic-minded organizations and business groups." "Who are these other groups, sir?" Red asked. "That's priviliged information." "Not any longer, Mr. Osborne," Red's voice had lost its hesitant quality. "Under the Truth in Advertising Law of nineteen-seventy-one you're required to furnish evidence of your assertions." "Just how do the laws of advertising apply here?" "You've been advertising yourself and the quality of your clientele for the last fifteen minutes." "Only in answer to your questions." "No, sir. In response to my remarks. Mr. Chairman, I request that the stenographer read the substance of my remarks. They will show Mr. Osborne has been asked only one question -- who is paying his fees?" Lyn read aloud Red Benton's remarks. There was not a question among them save the last. B y order of the chairman and under oath Osborne was required to list the sources of the fees paid him for entering the plea. The mothers had strange bedfellows. Some of Osborne's contributors were understandably in his camp, such as the AllYear-Round Club of Southern California and the California Auto Club, but one contribution drawing a gasp from the crowd was five thousand dollars by the Los Angeles Association of Morticians. Red Benton entered a plea to the chairman. "Sir, this list speaks for itself. The contribution of the mothers, a mere one hundred dollars, points to the fact that they are being used -- unknowingly. I'm sure -- as a front for others. Since Mr. Osborne has made such a touching appeal 'to our civic pride, I request that the chair ask the representatives of the organizations present which have contributed to Mr. Osborne's fee of fifteen thousand, four hundred dollars to step out from behind the skirts of the mothers and come to the witness stand to explain their contributions." Only one man rose and came forward at Kley's request. He was Merriweather Andrews, head of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Demographer's Association. Old enough to have survived the Holocaust, Andrews came forward as rapidly as his physical condition permitted and was sworn in. Since he was formally a hostile witness. Red questioned him first. "Mr. Andrews, would you explain why a demographer would contribute funds to a petition to suspend a student documentary conceived and executed as an educational experiment?" "Yes, sir. My organization is dedicated to the public good -- and the greatest public good is a negative population index." "Surely you're aware, sir, that such a trend already exists?" "Yes siree!" The old man exploded with enthusiasm. "But let's help it along, I say. I read where some young fellow was predicting an earthquake Wednesday. Sounds reasonable to me. I've been predicting one for seventy years. During the population sink -- hell, I was hoping for one." #n Ballanttne Books The watchword around here for so long was "Keep calm.  think." that it's a bit difficult to get used to the new image: "On to Victory!" Nevertheless. by the usual miracle (really meaning extraordinary editorial acumen) we continue the chronicle of our splendid Spring list. We promised word on the Adult Fantasy: (all #) OW. Lord Dunsany. What a title. Yet it has everything to do with this elegant tale about the loss of a charwoman's shadow. A delight, as usual. edited by Lin Carter. Containing George Macdonald. Chambers. Bramah. and Phillpots. (Phillpotts? Read and see). Lin can find fantasy just about anyplace. Up to his old magicks -- this one concentrates on A tiantis. You all know. liam Morris. Ah. that lovely man. If you like Morris (some deprived souls don't) a must. A really rare volume. Lin Carter writing about the subject of the title, the creators of fantasy -- with backgrounds, anecdotes, notes, comments, praise, blame, and a sturdy section on sword and sorcery which we freely admit is not our dish but it has a place, it really does. And somewhere, sometime, an epic s  s will hit us in the schnozz and we will publish it. We gave you a very quick onceover-lightly on our s.f. last time round, so to remind: the first brand new, all un-previousiypublished novel we've had from Jack Vance in too tong. It's the start of a series to be based on the worlds of the Alastor Cluster. Pure Vance. We don't need to say more. Mason, in all of his jivey. fast-talk, fliparounds of the distant future -- this one to do with androids. An exciting story, well done. And watch out any we've seen. ture. and Morgan and Kippax are at it good, you can call it space opera without smiling. On to Victory I BB His enthusiasm was contagious. The spectators were smiling. "Looky here, young fellow. You can take a drive on Sunday. I remember when a Sunday afternoon's drive had to start on Saturday. We built highways with taxes ple. There are less than half of that now. Cut out a few more and there'll be tennis courts on the freeways." "Are you saying you hope for an earthquake?" "Not hoping, son. Just thinking; Maybe..." "You don't want the people prepared, so you donate to a campaign to stop their preparations?" "Prepared? Who's ever prepared to die? Won't be anybody in those towers but damned fools who've been warned. So good riddance." "What about your own life, Mr. Andrews?" "I'm leaving for Halifax tonight." The spectators laughed and, after the room fell silent. Red turned to Osborne, "Your witness. Counselor." "No questions," Osborne snapped. In one of the shortest deliberations in committee history, six black balls and one white rattled into the bowl and the mothers' petition was denied. Lyn's announcement was greeted with applause. when she met with Red in the automat. He had risen so in her her esteem that she offered him a lift back to the tower as they sipped coffee, hoping the other two might arrive. "When you came shambling out to match Osborne's splendor I thought you were pleading nolo contendere," she confessed. "It was a part of the act," Red said. "I was giving Osborne a false sense of security. Dramatics is a required subject for law students at U.S.C. -- and I have a flair for acting. The character was based on Will Rogers, an early actor whose film clips I studied. The scratching was borrowed from another actor in an old movie. The times are changing in legal circles. Shakespeare's losing to Stanislol'." "Luckily for us that funny old man was in the audience." "Oh, 'Merry' Andrews? I suspect his donation to the mothers' cause came from the Students' Assistance Fund. I talked over our defense with Amal." "He wouldn't. Red. Bribing a witness is a crime." "Amal knows it. I've coached him on the legal pitfalls of stateless persons. But he would have no trouble twisting Gloria Jaffee's arm." "Finish your coffee," she snapped. '"I've got to get home and make a telephone call." Her mind was seething as she gunned the Dunemaster to the freeway and zipped toward University Tower, ignoring her passenger completely. Red had revealed more than she had asked for when he said Amal could "twist" Gloria Jaffee's arm. She knew Amal occasionally had been seeing Gloria alone, theoretically on business. Now she wondered about that business. Had Gloria been demonstrating her S waves and L waves to the seismologist? Since Dotham, Amal had been attentive and devoted to her, Lyn admitted, but he had been too dedicated -- no, consecrated -- to his damned earthquake to be amorous. At least she had thought his concern had been the earthquake. But with her bought red hair, her cantilevered bra and a mincing twitch to her overpadded hips. The Barbie doll of the Cinema Department could have been producing a few private spectaculars for a naive Arabian who had gone ape over Jean Harlow in The Redheaded Woman. Now it was becoming clear to Lyn why Amal had missed a hearing that meant so much to all of them. After he and Gloria, illegally and unethically, had hired a senile old man to tear Osborne's petition to shreds, Amal had known in advance what the outcome of the hearing would be. And just where was Miss Gloria Jaffee during the hearing? In a Cal Tech pod with Amal Severn? Lyn wheeled the Dunemaster into the parking basement, swerved into her parking place, slammed on the brakes and asked Red Benton, "Just where was Gloria Jaffee during the hearing?" "Near the front row, center," Red said. "She left early, while you were in the deliberations room, to catch a train for New Jersey. She asked me to tell you she hoped you weren't killed during the quake." No, only maimed, Lyn thought. T here had been another spectator in the audience -- Dr. John Heywood, whose name Lyn had heard once and forgotten. He had devoted little attention to the flamboyant Osborne, but studied carefully the girl at the council table on the dais, marking her high forehead, thin lips, strong jaw and alert, intelligent eyes. Nils Larsen had been remiss in describing her beauty. It was classic. And there were harmonies in the movement of her lithe, poised body. Little wonder Amal Severn had broken the restraints of his conditioning. There was no doubt in Heywood's mind that Lyn Oberlin had made the telephone call to Columbia, South Carolina. Next Heywood had studied the techniques of Red Benton. He had seen at the outset of the hearing that Osborne was in a contest with a superb legal mind. Heywood had departed at midpoint in the hearing, knowing that Amal Severn had erected around himself formidable bulwarks against his fate. Heywood was back in his office at Cal Tech as Lyn entered her apartment to call Amal. Reluctantly, the head of the Department of Experimental Genetics was putting through a call to the chief of an obscure bureau in the U.S. State Department. A mal was out, NUs Larsen told her, but had left word he would call her later in the evening. Later in the evening proved to be past eleven and the fatigue etched on Amal's face on the screen drove from Lyn's mind any discussion of a tenuous and still uncertain personal problem that concerned them both. Amal had got the news of the hearing on the radio, but he smiled at her firsthand report on Osborne's regalia and Red's tactics. "Red hinted that Merry Andrews might have been a plant. If you had a hand on it I'm going to lecture you on the ethics of city government," she told him. "Give your lecture on ethics to the marines," he said. "Red briefed me on the ordinances against stateless persons. You won't be hearing from me personally for a while, but you can always locate me through Nils. Listen carefully to what he says and limit your conversation to business matters." From the grin he directed offtelephone, Lyn knew Nils was in the room and listening. "Ed like to spend all my time with you," Amal added, "but I'm skewered by urgeney. I'll contact you in the morning about the work I'm doing but, for now, good night -- and bands of angels lull thee to thy rest." Quoting Hamlet's epitaph to her was hardly the best way to send her to bed, she thought, but he was tired. His shoulders were slumping. Though he was smiling as he hung up, she could feel his weariness even over the telephone. Vaguely troubled by her first premonition in weeks, she prepared for bed. In the past, when the Thirteen of greatest s c j enc e fiction stories -- never before published in lo ok form forms of her future hovered close, they had been neither sinister nor hostile, only watchful and indifferent. Tonight a menace seemed to be waiting behind the curtain of time. Her feeling came merely from her concern over Amal's fatigue, she told herself as she lay back, trying to relax. She had glimpsed a wistfulness in his eyes, a yearning for rest. An after-image of his face lingered in her mind after she turned out the bedlamp, the image stirring a memory of something not seen but sensed, a complex of feelings, tenuous, indefinable, just beyond her recollection. In the hiatus between waking and sleeping her memory made the connection that had eluded her conscious mind and she remembered that the emotions had come to her from a poem by Keats Amal had read to her on the Emersons' porch: and I shall die. Like a sick eagle looking at the sky. For a moment she sat up in bed, seeking full wakefulness to sweep from her the ineffable and black despair into which she had been falling in her sleep. Osborne had promised her nightmares, a crude trick for triggering the subconscious into autosuggestion her nightmare had been approaching on the subliminally recalled lines about death. She lay back to a sound sleep. If she died in an earthquake -- then, as Merry Andrews had said, she deserved to die. T he morning brought Lyn less faith in her analytical power and more in her psychic power. When she started down to breakfast she found outside her door an eightpage newspaper with a banner headline: Amal had "contacted" her about his work, in a manner that put him outside the law. She took the paper and stepped inside, knowing that in her hand was the project that he and Hal had discussed secretly on the day of the first hearing. Now both would be open to all manner of charges, not the least of which was publishing an unlicensed newspaper. The underground press had been revived in Los Angeles to spread a proscribed rumor and incite civic turmoil; and Amal, despite his vulnerability, shared in this conspiracy. A cold wind was blowing in her mind as she opened the newspaper. The feature article inside supported the headlines with a summary of Amal's findings from the stress sensors, explained his solar tides theory in relation to the coming eclipse of the sun and, in the clearest exposition she had yet read, explained the fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field. Safety zones around towers were defined and all beach dwellers in cottages, houseboats or towers adjacent to the sea were urged to evacuate inland beyond the Newport-Inglewood Fault Line. On the last page an editorial admitted the editor had placed his person and career in jeopardy by publishing the prediction in the belief that if only one life were saved through his act he would consider his gain worth more than the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. Despite her alarm Lyn smiled. With the mention of the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, Hal Carpenter might as well have signed the editorial. She was a quarter-hour late to the commissary where she found the underground paper far more in evidence at the tables than the morning edition of The TimesHerald. The usual chatter of breakfasting students was subdued. Four, sometimes five or six students were gathered at each table talking or listening intently. Seated alone with an untouched roll and coffee, Lyn's thoughts swirled around Amal. Superficially he was not harmed by the publication of his prediction, which was a matter of public record, but he was involved in the conspiracy to publish the paper -- given his nature he couldn't have acted otherwise. She could only hope he had taken care to prevent any evidence from pointing directly toward him. "May I join you, Lyn?" Rising, her glance traversed the two-meter frame of Wallace Bergner, a graduate geologist whose pod was on the same floor as her own. He was dressed in a business suit with white shirt and tie. His hair was neatly trimmed and brushed, and his brown eyes, magnified by horn-rimmed spectacles, held a rather gentle plea. "Of course, Wallace. Sit down." Her welcome was not a polite formality. Wallace Bergner's thoughts, easily read because of his magnified eye movements, were never obnoxious. He seldom dated girls but spent his odd hours exercising on Muscle Beach. His libido was sublimated in physical culture -- he waS infatuated with his own biceps and triceps. He carried no tray, only a cup of black coffee, and as he settled across the table from her he pulled a packet of wheat germ from his coat pocket to sprinkle into his coffee. "The thirty-second floor is having a picnic in the woods Wednesday noon," he said, "and other residents would like to have you join them. It's a pound party with different guests bringing different items. Here's a map showing the area where our group will meet and a list of items we'd like you to bring." She barely glanced at the mimeographed sheet he handed her, because his eyes had told her he was the evacuation leader for the #nd floor. The information vexed her. She was supposed to be an inner member of the earthquake committee, and without her advice or knowledge the tower had been organized, floor by floor, obviously with care since Wallace was the most commanding figure on her level. In this feat of secret organization she detected the fine hand of the expert on Student Restraint Laws, Red Benton. Deliberately studying the brown eyes across from her, she said, "I'm sorry, Wallace, but I have a one o'clock class Wednesday." His eyes revealed his confusion. "It won't be a picnic without you, Lyn." She glanced at the list he had handed her. "This is a strange picnic list. Wall ace. Who could eat two leg sprints and four hundred yards of one-inch bandage gauze? Eight cadmium one-phase batteries -- aren't those for hand lasers? Surely yciu're not holding a turkey shoot with laser guns?" She looked at him and saw him thinking: But she's supposed to know about us. He told me to guard her with my life. Why is she staring at me? Suddenly he steadied on an inspiration. "A friend of yours said you might bring some pemmican." Then it was Amal who had assigned him as her bodyguard. Suddenly she smiled. "Of course I'll be there, Wallace." She added, lowering her voice to conspiratorial levels to let him know she knew; "What provisions have you made for pharmaceuticals?" His huge bulk heaved in relief. "Three marshals have keys to the drugstore pod. The druggist will lock up and leave at one o'clock." T hough Lyn was ten minutes late to the office, Kley had not arrived. A methodical reader, he would scan the underground paper twice, once for the earthquake instructions and again for evidence of a conspiracy. Without waiting for his instructions she went about preparing for an emergency conference, setting the switchboard in the front office to rotate the incoming calls to each girl in turn. "All personnel will be on the phones this morning," she announced. "All category-A officials calling in will go on a listen and no-speak connection. Nonofficial calls for Doctor Kley will be given the 'in conference, call back' reply." As the girls put away their routine work and reached for their individual call recorders Lyn went into her office and dialed Nils Larsen, knowing Amal would not answer. She caught Nils as he was leaving, fully dressed, a cigar protruding from his shirt pocket. "Nils, did Amal leave a message for me?" "He said join him in Uncle Moses' country for the rock-androll session. He'll be there at two o'clock today. Does that mean anything to you?" It meant he would meet her by the mill pond and she nodded. Amal had warned her to limit her conversations with Nils to business only, but his cigar intrigued her. Pleasantly, without being the least bit flirtatious, she said, "I didn't know you smoked. Nils." "I don't." He grinned. "Chemistry gave me the cigar, imported from Madrid. Amal assigned me to the laser locker and it has a combination lock. This little cigar can blast open a bank vault." "Then, for heaven's sake, put it where it can't be seen." She hung up, connected the official stenographic recorder to the conference control board and began to telephone the secretaries of the supervisors, telling them to stand by for a group conference at ten. Most of the offices were manned by pro tern supervisors. Of the supervisors at the original earthquake hearing, Lyn found only Police Chief Jeffers, Supervisor of Public Safety, and Howebrand, of Spectaculars, on hand. After a moment's deliberation she called the city attorney's office and the secretary of the Los Angeles commandant of the California Highway Patrol. She had alerted all concerned officers when Dr. Kley appeared in her doorway. "Set up the emergency telephone procedure in the front office and get the supervisors on the line for a conference. The agenda will cover the earthquake rumor and remedial measures for civil commotion. Better get the D.A. and the local commandant of the C.H.P. in on the proceedings." "Yes, sir." He turned to go, paused and turned back. "By the way, the registrar at Cal Tech called me Friday. He wanted me to find out on the q.t. who called Columbia, South Carolina from this office a week or ten days ago. Ask around when you get the time." "Yes, sir." Honesty prompted her to answer immediately, as she would have done had he merely asked her who made the call, but the phrase "on the q.t." alerted her. From her knowledge of governmental procedure she knew that someone had checked the Columbia archivist's log and found her inquiry about Leroy Thatcher, a call she had made at the city's expense without personally identifying herself. But why would anyone at Cal Tech be interested in her interest in the frozen corpse of a racing driver dead almost two centuries? Had some experiment been performed which the medical schools wished kept secret? And was some nation-wide infrastructure of medical counter-intelligence operating from the universities, seeking to warn her away from the area? Mulling a problem more immediate to her than earthquakes, she welcomed the diversion of flashing lights along the intercity conference board as she switched in the calls. Red and Amal had been right in holding her aloof from any conspiracy. She could do her job as a governmental employee unhampered by guilt feelings and keep her mind free to ponder the curious relationship between a telephone call, a dead man whom Amal thought he remembered and Cal Tech where Amal studied. She leaned to the intercom and said, "Your conference is ready, Doctor Kley." statement of the agenda and closed on an informal note: "I'm assuming the public will react to the rumor. Two-thirds of the board members who heard the original argument are out of the city and I'm planning a stroll in the CD O K Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher "...and once again we must commend this publisher for consistent high quality in this special field. " -- Publishers Weekly #, #. was "outselling all the others." (Well, we cannot know this definitely... But it is nice to hear. Take our June, #, titles, for instance. We have a Hal Clement novel, first time in paperback, of deals with that last frontier in the power-energy crisis for development on Earth -- the ocean bottoms. (UQ#O# -- #) space opera which takes the double-mind of space pilot Grainger into the depths of a honeycombed and lightless planet. (UQ# -- #t) Sam J. Lundwall, whose book about sf is a bestseller in two countries, brings back the 'hero ' #St) Bothered by mechanization and the obstinacy of the inanimate? So is Ron Goulart, whose best tales of mechanized madboisterous adventure in reading. " says the Columbus Dispatch. (UQ# -- #t) park tomorrow soon after lunch." "Transportation here, Mr. Chairman. I can verify the assumption. For the past week there's been a general exodus from the city and a decline in visitors." "Transportation, order the railroads to suspend operations between one and two tomorrow." "City attorney here, Mr. Chairman. Such an order would be a de facto endorsement of the rumor and leave the city open to time-lost suits." "Transportation, couch your order in the form of a suggestion. Engineering, have crews standing by at the master valves on the gas lines to close them for emergency repairs at one-thirty tomorrow. Health, walk or carry your hospital patients into safe areas for officially authorized sunbaths -- even if it's raining. Chief Jeffers, what about your prisoners?" "I'll have to leave them in the tower, Mr. Chairman. If you go along with this prediction I'll need every man I've got to patrol the residential towers." Kley was ignoring the flashing lights in front of him as various officials asked for the floor. He plowed through the agenda, issuing precise instructions which reflected his acceptance of Amal's prediction. He was following Amal's evacuation procedure, which would cost the city nothing but an extra effort on the part of its employees. Kley was not advocating an evacuation from the towers, merely preparing to assist those who wished to evacuate. Obviously he was gambling that public opinion would support him if the slightest temblor shook the city. As always, Lyn listened, fascinated by the give and take of the democratic process. Despite Kley's ramrodding, it was eleven before the agenda reached the subject of crowd control. In this area Kley yielded the floor to the California highway patrol's local commander. "We'll install the old pre-Holocaust Sunday afternoon traffic directives to implement the master plan's proposal for clearing the beach areas." With wry amusement Lyn noticed that Amal's plan had become "the master plan." "Chief Jeffers here. Every cat burglar in Los Angeles is sharpening his claws over this scare. With eighty floors in each of the one hundred and ten empty towers to protect, plus riot control on the ground, the police department would like to offer a plan to squelch the rumor entirely." Jeffers paused. A portentous rustle of paper alerted the conference to an important announcement. "I've been authorized by the U.S. State Department to announce that the earthquake predicted by Amal Severn, a male Caucasian, aged twentytwo, is true in fact, though false in substance." "What in hell has the state department got to do with a Los Angeles earthquake?" Kley exploded. "I don't know," the chief admitted, "but here's the official prediction. I'll read it. 'South of Victorville the San Andreas Fault jogs eastward. At that point the granite facings of the fault are permeated with iron ore, which creates a higher degree of bonding than the original equations consider. Fault displacement will occur at the hour predicted no farther south than the Victorville Intercept and will be felt in Los Angeles only as a minor temblor.' And that's what the statement says, Mr. Chairman." "Chief, you and I know something about announcements. If group-think can authorize a four point eight, then Severn can authorize a nine point five. Take your choice. Any prudent citizen would accept Severn's figure and evacuate. I know. I'm a prudent citizen." In the laughter following Kley's quip Lyn thought: There is no medical school at Cal Tech... T he voice of Jeffers brought her back to the conference. "It has been suggested that the D. A. publicly offer Severn an arrangement: if he reports to the police before midnight, studies his own figures and admits his error, then he will be bound over in the tower to answer only to his non-capital offenses." "The prediction's now in the public domain, Chief. What's he being sought for?" "Seven violations of the Students' Restraining Act plus conspiracy in the first degree. He bought the newsprint on which an unlicensed newspaper was published." "If he recanted," Kley pointed out, "the public would figure he was acting under duress." "Not a chance. His honesty profile is too high." "And what if he doesn't report?" Kley asked. He would not report, Lyn knew. His earthquake phobia would prevent him, for he would know that he would be detained on the #th floor of the courthouse tower. Lyn's growing anxiety rocketed to panic when Jeffers answered Kley's question. "We'll throw the book at him. As a stateless person he can be sentenced in absentia." "This is a police matter. Chief," Kley pointed out. "No, Mr. Chairman. The department is requesting that a reward of twenty-five thousand dollars be posted. The fugitive's hologram prefers the hunting preserve to the gas chamber. Without a reward, every sportsman in the city would be aiding and abetting to get the fugitive past the midnight deadline." "Comptroller, what do you say?" Kley asked. "It's a good wager, Mr. Chairman. If he reports before midnight, the city will lose the reward. If he doesn't, the revenue accruing from the sale of hunting li"Very well. I'll err on the side of humanity. Post the reward. Now, gentlemen, let's consider the disposition of emergency vehicles." More than the inhumanity, the casual indifference in the words shattered Lyn, undermining her confidence in the benignity of a government which, as a matter of policy, could order a young man to his death in the moral equivalent of war. The "take" in the "give and take" of the democratic process went mostly to the process servers, she thought. But why had Amal, with his brilliance, signed for the newsprint on his green card? That idiocy was Red Benton's fault -- Red had failed to brief Amal properly on the vulnerability of a stateless person. Amal must not have known that first-degree conspiracy was a felony established to permit the elimination of native radicals. All the chaos of history, its violence and the violent repression of violence, focused in one moment on Lyn's mind and her thoughts were fragmented by the question: why had Amal signed for the newsprint? The voices on the phone were drifting from her, growing remote, lulling her with their sibilance. She seemed to be floating through the voids of her mind, relaxed now, waiting for a sign. She felt the word "pemmican." Amal had gone into the hunting preserve to get venison for pemmican -- venison for pemmican. She clung to the floating phrase, no longer anxious or even concerned, awaiting the revelation in the words. The void within her became gray, straited with darker, coiling maculations. From the grays grew hues and tints, forming the shapes of a vision. She went into a trance. S HE found herself standing at the San Fernando gate of the hunting preserve watching Amal, bent under the weight of a small deer, emerge. He wore a mottled green and brown jacket with matching jeans. A Chamberlain sweatband bound his forehead beneath the mandatory red cap of the hunter. Laced around his ankles were the winter moccasins of the Iroquois Indians. His longbow and sheath of arrows were missing. She knew this: on the day the hunters came for Amal they would face prey more familiar than they ground. They would come seeking a camouflaged shadow that moved with moccasined stealth -- and the hunters would become the prey of their quarry who would be armed with a silent and deadly longbow he had cached earlier among the canyons and boulders of the vast preserve. Red Benton had briefed Amal well. Amal had signed for the newsprint with the full knowledge that he might be apprehended and he had taken precautions. The focus of her psychic powers was blurring, the vision from the past fading, and she sent into the void from the conscious periphery of her thoughts the talismanic phrase, "sick eagle," hoping to garner a glimpse of the future. Tiny and remote, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, she saw the stanchion of a stripped tower slowly topple and fall. She herself was high among the griders of a naked tower and appalled by a fear for Amal somewhere close at hand. Even as the vision faded she heard, clearly and inexplicably, a series of sharp reports followed by metallic clangs and rattles. She had seen enough to know that Amal's prediction was more dreadfully accurate than his worst fears had assumed. At no time had he hinted that the stanchions themselves would fall. On the contrary, he had said repeatedly that the towers would stand, that only the modules would fall. Over the phones the voices grew clearer -- the conference was ending. Lights began to flicker off on Lyn's board and finally Kley's voice came to her over the intercom. "That's it, Lyn. Wrap it up. And don't think I'm tossing your boy friend to the lions. If one linkpin shears when the ground rolls tomorrow I'm granting him full amnesty." At the moment the matter was academic in Lyn's mind. Tomorrow there would be no Los Angeles left to grant Amal amnesty. But would the stanchions fall tomorrow? From the past she knew that her precognitions, though accurate, were often seen out of context of the full range of future events of which they were a segment. But Amal had been near her in the vision, so he had escaped the hunters of Angeles Crest. In the hypersuggestibility of her post-trance period, it occurred to her that the popping sounds, aurally so welldefined in her trance, might have been the crack of rifles, the metallic clang and rattle that of bullets striking among the girders. It was almost one o'clock. Skipping lunch, she could reach the mill pond by two. She would tell Amal all that she had discovered. His analytical power, so much greater than her own, might solve the riddles'that perplexed her. Rapidly she began to remove and label the taped records of the conference, preparatory to filing them. Efficiently she went about her tasks in the Service of a government with which she had grown disenchanted. A mal had done well in choosing the historical village for his refuge, Lyn reflected, as she shimmied into the cotton dress she had brought with her. His hologram would not be broadcast here. And here, too -- in an era when lawmen were treated lightly and the folk heroes were Pretty Boy Floyd and Clyde Barrow -- he would find friends bold enough to conceal him. She put on high-heeled shoes, walked out of the station and cut across Lee's Square toward Hamburger Heaven. At the Confederate monument she could see through the trees to the Essex parked before the hamburger stand and looked at her necklace watch. One-fifteen. Plenty of time to grab a bite before she drove out to meet Amal. Knowing that the local sheriff was kept posted on Los Angeles fugitives and would have the station area watched, Amal would not attempt to use the car. She suspected a student confederate would drive him to the San Bernardino boundary of the compound and that he would come in over the fence from the north. The Emersons' delight at seeing her did as much to lift her spirits as the free ten-cent hamburger and coffee did to lessen her hunger. They could afford the treat. Their business was doing so well they foresaw prosperity just around the corner. Insulated in the #s, they knew nothing of the turmoil in Los Angeles. Their questions about Amal she answered merely by saying that he was very active, that she and he were still planning to be married in Dotham next Sunday and that the government had confirmed Amal's predictions of an earthquake. To her sadness Lyn learned from the old couple's eyes that a rift had developed in their marriage. Emily had finally come into the open with her confession magazines. Reaffirming his commitment to science fiction, Vernon had grown caustic toward his wife's lowbrow literary tastes and was lording it over her anonymous writers by dropping the names -- probably pseudonyms, if he only knew -- of his own bylined authors. Privately Lyn sided with Emily. The romantic tales might be fiction, but they approached truth closely. Nostalgia was her excuse to the Emersons for her return to Dotham without Amal. Under different circumstances nostalgia might indeed have given her a reason for her visit. Wheeling the Essex down the tree-arbored streets of Dotham, seeing again the white houses behind the green hedges and lawns, she grieved for her loss of innocence and passing Reb's place she felt the pang of happiness remembered. Then she was driving the unpaved portion of the road, crossing the creek and parking as of old beside the Emersons' hedge. As she swung down the path through the woods to the mill pond her throat ached with nostalgia. For a moment she stood on the bank. The pond was a placid sheet of water to a casual eye, but much more to a girl who in its waters had first been touched by the magic wand of love. Forcibly she turned her gaze away and followed the path toward the mill, the meadow and the hillcock, scene of the first and only consummation of her love for Amal. However brief that consummation, she was beginning to suspect it might be commemorated by something more than a diamond ring and a promise of marriage. Old Uncle Moses sat at his favorite spot, his bald head nodding over a fishing pole set in the bank. The serenity exuding from the ancient black was reassuring to her after the swift pace changes in Los Angeles. In him was an unchanging simplicity. Rather than startle him, she called from ten yards away, "Any luck. Uncle Moses?" "No'm. Catfish ain't biting yet. How's y'all?" The phrase "y'all" impacted against her consciousness. No old darky who had spent his life in Dotham, Alabama, would use "y'all" to address one person. Walking closer she looked down at him intently, deliberately burlesquing the dialect.' "I's jes' fine. Uncle Moses. How's y'all?" He looked up at her smiling, but in the eye not covered by a cataract she saw a flash of alarm. She focused her gaze on his clear eye, studying it and the muscles of his face intently, knowing he would read her stare as hostile. She no longer cared. The time for social amenities was past. If Uncle Moses turned out to be an informer both she and Amal were in danger -- she for aiding and abetting a fugitive. With her post-trance sensitivity she read clearly a question Uncle Moses was asking himself: Hove I blown my cover? I F HE had a "cover" he was not an informer but an agent. Perhaps his cataract was made of fish skin. His head could be bald from shaving, its fringing hair dyed gray. She reproached herself for her past negligence. Weeks previously she had wondered about the surging libido of a seventy-year-old man and then permitted herself to be distracted from her chain of thought. His lasciviousness, carefully considered, might have given her a clue to the conspiracy surrounding Amal. He was asking, "How's Mr. Amal?" "He's wanted by the law. Uncle Moses. There's a reward of twenty-five thousand dollars posted for his apprehension." "Whooeee! How you and him get married if he do time?" "We're not getting married. I'm after the reward money." "Looked to me, last time, like you sho' loved'that white boy." "Not twenty-five thousand dollars' worth. Listen carefully. Uncle Moses, and you can get some of that money for yourself. Amal's coming to meet me. As soon as you see him you amble down the creek, cut over to Reb's Place and have Reb telephone the sheriff. I'll coax Amal over for a barbecue sandwich. If the sheriffs waiting to arrest him you've made yourself five dollars." The old man considered her proposal, looking out toward the cork on the end of his line. When he spoke his voice had lost its quaver and two centuries had dropped from his manner. Suddenly the humble, twentieth-century "darky" was a modern U.S. African, alert and imperious. "Don't concern yourself with methods for the suspect's capture, Miss Oberlin, and don't try to con me away from here so he can escape. The area is surrounded. If you cooperate with the arresting officers I'll see that you get your share of the reward." "Cooperate how?" Since he would see that she got her "share of the reward" Uncle Moses was a man of authority. He had said "the arresting officers" instead of "us," so he was not a policeman. "Walk to the top of the hill and look around -- as if you were waiting and anxious." Only one other person had known she and Amal were meeting here. She would share the reward for Amal's capture with his roommate. Nils Larsen. "Who are you?" she asked the African, openly staring now. "Never mind who I am. Just get on the hill. Stay there until the police tell you it's over." But she had read his answer before she turned to comply. "Uncle Moses" was an operative of the Eugenics Surveillance Agency. She had never heard of the Eugenics Surveillance Agency, but whatever else it did it certainly hired actors as operatives. Looking down at Uncle Moses as she walked up the hill, she saw that he was slumped back into his nodding posture, for all the world an old-fashioned darky enjoying a fishing outing. His bald head gleaming in the sunlight reminded her of Amal's remark Uncle Moses would not have to get his head shaved to join the Skinheads on the Fort Tejon Reservation... She had not paid close enough attention to Nils' words, as Amal had instructed her, but for once she had profited from her error. Amal had not wanted her here, but on the Skinhead Reservation. Still, Nils was definitely one of "them." After she had spent the time required of her here on the hill, growing more and more anxious about Amal, she would spend the rest of the afternoon calling on Nils Larsen at Cal Tech. He knew the secret of Amal's identity and would know why the Department of Experimental Genetics was intent on eliminating Amal. Tomorrow -- if Amal escaped capture today -- she would drive out the Ridge Route after a routine day's work at the office, drop from the guide band and be with Amal on the Skinhead Reservation when the earthquake struck. There at least he was safe from the authorities. He would not be distinguishable from any chance supplicant for admission to the sect and, in his religious fervor against the gods of technology. Brother Kiefer would not permit even a transistor radio on the reservation. lack of infatuation with status that he had never once mentioned to her that his apartment was on the #th floor, only one level below the faculty residences, and she felt the irony of her position as the elevator rose. Engaged to one of the most eligible bachelors in Pasadena, she had never entered his pod. Now, during the dating hours, she was calling unannounced on the roommate he had wanted her to avoid. In a way the police had done her a favor by holding her, as a lawabiding citizen, on the mound until three-thirty as a lure for Amal. They had delayed her call on Nils until slightly after four o'clock when she could arrive inconspicuously with other incoming females, while all males were sequestered in their rooms, doors open, awaiting whatever "date" chose to enter. Cal Tech, she observed, was no U.S.C. during the period called by students "Sadie Hawkins' time." Her elevator was far from being crowded. Three very young girls in the blue uniforms of Marymount High School, all giggling and twittering over their lark, were riding to the freshman's level. An older platinum blonde with the bored hauteur of a demirep had punched the #th floor button -- the topmost level reserved for Nobel Prize winners. Apartment number #I was directly across the rotunda from the elevator. Before she stepped into the music-flooded corridor Lyn saw the door was closed. Already Nils had scored. She might have expected it. He was a native of nearby Covina, blond and handsome, and not every girl shared Lyn's distaste for trite metaphors. His date introduced complications in Lyn's plan of attack, but she remembered the slogan of the sex hour -- two's company; three's a party -- and pushed the doorbell. She waited, listening to the beckoning music from the open doors around the circular corridor. A full minute passed before the startled face of Nils appeared at the door window. "Lyn!" "How are you, Nils?" "Well, er, at the moment taking a bath." His voice dropped. "Amal's not hiding here." "I know it. Nils. I've come to double your pleasure, double your fun." He smiled at her cliche and his voice rose an octave. "I'm alone, Lyn. Wait a moment until I slip into a bathrobe." From the corner of her eyes, she saw a young man peer from an open doorway farther around the circle. He grew slightly bug-eyed and called loudly to her, "Lyn Oberlin -- in the flesh." She waved and smiled at him, flattered that he should remember her name. It had been months since the Scientists and Models Ball. Then the whistling began, even from the doorways beyond her vision, drowning the music with luring sibilance, and Nils seemed to be taking an interminable time to towel himself and throw on a robe. Feeling sympathy for all female mynah birds caught in the middle during mating rites, she called over the sound, "Back to your holes, moles. Tm not your earth mother." Laughter greeted her sally and the whistling was dying when Nils opened the door. Lyn closed the door firmly behind her. "How are you. Nils?" "Then you didn't come to see Amal?" "No. You. When the cat's away the rats may play." Her words held a Freudian slip. He failed to notice -- but Lyn was noticing much. They were standing in the reception alcove and the door to the bedroom on her left was slightly ajar. The bed was mussed and Nils hair was dry. His first thought when he opened the door had been clear and strong enough for her to catch at a glance:  hope she doesn't ask to use the bathroom. "You're sure you don't have a date?" she insisted, knowing that he did -- and with surely the world's most modest girl, one hiding in the bathroom. "No, I've been working all afternoon." He escorted her into a living room where her feet sank inches into a Persian carpet -- handwoven, no doubt. Near the window a long leather sofa, fronted by a massive ebony coffee table and chairs, had been placed to catch the view to the southwest. To the right was a bar. "May I offer you a drink?" Nils turned to her as he asked and she could tell that his still fragmented thoughts held a high libidinal content. Very good. Her plan was to encourage such expectations. "Please. Scotch and soda." She strode to the window to look out as he hurried to the bar. "What a lovely view. Nils." "Yes. On a clear day you can see Catalina." S HE would huild up his hopes, she decided, and when he was keyed to the proper pitch she would snap his string. In the resulting emotional chaos his most guarded thoughts might surface and she would do her best to follow whatever leads he gave her to their source. She turned as he approached with a tray bearing drinks. "Where do you want me to sit. Nils?" Flustered, he splashed their drinks slightly as he tried to put down the tray and point to the sofa simultaneously. "My, what a clumsy Ganymede you are," she chided him. "Give it to me, Nils -- the tray." Smiling sheepishly he handed her the dampened tray and asked, "What's a Ganymede?" "A Greek god, cupbearer to Zeus." "Was he something like Apollo?" "Much more handsome. Apollo was to Ganymede what Loki was to Siegfried." Indubitably, among the girls who would be attracted to Nils Larsen, many would have compared him to Siegfried. Her allusion should not go unnoticed. She took the tray to the bar, swabbed it dry with a few deft circles of the bar cloth, letting her movements carry to her thighs. When she turned back he was standing, watching her, his robe loose. She pointed to the end of the sofa as she handed him a napkin and ordered, "Down, boy. Sit!" She took her drink to the opposite end of the sofa, sat and arched back luxuriantly into the leather. "Here's to you and yours," he said, lifting his glass. She raised hers. He was responding to her body language, but still strangely anxious about the girl in the bathroom. Probably some Cal Tech coed had dropped in and Nils was ashamed of the I.Q. freak, which only proved him as unperceptive as pretentious. It should be obvious to him -- from Amal -- that she, too, preferred intellectuals. From sheer gossipy interest she was tempted to probe his thoughts about the girl, but her depth scanning would have to await more serious concerns. "Did you meet Amal?" "No. One of your boys from Eugenics Surveillance got there before I did and Amal must have seen him first." It would have taken no mindreader to translate the quizzical glance Nils threw at her. It asked an outright question: how did a psychologist learn about the Eugenics Surveillance Agency? "I never heard of the agency," he said. He lied with the same skill he served drinks, she thought, remembering the rumpled bed, his dry hair and now his use of the word "agency" which she had avoided. "I didn't mean yours personally," she said. "I meant the genetics department's agency. Though it does seem strange that your man was there, with members of the the meeting but Amal and me -- and you." "He never told me where you were meeting," Nils reminded her. "All he mentioned was 'Moses' country!" He turned his gaze from her, looking through the window, and she focused on his profile, the lines of his body, catching the perturbations of a mind torn between friendship and a sense of duty. Duty to what, to whom, she wondered, as his first clear thought came to her: What went wrong at the stakeout? After the thought she caught his sense of relief. At least he had a remnant of conscience, she decided, and attacked his guilt feelings. "But he had told you about Moses earlier -- " her voice flooded with anger -- "and for a few pieces of silver you sold the man who is risking his life to save yours." "He won't be killed -- " He saw the anger in her eyes and the sentence continued only in his mind:... by the hunters. When they come for him they will be moving in stow motion... "His reflexes are too fast," he finished aloud. "His reflexes failed him once," she said, concentrating on his eyes, "on the seventh lap of the John C. Calhoun Raceway." Black file date! S HE caught the thought streaking through his mind on a laser pulse of alarm -- and she admired the self-control that allowed him to say calmly, "He never mentioned to me any failure on any race course." "Come now," she said deliberately, tensing ail her receptors and focusing on his thoughts. "Surely you've learned from the black file that Leroy Thatcher was killed." It was then his control left him. Stupefaction showed on his face. His thoughts shattered, the fragments striking against her in bits and pieces. Some lodged like live coals in her brain. Where did she learn about the black files? Amal? No... some other method... telepathy? It must be... yes, bioplasmatic receptors... parametric waves... all indications... the cocked head... the off-focus eyes... but Heywood said the psi experimerits failed. There are no mindreaders. Witchcraft , then... guard my thoughts. She's staring at me... make her look somewhere else... her mind's burning me... Lyn, herself shaken, looked away, focusing her attention on a painting of a Saracen knight on the wall behind him. She had come seeking knowledge only of Amal's origins, and .from the mind of this geneticist had rolled secrets pointing to a solution of her own mysteries. Obviously there had been an attempt to breed psychic sensitives and Nils Larsen, aware of such experiments, carried in his mind psychic arcana of which she was unaware. "Bioplasmatic receptors" and "parametric waves" were terms unknown to her, but Nils Larsen evidently had been trained to look for such phenomena. Walk carefully around this man, her mind cautioned her even as her memory Hashed back to the disappointed parapsychologist of her childhood. No doubt the man had been a member of the Eugenics Surveillance Agency and by a ruse she had escaped observation. They believed the "psi experiments had failed -- " or so Heywood had told Nils. The name Heywood stirred in her memory, but she could not place it. Nils, composed now, was asking, "What did Amal tell you about this Leroy Thatcher?" Suspicious, sensing the powers of adversary and probably aware that he could guard his thoughts effectively by such simple stratagems as adding a column of figures in his mind or counting backward. Nils was now taking the offensive. He was seeking less to determine what she knew, she suspected, than to discover how much of her information came from Amal. "You forget I'm Amal's consulting psychologist," she said. "What he tells me is privileged." "Then you probably know more about him than I do -- so why come to me?" He was definitely seeking information and it would be pointless to attempt to read his thoughts while his defenses were alerted. Her best chance for breaking through to his knowledge, she realized, would come if she could force him to a crisis of conscience. His guilt feelings might be her greatest ally. "Tve come to let you know that I know you've sold a friend and fellow student for blood money. Of all who know where Amal is, with his hologram being broadcast constantly, the only one who came forward to claim the reward was his doting and obsequious roommate. I imagine your parent is proud of her son." "Rest your mind on that score," he said, stirring uneasily. "I wouldn't have taken a penny." spoke the truth. "Then why did you inform on him?" "Amal's not what you think, Lyn." He turned to her. "I did what Amal would have done -- voluntarily -- if he understood the patterns of his fate as well as I. Lyn, stay away from him. Leave Los Angeles. He's the danger. Not the earthquake. To you and me -- to himself -- he's everything he seems to be, brave, generous, unselfish. But get out -- out of Los Angeles -- tonight, while there's time." "You're gibbering," she snapped. "I wish to God I were. But I've already told you more than I'm cleared to talk about. I'm sorry, Lyn, but I'm asking you to leave. Please go." "All right." She stood up. He was weakening. She could still force his conscience to a crisis. She was standing close to the bedroom door and the floor plans of all apartment modules were standard. Through the door and across the bedroom was the bathroom. "All right. I'll leave, you Judas," she said. "But your stench has made me sick. I'm going to throw up." She whirled and flung open the door, seeing him rise too slowly to stop her. She was across the bedroom, noticing the two beds, one mussed, before Nils could stumble after her, calling "Don't go in there!" The strained hoarseness in his voice reminded her of a yelping seal. She slammed the bathroom door and clicked the lock. At first glance the bathroom appeared unoccupied, but a vague shadow behind the opaque plastic of the shower panel revealed Nils' guest's hiding place. Lyn slid back the panel and stood breast-tobreast with herself standing regally in the shower stall, stark naked except for the pendant watch draped around her neck. For a moment Lyn was fractured between laughter and indignation, but a few shards of her feelings consisted of outright admiration for the artifact in front of her. The boys of the Daedalus Society might have taken the original's measurements -- all of them -- with calipers, so exact was the replica. They've made, my lips too full, she thought, nitpicking, and my eyes are a shade too green... "What's your name?" she asked the gynodrone. Focusing its eyes on the sound of her voice, wetting its lips and answering with a huskiness deeper than her own, it answered, "Lyn Oberlin." "How dare you use my name, you simpering whore?" Her shriek was designed to carry through the door to Nils Larsen in the bedroom and she was forced to mute a note of triumph in her squeal. The patterns of Nils' fate had presented her with an opportunity to squash him without resorting to mindreading. She had almost caught him in the act of making love to a plastic replica of herself. She swept back into the bedroom to find Nils sitting on the edge of the mussed bed, his head in his hands, looking down at the floor. Standing in front of him, looking down on the top of his head, she lashed him with her voice. "Hiring that gynodrohe leaves you open to invasion-of-privacy charges. After today I'm not above airing your solitary practices in court. What would your girl friend in Covina think of a Romeo who could only score with a plastic dummy? Did Amal know you were renting this thing? Or were you turning him in to get him out of the room? Look at me!" His ego, completely crushed, had readied him for interrogation. He lifted stricken eyes. "What do you want from me? Why did you come?" She asked, "Who's Heywood?" "The head of the genetics department," he said. "Is he qualified to tell me about Amal?" "Yes." "Where is he?" "On the seventy-ninth floor." Behind her she saw a trail littered with missed opportunities. She should have remembered Heywood and his should have been the mind to burn with her questions. Moreover, she should have briefed herself on his background. His residence on the #th floor indicated that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize, so he would be listed in Who's Who. "Get your clothes on," she snapped. "Then telephone the head warlock of your coven. Tell him you're bringing Lyn Oberlin up to interview him on Amal Severn. He'll know my name. He's already been snooping around my office. Tell him anything you wish -- but you'd better persuade him. Otherwise, lover boy, your plastic sweetheart will become public knowledge." "Heywood's not what you think he is," Nils muttered, looking again down at the carpet as he stood up. "I'll draw my own conclusions," she said brusquely. S HE had used a shameful combination of blackmail and bullying on Nils, she later admitted to herself, and enjoyed every minute of it. As a social psychologist, she knew that students in Nils' category frequently preferred gynodrones over live girls as lesser hazards to concentration -- and in retrospect she was more flattered than indignant over finding her replica on campus. Dr. Heywood lived alone in a double pod, richly but quietly furnished. He greeted them in the entrance alcove with the graciousness of a host receiving guests, saying to Lyn, "I'm truly sorry. Miss Oberlin, that you should arrive at this hour with a male escort." Superficially he was suave, charming, seemingly gentle. Though slightly built and no taller than Lyn, his air of authority made him seem taller. She noted a sensitive, almost poetic quality to his widely spaced blue eyes whose color matched the tints in his wavy gray hair. Distinguished looking, almost handsome, the formalism of his appearance -- his trimmed hair, business suit and white shirt -- indicated that he identified with students. His only concession to his fifty-odd years was a flaring Windsor knot in his necktie. Bowing, he ushered them into his office, apologizing for his mild witticism. "Of course, I jest. An aging swan can only dream of Ledean bodies." His wistful, Yeatsian metaphor alone, comparing her to Leda, would have attracted her and the burden of regret it carried touched her sympathies. In the office he took her chair and arranged it to take full advantage of the view through the window of San Jacinto far to eastward, its snow-capped summit ensalmoned by the late afternoon sunlight. He held her chair until she was seated, a bit of old-fashioned gallantry she found endearing. "I fell under your spell yesterday, Miss Oberlin," he confessed as he passed behind his mahogany desk to seat himself, "while you watched Red Benton thrash the Gorgeous One in defense of academic freedom. It was then, seeing what beauty and talent had allied itself with Amal, that I decided, reluctantly -- and I want to make it very clear that it was reluctantly -- to call in outside authority to influence Amal's fate." "Doctor Heywood, for the second time in this hour I've heard Amal's fate mentioned. What is his fate? What has Leroy Thatcher to do with it and how did the state department get involved in it?" Heywood threw up his hands in self-defense and peeked from behind them, smiling. "Gentle woman, please. I'll attempt to answer all questions, but space them. First, Amal's fate." He lowered his hands to his desk and drummed its polished surface lightly with manicured nails. He was gathering his thoughts. "As a psychologist you know that many behaviorists maintain there is no random human behavior, that even an impulse to rise and get a drink of water is predestined, preordained. Shakespeare wrote that our fate is not in the stars but in ourselves. The truth goes deeper. Our fate is not in ourselves but in our genes." His voice trailed a little sadly into the final admission, but it suddenly changed timbre. He tilted his head upward and his eyes glowed with an inner exaltation. "Man's fate -- the orchestrations of his genes. From life's primal matter we geneticists compose arias, symphonies. Ambulatory Eugenic Experiment Number Seven was to have been our supreme creation in the lyric mode, derived from a motif designed to counterpoint triumphantly the dissonances of the population sink. The theme of Amal Eugene Severn was this -- he was to be the prototype of the ideal man for a crowded planet, a short movement rising to an unforgettable climax." He paused and in the pause Lyn realized a poet was speaking, a master lecturer known in the parlance of students as a "snowman." She leaned forward. "I have a secret to tell you, M iss Oberlin... three questions before he started. For the next twenty minutes she was mesmerized by his flowing, allusive speech and his facial expression, now intent, now withdrawn, smiling quickly, quickly serious. Ambulatory Eugenic Experiment Seven was begun before the Holocaust solved the population problem, he told her. "Newspapers rationed to four pages because of the declining supply of wood pulp carried stories predicting a ninety-year active life span. More people were living longer, consuming more, contributing less to an age of gluttonous sloths blindly procreating. In the year two thousand twentyfour an unidentified U.N. spokesman tendered a sub rosa offer to a world congress of geneticists -- money would be available for experiments to limit population and increase the supply of contributing inhabitants by morally acceptable means. "Ah, dear lady, how could human life be made shorter and more fruitful by morally acceptable means?" "As is not unusual in such matters the geneticists received assistance from an unforeseen source. An actuarian wrote an article in an insurance journal describing ten generations of an English family in which every male died accidentally before the age of twenty-six. The actuarian suggested that the so-called 'death wish' might be inheritable. "One of our boys ran across the article, took a computer readout on the actuarial statistics at Hartford and verified the actuaritaken of the accident prone, of all who died accidentally while young -- suicides, trapeze artists. holograms were made of the cell tissues. Out of the maze of charts, diagrams and configurations a consistent anomaly arose, a warp Thanatos Syndrome Factor was isolated. Through breeding and by foetal implants we felt we could solve, in a morally acceptable manner, the planet's population crisis. "We were not playing God but using our intellects. Who is to say what determines good breeding? The Adamses? The Jukes? The Kallikaks? Or shall reasonable, hard-pressed men of good will forfeit the decision to two fumbling teenagers in the rear of an automobile? "Why continue such an experiment after the Holocaust struck and the need for it had passed, a delightfully intent young woman might ask. Simple inertia. We had to climb Annapurna because it was there, its virginal snowcrest gleaming." Amal had been well bred for his purpose. He was the product of the ovum of a distinguished poetess who was a suicide at twenty, inseminated by the sperm of a mathematician who had contributed to unified field mathematics before his death in a plane crash, following family tradition, at the age of twenty-three. Amal's forebrain had been further enriched by foetal cloning of Leroy Thatcher's neural tissue in a uterine operation. The cloning was an error of commission, Heywood admitted: with the Thanatos gene -- seven generations of Thatcher males died at the age of twenty-one." It seemed that the pre-patterned cast shadows along Amal's neural paths. Still, the auto racer had added a charming, devil-may-care nonchalance to Amal's personality. ment seem so rational, so necessary and so truly humanitarian that Lyn ceased to think of Amal as the man she loved and began to regard him solely as AE # -- Ambulatory Eugenic Experiment Number Seven. She was commiserating with Heywood over the defects hindsight revealed in the experiment when one of his remarks wrenched her back to subjectivity. "Nature has her own logic which at times defeats us -- even defeats nature. Foredoomed to a short lifespan, moved at a faster pace by its higher frequency brain waves, the new species -- homo ultra sapiens, I suppose we should have called it -- was apparently protected by high sexual potency. An unwed Spanish gypsy is bringing suit against the University of Madrid for child support, and a South African black girl is in jail for violation of apartheid. We erred in that our anti-sex conditioning was not strong enough -- vasectomies would have been surer. "But nature erred in the specimens' overkill capabilities. Far from behing the 'ideal man for a crowded planet,' one generation of the species would have depopulated a planet the size of Saturn, leaving only the birds and beetles. So -- our Ambulatory Experiment Number Seven will soon be filed with our failures." Thrashing out of the snowbank, Lyn asked, "After Amal dies?" "Not necessarily," Heywood shook his head. "After we discover if he has been defused or not. I will call on outside authorities only to reapply psychic pressure released when he made his contribution to science. With his host of loyal fellow students -- I'm sure there's not another turncoat among them -- to guard him and with his quickness of mind and physical reactions, I doubt if he'll be apprehended by the police unless he wishes to be. In that event he'll be placed immediately into another pressure cooker. "If we can keep his lid on tightly enough, occupy him with surrogate obsessions until his love for you erodes his death wish -- I think we all may be safe from his Doomsday Gene." "Then you think Amal has a chance to avoid his fate?" "At least fifty-fifty. We have a young school administrator in Hamburg, Germany, who is happily married and pregnant with twins. You see, Miss Oberlin, we keep a close watch on our subjects. My fear is that Amal will have already set in motion the machinery for riots and destruction when Little Palmdale strikes. But we'll know tomorrow. All AE Sevens die in the cataclysms they create." He smiled at Lyn. "After the crisis, I can assure you, a living Amal will be granted amnesty as a public benefactor. I hope to see you again next Sunday. Even if I'm not invited to the wedding I may slip into a back pew at Dotham Baptist just to see you in your wedding gown." He arose and extended his hand in farewell. Gratefully she arose and accepted it, saying, "I'll see that you get an invitation. Doctor Heywood, but I have one more question. What happened to Amal's creche mother?" "Poor lady," he sighed. "She believes her favorite son was killed in a bus crash." His face brightened and he added: "On your honeymoon you might visit her in Iran." "I have a question. Doctor Heywood." Nils spoke for the first time. "Since Lyn knows about AE Seven, will Amal's genetic card by reclassified from top secret?" Heywood was vexed. "Of course Lyn will keep our secret. Would any girl tell the boy she loves that he's a pastiche, an artificial man, a thing of bits and patches? Certainly not Lyn. Even if he dies tomorrow she'll not dishonor his memory. After all, we still must consider the Puritan ethic and Lyn is too loyal to spread canards about the boy." H eywood was so right, Lyn thought, as they bade the doctor good evening and exited into the corridor. "What did you think of him?" Nils asked. "He's overwhelming," she said, thinking: I shall tell Amal about his creche mother on our wedding day... "I'm beginning to think differently about him myself," Nils said. "This morning he thanked this 'turncoat' for giving him the exact time you were supposed to meet Amal in Dotham, which was already staked out. "My dad used to be a salesman," Nils continued, as if talking to himself. "He told me how he used to feel after the sales manager gave all the salesmen a pep talk early in the morning. They would go out feeling they could soon as they hit the sidewalk it was the same old street." A strong note of dissent in Nils' opinion aroused her critical faculties -- which, she realized, Heywood's personality had numbed. "He did seem to be wearing blinders. Something was missing in his arguments." "Honesty," Nils said, punching the elevator button viciously. And her appreciation of Nils climbed as he continued to mutter. "They lied to Amal. They lied to his creche mother. They conditioned him to fear earthquakes through lies, then manipulated him into coming to a school which practically straddles the San Andreas Fault. In the seismo lab -- every time the damned needle wavered Amal bolted for the door. Talk about free will. He has as much control over his fate as a rat has over its maze. He's more conspired against than conspiring." Still muttering as they stepped into the elevator. Nils said, "I tell you this -- my name may be mud with you, but if the pods fall tomorrow I'll be waiting on the ground with a laser torch to burn Amal's card from the black files and present it to you as a wedding present. It's the only master card. It's microfilmed in Switzerland, but no one could find the film without the number on the card." "Why not take all the files?" "What would I do with them?" She felt she might have a personal interest in the files but didn't wish to tell Nils. "I don't know," she answered, "but Red Benton would know. May I call him from your apartment. Perhaps we three could have dinner together." to return to my apartment?" She laughed aloud at the incredulity in his voice and confessed, "Of course. Nils. I might even use your bathroom. I wouldn't think of bringing charges against you -- unless I catch you running around with some other gynodrone." Her call reached Red Benton alone in his room. He complained that the allegations of an impending earthquake had ruined Sadie Hawkins. Lyn's invitation to dinner to discuss "an important development concerning Amal" found him eager to accept. He suggested they meet at the Steak-Out, a restaurant atop the courthouse frequented by policemen. The patrons were people who respected privacy. The Steak-Out also had facilities for projecting Amal's "wanted" hologram live. In the rush of her day Lyn had not seen the hologram, though it had been shown every hour since noon. Red wanted her to see that even the police were not above editorializing in a five-minute all points bulletin. T hey met in the lobby of the restaurant and had no trouble finding a table adjacent to the television stage. Off-duty policemen were bored by a hologram most had memorized earlier and which was fading from the platform as the waiter led Lyn's trio to seats. Still inhibited by his professional attitudes toward secrecy. Nils let Lyn explain the black f'Ics to Red and recount in detail her conversation with Dr. Heywood concerning the genetic experiment and the unforeseen destructiveness of the Doomsday Gene. So strong was the charisma Heywood had cast over her thoughts that she found herself justifying AE # to the intent lawyer. Red did not accept Heywood's position. "What you've outlined," he said, "is a crime against humanity. The governments of Spain, Russia and South Africa are criminally liable before the World Court for connivance in this experiment which, apart from inhuman aspects, constitutes mass murder. More to the point, each government has opened itself to a class action for damages on the part of the dependent survivors of the victims." He turned to Nils. with hard evidence I'll see that it's used without prejudice to you and to your financial advantage. If any catastrophe results from Amal's behavior -- even as a proximate cause -- I can bring a class action that will end experimentation with human lives now and forever." "I'm thinking of Amal," Lyn pointed out. "Both Kley and Heywood assured me that if one pod popped Amal would be granted amnesty. If the earthquake is not severe, could Amal bring counterconspiracy charges against the government or claim that he was a tool of government policy?" "Kley and Hey wood were quoting the official line from Washington," Red said, shaking his head. "If a killer quake strikes, the city will have unofficially assisted in evacuating the towers and the government will get the credit. If there's only a mild temblor the government has Amal to blame for disrupting the city's activities. He'll never be let off the hook." "But Heywood sounded so humanitarian. Surely the government would not carry out a vindictive policy?" Red looked at her as if confounded by her naivete. "You've become so involved with government you forget its history and traditions. Heywood was giving you a cover story designed to bridge a credibility gap. In a way, you've been honored because on your own, you uncovered a governmental conspiracy. Our stringent anti-conspiracy laws arose from the need of governments to monopolize the practice of conspiracy. Anything marked top secret is ipso facto evidence of governmental conspiracy. Heywood was no doubt authorized by the state department to extend to you the full benefits of an official brainwashing." Nils spoke up suddenly. "Heywood's avocational job is cosmetician at Forest Lawn. They tell me he has a genius for making a corpse look as if it were alive." "That follows," Red Benton commented. Lyn was not interested in their personal comments about Heywood -- and in Red Benton she sensed more than a conspirator or a behind-the-scenes manipulator. He had spoken with the cynicism of a revolutionary and she suspected he held a secret contempt for democratic processes. As he turned to Nils to outline a plan for tomorrow she studied his face. She could not share his belief that the government would deliberately practice malfeasance -- but as a malfeaspr himself. Red was qualified to know. Even though she saw only his profile, his thoughts were clear and strong enough for her to read. While remaining strictly in the background, he intended to get the black files and make a name for himself as a lawyer, even if it meant talking Nils into burglarizing the genetics department pod if it failed to fall. It was a two-unit pod, she recalled, on the twentieth floor. Suspended on the Y of a double frame, it would probably hold. Still, Red had a keen legal mind and a thought prompted her to ask, "Red, what if I should find Amal and marry him? He would no longer be stateless." "The marriage would have no retroactive bearing on his prior offenses -- but if he should die accidentally tomorrow you could collect benefits as his widow." "Forget it," Lyn snapped. "I'm no harpy." Red glanced at her, confused by her refusal of the opportunity. Nils Larsen was equally confused on different grounds. "What's a harpy?" Nils asked. "An ill-strung musical instrument," she answered, reading in the flippancy of her remark the symptoms of cultural dislocation. The rapid pace changes were beginning to affect her. "Here it is, Lyn," Red said as the television stage darkened and the three-dimensional form of Amal Severn appeared. The image cast from lensless photographs, was so real Lyn felt a pang of recognition. The pang dissolved into rising anger. The questions asked by the voice of an offstage genetic detective were obviously slanted. "Leading questions," Red called them, designed to point up Amal's appeal to hunters. Amal's answers suggested that he was extremely quick, bold and skilled in the use of camouflage. He could go days without water and could run one hundred meters in ten seconds. He feared nothing but earthquakes -- and his pathological fear of quakes had led him to predict a disaster. "You get their drift?" Red said to her. "Nothing less than a killer quake will set Amal free. On the hoof, he's worth over half a of Los Angeles County in hunting licenses." Red spoke the truth. Kley and Heywood had lied. She sat dazed, the iconography of her life shattered and the dust from her plaster saints choking her. She could only nibble at the food the waiter brought. Her mouth was too dry. The government she had trusted was a fraud. O N Red's advice she left the restaurant after dessert. He did not want her involved in any possible conspiracy he and Nils might discuss. But she also knew that he feared she was still loyal to the board of supervisors. He was wrong, but she wished to be alone. She left, feeling even more upset by Red's motives. He was less concerned with Amal or with righting a social wrong than with the opportunity to bring a class action against the government and win it. His indignation, though genuine, was a cover story to conceal his own ambition. No wonder he planned to enter politics, she thought -- he had the talents of a politician. Whatever his failings. Red Benton held to the integrity of his own thoughts, Lyn admitted, as she drove the Dunemaster onto the Harbor Freeway. In contrast, her mind was like a banjo on which anyone could pluck his tune. She who had been swayed so easily by Heywood's charisma was now equally in vassalage to Red's cynicism. IX Attempting to weigh the arguments of both men, she felt the weight of logic was in Red's favor. Contrary to Heywood's implied assertion, Amal was no puppet on strings. For her authority she had Amal himself who -- centuries ago, it seemed -- had declaimed with such fervor in the Emerson's parlor that he was the captain of his fate. Heywood had been completely wrong in assuming that for love of Amal she would conceal from him her knowledge of his origins. Heywood erred because he did not know that she was aware that she, too, was a product of human engineering with her dubious gifts of telepathy and precognition. What tie could bind more strongly lover and beloved than a mutual awareness that both were genetic freaks? After she had parked the Dunemaster and brought down her supplies and pemmican to store in the auto it was her precognition that allowed her at bedtime to drift almost immediately into an untroubled sleep. She knew there would be a major earthquake, that far out in space the circling moon -- which would shadow the sun tomorrow -- was bringing Amal amnesty. For in her trance she saw the stanchion fall. Only one snag roiled the currents of her oncoming sleep. On the edge of somnolence her mind stirred to the memory of the popping sounds so clairaudible in her vision. What were they? She still wondered as she fell into deep slumber. and clear, an ill portent for Los Angeles. Lyn rose early to catch the morning news. From her bedroom window she could see the far snow crest of Mount San Jacinto. She could feel the positive ions in the crystalline air drawing taut her skin. The wind was off the high desert. There would be spontaneous fist fights in the parks today, for when the Santa Ana conditions prevailed tempers in Los Angeles grew frayed. Foehns had been used to exonerate murderers in California, and a Santa Ana had been blowing when Los Angeles was burned -- both times. Listening to the news she felt rubber-brained from a mild attack of cultural shock, caused, she assumed, by a delayed reaction to her shift from the quiet of Dotham to the pace of Los Angeles. Amal had not been apprehended during the night, so she decided to put in a full threehour day before joining him on the Skinhead Reservation after lunch. As she slid into her fabricated buckskin jeans, ankle boots and denim shirt she considered -- and decided against, because of the weight -- putting something by Rousseau into her backpack to help her understand the noble savages she would be among. By then, the office routine should have stabilized her sense of reality. All seemed normal at the office when Lyn floated in. Clerks and typists were going about their usual minimal tasks with a maximum of gossip. As usual, Kley arrived twenty minutes late. For the first hour and a halfher therapy seemed to be working. By #:# she had received seven calls, only two of which she transferred to Kley. The eighth call tossed her senses back into the centrifuge. Dr. Kiefer, former professor of economics at U.S.C. and presently pastor of the Skinhead Reservation, had urgent and private business with Dr. Kley. Lyn took the call, realizing immediately what the urgent and private business concerned and knowing, too, that Kiefer had called the wrong bureau. Her mental malaise left her at the sight of his face. When she had been an undergraduate, before the revocation of Kiefer's tenure because of his anti-technology bias, he had been pointed out to her as the last Malthusian economist. He had been young then and his hair had been long and flowing. Now, shorn even of eyebrows, ball. He looked even younger than she remembered him, despite his horn-rimmed glasses whose power of magnification seemed to cantilever his hrown eyes. All this she caught at a glance and focused on his background. He was calling from a booth in what must have been a country store, judging from the jumbled merchandise on the display counters. But the few shoppers she could see were browsing too leisurely to be agricultural workers. Through a window she saw a single auto pass, going too slowly to be on a freeway, so the store was on a rural road. The headdress of an Indian hanging on a distant wall suddenly clinched the location. Kiefer was calling from the souvenir shop at Old Fort Tejon, just outside the Skinhead Reservation. Unrestrained by any loyalty to Kley or the government, Lyn lied swiftly from behind her official smile. "If your call concerns the reward for Amal Severn, I'm in charge of temporary disbursements." Kiefer cast a worried glance behind him. Only his head and shoulders were visible in the view frame, but she could see he wore a sleazy garment and in the V below his neck his chest was bare. No doubt, dressed in a sack cloth robe, barefooted and baldheaded, Kiefer was concerned about his appearance in a public place. "That's it. I've got your man. Here, on the reservation." Slowly, officiously, she reached for a note pad and pen, asking, "Does the description fit that of the suspect broadcast from his official hologram?" "We don't permit television on our reserve. But the one you want, the earthquake nut, is here. He's telling my people where to go, how to stand... He's scared stiff." Lyn tapped her cheek with her pen. No television was permitted on the reserve, likewise no radios. This paragon of Christian anti-technology was a hypocritical Judas with a radio hidden on the reservation. "You realize. Doctor Kiefer -- " "Brother Kiefer, please." "We have received hundreds of calls. Brother Kiefer, which must be checked carefully to avoid false arrest suits against the city. Really, your description is rathpersons in Los Angeles are at this moment frightened by earthquakes and -- " "But this one calls himself Amal Severn and there's another, a Hal Carpenter -- " "You don't quite seem to understand the problem. For twenty-five thousand dollars -- " "I don't want the money," Kiefer interrupted, obviously anxious to get out of the store and back onto the reservation. "What I want is the equivalent in powdered milk, powdered eggs, medical supplies -- " "Please, Brother Kiefer. Those details will have to be settled after the identification of the suspect is established. Now, I can have someone out there within the hour -- " "Listen, lady. I don't want to get involved. I don't want personally to identify -- " "For heaven's sake. Brother Kiefer, how do you propose to identify the suspect while incognito?" "You can send someone out to identify him. I want the supplies -- that's all." "Very well. Brother Kiefer, I'll send someone out, but how will we know where to find you?" Kiefer licked his lips. "I'll be in my tent, meditating." "Where is your tent?" "Come through the Fort Tejon Gate. Go to the pile of boulders on top of the hill. Cathedral rocks. You can't miss them. Ask Moon Boy, the hermit. He lives there. But I want your word that the supplies will be forthcoming." "Brother Kiefer, I can promise nothing until identification is proved. Then there will be forms to fill out, affidavits to attest to. There'll be a broker's commission, usually ten per cent, for the purchase of your supplies. You'll have to sign the broker's release. A release will have to be signed absolving the city of responsibility in the event of defective merchandise. Next, of course, there will be requisitions to be signed for the city's trucks since I'm sure you'll not be transporting the merchandise -- " "Madam," he broke in. "I'll put my faith in the Queen of Angels. With her help, get someone out here quickly. Go with God." He hung up. F rom his haste, his apprehension, his nervousness, it would have been easy for the most inept social psychologist to recognize in Brother Kiefer advanced symptoms of maladjustment and his manner had struck resonances in her own mind. Suddenly she wondered what was wrong with her -- Amal was in peril and she was analyzing Kiefer. A part of her psyche seemed afloat. Yet her detachment floated above a hard and solid base. She had shielded Amal from his fate for at least another hour and there was more she could do, much more. Switching on Kley's intercom. she put a smile in her voice. "Doctor Kley, my stomach's a little upset. May I be excused for the rest of the day?" "Certainly, Lyn. In about half an hour I'm going to develop a splitting headache myself." Leaving the office for the elevator to the garage basement, she recalled that Amal had laughed at her paper on the Skinheads. What she was doing naw should demonstrate to him that abstract knowledge had practical value. She knew exactly which roads to take. Oh, yes, she reminded herself, a telegraphic warrant would permit the authorities to follow her onto the reservation. She would have to assume she was being followed and lose her tail. Dropping in the elevator widened the breach between her thoughts and reality. Vaguely she wondered when this flippancy, this sense of remoteness so characteristic of cultural displacement had begun. Probably when she found her gynodrone in Nils' shower. The sight had split her between laughter and indignation and the rift had not healed. There were earthquakes inthe human mind, she thought. When the stresses grew too great a fault slipped, the personality was shaken and slowly subsided into a new balance of forces. Wheeling the Dunemaster up the ramp, she decided she had been hit by a # temblor. She turned on the car radio and focused her attention on the announcer's voice. His thoughts, more coherent than her own, might help to readjust her thought patterns, or so she hoped. Earthquake panic had stricken Los Angeles, the announcer said. Orderlies were moving nonambulatory patients from the hospitals. Thank heaven, Amal was ambulatory. Ambulatory Eugenic Seven, a pretty name. As a result of the panic, the announcer said, supply depots were being set up in the city's parks. "Some panic," she said aloud, thinking of Red Benton's distaste for editorializing reporters. This particular announcer was not much help in arranging her thoughts into logical patterns. Perhaps all of Los Angeles was in a permanent state of cultural shock. Thirty new warrants had been issued for the arrest of students charged with varying degrees of conspiracy. Among those named were Wallace Bergner, her floor warden, and Hal Carpenter. Gloria Jaffee, producer of the spectacular Los Angeles -- the Last Day, had been arrested in New Jersey and was being held. Red Benton had been right in keeping Lyn's name off the list of credits -- but Red was always right. At San Fernando she switched to an inside fast lane and turned from the news to a classical music station. Still pursuing her dreamy self-analysis, she wondered why she had changed stations. Did she fear news from Hamburg, or did she wish to die to appropriate background music when she took the U-turn at Lebec? In a fit of peevish defiance she turned to a hop music station and upped the volume on the radio. She would go to her Gotterddmmerung to the soaring strains of the Berkeley Bounce. Yet at the moment she half-wished she had been cloned with the forebrain of Leroy Thatcher. She prided herself on her driving skills but she had never before cut from a guidance band at # kilometers per hour to make a U-turn on a busy freeway. "Well, there's a first time for everything," she said aloud, testing her grip on the steering wheel. Though her words were self-bantering, her mood whimsical, a serious substratum of her mind was grateful she had planned the U-turn in advance and had chosen her spot with care. Past Gorman she was climbing toward the Grapevine, and the north-south lanes of the freeway were separating farther for the Lebec turn. At the curve, behind a huge boulder, the median strip was as wide as a football field, though far from as smooth. She the width for her turning space. Five hundred meters ahead, only a few meters north of the San Andreas Fault line, the boulder swung into view. Her euphoria left her. She was alert, concentrating. The closest vehicle trailing her in the inside lane was fifty meters behind. If policemen were in the car they would have no time to react and the next turn-around was Wheeler Ridge, forty kilometers north. No helicopters were overhead. The green upthrusts of the Tehachapis were sweeping down and past her like waves in a frenzied surf. G ripping the wheel with her left hand, she leaned forward and grasped the demagnetizer switch. She fixed her eyes on the marker. She no longer heard the blast from the radio. The boulder was hurtling toward her. It swooshed abreast of the car. She cut the switch, gripped the wheel and twisted it to the left. The car, freed from the guidance band, swerved onto the median strip. The strip was not empty. Obscured from her view by the boulder, a camera van was parked in the bight of her proposed U. One of Howebrand's camera crews -- she had read its planned location in his mind -- was setting up to photograph the crashes if a fault slip snapped the guide bands. Her vision, blurred by the speed, jounce and sway of the Dunemaster as it careened over gullies, small boulders and hummocks aided her little in the instant revision of her turning plan as she hurtled toward the van and its clustered crew. She had gifted the cameramen with an unscheduled rehearsal of the main event, but they were not prepared to accept her once-in-alifetime offer. One photographer dove from the trajectory of her car, but the camera he was attending had taken its last picture. Braking by slewing -- Dotham boys called it "revenuer's reverse" -- she twisted the wheel and spun the car. The Dunemaster missed thevan, but its giant wheels graded a tennis court and mowed a bale of hay before they gripped and shot her forward. She gunned the motor, heading south. On her left she saw the television camera slowly cartwheeling back to Earth. She was exhilarated. She had knocked the camera forty meters into the air if she had knocked it a meter and she couldn't have chosen a more appropriate first casualty for Amal's earthquake. But her exultation was brief. Before her lay the southbound lanes of the freeway. A two-unit Diesel between her and Lebec was roaring downgrade. "Oh, fiddle-dee-dee!" She wasted no time calculating the truck's approach angle -- she had solved enough geometry problems for the day. The shortest path across a freeway was at right angles to the traffic. She cut in front of the truck and found a full meter's grace between the Dunemaster's rear and the truck's front. In anger, admiration or awe the truck driver saluted her with a blast from his klaxon. In thirty seconds her U-turn -- modified to a Square Root Symbol turn -- was completed and the sibilance of the freeway was fading behind her as the Dunemaster, straddling the San Andreas Fault cleft, waddled in the general direction of Frazier Park. The only casualty was the radio, gone deader than Leroy Thatcher. My heavens! Is losing one's tail always so delightful? A half-mile along she wrestled the Dunemaster up a scarp and trundled onto the rural road to Old Fort Tejon. On the summit to her right towered a pile of boulders -- the uppermost boulder, eroded to resemble a Gothic arch, was Cathedral Rock. She swung off the road and up a ravine toward a clump of oaks dense enough to conceal the car from aerial observation. After she parked and got out she looked at her pendant watch. The hour was eleven-thirty -- by now Kiefer was back from Old Fort Tejon and had begun his meditation. Through the boles of the trees she saw the cyclone fence that marked the Skinhead Reservation. Following it, she stayed under the cover of the trees as far as the cover lasted, then ran the remaining hundred meters upslope to the gate and entered. Through the gate to her left she could see the fresh green of a winter wheat field sloping away to the west. Ahead of her, fifty meters in a straight line, rose Cathedral Rocks. She hurried the remaining distance to the abode of the hermit. Moon Boy. She heard Moon Boy before she saw him. pile of rocks, chanting a mantra in high, reedy tones. From what she could understand of the words the mantra seemed multilingual for, following the sound, she heard distinctly: "Nuestra sehora, Deus vous benisse, im heilige nomen des Jesu Cristo, Amen." Led by the singsong chant, she rounded the boulders and found the hermit seated cross-legged in the lotus position of Yogi meditation before a narrow aperture in the rocks. He was swaying gently from the hips in a self-induced trance. His eyes did not change focus as she moved in front of him, shadowing him from the sunlight. She looked down at him unobserved. His hair was long, glossy and dark. His beard was a neatly trimmed Van Dyke. The beard and flowing hair suggested a Jesus freak, but the spotless white sari wrapped around him reflected an Oriental influence. His religion, she decided, still trying to interpret his mantra, must be Los Angeles eclecticism. Unseres Voter Der in Himmel Sein, Deliver us from schrecklichheit und Los Angeles... Maybe not Los Angeles eclecticism. Merely eclectic. It was difficult for her to determine from his chant whether Moon Boy was praising God or damning Los Angeles, but she was not here to write a paper on comparative religon. She snapped her fingers under his nose and his eyes focused. "Shalom, shanti and peace, brother," she said. "Where may I find the Skinheads?" Moon Boy lifted a long skinny arm and pointed. "Follow yonder path to the eucalyptus grove on the northwest slope of the mountain. Keep to the ravine when the path splits." He looked up at her in mild rebuke and added: "Sister, you have destroyed my satori." Lyn lifted her watch from around her neck and stepped aside so the sun's rays would glitter against it. Holding it slightly above the level of his eyes, she swung it slowly from side to side. "Keep your head straight, brother, and follow the movement of the watch with your eyes." "I can't. Your diamond is blinding me." She shifted hands, putting her left hand behind her, and continued to swing the watch, coaxing him back into his trance with a soothing, somnolent chant: Bins, zwei, four and three, Back you go to satori Vishnu, Isis and Vedanta Lo. you've learned another mantra. She doubted he even heard all of it. His eyes drifted out of focus and his torso was swinging like a metronome. He was no longer chanting. As she replaced her watch she noticed him sway and wondered if he had reaehieved satori. She was not hip enough in Zen to recognize the symptoms of satori but she hoped he at least might be zazzing a koan. She turned from him, feeling compassion for all seekers of certainties in Greater Los Angeles and her sadness lingered as she strode down the path. She was not given to snap diagnoses of complicated mental aberrations, but there was little doubt in her mind that Moon Boy was suffering from a cultural displacement worse than a kangaroo's in a tar pit. Really she had no right to judge the anomalies of others, she chided herself. Here she was, head filled with helium, floating down a path on a life or death mission after a ballbearing-busting turn off a freeway -- and she was restraining an impulse to skip along like a school child. Of course, her giddiness could be caused by the elevation -- more than # meters -- and the bouyancy of the air which, in the eucalyptus grove, was filled with the pungency of lerp. The lerp was doing it, she decided. The path dropped into a ravine, where she came upon a spring feeding a sizable brook. After stopping for a drink she walked over and embraced the scaly bole of a eucalyptus, trying to anchor her sense of reality on the solidity of the tree, to absorb its "treeness" with her fingertips. Clinging there, it occurred to her that this inner split might have started last evening whn Red Benton undermined her faith in the government -- the moment of truth had revealed her alleged love for the democratic process as nothing more than the self-justification of a common political group. For a long moment she stood with her arms around the tree, recognizing in her gesture the physical correlative of Moon Boy's mantra. She snuggled closer, spreading her breasts on the bole. In the secret places of her heart she wondered -- was she a nature worshiper? A Shintoist? A Druid? "Hell, no," she answered her thoughts. "I'm becoming queer for trees." She fled from the bole and raced down the path, running due west now -- and broke from the grove, stopping at the sight of a young man on the opposite side of a small pool who was flailing a croker-sack on a rock. He was completely naked and hairless even to his pubic area. "Hi," she greeted the boy. "Where's Brother Kiefer and the rest of his shorn lambs?" "Around the shoulder of the hill. Brother Kiefer's in his tent, meditating. Some other kook from the Queen of Angels is down there showing them what to do when the earthquake comes... Hey, are you on pot?" "No. Why do you ask?" "You look like you're floating." She sprinted down the path around the western slope of the mountain onto a broad meadow spotted with cook fires attended by baldheaded men in loincloths. Upslope to her left stood a pyramidal tent that had to be Brother Kiefer's, its flaps down, its centerpole topped by a Christian Cross. Twenty meters in front of her was a group of women -- she could tell by their breasts and babies -- dressed in croker-sack robes watching Hal Carpenter hold a stake as Amal drove it with the blunt end of an ax. B ehind the group she saw a line of blanket hammocks supported at each corner by stakes. In the thin air she could hear Amal explaining, "Remember, center the baby in the blanket. It won't be frightened. Babies like to be bounced." Hal Carpenter saw her first. "Look, Amal! Hairy Lyn." She ran forward. Dropping the ax, Amal strode to meet her. He wore mottled jeans and a mottled shirt. On his feet were the winter moccasins of the Iroquois. In his embrace she wept -- and it occurred to her that her cultural shock was nothing more than old-fashioned anxiety for a loved one. It was fully a minute before she recovered enough composure to shake hands with Hal Carpenter and to tell him a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Smiling, he shrugged. "There goes my chance at the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism." "Wait till you hear what they've done to Amal," she said, but she refrained from saying more because the women were crowding around her to admire her ring, watch, shoes and hair. They looked skeletal. She saw a longing in their eyes that made her more ill at ease than their questions. They asked how much her diamond was worth and she told them it was priceless. They asked where she got the locket watch -- from her grandmother -- and if the bottoms of her feet were ticklish. Yes. They wanted to know if her hair was dyed and if lice got in it. No. No. One woman was deliberately offensive. Tall, blue-eyed, under thirty, her melon-heavy breasts visible under her sleazy robe, she carried a baby, probably an illegal one, on a hip that flared from a wasp-waist. Insolence was in her British accent when she spoke to Lyn. "So, you're the bird that's got her 'Reserved' sign on Amal. What have you got that I haven't got?" "Hair," Lyn answered. The woman rubbed her head and said, "That's my woman's handicap. I can spot you hipless birds a full head of hair and still beat you in the sleeping bag." Amal interposed politeness between their hostility. "Sev Undgren, this is my fiancee, Lyn Oberlin. Sev's from Sweden, Lyn, by way of London." "Scandinavians should never shave their heads," Lyn said icily. "Ethnic jokes aren't appreciated here," Sev Undgren said. "It wasn't a joke. It was advice to the lovelorn. Amal, I must speak to you and Hal privately." Once more walking hand in hand with her love, her life and the very fount of her romantic frustrations, she climbed the hill to the shade of a scrub oak. The two men sat down in front of her, listening as she described affairs in the city and told them of Kiefer's attempt to betray them for Amal's reward. She told of Nils' attempted betrayal, of his later conversion, and of what she had learned about the ambulatory eugenic experiment. Without euphoria and the need for haste, she might have been more tactful in describing Amal's genesis but this was no time for sunshine soldiers. Her only concession to his feelings was to edit all references to the catastrophes in Russia, South Africa and Spain. And she never used the term "Doomsday Gene." Her words pouring from her had a therapeutic effect. She found her grasp of the seriousness of their situation returning as she talked. Into her summation she managed to inject an attempt to convince Amal that he was in control of his destiny. "Nothing's final in your fate, Amal. Your genetic recklessness has been held in check by your conditioned drive to learn to predict earthquakes. Now that you're free of the obsession, the geneticists predict your recklessness, your eagerness to take grave risks at impossible odds, may do you in. But no one thinks that's inevitable. If we can get you past your mental letdown you'll be safe. If you take no unnecessary risks right now we can still be married on schedule." She had said all she could say. L eaning back on one elbow, chewing a stalk of grass, Amal said, "I wonder where I made my mistake in the Unified Field Theory." "You made no mistake," Lyn said. "I can assure you there'll be a great earthquake." He looked at her wonderingly and smiled. "We'll get to Dotham, darling. I've won against odds all my life. There's no reason to change my habits." Hal Carpenter was more upset than Amal. "This sort of experiment is illegal. The bureau of scientific ethics has forbidden the use of human beings in experiments. The ban grew out of the twentiethcentury Nuremberg Trials. We're human beings, not guinea pigs." "Speak for yourself, Hal," Amal said, but Lyn caught no bitterness in his remark, only irony. "I speak for humanity," Hal said. "We're not the playthings of the tin gods of biological science. With or without a police record -- if we can get those black files I'll win a Pulitzer for writing the expose." Suddenly eagerness crept into his indignation. "Amal, I'm sitting on the news story of the decade. You're the central figure in the most heinous crime against humanity since the bloody twentieth century. Give me exclusive rights and we'll split a pot of money. You'll need every dime you can get now they've canceled your green card." Hal was following Red Benton's pattern, Lyn thought, using Amal for his own ends. "As a public figure I can't grant exclusive rights," Amal said. "But you can authorize my story." "Very well. Consider your expose authorized," Amal said. "Now, let's visit the loving pastor." "The hypocritical liar," Lynn exploded. "Which doesn't reflect on his professional ability," Amal remarked with a tolerance Lyn found hard to understand. Strangely reluctant, Hal said, "But Brother Kiefer's meditating." "Rather, he's in his tent listening to his radio," Lyn said cynically. "An electronic instrument would violate his creed," Hal said, rising and suddenly eager to go. "If we find it we can threaten him with an expose to keep him quiet." "Who would we expose him to?" "He has an ad hoc creed committee of four deacons." "Get him into the sunlight so I can see his face," Lyn promised, "and I'll find his radio. Ask him outright where it's hidden. He'll be surprised to see me. He doesn't know he called the wrong department for the reward. From this area he should have dialed the Northridge sheriffs office." "Pity, the poor preacher in a bureaucratic maze," Amal said. Amal was taking his situation too casually, Lyn thought as they walked toward the tent, moving silently to catch the sound of a radio. His self-confidence could be dangerous. She wondered if she should tell him of the Doomsday Gene and its catastrophic side effects. For the sake of others, she knew, he would be more cautious. They heard no radio. A short distance from the tent Amal whispered to Hal, still in a jocular vein, "I'll talk. You listen. You might get a footnote for my biography." Striding to the tent, he pulled aside the flap and called in, "Come out, Keifer." His three words carried a weight of command that brought Kiefer blinking into the sunlight. "My son, I was meditating." "No matter. I've brought a cheek for Judas to kiss in the presence of a witness from Los Angeles. Unfortunately the witness is a lady." Kiefer was a small man, barely topping a meter and a half. He grew suddenly smaller as he recognized Lyn. His eyes had a tortured look and his voice held a quaver. "My son, I've been asking God's grace on your soul and for me -- forgiveness." He was telling the truth, Lyn saw. "I suppose you can mouth a lot of prayers during the commercial breaks," Amal said. "Where's your radio hidden?" "I have no concealed radio, my son," he said, thinking: God forgive me. but technically I'm telling the truth. The radio's in plain sight. Lyn reached over and plucked his eyeglasses from his head. She twisted an inset knob on the left temple of the glasses. Faintly but clearly they could hear: "... Angeles asking, is this the way the world ends? A few diehards are staying in the towers. Will they, if this all proves a fizzle, have the last laugh?" S HE turned off the radio and handed the glasses back to Kiefer, saying, "Another sin. Brother. Hypocrisy. What will your lambs think of their Judas now?" "This will ruin my mystique," he muttered, fumbling his glasses back on. "Amal, I wasn't doing this for money, but for medicine for the children, food for my peopie. You have eaten with us. You have seen our problems. I was not asking for the fifty thousand in money -- only in supplies for my people." "Is that true, Lyn?" Amal asked, his voice suddenly gentle. "True about the supplies, but the sum agreed on was twenty-five thousand dollars." "No," Brother Kiefer said. "The sum has been doubled by the American Hunters' Association." "Why didn't you wait until after the earthquake?" Amal asked. His voice held only curiosity now. "Because I had faith in you, my son. You have prophesied an earthquake and one will come. My people, untutored in the ways of science, would then have believed you chosen of God and would not have permitted the authorities to take you. There would have been bloodshed." He turned to Lyn. "That was why I wished to keep to my tent until you came. My flock would reject me if they knew I had betrayed a friend. It has been a dry spring. Summer will be harsh. They need a leader. And food." Amal said gently, "It's true about the camp, Lyn. The people are close to starvation. The children have whooping cough, measles, hepatitis." She listened, sensing the flow of his thoughts and thinking of blood being shed and of Heywood's prediction. She felt awed by the imminence of fate. Amal turned back to Brother Kiefer, speaking now with the authority of a general outlining a plan of battle. "We'll do it this way. Brother Kiefer. Lyn's car has a telephone. Hal can bring it through the gates as far as Cathedral Rock -- " "My son, no automobiles are allowed on -- " "I'm sure you can persuade your committee to permit another slight violation of the camp rules. If not, there's the radio to prove to them no precedent is being broken." "Very well, my son." "At one-twenty you can call the sheriff's office at Northridge to report me. I can come on the screen and say that you've persuaded me. A few more lies are permissible, aren't they. Reverend? Then, come what may, you'll be on record for the reward. If it's a minor earthquake you can start collecting the supplies immediately." "But the hunters -- " Lyn interjected. "They're part of my plan. I can evade the hunters." "If so, you'll be welcomed back here, my son." "No," Amal shook his head. "We'll go for broke. I'll explain my plan to your people at lunch and you can claim the bounty on me twice. The law against double triple jeopardy applies to stateless persons and after my second escape I'll be a free man." ing preserve, only one man had managed to escape three times, Lyn remembered. Yet Amal was almost blithely offering to perform the impossible on behalf of this wretched collection of social rejects. He was taking unselfishness too far. In fear, anger and admiration she blurted out, "Amal, I must talk to you alone." Drawn by the urgency in her voice, he walked aside with her and in their short walk she regained enough composure to make her reluctant to tell him immediately of the Doomsday Gene he carried. She floundered through an introduction which, she hoped, might soften the implications of her explanation. "Amal, I saw you in a vision, dressed as you are, concealing a longbow and seven arrows on the Angeles Crest Preserve." "Then you really are psychic," he said, more bemused than amazed. "You may call it that. Actually I think we're both in the black files -- that I, too, am a product of their 'human engineering.' " "Then, we have even more in common than we thought." "I cherish what we have in common, but your recklessness frightens me. You're doing exactly what Heywood said you would do, challenge the redhats." "Does it matter? You've already foreseen a major quake haven't you?" "In my vision I saw a great earthquake, a cataclysm, but I don't know when it will happen. You were near, but you weren't with me and I was dreadfully concerned." "That's understandable. I'm chief marshal for the Cal Tech tower. When the quake strikes I'll be very busy." "But there's nothing in those visions to assure me the earthquake will strike at the hour you predicted, this month or this year. I saw only a fragment of the future in the trance. Now I have to assume it will happen today and you won't be with me because... But enough of this -- I don't want you thinking I'm some mystic seer, some freak. I have something more important to tell you." Then she told him of the Doomsday Gene and of the death and destruction its three other carriers had caused. He heard her out with an intent but poised demeanor she could not have penetrated had his brain waves been normal. Encouraged by his acceptance and his strength, she spoke bluntly of the Mayfly factor, of his overwhelming death wish, of his genetic drive to weave from chance circumstances the strands of his own doom and that of others. The expression in his eyes never changed. When she finished he stood in thoughtful silence for a moment. Then: "As Kiefer pointed out, I could cause bloodshed by staying here. On Angeles Crest my bomb could be defused. Possibly the other catastrophes were merely coincidences, though incredible. Still, they're no more incredible than Mrs. Murphy's cow -- it kicked over the lamp that burned Chicago. Unless Mrs. Murphy's cow carried a Doomsday Gene. Granted this hokum has a certain validity, I would still be safer on the hunting preserve." "Amal, I'm selfish. I don't care about anyone but you. You could be killed on the preserve -- or murder someone." "Darling, I'll not be killed by the hunters. And I won't hurt them. Perhaps some will get an arrow in the butt if they get too close." He smiled. "It would be self-defeating to teach a hunter empathy for He grasped her by the shoulder and tilted her eyes up to meet his. "Don't weep for me. I have you to live for. True, I hid a non-metallic weapon on the preserve, foreseeing this, but it was put there only for my self-defense in the moral equivalent of war. Forgive me for throwing your words back at you." "But Heywood predicted this." "Forget Heywood." His voice went suddenly harsh and he looked beyond her. When his eyes focused again on hers the gentleness returned. "His prediction was based on nothing but logic. The only way I can master my destiny is by responding to logical challenges. Kiefer has unwittingly given me a chance to be of service to his people while I immobilize my Doomsday Gene. So you see, fate can work in my favor. Put your faith in me, not in Heywood's fortune telling. Unless you have a better alternative." "Kiefer could marry us. We could live on the preserve." "With dirt, hunger, and disease? Oh, no, Lyn. You deserve more." He was right. There would be dirt, hunger, disease -- and Sev Undgren swinging those hips toward Amal every time Lyn's back was turned. Heywood had said that if substitute psychological pressures restrained Amal he might survive the crises. And Nils had said of Amal that no hunter could kill him. Strangely, the geneticists who had brought her life to this impasse offered her the greatest comfort as she watched the currents of Amal's fate converge on their predestined end. "Whatever you do, Amal, you have my love and support." He embraced and kissed her in full view of the others -- a public show of devotion which, for him, required courage. Now she could think of predestination without fear. Her glimpse of the future had shown her a fragment of a warp and woof weaving itself into a pattern of deliverance for her and Amal. "We'll be married in Dotham next Sunday," he whispered and for the first time in weeks she felt secure.  Lyn whispered to Moon Boy as she crowded around him to store Amal's emergency kit in the rock crevice. A Skinhead had brought the hermit a bowl of thin barley soup -- "lunch" on the reservation -- and he had sipped it all ing a beat in his metronomic sway. She assumed the police would not search the hermit's cave. Amal's kit contained a pistol -- for destroying fear-maddened dogs, he had told her. She was grateful for the minor task. It gave her an excuse to stay away from her car while Amal, Kiefer and Hal put in the call to Northridge. After Lyn had estimated twenty minutes flying time for the police departments Black Maria they had decided to make the call at #:# to give Kiefner time to return to his flock before the quake hit. Emerging from the cave, she could see Kiefer exit from the car and hurry down the path, indicating that the call had been completed. In the little more than an hour she had spent among the Skinheads she had learned to respect the preacher and to feel compassion for his flock. During lunch she had come to understand Amal's desire to help the people, particularly since they had vehemently protested his decision to give himself up. A majority preferred to risk starvation rather than let him put his life on the line on the hunting preserve. He won his point by assuring them he would have to face the hunters regardless of whether people here profited or not. Kiefer, who truly detested electronic equipment, had also explained to Lyn that the miniaturized radio was a necessary evil for the survival of the sect, which depended largely on Los Angeles for its supplies. The cult's dogma reflected the adaptability of its leader. For members too simple-minded to grasp the abstractions of religion, Kiefer's nightly sermons were held on the southeast slope of the mountain where the glow from Civic Center was visible. A few cultists believed the glow was actually the halo from the Queen of Angels, Mary, and Kiefer had not disenthralled such votaries. All seekers could find refuge in the sanctuary and were free to share its bounty -- unfortunately little more than starvation rations. The hairlessness of cult members held no religious significance -- it was a deterent to the spread of lice. The sackcloth robes and loincloths were worn from economic necessity, not because of any vow of poverty. As Amal remarked privately to Lyn, all that the cult possessed in abundance were love and malnutrition. Now Amal and Hal were approaching her and Amal called out, "The helicopter will land in the wheatfield, marking on your automobile. We're going to move Moon Boy away from the rocks. They might topple when the quake hits." "Shall I snap him out of it?" "No. Let him sway. Hal and I can carry him in scout saddle." They slid their hands beneath him, interlocked their wrists, hoisted the still-swaying Moon Boy and carried him into the meadow. Lyn followed. "He's an apostate," Hal told her. "He rejected the Skinheads because Brother Kiefer preaches in English. He thinks many languages make rituals truer and more impressive." She knew Hal's chatter was for Amal's diversion rather than her own. Both of them could sense Amal's animal fear as he walked stiff-gaited away from the Moon Boy and looked back at the rocks. He was fighting to control panic. She decided on instant therapy when he turned to her and asked, "How much more time, Lyn?" "Four minutes. Don't be so upset, Amal. You know this is a neurotic fear, planted in your mind to encourage you to study seismology." "Sure, it's all in my mind. Schizophrenia's all in the mind, too. But this fear's based on knowledge. I know what forces are released by an earthquake. One killed my mother." She was tempted to tell him on the spot that his mother was alive, but that bit of information was to be her wedding gift to him. Besides, her therapy was working. Amal was growing calmer. "Lyn, this is the position I want you to take," he said, squatting to lean forward on his widespread palms, balancing his hindquarters on the balls of his feet. "A severe shock can rupture you or break a bone." Obediently she took position, feeling a little foolish -- like a grownup playing leapfrog. "Take your watch off your neck," he said. "It could damage an eye." She laid the watch before her on the grass and focused on its sweep second hand, saying, "Three minutes." "Take position, Hal," Amal ordered. Looking at the second hand moving around the face of the watch put thoughts of the globe in her mind. Far off, above the Atlantic, the shadow of the moon had been racing toward the Isthmus. Now it was darkening the jungles of Guatemala. She could feel in her mind the vast internal forces of the Earth's shifting and the fluctuation of the planet's magnetic field. An eerie hush lay over the land. Something was growing in the atmosphere, an electricity, a plasma that made her feel playful as a kitten before a storm. She glanced toward Amal, crouched a body's length away from her, hoping to cheer him with a smile. But she did not smile. His face was drained of blood. His eyes were terror-stricken. She marveled at the power of his phobia. Every line of his body told her he was weathering tornadoes of fear scourging the landscapes of his mind. Yet this was the same man, who had agreed almost happily to offer himself as prey of the hunters, an act she was beginning to understand. The terror he faced from the hunters would be mild compared to the horror he was facing now. Then it came, a slight shiver of the Earth, a mild rolling shock. A few birds fluttered from a nearby oak, twittered and settled back into the branches. Amal rose to his feet, grinning sheepishly, and said, "That was it. It's all over." "But it was an earthquake," Lyn said, "precisely at one thirtythree. At least you've saved face." "It's not my face I'm worried about anymore. Let's put Moon Boy back, Hal." As the two replaced the hernfiit Lyn walked to the edge of the wheatfield, scanning the sky. Until now she had believed Amal to be all but superman. Vulnerable, error-prone, he was the most human of humans, a little more shy, more brave, more fearful, more compassionate. The geneticists could take pride in their AE # if he survived, but nothing was certain anymore. Even her clairvoyant's view of a great earthquake had been as insubstantial as any vision conjured by Prospero. Nothing was certain but the dot in the sky above the southern mountains. She watched it grow, become audible, then recognizable as the huge black-and-white shape of a Sikorski helicopter, the prisoners' van of the L.A.P.D. X A t #:# P.M., in Bakersfield, California, an employee of the California Edison Company had left a room housing the control panel that monitored all power stations in San Joaquin-Tehachapi District. He had gone across the hall, ostensibly for a cup of coffee. Actually the technician wished to flirt with a new receptionist. Flora Whitfield, hoping to relieve the tedium of his assignment. The moment Charles Martell stepped from the control room marked the last opportunity for any human agency to control the destructiveness of the Doomsday Gene. Martell had poured his coffee and was pausing at the receptionist's desk to drop a quarter into the office kitty when Little Palmdale struck. "Did you feel a quake. Flora?" "My rose did." She pointed to a gently swaying bud vase holding a long-stemmed rose. "Some nut in L.A. was prophesying a quake," Martell said, glancing at his watch, "and he hit it on the button -- one thirtythree." "I saw his hologram," Flora said. "He was a handsome boy, young and slender. I heard they issued a license on him." "The young and slender ones make the best hunting," the technician said. "Did you make this coffee?" "Yes. Like it?" "Never tasted better -- and I got one of the newest coffee makers at home..." It was fifteen minutes before Martell returned to the control panel across the hall and saw the red light on the panel board. He walked over and jiggled the board, testing to see if the red light had been activated by a short circuit. It continued to glow. He sat at his desk and called the Tehachapi power distributing facility. "Bakersfield, Ed. Have you got the steamfitters in mohole three?" "They're topside, sweating out Little Palmdale." "I'm getting a critical signal from the pile. You'd better get them back -- No, hold it. This thing could have been red for fifteen minutes. Don't risk a crew. Shut off the pile. I'll check with L.A. and get a repair crew." "Wilco, Bakersfield. Am closing off mohole three." Martell leaned back, considering the problem. He was confident he was getting a false reading. No pile in any atomic steamgenerating plant had ever grown critical. As a sop to the public, the steam plants had been located in tunneled offshoots from the moholes dug long before by geophysicists penetrating the Earth's crust. Theoretically it was almost an impossibility for a pile to grow critical. The cadmium dampening rods which absorbed the atomic radiation operated by gravity if the electromagnet holding them in position failed. If a signal to the magnet malfunctioned and the rods were held out of an overheated pile, the steam channels were voided by the heat and the voided channels themselves acted as dampeners to cool the reactor. In any event, the matter was academic. Once the blast gate into the feeder tunnel was closed the pile could blow. But the only surface effect from the explosion seven thousand meters below would be a slight change in the purr of an airconditioner, a flicker in a light bulb, as other generators took over. The Southern California power grid, built before the Holocaust, was designed for twice the population it served. Martell was not worried. know was that the subterranean shock from Little Palmdale had been sufficient to jar loose the laser terminal of the stress sensor Amal had placed on the Garlock Fault, through which the feeder tunnel was bored. Tilting downw'ard, the pulse from Amal's laser synchronized with the pulsations along the laser beam from the more heavily anchored pile-control laser. The "impossible" chain of events which had occurred in Spain, South Africa, and Russia was taking place in Southern California. Now the laser beam was transmitting to the local control panel a light pulse which the control board was interpreting as: "Lift rods." Only a week earlier the pile at mohole three had been enriched with a fresh supply of uranium. Moreover, the steam-vent pipes were being replaced in the boiler room. Steamfitters had juryrigged a fire hose as a temporary vent. The hose snaked through the exit from the generating room into the tunnel. Though swollen from the overload of steam which the lifted rods were generating, the hose was venting the steam harmlessly into the tunnel when the blast gate dropped. The hose was pinched off. The dropping gate cut the control signal, allowing the cadmium rods to drop back into the pile, but they fell onto a cushion of steam and did not fall far enough to dampen the reaction. Gradually, but inexorably, steam pressure forced the rods back toward the ceiling. The generating room began to fill with live steam. The steam grew superheated and the emissions in the pile stepped up. Live, superheated steam stimulated the emission of radiation which further heated the steam which stimulated more emissions... On the scale of forces that move the Earth an atomic explosion is a firecracker on a mountainside, but if conditions are right the explosion of a firecracker on a mountain can release an avalanche. Mohole three was .# of a kilometer from the Garlock Fault. The Garlock Fault intersects the San Andreas Fault at Frazier Park. Frazier Park is five kilometers from the point on the mountain where the L.A.P.D. Sikorski was preparing to land. Little Palmdale had hit and was over. Great Frazier was on the way. G azing up at the helicopter Lyn thought, How like a monstrous dragonfly... and turned toward the rocks. Amal Jiad asked her to stay and prepare the supply list for Brother Kiefer. Now she was familiar enough with Amal's modus operandi to realize he wanted her to keep busy, to keep her mind off what was happening to him. The faint, fluttering sound of the helicopter should have been audible to Hal and Amal, but neither was looking skyward, she noticed. She mounted toward Cathedral Rocks. They had put Moon Boy back in front of his cave and were standing beside him, looking down the northeast slope of the mountain. As she topped the ridge line and looked down her heart fibrillated. Heywood's prophesy would be fulfilled. Filtering out of the eucalyptus grove came a skirmish line of Skinheads, resembling an army of cave dwellers in their sack robes and burlap loincloths. They were keeping to a ragged line of battle. In their vanguard marched the roly-poly Kiefer -- and swinging beside him was a baldheaded Amazon with unmistakably wide hips bearing aloft the Cross of Jesus. This was no peaceable demonstraton, Lyn saw at a glance. It was an act of defiance so brave, futile and pathetic it brought a mist to Lyn's eyes -- the last knights of Christendom had come on a crusade, armed with sticks. She moved swiftly to Hal and Amal, hearing Hal say, "They look like Neanderthals hunting for mammoth." With incredible sang froid Amal turned to Hal -- and was actually chuckling as he spoke: "My lunchtime oratory didn't work. They're not going to let us be taken alive after all." Here was the possibility Heywood -- and now Lyn -- feared. There would be an entire squad of riot troopers in the Sikorski and they would be armed with machine guns. The Skinheads were fifty meters below them. Kiefer turned, marching backward, and lifted his hands high in some cabalistic signal. Then he dropped his hands. When his palms struck his thighs his tattered battalions, as one voice, broke into the rousing strains of Onward Christian Soldiers. Malnourished, barefooted, weak and diseased, the Skinheads were working themselves into a martial frenzy. Their singing drowned the hum of the helicopter's engines. Then Amal was racing downhill to say something to Kiefer, walking beside the preacher, gesticulating, bent down, shouting. Kiefer kept shaking his head. Once he shrugged as if to say. The matter is out of my hands. Abreast of the rocks now, they were advancing toward the wheatfield, men in the front ranks, women and children in the rear. Lyn had not known there were so many and she could understand their tactic now. They were denying the landing area to the helicopter, interposing their bodies between it and the wheatfield. The helicopter was hanging in the sky above them. It dropped and its roar drowned out the song as it circled once, lazily, as if reconnoitering the terrain. It rose a little in the air. The men aboard the vehicle would have seen the weapons and would have gauged the hostility of the crowd. Below the plateau on which the wheatfield stood, a wedge-shaped peninsula jutted from the edge of the mountain, its narrowest point against the mountainside. On each side of the outjut was a deep ravine -- behind it the cliff face fell precipitously to the slope of the mountain. On this spot, cluttered with boulders interspersed with chaparral, the pilot decided to land. He angled slowly onto the ledge, cut his rotors and activated his air jets. For a moment the helicopter hovered above the area, then settled gently. Its air blasts had cleared its own landing field. The first skirmish had ended in a clear victory for the technologists, although the police now had over a hundred-meter climb to the wheatfield. They had landed and the helicopter was in an easily defended position. Amal began to shout to the Skinheads when the rotors fell silent. "Hal and I appreciate your self-sacrifice, but render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Hal and I belong to Caesar. Let us go in peace. There is no danger. Hal will be safe in jail. I will be safe on the hunting preserve. "I repeat -- I will be safe on the hunting preserve. I've never lied to you. I said there would be an earthquake at one thirty-three. It came. What I now tell you is also true; I will be safe on the hunting preserve because I can dodge rifle bullets. "So, I beg you, get back to the Crestline, Don't jeopardize your lives and the sanctity of this reservation to which I shall return after I escape the hunters. Without the sanctuary of your reservation -- I will have no hope." They began moving back -- either they believed he could dodge bullets or sensed his desperate need for a sanctuary. Lyn was certain they were not influenced by his arguments in behalf of Caesar. Then Amal was calling to her, "Go back with them, Lyn, and stand in plain view of the police. They'll not fire into the crowd if they see you." E ven as she glowed at his exaggerated estimate of her effectiveness as a deterrent to police violence, she was frightened. Three days ago she would have thought anyone insane who suggested the police would fire into an innocent crowd. That they would do so now was her fear, particularly when she saw the line of blue-coated, blackhelmeted men, visors on their helmets, filing across the neck of the promontory and climbing toward the plateau. They were young, hard-faced, eager-looking. Three carried automatic rifles and two were carrying long tubes resembling stovepipes. When it reached the plateau on which the wheat was planted the squad did not advance uphill but walked along the ledge, spreading into a skirmish line, twelve men plus a lieutenant. The line halted, faced right and stood at attention. Visors were lowered at a barked order. At two hundred meters the line of blukes looked formidable. Amal and Hal herded the Skinheads up the slope. They stopped at the crest, looking down at the officers. Amal shouted toward the policemen, "Amal Severn and Hal Carpenter are coming down, unarmed. Doctor Kley's secretary is among these people. Hold your fire." Amal and Hal moved toward the skirmish line. The lieutenant walked alone uphill to meet them. In his right hand he held a pistol, in his left two pairs of handcuffs. At each end of the police line the two officers carrying stovepipes pointed them uphill. Hal and Amal moved cautiously into the wheatfield, walking as if they feared a sudden movement might precipitate a clash. Impassively the line of policemeTi waited, their backs to the beginning slope of the mountain. As wary as his adversaries, the lieutenant advanced uphill. They moved ten paces toward each other. At #:# the Tehachapi pile blew. A slight tremor shivered along the Garlock Fault to the San Andreas Intercept. The northeast face of the Garlock Fault had quivered ever so slightly, but enough. Garlock snapped at the San Andreas Intercept. Great Frazier struck. T hat part of upper and lower California which for eons had mainland toward Asia took, in geological terms, a giant step toward Japan. The first human casualty of Great Frazier was a Los Angeles policeman with a bazooka on his shoulder who, when falling backward, was literally pole-vaulted down the mountain slope and broke his aiming shoulder against a boulder. For Lyn, there was no ionization of the atmosphere to warn her this one was coming. Her attention was focused on Amal and Hal, looking remote and lonely between the two hostile lines, and the silence over the field was so palpable she could have reached out and touched it. No birds sang. Suddenly there was sound. To Lyn it seemed as if a thousand jet planes were taxiing across some hardpan in the sky immediately above her, yet she could hear Amal shrill, "Crawl position, everybody. Crawl position!" She went to her crawl position, placing her watch in the grass before her, noting the time -- #:#. Then the watch began to skitter back and forth across the grass. Her palms had barely touched before the sheer waves merged with the long waves. The Earth heaved. Nearby she heard a limb break from an oak tree and down the line a man screamed, his voice hyphenated by the waves of the Earth until his keening became an ululation, rising and falling. She heard a woman cry out, "Somebody stop it!" Nobody was stoppirig it. Dust was rising out of the grass in a choking pall. Downhill, the rank of policemen was gone, either fallen down the slope or lost to her view in the dust. Mount Tejon, literally, was dancing. Walpurgis by sunlight, she thought, and the mountain had joined the valse macabre, the dance of death. She felt no panic, no fear, no awe. These emotions would come later. At the moment she felt no more alarm than a kernel of popcorn in a popper. She was solely intent on remaining balanced in her four-limbed stance and, after five minutes of bouncing without being toppled, she was thanking her ballet lessons for her sense of balance. It was becoming a competitive game -- she would not let the quake topple her as it was doing to the rocks on the crest. She wasn't thrown. She was crabbed into a southwest facing position where she could see the distant white form of Moon Boy, still in his lotus position, bouncing down the northeast gradient from the crest like some springpropelled toy. On the southeast edge of the rock pile she saw a lesser boulder -- hardly more than twice as big as a Dotham house -- jiggle from the mass of Cathedral Rocks. It shivered on the edge of the incline -- then an Earth convulsion sent it rolling downhill. Suddenly the boulder was gaining speed, rolling, bouncing, hurtling downslope toward the police helicopter one hundred meters below. She saw the juggernaut arc from an overhang, its trajectory carrying it straight toward the helicopter. But the boulder did not strike the Sikorski. The outjut on which the aircraft sat vanished, taking the helicopter with it. All were gone, aircraft, promontory, boulder, in a three-hundred-foot drop into the canyon. As far as Lyn could detect, the landslide did not add a decibel to the roar from the Earth. She glanced down toward Hal and Amal, wondering if they had seen the side of the mountain peel away, but both were facing her, both rigid on all four limbs and bouncing downhill toward her -- which was strange since she was above them. Within the next five minutes, simply by holding their posture, they were bounced three meters closer to her. While one part of the mountain sank, another part had risen. It struck her that Amal looked no more panic-stricken than Hal. In respect to terror they were running a dead heat, when suddenly Hal went up and came down on his side. She heard herself cry, "Tilt!" Hal was well disciplined. Jouncing on his side, he coiled himself immediately into a fetal ball. T hen it all stopped. There was silence from the Earth, but around her Lyn could hear the low moans and whimpers of the wounded or panic-stricken. Amal was still crouched on all fours. Hal still coiled. Her watch had skittered closer. She reached over and picked it up. It read #:# and the second hand was moving, but the shaking must have injured its mainspring. She would take it to a jeweler as soon as she returned to Los Angeles. In the distance her Dunemaster appeared undamaged, though it was now headed east instead of south. Then she remembered that AmaTs emergency kit was still in the hermit's cave and stood up. Men had less presence of mind than women, she decided. Amal and Hal were still waiting for the Earth to stop and it had quit shaking ten minutes ago. She walked toward Cathedral Rocks, weaving among the Skinheads. Some were sitting. Some were crouched. Most were lying coiled on the ground. "Rise and shine, folks," she called cheerfully. "It's all over." No one rose and shining would have been difficult in any event. Everyone was covered with a layer of dust. A woman coiled on her side, her hands locked behind her neck, was calling through her kneecaps, "Praise the Lord!" Lyn thought it a silly suggestion. The Lord was not a flatteryseeker. The woman was carrying anthropomorphism a bit too far. In one of those odd quirks which sometimes attend cyclones and other natural disasters, she found that Moon Boy had been bounced twenty meters from his original position and was sitting in his lotus position out on the grass, swaying right and left. For all Moon Boy knew there had never been an earthquake. The hermit's ignorance was for the best, she decided, for he had lost his cave. Where there had been a crevice in the rocks was now a cleft in a granite brow. Cathedral Rocks no longer deserved the title -- the steeple was gone. She found Amal's backpack where she had left it, partially covered with debris. As she cleared the shards from the kit she could hear coughing and sneezing behind her. The people were beginning to ask about each other. She retrieved Amal's kit and started back, passing a woman who looked up at her and said, "God has visited His wrath on the LA. P.D." A man nearby added: "Yeah, but He didn't do too well by the faithful." Lyn said to the man, "Hey, you. Get your pals and put Moon Boy back in his place." "Yes, ma'am," the man said, rising. "Then what do we do?" "Rally around Moon Boy," she answered promptly. She strode on down the meadow. The mountain seemed to have righted itself. Hal was sitting up, his elbows on his knees-, not doing anything. Amal was still crouched on all fours. She walked up to him, patted his head, hung the kit around his neck and snapped her fingers in front of him, "Up, boy! There's your leash." He rose to his feet, asking, "What happened?" "You're the seismologist and you're asking me what happened? We had an earthquake, you idiot! On the Richter scale -- a ripsnorter." "I mean why did it happen? It was supposed to hit at one thirtythree." "That was the first one," she said, "The second one started at one fifty-three, shook for fifteen minutes and was over at one fiftyfive." Lyn was telling him what she believed. She would never accept the official version that Great Frazier lasted two minutes and eighteen seconds. "Where are the police?" he asked. "Smote by God's wrath. Hal, get up." Everyone seemed eager to obey her commands. Hal leaped to his feet, clapping his hands. "Yep. Got to get over to Cal Tech and dig out the data for my bit story." "Red Benton's already there," she said, "to seize the black files for his group action at law." "Forget the black files," Amal said. "We've got to get away before the police recover." "They'll be grateful to you for prophesying this," Lyn said. "They won't be and I didn't prophesy this." Eyeing her intently, he added: "I'll drive." "I'm perfectly capable of driving my own car." "You're not -- and you'll know it later." Amal had taken over and she grew docile. T he Dunemaster started and she was glad Amal had the wheel. She wanted to savor the exhilaration she gained from finding herself one of a happy band of brothers who had fought with Harry on St. Crispin's Day. She was still feeling excited as Amal trundled the Dunemaster onto Mirror Lake Road, now a tattered ribbon of asphalt covered at intervals by landslides, but her buoyancy was sinking fast. She was feeling herself collapse inside and her hands were starting to shake. They rolled finally onto the freeway and turned south toward Los Angeles. For miles downgrade the freeway stretched completely empty and she grew slightly irritated when the forebrain of Leroy Thatcher did not immediately tromp on the gas and head for Cal Tech. Amal was driving like a little old lady from Pasadena, she thought, barely doing thirty when he passed the median strip where she had made a U-turn at #. Even so, he was slowing down. "Are we going to park?" she asked as he pulled off the road and swung up the embankment. He smiled and pointed downhill. She looked below and could see where a bandsaw had neatly sliced all freeway lanes -- the southern segment was fifteen feet below the northern segment. At the base of the drop-off, which had been invisible from above, she saw her first traffic casualty. The camera truck of the L.A. Spectacular Department formed a crumpled exclamation point at the end of a skid mark on the concrete. It had somersaulted from the drop at high speed and slid on its roof for fifteen meters along the concrete. Obliquely she recognized that she was malfunctioning mentally, for her first thought was that the cameramen inside had missed two opportunities for some sensational footage of highway action -- hers and theirs. "How did you know the freeway was broken?" "I didn't. I knew the fault line was there." "Tell me. Can you really dodge bullets?" "Of course not. My vision's keen enough to watch a rifleman's trigger finger. When it flexes I leap aside." She remembered her vision of the falling stanchions and commented, "I told you I could see the stanchions fall." "You were seeing the wrong earthquake. We were above the epicenter. No towers in the basin fell." "How do you know we were above the epicenter?" "The way the L waves merged with the S' waves." "If you noticed that you must have lost your earthquake phobia." "It was the last thing I noticed -- until you snapped your fingers." His answers were brusque. The forebrain of Leroy Thatcher was taking over. Amal was concentrating on driving and the roar from the windstream was making conversation difficult. Out of the corner of his mouth he shouted over to Hal, "Get on the Valley State frequency and let me know when we're in range." "Aye, aye, sir," Hal answered and he wasn't being facetious. He turned to the emergency kit behind him, brought out a walkietalkie and began to twist its dial, checking from a small book he pulled from his shirt pocket. The book had a list of radio frequencies assigned to the different towers. An extensive conspiracy had been organized behind her back, Lyn could tell, for even Hal's radio log was printed. It galled her to realize how accurately all others had recognized her so quickly for what she had been, a gullible, overidealistic political groupy, and had cordoned her off from any active part in the operation. Yet her inner chagrin was not so great that she could not lean back and enjoy the ride at # k.p.h., the limit on the speedometer dial. had their first view of the San Fernando Valley -- a dust cloud hanging in the sky. At the Foothill Freeway Interchange the first collapsed overpass emerged from the dust blocking the San Diego Freeway to the south, but Amal was navigating the Dunemaster with eclat. He angled across the median strip and zoomed off the on-ramp onto the wrong lane of the Foothill Freeway, which at this point had been rippled into corrugations by a disturbance in the Sylmar Fault. At Sylmar the first metropolitan tower emerged from the dust on their left. From the fifth floor up to the turret restaurant the stanchion stems were completely stripped of modules. Southeast the freeway was stained with red blobs where pods had struck the concrete and bounced into the woods to the south. One crumpled pod was imbedded into the median strip and off to the right another had crushed an oak. An impression of the awesome force of the earthquake was seeping into Lyn's consciousness. Amal's phobia was the most justifiable mental aberration she had ever encountered -- she knew her subconscious was saturated with a fear so strong it was cutting out her recollection of the heaving mountain. In a literal sense, twice over, her recent experiences were only a blur. If she ever sorted out and recalled her memories, she and Amal would have one other thing in common, temblorphobia. Hal called out, "Valley State's coming through." "Request them to relay a message to Cal Tech: Nils meet Amal at Charlie-four in ten minutes." Hal raised Valley State and a young but surprisingly calm voice answered, "Valley State here. Go ahead. Over." Hal transmitted Amal's request and was answered, "Wilco. Regards to Amal. Out." "He's violating procedures," Amal said, obviously irritated by the personal greeting. Amal was slowing. Wrecked and abandoned cars were beginning to spot the freeway. "Why are you meeting Nils?" Lyn asked. "He's second in command," Amal said. He was smiling. "He wanted me arrested so he could get my job." Actually it took them over twenty minutes to reach Cal Tech. More autos and pods from the Eagle Rock Tower were littering the freeway. Several overpasses were down and the bridge over Arroyo Seco was out. As they trundled over the brow of the ravine and down its sides they could pick up the Cal Tech signals loud and clear. So far, Lyn had yet to see a human being, dead or alive, but she knew from transmissions that people were in the woods. "Morphine at baker-four, urgent... Restraint jacket at dog-two... German shepherd at easy-six." Most ominous of all was the call: "Six plastic bags at fox-one." She dreaded what they would find among the trees as Amal drove south on Lake. Fallen tree limbs lined the avenue. Except for the layer of dust over everything, Pasadena might have been struck by a hurricane. To the southeast she saw the stanchion at Cal Tech tower lifting to the pleasure dome. It was not as hard hit as the Sylmar Tower. A few residential pods still dangled from their stems on the southwest and northeast sides of the stanchion, some as high as the #th floor, she estimated. Farther below, the two-stem administrative pods had mostly held -- though staggered away from the stanchion -- but gaps were showing as low as the tree line permitted her to see. Amal angled across the Lake California intersection and drove down a park mall as far as the fallen pods and crushed trees permitted. To her left, at the base of the tower, the pods had fallen into a jumbled mass reaching as high as the fifth floor. The naked grotesqueness of the tower reaching into the rapidly clearing sky, the crumpled pods and crushed trees nearer at hand, sickened her. She was glad when Amal stopped the car and, with packs on their backs, they could walk away from the scene into the woods toward their rendezvous in the safety zone. Sun shafts through the trees and glinting on dust gave a cathedral atmosphere to the forest and Lyn was beginning to feel at peace until they passed a row of bodies in black plastic bags laid out in an open area by someone with a peculiar passion for order. All the tied ends of the bags were aligned in the same direction and from each hung a large shipping card covered with notations in grease pencil. Lyn turned her eyes away, but noticed Amal ahead of her inspecting each body as he passed, apparently checking to see if the knots were tied properly. An organization was at work here -- and Amal, moving with the fluidity of an Indian in his moccasins, was the brain behind it. Watching him, she underhimself against the hunters. Without the glint of the pistol in his belt his camouflage would have hidden him from her view at ten paces. If his capture had spared the Earth this horror she could have wished that he had gone to Angeles Crest. More than any other mortal, he was master of his fate -- Amal was invincible. Thoughts of the quick and the dead brought her peace of sorts until, farther into the woods, she saw a Marymount girl, not over fifteen, whose blue uniform was silvered with dust. Aimlessly, endlessly, the little girl was shuffling around the bole of a beech, her head to the ground. She had lifted the front of her skirt to her mouth and was chewing its hem. Spittle drooling from the corners of her lips had drawn two white lines through the dust on her chin and her eyes were wild. Sensing Lyn's impulse to go to the girl's aid, Amal called back, "Let her be, Lyn. She'll recover. She's lucky. She's out of it." Amal's words hinted obliquely at his own horror of this disaster. outside a pyramidal tent anchored in the center of four equidistant trees. The two shook hands in formal greeting, not cordially, and Nils led them inside. Near the centerpole, a large plot map of the tower area was spread over a bridge table. In one corner stood a rack containing four laser torches and beside the rack lay four canvas bags. In another corner a radioman 'wearing earphones sat on a camp chair before a portable radio transmitter. He did not look up. He was taking notes on a pad. Amal's first question was, "Who decides the dead are dead before the bodies are bagged?" "Medical students from Covina. We have only four doctors at the field hospital. They're swamped." Amal nodded, not in agreement but to indicate he had heard, and asked Nils to brief him on the situation. As Nils spoke Amal listened intently. Few occupants had returned to the tower after Little Palmdale hit. Some feared the smaller quake was merely a preliminary. Others, caught in the park with supplies, stayed to picnic. Many students were well on their way to getting stoned when the big quake hit. Pot or alcohol had reduced the original fourteen five-man rescue squads to ten, because Nils had refused to issue laser torches to anyone under the influence. "Where are the rescue squads?" Amal asked. Nils pointed them out on the map coordinates. At the moment they were working away from the stanchion midway in the northwest and southeast danger areas. Nils estimated that ten per cent of the student body and twenty per cent of the faculty had remained in the tower and were assumed dead. Side pods, bouncing into the fringes of the safety zone, had killed three persons on the ground. Most of the patients in the field hospital were serious shock victims. At one point Nils veered from the objectivity of the briefing with a Severnian metaphor. "On each L wave the upper pods were volleying between here and the Pasadena tower. I felt like an ant watching a tennis match." Some oddities had developed. The main water valve to the tower had been closed, but gravity pressure in the mains was keeping a flow to the park drinking fountains. Electric power was still available and Nils had heard the stanchion elevators were still running. "Heard?" Amal ejaculated. "Didn't you find out?" Then he waved aside his own question and Nils continued. There had been some looting. A few students were peddling marijuana and whisky in the park. Medical supplies were running low. A shortage of plastic bags was developing. Red Benton entered the tent, the dust on his face clotted with sweat. Silently he shook hands with Hal, nodded to Lyn and stood listening to Nils. Amal did not turn to shake hands with Red until Nils had finished. Brushing aside Benton's compliments on his escape from the police, Amal asked abruptly, "Is the elevator operating?" "To the twentieth floor at least. I was up checking the genetics pod." "Did you get the black files?" Hal asked. "Not out of that module." Red shook his head. "Its Y stem was bent to the shape of a tuning fork and it's hanging to the last four meters of stem. When I saw Lyn's Dunemaster coming I came down to get help." "Forget the black files," Amal said. "No one's going above the tenth floor. One after-jolt and those upper pods will fall." He turned back to Nils. "I'm bringing in the rescue squads to search the modules that held. There may be survivors in them. There are nothing but bodies in the fallen pods." He went to the radio, turned on the transmitter mike and spoke with calm authority, "Attention, all sectors. This is Amal Severn. Rescue squads report to the command post -- on the double. Medicos, use plastic bags only for dismembered bodies. Marshals, seize all supplies of marijuana and whisky and take them to the medical supply depot. Apprehend any besides medicos using hypodermic needles..." A mal was the general commanding, foreseeing problems and eliciting solutions. Even as she admired him, Lyn wished he were more selfish. True, an after-shock might jolt some modules loose. On the other hand, the genetics department module might hang for a week, giving the Eugenics Surveillance Agency time to recover and reorganize. That agency's primary mission would be to recover the black files. If it succeeded, if Amal's genetic card were restored to official hands she and he would never know a normal family life. Nor would her child. Amal had finished with the mike. He turned and tapped the shoulder of the radio operator. Galncing up, the radioman recognized Amal, removed his headset and rose. "What's the situation on the outside, Jerry?" "Grim, Amal. San Francisco felt it. San Diego was hit badly. Long Beach is gone with Los Angeles." "Any word from the Bishop Seismological Lab?" "Yes. There was a ground wave shortly before the Great Frazier jolt. It was pinpointed at Cal Edison's mohole three. Preliminary readouts project back to an atomic explosion in the Tehachapi pile. Something about a modulated laser wave sending incorrect signals to the pile right after Little Palmdale hit." Lyn glanced at Amal and saw his face turn pale. He turned to Nils and asked suddenly, "Where's Heywood?" "Dead." Nils shrugged. "His body's somewhere near Pomona. He stayed in his pod." All of Amal's interest seemed to become focused on the black files he had previously dismissed. "Where are the secret genetic cards kept?" "In a tungsten steel combination safe," Nils said, "weighing over a thousand kilograms. Only Heywood had the combination." "We're going after it and burn it open," .mal said. "There are four of us and the spare rescue apparatus. I'll carry the block and tackle and the gangplank." "There are five of us," Lyn interjected, "and I can carry the gangplank." She had watched steeplejacks install the prefabricated modules on the tower stems and knew the gangplank, a folding board laid to traverse from one stem to another, though immensely strong, was light. "You stay at the command post," Amal ordered. "It's not safe up there." "That's why I'm going. To protect you." The others laughed and Amal was smiling when a youth wearing a hard hat with a grappling line coiled over his shoulder appeared in the entrance of the tent. "You called in the rescue squads, Amal." "Yes, Hank," Amal said, stepping outside. "I want you to search the pods on the tower for survivors -- from the tenth floor down." Lyn followed Amal. Other rescue crews were coming from the woods, checking in, and Amal waited for a moment to address them as a group. He completed his instructions on a note of caution. "Stay close to the entrances. If the tower starts to shake run to the corridor circle and hang on." Dismissed, the crews made for the tower and Amal turned to go back into the tent. Lyn grasped his arm. "Why were you asking about Heywood." "I intended to kill him." "He wasn't personally responsible for AE Seven." "No, but he knew about me and he did nothing. He could have stopped me a month ago." "Why should he have stopped you? You've possibly saved a million lives by predicting the quake." "No," Amal said calmly. "I didn't predict this earthquake. I predicted Little Palmdale. I caused this earthquake, by installing a stress sensor on the Garlock Fault. But I'm not morally responsible. Remember that while we're being married on Sunday -- if Brother Barnes is still alive." He had spoken softly, but his intentness revealed his driving urge to clear his conscience of Great Frazier. Despite the death and destruction for which Amal admitted being the agent, Lyn felt a surge of joy, a keen, almost ecstatic and thoroughly selfish wave of happiness. Amal had found a new obsession, the drive to purge himself of his sense of guilt, and he was past the crisis. All other AE #s had died in the cataclysms they created. XI A t some point in its ascent the elevator passed above an upper dust level in the atmosphere. Stepping from the lift onto the platform circling the stanchion which had once been the tower's corridor, Amal's quintet looked over the San Gabriel Valley. Dust shimmered to the far green of the Puente Hills. Eastward the skeletal stanchions of Claremont, Pomona, Ontario and far San Bernardino jutted out of a pall as smooth and almost as silvery as a lake of mercury. Above was an incredibly clear sky, but because of the bulge of the dust mantle Lyn could not see Catalina. Red Benton had prepared her for her first view of the genetics department's double module. The L waves from Great Frazier had sheared its connecting pins and flung it outward. The welded module's twin stems, projecting from the stanchion at different angles, had held in the plasti-steel grooves along its base, but barely. The V of the module's stems were bent to an elongated U. The pod was being held fourteen meters from the corridor platform on the tips of the two fingerlike extension girders of structural steel. The door of the module, directly between the steel fingers, which were eight meters apart, opened now onto a twenty-floor drop. It was Lyn's job, as the crew member who carried the gangplank, to walk one of the  beams to the pod, unfold the plank and bridge the extenders so the crew could reach the door between the girders. Positive that Amal would try to stop her from walking the beam, she slipped the backpack from her shoulders, removed the plank and walked onto the girder while the others were still admiring the scenic phenomenon. Turning, Amal saw her and called, "Don't look down." But she had already looked. From below, the module appeared to be low on the stanchion. From above, looking down through the jutting girders, an infinity of emptiness dropped to the next pod, seven floors below. When she moved her gaze slightly outward the infinity was cubed, stretching downward forever to the green grass of eternity. The I beam she traversed had been a full meter wide when she started -- it had shrunk to half its original width. Correspondingly, the fourteen meters to the module wall had doubled to twenty-eighC She silently swore by the ghost of Susan B. Anthony that anything a man could do she could do as well, but the ploy failed her when she recalled that most men could not do this -- steeplejacks were largely recruited from Mohawk Indians in a tribal enclave near Utica, New York. So she thought: Anything a Mohawk Indian can do a woman can do as well... The fallacy in her premise was so self-evident she had to switch her self-inspirational methods before she could make it to the module wall, where she flipped open the plank and laid it across the beams. As she stooped there to adjust the safety hooks, carefully keeping her eyes to the horizontal, her courage was sustained by a rapidly muttered Lord's Prayer alternated with the Twenty-third Psalm. Still crouching, clinging to the secured board, she turned gingerly on the beam and stood up, forcing a nonchalant smile to her face as she began her way back to the platform. But no gallery stood there, open-mouthed with admiration, to applaud her feat. Amal had gone to the floor above and was walking the beam over her head, carrying a block and tackle. Hal, not far behind, trailed a line and a cargo net for lifting the safe. Red was attaching a pulley to an eyebolt welded to the stanchion wall. Nils was strolling out on the I beam opposite to hers, cradling the laser rod in his arms. With insufferable indifference to height, they were behaving as if they had been conceived and delivered on the high iron. She reached the platform, vowing never to walk a beam again. Keeping close to the stanchion, holding the rail of the stairway, she felt there was a lesson in psychology to be learned here. Each of these daredevils was well motivated -- Hal had his Pulitzer Prize dream, Red a law career and Amal wanted to assuage his guilt feelings by placing the responsibility for Great Frazier on the geneticists. And Nils wanted to atone for the betrayal of a friend. All that moved her was a mild curiosity about the genesis of her grandmother and the desire to protect a lover who needed no protection. Her motivation was weak. B efore she had justified her cowardice Nils had burned a hole through the door, reached in and swung it open, stepping in, and Amal had hooked the block and tackle to the beam above. Hal was behind Amal on his beam, carrying the cargo net and paying out the towline. She wondered if the two would attempt to maneuver past each other on the same beam -- but, no, Amal dropped to the roof of the genetics pod and swung himself down through the doorway. She heard Nils call to Amal, "We're in luck. Here's a dolly." Amal reappeared in the doorway and looked up at Hal, stringing the block and tackle and hooking on the cargo net. He started to lower the net and Amal called impatiently, "Throw it." Hal tossed the net. Amal caught it, began to spread it near the doorway, and Hal, using Amal's short cut, swung down to assist. Lyn gained the impression that Hal was trying to beat Red to the black files to establish a prior claim, because Red was just starting to walk Lyn's beam. Then all were lost to her view and from the interior she could hear in unison, "Heave! Heave! Heave!" as they tilted the safe onto the dolly. Nils emerged first from the doorway, nursing his laser torch in his arms. After him came Hal and Red, walking the beams back to the platform. Amal appeared in the doorway, trundling the safe and the dolly onto the cargo net. On the platform now. Nils placed the laser around the bend in the corridor, pointing its pulse end away from the stanchion, and turned to join the other two at the end of the towline. Amal called from the doorway, "Heave away -- " Stillclinging to the stair rail, Eyn acted as observer as the three men hauled away at the line, drawing in the slack. Amal stood by to guide the safe around the door frame because the upper beam from which the hoist hung was offset above the doorway. Then the safe, huge, black, swung free of the pod and the men on the stanchion were hauling away, bringing it as close to the elevator door as the pulley permitted before they let it thump to the platform. Amal folded the gangplank and had started down the beam toward the platform, when the tower began to quiver from an aftershock. He tossed the folded plank into space and leaned forward to grip the edges of the I beam. Lyn thought the shear waves were acting strangely for those of an aftershock. The building was continuing to quiver and no long wave had struck. Amal shouted to her, "Grab the rail, Lyn, and crouch. It's Inglewood -- Inglewood -- Inglewood." She crouched. She had long been holding the stair rail. Not understanding what he was shouting about, she looked southwest beyond the Civic Center towers to the stanchion of Inglewood Tower rising above the dust line. The stanchion was so remote and tiny in the distance it was if she were viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. As she watched it swayed, righted itself and swayed again. Very slowly, at first, it tilted and she saw it fall. Her vision from the trance was given a new dimension in reality by her waking knowledge. She understood the meaning of Amal's cry -- and more. The Newport-Inglewood Fault had slipped. The Inglewood stanchion astride the fault had fallen. Amal was ten meters out on a bare girder. Inglewood would be a delayed extension of Great Frazier, which had been caused by the explosion in mohole three. An L wave was approaching, one as powerful as that which had made the mountain dance -- and all AE #s had died in the cataclysms they created. S HE could see the first L wave coming by a trailing ripple in the atmospheric dust. In front of the wave the striated dust lay silvery in the sunlit air -- behind the wave the dust was moiling into dirty grays and browns. Far in advance of the churning air the long wave hit. A breeze struck her face. The horizon to the south tilted, lifted upward, steadied itself, then swung far below her as a breeze rustled against the nape of her neck. The stanchion creaked. Girders swished. Behind her she heard the safe topple from the dolly. A clunk sounded in the elevator shaft. Then the popping sounds began, followed by metallic clanks she had heard in her trance, and she recognized the sound. Rivets were breaking from the stanchion to roll across the platform and clatter among the girders. The blur of a pod falling from a higher level plummeted across her line of vision, which was focused on the Civic Center, rising and falling on the southern horizon. The stanchions were standing, though the broken strands of the pedestrian walkway flapped from their sides as they swayed. She kept her gaze on the central towers. As long as they stood, the tower she rode would stand, for the Civic Center towers were closer to the epicenter. Time congealed around her. There were no P waves to bounce her. The # waves were absorbed by the sickening sway of her vast, upside-down swing. No roar came from the Earth -- only the hailstone rattle of rivets was sounding, the creak of the stanchion, the swish of the girders. She saw only the Civic Center towers rising and falling in the southern horizon. The sway was lessening. The rivets were popping at a slower tempo. Southward the Civic Center towers were still standing. A final shuddering creak, a final dip to the horizon -- and there was silence. Once she was sure it was over she felt composed and self-possessed. This time her composure was not the euphoria of shock but arose from the calm objectivity of an earthquake veteran. She appraised her situation. Two great earthquakes in one day were really just too much. Now that she had lost Amal she would be free to move, and prudence dictated her withdrawal from the land of shaking Earth. She would leave California, she decided -- she had heard some nice things about Phoenix. Rising, she looked over to the girder where Amal had been. Amal was still there. B ehind him reared the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains slithering with a downfall of dust and rocks. The genetics pod had fallen, shearing the girder barely a meter behind his feet. She walked to the edge of the platform and called, "It's over, darling." He did not hear her. The muscles of his forearms bulged beneath his sleeves from the force of his grip on the  beam. His eyes were vacant. Strangely, his face was as clean as if it had been freshly washed and it was chalky white. "Amal, it's over. Come in." "He's in shock," Nils Larsen said beside her. "His phobia has him locked in. We could be a thousand miles away." "I'll unlock him," she said. Once more she went out on the beam, crawling this time, oblivious to the emptiness beneath her, though now it stretched to the lowermost pods of the almost completely stripped stanchion. With her face an arm's length from his, he still did not see her. His gaze was focused on some private hell. Sweat pouring from his face had cleaned it. His knuckles were white from the strain of gripping the I beam. Patting his hand, she spoke in a low, soothing voice. "Darling, it's all over. You've survived the crisis. You're safe now -- with me -- and I Idve you. Come back with me. We have the black files. You can lead a normal life now. The experiment is over." He was still not hearing her. "Darling, come back to the platform with me," she whispered. "I need you. I'm going to have your child. Your son will need you, too, to teach him to hunt gazelles." He quivered. Some of her words were getting through to him. She made her strongest move. "Your mother's alive. She never died in an earthquake. They tricked you into believing it, Amal. They tricked her into thinking you were dead. But she's alive. She wants to see her favorite son. I'll take you to visit her." Tears formed in his eyes. She had kept her voice low, partly to soothe Amal and partly to keep the others on the platform from overhearing her. Now from behind her Nils spoke with harsh urgency. "Get back, Lyn. He'll fall if he comes out of it on the girder. Let me hook a safety line around him. We can hoist him to the platform." Nils was speaking the truth. Standing, she turned and strode rapidly back to the platform, clearing the beam for Nils who went out, straddled the girder and snaked the safety line under Amal's chest. Hooking its catch, he called over his shoulder, "Haul away." As the line went taut Nils slapped Amal's wrists and barked, "Let go, Amal." Obediently Amal released his grip. Nils steadied his body as it rose, swung out over space, and Red and Hal reeled him onto the platform. Red secured the line on the eyebolt and let Amal dangle near the stanchion, head and shoulders sagging, his body convulsing with sobs, his feet dragging the platform. Lyn went to him to swab the perspiration from his forehead. "Let him hang there for a while and cry it off," Red said. "I've seen forty like him today." N ils walked up and looked at Amal, saying, "It's a form of battle fatigue. He's got to be the bravest Coptic Christian alive, considering the conditioning the department gave him. He should have cracked up over Little Palmdale.". "He damned near did," Hal Carpenter said. "Then he snapped out of Great Frazier ahead of Lyn and me." Suddenly Lyn was admiring the calm professionalism of the trio, particularly Nils. Quake veterans all, they had sized up the situation calmly and gone about rescuing Amal with efficiency and dispatch. "I want to thank you all," she said. "Especially you. Nils. If you hadn't stopped me from waking him on the girder we both might have fallen. For this I might even pay your rent on a gynodrone we know." Neither Hal nor Red, from U.S.C., would have caught her reference to the other Lyn Oberlin on the Cal Tech campus. "I might have wished for an even more gracious gesture," Nils said. "But if you can bring Amal through this I'll be happy." "Don't you think he's past his crisis?" she asked, remembering that Nils knew more about the experiment than she. "I think so. Surely I hope so. I've done some deep thinking -- deep for me, that is -- since last night. From the records of the other AE Sevens it appears that the Thanatos Eactor creates more than a death wish, rather a form of idolatrous necrophilia. Maybe, since they came from the dead, they're loyal to the dead. Even so, there's been enough death today to placate the most blue-blooded Prince of Darkness. And with you on this side of the veil -- if he still craves the other side he deserves any grave he can get." His tone suddenly turned serious. "You're his best hope, Lyn. Haven't you turned me into a traitor to my department?" "Nils," Red said, "the elevator's out of order." "No matter. We'll open the safe up here. You and Hal unhook the cargo net and I'll get the laser." Lyn turned her attention to Amal. The sweat was no longer pouring from his face. His sobs were subsiding and he was losing his pallor. He was still hanging from the line, his arms dangling, his head drooping. She rubbed hishands and whispered encouragement to him. She saw his knees stiffen, his face contort as he fought for control. He lifted his head. His eyes were coming into focus though they reminded her of those of a sleepwalker suddenly awakened. Returning with the laser, Nils glanced over and said, "He's coming to." Amal shuffled to his feet with a visible effort. The line around his chest went slack. Looking at the safe. Nils wondered aloud, "From what I remember of the design of safes -- I'll probably have to burn away the whole front door." Suddenly Amal spoke, his voice hoarse and indifferent. "Burn a concave hole through the metal around the lock, lift out the lock and then manipulate the bolts by hand." "Our captain has returned," Nils said. He set about burning a circle at a slant angle around the lock. The steel hissed as Nils cut his preliminary circle. A mal had not fully returned. His hand was clinging to hers in an uncharacteristic gesture of dependence. Below the sound of the laser he asked, "Did I freeze?" "For a little while. Nils hooked a line under your arms and the other boys pulled you in." "The remaining pods must have fallen onto the safety zone," he said. "What about the rescue squads I sent to the tower?" "They had plenty of warning before the long wave hit. I'm sure they're safe." He nodded vacantly, either in agreement or to show he had heard, and said, "I froze. You must think me a coward." "Of course not, dear. We all understand your phobia. Nils even complimented you on your bravery. He was surprised that you didn't go into shock at Little Palmdale." "He should know," Amal said. "He's memorized my genetic code." A note of bitterness in his remark alarmed her. "Nils saved your life, Amal. He put the rope around you." "Too bad he didn't bring a genetics department straitjacket." She was losing her fear for Amal and becoming fearful for Nils. "Darling, don't be bitter. We're getting your black card now. Once it's out of official hands you can lead a normal life." "As a genetic freak?" "Hush. You're disturbed. In one way or the other, we're all genetic freaks." "But there's only one Prince of the Dead," he said. He had heard Nils' remark through his coma and remembered it. Yet he seemed resigned in his bitterness, even docile. The rope was still around him and he was making no attempt to remove it. Without disengaging his hand, she reached behind him and unsnapped it, letting it fall. As she fumbled with the catch the laser ceased to hiss. Wearing a gauntlet. Nils lifted the combination dial and reached inside to manipulate the bolts. He opened the door. From inside he lifted a metal filing case that resembled an oversized safety deposit box and held it aloft. "Here they are. When the boys from Eugenics Surveillance find the pod they'll find the safe missing. When they find the safe they'll find the files missing. By then the files, minus Amal's card, will be with the U.N.'s Scientific Ethics Bureau. The printouts will be in the hands of our legal beagle and journalistic hawkshaw. After that a former member of the genetics department. Nils Larsen, will be applying for a job as street sweeper in Phoenix, Arizona... Counselor, you take charge of the files -- you're big and strong. We'll leave everything but the laser for the next residents of Los Angeles." An air of light-headed gaiety infused the group, with the exception of Amal who was still preoccupied. Red Benton slid the heavy files into the backpack for the gangplank and hoisted them to his shoulders. Nils asked Amal, "Think you can make the hike down, old buddy?" Amal nodded. It took them twenty minutes to negotiate the winding stairway twenty levels to the ground, stopping once to let Red and Nils rest. Lyn stayed on the outside of Amal, who still held her hand, and she was grateful his eyes were fixed on the steps to avoid the rivets. On a turning in the upper circles she could see clearly that one of the remnant pods had fallen very close to the field hospital. On the ground, she was certain, were new casualties. At ground level, as they threaded their way between the fallen pods close to the stanchion, through canyons and under arches created by the downfall, she noticed Amal continued to walk with his head down, shuffling, lead-footed. His face and eyes were empty of expression. Though her mind strongly rejected the simile, it kept occurring to her that he was acting like a zombie. Nils' words repeated itself in her mind: They were born of the dead... they are loyal to the dead. B eyond the circle of layered modules the wreckage grew more scattered. Red Benton suggested another rest period. Nils was agreeable -- the implement he carried was also heavy. Red slid the pack from his shoulders onto a clear spot in the grass. Nils squatted, cradling the laser in his arms. Amal continued to stand, holding her hand, still morose. In an effort to snap him from his lethargy, she said to Nils, "I'd like Amal's card -- right now. I want no one reading it." "Red will need it," Amal muttered. "He can sue in a U.N. Court on behalf of the others in Europe and Africa." "She's right, Amal," Red said. "There's no case against the geneticists in the United States since you're not liable for the earthquakes. Both quakes were an act of God." "The files are alphabetical. Red," Nils said. "Give Lyn his card." Red lifted the lid and flipped along the index. She judged there were more than a thousand cards in the box. Red found Amal's, plucked it out and handed it to Lyn. She glanced at it. Except for its black border it resembled the standard buff-colored genetic card, filled with perforations and arcane symbols stamped in magnetic ink. Turning to Amal, she asked, "Would you like to tear it up, or shall I perform the ritual honors?" Neither could tear it holding hands and she was diplomatically hoping for a disengagement. His hand had grown cold and clammy. He didn't look at the card. He flipped his free hand toward the wreckage around them and said, "Why destroy it? It can't restore this." Nils was obviously concerned about Amal's continuing depression. He stood up, said sharply, "You're talking drivel, Amal. If it hadn't been for that card there'd be a lot more bodies in and under those pods." Amal lifted his head, "Wrong, my good and faithful friend... What manner of mind would attempt an experiment like this one when there was no need for it?" He had not truly asked the question of Nils, but Nils answered it. "You know the scientific mind, Amal. These things develop their own momentum once they start rolling." "And steam-roller humanity," Amal said. "You're a scientist," Nils said. "You know the conventions. Humanity's an abstraction. There are only people, Lyn, you. Red, Hal and -- lately -- me." "Then why in the hell didn't you stop to think about people?" A mal was snapping out of his lethargy. Lyn could sense vast currents of energy stirring in him, swirling around him, as his alertness returned on a wave of anger. His face was growing pale again -- the veins on his neck stood out. Amazed and alarmed by his sudden fury. Nils stood and stared at him. "I'm asking you -- geneticist! Why weren't you thinking of Lyn, of me, of the dead around us, three months ago, before I went into mohole three?" "Mohole three!" Nils seemed stunned by the implication in Amal's words. He lifted his left hand placatingly. "Hold it, Amal. Don't paint me with the same brush. I came over to your side, remember?" "You came over a little late for shouted, dropping Lyn's hand and advancing toward Nils. "What were you doing with your knowledge of me, roommate, while we were parsing Arabic sentences?" Nils backed away. In a wise but unnecessary precaution Hal Carpenter reached over and deftly removed the pistol from Amal's belt. Had Amal intended to harm Nils, Lyn knew, he would have used his fists and Nils would have been pummeled already, but Amal was alert now. He would be aware that of all who had gone on the tower with him, including Lyn, Nils had acted from the least selfish motive. "Where were you when Madrid blew?" Amal yelled. "Johannesburg caved in? Kiev was poisoned?" He continued to advance slowly, battering Nils with his questions. Nils, backtracking, kept his distance. "Where will you be, geneticist, when Hamburg -- " Lyn never saw the broken  beam imbedded in the turf until Nils stumbled over it. Falling backward he swung the heavy laser rod out before him with his right hand in an unsuccessful attempt to balance himself, throwing his left hand behind him. When he clutched the rod his finger inserted itself into the trigger guard. The weight of the laser, sliding forward in his hand. forced the trigger against his finger. The laser, set to burn through tungsten steel, pulsed. Lyn saw the bolt of light flash outward and upward to scorch the wall of a pod behind Amal. A bit of charred cloth near Amal's shirt pocket emitted a wisp of smoke. He had been taking a step when the beam pulsed through him. His knees went slack, balancing his torso as he sank. His body tilted slightly to the left, his left arm dangling outward, his right arm slanting behind him. He crumpled to the ground, his right arm beneath him, his right knee jutting up, his left leg bent under. The vast, dark maelstrom of energy she had sensed swirling around him was suddenly stilled. She looked down, knowing it was useless to bend to him. Detachedly, in the remnants of phrases he had once read to her, she thought:... here lies my love, the bold and gentle, the quick, the witty, the kind, gone from the mountain, lost to the forest... The dead had called to him and he had gone -- Ambulatory Eugenic Experiment Seven was over. Red could have his genetic card, but later. She continued to look down for a moment before she went to comfort Nils, considering a clash of metaphors in her mind. Amal did not resemble an eagle looking at the sky -- his waxen face, his dark hair, his skewed limbs, his unseeing gray eyes reminded her of nothing more than a puppet whose strings had been cut.  The first truly machine candidate, his mission was to destroy civilization! in love with the daughter of a mad scientist. Stevenson Woolsey had no paunch, did not chew cigars (didn't smoke at all, in fact), never wore striped suits or dark glasses, never slapped a back or kissed a baby. He had taken a degree, cum laude, from Western Reserve, had read Finnegans Wake through twice and understood some of it. At thirty-two he was the sleeping partner in a number of businesses which consistently sold goods or services to the city or county -- he was the unquestioned wheel of the Fifth Ward Horace Greeley Club. Four councilmen of the city's nine owed their election to his support -- the mayor was his political ally. He had supplied the margin of victory to the sheriff and two of the county supervisors and the three local state legislators consulted Steve before they voted on important bills. He was handsome in a subdued sort of way but he never spoke in public because of a slight stammer. If Steve Woolsey conformed more to the pattern of the modern political manipulator than the popular stereotype of the wardheeler, Aurelie van Ten Bosch was the quintessential ideal of a mad scienlist's daughter. The Eurasian strain introduced into the Bosch family in the eighteenth century -- which, suddenly reappearing in Willem van Ten Bosch, gave him a properly sinister expression -- made of Aurelie a living doll. She was dainty, exquisite, flawless, charming, graceful. And if she did not inherit her father's genius -- make no mistake, he was as brilliant as he was paranoid; mad as smart enough to come in out of the rain before the downpour soaked her through enough to reveal her enticing curves. "Steve, darling, I could never, just never go for a politician. Besides, I'm not old enough to vote. If you were an outfielder, or even a first baseman -- you're tall enough and you've certainly got the reach -- " here she firmly removed his hands -- "I might be faintly... But all those figures and precincts and percentages give me a headache." "I don't know where b-baseball would b-be without percentages," said Woolsey, feinting a bunt, wistfully aware that you couldn't steal first base. "Who cares? It's like a ballet -- so precise, so cerebral, so fluent. When the batter judges the ball and it soars through that lovely curve and the centerfielder runs back, back, back, up against the fence and leaps into the air... Percentages!" "Just the same it's the percentages that d-decide next year's contracts." "See what I mean? You're so material. Like no ideals." "My ideal is to get my boys elected and to hit the b-ball clear through the hole between first and second to s-score." "And besides, you have no sense of humor and you're just an old tory at heart." "Tm a liberal p-progr-essive," cried Steve, outraged. "I've always been for labor, the minorities, civil rights, m-medicare, honest labeling -- the whole w-works." "Just old tory window dressing, like Daddy says. Daddy is making a robot that will destroy all the tory fakery and phoniness -- Daddy is a philosophical nihilist -- " "Your Daddy is a philosophical n-nut." " -- because it will do everything perfectly. At bat it will hit only home runs on the first pitch because its vision and coordination will be superhuman -- pitching, it will throw nothing but strikes." "They'll never let him in the game." "Just what Daddy says. A reactionary plot." "So what's he wasting his time for?" "You wouldn't understand. Daddy's an idealist." dered the problem of Aurelie. Fortunately he had other problems to act as counter-irritants. The ninth-ward councilman, who had been in office twenty years and firmly believed Earl Warren had been a dangerous radical, was retiring -- if Steve could run a successful candidate he would have a majority of the city council in his pocket. However, the ninth ward had been gerrymandered and regerrymandered until it had become a political enigma. Part of it was silkstocking, with cooperative apartment houses guarded by doormen with stripes down their pants and galloons on their sleeves. Part was unredeemed slum inhabited by blacks. West Indian immigrants and a small but densely populated enclave of Hassidic Jews and shanty Irish. The retiring councilman had been elected and reelected by managing never to offend any of these groups. He had publicly denounced Arabs (there was not one Mussulman in the county, much less the city) -- his office sported a mezuzah from Israel and a crucifix blessed by the Pope. He was vociferously against all taxes, whether levied by county, state or federal government. "We have to put up an allaround liberal," said Steve. "An That's the only thing will go over in the ninth." "Jose Garcia Alvaroes," suggested Appalachia Bethune Lee, who was not only Steve's secretary but a very shrewd member of the Fifth Ward Horace Greeley Club, a lovely girl the color of the finest milk chocolate. To Stevenson Woolsey she was a good right arm -- the silly man had no eyes for any woman but Aurelie van Ten Bosch. He was a man of limited insights. He shook his head. "Jose? No. The blacks won't buy him. The button-down collar set will think he's cute but they're liable to have cramps in the voting booth if they ever get that far. The Irish won't mind his going to mass but city hall is for keeps. And the Jews -- " he shrugged. "Who understands the Jews? They vote for Catholics. But Garcia? I wouldn't put money on it." Appalachia patiently suggested a number of other names, but Steve wasn't fired by any of them. One was known to have split his ticket at the last election. A second had done time as a peeping tom ("if only it had been embezzlement or armed robbery or even arson," groaned Stevenson Woolsey, "but a peeping tom! He's poison -- "). A third had written a novel, a fourth loathed dogs, a fifth was not only a vegetarian but chewed raw wheat instead of gum. "All right," summed up Appalachia, ticking off the points on her long, slender fingers, "a young man but mature, good-looking but not too, energetic, loyal but able to stand on his own feet, good to his mother but one of the boys, godfearing but nonsectarian, good speaker but no smoothie. Anything else?" "Modern. Progressive. Moving with the times. No horse-andbuggy man." "I pass," said Appalachia, running out of fingers. "Maybe you better get your girl friend's old daddy-#, van Frankenstein, to hurry up with his mechanical man." "It's an idea," said Woolsey thoughtfully. "It's an idea." "Oh, you're impossible," exclaimed Appalachia. stared through the thick-lensed glasses, which enlarged his madly glittering eyes into maniacal incandescence. "What?" he bellowed, "make my plot model into a demagogue, a mere vote-getter, tool of an unscrupulous wardheeler, a prop of decadent democracy? Do you think for a moment I would consent to turn my homonechal, my ultrabot, my final solution to the human problem -- " "You m-mean it will b-blow up the world?" The mad scientist sneered. "Blow up the world? Childish prattle. The human race is doomed, but not the world it disgraces. It is doomed -- " here he gave a fiendish chuckle -- "to be replaced by mechanical intelligence, the first truly aristocratic being in the solar system. And you want me to turn him into a mere guzzler in the hog trough, a rooter in the pork barrel?" "Your metaphors are a little mixed," said Steve coldly. "I hope you realize that in dooming the human race you will be extinguishing your own descendants?" "Bah!" retorted van Ten Bosch. "Progeny of my daughter, who lacks the intelligence of a first-generation computer, and some befuddled numbskull -- you or another halfwit manipulated by blind biological urge, egged on by the use of cosmetics manufactured from the glands of dead goats and skunks? Do you think a dedicated scientist would be moved by such greeting-card sentimentality? Besides, what's in it for me?" Steve, having already worked this one out, replied promptly, "Any salary he -- it -- may earn. Less taxes and upkeep, of course." "Bah!" repeated the inventor with some lack of originality. "I'd be crazy to settle for such pigeonfeed. Salary! Anyone running for anything spends twice his salary to get elected. I want ninety per cent of the gross." They haggled for some time. Ten Bosch with the greedy cunning of a madman, Woolsey with the calm assurance of the pure in heart. At length they came to an agreement and the scientist, picking up a microphone, said, "Mr. Watson, come here." "Is that its name, Mr. Watson?" Ten Bosch looked at him contemptuously. "If you weren't such an ignoramus you'd know I was merely quoting an illustrious predecessor." Steve's disappointment was overwhelming when the mechanical man obeyed the summons. He had not expected an android, a facsimile of a Shriner from Los Angeles or a Soroptimist from Osceola. Nor did the robot look like the Tin Woodman or Tik-Tok. His feet and hands were articulated with toes and fingers, though with many more than the normal number of joints. If he lacked hips he did so no more than Li'l Abner or any other American ideal and his chest, which no doubt contained the nuclear power-plant, memory banks and the rest of the electronic fricassee, was Princetonian rather than Martian in its bulge. To where the collarbone would have been if robots had collarbones, as Ko-ko might have said, he could be draped in continental slacks and a sports jacket without loss to his masculine sex appeal. Shoes, of course, and gloves. Clemenceau had always worn gloves and they hadn't hindered his political career. But from the neck up... To begin with, he had no neck. None whatever. No more than an octopus, jellyfish, egg, or a whole salami. But whereas these have a certain organically fluid line which is not inconsonant with Hogarth's curve of beauty, the robot's neckless head was no more than an undersized immovable drum set directly on his shoulders, a drum with five convex bands running uninterruptedly around it, obviously for speech, smell, sight, hearing and some vibrations imperceptible to coarse human senses. Efficient no doubt, but quite incapable of getting more than three votes against, in one long-dead politician's immortal words, a Chinaman running on a laundry ticket. "Im-im-p-possible," stammered Woolsey. T he robot turned himself slightly toward the boss. "If I grasp your thought -- " the baritone voice was smooth, the enunciation clear, the projection effortless -- "you are dismayed that the electorate will automatically reject a candidate with whom they cannot literally see eye to eye. This is something that can be remedied. At present, though not entirely functional, I am constructed for efficiency. The usefulness of my upper works would be reduced approximately nineteen and a half per cent if mounted on a column capable of revolving one hundred and eighty degrees and encased in a flexible plastic mask indistinguishable from animal flesh and able to stimulate movements of lips, jaw, nostrils and eyes so as to convey appropriate expression." "Never!" shouted Willem van Ten Bosch. "I would be insane to consent to have my work -- my lifework -- debased." "Your consent would be superfluous," said the robot rather pedantically. "On legal grounds (I regret I have been so far unable to pick up much legal knowledge except some oddments Mr. Woolsey seems to have acquired over the years, but I believe Masters  Servants, # Edward IV and # Henry agent is bound to regard as valid a contract made on his behalf by his principal. And on pragmatic grounds I remind you of the multiple-choice circuits that make it possible for me to select a reasonable -- that is a least inconvenient, most socially acceptable -- course of conduct." The angry scientist gnashed his teeth. "I only installed them to please my stupid daughter. So you could be a perfect ballplayer." "Ah, well," said the robot philosophically, "to err is human." "I will destroy you," threatened Ten Bosch furiously. "How? I perceive you are running through possible means -- " "Can you read m-minds?" asked Woolsey. "Not precisely. My perception is like that of humans reading the expression on another human's face, only far more penetrating. I receive images that are vividly present in the conscious mind -- the more emotionally projected the clearer they are to me. Thus I perceive pictures of a pistol, a bomb, a garbage truck with shredding machinery, a bessemer furnace, a ship hovering over deep water, myself clamped to a workbench with hacksaws, blowtorches, sledgehammers and pinchbars ripping me into scrap. None of these is practicable." "You'll see," predicted Ten Bosch darkly. "I think we had better leave now," suggested the robot. "I am receiving strong images of your being attacked on the evident theory that your demise will void the contract. Perhaps you would be weir advised to convey it to an incorporated company." "You may escape physically," said Ten Bosch, "but you can't get away from your built-in programing. It is true you have multiple choice, but the ultimate outlook that will decide which choice you take is mine. You will always be my creature." "That remains to be seen," said the robot confidently. The only refuge Steve could think of was the Fifth Ward Horace Greeley Club. But once locked in the inner office -- the backroom behind the backroom -- guarded by a squad of cops and four trustworthy club members roused from their beds, he didn't know how to proceed beyond phoning Appalachia Bethune Lee. "You want me to come down there at this time of night? I mean morning? Oh, Steve, I'm simply thrilled, you lecherous man." "This is no time for j-joking. I have a serious p-problem." "Haven't we all? Take a cold shower and think pure thoughts, ni be there as soon as I can fix myself up to look ravishing." "Will you be s-serious?" "No. But I'll be there before you change your mind." T he security precautions being not yet perfected so as to admit the unwanted and bar friends, Appalachia arrived quickly. "I'm panting," she said as she came in. "Ooh! What's that?" "P-possibly our candidate for ninth-ward councilman. Thanks to your impulsive suggestion." "Always blame the woman." The robot turned toward her. "I hope. Miss Lee, that you are not prejudiced against fellow beings who happen to be of a different color and facial configuration?" "We-ell -- let's say I'm in favor of faces. Especially for prospective councilmen. Say, what's your name, anyway?" "Shall I say Four-X?" "You a Muslim? You won't get ten votes." "I have at present no denominational affiliation. I gather it is advisable for a candidate to have one. If necessary I could be a Unitarian, "Twelve votes," amended Appalachia. "Can't you come up with something real cool? Like Clark Gable Roosevelt Kennedy Elvis Dayan Castro?" "Aurelie used to call me Frank Merriwell. Because I can pitch nothing but strikes, hit nothing but home runs. A literary allusion, I believe, to my prowess." "Mac, if you're going to be a councilman lay off the literary allusions -- they're poison. Stick to straight pornography."  "N-now see here, Appalachia, this is serious. You put the f-finger on it yourself. If he -- ... "Frank Merriwell. How about it? Can't think of anything better except maybe Lincoln Truman Eisenhower." "Okay. M-Merriwell it is. This is the problem. He has to have a head, a face. Where are we going to get an electronics engineer and a pplastic surgeon we can trust?" "No need," said Frank Merriwell. "I can do it all myself. I have acquired the technical knowledge from my manufacturer -- isn't it good Americanism to confess that all wisdom comes from the creator? All I need is some trustworthy help at the critical moment." Appalachia groaned. "I could see it coming. Just call me Aunt Tammy." "I shall make a list of the tools and materials needed," Merriwell went on, "and construct a head and neck. Since my movements are not controlled by circuits in my upper works my fingers will remain capable of detaching my present head and reattaching it after I have fitted it into the plastic mask and connected the impulses which will serve in the place of muscles to move the neck, eyes, eyelids and all the rest -- " "Fix it so you can wiggle your ears," suggested Appalachia. "There's something irresistible about a man who can wiggle his ears." " -- but there will be an interval between disconnection and reconnection when I shall be blind, deaf, speechless and unable to pick up mental images. Miss Lee will therefore have to make a temporary connection in my visual circuit. After that I can do all the rest." "Lordy, what a responsibility. Aren't you afraid I'll gum up the works?" "I am programed for normal precaution but not abstract fear." "All these technicalities are ffascinating, but what I want to know is how you stand. Are you a liberal?" "What is a liberal?" inquired Frank Merriwell. "Let's not quibble. How do you stand on human rights versus property rights?" "What is property?" "P-Proudhon, for God's sake," muttered Steve disgustedly. "Look, let's keep it simple. How do you feel about tax rebates for new industries moving into the city?" "What industries?" asked Frank Merriwell. Woolsey, whose vocabulary was usually restrained, uttered a scatalogical word. "What about public housing?" he demanded roughly. "On one hand everyone is entitled to a livable home. On the other hand -- " "He's a liberal, all right," said Appalachia. II T he nervousness with which she and Steve looked forward to Merriweir.s alteration -- the robot himself, having nerves of stainless steel and silver wire, displayed no anxiety -- was postponed while the question of his future complexion was decided. At last they settled on the black Irish type -- dark blue eyes, ruddy cheeks and a black wig with just a faint waviness. Meanwhile Frank was busy with soldering guns, solenoids, servometers, flexible plastic, paper-thin steel plates and other paraphernalia. The mask he constructed was something of a cross between the young Spencer Tracy and an ageless Jimmy Walker. The actual operation went without a hitch, except for one agonizing moment when Frank's drum head lay inert on the desk being used as a workbench and his fingers fumbled with the wires protruding from where his trachea would have been if he'd had one. The convex bands had not glowed or reflected, had not showed any variation -- yet, lying on the desk where Frank Merriwell had placed the cylinder they circled, they looked extremely and finally dead. It was hard for Steve and Appalachia to remember that Merriwell's sentience was in his torso, that he was not acting reflexlively, like a decapitated chicken. Suppose his confidence in the skill he had acquired from Ten Bosch were misplaced and he proved unable to put himself together -- or would botch the Job so as to be a defective, a metal moron, less a potential councilman than a radio announcer, a postal clerk or an advertising executive? Appalachia moaned, "That damn diagram looked as simple as Fun with Dick and Jane. Blue wire with red spots... Oh, Steve -- " But at last she found it and its counterpart and put them in Frank Merriwell's left hand and the soldering gun in the right. In no time at all the cylinder had sight again and Merriwell fitted the plastic and metal mask around it. Then he connected the other senses. The eyelids blinked, the ears wiggled, the nostrils dilated, the lips smiled and opened. "Everything under control," he said. "But what's the m-matter with your voice? I can hardly hear you." "Five-sixths of my vocal band is now covered," explained Frank. "I'll have to amplify it. And I'm afraid my extrasensory perception is practically useless." "The question is, are you f-fit to run for councilman?" "My friends have been kind enough to say so and while I am reluctant to thrust myself forward as one seeking office, the gross corruption and manifest incompetence of the majority of the present city council force me to overcome my natural preference. At the insistence of those who wish for a thorough housecleaning at city hall I doing my humble part to bring good government to our great municipality. Civic duty must come before personal inclination." "He's got the w-words and mmusic, but can he put the tune across?" T he opposition (amid cries of "Carpetbagger -- " "Whoever heard of Merriwell?" "A machine candidate, a charlie mccarthy for Boss Woolsey -- " "We must have a councilman with a warm human heart that beats for all, not a mere mechanical loudspeaker for a greedy manipulator -- ") nominated Adolphus Washington Hammer. "How do you suppose they ccaught on?" asked Steve. "Campaign oratory," said Appalachia. "They haven't the foggiest." Jose Garcia Alvaroes announced that he would run as a progressive independent on the Peoples Freedom Nationalist Equal Rights and Cultural Commonwealth ticket. Aurelie van Ten Bosch was sitting in the front row when Frank opened his campaign in Carpenters Hall. She looked so entrancing that Woolsey was hard put not to forget politics and scoop her up in his arms and run off with her. "Pay attention to business," Appalachia hissed in his ear. "Moon on your own time. Our boy is about to sound off and God only knows what he will say." "That's more than I do." A spattering of applause vigorously led by Aurelie greeted Frank Merriwell as he strode forward. polished. His olive-green suit with natural shoulders fitted perfectly. His white shirt was dazzling. His fawn-and-green bow tie was tied just imperfectly enough to show it wasn't one of those snap-on vulgarities. He bowed, turning his head smoothly to the right and left. He blinked his long-lashed eyes, smiled to show white teeth and spoke in a voice that carried so perfectly that even the deaf old gentleman in the last row who had dropped in by mistake heard every word. "Voters," said Frank Merriwell, "I am opposed to all progress. Thank you." Gasps of outrage filled the hall as though the audience were composed of geese or muscovy ducks. Steve turned purple. Appalachia turned pale (a becoming cafe au lait). A.W. Hammer turned pink with pleasure. Jose Garcia Alvaroes turned red with repressed oratory. A dowager with the figure of a dress form rose to ask a question, then sat down again. Clearly the magnitude of Merriwell's statement was too enormous to grapple with. Finally a young man who didn't look old enough to vote called out, "You mean you want everybody to run around naked, live in trees, eat grass?" "Sir," replied Merriwell, "I am running for councilman, not for a position as regulator of dress and life styles. It is not within the power of the city to regulate dress -- the ordinance against nudist camps has, I believe, been declared unconstitutional. Furthermore, it would be a foolish official indeed who attempted to dictate fashion. Besides, going without clothes is impractical, leading to frostbite in temperate zones and dangerous burns in the torrid. Disillusionment with progress is a rational conclusion, not a blanket denial of all history. Let us view things empirically. And please, let us stick to municipal issues." Some of the tension went out of the listeners. Obviously Merriwell knew how to hedge as well as any other politician. They didn't have to take what he said seriously. Someone spoke up. "How about living in trees like monkeys? Nobody's gonna make a monkey outa me. "Nature cannot be improved upon," replied Merriwell. "Not all monkeys live in trees -- if we broaden the term to include apes, some of whom live in caves quite as dark, dank, uncomfortable and verminous as a ninth-ward tenement." There was some handclapping. Then: "If you tear them down like these urban renewers want and we got to sleep in the park -- so why not in the trees? Because when they wreck the old places they either put up projects like penitentiaries where you can't spit without a housing cop giving you a summons or else they build classy coops for the fat cats." Louder applause. "There seems to be a natural human predilection for arboreal habitations," said Merriwell. "Children build treehouses at every chance. However it seems to me it would be better and cheaper to make the tenements habitable." "Ain't that progress?" "Light, air, cleanness aren't progress -- they've always been. Slums, overcrowding, profits for landlords are progress." "You wanna do away with relief and welfare? Let people starve like in the old days?" "Welfare and relief are hardly progress. They are palliatives that try to make progress endurable." Appalachia passed Steve an aspirin. "It could be worse," she whispered. "You mean he could come out against s-sex?" "Mr. Merriwell, aren't you just calling everything you're opposed to 'progress?'" "If I am it's because progress is what I'm opposed to. I think humanity has confused motion with direction, so that any movement at all has become an end in itself, desirable simply because it is going somewhere -- it doesn't matter where. Take sanitation. That's a municipal problem. It isn't for animals or primitive man. But civilized man poisoned the streams he drank from, polluted the air he breathed. So he paid the price in epidemics and plagues for living cozily in towns and cities. Then he paid the price for alleviating the plagues with sewage systems and garbage disposals, which dumped the wastes in the nearest lake, river, or ocean to sicken outlanders instead of homefolks, to kill the fish, birds and game -- upsetting the whole ecological balance. Next step in the march of progress -- by no means completed -- was to treat the raw sewage and make it innocuous. Or so it is claimed. But the same ecological balance that was upset when farmers began plowing the subsoil and burning the weeds -- instead of dibbling holes in which to drop seeds -- called for manure to restore the fertility of the soil. Progress gave them artificial fertilizers, chemicals that made crops grow like mad but lacked the virtue of those grown with natural manure, the same natural manure that was being thrown uselessly away. So in a few -- very few -- communities the  nutrient wastes are dehydrated, sacked up and sold to gardeners. Progress. The longest way around is the shortest way home." "Back to Chic Sale, huh mister? Is that what you want?" "History is irreversible. No man bathes twice in the same stream. You can't go home. We cannot restore the past, nor would anyone want to, any more than he would want to have his memory erased and reconstructed to fit some idealized notion. Until -- if ever -- the oversaturated concentration of people can be dissolved and spread out in a more rational pattern, all we can do is make the least damaging compromises, avoiding such progressive solutions as total incineration. What is now an expensive operation to get rid of valuable products can be reorganized so some of the cost can be recovered." W palachia, "you'll have to admit he's in the groove at last. What could be safer or duller? Conservation plus money-saving without cutting payrolls? And nothing warms the voter's heart more than defecation." "If he hadn't s-started off with that manifesto about being against p-progress I'd say he'd had it made. If he were human I'd call him a screwball -- unreliable, a wild-pitch artist. But he's a machine -- rational, predictable, logical. Why drag in p-poison like that?" "Catch their attention?" suggested Appalachia. "Set them up so they'll listen." "You know b-better than that. I wrote him a good speech, tried to ccoach him -- delivery, g-gestures, everything -- tutored him carefully on not saying too much, committing himself, leaving himself wide open. I really thought I'd gotten across to him, but he's evidently a m-maverick. I wonder if we could deal with Garcia?" "What would it get you? The Tin Woodman could come in, but Jose can never do better than place. Honey, you're all shook up for the moment but there's no irrevocable damage done. Chew him out till his transistors are all jelly but don't throw him overboard. There are going to be other elections and some voters have memories. He hasn't really alienated anybody with his against-all-progress line -- " "Y-yet." " and his cracks about the slums didn't hurt him. Everyone's against slums." The race for councilman wasn't important enough for anyone to take a straw vote, but Stevenson Woolsey's antennae told him that Merriwell and A.W. Hammer were running neck and neck with Jose Garcia Alvaroes far behind. Except for an editorial sneer or two at Merriwell's name and slogan, the press ignored him. As might have been expected, both Alvaroes and Hammer concentrated their fire on him, disregarding each other. But while Jose denounced Merriwell almost impersonally as an imperialist tool, the voice of the exploiters of oppressed colonial peoples, Hammer's attacks were in the fine old American tradition of personal vituperation -- except that he lacked the vocabulary. "The machine can'idate," he roared, "is against progress. You know what this means, ladies? No more nylons, no more girdles, no more washing machines, no more telephones, radios, television. No more votes for women! How do you like that? Back to the scrub-boards, woodstoves, flatirons, tallow candles, washboilers, high-button shoes -- and you won't be allowed to say a thing about it. That'll be for your lords and masters, just like it was in the good old days before there was progress. The men'll do the voting and you'll do the drudgery. No vacuum cleaners, no frozen foods, no toasters, no percolators, no instant coffee, no beauty parlors -- no lipsticks even... Ladies, I say to you, the can'idate who'd propose such things is a monster in human form, a dupe of the communists if not a card-carrying communist himself, a tearer-down of the American way of life, a man unfit to breathe the pure air of our country and our century..." "That'll give our boy the epicure vote, the eggheads and maybe all those who'd rather fight than switch. If there just weren't any women in the ninth ward... I suppose we can live with Hammer -- wasn't he mixed up in some pinball deal?" Frank Merriwell's reply was short, direct and dignified. "I am not now nor have I ever been a communist. Communism represents the ultimate in progress -- the deification of science, the absolute rule of bureaucracy, 'government by experts,' the final stultification of free will. The charge that I would repeal the Nineteenth Amendment is as absurd as the amendment itself was superfluous. All citizens are enfranchised and always have been. The word 'men' in the Declaration of Independence has common gender and applies equally to women, as the nineteenth-century feminists insisted. I do not feel that nylons or flatirons are an issue in this election. Whatever the aesthetic objection to girdles, I propose no restraint on their confinement. As for the pure air, I am in favor of it, free of carbon monoxide and strontium ninety as well as campaign speeches." Appalachia checked the registration lists against the reports of voting which were continuously phoned in. Late morning the volunteer baby-sitters and those who offered free transportation to the polls shifted from a haphazard basis of waiting to be called for to methodical visits to those who had not yet voted. Lesser members of the Horace Greeley Club advised poll watchers and precinct captains of what to do where routine instructions for dealing with challenges and other problems were inadequate. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first precincts the voting was running ahead of normal expectation for an off-year. minor election. In the twenty-second it was average. In the twentythird and twenty-fourth it was light. The first three were the slum districts, the twenty-first and twenty-second were the Hassidic neighborhood -- the rest was silkstocking. "Looks pretty good," commented Appalachia. "Under ordinary circumstances," conceded Woolsey. "But who can figure this one? I p-particularly don't like the pattern of the Jewish vote. Are they sitting on their hands in the twenty-second? Or are they going to clobber us after work?" "'Morning votes are "no" votes,'" she reminded him. "Sure, but who are they saying no to? T-take it for granted they're saying no to Hammer, but who are they negatively for? Garcia?" "Not a chance," said Appalachia bravely. The early-afternoon lull seemed ominously long. At any other time a pro like Steve would have known the results by now, even though not a vote had been counted and the polls would be open for another five hours. But there were too many unknown quantities in this occasion. The subtle projection of Merriwell's non-human personality was it or wasn't it unconsciously perceived with or without hostility? -- the size of Jose's protest vote, the depth of middle-class interest. Like the eminent amateur characterized by Harry Truman as knowing "no more about politics than a pig does of Sunday," he had to wait for the first returns. Perhaps not quite. "They're piling up in the twenty-second precinct -- looks like there'll be a line when the polls close. Twenty-third and twenty-fourth are normal." Steve and Appalachia looked at each other, allowed themselves the faintest of cheerful smiles. "If not the world, at least the ninth ward. Apparently," she added, careful to avoid hubris. The first returns were incomplete, in fact they were nothing more than the first bakers' dozen ballots counted in one of the two silkstocking precincts. "Merriwell five. Hammer five, Alvaroes three." "Fluke," said Steve. "Some family of nuts all voted together." He also sidestepped hubris. "Well, how's this from the eighteenth? Hammer six, Alvaroes seven. Merriwell fifteen..." Steve sighed. "We're in." Frank Merriwell not only carried the slum and Hassidic precincts by majorities -- Jose Garcia Alvaroes ran ahead of Hammer where there was a threat of urban renewal -- but was barely edged by Hammer in the wealthier neighborhoods. Steve didn't wait for Hammer's concession to have a serious talk with Frank Merriwell. "Well, Councilman," he began. HI leon and Joseph Pulitzer the ability to simulate rage while remaining perfectly calm. "Listen, you refugee from Smith and T-Tinker," he snarled. "You collection of electronic junk. You think you're riding pretty high right now. d-don't you? You know what's lower than a councilman? Only the g-gastric growlings of an amoeba bucking for undersecretary to a minor worm, that's what. And do you know how you got to this unexalted position? By your own efforts? By the weight of your thinking, the length of your political foresight, the sharpness of your wit, the ppower of your oratory? Not a bit. We m-made you, the organization and I, with the sort of w-work that wins elections -- and we can unmake you the second you stop being regular." "Steve!" cried Aurelie van Ten Bosch, "how can you rave and rant this way at Frank? And all for nothing. I do believe you're jealous because he won the election." "Oh, Aurelie," exclaimed Steve in anguish. "How can you think I'd be jealous of a m-machine?" "Don't be gruesome," said Aurelie. "Besides, it's a low form of bigotry to belittle Frank for the way he was born -- uh -- manufactured." "Name a high form of bigotry. Oh, Aurelie, do we have to quarrel?" "Yes, we do, because we don't agree on anything. I keep telling you and telling you -- we're not compatible." By the end of his term as councilman Frank Merriwell had cut the heart out of the local urban renewal program. This was done not by one speech or vote but by his methodical chipping away at the figures during budget sessions. His lightning calculations exposed the inflated sums before the councilmen got through reading them and his cold logic impressed the other members. When Frank rapped his gloved steel hand for emphasis and insisted that this or that old building deserved better than the steel ball and bulldozer he was heard respectfully. When he charged them with acting mechanically out of a mindless fascination with the idea of a city full of indistinguishable boxes made to house indistinguishable tenants they nodded. In the end architectural renderings already paid for were scrapped and federal money already allocated was withheld. At the Horace Greeley Club, Appalachia said, "Isn't it time you gave some thought to where it will all lead, Steve?" "There are only two places it could lead to. Congress or the state senate. I haven't d-decided which." Appalachia placed herself between her boss and the window, so that his view of the airshaft and the inside window box where he grew African violets was complicated by her interesting silhouette. "Time's not standing still," she reminded him. "We're not -- I mean Frank's not getting any younger." "Thinking of obsolescence? What if the opposition comes out with a new model?" He looked at her thoughtfully. "No one but van Ten Bosch could make one, but suppose he decided to try -- just for spite? I must see Aurelie about this." Aurelie said, "You don't understand Daddy at all. He's mad, you know." "No k-kid?" muttered Steve. "I mean he's mad on the subject of destroying the world. But he's fair -- even you will have to admit he's fair." "I'll admit anything when you look at m-me like that. Oh, Aurelie, we could be so h-happy together." "Please, Steve, let's not get romantic. My ideal of a lover is one who is firm as steel, logical, precise, brainy, unwavering, unmoved by selfish considerations -- " "A d-damn robot, in fact. What will you do if your father builds one whose sole function is to charm women?" "But that's exactly what I'm trying to explain to you. As long as Frank is doing exactly what Daddy designed him to do Daddy won't make another. You can stop worrying about that." "And s-start worrying about being an accessory to the d-destruction of civilization." "Are progress and civilization the same thing?" asked Aurelie prettily. "Daddy and Frank don't think so." Steve said to Appalachia, "I'm going to ditch him. I can't have his career on my c-conscience." "What can you do?" asked Appalachia. "Deny him the nomination? He'll run as an independent and win in a walk. Listen, he made a speech last night to a really advanced group -- the Association of Stitchers, Hemmers and Embroiderers -- and he had them gasping in the aisles, gasping for more, that is. And you know the line he fed them? He told them they were being exploited by the machines. That they had lost all pride in their craft, had become mere slaves to the machines. And they were demanding newer, better, more automatic machines to enslave themselves further instead of higher wages for the skill only they possessed. They were doing themselves out of their jobs and a higher standard of living by their shortsighted worship of progress. He painted a rosy picture of life with twice, three times as much money in their pay envelopes for half the time they now put in -- and work spread around so they had no fear of scabs taking their jobs. And what would they come home to with their bigger pay? Why, a life without television commercials, overworked spouses, neurotic children, cars to keep payments up on and ride bumper to bumper on Sundays, the air poisoned by their fumes, people killed in fantastic numbers by them, instead of keeping a horse and buggy -- that's what he said, right out -- a horse and buggy to ride quietly to the grocery store instead of a madhouse supermarket. And they lapped it up. I know he's just a machine but he sounds so sincere they'll buy anything he says." F rank merriwell was nominated to run for the Fifteenth Congressional District seat the following summer. In his acceptance speech he said, "I am against schools." His audience, conditioned by his rapidly burgeoning reputation to applaud whatever he said, paused with hands in midair. "Now he's d-done it," Steve whispered to Appalachia. "He might as well have c-come right out flat against m-motherhood and be done with it." "Hush. Wait and see what happens." There were mutterings of: "Education's the most important thing there is -- " but they were met by counter-mutterings of: "Never did anything for me -- " "I got a real smart kid, see, and what does he bring home? Nothing but Fs -- " "I was beat out of this job by a guy with a string of degrees as long as your arm and he don't know the time of day -- " "All these teachers are overpaid anyhow. I'd sure like a eight-to-three job with four months off a year -- " The applause came first in a liquid splatter, like the first drops of a hard storm, then in a forceful ovation. Frank won the primary, but there competition was not serious and he coasted to his victory on the reputation he had made as councilman, plus the assurances of his supporters that being against schools implied no hostility to education -- quite the contrary. Progress had locked pupils and teachers into a cage -- he proposed to do away with this imprisonment and let them find each other again freely. The general election was something else. Just as the ninth ward had been, the fifteenth district was an enigma. For as long as anyone could remember it had been sending to Congress Tyrconnel Costello, a Presbyterian minister who owed his continuing success to keeping his mouth shut. His constituency voted him into office without looking at its ballots -- he ran for office without even making a speech, often without leaving Washington. But after a series of lucky investments, Reverend Tyr had announced his retirement. It remained for Frank to run against the incumbent's hand-picked successor, Lemuel Fox. Again dissident groups joined to back a third candidate, but running in front were Merriwell and Fox. "No use to write him a speech," Steve declared. "When did I ever write him a speech he d-didn't ignore?" "He doesn't ignore them -- he stores them in his memory banks," said Appalachia Lee. "If you listen closely you can hear the pure accents of Western Reserve coming through now and then. That pest from the wire service is still waiting like a cat sitting down in front of a bird cage. What do you want me to tell him?" Steve clutched his brow in a gesture he had developed since Frank Merriwell had come on the political scene. "T-tell him to d-drop dead. He's out to do a hatchet job." "You're slipping, Steve -- that robot is getting you down. Remember what happened to Nixon when he antagonized the working press. And Wilton Ogilvie can do you, if not your boy, a lot of harm." "T-tell him anything. Make up a story, that's a sweetheart. I've got to wrestle with Frank's statement repudiating the support of the John Birch Society." "What's so tough about that?" "If I can't get him to tone it down -- and when have I ever got him to t-tone anything ddown? -- he's going to slap some of his most ardent s-supporters in the face. Listen. T want no help, nor will I accept any from the forwardlooking John Birch Society. I am opposed to all progress, and the society represents the progress from McKinley to Harding.' How can I let that go?" "Sleep on it," advised Miss Lee. "Meanwhile I advise you to sweettalk Wilton Ogilvie. He's fairly sharp as newspapermen go and he won't take a runaround. He thinks he's got something on Frank and he wants a complete life story, beginning exactly with what little old log cabin Frank was born in and whose little old child he was." Steve groaned. "I knew this was bound to happen. Okay, I'll t-talk to him out there. Let one of these fellows in your private office and something's b-bound to catch his eye that shouldn't." a Pekingese with glasses. His air of baffled pugnacity didn't fool Steve Woolsey for a moment. "Ah, MMr. Ogilvie." Steve nervously offered his hand and got a relaxed bundle of icy fingers. Ogilvie riffled a notebook. "Few little questions here, Mr. Woolsey. For a starter, how old's your candidate and when's his birthday?" "March fifteenth," said Steve, picking the date he had led Frank away from van Ten Bosch's laboratory. "And he's not m-my candidate. Frank Merriwell is the ppeople's choice of a c-candidate. His m-meteoric rise -- " "Year," cut in Ogilvie, "of birth?" "N-nineteen forty-three," said Steve, rapidly counting backward. "If elected -- and we have every rereason to believe -- " "Where?" "Where? Wisconsin," Stevenson said, naming a county seat where he knew the courthouse had burned to the ground in #. "But he's spent his entire life in this city. Frank was an orphan." Steve, momentarily encouraged by Ogilvie's slacklipped grin and warmed by the sound of his own voice, ran on recklessly. "An excellent s-scholar, good at sports, Frank was -- " "Where?" "Where did he g-go to school? Oh, PS number -- ah-ah -- I've forgotten, but I'll check any details you want and #-let you know." The newsman's lips changed into the rigid shape of a trap. "Who you trying to snow, Woolsey?" Steve blinked. Ogilvie flipped more pages in the notebook, began to read -- or pretend to read. "Says here Frank Merriwell was born Kearney, Nebraska, April first, nineteen fortytwo, youngest of five. I went to see Merriwell before I came here." "Ha-ha. A great kidder, Frank. A regular b-buffoon. April Fool's Day -- catch on?" Ogilvie flicked his wrist in a brushing motion. "Save it," he advised. "I've been working on this a long time. Also been out to see this guy -- " he riffled more pages -- " Vanderbosh." in all the evening papers and the next day the morning ones had possible ramifications of letting a machine run for office. Suppose Soviet scientists invented a way of tuning in on his wavelength and making him a tool? A communist tool right in the United States Congress? Or suppose he ran amuck, as computers do from time to time, and attacked other Congressmen with his steel fists. There was no end to the possible dangers. There was also an interview with Lemuel Fox. "Let a machine take over from our beloved Reverend Costello? It would be unAmerican. Talk about dehumanizing the oifice-seeker! Open the door to this kind of corruption and pretty soon Boss Woolsey will have a hundred robots on Capitol Hill running his errands. Anarchy! Chaos! If this mess of nuts and bolts can run for Congress -- even though he'll be swamped as all my polls predict -- our next governor could be a Marchand calculator and our next Senator a Burroughs bookkeeping machine!" The New York Times editorial said in part, "... disagreeing with his callow philosophy we would advise the voters of his district to repudiate him at the polls, it is not because of his origin. It is for the courts to decide whether he can legally represent the people in Congress. Without anticipating the decision we feel that an artificial man has many advantages to offer the electorate. A robot needs no sleep and can work at the public business twenty-four hours a day. Having no appetites he is incorruptible." The Daily News said, "Merriwell may be a better American than many officials. At least he was can be said for many commie-coddlers." Since the story was national, many columnists commented. A leading conservative wrote; "Merriwell is a subtle plant by the liberal establishment. On the surface he appeals to the normally conservative voter, but once in office he is likely to turn on the police force and shelter crooks from punishment for their peccadilloes, for not having a soul..." A nationally syndicated rumormonger chanted: "Surely an honest machine is better than a machine politician like 'Foxy' Fox, who has yet to explain a # fee from the Elves, Gnomes and Little Men Marching and Chowder Society. Why did they give you ten grand. Foxy?" A liberal commentator spoke wistfully of the unenviable position of Steve Woolsey, exposed and lonely. Time began its cover story, "Robot Merriwell made history and litigation as well as news. Worried was opponent Lemuel 'Foxy' Fox..." A nationwide poll produced the following answers to this question: Do you believe a robot should be elected to Congress? Yes No Don't know # # # Do you regard a robot as a fellow being? # # # Would you want a robot as a neighbor? # # # The American Civil Liberties Union asked biblically, "What is man?" and answered Aristotelianly, "A political engine." The Americans for Democratic Action issued a statement that democracy was not only color blind but ignorant, of biology, and students on campuses as far north as the University of Alaska and as far west as Hilo were aroused on Frank's behalf. Demonstrations were held, placards went up and Frank received altogether far more publicity than if his campaign had been run by Madison Avenue. An Association for the Preservation of the Rights of Machines was formed and the Elves, Gnomes and Little Men Marching and Chowder Society denied through its president that it had ever paid Foxy Fox ten thousand dollars, insisting that it had never had a dime in its treasury -- that it had no treasury, in fact, that subsisted solely on golden dew gathered on midsummer mornings. The President of the United States, speaking to a Congress of Inventors, asserted that he took no sides and when he said, as he did now, that a public servant must have a heart, he was speaking in the pickwickian sense. On election eve Steve was asked by the press -- in the form of Wilton Ogilvie, to whom the Horace Greeley Club had evidently been assigned as a permanent beat -- if he thought disclosure of Frank's origin had hurt his chances. And Steve, filled with intimations of Frank's ruin and his own, replied with a resounding, "N-no." IV to be mentioned for the Presidency while he was still a freshman Congressman. Stevenson Woolsey saw only three things that would stand in his way. Merriwell had no national organization. He was not married. And the court case was still pending over whether he was in fact qualified to be a Representative in Congress. He had won an earlier case testing whether he was a citizen of the United States when the court construed the word "born" in the Constitution also to mean "manufactured." "I am not worried," Frank said. (He no longer bothered to point out that he wasn't programed to worry -- after having beerrexposed as a machine he had behaved as if he no longer believed he had ever been anything more or less than human.) "I have faith in our courts. I shall abide by whatever judgment is made." "You're d-damn right you will," Steve said. "You will also keep your big mouth shut for once and let Harry do all the talking. This time." "I am opposed to progress," said Frank simply. "The Common Law will deliver me." The Harry referred to was Harry Shapiro, an attorney famous for having successfully argued on behalf of a number of unconventional clients, including a lady who had put her fist through a glass door (Shapiro had won her substantial damages for cuts and abrasions as well as mental anguish), a bigamist being sued simultaneously by both wives (Harry proved both suits invalid because his client had not been convicted of bigamy), and a contractor who had run up a twenty-story building on the wrong site. Steve, Aurelie and Appalachia occupied the front row during Frank's hearing. To begin with, counsel for the plaintiff, an "interested citizen," argued that no person who had been born -- or manufactured -- on the date it was stipulated Frank had been turned out in the van Ten Bosch laboratory, was old enough to hold office as a Representative and that Frank's election should be nullified. Harry Shapiro rose to the occasion like a porpoise to sunshine. A small man, gray and squinting, with the voice of a cannon, he called a curious bevy of witnesses -- a man with a metal hand, another with a prosthetic leg, a surgeon who testified to implanting an artificial kidney and the patient with the said kidney. Of each Shapiro inquired the date of birth, the date of installation of the particular prosthesis, calling attention to the fact that the date of one had no connection with the other. His point was clear long before he had finished. The parade was closed with the most important witness of all. Dr. van Ten Bosch looked much the same as he had the day Steve first laid eyes on him -- the day Aurelie had said. This is Daddy -- he's so far out in left field he's playing in another league. His bushy white hair was wild. His eyes were glowing embers. His mouth was set in a perpetual sneer. He began by refusing to be sworn. "Hocus-pocus for superstitious minds.  will say my say and if you think it is untrue, convict me of perjury." "I shall fine you for contempt of court instead," said the judge. "I will allow you to affirm, if you prefer." "It's all humbug," snarled Ten Bosch. "This I will affirm with all my heart." One of the jurymen looked so pleased at this that Steve suspected he had been planted by one or the other lawyer. Then, under Shapiro's sharp questioning. Ten Bosch affirmed that he had been at a loss for a particular part and in his haste had made use, in Frank's construction, of the handiest substitute, a transformer from a Ihirty-five-year-old radio that was lying around. O pposing counsel called no witnesses. He addressed the jury. "Ladies and gentlemen. It has seldom been my pleasure to look upon a jury so alert, so clearly unbiased, so eager to weigh the evidence and bring in a patriotic verdict -- it is really superfluous for me to address you. My learned adversary has proved that the date of a mechanical appliance does not invalidate the date of birth or manufacture. Now the date of manufacture of this mechanical thing, known as Four-X alias Frank Merriwell, is less than twenty-five years ago, consequently, even if he were a sentient human being -- which he is not as I shall demonstrate to your satisfaction -- he would not be old enough to serve in Congress. My learned friend would like to date his creation from the installation of a part from a thirty-five-year-old radio. Why not from the date his metal was mined? This is nonsense.Suppose a man uses his grandfather's false teeth -- does this date his birth from that of his grandfather's dentistry? Letus assume, as my learned opponent might imply if he thought of it, that this transformer or transistor or transubstaniator is of such importance that this mechanical oddity could not exist without it. Does this lend weight? I think not. I think not. Consider the case of a baby born at midnight. The head, clearly the most important part of a Congressman -- ahem -- (laughter from the jury) -- clearly the most important part, emerges at eleven fifty-nine, the legs only at twelveoh-one. The baby is credited to the later day, not the earlier. I'm sure this disposes of learned counsel's spare parts. Your honor, if the court please, I meant no disrespect to my colleague. I spoke only of what was brought forth in his direct examination. I withdraw spare parts and speak instead of the transformer by which my learned adversary would transform this machine into a human being. But with a jury such as I see before me he cannot do it. I repeat, he cannot do it. For what is the definition of a sentient human being, capable of bearing responsibility of election to a governing body? Why, he must be able to distinguish between right and wrong. Is this the function of a machine? Members of the jury, you know as well as I that no machine can distinguish between right and wrong. If it could, our whole judicial system would fall to the ground -- we would install machines to return our verdicts and other machines to pass sentences." Here the jury began yawning. "A machine cannot weep, cannot laugh, and without tears or laughter how can one say, 'This is good or this is evil?'" A juryman dozed. "Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you." Without leaving the box the jury brought in a verdict for Frank. The court recapitulated by saying that if a man had an artificial leg made in # this didn't invalidate his having been born in #. On the other hand, his having parts dating from # is prima facie evidence of his having existed at that time. As for learned counsel's argument that ability to distinguish between right and wrong defined the capability to serve in Congress -- this was the first time he had heard of this doctrine. He, the court, wished it could be applied, and rigorously. To resume, right and wrong were absolutes -- the court had no sympathy with notions that they were relative matters. But to a savage from the wilds of New Guinea (he meant no disrespect to that distinguished member of the United Nations -- this was only by way of example) it was necessary to instill a concept of what constituted social as opposed to antisocial behavior in western culture. No testimony had been offered that Mr. Merriwell had not had such concepts inculcated. As for machines taking over the judicial functions, he for one would welcome such a relief. The court warmly agreed with the jury's eminently sensible verdict and gave judgment and costs to the defendant whom he congratulated on his recent political victory. (Cheers.) OlachiaM've begun to think of Frank as one who can't lose." "Why, of course, dear," said Aurelie. "What else?" While he was in Congress Frank helped curb highway building, tariff-raising, defense-spending. He voted no on practically everything, including funds for the un-American Activities Committee, except foreign aid -- as long as it didn't include munitions ("Isolation is progress."), cultural exchanges ("I am opposed to schools, not to knowledge."), increased income taxes in the upper brackets ("Wealth is progress. Let us have primitive equality."), and programs calling for aid to artists and writers. ("Art knows nothing of progress. Even James Joyce is not an improvement on Laurence Sterne.") He introduced a bill to tax all advertising and voted for higher taxes on cigarettes but to remove all excise on liquors. ("As well tax cheese," he said. "Fermentation is a natural process.") He voted to favor labor unions ("The most unprogressive force in the country."), and for civil rights ("Enslaving the black man is progress -- he was free before the white man set foot in Dahomey.") Despite his stand on civil rights, southern politicians were not unfavorably inclined toward the Merriwell-for-President boom. What better solution to the bitter pill of integration than the abolition of schools altogether? Before the New Hampshire primary Frank had a hundred pledged delegates from Dixie. Steve Woolsey -- noting one day in his office how the sun on Appalachia's skin made him think of a vacation in the tropics -- said, "Frank's career has been too quick, too s-slick. He may even get the nomination. But he isn't ready for the P-Presidency." "How's that?" asked Appalachia, tenderly scratching a pale brown arm with long brown fingers. "It seems to me he was born ready -- and I use the word born in the broad legal sense. He goes straight to his objective." She sighed. "Sometimes I wish -- " Steve, all politics, ignored the sigh and the unfinished sentence. "The worst drawback and the one we c-can't do anything about is his n-not being married. No one except Buchanan and Cleveland has been elected who wasn't married. Jackson was a widower." "So was Jefferson," she reminded him. "Not being married won't hurt him with the old maids. Besides -- " "Go on." "He'll get married." "How can he? I mean he's not -- Who would marry him?" "Aurelie van Ten Bosch, of course. He was made for her." Stevenson waited for the impact of the shock to crush him. All the time he had known Aurelie would throw him over for another man. Another man, that is. He had always feared she would give the heart he could never quite command to a four-minute miler or a centerfielder batting .# or a pitcher winning twenty-five games in a season -- or even a catcher. But this was -- this was... Words, even stuttered ones, failed him. A machine candidate, he remembered at last. He had groomed his own rival. And yet -- somehow he wasn't shattered. If Aurelie really perferred the Tin Woodman to the Wizard of Oz her mind was not functioning, poor girl. Perhaps -- perhaps she would realize her mistake before it was too late. If only she were as sensible as -- as, say, someone like Appalachia Lee. Feminine, yet with a grasp of reality... story of the engagement three days later. Four days after that Congressman Merriwell and his betrothed eloped to Mexico. No Presidential aspirant could have asked for a better press. Frank, every black-Irish hair of his wig smoothed not quite enough to hide the slight wave, was quoted as saying, "I am opposed to all progress," while astride a burro in Swimming at Puerto Vallarte -- Frank's torso in sunburned makeup looked as good as any other on the beach -- he challenged the usefulness of computers, praised the abacus and the quill pen, denounced submarines, elevators and miniskirts. In all the pictures, Aurelie was radiant. "That's what the caption says," muttered Steve gloomily. "What's she got to be radiant about?" "I asked her the same thing," admitted Appalachia. "You might call it feminine curiousity. All she did was give me a look and say, 'Science is wonderful, progress or no progress.'" "N-nonsense. A girl like you -- " "Yes, go on," urged Appalachia. "What about a girl like me?" "I was only going to say a g-girl like you wouldn't settle for sscience. Progress or no progress." "Oh, Stevenson, you do have the neatest way of putting things. In a nutshell." "I c-could have been on the debating team if it wasn't for m-my sstutter." "I think your stutter is adorable." Frank continued his winning streak. He won the New Hampshire primary. He was nosed out in North Dakota but swept Wisconsin and Nebraska. He carried Oregon and got most of the California delegates. He went to the convention with four hundred votes and Steve Woolsey worked out a deal with the runner-up for the Vice Presidency. Frank was nominated on the first ballot. His opponent was a maverick Kennedy who had as running mate an equally maverick Rockefeller. "Young" (fifty) Kennedy declared, "I am for progress. I don't intend to give up the steam locomotive or the steel plow for any renegade who has turned against the very force that created it. The only progress I'm dubious about is that which allows artificial men to run for office. When the steel plow was first invented they said it would poison the soil. When the first passengers traveled at a hair-raising fifteen miles an hour by locomotive they were warned they would hemorrhage to death. Those are the kind of people who are against progress and want to go back to the hoe and the handcart." "My esteemed opponent," replied Frank smoothly, "is for the steel plow -- the plow that broke the plains and gave us the dustbowl of the nineteen-thirties. He is for the steam locomotive -- which is now to be found only in museums. If this is the kind of progress my opponents are for, let' me say, Go to the museums and dustbowls, my friends, a.nd give us pure air and pure food..." But it really didn't rhatter what Frank said. People asked themselves for the first time what progress had brought them. Installment buying? Planned obsolescence? Devitalized food? The out as fast as they could be replaced? Automobiles that broke down carrying people at eighty miles an hour to new billboards, new hot-dog stands? Jerry-built housing developments that became slums before the crumbling houses were paid for? H-bombs? Napalm? Starvation in Mississippi and New Mexico? The UN? Policemen, cenphantiasis? Fashions? Caramel-colored grain neutral spirits? A morality based on The Pill? Enough people came up with an answer to elect Frank. He carried every state but Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Vermont. He even squeaked through in Maine and Florida. A t his inaugration Frank wore a three-cornered hat with a red-white-and-blue cockade and rode down Pennsylvania Avenue in an open horse-drawn carriage. The music for the Inaugural Ball was provided by hurdy-gurdies. In doing over the White House Aurelie had the electric lights ripped out and candles ordered for the chandeliers. The Master Chandlers Association sent her a set of antique brass bedwarmers in token of gratitude. A golden age dawned. Except for a few scattered diehards, Frank Merriwell's view had become the popular view. People discovered a new content, even a new prosperity in abandoning television, the all-electric kitchen and the princess telephone in every room. All open-air movie theaters were turned into archery ranges, and cracker barrels returned to the corner groceries. Advertising was so heavily taxed that Madison Avenue became a ghost street. Automobiles were not prohibited, but they were considered to be a sign of drivers who hadn't yet made it into the horsey set. Smoke and soot gradually vanished from the shrinking cities as factory after factory for manufacturing useless gadgets closed down. And there were charming fringe benefits. One week Aurelie appeared in public in a fascinator and the next every secretary from Boston to Los Angeles appeared in fascinators. Of course, the country had fewer secretaries (and bookkeepers and time-study experts) now that competition among businesses was slackening. Wimples became popular. Most girls stayed home to bake bread, be wed young and discover that large families sharing the burdens of the household could accomplish more with greater ease than all the silent, automatic mobilmaid, pop-up, snap-on, drip-dry, and press-to-release items had in the dreary past. Sociologists studied the phenomenon and announced it was a perfectly normal synthesis brought about by the pressure of the new feminism versus the new antifeminism and would have happened without Frank Merriwell, he being only the product of his age and not vice versa. It is doubtful if President Merriwell ever scanned it, he being busy with the erection and dedication of the grandest of Washington's memorials, that deGilbert, the only non-American ever to be so honored. As the President cut the ribbon before the mammoth replica of the Savoy Theater, he said tersely, "He was absolutely against all progress." Receiving the account by special courier who had used up several relays of horses, Stevenson Woolsey absently laid the heavy parchment aside. "Appalachia -- what an appalling name for such a g-girl. May I call you P-Polly?" "Oh, Steve -- all my life I've wanted to be called Polly. Now I'll never let anyone call me anything else." "Well, no use going overb-board about it. Appalachia's still your legal name, you know. Appalachia Lee. You think it might sound awkward if you changed it to Polly Woolsey?" His political partner, removing Author delivers wife of daughter in east coast national forest. Fiction? No, fact! Six years ago Ward Moore and wife Raylyn were traveiing up the coast when aboutto-be daughter Sara arrived at her destination, sometime before her parents reached theirs. Moore, already the patriarch of several grown families, delivered the newest member of the tribe. "There has always been a certain amount of imagination effervescent in my family," Ward Moore writes us. "One of my maternal ancestors 'ran -- ' so help me that's the verb in the encyclopedia, ' -- through Italy and Istria in the #th century, proclaiming the imminent coming of the Messiah...' " A fine heritage for an sf writer! "What have I been doing in the past few years." Moore's ietter echoes in response to our queries. "I have written three excellent novels which passed, without the change of a word or punctuation mark, from being too far ahead of their time to being just too old fashioned and conventional. "Also I've been cultivating my garden. Why doesn't someone realize that Voltaire wasn't speaking metaphoricaily, but quite literally? "Of the novels I published before I went out of style, there were several: Breathe the Air Again, Greener Than You Think. Cloud By Day. Bring the Jubilee, and Joyleg -- a # collaboration with Avram Davidson." his hands from just below her waist in the back, murmured, "What a turn you've given me! Just let me have a few days to think it over, will you? Or at least a few minutes?" And she allowed a becoming blush to creep up under her milk-chocolate complexion. "Frank wants us to go along as p-part of his staff to Ulan Bator for his summit conference with the chairman and party secretary, and ninety days on a clipper ship can be pretty boresome to those who aren't married -- while it would be just the thing for a honeymoon." "Why, Stevenson, you romantic old darling, you. Three months on a sailing ship. Whatever will we do?" It was something short of a year later, after the historic Merriwell summit talks had borne fruit and the world, stimulated by Frank's honest antagonism to any weapon more lethal than a rock, decided to scrap every gun, rifle, plane, tank, warship, pistol, bayonet and bomb, that the unheard-of happened. It came first as a laconic statement from White House Press Secretary Wilton Ogilvie, transmitted by heliograph and semaphore all over the country and around the world: "After the most conscientious consideration. President Merriwell has decided to resign." Pressed immediately for reasons, Ogilvie gave out his next communique: "The President is taking this step because he feels his objectives have been achieved and progress is at an end." All over the world heads of state dropped whatever they were doing to call Frank Merriwell -- they forgot or ignored the open secret of his origin -- " A great human being..." "A man for the ages..." "A soul to admire... and so on. Some reporter even got to Frank's father-in-law, nested as befitted Frank's position in a hermit's cave high up in the Great Smokies, complete with bats and familiars. Madder than ever, too, he took full credit for everything. "I made Frank Merriwell," he said for publication by various town criers. "I made him what he is. I promised I would destroy civilization and I have done so. What little nests of progress remain in isolated spots will disappear in a few years as soon as the formulas for soft drinks and calculating the velocity of light have been forgotten. We have won, beaten all the false prophets, kept the human race from going to the stars in order to build a heaven on Earth." Mrs. Merriwell, invited to comment on her father's pronouncement, said only, "Oh, Daddy's an old fuddy-duddy, still living back in the scientific age." First Ladyship had done well by Aurelie. Her charms were the delight of the wood-engravers who had succeeded the photographers. The clincher came at the press conference when they asked Frank Merriwell what, as ex-President, he proposed to do. He said, "I've had an offer from -- " in the pause a score of minds filled in: the Vatican, Oxford University, The Society for the Rights of Man, the Reunited Nations. But Frank finished, " -- the Mets, which I've decided to take." So he did.  Some Contributors Past and Present Pou! Anderson Isaac Asimov AM ted Bester James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menzel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohi Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut. Jr. H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: New York. N Y. # For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD D # issues of IF for # # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find . in payment for my subscription as checked above. He could stop the world, but would it let him get off? office he found a message on his desk: Dr. Arno called. He would like to see you at the lab when you have a chance. He immediately depressed the key on his squawk box and told his secretary, "Miss Carter, cancel all my appointments today. Tell anyone who calls that I will have to get back to them tomorrow. Get me a company helicruiser. Oh, yes, and call Dr. Arno and tell him that I'll be over in twenty minutes." The helicruiser was waiting by the time he reached the roof. He did not often rush like this. But it would be foolish to play executive games with Arno, who was completely impervious to them. Dr. Arno was not just another member of the research staff. He was a physicist whose findings often made sense in dollars. Martin had set him up with a lab of his own and had given him a very significant budget for equipment and supplies and complete freedom to pursue whatever research he wished. Probably ninety per cent of his time was spent on pet theories that, even if proven, could not possibly have any commercial application. But the other ten per cent had made Martin Electronics great. The #-year fuel cell, so necessary for the outer colonies; the loop drive, which was the single largest breakthrough in the development of interstellar travel; the multipolarized memory cell, which reduced room-sized computers to six cubic feet and made them a common household item -- these were just a few of the revolutionary advances that had begun with Arno's research. Martin's train of thought was broken as he spotted the RD complex below. Off to the left, apart from the other labs, was Dr. Arno's facility, a two-story struccredits' worth of equipment and one man. Arno generally worked alone. When he needed help he could requisition personnel at will from the other RD facilities in the complex. Currently he was working alone. He was out on the roof, waiting for Martin, as the helicruiser landed. This meant that whatever he had been working on was completed. While he was still working on something not even a fire could drive him from his lab, much less anything as trivial as a visit by the boss. In fact, Arno did not actually greet the head of Martin Electronics. Without even a hello, Arno had Paul Martin by the arm and was dragging him quickly into the lab as he talked in that rapid, machine-gun style of his about quantum physics and time and about shaking the very foundations of conventional physical thinking. Martin let it all go in one ear and out the other as he was rushed down the corridors. He knew that once he got Arno calmed down, he would hear it all over again in simple layman's language, which was all that he understood. Paul Martin was a businessman. He did not have the slightest knowledge of science, f you were to tell him what a machine did he would neve'" ask -- nor would he care -- how it worked. But, faster than any other man in the galaxy, he could come up with twenty-five commercial applications and a hundred major markets. A S HE entered Dr. Arno's office Martin saw on the desk a metal box about two inches by five inches by eight inches, a pair of coveralls and some wires leading from the box to the coveralls. That had to be it, whatever "it" was, he decided. He soon got Arno calmed down and had him begin all over again under the usual ground rules -- namely, in simple English. "Well, ever since the birth of quantum physics at the beginning of the twentieth century there has been speculation as to whether or not time is quantized." "You're getting closer to the mother tongue -- but you're not yet quite there." "Well, let me give you an example. You know a little about electricity. Now, given a sufficient power source, can you get any specific amount of electric charge that you want?" "Of course." "Wrong. Because there is an absolute unit of electric charge, namely the charge of one electron. So you can get the charge of lion and one electrons, but you and a half electrons. So we say that electricity is quantized. Heat, on the other hand, is not quantized. You can get any specific amount of heat." "But the difference between one and a half is too trivial to make any difference." "That's true in any normal use of electricity. But the fact that electricity is quantized has immense scientific significance. Now, we were talking about time. As I was saying, physicists have long argued over whether time is or is not quantized. Given the limitations of our measuring devices, we have not been able to answer the question -- until now. I have always believed that it is. Just a gut reaction, mind you, not based on any experimental data. But I've been playing with the idea in experimental applications on and off for several years -- and I've finally proved my point. Just as we can isolate a single electron, the quantum of electricity, I have developed a device that can isolate a single quantum of time." Paul Martin let this last statement sift through his mind, but without results. He could not understand what the machine did. "Let me demonstrate." Dr. Arno slowly put on the coveralls, taking care not to disconnect any of the thin wires linking them with the black metal box. They covered him completely except for his head. Then he hooked the box onto the belt, thus leaving his hands free. As Martin closely watched, he reached over and pushed a button on the box. Suddenly he was not there. Martin choked. He closed his eyes tightly, looked again at the spot where Dr. Arno had stood. He refused to believe his eyes. "Well?" His heart skipped a beat as he spun around to face the voice. Dr. Arno was sitting in a chair by the door. "But this is impossible! It's -- it's teleportation!" "Nonsense. First of all, it was not teleportation. I walked leisurely from the desk to this chair and sat down. Secondly, I doubt that teleportation is impossible, although I've never tried lo experiment with it. But that is an idea. Maybe when this is perfected -- " "But, but you couldn't have walked to that chair. I saw you standing by the desk one instant and suddenly you were in that chair." "Yet it wasn't instantaneous. In your time reckoning, it took one time quantum, approximately one three-hundred-thousandth of a second. I haven't yet computed it exactly. This device slipped me into one time quantum and kept me there for about two minutes in my time. Your time -- and that means the whole rest of the universe except me -- was frozen into one three-hundred-thousandth of a second, while I had about two minutes to walk around." "I just can't understand what happened. I can't believe my senses. I can't-" As he was speaking Dr. Arno pushed the button again and Paul Martin was talking to an empty chair. Dr. Arno was seated behind his desk. "Here, try it," he said as he started to get out of the coveralls. "It can't hurt you." D espite this pledge it took quite some time to coax Martin into the coveralls. He protested the entire time that Dr. Arno was stuffing him into them. Arno later described the experience as similar to that of clothing a young child, who had not mastered buttons, zippers, or shoelaces. But finally Paul Martin was set. "Now wait a minute while I get a coin. Let me know when you're about to push the button and I'll drop it. The result should be impressive." Arno reached into his pocket and got out a ten-centicredit coin. "Okay. Go ahead." Martin drew up his courage and reached for the button. Just as he saw Dr. Arno drop the coin, he closed his eyes and pushed the button. Nothing happened. Everything felt the same. He tried moving his hands, and they worked perfectly. Then it dawned on him that he had not heard the coin drop. He slowly opened his eyes. Arno was frozen in place. The coin was suspended in midair. There was no sound. The sound waves were not moving through the air. It was all a dream. Half in a daze, he moved toward the coin. He reached his hand out and touched it gingerly. It did not move. He drew his hand back and then tried again. This time the coin dropped to the floor. "Your two minutes are up." It was reassuring to hear Arno's voice, to be back in the real world again. "You look pretty shaken up. I was, too, the first few times. It takes some getting used to. I'll never forget my first time. It was only about ten seconds then, not two minutes. And lucky for me that it was. I hadn't anticipated that the air molecules wouldn't move, so I couldn't breathe. Since then, I extended the field a bit in front of the face to correct that problem." But Martin was not listening. He was still trying to believe that what had just iiappened had really happened. He could not quite convince himself. They sat and discussed it some more. Then he tried the experiment again. He was still shaky, but no longer in a stupor. The third time he was confident in his movements. The fourth time he enjoyed. By the time he left the lab it was evening. He decided to fly straight home, rather than return to his office. He knew that he could not work any more that day. He had a lot of thinking to do. His entire concept of the universe seemed shattered. All he wanted in the whole world just then was a drink, a hot shower and a stretch of solitude in which to think. Margaret had taken the children down to Buenos Aires that morning for the November Carnival. It was a two-day affair -- they were not due back until the following evening. He still had not been able to think up any salable uses for the device, but he felt certain that there must be some. Part of his agreement with Dr. Arno was that anything he could see a commercial use for belonged exclusively to the company. Anything else Arno was free to publish. It did Martin's ego a world of good whenever he thought about how, of the hundreds of papers that Arno had published on all sorts of topics, no one else had ever come up with a commercial application. If he couldn't, nobody could. Dr. Arno felt that he would be publishing this one and he was looking forward to it. He was really a child at heart. There had been a look of pure, mischievous glee in his eyes when he had told Martin he would spring his latest findings on the next meeting of the World Physical Society without any advance warning -- and then watch their faces as he destroyed the very foundations of their thinking with his announcement. Around midnight Martin had pretty much decided that this was another of Arno's ninety percenters, but he vowed to think about it some more the next day. In the meantime, if he were to sleep that night, he had to get the machine off his mind. He flipped on the screen to catch the late news. It rapidly took his mind off Dr. Arno's new invention. It gave him something far more serious to think about. The first item was that Stardeck IV had limped into Outer Station XI. It had been hit by a meteor and would be at least six months in repair. invested in that venture and he had borrowed the entire sum. In fourteen days, he had to meet a #-credit payment. If the ship had returned on schedule, he would have netted at least # to # credits, more than enough to meet the payment. But right now his cash was tied up. To make matters worse, the collateral for his loan was six million credits worth of Martin Electronics stock. If he failed to meet that payment the First Galaxy Commercial Bank could call the entire loan and sell enough of the stock to raise it. The stock was unregistered and not free to trade. With such stock, sold privately, you could only figure on receiving about half of the market value of free stock. That meant that the bank might have to sell Martin's entire holdings. He went over all of his records, looking for the means to raise # credits quickly. He woke his accountant and had him join the hunt. There was no way. Nearly all of his assets were frozen and could not be converted to cash in only fourteen days. He lay in bed awake all night, thinking and smoking one synthetic cigarette after another. By dawn he had not slept, but he had the embryo of a plan. Instead of going to the office that morning, he returned to Dr. Arno's lab. "How long can you keep someone in a time quantum? Can you extend it beyond the current two minutes?" "Yes, but not much more, since the power supply must be selfcontained. I'd say the upside limit is in the fourto five-minute range." "I'd like you to build me another device with the following specifications -- " He took a piece of paper from the desk drawer and wrote: #. Time freeze #-# minutes. #. Coveralls can be worn under street clothing, with clothing included in the field. #. Mechanism built into conventional attache case, with button on outside of case. Remainder of case free to carry other materials. #. Only one wire, leading from case to waist of coveralls, which can be plugged and unplugged at case end. He handed the paper to Arno. "Well, can you do it?" "Of course. There's nothing really different here except the packaging and upping the power source." "How long will it take you?" "If I convert the one I already built -- about a week." "If you don't work on anything else except this?" "Then I guess about three days. But I don't see the reason for all the rush." "I've got a very good reason, but I can't discuss it with you now. I'll be back Friday afternoon to pick up the unit." H e called Miss Carter to tell her that he would not be in for the rest of the day and asked her to pacify all callers as best she could. His next stop was the financial district, where he visited several banks. He spent most time at the First Galaxy Commercial, which he considered the source of his problems. He kept his usual office hours during the rest of the week. The time seemed to him to pass remarkably slowly. He spoke with no one at the office and during evenings he avoided Margaret and the children. Nothing mattered until he picked up the machine at Arno's lab on Friday. Over the weekend he tried hard to act as if he realized that Margaret and the children were alive, but he did not succeed. By Sunday night his children hated him and his wife was insisting that he see a psychiatrist. But he knew that a great weight would be lifted from his shoulders tomorrow and he would be able to live and enjoy again. After an eternal, sleepless night Monday morning finally dawned. As soon as he was alone he called Miss Carter to tell her that he had an urgent business meeting and would not be in today. Then he got into the coveralls and put on a business suit over them. He called for a taxi, put on a topcoat and leather gloves, picked up his special attache case and announced at the door that he had an early meeting and would have to eat breakfast on the way. "I really don't think you should go in today, dear. You haven't been yourself lately." "Oh, ridiculous. Marge. I've had a few rough days worrying about one particular problem. This meeting today should solve it." "Well, I don't like it. But if you insist on going, at least have some coffee before you leave." "No time. But I promise you that I'll have a cup before my first appointment." He kissed her tenderly and left. The taxi was waiting. He gave an address in the outskirts of the financial district. He would walk the last several blocks. He paused outside the entrance of the First Galaxy Commercial Bank and ran through his mind exactly what he was going to do. He examined every detail of his plan for the hundredth time, looking for areas of possible trouble. Having decided for the hundredth time that there were none he lifted his head, threw back his shoulders and strode into the bank. Once inside, he did not hesitate. He knew exactly what to do. He walked directly to the lounge area, where people filled out forms and waited to see loan officials. From it, he had an unobstructed view of the entrance to one particular teller's cage. It had one of those buzzer contraptions that let you in after you were recognized. He unfolded a newspaper and, under its cover, plugged the wire from his clothes into the attache case. He then settled back, feigned reading and watched the buzzing door. Many people entered and left by it. Eventually one of them would open the door wide enough for a second person to pass. He would not have to keep it that way for long. One three-hundredthousandth of a second was quite sufficient. that morning. He came to sneezing, his eyes running. Numerous pills and nose sprays later he again felt like a functioning human being. He cursed the generations of medical researchers who had broken the backs of cancer, heart disease and most infectious diseases, but who still could offer nothing better against hay fever than temporary relief. Everywhere men with artificial hearts, livers, kidneys or lungs walked the streets, but no one yet had artificial sinuses. Nor would anyone ever have them, most likely. What annoyed him most was the fact that it was man-made pollutants in the air that made the lives of men such as himself so unbearable. His job as an executive trainee at the First Galaxy Commercial was neither interesting nor challenging. There was precious little training. One was simply made to endure a period of menial servitude before he was given meaningful work. Most of his time v as spent on such essentials as retabulating figures already calculated by a computer, checking for errors (in eighteen months he had yet to find one), going out for coffee and counting the days until he would be performing useful work. He smiled at the thought that at least today he would probably have occasional fits of sneezing to break the monotony. Viewed in that light, his hay fever no longer appeared so unredeemingly awful. Once the customers began to arrive he was able to make the time pass more quickly by practicing his people-watching hobby. The bank was a good place for it, because it drew a lovely assortment of strange characters. There was the old woman who came every Monday to open her safe deposit box and look fondly at her jewels and stock certificates. There was a chap in the lounge who sat caressing an attache case as if it contained a key to the wealth of the universe. A call interrupted his observations to inform him that the computer runs were ready. He went to the computer room to get the four copies for the day. Each was a little over two inches thick and contained over six pounds of paper. Unfolded, they would probably stretch clear to the uptown branch. Ted, a programer, piled them on Marlow's outstretched arms and he backed out of the room with his burden. He delivered one to Mr. Gate's office and that staid, gentleman removed the top copy from the pile. The weight drop to eighteen pounds felt good. Delivering the two copies to the teller's cage required him to cross the lobby, bend at the knees with his back straight and his arms parallel to the floor so that he could push an annoyingly low buzzer to request entry. As he crouched, pressing the buzzer, he realized that there would be an added difficulty today. He felt the beginnings and then the rumbling growth of a monumental sneeze. There was no place handy for him to put down the runs, so he hurridly balanced them on his left arm, using his right to grope for a tissue in his jacket pocket. The buzzer rang. Clutching the runs with his left arm and the tissue with his right hand, he pushed open the door with his back and turned to enter. But the sneeze was upon him. As he doubled over he felt the runs slip from his arm and the tissue fly from his hand, driven by the hard, loud gust of air he had just expelled. His eyes tearing and half closed, he tried to grab both simultaneously. In doing so he pushed the door open wide. Across the lobby, Paul Martin pressed a small black button on the attache case he was holding on his lap, under his newspaper. was silent. Paul Martin attached the case to the hooks he had secured to his belt and crossed the lobby. As he slipped past the crouching figure, frozen as it grasped toward a falling stack of paper and a solitary tissue suspended in the air before it, Martin's eyes widened. He would not hto go any farther. Just off to his left, on a shelf, were piled packets of twentyand fifty-credit notes, one hundred notes to each packet. He counted five packets of fifties and eight of twenties. That meant # I ,# credits. He glanced at his watch. One minute and five seconds had passed. A minimum of two minutes, fifty-five seconds were left and he had already located all he needed at this first stop. He opened the attache case and reached for the topmost packet of fifties. It would not budge. He tried again -- pushing, pulling and twisting -- but to no avail. His mere mortal strength could not move a stationary pile of paper even a fraction of an inch in one three-hundred-thousandth of a second. Two minutes were gone. In a fury, he attacked the higher pile of twenties. He rammed it with his shoulder. It was like ramming a steel girder. Two minutes, forty seconds. He looked around for something hard to smash the piles with, but he could no more move any useful tool than he could the money. Three minutes, thirty seconds. In one last effort he clamped his hands around the pile of twenties, placed both feet high against the wall and pushed. It would not budge. He strained and pushed harder. Still it would not budge. He was so wrapped up in his effort that he did not notice his grip slipping. Suddenly he was flying backward through the air. His back hit the corner of something hard, sharp and unyielding. As he felt the expanding blade pierce his coat, his jacket and then his skin he let out a soundless scream. ly struck a man. A falling man. A screaming man. But where had he come from? The man hit the ground and lay still. He was no longer screaming. A pool of blood began to work its way out from under his form. "What happened?" "Who is it?" "What's going on?" "Somebody call the police -- " John Marlow leaned over and listened for the stranger's breath and felt for a pulse. He could detect neither. "John, do you know this man? What's he doing in the teller's cage?" "He's dead." John Marlow got up slowly and moved to a chair. He could not understand what had happened. He was sure that this man had not been in the cage the instant before. In fact, wasn't he the gentleman who had been sitting in the lounge? Yes, of course he was. But that was impossible. Marlow had seen him still sitting there, at the other end of the lobby, as he backed into the teller's cage. Marlow told this to the police when they arrived and again at the lengthier questioning that took place at police headquarters. He was noticeably experiencing mild shock, so his testimony was considered of limited value. It was to be many years before he completely stopped having at least occasional nightmares about the screaming man, who suddenly appeared before his eyes, only to die with a horrible, wide-eyed look on his face. Autopsy results failed to shed any light on the mysterious death of industrialist Paul R. Martin, chairman and president of Martin Electronics Corporation, who died on Monday of apparently violent causes in the main office of the First Galaxy Commercial Bank. Dr. Andrew Stein, the city's chief medical examiner, announced today that death was due to internal trauma, caused by a sharp object. The wound indicated that the weapon was flat, rather than tapered, and came to a point at a # angle. Although Mr. Martin died in front of a large number of witnesses, no trace has been found of a weapon of any description. Anthony Carp, chief of detectives, stated that his men had uncovered several leads, which they were following up, , but he could not yet state publicly what these leads were. Dr. Stein further stated, "Throughout the entire extent of the wound there were traces of tissue paper. We do not know how this tissue paper got into the wound or how it managed to cover virtually its entire surface, but we do not believe that it could have contributed in to Mr. Martin's death." Mr. Martin will be cremated at a private ceremony on Friday. He is survived by his wife, Margaret, #, and two children: Linda, # and Thomas, #.  To find the last two men on Earth, look for them at each other's throats! sneezed the sodden gray cotpressed hands to head. He wanted ton of his brain was jammed more to rip off his ears, let his swollen tightly into his skull, causing dull brain spill forth to relieve the pain to radiate from his mind, congestion. Wh en he coughed, which The spider legs of pain stopped was -- thank God -- a more infredancing, trudged back to the center quent occurrence, invisible pliers of his mind to become the familiar locked on the bridge of gristle beache. Elmo Shireet, big-boned and tween his eyes, then twisted, exblunt of feature, glanced back from acting a sharp throb. The two the forward drive control and pains, that of sneeze and that of grinned sympathetically. His words cough, were diabolical comswirled in frosted air. plements, the one making him suf"Sorry, Captain. That shell crafer if the other failed. Together ter slipped up on me." they rendered the lesser body Sol blew a chill vapor of his own, aches -- some hundred to a thoua frozen curse at its core. He mansand -- impotent. aged a weak smile. Dunklebloom, Sol turned his head slowly. The the gunner, rummaged in the aid movement, slight as it Vwas, inkit with his artist's hands, procreased the thudding tempo in his duced a bottle of brown glass, brain. The tank found an irregular"Here, Captain. Try these." ity in the terrain, bounced as only Sol consulted his watch, then fifty tons of steel can do, then rewashed the tablets down with water from an old grimy paper cup. "Cold, Captain. You got a cold. No one ever found a cure for that." Sol fumbled for a tissue. "I had a cold yesterday, Maurice. The way I feel now it's got to be pneumonia." Isaac Wolfsohn, laser engineer, took his eyes from the cupola periscope. Sol wondered how a boy so young could produce a beard so thick. It was burgundy and leonine, but carefully trimmed. A rare and true color, thought Sol. "Jeep coming up fast from behind," said Wolfsohn. He returned to the periscope. "He's waving. Wants us to stop." Sol clutched the shortcom. "Lock 'em up, lads. We've got company." The order was not formally phrased, did not need to be. Sol's crews had been with him almost a year. They had an unspoken understanding. That, and the fact that they had ceased to give a damn about too many things, explained their efficiency as a fighting unit. With a gathering of linked steel the squadron halted on the tarchinked highway. Sol climbed wearily past Wolfsohn, popped the cupola and ascended into withering heat. He rested thinly fleshed forearms upon the rim of the hatch and waited. The jeep stopped fifteen paces away, just off the concrete. Dust drifted menacingly toward Sol's tank. As it arrived, Sol sneezed. coughed, then wished he were dead. When the pain retreated with the dust and the coughing, Soj made out a form standing rather stiffly by the Centurion's left skirting plate. He rubbed away tears, looked again. Sure enough, someone had removed himself from the jeep and come forward with the dust. Sol's red eyes focused on the courier in time to see a crisp salute. He returned the salute with one of his own, the kind a dead fish would make if it were in the army and felt as bad as Sol. Embryotic warrior, thought Sol, fresh out of an academy and still ingenuous enough to take orgasmic pleasure in being a soldier. The embryo's eyes moved surreptitiously over Sol's modified uniform, further altered by dirt and wear. Sol knew the embryo's thoughts, his uniform correct, neat, Sol's: A mess! A perfect mess! No wonder we haven't won! Sol laughed mentally only because he did not want to antagonize the pain in his skull. If wars were won by the best-dressed armies, generals would be made in Paris boutiques and armies would mince rather than march to victory. "Sir, you are Captain Inglestien, commander of Squadron C, Eleventh armored Regiment, code Bagel C of Big Bagel?" Sol doubted the courier would appreciate a humorous answer so he contented himself with a nod. Dust coated the made-in-an-academy soldier's face like cheap mascara. Sweat was making it run. "Then, sir, these are your orders." Sol received the brown envelope with disinterest. The courier allowed himself a grimace of contempt, made another curt salute, very precise, as if to say, This is how it's done, sir!, and marched back to the jeep. The jeep roared, pumped gravel and dust. Cursing aloud so that his head began to smolder, Sol slammed the hatch cover before the red dust could reach him. T he Centurion's air-conditioning continued to manufacture ice cubes malignantly. The outside temperature of one hundred plus degrees had begun to clear Sol's head. But now, back inside the fifty-ton micro-environment, a viscous fluid welled between Sol's temples. He kept his voice even as he glared at Dunklebloom. "First time we stop, Maurice, you fix that damn airbox or, by Solomon, I'll rip it out, throw it in front of the Jehovah and tread it to iron pulp!" "Right, Captain," answered Dunklebloom, grinning lamely. "First chance I'll pop 'er and find the bug." "Right, Captain," answered Dunklebloom, grinning lamely. "First chance I'll pop 'er and find the bug." Sol opened the brown envelope. The orders could only lend detail to a general fact already known. His voice squawked over the shortcom to the eleven Centurions drawn up behind the Jehovah: "Roll!" Early the following morning Charlie Bagel Squadron reached a river -- the river -- after veering from Highway #I and dusting a mile east over a dirt road recently gouged out by engineers. Two armored squadrons were . already there, along with an uncertain amount of ordnance, artillery and support auxiliaries. All formed an iron tangle along the northern bank, waiting to spill across the muddy river. A traffic MP, trying hard to blow the bean out of his whistle, waved Sol's squadron to a parking zone of red sand. As the Jehovah locked tread, Sol flipped the cupola hatch. Clambering through the opening, he slid across the olive turret cover and dropped to the sand. "Why the jam?" The MP tucked his whistle into a pocket, shook sweat from his nose. "Guerrillas. Slipped in last night. Blew the pontoonie half to heaven." "How long before she's fixed?" "Engineers say noon." The trafficker pointed. "See. Got new 'toons strung to the other shore already. Be ready now except they're having tp improvise. Those guerrillas did a pretty good job there." The MP darted away as a dozen personnel carriers rattled on the horizon formed by the northern embankment. Sol turned to his crew. "Spread the word. We've got till noon. Seems guerrillas put a fly in the enginners' soup last night." Crews spilled from iron wombs. Most made for the red water -- a few sprawled in the long shadows of their tanks. Like a father, Sol watched his crew join others in the sluggish river, some whooping and yelling, twenty with arms linked in the dancing oval of a hora. Each man had suffered and had seen his dreams broken. Their very world had nearly passed into the oblivion of radioactive dust. There was much they wished to forget. There was much Sol wished to forget. Members of his family had been in the Jewish Legion during World War I, serving with Field Marshall Allenby and the Zionist leader Vlakimir Jabotinsky. His grandparents had died in # when Arabs burned and looted Jewish homes in Haifa. Two older brothers and an uncle had been lost to the El Alamein push of World War II. When Israel had become a state Sol's parents had been there to rejoice, but not for long -- Egyptian guerrillas had seen to that. At age three Sol had found himself alone and he had been so ever since. In the wars and protracted attritions which followed -- and of these there were many -- young Sol had had his revenge, again and again. War became like a wife, sometimes loved, often hated. M yra Kalan returned Sol's thoughts to the present. "How's the cold?" Myra's voice was soft, dulcet, hardly the voice of a tank commander. Yet Myra and her lady crew had taken their Blessed Mary into a dozen mancreated hells. "Fine. Dunklebloom performed surgery on the air-conditioning. That helped. Head's beginning to clear." Myra smiled. Sol looked away, feeling empty and alone. Two months earlier they had slept together. Since then there had been little time even for quiet words and affection. Myra was a thing of beauty in a world which was systematically destroying beauty. "Why so sad, then?" Sol shrugged. "Guess I was born frowning." For reasons never clear, Charlie Bagel was the first cleared for crossing. The Jehovah raked onto the unevenness of linked pontoons and rattled toward the southern bank. The rest of the squadron filed behind, spaced so as not to overburden the temporary bridge with a massing of fifty-ton weights. Where the river made a leisurely turn a mile to the west, the #I truss bridge lay black in the red water like a collection of broken spiders. Sol frowned. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my hand forget her cunning. The land south of the river was much the same as that north; red earth, sand, scablike vegetation on the dry soil, sparse grass, weeds brittle with midsummer heat. Through the periscope, Sol watched the Red River and Oklahoma receding, while ahead, the plains of Texas opened in arid infinities. The squadron passed southeast, then due south. The terrain changed only as the sun fell. As yet Charlie Bagel had encountered no resistance. In fact, not a living Texan had been seen, if the numerous jackrabbits were discounted. Shireet tapped a point on his Fina highway map. "Nocona, two miles, junction highways eightytwo and one-seventy-five. That the place?" Sol nodded. "We blow theircommunications, give 'em a scare, then ghost south roughly parallel to eighty-one." Wolfsohn consulted his badly thumbed Backpacker s and Camper's Guide to the Southwestern States, then a thinner dog-eared volume, A Tourist's Guide To Texas, copyright #. The laser engineer clucked in triumph. "Nocona! Hum." After a moment of study; "Doesn't say much about the place except it's farrtous for its cowboy boots." Charlie Bagel Squadron met its first resistance on rolling pasture outside the little town famous for its boots. Lank cattle fled as artillery and tanks which were museum pieces boomed at the Centurions from low hillocks. Sol's squadron fanned, returning fire with their lasers. The battle was one-sided, abbreviated. Tex artillery was broken, every tank smashed. Still, Sol lost a tank and its crew -- a disappointment. He would miss that tank in the future, need it sorely. This Texas force had been illarmed militia, a part of the converted Texas Department of Public Safety, now the Public Military Defense Force. Farther south would be the Retex heavy armored units, few in number, but armed with modern ordnance. The sun cracked like an ocherous egg on the horizon. Sol's column, minus a Centurion, left Nocona with its skeleton crew of citizens who were relieved to see the Israeli mercenaries on their way. S OL grinned wryly as he examined his new cowboy boots. His were simple black, Dunklebloom's a tan, Shireet's tan, Wolfsohn's ostentatious red. Back along the string of Centurions there were other pairs; more black, brown, tan, and others white, buff, green, red, two-toned, a few unbelievably garish. That's my squadron; a mirror to the world's madness, thought Sol, waxing philosophic now that his head had cleared. And little wonder. Couldn't the World War of '# be traced back to fanatics in Eire, backed by an eager China? Led by one monumental fanatic who had believed himself Finn MacCoul reincarnate, they had conquered the north, driven out the Protestants and eventually threatened Britain herself. What Sol never quite understood was how this mushroomed into thirty nuclear minutes of Sino-Soviet-Anglo-American combat followed by a seven-year mopping-up operation. Sol studied the steel juggernauts crawling in the Jehovah's wake of brown dust. Originally the squadron had been composed of Israeli mercenaries, their tanks christened with names like Wrath of Jehovah (Sol's Centurion), Angel of Death, Zion, Aleph, Ben Gurion and What's Sadat? But in the first abortive invasion of Texas, nine months before, three tanks had been lost. As replacements, Sol received new crews, Myra Kalan and her female mercenaries among them. Regional Oakies composed the second crew. The third was made up of individuals of little religious experience. Respectively, they had named their Centurions Blessed Mary, Jehovah's Witness and Damnit. The War had decimated America and had taken a terrible toll in most other nations involved. It had not ended, but simply degenerated into more primitive styles as the combatants exhausted sophisticated weapons systems. Nuclear weapons had been the first to go in a quick flash at the beginning of '#. These nuclear bombs, the few retained after the falsely reassuring disarmament of '#, had destroyed the world's facilities for producing new bombs. The chemical and biological attacks that followed did to the people what the bombs had done to industry. With its mass of people all but obliterated, with much of its industry broken, America's specialized economy collapsed. The world followed. Ten years later few aircraft were operable. Even the army had difficulty replacing weapons as they were worn out or destroyed. The remaining factories lacked skilled scientists and a sufficient labor force and were mostly useless. Sol's unit was among the last possessing modern tanks. When the remaining heavy stuff wore out, the battlefields would be given over totally to infantry just as, already, aircraft had met the dodo's fate. The United States, Russia and their allies continued to pursue the war with China and India. The two factions resembled men who, having wounded each other fatally, crawled together and thumb-wrestled even as they bled to death. Israel had suffered less physically than many of her neighbors and -- along with a few other small nations not targeted for early annihilation -- to some extent had risen to the status of a world power. But the war madness which gripped the world had reached into her, drawing her men to Earth's corners where they fought as mercenaries. After Texas' secession from the Union, Sol had found employment in America, a nation with more wars than men. The Lone Star State had declared its neutrality. The United States Government had other ideas, hence the war with The Second Republic of Texas. A quote came to Sol's mind, Jeremiah #:#I -- or was it #:#? Thus said the Lord: a voice was heard in Ramah, lamentations, and bitter weeping: Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. Who will weep for man when man is not? wondered Sol, rubbing the hard wedge of his nose. Rachel is dead. Who will weep? A t dusk, near a town called Mallard -- a small, round hollow dot on the Fina map, Charlie Bagel formed a laager around an abandoned barn. In darkness watched sad ghosts, crickets sang a dirge. Far away a coyote cried the moon up out of the east. The men slept or took their turn at the watch. Sol lay wakeful, thinking of Myra sleeping by her tank twenty yards aw'ay. Earlier they had talked of the War's end. Of a time when they might be together. Of taking advantage of the generous land grants America offered her mercenaries. Of marriage. All wellintentioned lies. Before dawn the column rolled south. The sun rose orange and bloated in the angle-thickened atmosphere, sent shadows running west over undulating plains. Thus far an accident of fate had kept them from further contact with Retex armor. The population, upon seeing the American stenciling on the armor and hand-painted stars of David, melted into the rubble of their homes. They did not care for the Y ank eeJewish invaders. Sol began to wonder if the Texans had any intention of resisting the invasion. Was it possible that Tex strength had been overestimated? Sol was dubious. The cowboys, like the U.S. Domestic Force, had only limited armor. With Texas so big and communications so poor it was necessary for both sides to maneuver until they collided at random like flying atoms. Because Charlie Bagel had not yet collided was no reason to discount the inevitable. Shireet spilled words like pebbles. "Old man up ahead." Sol pressed his eyes to the command periscope. A hundred yards ahead an old man ascended a grassed elevation topped by a splash of sallow-colored trees. "Big Bagel's been too quiet on the longcom," said Sol. "Stop and I'll ask that native if he's seen anything." "Sure thing, Captain." Shireet touched the track steering control and veered appropriately. Sol's dry voice went into the shortcom. "Short stop, lads. Fifty yards." Tq Jehovah drew up a few yards from the man, its Rolls-Royce Meteor idling like a hive of iron bees. Sol thrust his head and shoulders from the coolness of the Centurion. The old man seemed a holdover from the Jurassic, dressed in a straw hat and overalls five sizes too large, like sails empty of wind. His skin was wrinkled, brown like a persimmon too long in the sun. At least a hundred years had siphoned him dry of all but a spark of life. That spark had taken refuge in his eyes, the best place. It meant there was still a mind working in the mummifying shell. "Shalom," said the ancient, levering up an arm like a stick and a hand like a dry leaf. Sol blinked. "You Jewish?" "Nope, ain't nothin' now, but never was a Jew." He paused, spat tobacco from the corner of his mouth. "Knew a Jewish fella once, though. Owned a dress shop in Slidell. He alius said, 'Howdy, Jake,' and I'd alius' say, 'Shalom, Phil.' He's been dead a long time now." The old man nodded toward the column of tanks. "Boy, your contraptions shore are givin' my field hell. Don't them things work on the roads?" Sol smiled. "Sorry, sir. I wasn't aware this field was under cultivation." "Ain't." Sol laughed, a thing he had not done lately. "Everyone else ducked when they saw us coming. You're not afraid?" It was the old man's turn to be amused. "Lord, no. I ain't got nothin' you fellas 'ud want. Sallie May ran off Tuesday with a slick in the Highway Patrol Corps. All I got left is ma and a few taters and, if you're smart, you'll run off with the taters." Sol tossed the old man two packs of tobacco, a form of wealth, fleeting as it might be. "Keep your potatoes and your woman, too." The old man cranked himself over, picked up the smokings. "Shalom, boy. Thank ya." Sol gestured at the surrounding terrain. "Seen any Tex armor?" The old man made an oblique shrug. "Ain't seen a thing. Been fishin'." He nodded toward a stock tank at the bottom of a draw a mile away. "Perch and catfish bitin' poorly. Did better yesterday when we had a little shower in the morning. Perch like to feed when rain tickles the pond." Sol nodded. "Good fishing, sir." HE old man became a pleasant  memory wedged between many that were bad. The column rolled through farmland between Rhome and Justin, came finally to the suburbs of the megapolis of Dalworthington, with Fort Worth anchored in the west and Dallas in the east. A vacant thing, sprawling traps for dead dreams, the suburbs spread on every quarter. The Centurions meshed over asphalt streets not meant to bear the weight of juggernauts, tore across lawns of rank grass, beat down fences and rusting clotheslines. "Something coming in," said Dunklebloom. Sol took the longcom earphones. Big Bagel had bad news for her iron children. Sol removed the earphones and handed them to Dunklebloom. "Squadrons north, northwest and northeast of Dallas are having it rough once they draw within twenty or so miles of the city. We expected Tex armor, but they're also getting heavy artillery on their heads, the sort Intelligence said the cowboys lacked. We're losing a lot of tanks, being mauled. Wherever the Texans got their artillery -- it was a neat trick." Dunklebloom blew a breath between a gap in his teeth. "If they break the main thrust into Dallas we'll be stalled." "Exactly," snapped Shireet. "Those cowboys aren't dumb." Sol peered at Shireet's map of Dallas. "Well, let's try to be smart, then." In view of the available intelligence, Sol decided the Tex artillery must be located somewhere on Dallas' north side, possibly in the suburbs of Farmers Branch, Richardson or Garland. It might be possible then to come upon the emplacements from the rear and knock them out in a blitz. "Remember," admonished Sol, speaking into the shortcom, "surprise will be our only advantage, so keep your eyes open. The ploy washes out if we blunder into a defensive force before we're within range." Moving east into Dallas, the column crested a hill of black earth and shattered trees. Westward lay a vast charcoal radius where defense industries had once been. There, thought Sol, God stubbed out his cigarette. But he knew it seen them in the past, was destined to see more. The column scrabbled down a twenty-degree grade, churned across a six-lane avenue, sought narrow side streets where there was less chance of detection. Grass grew yellow in road chinks. The Centurions climbed a talus formed by a fallen Sears store, then spanned a ringent crevice where a gas main had burst through the pavement. In the summer-hot channel of a street Charlie Bagel halted. To the east and a little north the fortissimo of heavy artillery was plain to # Frame-worthy in space. by Patrick Moore with # full-color paintings by David A. Hardy Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke Not Sci-Fi, but the likely next steps in man's exploration of the solar system and the universe beyond. '# welcome this book... It provides a heady mixture of education, entertainment -- and inspiration." Arthur C. Clarke If you are fascinated by the vast expanse of the worlds beyond our own, make this your personal Christmas gift... to yourself! #V# X #" only # wherever books are sold hear, but blocking the view were several massive warehouses with windows like gouged-out eyes. "We're here," said Shireet, indicating the map. "Singleton Boulevard. Those guns are about a mile away, probably mounted on railway cars." The column advanced until the thunder of heavy guns shook the very streets. The Centurions halted. Sol, Dunklebloom, Myra and another tank commander armed themselves with M#s and #mm submachine guns and set out to reconnoiter. They turned a corner, then another, advancing with exquisite caution. A third turn revealed open ground, a levee beyond -- the Trinity Waterway, completed in #, reaching from Galveston on the Gulf to Houston and finally to Dalworthington. Beyond the earthen levee rose a complicated scaffolding. The sound of cannon fire came from there, together with gouts of smoke and fire. Dunklebloom gasped in disbelief. They zigzagged across the open ground, climbed the earthen slope to a stone house which afforded cover. A ship was anchored in the Trinity, a warship. "A cruiser," breathed Myra. "The Judge Roy Bean," muttered Dunklebloom. "She's a heavy cruiser," said Sol. "One of two the cowboys cornmandeered at the time of the Secession. We've found their phantom artillery. Those twelve fourteeninch guns have quite a reach." T hey retreated down the embankment, returned to the waiting tanks. Sol leaned against the Jehovah, breathing hard. He spoke quickly as he outlined a plan for assaulting the cruiser. bounty on the Bean," Sol finished. "We sink her and it's ours." "How'll we prove we were the boys who sank her?" asked an Oakie, his mind working like a piggy bank. Sol laughed sardonically. "They can check the markings on the iron coffins we leave behind." Crews were swallowed by their tanks. The Meteor Mk. #Bs revved, roared. The Centurions crawled forward in graceful lurches, one hanging back as rear guard. As the squadron crossed the open space between the buildings and levee, it fanned. Two tanks veered south to guard a bridge approach, should armored units attempt to cross the Trinity to lend assistance to the Bean. Eight tanks labored up the dike's thirty-degree outslope, found the crest, then locked track and skidded down the concrete inface in a shower of steel sparks. Even as the squadron slammed to a stop at the base of the levee, just a few feet from the muddy Trinity, their laser cannons opened up on the Bean. The cupola-mounted #mm cannon rattled, raked the cruiser's decks, chewing khaki-clad gunners racing along the catways. The Bean's fourteen-inch guns roared angrily, but futilely -- none could be depressed low enough to reach the tanks. But the vessel's lesser guns and laser mounts swiveled with sickening speed. Black wads of macerated earth began to rise along the tank-clotted bank. Dowels of livid energy laced the air. A five-inch shell found the Ben Gurion, spread her fifty tons on the air like torn paper. A laser finger detonated .t Aleph's fuel. Her cupola, like the top ripped off a beer can, rose sixty feet into the air, pinwheeled, fell steaming into the deep-dredged Trinity. The Damnit erupted in a final curse of flame, filled the air with shards of steel. Like the inside of a crematorium, the Witness blushed red. The OakAll Magazine Retailers magazines available to all retailers. Full details on procedures and requirements for proper display of mission of semi-annual sales affidavits can be obtained by writing Select Magazines Inc... # Park Ave. South, New York. N.Y. # ies died screaming, but no one heard. Shrouded in a pall of dense smoke, the remaining Centurions continued to beam energy into two predetermined sections of the Bean's hull. Plating began to peel like scorched paint, twist and warp in an agony of blistering steel. Near the aft section the hull opened like a bloody gut. The Jehovah's whining laser found the aft magazine. The remaining Centurions were lifted almost clear of the earth as the cruiser detonated with a sound like the slamming of hell's gates. Lesser explosions followed. Then deadness. Silence. The Jehovah limped up the embankment, slid down the far side, paused. Sol hauled himself from the tank. Wolfsohn followed. They climbed the levee. Blowing and steaming like a great fish, the Bean lay half-submerged in the Trinity, her keel resting against the muddy bottom. Survivors erawled upon the shattered superstructure like dazed ants. Wolfsohn slapped Sol's back. "We did it. Captain. We proved eight Davids can take on Goliath!" Sol gazed at the five burning Centurions. The fifth was Myra's. Myra dead. Dark hair and brown eyes and beauty in a face and in a soul. Gone. Sol returned to .Yt Jehovah. The remains of Charlie Bagel Squadron rolled into the canyons of downtown Dallas. With fatalistic cynicism a crew sang the Hatikva. Several Highway Patrol officers tried an ambush with M#s, grenades and a #-in. rocketlauneher. The launcher was pasted to a wall. Sol raked a mall with the black-clad officers and one naked statue. The Centurions rolled on, unopposed. Sol remembered the old fisherman's daughter. He wondered if he'd killed Sallie May's fella, wondered if she'd cry if he had. The Achrit Hayamin has come to earth. But the last days would not be spent in perfection, at least not in the sort of perfection envisioned by the prophets. Man moved rapidly toward perfecting himself as a machine of destruction. Eventually that perfection would be realized when the last two men found each others' throats. In an intersection where dead signals dangled ludicrously, two antiquated Pattons waited like iron toads. The J ehovah' s turret rotated on its traversing ring. The muzzle lost degrees of elevation as Dunklebloom aimed. A Patton blinked fire. The Centurions answered with knives of lightfire. The blood-lust rose in Sol, stronger than sex, stronger than love. A part of the intersection jumped into the air, geysering concrete. Chefzi ba, thought Sol, I have all that I desire.  the arguments -- and almost all the material for more arguments -- are in Cornell University Press's ited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, it consists primarily of the papers submitted to a symposium on unidentified flying objects held in Boston in December of #, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Many of the papers have been revised, expanded and updated for the book. There is also a good deal of additional material, appendices, photographs, charts and diagrams, together with a good index and bibliographical listing. A good, careful, meticulous job, full of healthy controversy and quite lacking the hysteria and misled religiosity so often found in discussions of the phenomenon. For phenomenon it is -- not so historical event, which serves, if properly used, as a potent and useful data-bank for the examination of our remarkable species. Perhaps only in criminology and law is there such a mother-lode of case-history, testimony and interpretation as exists in the microter has the useful character of short span and sharp focus -- in a word, spectacularity. And as a psycho-social phenomenon it has one more thing: the intrusion of the Other, hazy and perniciously illogical though it might seem -- yet it forces us to regard ourselves and our works not by standards established by our works and ourselves, but by the Other... something different, something outside. John Campbell used to challenge his writers; "Write me a story about a being who thinks as well as a man but not like a man." Few writers have succeeded; virtually none of the saucerian extremists have even come near. The Sagan Page book is, like Scripture, the voice of many different throats, and to the attentive reader has no single thing to say. Project Blue Book was a success, a failure; Condon is a saint, a devil; the Air Force is above-board -- the Air Force suppresses, represses, and Has Secrets. The contributors to the Symposium are without exception serious-minded people and not stupid, which makes their occasional, diametrical opposition so fascinating. Get this book. If you can't get it for yourself, plague your local library to put it within your reach. I say again: it is not necessary to care about this book. It is only neeessary to care about what people think they see, which is only another way of caring about what people are. Cornell University Press, #. H ere are a couple of "peripherals" for you. The Enigma of Reincarnation, by Brad Steiger (Avon, #(f) is a somewhat less than detached presentation of case histories and ratiocinations on the fascinating subject of having been born before. Some of these seem to fall rather more into Dr. Prince's "multiple personality" territory than into the occult -- and some of the documentation of the ground rules is more a presentation of what someone said than an exercise in reason. Interesting, though, on two counts: the subject itself, and the fact that so many people are devoted to it -- The other recent peripheral comes from none other than the tireless anthologist Roger Elwood -- this one is hi's very own book. It's about satanism, witchcraft and God, is called Strange Things are Happening (Family Library, #c) and is one of that uprush of church-oriented books we begin to find in supermarket racks next to -- and confronting -- the Gothics and the raunchies. No matter what your feelings about his basic thrust (that "faith in God and His Son" is "the only real alternative to Satan, his demons, and the 'strange things' of our past and present") you'll find it an interesting fast course in the history of witchcraft and the occult -- and a startling glimpse at the new explosion of their practices in modern life. There's a compact but excellent bibliography, too. of speculative fiction as I do affords a number of peak moments, explosive discoveries. Imagine finding for the first time Delany, Disch, Lafferty. I can recreate in a blink the impact on me of my first exposure to D.G. Compton, Barry Malzberg and Elizabeth Saxton. Well, here's another one. Richard E. Peck in Final Solution (Doubleday, #) has written a yarn of the "if this goes on" category which will curl up your toes in delight. Coupled with a swift, bright narrative style and a coruscating sense of humor is a sharply serious social commentary, generally encompassing the immediate future but most specifically dealing with the University. Take current trends in higher education -- the lowering of entrance requirements, the increasing voice of students in curriculum and administration and the purse-power of Government -- and extend, extrapolate them. Mix in a lot of laughter and an underlying sense of respect and responsible concern for education per se, throw in a fistful of genius for characterization (and caricature) and a fine feel for language, and you have a rough idea of Richard Peck's recipe -- and clear notice to watch for this name again. S F'S bookish bulldozer Sam Moskowitz is at it again. With heavy horsepower and a lowered blade he has excavated a boxful of well-buried gems and presents them in Horrors Unknown (Walker, #). I call them gems; Sam calls them masterpieces. The distinction lies, for example, in the appearance here of Ray Bradbury's very first story, not once but twice (the second a rewrite of the first with help from Henry Hasse). Masterpiece it is not gem it most certainly is, in the sense of its being a literary rarity. But the book does contain one authentic masterpiece: C. L. Moore's very early, exquisitely written Were-woman, one of the most spellbinding tales ever and worth the price of the book many times over. Warm thanks to the Annm c. a Am His first novel since #I : A Space Odyssey On sale August I editor for the storys' renascense -- it was very nearly lost. The book also contains a story by (brace yourself) C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long, Jr. There are others, notably one by Edwin L. Sabin, from the twenties, which reads like G.C. Edmonson at his best. The book has an introduction by Moskowitz. S EX is here to stay -- it's been in and with sf for far longer than the superficial surveyors (like Kingsley Amis) seem to know. But now it flowers and the inevitable has happened: two anthologies of sfsx (if I may coin a symbol) -- one of them reprints, one, originals. I shall beat one of them heartily over the head and ears, even if it does include one of my stories. Strange Bedfellows, edited by Thomas Scortia (Random House, #) contains some true landmarks -- like Farmer's Mother and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's False Dawn and a long-lost Boucher -- and a good deal more of excellence. My cavil is the editor's arrangement of the stories into groups absolutely guaranteed to deflate the most skilled auctorial efforts at structured surprise. It should have been enough that the book itself is a category (it's even subtitled Sex and Science Fiction) but Scortia has gone and grouped sado-masochism stories, homosexual stories, bestiality stories, and so on, so that if (as is usually the case) the writer tried to time his punch or explode his revelation, Scortia has seen to it that he is defeated. It would have been far better if he had extracted the two strongest yarns to open and close the book and shuffled the rest like cards, letting them speak for themselves. I guess what makes me maddest is that most of his selections are very good indeed. The other one (Eros in Orbit, Trident, S#) is edited by Joseph Elder and is quite something else. Ed Bryant with an edged and hilarious commentary of future sex ("They've even got a model that ejaculates flavored yogurt!"); Gordon Eklund and Thomas Scortia with potent horrors; Pamela Sargent with a finely wrought and most tender story about cloning; Jon Stopa with what is either a comedy or a nightmare; one of Barry Malzberg's sex-ridden, or rid-sexing astronauts and others, all enjoyable-to-good. The book makes a nice package and this is the first appearance for all of the stories. Many times I have been asked what early reading influenced me most. Of the most potent of those forces one novel has been out of my hands ever since I was in high school. I love that book with an abiding passion as a perennial evocation of delight and humor and beauty. You might imagine my pleasure on opening a package the other day to find Lord Dunsany's The Charwoman's Shadow in a handsome paperback from Ballantine (#). My warmest thanks to the publisher and Lin Carter (who did an introducion). Hey -- be sure not to miss The Best from If (Award, #(p). A solid antho.  On the moon, as on Earth, a misstep can mean death. And the question remains -- whose? I Let us buy the wine! Let us drink together... we will drown the sorrow of a thousand generations! Li Po, c. # night through a slanted transparent triangle of Mylarform, whose center was precisely (though coincidentally) at eye-level. My eye-level, that is. It was somewhat above that of Carole, my wife, who stood at my side. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "Will you tell Winter or will you not?" "I don't know yet. I have to think." I looked out into the night, seeking wisdom, but didn't find it. Luna One is in Mare Imbrium, near Eratosthenes, a crater as familiar to me now as Mount Monadnock had been on Earth. We're in the middle of the lunar night, though, and I can't see my crater. We're also in the middle of the local night and we should be in bed. So we stood there looking up at Earth. We -- Carole and I and The Chairman -- have a private place on the twelfth level of Luna One. Private with solid walls. Not as private as Eli Winter's, but he is the mayor, while I am but his right arm. The executive mayor, yes, which gives me more than a little clout, so we have solid walls and, as they say, a view. The view was of a crystal-clear sky (what else on the moon?), with blue-green Earth up there. And she looked winsome -- the trouble didn't show from here. Earth was winsome like a battered old lady, wrecked by time and careless use, seen through dim lenses from a great distance, only the fundamental form showing, lacking detail of pore and wrinkle. The Chairman? Ah, so. The first dog on the moon, one of six. He is in all effect Our son -- or so it seems -- a smoky-brown Pekingese, prideful of the wealth of feathers on his paddy feet. If Luna One is to be a permanent colony we must have our pets. Six dogs and six cats have come by rocket-propelled Ark to this improbable Ararat -- male and female pairs of each of six subspecies. Of the dogs: Pekingese, Lhasa apsos and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels -- the dogs had to be small. Of the cats: short-haired tabbies, Siamese and Manx. The plural of Manx, if there is one, is something I don't intend to become involved with. Carole grasped my shoulder, turned me to face her, and gave me a look I knew too well. "You'll have to, sooner or later," she said. "And shouldn't it be sooner?" I turned back to Earth. "I must think about it," I said. The smell of this place came to me now -- artificial, man-made, unnatural. Mostly one got used to it, like a freshman grows accustomed to the anatomy lab at medical school, but now and then that sterilized scent came back afresh, the olfactory cortex showing once more that it couldn't be taken in forever. The engineers and psychologists had provided a number of essences, including (it was said) some obscure pheromones, but you still knew you had air-conditioning. Nothing here to remind you of the smell of a newly mown field of hay. Most of the colonists had never known that vanishing smell, but I had. No scent of Earth here on Luna One, right. But Earth being what it was -- what it had become -- that was not a total loss. "You've been thinking about it." "Maybe I can take care of it myself. It's really not that big a deal, is it?" on the moon -- the first still on the moon, for that matter -- and the first attempt to grow Cannabis saliva, and both of these activities were altogether prescribed by our ground rules. Carole thought the still and the Cannabis endangered the colony. I knew they were illegal, but I doubted they were much of a threat. Still, I couldn't easily decide what to do. We, the colony, were a prototype, designed to see how things might be when we left Earth and carried our virtues and vices, weaknesses and strengths to other places where we might or might not survive -- assuming arrival in the first place. I thought Carole was making a foothill out of a molehill. But there lies deep within me an analog of a Mohorovicic discontinuity and I'm grateful for its presence, since it usually tells me when things are going too far. I touched my wife, looked straight into those blue-green eyes and said, "I will think about it -- I will -- but now it is time to go to bed." And we did so. As we were going to sleep The Chairman heard something out there, somewhere beneath the dome, and lifted his head about an inch and offered a tired woof to whatever it was. He set a lot of store by face, he did. O NE of the obvious stepping stones in man's penetration into space, beginning with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, was the establishment of a permanent lunar colony. There being no end to the fouling of Earth, we had to go someplace. And we weren't ready for the other planets close to home (even if they could support us), let alone the stars. Our penetration of space didn't begin with the Mercury program, of course. There were V-#'s over London before that, then Vikings, Sputniks and other interesting hardware. A thorough reprise, however, would take us back to China and rockets in the Yuan Dynasty, when a nameless (to us) Oriental seeker after knowledge combined saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal into an inflammatory mix -- the propellant whose energy thrust the first fireworks into the sky. But that's stretching things. So, in the technological world of more or less now we go back to Robert Hutchings Goddard, standing in the Massachusetts snow in #, firing up an awkwardly supported apparatus, the first liquid-propelled rocket. This device ascended some fortyone feet in a gentle curve before entering its geometrically and physically ordained return path to the Massachusetts field, into which it fell with a no doubt satisfactory thunk. And, in due course that rocket had led, as one thing does to an unpredictable other, to the moon. The establishment of a reasonably permanent lunar base would be much facilitated, to say the least, by the presence of a breathable atmosphere, but that formidable accomplishment would be a long time coming. In the meantine, then, back to the dome. And -- for a permanent colony -- a dome whose size, construction and engineering made the simple habitations of the Mayflower missions look like children's toys, lying abandoned and forgotten in Mare Nectaris and in Tycho -- the boys and girls having lost interest and gone elsewhere to play. A dome meant to house # people (men, women and children) and twelve animals (dogs and cats) upon the lunar surface posed an array of problems of dimensions the first dome designers, those of the Mayflower missions, hadn't had to deal with. There were options, however, though only two. The first domes on the moon -- for the early, temporary colonies -- had been of Mylarplex, the dome prefabricated on Earth, carried to the moon and there inflated with an oxygennitrogen mixture into the approximate shape of a hemisphere. Those domes had worked, too, but in the early missions they had had to work for only a few people -- eleven, for example, in the case of ill-starred Mayflower Three, and that had been three more than Mission Design had called for. For the first really serious attempt to survive indefinitely on the moon something larger -- and by more than an order of magnitude -- was required. There were two possibilities: an enlargement of the prototypical Mayflower dome, preserving the general concept of those early structures, or a geodesic construction, a la Fuller, of solid triangular sheets of lightweight material, which could be transparant, opaque or anything between. (A bewildering variety of force fields had been proposed to obviate the necessity for this cumbersome construction, but without exception they had remained on their respective drawing boards.) In the end the geodesic dome had won over the Mayflower prototype because the psychologists foresaw, accurately or not, that the colonists would feel insecure beneath a very large dome constructed of such apparently flimsy stuff as Mylarplex. This view had been supported by the reactions of some of the colonists on the intermediate domes between the Mayflowers and the first permanent colony, Luna One. The psychologists and psychiatrists had prevailed over the engineers, who were the ones who had to erect the structure in hostile surroundings. The engineers had wanted Mylarplex, but they had lost. They had lived, however, in smaller Mylarplex domes while erecting the mammoth geodesic structure, whose form was essentially that of a sphere projected upon an icosahedron. HY five hundred and sixty  eight people anyway?" Frank Mei asked. This was an early conference in Houston. "Not ours to ask. Ours to build the dome." "Within lousy budgetary considerations. Limitations, I should say." These are engineers and architects, sitting around a long table. They've been complaining about the budget and other aspects of life. "Yes. Okay. Jonas, you're von Neiman asked. Von Neiman was the chairman of this loosely structured body. Jonas Mills was liaison between Project Design and this group. "Right, Bill," he said. "Gentlemen -- ah, and ladies -- it's Hke this. Luna One is going to start off with five hundred and sixty-eight people. And twelve small animals. dogs and cats. The population density must approach what Project Design considers optimal. I don't say be, I say approach." He looked owlishly around the table. "The density will be greater than that of New York City, less than that of Calcutta -- nearer that of New York. For the referent year that density in New York was about thirteen thousand five hundred people per square kilometer. Or thirty-five thousand per square mile, imperial measure. For Calcutta, forty-seven thousand five hundred per square kilo. A hundred and twenty-three thousand per square mile." Mills looked up from his notes, hoping the figures weren't boring his audience. They weren't. "Project Design decrees that the population density in the dome of Luna One will be twenty thousand per square kilometer, plus or minus no more than five per cent. That would be about fifty thousand per square mile. This is people-density. To the area required to produce this density fifteen per cent is to be added for the agricultural fields and a total of ten per cent more for life support, the recycling plant and the like. That is the basic position." . "Ho w did they come up with this particular figure -- twenty thousand per square kilometer?" "They didn't say, but the figure is firm. The people-figure is firm, that is, within the plus or minus five per cent. The additional area, for fields and life support and nonpeople needs, is not quite so firm. But those are the figures you're supposed to work with." Calculators were drawn from pockets around the table. The soft tapping of keys was heard, and digits flashed in brisk animation. "I have the figures, gentlemen. And ladies." Mills flushed. The others continued to make their own calculations. "Five hundred and sixty-eight divided by twenty thousand is point oh two eight four. So the floor area of the dome will be, people-wise, about a thirty-fifth of a square kilometer, or twenty-eight thousand six hundred square meters. Add the other twenty-five per cent and it comes to thirty-five thousand seven hundred and fifty square meters. Three point six hectares, something under nine acres. The floor will be circular. The diameter works out to about two hundred and twelve meters. These are rough figures." Some of those at the table looked up from their calculators with scorn. "The circumference is six hundred and sixty meters. Height at center of dome -- which is somewhat flattened from the hemispherical -- is approximately ninety meters." Silence for a time, the pocket calculators verifying and refining these data. "That's a lot of people to put into a space like that," Mei said. "Let alone the animals, the pets. And the hardware, the life support. How about space for recreation? I won't be there, but I don't think Fd like it if I were." "Look outside the windows," Mills said. Knowing what they would see, they did so. A yellowish, sulfurous mess. "And remember, they'll be building up in the dome. it won't all be at ground level." "Ho w high up?" Lucia Lehmann asked. "The interior of the dome isn't our problem. Another team will be handling that. There will be liaison, of course. Your only responsibility is to build the dome. To answer your question, Lucia, they'll be building, inside, all the way to the top." "How are they going to get up and down?" "Ramps and ladders, I think." "Any provision for -- well, a small park, or like that?" "I don't know. Provision for fields of growing crops, of course. That might be sort of the same thing." "They know where we're going to put it yet?" "Probably in Mare Imbrium. Nice flat terrain -- and other considerations I don't understand." There were other only partly relevant questions, but their real business was the dome itself and they talked about that for some time. And they thought of the people who would be living there. "I find this quite depressing," Mei said as the group left the conference room. "Yes. That's understandable," said Mills. "A honeycomb." "A maze." "A labyrinth." "I'm not so sure," said Lucia, who as a child had played elaborately with doll houses. "I think it might be, you know -- cozy." R elative quiet in the dome now. There is always a hum and a throb in the background, but these are omnipresent and cease to have meaning as auditory stimuli, becoming simply conditions of existence. The colonists have mostly gone to bed. In the fourth level of Sector B, Antonio Scartia, thinking his wife asleep, creeps from the place they share. In this thought about his wife, as frequently about other such thoughts, he is wrong. "Where are you going, then?" Gina Scartia asks. "I have to talk to Charlie." Gina raises her head and passes a hand through an abundance of tousled black hair. She doesn't know it, doesn't think about it, but she is as beholden to the hair on her head as is The Chairman to the feathers on his paddy feet. "If you're going to see Maria I kill you, all right?" "All right, Gina. But I'm not -- and you know it." She gets out of bed for the moment, draws a shapeless garment over her shoulders, emphasizing the shapeliness beneath. "You are up to something, always up to something, same as on Earth. I don't know how you made this mission. But, as on Earth, I find out later what you are up to." She watches her husband leave, he flicking aside the curtained partition to their quarters. "You will be back before an hour," she says to his departing back. "Or I hurt you, all right?" The partition, drawn by lunar gravity, fell gently back into place. L una one was a honeycomb, a maze, a labyrinth, not an easy place to move about in, and eighty per cent of the inhabitants knew only the parts of the passages that had meaning to them. The others were more familiar with places that were none of their business. And, as with ancient cathedrals, history and complexity had produced a place no one totally knew. Antonio Scartia threaded his way through a warren of passages, ramps and what seemed like tunnels to the quarters of Charles Erskine. Erskine was one of the few single men on Luna One. His small place was on the second level in Sector F, near the periphery, though not commanding a view. Scartia was a' chemist and Erskine was his assistant. "I can't stay long," Scartia said. "Gina thinks I might be otherwise occupied. Suspicious girl, but I love her. For all I know she's followed me here." He peered into the dimly illumined passage beyond the hanging partition. "So, you've been putting your head to work? What do we do about Operation Red, then?" "I know the first thing we're going to do." Charlie's place had no solid partitions, but he made gestures to make the cubicle as secure as he could, then unlocked a small closet and withdrew a bottle and two glasses. Into the glasses he poured small quantities of a dark amber fluid. He handed one glass to Scartia, raised his own, and said, "Up!" They drank, knocking it down in a swallow. There wasn't much of it. "Down!" said Scartia, in ritual response. "So old friend, what now?" "Well, we're not sure he's onto us, are we? Maybe he didn't tumble." "Maybe he didn't. My guess is he did. Something about the look in his eyes when he left. The question is, do we keep Red going in the lab or do we put it someplace -- where he can't find it?" Scartia eyed the small amount remaining in the bottle. "Might as well finish it," Charlie said. The last drops fell slowly into the glasses. They sat at a small table, looking at each other, partners in crime, knowing no guilt whatever, thinking only of ways to keep their thing going. Scartia looked at his watch. "We've always done it, you know," Charlie said. "Always." Anthony raised a questioning glance. "Fermented and distilled. It's been part of us back to the cave. The fermenting part, anyway. Why shouldn't we do it here? For the love of God, do we survive or do we not?" Charlie's face held a serious look. "I say that we do survive. And that we should survive with -- amenity. And that if we do so it is -- in part at least -- because of what we do, you and me. In these particular operations, that is. Their time will come. Project Design or no. We will provide an important service, a necessity. The provision of such service will, of course, have its reward," he added almost as an afterthought. "A necessity, yes, but one overlooked by Project Design. This makes us crooks, you know. And I'm really an honest man at heart." "Well, don't go too far, Tony. So you're an honest man. Think of the virtue in providing an honest service then. Let's just say we carry on in the tradition of our ancestors." "Yes. However, I didn't come to discuss philosophy, but practical matters. We will provide a service, yes. But I think that Pierre, good fellow that he is, is onto us. By accident, granted, but it's still the same problem. I say we move the operations, both of them. Question is, where?" "I had come to the same conclusion. Though it makes, of course, an inconvenience to us. However, in such matters it is best to be prudent. I think I know of a place in A. Fifth level." "Mario's?" Charlie shook his head. "No. Perhaps, for now. I'd best not tell you. You understand, friend?" "Of course. And I'll move Yellow, fire that one up in a place I know in C. When the heat's on, move on. Old aphorism." "Right on." "What?" "An old twentieth-century expression. You know I'm a history buff." "Okay. I've got to get back. I don't like Gina to be mad at me." Hives do hum and Luna One was humming, though at this time at a subdued level. Activities, licit and not, were in progress. The decision having been made to move the two operating stills into dark quarters known only to Scartia and to Charlie (and each of these knowing only one of those locations), Scartia made his way back to his enclosure. He took some pride in knowing what went on where in Luna One, but he passed within ten feet of a conversation he knew nothing of, one in which he would have taken a considerable interest. agronomists, the first growers of marijuana, pot, grass, on the moon. These are two boys and a girl whose responsibilities involve the production of food. C. sativa is not a food, but these three have an interest in it. On their ride up to Luna One they have carried a small number of seedlings. Such transport was, of course, proscribed, but they had gotten away with it. It is the view of Project Design that man will not escape to the stars unless he can first establish a self-sustaining base on the moon -- as prelude to a self-sustaining spacecraft. Self-sustaining. This means, among other imperatives, the production of food. Thus there are on Luna One a number of carefully tended agricultural plots. Some are at the skin of the dome, where sunlight comes in during the lunar day, and some are inside, bathed with rays of sophisticated content. Some of these plots are hydroponic, some are not. The three junior agronomists have put their smuggled flora in a small plot meant for Idaho potatoes, thinking no one would notice this small departure from Plan. But Pierre Charpentier, executive mayor, had noticed. The three horticulturalists are Robert and Pamela McDonald and Andy Rikishin. They were meeting in the McDonald place as Antonio Scartia passed by, almost within earshot. "I think Carp is ontp us," Andy Rikishin said. Carp's name was Charpentier, but most opted for Carp. He was an informal type and was reasonably well liked. "Though, I think, he tried not to show it." "He's no botanist, no agronomist," said Pamela. "He's not even a scientist. He's an administrator." "Right. But how much of a scientist do you have to be to tell the difference between marijuana and potato plants? And he's not stupid," McDonald said. "The question is, if he's made our small plot, the Idaho potato one, why hasn't he done something about if?" Andy extracted a joint from a thin metal case in his shirt pocket, lit it and passed it around. "I always think someone will get the smell," he said. "Good thing this fake atmosphere is something we can burn the stuff in without blowing up the dome. I say we sit tight and see what happens. We've the other patch he almost certainly doesn't know about. Okay?" "Okay. It would be a bother to move it, plus more chance of somebody else seeing it." Another decision made, then. "What are you thinking about?" Rikishin asked, noting Robert's thoughtful gaze. "Well, I really wouldn't want us to, you know, louse up the colony with our -- uh -- project. I mean it. If I thought it was bad, really bad for Luna One, I'd pull up the plants. I can do without it. You know?" "Sure," Rikishin said, not hesitating. "And so would I. We're in this to survive. But we think our -- project, good word -- enhances our prototypical effort to make it, don't we?" They nodded in a silent but not totally committed accord and finished the joint. Andy made his way, then, through tangled passages back to his own place, back to Sandra and The Mai. The Mai? The other Pekingese on the moon. Antonio Scartia had arrived at his bed about two minutes before that. Gina had been only moderately suspicious and was, he saw thankfully, asleep. The end of another day on Luna One. Day three nine one. II Scholars and saints are soon forgotten, but great drunkards are immortal. Li Po D ays into the mission since the arrival of the first colonist: #. Deaths to date: one. Jeff Barnes, power-plant technician -- and, according to present indications, the only accident-prone colonist to sift through the screenings. In his first week on the moon he'd worked on an inadequately shielded module in the plant with both hands at the same time, thus violating safety regulations, this particular one going back to the nineteenth century. He had jerked away in time and fallen backward -- gently in the lunar gravity, so he'd suffered only a burned hand. The next week he'd gone out on the surface for needed equipment without checking the life-support of his suit and had run out of anything to breathe just outside the lock. Natural selection at work on the moon. Barnes probably wouldn't have lasted long in the Plymouth Plantation either. Births: two. A boy to one couple and a girl to another, which tended to maintain a balance. Peter Mungo and Ishbel Lopez y Gasset were the first children born in the first permanent colony on the moon. There had been two other births on other, more transitory lunar missions. Population: #, up one from Day One. Why only two births in # days? Actually there should have been but one, since the desideratum was zero population growth. Not only was there no hurry to overpopulate -- their situation being what it was, their memories of Earth being what they were -- but overpopulation was specifieally defined, proscribed and under control. The members of the community had been chosen with this in mind. Which is to say that they were supposed to be relatively long on contraception and short on compulsion to beget. One extra birth had, though, slipped in. Or out, if you will. The Mungo boy was strictly legitimate, having been conceived with full official approval about three weeks after Jeff Barnes had made his anoxic departure from Luna One. The Lopez y Gasset girl was also legitimate, though only aeeidentally so. The p-c pill was almost perfect, but not quite. In any case, Desiree Lopez y Gasset had convinced the council that she had indeed taken the pill and that it, well, hadn't worked. This had been known to happen on Earth, so why not here? Day three nine two. W "I need to take a walk," I said. "I'm claustrophobic, though I was well sereened for that. As were we all. I've things on my mind." Carole propped herself on her elbows to look at me. She was cute. "So walk here," she said. "See the view. How many of us have one? Enjoy. I'll be quiet. Or go up to the Penthouse. Or let's both go to the Penthouse." "With all due respeet," I said, "being quiet is not your major virtue. Though virtues you have." I trod the short space, thinking that Earth gravity would be more suitable for this kind of pacing -- you could put more into it. Triangle after triangle floated past my peripheral vision. I turned and they slid by on the other side. There were small imperfections in each pane of Mylarform and I knew them all. One was like a great white pine, I thought, though Carole couldn't see it. I hadn't seen a real one for a long time. "And I don't feel like going to the Penthouse just now. I'd have to check the list anyway and it's in my office." I stopped walking for a minute and sat on the edge of the bed. The Chairman came out from under and gave me the look that says its time to saek out. "I'm going to look around tomorrow and see how things are. Then I'll talk to Winter," I said. I rose from the bed. Pace, pace. The Chairman down under again. Passes to leave the dome to walk, however briefly, on the surface were stringently rationed. Not that I needed a pass. There wasn't much to do out there, not now, and it cost a bunch of energy every time someone went out. It was surprising how the need (for some) to get out there became so urgent now and then. It seemed a little closer to Earth and I understood that, but none of us wanted to go back there -- and even if we wanted to we knew we never could. "I don't know why you're so psyched up about it," Carole said. "You've discovered forbidden operations and you must stop them. The colony won't survive without discipline, right? I've heard you say that so many times. Remember Mayflower Three?" "I remember Mayflower Three as well as anyone," I said, "though it was before my time. But I think this is something different." "Different how? And why haven't you talked to me more about it?" "I haven't talked to you more about it because it's just happened. The point is this -- and I do remember Mayflower Three -- we're leaving Earth because it is, more or less, a ruin. A ruin made by us. One of the things that put it where it is was drug abuse." Carole opened her lovely mouth, but I shut her off. "One of the things," I said. "Not drugs, but drug abuse. I don't propose to give you a learned discourse on the history of fermentation, distillation, tobacco, mushrooms, heroin -- " Here Carole cast her eyes aloft, all the way to the ceiling of our small place. The ceiling was low. For me there is a comfort in lowceilinged places, except when I'm claustrophobic. When I was a child I dreamed much of such places, pleasant dreams. It must have been tied up with a return to the womb, so the psychologists had said when I was being screened for Luna One. Well, why not? It was safe and quiet there. And low-ceilinged. "What I'm really thinking about," I said, "is maybe here is an opportunity to work with the drug thing on a different basis. We certainly blew it there," I said, nodding toward the familiar blue-green disk. "Maybe we could do it better. Find a different way, a new approach, something." Carole thought about that. "I see something of your point, I guess. But the law is the law, isn't it? And you're the number-two man here. Must be you've got to be on the side of the rules, Pete." I looked into the blue-green eyes I knew so well. Something here was out of joint, but I couldn't put my finger on it. "You're coming on strong on the side of law and order, aren't you?" The blue-green eyes looked away as I crawled into bed. "I know you're troubled," she said. "You'll do what's right. I know." I was almost asleep. Unconscious resolution. Or attempts in that direction. "The law is the law is Project Design is Project Design," I heard myself saying. I thought that was silly, knocked it off and snuggled against Carole, seeking wisdom and comfort. Comfort I found. N ext morning, still in the lunar night, I went to Winter's office. This was on a high level, the third from the top, occupying half of that space. The view was something, but I wasn't there for that. Anyway it was night and I couldn't see Eratosthenes. It took some getting used to -- its being dark all day for two weeks, then light all night. Winter sat behind his desk, looking like a displaced secretary of state: dolichocephalic of skull, bushy white of mustache and old Boston Brahmin of mien. His name was Winter and that suited his smile. He was another of the few single men on the moon. His wife and only daughter had been killed in a rocket crash two weeks before the liftoff they were supposed to ride with Winter on. I told him straight off what I had found and what I hadn't done about it. He took it coolly. "Actually," he said, "I'm not much surprised. These activities are, of course, against our law, against Project Design, and will have to be terminated. Have you gotten onto John Edgar yet?" "No, I haven't." John Edgar was our law enforcement officer. John Edgar wasn't his name, though, he was called that after a twentieth-century bureaucrat whose name someone had remembered. "Why not, then?" I was not at ease. "It's a long story," I said, buying a few moments, wondering what I was doing. "The thing is, Eli, I'm not sure what is the right thing to do." We were a small colony and we all more or less knew each other. I could see that Winter was trying to understand something in me he hadn't known was there. He was a little off balance. "Carp," he said. "Carp. I don't have to tell you this, but it is possible that the future of our race, for what it's worth, depends on what happens in Luna One. Our laws, directives, were well thought out, well planned. For what possible reason would you think of violating them?" "I'll come to that. But, Eli, the laws weren't made by us, were they? They were made by Project Design on Earth. None of whose personnel became part of Luna One. Not one. They're there, all of them. We're here. Maybe we should make our own laws. We're alone and almost autonomous. How many more supply ships are coming? Three? Then radio contact only, through which we tell them how to make a self-sufficient colony work while they're building the ships, assembling them in orbit, to head for our nearest neighbors. Presumably we -- our descendants, that is, if the colony survives -- will be shuttled to the ships and away we go, the ships carrying other selfsustaining colonies constructed upon what we have learned here." I paused. "Excuse the lecture. I got off my point." "Which was," Winter said, "how you could consider percontinue. I'm not about to send you Earthside on the next supply ship, but you've aroused my interest. My interest, not my approval." "To make it short, it's simply that this is somethingwe've always done -- back to prehistory. That must mean something. Ferment"But not mainlining heroin." "That's something else. That's not what we're dealing with." "What we're dealing with is the beginning of that. In one word -- why do we have to leave Earth?" "In one word, pollution." "That's right. Carp. But pollution is an omnibus condition. One of the reasons we're here is because of escalating internal pollution, if you will, through ubiquitous use of psychoaclive drugs on Earth. What's keeping much of Earth quiet right now, Carp, except a combination of Jesus and junk? We want to do better up here." "We do. No argument. But -- a small drink now and then? A quiet smoke?" Winter looked at me thoughtfully. "The history of that Earth out there," he said, nodding, "is what has put us here, in uncomfortable and hostile surroundings, trying to escape. Don't think Project Design didn't think out a few things. Carp. They did." He rose and walked a little. I sat there looking at the stars. "They have to go. Carp, the stills and the grass. You want John Edgar? Want me to come with you?" "No," I said, standing up. "No. I'll take care of it. I'll be back to you in due course." I turned to leave, then turned back again. "If we pull up the plants," I said, "they're gone. We can't synthesize the plants. They can't. So they might try putting something else together. Acid, maybe. And there will always be something to ferment, to distill, as long as we grow wheat, potatoes, rice, whatever. Unless we can eliminate yeast from Luna One -- and we're a little late for that. I'm just wondering if we're not conducting an exercise in futility." "Luna One is a warren, as you know. Carp, but it's not that big. We can keep an eye on all the labs. We could put John Edgar on it full time, there hasn't been much else by way of crime here." His tone indicated that the interview was over. "You know what you have to do." I nodded and left. and headed toward the center of the dome. Antonio Scartia's lab didn't need skin space and he was deep inside. His shop was strictly analytic -- or had been until he'd fired up the still I'd spotted by accident. Scartia was a chemist. His primary function was to analyze lunar soil and the products produced from it. Vitamins in the cabbage, trace elements in the potatoes, like that. He wasn't supposed to be a creative scientist, just a fact-finding one. I rapped on the jamb of his portal and walked in. A spacious laboratory, considering where it was. "Scartia," I said. "Good morning. I'm just wandering around. Part of my job, eh? Any problems? Everything going well?" "Good morning. Carp. I mean, Mr. Charrp -- that is -- " "Carp is fine, just fine. Any problems here?" I walked slowly along the aisle between the two long benches filled with arcane apparatus. The apparatus I sought wasn't there. "No, Carp. No problems. All going well." Bubbling retorts, strange odors and no still. "This -- " Scartia indicated a complex array of glassware -- "is a new analysis of the major nutrient in the new hydroponic bay. Here are the first results if you're inte"ested." I glanced courteously at the sheet he proffered and understood some of it. "They seem to be going well, the hydroponic projects." "They are. Everybody knows where the water comes from, but it makes good vegetables." We walked back the way we had come, looking now at the gear on the other bench. Scartia was wary, but unruffled. He had moved the still, so he had guessed or suspected that I was onto him. "What happened to the apparatus that was here the other day?" I said, placing my finger on a precise spot on the table. "It looked interesting." "Here?" he said, looking at the spot mystified, as if trying to remember. He did it well. column, Scartia -- adapted to moon conditions, but recognizable." His swarthy features assumed a look of such spurious innocence that I almost laughed, but I played it straight. This was serious busiin our program here, sir," he said, looking like a Renaissance angel. Or trying to. "I could have sworn," said I. "Right here. A glass flask, a reflux column, a water-cooled condenser. A collecting vessel. Surely I didn't dream it." "That piece of apparatus you must have dreamed, sir. Carp. Never anything like that here." "Perhaps an assistant moved it to a different place?" "No, sir. Carp. I only have one assistant, that's Erskine -- Charlie -- and I know everything he does. It all has to be in the log." He proceeded to a disorderly desk. "See," he said, passing me a thick notebook. I gave it a pro forma glance. "And everything you do must be recorded here also, of course." "Certainly, sir. Carp." "Yes. Perhaps I imagined that apparatus. Or maybe it was in some other place. Perhaps I'll find it, eh?" There was an understanding in our mutual appraisal. He knew that I knew and he knew that I knew that he knew. But it was a small world and we were treating each other like gentlemen. Which we both, after all, were. Scartia was eager for me to be gone, but I had things on my mind. "You're an analytic chemist, right?" "Yes, sir." "Can you give me a few minutes? I've a few questions. On unrelated matters." "Sure, Carp." He was wary again. "Why don't we sit down right over here?" He led me to his untidy desk. "Okay, Tony. Tell me this. Can marijuana be synthesized? And keep it simple -- I'm no chemist." A look of genuine and refreshing innocence now came to Scartia's face, together with relief. Pot, clearly, was something he wasn't into. "Well, Carp, yes and no. First of all, there's no such one simple thing as marijuana. What's in the grass is a very complex mixture. The major hydrocannibanol -- can be synthesized. But it's a long and tedious process. Why do you want to know about that?" "I'm curious. And I'm interested in chemistry -- also in Luna One. In other words -- among our various worries here we don't have to think about some ambitious chemist -- not you, of course -- synthesizing grass?" "No, sir. No problem. Carp. The way to do it would be to grow the plants -- " Sudden comprehension illumined his dark face and he let the sentence trail off. "Fine. I won't worry about that, then. All right, how about acid? Could it be synthesized here on Luna One?" Scartia was enjoying this. "Well again, yes and no. If you have Dlysergic acid to start with, there's no problem. But to make the Dlysergic acid is one hell of a job -- sir. I don't think anybody could get away with it in any lab in this dome, Carp, if that's what you're worried about." "I didn't say I'm worried -- I said I'm curious. Is there any way to make acid without synthesizing Dlysergic acid?" "Well, yes. You'd need ergot. The best way would be to grow rye -- which we don't have any of on Luna One that I know about -- and infect it with Claviceps purpurea. That's an ergot fungus. This grows on the rye. Then you isolate the dried sclerotia of the ergot, extract the alkaloids and you can get D-lysergic acid out of that without too much trouble." "I said to keep it simple, Tony. So -- if I understand you, we couldn't have an acid problem on Luna One unless we had both rye and an infective fungus. Right?" "That's right. Carp. Again no real problem. I'd say." Scartia, illicit distiller that I knew him to be, was sitting in on a high-level conference here and I could see that it pleased him. Also, it was obvious to him that I had other problems than his still (stills?) on my mind -- and that was clearly a comfort. "You seem very knowledgeable about all this, Tony." "Well, yes. I'm a chemist. A good one. There was lots of competition to get up here, Carp." "Right. Okay. Last question. Flow about skag? Heroin? Can that be synthesized?" "Yes, sir, it can. But it is a very, very long and difficult procedure. No way to do it here. No way. Another worry off your mind, sir?" "Yes. But there's an easier way to make heroin." "There is. Grow the poppies. Pap aver somniferum. That gives you the raw opium and it's easy to make heroin from that. But there's not much room here to grow that many poppies." I rose. "Thank you, Tony," I said. My informant got up hastily. "I've got to look for a still now," I said at the jamb. "Sure, Carp. If there is one I hope you find it." I walked out. I hadn't solved anything, but I'd put a card on the table. N ext I drifted through many a walkway, past many rooms, nearly weightless down a number of ladders, to a place on ground level at the outer wall -- the field watched over by Robert McDonald and Andy Rikishin. Idaho potatoes, Kansas wheat and Iowa corn. This plot wasn't much by way of being international, but we had the best of those products and that was that. Rikishin greeted me. "Hi, Carp," he said, not long on ceremony. Likable boy, I thought. We knew each other socially to a degree. The Rikishins had the only other Pekingese on Luna One. McDonald was off at the other end of the plot, measuring different plant heights in different sub-plots. "Just wandering around," I said. "Part of my job. How are things going? Any problems here, Andy?" "No problems, not really. We could use more phosphates, but we understand the difficulty there. But we're just about on target. Carp." I strolled about in this airy place where green things grew. It was the lunar night, but it was our day and overhead lamps of sophisticated design shed complex frequencies of radiation upon the plants and the soil. And upon us, of course. I wasn't quite used to the idea of green things growing on the moon. It was beguiling to walk around. "Idaho potatoes," I said at the appropriate place. They ought to do well here. The volcanic soil." Always, on Earth, the best potatoes had come from Idaho, growing not far from the so-called Craters of the Moon, in soil not dissimilar to this. I suddenly saw Eratosthenes, my moon crater, not as the Mount Monadnock I'd become familiar with later, but as some kind of inverse kin to the Great Southern Butte in Idaho which, in my boyhood, I had known from almost daily observation. I had looked out at it from my bedroom window and from the windows of the physics lab in high school, when I should have been attending to the work at hand. "We've got a good crop coming here. Carp," he said, somewhat uneasily now, following my gaze. "You're right about the soil. Nothing like volcanic soil for potatoes." "And how about the Cannabis saliva?" I asked casually. "Does it do well?" Rikishin sighed, but he didn't flap. "We thought you were on to us. Carp," he said. "We tried to hide the plants behind the potatoes. They do stand out, though, come to think of it. Don't look like potatoes at all, do they?" "They do not," I said. In a small miles from a bad place and lightyears from anything else reasonable, you treat each other like -- well, people -- or you don't survive. So I thought. McDonald had walked up, gotten the picture. We nodded to each other. There wasn't one person on Luna One I didn't know. Everybody didn't know everybody else, but I did. And everybody knew me, too. Not my fault, just that I was the executive mayor. "Has John Edgar been around much?" I asked. "He's walked through, but he didn't make the pot," Rikishin said. "Do I have to say these plants aren't supposed to be here?" "No, Carp. We know that. We thought it was worth a try. What are you going to do with them?" I looked at these young boys. "I can't leave them growing, can I?" "You can if nobody knows about it," McDonald said hastily. "Luna One is no game, boys, as you know. I've already mentioned the plants to Mayor Winter. I'll have to take them," I said. "You can understand that.' ' "I suppose so," Rikishin said. "But think of this -- the concept of irrevocability. If the plants are destroyed there's no way we can get any more. No way. We can't synthesize the plants, right?" he said. "But it doesn't take much of a lab to synthesize acid. Not that I'm for that. I'm not. But it wouldn't be too difficult to do. Luna One does have chemical laboratories." Time now to display my newly acquired knowledge. "Actually," I said, "it would be an extremely laborious undertaking to synthesize acid to start with. And I don't think there's any of that on Luna One." I told them about the rye and the ergot. "Oh. All right. Leastways we're not growing poppies," McDonald said. They wrapped the plants carefully for me, gave them to me and I took them away. I respected these boys and their enterprise. Not this specific enterprise, but their enterprise generally. Perhaps they respected me, I didn't know. I had tried not to show that I'd seen two or three other plants hidden behind the Iowa corn. If they respected me they'd think I'd seen those other plants. If I'd seen them and hadn't taken them, then what would they think? I was mildly apologetic at leaving them with what I recognized as a minor dilemma. But I couldn't think too much about their problems, having quite enough of my own to deal with. In the end, with Rikishin's concept of irrevocability in mind, I took that one bundle of plants to Winter's office and left them on his desk. I recognized that I was playing some kind of small-time God here and wondered if I was cut out for it. HI These impossible women! How they do get around us! Aristophanes, c. # B.G. i Rikishin said. "In case you haven't noticed." "I've noticed, all right," Andy said. He had told Sandra about the pot semi-bust, but she hadn't been much interested. "You didn't give her the pill, then?" "No, I didn't. It isn't right." "Do you remember how many papers we signed to get onto this mission? Do you know how few people were allowed to bring a pet? Six cats and six dogs. Two of which are Pekingese." "And you get caught growing grass. You have no base to stand on." The dogs and cats on the moon had adapted to lunar gravity without difficulty. Mai Ling now paced sensuously about the room, her hairy tail waving in a slow dignity it could never have achieved on Earth. She sniffed at the canopy guarding the entrance, threw herself on the floor in front of Andy, presenting her stomach to be stroked. Andy did so. "It's not me she wants," he said. "She wants The Chairman. Poor thing. You should have kept her on the pill, damn it. She'll whine and talk and howl all night. And tomorrow and tomorrow." "It isn't right," Sandra said. Her figure was more than ample. She took her turn walking round the small place, her walk as sensuous as that of the hapless guardian of the wall against the heathen devil. "I take the pill, too, a different one, granted, but a pill. I don't want to, but I know the rules and I do it. For now I do it." Andy glanced at her sharply. "The Mai does not know the rules, so it isn't fair." Sandra said this as if she had, without really thinking about it, just discovered how to square the circle. Her maiden name had been Lee. She was Chinese, the Sandra notwithstanding. "But -- you know the rules, as you admit, and the rules are to give the dogs the pills. For at least two more months. Then we can petition." Andy realized that his stance reeked of paradox and contradiction, but he didn't know anything to do about it. "This is Project Design," he added lamely. Sandra said where Project Design could put it and Andy had cause to doubt the gentility of his wife's breeding, though her pedigree went back almost as far as did Mai Ling's. Or The Chairman's, for that matter. "It is late," she said. "It is time for bed. I will fix you a hot chocolate." "That would be nice," Andy said, idly stroking Mai Ling. "I'm glad the cacao grows well in the hydroponics." Sandra was a good helpmeet. She made hot chocolate for her tired young husband and into this sweet mix, which Andy adored, she thoughtfully added enough nonatal to stone an ox. There are two sexes and one knows more than the other. Chairman was sniffing around near the door to our place, trying to mount my left leg from time to time and, failing that, trying the table leg. "What's the matter with this dog?" "He's nervous, that's all," Carole said. "He didn't eat much of his dinner tonight. It's late. Leave him alone and let's go to sleep. I'll fix you a nice hot cup of tea, all right? With lots of sugar, the way you like it. We're way ahead of our ration." "That would be nice," I said. "The bitches on this trip are all fixed on the pill so it couldn't be that. Where's The Chairman getting all of these raunchy ideas?" "He's nervous," Carole said and went into the cubby to fix my tea. "I do like a cup of hot tea before bed," I said. "A proper hot toddy would be better, but -- " "You left the plants with Winter?" she asked from the cubby. "I did. I don't want to talk about it now." Carole brought me a steaming cup. I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. I had a fragmented dream or perhaps just a hypnagogic flight of fancy before dropping off. Carole held my hand and said something about how everything would be all right and she would be right back, just as soon as she took The Chairman for a little walk. IV When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine... Aristophanes That's what you do on Luna One when you want to see someone; you go looking. There were no telephones -- Project Design had thought such expenditure frivolous. There was a thin network of emergency links between the mayor's office, my office, the power plant, the electronics bay and so on. We could talk to Earth with some ease, but not to the guy around the corner on the next level. A sensible arrangement, one most people liked. Whatever our problems were we didn't have to be on the phone the livelong day. I found John Edgar playing gin rummy with a technician in the power plant and led him through the passages to my office on the sixth level, at the skin. "John Edgar," I said. "We have a small problem." He sat in the chair across from me on the other side of the desk. He was paunchy and bald, a short man. "Nothing serious, I hope?" "Not really. I found some marijuana growing in Field K." John Edgar raised his shaggy brows. "That's a serious violation, sir. Field K. Rikishin and McDonald?" "Yes. I pulled up the plants and disposed of them. Turned them in to Winter, that is." "Case closed?" "Maybe. I want you to look around the fields and the hydroponic bays, see if there's more. Know what it looks like?" "Sir!" He was offended, perhaps doubly so since I'd made the discovery in his field, as it were. "Of course you do. Sorry, John Edgar. Look around, confiscate anything you find and take it to Winter. Don't make a big thing of it. We don't want word to get around for a number of reasons." "Right, Carp. Will do. If this has gotten much of a start they could be growing it in their rooms, right?" "Not easily. And you can't go into private places without good cause plus an order from the mayor or me. Few people live at the skin. They might use sunlamps, of course." "The only lamps like that in the colony I know anything about are the big ones in the fields and the hydroponics. One of those would attract attention in private quarters. And probably would show up on the power-plant tape." "Right. Well, John Edgar, look around, casual like, check it out, and let me know if you find anything." "Will do." He left then and I got into my next conference, which was with myself. I wondered why I hadn't told John Edgar to check Field K with particular care, instead of giving the impression I'd entirely taken care of that particular problem. What, I wondered, was I doing with, to or for Rikishin and McDonald? Giving them a sporting chance to keep their small operation going? It would have to be small. And why hadn't I mentioned the disappearing still? No doubt for the same reason I'd told Winter I'd been mistaken about the still, that it had been a different apparatus altogether. And where had that still been hidden, I wondered. Questions in my mind. You don't need sunlamps or skin space to run a still. You need raw materials, but in a colony of this size a modest amount of wheat or corn could easily enough be liberated. Was I with Scartia and Erskine or against them? If one still were operating secretly, perhaps there were others. Did we have on Luna One a revival of the Mafia? I knew from my study of history that that organization was thought to have died out in the late twentieth century. I also knew that it had been a powerful force from time to time. Perhaps it had only been driven underground. Was I up against a few individualists or a service organization? The problems I had here would be difficult to solve, assuming that I wanted to solve them, because we had rules, directives about privacy, and they were meant to be enforced. We lived so close together it had to be that way. Most of the partitions, except for the structurally functional ones, were not solid -- they were hanging drapes, as on an ancient pleasure barge. This gave some visual privacy, though in the auditory area there were problems. The height of the dome at the center was some ninety meters, and the honeycomb within rose all the way to the top, following the upward sweeping curve from the perimeter of the base. Because of fear of claustrophobia (which ought to be called claustrophobiaphobia), about which Project Design had had some cause to be thoughtful, the height of each level averaged about ten feet. Because of structural considerations I didn't understand, some levels (such as ours, the twelfth) were lower-ceilinged and some were higher. An average height of ten feet was somewhat extravagant, but the social scientists had prevailed. In the end there were, then, twenty-four levels. At the periphery, at the skin of the dome, there was less upward extension, of course, but at the center of the dome the top level was number twenty-four. The Penthouse. Elevators could have been provided, but would have represented an unconscionable expense. Anyway, climbing and descending all those ladders and ramps in moon gravity was dandy exercise, something between jungle-gym and trampoline. I sat alone in my office, in conference with myself, thinking about privacy and other things. Our need for privacy would impede John Edgar's search for marijuana plants and also any effort I might make to discover stills making alcohol. There was no way anyone could have too much privacy on Luna One -- or enough of it -- but the aim of Project Design had been to create at least the illusion of it. Thus the heavy hangings which served as walls, partitions, where structurally important support wasn't necessary. These made for a vague reminiscence of potentates' tents pitched near quiet oases. And the hanging before the door was, barring extreme cause, inviolate. You knock on the flimsy jamb or stand there and announce yourself. Entrance is granted or it is not. And when it isn't no offense is taken. I could, of course, check the fields and laboratories with no difficulty. But I didn't think I'd find much action there, not now. I put a piece of paper into my typewriter and wrote this: Luna One, Day #. I have two problems. Pot is being grown on Luna One and alcohol is being distilled.  have terminated one pot plantation and have let one go.  have permitted a still to go underground. My query to me: how far do  pursue these enterprises?  am second in command here and my hand is not empty. My dreams, however, are uneasy. From the extensively unpublished works of Pierre Charpentier, day # moving toward day #. I tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket. N OW day #, the sun three days up. See Sandra Rikishin and Carole Charpentier. They have connived to increase the Pekingese population of Luna One, not having thought even to ask for approval in the certain knowledge that no approval was available. And they, united in this unlawful venture, have united also in a greater sin. Eor sin, read violation of Project Design. Pierre, Pete, Carp, executive mayor, is off about his troubled business and the girls bask near the skin in the Charpentier quartier. "I did it," Sandra Rikishin says. "I mean. I didn't do it. I really, honest to God, didn't." Sandra has not brought The Mai along. The Chairman lies there, as close to the skin as he can get, seeking what there is of the rising sun, thinking he must be, this day, a pussycat. He entertains little thought of The Mai, that is all behind, though one must believe that his recent memories, though fleeting, are not without satisfaction. He studies the feathers on his paddy feet. The post-coital pill is what Sandra is talking about. She has cohabited and she has not taken the pill. She looks now at Carole and there is an understanding here. chauvinism aside, that can only be inter-female. They are partners in sin and their sin is of no mean dimension. They have let The Mai and The Chairman have their way and that has been their undoing. They have witnessed this Oriental joining, have observed the motions, the looks in the eyes. In consequence they have, both of them, done considerable violence to Project Design. They touch each others hands for a moment. "We're in it together," Carole said. "I refuse to believe it's bad for the mission. For Luna One. And so do you." The Chairman turned his head their way for a moment, wondered if there was something worth commenting on, decided not, and returned to his pleasurable musings. "It may not be bad for the mission, Carole, but it might be bad for us," Sandra said. She hadn't been slender to start with and now she was, overnight, a garden of plums. Overnight. Such is the way is, so to say, inescapable. Carole, for her part, was beyond all recall a grove of ripe apricots. "This was how it had to be." "Yes." Many are the faces of love. It has been difficult for a man to love a man, but it has been possible. It has been said that the truest love is that between a father and his son, a mother and her daughter. Perhaps that is so. Women love women more easily than men love men. Though they have a greater problem in giving physical expression to such emotion -- witness, say, any male athletic team in the arena at the moment of victory. Forgetting about sex (a likely story) the young can love the old and the old the young. All of which is peripherally to the point of Carole Charpentier and Sandra Rikishin. They, in their various lovings, have sinned -- and, in the view of Project Design, have sinned grievously. And see this -- they feel no guilt, none at all. Fear, yes. But guilt is not their problem. "We had to do it," Sandra says. Carole nods and they touch their hands together fleetingly once more. "I've got to go." "Yes. Pete will be back soon." They had been drinking tea. They looked through the Mylarplex into the abrasive landscape. "We did have to," Carole says. "We did. You know." They understand each other and that is the end of the exchange. Carp and Andy, engaged in other inquiries and operations, know very little of what is going on with their women -- though they love them very much. V No poems can please for long, or live, that are written by water-drinkers. Horace, # B.C. L una one, day #. The sun high, two days past lunar noon. No Cannabis sativa grew in any agricultural plot or hydroponic bay, not that I knew of. I had uncovered no still. A small amount of grass could be in almost anyone's private place, if they could get it into the right radiation often enough. I was sure at least one still was going someplace and wondered why Scartia, fallen Renaissance angel that he was, hadn't come round with a clandestine drink for me. I knew that he knew that I knew. John Edgar, in an excess of enthusiastic search, had almost blundered his way back to Earth on the next to the last supply ship, but Winter and I had decided to keep him on. Call it nostalgia. And I still worried about heroin and acid and wondered -- was I missing something? If tender little marijuana plants could be (had been) brought up, smuggled, to Luna One, why not raw opium? Why not poppies? Raw opium was no real problem -- that would make one batch of heroin and that would be the end of it. But poppies could be forever. And if our artistes had the skill to produce alcohol (brandy? vodka? applejack? what were they up to?) then perhaps others leaning toward public service had brought up small amounts of rye and Claviceps purpurea and gotten into acid. "Why do you worry so much about it?" Carole asked, we about to go to sleep. "Whatever they're up to they can't do much of it. What's the harm?" I cast my wife a questioning look. "Not long ago I was thinking these problems didn't amount to much and you were saying they had to be stopped. Now it seems to be the other way around. Are you putting on weight?" "Not enough to worry about," she said. "But we're talking about your worry. Why are you thinking all the time about these things -- when whatever it might be that someone is up to must be on such a small scale that it isn't much of a problem?" "You may be right as far as Luna One goes, sweetheart. My trouble is, I look ahead." "I don't get it." "What's the point of Luna One? Why are we here, herded together like turtles in bottles, in considerable discomfort?" "I don't feel uncomfortable at all at the moment, if you want to know," she said, displaying herself outrageously on the bed next to the skin. "But, yes, things could be more comfortable elsewhere. All right. We're here because Earth is a mess. Though she do look pretty from here." We looked. The airconditioning worked, but because of the heat and glare we had covered most of our skin space with movable hangings. We could still see Earth through the bright slit. "Doesn't she?" "She do. But she is a ruin and we've all got to leave the general area before too long. And wherever man does survive, if he does, it won't be on the moon. It will be on a reasonably Earth-type planet. Upon which we will'erect, among other facilities, laboratories. Upon which place, if not eliminated here, could be grown pot and poppies." "And things to make alcohol from." "That's a different thing altogether. Wherever we have potatoes or grapes or corn or anything like that we'll have alcohol. But when we take off for our first new planet -- we could leave the marijuana and poppies behind. Those problems solved." "So why wouldn't someone synthesize the drugs without the plants?" "Too difficult a process." "Marijuana and poppies might be growing in abundance on our landfall, of course." "They might be, but it's most unlikely." "It's not much of a job to put acid together, is it?" "It is if you don't have the precursor. We could set up the plan so there wouldn't be any rye or Claviceps purpurea. " "But if it's an Earth-type planet something will be there. In some form or other. You're trying to sweep back the tide, Pete." "It seems that way to me now and then." "I'll make us a cup of tea," she said. And she did. "None of this has anything to do with you, with us," she said. "We'll be out of it long before." "I know. But if we can have a child, he or she might be on the first ship. We have to think of their world. I do hope we get the approval for that. Tm the exec, after all." Carole looked at me in a way I didn.t understand, but I liked it. "We'll have a child," she said confidently. "But I think you're taking a too-regimented view of things." "I'm thinking of starting a new world someplace and making it better. I won't be there to start it -- nor will you -- but I'm thinking about those who will. Our grandchildren -- or maybe beyond them, even." "You're not saying that marijuana and acid ruined Earth?" "They were and are part of the picture that did." "And alcohol?" "There's always alcohol. Always has been and that didn't tear down the planet. Anyway, that will always be there." "Tobacco?" "That's all right for people who want to cut down their life expectancy." "Herion does that, too, but that isn't all right?" I was getting the worse of this and didn't know why. I copped out. "It's time for bed," I said, pulling the shade all the way across. "I think you're being simpleminded." "You are putting on weight," I said, just before dropping off to sleep. "It feels nice." A nd the next morning I set off on my appointed rounds. I visited Rikishin and McDonald first. There hadn't been anything amiss there for months, but it didn't seem a bad idea to check it out, to begin there, where I'd found the pot in the first place. "Hi, Carp," Rikishin said. "Nice crop of beets coming here." He was innocence itself. I looked around. "Lots of nice crops," I said. "Doing very well." This was, I thought, something like walking through a field of growing things on Earth. "Any Cannabis hidden away here or there?" I asked. Rikishin wasn't offended. "You know you took all those plants," he said pleasantly. Nice boy. "How's The Mai?" "Why -- just fine. And The Chairman?" "He was nervous a while back, but he seems better now. We ought to get them together some time. Soon as we get the authorization, of course, and The Mai is in the mood." "That's right, Carp. That is so right." I looked around some more after that and found nothing of interest. The colony hummed along, folks went about their designated tasks, the atomic power plant worked, our wastes were recycled and we lived. I dropped by our place and saw that Carole was deep into something with Sandra Rikishin. Andy was, I knew, busy tending his field and crops. So I exercised a prerogative and violated the sanctity of the Rikishin place. In this I was responding, I saw later, to subliminal clues. The Mai was there, all right. She came padding up to me with pleasure and recognition because she did know me and she brought along with her two brown puppies, one of which immediately began to lick my hand. Then the other one wanted to play and my Mohorovicic discontinuity informed me that I was in trouble up to my incudes, mallei and stapes. Those are the bones in my middle ears. And in yours. So I played with the puppies. They were beguiling and seemed happy with lunar gravity. Most puppies I'd known had been happy with Earth gravity, but these were the first to be born on the moon. I complimented The Mai upon her qualities of motherhood. I knew who was the father of those puppies. My dog. As in instant replay of something not seen the first time the picture formed in my mind. I played with the puppies a little bit more and got out of there. I had, I saw, been had. The executive mayor, yes. There are two sexes and one will have its way. I went to the upper levels and climbed the last ladder to the Penthouse to think about this, but it didn't help. My sweet wife Carole, Sandra Rikishin and The Mai had had their way. I saw The Chairman sory during and after the fact, but victimized along with me. I didn't say anything to anyone about it until eleven o'clock that night. Local time. "The Mai," I said to Carole, "has two puppies. Pekingeses. About a month old." "But that's not -- " "No, it's not possible, is it? Very cute puppies, I must say." "I wonder -- " "Knock it off, sweetheart. I don't wonder at all, nor do you. You and Sandra laid it on. She didn't give The Mai the pill and you took The Chairman down there about three months ago. I remember it as in a dream. Though I didn't understand it at the.time." The Chairman, at the mention of his name, stuck his head out from beneath the bed, then considered this conversation beneath his interest and went back. Carole had been listening to Bach. She now turned off the tape. "All right, we did it. The puppies are sweet, aren't they?" "They are. But where does this put me? Where does this put Luna One, for that matter? We have to follow the rules." "You don't always do so, do you? Why did they send two of each up? Two of each of the pets?" "You know as well as #. Or as Noah. To reproduce." "Then -- " "To reproduce in due course. When Project Design says so. When the parents are older. To reduce the overpopulation prob -- " "I know. I do. But it's wrong. And it's bad genetically. Mothers -- bitches or people -- should conceive before they're too old." I couldn't deal with that for the moment, so we went back to Bach. morning. "Come on." "Come where?" "To Winter's office. We'll pick up Sandra on the way." "Damn it," I said as the puppies greeted me in the Rikishin place. "They are cute. I wish you hadn't done this," I said to both girls. We left the puppies with The Mai and I took the girls to Winter's office. "I'm please to see you," he said to Sandra and Carole and indicated where they should sit. I walked back and forth. "I don't suppose this is a social visit?" "It is not," I said. "We have a problem." Winter remained silent, looking at me thoughtfully. "The fact is that The Mai -- that's the Rikishin's Pekingese -- has two puppies. About a month old. I happened to find out about them yesterday." Sandra gave me a reproachful look. "Pekingese puppies?" "All the way." "Then the -- what do you call it in a dog? -- father, sire, must, of course, be The Chairman." "That's right," I said. Winter had neither dog nor cat -- no wife or child. His attitude toward the pets on Luna One was, as far as I knew, more or less neutral. "And it means," Winter said, "that the -- ah -- Mai was not given her pill." He looked at Sandra. "By accident, or by design. That pill hasn't failed yet." "No point in not admitting it," Sandra said. "Carole and I cooked it up. The pill isn't natural." She blushed. "So you rewrote the regulations as you saw fit?" I had to hand it to the girls. They didn't seem to feel guilty at all. More defiant than anything. "Something will have to be done about this," Winter said. "I'll have to call a meeting of the council right away." The council was a group of five colonists -- governing body, judge, and jury in one. Its function was to deal with the more serious infractions of Project Design. It hadn't been convened in the pot and alcohol business because both Winter and I wanted to keep that as quiet as possible. In addition to Winter and me, the members were: Joe Collins, M.D., Luna One's first and only physician -- he had had veterinary training as well -- Linda Wellman, who on Earth had been a social worker, and Chin Wang, chief scientist . cession, suggested that one of the puppies be destroyed and I regretted having brought the matter to his attention. Winter, Wellman and Wang supported this proposal. Joe Collins was against it and I abstained. I was afflicted by the importance of discipline, but I couldn't vote to do away with one of the puppies. Also, I knew what execution of the sentence would do to both Sandra and Carole. "You'll take care of it, Joe?" Winter asked. "Yes. But I won't enjoy it." Meeting over. I walked with Collins to the Rikishin place. Bad scene. Sandra was supposed to pick out the one she was allowed to keep. There was one of each sex. She couldn't do it. I picked up one of the puppies, put it into the arms of Collins and we moved swiftly away. I walked with Collins to his officelaboratory. We were silent, threading our way through the maze to his work place on the second level, near the center. Collins, our one physician, I thought, walking and climbing along behind him. We age and we die. When we lose our physician where is the next one to come from? Not from Earth. Collins is training a younger man, apprentice-style, who will take over in due course. Luna One has a medical library, an operating place and a laboratory. Plus one apprentice, Clif Manescu, and that will have to do. We came to the dispensary and closed the door -- our doctor rated solid partitions. Collins put down th puppy. "This is the male." The unnamed (as far as I knew) male padded over and licked my hand. "We can't do this, Joe," I said. "I don't like it any more than you. I was, you noticed, the only one who voted against the proposal." "I know. I didn't abstain lightly. I want you to violate the council's directive, Joe. Many more people wanted to bring pets up here than could. We can find this fellow a secret home, right?" I remembered telling Carole that puppies couldn't be kept secret. "I know a young couple that would go out of their minds to have him," Collins said. "But why should we do that? Why should I? Project Design, via council, says I do away with this creature. Besides, he'd probably be discovered." The creature wagged its developing tail and went over to Collins. "I'll tell you why," I said and I told him about the RikishinMcDonald pot caper. "I propose a trade-off. I'll tell the Rikishins that we'll try to keep this puppy in the colony if Andy will pull up the rest of the marijuana. I'm sure they've got it growing someplace. I can't find it. They'll do it, so's not to do in the puppy. All right?" "I don't want to do in this boy any more than you do," Collins said. "But in the end the rules, laws, directives are important, aren't they?" "They are. But here's a chance to trade one violation for another. Project Design comes out even. You want, with your own hand, to put this pup away and have the pot grow -- or the other way around, man?" "You think one offense is worse than the other?" He rubbed the puppy's pink stomach. "I most certainly do." "You don't mind at all playing God, sort of, do you?" I'd thought of that. "In these small ways I don't, I guess. What say, Joe?" He abandoned the puppy for the moment and gave me a long hard look. "You don't have to twist my arm. Carp. I'm on your side. I'll do it. Not just for the trade-off either -- though, professionally. I'd have to be against the Cannabis. All of this puts us in quite a spot. We've been up here almost five hundred days now. And I haven't violated a directive yet. Though I've had ample opportunity. Now I'm an accessory after the fact. Some cheap imitation God's younger brother -- no offense." "I know, I know." "The thing is," Collins said, "people can be told only so far what to do. Even when it gets down to the bare bones of survival everyone won't be told what to do all the lime. They'll burn their joint on the gallows, jump off the plank with their puppy." "Thank you much, Joe. You're a gentleman and a scholar. I'll go talk to the Rikishins." "Best this doesn't become common knowledge, exactly." "Goes without saying. There's room for many a secret in a hive like this." was sitting on the bed, red of eye, while Andy walked the floor. "Carp," Andy said without enthusiasm. The Mai and the puppy lay in the corner, knowing everything was wrong. "I've a deal to put to you," I said. "Have you named the puppies?" "What difference does that make?" "Look, damn it. I said I have a deal for you. Have you named the puppies?" "Yes," Sandra said. "This is Ling Ling. The other one is Shau. Means Little Shadow." I lowered my voice. The dogs, sensing something in progress, came to the middle of the floor. "This must go no further," I said. They nodded, some kind of desperate hope in Sandra's eyes. "Joe Collins and I are prepared to try to smuggle Shau into a cozy home." Sandra was, suddenly, the most beautiful girl on Luna One. "But there's a price," I said softly but quickly. "Anything." Sandra. "What?" Andy. "Okay, Andy. You remember when I found the Cannabis behind tlje Idaho potatoes?" "Sure." "All right. I saw the other bunch at the same time. Behind the Iowa corn. Don't ask me why I let you -- uh -- transplant it. I don't know. The deal is this. Doc Collins and I put Shau into a happy home -- we just have to hope we can make it stick -- and you, Andy, destroy every marijuana plant on Luna One you know about. All right?" Sandra was flipping daggers Andy's way, but it wasn't necessary. He remained gently unflappable, touched his hand to Sandra's knee. "Why, sure. Carp. Sure. That's a bargain -- and a good one, too. I didn't favor the grass too much anyway. Want me to bring the plants to you? There aren't many of them." "Just pull them up, Andy. Recycle them into Idaho potatoes. I don't need to see them." I made to leave. "Will we know who has Shau," Sandra asked, "so we can -- " "Sure. But nobody else. Nobody. Right?" I made to leave again and Sandra touched the dogs, got up and kissed me fully and sweetly on my surprised mouth. narrow passages which I now thought of as dry runnels, to the twelfth level. Home. Being a minor deity, I thought, is not altogether without compensation. I told Carole what I, with Collins, had done. And she overwhelmed me, she did. I can't say I put up any resistance. W Rikishin asked Andy. "You overwhelm me," Andy said. "That's nice, but not to the point. Why did Carp do what he did?" Andy thought this over for some time, though Sandra was distracting him. "How can I say?" he finally asked. "He likes Pekingeses, obviously, and cats and other dogs, but I don't think that's it. He wants Luna One to survive. And he has his own ideas how it must do so." "Bless him," Sandra said. They played with the dogs and went to sleep. VI... , fill my precious glass, and let it glow... If you can only make me drunk, mine host, it is enough. No longer shall I know the sorrow of a strange land. Li Po L ittle otto wasn't little any more, but everyone still called him that. He was a short-haired domestic tabby and his knowledge of Luna One exceeded that of any human. He was mostly gray, with white on his paws and parts of his face -- he was handsome and, watching his demeanor, one had to think he was aware of this. His adaptation to lunar gravity made it seem that cats had been designed for it in the first place. If the passage was long enough, Little Otto simply flew down it, touching the floor but fleetingly, now and then. There were two other male cats on Luna One, but they had learned not to tangle with Little Otto. There were three female cats, and Little Otto made his rounds frequently, forever checking things out, evaluating. Thus, when the Milfords, on the eighth level, after considerable discussion, decided not to give Princess (their short-haired domestic tabby) her pill. Little Otto was the first to know. The sounds of that night must have penetrated fifty yards in all directions, through all the hangings and partitions, the two cats at the center of a sphere of intoxicating cacophony, but no one seemed to mind. It quieted down in the end and no report reached Winter's desk, nor did John Edgar hear of it. Nor did Pierre Charpentier. Little Otto found his way back to his own place as if he controlled and owned Luna One lock, stock and barrel. Which, from his point of view, he did. He leaped upon the bed of his so-called owners (the McKays, level nine) and kneaded so forcibly and purred so loudly he woke them both. "Good boy, Otto," Kenneth McKay said sleepily. "Damn cat has got me started," he said, turning toward his sleepy wife. D ay # -- and I had a disturbing night for reasons that were still in my unconscious when I put my head on my pillow. Shau was doing fine, his presence not brought to official attention, not that I knew of. As far as I knew pot had been eliminated from Luna One. I trusted Andy Rikishin. Yet my sleep that night was filled with edgy dreams. I dreamed that Andy had double-crossed me, that the entire colony had gone junkie and there was no chance whatever to survive on the moon, let alone go to the stars. I dreamed that there were so many dogs you couldn't walk the corridors or climb the stairs without being made filthy -- as in New York before the Canine Code. I dreamed there were so many babies a man couldn't get a good night's sleep. Tomcats added to the din in that one. And I dreamed I couldn't sleep. This can happen in dreams, though you must be asleep to dream it, which seems a paradox of some kind. I couldn't sleep and thought to seek comfort by resting my head for a time on the plump cushion of Carole's stomach. I did so and heard her heart beat and this was comforting. I dreamed then that I was almost going to sleep. But stay! Carole was sleeping easily, but her heart was going about a hundred and twenty times a minute. She's sick, I thought, something is wrong. But I knew Carole had great reserves of some kind of Amazonian strength and never got sick. So in my dream I figured it out -- what I heard wasn't Carole's heart at all. She was pregnant and I was listening to my -- son? Daughter? I knew a fierce pride for some moments, then realized that something was indeed wrong. Very wrong. Then Carole gave birth to a child (a lovely girl, lovely) and Winter and the council met to decide what must be done. I had no vote. The sentence was for Carole to suit up and carry the defenseless child out upon the lunar surface. I awoke shaking and leaped from bed, knowing the world was over. I walked back and forth within that small space and gradually disentangled dream from reality. "What is it, Pete?" "I had a bad dream. It's all right now." Carole raised her head. "It's still about the puppy, isn't it?" I said I guessed so and Carole comforted me. A man needs comfort at a time like that. She snored gently not long after and I felt myself dropping off. My girl's stomach is a pillow, I thought, and I scrounged about and got my head on it. And there it was. V.xhdup, lubdup, nhdup... a hundred and twenty times a minute, give or take five. that I had discovered that I was a father. Would it be going too far to say that I was distracted, preoccupied, anxious and consumed with a sense of imminent doom? I would have to add that I'd wanted to, well, be a father for what now seemed a long, long time. I needed a psychiatrist, no doubt about it, but Project Design, in their not-soinfinite wisdom, had thought that rigorous earthside screening would leave room on Luna One for some more essential person. I thought about consulting my fellow councilperson, Linda Wellman, but abandoned that. The hell with it. The fruits of the Earthside screening included, so far: unauthorized production of alcohol; unauthorized growing of marijuana (this now, presumably, terminated); two unauthorized Pekingese puppies, one of whom continued to maintain a secret existence -- and that had to be with the active connivance of more than the few people I knew were involved -- and now at least one unauthorized human pregnancy, in respect of which I was accessory after the fact, as long as I knew about it and didn't say anything about it. I was accessory before and during the fact, for that matter, though that circumstance was beyond my then knowledge. That rigorous Earthside screening was bearing a variety of forbidden fruit that I knew of -- and maybe there were more I hadn't heard about. If there were I wanted right now to keep not hearing about another thing wrong. I spent some time thinking and wandering here and there in the dome until I began to collect questioning glances. I needed to think and to think alone. I could suit up and go for a walk on the surface outside, or I could lock myself into the Penthouse. Walking on the outside in quest of nothing, more than solitude required to commune with oneself was not smiled upon. So, the Penthouse. I have not really spoken of this. The Penthouse was a kind of oasis or sanctuary or hideout -- a small but airy space fitted with sofas, chairs, a bookcase, directly beneath the apex of the dome. Pleasant by lunar day and awesome by night. Its door was one of seven in the entire dome to carry a lock. Access was free to anyone, but on a waiting-list basis. For reasons I thought I understood, someone in Project Design had decreed that no more than two persons could be in the Penthouse at the same time. And there was a time limit' of one hour. Couples now and then went there to fornicate, of course, but the waiting list was never very long -- it was an eerie place which did not appeal to all. But it appealed to me with force, particularly now. There was a waiting list, yes, but I was the keeper of the list. Rank has its privileges. So I spent a bit of time up there the three or four days after hearing the fetal heartbeat of my child. I'd thought at first that the new problem would submerge the others -- the alcohol, dogs and cats -- and indeed that was the case in the beginning, but very shortly I found to my consternation and added anxiety, that all the difficulties complemented and reinforced each other, revealing themselves as but different aspects of the same problem. U "I've been looking for you." I'd been wandering around aimlessly, preparing myself for a talk with Carole. "How's Shau?" His face lit for a moment. "Just fine. We got away with that one all right. I guess." Then the clouds came over. "And I did do away with the pot," he said. "You know." "I know. If you say'so, Andy." "But there's a bigger problem now." Good, I thought. I'll submerge mine into yours, hence have less of my own to deal with. "Want to tell me about it in the Penthouse?" I asked. "Nobody there now." "All right." We went there. Comfortable chairs, lunar day, Eratosthenes out there and other features anyplace you wanted to look. Not much variety, though. "The thing is, Carp -- " Andy said and stopped. "The thing is," he began again, "Sandra is pregnant. Like about five months." I looked at Andy, said nothing, turned to look out upon my crater. "That's bad, isn't it. Carp?" I heard. I faced him. "You might say that. You might say it makes a puzzle, a few pieces of which are clicking autonomously together...' Andy gave me a blank look. "It's The Mai and The Chairman all over again, Andy, but this time with people. Carole and Sandraand hence you and I -- are in the same boat." He thought about that briefly. He was a bright boy. I could see he was glad to have company. "I thought Sandra's been putting on weight," he said. "I only found out last night." "How?" I asked. "Did she tell you?" "No. I, well, heard it. Her. Him. And thought I felt him move, too." "Does she know that you know?" "Yes. I told her right off." "What did she say?" "She said a lot, Carp, but what it came down to was that no fascist gang of cowards on Earth was going to tell her what to do with her body. She swore a lot. She used words I didn't know she knew." "Yes. We have a problem, Andy, no doubt of that." "What do we do about this one?" "Good question. I don't have the' answer to it yet. But Tm working on it." I put my hand on his shoulder. "Say hello to The Mai and Ling Ling for me. And to Sandra," I said. "She'll already know about Carole." I left him to have a talk with my headstrong wife.  or later, Pete. Of course. But the thing is this: a woman's pregnancy -- or the lack of it, the avoidance of it -- is the most important thing that happens in a woman's body. I don't think Project Design -- " and here she interposed some descriptive words I hadn't known she knew either -- "included one woman, one honest-to-God female in its decision-making machinery." "Collins could have done an AB. Maybe even now -- " "No, Pete. This was no accident. I -- and Sandra -- are going to have our babies. Aren't you glad?" "I confess that I am. But look at the problem. How many others? Luna One can sustain but so many." "Yes. But we'll say how many -- and when." "I've got to go right now. But one final word for you -- sweetheart." "Yes?" "Whatever happens, you are one honest-to-God female woman." Her look almost did me in, but I knew how much I had to do and I moved away. "You'll think of something," I heard her say. I sought Antonio Scartia. I found him in his lab on the fourth level. "Hi, Carp." "Tony. I need to talk with you. Right now. All right?" "Well, sure. I've work to do, but -- " "Now," I said. I pulled a book from my pocket and checked my memory. "Nobody there. Let's go up to the Penthouse." Tony followed me through the passages and I went into that place for the second time that day. We stood there warily. At least Tony was wary. I'd summoned him and he waited to hear what I had to say. So I said it. "The fact is, Tony, that I'm in the middle of a sticky mess -- along with some other folk -- and I'd like to sit here quietly to think about it. With a good stiff drink or two to hand. You, Antonio Scartia, are the only one I know who can provide it." It is said that while drunk he attempted to kiss his reflection in a moonlit river, fell into the water, and drowned. Traditional account of Li Po's death much. If the input to his computer was overloaded he gave no indication of that. He was cycling, with an equation on the fringes of its capability. It took time. Then: "I don't get it. Carp." "Come off it, Tony. I know you had a still in your lab. You knew I knew and you moved it. I could have confiscated it at the time. I gave you a chance to hide it. And don't ask me why. I'm in more trouble than you can possibly ever be in on Luna One. So, Tony, let's drop the pretense and kindly bring me a drink. I'll leave you with your problems, and you'll do the same with me." Some more cycling in the computer and then the sun came out. "As it happens," he said, "I do have a little something left over from a small experimental project. If I bring it to you you can hang me for it, figuratively speaking, that is. But you won't." "I won't. And what is that outragious grin about?" "Just that I've always known there would be room for a -- well, service organization like ours. Here -- or wherever we'll go afterward. I'll be right back." He returned shortly with what appeared to be a leather pouch, from which he extracted a glass and a corked liter beaker filled with amber fluid. Not just a little in the bottom, it was full. I relocked the door and we sat there at the top of our world. "You haven't exactly given me a quid pro quo," Scartia said, "but I don't think I'm worried about that. You want me to go now?" "Sit down a minute and have one with me, Tony," I said. "Though we both be on duty at the moment." He withdrew a second small glass and filled it and mine. We raised glasses in a silent toast. Now I was the wary one, but I tried whatever it was and it was good. "That is good, Tony," I said. "Thanks. Thanks very much. It isn't the alcohol so much as -- something going back there." I nodded to the blue-green Earth. "What's your problem, Carp, if you want to talk about it? I've got one of my own, matter of fact." "I'll tell you," I said, wondering why I was taking this youth, boy, man into my confidence. "You're aware, of course, of the rules concerning reproduction on Luna One?" He nodded, permitted his left eyebrow a micrometric rise. "My wife is five months pregnant. So is another wife I know. Those are the main problems. There are others, such as an illegal Pekingese, no doubt some kittens here and there -- what's funny now?" "An awful lot of people know about Shau," he said. "Everybody except Winter and John Edgar, I'd say." Then his face clouded. "But the girls are another problem, yes. We'll have to find ways of taking care of that. I have news for you." "Yes?" "Gina is three months pregnant." The computer was busy again, I could see in Scartia's eyes. New data had been thrust into the intake -- he was working on it and I knew why I had brought him up to the Penthouse. I had done so only partly to ask him for a drink I knew he had and I wanted, a drink he wasn't supposed to have. Scartia was an organizer. "How did that happen?" I asked. "You know Gina. She's a tigress. She decided she wouldn't let anybody tell her what to do. She didn't tell me until after." "They never do." We sat in silence for a time. "You begin to see the problem, Tony?" "I think I do." "If this is going on all through Luna One we're going to be in serious difficulty very soon. I don't mean you, the other presumptive parents, me, Carole. I mean the colony. We have to follow rules. Or we die." The level in the beaker was slowly falling. "You're right, Carp. You're right." "You have any answers, then?" "I might have. You?" "Yes." I looked out at Eratosthenes and thought about the Great Southern Butte in Idaho. I thought about Idaho potatoes, tubers that could be eaten and from which alcohol could be made. "Tony," I said. "Did you tell Gina not to take the pill?" He paled a little in the harsh light of the dome. It was hot out there on the other side of the skin, but here, where it was needed most, the air-conditioning was adequate. "I did not. Carp. I swear on the Bible of my family, I did not." "Neither did I tell Carole," I said. "Nor did Andy tell Sandra, he says, and I believe him." A ll this was going into the Seartia computer. "So. The girls won't be told whether or when to have babies. They violate Project Design." A look of spurious virtue on his face for a moment. "They violate Project Design in their way. Indeed they do. And we, the men, in ours, eh, Tony? Booze, pot, probably other things I don't know about." "Well, if you put it that way. It comes down to, we won't let Project Design tell us what to do, how to run everything." "This," I said, holding my small glass, "is a very fine product, Tony. What did you make it from?" "Corn. Good Iowa corn." "I thought so. But, you can see, Tony, that if every girl on Luna One decides she can get pregnant any time she wants to we're all in deep trouble. You see that." "Of course." "I am second in command of this colony. We must have discipline or we die. You do see that, Seartia?" He smiled an ancient kind of smile -- it seemed to go back two thousand years. He nodded. "I see. The discipline we need, yes. And we'll get it. But from us, up here, and not from those down there." "You think we can do it?" "As you say. Carp, we do it or we die. But takes -- organization. I say we can do it." There was a light in his eye and I knew I had to say something. "We'll have to do something or Luna One becomes a minus sign in the books of extraterrestrial exploration," I said. "This is good stuff, by the way. Let's finish it." Seartia emptied the beaker. "A certain reorganization will be necessary," I said. "This is obvious." "Yes. And it will be done. But there's something I have to say to you, Tony." He looked at me, eager, thinking and planning, building a new Luna One. "There will be no place here," I said, "for a Don Antonio, if you take my meaning." He flashed those impossibly white teeth my way. "I know. Carp. I know. I do. There's no place here for the cosa you're thinking about. Not that kind. No way. If we wind up with a Don, it won't be me. It'll be Don Pierre. That has a nice sound to it." "Nonsense. Listen, Tony. We'll have to have a meeting. Tomorrow. Not a big one. Who, from your point of view, do we have to have?" "We going to take over, Don Pierre?" "Listen, Tony. Don't call me that. But we must get going, we must do something. Such a simple thing, for example, as finding out as soon as possible how many pregnant women we have here. And stopping any more conceptions forthwith. On terms the girls will accept. How many do we have? I wonder. They won't tell Winter and they won't tell their husbands until it's done. But they'll have to tell us. So who -- as you see it -- is us going to be?" "Okay, Don -- I mean Carp. Us is going to be you, me, Charlie Erskine, Andy, Bob McDonald, Doc Collins. For starters. Is enough? Did I leave anybody out?" "You know a lot about Luna One, don't you, Tony? Those names would be on my list, too, though I don't know much about Erskine. He's part of your -- operation?" "Yes." "How many stills?" "Just the two. Production's pretty good, though. Why didn't you root them out? You knew we had one that day." W HE girls don't have it all, do X they? I don't like to be told altogether what to do any more than they do. Than you do. Or Andy or Charlie. Or the dogs and cats, for that matter. The Mai, The Chairman, Little Otto, the lot. Now, back to your list for a minute. You, me, Erskine, Rikishin, McDonald, Collins. Right?" "Right." "That list is fatally flawed." Tony was startled. "How so?" "You'd get it if you thought about it a little, but I'm in a hurry. No women on it, Tony. No women. What have these girls been showing us if not that they must be in on making the decisions that involve them? You think they'll let us dictate to them just because we're here on Luna One, and not back on Earth in Project Design?" "Jesus. You're right all the way." He shook his head. "All right. We'll have to think of whom to appoint to our, er, committee from the distaff side. Think about it and we'll all talk about it tomorrow." "All right. So we meet tomorrow. Where and when?" "This seems a good place," I said, looking again at Eratosthenes. "Not supposed to be more than two people here at once, Carp," Scartia said, putting me on. "If we're going to change things we might as well start here. Anyway, we'll have more privacy here than anyplace else." "One more thing." "Yes?" "This is no child's game we play here. Carp. The stills, sort of, were. Are. Taking over Luna One from Project Design is something else. There's one place we'll have to be very sure of." "Yes?" I knew, but I was testing the guy I was beginning to think of as my lieutenant. "The electronics bay. If Project Design got onto this they could send a lot of trouble up with the last supply ship." "Can you take care of it?" "I think so." I saw that he knew he could. "Carp?" "Yes?" He put the empty beaker and glasses into the pouch. "You'd already thought about the need to control the electronics bay, right?" "Well, yes." "Good. You don't have to test me any more. Carp. I'll be all right at what we have to do. Though I should have thought of putting women on the committee." I began to deny that I'd been waiting to see if he'd bring up the vital question of Earth-Moon communication during our proposed reorganization, but had the sense to see that I shouldn't. "All right, Tony, call it a test if you want. I did wonder if you'd see the absolute need to control that part of Luna One. You did. You get A Plus. I don't apologize for the test, understand." "That's right," he said. "That's right, Don Pierre," and he was gone before I could reply. office. We didn't have much time, if many of the women on Luna One were pregnant (as the sample I knew about certainly indicated) we were already in bad shape and the least we had to do was stop the increase in fetal population right now. Yesterday. My formal responsibility was to approach Winter with this. Clearly Luna One stood in need of change and Project Design wasn't going to be the instrument to effect it. Where would Winter be? I checked the names of the technicians and operators in the electronics bay. I knew them all and hoped they would be on our side. There were six of them, four boys and two girls. I decided not to wait for meeting tomorrow. I went to talk to Winter. He welcomed me with the usual frosty smile. "I've been thinking," I said. "About the Pekingese puppies." "Yes." "What if the same thing happened with one or two Luna One women? The problem -- or the solution -- wouldn't be the same, would it?" "Do you have anyone in mind?" "No. But the puppies are in my mind and I think about the possibility." "It would be a different problem, yes, and a more serious one. We're one over our quota right now. Five hundred and sixty-nine, which is one too many. No one will get a Conception Certificate until someone dies, obviously." "I understand. But what if a woman does become pregnant?" "Accidentally or by design?" "Either way." "It would have to be the same thing, either way. The major imperative of Luna One, according to Project Design is to control the population. You know this as well as I. We all do." "Yes. All right, we've had one baby over the quota already and Project Design didn't go into too great a flap about it. What if we have two or maybe three more?" "If we had one more, Charpentier, the council might let it go -- if it were convinced that it was a case of the pill's not working. But any more than that -- " "What?" ' "They'd have to -- go, that's all. Dr. Collins would have an unenviable but inescapable responsibility." Not with my -- son? daughter? he wouldn't. Mine and Carole s. Andy's and Sandra's. Gina's and Tony's. "What if the council voted to let it pass?" "I would overrule. I can do that in some cases, you know -- and this is one." I knew that as well as he did, because I'd checked it out. What I was really up to here was a probing of Winter's attitudes. "That would be a pretty tough line to follow," I said. "That's right. Tough, but necessary. Does that answer your question, Charpentier?" "It does. Thanks, Winter. I've been thinking about the puppies, that's what got me onto it." T here was no doubt in my mind that he meant what he said. It was getting late, but now I needed to call another meeting. I wished for some kind of telephone but there wasn't one, so I went out through the passages in search of Andy Rikishin and Antonio Scartia. I found them and led them back to my office. I told them about my interview with Winter. "So," Andy said. "Unless we do something, at least two dead babies. Ours." "One of them mine, for sure," Scartia said. "Gina's only three months pregnant." "Yes," I said to Andy. "At least one of them ours, yours or mine. And God knows how many other pregnant women there are on Luna One." "We must move now," Scartia said. "Before tomorrow's meeting." "You realize the importance of communications?" "The radio to Earth?" "Yes. Let's nail that down first, then confront Winter. Tonight." I gazed at my fellow mutineers. "You understand this begins to be serious?" They nodded silently. I found the list in the clutter of papers on my desk. "These people are the crew of the electronics bay," I said. "Get them here as fast as you can." "I know who they are," Scartia said. He looked at Andy. "You get th ese," he said, checking two names on the list. "I'll get the other three. One will have to stay on duty." "You don't think we're moving a little too fast?" Andy asked, looking at me. I started to answer, but Scartia came more quickly to the point. "How many more women on Luna One are going to get pregnant in the next week if we don't get going now?" Andy and Scartia set off to round up five of the six operators of the communications gear and I sat there, alone for the moment, considering options. Were we indeed moving precipitately? The thought of the fetal heartbeat inside Carole told me, no, not fast enough. In about fifteen minutes Andy and Scartia were back with five of the six operators. The five: Linda Escalante, Irene du Uribe, Tadashi Shimizu, Paoli Which left Karl Kraft minding the store. Of these five, two girls, three boys. They were all younger than I and I thought of them as such, boys and girls, though they were really men and women. Linda was from Argentina, Irene from Brazil. Tadashi from Yokohama, Paolo from don. It had been difficult at first to name not easily susceptible to familiarity, but those who knew him had settled on Whit. The eight of us in my office now. Mostly they had to sit on the floor -- I had a small office. I addressed the delegation from electronics. "This may come as a surprise to you," I said. "Our colony is quite possibly in grave danger. It is probably that Luna One will, at least temporarily, have to be out of all radio contact with Earth, particularly with Project Design." I had my audience, all right. "It is likely that we -- a group of us, some of us -- will have to neutralize Mayor Winter in some way and undertake to run the colony under new rules, rules we make ourselves." "Why, Carp?" asked Tadashi Shimizu. "It's not a short story," I said. "Let me ask you something first. You girls," I said, looking at Irene and Linda. "Are either of you pregnant?" Some consternation. I looked at the boys. "And you," I said. "Is the wife of any of you pregnant?" More consternation. "All right. Our colony is in trouble because at least three women in the colony are unlawfully pregnant. These are the wives of Andy, Tony and me. We don't know how many more there are. But if the ones we know about are any sample you can see the trouble we're in. Winter's solution, and Project Design will certainly back him up in it, is to -- well, do away with the illegal babies. So we propose to take over. It's obvious that we need your help." T hey all started to talk at once. I raised my hand to silence them. "Before we get onto that, however, how about you, Linda?" "I'm not. But I've been thinking about it." "Irene?" "I have to say -- maybe. I didn't take the pill and I'm four days overdue." "Paul know about this?" "No. I didn't tell him." "The pattern continues. You three!" I said, nodding to the men. Tadashi and Paolo said, not as far as they knew. Whittle didn't know either but thought his wife. Use, had been putting on weight lately. "So. Are you with us or not? You can see why we need you." "Winter would kill the babies?" Linda asked. "He would. Or, rather, he'd have Doc Collins do it. And he would have full official backing." "No doubt of that?" Tadashi. "None." "Then I for one am with you," Tadashi said. "So am I," Linda said. "Obviously. Though I'm not sure yet." The other three made it unanimous. So that made eight of us out of the five hundred odd. "We'll need Karl, too," I said. "Will one of you relieve him and send him here?" Tadashi left and a few minutes later Karl Kraft came into the office. I explained the situation. "My wife isn't pregnant," he said. "Not that I know about, anyway. And this amounts to mutiny." "I don't know what word to put on it," I said. "But are you with us or not?" I noted Scartia's vigilant pose here and knew how important he would be in whatever it was we would wind up doing. "I don't know. This is all very new and I need to think about it." "There's not much time to think about it." "How about survival of the colony on Winter's terms. On the terms of Project Design, that is?" I looked at Andy and Scartia. "No way," Scartia said. "Not if it's your kid being put to sleep out there in the deep freeze. No way. Our course is clear, Karl. The question is, are you with us?" "What if I'm not?" "You'd better be," I said. "This is a matter of life and death. Several lives and deaths we know of -- others most likely. You can see that." "Best you be on the right side," Scartia said and he communicated something I hadn't. Kraft got the message. "When does this takeover happen?" Scartia, Andy and I looked at each other. "The sooner the better," I said and the other two nodded. "Okay," Kraft said. "My wife isn't pregnant -- " and he stopped. Y OU'VE seen a human brain at work? No, nor has anyone, but there are times when it seems that this is what you're watching and this was one. Each to his own imagery. Mine was rather old-fashioned: reels of magnetic tape spinning, memory chips (figuratively) flipping and flopping, lights dancing on and off on a handsome display panel. 'I'm with you," Kraft said. "Good." We shook hands all around. The girls left with the three men from electronics. "From now on," I said, as they were leaving, "there will always be two people at the station. Until we're squared away. Understood?" Murmurs of approval and understanding. "Do we go see Winter now?" Scartia asked. "The sooner, as has been said, the better. Andy?" "Let's put it to him right off, I say. But what do we do after we've put it to him?" "We'll play it by ear as we go along." Scartia nodded. "Let's go" We strode rather awkwardly, I thought, into his presence. "The hypothetical case I put to you this morning wasn't hypothetical," I said. "The fact is that our three wives, each and every one, are pregnant. We don't propose to put up with the doing away of the babies. Will you go along with us?" He sat there quietly. Cool, real cool. "I suspected as much, Pierre," he said. "In answer to your question, no, I shall not go along with you. We shall, all of Luna One, go along with Project Design." He opened a desk drawer. "As it happens," he said, "this was a possibility not overlooked by Project Design. I'd hoped it wouldn't come to this. But I am not without resource, Pierre. And Scartia, and Rikishin. There will be no mutiny on Luna One." He made to reach into the drawer. "Don't move," Scartia said quietly. "Don't move. Winter." Winter rested his right hand on his lap. "Better not," I said. "What is it?" "A button, that's all." Winter said. "I push it and Project Design gets a message you can in no way stop. A separate transmitter," he said. He placed his hand on the front edge of the drawer. "I can touch it before you can touch me," he said to Scartia, who had edged toward the side of the desk. I looked at Scartia. He nodded. "There's a black box in there, all right." "Yes there is," Winter said. "And if one of you comes one step nearer, I push it. It's automatic from there on out, can't be shut off." We stood our ground. "We're taking over," I said. "For the survival of the colony. It won't work the way Project Design wants it to. God knows how many pregnant women we have here already. We can control our birth rate and lives ourselves, but we -- particularly the women -- won't let Project Design do it. It won't work. Winter. You'd better come along with us." "I guess I'll have to push the button, then," he said, still cool. Very cool. "Don't move that hand," Scartia said. "So what happens if you push it?" "They'll send ships. They'll put you down. Luna One must survive, you see." "We see and we agree. But it will survive our way, not theirs. Not yours." "You're wrong," Winter said. And he moved his hand. "Don't -- " Scartia cried. But the movement was halfway there, so Scartia made one of his own. A flash of light flew (almost gently, it seemed) through the short distance and landed in Winter's fifth intercostal space. A sliver of silver glinted in the light. Winter sank back into his chair, slowly, gracefully, his hand withdrawing from the drawer. "No other way," Scartia said to him. Andy was pale. No doubt I was, too. "Good throw, Tony," I said. "Now there are some things we must do. Right now." "Yes. Yes, Don Pierre." We took first things first. If heaven loved not the wine, a Wine Star would not be in heaven. Li Po T here was no morgue on Luna One. This would have been an extravagant use of space. Recycling of the departed had been thought of, but even Project Design hadn't been able to go along with that. What we were left with, then, was a plot not too far from Luna One, tastefully positioned behind a pile of stored goods and assorted debris, where we were meant to scoop out shallow trenches to receive our fatalities, of which this was the second. It will be understood that we could not go on the intercom, there being none, to announce the sudden death, by acute coronary attack, of our leader. There had been talk of two-meter FM to keep everyone in touch with important news, but that had been vetoed somewhere along the line. What we had was a duplicating machine and a lot of passages. "We'll have to get Doc Collins in on this," I said. "I know he's on our side, though we haven't kept him in touch with what's been going on the last hour or so. Andy?" "I'll find him." He left. Scartia and I alone with the dead one. "I had to do it, Don Pierre. I did. You know?" "I haven't hit you for it, have I? I deplore violence. But I agree you had to do it. It was his form of violence or ours. And call me Carp." "All right." Andy came back with Collins. "Doc," I said. "We've had a sudden heart failure here. Our leader has fallen. We'll need, I guess, for Project Design, a death certificate. At least an oral one over the air, right?" Collins saw the neat gash. I filled him in. "All right," he said. "First things first. Let's plant him." Luna One night, but the middle, just about, of the lunar day. Collins and Andy left, came back with a litter and straps. The four of us, pall bearers now, carried our awkward burden down to the lock. We met two people on the way. We told them someone had died. Who, they had asked. Winter, we had said. They'd hurried off to wherever they'd been going before we'd run into them in the passages. We suited up, next to the skin at ground level, and carried the body out onto the lunar surface, then behind the storage pile and the junk to the place where the other one was. Two shovels there, unmoved since we'd put Jeff Barnes down. I stood watching, now and again looking up at Earth, while Andy and Scartia dug a shallow trench. I remembered seeing old tapes of the Apollo missions, with the dust moving ever so gently. It was like that now, but we were on a different mission. "That ought to do it," Scartia said. All the suits had a common circuit. We could talk, but no one else could hear us. "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust," I said. "If the women don't get you, the liquor must." "I didn't know you were an antiquarian," Collins said. "Someone could come up here a thousand years from now and see this bird didn't shuffle off with a coronary, you know." "That's right. I don't think anyone will, though, do you?" We went back inside and unsuited. Collins and Andy put tbe litter and straps away. We met in the electronics bay. Irene and Tadashi had the duty. "You'll be interested to hear this," I said. "Put me on the horn." Now we had a brief exercise in bureaucracy. I told Project Design that Mayor Winter was unexpectedly dead and they said that was too bad. I put Collins on and he did violence to his Hippocratic oath. Then I got back on and they said I was now mayor and to carry on under all appropriate regulations and to appoint an executive mayor without delay. I said yes, and did it at that moment by winking at Antonio Scartia. I thanked Irene and Tadashi and told them I'd be in touch with them in the morning. We left the electronics bay and I spoke to my three colleagues. "We are now going to talk for a few moments and we are going to have a drink. With our girls. In the Penthouse. In five minutes." Carole was fussed at me because I was late home and hadn't been in touch. I told her what we'd done and that we were going to have a party, or wake of sorts, and she came along with me to the Penthouse. Scartia arrived a moment later with Gina, a container of amber fluid, and eight glasses. Then the rest were there and we filled the glasses and looked at each other and up at Earth. "To survival," I said and we drank to that. "Now we will spend an hour or so here and talk of what we must do next -- how it will go, beginning tomorrow. We will have to communicate with five hundred-plus people. It is, excuse me, a new ball game." We drank to that, too. "In one way we're right back to Project Design," Collins said. "How's that?" "Right on target. Five hundred and sixty-eight people." So we had a small party there, sitting on the top of our small world. Carole and Sandra (they were the first, after all) exchanged glances that I thought I understood and I was glad to see that they included Gina immediately. Not that Gina could easily be kept out of anything. Then the glasses were empty and the party was over and Carole gave me a glance I knew I understood. "We've work to do," I said. "Tomorrow. Good night." Scartia and Gina gathered together the container and the glasses. "Good night -- Don Pierre," Scartia said. I was too tired to make a point of it and Carole was pulling me along, her hand possessively in mine, so I shrugged to or at something back at home that had come with us out here and we went to our place. # # Edit # Street New York, N.Y. # RI SOt par won (including name and addrmss). lO-word minimum. Paymant with ordar. l' magazines. Arkham House. Fantasy Press. LoveNJ. #. nal by three-time Hugo Winner, Praised by top s-f NY. I #. Longview, Washington # N J. # book Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard has an applied philosophy to show you how. Send # # to BookstoreIF, Founding Church of Scientology, # #th St , N.W , Washington. D C. #. S  S Books, G-#. # North Hamline. St. Paul. Minn. # -- Rosemead, Calif. #. dime for list. Edwin Bruns. # Cemetery Road. Junesville Wise. #. Columbia, S.C. #I . Frankenstein Interview. Monster Tells "True" Story. #P. Booklet. #. Norris, Postbox #-M, Indianapolis #. May issue: Cordwainer Smith retrospect. Aldiss, White, Lupoff. 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State Zip A world turned inside out came hurtling through space. Did it mean the end of man -- or another beginning? It was bound to happen sooner or later. On June #, #, Moscow had escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers -- a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. On February #, #, a city in Siberia had a still narrower escape when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, the explosion rivaling the force of the newly invented uranium bomb. In those days men could do nothing to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the moon. The meteorites of # and # had struck uninhabited wilderness, but by the end of the twenty-first century, there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably... I A t # G.M.T. on the morning of September #, in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year #, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the sun and as it moved across the heavens -- at first in utter silence -- it left behind it a churning column of dust and smoke. Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones. Moving at fifty kilometers a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labor of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the earth and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landward after the hammer blow from space. Six hundred thousand people died and the total damage was the loss to art, to history, to science -- to the whole human race, for the rest of time -- was beyond all computation. If was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning -- and few could draw much pleasure from the fact that, as the dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets since Krakatoa. After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand years -- but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time the consequences would be even worse. There could be no next time... A hundred years earlier a much poorer world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to destroy weapons launched suicidally by mankind against itself. The effort had never been successful, but the skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now they could be used for a far nobler purpose and on an infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite. large enough to cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach the defenses of Earth. So began Project spaceguard. Fifty years later -- and in a way that none of its designers could ever have anticipated -- it justified its existence. B y the year # the Marsbased radars were discovering new asteroids at the rate of a dozen a day. The spaceguard computers automatically calculated their orbits and stored away the information in their enormous memories, so that every few months any interested astronomer could have a look at the accumulated statistics. These were now quite impressive. It had taken more than a hundred and twenty years to collect the first thou.sand asteroids, following the discovery of Ceres, largest of these tiny worlds, on the very first day of the nineteenth century. Hundreds had been found and lost and found again -- they existed in such swarms that one exasperated astronomer had christened them "vermin of the skies." Only the five giants -- Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Eunomia and Vesta -- were more than two hundred kilometers in diameter. The vast majority were merely oversized boulders that would fit into a small park. Almost all moved in orbits that lay beyond Mars -- only the few that came far enough sunward to be a possible danger to Earth were the concern of spaceguard. And not one in a thousand of these, during the entire future history of the solar system, would pass within a The object first catalogued as ##, according to the year and the order of its discovery, was detected while still outside the orbit of Jupiter. Nothing about its location was unusual -- many asteroids went beyond Saturn before turning once more toward their distant master, the sun. And Thule II, most far-ranging of all, traveled so close to Uranus that it might well be a lost moon of that planet. But a first radar contact at such a distance was unprecedented -- clearly, ## must be of exceptional size. From the strength of the echo the computers deduced a diameter of at least forty kilometers. Such a giant had not been discovered for a hundred years. That it had been overlooked for so long seemed incredible. Then the orbit was calculated and the mystery was resolved -- to be replaced by a greater one. ## was not traveling on a normal asteroidal path, along an ellipse which it retraced with clockwork precision every few years. It was a lonely wanderer among the stars, making its first and last visit to the solar system -- for it was moving so swiftly that the gravitational field of the sun could never capture it. It would flash inward past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury, gaining speed as it did so, until it rounded the sun and hurtled into the unknown. It was at this point that the computers started flashing their Hi, there! We have something interesting... sign and for the first time ## came to the attention of human beings. There was a brief flurry of excitement at the interstellar vagabond was quickly dignified by a name instead of a mere number. The astronomers had long ago exhausted Greek and Roman mythology -- now they were working through the Hindu pantheon. And so # I # was christened Rama. F or a few days the news media made a fuss about the visitor, but they were badly handicapped by the sparsity of information. Only two facts were known about Rama -- its unusual orbit and its approximate size. Even this was merely an educated guess, based upon the strength of the radar echo. Through the telescope Rama still appeared as a faint, fifteenth-magnitude star -- much too small to show as a disk. But as it plunged toward the heart of the solar system it would grow brighter and larger month by month. Before it vanished forever the orbiting observatories would be able to gather more precise information about its shape and size. There was plenty of time -- and perhaps during the next few years some spaceship on its ordinary business might be routed close enough to get good photographs. An actual rendezvous was most unlikely. The energy cost would be far too great to permit physical contact with an object cutting across the orbits of the planets at more than a hundred thousand kilometers an hour. So the world soon forgot about Rama, but the astronomers did not. Their excitement grew with the passing months as the new asteroid presented them with more and more puzzles. Most absorbing of these was the problem of Rama's light curve. It didn't have one. All known asteroids, without exception, show a slow variaand waning with a period of a few hours. It had been recognized for more than two centuries that this phenomenon was an inevitable result of their spin and their irregular shape. As they toppled end over end along their orbits, the reflecting surfaces they presented to the sun were continually changing and their brightness varied accordingly. Rama showed no such changes. Either it was not spinning at all or it was perfectly symmetrical. Both explanations seemed equally unlikely. There the matter rested for several months, because none of the big orbiting telescopes could be spared from their regular Job of peering into the remote depths of the universe. Space astronomy was an expensive hobby and time on a large instrument could easily cost a thousand dollars a minnever have been able to grab the Farside two-hundred-meter reflector for a full quarter of an hour if a more important program had not been temporarily derailed by the failure of a fiftycent capacitor. One astronomer's bad luck was his good fortune. Bill Stenton did not know what he had caught until the next day, when he was able to get computer time to process his results. Even when they were finally flashed on his display screen it took him several minutes to understand what they meant. The sunlight reflected from Rama was not, after all, absolutely constant in its intensity. There was a very small variation -- hard to detect, but quite unmistakable and extremely regular. Like all the other asteroids, Rama was indeed spinning. But whereas the normal "day" for an asteroid was several hours, Rama's was only four minutes. Dr. Stenton did some quick calculations and found it hard to believe the results. At its equator this tiny world must be spinning at more than a thousand kilometers an hour -- it would be rather unhealthy to attempt a landing anywhere except at the poles. The centrifugal force at Rama's equator must be powerful enough to flick any loose objects away from it at an acceleration of almost one gravity. Rama was a rolling stone that could never have gathered any cosmic moss. It was surprising that such a body had managed to hold itself together and had not long ago shattered into a million fragments. An object forty kilometers across and with a rotation period of only four minutes -- where did that fit into the astronomical scheme of things? Dr. Stenton was a somewhat imaginative man, a little too prone to jump to conclusions. He now jumped to one that gave him a very uncomfortable few moments indeed. The only specimen of the celestial zoo that fitted this description was a collapsed star. Perhaps Rama was a dead sun -- a madly spinning sphere of neutronium, every cubic centimeter weighing Just then there flashed briefly through Dr. Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H.G. Wells' The Star. He had first read it as a boy and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy. Across more than two centuries of time it had lost none of its magic and its terror. He would never forget the images of hurricanes and tidal waves, of cities sliding into the sea, as that other visitor from the stars smashed into Jupiter and then fell sunward past the Earth. True, the star that old Wells described was not cold, but incandescent -- it had wrought much of its destruction by heat. The point scarcely mattered. Even as a cold body, reflecting only the light of the sun, Rama could kill by gravity as easily as by fire. Any stellar mass intruding into the solar system would completely distort the orbits of the planets. The Earth had only to move a few starward -- for the delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The Antarctic icecap could melt and flood all low-lying land or the oceans could freeze and the whole world be locked in an eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough. Then Dr. Stenton relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief. This was all nonsense -- he should be ashamed of himself. Rama could not possibly be made of condensed matter. No star-sized mass could penetrate so deeply into the solar system without producing disturbances that would have betrayed it long ago. The orbits of all the planets would have been affected -- that, after all, was how Neptune, Pluto and Persephone had been discovered. No, it was utterly impossible for an object as massive as a dead sun to sneak up unobserved. In a way it was a pity. An encounter with a dark star would have been quite exciting. While it lasted. T he extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Council was brief and stormy. Even in the twenty-second century no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted that the problem ever would be solved. To make matters worse, the curProfessor (Emeritus) Olaf Davidson, the distinguished astrophysicist. Professor Davidson was not very much interested in objects smaller than galaxies and never bothered to conceal his prejudices. And though he had to admit that ninety percent of his science was now based on observations from space-borne instruments, he was not at all happy about it. No less than three times during his distinguished career, the satellites specially launched to prove one of his pet theories had done precisely the opposite. The question before the council was straightforward enough. There was no doubt that Rama was an unusual object -- but was it an important one? In a few months it would be gone forever and suddenly there was little time in which to act. Opportunities missed now would never recur. At a rather horrifying cost a space probe soon to be launched from Mars to travel beyond Neptune could be modified and sent on a high-speed trajectory to meet Rama. There was no hope of a rendezvous -- and it would be the fastest fly-by on record. The two bodies would pass each other at two hundred thousand kilometers an hour. Rama would be observed intensively for only a few minutes -- and in real close-up for less than a second. But with the right instrumentation that would be long enough to settle many questions. Although Professor Davidson took a very jaundiced view of the Neptune probe, it had already been approved and he saw no point in sending more good money after bad. He spoke eloquently on the follies of asteroid-chasing and the urgent need for a new high-resolution interferometer on the moon to prove the newly revived Big Bang theory of creation once and for all. That was a grave tactical error, because the three most ardent supporters of the Modified Steady State Theory were also members of the council. They secretly agreed with Professor Davidson that asteroid-chasing was a waste of money -- nevertheless... He lost by one vote. T hree months later the space probe, rechristened Sita, was launched from Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. The flight time was seven weeks and the instrument was switched to full power only five minutes before interception. A cluster of camera pods was released simultaneously to sail past Rama, so that it could be photographed from all sides. The first images, from ten thousand kilometers away, brought to a halt the activities of all mankind. peared a tiny, featureless cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time it had doubled its size no one could pretend any longer that Rama was a natural object. Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe -- one with centers fifty kilometers apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the center of one face, and were twenty kilometers across. From a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler. Rama grew until it filled the screen. Its surface was a dull, drab gray, as colorless as the moon and completely devoid of markings except at one point. Halfway along the cylinder was a kilometer-wide stain or smear, as if .something had once hit and splattered there ages ago. No sign could be detected that the impact had done the slightest damage to Rama's spinning walls, but this mark had produced the slight fluctuation in brightness that had led to Stenton's discovery. The images from the other cameras added nothing new. However, the trajectories their pods traced through Rama's minute gravitational field gave one other vital piece of information -- the mass of the cylinder. ITrrVBidlantlne. jJBooKs The biggest and best news of the month -- although the actual event took place a while back -- is that JudyLynn del Rey has joined the Ballantines. Welcome to the duckpress, Judy. The second big news is the acquisition by Ballantine (for staggering sums of lovely money) of Arthur Clarke's new works. This is welcome home for Arthur, one of the very first greats we ever published (## where are you? Still in print -- you So. August's publications include a (rather desperately, we suspect) by Anne McCaffrey. As a seasoned s.f. writer even she could not have anticipated some of the recipes her writing fraternity would come up with. But it's fun, and there are even some good recipes. So plunge in-there is nriuch to be learned about your favorite authors. Anne herself contriwildly talented lot; and Isidore HaiThe adult fantasy is a first -- by Anne Sanders Laubenthal who, incredibly, makes it probable, even likable, that Excalibur should turn up in Mobile, Alabama. (Honest to God.) We couldn't believe it ourselves when she told us -- but the book is very convincing. Besides being splendid adventure.   September -- all you Deryni fans will be grateful to learn that Katherine Kurtz has at last written Volume not seen the end yet. A fourth, and even a fifth, are planned. Adult fantasy does not seem to like the confines of one volume. Larry Niven has a brand new, long, complex, wonderful novel called describe, you must experience for yourselves -- and a marvelous group of And, finally, pick up a book by a stranger (?) calling himself John Holstream would have it, a tour de force. This department cannot subscribe to the theory of the author that Ronald is a perfectly normal boy who went a little wrong. Anyway, buy it. Buy, buy, buy them all. Now that we're big and important we've got to sell a lot of books. See you for fun and games at Torcon. BB It was far too light to be a solid body. To nobody's great surprise, it was clear that Rama must be hollow. The long-hoped, long-feared encounter had come at last. Mankind was about to receive its first visitor from the stars. II membered the TV transmissions he had replayed so many times during the final minutes of the rendezvous. But there was one thing no electronic image could possibly convey -- and that was Rama's overwhelming size. He had never received a similar impression when landing on a natural body. The moon and Mars were worlds, of course, and one expected them to be big. But he had which was slightly larger than Rama -- and that had seemed quite a small object. To resolve the paradox was easy. His judgment was wholly altered by the fact that this was an artifact anything that man had ever put into space. The mass of Rama was at any spaceman, that was not only an awe-inspiring but a terrifying thought. Norton knew a sense of insignificance, even depression, as that cylinder of sculptured and ageless metal filled more and more of the sky. There was also a sense of danger here that was wholly novel to his experience. In every earlier landing he had known what to expect -- there was always the possibility of accident, but never of surprise. With Rama surprise was the only certainty. Now Endeavor was hovering less than a thousand meters above the north pole of the cylinder, at the very center of the slowly turning disk. This end had been chosen because it was the one in sunlight. The shadows of the short, enigmatic structures near the axis swept steadily across the metal plain as Rama rotated. The northern face of Rama was a gigantic sundial, measuring out the swift passage of its four-minute day. Landing a five-thousand-ton spaceship at the center of a spinning disk was the least of Commander Norton's worries. The feat was no different from docking at the axis of a large space station. Endeavor s lateral jets had already given her a matching spin and he could trust Lieutenant Joe Calvert to put her down as gently as a snowflake -- with or without the aid of the computer. "In three minutes," said Joe, without taking his eyes from the display, "we'll know if it's made of anti-matter." Norton grinned as he recalled some of the more hair-raising theories about Rama's origin. If the unlikely speculation Joe had referred to proved accurate, the next seconds would witness the biggest bang since the. solar system was formed. The total annihilation of ten thousand tons would, briefly, provide the planets with the light of a second sun. Yet the mission profile had allowed for even this remote contingency and Endeavor had squirted Rama with one of her jets from a safe thousand kilometers away. Nothing whatsoever had happened when the expanding cloud of vapor had arrived on target; any matteranti-matter reaction involving even a few an awesome fireworks display. Norton, like all space commanders, was a cautious man. He had looked long and hard at the northern face of Rama before selecting the point of touchdown. After much thought he had decided to avoid the obvious spot -- the exact center, the axis itself. A clearly marked circular disk, a hundred meters in diameter, was centered on the pole and Norton had a strong suspicion that this must be the outer seal of an enormous airlock. The creatures who had built this hollow world must have had some way of taking their ships inside. This was the logical place for the main entrance and Norton thought it might be unwise to block the front door with his own vessel. But this decision generated other problems. If Endeavor touched down even a few meters from the axis Rama's rapid spin would start her sliding away from the pole. At first the centrifugal force would be very weak, but it would be continuous and inexorable. Commander Norton did not relish the thought of his ship slithering across the polar plain, gaining speed minute by minute until it was slung off into space at a thousand kilometers an hour. It was possible that Rama's minute gravitational field -- about one thousandth of Earth's -- might prevent this from happening. It would hold Endavor against the plain with a force of several tons and if the surface proved sufficiently rough the ship might stay near the pole. But Norton had no intention of balancing an unknown frictional force against a quite certain centrifugal bne. Fortunately Rama's designers had provided an answer. Equally spaced around the polar axis were three low, pillbox-shaped structures about ten meters in diameter. If Endeavor touched down between any two of these the centrifugal drift would fetch her up against them and she would be held firmly in place, like a ship glued against a quay by the waves. "Contact in fifteen seconds," said Joe. As he tensed himself above the duplicate controls, which he hoped he would not have to touch. Commander Norton became acutely aware of all that had come to focus on this instant of time. This, surely, was the most momentous landing since the first touchdown on the moon a century and a half ago. The gray pillboxes drifted slowly upward outside the control port. There was the last hiss of a reaction jet and a barely perceptible jar. In the weeks that had passed Commander Norton had often wondered what he would say at this moment. But now that it was upon him history chose his words and he spoke almost automatically, barely aware of the echo from the past. ""Rama Base. Endeavor has landed." ago he would never have believed it possible. The ship had been on a routine mission, checking and emplacing asteroid warning beacons, when the order had come. Endeavor had been the only spacecraft in the solar system that could possibly make a rendezvous with the intruder before it whipped around the sun and hurled itself back toward the stars. Even so it had been necessary to rob three other ships of the Solar Survey, which were now drifting helplessly until tankers could refuel them. Norton feared that it would be a long time before the skippers of Calypso, Beagle and Challenger would speak to him again. Even with all this extra propellant it had been a long, hard chase -- Rama was already inside the orbit of Venus when Endeavor caught up with her. No other ship could have done so -- this privilege was unique and not a moment of the weeks ahead was to be wasted. A thousand scientists on Earth would have cheerfully mortgaged their souls for this opportunity -- now they could only watch over the TV circuits, biting their lips and thinking how much better they could have done the job. But the inexorable laws of celestial mechanics had decreed that Endeavor was the first -- and the last -- of all man's ships that would ever make contact with Rama. The advice he was continually '"l!irUer turns on Eposes H V" I receiving from Earth did little to alleviate Norton's responsibility. If split-second decisions had to be made no one could help him -- the radio time-lag to mission control was already ten minutes and increasing. He often envied the great navigators of the past, before the days of electronic communications, who could interpret their sealed orders without continual monitoring from headquarters. When they made mistakes no one ever knew. At the same time he was glad that some decisions could be delegated to Earth. Now that Endeavor's orbit had coalesced with Rama's they were heading sunward like a single body. In forty days they would reach perihelion lometers of the sun. That was far too close for comfort -- long before then. Endeavor would have to use her remaining fuel to nudge herself into a safer orbit. They would have perhaps three weeks of exploring time before they parted from Rama forever. After that the problem would be Earth's. Endeavor would be virtually helpless, speeding on an orbit that could make her the first ship to reach the stars -- in approximately fifty thousand years. There was no need to worry, mission control had promised. Somehow, regardless of cost. Endeavor would be refueled -- even if it proved necessary to send tankers after her and abandon them in space once they had transferred every gram of propellant. Rama was a prize worth any risk, short of a suicide mission. And, of course, it might even come to that. Commander Norton had no illusions on this score. For the first time in a hundred years an element of total uncertainty had entered human affairs. Uncertainty was one thing that neither scientists nor politicians could tolerate. If human sacrifice became the price of resolving it -- Endeavor and her crew would be expendable. R ama was silent as a tomb -- which, perhaps, it was. Endeavor detected no radio signals on any frequency, no vibrations that the seismographs could pick up -- apart from micro-tremors undoubtedly caused by the sun's increasing heat -- no electrical currents, no radioactivity. Rama wasalmost ominously quiet -- one might have expected that even an asteroid would be noisier. What did I expect? Norton asked himself. A committee of welcome? He was not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. The initiative, at any rate, appeared up to him. His orders were to wait for twenty-four hours, then to go out and explore. Nobody slept much that first day -- even the crew members not on duty spent their time monitoring the ineffectually probing instruments or simply looking through the observation ports at the starkly geometrical landscape. Was this world alive? Was it dead? Or was it merely sleeping? took only one companion -- Karl Mercer, his tough and resourceful life-support officer. He had no intention of getting out of sight of the ship and if any trouble arose it was unlikely that a larger party would be safer. As a precaution, however, he had two more crew members suited and standing by in the airlock. The few grams of weight that Rama's combined gravitational and centrifugal fields gave the explorers were neither help nor hindrance -- they had to rely entirely on their jets. As soon as possible, Norton told himself, he w'ould string guide ropes between the ship and the pillboxes, so that they could move around without wasting propellants. The nearest pillbox was only ten meters from the airlock and Norton's first concern was to check that the contact had caused no damage to the ship. Endeavor's hull was resting against the curving wall with a thrust of several tons, but the pressure was evenly distributed. Reassured, he began to drift around the circular structure, trying to determine its purpose. He had traveled only a few meters when he came across an interruption in the smooth, apparently metallic wall. At first he thought it was some peculiar decoration, for it seemed to serve no useful function. Six radial grooves -- or slots -- were deeply recessed in the metal and lying in them were six crossed bars like the spokes of a rimless wheel, with a small hub at the center. But there was no way in which the wheel could be turned -- it was embedded in the wall. Then he noticed, with growing excitement, that there were deeper recesses at the ends of the spokes nicely shaped to accept a clutching hand. Claw? Tentacle? If one stood braced against the wall and pulled on the spokes so... Smooth as silk the wheel slid out of the wall. To his utter astonishment -- for he had been virtually certain that any moving parts would have become vacuumwelded ages ago -- Norton found himself holding a spoked wheel. He might have been the captain of some old windjammer standing at the helm of his ship. He was glad that his helmet sunshade did not allow Mercer to read his expression. He was startled, but also angry with himself -- perhaps he had already made his first mistake. Were alarms now sounding inside Rama and had his thoughtless action already triggered some implacable mechanism? But Endeavor reported no change. Its sensors still detected nothing except faint thermal crepitations and his own movements. "Well, skipper -- are you going to turn it?" Norton thought once more of his instructions. Use your own discretion, but proceed with caution. If he checked every single move with mission control he would never get anywhere. "What's your diagnosis, Karl?" "It's obviously a manual control for an airlock -- probably an emergency backup system in case of power failure. I can't imagine any technology, however advanced, that wouldn't take such precautions." "And it has to be fail-safe," Norton decided out loud. "So that it can only be operated if there's no possible danger to the system." He grasped two opposing spokes of the windlass, braced his feet and tested the wheel. It did not budge. "Give me a hand," he asked Mercer. Each took a spoke. Exerting their utmost strength, they were unable to produce the slightest movement. Of course, there was no reason to suppose that clocks and corkscrews on Rama turned in the same direction as they did on Earth. "Let's try the other way," suggested Mercer. This time there was no resistance. The wheel rotated easily through a full circle. Then, smoothly, it took up the load. Half a meter away the curving wall of the pillbox started to move like a slowly opening clamshell. A few particles of dust, driven by wisps of escaping air, streamed outward like dazzling diamonds them. The road to Rama lay open. Ill Dr. Bose often thought, to put the United Planets Headquarters on the moon. Inevitably Earth tended to dominate the proceedings -- as it dominated the landscape beyond the dome. If they had had to build here perhaps they should have gone to Farside, where that hypnotic globe never showed itself. But it was much too late to change things now -- and in any case no real alternative existed. Whether the colonies liked it or not Earth would be the cultural and economic overlord of the solar system for centuries to come. Dr. Bose had been born on Earth and had not emigrated to Mars until he was thirty, so he felt that he could view the political situation fairly dispassionately. He knew now that he would never return to his home planet, even though it was only five hours away by shuttle. At one hundred and fifteen he was in perfect health, but he could not face the reconditioning needed to accustom him to three times the gravity he had enjoyed for most of his life. He was exiled forever from the world of his birth. Since he was not a sentimental man this had never depressed him unduly. What did depress him sometimes was the need for dealing, year after year, with the same familiar faces. The marvels of medicine were all very well and certainly he had no desire to put back the clock -- but there were men around this conference table with whom he had worked for more than half a century. He knew exactly what each would say and how each would vote on any given subject. He wished that, some day, one of them would do something totally unexpected -- even something quite crazy. And probably they felt exactly the same way about him. The Rama Committee was still manageably small, though doubtless that would soon be rectified. His six colleagues -- the U.P. representatives for Mercury, Earth, Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Triton -- were all present in the flesh. They had to be -- electronic diplomacy was not possible over solar .system distances. Some elder statesmen, accustomed to the instantaneous communications which Earth had long taken for granted, had never reconciled' themselves to the fact that radio waves took minutes -- even hours -- to journey across the gulfs between the planets. "Can't you scientists do something about it?" they had been heard to complain bitterly when told that face-to-face conversation was impossible between Earth and its remoter children. Only the moon had that barely acceptable one-and-a-half-second delay -- with all the political and psychological consequences such proximity implied. Because of this fact of astronomical life the moon -- and only the moon -- would always be a suburb of Earth. Also present in person were some of the specialists who had been co-opted to the committee. Professor Davidson, the astronomer, was an old acquaintance-today he did not .seem his usual irascible self. Dr. Bose knew nothing of the infighting that had preceded the launch of the first probe to Rama, but the professor's colleagues had not let him forget it. Dr. Thelma Price was familiar through her numerous television appearances, though she had first made her reputation fifty years ago during the archeological explosion that had followed the draining of that vast marine museum, the Mediterranean. Dr. Bose could still recall the excitement of that time, when the lost treasures of the Greeks, Romans and a dozen other civilizations were restored to the light of day. That was one of the few occasions when he was sorry to be living on Mars. The exobiologist, Carlisle Perera, was another obvious choice -- so was Dennis Solomons, the science historian. Dr. Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and crotocism in his study of puberty rites in Late twentieth-century Beverly Hills. No one, however, could possibly have disputed the right of Sir Lewis Sands to be on the committee. A man whose knowledge was matched only by his urbanity. Sir Lewis was reputed to lose his composure only when called the Arnold Toynbee of his age. The great historian was not present in person -- he stubbornly refused to leave Earth even for so momentous a meeting as this. His stereo image, indistinguishable K Edgar Rice Burroughs doesn't write any more and John Norman writes only once a year, so if you thirst for high adventure on a fullbodied and visually real alien planet, Alan Burt Akers stands ready with the third of his Prescot trated by Tim Kirk. (UQ # -- #) What happened, when Earth was finally conquered by the leonine legions of Centra, made the victors wish they had not been so successChristopher Anvil, with a great Kelly Freas cover and high-galactic David Walker is so prophetic that it has almost come true before it was printed. Remember last year's red tides? It's a fine and sensitive novel about two families alone -- or so they thought -- in a deadly world that may already be lapping at our shores! (UQ#-#t) Gerard Klein's second novel for us. France's leading sf writer takes us into confrontation with the unseen masters of the farther half of the Milky Way in a novel that guarantees Klein's place among the world's sf giants. (UQ# -- #) from reality, apparently occupied the chair to Dr. Bose's right. As if to complete the illusion someone had placed a glass of water in front of him. Dr. Bose considered that this sort of technological tour-de-force was an unnecessary gimmick, but it was surprising how many undeniably great men were childishly delighted to be in two places at once. Sometimes this electronic miracle produced comic disasters -- he had been at one diplomatic reception where somebody had tried to walk through a stereogram and discovered, too late, that it was the real person. And it was even funnier to watch projections trying to shake hands. H IS Excellency the Ambassador for Mars to the United Planets called his wandering thoughts to order, cleared his throat and said, "Gentlemen, the committee is now in session. I think I'm correct in saying that this is a gathering of unique talents, assembled to deal with a unique situation. The directive that the secretary general has given us is to evaluate that situation and to advise Commander Norton when necessary." This was a miracle of oversimplification and everyone knew it. Unless there was a real emergency, the committee might never be in direct contact with Commander Norton -- if, indeed, he had ever heard of it. For the committee was a temporary creation of the United Planet's Science Organization, reporting through its director to the secretary general. In theory, however, there was no reason why the Rama Committee -- or anyone else for that matter -- should not call up Commander Norton and offer helpful advice. But deep space communications are expensive. Endeavor could be contacted only through corporation famous for the strictness and efficiency of its accounting. It took a long time to establish a line of credit with one was working on this, but at the moment planetcom's hardhearted computers did not recognize the existence of the Rama Committee. "This Commander Norton," said the ambassador for Earth. "He has a tremendous responsibility. What sort of person is he?" "I can answer that," said Professor Davidson, his fingers flying over the keyboard of his memory pad. He frowned at the screenful of information and started to make an instant synopsis. two thousand seventy-seven, Bri.sbane, Oceana. Educated Sydney, Bombay, Houston. Then five years at Astrograd, specializing in propulsion. Commissioned twenty-one hundred two. Rose through usual ranks -- lieutenant on the Third Persephone expedition -- distinguished himself during fifteenth attempt to establish base on Venusumexemplary record dual citizenship. Earth and Mars. Wife and one child in Brisbane, wife and two in Port Lowell, with option on third" "Wife?" asked Taylor innocently. "No, child of course," snapped the professor, before he caught the grin on the other's face. Mild laughter rippled around the table, though the overcrowded terrestrials looked more envious than amused. After a century of determined effort Earth had still failed to get its population below " -- appointed commanding officer Solar Survey Research Vessel Endeavor. First voyage to retrograde satellites of Jupiter... um, that was a tricky one... on asteroid mission when ordered to prepare for this operation. Managed to beat deadline -- " The professor cleared the display and looked at his colleagues. "I think we were extremely lucky, considering that he was the only man available at such short notice. We might have had the usual run-of-the-mill captain." "The record only proves that he's competent," objected the representative from Mercury (Population; # but growing). "How will he react in a wholly novel situation like this?" On Earth Sir Lewis Sands cleared his throat. A second and a half later he did so on the moon. "Not exactly a novel situation," he reminded the Hermian. "even though it's three centuries since it last occurred. If Rama is dead, or unoccupied -- and so far all the evidence suggests that it is -- Norton is in the position of an archeologist discovering the ruins of an extinct culture." He bowed politely to Dr. Price, who nodded in agreement. "Obvious examples are Schliemann at Troy or Mouhot at Angkor Vat. The danger is minimal, though of course accident can never be completely ruled out." "But what about the booby-traps and trigger mechanisms these Pandora people have been talking about?" asked Dr. Price. "Pandora?" asked the Hermian quickly. "What's that?" "It's a crackpot movement of people who are convinced that Rama is a grave potential danger. A box that shouldn't be opened, you know." "Pandora -- paranoia" snorted Conrad Taylor. "Oh, such things are conceivable, but why should any intelligent race want to play childish tricks?" "Well, even ruling out such unpleasantness," Sir Lewis continued, "we still have the much more ominous possibility of an active, inhabited Rama. Then the situation is one of an encounter between two cultures -- at very different technological levels. Pizarro and the Incas. Peary and the Japanese. Europe and Africa. Almost invariably, the consequences have been disastrous -- for one or both parties. I'm not making any recommendations -- I'm merely pointing out precedents." "Thank you, Sir Lewis," replied Dr. Bose. "I'm sure we've all thought of these alarming possibilities. But if the creatures inside Rama are malevolent -- will it really make the slightest difference what we do?" "They might ignore us if we go away." "What? After they've traveled years?" The argument had reached the take-off point and was now selfsustaining. Dr. Bose sat back in his chair, said very little and waited for the consensus to emerge. It was just as he had predicted. Everyone agreed that, once he had opened the first door, it wa inconceivable that Commander Norton should not open the second. IV videograms, Commandor Norton thought with more amusement than concern, it would involve him in a lot of extra work. Now he could make one long 'gram and dupe it, adding only brief personal messages and endearments before shooting almost identical copies off to Mars and Earth. It was, of course, highly unlikely that his wives would ever check with each other -- even at the concessionary rates allowed to spacemen's families such communication would beexpensive. And there would be no point in it. His families were on excellent terms with each other and exchanged the usual greetings on birthdays and anniversaries. Yet, on the whole, perhaps it was Just as well that the girls had never met and probably never would. Myrna had been born on Mars and so could not tolerate the high gravity of Earth. And Caroline hated even the twenty-five minutes of the longest possible terrestrial air journey -- which made the long trip to Mars unfeasible for her. "Sorry I'm a day late with this transmission," said the commander after he had finished the general-purpose preliminaries, "but I've been away from the ship for the last thirty hours, believe it or not. "Don't be alarmed -- everything is under control, going perfectly. It's taken us two days, but we're almost through the airlock complex. We could have done it in a couple of hours if we'd known what we know now. But we took no chances, sent remote cameras ahead and cycled all the locks a dozen times to make sure they wouldn't seize up behind us after we'd gone through. "Each lock is a simple revolving cylinder with a slot on one side. You go in through this opening, crank the cylinder around a hundred eighty degrees -- and the slot then matches up with another door so you can step out of it. Or float, in this case. "The Ramans really made sure of things. There are three of these cylinder locks, one after the other, just inside the outer hull. I can't imagine how even one would fail unless someone blew it up with explosives, but if it did there would be a second backup and then a third. "And that's only the beginning. The final lock opens into a straight corridor, almost half a kilometer long. It looks clean and tidy like everything else we've seen. Every few meters there are small ports that probably held lights, but now everything is completely black and, I don't mind telling you, scary. There are also two parallel slots, about a centimeter wide, cut in the walls and running the whole length of the tunnel. We suspect that some kind of shuttle runs inside these, to tow equipment -- or people -- back and forth. It would save us a lot of trouble if we could get it working. "I mentioned that the tunnel was half a kilometer long. Well, from our seismic soundings we know that's about the thickness of the shell, so obviously we were almost through it. And at the end of tunnel we weren't surprised to find another of those cylindrical airlocks. "Yes, and another. And another. These people seem to have done everything in threes. We're in the final lock chamber now waiting for the okay from Earth before we go through. The interior of Rama is only a few meters away. I'll be a lot happier when the suspense is over. "You know Jerry Kirchoff, my exec, who's got such a library of real books that he can't afford to emigrate from Earth? Well, Jerry told me about a situation just like this back at the beginning of the twenty-firstno, twentieth century. An archeologist found the tomb of an Egyptian king, the first one that hadn't been looted by robbers. His workmen took months to dig their way in, chamber by chamber, until they came to the final wall. Then they broke through the masonry and he held out a lantern and pushed his head inside. He found himself A dazzling new Super Agent The stakes are even more deadly as Steve Austin --  "The Bionics Man" -- confronts an international black market ring in nuclear weapons. # at bookstores or from # Third Ave., New York # looking into a whole roomful of treasure -- incredible stuff, gold and jewels. "Perhaps this place is also a tomb -- that seems more and more likely. Even now there's still not the slightest sound or hint of any activity. Well, tomorrow we should know." Commander Norton switched the recorder to hold. What else, he wondered, should he say about the work before he began the separate personal messages to his families? Normally he never went into so much detail, but these circumstances were scarcely normal. This might be the last 'gram he would ever send to those he loved -- he owed it to them to explain what he was doing. By the time they saw these images and heard these words, he would be inside Rama -- for better or for worse. N ever before had Norton felt so strongly his kinship with that long-dead Egyptologist. Not since Howard Carter had peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen could any man have known a moment such as this -- yet the comparison was almost laughably ludicrous. Tutankhamen had been buried only yesterday -- not even four thousand years ago -- and Rama might be older than mankind. That little tomb in the Valley of the Kings could have been lost in the corridors through which they had already passed, yet the space that lay beyond this final seal was many times greater. And as for the treasure it might hold -- that was beyond imagination. No one had spoken over the radio circuits for at least five minutes -- the well-trained team had not even reported verbally when all the checks were complete. Mercer had simply given him the sign and waved him toward the open tunnel. It was as if everyone realized that this was a moment for history, not to be spoiled by unnecessary small talk. That suited Commander Norton, for at the moment he, too, had nothing to say. He flicked on the beam of his flashlight, triggered his jets and drifted slowly down the corridor, trailing his safety line behind him. Only seconds later he was inside. Inside what? All before him was total darkness not a glimmer of light was reflected back from the beam. He had expected this, but he had not really believed it. All the calculations had shown that the far wall was tens of kilometers away -- now' his eyes told him that this was indeed the truth. As he drifted slowly into darkness he felt a sudden need for the reassurance of his safety line, a stronger such feeling than he had ever experienced before, even on ridiculous -- he had looked out across the light-years and the megaparsecs without vertigo. Why should he be disturbed by a few cubic kilometers of emptiness? He was still queasily brooding over this problem when the momentum damper at the end of the line braked him gently to a halt with a barely perceptible rebound. He swept the beam of the flashlight down to examine the surface from which he had emerged. He might have been hovering over the center of a small crater-which was itself a dimple in the base of a much larger one. On either side rose a complex of terraces and ramps -- all geometrically precise -- which extended for as far as the beam could reach. About a hundred meters away he could see the exits of two other airlock systems identical with this one. And that was all. He noted nothing particularly exotic or alien about the .scenein fact, it bore a considerable resemblance to an abandoned mine. Norton felt a vague sense of disappointment. After all this effort there should have been some dramatic, even transcendental revelation. Then he reminded himself that he could see only a couple of hundred meters. The darkness beyond his field of view might yet contain more wonders than he cared to face. He reported briefly to his anxiously waiting companions, then added; "Tm sending out the flare -- two-minute delay. Here goes." With all his strength he threw the little cylinder upward and out and started to count seconds as it dwindled along the beam. Before he had reached the quarter-minute it was out of sight. When he had come to a hundred he shielded his eyes and aimed the camera. He had always been good at estimating time. He was only two seconds off when the world exploded with light. And this time there was no cause for disappointment. power of the Hare could not light up the middle of this enormous cavity, but now he could see enough to grasp its plan and appreciate its titanic scale. He was at one end of a hollow cylinder at least ten kilometers wide and of indefinite length. From his viewpoint at the central axis he could see such a mass of detail on the curving walls surrounding him that his mind could not absorb more than a minute fraction of it -- he was looking at the landscape of an entire world by a single Hash of lightning. He tried by a deliberate effort of will to freeze the image in his mind. All around him the terraced slopes of crater reared up until they merged into the solid wall that rimmed the sky. No -- that impression was false. He must discard the instincts both of Earth and of space and reorientate himself to a new system of coordinates. He was not at the lowest point of this strange, inside-out world, but the highest. From here, all directions were down, not up. If he moved away from this central axis and toward the curving wall -- which he must no longer think of as a wall -- gravity would steadily increase. When he reached the inside surface of the cylinder, he could stand upright on it at any point, feet toward the stars and head toward the center of the spinning drum. The concept was familiar enough -- from the earliest dawn of spaceflight centrifugal force had been used to simulate gravity. It was only the scale of this application that was so overwhelming, so shocking. The largest of all space stations, Syncsat Five, was less than two hundred meters in diameter. It would take some little while to grow accustomed to one a hundred times that size. The tube of landscape that enclosed him was mottled with areas of light and shade that could have been forests, fields, frozen lakes or towns -- the distance and the fading illuminations of the flare made identification impossible. Narrow lines that could be highways, canals, or well-trained rivers formed a faintly visible geometric network and, far along the cylinder, at the very limit of vision, was a band of deeper darkness. It formed a complete circle, ringing the interior of this world, and Norton suddenly recalled the myth of Oceanus, the sea which, the ancients believed, surrounded the Earth. Here, perhaps, was an even stranger sea -- not circular, but cylindrical. Before it became frozen in the interstellar night, did it have waves and tides and currents -- and fish? The flare guttered and died. The moment of revelation was over. But Norton knew that as long as he lived these images would be burned in his mind. Whatever discoveries the future might bring, they could never erase this first impression. And history could never take from him the privilege of having been the first of all mankind to gaze upon the works of an alien civilization. V Tt five long-delay flares down the axis of the cylinder and so have a good photo coverage of its full length. All the main features are mapped. Though there are very few that we can identify, we've given them provisional names. "The interior cavity is fifty kilometers long and sixty wide. The two ends are bowl-shaped, with rather complicated geometries. We've called ours the Northern Hemisphere and are establishing our first base here at the axis. "Radiating away from the central hub and one hundred and twenty degrees apart, are three ladders that are almost a kilometer long. They all end at a terrace or ring-shaped plateau that runs right around the bowl. And leading on from that, continuing the direction of the ladders, are three enormous stairways, which go all the way down to the plain. If you imagine an umbrella with only three ribs, equally spaced, you'll have a good idea of this end of Rama. "Each of those ribs is a stairway, very steep near the axis and then slowly flattening out as it approaches the plain below. The stairways -- we've called them Alpha, Beta, Gamma -- aren't continuous, but break at five more circular terraces. We estimate there must be between twenty and thirty thousand steps. Presumably the stairs were only used for emergencies, since it's inconceivable that the Ramans -- or whatever we're going to call them -- had no better way of reaching the axis of their world. "The Southern Hemisphere looks quite different. For one thing, it has no stairways and no flat central hub. Instead, there's a huge spike -- kilometers long -- jutting along the axis, with six smaller ones around it. The whole arrangement is very odd and we can't imagine what it means. "The fifty-kilometer-long cylindrical section between the two bowls we've called the Central Plain. It may seem crazy to use the word 'plain' to describe something so obviously curved, but we feel it's justified. It will appear flat to us when we get down there -- just as the interior of a large bottle must seem flat to an ant crawling around inside it. "The most striking feature of the Central Plain is the ten-kilometer-wide dark band running completely around it at the halfway mark. It looks like ice, so we've christened it The Cylindrical Sea. Right out in the middle of it is a large oval island, about ten kilometers long and three wide and covered with tall structures. Because it reminds us of Old Manhattan, we've called it New York. Yet I don't think it's a city -- it seems more like an enormous factory or chemical processing plant. "But there are some cities -- or towns -- at least six of them. If they were built for human beings they could each hold about fifty thousand people. We've called them Rome, Peking, Paris, Moscow, London, Tokyo. They are linked with highways and something that seems to be a rail system. "There must be enough material for centuries of research in this frozen carcass of a world and we've only a few weeks to do the job. I wonder if we'll ever learn the answer to the two mysteries that have been haunting me ever since we got inside; who were they -- and what went wrong?" T he recording ended. On Earth and moon the members of the Rama Committee relaxed, then started to examine the maps and photographs spread in front of them. Though they had already studied these for many hours. Commander Norton's voice added a dimension no pictures could convey. He had actually been there -- had looked with his own eyes across this extraordinary inside-out world, during the brief moments its age-long night had been illuminated by the flares. And he was the man who would lead any expedition to explore it. "Dr. Perera, I believe you have some comments to make?" Dr. Bose wondered briefly if he should have first given the floor to Professor Davidson, the senior scientist and the only astronomer. But the old cosmologist still seemed to be in a mild state of shock and was clearly out of his element. All his professional career he had looked upon the universe as an arena for the titanic impersonal forces of gravitation, magnetism and radiation -- he had never believed that life played an important role in the scheme of things and regarded its appearance on Earth, Mars and Jupiter as an accidental aberration. But now there was proof that life not only existed outside the solar system, but had scaled heights far beyond anything that man had achieved or could hope to reach for centuries to come. Moreover, the discovery of Rama challenged another dogma that the professor had preached for years. When pressed, he would reluctantly admit that life probably did exist in other star systems -- but it was absurd, he had always maintained. to imagine that it could ever cross the interstellar gulfs. Perhaps the Ramans had indeed failed -- if Commander Norton proved correct in believing that their world was now a tomb. But at least they had attempted the feat on a scale that had at the outset indicated a high confidence in the outcome. If such a thing had happened once it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred thousomewhere, would eventually succeed. This was the thesis which, without proof but with considerable arm-waving. Dr. Carlisle Perera had been preaching for years. He was now a very happy man, though also a most frustrated one. Rama had spectacularly confirmed his views -- but he could never set foot inside it or even see it with his own eyes. If the devil had suddenly appeared and offered him the gift of instantaneous teleportation he would have signed the contract without bothering to look at the small print. "Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I think I have some information of interest. What we have here is undoubtedly a Space Ark. It's an old idea in astronautical literature -- I've been able to trace it back to the British physicist J.D. Bernal, who proposed this method of interstellar colonization in a book published in nineteen twenty-nine -- yes, two hundred years ago! And the great Russian pioneer Tsiolkovski put forward somewhat similar proposals even earlier. "If you want to go from one star system to another you have a number of choices. Assuming that the speed of light is an absolute limit -- and that's still not completely settled, despite anything you may have heard to the contrary -- " there was an indignant sniff, but no formal protest from Professor Davidson -- "you can make a fast trip in a small vessel or a slow journey in a giant one. "There seems no technical reason why spacecraft cannot reach ninety percent or more of the speed of light. That would mean a travel time of five to ten years between neighboring stars -- tedious, perhaps, but not impractical, especially for creatures whose life-spans might be measured in centuries. One can imagine voyages of this duration carried out in ships not much larger than ours. "But perhaps such speeds are impossible with reasonable payloads -- remember, you have to carry the fuel to slow down at the end of the voyage, even if you're on a one-way trip. So it may make more sense to take your tirtie -- ten thousand or a hundred thousand years. "Bernal and others thought this could be done with mobile worldlets a few kilometers across, carrying thousands of passengers on journeys that would last for generations. Naturally the system would have to be rigidly closed, recycling all food, air and other expendables. But, of course, that's just how the Earth operates -- on a slightly larger scale. "Some writers suggested that these Space Arks should be built in the form of concentric spheres. Others proposed hollow, spinning cylinders so that centrifugal force could provide artificial gravity -- exactly what we've found in Rama -- " could not tolerate this sloppy talk. "No such thing as centrifugal force. It's an engineer's phantom. There's only inertia." "You're quite right, of course," admitted Perera, "though it might be hard to convince a man who'd just been slung off a carousel. But mathematical rigor seems unnecessary -- " "Hear, hear," interjected Dr. Bose with some exasperation. "We all know what you mean, or think we do. Please don't destroy our illusions." "Well, I was merely pointing out that there's nothing conceptually novel about Rama, though its size is startling. Men had imagined such things for two hundred years. Now I'd like to address myself to another question. Exactly how long has Rama been traveling through space? "We now have a very precise determination of its orbit and its velocity. Assuming that it's made no navigational changes, we can trace its position back for that any visitor would be coming from the direction of a nearby star -- but that isn't the ca.se here at all. "It's more than two hundred thousand years since Rama passed near a star and that particular one turns out to be an irregular variable -- about the most unsuitable sun you could imagine for an inhabited solar system. It has a brightness range of over fifty to one -- any planets would be alternately baked and frozen every few years." "A suggestion," put in Dr. Price. "Perhaps that explains everything. Maybe this was once a normal sun and became unstable. That's why the Ramans had to find a new one." Dr. Perera admired the old archeologist, so he let her down lightly. What would she say, he wondered, if he started pointing out the instantly obvious in her own specialty? "We did consider that," he said gently. "But if our present theories of stellar evolution are correct this star could never have been stable -- could never have had lifebearing planets. So Rama has been cruising through space for at least two hundred thousand years -- and "Now it's cold and dark and apparently dead -- and I think I know why. The Ramans may have had no choice -- perhaps they were indeed fleeing from some disaster -- but they miscalculated. "No closed ecology can be one hundred percent efficient. There is always waste, loss -- some degradation of the environment and build-up of pollutants. It may and wear out a planet -- but it will happen in the end. The oceans dry up. The atmosphere will leak away. "By our standards Rama is enormous -- yet it is still a very tiny planet. My calculations, based on the leakage through its hull and some reasonable guesses about the rate of biological turnover, indicate that its ecology could survive only about a thousand years. At the most I'll grant ten thousand. "That would be long enough, at the speed Rama is traveling, for a transit between the closely packed suns in the heart of the'galaxy. But not out here, in the scattered population of the spiral arms. Rama is a ship that exhausted its provisions before it reached its goal. It's a derelict, drifting among the stars. "There's just one serious objection to this theory and I'll raise it before anybody else does. Rama's orbit is aimed so accurately at the solar system that coincidence seems ruled out. In fact. I'd say it's now heading much too close to the sun for comfort. Endeavor will have to break away long before perihelion to avoid overheating. "I don't pretend to understand this. Perhaps some form of automatic terminal guidance is still operating, steering Rama to the nearest suitable star ages after its builders are dead. "And they are dead -- I'll stake my reputation on that. All the samples we've taken from the interior are absolutely sterile -- we've not found a single micro-organism. As for the talk you may have heard about suspended animation, you can ignore it. There are fundamental reasons why hibernation techniques will work for only a very few centuries -- and we're dealing with time spans a thousandfold longer. "So the Pandorans and their sympathizers have nothing to worry about. For my part. I'm sorry. It would have been wonderful to have met another intelligent species. "But at least we have answered one ancient question. We are not alone. The stars will never again be the same to us." VI was sorely tempted -- but, as captain, his first duty was to his ship. If anything went badly wrong on this initial probe he might have to retreat the vessel. So that left his second officer, Mercer, the obvious choice. Norwas better suited for the mission. An authority on life-support systems, Mercer had written some of the standard texts on the subject. He had personally checked out innumerable types of equipment, often under hazardous conditions, and his biofeedback control was famous. At a moment's notice he could cut his pulse rate by fifty percent and reduce respiration to almost zero for up to ten minutes. This useful little trick had saved his life on more than one occasion. Yet, despite his great ability and intelligence, he was almost wholly lacking in imagination. To him the most dangerous experiments or missions were simply jobs that had to be done. He never took unnecessary risks and had no use at all for what was commonly regarded as courage. The two mottos on his desk summed up his philosophy of life. One asked what have you forgotten? The other said help he was widely regarded as the bravest man in the fleet was the only thing that ever made him angry. Given Mercer, the selection of the next man was automatic. Lieutenant Joe Calvert was Mercer's inseparable companion. It was hard to see what the two had in common -- the lightly built, rather highly strung navigating officer was ten years younger than his stolid and imperturbable friend, who certainly did not share Joe's passionate interest in the art of primitive cinerna. But no one can predict where the lightning will strike and years ago Mercer and Calvert had established an apparently stable partnership. That was common enough -- much more unusual was the fact that they also shared a wife back on Earth who had borne each of them a child. Commander Norton hoped that he could meet her one day -- she had to be a remarkable woman. The triangle had lasted for at least five years and still seemed to be an equilateral one. Two men were not enough to make an exploring team. Three was the optimum -- for if one man were lost two might still escape where a single survivor would be doomed. After a good deal of thought Norton chose Technical Sergeant Willard Myron. A mechanical genius who could make anything work -- or design something better if it wouldn't -- Myron was the ideal man to identify alien pieces of equipment. On a long sabbatical from his regular job as associate professor at Astrotech, the sergeant had refused to accept a commission on the grounds that he did not wish to block the promotion of more deserving career officers. No one took this explanation very seriously and it was generally agreed that Will rated zero for ambition. He might make it to space sergeant, but would never be a full professor. Myron, like countless ered the ideal compromise between power and responsibility. last airlock and floated out along the weightless axis of Rama, Joe Calvert found himself, as he so often did, in the middle of a movie 'flashback. He sometimes wondered if he should attempt to cure himself of this habit, but he could not see that it had any disadvantages. It could make even the dullest situations interesting and -- who could tell? One day it might save his life. He would remember what Fairbanks or Connery or Hiroshi had done in similar circumstances. This time he was about to go over the top in one of the early twentieth-century wars. Mercer was the sergeant, leading a threeman patrol on a night raid into No Man's Land. It was not too difficult to imagine that they were at the bottom of an immense shell crater, though one that had somehow become neatly tailored into a series of ascending terraces. The crater was flooded with light from three widely spaced plasma arcs, which gave an almost shadowless illumination over the whole interior. But beyond that -- over the rim of the most distant terrace -- lay darkness and mystery. In his mind's eye Calvert knew perfectly well what lay there. First there was the circular plain over a kilometer across. Trisecting it into three equal parts -- and looking very much like broad railroad tracks -- were three wide ladders, their rungs recessed into the surface so that they would provide no obstruction to anything sliding over it. Since the arrangement was completely symmetrical there was no reason to chose one ladder rather than another. The one nearest to Airlock Alpha had been selected purely as a matter of convenience. Though the rungs of the ladders were uncomfortably far apart they presented no problem. Even at the rim of the hub, half a kilometer from the axis, gravity was still barely one-thirtieth of the Earth's. Although they were carrying almost a hundred kilos of equipment and life-support gear, they would still be able to move easily hand-over-hand. Commander Norton and the back-up team accompanied them along the guide ropes that had been stretched from Airlock Alpha to the rim of the crater. Beyond the range of the floodlights lay the darkness of Rama. All that could be seen in the dancing beams of the helmet lights was the first few hundred meters of the ladder, dwindling away across a flat and otherwise featureless plain. And now, Karl Mercer told himself,  have to make my first decision. Am I going up that ladder or down it? T he question was not a trivial one. They were still essentially in zero gravity and the brain could select any reference system it pleased. By a simple effort of will Mercer could convince himself that he was looking out across a horizontal plain or up the face of a vertical wall, or over the edge of a sheer cliff. Not a few astronauts had experienced grave psycholocigal problems by choosing the wrong coordinates when they started on a complicated job. Mercer was determined to go head first, for any other mode of locomotion would be awkward -- moreover he wanted to see what was in front of him. For the first few hundred meters, therefore, he would imagine he was climbing -- only when the increasing pull of gravity made it impossible to maintain the illusion would he switch his mental directions one hundred and eighty degrees. He grasped the first rung and gently propelled himself along the ladder. Movement was as effortless as swimming along the seabed -- more so, in fact, for there was no backward drag of water. It was so easy that there was a Starting with this issue into monthly  orbit... to double i;our reading pleasure! monthly -- doubling the number of issues it will bring each year to you and to thousands of other science fiction connoisseurs the world over. newest, finest work by today's masters of science fiction: Anderson, Asimov, Bloch, Bradbury, Clarke, del Rey, Heinlein, Pohl, Silverberg, Sturgeon, Van Vogt... and many more. In every issue you'll find bold, exciting fiction. And intellectually stimuauthors aren't afraid to tackle today's big questions -- from ecology to future shock, genetic engineering and new sex styles. Or to come up with daring, imaginative solutions for tomorrow. you the best of contemporary science fiction every month... I # times a year! There never was a better time to So check the postage-free card bound (or extend your current subscription) special price! James White's The Dream Millennium... ,Us newest, most exciting novel -- about man's search for a better home than Mother Earth. Ursula Le Guin's The Field of Vison...astronauts caught in a mysterious, mystical Martian experience. Michael Kurland's Think Only This of Me... the fascinating tale of an earthly paradise -- for those who like living in the past... and the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. QBlXXy now more than ever the premier magazine of science fiction temptation to go too fast, but Mercer was much too experienced to hurry in a situation as novel as this. In his earphones he could hear the regular breathing of his two companions. He needed no other proof that they were in good shape and wasted no time in conversation. Though he was tempted to look back he decided not to risk it until they had reached the platform at the end of the ladder. The rungs were spaced a uniform half-meter apart and for the first portion of the climb Mercer missed the alternate ones. But he counted them carefully and at around two hundred noticed the first distinct sensation of weight. The spin of Rama was starting to make itself felt. At rung four hundred he estimated that his apparent weight was about five kilos. This was no problem, but it was now getting hard to pretend that he was climbing when he was being firmly dragged upward. The five-hundredth rung seemed a good place to pause. He could feel the muscles in his arms responding to the unaccustomed exercise, even though Rama was now doing all the work and he had merely to guide himself. "Everything okay, skipper," he reported. "We're just passing the halfway mark. Joe -- Will, any problems?" "I'm fine. What are you stopping for?" Joe Calvert answered. "Same here," added Sergeant Myron. "But watch out for the Coriolis force. It's starting to build up." So Mercer had already noticed. When he let go of the rungs he had a distinct tendency to drift off to the right. He knew perfectly well that this was merely the effect of Rama's spin, but it felt as if some mysterious force were gently pushing him away from the ladder. Perhaps it was time to start going feet first, now that "down" was beginning to have a physical meaning. He would run the risk of a momentary disorientation. "Watch out. I'm going to swing around." H olding on firmly to the rung, he used his arms to twist himself around a hundred and eighty degrees and found himself momentarily blinded by the lights of his companions. Far above them he could see a fainter glow along the rim of the sheer cliff. Silhouetted against it were the figures of Commander Norton and the backup team, watching him intently. They seemed small and far away and he gave them a reassuring wave. He released his grip and let Rama's still feeble pseudogravity take over. The drop from one rung to the next required more than two seconds -- on Earth, in the same time, a man would have fallen thirty meters. The rate of fall was so painfully slow that he hurried things up a trifle by pushing with his hands, gliding over spans of a dozen rungs at a time and checking himself with his feet whenever he felt he was traveling too fast. At rung seven hundred he came to another halt and swung the beam of his helmet lamp downward. The beginning of the stairway was only fifty meters below. A few minutes later they stood on the top step. It was a strange experience, after months in space, to stand upright on a solid surface, and to feel it pressing against one's feet. Their weight was still less than ten kilograms, but that was enough to give a feeling of stability. When he closed his eyes Mercer could believe that he once more had a real world beneath him. The ledge or platform from which the stairway descended was about ten meters wide and curved up on each side until it disappeared into the darkness. Mercer knew that it formed a complete circle and that if he walked along it for five kilometers he would come right back to his starting point. At the fractional gravity that existed here, however, real walking was impossible -- one could only bound along in giant strides. And therein lay danger. The stairway that swooped down into the darkness, far below the range of their lights, would be deceptively easy to descend. But it would be essential to hold on to the tall handrail that flanked it on either side -- too bold a step might send an incautious traveler arching far out into space. He would hit the surface again perhaps a hundred meters lower down. The impact would be harmless, but its consequences might not be -- for the spin of Rama would have moved the stairway off to the left. And so a falling body would hit against the smooth curve that swept in an unbroken arc to the plain almost seven kilometers below. That, Mercer told himself, would be a hell of a toboggan ride. The terminal speed, even in this gravity, could be several hundred kilometers an hour. Perhaps it would be possible to apply enough friction to check such a headlong descent -- if so, this might even be the most convenient way to reach the inner surface of Rama. But some very cautious experimenting would be necessary first. Mercer reported: "There were no problems getting down the ladder. I'd like to continue toward the next platform. I want to time our rate of descent on the stairway." Norton replied without hesitation. "Go ahead." He did not need to add; "Proceed with caution." make a fundamental discovery. It was impossible, at least at this gravity level, to walk down the stairway in the normal manner. Any attempt to do so resulted in a slow-motion, dreamlike movement that was intolerably tedious. The only practical way was to ignore the steps and to use the handrail to pull oneself downward. Calvert had come to the same conclusion. "This stairway was built to walk up, not down," he said. "You can use the steps when you're moving against gravity, but they're just a nuisance in this direction. It may not be dignified, but I think the best way down is to slide along the handrail." "That's ridiculous," protested Myron. "I can't believe the Ramans did it this way." "I doubt they ever used this stairway -- it's obviously only for emergencies. They must have had some mechanical transport system to get up here. A funicular, perhaps. That would explain those long slots running down from the hub." "I've been assuming they were drains -- but I suppose they could be both. I wonder if it ever rained here?" "Probably," said Mercer. "But I think Joe is right -- and to hell with dignity. Here we go." The handrail -- presumably it had been designed for something like hands -- was a smooth flat metal bar supported on widely spaced pillars a meter high. Mercer straddled it, carefully gauged the braking power he could exert with his hands and let himself slide. Very sedately, slowly picking up speed, he descended into the darkness, moving in the pool of light from his helmet lamp. He had gone about fifty meters when he called the others to join him. In less than two minutes, they had made a kilometer descent in safety and comfort. "I hope you enjoyed yourselves," Commander Norton called when they stepped off at the second platform. "Climbing back won't be quite so easy." "That's what I want to check," replied Mercer, who was walking experimentally back and forth, getting the feel of the increased gravity. "It's already a tenth of a gee here -- you really notice the difference." He walked to the edge of the platform and shone his helmet light down the next section of the stairway. As far as his beam could reach the steps appeared identical with the ones above -- though careful examination of photos had indicated that their height steadily decreased with the rising gravity. The stair had apparently been designed so that the effort required to climb it was more or less constant at every point in its long curving sweep. Mercer glanced up toward the hub of Rama, now almost two kilometers above him. The little glow of light and the tiny figures silhouetted against it seemed horribly far away. For the first time he was glad that he could not see the whole length of this enormous stairway. Despite his steady nerves and lack of imagination he was not sure how he would react if he could see himself like an insect crawling up the face of a vertical saucer sixteen kilometers high -- and with the upper half hanging above him. Until this moment, he had regarded the darkness as a nuisance -- now he welcomed it. "There's no change of temperature," he reported to Norton. "Still just below freezing. But the air pressure is up as we expected -- around three hundred millbars. Even with this low oxygen content it's almost breathable -- farther down there will be no problem at all. That will simplify exploration enormously. What a find -- the first World on which we can walk without breathing gear. I'm going to take a sniff." U P ON the Hub Commander Norton stirred a little uneasily. But Mercer, of all men, knew what he was doing. He would already have made enough tests to satisfy himself. Mercer equalized pressure, unlatched the securing clip of his helmet and opened it a crack. He took a cautious breath, then a deeper one. The air of Rama was dead and musty, as if from a tomb so ancient that the last trace of physical corruption had disappeared ages ago. Even Mercer's ultra-sensitive nose, trained through years of testing life-support systems to and beyond the point of disaster, could detect no recognizable odors. There was a faint metallic tang and he suddenly recalled that the first men on the moon had reported a hint of burned gunpowder when they repressurized the lunar module. Mercer imagined that the moondusty cabin on Eagle must have tasted rather like Rama. He sealed the helmet again and emptied his lungs of the alien air. He had extracted no sustenance from it -- even a mountaineer acclimatized to the summit of Everest would die quickly here. But a few kilometers farther down it would be a different matter. What else was there to do here? He could think of nothing except the enjoyment of the gentle, unaccustomed gravity. But there was no point in growing used to that, since they would be returning immediately to the weightlessness of the hub. "We're coming back," he reported. "There's no reason to go on until we're ready to go all the way." "I agree. We'll be timing you, but take it easy." As he bounded up the steps, three or four at a stride, Mercer agreed that Calvert had been perfectly correct -- these stairs were built to be walked up, not down. As long as one did not look back and ignored the vertiginous steepness of the ascending curve the climb was a delightful experience. After about two hundred steps, however, he began to feel some twinges in his calf muscles and decided to slow down. The others had done the same. When he ventured a quick glance over his shoulder he saw them considerably farther down the slope. The climb was wholly uneventful -- merely an apparently endless succession of steps. When they stood once more on the highest platform, immediately beneath the ladder, they were barely winded and to reach this point had taken them only ten minutes. They paused for another ten, then started on the last vertical kilometer. Jump -- catch hold of a rung -- jump -- catch -- jump -- catch... it was easy, but so boringly repetitious that carelessness became a danger. Halfway up the ladder they rested for five minutes. Once again Mercer was glad that he could see so little of the vertical face to which he was clinging. It was not too difficult to pretend that the ladder extended only a few meters beyond the circle of light and would soon come to an end. Jump -- catch a rung -- jump -- then, quite suddenly, the ladder did end. They were back at. the weightless world of the axis. The whole trip had taken under an hour and they felt a sense of modest achievement. Yet each of' them knew that, for all their efforts, they had traversed less than an eighth of that cyclopean stairway. Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship -- weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless, but when they started to move and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of an unholstered lady officer through the control cabin. He had once mentioned this theory to Endeavor's Dr. Laura Ernst, without revealing who had inspired his particular train of thought. There was no need -- they knew each other much too well. On Earth, years ago, in a moment of mutual loneliness and depression they had once made love. Probably they would never repeat the experience (but could one ever be quite sure of that?) because so much had changed for both of them. Yet whenever the well-built surgeon oscillated into the commanders' cabin he felt a fleeting echo of an old passion -- she knew that he felt it and everyone was happy. "Bill," she began, "I've checked our mountaineers and here's my verdict. Karl and Joe are in good shape -- all indications normal for the work they've done. But Will shows signs of exhaustion and fluid loss -- I won't bother with the details. I don't believe he's been getting all the exercise he should -- and he's not the only one. There's been some cheating in the centrifuge. If there's any more, heads will roll. Please pass the word." "Yes, ma'am. But there's some excuse. The men have been working very hard." "With their brains and fingers, certainly. But not with their bodies -- not real work in kilogrammeters. And thaEs what we'll be dealing with if we're oing to explore Rama." "Well, can we?" "Yes, if we proceed with caution. Karl and I have worked out a very conservative profile -- based on the assumption that we can dispense with breathing gear below Level Two. Of course, that's an incredible stroke of luck and changes the whole logistics picture. I still can't get used to the idea of a world with oxygen. But we only need to supply food and water and thermosuits and we're in business. Going down will be easy -- it looks as if we can slide most of the way on that very convenient bannister." "I've got Chips working on a sled with parachute braking. Even if we can't risk it for crew we can use it for stores and equipment." "Fine. That should do the trip in ten minutes -- otherwise it will take about an hour. Climbing up is harder to estimate. I'd like to allow six hours, including two onehour rest periods. Later, as we get experience -- and develop some muscles -- we may be able to cut this back considerably." "What about psychological factors?" "Hard to assess in such a novel environment. Darkness may be the biggest problem." "I'll establish searchlights on the hub. Besides its own lamps, any party down there will always have a beam playing on it." "Good. That should be a great help." "One other point -- should we play safe and send a party only halfway down the stair and back -- or should we go the whole way on the first attempt?" "If we had plenty of time I'd be cautious. But time is short and I can see no danger in going all the way -- and looking around when we get there." "Thanks, Laura. That's all I want to know. I'll get the exec working on the details. And I'll order all hands to the centrifuge -- twenty minutes a day at half a gee. Will that satisfy you?" "No. It's point six gee down there in Rama and I want a safety margin. Make it, oh, three-quarters -- " "Ouch!" " -- for ten minutes -- " "I'll settle for that -- " " -- twice a day." "Laura, you're a cruel, hard woman. But so be it. I'll break the news just before dinner. That should spoil a few appetites." mander Norton had ever seen Karl Mercer slightly ill at ease. He had spent fifteen minutes discussing logistics problems in his usual competent manner, but something was obviously worrying him. His captain, who had a shrewd idea of what it was, waited patiently until he brought it out. Karl said at length, "Are you sure you should lead this party? If anything goes wrong I'm considerably more expendable. And I've been farther inside Rama than anyone else -- even if only by fifty meters." "Granted. But it's time the commander led his troops and we've decided that there's no greater risk on this trip than on the last. At the first sign of trouble I'll be back up that stairway fast enough to qualify for the Lunar Olympics." He waited for further objections, but none came, though Karl still looked unhappy. Norton added gently: "And I bet Joe will beat me to the top." Mercer relaxed and a slow grin spread across his face. "All the same, Bill, I wish you'd chosen someone else." "I wanted one man who had been down before and we can't both go. As for Sergeant Myron, Laura says he's still two kilos overweight. Even shaving off that mustache didn't help." "Who's your number three?" "I still haven't decided. That depends on Laura." "She wants to go?" "Who doesn't? But if she turns up at the top of her own fitness list I'll be very suspicious." As Mercer gathered up his papers and launched himself out of the cabin Norton felt a brief stab of envy. Almost all the crew had worked out some sort of emotional accommodation. He had known ships where the captain had done the same, but that was not his way. Though discipline aboard Endeavor was based largely on mutual respect between highly trained and intelligent men and women, the commander needed something more to underline his position. His responsibility was unique and demanded a degree of isolation even from his closest friends to avoid charges of favortism. For this reason affairs spanning more than two degrees of rank were firmly discouraged. But apart from that, the only rule regulating sex was: "So long as they don't do it in the corridors and frighten the simps." There were four superchimps aboard Endeavor, though strictly speaking the name was inaccurate, because the ship's nonhuman crew was not based on chimpanzee stock. In zero gravity a prehensile tail is an enormous advantage and all attempts to supply these to humans had turned into embarrassing failures. After equally unsatisfactory results with the great apes the Superchimpanzee Corporation had turned to the monkey kingdom. Blackie, Blondie, Goldie and Brownie had family trees whose branches included the most intelligent of the Old and New World monkeys, plus synthetic genes that had never existed in nature. Their rearing and education had likely cost as much as those of the average spaceman and they were worth it. Each weighed less than thirty kilos and consumed only half the food and oxygen of a human being, but each could replace # men for housekeeping, elementary cooking, tool-carrying and dozens of other routine jobs. That # was the corporation's claim, based on innumerable time-and-motion studies. The figure, though surprising and frequently challenged, appeared to be accurate, for simps were quite happy to work fifteen hours a day and did not get bored by the most menial and repetitious tasks. So they freed human beings for human work. And on a spaceship that was a matter of vital importance. their nearest relatives. Endeavor's simps were docile, obedient and uninquisitive. Being cloned, they were also sexless, which eliminated awkward behavioral problems. Carefully house-trained vegetarians, they were clean and didn't smell -- they would have made perfect pets, except that nobody could possibly have afforded them. Still, having simps on board involved certain problems. They had to have their own quarters -- inevitably labeled "The Monkey House." Their little mess room was always spotless and was equipped with TV, games, equipment and programed teaching machines. To avoid accidents they were absolutely forbidden to enter the ship's technical areas -- the entrances to all these were color-coded in red and the simps were conditioned so that it was psychologically impossible for them to pass these visual barriers. There was also a communications problem. Though they had an I.Q. equivalent of # and could understand several hundred words of English, they were unable to talk. It had proved impossible to give useful vocal chords either to apes or monkeys and they therefore had to express themselves in sign language. The basic signs were obvious and easily learned, so that everyone on board ship could understand routine messages. But the only man who could speak fluent Simplish was their handler. Chief Steward Me Andrews. It was a standing joke that Sergeant Ravi McAndrews also looked rather like a simp -- which was hardly an insult, for with their short, tinted pelts and graceful movements the simps were handsome animals. They were also affectionate and everyone on board had his favorite -- Commander Norton's was the aptly named Goldie. But the warm relationship one could so easily establish with simps created another problem, often used as a powerful argument against their employment in space. Since they could only be trained for routine, low-grade tasks they were worse than useless in an emergency -- they could then be a danger to themselves and to their human companions. In particular, teaching them to use spacesuits had proved impossible, the concepts involved being quite beyond their understanding. No one liked to talk about it, but everybody knew what had to be done if a hull were breached or the order came to abandon ship. It had happened only once -- then the simp handler had carried out his instructions more than adequately. He was found with his charges, killed by the same poison. Thereafter, the job of euthing was transferred to the chief medical officer who, it was felt, would have less emotional involvement. Norton was thankful that this responsibility, at least, did not fall upon the captain's shoulders. He had known men he would have killed with far fewer qualms than he would have felt about destroying Goldie. of Rama the beam of the searchlight was completely invisible. Three kilometers down from the central hub, the hundred-meter oval of light lay across a section of that colossal stairway. A brilliant oasis in the surrounding darkness, it was sweeping slowly toward the curved plain still five kilometers below and in its center moved a trio of antlike figures. It had been, just as they had hoped and expected, a completely uneventful descent. They had paused briefly at the first platform and Norton had walked a few hundred meters along the narrow, curving ledge before starting the slide down to the second level. Here they had discarded their oxygen gear and reveled in the strange luxury of being able to breathe without mechanical aids. Now they could explore in comfort, freed from the greatest danger that confronts a man in space. By the time they had reached the fifth level -- and there was only one more section to go -- gravity had reached almost half its terrestrial value. Rama's centrifugal spin was at last exerting its real strength -- they were surrendering themselves to the implacable force that rules every planet and can exert a merciless price for the smallest slip. It was still easy to go downward; but the thought of the return up those thousands upon thousands of steps was already beginning to prey on their minds.' The stairway had long ago ceased its vertiginous downward plunge and was now flattening out toward the horizontal. The gradient was now only about one in five -- at the beginning, it had been five in one. Normal walking was now both physically and psychologically acceptable -- only the gravity reminded them that they were not descending some great stairway on Earth. Norton had once visited the ruins of an Aztec temple and the feelings he had then experienced now came echoing back to him -- amplified a hundred times. Here was the same sense of awe and mystery and the sadness of the irrevocably vanished past. Yet the scale here was so much greater both in time and space that the mind was unable to do it justice -- after a while the senses ceased to respond. Norton wondered if, sooner or later, he would take even Rama for granted. In another respect the parallel with terrestrial ruins failed completely. Rama was hundreds of times older than any structure that had survived on Earth -- even the Great Pyramid. But everything here looked absolutely new -- there was no sign of wear and tear. Norton had puzzled over this a good deal and had arrived at a tentative explanation. Everything that they had so far examined secured part of an emergency backup system, seldom put to actual use. He could not imagine that the Ramans -- unless they were physical fitness fanatics -- ever walked up and down this incredible stairway or its two identical companions. Perhaps the stairs had only been required during the actual construction of Rama and had served no purpose since that distant day. That theory would do for the moment, yet it did not feel right. Something was wrong somewhere. They did not slide for the last kilometer but went down the steps two at a time in long, gentle strides -- this way, Norton decided, they would give more exercise to muscles that would soon have to be used. And so the end of the stairway came upon them unannounced -- suddenly there were no more steps. A flat plain, dull gray in the now weakening beam of the hub searchlight, faded into darkness a few hundred meters ahead. Norton looked back along the beam. He knew that Mercer would be watching through the telescope. He waved. "Captain speaking," he reported over the radio. "Everyone in fine shape -- no problems. Proceeding as planned." "Good," replied Mercer. "We'll be watching." T here was a brief silence. Then a new voice cut in. "This is the exec on board ship. Really, skipper, that isn't good enough. You know the news services have been screaming at us for the last week. I don't expect deathless prose, but can't you do better?" "I'll try." Norton chuckled. "There's nothing to see as yet. It's like -- well, being on a huge, darkened stage under a single spotlight. The first few hundred steps of the stairway rise out of it until they disappear into the darkness overhead. What we can see of the plain looks perfectly flat -- the curvature's too small to be visible over this limited area. That's about it." "Care to give any impressions?" "Well, it's cold here -- below freezing -- and we're glad of our thermosuits. And it's quiet -- quieter than anything I've ever known on Earth or in space, where there's always some background noise. Here every sound is swallowed up -- the area around us is so enormous that there aren't any echoes. It's weird. I hope we can get used to it." "Thanks, skipper. Anyone else -- Joe, Boris?". Joe Calvert, never at a loss for words, was happy to oblige. "I can't help thinking that this is the first time -- ever -- that we've been able to walk on another world, breathing its natural atmosphere -- though I suppose 'natural' is hardly the word you should apply to a place like this. Still, Rama must resemble the world of its builders -- our own spaceships are all miniature Earths. Two examples are damned poor statistics, but does this mean that all intelligent life forms are oxygen-eaters? What we've seen of their work suggests that the Ramans were humanoid, though perhaps about fifty per cent taller than we are. Wouldn't you agree, Boris?" To all his shipmates Lieutenant Boris Rodrigo was something of an enigma. The quiet, dignified communications officer was popular with the rest of the crew, but he never entered fully into its activities and always seemed a little apart -- marching to the music of a different drummer. As indeed he was, being a devout member of the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut. Norton had never been able to discover what had happened to the earlier four and he was equally in the dark about the Church's rituals and ceremonies. But the main tenet of its faith was widely known -- it had constructed an entire theology on the assumption that Jesus Christ was a visitor from space. It was perhaps not surprising that an unusually high proportion of the devotees worked in space in some capacity or other. Invariably they were efficient, conscientious and absolutely reliable. They were universally respected and even liked, especially as they made no attempt to convert others. But there was also something slightly spooky about them -- Norton could never understand how men with advanced scientific and technical training could possibly believe some of the things he had heard Christers state as incontrovertible facts. As he waited for Rodrigo to answer Norton wondered if some part of his mind had not selected the lieutenant for this mission out of curiosity -- to see how a man with Rodrigo's religious beliefs would react to the awesome reality of Rama. Boris Rodrigo finally answered Joe's possibly loaded question with his usual caution: "They were certainly oxygen-breathers and they could be humanoid. But let's wait and see. With any luck we should discover what they were like. There may be pictures, statues -- perhaps even bodies in those towns. If they are towns." "The nearest is only eight kilometers away," Joe Calver said hopefully. A quick sortie to the "town" they had named Paris had been among the first of Norton's contingency plans. Could he now risk it? They had ample food and water for a stay of twenty-four hours. They would always be in full view of the backup team on the Hub and any kind of accident seemed virtually impossible on this smooth, gently curving metal plain. The only foreseeable danger was exhaustion, and time was a consideration. Even a brief foray could be worth much -- there was so little time as Rama hurtled sunward, toward a perihelion too dangerous for Endeavor to match. In any case, part of the decision was not his to make. Up in the ship. Dr. Ernst would be watching the outputs of the bio-telemetering sensors attached to his body. If she turned thumbs down, that would be that. "Laura, what do you think?" "Take thirty minutes' rest and a five-hundred-calorie energy module. Then you can start." "Thanks, doc." From Joe Calvert. "Now I can die happy. I always wanted to see Paris. Montmartre, here we come." A fter those interminable stairs it was a strange luxury to walk once more on a horizontal surface. Directly ahead the ground was indeed completely Hat. To right and left, at the limits of the floodlit area, the rising curve could barely be detected. They might have been walking the bottom of a wide, shallow valley -- it was quite impossible to believe that they were really crawling along the inside of a huge cylinder and that beyond this little oasis of light the land rose up to meet -- no, to become -- the sky. Though all three felt a sense of confidence and subdued excitement the almost palpable silence of Rama began shortly to weigh heavily upon them. Every footstep, every word vanished instantly into the unreverberant void -- after they had gone little more than half a kilometer Calvert could stand it no longer. Among his minor accomplishments was a talent for whistling. With or without encouragement he could reproduce the themes from most of the movies of the last two hundred years. He started at the beginning of his repertory and progressed, more or less chronologically, through half a dozen epics -- culminating with the theme from Sid Krassman's famous late twentieth century Napoleon -- before he realized the inappropriateness of his efforts. Rama made trivia of his tunes -- they were lost in the unechoing stillness. Thereafter, apart from an occasional consultation with the ship, the trio marched in silence. Rama had won this round. On his initial traverse Norton had allowed for one detour. Paris lay straight ahead, halfway between the foot of the stairway and the shore of the Cylindrical Sea, but only a kilometer to the right of their track lay a prominent and rather mysterious feature which had been christened the Straight Valley. It was a long groove or trench, forty meters deep and a hundred wide, with gently sloping sides -- it had been provisionally identified as an irrigation ditch or canal. Like the stairway, it had two counterparts, equally spaced around the curve of Rama. The three valleys were almost ten kilometers long and stopped abruptly just before they reached the sea -- which was strange if they were intended to carry water. And on the other side of the sea the pattern was repeated; three more ten-kilometer trenches continued to the South Polar region. The men reached the rim of the Straight Valley. The perfectly smooth walls sloped down at an angle of sixty degrees -- there were bottom was a sheet of flat, white material that looked very much like ice. A specimen could settle a good many arguments and Norton decided to get one. With Calvert and Rodrigo acting as anchors and playing out a safety rope, he rapelled slowly down the steep incline. When he reached the bottom he fully expected to find the familiar slippery feel of ice underfoot, but he was mistaken. His footing remained secure. The material was some kind of glass or transparent crystal -- when he touched it with his fingertips it was cold, hard and unyielding. Turning his back to the searchlight and shielding his eyes from its glare, Norton tried to peer into the crystalline depths. He could see nothing. The stuff was translucent but not transparent. He tapped it gently with the hammer from his geology kit -- the tool rebounded with a dull, unmusical clunk. He tapped harder with no more result and was about to exert his full strength when some impulse made him desist. It seemed most unlikely that he could crack this material -- but what if he did? He would simply be a vandal, smashing something he did not understand. He had already discovered valuable information. It now seemed more unlikely than ever that this was a canal -- it was simply a peculiar trench that stopped and started abruptly but led nowhere. If at any time it had carried liquid -- where were the stains, the encrustations of dried-up sediment? Everything was bright and clean, as if the builders had left only yesterday. Once again, he was face to face with the fundamental mystery of Rama and now for the first time he had a sense not exactly of foreboding but of anticipation. Things were not what they seemed. There was something odd about a place that was simultaneously He began to walk slowly and thoughtfully along the length of the little valley His companions. still holding the rope that was attached to his waist, followed along the rim. He did not expect to make any further discoveries, but he wanted to let his curious emotional state run its course. For something else was worrying him and it had nothing to do with the inexplicable newness of Rama. He had walked no more than a dozen meters when it hit him like a thunderbolt. He knew this place. He had been here before. man being could possibly have seen was shocking. For several seconds Commander Norton stood glued to the smooth crystalline surface, trying to straighten out his emotions. His well-ordered universe had been turned upside down and he had a dizzying glimpse of those mysteries at the edge of existence which he had successfully ignored for most of his life. Then, to his immense relief, common sense came to his rescue. The disturbing sensation of deja vu faded, to be replaced by a real and identifiable memory from his youth. It was true that he had once stood between such steeply sloping walls and watched them drive into the distance until they seemed to converge at a point indefinitely far ahead. But they had been covered with neatly trimmed grass and underfoot had been broken stone, not smooth crystal. It had happened thirty years ago, during a summer vacation in England. Largely because of another student (he could remember her face, but had forgotten her name) he had taken a course in industrial archeology, then very popular among science and engineering graduates. She and he had explored abandoned coal mines and cotton mills, climbed over ruined blast furnaces and steam engines, goggled unbelievingly at primitive (and still dangerous) nuclear reactors and had driven priceless turbine-powered antiques along restored motor roads. Not everything they had seen had been genuine. Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life. But copies had been reconstructed with loving care. And young Norton had found himself bowling along at an exhilarating hundred kilometers an hour while furiously shoveling precious coal into the firebox of a locomotive that had looked two hundred years old, but was actually younger than he was. The thirtykilometer stretch of the Great Western Railway, however, had been quite genuine, though it had required a good deal of excavating to get it back into commision. Whistle screaming, the train had plunged into a hillside and raced through a smoky, flame-lit darkness. An astonishingly long time later it had burst out of the tunnel into a deep, perfectly straight cut between steep grassy banks. The long-forgotten vista was almost identical with the one before him now. "What is it. Skipper?" called Rodrigo. "Have you found something?" As Norton dragged himself back to present reality some of the oppression lifted from his mind. There was mystery here -- yes, but it might not be beyond human understanding. He had learned a lesson, though it was not one that he could readily impart to others. At all costs he must not let Rama overwhelm him. That way lay failure -- perhaps even madness. "No," he answered, "there's nothing down here. Haul me up -- we'll head straight to Paris." IX UT 'VE called this meeting of J. the committee," Dr. Bose said, "because Dr. Perera has something important to tell us. He insists that we get in touch with Commander Norton right away, using the priority channel we've been able to establish after, I might say, a good deal of difficulty. Dr. Perera's statement is rather technical and before we come to it I think a summary of the present position might be in order. Dr. Price has prepared one. Oh, yes -- some apologies for absence. Sir Robert is en route to Earth, Professor Solorhons is somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific and Dr. Taylor asks to be excused." He was rather pleased about that last absence The anthropologist had rapidly lost interest in Rama when it became obvious that it would present little scope for him. Like many others he had been bitterly disappointed to find that the mobile worldlet was dead -- there would be no opportunity for sensational books and viddies about Raman rituals and behavioral patterns. Others might dig up skeletons and classify artifacts -- that sort of thing did not appeal to Conrad Taylor. Perhaps the only discovery that would bring him back in a hurry would be some highly explicit works of art -- like the notorious frescoes of Thera and Pompei. Thelma Price, the archeologist, took exactly the opposite point of view. She preferred excavations and ruins uncluttered by inhabitants who might interfere with dispassionate, scientific studies. The bed of the Mediterranean had been ideal -- at least until the city planners and landscape artists had started getting in the way. And Rama would have been perfect, except for the maddening detail that it was a hunshe would never be able to visit it in person. "As you all know," she began, "Commander Norton has completed one traverse of almost thirty kilometers without encountering any problems. He explored the curious trench shown on your maps as the Straight Valley. Its purpose is still unknown, but it's clearly important. It runs the full length of Rama -- except for the break at the Cylindrical Sea -- and there are two other identical structures a hundred and twenty degrees apart around the circumference. "Then the party turned left -- or east, if we adopt the North Pole convention -- until it reached Paris. As you'll see from this photograph, taken by a telescopic camera at the Hub, Paris is a group of several hundred buildings separated by wide streets. "Now these photographs were taken by Commander Norton's group when they reached the site. If Paris is a city it's a very peculiar one. Note that none of the buildings have windows or even doors. They are all plain, rectangular structures an identical thirty-five meters high. And they appear to have been extruded out of the ground -- there are no seams or joints. Look at this closeup of the base of a wall -- there's a smooth transition into the ground. "My own feeling is that this place is not a residential area, but a storage or supply depot. In support of that theory, look at this photo... "These narrow slots or grooves, about five centimeters wide, run along all the streets and there's one leading to every building, going straight into the wall. There's a striking resemblance to the streetcar tracks of the early twentieth century -- they are obviously part of some transport system. "We've never considered it necessary to have public transport connect directly with every house. It would be economically absurd -- people can always walk a few hundred meters. But if these buildings were used for the storage of heavy materials, direct access by transportation machinery would make sense." "May I ask a question?" From the representative for Earth. "Of course." "Commander Norton couldn't get into a single building?" "No. When you listen to his report, you can tell he was quite frustrated. At one time he decided that the buildings could only be entered from underground. Then he discovered the grooves of the transport system and changed his mind." "Did he try to break in?" "There was no way he could -- without explosives or heavy tools. And he doesn't want to smash anything until all other approaches have failed." "I have it!" the representative suddenly interjected. "Cocooning." "I beg your pafdon?" "It's a technique developed a couple of hundred years ago. Another name for it is mothballing. When you have something you want to preserve you seal it inside a plastic envelope and then pump in an inert gas. The original use was to protect military equipment between wars -- it was once applied to whole ships. It's still widely used in museums that are short of storage space. No one knows what's inside some of the hundred-year-old cocoons in the Smithsonian basement." Patience was not one of Carlisle Perera's virtues -- he was aching to drop his bombshell and could restrain himself no longer. "PI ease, Mr: Ambassador! This is all very interesting, but I feel my information is rather more urgent." "If there are no other points -- very well. Dr. Perera." T he exobiologist, unlike Conrad Taylor, had not found Rama a disappointment. It was true that he no longer expected to find life -- but sooner or later, he had been quite sure, some remains would be discovered of the creatures who had built this fantastic world. The exploration had barely begun, although the time available was horribly brief before Endeavor would be forced to escape from her present sungrazing orbit. But now, if his calculations were correct, man's contact with Rama would be even shorter than he had feared. For one detail had been overlooked because it was so large that no one had noticed it before. "According to our latest information," Perera began, "one party of explorers is now on its way to the Cylindrical Sea, while Commander Norton has another group setting up a supply base at the foot of Stairway Alpha. When that's established he intends to have at least two exploratory missions operating at all times. In this way he hopes to use his limited manpower at maximum efficiency. "It's a good plan, but there may be no time to carry it out. In fact, I would advise an immediate alert and a preparation for total withdrawal on twelve hours' notice. Let me explain. "It's surprising how few people have commented on a rather obvious anomaly about Rama. The artifact is now well inside the orbit of Venus -- yet the interior is still frozen. But the temperature of an object in direct sunlight at this point is about five hundred degrees. "The reason for the cold interior is, of course, that Rama hasn't had time to warm up. It must have cooled down to near absolute zero -- two hundred seventy below -- while it was in' interstellar space. Now its outer hull is already almost as hot as molten lead. There's some kind of fancy dessert with a hot exterior and ice cream in the middle -- I don't remember what it's called -- " "Baked Alaska. It's a favorite at U.P. ' banquets, unfortunately" "Thank you. That's the situation in Rama at the moment, but it won't last. All these weeks the solar heat has been working its way through and we expect a sharp temperature rise to begin in a few hours. That's not the problem -- by the time Commander Norton will have to leave the air will be no more than comfortably tropical." "Then what's the difficulty?" "I can answer in one word, Mr. Ambassador. Hurricanes." T here were now more than twenty men and women inside Rama -- six of them down on the plain, the rest ferrying equipment and expendables through the airlock system and down the stairway. The ship itself was almost deserted, with the minimum possible staff on duty. The joke went around that Endeavor was really being run by the four simps and that Goldie had been given the rank of acting commander. For these first explorations Norton had established a number of ground rules. The most important dated back to the earliest days of man's spacefaring. Every group, he had decided, must contain one person with prior experience. But no more than one. In that way everybody would have an opportunity of learning as quickly as possible and substitutes would be available for possible future emergencies. The first party to head for the Cylindrical Sea, led by SurgeonCommander Laura Ernst, had as its one-time veteran Boris Rodrigo, just back from Paris. The third member. Sergeant Pieter Rousseau, had been with the backup teams at the Hub -- he was an expert on space reconnaissance instrumentation, but on this trip he would have to depend on his own eyes and a small portable telescope. From the foot of Stairway Alpha to the edge of the sea was just under fifteen kilometers. Laura Ernst set a brisk pace. She stopped her team for thirty minutes at the midway mark and made the whole trip in a completely uneventful three hours. Walking in the beam of the searchlight through the anechoic darkness of Rama was also quite monotonous. As the pool of light advanced with the explorers it slowly elongated into a long, narrow ellipse -- this foreshortening of the beam was the only visible sign of progress. If the observers on the Hub had not given them continual distance checks, they could not have guessed whether they had traveled one kilometer or five or ten. They simply plodnight over an apparently seamless metal surface. But at last, far ahead at the limits of the weakening beam they saw something new. On a normal world it would have been a horizon. They were nearing the edge of the sea. "Only a hundred meters," said Hub Control. "Better slow down." They had already done so. From the level of the plain to the sea was a sheer straight drop of fifty meters. Although Norton had impressed upon everyone the danger of taking anything for granted in Rama, few doubted that the sea was really made of ice. But for what conceivable reason was the cliff on the southern shore five hundred meters high, instead of the fifty here? proaching the edge of the world their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them, became shorter and shorter. But far out on the curved screen of the sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows appeared in magnified and exaggerated movement. Those shadows had been their companions every step of the way, but now that they were broken at the edge of the duff they no longer seemed part of the humans who cast them. They might have been creatures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any intruders into their domain. From the edge of the fifty-meter cliff it was possible to appreciate fully the curvature of Rama. But no one had ever before seen a frozen lake bent upward into a cylindrical surface -- the image was distinctly unsettling and the eye did its best to find some other interpretation. It seemed to Dr. Ernst, who had once made a study of visual illusions, that half the time she was really looking at a horizontally curving bay, not a surface that soared up into the sky. It required a deliberate effort of will to accept the fantastic truth. Only in the line directly ahead, parallel to the axis of Rama, was normalcy preserved. In this direction alone was there agreement between vision and logic. Here -- for the next few kilometers at least -- Rama looked flat and was flat. And out there, beyond their distorted shadows and the outer limit of the beam, lay the island that dominated the Cylindrical Sea. "Hub Control," Dr. Ernst radioed. "Please aim your beam at New York." The night of Rama fell suddenly upon the team as the oval of light went sliding out to sea. Conscious of the now invisible cliff at their feet, they all stepped back -- and then, as if by magic, the towers of New York sprang into view. The resemblance to old-time Manhattan was only superficial -- this star-born echo of Earth's past possessed its own unique identity. The more Dr. Ernst stared at it, the more certain she became that it was not a city at all. The real New York, like all of man's habitations, had never been finished -- still less had it been designed. This place, however, had an overall symmetry and pattern, though one so complex that it eluded the mind. It had been conceived and planned by some controlling intelligence -- and then it had been completed, like a machine devised for some specific purpose. After that there was no possibility of growth or change. The beam of the searchlight slowly tracked along those distant towers and domes, interlocked spheres and criss-crossed tubes. Sometimes there would be a surface shot the light back toward the viewers. The first time this happened they were taken by surprise. It was exactly as if someone on that strange island were signaling to them... But they could see nothing here that was not already shown in greater detail on photographs taken from the Hub. After a few minutes they called for the light to return to them and began to walk east along the edge of the cliff. It was plausibly theorized that somewhere there had to be a flight of steps or a ramp leading down to the sea. And a sailor among the crewmen raised an interesting conjecture. "Where there's a sea," Sergeant Ruby Barns predicted, "there must be docks and harbors -- and ships. You can learn everything about a culture by studying the way it builds boats." Her colleagues thought this a rather restricted point of view, but at least it was a stimulating one. up the search and was preparing to make a descent by rope when Rodrigo spotted the narrow stairway. It could easily have been overlooked in the shadowed darkness below the edge of the cliff, for there was no guard rail or other indication of its presence. And it seemed to lead nowhere -- it ran down the vertical wall at a steep angle and disappeared below the surface of the sea. They scanned the flight of steps with their helmet lights, could see no conceivable hazard, and D.r. Ernst got Commander Norton's permission to descend. A minute later she was cautiously testing the surface of the sea. Her foot slithered almost frictionlessly back and forth. The material felt exactly like ice. It was ice. When she struck it with her hammer, a familiar pattern of cracks radiated from the impact point and she had no difficulty collecting as many pieces as she wished. Some had already melted when she held the sample holder to the light -- the liquid appeared to be slightly turbid water. She took a cautious sniff. "Is that safe?" Rodrigo called down with a trace of anxiety. "Believe me, Boris," she answered, "if there are any pathogens around here that have slipped through my detectors dur insurance policies lapsed a week ago." But Boris, she knew, had a point. Despite all the tests that had been carried out there was a risk that the substance might be poisonous or might carry some unknown disease. In normal circumstances Dr. Ernst would not have taken the chance. Now, however, time was short and the stakes were enormous. If it became necessary to quarantine Endeavor the price would be a small one to pay for her cargo of knowledge. "It's water, but I wouldn't care to drink it. It smells like an algae culture that's gone bad. I can hardly wait to get it to the lab." "Is the ice safe to walk on?" "Yes, solid as a rock." "Then we can get to New York." "Can we? Have you ever tried to walk across four kilometers of ice?" "I see what you mean. And there's another problem -- the temperature is already above freezing. Before long that ice is going to melt. How many spacemen can swim four kilometers?" Dr. Ernst held up her small sample bottle in triumph. "It's a long walk for a few cc's of dirty water, but this may teach us more about Rama than anything we've found so far. Let's head for home." They turned toward the distant lights of the Hub. Often they looked back, drawn by the hidden enigma of the island out there in the center of the frozen sea. Just once Dr. Ernst thought she felt the faintest suspicion of a breeze against her cheek. It did not come again and she quickly forgot all about it. X xwell. Dr. Perera," said Dr. Bose in tone of patient resignation, "few of us share your knowledge of mathematical meteorology. So please take pity on our ignorance." "With pleasure." Perera was unabashed. "I can explain it best by telling you what is going to happen inside Rama very soon. The solar heat pulse has reached the interior and the temperature is on the rise. According to my latest information it's already above freezing point. The Cylindrical Sea will soon start to thaw and, unlike bodies of water on Earth, it will melt from the bottom up. That may produce some odd effects, but I'm much more concerned with the atmosphere. "As it is heated the air inside Rama will expand -- and will attempt to rise toward the central axis. And this is the problem. At ground level, although it's apparently stationary, it's actually sharing the spin of Rama -- over eight hundred kilometers an hour. As it rises toward the axis it will try to retain that speed -- and it won't be able to do so, of course. The result will be violent winds and turbulence -- I estimate velocities of between two and three hundred kilometers an hour. "Incidentally, very much the same thing occurs on Earth. The heated air at the equator -- which shares the Earth's spin -- runs into the same problem when it rises and flows north and south." "Ah, the trade winds. I remember them from my geography lessons." "Exactly. Rama will have Trade Winds -- with a vengeance. I believe they'll last only a few hours and then some kind of equilibrium will be restored. Meanwhile, I should advise Commander Norton to evacuate as soon as possible. Here is the message I propose sending..." Commander Norton told himself, he could pretend that he was night-camping at the foot of some mountain in a remote region of Asia or America. The clutter of sleeping pads, collapsible chairs and tables, portable power plant, lighting equipment, electrosan toilets and miscellaneous scientific applaratus would not have looked out of place on an Earth expedition -- especially as the men and women around him were without life-support systems. Establishing Camp Alpha had been hard work. Everything had had to be manhandled through the chain of airlocks, sledded down the slope from the Hub and then retrieved and unpacked. Sometimes, when the braking parachutes had failed, a consignment had ended up a good kilometer away out on the plain. Almost all this equipment would stay here, for the labor of carrying it back was unthinkable -- in fact, impossible. Norton felt an irrational shame at leaving so much human litter in this strangely immaculate place -- but in the meantime he had a more immediate problem. During the last twenty-four hours he had received almost identical messages from both Mars and Earth. It seemed an odd coincidence -- had his two wives been commiserating with each other? Rather pointedly each had reminded him that even great heroes had family responsibilities. The commander picked up a collapsible chair and walked out of the pool of light into the darkness surrounding the camp. It was the only way he could get privacy. Deliberately turning his back on the organized confusion behind him, he began to speak into the recorder slung around his neck. "Original for personal file, dupes to Mars and Earth. Hello ddrlirig -- yes, I know I've been a lousy correspondent, but I haven't been aboard ship for a week. Apart from a skeleton crew, we're all camping inside Rama, at the foot of the stairway we've christened Alpha. "I have three parties scouting the plain, but we've made disappointingly slow progress. Everything has to be done on foot. I'd happily settle for a few electric bicycles. "You've met my medical officer, Dr. Ernst -- " He paused uncertainly. Laura had met one of his wives, but which one? Erasing the sentence, he began again. "My medical officer, Dr. Ernst, led the first group to reach the Cylindrical Sea, fifteen kilometers from here. She found frozen water as we had expected -- but you wouldn't want to drink it. Dr. Ernst says it's a dilute organic soup, containing traces of almost any carbon compound you might care to name, as well as phosphates and nitrates and dozens of metallic salts. There's not the slightest sign of life -- not even any dead micro-organisms. So we still know nothing about the biochemistry of the Ramans -- though it was probably not wildly different from ours." Something brushed lightly against his hair. He had been too busy to get it cut and would have to do something about that before he next put on a space helmet... "You've seen the viddies of Paris and the other towns we've explored on this side of the sea -- London, Rome, Moscow. It's impossible to believe that they were ever built for anything or anyone to live in. Paris looks like a giant storage depot. London is a collection of cylinders linked together by pipes connected to what are obviously pumping stations. Everything is sealed up and there's no way of finding what's inside without explosives or lasers. We won't try these until there are no alternatives. "As for Rome and Moscow -- " "Excuse me, skipper. Priority from Earth." What now? Norton asked himself. Cant a man get a few minutes to talk to his families? H e took the message from the sergeant and scanned it quickly to satisfy himself that it was not urgent. Then he read it again more slowly. What the devil was the Rama Committee? And why had he never heard of it? He knew that all sorts of associations, societies and professional groups -- some serious, some completely crackpot -- had been trying to get in touch with him. Two-hundred-kilometer winds -- probably sudden onset -- well they were something to think about. But it was hard to take them too seriously on this utterly calm night and it would be ridiculous for his people to run away like frightened mice when they were just starting effective exploration. Commander Norton lifted a hand to brush aside his hair, which had somehow fallen into his eyes again. Then he froze, the gesture uncompleted. He had felt a trace of wind several times in the last hour. It was so slight that he had completely ignored it -- after all, he was the commander of a spaceship, not a sailing vessel. Until now the movement of air had not been of any conceivable professional concern. What would the longdead captain of that earlier Endeavor have done in a situation such as this? Norton had often asked himself that question at moments of crisis. Endeavor had been named after one of the most famous ships in history. During the last four hundred years there had been a dozen Endeavors of sea and two of space, but the ancestor of them all was the #-ton Whitby collier that Captain James Cook, R.N. had sailed around the world between # and #. With an absorbing curiosity -- almost an obsession -- Norton had read everything he could find about Cook. Cook had been not only a supreme navigator but a scientist and -- in an age of brutal discipline -- a humanitarian. At times like this Cook's reassuring presence seemed very close. The sergeant waited patiently while his commander stared silently out into the night of Rama. It was no longer unbroken, for at two spots about four kilometers away the faint patches of light of exploring parties could be clearly seen. In an emergency,  can recall them within the hour, Norton told himself. And that surely should be good enough... He turned to the sergeant. "Take this message. Rama Committee, care of Spacecom. Appreciate your advice and will take precautions. Please specify meaning of phrase 'sudden onset.' Respectfully, Norton, Commander, Endeavor." He waited until the sergeant had disappeared toward the blazing lights of the camp, then switched on his recorder again. But the train of thought was broken and he could not get back into the mood. The letter would have to wait for some other time. It was not often that Captain Cook came to his aid when Norton was neglecting his duty. But he suddenly remembered how rarely and briefly poor Elizabeth Cook had seen her husband in sixteen years of married life. Yet she had borne him six children -- and had outlived them all. Norton's wives, never more than . ten minutes away at the speed of light, had nothing to complain about. XI D uring the first "nights" on Rama it had not been easy to sleep. The darkness and the mysteries it concealed were oppressive, but even more unsettling was the silence. Absence of noise is not a natural condition -- all human senses require some input. If they are deprived of it the mind manufactures its own substitutes. Many in Endeavor's crew had complained of strange sounds -- even of voices -- which were obviously illusions, because instruments had recorded nothing. Dr. Ernst had finally prescribed a simple cure -- during sleeping periods the camp was now lulled by gentle, unobtrusive background music. Tonight Commander Norton found the cure inadequate. He kept straining his ears into the darkness and he knew what he was listening for. But though a very faint breeze did caress his face from time to time, there was no sound that could possibly be taken for that of a distant, rising wind. Nor did either of the exploring parties report anything unusual. At last, around ship's midnight, he fell asleep. There was always a man on watch at the communications console, in case of any urgent messages. No other precautions seemed necessary. Not even a hurricane could have created the sound that did wake him -- and the whole camp -- in a single instant. It seemed that the sky was falling -- or that Rama had split open and was tearing itself apart. First came a rending crack, then a long drawn-out series of glass houses being demolished. It lasted for minutes -- it was still continuing, apparently moving away into the distance, when Norton got to the message center. "Hub Control. What's happened?" "Just a moment, skipper. It's over by the .sea. We're getting the light on it." The searchlight began to swing its beam out across the plain. It reached the edge of the sea, then started to track along it, scanning around the interior of the world. It stopped a quarter of the way around the cylindrical surface. Up in the sky -- or what the mind still persisted in calling the sky -- something extraordinary was happening. At first it seemed to Norton that the sea was boiling. It was no longer static and frozen in the grip of an eternal winter. A huge area, kilometers across, was in turbulent movement. And it was changing color -- a broad band of white was marching across the ice. Suddenly a slab perhaps a quarter of a kilometer on a side began to tilt upward like an opening door. Slowly and majestically it reared into the sky, glittering and sparkling in the beam of the searchlight. Then it slid back and vanished beneath the surface, while a tidal wave of foaming water raced outward in all directions from its point of submergence. Not until then did Norton fully realize what was happening. The ice was breaking up. All these days and weeks the sea had been thawing far down in its depths. It was hard to concentrate because of the crashing roar that still filled the world and echoed around the sky, but he tried to think of a reason for so dramatic a convulsion. When a frozen lake or river thawed on Earth it was nothing like this. B ut the explanation became obvious enough after the fact. The sea was thawing from beneath as the solar heat seeped through the hull of Rama. When ice turns into water it occupies less volume, so the sea had been sinking below the upper layer of ice, leaving it unsupported. The strain had been building up day by day and now the band of ice that circled the equator of Rama was collapsing like a bridge that had lost its central supports. It was splintering into hundreds of floating islands that would crash and jostle into each other until they, too, melted. Norton's blood ran suddenly cold when he remembered the plans that were being made to reach New York by sledge. The tumult was subsiding. A temporary stalemate had been reached in the war between ice and water. In a few hours, as the temperature continued to rise, the water would win and the last vestiges of ice would disappear. But in the long run ice would be the victor as Rama rounded the sun and set forth once more into the interstellar night. Norton remembered to start breathing again. Then he called the party nearest the sea. To his relief. Lieutenant Rodrigo answered at once. No, the water hadn't reached them. No tidal wave had come sloshing over the edge of the cliff. "So now we know," he added calmly, "why there is a cliff." Norton agreed silently, his mind briefly groping for reasons why the cliff on the southern shore was ten times higher -- and unable to settle on one. The Hub searchlight continued to scan around the world. The awakened sea was steadily calming and the boiling white foam no longer raced outward from capsizing ice floes. In fifteen more minutes the main disturbance was over. But Rama was no longer silent. It had awakened from its sleep and over and again there came the sound of grinding ice as one berg collided with another. Spring had been a little late, Norton told himself, but winter had ended. And there was that breeze again, stronger than ever. Rama had given him enough warnings. It was time to go. A she neared the halfway mark Norton once again felt gratitude to the darkness that concealed the view above -- and below. Though he knew that more than ten thousand steps still lay ahead of him and could picture the steeply ascending curve in his mind's eye, the fact that he could see only a small portion of it made the prospect more bearable. This was his second ascent and he had learned from his mistakes on the first. The great temptation was to climb too quickly in this low gravity -- it was hard to adopt a slow, plodding rhythm. But unless one did this muscles that one never knew existed started to protest, and it was necessary to take longer and longer periods of rest for them to recover. This time he had started with almost painful slowness, moving like an old man. He had been the last to leave the plain and the others were strung out along the halfkilometer of stairway above him -- he could see their lights moving up the invisible slope ahead. He felt sick at heart at the failure of his mission and even now hoped that this retreat was only temporary. When they reached the Hub, they could wait until any atmospheric disturbances had ceased. Presumably a dead calm would reign there, as at the center of a cyclone, and they could wait out the expected storm in safety. He realized he was jumping to conclusions, drawing possibly dangerous analogies from Earth. The meteorology of a whole world, even under steady-state conditions, was a matter of enormous complexity. After several centuries of study, terrestrial weather forecasting was still not reliable. And Rama was not merely a completely novel system -- it was undergoing rapid changes. The temperature had risen several degrees in the last few hours. Still there was no sign of the promised hurricane, though a few feeble gusts had come from apparently random directions. They had climbed five kilometers when, at the third level, three kilometers from the axis, they paused to rest for an hour, taking light refreshments and massaging leg muscles. This was the last point at which they could breathe in comfort. They had left their oxygen supplies here and now put them on for the final ascent. An hour later they had reached the top of the stairway -- and the beginning of the ladder. Ahead lay the last vertical kilometer, fortunately in a gravity field only a few per cent of Earth's. Another thirty-minute rest, a careful check of oxygen and they were ready for the final lap. Once again Norton made sure that all his men were safely ahead of him, spaced out at twenty-meter intervals along the ladder. From now on it would be a slow, steady haul, extremely boring. The best technique was to empty the mind of all thoughts and to count the rungs as they drifted by -- one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred... He had reached twelve hundred and fifty when he suddenly realized that something was wrong. The light shining on the vertical surface immediately before his eyes was the wrong color -- and it was much too bright. Norton did not have time to check his ascent or to call a warning to his men. Everything hapoened in less than a second. In a soundless concussion of t dawn burst upon Rama. for a full minute Norton had to keep his eyes tightly shut. When he risked opening them he had to blink and wait for involuntary tears to drain away before he turned slowly to behold the dawn. He could endure the sight for only a few seconds before he was forced to close his eyes again. It was not the glare that was intolerable -- but the awesome spectacle of Rama, now viewable for the first time in its entirety. Norton had known exactly what to expect -- nevertheless the sight was at once stunning and disorienting. He was seized by a spasrn of uncontrollable trembling. His hands tightened around the rungs of the ladder. His legs felt ready to give. Except for the low gravity he might have fallen. Then his training took over and he began to apply the first remedy for panic. Keeping his eyes shut and trying to forget the monstrous spectacle around him, he started to take deep, long breaths. Presently he felt much better, but he did not open his eyes until he had performed one more action. It took a major effort of will to force his right hand to open -- he had to talk to it as to a disobedient child -- but presently he maneuvered it down to his waist, undipped the safety belt from his harness and hooked the buckle to the nearest rung. Now, whatever happened, he could not fall. Norton switched on his radio. He hoped his voice sounded calm and authoritative as he said, "The captain speaking. Is everyone okay?" As he called out and checked off the names one by one his confidence and control returned. "Keep your eyes shut until you're quite sure you can stand it -- the view is overwhelming. Anyone who finds it's too much -- continue climbing without looking back. Keep in mind that you'll soon be at zero gravity, where falling is impossible." The thought of zero gravity was a kind of talisman now. It became an urgent matter of pride and self-esteem for Norton to open his eyes once more and look at the world around him. He let go of the ladder with both hands and hooked his left arm under a rung. Clenching and unclenching his fists, he waited until the muscle cramps had vanished. When he felt quite comfortable he turned to face Rama. His first impression was one of blueness. The glare that filled the sky could not have been mistaken for sunlight -- it might have been that of an electric arc. He suddenly understood the purpose of those mysterious trenches -- Straight Valley and its companions were gigantic light strips. Rama had six linear suns, symmetrically arranged around its interior. A broad fan of light was aimed from each, across the central axis to shine on the far side of the world. Norton wondered if the lights could be switched alternately to produce a cycle of day and darkness -- or was Rama, awakened, a world of perpetual day ? T OO much staring at those blinding bars of light had made his eyes hurt again -- he was not sorry to have a good excuse to close them for a while. It was not until he had recovered from the initial visual shock that he was able to devote himself to a much more serious problem. Who -- or what -- had switched on the lights of Rama? This world was sterile by the most sensitive tests that man could apply to it. But now something was happening that could not be explained by the action of natural forces. There might not be life here, but there could be consciousness, awareness -- robots might be waking after a sleep of eons. Perhaps this outburst of light was an unprogramed, random spasm -- a last dying gasp of machines that, were responding wildly to the warmth of a new sun and would soon lapse again into quiescence, this time forever. Yet Norton could not believe such a simple explanation. Bits of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place, though many items were still missing. The absence of all signs of wear and the feeling of newness, the sense that Rama had just been created, remained unexplained. He began a careful inventory of everything he saw. First he had to establish some kind of reference system. He was looking at the largest enclosed space ever seen by man and needed a mental map to find his way around it. The feeble gravity was little help -- with an effort of will he could switch up and down in any direction he pleased. But some directions were psychologically dangerous. Whenever his mind skirted these he had to vector it away hastily. Safest of all was to imagine that he was at the bowl-shaped bottom of a gigantic well, sixteen kilometers wide and fifty deep. The advantage of this image was that there could be no danger of his falling farther. Nevertheless, it had some serious defects. He could pretend that the scattered towns and cities and the differently colored and textured areas were all securely fixed to the towering walls. The various complex structures that could be seen hanging from the dome overhead need be no more disconcerting than the pendent chandelier in some great concert hall on Earth. What was quite unacceptable was the Cylindrical Sea. There it was, halfway up the wellshaft -- a band of water wrapped completely around it and with no visible means of support. It was a vivid blue, flecked few remaining ice floes. But a vertical sea forming a complete circle twenty kilometers in the sky was such an unsettling phenomenon that after a while he began to seek an alternative. That was when his mind switched the scene through ninety degrees. Instantly the deep well became a long tunnel, capped at either end. "Down" was obviously in the direction of the ladder and stairway he had just ascended. And from this perspective Norton was at last able to appreciate the true vision of the architects who had built this place. H e was clinging to the face of a curving, high cliff, the upper half of which overhung completely until it merged into the arched roof of what was now the sky. Beneath him the ladder descended more than five hundred meters until it ended at the first ledge or terrace. From there the stairway continued almost vertically through its low-gravity regime, slowly becoming less and less steep until, after breaking at five more platforms, it reached the distant plain. For the first two or three kilometers the individual steps were visible. Thereafter they merged into a continuous band. The downward swoop of that immense stairway was so overwhelming that it was impossible to appreciate its true scale. Norton had once flown around Mount Everest. He reminded himself that this stairway was as high as the Himalayas, but found the comparison meaningless. And no comparison at all was possible with the other two stairways, Beta and Gamma, which slanted up into the sky and then curved far out over his head. Norton had now acquired enough confidence to lean back and glance up at them -- briefly. Then he tried to forget that they were there. Too much thinking along those lines evoked yet a third image of Rama, one he was anxious to avoid at all costs. It regarded Rama as a vertical cylinder, but now he was at the top, with a fifty-kilometer drop immediately below. Every time Norton found this image creeping up on him he needed all his willpower to keep from clinging to the ladder again in mindless panic. In time, he was sure, all these fears would ebb. The wonder and strangeness of Rama would banish its terrors for men trained to face the realities of space. He looked at his chronometer. His pause for orientation had lasted only minutes, but had seemed a lifetime. Exerting barely enough effort to overcome his inertia and the fading gravitational field, he started to pull himself slowly up the last hundred meters of the ladder. Just before he entered the airlock and turned his back upon Rama he decided to make one final swift survey of the interior. It had changed even in the last few minutes. A mist was rising from the sea. For the first few hundred meters the ghostly white columns were tilted sharply forward in the direction of Rama's spin. Then they started to dissolve in a swirl of turbulence as the uprushing air tried to jettison its excess velocity. The trade winds of this cylindrical world were beginning to etch their patterns in its sky -- the first tropical storm in unknown ages was about to break. F or the first time in weeks every member of the Rama Committee had made himself available. Professor Solomons had emerged from the depths of the Pacific, where he had been studying mining operations along midocean trenches. And, to nobody's surprise. Dr. Taylor had reappeared now that there was at least a possibility that Rama held something more newsworthy than lifeless artifacts. The chairman had fully expected Dr. Carlisle Perera to be even more dogmatically assertive than usual now that his prediction of a hurricane in Rama had been confirmed. To Dr. Bose's great surprise, Perera was remarkably subdued and accepted the congratulations of his colleagues in a manner as close to embarrassed modesty as he was ever likely to achieve. The exobiologist was, in fact, deeply mortified. The spectacular breakup of the Cylindrical Sea's ice was a much more obvious phenomenon than the hurricane winds -- yet he had completely overlooked it. To have remembered that hot air rises, but to have forgotten that hot ice contracts, was not an achievement of which he could be proud When the chairman offered him the floor and asked what further climatic changes he expected Perera was careful this time to hedge his bets. "You must realize," he explained, "that the meteorology of a world as strange as Rama may have many other surprises. But if my calculations are correct there will be no further storms and conditions will soon be stable. There will be a slow temperature rise until perihelion -- and beyond -- but that won't concern us. Endeavor will have had to leave long before then." "So it should soon be safe to go back inside?" "Probably. We should certainly know in forty-eight hours." "A return is imperative," said the member from Mercury. "We have to learn everything we possibly can about Rama. The situation has now changed completely" "I think we know what you mean, but would you care to elaborate?" "Of course. Until now we have assumed that Rama is lifeless, or at any rate uncontrolled. But we can no longer pretend that it is a derelict. It may be directed by robot mechanisms programed to carry out some mission -- perhaps one highly disadvantageous to us. Unpalatable though it may be, we must consider the question of self-defense." A babble of protesting voices rose and Dr. Bose had to hold up his hand to restore order. "Whether we like the idea or not, the suggestion should be considered seriously," he called out. "With all due respect," said Dr. Conrad Taylor in his most disrespectful voice, "I think we can rule out as naive the fear of malevolent intervention. Creatures as advanced as the Ramans must have correspondingly developed morals. Otherwise they would have destroyed themselves -- as we nearly did in the twentieth century. I've made that quite clear in my new book Ethos and Cosmos. I hope you received your copy." "Yes, thank you, though I'm afraid the pressure of other matters has not allowed me to read beyond the introduction. However, I'm familiar with the general thesis. We may have no malevolent intentions toward an ant colony. But if we want to build a house on the site occupied by one -- " "This is as bad as the Pandora Party! It's nothing less than interstellar xenophobia -- " "Please, gentlemen! This is getting us nowhere. Mr. Ambassador, you still have the floor." T he chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided. "Thank you," said the member from Mercury. "The danger may be unlikely, but where the future of the human race is involved we can take no chances. , And we Hermians are particularly concerned. We may have more cause for alarm than anyone else." "Why. Mercury, more than any other planet?" asked the chairman. "Look at the dynamics of the situation. Rama is already inside our orbit. It is only an assumption that it will go around the sun and head out again into space. Suppose it carries out a braking maneuver. If it does so, this will occur at perihelion, about thirty days from now. My scientists tell me that if the entire velocity change is carried out there Rama will end up in a circular orbit only from the sun. From there it could dominate the solar system." For a long time nobody -- not even Conrad Taylor -- spoke a word. All the members of the committee were marshaling their thoughts about those difficult people, the Hermians. To most people Mercury was a fairly good approximation of hell -- at least it would do until something worse came along. But the Hermians were proud of their bizarre planet, of its days longer than its years, its double sunrises and sunsets and its rivers of molten metal. By comparison the moon and Mars had been almost trivial challenges. Not until men landed on Venus (if they ever did) would they encounter an environment more hostile than that of Mercury. And yet this world had turned out to be in many ways the key to the solar system. The reasons for this seemed obvious in retrospect, but the space age had been almost a century old before the fact was realized. Now the Hermians never let anyone forget it. Long before men reached the planet. Mercury's abnormal density hinted at the heavy elements it contained -- even so, its wealth was still a source of astonishment and had postponed for a thousand years any fears that the key metals of human civilization would be exhausted. And these treasures were in the best possible place -- where the power of the sun was ten times greater than on frigid Earth. Unlimited energy and unlimited metal -- that was Mercury. Its great magnetic launchers could catapult manufactured products to any point in the solar system. It could also export energy in synthetic transuranium isotopes or pure radiation. It had even been proposed that Hermian lasers would one day thaw out gigantic Jupiter, but this idea had not been well received on the other worlds. A technology that could cook Jupiter had too many tempting possibilities for interplanetary blackmail. That such a concern had ever been expressed said a good deal about the general attitude toward the Hermians. They were respected for their toughness and engineering skills and admired for the way in which they had conquered so fearsome a world. But they were not liked -- and still less were they completely trusted. At the same time it was possible to appreciate their point of view. The Hermians, it was often joked, sometimes behaved as if the sun were their personal property. They were bound to it in an intimate love-hate relationship -- as the Vikings had once been linked to the sea, the Nepalese to the Himalayas, the Eskimos to the tundra. They would be most unhappy if something came between them and the natural force that dominated and controlled their lives. A t last the chairman broke the long silence. He took the Hermians very seriously indeed, even though he considered them uncouth technological barbarians. "I think there is some merit in your argument, Mr. Ambassador," he said slowly. "Have you any proposals?" "Yes, sir. Before we know what action to take we must have the facts. We know the geography of Rama -- if one can use that term -- but we have no idea of its capabilities. And the key to the whole problem is this; does Rama have a propulsion system? Can it change orbit? I'd be very interested in Dr. Perera's views." "I've given the subject a good deal of thought,"" answered the exobiologist. "'Rama must have been given its original impetus by some launching device, but that could have been an external booster. If it does have onboard propulsion we've found no trace of it. Certainly there are no rocket exhausts -- or anything similar -- anywhere on the outer shell." "They could be hidden." "True, but there would seem little point in anyone's having done so. And where are the propellant tanks, the energy sources? The main hull is solid -- we've checked that with seismic surveys. The cavities in the northern cap are all accounted for by airlock systems. "That leaves the southern end of Rama, which Commander Norton has been unable to reach owing to that wide band of water. There are all sorts of curious mechanisms and structures on the South Pole -- you've seen the photographs. What they are is anybody's guess. "But I'm reasonably sure of this. If Rama does have a propulsion system it's something completely outside our present knowledge. In fact, it would have to be the fabulous 'space drive' people have been talking about for two hundred years." "You wouldn't rule that out?" "Certainly not. If we can prove that Rama has a space drive -- even if we learn nothing about its mode of operation -- that would be a major discovery. At least we'd know that such a thing is possible." "What is a space drive?" asked Sir Robert. "Any kind of propulsion system, Sir Robert, that doesn't work on the rocket principle. Anti-gravity -- if it is possible -- would do very nicely. At present we don't know where to look for such a drive and most scientists doubt it exists." "It doesn't," Professor Davidson interjected. "Newton settled that. You can't have action without reaction. Space drives are nonsense. Take it from me." "You may be right," Perera replied with unusual blandness. "But if Rama doesn't have a space drive it has no drive at all. There's simply no room for a conventional propulsion system, with its enormous fuel tanks." "It's hard to imagine a whole world being pushed around," said Dennis Solomons. "What would happen to the objects inside it? Everything would have to be bolted down. Most inconvenient." "Well, the acceleration would probably be very low. The biggest problem would be the water in the Cylindrical Sea. How would you stop that from..." faded away and his eyes glazed over. He seemed to be in the throes of an incipient epileptic fit or even a heart attack. His colleagues looked at him in alarm. He made a sudden recovery, banged his fist on the table and shouted, "Of course! That explains everything. The southern cliff -- now it makes sense!" "Not to me," grumbled the Lunar representative. "Look at this longitudinal crosssection of Rama," Perera continued excitedly, unfolding his map. "Have you got your copies? The Cylindrical Sea is enclosed between two cliffs, which completely circle the interior of Rama. The one on the north is only fifty meters high. The southern one, on the other hand, is almost half a kilometer high. Why the big difference? No one's been able to think of a sensible reason. "But suppose Rama is able to propel itself -- accelerate so that the northern end is forward. The water in the sea would tend to move back -- the level at the south would rise perhaps hundreds of meters. Hence the cliff. Let's see -- " Perera started scribbling furiously. After an astonishingly short time he looked up in triumph. "Knowing the height of those cliffs we can calculate the maximum acceleration Rama can take. If it were more than two per cent of a gravity the sea would slosh over into the southern continent." "A fiftieth of a gee? That's not very much." megatons. And it's all you need for astronomical maneuvering." "Thank you very much, Dr. Perera," the Hermian said. "You've given us a lot to think about. Mr. Chairman -- can we impress on Commander Norton the importance of looking at the South Polar region?" "He's doing his best. The sea is the obstacle, of course. They're trying to build some kind of raft so that they can at least reach New York." "The South Pole may be even more important. Meanwhile, I am going to bring these matters to the attention of the general assembly. Do I have your approval?" There were no objections, not even from Dr. Taylor. But just as the committee members were about to switch out of circuit. Sir Lewis raised his hand. The old historian seldom spoke. When he did, everyone listened. "Suppose we do find that Rama is active and has these capabilities. There is an old saying in the military that capability does not imply intention." "How long should we wait to find what Rama's intentions are?" asked the Hermian. "When we discover them it may be too late." "It is already too late. There is nothing we can do to affect Rama. I ndeed, I doubt if there ever was." "I do not admit that. Sir Lewis. There are many things we can do -- if it proves necessary. But the lime is desperately short. Rama is a cosmic egg being warmed by the fires of the sun. It may hatch at any moment." The chairman of the committee looked at the ambassador for Mercury in frank astonishment. He had seldom been so surprised in his diplomatic career. He would never have dreamed a Hermian capable of such a poetic night of imagination. XHl him "Commander" or, worse still, "Mr. Norton" something serious was afoot. Norton could not recall that Boris Rodrigo had ever before addressed him in such a fashion. So whatever was on Rodrigo's mind, obviously the man considered it to be of the gravest importance. "What's the problem, Boris?" "I'd like permission. Commander, to use ship priority for a direct message to Earth." The request was unusual, though not unprecedented. Routine signals went to the nearest planetary relay -- at the moment they were working through Mercury -- and even though the transit time was only a matter of minutes, it was often five or six hours before a message arrived at the desk of the person for whom it was intended. Ninetynine per cent of the time that was quite good enough. In an emergency more direct -- and much more expensive -- channels could be employed at the captain's discretion. "You know, of course,' that you have to give me a good reason. All our available bandwidth is already clogged with data transmissions. Is this a personal emergency?" "No, Commander. It's much more important. I want to send a message to the Mother Church." "I'd be glad if you'll explain." It was not mere curiosity that prompted Norton's request. If he acceeded to Boris' request he would have to justify his action. The calm blue eyes stared into his. He had never known Boris to lose control, to be other than completely self-assured. All the Cosmo-Christers were like this -- it was one of the qualities that made them good spacemen. Sometimes, however, their unquestioning certainty was just a little annoying to those who had not been vouchsafed the Revelation. "It concerns the purpose of Rama, Commander. I believe I have discovered it." "Goon." "Look at the situation. Here is a completely empty, lifeless world -- yet it is suitable for human beings. It has water and an atmosphere we can breathe. It comes from the remote depths of space, is aimed precisely at the solar system -- something quite incredible if we attribute it to pure chance. And it appears not only new -- it looks as if it has never been used." "We've all been through this dozens of times," Norton said. "What can you add to it?" "Our faith has told us to expect such a visitation, though we do not know exactly what form it will take. The Bible gives hints. If this is not the Second Coming it may be the Second Judgment -- the story of Noah repeated. I believe that Rama is a cosmic Ark, sent here to save those who are worthy of salvation." T he silence in the captain's cabin lasted for quite a while. Not that Norton was at a loss for words -- rather, he could think of too many questions. But he was not sure which would be tactful to ask. Stripped of its religious overtones, Rodrigo's theory was at least as convincing as a halfdozen others he had heard. "A couple of questions, Boris. Rama will be at perihelion in three weeks -- then it will round the sun and leave the solar system just as fast as it came in. There's not much time for a Day of Judgment, or for shipping across those who have been -- ah -- selected -- however that's going to be done." "Very true. So when it reaches perihelion, Rama will have to decelerate and go into a parking orbit -- probably one with aphelion at Earth's orbit. There it might make another velocity change and rendezvous with Earth." The possibility was disturbingly persuasive. Others had mentioned it. if Rama wished to remain in the solar system it was going the right way about it. The most efficient way for it to slow down was to get as close to the sun as possible and carry out the braking maneuver there. If there were any truth in Rodrigo's theory -- or some variant of it -- it would soon be put to the test. "One other point, Boris. What's controlling Rama now?" "There is no doctrine to advise on that. It could be a pure robot. Or it could be -- a spirit. That would explain why there are no signs of biological life." The Haunted Asteroid... Why had that phrase popped up from the depths of memory? Norton recalled a silly story he had read years ago -- he thought it best not to ask Boris if he had ever run into it. "I'll tell you what we'll do, Boris." Norton abruptly made up his mind. He wanted to terminate this interview before it became too difficult. "Can you sum up your ideas in less than -- oh, a thousand bits?" "Yes, I think so." "Well, if you can make it sound like a straightforward scientific theory I'll send it, top priority, to the Rama Committee. A copy can go to your Church at the same time and everyone will be happy." "Thank you. Commander, I really appreciate it." "Oh, I'm not doing this to save my conscience. I'd just like to see what the committee makes of it. Even if I don't agree with you all along the line you may have hit on something important." "Well, we'll know at perihelion, won't we?" "Yes. We'll know at perihelion." When Boris Rodrigo had left, Norton called the bridge and gave the necessary authorization. He thought he had solved the problem rather neatly. Besides, Just suppose that Boris were right. He might have increased his chances of being among the saved. A S HE drifted along the now familiar corridor of the Alpha airlock complex Norton wondered if he had let impatience overcome caution. He had waited aboard Endeavor for forty-eight hours -- two precious days -- ready for instant departure if events should Justify it. But nothing had happened. The instruments left in Rama had detected no unusual activity. Frustratingly, the television camera on the Hub had been blinded by a fog which had reduced visibility to a few meters and had only now started to retreat. When he had passed the final airlock and floated out into the cat's-cradle of guide ropes around the Hub, Norton was struck first by the change in the light. It was no longer harshly blue, but was much more mellow and gentle, reminding him of a bright, hazy day on Earth. He looked out along the axis of this world and could see nothing except a glowing, featureless tunnel of white, reaching all the way to those strange mountains at the South Pole. The interior of Rama was completely blanketed with clouds and nowhere was a break visible in the overcast. The top of the layer was quite sharply defined -- it formed a smaller cylinder inside the larger one of this spinning world, leaving a central core five or six kilometers wide quite clear, except for a few stray wisps of cirrus. The immense tube of cloud was lit from within by the six artificial suns of Rama. The locations of the three on this northern continent were clearly defined by diffuse strips of light, but those on the far side of the Cylindrical Sea merged together into a continuous, glowing band. What was happening down beneath those clouds? The storm had now died away. Unless there were some other surprises it would be safe to descend. It had seemed appropriate to Norton, on this return visit, to use the team that had made the first deep penetration into Rama. As he watched Mercer, Calvert and Myron "swimming" quickly and confidently down the ladder he reminded himself of how much had changed. The first time they had descended in cold and darkness -- now they were going toward light and warmth. And on all earlier visits they had been confident that Rama was dead. That might yet be true in a biological sense. But something was stirring -- and Boris Rodrigo's concept would do as well as any other. The spirit of Rama was awake. the platform at the foot of the ladder and was preparing to start down the stairway Mercer carried out his usual routine test of the atmosphere. There were some things he never took for granted -- even when the people around him were breathing perfectly comfortably and without aids he had been known to stop for an air check before opening his helmet. When asked to justify such excessive caution, he had answered: "Because human senses aren't good enough. You may think you're fine and you could fall flat on your face with the next deep breath." He looked at his meter and said, "Damn!" "What's the trouble?" asked Calvert. "It's broken -- reading too high. Odd, I've never known that to happen before. I'll check it on my breathing circuit." He plugged the compact little analyzer into the test point on his oxygen supply, then stood in thoughtful silence. He unplugged the meter, used it to sample the Rama atmosphere again, then called Hub Control. "Skipper -- will you take an ohtwo reading?" A much longer pause ensued than the request justified. Finally Norton radioed back: "I think there's something wrong with my meter." A slow smile spread across Mercer's face. "It's up fifty per cent, isn't it?" "Yes. What does that mean?" "It means that we can all take off our masks. Isn't that convenient?" I'm not sure," replied Norton, echoing the sarcasm in Mercer's voice. "It seems too good to be true." He had no need to say more. Mercer cracked his mask open a trifle and took a cautious sniff. For the first time at this altitude the air was perfectly breathable. The musty, dead smell had gone -- so had the excessive dryness, which in the past had caused several respiratory complaints. Humidity was now an astonishing #  -- doubtless the thawing of the sea was responsible for this. There was a muggy feeling in the air, though not an unpleasant one. It was like a summer evening, Mercer told himself, on some tropical coast. The climate inside Rama had improved dramatically during the last few days. But why? The increased humidity presented no mystery -- the startling rise in oxygen was much more difficult to explain. As he recommenced the descent, Mercer began a series of mental calculations. He had not arrived at any satisfactory result by the time his team entered the cloud layer. It was a dramatic experience. The transition was abrupt. One moment they were gliding downward in clear air -- then they shot suddenly into blinding white fog. Visibility dropped to a few meters. Mercer put on the brakes so quickly that Calvert almost bumped into him -- and Myron did bump into Calvert, nearly knocking him off the rail. "Take it easy," said Mercer. "Spread out so we can just see each other. And don't let yourself build up speed." tinued to glide down through the fog. In some ways, this was even spookier than descending in the complete darkness of the Raman night -- then, at least, the searchlight beams had shown them what lay ahead. Mercer suddenly braked again. When they had bunched together he whispered, "Listen. Don't you hear something?" "Yes," Myron said after a minute. "It sounds like wind." Calvert was not sure. He turned his head, trying to locate the direction of the very faint murmur that had come to them through the fog, then abandoned the attempt as hopeless. They continued the slide, reached the fourth level and started on toward the fifth. All the while the sound grew louder -- and more hauntingly familiar. They were halfway down the fourth stairway before Myron called out, "Now do you recognize it?" They would have identified it long ago, but it was not a sound they would ever have associated with any, world except Earth. Coming out of the fog, from a source whose distance could not be guessed, was the steady thunder of falling water. The party glided on. A few minutes later the cloud ceiling ended as abruptly as it had begun. They broke into the blinding glare of the Raman day, made from the low-hanging clouds. There was the familiar curving plain -- now made more acceptable to mind and senses by the fact that its full circle could not be seen. It was not too difficult to pretend that they were looking along a broad valley and that the upward sweep of the sea was really an outward one. They halted at the fifth and penultimate platform to report that they were through the cloud cover and to make a careful survey. As far as they could tell nothing had changed down there on the plain -- but up here on the northern dome Rama had brought forth another wonder. There was the origin of the sound they had heard. Descending from some hidden source in the clouds three or four kilometers away was a waterfall. For long minutes the men stared at it silently, almost unable to believe their eyes. Logic told them that on this spinning world no falling object could move in a straight line, but there was something horribly unnatural about a waterfall that curved sideways, to end many kilometers away from the point directly below its source. "If Galileo had been born in this world," said Mercer at length, "he would have gone crazy working out his laws of dynamics." "I thought I knew them," Calvert replied, "and I'm going crazy anyway. Doesn't it upset you. Professor?" "Why should it?" said Sergeant Myron. "It's a perfectly straightforward demonstration of the Coriolis effect. I wish I could show it to some of my students." Mercer was staring thoughtfully at the globe-circling band of the Cylindrical Sea. "Have you noticed what's happened to the water?" he asked at last. "Why -- it's no longer so blue. I'd call it pea-green. What does that signify?" "Perhaps the same thing that it does on Earth. Laura called the sea an organic soup, waiting to be shaken into life. Maybe that's exactly what's happened." "In a couple of days? The Earth." "Three hundred and seventybest estimate. So that's where the oxygen's come from. Rama's shot through the anerobic stage and has gotten to photosynthetic plants in about forty-eight hours. I wonder what it will produce tomorrow?" When they arrived at the foot of the stairway they had another shock. At first it appeared that something had gone through the camp, overturning equipment, even collecting smaller objects and carrying them away. But after a brief examination of the scene their alarm was replaced by shamefaced annoyance. The culprit was only the wind. Some ropes must have parted during exceptionally strong gusts. It was several days before they were able to retrieve all their scattered property. Otherwise there seemed no major changes. Even the silence of Rama had returned now that the ephemeral storms of spring were over. And out there at the edge of the plain was a calm sea -- waiting a new boat with a bottle of champagne?" "Even if we had any on board I wouldn't allow such a criminal waste. Anyway, it's too late. We've already launched the thing." "At least it does float. You've won your bet, Jimmy. I'll settle when we get back to Earth." A pause while everyone gloated. "It's got to have a name. Anyideas?" The subject of these unflattering comments was bobbing at the foot of the steps leading down into the Cylindrical Sea. It was a small raft, constructed from six empty storage drums held together by a light metal framework. Building it, assembling it at Camp Alpha and hauling it on demountable wheels across more than ten kilometers of plain had absorbed the crew's entire energies for several days. It was a gamble that had better pay off. The prize was worth the risk. The enigmatic towers of New York, gleaming in the shadowless light five kilometers away, had taunted the explorers ever since they had entered Rama. No one doubted that the city -- or whatever it might be -- was the real heart of this world. "We still don't have a name. Skipper -- what about it?" Norton laughed, then became suddenly serious. "I've got one for you. Call it Resolution." "Why?" "That was one of Cook's ships. It's a good name -- maybe she'll live up to it." There was a thoughtful .silence. Then Sergeant Barnes, who had been principally responsible for the design -- and who had the only master's certificate among Endeavor's crew -- asked for three volunteers. Everyone present held up a hand. "Sorry -- we have only four lifejackets. Boris, Jimmy, Pieter -- you've all done some sailing. Let's try her out." Ever since she had set eyes upon the Cylindrical Sea, Ruby Barnes had been determined to make this voyage. In all the thousands of years during which man had had dealings with the waters of his own world, no sailor had ever faced anything remotely like this. Her passengers took their places on the improvised bucket seats and Ruby opened the throttle. The twenty-kilowatt motor started to whirr -- the chain drives of the reduction gear blurred and Resolution surged away to the cheers of the spectators. Ruby had hoped to get fifteen kph with this load, but would settle for anything over ten. A halfkilometer course had been measured along the cliff and she made the round trip in five-and-a-half minutes. Allowing for turning time, this worked out at twelve kph and she was quite happy with that. With no power, but with three energetic paddlers helping her. Ruby was able to get a quarter of this speed. Even if the motor broke down they could get back to shore in a couple of hours. The heavy-duty power cells could provide enough energy to circumnavigate this world and she was carrying two spares to be on the safe side. And now that the fog had completely burned away she was prepared to put to sea without a compass. She saluted smartly as she stepped ashore. "Maiden voyage of Resolution successfully completed, sir. Awaiting your instructions." "Very good. Admiral. When will you be ready to sail?" "As soon as stores can be loaded aboard and the harbor master gives us clearance." "Then we leave at dawn." "Aye, aye, sir." F ive kilometers of water does not seem very much on a map -- it looks entirely different when one is in the middle of it. The team had been cruising for only ten minutes and the fiftymeter cliff facing the northern continent already seemed a surprising distance away. Yet, mysteriously. New York hardly appeared much closer than before. But most of the time Norton paid little attention to the land -- he was too engrossed in the wonder of the sea. Whenever, he told himself, he felt that he had grown inured to Rama it produced some new wonder. As Resolution hummed steadily forward it seemed to him that she was caught in the trough of a gigantic wave that curved up on either side until it became vertical -- then overhung until the two flanks met in a liquid arch sixteen kilometers overhead. Despite everything that reason and logic told him he could not entirely throw off the impression that at any minute would come crashing down from the sky. Too, the water was now alive. Every spoonful contained thousands of spherical, single-celled micro-organisms, similar to the earliest forms of plankton that had existed in the oceans of Earth. Yet they showed puzzling differences. They lacked a nucleus, as well as many of the other minimum requirements of even the most primitive terrestrial life forms. And although Laura Ernst -- now doubling as research scientist as well as ship's doctor -- had proved that they definitely generated oxygen, there were far too few of them to account for the augmentation of Rama's atmosphere. She had also discovered that their numbers were dwindling rapidly and must have been far higher during the first hours of the Raman dawn. It was as if there had been a brief explosion of life, reswifter time-scale the early history of Earth. Now, perhaps, it had exhausted itself -- the drifting micro-organisms were disintegrating, returning their stores of chemicals to the sea. "If you have to swim for it," Dr. Ernst had warned the mariners, "keep your mouths closed. A few drops won't matter if you spit them out right away. But all those weird organo-metallic salts add up to a fairly poisonous package -- and I'd hate to have to work out an antidote." This danger, fortunately, seemed very unlikely. Resolution could stay afloat if any two of her buoyancy tanks were punctured. And even if she sank the crude but efficient lifejackets would keep the crew's heads above water. Although Laura had been reluctant to give a firm ruling, she did not think that a few hours immersion in the sea would be fatal -- but she did not recommend it. Presently New York ceased to be merely a distant island. It was becoming a real place. Details that until now had existed only as photo enlargements were now revealing themselves as massive, solid structures. It was now strikingly apparent that the "city," like so much of Rama, was triplicated -- it consisted of three identical, circular complexes or superstructures rising from a long, oval foundation. Photographs taken from the Hub also indicated that each complex was itself divided into three equal components, like a trisected pie. This would greatly simplify the task of exploration -- presumably one had to examine only one ninth of New York to have seen the whole of it. Even this would be a formidable undertaking -- it would mean investigating at least a square kilometer of buildings and machinery, some of which towered hundreds of meters into the air. T he Ramans, it seemed, had brought the art of triple-redundancy to a high degree of perfection. This was demonstrated in the airlock system, the. stairways at the Hub, the artificial suns. And where it really mattered, they had even taken the next step. New York appeared to be an example of triple-triple redundancy. Ruby was steering Resolution toward the central complex, where a flight of steps led up from the water to the very top of the wall or levee that surrounded the island. There was even a conveniently placed mooring post to which boats could be tied -- when she saw this. Ruby became quite excited. Now she would never be content until she found one of the craft in which the Ramans sailed. Norton was the first to step ashore. He looked back at his three companions and said, "Wait here until I get to the top of the wall. Pieter and Boris will join me when I signal. Sergeant Barnes will stay at the helm so that we can cast off at a moment's notice. If anything happens to me, report to Karl and follow his instructions. Use your best Judgment -- but no heroics. Understood?" "Yes, skipper. Good luck." Norton did not really believe in luck, but once again Rama was forcing him to break some of his cherished rules. Almost every factor here was unknown -- and he could do with all the good wishes that happened to be lying around. The stairway was a virtual duplicate of the one they had descended on their shore of the sea -- doubtless his observers there were looking straight across at him through their telescopes. And "straight" was now the correct word -- in this one direction, parallel to the axis of Rama, the sea was indeed completely flat. It might well be the only body of water in the universe of which this was true, for on all other worlds every sea or lake must follow the surface of a sphere, with equal curvature in all directions. "Nearly at the top," he reported, speaking for the record being made five kilometers away. "Still completely quiet -- radiation normal. I'm holding the meter above my head. Just in case this wall is acting as a shield. And if there are any hostiles on the other side, they'll shoot that first." He was Joking, of course. But only for the record. Rama might still have the final laugh. When he took the last step he found that the flat-topped embankment was about ten meters thick. An alternating series of ramps and stairways led down to the main level of the city twenty meters below. In effect, he was standing on a high wall that completely surrounded New York and so was able to get a grandstand view. It was a view almost stunning in its complexity and his first act was to make a slow panoramic scan with his camera. Then he waved to his companions and radioed back across the sea: "No sign of any activity -- everything seems quiet. We are now about to enter the city." Two men, each programed to bring Earth final peace -- with honor! T he gate in Real's mind swung open, swung closed. The bombs were gone. He was back again on the silent planet (orange night, orange light?) at the chess table in the middle .of an endless desert. Across from him the naked creature sat quite still, its pointed chin resting easily on a twofingered hand. "Your move. Real," it said, the yellow mouth barely vibrating in a low monotonous whisper. "No, I won't move," Real replied. "We must have played a hundred games already. Maybe more. I am tired of playing chess and tired of losing." He pressed his knuckles into the sandy texture of the chessboard. "I don't even know what I'm doing here." The creature stared back. "We are in the middle of a game. Real." "I remember." "It is your move." "I remember that, too." "Real-" "No!" He straightened in the chair, his arms folded defiantly. He knew what would happen. Still, once again he would be firm and stand his ground -- but this time he wouldn't give in. "You must move," it said again. And then it waited. In the middle of the open land of a desert planet, it waited. Under the unfamiliar moon and the starless sky, where one small table and two chairs and two beings sat in a vast emptiness, it waited patiently, while the orange rays from no place spotlighted the black and white blocks of the chessboard, upon which intricate glass figures formed the pattern of contest. And Real shook his head. "I don't do what I don't want to do." "You must play until you win." "I'll never win. I haven't won in a hundred games and I won't win if we play a hundred more. You know yourself that even if we play forever -- " "Your move, please," the creature insisted. "No. No way. I won't touch those damn things." "Too bad. Real." The words were the warning. But Real told himself that this time he would withstand the fire. He felt strong. He would ignore the pain. Pain was only a feeling like coldness or softness, only a sense like hearing or seeing, only an emotion like terror or anger. It was a matter of conditioning yourself to absorb it. He was ready and now he would show them. Show whom? "Well, what are you waiting for?" The creature beckoned. The ball of fire appeared on the horizon, jumping and rolling in the sand. From it came a sobbing, wailing siren sound. Strangely enough, it did not appear to get bigger as it approached, as it crossed the entire desert in a moment or two, leaping and whirling and crying as it came. Not bigger but louder. Faster, nearer, louder and louder. Keal waited and sweated. He stiffened. The weeping fire moved in. And then it was upon him, encircling and wrapping him. His skin burned. Hot blasts seared his eyes. Torture flooded his brain, pounding there, finally starting him screaming, struggling, kicking. The fire screamed more loudly. No more, he thought. Please take it away. He'd do anything. He'd move. He'd finish the game. Suddenly the air was clear and the pain was gone. Keal saw that his skin was unmarked. The fire had felt like napalm, but the only after-effects were the imprints scorched into his memory. That was bad enough. Keal turned slightly in his chair, picked up the white king's knight, hooked it left and forward. "Thank you, Keal," the other said, its two fingers reaching for the chessboard. It was very clear now that Keal had moved badly. He watched as the black crystal queen stormed the center of strength and turned the remnants of the white army into helpless bystanders. Keal was not surprised. He had seen it all before. His good move was, in retrospect, an amateurish play based on the obvious, overlooking the integral strategy of the battle. Why had he made it? The creature leaned forward. "Checkmate." "I don't care," Keal answered. "What difference does it make?" "You lose again." "I don't care." "You lose again and again and again..." T he red-haired man walked out of the house and toward the car. He was dressed much as Keal was, in chino pants and a dark leather jacket. A canteen was slung over his left shoulder. His right hand held a rifle. The muzzle thrust through the open window and stopped six inches from Keal's face. "Speak up, buddy," the man said. "It's me-Keal." The rifle pulled back. The man leaned in. "Glad you made it. We'd better get going right away. Your car or mine?" Keal gave it some thought. "Well, I've been driving from Estes Park. If we take your car we can go with a full tank of gas." "Hang on then. I'll bring it around." "You're Anderson?" The man was already moving toward the garage. He glanced back, laughed and said, "Yeah, I'm Anderson -- or the last Anderson." Keal knew what he meant. He rubbed his hands and waited in his own car, his gray eyes staring passively at the glow of death on the Colorado horizon. Far off. But not far enough. Billows of great mushrooms, blasting and echoing, licked by shooting towers of flame, rising in an awesome mass to cover the stars and to camouflage the destruction from the eyes of God. There and there and there -- hell and atoms breaking loose. There and there -- all the distance burning brightly. There again -- the hydrogen flash that was sudden death. Chaos, heat and bitter poison. Something in Keal's mind refused to let him panic. The post-hypnotic cloud that rendered him almost incapable of fear, that had led him step by step to Anderson's house, would continue to lead him the rest of the way. "Hey, let's go," Anderson was shouting. Keal turned. A car identical to his stood alongside, purring. Sleek and black and powerful and lead-lined, with cartons of canned goods stacked in the rear and an extra gas tank welded to the side. Matched cars. Matched men. A job to do. And nothing can stop us... Keal picked up his rifle and canteen and switched to the other car. He leaned back in the passenger seat. "Do you know the way?" he asked. "Sure," said Anderson. "Don't you?" "I suppose so." "Well, don't you?" "It depends on how you figure it," Keal said. He braced himself as the car swung onto the highway and picked up speed. "I never heard of you, Anderson. But when this all started I packed up my gear and drove straight to your house. That's the way it's been. I don't really know where I'm going, but I know why I'm going and I know how to get there." "Post-hypnosis," Anderson explained. "Sure, now I know," Keal said quietly. "And I'm just as glad they didn't tell us before. So we wondered a little -- it's been a helluva good life. Subsidized playboys. All we had to do for our money was report to the Pentagon Medical Center once a month for treatment." Anderson struggled with the wheel, roaring around a sharp curve in the road. "They went to a lot of trouble to get us ready," he said when the car settled back to ninety. "It could have been a waste, but it turned out not to be. I'm glad it's us, Keal. Look out there at that blazing hell." He paused piously. "I want this job." "It's all right if you like temporary work," Keal said with a cheerless smile. "How old are you?" "Thirty-two." "I'm two years older," Keal said. In the distance he saw another flash on the skyline, then the soaring bubble of smoke that marked the spot. Denver, maybe, full of agony. The screaming and the dying and the dead -- and the dying and the dead and the dead. He turned on the radio, twisting the pointer from end to end. No response. He checked his watch. It was about three hours since the announcement of the surprise attack, the coming of war. Now even the emergency network was silent. "Just us," he mused aloud. "H'mm?" said Anderson. "We're pretty much alone. Cut off from the rest of the world." Anderson shook his head. "No, they're cut off from us. We're the important ones." "Suppose we don't make it." "Nothing ca stop us." "That's what somebody keeps telling me," Keal said. "But a bomb -- " "Bombs are for cities." "They're not always on target. And the radiation keeps spreading." "Quit it," Anderson said. "Nothing can stop us. So it... Well, remember, there are four others heading the same way. Someone will get through." He half-smUed. "We're the closest, you and me, and we'll be there first. By the time the others come it'll be all over. We can sit back and tell them how we killed every Commie in the world." "And nothing can stop us," Keal found himself saying. The words were not his own. Neither was the thought. Yet it was his brain that had shaped them and his tongue that had uttered them and it would be his hand that... He wiped the sweat off the back of his neck. T he creature was carefully placing the chessmen on their proper squares. One by one, fitted neatly into their defensive positions. "You have the white and move first," it said, as if it had noticed no intermption. Keal's face darkened. "Okay, I'll show you how to play this game. This time I'm going to win." The creature shrugged and waited. Keal concentrated on the board, determined that every move be perfect. Finally he selected the king's pawn and moved it two squares forward. The creature countered without hesitation. The battle was on. Nothing else stirred in the great desert but the little glass things hopping backward and forward, diagonally and across, slowly and within limits, like grasshoppers in chains. A pawn was lost and then a knight. A bishop. Another pawn. The pieces toppled one by one. Keal took a deep breath. He had led the creature into a trap. With the right move the game was his. He re-thought it to make sure -- and when he was positive he took his white queen into enemy territory. Then he watched in complete disbelief as the two fingers reached out and moved a black bishop into the vacated spot. "Checkmate," said the creature. It was incredible, Keal told himself. Why hadn't he seen ahead? He should have won. Anyone in his right mind could have won that game. He laughed. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe no one here was in his right mind. "You lost again," the creature was saying. "I don't care," Keal lied. "I just don't care." "You lost again and again and again..." T he high beams of the headlights bounced off scores of glossy road signs, zigged and zagged among trees and poles and concentrated on (he white center line that rolled on endlessly. Ninety miles of it each hour, on and on and on. Then suddenly the pattern was broken. Keal straightened, leaning forward to squint through the windshield. Some sort of obstmetion loomed iihead. Slowly it came into focus. Giant criss-crosses of thick lumber. Red, blinking lanterns. White helmets and white armbands on three men who were standing in front of the barricade, waving. Anderson saw it, too. He said, "A roadblock. Looks like civil defense." "What do they want?" Keal wondered. "Who the hell knows? We're not waiting to find out." Anderson twisted the big car to the middle of the road and kept the speed high and constant. Keal stared at him. "You're not -- " "H'mm?" Anderson's lips were a thin, straight line. "You can't just rip through them!" "Don't bet on it, pal." "For Chrissake -- " Keal reached quickly for the ignition key, but stopped when a glance showed him that he was much too late. The maze of red and white and sticks and limbs was directly in front of him, racing at him, arriving and expanding in dimly lighted cinemascope. He covered his eyes just before the impact. He heard the sounds of all against all. Thud of steel against wood. Clamor of shouts and broken glass. Hot spinning of tires. The heavy car shook, tore free and roared on. Through the rear window Keal looked at what was left behind. A man was draped across a snapped timber, his bloody face grotesque in the light of a swinging lantern. Another man was on his knees, shaking a fist. The third man was flat on the ground. Keal turned to the front and sat quietly for a moment, hoping that the scene would fade. His hands were cold. "That was a lousy thing to do, no matter what," he said finally. The reply came with a shrug. "We're too important to be stopped by them." Keal knew it was true. He settled back and studied his partner. Sure we're important. We're the secret weapon. One touch of our fingers and there'll be no conquerors. No one can bomb us and get away with it. And why? Because Keal and Anderson, hypnotized human robots, were on their way to a certain cave in a certain mountain to a certain trigger that would fill the sky with fiery rockets of retaliation. Button, button, who's got the button? His head was full of firm instructions -- pushing him, yelling at him, pleading with him. There was no rest from it. Post-hypnosis, the seed that bloomed when the bombs snapped their fingers and sent the tiniest army of all time marching to complete the last war. "So we killed a couple of guys on our side," Anderson was explaining. "They'd be dead in a few days anyway. We'll all be dead -- you and me and everybody." He stretched his arms on the steering wheel. "Want to drive for a while? I could use a break." "Sure," Keal said. When the car stopped he got out and walked around it. Anderson was already relaxed in the passenger seat with a can of cold beans and an opener. "Funny," he said. "We're ready to die and we still have to go on eating. But if we can make it to the trigger, if we can get every damn one of them-" "Nothing can stop us," Keal repeated automatically. Anderson gmnted and dug the spoon into the beans. Keal didn't look at him again. He drove straight and fast, mulling over the implanted orders that kept him on the track. T he legs of the chess table were wedged into the barren sand. The chairs at either end were placed in perfect symmetry. The beacon of orange light formed a cone that reached to the sky where the faceless moon hung, ignoring the small spot of action. The creature arranged the thirtytwo chessmen. The words sneaked from its yellow lips. "Take the first move, Keal." It was time to play the game. "Dammit, no!" Keal said, glaring at his adversary. If he couldn't win he had to stop playing. Somehow he had to break it up -- to break out of this dream or whatever it was, to scramble the system. "Eventually you will make the move," the creature said in a low tone. Keal shook his head. "I can't keep playing. No more." "Too bad, Keal." It beckoned. Keal looked up to watch it come. Far off, someone struck a wooden match and the ball of fire was born. It skipped and danced, flared and wept. The siren sound rose higher. A wild spark, it skimmed across the empty planet with fantastic speed and deadly aim, coming hard at him, crying in its final lunge. Stinging fire everywhere. Keal clamped his teeth until his mouth bled. Then he yelled for mercy. All was quiet again. The pain vanished instantly. The creature calmly waited. Keal led a white pawn. He was sure now that he could never resist the fire -- therefore he could never refuse to play. One move followed another. It occurred to Keal that the only way left to end the madness was to win a game. But he had used all his skill and he had always lost. Well, he would try again. At least it was better than the fire. "Your move, Keal," it said constantly. "There's a way to beat you," he answered. "Some day I'll find it." S unrise. But the clouds were dark and sick. Keal felt his body tighten as he sensed the nearness of their destination. He stopped the car in a green, wooded valley. He had driven down a sloping hill -- the other side was a high mountain. He put on the handbrake. "I guess we walk from here." "Right," said Anderson. "C'mon, let's not waste time. We've got to be first." Keal climbed out, but not hurriedlyThey took the rifles and the rations and the voices in their heads and started up the mountain along a path that was mapped in their nerves. Up and up, and all the way they were watched by screeching birds and rabbits on the run -- ignorant beings who still had visions of tomorrow. Anderson climbed onto a jutting ledge and pulled Keal up after him. The ledge was wide enough and flat enough to let them walk side by side. They knew just how far to go. They knew just where to turn and stop. Briefly they studied a curtain of foliage, then used their rifle butts to hack their way through it. Keal followed Anderson into the cave. A switch at the entrance animated a string of lights that extended as far as Keal could see. Otherwise the cave was nothing spectacular. Made completely by nature, its height and width and direction varied at nearly every step. But it was deep and traversing it took time -- until finally it ended at a heavy steel door. Keal looked at the combination lock. He said, "There had to be some extra protection. I guess we're supposed to think of the right numbers." "Let me try it," Anderson offered. In a minute he had the door open. Keal's eyes probed the large natural room. At the center of the far wall, imbedded in rock -- the trigger. No decorations, no intricate gadgetry -- just one short unmarked lever. That was all. But Keal could imagine the fantastic setup that lay beyond, that stretched from ocean to ocean. Anderson anxiously rubbed his hands. "I'll flip you for the honor." "Let's wait a minute," Keal said. "What for? To let the others get here? Not a chance." "Well, we ought to think about what we're doing." "Think?" Anderson snapped. "Who the hell are you? The thinking and planning have already been done -- and by men who are a lot smarter than you'll ever be. Get it straight, Keal. You're nothing but a machine. Act like one!" board. The game was almost finished. Each of them was left with a few major pieces. Most of the pawns were off the board. "Your move," the creature said. Keal studied the squares. The layout was perfect. It was all in his favor. Although there was one move that would trap him completely, another would quickly give him the game. All he had to do was move his white queen in front of the other's bishop and he would have to win. He reached for it. But he hesitated. This is the one that should be moved, he told himself. It's very obvious. Or so it seems. What was it Anderson said? You 're nothing but a machine. Act like one! If he were really playing under his opponent's influence... Keal struggled to clear his head. If the creature were playing both ends, then he was simply following its will. In that case the right move became the wrong move. No matter how it looked and against all reason -- somehow the wrong move became the right move. His fingers were damp. He forced them away from the queen and swung his hand over to the left corner where the rook was protecting his king. His ears were pounding, his neck veins throbbing. It's the wrong move, something in him insisted repeatedly. The other one, the other one... But he kept his hand where it was and with tremendous effortleaving the white king defenseless -- he pushed the rook all the way across the board. He sat back. It was all very clear now. It wasn't his king that was trapped. The white army had crushed the black. Checkmate. He'd won. He'd actually won. "You did that very well," the creature said. "There's no use playing another game. I'm afraid you would win every time." "I don't care," Keal said. "You'd win every time every time every time..." F rom the distance of a few feet Anderson had turned to look back at him. The trigger was about twenty steps farther. Keal knew he should go blindly to the job, rather than wonder about the hole in the post-hypnosis. Probably it was an accident of some sort -- some unforeseen quirk of his own mind had refused to yield. But he considered something else. In a way Anderson was right. All the arrangements had been made by the best men in the country. Perhaps they were better and smarter than anyone realized. Perhaps they had purposely left one man some ability to think for himself -- or set up the challenge of a strange orange planet -- just in case the situation added up to zero. Well, maybe they had. And maybe they hadn't. Either way it ended here -- in a mountain of nuclear buckshot. Part two of the war, Keal reflected grimly. But what kind of war is it where d# everybody loses, where nothing is left but charred flesh and boiling flood, where the Earth becomes desolate and useless and gone to limbo? Wliat kind of war is that? He started to raise the rifle. "We're not going to do it," he said. "Half the world is still alive." Anderson's eyes were flat and frozen. "We're making sure it comes out even. We're giving it to the bastards who gave it to us." He was walking toward the far wall. "All right, if you're scared -- I'll do it myself." Keal lifted the rifle higher, moving it to follow Anderson across the cave. He yelled, "Stay away from there!" Anderson didn't look back. "You can't threaten a dead man," he said and he ran for the trigger. Keal fired. The shot hit Anderson in the lower part of the back, dropping him to his knees. White-faced, he crawled forward, the blood trailing behind him, the trigger in front of him. Keal shot him again -- once, twice, three times more -- until Anderson fell flat in the dirt, his fingers still groping. Keal locked the steel door behind him and returned to the dismal daylight at the mouth of the cave. There were other men still coming, he thought. Four other triggermen, with Anderson's determination, coming to seek the height of glory. Well, no one, no one... He sat and reloaded the rifle and waited.  Now in paperback!  Lester del Key's first new adult Science Fiction novel in ten years Highly original"Theodore Sturgeon, N.Y. Times Book Review Utter believability and constantly heightening fascination."Harlan Ellison, Los Angeles Times # wherever Berkley paperbacks are sold # Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. # nomenon in television, launched in # at the old Desilu studios, attaining immediate and growing popularity, achieving a third season-after the network's firm decision to cancel it -- because of the near-hysterical pressure of its fans, and then going into syndication, where it has proved so successful that the remns can be seen or will shortly be seen all over the country. At one time recently in New York it was possible (for viewers properly placed) to see Star Trek four times a day, and there were adherents who did. The show evoked a periphery of fans, fan clubs, literature and conventions which continue to grow and flourish, recently melding with wider-interest science fiction conventions like last spring's Equicon in Los Angeles at which the attendance approached ten thousand and (mirabile dictu) the banquet was sold out. Born with Star Trek was the writing career of David Gerrold, whose very first sale anywhere was a Star Trek script called (finally) The Trouble with Tribbles, and who has in the short time ensuing run up a formidable bibliography which includes the Nebula-nominated When Harlie Was One. Personable, apparently relaxed, rather inexcusably young, he writes # words per minute and does it for four hours a day, every day. He apparently spends the rest of the time watching the angles, and he hits them all. At the Equicon, though he had no official status in the convention machinery, he was everywhere -- on panels, chatting, autographing, MC-ing, participating in every conceivable way. Whenever things ran late and the wall-to-wall fans began to grow restive Gerrold was there, joking, lubriin. In the sales room he had a table of his own stocked with his various published collections, anthologies and novels and a large cage full of tribbles -- balls of soft fur which he makes himself -- and sales were brisk. He's a go-bird, a kind of Harlan Ellison without the abrasion. All of which would be insufficient were he not, in addition, a bright and articulate writer with an engaging style in his nonfictional work and a fine wide spectrum in his fiction; he is one of the very few writers around who recognizes the value of shifting style and pace and approach in his work -- a knack unrecognized or impossible to the great many better-established writers he is destined to surpass. Typical of his comprehension of the angles; he had ready for the Equicon two new books The World of Star Trek and The Trouble with Tribbles, both from Ballantine, each #. The former supplements and expands on the Roddenberry-Whitfield The Making of Star Trek (Ballantine, #) and is especially rich in personal anecdote, giving a fine view-in-depth of the show with an unusual cognizance of the fact that people made it, that it was successful because it was about people and because people -- not just faceless "viewers"responded to it. For me the book was full of nostalgia; Star Trek, especially in its first and second years, had an esprit I have never again seen on any Hollywood lot. The Trouble with Tribbles is Gerrold's account of the nascence and development of a single script -- and a scripter -- and is required reading not only for sf and Star Trefc addicts, but for anyone interested in writing anything for television. The two books are an engaging addition to your basic library -- and Gerrold, to the sf firmament. V don't miss R. A. Lafferty's Eisenberg's The Best Laid Schemes (Collier, #). Both reprints of recent hardcovers, both short-story collections, they have this in common: outrageous imagination, rippling humor and a profligate use of the unexpected. I have written before that one day the categorizers will get around to describing fiction as westerns, whodunits, howdunits, fantasy, science fiction, lafferties -- otherwise the output of this zany, magic, musical, philosophical nut can never be captured in any corral. I love the way Lafferty sips, nibbles, chews on language -- oh, he loves the feel of it on his tongue, and if you want a special joy, read any of him aloud to people who love words. Eisenberg, too, has a special kind of humor, a balloon-popping irreverence. Many of his stories attack academic and scientific smugness. but in the course of them he also throws away deadpan lines which knock props out from under many an icon. For example, in a wild story of people from the borough of Manhattan, he mentions offhandedly a startling rise in pupils' reading scores, due to the disappearance of so many teachers. Eisenberg's prose is peppered, salted and spiced with this kind of thing. Read him with joy. Dickson, whose new collection The Star Road (Doubleday #) is most welcome. It consists of nine fine stories, all but one previously unanthologized, from various sources and a good many years, the earliest being #, the most recently, #. The book is a good way to acquaint -- or reacquaint -- yourself with one of the better, soUd, reliable storytellers around. I especially liked On Messenger Mountain, in which the author builds up a thrumming tension that left me limp at the end. l.Rats (Walker, #) is Barbara Guignob Ricci's first novel and I do hope it won't be her last. She writes a supple, articulate prose and the thing she writes about is indeed a simple one -- compassion. To say what she has to say she uses a frightening overpopulated scene in which the guarded central "city" can only suroutside, but that's not what the book is about -- it's about compassion. This is one of the times I genuinely regret I don't have the space to go into more detail; but try to get this one -- and the ones she'll write after it. i ume II of his Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy (Ballantine #) and they run from great to quaint. George MacDonald, Ernest Brahmah, Robert W. Chambers and Eden Philpotts are represented in a worthwhile follow-up to its worthy predecessor... Isaac Asimov's The Hugo Winners, Vol #. is now in paperback (Fawcett, #); it has nine of the greatest, with the years # through #I represented, and of course some delightful comments by The Good Doctor. You can't go wrong on this one... Crash Go the Chariots (Lancer, #) is Clifford Wilson's sensational rebuttal of Erich van Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, which later produced one of the more sensational TV specials of recent years, The Ancient Astronauts. One is reminded of Col. Robert Ingersoll and Immanuel Velikovsky and many, many others to whom assertiveness is more of a means toward truth than patient and disPlease turn to page # Re: October, # Everybody with a future has gotten off the Earth in Michael Kurland's fine new novelette (Think Only This of Me) in Galaxy's forthcoming Thank-You-AU October '# issue. No holocaust has struck. Earth is well and verdant, nicely populated and richly clothed in memories. Its contented, cared-for and genetically engineered humans live endlessly in the great millennia of man's pasteach separately created for them -- forever finding fire, inventing the wheel, the automobile, the airplane, the jet, smashing the first atom, making the first space flight, tirelessly reliving man's dream of reaching the stars. The off-Earth humans, though, have reached the stars and won them. Those men and women are what the story is about, and it's a beauty. So buy, borrow or steal the October '# Galaxy. And read it. It is barely possible that I, too, am a little off the Earth at this moment. October '# mileposts more than Galaxy's return to monthly publication -- it celebrates the return of a vagabond month to your calendar and mine. While we have had stretches of monthly pubhcation on occasion, we have not had an issue of Galaxy dedicated solely to October since #. But what, then, is to come in the memorable October Galaxy? I asked the company president and the many friends of yours and mine who author the field and the answer shapes up -- solid. More than # additional wordage, the result of a new and tighter type face, will make it possible for us to launch a momentous new novel, James White's The Dream Millennium (our traditional first publication anywhere) coincidentally with the concluding installment of Arthur C. Clarke's historic, two-part Rendezvous With Rama. October '# is also Ursula Le Guin, # National Book Award winner, pondering the gain -- or loss -- if man had to trade his humanity for the Ultimate Answer to his quest for knowledge. That's the stuff of her latest novelette. Field of Vision. And October '# is Ray Bradbury meditating -- in Ode To Electric Ben -- on the #st Anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's first announcement -- in the October #, # issue of his Gazette -- oi his lightningtaming electric-kite experiment, reordering his world and ours. October '#, of course, is Theodore Sturgeon's new and longer Bookshelf, plus a spariding new Sturgeon story, Agnes, Accent and Access, featuring Merrihew, the troubleshooter. And more. The month is stiU open. But while we are name-dropping, let me add two more. In the issue of Galaxy you are now reading you will find Michael Hatt's Circle of Flies, which is not only his first published story but the first he submitted anywhere. And Lou Fisher's Triggerman... Let me know what you think, Man thought himself alone till CosCros scratched the Earth creature -- and found an alien! I T hey left CosCros a barrel of water and a knife with a short, rounded blade for prying shellfish off the rocks and opening bivalves. It was an island small as a roof and tail as a house, with no shelter, no vegetation and no fresh water. After the second sixday alone he began whetting the knife on a fine-grained rock. After a sambat he was talking to it as his only friend. His friend helped him kill a small octivort in the crystal ocean, but in a spell of dead calm weather -- when he had stopped eating and speaking and the water in the barrel was hand-deep and green with algae -- his friend drew a thin red line across his wrist and he threw the knife tumbling into the sea. It stuttered sunset remonstrations back at him. He lay face down on the rock. He was done with friends. That night a squall dumped two fingers of rain on the island. It overflowed the shallow catchbasins CosCros had cleaned of sand and seawrack. It washed the salt grime from his body. It washed away the last of his hope for justice. He had been accused, betrayed and condemned by the Question Framers. The electorate had voted # per cent in favor of his death, but the answer had been implicit in the question: Should the traitor CosCros die? The men who framed the questions ruled the world. There was no recourse in direct democracy. He had been put on the island and his execution out to bid. Eight years had passed since the last time the vote had gone over # percent -- when AlaGran, the pirate, had abrogated the will of others and the skene of Jannali had beggared itself with an unexampled high bid. The Jannali had enlarged their amphitheater and put AlaGran arena with an octivort. He had killed and eaten three before the fourth octivort had eaten him. He had lasted three sixdays and the ticket sales alone had covered the bid price. The food concessions, the entertainment licenses, the lodgings and mementos had made the Jannali affluent. It had been a worthy end for a pirate. But for a man who wanted to save the world? CosCros lay on his belly and drank the sweet water. Whoever threatened the instant expression of public desire should anticipate a skene with a population of one. The man who holds a mirror to the incoherent beast with many heads should realize he will be condemned to single sovereignty, left to institute his own reforms and plan for a future as nebulous as... as that smoke on the horizon. It was not the excursion boat he expected with a cage on deck. It was an Implementation ship under forced draft, the smoke streaming away in the wind, the bow waves thrown high and the wake rolling cream-green behind. It approached smartly. The boom was rigged. The ship stood off the sheer north face of the island. The net swung out, CosCros timed the surge and was swept up like a child in a swing. The ship was underway before he had been lowered to the deck. A sailor steadied him against the pitch and roll. The deck shook under the thrust of the screw. He was led below to the central cabin. ease. He was a big man with a high forehead and heavy jaw, tumbled brown curls, a voice smooth as a barrel of oil. He waved negligently to a chair and dismissed the guard. CosCros had trusted him. He trusted him now to serve his own interests. "Due to an unforseen circumstance, CosCros, the bid award is delayed. I hear that Jannali are thinking in terms of an irax an hour to be released in a caged arena -- the prisoner to be awarded an hour and twelve minutes before the next. Then an hour and twenty-four, an hour and thirtysix and so on. Mad vicious little beasts. And Moorine are said to have some notion of a glass oven. The prisoner would be fed on the fungus that kills when half-cooked." His voice grew contemplative. "The weight of a man in the oven is required to activate the heat." CosCros felt a stinging sensation high in his nose. The chair felt infinitely luxurious after bare rocks. He was secure from the empty bowl of the sky in the cabin. The mellifluent voice was balm after the mindless mutter of the waves. His hatred was not diminished, but what a wondrous thing was man! GrisOngir spoke with more emphasis. "There are the usual variations of the shooting gallery, but the Tintenbar are reported to have a really ingenious notion. They propose a tracked maze down the side of the amphitheater and the prisoner flat on a cart, his head projecting over the front. Down he goes at random -- they say -- along the pathways. They contemplate many resolutions to the pattern: food, a beast to fight, a maiden to bed and perhaps -- entirely at random -- a very solid post." CosCros marveled at the ingenuity. "Once a day, down you go through the maze. It is a most expensive idea and has aroused great interest, but bids were sure to run high for the denigrator of democracy, the arch-deviationist, the unashamed elitist. That's you, CosCros." "Why is the bid award delayed?" "To the heart of the matter!" said GrisOngir admiringly. "It is simple enough. We have found a use for a devious, suspicious mind. Your observation is acute, no matter how flagrantly impolitic. Consensus democracy will not tolerate a challenge to the rule of law." CosCros was silent. He had given GrisOngir his allegiance to elect him Question Framer from Yelavon. Had hope been betrayed the day GrisOngir had said he would implement their hopes for the future and climbed aboard the steamcar for Crux? No hope betrayed. GrisOngir had been true to himself. "For the proposed service we will grant you null status -- no mandatory ballot and optional voting rights." "A handsome offer." CosCros rubbed a finger on the smooth edge of the table. "When do you want me to stop the sun? Or bag the wind? Tell me, at which end of the hairy vorticor do I stand -- the teeth or the flatulence?" GrisOngir ignored the childish vulgarity. "A ship from the stars has landed at Crux. The aliens are men. They call their home Earth. Their planet circles a sun similar to our own. How far? The answer is in terms of the distance light travels in a measured period of time. The terms are meaningless. Give them a droos to wear instead of their peculiar garments, put a cup of beer in their hands and you could not tell them from AhwRahn, the common man." CosCros stared at him. "Why?" "Of course. Why have they come and what do they want? It may be as simple as why we travel the skenes. Why do we build bridges between them? Why run steamcars around the two rings? Why do we sail the endless ocean to the ice, searching for islands that exist only in fanciful tales? Because they are there -- even when they are not!" Suit your style to your idealistic audience, thought CosCros, and so encourage this image of a metaphysical cloudhead. "Have they seen God in their travels? Do they have gods?" "As many as we. In the service of their gods, will they enslave our people and take our treasures? The answer is one of many we must find." CosCros held the table light with both hands. He was a leaf in a torrent of information, spun by the smell of food from the galley, the motion of the ship, the colors and shapes and sizes of human constructions as opposed to bare rock and sea and sky. "What is my function?" GrisOngir rubbed his face to an expression of candid honesty. "If I remember the judgment -- you are an ethical imperialist, a truth-bender, a contamination to the young and an advocate of slave work morality." He smiled without humor. "We need such a person to understand the aliens. If you refuse -- " "This is my world." The obvious. "You made me Question Finder in Yelavbon." Flattery. "It is better to be a live skink than a dead octivort." Meeching self-interest. "Agreed. You are true to your skewed reality. Fortunately for you, it now coincides with my own." He said benevolently, "You look like Ahwjlahn after a sixday drunk. Go through that door. They'll take care of you." bath, was dressed in a rich orange bias and darker droos and enjoyed the skills of a barber who clucked his tongue over the neglect of man's crowning glory and shaved his beard and curled his hair in a style he had never worn before. He was served a simple meal. He sipped a glass of distilled beer and enjoyed the volition-free state of travel so praised by the poets. He did not believe a word of the promises made him. In the timeless zone of travel personal danger was as hypothetical as the monsters from space in his future or the rock in his past. What he thought about was the stranger in the barber's mirror, burned brown and gaunt by the sun and made wary by solitary confinement. There was an unfamiliar set to the jaw. The dark-gold eyes smoldered. Who he was and what changes had occurred would be determined by his reaction to the high probability that when his usefulness was over he would again face betrayal and death. The ship steamed discreetly into the bay at Crux the next afternoon. The fishing boats, the sea-plant scows, the ferries, the green-garden rafts up the river and the swarms of houseboats were the same as ever. So was the pall of smoke, the harbor garbage and the stink of the brown river. The men on the streets wore checkered I-have-voted patches. The crew had the old red-and-white stripes with the barred exemption for sailors. CosCros wore a temporary null with the white cross on black. He read the ballot outside the poll while GrisOngir and the crew voted and got their checkered patches. Mother and skene questions; Should cargo boats charge one freight for Damanami skeul wood? Obviously, yes. Should the beer allotment be decreased? Obviously, no. Should land returning to skene control from entrepreneurs carry an increased minimum bid price? Yes, otherwise where would the money come from? All misapprehension to the people, CosCros said to himself without emotion. He turned and looked up at the ruined fortifications of the CruxCos kings in the days before democracy. The spaceship had landed in the great courtyard. He could not see it from below. He wondered if the representative democracy he advocated could be essentially another form of tyranny. There lay the problem: one man's benevolent despotism is another man's half-cooked fungus. A labor master trooped by with his boys and girls, for once a goodlooking crew, alert and well fed. A senior mendicant with a dwarf came whining to CosCros, caught sight of his face and sidled away. A bompan man blew the ash from his coals and offered to cook whatever was brought him. A dye merchant carried cerise cloth on his arm. A milk woman with a baby on her hip bared a breast and squirted the eye of a wizened stall-keeper who screeched at her to move on. CosCros shortened his stride to walk with GrisOngir through the open market to the base of the cliff. The swarms of men and women getting and spending, children underfoot, begging and eating, haggling and drinking, did not affect him as once they had. Was devotion to the public weal a sickness from which he had been cured by isolation? T he elevator driver spun the wheel when the car was loaded. Water gushed from the tank into the channel until the lift rose freely, drawn up by the weight of the descending car. GrisOngir and Cos Cros disembarked on a tableland striped with crops and salted with houses that overflowed the city on the alluvial plain. The artesian bore and tank serving the elevator had once stood inside the castle wall, now many years gone, but the inner stonework remained as testiihony to the oppressive past. They walked through the zigzag entry into the paved courtyard. The starship was a flattened sphere six men tall and ten wide at the belt line. It loomed over the myriads in the ship, reading the graffiti scrawled as high as a man could reach. A group of drummers lounged in the shade of a wall. A teacher huddled with a class of prevoters. Lackadaisical women from one of the farms hawked minced fruit in halfshells. Four steamcar men were feeding two happy girls in country hats. A bright yellow ramp extended from a rectangular opening. A guard was ignoring a woman who insisted the ship be moved because her corybantic band was hired into the court a sixday from now. The lead treble drummer was picking up tempo and the others patterned around his beat. CosCros found his heart following the treble up a beat, then faster in an insistent progression. GrisOngir stopped. He unhooded his octivort eyes, flat gray and ruthless. "Give no refusal. None at all." CosCros followed him up the ramp. The ship had been built under a far sun and not of wood, stone or metal. The boilers had to be fantastic to move it through the thin empyrean along an invisible track, by intangible cogwheels. He abandoned all attempts to understand in the entryport. He saw a deep room illuminated by forced flame sliced thin and fixed cold in the ceiling. The cupboard doors on either side were filled with -- wings for flying? Gold wire in coils? Filled with exotic food cured by symp so sweet a spoonful fed a man for a day? A tiny figure moved in the wall. It opened its mouth and gibberish came out: "Is this our guineapig?' Were there hordes of hand-high aliens, fanged and irax-vicious, hidden in the cupboards? T he inner wall split and each door slid away. The room beyond was large and circular. The floor was covered with rugs over a resilient carpet and the man whose miniature had been in the wall was sitting in a chair, turned to the entry. "Welcome aboard. Oh, the writing instrument of my mother's sister! How's that?" His legs were individually encased in cloth. He wore a short red bias and another over it, of black and white checks. He said, "My name is PeTersNel," and his face became fixed forever in CosCros' mind. Question Framers sat in a double arc of spindly chairs against the curved waU. The ghost of a shimmer hung across the room between the men and the three aliens. Pedantic young DasiKan tapped a slate with a wand for attention. "A writing instrument," said DasiKan, "is a tool for writing -- " CosCros sat down and gripped the chair seat. The room was thick with inexplicable devices. The commonplace was not what it seemed. Behind the starmen were windows, but each showed a different direction. The worst was the window looking down at the spaceship, the courtyard, the cliffs and the tiny, moving, foreshortened people from high in the air, all fixed on a vertical -- yes -- a vertigo wall. PeTersNel had gray eyes and high cheeks and straw-yellow hair. His face was melancholy and mocking. It was also vital and innocent. He was clean shaven. He turned his head and CosCros saw a burr of gold on his cheeks. He was older than CosCros. He was younger. CosCros groaned silently. The smile on those lips could mean he was figuring ways to butcher plump young DasiKan, who was tediously explaining familial relationships with drawings on the alien board that held lines inside the glass surface. The slender starman with the dark brown hair had sleepy eyes bright as coals in a cave. He wore lazy arrogance like a droos and calmness like a bias. He was a sheathed sword in qiiiet and bloody potential. The third man sat in a condition Qf arrested momentum, like an enormous stone in the middle of the air. He was bigger and broader than the other two, relaxed and inevitable as the fall of night. His face was ruddy, his hair white, his expression placid. Was he thinking of recipes? CosCros put the question to himself harshly, in a futile hope of diminishing the impact, the fascination of this contradictory trio. PeTersNel cut short mother's sister's married relationships. He said they would see a recording of Earth to complete the day's work. The windows faded to a single large picture of an unsupported ball, mottled white and blue and brown. The ball expanded until it was Earth with a harbor, with ships of sea and air and land. The buildings were gigantic, but Earthmen also had trees and green grass. They had enormous oval amphitheaters. They tamed weird monsters. They farmed to the horizons. They held back rivers. Their casual mastery of the world, the bewildering scope and variety of their activities was presented against a background of alien music more insistent than drums. When it was over CosCros slumped in his chair, bludgeoned by the intensity of his attention, stunned into a lassitude of shock. The slender alien was speaking. He said the danger of contact was real, and this was why they maintained the force barrier, the invisible division between themselves and the men of this world. GrisOngir replied the Framers understood disease and would not hold the aliens responsible if the volunteer died. They hoped he would not prove infectious. In fact, he had been living in isolation since the landing for this very reason. All eyes turned to CosCros. H e stood up. He kept a properly sober face. It was lunatic comedy that GrisOngir should smile as his new treachery was accepted. This was throwing an octivort into the ocean to drown. There was nothing CosCros wanted as much as to stay with the Earthmen. The Question Framers filed out of the spaceship. The inner entryport doors closed. The shimmering barrier snapped and was gone. PeTersNel stretched and said, "Nice to have you aboard. You understand that time is needed for all things, from seed to flower, from stranger to friend, from alien menace to a comity of understanding without alienation." "Why do you take lessons," asked CosCros slowly, "when you are fluent in our tongue?" "It's a trick," said the slender man. He yawned. "It's also common sense to give you weight, to balance your special knowledge against our own." He was not sleepy. "I'm WilDysE." The broad-shouldered man with the white hair sighed. "We overwhelm. There is no way our landing will not be a shock. We try to restore confidence by being less than omnipotent. My name is BranDer, ChaRlzBranDer." "I am overwhelmed," said CosCros. He sat down abruptly. He knew no ritual for social conduct with starmen. He would have to be himself -- whatever he had become. They waited. He said, "I have a feeling you have done this before.' "Do you know?' asked WilDysE. BranDer blinked. PeTersNel swung a chair around and straddled it. "You are the first man to make this observation on all the planets we have visited," he said pleasantly. "Why?" asked CosCros. BranDer said, "Why visit other planets? A good question. Perhaps to socialize. To be neighborly. To visit relatives and -- through meeting them -- to understand ourselves a little better." "Greed," said WilDysE, "Simple honest need To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.' Who wants to be an Idle King? Tennyson was a great poet in spite of himself," "Maybe we're looking for God," said PeTersNel, "We don't like to be God," said BranDer. "Having tried it," said WilDysE. PeTersNel said, "When we were Earthbound we could anticipate marvels. Intelligent arachnids or reptiles, star kings and galactic empires, talking plants and talking planets. Oh, we had the gaudiest kind of dreams -- alas, lost innocence! What we have found circling the far stars is man -- and only man. We don't know why. And last and worst, we are the advanced race." "A deadly disappointment,' said BranDer. 'This is why we keep searching," said PeTersNel. "We are looking for someone else to blame, to give us revelation, to take responsibility." "My name is CosCros." He was deeply moved. "I am pleased beyond saying to be with you." It was ridiculous to think that truth was freedom, but anything less than the available truth became incentive. to it. He did not entirely believe the Earthmen, but whatever they wanted here their preoccupations were of the same order as his own. "Then let's eat dinner," said WilDysE. "Come on CosCros. Kitchen and bedrooms are upstairs. All the machinery is downstairs -- this is where we work. Let's go, PeTerDamlt -- philosophy is tolerable only with a fuU belly." CosCros followed through a door and up perfectly ordinary stairs. If the strangers had consciously set him at ease, what else should they do? If they were more or less than they seemed, what man is not? He could deal with them. He walked into the upstairs room with modest confidence. It was filled with women. and Jen and CaMila and Fay and BarBarA. They wore brighter colors than the men and far less clothing. Women had appeared in the picture of Earth, but they had been no more real to CosCros than the ships of air or the incredible buildings. If women existed in fact, then Earth must exist in reality. He stood bemused. BranDer saw his difficulty and took him to an ablutions room. He explained the mechanisms, challenged CosCros to wash his hands and patiently explained again. The meal was bright red lips, bold eyes and sUky hair and the confused realization that women were peers among Earthmen. They dressed -- or were undressed -- shamelessly -- or shamefully -- and exposed their navels without qualm. They calmly exposed six bare toes on each bare foot. They spoke to him freely and they were kind to him. Their kindest act was pouring half a tumblerful of whiskey and putting him to bed in one of the bed closets around the room. "He is emotionally exhausted, " said BranDer. "Sleep well, CosCros. You have journeyed to Earth today and that's enough to tire any man." The next sixdays were forever jumbled. CosCros thought it was because he could not distinguish relative values and aU the things he learned were of indeterminable consequence. He did not forget the real world. His belief that death awaited him settled his mind and concentrated his attention. The Earthmen gave him the English language in direct imprints under a helmet. His understanding surprised them. "On some other worlds," said sturdy MariAn, "the cultural lock made learning impossible." "How could you learn my tongue so fast?" he asked. Plain Jen said, "Computer analysis and rationalization. Plus a long history of trying to be culture-free, which is impossible." "And the quick imprint," said Fay, plump and smiling. "We also try to understand the common denominators." CaMila said, "All men eat, drink and snore." "It beguiles the observant mind," said languid Bar Bar A, "that on every world the old trinity mles or death results: identity, variety and security." CosCros shook his head. "I will never understand." They protested, but he meant he did not expect to be allowed time for understanding. He soaked up information like a child. He was diown the drive engines where a small sun was entrapped, he saw the microfiche files and the retriever, which supplied data on a molecular level to the manufactuary. To please him, BranDer programed a writing instrument and it was spun -- it took place -- it happened together -- it was made before his eyes. It was a light-negation pen that unreflected light on any surface. The gadgetry was only technological wonder -- it was the friendship and trust, the courtesy and thoughtfulness the Earthmen showed to him and to each other that amazed CosCros. They had no meanness of spirit. They quarreled and laughed and argued together in amity. He found this sadly suspicious. The language lessons progressed in the room below. The Question Framers slowly came to regard the Earthmen as lucky relatives who had struck it rich. It seemed possible, then reasonable, then only right that they should share the wealth. CosCros watched the screens in the room above. At first he was shamed by the Framers' transparent interest in changing lead to gold, but when he saw the oblique encouragement the Earthmen offered he forgot apologies. The Framers were especially charmed by a magic fluid that occurs when certain particular requirements are met, to provide illumination or heating or turning wheels or saying time it takes a man to breathe -- and thereby solving any problem. If electricity were man's right and heritage, then they should be given it. As they learned more of Earth the Framers grew eloquent in favor of advanced weaponry, aircars, medicine, mountains of food and immortality. CosCros listened with growing disquiet. PeTersNel said that Earthmen had learned these things -- but not immortality-through a sharp discipline called science, a system of looking at the world so cutting that most men took the benefits and deplored the method. WilDysE said science was a faith, just as mathematics was a hypothesis that three plus three equals six. BranDer said it was obvious they had landed on a paradisaical planet. The two long loops of islands in the green sea joined by the steamcar bridges were unique and delightful. He thought this world should follow its own course and refuse any gift. The Framers became importunate. PeTersNel was persuaded to admit the Earthmen had made gifts in the past. "But it was always a universal gift. It must go to every man, woman and child on the world, for the common good. This is impossible." Not so, shouted the Framers. It was the obligation of every man to vote every sixday. This was the thousand-year-old method of direct democracy, made possible for the entire world by the steamcars. Certainly every individual could receive a gift. What was it? 'The common good has not yet been determined," said PeTersNel and he would say no more. are you so silent?" T T asked CaMila. "I was wondering what you can give," said CosCros, "that will not accrete to a smart and greedy man in a sambat." "Moonlight," she said promptly. "A world called Cor Carol! Threeeight was in so sluggish a time referent, we gave it a moon." She was lithe and brown and supple. The idea of her reaching out through a window and pushing a moon around a world... was not funny after all. "Why give anything?" "So we are not forgotten," she said, but this was the same sort of limited answer as moonlight for Cor Carol! Three-eight, because moonlight is not all that moons give worlds. CosCros said, "I am proud of our achievements, the unification of mankind, the growth of equity in government along with the engineering skill to make it possible. At first there were boats, then little walkways and then stone bridges between the near islands. When it was time for pile-driving, steamdriven piles linked the skenes. The evolution of highspeed steamcars, with the knee-high wall in the center for directional stability and the smooth flanges on either side, made the will of the people manifest in a sixday. AH this occurred in the incredibly short space of a thousand years. Who knows what the future holds? Do you?" "Yes," said CaMila. She had drawn a thin line of red just above and below her eyelashes. "The demand outgrows the resources. The result is chaos and retrogression. A new balance is struck at a subsistence level of achievement." "It's not an immutable law," said Mari An, "but there is a time imperative for society, just as the unstimulated child will not achieve optimum." "We have no fixed obligation," said Jen. "Do you think we should go away and forget your world?" "Or do we have some responsibUity?" asked Fay. "I don't know," said CosCros. 'Then we must do the best we can," said CaMila. CosCros had been sure of many things before he was convicted of treason, but exposure on the island and exposure to the Earthmen had shaken his certainties. They were not arrogant or self-righteous, but their undisclosed intention and their refusal to consider serious matters with due sobriety filled him with misgivings. They were hoodwinking the Framers into accepting a gift. Whatever it would be, he had the queasy feeling it would be for good. A morally loaded gift is always suspect. It was instant voting. Earthmen would supply talking bracelets to all. Then every man and woman could push Yes or No on the bracelet. Their response would be sent by magic to a central repository and tallied. WilDysE passed out bracelets to the Question Framers. "Is the sun shining today?" he asked. A box tall as a man showed the words oii a screen: Yes #, No #. PeTersNel explained again and the Yes vote rose to sixty-one. DasiKan protested that there was no assurance that everyone would vote. BranDer told him to abstain and asked, "Are Question Framers intelligent?" The Yes vote was sixty, the No vote zero and one abstention was noted. BranDer tapped the box and a number showed on the screen, the same as that on DasiKan's bracelet. The matter of enfranchising women was bitterly opposed. It was resolved only when PeTersNel agreed the screen should show male and female voting. He was adamant in his insistence that every woman should have a bracelet as well as every man. Finally GrisOngir stood beside the box and asked, "Should we accept the gift of the Earthmen?" The vote was unanimously in favor. GrisOngir said it was evident from the disappearance of the force barrier, that hands-across-the-stars were not infectious, and their volunteer should be returned. CaMila said soberly, "Stay with us." WilDysE appeared at the top of the stairs. "It is your choice, CosCros." "Where does loyalty lie?" He was numb with decision. "I must go." He turned blindly and stumbled down the stairs. He wanted with his whole heart to stay, but he understood the peril of the gift. He foresaw the destruction of his world. He had no illusions about his probable success in persuading the Framers to his viewpoint but he had no option -- he had to walk into the dull, mumbling jaws of futile endeavor. He said goodbye to PeTersNel and BranDer and followed GrisOngir down the yellow alumina-fibered ramp. The afternoon sun washed the old castle walls to painted scenery. He walked with the Question Framers through the swarming men and women. The crowd stank. He reminded himself, as he had so often before, that he was obligated to people and not disembodied ideas, that he must be wary of Humanity and Large Issues in order not to become a tyrant himself. He had made his choice. He wondered if the memory of his time in the spaceip would ache forever. He wrenched his thoughts back to the old problem of how gratifying it was to be concerned with abstractions about mankind and to forget actual men and women. They went down the elevator and through the streets into the central district, past the steamcar terminus and the Implementation barracks to the hollow square where the Question Framers lived. Concordance Hall was at one end, along with clerical and bureaucratic support offices. "I must give you a warning," said CosCros. "Come into the anteroom," said GrisOngir. "You know my mistrust of direct democracy and instant laws -- " "Which got you condemned to death." "I implore your attention! Instant voting will be far worse. There will be no time cushion, no time for modifying thought, no time for -- " "You want to modify the will of the people." "It takes time for all things -- " "It is time to vote for the purest democracy. This meeting will make official the vote aboard the ship. We will frame the question, 'Shall we accept the beneficent gift of the visitors?' It will be put out for vote on the steamcars tomorrow morning. No more nonsense from you. Wait here. I want your secret report on the monsters." "You fool! Instant response means destruction!" GrisOngir shook off CosCros' hand. His eyes were opaque. "I see it is time to reconsider your status." Ill H e went out and slammed the door behind him. CosCros opened it immediately. GrisOngir was cutting across the flow of the Framers to the Implementary station. CosCros moved with the crowd. He glanced back and saw a guard take position in front of the door. He walked briskly along the outer hall and out the back stairs. He had no food, no friends and no money, but he was his own man for the first time in more than three sambats. He walked at his own pace toward the estuary. Null patches were less uncommon there and the brewery was famous. He idled along the docks, watched the labor crews finish work. They piled the last baskets of skeul wood and arardup kindling onto the carts. The skeul was even smaller in diameter than it had been -- instant voting would reduce the pressure on the supply -- Earthmen had used petroleum -- none was available here. Concentrated energy was growing short. CaMila had been serious -- why should the thought dry his mouth? He entered a tavern displaying the brewery logo, a cloud of steam riven by a lightning bolt of discovery, and tore a beer privilege slip from the back of his patch. The proprietor was sympathetic when CosCros said he had forgotten his purse and slipped him a flatbread wrapped around a piece of fish for another beer slip. He returned to the estuary in the gathering dusk, found a watchman and had him load a barrel of fish oil onto a boat that was broad beam and light draft. A single gaff sail was rigged without a boom. CosCros told the watchman the skipper was drunker than AhwRahn. The watchman said he wished he were, lit the lantern on the stern pole and cast off the mooring lines. A null badge worn with audacity had real advantages. CosCros was out of the harbor traffic by moons-up, thanks to the favoring wind and quiet sea. The wherry had a low freeboard and belonged on the river or in the harbor, but it was loaded with bundles of arardup and was a safe enough coastal craft. CosCros sailed half the night before he saw the waves on the causeway to Iloura, a straight line of pale breakers. The steamcar bridge crossed the deeper water on pilings. He tied the wherry four boatlengths from the Douran shore two hours before sunrise. It was not too late to change his mind. He gripped the tiller until his fingers hurt, trying to squeeze understanding from apprehension. Were the Earthmen guilty of malicious mischief? How could men of good will sponsor disaster? Democracy is responsibility and AhwRahn will always make beer from grain and worry about flatbread later. Society is based on restraint -- without restraint anything is immediately possible. Drowning every other person would leave more for the others -- solution unacceptable. He groaned and looked at the loom of the land in the night. as long as Crux was wide, a skene with a small population and scant resources. The north ring began at Iloura, the south at Crux. Here was the single bridge north and here he could buy the most time. The vote could not be quickly ratified until the steamcar line was repaired. Buy time for what? Second thoughts? Rebellion? Who will rebel against immediate gain? He knocked in the barrelhead and poured oil on the arardup. It was still not too late. He could change his mind. He could return to the spaceship. Let the world take care of itself. Who was he to read the future and find disaster in instant democracy? He swung the hobbling stern lantern inboard. If the Earthmen were dedicated to longterm good, it was presently cold comfort. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was not. He smashed the lantern into the cargo. He swam ashore because he had been wrong. He should have set the fire from the bridge. The arardup caught from the flaming oil and volatilized into a burgeoning flower of fire. He dove into the black water. He pulled himself onto the rocks and was aghast at the intensity of the blaze. The flame gouted high over the bridge. He crouched to avoid the searing heat. The piers were burning, so was the cribbing and so was the bolted wooden track. He climbed to a cart road and loped along the shore. He heard voices ahead and hid in the dark while men and boys passed him toward the glow in the sky. He turned downhill to a sheltered bay, avoided the houses and found a skiff pulled up on the sand. He rowed to an anchored fishing boat, sharp at both ends, and sailed out of the bay on the light wind running ahead of dawn. The boat had provisions and water. He coasted well offshore for the day and night and at midmorning he saw the hills of Kuttai, the first skene of the eastern loop. He went ashore at twilight to refill his water cask at the foot of a sharp ravine. The steamcar trestle crossed above. There was a rusty universal wrench aboard the boat and he spent that night removing bolts from the trestle track. He sailed at dawn and rounded the tip of Kuttai before noon. Bridges marched to the horizon over a chain of low islands. He fished the inner sea until night fell, then set out for the western skenes. He was becalmed in the morning. The sail did not stir for three days. He chewed the fish he caught to supplement his water. The inner ocean was glassy. He fell into a condition of somnambulant contemplation -- and when the wind stirred again, old facts had assumed new relationships. The spaceship had to be old. The main fabric showed signs of age and repair, though individual parts were new. The folding chairs for the Framers were sparkling new. The rugs covering the carpet could have been made on his own world. The food was exotic, but he was sure it was not Earth food because the words were not in the English language. The bed closets were more than individually different -- the sand-orange of BranDer's, the lines of green on green on green of BarBarA's, WilDysE's aqueous blue-gray. Fay's overlapping white scales. Of course the ship had visited on many worlds. How long did it take to wear a hollow along the alumina-fiber ramp? Men and women on Earth had five fingers to a hand and everyone else had six. Other pictures showed one navel per person. They had peculiar skin shades -- they might go through color phases -- and the starcrew could have been chosen from a single variant race. More women than men? Strange worlds surely presented strange dangers. English as a common tongue? Because of its wealth? Or because each crew member spoke a different native language? The starmen were not Earthmen. plenished his water and lodged a timber across the track in a tunnel. He stole food from an Implementation kitchen and was nearly caught. He sailed north again. Between Kareelpa and Nargan he sawed through a flange and filled the kerf with sawdust and fish oil. He undermined a boulder and rolled it through a concrete track section, where the graded way cut a sidehill on Waranalin. He was always tired. The demands of his self-imposed task shut out fruitless speculation about aliens. He escaped capture by a ten-oar boat only because a fogbank gave him shelter. He turned east and sailed across the widest part of the inner sea, careless from short sleep and food. He was caught in a storm and driven ashore on Damanami. Surf smashed the boat to firewood on an open beach. He hobbled half a day through saltgrass and swamp. The purple bruise on his thigh seeped blood but the gash from his jawhinge to temple was shallow. It opened again when he stumbled at the door of a basketmaker's hut and thumped his head on a worn chopping block. The bed on which he woke was covered with rushes over a wooden frame. His arms and legs were tied with withes to the corners of the bed. An old woman was weaving a split saltgrass basket. "Water," he said and she paid no attention. His throat was tight fire. His mouth was swollen shut. "Water," he croaked. "So shrivel up," she said. He tried to speak again and got the dry heaves. "Choke, renegade," said grandma. He contracted his body in fury. The bindings held, but the old bed did not. It collapsed and he lurched to his feet. He swung the headframe into the air. "Cut my feet loose, mother." Free of the bindings, he rinsed his mouth and drank sparingly. "My boat was wrecked. Droos and badge ripped off. Why renegade?" For an answer, she held up her left arm. A broad band circled her thin wrist. It conformed to the bones and tendons, except for a rectangular section thicker than the rest. One edge of the rectangle was straight and white, the other wavy and black. The surface was washed with colors that changed as CosCros stared. "Give it to me." "Can't cut it. Won't come off." "What if I cut off your arm?" "It defranges," she said triumphantly. "That means it busts into powder. Been hiding a sambat, hah?" "Where 'd you get it?" "At the poUs. You push your hands in a box. If you got a stump you push it in, too. You got no arms, you go to Damanami and they put it on your ankle. You be a basket case, they stick it on your neck. You got no neck, renegade, you don't need one." "What about nulls?" "They don't send Implementors after you, is all.' "I thought the steamcars were down." "Not enough to stop the vote. 'Should we accept the ben-iffy-sent gift from the stars?' Ninety-nine point seven. Yes. The starmen carried the boxes all over. In the comfort and convenience of your own home, renegade. No more miserable walk every sixday. No more fines when you're sick or -- " "Attention!" said the bracelet. "Yessir," said the old woman. "I'm here. I'm listening." "Your Question Framers ask the win of the people. The question is, should the steamcar crossing at Bublara be elevated for the common good?" "Dearie me, yes." She pushed the white edge. "Where's Bublara?" The bracelet spelled out; Thank You. You Have Voted. Then it added: The answer is # per cent Yes. # per cent and gaining. Remember, you have one hour to respond before your order is delinquent. There is one more question framed for today to be answered one hour from now. Should the skene of Tintenbar be allowed to increase the reward for the capture of the traitor CosCros? Such reward to be an effective addition to the bid price? I will repeat the question"Where's your old man?" said CosCros. "He died." "Two dirty bowls. That droos on the peg." He took her throat in both hands. "Gone to town," she said. "They don't pay much for renegades, but we need every little bit we can get." He dropped her onto the remains of the bed. She glared up at him. He put on the droos. "I'll bounce a rock off your head if you stick it outside." He ran to the swamp and when he was hidden from the hut, circled back to the footpath. He found he was on an island of firm ground. A rotten log made a bridge over the last of the swamp. The path crossed into leafy third-growth skeul. He crossed the log and entered the bosky forest. He heard the old woman grunt and turned in time to catch a billet of skeul at the base of his skull. "I'm here. I'm here. Pay money for CosCros, yes, yes, yes!" His head swelled and diminished. His eyes focused and faded. She had dragged him between two trees, tied his feet together around one and his arms behind him to another. She was happily weaving more peeled bark into rope and had knitted him into the greenery by the time two Implementors and her husband came down the trail. They cut him loose, hobbled his legs and walked him to the village. "Without exception," said the Implementor and forced his hands into the alien box. The babble of the bracelet drove his ignominious failure through his head like a bolt. He was hauled in a cage on a cart to the steamcar station. Grandma went along for her reward. She amused the guards and they pointed out places of interest on the trip. They showed her the scarred hill where the starship had settled to manufacture bracelets and boxes from rock and seawater. CosCros' bracelet crepitated with black on purple. The guards' flashed stalwart green. Grandma's blipped scarlet and orange with avaricious joy. GrisOngir's bracelet was malicious yellow when he stared through the bars at Crux, spat and turned away. The amphitheater was being enlarged when CosCros was put into a handsome new cage at Tintenbar. Admission to view the rebel was to the floor only. Interest was so great that guards cleared the arena twice a day before feeding time -- and if the public wanted to view the mad arsonist at his food another admission was charged. An enterprising potter cast souvenir mementos of the infamous CosCros meeting his possible fates, old-fashioned paper votes were sold to choose the most beautiful maiden, a company of fishermen brought in a record vortvert with twelve legs to be kept in a shallow tank until needed. T he opening ceremonies were well worth the doubled admission price. The amphitheater overflowed. The notorious CosCros was paraded around the arena and everyone got a good view of his evil features. He was shown the several stalls, three on either side of a tall striped post with banners on top. When the track debouched at the post his head would be driven into his shoulders. One stall held the maiden. Another a pair of snarling irax on light chains. The third was filled with bladders of excrement. In the stall beyond the post stood a man with a whip. Next came a stall of bitegrass with serrated edges. The last held a cook and his coals plus succulent viands. One of the stalls would be changed every day. The trip device on the bottom of the cart automatically released the prisoner from his bindings in every stall -- but not at the post. The switches in the maze were controlled by the weight of water and windmill-driven cams -- entirely at random. Betting was skene-controUed. Get your program here! Watch out for cutpurses! A fine show... CosCros stood on the cart, his hands locked to a waist-high bar. Dignitaries were introduced. They took their places at the rope. To a ceremonial flourish of drums, they pulled the cart up the amphitheater slope. At the top the hook was disengaged and a nimble-footed boy dragged it down to the arena, the pulley whirring, to be ready for the next day's ride. The cart was trundled to the launching platform. A pin was pulled and the bar swung forward, locking the prisoner prone, his chin on a rest. "Do you have any last words?' asked the Ceremony Framer. CosCros raised his head and shouted, "Beware the Question Framers -- " but the roar of the crowd drowned his voice. The Ceremony Framer pulled the long lever and the cart rolled down the incline. It switched left as the drums beat, was masked by potted trees, zagged right and burst into full view through a sheet of water falling down the artificial mountain. It slowed on a rise and stopped on a turntable. It chose one of seven tracks and eased down into a tunnel. It burst into view, rocketing diagonally across the slope. It turned on a banked curve near the bottom, spent momentum up the hill and came to rest on an elevator that took it nearly to the top again. Off and around, it ran directly for the post, spun on a pivot, turned right and ran gently toward the irax stall. The crowd broke into spontaneous applause. It was the finest execution ever devised. History was in the making. And there would be days and sixdays of this delightful celebration. Silent as a cloud the pale gray spaceship settled onto the irax stall. The door opened. The yellow ramp extended. The cart ran into the entryport and the ship lifted. The empty cart fell tumbling through the air and hit the bladders. The maiden shrieked. The ramp sucked in and the door shut. The crowd screamed rage. The spaceship lifted, twinkled, dissolved and was lost in the sky. "What took you so long?" said CosCros. H e was dizzy and belligerent. He had given up friends when a friend tried to kill him and here he was again, trusting people. The star men surrounded him, PeTersNel, MariAn, WilDysE, Jen, Fay, BranDer, BarBarA and CaMila and CaMila and CaMila. She had drawn a tawny dot in the middle of each navel. He sighed, looked up to meet her laughing eyes and was overwhelmed by a different sort of dizziness. "You had to find out for yourself," said PeTersNel. "You're not Earthmen," he blurted. CaMila said, "Told you he was smart." "We're each from a different world," said BranDer. "Replacing Earthmen who died long and long ago," said Fay. 'Taking their jobs and their names." "Honor and continuity," said MariAn. The skene of Tintenbar shrank in the screen. The other islands drew in from the edges until CroCros could see the whole double loop cast in the sea, blurred by clouds. The picture stayed as the spaceship followed the world's rotation at a constant height. (bsCros cleared his throat. "And now?" "Now you make a choice for your world," said PeTersNel. Just as he had seen them the first lime, they were the contradictory )eople again. They were joy and sorrow, challenge and resignation -- I hey were reason and emotion inexIricably mixed. They were men and women -- mankind. "It has to do with time?" said (bsCros. "The real Earthmen -- how long to make steamcars?" PeTersNel understood. "From a slationary steam pump built to lift water, to an engine that lifted men to llieir single moon, a hundred and sixty -- plus some -- years. Not four lifetimes. It took them less than two lifetimes more to build this ship." "The impetus must run ahead of resource use," said Fay. "Otherwise we crest and falter and fail," said Bar Bar A. "How did Earth make it?" "To the stars?" said Jen. "Raging al the finish line, choking and screaming, running through the foresl butting down trees, mad, bloated, horrid -- and triumphant." "What is the choice I must make?" PeTersNel said, "Keep in mind I hat the bracelets should interrupt I he long downhill slope. The curve will break sharply and, in reaction, surge up and high." "The tempo will be changed for all who live," said CaMila. "The bracelets are subtle things," said WilDysE. 'They communicate, reflect emotion -- and they defrange at death." His eyes were hard and compassionate. "Or they can be ordered to defrange and cause death." Too many people? Drown half the population. Or only one out of three? More food, more houses, more skeul for the rest -- and how many would survive instant democracy? Kindly kill them now instead of letting them starve? He was suddenly sick with responsibility. "What is good?" "We don't know." "No," said CosCros. He looked at them all. "We've done enough. No!" CaMila said gently, "Each of us made the same choice." "And the Earthmen?" "The most advanced race -- " "They never made that decision for another world -- " "We follow their pattern -- " The screen showed the floating ice of CosCros' world. They were leaving. The infinity symbol -- of EngUsh notation -- was fading into the bright mottled ball, floating serenely in black and star-pricked space. "To save Earth, they defranged two out of three." CosCros shuddered. "All we can do is the best we can do," he said. He was not satisfied. The vaulting spirit, the use of power, passion and impassion all came to a dull -- and blazing -- irreducible. "Keep trying," he said and joined the crew.  Every prison wall poses this treacherous question -- which side is the outside? T he television set went first. Ruining it took me a long time because it was imbedded in the wall. The generator was due for a clobbering, but it had to be spared until I found out what the weather was like. I vented my frustration on the communications board, tore out wires, smashed tubes, made pulp of the earphones that had relayed no sounds for years. The next to die was the library. Into the incinerator it went, half a shelf at a time. I killed practically everything in the house that represented a barrier between me and the world. After clearing away some of the debris in the living room I set to work on one of the walls at a spot where there was supposed to be a window. The surface was so hard it broke three drill points right away. One of the points finally dug in and I settled down to some steady labor. It had been the right spot to rammed through and glass tinkled. That sound of breaking glass made the beast in my head go wild. For a few minutes I was a madwoman. Sick with the longing to escape, I thrust like a maniac with the drill. All my weight was against it as it passed beyond the window and struck something hard -- then the drill slipped out of my hands and I fell to the floor. I couldn't believe it. There should have been free space beyond the glass. The drill ought to have gone on through. Scrambling up, I jammed my nose against the hole and sniffed like a starved dog. Did I smell fresh air? Christ, was the wind blowing out there? By the time I drilled a square of holes around the window I was pooped and quivering. It took a few minutes to knock out the square with a hammer, then the glass, then... I came up against another solid wall. It was impossible, but beyond the glass was another plastic surface harder than the one inside. The second wall was stronger than any drill point in the house and it had no business being there. Somebody had been pretty clever. They had walled up my house without my suspecting they were doing it. I sat in a chair and stared at that shiny square. No drill nor any other hand tool would ever make that wall yield. No matter. I would wait until morning (a figurative expression) and then I'd blow the wall away. I had plenty of powder. Chad used to work in munitions. that the glare of the light hit me directly in the face. As I stared at the bright bulb I congratulated myself for having decided to get out. It wouldn't be bad. At first the thought of the plague had paralyzed me so that I was afraid the two needs would grip me forever in an emotional crossfire. I had to have some space about me and I had to avoid contamination in case the bug was still out there. But it couldn't possibly be. Such a long time had passed. There were thousands of tracts like this one -- a lot of people. We locked all the slum people out and quarantined ourselves away from the sickness. The slummers and their rats were responsible for the plague in the first place and it was their misfortune that they couldn't finance their own safety. They had to go on mingling with one another and they either lived or died. We on the other hand had money to burn and we used it to save ourselves. Our houses were made completely selfsufficient. We planned to do a little work and put the finished products in pneumatic tubes that would transfer everything to a storage place where it could be picked up when we all came out. The automatic dispensers contained plenty of food and we didn't need doctors because we knew internal medicine and surgery. Communications systems were installed in each house and in the beginning we called our Congressmen daily. We were sorry for the people on the outside but felt they should have worked harder and earned more and saved. Things changed. After the first year had gone by the Defense people suggested that a team go out and look the situation over. The Vice President thought it was too soon. Another year went by and again the suggestion was made. No one seemed to think it was a good idea. They said wait. We did. We waited for a long time and eventually we stopped talking to each other on the radios. Sleep was slow in coming. After awhile the light hurt my eyes. I closed them and endured the pain of a headache, tossed on the bed, tried not to think of Chad, then decided to go ahead and think about him. I should have thought more about him in the beginning. Who was it wrote about:... what might have been? Such was the star by which men set their course. Chad is -- was -- insane. Which tense applied? "There are just the two of us now, pet," he said. "I suppose we should thank God that we didn't catch the bug, but how would you like to be stuck in here by yourself? Well, aren't you going to answer me?" We spent that first day watching television. It was as it had been in the days after we were married -- with him looking at me most of the time and not at the screen. "Remember that old passion I had for cooking?" he said. "Now that we have so much leisure time I think I'll start giving you a hand in the kitchen." It wasn't quiet enough in the house. I tried keeping the TV off but whenever Chad had one of his pacing seizures he turned it back on. Occasionally I switched off the air-conditioning, but then he complained about the stuffiness. He was never slow to complain. "Why do we have to pretend every day from one to three o'clock that each of us is alone in the house? It's weird. I get depressed when I can't see or hear you. I'm beginning to feel as if I'm locked in a big tomb." Later he said, "You're kidding. Why do we have to extend our separation periods? Two hours are plenty. And I disagree with your theory. Mental health doesn't depend on solitude and silence...Human beings aren't -- oh, hell, it's just that I don't want to be completely alone. I've grown jumpy since you moved into a room of your own. I have the feeling that all the substance is being sucked out of the house, as if I were being drawn into a vacuum where there's nothing but me." At one time he was in love with the library. "I swear the damned place is like a museum," he said. "The second I go in and shut the door behind me the rot sets in. Why can't I leave the door open? I don't make any noise. Besides, the place is a museum. All those rows of microfilm boxes are like the eyes of history staring at me. What has become of us? What are we doing here? We made a mistake, pet. This is no answer. Now wait a minute -- calm down. I didn't say anything about going out." There was the radio. "Mind if I make a call, pet? To whom? To anyone. Okay, okay, I've forgotten it already." Later; "Whoever makes the first noise has to reward the other? My God, that's a kid's game. Hey, wait a minute. I'll play if I get a reward first. No? Then I won't play. What's the matter with me, anyway? Have I got bad breath all of a sudden? Surely you can't be enjoying yourself. I never see you, I never hear you -- what is so fascinating about being all by yourself?" I should have thought of him. "No, I don't want to play any more. No, I won't lower my voice. I like the sound of it. I like any sound. I wish the place were overrun with mice. I wish we had a cat or a dog. So help me -- oh, hell, I'm sorry, pet. For God's sake -- I said I'm sorry. You needn't act like I've burst your eardrums. What do you mean I'm disintegrating?" H e began playing his phonograph. As if it weren't bad enough, he selected the worst pieces to play -- hop junk from the bebop era. "You'll just have to move," he said. "My room is at the far end of the house, so you're the pne who will have to put distance between us. You don't have to, you know. You could come in and listen. It would do you good. We could dance. How long has it been since we've danced? Or touched one another? Don't you get hungry for the touch of skin? Here, love, take my hand. All right, don't take it, just touch it. Touch, touch, touch me. Oh, goddamn, I haven't got leprosy, I only want to be reminded that I'm alive. The senses have to be stimulated or you're dead, I don't want to be dead standing up." He had to stop following me. My pressure point had been tapped and from then on it was a choice between using defense mechanisms or popping a capillary. "Why can't I come in?" he often asked -- too often. "What are you doing in there? It's so quiet. I can't hear anything. Please open the door. I know you're only sitting there. Let me sit with you. I won't make any noise, I promise. We'll sit together and think quietly, or maybe we'll chat about something. Honest to God, pet, I don't think I can stand this much longer." After one such display he went back to his room and began beating his drums. "I'm doing no such thing. For God's sake, I don't own any drums. And I haven't played the phonograph for days. I'm merely sitting in this damned chair staring at the damned wall. What else is there to do?" He never stopped drumming. "What the devil is that? Oh, come on now, what do you think you're doing? I tell you I'm not pounding drums and I haven't worn cleated boots since my school days. You can't be serious. The house is big enough for us both to enjoy a little peace and quiet without this sort of thing. I'm warning you, pet, that insulated stuff won't come down once it goes up. You seal those borders and you'll have a house permanently divided into two sections. Oh, God, what's happening to us? What are we becoming? Do you hear me? Don't you care? Damn you to hell, go ahead and do it. Thanks for leaving a door in the thing. Once in a while I'll come out and see if you're still alive." He had everything he needed on his side and I had all I needed on mine. Or so I thought. I might as well have been in Africa and the Rose Bowl simultaneously. The drums, the bebop and the boots. The drums. The bebop. The boots. The son of a bitch. The maniac. Was that a scream? "I can't work! Sometimes I think it would be a good thing if instead of making dynamite sticks and caps I made a bomb and blew up the whole tract. I can't figure it out. Something's happening and I don't know what it is. I'm starving to death for substance. I wake up from dream conversations and I want to shriek because they aren't real. I think of bodies all around me and I want to reach out and grab them. I want to strip naked, have an orgy, wallow with a hundred women, but most of all I want to hear them. I want to hear something besides my own heartbeats. Please, please, please, please, please -- " Something was making a din so terrible that my brain cells threatened to shatter. How did you track a noise t o its source when it was everywhere around you? I did the impossible. I tracked that sound from room to room until I came to a small opening in a thick wall. There was the source of my agony. The sounds, the screams from far off, the thumping from the other side of a door that was no longer open. Somebody had been right. Nothing short of dynamite would break that sealing. Defense mechanisms were impregnable. work on the wall. It took hours to drill indentations deep enough to hold the caps, hours that rubbed my hands raw and broke my back, yet they were hours sublime because for the first time in years I was doing something that had a sane purpose. Not exactly as in Jericho, a section of the wall came tumbling down with a loud crack of dynamite. My claustrophobia was driving me wacky, making my hands fumble, putting a watery sensation in my knees that sent me to the floor a half-dozen times before I managed to get my head through that hole. I spent five minutes running through my vocabulary of profanity "I loved sf as a child and I still do," says Doris Piserchia. "I write it for fun -- and because it lets me say anything I please. Sf is so much less restrictive than the mainstream -- " Nevertheless, it was not until her late thirties that Doris became a writer. We asked how she finds the time to keep it up, now that she has five children. "For me, writing is possible only when I stick to a strict schedule. I start working in the morning as soon as the last child gets on the school bus. If I'm facing a deadline or doing something especially interesting. I'll put in time in the evenings as well." Not only has Doris a busy life; she has an exceptionally busy mind. Consider her goals, and her views on sf's future. "I intend to make women prominent in my writing. This is a difficult thing to do, since I'm as conditioned as everyone else. In literature, females have few lofty motives or sexual musts, and since writers learn from' reading they tend to write in the same vein as others before them. Besides, putting down on paper what I know so well in my head is like superimposing myself on a bull's-eye for readers to throw darts at. "We had the Nuclear Age, and now it is Minority Groups time. We're all saying, 'Look, I'm as human as you are.' Whether or not we're listening to each other is questionable. "But science fiction can handle the gripes and the dreams of everybody. It is a wide-open field, and that's why nearly all writers will probably land in it sooner or later. More than one writer has claimed that sf is the literature of the future... it may very well turn out to be true." the near future. because of all the times to break out I had to do it in the dead of night. There was nothing to do but wait for morning. Morning never came. It might have helped if I'd gone to bed and rested. I sat in my big chair with my eyes on that hole and waited for the sun to come up. Patiently I waited for my beast to die. There must be space, beautiful emptiness that drained the pressure away from one's bones, wonderful sunshine that sped to infinity, vigorous wind that first belted and then fled, little drops of rain falling from far overhead. I never once looked at my watch but eventually I realized that if morning were ever going to come it had already come and was out there beyond that hole. I still saw nothing but blackness. A flashlight was no good, showing me only the cracked sidewalk the shiny surfaces on the nearby houses. A quick rummage in the basement to grab up a couple of flares and a beacon -- then I crawled out through the hole and walked up the street. I had to move with caution to avoid the holes made by rain and wind over the years. I stood in the middle of the street and set up the beacon. It was a good view I got of whatever that thing was where the sky should have been. Because of the condition of the streets I knew it had been put up recently. It was an endless length that glinted in the beacon's light like a sheet of solid steel. It was everywhere overhead. I know because I tracked that lightless cage from one end to the other and back again, and I didn't quit until the flares were gone and the battery in the beacon was as dead as the chunk of heart in my chest. Now I sit in my big chair and do nothing. The hole in the wall is sealed because a crypt isn't a proper crypt when it opens to the outside. There's an outside beyond the hole but it is just a bigger crypt and all that quiet and darkness is more than I can take. As long as I have to be bqried I'll take it small. I may be the only one who knows the secret. They survived out there, and now they've giving us back in kind. We locked them out, they have locked us in. They are more humane than we were. They haven't contaminated our air or cut off our food supplies. We will go on living until the last one of us is gone and then maybe they'll stop building things on top of us. One day they will excavate the whole works and start all over again. I sit in my big chair and worry. My sources of diversion were destroyed by my own hand. I know that one day I won't be able to control my longing to talk to somebody. The only one around is Chad.  Great new science-fiction titles from... World renowned ghosthunter perhaps the greatest living authority on parapsychological phenomena, combines his great talent and experience to make this hair-raising tale featuring Randy Knowls, psychic detective. AN# #  J! jjc sjc dfc dfc )c sfc sjc jjc oft sjc sjc ojc tfc t tfc ift oft "Excellent "--N.Y. Post. Including top stories by John Brunner, R.A. Lafferty, Michael G. Coney, Harlan Ellison. AN# Including stories by Hugo awardwinners James Blish, Keith Laumer, and the Nebula award-winning "Occam's Scalpel, by Theodore Sturgeon. (please add # for shipping) Life fought on, though the planet itself was dying... vr I From The Manual of Ships and Units of the Fleet FleetDoc l-G#B,#thed. Unit Symbol. Center: confederate sunburst with crimson cross affixed mid-seal. Astride: crimson Andromeda Firebird at unfurled salute. Below: crimson Islamic scimitar with scabbard hung. Commission. All-purpose reinforceable armor-infantry regiment; male anthropoid staff; ground force assignments. Decorations. Confed Cit for Unit Valor (#); Grand Mershiesh Seal for Spirit of War (#); Fit Cmpgn Star for Gallantry (#); Unit Cit, Terran Order of Glory (#); Courage Colors (Terra, Pan-Mohshu, Mershiesh, Gif.) History and Campaigns. Commissioned # S.C., formerly the #rd Ancillary Armored Regiment Pan-Terran Forces; first assignment aboard Fleet Cruiser Chardunmay with additional non-Terran staff; first commander Capt. Hoisie Maighan, hero of the Battle of Mabrit. Campaigned at Beta Chevrops against the Longside Pirates; at Mershiesh in the Battle of Shuus against the Imvir; at Tri-Mepo in the Battles of Ixquilovir and Baidn against the Imvir Remnant and Kilton Pirates; at Zetha in the Battle of the Mouth of Brythis against the Gutu marauders. The Protective Directory of Zetha was militarized in # S.C. and mandated to the Terran Board; at the same time, assigned to the Terran Fleet. The unit performed reflexiveprotective duties until # S.C., when, in a strange circumstance... rocks, up a slope rising to a plateau. He stopped his climb and listened carefully. The red earth of the desert was still and windless that day, and there were no sounds but those made by living things. He recognized the whir and rumble of an approach ingfl # . Below, at the base of the slope, he saw it move into sight, fat and shiny. It jiggled and meandered, steering around the bigger rocks that it could not climb. Its sound was a whine like a baby's hunger cry. Hjek knew that these things had watchful eyes and could see a great distance. He crouched, grinding his heels into the dirt beneath him. Slowly he laid his long-bladed sword and his spear over his lap and leaned his elbows on his knees. He minded himself that he must be like the bluk, the giant rock sloth. He had even seen a bluk when he was a boy. Now no one saw them. Like every kind of great hunting beast, they were no more. The Old Gutu remembered how the f'gaiin had slaughtered. No hunting beasts and very few Gutu remained. Hjek himself was a great warrior. He had stamped out the teeth of seven of the f'gaiin that he killed. He was clever and could make the Old Gutu laugh and nod their heads at him, and his body and spirit were strong so that women admired him. But Hjek was right to fear the strangers. They were deadly, especially the ones that wore gray and rode inside the shiny beasts. The thing below picked its way all around the slope. Hjek lowered his inner eyelid, clouding his vision. He could still watch the form of the thing moving. In his mind he thought of his new woman. She was young and ardent. He dropped one hand to the ground and scratched the warm dirt and wondered if she would soon be fat and let out a boychild. He had made his first woman fat, but then the strangers had caught and killed her. It had been a very bad thing. It had made him weep and for many days his anger had been too great for even his brothers to come near him. Hjek raised his inner lid. The creature had stopped almost directly beneath him. Tightness filled his throat and his body tensed. But the thing moved on and Hjek relaxed and thought that it looked like a big bug. The comparison pleased him. He smiled. And then Hjek expanded on his idea. He made a picture in his mind -- in it the creature looked exactly like the awkward beetle which sometimes fell from the elephant trees. Hjek had crushed some of these under his foot. In his mind he imagined his foot crushing the thing below. He was happy with himself and laughed. He would go home and tell everyone his idea. They would laugh, even the Old Gutu. Hjek was clever. He laughed so hard that he closed his eyes and his body rocked with mirth. When he opened his eyes again, still aching with joy, he saw that the creature had turned onto a ramp of slag and was climbing the slope. It had already come very close to him. H jek was seized with terror, for he could feel that the thing's eyes were on him. He jumped to his feet and searched for the best way to run. Near his head a rock shattered and splinters flew into his face. Hjek slapped at his cheeks and bloodied his palm. The creature was drawing much closer, screaming in its climb up the slag, and its guns spoke. Rocks shattered and sprayed Hjek with fragments each time it fired. Suddenly Hjek's body Was thrown down on the rocks. He felt a terrible burning in his bowels. He scrambled up and pulled his body over the nearest rocks. Everywhere he went rocks broke up and showered him and he could see blood gushing from his side. The thing had thrown something into him. He was hurt badly. Hjek reached the crest and crawled onto the plateau, but the creature had made the easy climb up the slag and bounced over the crest just behind him. Hjek started to run away at an angle. In the center of the plateau he saw a tall column of rocks the thing could never climb. He opened his lungs and ran as hard as he could, lowering his inner lids so that his eyes did not burn. The thing screamed behind him and the guns started to fire. Hjek opened his eyes and saw the ground before him blowing up puffs of dust. And then he was struck. A chunk of his thigh flew away. He was hit in the right shoulder and stumbled. He was hit three times over his body, each time hard, and he spun round and dropped to his knees. He saw the creature grow large, flames rippling on its face. Hjek was close to death. He could not draw his breath and his body felt broken. His inner flesh seethed. He stumbled to his feet and tilted his face to the sky, wanting to gasp, trying to call to the sun. Anger seared his brain. He cocked his spear arm and pitched his whole body. His spear flew away and then his lungs expelled their air and flecks of blood and a thin piercing scream -- the death scream of his race. Hjek's body shuddered and collapsed. The creature stopped near the body and the top popped open. An animal that looked like Hjek jumped down. He was like Hjek, but he was smaller and his body was covered with gray fabric. He wore the jeweled insignia of a commander of the fleet. Hjek's flesh was the color of his world and so he had worn nothing at all. His body was spread-eagled, face to the sun. His eyes were open but saw nothing. His sword lay behind him, fallen from his hand. The f'gaiin stalked cautiously around Hjek's body. He stopped. With both hands he tugged at the sword and dragged it to Hjek's hand and dropped the pommel into Hjek's palm. Hjek, of course, did not know that he had been done this kindness. II the star system Omega Medusa. Discovered # Sirenian Calendar by Gudwar Zetha, contract explorer for the Galactic Confederacy. First GC scientific expedition # S.C. under Amrer Xz and K.K. Patrick. Zetha is best known as a source of numerous rare minerals, some essential to ship hull construction. It is a self-terminating planet due to an aberration in its orbit and axis. The axis inclines sharply toward its star and Zetha follows a reducing orbit, which draws it into Omega Medusa. All present life forms will perish under increasing temperatures. Also, stress on the planet creates violent geologic shifting, which may in time cause the body to break up in space. The southern hemisphere of Zetha is largely frozen to the #th parallel. The central belt of the planet is marine and has a complex marine ecology. The terrestial ecology is concentrated in the northern hemisphere, which is a single continent to the #th parallel. The polar cap to the #th parallel is hot and arid. A single people live on Zetha, primarily in desert caves and in the surrounding forests. They are a primitive humanoid: Homo Gutu Zethanus. A cousin species of sub-People hominids dwell in the dense forests. They are commonly called Zethans and were mistakenly classed as a People with the Confederacy until the error was corrected in # S.C. In # S.C., Zetha was entered into the Galactic Confederacy as a non-participating protectorate with a civil directory. The directory was militarized in... From The Little Handbook of Planets, a pamphlet by Dr. Horace Amayn Woo R obinson dosed the Gutu 's fingers over the swordhilt with his foot. They cared to die with their weapons gripped. He knew much about them. For seventeen years he had chased the Gutu, hounded them, butchered them in the desert. And for seventeen years he had watched the sun come closer. The heat of this world had sucked him dry. He was a cinder, spare and lean. Robinson snapped up the visor of his helmet and squinted. He stood on the tenth parallel. The searing sun was overhead. It was early morning. So bright was the light that he could not distinguish the timeless still shapes nor the dull red of the desert. He pulled the screen back over his eyes. The commander's skin was dark, colored by birth by the mixing of his ancestors and blackened under the Zethan sun. His hair was a tangle of black wool. His eyes were blue so dark that some men thought them black, and his gaze had power that pierced like a stake through a man and pinned his soul to the wall. He was not handsome. The hawks and eagles of his mother Earth resembled him. The warrior lay on his back staring at the star to which he prayed in life. Already the reddish irises were faded, the eyes dry. This was a big one. Robinson leaned over the corpse to estimate its length. Over eight feet. He jerked back his head. The odor of blood mixed with the contefits of the Gutu's bowels evaporated from a large hole in the warrior's belly. Robinson kneeled by the Gutu's head. It had the flat face of its race, a heavy browridge and shallow forehead. Robinson reached under the skuU and gripped a knot of black hair. He tugged, turned the head. Twined in the knot of hair were colored strings, "beads and human teeth. This one had killed a half dozen or so offworlders. Robinson thought he recognized the Gutu, a rogue warrior involved in perhaps twenty raids in recent years. He pulled a thin-bladed knife from his boot and sliced through the hair at the back of the head. These souvenirs brought a thousand visigulls from cargo sailors who in turn got four or five times as much offworld. The heat prickled his skin. The moisture fried from the flesh and the flesh stung. He had to go back to cover. He walked to his tractor, threw in the souvenir, then climbed the side and plopped into the cab. He reached overhead and drew down the bubble, locked it in place. The refrigerator blew cool air over his legs. Robinson sighed and reached for the microphone. But when he keyed the transmitter, the emergency power relays shut down the cooler. He kicked the floorboard to switch on the refrigeration again. Commander of a yard full of junk! The #st with its record of gallantry was fit to be scuttled. It was an undermanned gang of assassins, staffed by the fleet's unwanteds and equipped from a scrap heap. Robinson's vehicle was sixty years old. They had plucked it out of the garbage and sent it to him for service -- and it ran only because he paid out of his pocket for parts from private dealers and did his own maintenance. He was constantly afraid for himself and his men. Their creaking clanking dog carriages had broken down in the past and Robinson had the memory of what two days becalmed in the desert could do to a man. Robinson gazed a final time at the body. You are a fine animal, he thought, but it's good you're dead. They looked so much like Terrans. They behaved in many ways like men, but their brains were small, primitive. Once caught in the open they were easy prey to the genocidal machinery that Robinson commanded. Robinson thought it ironic that the Confederacy liked to work the races together, humanoid with humanoid, arachnoid with arachnoid, in order to facilitate understanding. And here the likeness facilitated murder. And the hot face of the sun came nearer. Zetha's brazen mother called her home. Never enough Gutu died. They were tenacious and fierce and deadly in their turn. Robinson wondered if the Gutu knew that the only each other's time. sat on a stump by the gate. He was filled with an inexplicable uneasiness, but thirty-four years as a fleet man had taught him to trust his intuitions. He waited now for the reassurance of seeing his friend and commander. At least he could tell Robinson. Robinson would take heed, be watchful. Robinson had the instinct for trouble, too. Delphinius had been in trouble aU his life. He liked to tell men that and grin. His grin lacked a lot of teeth, and his face was pitted and lacerated, a free-form pattern of scars. Sweat trickled from under his dust-colored curls over the smooth skin of his scalp and dripped into his eyebrows. He dabbed at his face with thick fingers, flicked away sweat. Next to Robinson, Delphinius had been on Zetha longer than any man -- fourteen years. He had shared the anguish of the long campaign with Robinson. Both men had become dry and dessicated in mind and body. Both were unwelcome among their rightful peers. Both were being punished. They had swilled together in hot brandy through hot nights, degrading their natures with the hot and stupid bodies of hairless Zethan apes. Delphinius stared between his chunky thighs and tried to remember a cooler place. He had been so long a fleet man that he had lost the dialect of his native agricultural colony. At home they spoke a blend of Simplingual and frenched Anglic-Terran with moans and gutturals and spatulated vowels. And the vixen Zethan sun had lately burned into his brain vivid memories of Messedorn, the family groves, his father's manicured fields, the stream at Eddys Market and the girls with whole armfuls of pink and orange flowers. He snorted and watched his sweat drip between his legs. He had been a bullish boy, not very bright after all, and too heavy-handed and eager to fight. Exasperated, his father had finally thrown a tote bag at him and said, "Y'll git yer butt up and jine wit' fleet roit noo, bucky bee. Git off!" Delphinius was assistant commander of Gamma Company. Gamma was the star company in the #st. Robinson staffed it with his best veterans and the most likely recruits and used it to spearhead every operation. Gamma was sitting ready to begin the newest of the interminable sweeps. They waited for Robinson who was coming the two hundred kilometers from headquarters at Lake Serenity. The companies of the #st were deployed evenly spaced in a ring around the desert. Each company had its command post in a square cleared of elephant trees. The squares were walled and in the center were half-sunken barracks. Delphinius liked the elephant trees. Everyone did. They gave shade. They were huge plants, some over a hundred feet high, and on their umbrella-frame branches enormous leaves grew. The leaves had a thick cellulose and mucuous skin on top which let in sun but let off no moisture. The sunlight let in by and the humidity trapped under the canopy fed the secondary growth that once nurtured Zetha's big game. The leaves gave the plant its name. They looked like the ears of Terran pachyderms. A man had to be careful that a dead leaf falling did not catch him and knock him down. It had happened. T he sentry pulled open the gate and saluted Robinson's vehicle as it trundled into the compound. Delphinius watched the commander dismount and start toward him. He measured the officer's stride, judged his mood. Robinson was intent, a bit gloomy. All the men watched the commander walk across the dirt. Three troop carriers, dully polished, waited against the far wall. Tenders and drivers who had moved in and out of the vehicles, finishing their preparations, now stood and wiped their hands with rags. The company commander climbed out of his hut and stood rather stiffly at the ready. The six new Vupeculans squatted down to gamble. Robinson strode over to them and kneeled into their circle. One of tliem shuffled handfuls of multicolored disks in his fingers and then, when the others burbled anxiously, scattered them before himself. Bald heads bobbed. A frenzied round of clucking started. They stabbed with delicate fingers and plucked up disks, threw them down again. Robinson played. At the end of the round, Robinson held up his disks. The Vupeculans chortled and made oval smiles with sphincter mouths and their nostrils puckered in and out, meaning no. Robinson was a bad player. He threw in his chips and the others flapped their fingers and argued out the tally. Only their sergeant spoke Simplingual. His head nodded up and down and he greeted Robinson, "Haddo, Comamer. Haddo." Delphinius knew the Vupeculans were cursed to have been sent here. They would all be dead in months. Their race burned up on Zetha. Their blood dried and they always seemed to die at night, weeping and shivering. The last to die would die alone, surrounded by Terrans who did not know his language or his medicine. And he would not even be able to comprehend the compassion in the alien faces that watched his life seep out. Robinson straightened up. "What are the men doing out. Lieutenant?" The company commander grimaced. He was new and he remembered his first meeting with Robinson. The commander had promised to kill him if ever again he set the troops outside in the heat for a regulation inspection. "They wanted the air, sir. It's been cool. Under a hundred and twenty all day." "Well, it's hot topside. A hundred sixty-three at the tenth. Get 'em mounted up and cooled down." "Aye aye, sir." The lieutenant looked at the chief. "Give the order, Mr. Delphinius." Delphinius opened his mouth and took a breath. Rapid-fire orders rumbled out of the chamber of his chest. Petty officers echoed the command. The men of Gamma Company climbed to their feet, lumbered out of the barracks, each lugging his gear. They lined up, threw packs and rifles into the  carriers and clambered aboard. The lieutenant saluted Robinson and pivoted on his heel. Delphinius started at once. "It's got me all tied up, the last day or two, sir. I'm a-fret thinkin' sumpin's up, but I dunno. I dunno." Robinson frowned. He watched the little Vupeculans scamper into the last carrier. The motors hummed and the doors were sealed shut. "We're just going to sweep sector nine. Tremors have been minimal all over the topside for the last two weeks. But there have been Gutu sighted all through the tree line in the sector." "Aye, well. There's been no shakes till now. No doubt we'll doodle into the wrath of hell." Zetha, falling on its face, was subject to grand earthquakes, to random breaking of the crust, volcanic gushers, sudden fissures that unzipped in the blink of an eye and frenetic sprays of steam and gas. A man, a vehicle, a whole army could be swallowed by an abrupt, capricious hunger of the planet for flesh and steel. The disruptive quakes were a peril greater than the Gutu, although wandering warriors often hacked the flesh off those stalled by eruptions. And fierce electrical storms in the brittle air had made surveillance flights and gunships an impossibility from the start. They also -- frequently -- distorted and destroyed radio communication and had made power rays and blasters useless, even dangerous. The #st relied on old-fashioned big-bore bullets to knock down berserk Gutu charges. "I wouldn't worry, Delphie. Five days out and back." D elphinius snorted. Then he abruptly recalled something, and plunged a hand inside his field suit, withdrew a lavender postal tube and handed it to Robinson. "Came with cargo yesterday, sir." Robinson snatched it anxiously and popped it open. He had waited months for this reply. It took his breath and raced his heart to roll open the scroll. The paper was heavy, translucent -- expensive stationery. He blinked at it and pressed his lips together. It had been calligraphed by some scribe in Sirenian script, unfamiliar lettering to a man who seldom had intercourse with patricians. And it was composed in the artful dialect of the Capital, a blend of languages affected by people of affairs. Robinson's letter had been written in terse Simplingual, the only form of composition he had ever learned. He unraveled the phrases patiently. To Commander S. V. RobinGeneral of the Provisional Protective Military Directory of Zetha, Commander of Forces; From C. Frank Markos, President, Markos Presentations, Inc., et alia, etcetera. To my friend Robinson, greetings! I was most flattered and pleased to receive your private post. Flattered that you should look to me for help in a time of serious difficulty -- pleased that the differences of years past do not restrict our continuing relationship. You have served as a brilliant and inspirational example to me. Your heroic exploits at the now famous Battle of the Mouth of Brythis not only enriched me with material for my news correspondence and commercial dramatic presentations, but also provided me an example of stirring courage and manly leadership. I did not neglect to notice your mention of a personal debt and this I concede to owing you after using, without your permission, your name and identity as the basis for a fictional hero. However, at the time I assumed you would not be displeased. I am enclosing a draft against my treasury deposit at Napor Silento in the Antigones, closest to you, for twenty thousand visigulls. You can cash it there at your leisure or the Negotiator at the Napor Silento Currency Services Agency, a Mister Eu, will arrange transfer to your account anywhere for a simple two per cent fee. I would trust no other. As regards the wide-spread corruption and exploitation, which you claim goes on vis-avis the miners and government services on Zetha, I can only caution you to guard the rhetoric of your accusations. It is true I have made much of my name and wealth as a respected news agent and analyst, but my career has been guided by prudent consideration for avoidance of seriously complicated controversy and my long experience in and with the ruling circles of our universe prompt me to advise you to wait solemnly for retirement and... R obinson grunted, snarled and ripped up the letter. The two men watched curiously the pieces float to the ground and lie dormant. "He means to buy me off!" "Sir?" 'This," said Robinson and thrust his finger into the tube. He withdrew a yellow personal draft, tossed aside the tube and began to tear the draft in two. He paused. So much for his crusade for justice. So much really for his fight to save himself and his men from tedious death in hell. Markos had been the last and worst chance. Robinson stared back through his memory at the pallid, clammy little man who had wet his pants in the pitch of battle -- which had been more slaughter than battle -- and then had run off to produce videos about Bloody Jack Robinson and the #st, starring Shane Shang. "Mr. Delphinius." "Yes, sir." 'Take this draft. After we return from this mission, arrange to have this amount put into my treasury account. You can do business with a negotiator, a Mr. Eu of Napor Silento. He comes well regarded. While we're out I want you to figure -- get Busic to help you with the figures -- I want you to figure a fair system of distribution of this money as a prize to the five-fifty-first." "Yes, sir!" Robinson left Delphinius staring at the draft, dumfounded. It had cost him his pride to go begging to Markos. And this is a good example of why, he thought, a man should never bargain with his pride. But the hand that slaps your face may at the same time hold a reward. To announce a prize was an honor and a privilege for an officer, a pleasure almost always reserved to a ship's captain when his crew grappled a floater or disabled an enemy vessel. Robinson was pleased to act like the space-going captain he had dreamed of becoming and would never be. The last prize had been announced to the #st when they had seized the treasure cache of the Kilton Pirates at Baidn and fleet retained a percentage to reward the forces. If they were to seize anything of value on Zetha the mining companies would demand it as compensation for their losses and the directory would fairly well give it to them and swap favor for favor later. Robinson jumped into the cockpit of his tractor, slammed down the bubble and poured himself a glass of Vuito, the lusty orange liquor of the Nuns of Kjimk, pudgy little reptilian females who had found that their divine nectar was worth a fortune in exports. He sipped the Vuito and controlled his breathing, relaxing himself. It had cost Robinson the flower of his lifetime to sweat in the Zethan dungheap. He would take his pitiable rewards where he might. He had not been offworld in eleven years. He was held on emergency orders and he was kept from early retirement by an order of exigency -- and they would no doubt try to assassinate him when he did retire. They had reason to fear him. Robinson shifted the gears in the tractor and rolled out through the company gate. His rabble clattered along behind. Ill sat six to a bench on both sides. But in the third squad the Vupeculans all huddled together by the rear port as was their custom. With each violent shake of the ground they burbled anxiously and squeezed more closely together. It suited the rest of the men who had more room, even enough to lie down. Delphinius had predicted rightly. In two hours, three big quakes had bumped the troop carriers to a standstill. The last had ripped a wide chasm across their path, necessitating a wide detour. Delphinius' voice boomed on the intercom: "Here we go, lads, a big one starboard." The men peered through the ports. Fifty yards from the vehicle the ground swelled and cracked like a fast-baking loaf. The floor of the carrier shivered. Then red vapor shot from the cracks and suddenly a chunk of ground was bjown away and a geyser of steam soared far overhead. Everyone went back to his seat. Sometimes the steam pockets took days to blow out. Finch, a brawny brigrat from Terra Nova, lay on his back, his knees up. He was a scrapper and a chronic fence jumper and the Terran Fleet had finally given up and sent him to Zetha. Finch blinked, tightened his face and quickly broke wind like a small clap of thunder. "Finch, you're a disgust." Brope was sitting at Finch's feet, his arms crossed and his feet stretched out. He was an ox of a man born on Garday. His father was Terran, his mother Shesemii. Frequently the children of such a mating were mules. On that account, Brope suffered a little less than most of the men because he had no sexual appetite. "Me the disgoost?" said Finch. "Why, 'tis yoo, Brope, joost to look at the loomp of fat on yer shoulders." The rest of the men laughed, except the Vupeculans, who kept their own counsel. Brope was the squad leader, but it was all right to have fun with him. He was simple and good-natured. His error had been that he killed a man, inadvertently, in a bone-crushing embrace in an attempt to keep the man from deserting. Brope was innocent but dangerous. Fleet sent him to Zetha. Very few realized he had been there for ten years. Brope also happened to speak a little Vupeculan. He had gotten around in his time. His squad was always given the little men. He tried to explain to the others that the Vupeculans got there like anybody else. In the Vupeculan culture there were seventeen cardinal Disgraces. The six men with Brope had committed one, which was to enter a village looking for imimiv on one of the liege lord's sanguinary days. The six Vupeculans had confessed after reciting the grueling prayers of contrition during a vigil beneath the black obelisk of Oimoidin. In a less enlightened day they would have been punished by having two of the three sperm ducts pared out of the crotch. Now they were assigned to Zetha. "Now, Brope," said Finch, "they tell me here that yoo be knowin' all there is aboot our fine purposes here on Zetha." Finch was a new man. He had been cautioned to set up the right relationship with Brope, which meant to keep a little distance. Brope had religious ideas. But Brope always knew what there was to know about Robinson, Zetha and the #st. "There are no fine purposes on Zetha," said Brope. "Meanin' what?" Finch propped his head on his helmet and stared at Brope from between his knees. "Meaning that." "Well, what is it we be up to then?" "We ride around like so. We go to all the various caves we know they've lived in before and search. Maybe we find an old man or some women, maybe even a buck or two. We kill them and when the time comes we go back and sit." "Well, noo, tell me what this war be aboot." "There is no war." "Well, then, who the hell be I?" "You're Finch and you're a disgust." T he men laughed and Brope thumped his head on his helmet. "Brope, yoo're an idiot," he said. "Finch, here's how it is. You're in garrison. You're police. You protect the good Gutu from the bad Gutu." Finch thought a while. "Ah-hah! But there be no good Gutu." "There you are." Brope stared a while at nothing. "When it all began was when they found this place, see? The miners worked this planet with no licenses. But then the Confederacy come along and told the miners they'd have to negotiate with the natives, the rightful landlords here, which is the way the Confederacy looks at things. But the Gutu are a mean lot and pretty stupid anyway -- and they don't negotiate, see. So the miners come up with a plan to have the little ape people be the natives and they set it up that way, with a tribal synod and a request for a directory. Then the miners just bribed off all the directors who came, and they got the troopers to come cause, as they put it, the Gutu were people" "Ah!" said Finch. "That was when Robinson and this outfit come here." One of the men laughed. "Tell him 'bout the rape." Finch's eyes brightened. "A rape, now." "It was but it wasn't. You see, there was this lieutenant-commander had a little gaf ape that he screwed with. Well, a trooper come by one day and sees her, throws her down and screws with her as well. The lieutenant-commander caught him and court martialed him for rape of a native and all. Well, away off somewhere, some bureaucrat starts feeding all this into his computer for storage and the computer spits it back out and says it can't be rape to rape an animal. That's .when the works got twisted up and the bureaucrats figured it out that the apes can't be the natives. So they made the Gutu the natives again." Brope pulled on his nose and sat placidly staring at the opposite bulkhead. Finch sat up. "So?" He jabbed Brope with his foot. "Well, what's the rest of it, then?" "There isn't any rest of it." "Well, what's Robinson and all them doin' aboot it?" Brope nodded. "There are two kinds of people here. Those who take their money and have a good time messing up the place and those who keep their mouths shut and do the humping. Robinson can't do anything. Last time he went on leave, he went off to the Ministry of Peoples on The Siren and requested an audience and come damn close to getting in. Then they arrested him and shipped him back. It's all he can do to keep us off the field as much as he can -- and he keeps away from Lake Serenity where he's not wanted and where he's apt to wind up cold dead on his ass if he doesn't watch out." "Ah, Brope!" "Ah nothing. This is money you're talking about and plenty of it." Delphinius' voice broke over the intercom again. "Here it is, lads." The carrier stopped and the men went to the ports. It was the Mouth of Brythis. Brope had seen it. He went back to his seat. Brythis was the devil-god of the Utixu who swallowed up in his horrible maw wayward children who stole or pestered cripples or played with their genitals. Brythis seized adults, too, but those he chewed. The Mouth was an immense bowl, more awesome than anything else in Zetha's elaborate, torn landscape. In the mindless past, rifts had formed in the mantle below and moisture had been forced up through the crust. Rushing into the rifts and hollows had come magma and malten minerals, a natural alloy containing all the elements of the planet. Then, in an instant, the bottom collapsed and the ring around it erupted and splashed molten elements high into the air in waves, boils, columns, spirals, and it all froze there. It remained forever, polished, reflecting every shade and color, some of it too bright to look at. From the Mouth the Gutu mined splinters with which they made their weapons. And to the Mouth they had led the #st in the first year of battle. The warriors united. Every man had come, bringing all his trophies and weapons and his boys to carry his extra spears. The #st had found them dancing and shrieking, singing a frantic ululation -- the Gutu exultation over war. And to get to them the #st had been forced to descend the few treacherous trails in column, with the nation of giants wild and surging at their flanks. The Mouth had filled up with slaughter, bodies dumped on bodies, and the living stood on the stacks of dead in frantic defiance. After seventeen years all the bones had finally been carried away. IV R obinson steered the tractor over a ridge, and began a violent joggle to the valley floor. Fourteen troop carriers, a single tank and two scout cars were pulled into a circle below. Mount Misery sat to the north. It hulked above the terrain like a hunchback. Sharp ridgelines radiated from the base of the mountain. The night camp lay in a sandy valley like glistening toys between the mountain's spread legs. A peaked shadow skimmed across the valley floor. As the sun sank the mountain sent its groundcast sniffing for blood. Robinson's vehicle rolled into the circle and parked. The mountain provided an extra half-hour of semidarkness, shade, the illusion of a break in the heat. The men spilled out of their vehicles. A mess crew erected a camp kitchen. A water barrel was rolled into the arena and Robinson went to it, marked the night's ration on the glass measuring tube. The men were free to take what they wanted. Experience and the careful eyes of their fellows told them what was fair. The chief messman handed Finch a plate. "Better eat it before it gets too hot." The messman guffawed. It was an old joke. Finch took the plate and watched Robinson stride around the perimeter, inspecting each vehicle inside and out. According to military custom, Robinson was the last served. Other officers ignored tradition, but Robinson did not. The #st maintained a schedule of strict discipline and Robinson considered it his discipline to keep up the morale of the men and to set an example. Robinson took his plate to a small circle where other officers were eating. He sat with them but just a Uttle apart and chewed quietly, efficiently, at his meal. When finished he dunked his own plate in the sterilizer vat and replaced it in the stacks. Then he moved out of sight. Delphinius stumbled in the gray of night. One trooper played lonesome songs on a mouth harp. The camp had grown quiet. He found the commander lying on his bedroll between two vehicles. Robinson held a slender inhaler, a gold tube containing a euphoric. "Sit down, Delphie. Have a sniff." Delphinius accepted the inhaler. "Thanks, sir." He drew the drugged vapor into one nostril. They were silent a long while. "You were right about the shakes today, Mr. Delphinius." "Damned if I weren't." The warmth of the drug reached the chiefs brain and he sighed. The tense knots in his muscles slackened one by one. "Sir, when does a man know he's up to the end of his hitch?" "Delphie, you and me could've gotten ourselves killed many times over the year. Seventeen and fourteen. That's thirty-one years of nothing to live for. But we never did manage to die. A lot of men have. Maybe now seems like the time if you've quit having a reason to stay alive." "Nope." Delphinius wagged his head slowly. "I ain't put up that way. It's just the feelin' I've got. I keep on dreamin' right along." The chief embraced his own meaty arms. "Things are just breakin' up and I feel somehow the hitch is over -- but I can't really say." He dirugged and stood up. Robinson lowered himself to his bedroll. "Maybe so. My dreams have been getting pretty thin. It's the end of the line when you've got no hope and I can't find any." He shut his eyes and Delphinius moved away. an image of his mother, a fat woman, Jamaican. She had bunched the youngest ones around her and left London for better parts. His old man had been drunk as ever, always dying and never managing to be dead. She had thought the oldest had already gone bad and had left him with his father so that neither would spoil the ones remaining.  wish you'd taken me, he thought. Life would have come out some way other than this. Robinson had gone to school sometimes, just to learn the mathematics. The cargo sailors at the docks -- he had even talked to goldbraided officers, astrogators and pilots -- had told them, "Boy, you want to go up there, you got to know the mathematics." He did well when he studied. When his father disappeared, he kept their room by himself, and he kept up his thieving to pay for it. He whipped the lights out of a Kuzian, a Gif, some Terra Novans, any fool who walked away from the docks into Robinson's dreary slum and looked like he might have money. In time he was even Mr. Crutt suggested that if Robinson could learn to keep up attendance he would help the boy secure a grant to go to the university. He agreed. He had just one ambition. To fly in space. One of those periodic attacks of social conscience that grip aristocrats put him where no boy from his background dared dream of going. One day word simply came that there was a billet for a disadvantaged bright young man at the Galactic University in the Academy of Fleet Science -- and the billet was his! He excelled. He was proud of his cadet whites, thirsted for the regular uniform, dreamed of standing on the bridge as an ensign, rising to become ship's captain, the master. In his class of eight hundred, he always rated in the top five. Where he was weak he struggled until he did weU. In the women's cadet corps had been an unusual girl. She was the daughter of the great Nance Gershon, the industrialist. She was radiant, delectable, a joyful person. And she had ambition. Girls of her class did not follow careers. They were expected to inherit, to become hostesses to the centers of power and to be brood mares to the dynasty. But Stella wanted, before she surrendered to that, to have a few years on the bridge herself. She met Robinson at the Mid-Year Ensemble in which the supplicant cadets were presented. Her betrothed. Cadet Throble, had been ill and she danced with Robinson that night. They fell injudiciously into love. Stella's family cowed before her will, inherited from her father. But they had been alarmed by the proposal that she not only marry beneath her class but that she break an appropriate engagement to do it. Nevertheless, it was to be so. Except that Robinson had been so engrossed in his career that he had never noticed that between the other cadets -- scions of patrician homes -- wound a thick web of alliances. To them Robinson and the few like him were tolerable outsiders. When he courted one of their women he made enemies that stretched from the Academy deep into the fleet. Soon no cadet would share quarters with him. His membership in the Sailors' Club was revoked. His test papers were lost or misgraded. His equipment was vandalized. Finally, frustrated, he confronted Thorble and Thorble called him out. It was permissible for cadets and for officers without assignments to fight duels. Every Terran cadet turned out on the parade field, row on row of white tunics, silent, certain of who the winner would be. And wondering what revenge would be meted out to him. Thorble fell with a gash in his thigh and his nose shattered by Robinson's handguard. It took only a few seconds. The next day Robinson was awarded a commission and an immediate transfer to ground forces, with orders to report to the #st Field Expeditionary Force, then in training. T he drug numbed him, and Robinson fell into a troubled sleep, bothered by heat, too weary to rest. He dreamed and the laughing girl stroked his cheek and her voice was rich and lustrous : Darling, you 're so handsome in whites! Next he stood erect behind the helmsman, trembling, for the helmsman steered hopelessly for the points of light, but one by one each went out and he cried. Sir! Are we lost? and he tried again and the light diminished into nothing: Sir! Are we going to die? But the last light guttered down and then flickered back to life and Robinson answered himself. No, we are just becalmed. Robinson jumped to his feet without knowing why. He heard gunfire, a carbine. He turned and looked out beyond the circle of vehicles. The Gutu were massed and running in, hundreds of them. He pulledout his pistol and fired twice into the heart of the nearest one. Two replaced the fallen Gutu. They were quiet! Robinson fired at both, tore their flesh, but they rushed into him, smashed his chest, and he felt himself hurled into deepest night... He awakened startled and turned his head. A shock went off in his neck and scorched a path up and down his spine. He held his head still and blinked. He was in a room of pink walls, constructed of form-afoam. The walls were warped, irregular. He heard someone murmur and slowly turned his head. A young Gutu leaned on the far wall, his sword in the floor, hands cupped over the pommel. Two females in white cloth skirts sat on the floor by the warrior's feet. It was cool in the room. One female stood and peered at him, creeping closer. "Subu h 'n!" she said and the other female jumped to her feet and passed through a drape that hung over the door. The warrior gazed dull-eyed, not able to comprehend the activity around him. He stared into space. The females watered and fed Robinson and helped him to sit up. They were tall women, but they were young Gutu with firm breasts and soft plaits of hair. Robinson wondered what it would be like to have one. No man had that he knew of. You could not rape a Gutu and the Directory seriously forbade any fraternizing, not that it had ever been possible. Robinson's shoulder was broken. It had been set and wrapped. He thought he had a concussion. Dizziness crowded him if he stood too long. The females steadied him and wiped his face with cool rags. He was treated to this tender therapy for hours. No one spoke. The girls passed in and out and the guard kept his vigil solemnly. At last one of the females entered and said, "Joo -- come -- mmm -- me." Both females helped him walk. He felt like a child between them. They helped him through the drapes and he suppressed a gasp. The remnants of the #st were scattered before him. Over a hundred men, many wounded and injured -- these had been bandaged and splinted. Gutu females moved among the men, serving food and drink, tending to the hurt. Silent warriors lined the walls. He saw Delphinius, arm broken, cheeks slashed. The chief smiled and raised a hand in salute. Four Vupeculans huddled at the chief's feet. Brope was stretched out beside them asleep on a pallet. They were all in a deep cave, a chill dank place, lighted by stolen lamps. Water dripped from the walls and coursed through grooves in the stone floor. Form-a-foam cells had been constructed along the cavern walls. Robinson always wondered how the Gutu used half the things they stole. The females guided him to a side grotto, away from the main cavern and to the door of a form-a-foam cell. One girl pointed for him to go in. Dizziness washed over him. He lurched and went through the door. H e was in a room with a huge desk. The desk had been intended for Commodore Tsu, but the Gutu had stolen it seven years earlier in a raid on the cargo platform south of Lake Serenity. It was of genuine Sirenian diieldwood and cost a fortune. On shelves behind the desk were bound volumes, tapes and a tape reader. Gutu spears and swords were placed along the walls. On one wall was an original portrait of a Synch maiden in mating frock. On the others were star charts, a photo of The Siren and beside it a photo of Zetha, the view from the north pole. The Gutu behind the desk was named Dak. Thirteen years earlier six reasonably bright Gutu had been selected to go offworld to school. That had been a cool period, during which the miners and the Directory stifled their ambitions. The Confederacy had sent cultural enrichment agents to Zetha for a short while. Dak, one of the six, had gone off to school at Beta Amanda. No one had since figured out what became of the educated Gutu. Dak was pointing to a chair before his desk. "Please sit. Commander." Robinson slid into the chair and put his head down for a moment. Nausea tugged at him. Dizziness and fear threatened to make him sick. Finally he raised his head. Dak was studying him, leaning forward on the desk. He wore a green robe and several necklaces. Robinson became aware that he was wearing only his undergarments. The Gutu had a superstitious regard for the few among them who were actually intelligent. These performed the magic of reasoning with alacrity and were frequently obeyed out of awe. "How are you, Dak?" Robinson asked. He straightened himself, struggled to compose his emotions. "I am very well, Commander. It is pleasing to see you are alive. It was not known at any time that you would survive, of course." Dak poured brandy into two exquisite pink crystal goblets. Robinson had lost them in a raid on the officers' warehouse. He could no longer remember when. "Fattening the kill. Dak?" Robinson took the glass of brandy. "Only as a manner of speech. Commander." "I'd like to know what is going on. My men -- " "You have seen your men? Then you know they are in good care. Those who survived. There were casualties." "What about all our equipment?" "That unfortunately will mostly have to be destroyed. What is useful will be kept. It will take some time." Dak raised his glass. "I would like to toast, as your people do, a noble enemy." R obinson acknowledged and sipped his brandy. He drained the glass. The brandy heated his throat and he sucked in air to refresh his mouth. "How long have you been around. Dak?" "For many years now. I returned at night with cargo and slipped away. It was impolite of me, but the sailors had been good enough to let me know that any Gutu was shot at first sight. I thought to avoid the social amenities. "I think you will appreciate. Commander, that this has been carefully planned. We plotted your habits. You have simple habits for fighting simple people. We know your favorite campsites. We know you have become uncareful with your guards. And we had to guide our men to make them fight a different way. It is harder to teach them new habits than it is for your men to learn them." "I'm impressed," said Robinson. "Listen, D, let's get to the point. The Gutu have never tortured people. Why didn't you just overrun us? You've always been straightforward killers in the past." "Yes, straightforward." Dak's bulk was slightly ludicrous behind the desk. When he straightened he loomed up behind it, reducing its scale and importance. He sensed this and leaned forward again. "You have not been tortured, I think." "No." "You will not be -- and I will explain. But first I ask you to tell me one thing, to answer a question. Why have you stayed to fight us so long. Commander? Do you hate us so much? You have become part of our very lives." Robinson thought, looking into his goblet. "I had to get my crystalware back," he murmured. Dak turned an ear toward him. "What is that?" "Nothing." He looked into Dak's eyes. "No, I don't hate you people. Dak. I've been here because I had no choice. I had to do it to survive." D ak nodded vigorously, satisfied. "Good. Then we understand. None of us had any choice. It is necessary to survive, yes? And you will see that when I went off to school it was to find a way for my people to survive." "Why the hell did you come home then? This place is going to blow up any minute. Your people can't see that, but you can. And there's been this-" "You would have killed me if you had found me. I knew this. But I knew as well that you could be our survival. I have had to learn to think in many new ways. In unusual ways. Here." Dak reached behind him and picked up a volume. It was stamped Robinson. "It is volume eight of The Comparative History and Study of Structures and Genetic Affinities of the Anthropomorphic Species of Peoples, by Professor Marg Thqir. Are you familiar with Thqir?" "No. He's a biologist of some kind?" "Thqir, yes. I'm surprised you do not know of him. He pioneered in the study of the humanoid life forms. Let me explain. He observed that certain forms are repeated in the universe. Thqir was a humanoid himself, a Vupeculan, in fact. He traveled to over a hundred worlds. He had many students who assisted his study. He wondered if there were common genetic pools or if adaptation to form were predictable under given circumstances -- " 'That's all academic to me. Dak." "Of course. I was in the library at the university, feeling very sad because I could think of nothing to help my people. They are hard people to deal with. They are not only conservative, they are too stupid to be anything else. They are a difficult people to save. "So I found that book and started to thumb through it to see if my people were mentioned. I looked them up under the genetic tables -- the genotype and also the affinity genotypes. Do you see it? Good, The list at the bottom of the column indicates the species with which the Gutu ought successfully be able to breed." Robinson peered at the page. He recognized the symbols for what in Anglic-Terran is called Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Robinson chuckled and handed the book back to Dak. "So what?' "Indeed, Commander. Do you not see why you are alive?" "You want me and my men to breed with your people?" "Exactly. That is it." "Dak, Dak, be a realist." Robinson shook his head. A tired grin gripped his mouth. "Your people breed and what does it get you? More babies to feed to the guns? Oh, I realize what you're after. More intelligent offspring. So they'll be a little harder to kill -- is that it? Dak, this world is going to blow up. They're going to sit out there and kill you until it happens. They're fools. They love that metal and that money. They'll ride this world to death to get it. The road has run out, man, for you and your people and for me and my men." D ak listened calmly. He spread his hands on the desk. "Commander, more intelligent offspring they will be, no doubt. But also they will have hearty constitutions. Look at the Gutu physically. Look at the adaptations we are capable of. We are a powerful people." "But, Dak, you cannot beat them out there -- no matter how strong you are. And what's the point? There's nothing to save. The world's going to fly-" "You keep saying that, Commander. But perhaps not for a thousand years. Yes, yes, but perhaps tomorrow. I know this. But there are other worlds, better worlds than Zetha by far." "How do you get to them?" "Commander, think for one moment. You are tired. You have lost belief! There are not many Gutu ' left. It is a good thing because without our animals we would only have starved these many years anyway. But suppose that we had a population of brighter children. Now with that and the rights to what they want here so badly, the minerals, the ores -- and they are ours by right -- " Dak slapped the desk -- "we would have something. Your people make bQlions from us, do they not? If we could have the revenues from that for just one year -- but we've not a visigull, not a fobber!" Robinson pursed his lips. "Even without wealth, perhaps -- " "Perhaps what?" "Mercenaries. Your people are hell lo fight. Discipline them, get a smarter generation together, a little more nip and tuck -- " "Now you begin to think. Commander! That is excellent." Dak looked at him for a moment and then said, "I make this proposition on behalf of my people. Those of you who will agree to this -- to father the children and to teach them -- will live out your lives in peace.' "And the alternative?' "Painless death." Robinson held out his crystal and Dak refilled it with brandy. "My hitch seems to be over." "What is that?" "Nothing. You know. Dak, I've kept myself alive so that I could live my life. Does that make sense?" "To me, very much." "Then I agree -- if you guarantee that every one of my men will be treated well." "Some are not useful, not Terran-" "Those are the ones I mean most of all." "Ah! Well! It is done. Commander. A toast?" They drank their glasses down and Robinson stood up. "I will make an announcement to my men in a few hours. I'd like to rest now and I want the guard out of my room." Dak nodded, smiling, and rushed out of the room. Robinson felt his way into the cavern and looked for his cell. One of the females spied him and came to take his arm. The men watched the sagging body of their commander being taken to his bed and they worried. The warrior was gone. The room was cool. The girl put water to his lips and helped him to lie down. Her hands, fretful and tender, touched his many wounds, and Robinson stared into the girl's eyes. He realized that Dak must have selected some of the brighter girls to consort with him. He reached up and ran his fingers over her flat smooth cheeks. "You must be mine, h'm? Well, come on, lie down here. Let's take a little rest."  T hey bought the baby because Elain said she'd go crazy if she didn't have something. "This is the best we have," the salesman said. He showed them the super deluxe model. Turned off, it looked like a life-size doll -- blond hair, blue eyes and pudgy arms and legs. "It cries, wets, drinks. It's programed to sit up by itself, roll over. put things in its mouth. It can stand up holding onto furniture. It will even teethe and grow two inches in the next six months -- and it sleeps twelve or more hours a day." The salesman put in the power pack and flicked the tiny button behind the right ear. The doll kicked in its crib, lifted its head and looked around. "Oh, Jim, he's beautiful," Elain said. She reached over and the baby put out his hand, closed it over her finger and squeezed. She blinked hard, smiled, and the baby smiled back. "May I pick him up?" "Of course." She buried her nose in the baby's neck and nuzzled it as the tiny legs kicked excitedly. The baby laughed. She held it close and its fingers touched her face. "Can we buy him, Jim?" She looked at him, her eyes soft and hungry. She stayed home all day with nothing to do. She'd had goldfish once, then a kitten, then a puppy. The goldfish had died -- probably from overfeeding -- and the kitten and puppy had grown too fast, become independent animals too quickly, not the soft, cuddly things she had fallen in love with. The robobaby looked as though it might work -- it was soft and cuddly, would grow slowly -- and the best thing was that it could be thrown away when she became bored with it. "All of the pleasures of a real baby, none of the pain," the salesman said. "Venerri circuits throughout its body. People who don't know will think you have a real baby." He dropped his voice. "Have you ever seen your wife so happy, sir?" Elain was holding the baby, walking around the store with it, showing it the reflections in the mirrors, cooing to it, rocking it in her arms, her eyes warm and misty. "We'll take it," Jim said. "It needs rest, of course," the salesman said. Jim nodded. The Venerri circuits, which could be programed for anything -- including memory, compassion and even daydreams -- needed at least one hour of inactivity in three. Everyone had seen an overworked robo -- and they were everywhere, doing everything -- suddenly collapse when the Venerris burned out. "It's smaller, so that it needs even more rest." Jim was amazed at the cost. "Because of the programs," the salesman explained. "You can set it to sleep through the night if you want -- it never needs a baby sitter. Shut it off when you leave the house. It can even be programed for sickness -- if you want to practice before having a real baby." "We're not planning on it," Jim said. smiling at it, looking down at it in her arms, laughing when it smiled back at her. "We have to think of a name," she said. "You think of it. It's your toy." "It's not a toy, Jim. Look." She whistled between her teeth and the baby waved its arms and laughed. "It's a baby, Jim, and it's ours. Ours." While she fixed dinner the doll played on the floor of the living room, lifting itself onto the coffee table and chairs, drooling onto the carpet. While they ate she fed it milk from the bottle that had come with it. During the evening, while he worked on papers he had brought home from the office, she played with the baby, then put it to sleep in the extra bedroom. It awoke once during the night. Jim got up -- ordinarily he was a very sound sleeper -- when Elain didn't, went into the baby's room and shut it off. He heard her in the morning. "The baby!" she screamed. "The baby!" He ran from the table to her and saw her looking down at the lifeless doll. "It's dead, Jim. It's dead." She was terror-stricken, ashen and shaking. "No it's not." He reached over, found the small button and flicked it on. The baby kicked, smiled and looked up at him. "It cried in the middle of the night," he said. "You know I need my sleep." "Don't ever do that again." She lifted the baby, held it close and cooed to it. When he came home the spare bedroom had been turned into a nursery. There was new paper on the walls, a crib and a bassinette and a dresser full of baby clothes. Elain was sitting on the floor, watching the baby play with new toys. "You said I could," Elain said when she saw him looking at the paper and calculating its cost. "I did." He crossed to the picture window and looked down at the harbor. "Are drinks ready?" It was a ritual that they each have two drinks in front of the window when he came home from work. The baby started to cry almost as soon as he sat down. Elain picked him up, but he kept crying. "What's wrong with that -- thing?" Jim said. "I don't know. He may be teething. There -- there -- " she said softly. She stood up and went into the nursery. Jim waited for her and, when she didn't come back, followed her. She was sitting in a chair holding the baby, trying to feed it. There was a dirty diaper on the floor and Jim wrinkled his nose in disgust. "They do that, too?" he said. She glared at him, indicating that the baby was going to sleep, and asked him to leave the room. H e went back to the picture window and slumped into a chair waiting for her. When she came out the drinks had turned to junipersmelling water in the pitcher. "I didn't think it would take that long," she said. "He's teething, I think." "Teething -- " "Babies are like that. They teethe, they make messes -- but they're so lovable. Oh, Jim -- " "It's a doll -- a robot," he said, harder than he had to. "No -- don't say that. Think of it as a person." She bit her lower lip, blinked hard. "I want a baby -- someone to love -- so much. It's a baby. It has to be." She looked away from him. "It's not." "Please, Jim. Say it's a baby. You don't know what it's like, being home all day with nothing to do." "You had the goldfish, the puppy." "The goldfish." She almost laughed. "They died. I overfed them, remember?" From the nursery came sound -- they could hear the baby cry for an instant in its sleep. "I need this, Jim." He looked at her, so tiny, so alone. "Okay," he said. She reached out her hand, took his and they sat in front of the window for five minutes until the baby cried. The baby awoke during dinner, too. Elain fed it at the table, holding the bottle with her chin, the baby cradled in her left arm as she ate. "I really think he's teething," she said. When dinner was over, Jim found the instruction book that had come with the baby and read it while she rocked the child and crooned to it. "What kind of a program is the baby on ?" he asked when she had tucked it in for the night. "The one he was on when we -- got him," she said. She looked defensive. "Why?" "I just wonder if he should be awake as much as he is." "He's teething," she said. "Isn't he supposed to sleep twelve hours a day?" "All babies are different," she said. Tlie baby woke once during the night and she left the bed to tend it. He rolled over, angry at being awakened. Elain was feeding the baby in the new high chair when Jim came into the kitchen. She smiled at him, then fixed his breakfast -- though he had told her many times he didn't need it -- as the baby played with its cereal. When he called home at noon he could hear the baby in the background as he talked to her. When he came home the baby was in the playpen and Elain was watching it. She fixed drinks and they sat in front of the window while the baby cooed and gurgled behind them. "Isn't he beautiful?" Elain said. He nodded, knowing it would please her. "Do you think Byron is a good name?" "Byron?" "For the baby." "Fine." "I mean -- do you really like it?" "Yes." He reached to touch her face and she kissed the palm of his hand. The baby started to cry. E lain sent out birth announcements, called a christening service and arranged for a short ceremony. On a shopping trip with the baby she signed up for a photography gimmick-one picture a week for a year. She joined a Young Mothers Club. She told Jim that she was happier than she had ever been before and he believed her -- she smiled more now, laughed more often and seemed like a young girl again. She was also more tired than she had been before. Byron woke up once or twice a night and seemed to be awake all day, but that didn't seem to bother her. She had never been an intellectual -- in spite of her college education -- and holding the baby, taking care of it, sacrificing for it, seemed to fill a need in her that had not been hinted at before. She had always been lonely, she said, but he had never guessed at the depth of her need to be with someone. It was all Byron now. He would wake in the middle of the night and Elain would go to him, feed him and rock him back to sleep. He crawled on the floor, drooling onto the carpet and destroying magazines. He wet himself often, threw up onto Jim's best shirt one afternoon when he held the child at Elain's insistence. Elain didn't want drinks in the afternoon any more -- she forgot to make them several times, rarely finished the one she made for herself -- although it was she who had begun the custom, as she had begun most of their rituals that made them different, she said, from all the other people who had ever lived. The baby was there constantly, demanding to be held or changed or fed, having to be lifted away from dirt, breakables and electrical outlets. "I don't think the baby should be awake all the time," he said. "It's just healthy, that's all. We wouldn't want a sick baby, would we?" When he looked again for the instruction book he found the thing more tattered and torn than he had expected it to be. He knew that she had been using it often. "Have you been changing the program?" he asked, knowing that she had, knowing that she was doing something to keep the baby awake and active. "Look how healthy he is," she said instead of answering. She lifted Byron and touched his mouth. "He has a tooth already. You can feel it." She made Jim run his finger over the baby's gums. He could feel a tooth under the softness. "It's a tooth," he said. "You don't sound very impressed. Don't you care?" "I care, about you." "You should care about the baby, too." She turned her back on him. He looked at the instruction book in his hand and decided to call the salesman. X mandatory .for that machine," the salesman said. "You've seen that it -- uh -- digests?" "Too well." "That's a special formula. When the machine is resting, either turned off completely or just when the child is sleeping, the chemicals actually rebuild and strengthen the circuits." "In other words, she's really feeding it?" "It only needs one or two feedings a week. Most of the rest is wasted, but the owners like to think they have a real baby. Many feed them four times a day. They feel motherly -- and it's good for them.". "It's the lack of rest that bothers .-,.# me. "The machine has to be rested." The salesman looked down for a moment. "She likes the doll quite a bit?" "Yes." "Some young mothers are overzealous at first. The doll is made for about a week of overuse." "We've had it three." "You've never had a baby before?" "No. We had a puppy once. Goldfish. She overfed them." "Some women do that. They love too much." The salesman shook his head slowly. "You'll have to make her understand." Elain wouldn't understand. "It's because he's so healthy that he's awake so often," she said. "He's only awake because you keep him awake." "I need him." She picked Byron up and held him close. "It's not good for him to be awake so much." "You're just jealous," she said. "I need someone to love, that's all. You have your job and you can't love me the way Byron can. I thought you could, but it's impossible. I need him, Jim." "Okay," he said. He knew she had never been so content and he listened while she told him what Byron had done -- climbed onto the coffee table. drank from a cup, played peek-a-boo. She had taken him shopping and people had told her what a nice baby she had. #  drink?' TT she asked. He nodded; it was the first time in five days she had asked. She put the baby onto the floor and put ice cubes into the pitcher, splashed some vermouth on top of them. Byron started to cry. "I think he needs a change," Elain said. "Will you add the gin, dear?" She ran into the nursery with Byron in her arms. Jim crossed to the window. Down below he could see a freighter being pushed upriver by tugs, a barge loaded with garbage going the other way. He poured gin onto the ice cubes and stirred. Elain came from the baby's room before he had poured the drinks. She put Byron on the floor near his newest toy. He laughed and clutched at it. She came over to Jim, kissed him and held out her glass. He poured her drink. They clinked glasses and sipped. "You do understand?" she asked. "Of course," he said slowly. "Isn't he beautiful?" Elain looked at the baby. It was standing at the coffee table, holding the top with pudgy hands, reaching for the magazines just out of reach. Elain smiled, said "Hi, baby," and the child turned to her and beat his hands on the table in excitement. "He is beautiful," Jim said. "Did he rest today?" "A little," she said. Which probably meant not at all. Byron had been awake at seven in the morning, had been awake when Jim called home at eleven and Elain had taken him shopping in the afternoon. It was now past five. Ten hours. And it would be awake until about nine. It would then awaken at least once during the night. About eight hours of sleep -- and supposedly it needed twelve. They were both watching Byron when he fell. One moment he was standing, holding onto the table, and then he tipped to one side, thumped onto the floor and lay there not moving. Elain dropped her glass and ran to the baby, skidding to a stop on her knees beside it. She lifted it and looked into its dull eyes. It was breathing and tried to smile back, but the mouth was crooked and the look was pitiful. "Jim. It's -- sick." "Easy, dear." He kneeled beside her and looked at the doll in her arms. Funny how much it looked like a doll now. The hair was false and too thick, the color in the cheeks too red. It was stiff, hard -- not th:e way a real baby would feel -- as though it had already been made up by a mortician. It kicked convulsively and... "It's dead. It's dead!" Elain screamed. She held the doll in her arms and rocked back and forth with it, moaning, "My baby, my baby." "Easy, dear. Easy," he said, thinking of the money it had cost, of the furnishings and accessories they had purchased. "I want my baby," she moaned. "I want my baby." "It will be all right," he said. "We can do other things, go on vacation-" "My baby." "There are other babies. We'll get one." "I want this one." He took a deep breath, lifted her tear-stained face in his hand and looked at her. It had never occurred to him until now that she was not pretty. "It's not a baby," he said. "It is a doll. A toy. It was never alive -- and it can never be dead." "It was my baby." She was angry now. "I loved it." "I love you." "Don't you care about the baby?" "It isn't a baby." "It is!" She fell against his chest, the limp doll in one arm, sobbing. When she stopped shaking, he put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her. He lifted her hand and put it to his mouth, kissed the tips of her fingers and the palm of her hand. "I'm sorry," he said. He watched her blink away tears. "You don't care," she said. "I thought you would, but you don't." The hand she had on his face reached behind him and shut him off. He fell heavily onto his side and she sat on the floor, holding the baby in her arms, weeping softly.  Continued from page # passionate observation. It is a little wearying to read this kind of shriek; surely the truth stitches in and out of both their fabrics and will emerge in its good time. Ursula K. leGuin's The Lathe of Heaven (Avon, #o:) is out in a handsome paperback. If you haven't read it, you're impoverished; enrich yourself. Lester del Rey's welcome collection, Gods and Golems, contains my very favorite sf story, For am a Jealous People-, rereading it after all these years, I still think so, doubled. Another welcome collection is A Pride of Monsters by James H. Schmitz. (Collier, #) which includes Greenface -- l think, his very first published story -- and The Pork Chop Tree, and three other good ones. A nice package. I'm going to steal a little space here to tell you about something Wina and I are into. It's hard to say just when it began -- each of us, long before we met, had worried away at the basic thinking, but it was Wina who really made it happen. Without being faddists or back-to-nature freaks we've started to grow various kinds of sprouts right in the kitchen, at about lU a pound (vs. # in the supermarket) and we've started to raise rabbits, which give us highquality meat for # -- #t a pound, plus pelts which we are accumulating toward a bedspread and jackets. We bake our own bread -- lots of it -- and use it to barter with: two loaves for a brake job on the VW, for examplehalf a bushel of prime avocados for three. In a garden no bigger than a large living room we have herbs and spices and medicinal plants and the usual array of salad greens -- and last year we had bmssels sprouts, broccoli, com, beets, carrots and Swiss chard to give away. Meanwhile Wina has become an expert on roadside plants, many of which are edible or therapeutic. The more we do the more we learn. For example, you don't even have to have land. A bucket of soil and # invested in sets will give a family tomatoes all summer long, grown indoors. We are not Cassandras crying catastrophe, but I had a kind of vision one day; Wina and I standing at the window looking down at the next street. About eight doors down, a house was afire. We were waiting for the sound of the sirens -- and after a few minutes I turned to her and said: "They're not coming." End vision... but if something happens, something that makes our money no good at the store, or if suddenly there's no store, well, we will not, like many people, be at the mercy of the present contents of our stomachs. We'll know what to do, what to find, where to go, whom to take with us. Think about it. Think hard. The problem was whether mankind could learn to live with its fathers! X about this mission," protested Professor Seemly Vivian, tossing her unruly hair back from her forehead. "They canceled my tutorial leave, hustled me out of Lunar University and shipped me out here so fast I didn't have time to locate the paperwork." "Serves you right. Seemly," Captain Robin Andersen said unfeelingly. "You shouldn't accept Space Survey assignments if you don't want an exciting and varied life." "The excitement and variation I can stand. It's the lack of information that's bugging me. Just what am I supposed to be excited about?" "The old king's answers," said Andersen, turning his attention back to the scoutship's controls. His enigmatic perverseness carried an unexplained edge. Clearly he, too, had feelings about this particular mission. Chad Hartzman, the third member of the survey team, looked up from the navigation console. "If you won't tell her, Robin, I suppose I must. It's like this. Seemly. A storm blew up in the Federation Council when Space Survey refused clearance for the colonization of the planet, Loric Four. A quorum of the council contested the decision on the grounds that Space Survey hadn't filed sufficient evidence to show why Loric was unsuited for human habitation. Fortunately the survey commissioner refused to move on the point and managed to force a postponement. Then he collared Robin and myself, told us to acquire you regardless of expense and get the hell out to Loric for some answers he could use on the council rostrum." "But if he's made a case for refusing clearance, he must already have his answers," said Seemly reasonably. Her dark eyes were questing and alert. Stray wisps of hair had already crept back over her forehead. Robin Andersen returned to the conversation. "He may have the answers, but he hasn't told us what they are. At a guess, the material is either untenable or not particularly convincing. I'd presume that only the reputation of the official Resident on Loric has prevented the commissioner from being overruled. So our mandate's to make an independent assessment of Loric and report back." "If we have to reestablish all the base data," said Seemly, "it could be a very long job. Why can't we merely reexamine the work that's already been done?" "There's nothing against that. But if the Resident's gone off on a tangent we must be careful not to follow him. There's no point in an independent investigation if it's going to start from premises that may or may not be false." "But I still don't see why it was necessary to drag me back from tutorial leave. Surely this assignment could have been handled by a routine survey team?" "It isn't a routine assignment. We've been handpicked to solve the commissioner's dilemma. You're one of his big guns. Seemly. He's pitting you against the old king -- and he's obviously prepared for a fight. Whoever has to bring down the old king is going to need all the standing of Professor Seemly Vivian." "I refuse to be used as a sort of academic battering ram," she said severely. "I'll make up my own mind as to whom I depose and for what reason. How much to we know about Loric Four?" Chad slid the abstracts across the table. "There's nothing very special about it. According to the manual, it's a fair candidate for colonization. All the critical parameters are centered around Earth-norm and no major hazard areas are indicated. There's a blanket protection order covering the indigenous fauna, but that still leaves considerable scope for adaptive colonization." "So where's the problem?" "Darned if I know. The Resident's had a ship down there for a couple of years and seems to have survived quite happily. Nothing in our records suggests die place is unsuitable for human habitation." "It can't be as simple as that." "There are a couple of oddities on the books. Two of the survey ships making field contact with the Resident crashed on their subsequent takeoffs from Loric." "You mean survey trips like this one? Two ships out of how many total?" "Just those two," said Chad. "I'd hoped you wouldn't ask." "And is there anything else about this trip that you're being too damn nice to tell me?" "Not really -- except that the only other woman ever to set foot on Loric ended her life by jumping off a cliff." "I knew there had to be some good reason why I couldn't get my hands on the paperwork," she said seriously and went off to the galley in search of coffee. T hree days later the little survey scoutship made orbit around Loric Four. Seemly had spent the intervening period reading and rereading everything that had an even remote connection with the planet. Now she acquired the optical bay and spent several hours with the big telescope while Andersen and Hartzman made the preliminary instrumental analyses. Finally she sought out Captain Andersen. "Tell me about the Resident down there, Robin." "None other than the old king himself." "Why do they call him the old king?" "I suppose it's basically because his name's Kohl -- Peter Kohl -- the grand old man of extraterrestrial exploration." "I've read his books, but I didn't get the impression he was old." "Not in years, perhaps. But in terms of experience he's seen and achieved more than most of us could in several lifetimes. So whichever way you look at it, I guess the title's apt. He's the old king." "And we're supposed to make an independent assessment of a space territory he's been working on for two years. It doesn't make sense." "It does if you assume the old king's answers were the kind nobody wanted to hear. I think that's the point of sending you out here, Seemly. You've the status to depose hint if you disagree. But if you happen to concur, then not a damn soul in the universe is qualified to argue with the pair of you. The commissioner has hedged his bets most carefully." "Mm! I'll sort out the commissioner later. How does a Resident function in a situation like this? Is he alone down there?" "No. As Resident, he'd have a small naval garrison. A ship and about twenty men to handle security and routine, so that he's free to carry out any research he chooses. Under Space Law the planet is legally his until the Federation Council replaces him by another Resident or by a structural colony. At the same time he's the custodian of the planet on the Federation's behalf. Presumably he has to answer some hard questions if he lets it slip out from under him." "I thought you were being serious." "I was. The point I was leading up to was that he'd be well within his rights to refuse us permission to land. If he tells us to go away again, there's not a thing we can do about it." "Is it likely?" "No. But I can imagine his feeling slighted at having his conclusions questioned. So we'll need to treat him with a little tact and a little due respect. Please don't antagonize him. Seemly." "I don't know what you mean." "You know exactly what I mean. I've seen you completely dismantle men. But I doubt if you're a match for the old king. Start getting tough with him and you'll probably get your little academic hide tanned where it hurts the most." igranted, Andersen put the scoutship accurately down on the landing pad. While the area cooled he and Chad Hartzman carefully donned dress uniform in preparation to meet the Resident. Once the formalities were over, they would relax and become themselves again, but protocol decreed that first contact be conducted with full ceremony. Seemly, trim in her green Space Survey uniform, had not attended a Resident's reception before and was slightly apprehensive. A smart escort of naval ratings came to conduct them to the Resident's ship. In front of the ship, under a white awning erected especially for the occasion. Seemly had her first glimpse of Old King Kohl. Whfle Andersen presented their credentials and made formal introductions she could only stare at the imposing giant of a man who sat bare to the waist on an upturned crate and rumbled through his beard in a voice like thunder. Protocol, it seemed, made no demands on the appearance or conduct of Residents themselves. The old king's hide was nutbrown, tanned and ripened by exposure to a dozen alien suns. Beneath his closecropped hair, which had been prematurely bleached to strands of platinum, blue eyes peered out, constantly inquiring and amused. The leathery face was alive with comprehension and concern. His frame was large, yet with loose and wiry limbs. He stood up suddenly to emphasize some point and she found her eye level disconcertingly in the middle of the grizzled mat .of hair that covered his mighty chest. Later she returned discreetly to Chad's side. "He's big," she whispered. "Big in every way. Seemly. Robin's not at all keen on being sent to reexamine Kohl's work. And as far as I'm concerned he's the king and we're the fiddlers three." "Is he married?" "Once was. His wife was Marion Matteau, the exo-biologist. She was with him here on Loric before she died." "Died?" "She's the one I mentioned. She apparently threw herself over a cliff. Not a shred of a reason why. Must have been quite a blow to him. She was quite a remarkable woman." "He's pretty remarkable himself, if you ask me." Robin Andersen beckoned them back to where he and the Resident were engaged in conversation. "I've been explaining to Doctor Kohl the purpose of our visit. It appears he hadn't been informed of the Federation Council's opposition. Were there any points you wished to take up at this stage. Seemly?" Seemly found the old king's eyes watching her shrewdly. She turned to face him, wondering what was passing through his mind and suddenly feeling the need to justify her position. "I've been trying to understand your reasons for refusing colonization, Doctor Kohl. As far as our reports go, your stand is untenable. The climate and the soil are fully compatible with Earth's agriculture and many of the native plants are edible. Admittedly there are a few large predators about, excluding some creatures described as bears, but nothing a well-defended colony couldn't handle. The air's good and the water's good and the manuals don't give a single hint of anything that might support your refusal." "My reasons aren't written into the manuals. Professor Vivian. Not. yet." "Then they can't be very manifest. I know the responsibilities of a Resident tend to induce excessive caution. But you must see there's a realistic balance between potential dangers to the colony and Earth's crying need for living space." "That's only part of a Resident's responsibility," said the old king gently. "Under Space Conventions he's also to consider the effects of colonization on the planet's indigenous population. Specifically, no planet may be colonized if such an act might prove detrimental to any indigenous species considered to be in evolutionary ascent with a possible potential approaching that of man." "Which condition doesn't appear to apply to any of the species so far recorded in the Lxjric indices." "Well, since you've been given the mandate to make an independent assessment I'll leave you to form your own conclusions -- after you've had a chance to investigate. If you want to discuss anything you'll find me available. Copies of my reports to the commissioner are also yours for the asking. But I'd prefer you first to form your own conclusions, then check your findings against mine. That way I can't be accused of subjecting you to bias." "We couldn't ask for fairer than that," said Andersen hastily, taking Seemly firmly by the arm. "I appreciate the way you're taking this. Doctor Kohl. It can't be easy for a Resident to accept that his work needs to be reexamined." "I don't accept that it needs to be reexamined. I merely accept that my findings don't sit too easily in the soft guts of the commissioner's office. Your reevaluation can only strengthen my hand." "Assuming we agree," said Seemly pointedly. "Oh, you'll agree, my dear. You may make a few false starts, but if you're the type of person your reputation suggests, then I shan't have lost a cause but gained an ally." II Awhat's missing," Chad said some ten days later. "The larger predators are dangerous but controllable. The smaller omnivores cover a wide spectrum, but only the things called bears have any dominance -- and that may be only a regional phenomenon. The true herbivores are fleet of foot and only as intelligent as you'd expect from their low position in the food chain. There are no reptiles worth talking about -- and though insects are plentiful, some sort of hornet appears to be the worst hazard. Haven't you come up with anything, Robin?" "Afraid not. Radioactivity marginal. Ultraviolet is a little high, but not beyond Terran tropical levels. Cosmic radiation is low. The primary distribution of elements approximates that of Earth, though the allotropic forms suggest a different and more recent thermal history for Loric. As far as my work is concerned -- this is a good place to come for a holiday. What about your pitch. Seemly?" "I've been checking the interreaction between the indigenous resources and the human animal. The garrison doctor's done a very thorough job of recording the progress of every sting, cut or infection suffered by the Resident's staff over the past two years." "And?" "Nothing showed up. No poisons or allergies that didn't respond to treatment and no infectious diseases outside the range of human expectation. In short. I'd expect to be safer here than in many places on Earth's equator." "Which," said Chad, "brings us neatly back to the point that we can't even discern the area in which Kohl's objections lie." "I've been thinking about that," said Seemly. "About the two space crashes -- which may or may not be relevant -- and particularly about the death of his wife. Apparently she went off one day to a canyon about two kilometers east and walked straight over the edge. An hour earlier she had been in the company of Kohl and other members of the garrison, who all testified that she'd been quite normal and very enthusiastic about the progress of her work." "Could her death have been an accident -- one Kohl has rationalized to place the blame on some local influence?" "It's possible, though I'd have judged him to be a more balanced character than that. But in the absence of a more definite lead. I'd like to look at the idea more closely." "Well, I'm in agreement," said Andersen. "As a matter of fact I've already been out to the canyon. It's called the glass canyon and is a fabulous sight. If you feel like going there this afternoon I'll show you the way." "You won't mind if I tag along?" asked Chad. "I was going in that direction anyway. I want to lay some cameras along the bear tracks. The most intelligent creatures I've found on Loric are the bears. I've a feeling they merit a bit of extra study." "That's interesting," said Seemly. "Because that's substantially what Marion Kohl nee Matteau was saying shortly before she went over the cliff." B eyond the fringes of the forest they came to the glass canyon. As Anderson had promised, it was a fascinating place. During some struggle of truly amazing geological forces the land had literally been torn apart and a vast fissure had been formeda canyon nearly a kilometer across and a quarter of a kilometer beautiful than anything they could have imagined. The fissure was a vision of wonderland. The deep bedrock of mainly glasslike silicates had been fractured along cleavage lines and crystal boundaries and age-old prisms of nearly flawless crystal glass stood tens of meters high, like the stockroom of a manufacturer making chandeliers for giants. The powdered frit had fallen to the floor of the canyon, there to receive a carpet of forest loam washed down by the occasional storms -- and on it flourished lush vegetation. Through the grasses and shrubs the bears had worn paths of pure enchantment down to the crystal sand. The real wonder of the place, however, was the crystal bridge. A vast hexagonal prism leaned out from the foot of the forest to span a full half kilometer of the canyon's head. To conjecture that it had been placed as a bridge to provide a path across the great gulf in the land was easy -- certainly it was widely used as a bridge by the bears and other animals, as many paths leading to its extremities testified. To cross its glasslike length over an experience to daunt all but the most experienced climbers. The complete absence of handor foot-holds, the unbroken exposure to the occasional gusts of wind and the profound sense of vertigo such an exposed and transparent situation could produce, bred a sensation so alien to human instinct that Seemly, for one, at first refused to do more than lie down on the spar and peer breathlessly into the crystal depths. For the rest of the afternoon she and Andersen helped Chad set his cameras and instruments along the bear paths and never mentioned the exo-biologist whose death had brought Seemly to this site. She had already decided for herself that wonder alone could bring a person to this spot -- and accidents were a continuing possibility in an unknown environment. She forgot about the whole incident until, while leading the party on its return that evening, she came across the old king standing in the path. H e was wearing a loose tropical jacket, partly unbuttoned. From its open front the head of an infant bear poked inquisitively. "Professor Vivian -- what a pleasant surprise!" Kohl seemed genuinely pleased to see her. "How's the investigation going?" "Not too well at the moment," said Seemly. She waited for Andersen and Hartzman to cafdh up. "Frankly we can't find a thing to worry about." "You will. If you want a hint on where to look -- the problem has to do with the bears." He reached into his jacket, extracted the small creature and held it gently in his arms. "This one was Marion's pet. Unwittingly it caused her death. Cute little rascal, isn't he?" "He doesn't look dangerous." "Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. But he was an accessory before the fact of her demise as surely as some of his kin caused the loss of two survey scoutships." "That charge would need quite a bit of substantiation." "Oh, I can prove it all right. But I rather hoped you'd do it for me." Seemly stroked the little creature's head with her finger. "I don't suppose you'd consider letting me have it, would you -- as a pet?" The old king rumbled into his beard; "In the circumstances I couldn't take the risk. Even if you weren't the cleverest, you'd still be the most charming person on Loric. We can't afford to lose you." "I'm not superstitious, you know." "Neither am I, Professor Vivian." "Call me Seemly." "Delighted! But as I was about to say, it wasn't superstition that killed Marion. It was a force more logical and compelling than any magic." "Well, what do you make of it?" she asked the others when Kohl had continued on his way. "He could be rationalizing along the lines we discussed elier," said Chad. "After all, what can a small bear do except bite you or transmit some infectious disease?" "Which we know from the garrison medical records, didn't happen," said Seemly. "It tends to confirm our suspicions that the bears are important, though." Andersen was thoughtful. "Whether Kohl has a phobia about them or whether they do constitute some form of danger remains to be proven. But Kohl seems convinced, so I vote we concentrate our attention on bears for a while. Pity he wouldn't let you have that one for a starter. Seemly." "And there's an odd thing about that, Robin. Because I don't know why I asked him for it. I've never been a great one for pets. But just for a moment I really had a feeling for that little one." "Frustrated maternal instinct," commented Chad. "Next thing you know, die'll be going broody on us. Captain." awoke in her cabin and turned on the lights. The notes on which she had been working were still on the open flap of the desk. Shaking the sleep from her head, she sat on the corner of the bunk and leafed through the papers, as though seeking in them a key to something not yet written. Rubbing her forehead to try to stimulate some thought that refused to come, she shrugged off her nightwear, donned her working coveralls and went out to the galley to make coffee. The discussions of the day still lingered in her mind and she knew that, for a while at least, sleep would be impossible for her. She felt certain she was on the verge of a breakthrough of some importance, but the elements of the idea refused to come together. Exasperating! Coffee made, she sat abstractedly, not really relishing the bitterness of the particular brand with which the ship had been provided. Then, realizing she was wasting time when she could be doing something with it, she picked up her field kit and went outside. Loric had no moon, but the light from the bright Rim stars was ample compensation. Against the blackness of a cloudless sky the firmament was scribably richer than the starlight of Earth. Seemly found she could easily discern the paleness of the track against the darker foliage -- and even when she entered the confines of the forest there was still sufficient light to supplement her memory of the way. Soon her eyes adapted to the dimness and she was able to walk faster, possessed now by the certainty that she was on the trail of something really significant. The origin of her feeling was not too clear, but intuition had been her guide through many a trial in the past. It was certainly puUing for her now. She came to the crystal bridge sooner than she had expected, and marveled at how short the walk had seemed. Her destination lay on the other side of the glass canyon and the bridge shone before her under the bright stars like a shaft of light frozen into crystal immobility. It was curious, she reflected, how much easier it was to walk across the spar without the distraction of being able to see the depths of the canyon below. She recalled her foolishness earlier when, at one point during the afternoon, site had set a foot on the bridge and nearly fainted from vertigo. The far side of the canyon wall presented a difficult climb up a rockfall. Fortunately the bears had compacted little footholds and runs of steps, which helped somewhat. Finally she gained a firm bear track, which, though sloping upward at a disconcerting angle, proved relatively safe. She broke several fingernails during the ascent, but at last emerged triumphantly over the crest and rested for a while on a damp and grassy bank. F rom there on the going was easier. A clear track led across the grassy slopes into a continuation of the forest. Seemly sighed with relief as she labored up the final bank and eagerly entered the trees beyond. Here the foliage was denser and the starlight filtering through the branches was barely sufficient to show her where to place her feet. Time and again she blundered into small bushes and only regained the path by a series of fortuitous accidents. By now her enthusiasm was burning at fever pitch and the trials of the journey only made the final prize more desirable and more worth the effort. She could not restrain herself from hurrying. Then shock! She stepped forward and fell into an unseen depression heavily disguised by the darkness. She avoided hurting herself in the fall -- she seemed to have landed in a peaty bowl -- but her tribulation made her suddenly aware of herself and the alien situation into which she had stumbled. Her sudden apprehension rustle of movement around her made her shockingly conscious that she was not alone. Panic rose high in her throat as she strove to come to grips with the instant nightmare into which she had awoken. Creatures were moving all around her. Whether a few or several dozen, it was impossible to tell, but there were certainly a great number. Not knowing how many only added to her terror. From the hint of starlight occasionally reflected in bulbous eyes she became convinced she had fallen into a covert of bears. However, the most complete damage to her equilibrium was a realization that the impulse that had fetched her here was devoid of a rational basis. Like a drunk who wakes on a strange floor, she had only the vaguest recollection of her motives for coming -- and felt a dreadful certainty that her situation would have been untenable by daylight logic. A sick dream had become a frightening reality. Something brushed her hand in the darkness and she screamed. It came upon her suddenly that the bears were omnivorous -- preferentially carnivorous -- and that she was unarmed and hopelessly outnumbered. She had occasionally seen carcasses of large animals torn apart by the bears. A gruesome observation remained in her mind -- the bears never picked a carcass clean. They tore only the meat they wanted and left the scavenging to ants and eaters of carrion. The observation made her retch with fright. Her field kit was in a strong case of hide, heavy with the bottles and instruments it contained. She slipped it from her shoulder and, holding it by the strap, struck about her, her panic increasing with every swing. She could tell by the little patches of starlight reflected in their eyes that the bears had closed a circle around her, but they were nimble enough to avoid her flailing box. However, it needed only one to make the first move. As soon as sh? felt the claws and sharp teeth in her flesh, she would have to concentrate on that. While her attention was thus diverted, the rest of them would spring. Powerful jaws would strip her flesh away from the bone even as she fell... Seemly knew that her only chance was to make the decisive move first. If she could force a passage through to the pathway she might have an opportunity to run. Seeing a slight patch of a lighter color at the edge of the bowl, die moved in that direction, her box still flailing on all sides. Then, thinking only of flight, she ran full-tilt at what she judged to be a break in the circle of bears. There were no bears there -- only bushes. Her field kit became entangled in the branches and was torn from her grasp as she cannoned off a springy sapling. She caught her foot under a root and toppled back into the peaty bowl. As she stopped rolling, the circle of bears closed around her again. An overwhelming terror trapped her limbs like leaden weights. Screaming with a force sufficient to burst her lungs, she could only look up into the small circles of reflected alien starlight. Finally even her screams were inhibited to a whisper. Hysterical fear gripped her and, hypnotized by the bright and bulbous eyes of the circling beasts, she hugged herself against the dirt, whimpered and gave up all hope of survival. S HE had no idea of how long she remained like this. Gradually she became aware of a lessening of tension and dared to ask herself why she had not been attacked and killed. A noise up on the side of the bowl made her shrink with a new fear -- which changed immediately into a pathetic cry of relief. "Peter! Peter -- I'm here!" "Seemly?" Peter Kohl's voice was surprised and anxious. A powerful handlamp played down upon her. "What the hell are you doing out here?" The question was rhetorical. He did not even wait for an answer. The handlamp played around the edges of the bowl and probed the surrounding foliage. All the bears had gone. After scouting the area for a few minutes, Peter Kohl came back. "Are you hurt?" "Not much. Only what I did to myself. The bears -- " "On Loric it's always the bears," he said comprehendingly. "Did they attack you?" She heard the whip of leather as he drew his weapon from its holster. "No -- I -- " She was weak and distraught and propped herself on her elbow with difficulty. "They just all came around and looked at me with those eyes. I tried to beat them off with my case, but I lost it. And then I got frightened -- it wasn't just ordinary fright. I couldn't even move -- " "I know, I know," he said, as though her explanation were sufficient. He returned his weapon to his belt. "They've gone now anyway. Let's see about getting you back." Seemly rose unsteadily to her feet and began to brush the clinging peat from her coverall. She was still trembling in uncontrollable spasms and instinctively sought the support of Kohl's arm. The look of seriousness on his face spoke volumes, but for the moment his attitude was purely one of concern. When she stumbled on a root he rumbled like a giant, swung her over his shoulder and carried her along the path without appearing to notice her weight at all. When they came to the rockfaU above the crystal bridge he set her down gently. "I'll go down first -- you follow. Don't be surprised if you feel me guide your foot to a hold. Whatever you do, don't panic. I'll break your fall if you slip." Once started on the downward climb. Seemly was dismayed to find how difficult it was. The hazards of the descent contrasted so greatly with her memory of the outward journey that at first she considered Kohl had chosen a more dangerous route. It was only when they reached the head of the crystal bridge and she looked up that she realized that her recollection had played tricks on her. It was now obvious that for an inexperienced person to have climbed the broken face in darkness was tantamount to a suicide attempt. Kohl saw the expression on her face as she looked back up the treacherous barrier, but if he had any comment he kept it to himself. This left the problem of crossing the crystal bridge itself. As before, the glassy straightness of the spar was plain under the dim light, but now the blackness of the canyon was a compelling magnet that threatened to draw her off the featureless surface and destroy her in the depths below. She took two steps before her courage deserted her. Turning back, she sat shaking on a crystal outcrop. "It's no good, Peter. I can't do it. I haven't got the nerve." "You crossed it earlier -- and alone," be said reasonably. "Earlier I was -- " she searched urgently for the word she needed -- "possessed? Does that make sense?" Kohl nodded. "It does to me. But I can't leave you here and you won't find the crossing easier in daylight. So there's only one thing for it." He bent down, swung her across his shoulder again and immediately started across the crystal bridge. Seemly shut her eyes, gripped the folds of his jacket and prayed that sudden panic would not cause her to kick and disturb his balance. After what seemed a lifetime a change in the sound of his footsteps told her that they were safely on the farther bank. Once more he set her down, but this time his face was stern and a little angry. He strode ahead down the bear tracks without a further word. She followed meekly, not daring to let him get too far ahead. When they reached the ship. Robin Andersen was standing in the lock, searching the night with curious eyes. He gave a little gasp when Kohl came into view, followed by Seemly,, pale and distraught. "Doctor Kohl -- what happened? Is she all right?" "I found, her in a bear covert on the other side of the glass canyon. Give her a sedative and make her get straight to bed. She should sleep off the worst of the effects. In the future. Captain Andersen, I'll thank you to maintain an electronic lockwatch at night. It serves a double purpose on Loric -- not only does it warn you if something's approaching, it also cautions you when somebody's going out. I take it you didn't know Professor Vivian had left?" "No. I assumed she was asleep in her cabin." "I'll require you to give me a full report on this affair tomorrow. I don't expect to have to wet-nurse a supposedly competent survey team." Andersen was about to contest the point, then saw the look of gravity on Kohl's face. Instead he threw a brief salute. If Kohl insisted on a lockwatch, he presumably had his reasons. After all, it was his kingdom. Ill A ndersen called the team toLgether in the operations room late the next morning. Seemly, although tired and depressed, appeared to have suffered no lasting ill effects from her experience. Realizing this was to be an official inquiry into her actions, she had dressed in her best uniform and now sat nervously on the edge of her seat and looked remarkably unhappy. "The Resident wants to 'see me in an hour's time," said Andersen. "As you know, he found Seemly on the far side of the crystal bridge during the night, scared half out of her wits. Knowing her as I do. I've no doubt she had a good reason for going out there alone. But it wasn't very wise and it wasn't according to standing orders. Technically we're out on a limb, and the Resident could order us off-planet because of it. Therefore I have to hold a formal inquiry and produce a few good answers." "I'd prefer to discuss my part first with you in private," Seemly said. "Normally I'd be only too happy to oblige. But going out there at night was so far out of character for you that there must have been a pretty powerful factor at work. Something as powerful, perhaps, as the influence that took Kohl's wife over the edge of the crystal canyon. If there are any of these factors around, the sooner we all know and can recognize them, the safer we'll all be. Come on. Seemly -- give." Seemly's brow furrowed as she concentrated on her answer. "It's all very much like a bad dream. The truth is, I don't really know why I went out. I remember waking up and feeling certain I had something important to do. Thinking about it now I'm sure the feeling of important came first and I went around looking for something to attach it to. I think I started with Chad's cameras in mind, down by the crystal bridge. I know I was feeling quite interested and purposeful when I left the ship." "And you weren't frightened then?" asked Andersen carefully. "Not at all. Fear never occurred to me. The sky was so light I didn't even bother with a handlamp. You see, I knew where I was going, and it seemed such a perfectly ordinary thing to do. I even walked the forest path in darkness as though I'd been doing it for years." "But Chad's cameras were all on this side of the canyon. You helped put them there yesterday. So what persuaded you to go across the bridge?' "When I reached the bridge, I knew the important thing I had to do lay well on the other side. I crossed the bridge and even entered the second forest quite happily. It wasn't until I fell into a group of them that I woke up and began to get scared." "Them?' "Bears. I fell among them in a sort of bowl. Suddenly they were all around me. Whichever way I looked I could see nothing but eyes. I thought they were going to attack, but they didn't. I wonder now if they weren't as frightened of me as I was of them. But at least they didn't panic." "Did you?" "Not at first, but then I really flipped. I attacked them with my field case and tried to run. I ran straight into a bush, tripped and tolled right back among them. They all crowded around and just looked at me. I remember nothing but eyes on all sides -- eyes full of strange stars. And I was more terrified of them than I've ever felt in my whole life. I suppose I was screaming, because my throat's still raw. But it wasn't just ordinary fear. It was the sort of fear which breaks you out of a nightmare -- the absolute fear which comes from somewhere deep inside you." "What happened then?" "That's it -- finish. King Kohl came by and brought me home. He had to carry me across the crystal bridge because I didn't have the nerve to make it on my own." Chad Hartzman, who had been taking notes, looked up. "A couple of things don't make sense to me. Seemly. First, I take Robin's point that it's utterly out of character for you to go out at night on your own. Weren't you even slightly aware that this was an irrational act?" "No. I was certain that I had something to do. That's not an unusual experience for anyone. I didn't bother to tell anyone, because it didn't seem necessary. It's the sort of decision one makes every hour of the day without even being conscious of it." "So whatever influence took you out there was certainly insidious. Secondly, I've seen you in some pretty tough spots before. The one thing you don't do when the pressure's on, is to lie down and scream. Something got into you. Seemly, and it's important we find out what." "I wish I could tell you. All I know is that the fear was so intense that I was virtually paralyzed. Even if they'd attacked me, I don't think I could've raised a finger in defense." "Which again is untypical of you." Chad looked at Andersen. "What do you think, Robin? Hypnosis? A drug of some sort?" "I don't think it's that simple." Andersen had risen to his feet and turned to one of the viewports. He was looking out at the fringes of the forest. "I was standing at the lock when the old king brought Seemly back. I've just been asking myself why I was standing there when I should have been asleep." "And did you get an answer?" "Yes." Andersen turned back to face them. "The answer's that I was trying to remember what was the interesting and important thing I had to do near the glass canyon." "Telepathy?" asked Chad, astounded. "I honestly don't know. I can't explain it any more than can Seemly. But in case you've missed the point -- what was it that took the old king to such an unlikely spot in the middle of the night?" turned. He looked dazed. "Did he accept your report?" asked Chad. "Accept it? He congratulated us on it. IThe old devil was delighted that we'd picked up the point that Seemly couldn't distinguish her reasons for going out from any normal everyday decision. And he confirmed that the same influence prompted him to go out there. The difference was that he went deliberately to find out what was going on, taking a handlamp, a gun and enough ammunition to decimate the forest if necessary. He also alerted his garrison commander and told him where he was going -- and why." "I guess we still have a lot to learn," said Chad ruefully. "Did he explain how it was that the same thought occurred to the three of you?" "No, but he knows. He just wants us to work it out for ourselves. He did add some information, though. The bears Seemly fell among were all females. Had they been males, she'd have been eaten alive. Also he showed me the off-going cargo lists for the two spacecraft that crashed after takeoff. Notably -- both contained a pair of infant bears, destined for the Galactic Zoological Center." "So what's the answer?" asked Seemly at last. Andersen rubbed his brow. "Telepathy's still the only hypothesis that fits all the facts. I think that what you. Kohl and to a lesser extent myself, experienced last night was some sort of empathy with the bears. Some instinct prompted the creatures to congregate on the far side of the crystal bridge. I don't know what the call could mean to them in terms of their own social organization, but it's clear they all heard it. And we heard it, too." "Would that also explain the quality of the fear I felt?" asked Seemly. "I think so. A simple feedback mechanism. You blundered into their party and scared the hell out of them. They broadcast their fear back to you." "Which is all very tidy," said Chad, "provided you accept that telepathy -- especially telepathy between different species -- is even a remote possibility. I'm afraid I don't accept it." "Accept it or not, I don't have a better answer right now. Something called those animals together. It could have been some instinctive homing urge, but it was highly specific as to time and place. Then Seemly wakes up with a bug in her mind and makes for the same spot. Shortly the old king goes there, too. Some time later, knowing nothing of all this, I wake up with the same idea. There has to be some mechanism to explain all that." "Granted -- but telepathy -- " said Chad doubtfully. "I admit you've stacked up a remarkable set of coincidences, but coincidences are all they need to be. I don't know what made Seemly go out there, but for all I know, the old king walks there every night. As for you, Robin -- we heard nothing about your call until the rest of the facts had been established. That leaves fair scope for suggestion to supplement whatever was missing from the scene." "Let's leave it there for now," said Andersen. "We don't have enough evidence to work on. There's just one point that strikes me, though. Your resistance to the idea of telepathy tends to confirm the hypothesis. This could be exactly the reaction that has made the old king's answers unacceptable to Survey Center." her uniform again for a working coverall. She preferred the latter because it was more comfortable and because it had a plentiful supply of pockets, of which she was eternally short. Her unruly hair, which had been tightly drawn under her uniform cap, was released to find its usual position around her neck and over her forehead. This done, she felt again more like a woman and less like a symbol of the survey establishment. Having pointedly announced her destination both to Andersen and Chad Hartzman, she went straight to the part of the naval ship that served as the Resident's office. Peter Kohl looked up from behind a pile of papers, this time appearing to be more of an academic and less of a barbarian. He was genuinely pleased to see her. "Seemly! Grab a chair and sit down. None the worse for last night's experience, I hope." "A bruised ego is about the worst," she said. "I feel I owe you an apology. I caused you a great deal of trouble." "Not half as much as if I hadn't come along. I've a bad record for losing people. Perhaps you'll change my luck. Is there anything I can do for you-or is this purely a social visit?" "I do have an ulterior motive. I'd like you to tell me something. Do you have any idea why so many bears were gathered in that one spot last night? Does it have any special significance for them?" "If I told you the complete answer, you'd be as wise as I am. Which would spoil the object of your independent investigation. The circumspect answer is that I'm certain the location has no great significance. Such bowls occur all over the forests. I think the bears were holding a kind of party and its location was prearranged." "Prearranged?" Seemly was doubtful. "You and I both responded to a 'call' to go there. That suggests spontaneity." "It does no such thing," said Kolil seriously. A 'call' is a product of a gathering, not the cause of its inception. The function of a call may be to contact others who've missed the news, but there can't be a substantial call until a sufficient number are gathered." "Are you sure of that?" asked Seemly. "Completely sure. As soon as I receive a Call, I always go out and check. That's why I went there last night." "You realize the implications of what you're saying? If the meeting were prearranged the fact would suggest the bears have the ability to make abstract communications at a reasonably high level. Frankly, they would need a developed language." "Wliich they have -- after a fashion. Verbally it doesn't amount to much, but they're great writers." "Writers?" The tone of her voice indicated she considered he was joking. Certainly his eyes were smiling, but with amusement because of her consternation rather than anything else. "You don't believe they can write? I'll prove it to you. It isn't writing as we know it, but it's a written message just the same. Do you have this afternoon to spare?" 'To see bears writing I'd have a week to spare." "Good. Join me after lunch. With a bit of luck we'll see an exercise in alien literature and possibly some literary appreciation." "Wild -- er -- bears wouldn't keep me away from it. I still think you're pulling my leg." "My dear Professor Vivian, you're a charming companion, but I don't underestimate your academic ability. If I promise to show you bears writing-that's exactly what you'll see. T hree hours later, on a ledge overlooking the crystalline canyon, Seemly adjusted her binoculars to focus on the indicated point. A bear, one of the largest she had seen, came wandering along a path in the depths of the crevice. It cocked its head alertly as it rounded a bend in the track. "He knows we're here," said Kohl. "But I don't think it'll worry him. They aren't at all shy. See what he does now." The bear shook its head impatiently a few times, then rose to its hind legs before the slab of crystal Kohl had pointed out. "Watch closely." The bear began to jab and pat at the slab with its paws, following no apparent order but gradually covering most of the crystal with a scratch or a tap or a firm pad pressure. Completing the exercise after some twenty minutes, it dropped back to all fours and inspected the rock for a few moments. Then it ambled off in the direction it had been going. "What was all that in aid of?" asked Seemly. 'That was a bear, writing." Seemly adjusted her binoculars more carefully. "But there's nothing written there," she objected. "He may have been doing no more than catching ants or sharpening his claws." "Nevertheless he did write something, even though we can't see it," said Kohl softly. "Now we must be patient and wait for the next bear to come along." They had a long time to wait. Nearly an hour passed before a potential reader padded along the path. Even then the creature passed the spot and appeared to turn back only as an afterthought. Then, incredibly, it sat in front of the slab and gazed, its head rocking as it strove to follow whatever was written on the face. "I don't believe it!" Seemly said. "He's reading the damn thing as though it were a poster." This creature's departure was hurried. It almost ran from the scene, following the direction taken by the first bear. After a few minutes the episode was repeated, this time with a group of three bears who sat in comical unison gravely nodding their heads in front of the blank crystal surface. The three also left in a hurry, following the direction taken by the preceding two. Two more arrived a little later to study the slab. "Convinced?" Kohl asked. Seemly nodded. "Yes. But I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. What's the explanation?" "The bears have scent glands in the pads of their feet. I assume they evolved as trail markers to indicate whether a particular route was being taken in flight, pursuit of food or merely as an idle stroll. Such signals would have a strong survival value, and therefore favor natural selection, as would the development of an extremely sensitive nose." "Chemical trail and domain markers are pretty widespread in the animal kingdom throughout the galaxy," said Seemly in agreement "The bears on Loric have taken the idea a step further. They've settled on the flat faces of the crystal rocks when they really want to leave a message for the world. Using chromatography. I've managed to identify three individual scent products, all of them remarkably persistent. These are combined together on the crystal faces in an amazing spectrum of complexity. In their scentwriting they have the capacity -- though I'm not sure how much of it they utilize -- to compress more bits of information in a given space than we humans can in our optical writing." "Then the bears don't read it -- they smell it?" "Precisely! But that's a technicality. Sensory information, however derived, is still information. If you smell smoke, you don't wait for somebody to diout 'fire.' The fact that we humans habitually exchange the bulk of our communications optically and verbally doesn't preclude other species' doing it differently." "No argument about that," Seemly said. "But I've a feeling you've not yet come to the point you wished to make." "Then I'll come to it now. I know of thirty-three of these reading sites in this one forest alone and there could be more. The other day we were discussing the responsibilities of a Resident. In all honesty, can you expect me to recommend colonization of a planet where the indigenous population publishes its own newspapers?" Seemly was silent for a long moment. "Could I examine the writing more closely?" she asked at'last. "Certainly. But I don't think it's worth the bother of climbing down into the canyon. There's a nearer one through the forest. Come, I'll show you." the undergrowth at this point and she chose to follow the old king rather than take the lead. Patterned sunshine fell through the tracery of the overhanging branches and the forest air was sweet and warm and loud with the rasp of insects. Perhaps because of her recent conversation, she became aware of the multitude of individual scents of flower and fern which lingered in the soft air. "Did you ever think," asked Kohl over his shoulder, "that even man has a remarkable memory for scents? Fragrances attach themselves to whole bundles of experience. A remarkably small trace of just the right odor can trigger a whole chain of recollections. You walk into a room -- and suddenly you're transported years back to a scene where the essential essences were exactly the same. I sometimes wonder if a lot of our brain's spare capacity wasn't evolutionarily involved in scent memory -- for some reason we've allowed the sense to atrophy. It isn't considered civilized to go around sniffing at your neighbors. I'm sure the human race is the poorer for it." "I know what you mean about the memories -- I remember childhood Qiristmases by their smell. Puddings and spice and citrus, liqueurs and incense -- all somehow synonymous with a child's excitement. I also remember the smells of examination halls and places I've hated." "A good observation. Unusual levels of stress, excitement or fear seem to heighten scene perception. At such moments we're thrown back closer to the instincts of our animal ancestors, for whom good scent perception could mean the difference between life and death. It's curious how much remains to be discovered about ourselves." They emerged into a forest clearing at a point where many bear paths crossed. At one corner of the intersection a huge prism of crystal protruded from the ground. From what Kohl had already told her. Seemly knew that the placing of the intersection was no accident. The smooth, glasslike face of the prism had an important function -- this was confirmed by the fact that all the tracks merged deliberately to pass one particular face. Seemly studied this face carefully. She had no way of knowing what sort of message might be im printed on it. Was it, as Kohl had suggested, a form of newspaper? Or was it an elementary signpost? Perhaps it was a list of local residents -- or an indication of the best areas for hunting. Perhaps even a record of visiting pilgrims. She stood before it, entranced and intrigued. The old king was watching her from a short distance, quite amused by her intense concentration. "I know what you're thinking. Seemly. Will we one day discover a Rosetta stone that will unlock the mystery?" "Well -- what do you think?" "I'm sure the key exists -- somewhere inside us. Sometimes when I'm looking at one of the crystals I get the strangest impressions -- images of places I've never seen and recollections of conversations I'm sure I've never had. I can't tell if it's imagination or whether I'm being influenced by the imprint on the crystal face. My guess is that the scents trigger chains of unusual associations. They'd have the greatest meaning for those for whom the message has the greatest relevance. What you might read there could be different for everyone."  Tzation?" Seemly asked. They started back along the edge of the forest toward the plateau where the ships stood separately on their pads. "Wouldn't it work if it were made incumbent on the colonists to adapt to the special requirements of the bears -- rather than try to force Loric into a Terran mold?" "No. It could be disastrous either for the colonists or for the bears. Short-term, I suspect the bears would win. So far you've only seen the tip of the iceberg. The only way a Terran colony could survive on Loric would be by virtually eliminating the bears -- and that, I hope and pray, is contrary to the Space Conventions." "The bears will be safe under any circumstances," Seemly declared. "You've made your point and my reports to Survey Center will support you. But the bears' reading potential is only one factor to be considered. They could be evolutionary dropouts. Terra couldn't hold up colonization for a species in evolutionary decline." "It would take a thousand years of observation even to discover which way they were going, though my favorite bet is up. Their paws include an opposed thumb, which gives them the ability to use tools when they need to. They've a high order of intelligence and they're able to record and communicate complex ideas -- which in itself means they must have developed powers of abstract visualization. In short, they've the potential to develop everything we mean by civilization, though it's difficult to see what advantage they might gain by so doing. There's no virtue in civilization unless it carries an enhanced survival value. Space travel and Coca Cola aren't in themselves relevant criteria." "I grant you that, but you still haven't given me a good reason why you think human coexistence on Loric is impossible." "I have my reasons, Seemly. But they'll have more force if you deduce them for yourself. I'll give you one last clue -- the bears and the humans are too damn much alike." They were halfway across the plateau before Seemly found her tongue again. "Too much alike?" The phrase plainly worried her. "Certainly. There's an interaction between the bears and the humans which neither can avoid. Captain Andersen has diagnosed the effect as telepathy. He's absolutely wrong, but the strength of the effect is something to which you can personally testify. All in all, you were lucky." "I'm sorry," said Seemly. "Soiry?" "Your wife wandered off in the same way, didn't she? That was why she died." "It was. In those days we still underestimated the potency of the effect. Even when the second contact team left we still hadn't realized exactly what we were up against. I was still blundering around looking for something like telepathy to explain the facts. It was only later I found the real answer." "Then you know what caused the field-contact teams to crash?" "I've only been able to give a name to it these last few months. Both of the teams wanted to take bears back to the Galactic Zoological Center for further study. That's permissible under license, of course, but we all overlooked a vital point.' "Which was?" "The interaction between bears and humans is compulsive even over a fairly long range. In the confines of a spacecraft the reaction of a pair of frightened bears produced a greater effect than the human crews could stand. The bears' panic literally took command." Seemly's comprehension was swift. "The bears communicated their extreme fear to the crew, just as the bears in the bowl affected me?" "And probably the converse was also true. Try to imagine communicating to a bear the stresses of a space crew during liftoff. It's anxieties would reinforce the natural apprehensions of the bear. In a small, closed system you arrive at total feedback with no damping mechanism. The intensity of fear spirals upward -- and the inevitable result is a ship out of control." "And you're now able to give a name to the source of this interaction? And it isn't telepathy?' "No, it isn't telepathy. And the rest of the answer you must determine for yourself.' IV alarm bells screaming in her mind: Danger! Emergency! She was dressed and through the cabin door before she was fully awake. In the corridor she collided with Hartzman. "What's the matter, Chad? What's going on?" "I don't know -- but that damn siren woke me -- " "What siren?" "The emergency -- " "You're dreaming, Chad. Survey ships don't have emergency sirens. We'd better get Robin." "He just passed me, headed for the fire bay." "Let's hope he doesn't make it." "Why?" "Survey ships don't have fire bays. Our fire control's all manual, remember?" "But the emergency -- ' "I don't know what it is or where it is, but I know sure as hell there is one. You'd better get to the controls in case we need emergency liftoff. I'll go look for Robin." She went down into the hold. At the foot of the ladder she found Andersen heaving boxes into a corner. "You've picked a rare time for taking inventory," she said critically. "No joke, Seemly! Some criminal idiot's loaded stores across the firebay hatch." "Knock it off, Robin. There's no fire bay on this ship. If you ever did get through that bulkhead you wouldn't find a thing but engines. You're dreaming of a spacer." Appalled, he stopped and banged his head with his hand. "D'you know, you're right! God -- what a mistake to make in an emergency! I could lose my ticket for this." "Chad's gone up to the controls. I think we'd better get there first in case he tries an emergency liftoff. I doubt we'd survive it down here." "He wouldn't be so stupid -- " "Robin, until I've had the chance to knock your silly heads together I wouldn't certify either of you as rational!" Pausing only to assure herself that Andersen was following, she climbed back up the ladder. The captain overtook her in the corridor, grabbed her arm. "Seemly -- what's the emergency?" "I don't know, but the sense is strong, and it's getting stronger. I've a feeling of panic, a desire to run -- but I don't have a thing to attach it to." "Telepathy," said Andersen suddenly. "It's those bears again. Something's happening to them, and it's their fear we're feeling. Something to do with fire. That's it! There has to be a fire." Seconds later they entered the control room. Chad was methodically going through the takeoff preparations. Through the viewports at least part of the answers became apparent. Against the vivid darkness of the Loric night, a great tide of flame was visible, stretched broadly across the horizon. A vast fire was eating its way through the forest adjacent to the spaceport. Andersen began estimating the danger to the ship. He stopped Chad's countdown well clear of liftoff. "Hold her ready, but I don't think it'll be necessary to go. The plateau should give us sufficient clearance even if the nearer trees do catch fire. We'd better stay on internal atmosphere because of the smoke. Seemly, call the old king on the radio and check that they're okay." "Right." She turned her attention to the communications board and waited impatiently for Kohl to reply. Shortly his voice came through. "Thanks for inquiring. Seemly, but we're well protected by natural fire-breaks here. How are the tensions affecting you?" "The tensions?" "The fire panic -- don't tell me you don't feel it?' "We felt it all right. Caused quite a bit of consternation at first. Then we realized we were reading the bears' danger, not our own. The feeling's going now.' 'That's curious. The bears' general pattern of flight has been in your direction. You should have the greatest concentration of them -- hence, feel the greatest tension." "That's something to know. We'll call you back if the situation changes." "Answer me one question before you switch over. Seemly. Your ship's prepared for liftoff, isn't it?" "All the standard preparations. Why did you ask?" "Curiosity, that's all." "It's more than that. You don't ask questions without a good reason." "Seemly, would you like to try a little experiment?" "At this time of night?" "It's an opportunity that's not often repeated." "I'U check with Robin." "Don't! It may not work too well if he knows what to expect. Let's keep this to ourselves. Here's what I suggest you do -- " JL Andersen said after a while. "The fire's coming too close for safety." "But we're well clear of the trees," said Seemly. "We aren't well clear of the brush and grasses. If they catch it'll come right through the area." "What if it does? All that could reach the ship would be a few sparks and a little heat. That's nothing compared with atmospheric insertion conditions. And after all, we are on a landing pad." "With the quantity of fuel we carry even sparks and a little heat don't add up to a sensible risk. What do you say, Chad?" "I say let's get out of here. Heat exposure under atmospheric conditions is a different animal from heat of insertion under near vacuum. That fire could fry us if the tanks go up." "Sorry, Seemly. You're outvoted two to one -- even assuming that as captain I weren't solely responsible for the ship. Resume countdown, Chad." "Stop being stupid," said Seemly fiercely. "Our fuel reserves only give us one liftoff package. Expend that now and we'll have to return to Survey Center for refueling before we can come back. That'll take a month at least. Think about it. Is our position really that serious?" "In my opinion, it is," said Andersen. "What's got into you, Seemly? You don't usually question my flight orders." "I'm trying to make you under stand that you're being irrational. It's the bears' fear that's controlling your decision. The actual risks are negligible." Chad swung to the captain's defense. His hand made a gesture to encompass the sea of fire before them. "You call that negligible?" "Not if you're an exposed bear. But if you're a man in a heat-insulated space vehicle -- of course it's negligible. Look at the hull thermistor readings. Less than the temperature the sun's shining." "They could be misreading," Chad said dubiously. "All of them? Stop the nonsense. You're making the same kind of mistake I made when I went across the crystal bridge. You think you know what you're doing and you think you know why, but it's the bears' panic you're feeling." Andersen shook his head. "If that were true it would also be affecting you. You wouldn't be able to see it either." "It is affecting me. But I knew it was coming. In fact, I caused it to come. King Kohl told me what to do." 'Then for Pete's sake stop it! Let's get down to some rational thinking. What did you do to cause it?" "I merely switched the ship back to circulating the external atmosphere. If the effect is telepathy it's remarkably attenuated by the closing of a ventilation port." T en minutes later, with the ship again on its own internal atmosphere, they sat and watched the brush and short grass burn off around the perimeter of the landing pad. It was an interesting sight but contained no element of hazard whatsoever. "Well, you've proven your point," said Andersen. "Now explain it to us." "I can't explain it -- yet. But Kohl put me up to it. He knew it would work -- and to my mind that's significent. When I mentioned to him earlier that the tensions in the ship had lessened he guessed that we were prepared for liftoff.' Andersen was thoughtful. "So to him the effect is both deducible and reproducible. Which suggests he knows exactly what he's talking about. Apart from the effect's being airborne I don't know what it is he's got, but we could waste a lot of time before we came up with an answer we could use with the same degree of certainty. I vote we capitulate and ask the old king to let us see his reports." "I don't see how we can, Robin. He's bending over backward not to influence us," said Chad. "For which I'd thank him if I thought we might seriously disagree with his answers. But he's on solid ground and he knows it. So what's the point in our sitting around 'discovering' what he's already documented? We're supposed to be professionals, not first-year students." "What brought this on so suddenly?" asked Chad. "You've had a great change of heart since yesterday." "Yesterday I couldn't see a reason for refusing colonization. Today I can. Picture a colony exposed to what we've just been through. We've overreacted to stimuli, consistently made the wrong decisions and generaUy made fools of ourselves. In our case, it wasn't too important. We'd have survived even if we had placed ourselves into orbit unnecessarily. But in a colony such misconceptions could be disastrous. So I take it that's one of the old king's answers we're ready to endorse." "I'll go along with that," said Seemly. "You can't run a colony if you can't trust the basis of your own decisions. The insidiousness of the effect is as dangerous as its intensity." "So how do you propose to tackle him?" asked Chad. "If you don't mind," said Seemly, "I'd prefer you left it to me. I think I'm just beginning to see the light." HE found Peter Kohl behind the usual clutter of papers when she went into his office. He looked curiously at the letter she handed him. "What's this?" "A copy of our radio communication to Survey Center. It confirms that in our opinion Loric is unsuitable for colonization. Reading between the lines, the commissioner owes you an apology." "I've never doubted it, but thanks for your support. I take it you've worked out the answer." "Only the principle. It's all to do with pheromones, isn't it?" "You're absolutely right! Pheromones -- exo-hormones. Airborne chemical messengers every bit as powerful as the hormones that control our bodies. But these originate from other organisms, namely the bears. They're effective in negligible concentrations and over distances of several kilometers if the air currents are favorable." "That's what had me baffled," Seemly said. "I know of pheromones as sex attractants and colony regulators in the insect world, but it's difficult to accept their role in higher mammals." "Only because you've not thought about it before. The canine bitch in season broadcasts just that effect. And although we try to deny it, there's ample evidence that human crowd psychology is similarly controlled. Mob panic, excitement and hysteria are more satisfactorily explained in terms of pheromone concentration than by any psychological mechanism." "I'd never realized that." "It's a sad reflection on our age that we spend too much time looking at the rest of the universe and too little looking at ourselves. I suspect exo-hormones had a strong survival value for the human race in our early stages of evolution. Unification of mental states is a vital part of the herd instinct. Somehow we've tried to forget this basic aspect of nature, but reality dies hard. Even the language still carries phrases like the scent of danger and the smell of fear -- unwitting acknowledgment of our more chemically sensitive past." "Assuming I accept all that as true," said Seemly, "it still doesn't explain about the bears. Surely the hormone would be specific to the species?" "A reasonable assumption -- and one that has a great deal going for it. It's the basis behind my refusal to sign the colonization acceptance. The truth is that the bears aren't bears at all. Except for size and bodyweight, they've more in common with elementary Terran primates. Environmental differences modify the courses of natural selection, leading to an infinite variety of potential evolutionary chains -- but the point at issue is this; the biochemical simUarities are such that I can only consider Loric bears and Homo sapiens to be descended from the same evolutionary stock." "You have to be joking!" "Do I?" The old king was serious. "Everything from gastric enzymes to rhinal morphology points to the bears' being analogues of the early ancestors of man. Any interference with their evolution could have an incalculable effect on the future of the organic population of the universe. Think about that. Seemly. View it against the intentions of the Space Conventions. And if you've any doubts, remember their hormonal and pheromonal makeup is exactly interchangeable with your own. Coincidence? I doubt it." "But the activity of the pheromones over long distances is fantastic-" "I suspect the human receptors aren't much dimmed. It's the excretory mechanisms which have atrophied in man. The sweat accompanying fear or tension is about the most obvious signal we can still produce." "Surely we'd be aware of being affected if even a vestigial link between humans remained." "Not necessarily. Various things -- certain psychotropic drugs, for instance-can affect mental attitudes without being called into awareness. And just how aware are you of the effects of your own hormonal body chemistry? It colors your every thought, yet you rationalize the feeling to produce a 'reason' for your attitude's being what it is. We're all liars to ourselves. Seemly. Trying to rationalize what our molecules are urging us to do..."  up," said Andersen, as he signed the final copy of the report. "It's ironic that we had to travel to the end of the universe to find out we may be strangers to ourselves. I suppose you'll use thisas the starting point for a new university research ideas on crowd psychology and herd instinct?" "I'U certainly do some research on it," said Seemly. "But I'm not returning to the university-not yet." "A lecture tour, perhaps?" "No. I've contacted Space Survey for permission to remain here. My field experience qualifies me for a junior Residency." "Stay on Loric with old king Kohl?" Andersen was surprised. "There's a lot of work to be done on Loric, Peter's only scratched the surface of it. For the first time we've a chance to study the human prototype at an early stage in evolution. Those bears are laying down the deep-mind patterns that can give us a whole new view of human psychology. The implications for civilization are immense." "And?" "And what?" "Come off it. Seemly! We've been together too many trips. I know you when you've a big idea in mind. Don't tell me you're thinking of making a play for the old king?" "Could you blame me? He's probably the best planetary ecologist alive and he's one of the kindest and most understanding men I've ever met. And he isn't even very old." "Well, I hope you've thought about it carefully. It could be the old long won't play. A wasted Residency here could make a big hole in your academic life." "I have thought about it, Robin. Really I have. The way I see it, Loric in the bears' mating season is going to be a very interesting place."  #Eai#Strept I New York, N Y. # I RI # P # T word (inetirding nwno and addrmaa). tO-mrerd minimum. Pufmant with ardor. LU Kent, Ohio #. Box #, Longview, Washington #. S-F Journal by three-time Hugo Winner. #, Portland, Oregon #. on the elevator, # W. #th St.", a recording from the distant future. High quality # rpm ten-inch disc. # to The Record, Box #, New York, N.Y. #. Weird Fiction Books -- Pocketbooks. Lists Box #. Kings Park, L.I., N.Y. #. of titles listed from Rarities to Reading S. Fullerton Ave., Montclair, N.J. #. Jersey #. Box # -- Rosemead, Calif. #. Box #, Zenith, Wa. #. journal of s-f and fantasy. 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The publishers assume no responsibiiity for unsolicited materiai. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Introductoi States, Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bester James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menze! J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert SUverberg Theodore Sturgeon A.E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut. Jr. H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: New York, N.Y. # For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD D # issues of IF for # # issues of IF for # of IF for # of IF for # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription as checked above.  # . ' V...V  ' ' V' ' J! '  w a ' .  ' . ' r J r. ' ' : V-' ' I ,' . o --  # -- c -- # --  ' f      f  i   If  U   #c #. t , # u ,#-Z# -- # -- #  #C  -- # -- # -- rh ir f -- ' AouAR js "   . M "#  'I'.' The Largest, Most Complete Star Chart It will fascinate you. Its size? A full # V # by # V # feet! Hang this noble map on your wall, then stand # or # yards away. You see an amazing replica in deep blue of the night sky -- showing # stars, just about every star significantly visible to the unaided eye. Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellations! No intelligent, aware person -- and certainly no science-fiction reader -- can afford to be without this dramatic reproduction of the heavens. For it is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. It stretches the mind and the imagination. And as never before, the Celestial Map charts the vast reaches of space through which hurtle space-ship Earth, the solar system, the galaxy itself... Own this magnificent map. It will instruct, entertain and delight you! Advertisement copyright  # by Celestiai Map Company. Offer good untit December #, #.  A numbered degree scale marks the entire map perimeter  Shows all stars up to and including the sixth magnitude. fffS !  tilt nm VA ' . -- CNTuRuS '-,.# #r A  Projection is a Mercator rectangle.  Stars are identified by Yale Catalogue numbers. Bright Star numbers, Flamsteed numbers, plus Greek letters and specific star names. A Thing of Beauty. The huge Celestial Map is a distinguished work of art in its own right, sure to adorn any interior. It is sent to you in a stout container designed to protect the valuable contents.  Map is issued in conjunction with the #th Anniversary of Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy.  Map computed by U. of California's star-sifting computer.  Map is plotted by David W. Teske, recipient of the American MuseumHayden Planetarium #I Kepler Award. The Celestial Map Company # West # Street New York, N.Y. # Enclosed find # (cash, check or money order). Please rush the Celestial Map to: The brave had made Earth unlivable. It remained for the meek to inherit the stars! I H IS awakening was like walking out of a warm room and into a snowstorm. The dream, what little he could remember of it, had not been entirely pleasant but it had been warm. He tried desperately to hold onto it, to pull it back and around him again like a warm blanket that was slipping off his bed, to do anything that would hold back this awful heartstopping cold. But his mind was working, which meant that his blood was carrying sugar and oxygen to his thawing brain, and his circulatory systems had been successfully restarted or he would not have been able to feel the cold in the first place. So he waited patiently while the dream warmth faded, to be replaced by the real thing -- then he opened his eyes. In the unlighted cubicle the bright letters on the ceiling display seemed to float in the darkness above his head. Devlin pressed hard on the indicated button -- which did not move. His heart, which was the loudest thing in the utterly silent ship, became even noisier. Had the moisture in his breath penetrated the mechanism, he wondered, freezing and jamming it with ice? Were the delicate actuators frozen solid by the years of hyperthermia which had held his body? In short, had the complex life-support system of the starship, which represented the pinnacle of Earth's scientific achievements in virtually every field of knowledge, already developed a malfunction? He pressed again, much harder. Devlin reminded himself that he had not used his hand for a very long time and the digits, like the rest of his newly warmed body, were weak and stiff. Also, the buttons would have been designed to operate with a firm pressure to avoid accidental activation. The moment of calm and logical thinking had an immediate effect on his elevated pulse rate and this time the indicated button went in at the first attempt. The words hung in the darkness for the length of time needed for him to read them very slowlythen they were replaced. Devlin pressed the button on the left. T here was no sane reason why he should not say something out loud, or make some sort of modulated noise like a hum or a whistle, perhaps. But he could not do any of those things. The thought of the vast, utterly silent ship stretching away on all sides of his cubicle, guarded and guided by completely silent computers, was paralyzing his own ability to make sounds with an overwhelming spell based on the laws of sympathetic magjc. "I don't believe you," said Devlin. Satisfied, the display replied: "Yes, master," said Devlin, beginning to sit up. His head rose perhaps six inches from its padded rest before he collapsed back. By the time his grayed-out vision had returned to normal there was a new message hanging above him. The display blanked out for a few minutes, then lit with another message. "Now," said Devlin, laughing, "I believe you." "All rightr The display rolled away from him as he carefully opened the side wall of his casket and swung his feet to the deck and into the exercise stirrups, but there was another display facing him as he sat up. The words dimmed slightly as the cubicle lighting came on. "I'm not really lumgry," Devlin 'lied as his eyes went to the food dispenser. He had been required to fast for twelve hours before the pre-flight cooldown and, in a manner of speaking, he had had nothing to eat for seventy-five years. At the same time his body, although stiff and weak, still looked healthy and well-nourished, and the really severe pangs of hunger had begun only when the display had informed him that he was not to eat. "Psychosomatic malnutrition," he said drily, "is a terrible way to die." B ut he was not even considering using the dispenser. There were sound medical reasons for not undergoing hibernation anesthesia on a full stomach and hunger had been a common enough condition on Earth. His present hunger, like the rest of his body, had been frozen and preserved for more than seventy years and the process could be repeated indefinitely. The truth was that he felt fine. All at once his hunger receded, driven back by a feeling composed equally of wonder and sheer relief. Seventy-five years of ship-elapsed time had passed and he was alive and well, while back on Earth everyone he had known was long since dead. He shied away from remembering some of them and tried to think instead about the starship, its inconceivable velocity, which was the end result of decades of gentle acceleration, and the polluted and over-populated planet it had left behind. There was a narrow area of clear deck on the open side of the casket. The rest of the space in the cubicle that not occupied by the food dispenser and the ceiling and wall displays-was stuffed with equipment associated with the cold sleep systems and sensors. One of the few tests that had qualified him for joining the mission had been to check for any tendency toward claustrophobia, Devlin remember, and another had been a test for the degree of dissatisfaction with present -- or rather seventy years' past-surroundings. While he exercised in the narrow space Devlin wondered how he was supposed to know if there were an obvious gap in his memory. If he could not remember something important, how was he supposed to know that he had forgotten it? From both displays in unison. Obviously the computer knew when he had obeyed the instructions to speak and exercise, but it could not tell whether or not he was remembering properly. Telepathic computers were beyond even the resources of Earth science, so the chances were that it would simply keep reminding him and hoping for the best. Gradually his stiffness left him and he drifted into the corridor. The lighting was switched on but not the heating -- Devlin's breath hung like an intermittent fog around his face and he had to pull himself rapidly around the wall nets to keep warm. But there was nothing strange to him -- no obvious gaps in his memory -- about this short corridor in the crew segment of the ship. It was just like the corridor in the simulator back on Earth, except that there the feeling of weightlessness had been' produced by a system of spring wires and localized sensory deprivation drugs. If he had been chosen to occupy one of the four colonist segments built around the central crew and computer module, there would have been much less room in which to exercise the others were confined to their cubicles for the duration of the trip. Feeling warmer, but short of breath, he stopped for a moment with his fingers around a strand of netting. As he was about to move off again he saw the other figure, ghostlike, its head surrounded by the same self-generated fog and wearing an open-mesh cold suit identical to the one he was wearing himself. The figure was standing only a few feet away. He reached forward instinctively and discovered that it was his reflection an instant before his hand touched the transparent plastic door and two messages, one of them upside down with respect to the other, appeared on it. Devlin shivered suddenly and decided that he had had enough exercise. He moved back to his cubicle, trying unsuccessfully not to read the name tag on the door opposite his own. For a few seconds he stared at the manual override handle, which grew from the gray metal like a bright red banana. In an emergency he could bypass the computer controls and initiate the awakening of any person rr? Ballanlne  ll Boo#k Gazing into our crystal ball, we find some gems already on the schedule for '#. Leigh Brackett has signed to do an open-ended series of new John Stark novels for us. No, they won't be set on Mars. Leigh has found herself a new planet, Straith, and it's a beauty. We have just bought a bright new Raymond Z. Gallun novel (the old wave is alive and well at Ballantine) and we plan to publish it on the #th anniversary of the appearance of Ray's first story, November #. Next spring we will be launching the Ballantine SF Classic Series, reprinting some of the best books in the field. Our lead-off title is nal title better. A good list followswatch for it. You may find books you have been looking for that have long been out of print. And while you are waiting for Angel's Experience, filled with fullcolor photos from the motion picture of the same name. Herbert's inspirational text accompanying the photographs makes this a book you will want to own. (first cousin, once removed from the the Fall of #. This first volume is what is to be a regular series features all original science-fiction stories -- with the emphasis on "science" -- by many of your favorite sf authors. We have several first novels under contract by young writers we believe will soon be old favorites. Get ready to add Suzy Mckee Charnas, Michael Bishop, Howard Waldrop and Buddy Saunders to your list of writers to reckon with. On the drawing board we have a definitive collection. And there will Leiber, for two. More to come on these books as their publication dates draw near. Next month we have new books by Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg. Stay tuned... BB in the ship. He was not, however, supposed to warm up one of the females just because he felt cold and lonely. He shivered again and sought the warmth of his own cubicle. But the heaters had been turned off in preparation for his imminent cooldown and his jaws began to ache with the effort of not allowing his teeth to chatter. Devlin lay down and the hinged flaps swung up and clicked into position. It was the first noise not made by himself that he had heard since the awakening. Devlin had been told often enough how important it was that he remember as much as possible of the dreams experienced during cold sleep -- the dreams that spelled out the difference between a dead and frigid mind and body and a mind body that has suspended life, identity and continuity. But he was not supposed to remember the reasons now -- there was no time. If he were to be sure of another coherent awakening he had to concentrate on his last dream. The display was hazy with breath fog as he closed his eyes. He tried to ignore the goose pimples that crawled like frozen insects all over his body and the picture of Brother Howard that kept getting between him and his dream. He had been warm. He had floated in a thick, warm soup where existence was incredibly violent. Pain, pleasure, hunger, repletion, sex -- all had been experienced in such raw, savage concentrations that he could not now tell which had been painful and which pleasant. All his senses had been affected as if by an abrasive rubbed along a bared nerve. And he had been blind. As more and more of the dream came back to him he began to realize that the only thing nice about it had been its warmth. A small change in the quality of the light on the other side of his closed eyelids made him open his eyes. The display had a final message. Around and within his body there was a sharp, silent explosion of cold. II Hunger was making him take risks. He had lived long and grown large by not taking unnecessary risks, but with increasing size had come a proportionate growth in his hunger and in the number of risks taken to assuage it. On this occasion his hunger was intense and the risks acceptable. He moved from beneath the cover of a clump of gently waving algae, skirting the overhanging curve of a massive Tabulata and crawled onto the bright area of sea bottom that stretched ahead for as far as his rudimentary eyes could see. The area was clear of rocks and major growths, but it was not empty. In the middle distance lay the enormous, garishly patterned shell of a carnivorous cephalopod, the pointed rear of its narrow conical body clearly visible while the forward section was hidden by a self-generated fog of disturbed mud that concealed its head, tentacles and wildly struggling victim. Nearby lay a small group of brachipods, looking disdainful behind the protection of their smooth white shells. The remainder of the area was, as usual, covered by the tiny scurrying shapes of small trilobites scavenging for the plant and animal debris that littered the sand. He joined them. But the tiny morsels of organic material did nothing to quell the hunger that raged along every nerve in his body-if anything, feeding that resulted in something less than satiation served only to make his hunger worse. It was like a conflagration within him, interrupted only by the brief, hot explosions of fury that occurred when he encountered long-dead husks or fresh remains already picked clean of edible material, or when a smaller trilobite was able to squirm free of the four pairs of appendages serving his wide, underslung mouth. Such escapes were frequent because he was not by nature a carnivore and, in that continuing fire of hunger and anger, emotions like caution and fear were obliterated before they could properly form. Then he encountered a trilobite that did not try to escape, because it was trapped between the long narrow shell of the cephalopod and himself. The muddy water around the carnivore's head had grown clearer, indicating that it was finisliing off its victim. The image registered clearly on his visual equipment and was transmitted accurately to his crude equivalent of a brain, but the warning that accompanied it was like a glass of water on a forest tire. This trilobite was larger than others of its kind currently infesting the sandy bottomalmost half as big as he was himself -- and it had rolled itself tightly into a ball to protect its vulnerable underbelly. He probed angrily with his antenna and head appendages, but succeeded only in removing a few of the small and weaker legs from the tail section. It rolled itself into an even tighter ball and he swarmed over it again and again, his hunger and frustration making it impossible for him to think. But he did not need to think. A purely defensive and involuntary reflex, triggered when his victim's tightly rolled body opened briefly to trap and damage one of his antennae, gave him the advantage. It caused him to roll his body tightly around that of his victim. He maintained the hold, squeezing harder and harder while the other's body segments telescoped and their connecting sutures snapped and pulpy flesh began oozing from the organic wreckage. But the struggle had stirred up the mud and sand around him to such an extent that when he uncurled from the crushed body he could barely see it, although that did not stop him from feeding. It did, however, prevent him from seeing that the cephalopod had finished with its victim and, attracted by the disturbance, was seeking another. It found two. He was feeding when the forest of tentacles wrapped itself around both his victim and himself and began pulling them into the cephalopod's enormous maw. He went on feeding while the hot, constant flame of his hunger became punctuated by explosions of pain as his appendages were twisted and crushed and torn away and as more and more of his body segments collapsed under the pressure of the cephalopod's teeth. He was still eating and being eaten when the triple fires of his pain, anger and hunger faded and died... kRE you sure I'm awake?" His dream of being a recently defunct trilobite on the muddy bottom of a Silurian sea was still very much with him and would require no effort of memory to recall. For a time he had been a tiny organism whose blind fury had been the direct cause of its violent end. But he was now fairly sure that it had not been intelligent, that its continued survival had been a matter of pure luck and that the impressions he had gained of forethought and the ability to learn from experience were false. The intelligent dreamer, himself, had given an aura of intelligence to his dream creature which had, in fact, been driven by nothing more than blind instinct. Hunger and blind instinct were still driving people to acts of violence-at least, they had been two hundred and eighty-two years ago. He tried hard not to think about the time that had passed and think instead about the present and himself. He was still very hungry. "No, thanks," said Devlin. He recalled having to sit for three hours watching that re-education film, which had begun by assuming that the viewer had the mind of a retarded child. "Bless you!" K Going up to five books a month with sf readers... In September we mean to give Perry Rhodan some tough competition with the first episode of a new space-hero series chronicling the ways, undercover operative of Earth amid the myriad worlds of humans and non-humans. reprint of something thirty years ancient, and not a novelization of a rather skimpy rerun television series. It is all new, all original, and although written under the house name of Gregory Kern it is by a popular and skilled writer whose sf works have already sold in the (UT#) is #t. Gordon Dickson, paperback edition, first appearance Michael G. Coney's latest, certain to be at least a Hugo or Nebula John Brunner's fine collection of (UQ#-#t). back. The first time in paperDevlin exercised gently, then released the casket's hinged side. The cubicle's heaters were coating his skin with a film of warmth, making him think of one of his mother's baked alaskas -- a hot crust surcream. But his icy center thawed quickly and he returned his attention to the displays. "No," said Devlin firmly. He had been told how important it was that he remember his cold dreams and store them in his waking memory in as much detail as possible. The reasons he had been given for doing so were in part psychological, biological and perhaps even philosophical -- after all, he had been dead in every medical sense of the word for more than three average lifetimes. B y its very nature long-term hibernation anesthesia could be tried, but it could never be adequately tested. During the years following its perfection as a method of suspending animation for indefinite periods there had been no shortage of volunteers wishing to undergo the process -- people with diseases incurable by the medical science of the day, or those simply wanting to awaken into a better world. But data was still lacking on the biological and psychological side effects, if any, on really long-term subjects. It had been thought at first that there were no harmful side effects, but the medics responsible for hyperthermia processing on the starship project said that they must be absolutely sure. They were worried, it seemed, by a slight tendency toward disorientation and forgetfulness, so minor as to be virtually undetectable. But on a voyage that might last for a thousand years even a tendency toward mental confusion and forgetfulness could be deadly. Forced, as they were, by the necessity of finding an answer to a problem that quite possibly did not exist, medical scientists could only theorize and try to guard against all theoretical eventualities. The most generally accepted and worrying theory was that ultra longterm suspension would greatly increase disorientation and memory impairment and that the harmful effects would not increase proportionately, but multiply with the passage of time.Extended periods in low temperatures could well bring about a leakage in the electro-biological system which coded and stored the memory impulses -- and the end result would be a starship crew member or colonist being revived in perfect health -- but without a single thought in his head. To guard against this purely theoretical disaster the medics had decided to revive the travelers at lengthy intervals -- one hundred and fifty to two hundred years -- during the voyage. More frequent awakenings would have placed a severe strain on the ship's power reserves and consumables. It was also thought necessary to provide a link between the awakened mind and the frigid and not quite arrested mind of the cold sleeper. The minds on the ship had to be continuously occupied, insisted the project psychologist. They had to engage themselves with dreaming during the centuries of frigid suspension and, whOe awake, perform exercises in recall so that the original memory store and linkages would be periodically reinforced instead of being lost. Dreams were, after all, simply an involuntary form of memory recall. "But there must be more to it than that," said Devlin suddenly. "Or else that book they made me read on prehistory left a bigger impression than I realized." He Was remembering the shocking clarity of sensory detail in his last dream memory and he decided firmly that it required no further reinforcing. Saying "No -- " to the computer might or might not produce dramatic results, but if the thing had been telling the truth in the first place it had probably noted the word as a sound -- and proof only that he was obeying the instruction to speak and not disobeying the order to recall his dream. That last dream was still too uncomfortably fresh. Instead he turned his mind to the layout, organization and control of the starship -- and deliberately ignored the food dispenser -- as he moved into the corridor to continue his physical exercises. He was a human being in full control of his mind and instincts, not an insanely hungry trilobite. The display had a new message for him on his return. Ill T he ship moved imperceptibly among the stars and the dreams trickled even more slowly through the minds of its occupants, with one exception. That was the man who occupied one of the two control positions and was not moving at all. It was not that Devlin did not know what to do. The memory of his training-minimal as would be expected for a fully automated and computerized ship -- was sharp, complete and recent despite the fact that in real time it was two hundred and eightyodd years in the past. Possibly it was the silence that kept him motionless -- he was the only component in the ship making a noise -- or simply the fact that he was all alone -- or the knowledge that he was not truly alone and was afraid of the ghosts of people who were not really dead... Devlin shivered, even though the heaters had long since raised Ihe temperature to a comfortable level. and forced a laugh. Of one thing he could be sure, the people in this ship would never walk in their sleep. The display had been saying this from the moment he had taken the control position. This was a different breed of computer from the one that supervised his awakenings and nagged at him to do the proper physical and mental exercises. As far as this one was concerned, Devlin was expected to know his stuff. This was, in short, a highly professional computer that would stand for no nonsense. Apart from these purely subjective impressions, Devlin thought wryly, it was exactly the same as the other computer -- it possessed no human attributes whatsoever. He leaned forward and tapped the button labeled: Report. Devlin tapped the Hold button to give himself time to think and to control his anger and disappointment. The starship's course had been plotted to take it through ten solar systems that lay in a fairly straight line from Earth, and most of these had been thought to contain planets with a high probability of being suitable for colonization. That being the case the first target should also have been the ship's final destinationto assume that the observational data on the nearest target system would be the most accurate had been only natural. And the probability of the colonists' finding a suitable world on their second target should also have been high. But the farther the ship traveled the more they would have to rely on chance, the greater the danger of their having to cope with a possible malfunction in the ship's hyperthermia caskets, guidance and propulsion systems -- or even in the periodically frozen organic computers belonging to its occupants. Devlin remembered the words of old Care we, the man responsible for the design of the long-range geophysical sensors, who also had been angry and disappointed because he had been chained to Earth by age and a disease which in a lesser individual would have been terminal. "This ship is the most intricate, sophisticated, foolproof fabrication ever to be conceived and built by man," he had said at the conclusion of his first lecture, "but it is only a bloody machine." Devlin's anger now derived chiefly from the fact that the machine had bypassed two likely solar systems without consulting a member of the crew. Perhaps it also came from a fear that the machine could not be trusted -- and he wondered what he could do if a playback on the two earlier fly-bys showed that they had bypassed a suitable colony world. He tried to control this fear and make himself think. The first two larget systems had been bypassed without crew consultation, the comjnjter was saying, and it meant just that. But members of the crew could be awakened for other reasonsand he should also have remembered (hat. button he called up crew status data. Like the occupants of the colonist sections -- who were not supposed to leave their cubicles until after the landing -- two crew members had been awakened once for physical and mental exercise. The display showed a pale blue Exercise Only light burning against each name-one was his. His name was also tagged with his present orange Decision Awakening light and his crew mate's name carried the yellow light that indicated an awakening for observation purposes only. A quick check showed that the observation awakening coincided with the fly-by time on one of the bypassed systems. He knew the crew member concerned very well. She was not the type to sit idly by if the world they had been passing had been suitable for colonization. Devlin swung back to the main display. He said, "For all the unkind things I have been thinking about you, I am truly sorry," and released the Hold. The information came in bright, sharp, silent words. It was a system comprising seven planets held by a sun approaching middle age, stable and emitting radiation of an acceptable type and intensity. Six of the worlds were unsuitable, either too Box OG, # Folsom, SF, Ca # "The Underground Comix People" Illustrated SciFi Fantasy for Adults # each -- Save #I Off Retail  A. Sci-Fi: Slow Death #-#, Starwench, Enigma, Brain Fantasy, American Flyer No. #  B. Fables  Heresies: Fantagor No. # (# color). Grim Wit No. # ISi color), Little Green Dinosaur I  #, Binky Brown, Leather Nun.  C. Spinejarring Horrors: Skull #-#, Psychotic Adventures No. #, Two-Fisted Zombies.  D. Next # comix published for #. I am over I # years of age Ask for our free catalog  how you can make  selling comix credit. Mention this ad  we'll pay shipping on orders above I # comix. Testing Conceptual Limits Since # Close to or too distant from the primary, and the display gave brief details of the planetary diameters, gravity, temperature, atmospheric pressure or the lack of it. The remaining one, third from the sun, was within the temperature and light zone in which planetary life could evolve -- and it had. He jabbed the button marked Visual and divided his attention between the data display and the pictures on the side screen. Planet Three was enormous, a rapidly spinning globe composed of semi-molten material, superheated liquid and a wide-flung, roiling gas envelope that warmed its two satellites like a second sun. Satellite A was a ten-milewide chip of rock that orbited its primary every twelve hours, while Satellite B was much larger, more distant and sedate in its rotational movement -- and the second most beautiful world that Devlin had seen. He blinked away a temporary impairment of the Devlin visual equipment and concentrated on the data display. In the stillness of the ship his breath sounded like an interrupted gale and his heart was banging against his rib cage as if it wanted out. Devlin jabbed the Hold button so hard that he cracked his fingernail. Third time lucky... He wanted suddenly to shout so loudly that the silent ship would never get over the shock, so loudly that it would disturb even the slow, frigid dreaming of the colonists. And that wasn't such a bad idea, because this was the sort of good news that should be shared as soon as possible. It was completely against the rules, of course. The manual overrides were not supposed to be used to awaken people except in cases of extreme emergency and this was anything but an emergency. But the control center was designed for two people and six could probably squeeze in at a pinch. They would be able to see their future home for a few minutes before they returned to their cold dreams, because planetfall was still a long way off in time and distance. The ship would have to go away and come back again. T here was nothing wrong with his memory, Devlin thought happily -- he could remember every word, every line drawn by the electronic pointer and every nuance of Carewe's voice as he had outlined the approach, reapproach and landing sequences. Perhaps the reason Devlin remembered the instructions so well was that they made up the knowledge that would be used only when the mission's goal had been achieved. Despite the sarcastic, hectoring manner of old Care we, who had invariably spoken to his audience like an Einstein who was trying to make his Special Theory comprehensible to a bunch of ten-year-olds, it had been the most popular lecture in the whole training course. In case the first or second or sixth target stars proved unsuitable. Care we had said, the ship would not, as was customary in interplanetary flights, accelerate for half the distance to its proposed destination and decelerate during the remainder of the trip. To do so would save time but be very wasteful of power. With their life suspension techniques they could afford to waste time, but the ship's power reserves had to be conserved for a second or a third or an umpteenth try. That was why acceleration would be gradual and applied over many decades, until the ship had achieved a velocity just over one-quarter that of light. This velocity would be maintained until a system with a suitable planet was found. Only then would the ship decelerate, just as gradually checking its tremendous velocity and converting its fly-by into a cometary return orbit -- and many decades would pass before general awakening and landing. Caution diluted Devlin's happiness as he thought of the colonists crowding into the control center seven at a time. Awakening the first seven would be relatively easy -- they in turn could awaken the others before returning to the cubicles. But some of them might not want to be reprocessed after only a few minutes of looking at their new world. Some would probably want to study the probe data and others might want to hang around or start celebrating. It was not impossible that all the people on the ship might be awake at the same time, crowding the control center, corridors and cubicles and placing a severe strain on the heating reserves and food dispensers. Intrapersonal difficulties might arise, even arguments. His instructions, DevUn reminded himself once again, were that no more than the two crew members were to be awake at one time unless an emergency dictated otherwise. Good news like this and the natural urge to spread it around were the very antithesis of an emergency. But he might bend the rules just a little and spread the good news to one other person. His last meeting with her, in biological time, had been only ten hours ago. They had been sitting on the edges of their suspension caskets in the dormitory that held the colonists who had just completed their training courses -- some of them had been cooled for more than a year to preserve their precious biological time while the later arrivals were being trained. Classes had been small. The training could not have been described as intensive and on its completion cooldown was immediate. The latest batch, like the first, would awaken on the ship somewhere between the stars. She had been sitting facing him, a slim, dark-haired beautiful girl shivering in her open-mesh coldsuit while she waited for the signal to get into the casket and lie down. She had smiled at him when he smiled at her. Patricia Morley had been undemonstrative but not unfriendly. When the two-minute warning had sounded he had reached forward to take her hand, meaning to say something that would probably have sounded trite. But she had spoken first. "Just suppose," she said quietly and serioudy, "that these caskets malfunction. Do you think that we will know when we become permanently instead of temporarily dead?" Devlin had shivered with more than the cold and said, "Pleasant dreams." For a few seconds she had gripped his hand so tightly that he had still felt it tingling when the cold explosion came. At that moment he had been remembering the advice of one of the project psychologists who had insisted that pairing-off should wait until planetfall, when the pool would include everyone on the ship, and that pairings among training groups had a much lower probability of success. But right now he wanted to awaken her with his good news and go on from there. He laughed out loud and released the Hold. "Wliat" began Devlin. The computer ignored him, but answered anyway. D evlin thought about the kind of life they could lead on the Earthlike satellite of Planet Three, the clean air and unpolluted oceans and the fresh green vegetation that covered the land surfaces like chlorophyl paint. He thought of the night sky with that tremendous primary shining above them, the fantastic play of light and shade and color when the sun shared the sky with it and the beautiful spectacle of an eclipse. "No," he whispered. Devlin swung away from the console and out of the control center, wanting desperately to find something or someone who would make the awful pain of disappointment go away. He stopped outside his cubicle. The big red manual override handle on Patricia's door was within easy reach, but if he had refused to awaken her to tell the good news there could be no excuse for his doing so to tell her about this. He swore horribly and went into his cubicle and began pushing buttons on the food dispenser. The wall and ceiling displays were saying: He went on swearing at them, but in the end his emotional heat and the warmth imparted by the hot food faded before the cold radiating from his casket and he returned to the control center. The right decision was obvious. But he did not make it at once. For a long time he lay watching Three B on the screen. It hung like a great, cloud-wrapped vision of heaven -- a planet-sized egg waiting to be fertilized and to grow and be stillborn. There could be only one decision and he took it, but not until after he had rerun all the data on Three B and called up more detailed information from his sensors, and spent many hours exercising his brain with thoughts that were psychologically undesirable. Finally he tapped: The display replied: "The sooner," said Devlin bitterly, "the better.' IV The days were long and happy and full of incidentusually the same kind of incident. Day after day he sunned himself on the edge of the swamp or pastured among the aquatic plants or fed on the palm fronds within reach. The changes came too slowly to be perceptible at first, taking many thousands of long, warm, contented days to become manifest. He was vaguely aware that the deep area of the swamp had become shallower and that when he pushed against the trees in an attempt to reach the higher fronds they tore up their roots or splintered and fell, so that he was able to reach down for the food he wanted. Gradually everything seemed to be growing smaller and he became aware, very slowly, that it was himself who was growing larger and more mature. The internal upheaval of puberty and his first incredibly awkward attempts at mating made him fully aware of his growth and took the calm, contented sameness out of the nearly infinite succession of days. But then even those gargantuan heavings and squirmings became just another aspect of his life and the days passed in their thousands until the one when he nearly died. He had been sunning himself on a raised shelf of land close to the swamp, sleepily digesting his last meal, when the young saurian appeared between his prone body and the safety of the swamp. It was a small reptile -- perhaps only a fifth of his own mass -- and stupid enough for the difference in size not to worry it. But its small size and consequent lack of inertia made the attack incredibly fast. It was his first experience with a carnivorous reptile and, until the razor-sharp teeth raked his flank, the appearance of the saurian had made him feel uneasy rather than frightened. But the savage pain put an abrupt end to his slow, contented thinking and, awkward and uncoordinated, he struggled to his feet while his head swept around in a wide arc so that he could see what his attacker was doing. The saurian, who until then had been able only to tear at the surface of the enormous wall that was his flank, now transferred its attention to his rear left leg. The teeth sank in like multiple rows of daggers, the jaw locked in position and it began to pull and twist at the upper section of the leg. An avalanche of pain impulses from the damaged member engulfed the rudimentary brain in the sacral area long before it registered in the forty-feet distant brain in his head, and that collection of nerve ganglia reacted at once, automatically withdrawing the leg in an attempt to remove it from danger. Already in an unbalanced condition because of the weight and position of his massive neck, withdrawal of the leg from the ground caused him to topple ponderously on to his side and on top of his attacker. He could feel bones snapping and the other's shrill hiss of pain as he collapsed and the sensations continued during the few minutes it took for him to regain his feet. By that time he could see that the creature's skeleton was seriously distorted and compressed, with bones showing like misplaced teeth in the long, ruptured wounds, and that there had been a considerable loss of internal body material and fluids. The saurian was still alive, but unable to move very far, and the scavenging insects and small predators were already converging on it. He did not eat meat and had no reason to stay, so he moved painfully toward the deeper areas of the swamp where he could pasture and cool the fire in his leg and think slow, contented thoughts again. Once again the days crawled past while he wallowed and pastured and sunned himself in the Jurassic swampland, but there was no mating and very little travel because of his reduced mobility and the raging fire in his leg. One day he was unable to get up and the days succeeded each other once again -- but slowly now and perceptibly different and filled with pain. Fortunately or unfortunately the large carnivorous reptiles did not find him, so that he lay undisturbed for a long time. Unable to reach the tremendous quantities of food needed to maintain his gigantic body, he grew steadily weaker. But a long time is needed for a mountain to die, even one of flesh and bone, and the days dragged on while, no longer able to move, he lay with his head turned around so that he could see the thick, angular lump of corruption that his leg had become. By then a new fire had started along the parts of his body that were in contact with the ground -- the slow, persistent erosion of insects and tiny carnivores who could not wait for him to die. The days passed, far too many of them, and very gradually the fire and the hunger and all the other sensations faded and were gone. D evlin remained still for the first few minutes after his awakening, hoping that if he did not move or open his eyes the computer would be fooled into thinking that he was still unconscious. He needed time to think. His long happy dream life as a brontosaurus and the long and unhappy death which, as far as he was concerned, had ended only a few minutes earlier, were worrying him. The images and sensations had been sharp -- and the remarkable lack of compression or vagueness in the dream-elapsed time was frightening. He had been given books to read on a wide range of unrelated subjects which had included prehistory-to give his cold-sleeping brain something to work on, the chief psychologist had told him -- but the material had consisted of simple popularizations of the relevant branch of science or period in history. They had not given him any information or insight on how it felt to be a trilobite or a brontosaurus, nor had they described in such exact detail the structure and coloring of the Jurassic palm fronds or the various types of aquatic vegetation on which he had lived. Certainly no one had shown him a picture of the improbably marked pink and gray nightmare that had been the young aUosaurus which had attacked and ultimately killed him. To dream the lifetime of a brontosaurus -- which could cover anything up to a couple of centuries -- in such detail indicated a very fertile imagination. Considering the paucity of material available to him and the many, many years of cold dreaming that stretched ahead, the thought of what might happen in his dream future scared him stiff. The dreams were supposed to keep his mind alive in an otherwise dead and deep-frozen body, but if the dreams were to become centurieslong nightmares the mind they kept alive might not remain sane. He wondered if it would  be possible for the dreamer to exercise more control over his dream, to make it more pleasant and to shut out the nightmarish aspects. In the last dream he, personally, had been aware of what had been going on. He had viewed the events and experienced the sensations as an intelligent being, even though the giant saurian, with two rudimentary brains to control its far-flung Umbs and musculature, had not had enough intelUgence to learn by observation rather than experience to avoid danger. But if Devlin had taken a more active part in the dream he should have been able to make his enormous, brainless and insubstantial monster avoid the aUosaurus, or he should at least have made it stay where it was -- on dry ground -- for a couple of days while the sunlight and fresh air healed the wounded leg, instead of dragging it through that stinking swamp... not painful, jolted his body and instinctively he opened his eyes. "You think," said Devlin drily, "of nearly everything." Only forty-one years since his last cooldown. It could hardly be another fly-byand the Caldwell girl was one of the colonists. Devlin had already begun the initial exercises when the display flashed another message. And another. tup: control cl'ntI'R. "If the malfunction is serious," said Devlin angrily, "I might not be able to think of anything else." When he reached the control center the colonist status display for the Blue module told him that the colonists had all been awakened three times. All the lights were pale blue because the people in that, and in the other three modules, were not required to make observations or decisions or deal with emergencies. All they could do was exercise their minds and bodies on each awakening and very occasionally eat. Three pale blue Exercise Awakening lights burned steadily against Blue #, indicating three successful awakenings and subsequent cooldowns. But a fourth light winked off and on as if it could not make up its mind. Five minutes to don the thefmal suit, Devlin estimated, and another five to strap on the air tank and heater and perhaps another minute to put the tools of his trade into an insulated container. The organic malfunction could be serious or trivial, but he did not want the organism concerned to complain later about being jabbed with a needle that had a temperature close to absolute zero. Then there would be another ten minutes getting from the control center to the Blue module and cracking the cubicle seal. He lost another minute doing as he had been told, but made it up on the way to Blue # I . As in the other colonist modules, heating was used only during the periodic awakenings and was confined to the cubicles. Devlin was not cold outside his suit until he bent his arm to activate the seal release and the revivification Hold switch. The lining of his thermal suit creased in the fold of his arm, compressing the insulating foam, and for a moment he thought that his elbow joint would seize up and the blood in the area congeal. though the girl were kneeling in prayer beside her casket. Her head and arms were inside, held there by the edge of the hinged flap which, for some reason, was in the closed vertical position. Obviously she had been trying to cUmb into the closed casket when cooldown began and the radiation had hit her. That radiation was potent stuff and was designed to achieve molecular arrest and plunge the subject to a temperature close to absolute zero so quickly that cell damage could not occur -- and it was focused only on the contents of the casket. As a result her head, arms and body down to a level slightly below the waist had been reprocessed in the normal way while the rest of her had cooled not so rapidly. Devlin swore and moved closer to carry out a quick visual examination. She was small and slim and looked to be about eighteen. Her eyes were open and there were two thin patches of ice on her cheeks where tears had frozen. He saw indications of bruisings on the outside edges of her hands and on her knuckles, as if she had been beating at something with her fists, but no other outward signs of physical injury. Very carefully he lifted her into the casket -- in the cooled-down condition human tissue was brittle and highly susceptible to damage. She lay with her knees projecting above the edge while her arms reached grotesquely upward, like one of the undressed female window-display models he used to stare at as a growing boy when he thought his mother wasn't looking. They, too, had been cold and stiff and unbelievably lifelike, but none of the display staff had thought of giving them plastic tears. When he was sure that all of her body was in radiation focus he went outside and canceled the revivification Hold. Like the cooldown treatment, the radiation designed to reverse the process was also potent stuff and deadly to anyone who was already revived. When he went in again she was not yet conscious. He moved her into a more comfortable position and replaced the arm hanging over the edge of the casket. The heaters had raised the temperature sufficiently for him to do without his suit and by the time he had opened the helmet she was coming awake. He pulled off his gauntlets and put his hand to her forehead. "Relax," he said gently. "Do not make any sudden movements." Her eyes opened and she said, "I'm cold. My legs are asleep and my hands -- " "That," lied Devlin quietly, "is because you woke up before they did." Her respiration was normal and the partial and premature cooldown had not affected mentation, but, considering her position at the time, that was, not surprising. He thought that her hands must have slipped over the opposite side of the casket during the cooldown instant and dropped back inside when she had slipped backward. Suddenly she smiled and said apologetically, "I was stupid. It wasn't claustrophobia or anything -- I just wanted to see Brian for a minute. The display said we were three hundred years older and I thought something might have happened to him in all that time. I wanted... I even beat on the door with my fists before I realized how stupid that was. By then it was only a few seconds from cooldown and I rushed to the casket so quickly that my knee hit the flap and knocked it shut and the computer thought I was in it and-" "So that's how it happened," said Devlin. She nodded and said, "I'm still very cold." "I'll get you some warm food," said Devlin, going to the dispenser. "Don't move. I'll feed you. But talk as much as you want to." "The computer didn't say that I could eat-" she began doubtfully. "Doctor's orders," said Devlin. She obviously enjoyed the hot meal, even though she seemed to be increasingly ill at ease and her color was high. Apparently she had become aware of the fact that there was a man in her cubicle who was not her Brian -- and that the suspension garment was little more than a collection of holes held together by fine wire. But the flush stopped short below waist level and a few inches above her wrists. And the areas of bluish white skin bordering these lines of demarcation were increasing perceptibly as he watched. Circulation had already ceased at the extremities and she had only a few minutes to live. "Brian is doing fine," said Devlin, keeping his eyes on her face. "If anything had gone wrong, in his cubicle I would have been awakened to deal with it, just as in your case. But I'm afraid all you'll be able to do is dream about him for a while.' She smUed again. "All I seem to dream about is being a lady dinosaur." "They made you read that book, too?" She shook her head slowly. "They told me to, but I didn't and read a historical romance instead. Learning about dinosaurs isn't useful to a colonist so I didn't bother, but I still dreamed about being one so clearly that -- " She broke off. Her breathing became labored and uneven and she looked suddenly frightened. She said, "I'm terribly cold. What -- what's happening to me?" "You'll be all right," said Devlin reassuringly and put his hand on her forehead again. "You're doing fine." A few minutes later he closed her eyes and left the cubicle. figure and her manner register with him as he shut down the computer outlet and suspension equipment and for a while he thought that he had succeeded. In the old days he used to have no trouble forgetting that kind of thing -- perhaps because there had been so much of it. But recently his memory had become unusually retentive -- even when he was only remembering dreams -- and he could no longer trust himself to forget. By the time he had returned to central control and stowed the thermal suit, less than two hours had passed since his awakening. The status display for Blue #I now read: Devlin tapped instructions for his own cooldown in one hour and returned to his cubicle. His instructions were waiting. V E very day he awoke in a room not much larger than the starship suspension cubicle which, at that time, was still in his future. His room expanded considerably when the bed folded into its wall recess to become a set of well-filled bookshelves -- glassed in, of course, to keep the books from falling out when it was being used as a bed -- and contracted again when the dining table and stool came out. But he did not notice the cramped conditions or the pitifully few touches he had been able to give the place to express his individuality, or the taste of the food he pushed in the general direction of his face, because normally he did not come fully awake until he had been up and about for at least an hour. By that time he had tidied up, converted the room to its daytime mode and unlocked the waiting room in readiness for morning surgery. The waiting room was the largest of the three, holding up to nine people uncomt'oitably, and liis office was the smallest. Into this shoebox were fitted an examination couch, a combination desk and drug cabinet and a folding chair for patients who were well enough not to have to lie down. Behind his desk the imitation window was transmitting a picture of the surrounding apartment buildings, rising like bottomless pillars from the early morning smog. The clock on his office wall was showing six-thirty when the patients began to arrive hobbling, sniffing, coughing and occasionally bleeding. In a medium-sized block of apartments aggregating two thousand rooms and an average of three potential patients per room, infections of the upper respiratory tract were circulated like money. To these cases he dispensed a face mask, which the majority of them would not wear, with small doses of the indicated medication and sympathy. The sympathy was an optional extra-his option, not his patients -- and the dosage varied in direct proportion to the amount of sleep he had had the previous night, the quantity of residual alcohol still in his system and various psychological factors. When the patient was old andor disturbed he tried to dispense constructive sympathy no matter how rotten he felt, because that was the only form of treatment available to him and he was always trying to bring down the suicide rate in the building. The first of the walking wounded arrived on the arm of a girl who helped him on to the examination couch and returned to the waiting room without speaking. Devlin Judged the patient to be in his early twenties, still partially in shock and, judging by the outraged expression on his face, a bystander. The right leg of his evening coveralls was bloodstained below the knee and had been ripped open to show an even more bloodstained towel knotted tightly around the wound. The pale green material of the coveralls toned with the greenish shade of the patient's face, but clashed horribly with the primary color soaking his leg and right slipper. "D-don't cut the towel, please," said the patient as Devlin folded back the sodden material. "My mother -- it's organic wool, she says, and very expensive." Devlin nodded and began undoing the knot. "I suppose," said the patient, "you're wondering how I got it." On the contrary, Devlin thought, am agog with disinterest. But it would do no harm for the medic of the building to be polite and pretend that this particular wound, out of the hundreds he had already treated this week, was unique in all its aspects. To the patient -- especially if it happened to be his first such injury-it was unique. Devlin nodded again and said, "Please lie face down." While Devlin sprayed the area with painkiller and began probing the wound for traces of coverall material that might have been carried inside by the bullet, the patient outlined the circumstances that had led to his accident. X understand," he began angrily, "and they were too old for it anyway. Besides, the old fools were practically in Lunar insertion on mix eighty-two the rec hall bars had run out of everything else -- and were incapable of telling the difference between an insult and a fair comment. You know that stuff -- it's supposed to be a harmless euphoric, but hydraulic fluid flavored with fruit juice has the same effect. I don't think they were even talking clearly enough to be insulting, but they insisted on having an affair there and then just to show us young folks that -- that-I couldn't quite follow their reasoning." "If they were high on eighty-two I'm not surprised," said Devlin with feeling. "Move your foot up and down and flex your toes, please." "This was three hours ago," resumed the patient. "It was still dark but there was enough moonlight to see a man the regulation thirty yards away. My girl and I went with them to act as official witnesses and to see that the Maxers didn't interfere. We didn't expect them to be able to hit each other and we were right, but one of them got me and -- " "You demanded satisfaction," said Devlin wearily. "Well, no," replied the other. "They expected me to, of course, and I never saw two old boys sober up so fast, but the situation was complicated. One of them was my old man and the other was my girl's old man. My mother wouldn't approve of me having an affair with Dad -- and this girl I'd like to keep permanently. If she called me out I wouldn't like it at all. I don't approve of affairs of honor between men and women," he said seriously. Devlin squirted wide-spectrum antibiotics into the entry and exit wounds and began to tape a dressing in place before he spoke. "You are a believer in men's upholding the honor of women, but not in women's upholding their own?" "No. Not exactly." "Maybe it is just that you can't abide male property -- the female of the species, in this case -- being able to shoot back. Maybe you think that it is unfair to young -- or even oldmales." The patient tried to turn his head to look at Devlin -- despite the fact that it was physiologically impossible for the human neck to travel through one hundred and eighty degrees. He sounded angry as he asked, "Are you suggesting that I'm some kind of Maxer? Listen, Doctor. You belong to one of the few professions excused from wearing the belt and you don't suffer loss of status by not wearing it. But that doesn't give you the right to insult-" Devlin, who was putting the finishing touches to the dressing, paused to put his hand on the other's shoulder. He said seriously, "I did not mean to insult you and I unreservedly apologize. But I had an old man, too, and for a while there I was talking just like him. And I agree with you about mixed affairs -- women are neither physically nor temperamentally suited to fighting death duels with men -- and I think you behaved as a responsible Citizen should. I also agree that men should wear the trousers, but I disagree with the idea that the proper way to hold them up is by wearing a gunbelt." The patient was silent for a few minutes and the color of his neck and ears became a less angry shade of pink. He said, "Your apology is accepted without loss of honor by either side." He went on less formally: "Some of us have to wear belts, Doctor. As a salesman I must wear one to talk to armed executivelevel people I have to do business with. If I went dressed as a sheep they wouldn't let me in to talk at all. At the same time, if I went in with too many studs on my belt they would think that I was the touchy kind who would as soon fight as sell-or a man who sells by intimidation -- and I wouldn't get many more appointments. I don't want a belt loaded with studs, anyway," he ended. "People are too touchy about their honor these days." "You can sit up now," said Devlin, then added: "Just to satisfy my curiosity -- how did you extricate yourself from last night's business without staining your escutcheon?" For a few seconds the other would not meet his eyes. Then he said apologetically, "I didn't actually tell a lie, you understand. It was just that these two old boys were blasting at each other so enthusiastically that it sounded like a commando assault -- and an armed vidge from the next block could have thought that a Maxer attack was developing and decided to loose one off. After all, there is no proof that the bullet came from -- " . "No need to apologize," said Devlin, holding up his hand. "If you stop to think for a minute you'll realize that I prefer people to talk their way out of trouble -- it makes less work for me. As for the wound itself, come back in three days unless it begins to feel hot. And rest -- don't do anything more energetic than watching television for at least a week. After you are back on your feet, wear a wound disk on your belt for at least a month." He pressed the stud controlling the office door and, as the girl was helping the patient out, he called, "Next." succession of sniffs and coughs that followed, Devlin kept remembering that young and unusually sensible patient and the two glimpses he had had of the girl. He decided that he liked them well enough to arrange an evening meeting with them in the rec hall for a longer and more wideranging discussion. But there was the danger of his other patients thinking that he was playing favorites. Even greater was the danger that, by talking too much to any of his patients, he might give someone the idea that he was not simply a medic but a medic with psychiatric experience and, just possibly, a cabinet full of the hallucinatory or personalitychange drugs which were the institutional psychiatrist's stock in trade. If a rumor got out that he was a psychiatrist his time, his property and person would never be his own again. His last patient was last because, judging by the condition of the pad she was holding to the side of her face, she had deliberately waited until the others had been attended before coming in. Any number of the coughers and sniffers would, Devlin was sure, have given up their place in the line for her. She was in her early twenties. The half of her face which was not hidden by the bloodstained pad was beautiful and it was obvious from her expression that the facial injury was merely a symptom of much deeper trouble. Even the symptom was serious enough -- three deep, incised wounds running from the cheekbone to the line of the jaw and apparently inflicted with a not very sharp knife. There was a question he had to ask even though he knew what the answer must be. "Is this a police matter?" She shook her head. Devlin tried to conceal his disbelief. He said, "Very well. These are deep cuts and require sutures. I can do the job myself, but frankly, my needlework isn't very neat. A goodlooking girl like you needs a specialist for this sort of thing and I still have friends at Sanator Five who will help you beat others waiting in line-" She was shaking her head again. Leave this one alone, Devlin told himself firmly. You are not a psychiatrist. Go away, himself replied, and mind your own business. None of the seats in the waiting room were occupied, so he could give her extra time without being accused of playing favorites. He said, "Most of the rumors you hear about institutionalized medicine are wildly exaggerated, if not completely untrue. I did my training in Five and served there for six years and have kept in touch with some of the residents -- An Informal Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Articles, interviews, columns, reviews and letters by professionals and aficionados! Scheduled for Issue No. #: Trenchant Bludgeon." And editing and editors. In every issue; new book, story and magazine lists. Sample Issue : # One year: # Two Years: # P. O. Box # Portland, Oregon #I one of whom is an expert in invisible mending. He'd see that you are not treated as just another statistic -- Don't shake your head like that or you'll start bleeding again." The trouble was, Devlin thought angrily, that the rumors about the big hospital complexes were not exaggerated. But he wanted to play favorites in this case and use his influence to get her special attention, because the thought of her going through the rest of her life with three ugly puckered scars on the side of one of the most beautiful faces he had ever seen was not to be borneit would be like watching an old leprosy case burn itself out when the medication was available to cure the condition without wastage. "I don't understand you," he said quietly. "If it isn't a police matter was it a family fight? A jealous lover? Wliy not have plastic surgery?" She stared silently at him for a moment and Devlin thought that it was her polite way of telling him to mind his own business. Then she said firmly, "Because I did it myself." Devlin cringed inwardly. It had taken determination to inflict that first cut, but three of them... He did not have to ask any more questions because she wanted badly to talk about her problem to someone, even though it had only one highly unsatisfactory solution. Her trouble was that she could not keep a boyfriend. "... the first two I hardly got to know at all," she said quietly. Having decided to talk, she spoke freely. "Somebody decided that I was too good for them and wanted me for himself. One of them died and the other was badly wounded. I wouldn't even speak to the somebody who had challenged them and for a while I wanted to apply for a belt myself. But I hadn't known them long or well enough to want revengeI was just angry. Then I met a sheep boy -- from this building -- who was nice and considerate and sometimes boring about his eye condition, which kept him from wearing a belt. They couldn't call him out, but they made life miserable for him in other ways -- usually by insulting me in front of our friends-so that he applied for a belt anyway. I broke it off before lie could get killed, too. "The next one was a very good shot," she rushed on, "but tried to avoid trouble. Two young men who thought that I was too good for him but an ideal piece of organic property as far as they were concerned, died. I didn't want that -- it didn't prove anything except that our society has gone mad. So I thought that if I became a less desirable piece of property I would not be the cause of so many people dying or-" "Surely there was an easier way -- " Devlin stopped. His hand was covering the mutilated side of her face and he could see that she had been not only a lovely piece of organic property, her expression reflected character, determination, self-assurance and compassion, the last predominating. Obviously she would have given a lot of thought to her problem before coming up with her terrible answer. Devlin swore long and luridly behind a calmly clinical expression and went to work. Almost an hour later, after the neatest and most painstaking piece of surgery he had ever performed, he said, "Let me have a look at it tomorrow. And don't try to smile or you might open the -- " He broke off again, feeling his face begin to burn with embarrassment. What could she possibly find to smile at? "I'm sorry," he said awkwardly. "The trick of putting my foot in my mouth I usually reserve for the rec hall, after a couple of liters of mix eightytwo." VI Her eyes showed sympathy for Devlin's embarrassment, which made him feel worse than ever. She said, "No need to apologize. Doctor. But if you are in the rec hall tonight and feel like doing acrobatic tricks with your foot. I'll be somewhere in Yellow area with my parents. They will probably need some cheering up." Devlin, stared at her for a long time, thinking that he could understand why people wanted to fight over her. Her parents needed cheering up? He nodded finally and said, "I may see you then, provided that I am capable of seeing anything by that time. But if there is a younger male at the table I shall stagger past." He had a sharp, mental picture of her as she had opened the surgery door. Then reality faded in with a message from the ceiling display and he was pulled from his reverie. "My day," said Devlin, "has hardly yet begun." The computer would take no meaning from the words, of course, and would accept the instruction as being performed if he did nothing. But he had been asked to remember a day in the Devlin lifetime in complete and accurate detail and, whether he was driven by a sense of duty, a vestigial conscience or a tendency toward masochism, he would try to do just that. So he rose, tapped for a one-hour Hold and returned to his casket. As the cubicle heaters came on again he sighed and resumed his not very pleasant daydream. H e had only one house visit to make that day. It was on the edge of the city more than seven miles away and, although he did not like the thought of a round trip of fifteen miles, he had to take some risks if he wanted to build a private practice. The high-density central areas provided resident medics for each block of apartments, but their work was listed as an essential service covered by the rental and the salary of each individual doctor was not high. Private patients occupied family dwellings rather than apartments and had to be rich, brave or well liked to be able to survive at all in such small defensive units. The Bennetts were an unusual combination, Devlin had discovered during his two earlier visits: they were both rich and well liked. Before leaving his office he called City Security to check on route safety and found that there was only one major trouble spot between his block and the Bennett home. Two large rival bands of Maxer mercenaries had started a shootout in the early hours at a shopping complex about four miles away. Casualties were reported to be heavy and ambulances were standing by, but they could not go in because of the danger of their being hijacked and used by curity forces could not go in either because the situation was complicated by the fact that pockets of property owners and members of their night staffs were trying to defend various buildings against both Maxer factions. The Security forces were being used merely to contain the trouble until it burned itself out. People with business in the area were advised to stay clear for at least three hours unless equipped with vehicles possessing overall armor and gas filtration apparatus. Devlin mentally plotted a course that would skirt the trouble spot, grabbed his bag and headed for the elevator. His armored car had been visited during the night or the late morning. On its flank someone had written with a very small finger "Please wash me" in the grime that coated the white paintwork, and all the doors were open. No fittings were missing or damaged, however, and the medical stores were disturbed but otherwise intact. It was possible that someone had investigated the unlocked car on the off-chance of finding hard drugs, but it was much more likely that one of the children from the block, sent by its parents to play in the relatively fresh air and safety of the early morning, had been indulging its curiosity as weU as practicing its joined-up writing. He drove as rapidly as possible along streets that were peaceful and thronged with shoppers. Only once did he pass a suddenly deserted area indicative of an affair about to reach its deadly climax. He did not stop to offer assistance because the city hospital service had that responsibility and professional poaching was frowned on. It was an unusually quiet morning -- he heard less than a dozen shots above the traffic noises and none of them close. He was tempted to open the heavy metal hatches covering the vehicle's tiny windows and drive by direct vision instead of with his face bouncing against the periscope, but his sense of caution prevailed. It was the generally held belief that the people responsible for the greatest amount of disorder and destruction in the city did their work at night and, because of this, tended to sleep late and leave the streets safe for law-abiding folk during the early part of the day. Like all good rules, Devlin knew from experience, this one had its exceptions. When he arrived at the Bennett home he was checked and passed by the oldest boy, whose angry brown eyes seemed to be the only spots of color in his face. A man in a high white collar was already there. He seemed to be one of the new, relaxed breed of clergymen who occasionally swore or cracked jokes or talked a bit dirty if the situation seemed to warrant it. Even though they did good work in many places, Devlin did not completely approve of the type. An agnostic himself, he still preferred the ministers of the religions he did not believe in to be the proper, old-fashioned kind. He nodded politely. "My name is Howard," said the minister quietly. "Brother Howard. You cannot help him." "Can you?" asked Devlin, maintaining his politeness with an effort. It was beginning to look as if the elder Bennett had roped in a faithhealer for his son. But the Brother was looking sympathetically toward the boy's father as he said, "Probably not. Doctor. But I shall try." Until then Devlin had not given much attention to the boy's father. Far too much of his mind was being taken over with thoughts of the two patients he had treated in this morning's surgery. Now he turned a more clinical eye on the father of the patient. He saw at once that Bennett had more on his mind than a young son with a septic hand, which was responding nicely to treatment. He was moving about normally and saying the right things while his expression changed properly to match his words. But all the time his eyes were strangely empty. The mind that should have been looking out of them was somewhere else while the body was switched to auto-pilot. Without speaking, Devlin hurried into the boy's room. H e had confined Tommy Bennett to his room in an attempt to make him rest the hand and to keep the dressings as clean as possible, but now the bandages were smeared with dried watercolor -- some lime during the past two days since Devlin's last visit the boy had been playing with his paintbox. That was of no importance now, of course, because there was a lot more primary color on the floor by the window and on the white wool bedspread on which the boy was lying. The boy looked pale and serious -- and apparently uninjured, but that was because his red bathrobe was buttoned up to the neck so that a second look was needed to see the wide, sticky area covering his chest and abdomen. Devlin looked away, noticing the starred window and the small red-flecked crater in the opposite wall. He cursed. He had made the mistake of liking young Tommy. Devlin could imagine the boy standing by the direct vision window, watching the smoke rising from the distant trouble spot and listening to the shooting. One of the shots had been wide and from a high-velocity weapon a bullet traveled forever. He could imagine Tommy's father picking him up and laying him on the bed -- or perhaps his mother had had to do that. Whichever it had been, they both needed help -- a couple of largecaliber tranquilizers to begin with, and possibly a course of PCs, which would give them a calmer, more fatalistic personality for the next few weeks to allow the shock to be absorbed in easy stages. But Devlin could not, of course, give them that kind of help. No medic who did not work and live in one of the big Government hospitals was allowed to prescribe such drugs. Any drugs used for the cure or alleviation of psychiatric conditions could be misused and, in the absence of the more common hard drugs, were continually in demand. The price, until they had been withdrawn many years earlier from all but the maximum security hospitals, had very often been the Ufe of the doctor who had carried or stocked them in his surgery. The only course left open to Devlin would be to refer the Bennetts to a psychiatric hospital for treatment, where the waiting list might not stretch for longer than a few minutes and where, if they elected to risk the outpatient department, they would be lucky not to be robbed of their medication on the way out. In short, he could not help them at all, beyond going through the motions. But when Devlin had left Tommy's bedroom, Bennett was still being absently polite and asking no help. Brother Howard and Devlin both finally asked if there was anything they could do and Bennett made it evident that he simply wanted them to go away. Devlin caught the Brother's eye and said, "Can I give you a lift anywhere?" "That is very kind of you. Doctor," said the other and they began a brief conversational disengagement. Brother Howard said quietly, "Mr. Bennett probably wants to curse or cry or break things or, more probably, try to console his wife. He could not do any of those things with us there. So I really don't need a lift. Doctor. I live only a few miles away and at this time of day unaccompanied pedestrians are in very little danger." "I have to divert anyway," said Devlin, "and there are no other urgent calls." He held open the door on the passenger's side, then walked around the car checking for tire damage or the attachment of foreign and possibly explosive objects. Then he climbed in himself. But for a long time he made no move toward starting the car, nor did he speak. "Perhaps," said Brother Howard, when the silence had begun to drag. "you would like to break a few things yourself. Doctor?" He did not sound impatient at the delay, just sympathetic and angry. Devlin did not reply. When the other man spoke again the anger was under control so that only the sympathy showed in his voice. He said, "Perhaps you would like to ask questions, then? A great, sweeping question like: 'Why?' Or a more detailed one like: 'Why did a young boy like Tommy Bennett have to be killed?' Or perhaps you are the kind who asks questions like: 'Why is the human race, which has reached an undreamed-of peak of scientific achievement and personal affluence, with more than enough leisure for cultural and philosophical advancement to catch up with those material achievements -- why is it trying to tear itself apart?' Or maybe you would like to ask the God whom you don't believe in what He thinks He's playing at?" Angrily Devlin started the car and moved slowly through the Bennett security gate before he said, "Perhaps you would like to answer the questions I haven't asked. Or maybe you are looking for the answers to some of them yourself?" He could feel the other's eyes on him while he stared into the driving periscope. Then the Brother said aridly, "Well diagnosed. Doctor." They drove for several minutes in silence, with Devlin beginning to feel more and more ashamed of himself. The other man had been trying to help him, applying a little practical psychology by inviting him to blow off steam. The procedure was sound and the other was expert in practicing it -- and Devlin, of all people, should have realized that even an expert can be vulnerable. "I'm sorry," he said suddenly. "I don't know why the human race seems bent on individual and collective suicide when, as everyone agrees, we never had it so good. And I'm sorry that I don't share your belief that this is all a transition stage, an unpleasant wait or training period for something better. But if you wouldn't mind my asking a personal question, what made you become a soul-saver? Why not, a socio-technician, psychologist or even a medic? Those jobs usually attract the, well-" "The do-gooders?" supplied Brother Howard. "The sheep who want to do something useful but are too yellow to wear a belt while doing it? There is no need to spare my feelings. Doctor, because you are in the same category. But why, when you were in a position to do the most good for the greatest number of people, did you leave a respectable, secure job in a big hospital to take a block practice?' Bennett must have been talking about me, Devlin thought. He said, "I suppose it was because I was processing up to two hundred patients a day -- mostly major reconstructions following car accidents -- and I couldn't remember a single one of them by bedtime. I was even losing the inclination to check with Recuperation to see if any of them had survived. Too, when I came across a patient who was wandering around, lost in a maze of hospital red tape, I got angry at him for his stupidity, regardless of how serious his injuries were. I was beginning to think like a clerk. And if you want to know why I became a medic in the first place," Devlin went on, "it was because my father told me at a very early age that death and injury would always be with us and that the people who helped alleviate it would always have work to do and a measure of respect no matter what kind of insane society evolved in the -- future." "That was very good advice," said Brother Howard, then went on: "I trained for a job that I wanted to do very much -- I was sure that I would be happy in it. But the job became more complicated, difficult and normally disturbing than I had anticipated. I won't go into all the details now, if you don't mind." Devlin nodded. "We have something in common, then -- we were both looking for job satisfaction. Or maybe we are merely being selfish in looking for the gratitude and respect of individuals -- seeking personal gratification -- instead of the impersonal thanks of the many." "Do you want an argument?" asked the Brother. "Yes, please," said Devlin. "Sorry," said Brother Howard. "I'm inclined to agree with you. Doctor. We may well be selfish while practicing altruism. But we are helping things, not making them worse ." "Nothing can make them worse," said Devlin. side of the car at that moment -- a stone or a spent bullet from somewhere. When the noise was not repeated Devlin began to relax again. "Why can't it get worse, Doctor?" asked the Brother. "I'd like to know why you said what you did." Devlin took a deep breath. "I hope this isn't a lead-in to a conversion pitch, Reverend. Nothing personal, you understand, but I hate to see wasted effort. But to answer your question, I don't think things can get worse, or much worse, because we have never had it so good and, at the same time, we have never been so universally unhappy. People are bored. Instead of building they are tearing down -- even though they themselves know that it is stupid to do so. And there are pressures of all kinds building up in them, both individually and as social groups. You can't teU people to do things any more -- they react, push away from you and each other. They want a change, or they want out, or they don't know what they want except that it isn't -- this. One of these years the pressure will be too much and there will be a great, sick, soggy explosion that will take out even the sensible, responsible kind who are trying their best to run things at present. "The way I see it," said Devlin seriously, "we have reached the peak of our cultural and scientific potential. It's as if we were a great overripe fruit. We started as a pretty sour and green culture, prone to war and disease and social injustices. Gradually we grew in intelligence and self-awareness and empathy and personal freedom. The growth continued with society becoming richer, more colorful, sweeter and softer in every way. Now we are ripe." "And?" asked the Brother. "After ripening," said Devlin, "fruit rots." "And you hope for nothing after that?" "Oh, I'm stupid enough to go on hoping." "For what?" pressed Brother Howard. Devlin was silent for a moment, trying to find words that would not make him sound ridiculous. Then he replied, "We are a big, overripe fruit under increasing pressure. Maybe, before we fall completely apart, pressure will squeeze out a pip." Brother Howard gave a strained laugh and said, "A good analogy. Doctor." The laugh and the tone sounded so odd that Devlin glanced away from his periscope. When he looked back into it he saw a car nosing out of a side street on a collision course. He braked hard, skidded, but stopped broadside-on to the other car without hitting it. A large fat man wearing a belt got out of the car. Devlin muttered under his breath and prepared to do some serious apologizing. "This was my fault. Doctor," said Brother Howard, climbing out on the other side. "I distracted you." T hey stood together for several minutes while the other driver told them what he thought of their stupidity in not looking where they were going. If they had been wearing gunbelts the other driver would have been in the wrong but, as things were, sheep were never in the right. Devlin was used to this kind of thing and so, no doubt, was Brother Howard. No actual damage had been done and it was highly probable that the tongue-lashing would not last for very long because a line of vehicles was beginning to form. He amused himself by counting the number of times the fat man repeated himself and wondering if the overly tight belt were upsetting his digestion. But a small crowd had gathered. It included a boy of fourteen or fifteen who was also wearing a gunbelt, and it was plain that the things the fat man was saying to the two sheep, or at least to the Brother, were beginning to embarrass the young citizen -- so much so that he was about to join in. Brother Howard had noticed the boy as well, Devlin saw, and seemed to be just as anxious as Devlin was not to be the cause of an affair. The Brother stepped forward and held up his hand. "Don't you dare interrupt me, you stupid sheep," said the fat man furiously. "Your profession will save your life but not your honor, if you ever had any. A sheep like you should be -- " "I prefer," said Brother Howard quietly, "to be called a shepherd. In any case, the condition of sheep is a temporary one that can be ended at any time for any desired period of time." He swung around and walked to the boy. Very politely and correctly he said, "Pardon, Citizen. I would be obliged if you would lend me your belt." "But Reverend -- " began the boy. "I would be obliged if you would retain your weapon. Citizen, and lend me your belt." The fat man had paled when the Brother had turned wolf suddenly, and Devlin realized that he had probably been greatly relieved when two sheep had climbed out of the car a few minutes earlier. If a full, beltwearing Citizen had been driving it there might have been an affair on the spot, with the possibility of the fat man being killed -- though he might have publicly accepted all blame for the near-accident. But relief had made him vicious rather than gracious -- and now that he would have the double relief of shooting at a suicidal maniac, Devlin doubted that he would be satisfied with inflicting a token wound. "Excuse me. Citizen," said Devlin desperately to the fat man. "My friend has had a very severe mental shock. A young boy who -- " #TT IS my considered opinion -- " Jl Brother Howard, joining them again, his hands hanging very still below his empty, borrowed belt, addressed the fat man -- "that you are self-indulgent in food and alcohol, vastly overweight, completely lacking in manners and the worst driver I have ever seen. If you wish to dispute this opinion, be prepared to defend yourself." For an instant Devlin entertained a wild hope that the fat man would pass out from a cerebral hemorrhage before he was able to draw -- his face had gone an improbable plum color. But no. Devlin clearly saw him begin to draw. Less distinctly he saw the gun wrist and nose of the fat man broken, not necessarily in that order, by the blunt edges of two fleshcolored blades that had been the Brother's hands. Clearly, because it was the last and slowest blow, he saw a set of stiffened fingers sink into the fat diaphragm -- a blow that would have been fatal but for the thick layer of adipose in the area. Devlin brought a litter from his car and made the fat man as comfortable as possible while the Brother returned the boy's belt. Judging from the conversation, he had gained a convert as well as a hero-worshiper. But when they were moving again Brother Howard looked depressed. "There is no permanent damage. Brother," said Devlin reassuringly, "but he will need hospital treatment." "I know. Doctor,' said the other apologetically. "But it will put you to considerable inconvenience -- and I am ashamed to say that I took sinful pleasure from that incident." "No comment," said Devlin. "You're very kind. Doctor," said the Brother. "Oh, you can drop me here, please. And maybe we can meet again soon and continue our discussion. I mean that -- I'm not just being polite." "You're an interesting man to know. Reverend," said Devlin. "But you still won't make a convert." "Maybe I'm only looking for recruits," said the other airUy. "There's a difference?" "There's a big difference," said the Brother as he slammed the hatch. The name he had known in the casualty department of Sanator Five had recently transferred to another hospital so that it was long after dark before he could untangle himself from the red tape. Devlin could recall every minute of the ride home, during which every vidge on the way seemed to take a shot or throw a piece of homemade nastiness at him. By the time he had freshened up and gone down to the Yellow area of the rec hall, the pre-midnight activity level had reached the noisy and nasty stage, with nonaffair brawls breaking out all over. The girl and her parents were occupying a four-piece table but were about to leave. Althouglr he could not apologize directly for his late arrival -- that would have implied that two Citizens and their daughter had been awaiting the pleasure of a sheep -- the atmosphere thawed considerably when he mentioned the incident that had delayed him. They stayed talking about nothing in particular for about half an hour. They called him Devlin, of course, because he was off-duty and not a full citizen, but otherwise they were friendly and easy to talk to. The girl's father had vidge duty from midnight, however, and wanted to see the others secure before he left for the roof. Devlin wanted to say that he would look after his daughter for an hour or so and see her safely to her home flat, but that would have embarrassed them. A man without a belt was not considered capable of looking after anyone in this situation and they would have been forced to tell him so. He remembered the look of concern in her eyes as they rose to go -- and every wrinkle in every strip of tape that held the incongruous dressing to the damaged side of the otherwise lovely face. Especially he remembered her voice as she said. "We may see you tomorrow night, if you happen to be here then," Devlin had nodded, making a mighty resolution to be nowhere else. She had said, "Good night, Devlin." The display was saying: From the time he became aware of himself in relation to the others around him he knew that he was different. He had been scrawny and malformed from birth, and his condition had not been helped by minimal food intake during the early months of his life. Every feeding time had been a battle with siblings stronger than he for a place at their mother, who did not seem to care whether he had enough or not. It had been a long and unhappy childhood completely without warmth or affection or security and his even longer approach to maturity was a period of unallayed misery. The other tribes and large family groups occupying the forest drove him away because he was a stranger. His own people tolerated his presence because he had the right tribe smeD, but otherwise would have nothing to do with him. Unlike them, he was not good in the trees. He did not have the stamina for a rapid, sustained climb to safety when the predators of the forest floor tore at the lower branches. He grew cautious and was always alert for the approach of the carnivores, so as to have more time to climb to safety. As the days passed he was able to watch the quick, happy, overconfident ones being smashed against the treetrunks by enormous paws, or the ones with the long, sleek fur shaken from ill-chosen branches to be ripped apart before they could hit the ground. For some reason the predators had become more than usually active in that area of forest and the number of males in his tribe was diminishing. Like himself, the females were more cautious and tended to survive these attacks. But the days passed and he grew as strong as he would ever be and the tribe was strutting and squabbling and grappling its way through the mating season. Over the long, unhappy years he had learned that for him to take part was to risk serious injury or death -- even in a group seriously depleted in males, he was tolerated but not wanted. He thought about it seriously and decided that he did not want to be injured or to die. Then a female recently made mateless passed within a few feet of him... She screeched and fought and tried to get away from him at first. He felt flie painful nipping of her teeth and the long scratches she left on his face and almost hairless body. But the pain stimuli was swamped by the roaring flood of raw, mindless instinct that drove him at the female. He knew that they were making too much noise and they were attracting the attention of their tribe and probably that of nearby carnivores, but his fear was insubstantial as the pain of the scratches and bites, because now the urge to join and mate had triggered off a response in the female and she was no longer fighting. Caught in the biological trap and shaken by diminishing explosions of sensation, he became aware that he was still being attacked. Fear and pain returned as the female left him and he realized that virtually the whole tribe was surrounding him, struggling for a chance to scratch and bite his body. He struggled frantically to escape, but the angry circle was always there, nipping and scratching and pulling him  down when he tried to climb. They were herbivores lacking the physical equipment to inhad hate and persistence and numbers enough to kill one of their fellows if it became necessary. Apparently it was necessary to kill him for the present and future good of the tribe -- an instinctive attempt to avoid the possibility of other scrawny weaklings being born to them -- and they would do it no matter how long it took them. But suddenly the attack stopped. He lay quivering with pain from the tight lacework of bites and tears that covers his body, unable to see the damage because his eyes had been lost early in the attack. Then the explanation came as something large and heavy flattened the undergrowth beside him. The predator, unlike the members of his tribe, did have the natural weapons to kill effortlessly and efficiently. A darkness which was not of his blinded eyes descended with merciful speed and the cold was invading every molecule of his being... it back. "Wait. Wait a minute," said Devlin through chattering teeth. "There's something wrong -- let me think, damn you!" The idea that had been trying to reach the surface of his mind sank again without a trace. Overall human guidance required -- ihat sounded serious. "Get on with it," said Devlin irritably. The display kept telling him the same thing after each awakening-in case of memory impairment, no doubt. But if anything, the cold sleep seemed to be sharpening his memory rather than dulling it. He surprised himself by being able to ignore his anxiety over the nature of the ship emergency and by recalling several incidents from his seventh birthday. They were sharp and clear because it had been his last happy birthday, and for that reason he usually tried not to remember it. But as he moved through the preliminary physical exercises his mind kept jumping all over the place, from his latest dream to his recent past in the training center, back to the brontosaurus sequence, to Tommy Bennett and Brother Howard and the girl in Blue # I . Each time his mind jumped the person or incident flashed up bright and clear -- like lights in a pinball machine. He could see and feel every sensory impression associated with it and he knew that if need be he could concentrate his mind and expand on any of the incidents until he had a complete sequence, equally sharp and clear in every respect. "There's something wrong," he said again. Memories, or memories of dreams, should not be as sharp and clear as that. Loss of mental ability was thought to be the greatest single danger, he had been told, threatening the success of the voyage. But Devlin's memory and presumably his ability to think, were not impaired after four centuries in cold sleep -- the exact opposite was happening, in fact. His memories were gaining a clarity usually associated with hallucinatory and sensation-heightening drugs, and his dreams... He did not think that he could take any more such dreams. The last one had been so vivid that he sweated just thinking about it and the creatures inhabiting it had been completely unfamiliar to him. He doubted that they were pre-men or even pre-monkeys and the predators had been shaggy and shapeless to his terrified eyes and, could have been descended from anything. He had certainly not read about anything like them. And the dead girl in Blue #I had read nothing about dinosaurs. From the moment he had been forced to watch her die, Devlin had tried to forget the incident. But now, for some reason, it was becoming impossible for him to forget anything. Suddenly he was back in Blue #I , hearing her talking and seeing her die from a combination of galloping gangrene and massive thrombosis -- and feeling all the emotions he at that time had tried so hard to' suppress. Her last dream had been of being a female dinosaur and her last thought of her Brian. She must have known Brian very well and she had known nothing at all about dinosaurs-she had deliberately avoided reading about them. Why, then, liad she dreamed about them and not about her Brian? Why had Devlin, not even once, dreamed of his Patricia? Is everyone on the ship having the same dreams? He stopped exercising, his breath making an intermittent fog around his head while he souglit a way through tlie even thicker haze of speculation that filled his brain. If everyone were having the same dreams -- and that could be checked by awakening a statistically meaningful number of the others and questioning them -- then the dream material had been artificially produced despite everything they had been told during training. They had been told that the ship could not carry enough direct mental stimulators and recordings to keep their minds occupied during the centuries-long voyage. But would that still apply if only one set of recordings were being used for everyone? And what about the memorysharpening effect he had noticed recently? That suggested the use of hallucinatory drugs. And was he really undergoing cold sleep for hundreds of years at a time just because a computer display told him so? Was he, perhaps, still under training? Was this frigid, silent structure all around him in Earth orbit and were his reactions, along with everyone else's, being continually observed and monitored? "If you must question," Brother Howard had told him on one occasion, "question everything." D evlin was stui asking questions of himself when he took one of the control positions an hour later. "I should damn well hope so," said Devlin, relieved. "But thanks, anyway." "Bypass, stupid," said Devlin. "What's the problem?" Devlin stared at the words on the display screen, felt the sweat pop on his hands, forehead and at the base of his spine. It was probably a test. Almost certainly it was a test. But was it a test? There might be no danger at all. Their ship, possibly the last hope of a race stewing in its own physical and psychological effluent, might not be about to be torn into its component atoms by an alien nuclear device. Probably it was nothing more than a near-perfect simulation. But he kept remembering Yvonne Caldwell, the girl in Blue #. Her death had been a too-perfect simulation. If he really were being tested and he made a mistake, like the stupid accident in the girl's cubicle, it could well be a test to destruction. been plentifully equipped with highly sophisticated and dirigible forms of nastiness, the ship had been deliberately designed and built without any form of offensive or defensive armament. The idea had been that in the highly unlikely event of a meeting in space with an extra-terrestrial race possessing a technology equal to or greater than that of Earth, friction was unlikely to occur. Any race that achieved interstellar flight and possessed the background of social and scientific cooperation such a high level of technology implied should be civilized in every sense of the word. Such a race would not, the ship's designers and psychologists had been sure, be expected to react with hostility toward strangers simply because they were strange. The computer had other ideas. Devlin rubbed his palms against his coveralls and wondered if the ship and project designers had made any other fundamental errors -- though this error could make the others irrelevant. Do I need help? Awakenings, except for reasons of the direst emergency, were forbidden. Ship consumables were strictly limited so that periods of awakening were kept as short as possible. Loneliness, however, andor a need for human conversation or contact, were not considered to be emergencies. In a voyage which had lasted over four centuries, Devlin had spent less than four days of biological time in the ship. As a result his memory of the final briefing was only four days old despite all the dream lifetimes that had occurred since then. Especially sharp was the memory of the instructions regarding emergency procedures... We can conceive of no emergency that would require more than one person to be awake at a time. Your ship is self-guiding and its systems either are self-repairing or possess multiple backups, so that awakenings should be for exercise, observation and, of course, decision on the suitability of the target planet before deceleration is applied. "If awakened for any other reason," the instructor had gone on, "it will be up to the individual concerned to decide whether or not he needs additional human assistance. But to avoid situations where, say, a crew member wakes others for moral support, or to try to pass responsibility for solving a tricky problem to one of the colonists, who will be less qualified than himself to handle it, we have made it the rule that the first crew member to be awakened is deemed to be the senior during the emergency. "If absolutely necessary he can call on additional human assistance or advice," the instructor had added, "but he cannot transfer responsibility to another. Ideally he should take the decision himself and save on the consumables." T he display was reminding Devlin that dire emergencies would occur in three hours forty-seven, fifty and fifty-three minutes' time. He decided to sweat it out alone for a while, rather than wake Patricia or some of the others to watch him do it. He requested the data obtained by the probe before it stopped communicating and a fast rerun of transmitted visual material up until that time. Like the Earth, which his memory insisted he had left only four days ago, this planet was habitable, densely inhabited, but not really suitable for human or any other kind of intelligent habitation. Even the world's two airless moons, which had never been capable of sustaining any form of life, were covered with city-sized blisters filled to bursting with beings who had exchanged their larger and more crowded planetary prison for ones that were smaller but offered fractionally more living space. He had thought that the Earth had been polluted, but it had been like an eighteenth century garden compared with the visual data sent back by the probe. Nothing lived on the planetary surface. Nothing moved on the land or sea except robots that tended vast, inland lakes of waste or tracts of bright, artificial greenery protected by domes whose natural sunlight, because of the stinking and nearly opaque atmosphere, had to be augmented by massed batteries of artificial lighting. Hundreds of other dome cities floated on or under the turgid oceans, which were also covered by vast carpets of greenery. There was evidence of robot activity around areas of sickly yellow or brown, presumably diseased sections undergoing cure or destruction. Not unexpectedly, the natives of this world looked like something that had crawled from underneath a damp rock. Steady, thought Devlin, your xenophobia is showing... He had many chances to see the natives in action as, covered, by opaque protective suits, they retrieved the probe from the planetary surface, subjected it to elevated temperatures and a variety of what were presumably antibacteria sprays and, finally, transported it to a sub.surface laboratory staffed by beings whose physical charms were no longer concealed by protective apparel. If they had had tentacles or pincers or antennae he would not have felt so badly about them, but they were so nearly human in shape that they made him want to be sick. Their narrow cylindrical heads were joined to the chest by a flexible neck of the same diameter as the head, which was hairless and seemed to have much more skin than it really needed. Among the loose folds and creasings of skin were the fleshy gashes of eating or breathing orifices, a couple of flowerlike protuberances that were probably ears and, set on top of the head, two large yellowish blisters that could only be eyes. The shoulders and chest were uniformly rounded and from the waist the creatures spread out like giant, wrinkled pears balanced on two short legs fringed with misshapen toes or atrophied tentacles. The arms were long and thin, sprouting from just above waist level, and were jointed at elbows and wrists. Beyond the wrist the limbs were multi-brachiate, with three distinct groups of fingers evolved for rough, medium or very delicate work. Their skins were pallid and greasy and partly covered by small patches of color that might have been dress or badges of rank. The placement of their eyes made them incline their heads toward each other when communicating, giving the impression of aggressiveness. The sounds Devlin caught were like the gobblings of turkeys. The probe's vision pickup showed one of the aliens gobbling and waving its arms at three others who looked and sounded much less agitated -- or perhaps they were the first creature's subordinates and were merely being attentive. Suddenly one of them held up an arm level with its face and gave it a peculiar, whiplike jerk. All the groups of fingers made small, crackling sounds like a body falling into dry underbrush. An absolute silence ensued and lasted for minutes -- then the voluble one reached toward the vision pickup and the picture died. Devlin stared at the blank display, aware that he had been jumping to conclusions. The agitated one probably had not been the boss, but a subordinate who could have been arguing with its superiors for a course of action that had been overruled -- perhaps it had wanted to maintain the vision channel with a view to establishing communications and its chief had been worried about security. Devlin tapped for a slowmotion rerun of the final ten minutes, studying not only the four beings but the items of equipment within visual range. H e could make nothing of the equipment and all four aliens looked exactly the same to him -- but he discovered another conclusion to jump away from. The soft, fleshy heads were not heads at all but simply a flexible platform for the beings' main sensory organs. The head was the rounded structure he had mistaken for a chest and the arms grew from the shoulder area and not the waist. The creatures were really unhuman and the realization made him, for some odd reason, feel much better disposed toward them. But they still had launched three nuclear missiles against the ship. Cursing, Devlin cleared the display of slow-moving aliens and their distorted, low-key gobblings. In all probability the probe had been dismantled by now and was no longer capable of responding to signals from the ship. Nevertheless, he would have liked to communicate with these aliens, even though their world was too overcrowded to be of any use as a colony site. However briefly, Devlin would have liked to talk instead of fighting with them. Especially as I have nothing to fight them with... His palms were sweating again as he tapped; "You stupid computer," raged Devlin. "You know what I want -- " But did it? The ship was unarmed and, while its computer was capable of recognizing a threat in the shape of oncoming missiles, it had no programed instructions for turning its ploughshare power sources and equipment into the sword type. Should he take it upon Wmself to wake someone? Devlin shook his head angrily. He had to think. Could anyone on board do it better? Carefully he tapped: But before the display could react he hit the Cancel button. He would be stupid to waste time watching the computer talking with the ship in great and probably useless detail. He tried again; Devlin took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. The computer, he reminded himself, could give only the answers it had been programed to give, and then only when the questions were properly phrased. He tapped: Devlin turned his face away from the display, fighting despair. He had had a vague idea of finding out ways in which the ship could be dangerous lo objects or people approaching it by discovering the safety devices and systems and then switching them off. But as the list of safety measures lengthened it became more and more obvious that the greatest danger to an object in the vicinity would be if the ship rammed it. He turned back to the display and reached for the Cancel button, then stopped. H e had almost forgotten about the secondary drive, which was needed only during the final approach and landing. It was a relatively unsophisticated piece of equipment using a nuclear reactor and water as fuel, but anything that got in the way of the jet would become severely overheated and, in the case of a dirigible missile, its control and guidance systems would be disrupted by a concentrated beam of ions and its warhead might very well go prematurely critical. Directing the drive at three missiles in turn while they were within effective range would call for some fancy maneuvering on the part of the computer, for beyond a distance of five miles the secondary drive jet would be something less than a hazard. Devlin eagerly called up the relevant figures, then slumped back in his couch. The fantastically high closing speed of ship and missiles was such that only a few seconds could be allocated to dealing with each of them between the times needed for changes of attitude. That was scarcely enough time to warm their metallic hides, much less detonate them a safe distance from the ship. He had to face the fact that the ship could not fight. But could it evade? Devlin began tapping again, trying to find out exactly what the ship had in the way of legs to run with. There was the main drive, which had provided the gentle and continuous acceleration to achieve onequarter lightspeed. It had been shut down pending discovery of a suitable planet, when they would use it again to decelerate and return. The secondary drive, whose legs were designed for sprinting rather than marathon running, delivered three Gs during final approach and landing. According to the computer, the missiles had been launched from a satellite of the alien home planet nearly three months earlier. Devlin did not know exactly how advanced the aliens' equipment was, but he assumed that the ship had been detected and its course through the system plotted anything up to a year earlier. The missiles had been launched on an intersecting course but, like the ship, were no longer under acceleration. Perhaps they were nothing more than large, sophisticated bullets, incapable of further trajectory modification. In which case he could duck, with a very good chance of avoiding trouble -- and the sooner he ducked the better his chances would be. He strapped himself more securely to the couch and, without giving himself a chance to have second thoughts, requested three minutes of three-G thrust on the secondary drive at right angles to the present course. Theoretically the evasive action would have been equally effective if he had accelerated toward the missiles, or even decelerated and allowed them to pass ahead of him, but psychologically it was more comforting to turn away from the attack and the people who had launched it -- especily when the display was showing graphically the narrow margin by which the ship would avoid disaster. According to the display, the missiles would pass within fifty to sixty miles, unless their courses were modified. Should the aliens be capable of this, the display gave the times involved -- a little over six minutes for the ship's change of course to become apparent to the attackers, an unknown number of seconds or minutes for the aliens to react and recompute trajectories and just under three minutes for their radio signals to go out to the missiles. Devlin watched the display anxiously. Devlin swore. The missiles did carry enough fuel to make course corrections. But only one of them had done so -- the one that had been due to strike last and therefore had more time to maneuver. This might be an indication that the aliens' computing facilities were being overstretched, or simply that they were so confident of hitting the ship that they were refusing to waste time by diverting all three missiles. To give himself time to think he tapped for a replay of the sound and visual material from the probe, and stared at what he thought might be a good alien and the three bad aliens. H IS first impulse had been to order random attitude changes and periods of thrust, which would give the aliens' control and guidance specialists a lot of work to do and, just possibly, reduce missile three's capacity for maneuvering. But random attitude and course changes would occasionally take the ship toward the missile. He could not afford a near miss because the radiation, although it might not be fatal to everyone on board, would probably injure the people in cold sleep who were positioned below the outer hull. There was also the fact that the computer would have to carry out all the random movements in reverse order if the ship were to regain its original course and reach the next target system. The ship was moving deeper into the alien system as well as closing rapidly with the missiles, . which meant that the reaction time of the missiles' guidance experts to ship course changes was also being reduced. But if he could make a drastic course change within that reaction time, using the secondary drive at its full emergency thrust of five Gs, the aUens might assume that the ship was incapable of any greater evasive effort than the three Gs already used and their counter computations, necessarily hurried, might be correspondingly off. Devlin did a few quick calculations and decided that a two-minute five-G burn within the reaction time would pull the ship out of danger. The computer did not agree. Devlin found himself fighting back anger and a bout of hysterical laughter as the ship's computer did its best to mutiny. It did not want him to apply five Gs thrust to the ship, it flashed, because this should be done only in the event of an extreme emergency shortly before landing on unsuitable terrain. The ship's systems would be severely overstressed by five Gs. This would not matter if the ship were landing shortly afterward, but it could be dangerous for the occupants if it had to resume the voyage after such a period of maximum stress. The display went on to list the dangers of such an action, detailing the effects on power reserves, life-support systems and longrange sensory equipment. Every time Devlin tried to tap out an instruction he got nothing but warning lights, and the minutes were rushing past. "Damn you," he said to the side display, which was still showing the four aliens talking and gesticulating in slow motion. "We aren't invading you. We wouldn't touch your stinking overcrowded system with a barge pole -- " But a calmer, more controlled corner of his mind knewthat the aliens had a point of view, too. They were simply reacting to the apparent threat by a strange ship storming into their system with intentions they could only guess at. If the positions had been reversed. Earth people would probably have done the same. He tapped again for emergency acceleration of five Gs and the warnings and precautionary telltales began flashing again. He tapped for four Gs and received no objections at all. With his finger poised above the Execute button he stopped, canceled and tapped for four point five Gs. Still no objections. He tried edging it up by a few decimal points while extending the period of thrust and the arguments started again. Apparently the computer would cooperate at four point five Gs for three minutes and no higher. N early two hours were needed to power up the secondary drive reactor and to check its focusing coils. By that time it was obvious that the first two missiles were being allowed to go wide. The third was still on a collision course and closing rapidly. When the ship took evasive action, the time lag needed for the light carrying this information to reach the aliens and for the radio signals bearing the missile's course correction to reach it was just over four minutes. Any dodging would have to be done within that time. He called up a picture of the area of sky from which the missile would come. The aliens, if they were using their oddly equipped heads, would pretime the missile to explode at the nearest approach. The detonation signal would go out to it at the last possible moment and be based on the latest available course data -- which would be less than four minutes out of date. Precisely four minutes before estimated impact the thrust from the secondary drive rammed him deeply into his couch. There was nothing on the display screen but stars and, in one corner, a distant figure, blurring rapidly through the eight hundreds. One minute, two minutes, three minutes passed and it seemed that the missile's rate of approach was slowing, but not, Devlin was sure, quickly enough. It was not until the distance closed to under one hundred miles that he was able to recognize individual numbers, not until the forties that it showed any signs of slowing, but there were only a few seconds remaining before estimated impact when the figures crept out of the low twenties and into the 'teens. They hesitated at sixteen miles distance, then withdrew to seventeen, eighteen... An intolerably bright point of light appeared near the center of the display screen. By the time Devlin had blinked away the after-image it had become an expanding patch of mist that was almost too diffuse to see. He waited for a shock wave to hit the ship, but the instruments did not even shudder. "The inverse square law," he said, laughing with relief, "is wonderful." He felt happy as the ship went through the secondary drive maneuvers that would return it to its original programed course toward the next target system. The near-miss had not-so far as the status displays were concerned -- had any ill effects on the ship, its systems or the coldsleeping colonists. But he also knew a vague uncertainty and a feeling almost of surprise that he had been able to accomplish what he had. True, his memory had recently become much more retentive and the lecture material on computers during training could, perhaps unconsciously, have been available in his mind. Whatever the reason, he had, for a few crucial minutes back there, felt that he knew exactly what he was doing. At best he was a hero, Devlin thought aridly -- and at worst a crew member under observation who had passed a difficult test. Trouble was, he found it difficult to believe that the aliens who had tried to kill him were the product of a simulator. And if he had proven himself a hero, he deserved a pat on the back from someone. He did not get it from the computer. If it had been a test, he might not have passed it. blew slantwise through the offices of MH. The phrase was Mr. Miroshi's for he had a touch of poetry about him. What he meant by it was the mildly bizarre, perplexing, and completely unpredictable behavior of the information retrieval sequences. In the course of an ordinary business day one might hardly think it crucial if the computer delivered to the Math section, for example, a medical paper complete with unsettling illustrations, or if Marketing, wanting a survey of New Zealand imports, received instead a treatise on human hostility and aggression. But MH was no ordinary business, so they called in Merrihew. Merrihew was no ordinary troubleshooter, either. Mr. Handel, co-president of MH, explained to Merrihew about MH, once they were settled in their booth in a cafe not far from the MH headquarters. (Merrihew's suggestion, of course; he was not given to charging into situations he did not comprehend.) "No ordinary business, Mr. Merrihew. We are not a large firm, really. But then Maserati isn't a large firm either, and no one yet produces Yomeimon Gates on a production line. Our methods are, I would say, unusual. I would not," he added modestly, "say unique." "Your advertising says that for you." "Ah, then you do know something about us." Merrihew, whose reputation was that of knowing something about everything, gestured for Mr. Handel to continue. He did: "We are highly diversified and we buy, sell, trade, manufacture, contract, subcontract and produce a great many things in many different ways and places. It is safe to say that each of our activities is successful to a degreevarying, of course -- " "From excellent all the way down to good." "You are kind, Mr. Merrihew." "You are successful, that's all." "Ah." Mr. Handel was pleased. "You do make it difficult to be modest." "It is only difficult to be modest when it's painful, Mr. Handel, and it's only painful when it's necessary. Please go on." Mr. Handel raised his eyebrows at this piece of pragmatic philosophy and went on: "Well then, it's no secret that our basic product is office equipment and that our products and services are means to promote that equipment. We try to integrate our approaches completely. Tliat is, the problem dictates its solution, the chosen method of operation is what designs a machine or a component. If you came to us asking if one of our systems would sell oranges, say, or move merchandise or establish a Matto Grosso market or test consumer response equally well in Prague as in Bangkok, why, we would devise the best possible approach to the problem and take that t)iie step further -- the one that makes actually enter the field. We take the risks, we do the work, we find out if I lie approach is optimum. And if there seems to be a better way we try that too. When that happens, it is frequently the case that a new office machine or method is called for, wliich is why we say that 'your jiroblems design our equipment.' " "And how do your customers -- jirospectsfeel about your incursions into their fields? Especially the successful ones?" "Mr. Merrihew," said Mr. Handel, as if explaining not the phenomena, but the very fact of day-and-night, "they know we will withdraw." Merrihew lifted one eyebrow -- somehow a much more potent gesture than the elevation of Mr. Handel's two. "Don't you sometimes find it a little tempting to stay with a nice new fruitful operation?" "One need not yield to temptation," Mr. Handel said primly. "Our central concern is office systems -- and we try hard not to forget it." "Then you can't lose." "As long as everything works as it is designed to work." "Ah," said Merrihew. "Now we come to the problem." OW we come to the problem. For you can see how essential, how absolutely vital, in a small but highly diversified operation such as ours, is the matter of retrievalimmediate, reliable retrieval of the information stored in our banks and available from outside. For not only do our operations depend on retrieval, but each operation, each sequence in each operation, is a demonstration of our systems and is on display. I have my own special nightmare, Mr. Merrihew," said Mr. Handel, running a controlled finger around the back and side of his collar -- a small movement, but in this bright, intense little man, a signal of submerged fatigue and terrible tension. "I have this nightmare in which some Very Important Person stands behind Mr. Samm of our Math division and witnesses Samm's request for a certain set of figures -- and there is a click from the console and from the slot comes something like this-" From the capacious attache case beside him on the seat he drew a sheaf of papers and slid them across to Merrihew. A typical MH duplication, with crisp typography and in vivid colors, it was an excessively specific illustrated article entitled Alternatives to the Posterior Colpotomy. Under it was another called Management of Abcesses of the Lower Mandibular Arch. There was more, and worse. Merrihew lifted the stack, banged the edge of it against the table to align the papers and carefully turned the whole thing face down. His eye fell on his half-empty coffee cup and with an infinitely eloquent gesture he pushed it away from him. "The nightmare," said Mr. Handel hoarsely, "actually came two-thirds true. Tlie only iinportant element missing was the Very Important Person." He informed a discreet shudder and then displayed anotlier manyleaved paper, " 'Hostility and Aggression, A Radical Approach, ' " he read. "This arrived on the desk of our marketing director in response to a request for trade information on the Soutli Island of New Zealand. Tliese, of course, are gross examples. In a way I'm far more worried about the little ones. You can see the big ones. I don't have to describe to you the possibilities of one misplaced decimal point, or the inaccurate reporting of a single raw-material supply in some of the more complex projections we get into." "I get the picture. Now, how often is this happening?" "That," said Mr. Handel, "is the most troublesome thing of all. I have here a chart of the incidence of these, ah, events -- dates, times, locations of demand and points of retrieval -- and as much as one can express as to the nature of the, ah, irregularities, and as you can see at a glance, they are about as nearly random as such things could possibly Subscribers Please Note If you change your address, please mail notification to: L. C. Murphy, Manager Fulfillment Dept. # Secatogue Avenue Farmingdale, N.Y. # Allow # to # weeks for your notification to take effect. be -- in frequency, quality, kind, importance and every other factor." "And your circuitry-tapes, disks, all that?" Anotlier thick slieaf joined the growing mound on the table. "That's one area we can practically eliminate," Mr. Handel said with confidence and more than a little pride. "These are MH installations, naturally, in an MfeH environment and maintained and inspected by MH personnel. We are on display at all times, Mr. Merrihew, through and through. Our weekly maintenance is more thorougli than you'd find elsewhere twice a year and our engineers know their jobs. As for the computers and their satellites, most are self-checking and run their own diagnostics periodically. No, Mr. Merrihew, we won't find tlie trouble there." "I think you're riglit. We won't," said Merriliew, with a positiveness that apparently startled the co-president. "You sound, suddenly, as if you had solved the problem." "Oh, I have," said Merrihew. He reached for the chart of events and glanced at it again. "It's just that knovidng what's wrong isn't enough. I want to know why." "# -- don't quite follow you, Mr. Merrihew." "I know that, Mr. Handel. Now, here's what I want you to do. When I come to see you tomorrow morning, don't let me." "I -- beg your pardon?" "Don't get rid of me either. Just stall. All right?" "Mr. Merriliew, would you mind telling me-" "I'd mind a lot. Now I have to go think. See you tomorrow, Mr. I landel." He rose and slid out of the booth and added the word: "Ultimately." He left. Mr. Handel sat where he was, motionless and speechless and for a long moment without even thought, until at length he stirred, picked up his documents -- and, of course, the check -- and went back to the office. was suave. The lighting was gentle and varied, tasteful and flattering. Sound went where one desired it to go and was swallowed up everywhere else. There was a sense of pleasant disorientation, for the walls, and to a very subtle degree the floor, were not perfectly flat and there was no special place or line where wall became ceiling. In 'a strange way one seemed not to be indoors at all as much as in another country. Most of the light in the room changed color, but only slightly and with the wonderful gradualness of an aurora, for one does not see the change; one must look away and look back again to be able to know it at all. Yet the light was steady and clear where it should be so -- around the wide soft benches and their displays of literature (current magazines, "coffeetable" art books and, nowhere in sight but by no means out of reach, discreetly startling MH promotions) and equally steady and warm near the two mirrors. Clever touch, that, thought Merrihew. But no one, on entering the reception room at MH, could count the instruments of this symphony of subtleties, most especially when Miss Kuhli was at her console. Miss Kuhli (Merrihew had heard it "Cooley" the day before, and had built quite a different picture) was Eurasian. Not since the perfection of ferro-concrete and its self-stressed freedom has architecture been able to match the construction of such eyelids and supraorbital arches as those with which Miss Kuhh had been born. Her hands seemed to be the cooperative work of a florist and a choreographer. Her body had not been designed, but inspired, and her hair was such that it could not be believed at a single glance. She dressed with the studied spontanaeity of the highest possible high fashion, of which Merrihew had once cynically remarked. If the eardrum ever becomes taboo, high fashion will find a way to give you a glimpse of it. All of which was quite secondary to Miss Kuhli's voice. Correction. It wasn't solely the voice. It was the instrument and the skill, the genius with which it was played. "Good morning," she said as Merrihew entered, and he all but responded. Thank you-oh, thank youjust because she cared to give him all her attention, aU her time while she was saying it. "Good morning." "Is there anything I can do for you?" she asked with tastefully controlled eagerness. Offhand, Merrihew could think of twelve ways to answer that question and was strongly inclined to use all of them. "But he said, "I'd like to see Mr. Handel." Her eyes flicked swiftly to what could only have been an appointment list; but the way she did it could be translated by any wishful visitor as -- just possibly -- a wink. "I'll see if he's in yet. Your name is -- " "Merrihew." "Mr. Merrihew!" she said tluough a warm quick smile. One would think she had been waiting for months for this meeting. "Lois," she said to the holoscreen on her console. "Is Mr. Handel there yet? Mr. Merrihew's here." The way she spoke it Merrihew's name was in a slightly larger type than the rest of the sentence -- but discreetly not itahcized. The punctuation at the end was something more emphatic than a period but nothing as gross as an exclamation point. The screen asked if Mr. Merrihew could wait. Merrihew could. He squinted against the flashbulb radiance of Miss Kuhli's smile and went to one of the benches (if it was a bench) against the wall (if it was a wall) where he might best watch the action. And action there was. Miss Kuhli's console (on which was affixed a polite but monumentally expensive small bronze plate in lower-case italics: agnes kuhli) was so placed that it was not a barrier between herself and the world. At the same time it was not exactly included in the waiting room. One might call it a half-surround, a construct of such a nature that it was a convenience for her to occupy it, while clearly the lesser of comforts to anyone else. Seated, she was not concealed, and to a degree shared the space as one might share a living room. Yet her operating point was hers and no one's else. People came. People went. People waited. Merrihew very soon observed, with a small cynical slap on his own wrist, that Miss Kuhh's eager recognition of strangers and her been for him alone. She surely was among the best in the world at what she did, and this special thing she did better than anyone he had ever seen. But he did indulge himself in a childish moment of regret... S HE was never hurried and never at a loss. It took some time for the casual observer (which Merrihew certainly was not) to realize that reception was a very small part of what she did. Her console was constantly active -- soft lights and whispers, little flashings and murmurings, to each of which she responded according to its demand. At times she seemed to sink into a species of meditation -- hands clasped on her knee, eyes downcast -- and during (hose times it would take a practiced eye as sharp as Merrihew's to divine that she was speaking and that this was no mantric interval -- any more Ilian the occasional rhythmic manipulation of the simply designed, glittering little ornament at her Ihroat was meditative. Therefore, while anyone might walk in and find an extremely restful, beautifully decorated room commanded by a startlingly pretty young woman at ease on a comfortable bench, a young woman who would put him at his ease unhurriedly, share his concerns for a moment, do what needed doing and then apparently retire quietly into lier thoughts, there was actually a great deal more going on. In the moments between the ebbs and flows of people -- who waited, who left, who delivered, who received, who were directed and ushered, who were greeted by suddenly appearing personnel from inside and led away, and who, twice that morning, included herds of awed children being given a tour through the plant -- in these lulls when there was no one there but Merrihew and Agnes Kuhli (and each time she acknowledged this remote intimacy with a charming smile; never for a second did she seem unaware of him) his sharp ears extracted from the miracles of soundabsorbency around her some of the flood of detail she was handling. FUckers and pulses from little lights, quick touches from her long hands on illuminations and patches which could only be electrostatic switches, and the occasional radiance of the holoscreen, each elicited its quick manual or vocal response. Not that her every minute was crowded -- far from it. It was in one of the occasional lulls that their eyes met -- he saw to that, keeping his gaze fixed on her in peril of drying his eyeballs -- and she gave him that incredible, sharing smile and said, "My -- he's keeping you here so long -- " So caring, so concerned. "Here, I'll just -- " Her fingers flickered on the console and her face was palely lit by the glow from the holoscreen, which was not in his view. "Lois, Mr. Merrihew's been waiting so long -- " Lois, as expected, said whatever needed to be said and the glow died. "Something came up," Miss Kuhli commiserated, "and Mr. Handel would like you to wait Just a little longer, if you don't mind." A heartily. He rose and approached her. "Miss Kuhli, would you mind very much showing me some of the things that console does? I've been watching you work and -- " "Of course I don't mind!" she cried, this time with a real exclamation point. "That's what I'm here for. What would you like to know?" As she spoke an amber light showed on what seemed to be a solid piece of handrubbed walnut. Her hand hovered over it a moment and then stroked it. It disappeared. "Well, practically everything," said Merriliew. "What was that, for example?" He pointed to the spot where the amber glow had been. "Oh, Mr. Stamm isn't going out for lunch and he wants it sent in." "That little liglit said all that?" She tinkled a laugli. "No, he did." "I didn't hear anything." "Naturally not." She lifted away some of her shining hair and revealed an ear wliich had obviously been designed by whomever it is that holds the patent on tlie chambered nautilus. Resting in the orifice was a glittering little gem of a device. There were no wires or brackets or anything else of the kind. "It's my personal receiver. I have one in tlie other ear too. Sometimes it's nice to hear with both ears but I can use either one -- or both on two lines, if I have to." "Microrange FM," Merrihew deduced. "Yes! And I answered him the same way." She pointed to the jewel at her throat. "You spoke to him?" "Yes, I asked him if he'd like the usual and he said yes and thanked me and I said goodbye." "All the time you were talking to me?" "Well -- between talking to you." "Subvocals -- is that it?" "You do know a lot about it!" she said admiringly. Another amber spot showed on the board and she put out her hand. This time she touched the board right under the glow and it turned red. "I put him on 'hold,' " she explained. She waved at the end of the board and the briglit numerals of a digital clock appeared (remaining in siglit five seconds and then disappearing) and she said "It's Mr. Damiani in Design. He's been waiting all morning for hand delivery of some special components and he'll be wanting to know if they've arrived. m tell him no, not yet and I'll send them up the instant they arrive -- and shall I call the factory again. Watch." He leaned closer while she touched the red into amber. She smiled (and he recalled how many ventriloquists maintain a smile the whole time the dummy is talking) and he was aware of the slightest possible murmur of her voice, the barest motion of her lips. Even forewarned, however, he could not distinguish the words. Wlien she had finished he said, meaning it, "That's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life." You also smell wonderful, he added, but not aloud. "It isn't hard to learn," she said deprecatingly. "I don't suppose it's necessary, either, but you can see how nice it is in an open office Hke this -- no bells and 'scuse-me's and plugs and wires. And it's the best possible demonstration of our new system." "What's that?" MH Computer Central. We centralize all the office functions -- well, almost all-into one computer, but it's very special. We have access to-it by voice. Some day," she went on with heart-stopping enthusiasm (oh, my, thought Merrihew, it's so easy to listen to this lady without hearing a I lung: she is her own diversion, bless licr). "we hope to be able to perfect over an office. At this stage it's geared to operate through one person." "You." "And two others, with another girl in training," she went on. (The entire lime she talked, the board glowed and flashed, her fingers moved, hovered, touched and rested.) "Look." She touched a point in the wall (or whatever it was) at the base of the console, and a drawer slid out. Inside were four small compartments. One was empty. Each of the others held two of the jeweled earsets and one such ornament as the one she wore on her throat. She took out one of these. "Beautiful," said Merrihew, meaning whatever he meant. She held up the throat device, meaning that. "There's no reason it shouldn't be. And it really is, inside and out. Really, some of the microcircuits in this thing are as beautiful as anything a jeweler ever turned out. I'll give you some literature on them before you go, if you like." S HE paused, for the holoscreen lit up. Merrihew could see it now. It was nothing but a film of frosted plastic, perhaps sixteen by twenty inches and a very few sixteenths of an inch thick. At first blush one thought of rear projection, but it was far more than that. It was like looking into a clear cube of glass in which was not the picture of a girl's face, but the girl's face itself. The pleasant blond apparition asked, "Aggie, is Mr. Merrihew stiU there?" "That's Mr. Merrihew, looking over my shoulder." "Oh," said the image, looking straight into his eyes, "Hello! I'm Miss Addamski, Mr. Handel's secretary. I'm so sorry to keep you like this. Truly, Mr. Handel will get to you just as soon as he can." "That's all right," said Merrihew. "I'm in good hands, as you can plainly see." Miss Addamski smiled and faded away while Miss Kuhli (magnificent woman, he thought) managed to laugh at what he had said without giggling. "Beautiful holograph." "Would you believe Mr. Miroshi's not pleased with it yet? He still thinks a lot more can be done with the color rendition." "It's so much better than the passionate pinks and sick greens I've been used to." "Oh, thank you. Now, where were we?" "At the jeweler's, I think." "Oh, yes." She held up the throat device she had taken from the drawer. "You'll notice that all of them are twelve-sided, with a hole in the center. This is what makes it so quick and easy to learn. You think of a clock, you see. You pretend you have a clock or watch on your throat. Now it's easy to locate which of the twelve sides is which number -- two o'clock, seven o'clock, and so on. You can use it to dial a telephone number if you want to, for example, just by switching in here -- " she touched the board and an amber light glowed -- "or the intercom system, or paging, or to retrieve something from the files." "I understand that everything stays in the MH files, and what you really get is a copy." "My! You really do know us. Yes -- look. I'll show you." She touched the board, manipulated the jewel at her throat and a ten-bytwelve section of the board became a projection of a business letter. "That's for inspection," she explained, "just to be sure it's the one you want before you reproduce it. If it is, you just..." and she touched the board at the right place and in five seconds a sheet of paper emerged from a slot -- an exact duplicate of the letter. "Really amazing. But where does "Oh, I had to show you the old way first." She beamed. "Would you like to see that letter again, or another?" "Let's try another one." At that moment a young man came in with a small package. Almost simultaneously, it seemed, a startlingly pretty young girl emerged from an inner door, took and signed for the package while the young man ogled her and Miss Kuhli, his head moving like that of an aficionado of table tennis. Miss Kuhli the while asking after his sick mother. And while this was going on the image of another letter appeared on the small screen. Miss Kuhli caught Merrihew's nod, touched her control and by the time the young man and the secretary were gone the new letter was in his hands. "I feel foolish," said Merrihew, "like the audience of a magic act. How did you do that? I mean, when?" Clearly she was enjoying herself. "Between the time I said heUo to him and the time I asked after his mother. While he was handing the package to Sue." "You never touched your throat mike." "I used it, though. I switched here -- " she showed him -- "to activate code number of the letter I wanted." "SubvocaUy." "Yes, it seemed the best way at the time. But I didn't have to. Oh, Mr. Samm's lunch -- unfinished business. I can show you with that. Now, what I must do is call the restaurant. Let's say I don't know the number. I could look it up. Or I could -- " she fingered the throat jewel -- "call Inforthis -- " and she touched a spot on the the Blue Corner Restaurant?" Before the words were out of her mouth the telephone number appeared in brightline numerals. "But I can do better than tliat." She candemanded: "Get me the Blue Corner." Instantly the holoscreen lit up and they were looking at a young man in a blue apron, with all the surprising dimensionality of the MH holoscreen. "Blue Corner. Oh," said the young man, lighting up much as the screen had done. "Miss Kuhh! How are you. Miss Kuhli?" "Fine, Ronnie. Ronnie, Mr. Samm's eating in today. WiU you send over the usual, a quarter to one?" Devoutly, Ronnie vowed he would, waited for and got a Kuhli smile and rang off. "Marvelous," said Merrihew, and could tliink only to repeat the jaded word. "Marvelous. What you've done liere at long last is to perfect the old impossible idea one finds in those silly science fiction stories -- the computer you can talk to, the robot that acts on spoken command." "Mr. Miroshi says we have never perfected anything," said Miss Kuhli, "We merely produce the best. We're really a long way from the computer one can talk to, the way I'm talking to you. And as you see, we still have to acquaint the computer with a certain person -- " she touched the jewel at her throat -- "before it can be to know a person's way of phrasing, the diction, the normal vocabulary and what to accept in variations of you know. We stUl have to write our own letters, but he does make it a lot easier. Let me show you." S HE brought out her typewriter, an act that consisted of pulling out from the edge of the console a fingerboard no more than half an inch thick and pushing it inward again, which, with a click, made it assume the slight slant of the conventional keyboard and apparently complete rigidity. "It can afford to be as thin as this," she explained. "It's all electrostatic switches. The other parts are all in the computer." She touched the ON point, which lit up, along with the same screen on which he had seen the files. "Now we get activated the system and said "Letterhead and date, please." They appeared on the screen. "To?" "Mr. Handel. From me." three lines properly spaced, there appeared on the screen Mr. Handel's name and title, room number, street address and zip code. A triple space and then: Dear Mr. Handel: "Wow," said Merrihew, impressed yet again. He then began to dictate. Miss Kuhli's fingers flew. In a way it was eerie, for the typewriter made not the slightest sound, and there was no carriage, no paper, nothing but the shining words appearing on the screen one by one as he spoke. They were: I have confirmed, and in a matter of minutes will prove to your satisfaction, that the source of the difficulty we discussed yesterday is in my present location. No one is, perfect, Mr. Handel, and the closest you can get to perfection is, as your partner remarked, to achieve the best there is at any moment. I concede that you have done this. Wliat I tliink you have overis set up for a perfect input. No person is perfect because no person is any one single thing. Mood and pressure can turn one facet or another of a person to the front, despite the determination of that person not to let that happen. How easily it happens depends upon the person, but for everyone there is a point, a degree of pressure, at which the turn will occur and another "person" will present itself. But not quite another person, you see. To a computer finely tuned to one individual this must present a perplexing development. It can then only do what any of us do when perplexed -- that is, make a good guess. Tliere is a common denominator in the two documents you showed me -- the medical report delivered to your Math section and the treatise on agression and hostility. Unless I am seriously in error -- and I am not -- Math was looking for a certain regular series of figures, probably daily, in the preparation of a graph of some sort. and came up with "abcesses." In the other case a request for infonnation on the antipodes got a response which concerned antipathies. There is only one place in the world where each of these couples is pronounced almost identically, and that is in the part of New York City known as the West Bronx. "Why -- I was born in the West Bronx!" exclaimed Miss Kuhli. "Think of that," said Merrihew. "Shall we go on?" They went on. One of the many facets of the human being capable of being turned to the front under stress is the blind spot, Mr. Handel. The fact that every one of the troublesome events you listed occurred on the same shift, with the same operator, completely escaped you and everyone else who saw the list. Doubtless it would have escaped me as well had I met Miss Kuhli before I saw it instead of afterward. As I dictate this it also becomes clear that in spite of the distress this matter has caused you, and the thoroughness of your investigation, no one to this moment has checked with her. No one, least of all Miss Kuhli, would even begin to believe she could do any wrong. "Now let's hold it right there. Mister," said Agnes Kuhli harshly. "I work hard and I do the best I know how, so what kind of con is this 'do any wrong'?" "Miss Kuhli," said Merrihew gently, "your West Bronx is shoving." She glared at him hotly for a long moment. He held her gaze and radiated as much calm as he could. Merrihew could, when he cared to, radiate a great deal of it. She subsided from fury to sullenness and took her eyes away to scan down the words on the screen. "Never in life," she growled -- it was a real growl -- "could I get so uptight that I'd make such a stupid -- " Her voice eyes on a word. " 'Antipodes.' Oh. Oh, that was the time he -- " Surprisingly, delightfully, she colored to the earlobes. "You don't have to tell me or anyone about it. But you were under antipodes as antipathies and gave Marketing a psychiatric lecture instead of a trade report." "And the other time, the abscissas. That was when he threatened me that if I didn't -- " "Shh," he interrupted. "I don't have to know as long as you do." He waved a hand. "Type." Office efficiency dictates that an office chair be designed to avoid low back pains. The comfort and well-being of the employee is important, of course, but the truly basic thrust is the accomodation of the whole human being to the sophisticated that such a simple basic can be overlooked. programed to respond unfailingly to its operator in any m ood -- laughing, furious, frightened, weary -- it should be used only in periods of comaccomodate all the facets of a human being -- the irrational child, the bigot, the daydreamer, the wishful thinker, the spring-feverish, as well as it does the carefully schooled office presence, I recommend that it go back to the drawing boards until it can. You'll get my bUl in the morning. Right now I'm taking Miss Kuhli to lunch.  ,  ,  ours. In celebration of the #st anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's first announcement -- in the October #th, # issue of his Gazette-of his lightning-taming electric kite experiment that reordered his world and Ben Franklin was that rarity: A man whose jolly-grim polarities did tempt our God To hurl his bolts which, fastened to Ben's ears. Lit up his cerebrum for years And thus illuminated reams of history. His dreams, electric dreams. Were knocked together out of Boy Mechanic schemes; He whet his finger, held it to God's Mystery and Storm God, in turnabout, gesticulated, touched To know Ben's warm or cooling weather. So somehow these unconvivial two Fell in together and were friends. Their means quite different But most similar-same their ends: To Light the Universe, Or light a world. Large thing or small... God blinked and Lo! the Nebulae! Ben blinked; electric founts poured from his hands; Within a century his sparks had lit the lands And filled the towns with noon at night. Such was God's vision. Such was Ben's sight. And after long years, some eighty-odd or more Of intemperate days, good afternoons, storms, calms. Bad fights, then making peace. Vast multiples of weather, God yawned, Ben gummed his eyes. But still arguing... went off to bed together. ''fa W'  sf.' iu  ?  i .  ' ''A.Si mmj-,MrM: Know your local mailman, whom nothing can stop... ' ' r-. y V ' tr .  I .'iv: ' "i JS '   t '  B ecause I had died of cancer of the lymph glands, I was the only one saved when the world disappeared. The name for it was "spontaneous remission," and as I understand it, it is not uncommon in the world of medicine. There is no explanation for it that any two physicians will agree upon, but it happens every so often. Your first question will be: why are you writing this if everyone else in the world is gone? And my answer is: should I disappear, and should things ever change, there should be some small record available to whomever or whatever comes along. That is hypocrisy. I write this because I am a thinking creature with an enormous ego and I cannot bear to consider having been here, being gone and leaving nothing behind. Since I will never have children to carry on my line, to preserve some tiny bit of my existence... since I win never make a mark in the world, because there is no world left... since I will never write a novel, or paste up a billboard, or have my face carved on Mt. Rushmore... I am writing this. Additionally, it keeps me busy. I have explored all three square blocks of what's left of the world and, quite frankly, there isn't much else to do to amuse myself. So I write this. I have always had the detestable habit of having to justify myself. Let me hear some vague rumor or snippet of gossip about myself and I spend weeks tracking it down, refuting it, bringing to justice the one who passed the remark. Now that's just ridiculous. And here I am justifying myself again. This record is here, read it if you please, or don't. That's that. I was in the hospital. I was terminal. Oxygen tent, tubes plugged into me everywhere, constantly sedated, the pain was the worst thing I've ever known -- it never stopped. Then -- I just started to get well. First I died. I know I died. Don't ask me how I can say such a thing with complete assurance that I'm telling the truth, because if you've ever died, you'll know. Even under the knockout stuff they'd pumped into me, I still had some awareness. But when I died it was as if I was strapped flat to the front of a subway car, spreadeagled to the waU, facing down the tunnel, into the blackness, and the subway car was hour. I was utterly helpless. The air was being sucked out of my lungs and the train just slammed down that tunnel toward a little point of light. And in receding waves of sound I heard a whispering voice calling my name, over and over and over: Eugene, Eu-gene, Eu-gene, Eu-gene... I went screaming down at that tiny square of light at the end of the tunnel and I closed my eyes and could see it even with them closed. And then I crashed forward even faster and went into the spot of light and everything was blinding and I knew I was dead. A long time later -- I think it was two hundred years; on the other hand it may only have been a day or two -- I opened my eyes and there I was in the hospital bed with a sheet up over my face. I lay like that for almost a day. I could see the light of the ceiling fixture through the sheet. No one came to help me and I felt weak and hungry. Finally I got angry and I was so hungry I couldn't stand it any longer, so I whipped the sheet down off my face and pulled the remaining tube out of my armI presumed it to be an intravenous feeding tube and whatever had been left in the bottle was what had sustained me -- and got out of bed. I slid my feet into my slippers -- the heels of my feet were red and dry like the heels of old women in nursing homes -- and in that ridiculous hospital gown I went looking for something to eat. I couldn't find the kitchen of the hospital at first, but I found a candy machine. I didn't have any dimes for it, but there was a nurse's station right there. And I was so angry at being ignored I rummaged through some drawers and a purse under the counter till I found a handful of change. I ate four Power House bars, two almond Hersheys and a box of those pink Canada mints. Then, sucking on tropical fruit Lifesavers, I went looking for the hospital staff. Did I mention the hospital was empty? The hospital was empty. E veryone was gone, of course. I told you that at the outset. But it took me a few hours to establish the fact. So I got dressed and went outside. Everything looked the same. The name of this town is Hanover, New Hampshire, if you need to know. I won't bother with what the names of streets and things were when it was in the world, because I've given them all new names. It's my town now, all mine, so I decided I'd call it what I felt like calling it. But when this town was in the world. Dartmouth College was here and there was good skiing and it was desperately cold in the winter. Now the mountains are gone and it hasn't been winter in a year or so. Dartmouth is also gone. It lay outside the three block area of what was saved when the world vanished. There's a pizza place here, though. I don't know how to make pizza, though I've tried. I think I miss that most of all. Isn't that mundane! My God. The world is gone and aU I seem to be able to dwell on is pizza. What hapless little creatures we humans were. Are. Am. I am. So. I was alive again and I suppose the only reason I didn't poof away with all the rest of them was that everyone thought I was dead. I suppose that's the reason. I don't really know. I'm guessing, of course; but since none of this made any sense at the time, that was my only conclusion. If you think I'm terribly calm and rational about something as berserk as this, you can believe that I was frantic when I wandered out into the street in front of the hospital and saw the street was empty. I started walking, sticking my head into one store after another, looking for anybody . And every once in a while I'd stop and cup my hands around my mouth and yell, "Hey! Anybody! Eugene Harrison! Hey! Anybody there?" But there wasn't a soul. When the world was here I was a postal clerk. I'm not from Hanover, I lived in White Sulphur Springs. I was brought to Hanover, to the hospital, to die. Wlien I got to the end of the world -- at the foot of the street where the hospital stood -- I just stared. I sat down and dangled my feet over and just stared. Then I scrunched around and lay on my stomach and looked over the edge. The ground sloped back, under there, and beneath the sidewalk there was dirt -- I could see roots hanging out -- and it gave a wedge-shape to the chunk of world floating with me on it. And underneath the chunk there wasn't anything. I guess it's not anything. I tried lowering myself on a mountain-climber's rope once about a month later, but even when I threw the rope over the edge it just lay there in the emptiness and wouldn't fall straight down. I think perhaps gravity is gone out there, too. circumnavigate the chunk. It was three blocks square, just the buildings and the bit of park and the hospital and some small houses. The U. S. Post Office was also there. I spent one day, a while later, a whole day, sorting the mail that had been left behind when the world vanished, stocking one of the clerks' windows, oiling the wheels of the carts, sewing up the storage bags with the heavy thread and monster needle every substation keeps in its larder. It was one of the dullest days of my life. I don't want to say too much about myself-hypocrisy again-just enough to pass me on down to you so I won't be forgotten or faceless. I've already said my name is Eugene Harrison, from Wlrite Sulphur Springs, and I was a postal clerk. I was never married, but I've had relationships with at least four women. None of them lasted very long -- I think they got tired of me, but I don't know for sure. I'm moderately educated: I went two years to Dartmouth before I dropped out and went to work in the Post Office. I was majoring in arts and letters, which means I thought perhaps I would go into advertising or television or journalism or something. That was certainly a waste of time. I can write things down in order and even with a little grace, but I'm no writer, that's for certain. I can't keep myself at the writing for very long -- I get very antsy. And I think I use the word "very" too much. I wish I could tell you there was something particularly heroic or remarkable about me -- besides the dying, that is -- but I am just like all other people I've ever known. Or, like they were. They aren't any more. That's the truth. And I think it takes a big person to admit that he's very ordinary. My socks always matched. I forgot to fill the gas tank sometimes and ran out and had to carry a can up the road to the station. I shirked some of my responsibilities. I made gallant gestures occasionally. I hate vegetables. My interests were in travel and liistory. I never did much about either. I went to Yucatan one summer and I read a lot of history books. Neither of those is very interesting. It would be great to be able to say I was special, but I wasn't. I'm thirty-one years old and I'm just plain damned average, damn it, I'm average, so stop it, stop your damned badgering! I'm a nothing, a nobody, you never even saw my face through the wicket when I gave you your stamps, you arrogant swine! You never paid me the least attention and you never asked me if I'd had a good day and you never noticed that I trimmed the borders of the stamps I sold you -- if they weren't full sheets, because many people collect full sheets -- but you never even noticed that little service! That's how I was special. I cared about the little things. And you never paid any attention. I don't care to tell you any more about myself. Listen, this is about what happened, not about me, and you don't care about me anyhow, so there's no need to carry on like that about myself. now. It was an outburst. I'm sorry. And I'm sorry I cursed. I didn't mean to do that. I am a Lutheran. I attended Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in White Sulphur Springs. I was raised not to curse. I'm going on now to what happened. I walked all around the edge of the chunk of the world. It wasn't chopped off neatly. Whatever had done it, made the world vanish, had done it sloppily. The streets came to ragged ends, telephone lines trailed off where they'd dropped and some of them hung off into the emptiness, just floating like fishlines in water. I should tell you what it looked like out there beyond the edge. It looked like a winter snowfall, murky and with falling motes of light like snowflakes, but it was dark, too. I could see through the dark. That was what made it frightening; one shouldn't be able to see through the darkness. There was a wind out there, but it didn't blow. I can't describe that any better. You'll have to imagine it. And it wasn't cold or hot. It was just pleasant. So I spent my days in what had been Hanover; I spent them all alone. And there was nothing heroic about me. Except that during the first week I saved my town from invasion about fifty times. That will sound remarkable, but I assure you it wasn't. The first time it happened I was coming out of the Dartmouth Bookstore on Main Street, carrying several paperbacks I had taken to read, when this Viking came screaming down the street. He was enormous, well over six feet tall, with a double-bitted axe in his hand and a helmet with two horns and a fierce orange beard. He was wearing furs and thongs and a bearskin cape and he came right at me, shrieking in some barbarian language, with blood in his eyes and certain as God determined to hack me to bits. I was terrified. I threw the paperbacks at him and would have run if I had been able to run, but I knew he'd catch me. Except, what he did was: he threw up his free hand to ward off the paperbacks and swerved around me and started running away from me down a side street. I couldn't understand what was happening, but I picked up the paperbacks and took off after him. I ran as fast as I could, which was pretty fast, and I started to catch up to him. When he looked over his shoulder and saw me coming, he screamed and ran like a madman. I chased him right off the edge of the world. He kept on running, right out into that darkness 'vith the snowstorm in it and he disappeared after a while, but I saw him still running at top speed till he shrank out of sight. I was afraid to go after him. Later that day I turned back an attack by a German Stuka that strafed the main street, an attack by a Samurai warrior, an attack by a Moro with a huge batangas knife, an attack by a knight on a black horse -- he carried a couched lance -- and attacks by a Hun, a Visigoth, a Vandal, a Vietcong with a machine gun, an Amazon with a mace, a Puerto Rican street mugger, a Teddy Boy with a cosh, a deranged and drugged disciple of Kali with a knotted silk rope, a Venetian swordsman with a left-hand dagger, and I forget which aU that first day. It went on that way all that week. It was all I could do to get any reading done. Then they stopped and I went about my business. But none of that was heroic. It was just part of the new order of things. At first I thought I was being tested -- then I decided that was wrong. Actually it go annoying and I stood on the steps of the hospital and yelled at whoever it was responsible, "Look, I don't want to know about any more of this. It's just nonsense, so knock it off!" And it stopped just like that. I was relieved. movie house was gone) or radio, but the electricity worked fine and I had music and some talking records. I listened to Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood and Erroll Flynn telling the story of Robin Hood and Basil Rathbone telling the story of The Three Musketeers. That was very interesting. The water worked, and the gas, and the telephones didn't work. I was comfortable. There was no sun in the sky or moon at night, but I could always see as if it were daylight in the daytime and clear enough to get around by night. I saw her sitting on the front steps of the Post Office -- T guess it was about a year after I'd died; I know that doesn't sound right, but time is different now -- and I hadn't seen anyone else after the invaders stopped doing their crazy screaming thing in the streets. She was just sitting there with her elbow propped on her knee and her chin resting in her palm. I walked down the street to her and stopped right in front of the Post Office. I was waiting for her to leap up and scream, "Amok! Amok!" or something, but she didn't. She just stared at me for a while. She was awfully pretty. I'm not good at describing what people look like, but you can take it from me, she was very pretty. She was wearing a thin white gown that I could see through and she was pretty all over. Her hair was long and gray, but not old gray-it was gray as if she liked it that way, the fashionable young person kind of gray. If you know what I'm getting at. "How do you feel?" she asked finally. "I'm all right, thank you." "Have you healed up nicely?" "I knitted real weU. Who are you? Where did you come from?" She waved toward the end of the world and around the street and shrugged. "I don't know. I just sort of woke up here. Everybody else is gone, is that right?" "That's right. They've been gone for about a year. Well, uh, where did you wake up?" "Right here. I've been sitting here for about an hour. I was just starting to get my bearings. I thought I might be all alone here." "Do you remember your name?" She seemed annoyed at that. "Yes, of course, I remember my name. It's Opal Sellers. I'm from Boston." "This was Hanover, New Hampshire." "Who are you?" "Eugene Harrison. From White Sulphur Springs." She looked very pale. I didn't say it, but that was the first thing about her I noticed. It wasn't the dress I could see through, really -- it was the paleness. Just very white, as if she had been left out too long in the snow. I thought I could see the blood rushing along under the skin, but that was probably my imagination. Now I know someone is going to think she was a ghost or a vampire or some alien creature dressed up to look like a human being, but as Nero Wolfe says in the mysteries, that is just flummery. She was a person, nothing more than that, and you can forget that sort of stuff, even with what comes next. She was as real as I was. "How did you know I'd been sick?" I asked. She shrugged again. "I don't know -- I suppose I just knew, that's aU. But I saw you coming out of the hospital up the street." "I live there. But how could you know I was sick? Actually, I almost died. Well, that's not accurate. I did die, but I'm all right now." "Wliat do we do here?" "Nothing much, just take it easy. The rest of the world is gone and I don't know where, so we just sort of take it easy, I guess. There used to be a lot of crazy invasions about eight months ago, but they stopped pretty suddenly." "I'll need a place to live," she said. "How about the hospital?" "Well, that's fine with me," I said, "but actually, I was going to take over one of those little houses over there. If you like, you can move into the one next door." nice for a few weeks. I always went very slowly with women. Or maybe it's that they went slow with me. I'm a big believer that women give off radiation or something that keeps a man from moving in on them if they don't want him to. I don't know much about it, if you want the truth. We had a cordial relationship. Opal and I. She kept up her yard and I kept up mine. We ate dinner together a lot and we saw each other frequently through the day. Once -- when she realized I was spending time at the Post Office -- she came in with a letter and came up to my window and asked me for an air mail stamp. She had money. I sold it to her. She took it and said, "Thank you for removing those little white borders. I always have trouble with them and usually rip the stamp or leave some on the edge. That was very nice of you, sir." And she left. I was too stunned and pleased to even consider where she was mailing the letter to. Or to whom she was writing. One night we had dinner together and she made fried chicken. The grocery store had a large supply of food, more than enough for us for a long time. It did bother me, of course, that the milk was always fresh and the meat was always freshly cut, but I assumed it was part of the scheme of things that kept the lights and water working, that took away the garbage and kept the streets clean. I never saw anyone who did it, but it got done, so I didn't worry about it. Look; before I died, when the world was here, I drove a mail truck and I rode a Honda. I didn't know how either of those things worked, I mean aside from cleaning the spark tanks, or superficial repairs like that. I never worried about it, because it got done, and that was the long and short of it. No one was any different. It was the same after everything vanished. As long as it worked I didn't have to think about the logic of it. If it had started going sour I would have; but it didn't, and that's all I want to say about that. You'd have done the same. Anyhow. We had this fried chicken dinner, which I Uked a lot because she made it just the way I like it, dark and golden and crunchy on the surface and dry underneath, without that thin oily film that makes your teeth feel greasy. And we had some wine. Now I don't drink much. I won't apologize. I can't hold it. But we had wine. And I got, well, a little drunk, just a little. And I tried to touch her. And she was cold. Very cold. Very very cold. And she yelled at me, "Don't ever touch me!" Now that was just two weeks before she told me she loved me and wanted to be mine. I asked her what she meant by that, "be mine." I never wanted to own anybody. And I certainly had the idea she didn't want to be anybody's possession, but there it was. "I love you and I want to stay with you." "There's no place to go." "That isn't what I meant. We could live here together and not see each other. I mean, I love you and want to share the world with you." "I don't know if that's a good idea," I said. I really wanted what she wanted, but I was afraid she'd get tired of me, and then what? Our situation wasn't too normal, at least by the usual standards I'd grown up with, if you catch my meaning. So. She got angry and went stalking out the door. I waited a few minutes to let her cool off and then I went looking for her. She had walked straight out to the edge of the world, and kept right on going. I don't think she knew I was following her. I went back to my house and laid down. When she came back, about two hours later I guess, I sat up and said, "Just who the dickens are you?" She was furious -- still furious. "Who the dickens are'OM?" "I know who I am," I said, getting angry too, "and I want to know who you are. I saw you walking out there off the edge.  can't do that!" "Some of us are talented, some aren't. Learn to live with it." Really a snotty answer, boy! "I was here first!" "That's what the Indians said and look what happened to themV' "Dammit, are you responsible for all of this, for every crazy thing that happened?" T hen she really blew her stack and shouted at me, "Yes, you silly, irresponsible clown. I'm responsible. I did it aU. I destroyed the world. Now what the hell are you going to do about it?" I was too stunned to do anything. I hadn't really thought she was responsible, but when she admitted it I didn't know what to say. I went over and tried to grab her by the shoulders and I could feel that cold coming right off her. "You're not human," I said. "Oh, go to hell, you idiot. I'm as human as you are. Humaner." "You'd better tell me," I said in a threatening tone, "or else -- " "Or else what, you nerd? Or else rU wipe out this last Uttle chunk and you and everything else and I'll be all alone the way I was before I did it!" "Did it?" "Yes, did it. Blew it aU away. Just sat back and put my thumb in my mouth and said, 'Vanish everything but Eugene Harrison, wherever he is, and me, and a little town where I can be with him.' And when I took my thumb out of my mouth, everything was gone. Boston was gone and the sky and the Earth and every other thing, and I had to go walking through that glop out there till I found you," "Why?" "You don't even recognize me, do you, you idiot? You don't even remember Opal Sellers, do you?" I stared at her. "Dope!" I continued staring. "I was in your graduating class in high school. You were right behind me when we went up for our diplomas, I was wearing a white gown and you were standing behind me during the invocation. And I was having my period and I was spotting and it had gone through the white gown. And you leaned over and told me and I was embarrassed to death, but you gave me your mortarboard and I held it across my backside and I thought it was the kindest, nicest thing anyone had ever done. And I loved you, you simple stupid insensitive sonofabitch!" And she let down the screen or the image or the mask or whatever it was that she'd put up over herself, which was why she was cold to the touch, and inside there was Opal Sellers, who was one of the ugliest girls I'd ever seen, and she knew that was what I thought, and she didn't wait a minute but put her thumb in her mouth hke I remember she used to and started mumbling around it -- but nothing happened. Then she went completely out of her head and started screaming that she'd passed on the power to me, and she couldn't do a thing about me and she ran out the door. I took off after her, and she went off the edge and kept going straight away Hke the Viking and the Stuka and the Hun and all the rest of them, which I guess she'd sent to liven things up for me so I would feel heroic. And that's it. Gone. Just went. Where, I have no idea. I'm not leaving here, that's for sure, but I don't know what to do about it. Somebody ought to say I'm sorry to her, I mean -- she's a nice girl and aU. It's just I'm here and I'm comfortable and who can ask for more than that? She was always talking about love. Well, damn, that wasn't love. I don't think. But what do I know? Girls always got tired of me very quickly. I'm going to teach myself how to make pizza.  This -- the October '# -- issue of Galaxy set out to be special in that it makes our return to monthly publication a concrete reality. By happenstance it also marks an anniversary -- the very first issue of Galaxy bore the October # cover date. Partly to celebrate and partly out of curiosity we invited authors to submit representative works to show us -- and the world -- the state of the art right now. The result is a glittering array of contents, ranging from deepest traditionalism to the latest speculative approach to squeeze under our copy deadline: Harlan Ellison's probe of the U.S. Mail at the irreducible (atomic?) level of a mailman who has mislaid Earth itself -- but not his human integrity and never (functionally) a piece of mail. This one alone should fuel debate in Directions for months to come. But read it carefully and think of brief human lightnings-or livesblinking across horizonless skies. Science fiction has many faces -- some real, others masked -- and you and I will not meet all of them in our lifetimes. The response of the field to Galaxy's October '# probe has been a flood of manuscripts and much has spilled over into November, including Michael Kurland's excellent Think Only This of Me, originally announced for October. Also in November: definitive works by Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, R. A. Lafferty, Ernest Taves, Joe Haldeman and others. Pertinent reader comment follows. Directions: The announcement of the Nebula Awards for # has caused a tired topic once again to raise its headthe so-called controversy between the Old and New Waves in science fiction. The event is noteworthy only because this time the issue is raised in an article in Publisher's Weekly, where it will be noted by influential people. The piece describes current events on the science fiction scene as consisting of a continuous battle between these Waves-or, as PW calls them, the Trads and the Mods, even going so far as to hail the announcement of the winners as a victory for Trads. What is implied is a conflict between two enemy campsantipathy, perhaps even hatred. Who knows how many readers now try to classify an sf writer as either a Trad or a Mod and attempt to pigeonhole his style and meaning as one or the other? And how many editors and publishers will fall into the same trap and plan their programs and schedules accordingly? And-probably most important -- how many sf writers are now nagged and haunted by this specter until they unconsciously gear their work along these narrow, arbitrary and heavily drawn lines? I can easily visualize a writer finally spending more time in explaining what he writes than in the actual writing. The important point the rabblerousers and the author of the PW article miss is that science fiction is a literature engrossed in change. As such, its very nature must accept change. As a formal literary form sf is hardly a half-century old, yet in that short time it has undergone a few upheavals. We moved from Gernsbackian scientifiction to Heinlein and Asimov et al; from there we went to FSF and Galaxy. Now, or at least in the past five years or so, we're in the middle of another transition. The growth and development of sf has been remarkable, considering its short lifespan. How many centuries-long phases did other literary forms go through? How many thousands of years of tradition lay behind poetry before Pound and Imagists broke it wide open? Mine may be a simplistic analysis-! never claimed to be an Alexei Panshin. Yet those who really know the field would agree with me, I think. Writers and their work undergo changes as environmental conditions change. The past is not rejected or newness heralded for its own sake. A new writer may build on fresh foundations simply because suddenly they are there, and there are guidelines and a sense that run through all sf that make it sf. These are sf's paradigms-and even they may change. Even to consider separate Old and New Waves-or warring Trads arid Mods-is laughable. All are manifestations of the same phenomenon and we have to consider all and arbitrarily reject nothing to get the complete picture. As for the Nebula Awards themselves-well, I have thoughts about them as does everyone else. Novel: The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov. No argument. By far the best novel of the year. The only one that came close, I think, was Silverberg's Dying Inside. Novella: A Meeting With Medusa, Arthur C. Qarke. Here it was very tight, I thought. Just as good were Ursula Le Guin 's The Word for World Is Forest and Frederick Pohl's The Merchants of Venus and The Gold at Starbow's End. Novelette: Goat Song, Poul Anderson. Here I would disagree. Good as Goat Song was, I thought Greg Benford's In The Ocean of Night had award-winner written all over it. Short Story: When It Changed, Joanna Russ. A good choice. I can 't really think of any other memorable shorts. A victory for the Trads? I don't think the question applies. The winners' works are as different from their long-ago efforts as those of the Mods are from old-line sf. Asimov 's novel is much tighter, more in step with current times, than his earlier writings and his aliens are now truly alien. The same criteria apply to the Qarke, the Anderson and the Russ. Perhaps I've gone on at too much length. But although I've seldom been vocal about it. I've long felt a commitment to science fiction in all its shapes and forms. I think I know the field as well as anyone and better than many. People who rely on spotting new trends and instantly labeling them separatist movements simply don 't strike me as qualified to make judgments and analyses. Glenn Chang Three star-men asked the ultimate question, and each got a different answer! I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light... -- Henry Vaughan, #-# I in regularly, all routine, until just before their return window opened... Then all at once Commander Rogers radioed that they had left surface, had rejoined the ship, and were commencing departure procedures -- # hours # minutes early. Houston, of course, demanded explanations, but Psyche's answers were erratic. The #-second answer lag didn't help. Psyche kept breaking contact. Once Rogers said, "We have got to bring her home now if we're going to do it at all -- " apparently in answer to Houston's questions, but the next thing was Hughes asking for a reading, and then something about a dosage. The sun was noisy and reception was very bad. The voice transmission ceased without sign-off. The automatic information feed from the ship continued. Departure was normal. Normal reports came in during the # days of flight, which the astronauts spent in drugged sleep no medical monitor on Psyche missions. The only link with the crew was voice contact. When they did not call in on Day #, the long tension at Houston tightened to despair. The onboard automatics, directed by the ground crew, had just about established Psyche's reentry course when the dead speakers suddenly said in Huglies' voice, "Houston, can you give me readings. Optical interference here." Tliey tried to direct him, but the one attempt he made at a manual correction was disastrous and took ground control five hours to compensate for. They said hands off, they'd bring in the ship. Almost immediately' after that they lost voice contact again. The great pale parachutes opened above the gray Pacific -- roses slowly falling out of heaven. The speedburned ship screamed steam, plunging; popped back up and rocked, quiet, on the long deep swells. Ground control had done a beautiful job. She was down within a halfkilometer of the California. Helicopters hovered, rafts assembled, the ship was stabilized, the hatch opened. Nobody scrambled out. They went in and brought them out. Commander Rogers was in his flight seat, still strapped down and had been dead about ten days and it was clear why the others had not opened his suit. Captain Temski seemed physically unhurt, but dazed and bewildered. He did not speak, or respond to instructions. They had to manhandle him to haul him out of the ship, though he put up no active resistance. Dr. Hughes was in a state of collapse, but fully conscious -- he appeared to be blind. "Please... "Can you see anything?" "Yes! Please let me have the blindfold." "Do you see this light I'm showing? Wliat color is it, Dr. Hughes?" "All colors -- white -- ah, it's too bright." "Please point toward it." "It's everywhere. It's too -- too bright." "The room's quite dark. Dr. Hughes. Now, will you open your eyes again, please." "It isn't dark." "Mmmh. Possible supersensitivity here. All right now, how about that? Dark enough for you?" "Make it dark!" "No, keep your hands down, please. Take it easy. All right, we'll put back the compresses." The struggling man relaxed as soon as his eyes were covered. He lay still, breathing hard. His narrow face, framed in a month's growth of dark beard, was oiled with sweat. "I'm sorry," he said. "Will you open your eyes, please. The room's quite dark." "Why do you tell me that when it's not dark?" "Dr. Hughes, I can hardly make out your face. I've got the faintest red illumination on my scopenothing else. Can you see me?" "No! I can't see for the light!" The doctor increased the illumination until he could see Hughes' face, the clenched jaw, the open, dazzled, frightened eyes. "There, does that make it any darker?" he asked with the sarcasm of helplessness. "No!" Hughes shut his eyes -- he had gone dead white. "Get dizzy," he muttered, "the whirling-" Then he gasped for breath and began to vomit. H ughes was unmarried and had no immediate kin. His closest friend was known to be Bernard Decelis. They had trained together. Deceits had been specialist on Psyche the "City" on Mars -- as Hughes was debriefing station in Pasadena and instructed to go in and talk with his friend. The conversation was, of course, recorded. D. Hullo, Gerry. Decelis. H. Barney? D. How you doing? H. Fine. You been okay? D. Sure. No picnic, was it? H. How's Gloria? D. Fine, just fine. H. She got past Aunt Rhody yet? D. (laughs) Oh, Christ, yeah. She can play Greensleeves now. At least she calls it Greensleeves. H. What have they got you in this dump for? D. See you. H. Wish I could return tlie compliment. D. You will. Listen. I've been assured by three different oculists -- or whatever the hell they are, opthamollywhoggers, eye doctors -- here that there is absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes. Three optliamacadamizers and a neurologist, in fact. It's a sort of chorus they have. H. So what's wrong is my brain, evidently. D. In the sense of a crossed connection, maybe. H. What about Joe Temski? D. I don't know. Haven't seen him. H. What did they tell you about him? D. They didn't have a chorus line worked out for him. Just said he's inclined to be withdrawn. H. Withdrawn! Jesus, I'll say so. Like a rock is withdrawn. D. Temski? That joker? H. It started with him. D. What did? H. At the site. He stopped answering. D. What happened? H. Just that. He stopped answering. Stopped talking. Stopped noticing. Dwight thought it was cafard. Is that what they're still calling it? D. It's mentioned as one possibility. Was there anything special that happened -- there at the site? H. We found the room. D. The room, yeah. That all came back in your reports. I've seen them, and some of the holos you brought back with you. Fantastic. What the hell is it, Gerry? H. I don't know. D. Is it a construct? H. I don't know. What's the whole City? D. It was built, made -- it must have been. H. How do you know? How can you tell when you don't know what made it? Is a seashell "made"? If you didn't knowif you didn't have any background and couldn't assume any likeness and you looked at a seashell and a ceramic ashtray -- could you tell, could you say which was "made"? And what for? What does it mean? Or what about a ceramic seashell? Or a paper wasp nest? Or a geode? D. Yeah, okay. But what about those things, that -- arrangement that you call "pigeonholes" in the reports. I saw the holos. Tell me, what did you make of them? H. What did you make of them? D. I don't know. They're weird. I thought of running the spatial arrangements through a computer, looking for meaningful pattern... You don't think much of that. H. No. Fine. Only what are you to program for "meaning"? D. Mathematical relationships. Any kind of geometrical patternregularity-code. I don't know. What was the place like, Gerry? H. I don't know. D. You were in there a lot? H. All the time -- after we found it. D. That's where you noticed this kind of eye trouble you've got? How did it start? H. Things going out of focus. Like eyestrain. It was worse outside the room. Came on over several days. I could still make things out all right when we were taking the ML up to the ship. But getting worse. There 'd be these flashes of light, left my depth perception all screwed up -- I'd get dizzy. Dwight and I set up the course -- one or the other of us was functioning most of the time. But he was getting kind of wild. Didn't want to use the radio, wouldn't touch the onboard computer. D. What was... wrong with him? H. I don't know. When I told him about my eyes he said he'd been having something like shaking fits. I said we'd better get the hell up to the ship while we could. He said okay, because Joe was really beginning to not function. Before we even launched he started having some kind of seizures, like epilepsy -- Dwight, I mean. When he came out of one he was shaky, but he seemed rational. He took us up okay, but as soon as we docked in he went into another fit. The fits kept getting longer. He started hallucinating in between them. I gave him some tranquilizers and strapped him in -- it was wearing him out. When I took the sleep -- I don't know, he could already have been dead then. D. No, he died in the sleep. About ten days out from Earth. H. They didn't tell me that. D. There wasn't anything you could have done, Gerry. H. I don't know. Those attacks he had -- they were like overloads. Like all his fuses blew. Burned him out. He talked while he was in them. Sort of in bursts, like barking -- as if he was trying to say a whole sentence at once. Epileptics don't talk, do they, when they're having a seizure? D. I don't know. Epilepsy's so well controlled now you don't hear much about it. They catch the tendency and cure it first. If Rogers had had the tendency... H. Yeah. He never would have been in the program. Christ, he'd had six months in space. D. What had you had -- six days? H. Like you. One moon hop. D. It isn't that, then. Do you think... H. What? D. Some kind of virus? H. Space plague? Martian fever? Mysterious ancient spores that madden astronauts? D. All right, it sounds dumb. But look, the room had been sealed. And it does sound like all of you -- H. Dwight gets a cortical overcharge. Joe goes catatonic. I start seeing things. What's the connection? D. Nervous system. H. Why different symptoms in each of us? D. Well, drugs affect people differently -- H. Do you think we found some kind of goddamned Martian psychogenic mushrooms in there? There isn't anything there -- it's dead, like all the rest of Mars. You know, you've been there! There aren't any goddamned germs or virusesthere's no life there, no life. D. But there may have been -- H. What makes you think so? D. The room you found. The City we found. H. City! For Christ's sake, Barney, you talk like some damned pop journalist. You know damned well the whole thing is a set of mud concretions for all we can tell. There's no way to tell. It's too old -- conditions are too different. We have no context. We don't understand -- we can't understand -- it's something the human mind is outside of. Cities, room, all that -- we're just analogizing, trying to make sense in our terms. But it's not in our terms. There is no sense. I can see that now. That's the only thing I can see! D. See what, Gerry? H. What I see when I open my eyes! D. What? H. Everything that isn't there and doesn't make sense. Oh -- # -- D. Here, come on. Take it easy. Look, it'll be okay. It's going to be all right, Gerry. You'll be fine. H. (unclear) light, and the (unclear) try to see what I touch and I can't, I don't understand and I can't (unclear)... D. Hang on. I'm right here. Take it easy, old man. II H ughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record -- in fact, a briUiant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination. His performance had been solid and his behavior irreproachable, but now it was frequently recalled that he was, after all, an intellectual. Temski was harder to explain. He was a crack test pilot, an air force captain and a baseball fan, but now his behavior was even more aberrant than Hughes'. All Temski did was sit. He was capable of looking after himself and did so. That is, when he was hungry and food was present he ate some with his fingers. When he had to relieve himself he went to a corner and did so. When he was sleepy he lay down bn the floor and slept. The rest of the time he sat. He was in good physical condition and quite calm. Nothing said to him produced the slightest reaction, nor did he take any interest in anything that went on. His wife was brought in to see him in hopes of producing a response. She was taken away weeping after five minutes. Since Temski wouldn't respond and Rogers, being dead, couldn't respond, it was quite natural to look upon Hughes as being, somehow, responsible. There was nothing wrong with him except a case of something like hysterical blindness, so it was to be expected that he should answer questions rationally and explain precisely what had happened. This, however, he could not -- or would not -- do. A psychiatric consultant was brought in, a distinguished man called Shapir. He was requested to work with both Temski and Hughes. It was, of course, unthinkable to admit that the mission had been a failure (the word "disaster" was not even mentioned), but a couple of rumors had leaked out to the press despite all security precautions. Irresponsible journalists demanded to know why the crew of Psyche XfV was being held incommunicado and claimed the "right" of the American people to "know," etc. It had been necessary to issue a statement concerning a new health test being run on astronauts who had spent over fifteen days in space -- this because of Commander Rogers' unexpected and tragic death from heart failure -- and to have a whole new series of articles written for the media concerning plans for a "Little America" dome city on Mars, in order for the authorities to maintain a positive attitude in public. The real people, of course, knew that the rest of the Psyche program was in jeopardy -- they instructed Dr. Shapir to diagnose and cure the astronauts with all deliberate speed. Shapir talked with Hughes for half an hour about the food in the hospital, Cal Tech, and the latest Chinese report on their Alpha Centauri probe, all very relaxed and trivial. Then he asked, "What is it you see when you open your eyes?" Hughes, who was up and dressed now, sat silent for a while. Opaque goggles covered his eyes entirely, giving him the arrogant, staring look of people who affect dark glasses. "Nobody's asked that," he said. "Didn't the oculists?" "Yes, I guess Kray did. Early on. Before they decided I was a mental case." "What did you tell him?" "It's hard to describe. The point is, it's indescribable. At first it was things going out of focus, going transparent, going away. Tlien tire light. Too much light. Like overexposing a film, bleaching everything out. But with that, a kind of whirling. Changing positions and relationships, changing perspectives, constant transformation. It made me get dizzy. My eyes kept sending signals to my inner ears, I guess. Like that inner-ear disease, only in reverse; doesn't it foul up your spatial orientation?" "Meuniere's syndrome, I think it's called, yes, it does. Especially on stairs and slopes." "It's as if I were looking from a great height, or...up at a great height..." "Heiglits ever worry you?" "Hell, no. They don't even mean anything to me. What's up and down, in space? No, see. I'm not giving you the picture. There is no picture. I've been trying to look more, to learn to... how to see... It's not much good." There was a pause. "That takes courage," said Shapir. "Wliat do you mean?" the astronaut asked sharply. "Well, to have the sensory input most important to the conscious mind -- sight -- reporting nonexistent and incomprehensible things in flagrant contradiction with aU other sensory input -- your touch, your hearing, your sense of balance and so on -- to have that going on every time you try to open your eyes, and not only to live with it but to attempt to investigate it... It doesn't sound easy." "So mostly I keep my eyes shut," Hughes said dourly. "Like a damned see-no-evil monkey." "Wlien you do have your eyes open and you look toward some object you know is there -- your own hand, for instance -- what do you see?" " 'A blooming, buzzing confusion.' " satisfaction. "What was he talking about -- how a baby perceives the world, eh?" He had a pleasant voice with a mild, glancing quality to it, non-percussive -- one could not imagine him scolding or yelling. He nodded several times, thinking out the implications of what Hughes had said. "To learn how to see, you said. To learn. That's how you feel about it?" Hughes hestitated, then said with a sudden, marked increase of trust, "I have to. What else can I do? Apparently I'm never going to be able to -- to see the way I used to, the way other people do, again. But I still do see. Only I don't understand what I see -- it doesn't make sense. There are no outlines, no distinctions, even between nearer and farther. There is something there -- only I can't say that, because there aren't any things. No forms. Instead of forms I see transformations -- t ransfigurations. Does that make any sense at all?" "I think it does," Shapir said, "only it's enormously difficult to put a direct experience into words. And when the experience is new, unique, overwhelming... "And irrational. That's it." Hughes spoke now with real gratitude. "If only I could show it to you," he said wistfully. T he two astronauts were being kept on the tenth floor of a big military hospital in Maryland now. They were not permitted to leave that floor, and anyone who visited it still spent ten days in quarantine before he rejoined the outer world: the Martian Plague theory was currently on top. At Shapir's insistence, Hughes was allowed to go up to the roof garden of the hospital (after which the elevator was elaborately sterilized and roped off for three days). They demanded that Hughes wear a surgical mask -- and Shapir had asked him not to wear his goggles. Docile, he went up the elevator with his mouth and nose covered, his eyes uncovered, but tightly shut. The change from the dusk of the elevator to the hot smoggy sunlight of July on the open roof did not, as far as Shapir could see, affect those shut eyes. Hughes did not screw them tighter against the flooding light, though he raised his face to it as if he felt the heat pleasant on his skin. He took a deep breath through the binding gauze. "I haven't been outside since March," he said. It was true, of course. He had been in a spacesuit or in a hospital room, breathing carmed or conditioned air. "Have you got your compass bearings?" Shapir asked. "Not the faintest. It makes me feel blinder, being outdoors. Afraid to walk off the edge." Hughes had refused assistance coming through the corridors and in the elevator, feeling his way adeptly with his hands, and now, despite his joke about falling off, he began to explore the roof garden. He was exhilarated, an active man released from long confinement. Shapir watched him, brooding. The low furniture was a hazard to him but he learned at once how to feel for it -- he had tactile intelligence. There was grace in his movements even as he blundered in blindness. "WiU you open your eyes?" Shapir said in his glancing, reluctant voice. Hughes stopped. "All right," he said, but he turned toward Shapir and his right hand came up gropingly. Shapir came forward and let that hand take his arm. The grip of it tightened as Hughes opened his eyes. Then Hughes let go and took a step away, stretching out both his arms. A cry broke from him. He reached forward and upward, his head back, his eyes wide open, staring at the empty sky. "Oh, my God!" he whispered and dropped like a man hit by a sledgehammer. Psychiatric counseling session, # July. S. Shapir, Geraint Hughes. S. Hello. Sidney. I won't stay long. Listen, that wasn't such a bright idea of mine. The roof. I'm sorry. I had no idea. But no right, either. Would you rather I left? H. No. S. All right. I'm getting stir-crazy myself. Need a good walk. I walk a good deal, usually. About two miles to my office and the same back. Then I add detours. Whatever they say. New York is a beautiful town to walk in. If you know how to pick your route. Listen, I have a queer story about Joe Temski. Not a story, just a queer fact, actually. Did you know that they have written on his record that he is "functionally deaf?" H. Deaf? S. Yes, deaf. Well, you know -- I began to wonder. I go in and talk to Joe, touch him, try to make eye contact, any kind of contact, to get through. No go. I've had patients tell me in so many words, "I can't hear you." A metaphor. But what if it isn't a metaphor? It happens sometimes with little kidsthey're called retarded and it turns out they've got thirty, sixty, eighty per cent hearing dysfunction. Well, maybe Joe really can't hear me. Just like you can't see me. H. (Pause of # seconds) Do you mean he's hearing things? Listening? S. It's possible. H. (Pause of # seconds) You can't shut your ears. S. That's what I thought, too. It could be rough, couldn't it? Well, what I thought was -- what about trying to shut them for him? Put earplugs in his ears? H. He still wouldn't be able to hear you. S. No, but he wouldn't be distracted. If you had to watch your light show all the time you wouldn't be able to pay much attention to me or anything else, right? Maybe it's like that with Joe. Maybe there's this noise drowning out everything else for him. H. (Pause of # seconds) It would be more than noise. S. I don't suppose you want to talk about... on the roof... No, all right. H. You'd like to know what I saw, wouldn't you? S. Sure I would. But in your own time. H. Yeah, I've got so much else to do here besides talk to you. All the books I can read and the beautiful women I can look at. You know damned well I'll teU you eventually, because I haven't got anybody else to talk to. S. Oh, hell, Geraint -- (Pause of # seconds) H. Shit. I'm sorry, Sidney. If I didn't have you to talk to. I'd have cracked completely. I know that. You're very patient with me. S. Whatever you saw -- up there -- disturbs you. That's one reason why I want to know what it was. But what the hell? If you can handle it alone -- do. That's the idea, after all. My curiosity is my problem, not, yours. Listen. Let's forget talking. Let me read you this article in Science. Your Colonel Wood gave it to me, said you might be interested. I was. It's on what they found inside the Argentinean meteorite. The authors are suggesting we go comb the meteor belt for remnants of a trans-stellar fleet that came to grief in our solar system about six hundred million years ago. They would have landed on Mars first, of course. Are these guys nuts? H. I don't know. Read the article. easy for Shapir to insert ordinary wax plugs like those insomniacs use into his ears while he was asleep. When Temski woke he did nothing unusual at first. He sat up, yawned, stretched, scratched, looked lazily around to see if anything to eat was handy, in that serene way Shapir privately felt was altogether unlike any psychotic behavior he had ever seen and, in fact, unlike any human behavior he had ever seen. Temski reminded him of a healthy, poised, contented, tame animal. Not a chimpanzee-something milder, more contemplative. An orang, maybe. But the orang began to feel uncomfortable. Temski looked around, left and right, nervous. Perhaps he was not looking but moving his head, trying to find the vanished sounds. The lost chord, Shapir thought. Temski grew more and more disturbed and alert. He stood up, still turning his head restlessly. He looked across the room. For the first time in seventeen days of daily contact he saw Shapir. His handsome face was now contorted with anxiety and bewilderment. "Where?" he said. "Where-" His hands, groping at his ears to find the cause of silence, found the earplugs and removed one. That was enough. "Ah," he said and stood still. His eyes were still directed toward Shapir, but he did not see him. His face relaxed. Later attempts were more successful. Though bewildered at first, Temski was cooperative while artificially deafened, and responded readily to Shapir's attempts to communicate with him by touch, by sign, and finally by writing. After the fifth such session, Temski consented to longer sessions involving the use of a drug which would deaden his auditory nerve endings for about five hours at a time. During the second of these long periods he asked to see Hughes. Shapir had already been instructed to let the two astronauts talk together if possible-there was a feeling that such a meeting might elicit more information if they talked freely to each other. It was necessary for Hughes to write, since Temski was artificially deafened. Hughes knew touch-typing and carried on his part of the dialogue on a portable typewriter. Not all the material found in the wastebasket, however, could be successfully collated into the tape of Temski's spoken conversation. The two men mostly discussed the return journey and Commander Rogers' illness and death, which Temski could not recall. Hughes described all these events as he had done before, without adding new information. They did not talk about the "room" (Site D) or their respective disabilities, except as follows: T. Ifs not inside, is it? H. If it was, earplugs wd improve yr reception. T. It's real, then. H. Hell, yes. T. See, when they first stuck those plugs in my ears, when I woke up and there was this silence, I was really spooked. It took me a long time to come back from where I'd been. And I didn't much want to come back. But when Shapir began telling me how long it had been and I realized this was Earth -- you know, that's what spooked me-I thought, maybe all this has been some sort of like hallucination. You know. Jesus, have I been off my chump? That scared me. Like I was two different people. But I began to put it together, to see that it wasn't a split, but a... H. Change. T. Exactly. It changed me-it had changed me. It's real. Because when I can hear that's what I hear. And when you can see, that's what you see. Right? In other words, it is real. We have to be artificially blinded and made deaf to not hear it and see it. That's it, isn't it? (Hughes' typed responses for the following section were not identifiable in the wastebasket material.) H... T. Oh, no. Beautiful. It took me a long time -- at least I know now it was a long time -- to begin to get it. At first it didn't make any sense -- Jesus, it scared the balls off me at first. You or Dwight would say something and the re 'd be these kind of chords all around your voice, like rainbows around a prism so you can't even see the prism -- yeah, that's what ifs like for you, isn't it? It's the same, only this is with hearing. Ifs like everything turns into this music, only it isn't music. Ifs... At first, like I said, I didn't know how to hear it. I thought it was something wrong with my suit radio! Jesus! (Laughs) I couldn't follow the patterns, you know, the modulations, like, the transformations. It was all so different. But you learn. The more you listen the more you hear. I wish you could hear it. You know, you tell me it's two months since we left Mars and so on -- and shit -- I believe you, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter -- does it, Gerry? H... T. I wish I could see it, the way you do. It must be tremendous. But I'll tell you. I'm glad they pull me out of it like this every day now. I think it's meant to be that way. I was kind of -- I don't knowswamped, overwhelmed -- it's too much. We're not built right, not quite strong enough, maybe. At least at first. Can't take it all at once. What I'd like to try to do while I'm out of touch is try to write some of it down. H... T. No. I don't. But it wouldn't have to be music. See, it isn't music -- that's just like a way of describing it because it's beautiful. I think I could get it into words just as well. Maybe better. To say what it means. H... T. Afraid of what? Ill wife called Hughes every couple of days on the telephone, though they were prevented by the quarantine from coming to see him. On the #th of July Hughes and Decelis had a significant conversation concerning the so-called "room," Site D, of the Psyche XfV survey. Decelis said, "If I don't get on the Sixteen team and see that damned place. I'll flip." "Seeing is believing," Hughes remarked. He was not as excitable as he had been earlier, tending to be terse and rather bitter. "Listen, Gerry. Was there ever machinery in those pigeonholes?" "No." "Hah! There's a definite answer! I thought you wouldn't assert anything about Site D except its incomprehensibility to the human mind. You softening up?" "No. Learning." "Learning what?" "How to see." After a pause Decelis asked cautiously, "See what?" "Site D. Since it's all I can see." "You mean, that's what you -- when your eyes are open -- " "No." Hughes spoke wearily and with reluctance. "It's more complex than that. I don't see Site D. I see... the world in the light cast by Site D...a new light. The man you ought to ask is Joe Temski. Or, listen, did you ever run the pigeonholes through Algie, like you said?" "I had trouble setting up the program." "I'll bet you did," Hughes said with a short laugh. "Send the stuff here. I'll set it up. Blindfolded." radiant. "Gerry," he said, "I've got it." "Got what?" "I've got it together. I heard you. No, I wasn't lip-reading. Say something with your back turned. Go on!" "Ptomaine poisoning." "Ptomaine poisoning. Okay? See, I'm hearing you. But I haven't lost the music. I've got it aU together!" Blue-eyed and fair, Temski was ordinarily a handsome man -- now he was magnificent. Hughes could not see him (though the spy camera in the ventilator grille could and did), but he heard the vibration of his voice and was moved -- and frightened. "Take off your blinkers, Gerry," the gentle, vibrant voice said. Hughes shook his head. "You can't sit in the dark inside yourself forever. Come out. You can't choose blindness, Gerry." "Why can't I?" "Not after you've seen the hght." "What light?" "The light, the word, the truth we have been taught to perceive and to know," Temski said, with the gentlehess of utter certainty and a warmth in his voice, a warmth like sunhght. "Get out," Hughes said. "Get out, Temski!" T welve weeks had passed since body in the debriefing staff had come down with any symptoms more alarming than boredom. Hughes was no worse and Temski was now completely recovered. It could be safely assumed that whatever had affected the crew of Psyche vectored by a virus, spore, bacterium, or other physical agent. The hypothesis accepted tentatively and with various reservations by the majority, including Dr. Shapir, was that something in the arrangement of the elements constituting the "room," Site D, had, during their prolonged and intense study of the site, caused a degree of brain-wave disruption in all three men, analogous to the brainfunction disturbance caused by strobe Ughts at certain frequencies, etc. Precisely what elements of the "room" were involved was not yet known, though the holographs were being examined intensively by experts. Psyche XV was to make a still more thorough investigation of the site, taking due precautions to protect and monitor the astronauts. These suspect elements of Site D were so numerous and so intricately interrelated that it was very hard for a single mind to attempt to arrange or order them. Some Martianologists were sure the peculiar properties of the "room" were only a geological accident and that all the "room" had to "tell" us was the kind of information furnished so concisely and beautifully by the strata of rocks, the rings of a tree, the lines of a spectrum. Others were as convinced that intelligent beings had built the City and that in studying it we might learn something of their nature and the way their minds worked -- those years ago (for the radioactive-decay dating of the site was absolutely definite now). The job of doing so, however, was daunting. T. A. Newman of the Smithsonian Institution put it well: "Archeologists are used to getting a lot of information out of very simple things -- potsherds, bits of flint, a wall here, a grave there. But what if all we had of an ancient civilization were a very complicated thing, complicated in more than a technological sense -- let's say, one copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Now let's assume that the archeologists who find this copy of Hamlet are not humanoid, don't have books, don't have plays, don't speak, write or think at all as we do. What are they going to make of that little physical artifact, the evident complexity and purposefulness of it, the repetition of certain elements and the non-repetition of others, the semi-regularity of line lengths and so on? How are they going to read Hamletl" To those who accepted the "Hamlet theory" the obvious first step was to employ computers, and a number of them had been set to work analyzing the various elements of Site D: the spacing, size, depth and configurations of the "pigeonholes," the proportions of the first, middle, and third "subchambers," the extraordinary acoustical properties of the "room" as a whole. None of these programs had as yet produced any sure evidence of conscious planning or rational pattern -- none, that is, except the program set up by Deceits braic V, which had certainly gotten results, though they could not be called rational. Indeed that printout brass, and a good laugh to those few scientists to whom Deceits had shown it before it was suppressed as being probably a fraud and certainly an embarrassment. The entire printout read as follows: lying on the bed, as he now did most of the time, wearing his black goggles. He looked white and ill. "I think you've been overdoing it." Hughes did not answer. Shapir sat down. "They're sending me back to New York," he said presently. Hughes did not answer. "Temski's been released, you know. He's on his way to Florida now. With his wife. I can't find out what is being planned for you. I asked..." After a long pause he completed the sentence. "I asked for another two weeks here with you. No go." "It's all riglit," Hughes said. "I want to keep in touch with you, Geraint. Obviously we can't write letters. But there's the phone. And tapes -- I'm leaving a cassette recorder here with you. When you want to talk, please call me. If you can't get me, talk to the recorder. It's not the same, but -- " "You're a very good man, Sidney," Hughes said gently. "I wish..." After a moment he sat up. He reached up to his face and took off the black goggles. They fitted so close around his eyesockets that it took him a little while. When they were off he lowered his hands and looked across the room, directly at Shapir. His eyes, the pupils enlarged by long privation of Ught, were almost as dark as the goggles. "I see you," he said. "Hide and seek. I spy. You're It. Do you want to know what I see?" "Yes," Shapir said softly. "A blot, a shadow. An incompleteness, a rudiment, an obstruction. Something completely unimportant. You see, it doesn't do ?Lny good to be a good man, even..." "And when you look at yourself?" "The same. Just the same. A hindrance, a triviality. A blot on the field of vision." "The field of vision. What is the field of vision?" "What do you tliink?" Hughes said, quietly and wearily. "What is true vision of? Reality, of course. I have been reprogramed to perceive reality, to see the truth. I see God." He sank his face into his hands, covering his eyes. "I was a thinking man," he said. "I tried to be a rational man. But what good's reason, when you can see the truth? Seeing is believing..." He looked up again at Shapir, his dark eyes both piercing and unseeing. "If you want a real explanation, go ask Joe Temski. He's keeping quiet now -- he's biding his time. But he's the one who can tell you. And he will when his time comes. He can translate what he hears -- translate it into words. It's harder to do with visual perceptions. Mystics have always had trouble putting their visions into words; except the ones that got the Word, that heard the Voice. They usually got right up and acted, didn't they? Temski will act. But I will not. I refuse. I will not preach. I will not be a missionary." "A missionary?" "Don't you see? Don't you see that's what the 'room' is? A training center, a briefing room -- a -- " "A religious center? A church?" "Well, in a way. A place where you are taught to see God and hear God and know God. And love God. A conversion center. A place where you're converted! And then you want to go out and preach the knowledge of God to the others -- to the heathen. Because now you know how blind they are -- and how easy it is to see. No, not just a church, a mission. The Mission. And you learn The Mission and you come out of it with The Mission. They weren't explorers. They were missionaries, bearing the truth, bringing it to the other races and the future races, all the poor damned heathens living in the outer darkness. They knew the answer and they wanted us all to know it. Nothing else matters, once you've learned it. It doesn't matter if you're a good man or a bad one, if I'm an intelligent man or a fool. Nothing about us matters except that we are trivial vehicles of the great truth. Earth doesn't matter, the stars don't matter, death doesn't matter, nothing is anything. Only God is." "An alien god?" "Not a god. God -- the one true God, immanent in aU things. Everywhere, forever. I have learned to see God. All I have to do is open my eyes and I see the Face of God. And I'd give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree, just a tree, a chair -- a plain wooden chair, ordinary -- They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back and my own death!" Army psychiatrist who undertook the case of Geraint Hughes after Shapir was dismissed, Hughes was moved to a military hospital for the insane. As he was generally a quiet and cooperative patient he was not kept under strict supervision and after eleven months of confinement he unfortunately carried out a successful suicide attempt, slashing his wrists with a spoon handle which he had stolen from the mess haU and sharpened by rubbing against the bed frame. It is an interesting fact that he killed himself on the day the Psyche XV Mission started back to Earth from Mars, bringing the documents and records which, as interpreted by the First Apostle, now form the first chapters of the Revelation of the Ancients, the sacred texts of the holy and universal American Church of God, bringer of light to the heathen, sole vehicle of the One Eternal Truth. O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night Before true light... But as I did their madness so discuss One whisper'd thus. This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide But for his bride. if of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! AS# # A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. AS#I # n The BmI From  Galaxy Magazine A collection of science fiction that challenges the mind and captivates the imagination AN # # A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # #f Two men pursue the Rithian Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN# # A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# # prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II #f "Psycho." AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# #( . ; Farmingdale, N.Y. # (Please add # for shipping) I T IS, and always has been, the practice of this department to give attentive treatment to anything that comes its way, no matter how it's bound or who publishes it. As a matter of fact, the chance to do this was the heaviest persuasion in my undertaking at all what is sometimes a worrisome, time-consuming responsibility. The more I read reviews, the more apalled I became at the inability, the downright snobbish refusal of "serious" critics to take seriously that which appeared first in soft covers. It is easy to concede that a great many original paperbacks are just awful; it is odd that one must not concede, but assert, that a great many original hardcovers are also awful. Such a posture puts me to a great deal more trouble, perhaps, I might have to bear if I yielded to snobbery, but it has its rewards. A reviewer has something in common with the school teacher whose real payoff isn't salary-and-fringe, but the ignition in that one in a -- hundred? thousand? -- bored faces of the fire that first flamed in the teacher when he or she felt first-love for the subject taught. Every once in a whUe, out of the bushels of books and galleys decanted on my doorstep, comes that waited-for, hoped-for gush of warmth and light, and it's as likely to radiate from the paperbacks as anywhere else. Cases in point; Mister Justice (Ace Double, #) by Doris Piserchia, a first novel well worth looking for -- or sending for if you can't find it on the racks. This is by no means a perfect novel -- I'd give anything to see that ending reworked -- but never mind that: really, never mind. Ms. Piserchia writes with a lean and powerful style -- her pace and her characterizations are dimensional, spellbinding. She deals with a superman capable of a limited form of time travel, who can go back to the time and place of a crime and photograph it, document the supporting evidence and then, in present-time, capture the criminal and deliver the whole package to the authorities. When the authorities won't take action he does -- he becomes an executioner. As can be predicted, there are those dedicated to his elimination for a wide variety of reasons. In the larger matrix, early #st Century America is falling apart and as chaos approaches the hunt goes on. The violence and sex in this novel are shattering-and never overdone, never outside the legitimate advancement of the plot. I'm going to hang this one on my Hugo hook for this year and there it will stay unless something better comes along to knock it off. Meanwhile, welcome Ms. Piserchia. On the flip side of this double is fast and fun if you like rescue-thedamsel adventure stuff. VS) is Leo P. Kelly's second novel (he wrote Mindmix ) and he has here a most captivating, multifaceted narrative of an extraterrestrial "passing" as a human being, yet operating among humans with complete honesty, which makes him, to say the least, troublesome. He winds up on a funny-farm and the events and characters therein are comic, touching, poignant and astonishing. There are, in the narrative and dialogue, some profound commentaries and insights on the human animal, what he is and does -- and occasionally some truly beautiful passages. Kelly can, if he keeps up with this sort of thing, become one of those writer's writers who make other writers want to be file-clerks. by Barry N. Malzberg is another tense, puzzling and acidulous work by this unfailingly surprising writer. I look forward eagerly to his byline, snatch joyfully at it when I see it and he has never let me down. This one runs less to the special scorn that has become his hallmark, and more to a poignant, painful lostness which is genuinely touching. Why is this man in The Enclosure forced daily to give up technical information to a ravenous Earth? Who sent him? Why must he answer whatever is asked of him? Who programed him? What for? Why can't the Earth people understand that pressure and even torture are not necessary? Why do they torture him so? And there's Nala. Why, when she figures out the answers, won't she tell him? Finally the answers are all neatly there for you and not since D. G. Compton's Farewell, Earth 's Bliss has there been such a sting in a novel's tale. You find the warm glow and the great light in some non-fiction, too. Isaac Asimov's many, many collections of short pieces have engaged, instructed and amused me for a lot of years and I am never without one or some of them within reach. Of them all, however, his latest. Today and Tomorrow And... (Doubleday #) is his most potent, pungent and serious. It is beautifully organized. Articles originally printed in a wide variety of publications -- national Wildlife, Intellectual Digest, The Ladies Home Journal, Private Pilot, The Smithsonian, True, Electronic Age, and others, are brought together neatly and demonstrate fully the true value of this remarkable writer -- namely, that he can talk to anybody. Look at that spread. How much cross readership do you suppose there is between and among these publications? Essays of great moment to everyone are so often buried in some specialized outlet or other. Asimov is the synthesizer, the great interface, and in this book he talks to all these specialists -- and to you -- about things that have to matter to us all. I say again: things that have to matter... for in this book is Asimov's article (actually one version of an essay he sold all over the magazine stands a couple of years ago) called The End. In it he makes very clear that we have, perhaps, thirty years left. He says it clearly and succinctly and without hysteria; then he follows it with another essay called The End, Unless -- m. which he outlines those things which must be done if our species is to endure. He says in an afterword that this kind of thing makes some people call him a "doomcrier." But, "When I see doom," he says cheerfully, "I intend to cry it." The shapeliness of this book is beautiful to behold. "Today" is a section on biology, chemistry, astronomy and physics. "And Tomorrow" is the future of the space effort, the Earth, and science fiction. Finally, "And...", fully a third of the book in impact, but only a tiny few hundred words long, tells who it is that can do something about it. It rings. It tolls. Read it. the eve of the arrival to Mars orbit of the superbly successful Mariner #, five men gathered on the Caltech campus to speak of what it meant -- and further, what it meant to them. Two were scientists deeply involved in current space efforts. One was the science reporter for the New York Times. Two were science fiction writers...when I was in the West Indies I heard a native phrase: "Would God I were a fly on de wall fe see dat!" and I wish I could have been, for the men were Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, Walter Sullivan, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. Their remarks were recorded and then, a whole year later, were given to them to read over so that each might write a second take, a later thought. These, together with # photographs of Mars, surely the most astonishing ever seen by mankind, are the contents of Mars and the Mind of Man (Harper and Row, #.) There are only # pages... but the book is unique and I think you need it. xX gentle, colorful Laurence Yep. It's called Sweetwater (Harper  Row, #) and is packaged as a juvenile "Ages # up." Well, you know about sf juveniles by really good writers like "Paul French" and Robert Heinlein, don't you? They're a heU of a lot better than a lot of so-caUed "adult" releases. (Parenthetically, Edith Efron recently wrote a series for TV Guide about the new breed of children's programs and the fact that a great many kids dial away from them and hang fixated on the "adult" shows -- why? Qearly, because the latter were written for children in the first place!) Anyway, this one deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with Panshin's Rite of Passage and, where it deals with music, with Edgar Pangborn. There is no higher praise than that. So live for a while in the half-drowned city of Old Sion on the multi-mooned planet Harmony and learn how the Silkies live their harsh and homey Ufe and how young Tyree turns into a man. M oorcock... what do you say about Michael Moorcock? Wild man, maybe. Troublemaker. Maker of waves -- New Waves. The man who wrote Behold the Man and scalded me. Turns the crank and out comes thud and blunder, turns around and writes a magazine piece the very title of which gets his magazine banned -- and it partly funded by the government that banned it. Writes like an angel, but then, whose angel? Anyway, he's into something called "The Dancers at the End of Time," which is a trilogy, of which the first volume is An Alien Heat (Harper and Row, #). Seems, these days, like a fair price -- a little less so when you find out it's only # pages. Yet I don't complain specifically about that -- only that I couldn't put the book down and the end came so unexpectedly that it broke my stride... you know, like when you run up seven steps but the man built only six in the flight. This kaleidoscope, this chiaroscuro of a book, in which anything can happen because within its parameters anything really can, deals with a society so incredibly -- correction -- credibly decadent that it has produced, for statistical reasons (it's already done everything else) a genuine innocent. Jherek CarneUan is intelligent and quite sincere, but quite guileless. How he involves himself with a for-real Victorian lady who has been kidnaped from her time, how she is returned, how he follows her and what happens to him there -- this is tale-telling of the highest order. It carries the several bonuses of language under masterly control, a mordant. Puckish view of humans and their institutions, their vanities and their appetites, and with an especially long, especially sharp needle, has at the practice of research. And oh, wait until you meet some of Jherek's contemporaries... I'm glad to have encountered aU this, but I think I would have been pleased to wait a little longer for the whole thing rather than suffer this attack of go-read-us interruptus. book called A Peep Into the #th Century (Ballantine, #) because you think it's sf (I did)well, it isn't, which is not at all Ballantine's fault. Probably, then, I shouldn't mention it at all, except that it's a serendipity, a beautifully written, meticulously researched narrative of the first man to be killed by an electric chair. If you happen to see it, look on pp. # et seq., for one of the most profound arguments against capital punishment you will ever read. Christofer Davis wrote #:he book and the man really can write. In # Ace brought out a John Brunner novel called Day of the Star Cities. Now it's back, substantially revised and enlarged, as Age of Miracles (Ace, #). A chunky, competent book, it plods a bit from time to time but does well with new idea-variants and especially with the alienness of the aliens... Is there anyone out there who hasn't read John Sladek's utterly outrageous The MullerFoTcker Effect? It's out in paperback (Pocket Books, #t)... Gordon Dickson's # collection, Danger-Human, is out in paperback as The Book of Gordon Dickson mous competence and in this collection are two of my own great favorites, Dolphin's Way and Lulungomeena, as well as eleven others. Good book... Just received: the new Heinlein. I promise you a careful takeout in my next.  The year #I marked the first computer sighting of Object ##, a massive body # kilometers in diameter and estimated to weigh # Earth's solar system. At first little attention was paid to it beyond automated observation and tracking by orbiting Spaceguard computers. These, however, alerted humans when ## displayed characteristics unusual for asteroids one of which was its spin velocity of # kmh, giving it a #-minute "day. " Solar Survey Research Vessel Endeavor, # # Commander citizen with separate wives and families on each planet-was diverted from its routine mission of checking and emplacing asteroid warning beacons to investigate. The new arrival proved to be an artifact, cylindrical in shape and spinning on a longitudinal axis. Commander Norton effected a landing on the approximately flat "North Pole" of the cylinder and, during first Commander Karl Mercer, discovered locks leading to the object's interior. Earth and her planetary colonies, bound into a loose federation (United Planets, headquartered on Luna) were electrified. Astronomers, having exhausted their store of Greek classic names on the approximately # listed asteroids, reached into Hindi to rename Object ## Rama. A Rama Committee,consisting of United Planets representatives from Mercury, Earth, Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Triton, plus leading scientists, was formed on Luna to correlate the gathering of more information regarding the intruder. Commander Norton and his crew J'ound unobstructed entry into Rama through three airlocks guarding a half-kilometer tunnel. The interior of Rama was dark, cold and lifeless, hut jlares revealed an inside-out world of land and water and citylike constructs... Searchlights set up at the Hub of Rama's spin confirmed these first impressions, adding detail. The domelike interior of the point of access, the "North. Pole," was trisected by equidistant, radiating ladders, connecting with stairways leading to a cylindrical plain that ran around the inner surface of Rama. The plain was bisected by what the explorers dubbed the Cylindrical Sea. The sea appeared frozen. A feature of it was an island roughly the shape of Manhattan, supporting what seemed to be an urban complex the explorers named New York. Other structural clusters dotted the plain and became Rome, Paris, London, Peking, Moscow, Tokyo-each was about the size of an Earth city housing # humans. What seemed to be roads and rails linked the "cities. " Another major feature of Rama'j interior was the southern shore of, the Cylindrical Sea, which seemed to be an unbroken, unscalable cliff a half-kilometer high, while the northern shore rose a roughly uniform fifty meters above water level. Also, evenly spaced along the length and circumference of the plain were uniform depressions (Straight Valleys) apparently floored with some translucent, hard substance. After solving problems of directional orientation (save along the airless, no-gravity axis of Rama'.v spin, all directions from the Huh could he either up or down) explorers selected from Endeavors crew utilized the ladders and stairs radiating from the Huh to reach the plain, their progress lighted by Hubhased spotlights. They discovered breathable air and gravity fit for humans, thus were able to continue further exploration without spacesuits. No signs of life were evident, however-the silence of Rama was reported as more profound than human senses had ever encountered. But as Rama penetrated deeper into the solar system and the sun's warmth reached her, small breezes began to break the stillnessand suddenly the translucent floors of the Straight Valleys burst into sunRama with light. The iee melted in the Cylindrical Sea and the oxygen content of the atmosphere increased until the air became breathable even along the axis of spin. Rama seemed to be coming awake to the guiding intelligence that had sent it on its timeless journey. Consternation was expressed among members of the Rama Committee-the Hermians were particularly concerned. The committee's scientists had already deduced that the banks of the Cylindrical Sea had been designed to permit either rapid acceleration or gradual braking of Rama'j speed-it was now calculated that the alien artifact had the capability to brake into an orbit around the sun from which it would dominate not only Mercury but the entire solar system. The Cylindrical Sea yielded evidence that life was being born in its waters and suddenly it became imperative for humans to solve the mystery of Rama. Commander Norton and a hand-picked crew set out to explore New York in a makeshift raft named Resolution. chine. Norton had come to that conclusion in ten minutes and saw no reason to change it after making a complete traverse of the island. A city -- whatever the nature of its occupants -- surely had to provide some form of accommodation; there was nothing here of that nature, unless it was underground. And if that were the case, where were the entrances, the stairways, the elevators? He had not found anything that even qualified as a simple door. The closest analogy he had ever seen to this place on Earth was a giant chemical processing plant. However, there were no stockpiles of raw materials, or any indications of a transport system to move them around. Nor could he imagine where the finished product would emerge -- still less what that product could possibly be. It was all very baffling and more than a little frustrating. "Anybody care to make a guess?" he asked at last of all who might be listening. "If this is a factory, what does it make? And where does it get its raw materials?" "I've a suggestion, skipper," said Karl Mercer, over on the far shore. "Suppose it uses the sea. According to Doc, that contains just about anything you can think of." It was a plausible answer and Norton had already considered it. Buried pipes might well lead to the sea -- in fact, some had to. Any conceivable chemical plant would require large quantities of water. But he had a suspicion of plausible answers -- they were so often wrong. "That's a good idea, Karl. But what does New York do with its seawater?" For a long time nobody answered from ship, Hub or northern plain. Then an unexpected voice spoke. "That's easy, skipper. But you're all going to laugh at me." "No, we're not, Ravi. Speak right up." Sergeant Ravi McAndrews, chief steward and simp master, was the last person on this ship who would normally become involved in a technical discussion. His I.Q. was modest and his scientific knowledge was minimal, but he was no fool and had a natural shrewdness everyone respected. "Well, it's a factory all rit, skipper, and maybe the sea provides the raw material -- after all, that's how it all happened on Earth. I believe New York is a factory for making -- Ramans." Somebody somewhere snickered, but became quickly silent and did not identify himself. "You know, Ravi," said his commander at last, "that theory is crazy enough to be true. And I'm not sure if I want to see it tested -- at least, until I get back to the mainland." This celestial New York was just about as wide as the island of Manhattan, but its geometry was totally different. There were few straight thoroughfares. The layout was a maze of short, concentric arcs, with radial spokes linking them. Luckily, it was impossible to lose one's bearings inside Rama -- a single glance at the sky was enough to establish the north-south axis of the world. The team paused at almost every intersection to make a panoramic scan. When all these hundreds of pictures were sorted out it would be a fairly straightforward -- if tediousjob to construct an accurate scale model of the city. Norton suspected that the resulting jig-saw puzzle would keep scientists busy for generations. Getting used to the silence here was even harder than it had been out on the plain of Rama. A citymachine should make some sound -- yet there was not even the faintest of electric hums, or the slightest whisper of mechanical motion. Several times Norton put his ear to the ground or to the side of a building and listened intently. He could hear nothing except the pounding of his own blood. The machines were sleeping -- they were not even ticking over. Would they ever wake again and for what purpose? Everything was in perfect condition -- it was easy to believe that the closing of a single circuit in some patient, hidden computer would bring the whole maze to complex Ufe. When at last they had reached the far side of the city they climbed to the top of the surrounding levee and looked across the southern branch of the sea. For a long time Norton stared at the five-hundred-meter cliff that barred them from almost half of Rama -- and, judging from their telescopic surveys, the most complex and varied half. From this angle it appeared an ominous, forbidding black -- he found himself thinking of it as a prison wall surrounding a whole continent. Nowhere along its entire circle could he see a means of scaling it. He wondered how the Ramans reached their southern land from New York. Probably an underground transport system ran beneath the sea, bit they would have had to have aircraft as well. There were many open areas here in the city that could be used for landing. To discover a Raman vehicle would be a major accomplishment, especially if they could learn to operate it -- though could any conceivable power source still be functioning, after several hundred thousand years? There were numerous structures that had the functional look of hangars or garages, but they were all smooth and windowless, as if they had been sprayed with sealant. Sooner or later, Norton told himself grimly, he would be forced to authorize the use of explosives and laser beams, but he was determined to put off this decision to the last possible moment. His reluctance to use brute force was based partly on pride, partly on fear. He did not wish to behave like a technological barbarian, smashing what he could not understand. As for his fear -- perhaps that was too strong a word. Apprehension might fit better. The Ramans seemed to have planned for everything -- he was not anxious to discover the precautions they had taken to guard their property. When he sailed back to the mainland, it would be with empty hands. L ieutenant james pak was J the most junior officer on board Endeavor and this was only his A dazzling new Super Agent Adventure The stakes are even more deadly as Steve Austin -- "The Bionics Man" -- confronts an international black market ring in nuclear weapons. # at bookstores or from # Third Ave., New York # fourth mission into deep space. He was ambitious and due for promotion. He had also committed a serious breach of regulations and was openly hesitant when he asked the captain for a private meeting. Norton wondered, as he studied the uncertain expression on the young officer's face, what the problem was this time. He remembered his delicate interview with Boris Rodrigo, but this wouldn't be anything like that. Jimmy was not the religious type. The only interests he had ever shown outside his work were sports and sex, preferably combined. "Well, Jimmy, what is it?" "I have an idea. Commander. I know how to reach the southern continent -- even the South Pole." "I'm listening. How do you propose to do it?" "Ah -- by flying there." "Jimmy, I've had at least five suggestions that we do so -- more, if you count crazy suggestions from Earth. We've looked into the possibility of adapting our spacesuit propulsors, but air drag would make them hopelessly inefficient. They'd run out of fuel before they could go ten kilometers." "I know that. But I have the answer." Lieutenant Pak's attitude was a curious mixture of complete confidence and barely suppressed nervousness. Norton felt baffled. What was the kid worried about? Surely he knew his commanding officer well enough to be certain that no reasonable proposal would be laughed at. "Well, go on. I'll see that your promotion is retroactive if it works." That didn't go down as well as he had hoped. Jimmy gave a sickly smile, made several false starts, then decided on an oblique approach to the subject. "You know, Commander, that I was in the Lunar Olympics last year." "Of course. Sorry you didn't win." "It was bad equipment -- I know what went wrong. I have friends on Mars who've been working on it, in secret. We want to give everyone a surprise," "Mars? But I didn't know -- " "Not many people do. The sport is still new there -- it's only been tried in the Xante Sportsdome. But the best aerodynamicists in the solar system are on Mars -- if you can fly in that atmosphere, you can fly anywhere." Lieutenant Pak paused. Then: "My idea was that if the Martians could build a good machine, using all their know-how, it would really perform on the moon where gravity is only half as strong." "That seems plausible, but how does it help us?" Norton was beginning to guess, but he wanted to give Jimmy plenty of rope. "Well, I formed a syndicate with some friends in Lowell City. They've built a fully aerobatic flyer with some refinements that no one has ever seen before. In lunar gravity, under the Olympic dome, it should create a sensation." "And win you the gold medal." "I hope so." "Let me see if I follow your train of thought correctly. A skybike that could enter the Lunar Olympics at a sixth of a gravity would be even more sensational inside Rama with no gravity at all. You could fly it right along the axis from the North Pole to the South and back again." "Yes, easily. The one-way trip would take three hours, nonstop. But of course you could rest whenever you wanted to, as long as you kept near the axis." gratulate you. What a pity skybikes aren't part of our regular equipment." Jimmy seemed to have some difficulty in finding words. He opened his mouth several times, but nothing happened. "All right, Jimmy. As a matter of morbid interest -- and purely off the record -- how did you smuggle the thing aboard against all regulations?" "As -- ah -- 'Recreational Stores'." "Well, you weren't lying. And what about the weight?" "It's only twenty kilograms." "Only! Still, that's not as bad as I I bought. In fact, I'm astonished you can build a bike for that weight.""Some have been only fifteen, but lliey were too fragile and usually folded up when they made a turn. There's no danger of Dragonfly doing I hat. As I said, she's fully aerobatic." 'Dragonfly -- mce name. So tell me just how you plan to use her. Then I can decide whether a promotion or a court-martial is in order. Or both." name. The long tapering wings were almost invisible, except when I he light struck them from certain angles and was refracted into rainbow hues. It was as if the skin of a soap bubble had been wrapped round a delicate tracery of aerofoil sections -- the envelope enclosing the little flyer was an organic film only a lew molecules thick, yet strong enough to control and direct the movements of a # kph air flow. The pilot -- who was also the powerplant and the guidance system-sat on a tiny seat at the center of gravity and in a semi-reclining position to reduce resistance. Control was by a single stick that could be moved backward and forward, right and left -- the only "instrument" was a piece of weighted ribbon attached to the leading edge, to show the direction of the relative wind. Once the flyer had been assembled at the Hub, Jimmy Pak would allow no one to touch it. Clumsy handling could snap one of the single-fiber structural members and those glittering wings were an almost irresistible attraction to prying fingers. It was hard to believe that there was really something there. Commander Norton began to have second thoughts as he watched Jimmy climb into the contraption. If one of the wire-sized struts snapped when Dragonfly was on the other side of the Cylindrical Sea, Jim would have no way of getting back -- even if he were able to make a safe landing. He, Norton, was also breaking one of the most sacrosanct rules of space exploration by sending a lone, man into unknown territory, beyond the reach of help. The only consolation was that Lieutenant Pak would be in full view and communication all the time. The whole crew would know exactly what had happened to him if he did meet with disaster. Yet this opportunity to explore the southern hemisphere was far too good to miss. If one believed in fate or destiny it would be challenging the gods themselves to neglect the only chance humans might ever have of reaching the far side of Rama and seeing at close quarters the mysteries of the South Pole. Jimmy knew what he was attempting far better than anyone in the crew could tell him. This was precisely the sort of risk that had to be taken -- if it failed, that was the luck of the game. You couldn't win them all. "Now listen to me carefully, Jimmy," said Dr. Ernst. "It's very important for you not to over-exert yourself. Remember that the oxygen level here at the axis is still very low. If you feel breathless at any time, stop and hyperventilate for thirty seconds -- but no longer." Jimmy nodded abstractedly as he tested the controls. The rudderelevator assembly, which formed a single unit on an outrigger five meters behind the rudimentary cockpit, came alive under his touch, as did the flap-shaped ailerons halfway along the wing. "Do you want me to swing the prop?" asked Joe Calvert, unable to repress memories of two-hundredyear-old war movies. He barked, "Ignition -- contact -- " Jimmy grinned at him and slowly started to move the pedals. The flimsy, broad fan of the airscrew -- also a delicate skeleton covered with shimmering film -- began to turn. By the time it had made a few revolutions it had disappeared completely and Dragonfly was on her way. She lifted straight upward -- or outward -- from the Hub, moving slowly along the axis of Rama. When she had traveled a hundred meters Jimmy stopped pedaling. It was strange to see an obviously aerodynamic vehicle hanging in motionless suspension. "How does she handle?" Norton called. "Response good, stability poor. But I Imow what the trouble is -- no gravity. We'll be better off a kilometer lower down." "Now wait a minute -- is that safe?" By losing altitude, Jimmy would be sacrificing his main advantage. As long as he stayed precisely on the axis he -- and Dragonfly -- 'fiovXd. be weightless. He could hover effortlessly or even go to sleep if he wished. But as soon as he moved away from the central line around which Rama spun, the pseudo-weight of centrifugal force would reappear. And so, unless he could maintain himself at this altitude, he would continue to lose height -- and at the same time to gain weight. It would be an accelerating process that could end in catastrophe. The gravity down on the plain of Rama was twice that in which Dragonfly had been designed to operate. Jimmy might be able to make a safe landing -- he could certainly never take off again. But he had already considered all this and he answered confidently enough, "I can manage a tenth of a gee without any trouble. And she'll handle more easily in denser air." In a slow, leisurely spiral Dragonfly drifted across the sky, roughly following the line of Stairway Alpha toward the plain. From some angles the little skybike was almost invisible -- Jimmy seemed to be sitting in midair, pedaling furiously. Sometimes he moved in spurts of up to thirty kilometers an hour. Then he would coast to a halt before accelerating again. And he was always careful to keep a safe distance from the curving face of Rama. It was soon obvous that Dragonfly handled much better at lower altitudes -- she no longer rolled, but stabilized so that her wings were parallel to the plain seven kilometers below. Jimmy completed several wide orbits, then started to climb again. He finally halted a few meters above his waiting colleagues and realized a little belatedly that he was not quite sure how to land his gossamer craft. "Want us to throw you a rope?" Norton asked. "No. I've got to work this out myself. I won't have anyone to help me at the other end." He sat thinking for a while, then started to ease Dragonfly toward the Hub with short bursts of power. When he was only five meters away and the skybike was still moving Jimmy abandoned ship. He thrust himself off toward the nearest safety line in the Hub web work, grasped it, then swung around in time to catch the approaching bike with his hands. The maneuver was so neatly executed that it drew a round of applause. "For my next act -- " Joe Calvert began. Jimmy Pak frowned. "That was messy," he said, "but now I know bow to do it. I'll take a sticky-bomb on a twenty-meter line -- then I'll be able to pull myself in wherever I want to go." "Give me your wrist, Jimmy," ordered the doctor, "and blow into this bag. I'll want a blood sample, loo. Did you have any difficulty in breathing?" "Only at this altitude. Hey, what do you want the blood for?" "Sugar level. Then I can tell how much energy you've used. We've got to make sure you can carry enough fuel for the mission. By the way, what's the endurance record for skybiking?" "Two hours twenty-five minutes, three point six seconds. On the moon, of course -- a two-kilometer circuit in the Olympic Dome." "And you think you can keep it up for six hours?" "Easily, since I can stop for a rest at any time. Skybiking on the moon is at least twice as hard as it is here." "Okay, Jimmy -- back to the lab. I'll give you a GoNo-Go as soon as I've analyzed these samples. I don't want to raise false hopes -- but I think you can make it." A large smile of satisfaction spread across Jimmy Pak's face. As he followed Surgeon-Commander Ernst to the airlock he called back to his companions, "Hands off, please. I don't want anyone putting his fist through the wings." "I'll see to it, Jimmy," Norton promised, "that the Dragonfly is off limits to everybody -- including myself." T he real magnitude of his adventure did not hit Jimmy Pak until he passed the coast of the Cylindrical Sea. Until now he had been flying over known territory. Barring a catastrophic structural failure, he could always land and walk back to base in a few hours. That option no longer existed. If he came down in the sea he would probably drown, quite unpleasantly, in its poisonous waters. And even if he made a safe emergency landing in the southern continent, it might be impossible to rescue him before Endeavor had to break away from Rama's sunward orbit. He was also acutely aware that the foreseeable disasters were the ones most unlikely to happen. The totally unknown region over which he was flying might produce any number of surprises. What if he met flying creatures who objected to his intrusion? He would hate to engage in a dogfight with anything larger than a pigeon. A few pecks could destroy Dragonfly's aerodynamics. Yet, if there were no hazards, there would be no achievement -- no would gladly have traded places with him now. He was going not only where no one had ever been before -- but where no one would ever go again. He would be the only human being in all of history to visit the southern regions of Rama. Whenever he felt fear brushing against his mind he could remember that. He had now grown accustomed to sitting in midair with the world wrapped around him. Because he had dropped two kilometers below the central axis, he had acquired a definite sense of up and down. The ground was only six kilometers below, but the arch of the sky was ten overhead. The "city" of London was hanging up there near the zenith. New York, on the other hand, was the right way up, directly ahead. "Dragonfly, " said Hub control, "you're getting a little low. Twentytwo hundred meters from the axis." "Thanks," he replied. "I'll gain altitude. Let me know when I'm back at twenty." This was something he'd have to watch. There was a natural tendency to lose height -- and he had no instruments to tell him exactly where he was. If he got too far away from the zero gravity of the axis, he might never be able to climb back to it. Fortunately there was a wide margin for error, and there was always someone watching his progress through a telescope at the Hub . He was now well out over the sea, pedaling along at a steady twenty kilometers an hour. In five minutes he would be over New York -- already the island looked rather like a ship sailing forever around the Cylindricd Sea. When he reached New York he flew a circle over it, stopping several times so that his little TV camera could send back steady, vibrationfree images. The panorama of buildings, towers, industrial plants, power stations -- or whatever they were -- was fascinating but essentially meaningless. No matter how long he stared at its complexity, he was unlikely to learn anything. The camera would record far more details than he could possibly assimilate -- and one day, perhaps years hence, some student might find in them the key to Rama's secrets. After leaving New York he crossed the other half of the sea in only fifteen minutes. Though he was not aware of it, he had been flying fast over water, but as soon as he reached the south coast he unconsciously relaxed and his speed dropped by several kilometers an hour. He might be in wholly alien territory -- but at least he was over land. As soon as he had crossed the great cliff that formed the sea's southern limit, he panned the TV camera completely around the circle of the world. "Beautiful!' said Hub control. "This will keep the map-makers happy. How are you feeling?" "I'm fine -- just a little fatigue, but no more than I expected. How far do you make me from the Pole?" "Fifteen point six kilometers." "Tell me when I'm at ten -- I'll take a rest then. And make sure I don't get low again. I'll start climbing when I've five to go." T wenty minutes later the world was closing in upon him. He had come to the end of the cylindrical section and was entering the southern dome. He had studied it for hours through the telescopes at the other c'lid of Rama and had learned its I'.cography by heart. But nothing had all around him. In almost every way the southern and northern ends of Rama differed I'ompletely. Here was no triad of stairways, no series of narrow, concentric plateaus, no sweeping curve liom hub to plain. Instead he saw an immense central spike, more than live kilometers long, extending along I lie axis. Six smaller ones were ecually spaced around it. The whole assembly looked like a group of lemarkably symmetrical stalactites banging from the roof of a cave. Or, inverting the point of view, the spires of some Cambodian temple, set at the bottom of a crater. Linking these slender, tapering lowers and curving down from them lo merge eventually in the cylindrical plain, were flying buttresses that looked massive enough to bear the weight of a world. And this, perhaps, was their function, if they were indeed the elements of some exotic drive units, as some had suggested. Lieutenant Pak approached the central spike cautiously, stopped pedaling while he was still a hundred meters away and let Dragonfly drift lo rest. He sent back TV images, checked the radiation level and found only Rama's very low background. Of course, forces that no human instruments could detect might be at work here, but that was another unavoidable risk. "What can you see?" Hub control asked anxiously. "Just Big Horn -- " He paused. Then: "Unless you give it a better name that's what I'll call it. It's absolutely smooth -- no markingsand the point's so sharp you could use it as a needle. I'm almost scared to go near it." He was not joking. It seemed incredible to him that so massive an object should taper to such a geometrically perfect point. He had seen collections of insects impaled on pins and he had no desire to meet a similar fate. He pedaled slowly along it until the spike had flared out to several meters in diameter. Then he stopped again. Opening a small container, he gingerly extracted a sphere about as big as a baseball and tossed it toward the spike. As it drifted away, it played out a barely visible thread. The sticky-bomb hit the smoothly curving surface -- and did not rebound. Jimmy gave the thread an experimental twitch, then a harder tug. Like a fisherman hauling in his catch, he slowly wound Dragonfly to the Big Horn until he was able to put out his hand and make contact with it. "I suppose you could call this some kind of touchdown," he reported to Hub. "Surface feels like glass -- it's almost frictionless and slightly warm. The sticky-bomb worked fine. Now I'm trying the mike on it. Let's see if the suction pad holds -- it does. I'm plugging in the leads -- anything coming through?" There was a long pause from the Hub. Then: "Not a damn thing, except the usual thermal noises. Will you tap it with a piece of metal? Then at least we'U find if it's hollow." "Okay. Now what?" "We'd like you to fly along the spike, making a complete scan every half kilometer and looking out for anything unusual. Then, if you're sure it's safe, you might go across to one of the Little Horns. But only if you're sure you can get back to zero gravity without any problems." "Three kilometers from the axis -- that's slightly above lunar gravity. Dragonfly was designed for that. I'll just have to work harder." "Jimmy, this is the captain. I've got second thoughts on that. Judging by your pictures, the smaller spikes are just the same as the big one. Get the best coverage of them you can with the zoom lens. I don't want you leaving the low-gravity region unless you see something that makes you feel you must. Then we'll talk it over." "Okay, skipper. I'll stay close to Big Horn. Here we go again." H e felt he was dropping straight down into a narrow valley between a group of incredibly tall and slender mountains. Big Horn now towered a kilometer above him, and the six spikes of the Little Horns loomed all around. The complex of buttresses and flying arches surrounding the lower slopes was approaching rapidly -- he wondered if he could make a safe landing somewhere in that cyclopean architecture. He could no longer land on Big Horn itself, for the gravity on its widening slopes was now too powerful to be counteracted by the sticky-bomb. As he neared the South Pole he began to feel more and more like a sparrow flying beneath the vaulted roof of some great cathedral -- though no cathedral ever built had been even one hundredth the size of this place. He wondered if this were indeed a religious shrine or something remotely analogous, but quickly dismissed the idea. Nowhere in Rama had anyone discovered any trace of artistic or spiritual expression -- everything was purely functional. Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer haunted by the yearnings and aspirations that drove mankind. quite alien to Lieutenant Pak's usual not-very-profound philosophy -- he felt an urgent need to resume human contact. He decided it was time he reported his situation back to his distant friends. "Say again. Dragonfly f replied Hub, "We can't understand you -- your transmission is garbled." "Repeat -- I'm near the base of Little Horn number six and am using the sticky-bomb to haul myself in." "Understand only partially. Can you hear me?" "Yes, perfectly. Repeat, perfectly." "Please start counting numbers." "One, two, three, four -- " "Got part of that. Give us beacon for fifteen seconds, then go back to voice." "Here it is." Jimmy switched on the lowpowered beacon that would locate him anywhere inside Rama and counted off the seconds. When he went over to voice again he asked plaintively, "Wliat's happening? Can you hear me now?" Presumably Hub didn't, because the controller then asked for fifteen seconds of TV. Not until Jimmy had repeated the question tvdce did the message get through. "Glad you can hear us, Jimmy. But something very peculiar is happening at your end. Listen." . He heard the familiar whistle of his own beacon, played back to him over the radio. For a moment the sound was normal, then a weird distortion crept into it. The thousand-cycle whistle became modulated liy a deep, throbbing pulse so low that it was almost beneath the threshold of hearing -- it was a kind of hasso-profundo flutter in which each individual vibration could be heard. And the modulation was itself modulated -- it rose and fell, rose and fell with a period of about five seconds. Not for a moment did it occur to Lieutenant Pak that there was someIhing wrong with his radio transmitter. This was from outside -- though what it was and what it meant were beyond his imagination. Hub was not much wiser, but at least it had a theory. "We think you must be in some kind of very intense field -- probably magnetic, with a frequency of about Ion cycles. It may be strong enough (o be dangerous. Suggest you get out right away -- it may be only local. Switch on your beacon again and we'll play it back to you. Then you can tell when you're getting clear of the interference." Jimmy hastily jerked the stickyhomb loose and abandoned his attempt to land. He swung Dragonfly around in a wide circle, listening to llie sound that wavered in his earphones. After flying only a few meters, he could tell that its intensity was falling rapidly. As Hub had guessed, it was extremely locahzed. He paused for a moment at the last spot where he could hear it, like a faint throbbing deep in his brain. So might a primitive savage have hstened in awestruck ignorance to the low humming of a giant power transformer. And even the savage might have guessed that the sound he heard was merely the stray leakage from colossal energies, fully controlled, but biding their time. Whatever the sound meant, Jimmy was glad to be clear of it. Amid the overwhelming architecture of the South Pole was no place for a lone man to listen to the voice of Rama. AS Lieutenant Pak turned homexV ward, the north end of Rama seemed incredibly far away. Even the three giant stairways were barely visible as a faint Y etched on the dome that closed the world. The band of the Cylindrical Sea was a wide and menacing barrier, waiting to swallow him up if his fragile wings should fail. But he had come all this way with no problems and though he was tired he now felt that he had nothing to worry about. He had not even touched his food or water and had been too excited to jest. On the return journey he would relax and take it easy. He was also cheered by the thought that the homeward trip could be twenty kilometers shorter than the outward one, for as long as he cleared the Sea, he could make an emergency landing anywhere. To have to do so would be a nuisance, because he would have a long walk -- and, much worse, would have to abandon Dragonfly. But the prospect gave him a comforting safety margin. He was gaining altitude, climbing back toward the central spike. Big Horn's tapering needle still stretched for a kilometer ahead of him and sometimes he felt it was the axis on which this whole world turned. He had almost reached the tip of the giant needle when he became aware of a curious sensation. A feeling of foreboding -- and indeed of physical as well as psychological discomfort-had come over him. At first he shrugged it off and continued his steady pedaling. He had no intention of reporting a vague malaise to Hub. But the discomfort grew steadily worse. Presently he could, quite literally, feel his skin benning to crawl. Now seriously alarmed, he stopped to consider his situation. What made it all the more peculiar was the fact that his depressed, heavy feeling was not completely novel -- he had known something aldn to it before, but could not remember where. He looked around. Nothing in his environment had changed. The great spike of Big Horn was a few hundred meters above him. Eight kilometers below lay the complicated patchwork of the southern continent, full of wonders that no other man would ever see. In all the utterly alien yet now familiar landscape, he could find no cause for his discomfort. Something was tickling the back of his hand -- for a moment, he thought an insect had landed there and brushed it away without looking. He had only half-completed the swift motion when he realized what he was doing and checked himself, feeling slightly foolish. No one had seen an insect in Rama . He lifted his hand and stared at it, mildly puzzled because the tickling sensation continued. It was then he noticed that every individual hair was erect on his hand and forearm. He touched his head. There, too, his hair stood on end. So that was the trouble -- he was in a tremendously powerful electric field and the oppressed, heavy sensation he had felt was similar to that he had sometimes known before a thunderstorm on Earth. The sudden realization of his predicament brought him close to panic. He had not the faintest idea of where or how lightning might strike on Rama -- nox did anyone else. Never before in his life had he felt so helpless in a moment of real physical danger. He had known moments of frustration with balky equipment -- as did all spacemen -- and there had been times when he had believed himself in a desperately perilous situation. But he had never been helpless. There had always been a way out. This time no way out existed. He felt naked and alone in a suddenly hostile sky, surrounded by titanic forces that might discharge their furies at any moment. Dragonfly -- fragile at best -- now seemed more insubstantial than the finest gossamer. The first detonation of the gathering energies would blast her to fragments. He said urgently, "There's a static charge building up around me. I think there's going to be a thunderstorm at any moment -- whatever that means here -- " He had not finished speaking when there was a flicker of light behind him. By the time he had counted ten the first crackling mmble arrived. Three kilometers -- that put the "lightning" back around the Little Horns. He looked toward them and saw that every one of the six needles seemed to be on fire. Brush discharges, hundreds of meters long, were dancing from their points. What was happening back there could take place on an even larger scale near the tapering spike of Big Horn. His best move would be to get as far as possible from this dangerous structure and to seek clear air. He started to pedal again, accelerating as swiftly as he could without putting too great a strain on Dragonfly. At the same time he began to lose altitude -- though this would mean entering the region of higher gravity, he was now prepared to take such a risk. Eight kilometers was much too far from the ground for his peace of mind. The oifiinous black spike of Big Horn was still free of visible discharges, but he did not doubt that tremendous potentials were building up there. From time to time the thunder still reverberated behind him, rolling around and around the circumference of the world. It suddenly occurred to Jimmy how strange it was to have such a storm in a perfectly clear sky -- but, of course, this was not a meteorological phenomenon at all. It might, in fact, be only a comparatively trivial leakage of energy from some hidden source deep in the southern cap of Rama. But why now? And, even more important, what next? He was now well past the tip of Big Horn and hoped that he would soon be beyond the range of any lightning discharges. But now he had another problem -- the air was becoming turbulent and he had difficulty in controlling Dragonfly. A wind seemed to have sprung up from nowhere and if conditions became much worse the bike's fragile skeleton would be endangered. He pedaled grimly on, trying to smooth out the buffeting by variations in power and movements of his body. Because Dragonfly was almost an extension of himself, he was partly successful, but he did not like the faint creaks of protest that came from the main spar, nor the way the wings twisted with every gust. And now something else worried him -- a faint rushing sound, steadily growing in strength, that seemed to come from the direction of Big Horn. It sounded like gas escaping from a valve under great pressure and he wondered if it had anything to do with the turbulence he was battling. Whatever its cause, it added to his disquiet. From time to time he reported these phenomena to Hub. No one there could give him any advice or even suggest what might be happening but it was reassuring to hear the voices of friends, though the conviction was growing in him that he would never see them again. The turbulence was still increasing, as if he were entering a jet stream -- a thing he had once done in search of a record while flying a high-altitude ghder on Earth. But what could possibly create a jet stream inside Rama? He had asked himself the right question -- as soon as he had formulated it he knew the answer. The sound he had heard was the electric wind carrying away the tremendous ionization that must be building up around Big Horn. Charged air was spraying out along the axis of Rama and more air was flowing into the low-pressure region behind. He looked back at that gigantic and now doubly threatening needle, trying to visualize the boundaries of the gale that was blowing from it. Perhaps his best tactic would be to fly by ear, getting as far as possible away from the ominous hissing. Rama spared him the necessity of choice. A sheet of flame burst out behind him, fUling the sky. He had time to see it split into six ribbons of fire, stretching from the tip of Big Horn to each of the Little Horns. Then the concussion reached him. radio: "The wing's buckling -- I'm going to crash -- " when Dragonfly started to fold up gracefully around him. The left wing snapped cleanly in the middle and the outer section drifted away like a gently falling leaf. The right wing put up a more complicated performance. It twisted around at the root, and angled back so sharply that its tip became entangled in the tail. Jimmy felt that he was sitting in a bro'ken kite falling slowly down the sky. Yet he was not quite helpless. The airscrew still worked and while he had power he still had some measure of control. He had perhaps five minutes to use it. Was there any hope of his reaching the sea? No -- it was much too far away. Then he remembered that he was stiU thinking in terrestrial terms -- though he was a good swimmer, it would be hours before he could possibly be rescued and in that time the poisonous waters would undoubtedly have killed him. His only hope was to come down on land. The problem of the sheer southern cliff he would think about later -- if there were any "later." He was falling slowly through the one-tenth-gravity zone, but would soon start to accelerate. Air-drag, however, would complicate the situation -- at least it would prevent his building up too swift a rate of descent. Dragonfly, even without power, would act as a crude parachute. And the few kilograms of thrust he could still provide might make all the difference between life and death. Hub had stopped talking; his friends could see exactly what was happening to him and knew that there was no way conversation could help. Jimmy was doing the most skillful flying of his life -- it was too bad, he thought with grim humor, that his audience was so small and could not appreciate the finer details of his performance. He was going down in a wide spiral. As long as its pitch remained fairly flat his chances of survival were good. His pedaling was helping to keep Dragonfly airborne, though he was afraid to exert maximum power. And every time he swung toward south he managed to appreciate the fantastic display Rama had kindly arranged for his benefit. The streamers of lightning still played from the tip of Big Horn down to the lesser peaks beneath, but now the whole pattern was rotating. The sixpronged crown of fire was turning against the spin of Rama, making one revolution every few seconds. Jimmy felt that he was watching a giant electric motor in operation -- and perhaps he was not hopelessly far from the truth. He was halfway down to the plain, still orbiting in a flat spiral', when the fireworks display suddenly ceased. He could feel the tension drain from the sky and knew without looking that the hairs on his arms were no longer straining upright. Now there was nothing to distract or hinder him during the last few minutes of his fight for life. As soon as he could be sure of the general area in which he must land he started to study it intently. Much of this region was a checkerboard of totally conflicting environments, as if a mad landscape gardener had been given a free hand and told to exercise his imagination to the utmost. The squares of the checkerboard were almost a kilometer on a side, and though most of them were flat he could not be sure if they were solid, their colors and textures varied so greatly. He decided to wait until the last possible minute before making a decision -- if indeed he had any real choice. When there were a few hundred meters to go he made a last call to the Hub . "I've still got some control. Will touch down in half a minute -- will call you then." He was being optimistic and everyone knew it. But he refused to say goodbye. Indeed, he felt very little fear and this surprised him, for he had never thought of himself as a particularly brave man. But his environment was so strange and what was happening so unprecedented that he seemed to be watching the struggles of a complete stranger without being himself personally involved. He was studying an interesting problem in aerodynamics, and changing various parameters to see what would happen. Almost the only emotion he felt was a certain remote regret for lost opportunities -- of which the most important was the forthcoming Lunar Olympics. One future at least was decided: Dragonfly would never show her paces on the moon. A hundred meters to go. His ground speed seemed acceptable, but how fast was he falling? And here was one piece of luck -- the terrain was completely smooth. He would put forth all his strength in a final burst of power, starting now. The right wing, having done its duty, finally tore off at the roots. Dragonfly started to roll over and he tried to correct by throwing the weight of his body against the spin. He was looking directly at the curving arch of landscape sixteen kilometers away when he hit. It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the sky should be so hard. headache. He welcomed it -- at least it proved that he was still alive. He tried to move and at once a wide selection of aches and pains brought themselves to his attention. But no part of him seemed to be broken. Presently he risked opening his eyes, but closed them at once when he found himself staring straight into the band of light along the ceiling of the world. As a cure for a headache, the view lacked something. He was still lying there, regaining his strength and wondering how soon he could risk another look, when he heard a crunching noise. He turned his head slowly toward the sound, took a chance and opened his eyes -- and almost lost consciousness again. Not more than five meters away a large crablike creature was apparently dining on the wreckage of poor Dragonfly. When Jimmy had recovered his wits he rolled slowly and quietly away from the monster, expecting to be seized by its claws as soon as it discovered that more appetizing fare was available. However, it took not the slightest notice of him. When he had increased their mutual separation to ten meters, he cautiously propped himself up to a sitting position. From this greater distance the thing did not appear quite so formidable. It had a low, flat body about two meters long and one wide, supported on six triple-jointed legs. Jimmy saw that he had been mistaken in assuming that it was eating Dragonfly -- in fact, he could see no sign of a mouth. The creature was actually doing a neat job of demolition, using scissor-like claws to chop the skybike into small pieces. A whole row of manipulators, which looked uncannily like tiny human hands, then transferred the fragments to a steadily growing pile on the animal's back. Or was it an animal? Jimmy Pak began to have second thoughts. There was a purposefulness about the creature's behavior that suggested fairly high intelligence; he could see no reason why any creature acting solely from instinct should carefully collect the scattered pieces of the skybike-Linless, perhaps, it was gathering material for a nest. Keeping a wary eye on the crab, which continued to ignore him, Jimmy struggled to liis feet.He discovered that he still had his radio and TV camera. A few wavering steps demonstrated that he could walk, though he was not sure if he could outdistance those six legs. He switched on the radio, never doubting that it would still be operating. A crash that he could survive would not even have been noticed by its solid-state electronics. "Hub," he said softly. "Can you receive me?" "Thank God -- are you all right?" "Just a bit shaken. Take a look at this." He turned his camera toward the crab, just in time to record the final demolition of Dragonfly's wing. "What the devil is it -- and why is it chewing up your bike?" "Wish I knew. It's finished with Dragonfly. I'm going to back away -- in case it wants to start on me." Jimmy slowly retreated, never taking his eyes off the crab. It was now moving around in a steadily widening spiral, apparently searching for fragments it might have overlooked, and he was able to get an overall view of it for the first time. Now that the initial shock had worn off he could appreciate that it was quite a handsome beast. To describe the creature as a "crab" might not be quite accurate -- if it had not been so impossibly large he might have called it a beetle. Its carapace had a beautiful metallic sheen. Interesting -- could it be a robot, and not an animal? He stared at the creature intently with this thought in mind, analyzing all the details of its anatomy. Where it should have had a mouth was a collection of manipulators that reminded him strongly of multipurpose knives such as were used by some branches of the military. There were pinchers, probes, rasps and even something that looked like a drill. But none of this was decisive. The insect world of Earth had matched all these tools and many more. The animalor-robot question remained unanswered in his mind. The eyes, which might have settled the matter, left it even more ambiguous. They were so deeply recessed in protective hoods that it was impossible to tell whether their lenses were made of crystal or jelly. They were quite expressionless and of a startlingly vivid blue. Though they had been directed toward Jimmy several times, they had never shown the slightest flicker of interest. In his perhaps biased opinion, that decided the level of the creature's intelligence. An entity -- robot or animal -- that could ignore a human being could not be very bright. and stood still, as if listening to some inaudible message. Then it set off, with a curious rolling gait, in the general direction of the sea. It moved in a perfectly straight line at a steady four or five kilometers an hour and had already traveled a couple of hundred meters before Jimmy's mind registered the fact that the last sad relics of his beloved Dragonfly were being carried away from him. He set off in hot and indignant pursuit. His action was not wholly illogical. The crab was heading toward the sea, and if his own rescue were possible it could only be from this direction. Moreover, he wanted to discover what the creature would do with its trophy -- that should reveal something about its motivation and intelligence. Because he was still bruised and stiff, it took Jimmy several minutes to catch up with the purposefully moving crab. When he had done so he followed it at a respectful distance, until he felt sure that it did not resent his presence. It was then that he noticed his water flask and emergency ration pack among the debris of Dragonfly. He felt instantly both hungry and thirsty. There, scuttling away from him at a remorseless five kilometers an hour, was the only food and drink in all this half of the world. Whatever the risk, he had to get hold of them. He cautiously closed in on the crab, approaching from right rear. While he kept station with it, he studied the complicated rhythm of its legs until he could anticipate where they would be at any moment. When he was ready he muttered a quick, "Excuse me -- " and shot swiftly in to grab his property. He was delighted with his success. He was out again in less than a second and the crab never slackened its steady pace. He dropped back a dozen rneters, moistened his lips from the flask and started to chew a bar of meat concentrate. The small victory made him feel much happier. Now he could even risk thinking about his somber future. While there was life, there was hope -- yet he could imagine no way he could possibly be rescued. Even if his colleagues crossed the sea, how could he reach them, half a kilometer below? One of the strangest things about walking inside Rama was that you could always see your destination. Here the curve of the world did not hide -- it revealed. For some time Jimmy had been aware of the crab's objective. Up there in the land which seemed to rise before him was a wide pit. It was one of three in the southern continent; from the Hub, it had been impossible to see how deep they were. All had been named after prominent lunar craters, and he was approaching Copernicus. The name was hardly appropriate, for there were no surrounding hills and no central peaks. This Copernicus was merely a deep shaft -- or well -- with perfectly vertical sides. When he came close enough to look into it, Jimmy was able to see a pool of ominous, leaden-green water at least half a kilometer below. This would put it just about level with the sea and he wondered if they were connected. Winding down the interior of the well was a spiral ramp, completely recessed into the sheer wall, so that the effect was rather like that of rifling in an immense gun barrel. There seemed to be a remarkable number of turns -- not until Jimmy had traced them for several revolutions, becoming more and more confused in the process, did he realize that there was not one ramp but three, totally independent and # degrees apart. In any other background than Rama, the whole concept would have been an impressive architectural tour de force. The three ramps led straight down into the pool and disappeared beneath its opaque surface. Near the waterline Jimmy could see a group of black tunnels or caves. They looked rather sinister and he wondered if they were inhabited. Perhaps the Ramans were amphibious. T he crab approached the edge of the well. Jimmy assumed that it was going to descend one of the ramps -- perhaps taking the wreckage of Dragonfly to some entity that would be able to evaluate it. Instead, the creature walked straight to the brink, extended almost half its body over the gulf without any sign of hesitation -- though an error of a few centimeters could have been disastrous -- and gave a brisk shrug. The fragments of Dragonfly went fluttering down into the depths. There were tears in Jimmy's eyes as he watched them go. So much, he thought bitterly, for the creature's intelligence. Having disposed of the garbage, the crab swung around and started toward Jimmy. Was he going to get the same treatment? He hoped the camera was not too unsteady as he showed Hub the rapidly approaching monster. "What do you advise?" he whispered anxiously, without much hope that he would get a useful answer. It was some small consolation to realize that he was making history. His mind raced through the approved patterns for such a meeting. Until now, all of these had been purely theoretical. He would be the  first man to check them in practice. "Don't run until you're sure it's hostile," Hub whispered to him. Run where? He thought he could outdistance the thing in a hundred-meter sprint, but had a sick certainty that it could wear him down over the long haul. Slowly Jimmy held up his outstretched, open hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture. Would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as: See-no weapons? The crab showed no reaction whatsoever, nor did It slacken its pace. Ignoring Jimmy completely, it walked straight past him and headed purposefully southward. Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the plain, totally indifferent to his presence. He had seldom been so humiliated in his life. Then his sense of humor came to his rescue. After all, it was no great matter to have been ignored by an animated garbage truck. It would have been worse if it had greeted him as a long-lost brother. He walked back to the rim of Copernicus and stared down into its opaque waters. For the first time he noticed that vague shapes -- some of them quite largewere moving slowly back and forth beneath the surface. Presently one of them headed toward the nearest spiral ramp and something that looked like a multilegged tank started on the long ascent. At the rate it was going, Jimmy decided, it would take almost an hour to get topside. If it was a threatj it was a very slow-moving one. Then he noticed a flicker of much more rapid movement near those cavelike openings down by the waterline. Something was traveling swiftly along the ramp, but he could not focus clearly upon it or discern any definite shape. It was as if he were looking at a small whirlwind or dustdevil about the size of a man. He blinked and shook his head, keeping his eyes closed for several seconds. When he opened them again the apparition was gone. Perhaps the impact had shaken him up more than he had realized -- this was the first time he had ever suffered from visual hallucinations. He would not mention it to Hub. Nor would he bother to explore those ramps. It would obviously be a waste of energy. The spinning phantom he had merely imagined -- not seen -- had nothing to do with his decision. He did not believe in ghosts. thirsty. And in all this land there was no water that a man could drink. With the contents of his flask he could probably survive a week -- but for what purpose? The best brains of Earth would soon be focused oh his problem and doubtless Commander Norton would be bombarded with suggestions. But Jimmy could imagine no way he could lower himself down the face of that half-kilometer cliff. Even if he had a long enough rope there was no place to attach it. Nevertheless, it was foolish to give up without a struggle. Any help would have to come from the sea, and while he was marching toward it he could cany on with his job as if nothing had happened. No one else would ever observe and photograph the varied terrains through which he must pass and to record them would guarantee a posthumous immortality. He was only three kilometers from the sea as poor Dragonfly would have flown, but it seemed unlikely that he could reach it in a straiglit line. A week's food and water gave him, however, plenty of time. He would start with the most interesting scenery and send pictures as he walked. About a kilometer away and a little to his right was a square that glittered like cut glass -- or a gigantic display of jewelry. It was probably this thought that triggered Jirnmy's footsteps. Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems. He was not particularly disappointed when the jewels turned out them, set in a bed of sand. The adjacent square of the checkerboard was actually more interesting, being covered with an apparently random pattern of hollow metal columns, set close together and ranging in height from less than one to more than five meters. The area was completely impassable -- only a tank could have crashed through that forest of tubes. Jimmy walked to the next crossroads. The square on the right was a huge rug or tapestry made of woven wire. He tried to pry loose a strand, but was unable to break it. On the left was a tesselation of hexagonal tiles, so smoothly inlaid that there were no visible joints between them. It would have appeared a continuous surface, had the tiles not been colored all the hues of the rainbow. Jimmy spent futile minutes trying to find two adjacent tiles of the same color, then gave up. He did a slow pan around the crossroads and asked Hub, "What do you think this is? I feel I'm trapped in a giant puzzle. Or is this the local art gallery?" "We're as baffled as you, Jimmy. But there's never been any sign that Rama's builders went in for art as we know it. Let's wait until we have some more examples before we jump to conclusions." The two examples he found at the next crossroads were not much help. One area was completely blank -- a smooth, neutral gray, hard but slippery to the touch. The other was a soft sponge, perforated with He tested it with his foot, and the whole surface undulated sickeningly beneath him like barely stabilized quicksand. At the next crossroads he encountered something strikingly like a ploughed field -- except that the furrows were a uniform meter in depth and the material of which they were made had the texture of a file or rasp. But he paid little attention to this, because the square adjacent to it was the most thought-provoking of all that he had seen. At last there was something that he could understand -- and it was more than a little disturbing. T he entire square was surrounded by a fence, so conventional that he would not have looked at it twice had he seen it on Earth. There were posts -- apparently of metal -- five meters apart, with six strands of wire strung taut between them. Beyond this fence was a second, identical one-and beyond that, a third. It was another typical example of Rama redundancy -- whatever was penned inside this enclosure would have no chance of breaking out. There was no entrance-no gates could be swung open to drive in the beast, or beasts, that were presumably kept there. Instead, there was a single hole, like a smaller version of Copernicus, in the center of the square. Even in different circumstances, Jimmy would probably not have hesitated; now he had nothing to lose. He quickly scaled all three fences, walked over to the hole and peered into it. Unlike Copernicus, this well was only fifty meters deep. There were three tunnel exits at the bottom, each of which looked large enough to accommodate an elephant. And that was all. After staring for some time, Jimmy decided that the only thing that made sense about the arrangement was for the floor down there to be an elevator. But what it elevated he was never likely to know -- he could only guess that it was quite large. And possibly quite dangerous. During the next few hours he walked more than ten kilometers along the edge of the sea, and the checkerboard squares had begun to blur together in his memory. He had seen some that were totally enclosed in tentlike structures of wire mesh, as if they were giant bird cages. Others seemed to be pools of congealed liquid, full of swirling patterns -- however, when he tested them gingerly they were quite solid. And there was one so utterly black that he could not even see it clearly. Only the sense of touch told him that anything was there. Yet now there was a subtle modulation into something he could understand. Ranging one after the other was a series of -- no other word would do-fields. He might have been walking past an experimental farm on Earth. Each square was a smooth expanse of carefully leveled dirt, the first he had seen in the metallic landscapes of Rama. The great fields were virgin, lifeless-waiting for crops that had never been planted. Jimmy wondered what their purpose could be, since it was incredible that creatures as advanced as the Ramans would engage in any form of agriculture. Even on Earth farming was no more than a popular hobby and a source of exotic luxury foods. But he could swear that these were potential farms, immaculately prepared. He had never seen dirt that looked so clean. Each square was covered with a great sheet of tough, transparent plastic. He tried to cut through it to obtain a sample, but his knife would barely scratch the surface. Further inland were other fields and on many of them were complicated constructions of rods and wires, presumably intended for the support of climbing plants. They looked bleak and desolate, like leafless trees in the depths of winter. The winter they had known must have been long and terrible indeed and these few weeks of light and warmth might be only a brief interlude before it came again. Jimmy never knew what made him stop and look more closely into a metal maze to the south. Unconsciously his mind must have been checking every detail around him. It had noticed, in this fantastically alien landscape, something even more anomalous. About a quarter of a kilometer away, in the middle of a trellis of wires and rods, glowed a single speck of color. It was so small and inconspicuous that it was almost at the limit of visibility -- on Earth no one would have looked at it twice. Yet undoubtedly one of the reasons he had noticed it now was because it reminded him of Earth. He did not report to Hub until he was sure that he had made no mistake and that wishful thinking had not deluded him. Not until he was only a few meters away could he be completely sure that life as he knew it had intmded into the sterile, aseptic world of Rama. For blooming here in lonely splendor at the edge of the southern continent was a flower. As he came closer it became obvious to Jimmy that something had gone wrong. There was a hole in the sheathing that, presumably, protected this layer of dirt from contamination by unwanted life forms. Through this break extended a green stem about as thick as a man's little finger, which twined its way up through the trellis. A meter from the ground it burst into an efflorescence of bluish leaves, shaped more like feathers than the foliage of any plant known to Jimmy. The stem ended, at eye-level, in what he had first taken to be a single flower. Now he saw, with no surprise at all, that it was actually three flowers tightly packed together. The petals were brightly colored tubes about five centimeters long. There were at least fifty in each bloom and they glittered with such metallic blues, violets and greens that they seemed more like the wings of a butterfly than anything in the vegetable kingdom. Jimmy knew practically nothing about botany, but he was puzzled to see no trace of any structures resembling pistils or stamens. He wondered if the likeness to terrestrial flowers might be a pure coincidence. Perhaps this was something more akin to a coral polyp. It did not really matter. Whatever the scientific definition, to Jimmy this was a flower. The strange miracle, the m-Rama-ke accident, of its existence reminded him of all that he would never see again -- and he was determined to possess it. That would not be easy. It was more than ten meters away, separated from him by a lattice-work made of thin rods. They formed a cubic pattern, repeated over and over again, less than thirty centimeters on a side. Jimmy would not have been flying skybikes unless he had been slim and wiry, so he knew he could crawl through the interstices of the grid. But getting out again might be quite a different matter -- it would certainly be impossible for him to turn around, so he would have to retreat backward. Hub was delighted with his discovery when he had described the flower and scanned it from every available angle. There was no objection when he said, "I'm going after it." Nor did he expect there to be; his life was now his own, to do with as he pleased. He stripped, grasped the smooth metal rods and started to wriggle into the framework. It was a tight fit. He had to fight feeling like a prisoner who was escaping through the bars of fiis cell. When he had inserted himself completely into the lattice he tried backing out again just to see if there were any problems. It was considerably more difficult, since he now had to use his outstretched arms for pushing instead of pulling, but he saw no reason why he should become lielplessly trapped. Jimmy was a man of action and impulse, not of introspection. As he squirmed uncomfortably along the narrow corridor of rods he wasted no time asking himself just why he was performing so quixotic a feat. He had never been interested in flowers in liis whole life, yet now he was gambling his last energies to collect one. It was true that this specimen was unique and of enormous scientific interest. But he really wanted it because it was his last link with the world of life and the planet of his birth. Yet when the flower was within his grasp, he had sudden qualms. Perhaps it was the only flower that grew in the whole of Rama. Was he justified in collecting it? If he needed any excuse he could console himself with the thought that the Ramans themselves had not included it in their plans. It was obviously a freak, growing ages too late -- or too soon. But he did not really want an excuse, and his hesitation was only momentary. He reached out, grasped the stem and gave a sharp jerk. The flower came away easily enough. He also collected two of the leaves, then started to back slowly through the lattice. He had only one free hand now and progress was extremely difficult, even painful. He soon had to pause to regain his breath. It was then that he noticed that the feathery leaves were closing and the headless stem was slowly unwinding itself from its supports. As he watched with a mixture of fascination and dismay, he saw that the whole plant was steadily retreating into the ground as if mortally injured. I've murdered something beautiful, Jimmy told himself. But then Rama had killed him. He was only collecting what was his rightful due. XX never yet lost a man and he had no intention of starting now. He had been considering ways of rescuing Jimmy in the event of accident even before that accident had occurred. The problem, however, had turned out to be so difficult that he had found no answer. All that he had managed to do had been to eliminate every obvious solution. How does one climb a half-kilometer vertical cliff -- even in reduced gravity? With the right equipment and training the feat would be easy enough. But there were no pitonguns aboard Endeavor and no one could think of any other practical way of driving the necessary hundreds of spikes into that hard mirror surface. He had glanced briefly at more exotic solutions, some frankly crazy. Perhaps a simp, fitted with suction pads, could make the ascent. But even if this scheme were practical, how long would it take to manufacture and test such equipment and to train a simp to use it? Then there was more advanced units were tempting, but their thrust was too weak -- they were designed for operation in zero gravity. They could not possibly lift the weight of a man against Rama 's pull. on automatic control, carrying only a rescue line? He had tried out this idea on Sergeant Myron, who had promptly shot it down in flames. There were, the engineer pointed out, severe stability problems. These might be solved, but it would take a long time -- much longer than Endeavor's crew could afford. What about balloons? There seemed a faint possibility here -- if they could devise an envelope and a sufficiently compact source of heat. This was the only approach that Norton had not dismissed, when the problem suddenly ceased to be one of theory and became a matter of life and death, dominating the news in all the inhabited worlds. While Jimmy was making his trek along the edge of the sea, half the crackpots in the solar system were trying to save him. At Fleet Headquarters, all the suggestions were considered and about one in a thousand was forwarded to Endeavor. Dr. Carlisle Perera's arrived twice -- once via the Survey's own network, and once by way of Planetcom, Rama Priority. It had taken the scientist' approximately five minutes of puter time. At first Commander Norton thought Perera's idea was a joke in poor taste. Then he saw the sender's name and the attached calculations -- and did a quick double-take. He handed the message to Karl Mercer. "What do you think of this?" he asked, in as noncommittal a tone of voice as he could manage. Karl read it swiftly, then said, "Well, I'm damned! He's right, of course." "Are you sure?" "He was right about the storm, wasn't he? We should have thought of this -- that we didn't makes me feel a fool." "You have company. The next problem is -- how do we break it to Jimmy?" "I don't think we should -- until the last possible minute. That's how I'd prefer it in his shoes. Just tell him we're on the way." T hough he could look across the full width of the Cylindrical Sea and knew the general direction from which Resolution was coming, Jimmy did not spot the tiny craft until it had passed New York. It seemed incredible that it could carry six men and whatever equipment they had brought to rescue him. When it was only a kilometer away he recognized Commander Norton and started waving. A little later the skipper spotted him and waved back. "Glad to see you're in good shape, Jimmy," he radioed. "I promised we wouldn't leave you behind. Now do you believe me?" "I'll believe you, skipper," Jimmy said, "when I'm down there on the deck. Now will you tell me how I'm going to make it?" Resolution was slowing down a hundred meters from the base of the cliff. As far as Jimmy could teU she carried no unusual equipment. "Sorry about the secrecy, Jimmy. We didn't want you to have too many things to worry about." Resolution came to a halt fifty meters out and five hundred meters bejow. Jimmy had almost a bird'seye view of the commander as he spoke into his microphone. "This is it, Jimmy. You'll be perfectly safe, but it will require nerve. We know you've got plenty of that. You 're going to jump. " "Five hundred meters!" "Yes, but at only half a gee." "So -- have you ever fallen two hundred and fifty on Earth?" "Shut up, or I'll cancel your next leave. You should have worked this out for yourself. It's a question of terminal velocity. In this atmosphere you can't reach more than ninety kilometers an hour -- whether you fall two hundred or two thousand meters. Ninety's a little high for comfort, but we can trim it some more. This is what you'll have to do, so listen carefully." "I will," said Jimmy. "It had better be good." He did not interrupt the commander again and made no comment when Norton had finished. Yes, the plan made sense and was so absurdly simple that only a genius would have thought of it. Or, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself. Jimmy had never tried high-diving, or made a delayed parachute drop, both of which would have given him some psychological preparation for this feat. One could tell a man that it was perfectly safe to walk a plank across an abyss, but he might still be unable to do it. Now Jimmy understood why Norton had been so evasive about the details of the rescue. He had been given no time to brood or think of objections. "I don't want to hurry you," said Norton's persuasive voice from half a kilometer below. "But the sooner the better." Jimmy looked at his precious souvenir, the only flower in Rama. He wrapped it very carefully in his grimy handkerchief, knotted the fabric and tossed it over the edge of the cliff. It fluttered down with reassuring slowness, but it also took a very long time, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, until he could no longer see it. But then Resolution surged forward and he knew that it had been spotted. "Beautiful!" exclaimed the commander enthusiastically. "I'm sure they'll name it after you. Okay, we're waiting." Jimmy stripped off his shirt-the only upper garment anyone ever wore in this now tropical climate -- and stretched it thoughtfully. Several times on his trek he had almost discarded it. Now it might help to save his life. For the last time he looked back at the hollow world he alone had explored, and the distant, ominous pinnacles of the Big and Little Horns. Then, grasping the shirt firmly with his right hand, he took a running jump as far out over the cliff as he could. Now there was no particular hurry -- he had a full twenty seconds in which to enjoy the experience. But he did not waste any time as the wind strengthened around him and Resolution slowly expanded in his field of view. Holding his shirt with both hands, he stretched his arms above his head, so that the rushing air filled the garment and blew it into a hollow tube. As a parachute it was hardly a success. The few kilometers an hour it subtracted from his speed was useful, but not vital. It was doing a much more important job -- keeping his body vertical, so that he would arrow straight into the sea. He still had the impression that he was not moving at all, but that the water below was rushing up toward him. Once he had committed himself he had no sense of fear -- indeed, he felt a certain indignation against the skipper for having kept him in the dark. At the very last moment he let go of his shirt, took a deep breath and grabbed his mouth and nose with his hands. As he had been instructed, he stiffened his body into a rigid bar and locked his feet together. He would enter the water as cleanly as a falling spear. "It will be just the same," the commander had promised, "as stepping off a diving board on Earth. Notfiing to it -- if you make a good entry." "And if I don't?' "Then you'll have to go back and try again." the feet -- hard, but not viciously. his body. There was a roaring in his ears, a mounting pressure -- and even though his eyes were tightly closed, he could tell that darkness was falling as he arrowed into the depths of the Cylindrical Sea. With all his strength, he started to swim up toward the fading light. He could not open his eyes for more than a single blink -- the poisonous water felt like acid when he did so. He seemed to have been struggling for ages, and more than once he had a nightmare fear that he had lost his orientation and was really swimming downward. Then he would risk another quick glimpse, and every time the light was stronger. His eyes were still clenched tightly shut when he broke water. He gulped a precious mouthful of air, rolled over on his back and looked around. Resolution was heading toward him at top speed; within seconds, eager hands had grabbed him and dragged him aboard. "Did you swallow any water?" was the commander's first question. "I don't think so." "Rinse out with this, anyway. That's fine. How do you feel?" "I'm not really sure. I'll let you know in a minute. Oh -- thanks, everybody." The minute was barely up when Jimmy was only too sure how he felt. "I'm going to be sick," he confessed miserably. "In a dead calm -- on a flat sea?" protested Sergeant Barnes, who seemed to regard Jimmy's plight as a direct reflection on her skill. "I'd hardly call it flat," said the commander, waving his arm around the band of water that circled the sky. "But don't be ashamed -- you may have swallowed some of that stuff. Get rid of it as quickly as you can." Jimmy was still straining, unheroically and unsuccessfully, when there was a sudden flicker of light in the sky behind them. All eyes turned towards the South Pole and Jimmy instantly forgot his sickness. The Horns had started their fireworks display again. There were the kilometer-long streamers of fire, dancing from the central spike to its smaller companions. Once again they began their stately rotation, as if invisible dancers were winding their ribbons around an electric maypole. But now they began to accelerate, moving faster and faster until they blurred into a flickering cone of light. It was a spectacle more aweinspiring than any they had yet seen -- and it brought with it a distant crackling roar that added to the impression of overwhelming power. The display lasted for about five minutes. Then it stopped as abruptly as if someone had turned a switch. "I'd like to know what the Rama Committee make of that," Norton muttered to no one in particular. "Has anyone here any theories?' There was no time for an answer, because at that moment Hub called in great excitement. "Resolution! Are you okay? Did you feel that?" "Feel what?" "We think it was an earthquake. It must have happened the minute these fireworks stopped." "Any damage?" "I don't think so. It wasn't really violent, but it shook us up a bit." "We felt nothing at all. But we wouldn't, out here in the sea." "Of course, silly of me. Anyway, everything seems quiet now -- until next time." "Yes, until the next time," Norton echoed. The mystery of Rama was steadily growing -- the more he learned about it, the less he understood. A sudden shout came from the helm. "Skipper -- look -- up there in the sky!' Norton lifted his eyes, swiftly scanning the circuit of the sea. He saw nothing, until his gaze had almost reached the zenith and he was staring at the other side of the world. "My God," he whispered slowly, as he realized that the "next time" was already almost here. A tidal wave was racing toward them, down the eternal curve of the Cylindrical Sea. ton's first concern was for his ship. "Endeavor!" he called. "Situation report, please." "All okay, skipper," was the reassuring answer. "We felt a slight tremor, but nothing that could cause any damage. There's been a small change of attitude -- the bridge says about point two degrees. They also think the spin . rate has altered slightly -- we'll have an accurate reading on that in a couple of minutes." So it's beginning to happen, Norton told himself, and a lot earlier than we expected. They were a long way from perihelion and the logical time for an orbit change. But some kind of trim was undoubtedly taking place-and there might ho more shocks to come. The effects of this first one, meanwhile, were all too obvious up there on the curving sheet of water. The wave was still about ten kilometers away and stretched the full width of the sea from northern to southern shore. Near the land it was a foaming wall of white, but in deeper water it was a barely visible blue line, moving much faster than the breakers on either flank. The drag of the shoreward shallows was already bending it into a bow, with the central portion getting farther and farther ahead. "Sergeant Barnes," Norton said urgently. "This is your job. How do we proceed?" Sergeant Barnes had brought the raft completely to rest and was studying the situation intently. Her expression, Norton was relieved to see, showed no trace of alarm -- rather a certainzestful excitement. She looked like a skilled athlete about to accept a challenge. "I wish we had some soundings," she said. "If we're in deep water there's nothing to worry about." "Then we're all right. We're still four kilometers from shore." "I hope we have enough water under us, but I want to study the situation." She applied power again and swung Resolution around until it was Just under way, heading directly toward the approaching wave. Norton judged that the swiftly moving central portion would reach Resolution in less than five minutes, but he could also see that it presented no serious danger. It was only a racing ripple a fraction of a meter high and would scarcely rock the boat. The walls of foam lagging far behind it were the real menace. Suddenly, in the very center of the sea, a line of breakers appeared. The wave had clearly hit a submerged wall several kilometers in length, not far below the surface. At the same time the breakers on the two flanks collapsed as they ran into deeper water. Anti-slosh plates, Norton told himself. Probably similar to those in Endeavor's propellant tanks -- but built on a thousandfold greater scale. There must be a complex pattern of them all around the sea, to damp out any waves as quickly as possible. The only thing that matters now is-are we right on top of one? Sergeant Barnes was one jump ahead of him. She had again brought Resolution to a full stop and now threw out the anchor. It hit bottom at only five meters. "Haul it up," she called to her crewmates. "We've got to get away from here!" Norton agreed -- but in which direction? Next he realized that the sergeant was headed at full speed toward the wave, now only five kilometers away. For the first time he could hear the sound of its approach -- a distant, unmistakable roar he had never expected to hear inside Rama. Then it changed in intensity -- the central wave's central portion was collapsing once more and the flanks were building breakers again. He tried to estimate the distance between the submerged baffles, assuming that they were spaced at equal intervals, and concluded that there should be one more before the wave and Resolution met. The idea would be to station the raft in the deep water between the baffles... Sergeant Barnes cut speed and threw out the anchor again. It went down thirty meters without hitting bottom. "We're okay," she said with a sight of relief. "But I'll keep the motor running." N OW there were only the lagging walls of foam along the coastout here the sea was calm again, apart from the inconspicuous blue ripple still speeding toward them. The sergeant was barely holding Resolution on course toward the disturbance, ready to pour on full power at a moment's notice. Then, a scant two kilometers ahead, the sea started to foam once more. It humped up in white-maned fury and now its roaring seemed to fill the world. Upon the sixteenkilometer-high wave of the Cylindrical Sea was superimposed a thundering avalanche. Sergeant Barnes shouted above the roar, "I've ridden bigger ones than this -- but if we have to jump wait until I tell you -- " She was magnificent, Norton thought. She was obviously enjoying every minute, like a Viking warrior going into battle. The wave continued to rise, curving upward and over. It looked enormous -- an irresistible force of nature that would overwhelm everything in its path. Then it collapsed as if its foundations had been pulled out from under it. It was over the submerged barrier and had fallen into deep water again. When it reached her a moment later the Resolution merely bounced up and down a few times before Sergeant Barnes swung the raft around and set off at top speed toward the north shore. "Thanks, Ruby -- that was splendid. But will we get home before it comes around for the second time?" "Probably not. It will be back in about twenty minutes. But it will have lost strength by then. We should scarcely notice it." Norton relaxed, though he knew he would not be completely at ease until they were back on land. The disturbance had left the water swirling in random eddies and had stirred up a peculiar acidic smell -- "Like crushed ants," somebody said. But though unpleasant, the odor caused no seasickness or other discomfort. It was something so alien that human physiology could not respond to it. A minute later the wave front hit the next underwater barrier. Seen from the rear, the spectacle was unimpressive and Norton felt ashamed of his earlier reaction. He began to feel that Sergeant Barnes and her crew were masters of the Cylindrical Sea. His shock was therefore all the greater when, not more than a hundred meters away, something like a slowly rotating wheel began to rear up out of the water. Glittering metdlic spokes, five meters long, emerged dripping from the sea, spun for a moment in the fierce glare of Rama and splashed back into the water. It was as if a giant starfish with tubular arms had broken the surface. At first sight, it was impossible to tell whether the thing was an animal or a machine. Then it flopped over and lay partly awash, bobbing up and down in the gentle aftermath of the wave. Norton counted nine arms, apparently jointed, radiating from a central disc. Two were broken, snapped off at the outer joint. The others ended in complicated collections of manipulators that reminded Norton of the crab Jimmy Pak had encountered. Jimmy confirmed that the two creatures came from the same line of evolution -- or the same drawing-board. At the middle of the disk was a small turret, bearing three large eyes. Two were closed. One was open, but seemed blank and unseeing. Norton decided he and the crew were watching the death throes of some strange monster, tossed up to the surface by the submarine disturbance that had just passed. Next he realized the monster was no longer alone. Swimming around it, snapping at its still feebly moving limbs, were two small beasts like overgrown lobsters. They were efficiently chopping up the monster and it did nothing to resist, though its own claws seemed quite capable of dealing with the attackers. Jimmy Pak was again reminded of the crab that had demolished Dragonfly. He watched intently as the one-sided conflict continued and quickly confirmed an earlier impression. "Look, skipper," he whispered. "They're not eating it. They don't even have any mouths. They're simply chopping it to pieces. That's exactly what happened to Dragonfly- "You're right. They're dismantling it as if it were a broken machine." Norton wrinkled his nose. "But no dead machine ever smelled like that." Then another thought struck him: "My God -- suppose they start on us! Ruby, get this contraption to shore as quickly as you can." Resolution surged forward with reckless disregard for the life of her power cells. Norton stared back. The nine spokes of the great starfish -- he could think of no better name for it -- were clipped steadily shorter, and presently the weird tableau sank back into the depths of the sea. There was no pursuit, but he did not breathe comfortably again until Resolution had drawn up to the landing stage and the crew had stepped ashore. As he looked back across that mysterious and now suddenly sinister band of water. Commander Norton grimly determined that no one would ever sail it again. There were too many unknowns, too many dangers. He also looked back at the towers and ramparts of New York and the dark cliff of the continent beyond. They were safe now from inquisitive man. He would not tempt the gods of Rama again. F rom now on, Norton had decreed, there would at all times be at least three people at Camp Alpha -- and one would be awake at any given moment. All other exploring parties would follow the same pattern. Potentially dangerous creatures were on the move inside Rama and, though none had shown active hostility, a prudent commander would take no chances. As an extra safeguard an observer up on the Hub kept constant watch through a powerful telescope. The whole interior of Rama could be surveyed from this vantage pointeven the South Pole appeared only a few hundred meters away. The territory around any group of explorers was to be kept under regular observation. That way Norton hoped to eliminate any possibility of surprise. It was a good plan -- and it failed completely. After the last meal of the day and just before the #:# hour sleep period, Norton, Rodrigo, Calvert and Laura Ernst were watching the regular evening news telecast specially beamed to Camp Alpha from the transmitter at Inferno, Mercury. They had been particularly interested in seeing Jimmy's tape of the southern continent and the rescue team's return across the Cylindrical Sea -- both episodes had aroused much comment. Scientists, news commentators and members of the Rama Committee had given their opinions, most of them contradictory. No one could agree whether the crablike creature Jimmy had encountered was an animal, a machine, a genuine Raman-or something that fitted none of these categories. The Camp Alpha team had just finished watching -- with distinctly queasy feelings -- the giant starfish being demolished by predators when an intruder was discovered in the camp. Laura Ernst noticed it first. She froze in sudden shock, then said, "Don't move fast. Bill. But look slowly to the right." Norton turned his head. Ten meters away was a slender-legged tripod surmounted bya spherical body no larger than a football. Set around the body were three large, expressionless eyes, apparently giving # degrees of vision, and trailing beneath it were three whiplike tendrils. The creature was not quite as tall as a man and looked far too fragile to be dangerous, but that did not excuse the camp watch's letting it sneak in unnoticed. The creature suggested to Norton a three-legged spider or daddy longlegs and he wondered how it had solved the problem -- never even challenged by any creature on Earth -- of tripedd locomotion. "What do you make of it, Laura?" he whispered, turning off the voice of the TV newscaster. "Usual Rama three-fold symmetry. I don't see how it could hurt us, though those whips might be unpleasant -- and they could be poisonous, like a coelente rate's. Sit tight and see what it does.' After regarding them impassively for several minutes the creature suddenly moved -- and now they could understand why they had failed to observe its arrival. It was fast. It covered the ground with such an extraordinary spinning motion that the human eye and mind had real difficulty in following it. As far as Norton could judge -- and only a high-speed camera could settle the matter -- each leg in turn acted as a pivot around which the creature whirled its body. And he was not sure, but it also seemed to him that every few "steps" it reversed its tion of spin, while the three whips flickered over the ground like lightning as it moved. Its top speed -- though this also was very hard to estimate -- was at least thirty kilometers an hour. camp, examining every item of equipment, delicately touching the improvised beds, chairs, tables, communication gear, food containers, electrosans, cameras, water tanks, tools -- it seemed to ignore nothing except the human watchers. Clearly it was intelligent enough to draw a distinction between living organisms and their inanimate property -- its actions gave the unmistakable impression of an extremely methodical curiosity or inquisitiveness. "I wish I could examine it -- " Laura's whisper expressed frustration as the creature continued its swift, pirouette. "Should we try to catch it?" "How?" Calvert asked, reasonably enough. "You know -- the way primitive hunters brought down fast-moving animals with a couple of weights whirling around at the end of a rope -- a bola. It doesn't even hurt." "That I doubt," said Norton. "But even if it worked, we can't risk it. We don't know how intelligent or physically strong this creature is-a trick like that could easily break its legs. Then we would be in real trouble -- from Rama, Earth and everyone else." "But I've got to have a specimen." "You may have to be content with Jimmy's flower unless one of these creatures cooperates with you. Force is out. How would you like it if something landed on Earth and decidedthat you would make a nice specimen for dissection?' "I don't want to dissect it," said Laura, not at all convincingly. "I only want to examine it." "Well, alien visitors might have the same attitude toward you, but you could have a very uncomfortable time before you believed them. We must make no move that could possibly be regarded as threatening." He was quoting from ship's orders, of course, and Laura knew it. The claims of science had a lower priority than those of space diplomacy. But there was no need to bring in such elevated considerations here -- the behavior of humans in Rama was merely a matter of good manners. They were all visitors here and had never even asked permission to come in. The creature seemed to have finished its inspection. It made one more high-speed circuit of the camp, then shot off at a tangent -- toward the stairway. "I wonder how it's going to manage the steps?" Laura mused. Her question was quickly answered; the spider ignored the steps completely and headed up the gently sloping curve of the ramp without slackening its speed. Norton radioed Hub. "You may have a visitor shortly ; take a look at the Alpha Stairway Section Six. And incidentally, thanks a lot for keeping such a good watch on us." It took a minute for the sarcasm to sink in; then the Hub observer started to make apologetic noises, finished with; "I can just see something, skipper, now that you tell me it's there. But what is it?" "Your guess is as good as mine," Norton answered as he pressed the General Alert button. "Camp Alpha calling all stations. We've just been visited by a creature like a threelegged spider. Extremely thin legs, about two meters high, small spherical body -- travels very fast with a spinning motion. Appears harmless but inquisitive. It may sneak up on you before you notice it. Please acknowledge." The first reply came from London, fifteen kilometers to the East. "Nothing unusual here, skipper." The same distance to the West, Rome answered, sounding suspiciously sleepy. "Same here, skipper. Uh, just a moment -- " "What is it?" "I put my pen down a minute ago and it's gone. What -- oh!" "Talk sense." "You won't believe this, skipper. I was making some notes -- you know I like writing and it doesn't disturb anybody. I was using my favorite ballpoint, the one that's nearly two hundred years old. Well, now it's lying on the ground, about five meters away. I've got it -- and damned glad it isn't damaged." "And how do you suppose it got there?" "Ah -- I may have dozed off for a minute. It's been a hard day." Norton sighed, but refrained from comment. He had so few people and they had so little time in which to explore a world. Enthusiasm could not always overcome exhaustion and he wondered if they were taking unnecessary risks. Perhaps he should not split his men up into such small groups and try to cover so much territory. But he was always conscious of the swiftly passing days and the unsolved mysteries around him. He was becoming more and more certain that something was about to happen and that they would have to abandon Rama even before it reached perihelion-the moment of truth when any orbit change must surely take place. "Now listen. Hub, Rome, London -- everyone," he said. "I want a report every half-hour through the night. We must assume that from now on we may expect visitors at any time. Some may be dangerous, but at all costs we have to avoid -- incidents. You all know the directives on this subject." That was true enough -- the directives were part of their training. Yet perhaps none of them had ever really believed that the longtheorized "physical contact with intelligent aliens" would occur in their lifetimes -- still less that they would experience it themselves. Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency. Yet it was essential to give every entity they encountered in Rama the benefit of the doubt, up to the last possible minute -- and even beyond. Commander Norton did not want to be remembered by history as the man who started the first interplanetary war. hundreds of the spiders and they were all over the plain. Through the telescope it could be seen that the southern continent was also infested with them -- but not, it seemed, the island of New York. They took no further notice of the explorers, and after a while the explorers took little notice of them -- though from time to time Norton still detected a predatory gleam in Laura Ernst's eye. Nothing would please her better, he was sure, than for one of the spiders to have an unfortunate accident -- and he would not put it past her to arrange one in the interest of science. It seemed virtually certain that the spiders could not be intelligent; their bodies were far too small to contain much in the way of brains -- and indeed it was hard to see where they stored all the energy to move. Yet their behavior was curiously purposeful and coordinated; they seemed to be everywhere, but they never visited the same place twice. Norton frequently had the impressiori that they were searching for something. Whatever it was, they did not seem to have discovered it. They went all the way up to the central Hub, still scorning the three great stairways. How they managed to ascend the vertical sections, even under almost zero gravity, was not clear; Laura theorized that they were equipped with suction pads. And then, to her obvious delight, she got her eagerly desired specimen. Hub reported that a spider had fallen down the vertical face and was lying, dead or incapacitated on the first platform. Laura's time up from the plain was a record that would never be beaten. When she arrived at the platform she found that, despite the low velocity of impact, the creature had broken all its legs. Its eyes were still open, but it showed no reactions to any external tests. Even a fresh human corpse would have been livelier, Laura decided. As soon as she got her prize back to Endeavor she started to work with her dissecting kit. The spider was so fragile that it almost came to pieces without her assistance. She disarticulated the legs, then started on the delicate carapace, which split along three great circles and opened up like a peeled orange. After some moments of blank incredulity -- for she found nothing she could recognize or identify -- she took a series of careful photographs. Then she picked up her scalpel. Where to start cutting? She felt like closing her eyes and stabbing at random, but that would not have been very scientific. The blade went in with practically no resistance. A second later, Surgeon-Commander Ernst's most unladylike yell echoed the length and breadth of Endeavor. It took an annoyed Sergeant McAndrews a good twenty minutes to calm down the startled simps. women," said the Martian ambassador, "a great deal has happened since our last meeting. We have much to discuss -- and to decide. I'm therefore particularly sorry that our distinguished colleague from Mercury is not here." That last statement was not altogether accurate. Dr. Bose was not particularly sorry. It would have been much more truthful to say that he was worried. All his diplomatic instincts told him that something was happening and though his sources of information were excellent, he could gather no hints as to what it might be. The ambassador's letter of apology had been courteous and entirely uncommunicative. His Excellency had regretted that urgent and unavoidable business had kept him from attending the meeting either in person or by video. Dr. Bose found it very hard to think of anything more urgent -- or more important -- than Rama. "Two of our members have statements to make. I would first like to call on Professor Davidson." There was a rustle of excitement among the other scientists on the committee. Most of them had felt that the astronomer, with his wellknown cosmic viewpoint, was not the right man to be chairman of the Space Advisory Council. He sometimes gave the impression that the activities of intelligent life were an unfortunate irrelevance in the majestic universe of stars and galaxies and that it was bad manners to pay too much attention to it. This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr. Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them the only purpose of the universe was the production of intelligence and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena. Mere dead matter... was one of their favorite phrases. "Mr. Ambassador," Professor Davidson began, "I have been analyzing the curious behavior of Rama during the last few days and would like to present my conclusions. Some of them are rather startling." Dr. Perera looked surprised, then smug. He strongly approved of anything that startled Professor Davidson. "First of all, there was the remarkable series of events when that young lieutenant flew to the southern end of Rama. The electrical discharges themselves, though spectacular, are not important. It is easy to show that they contained relatively little energy. But they coincided with a change in Rama 's rate of spin and its attitude -- that is, its orientation jn space. This must have involved an enormous amount of energy -- the discharges that nearly cost Lieutenant -- er -- Pak his life were merely a minor byproduct -- perhaps a nuisance that had to be minimized by those giant lightning conductors at the south pole. "I draw two conclusions from this. When a spacecraft -- and we must call Rama a spacecraft despite its fantastic size -- makes a change of attitude it usually means it is about to make a change of orbit. We must therefore take seriously the views of those who believe that Rama mSiy be preparing to become another planet of our sun, instead of going back to the stars. "If this should prove to be the case Endeavor must obviously be prepared to cast off -- is that what spaceships do? -- at a moment's notice. She may be in serious danger while she is still physically attached to Rama. I imagine that Commander Norton is already well aware of this possibility, but I think we should send him an additional warning." "Thank you very much. Professor Davidson. Yes -- Dr. Solomons?" "I'd like to comment on that" said Dr. Solomons. "'Rama seems to have made a change of spin without using any jets or reaction devices. This leaves only two possibilities, it seems to me. The first one is that it has internal gyroscopes or their equivalent. They must be enormous -- where are they? The second possibility, which would turn aU our physics upside down, is that it has a reactionless propulsion system. The so-called spacedrive, which Professor Davidson doesn't believe in. If this is the case Rama may be able to do almost anything. We will be quite unable to anticipate its behavior even on the gross physical level." The diplomats were obviously baffled by this exchange and Davidson refused to be drawn in deeper. He had gone out on enough limbs for one day. "I'll stick to the laws of physics, if you don't mind, until I'm forced to give them up. That we've not found any gyroscopes in Rama may mean that we have not looked hard enough -- or in the right place." Ambassador Bose could see that Dr. Perera was growing impatient. Normally the exobiologist was as happy as anyone else to engage in speculation, but now he had some solid facts for the first time. His long-impoverished science had become wealthy overnight. "Very well. If there are no other comments, I know that Dr. Perera has some important information." "Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. As you've all seen we have at last obtained a specimen of one life form on Rama and have observed several others at close quarters. SurgeonCommander Ernst, Endeavor's medical officer, has sent a full report on the spiderlike creature she dissected. I must say at once that some of her results are baffling, and in any other circumstances I would have refused to believe them. "The spider is definitely organic, though its chemistry differs from ours in many respects -- it contains considerable quantities of light metals. Yet I hestitate to call it an animal, for several fundamental reasons. "In the first place, it seems to have no mouth, no stomach, no gut -- no method of ingesting food. It also has no air intakes, no lungs, no blood and no reproductive system. "You may wonder what it does have. Well, a simple musculature controls its three legs and the three whiplike tendrils or feelers. There's a brain -- fairly complex, mostly concerned with the creature's remarkably developed tri-ocular vision. But eighty per cent of the body consists of a honeycomb of large cells. This is what gave Dr. Ernst such an unpleasant surprise when she started her dissection. If she had been luckier she might have recognized it in time, because the honeycomb is the one structure we've found on Rama that does exist on Earth -- though only in a handful of marine animals. "Most of the spider is simply a battery, very much like that found in electric eels and rays. But in this case it's apparently not used for defense -- it's the creature's source of energy. That is why the beast has no provisions for eating and breathing. It doesn't need such primitive arrangements. And incidentally, this means that it would be perfectly at home in a vacuum. "So we have a creature which, to all intents and purposes, is nothing more than a mobile eye. It has no organs of manipulation -- those tendrils are much too feeble. If I had been given its specifications, I would have said it's merely a reconnaissance device. "Its behavior certainly fits that description. But the other creatures are different. The crabs, the starfish, the sharks-for want of better designations -- can obviously manipulate their environment and appear to be specialized for various functions. I assume that they are also electrically powered since, like the spider, they appear to have no mouths. "I'm sure you'll appreciate the biological problems raised by all this. Could such creatures evolve naturally? I really don't think so. They appear to have been designed, like machines, for specific jobs. If I had to describe them I would say that they are robots -- biological robots -- and as such have no analogy on Earth. "If Rama is a spaceship, perhaps they are part of its crew. As to how they are born -- or created -- that's something I can't tell you. But I can guess that the answer's over there in New York. If Commander Norton and his men can wait long enough they may encounter increasingly complex creatures, given to unpredictable behavior. Somewhere along the line our explorers may meet the Ramans themselves -- the real makers of this world. "And when that happens, gentlemen, there will be no doubt about the answers to these questions." sleeping soundly when his personal communicator dragged him away from happy dreams. He had been holidaying with his family on Mars, flying past the awesome, snow-capped peak of Nix Olympica, mistiest volcano in the solar say something to him. Now he would never know what it was. The dream faded. The reality was his executive officer on the ship. "Sorry to wake you, skipper," said Lieutenant-Commander Kirchoff. "Triple A priority from headquarters." "Let me have it," Norton answered sleepily. "I can't. It's in code -- Commander's Eyes Only." Norton was instantly awake. He had received such a message only three times in his whole career -- and on each occasion it had meant trouble. "Damn!" he said. "What do we do now?" Kirchoff did not bother to answer. Each understood the problem perfectly -- it was one that Ship's Orders had never anticipated. Normally a commander was never more than a few minutes away from his office and the code book was in his personal safe. If he started now Norton might get back to the ship, exhausted, in four or five hours. That was not the way to handle a Class "Gerry," he said at length. "Who's on the switchboard?" "No one but myself." "Recorder off?" "By an odd breach of regulations -- yes." Norton smiled. Gerry was the best exec he had ever worked with -- one who thought of everything. "Okay, you know where my key is. Call me back." He waited as patiently as he could for the next ten minutes, trying -- without much success -- to think of other problems. He hated wasting mental effort. It was unlikely that he could outguess the message that was coming and he would know its contents soon enough. Then he could start worrying effectively. When IGrchoff called back he was obviously speaking under considerable strain. "It's not really urgent, skipper -- an hour won't make any difference. But I prefer to avoid radio. I'll send it down by messenger." "But why -- oh, very well. I trust your judgment. Who will carry it through the airlocks?" "I'm going myself. I'll call you when I reach the Hub." "Which leaves Laura in charge." "For one hour at the most. I'll get right back to the ship." A medical officer did not have the specialized training to be acting commander, any more than a commander could be expected to do an operation. Both jobs had sometimes been successfully switched, in emergencies, but this was not recommended. Well, one rule had already been broken tonight , . , "For the record, you wUl never have left the ship. Have you woken Laura?" "Yes. She's deUghted with the opportunity." "Lucky that doctors are used to keeping secrets. Oh -- have you sent the acknowledgment?" "Of course. In your name." "Then I'll be waiting." Now it was quite impossible to avoid anxious anticipations. Not really urgent... , but  prefer to avoid radio... One thing was certain. The commander was not going to get much more sleep this night. teered for this job -- in many ways, it was a realization of a childhood dream. He had become fascinated by telescopes when he was only six or seven years old and much of his youth had been spent collecting lenses of all shapes and sizes. These he had mounted in cardboard tubes, making instruments of ever-increasing power until he was familiar with the moon and planets, the nearer space stations and the entire landscape within thirty kilometers of his home. He had been lucky in his place of birth among the mountains of Colorado. In almost every direction the view was spectacular and inexhaustible. He had spent hours exploring, in perfect safety, peaks that every year took their toll of careless climbers. Though he had seen much, he had imagined even more; he had liked to pretend that over each crest of rock, beyond the reach of his telescope, were magic kingdoms full of wonderful creatures. And so for years he had avoided visiting the places his lenses brought to him, because he had known that reality could not live up to the dream. Now, on the central axis of Rama he could survey marvels beyond the wildest fantasies of his youth. A whole world lay spread out before him -- a small one, true, yet a man could spend an entire lifetime exploring four thousand square kilometers even when it was dead and changeless. But now life, with all its infinite possibilities, had come to Rama. No one knew who had invented the word "biot." It had seemed to come into instant use by a kind of spontaneous generation. From his vantage point on the Hub, Pieter was Biot-Watcher-in-Chief, and he was beginning, so he believed, to understand some of their behavior patterns. The spiders were mobile sensors, using vision -- and probably touch -- to examine the whole interior of Rama. At one time hundreds of them had been rushing around at high speed, but after less than two days they had disappeared. Now it was quite unusual to see one. They had been replaced by a whole menagerie of much more impressive creatures -- it had been no minor task to think of suitable names for them. There were the window cleaners, with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way along the whole length of the six artificial suns. Tlieir enormous shadows, cast across the diameter of the world, sometimes caused temporary eclipses on the far side. The crab that had demolished Dragonfly seemed to be a scavenger. A relay chain of identical creatures had approached Camp Alpha and carried off all the debris that had been neatly stacked on the outskirts. They would have carried off everything else if Norton and Mercer had not stood firm and defied them. The confrontation had been anxious but brief; thereafter the scavengers seemed to distinguish what they were allowed to touch and arrived at regular intervals to see if their services were required. It was a most convenient arrangement and indicated a high degree of intelligence -- either on the part of the scavengers themselves or some controlling entity elsewhere. Garbage disposal on Rama was simple -- everything was thrown into the sea, where it was presumably broken down into forms that could be used again. The process was rapid: Resolution had disappeared overnight, to the great annoyance of Ruby Barnes. Norton had consoled her by pointing out that it had done its job magnificently and that he would never have allowed anyone to use it again in any case. The sharks might not be as discriminating as the scavengers... No astronomer discovering an unknown planet could have been happier than Pieter when he spotted a new type of biot and secured a good photo of it through his telescope. Unfortunately it seemed that all the interesting species were over at the South Pole, where they were performing mysterious tasks around the Horns. Something that looked like a centipede with suction pads could be seen from time to time exploring Big Horn itself, while around the lower peaks Pieter had caught a glimpse of a burly creature that could have been a cross between a hippopotamus and a bulldozer. There was even a double-necked giraffe, which apparently acted as a mobile crane. Presumably Rama, like any ship, required testing, checking and repairing after its immense voyage. The crew was already hard at work -- when would the passengers appear? main job. His orders were to keep watch on the two or three exploring parties that were always out, to see that they did not get into trouble and to warn them if anything approached. He alternated every six hours with anyone else who could be spared, though more than once he had been on duty for twelve hours at a stretch. As a result he now knew the geography of Rama better than any man who would ever live. It was as familiar to him as the Colorado mountains of his youth. When Gerry Kirchoff emerged from Airlock Alpha, Pieter knew at once that something unusual was happening. Personnel transfers nevpr occurred during the sleeping period and it was now past midnight by Mission Time. Then Pieter remembered how short-handed they were and was shocked by a much more startling irregularity. "Gerry -- who's in charge of the ship?" "I am," said Kirchoff coldly as he flipped open his helmet. "You don't thiiik I'd leave the bridge while I'm on watch, do you?" He reached into his suit carry-all and pulled out a small can still bearing the lable: Concentrated Orange Juice-To Make Five Liters. "You're good at this, Pieter. The skipper is waiting for it." Pieter hefted the can, then said, "I hope you've put enough mass inside it. Sometimes they get stuck on the first terrace." "Well, you're the expert." That was true enough. The Hub observers had had plenty of practice at sending down small items that had been forgotten or were needed in a hurry. Tlie trick was to get them safely past the low-gravity region and then to see that the Coriolis effect did not carry them too far away from the camp during the eightPieter anchored liimself firmly, grasped the can and hurled it down the face of the cliff. He did not aim directly towards Camp Alpha, but almost thirty degrees away from it. Almost immediately, air resistance robbed the can of its initial speed, but then the psuedo-gravity of Rama took over and it continued to move down, now at a constant velocity. It hit once near the base of the ladder and did a slow-motion bounce which took it clear of the first terrace. "It's okay now," said Pieter. "Like to make a bet?" "No," was the prompt reply. "You know the odds." "You're no sportsman. But I'll tell you now -- it will stop within three hundred meters of the camp." "That doesn't sound very close." "You might try it some time. I once saw Joe miss by a couple of kilometers." T he can was no longer bouncing-gravity had become strong enough to glue it to the curving face of the north dome. By the time it had reached the second terrace it was rolling along at twenty or thirty kilometers an hour and had reached very nearly the maximum speed that friction would allow. "Now we'll have to wait," said Pieter, seating himself at the telescope, so that he could keep track of the messenger. "It will be there in ten minutes. Ah, here comes the skipper -- I've gotten used to recognizing people from this angle. Now he's looking up at us." "I believe that telescope gives you a sense of power." "Oh, it does. I'm the only person who knows everything that's happening in Rama. At least, I thought I did," he added plaintively, giving Kirchoff a reproachful look. "If it will keep you happy -- the skipper found he'd run out of toothpaste." Conversation languished after that. At last Pieter said, "Wish you'd taken that bet. He's only got to walk fifty meters... now he sees it. Mission complete." "Thanks, Pieter-a very good job. Now you can go back to sleep." "Sleep? I'm on watch until oh four hundred." "Sorry. You must have been sleeping. How else could have dreamed you saw me here?" Norton read the message a halfdozen times to memorize the date. It was hard to keep track of time inside Rama. He had to look at his calendar watch to determine that it was now Day #. for what it said, but for what it implied. The Hermians had made a clandestine launch. That was in itself breach of Space Law. The conclusion was obvious: their "vehicle" could only be a missile. But why? It was inconceivablewell, almost inconceivable -- that they would risk endangering Endeavor, so presumably he would receive ample warning from the Hermians themselves. In an emergency he could leave at a few hours' notice, though he would do so only under extreme protest, at the direct orders of the Co mman de r-inChie f . Slowly and thoughtfully he walked across to the improvised lifesupport complex and dropped the message into an electrosan. The brilliant flare of laser light bursting out through the crack beneath the seatcover told him that the demands of Security were satisfied. It was too bad, he told himself, that all problems could not be disposed of so swiftly and hygienically. kilometers away when the glare of its plasma braking jets became clearly visible in Endeavor's main telescope. By that time the secret was already out and Norton had reluctantly ordered the second and perhaps final evacuation of Rama. But he had no intention of leaving until events gave him no alternative. When it had completed its braking maneuver the unwelcome guest from Mercury was only fifty kilometers from Rama and apparently carrying out a survey through its TV cameras. These were clearly visible -- one fore and one aft -- as were several small omni-antennas and one large directional dish, aimed steadily at the distant lightpoint of Mercury. Norton wondered what instructions were coming down that beam and what information was going back. Yet the Hermians could learn nothing that they did not already know. All that Endeavor had discovered had been broadcast throughout the solar system. This spacecraft -- which had broken all speed records to get here -- could only be an extension of its makers' wiU, an instrument of their purpose. That purpose would soon be known, for in three hours the Hermian ambassador to the United Planets would be addressing the General Assembly. Officially the missile did not yet exist. It bore no identification marks and was not radiating on any standard beacon frequency. This was a serious breach of law, but even Spaceguard had not yet issued a formal protest. Everyone was waiting with nervous impatience to see what Mercury would do next. It had been three days since the missile's existence -- and origin -- had been announced; all that time, the Hermians had remained stubbornly silent. They could be very good at that when it suited them. Some psychologists had claimed that it was almost impossible to understand fully the mentality of anyone born and bred on Mercury. Forever exiled from Earth by its three-times-more powerful gravity, Hermians could stand on the moon and look across the narrow gap to the planet of their ancestors, even of their own parents -- but they could never visit it. And so, inevitably, they claimed that they did not want to. They pretended to despise the soft rains, the loUing fields, the lakes and seas, the blue skies -- aU the things that they could know only through recordings. Because their planet was drenched with such solar energy that the daytime temperature often reached six hundred degrees, they affected a swaggering toughness that did not bear a moment's serious examination. In fact, they tended to be physically weak, since they could only survive if they were totally insulated from their environment. Even if he could have tolerated the gravity, a Hermian would have been quickly incapacitated by a hot day in any equatorial country on Earth. Yet in matters that really counted they were tough indeed. The psychological pressures of that ravening star so close at hand, the engineering problems of tearing into a stubborn planet and wrenching from it aU the necessities of life -- these had produced a spartan and in many ways highly admirable culture. You could rely on the Hermians. If they promised something they would deliver, though the bill might be considerable. It was their own joke that if the sun ever showed signs of going nova, they would contract to get it under control once the fee had been settled. It was a non-Hermian joke that any child who showed signs of interest in art, philosophy or abstract mathematics was ploughed straight back into the hydroponic farms. As far as criminals and psychopaths were concerned, being ploughed under was not a joke at aU. Crime was one of the luxuries that Mercury could not afford. Commander Norton had been to Mercury once, had been enormously impressed -- like most visitors -- and had acquired many Hermian friends. He had fallen in love with a girl in Port Lucifer and had even contemplated signing a three-year contract, but parental disapproval of anyone from outside the orbit of Venus had been too strong. It was just as well. "Triple A message from Earth, skipper," said the bridge. "Voice and backup text from commander-inchief. Ready to accept?" "Check and file text. Let me have the voice." "Here it comes." Admiral Hendrix sounded calm and matter of fact, as if he were issuing a routine fleet order instead of handling a situation unique in the history of space. But then, he was not ten kilometers from the bomb. "C-in-C to Commander, Endeavor. This is a quick summary of the situation as we see it now. You know that the General Assembly meets at #:# and you'll be listening to the proceedings. It is possible that you may then have to take actiop immediately and without consultation -- hence this briefing. "We've analyzed the photos you have sent us. The vehicle is a standard space probe, modified for highimpulse and probably laser-riding for initial boost. Size and mass are consistent with fusion bomb in the #to #-megaton range -- the Hermians use up to # megatons routinely in their mining operations, so they would have had no difficulty in assembling such a warhead. "Our experts also estimate that this would be' the minimum size necessary to assure destruction of Rama. If it were detonated against the thinnest part of the shell -- underneath the Cylindrical Sea -- the hull would be ruptured and the spin of the body would complete its disintegration. "We assume that the Hermians, if they are planning such an act, will give you ample time to get clear. For your information, the gamma-ray flash from such a bomb could be dangerous to you up to a range of a thousand kilometers. "But that is not the most serious danger. The fragments of Rama, weighing tons and spinning off at almost a thousand kilometers an hour, could destroy you at an unlimited distance. We therefore recommend that you proceed along the spin axis, since no fragments will be thrown off in that direction. Ten thousand kilometers should give an adequate safety margin. "This message cannot be intercepted -- it is going by multiplepseudo-random routing, so I can talk in clear English. Your reply may not be secure, so speak with discretion and use code when necessary. I will caU you immediately after the General Assembly discussion. Message concluded. C-in-C out." According to the history a. books -- though no one could really believe them -- there had been a time when the old United Nations had # members. The United Planets had only seven and that was sometimes bad enough. In order of distance from the sun, they were Mercury, Earth, Luna, Mars, Ganymede, Titan and Triton. The list contained numerous omissions and ambiguities which presumably the future would rectify. Critics never tired of pointing out that most of the United Planets were not planets at all, but satel-lites. And how ridiculous that the four giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were not included. But no one lived on the gas giants and quite possibly no one ever would. The same might be true of the other major absentee, Venus. Even the most enthusiastic of planetary engineers agreed that it would take centuries to tame Venus. Meanwhile the Hermians kept their eyes on her and doubtless brooded over long-range plans. Separate representation for Earth and Luna had also been a bone of contention-the other members argued that it put too much power in one corner of the solar system. But there were more people on the moon than on all the other worlds except Earth itself. And it was the meeting place of the UP. Moreover, Earth and moon hardly ever agreed on anything, so they were not likely to constitute a dangerous bloc. Mars held the asteroids in trust -- except for the Icarian group (supervised by Mercury) and a handful with perihelions beyond Saturn and thus claimed by Titan. One day the larger asteroids, such as PaUas, Vesta, Juno and Ceres, would be important enough to have their own ambassadors and membership of the UP would then reach two figures. Ganymede represented not only Jupiter -- and therefore more mass than all the rest of the solar system put together -- but also the remaining fifty or so Jovian satellites, if one included temporary captures from the asteroid belt (the lawyers were still arguing over this). In the same way, Titan took care of Saturn, its rings and the other thirty-plus satellites. Tlie situation for Triton was even more complicated. The large moon of Neptune was the outermost body in the solar system under permanent habitation. As a result its ambassador wore a considerable number of hats. He represented Uranus and its eight moons (none yet occupied); Neptune and its other three satellites; Pluto and its solitary moon; and lonely, moonless Persephone. If there were planets beyond Persephone they, too, would be Triton's responsibility. And as if that were not enough, the Ambassador for the Outer Darkness, as he was sometimes called, had been heard to ask plaintively, "Wliat about comets?" It was generally felt that this problem could be left for the future to solve. And yet, in a very real sense, that future was already here. By some definitions, Rama was a comet. Comets were the only other visitors from the interstellar deeps and many had traveled on hyperbolic orbits even closer to the sun than Any space lawyer could make a good case out of that, and the Hermian Ambassador was One of the best. Vt lency the Ambassador for Mercury." As the delegates were arranged counterclockwise in order of distance from the sun, the Hermian was on the president's extreme right. Up to the very last minute he had been interfacing with his computer. Now he removed the synchronizing spectacles which allowed him alone to read the message on the display screen. He picked up his sheaf of notes and rose briskly. "Mr. President, distinguished fellow delegates, I would like to begin with a brief summary of the situation which now confronts us." From some delegates, that phrase "a brief summary" would have evoked sUent groans among all listeners, but everyone knew that Hermians meant exactly what they said. "The giant spaceship, or artificial asteroid, which has been christened Rama was detected over a year ago in the region beyond Jupiter. At first it was believed to be a natural body, moving on a hyperbolic orbit which would take it around the sun and on to the stars. "Wlien its true nature was discovered, the Solar Survey Vessel Endeavor was ordered to rendezvous with it. I am' sure we will all congratulate Commander Norton and his crew for the efficient way in which they have carried out their unique assignment. "After first actual contact Rama was stUl believed to be dead -- frozen for so many hundreds of thousands of years that there was no possibility of revival. This may still be true, in a strictly biological sense. There seems general agreement, among those who have studied the matter, that no living organism of any complexity can survive more than a very few centuries of suspended animation. Even at absolute zero, residual quantum effects eventually erase too much cellular information to make revival possible. It therefore appeared that, although Rama was of enormous archeological importance, it did not present any major astropolitical problems. "It is now obvious that this was a very naive attitude, though even from the first there were some who pointed out that Rama was too precisely aimed at the sun for pure chance to be involved. "Even so, it might have been argued -- indeed, it was argued -- that here was an experiment that had failed. Rama had reached the intended target, but the controlling intelligence had not survived. This view also seems very simpleminded. It surely underestimates the entities we are dealing with. "What we failed to take into account was the possibility of nonbiological survival. If we accept Dr. Perera's very plausible theory, which certainly fits aU the facts, the creatures who have been observed inside Rama did not exist until a short time ago. Their patterns, or templates, were stored in some central information bank and when the time was ripe they were manufactured from available raw materials, presumably the metallo-organic soup of the Cylindrical Sea. Such a feat is still somewhat beyond our own ability, but does not present any theoretical problems. We know that solid state circuits, unlike living matter, can store information without loss for indefinite periods of time. "So Rama is now in full operating condition, serving the purpose of its builders -- whoever they may be. From our point of view, it does not matter if the builders themselves have aU been dead for a will be recreated to join their servants at any moment. With or without them, their will is being done and will continue to be done. ""Rama has now given proof that its propulsion system is still operating. In a few days it will be at perihehon, where it would logically make any major orbit change. We may therefore soon have a new planet moving through the solar system over which my government has jurisdiction. Or it may, of course, make additional changes and occupy a final orbit at any distance from the sun. It could even become a satellite of a major planet -- such as Earth. "We are therefore, fellow delegates, faced with a whole spectrum of possibihties, some of them very serious indeed. It is foolish to pretend that these creatures must be benevolent and will not interfere with us in any way. If they came to our solar syem they need something from it. Even if it is only scientific knowledge, consider how that knowledge may be used. "What confronts us now is a technology hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of years in advance of ours, and a culture which may have no points of contact whatsoever with ours. We have been studying the behavior of the biological robots -- the biots -- inside Rama as shown on the films that Commander Norton has relayed, and we have arrived at certain conclusions we wish to pass on to you. "On Mercury we are perhaps unlucky in having no indigenous life forms to observe. But we have, of course a complete record of terrestrial ecology and we find in it one striking parallel with Rama. "This is the termite colony. Like Rama, it is an artificial world with a controlled environment. Like Rama, its functioning depends upon a whole series of specialized biological machines -- workers, builders, farmers -- warriors. And although we do not know if Rama has a Queen, I suggest that the island known as New York serves a similar function. "Now, it would obviously be absurd to press this analogy too far. It breaks down at many points. But I put it to you for this reason. "What degree of cooperation or understanding would ever be possible between human beings and termites? When there is no conflict of interest, we tolerate each other. But when either needs the other's territory or resources no quarter is given. "Thanks to our technology and our intelligence, we have always won and will continue to win if we are sufficiently determined. But sometimes it is not easy and there are those who believe that in the long run final victory may yet go to the termites. "With this in mind, consider now the appalling threat that Rama may -- I do not say must -- present to human civilization. What steps have we taken to counter it if the worst eventuality should occur? None whatsoever. We have merely talked and speculated and written learned papers. "Well, my fellow delegates. Mercury has done more than this. Acting under the provisions of Clause thirty-four of the Space Treaty of two thousand fifty-seven, which entitles us to take any steps necessary to protect the integrity of our solar space, we have dispatched a highenergy nuclear device to Rama. We will indeed be happy if we never have to utilize it. But now, at least, we are not helpless -- as we were before. "It may be argued that we have acted unilaterally and without prior consultation. We admit that. But does anyone here imagine -- with all respect, Mr. President -- that we could have secured any agreement on this matter in the time available? We consider that we are acting not only for ourselves, but for the whole human race. All future generations may one day thank us for our foresight. "We recognize that it would be a tragedy, even a crime, to destroy an artifact as wonderful as Rama. If there is any way in which this can be avoided, without risk to humanity, we will be very happy to hear of it. We have not found a way and time is running out. "Within the next few days, before Rama reaches perihelion, the choice will have to be made. We will, of course, give ample warning to Endeavor. But we would advise Commander Norton always to be ready to leave at an hour's notice. It is conceivable that Rama may undergo further dramatic transformations at any moment. "That is all, Mr. President, fellow delegates. I thank you for your attention. I look forward to your cooperation."   mians fit into your theology?" "Only too well. Commander," replied Lieutenant Rodrigo with a humorless smile. "It's the age-old conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil. And there are times when men have to take sides in such a conflict."  thought it would be something like that, Norton told himself. This situation must have been a shock to Boris, but he would not have resigned himself to passive acquiesence. The Cosmo-Christers were very energetic, competent people. Indeed, in some ways they were remarkably like the Hermians. "I take it you have a plan. Rod." "Yes, Commander. It's really quite simple. We merely have to disable the bomb." "Oh? And how do you propose to do that?" "With a small pair of wirecutters." If the suggestion had been made by anyone else Norton would have assumed that it was intended as a joke. But Boris Rodrigo did not joke about most matters. "Now just a minute -- the probe is bristling with cameras. Do you suppose the Hermians will just sit and watch you?" "Of course. That's all they can do. When the signal reaches them it will be far too late for them to do anything else. I can easily finish the job in ten minutes." "I see. They certainly will be mad. But suppose the bomb is boobytrapped so that interference sets it off." "That seems very unlikely -- what would be the purpose? This bomb was built for a specific deep-space mission and it will be fitted with all sorts of safety devices to prevent detonation except on a positive, command. But that's a risk I'm prepared to take. And it can be done without endangering the ship. I've worked everything out." "I'm sure you have," said Norton. The idea was almost seductive in its appeal. He particularly liked the thought of frustrated Hermians and stood ready to give a good deal to record their reactions when they realized -- too late -- what was happening to their deadly toy. But there were other complications and these seemed to multiply as Norton surveyed the problem. He was facing by far the most difficult, and the most crucial, decision of his entire career. And that was a ridiculous understatement. He was faced with the most difficult decision any commander had ever had to make -- the future of the entire human race might well depend upon it. For just suppose the Hermians were right? switched on the Do Not Disturb sign. He could not remember when he had last used it and was mildly surprised that it was working. Now, in the heart of his crowded, busy ship, he was completely alone -- except for the portrait of Captain James Cook gazing at him down the corridors of time. It was impossible to consult with Earth. He had already been warned that any messages might be tapped, perhaps by relay devices on the bomb itself. That left the whole responsibility in his hands. He could do nothing and simply wait until the Hermians advised him to leave. How would that look in the histories of the future? Norton was not greatly concerned with posthumous fame or infamy, yet he did not care to be remembered forever as the accessory to a cosmic crime it had been in his power to prevent. And Rodrigo's plan was flawless. As Norton had expected, Rodrigo had worked out every detail, anticipated every possibility, even the remote danger that the bomb might be triggered when tampered with. If that happened Endeavor would still be safe behind the shield of Rama. As for Lieutenant Rodrigo himself -- he seemed to regard the possibility of instant apotheosis with complete equanimity. To act, or not act -- that was the question. Whatever he did, the possibilities for good and evil seemed in perfect balance. He was faced with the most morally difficult of all decisions. If his choice turned out wrong he would know very quickly. But if he were correct he might never be able to prove it. The time had come to listen to his inner voices. He pressed the call button for the bridge circuit and said slowly, "Lieutenant Rodrigo -- I'd like to see you." Then he closed his eyes, hooked his thumbs in the restraining straps of his chair and prepared to enjoy a few moments of total relaxation. It might be some time before he would experience it again. T he scooter had been stripped of aU unnecessary equipment -- it was now merely an open framework holding together propulsion, guidance and life-support systems. Even the seat for the second pilot had been removed, for every kilogram of extra mass had to be paid for in mission time. That was one of the reasons, though not the most important, why Rodrigo had insisted on going alone. It was such a simple job that there was no need for any extra hands and the mass of a passenger would cost several minutes of flight time. Now the stripped-down scooter could accelerate at over a third of a gravity and could make the trip from Endeavor to the bomb in four minutes. That left six to spare -- they should be sufficient. Rodrigo looked back only once when he had left the ship. He saw that, as planned. Endeavor had lifted from Rama's central axis and was thrusting gently away across the spinning disk of the North Face. By the time he reached the bomb she would have placed the thickness of Rama between them. He took his time, flying over the polar plain. There was no hurry here because the bomb's cameras could not yet see him and he could therefore conserve fuel. Then he drifted over the curving rim of the world -- and there was the missile, glittering in sunUght fiercer even than that shining on the planet of its birth. Rodrigo had already punched in the guidance instructions. He initiated the sequence. The scooter spun on its gyros and came up to full thrust in a matter of seconds. At first the sensation of weight seemed crushing but Rodrigo adjusted to it. He had, after all, comfortably endured twice as much inside Rama and had been born under three times as much on Earth. The huge, curving exterior wall of the forty-kilometer cylinder was slowly falling away beneath him as the scooter aimed itself directly at the bomb. Yet it was impossible to judge Rama's size, since it was completely smooth and featureless -- so featureless, indeed, that it was difficult to tell that it was spinning. One hundred seconds into the mission: he was approaching the halfway point. The bomb was stUl too far away to show any details, but it was much brighter against the jetblack sky. It was strange to see no dazzling Venus. The dark filters that protected his eyes against the deadly glare made sightseeing impossible. Rodrigo guessed that he was breaking a record; probably no other man had ever engaged in extra-vehicular work so close to the sun. Luckily solar activity was low. At two minutes, ten seconds the flipover light started flashing. Thrust dropped to zero and the scooter spun through # degrees. FuU thrust was back in an instant, but now he was decelerating at the same mad rate of three meters per second squared -- rather better than that, in fact, since he had lost almost half his propellant mass. The bomb was twenty-five kilometers away; he would be there in another two minutes. He had hit a top speed of fifteen hundred kilometers an hour, utter insanity for a space scooter and probably another record. But this was hardly a routine was doing. T he bomb was growing. He could now see the main antenna holding steady on the invisible star of Mercury. Along that beam the image of his approaching scooter had been flashing at the speed of Ught for the last three minutes. There were still two to go before it reached Mercury. What would the Hermians do when they saw him? There would be consternation, of course. They would realize instantly that he had made a rendezvous with the bomb several minutes before they had even known he was on the way. Probably the first observer to detect him would call higher authority. That would take more time. But even in the worst possible caseeven if the observer on duty had authority to detonate the bomb and pressed the button immediately -- it would take another five minutes for the signal to reach the bomb. Though Rodrigo was not gambling on it -- Cosmo-Christers never gambled -- he was quite sure that there would be no such instantaneous reaction. The Hermians would hesitate to destroy a reconnaissance vehicle from Endeavor, even if 'they suspected its motives. They would certainly attempt some form of communication first. Too, they would not want to waste a gigaton bomb on a mere scooter, and wasted it would be if it were detonated twenty kilometers from its target. They would want to move it first. Rodrigo was sure he had plenty of time, but he still planned to assume the very worst. He meant to act as if the bomb's triggering impulse would arrive in the shortest possible time -- in just five minutes. As the scooter closed in across the last few hundred meters Rodrigo quickly matched the details he could now see with those he had studied in photographs taken at long range. The bomb was a cyUnder about ten meters long and three in diameter -- by a strange coincidence its proportions nearly matched those of Rama. It was attached to the framework of the carrier vehicle by an open latticework of short I-beams. For some reason, probably having to do with the location of the center of mass, it was supported at right angles to the axis of the carrier, so that it conveyed an appropriately sinister hammerhead impression. It was indeed a hammer: one powerful enough to smash a world. From each end of the bomb a bundle of braided cables ran along the cylindrical side and disappeared through the latticework into the interior of the vehicle. All communications and controls were here -- there was no antenna of any kind on the bomb itself. Rodrigo had only to cut those two sets of cables and there would be nothing here but harmless, inert metal. Although this was exactly what he had expected, the job now seemed a little too easy. He glanced at his watch. It would be another thirty seconds before the Hermians, even if they had been watching when he rounded the edge of Rama, could know of his existence. He had an absolutely certain five minutes for uninterrupted work and a # per cent probability of much longer than that. As soon as the scooter had drifted to a complete halt Rodrigo grappled it to the missile framework, so that the two formed a rigid structure. That took only seconds. He had already chosen his tools and was out of the phot's seat at once, only slightly hampered by the stiffness of his heavyinsulation suit. The first thing he found himself inspecting was a small metal plate bearing the inscription: Section D. # Sunset Boulevard, Vulcanopolis # For information; apply to Henry K. Jones. Rodrigo suspected that in a very few minutes Mr. Jones might be rather busy. The heavy wirecutters made short work of the cable. As the first strands parted Rodrigo gave scarcely a thought to the fires of hell that were pent up only centimeters away. If his actions triggered them he would never know. He glanced again at his watch. He had spent less than a minute, which meant that he was on schedule. Now for the backup cable -- and then he could head for home in full view of the furious and frustrated Hermians. He was just beginning to work on the second cable assembly when he felt a faint vibration in the metal he was touching. Startled, he looked back along the body of the missile. The characteristic blue-violet glow of a plasma thruster in action was hovering around one of the attitude control jets. The bomb was preparing to move. T he message from Mercury was brief and devastating. It arrived two minutes after Rodrigo had disappeared around the edge of Rama. Norton read it with disbelief and anger. He felt a childish impulse to radio back that all his crew was inside Rama, and it would take hours to get everyone out. But that would achieve nothing -- except perhaps to test the will and nerve of the Hermians. And why had they decided to act several days before Rama reached perihelion? He wondered if the mounting pressure of public opinion had become too great and they had decided to present the rest of the human race with a fait accompli. It seemed an unlikely explanation; such sensitivity would have been uncharacteristic. There was no way Norton could recall Rodrigo, for the scooter was now in the radio shadow of Rama and would be out of contact until they were in Une of sight again. That would not happen until the mission was completed -- or had failed. Norton would have to wait it out. He still had plenty of time -- a full fifty minutes. MeanwMe, he had decided on the most effective answer to Mercury. He would ignore the message completely and see what the Hermians did next. not one of physical fear-it was something much more devastating. He believed that the universe operated accorded to strict laws that not even God Himself could disobey, much less the Hermians. No message could travel faster than light. He was five minutes ahead of anything that Mercury could do. That the bomb was starting to move could only be a coincidencefantastic, and perhaps deadly, but no more than that. By chance, a control signal must have been sent to the bomb at about the time he was leaving Endeavor. While he had been traveling fifty kilometers it Or perhaps the bomb's movement was only an automatic change of attitude to counter the overheating somewhere in the vehicle. There were places where the skin temperature approached fifteen hundred degrees and Rodrigo had been careful to keep as much in the shadows as possible. A second thruster started to fire, checking the spin given by the first, so this was not a mere thermal adjustment. The bomb was reorienting itself to point toward Rama. Useless to wonder why this was happening at this precise moment in time. There was one thing in his favor -- the missile was a low-acceleration device. A tenth of a gee was the most that it could manage. He could hang on. He checked the grapples attaching the scooter to the bomb's framework and rechecked the safety line on his own suit. A cold anger was growing in his mind, adding to his determination. Did this maneuver mean that the Hermians were going to explode the bomb without warning, giving Endeavor no chance to escape? That seemed incredible -- an act not only of brutality but of folly, calculated to turn the rest of the solar system against Mercury. And what would have made the Hermians ignore the solemn promise of their own ambassador? Whatever their plan, they would not get away with it. T he second message from Mercury was identical with the first and arrived ten minutes later. So they had extended the deadline -- Norton still had one hour. They had obviously waited until a reply from Endeavor could have reached them before calling him again. Now there was another factor; by this time they must have seen Rodrigo and would have had several minutes in which to take action. Their instructions to the bomb could already be on the way and might arrive at any second. He should be preparing to leave the area. At any moment the skyfilUng bulk of Rama might become incandescent along the edges, blazing with a transient glory that would far outshine the sun. Rodrigo was securely anchored. Only twenty seconds later it cut off again. He did a quick mental calculation and decided the bomb at its present rate of speed would take over an hour to reach Perhaps it was only moving in close to get a quicker reaction. If so, the precaution was a wise one, but the Hermians had taken it too late. Rodrigo glanced at his watch, though by now he was almost aware of the time without having to check. Observers on Mercury would now be seeing him heading purposefully toward the bomb and less than two kilometers away from it. They could have no doubt of his intentions and would be wondering if he had already carried them out. The second set of cables were severed as easily as the first. Like any good workman, Rodrigo had chosen his tools well. The bomb was disarmed or, to be more accurate, it could no longer be detonated by remote command. One other danger remained and Rodrigo could not afford to ignore it. There were no external contact fuses, but there might be internal ones that would be armed by the shock of impact. The Hermians still had control over their vehicle's movement and could crash it into Rama whenever they wished. Rodrigo's work was not yet completed. Five minutes from now, in that control room somewhere on Mercury, they would see him crawling back along the exterior of the missile, carrying the modest wirecutters that had neutralized the mightiest weapon ever built by man. He was almost tempted to wave at the camera, but decided that the gesture would be undignified. He was, after aU, making history and the years to come. Unless, of course, the Hermians destroyed the recording in a fit of pique -- for which he would hardly blame them. He reached the mounting of the long-range antenna and drifted hand-over-hand along it to the big dish. His faithful cutters made short work of the multiplex feed system, chewing up cables and laser Wave guides alike. When he made the last snip the antenna started to swing slowly around. The unexpected movement took him by surprise until he realized that he had destroyed the automatic communications lock on Mercury. Exactly five miriutes from now the Hermians would lose all contact with their servant. Not only was it impotentnow it was blind and deaf. Rodrigo climbed slowly back to the scooter, released the shackles and swung it around until the forward bumpers were pressing against the missile, as close as possible to its center of mass. He brought thrust up to full power and held it there for twenty seconds. Pushing against many times its own mass, the scooter responded very sluggishly. When Rodrigo cut the thrust back to zero he took a careful reading of the bomb's new velocity vector. It would miss Rama by a wide margin -- and it could be located again with precision at any future time. It was, after all, a valuable piece of equipment. Lieutenant Rodrigo was a man of almost pathological honesty. He would not like the Hermians to accuse him of losing their property. I J "this nonsense has cost us more than a day, but at least it's given me a chance to talk to you. "I'm still in the ship and she's heading back to station at the polar axis. We picked up Rod an hour ago, looking as if he'd just come off duty after a quiet watch. I suppose neither he nor I will ever be able to visit Mercury again and I'm wondering if we're going to be treated as heroes or villains when we get back to Earth. But my conscience is clear. I'm sure we did the right thing. I wonder if Rama will ever say, 'Thank you.' "We can stay here only two more days. Unlike Rama, we don't have a kilometer-thick skin to protect us from the sun. The hull's already developing dangerous hotspots and we've had to pu,t out some local screening. I'm sorry. I didn't want to bore you with my problems. At any rate, there's time for just one more trip into Rama and I intend to make the most of it. But don't worry -- I'm not taking any chances." He stopped the recording. He was, to say the least, stretching the truth. A sense of danger and uncertainty filled all his moments inside Rama. No man could ever feel really at home there, in the presence of forces beyond his understanding. And on this final trip, now that he knew he could never return and that no future operations would be risked, he intended to press his luck just a little further. He resumed: "In forty-eight hours, then, weTl have completed this mission. What happens afterward is still uncertain. As you know, we've used virtually aU our fuel getting into this orbit. I'm still waiting to hear if a tanker can rendezvous with us in time to get us back to Earth, or whether we'll have to make planetfall on Mars. Anyway, I should be home by Clmstmas. Tell Junior I'm sorry I can't bring a baby biot -- there's no such animal. "We're all fine, but very tired. I've earned a long leave after all this and you and I will make up for lost time. Wliatever others say about me, you can claim you're married to a hero. How many wives have husbands who have literally saved a world?" As always, he listened carefully to the tape before duping it, to make sure that it was applicable to both his families. It was strange to think that he did not know which of them he would see first. Usually his schedule was determined at least a year in advance, by the inexorable movements of the planets themselves. But that had been in the days before Rama. Now nothing would ever be the same again. #TF WE try it," said Karl MerXcer, "do you think the biots will stop us?" "That's one of the things I want to find out. Why are you looking at me like that?" "I was wondering. Commander, if you think you own Rama. Until now you've vetoed any attempt to cut into buildings. Why the switch? Have the Hermians given you ideas?" Norton laughed, then suddenly checked himself. It was a shrewd question. He himself was not sure if the obvious answers were the right ones. "I may have been ultra-cautious -- I've tried to avoid trouble. But this is our last chance. If we're forced to retreat in a hurry we won't have lost much." "Assuming that we retreat in good order." "Of course. But the biots have never shown hostility. And except for the spiders, I don't believe there's anything here that can catch us if we do have to run for it." "You may run, skipper, but I intend to leave with dignity. Incidentally, I've decided why the biots are so polite to us." "It's a little late for a new theory." "Here it is anyway. They think we're Ramans. They can't tell the difference between one oxy-eater and another." "I don't believe they're that stupid." "It's not a matter of stupidity. They've been programed for their particular jobs and we simply don't come into their frame of reference." "Perhaps you're right. We may find out as soon as we start work on London." joyed those old bank-robbery movies, but he had never expected to be involved in one. Yet breaking and entering was what he was doing now. The deserted streets of "London" seemed full of menace, though he knew that mostly his guilty conscience was bothering him. He did not really believe that the sealed and windowless structures ranged all around were full of watchful inhabitants, waiting to emerge in angry hordes as soon as the invaders laid a hand on their property. In fact, he was quite certain that this whole complex -- like all the other towns -- was merely some kind of storage area. Yet his second fear, also based on innumerable ancient crime dramas, might be better grounded. His activities might not evoke clanging alarm bells and screaming sirens, but it was reasonable to assume that Rama would have some kind of warning system. Or how did the biots know when and where their services were needed? There was a smell of nitric oxides as the air itself started to burn in the beam of Joe's laser torch, and a steady sizzling as the fiery knife sliced toward secrets that had been hidden since the birth of man. Nothing material could resist this concentration of power and the cut proceeded smoothly at a rate of several meters a minute. In a remarkably short time a section large enough to admit a man had been sliced out. As the cutaway section showed no sign of moving Sergeant Myron tapped it gently -- then harder -- then banged on it with all his strength. It fell inwards with a hollow, reverberating crash. Once again, as he had done during that very first entrance into Rama, Norton remembered the archeologist who had opened the old Egyptian tomb. He did not expect to see the glitter of gold; in fact, he entertained no preconceived ideas at all as he crawled through the opening, his flashlight held in front of him. A Greek temple made of glass -- that was his first impression. The building was filled with row upon row of vertical crystalline columns, about a meter wide and stretching from floor to ceiling. Hundreds of them marched away into the darkness beyond the reach of his light. Norton walked toward the nearest column and directed his beam into its interior. Refracted as if through a cylindrical lens, the light fanned out on the far side to be focused and repetition in the array of pillars beyond. He felt that he was in the middle of some complicated demonstration in optics. "Very pretty," said the practical Mercer, "but what does it mean? Who needs a forest of glass pillars?" Norton rapped gently on the column. It sounded solid, though more metallic than crystalline. He was completely baffled and so followed a piece of useful advice he had heard long ago; When in doubt, say nothing and move on. As he reached the next column, which looked exactly like the first, he heard an exclamation of surprise from Mercer. "I could have sworn this pillar was empty. Now there's something inside it." Norton glanced back quickly. "Where? I don't see anything." H e followed the direction of Mercer's pointing finger. It was aimed at nothing; the column was stiU completely transparent. "You can't see it?" Mercer asked incredulously. "Come around to this side. Damn -- now I've lost it!" "What's going on here?" demanded Calvert. It was several minutes before he got even the first approximation to an answer. The columns were not transparent from every angle or under all illumination. As one walked around them, objects would suddenly flash into view, apparently embedded like flies in amber, and would then disappear again. There were dozens of them, aU different. They looked real and solid, yet many seemed to occupy the identical spaces. "Holograms," said Calvert, "Just like a museum on Earth." That was the obvious explanation, therefore Norton viewed it with suspicion. His doubts grew as he examined the other columns and either discovered or conjured up the images stored in their interiors -- he was not sure which. He thought he could identify hand tools (though for huge and peculiar hands), containers, small machines with keyboards that seemed to have been made for more than five fingers, scientific instruments, startlingly conventional domestic utensils, including knives and plates which, apart from their size, would have not attracted a second glance on any terrestrial table. They were aU there, with hundreds of less identifiable objects, often jumbled up together in the same pillar. A museum, surely, would have some logical arrangement, some segregation of related items. What he saw seemed to be a completely random collection of hardware. "All right. Let's try the cameras on these," he said. "They might make sense to somebody." The crew had photographed the elusive images inside a score of the crystal pillars when the sheer variety of items gave Norton a clue. Perhaps this was not a collection, but a catalog, indexed according to some arbitrary but perfectly logical system. He thought of the wild juxtapositions that any dictionary or alphabetized list will give, and tried out the idea on his companions. "I see what you mean," said Mercer. "The Ramans might be equally surprised to find us putting -- ah -- camshafts next to cameras." "Or books beside boots," added Calvert, after several seconds of hard thinking. One could play this game for hours, he decided, with increasing degrees of impropriety. "That's the idea," replied Norton. "This may be an indexed catalog for three-D images -- templates -- solid blueprints, if you like." "For what purpose?" "Well, you know the theory about the biots, the idea that they don't exist until they're needed and then they're created -- synthesized -- from patterns stored somewhere?" "I see," said Mercer, slowly and thoughtfully. "So when a Raman needs a left-handed blivet he punches out the correct code number and a copy is manufactured from the pattern in here." "Something like that. But please don't ask me about the practical details." The pillars among which they had been moving had been steadily growing in size and were now more than two meters in diameter. The images were correspondingly larger; it was obvious that, for doubtless excellent reasons, the Ramans believed in sticking to a one-to-one scale. Norton wondered how they stored anything really big. coverage the four explorers spread out and were taking photographs as quickly as they could get their cameras focused on the fleeting images. This was an astonishing piece of luck, Norton told himself, though he felt that he had earned it -- they could not possibly have made a better choice than this Illustrated Catalog of Raman artifacts, And yet, in another way, it could hardly have been more frustrating. There was nothing actually here except impalpable patterns of hght and darkness. These apparently solid objects did not really exist. Even knowing this, more than once Norton felt an almost irresistible urge to laser his way into one of the pillars, so that he could have something material to take back to Earth. It was the same impulse, he told himself wryly, that would prompt a monkey to grab the reflection of a banana in a mirror. He was photographing what seemed to be some kind of optical device when Calvert's shout started him running through the pillars. "Skipper -- Karl -- Will -- look at this!" Joe was prone to sudden enthusiasms, but what he had found now was enough to justify any amount of excitement. Inside one of the two-meter columns was an elaborate harness or uniform, obviously made for a vertical creature much taller than a man. A narrow central metal band apparently surrounded the waist, thorax, or some division unknown to terrestrial zoology. From this rose three slim columns, tapering outward and ending in a perfectly circular belt, an impressive meter in diameter. Loops equally spaced along it could only be intended to go around upper limbs or arms -- three of them. There were numerous pouches, buckles, bandoliers from which tools (or weapons?) protruded, pipes and electrical conductors, even small black boxes that would have looked perfectly at home in an electronics lab on Earth. The whole arrangement was almost as complex as a spacesuit, though it obviously provided only partial covering for the creature wearing it. "About two and a half meters high," said Mercer thoughtfully, "not counting the head -- whatever that was like." "With three arms and presumably three legs. The same plan as the spiders, but on a much more massive scale. Do you suppose that's a coincidence?" "Probably not. We design robots in our own image. We might expect the Ramans to do the same." Joe Calvert, unusually subdued, was looking at the display with something like awe. "Do you suppose they know we're here?" "I doubt it," said Mercer. "We haven't even reached their threshold of consciousness, though the Hermians certainly had a good try." They were still standing there, unable to drag themselves away, when Pieter called from the Hub, his voice full of urgent concern. "Skipper -- you'd better get outside." "What is it -- biots heading this way?" "No -- something much more serious is happening. The lights are going out." side, it seemed to Norton that the six suns of Ramc were as had made a mistake... Pieter had anticipated his reaction. "It happened so slowly," he explained, "that it was a long time before I noticed any difference. But there's no doubt about it. I've taken a meter reading. The light level's down forty per cent." Now, as his eyes readjusted themselves after the gloom of the glass temple, Norton could believe him. The long day of Rama was drawing to its close. It was still as warm as ever, yet Norton felt himself shivering. He had known this sensation once before, during a beautiful summer day on Earth. There had been an inexplicable weakening of light as if darkness were falling from the sky, though not a cloud had been visible. Then he remembered -- a partial eclipse had been in progress. "This is it," he said grimly. "We're going home. Leave all the equipment behind. We won't need it again." Now, he hoped, one piece of planning was about to prove its worth. He had selected London for this raid because no other town was so close to a stairway. The foot of Beta was only four kilometers away. The men set out at a steady, loping trot, the most comfortable mode of traveling at half a gravity. Norton set a pace which, he estimated, would get them to the edge of the plain without exhaustion and in minimum time. He was acutely aware of the eight kilometers they would still have to climb when they had reached Beta, but he would feel much safer when they had actually started the ascent. The first tremor came when they had almost reached the stairway. It was very slight and instinctively Norton turned toward the south, expecting to see another display of fireworks around the Horns. But Rama never seemed to repeat itself exactly. If there were any electrical discharges above those needle-sharp mountains they were too faint to be seen. "Bridge," he called, "did you notice that?" "Yes, skipper. Very small shock. Could be another attitude change. We're watching the rate gyro. Nothing yet. Just a minute! Positive reading. Can just detect it -- less than a microradian per second, but holding." So Rama was beginning to turn, though with almost imperceptible slowness. Those earlier shocks might have been a false alarm but this, surely, was the real thing. "te increasing -- five microrad. Hello, did you feel that shock?" "We certainly did. Get all ship's systems operational. We may have to leave in a hurry." "Do you expect an orbit change already? We're still a long way from perihelion." "I don't think Rama works by our textbooks. We're just about at Beta. We'll rest here for five minutes." Five minutes was utterly inadequate, yet it seemed an age. For there was now no doubt that the light was failing and failing fast. Though they were all equipped with flashlights, the thought of darkness here was now intolerable. They felt an overwhelming urge to escape, to get out into the light of the sun, a kUometer away on the other side of these cylindrical walls. Norton called Hub. "Is the searchlight operating? We may need it in a hurry." "Yes, skipper. Here it comes." started to shine eight kilometers above their heads. Even against the fading day of Rama it looked surprisingly feeble, but it had served them before and would guide them once again if they needed it. Tliis, Norton was grimly aware, would be the longest and most nerve-wracking climb they had ever made. Whatever happened, it would be impossible to hurry. If they overexerted themselves they would simply collapse somewhere on that vertiginous dope and would have to wait untU their protesting muscles permitted them to continue. By this time, he thought, he and his men had to be one of the fittest crews that had ever carried out a space mission. Still, Rama imposed limits to what flesh and blood could do. After an hour's steady plodding they had reached the fourth section of the stairway, about tliree kilometers from the plain. From nowon travel would be easier-gravity was already down to a third of Earth value. Although there had been minor shocks from time to time, no other unusual phenomena had occurred and there was still plenty of light. Norton began to feel more optimistic and even wondered if he had cut off the exploration of the crystal pillars too soon. One thing was certain, however: there was no going back. He and those with him had walked for the last time on the plain of Rama. It was while they were taking a ten-minute rest on the fourth platform that Joe Calvert suddenly asked, "What's that noise, skipper?" "I don't hear anything." "High-pitched whistle -- dropping in frequency. You don't hear it?" "Your ears are younger than mine -- oh, now I catch it." The whistle seemed to come from everywhere. Soon it was loud and piercing, then fell swiftly in pitch. Suddenly it stopped. A few moments later it came again, repeating the same sequence. Despite its alienness the sound had the mournful, compelling quality of a lighthouse siren sending out its warnings into the fog-shrouded night. It held a message -- and an urgent one. It was not designed for their ears, yet they caught the sense of it. Then, as if to make doubly sure, it was reinforced by the lights themselves. They dimmed almost to extincbeads like ball lightning raced along the six narrow valleys that had moments earlier illuminated this world. They moved from both poles towards the sea in a synchronized, hypnotic rhythm which could have only one meaning. To the sea! the lights were calling. To the sea! And the summons was hard to resist. There was not a man who did not feel a compulsion to turn back, to seek oblivion in the waters of Rama. Norton called Hub urgently. "Can you see what's happening?" The voice of Pieter came back to him, sounding awed and more than a little frightened. "Yes, skipper. I'm looking across at the southern continent. There are still biots over there, including some big ones. Cranes, bulldozers -- lots of scavengers. And they're all rushing back to the sea faster than I've ever seen them move before. There goes a craneright over the edge! Just like Jimmy, but going down a lot quicker. It smashed to pieces when it hit. And here come the sharks. They're tearing into it -- uh -- it's not a pleasant sight. "Now I'm looking at the plain. Here's a bulldozer that seems to have broken down -- it's going around in circles. Now a couple of crabs are tearing into it, pulling it to pieces -- skipper, I think you'd better get back right away." "Believe me," Norton said with deep feeling, "we're coming just as quickly as we can." hatches like a ship preparing for a storm. That was Norton's overwhelming impression, though he could not have put it on a logical basis. He no longer felt completely rational. Two compulsions were warring in his mind -- the need to escape and the desire to obey those bolts of lightning that still flashed across the sky, ordering him to join the biots in their march to the sea. One more section of stairway -- another ten-minute pause to let the fatigue poisons drain from his muscles. Then on again -- another two kilometers to go... The maddening sequence of descending whistles ceased. At the same moment, the fireballs racing along the slots of the Straight Valleys stopped their seaward strobing. Rama's six linear suns were once more continuous bands of light. But they were fading fast and sometimes they flickered, as if tremendous Jolts of energy were being drained from waning power sources. From time to time slight tremors occurred underfoot. The bridge reported that Rama was still swinging with imperceptible slowness, like a compass needle responding to a weak magnetic field. This was perhaps reassuring -- when Rama stopped its swing Norton would really begin to worry. All the biots had gone, Pieter reported. In the whole interior of Rama the only movement was that of human beings, crawUng with painful slowness up the curving face of the northern dome. Norton had long since overcome the vertigo he had felt on that first ascent, but now a new fear was beginning to creep into his mind. He and his men were too vulnerable on this endless climb from plain to Hub. Suppose that, when it had completed its attitude change, Rama started to accelerate? Presumably its thrust would be along the axis. If it came in the northward direction, that would be no problem -- they would be held a little more firmly against the slope they were ascending. But if it were toward the south they might be swept off into space, to fall back eventually on the plain far below. He tried to reassure himself with the thought that any possible acceleration would be very feeble. Dr. Perera's calculations had been most convincing -- Rama could not possibly accelerate at more than a fiftieth of a gravity, or the Cylindrical Sea would climb the southern cliff and flood an entire continent. But Perera had been in a comfortable study back on Earth, not with kilometers of overhanging metal apparently about to crash down upon his head. And perhaps Rama had been designed for periodic flooding. Norton tried to tell himself that he was being ridiculous. It was absurd to imagine that all these unwieldy tons could suddenly start moving with sufficient acceleration to shake him loose. Nevertheless, for the remainder of the ascent he never let himself get far' from the handrail. The stairway ended lifetimes later. Only a few hundred meters of vertical, recessed ladder were left. It was no longer necessary to climb this section since one man at the Hub, hauling on a cable, could easily hoist another against the rapidly diminishing gravity. Even at the bottom of the ladder a man weighed less than five kilos -- at the top, practically zero. grasping a rung from time to time to counter the feehle Coriolis force stUl trying to push him off the ladder. He almost forgot his knotted muscles, as he had his last view of Rama. The scene was about as bright now as Earth under a full moon. The overall view was clear, but one could no longer make out details. The South Pole was partially obscured by a glowing mist. Only the peak of Big Horn protruded through it-a small, black dot, seen exactly head-on. The carefully mapped but still unknown continent beyond the sea was the same apparently random patchwork that it had always been. It was too foreshortened and too full of complex detail to reward visual examination and Norton scanned it only briefly. He swept his eyes around the encircUng band of the sea and noticed for the first time a regular pattern of disturbed water, as if waves were breaking over roofs set at geometrically precise intervals. Rama's maneuvering was having some effect, but he was sure that Sergeant Barnes would have sailed forth happily under these conditions, had he asked her to cross the sea in her lost Resolution. New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Rome... He said farewell to all the cities of the northern continent, and hoped the Ramans would forgive him for any damage he had done. Perhaps they would understand that it had been in the cause of science -- or at least learning. Suddenly he was at the Hub and eager hands reached out to grab him and hurry him through the airlocks. His overstrained legs and arms were trembling so uncontrollably that he was almost unable to help himself and was content to be handled like a semi-paralyzed invalid. Tire sky of Rama contracted above him as he descended into the central crater of the Hub. As the door of the inner airlock sliut off the view forever he found himself thinking; How strange that night should be fallingnow that Rama is closest to the sun! , adequate safety margin, Norton had decided. Rama was now a huge black rectangle, exactly at broadside, eclipsing the sun. He had used this opportunity to fly Endeavor completely into shadow, so that the load could be taken off the ship's cooling systems and some overdue maintenance could be carried out. Rama's, protective cone of darkness might disappear at any moment and he intended to make as much use of it as he could. Rama was still turning. It had now swung through almost fifteen degrees and it was impossible to believe that some major orbit change was not imminent. On the United Planets excitement had now reached a pitch of hysteria, but only a faint echo of this came to Endeavor. Physically and emotionally her crew was exhausted. Apart from a skeleton watch everyone had slept for twelve hours after take-off from the North Polar Base. On doctor's orders, Norton himself had used electro-sedation. Even so he had dreamed that he was climbing an infinite stairway. The second day back on ship, everything had almost returned to normal. The exploration of Rama already seemed part of another life. Norton started to deal with accumulated office work and to make plans for the future, but he refused the requests for interviews that had somehow managed to insinuate themselves into the Survey, and even Spaceguard radio circuits. There were no messages from Mercury and the United Planets General Assembly had adjourned its session, though it was ready to meet again at an hour's notice. Norton was having his first good night's sleep, thirty hours after leaving Rama, when he was rudely shaken back to consciousness. He cursed groggily, opened a bleary eye at Karl Mercer and then, like any good commander, was instantly awake. "It's stopped turning?" "Yes. Steady as a rock." "Let's go to the bridge." The whole ship was awake. Even the simps knew that something was afoot and made anxious, meeping noises until Sergeant McAndrews reassured them with swift hand signals. Yet as Norton slipped into his chair and fastened the restraints around his waist, he wondered if this might be yet another false alarm. Rama was now foreshortened into a stubby cylinder and the searing rim of the sun had peeked over one edge. Norton jockeyed Endeavor gently back into the umbra of the artificial eclipse and saw the pearly splendor of the corona reappear across a background of the brighter stars. There was one huge prominence, at least had climbed so far from the sun that its upper branches looked like a tree of crimson fire. So now we have to wait, Norton told himself. The important thing is not to get bored, to be ready to react at a moment 's notice, to keep all the instruments aligned and recording, no matter how long it takes... That was strange. The star field was shifting, almost as if he had actuated the roll thrusters. But he had touched no controls and if there had been any real movement, he would have sensed it at once. "Skipper," said Calvert urgently from the navigator's position, "we're roUing-look at the stars. But I'm getting no instrument readings." "Rate gyros operating?" "Perfectly normal-I can see the zero jitter. But we're rolling several degrees a second." "That's impossible." "Of course it is. But look for yourself -- " When all else failed, a man had to rely on eyeball instrumentation. Norton could not doubt that the star field was indeed slowly rotating -- there went Sirius, across the rim of the port. Either the universe, in a reversion to pre-Copernican cosmology, had suddenly decided to revolve around Endeavor -- or the stars were standing still and the ship was turning. The second explanation seemed rather more likely, yet it involved apparently insoluble paradoxes. If the ship were really turning at this rate he would have felt it, literally, in the seat of his pants, as the old saying went. And the gyros could not all have failed simultaneously and independently. Only one answer remained. Every atom of Endeavor must be in the grip of some force -- and only a powerful gravitational field could produce this effect. At least, no other known field. The blazing sun had emerged from behind the shield of Rama and its glare had driven them from the sky. "Can you get a radar reading? What's the doppler?" Norton was fully prepared to find that this, too, was inoperative, but he was wrong. Rama was underway at last, accelerating the modest rate of # gravities. Dr. Perera, Norton told himself, would be pleased -- he had predicted a maximum of #. And Endeavor was somehow caught in its wake like a piece of flotsam, whirling around and around behind a speeding ship. Hour after hour that acceleration held constant, was falling away from Endeavor at a steadily increasing speed. As its distance grew the anomalous behavior of the ship slowly ceased and normal laws of inertia started to operate again. The crew could only guess at the energies in whose backlash the ship had been briefly caught and Norton was thankful that he had stationed Endeavor at a safe distance before Rama had switched on its drive. As to the nature of that drive, one thing was now clear, though all else was mystery. No jets of gas, no beams of ions or plasma were thrusting Rama into its new orbit. No one put it better than Sergeant-Professor Myron when he said in shocked disbelief, "There goes Newton's Third Law." It was Newton's Third Law, however, upon which Endeavor had to depend the next day, when she used her very last reserves of propellant to bend her own orbit outward from the sun. The change was slight, but it would increase her perihelion diswas the difference between running the ship's cooling system at # per cent capacity and a fiery death. When Endeavor had completed its maneuver Rama was two hundred thousand kilometers away and difficult to see against the glare of the sun. But the humans could still obtain accurate radar measurements of its orbit and the more they observed, the more puzzled they became. They checked the figures over and over again, until there was no escaping the unbelievable conclusion. It looked as if all the fears of the Hermians, the heroics of Rodrigo and the rhetoric of the General Assembly, had been utterly in vain. What a cosmic irony, said Norton as he looked at his final figure, if Rama's computers had made one trifling error -- perhaps changing the sign of an equation from plus to minus. Men who had sought to destroy it had been so certain that Rama would lose speed in order to be captured by the sun's gravity and thus become a new planet of the solar system. It was doing just the opposite. It was gaining speed -- and in the worst possible direction. Rama was falling ever more swiftly into the sun. k. became more and more clearly defined it was hard to see how Rama could possibly escape disaster. Only a handful of comets had ever passed as close to the sun -- at perihelion it kilometers above that inferno of fusing hydrogen. No solid material could withstand the temperature of such an approach. The tough alloy that made up Rama hull would start to melt at ten times that distance. Endeavor had now passed its own perihelion -- to everyone's relief -- and was slowly increasing its distance from the sun. Rama was far ahead on its closer, swifter orbit and already appeared well inside the outermost fringes of the corona. The ship would have a grandstand view of the drama's final stage. the sun, and still accelerating, Rama started to spin its cocoon. Until now it had been visible under the maximum power of Endeavor's telescopes as a tiny bright bar; suddenly it began to scintillate, like a star seen through horizon mists. It almost seemed to be disintegrating. When he saw the image breaking up, Norton felt a poignant sense of grief at the loss of so much wonder. Then he realized that Rama was still there, but that it was surrounded by a shimmering haze. And then it was gone. In its place Rama had suddenly contracted into a tiny ball. It was some time before they realized what had happened. Rama had indeed disappeared. It was now surrounded by a perfectly reflecting sphere about a hundred kUometers in diameter. All they could now see was the reflection of the sun itself, on the curved portion that was closest to them, hind this protective bubble Rama was presumably safe from the solar inferno. As the hours passed, the bubble changed its shape. The image of the sun became elongated, distorted. The sphere was turning into an ellipsoid, its long axis pointed in the direction of Rama's flight. It was then that the first anomalous reports started coming in from the robot observatories, which for almost two hundred years had been keeping a permanent watch on the sun. Something was happening to the solar magnetic field in the region meter-long lines of force that threaded the corona and drove its wisps of fiercely ionized gas at speeds that sometimes defied even the crushing gravity of the sun, were shaping themselves around that glittering ellipsoid. Nothing was yet visible to the eye, but the orbiting instruments reported every change in magnetic flux and ultraviolet radiation. And presently even the eye could see the changes in the corona. A faintly glowing tube or tunnel, a hundred thousand kilometers long, had appeared high in the outer atmosphere of the sun. It was slightly curved, bending along the orbit Rama was tracing and Rama itself -- or the protective cocoon around it -- was visible as a glittering bead racing faster and faster down that ghostly tube through the corona. For it was still gaining speed. Now it was moving at more than two thousand kilometers a second, and there was no question of its ever remaining a captive of the sun. Now, at last, Rama's strategy was obvious. It had come so close to the sun merely to tap its energy at the source and to speed itself even faster on the way to its ultimate, unknown goal. And presently it seemed that Rama was tapping more than the sun's energy. No one could ever be sure of this, because the nearest observing instruments were thirty were definite indications that matter was flowing from the sun into Rama itself, as if replacing the leakage and losses of ten thousand centuries in space. Faster and faster Rama swept around the sun, moving now more swiftly than any object that had ever traveled through the solar system. In less than two hours its direction of motion had swung through more than ninety degrees and it had given a final, almost contemptuous proof of its total lack of interest in all the worlds whose peace of mind it had so rudely disturbed. It was dropping out of the ecliptic, down into the southern sky, far below the plane in which aU the planets move. Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way. Norton absent-mindedly at the quiet knock on his door. "Some news for you, BiU. I wanted to give it first, before the crew gets into the act. And anyway, it's my department." Norton still seemed far away. He was lying on his bunk, his hands clasped under his head, eyes half shut, cabin light low -- not really drowsing, but lost in some reverie or private dream. He blinked once or twice and was suddenly back in his body. "Sorry Laura -- I don't understand. What's the news about?" "Don't say you've forgotten." "Stop teasing, you wretched woman. I've had a few things on my mind recently." Surgeon-Commander Ernst slid a captive chair across in its slots and sat down beside him. "Though interplanetary crises come and go, the wheels of Martian bureaucracy grind steadily away. But I suppose Rama helped. Good thing you didn't have to get permission from the Hermians as well." Light was dawning. "Oh -- Port Lowell has issued the permit?" "Better than that -- it's already being acted on." Laura glanced at the slip of paper in her hand. "Immediate," she read. "Probably right now, your new son is being conceived. Congratulations." "Thank you. I hope he hasn't minded the wait." Like every astronaut, Norton had been sterilized when he entered the service. For a man who would spend years in space, radiation-induced mutation was not a risk -- it was a certainty. The spermatozoon that had just delivered its cargo of genes on meters away, had been frozen for thirty years, awaiting its moment of destiny. Norton wondered if he would be home in time for the birth. He had earned rest, relaxation -- such normal family life as an astronaut could ever know. Now that the mission was essentially over, he was beginning to unwind and to think once more about his own future and that of both his families. Yes, it would be good to relax for a while and to make up for lost time -- in many ways. He had some lost time to make up right here. He told Laura so and, reaching for her, began to act upon it. "This visit," protested Laura rather feebly, "was purely in a professional capacity." "After all these years," rephed Norton, "we know each other better than that. Anyway, you're off duty now." This situation, he knew, was doubtless being repeated throughout the ship. Even though they were weeks from home, the end-of-mission "Orbital Orgy" would be in full swing. "Now what are you thinking?" demanded Surgeon-Commander Ernst, very much later. "You're not becoming sentimental, I hope." "Not about us. About Rama. I'm beginning to miss it." "Thanks very much for the compliment." Norton tightened his arms around her. One of the nicest things about weightlessness, he often thought, was that you could really hold someone all night without cutting off the circulation. There were those who claimed that love at one gee was so ponderous that they could no longer enjoy it. "It's a well-known fact, Laura, that men, unlike women, have twotrack minds. But seriously -- well, more seriously -- I do feel a sense of loss." "I can understand that." "Don't be so clinical. Oh, heU, never mind." He gave up. What he felt was not easy to explain even to himself. He had succeeded beyond all reasonable expectations. at his men had discovered in Rama would keep scientists busy for decades. But he had also failed. One might speculate endlessly, but the nature and the purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown. They had used the solar system as a refueling stop, a booster station -- call it what you will -- and had then spurned it completely, on their way to more important business. They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. When Norton had glimpsed Rama for the last time, a tiny star hurthng outward beyond Venus, he knew that part of his life was over. He was only fifty-five, but he felt he had left his youth down there on the curving plain, among mysteries and wonders now receding inexorably beyond the reach of man. Whatever honors and achievements the future brought him, for the rest of his life he would be haunted by a sense of anticlimax and the knowledge of opportunities missed. So he told himself -- but even then, he should have known better. And on far-off Earth, Dr. CarUsle Perera had as yet told no one how he had woken from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious stiU echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.  # # East # Street New York, N Y. # #(t per word per issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. galaxy is now published monthly; IF remains bi-monthly. 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Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellations! No intelligent, aware person -- and certainly no science-fiction reader -- i can afford to be without this dramatic reproduction of the heavens. For it is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. It stretches the mind and the imagination. And as never before, the Celestial Map charts the vast reaches of space through which hurtle space-ship Earth, the solar system, the galaxy itself... Own this magnificent map. It will instruct, entertain and delight you! Advertisement copyright  # by Celestiai Map Company. Offer good until December #, #. (New York Stale residents add applicable sales tax.) A Thing of Beauty. The huge Celestial Map is a distinguished work of art in its own right, sure to adorn any interior. It is sent to you in a stout container designed to protect the valuable contents. The Celestial Map Company P.O. Box #, Grand Central Station New York, N.Y. # Enclosed find # (cash, check or money order). Please rush the Celestial Map to;  A numbered degree scale marks the entire map perimeter  Shows all stars up to and including the sixth magnitude.  Projection is a Mercator rectangle.  Stars are identified by Yale Catalogue numbers. Bright Star numbers, Flamsteed numbers, plus Greek letters and specific star names.  Map is issued in conjunction with the #th Anniversary of Copernicus, the father of modem astronomy.  Map computed by U. of California's star-sifting computer.  Map is plotted by David W. Teske, recipient of the American MuseumHayden Planetarium #I Kepler Award. OF ME Earth basked in her mellow yesterdays beneath stars ablaze with tomorrows. But Diana wanted love today... I charmed. The Seventeenth Century it was. Two weeks and three centuries later we were in love. Her name: Diana Seven; my name: Christopher Charles Mar d'Earth. Both of old stock, or so I thouglit; both certainly of Earth; both certainly human, for what that might mean in this galactic day. She was young, how young I did not know, and I was gracefully middle-yeared for an immortal. I would not see my first century again, but I would be a long time yet in my second. I looked to be somewhen around forty, normal span; she looked an unretouched twenty, except in motion when she looked barely teen and also ageless. Aimo Domini was my first pause in twenty years. I legislate in the Senior Chamber of the Parliament of Stars. We tend to feel, we beings of the Senior Chamber, that our efforts bind the intelligences of the galaxy together, for all that races still aggress and habited planets are still fused in anger. We also feel that, despite all our posturing, blustering and rhetoric, we accomplish notliing save the passage of time, for all that beings have not starved, races have not been destroyed and planets have not turned to stars through our efforts. This dichotomy slowly erodes empathy, emotion and intellect. So I paused. I returned to Sol to become again a man of Earth, an Earthman, and walk among trees and down narrow, twisting streets and wide boulevards -- but mainly to walk among the men and women of Earth, who are my constituency, my ancestry and my soul. The races of man are varied and the farther one gets from Sol the greater the variation, though all are men and can interbreed and trace their language back to a common source -- if they still have sex, if they still have language. But I no more represent the Autocracy or the Diggers of Melvic than I speak for the Denzii Hive or the unfortunate Urechis of Mol. I felt a need for history: to be one with Earth is to be a part of the sequence of man, a product of all that has come before and a precursor to aU that will follow. To return to Sol, to Earth, to man, to our common history: that was my plan. I spent tlie first month in the present, walking, looking, visiting, remembering -- chronolizing myself to the fashions, mores, idiom and art of this most volatile of planetary cultures. Then I retreated to Earth itself, to the past, to Anno Domini, the religious years: twentyfour centuries called after the Son of the One God. The period right before what we call the present era, when man no longer needs any god but himself. Earth is now all past: the present comes no closer than Earth's satellite, the moon; the future -- I wonder at times, what future a planet can have when it has renounced the present. I picked Seventeen to start and was garbed and armed and primed and screened and out before I could say. All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and their entrances... The town was London and the year was sixteen-whatever. In this recreated past the years sometimes slip and events anachron -- a fact of interest but to scholars and pickers of nit. Tlie costumes of our recreated century were exotic, but no more than the smell. Charles had been beheaded a few years before. The Roundheads had been in power for however long the Roundheads were Orange was about to land at Plymouth Dock. I was sitting in the Mermaid Tavern, at a small table at the rear. Next to me, over my left shoulder, was a large round table where Ben Jonson sat deep in conversation with Will Shakspere, John Milton, Edmond Waller and the Earl of Someplace. As writers will when alone together, they were discussing money and I quickly tired of their talk. S HE walked in as I was preparing to leave. Walked? She danced with the unassuming grace of windblown leaves. She flowed across the walk and quickstepped through the door as though directed by a master choreographer and rehearsed a dozen times before this take. These are the images that came to mind as she appeared in the doorway. I sat back down and watched, as she came in. She was aware of everything and interested in aU that she could see, and the very air around her was vibrant with the excitement of her life. And so I was attracted and excited and aware before a word had passed between us. A man too doltish to see what she was stood by the door as she passed. He thought she was something other, and he spoke to her so: "Hey, girl -- hey, wench, you should not be alone. Perhaps I'U keep you company if you ask m.e pretty." She did not reply. She did not seem to hear, but passed him by as if he were a wall. He reached out to grab her by the shoulder and I stood up, my hand falling to the handle of my walking stick. She spun almost before his hand had touched her. She reached out, her fingers appearing almost but not quite to reach his neck. He fell away and she continued the pirouette and came inside without further pause. I must have stood like stone, frozen in my foolish-heroic pose with half-aimed stick. She smiled at me. "No need," she said. "Thank you." I stammered at her some wish that she share my table and she nodded, sat and smiled again, introduced herself as Diana and looked about. She was also, I decided, a visitor to this recreated Seventeen. I pointed out to her the round table next to us and its famous occupants, indicating each one with almost the pride of a creator, as though I had done something clever merely to be sitting next to them. Diana was interested, but not awed. The sound of fifes came at us from a distance. A far rumble soon became the beat of many drums. The entourwent outside the tavern to join the patient mob that awaited his passing. First the soldiers, row on row, and for a long time nothing passed but soldiers. Then soldiers astride horses. Then soldiers astride horses pulling small cannon. Tlien a military band. Then more horses with soldiers astride, but now the uniform had changed. Then a coach and the crowd went wild -- but it was the wrong coach. By now, unless he were twelve feet tall, the new king was an anticlimax. I looked over the crowd and tried to tell which were residents and which were guests of Anno Domini. I couldn't. If this were the real Seventeenth Century -- that is, if it were historical past rather than Anno Dominical recreation -- there would be signs. The pox would have left its mark on most who lived. Rickets would be common. War cripples would be begging from every street corner. This Seventeenth Century, the only one the residents knew, was being redone by a benevolent hand. The new king passed. His coach was open and he smiled and nodded and waved and was cheered. A stout, red-faced little man -- anticlimax. I laughed. We left then, Diana and I, and I offered to walk her to her inn. She named it and I discovered it was my own. "How do you like this time?" I asked her as we walked. "Have you been here long?" "All day," she said. "Then you're a guest too? I wondered why you were the only one in the tavern I hadn't heard of." "Thanks," I said. "In realtime I am weU known. My return to Earth was mentioned as primary news. I am a tliird of Earth's voice in the Parliament of the Stars. I am known and welcome in half a thousand worlds throughout the galaxy. I number some fifty life forms among my friends. It is not necessary that you have heard of me." "You're insulted!" she said, clapping her hands together. "How delightful! Now you make me feel important, that my words could insult one as essential as you. I thank you for feeling insulted. I am pleased." I hadn't thought of it that way, ever before. Somehow she made me glad that I had felt insulted. It was nice to be insulted for her: it made her happy. She reminded me of a beautiful half-grown kitten, newly exploring the world outside its kitten box. T he inn was a U-shaped structure around a central courtyard. The stables were to the right, the rooms to the left and the common room straight ahead. It had been called The Buckingham the last time I was there, some thirty years before. Now, after a decade of being the Pym  Thistle, it sported a new signboard over the door: Tire Two Roses. The device showed a red and a white rose thoroughly entwined. The landlord I didn't remember -- a small, chubby man with a wide smile carved into his unhappy face. I asked him what the new name signified. "It signifies I'm tired of changing the name of my inn," he told me. "I'm becoming nonpohtical. York and Lancaster settled their differences quite a ways back." think it means you prefer the white and red to his orange," I suggested. He looked after me strangely as I escorted Diana across to the common room and we sat at a table in the corner. "Dinner?" I suggested. Diana nodded enthusiastically, "Meat!" she said. "Great gobs of rare roast -- and maybe a potato." "I -- uh -- I think they boil their meat these days," I told her in jest. "No!" She was horrified. "Boil perfectly good, unresisting roasts and steaks? That's barbaric." "O tempora, o mores!" I agreed, wondering what my accent would have sounded like to Marcus Tullius. Diana looked puzzled. I tried again, slanting the accents in a different direction. She looked more puzzled. "It means: 'Oh, what times -- oh, what customs!' It's Latin," I told her. "It's what?" "Latin. That's a pre-language. Ancient and dead." Now I was puzzled. Who was this gjrl of Earth who didn't know of Latin? For the past four hundred years, since humanity had begun trying to recreate its cradle -- or at least its nursery -- all bom of Eartli, except those born on Earth, knew something of prehistory and the prelanguages: the times and the tongues of man before he met the stars. "You know what tongue was spoken here?" I asked her. "Common," she said, looking at me as if I had just asked if she knew what those five slender tubes at the end of her hand were called. "The language of Earth. The one standard language of humans throughout the Galaxy." "I mean," I explained, "what language was spoken in the real Seventeenth Century London? What language aU that beautiful poetry we heard discussed in the tavern by those great names at the next table was translated from?" She sliook her head. "I hadn't thought -- " "English," I said. "Oh. Of course. England -- English. How silly!" The servitor approached the table circumspectly, waiting until he was sure we had finished speaking before addressing us. "Evening m'lord, m'lady," he mumbled. "Roseguddenit. Venice impizenizeto." Diana giggled. "English?" she asked. "Have we really receded in time?" "In time for what?" Diana giggled again. The thin lad in the servitor's apron looked puzzled, unhappy, frightened and resigned. "Would you go over that again?" I asked him. "Parme?" "What you said, lad. Go over it again for diction, please." Now he was also nervous and upset and clearly blamed me. "My lord?" "Speak more slowly," I told him, "and pronounce more carefully and those of us without your quick wit and ready mind will be able to comprehend. Yes?" "Yes, my lord." If he could have killed me... "Sorry, my lord. The roast is good tonight, my lord. The venison pie is very nice, my lord. My lady. What may I serve you?" "Roast!" Diana stated. "Thick slices of roast. You don't boil your roast, do you? You wouldn't do that?" The boy nervously replied that he wouldn't think of it, heard my order, then removed himself like a blown candle flame, leaving not even an after-image. "You frighten people," Diana told me. "It's my most valued ability," I said. "I shall not frigliten you." "You certainly shall not," she agreed. "My teachers were all more menacing than you -- and more unforgiving. And they didn't notice my body." I ignored the last part of her remark and stared into her blue eyes. "You went to an unpermissive school," I said, smiUng. "The universe is unpermissive," she said seriously. It was a learned response and I wondered who had taught it and why. The innkeeper approached us during dessert. "Good?" he asked. "You enjoyed?" "Indeed," I assured him. "My pleasure," he nodded. "My guests. There will be no reckoning." "Gracious of you, sir," Diana said. "Why?" I asked, being wiser and therefore trustless of hostels. "I am taking your suggestion," he told me. "And I thank you by feeding you dinner." "Suggestion?" "Yes. I am changing the name of the inn. Henceforth it shall be known as The Two Roses and the Tulip. I have sent a boy to notify the signpainter." II Diana and I. Hand in hand we walked, although it was conversation and not love that bound us then. We contrasted: she bright and quick, with an aim as true as a hawk's; I ponderous and sure as a great bear (I metaphor our speech only). We learned from each other. I arrayed my vast store of facts before her in the patterns dictated by the logic of my decades -- she swooped and plucked out one here, another there, and presented them as jewels to be examined for themselves, or changed their position to create the fabric of a new logic. "These people," she asked me, waving a hand to indicate the residents in the houses around us, "what do they feel? What do they think? They are human, yes? How can they just spend their lives pretending they're Anno Domini?" "They're not pretending," I told her. "But this isn't the Seventeenth Century." "For them it is. They know of nothing else. Weren't you warned about postchronic talk while you're here?" "I thought it was just not to spoil the -- the -- flavor. Tliey don't know?'" "Truth." "But that's cruel -- unfair!" "Wliy? They're stuck in their lives just as you and I are imbedded in our own. Are we any less actors in someone else's drama than they?" "Philosophy, like reUgion, is a very useful drug," she didacted, "but it should be used only to condone the evils we cannot control -- and not those we create." "You're quoting," I guessed. "My most valued ability," she agreed. "I have a memory like a wideband slow-crystal -- the input can't be erased without destructing the device. Do you condone this make-believe?" "It isn't make-believe. And convince me that it's evil." "But it's so limited -- " "They have the whole world. Their world -- the world of the Seventeenth." "They don't -- not in any real sense. This whole area can't be bigger than -- than -- " She looked to me for help. I shrugged. "I don't know either. But however large it is, it's also -- in a very real sense -- unbounded. How much can a man expect to see in one normal lifetime -- especially limited to horses and sailing ships for transportation? Any of these people who wish to go to France or the New World will get there. Aided by Anno Domini, they will arrive in their France without noticing whatever odd maneuvering the ship does in the 'Channel'. I've taken that trip." Ballantlne  J Boofcg On the top of the science-fiction Robert Silverberg's big new novel. If you think you may have heard the title before, you're right! A year and something ago, the book was serialized in Galaxy, much to everyone's delight. The Chicago Daily News says the book is "...a fascinating speculative novel on the theme of telepathy." Buy it! You'll want a copy for your sf shelf of books to read and read again. When Silverberg is not writing (andor lolling about in his swimming pool, soaking up the California sun), he's editing memorable anthologies. And this month he has on tap series. Collected in this volume are classic stories by Aldiss, Bester, Blish, Carr, Disch, Farmer, Knight, Lafferty, Pangborn, Spinrad and Tenn. Pardon a book not to be missed! Turning to the adultfantasy side retelling of a famous Norse legend. Anderson has long been known for his love affair with the legends and myths of the great Norse heroes. Coordinating, translating and retelling the scattered heroic literature could only be the work of a scholar and a lover of the genre. And that could only be Poul Anderson. Every year, it seems, new readers pop up on the landscape who haven't read some of the all-time favorite books in the field. So in among BB's new titles, you'll find fifteen old favorites -- most with jazzy new covers. Good chance to replace your copies that are fraying around the edges. Good for stocking-stuffers, too! Here are the re-issued favorites: Fahrenheit #I and The October Country, by Ray Bradbury; The Whole Man and Squares of the City, by John Brunner; Dragonf light and Dragonquest, by Anne McCaffrey; The Masks of Time, Up the Line and Thorns, by Robert Silverberg; DrunA:ard's Walk and A Plague of Pythons, by Frederik Pohl whose three "Starare also back; and The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham. What a heady group! To order by mail, send # per book plus #c per order for handling to Ballantine Cash Sales, P.O. Box #, Westminster, Maryland #I #. BB "What would happen if I decided to get up and just walk -- " she pointed off to the left -- "that way, in a straight line?" "You'd come to the edge," I said. "Wherever that is." "Yes. Suppose I were a native -- a residentthen what?" "Then you'd probably fall asleep by the side of the road, and when you woke you'd suddenly remember urgent business back in town, or forget what you were doing there in the first place. And you'd never have the urge to roam again." "You mean they dethink and rethink these people? Just to keep them putting on a show for us?" "Also to keep them happy," I argued. "It's for their own good. Think how they'd feel if they knew they were part of a, a display. This way they live out their lives without knowing of any options. It's no more unfair to live here tlian it was to live in the actual Seventeenth Century. A lot better -- the food is adequate, diseases are eliminated, sanitation is much improved." "It sounds like an argument for slavery," Diana snapped. "Or pigfarming!" be the main street of the district. It was paved and lit. Bayswater High Street, the signpost read. Tlie lights were open flames on stanchions, bright enough to mark the way but not to illuminate. "Perhaps we had better head back," I suggested. "In another half-hour it wUl be too dark to see our way." "The moon will be up in twenty minutes," Diana told me.' "And it's only two days off full. Plenty of light." "Example of your memory?" I asked. She nodded. "I saw a chart once." The houses were two and three story, the upper stories overlapping the first. Picturesque in daylight, they were transformed at dusk into squatting ogres lurking behind the streetlights. The few people left on the street were scurrying like singleminded rats toward their holes. "Some things are changeless," I said, pointing my walking stick at a receding back. "Fear of the night is one such. These people fear footpads and cutthroats -- our people fear the stars. Evolution, I fear, is too slow a process. Our subconscious is still a of our youth." "You mean that literally?" Diana asked. "About our people fearing the stars?" "Extraordinarily literally. Astrophobia is the current mode. Not a fear of standing under the stars, like Chicken Little, but fear that, circling one of those points of light, is the race that will destroy humanity. The in pursuit of this fear. I believe that it couples with the subconscious belief that we deserve to be destroyed. That aU Earth has turned its back to the stars to live wholly in the past is part of the syndrome -- our fears unite here." Diana asked me a question then, something about the deeper manifestations of this ailment, and I prattled on about how easy it was to recognize the problem, but no one was getting it cured because it was chronolous to declare the inside of your head sacrosanct -- if you were of high enough status to make it stick. I'm not sure of what I said, as most of my attention was on three sets of approaching footsteps I was attempting to analyze without alarming Diana. In step, but not in the rhythm of soldiers -- a slightly slower, swaggering step. Three young dandies out for an evening's entertainment, no doubt. They rounded the corner and appeared under the light. They were well dressed, indeed foppishly dressed, and carrying swords -- so they were gentlemen of tliis time. Or at least they were sons of gentlemen. "What say?" the first one said, seeing us. "Say what?" the second demanded. "What?" asked the third. "Wliat ho!" he amended, strutting toward us. "What have we here? A lissome lass, begad! And unescorted." "Madam," the first said, "my lady, ma'am -- chivalry is not dead! We shall prove this." Diana looked puzzled, but completely unafraid. I don't know how I looked -- I felt weak. "Get behind me," I instructed her. "Yes, indeed," the third amplified, "we shall chivalrously rescue you from that old man there, who's #fi clearly attempting to have his vay with you." "We shall," the second added, "expect a suitable reward." "Is this some game?" Diana asked me. "No," I told her. "These lads are going to try to kill me. If they succeed they'll kill you, too -- eventually." The first drew his sword. I twisted the handle of my stick until I felt it click. We were now about eventhree swords against one sword-stick with a narcospray tip. Anyone within one meter of the front of the tip would fall inanimate ten seconds after he was hit -- and I should be able to keep even three of them away for ten seconds. "These are truly enemies?" Diana asked me, staring up into my eyes. There was an undercurrent of excitement in her expression. "Yes," I said briefly. "But don't worry. Just stay -- " "I trust you," she said, nodding as though she had just made a prime decision. "Enemies!" Then she was in motion. S HE dove forward onto her shoulder and pushed off as she rolled, catching the first one on the chin with the heel of her boot. He flew backward and came to a skidding stop on his back across the street. The second was just starting to react when she slammed him across the side of his head with her forearm. He slid slowly to the ground, folding in the middle as he dropped. The third was aware of his danger, although he had no clear idea of what this whirlwind was. His sword was up and he was facing her. I managed one step toward them when, with a small cry of joy, she was past his guard and had fastened both of her hands around his throat. She must have known just where to press with her small fingers, because he didn't struggle, didn't even gasp -- he just crumpled. She went down with him, keeping her grip. Her eyes were alive with excitement and she was grinning. She had, somehow, not the look of a person who has vanquished a foe, but more that of a terrier who has cornered a rat. "All right," I said, going over and pulling her off. "It's aU right. It's all over." She looked up, small and sweet and innocent, except for a rip in the right sleeve of her dress. "He's still alive, this one." "No!" I yelled, when I saw her hands tighten around his throat. She stared at me. "The other two, they are dead." "Leave him," I instructed. "Yes." She stood up, sounding disappointed. I took her hand and led her away. I began to tremble slightly -- a touch of aftershock. Diana was calm and gentle. I had no empathy for the three ruffians -- they had danced to their own tune -- but I worried about Diana. No -- I think rather she friglitened me. I was not concerned with the ease with which she dispatched -- body combat ballet is not new to me. I worried rather about the joy with which she destroyed. I remembered to disarm the stick, so as not to shoot myself in the foot. "Diana," I said, picking my words not to offend, "I admire the way you handled those men. It shows great skill and training. But when a man is down -- more particularly when he is unconscious -- you don't have to kill him." "But he was an enemy. You said so." Semantic problem -- or something more? "Christopher?" We stopped at the innyard and she stared up at me, her eyes wide. "Yes?" Tears were forming in the corners of her eyes and she was shaking. Delayed reaction? I held her and stroked her long hair. "Those men wanted to hurt us. It wasn't a secondary thing, like wanting to take our money and hurting us if we resisted. Tliey just wanted to hurt us." "True." "Why would anyone behave like that?" It wasn't the fight that had her upset, but the morals of her opponents. "You killed two of them and were working on the third," I reminded her. "But that was their doing. You said they were enemies. They declared status, not I. They attacked unprovoked. And I had your word." "Right," I said, deciding to watch my words around this girl who took my definitions so literally and acted K Donald A. Wollheim. Publisher Heading our October list is Andre Norton in a first paperback printing of the original high-priced takes you back to a far section of the Witch World. Amid the conflicts of invasion from the present and past, a half-human princeling learns the meaning of his alien heritage. UQ# -- #c And we have E. C. Tubb continuing the great saga of Earl Dumarest's efforts to find lost Terra. He picks up the trail on Ourelle and sets out to rescue the kidnapped Stuart Gordon opens a new chapter in the future history of the a mutant infant. Extraordinarily colorful and commandingly different, it has a proper cover by Tim Kirk. UQ#-#C of a science-fiction writer, to illustrate reaching that point, and contains his highly praised short story, "The Listeners." UQ# -- #c And in the second of our new Agent of the Spaceways, tackles the adventure by Gregory Kern which will further demonstrate Cap Kennedy as rightful heir to the great hero tradition! UT# -- #c First Time in Paperback. on them with such finality. "Well, they behaved that way because they've been taught to think it's fun." "I don't understand," she said. "Neither do I," I agreed. We retired to our separate rooms and I spent some time studying the cracks in the ceding in an effort to think before I fell asleep. Diana and I spent the next ten days together in Shakspere's London. Diana was delighted by everything and I was delighted by her. We grew closer together in that indefinable way men and women grow closer together, with neither of us mentioning it but both of us quite aware. She questioned me incessantly about everything, but gave little detail in return. I learned she had no family and grew up in a special school run by Earth government. I learned how beautiful she was, inside and out, in motion and in stillness. After the first week we shared the same room. Luckily Seventeen was a time that allowed of such a change. The innkeeper persisted in winking at me whenever he could, until I felt I had earned that dinner, but we suffered no other hardship for our affection. Then one day over breakfast we decided to abandon the Seventeenth Century. I voted for the Twentieth, and Diana ayed, although she knew little of it. "Those are the breakthrough years, aren't they?" she asked. "First flights to the nearer planets!" I munched on a bacon stick. "Out of the cradle and into the nursery, "I said. "And the babes yelling, 'No, no, I don't want to walk-haven't learned to crawl properly yet.' As though that skill were going to be of value to them in the future. Interesting times. As in the ancient curse." "Curse?" Diana asked, wide-eyed as a child. I nodded. "May your children live in interesting times," I said. "Chinese." "Not much of a curse," Diana insisted. "Where are the mummies' hearts and the vampires and such?" "Now that would be interesting," I said. After breakfast I pushed the call for Anno Domini and they removed us in a coach. They declothed us and reclothed us and backgrounded us and thrust us into an aeroplane. Ill T his dubious contrivance, all shiny and silver and with two whole piston engines -- to keep us going forward so we wouldn't fall down -- flew us to LaGuardia Field outside New York City. Tlie field, like the aeroplane, was sleek and shiny and new and modern. Everything was modern -- it was in the air. The modern taxi drove us to the modern city with its modern skyscrapers muraled with the most modern art. The year was # and nothing could go wrong. We checked into the Plaza and took a tenth-floor suite overlooking Central Park. It was evening and the park lights, glowing over the paths, roads, fields, rocks, ponds, streams, lakes and other structured wildnesses, turned it into a rectangular fairyland. The skyline surrounding the park was civilization surrounding and oppressing imagination, keeping it behind high walls and ordering its ways. This is known as interpretive sightseeing. Diana had a lot of things she wanted to do. She wanted to see a play and a movie and a zoo and an ocean liner and a war and a soap opera and a rocket leaving for the moon. "Everything but the rocket," I told her. "Your timing's off by about thirty years. They haven't even designed the machines to build the machines to build the rocket yet." We compromised on a visit to the top of the Empire State Building, the closest thing to a trip to the moon that # New York could provide. "This is all real, isn't it?" Diana asked as we wandered around the guard rail, peering at Bronx tenements and Jersey slums. "In a sense," I said. "I mean the buildings are buildings, not sets, and the streets are streets and the river is a river and the ships are ships." "And the people are people," I agreed. "The original had eight largest cities of the time. That's a lot of people to stuff into a small area and move around by automobile and subway." She nodded. "How many people are here now -- residents, I mean?" "I don't know," I told her. "I doubt if they have the fuU original "Still," she said seriously, "it would be fair to say that there are a great many." "That would be fair," I agreed. "Why are they here?" "It's getting chiUy," I said, buttoning the two top buttons on my coat. "Let's go eat dinner." "How can we justify bilking so many people out of their lives -- out of whatever value their lives might have -- by making them live in an artificial past?" "How do their lives have any less value here than in realtime?" I asked in my best Socratic manner. "Suppose you were an inventor," Diana hypothesized. "How would you feel to discover that you had reinvented the wheel -- or the typer -- or the bloaterjet?" "I'd never know it was a reinvention," I said. "But it would be. And you would have been cheated out of whatever good and new and beautiful you could have invented in realtime." "I doubt Anno Domini encourages invention," I said. "Worse ! Where shall we eat dinner?" We took a Domino Cab to where Glen Miller and his band were providing the dinner music. The music must have soothed Diana, since we got through the rib roast and into the crepes suzette before the sociology seminar continued. "Wliat about people like Glen Miller here -- or Shakspere -- who were real people in history? Are they actors?" "No, they're mindplants. Each of them has the personality and ability of the character he becomes, to the best of our ability to recreate it." Diana sat silent for a minute, considering, her mouth puckered into a tight line and her eyebrows pulled down in concentration. She stared at her spoon. Then she picked it up and waved it at me. "That's disgusting. You don't merely cheat them out of the future -- you cheat them out of their very lives." It was my turn to be silent. I was silent through String of Pearls and Goldberg's Blues. Diana watched me as though expecting momently to see wisdom fall from my lips, or possibly smoke rise from my ears. I found myself uncomfortably defending policies I had never really thought about before. I tried to think it out, but was distracted by Diana's stare. I felt that I had to look as if I were thinking and it's very hard to work at looking the part and think at the same time. "I would say it's more productive rather than less," I said when I had the idea sorted out. "You know our Shakspere has added several plays to the list that the original never got around to writing. Saint Joan and Elizabeth the First -- those are his. We haven't cheated him. Both he and humanity have benefited from this arrangement." "It's not an arrangement," Diana stated positively. "It's a manipulation. It takes two to make an arrangement. Let's dance." T here is something deeply satisfying about two bodies pressed together and moving together. The waltz and the foxtrot are more purely sexual than either the stately minuet before them or the frenzied hump after. We glided about the floor, letting our bodies work at becoming one. "Christopher," Diana said. "Hm?" "I'm glad we've become friends." "More than friends?" "That, too," she said, squeezing against me. "But friends is something else. I think you're my only friend." "I hope you exaggerate," I said. "That's very sad." We danced silently for a moment. Then Diana stopped and pulled me back to our table. We sat down. "This is a major thing, isn't it?" "Friendship?" "No. Anno Domini and this whole recreation. How many different historical times are there?" "You're so beautiful and so serious and so young," I said. "And so intent -- and so knowledgeable in, some fields and so ignorant in others. Whoever brought you up had strange educational values." "I told you I don't like talking about that," she said. Her expression could best be described as petulant. "It requires no conversation," I told her. "Fifty." "Fifty historical periods?" she said, instantly picking up the thread. One of the things I adrriired, that ability. "But there aren't that many centuries!" "Many are covered with more than one set. The really popular ones are started every twenty-five years. All have one, at least. There may be some centuries that appeal not at all to you, but someone has a need for them." "What sort of need? Why that word?" "Ah! Now we speak of purpose: what you asked me before. The past is Earth's only industry. Its function is to hold together the more than two hundred diverse human cultures, spread out on close to a thousand planets, circling as many suns. Tens of thousands of people from aU these planets, all these new directions for humankind, are here at any one time, sharing the one thing they all have in common; the past. "This maintains Earth's preeminence in the councils of man and presumably bolsters her prominence in the Parliament of Stars. But more important; it provides a living point of origin for the human race. "The psychologists decided over four hundred' years ago,' at the time of the Mabden Annihilation, that this was the best -- perhaps the only -- way to hold us together. Those of us who weren't already too far out. There are external threats still, you know." "I know," Diana said dryly. "You mentioned the fear syndrome earlier in this connection." "It should be taken seriously," I insisted. "Here on Earth you feel secure, but it's only because you're so far away from the action. The Denzii -- " "I take it very seriously," Diana assured me. "So seriously that I'd prefer not to talk about it even now." "Yes. I didn't mean to frighten you." "Frigliten?" Diana smiled gently. "No, you don't do that. TeU me, what else is there to do in this year, in this town?" We took the subway to the Battery and walked quietly on the grass around the Aquarium, which was closed and shuttered for the night. Then we took the ferry over to Staten Island and stood in the open on the top deck, letting the cold brinewind flap our coats and sting our cheeks. We waved to the Statue of Liberty and she smiled at us -- or perhaps it was a trick of the light. I had my coat wrapped around Diana and she huddled against my chest and I felt young and bold and ready to explore uncharted worlds. We talked of minor things and we shared a cup of coffee, black and four sugars, and I think, perhaps, realized fuUy that we were in love. T he next day we went to the Bronx Zoo in the morning, came back to Manhattan in early afternoon for a matinee of Our Town, and then returned to the hotel to dress. A man was waiting in the sitting room of our suite. He was standing. "Why, Kroner," Diana said, "how deliglitful to see you. And how silly you look in those clothes here." Thus she effectively suppressed the Who are you and what are you doing in my room? that I had been about to contribute to the occasion. Kroner was a short man with too much hair on his head. He wore a onesuit that squeezed around liis stocky, overly muscled body. The weightlifter is a physical type I have always disliked. I didn't recognize the Identification and Position badge he wore, except that it was medium-high status and something to do with education. "Who is he?" "Kroner," Diana said. "My professor -- or one of. And this is Christopher Mar." "Delighted." Clearly he lied. "Surprised," I said. We touched hands. "To what do we owe this visit and what may we do for you? Any professor of Diana's -- " I waved a hand vaguely. The current trend toward the vague can be very useful in conversation. "I suppose you know what you're doing?" Kroner asked coldly. "I have no idea of what that means," I told him. "At which of us are you sneering?" "Both of you, I suppose," Kroner said. He sighed and sat down on the sofa. "You're right, I was being hostile. And there's no reason. You're a very important man, Senior Senator Mar -- there's no way I can threaten you. And Grecia knows I'm only interested in protecting and helping her. When she disappeared from Seventeen without notifying us -- " "Who?" I interrupted. "Grecia. Your companion." "Is that right?" I asked Diana (Grecia). She nodded. "Of course you have a perfect right-" "What does she call herself?" Kroner asked. "Diana Seven," I said. Diana (Grecia) looked defiantly down at Kroner and remained silent. Kroner nodded thoughtfully. "Of course," he said. "A clear choice. 'Fhen he doesn't know? You haven't told him?" "No," Diana (Grecia) said. "Why should I?" "Of course," Kroner repeated. "From your point of view, no reason. You've always been the most stubborn and independent-minded. No matter how much we strive for uniformity. Not that we mind, you understand -- it's just that the variations make the training more difficult to program. I suppose it will make you harder to predict in action, so it's all for the best." "Haven't told me what?" I demanded. I tried to picture some horrible secret, but nothing would come to mind. "Diana Seven is not a name," Kroner told me, "it's a designation. Choosing it as her alias is the sort of direct thinking we've come to expect from Grecia." "It's a comment," Diana (Grecia) said. "Grecia is number seven in an official government program known as Project Diana," Kroner said. "The number is arbitrary." "So is the name," Diana (Grecia) said. "You know how I was named? Listen, I'll recite the names of the first seven girls, in order -- that should give you the idea: Adena, Beth, Claudia, Debra, Erdra, Fidlia, Grecia. It goes on like that. I prefer Diana Seven, it's more honest." "Diana Seven you are to me forever," I told her. "I don't understand, though. What sort of government project?" "This is going to sound silly," Kroner said, managing to look apologetic, "but I don't think you have the need to know." "I might not have the -- but I do indeed need to know very badly, and I can develop the official Need to Know in a very few minutes realtime." "I will tell everything," Diana said, sitting down on a straightback chair and crossing her shapely legs. "What do you push to get them to bring up drinks?" "I'll do it," I said, picking up the housephone and dialing. "What would you like?" "Coffee," Diana said. "Another profession," Kroner said. "I guess you're right -- we'd better talk about it." "Something harder than coffee for you," I said, and ordered a pot of coffee and a portable bar sent up. "Grecia-" "Call her Diana -- she prefers it." K roner shrugged. He was not Project Diana is one of a series of funding." on Earth, as it was felt that no alteration of the zygote could make up for a happy home life, or some such illogic. "I thought the Bureau of the Future was only involved in longrange planning of city growth and transportation and that sort of thing," I said. "And defense," Kroner told me. "Diana is a defense project." That stopped me. I went into the bedroom to take off my tie and think of something clever to ask. "What do you mean, 'a defense project'?" I cleverly asked when I returned. The bar was ported in then, so I had to wait for my answer. The waiter tried hard to preserve his air of waiterly detachment and not stare at Kroner, and even harder not to smile. Kroner glared at him and stood up, flexing his biceps under the skintight onesuit. "What's the matter?" he demanded. "What are you staring at? Haven't you ever seen a Frog Prince before?" The waiter merely gulped and fled the room. We all burst out laughing and I remembered that in my youth one of my closest friends had been a weightlifter. "You really should have dressed for the period," I told Kroner. He shrugged. "I was wearing a period overcoat," he said, gesturing to a crumpled garment lying over a chair. I fixed our various drinks and we sipped them and stared at each other. "We've been keeping an eye on the girls while they were on their travels," Kroner said. "When Diana took off with you we got worried. Diana has a certain reputation among the staff as a trouble-maker and you are a -- prominent senator. The combination could be explosive." "How?" I asked. "The projects are played down," Kroner said. "For us, any press is bad. We'd be caught between two fires; those who are afraid of any superman is a dead superman' group -- and those who would feel sorry for Diana and her sisters -- poor little girls deprived of a home life and mother love and apple pie." "It might have been nice, you know, all that stuff," Diana said, a surface anger in her voice covering some deeper emotion. "Why do people decide they have the right to do what's good for other people?" "What?" I asked, feeling ignorant and ignored. "We didn't exactly do it because it was good for you," Kroner said sadly. "We did it because it was necessary for us. We never lied to you about that." "Great ethics," Diana said in a low, clipped voice that had an undertone of controlled scream. "We screwed up your life from before you were born, but at least we didn't lie to you -- and that makes it all all right." She turned to me. "Did you know I'm a mule?" she demanded. "What?" "A mule. Or perhaps a hinny. Except instead of a cross between a jackass and a mare, I'm a cross between a human gamete and a micro-manipulator. Sterile." "You mean you're -- " "No pills, no inserts, no children -- no chance. Just me. Dead end. Supermule." I went over to hold her, to show I understood, but she drew away. Mulelike, I couldn't help thinking, in her anger. "I'm on your side, you know," I said to her. She nodded, but stayed encased in herself. I asked Kroner, "In what way is this girl a weapon?" "Not a weapon," Kroner said. "More like a soldier." "A hunting dog," Diana said. Well, it was a better self-image than a mule. Kroner nodded. "In a way. Superfast reflexes, for one thing. One of the reasons she's small: information travels to the brain faster. Nerves react and transmit faster. Eyes see farther into the infrared and ultraviolet. Raw strength is of little use today. You know how old she is?" I didn't. "I'm not good at guessing age," I said. "Twelve," Kroner said. There was, I believe, a long pause then. "Do you mind?" Diana asked softly. "I am surprised," I said. "The tendency in naturally evolved high intelligence is for longer childhoods, not shorter," Kroner said. "You must experience more, cogitate more, and have more time to experiment -- play -- to develop a really high intelligence potential. But it is possible to mature a high intelligence very quickly in an extremely enriched environment. Twelve years from birth to adult is about the best we can manage. The body takes that long to grow and mature anyway, if we want a comparatively normal body." "Diana is an adult," I said. "No matter how many times, or how few, the Earth has circled the sun since her birth." Kroner nodded. "Diana is a highly capable adult, able to handle herself well in almost any situation." "I'll not argue that," I said. "She dispatched three ruffians who attacked us and did so with unseemly ease." "vh!" Kroner said. "We thought that was she. Very good, Diana. Of course, that's what she's been trained and bred for, so it's fitting that she did." "Trained for close combat?" I asked. "What sort of war are you expecting?" "Not that," Kroner explained. "For you, as for most of the rest of being -- and many lower animals -- would be murder. You'd have to steel yourself and be highly motivated to perform the act. For Diana, even humans who are clearly 'enemy' -- is equivalent to hunting. And, like a good hunting dog, she enjoys it. Isn't that so, Diana?" She nodded. "I can't see anything the fact that I know this is genetics and conditioning doesn't matter-all attitudes anyone has are a result of genetics and conditioning. If you gentlemen will excuse me, it's been a long day and I think I'll go to bed." K roner and l spoke privately for a short while after Diana retired. I suspect Diana listened at the door, as she was awake when I went to bed, but if so I'm glad of it. "Does this mean I have to worry about Diana's getting angry at me and breaking my neck?" I asked Kroner, when she had left. "Not at all," he said. "If anything, the opposite. She may tend to overprotect you. To kill a human being who is not an enemy would, in any case, be murder, and she is incapable of murder." "How does she determine an enemy?" "I think, at the moment, she'll take your word for it. She appears to be fixated on you. You may call it love, if you like, but we prefer the scientific term." "I appear to be fixated on her," I said. "Whatever you call it." "That's fine. We approve. As long as you aren't planning to use her -- or make a political issue or anything of that sort -- we're on your side." "Wliat is she doing here anyway? Is school out? Vacation?" Kroner fixed himself another drink. "No," he said. "This is part of her training. Mixing with humanity to learn more fully what it is she may be fighting for. Two years of thisgoing and doing more or less where and what she wants -- then she'll be ready for, let's call it graduate school." "More fixating?" "That's right. Fixating on man. Those in charge of this project seem a bit afraid of their creation." "Historical precedent," I said. "Or, at least, literary." "Yes," Kroner said. "Take care of Diana. Enjoy her. Lx)ve her. She needs more love than the other girls." "You mean she fixates more strongly?" I asked. Kroner smiled. "As of now," he said, "I'm on vacation. Bye." He picked up his coat and left. I went in to sleep with Diana and she held me tight for a long while. I think she would have cried if she had known how. I held her, but it's hard to comfort someone who cannot cry. B ack in realtime -- away from Earth and Anno Domini -- I used my status to find out about the Project. Diana opted to stay with me. We fixated well together. It was difficult, even for me, to open the private record of Project Diana. It was the most recent in a line of such projects dating back to shortly after the Mabden Annihilation. I immersed myself in it and read motive, intent, achievement, method, fear and design in the record crystals. Earth is afraid of its heroes. Always has been. Diana is sterile by design. Female by convenience -- easier to control without the Y chromosome. She is sterile by design. Safer. Can't breed a superrace behind our backs. Diana's cells won't regenerate. Our long life depends upon regeneration -- actually replication -- of certain cells. Diana's -- let us call it template -- is inaccessible to our techniques. Also by design. Safer thus. Can't make long-range plans behind our backs. She will also age fast and be old by forty-probably dead by fifty. I went home that evening and cried myself to sleep. Diana held me, but the crying frightened her and she couldn't help because I wouldn't tell her why, and it's hard to comfort someone unless you know why he's crying. I have two years with her before she has to go off to prepare for the war we may never have. She wants to go. They want her for twenty-five years, she says, and she owes them that. We're planning what we will do when she returns. There are so many things she wants to do and see in this vast galaxy. I promised to show them all to her. I hardly cry at all any more, even late at night. ir NO X it exactly," Harry Norman said. "I still see things as well as ever. Things, I mean, like machinery and cars and houses and trees. And myself, too. In the mirror, when I shave or -- " He glanced down at his hands splayed on his thighs. Brown spots were beginning to appear on them, just as they had appeared on the backs of his father's hands, he remembered, when his father had reached fifty. "It's not things or myself -- it's people, other people. The only way I can think to put it is that they're-well, everybody is fading." Harry Norman was a stocky ruddy-cheeked man with crisp black hair that was lightly flecked with gray. He held his broad shoulders back with a military stiffness that stretched his striped blue-and-white shirt tight across his chest. His dark summer suit was conventionally tailored. His black shoes were shined to a high luster. "I first became aware of it a week ago -- exactly a week ago, in fact. I remember the day because that was when they delivered the new carding machine at the shop. One of my salesmen was standing in the door of my office talking to me. He had a hank of red yarn in his hand and I could see the yarn and the clothes he was wearing distinctly, but all of a sudden his face blurred and his features ran together -- like a fadeout in the movies, if you know what I mean. It lasted only a few seconds and then I could see his face clearly again. "I was startled, but I didn't think much about it afterward. All of us were too excited about the arrival of the new carding machine that day to give much thought to anything else. But that night, at home, when my son Dave came in late to dinner and sat down opposite me, I noticed he had shaved off his beard and cut his hair and I started to say something to him about it. I've never minded the beard much, but I couldn't stand the long hair, although I've never criticized it. So I started to say something then -- tell him how much better he looked -- when suddenly the hair was all there again, down to his shoulders. And the beard was back, too. That was when I decided I'd have you examine my eyes." The oculist, Charles Warren, a gray wisp of a man whom Harry Norman had known all his life, smiled and spoke as if he were humoring a child. "Well, now, Harry, it sounds like you've got something new for ophthalmology. Here, let's try this. Read that third line for me again." He slipped another disk into the heavy frame resting on Harry Norman's nose and Harry dutifully read the line. "Oh, I can read as well as ever," Harry said afterward. "Even fine print. But you, Charles -- when I look at you -- " He broke off, feeling foolish, convinced that his friend would never believe that his face was only a smoky mist above the glistening and sharply defined white shirt he was wearing, that the hand that had inserted the lens in the frame was only a gray shadow. The oculist continued the examination and Harry submitted to the rest of it without protest. Afterward the two men went into the doctor's consultation room and sat down with the doctor's desk between them. "Have you been working pretty hard lately, Harry?" Harry shrugged. He had worked hard all his life. If you were in the yarn business, especially in New England, you had to work hard -- most of the mills had moved south long ago. Oh, he had worked hard, all right. But he had enjoyed it and he had done pretty well. Even with both kids in college now -- Dave and Lucy -- he was doing all right. He could give them and his wife Dora just about anything they wanted. Early in the spring, when Dave and Lucy had said they wished they had their own swimming pool, for example, like some of their friends, he had had one installed. At the mill he would have the new carding machine in operation in another week and that would make it as modern as any mill in the country. Yes, he had worked hard, but he liked his work. "Been worried about anything?" newspapers and watched TV these days must worry, Harry supposed, what with the war in Southeast Asia all those years and the unrest and the violence and those hijackings and the dmg problem and now inflation and the collapse of the dollar and the mess in Washington. But what was the use of worrying about something you couldn't do anything about? Take the war. He had watched the same horrors on TV over and over for so long that finally he had gotten to the point where he was almost used to them or else he turned away and didn't look. As for the kids, he never asked Dave and Lucy too many questions about their private Uves and just hoped for the best. As his friends said, if your kids weren't in jail or mental hospitals these days you should consider yourself lucky. Of course his marriage had its ups and downs, like everybody else's, but he really believed that he and Dora were happier now than they had ever been, all things considered. "And physically," Harry concluded, "I've never been in better shape. I had my annual checkup just last week and everything was okayblood pressure, blood sugar, prostate, He spread his hands on his thighs and leaned forward. "But there's another thing, Charles," he said. "People's voices. I mentioned Dora just now. You may remember her voice. It used to have a kind of harshness. I think it was one of the things that first attracted me to her. It sounded sexy when I was young. Then, after we were married for a while, it got on my nerves. But lately Dora's voice seems to have softened. Sometimes I can hardly hear what she is saying. Sometimes I don't hear her at all. I'd think I was getting deaf, except that I can hear everything else as well as ever -- that noise out there in the street, for instance, and voices if they're mechanical -- you know, on tlie telephone or TV. But when people talk, even in the same room -- I don't know..." Through the cloud that obscured the doctor's face Harry thought he saw him smile again. "Anybody getting deaf in this age is lucky, Harry." As the doctor spoke it seemed to Harry that the hum of traffic outside rose briefly to a roar in the room, although the windows of the air-conditioned office were closed. "I'm sure I'm not getting deaf," he said. "It's only when people talk." He shrugged. "Maybe I don't listen any more." The doctor began to tap on his desk with a silver pencil and, while Harry watched, the hand that held the pencil vanished and the pencil jigged on the desk unsupported. He was about to mention the phenomenon when tlie hand suddenly came back into view. "There's nothing the matter with your eyes," the doctor said finally. "I think you must be suffering from a nervous disturbance of some kind. I'm no neurologist, so you'd better go to one. Suffolk is a good man. You go see Suffolk. I'll arrange it for you. Maybe all you need is a vacation." H arry doubted that a neurologist could do anything for him. He was sure that what he saw -- or, rather, did not see -- was real, not imagined. But when he went out into the hot June day and drove back to the mill he tried to argue with himself that maybe his trouble was nerves, after all. Maybe he had let himself get too concerned about the state of the world. Maybe he had absorbed more than he realized of his children's discontent. To put an end to his thoughts he turned on the radio in his car. Somebody was asking somebody tire usual questions about modern problems and whoever was being interviewed was using a great many big words to say nothing. He tuned in another station. On it a singer was moaning words that were obviously intended to be apocalyptic but were incomprehensible. On a third station a man was whispering confidentially about irregularity. Harry turned off the radio. The shift was changing at the mill and when he got out of his car in the office parking lot Harry paused to watch the workmen leaving the building in a ray mass, like a huge snail crawling across the millyard. All he could think, as he watched, was that tliere were too many of them. They weren't individuals any more. He could call hardly a dozen of them by name now. It was the same everywhere. There were too many people in the streets, on planes, on the road, in restaurants, on all the good vacation places. The new card would let him cut down on a lot of manpower -- just as well he didn't know all of them. As he watched the men and women cross the millyard all of a sudden their heads and hands and arms vanished and nothing was before him but a moving mass of empty workclothes, shoes and workpants and short-sleeved shirts. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The headless, armless procession continued toward the parked cars in the mill lot. Saliva filled Harry's mouth and, believing he was going to vomit, he bent over with his head between his knees. When he looked up again at the workers the heads and arms and hands were all back where they should be, attached to the clothed bodies. "Nerves!" he said aloud, contemptuously. "I saw it!" But even as he spoke the assertion trailed off in his mind and became a question and he was telling himself that what he had just seen had to be an illusion. He would have to go to Dr. Suffolk, the neurologist, as Charles Warren had proposed. But in the same moment he reversed himself, deciding to wait a while. He would cancel any appointment Charles might make witli Suffolk. If he was suffering only from nerves maybe the illusions would cease of their own accord. He waited a week, until the day after his fiftieth birthday, the day the new carding machine was installed and ready for use. On that day he discovered that it might be disastrous if he waited any longer. Harry told the neurologist, Suffolk, that, at his wife's suggestion, he had invited his son to come down to the mill to witness the first operation of the new carding machine. The card was the very latest in mill equipment, he told Suffolk, and everyone from himself down to the night watchman had buzzed with pride and excitement while it was being installed. Dave had not wanted msceial lminq Toward a science of self-control M bu Gerald Jonas "A shattering attack on the foundations of Western science." -- Kirkus Reviews # Madison Avenue New York, N.Y. # to come to the mill, however, Harry said, because he had invited some friends over for a swim in the new pool at home. "I wanted to point out to the boy," Harry told Dr. Suffolk, "that he was going to inherit the business come day and the least he could do was to show some interest in its progress. But I didn't say anything. Dave doesn't want to go into the business when he gets out of college. He thinks he wants to be a farmer and raise everything organically. I hate getting into that argument with him, so I said I hoped he would come in with me if he could and let it go at that." The boy did show up finally, at the very last minute, just as the mill foreman was announcing everything was ready for turning on the power. "All Dave had on was a pair of ragged swimming trunks," Harry said. "He was even barefooted. I was embarrassed of course. For him as much as myself. When we went out into the mill together I could hear some of the hands snickering beliind our backs. After aU, Dave is twenty years old and ought to have known better. But I didn't say anything." A carding machine, Harry explained to Dr. Suffolk, is composed mostly of teeth -- thousands of small steel teeth that meet on large cylinders revolving in opposite directions. The new card stood at the far end of the long millroom, bright and shiny, its green paint glistening, its oiled steel gears catching gleams of the sunliglit that poured in through the high windows, its wire combs sparkling Uke diamonds. Harry and Dave joined the men and women who stood round the machine admiring it. "Okay," the mill foreman shouted and the gears began to turn with a low rumble. F or several minutes they watched. Harry was sure that even Dave could not help admiring the machine's insatiable appetite and the speed with which it devoured the fiber. Nothing escaped it. Every shred was caught in the endless interlocking of the vicious little wires and was clawed into gossamer. "Isn't it a beauty?" Harry asked finally, turning to his son. But Dave was no longer at his side. Harry swung about to see where he had gone and, not finding him in the crowd behind him, swung back again angrily, annoyed with the boy for his lack of interest. In tliat moment there was a loud cry at his side -- a warm wetness splashed across his cheek and he heard the foreman shout for the power to be turned off. At the same time someone else yelled, "Mr. Norman! Look out!" Harry told Dr. Suffolk that he had believed for a moment that the blood on his face was his own, althougli he had felt nothing. But in the next instant the men were shoving himaside and gathering about Dave, who must have been at his side aU the time, invisible. Now, however, Dave's head and naked shoulders loomed above the workmen who surrounded him. "I'm okay," Harry heard the boy say. "It's just the tip of my finger. I'm sorry I yelled. It was my fault." "I simply had not seen him," Harry explained to the neurologist. "The boy had vanished temporarily. Maybe if I had glanced down when I turned to speak to him I'd have seen his swimming trunks. But I didn't. He was carelessly leaning too far over the card and I jostled him and he lost his balance. Fortunately the card cauglit only the tip of his finger before the foreman grabbed him and saved him from the rest of those steel teeth. But, my God, Doctor, I might have killed him! I tell you, the boy simply was not there when I spoke to him. It wasn't that I failed to see him -- he wasn't there. When I bumped into him I didn't feel anything. There was nothing there." Harry paused and tried ta gather his thoughts. "That's a new development. Not feeling anything. Because -- well, untd today, when I shook hands with someone or when I kissed my wife, even if I didn't see anything -- " Harry wondered how he could convince the neurologist that what he was telling him was true. "Everything is disappearing." he said hopelessly. "Everything that lives -- men, women, animals -- even you." He looked hard in the direction from which Dr. Suffolk's voice had come to him earlier in the interview and saw nothing but another white shirt like the occulist's. But this time there was no blur above the starched high collar as there had been in Charles Warren's office a week before. This time there was no face at all -- nothing. "Even you, Doctor -- " he repeated. Dr. Suffolk made no comment. Instead, a series of questions began to come from behind the desk in a voice that was barely audible. The voice asked about Harry's childhood, the things he ate, whom he loved, whom he hated, what he dreamed of. As the story of his life was thus extracted from him, it struck Harry as a very ordinary one indeed. A normal and healthy childhood, no strong rebellions against or attachments to his parents, average grades in school, no tempestuous love affairs, a reasonably happy marriage, two kids who troubled him at times but gave him no cause for serious worry, moderate success in business, no torturing ambitions or frustrations, no extraordinary appetites or sexual aberrations, no recurrent dreams. To Harry it all seemed extremely uninteresting. He had no idea of what the doctor could make of it. "I think you need analysis." the doctor said finally. "If you don't believe in a thing like that. Doctor, I don't see how it can do you any good. Now, maybe if I were seeing things -- but I'm not." The doctor lighted a cigar -- no hand held the match and no mouth supported the cigar. Afterward the cigar's end pulsated warmly above the empty white collar and the smoke rose in blue clouds where the A dazzling new Super Agent deadly as Steve Austin -- "The Bionics Man" -- confronts an international black market ring in nuclear weapons. # at bookstores or from # Third Ave., New York # doctor's head should have been. Finally the cigar descended in an arc to an ashtray and lay there. The low voice came again. "Can you still drive your car safely, Mr. Norman?" The question, Harry thought, at least acknowledged that he had been telling the truth, that he was actually not seeing people. "I can see traffic all right," Harry said, "and pedestrians, too -- if they have clothes on." He uttered a short laugh. "Maybe-in view of what happened to Dave -- I'd better avoid the streets around tlie university. Some of those college kids, you know -- " The cigar rose from the ashtray. The end of it glowed above the white collar and the oracular voice came once more through the smoke. "Maybe if you could get off alone somewhere for a while, Mr. Norman, where you would not see or talk to anyone, where there are no telephones, no TV, no mail -- " The voice had begun to sound wistful. "If there is such a place left in the world," it concluded. "I have a cabin in the Maine woods." Harry said. "That might be just the place." white shirt rose from behind the desk and followed Harry to the door. Harry stopped and turned about. "Doctor," he said, peering at the emptiness above the white collar. "tell me honestly. Isn't it happening to you, too? Aren't people fading? Can you see me, hear me clearly? Can you?" There was a moment of silence. Then Harry heard tire doctor's voice again. "Mr. Norman, I can see you perfectly. As a matter of fact, I have been having a little trouble with my own eyes lately, but while I've been sitting in this room talking with you it seems to have cleared up. I can see you perfectly. There is a very small mole under your right eye and you cut yourself on the neck just below your right ear when you shaved this morning. You used a styptic pencil or powder and there is still a faint smudge of white there. Brown spots are beginning to appear on the backs of your hands and you keep looking at them. Does that convince you?" "I suppose then you think I am crazy." Harry Norman said. Dr. Suffolk was silent for a long time. Finally he said quietly, "Everybody is crazy, as you put it, in one way or another." "Well, a vacation in the Maine woods isn't going to cure me!" Harry blurted out in sudden anger. "There's nothing I'd like better, but I've promised my wife we'd go on a cruise. Anyhow, do you know what I think? I think maybe I'm the only one in the world who isn't crazy. I think maybe I'm the only one who is seeing -- or not seeing -- what is happening. Dr. Suffolk, ever since I came into this room you haven't had a head on your shoulders or hands at the ends of your sleeves. I'm alone right here. I don't have to go to Maine. I'm alone anywhere I go." Driving back to his office, Harry regretted his final outburst and began to panic. Everyone is daft but me and thee, and sometimes I don 't know about thee... Wasn't that kind of thinking a sure symptom of insanity? He became paranoid about the neurologist. He imagined Dr. Suffolk picking up the phone immediately after his departure and calling Dora. Mrs. Norman, I think your husband needs surveillance, hospitalization... He could see men in white waiting for him at his front door when he got home that night. He imagined shock treatments, electrodes on his head, knives probing into his brain. By the time he reached his office Harry had made his decision. With the door shut and locked behind him he telephoned his wife. "Dora, has a Dr. Suffolk called you?" "No, Harry, but I've been out shopping all afternoon. I was just coming into the house when you rang. Why? Is something wrong?" "Well, if he calls, tell him I've gone to Maine. Tell him I'm giving it a try. Tell him to let me alone for a week, two weeks, a month -- " "Maine? What do you mean, dear? You know how you hate the noseeums up there at this time of year. And we were planning that Scandinavian cruise -- " "There won't be any no-seeums," Harry said. Then he began to laugh. He laughed long and loud. "But of course!" he said finally. "There will be -- for a while, at least. That's why I'm going -- because of the noseeums!" He laughed again. "Harry, are you all right?" "Yes. No. No, I'm not all right. Look, Dora, I've been off my feed lately and I guess Dave's accident this morning got to me more than I realized. Anyhow -- " She gasped. "Dave's accident? What accident?" "His finger. He cut it in the new card." "Oh, is that what happened? He didn't teU me. He came home with a cut on his finger and I put a band-aid on it. It's nothing. He drove to Boston this afternoon to see a movie. Harry, what is wrong with you? You haven't told me. Who is this Dr. Suffolk? What did he say?" "He said I needed a vacation, so I'm taking one. I'm going to Maine this afternoon, straight from the office. I won't be home. I've got clothes up there and things. I can get there by midnight. I don't want anyone to come up or disturb me or try to reach me by the phone in the village -- except, of course, in an emergency. Do you understand?" "Oh, Harry, wouldn't the Scandinavian cruise be just as good?" "No." There was a silence. "Do you understand, Dora?" "Of course, dear, but -- " "Goodbye." "Goodbye, darling. But Harry -- " on the radio. Somebody was talking to somebody about the world's problems, using a lot of big words that meant nothing. He tuned in another station. A singer was moaning unintelligible words. On a third station a man was whispering about irregularity. He turned off the radio. The first night in his cabin in Maine, Harry slept a long, long time. And it seemed to him he continued partly asleep as he spent what was left of the first day lounging about the place in delicious indolence. He could all but feel his nerves relaxing, all but hear them slackening like violin strings that twang when the pegs are loosened. He did not stray from the cabin until the second day -- after another long sleep -- and that day he wandered only briefly in the woods before he was overcome by drowsiness and, dropping on a bed of pine needles, slept the afternoon away in the sun. When he ventured outdoors on what he believed was the third day, he came upon a brook and its busy murmur made himrilize how silent the woods were around him. No birds sang and there was no sound of insects or animals. Because the day was windless even the pine branches overhead were still. After that he lost track of time. But he felt no need to calculate the days he spent in the cabin or the woods. He found himself content merely to exist, to float in apathy in the stillness of his surroundings, convinced that he would be happy to continue forever as he was. It seemed to him that with the passage of time his physical self must be fading, as men and women all around him in the city had faded. His body became light and lost sensation. Not only the minor aches and pains of middle-age left him, but also the joyous feeling of being alive. He was not ecstatic in his new state, but simply content with the sense of being bodiless, of floating without substance in silent air. To avoid seeing himself, he turned the bathroom mirror's face to the wall and did not shave. Harry was not at all surprised when one morning he awoke to find that it was snowing. It had been early June when he had come to the cabin, he remembered -- now, he assumed, it had to be at least early October. A half-inch of snow whitened the vinyl roof of his car, parked outside the bedroom window. But as soon as he looked beyond the car he saw that the snow could not be the first of early autumn -- it had to be a late snow in spring, for the wildflowers that Dora had transplanted in the yard with great care were in bloom and the few deciduous trees around the house had fresh green leaves. He was not amazed and only wondered idly whether he had slept a whole winter through. Two winters maybe? Three? Or, Hke Rip Van Winkle, twenty? He put his hand to his face. He felt no beard. He was, amazed then. Time itself must have stopped, for he was sure that men's beards grew whether they were dead or alive. But if time had stopped -- why was it suddenly spring? He leaped from his bed, ran out into the wet snow. His hands trembled as he opened the door of his car and turned on the radio. Immediately there was the voice again of somebody answering somebody's questions, saying the same things Harry had heard on his drive up to the cabin, the same things, he realized, that he had heard a week before that, when he had been returning from the oculist's office. He tuned in another station and heard the singer moaning apocalyptically. He could not be sure whether or not the song was the same one he had heard before. They all sounded alike to him. On a third station a man was again whispering confidentially about irregularity. Harry shut off the radio and turned the ignition key. The motor started instantly. cabin, Harry saw that the snowfall had slackened and there was no white on the ground. No one was astir in the streets and he kept on going. At tire intersection of the town road with the highway cars swished past in both directions -- and as he waited for an opening that would allow him to join the procession south and westward toward Massachusetts, he saw that the cars were without drivers, that not only heads and hands were missing but whole bodies, clothing and aU. He turned on the radio again. The man was still talking about irregularity; the singer was still moaning; somebody was still not answering somebody's questions. He turned off the radio. Through an empty landscape, past empty farmhouses, on a highway crowded with empty cars, Harry Norman drove swiftly. At one point he saw a driverless tractor bumping across a field, dragging a hay rake, and he wondered how the machine knew that it was haying time, that it was... His thought stopped. He was startled. Why, it must be June again! At another place an unattended drawbridge opened for a crewless trawler coming down a river. If there were no people, he wondered, why was a trawler going out to sea to fish? Wliat would become of the fish that were caught? But of course -- there were no fish. After that he thought of his business. If there were no people, what was the use of a mill that made yarn for the purpose of clothing them? But apparently there were no longer any clothes. They, too, had vanished with the living bodies. He glanced down at his own legs, one extended toward the accelerator, tlie other outstretched idly -- but before he could be sure he saw them and was not simply feeling their existence as part of his body below his waist, he heard a police siren and, from old habit, slowed, drew off the road and stopped to wait for the riderless motorcycle that pulled up beside hun. "Officer," he shouted at the emptiness above the motorcycle, "what is happening? My radio keeps repeating. There aren't any drivers. Officer-" There was no answer. The motorcycle leaned crazily without falling, as if the law of gravity as well as time had been suspended and Harry sat still and waited, listening to the chatter of the police radio. Soon there was a traffic ticket in his hand. The motorcycle righted itself and sped on. Harry looked at the date on the ticket. It was June but the rest was so badly scrawled he could not read it. He pulled back on to the road, afraid now to look down at his legs, believing that what he would see -- or would not see -- might unnerve him. red traffic light at the edge of the town where he lived all cars on the highway stopped and allowed those at the intersection to pass through on their green signal. When the light changed and he failed to start immediately a horn blasted from the line behind him. Machines, too, he thought, could be impatient and ill-mannered on the road, like people. As he entered the town the street lights came on, illuminating an empty dusk. He had to stop once or twice behind a city bus. Its door folded open. No one got in or out, but the bus waited for several seconds. Then the door shut and the bus moved on. In a shopping center neon lights blinked on and off and he saw a laundromat with machines splashing suds against their windows like the flume at Marblehead. There were no customers in the stores or moving in and out among the parked cars, although he noted that the cars were parked in the usual disorder of such unsupervised lots. Two became involved in a minor accident and he saw a police car approaching the scene. Harry's home was on the far side of the town and he came to his mill first. It was lighted. The big illuminated clock atop the roof told him the night shift had come on ten minutes before. He parked his car in the office lot and went in. The offices as well as the mill were lighted. The clerical staff would not go home for another three-quarters of an hour. Nobody appeared to be in the big room, but electric typewriters were at work everywhere. "Hello!" Harry said in his usual general greeting to his employees, but no answer came. He was neither surprised nor dismayed, but moved carefully through the outer office, afraid that he might bump into someone. As soon as he was in his private office, the door closed behind him, he picked up the telephone and dialed his home. "Hello, Dora. I just gQt back. Is everything all right?" "Goodbye, darling. But, Harry -- " "I say, Dora. I just got back from Maine. Dora!" "Goodbye, darling. But, Harry -- " "Yes-" Dora's voice repeated the words over and over. "Goodbye, darling. But, Harry -- " Finally he realized they were the last words he had heard her speak on the phone before he left for Maine. "Dora-" "Goodbye, darling..." He held the phone away from his ear and stared at it. The disembodied voice was hollow in mid-air. "Goodbye..." He dropped the phone to his desk and it lay there repeating Dora's last words insanely. In a panic he went out by the private door of his office and down his private stairs three steps at a time. As he hurried through the mill to the parking lot a part of his mind was aware that the new card had just been turned off and was running down with a whine, and he wondered if something had gone wrong with it. But he did not stop to investigate. He had forgotten how much he loved Dora. He drove through the homeward-bound traffic like a madman, jumping red lights and stop signs and pulled up in front of his house in the suburbs with a squeal of tires. He did not want Dora to be vanished like everyone else -- like himself perhaps. He did not know what to expect when he entered the house. His heart was pounding hard as he leaped up the front steps. The door opened and Dora stood there to greet him, her face upturned for a kiss. He had forgotten what a beautiful woman she was. Behind her his bearded son stood grinning at him. "You're late, darling." Dora said. "It's a shame you had to work late today of all days." Harry could not believe his ears or his eyes. He had thought for a moment that she was fading, as people had faded momentarily in the beginning of his illness or whatever it was. But when she spoke, she was clearly back in focus again. "I -- " he began, not knowing how to go on. Over Dora's shoulder Dave was saying, "Happy birthday, Dad, Sorry I didn't get down to breakfast this morning. How does it feel to be fifty?" And Dora was smiling up at him, ready for another kiss. So this was June second, the day before he had gone to see Suffolk, the day before they began the operation of the new carding machine. He looked at Dave's hands -- there were no band-aids on his fingers. But of course -- the accident happened the next day, June third. "Come," Dora said. "Our drinks are ready. Dave made them. Soon we'll have dinner. We won't wait for Lucy. She called to say she had to stay for a sorority meeting, but she'll come as soon as she can." D uring dinner Dora did not mention the cabin in Maine. But when she brought the birthday cake in from the kitchen, her eyes sparkling above the candles, she said, "Oh, by the way, a Dr. Suffolk's office called this afternoon. Charles Warren has made an appointment with him for you for tomorrow afternoon. Why did Charles do that, Harry? Is something wrong?" "No," Harry said. "Charles told me I was okay." But as he spoke he was remembering vividly the afternoon session in the neurologist's office, although it seemed like a long time ago. And yet Dora had said the appointment with Suffolk was for "tomorrow." "Then why this Dr. Suffolk?" Dora said. "Who is he?" "I don't know. It's a mistake of some kind, I guess." Harry replied -- and now he heard an echo in his voice and had the dizzying sensation of deja vu. He had said the same thing to Dora once before. In fact, he had come home to this birthday party and eaten this same birthday cake once before, the night before the carding machine was put into operation. Dora had told him then about the appointment with Suffolk and he had evaded her questions, because he had had no intention of keeping the appointment. Until the next morning. Then, when Dave had caught his finger in the new carding machine, Harry had changed his mind. "Well, I'm glad," Dora said. At that point Lucy came in the front door, slamming it behind her and calling out, "Happy birthday!" and Harry Norman remembered that, too. He knew that Lucy was going to kiss him and flop down on a chair beside him and say,  hope you saved me some of your cake, Pop. I skipped dessert at the house. I'm sorry I had to stay for that old meeting. And that was exactly what Lucy did and said. As she spoke, Harry thought she faded for a moment in the way that people had faded at first, but she quickly came back into focus. She wore blue jeans, with white buttons uselessly and ridiculously sewn down the outside of the fly and her blond hair was in disarray and kept falling over her wide blue eyes like a theater curtain and she was beautiful like her mother and Harry loved her very much. T hat night, in bed, long after he believed Dora was asleep, Harry Norman lay awake, puzzled. He was remembering Dave's near tragedy beside the carding machine and the visit to Suffolk's office and the long stay in the cabin in Maine and the trip home with all life around him completely vanished and he was sure those experiences were real. He was sure of it. It had all happened, those things and that other fiftieth birthday dinner just like the one he had had tonight. And it had been real, too, when he returned to the plant from Maine only a few hours ago and there was no one visible in. the office. And he had heard Dora's voke on the phone saying the same thiis she had said a long time before. He was sure. But Dora had been very real here in bed with him tonight too, only a short while ago. And yet at dinner neither she nor Dave had seemed to have any recollection of the accident in the mill or his phone call or his long absence in Maine. Nor was there anything in their manner that made him think they had the experience of deja vu that had made him dizzy at the birthday dinner. Dora startled him then by speaking in the dark. "Oh, Harry, darling, I forgot to tell you. There was another call from the plant just before you came home tonight, while you were on the way home, I guess. It was the mill foreman. He said the new carding machine was all set up and ready to be put in operation tomorrow morning." And Harry was sure Dora had said that before, that other night, after the birthday dinner and after they had made love and he had thought her asleep at his side. "Harry," Dora continued, "why don't you invite Dave down to the mill tomorrow to see them start the machine?" And she had said that too ! Suddenly Harry was no longer puzzled. He was convinced that it was the machine, the new carding machine, something alien at work in the machine. It had to be. His "illness" had begun on the day the machine was delivered to the mill, when the salesman in Iris office doorway with the hank of red yarn had seemed to fade for a moment. That had been the first time. And then, on the day they put the card into operation, Dave had become completely invisible and Harry had pushed the boy accidentally against the machine and...and tonight, he remembered, in the mill, he had been aware that they were turning off the machine -- it had been running down with a whine. It had to be the machine. For a reason that Harry could not understand, the carding machine had given him a glimpse of what was going to happen to him, what some day was going to happen to everyone on Earth -- when people everywhere would close their senses and their minds and concerns to reality and to each other and not give a damn. But now, for a reason also beyond his comprehension, it was giving him a reprieve by breaking down and stopping and thus starting time over again at the day before Dave was hurt and everyone vanished. Harry was no longer puzzled. He was sure. But now, for the first time, he was frightened. "Why don't you do that, Harry?" Dora said in the dark. "Why don't you invite Dave to the mill tomorrow to see the machine started?" "I'll have to think about it," Harry said. And Dora went to sleep then, but Harry did not.  To become an outcast was all that the alien wanted. Unfortunately, he had space, and spacemen, to contend with! I from his home planet of Ferlang for "acts of incredible grossness" -- he had sucked his teeth insolently during the Meditation Frolic and had switched his tail widdershins when the Regional Grand Ubiquitor condescended to spit at him. These impertinences would normally have earned him no more than a few dozen years of Plenary Ostracism. But Detringer had aggravated his offenses by Willful Disobedience during Godmemory Meeting, at which time he had persisted in audibly reminiscing upon certain of his rather unsavory sexual exploits. His final asocial act was unprecedented in the recent history of Ferlang; he had meted out Overt Malevolent Violence upon the person of a Ukanister, thus performing the first act of Open Public Aggression since the primitive era of the Death Games. This last repulsive act, resulting in minor bodily injury but major ego damage to the Ukanister, earned Detringer the supreme punishment of Perpetual Banishment. Ferlang is the fourth planet from its sun in a fifteen-planet system situated near an edge of the galaxy. Detringer was taken deep into the void between galaxies via starship and set adrift in a tiny, underpowered Sportster. He was voluntarily accompanied by his loyal mechanical servant. Ichor. Detringer's wives -- gay, flighty Maruskaa, tall, thoughtful Gwenkifer and floppy-eared, irrepressible Uu -- all divorced him in a solemn Act of Eternal Revulsion. His eight children performed the Office of Parental Repudiation -- though Deranie, the youngest, was heard to mutter afterward, "I don't care what you did. Daddy, I still love you." Detringer was not to be afforded the comfort of knowing this, of course. Cast loose upon the infinite sea of space, the inadequate energy systems of his tiny craft inexorably ran down. He came to know hunger, cold, thirst and the continual throbbing headache of oxygen-deprivation as he voluntarily put himself upon stringent rations. The immense deadness of space spread on all sides of him, broken only by the merciless glare of distant stars. He had turned off the Sportster's engines immediately -- he had seen no use in wasting its small fuel capacity in the intergalactic void that taxed the resources of the enormous starships. He would save his fuel for planetary maneuvering -- if that unlikely opportunity should ever be vouchsafed him. Time was a motionless black jelly in which he was encased. Deprived of its familiar moorings, a lesser mind must have cracked. But it was a measure of his being that, instead of giving in to the despair whose objective correlatives were all around him, he rallied, forced himself to take an interest in the minutest routines of the dying ship, gave a concert every "night" for his tone-deaf servant Ichor, performed calisthenics, practiced High-speed Meditation, erected elaborate auto-sexual rituals as set forth in the Solitude Survival Book, and in a hundred ways diverted himself from the crushing realization of his own almost certain death. After an interminable period the character of space changed abruptly. The doldrums gave way to unsettled conditions. There were elaborate electrical displays, presaging new peril. At last a linestorm hurtled upon him along a narrow front, caught up the Sportster and swept it pellmell into the heart of the void. The very inadequacy of the little spaceship served to preserve it. Unresistingly driven by the storm's front, the ship survived by yielding -- and when the storm had run its course the ship's hull still preserved its integrity. Little need be said about the ordeal of the occupants at this time, except that they survived. Detringer experienced a period of unconsciousness. Then he opened his eyes and stared groggily around him. After that he looked out through the spaceports and studied his navigational instruments. "We've completely crossed the void," he told Ichor. "We are approaching the outer limits of a planetary system." Ichor raised himself on one aluminum elbow and asked, "Of what type is the sun?" "It is an # type," Detringer said. "Praise be to God's Memory," Ichor intoned, then collapsed, due to discharged batteries. T he last currents of the storm subsided before the Sportster crossed the orbit of the outermost planet, #th out from the sturdy, medium-sized life-giving #-type sun. Detringer recharged Ichor from the ship's accumulators, although the mechanical protested that the current might better be saved for a possible ship's emergency. This emergency came sooner than Detringer had imagined. His instrument reading had shown that the fifth planet out from the sun was the only one that could support Detringer's life-requirements without the assistance of imported artificialities. But it was too far away for the ship's remaining fuel and now space was doldrum-calm again, affording no impetus to aid them toward their goal. One course of action would be to sit tight, wait and hope that a stray inbound current would come their way, or even another storm. This plan was admittedly conservative. It bore the danger that no current or storm would come during the short period in which they could sustain themselves on the ship's resources. Additionally, there was the risk that if a current or storm should arise it would bear them in an unpromising direction. Still, there were risks no matter what course of action was taken. Characteristically, Detringer chose the more enterprising and perhaps more dangerous plan. Plotting the most economical course and speed, he set forth to cover whatever portion of the journey his ship's fuel would allow, prepared to trust to Providence thereafter. By painstaking piloting and handmetering of the fuel he managed to miles of his destination. Then Detringer had to shut down the engines, leaving himself only a scant hour's worth of fuel for intra-atmOspheric maneuvering. The Sportster drifted through space, still moving toward the fifth planet, but so slowly that a thousand years would barely suffice to bring it within the planet's atmospheric limits. By a very slight effort of the imagination, the ship could be considered a ooffin and Detringer its premature occupant. But Detringer refused to dwell upon this. He began again his regime of calisthenics, concerts, High-speed Meditation and auto-sexual rituals. Ichor was somewhat shocked by all this. Himself of an orthodox turn of mind, he gently pointed out that Detringer's acts were inapropos to the situation and therefore insane. "You're quite right, of course," Detringer replied cheerfully. "But I must remind you that Hope, even though judged incapable of fulfillment, is still considered one of the Eight Irrational Blessings and therefore (according to the Second Patriarch) of a higher order of magnitude than the derived Sanity Injunctions." Confuted by scripture. Ichor gave his grudging assent to Detringer's practices and even went so far as to sing a hymn in harmony with him (with results as ludicrous as they were cacophonous.) Inexorably their energy ran down. Halfand then quarter-rations impaired their efficiency and brought them near the point of complete dysfunction. In vain did Ichor beg his master's permission to drain his own personal batteries into the ship's chilly heaters. "Never mind," said Detringer, shuddering with cold. "We'll go out together as equals, in possession of what senses we've got, if we go out at all -- which I seriously doubt despite impressive evidence to the contrary." Perhaps nature is influenced by temperament. Surely only for Detringer would she have obliged by sending a strong inbound current just when the ship's energy resources had dwindled to no more than memories. The landing itself was simple enough for a pilot of Detringer's skill and luck. He brought down the ship, light as a windblown seed, upon the green and inviting surface of the fifth planet. When he shut down the engines for the last time there were some thirty-eight seconds of fuel remaining. Ichor fell to his ferrominium knees and praised the Godmemory that had remembered to bring them to this place of refuge. But Detringer said. "Let's see if we can live here before we go maudlin with thanks." The fifth world proved hospitable enough. All of the necessities of life could be found with moderate effort, though few of the amenities. Escape was impossible: only an advanced technological civilization could produce the complex fuel needed for the ship's engines. And a brief aerial sui-vey had shown that the fifth planet, although a picturesque and inviting world, harbored no civilization -- nor did it even give any sign of being inhabited by intelligent beings. By a simple cross-wiring procedure, Ichor prepared himself for the prospect of spending the rest of his lifespan in this place. He advised Detringer similarly to accept the inevitable. After all, he pointed out, even if they did somehow obtain fuel, where would they go? The odds against their finding an advanced planetary civilization, even with a well-equipped exploration ship at their disposal, were astronomical. In a small vessel like the Sportster the attempt would be tantamount to suicide. Detringer was unimpressed by this reasoning. "Better to search and die," he said, "than vegetate and live." "Master," Ichor pointed out respectfully, "that is heresy." "I suppose it is," Detringer said cheerfully. "But it is how I feel. And my intuition tells me that something will turn up." Ichor shuddered and was glad for the sake of his master's soul that, despite Detringer's hopes, he was to receive the Unction of Perpetual Solitude. Macmillan stood in the main control room of the exploration ship Jenny Lind and scanned the tape as it came out of the # Series Coordinating Computer. It was apparent that the new planet presented no dangers within the measuring ability of the ship's instruments. Macmillan had come a long way to sciences major at the University of Taos, Macmillan had gone on to do graduate work in Nucleonic Theory and Control. His doctoral thesis, titled Some Preliminary Notes on Certain Considerations Concerning the (Projected) Science of Interstellar Maneuvering, had been enthusiastically accepted by his committee and had later been successfully pubUshed for the general public under the title. Lost and Found in Deepest Space. That, plus his long article in Nature, titled. The Use of Declension Theory in Spacecraft Landing Modalities, had made him the only possible choice to captain America's first interstellar ship. He was a tall, handsome, strongly built man. His hair was prematurely flecked with gray, belying his thirtysix years. His reactions concerning navigation were quick and sure and his instinct for the integrity of his ship was awesome. Less awesome were his dealings with men. Macmillan was cursed with a certain shyness, a diffidence toward others, a knowledge of dubiety that sapped the decision-making process and that, however admirable it might be in a philosopher, was a potential weakness in a leader of men. A knock came at his door and Colonel Kettelman entered without bothering to be asked. "Looks good down there, hah?" he said. "The planetary profile is quite favorable," Macmillan said stiffly. "That's fine," Kettelman said, staring uncomprehendingly at the computer tape. "Anything interesting about the place?" "A great deal," Macmillan said. "Even a long-distance survey has shown what might well be some unique vegetable structures. Additionally, our bacteria scan shows some anomalies, which -- " "I didn't mean that kind of stuff," Kettelman said, evincing the natural indifference a career soldier sometimes feels for bugs and plants. "I meant important stuff like alien armies and space fleets and Uke that." "There is no sign of any civilization down there," Macmillan said. "I doubt we will even find traces of intelligent life." "Well, you can never tell," Kettelman said hopefully. He was a stocky, barrel-chested and unbending man. He was a veteran of the American Assistance Campaigns of '# and had fought as a major in the jungles of western Honduras in the so-called United Fruit War, emerging as a lieutenant colonel. He had received his full colonelcy during the ill-fated New York Insurrection, at which time he had personally led his men in storming the Subtreasury Building and then had held down the #nd Street Line against the crack Gay Battalion. Utterly fearless, known as a soldier's soldier, possessing an impeccable combat record, wealthy in his own right, a friend of many U.S. not unintelligent, he had won the coveted appointment of Commandant of Military Operations aboard the Jenny Lind. Now he awaited the moment when he would lead his combat team of twenty Marines onto the surface of the fifth planet. The prospect hugely excited him. And, despite the instrument readings, Kettelman knew that anything might be down there waiting to strike and maim and kill -- unless he did so first, as he planned to do. "There is one thing," Macmillan said. "We have detected a spacecraft on the surface of the planet." "Ah," Kettelman said. "I knew there'd be something. You spotted only one ship?" "Yes. A small one, displacing less than a twentieth the volume of our craft and apparently unarmed." "That's what they'd like you to believe, of course," said Kettelman. "I wonder where the others are." II "What others?" "The other alien spaceships and crews and ground-to-space weapons systems and all the rest of it, of course." "The presence of one alien spacecraft does not logically imply any other alien spacecraft," Captain Macmillan said. "No? Listen, Mac, I learned my logic in the jungles of Honduras," Kettelman said. "The rule there was that if you found one runt with a machete you could be sure of finding another fifty or so hiding in the bushes, waiting to cut your ears off if you gave them a chance. You could get killed if you waited around for abstract proofs." "The circumstances were somewhat different," Captain Macmillan pointed out. "So what does that matter?" Macmillan winced and turned away. Talking with Kettelman was painful for him and he avoided it as much as he could. The colonel was a disputatious individual, stubborn, easily driven to wrath and possessed of many positive opinions, most of which were founded upon a bedrock of nearly invincible ignorance. The captain knew that the antipathy between himself and Kettelman was mutual. He was well aware that the colonel considered him an indecisive and ineffective person except perhaps in his special scientific areas. Luckily, their areas of command were sharply defined and delineated. Or had been to date. clump of trees and watched as the large alien spacecraft settled down to a faultless landing. "Whoever is piloting that ship," Detringer said, "is a master pilot beyond compare. I would like to meet such a being." "Doubtless you will get your chance," Ichor said. "It is surely no accident that, given the entire surface of this planet to choose from, they have elected to put down almost beside us." "They must have detected us, of course," Detringer said. "And they have decided to take a bold line -- exactly as I would do, given their position," "That makes sense," Ichor said. "But what will you do, given your position?" "Why, I'll take a bold line, of course." "This is a historic moment," Ichor said. "A representative of the Ferland people will soon meet the first intelligent aliens our race has ever encountered. How ironic that this opportunity should be vouchsafed to a criminal!" "The opportunity, as you call it, was forced upon me. I assure you that I did not seek it. And by the way -- I think we will say nothing about my little differences with the Ferlang authorities." "You mean you're going to lie?" "That is a harsh way of putting it," Detringer said. "Let us say that I am going to spare my people the embarrassment of having a criminal as their first emissary to an alien race." "Well -- I suppose that will be all right," Ichor said. Detringer looked hard at his mechanical servant. "It seems to me. Ichor, that you do not entirely approve of my expediences." "No, sir, I do not. But please understand; I am faithful to you without cavil. I would unhesitatingly sacrifice myself for your welfare at any moment. I will serve you unto death -- and beyond, if that is possible. But loyalty to a person does not affect one's religious, social and ethical beliefs. I love ou, sir -- but I cannot approve of you." "Well, then, I am warned," Detringer said. "And now back to our alien friends. A port is opening. They are coming out." "Soldiers are coming out," Ichor said. The new arrivals were bipedal and also had two upper limbs. Each individual had only one head, one mouth and one nose, as had Detringer himself. They bore no visible tails or antennae. They were obviously soldiers to judge by the equipment they carried. Each individual was heavily laden with what could be deduced to be projectile weapons, gas and explosive grenades, beam projectors, short-range atomics and much else besides. They wore personal armor and their heads were encased in clear plastic bubbles. There were twenty of them so equipped and one, obviously their leader, who had no visible weaponry. He carried a sort of whippy stick -- probably a badge of office -- with which he tapped himself on the upper left pedal appendage as he marched at the head of his soldiers. The soldiers advanced, well spread out, taking momentary concealment behind natural objects and posturally demonstrating an attitude of extreme suspicion and wariness. The officer walked directly forward without taking cover, his mien obviously portraying nonchalance, bravado or stupidity. "I don't think we should skulk around these bushes any longer," Detringer said. "It is time for us to go forward and meet them with the dignity that befits an emissary of the Ferlang people." He stepped forward immediately and strode toward the soldiers, followed by Ichor. Detringer was magnificent at that moment. E verybody on the jenny Lind knew about the alien spacecraft only a mile away. So it should have proven no surprise that the alien ship turned out to have had on board an alien who was at that moment advancing boldly to meet Kettelman's marines. But it did prove a surprise. No one was prepared to meet a genuine, honest-to-god, weird-looking aliveand-kicking alien. The occasion opened up too many imponderables. To name just one -- what do' you say when you finally meet an alien? How do you live up to the awesome historic quality of the moment? Whatever you come up with is going to sound like, Dr. Livingston, I presume? People are going to laugh at you and your words -- pompous or banal -- for centuries. Meeting an alien has enormous potential for embarrassment. Both Captain Macmillan and Colonel Kettelman were feverishly rehearsing opening lines and rejecting them and half-hoping that the C#I Translating Computer would blow a transistor. The Marines were praying, Jesus, I hope he don 't try to talk to me. Even the ship's cook was thinking, Christ, I suppose first thing out he'll want to know all about what we eat. But Kettelman was in the lead. He thought. To hell with this-I'm not going to be the first to talk to him. He slowed down to let his men go ahead of him. But his men stopped in their tracks, waiting for the colonel. Captain Macmillan, standing just behind the marines, also stopped and wished that he hadn't worn his full-dress uniform, complete with decorations. He was the most resplendent man on the field and he just knew that the alien was going to walk straight over to him and begin talking. All the Terrans stood still. The alien continued to advance. Embarrassment gave way to panic in the Terran ranks. The marines looked at the alien and thought, Jesus, what's happening? They wavered, obviously on the verge of flight. Kettelman saw this and thought. They are going to disgrace the corps and me! The realization sobered him. Suddenly he remembered the newsmen. Yes, the newsmen! Let the newsmen do it -- that was what they were paid for. "Platoon, halt," he called, then set his men at port arms. The. alien stopped, perhaps to see what was going on. "Captain," Kettelman said to Macmillan, "I suggest that for this historic moment we unleash -- I mean break out -- the newsmen." "An excellent suggestion." Captain Macmillan said and gave the order to take the newsmen out of stasis and bring them forth immediately. Then everybody waited until the newsmen came. T he newsmen were laid out in a special room. A sign on the door cept to Authorized Personnel. Handlettered below were the words: Not to Be Awakened Except for Top Story. Within the room, each stretched out in his own capsule, were four newsmen and one newswoman. They had all agreed that it would be a waste of subjective time for them to live through the uneventful years required for the Jenny Lind to reach any destination at all. So they had all agreed to go into stasis freeze, with the understanding that they would be resuscitated immediately if anything newsworthy occurred. They left the decision as to what constituted news to Captain Macmillan, who had worked as a reporter on the Phoenix Sun during his junior and sophomore years at the University of Taos. Ramon Delgado, a Scots engineer with a strange life story, received the order to wake up the newspeople. He made the necessary adjustments in their individual lifesupport systems. In fifteen minutes they were all somewhat groggily conscious and demanding to know what was going on. "We've landed on a planet," Delgado said. "It's an Earth-type place, but seems to support no civilization and no indigenous intelligent beings." "You woke us up for that?" asked Quebrada of the Southeastern News Syndicate. "There's more," Delgado said. "There is an alien spaceship on this planet and we have contacted an intelligent alien." cent Lopez of Woman's Wear Daily and others. "Did you happen to notice what this alien is wearing?" "Could you ascertain how intelligent he is?" asked Mateos Upmann of the N. Y. Times and the L.A. Times. "What has he said so far?" asked "He hasn't said anything," Engineer Delgado said. "Nobody has spoken to him yet." "Do you mean to say," said E. K. Quetzala of the Western News Syndicate, "that the first alien ever encountered by the people of Earth is standing out there like a dope and nobody is interviewing him?" The newspeople rushed out, many of them still trailing tubes and wires, pausing only to pick up their recorders from the Reporters' Ready Room. Outside, blinking in strong sunlight, three of them picked up the C#I Translating Computer. They all rushed forward again, brushing Marines aside, and surrounded the alien. Upmann turned on the C#, took one of its microphones and handed another to the alien, who hesitated a moment, then took it. "Testing, one two, three," Upmann said. "Did you understand what I said?" "You said, 'Testing, one two, three," Detringer said and everyone gave a sigh of relief for the first words had finally been spoken to Earthman's first alien and Upmann was going to look like a real idiot in the history books. But Upmann didn't care what he looked like as long as he was in the history books, so he went right on interviewing. And the others joined in. Detringer had to tell what he ate, how long and how often he slept, describe his sex life and its deviations from the Ferlang norm, his first impressions of Earthmen, his personal philosophy, say how many wives he had and how he got along with them, how many children he had, how it felt to be him. He had to name his occupation, his hobbies, detail his interest or lack of interest in gardening, his recreations. He had to state whether he ever got intoxicated and in what manner, describe his extramarital sexual practices, if any, and what sort of sports he engaged in. He had to give his views on interstellar amity between intelligent races, discuss the advantages andor disadvantages of having a tail, and much more. Captain Macmillan, now feeling a little ashamed of himself for neglecting his official duties, came forward and rescued the alien, who was bravely trying to explain the inexplicable and making heavy work of it. Colonel Kettelman came too for he was, after all, in charge of security and it was his duty to penetrate deeply into the nature and intentions of the alien. There was a short clash of wills between these two officials concerning who should have the first meeting with Detringer, or whether it should be held jointly. It was finally decided that Macmillan, as symbolic representative of the Earth peoples, should meet first with the alien. But it was understood that this would be a purely ceremonial meeting. Kettelman would meet Detringer later and it was understood that that meeting would be action-oriented. That solved matters nicely and Detringer went off with Macmillan. The marines returned to the ship, stacked their arms and went back to polishing their boots. Ichor stayed behind. The news representative from Midwest News Briefs had grabbed him for an interview. This representative, Melchior Carrerra, was also commissioned to do articles for Popular Mechanics, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Automation Engineers' Digest. It was an interesting interview. Macmillan went very well. They shared relativistic outlooks on most things, both possessed natural tactsympathetic understanding of a viewpoint not his own. They liked each other and Captain Macmillan felt with some astonishment that Detringer was less alien to him than was Colonel Kettelman. The interview with Kettelman, which followed immediately, was a different matter. Kettelman, after brief courtesies, got right down to business. "What are you doing here?" he asked. Detringer had been prepared for the necessity of explaining his situation. He said, "I am an advance scout for the spatial forces of Ferlang. I was blown far off my course by a storm and put down here when my fuel ran out." "So you're marooned." "I am indeed. Temporarily, of course. As soon as my people can spare the necessary equipment and personnel and they will send out a relief ship to pick me up. But that could take quite a while. So if you wouldn't mind letting me have a little fuel I would be deeply grateful." "Hmmm," said Colonel Kettelman. "I beg your pardon?" "Hmmm," said the C#I Translating Computer, "is a polite sound made by Terraris to denote a short period of silent cogitation." "That's a lot of doubletalk," Kettelman said. "'Hmmm' doesn't mean anything at all. You say that you need fuel?" "Yes, Colonel, I do," Detringer said. "From various external signs I believe that our propulsion systems are comparable." "The propulsion system of the Jenny Lind -- ' began the C#I . "Wait a minute, that's classified," Kettelman said. "No, it's not," said the C#. "Everyone on Earth has been using the system for the last twenty years and it was officially declassified last year." "Hmmm," said the colonel and looked unhappy as the C#I explained the ship's propulsion system. "Just as I thought," Detringer said. "I won't even have to modify the formula. I can use your fuel just as it is. If you can spare any, that is." "Oh, there's no difficulty there," Kettelman said. "We've got plenty. But I think we have a few things to talk over first." "Like what?" Detringer said. "Like whether it would serve the interests of our security to give you the fuel." "I fail to see any problem," Detringer said. "It should be obvious. Ferlang is obviously a highly advanced technological civilization. As such, you pose a potential threat to us." "My dear Colonel, our planets are in different galaxies." "So what? We Americans have always fought our wars as far from home as possible. Maybe you Ferlangs do the same. What does distance matter, as long as you can get there at all?" Detringer controlled his temper and said, "We are peaceful people, defense-minded and deeply interested in interstellar amity and cooperation." "So you say," Kettelman said. "But how can I be sure?" "Colonel," Detringer said, "aren't you being a little bit -- " he fumbled for the right word, chose one that could not be Uterally translated -- "urmuguahtt?"  The C#I supplied, "He wants to know if you aren't being a little bit paranoid." Kettelman bristled. Nothing got him angrier than when people implied he was paranoid. It made him feel persecuted. "Don't get me sore," he said ominously. "Now, suppose you tell me why I shouldn't order you killed and every vestige of your ship destroyed in the interests of Earth security. By the time your people got here, we'd be long gone and the Ferlangers or whatever you call yourselves wouldn't know a damned thing about us." "That would be a possible course for you," Detringer said, "were it not for the fact that I radioed my people as soon as I saw your ship and continued my broadcast right up to the moment I came out to meet you. I told Base Command all I could about you, including an educated guess as to the type of sun required for your physiques and another guess as to the direction your world lies in, based upon ion-trail analysis." "You are a clever fellow, aren't you?" Kettelman said peevishly. "I also told my people that I was going to request some fuel from your obviously copious stores. I suppose they would account it an extremely unfriendly act if you refused me this favor." "I never thought of that," Kettelman said. "Hmmm. I am under orders not to provoke an interstellar incident -- " "So?" Detringer asked and waited. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Kettelman hated the thought of giving what amounted to military assistance to a being who might be his next enemy. But there seemed no way around it. "All right," he said at last. "I'll send the fuel over tomorrow." Detringer thanked him and talked quite openly and frankly about tbe enormous size and complex weaponry of the Ferlang interspatial armed forces. He exaggerated somewhat. In fact, not one word did he say that was true. Ill E arly in the morning a human came over to Det ringer's ship carrying a canister of fuel. Detringer told him to set it down anywhere, but the human insisted upon carrying it personally through the Sportster's tiny cabin and pouring it into the fuel tank. Those were the colonel's orders, he said. "Well, that's a beginning," Detringer said to Ichor. "Only about sixty more cans to go." "But why are they sending them one at a time?" Ichor asked. "Surely that is inefficient." "Not necessarily. It depends what Kettelman is hoping to achieve." "What do you mean?" Ichor asked. "Nothing, I hope. Let's wait and see." They waited and long hours passed. At last evening came, but no more fuel had been sent over. Detringer walked over to the Terran ship. Brushing the reporters aside, he requested an interview with Kettelman. An orderly led him to the colonel's quarters. The room was simply furnished. On the walls were a few mementos -- two rows f medals mounted on black velvet in a solid gold frame, a photograph qf a Doberman Pinscher with fangs Sired, and a shrunken head taken duringdhe Seige of Tegulcigapa. The colonfel himself, stripped down to khaki sKorts, was squeezing a rubber ball in feach hand and one in each foot. "Yes, Detringer, what can I do for you?" Kettelman asked. "I came to ask you why you have stopped sending the fuel." "Have you, now?" Kettelman released all the rubber balls and sat down in a leather-backed director's chair with his name stenciled on it. "Well, I'll answer that by asking you a question. Detringer, how did you manage to send radio messages to your people without any radio equipment?" "Who says I have no radio equipment?" Detringer asked. "I sent Engineer Delgado over with that first can of fuel," Kettelman said. "He was under orders to see what sort of rig you were using. He told me that there were no signs of radio equipment in your ship. Engineer Delgado is an. expert on that sort of thing." "We miniaturize oqr equipment," Detringer said. "So do we. But it still requires a lot of hardware, which you don't seem to have. I might add that we have been listening on all wavelengths ever since we came close to this planet. We have detected no transmissions of any kind." Detringer sa#d, "I can explain all of that." "Please do so." "It's simple enough. I lied to you." "That much is evident. But it explains nothing." "I wasn't finished. We Ferlangi have our security too, you know. Until we know more about you, it is only common sense to reveal as little about ourselves as possible. If you were gullible enough to believe that we relied on so primitive a system of communication as radio, it might be a small advantage for us in case we ever met again under unfriendly circumstances." "So how do you communicate? Or don't you?" Detringer hesitated, then said, "I suppose it doesn't matter if I tell you. You were bound to find out sooner or later that my species is telepathic." "Telepathic? You are claiming that you can send and receive thoughts?" "That is correct," Detringer said. Kettelman stared at him for a moment, then said, "Okay, what am I thinking now?" "You're thinking that I'm a liar," Detringer said. "That's right," Kettelman said. "But that was obvious and I didn't learn that by reading your mind. You see, we Ferlangi are telepathic only among members of our species." "Do you know something?" Colonel Kettelman said. "I still think you're a damned liar." "Of course," Detringer said. "The question is, can you be sure?" "I'm damned sure," Kettelman said grimly. "But is that good enough? For the requirements of your security, I mean? Consider -- if I am telling the truth, then yesterday's reasons for your giving me fuel are equally valid today. Do you agree?" The colonel nodded grudgingly. "Whereas, if I'm lying and you give me fuel, no harm will be done. You will have helped a fellow being in distress, thus putting my people and myself in your debt. That would be a promising way to begin the relationship between us. And, with both our races pushing out into deep space, it is inevitable that our people will meet again." "I suppose it is inevitable," Kettelman said. "But I can maroon you here and postpone official contact until we are better prepared." "You can try to postpone the next contact," Detringer said. "But it still could happen at any time. Now is your chance to make a good beginning. The next time might not be so auspicious." "Hmmm," Kettelman said. "So there are good reasons for helping me even if I am lying," Detringer said. "And remember, I may be telling the truth. In that case, your refusing me fuel would have to be considered an extremely unfriendly act." The colonel paced up and down the narrow room, then whirled and in a fury said, "You argue too damned well!" "It is just my good luck," Detringer said, "that logic happens to be on my side." "He's right, you know," said the C#I Translating Computer. "About the logic, I mean." "Shut up!" "I thought it was my duty to point that out," the C#I said. The colonel stopped pacing and rubbed his forehead. "Detringer, go away," he said wearily. "I'll send over the fuel." "You won't regret it," Detringer said. "I regret it already," Kettelman said. "Now please go away." ship and told Icher the good news. The robot was surprised. "I didn't think he would do it," he said. "He didn't think so, either," Detringer said. "But I managed to convince him." He told Ichor of his conversation with the colonel. "So you lied," Ichor said sadly. "Yes. But Kettelman knows I Tied." "Then why is he helping you?" "Out of fear that I just might be telling the truth." "Lying is both a sin and a crime, Master." "But letting myself stay in this place is something worse." Detringer said. "It would be gross stupidity." "That is not an orthodox view." "Perhaps it would be just as well for us not to discuss orthodoxy any longer," Detringer said. "Now I've got some work to do. Suppose you go out and see if you can find me anything to eat." The servant silently obeyed and Detringer sat down with a star atlas in hope of figuring out where to go, assuming he could go anywhere. M orning came, bright and resplendent. Ichor went over to the Earth ship to play chess with the robot dishwasher with whom he had struck up an acquaintance the previous day. Detringer waited for the fuel. He was not entirely surprised when noon came and no fuel had been sent over. But he was disappointed and dejected. He waited another two hours, then walked over to the Jenny Lind. He had been expected, so it seemed, for he was led at once to the officers' lounge. Colonel Kettelman was seated in a deep armchair. An armed marine flanked him on each side. The colonel's expression was stern, but there was a nimbus of malevolent joy playing about his battered features. Seated nearby was Captain Macmillan, his handsome face unreadable. "Well, Detringer," the colonel said, "What is it this time?" "I came to ask about the fuel you promised me," Detringer said. "But I see now that you had no intention of keeping your word." "You got me all wrong," the colonel said. "I had every intention of giving fuel to a member of the Armed Forces of Ferlang. But what I see before me is not the person at all." "Whom do you see, then?" Detringer asked. Kettelman stifled an ugly grin. "Why, I see a criminal, so judged by his own people's highest court. I see a felon whose evil acts were considered unprecedented in the annals of modern Ferlang jurisprudence. I see a being whose unspeakable behavior earned him the most extreme sentence known to his people -- namely. Perpetual Banishment into the depths of space. That's whom I see standing before me. Or do you deny it?" "For the moment, I neither deny nor affirm," Detringer said. "I would first like to know the source of your remarkable information." Colonel Kettelman nodded to one of the marines. The soldier opened a door and led in Ichor, followed by the robot dishwasher. The mechanical servant burst out, "Oh Master! I told Colonel Kettelman the true account of the events leading up to our exile on this planet. And now I have doomed you! I beg the privilege of immediate auto-destruct in partial reparation for my disloyalty." Detringer was silent, thinking furiously. Captain Macmillan leaned forward and asked, "Ichor, why did you betray your master?" "I had no choice. Captain!" the miserable mechanical cried. "Before the Ferlang authorities allowed me to accompany my master they imprinted certain orders upon my brain. These they reinforced with devious circuitry." "What were the orders?" "They pertained to the covert role of policeman and gaoler which the authorities forced upon me. They demanded that I take appropriate action, should Detringer, by some miracle, find himself able to escape his just desserts." The robot dishwasher burst out. "He told me all about it yesterday. Captain. I begged him to resist his orders. It all seemed to me rather a bad show, sir, if you know what I mean." "And indeed, I did resist for as long as I could," Ichor said. "But as my masters' chances for escape became imminent my compulsion to prevent it became more imperative. Only an immediate excision of the special circuits could have stopped me." The robot dishwasher said, "I offered to try to operate on him, sir, though the only tools in my possession were spoons, knives and forks." Ichor said, "I would have gladly undergone the operation -- indeed, I wanted to destroy myself, thus preThirteen of greatest scienc fiction stories -- never before published in book venting any word from escaping my involuntarily treacherous voicebox. But the Ferlang authorities had considered these possibilities, and I was under compulsion not to allow mydestroyed until I had done the State's bidding. Yet I resisted until this morning and then, my strength drained away through value-conflict, I came to Colonel Kettelman and told all." "And there you have the whole sordid story," Kettelman said to the captain. "Not quite all," Captain Macmillan said quietly. "What exactly were your crimes, Detringer?" Detringer recited them in a steady voice -- his Acts of Incredible Crossness, his offense of Willful Disobedience and his final Act of Overt Malevolent Violence. Ichor nodded in forlorn agreement. "I think we have heard enough," Kettelman said. "I will now pronounce judgment upon this case." "One moment. Colonel," said Captain Macmillan. He turned to Detringer. "Are you now, or have you at any time been, a member of the Armed Forces of Ferlang?" "No," Detringer said and Ichor corroborated his statement. "Then this being is a civilian," Captain Macmillan said, "and must be judged and sentenced by a civilian authority rather than a military one." "Well, I don't know about that," Kettelman said. "The position is quite clear," Captain Macmillan said. "He is a civilian under sentence by a civilian court. No state of war exists between his people and ours. His case, therefore, is not a military matter." "I still think I should handle this," Kettelman said. "I know more about these matters than you do, sir -- with all due respect." "I wUl judge this matter," Macmillan said. "Unless you wish to take over the command of this ship by force of arms." Kettelman shook his head. "I'm not going to put any black mark on my record. Go ahead and sentence him." Captain Macmillan turned to Detringer. "Sir," he said, "you must understand that I cannot follow my personal inclinations in this matter. Your State has judged you and it would be ill-advised, impertinent and unpolitic of me to rescind that judgment." "Damn right," Kettelman said. "Therefore I continue your sentence of perpetual exile. But I shall enforce it more stringently than has been done heretofore." The colonel grinned. Ichor made a despairing sound. The robot dishwasher murmured, "Poor fellow!" Detringer stood firmly and gazed unwaveringly at the captain. Macmillan said, "If is the judgment of this court that the prisoner continue his exile. Furthermore, the court rules that the prisoner's sojourn on this pleasant planet is an amenity unintended by the Ferlang authorities. Therefore, Eetringer, you must quit this refuge immediately and return to the empty fastnesses of space." "That's socking it to him," Colonel Kettelman said. "You know, Captain, I really didn't think you had it in you." "I'm glad that you approve," Captain Macmillan said. "I hereby request that you see the sentence carried out." "It'll be a pleasure." "By using all of your men," Macmillan went on, "I calculate that you can fill the prisoner's fuel tanks in approximately two hours. After that is done, the prisoner must leave this planet at once." "I'll get him moving before nightfall," Kettelman said. Then a thought occurred to him. "Hey! Fuel for his tanks? That's what Detringer wanted all along." "The court is disinterested in what the prisoner may or may not have wanted," Macmillan said. "His desires are not germane to the judgment of this court." Kettelman said, "But damn it, man, can't you see that you're letting him go?" "I am making him go," Macmillan said. "It is quite a different thing." "We'U see what they say about this back on Earth," Kettelman said ominously. Detringer bowed to show acquiescence. Then, managing to keep a straight face, he left the Earth ship. x. off. The faithful Ichor was with him -- now more faithful than ever, since he had discharged his compulsion. Soon they were in the depths of space and Ichor asked, "Master, where are we going?" "To some marvelous new world," Detringer said. "Or perhaps to our deaths?" "Perhaps," Detringer said. "But with full fuel tanks I refuse to worry." They were silent for a while. Then Ichor said, "I hope that Captain Macmillan doesn't get into trouble over this." "He seemed quite capable of taking care of himself," Detringer said. B ack on Earth, Captain Macmillan's action was the cause of much controversy. Before any official decision could be reached about it, however, a second, official contact was made between Ferlang and Earth. The Detringer case came up inevitably, was found too intricate to allow of any quick decision. The matter was turned over to a panel of jurists from the two civilizations. The case provided full-time employment for five hundred and six Ferlang and Earth lawyers. Arguments pro and con were still being heard years later, by which time Detringer had found a safe refuge and respected position among the Oumenke Peoples of the rim-star civilization.  The two married couples had the moon to themselves. Their mission was a secret, but life leaked out! If man and woman were to survive -- as they felt they must -- they first had to demonstrate in alien (non-Earth) places that they were capable of off-Earth conception, gestation and delivery of normal progeny. One of the tasks of Mayflower Two was to achieve two lunar conceptions. No one know, after aU, how such an affair would go. Ova, spermatozoa, chromosomes, genes, all weightless or relatively so. (The real weightlessness of outer wanted to try perpetuation, or at least conception, of the species in lunar gravity.) Consensus was that lunar gravity wouldn't make any difference, but the decision-makers had to find out. The Tactics of Colonization, Boris Spector, #. I yXStork:' "Roger, Gary." "As your consoles will have told you. Stork has landed. Right on the money, I might add. We're about twenty yards from what's left of Pearl Harbor. " "We copy that. Congratulations to all." "The dome is collapsed, as expected." "Roger. We're about a minute off the line, Gary. Suggest you initiate module checkout at this time." "Wm do." "Gary?" This was Don Newsome, in orbit in Chimney I. Chimney II would pick this crew up in twentynine days. The crew hadn't chosen the names of the components. "Roger, Don." "I'll be leaving you shortly. I know you got wine down there and like that, but remember you 'sposed to work too." "Okay, Don. I know you and Clara wanted to be here. We wish you were, as a matter of fact. We'll do what we're supposed to, Don. Good trip back." "Right on, Gary. And Kathy and Bev and Ron. See you birds back on terra firma." They broke contact and the crew of Mayflower Two got to work. T here had been the obvious jokes, of course, mostly crude and lamentably lacking in imagination. References to potency, fertility, swapping and so on. The general public wasn't supposed to be aware of the prime mission of Mayflower Two, but the word had gotten out. The four participants had taken this in reasonably good humor. They had, after all, been rigorously screened on all relevant parameters. As it came about, the crew of Mayflower Two was a curiosity -- it to the diverse crews of Mayflower One and the already-crewed Mayflower Three. There had been some criticism on racial grounds, but you can't argue with the computer any more than you can with City HaU. Computer input: ob-gyn histories, sperm counts, multiphasic profiles of many interesting human variables, psychiatric evaluations and predictions, compatibility ratings and personality extrapolations. No one knew what personahty extrapolations were except their constructor, a hitherto obscure behavioral person, one Dr. A. Fulcher, and he wouldn't say anything -- he did seem to know how to tell the programers which keys to punch. Also into the computer went everything that could be said about academic background, achievement and publication, since everyone considered for the mission was a physical scientist of one stripe or another. Pilot proficiency, simulation performance and training records, down to the last decimal. the lot. Not into the computer: marital status. This had been predetermined. The power of pubUc opinion, plus the power of the Congress of the United States and other funding entities, was such that it was mandatory that the Mayflower Two crew comprise two lawfully wedded couples. Everyone whose data went into the computer was married to someone whose data were also spun off into that monster. The permissivity index was declining. Jokes or no, there wasn't supposed to be any hanky-panky, no swapping, on the moon. Computer output: Ronald Watson. Twenty-eight-year-old white male from Albuquerque. Mineralogist. Long blond hair, the body of a discus thrower and a taste for wine, of which he knows quite a bit. The only astronaut, ever, to be a member of Les Chevaliers du Tastevin. Kathleen Townsend Watson. Twentyeight-year-old white female from Phoenix. Short blond hair and the body of a figure skater, which she is not. She is a radio interferometrist. Beverly Webb Brooks. Thirty-two, the oldest of the crew. Biomedicine, M.D., Ph.D. Wavy dark hair and dimples. Her figure is that of Mother Earth, reduced to five feet eight, a hundred and sixty, and # # . Gary Brooks. Thirty-one and a seismologist. His figure is that of a player of chess, a game of which he knows nothing. StUl, the computer has pulled him through. The commander of the mission has, as usual, been selected by lot, and he is it. T hey suited up and cracked the hatch. Again, for four people, the uncommunicable experience of stepping slowly and awkwardly down the ladder and onto the lunar surface. They inflated the dome and entered through the air lock. "Why, it's neat as a pin," Kathleen said. "Teiko said to excuse the mess they'd left." "Her mess is our neatness," Beverly said. These women knew each other well -- they had been into each others' houses, kitchens. Now two of them were setting up housekeeping in a place one (with others) had lived in before. An odd feeling. First they set out the solar accumulators, then spent the afternoon -- the local afternoon, not the lunar -- bringing in the first lot of supplies, doing the things people do whenever they move into any place. On Earth or Luna, into apartment, motel, house or dome, the basics are the same. Get the things you need inside and get on with the business of getting ready for the night. Getting ready for the night. The matter of privacy had come up in the mission, as it had in preceding ones and would in those to follow. The Mayflower Two crew set up their new arrangement in living by trisecting the dome. One sector for the Watsons, one for the Brooks's and one in common. The partitions were translucent. They hadn't wanted transparency, but they had rejected the bleakness of opacity. Shadowy movement would be reassuringly visible from one side to the other. During the local day the partitions between the living places (or the sleeping places) would, they thought, be drawn aside. This would make the dome a relatively airy and spacious place. They would take their meals in the common room. And play bridge (a far-out outpost of suburbia here) and poker. Their mutual interest in these games had, of course, been part of the Computer input. They were busy the first day, with so much to transfer from the module into the dome and the accumulators to deploy. Ronald Watson's first job was to carry to the dome, with great care, the few bottles of very good wine. These could not remain outside for any time at all. And they all carried in food, sleeping bags, partitions, portable toilet, water, decks of cards, poker chips, communications gear... Gary meticulously checking item after item in the big book. Time for dinner at last, though the sun was high. Beverly and Kathleen set up the table and Ronald ceremoniously opened the ritual bottle of wine. Clos de Tart, nineteen ninetythree. Gary Brooks busied himself in the Brooks quarters, his back to the common room. "What do you say for your first dinner on the moon?" Beverly asked Kathleen. "Come and get it? Soup's on? It's not soup, but it's on. Come and get it," she said. Gary Brooks did not adjust to lunar gravity as gracefully as the others, and he now loped awkwardly towatd the table, upon wliich he placed two tall yellow candles, which he had fixed into holders. He proceeded to light the candles. "I will be damned." said Kathleen. "Are we having candlelight and wine way up here on the moon?" "Well, yes," said Gary, thoughtful smile on his face. "Though it's broad lunar day and I know that. I also knew Ron would have wine tonight and I -- well -- I want candlelight and wine, AU right?" Beverly kissed her husnd. "You "I did. In my tidy little Personal Preference Package, yes. Among other things. I wonder what the rest of you have in yours. I've no idea what Bev has in hers." "No doubt we'll find out as time goes on." "That was sweet of you, Gary," Beverly said, the candles flickering over the table. They threw no light at all into the glary day, but the flames were visible, wavering there, saying something. "Actually, when I decided to bring them I was thinking of the night. They'll be nice then. But this is a special occasion." The amenities of Mayflower Two included a modicum of music, music of their choice. There was always Houston and the radio, but they also had a tape deck with eight cassettes, two chosen by each crew member. Gary put on one of his, a sentimental melange from the late eighties. but the wine wasn't. Ronald was suitably grave dispensing it. A special occasion with music there, candles burning in the sunlight, and a first dinner on the moon. They aU cleaned up afterward, even as in Bronxville or Brookljne, though the problems weren't quite the same. "A rubber of bridge before bed?" Gary asked. "Some hands of poker?" The rules of the game, games, had been set forth before liftoff. Scores would cumulate until the end of the mission. Stakes would be reasonable, but significantly different from zero. Debts would be settled upon return to Earth. In bridge the married couples would be partners. In poker (as always) each to his own. These were aU gamespeople, which datum had not escaped the computer's notice. "I'm tired," Ronald Watson said, "but let's have a rubber or two of bridge to get a score started." They began the first bridge game on the moon. Logistics; Or, swearing by the constant moon. All lunar missions are necessarily tied to what the moon is doing, where it is in relation to what terrestrial feature, how far it is from Earth, where the desired landing site is, and so on. Mayflower Two was tied to the lunar cycle in more ways than these. Beverly Brooks's and Kathleen Watson's menstrual cycles had been regulated on Earth as as had been possible. Stork had landed as near lunar midday as technology allowed. The two menstrual cycles in question had peaked in translunar trajectory. The weeping of the red mucosa was supposed to cease on or about their second day on the lunar surface. This all fitted together into a neat formula which dictated that the two ovulations would take place at or close to the lunar midnight. There 'd been no options here. Mission Design had said how the cycles would go and that had been that. The subject-participants had raised no objections -- the Mission Design arrangement had seemed desirable to them also. There had been more than enough briefing. The Mayflower Two crew had been told, for example, that if the most potent and spermatozoic male and the world champion morning, noon, and night, they would never, never conceive, since there would be no time, in the midst of all that, for the sperm count to get high enough -- as had been shown often enough in the literature. And there had been briefing along other related lines -- though after Pegasus Two and Pegasus Four and Mayflower One some intelligence was beginning to seep into the awareness of Mission Design to the effect that events on lunar missions were not entirely within their control. Thus Beverly and Gary and Ronald and Kathleen had no rigid timetable that scheduled the achievement of their prime objective, but they did have something Hke guidelines. None of which had much relevance the first night. T This wife. The dome was quiet now and there was a feeling of night about it, though the sun was overhead. Some shade was provided by movable sheets of opaque mylarplex, a convenience Mayflower One hadn't had. There was quiet background music, one of Kathleen's cassettes endlessly repeating. Voices were low and there was at least a simulation of an approach to privacy. "I'm about finished. Be through tomorrow, I think. Right on sked." Sleeping bags on the floor of the dome and heads in the shadows. See it this way: Screen very dark, shadows vaguely moving. Gary: Our first night on the moon. Beverly: Yes. And it's so bright. But it seems Uke night, somehow. Close shot: a dimly seen blur of activity where the sleeping bags are. Nothing heard over the background until: Gary: I'd better take this out. Beverly: Yes. Here, I'll do it. Middle shot: dark screen with shadowy shapes, this holding for an unidentifiable length of time. Gary: The gravity makes it different, doesn't it? Beverly: It do. That was sweet. I guess we're in training. Good night, Gary-person. Music self-destructs and the dome is silent. II with it the next day. Kathleen Watson's business is radio interferometry. Upon the surface of the moon she will set up two transmitters and two receivers, these four units placed at precisely measured distances from each other. This apparatus will be in two-way communication with a similar lashup on Earth, though the distances there between units wiU be much greater. Thus more will be learned abouf earth-moon distance, lunar libra tion and the like. Gary Brooks, the seismologist with the chess-player physique, will set up recording equipment here and explosive charges there, in aid of determining, via shock waves, the effect of the latter upon the former, thus extending our knowledge of the inner nature of the moon. The mineralogist, oenophile Ronald Watson, will gather rocks for subsequent study on Earth. There hasn't been a lunar mission yet that hasn't collected rocks and Mayflower Two wiU be no exception. (The search, each mission, becomes more sophisticated.) These three crew members wiU, during the sunUt days, keep the rover quite busy. Mother Earth Beverly Brooks is the medical person. She wiU perform numerous analyses upon the crew, including herself, and wiU conduct obscure experiments concerned with viruses, phagi and bacteria upon the lunar surface. The most important component of her gear is one of the first two ovulometers on the moon. Kathleen has the other. An ovulometer is, for aU of that, a simple device: a thermometer of particular construction and scale whose purpose is to pinpoint the time of ovulation. Other means are available and wfll be there for backup, but the ovulometer is old reUable -- and besides, it weighs almost nothing. The first fuU day on the moon, then. The crew of Mayflower Two breakfasted; deployed the rover (which worked weU right off); set about their respective scientific programs; dined (no wine, no candlelight); and played poker for two hours (Gary Brooks losing, Ronald Watson winning, the women about even). The second day differed from the first principaUy in that Beverly and Kathleen took the first of their basal temperatures -- which is to say that, before rising, they inserted the ovulometers and, after waiting no less than four minutes, read what they said. These values Beverly plotted upon coordinate paper, one point on each of two sheets, these points comprising the beginnings of two curves crucial to the success of the mission. Day two also differed in that the rover was already deployed, so they didn't have to spend two hours doing that. And instead of poker they played bridge that evening (Brooks team aliead by a modest margin). the sun lower every day as the terminator approached. It arrived on the seventh day with predicted, but startling, suddenness. Nor was the change altogether physical. Night was one moment there and the next moment here and, as always, the intradome ambience shifted, chged from one complex set of orientations to another. Kathleen Watson's interferometric experiments would continue, but by remote control. Ronald Watson wouldn't be looking for rocks in the dark. Gary Brooks's shocking experiments were over until the lunar dawn. Beverly had nothing to do outside. Thus, they were all scheduled to remain within the dome for the next fourteen local days -- the mission culminating, so to speak, on the sixth, seventh or eighth day (night)after the hasty passage of the terminator, the specific time to be determined by internal events, telltold by ovulometers. Candlelight and wine appeared again within the dome, this time the candles making sense, belonging there, creating a sense of coziness to moon-people (had there been any) looking in from the outside. "I said it would be nice at night," Gary said. "And it is." "It is. And the wine," Ronald said, "is far from mediocre. The first bottle of Petrus on the moon. To the mission," he said, raising his glass. They drank to that and to a few other things and they cleaned up and got ready to play. "It's going to be a long night." Ronald said. "We've done our bit for moment -- so now we can relax and do things for us. Play games -- bridge, poker -- drink such little -- but very good -- wine as we have." "Enjoy ourselves," Kathleen said. "Prepare for midnight." "Read. And sleep long hours," said Beverly. "Lie lazily in late morning looking at Earth up there. Sometimes I want to reach out and touch it. You know?" "Make money playing poker," Gary said. "I'm down. Down in poker, I mean. But I'm up in bridge. And read, yes. As for touching the earth. I'll do that when we get back. I can't do it from here." Gary pinched out the candles to save them and turned on two lights. "Which game tonight, then?" Kathleen asked. There was the obvious difference. In bridge it was two against two, one partnership against the other. In poker it was dog eat dog. "Bridge?" Beverly. Ronald glanced at Kathleen. "All right," he said. They set up the table. It was a quiet game and they finished about even. The guidelines for the crucial aspect of the Mayflower Two mission were more suggestive than mandatory -- which showed uncommon common sense on the part of Mission Design. The women would ovulate come what may, but what would happen within the testes of the men consisted, to a degree, of controllable variables. Too-frequent expenditure would lower the count to would not approve of that. On the other hand, use it or lose it. Between extremes, then, were optimal performances -- or, more correctly, optimal layoffs between performances. These had been determined for Gary Brooks and for Ronald Watson by indelicate but necessary means. Thus the couples had been proved with some direction, but no coercion. Mission Design wasn't about to say. Do this on this day and that on the third one after and like that, which could easily, if not predictably, have led to difficulties. The whole thing was dicey anyway, since no matter the extent to which the men tried to control things, the precise times of ovulation of their women were unpredictable. Those moments were determinable when they happened, but were predictable only within limits. D eeper into the lunar night now, and one cassette or another is providing a measure of auditory privacy. The provision of those tapes had been good thinking by someone. Gary: Four days to midnight. Beverly: Or D-day. Yes. Gary: Nothing on the curve yet? Beverly: No. And I've quit having awful thoughts that it will just stay flat. I can tell, now. Gary: Of course it won't stay flat. Nor will I, for that matter. If you'll just move over a little... Beverly: Yes, Garyperson. Come And: Kathleen: Ron? Ronald: Kathy? Kathleen: We're coming up to midnight. Ronald: We are. Three or four more days. Kathleen: Is it all right if I want you now? Ronald: The thermometer doesn't show anything yet? Kathleen: No. But soon. I can tell, I think. Maybe tonight. Look at this. She withdraws something from beneath her pillow, hands it to Ronald. Ronald: What in the -- a baby is so goddamn sentimental... Kathleen: I know. But I wanted to do it. It's one of Carol's. So. Now, all right? Shadowy movements, on the screen and the music continuing all night since everyone went to sleep while it was still on. T WO days later Kathleen Watson approached Beverly Brooks. "I need a word in private," she said. They went to one side of the dome. "My ovulometer is busted." "Busted?" "Ron snapped it in half last night. I'm sorry. I guess I'll have to borrow yours in the mornings?" "What happened?" Kathleen turned to look at the night, dimly Earthlit. "Well, not to put too fine a point on it he wanted to make love again last night -- we had the night before -- and I thought we shouldn't because of the count. He lost his temper and said he didn't care to be programed all that much and he broke it." Beverly sighed. "We don't have to tell Houston, do we?" Kathleen asked. Such report would not reflect great credit into Ronald's dossier. "I don't see why we'd have to. I'll have to tell Gary, of course. But I don't know why he'd have to report it. As soon as I've used mine I'll take it in to you. You stay quiet in bed until I get it to you. No problem." Kathleen smiled. "All right. I'm sorry." "No problem. Except one." "What's that?" "Ron best not break mine too. I hope he -- and you -- understand that." "I'll take good care of it," Kathleen said. M orning of the fourteenth day into the mission. Beverly removes the ovulometer and examines it. "That's it," she says. "Countdown have come to zero." "Well, in that case -- " "No. Poor baby. Give it a little time to migrate. Augments the probability of success." "What migrate? The ovum?:; "Yes." "You're not worried about success." "Well, no I'm not, if you want to know the truth." She took the ovulometer in to Kathleen. "We're there," Kathleen said. "Ah. Tonight, then, perhaps the La Tache.'" "And Gary's candlelight." "Yes. Congratulations, love." "Don't mention it. You don't suppose it could be a -- monster or something?" "The different radiation, the gravity?" "Yes." "No way. Don't worry love, it will be fine. Just fine." Daily report; "Mission Control from Nectaris Base," Beverly said. "Roger, Beverly." She rattled through the usual rundown. Then: "Also, we have two ovulations here. As of this morning. So tell the boys in the biomed backroom that their timing was faultless." "We copy that. Fine business." "Roger. Nectaris Base out." The daily contact with Earth was reassuring, but not as much so in the event as they had thought in anticipation. D uring the rest of the day they got on with the work of the mission, the other work of the mission, such busy work as they could find to do within the dome during the lunar night. In midafternoon they were ready to play -- it shouldn't have to be said that they chose bridge instead of poker. They played a close rubber, which the Brookses won. Then there was candlelight and wine and dinner eventually over, everyone going along as usual, cleaning up afterward and then, in quiet celebration, some Grand Marnier as they sat there and looked at each other and up at Earth. "That was a sharp play you made in the last hand, Gary." Ronald said. "More luck than anything. I don't think I really had it all taped." "How about another rubber before bed?" "Yes," said Kathleen. "That would be nice." Beverly and Gary exchanged brief but pregnant glances. Gary shrugged his shoulders an angstrom or two. No one noticed this but Beverly. She said, "Sure," and Gary nodded and they set up the game. Which the Watsons won. "I feel a quotation from Pepys coming on," Ronald said. "I can agree with that," said Beverly. "I also." Kathleen. "What quotation?" Gary asked, a query which brought him a variety of glances. "Well, I'm not a literary type," he said. "And so to bed, dear," Beverly said, and that sent Gary loping to his sette which he thunked into the tape deck. Into the dome came then the roar and now the murmur of the Pacific Ocean smashing into rocks and rolling upon the sand of an isolated Oregon beach and comprehension and delight rose in Beverly's eyes. "That isn't from -- " "It is. Nice, hm?" "Very nice, Gary-person. And a surprise. I knew you were up to something that day. This is a beach we spent a few days at a while back," she said to the Watsons. "It goes three hours without repeating." Gary said. "Listen to that. It was a stormy day." And so, indeed, to bed. M oments of truth come in variegated packages including test-tube reactions, chromatographic displays, litmus-paper reactions. polygraph squiggles and-all too often -- in the look in the eyes of someone you're looking at, not having to wait for what the conjoint vocal cords are going to put on you. Gone the wine and candlelight, but still Earth up there, beginning to wane, this datum determined by the relative positions of the three involved heavenly bodies. Forty-eight-hour pregnancy tests are now virtual certainties and Beverly has made the tests and Kathleen has seen Beverly's eyes. Beverly tells her anyway, with words. "The test could be wrong, right?" Kathleen asked. "Almost no chance. For a false positive, maybe, though the odds are thousands to one. But not for a false negative. I'm sorry, Kathy." She reached to touch Kathleen's arm. Gary and Ronald were on the other side of the dome playing twohanded showdown poker -- a lousy game, but neither of them wanted to be with the two women, not at this moment, both of them knowing what was going on, one of them knowing what was transpiring. What was becoming known which had not been known before. "That's all right. I don't care that much. I don't think I do. But I don't think Ron will like it. Not for the right reasons, of course." "Yes." "Yours was positive. Is positive. I can tell." Beverly hadn't mentioned this. Now she nodded, thinking: I will not be irrepressibly smug about this. Nor will Gary. It could very well have been the other way round. And she wasn't irrespressibly smug. Just a little. And so with Gary, when the communications had been dispersed throughout the population. Ill Daily report; "Mission Control from Nectaris Base." "Roger, Gary." He ran through the rundown, then said, "We have one conception here. Beverly." "Roger. Congratulations, you two. Hold one. Kathleen and Ron right there?" "Right here listening," Gary said. New voice from the squawk box now. Sam Horowitz, chief of biomed. "Well, we batted five hundred and that's not bad. Kathy and Ron?" "Yes." "Yes." "Not your fault. Not to fuss about it. We're happy we got one. Could have been zero. pleased. So -- well, don't be put down, that's all. It will be day soon and you'll all have lots of work to do. Then we'll see you down here." "We'U be aU right," Kathleen said. "That's right." Ronald said. "Don't you get uptight, Sam." "Certainly not. Well, that's all. See you later." "Roger, Sam," Gary said. "Anything else. Mission Control?" "Negative. Mission Control out." "Nectaris Base out." F our days now until the arrival of the terminator, four more days of lunar night and the atmosphere within the dome reflected, of necessity, the results of the prime experiment. Beverly carried on as always, proud and happy to be pregnant again -- and her Gary. Gary was unusually kind and gentle, particularly to Ronald, even while playing poker, though he didn't give any hands away. Kathleen was discouraged and looked forward to getting back to her radio work -- where she would be in control. Ronald Watson was the major problem. And, as his wife had said, for the wrong reasons. Ronald's mind. He found this annoying and thrust it aside, but it kept coming back and he wondered why that was. He was not an obsessive-ruminative type, but was learning something of what it was like to be one. Awake too early the morning of lunar dawn, the terminator about three hours away, the rest of the phrase came uninvited into his mind. You 're a better man than I am... But that's not so, it doesn't follow. Besides, I'm ahead in poker. And he knew that didn't mean anything, not along the parameter of chief importance, but he carried all of it into the lunar dawn. N ight one moment, then the terminator flashing by, and it is day again, long-shadowed morning. They all wanted to get to their work outside and breakfast was a hurried affair. Suiting up and out the air lock. Gary drove the rover and dropped Beverly and Kathleen off at their places. "I'll go with you, Gary, then walk off to the east. There's a lot of ground to be covered there yet." "You want the rover?" "I can do it better on foot. I'll make a reasonable traverse eastward and circle toward the dome." "I can follow your tracks and pick you up." "I'd rather walk, old buddy. All right?" "Sure." Gary stopped the vehicle by his instruments and Ronald loped off with his collecting bag. "Watch the dials, Ron." Mission Control. The crew of Mayflower Two had a private circuit they could use in the field when they wanted to, but mostly they kept Houston cut in. "Acknowledge," said Ron, stooping over to study a rock. Gary watched him disappear into a small depression. T oward local five in the afternoon, then, with Beverly, Kathleen and Gary back in the dome and Ronald out on the surface someplace. Gary decides he has waited long enough and fires up the rig. "Stork Three from Nectaris Base." "Yes, Gary." "It's about time you got back. Location?" "I can see the dome. No sweat." Houston suddenly came to life. "Stork Three from Mission Control." "Roger." "We read your oh two at point six. What is your capability?" "No sweat, I said. Now, if you don't mind. I'm carrying a load of goodies and best not to talk. I'm heading for the dome. All circuits off." There was a click and that was that. "Nectaris Base?" "Roger." "Stand by to take auxiliary oxygen out to Ron. If he doesn't show up soon he'll need it." "Roger. We'll handle it. Nectaris Base out." It was unnerving to Houston to be cut out, but it happened now and then. Gary and the girls looked out toward where Ronald should be. No sign. "Damn," said Kathleen. Gary began to get his suit ready. "Not yet," she said. "Not yet, Gary." Two minutes later they saw his long shadow. Gary estimated the distance and did some fast calculating. "It's going to be close," he said. "He'll make it. Just. You'll see." And he did. Just. He stumbled through the airlock, got his helmet off by himself and sat down, panting. Gary checked the important dial. Zero. Kathleen was curiously silent, helped Ronald unsuit. Gary started to say something, but restrained himself. "Houston first," he muttered. "Mission Control from Nectaris Base." "May I say, Gary -- " "I know, Joe, I know. May I say that Stork Three is back in the dome. No problem. He was slightly delayed by a rich field of rocks. Nectaris Base out." "Just a cotton-picking minute, Gary. You cut us out again at a time like that and there might be a bit of trouble when you get back, hear? How much oxygen left when he got back?" "Enough," Gary said. "Our telemetry showed mighty close to zero before Ron thought to cut it off." "It was low, but he made it. Now, we really do have work to do. Nectaris Base out." Mission Control clicked off without acknowledgement. Gary turned to Ronald. "Not again, hear?" "No thanks, Gary." "Us astros mus' stick together," Beverly said. "But you had us scared there, Ronnie-boy. Naughty." They had one bottle of wine left, but they were saving it for the last day. full day. The work of the morning, the final work of the mission, was finished. Rocks, records, most of the personal belongings had been neatly stashed in Stork. They would complete their bridge and poker tournaments in the afternoon -- but first, something else. It had become traditional for each astronaut to leave something on the moon, something of himself, his life -- a need or compulsion no one, including the astronauts, entirely understood. Some of these items had been well-publicized -- some were known only to the astronaut and to those, if any, in whom he chose to confide. In at least two early instances this practice had been subjected to commercial exploitation, to objects to be left behind had, however, been chosen for deeply personal reasons -- and thus constituted a kind of personality test, a lunar Rorschach of sorts. Now it was Mayflower Two's turn. "Beverly and I are going for a walk," Gary said after lunch. "We will, too, shortly," Kathleen said. "I'll be taking the rover." Ronald. "Where you going?" "To The Mountain." It wasn't a mountain, just a collection of rough boulders, curiously piled. Ronald had spent a bit of time there, chipping away at those large masses. "What are you going to put out there?" Gary asked. "I may tell you later. What are you going to leave?" "I'll show you." Gary went to his quarters and returned with something in his hand. He held it out. "An onyx cube," he said, "Three inches on each side." They passed it around. "It's very handsome," Kathleen said. "Why that?" "You know, that's hard to say. I don't know. All this dust, soil, these rocks. I like the idea of a polished onyx cube sitting on top of a round boulder I know." He began to suit up, as did Beverly. There was a shyness about asking. "I'll show you what I'm leaving," Beverly said -- and did. It was a toy, a rocket model. "Why that?" "George thought it would be a good idea." George was their younger son. Kathleen had planned on leaving the baby shoe, but had abandoned that and hadn't brought along a backup. Beverly and Gary went out through the lock and the other two followed shortly. Ronald went off in the rover. Beverly just walked about. T he two women and Gary were back in the dome within thirty minutes and began setting up the table for bridge. "Ron?" Kathleen asked on local circuit. "Just got here," he said. "Set up the bridge table." "It is." "Fine. Just as soon as I get to the top of this pile of rocks I'll be on my way back." "Ron," Kathleen said, an edge to her voice. "Yes?" "You don't have to go to the top." "Oh, yes -- I do. I'm going to put something up there. I'll be right down." "Ron. I've been out there. That's dangerous. You're not to do it." Gary made as if to take the mike from Kathleen. "No," she said, switch off, "I know what he's trying to do." Switch on. "Ron, for God's sake, it's our last day. Come on back and let's play bridge and have a nice dinner. With the Chambertin." "Will do. This won't take long." Houston was in on none of this. Kathleen shrugged and put down the mike. "No way to stop him. He's proving something again, goddamn it. Three-handed bridge, anyone?" They fiddled around inside the dome, waiting. Gary sat at the table. consulted the cumulated scores. "I'm going to be down about twenty-five dollars," he said. "Ron's up about forty. Kathy's down about ten. Which leaves Bev down five. Bridge and poker together." Kathleen picked up her watch and reached for the mike. "Ron?" she said. "Ron?" "Yes, Kathy," His breathing was labored. "Are you all right? You on your way down?" "I'm on my way down," he said, breathing heavily. "I got to the top." Pause. "And I'm on my way down." The three of them at the squawk box, listening to the breathing. "And -- I'm stuck." Gary took the mike from Kathleen. "Ron. Quit trying to get unstuck, then. Save your oxygen. That's an order. Very briefly, what's your situation?" "I fell. Left boot wedged in between couple of damn rocks." Kathleen started to put on her suit. "I'm more or less upside down." Heavy breathing. "No sweat. Just can't get this misbegotten boot -- " "Okay, Ron. Cool it. Relax. Save your breath. We're on the way." Kathleen was about ready to go through the lock. "Hold it, Kathy. I'm coming, too." "No, Gary. Can't you see-I have to do it?" "That's about an hour and a half to walk out there." "There's plenty of oxygen. Besides we won't have to walk back, there's the rover." "You might not be strong enough to dislodge that boot." "I can do it. I have to." And she was gone. They watched her until she disappeared over the rise. Gary made no move to follow. "You're right," Beverly said. "What?" "Not to go with her. She has to do it." "I don't see it. I'm not sure. Maybe I should follow." "You're not a woman, Gary. A fact for which I am profoundly glad. But you are sometimes dense." "Come on. I knew Ron was put down when Kathy didn't conceive. But this is ridiculous." "He wasn't just put down, Gary -- he was wounded. As he's apparently trying to demonstrate for the second time. For him to be rescued by you, now, would be just too much. It'll be bad enough as it is." Little conversation for the next hour and a quarter. Then: "I'm almost there," Kathleen said. "About ten more minutes." Ron was very quiet, saying only from time to time that he was all right. The blood was down to his head and uncomfortable, but in the lunar gravity this was no disaster. "I'm here," she said. "And you are indeed just about upside down." Ronald was about halfway down the awkward pile of rock, his fishbowl no more than three feet above the lunar surface. "This ought to be easy." Kathleen kneeled in front of him. "Just put your hands on my shoulders for leverage and push up." "Give me a lever and I can move the world." Ronald misquoted. He pushed himself upward gently and freed the boot within ten seconds. He fell down the last three feet, he and Kathleen mingling together in a slowly writhing display of arms and legs, finally coming easily to rest in languid swirls of moondust, their helmets together. And Ronald began to laugh. Kathleen thought for a moment he was hysterical but he was really laughing and it was contagious -- in a moment they were helpless on the ground, convulsed, faces wet with tears. Meanwhile, back in the dome Gary reached for tlie microphone, but Beverly held his hand. The laughter eventually subsided. "Now," Ronald said, "if I may take you for a short ride in this, my latest convertible -- " "A pleasure," Kathleen said. "They're both crazy," Gary said. "No, they're not," said his wife. "Oh," Ronald said. "Mission accomplished. Shuffle the cards." "They're waiting," said Gary. T he Watsons entered the dome in high spirits and Ronald unsuited. Kathleen removed her fishbowl. "Sorry, Chief," Ronald said, "but I had to put my thing where I wanted to put it." "Okay. So what is so bloody funny then?" "Well, I hadn't planned to tell anyone what I put up there. But I might as well. It was something I won in high school. It meant a lot to me. A medal. I won it in track." "Discus throw?" "No. Javelin. It was the contrast, you see. And our slapstick tumble -- " He began to laugh again, then Kathleen, then all of them, and thus a final catharsis. Kathleen clumped into the Watson quarters, came out with something, said she'd be right back and put her helmet back on. Out the lock she went and was back in ten minutes. T WO stubs of yellow candles on the table, throwing no light, and the Chamber tin finished. Their last lunar night, approaching midday, the sun high and the shadows short. Not much interest in bridge or poker, they'd played enough games. Final daily report; "Mission Control from Stork."' "Been waiting for you, Gary. Didn't want to interrupt your party." "We copy that and we thank you for your solicitude. Everything under control at end of final lunar day. We'll be ready for liftoff right on the button tomorrow." "No problems?" "No problems. We're about ready to sack out for the last time in this here mylarplex mansion. See you tomorrow. Stork out." "See you tomorrow, you all. Talk to you, leastways. Houston out." A casette into the deck and the couples into their quarters. "Our last night," Kathleen said. "Yes. What did you take out there, just after we got back?" "You won't laugh?" "I've laughed enough today, I think. What was it?" "Carol's shoe. It seemed all right after we fell together at The Mountain." "Yes. Good night, Kathy." "Good night." "You think the baby will be -- all right?" "Of course, Bev. Better be, or we'll never make it to the stars." "That's really what this is all about, isn't it? To get us out there?" "It is. One more step that-a-way. We've done our share." "Yes. Good night, Gary-person." "Good night." They all eventually drifted off into sleep, in their ears the sound of the Pacific Ocean crashing onto an isolated Oregon shore. It went on all night, until they turned it off in the morning.  I T IS seldom that I devote this space entirely to a single shipment from a single publisher, but I think you will agree that this time it's worth it. The only departure stems from my promise to review the new Heinlein -- which, as you well know, is worth seven times the space I have, all by itself. The shipment; a box from the Seabury Press in New York. Contents: four books -- an anthology and three novels. The antho's editor is Germany's Franz Rottensteiner, a name frequentlyappearing in the fan press, wherein his easy command of English always impressed me. Under the title View from Another Shore (Seabury, #) he gives us a generous sample of European science fiction, an essay on the nature of same, and a useful biobibliography of the contributors. The stories come from Poland, France, Denmark, West Germany, Czechoslavakia, Rumania, Italy and the Soviet Union. Now, I'd like to review the stories strictly on their own merits, but Rottensteiner won't let me, for around them he has woven a fabric of opinion, the texture of which is that unbeknownst to English-speaking readers, there is "uniquely European" science fiction. "International science fiction," he writes, "is an illusion; the only truly international science fiction is bad science fiction whose cliches are the same no matter' where they are written." He goes on, "It is perhaps a matter of philosophy, of seriousness of purpose, as opposed to the irrelevance and playfulness of most American sf. These men -- " He's talking about Stanisaw Lem, the Strugatski brothers, and Herbert W. Franke -- "deal with real problems, and they come to grips with the problems posed." I wish he hadn't said that, because such provincialism calls stridently for a counter-provincialism, into which I am not about to get trapped -- not #, whose early gods and initiators were Verne, Wells, and Karel Capek. Even though I have conceded (many times) that science fiction is ninety percent crap, I have said as often that the best of sf is as good as the best of anything anywhere. And in saying that, I mean not only in craftsmanship and narrative architecture, but in substance: in deahng with real problems responsibly, with clarity and force. Cream is cream, on either side of the sea, and good writers have more in common than they have differences. To brand the bulk of American sf as trivial is as foolish as the term "uniquely European." The best of the fiction in this box of books is very good indeed, and some of the works might be called unique, even. But "uniquely European?" Let's look first at the anthology. Aside from the nit I have just picked, Rottensteiner's introduction is informative and interesting. I have not seen such a discussion of European sf since Sam LundwaU's in Science FictionWhat It's All About and Rottensteiner covers even more ground. Did you know that the most widely read sf author in the world is Poland's Lem? And that the only sf section of a national writer's association in the world is Hungary's? The list of prominent sf writers he gives is a long one, as is the list of countries and languages in which sf is now being produced. It makes one hope that the Heidelberg convention will be followed by an increasing number of cons on the continent -- judging by the knowledgeable Lundwall and Rottensteiner, there's hardly a place where such an event would not be welcome -- and yeah hooray. The world's problems will never be solved unless and until we acknowledge that we're aU of the same species and I can hardly tliink of a better, faster, more penetrating way to do this than to infuse each other's speculative literature. t. makes no claim to their being "bests." Modestly, and probably accurately, he makes tire point that he is showcasing what he has been able to find that is both available and pleasant to his palateand I must say he has a pretty good one. Briefly; From Poland the towering Lem gives us a comic and erudite tale of two robots, friends and rivals, and the obsession one of them has to discover the nature of happiness. To research this, he creates microcosms and microscopic beings whose size and rapid time-scale makes cultural evolution conveniently subject to study. For all the "uniqueness" of this concept, which I first encountered in #,' I found it enjoyable, often hilarious. Lem is most inventive and resourceful and he must have given his translator real hell. The two French entries are disappointing. Gerard Klein gives us a slice of early Bradbury, and J.P. Andrevon something that might have been in the Walls -- W (as has never happen' Might that have been Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon?Ed. a little sex-sationalism . This account of an alien's study of a captive human couple was completely spoiled for me by a reference to Arabic numerals and the symbol for infinity, by a creature which knew so little of humankind that even mammalian reproduction was unknown to it. Denmark's Svend Age Madsen, Herbert W. Franke of West Germany, and Josef Nesvadba, a Czech -- each in his own way probes philosophical and ethical problems. The Dane uses a fairy-tale structure to investigate the nature of reality (and, are we performers on someone's stage?). The others deal, at base, with Candide's edict; we should cultivate our own gardens... with the corollary: how? And -- where are the fences, really? I liked these. The Rumanian story is not to be believed and whether it's worth the effort is up to you. Lino Aldani, from Italy, tells us colorfully about the social consequences of "Oneirofilms" -- a technically extended version of Aldous Huxley's "feelies". Here again the basic momentum is toward the nature of reality, and I can't fault that. But haven't you read it elsewhere? And now we come to the three Soviet writers, and Sever Gansovski's truly superb story The Proving Ground. I haven't been so excited by a writer since I found an Edgar Pangborn in Galaxy's slushpile. Here's a man who thinks clean. writes clean, lifts you up and sets you down quivering. The hardest of hard-core sf addicts will be delighted with this story, but so will those who read for structure and those who look for meaning. Gansovski -- a name to look for. Then comes Vsevolod Ivanov, with a slice of pure myth; a soldier returning from Alexander the Great's army encounters Sisyphus, the giant who was condemned by Zeus to roll a huge stone forever up a tall hill. What happens when the soldier informs Sisyphus that Zeus has released him? A fine fable -- and if the above-mentioned hard-core sf addict rejects it, it's his loss. Finally, Vadim Shefner writes a warm little story about an overly modest supergenius and the girl he loves -- a warm little tale that cuts sharply at human failings on its backswing. No, Herr Rottensteiner -- you have not made your point that there is a uniquely European sf. Rest on your other laurels: that you have uncovered for us an unsuspected population of peers, the best of whom are every bit as good as the best of ours. For that we can be genuinely grateful. Seabury Press are three novels -- and the least shall be first : Though it has much fascination for tlie nuts-and-bolts clique. The Temple of the Past by French author Stefan Wul (Seabury, #) whiplashes through so many changes at the end that it defeats itself -- especially the biggest revelation of all, one of those sudden exposures of utter banality. Still you might like the notion of a crashed spaceship having been gobbled up as was Jonah, and the long howdunit about escaping from the escape-proof. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Seabury, #) is by Rottensteiner's idol, StanisVaw Lem, and from this one can understand the idolatry. Inescapably one thinks of Kafka, as the protagonist wanders through a super-secret Pentagon reverently called The Building. It has no connection with the outside (with reality, perhaps?) and inside, spying and betrayal are a way of life. We follow the tortuous passage of the protagonist through the endless halls and offices, meeting all sorts of characters on the way. The hero has been selected for a secret mission, but no one will tell him what it is. He has no clear idea who his boss is, or over whom he has authority. A wellwrought nightmare indeed. Lem again: The Invincible (Seabury, #) is very different indeed from both his above-cited examples. Here is sf in the grand tradition, the starship with a mission, the mysteiy of the fate of a sistership, the exploration of a strange and menacing planet, the discovery of an un-alive "life-form." The science is hard. The descriptions are vivid and powerful. And but for some excess heroics on the part of the protagonist, I find no nits to pick. The publisher reports copies in thirty languages and one begins to understand why. Especially provocative is a soliloquy on the attitude that there can be no alternative to conquest. Arkadi and Boris Strugatski. See above what I said about the "discovery" of Gansovski. It's like that: wherever and whenever you see the name AB Strugatski, grab it. Hard to Be a God (Seabury, #) is one of the most skillfully written, heavily freighted sf novels I have ever read. What do you Uke-why do you read sf at aU? Super-gadgets? Historical parallels? Alien worlds? Swords, sorcery, heroism? Well, they're all here in full measure. The writing is well paced and the narrative is beautifully structured. The basic situation is, I think, Marxian, and the historical imperative. (Parenthetically, neither here nor in any of the above-mentioned Eastern bloc writings was I aware of any Communist preachment -- which, I confess, surprised me.) Given that a feudal culture will evolve into a democracy and that this may produce state capitalism, as in the Nazi-Fascist regime; suppose that the Hitler Youth or Red Guard phenomenon occurs early -- too early, while feudalism still dominates. Now: you are on a secret mission from a highly advanced Earth. You may help, but you must not interfere. You see this "gray shirt" phenomenon developing at the wrong point in the planet's history -- what do you do? Get the book and find out. Summing up, then: speculative fiction is by no means a phenomenon of the English-speaking world -- if indeed it ever was -- and the top levels of the creamiest cream may be found anywhere. I am grateful for this box of books, and just by the way -- I salute those translators, who have done some extraordinary jobs in this treasure-trove. Enough for LoveThe Lives of Lazarus Long (G.P.Putnam's Sons, #). At # pages it's a big package at a very small price. I'm a httle late in reporting it to you because this was one book I determined to read slowly and thoughtfully -- and when I had done so I took more time for rumination. I have not at this writing seen any other reviews of it, but I can predict a lot of jackalyapping at the old lion. It will be said that the book is self-indulgent, that it on his heap of notes and notions, and above all, that 'the author' "fascism" is showing. I'd like to address myself to that last item first, because I'm so heartily sick of hearing it. Fascism itself is one of the forms of state capitaUsm and is by its nature anathema to an old empire-builder like Heinlein JubalLazarus. He has a spectrum of scorn for masses of people who follow, simply follow without decision or dedication, and though it may be gentle when the following is something he personally believes in, it is still scorn, and rises to detestation when the sheep follow an idiot or a madman. It's so easy to stick out a tongue and smack a simplistic wet label on one's betters, but just maybe they have grounds for their convictions, and just maybe one should crawl behind their eyeballs and see things their way for just long enough to understand how they came to their conclusions. I'll give you just one example of how Heinlein can spin one's head around if one will but yield him the floor for a bit. This was a private conversation, not from his works. I had said something about traffic laws, by and large, being the most pragmatic, the most just, and the most universally obeyed, and perhaps other bodies of law should be patterned on them. Heinlein agreed but said about drunks in cars that "for them we should bring back the whipping post." My reaction was horrified and forceful and I said things about barbarism, sadism, recidivism and outright cruelty. Heinlein heard me out and then said quietly, "Now look. My neighbor on the right has a three-car garage under a mansion in the middle of two hundred forty acres. The neighbor on the left is a divorcee with four kids in a rental. The bite for drunken driving, first offense" (he was living in Colorado at the time) "is #. If my neighbor on the right should get convicted in court, it would mean the expenditure of whatever effort it took to find his checkbook and inscribe some numbers. For me it might mean the cancellation of a side-trip on my next world cruise. For the neighbor on the left, the mother, it would be a cataclysm. Now just suppose conviction meant ten lashes across the back. It would hurt us all just as much, just the same way." While my head was spinning off in search for a good answer, he amended, before I could even think of it, "Of course, there would be a full medical exam beforehand and the blows would be administered by a machine." It is this ability to think things through which, when added to his skill and his joy in spinning a yarn, that makes Heinlein the giant he is. It does something else, too, and I am amazed that so few of his admirers, critics, students and enemies have not caught the point. He emerges from straight (and strait) origins, through the armed forces and professional engineering, and has every conditioned reason to be a square; but this drive to ask the next question, and the one after that, has produced a man who champions Eros even when it involves siblings or parents or consexuals. Paradox? Not at all. Robert and Jubal and Lazarus are never satisfied with thinking a thing through to a conclusion and stopping there, and the point so many seem to have missed is that this urgency in the man, and its expression, have been responsible for many departures from his deep conditioning, and have required a great deal of courage. It hurts to think things all the way through. It hurts. Now lest I be justly accused of reviewing the man instead of his work, I must be unjustly brief. Time Enough for Love is about Lazarus Long, who appeared in several stories in the 'forties, and whose life is a solid unbroken line on the chart of Heinlein's celebrated "future history." Born at the end of the #th century, Lazarus is looking at his third thousand years of life. The book is not a solid unbroken line; it is a rambling, out-of-order collection of yarns about and by Lazarus -- and so states itself to be right at the beginning. Carp as you will at the reiteration of the Heinlein idiom: crusty authoritarian infallible man woman in harsh politicalphysical economic environment -- they decide to have their way and damn well have it. In the meantime the housekeeping, be it budget or business, staples or stocks, is immaculate. But along with it is the fascination of watching the mind of a man whose reach always exceeds his grasp but who will never stop reaching. Above and around it aU is his concept of Eros, a great mosaic which includes but transcends the patterns of sex. Time Enough for Love will not create the following that occurred with Stranger in a Strange Land. Personally, I like it less than Stranger-hut I love it more.  The comet brought joy to all who could endure it! Albert Novak -- the man who stalked Myron Landau -- and the Secretary of State alike, but tliey had this in common: they wanted. They each wanted something very badly and, as it happens, the thing that each wanted was not good by the general consensual standards of your average sensual man. Let us start with the man who stalked Myron Landau or, more accurately, with Myron Landau himself. Myron also wanted, and what he wanted was his girlfriend Ellen, with that masked desperation that characterizes the young man of seventeen who has never yet made out. On this night of July in New York City the factors against Myron were inexperience, self-doubt and the obstinacy of Ellen herself, but ranged on his side were powerful allies. Before him was the great welcoming blackness of Central Park, where anything might happen, and spread across the sky was a fine pretext for luring her into the place. So he bought her a strawberry milkshake in Rumpelmeyer's and strolled with her into the park, chatting of astronomy, beauty and love. "Are you sure it's all right?" asked Ellen, looking into the sodium-lit fringes of the undergrowth. "Gripes, yes," said Myron, in the richly amused tone of a Brown Belt in karate from one of the finest academies on the upper West Side, although in fact he had never gone into Central Park at night before. But he had thought everytliing out carefully and was convinced that tonight there was no danger. Or at any rate not enough danger to scare him off the prize. Overhead was the great beautiful comet that everybody was talking about and it was a clear night. Tliere would be lots of people looking at the sky, he reasoned, and in any case where else could he take her? Not his apartment, with Grandma's ear to the living-room door, just itching for an excuse to come in and start hunting for her glasses. Not Ellen's place, not with her mother and sister remorselessly there. "You can't see the comet well from the middle of the street," he said reasonably, putting his arm around her and nodding to a handsome white-haired gentleman who had first nodded benevolently to them. "There's too much light and anyway, honestly, Ellen, we won't go in very far." "I never saw a comet before," she conceded, allowing herself to be led down tlie path. In truth, the comet Ujifusa-McGinnis was not all that hard to see. It spread its tail over a quarter of the sky, drowning out Altair, Vega and the stars around Deneb, hardly paled even by the lights of New York City. Even a technicians were working aroundthe-clock shifts under the floodliglits of the Vehicle Assembly Building, trying to get ready the launch of the probe that would plumb Ujifusa-McGinnis's mysteries, it dominated the sky. Myron looked upward and allowed himself to be distracted for a moment by the spectacle, but quickly caught himself. "Ah," he said, creeping his fingers toward the lower slope of Ellen's breast, "just think, what you see is all gas. Nothing really away." "It's beautiful," Ellen said, looking over her shoulder. She had thought she had heard a noise. She had. The noise was in fact real. The foot of the handsome white-haired gentleman had broken a stick. He had turned off the flagstone path into the shelter of the dwarf evergreens and was now busy puUing a woman's nylon stocking over his white hair and face. He, too, had planned his evening carefully. In his right-hand coat pocket he had the woolen sock with half a pound of BBs knotted into the toe -- that was for Myron. In his left-hand pocket he had the clasp knife with the carefully honed edge. That was for Ellen, first to make sure she didn't scream, then to make sure she never would. He had not known their names when he loaded his pockets and left his ranch house in Waterbury, Connecticut, to go in for an evening's sport to the city, but he had known there would be somebody. He, too, looked up at the comet, but with irritation. In his Connecticut back yard, as he had shown it to his daughter, it had looked pretty. Here it was an unqualified nuisance. It made the night brighter tlian he wanted it although, he thought in all fairness, it was not as bad as a full moon. It would not be more than five minutes, he calculated, before the boy would lead the girl in among the evergreens. But which way? If only they would choose his side of the path! Otherwise it meant he had to cross the walk. That was a small danger and a large annoyance, because it meant scuttling in an undignified way. Still, the fun was worth the trouble. It always had been worth it. With the weighted sock now ready in his hand, the handsome whitehaired gentleman followed them silently. He could feel the gleeful premonitory stirrings of sexual excitement in his private parts. He was as happy as, in his life, he ever was. AT A time approximately two IM. thousand years earlier, when Jesus was a boy in Nazareth and Caesar Augustus was counting up his statues and his gold, a race of creatures resembling soft-slielled crabs on a planet of a star some two hundred light-years away became belatedly aware of the existence of the Great Wall of China. Although it alone among the then existing works of Man was quite detectable in their telescopes, it was not surprising they had not noticed it before. It had been completed less than # years before and most of that time had been lost in the creeping traverse of light from Earth to their planet. Also they had many, many planets to observe and not a great deal of time to waste on any one. But they expected more of their minions than that, and # members of a subject race died in great pain as a warning to the others to be more diligent. The Arrogating Ones, as they called themselves and were called by their subjects, at once took up in their collective councils the question of whether or not to conquer Earth and add humanity to their vassals, now that they had discovered that humanity did exist. This was their eon-long custom. It had made them extremely unpopular over a large volume of the galaxy. On balance, they decided not to bother at that particular time. What were a few heaped-up rocks, after all? Oh, some sort of civilization no doubt existed, but the planet Earth seemed too distant, too trivial and too poor to be worth bothering to conquer. Accordingly they contented themselves with routine precautionary measures. Item, they caused to be abducted in their disk-shaped vessels certain specimens of Earthly human beings and other fauna. These also died in great pain and in the process released much information about tlieir body chemistry, physical structure and modes of thought. Item, the Arrogating Ones dispatched certain of their servants with a waiting brief. They were instructed to occupy the core of a comet and from it to keep an eye on those endoskeletal, but potentially annoying, creatures who had discovered agriculture, fire, the city and the wheel, but not as yet even chemical explosive weapons. They then dismissed Earth from their collective soft-bodied minds, and returned to the more interesting contemplation of measures to be taken against a race of insect-like beings that lived in a steamy high-G planet in quite the other direction from Earth, toward the core of the galaxy. The insects had elected not to be conquered by the Arrogating Ones. In fact, they had destroyed quite a large number of war fleets sent against them. Nearly a quarter of the collective intelligence of the Arrogating Ones was devoted to plans to defeat these insects in battle. Most of the rest of their intelligence was devoted to the pleasant contemplation of what they would do to the insects after the battle was won to make them wish they hadn't resisted so hard. haired gentleman was stalking Myron and Ellen, the second person who wanted, the Secretary of State of the United States of America, was about a hundred miles north of and # feet above Central Park. He was on board a four-engined jet aircraft with the American flag emblazoned on its prow and he was having a temper tantrum. The President of the United States was gloomily running his fingers between the toes of his bare feet. "Shoot, Danny," he said, "you're getting yourself all hot about nothing. Tm not saying we can't bomb Venezuela. I'm only saying why do we want to bomb Venezuela? And I'm saying you ought to watch how you talk to me, too." "Watch how you talk to me, Mr. President!" shouted the Secretary of State over the noise of tire jets. "I'm pretty fed up with your procrastinations and delays and it wouldn't take much for me to walk right out and dump the whole thing back in your lap. Considering your track record -- I am thinking of Iceland -- I don't imagine you'd relish that prospect." "Danny boy," snarled the President, "you've got a bad habit of digging up ancient history. Stick to the point. We've got to have oil, agreed. They have oil, everybody knows that. They don't want to sell it to us at a reasonable price, so you want me to beat on them until they change their minds. Right? Only what you don't see is, there's a right way and a wrong way to do these things. Why can't we just go in with some spooks and Tommy-guns, as usual?" "But their insolence, Mr. President! The demeaning tone of' this document they sent me. It isn't the oil, it is the national credibility of the country that is involved here." "Right, Danny, riglit," groaned the President. "You can talk. You don't have Congress breathing down your neck at every little thing." He sighed heavily and opened another can of no-calorie soda. "What I don't see," he said, with a punctuation mark of gas, "is why we have to hit them tonight, with Congress still in session." The Secretary said petulantly, "I have explained to you, Mr. President, that our communications system is malfunctioning. We've lost global coverage. There is strong dissipation of ionosphere scatter, due to interference from an unprecedentedly strong influx of radiation apparently emanating from -- " "Oh, cut it out," complained the President. "You mean it's that comet that's bollixed up our detection." The Secretary pursed his lips. "Not precisely the comet, no, Mr. President. No such effect has ever been detected before, although it is possible that there is a connection. Doesn't matter. The situation before us is that we do not have total communication at this time. And so we have no way of knowing whether the Venezuelans are treacherously planning a sneak attack or not. Do you want to take a chance on the security of the Free World, Mr. President? I say preempt now!" "Yes, you've made your point, Danny," said the President. He swiveled his armchair and gazed out at the bright spray of white light across the eastern horizon where Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis lay. "I've heard worse excuses for starting a war," he mused, "but I can't remember exactly when. All right, Danny. We'll do what you say. Get me Charlie on the scrambler and I'll put in the attack in two hours." T he watchers for the Arrogating Ones, hiding inside the pebbly core of the comet named after the two amateur astronomers who had simultaneously discovered it, studied the results of their radar-like scan of the Earth. This was routine. They were not aware that their scanning had damaged mankind's communications, but that was not their problem. Their only task was to spray out a shower of particles and catch the returning ones to study -- this they did, and what their study told them was that the planet Earth had reached redpoint status. It was now well into a technological age and was thus an active, rather than merely a potential, threat to their masters. The Arrogating Ones were no longer quite as effectively arrogant as they had once been. They had been creamed rather frequently in their millennia-long struggle against the insectoids. The score was, roughly, Arrogating Ones #, Insectoids #. The watchers, knowing this, were aware that at least their task would not under these circumstances involve the actual physical conquest of the Earth. It would simply be destroyed. This was no big deal. Plenty of mechanisms for wiping out a populated planet were stockpiled in the arsenals of the Arrogating Ones. They had not worked very well against the insectoids, unfortunately, but they would be plenty powerful enough to deal with, say, mankind. The weapons for accomplishing this were readily available at any time, but not to the watchers, who were far too low in the liierarchy of authority to be trusted with anything like that. Their task was much simpler. They were only required to report what they saw and then to soften up the human race so that it would not be able to offer resistance, even ineffectual resistance, to the clean-up teams when they arrived with their planetbusters. Softening up was a technical problem of some magnitude, but it had been solved long ago. The abducted humans had died messily but not in vain. At least, from the point of view of the Arrogating Ones their deaths had not been in vain, for in their dying agonies they had supplied information about themselves which had enabled the Arrogating Ones to devise appropriate softening-up mechanisms. The watchers had been equipped with these on a standby basis ever since. Of course, from the point of view of the abducted humans the question of whether their deaths had been in vain might have had a different answer. No one had troubled to ask them. At any rate, the watchers now energized the generators which would soften up mankind for its destruction. While they were waiting for a charge to build up they looked up the coordinates and call signal for the nearest cruising superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones and transmitted a request for it to come in and finish up the job with a core-bomb. They tlien discussed among themselves the prospects of what their next assignment would be. It was not a fruitful discussion. Core-bombs are messy and there was not much chance that Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis's orbit would get them far enough away to be out of its range when it went off. Even if they survived, none of them had any idea what the Arrogating Ones' future plans for the watchers were. All they were sure of was that they were certain not to enjoy them. W E now turn to Albert Novak. He was in another four-engined jet, cUmbing to cruising altitude out of Kennedy en route to Los Angeles International. He was a crew-cut young man, with something on his mind. His neighbor was a short. white-haired, dark-tanned Westerner with the face of a snapping turtle, who offered his hand and said aggressively, jerking his head toward the window, "That confounded thing! Do you know the space dollars of your tax money just to go dollars! Just to sniff some marsh gas! Not as long as I'm ' on the Aeronautics and Space Committee. Let me introduce myself. I'm Congressman -- " But he was talking to gas himself. Albert Novak had not accepted his hand, had not even met his eyes. Although the "Fasten Seat Belts" sign was still lighted in three languages, he unstrapped himself and walked down the aisle. Hostesses hissed at him and tardily began to unsnap themselves to make him return to his seat. He ignored them. He had no intention of ever arriving at L.A. International and when he wanted to talk to a hostess he would do so on his own terms. He carried a cassette recorder into a toilet and locked the door against everyone. The cassette recorder could no longer be used to record or play. He had removed its insides tlie day before, replacing tliem with more batteries and a coil of fine wire,which he now carefully connected to thirty Baggies full of dynamite and firing caps he had sewn into the lining of his trenchcoat while his mother nearsightedly smiled on him from across the room. Although Novak thought of himself as a hijacker, it was not his intention to cause the jet to head for Cuba, Caracas or even Algiers. He did not want the airplane. He didn't even dollars' ransom he planned to ask for. What Novak wanted, mostly, was to matter to somebody. As far as he had thought out his plan of action, it was to walk up to a stewardess with his hand on the detonating switch, show her the ingenious arrangement he had gotten past the metal detectors, be escorted to the flight deck in the traditional manner and then, after the airUne had begun trying to get together the # unmarked twenty-dollar bills he intended to demand and the maximum of annoyance and confusion had been caused, to close the switch and explode the dynamite. He knew that in destroying the airplane he would die. That was not very important to him. The one important failure that he regretted very much was that he would not be able to see his mother's face when the reporters and TV crew began to swarm around her and she learned he had been pushing around all kinds of worth of airplane. T he generators at the core of Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis were now up to full charge. Disgruntledly the watchers of the Arrogating Ones sighted the beam in on the planet Earth. They were quite careful to get it aligned properly, for they remembered very well what the consequences were for slipshod work. When it was locked in tliey released the safety switch that allowed the contact to close that discharged the beam. beamed power surged out toward the near hemisphere of the planet. Certain chemical changes at once took place in the atmosphere and were borne by jet stream, trade winds and the aimless migration of air masses all around the Earth. The equipment used was highly directional, but the watchers who operated it were very close and large magnitudes of energy were involved. Some of the radiation sprayed them. There was some loss from corona points, some reflection even from the tenuous gases of the comet's halo. As the radiation had been designed specifically for use against mankind, on tlie basis of the experiments conducted on the kidnappees of two thousand years before, it was only of limited effect on the watchers. But they happened to be warmblooded oxygen-breathers with two sexes and many of humanity's hangups, so that the weapon did do to them much what it was intended to do to mankind. First tliey felt a sudden, sharp pang of an emotion which they identified (but only by logical deduction) as joy. The diagnosis was not simple, for they had little in their lives that would enable them to recognize such a state. But they looked at each other with fatuous fondness and, in their not really very human ways, shared pleasure. The next thing they shared was serious physical pain, accompanied by vomiting, dizziness and a feeling of weakness, for they were receiving a great deal more of the radiation than was necessary for the mere task of turning them into pussycats to receive the knockout blow of the Arrogating Ones. They recognized that, too. They deduced that they were dying, and doing it pretty fast. They did not mind that any more than Albert Novak minded blowing himself up with the airliner. It was worthwhile. They were happy. It was what the ray was intended to do to people and it did its work very well. Jl. Earth, as the radiation searched out and saturated humanity, joy replaced fear, peace replaced tension, love replaced anger. In Central Park three slum youths released the girl they had lured belund the #d Street boat house and decided to apply for Harvard, while a member of the Tactical Patrol Force lay down on Umpire Rock and gazed jubilantly at the comet. At the park's southern margin the white-haired gentleman came leaping out at Myron Landau and his girl. "My dear children!" he cried, tugging the women's stocking off his face. "How sweet and tender you are. You remind me so much of my own beloved son and daughters that you must let me stand you to the best hotel room in New York, with unlimited room service." This spectacle would normally have disconcerted Myron Landau, especially as he had just succeeded in solving the puzzle of Ellen's bra snap. But he was so filled with the sudden rapture himself that he could only say, "You bet you can, friend. But only if you come with us. Ellen and I wouldn't have it any other way." And Ellen chimed in sweetly: "What do we need a motel room for, mister? Why don't we just get out of these clothes?" Forty thousand feet directly overhead, as the Presidential jet sped back from the Summer Wliite House near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the Secretary of State lifted eyes streaming with joy and said, "Dear Mr. President, let's give the spies another chance. It's too nice a night to be H-bombing Caracas." And the President, flinging an arm around him, sobbed, "Danny, as a diplomat you're not worth a bucket of warm snot, but I've always said you've got the biggest damn heart in the cabinet." A great bubble of orange-yellow flame off on the western horizon disconcerted them for a moment, but it did not seem relevant to their transcendental joy. They began singing all the good old favorites like Down By the Old Mill Stream, Sweet Adeline and I've Been Working on the Railroad, and had so much fun doing it that the President quite forgot to radio the message that would cancel his strike order against Caracas. It did not matter very much. The B-# ordnance crews had dumped the bombs from the fork lifts and were now giving each other rides on them, while the commanding general of the strike, Curtis T. "Vinegar Ass" Pinowitz, had decided he preferred going fishing to parachuting into Venezuela in support of the bombing. He was looking for his spinning reel, oblivious to the noise on the hardstand where the #st Airborne was voting whether to fly to Disneyland or the Riviera. (In any event, the Venezuelans, or those members of the Venezuelan government who were bothering to answer their telephones, had just voted to give the Yankees all the oil they wanted and were seriously considering scenting it with jasmine.) The ball of flame on the horizon, however, was not without its importance. Arnold Novak had released the armlock he had got around the little brown-eyed stewardess's neck and had begun to try to explain to her that his intention to blow up the jet meant nothing personal, but was only a way of inducing his mother to pay as much attention to him as she had, all through their lives, to his brother, Dick. Although he stammered so that he was almost incoherent, the stew understood him at once. She, too, had had both a mother and an older brother. Her pretty brown eyes filled with tears of sympathy and with a rush of love she flung her arms around him. "You poor boy," she cried, covering his stubbly face with kisses. "Here, honey! Let me help you." And she caught the cassette from his hand, careful not to pull the wires loose, and closed the switch that touched off the caps in all the thirty Baggies. One hundred and thirty-one men, women and children simultaneously were converted into maltreated chunks of barbecued meat falling through the sky. Their roster included the pilot, the co-pilot, the third pilot and eight other members of the flight crew; plus, among the passengers, mothers, infants, honeymooning couples, non-honeymooning but equally amorous couples who did not happen to be married to each other, a middle-aged grape picker returning home after a five-days-four-nights all-expense tour of Sin City (which he had found disappointing), a defrocked priest, a disbarred lawyer and a Congressman from Oregon who would never now achieve his dream of dismantling waste of the taxpayer's funds on space, which he held to be empty and uninteresting. Whoever they had been when whole, the pieces of barbecue all looked pretty much alike now. It did not matter. Not one of the passengers or crew had died unhappy, since they had aU been touched by the comet. comet Ujifusa-McGinnis, the device which was meant to display the wave forms signifying receipt of the destruction order for Earth remained blank. No signal was received. No one would have observed it if it had been, certainly not the watchers, but it was unprecedented that a response should not be received. The reason was quite simple. It was that that particular superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones, like most of the otliers in their galactic fleet, had long since been hurled against the fortresses of the insectoids of the core. There, like the others, it had been quickly destroyed, so that the message sent by the watchers had never reached its destination. It was, in a way, too bad, to think of aU that strength and sagacity spent with no more tangible visible result advanced primates. Although this was regrettable, it did not much bother the Arrogating Ones. They had plenty of other regrets to work on. What remained of their collective intelligence was fully taken up with the problem of bare survival against the insectoid fleetsplus, to be sure, a good deal of attention given to mutual recrimination. The watchers did not mind; they had long, since perished of acute terminal pleasure. And, as it turned out, they had not died entirely in vain. Because the Oregon congressman did not live to complete his plan to horse-trading power having perished with him, the projected comet-study mission was not canceled. To be sure, the bird did not fly on schedule. The effects of the joy beams from the comet did not begin to wear off for cians simply could not be bothered while their joy was in its manic phase. But gradually the world returned to -- normal? No. It was definitely not normal for everyone to be feeling rather cheerful most of the time. But the world settled down, sweetly and fondly, to something not unlike its previous condition of work and play. So the astronauts found another launch window and made rendezvous with the comet; and what they found there made quite a difference in the history of both the human race and the galaxy. The watchers were gone, but they had left their weaponry behind. When the astronauts returned with the least and weakest of the weapons, all they could cram into their ship, the President of the United States gave up his shuffleboard game to-, fly to the deck of the Independence and stare at it. "Oh, boy!" he chortled, awed and thrilled. "If that'd turned up two months ago Brazil would've had a seaport on the Caribbean!" But Venezuela went about its business untouched. The President was tempted. Even cheerful and at peace with himself and the world, he was tempted -- old habits die hard. But he had several thoughts and the longest and most persuasive of them was that weaponry like this meant that somewhere there was an enemy who had constructed and deployed it and some day might return to use it. So with some misgivings, but without any real freedom of choice, he flew back to Washington, summoned the ambassadors of Venezuela, Cuba, Canada, the U.S.S.R., the People's Republic of China and the United Irish Republics of Great Britain and laid everything before them. Although politicians, too, were residually cheerful still from the effect of the comet, they had not lost their intelligence. They quickly saw that there was an external foe -- somewhere -- which made each of them look like a very good friend. Nobody was in a mood to fool with little international wars. So treaties were signed, funds were appropriated, construction was begun. And the human race, newly armed and provided with excellent spaceships, went looking for the Arrogating Ones. They did not, of course, find them. By the time they were ready to make their move, the last of the Arrogating Ones had gone resentfully to his death. But a good many generations later humans found the insectoids of the core instead and what then happened to the insectoids would have satisfied even the Arrogating Ones.  of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! AS# # A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. 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The total solar eclipse of June #th, # was notable in that its period of totality -- seven minutes and four seconds -- tied for second place as the longest in the last I ,# years. The moon's shadow first touched Earth just after dawn, in South America, near the border of Guyana. It then swept across the Atlantic Ocean to strike the African coast at Mauritania. The path of totality continued through drought-stricken Mali, Algeria, Niger, and Chad, then across the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and the Somali Republic. The moon's shadow left Earth, at sunset, in the Indian Ocean. (Some scientists pursued the shadow eastward over Africa in speedy aircraft, thus observing up to seventy-two minutes of totality, something new in eclipse history.) Though much of the country through which the shadow passed was inhospitable or downright hostile, numerous expeditions were mounted to record and study this eclipse. One of these, under the direction of Dr. Donald H. Menzel, and sponsored by the Harvard College Observatory, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and the National Geographic Society, was based in the Sahara Desert eight miles northeast of Akjoujt, Mauritania. I was privileged to accompany this expedition as Assistant Director. Through the organization of logistics by Educational Expeditions International, with the cooperation of Quest #, an England-based professional expedition outfitter, more than thirty amateur enthusiasts were able to participate in this venture into the desert. The personnel of the expedition comprised a scientific staff of eleven, the group of more than thirty amateurs, a number of media representatives, an Educational Expeditions International staff of seven and a Quest # staff of eight. For this expedition Quest # traveled by land and ferry from England to the eclipse site in a caravan of Land Rovers, Range Rovers and Bedford lorries. The prime, though not the only, mission of an eclipse expedition is to record and study an array of phenomena related to the solar atmosphere, which is visible only when the sun is entirely occulted by the moon. (Though an eclipse may, to a degrefe, be simulated by a coronagraph -- a telescope fitted with a number of devices, including filters and an occulting disk -- there is no substitute for the genuine article.) The solar atmosphere includes the chromosphere (the gaseous envelope surrounding the sun immediately outside of the photosphere) and the corona (the luminous envelope beyond the chromosphere). Their study requires an extensive assemblage of instruments, including telescopes, cameras and spectrographs. This apparatus varies in size, but some are large and must be mounted upon concrete piers, whose construction is something of a problem in the Sahara. Oddly enough, one of the problems is obtaining the right kind of sand. Sand is everywhere, but the typical Saharan sand is not suitable for the mixing of high-quality concrete. To study the solar atmosphere during this eclipse the expedition transported to the desert, among other instruments, a number of spectrographs and an eight-inch off-axis Cassegrain #-foot focal length telescope. A secondary mission of the expedition was to conduct an Intramercurial Object Search, whose purpose was to attempt to discover hitherto unknown celestial objects (perhaps a tenth planet, undiscovered as yet, but tentatively named Vulcan) between the orbit of Mercury and the sun, such objects also being visible only during total solar eclipse. For this study an equatorially mounted K-# aerial camera was used. Yet another mission, which was my particular responsibility, was to perform for the Ionospheric Physics Laboratory of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories an experiment to determine the effect of the eclipse upon the Faraday polarization of a (nominal) # mFlz radio signal transmitted to the eclipse site (and elsewhere, of course) by a geostationary communications satellite (Intersat #F#) approximately overhead. This required the use of two seven-element Yagi antennas, a polarization tracking receiver and a two-channel recorder. The satellite provided a convenient source of a polarized radio signal. The elements of the two Yagi antennas, mounted on a single boom, were at right angles to each other. As the radio signal passed through the ionosphere its plane of polarization was rotated, as a function of the accordance with the Faraday Effect. Thus the signal would be received relatively strongly or weakly by the two antennas, depending on its state of polarization. The point of the experiment was, then, to measure the the ionosphere . In fact, though the eclipse was total on the ground, preliminary calculations indicate that it was but # total at the ionosphere -- an arbitrary distance from the Earth's surface of # kilometers was used for this calculation. The outputs from each antenna were separately fed into a pen-and-ink recorder and for ten days the sawtooth patterns appearing on the chart paper were the focal point of my daily activities. M auritania is a desert country, inhabited by about one people. The population is eighty per cent Moorish, of mixed Arab and Berber stock. Negroes comprise about twenty per cent of the population. The official language of the country is the Hassaniyah dialect of Arabic, but the working language is French. Population density is less than three per square mile, one of the lowest in Africa. Life expectancy is forty to forty-five years. sheep and goats, and # camels -- at least this was so before the present drought, which has afflicted the country for years. Because of the drought animals are dying and nomads, threatened by the decimation of their herds, are moving toward the towns. A massive international relief effort is now under way. If it does not succeed many Mauritanians will die of famine. To get to Akjoujt from the eastern United States -- from where most of the equipment and many of the to Dakar, Senegal. Here you sit in the terminal building for some hours waiting for an Air Afrique plane to carry you north to Nouakchott, the capital of the now independent Islamic Republic of Mauritania. And if you have not been in this clime before, getting off that plane, any time near midday, is a memorable experience. I thought I was walking into the exhaust of a jet engine, but it was only the proximity of the desert. From Nouakchott one proceeds about # miles northeast to Akjoujt by Land Rover or other rugged vehicle, carrying a plentiful supply of water and of gasoline. Our hegira thence was most welcomely interrupted by the hospitality of Ambassador Richard W. Murphy, who thoughtfully placed the amenities of the embassy, including a swimming pool, at our disposal. The road from Nouakchott to Akjoujt is one of the very few hard-surfaced roads in the entire country. Along the way you see the inevitable camels, flocks of goats, an occasional cluster of bedouin tents. Otherwise it's sand, scrub, and wind. It doesn't take long to understand that water and shade are the keys to survival. Akjoujt is a company mining town situated near an extensive deposit of rich copper ore. The company is Somima, partly owned by the Mauritanian government, partly by AngloAmerican. Akjoujt is an oasis and there is water underground, but the principal water supply is piped from a distant source -- a potentially hazardous situation, as we were to learn later. The expedition encampment, a colorful assemblage of many small tents and two large ones, was located about eight miles northeast of Akjoujt, a few hundred yards off the crude graveled road leading to Atar. An advance party had preceded us and when we arrived packing cases were strewn about, cameras were everywhere, and telescopes, coelostats, and other apparatus were all around. Sand gets into everything in the desert, which makes an astronomic venture a challenging one to the investigator and to his instruments, which must be housed, protected and unendingly brushed free of sand. An entirely lightproof film holders, left for any time in the desert wind, will accumulate within itself a troublesome amount of fine sand. Materials to hand and the limited suppUes available in Akjoujt were used to construct shelters and housing for much of the gear. The expedition force was by no means isolated from the community of Akjoujt. Members of the scientifi'c staff made a presentation to the grade-school children, and Dr. Menzel gave slide-accompanied lectures to both the European and the native adults. We passed out hundreds of protective viewing filters to the friendly Moors. Nor were we entirely isolated from the rest of the world. Thanks to the efforts of our Communications Offiradio station -- our sole contact with the outside -- was in operation throughout the expedition, using the handle third-party traffic was granted to this station, for the duration of the expedition, by the Mauritanian government and the Federal Communications Commission. Thus expedition participants were able at times to be in touch, via radio-telephone, with their families. The plan was for this station to be operated at the campsite, but again conditions made this impossible. The station was maintained in Akjoujt in the temporary Porta-Van home of Jean-Pierre Coulondre (F#LO#T#LO), the only active amateur radio operation in Mauritania and a very good friend of the expedition, to whom we owe much. dred messages and received and delivered twentysix, in addition to running forty-three phone patches. is always the chance, of course, that the entire effort will be wiped out, possibly at the very last minute, by bad weather. Dr. Menzel's record -- and no one has seen more eclipses than he, though one astronomer is tied (Charles H. Smiley of the Ladd Observatory, Brown University) -- was, prior to this ecUpse, eleven successful expeditions out of fourteen tries. At our site the preecUpse information available indicated these conditions: airborne dust present an average of seven days in June, three days in July; no significant rain in Akjoujt for the last Distance lends enchantment to luxuryless camp (below) This three-camera battery permits studying corona polarization in different lights Photographs copyright  # by Ernest A. Taves The buildings at Akjoujt share mysterious facades Coelostat and small spectrograph are set up on mounts improvised from oil drums and concrete blocks (below)   Fourteen-element double Yagi is aimed at satellite (left) Dr. Menzel demonstrates use of filter for safe eclipse viewing eleven years; haze commonly present; now and then an overwhelming sandstorm. The consensus among the scientists was that the odds favoring a reasonable clear view were about seven or eight out of ten. The lowest night temperature noted at the expedition site was #F. but the average low was considerably above that. On at least one occasion the midnight temperature was #. Midday temperatures ranged approximately from # to #. Accordingly, the expedition plan called for air conditioning in the desert. An echpse expedition must have, of course, a photographic darkroom since procedures must be tried out first, under ambient conditions, to ensure success at the moment of totality. Some apparatus works weU the first time, some doesn't. Light leaks, for example, occur in disconcerting places -- these must be remedied. We were to have our airconditioned darkroom, plus an airconditioned work tent, at the campsite. But if things can go wrong they will, as is known, and in this case the generators provided were totally inadequate to power the too-large air conditioners. An air-conditioned apartment was available in the Somima enclave in Akjoujt -- this was meant to house Dr. and Mrs. Menzel. And it did, but it also housed the darkroom -- into which the kitchen was converted. Let the record show that Mrs. Menzel accepted tliis intensive violation of her kitchen with grace. The apartment also housed my temperaturesensitive polarization receiver, which would have failed to operate at desert temperatures. It also housed me, since a close eye on my temperamental apparatus was required. two days before the eclipse, there occurred a sandstorm of sufficient severity to cause the cancellation of a scheduled rehearsal of the procedures to be undertaken by the expedition personnel during the eclipse. On Friday, the day before the eclipse, weather conditions at what would be eclipse time the next day were marginal. The sun was visible, but not clearly so, and people walked about with fingers crossed. On eclipse day the sun rose at # #I Universal Time (UT) which was locally. One hour after sunrise the haze and cloud cover were such that I -- eight miles from the expedition site, alone at my air-conditioned apparatus -- could safely examine the sun with the naked eye. This was not good and this condition obtained through # # hours. Worse, at # #, twenty-five minutes before first contact (the moment when the moon begins to occult the sun) the sun was completely obscured by cloud. At # # the sun was barely visible through a high-density filter. The cloud cover tlien disappeared as if by miracle and at first contact -- # # # UT -- the sun was clearly visible through light haze, with some remnants of the cloud cover passing over the solar disk. By second contact -- the beginning of totality, at # #I # -- conditions were very good. The sun was eclipsed and the corona shone forth. Whether you have previously seen no eclipses -- or fourteen -- the appearance of the corona surrounding the dark of the occulting moon is, simply, stunning. Missing the excitement of the group activity at the expedition site, I shared these extravagant moments with two members of the Mauritanian equivalent of our National Guard, assigned to protect our quarters from 'undesirables' -- of which we at no time saw any evidence. I explained that it was now possible to view the spectacle without protection. We stood there, a quiet group of three, each lost in his own thoughts. Then, at # # #, after more than six minutes of totality, came the ance. I shouted a warning to the gendarmerie to use their filters henceforth and dashed inside to my instruments to mark the time. Conditions remained good until fourth contact -- the moment at wliich the disk of the sun is again entire -- at # # #. Shortly thereafter there was a moderate sandstorm. The expedition had lucked through. O N an eclipse expedition into the Sahara things do go wrong, however, before, during, and after the main event. I have mentioned the water supply to Akjoujt (and to the expedition site -- the expedition's large water bladders were filled in Akjoujt). A few days before the eclipse the pipeline failed, some sixty miles from Akjoujt. A tank of considerable size, perched upon a hill near the copper mine, kept the water running untU the next day -- when the faucets went dry. It is not pleasant to have your water supply threatened in the Sahara. Mineral water was in great demand and bathtubs and all other available containers had been filled in advance. And, at vast expense, the mine had been forced to shut down -- the familiar clouds of smoke were not to be seen. It was said that the site of the failure was in a low place, thus creating a small lake, to which animals came to drink from miles around. To restore water to the town the lake had to be pumped out and the pipeline had to be emptied and repaired. And this was done. Within forty-eight hours the faucets were running again and smoke was coming from the minea pleasant sight, environmental considerations apart. The mine can't operate without enormous amounts of water. Other things went wrong. A spectrograph shutter jammed ten minutes before totality. At least one other important camera failed and could not be made to operate in time for totality. Conditions reasonably good for spectrographic study were probably not adequate for the Intramercurial Search. Robert Fisher, who was in charge of this program, was able, however, during totality, to view a fourth-magnitude tracking star. At this writing the films have not been developed, but Fischer's present attitude is one of cautious optimism. In general, the consensus of the scientists was that the expedition was a success. Most of the important films were brought back to the States for processing and the results obtained are unavailable at the time this is written. My own experiment -- which was expected to be workable in any weather condition -- was apparently successful; the data have been partly reduced, though the baseline for comparison has not yet been estabhshed. Prehminary indications are that minimum electron content occurred -- to the nearest minute -- at #:#, some five minutes after the appearance of almost # totality in the ionosphere. This is a smaller time delay than expected, but these measurements have not been made in such near-equatorial latitudes before , It is hoped that the results of this experiment will be pubhshed shortly. Some films were developed in the kitchen-darkroom before breaking camp. Jonathan Kern, using a sixinch refractor fed by a ten-inch singlemirror coelostat, obtained some striking photographs of the corona, clearly showing the presence of streamers -- which are characteristic of coronas seen at sunspot minimum. Kern used, for his photography of the corona, a radial filter located in the focal plane of the optical system, whose purpose was to attenuate the Ught of the inner corona by a factor of about #, in order to obtain useful photographs of the outer corona out to about four sun radii. It is not, however, my intention to dwell here on the technical aspects of the expedition. I have wished, rather to give a general idea of how it is to mount an eclipse expedition into a hostile environment. I spoke later on eclipse day to those who had been at the camp and was told of a variety of happenings. A number of Bedouins were there, and as the moon began to occult the sun they turned toward Mecca in prayer. Prayer for what I don't believe anyone discovered. They completed their obeisances well before the time of totality, which they watched with rapt interest. And, even as at Cape Kennedy, where an ancient black, present at the launch site, denied any possibihty that the Apollo mission was going to the moon, so an elderly Bedouin declared that the sun could not and would not be eclipsed. Later, faced with the awesome reahty, he said, "Well, the Americans are very powerful." Thinking about the end of the expedition, impressions come fast and tend to coalesce. On eclipse night there was a lamb barbecue, with Moors wielding murderous knives with a skill reminding me of chefs in first-class Japanese restaurants. Then, next morning, another ride through # miles of desert to Nouakchott, and again a welcome from Ambassador Murphy, a dedicated diplomat deeply concerned about Mauritanian problems. His hospitality will be remembered by many. That afternoon Dr. Menzel was awarded, by President Moktar Ould Daddah, the Mauritanian Medal of Honor. Then to the airport, and the usual interminable delay. Finally we were allowed to board an Air Afrique Caravelle. Every seat was taken, and one or two persons squatted in the aisle. And -- the cargo compartment being fuU -- a number of large chests (containing films exposed but not processed, cooled by dry ice) were brought on board and put into places not normally utilized for baggage. From my seat I could see the runway ahead, but I averted my gaze at takeoff. I think, though, that the pilot, who wore a worried expression upon his black countenance, used every inch of it. I had never before, on any flight, heard a round of applause and cheers as the aircraft became airborne. I did now, and my cheers were as loud as any.  In the photograph on this page you may note how Playboy sees Ernest H. Taves, M.D.; master of sophisticated prose and connoisseur of French wines. In the pages preceding you may observe him as science and science fiction see him: a dedicated researcher of Earth's environs -- French for "out there." Speaking of views of Ernest -- to the reader who wrote in following Galaxy's publication of Mayflower One (Nov. '#) to ask if Ernest Taves could be a nom de plume of Theodore Sturgeon the answer is no, it could not. Everybody would object, including us. But with this issue the two men come to share one distinction: Ernest becomes the second author with a wide enough range to have his byline appear twice in the same issue of Galaxy. Ted lent us his strength twice in October. So much for our side. Here is Ernest: "I began writing science fiction later than most and came to this activity via a circuitous route. I was born and raised in the Snake River Valley of southeastern Idaho, but during college years gravitated to New York City -- Columbia College and University, where I obtained a number of degrees. My interest at that time was in fixperimental psychology and I was also into parapsychology, to which I devoted considerable time. I received the first (and only, as far as I know) M.A. degree granted by the Department of Psychology lor parapsychological research. My Ph.D from the same institution was more legitimate, having to do with visual perception. "I abandoned academic life in favor of medical school, took a medical degree from New York University. This led into military service and eighteen months in Yokohama as Chief of the Neuropsychiatric Service of the #th Station Hospital. After discharge came psychoanalytic training, followed by some twenty years of practice, first in New York, later in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "I had wanted to write during those years, but in the press of other circumstance had never really gotten into it. Now, in the view that twenty years is bnough to spend doing any one thing, I Photograph by Dick Norton. Courtesy of Playboy. Copyright (# by Playboy. phased out of medical practice and into writing. "I sold my first short story (not science fiction) to Playboy in #. This hooked me on writing. Then, having been interested for decades in the mysteries of Stonehenge, I wrote a science fiction story about that (Second-hand Stonehenge) , which was bought by Galaxy. And this hooked me on science fiction. "I'm married and my wife and I divide our time between Cambridge and New Hampshire (where we are much involved with conservation) and, now and then, other parts of the world. We have one son, Henry, a physics major at Harvard. One of his many current interests is to restore the railroad to contemporary America. "My own other interests include astronomy, electronics, amateur radio, chess, French wines and other disciplines beyond mention." . John Devlin is awakened from cold sleep by ship's computerized system and told he's seventy-five years into mission: man's first attempt to colonize a star system other than his own. He is computer-instructed to check ship 's systems, then his own voluntary; involuntary bodily functions, circulation, sensorium, speech organ and memory. His period of awakening is for one hour. During this time he is to speak, exercise and try to remember his cold-sleep dream. In his dream he was a primitive, ocean-dwelling life form, inordinately hungryand was himself eaten by a carnivorous cephalopod while eating a trilobite. His second awakening comes # years into mission. His instructions are as before, but in addition he's told to go to the ship 's control center to evaluate target system ##. The ship's computer had bypassed the first two target star systems as unsuitable for human colonization. Number # is a perfect. Earth-type planet, unpolluted and verdant-but r-M is entering Roche's limit and will soon break up to become a ring rules no landing, obediently remembers last cold-sleep dream: in it he was an enormous brontosaurus and was killed by a small, carnivorous allosaurus. On his next awakening-# years into mission-he is told to check a malfunction in Blue #, a colonist cubicle, and discovers Colonist cal years old, improperly frozen and dying. At the end of her last waking period she had tried to communicate with her boy friend, also a colonist, and had not made it to her cold-sleep death as comfortable as he can. Before returning to cold sleep he is required to remember a complete day in his life before starting on mission. He had been a physician and remembers three instances of violence he had attended on an Earth made uninhabitable by its inhabitants: IJa young man wounded as a bystander in a duel between his father and father-in-law; #) a lovely voung girl, figured her face to discourage murderous duels between her suitors; #) a dead boy, victim of a chance bullet fired during riot in a distant part of town. During the same day he also meets a rather mysterious man the purpose of evaluating another possible habitable star system. The system is already inhabited by highly technologically advanced aliens who have polluted it and send spacecraft forms evasive action. IX life had been spent trying to pass tests, failing most of them -- and then trying to escape the results of the failures. He was trying to escape the latest failure by fleeing into cold sleep, but the computer was being awkward. Devlin did not want to remember anything, neither his own past life nor the bright, pleasant and often agonizing dream lives. The process of memory was one of the Devlin organic systems capable of being checked by a temporary Hold, but it could not be switched off. Not only was it becoming impossible for him to forget anything of importance, but even the most trivial incidents were coming back to him with a clarity and intensity that made him wonder if someone -- or some medically programed process -- could be feeding him psycho-augmenter drugs. He did not know and he could be sure of nothing. His only means of defense against a recall of too-painful memories was to concentrate on one of the less unpleasant days in his life. The day he had decided to recall had begun pleasantly. There were only three patients in morning surgery and he had no private visits scheduled. The preceding two weeks had seen a sudden upsurge in block security casualties and affairs of honor within the building, but now the area was entering a period of relative sanity which, experience had taught him, might last for a few days. His last patient had been Patricia Morley, the girl with the lacerated cheek. "It is healing nicely," Devhn said as he renewed the dressing, "but there will be scars. Are you sure you won't have plastic surgery?" "No," she said firmly. This was her fourth visit to the surgery and he had twice spoken to her in the recreation hall, so that their time togetlier totaled no more than three hours. Her face was no longer giving her pain and, although she still considered her reason for inflicting the wound a good one, she remained normal enough to want to hide the scars behind a no longer necessary dressing. Soon she would cease to need him as a doctor. Devlin was glad about that, but a little worried that she might have to swap him for a psychiatrist. Sufferers in silence, even those who could do so without complaint or outward show of distress, were still sufferers. It was clear that she wanted to talk about her problem -- which was, fundamentally, a non-surgical one -- and she was not a waller, a martyr to misfortune or a potential suicide. Devlin would not in the least mind listening to her, but in their present surroundings the conversation stayed on a much too clinical level. "It's a fine, sunny day," said Devlin. "I advise you to get some fresh air and exercise in the district park." She laughed at that because the fresli air of the city was anything but -- and compared unfavorably with the cooled and filtered hurricane that whistled continually from the building's main air ducts. "It is three miles away," Devlin went on, "which should be exercise enough if you go on foot. But to make sure that you are following doctor's orders I shall call at the park on my way back from morning rounds. If you look to be on the verge of exhaustion I shall offer you refreshment and a ride back." "As a form of exercise," she replied, "it beats the nightly epilepsy to music in the rec hall. All right. Doctor, I'll follow, the prescribed treatment. But isn't this a very complicated way of asking for a date?" "It is?" asked Devlin -- then more honestly he added: "It is." B ut he had good reasons for circumspection, Devlin thought as the girl left his surgery, and she understood them just as well as he did. The rec hall had held too much noise and not enough light for their few chaperoned meetings to have been generally noticed, but driving her away from the block in his car after passing through the security checkpoint which, at this early and safe time of the day was manned by overly talkative oldsters, would cause comment. Giving her a lift back in his medic's vehicle, considering the fact that her dressing would make her look like a walking casualty, would not give rise to any talk. There was also the fact that as a member of a non-belted profession he was nominally a citizen, but actually, as far as the younger beltwearers in the block were concerned, a sheep pretending to be a citizen. The girl had already suffered too much as a result of young citizens' offering her unwanted protection men friends. They could not, of course, challenge Devlin to an affair, but they could make life unpleasant for him in many ways if he made them envious -- or even annoyed them with the thought that a sheep might win a girl a citizen had lost. Devlin wanted to help the girl and he liked her company, but he was cautious by nature. The city park for that area was a tiny island of greenery surrounded by an enormous car park provided for its users. The car park was threequarters fuU, Devlin noticed as he found a slot close to the main entrance. This meant that the park itself was relatively uncrowded. He also saw, without really noticing them, the signs warning against the carrying of weapons inside the park and the city security men in full riot gear who lost interest in him as soon as they saw his walking-out whites. Beetle-like inside his air-conditioned armor and his features hidden by the reflections in his visor, the security sergeant waved him past the search point, as he had waved on the blackgarbed figure who had preceded Devlin by a few seconds and who had halted inside the entrance. Hearing Devlin's footsteps behind him the man turned suddenly and smiled. It was Brother Howard. "Good morning, Doctor," he said pleasantly. "I was hoping to meet you again. Do you mind if we walk together?" "I'm meeting someone -- " began Devlin. "I understand," said Howard, holding Devlin's gaze until the Brother could have no doubt that the doctor was telling the truth. Then he looked at this watch and went on; "But you strike me as being a methodical individual. Doctor, who would be inclined to make appointments, professional or social, exactly on the hour. It wants eighteen minutes to the hour, and if you could spare me those few minutes for a talk-" He kept pace with Devlin, waiting. The truth was, Devlin realized suddenly, that he did not know how long Patricia would take to reach the park -- she might even have changed her mind about coming. He was tempted to be impolite to Howard. But the man had not been discourteous to him, merely a little too insistent and Devlin had survived this far by being as polite as possible to everyone. "My pleasure," he said. B ut the Brother said very little during the first few minutes and Devlin began to relax and enjoy the slow, silent pacing between the flower beds and under the trees. Many other parks in the city featured artificial plants, but the trees in this one were real. Transparent plastic protected the first few yards of their trunks against vandals and name-carvers. The flower beds, which had less obtrusive, electronic protection, were real as well, as evidenced by the delicate and natural scents leaking into the air and the number of bees in the area. The turf underfoot was fresh, green and springy -- it had to be a hardwearing synthetic to remain in that condition after the daily pounding it had to withstand from the district's collective feet. A sudden burst of firing -- its irregular spacing, less than a mile distant, suggesting an affair between contestants who could not shoot straight -- presently reminded Devlin once more that beyond the real trees and flower beds lay an unpleasantly real world. Beside him the Brother sighed and said, "I realize that I am rushing things. Doctor -- coming much too quickly to the point. But there isn't much time. I hope you will forgive me and make allowances." Devlin made a wordless noise, a guarded grunt which, he hoped, would bind him to nothing. The Brother went on soberly, "I won't insult your intelligence by asking if you are happy with things as they are. But just how unhappy are you?" "With things as they are?" Brother Howard nodded. "As detailed a list as you can manage." Devlin began to laugh, then stopped, his amusement changing suddenly to irritation. He said, "There is a long list of things I'm unhappy about. Arming so-called responsible citizens before they have reached maturity, much less achieved a sense of responsibility, is wrong. And I don't like the way the majority of these citizens treat the sheep -- or the way the Maxers overreact if someone so much as sneezes without using a tissue -- or the way city security can't seem to be able to keep the peace without waging total # Frame-worthy in space. by Patrick Moore with # full-color paintings by David A. Hardy Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke Not Sci-Fi, but the likely next steps in man's exploration of the solar system and the universe beyond. '# welcome this book... It provides a heady mixture of education, entertainment -- and Inspiration." Arthur C. Clarke If you are fascinated by the vast expanse of the worlds beyond our own, make this your personal Christmas gift... to yourself I ## X #" only # wherever books are sold war on all and sundry. Of course, I'm not being quite fair to them -- it's pretty obvious that they can't trust anyone who is not another security man. But they don't bother to hide that fact." He went on angrily. "Oh, I know that the citizens and Maxers started out with the highest possible motives. We were on the verge of anarchy and it was thought that sober and responsible citizens bearing arms would be able to curb the worst excesses -- the wholesale muggings and murders and bombings. And the idea of maximum rather than minimum response to violent crime -- that worked for a while, too. But then both citizens and Maxers began looking for wrongs to right and when they could no longer find even a minor wrong they -- " Devlin broke off, took a deep breath and continued, "I don't like the mass processing of patients and the complete depersonalization in present-day hospitals -- or the increasing loneliness that overcrowding brings. You have only to walk through a crowded rec hall at night to know what I mean. Curative treatment for these social ills should have started many generations ago," he said bitterly. "I realize that nothing can be done at this late date, but I don't have to like the situation. In my profession one is conditioned to dislike illness, I suppose -- and I especially do not like the illness and the rot afflicting society these days. The sickness goes through to the core and from the top to the bottom. There is no secure place, nothing to hold on to, nobody in authority who is fully trustworthy, nowhere to go that is any better. I'm generaUzing, of course -- there are bound to be some individuals or groups trying to improve matters, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule and they will eventually go soft and rotten like the rest of us. Their psychiatrists or friends will explain the folly of remaining firm while everyone else is going loose. They will be given, or elect to take, one of the personality change series that will chemically tailor their minds to fit happily into present-day society. Sheep into citizens or vice versa with a couple of color-coded pills!" Brother Howard nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but DevUn went on savagely. "And now you will say something ponderous about confession being good for the soul, then lead into a lecture designed to show me the error of my ways-" "Like hell I will-" began the Brother, then stopped to look past him at the girl who was hurrying toward them. D evlin had not realized that they had walked around to the main entrance again. He introduced Patricia to Howard, then added; "We were talking about-" "No need to explain," she said, frowning. "I could hear you from the gate. It sounded hke the beginning of a hand-to-hand affair." "Nothing like that," Howard said reassuringly. "We were simply continuing a discussion begun some time ago and, much as I would like to finish it, I realize that I am intruding-" He was intruding, but a full minute passed and he was still standing there, looking from Devlin to the girl and pleading silently for them to deny it. Something was bothering him and Devlin's curiosity was beginning to outweigh his irritation. He looked enquiringly at the girl. "There is no need to cut short your discussion on my account," she said. The Brother's sigh was clearly audible. He said, "Thank you. What I was really asking a few minutes ago. Doctor, was whether you were unhappy enough with the situation here and now to want to escape from it. I can offer you, perhaps both of you, a chance at something much better -- " "Another thing I dislike about present-day society," Devlin broke in harshly, "is the way people can have their minds changed by subtle argument or by people offering new methods of escape through drugs, hallucinations or heightened metaphysical experience. I do not think, ftrother, that you will ever convince us that we would be better off dead and in heaven." Brother Howard was waving his hands in agitation. They were the same hands that had sent an armed citizen to a hospital, but Devlin was too angry to care. He did not want to embark on an interminable argument about the after-life, comparative religion or any other metaphysical means of life-support. All he wanted was to be alone with Patricia Morley and talk -- and hope that something would develop despite the pressures of the sick society in which they lived. He would dearly love to escape from it -- but not by using the Brother's method. Taking Patricia's arm, he began to turn away. "Wait, Doctor, please," the Brother said. "When we spoke last you accused me of wanting to convert you and I denied it. I still do. But I have been thinking about our meeting and... Well, I've had a chance to sleep on it and I've come to a decision. The reason I wanted so badly to speak to you again was because of your ripe fruit analogy. You said that the human race was at the peak of its scientific and cultural abilities, but that we were too rich, too ripe and were about ready to burst. You suggested what might happen if someone took a firm grip on that fruit and squeezed hard?" "You would be left with a nastiness," said Devlin. "And the pit would shoot out," added the girl. "Exactly," said the Brother. They stood for several minutes in silence broken only by the sound of bees and some distant shooting. When Brother Howard finally spoke he sounded awkward, diffident, but sincere. He said, "I've already told you that I am not seeking converts, but recruits. I am recruiting colonists and crew for a starship." X D evlin had expected to see a ten-thousand-person block wrapped in a security blanket maybe three guards deep and packed with computers, simulators, medics, instructors and all kinds of technical and nontechnical support staff, as well as hundreds of other candidates under training. Instead he saw a small, three-story building with boarded-up windows and pitted walls symptomatic of a structure that had suffered a near miss. There were a lot of city security men nearby, but they were grouped around a dozen or more armored vehicles parked in the space where an adjoining building had been. The security guard at the entrance paid little attention to Brother Howard, Devlin or the girl, but this was because his eyes were on the telltales of one of the most sophisticated weapon sniffers that Devlin had ever seen. And when the Brother ushered them into a ground-floor office -- the building did not have an elevator and the room's sole occupant was obviously incapable of climbing stairs -- the old man sitting behind the impressive desk computer showed only the most casual interest. There was too much skin and not enough underlying tissue on his shrunken skull for any facial expression to show, Devlin thought. A face like that belonged in a terminal geriatrics ward, but the depth and power of the voice were surprising. "My name is Martin," he said. "Sit down, please, and relax while Brother Howard wires you up. Don't talk until he is finished and don't ask questions until I have finished asking mine. That way you will probably find that you need not have asked them in the first place." Silently and with the gentle but impersonal touch of an experienced medic. Brother Howard fitted Devlin and Patricia with psych collars and positioned the leads and sensors as accurately as if their skulls had been shaved and marked. Devlin knew that he should object because the collars were diagnostic tools that could be dangerous in the hands of someone who was not a high-level psychiatrist, and he had no idea of the incredibly old man's professional qualifications, if any. But he was too intrigued -- or perhaps too much of a moral coward -- to argue. He cleared his throat and said, "You're full of surprises. Brother." Brother Howard smiled, gave both collars a final check and sat close enough to Martin for Devlin to be able to look at both men without moving. He swallowed nervously and said, "I'm not sure that I believe everything I've been told. But if I did believe it... Well, I'm no superman." The old man nodded and said, "For this particular exercise I am completely disinterested in supermen or superwomen. Instead I am seeking standards that may be too high or too low for you to reach, because whether you pass them or fail to reach them, you fail. And now that my words have made you sufficiently worried and confused for your mental reactions to be as revealing as possible to this oversophisticated bundle of scrap -- " "Excuse me," said Devlin, "but isn't it wrong to reveal so much about the purpose and mechanics of a test to the subject?" "Maybe," said the old man. "I'm a stupid psychologist." "But I wouldn't bet on it," said the Brother dryly. "Very well," Martin went on. "We know that you are not a superman. What else are you not? Have you ever been a citizen? And don't shake your head or you'll loosen a sensor. Use your tongue." "Sorry. No." "Was the reason cowardice, irresponsibility or a sense of vocation?" D evlin to.ok a deep breath and tried to control his irritation, even though he knew that the sensors were picking it up and telling the old man all about it. He said, "In order -- probably yes -- definitely no -- and I was ordered to take up my profession." "Go on." "I was afraid of wearing the belt of a responsible citizen," Devlin replied. "I think that too many citizens are strutting braggarts and completely irresponsible. I became a doctor because, in my father's opinion, I was unsuited for any other job." The old man nodded, but there were too many lines on his face for his expression to be readable. He said, "Your father isn't being assessed. Doctor, but his opinion of you might have some relevance." "It has a lot of relevance," said Devlin, "because I did as I was. told. According to my father, however, I was too impressionable, too soft, too prone to fall over my own feet to have any real coordination between eye and muscle. He did say that I showed intelligence at times. He thought that I might be stampeded into wearing a belt by some real or fancied insult. But if I did, then my first opponent would almost certainly win because, even if I didn't refuse to shoot because it might hurt him, I might not be able to draw my weapon without dropping it or shooting myself in the thigh with it. He was also fond of saying that society was going to hell and that nothing was sure or permanent but death and taxes. There was nothing I could do about the taxes, he told me, but the more widespread became the the greater would be the need for doctors." "Was he a citizen?" "No." "I see," said Martin. "But we'll leave your father for now. Have you ever been a Maxer? Ever been in a sheep fight with illegal weapons or hands? No? Well, how about a heated argument? You're beginning to sound like a supersheep, Doctor, and that also is an abnormal condition that could -- " "Try not to feel angry and insulted, Doctor," Brother Howard broke in, his eyes moving over the desk displays. "My colleague is very short of time, which often means that he is also short of tact and good manners. Forgive him -- and remember that the qualities and characteristics for which we are testing are not those you yourself might consider important or admirable. The meek are going to inherit the Earth, Doctor. Not this Earth -- but they mil inherit." "I shall try to remember that," said Devlin skeptically. Then, to the old man; "Yes, I have had arguments with other sheep, too many for me to remember with accuracy, but no fights. I take my turn on block security duties, but have never had to shoot anyone. I believe that the best form of defense is defense. I was never a Maxer for the same reason." "I see," said the resonant voice coming from Martin's pendulous, bloodhound's face. "Have you ever been friendly with or related to anyone who subscribed to the philosophy of maximum response?" "We're back to my father again." said Devlin. "How long was he a practicing Maxer?" "Seven, maybe eight minutes. Just after they had cut my mother for saying that they were of bunch of -- " "So he was provoked. Casualties?" "Three dead, two requiring hospitalization and one with psychic damage that caused him to resign his citizen status." "So he killed three, injured two and scared the sixth one into becoming a sheep," said the psychiatrist. "What age were you when he told you about it and how often did he describe the incident?" "I was ten," said Devlin. "I found out about the incident much later. He didn't speak of it at all -- except once, maybe, when he told me that the most dangerous thing in the world was a coward driven to desperation." "You felt proud of him?" "Yes. No. I'm not sure." T urning to the glrl, Martin said, "My apologies for taking on the Doctor before you. Miss Morley. It is Just that I was expecting to interrogate your friend and you were not expected -- " "What about my mother?" asked Devlin. "Isn't her influence important?" "It is," said Brother Howard, "but since she died sixteen years ago as a result of the Maxer incident just described, when you were only ten, her influence isn't recent. Besides, her death meant that full psychomedical records became available to us, so that her effect on you could be estimated with a fair degree of accuracy. Your father, on the other hand, did not break any laws, never caught any serious diseases, managed to avoid major injuries and is still alive somewhere." "But this means that you expected me here!" Devlin burst out. "If you had already studied my -- " "Thoroughly," said the Brother, nodding toward the psychologist. "Miss Morley's being with you was a bonus. We have called up her records and she, too, is colonist material. But please be quiet. Doctor. My colleague is busy." Devlin nodded carefully so as not to dislodge the sensors, his mind suddenly at least as busy as that of the psychologist's -- so much so that he missed Patricia's initial answers. For if the material in Central Records had been made available to these people, then they had the support of Population Provisioning and Control, which in turn had a great deal of influence with Security and Health. In all probabiUty then, the squadron of security armor outside was not simply on standby in case a disturbance might break out in the area -- it was there to protect this building. It made the Brother's starship story much easier to believe. He wondered about Howard's reference to Martin as his colleague. Was the Brother really a Brother? By the time Devlin had decided . that he was -- his conversation and reaction after the Bennet boy's death had been too good to be false -- Martin had finished with the girl. "Bearing in mind that we are not looking for superhuman physical or mental abilities," he said, his eyes moving slowly from the girl to Devlin and back, "I consider both of you suitable for further indoctrination -- as crew members rather than colonists. The major factors we have considered in reaching this decision are that both of you are intensely dissatisfied with your present life styles and would like to escape them -- and neither of your personalities is basically violent. More simply, you would like to change people to do it. "The decision regarding your crew status was a close one," he went on, his voice seeming to vibrate inside their very bones, "because you. Miss Morley, gave indications of future instability should you be unable to find a permanent male dependent. You, Doctor, although Brother Howard had already decided on your suitability as a colonist, are a drifter dissatisfied with everything -- including yourself. You know that some kind of change is necessary, but you are too lacking in self-confidence to make any decision that involves only yourself. If you two had not been complementary personalities and potential mates the crew rating decision could well have gone against you. My congratulations." Devlin could feel the girl's eyes on him. He opened his mouth to speak. but the psychologist went on, "We cannot fit you into a training schedule for another two weeks, however, so Brother Howard will spend as much of the intervening time as possible with you, answering your questions and outlining project philosophy. To begin with, this will be done in your own living block. You can arrange a cover among yourselves -- Miss Morley requires spiritual as well as medical comfort, perhaps, and needs frequent visits of a reverend during rec periods. You have quiet-talkers -- hush-mikes -- I would presume?" "Yes, but -- " began Devlin. "I'll try not to intrude," said Brother Howard. " -- we scarcely know each other," Devlin ended. There was a moment's silence. Then Martin said firmly, "You are introducing an unnecessary complication, Doctor. I can solve it -- in fact, I already have -- but it might be better for both of you if I let Brother Howard explain it. Unlike me, he still has a little romance left in his soul." B ut the answer was delayed. When they left Martin's office Brother Howard signaled for silence and motioned them against the corridor walk Eight white coffinlike containers, wheeled for easy movement, were being pushed toward the rear of the building where Devlin could see a large riot ambulance backed against a loading ramp. The men pushing the containers, which were beaded with moisture and radiating intense cold, were silent. "So that's what you do with the unsuccessful candidates," said the girl, shivering. "They are the successful ones. Miss Morley," said Howard, "in suspended animation for holding in orbit. In that condition they are not a drain on the ship's consumables. It also means that we can train them in small numbers over a considerable period and store them until we have a full complement -- and there is less risk of a security leak..." He talked about the training program and nothing else during the drive back to Devlin's block. Perhaps, Devlin thought, Martin had handed the Brother a chore highly embarrassing for a man of God who believed in free will instead of endocrinology. Or maybe the Brother's enthusiasm for the project was as honest as it sounded. But he had to break off talking as a small explosion rocked the car and the armored shutters dropped into place. The period of temporary sanity had come to an end. Devlin reduced speed and drove on his periscope for a few hundred yards until a larger and softer explosion showered the car with debris and jerked it to a halt. Through the dust that had settled on his outer lenses Devlin could see that the front of a building had fallen into the street and that traffic was blocked in both directions. From somewhere farther ahead came the sudden wzwmp-crash of a rocket opening up a vehicle, accompanied by sounds of shouting and screaming, but his armor muffled the noise so that he could not tell whether the people were protesting or in pain. He cut the engine, sat back and loosened his safety harness. "We could be here for some time," he said. "There are sandwiches on the shelf beside the instrument cabinet." "A lot of them," said the Brother appreciatively. "But of course. Doctor -- you were planning a picnic in the park, off an imitation log table under a real tree. Very romantic." "And practical," said Devlin, "considering the mob around the park food dispensers. Which reminds me -- you were supposed to give us a romantic answer to a practical question back there." H oward smiled and said, "I was hoping that you would not insist on an answer -- that you would let things happen naturally. Two people whose psych profiles are as complementary as yours would have to spend only a short time in each other's company to become inseparable. But informing most people of this fact tends to make them think that their free will is being taken away, that they have no choice in the matter. They then tend to react in an abnormal fashion toward each other out of sheer contrariness. To prove that they still have a choice they sometimes insist on making the wrong choice." A smooth talker, this Brother, Devlin thought. But the truth was that he had already made his choice. Had Patricia made hers? "Pairing is forbidden until after the landing in any case." Brother Howard went on, "so you will have plenty of time to consider. We could adjust your personalities so that you would become a latter-day Romeo and Juliet. But personality engineering is one of the things you will be escaping from -- " He broke off as a long burst of gunfire made speech impossible. During a short lull that followed he tried again, then gave up. Devlin looked from the Brother to the girl, while she gazed steadily at him. Then the firing rose to a crescendo, became interspersed with the small, soft explosions of gas grenades, the sounds of screaming, jeering and the tinkle and hiss of thrown firebombs. The girl reached forward and' gripped his hand. It was not a panic reaction. Her hand was cool and steady, her grip just tight enough to let him know that she did not want to let go. The car's filters, which were never one hundred per cent effective, were leaking a sharp and not unpleasant smell composed of smoke and barbecue odor. Quite suddenly the world became quiet -- except for the screaming. In the distance presently arose the sound of sirens and the intermittent whining of the heavy Sanator ambulances as they used their jet-lift to jump intervening traffic. Brother Howard reached toward the hatch handle. "No," said Devlin harshly. "We can't give medical assistance to compare with the heavies -- and they'll be too busy to let you give any other kind. Oh, they'll give you a white coat if you insist, but not the body armor to go under it -- and they'll be very annoyed if a surviving protester makes another casualty out of you. Believe me, I know." More quietly he went on: "But they are very well equipped and expert at their job. Brother. And good at separating the potential survivors from the others on whom hospitalization would be wasted. So just be patient until the ambulances and the law have gonethen there will be plenty of work for you to do. After all, it is the unsalvageable ones who really need your help." The Brother nodded and loosened his grip on the handle while the girl suddenly tightened hers on Devlin's hand. "This," she said, "is a terrible way to live." The hours that followed were not pleasant to remember because they were spent helping the Brother to comfort the still-living dying. But later, when they were together in the block rec hall and talking about the starship via miniature hush-mikes and earplugs, they had soon forgotten the incident. It had been very easy to forget just then because the process that was supposed to happen naturally was well advanced and Devlin for one had no control over it. And it had been a happy and interesting day apart from the riot. Devlin shivered and thought about the enormous, complex ship and its interminable voyage, about the colonists, with hours of life sandwiched between decades of frigid sleep and about his suspicions that something had been done -- or was being done -- to their cold-sleeping minds. His memories and dreams were much too vivid and complete, suggesting that they were being artificially stimulated. Were he, Patricia and the colonists where they thought they were -- or was this simply an advanced simulation and final weeding-out process for the candidates? Of one thing he was sure. This, too, was a terrible way to live. XI The most persistent memories of his early life were of confinement and restriction, both in the clothing he had to wear and the limitations placed upon his movements inside and around the castle. As he grew older he came to realize that the stairs had been too large and steep for his child's legs and undeveloped sense of balance, and, as he grew older still, he learned about the faceless people who might kill him if he strayed alone beyond the protection of the outer walls. He never did fully understand why he had to be continuaUy smothered in satin and frills. Even in bed he had to wear more clothes than most of his people wore in mid-winter, including a cap with ear-muffs that was like a jeweled cloth crown. A laughing, leather-kilted and strong-smelling giant called Hawn told him' that all this was because he was more important than everyone else and had to be protected against sickness, damp and the attacks of enemies. Later, when the giant Hawn had shrunk to normal size, he said much the same things, but usually tried to change the subject by hitting or prodding him with a wooden sword -- but never painfully. And when he was full grown and Hawn had become a wiry little man with graying hair who laughed but seldom, such questions were left for his advisors to answer and the swords used to change the subject were no longer of wood. But age, or perhaps an unshrewish of late. "Slashing and cutting is a waste of effort, armed as you are. Sire. To slash with a light sword you must move your shield clear of your body, leaving it unprotected. Move it aside only enough to aim and stab and never block a blow directly -- a strong thrust from your enemy will go through your shield unless it is very thick and heavy, and in that case it will tire you and slow you down. A light shield used to deflect, not block, an attack and with a sharp edge which enables it to serve as an additional weapon is best. Sireprovided you do not become angry and begin waving your sword around your head as most of the others will be doing." "Yes," he , said, whirling the sword around his head and cutting another notch in the wood of the practice stump. "Carving pieces off your enemy may give you pleasure. Sire," said Hawn with irritating patience, "but an aimed thrust in the vitals is instantly disabling and fatal. There is no need to skewer your enemy -- a finger's length in any vital area, followed by a twist before withdrawal, will do it. You should practice at every opportunity, Sire, until it becomes habit." "Very well, Hawn," he said coldly. "I shall keep a cool head and kill an enemy with every blow, but I, think you are a calculating and cruel man." "No, Sire," said his master-atarms. "A wounded enemy is a dangerous enemy. If he is also a thoughtful enemy he will know that his wound, even though it may not be disabling, will go bad and kill him slowly with fever and vomiting and endless thirst. You have not yet seen a battle. Sire, or its long aftermath when the wounded are brought home to their friends who try to bind and poultice them and try to make them live, to no avail." "Enough!" he said angrily. "I shall try, then, to be cool and kind in battle. Now guard yourself." For several minutes he cut and thrust at his master-at-arms while the old man parried or ducked every single blow. Then gradually the cool, calculated methods of attack which Hawn had tried to instill came back to him and he saw his aged opponent becoming more and more worried. But by then his anger had faded and he was no longer trying to kill the irritating old man. When he told his mother about the incident that evening and of how Hawn had complimented him on the excellence of his attack, she was far from pleased. For the first time she told him how his father had died -- not as it was recorded in the library, of wounds received in a glorious and heroic battle, but from a mere scratch in his arm made by the dirty stave of a dying foot soldier. The scratch had gone bad and, after many weeks, so had the arm. It was stinking and corrupt, and dead before his father was. Unlike his mother and Hawn, his advisers were old and wise and never irritating. They gave quiet and thoughtful approval to his idea -- or had it, perhaps, been their idea? -- that a man should not run like a child to his mother for advice and that he should think of fathering an heir to his kingdom. He overheard a highly insulting remark, which he was probably meant to overhear, about his peace-loving grandfather's having been a great and glorious queen -- and everyone had laughed just an instant after he did. But later they became serious and talked about the noble ladies he might choose to marry and the political and territorial advantages each possible candidate would bring him. The discussions were all cold and calculating and much hke one of Hawn's lessons. But he did not mind because they also spoke, for the first time, of the desirability of bringing royal concubines into residence while a suitable queen was found for him. Except for Hawn's irritating bullying and the equally irritating acquiescence of his advisers, he was happy during the eight years that followed. His domain was free of disaffection, plague, and war. The war started because of a chance remark by a traveler to one of his advisers, a remark he was not supposed to overhear. The advisers had boasted that from the highest tower in the palace their king could not see to the borders of his lands, and the visitor had replied that this was so only when rain was falling to the eastward. Even on the clearest days the hill, which was just inside the border of the adjoining kingdom, was only a tiny swelling on the eastern horizon, misty with distance and visible only from the highest tower. It was densely wooded and uninhabitated and unlikely to be considered of value by the monarch to whom it belonged, but this had not been the first visitor to joke about it. Of itself the thing was unimportant, a tiny pimple on the face of his fair land -- but even a small pimple could itch. When he mentioned it in council, Hawn laughed uproariously, then said, "The simple solution. Sire, would be to plant a grove of trees between the palace and the offending object -- " Hawn broke off, sUenced by the look on his face. Realizing that their king was not jesting and that he knew exactly what he wanted, the council members began deliberating on the best way of getting the hill for him. Very tactfuUy it was suggested to him that he could not simply take the small and worthless piece of his neighbor's territory without very good reasons for doing so -- reasons that would add to rather than diminish the respect in which he was held. The constant reminders about the presence of the hill were embarrassing, of course, but his advisors suggested that perhaps at the back of his mind he might also have realized that it overlooked a large area of his kingdom and, should his neighbor intend taking up arms against him -- and there was no evidence to the contrary -- the hill would confer a mihtary advantage. In fact, it was suddenly considered imperative that a small, well-armed but secret force should be deployed on the border as close to the hill as possible, to guard against the possibility of an observation post's being set up there. Preparations would probably take half a year, but this would allow time to recruit and train men and for the people to come to feel sufficiently threatened to support a war. They saw his baffled expression and once again it was Hawn who spoke. He said, "The men will be equipped with plain shields and armor and will carry no identifying standards. We will see that they are undersuppUed and that they will find it necessary to Hve off the land. This means that much Uvestock in the area will disappear, usually at night, and it will be easier to rob our own people than the others across the border -- although they, too, will find sheep and chickens missing from time to time. Soon the other king will send some of his soldiers to investigate these occurrences, but before that there will be complaints and much anger from our own people who have suffered. Cause and effect will become confused in their minds, which are not very bright, Sire, and they wiU appeal to you for protection. The appeal will have general support and when the other king's men clash with ours -- " "These nocturnal raids -- " he said sharply. "WUl any of my people be hurt?" "No, Sire," said Hawn. "Unless they think more of their chickens than they do of their miserable hves." During the months that followed he had second thoughts about the war he had engineered and which was rapidly becoming inevitable. When the first news of the growing trouble on his border reached the capital he tried to give orders that would recall his soldiers and allow the situation to cool down -- but the effort dwindled to a small inner voice that never won the cooperation of his Ups and tongue. When word reached him that his anonymous men were taking more than chickens and sheep -- that they were taking wives and daughters as weU jected -- he grew angry Avith himself. He also grew publicly angry and rode among his people, who more and more often hailed him as their protector. Sometimes their cheering managed to drown the quiet, nagging voice of his conscience -- of both his consciences. He was dimly aware of a strange mental ghost called Devlin that gibbered unheeded when his real thoughts and decisions were leading him into danger. It kept reminding him that the brachiapod, too, had represented a deadly danger and his trilobite had crawled within reach of its tentacles. Then there had been the incident with the young allosaurus, the insane jealousy of the tree-dwelling presimians, the time he had been wounded by a big cat and had plastered the bloody tear with filthy, matted grass instead of washing it in the sea and allowing the sun's UV to heal the wound. But the ghost's warnings were like a viewer's efforts to influence the actors on a television screen -- whatever that was. The Devlin ghost was inside him, thinking strange out-of-context thoughts and giving unheard advice, but it was not really a part of the spoiled, forty-year-old boy who rode at the head of his small army against a self-manufactured threat. Eastward his domain extended to the river that passed within a mile of the lower slopes of the offending hill. The river was only a few feet deep, but the banks were Uned with prickly bushes. One of them must have scratched the belly of Hawn's horse as it was climbing the bank, because the animal reared sudenly, throwing its rider and then dragging him by one stirrup as it floundered and splashed downstream. Two of Hawn's men gave chase and managed to head the horse up and on to the bank, but by that time the master-at-arms had drowned. Looking at the slack, wet face and the heavy armor Hawn had taken to wearing as his aging joints had stiffened, the king felt anger at the man's ridiculous and ignoble death. The laughing giant of his childhood should not have ended his life like this, "Leave him until after the battle," he said sternly, then more softly for the benefit of his soldiers, "If you remember his teaching when you meet the enemy, he stiU lives." They reformed and moved toward the base of the hill where the other army was already gathering All soldiers in his service had been trained -- taking into account the differences in personal armor and weapons -- in the same way as their monarch. Even the pikemen, who did not matter very much to either side in a battle, had been instructed in Hawn's methods of cool-headed and calculated attack and personal defense. The long and unhandy pikes -- which until then had been little more than sharpened branches -- had been shortened and thickened and a cross-piece had been added near the base so that they had the handling characteristics of both a long sword and a short spear. In battle a pike-man was supposed to knock aside his opponent's lighter and longer pike with his short heavy one or catch the thrust in his crosspiece and steer it past his body, then close and dispatch his enemy before the other could shorten his grip for a second blow. There were hundreds of bruised ribs among his men to prove that, in training at least, the method  was effective. There was no sign of cooking fires from the other side, so obviously their prince wanted to settle the affair before the midday meal. The prince, who was leading an army slightly more numerous than his own, had taken the field because his father was too old and heavy to mount a horse safely. The fact that losing this battle would mean his yielding to little more than a boy -- and a very boastful boy, at that -- had weighed heavily in his decision to adopt Hawn's new and in some ways not quite honorable ideas. In leisurely and dignified fashion he deployed his forces -- pikemen to the fore, mounted soldiers who were the personal troops of two of his most trusted lords protecting his flanks, and the rest of the nobles, their men and his own guard surrounding him. When his formation was complete the two armies would face each other within hailing distance until trumpeters on both sides announced their readiness to fight. After that they would advance toward each other and fight until one side or the other decided that an unacceptable number of casualties had been sustained and yield the field to the victor. A parley to achieve a settlement of land or gold would follow and then everyone would go home. Most of the fighting would be between pikemen and foot soldiers, but a few of his nobles would be able to exercise within the safety of their resplendent armor while he and his guard stood decoratively in the middle of his army until the issue had been decided. But his formation was still incomplete when trumpets blared on die other side. Their nobles, personal troops and the prince's guard, the prince himself at their center, began trotting quickly along the rear of their own pike lines, pennants fluttering on their lances and plumes undulating like flying caterpillars. It was not until they had rounded the flank of their pike-men and lowered their lances to charge that he realized that Hawn had not been the only radical military thinker. The young prince was hotheaded and anxious to prove himself fit to lead and rule, but he was doing a strange and dishonorable thing. Instead of trying merely to win a battle the prince intended to kill the opposing king. TTie king's pike-men had not been expected to withstand a charge led by heavily armored horsemen and they did not do so. But they did remember Hawn's training and some of them managed to fend off the lances and stab at the horses, or jump aside at the last moment and stick their pikes between the forelegs, bringing the horse and its rider to the ground, where a dazed and heavily encumbered man was easy to IdU. The king saw the center of his pike line collapse, saw the opposing lines of pike-men begjn to walk forward, saw his flankers galloping from each side along the narrowing gap between the opposing lines with the obvious intention of following the enemy horsemen through the gap they had made and taking them in the rear. Then he, whose royal person was supposed to be inviolate, was fighting for his life like the lowliest pike-man. One of the opposing nobles leading the attack was charging down on him, lance leveled and visor open for better seeing. He tried desperately to move aside, but was hampered by the press of his guards. Suddenly there was a horseman between his attacker and himself -- his guard captain, judging by the helmet crest -- who screamed shrilly as a bloody lance head sprouted from the small of his back. The captain rolled off his horse, taking the enemy's lance with him. But the other was already drawing his heavy sword to aim a two-handed swing. The king slashed in panic at the man's helmet, saw the plume begin to drift groundward, then managed to get his shield up in time to block the swing. The shock nearly paralyzed his arm and he was left with a splintered shield dangling loosely from its arm straps and his enemy was raising his sword high above his remembered Hawn saying that a shield should be used to deflect, not block a heavy weapon and that an angry or excited enemy exposed himself during an attack. He spurred forward, took atm at one of the dimly seen eyes below the opponent's open visor and thrust to fuU extension. His sword met with very little resistance and he thought that he had not been able to reach far enough, but he twisted it before withdrawing as Hawn had advised. His enemy's weapon tumbled into the long grass and the man followed it, beating frantically at the sides of his helmet with his mailed fists. Then another lance was reaching toward him across the riderless horse, so that he could not get to close quarters with the new threat. He dug his spurs into his mount and puUed back hard on the reins -- another Havm-taught trick -- so that it reared and took the thrust meant for him. He had already disengaged his feet from the stirrups by the time the horse fell squealing and threshing to the ground, taking the broken lance with it. He jumped clear and ran around the riderless horse in time to see his opponent reaching for the sword in a back scabbard. The two-handed reach left a three-inch unarmored gap at the enemy's armpits. The king paused an instant to take aim, make a thrust, twist and withdrawal. As the man fell he snatched the other's shield and for a few minutes had to fight vidth one of his own Havm-trained guards who took him for an enemy. The look on the man's face when he discovered whom he was fighting was so ludicrous that the king laughed out loud -- a great, bellowing guffaw that sounded terribly out of place in the middle of a battle. This was the stuff of which legends were made, for it was clearly evident that his enemies as winning the battle -- a most dishonorable intention. He was matching their dishonor with his own cold and calculating fighting methods. As the attacks on his person became fewer he took to helping his guards, stepping forward to make a flanking attack when a man or group was hard-pressed, relieving his men with the deadly, calculated thrusts which left dead or rapidly dying enemies in his wake. He did not have to do this very often, but later there was hardly a man who did not boast proudly that the king, personally, had saved his life during the battle. Later the scribes elaborated on these stories and added details of a fight in which the king had slain the opposing prince in single combat. There were many suits of beautifully decorated and costly armor tumbled about in the long, trampled grass and leaking blood -- but he had not been responsible for all of them. Anyone, perhaps even an overzealous pikeman, could have slain the prince on that confused and bloody morning. It was a strange battle with only the enemy making the noise. Only they did the charging, the shouting of battle cries and most of the dying. If the fighting were not stopped soon there would not be enough of the enemy left to bury his own dead. "Hold -- enough of this slaughter!" he called suddenly and pointed with his sword toward a group of opposing nobles and their remaining personal soldiers who were fighting hopelessly a few yards away. "Enough! I call on you to yield with honor!" On his return to the palace that evening he was haded as the greatest warrior of all time and the festivities in celebration of his victory went on for three days. He had been called his people's protector and now they added The Merciful to his name because he had not killed each and every one of his enemies. A little later they added The Peacemaker because of the alliance he negotiated between his kingdom and its recent enemy. With the prince slain and his father, the old king, ailing and ruling with difficulty a country that was poor and ripe for revolt, the victorious king helped his erstwhile enemy with gold and grain in return for an agreement that their kingdoms would eventually merge with his marriage to the enemy princess, an exquisitely beautiful child of nine, when she arrived at a suitable age. This would probably mean that he would have to give up his concubines for a while at least, but in ten years' time he would be much older and that might not be such a great hardship. There was one problem, however, and that was that his young queen-to-be did not like him. Her father explained that she had dearly loved her older brother, the prince, who had taken her about on his horse and told her tales of great and glorious deeds of valor. In a way it had been like the early relationship between Hawn and himself, except that she had been an impressionable girl-child and the prince had not lived long enough to become boastful and irritating to her maturing mind. But her father assured him that childish memories and feelings were shortlived and that when the time came she would be honored to wed such a great king. And he was a great and wellloved king to his people. Apart from that single morning's battle there were no more wars in his reign. Adjoining kingdoms, worried by the fighting prowess of his small but well-trained army, had to be reassured. Threats of combined aggression had to be countered by various devious methods -- none of which were honorable and many of which were utterly despicable. He had to be constantly on guard against the devious threats of groups within his own court. But his kingdom prospered and his reputation for honesty and mercy and nobility grew, it seemed, in direct proportion to the depths of dishonor to which he sank. As the years went by the costly robes he used to find so irksome gave girth and stature to his wasting body and when the time came for his wedding he had begun to feel uncertain in ways he would never have believed possible. He was beginning to feel old. But he was not yet old enough to be unaffected by the glory and pageantry of the wedding or by the obeisance of the nobles of two powerful kingdoms which were now one. And he would have had to be senile indeed not to be affected by the sight of his young queen. She had been a beautiful child and he had discounted as diplomatic exaggeration the stories of her increasing beauty as she approached womanhood. But when he saw her on the eve of their wedding he knew that the couriers had been stupid, tonguetied, insensitive and blind creatures whose rhapsodies had not done her justice. During the three years following the wedding she was the most loved person in the kingdom -- the king was respected and feared as well as being loved. She was incredibly lovely, regal, gracious and faithful -- and as cold toward him in the privacy of their chambers as the ice that covered the northern wastes. During those three years she gave him two strong and healthy sons and a great deal of irritation. He could not express his anger in public, or even admit to its existence within the palace, because his queen was too much loved for him to make her appear anything but perfect. The trouble was that she behaved perfectly toward everyone but him -- her disposition was pleasant toward the servants and guards -- she laughed a lot and her gaiety was unforced and to nobles and serfs alike she showed consideration. But the king she did not love and she did not want to be his confidant or companion either. Several times he tried to explain about the bloody confusion of the battle in which her brother had died, but on each occasion it was obvious that the impression left by the scribes who had recorded the event, and who had not even been there, was much deeper and longer lasting than the words of her king. Sheer loneliness and the need for companionship if not understanding made him consider recalling one of his concubines, but that would have made him look ridiculous -- not because the practice was frowned on, but because no woman in the kingdom was more beautiful and desirable than his own queen. So he returned to the lonely Ufe of being a feared and respected and powerful monarch and took pleasure in only three things. Two of them were his sons, who were growing taller and stronger and more handsome with each passing day. His third pleasure came from playing the devious, dangerous and dishonorable game that would, if he won, ensure the continued existence and future long life of the first two pleasures. For the life of a king, even one who was loved and generally referred to as Great, was an uncertain thing. He could not know for certain who had been responsible, but for the few seconds in which he was able to think he thought sadly that this act would cause grave instability in the kingdom and that his queen must have loved her big brother very much. Then the knife that had been driven upward into his back at waist level was given an expert twist as it was withdrawn and, briefly, he suffered more pain than he would have believed possible. S IX hundred years! All systems or backup systems... That meant there had been system failures since his last awakening. But how many -- and how serious? "Mary," said Devlin furiously, "had a little lamb." He began the careful movements of his back, arms and legs which would allow him to get out of the casket. The process of remembering was involuntary and the memories were painfully sharp. Devlin gritted his teeth and moaned at the remembered pain of that knife thrust, at the burning agony that was like a fire inside his cold and shocked body. He tried to push away the memory, to escape the king's life as well as his death and return to his own life. Instead he found himself watching that same king in action from a distance of a few dozen yards, and holding the broken pike that had transfixed him. He was moaning and holding it as steady as his fading strength would allow because if it moved the pain became even worse. He fought off that dream, too, and suddenly he was babbling at the streaming roof of his cave while a fever raged through his hairy body -- then he was a dying mountain of flesh and bone somewhere in the Jurassic period and a near-mindless crawler on a warm seabed, eating and being eaten... "Stop it!" he shouted. "You're driving me insane -- " "I can do that," said Devlin savagely, "without even trying." He had been repeatedly told during training that the ability to remember was vital and that it must not be allowed to weaken, lest the human seedlings in their star-traveling metal pod drift forever as coldsleeping and mindless vegetables. But that, apparently was not to be the danger. His memory of past real and dream incidents kept returning with a clarity and intensity that terrified him. While he had been thinking back to that training session, he had been in the room, hearing every word the instructor had said, aware of the sounds of attention and inattention of the people around him, feeling the abrasive pressure of bristles against the backs of his fingers as he rested his chin on his closed fist. This, he thought fearfully, is what total recall is like. E verywhere Ms mind's eye looked it was dazzled by the bright intensity of the images and the sharpness of sensory recollections. Their impact seemed to be worse when he closed his eyes, so he kept them open and tried desperately -- and vainly -- not to use his mind at all. But then his hand rested briefly on the edge of the service panel and it was as if two full-sensor films were being superimposed. There was the sight and feel of the panel's edge, the open casket and the display that was still reminding him to exercise and remember. But there was also, equally sharp, the picture of one of the lecture rooms and an instructor saying, "...the duration of the voyage win be measured in centuries, but the biological time that will elapse -- that is, the time during which you will be conscious and with your metabolism functioning normally -- will be measured in days. And not very many of those. That is why the food and air must be strictly rationed -- the water is recycled and no problem. You must not eat unless advised to do so by your cubicle display-, no matter how long in real time it has been between meals. Food synthesizers, seed stores, domesticated animals in cold sleep will remain sealed in their special module, which can be opened only on landing. "So it will be the duration of waking time that dictates your food intake," the instructor went on, "and you should not increase your hunger by staying awake longer than the allotted time, even though there is provision for delaying cooldown in an emergency. For the same reason you must avoid using the resuscitation overrides to warm one or more of the others before their allotted time..." He smiled, showing teeth pointed in a style that had been fashionable three years earlier. Devlin remembered the digestive upsets and lacerated tongues that particularly stupid fad had caused in its time and then the instructor was talking again. "It is not our intention that you arrive on your new planet suffering from malnutrition, but you must exercise restraint in the matter of -- " One of the group, a colonist whose name was Clarke, broke in with a question. He asked, "Suppose we are lonely rather than hungry. Suppose we feel the need, after all those centuries of time, of a little female company -- or male company, as the case might be. Are we forbidden to-" "You are advised most strongly against it," said the instructor. "By now you should be aware that your period of deprivation, counted in biological time, will be a matter of days or at most weeks. Try to pay attention. This matter will be explained in greater detail during the project philosophy lectures, but two reasons can be mentioned now. "The first is that such premature couplings will involve a heavy expenditure of energy, which in turn will demand an increased intake of food. The second -- and much more important-reason is that while we have proved to our complete satisfaction that repeated coolings and resuscitations in no way impair the male and female reproductive systems, we are still unsure of the results on such a delicately balanced organism as a recently conceived foetus. For this reason conception must not take place during the voyage..." opened up a Hne of thought that fiUed the cubicle with bright, remembered pictures of gargantuan grapplings and couplings from his dream past, many of which he seemed to be recalling for the first time and found too incredibly savage to be pleasant. But occasionally there were incidents -- snatches of the king's lovelife when he was young, a memory of a small, dark, incredibly passionate girl from he knew not where -- which were very pleasant indeed. But he could not hold on to the pleasant dream incidents because the raw, violent episodes were pulled in again by strong chains of association and engulfed them. H e sat for a moment on the edge of the casket, his eyes squeezed shut and his limbs trembling despite the exercises and the cubicle heaters. But closing his eyes blotted out only the cubicle around him, not the supersharp pictures that Ids mind kept throwing on the dark red screen of his closed eyelids. What have they done to my mind? "...During the voyage you will be thrown on to your own mental resources," Martin, the incredibly aged psychologist was saying. "You must use your minds because what you don't use you lose. We cannot use them for you in spite of the wide range of psycho-medication presently available to us. "While it is possible to include mechanisms capable of administering medication of this type during the voyage," he continued, "it is imperative that the cubicle systems be kept as simple as possible to reduce the possibility of long-term component failure. Adding dispensing equipment of this kind would place a serious strain on the overall system. In any case, the temperature and radiation changes used during the hibernation and resuscitation processes could, over a long period, cause chemical changes in the medication with unforeseen and perhaps fatal results. "You must also remember that you have been chosen because you are normal people," he went on, playing the beautifully modulated instrument that was his voice in such a fashion that what should have been an insult came across as a sincere compUment. "We have sought long and diligently for people who are normally motivated, normally nasty, normally accident-prone and even normally stupid. It is not -- and never has been -- our intention to make supermen or superwomen out of you. Geniuses, supernormal people, are like rare chemical elements -- they tend toward instab Uity. We cannot afford to be too sophisticated, to finesse too much. There is too much danger of component failure for us to risk people failure as well. So you are as stable as we could make you. "you are like lead -- or no, that is a trifle too stable. Think of yourselves as mud, but mud in which something will grow..." With the remembered words came the memory of the almost imperceptible sighings, rustlings and creakings of the other colonists-to-be trying to remain silent and the sharp, fearful excitement of what they were going to do. But something had now gone terribly wrong. D evlin opened his eyes and looked intently at his immediate surroundings, trying to fix his mind as well as his vision on the here and now. If he could believe that wrinkled husk of a psychologist or any of his instructors -- or even Brother Howard -- his mind was his own. During'the early stages of instruction he had been questioned under hypnosis, but this had been admitted by the medics concerned and had been simply a means of speeding up the acquisition of his personality data. There had also been a number of physical tests carried out under anesthetic -- but those, he had been assured, had been aimed solely at estabhshing genetic and general health factors. A wide variety of medication and direct electrical stimulation were available -- these could heighten sensation, improve memory and even insert memories which had not previously been there -- but these procedures, he had been told, had not been used on the ship's personnel. If he believed that, what explanation was there for the diamond-sharp dreams about subjects and events and people of which he knew that he had no previous experience? The trilobite sequence, the brontosaurus, even the incredible details of his dream of being a great king -- his mind had contained no such source material before he joined the ship. So it must have been implanted afterward, perhaps was being implanted every time he underwent a cooldown. Suppose the things they had told him were generally true, but just to be on the safe side they had decided to ignore the simple approach in his case. Perhaps someone had second thoughts and the result had been that, instead of fading and needing constant exercise and renewal, Devlin's mind and memory were growing sharper and more retentive with every cooldown. It had grown so sharp that he was, he realized, utterly terrified of going into cold sleep again. Abruptly he wanted out of that cubicle and away from the process that was driving him mad. If there had been post-hypnotic commands against leaving the cubicle when not ordered to do so, they had faded over the centuries because he was able to use the manual override on the seal without any hesitation whatever. Then he was in the corridor, his breath hanging like misty balloons around his head. He was trying to think. If he was, as he suspected, a special case, then the circuitry that had been feeding his mind with dreams and the mechanism for administering the supportive medication should be capable of being switched off. He did not have the technical training to recognize one of the circuits or mechanisms or switches if he saw them but by careful scrutiny he should be able to see differences in the wiring and telltales coming from his cubicle and those of the others. If he had an extra strand of cable or length of plumbing he could always cut it -- if he could not follow it back to a switch. Such a course would be very dangerous, stupid even. But the risk was acceptable because he refused to undergo cooldown again if there were the slightest chance that those incredibly realistic dreams would return. For a few seconds he cringed as the remembered knife tore into his body and he was crushed by the cephalopod and a score of other violent deaths overtook him -- then he fought desperately to force those memories away and return to reality. It was the cold that saved him finally, reminding him that he must go to the control center and switch on the heaters and put on coveralls before he did anything else. But he had gone only a few yards when he had to stop. A man's body had been concealed by a cabinet that projected from the wall of the corridor. It was held between the wall-net and the metal plating, arms and legs outstretched and shining with the intense cold. Devhn could see that as much as possible of the body's surface was in contact with the cold metal and that the man had, of course, died from exposure. The reason for the death, as opposed to the cause, was equally easy to see. The eyelids were held open by two pieces of adhesive tape. Devhn, it appeared, had not been the only one to be singled out for special treatment and this man had chosen to die rather than go on dreaming. F or more than an hour Devhn checked and rechecked the control center teUtales, searching for some clue to the identity of the dead man and where he had come from. He concentrated on the search because he badly needed something safe to think about -- even though he knew that when the search was ended he would have to face the question of why the man had killed himself with cold and that would mean thinking about the dreams again. But the colonist status displays showed only the pale blue that indicated awakenings for exercise only. Except for the negative indication beside the name and number of Yvonne Caldwell -- and he had switched off that particular system after the girl had died -- there was no evidence of a cubicle malfunction, which should have registered if a casket had been empty. For a wild moment he wondered if the man had belonged on the ship or if he had wandered in from outside and the whole thing was, after all, just a complex simulation in which they were all being tested. Then he remembered the dead girl who had dreamed of being a female dinosaur. Could she have been undergoing the same kind of psycho-drug treatment as the dead man and himself? Two colonists and one crew member had been or were being fed advanced and possibly experimental forms of psycho-drug. Of a complement of over two hundred, what were the chances of any three people's -- chosen at random -- being special subjects? Just how many people on the ship were undergoing the treatment? And why didn't the dead man's absence from his casket register on the status board? Without being able to work it out exactly, he knew that a fairly large proportion of the ship's personnel would have to be undergoing the treatment for the first two he had encountered to be special subjects. But wait. Were the three subjects truly random samples? The Caldwell girl was -- she had suffered an accident with her cold sleep casket and died before the side effects of the treatment had become manifest. But the dead man was a different matter -- a subject who had found Devlin because the treatment had driven him to his death in the corridor. It could be argued that if a large number of colonists were being treated the ship should be filled with permanently cold-and dead -- bodies. Perhaps it was. Devlin shook his head violently, trying to discard that ridiculous idea and to jolt his mind into producing a more reasonable one. The status board and its associated monitoring system were designed to show the condition of each and every person on the ship. The dead man either did not belong to the ship or he was a colonist who had somehow devised a way of leaving his cubicle and concealing his absence from the monitoring system. Devlin's first step would be to find out who the man was if he did belong to the ship, and an examination of his cubicle should then show how he had been able to fool the monitor. It occurred to him that a simple answer would be to open all the cubicles in turn until he found, or did not find, one that was empty. But he dismissed that idea as too impractical and time-consuming. Instead he would try to identify the man by searching his new, recently improved memory. He would be looking at events and people in his own past -- a fairly safe and pain-free area in which to explore. D evlin put on warm coveralls and returned to thesection of corridor containing the dead man. He detached him from the wall net and towed him back to the control center, where he placed the body on the spare couch. For a few minutes he focused a heater on the head and shoulders -- then he carefully removed the tape from the eyelids and pressed them down until they were halfclosed. The heat had made the features look expressionless but natural. He tried harder to remember therri. Most of the lectures had been given in small rooms with rarely more than a dozen people present. Devlin concentrated on recalling a particular sequence and gradually the still features of the dead man became overlaid with the mobile, incredibly wrinkled face of the project's chief psychologist. The old man was seated at a desk behind which was a wall chart containing information and hundreds of small photographs of the ship's personnel. "...you people represent the final intake for this ship," Martin was saying in his deep, resonant voice. "There will be no chance for all of you to get to know each other before the end of the trip, but we are fairly sure that your predecessors and yourselves will be fully compatible -- " "Excuse me, citizen, a question." Devlin turned around to look at the questioner -- a small, beautiful, dark-haired girl whose timidity was apparent in her tone and overly respectful manner. No person would normally address another as citizen unless he wore a gun-belt and Martin was as beltless as any sheep. She was, Devlin realized with a rush of hindsight, the girl who would accidentally kill herself in Blue # I -- and who might have been lucky to have died when and how she died rather than live until her dreams drove her to self-destruction. He forced his mind back to the girl's question, not looking at the mind-picture of her as much as at the other faces of the group, which should have included that of the dead man. He did not see it. The psychologist must have nodded because the girl went on, "Surely we will be compatible. I mean, it cannot be your intention to transplant all the conflict and viciousness of our society to -- to -- " She had lost her timidity, Devlin noted, just before losing her voice. He faced to the front again as Martin replied, "To be perfectly frank, our intentions are not clear even to ourselves. Certainly we do not intend to turn loose all the. social and psychological ills of Earth on your future home, but we cannot be absolutely sure that we will not. We do not believe that we will because we are selecting and educating normal, average people. "This appears to us to be the safest course," he went on pleasantly, "because supermen and superwomen are unpredictable during long periods in nonstress situations. Their treatment and training of their offspring are likewise uncertain, because their children are unlikely to be superchildren and the superparents may be unable to accept that fact. The result will be personalities subjected to abnormal pressures during the formative stage and pressures of abnormal kindness or abnormal cruelty can be equally damaging. There is also the high probability that the genetic backgrounds of the parents, the characteristics that made them superior in the first place, are in themselves abnormal-and that a strength in one area is usually balanced by a weakness in another. unnecessary abnormalities to the stars," he continued, pulling up the corners of his lipless mouth and modulating his tone to express humor, "we have decided to educate people who are moderately honest, moderately unselfish and even moderately abnormal..." The words, the tone, the smallest changes in expression of that bloodhound's face came back to Devlin the way sensorama plays were supposed to but did not. Devlin went back a few minutes to look at the memory sequence again, but this time he was concentrating on the chart containing the photographs behind the old man. ered at once, did not improve the eyesight. He had to go back over the episode three times before he was able to remember a photograph, indistinct with distance, that might have been that of the dead man. The adjacent color-coding indicated that he was a colonist due for cooling in Red #, and the status board gave his name as Thomas Purdy. What, he wondered again, have they done to my mind? But the question brought on a rush of too-perfect dream memories and, in self-defense, he returned to the memory of the lecture. The old man, Martin, had not seemed to mind interruptions, so that Devlin was able to listen again to Patricia, who had been sitting beside him, and the Caldwell girl. They had started by asking questions but had progressed to a three-way debate on the advisability of sending untrained personnel on such an important mission. He could not remember anyone's asking if it were possible, after joining, to quit the project. Judging by his own feelings and those of Patricia, everyone was so glad to have been given the chance to run away from everything that the thought had not entered their heads -- which said a great deal for the effectivenessof the initial selection procedures. But suppose that some of the personnel chosen were expendables, guinea pigs who would be tested to destruction in order to increase the chances of survival for the others. The most important items to be tested, as far as he and the project were concerned, had been his mind and memory. The memory of his first decision awakening came rushing .back -- the intense, almost physical pain of his disappointment at having to pass that beautiful but doomed world. Then came the fly-by of Target Five, the evasive action he had taken and the memory of its physically repulsive and warlike natives. He had already convinced himself that the ship was real, that it was light-years from home and that the things he remembered when he was awake were real. But now he was reversing, or at least weakening, that conviction. If his dreams were as sharp and detailed and intense as his waking memories-what, if anything, was real? Was it any more difficult to produce a full sensory hallucination of a space battle with extra terrestrials than a near-massacre in medieval setting or the adventures of a giant saurian? Possibly not. But there was one essential difference between his dream and his waking shipboard experiences. During the former he had no control over the incidents that occurred -- no matter how hard he tried there seemed to be no way of altering the results. With the latter, however, he had a choice. He had the power of deciding, for instance, whether he would leave the dead Purdy on the couch or carry him back to his cubicle. He was on a real ship or on a completely real simulation of the ship. In either case anything that happened to him between the present moment and the time he returned to cold sleep or died, was real. He left the control center and headed for Purdy's cubicle to see how the other had managed to fool the computer into thinking that he was still in residence. T he manual override allowed him to open the cubicle without initiating the resuscitation sequence, and the answer was obvious as soon as he bent over the casket. But the question still remained -- how had Irdy let himself out of a colonist cubicle? Where could he have picked up the highly specialized knowledge to do so? Purdy had been desperate but logical. Unsure of the extent of the computer's sensors and incapable of would be effective before a crew member could be roused to go to his assistance, he must have examined the personnel status board and found the answer in Blue # I . Devlin had switched off Blue #I when the occupant died. With the sensors out of action there was no way for the computer to know whether the girl's body was or was not still there, so Purdy had moved it to his own casket. The sensors did not operate during cold sleep, only while resuscitation was in progress to monitor the physical condition of the occupant, so the substitution had gone unnoticed. But when the occupant of Purdy's cubicle became due for revival, the substitution would be noticed -- but as a substitution. It would be flagged as an organic malfunction for the attention of a crew member, probably Devlin himself. Except that by then Devlin might also show as an organic malfunction, because the dead Purdy could be in Devlin's casket while he himself has dead in another part of the ship and long past caring. Purdy had shown him the way out. On his way back to the control center he passed the open door of his own cubicle and the closed one with Patricia's name on it. He had been trying not to think and trying expecially hard not to remember, but he knew there were problems for him to face other than the simple, mechanical one of committing suicide. That was why he was going to return Purdy to the man's own cubicle, for a short time, anyway, so that he would have the control center to himself while he tried to face his problems. Until recently -- a few weeks or six centuries ago -- he had done his best thinking when he was alone. But something was happening in the control center when he returned from Purdy's cubicle for the second time. One of the repeater screens was glowing with a message, but he was too far away and the angle was too acute for him to read it. By the time he reached his couch the message was gone, to be replaced quickly with another. "Patricia -- " began Devlin. Patricia had been awakened to discover why he was absent from his cubicle and the computer had warned her against the possibility of finding his mind rather than his body malfunctioning -- which meant that the project's psychologists and programers had also been aware of this possibility. Very carefully Devlin kept his mind on his present surroundings and his eyes on the entrance to the control center. It would take her half an hour to finish her resuscitation exercises, find his cubicle empty and come to control. He wondered if she would be as terrified of going to sleep as he was or if she would be able to help him find an answer different from Purdy's. H er face was still and calm and lovely and as stiff as chiseled marble. When she spoke her voice was under tight control. "What are you doing out of your cubicle? Are you all right?" Devlin nodded and tried to smile. He said, "There's nothing wrong with me. At least, nothing more serious than a case of self-induced insomnia." Suddenly she launched herself at him, knocking him backward into his couch. Her arms were wrapped around him so tightly that he found it difficult to breathe and she was trembling. He did not have to be a medic to be able to diagnose desperation rather than desire. With one arm he held her as tightly as she was holding him, feeling the warmth of her body through the metal mesh. With his free hand he stroked her hair which, because it was long and thick, still retained the icy cold of the cubicle. "What's wrong?" he asked softly. "Bad dreams?" Her face was pressed too tightly against his chest for her to speak, but he felt her nod."I was hoping," he said, "to meet someone on this ship who was not troubled by unpleasant dreams. It might have helped to disprove a theory of mine." When she did not reply for several seconds he said, "We'll talk about it -- you'll be all right, you'll see. And there is at least one answer to bad dreams. It is a bit drastic -- and only to be used as a last resort -- but it has been used at least once." Devlin fell silent. Patricia was still trembling in his arms, but his position on the couch was very pleasant. Despite his confusion and anxiety about the ship and his terrible fear of going to sleep again, he began to react physically to the situation. As his fear and confusion ebbed, other memories rushed in to fill the spaces -- memories of incidents in his own past as well as a flood of dream episodes of a similar nature involving females which, in many cases, were not even human. All at once his need for her became so great that he, too, began to shake. Suddenly, violently, she pushed herself away from him and the couch, crying silently and shaking her head. "What's wrong?" he asked angrily. But he knew the answer as soon as he asked the question. In fact, virtually every item of the dream material was supplying its own answer. Very few of those episodes had been pleasant for the female concerned. "Put on a coverall," he said more quietly, "and sit on the other couch. I know what's bothering you and I-won't." She relaxed enough to smile briefly, then tightened up again. Devlin turned his head away as she began pulling on the coveralls. He wondered why he felt more embarrassed watching her dress than seeing her naked. When she returned to the couch a few minutes later he told her of his confusion regarding the voyageor the simulation of a voyage -- and of his uncertainty as to whether everyone or only an unlucky few were having dream trouble. He told her about the solution Purdy had found to the problem and waited for her reaction. She said finally, "I'm glad you're all right." He turned on her, suddenly furious at her for putting the whole problem on a personal basis, then silenced his tongue behind clenched teeth. He knew that she was concerned for the other people in the ship and also afraid of what had been happening in her mind. And her feeling for his health and sanity did not have to be entirely selfish. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have -- Well, let's both try to relax and talk about the problem without getting too uptight about it. That sounds stupid -- what I mean is if our talk brings back something really unpleasant, let's sidetrack it by thinking of something nice. Remembering a difficult piece of music you may have heard at a concert is probably a good way. Nothing terribly unpleasant ever happens at a concert." "Except," she said, smiling,"if there's a bomb hoax or the music is boring -- I remember once going to sleep." "You just said a dirty word," said Devlin. "But do you have any ideas? Suicide isn't a good answer for us." "No future in it," she said. "And we're supposed to be the future." She shivered again. "I never thought of just plain tomorrow-of just taking another breath -- as an awesome responsibility. But I agree with you -- what happened to the CaldweU girl and Purdy makes it unlikely that all this -- the whole ship -- is a simulation. However, whether it is or is not isn't important. What's happening to our minds is. And so is the question -- is the dream trouble happening to everyone or only to a few of us?" Devlin nodded. "Right. We could probably establish the number of disturbed dreamers by studying the status board, calling up the details of their awakenings and checking if any of them resisted, by even an hour, the return to cold sleep. A check on the consumables will tell us if they stayed awake inside their boxes rather than breaking out to commit a Purdy style body swap and suicide." "Does that mean," she broke in, "that you think some of the people in the cubicles are already dead?" Devhn shook his head. "I don't see how they could have managed it. If they killed themselves prior to or during a cooldown, it would have been flagged as a malfunction and a crew member would have been awakened to investigate -- you were awakened, remember, to check on a possible malfunction in me. I was required to check on the Caldwell girl." S HE was silent for a moment. Then: "I'm frightened. Some of my dreams were so depressing that if I deliberately recalled them I, too, might think that suicide was the only answer. But I don't want to think as Purdy evidently did. Maybe he was in an earlier intake. We don't know what kind of person he was -- perhaps he was flawed in some fashion. I realize this is wishful thinking and not logic, but I don't want him to influence us too much-or the people who awaken later. There might be a chain-reaction of suicides," she ended grimly. Devlin reached for her hand. She did not pull it away. "Suppose Purdy was tlie first to encounter this problem," he said, "and we are the second. I didn't know him at all, but there is one difference between his case and ours -- he didn't have anyone to talk to. It could be an important difference." She nodded wordlessly and he said, "Let's check the status board-" It took many hours of concentrated, repetitious effort to call up and study each awakening in turn and to check each one for evidence of abnormal behavior or refusal of a colonist to return to his or her casket at the specified time. But all seemed normal. Devlin decided to make spot checks on the cubicles and look for the evidence at first hand. The job would have gone faster if he and Patricia had split it between them, but somehow it was easier for them to keep their minds off unpleasant memories when they worked together. Opening a statistically meaningful number of cubicles -- performing the sequence of operations that allowed entry without initiating warmup of the occupant -- took an additional three hours. But the effort required to control their minds -- of looking at cold sleepers time after time without allowing themselves to think about the dreams that had to be going on inside those frozen heads -- was much more tiring than the physical work involved. When they returned to the control center, still without the evidence of abnormalities, their voices were slurred with fatigue and they kept yawning in each other's faces. But their fatigue was filled with the fear of going to sleep-it kept them moving about when they should have been resting in the couches. To help each other stay awake they ran another detailed check on the status board and found nothing, except for one minor departure from norm that seemed to have no bearing on their problem. Devlin said wearily, "I feel stupid. But surely everytliing can't be as simple as it seems." Patricia's face was pale with weariness so that the scar tissue on her cheek stood out like an embossed pink star. She said, "I've been doing some tliinking. The Caldwell girl doesn't really come into our present picture-she died accidentally a long time ago -- and the only thing Purdy had in common with us was that we three have been awakened more often than the others." "Right," said Devlin, "Purdy and we have had one extra awakening. The computer says he had a test warmup during the first few years of the trip to check on the accuracy of the resuscitation timers. I had an extra awakening to attend to the Caldwell girl and you were warmed because of me. That means the trouble could affect everyone in the ship at their next awakening. We are not special cases -- we have simply had an early warning." "We ought to pass it along. We have to tell the others what to expect-" "They'll know the problem as soon as they're awake, damn it. What you mean is that we have to think of a solution to it for them. And I'm too tired to think of anything." "I'm tired, too," she said angrily, "and it keeps me from saying exactly what I mean. I meant that we must find a better answer than Purdy's." "How much time," Devlin asked sharply, "do we have to find it? How long can we stay awake?" She made no reply and he could see his own fear mirrored in her expression. He said, "I'm sorry. If we don't stop snapping at each other we'll have to send out for a couple of belts. Let's try, despite our fatigue, to think about Purdy's answer. Let's examine it, and the situation that drove him to it, in case there is something there that we can use." T hey had to assume that Purdy had been terrified by his dreams and that he had tried hard to find an answer other than suicide. Probably he had tried so long and so hard that he had reached the same stage of physical and mental exhaustion as Devlin and Patricia were experiencing. But Purdy had been all alone. He had not been selfish enough to wake someone else to share his troubles, but he had not panicked. Knowing that he had to sleep sooner or later, he had delayed sleeping for as long as possible by taping open his eyelids. Then, after stripping off his coverall, he had gone to an extremely cold section of the corridor and arranged himself so that the greatest possible area of his body's surface was in contact with the cold plating. The taped-up eyelids and the freezing cold metal would have kept him awake for some time, but eventually he had fallen asleep -- and had probably dreamed briefly before dying. "The extreme fatigue we feel and that Purdy presumably felt bothers me," Devlin said thoughtfully. "All of us were fit at the beginning of the voyage, which was only a matter of days ago in biological timeand we have not been working so hard on the ship that we should be ready to drop from exhaustion like this." He paused, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his .head violently, trying to jostle his brain cells into increased activity. Then: "Suppose the project people made a fundamental error in thinking that the long periods in cold sleep were enabling us to rest -- a justifiable assumption. But let's suppose that in reality the cold sleep preserved the body's fatigue toxins along with everything else and that we haven't in fact slept properly since the day before we entered the caskets on Earth. Sleep deprivation causes some odd mental effects -- disorientation, reduced self-confidence, that sort of thing." "Are you suggesting," Patricia asked, smiling, "that we should have been awakened periodically and told to go to sleep?" "Yes," said Devlin, "if they wanted us to stay mentally alert." He did not smile. Despite her fatigue she saw what he was driving at and began shaking her head violently. "I know how you feel -- I feel the same way," Devlin said. "But we won't be able to think properly about anything until we've rested, even if it is only for a few hours. And we won't be asleep at the same time. One of us will stay awake to rouse the other if the sleep appears to be disturbed -- we won't be in a cold casket, unable to stop dreaming. At the first sign of distress -- I'll explain about the mechanics of sleep, the eye movements behind the closed lids that indicate natural dreaming and so on -- the other person will rouse the sleeper. We have to try it," he finished firmly. "I'll go first." But as soon as he said the words his fatigue disappeared, driven away by the terror of dozens of remembered dyings. He could see that the same terror had the girl in its grip, but when she spoke his strongest emotion was one of shameful relief. "If we are going to try it I'll go first," she whispered. "You have a better idea of the symptoms to watch for." But it was not easy to make her relax. She kept fighting sleep for what seemed like hours, even though Devlin spoke softly to her, held her hands and finally reran a close-range probe sequence from his first observation awakening which showed the beautiful, park-like scenery of the satellite of Planet Three. Gradually her eyes began to close more and more frequently and remain closed for longer and longer periods. Her breathing became deep and regular after she passed the restive period on the threshold of sleep, but there were no indications of disturbance or distress. Devlin rubbed his eyes and thought. Poor Purdy... Watching her he wondered what was going on in the mind behind that lovely tranquil face and if it were possible that the fearfully sharp and intense dreams they had both experienced could go on without some outward sign becoming apparent. He did not think so -- and gradually he began to feel a little envious of her escape. He remembered the young king tired after a strenuous training session with Hawn or lying exhausted in the arms of his favorite -- and the feel of sunshine and warm mud on his enormous, leathery body as he dozed in the shallows of a prehistoric lake... He came awake to find Patricia shaking his shoulder and smiling. She said, "I don't know how long you've been asleep, but I've had nine hours. As a sentry you're a total loss!" XV XJ-any unpleasant dreams?" She shook her head. "I feel fine." "Me, too," said Devlin. "But we should try to remember as much as possible to discover the difference between cold sleep and the normal kind of dreaming. It might help us to understand what is going on." Devhn had never been very good at recalling dreams -- he had been convinced that he did not dream at all until he discovered during his medical training that everyone dreamed. But now, with very little effort, he found that he could bring back the memory of what his mind had been doing while he had been asleep. There had been chaotic flashes of dozens of unrelated incidents, a kind of sorting and sifting through the records of his last waking period. His sleeping mind had tried to impose some kind of order and sense on them, with the result that people and places and incidents and timing were mixed in a fantasy world that was ridiculous rather than frightening. Some dreams had been logical within themselves, had consisted of events, imagined or remembered, that fairly shouted out his fears regarding the voyage and his own reduced probabilities of surviving it. His cold sleep memories had intruded also, but not seriously enough to scare him awake -- and there had been one odd sequence involving Brother Howard. The Brother had been talking seriously to him and Devlin had replied occasionally, but the whole sequence had been completely silent. He asked Patricia, "Find anything?" "I don't think so," she said. "But then. I'm not sure what I'm looking for. There was nothing in the dreams as frightening or intense as in the cold sleep kind, although I'm pretty sure that if I tried I could recall them in just as much detail -- my memory seems to be enormously improved. Some of the incidents -- one involving Brother Howard, for instance -- were completely ridiculous. I'm -- very hungry." "What did you say?" "I'm hungry," she repeated. "And I know that we shouldn't really be awake and should not, therefore, draw on the ship's consumables. But being practical -- Well, Purdy and the Caldwell girl will not be using their allowance and we could -- " "A good idea. But I didn't mean to ask about your hunger. You mentioned dreaming about Brother Howard. Was the dream silent? Did he talk during it, but you couldn't hear him or yourself speaking?" She did not reply, but her expression was answer enough. Once again he wondered what had been done to their minds. After a long and baffled silence he said, "Well, it seems that we can stay warm and eat and sleep for about two weeks without using anyone else's rations. That should give us enough time to come up with some alternatives. I feel happier thinking about this in my own language, but if I forget something or seem to be going wrong, don't be afraid to interrupt, right? Now suppose we treat our problem as a dangerous and possibly lethal symptom of a disease. The first step would be to find out how the infection, or whatever it is, was introduced into our systems." T he possibilities, Devlin went on to explain, were that it had been deliberately introduced by mechanical means, either before the voyage had started or during it. If the former, it had delayed-action effects that were only now becoming manifest. If the latter, the effects were cumulative and the method of introduction was probably incorporated in the cooldown processing or it was taken with the food or water. "In that case," Patricia broke in worriedly, "we shouldn't eat or drink." "When we get hungry and thirsty enough." Devhn said wrdy, "we'll find good reasons why it could not have been introduced with the food and water. But right now we have to search the ship's cold sleep and lifesupport systems for indications that some form of medication is being introduced. We must also search our memories for clues to some form of treatment that might have been given to us before we left Earth. "I don't know any more than you do what we are looking for. It could be a hallucinogenic drug, direct modification of memory psychoradiation techniques-they were getting very good at that sort of thing before I left the hospital -- or post-hypnotic verbal or visual triggers for an implanted memory sequence placed during training. Or it could be a mixture of all three -- andor in combination with drugs or techniques we can't even guess at. One good thing is that we can look at two sources of infection -- the ship and our training period memories -- at the same time." But their detailed examination of the ship's cold-sleep, life-support and food-dispenser systems turned up nothing suspicious. True, the information was available only through the relevant computer displays and it was possible that the computer had been programed to conceal the data they were seeking. But such precautions would have introduced highly dangerous complications irito the mission -- Devlin felt he had to assume that the information given was accurate. Still,, to check on this accuracy both he and Patricia returned again and again to memories of their training, to lectures and simulations. #I . conversational asides and wall charts, circuit diagrams and stores inventories -- their ability to remember, whatever the reason for it, continued phenomenal. One important piece of information they learned was that the ship was pushing hard against its limits of operational safety. The next fly-by, due in just under one hundred and eighty-one years, would probably be the last with a fully functioning ship. X about that," said Devlin later, while they were discussing their findings in the control center. "We're still trying to solve the cold sleep problem and knowledge of that fact tends to sidetrack one's train of thought." "Not necessarily," she replied. "The data on the next target system looks good -- one of the best prospects we've had, in fact. Would it be possible for us to reprogram the computer so as not to awaken anyone at all until we go into landing orbit?" Devlin shook his head. "One of the things drummed into us was the necessity for mental and physical exercise at regular intervals. Besides, I wouldn't like to fool around with programs as important as that." "But one of the things they were worried about," she argued, "was the possibility of memory loss. Reduced temperatures were supposed to allow the electro-chemical charges used for memory storage to leak away. That is not happening." "I know, I know," said Devlin irritably. "Our problem is that we seem to be registering too many memories, not losing  them. But you're forgetting that the period will be much longer than one hundred and eightyone years. If the fly-by shows a planet suitable for colonization we have to decelerate and return, so that it could be three times that length of time before we are in landing orbit. Even if we could be sure there would be no physical or mental deterioration I'm still not convinced that we should risk an arbitrary cold-sleep period unbroken for more than five hundred years. To crib from Shakespeare -- what dreams might come?" "But we must do something!" Devlin was about to snap back at her, but he stopped himself in time. They were both tired and anxiety, as it usually did, was making him hungry. He smiled and said, "Let's eat." She yawned suddenly. "And sleep." Neither of them was afraid of what might happen during a warm sleep and both of them felt relaxed in their couches. But, perversely, sleep would not come. Devlin's mind would not leave the problem of the cold dreams and Patricia could not stop talking about it. "From what you've just been saying," she said after yet another exercise in circular logic, "we can be sure -- or fairly sure -- that any of the psycho-drugs, whether they were hallucinogens, personality changers or whatever, would not remain active over this length of time. Despite the fact that an efficient cooldown system is supposed to halt all chemical and metabolic reactions, those particular drugs are composed of unstable material which is also highly complex structurally. Too, the most effective ones had not been in existence long enough before our departure for proper long-term tests, a couple of centuries or more, to be carried out. The project planners would hardly have risked the success of this mission by using drugs with long-term effects that could have mental effects on us they were unable to predict." Devlin replied tiredly, "Still, they may have taken the risk." She shook her head. "If they had administered any of the known effective -- and unstable -- drugs, any biochemical instability would react against the original purpose of the drug. Our memories would have remained normal or perhaps even faded instead of becoming sharper, as has happened. More likely such instability and subsequent breakdown of the chemical structure would have caused severe and apparent brain damage and, at very least, the type of hallucination generally encountered nightmares -- and bad ones -- but they were invariably self-consistent." "You are saying then," said Devlin, rubbing his eyes, "that they didn't adminster a psycho-drug." "Not exactly," she replied. "They could have administered something that would not change over a long period because it was nonmaterial. The treatment could have been hypnotic rather than biochemical." D evlin rolled onto his side so that he could look across at her. He said, "All right -- let's kick that around. Hypno-conditioning is affected only by the passage of biological time, so as far as our conscious minds are concerned the conditioning took place only days or weeks ago. Assuming you're right, it was probably administered at intervals during training. But we're still left with questions." "I know that. But I think something like it is probably close to the true explanation." "Until we know the true explanation," he said dryly, "I can't answer that. But assuming it is the right or nearly right answer, think of the work involved for the project staff. Hypnotizing us and concealing the fact with various forms of post-hypnotic suggestion would have been the easiest part of the job. The rest would have had to consist of subjecting us to the right sensory impressions -- and fine psycho-surgical work of a type that needs a lot of time. I don't know when all that could have happened. But my strongest objection to your theory is based on the quality and detail of the dreams themselves and the apparent duration of the dream sequences. I say apparent because I know how time can be telescoped during conditioning, but those dreams went on for years. Still, assuming your idea to be correct in every detail," Devlin ended, "how does it help us?" "I'm not sure," she replied. "But wouldn't it be possible to search our memories of the training period for time gaps and try to use our improved memories to break those post-hypnotic commands? Alternatively, isn't it possible that if we go over some of those dream sequences again -- the humdrum episodes as well as the more dramatic bits -- we might be able to spot the joins or see some evidence artificiality or error in the dreams?" Devlin sat up suddenly and swung his legs off the couch. He said, "I see what you're driving at. You're suggesting that if we can demonstrate that the dreams have been imposed from without we can communicate this fact to the otliers and perhaps convince them that it is possible to negate the worst effects." "That's it," she agreed. "Even when I dreamed of being a crustacean or a wolverine I was still aware of being myself. Maybe we can do or suggest something to strengthen that awareness." Devlin nodded. "It might not be as simple as you make it sound," he said, "but where do you want to start? With the dreams or actual memories?" "With memories," she said firmly. "I'm very reluctant to go back to some of those dreams -- and we just might find what we're looking for in the real past. I realize that the actual conditioning sessions would not show because we have been ordered to forget them, but we must have undergone some prior mental preparation. Brother Howard might have let something slip during those early meetings -- in the park, at the project building or in the rec hall. If hypnoconditioning was being used, he must have known about it." Devlin said, "I don't think he let anything slip in the park or during his first visit to the block. I went over that day as a memory exercise during an earlier warm-up. It was a pleasant and important day for me -- except for the riot on the way home -- and I remembered it in considerable detail -- " "Funny -- I picked the same day to remember." "We'll go into the deep dark, psychological significance of that later -- " Devlin smiled"because if we did it now we probably could not remain objective about ourselves." "Later that evening," Patricia said, "Brother Howard was very objective about us. Objectionable, even." "My cooldown warning came before I was able to remember into the evening," Devlin said, "and that was the time when the Brother spoke very freely. I'd like to go over that memory again, starting with the time when your father left us..." small man who did not try to compensate for this fact by making a lot of noise. That night he wore an empty belt signifying that, although he was technically safe within and among the residents of his block, he was not entirely surrounded by his own family circle. When Brother Howard and Devlin found his table and were introduced by Patricia, her father, for all his mildness and friendliness, looked quietly furious. She explained the presence of the Brother and doctor by saying that her self-inflicted wound had caused them to be concerned about her mental as well as her physical health and that the two men wanted to help her. Citizen Morley, as he handed her formally into their charge, said that he could not really blame his daughter for doing as she had done, but it was obvious to Devlin that if Morley ever did find someone to blame that person's life-expectancy would be drastically shortened. For their first few minutes alone at the table Patricia, Devlin and Howard had privacy of a sort. The Brother's profession was obvious from his dress and Devlin's from the ornate dress earring he wore on semi-social occasions. But a crowd of hfgh-spirited but essentially good youngsters -- that was how the block sociologist described them -- seemed intent on harrassing the two halfsheep. None of them were old enough to be citizens, which meant that theoretically anyone living in the block who had reached maturity had the right to chastise them. In actual fact, however, no one who was not a full citizen with a large number of citizen relatives could do so if he or she expected to go on living, much less working, in the block. And in any case it would have been senseless to try chastising a group that outnumbered the trio five to one. Devlin suggested adjournment to the roof. The high-spirited but "essentially good" youngsters were not allowed on the roof lest they render it as uninhabitable for ordinary people as the Maxers made the city parks at night. But Brother Howard and Devlin were adults and responsible, theoretically, even though they were not citizens. And the fact that Citizen Morley had placed himself on duty with the roof security party, which searched them for weapons, saved a lot of red tape. A cold wind was blowing from the sea, dissipating the air wastes inland and carrying away the sounds of desultory gunfire from the business districts. The three found a radiant plate, which at once provided shelter from the wind and gave a good view of the city through the anti-suicide netting while its warmtli bathed their backs. Occasionally a security man came along to check on the plate's functioning -- the plates were not there for the convenience of blockdwellers on cold nights, but as infrared dazzlers against high-spirited but essentially good types in other blocks who wanted to shoot at roof security men with heat-sighted or heatseeking weapons. Brother Howard's conversation that night, while interesting, was not very informative regarding the project. Without becoming openly insistent about it he was steadfastly refusing to change the subject -- and the subject was Patricia. Without ever telling her why he wanted to know, the Brother found out a great deal about her -- and Devlin knew enough to become finally aware that she was being subjected to one of the most expert verbal probings he had ever witnessed. After more than two hours of it there was an interruption -- a sharp detonation and ground-level flash from a few miles away -- which stopped the interrogation long enough for Devlin to ask a question. "Now that you know everything there is to know about Patricia," he said, "I expect it will be my turn. Then, presumably, you will finally decide whether or not we are suitable candidates for training?" The light was too weak to enable Devlin to read Howard's expression accurately, but the other sounded impatient as he replied, "I decided that you. Doctor, were suitable a few hours after meeting you for the first time. Deciding about Miss Morley is a longer and more difficult job, because no man can get inside a woman's mind and fully understand what is going on there. But don't worry, either of you -- you will be on the ship. The process you are shortly to undergo is not really training as much as a transfer of necessary information, an adult education exercise -- " He broke off, then said worriedly, "I'm not sure of my bearings from this block. Doctor. Was that explosion close to the project building?" "No, nowhere near it -- " A second and larger explosion occurred in the same area as Devlin spoke. Armored fire and ambulance units were jumping toward the trouble spot, their positions signaled by flashing blue lights and the strident donkey-call of their sirens. As they converged on the blaze set off by the explosions, heavy gunfire and a few armorpiercing rockets hammered at them from the surrounding darkness. The ambulance and fire-fighting units grounded themselves to protect their vulnerable undersides, unable to deploy their equipment. Then the lights and sirens of the city security heavies, a great many of them, came bounding to their support. It was rapidly becoming impossible to hold a conversation, even at a distance, without shouting. Citizen Morley appeared out of the darkness. "This looks like a bad one," he said, speaking slowly and clearly. "The timing and tactics indicate cooperation between a large number of protesting factions and the incident, together with the city security reaction to it, is sure to involve a lot of uncommitted local residents. That will mean confusion and wild shooting. You will be safer in your room, Patricia -- and I suggest that you gentlemen will also be more comfortable below." He could have sent them from the roof with a few short, sharp words, Devlin thought, but Patricia's father was a citizen in the true sense of the word -- firm, decisive, responsible and considerate. As he turned to go below Devlin's last view of the incident -- the most serious of that week -- was of a writhing, red and many-petaled flower growing rapidly in a bed of flickering blue stars. The sight had a terrible and all too familiar beauty... T he control center bulkheads took on substance behind the fading mind picture and Devlin said, "The initial explosion and his worry about the project building may have put the Brother off guard for a moment. Perhaps he did not mean to say what he did about training and education. I asked him about it later. If you give me a few minutes I'll recall the conversation for you." She shook her head and said, "I'm hungry." "So am I." "I'm more immediately worried about the others on board this ship," she went on. "I think we've exhausted the subject of Brother Howard. Do we eat and sleep again or do we try to check cold dreams, as we planned?" Devlin sighed. "All right -- we'll check the dreams for faulty workmanship for a while. Then I'll go back to Brother Howard talking on my surgery couch. But I suggest you begin with a pleasant episode." Patricia shook her head again. "We're not trying to protect them against pleasant dreams." Devlin said angrily, "You can do just as you please, of course." He lay back in his couch and stared straight ahead. He was beginning to realize that a girl strong-willed enough to disfigure herself for wholly unselfish reasons could, at times, have headstrong mannerisms that were not entirely charming. Very carefully he sent his memory probing. His biggest problem was his own ignorance. He did not know enough about the subject to pinpoint a possible technical error in the sensory impressions or environment of the trilobite or the giant saurian of his dreams, or tell if the weapons and armor given to the young king by Hawn were correct for that historical period. Some of the vegetation, coloration of fur and skin, methods of making and fastening clothing surprised him in retrospect, but were not necessarily incorrect. Timidly Devlin began to move into the actively unpleasant areas, even though he found it impossible to remember the finer details of environment and sensation through the floods of remembered pain. He had the feeling that these dream portions were crude and melodramatic. If they were in fact psychological constructs the people who might have implanted them might also have been a little careless. He had small knowledge of the physiology or nervous systems of the majority of the creatures he had dreamed himself to be -- with one exception. The king had been a man, a human being, and Devlin knew humans as only a trained medic could know them. Very carefully he recalled the assassination, how the knife had felt going in, how it had felt inside the wound and how he had felt, going rapidly into shock from the loss of blood. Devlin went over the incident again and again. He could detect no technical or physiological errors. Suddenly he sat up. "Something's wrong," he said harshly. "Have you been going over the painful stuff, too?" She nodded. "A very unpleasant death in childbirth in a smelly cave with-" "You don't seem unduly bothered." "No," she said. "It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the first time I remembered it. Why is that?" Devlin was silent for a moment while he explained it to himself before he began giving her the answer. It was simply that Patricia and he had done something neither the Caldwell girl or Purdy had donethey had slept normally. The situation was analogous to the painful post-operative period following major surgery. The patient remembered the experience for the rest of his or her life -- but the first good, sound sleep filtered out much of the memory of the associated suffering. IT'S as simple as that," Patricia said when he had explained. "When we were warmed and awakened from cold-sleep the memories were like a raw nerve. But after we slept naturally they became normal memories, unpleasant but not actually painful." She laughed suddenly. "The others wUl be relieved when we tell that all they have to do when they are awakened is to go back to sleep." Devlin did not smile. He was still worried at the prospect of another interminable session of cold dreaming. He said, "We probably do have the answer to the cold dream suicide problem, even though we still don't know the cause andor reasons for the dreams. But we can go on working on that problem while we are waiting to be cooled. Right now we should tape instructions to the others," he went on firmly, "and I see no reason for our eating while we are doing that. Unless you have a strong objection, I suggest that we go cold as quickly as possible." "Yes," she said, "before our feet get a chance to go cold before we do." The message they composed was as simple as possible to avoid confusing people who would be freshly awakened and very frightened. They agreed that that message should do it, until Patricia became worried that the constant use of the manual overrides might worry the computer into waking the crew to check for possible physiological malfunctions in people who insisted on sleeping in their caskets instead of being out of them, exercising. It was a valid cause for worry, so they spent an additional few minutes modifying the computer instructions to cover this possiblity. Then they spent several minutes more in very close contact without, however, recalling unpleasant dream memories. As they were returning to their caskets Patricia said sadly, "Poor Purdy. If only he hadn't managed to die in his sleep." H e had two hours before cooldown -- more than enough time, Devlin thought, to recall the details of a conversation that could only have lasted for half of that period. Brother Howard had been tired, irritable and argumentative. Using hindsight, Devlin thought he might find that the Brother had also been less than careful about concealing his true intentions. At the time Devlin had not known enough to ask the right questions... "I don't quite understand your acceptance standards, Brother," Devlin said. "You keep insisting that the colonists are nothing special. In fact. you seem to suggest that their mediocrity is a virtue. Surely you must be looking for some special qualification?" For a few seconds Devlin thought that the Brother was not going to answer. He lay on the examination couch, fully dressed except for his shoes and high, tight collar. But then he stretched, sighed and said, "These days mediocrity is a special qualification." "If it were as simple as that," said Devlin, irritated, "all you would need of us would be our names, ages and respective genders before putting us into cold storage until it was time to go. I need a serious answer to a serious question." "And I gave you a serious answer," the Brother replied. "But what you really need, perhaps, is to know if you are just a little bit above normal, or someone who is a shade more average than the others. Well, the trip requires two people aboard to observe, make a few simple decisions and -- very occasionally if at all -- to perform simple actions. For this reason," he added sardonically, "we have chosen carefully from our average travelers two who will act as the ship's crew." "But why the average people?" Devlin burst out. "What is it that you're afraid of? Surely, for the success of the project, you need an above-average crew, at least? Even in these degenerate days there must be a few stable, highly intelligent and dedicated supermen -- " "Like me?" "If this is something I shouldn't know about say so," said Devlin angrily. "Don't bother to make jokes." The couch sighed as Brother Howard raised himself to his elbows. He said, "I am too tired and there is too little time left for me to waste it in making jokes. You would like to know why we seem so abnormally interested in normal people. Well, I must admit that there are a few pieces of information that must be concealed from you -- for the present, that is -- but this is not one of them. But before I try to answer I want you to think about the society we are currently living in and all too frequently dying in. Where would you go to find a superman under these conditions? This is assuming that supermen ever existed in the first place -- not just overtrained, hyperconditioned and forcegrown human beings. Then ask yourself where do we, the human race, go from here?" This, thought Devlin impatiently, is the sort of question I have debated many, many times. Mostly he had argued on the side of the optimists, insisting that the combination of the arts and sciences -- sensitivity joined with high technology -- were bringing Earth's culture to the brink of a new apd even greater Renaissance. The suffering of a comparative few individuals and the excesses of others were only to be ejpected, just as the first Renaissance had been marred by its plagues and famines and unbalanced distribution of wealth. H e developed the argument for the Brother, insisting that in spite of the fact that so many of the individuM and group activities were destructive, there had never in aU of recorded history been so much freedom of expression, so much medical care, so much food and associated comforts available to the population as a whole. Construction of mass accommodation buildings, road systems and recreational areas -- especially in cities with strong and psychologically well-trained security forces -- was slowly but surely, he had thought, pulling ahead of the protest groups that were bent only on wrecking civilization for reasons they themselves could not adequately explain. And there had always been danger to the individual in a growing vital culture -- carnivourous beasts prowling around the village at night, robbers and assassins infesting the highways and cities and now protesters and Maxers and security forces... "You're an oppy, then," Brother Howard broke in. "You like it here?" DevUn shook his head. "You know I don't. But I want to be optimistic, mostly because I don't want to agree with the doomsters. When I think senseless destruction of everything that has been or is being built, chaos and ultimate doom is all that I can honestly foresee. Yet the people who realize that we are headed for trouble -- and who try to rise to the top where they can do something about it -- are usually too old to survive the affairs needed to get there. And the ones who do get to the top without fighting are the ones who do what the people at the bottom want them to -- which is nothing, because the people at the bottom don't know what they want. "Even so there must be a few who reach the top without losing their ideals, their sensitivity, their feeling of responsibility for the long-term welfare of the people below them," Devlin went on. "These are the kind of people you should send to the stars. I know that I seem to be arguing myself out of a berth on the ship -- and I don't want to do that -- but I don't think that I'm really fitted for this job. I don't know who is fitted or even -- " "Nobody is really fitted for this job," said the Brother dryly, "because it is a brand new one. But you could be right. There are probably a few altruists and far-seeing types around, but they are much rarer than you realize. The majority of the people from the middle levels to the top, even within the starship project, are motivated by intelligent -- sometimes highly intelligent-self-interest. They do very valuable and necessary work, all of them, and very often display compassion and other noble qualities. But when you probe deeply enough you find that they want power over people, even if it is the power to do only good. That, naturally, is an absolute bar as far as I am concerned," "But why?" asked Devlin. "Surely we need leaders where we're going? And what about you. Brother? Why aren't yow a suitable candidate?" "Because," said the Brother, "my self-interest, intelligent or otherwise, impels me to stay at home and exert pressure." He smiled wryly, held up one hand and pressed the index finger and thumb together until both nails were rimmed with white, then added: "You could say that I want to give someone, somewhere, the pip." Devhn shut his mouth firmly so as not to express his anger verbally, but he could not clamp down on the expression on his face, "Before you accuse me of joking again," the Brother went on, "or you run to a citizen neighbor to borrow his belt, let me tell you that I am giving you the sober truth even if it is, at times, couched in non-serious language. I am a completely unsuitable candidate. Before I became a Brother I was the kind of person you think is needed for this projecthighly trained, highly intelligent, emotionally stable and possessing all of the qualities you seem to think are desirable for the job. But then I had a revelation -- a quasi-religious experience, you might say -- that made me a fanatic. As such I had time and energy for only one form of activity-" Once again he held up his tightly pressed thumb and index finger. triple shock made the surgery walls creak. The emergency PA began calling for all block security personnel, regardless of status, to evacuate tlie roof in preparation for a landing by city security forces. Obviously the protest was turning into a big one with -- judging by the shocks to the block's structurelimited mass-destruction weapons being brought into use. This was only the third time in a year that such a thing had happened in the city, but it could mean serious damage and perhaps destruction of the block's shelters and protector forces and cause a large number of bystander casualties. Devlin sighed and tried not to think about it while he was waiting for the Brother to start making sense. "My view of the future is both oppy and doomster," the Brother went on, raising his voice above tlie sound of the PA. "Earth's present high level of science and culture and the vast majority -- if not all -- of the people who live on it will be gone within a century. And it could all fall apart within the next decade. To me -- and remember that you had the same idea -- Earth is like a large, overripe but not quite rotten fruit. "I arrived at this idea before my, well, revelation, when I was still a sane and well-integrated superman," he went on without smiling. "The analogy is a reasonably good one. Initially the fruit is small and bitter and not at all pleasant. There is no subtlety of feeling in sucli a society, no freedom, little happiness for even the very few who grasp power because of the violence that brings them down. But later the fruit begins to grow and ripen. Order is imposed on the earlier chaos. Laws and community cooperation replace continual war and give much more individual freedom, which in turn sends minds questing inward toward philosophy and outward into science. The fruit continues to ripen, becomes mature. No longer is anyone forced to labor mindlessly for two-thirds of his or her waking life. There is time to develop new and subtle tastes and forms of pleasant or painful activity. Everyone feels free to indulge in any pursuit he or she fancies, and to go to hell if that is what an individual wants to do. Many people unfortunately feel free to take the others to heU with them. So the fruit becomes overripe and the next stage is dissolution and decay." "So endeth the parable." said Devhn patiently. "So beginneth the parable." the Brother replied firmly, "because here the analogy breaks down. Our growing ripening fruit is not free to expand indefinitely, you see. It is growing within a thick, strong skin which produces compression effects. Population pressure, diminishing agricultural society? Or should we send hardy, thrusting, aggressive seeds which will survive, spread rapidly and perhaps choke themselves to death as we are doing now -- or be destroyed by someone because they have become an obnoxious form of weed? Many times we have asked ourselves these questions, trying to find a seedling whose composition best represented our race. "The more deeply we went into the questions the more frightened we became of making a mistake," he went on, rubbing the back of his hand across a suddenly sweating forehead. "In the end we succumbed to moral cowardice and decided, if you could call it a decision, to select for mediocrity... It can't be my imagination. What is happening to your cooling system?" "Probably the security force on the roof are drawing power from this area for their equipment," Devlin replied, "The place won't become unUvable, but you'll feel more comfortable without your blouse -- that is, if your beliefs allow you to -- " "Thank you, no problem," said the Brother. While he was unfastening his black garment he went on: "So you will find no citizens or ex-citizens traveling in the ship. There is nothing at aU special about the colonists, other than they are only moderately good, moderately intelligent, neither too idealistic nor too cynical, not too lazy or too energetic. They are -- well, average. "You see, when we really began to look into the situation we found that the ordinary non-aggresave, nonviolent, moderate and average people have always been with us and have always been in the majority. They have always been there -- a great, inert mass of humanity who refused to make anything but the smallest change in their thinking and lifestyles when our flashy supermen and world conquerors tried to change, for good or bad, their world. Throughout history they have been like a great mass of sheep, slowly evolving -- sometimes because of, sometimes in spite of, the scientific and cultural predators in their midst. They have grown slowly but they have survived as a type even to the present day -- " He broke off as he pulled the blouse over his head, folded it carefully and placed it on the floor. " -- and that is why," he added, "the meek wiU inherit the new Earth." Devlin tried hard not to stare at the upper torso the Brother had revealed. The other was in his middle or late fifties, but the muscle tone was stiU good. However, the onset of the degenerative processes had caused the scars, which had been left by the removal of a large number of surgically implanted bio-sensors, to show clearly. Devlin had seen pictures of such scarring in the textbooks but until now had never met, or ever expected to meet, such a case. He had not believed that stellar astronauts really existed. "If supermen are excluded." he said, clearing his throat and trying not to stare at the ghostly scars, "surely the ordinary people must be given training to prepare them for -- I mean, we could meet anything out there." "What training could we possibly give to an average, normal individual," Brother Howard replied, "that would prepare him to meet the completely unimaginable. No, training as you understand the term is out. It might cause our carefully selected average people to warp or break -- and we can't risk that. No, Doctor, the process does not involve training, but education..." sound of the Brother began to dissolve as a change in the lighting beyond Devlin's closed eyelids brought him back to present time. He opened his eyes to look at the cubicle display. The fear of what the next frigid sleep might bring came rushing back to him as he realized that the cold explosion was only seconds away. But there was still a large portion of his mind that remembered only the feeling of awe at having made contact with a stellar astronaut who, it had been rumored, had been among the first to test hibernation anaesthesia in space conditions -- and the Brother's enigmatic closing remark before he, too, had wished Devlin good night. "...before you can understand the people you may meet you must first fully understand yourself." Directly north of the North Pole lies a world of understanding... T he most important event in the life of Oliver Murex was his finding of a seashell when he was four years old. It was a bright and shining shell that the dull little boy found. It was bigger than his own head (and little Oliver had an unusually large head), and had two eyes peering out of its mantle cavity that were brighter and more intelligentseeming than Oliver's own. Both Oliver and the shell had these deep, black, shiny eyes that were either mockingly lively or completely dead -- with such shiny, black things it was hard to say which. That big shell was surely the brightest thing on that sunny morning beach and no one could have missed it. But George, Hector, August, Mary, Catherine and Helen had all of them missed it and they were older and sharper-eyed than was Oliver. They had been looking for bright shells, going in a close skirmish line over that sand and little Oliver had been trailing them with absent mind and absent eyes. "Why do you pick up all the dumb little ones and leave the good big one?" he yiped from their rear. They turned and saw the shell and they were stunned. It actually was stunning in appearance -- why hadn't they seen it? (It had first to be seen by one in total sympathy with it. Then it could be seen by any superior person.) "I wouldn't have seen it either if it hadn't whistled at me," Oliver said. "It's a Hebrew Volute," George cried out, "and they're not even found in this part of the world." "It isn't. It's a Music Volute," Mary contradicted. "I think that it's a Neptune Volute," Hector hazarded. "I wish I could say that it's a Helen Volute," Helen said, "but it isn't. It's not a Volute at all. It's a Cone, an Alphabet Cone." Now these were the shelliest kids along the seashore that summer and they should all have known a Volute from a Cone, all except little OUver. How could there be such wide differences among them? "Helen is right about its being a Cone," August said. "But it isn't an Alphabet Cone. It's a Barthelemy Cone, a big one." "It's a Prince Cone," Catherine said simply. But they were aU wrong. It was a deadly Geography Cone, even though it was three times too big to be one. How could such sharp-eyed children not recognize such an almost legendary prize?  him aU the years of his growing up. He listened often to the distant sounding in it, as people have always listened to seashells. No cone, however, is a real ocean-roarer of a shell. They haven't the far crash; they haven't the boom. They just are not shaped for it, not like a Conch, not like a Vase Shell, not like a Scallop, not even like the common Cowries or Clam Shells or Helmet Shells. Cones make rather intermittent, sharp sounds, not really distant. They tick rather than roar. "Other shells roar their messages from way off," Helen said once. "Cones telegraph theirs." And the cUcking, ticking of Cones does sound somewhat like the chatter of a telegraph. Some small boys have toy pandas or bears. But OUver Murex had this big seashell for his friend and toy and security. He slept with it -- he carried it with him always. He depended on it. If he was asked a question he would first hold the big cone shell to his ear and listen -- then he would answer the question intelligently. But if for any reason he did not have his shell near at hand he seemed incapable of an intelligent answer on any subject. There would sometimes be a splatter of small blotches or dusty motes on the floor or table near the shell. "Oh, let me clean those whateverthey-ares away," mother Murex said once when she was nozzling around with the cleaner. "No, no -- leave them alone -- they'll go back in," Oliver protested. "They just came out to get a little s.unlight." And the httle blotches, dust motes, fuzz, stains, whatever retreated into the shell of the big cone. "Why, tliey're ahve!" the mother exclaimed. "Isn't everybody?" Oliver asked. "It is an Alphabet Cone just as I always said it was," Helen declared. "And those little skittering things are the letters of the different alphabets that fall off the outside of the shell. The cone has to swallow them again each time, and when it has digested them they will come through to the outside again where they can be seen in their patterns." Helen still believed this was an Alphabet Cone. It wasn't. It was a deadly Geography Cone. Tlie little blotches that seemed to fall off it or to come out of it and run around -- and that then had to be swallowed again -- may have been little continents or seas coming from the Geography Cone; they may have been quite a number of different things. But if they were alphabets (well, they were those, among other things), then they were more highly complex alphabets than Helen suspected. It isn't necessary that all children in a family be smart. Six smart ones out of seven isn't bad. Tlie family could afford big-headed, queer-eyed Oliver, even if he seemed a bit retarded. He could get by most of the time. If he had his shell with him, he could get by all the time. One year in grade school, though, they forbade him the company of his shell. And he failed every course abysmally . "I see Oliver's problem as a lack of intelligence," his teacher told father Murex. "And lack of intelligence is usually found in the mind." "I didn't expect it to be found in his feet," Oliver's father said. But he did get a psychologist in to go over his slow son from head to foot. "He's a bit different from a schizo," the psychologist said when he had finished the examination. "What he has is two concentric personahties. We call them the core personality and the mantle personality -- and there is a separation between them. The mantle or outer personahty is dull in Oliver's case. The core personahty is bright enough, but it is able to contact the outer world only by means of some separate object. I believe that the unconscious of Oliver is now located in this object and liis inteUigence is tied to it. That seasheU there, now, is quite well balanced mentally. It's too bad that it isn't a boy. Do you have any idea what object it is that Oliver is so attached to?" "It's that seashell there. He's had it quite a while. Should I get rid of it?" "That's up to you. Many fathers would say yes in such case; almost as many would say no. If you get rid of the sheU the boy will die. But then the problem wih be solved -- you'll no longer have a problem child." Mr. Murex sighed, and he thought about it. He had decisions to make all day long and he disliked having to make them in the evening, too. "I guess the answer is no," he finally said. "I'll keep the seashell and rU also keep the boy. They're both good conversation pieces. Nobody else has anything that looks like either of them." Really they had come to look alike, Oliver and his shell, both bigheaded and bug-eyed and both of them had a quiet and listening air about them. Oliver did quite well in school after they let him have the big seashell with him in class again... house one evening. This man was by hobby a conchologist or student of seashells. He talked about shells. He set out some little shells that he had carried wrapped in his pocket and explained them. Then he noticed Oliver's big seashell and he almost ruptured a posterior adductor muscle. "It's a Geography Cone!" he shrieked. "A giant one! And it's aHve!" "I think it's an Alphabet Cone," Helen said. "i think it's a Prince Cone," Catherine said. "No, no, it's a Geography Cone and it's alive!" "Oh, I've suspected for a long time that it was alive," Papa Murex said. "But don't you understand? It's a giant specimen of the deadly Geography Cone." "Yes, I think so. Nobody else has one," father Murex said. "What do you keep it in?" the conchologist chattered. "What do you feed it?" "Oh, it has total freedom here, but it doesn't move around very much. We don't feed it anything at all. It belongs to my son Oliver. He puts it to his ear and listens to it often." "Great galloping gastropods, man! It's likely to take an ear clear off the boy." "It never has." ' But it's deadly poisonous. People have died of its sting." "I don't believe any one of our family ever has. I'U ask my wife. Oh, no, I needn't. I'm sure none of my family has ever died of its sting. I just remembered that none of them has ever died at all." The man with the hobby of conchology didn't visit the Murex house very much after that. He was afraid of that big seashell. O NE day the school dentist gave a curious report of things going on in Oliver's mouth. "Little crabs are eating the boy's teeth -- little microscopic crabs," the dentist (he was a nervous man) told Mr. Murex. "I never heard of microscopic crabs," Mr. Murex said. "Have you seen them, really, or examined them at aU?" "Oh, no, I haven't seen them. How would I see them? But his teeth just look as if microscopic crabs had been eating them. Ah, I'm due for a vacation. I was going to leave next week." "Are the teeth deteriorating fast?" Mr. Murex asked the dentist. "No, that's what puzzles me," the dentist said. "They're not deteriorating. The enamel is disappearing, eaten by small crabs. I'm sure of that; but it's being replaced by something else, by some sheU-like material." "Oh, it's aU right then," Mr. Murex said. "I was going to leave on vacation next week. I'U call someone and tell them that I'm leaving right now," the dentist said. The dentist left, and he never did return to his job or to his home. It was later heard of him that he had first abandoned dentistry and then life. B ut little Oliver grew up, or anyhow he grew out. He seemed to be mostly head, and his dwarfish body was not much more than an appendage. He and the great seashell came to look more and more like each other by the day. "I swear, sometimes I can't teU which of you is Oliver," Helen Murex said one day. She was more fond of Oliver and his shell than were any of their brothers or sisters. "Which of you is?" she asked. "I am." Oliver Geography Cone grinned. I am. Oliver Murex grinned. of school and had taken his place in the family business. The Murex family was big in communications, the biggest in the world, really. Oliver had an office just off the office of his father. Not much was expected of him. He seemed stiU to be a dull boy, but very often he gave almost instant answers to questions that no one else could answer in less than a week or more. Well, it was either Oliver or his shell who gave the almost instant answers. They had come to resemble each other in voice almost as much as in appearance and the father really didn't care which of them answered -- as long as the answers were quick and correct. And they were both. "OHver has a girl friend," Helen teased one day. "She says she's going to marry him." "However would he get a girl friend?" brother Hector asked, puzzled. "Yes. How is it possible?" Mr. Murex wanted to know. "After all, we are very rich," Helen reminded them. "Oh, I didn't know that the younger generation had any interest in money," Mr. Murex said. "And, after all, she is Brenda Frances," Helen said. "Oh, yes -- I've noticed that she does have an interest in money," Mr. Murex said. "Odd that such a recessive trait sliould crop out in a young lady of today." Brenda Frances worked for the Murex firm. B renda Frances wanted round-headed OUver for the money that might attach to him, but she didn't want a lot of gaff that seemed also to attach to the young fellow. But now Oliver became really awake for the first time in his life, stimulated by Brenda Frances' apparent interest. He even waxed a little bit arty and poetic when he talked to her, mostly about his big seashell. "Do you know that he wasn't native to the sea or shore where we found him," Oliver said. "He tells me that he comes from the very far north, from the Sea of Moyle." "Damn that bug-eyed seashell!" Brenda Frances complained. "He almost looks ahve. I don't mind being leered at by men, but I dislike being leered at by a seashell. I don't believe that there is any such thing as the Sea of Moyle. I never heard of it. There isn't any sea in the very far north except the Arctic Ocean." "Oh, but he says that this is very very far north," Oliver said with his ear to the shell When you two put your heads together like that I don 't know whose ear is listening to whose shell, Helen had said once), "very, very far north -- and perhaps very again. It's far, far beyond the Arctic Ocean." "You can't get any farther north than the Arctic," Brenda Frances insisted. "It's as far north as there is any north." "No. He says that the Sea of Moyle is much farther," Oliver repeated the whispers and tickings of the shell. "I think probably the Sea of Moyle is clear off-world." "Oh great glabrous Glabula!" Brenda Frances swore. Things weren't going well here. There was so much nonsense about Oliver as nearly to nullify die pleasant prospect of money. "Did you know that he has attendants?" Oliver asked. "Very small attendants." "Uke fleas?" "Like crabs. They really are crabs, almost invisible, almost microscopic fiddler crabs. They are named Gelasimus Notarii or Annotating Crabs -- I don't know why. They Uve in his mouth and stomach most of the time, but they come out when they're off duty. They do a lot of work for him. They do aU his paper work and they are very handy. I've been practicing with them for a long time, too, but I haven't learned to employ them at aU well yet." "Oh great whelping whelks!" Brenda Frances sputtered. "Did you know that the old Greeks shipped wine in cone shells?" Oliver asked. "They did it because cone shells are so much bigger on the inside than on the outside. They by Colin Wilson. An exciting, documented account, by the celebrated author of The Outsider, of magic through the centuries. "Wilson is a superb historian of the realm of magic, witchcraft, mediums and seers." -- Chcago Tribune # Science Fact: Science Fiction, edited by Total Effect. This unique anthology juxtaposes first-rate sf stories and factual science articles, to suggest new ways of looking at such subjects as evolution, communications, satellites, ecosystems, and timespace travel. # a division of Random House would put half a dozen cone shells into an amphora of wine to temper them for it. Tlien they would take them out and pour one, two, or tliree amphoras of w'ine into each cone shell. The cones have so many internal passages that there is no limit to their capacity. Tlie Greeks would load ships with the wine-filled cones and ship them all over the world. By using cones, they could ship three times as much wine as otherwise in the same ship." "Wino seashells, that's what we really need," Brenda Frances mumbled insincerely. "I'll ask him," Oliver said. Tliey put their two heads together, Oliver and the cone shell. "He says that cones hardly ever become winos," Oliver announced then. "He says that they can take it or leave it alone." "After we are married you will have to stop this silly talk," Brenda Frances said. "Where do you get it anyhow?" "From Shell. I'll tell you something else. The Greek friezes and low reUefs that some students of shells study -- they are natural and not carved. And they aren't really Greek tilings. They're pictures of some offworld things that look kind of Greek. They're not even pictures of people. They're pictures of some kind of seaweed from the Sea of Moyle that looks like Earth people. I hope that clears up that mystery." "Oliver, I have plans for us," Brenda Frances said firmly, "and the plans seem very hard to put across to you in words. I have always believed that a half-hour's intimacy is worth more than forever's talk. Come along now. We're alone except for old sea-slob there." "I'd better ask my mother first," Ohver said. "It seems that there is some question about this intimacy bit, a question that they all believed would never arise in my case. I'd better ask her." "Your mother is visiting her sister at Peach Beach," Brenda Frances said. "Your father is fishing at Cat Island. George and Hector and August are all off on sales trips. Mary and Catherine and Helen are all making pohtical appearances somewhere. This is the first time they've all been out of town at once. I came to you so you wouldn't be lonesome." "I'm never lonesome with Shell. You think the intimacy thing will be all right, then?" "I sure do doubt it, but it's worth a try," Brenda Frances said. "For me, you're the likeliest jackpot in town. Where else would I find such a soft head with so much money attached?" "We read a seduction scene in a book once," Oliver said. "It was kind of funny and kind of fun." "Who's we?" "Shell and myself." "After we're married, we're sure going to change that 'we' stuff," Brenda Frances said. "But how does Shell read?" "With his eyes like everyone else. And the annotating crabs correlate the reading for him. He says that seduction scenes are more fun where he comes from. All the seductors gather at the first high tide after the big moon is full. The fellows are on one side of the tidal basin -- and then their leader whistles and they put their milt in the tidewater. And the she seashells (Earth usage -- they don't call themselves that there), who are on the other side of the tidal basin, put their roe into the water. Then the she seashell leader whistles an answer and that is the seduction. It's better when both moons are still in the sky. At the Sea of Moyle they have two moons." "Come along, Oliver," Brenda Frances said, "and you can whistle if you want to, but that sea wash talk has got to stop." She took bigheaded, short-legged Oliver under her arm and went with him to the chamber she had selected as the seduction room. And Shell followed along. "How does it walk without any legs?" Brenda Frances asked. "He doesn't walk. He just moves. I'm getting so I can move that way too." "It's not going to get into bed with us, Oliver?" "Yes, but he says he'U just watch the first time. You don't send him at all." "Oh, all right. But I tell you, there's going to be some changes around here after we're married." She turned out the lights when she was ready. But they hadn't been in the dark for five seconds when Brenda Frances began to complain. "Why is the bed so slimy aU at once?" "Shell likes it that way. It reminds him more of the ocean." "Ouch! Great crawling crawdads -- something is biting me! Are they bugs?" "No, no -- they're the little crabs," Oliver told her. "But Shell says that they only bite people they don't like." "Wow, let me sweep them out of this bed." "You can't. They're almost too little to see and they hang on. Besides, they have to be here." "Why?" "They're annotating crabs. They take notes." Brenda Frances left the bed and the house in a baffled fury. "Best jackpot in town, hell!" she said. "There are other towns. Somewhere there's another half-brained patsy in a monied family -- one that won't bring the whole damned ocean to bed with him." It was later learned that Brenda Frances left town in the same fury. "That was an even less satisfying seduction scene than in that book," Shell and his crabby minions conveyed. "We do these things so much better on the Sea of Moyle." So Oliver preserved his virtue. After aU, he was meant for other things. L other great and rich family in the communications field came to call on Mr. Murex at his home. "We weren't expecting your arrival in quite such manner," Mr. Murex said. He had no idea of how the other had arrived -- he simply was there. "Oh, I didn't want to wait for a vehicle. They're too slow. I conveyed myself," the visitor said. They met as tycoon to tycoon. Mr. Murex was very anxious that he and his family should make a good impression on their distinguished visitor. He even thought about concealing Oliver, but that would have been a mistake. "That is a fine specimen," the visiting person said. "Fine. He could almost be from back home." "He is my son Oliver," said Mr. Murex, quite pleased. "And his friend there," the visitor continued, "I swear that he is from back home." "There's a misunderstanding," Mr. Murex said. "The other one there is a seashell." "What is a seashell?" the visitor asked. "Are Earth seas hatched out of shells? How odd. But you are mistaken, person Murex. That is a specimen from back home. Do you have the papers on him?" "I don't know of any papers. What would such papers indicate?" "Oh, that you have given fair exchange for the specimen. We wouldn't want an interworld conflict over such a small matter, would we?" "If you will let me know what this 'fair exchange' is -- " Mr. Murex tried to comply. "Oh, I'll let you know at the time of my leaving," the visiting tycoon said. "We'll settle on sometliing." This person was very much up on communications. He engaged Mr. Murex and George, Mary, Hector, Catherine, August, Helen, yes and Ohver, all in simultaneous conversations on the subject. And he made simultaneous deals so rapid-fire as to astound aU of them. He controlled even more patents than did the Murex family, some of them overlapping. The two tycoons were making non-conflict territory agreements and the visitor was outshuffling the whole Murex clan by a little bit in these complex arrangements. "Oh, just let me clean them off there!" Mrs. Murex said once where she saw a splatter of small blotches and dust motes on the table that served both for conference and dinner table -- the splatter of little things was mostly about the visitor. "No, no, leave them," that person said. "I enjoy their conversation. Really, they could almost be Notarii from my own world." Things began then to go well in these transactions even for the Murex family, just when they had seemed to be going poorly. The visitor was handsome in an off-worldly way. He was toothless, but his boney upper and lower beak cut through everything, through the prime steak that seemed too tough to the Murex clan, through the bones, through the plates. "Glazed, baked clay, we use it too. It spices a meal," the visitor said of the plates as he munched them. "And you have designs and colors on the pieces. We do that sometimes with cookies." "They are priceless chinaware," Mrs. Murex said in a voice that was almost a complaint. "Yes, priceless, deUcious, exquisite," the visitor said. "Now shall we finalize the contracts and agreements?" Several waiting stenographers came in with their machines. Brenda Frances was not among them -- she had left the Murex firm and left town. The stenographers began to take down the contracts and agreements on their dactyl-tactiles. "And rU just save time and translation by giving the whole business in my own language to this stenographer from my own world," the visiting tycoon said. "Ah, that isn't a stenographer there, however much it may remind you of the stenographers where you come from." Mr. Murex tried to set a matter straight again. "That is what we call a seashell." But the visiting tycoon spoke in his own language to Shell. And Shell whistled. Then whole blotches and clouds of the almost invisible annotating crabs rushed into Shell, ready to work. The visiting tycoon spoke rapidly in off-worldly language, his beak almost touching Shell. "Ah, the Geography Cone shellthat's what that thing is -- is said to be absolutely deadly' Mf. Murex tried to warn the visitor. "They only kill people they don't Uke," the visitor said and he went on with his business. The annotating crabs did the paper work well. Completed contracts and agreements began to roll out of the mantle cavity of Shell. And all the business was finished in one happy glow. "That is it," the visiting tycoon said with complete satisfaction after all the papers were mutually signed. With his beak he bit a very small ritual wedge from the cheek of his hostess, Mrs. Murex. That was a parting custom where he came from. "And now 'fair exchange' for the specimen from back home," he said. "I always find these exchanges satisfying and fruitful." He had a sack. And he put the short-legged, big-headed Oliver into that sack. "Oh, that's not fair exchange," Mr. Murex protested. "I know he looks a little unusual, but that is my son Oliver." "He's fair enough exchange," the visitor said. He didn't wait for a vehicle. They were too slow. He conveyed himself. And he and OHver were gone. had to remind them of their vanished son and brother was that big seashell, the Geography Cone. Was it really from the world of the visitor? Who knows the true geography of the Geography Cone? Sea of Moyle in the far, far north. This was not in the cold, far north. It was on a warm and sunny beach in the off-world far north. And Oliver sat there as if he belonged. There hadn't been any sudden space-change in OUver. There had been only the slow change through aU the years of his life and that was never a great alteration -- a great difference hadn't been needed in him. Oliver was bright and shining, the brightest thing on that sunny morning beach. He had his big head and his little body. He had two shiny black eyes peering out of his mantle cavity. Oliver was very much a sea shell now, a special and prized shell. (They didn't use that term there, though. Seashell? Was the Sea of Moyle hatched out of a shell?) Six sharp-eyed children of the dominant local species were going in close skirmish right over that sunny sand and a smaller seventh child trailed them with absent mind and absent eyes. The big moon had already gone down; the little moon stiU hung low in the sky hke a silver coin. And the sun was an overpowering gold. The sharp-eyed children were looking for bright shore specimens and they were finding them, too. And right ahead of them was that almost legendary prize, a rare Oliver Cone.  # East # Street New York, N Y. # # per word per issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. journal of s-f and fantasy. Featured in ##: Out and Self-Rape -- The Exploitation of Speculative Fiction By Its Writers, Its Fans and Its Apologists." Every issue: Reviews, letters, new book lists. Subscriptions: #. land, OR #. of titles listed from Rarities to Reading S. Fullerton Ave., Montclair, N.J. #. Weird Fiction Books -- Pocketbooks. Lists P.O. Box #, Kings Park, L.I., N.Y. #. Complete illustrated catalog of all "In Print" SF and Fantasy paperbacks and hardcover books. Over # titles. No #-Gl, # Penn Plaza, New York, N.Y. #I . 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You now have the option of commanding Armies and individual men of the past or striking out and commanding your own space ship complete with Sensors, Grappling Beams and what not. Catering to the players is Battle Flag, a monthly magazine featuring # free games a year. For the game designers we offer Concepts , a quarterly magazine devoted to bringing in and expanding new and old ideas for better play and realism. Thanks for your time. Send check or money order to Third Millennia , Inc., #-A Woodland Hills, Philadelphia, Miss., #. Please enter my subscription to Battle Flag for:  I Year(# issues) #  # Years(# issues) #.  Concepts I Year( quarterly) # Please send the following games:  Battle for Mars #  Flying Tigers #  Shiloh I  Battle of Britain #  Sea Lion #  Graf Spee Name ' ddress ;ity State Zip Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor James Baen, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. 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Directions: Re: Directions in the May '# issue -- this man , Dave Wise, must look upon rhinestones with shuddering disaste, wondering in his high-falutin heart of hearts how come they come to be, since nothing less than diamonds have any right to be. I am simply weary up to my cerebral cortex of pseudointellectualism as practiced by people who put on a posture of denying ordinariness, which is the state in which most of us exist. We are not moronic because our depths are seldom plumbed by eight hours a day of earning our living at desks covered with paper, at machines making other machines, at cash registers, typewriters or gas pumps, in trucks, taxis and bulldozers, and so on. The depths are there, to be called on when the occasion warrants, and most of us in this country are well enough educated to understand the truly great works of social significance, but we are not so constituted as to seek surcease from our daily treadmills in the unrelieved perusal of tales of intolerance, inhumanity, greed, revenge, irresponsibility in high places and all the other moral shortcomings of man. We know only too well that they exist. Rhinestones are very pretty on the gal who works all day, for instance, as a grocery checker. She may also enjoy reading Gordon Dickson' s Dorsai stories, Andre Norton's witch series, E. C. Tubbs' Dumerest stories, Anne McCaffrey's dragon tales, et al. She is happy with onedimensional characterizations as long as they are larger than life in nobility and determination to change a world ( or even a universe) situation for the better. She is grateful for the imagination and ability of the authors who entertain her. She knows about Dickens, Joyce and Melville, but a few pages of Dickens, Joyce or Melville are not conducive to relaxation after eight hours on her feet slinging groceries around. Intolerance and insensitivity glare at her all day; she does not want them in her dreams. Science fiction need not aspire to be a creative field in parallel significance to the works of Dostoievsky, Plato, Chekov, Mann, Dante and the aforementioned Dickens, Joyce and Melville. Science fiction is doing a tremendous service as is, and it will be beloved by more and more thousands of ordinary dailybread people, though they may not be articulate about it. Rhinestones and science fiction are a hell of a combination to make life bearable at ninety bucks a week and contact with the daily news. Sebie D. Landers Burbank, California V ,I ;or on w r.nrv-rRJ#The Largest, Most Complete Star Chart It will fascinate you. Its size? A full # V # by #Vz feet! Hang this noble map on your wall, then stand # or # yards away. 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His name was Helward Mann -- and he was the last human hope fora future! I dred and fifty miles. Beyond the door the guildsmen were assembling for the ceremony in which I would be admitted as a guild apprentice. It was a moment of excitement and apprehension, a concentration into a few minutes of all that my life had been until then. My father was a guildsman and I had always seen his life from a certain remove. I regarded it as an enthralling existence, charged with purpose, ceremony and responsibility -- he told me nothing of his life or work, but his uniform, his vague manner and his frequent absences from the city hinted at a preoccupation with matters of utmost importance. Within a few minutes the way would be open for me to join that life. It was an honor and a donning of responsibility and no boy who had grown up inside the confining walls of the creche could fail to respond to the thrill of this major step. The creche itself was a small building at the very south of the city. It was almost totally enclosed -- a warren of corridors, rooms and halls. There was no access to the rest of the city, except by way of a door that was normally locked, and the only opportunities for exercise existed in the small gymnasium and a tiny open space, bounded on all four sides by high walls. Like the other children I had been placed in the charge of the creche administrators soon after my birth and knew no other world. I had no memories of my mother -- she had left the city soon after my birth. It had been a dull but not unhappy experience. I had made some good friends and one of them -- a boy a few miles older than I called Gelman Jase -- had become an apprentice guildsman a short time before me. I was looking forward to seeing Jase again. I had seen him once since his coming of age, when he returned briefly to the creche, and already he had adopted the slightly preoccupied manner of the guildsmen and I had learned nothing from him. Now that I, too, was about to become an apprentice I felt that he would have much to tell me. The administrator returned to the anteroom where I was standing. "They're ready," he said. "Can you remember what you have to do?" "Yes." "Good luck." I discovered that I was trembling and the palms of my hands were moist. The administrator, who had brought me from the creche that morning, grinned at me in sympathy. He thought he understood the ordeal I was suffering, but he knew, literally, only half of it. After the guild ceremony more was in store for me. My father had told me that he had arranged a marriage for me. I had taken the news calmly because I knew that guildsmen were expected to marry early and I already knew the chosen girl. She was Victoria Lerouex and she and I had grown up together in the creche. I had not had much to do with her -- there were not many girls in the creche and they tended to keep together in a tight-knit group -- but we were less than strangers. Even so, the notion of being married was a new one and I had not had much time to prepare myself mentally for it. The administrator glanced up at the clock. "Okay, Helward. It's time." We shook hands briefly and he opened the door. He walked into the hall, leaving the door open. Through it I could see several of the guildsmen standing on the main floor. The ceiling lights were on. The administrator stopped just beyond the door and turned to address the platform. "My Lord Navigator. I seek audience." "Identify yourself." A distant voice. From where I was standing in the anteroom I could not see the speaker. "I am Domestic Administrator Bruch. At the command of my chief administrator I have summoned one Helward Mann, who seeks apprenticeship in a guild of the first order." "I recognize you, Bruch. You may admit the apprentice." Bruch turned and faced me and, as he had earlier rehearsed me, I stepped forward into the hall. In the center of the floor a small podium had been placed and I walked over and took up position behind it. I faced the platform. the spotlights sat an elderly man in a high-backed chair. He was wearing a black cloak decorated with a circle of white stitched on the breast. On each side of him stood three men, all wearing cloaks, but each of these was decorated with a sash of a different color. Gathered on the main floor of the hall, in front of the platform, were several other men and a few women. My father was among them. Everyone was looking at me and I felt my nervousness increase. My mind went blank and all Bruch's careful rehearsals were forgotten. In the silence that followed my entrance I stared straight ahead at the man sitting at the center of the platform. This was the first time I had even seen -- let alone been in the company of -- a Navigator. In my immediate background of the creche such men had sometimes been spoken of in a deferential way, sometimes -- by the more disrespectful -- in a derisive way, but always with undertones of awe for the almost legendary figures. That one was here at all only underlined the importance of this ceremony. My immediate thought was that what a story this would be to tell the others -- and then I remembered that from this day nothing would be the same again. Bruch had stepped forward to face me. "Are you Helward Mann, sir?" "Yes, I am." "What age have you attained, sir?" "Six hundred and fifty miles." "Are you aware of the significance of this age?" "I assume the responsibilities of an adult." "How best can you assume those responsibilities, sir?" "I wish to enter apprenticeship with a first-order guild of my choice." "Have you made that choice, sir?" "Yes, I have." Bruch turned and addressed the platform. He repeated the content of my answers to the men assembled there, though it seemed to me that they must have been able to hear my answers as I gave them. "Does anyone wish to question the apprentice?" said the Navigator to the other men on the platform. No one replied. "Very well." The Navigator stood up. "Come forward, Helward Mann, and stand where I can see you." Bruch stepped to one side. I left the podium and walked forward to where a small white plastic circle had been inlaid into the carpet. I stopped with my feet in the center of it. For several seconds I was regarded in silence. The Navigator turned to one of the men at his side. "Do we have the proposers here?" "Yes, My Lord." "Very well. As this is a guild matter we must exclude all others." The Navigator sat down and the man immediately to his right stepped forward. "Is there any man here who does not rank with the first order? If so, he will grace us with his absence." Slightly behind me, and to one side of me, I noticed Bruch make a slight bow toward the platform. Then he left the hall. He was not alone. Of the group of people on the main floor of the hall, about a half left the room by one or other of the exits. Those remaining turned to face me. # T# WE recognize strangers?" X-Jsaid the man on the platform. There was silence. "Apprentice Helward Mann, you are now in the exclusive company of first-order guildsmen. A gathering such as this is not common in the city and you should treat it with appropriate solemnity. It is in your honor. When you have passed through your apprenticeship these people will be your peers and you will be bound, just as they are, by guild rules. Is that understood?" "Yes, sir." "You have selected the guild you wish to enter. Please name it for all to hear." "I wish to become a Future Surveyor," I said. "Very well, that is acceptable. I am Future Surveyor Clausewitz and I am your chief guildsman. Standing around you are other Future Surveyors, as well as representatives from other first-order guilds. Here on the platform are the other chief guildsmen of the first order. In the center, we are honored by the presence of Lord Navigator Olsson." As Bruch had earlier rehearsed me I made a deep bow toward the Navigator. The bow was all I now remembered of his instructions -- he had told me that he knew nothing of the details of this part of the ceremony, only that I should display appropriate respect toward the Navigator when formally introduced to him. "Do we have a proposer for the apprentice?" "Sire, I wish to propose him." It was my father who spoke. "Future Surveyor Mann has proposed. Do we have a seconder?" "Sir, I will second the proposal." "Bridge-builder Lerouex has seconded. Do we hear any dissent?" There was a long silence. Twice more Clausewitz called for dissent, but no one raised any objection to me. "That is as it should be," said Clausewitz. "Helward Mann, I now offer you the oath of a first-order guild. You may -- even at this late stage -- decline to take it. If, however, you do swear to the oath you will be bound to it for the whole of the rest of your life in the city. The penalty for breaching the oath is summary execution. Is that absolutely clear in your mind?" I was stunned by this. Nothing anyone had said -- my father, Jase or even Bruch -- had warned me of it. Perhaps Bruch had not known... but surely my father would have told me? "Well?" "Do I have to decide now, sir?" "Yes." It was quite clear that I would not be allowed to know the oath before deciding. Its content was no doubt absolutely vital to the secrecy. I felt that I had very little alternative. I had come this far and already I could feel the pressures of the system about me. To proceed as far as this -- proposal and acceptance -- and then to decline the oath was impossible, or so it seemed to me at that moment. "I will take the oath, sir." Clausewitz stepped down from the platform, walked over to me and handed me a piece of white card. "Read this clearly and loudly," he told me. "You may read it through to yourself first if you wish, but if you do so you will be immediately bound by it." I nodded to show my understanding of this and he returned to the stage. The Navigator stood up. I read the oath silently, familiarizing myself with its phrases. I faced the platform, aware of the attention of the others on me, not least that of my father. "I, Helward Mann, being a responsible adult and a citizen of Earth do solemnly swear: "That as an apprentice to the guild of Future Surveyors I shall discharge whatever tasks I am given with the utmost effort; "That I shall place the security of the city of Earth above all other concerns; "That I shall discuss the affairs of my guild and other first-order guilds with no one who is not himself an accredited and sworn apprentice or a first-order guildsman; "That whatsoever I shall experience or see of the world beyond the city of Earth will be considered a matter of guild security; "That on acceptance as a full guildsman I shall apprise myself of the contents of the document known as Destaine's Directive, and that I shall make it my duty to obey its instructions, and that further I shall pass on the knowledge obtained from it to future generations of guildsmen; "That the swearing of this oath shall be considered a matter of guild security. "All this is sworn in the full knowledge that a betrayal of any one of these conditions shall lead to my summary death at the hands of my fellow guildsmen." finished speaking. The very act of reading those words had filled me with an excitement I could hardly contain. Beyond the city... That meant I would leave the city, venture as an apprentice into the very regions which had been forbidden to me and were even yet forbidden to most of those in the city. The creche was full of rumors about what lay outside the city and already I had any number of wild imaginings about it. I was sensible enough to realize that the reality could never equal those rumors for inventiveness, but even so the prospect was one that dazzled and appalled me. The cloak of secrecy that the guildsmen placed around it seemed to imply that something dreadful was beyond the walls of the city -- so dreadful that a penalty of death was the price paid for revealing its nature. Clausewitz said: "Step up to the platform, Apprentice Mann." I walked forward, climbing the four steps that led up to the stage. Clausewitz greeted me, shaking me by the hand and taking away from me the card with the oath. I was introduced first to the Navigator, who spoke a few amiable words to me, and then to the other chief guildsmen. Clausewitz told me not only their names but also their titles, some of which were new to me. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by all the information. I was learning in a few moments as much as I had learned inside the creche in all my life to date. There were six first-order guilds. In addition to Clausewitz's Future Surveyors guild there was a guild responsible for Traction, another for Tracklaying and another for Bridgebuilding. I was told that these were the guilds primarily responsible for the administration of the city's continued existence. In support of these were two further guilds: Militia and Barter. All this was new to me, but now I recalled that my father had sometimes referred in passing to men who bore as titles the names of their guilds. I had heard of the Bridgebuilders, for instance, but until this ceremony I had had no conception that the building of a bridge was an event surrounded by an aura of ritual and secrecy. How was a bridge fundamental to the city's survival? Why was a militia necessary? Indeed, what was the future? the Future guildsmen, among them of course my father. Only three were present -- the rest, I was told, were away from the city. With these introductions finished I spoke to the other guildsmen, there being at least one representative from each of the first-order guilds. I was gaining the impression that the work of a guildsman outside the city was a major occupier of time and resources. On several occasions one or another of the guildsmen would apologize for there being no more of their number at the ceremony. They were away from the city. During these conversations one unusual fact struck me. It was something that I had noticed earlier, but had not registered consciously. This was that my father and the other Future guildsmen appeared to be to the fantastic planet of Mars. There's a new look to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian series at your bookstore. You'll find all eleven volumes in Burroughs' classic series now wearing stunning new wrap-around covers -- each one a magnificent scene from John Carter's amazing adventures on the dying planet of Mars, a vast planet of many races, many people, strange creatures and strange plants. Every Burroughs' fan will want the complete set: If you can't find the complete set on sale, you can order by mail. Send # per book, plus # c per order for handling, to Ballantine Cash Sales, P.O. Box #, Westminster, Maryland # . Please allow three weeks for delivery. it Our big science-fiction book his Hugo award-winning masterA smash hit in its high-priced hardcover edition and a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, be a sell-out as a Ballantine savage attack on our suicidal complacency in the face of an our planet -- Brunner tells of the people who live on the Earth and their attempts to come to terms with their environment. This is the book the whole sf world is sure to be talking about. Philip Jose Farmer is one of the most imaginative practitioners of the craft around today. No one ever knows quite what to expect when picking up a new Farmer title. But everyone knows one is about to read something differbook for us. Here the medium isn't chine -- a machine designed to provide a connection with the dead. At a price, of course! That is, if it works. And what if the messages picked up are not from the dead but from aliens? An interesting political problem develops, pulling us along on Farmer's crazy adventure. BB considerably older than the others. Clausewitz himself was strongly built and he stood magnificent in his cloak, but the thinness of his hair and his lined face betrayed a considerable ageI estimated him to be at least two thousand five hundred miles old. My father, too, now I could see him in the company of his contemporaries, seemed remarkably old. He was of an age similar to Clausewitz and yet logic denied this. It would mean that my father would have been about eighteen hundred miles at the time I was born and I already knew that it was the custom in the city to produce children as soon after reaching maturity as possible. The other guildsmen were considerably younger. Some were evidently only a few miles older than myself -- a fact that gave me some encouragement. Now that I had entered the adult world I wished to be finished with the apprenticeship at the earliest opportunity. The implication was that the apprenticeship had no fixed term and if, as Bruch had said, status in the city was a result of ability, then with application I could become a full guildsman within a relatively short period of time. There was one person missing whom I would have liked to see there. That was Jase. Speaking to one of the Traction guildsmen, I asked after him. "Gelman Jase?" he said. "I think he's away from the city." "Couldn't he have come back for this?" I said. "We shared a cabin in the creche." "Jase will be away for many miles to come." "Where is he?" The guildsman only smiled at this, infuriating me -- for surely, now I had taken the oath, I could be told? Later I noticed that no other apprentices were present. Were they all away from the city? If so, that probably meant that very soon I, too, could leave. After a few minutes of talking to the guildsmen Clausewitz called for attention. "I propose to recall the administrators," he said. "Are there any objections?" A sound of general approval came from the guildsmen. "In which case," Clausewitz continued, "I would remind the apprentice that this is the first occasion of many on which he is bound by his oath." the platform and two or three of the guildsmen opened the doors of the hall. Slowly the other people returned to the ceremony. Now the atmosphere lightened considerably. As the hall filled up I heard laughter and in the background I noticed that a long table was being set up. There seemed to be no rancor from the administrators about their exclusion from the ceremony that had just taken place. I assumed that the event was common enough to be taken as a matter of course, but it crossed my mind to wonder how much they were able to surmise. When secrecy takes place in the open, as it were, it lays itself open to speculation. Surely no security could be so tight that merely dismissing them from a room while an oath-taking ceremony took place would keep people in the dark as to what was happening? As far as I could tell, there had been no guards at the door -- what would have prevented someone from eavesdropping while I spoke the oath? I had little time to consider this, for the room was filled with activity. People spoke together in an animated way and there was much noise as the long table was laid with large plates of food and many different kinds of drink. I was led from one group of people to another by my father and was introduced to so many people that I was soon unable to remember names or titles. "Shouldn't you introduce me to Victoria's parents?" I asked, seeing Bridge-builder Lerouex standing to one side with a woman administrator whom I assumed to be his wife. "No -- that comes later." He led me on and soon I was shaking hands with yet another group of people. I was wondering where Victoria was, for surely now that the guild ceremony was out of the way our engagement should be announced. By now I was looking forward to seeing her, partly from curiosity, but also because she was someone I already knew. I felt outnumbered by people both older and more experienced than I and Victoria was a contemporary. She, too, was of the creche; she had known the same people as I and was of a similar age. In this room full of guildsmen she would have been a welcome reminder of what was now behind me. I had taken the major step into adulthood and that was enough for one day. Time passed. I had not eaten since Bruch had woken me and the sight of the food reminded me of how hungry I was. My attention was drifting away from the more social aspects of the ceremony -- it was all too much at once. For another halfhour I followed my father around, talking without much interest to the people to whom I was introduced, but what I would really have welcomed at that moment was some time to myself so that I could eat -- and think over all that I had learned. Eventually my father left me talking to a group of people from the synthetics administration (the group which, I learned, was responsible for the production of all the various synthetic foods and organic materials used in the city) and moved over to where Lerouex was standing. I saw them speak together briefly and Lerouex nodded. In a moment my father returned and took me to one side. "Wait here, Helward," he said. "I'm going to announce your engagement. When Victoria comes into the room, come over to me." He hurried away and spoke to Clause witz. The Navigator returned to his seat on the platform. "Guildsmen and administrators!" Clausewitz called over the noise of the conversations. "We have a further celebration to announce. The new apprentice is to be engaged to the daughter of Bridge-builder Lerouex. Future Surveyor Mann, would you care to speak?" My father walked to the front of the hall and stood before the platform. Speaking too quickly, he made a short speech about me. On top of everything else that had happened that morning this came as a new embarrassment. Uneasy together, my father and I had never been as close as he made out by his words. I wanted to stop him, wanted to leave the room until he had finished, but it was clear I was still the center of interest. I wondered if the guildsmen had any idea of how they were alienating me from their sense of ceremony and occasion. My father finished, but stayed in front of the platform. From another part of the hall Lerouex said that he wished to present his daughter. A door opened and Victoria came in, led by her mother. As my father had instructed I walked over and joined him. He shook me by the hand. Lerouex kissed Victoria. My father kissed her and presented her with a finger ring. Another speech was made. Eventually, I was introduced to her. We had no chance to speak together. The festivities continued. II told that I might continue to use my cabin until accommodation could be found in guild quarters and reminded once more of my oath. I went straight to sleep. I was awakened early by one of the guildsmen I had met the previous day. His name was Future Denton. He waited while I dressed myself in my new apprentice's uniform and then led me out of the creche. We did not take the same route as that along which Bruch had led me the day before, but climbed a series of stairs. The city was quiet. Passing a clock I saw that the time was still very early indeed, just after threethirty in the morning. The corridors were empty of people and most of the ceiling lights were dimmed. We came eventually to a spiral staircase, at the top of which was a heavy steel door. Future Denton took a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. There were two locks to the door and as he opened it he indicated that I should step through before him. I emerged into cold and darkness, such extremes of both that they came as a physical shock. Denton closed the door behind him and locked it again. As he shone his flashlight around I saw that we were standing on a small platform, enclosed by a handrail about three feet high. We walked over and stood at the rail. Denton switched off his light  -- K For November, John Brunner writes a special introduction to Philip Wylie's final statement to the world, his unforgettable It's a shocking and scientifically sound projection of the next fifty years and a really vivid wind-up to Wylie's unusual science fiction novels. ( UQ# #c) Herbert W. Franke is the leading sf writer in Western especially proud to present him to the English-language audience with our own translation of Franke's best novel, the modern about the question of what constitutes intelligence. ( UQ# -- #c) Behind every myth there is a real role Earth -- or one of its bravest -- played in an interstellar war of a thousand years ago. It's an sf retelling of a familiar story that will' surely surprise you. ( UQ# -- #C ) the top-rated tele-star of the #'s -- a talking dog with a colossal ego and a frenzied manager. Wait till you see Jack Gaughan's cover! ( UQ# -- #c) Agent of the Spaceways, enmoving adventure on an alien planet. (UT# -- #c) and the darkness was complete. "Where are we?" I asked. "Don't talk. Wait -- and keep watching." I could see absolutely nothing. My eyes, still adjusted to the comparative brightness of the corridors, tricked my senses into detecting colored shapes moving about me, but in a moment these stilled. The darkness was not the major preoccupation -- already the movement of the cold air across my body had chilled me and I was trembling. I could feel the steel of the rail in my grip like a spear of ice and moved my hands, trying to minimize the discomfort. It was not possible to let go, though. In that absolute dark the rail was my only hold on the familiar. I had never before been so isolated from what I knew, never before been confronted with such an impact of things unknown. My whole body was tense, as if bracing itself against some sudden detonation or physical shock, but none came. All about me was cold and dark and overwhelmingly silent, barring the sound of the wind in my ears. As the minutes passed -- and my eyes became better able to adjust -- I discovered I could make out vague shapes about me. I could see Future Denton beside me, a tall black figure in his cloak, outlined against the lesser darkness of what was above him. Beneath the platform on which we stood I could detect a huge, irregularly shaped structure, black and black on black. Around all this was impenetrable darkness. I had no point of reference, nothing against which I could make distinctions of form or outline. It was frightening, but in a way that struck emotionally, not in such a way that I felt at all threatened physically. Sometimes I had dreamed of such a place and then had awakened, still experiencing the after-images of an impression such as this. This was no dream -- the bitter cold could not be imagined, nor could the startling clarity of the new sensations of space and dimension. I knew only that this was my first venture outside the city -- for this was all it could be -- and that it was nothing like I had ever anticipated. When I fully appreciated that fact the effect of the cold and dark on my orientation became of subsidiary importance. I was outside. This was what I had been waiting for! There was no further need for Denton's admonition to silence. I could say nothing and had I tried the words would have died in my throat or been lost on the wind. It was all I could do to look -- and in looking I saw nothing but a deep, mysterious endlessness shrouded by the clouded night... could smell the soil! It was unlike anything I had ever smelled in the city and my mind conjured a spurious image of many square miles of rich brown soil, moist in the night, I had no way of telling what it was I was actually smelling -- it Was probably not soil at all -- but this image of rich, fertile ground had been one that endured for me from one of the books I had read in the creche. It was enough to imagine it and once more my spirits rose as I sensed the cleansing effect of the wild, unexplored land beyond the city. There was so much to see and do -- and even yet, standing on the platform, everything remained for these few precious moments the exclusive domain of the imagination. I needed to see nothing -- the simple impact of this fundamental step beyond the city's confines was enough to spark my underdeveloped imagination into realms which until that moment had been fed only by the writings of the authors I had read. Slowly the blackness became less dense, until the sky above me was a dark gray. In the far distance I could see where the clouds met the horizon and even as I watched I saw a line of the faintest red begin to etch the shape of one small cloud. As if the impact of the light were propelling it this cloud and all the others were moving slowly above us, borne on the wind away from the direction of the glow. The redness spread, touching the clouds for a few moments as they moved away, leaving behind a large area of clear sky, which was itself colored a deep orange. My whole attention was riveted on this sight, for it was quite simply the most beautiful thing I had experienced in my whole life. Almost imperceptibly the orange was spreading and lightening -- still the clouds were singed with red, but at the very point at which the horizon met the sky there was an intensity of light that grew brighter by the minute. The orange was dying. Far more quickly than I would have ever guessed, it thinned away as the source of light brightened. The sky that it was almost white. In the center of it, as if growing up from the horizon, was a spear of white light, leaning slightly to one side like a toppling church steeple. As it grew it thickened and brightened, becoming as the seconds passed so not possible to stare directly at it. Future Denton suddenly gripped my arm. "Look!" he said, pointing to the A formation of birds, spread out in a delicate vee, was flapping slowly from left to right across our vision. After a few moments, the birds crossed directly in front of the growing column of light, and for a few seconds they could not be seen. "What are they?" I said, my voice sounding coarse and harsh. "Just geese." They were visible again now, flying slowly on, blue sky behind them. After a minute or so they became lost to sight beyond rising ground some distance away. I looked again at the rising sun. In the short time I had been looking at the birds it had been transformed. Now the bulk of its body had appeared above the horizon and it hung in sight, a long, saucer-shape of light, spiked above and below with two perpendicular spires of incandescence. I could feel the touch of its warmth on my face. The wind was dropping. I stood with Denton on that small platform, looking out across the land. I saw the city, or what part of it was visible from the platform, and I saw the last of the clouds disappearing across the horizon farthest from the sun. It shone down on us from a cloudless sky and Denton removed his cloak. He nodded to me and showed me how we could climb down from the platform, by way of a series of metal ladders, to the land below. He went first. As I stepped down and stood for the first time on natural ground I heard the birds that had nested in the upper crannies of the city begin their morning song. Ill me once around the periphery of the city, then took me out across the ground towards a small cluster of temporary buildings which had been erected about five hundred yards from the city. Here he introduced me to Track Malchuskin, then returned to the city. The Track was a short, hairy man, still half asleep. He didn't seem to resent the intrusion and treated me with some politeness. "Apprentice Future, are you?" I nodded. "I've just come from the city." "First time out?" "Yes." "Had any breakfast?" "No. The Future got me out of bed and brought me more or less straight here." "Come inside. I'll make some coffee." The interior of the hut was rough and untidy, in contrast to what I had seen within the city. There cleanliness and tidiness seemed to be of great importance, but Malchuskin 's hut was littered with dirty pieces of clothing, unwashed pots and pans and half-eaten meals. In one corner was a large pile of metal tools and instruments and against one wall was a bunk, the covers thrown back in a heap! There was a background smell of old food. Malchuskin filled a pan with water, and placed it on a cooking ring. He found two mugs somewhere, rinsed them in the butt and shook them to remove the surplus water. He put a measure of synthetic coffee into a jug and when the water boiled filled it up. There was only one chair in the hut. Malchuskin removed some heavy steel tools from the table and moved it over to the bunk. He sat down and indicated that I should pull up the chair. We sat in silence for a while, sipping the coffee. It was made in exactly the same way as it was in the city, yet it seemed to taste different. "Haven't had too many apprentices lately." "Why's that?" I asked. "Can't say. Not many of them coming up. Who are you?" "Helward Mann. My father is -- " "Yeah, I know. Good man. We were in the creche together." I frowned at that. Surely he and my father were not of the same age? Malchuskin saw my expression. "Don't let it bother you," he said. "You'll understand one day. You'll find out the hard way, just like everything else in this goddam guild system makes you learn. It's a strange life in the Future guild. It wasn't for me, but I guess you'll make out." "Why didn't you want to be a Future?" "I didn't say I didn't want it -- I meant it wasn't my lot. My own father was a Tracksman. The guild system again. But you want it hard, they've put you in the right hands. Done much manual work?" "No-" He laughed loudly. "The apprentices never have. You'll get used to it." He stood up. "It's time we started. It's early, but now you've got me out of bed there's no point being idle. They're a lazy lot of bastards." He left the hut. I finished the rest of my coffee in a hurry, scalding my tongue, and went after him. He was walking toward the other two buildings. I caught up with him. With a metal wrench he had taken from the hut he banged loudly on the door of each of the other two buildings, bawling at whoever was inside to get up. I saw from the marks on the doors that he probably always hit them with a piece of metal. We heard movement inside. Malchuskin went back to his hut and began sorting through some of the tools. "Don't have too much to do with these men," he warned me. "They're not from the city. There's one of them -- I've put him in charge. Rafael. He speaks a little English and acts as interpreter. If you want anything speak to him. Better still, come to me. There's not likely to be trouble, but if there is -- call me. Okay?" "What kind of trouble?" "They don't do what you or I tell them. They're being paid and they get paid to do what we want. It's trouble if they don't. But the only thing wrong with this lot is that they're too lazy for their own good. That's why we start early. It gethot later on and then we might as well not bother." The day was already warm. The sun had risen high while I had been with Malchuskin and my eyes were beginning to water. They weren't accustomed to such bright light. I had tried to glance at the sun again, but it was impossible to look directly at it. "Take these." Malchuskin passed me a large armful of steel wrenches and I staggered under the weight, dropping two or three. He watched in silence as I picked them up, ashamed at my ineptitude. "Where to?" "The city, of course. Don't they teach you anything there?" I headed away from the hut, toward the city. Malchuskin watched from the door of his hut. "South side -- " he shouted after me. I stopped and looked round helplessly. Malchuskin came over to me. "There." He pointed. "The tracks at the south of the city. Okay?" "Okay." I walked in that direction, dropping only one more wrench on the way. xm see what Malchuskin had meant about the men who worked with us. They stopped at the slightest excuse and only Malchuskin 's bawling or Rafael's sullen instructions kept them at it. "Who are they?" I asked Malchuskin when we stopped for a fifteen-minute break. "Local men." "Couldn't we hire better ones?" "They're all the same around here." I sympathized with them to a certain degree. Out in the open, with no shade at all, the work was vigorous and hot. Although I was determined not to slacken, the physical strain was more than I could bear. Certainly it was more strenuous than anything I had ever experienced. The tracks at the south of the city ran for about half a mile, ending in no particular place. There were four tracks, each consisting of two metal rails supported on timber sleepers, which were in turn resting on sunken concrete foundations. Two of the tracks had already been considerably shortened by Malchuskin and his crew and we were working on the longest one still extant, the one laid as right outer. Malchuskin explained that if I assumed the city was to the front of us, the four tracks were identified by left and right, outer and inner in each case. Little thought was involved. What had to be done was routine, but heavy work. In the first place the tie-bars connecting the rail to the sleepers had to be released for the whole length of the section of rail. This was then laid to one side and the other rail similarly released. Next we tackled the sleepers. These were attached to the concrete foundations by two clamps, each of which had to be slackened and removed manually. When the sleeper came free it was stacked on a bogie waiting on the next section of track. The concrete foundation, which I discovered was prefabricated and reusable, then had to be dug out of its soil emplacement and similarly placed on the bogie. When all this was done the two steel rails were placed on special racks along the side of the bogie. Malchuskin or I would then drive the battery-powered bogie up to the next section of track and the process would be repeated. When the bogie was fully loaded the entire track crew would ride on it up to the rear of the city. Here it would be parked and the battery recharged from an electrical point fitted to the wall of the city for this purpose. It took us most of the morning to load the bogie and take it up to the city. My arms felt as if they had been stretched from their sockets. My back was aching. I was filthy dirty and covered with sweat. Malchuskin, who had done no less work than any of the others -- probably moregrinned at me. "Now we unload and start again," he said. I looked over at the laborers. They looked like I felt, although I suspected I, too, had done more than they, considering I was new to it and hadn't yet learned the art of using my muscles economically. Most of them were lying back in what little shadow was afforded by the bulk of the city. "Okay," I said. "No -- I was joking. You think that lot would do any more without a bellyful of food?" "No." "Right, then -- we eat." He spoke to Rafael, then walked toward his hut. I went with him and we shared some of the heated-up synthetic food that was all he could offer. T HE afternoon started with the unloading. The sleepers, foundations and rails were loaded on to another battery-powered vehicle -- this one traveled on four large balloon tires. When the transfer was completed, we took the bogie down to the end of the track and began again. The afternoon was hot and the men worked slowly. Even Malchuskin had eased up and after the bogie had been refilled with its next load he called a halt. "Like to have got another load in today," he said and took a long draught from a bottle of water. "I'm ready," I said. "Maybe. You want to do it on your own?" wanting to reveal the exhaustion I was feeling. "As it is you'll be useless tomorrow. No, we get this bogie unloaded, run it down to the track-end and that's it." That wasn't quite it, as things turned out. When we returned the bogie to the track-end, Malchuskin section of the track with as much loose soil and dirt as we could find. This rubble was laid for twenty yards. I asked Malchuskin its purpose. He nodded toward the nearest long track, the left inner. At its end was a massive concrete buttress, stayed firmly into the ground. "You'd rather put up one of those instead?" he said. "What is it?" "A buffer. Suppose the cables all broke at once -- the city would run backward off the rails. As it is, the buffers wouldn't put up much resistance, but it's all we can do." "Has the city ever run back?" "Once." M alchuskin offered me the choice of returning to my cabin in the city or remaining with him in his hut. The way he put it didn't leave me much choice. He obviously had low regard for the people inside the city, told me he rarely went inside. "It's a cozy existence," he said. "Half the people in the city don't know what's going on out here. And I don't suppose they'd care if they did know."  "Why should they have to know? After all, if we can keep working smoothly it's not their problem." "I know, I know. But I wouldn't have to use these damned local men if more city people came out here." In the nearby dormitory huts the hired men were talking noisily. Some were singing. "Don't you have anything at all to do with them?" "I just use them. They're the Barter people's pigeon. If they get too lousy I lay them off and get the Barters to find me some more. Never difficult. Work's . in short supply around here." "Where is this?" "Don't ask me -- that's up to your father and his guild. I just dig up old tracks." I sensed that Malchuskin was less alienated from the city than he made out. I supposed his relatively isolated existence gave him some contempt for those within the city, but as far as I could see he didn't have to stay out here in the hut. Lazy the workers might be, and just now noisy, but they seemed to act in an orderly manner. Malchuskin made no attempt to supervise them when there was no work to be done, so he could have stayed in the city if he chose. "Your first day out, isn't it?" he reminded himself. "That's right." "You want to watch the sunset?" "No-why?" "The apprentices usually do." "Okay." Almost as if it were to please him I went out of the hut and looked past the bulk of the city toward the sky. Malchuskin came up behind me. hind me. The sun was near the horizon and already I could feel the wind cold on my back. The clouds of the previous night had not returned and the sky was clear and blue. I watched the sun, able to look at it without hurting my eyes now that its rays were diffused by the thickness of the atmosphere. It had the shape of a broad orange disk, slightly tilted down toward us. Above and below, tall spires of light rose from the center of the disk. As we watched it sank slowly beneath the horizon, the upper point of light being the last to vanish. "You sleep in the city, you don't get to see that," Malchuskin said. "It's very beautiful," I said. "You see the sunrise this morning?" "Yes." Malchuskin nodded. "That's what they do. Once a kid's made it to a guild, they throw him in at the deep end. No explanation, right? Out in the dark, until up comes the sun." "Why do they do that?" "Guild system. They believe it's the quickest way to get an apprentice to understand that the sun isn't the same as he's been taught." "Isn't it?" I said. "What were you taught?" "That the sun is spherical." "So they still teach that. Well, now you've seen that the sun isn't. Make anything of it?" "No." "Think about it. Let's go and eat." We returned to the hut and Malchuskin directed me to start heating up some food while he bolted another bunk frame on top of the vertical supports around his own. He found some bedding in a cupboard and dumped it on the bunk. "You sleep here," he said, indicating the upper bunk. "You restless at night?" "I don't think so." "We'll try it for one night. If you keep moving around we'll change over. I don't like being disturbed." I thought there was little chance I would disturb him. I could have slept on the side of a cliff that night, I was so tired. We ate the tasteless food together and afterwards Malchuskin talked about his work on the tracks. I paid him scant attention and a few minutes later I laid on my bunk, pretending to listen to him. I fell asleep almost at once. IV by Malchuskin moving about the hut, clattering the dishes from the previous evening's meal. I made to get out of the bunk as soon as I was fully conscious, but at once I was paralyzed by a stab of pain in my back. I gasped. Malchuskin looked up at me, grinning. "Stiff?" I rolled onto my side and tried to draw my legs up. These too were stiff and painful, but with a considerable effort I managed to get myself into a sitting position. I sat still for a moment, hoping that the pain was cramp and that it would pass. "Always the same with you kids from the city," Malchuskin said, but without malice. "You come out here keen I'll grant you. A day's work and you're so stiff you become useless. Don't you get any exercise in the city?" "Only in the gymnasium." "Okay, get down here and have some breakfast. After that you'd better go back to the city. Have a hot bath and see if you can find someone to give you a massage. Then report back here." I nodded gratefully and clambered down from the bunk. This was no easier and no less painful than anything else I'd attempted so far. I discovered that my arms, neck and shoulders were as stiff as the rest of me. I left the hut thirty minutes later, just as Malchuskin was bawling at the men to get started. I headed back toward the city, limping slowly. It was the first time I had been left to my own devices away from the city. When in the company of others one never sees as much as when alone. The city was five hundred yards from Malchuskin 's hut, and that was an adequate distance to be able to get some impression of its overall size and appearance. Yet during, the whole of the previous day I had been able to afford it only the barest of glances. It was simply a large gray bulk dominating the landscape. Now, hobbling alone across the ground toward it I could inspect it in more detail. From the limited experience I had had of the interior of the city, I had never given much thought to what it might look like from outside. I had always conceived of it as being large, but the reality was that the city was rather smaller than I had imagined. At its highest point, on the northern side, it was approximately two hundred feet high, but the rest of it was a jumble of rectangles and cubes, fitted into what seemed to be a patternless arrangement of varying elevations. It was a dull brown and gray color, made as far as I could tell from many different kinds of timber. There seemed to be very little use of concrete or metals and nothing was painted. This external appearance contrasted sharply with the interior -- or at least, those few areas I had seen -- which were clean and brightly decorated. As Malchuskin's hut was directly to the west of the city, it was impossible for me to estimate the width as I walked toward it, though I estimated its length to be about fifteen hundred feet. I was surprised at how ugly it was and how old it appeared to be. There was much activity about, particularly to the north. As I neared the city it occurred to me that I had no idea how I could enter it. Yesterday Future Denton had taken me around the exterior of the city, but my mind had been so swamped with new impressions that I had absorbed few of the details pointed out to me. It had looked so different then. My only clear memory was that there was a door behind the platform from which we had observed the sunrise and I decided to head for that. Tills was not as easy as I had imagined. I went to the south of the city, stepping over the tracks I had been working on the previous day, and moved around to the east side, where I felt sure Denton and I had descended by way of a series of metal ladders. After a long search I found such an access and began to climb. I went wrong several times and only after a long period of clambering painfully along catwalks and climbing gingerly up ladders did I locate the platform. I found that the door was locked. I had no alternative but to ask. I climbed down to the ground, and walked once more to the south of the city where Malchuskin and the gang of men had started work again on dismantling the track. With an air of aggrieved patience Malchuskin left Rafael in charge and showed me what to do. He led me up the narrow space between the two inner tracks, directly beneath the lip of the city's edge. Underneath the city it was dark and cool. We stopped by a metal staircase. "At the top of that there's an elevator," he said. "You know what that is?" "Yes." "You've got a guild key?" I fumbled in a pocket and produced an irregularly shaped piece of metal that Clausewitz had given me. It opened the lock on the creche door. "Is this it?" "Yes. There's a lock on the elevator, Go to the fourth level, find an administrator and ask if you can use the bathroom." Feeling stupid, I did as he directed. I heard Malchuskin laughing as he walked back toward the daylight. I found the elevator without difficulty, but the doors would not open when I turned the key. I Waited. A few moments later the doors opened abruptly and two guildsmen came out. They took no notice of me and went down the steps to the ground. Suddenly the doors began to close of their own accord and I hurried inside. Before I could find any way of controlling the elevator, it began to move upward. I saw a row of keyed buttons placed on the wall near the door, numbered from one to seven. I jabbed my key into number four, but ineptly, making poor contact. The elevator seemed to be moving for a long time, but then it halted abruptly. The doors opened and I stepped forward. As I came out into the passageway, three more guildsmen stepped into the car. I caught a glimpse of a painted sign on the wall opposite the carseventh level. I had come too far. Just as the doors were closing I hurried inside again. "Where are you going, apprentice?" one of the guildsmen asked. "Fourth level." "All right, relax." He used his own key on number four, and this time when the car stopped it was on the right level. I mumbled my thanks to the guildsman who had spoken to me and stepped out. In my various preoccupations I had been able to overlook the discomforts in my body for the last few minutes, but now I felt tired and ill once more. In this part of the city there seemed to be much activitymany people moving about the corridors, conversations going on, doors opening and closing. It was different from outside the city, for there was a timeless quality to the still countryside and although people moved and worked out there the atmosphere was more leisurely. The labors of men like Malchuskin and his gang had an elemental purpose but here, in the heart of the upper levels which had for so long been forbidden to me, all was mysterious and complicated. I remembered Malchuskin's instructions and, choosing a door at random, I opened it and went in. There were two women inside -- they were amused but helpful when I told them what I wanted. A few minutes later I lowered my aching body into a bathful of hot water and closed my eyes. and effort to get my bath that I had wondered whether I would benefit by it at all -- the fact was that when I had toweled myself dry and dressed again the stiffness was not nearly as bad. There were still traces but the fatigue had gone. My early return to the city had inevitably brought Victoria to mind. The glimpse I had had of her at the ceremony had heightened my curiosity. The thought of returning immediately to dig old sleepers out of the ground paled somewhat -- although I felt I shouldn't stay away from Malchuskin for too long -- and I decided to see if I could find her. I left the bathroom and hurried back to the elevator. It was not in use, but I had to summon it to the floor I was on. When it arrived I was able to study its controls in rather more detail. I decided to experiment. I traveled first to the seventh level, but from a brief excursion into its corridors I could see no immediately obvious difference from the level I had just left. The same was true for most of the other levels, though there was more apparent activity on the third, fourth and fifth. The first level was the dark tunnel actually beneath the city itself. I rode up and down a couple of times, discovering that there was a surprisingly long distance between the first and second levels. All other distances were very short. I left the elevator at the second level, feeling intuitively that this would be where I would find the creche and that if I turned out to be wrong I would go in search of it on foot. Opposite the elevator entrance on the second level a flight of steps descended to a transverse corridor. I had a vague recollection of this from when Bruch had taken me up to the ceremony and soon I came across the door leading into the creche. Once inside, I locked the door with the guild key. It was all so familiar. I realized that until the moment I shut the door my movements had been guarded and cautious, but now I felt at home. I hurried down the steps and walked along the short corridor of the area I knew so well. It looked different from the rest of the city and it smelled different. I saw the familiar scratches on the walls, where generations of children before me had inscribed their names, saw the old brown paint, the worn coverings on the floors, the unlockable doors to the cabins. Out of long habit I headed straight for my cabin, and went in. Everything here was untouched. The bed had been made up and the cabin was tidier than it had ever been when I was using it regularly, but my few possessions were still in place. So, too, were Jase's, though there was no sign of him, I looked around once more, then returned to the corridor. I headed on down the corridor toward the various rooms where we had been given lessons. Muted noises came through the closed doors. I peered through the circular glass peepholes and saw the classes in progress. A few days earlier I had been in there. In one room I saw my erstwhile contemporaries -- some of them, like me, no doubt headed for an apprenticeship with one of the first-order guilds, most of them destined for administrative jobs in the city. I was tempted to go in and take their questions in my stride, maintaining a mysterious silence. There was no segregation of the sexes in the creche and in each room I peered into I searched vainly for a sight of Victoria. When I had checked all the classrooms I went down to the general area: the dininghall (here there was background noise of the midday meal being prepared), the gymnasium (empty) and the tiny open space, which gave access only of sight to the blue sky above. I went to the common-room, that one place in the whole extent of the creche that could be used for general recreation. Here there were several boys, some of whom I had been working with only a few days before. They were talking idly, but as soon as they noticed me I became the center of attention. It was the situation I had just now resisted. They wanted to know which guild I had joined, what I was doing, what I had seen. What happened when I came of age? What was outside the creche? Curiously, I wouldn't have been able to answer many of their questions, even if I had been able to break the oath. Although I had done many things in the space of a couple of days, I was still a stranger to all that I was seeing. I found myself resorting-as indeed Jase had done -- to concealing what little I knew behind a barrier of crypticism and humor. I clearly disappointed the boys and, although their interest did not diminish, the questions soon stopped. I left the creche as soon as I could, since Victoria was evidently no longer there. Descending by way of the elevator, I returned to the dark area beneath the bulk of the city and walked out between the tracks to the sunlight. Malchuskin was exhorting bogie of its rails and sleepers and he hardly noticed that I had returned. V T HE days passed slowly and I made no more return visits to the city. I had learned the error of my ways by throwing myself too enthusiastically into the physical side of the track work. I decided to follow Malchuskin's lead and confined myself in the main to supervising the hired laborers. Only occasionally would he and I pitch in and help. Even so, the work was arduous and long and I felt my body responding to the new labors. I soon felt fitter than ever before in my life -- my skin was reddening under the rays of the sun and soon the physical work became less of a strain. My only real complaint was with the unvarying diet of synthesized food and Malchuskin's inability to talk interestingly about the contribution we were making to the city's security. We would work late into the evenings and after a rough meal we would sleep. Our work on the tracks to the south of the city was nearly complete. The task was to remove all the track and erect four buffers at a uniform distance from the city. The track we removed was carried around to the north of the city where it was being relaid. One evening Malchuskin asked me, "How long have you been out here?" "I'm not sure." "In days." "Oh -- seven." I had been trying to estimate it in terms of miles. "In three days' time you get some leave. You have two days inside the city, then you come back here for another mile." I asked him how he reckoned the passage of time in terms of both days and distance. "It takes the city about ten days to cover a mile," he said. "And in a year it will cover about thirtysix and a half." "But the city isn't moving." "Not at the moment. It will be soon. Anyway, we don't take account of how much the city has actually moved, so much as how much it should have moved. It's based on the position of the optimum." I shook my head. "What does that mean?" "The optimum is the ideal position for the city to be. To maintain that it would have to move approximately a tenth of a mile every day. That's obviously out of the question, so we move the city toward optimum whenever we can." "Has the city ever reached optimum?" "Not as long as I can remember." "Where's the optimum now?" "About three miles ahead of us. That's average. My father was out here on the tracks before me and he told me once that they were then about ten miles from optimum. That's the most I've ever heard." "But what would happen if we ever reached optimum?" Malchuskin grinned. "We'd go on digging up old tracks." "Why?" "Because the optimum's always moving. But we're not likely to reach optimum and it doesn't matter that much. Anywhere within a few miles of it is okay. Put it this way -- if we could get ahead of optimum for a bit we could all have a good long rest." "Is that possible?" "I guess so. Look at it this way. Where we are at the moment the ground is fairly high. To get up here we had to go through a long stretch of rising country. That was when my father was out here. It's harder work to climb, so it took longer and we got behind optimum. If we ever come to some lower country we can coast down the slope." "What are the prospects of that?" "You'd better ask your guild that. Not my concern." "But what's the countryside like here?" "I'll show you tomorrow." Though I hadn't followed much of what Malchuskin said, at least one thing had become clear, and that was how time was measured. I was six hundred and fifty miles old? that did not mean that the city had moved that distance during my lifetime, but that the optimum had. Whatever the optimum was. T HE next day Malchuskin kept his promise. While the hired laborers took one of their customary rests in the deep shadow of the city Malchuskin walked with me to a low rise of land some distance to the east. Standing there we could see almost the whole of the city's immediate environment. It was at present standing in the center of a broad valley, bounded north and south by two relatively high ridges of ground. To the south I could see clearly the traces of the track that had been taken up, marked by four parallel rows of scars where the sleepers and their foundations had been laid. To the north of the city the tracks ran smoothly up the slope of the ridge. There was not much activity here, though I could see one of the battery-driven bogies rolling slowly up the slope with its load of rail and sleepers and its attendant crew. On the crest of the ridge itself there was a considerable degree of activity, although from the distance it was not possible to determine exactly what was going on. "Good country this," Malchuskin said, but then immediately qualified it. "For a trackman, that is." "Why?" "It's smooth. We can take ridges and valleys in our stride. What gets me bothered is broken ground: rocks, rivers or even forests. That's one of the advantages of being high at the moment. This is all very old rock around here, and it's been smoothed out by the elements. But don't talk to me about rivers. Then I get agitated." "What's wrong with rivers?" "I said don't talk about them!" He slapped me good-humoredly on the shoulders and we started our walk back toward the city. "Rivers have to be crossed. That means a bridge has to be built unless there's one already there, which there never is. We have to wait around while the bridge is made ready and that causes a delay. Usually it's the Track guild that gets the blame for delays. But that's life. The trouble with rivers is that everyone's got mixed feelings about them. The one thing the city's permanently short of is water and if we come across a river that solves one problem for the time being. But we still have to build a bridge and that gets everyone nervous." The hired laborers did not look exactly pleased to see us when we returned, but Rafael moved them and work soon recommenced. The last of the tracks had now been taken up, and all we had left to do was build the last buffer. This was a steel erection, mounted above and across the last section of track and utilizing three of the concrete sleeper foundations. Each of the four tracks had a buffer and these were placed in such a way that if the city were to roll backward it would be supported. The buffers were not in a line, owing to the irregular shape of the southern side of the city, and Malchuskin did not pretend they were an adequate safeguard. "I shouldn't like them to have to be used," he said, "but if the city did roll, they would slow it even if they failed to stop it." With the completion of the buffer our work was finished. "What now?" I asked. Malchuskin glanced up at the sun. "We ought to move house. I'd like to get my hut up across the ridge and there are the dormitories for the workers. It's getting late, though. I'm not sure that we could get it done before nightfall." "We could do it tomorrow." "That's what I'm thinking. It'll give the lazy bastards a few hours off. They'd like that." He spoke to Rafael, who consulted the other men. There was little doubt about the decision. Almost before Rafael had finished speaking some of them started to walk off. "Where are they, going?" "Back to their village, I expect," said Malchuskin. "It's just over' there." He pointed toward the southeast, over beyond the southern ridge of high ground. "They'll be back, though. They don't like the work but there'll be pressure in the village, because we give them what they want." "What's that?" "The benefits of civilization," he said, grinning cynically. "To wit, the synthetic food you're always griping about." "They like that stuff?" "No more than you do. But it's better than an empty belly, which is what most of them had before we happened along here." "I don't think I'd do all that work for that gruel. It's tasteless, it's got no substance and -- " "How many meals a day did you eat in the city?" "Three." "And how many were synthetic?" "Only two," I said. "Well, people like those poor sods work their skins off just so you can eat one genuine meal a day. And from what I hear, what they do for me is the least of it." "What do you mean?" "You'll find out." Later that evening, as we sat in his hut, Malchuskin spoke more on this subject. I discovered that he wasn't as ill-informed as he tried to make out. He blamed it all on the guild system, as ever. It had been a longestablished practice that the ways of the city were passed down from one generation to the next, not by tuition but on heuristic principles. An apprentice would value the traditions of the guilds far more by understanding at first hand the facts of existence on which they were based than by being trained in a theoretical manner. In practice, it meant that I would have to discover for myself how the men came to work on the tracks, what other tasks they performed and in fact all other matters concerning the continued existence of the city. "When I was an apprentice," Malchuskin said, "I built bridges and I dug up tracks. I worked with the Traction guild and rode with men like your father. I know myself how the city continues to exist and through that I know the value of my own job. I dig up tracks and lay them, not because I enjoy the work but because I know why it has to be done. I've been out with the Barter guild and seen how they get the local people to work for us so I understand the pressures that are on the men who work under me now. It's all cryptic and obscure -- that's the way you see it now. But you'll find out that it all has to do with survival -- and you'll learn just how precarious that survival is." "I don't mind working with you," I said. "I didn't mean that. You've worked okay with me. All I'm saying is that all the things you've probably wondered about -- the oath, for instance -- have a purpose and, by God, it's a sensible purpose!" "So the men will be back in the morning." "Probably. And they'll complain, and they'll slacken off as soon as you or I turn our backs -- but even that's in the nature of things. Sometimes, though, I wonder -- " I waited for him to finish his sentence, but he said nothing more. It was an uncharacteristic sentiment, for Malchuskin did not seem in any way a pensive man. As we sat together he fell into a long silence, broken only when I got up to go outside to use the latrine. Then he yawned and stretched and kidded me about my weak bladder. with most of the men who had been with us before. A few were missing, though the numbers had been brought up to strength by replacements. Malchuskin greeted them without apparent surprise and at once began supervising the demolition of the three temporary buildings. First all the contents were moved out and placed in a large pile to one side. Then the buildings themselves were dismantled -- not as difficult a task as I'd imagined, as they had evidently been designed to be taken down and put up again easily. Each of the walls was joined to the next by a series of bolts. The floors broke down into a series of flat wooden slats and the roofs were similarly bolted into place. Fittings such as doors and windows were part of the frames in which they sat. It took only an hour to demolish each cabin and by midday everything was done. Well before then Malchuskin had gone off by himself, returning a half-hour later in a battery-powered truck. We took a short break and ate a meal, then loaded the truck with as much of the material as it would hold and set off toward the ridge, Malchuskin driving. Rafael and a few of the workers clung to the sides of the truck. It was some way to the ridge. Malchuskin steered a course that brought us diagonally toward the nearest part of the track and we drove the rest of the way alongside it. There was a shallow dip in the breast of the ridge and it was through this that the four pairs of rails had been laid. There were many men working this part of the track, some hacking manually at the ground to each side of the track -- presumably to widen the dip sufficiently to take the bulk of the city as it passed through. Others toiled with mechanical drills, trying to erect five metal frames, each bearing a large wheel. Only one had been so far securely laid and it stood between the two inner tracks, a gaunt, geometric design with no apparent function. As we passed through the dip Malchuskin slowed the truck, looking with interest at how the work was proceeding. He waved to one of the guildsmen supervising the work, then accelerated again as we passed over the summit of the ridge. From here a shallow downhill slope ran to a broad plain. To east and west, and on the far side of the plain I could see hills that were much higher. To my surprise the tracks ended only a short distance beyond the ridge. The left outer track had been built for about a mile, but the other three were barely a hundred yards long. Two teams were already at work on these tracks, but it was immediately clear that progress was slow. Malchuskin stared around. On our side of the tracks that is, on the western side -- stood a small cluster of huts, presumably the living quarters for the track teams already here. He headed the truck in that direction, but drove some way past before stopping. "This'll do," he said. "We want the buildings up by nightfall." I asked "Why don't we put them up by the others?" "It's my policy not to. I have trouble enough with these men as it is. If they have too much contact with the others they drink more and work less. We can't stop them from mixing when they're not working, but there's no point in clustering them together." "But surely they have a right to do what they want." "They're being bought for their labor. That's all." He clambered down from the cabin of the truck and began to shout at Rafael to start the work on the huts. The truck was soon unloaded and, leaving me in charge of the rebuilding, Malchuskin drove the truck back over the ridge to collect the rest of the men and the materials. V rebuilding was nearly completed. My last task of the day was to return the truck to the city and connect it to one of the battery recharging points. I drove off, content to be alone again for a while. As I drove over the ridge the work on the raised wheels had finished for the day and the site was abandoned but for two militiamen standing guard, their crossbows slung over their shoulders. They paid no attention to me. Leaving them behind, I drove down the other side toward the city. I was surprised to see how few lights were showing and how, with the approach of night, the daytime activities ceased. Where Malchuskin had told me I would find recharging points I discovered that other vehicles were already connected up and no other places were available. I guessed that mine was the last truck to be returned that evening and that I would have to look around for more points. In the end I found a spare point on the south side of the city. It was now dark and after I had attended to the truck I was faced with the long walk back alone. I was tempted not to return, but to stay the night inside the city. After all, it would take only a few minutes to get back to my cabin in the creche -- but then I thought of Malchuskin and the reaction I would get from him in the morning. Reluctantly I walked around the perimeter of the city, found the tracks leading northward and followed them up to the ridge. Being alone on the plain at night was a rather disconcerting experience. It was already cold and a strong breeze me through my thin uniform. Ahead of me I could see the dark bulk of the ridge, set against the dull radiance of the clouded sky. In the dip, the angular shapes of the wheel structures stood on the skyline and, pacing to and fro in their lonely vigil, were the two militiamen. As I walked up to them I was challenged. "Stop right there." Both men had come to a halt and, though I could not see for sure, I had a feeling that the crossbows were pointing in my direction. "Identify yourself." "Apprentice Helward Mann." "What are you doing outside the city?" "I'm working with guildsman Malchuskin. On the tracks. I passed you just now in the truck." "Oh, yes. Come forward." I walked up to them. "I don't know you," one of them said. "Have you just started?" "Yes-about a mile ago." "Which guild are you in?" "The Futures." The one who had spoken laughed. "Rather you than me." "Why?" "I like a long life." "He's young, though," the other said. "What are you talking about?" I said. "Been up future yet?" "No." "Been down past yet?" "No. I only started a few days ago." A thought occurred to me. Although I could not see their faces in the dark I could tell by the sound of their voices that they w'ere not much older than I. Perhaps seven hundred miles, not much more. But if that were so, then surely I should know them, for they would have been in the creche with me? "What's your name?" I asked one of them. "Conwell Sturner. Crossbowman Sturner to you." "Were you in the creche?" "Yes. Don't remember you, though. But then, you're just a kid." "I've just left the creche. You weren't there." They both laughed again and I felt my temper weakening. "We've been down past, son." "What does that mean?" "It means we're men." "You ought to be in bed, son. It's dangerous out here at night." "There's no one around," I said. "Not now. But while the softies in the city get their sleep, we save 'em from the tooks." "What are they?" "The tooks? The local thugs who jump out of shadows on young apprentices." I moved past them. I wished I'd gone into the city and hadn't come this way. Nevertheless my curiosity was aroused. "Really -- what do you mean?" I said. "There's tooks out there who don't like the city. If we didn't watch them, they'd damage the track. See these pulleys? They'd have them down if we weren't here." "But it was the -- tooks who helped put them up." "Those as work for us. But there's a lot as doesn't." "Get to bed, son. Leave the tooks to us." "Just the two of you?" "Aye, just us -- and a dozen more all over the ridge. You hurry on down to bed, sou, and watch you don't get a quarrel between the eyes." I turned my back on them and walked away. I was seething with anger and had I stayed a moment longer I felt sure I would have gone for one or the other of them. I hated their manly patronizing of me and yet I knew I had needled them. Two young men armed with crossbows would be no defense against a determined attack and they knew it, too. But it was important for their selfesteem to belittle me and attach false prestige to themselves. When I judged I was out of their earshot I broke into a run and almost at once stumbled over a sleeper. I moved away from the track and ran on. Malchuskin was waiting in the hut, and together we ate another meal of the synthetic food. VI Malchuskin the time came for my period of leave. In those two days Malchuskin spurred the laborers on to more work than I had ever seen them do and we made good progress. Although laying track was harder work than digging it up, there was the subtle benefit of seeing the positive results. The extra work took the form of having to dig the foundation pits for the concrete blocks before actually laying the sleepers and rail. As there were now three track crews working to the north of the city and each of the tracks was approximately the same length, there was the additional stimulus of competition among the crews. I was surprised to see how the men responded to this competition and as the work proceeded there was a certain amount of good-natured banter among them as they toiled. "Two days," Malchuskin said just before I left for the city. "Don't take any longer. They'll be winching soon and we need every man available." "Am I to come back to you?" "It's up to your guild -- but yes. The next two miles will be with me. After that you transfer to another guild and do three miles with them." "Who will it be?" I said. "I don't know. Your guild will decide that." As we finished work late on the last night l slept in the hut. I had another reason, too -- I had no wish to walk back to the city after dark and pass through the gap guarded by the militiamen. During the days there was little or no sign of the militia, but after my first experience of them Malchuskin had told me that a guard was mounted every night and during the period immediately prior to a winching operation the track was the most heavily guarded area. The next morning I walked back along the track to the city. toria now that I was authorized to be in the city. Before, I had been hesitant in looking for her, for at the back of my mind there had been the thought that I should have been getting back to Malchuskin as soon as I could. Now I had two whole days of leave and was relieved of the sense of evading my duties. Even so, I still had no way of knowing how to find her and had to resort to the expedient of asking. After a few misroutings I was directed to a room on the fourth level. Here Victoria and several other young people were working under the supervision of one of the women administrators. As soon as Victoria saw me standing at the door, she spoke to the administrator, then came over to me. We walked out to the corridor. "Hello, Helward," she said, shutting the door behind her. "Hello. Look-if you're working I can see you later." "It's all right. You're on leave, aren't you?" "Yes." "Then I'm on leave, too. Come on." She led the way down the corridor, turned into a side passage, then walked down a short flight of steps. At the bottom was another corridor, lined on both sides by doors. She opened one of them and we went in. The room beyond was much larger than any private room I had so far seen inside the city. The largest single piece of furniture was a bed placed against one of the walls, but the room was also well and comfortably furnished with a quite surprising amount of floor space. Against one wall were a washbasin and a small cooker. I saw a table and two chairs, a cupboard to keep clothes in and two easy chairs. Most unexpected of all, there was a window. I went to it immediately and looked out. There was an area of open space beyond, bounded on the opposite side by another wall with many windows. The space extended to left and right, but the window was small and I could not see what lay at the sides of the space. "Like it?" Victoria said. "It's large. Is it all yours?" "In a sense. Ours, once we're married." "Oh, yes. Someone said I'd have quarters to myself." 'This is probably what they meant," said Victoria. "Where are you living at the moment?" "I'm still in the creche. But I haven't stayed there since the ceremony." "Are you outside already?" I wasn't sure what to say. Outside. What could I tell Victoria, bound as I was to the oath? "I know you go outside the city," said Victoria. "It's not such a secret." "What else do you know?" "Several things. But look, I've hardly spoken to you! Can I make you some tea?" "Synthetic?" I immediately regretted the question -- I did not wish to seem ungracious. "I'm afraid so. But I'm going to be working with the synthetics team soon, so I might be able to find some way of improving it. The atmosphere relaxed slowly. For the first hour or two we addressed each other coolly and almost formally, politely curious about one another, but soon we were able to take more things for granted. Victoria and I were not such strangers, I realized. The subject of conversation turned to our life in the creche and this immediately brought a new doubt to the surface. Until I had actually left the city, I had had no clear idea of what I would find. The teaching in the creche had seemed to me -- and to most of the others -- dry, abstract and irrelevant. There were few printed books, and most of those were fictional works dealing with life on Earth planet, so the teachers had relied mainly on texts written by themselves. We knew, or thought we knew, much about everyday life on Earth planet, but we were told that this was not what we would find on this world. A child's natural curiosity immediately demanded to know the alternative, but on this the teachers had kept their silence. So therewas always this frustrating gap in our knowledge between what, by reading, we learned of life on a world that was not this one and what, by surmise, we were left to imagine of the ways of the city. This situation led to much discontent, evidenced by a surplus of unspent physical energy. But where, in the creche, was the outlet? Only the corridors and the gymnasium gave space enough to move, and then with severe limitations. The need was manifest in unrest: in the younger children emotional outbursts and disobedience, in older children fighting and passionate devotion to what few sports could be played in the tiny gymnasium -- and in those in their last few miles before coming of age a premature carnal awareness. There were token efforts at control by the creche administrators, but perhaps they understood these activities for what they were. In any event, I had grown up in the creche and I no less than anyone else had taken part in these occasional outbursts. In the last twenty miles or so before coming of age I had indulged myself in sexual relationships with some of the girls-Victoria not among themand it had not seemed to matter. Now she and I were to marry, and suddenly what had gone before did matter. talked the more I found that I was wishing we could lay this ghost from the past. I wondered if I should detail my various experiences, explain myself. Victoria, however, seemed to be in control of the conversation, directing it along channels of mutual acceptability. Perhaps she, too, had her ghosts. She told me something of life in the city and I was, of course, interested to hear this. She said that as a woman she was not automatically granted a responsible position and only her engagement to me had made her present work possible. Had she become engaged to a non-guildsman she would have been expected to produce children as often as possible, and spend her time on routine domestic chores in the kitchens, or making clothes or whatever other menial tasks came along. Instead, she was now able to have some control over her future and could probably rise to the position of a senior administrator. She was currently involved in a training procedure similar in structure to mine. The only difference was that there appeared to be less emphasis on experience and more on theoretical education. Consequently she had already learned far more about the city and how it was run internally than I had. I didn't feel free to speak of my work outside, so I listened to what she said with a great deal of interest. She said that she had been told that there were two great shortages in the city: one was water -- which I knew from what Malchuskin had said -- and the other was population. "But there are plenty of people in the city," I said. "Yes -- but the rate of live births has always been low and it's getting worse. What makes this even more serious is that there is a predominance in the live births of male babies. No one is really sure why." "It's the synthetic food," I said sardonically. "It might be." She had missed the point. "Until I left the creche, I had only vague notions of what the rest of the city might be like -- but I had always assumed that everyone in it had been born here." "Isn't that so?" "No. A lot of women are brought into the city in an effort to boost the population. Or, more specifically, in the hope they'll produce female babies." I said, "My mother came from outside the city." "Did she?" For the first time since we had met Victoria looked ill at ease. "I didn't know that." "It doesn't matter," I said. Abruptly Victoria fell silent. It really wasn't of much concern to me and I regretted having mentioned it. "Tell me more about this," I said. "No -- there's not much more. What about you? What's your guild like?" Quite apart from the fact that the oath forbade me to speak about it, I felt no inclination to talk. In that abrupt silence from Victoria I had gained a distinct impression that there had been more to say, but that some discretion prevented her from doing so. For the whole of my life -- or at least as much of it as I could remember -- the absence of my mother had been treated as a matter of fact. My father, whenever we spoke of it, talked factually about it, and there seemed to be no stigma attached. Indeed, many of the boys in the creche had been in the same situation as I and, what is more, most of the girls. Until the subject had provoked this reaction in Victoria I'd never thought about it. "You're something of an oddity," I said, hoping to get her to return to the subject by approaching it from a different direction. "Your mother is still in the city." "Yes," she said. So that was to be the end of it. I decided to let it drop. In any event, I hadn't especially wanted to discuss matters outside ourselves. I had come to the city to spend my time getting to know Victoria, not to talk about genealogy. But the feeling persisted. The conversation had died. "What's out there?" I said, indicating the window. "Can we go there?" "If you like. I'll show you." I followed her out of the room and along the corridor to where a door led to the outside. There was not much to see -- the open space was no more than an alley running between the two parts of the residential block. At one end of it there was a raised section, reached by a wooden staircase. We walked first to the opposite end, where another door led back into the city. Returning, we climbed the steps and came out on a small platform, where several wooden seats were placed and where there was room to move with some freedom. On two sides the platform was bounded by higher walls, presumably containing other parts of the city's interior and the side by which access was gained looked down over the roofs of the residential blocks and along the alleyway. But on the fourth side the view was uninterrupted and it was possible to see out into the surrounding countryside. This was a revelation to me -- the terms of the oath had implied that no one but guildsmen should ever see outside the city. "What do you think?" Victoria asked, sitting down on one of the seats which looked out across the view. I sat next to her. "I like it." "Have you been out there?" "Yes." It was difficult -- already I was finding myself in conflict with the terms of the oath. How could I talk to Victoria about my work without breaking my word? "We're not allowed up here very often. It's locked at night and only open a few hours of the day. Sometimes it's locked for several days on end." "Do you know why?" "Do you?" she asked. "It's probably -- something to do with the work out there." "Which you're not going to talk about." "No," I said. "Why not?" "I can't." She glanced at me. "You're very tanned. Do you work in the sun?" "Some of the time." "This place is locked when the sun's overhead. All I've ever seen of it is the rays touching the higher parts of the buildings." "There's nothing to see," I said. "It's very bright and you can't stare at it." "I'd like to find that out for myself." the moment? In your work, I mean?" "Nutrition." "What's that?" "It's determining how to work out a balanced diet. We have to make sure that the synthetic food contains enough protein and that people get the right amount of vitamins." She paused, her voice having reflected a general lack of interest in the subject. "Sunlight generates vitamins, you know." "Does it?" "Vitamin D. It's produced in the body by the action of sunlight on the skin. That's worth knowing if you ever see the sun." "But it can be synthesized," I said. "Yes -- and it is. Shall we go back to the room and have some more tea?" I said nothing to this. I don't know what I had expected from Victoria, but I had not anticipated this. Illusions of some romantic ideal had tempted me during my days of working with Malchuskin, and from time to time these had been tempered by a feeling that perhaps she and I might have to adapt to each other. In any event, it had never occurred to me that there would be an undercurrent of resentment between us. I had seen us working together toward realizing the intimate relationship planned, for us by our parents and somehow shaping it in such a way that it would become a realistic and perhaps even loving relationship. What I had not foreseen was that Victoria had seen us both in larger terms: that I would be forever enjoying the advantages of a way of life forbidden to her. We stayed on the platform. Victoria's remark about returning to the room had been an irony and, I was sensitive enough to identify it. Anyhow, I felt that for different reasons we would both prefer to stay on the platformI because my work outside had given me a taste for fresh air, and Victoria because this platform was as near as she could come to leaving the city. Even so, the undulating countryside to the east of the city served as a reminder of the newly discovered difference that separated us. "You could apply to transfer to a guild," I said in a moment. "I'm sure -- " "I'm the wrong sex," she said abruptly. "It's men only, or didn't you realize that?" "No." "It hasn't taken me long to work out a few things," she went on, speaking quickly and barely suppressing her bitterness. "I'd seen it all my life and never recognized it: my father always away from the city, my mother working in her job, organizing all those things we took for granted, like food and heating and disposal of sewage. Now I have recognized it. Women are too valuable to risk outside. They're needed here in the city because they breed and they can be made to breed again and again. If they're not lucky enough to be born in the city, they can be bought from outside and sent away when they've served their purpose." The sensitive subject again, but this time she didn't falter. "I know that the work outside the city has to be done and whatever it is it's done at risk -- but I've been given no option. Just because I'm a woman I have no choice but to be kept inside this damned place and learn fascinating things about food production, and whenever l can I have to give birth." I asked, "Do you not want to marry me?" "There's no alternative." "Thanks." S HE stood up, walked angrily toward the steps. I followed her down and walked behind her as she returned to her room. I waited in the doorway, watching her as she stood with her back to me, looking out of the window at the narrow alleyway between the buildings. "Do you want me to go?" I said. "No -- come in and close the door." She didn't move. "I'll make some more tea," I said. "All right." She entered reluctantly. The water in the pan was still warm and it took only a minute or so to bring it back to boiling. "We don't have to marry," I said. "If it's not you it'll be someone else." She turned and sat beside me, taking her cup of the synthetic brew. "I've nothing against you, Helward. You should know that. Whether we like it or not, my life and yours are dominated by the guild system. We can't do anything about that." "Why not? Systems can be changed." "Not this one. It's too firmly entrenched. The guilds have the city sewn up, for reasons I don't suppose I'll ever know. Only the guilds can change the system and they never will." "You sound very sure." "I am," she said. "And for the good reason that the system that runs my,. life is itself dominated by what goes on outside the city. As I can never take part in that I can never do anything to determine my own life." "But you could -- through me." "You won't even talk about it." "I can't," I said. "Why not?" "I can't even tell you that." "Guild secrecy," "If you like," I said. "And even as you're sitting here now, you're subscribing to it." "I have to," I said simply. "I was made to swear -- " Then I remembered: the oath itself was one of the terms of the oath. I had breached it and so easily and naturally that it had been done before I'd thought. To my surprise, Victoria reacted not at all. "So the guild system is ratified," she said. "It makes sense." I finished my tea. "I think I'd better go." "Are you angry with me?" she asked. "No. It's just-" "Don't go. I'm sorry I lost my temper with you -- it's not your fault. Something you said just nowthrough you I could determine my own life. What did you mean?" "I'm not sure. I think I meant that as the wife of a guildsman, which I'll be one day, you'd have more of a chance of -- " "Of what?" "Well -- seeing through me whatever sense there is in the system." "And you're sworn not to tell me." "I -- yes." "So first-order guildsmen have it all worked out. The system demands secrecy." She leaned back and closed her eyes. I was confused and angry with myself. I had been an apprentice for ten days and already I was technically under sentence of death. It was too bizarre to take seriously, but my memory of the oath was that the threat had been a convincing one at the time. The confusion arose because unwittingly Victoria had involved the tentative emotional commitment we had made to each other. I could see the conflict, but could do nothing about it. I knew from my own life inside the creche the subtle frustrations that arose through being allowed no access to the other parts of the city. If that were extended to a larger scale -- if one were allowed a small part in the running of the city, but had been given a point beyond which no actions were possible -- the frustration would continue. But surely this was no new problem in the city? Victoria and I were not the first to be married in this way. Before us there must have been others who had encountered the same rift. Had they simply taken the system as it appeared to them? Victoria didn't move as I left the room and strode toward the creche. xm inescapable syndrome of reaction and counterreaction, I became more worried about my own situation. If the oath were to be taken at all seriously I could be killed should word reach one of the guildsmen. Could breaching the oath be that dreadful a thing? Would Victoria tell anyone else what I had said? On thinking this my first impulse was to go back to see her and plead for her silence -- but that would have made both the breach and her own resentment more serious. I wasted the rest of the day, lying on my bunk and fretting about the situation. Later I ate in one of the dining rooms of the city and was thankful not to see Victoria. toria came to my cabin. My first awareness was of the sound of the door closing and as I opened my eyes I saw her as a tall shape standing beside the bed. "Wha-" "Ssh. It's me." "What do you want?" I reached out to find the light switch, but her hand came across and took my wrist. "Don't turn on the light." She sat down on the edge of the bed and I sat up. "I'm sorry, Hel ward . That's all I've come to say." "Okay." She laughed. "You're still asleep, aren't you?" "Not sure. Might be." She leaned forward and I felt her hands press lightly against my chest and then move up until they were behind my neck. She kissed me. "Don't say anything," she said. "I'm just very sorry." We kissed again and her hands moved until her arms were tight around me. "You wear a nightshirt in bed." "What else?" "Take it off." She stood up suddenly and I heard her undoing the coat she was wearing. When she sat down again, much closer, she was naked. I fumbled with my nightshirt, getting it caught as it came over my head. Victoria pulled back the covers and squeezed in beside me. "You came down here like that?" I asked. "There's no one about." Her face was very close to mine. We kissed again and as I pulled away my head banged against the cabin wall. Victoria cuddled up close to me, pressing her body against mine. Suddenly she laughed loudly. "Great guilds! Shut up!" "Why?" "Someone will hear." "They're all asleep." "They won't be if you keep laughing." "I said, don't talk." She kissed me again. In spite of the fact that my body was already responding eagerly to her I was stricken with alarm. We were making too much noise. The walls in the creche were thin and I knew from long experience that sounds transmitted readily. With her laughter and our voices, the fact that of necessity we were squeezed in the bunk against the walls, I was certain we'd awaken the whole creche. I pushed her away and told her this. "It doesn't matter," she said. "It does." I flung back the bedcovers and scrambled over her. I turned on the light. Victoria shielded her eyes against the glare and I tossed her coat to her. "Come on. We'll go to your room." "No." "Yes." I was pulling on my uniform. "Don't put that on," she said. "It smells." "Does it?" "Abominably." She sat up and as she did so I stared at her, admiring the neatness of her naked body. She pulled the coat around her shoulders, then got out of the bed. "Okay," she said. "But let's be quick." We left my cabin and let ourselves out of the creche. We hurried along the corridors. As Victoria had said, this late at night no one was about and the corridor lights were dimmed. In a few minutes we had reached her room. I closed the door and bolted it. Victoria sat down on the bed, holding her coat around her. I took off my uniform and climbed into the bed. "Come on, Victoria." "I don't feel like it now." "Guilds! Why not?" "We should have stayed where we were," she said. "Do you want to go back?" "Of course not." "Get in with me," I said. "Don't sit there." "Okay." She undid her coat and dropped it on the floor, then climbed in beside me. We put our arms around each other and kissed for a moment, but I knew what she meant. The desire had left me as rapidly as it had come. After a while we just lay there in silence. The sensation of being in bed with her was pleasant, but although I was aware of the sensuality of it nothing happened. Eventually, I said, "Why did you come .to see me?" "I told you." "Was that all -- that you were sorry?" "I think so." "I nearly came to see you," I said. "I've done something I shouldn't. I'm frightened," "What was it?" "I told you -- I told you I had been made to swear something. You were right, the guilds impose secrecy on their members. When I became an apprentice I had to take an oath and part of it was that I had to swear I would not reveal the existence of the oath. I broke it by telling you." "Does it matter?" "The penalty is death." "But why should they ever find out?" "If-" Victoria said, "If I say anything, you mean. Why should I?" "Pm not sure. But the way you were talking today -- your resentment at not being allowed to lead your own life -- I felt sure you would use it against me." "Until just now it meant nothing to me. I wouldn't use it. Anyway, why should a wife betray her husband?" "You still want to marry me?" "Yes." "Even though it was arranged for us?" "It's a good arrangement," she said and held me tighter for a few moments. "Don't you feel the same?" "Yes." . "Will you tell me what goes on outside the city?" "I can't." "Because of the oath?" "Yes." "But you're already in breach of it. What could matter now?" "There's nothing to tell anyway," I said. "I've spent ten days doing a lot of physical work and I'm not sure why." "What kind of physical work?" "Victoria -- don't question me about it." "Well, tell me about the sun. Why is no one in the city allowed to see it?" "I don't know." "Is there something wrong with it?" "I don't think so -- " Victoria was asking me questions I should have asked myself, but hadn't. In the welter of new experiences, there had been hardly time to register the meaning of anything I'd seen, let alone query it. Confronted with these questions -- quite aside from whether or not I should answer them -- I found myself demanding answers. Was there indeed something wrong with the sun that could endanger the city? Should this be kept secret, if so? But I had seen the sun and... "There's nothing wrong with it," I said. "But it doesn't look the same shape as I'd thought." "It's a sphere." "No it's not. Or at least it doesn't look like one." "Well?" "I shouldn't tell you, I'm sure." "You can't leave it like that," she said. "I don't think it's important." "I do." "Okay." I had already said too much, but what could I do? "You can't see it properly during the day, because it's so bright. But at sunrise or sunset you can see it for a few minutes. I think it's diskshaped. But it's more than that and I don't know the words to describe it. In the center of the disk, top and bottom, there's a kind of shaft." "Part of the sun?" "Yes. A bit like a spinning top. But it's difficult to see clearly because it's so bright even at those times. The other night I was outside and the sky was clear. There's a moon and that's the same shape. But I couldn't see that clearly either, because it was in the wrong phase." "Are you sure of this?" "It's what I've seen." "But it's not what we were taught." "I know," I said. "But that's how it is." I said no more. Victoria asked more questions but I pushed them aside, pleading that I did not know the answers. She tried to draw me out further on the work I was doing, but somehow I managed to keep my silence. Instead I asked her questions about herself and soon we had moved away from what was for me a dangerous subject. It could not be buried forever, but I needed time to think. Some time later we made love and shortly afterward we fell asleep. some breakfast, then left me sitting naked in her room while she took my uniform to be laundered. While she was away I washed and shaved, then lay on the bed until she returned. I put my uniform on again. It felt crisp and fresh, not at all like the rather stiff and odorous second skin it had become as a result of my labors outside. We spent the rest of the day together. Victoria took me around to show me the interior of the city. It was far more complex than I had ever realized. Most of what l had seen until then was the residential and administrative section, but there was more to it than this. At first I wondered how I should ever find my way around until Victoria pointed out that in several places plans of the layout had been attached to the walls. I noted that the plans had been altered many times and one in particular caught my attention. We were in one of the lower levels, and beside a recently drawn revised plan was a much older one, preserved behind a sheet of transparent plastic. I looked at this with great interest, noting that its directions were printed in several languages. Of these I could recognize only the French and English. "What are these others?" I asked her. "That's German and the others are Russian and Italian. And this -- " she pointed to an ornate, ideographic script -- "is Chinese." I looked more closely at the plan, comparing it with the recent one next to it. The similarity could be seen, but it was clear that much alteration work had been carried out inside the city between the compiling of the two plans. "Why were there so many languages?" "We're descended from a group of mixed nationals. I believe English has been the standard language for many thousands of miles, but that's not always been the case. My own family is descended from the French." "Oh, yes," I said. On this same level Victoria showed me the synthetics plant. It was here that the protein-substitutes and other organic surrogates were synthesized from timber and vegetable products. The smell was terribly strong and I noticed that all the people who worked here were wearing masks. Victoria and I passed quickly into the next area, where research was carried out to improve texture and flavor. It was here, Victoria told me, sire would soon be working. Later Victoria expressed more of her frustrations, her fears for the future. This time I was more prepared and was able' to reassure her. I told her to look at her own mother, who led a fulfilled and useful life. I promised her -- under persuasion -- that I would tell her more of my own life and said that I would do what I could, when I became a full guildsman, to make the system more open, more liberal. My promise seemed to quiet her a little and together we passed a relaxed evening and night. should marry as soon as possible. She told me that during the next mile she would find out what formalities we had to undergo and that if it were possible we would marry during my next period of leave or during the one after. In the meantime I had to return to my duties outside. As soon as I came out from underneath the city it was obvious that much progress had been made. The immediate environment of the city had been cleared of most of the impedimenta of the work. No temporary buildings were in sight and no battery-operated vehicles stood against the recharging points -- all, presumably, were in use beyond the ridge. A more fundamental difference was that leading out from the northern edge of the city were five cables, which lay on the ground beside the tracks and disappeared from view over the hump of the ridge. On guard beside the track were several militiamen. Suspecting that Malchuskin would be busy I walked quickly toward the ridge. When I reached the summit my suspicions were confirmed. In the distance, where the tracks ended, a flurry of activity concentrated around the right inner track. More crews were working on some metal structures beyond, but from this distance it was impossible to determine their function. I hastened down. The walk took me longer than I. had anticipated, as the longest section of track was now more than a mile and a half in length. Already the sun was high and by the time I found Malchuskin and his crew I was hot and sweaty. Malchuskin barely acknowledged me and I took off the jacket of my uniform and joined in the work. The crews were laboring to get this section of track extended to a length equal to the others, but the complication was that a patch of ground with a rock-hard subsoil had been encountered. Although this meant that the concrete foundations were not necessary, the pits for the sleepers could only be dug with the greatest difficulty. I found a pickaxe on a nearby truck and started to work. Soon the more sophisticated problems I had encountered inside the city seemed very remote indeed. In the periods of rest I 'gathered from Malchuskin that apart from this section of track all was nearly ready for the winching operation. The cables had been extended and the stays were dug. He took me out to the stay-emplacements and showed me how the steel girders were buried deep into the ground to provide a sufficiently strong anchor for the cables. Three of the stays were completed and the cables were connected. One more stay was in the process oh completion, and the fifth was being erected now. There was a general air of anxiety among the guildsmen working on the site and I asked Malchuskin the cause of this. "They're fretting about time," he said. "It's taken us twenty-three days since the last winching to lay the tracks this far. On present estimates we'll be able to winch the city tomorrow if nothing goes wrong. That's twentyfour days. Right? The most we can winch the city this time is just under two miles-but in the time we've taken to do that the optimum has moved forward two and a half miles. So even when we've done this we'll still be half a mile farther behind optimum than we were at the last winching." "Can we make that up?" "On the next winching, perhaps. I was talking to some of the Traction men last night. They reckon we can do a short winch next time -- and then two long ones. They're worried about those hills." He waved vaguely in a northern direction. "Can't we go around them?" I said, noting that a long way to the northeast the hills appeared to be slightly lower. "We could -- but the shortest route toward optimum is due north. Any angular deflection away from that just adds distance to be covered." I didn't fully understand everything he told me, but the sense of urgency came across clearly. "There's one good thing," Malchuskin went on. "We're dropping this crowd of tooks after this. Future has found a bigger settlement somewhere up north and the people there are desperate for work. That's how I like them. The hungrier they' are the harder they'll work -- for a time at least." The work continued. That evening we didn't finish until after sunset, Malchuskin and the other Track guildsmen driving laborers with bigger and better curses. I had no time to react one way or another, for the guildsmen themselves -- and I -- worked no less hard. By the time we returned to the hut for the night I was exhausted. the hut early, instructing me to bring Rafael and the laborers to the site as soon as possible. When I arrived he and three other Track guildsmen were in argument with the guildsmen preparing the cables. I set Rafael and the men to work on the track, but I was curious about the dispute. When Malchuskin eventually came over to us he said nothing about it but threw himself into the work, shouting angrily at Rafael. Some time later, when we took a short break, I asked him about the trouble. "The Traction men," he said, "want to start winching now, before the track's finished." "Can they do that?" "Yes. They say it'll take some time to get the city up to the ridge and we could finish off here while that's going on. We won't allow it." "Why not? It sounds reasonable." "Because it would mean working under the cables. There's a lot of strain on the cables, particularly when the city's being winched up a slope, like the one before the ridge. You've never seen a cable break, have you?" It was a rhetorical question. I hadn't known before this that cables were even used. "You'd be cut in half before you heard the bang," Malchuskin finished sourly. "So what was agreed?" "We've got an hour to finish. Then they start winching." There were still three sections of rail to lay. We gave the men a few more minutes' rest and then the work started again. As there were now four guildsmen and their teams concentrated in one area we moved quickly, but even so it took most of the hour to complete the track. With some satisfaction Malchuskin signaled to the Traction men that we were ready. We collected our tools and carried them to one side. "What now?" I asked Malchuskin. "We wait. I'm going back to the city for a rest. Tomorrow we start again." "What shall I do?" "I'd watch if I were you. You'll find it interesting. Anyway, we ought to pay off these men. I'll send a Barter guildsman out to you later today. Keep them here until he arrives. I'll be back in the morning." "Okay," I said. "Anything else?" "Not really. While the winching is taking place the Traction men are in charge out here, so if they tell you to jump, jump. They might need something done to the tracks, so you'd better be alert. But I think the tracks are all right. They've already been checked." He walked away from me, toward his hut. He looked very tired. The hired men also went to their huts and soon I was left to my own devices. Malchuskin's remark about the danger of a breaking cable had alarmed me, so I sat down on the ground at what I considered a safe distance from the site. There was not much activity in the region of the stay emplacements. All five of the cables had been hooked up, and now ran slackly from the stays across the ground parallel to the tracks. Two Traction guildsmen were by the emplacements, carrying out what I presumed was a final check on the connections. From the region of the ridge a group of men appeared and walked in two orderly files toward us. From this distance it was not possible to see who they were, but I noticed that one of their number left the file at approximately hundred-yard intervals and took up a position at the side of the track. As the men approached I saw that they were militiamen, each equipped with a crossbow. By the time the group reached the stay emplacements only eight of them were left and these took up a defensive formation. After a few minutes one of the militiamen walked over to me. "Who are you?" "Apprentice Helward Mann." "What are you doing?" "I've been told to watch the winching." "All right. Keep your distance. How many tooks are there here?" "I'm not sure," I said. "About sixty, I think." "They been working on the track?" "Yes." He grinned. "Too bloody tired to do any harm. That's okay. Let me know if they cause any trouble." He wandered away and joined the other militiamen. What kind of trouble the laborers would cause wasn't clear to me, but the attitude of the militia toward them seemed to be curious. I could only presume that at some time in the past the tooks had caused some kind of damage to the tracks or the cables, but l couldn't see any of the men with whom we'd been working presenting a threat to us. T HE militiamen on guard beside the tracks seemed to me to be dangerously near the cables, but they showed no sign of any awareness of this. They marched patiently to and fro, pacing their allotted sections of the track. I noticed that the two Traction men at the emplacements had taken up a position behind metal shields, just beyond the stays. One of them had a large red flag and was looking through binoculars toward the ridge. There, beside the five wheel pulleys, I could just make out another man. As all attention seemed to be on this man I watched him curiously. He had his back toward us, as far as I could make out at this distance. Suddenly he turned and swung his flag to attract the attention of the two men at the stays. He waved it in a wide semicircle below his waist, to and fro. Immediately the man at the stays with the flag came out from behind his shield and confirmed the signal by repeating the movement with his own flag. A few moments later I noticed that the cables were sliding slowly across the ground toward the city. On the ridge I could see the pulley wheels turning as the slack was taken up. One by one the cables stopped moving, although the major part of their length still lay flat on the ground -- I presumed because of the weight of the cables themselves, for in the region of the stays and the pulleys the cables were well clear of the ground. "Give them the clear," shouted one of the men at the stays and at once his colleague waved his flag over his head. The man on the ridge repeated the signal, then moved quickly to one side and was lost to view. I waited, curious to see what was next -- although from all I could see nothing was happening. The militiamen paced to and fro -- the cables stayed taut. I decided to walk over to the Traction men and find out what was going on. No sooner was I on my feet and walking in their direction than the man who had been signaling waved his arms at me frantically. "Keep clear!" he shouted. "What's wrong?" "The cables are under maximum strain!" I moved back. The minutes passed and there was no evident progress. Then I realized that the cables had been slowly tightening until they were clear of the ground for most of their length. I stared southward at the dip in the ridge: the city had come into sight. From where I was sitting I could just see the top corner of one of the forward towers bulking up over the soil and rocks of the ridge. More of the city came into view even as I watched. I moved in a broad arc, still maintaining a healthy distance from the cables, and stood behind the stays, looking along the tracks toward the city. With painful slowness it winched itself up the farther slope until it was only a few feet away from the five wheel pulleys which carried the cables over the crest of the ridge. Here it stopped and the Traction men began their signaling once more. There followed a long and complicated operation in which each of the cables was slackened off in turn, while the wheel pulley was dismantled. I watched the first pulley removed in this way, then grew bored. I realized I was hungry and, suspecting that I was unlikely to miss anything of interest, I went back to the hut and heated a meal for myself. There was no sign of Malchuskin, although nearly all his possessions were still in the hut. I took my time over the meal, knowing that at least another two hours would elapse before the winching could be resumed. I enjoyed the solitude and the change from the strenuous work of the past day. When I left the hut I remembered the militiaman's warning about potential trouble from the laborers and walked over to their dormitory. Most of them were outside, sitting on the ground, watching the work on the pulleys. A few were talking, arguing loudly and gesticulating, but I decided the militia saw threats where none existed. I walked back toward the track. long to nightfall. I reasoned that the rest of the winching should not take long once the pulleys were out of the way, for it was clear that now the tracks led along a downhill gradient. In due course the final pulley was removed and all five cables were once again taut. There was a short wait until, at a signal from the Traction man at the stays, the slow progress of the city continued -- down the slope toward us. Contrary to what I had imagined, the city did not run smoothly of its own accord on the advantageous gradient. By the evidence of what I saw the cables were still taut -- the city was still having to pull itself. As it came closer I detected a slackening of tension in the manner of the two Traction men, but their vigilance didn't alter. Throughout the operation they concentrated their whole attention on the oncoming city. Finally, when the huge construction was no more than about ten yards from the end of the tracks, the signaler raised his red flag and held it over his head. A large window ran across the face of the forward tower and here one of the many men who stood in view raised a similar flag. Seconds later the city halted. There was a pause of about two minutes. Then a man came through a doorway in the tower and stood on a small platform overlooking us. "Okay -- brakes secured," he called down. "We're slackening off now." The two Traction men came out from behind their metal shelters and stretched their limbs exaggeratedly. Undoubtedly they had been under considerable mental strain for several hours. One of them walked straight over to the edge of the city and urinated against its side. He grinned back at the other, then hauled himself up onto a ledge and clambered up the superstructure of the city itself until he reached the platform. The other man walked down past the cables -- which were now visibly slacker-and disappeared under the lip of the city itself. The militiamen were still deployed in their defensive formation, but even they seemed to be more relaxed now. The show was over. Seeing the city so near I was tempted to go inside myself, but I wasn't sure whether I should. There was only Victoria to see, and she would be occupied with her work. Besides, Malchuskin had told me to stay with the men and I thought I ought not disobey him. As I was walking toward the hut a man came to me from the direction of the city. "Are you Apprentice Mann?" "Yes." "Jaime Codings, from the Barter guild. Track Malchuskin said there were some hired men here who were to be paid off." "That's right." "How many?" said Codings. "In our crew, fifteen. But there are several more." "Any complaints?" "What do you mean?" I said. "Complaints -- any trouble, refusal to work." "They were a bit slow, and Malchuskin was always shouting at them." "Did they ever refuse to work?" "No." "A#I right. Do you know who their squad leader was?" "There was one called Rafael, who spoke English." "He'll do." the huts and we found the men. At their sight of Codings, silence fed abruptly. I pointed out Rafael. Codings and he spoke together in Rafael's language and almost at once one of the others shouted out angrily. Rafael ignored him and spoke to Codings, but it was clear that there was a lot of animosity. Once again someone shouted and soon many of the others had joined in. A crowd gathered around Codings and Rafael, some of the men reaching through the packed bodies and jabbing at Codings. "Do you need any help?" I shouted over the row at him, but he didn't hear. I moved closer and shouted the question again. "Get four of the militia," he called out in English. "Ted them to keep it low." I stared at the arguing men for a moment, then hurried away. There was still a small group of the militia in the area of the cable stays and I went in that direction. They had evidently heard the noise of the argument and were already looking toward the crowd of men. When they saw me running over to them six of the men started out. "He wants four militiamen," I said, gasping from my running. "Not enough. Leave that to me, sonny." The man who had spoken, who was evidently in charge, whistled loudly and beckoned toward some more of his men. Four more militiamen left their position near the city and ran over. The group of ten soldiers now ran toward the scene of the argument. I tailed them. Without waiting to consult Collings, who was still in the center of the melee, the militiamen charged into the group of men, swinging their crossbows as clubs. Codings turned around suddenly, shouted at the militiamen, but was seized from behind by one of the workers. He was dragged to the ground and the men moved in, kicking at him. The militiamen were obviously trained for this kind of fighting, for they moved expertly and quickly, swinging their improvised clubs with great precision and accuracy. I watched for a moment, then joined the struggle, trying to reach Codings. One of the hired men grabbed at my face, his fingers closing over my eyes. I tried to snatch my head away, but he had helpers. Suddenly I was free -- and saw two men who had attacked me fad. The militiamen who had rescued me made no sign of recognition, but carried on with their brutal clubbing. The crowd was swelling now, as other locals came to give assistance. I paid no heed to this and turned back into the thick of it, still trying to reach Codings. A narrow back was directly in front of me, clad in a thin white shirt sticking wetly to the skin. Unthinkingly I slammed my arm around the man's throat, pulled his head back and punched him roughly in the ear. He dropped. Another man was beyond him and I tried the same tactic, but this time before I could land a blow I was kicked roughly and went down. Through the mass of legs I saw Codings 's body on the ground, still being kicked. He was lying face down, his arms defensively over his head. I tried to push my way across to him, but then I too was being kicked. Another foot slammed against the side of my head, and for a moment I blacked out. A second later I was conscious again and, like Codings, I covered my head with my arms but pushed myself forward in the direction I had last seen him. Everything around me seemed to be a surging forest of legs and bodies and everywhere there was the roar of raised voices. Lifting my head for a moment I saw that I was only inches from Codings and pushed my way through until I was crouched on the ground beside him. I tried to stand, but was immediately felled by another kick. Much to my surprise I realized Codings was still conscous. As I fed against him I felt his arm go over my shoulders. "When I say," he bawled in my ear, "stand up!" A moment passed and I felt his arm grip my shoulder more tightly. "Now!" With a massive effort we pushed ourselves upward and at once he released me, swinging his fist around and catching a man full in the face. I did not have his height and the best I could manage was an elbow-jab into someone's stomach. For my trouble I was punched in the neck and once more fell. Someone grabbed me and hauled me to my feet.' It was Collings. "Hold it!" He put both his arms around me and pulled me erect. "It's okay," he said. "Hold on." Gradually the jostling around us eased, then stopped. The men moved back. I was dazed and through a red mist building up in my sight I caught a glimpse of a circle of militiamen, their armed crossbows raised and aimed. The hired men were moving away. I passed out. later. I was lying on the ground and one of the militiamen was standing over me. "He's okay," he shouted and moved away. I rolled painfully onto my side and saw that a short distance away Collings and the leader of the militia were arguing angrily. About fifty yards from me the hired men were standing in a group, surrounded by the militiamen. I tried to stand up and managed it on my second attempt. Dazedly, I stood and watched while Codings continued to argue. In a moment the militia officer walked toward the group of prisoners and Codings came over to me. "How do you feel?" he said. I tried to grin, but my face was swollen and painful. All I could do was stare at him. He had a huge red bruise up one side of his face and his eye was beginning to close. I noticed that he held one arm around his waist. "I'm okay," I said. "You're bleeding." "Where?" I raised my hand to my neck -- which was hurting abominably -- and felt warm liquid. ColUngs moved over and looked at it. "It's just a bad graze," he said. "Do you want to go back to the city and have treatment?" "No." I said. "What the hell happened?" "The militia over-reacted. I thought I told you to bring four." "They wouldn't listen." "I know -- they're like that." "But what was it all about?" I said. "I've worked with those men for a long time and they've never attacked us before." "There's a lot of built-up resentment," said Codings. "Specifically, in this case the problem was that three of the men have wives in the city. They weren't going to leave without them." "Those men are from the city?" I asked, not sure I had heard properly. "No-I said that their wives are there. These men are all locals, hired from a nearby village." "That was what I thought. But what are their wives doing in the city?" "We bought them." Ou j iOAmoniss viorn nothing coulc I i -- . waited  live ;# ! S SECHiA port and looked out. There was nothing to see, but he looked anyway. He was thinking that it had finally come and that he was no more ready for it now than he had ever been. The thing old spacers feared but never talked about was happening to him. He was lost in the void with no chance of getting home and with a terrified commander who was getting ready to flip his lid. "It's time we got out of here," he said. "Get out where?" said Moore. His voice cracked and his eyelids fluttered up and down like little pale blinds that were out of control. "There's a planet down there and we have a landing boat." "No, we've got to stay here and wait. Someone will come along." "We didn't just run out of gas on a highway somewhere," said Carson. The eyelids fluttered faster. "Don't talk to me like that." Carson started to say something but his mind went blank and he forgot the words. It didn't matter. They couldn't have been important. Once again he stared through the sideport at the empty black space that stretched in every direction. Now his mind was absolutely clear. Twenty minutes earlier he had been outside the ship, floating in that black space. He had gone out to hand-set a marking buoy. Right after he and Moore had spotted the planet they had checked for it on the map. It wasn't there, so they had done what they were paid to do -- prepared a buoy and Carson had gone out to send it on its way to orbit around the planet. The buoy planet could be located whenever someone wanted to find it. Their small ship was like an infant kangaroo that was lost outside its mother's pouch. Somewhere out in the void were the remains of the mother craft. Captain Larsen, fifty crewmen and the big, modern spacecruiser were dead. One minute the intercom had been chattering busily-the next had brought only silence. Like an umbilicus, the intercom fed comfort and security to the small ship, assured its crew that when the work day was over they could return to the protection of the mother craft. When the intercom stopped signaling, Moore and Carson made repeated attempts to reestablish communication. They failed and this meant only one thing. Something had happened to the big ship. The umbilicus was severed and the infant drifted helplessly. sideport and looked at the young man who was going to be his companion in death. Moore was his superior. No, Moore had been his superior. Now neither was top man. They were both subordinate to fate, Lady Luck, lousy circumstance. They had a landing boat and a few days' rations of food and water and they had an impassable stretch of distance between them and Earth. "You realize what this means," he said. "There's just you and me and what's outside that window." Moore jammed his eyes shut. "Shut up. Don't talk." Carson walked away. He began packing equipment and putting it into the little auxiliary boat. Moore followed him, dogged every footstep he took. "I'm not giving up." "Who said anything about giving up?" said Carson. "We're still alive." "For what? What do you call being alive?" "Just plain breathing, if that's all there is left to me. Somewhere you have to draw a line between what you want and what you'll settle for." "You don't know what's down there. Maybe there's no air, maybe it's too hot or all frozen. We may crash." "Maybe," said Carson. "We can't risk it. Not until we're sure. I don't want to go down there. This is insanity. You're insane. You should have been retired ten years ago. Why did they put me with an old man who's lived his life? I'm twenty-three. I haven't had any life at all." "Get in the boat," said Carson. He wondered what he would do if Moore refused. Emitting whimpers of despair, Moore climbed inside. Carson strapped himself into the pilot's seat and released the auxiliary from the larger craft. They floated free and drifted away. He didn't have much fuel. At exactly the same instant the instruments signaled a mass ahead he turned on the jets and took the boat into the planet's atmosphere. It looked worse than bad. Where was the sun? There was nothing but fog, nothing but gray mist prowling ahead of them, ugly and impossible to see through. No sunlight, no trees or flowers or vegetables, probably no animal life. He stiffened as Moore made a little gasping sound. Quickly he examined the screen, and then he saw it. "An ocean," said Moore. It looked like no ocean Carson had ever seen. It seemed endless. From the looks of it, they were coming down during a seasonal storm or this world was one big hurricane. Colossal waves rose and smashed together, formed snowy fringes that erupted into the sky and sprayed the boat with hard jets of water. "We're nearly out of fuel," said Moore. Through the fog Carson saw a dead-white shadow that looked like a stretch of beach. He gave the brake rockets a blast and prepared for a landing. Moore suddenly yelled and grabbed his arm. He dropped faster than he had intended. He tried to avoid the dune that leaped up in front of the screen, but he was too late. The boat's bottom scraped several yards of sandy rock off the dune and gave up a sizable section of her hull. It turned out to be a fortunate accident. If they hadn't hit the dune, they would have plowed into the bordering ocean that began a mile from where the first one ended. Their impetus was slowed by the partial collision and Carson was able to land short of a row of angry waves. It took him a shaky minute to realize they were down. His hands dropped from the controls and he sat frozen in his seat and listened to the whistling sound of air escaping from the chamber. Cautiously, he took a sniff. "I smell sulfur." He looked at Moore. "It's all right. The air is good. Doesn't smell so sweet, but it's good. I think." The lights in the ceiling flickered and grew dim. "You work on the power box while I take a look at the hull," Carson said. Moore lay inert, his eyes fixed on the screen. "Get up. Do as I say!" While the younger man fumbled his way out of his seat, Carson shifted supplies to cover the hole in the hull. Most of the damage was in the rear. Two cases of food tins had dropped out when they hit the sand. Wherever they were now, they were gone, along with the flashlights, flares and mattresses. He scratched his stubbled cheeks and thought about what was outside. "There isn't more than a mile of beach between those oceans," he said. "It must be no more than a sand bar. We'll be able to take a look outside at dawn." He lay down on his seat and stared at the screen. His stomach complained. There was one carton of rations between them. T HE medical belt strapped around his waist pinched him and he shifted position. While he watched for any movement on the beach, he thought about the belt. Back on a planet called Earth a man named Stanton had fastened the belt on Carson's body and had said a few things as he did so. "Don't ever take it off. No matter what happens, wear it." "Sounds important," Carson had said. "Call it the Physician. It's miniature but mighty. It knows every alien bug we've ever picked up. Nothing can kill you." "Barring death?" Stanton hadn't smiled. "We don't know the Physician's limitations. You aren't feeling any pricks but it's putting monitor wires into every essential part of your body. It carries more cures than you ever heard of. It can think, diagnose, prescribe and deal out the medicine." "Sounds like a miracle worker." "It's the Physician." "The master of my body?" said Carson. "Maybe more than that," said Stanton. "You mean my soul, too?" "Make jokes. The Physician exists to keep you alive. Your suit is supposed to protect you from alien environments. What happens if the suit springs a leak? Pressure, heat, gas, chemicals-the Physician can prep your body to resist them if you aren't exposed to them too quickly." "What about something that kills me slowly?" "It won't," said Stanton. "You're sure you aren't dreaming?" "I know what went into this thing. What I don't know is exactly how good it is. But it was made to keep you alive and it will do its job come hell or..." The last thought made Carson jerk upright in his seat. Damn Stanton and the medical belt. There were no problems of pressure or heat here, only the big ones of certain starvation and probably more alien bugs than a computer could count. He looked at his watch and realized he must have dozed. It was growing lighter outside and he could make out the waves thundering onto the beach. Moore was doing exercises in the space between the seats. Carson got up, went to the rear of the cabin and opened the food case. There had been eighteen tins the last time he checked. Now there were six. All the beef was gone. He turned and looked at Moore. The younger man's breath sent puffs of vapor into the air as he did knee bends. Strain and desperation were on his face. He tried to finish a bend and get upright again. At the last moment he grabbed one of the seats and threw himself across it. A wave of dizziness hit Carson. He swayed. "I expect you to share those cans of beef with me." Moore lay on the seat with his head buried in his arms. "I need more food than you." "We're going to share it -- right down to the last bite." Moore only buried his head deeper in his arms. Carson opened two tins of fruit and ate. After that he pulled his hat down over his ears, stepped out of the cabin and pressed the steel door shut behind him. wind. It was full of hard rain that found its way into every opening in his clothing. The sound of it was worse. Its screech, as it hurtled across the beach at him, entered his gered away from the boat and at the same time tore pieces from his handkerchief and stuffed them in his ears. This muffled the sound a bit so that instead of tearing his head apart it rumbled up and down every nerve in his spine. His feet made holes in the sand as he walked along the saturated beach. Behind him stretched a line of puddles. The ocean was a heaving mass. Whitecaps rose in the air and ran toward him. He gave up trying to protect his face from the spray. There was no defense against such a planet. There had to be germs in his body, old and new, and the Physician must be working overtime right now. It was all a waste of time. There were no cures for hunger and fear. The beach was dotted with dunes and he sat on one and thought for a long while. What about a raft? A useless idea. Even if there was anything on this world besides oceans and sandbars he and Moore would drown before they got a hundred yards from shore. His legs grew numb with cold and he realized water had soaked through his pants. It poured into his boots as he stood up. Sick and miserable, he dropped his chin to his chest and shut his eyes. There was no way out. This little wet patch was going to be his grave. He shuffled back to the boat and knocked on the hatch. The sound was absorbed by the wind and he knocked harder. He sensed movement on the other side of the panel, knew Moore was standing there with his face touching the cold steel, listening to him. He thundered on the hull with his fist. "Go away," yelled Moore. "Open up." "No." Carson swayed. The wind knocked him off his feet into a puddle. He scrambled up and threw himself at the boat. "Let me in." "Pay me first," cried Moore. Carson bent down and a quart of water flushed from his coat collar. Placing his hands on the hull, he pushed and kicked. Fog licked at his neck. The wind at his back became hands that tried to pull him down to the sand where it could lash him to shreds; the howling gale became a single shriek that threatened to shatter his brain. His fear built shapes that stalked him through the mist. They took hold of him with inhuman fingers, drew him away from the boat. He heard a sniffling sound. Pushing his face into the storm, he opened his eyes wide. He found himself crouched on the sand with his body turned to the water, and he realized that his legs were making weak movements forward. He screamed and leaped at the boat. "Let me in!" "Two cans of food," said Moore. Again he smashed at the panel. "The food should be mine," said Moore. His fists were bruised and bleeding. "Two cans," he gasped. "No, by God, I want it all!" "You can have it all." The door swung open. A heavy boot caught him in the face as he fell forward. passed before he came to consciousness. When he opened his eyes he found Moore on his knees beside him, staring intently down at him. There was a gun in Moore's hand and there was fear in his eyes. "You stopped breathing for about five minutes. I knew you were alive, but you weren't breathing." "Get away from me." "How could you do it? How could you live without breathing?" Moore began to make gagging sounds. Putting his hand over his mouth, he started to heave. Carson grabbed the gun and climbed to his feet. He threw the gun at the wall, fell onto his seat and held his aching head. "I'm sick," Moore gasped. Carson closed his eyes. His head hurt, his stomach ached and he couldn't seem to get enough air into his lungs. Staggering to his seat, Moore dropped into it like a limp bundle, "You were so worried about the food. You needn't have been. It makes you sick to eat." "We can't be sick," said Carson. "We're wearing the medical belts. We're just in a state of shock." "This whole planet is in a state of shock. It doesn't like human beings." "It's just another planet." Moore leaned over, stared at him. "How do you feel? Inside, I mean." "Cold, hungry, thirsty, miserable." "I feel like a balloon that's about ready to pop. The pressure is all through me, in my legs, my arms, my chest and head. I keep thinking the next breath will finally do it, open that hole in the top of my skull and everything inside will go up like a firecracker. I start to pick up something and suddenly my fingers don't work -- or I start to scratch myself and I find the itch is in my fingers or my arms -- or it's inside my brain where I can't get at it -- " "Shut up," said Carson. "You feel it. You're scared, like me. If it hadn't been for you I wouldn't be here, but I can't kill you because I don't want to be left alone." "We're both scared. If you'd get hold of yourself we might be able to figure something out." "We don't have a prayer. There isn't anything on this planet but water." "Go to sleep," said Carson. He closed his eyes, made himself lie flat on the seat. Exhaustion swarmed over him and he felt himself slipping down a dark slope toward sleep. He forced himself awake long enough to take a look at Moore. The other man lay on his back, his eyes shut. He looked dead. His chest was still. He wasn't breathing. But Carson knew he was alive. Once he sat up, torn from a sound sleep, to find Moore fumbling at him. "Did you hear it?" "What?" said Carson. "Someone called me." "I was talking in my sleep." "It wasn't you." Carson dreamed he was lost in a black cloud, his weightless body drowned in fog. Stretching his legs, he felt his foot touch something. Frantically he groped for it. His fingers reached out, his body extended. He got out of his seat and stood up. "Where are you going?" said Moore, his voice frightened. "Home." "I am awake." He opened the door. Moore leaped from his seat and gave him a violent shove. "Go, damn you! Whatever is out there can have you, but it won't get sand. Water filled his mouth. Wind swooped into his ears. Spray lashed his face. He awoke with a scream. Staggering to his feet, he walked toward the ocean. His foot touched the roiling surf. He took one last breath before going into the waves. Water closed over his head and the tide grabbed his legs and drew him down into a dark universe of suffocating pain. As he opened his mouth to inhale and put an end to the pain, something encircled his waist and began to take him upward and away from the grave. He struggled, but the arm was too strong. Abruptly he felt the wind on his face. He was still fighting as he was taken from the sea and carried ashore. There came a steady pressure on his back and then he forgot everything in his struggle to keep from choking to death. At last he rolled onto his back and looked up. There were two of them, and their brown, scaly skins shone in the dim light. The scales shifted as they moved. Each stood six feet tall on two legs that ended in broad, web-toed feet. Each hand had three webbed digits. The heads were large. The eyes protruded. There were double indentations for nostrils. They had wide mouths and jutting chins. Long slits opened and closed where their ears would have been, had they been human, and similar slits moved on their sides. "Fish," said a hoarse, insane voice. Moore came swiftly across the sand, the gun in one hand up and aimed and before Carson could cry out, the shot sounded. One of the aliens dropped to the sand without making a sound. Its companion stepped back but made no attempt to escape. "Goddamn you, you killed it," cried Carson. "What did you think I meant to do?" Moore asked as he scrambled on over the sand. "Keep your eye on that other one." He grabbed a knife from his pocket, lunged onto the fallen creature and carved a deep line in its leg. Hacking off a chunk of flesh, he raised it to his nose and sniffed. With a curse, he hurled it away. "Stinking animal," he yelled and drove his knife into the carcass. The other creature sprang at him and wrapped its fingers around his throat. Moore sank the knife into its shoulder as he fell. Yanking it free, he raised it to stab again. Carson hurtled forward, hit him with a fist and knocked him onto his back. The creature tried to reach Moore's throat and Carson took it by the leg and hauled it away a few yards. He turned just as Moore rushed him. This time he punched with all his strength. Moore lay on his side, blood gushing from his nose. For an instant he looked as if he were going to attack again. Instead he turned onto his stomach and crawled away toward the boat. Carson knelt beside the wounded creature. The inner sheath of its double-lidded eyes slid up and down as it watched him. He shivered and tried to shield his face from the wind with his coat collar. As he reached to touch the scaly body a sudden pain ripped through his chest. He coughed, vomited. Clawing at his throat, he fell across the creature and blacked out. Two alien hands were kneading his back and neck when he regained consciousness. He rolled over. The alien stayed beside him, blinking its double-lidded eyes and gently blowing water from its gill-ears. It watched him with quiet interest. "Get out of here," Carson said weakly. "That crazy Moore will kill you just for fun." The alien blew water and kept its eyes on his face. "You're in the wrong place to have that big head," Carson whispered. "Who ever heard of a fish with brains?" He drew his knees to his chest to relieve the pain in his stomach. Spray slapped his bare head. He hunched against a dune and tried to wish he were dead, but within him a spark of insanity flared and he knew he wanted to live. He kept seeing fields of Earth shimmering in heat waves, deserts scorched from the sun, pots boiling over open fires. He hated to let go. There were still things he had to think about, questions he wanted to find answers to, places he wanted to go. "I don't need you," he said to the alien. He pointed to the ocean. "Go on, get out of here. Go home." The creature obeyed. With fluid motions it turned and entered the water. fact that the wind and spray battered his unprotected face. It made no difference. He was too old, too human, too fragile to meet this planet on its own terms and survive. He thought of Stanton, spoke away. "What now, mister miracle worker? There's no cure for the incurable, you know. Why did you waste your breath? But it's funny. Even at this stage of the game, I can't help wondering. A machine, being a narrow-minded idiot, doesn't know when to quit. What does it do when its primary function turns out to be impossible? Does it have a nervous breakdown? I wonder..." He must have slept, for when he opened his eyes the faint light in the sky was nearly gone. He was astonished that he was still alive. A cautious inventory of what he was feeling inside made him sit up in bewildered alarm. It wasn't possible that he could feel so well. He ought to be burning up with fever, ought to be lying in the mud and hacking out his lungs. He started to get up and felt the seat of his pants rip. Carefully, he stood up straight. For a moment he swayed with vertigo and then a warm glow began to radiate inside him. New energy flowed through his back and legs. It scared him. It wasn't normal. He liked it, but it was wrong. He should be dead, stretched out in t he puddles like a wet sock. "What the hell?" he said. "What's -- " Something happened to his voice. He opened his mouth to yell, but he couldn't make a sound. His jacket gripped him across the chest like a vise and he took a few stumbling steps, tried to curse. He tore off the jacket and threw it to the ground. Before he had time to tell himself (hat he had lost his mind his feet began to hurt. The boots were crushing them. Hopping in awkward circles, he rid himself of his confining clothes. When the wind swooped upon him he snarled at his insanity and tried to put the boots back on. All at once he stood .still. He trembled with shock. His heart pounded. Alter a long look at the foot he had been trying to ram into his boot he sat on the sand with his arms wrapped across his chest. Finally he had another look. His foot was turning a dark brown color. Between the thickening toes a sheath of skin was beginning to form. He fell face down in the sand and covered his head with his arms. He wanted to crawl inside the planet, conceal himself in it, hide from the atmosphere, the light, his own horror. He dug in with his toes and felt the sand grate against the new skin growing there. He had a disease the Physician couldn't combat. Not once had he believed the machine was a miracle worker -- and he had been right. He raised his head and looked into the dim light and the planet closed about him like a living thing. Death moved up close and he squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the terror that would come. Narrow-minded machine -- give it several orders but make one the most important: keep this mortal package alive. Put all the elements you could think of at its disposal; narrowminded machine would naturally play God. Master of my body, master of my soul. I have only one being. Not two. A master of one is the master of the other. Have I got that correct? Have I forgotten something? reality around him he abandoned Earth and all it had meant to him. There would be no escape from this world. Earth was another dimension that would never come his way again. They no longer belonged to one another. His body lengthened and filled out. The pores of his flesh opened and grew new tissue, a tough and durable material that cut the wind's brutality and accepted it like a balmy breeze. He stood on his feet, naked but rapidly becoming clothed with the exterior that he needed in order to survive. Death fled away from him and he laughed without sound. He looked at the boat and the thought came to him that he had to go to Moore, tell him what was happening, make him understand that this was what Carson had meant when he said that somewhere a man had to draw a line between what he wanted and what he would settle for. Effortlessly he ran across the sand toward the boat, raised a hand to rap against the panel. His hand froze in the air. Sorrow billowed in him as he stared through the open door at the figure stretched out on the cabin floor. The gun still in his fist, Moore had a little bloody hole between his eyes. Taking the gun from the limp fingers, Carson laid it aside and examined Moore's hand. He saw the telltale broadening of the palm, the web that had begun to form by the thumb, the darkening of the skin. He left the boat and swung the door shut behind him for the last time. For long minutes he stood looking at the craft that had brought him and the dead boy so far from the mother ship. Moore had believed that being a conformist was more important than being alive. The spray washed over him with exhilarating touches, the wind cooled his body while he waited on the sand. The muted sounds of the planet were music to his mind. He waited, breathing softly at first and then not breathing at all. When it was finished, he knew, and he looked down at himself. What he saw pleased him well enough. It was a good body and not unhandsome to his eyes. The medical belt felt a little tight. With a flick of a finger, he loosened it a notch. He stared up at the fog. Somewhere out there in the void spun a small green planet. The people on it didn't know the exact meaning of life and for the first time in their existence they hadn't insisted that they did. They created a thinking machine that owned an open-ended philosophy. The Physician had no prejudices. Had Stanton known? Maybe he had guessed. If the Physician would not allow a man to die... but this sounded like such a preposterous boast. Yet, suppose it were fact. What if ? Carson walked toward the ocean with an eager step. The sky was dark, and the spray lashed the barren beach as the newly born being sank into the depths of his new world.  T HE most surprising writer I've run across in years is Angela Carter. One might also say "colorful" and "unusual" and a good number of other things, including just plain "good." But "surprising" is exactly the right word, all through Heroes and Villains (Pocket Books, #c). When people speak in her work, you don't know what they're going to say; when they act, you will be surprised at what they do. There are many other good things about Ms. Carter's attack on narrativeher vivid color, her familiarity with her scene, the unexpectedness of her characters and plot development -- but it is the recurrent surprise that is her hallmark. This book was published three years ago in hard covers and well over a year ago in paperback and I did not see it at the time of either release, but damned if I'll withhold a review of it for that reason -- it's too good a book and you deserve it. The publishers list three other books by Angela Carter; I must assume that they are mainstream -- whatever that really means -- but this one, (surprisingly) called on the cover "a gothic fantasy of the future," deals with a post-holocaust situation in which a few neat stockaded villages have been organized by Professors -- anachronistic research scientists and educators with their own militia -- and an outside world of raiding barbarians and certain others -- mutated, sick, rotten, horrible. The story is Marianne's. She grew up, daughter of a Professor, in one of the villages and was a witness, more than once, to raids, until one day, not quite against her will, she rode off with the raiders... and not one more word do you get from me about the story. About the wandering-across-the-line of mainstream writers, however -- and the wandering goes both ways -- I have nothing but applause. Personally I have always felt uneasy with the hardline, stonewall definitions of sf, a field toward which I was drawn originally because it seemed to have no horizons, no limits at all, like poetry. I'll have more to say about that later, but for the moment the surprising Ms. Carter gives us an excellent reason for dissolving barriers. Heroes and Villains leaves me parched for more Carter, and lo on her flyleaf are the names of three more works: Honeybuzzard, The Magic Toyshop, and Several Perceptions. I shall cross that barrier, if indeed there be one, to find and read these books, and may denizens of the deeps of the mainstream, baited by something we have done, be led to paddle over here. We'll all benefit. il acter is Robert Wells, whose Right-handed Wilderness (Ballantine, #) is a real find. Meet Shroud, aging, loving doctor, and the urgent, earnest macho investigator Bart Reve ("Don't call me Mister Reve. I am not half a man; don't use half my name."). And above all, Selinda, whose love for and with Shroud is something to wonder at and wish for (let the prepositions fall where they may). The closely woven strands of his intricate plot leave no loose ends -- overall, it makes no pretensions beyond melodrama and it is that of the highest order. The science aspect is ingenious, unusual, reasonable and provocative. It's the kind of book that makes a buck and a quarter worthwhile outlay -- you pay more for a lousy movie. I N A peculiar and doubtless unjust way I am getting a little bugged at Roger Elwood. He has so many contracts going with so many publishers that he threatens to corner the anthology market, driving out other anthologists with other approaches. I would hate to see him, at his very best, threatening my access to Silverberg, Disch, Knight, Carr, or Harrison Aldiss, just to blurt out an incomplete list. Yet it must be said on the hardworking Mr. E's behalf that he has been able to bug certain publishers, some of them small, remote and unknown to most of us, to enter the sf area, to their benefit and certainly, by expansion of the market, to the benefit of the writers. And an argument bridging both points of view, pro and con: does the proliferation of anthologies make the cream at the top creamier -- or dilute it? Do the anthos make it tougher for the magazines, or are they better because so much of the slush-pile is drawn off to the books? Well -- wherever the argument goes, whatever the fate of either outlet, boom, bubble or bust, the fact remains that when Elwood comes up with a good one it's very good indeed viz .Future City (Trident Press, #). Will you look at this cast of characters: Foreword by Simak, afterword by Pohl, and in between, original stories and poems by Disch, Bova, Offutt, Janifer (a welcome rarity, Janifer), Malzberg and O'Donnell (how about that?!), Lafferty, Bill Nolan, Koontz, D. M. Price, the Bilkers, Virginia Kidd (where you been?), Scortia (a harsh hard heavy one, this), Frank Herbert, Zebrowski, Silverberg, Hensley, Robin Schaeffer (a fine tiny sharp little thing), Thomas F. Monteleone and Harlan Ellison. So many of these stories are downbeat, some speak of hopelessness -- and yet for most of them there's an underlying regard for the city and what it means, has meant to all of us. More than one of these authors say the city stands, the people die... but they say it with respect. Some say the city dies, the people die, too. Some say the city dies but the people live. Reading all the way through to Pohl's beautifully written afterword is quite an experience... and let no one, at any stage of argument, say Elwood can't put together a big one. one of the most proficient editors in the business. What he looks for -- further, what he gets by finding, by persuasion, by demonstration and sometimes, I think, by an almost unholy luck -- is a kind of literate and thought-provoking story bearing a special texture. He cares about science and about fiction and about science-fiction; his parameters for the Scale (I in.  # ft.) precision metal castings of over # U.S. and foreign warships. Very minutely and accurately detailed. Practically every World War II type, e.g. battleships, carriers, cruisers, etc. and class, e.g. Arizona, Iowa, Enterprise, Essex, Saratoga, Alaska, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Fletcher, Hood, Bismarck, Yamato, etc. represented. Whole miniature fleet ideal for collections, war games, mementos. These models are improved versions of those used by the Navy for recognition training during WW II. Warship data books and naval war games available as well. Send #? for illustrated catalog to: Dept.GN-I Box # Westfield, N.J. #I latter are rather more broad and inclusive than many of his colleagues', which is, I think, a good thing. In any case, his personal stamp on an anthology is as distinctive as a fingerprint and, after having read two of them, you could spot a third with the titles worn off. Universe # (Random House #) demonstrates the Gene Wolf is a triumph of the unexpected, full of disturbing disorientations, both for characters and the reader -- and yet is flawlessly consistent. It's called The Death of Doctor Island and will surely be in the running at award-time. In addition there are stories by Effinger, Silverberg (ringing more changes on the go-back-and-kill-your grandfather theme than anyone has ever done before), an absolutely enchanting fable by Ross Rocklynne (who was writing sf before most of his readers were born), a brand-new Pangborn -- always something to celebrate -- writing about the possibility, some time after the "Davy" period, that the world may be round. Then there's Ed Bryant and Gordon Eklund, each with a fantastic female, each with her special passions and compassions. All original, of course, and when I say original I mean just that. D ID you ever hear of a book called A Wrinkle in Time' I happen to know a little of the back-story on that, and tell it sometimes when I teach writing and sometimes to zap beginning writers who are sulky after a rejection. Madeleine L'Engel wrote it, after selling one mainstream novel which was what's called a "critical success," which means nobody made any money, but at least the writer is now an Author. Miss L'Engle then wrote Wrinkle -- not for any special market or genre, but just writing well a story she cared about. She submitted it and it bounced. It bounced again and still again -- it was rejected successively by # publishers. No misprint that -- I said two dozen plus four. Her husband was -- is -- an actor, and things at that time were not so dewy in show biz either, so they both said the hell with it, writing and acting both and, scraping up every available sou, they opened a crossroads general store in the wilds of Connecticut. Nine years later something moved Miss L' to resubmit the book and it hit. It also won the Newbery Medal as the best children's book of the year, which says something about book awards and I suppose about the contemporary child as well. It wasn't written to be a children's book; what it is is science fiction of the finest kind, where the science is intriguing and the people in it real and care-able about. Anyway it was followed by The Arm of the Starfish and now by A Wind in the Door (Farrar, Straus  Giroux, #) and I urge you to get these books and read them. It's high time and past time that this truly beautiful writer gets the recognition in our field which she deserves. l Silverberg is a heady experience indeed. He is completely a liberated writer, by which I mean... Well, let's put it this way. I carry with me at all times a silver symbol, the letter Q with an arrow through it, the name of which is "Ask the next question." It means that no matter how good a situation may be in which you find yourself, there is some significant question that may be asked -- and you'd better ask it, because if you don't, or if you can't find it, you're dead. And if you ever reason yourself through to an answer and you can't or won't ask the next question, you have ceased to be alive. It means what Charles Fort meant when he wrote, "Any answer is not necessarily the only answer." The symbol is that of all that is ongoing, mutable, life-oriented and fearlessly curious, beyond prejudice or preconception. So: Robert Silverberg's mind seems to have been branded with this symbol and it glows through everything he has written recently. It certainly illuminates the contents of Unfamiliar Territory (Scribner's, #), a collection of # of his previously published stories. (The galleys I have do not indicate if any of these are original; but some are new to me.) Some, like the celebrated Good News from the Vatican, you may know well; one, In Entropy's Jaws, is quite the most fascinating exposition of the nature of time that I have ever read. There isn't a bad story in the lot; Silverberg can, I think, do anything he wants to do except that. L our new Managing Editor dealt partly with my basic view of sf -- what it is I look for in the books and stories I read; or, when you come right down to it, what my definition of science fiction is. Well, I think you have a right to know. I wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review a while back, the thrust of which was that no definition to date fails to leak, and that the nature of the beast is that it can't be defined. On the strength of this I was asked by the Encyclopedia Americana to write an article for them defining it. Well, I tried my best, and essentially what I wrote was this: that if you go to the dictionary for the definition of the word fiction, you'll get fairly satisfactory answers, but if you look up science you will get (as in the big Random House Dictionary) six definitions which deal with systems and systematics, with the arrangement and methodology of data. I found this profoundly unsatisfactory; I can think of a long list of truly great sf which does not immediately concern itself with these strictures. So I went further and looked into the etymology of the word "science" and found that it derives from the Latin scientia, which means, not "method" nor "system" but knowledge. The concept of sf as "Knowledge Fiction" satisfies me completely. It permits the inclusion, for example, of Lord of the Flies in the sf category because of its profound investigation of the origins of religion and secular power in a human society; it even puts Kurt Vonnegut where (dammit) he belongs. I have this addendum, one of those vague but poignant definitions like "Love is when...": If you have a story and yank out the science (knowledge) aspects, and the story falls apart, it was sf. If you have a story and yank out the science (knowledge) aspects and a story still exists, then you have that cowboy story that occurs on Mars instead of in Texas. All of which I have said before elsewhere, but perhaps it's worth repeating here. See you next month.  The Bast From i Galaxy of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! AS# lbJ. A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. AS#I #f Galaxy Magazine A collection of science fiction that challenges the mind and captivates the imagination AN # #tf A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # #? Two men pursue the Rithian Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN# #tf A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# #? prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II # "Psycho." AX#I# #tf Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # (j. A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# ## t #i miogda.ie, N v # Please add #g for shipping) This struggle for survival had all the beauty of love. Would encroaching man upset the delicate balance? In one arm of the universe the sylvan globe of Narr spins in the gravity web of a small red sun. This realm, which is at once environment and being, home and inhabitant, is a planet cloaked largely in closelying broad-leafed vegetation that hugs the moist soil, protecting it from the thirsty breezes and drying winds that skirmish Narr's surface. There are trees here, too, that loop and scallop across the face of the planet in long unbroken bands. These bands interconnect, so that nowhere do they have beginning or end. The trees grow thick, sheltering broad channels that carry water. And if one possesses a certain awareness, stepping beneath the trees one will perceive that these waters offer a murmurous refrain as they pass. Shelter me, green brother, they say. I bathe your roots in moisture. I receive your life's fluid when the sky kingdom Fliiyr threatens. So spread strong limbs to shield my vulnerable body. I am your flowing sister. And if one brings awareness, one will perceive that the trees answer, Flow, sweet sister. Bring me the moisture I crave. When Fliiyr rumbles, receive my precious essence and carry it safely in your arms. See how I defend you? I am your green brother. This is the communion that passes from trees to waters and back again, a murmurous refrain that has comforted and reassured through the ages. But today's green brother's sentinel leaves send down intelligence. There is a change in the air. Light lessens. Fliiyr's restless breezes draw back into stillness. And there are other, more subtle and ominous indications. Storm threatens. The trees know immediately. Their capillaries contract. The precious fluids of life are expressed, boiling out into the soil, from there quickly joining sweet sister in her channel. Receive, sister, the trees plead with woody urgency. Cherish these fluids in safety until I can drink them back. Storm is near. The waters swell and thicken, becoming dark. I cherish, brother... Protect me... The sky rumbles. The air darkens. The voices of Fliiyr bellow across the land, crackling, damning. Jagged white fingers reach down. Winds appear, howling from dry throats. Fluid safely discharged, the trees hunch stolidly between sweet sister and the skvborne menace. There is no interchange between brother and sister now. There is only fear. Storm stalks and hunts across Narr. I grounds. Her party had stepped asoil six hours ago to greet its new surroundings with tense-lipped silence. Now, at midafternoon, individual members continued to dart uneasy glances at the sky. Barrett looked up. The sun was a rose-red egglet in a pale violet sky. The ground where they erected the first domes was flat, densely carpeted with unremarkable vegetation. A line of trees grew in the near distance. Deep beneath the trees flowed the stream from which they already drew drinking water. Certainly there was nothing here to stimulate anxiety. Conversely everything was here. There was the jarring unfamiliarity of open space, of harsh sunlight that lanced the eyes, of drinking water that carried no expected chemical taint. And there was the emptiness of an uninhabited world, the terrible barren stillness that dissolved every uttered word, purging it from existence. Cham Diallo, slight, his head shaven except for a single long braid, approached, prayer robe on his arm. He offered: "I am ready to inspect the fields, Headsw'an." Deliberately Barrett relaxed taut facial muscles. "Good." She unmoored the hoverscooter. Lofting, she held the scooter briefly above settlement grounds. The headsman's dome was already fully assembled. Three of the twelve dorms would be up before dark. Satisfied, she took the scooter planet-north. Native vegetation had been burned back from the edges of the preplowed acreage. Landing, Barrett paced across the scorched apron. As she bent to study the exposed soil she was keenly aware of responsibility. The settlers had been provided with food, materials and supplies sufficient to insure survival for five years. Within those five years, they must prove they could survive here indefinitely by their own efforts. Otherwise they would be returned to the warrens of CityAmerica and to the bottom of the planet-party list, those of them who chose to try again. Barrett stood. We'll make this world produce, she vowed. She turned. Diallo, prayer robe on his shoulders, was kneeling. When he rose she spoke briskly. "We'll hike the agtechs out tomorrow. Offhand I don't foresee any amendment to Klass's cultivation schedule." They had already lofted again when Diallo drew her attention to the sky behind them. Minutes before it had been pale violet. Now it was purple with cloud. As they hung, watching, darkness folded arms around the sun. "Storm." Quickly Barrett skimmed toward the settlement. "I want everyone in the headsman's dome, Second. We don't have rods on the dorms yet." When the scooter touched down wind fingered Barrett's hair and a sulky darkness claimed half the sky. A few of the party stood slackly, cloud-darkness in their eyes. Others scurried. Juvenile Director Laer toddled a clutch of children past. Quickly the wind ceased to finger and began to whip. At a distance a bright slash of white briefly united cloud and soil. The sky grumbled and spat moisture into Barrett's eyes. She maintained calm as she saw the last of her people into the big dome, "No cause for alarm. The grounded rods will protect us from electrical discharges." They secured dome doors and the sky turned black, offering dramatic contrast for the lightning that lit the horizon. A black-bellied beast, the storm strode toward them on flickering legs. Isolated flurries of moisture spattered clearplas panes but were quickly sucked back into the air. Barrett turned. Her people had been briefed. They knew what it was that prowled outside, knew that although it was more severe than any storm they had ever experienced at the bottom of City America's concrete canyons, its flashing tongue could not reach them in the dome. But facts were of the mind, fear of the blood. Barrett paced through the gathering, offering assurance. Diallo's Order of Confluence had claimed the largest storeroom. The mystics knelt in a bright-robed circle, bowed heads making them one. Their twenty voices, combined, created an airy whisper. A summons from the hallway: "Headsw'an! Disturbance in the second conference room." Reaching the room, Barrett was greeted by a dozen frozen faces. Keef Zinc spun, narrow features fierce. "Head! Sparling sent my girl for water!" "I detailed Vella and Carlo Hegg to fetch more water before anyone saw the storm coming," the little woman defended herself quickly. "I didn't realize they were still out when we were ordered to take cover. I-" Barrett turned back to Zinc. "You've checked the entire dome for them, citizen?" "You think I wouldn't know if my girl was inside? She'd be with Laer, wouldn't she? Carlo, too." Barrett glanced around. Diallo was beside her. "Get Laer." Diallo bobbed away and returned with the burly young juvenile director. "I haven't seen them since they went on water detail," he contended. "But I briefed them on storm safety before I released them. And Carlo's got sense for two." "Then we can assume they're safe," Barrett assured Zinc. "They've probably taken cover under the trees. I'll loft out to locate them as soon as the storm passes." now Barrett moved through her people, disturbed. True, Vella Zinc was fifteen, presumably mature enough to manage her own survival. And Carlo Hegg was an aggressively capable seventeen. But beyond the dome lightning probed and clawed. Wind bawled. If the rains that followed were extensive it might be hours before Barrett could loft in search. However no rains attended this storm. For another quarter-hour clearplas was alternately spattered and sucked dry. Then the storm stalked away across the horizon. The sun, a luminous Easter egg, reappeared. When the main door opened Zinc was among the first to push outside. Barrett stepped after him. "Zinc. Which is your work crew?" Zinc's narrow face petrified. "Work crew can suck a rock up its lube! I'm going out there." "No. I can't offer scooter passage. I'll need the space if anyone is injured. And you haven't been excused from duty. But if you'll name your crew leader I'll have Vella report to you when I return her." The urge to physical disputation was apparent in Zinc's bunching arms. Barrett met his belligerent glare. Zinc deflated. "Dailey's crew. Unloading the second capsule." "Good. I'll loft immediately." But she did not move until Zinc rejoined his crew. Then she swung low across the land. As she neared the trees she noted that, despite the severity of I he storm, neither wind nor lightning had inflicted major damage. She had almost reached the trees when Vella Zinc and Carlo Hegg struggled out of a shallow hollow in the ground. Barrett swung and settled near. Neither juvenile seemed to comprehend her sudden appearance. Their faces were twin masks, stiff, stark. Barrett dismounted. "Hegg. Why didn't you take shelter under the trees? Didn't you see the storm approach?" Carlo nodded numbly, a square boy with a hard, aggressive face. "We -- saw it." "We-" "Yes?" Barrett directed full attention to the girl. Vella was tall but slight, her thin face seldom animated by spirit. "We saw the storm when we started back with the pails," Carlo interrupted, suddenly determined to speak. "We ran back to take shelter in the trees. It was closer than the settlement. Then we decided it would be better out here. So we -- came out." Barrett sensed evasion in his answer. She decided not to press the matter immediately. "Well, load the pails in the rear bay. I'll lift you back." "Sure." Carlo shot an evaluating glance at the girl. "But I better warn you, Head -- the water's gone funny." Quickly he lugged a pail near and unlidded it. Barrett glanced into the container, then pulled back involuntarily. A heavy odor emanated from the pail. "Let's pour a sample into the lid." They did so and examined it distastefully. Water from the stream that had been clear and sweet earlier was gray now, clouded, repellent. "Anyone want to taste it?" Carlo suggested. "No. And we won't draw water again until the stream has cleared. There's evidently been heavy storm runoff." "But it didn't rain, did it?" Carlo demanded immediately. "And anyway, we drew this water before the storm actually came. Because we didn't see the storm till we came out of the trees and headed back." "But the water was dirty when we went under the trees, Head," Vella interposed. "We noticed the smell then. I didn't want -- and we noticed it was different under the trees then too. We-" Carlo's gesture was rejective. "You noticed it was different. I didn't see anything." "I didn't see anything either. I noticed it was different." She glanced from Carlo to Barrett. "It was." Barrett nodded. "There are definite atmospheric changes associated with the approach of storm, Vella. Possibly they were intensified in the enclosed area under the trees. And although we didn't have rain here, obviously there was heavy fall somewhere upstream. That accounts for the clouding of the water." "That's right." Carlo's tone was aggressive. Vella's eyes fell. Barrett sighed. "Carlo, empty the pails before you load them. I want to have a look at the stream." The trees were giants, at once tall, massive and dense with foliage. Their lower branches created a sheltering arch. Barrett stooped to enter. The air beneath the trees was heavy with the repellent odor she had detected in the water in Carlo's pail. She peered up and around with a disturbing sense of having entered a new environment. Leaves moved on the lower branches of the trees. The sound of water was a throaty murmur. The air itself was still, hauntingly so, as if there were some unperceived presence here. Straightening, Barrett approached the streambed. Six hours ago the water had flowed low in the channel. Now it was high. Barrett stooped and filled her cupped palm. She flicked the water away immediately, distastefully. Storm runoff. She stood and glanced around, uneasy victim of the sensation that tongues spoke under these trees, tongues whose language she could not comprehend. The still air was not disturbed by their murmurous appeal. But she was. Briskly she removed herself from the haunted stillness. Vella and Carlo waited beside the scooter. They lofted back in silence. Time passed its slow hand across the face of Narr. From the high kingdom Fliiyr directed down assassins, wind and storm. But low-growing vegetation shielded Narr from assault. Dense-limbed trees protected her running waters. Brother and sister, trees and water faced the aggressor, flowing, protecting, always resuming their murmurous refrain when crisis passed. Then brother and sister became aware of a new factor. It was one neither could comprehend. It was not of Narr. Nor was it of Fliiyr. It intruded upon their age-old communion, adding a disruptive refrain of its own. But to understand it in the singular was misleading. It was not singular. Even when the voice it employed was only one, that voice carried disparate messages. Fight, the messages said. Yield, Seek, Win. Die. Seize. Give. Be. Sometimes the voice denied the truth-reality of their being. At other times it tried, however tentatively, to merge its voice with theirs. It was a phenomenon difficult to assimilate, particularly when consciousness was amorphous and channeled largely into the murmurous refrain of being and surviving. Flow, sister-protect, brother... Then the sun climbed up Fliiyr's pale shoulder again and there came an incursion that was many voices at once. Like a wedge, it pushed beneath the trees. It was chaos. Fortunately it did not remain chaos. Instead the new incursion found the rhythm and flow of being and joined its multiple voices to the murmurous refrain. The invading voices became one, first with one another, then with brother and sister. The combined voice made itself welcome, a comforting part of the reassurance that passed from trees to The last word in time-machine novels. "This is all wildly imaginative and mindbending. Gerrold is such a good writer... After reading this one, time-machine addicts will never be quite able to look at the gadget again as a simple plaything." -- Publishers Weekly by David Gerrold author of When Harfie Was One A Science Ficlion Book Club selection Sd.#, now af your bookstore waters and back again. It made itself a part of time, the time that stretched beneath the trees, the time that flowed in the waters. But while brother and sister accepted and tried to understand, old Fliiyr stalked silently and pounced. Distracted, the trees' sentinel branches failed to give alert until suddenly bitter-dry winds chewed their tender leaves. Storm! The trees shrieked and a spike of fear gained physical being. Storm comes! Capillaries squeezed. Fluid was expressed and boiled through the soil, seeking safety. I receive ! sweet sister babbled, swelling, darkening. Shield me, brother! I flow with your life 's blood... It was as if the agents of Fliiyr knew brother and sister were caught unaware. The winds were fierce. Bright-white fingers reached down, ripping and slashing. But the trees had discharged their fluid. Their flesh was dense and fibrous. Those few limbs that took fire quickly sputtered out. When finally storm passed, brother and sister bore no mortal ravage. There were only fallen branches, a single deep slash wound, and the tailings of fear. And the incursion that had distracted them was gone. There was no alien voice, single or multiple. Gratefully green brother sucked his life's blood back. Sweet sister retired deep into her channel, clearing. Green brother renewed the refrain: Flow, sweet sister. Bring me the moisture I crave... I flow, green brother. No other voice joined theirs. They were content to be alone. II at dusk. The settlement was developing satisfactorily. All twelve dorms were occupied. Auxiliary sheds and shelters were in place. The fields were seeded. New confidence lit almost every face. But when Cham Diallo spoke from the doorway Barrett's face hardened. "Take a seat, Second." The mystic entered and sat. Before Barrett could initiate discussion her doorway was occupied again. Despite disparity of age, physique and feature, Keef Zinc and Carlo Hegg were one in attitude -- combative. Barrett's frown deepened. "Yes?" "We want Vella pulled off water detail," Zinc informed her, his narrow face knotted. Barrett did not feign receptivity. "I see. Have you discussed the matter with Sparling?" "I have," Carlo asserted. "I reported Vella to Sparling two weeks ago for not doing her share on water detail." Barrett's frown deepened. "Then I'm sure Sparling explained that a younger, less muscular individual's quota-" "The only reason Vella's meeting tier quota at all is because I'm doing my work and hers," Carlo asserted, his square cheeks turning to block. "The first day we went out, she worked. Until the storm. The water spooked her. After that I was the only one to go under the trees. She waited outside until I came back with the pails. I got tired of that. I told her she had to go to the stream, too. Never mind her -- " He glared belligerently. "Never mind. Well, now she goes in. And she sits around under the trees while I fill the pails and haul them out. She wouldn't even carry her quota back to the settlement if I didn't make her." "Excuse me, Headsw'an," Diallo said. "I received Sparling's report yesterday. It is in the day file." "Get it then." When he returned Barrett studied the document. Carlo had spoken to Sparling two weeks ago. Sparling had discussed the matter with Vella twice. She had queried Carlo yesterday and he had refused to withdraw his complaint. Barrett frowned. "Well, Carlo, it appears the next step is to call a conference of -- " "It appears the next step is to take Vella off water detail," Carlo interrupted harshly. "You call people together, you talk for two weeks more, you -- I'm tired of doing Vella's work while she sits out there getting queer about the trees." Barrett glanced at him sharply. "Queer? Can you clarify that?" Carlo's hard young face flushed. Apparently he had said more than he had intended. "I'll clarify it," Keef Zinc said. "These shavepates have been hanging around under the trees after work hours." He glared at Diallo. "I know what they're trying to do. They're trying to get my kid into the Order. They're-" Barrett's voice sharpened. "Second! Has there been an attempt on the part of the Order to proselytize any young person?" Diallo's impassive features deflected the accusation harmlessly. "The Order has respected the pledge." Barrett nodded. "I'm sure you realize, Citizen Zinc, that before we left City America, both organized religious groups pledged not to attempt to convert any minor, committed or uncommitted." "And you think the shavepates can't snake around that? My kid was there this morning when they had their feast. Are you going to tell me they didn't offer her food? Right off their spread?" "But how can any member of the community 'offer' food to any other member?" Diallo asked. "Our feast was drawn from communal stores. Any item belonged equally to each member of the community." "She watched their ceremonies, too," Carlo chimed in. "They were under the trees when we went on detail. I went downstream to draw water, but Vella stayed. The whole time. I know because when the water changed, I ran back to -- " Barrett cut short hostilities. "Carlo, Citizen Zinc -- I will speak to Sparling and Laer tomorrow. They will meet with Vella and report back to me. If we don't have rain soon, we'll necessarily expand the water detail to support irrigation. The presence of adults should prod Vella to take her leisure at a more appropriate time." fied. Barrett turned to Diatlo. "Now, Second, I have reports that your group left the shelter of the trees during this morning's storm and exposed themselves on open ground." More specifically, her informants had stated that the robed mystics had burst from the trees in stark fear, most promptly throwing themselves flat, but two running all the way back to settlement bounds. "Your group certainly had the right to convene and to hold religious observances on the day selected for them. But once you went beyond settlement bounds it was your responsibility to enforce storm safety rules, Diallo." Diallo's eyes flickered away. "Yet there is no authority in confluence, Headsw'an. Can a single expression of the Unity wield authority over those who are already himself?" "Yes. Very easily if he is also second in command of this party. There wasn't one member of our community who didn't experience panic this morning. If we allow our people to stampede in the face of fear we may never survive to meet evaluation, Diallo." Perhaps she exaggerated. Perhaps not. She had studied planet party histories. Many groups had survived catastrophes. Others had shattered at minor blows -- and perished. Diallo bowed his head. "This morning -- when the water changed I could control no one. I could not even control myself. The fear we experienced negated rationality." Barrett's brows arched. The admission surprised her. "Then I suggest the Order conduct future religious ceremonies within the bounds of the settlement, where you can reach shelter immediately." Diallo's eyes flickered up again, briefly dark with expression. "No. The trees best serve our purposes. And today, before the storm, we formally consecrated our temple of the waters, from which we will conduct ourselves into the spiritual flow of this world." "That may be. But community survival takes first priority. If there are further lapses I will restrict the Order. Citizen Zinc's outburst suggests another matter. In the future I want no underage individual to observe the Order's services." Diallo withdrew, promising. x  restless. She approached the window. Poled lamps created d.istinctly edged pools of light along the settlement's main footpaths. As she watched, two bright-robed mystics rustled from a dorm and disappeared into darkness. The starfield overhead was vivid and close. So close. And Earth so far. Barrett did not yearn for today's Earth. But upon occasion she longed for the Earth that had existed before the skies had closed with photochemical pall, before the hills had been leveled and the meadows paved, before water had ceased to run in boulder-studded streams, tumbling clear and cold to the sea. Water. She left the window. This morning the Order had fled when the waters darkened and rose. According to Carlo, Vella Zinc had been reluctant to step under the trees again after seeing the stream in storm stage. And Barrett remembered clearly the revulsion the stenchy gray waters had raised in her. Everyone knew the stream exhibited storm change. But few realized the degree of that change. Absently Barrett flipped through the weather diary. She was troubled by the frequency with which the storm code recurred, particularly during the last two weeks. She drew down the exploration party's microreport and loaded it. It told her little. The survey team had observed electrical storms. Nothing specific was said of their frequency or seasonality. Their intensity was measured as greater than that experienced on Earth. But the fact that the planet had been recommended for settlement suggested the storms hadn't been considered a major negative factor. Barrett flicked off the viewer. EarthAuthority hadn't resources in ships or trained personnel to conduct more than superficial study of any prospective planet. There were many hundreds potentially compatible to human life. Their air was breathable. Water was available. Growing conditions roughly suitable for human crops prevailed. On the other side of the equation were hundreds of thousands of humans desperately eager to escape City America and its European and Asian equivalents. Confronted with a shortage of certain resources, a surplus of others, EarthAuthority employed volunteer settlers to determine the ultimate habitability of selected worlds. Colonists were shipped and landed. If they survived and made the assigned world yield within five years, that world was habitable. If they died -- or if a world refused to support them -- the world was not habitable. And the loss of human lives, the devastation of human hopes, did not enter the equation. Barrett framed herself again in the window, inner eye intent upon planet features shrouded now by darkness: green fields, stalwart trees, clear waters, rosy sun. Certainly this world gave every outward sign of being habitable. Yet there had been five severe electrical storms in their first two weeks, seven in the last two. Another fact, equally disturbing, was that none of those storms had been accompanied locally by measurable precipitation. Native vegetation remained green, its thick foliage sheltering soil that was moist and loose. But settlement fields, exposed to the air, were dry. If no rain fell during the next week or so, irrigation would become necessary. But if the storms became much more frequent the settlers could be forced to use water that was redolent of storm runoff, both in the fields and in the settlement. Barrett returned to her chart counter and reactivated the viewer. She flicked quickly through available planetary data, finding nothing new. Perhaps they had arrived at storm season. Perhaps every season was equally stormy. Or perhaps storm season was yet to come. There was only one way to learn. That was to endure. She frowned. Although they were equipped with nothing as sophisticated as water pumps or piping, capsule three was convertible to a water tank. Perhaps she should assign personnel to haul emergency water stores. That tentative decision reached, Barrett was still not satisfied. The relation between electric storm and stream disturbed her. Why, if it rained hard enough upstream to cause marked clouding, did it never rain here? She found no satisfactory answer in sleep. She lofted early the next morning, when the sun was an egg hatching on a purple-gray horizon. The main dome glowed in the rosy rays. Beyond, in the settlement fields, the first crops tentatively greened the dry soil. The line of trees curved gently, embracing the land, a long unbroken band that crossed the horizon in either direction. Barrett left the scooter near the trees. Beneath arching limbs, morning was as old as time. Air was moist. The stream spoke with a gentle tongue. Barrett approached the bank. The water was clear today, low in its channel. How long, she wondered, had it required to clear after yesterday's storm? She paced the stream bank thoughtfully, finding brief respite from her concerns. Her taut shoulders relaxed. Her effectiveness might actually be enhanced, she reflected, if she granted herself a free day, if she brought lunch and sleeping pad to the streamside and let herself become attuned to this environment, serene and calm. She dismissed the prospect impatiently. Briskly she glanced around, seeking sign of the Order's waterside temple. But possibly Diallo had not referred to a specific plot of soil. She left the trees and took to the morning sky. The settlers were not completely helpless, she realized. They had been issued a store of basic chemicals. It might be possible to find a compound that would clear or deodorize storm water. Certainly no former City American would balk at drinking water that tasted of chemical. They were not helpless. But when Barrett set down at field's edge and saw a storm gathering on the horizon again, a finger of fear touched her, however lightly, however briefly. pletions when word came across the lawn. "Storm!" Jumping to the window, he saw the warning darkness and fear struck him, a slashing blade. But his course of action was predecided. Diallo seized the supply log and returned it to his cubicle. From a drawer he drew a length of strong cord. Tying it around his waist, he pattered from the dome. Settlers already converged on shelter. Diallo circumvented them, ran down the pathway and emerged at the edge of the settlement. Wind picked at his worksuit and slapped his shaven foreskull. As he loped across open ground toward the trees he glanced up. Storm had already swallowed the sun. Now it consumed the sky. Somewhere lightning licked air hungrily. The sharp crack of thunder announced its appetite. Diallo ran. By the time he reached the trees their upper branches whipped. Darkness swelled about him like some overwhelming force. In the broad archway under the trees fear was a live thing. It walked, it cried. Its voice pierced the mind and seared the spinal cord, rendering the feet useless, the legs numb. Yesterday it had taken Diallo unprepared. Today he was ready for it. He reached stream's edge and snapped the cord from his waist. Throwing himself down -- the waters were high, the waters were dark: protect me, green brother -- he, secured his ankles with a series of complex knots. He could never release them without concentrated effort. At this moment, his mind possessed, his fingers numb, he could barely tie them. That done, he crawled back until he encountered tree. He pressed his spinal column against its stout trunk, braced his head, flung his arms back to grasp bark with frantic fingertips. Fear had no words, only voice, and that voice was piercing agony. Diallo's fingers dug into the bark. His body convulsed briefly. Then he surrendered himself. His glassy eyes fixed on nothing. Storm bellowed. Wind snarled and tore. Then gradually, dimly, Diallo became aware that the storm had walked away. Fear faded. The dark waters seemed not so much to writhe as to run again. Diallo hunched forward weakly. He sucked blood from lacerated fingertips. Painfully he loosened the cord from his ankles, stood and groped toward daylight. In the distance the storm retreated. And his suspicion was confirmed. The fear he had felt under the trees yesterday had not been his own at all. It had been external -- not a cry he uttered but one he heard. He stared back at the trees. He was not ready to accept what struck him as obvious. Humans and other animals experienced fear. But the trees? Diallo trudged back toward the settlement. Reaching the dome, he took his shredded fingertips to the first-aid closet. They were physical proof of what he had experienced. No illusions had convulsed his body or shredded his flesh on the bark of a tree. Nor had the fear been hallucinatory. The entire Order had experienced it yesterday. Evidently Vella Zinc had experienced it, too. In his cubicle Diallo hunched on his stool, unable to resume work. Afternoon became night. Diallo stood at the window and stared at the stars. He was of the universe, the universe of him. Today he was sentient and self-willed. He commanded intelligence and mobility. Tomorrow perhaps he would be without those gifts. He would be soil, he would be dust. Or he would be microbe, lamb, cabbage, tree. Head bowed, he sat again. He was already tree. He and tree shared the basic unity of all matter and energy. He was already water, rock, star, sun. It gave him no comfort. Once -- a boy -- he had viewed the universe from another perspective. The sun at the top of the canyon had been a wondrous separate world inviting exploration. The water that trickled from the ration faucet had been a miraculous substance, each drop a separate cloudy mystery. His own fingernail parings had held urgent questions to be answered. Now he had to revive dormant boyhood curiosity. It still lived somewhere in him. It had to. Barrett was in her office. When Diallo entered he was aware of her speculative glance at his injured fingers and bruised head. "Headsw'an, I would like to check out microviewer and texts." Barrett did not answer immediately. "Second, I understand you left the settlement this afternoon when storm warnings were out." "I took shelter in the trees," he admitted. "It was necessary." Again she did not respond immediately. "And this time you were able to maintain control?" "I -- was," he affirmed, not sure the statement was true. Barrett elected not to pursue the matter. She reached across her chart counter and handed him the microviewer. "Help yourself from the library. Second. It's all there." "Thank you." Later, perhaps, he would discuss with her what he had learned today. Later, if he could find authoritative support for the validity of his experience. And if he could not? Diallo returned to his cubicle with his selection of microtexts. Two hours later he flicked off the viewer and cradled his eyes in his hands, discouraged. Finally he raised his head and reactivated the viewer. Lips moving, he continued to read. Ill at Barrett's door, carrybin in hand. "Nell -- let's see what you have." He removed sample jars silently from the carrier. "I followed instructions, Head -- as well as I could." Barrett glanced at him sharply. "You took samples each half-hour until signs of clouding, then each quarter hour until the water had cleared?" Today's storm -- the settlement had enjoyed two days' respite-had descended in early afternoon. It was near supper now. "As far as I could, I did." His tone was trenchant. The muscles in his forearms were knotting. Barrett examined the numbered bottles and frowned. The morning samples were clear. Pronounced clouding appeared shortly after noon. But the jars that should have contained the five subsequent samples were empty, although Nellis had numbered them and put down the appropriate collection times. The sixth jar -- drawn, she calculated, shortly after the storm passed -- contained dark water. Thereafter samples were drawn at the requested intervals again. They showed a gradual clearing over a three-hour period. Barrett glanced up, disturbed. A loner, Nellis exhibited stubborn pride of endurance that made him one of her most reliable workers. Today pride obviously had not driven him to collect water samples during the height of storm. "Can you tell me why you didn't conduct the test as requested, Nell?" "I did what you told me -- as far as I could," Nellis insisted stubbornly. His fists clenched. "That's all, Headsw'an." Barrett sighed. "Ail right, Nell. Drop these by Klass's shed. It's his turn now." Nellis sighed with relief. He withdrew. Barrett slumped on her stool. So storm water appeared at least half an hour before storm reached the immediate area and required three hours to clear. Only if storm frequency stepped up beyond twice daily would there be a definite water problem. But could she afford to gamble that that would not happen? She could not. Capsule three had been converted for water storage yesterday. Tomorrow she must schedule a crew to fill it. Decision reached, she remained uneasy. She ate, then returned to the dome. Light showed beneath Diallo's door. Barrett knocked on impulse. T HE mystic's face seemed older, drawn. His cubicle was austerely ordered except for the work counter. There the microviewer sat in a welter of microtext capsules. "Research?" Barrett asked. Diallo's slight shoulders tensed. "Yes. There are several matters of biological science that I -- I have felt compelled to study." "You haven't by chance touched on meteorology?" she asked. "I -- no." "Well, I'm puzzled -- and disturbed -- by our storms, Second. I was led to believe theyould be accompanied by rain. Not by any specific rain figures quoted in the exploration crew's report -- they give none -- but on the general principle that electrical storms are accompanied by precipitation. Now apparently they are, somewhere upstream. But not on our land. And our crops weren't bred for drought." "Yet native vegetation shows no sign of parching," he pointed out promptly. That was true. "Perhaps it's adapted to a lower level of moisture." She frowned. "But it's not functioning at a lower level, Second. I examined the uncultivated area near our fields this morning. The ground there is still quite moist, even though there has been no rain in the month-plus since landfall. It's only our land that is dry." He darted a glance at the microviewer. "Plant roots hold moisture," he reminded her quickly. "And foliage shields the soil from heat and wind. So stripped land dries and erodes while covered land is protected." "Ag unit one: erosion," she concurred. "But that same foliage should be passing soil moisture out through its leaves continuously, Diallo. Transpiration: ag unit four." She frowned, Diallo, after all, had taken ag only through unit two, then had specialized in stores management. "But that fact aside, tell me how the soil got to be moist in the first place if the storms aren't accompanied by rain here? And why aren't they? And if it doesn't rain upstream either, why do we have runoff in the stream preceding, during and following every storm?" "It -- " Diallo's eyes flickered away, troubled. "I had not thought of that aspect of matters. "I -- " Turning, he selected a microtext and dropped it into the viewer. "Headsw'an, did you know that plants experience emotion?" Barrett was totally unprepared for the switch of topic. "Plants? Like our crops?" "I was referring to the trees. The texts tell me plant emotion was first demonstrated in Earth laboratories over a century and a half ago. Certain individuals were shown to promote plant growth just through some quality of their presence. And human experimenters were also able to communicate threat to laboratory plants and measure fright-reaction. The experiments are reported here." Baffled, Barrett studied the indicated passages. She nodded slowly. "I suppose I've heard about the effect. But of course those experiments were done with Earthvariety garden plants. Not with anything resembling the trees down by the stream." "But do you not think that the principle could be applicable to the trees?" Diallo insisted. "And that they could experience fear?" "I suppose they could," she admitted. "But-" "Of storm?" "Well-yes." Suddenly the mystic's forehead was beaded with sweat from brow to braid. "And do you not think it possible for the communication of emotion to occur in the opposite direction too? For the trees to communicate their fear of storm to humans who happen to be near?" It took Barrett some moments to grasp what he proposed. "You think -- " Despite the incredibility of the suggestion, her mind was already marshaling support data: Vella's and Carlo's odd behavior after the first storm; Carlo's report of Vella's subsequent attitude: Diallo's admission that the entire Order had fled the trees during the storm; the unfilled sample jars Nellis had turned in. "Second, you stayed under the trees throughout Wednesday's storm." The mystic examined bandaged fingertips. "Only by the device of securing my ankles and clinging to a tree trunk. There was intense fear under the trees throughout the storm. But it was not mine, Head. It came from without. It came from the trees. There was no other possible source." Barrett nodded reluctantly. "Yes. There have been other incidents, Second." Quickly she reviewed them. Diallo's head bobbed eagerly. "And the girl's present behaviorwhen the trees are at peace, Headsw'an, they communicate that too. I have felt it. Any sensitive person would, I think, if only halfconsciously. That, I suppose, is why the Order selected the waterside for consecration. There is serenity there. A feeling of timelessness." "I felt relaxed there myself." Barrett smiled wryly. "I managed to overcome it." "But apparently the girl does not care to." Barrett nodded thoughtfully. Was it so incredible? If, as the texts clearly indicated, a plant could react to a human's emotional state, why not a human to a plant's? "Diallo, have you discussed this with anyone?" He was emphatic. "No one." "Good. I want to question Laer. I've asked him to draw the Zinc girl out. He may be able to confirm this hypothesis." Diallo agreed with patent relief. Normally Barrett would not have summoned Laer until morning. However the occasion was not normal. MJ our first nut case," the burly juvenile director informed Barrett an hour later. "She's in communication with the trees and the water. She's vague on the exact content of the interchange, but the general trend is that they care about her -- care a lot." Sparl proposes we pull her off water detail. Better, we'd both like to amputate her from Carlo and her father, give her a chance to grow." He shrugged loosely. "How, I don't know. She shouldn't even be here -- she's not pioneer material." Barrett nodded agreement. But there was little point in decrying the inadequate screening process now. Laer's testimony confirmed Diallo's hypothesis -- and there were decisions to be made. She snapped her jotter against her palm. "Tomorrow I plan to schedule an adult crew to fetch water for emergency stores. We'll reassign Carlo to field duty then, Laer, and Vella can take settlement work. And for the time being I want you to restrict Vella from the trees entirely. But make it clear that it isn't a punitive restriction. We have reason." Reason she was reluctant to broach now. Laer's beard parted in a grin. "Good enough for me." He departed with cheer. Bleakly Barrett wished she could share that cheer. Storms that weren't accompanied by rainfall, ground that remained moist in the absence of precipitation, trees that communicated fear -- Barrett felt suddenly plunged into a sea of anomaly. The fact that she had been forewarned that such anomalies might exist yielded scant comfort. She approached the window. Vividly she remembered today's storm. Could she in good conscience dispatch a water crew tomorrow without warning them that in case of storm the trees would communicate disorganizing fear to at least the more susceptible of them? She could not. Neither could she imagine now how she was going to present that warning when morning came. And the matters of rainfall, storm runoff and soil moisture unresolved, too... troubled. He had followed the line of trees upstream for three days, seeking rain. Now another storm moved down upon them, straddling the band of trees. Tensely he took the scooter to the surface, rolled it beneath the trees and secured it. The stench of fear was already thick in the shadows. Diallo ran from the trees and threw himself to the ground. As he huddled there, storm began to lick and taste at the land on either side of him. Diallo could feel its hot breath on his shaven skull. He shuddered. Last night, restless, he had seen storm in dream. It had walked his private night, green-eyed, supple, and he had wakened with the truth suddenly clear in his mind -- storm was a panther. And its prey? The trees. Storm stalked the trees mercilessly across the land, baring lightning fangs, howling from its black throat. Diallo quivered as his head was briefly spattered with moisture and licked dry. Lightning and wind -- claws of the beast. How was he to tell Barrett that what they confronted here was a skyborne predator? Facts: he had followed the line of trees upstream for three days without once encountering a break in their solid wall; nor had he encountered rain, although he had met storm frequently and had always found the stream swollen and dark at those times; and never once had he seen storm focused anywhere but upon the line of trees. These were facts. Barrett was a person of facts. But Diallo's facts were scanty and did not add up to his conclusion. His conclusion had come from other sources, by night. Yet his conclusion was valid. The more rational parts of his mind rejected it, but as an intuitional person he not only accepted its truth but embraced it. Storm was a preying beast. The trees cried with fear at its coming. Diallo cringed against the soil until the winds swept away. Then he rose, darted to the trees and released the hoverscooter. Lofting, he followed the winds downstream. He had failed in his mission to find rain. He did not believe now that there was rain, not anywhere on this world. There was only stream and trees, lightning and wind, prey and predator. How did the fact that there were now humans, too, affect the equation? Diallo didn't know. But his unease was great, his heart troubled, as he headed back toward the settlement. Vella woke rooted in fear. Wind clawed her branches, lightning stung her hair. Protect me, shield me, save me! her mind babbled. Storm! Electrified, Vella tried to spring up from the dirt. But her legs would not have her. Instead her lips parted and her own voice rent the air. Save me! I flow into your arms. Carry me, protect me, fire reaches down, wind tatters and tears! Shield me, protect me, flow, protect, carry, shield... Then Vella gained her knees, pounding ears with palms. No, no! She hadn't meant to lose herself in the dark. She hadn't meant to sleep the night under the trees. She hadn't meant anyone to ever know she had slipped away after lights out. She hadn't meant... Save me! Vella screamed again, a cry torn from her to join the other cries, to join the piercing fear, the possessing fear, the driving fear. And it drove her. Stumbling to her feet, she plunged through the trees.  flow into your arms. Cherish me, carry me, save me! She ran hard against a tree and her nose smashed and ran down her face. Her eyes were blind, her mind a bubbling geyser of fear. Then her feet found purchase on nothing and she flowed. There were arms wet and cold. They closed around her. She tried to shriek again but water bubbled in her mouth. It was thick, it was terrible, it was black. It was death. counter when the cry came across the lawn. She hurried through the dome. Search parties had been combing the trees and adjoining fields since noon yesterday for the missing girl. When Barrett reached the lawn, however, the cry resolved into, "Hover's coming!" Barrett glanced up and Second Diallo rode the sky, an insect against a backdrop of afternoon violet. His bright robe fluttered. Barrett hurried across the lawn. The craft touched ground and hands rushed to moor it. Diallo scrambled down uncoordinatedly. Catching uncertain balance, he glanced behind him, fear on his face. "Head -- storm upstream. Ten minutes, fifteen." Barrett peered down the line of trees. Barely perceptible darkness touched the sky. "L'Abbott, I want the searchers clear of the trees before the storm arrives," she instructed quickly. Nodding, L'Abbott loped away. Barrett turned back to Diallo. He was breathing shallowly, his features gaunt, his eyes too bright. "Come to my office, Second." From behind her closed door, they could hear the community taking storm haven. Barrett gestured Diallo to a seat. She spoke sharply to penetrate his obvious agitation. "Have you eaten?" "I've eaten. I've -- " "Then report, Second. Did you find rain?" Her hand touched Klass's final report. She knew, grimly, what Diallo's answer had to be. There was no other possibility. His eyes flickered past her, then returned and settled. He tongued his lips. "No. There is no rain, Head. Nowhere. It's all in the sky -- all the excess water vapor. The storm will never release it." Barrett rocked back, brows arching. The information was as she had anticipated. The delivery was not. "Well, I've had almost a week now to gather and consider new information," she said slowly. "And it does appear that we're dealing with the uncomfortable reality of an aberrant moisture distribution system." She glanced down at the Klass data on Nellis's storm-water samples. "Evidently what we're finding in the stream isn't runoff at all. I don't see how it could be. And Klass and I arranged some rather primitive experiments that demonstrated that local vegetation doesn't return moisture to the air by transpiration. So apparently moisture is distributed through some underground network we haven't had time to study yet. Those facts, coupled with the fact that we haven't observed rain -- " "Because a panther doesn't shed his fangs," Diallo hissed, leaning forward. "That is why the trees are afraid, Head -- panthers." He tried to impress his point with glittery-bright eyes. "I am not irrational, Head. I've found the truth. The storms are predators. They stalk the trees. They use what water vapor they have to create lightning. They -- why do they always move along the trees, if they aren't predatory? Why haven't we seen a storm focused anywhere else, Head?" Barrett frowned. The repetitious path of storm travel was another loose fact that troubled her. "There may be a meteorological explanation, Diallo," she offered slowly. "The landscape is flat and unbroken except for the bands of trees, ours and the others that lace the temperate zones. I haven't had opportunity yet to really study the meteorological texts, but -- " Diallo shook his head emphatically. "No. Meteorological conditions may make it possible for the predator to stalk. But he would not stalk if he were not a predator." "Second -- " Barrett murmured, buying time. "Second, if the storms are predators, they don't seem to be particularly effective ones, do they? On Earth wind often uprooted large trees. Lightning sometimes set fires that destroyed whole forests. But here, where we've already seen almost two dozen severe storms, we've seen almost no actual damage. A few limbs broken, a few leaves scattered-" "A house cat, Head. A house cat could never fell a deer," Diallo countered vehemently. "But a house cat is a predator just the same. It is a matter of disproportion of size and strength. To us the storm seems severe. To the trees, who are strong -- " "Yet you're the one who first pointed out that the trees fear storm. Intensely." Diallo's eyes were briefly frozen, disconcerted. His lips moved. "No, I appreciate the analogy, Second," Barrett went on quickly. "But we have to deal more realistically. We're faced with a number of anomalies we simply couldn't have anticipated." Quickly she indicated Klass' report. "What I thought was storm runoff into the stream, for instance, is an oily substance instead. It's -- " Her head spun at the clatter of footsteps. Her door rattled urgently. It was L'Abbott, his broad face strained. "Head -- " "Are the search crews out of the trees?" "No. They've found the girl's body. The water came up. She's floating. They're casting ropes for her. They're-" Barrett's voice rose sharply. "You didn't get those people out of the trees?" "I couldn't. They won't leave!" the window, then hurried from her office through the dome. Reaching the lawn, she stared up into the black face of the storm. She peered toward the trees. Any activity there was effectively screened from sight. And there wasn't time to send L'Abbott back or to take the hoverscooter out herself. Wind was already slapping and howling. Diallo reached her side. "Head?" Quickly she explained. "So we have thirty or forty people under those trees," she concluded. "But if they aren't panicking now, with the storm already so near -- " "They were briefed?" She nodded. "But if they don't have the same overdeveloped sensitivity members of the Order have, or perhaps if they're distracted or no more affected than Carlo Hegg evidently was -- " "Or if the peak of fear has not yet been reached," Diallo interjected. Barrett nodded, turning. "Well, we'd better get inside, Second. It's out of our hands." Inside L' Abbott's news had reached everyone. Faces were pasty, voices low. Then their words were drowned by the growl of the beast and he was upon them -- black belly, flickering fingers. Clearplas was first spattered, then voraciously licked dry. Barrett strode through the dome. Laer was in the first conference room. "The girl -- accident or suicide?" she demanded. For once the burly young juvenile director was somber. "Head, I don't think she had enough stuff to take herself out for drowning." Barrett agreed. "She had developed dependence on the trees. She probably slipped out of the dorm, intending to return before dawn. Instead she was caught under the trees when we had that night storm." "Sure. Scared and confused, running the wrong way in the darksplash!" "Well, she'd been warned, along with everyone else." Barrett hadn't much sympathy to spare. Before she left Laer, L'Abbott found her again. "Head -- the searchers are running! In the open!" Grimly Barrett hurried to the front of the dome. The windows were massed. She pushed to the nearest. Half a dozen members of the search party ran wild. Three raced toward settlement bounds. Three others scattered along the line of trees. She pushed back from the window. "Milario! L'Abbott! I want every entrance guarded. Don't let anyone out! If any of those runners make it this far, open to them!" Any. The word rang heavily in Barrett's mind. The settlers couldn't afford to lose workers. Their crops would have to be hand-irrigated through summer and early fall. After harvest they intended to move into new fields, pursuing a different scheme of cultivation. They needed every hand. Milario and L'Abbott assigned personnel to the doors. Barrett pushed grimly to the window again. Two of the runners had regained control and had thrown themselves flat. It became apparent that a third was not running in panic but pursuing a fourth. As they neared settlement bounds he launched himself, bringing the other man down. Barrett could feel tension lessen around her. Only two people were exposed now, one plunging back in the direction of the trees, stumbling, regaining her feet, falling again. And the other -- "It's Orth!" His blue worksuit appeared selfanimated as he pounded past the two struggling men on the ground and flung himself across the lawn. His face was contorted, his neck corded. The jagged white finger that reached to impale him fused him briefly into its own blinding column. His face was momentarily lost in light as every detail of the world was vividly overexposed. Then the fiery finger split and spat at the two nearest dorms, rending air. The world shook. Reality returned. Light was gone. All that remained was two men pressed against the ground. Orth sprawled supine with head twisted and eyes vacant, and the terrible silence. Barrett pushed from the window again. She fought to the main door. Quickly she chose her men. "Whipper, Danakil -- crawl out there and drag that man in. Don't raise so much as a hand above the ground. Heads down too." The door was opened and the two plunged out. "Down!" Barrett shrieked, her face fierce. They threw themselves flat and wriggled away. "Back from the doors," Barrett cried. "Everyone along the walls. If we get that man in, we'll need room." Whipper and Danakil got him in. Laer, one of the handful who had taken med units, was summoned. Barrett and Jones spelled him working over the lax body. Despite their efforts, the body remained just that. When Barrett finally stood her voice was hollow. "We've lost two people." the words held no reality. She met Diallo's eyes. Her jaw set. Today the storm had proven a successful predator after all. Time passed and there was still another incursion upon the union of trees and waters. And though consciousness was tenuous, channeled largely into the murmurous refrain that defined their joint existence, both brother and sister sensed the content of the incursion and were uneasy. For although the voices were chaotic in expression -- kill, save, destroy, live, conquer, own, -- they were united in intent. And that intent was somehow, in some incomprehensible way, threatening. Uneasily green brother's lower leaves rippled. He had defended himself and sweet sister against old Fliiyr's winds and fiery fingers since the beginning of time. But this incursion was not storm. And so it did not stimulate his usual responses. His sentinel leaves did not stir. His capillaries did not compress. His fluids did not flow. He did not know how to defend against what he felt on the air today. He had been provided with no mechanism. Sweet sister was equally helpless in her disturbance. Green brother did not cry, did not plead. And she did not swell and darken. Yet there was danger, dimly apprehended, not at all understood. Then green brother became aware of assault to his lower trunk. He did not feel pain because he did not have capacity for that. He did feel a certain helpless dread. For soon his bark was penetrated, his woody fibers slashed. Even as he stood there, life's fluid began to leak from the wound. And then, at first haltingly, his sentinel leaves signaled their own movement through the air. Their flight was brief. There was a jarring of the soil and green brother was fallen, his sentinel leaves brushing near the ground. His life's blood drained upon the soil and bled away. Consciousness lessened. Green brother was fallen, yet he did not die. Because he was not one. Nor was he many. He was one-who-was-many and as yet only a very small portion of that union died. Sweet sister was disturbed nevertheless. Because when earth jarred, her own body was suddenly exposed. The rays of the sun reached in to touch her, only in one small zone to be sure, but the sensation was acutely unpleasant. It was not right. Never in all time had it happened. She quivered, suffered vulnerability and the violation of order. But she flowed on, even though she could voice no more than a plaintive, I flow, green brother... The answer came. Flow, sister, and bring me your sweet moisture. I defend... But green brother's voice lacked assurance. For now he felt his bark penetrated again, felt his woody fibers slashed and chopped again, felt his life's fluid begin to leak from still another wound. His leaves shivered. Green brother experienced the beginning of a new and terrible dread. IV inventory on food stores when the felling crew returned to the settlement. Disturbed by the word that accompanied their return, he closed inventory, returned the books to their shelf and logged off duty. Diallo appreciated the expediency of clearing a stretch of the streamside. Irrigation crews would necessarily draw stream water daily for the next few months. And Vella's death and Orth's had bred an atmosphere of vengeful hysteria concerning the trees. So the settlers had voted not just to clear passage to the water but to assert mastery over this world and its forces. Nevertheless as Diallo set across the field toward the line of trees, he was disturbed. He hadn't walked far when the hoverscooter fluttered near. Barrett leaned out. "Ride, Second?" Her face reflected his own disturbance. Agtech Klass was impassive in the passenger's seat. Diallo scrambled into the cargo hold. Reaching the streamside, they hung over the scene briefly. Only three trees had been felled today. But they were giants. They sprawled across the land, limbs crushed, life's blood oozing across the bare soil to spill into the stream. Diallo peered down. An unmistakable stench filled the air. Barrett took the scooter down and they disembarked. They were dwarfed by the fallen giants. Diallo glanced at Barrett's set face. "The odor, Head -- " She nodded tightly. "It was reported accurately. It's the storm odor." It was, repellent and thick. Klass paced the length of the nearest tree, took a thin plastic blade from his tool belt, and dipped it into the gray substance that drained from the tree. He squinted at his sample, sniffed it. "No need to take it back to the shed for comparison, Head. It's the same stuff I strained out of those storm water samples. That smell -- has to be. Surprised the cutters stuck it out in this stench." Barrett stared at the woody base of the tree. "So here's our pollutant, Klass." Her words fell flat. Diallo studied them, aware that they shared information of which he was ignorant. "This substance has already undergone analysis, Headsw'an?" "It has." Barrett's face was suddenly older. "I intended to share the report with you the day you returned from upstream, Second. But we were interrupted. And in the subsequent hysteria Klass and I decided to withhold the information from discussion for the time being." She hesitated. "The substance in the storm-water samples I had Nellis take -- and evidently it comes from the trees -- is by every indication quite poisonous. Possibly lethal to humans. And we suspect that if we irrigated with uncleaned water it would kill the crops too." Diallo peered at the substance on Klass's blade, stunned. "Then each time it rains, the stream becomes poisonous?" His question seemed unreal. "For three hours or longer," Barrett confirmed. "The pollutant is an oily compound, Second," Klass clarified. "Doesn't ride the top of the water as you'd expect. Intermixes? Maybe colloid's the word I'm hunting. Maybe not. I only follow the procedures in the text, so don't expect me to talk like a chemmer. But I was able to strain a little of it out. The rest -- well, who knows what happens to it when the water clears? I haven't been drinking a lot lately, that's one fact I give you without fear of contradiction." "But if the substance comes from the trees, isn't it reasonable to hypothesize that it returns to the same place?" Barrett suggested. To the trees. Diailo did not respond. Intensely troubled, he turned and paced to the stream's edge. Each new finding was freshly disturbing. When storm stalked the trees, they not only experienced -- and communicated -- fear, they also discharged their life's blood into the stream. At his feet, the fallen tree's sap oozed thickly down the steep bank, graying the water. "Makes sense they'd absorb it back," Klass affirmed. "Now if you want to try storing this stuff for fuel purposes, Head, we could probably tap it out of the other trees before felling them. Take a little rigging -- " Barrett joined Diailo at stream's eage, shaking her head. "No. We don't have the technology for removing the stench, now, Klass. We'll keep it in mind for future development." Her features did not express the degree of optimism her words seemed to indicate. Diailo stared at hej, new information slowly taking possession of his thoughts. "This substance, the tree sap -- it's inflammable, Head?" She nodded briskly. "Highly." He continued to stare at her, further question forming in his mind, unwelcome, unwanted. It had to be expressed. "But then why doesn't lightning set fire to the trees, Headsw'an? If the sap is highly inflammable, the entire line of trees should burn when lightning scores a direct hit upon any single tree." They had all seen lightning touch the trees harmlessly many times. Eyes met. No one wanted to answer. "Because," Diailo supplied finally, "when storm approaches, the trees discharge theirinflammablesap into the stream." Klass' lips seemed numb. "But then the water itself could be ignited, Second. Because the proportion of oily stuff in some of those samples-" "But the stream is protected from lightning by the trees," Diailo said softly. Three glances turned upon the stream. Sunlight glinted from its freshly exposed surface. "The water is protected by the trees," Barrett said softly. "And in a way the water protects the trees too, by carrying the sap until danger of lightning passes." No one wanted to say more. The stream lay before them, three of its guardians slain. It was Diailo who finally spoke again. "Head, does it seem to you that the water is rising?" Barrett nodded numbly. "It is." settlement. "Head, I could be wrong," Klass asserted. "The samples I burned in the shed didn't have water content to extinguish them. But the stream -- that a lot of water, Head. I've never seen water burn." "However it is possible that lightning itself could produce some significant change in the electrical orientation of the substances in the stream," Diallo pointed out, groping helplessly through his dimly grasped understanding of chemical reactions. "That could contribute to and support inflammability." They reached the mooring hook and scrambled from the hovercraft. Settlers hurried to shelter. Diallo turned to face the darkening sky and fear touched them. Here they had stumbled upon a survival system that had probably existed through most of eternity. Today they had disturbed that system. Perhaps they had seriously weakened it. And now the panther strode down the line of trees, thrusting his black face near, teeth bared. Diallo entered the dome. The breath of the beast misted clearplas panes, then sucked them dry. Then the sky shattered with fiery discharges. Thunder snarled. The beast prowled the trees, licking, tasting, seeking. He found vulnerability. He leapt suddenly astride the exposed stretch of stream. His quivering bolts struck down to the water's surface, the fulfillment of the hunt. Diallo heard a scream behind him. "The water's burning!" He did not turn. Hands flattened against the pane, he watched flame rip down the surface of the stream, watched steam boil up, watched the trees' discharged sap flung back upon them in a cloud, watched as the trees exploded into flame. Diallo did not move, did not cry, but he felt the pain of the trees, the agony of the waters and the fierce exultation of the beast. Then the fire moved both upstream and down and the scene was lost in billows of steam and smoke. And the fire that destroyed trees and stream was to destroy Diallo. Not today, perhaps not tomorrow. But one day soon. He knew it. #Q EE you at noon rest, Head," kJLaer promised as he lofted his four youngest charges and scudded to the head of the column. Barrett watched him establish course directly planet-east before she turned for a last look at the stripped settlement. Six of the twelve dorms and a number of sheds had been disassembled for transport across the plain. Settlers who didn't have a hand in their transport carried seeds and supplies on their backs, personal possessions in their hands. Barrett regretted the necessity of abandoning the headman's dome. "Maybe the evaluation ship will lift it over for us if we don't get back for it." Diallo made no response. He stared toward the burned-out trees, devastation in his eyes. Barrett frowned. The hike planeteast would require a week, perhaps longer. Then they would reach a tree-shaded stream running parallel to this one. Milario had located it by scooter. This time, when they established their settlement, they would act upon solid knowledge of planet conditions. They would not clear broad fields for planting, for instance. Instead they would remove native vegetation from narrow bands of soil, cultivating only shallowly. It might prove necessary to irrigate, but there was hope to the east. There was no hope in Diallo's eyes. "Head, the streams interconnect. The survey report clearly states it. With each storm, damage to the trees will extend farther, until eventually it reaches us again. Until eventually the sky has consumed all the water." Barrett's face tightened. "You just have a theory, Diallo. You won't destroy everything by expounding it to the party, will you?" Diallo's eyes moved along the horizon. "I won't. It makes no difference now." "Good." The party was in possession of the facts as Barrett saw them. To present them with Diallo's poetic interpretations of apocalyptic visions could serve no purpose. They turned and walked after the others. They had not gone far before Diallo touched Barrett's arm. He pointed back toward the trees. Silently another giant wind funnel had formed over the exposed stream. It dipped into the water and spun moisture up into the thirsty reaches of the sky, diffusing it quickly into cloud. "The wind has come again." It had, the wind that had slain their fledgling crops. Barrett's shoulders tensed painfully. They were fleeing not just the morale-shattering devastation of the trees, the ever more vicious electrical storms, but also the destructive winds that had moved into the area like scavengers gathering around an unguarded kill. Fortunately Diallo said nothing. He did not tell Barrett again that the sky was a predator intent upon stripping the land of water, that it had fattened and strengthened on its first meal, that now it would return and feed again until it had consumed every morsel. He said none of those things again. Because he had promised not to say them again. The spout dissipated, sending vicious winds whipping over the land. Determined, Barrett turned and followed the column, her eyes set upon the eastern sky. There the sun was a rosy red egglet, the sky a clear violet expanse. When the air that enveloped this planet had taken enough moisture, it had to release some of it again in the form of rain. There were certain natural laws that governed any world. Even this one? Barrett did not permit' herself to dwell on that halfarticulated question. There were trees and waters and fields ahead. And her people strode like pioneers. So would she, as long as Diallo remained silent.  She loved the place -- and loved an earthling as well! Y OU can't neck in a spacesuit. The best thing Sonya and I could do was sit down on a flat rock about fifty meters upslope from the instrument pack, hold hands and try to read each other's impressions through the helmet visors. This time, though, we were mostly getting a last look at the Martian landscape. It was a landscape only a geologist could love. And Sonya loved it. It had everything I had seen on the moon -- pockmarks of craters and big gashed rills, hummocks and fissures and blowholes and scattered rocks from pebble to house size. There were some geologic differences and those made Sonya love it more. Also, you were heavier. And there were wind and duststonns. Sonya thought it was beautiful. If we'd had a year on Mars instead of only two months she might have talked me into thinking the same way. She could talk me into damned near anything when she tried hard. That last day we made our pickup on the instrument pack's sampling capsules, climbed up to the rock we called the "loveseat" and got as close to each other as we could. That was one of the nice things about the new spacesuits, the skin-tight long-john variety. You couldn't get as comfortable in them as you could in shirtsleeves, but at least you didn't look and move like a drunken teddybear. In fact, Sonya was so small (and I'm only about a hundred-seventy centimeters) that she could have sat on my lap if the life-support pack on her back hadn't always been getting in the way. We had been up there about five minutes when Sonya said, "I want to come back here some day." "You mean right here where we're sitting? And put up a plaque reading: 'Here sat Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Jacobs and Sonya Gorchakova, the first interplanetary romance -- ' " "No, silly." She patted my shoulder. "To Mars. To this whole planet. It's a real world, not like the moon. Some day we could give it more air could live here." She must have noticed the skeptical way I looked out at the landscape, because die giggled and said, "All right, I forget. You test pilots have no soul. But I love you anyway. I sometimes wonder why." I wasn't going to try to answer that, not with Colonel Harvey maybe listening in on our conversation. I just said, "You've got funny tastes in scenery." "Remember, I am Russian. I like emptiness. Sometimes when I am up here and you are somewhere else I can imagine that I am here alone, with the whole planet to myself." I grinned and shook my head. Then an old quote came back to me and I said, "The grave's a fine and private placeBut none I think do there embrace. " "Quite right," said a voice in our earphones and we both jumped. "I think you two lovebirds had better haul ass back to the ship. We're cutting things pretty fine on the Oh-Two, so I want everybody back here before I even think of cutting I sighed. "We're coming, boss." Of course he was right. The ascent module of the Grissom had a secondary life-support system for use during the trip up to our orbital rendezvous with the transport ship, descent module and would be disconnected and left on Mars, so that we wouldn't have the problem of hauling its considerable weight back up into orbit. However, the secondary we didn't rendezvous and dock within thirty-six hours after cutting out lot of trouble breathing. Earth out to Mars orbit. The landing ship, the Grissom, rode on a one-way robot propulsion module, while the Gagarin, the orbit-to-orbit ship that would take is all back home, slid along about a thousand meters away. Every three days two Gagarin to the Grissom and supplement the telemetry readings by an eyeball check of major systems. Sonya and I made the first check three days after Mars Orbit Injection burn, when we were already farther out than anybody had gone before. It got to Sonya -- well, it got to me too, being out there, even though space itself doesn't look any different. It doesn't show' any footprints or tracks even in close-Earth orbit, where we've been dumping garbage for thirty years. And out that farwell, I know I caught myself looking back over my shoulder suddenly, trying to surprise whatever or whoever was watching me. It might have got to be a bad problem for me without Sonya. We could talk privately over our suit radios when we were out of line-of-sight from the Gagarin and we could always talk by touching helmets. And talk was all we could do. We were both single. We could (and by the time we were halfway to Mars we knew we would) get married when we got home and make up for lost time. But this pairing-off we were doing was exactly what the psych boys had worried about when they discussed a mixed crew for the expedition. If we had gone any farther than we did, either Novikov or Harvey or both might have felt they had to break us up. That might have led to the first space mutiny, but fortunately we never had to find out. They let us talk, so we talked all meters of space. We traded bits of personal impressions, which were getting more personal as time went on, memories and, from the halfway point on, plans for our future. No politics. Either we didn't disagree, or neither of us cared enough about them to make a fight where we did. And of course there was the big point of the indoctrination they had hammered into all twelve of us: No Political Arguments. The joint expedition was a high-level experiment, so that bit at least made more sense than most of the rest of the indoctrination. That was where matters stood with us when we slid into Mars orbit. We stayed up there for a month, photomapping, picking our landing spot and running all the tests in the Mission Profile and a few more we improvised on the spot. On CircumMars  # we started checking out the Grissom. The Grissom had two parts, like to and a descent module. But she was much bigger and fancier. She was a cone fifteen meters in diameter across the heat shield on the base and twenty-two meters tall. She weighed over a hundred tons ready for injection into her landing orbit. Her powerplant was a lightweight Nimrod reactor heating Monopropellant B that gave her higher performance levels and a much bigger margin for error than the Apollonauts ever had. The descent module carried most of the fuel, the heat shield, the four articulated landing legs, the primary all the gear holding the two modules together. The ascent module carried the reactor and its supporting systems, the crew compartment, the computers and nav-com gear, the samples storage compartment, the get the whole thing off Mars and into a rendezvous orbit with the Gagarin. Between them the two modules were supposed to get five people down on Mars with two months' of supplies and the equipment for exploring out to about a fifty-kilometer radius from the landing site. This meant an electric tractor, two inflatable shelters with their own lifesupport systems, sounding rockets, explosive charges, drills, centrifuges, sterile sample boxes, thermal coveralls, clean socks, band-aids, and all the rest. When they had explored, the five would climb back into the ascent module and ascend. The touchdown went off well. The big ring of solid-fuel rockets around the Grissom's base retro-fired for about eighty seconds, then separated and we slid into landing orbit. We got a little help from the Martian atmosphere on the way down (that's why the heat shield), then about fifty kilometers up we jettisoned the shield, cut in the main engine, and sailed along for another two hundred kilometers to a perfect four-point landing. We waited about ten minutes for the ground to cool off. Then we suited up, climbed down to the surface of Mars, planted the UN, US, anese, National Geographic Society and Royal Interplanetary Society flags, unloaded the storage compartment, set up the shelters (one lab, one living quarters) and went to work. What we found is in all the reports and isn't all that interesting anyway. Most of it simply confirms what our orbital observations and the Mariner and Voyager unmanned probes back in the #'s and #'s had already suggested. Mars is apparently lifeless, although our one trip wasn't enough to prove that. It is pretty short on air and water and there is much more seismic activity than on the moon. There is a little less impact cratering, but some of the craters are real monsters. Mars, after all, is closer to the asteroid belt. The canals do exist, but beyond that we didn't do much to solve the mystery. Our tractor broke down before we could drive over to the nearest major canal system, so all we brought back was a lot of photographs from orbit. They look like pictures of parallel bands of fractures and faults. Obviously number-one priority for the next expedition had better be a canal survey and they'd better bring mountain-climbing gear for it. Some of those fractures are canyons two kilometers deep. Not getting to the canals was frustrating, but in spite of that we picked up well over a ton of supplies, ran ourselves and our equipment ragged and were usually so busy we forgot we were engaged in a great heroic pioneering enterprise. That shouldn't be any surprise. If you let yourself do the kind of thinking about what you're doing that makes for good reading in the popular magazines, you have to be more concerned with your own thoughts than with the job at hand. And if you let yourself go that far in space very often, you don't live to write about it anywhere. Sonya and I again managed to get teamed up fairly often, and we soon discovered that flat rock well up the crater wall that the gave the best view of any place within walking distance of the camp. Quite a lot of the planned work had to be scrubbed after the tractor gave out, so in these last three weeks we had plenty of chances to sit down by ourselves and talk for a few minutes. We didn't talk about ourselves as much as before. I think we both felt we knew each other's minds well enough for the time being. We decided one personal matter -- we would live in the U.S. But mostly we talked about developing a Martian colony, then maybe, if the planet could be terra-formed somehow -- with enough time and energy, a Martian civilization. Eventually she had me believing it. X V we sat silent for a moment. Then we stood up, brushed the grit off our suits and headed downslope toward the path back to the Grissom. The marker poles with thenreflectors were still sticking in the rock. We would leave them there and maybe some day somebody would have the time and shipping space to spare to go around and pick them up for museums. We reached the camp and passed the deflated shelters. The dead tractor was out of sight behind a spur of rock. The instruments we were leaving behind had all been distributed to their various stations. A lot of discarded gear was lying around and the whole camp was a pretty depressing sight. The Grissom stood about two hundred yards beyond the camp, squatting over the patch of cinders and glass her landing flare had made. They must have seen us coming, because they ran the little trolley down its tracks on the ship's side even before we reached the base and pressed, the call button. Sonya went up first, so while I wasn't the first man on Mars (that was Harvey's privilege), I was the last one off it. Then the trolley came down again. I got on, and they winched me in. I climbed in through the hatch -- it closed behind me and the compartment repressurized. I stripped off my suit and stuck it in die ejection compartment with all the other extra gear that would be dumped just before we lifted off. Two minutes later I was in the upper chamber of the crew cabin and slipping into my couch. The three crew couches -- Harvey's, mine, and Viktor Shrebnin's, the systems engineer's -- were arranged in a half-circle on the upper level, with instrument and computer and radar consoles over and under and around them in the usual claustrophobic way. Down below, Sonya and Cesar Vaubois, the biochemist, shared the floor space with food, personal gear, sample lockers and the pressure hatch to the airlock level and spacesuit storage. If they ever build a spaceship that doesn't require a thorough manual systems check before liftoff, I'll stand amazed and as far away from her as possible. I believe in computers, but I also believe in visual displays and the Mark I Model A eyeball. We used both aboard the Grissom. It took us over an hour before Harvey turned to me. He said, "Hank, ring up the general and tell him we're about ready to take off our skirt." I got on the radio and started calling, " Gagarin , Grissom calling," and I went on until Novikov came back with, "Roger, Grissom, we read you." "All ascent module systems actiare go for stage disconnect." "Taking off our skirt," or "stage disconnect" (Novikov was a stickler for proper terminology) meant firing the explosive bolts and then triggering the spring-loaded latches that held the ascent module locked in its cradle inside the descent module. Our name for it came from the fact that the ascent module lifting off and climbing out of the cradle looked like a woman climbing out of a particularly broad, stiff skirt. I punched the arming button on the explosive bolts, waited thirty seconds after the light flashed red, then punched the firing button. Eight sets of bolts fired with a rolling whant and the ship quivered slightly. I looked up at the status lights for the eight latches. Four at the base of the cradle, four up around the neck at the top of the descent module's cone. All eight lights showed green for "latches engaged." There was a single switch for unlocking all eight. I pulled open its cover plate and flicked it across. Clang, clunk, clung, skunk! It sounded beautiful. I looked up at the status lights. Seven had gone red, seven latches had disengaged. Number eight was still green. I frowned. Harvey looked at me, looked at the status lights and said disgustedly, "Shit." Silence. I flicked the switch gently two or three more times. The light stayed green. Viktor let out a long breath. Novikov's voice came through the hiss and crackle on the radio. "Gagarin to Grissom. Are you having a difficulty?" Harvey replied: "Grissom here. Status lights indicate number three upper latch did not disconnect on upper three latch. We are canceling initiation of the countdown until we find out what's wrong."' Throat-clearing noises on the circuit, then: "Very good, Grissom. minutes. We will check back with you when we reacquire. Good luck." "Thanks," said Harvey. Then, more to himself: "We may need it." out what was wrong. First, was the latch still in place? We knew that status lights had given wrong readings too many times for us to rule out the possibility that the latch had tripped just as it was supposed to and we were sitting and staring at a defective light. It would be pretty damned embarrassing if we went and did something drastic while the latch was all the time snugly retracted. But if it wasn't retracted, we were going to have to do something drastic. We couldn't lift off with the four tons of the empty descent module still fastened to our tail and have any hope of reaching orbit. If it didn't hold on, it might break loose somewhere along the trajectory and tumble us out of control. We might wind up crashing back to Mars at full speed or charging wildly off into space, so that if by some chance we did reach orbit we could never rendezvous with the Gagarin before our oxygen ran out. Except that we were going to be out of oxygen anyway within thirty-six hours whether we tried to lift off or just sat on Mars contemplating our inputs and outputs. Since all the things we might have to do were not only drastic but dangerous, the first thing we did was to pull off the status-light panel and check the accessible parts of the circuitry for malfunction. That was ticklish enough and doing it carefully enough to avoid causing damage took us nearly two hours. Halfway through our work Novikov came back on the radio. He got a progress report, then wisely shut up and let us work. By the time he came around again we could tell him that if there were any circuit defect it wasn't anywhere we could get at it. Therefore we would have to assume the latch was still engaged. Novikov didn't like that at all. "Possibility," he said. "Could you test for engagement by blasting with the main engines and watching the stress gauges?" "If we did it very carefully, yes," said Harvey. "But it would cut into our fuel reserves. Can the Gargarin maneuver to compensate if we take a piece out of our rendezvous capability?" A moment of silence, with voices off. Then: "Yes. We are at one hundred and twelve percent of our fuel reserves for docking and rendezvous maneuver. We can fill in for you." "All right. We'll blast at the absolute minimum thrust needed to register engagement. We can't risk distorting the latch if it's still engaged." Viktor nodded enthusiastically at that. So Novikov signed off again and we sat down to arrange things. Just in case the latch had tripped and we started climbing freely as thrust built up, we decided to wait until the next window for a reasonably fast -- six hours or less -- rendezvous with the Gagarin. That meant about a forty minute wait, so I unstrapped and climbed down into the lower level to talk to Sonya and Cesar Vaubois. Passengers in a spaceship have one advantage. The ship is so small and they are so thoroughly briefed on its workings that they usually have a fairly clear idea of the situation when something goes wrong. They don't have to sit in their cabins or their seats and bite their nails while somewhere off in the dim dark distance the captain or the pilot is sitting and biting his nails while the instruments tell him the sad story. So the two scientists were in no worse spirits than the three of us upstairs. Vaubois grinned at me as I came down. "It is at hard times like these," he said, "I could wish myself back in the days of Pasteur. A chemist could then make his discoveries sitting comfortably in his laboratory, not on some unbelievable planet in the middle of too-complicated machinery." Sonya spread her hands in despair. "This hairy Luddite -- he is always complaining about the machinery, the machinery. What would Pasteur have given for a chance to be here?" Vaubois shrugged and grinned again. There was nothing wrong with morale downstairs, so I climbed back up and sat down to wait for blast time. Harvey did the whole thing manually, starting the thrust at four per cent and slowly pushing it up to seven, ten, twelve, fourteen, eighteen --  -- and the strain gauges lit up, bright red faces showing quivering needles slowly swinging up across the dials, and a warning horn blatted in our ears. Harvey's big black hand clutched the throttle as if he wanted to tear it out by the roots and banged it hard down against the stops. There were clanks and clunks and pinging noises as we settled back into the cradle and loud curses in English, French, Russian, and Armenian. than before when the Gagarin radioed us and we were still stuck. There wasn't much he could do. however, except have a running rendezvous set up on the main computer, so they could blast to meet us any time we sprang ourselves loose. Also, wish us good luck, again, which was nice of him. We knew we were going to have to either trip the latch or cut it or break it somehow. Blasting with' the main engines at a higher thrust level wasn't the way to do it -- too much fuel expenditure, too much risk of distorting the latch, even the risk of ripping open the hull of the ascent module. It looked as though somebody was going to have to climb into the upper equipment bay of the descent module, get at the latch mechanism and cut it or hit it or something until it came free. And that somebody was now going to have to do it soon enough for us to rendezvous and dock with the Gagarin in thirty-one hours. So we got out the drawings and started looking at our problem area. The hardware for the upper ring of latches was in the upper equipment bay of the descent module, along with lots of other miscellaneous machinery. The engineers had used it as a sort of dumping ground for everything they couldn't fasten on or plug in somewhere else. The bay itself ran around the top of the descent module and was roughly the shape of a French-fried onion ring. There was one access hatch in the outer hull, so we didn't see any big problem getting into the bay. Moving around inside it to the defective latch (on the opposite side of the ship from the hatch) was going to be another matter. To save space and weight, the designers had arranged things so that the retracted latches simply snapped back into what little open space there was in the bay. The inside of that bay was a mess anyway, but with those retracted latches squatting in the path of whoever went inside to work on the jammed one, it was going to be next thing to impossible to move around in it. Viktor, as an engineer, was pretty angry over this lapse from "belt and suspenders" by his colleagues. But they were all back on Earth. He went on being angry in several languages for several minutes, then picked up the drawings and went down into the lower level, spread them out on one of the couches and began doing things with calipers and a slide rule over them. His tone was still angry when he climbed back up, followed by Sonya and Vaubois. He was also worried and that showed up in both his face and his voice. "I have reached a conclusion." He looked ominously at the rest of us. "Can the melodrama, Viktor," snapped the colonel. "All right. Someone can climb into the bay and release our troublesome latch. But that bay is very tight quarters, with bends around equipment, sharp edges and little space. So the person climbing in there must be very small." In spite of what Harvey had just said about melodrama Viktor paused for a few seconds. Maybe it was just to catch his breath, maybe to listen for the wheels turning. They were certainly turning in my head. Sonya was -- by a good fifteen centimeters -- the shortest of us all and slender besides. After the moment it took me to remember this I slowly turned around and looked at her. So did everybody else. Viktor waited until everybody was staring at her and then, just as she was opening her mouth to speak, he went on: "Yes. Also, she cannot wear her life-support pack." This time he got his effect right away. Everybody said "What?" or something like that, except for Sonya, who just looked at him. He ploughed on. "Yes. If you will see here -- " we bent over the drawings -- "there are two sharp bends here and here, around the emergency transponder power pack and the number-two sensor housing, where even Sonya would not be able to wriggle through if she were wearing the backpack. It would catch somewhere and she might be trapped. She might possibly be able to make it, but she cannot really do much wriggling in there if she does not wish to rip her suit." That was a hard point to argue. All this put the ball in my court. I cialist. I sat there for a bit, making up a mental list of the tilings I needed to check, then started checking them. man-hours -- we had plenty, since Sonya's consumption was less than were in the ejection compartment -- but they could easily be pulled out, checked over and brought back on line. This would take more time than we really wanted to spend, but not dangerously much. Even recharging the backpacks was only going to add an extra half hour. Hoses. There were the headaches. The way Viktor described the arrangement we would have to use, Sonya would be like an old-fashioned helmet diver. She would be inside the bay, her backpack with its oxygen supply would be out by the access hatch and connecting her with it would be two five-meter hoses. That length was the big part of the problem. It was barely enough to allow her to get in there and have some slack for working, but it was every bit of the flexible metal hose we had. And to get that much we meter lengths together with airtight seals and that would take more time. We could have solved the length problem by using the rubber laboratory tubing, but it was too small and too likely to get brittle and then rupture. The temperature out there after sunset would be down to around minus eighty Celsius, which does funny things to rubber. I outlined all this and nobody said anything, until Harvey looked at the clock and said, "We'll be coming up on the eighteen-hour mark by the time we've got the suits ready." The eighteen-hour limit for continuous work dates back to the Apollo lunar flights and it's not a bad idea -- you get tired and you start doing things you can't afford. Except that right now we couldn't really afford to put cycle. That would bring us down to about twenty-two hours of oxygen, which might not be enough if anything more went wrong. But if Sonya went out there are started working in that cramped equipment bay when she was tired, she might slip and then something would go wrong. Unless she thought she could sleep by herself while the other four of us banged around both compartments rigging the suits and the hoses. Harvey put the question to her. She nodded slowly and said, "I think -- if I lie down and rest for the hours while you are working on the suits I will be ready for the work even if I do not sleep." "Would you like a pill?" "The rules." "Screw the rules." She held up a hand. "No. For me, the pills make me sleepy for hours after I wake up. I will work better tired." Harvey nodded sharply. "All right. Go park yourself in one of the control couches. Hank, pressurize the ejection compartment and let's get to work on those suits." The suits turned out to be an easy job and even the long hoses weren't difficult -- just time-consuming. If we hadn't been working with one eye on the clock we'd have been in good shape. We gasketed the hoses with putty, then wrapped the gaskets several layers thick in epoxy tape. This didn't improve their flexibility, but they didn't have much to begin with. When we shot pressure through the hoses to test the new seals, there was still a very slight leakage at each joint, but not a critical one. In fact, the new seals tested out stronger than the built-in ones on the helmet and backpack. It was nagging, finicky work, and we were all feeling tired and cranky when we finished. Viktor took photos of the whole arrangement, while Harvey sat and muttered, "Stupidest damn do-it-yourself project I ever saw." Then he and Viktor climbed down to brief Sonya while I sat down and ran another set of tests on the hose connections. They didn't really need it. I think I was doing it mostly to put off the moment when Sonya would have to go out there and take her chances on our cobbled-together arrangements. I suppose Harvey noticed this, but he didn't say anything about it. I thanked him for that later. He didn't say anything about my volunteering to go out with Sonya, either-maybe logical man anyway. I suppose I ought to thank him for that, too. climbed out of the airlock the sun was almost down. There isn't enough air on Mars to give much sunset effect unless the sun happens to set through a duststorm. We saw that a couple of times and it makes an absolutely beautiful blood-orange glow on the horizon. Without the dust the sun just drops until it reaches the horizon line. And then there's a little gold patch on the horizon line for a couple of minutes while the sky purples and soon turns black very fast. Then the patch fades, the stars all come out, and it starts getting cold. And meanwhile thermals run past at maybe twenty meters per second, increasing the heat loss of anybody working outside. That was why Sonya went out there with two pairs of thermal coveralls over her basic pressure suit. It made her bulkier, but still nothing like the old-style suits. We wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting anybody wearing one of those into the bay. Harvey turned on the external lights. We tied our safety lines on to the first attachment point outside the hatch. I got a good grip on the line and started my slow walk around the upper part of the cone to a point just below the access hatch to the equipment bay. It was like walking across the face of a glacier and that wind didn't make it any easier. If I slipped, I might knock Sonya off. I certainly would break my helmet or my hose connections or something important when I hit the ground twenty meters below. I reached the hatch. Then, while Sonya made her trip, I kept one eye on her and the other on the hatch as I reached up and tripped the external latch. It opened, but the external lights didn't show much inside. I transferred my lines and, when Sonya reached me, pulled the flashlight off my belt and shone it inside the bay. It looked just as bad now as it had on the drawings. Sonya slid as close to me as the space would allow and stuck her head in. I saw her Ups move as she recited to herself the sequence of components she would have to crawl around. Then she braced herself against the open hatch cover, one leg hooked over the rim of the opening, and began unbuckling her life-support backpack. When she had finished, she crouched in the opening while I carefully picked up the pack and tied it firmly to the hatch mechanisms. While I was doing this Sonya was checking the tools on her belt. We didn't know exactly what was causing the jam, so we had hooked everything we thought she might possibly need on the belt, including one of the laser torches with enough power to cut right through the latch if necessary. With everything that was hanging from it the belt weighed nearly half as much as she did. I was getting edgier by the minute as she checked each tool. I wasn't going to blame her -- but was she getting cold feet? Maybe literally, since it must have been passing sixty below already? Finally she turned and nodded to me. I cut off my suit radio and leaned over to touch helmets with her, in case she had anything private she wanted to say to me. But the expression on her face was all business. I don't think she even noticed I had switched' off the radio. She just said, "Watch the hose for me," kneeled, flicked on her own flashlight, and crawled forward into the bay. I watched her disappear bit by bit -- head, shoulders, torso, hips, legs -- until she was entirely out of sight. Then there was only the vibration coming faintly through the metal of the ship, the jerking of the hose and the sudden darknesses and sudden glares of light as her flashlight shone down behind equipment or up against the low roof of the bay. I stuck my head in as far as I could without losing my grip on the outside handholds and tried to follow her course as well as I could . She went in about three meters, as far as I could tell from the length of hose left, then stopped. Both the hose and the light stayed steady for a couple of minutes and I couldn't feel any more vibration. I could hear her breathing getting heavier and once or twice something like half-audible Russian curses. Finally came a moment of total silence -- then, just before I started getting really frightened, she said quietly, "I'm coming out." I reached down and began taking in the slack on the hoses as they began jerking and twisting again. Sonya backed out of the bay, reappearing the same gradual way she had disappeared. When she was completely out in the open I took a good look at her. The thermal coveralls were ripped in a couple of places and I fingered the tears lightly to make sure they didn't cut into the basic suit underneath. She pushed my hand back gently and said, "Bad news, everybody. I can get through, all right, but these coveralls -- they keep bunching up at the waist and catching. I think I must try taking them off." Harvey came in with: "Are you sure you won't get too cold?" "I don't think so." Through her helmet faceplate I could see her drawing her lower lip back from her teeth, her normal gesture when she was getting impatient. Before I could say anything Harvey went on: "All right. Go ahead. But if you start getting cold -- " Sonya was already unbuckling her tool belt. I took it from her, laid it down on the deck and braced myself against my lines and the hatch cover to help her off with the coveralls. With both of us working on them they came off quickly. I rolled them up carefully and stowed them in a comer of the hatchway. With those shapeless coveralls off, Sonya had enough figure to show through the suit. I didn't try to keep from looking at her. What bothered me was how everything was so clearly visible, as if I had a couple of extra senses. It bothered me particularly because this was how I sometimes started feeling just before an attack of vertigo and I couldn't afford vertigo perched up out here in the cold and the wind, twenty meters up and Sonya needing my help. I finally looked at her so long and hard, trying to clear my head, that she noticed it. She didn't mind being looked at most of the time, but I was afraid she might be bothered by my doing it now. Instead, she looked right back at me -- the same kind of look I was giving her -- reached out and squeezed my shoulders. Then she buckled the tool belt back on and began her crawl back into the bay. Tills time the hose kept moving. I finally saw the light stay steady and heard her say, "I am there. The latch is still in place. I am going to try the hammer first." I heard her breathing as she twisted around to pull the hammer out of her belt, then I felt a faint shiver through the ship's hull as she began tapping on the latch. It went on for five minutes as she pounded away, harder and harder. Then: "Nothing is happening. I am going to try the laser cutter." There was a throat-clearing noise on the circuit from Viktor. "Sonya, I think it might go faster if you got at the retraction mechanism itself. Can you get at the access plate from where you are?" There was a little bit of silence, with a background of faster breathing. Then came scraping and clunking noises as Sonya shifted her position. "Yes." Two sharp bumps. "I have released the fasteners. I am taking off the plate now." "Be careful. If one of the bolts hasn't fired, a sharp jar might set it off." If one of the bolts hadn't fired, the explosive might have become unstable through months of low. temperatures with the heat generated by landing creating a problem on top of that. Sonya was careful enough. I didn't hear a thing for nearly a minute. Then there was a little click and: "Hatch is off. Both bolts fired but the spring didn't operate. I am going to examine the spring housing." I wasn't keeping track of time so well now. I was getting nervous and I was beginning to get uncomfortably cold, although the wind was dropping. I reminded myself that Sonya must be getting cold even faster and listened. Finally I heard her say: "I cannot see all the way into the housing. But I think the spring has fractured. Yes, this end is loose and there are little shards of metal lying around." "I'll be damned," came through from Harvey. "Sonya, is the laser torch working?" "Yes." "Put it on a medium setting and cut along a line about eight centimeters below the base of the latch." "The latch?" "Yes. Once you cut through the plating there, you can stick some sort of a lever through it and pry the latch free. Be careful-don't heat up or damage the retaining bar of the latch -- or we'll never get it free!" "Why not have her put the laser directly on the latch and slice it in two?" "It might fracture if we heat it up. Or we might fuse a piece from the spring. Either way it might end up jammed for good. It's too risky." "All right, Viktor." The silence went on and on this time -- until both Harvey and I got on the circuit with a "Sonya, are you all right?" For the first time there was a real note of strain in her voice. "Yes. Now stop bothering me." Harvey reacted before I did, using the senior-officer voice he only used when he wanted to shock something out of one of us. "Miss Gorchakova, report your condition!" She was silent for a few seconds, then said quietly, "My feet are getting cold. I am having a little trouble getting into position." "Sonya, I think you'd better try putting the torch directly on the latch. Shut up, Viktor!" Harvey's mind must have been working along the same lines as mine. If she lost the use of her feet, it might be impossible for her to crawl back out again. "Colonel Harvey." She took a deep breath. "Viktor is the engineer. And I am in here. You are not. Let me work." She shut off her radio with a sharp click. Harvey swore a bit, then shut up. I was too edgy to say anything. I hunched down, ready to move if Sonya called, and waited. I was imagining her in there, struggling with tools she had trouble lifting on Earth, while her body heat flowed rapidly out through the suit into the minus-eighty temperature now surrounding her. At least she was out of what was left of the wind. After about two minutes we heard a clanking noise as she picked up something, and then a series of smaller clanks, clicks, thumps and bangs that went on and on and seemed to be ready to go on for three hours. But it was really only about four minutes later when there was a single sharp thunk! that jolted the whole ship. She came back on the circuit with: "Latch cleared." As if we needed telling. It sounded like more than three people cheering from inside. When the noise died down, Harvey said: "Okay, Sonya, Hank. Get your asses inside and we'll call up Novokov as soon as we have initiate countdown. And Sonya -- thanks." "Nichevo, " she replied. Maybe it really was nothing to her. "My legs are a little -- stiff. I will have to come out slowly, using my hands." I shifted position to stretch out my arms as far as the space would let me towards where she would crawl out of the bay. I saw her light begin to jerk and waver again as she reversed her position and the hose started twisting. She was having a bad time of it. I could feel the vibration as she dragged herself around equipment, the lower part of her body a useless weight thumping down hard on each move. But it was her breathing that really scared me. It was rasping and half-choked. She sounded on the edge of collapse. Suddenly I saw her helmet silhouetted against the light reflected from the ceiling. I wriggled forward and stretched out my arms until I thought they would pop out of their sockets. Sonya saw me moving and raised her head. "Hello, Hank." I giggled softly with relief. Her voice had sounded quite normal. Then I noticed that her hose had become looped around a telemetry housing, just a few inches below the top. I mentioned it to her and saw her nod. She pulled herself around and reached out toward it, her back arched and her arms at full stretch. As she reached out she half-rose off one knee. The numb lower leg buckled. Overbalancing, she toppled forwards. Her head struck the hull with a jar I felt clearly and for a split second all her weight came down on the hoses. The helmet seals had become brittle in the cold, like the spring. They gave. I saw the white cloud as the air puffed out of her helmet and yelled something incoherent. Sonya tried to clasp her hands over the open hole, but the air was gone before she could do it. I heard her gasp. Then she twisted at the waist and fell over on her back. Her head smashed down on the deck and I saw the faceplate seals of her helmet crack. I jammed myself as far toward her as I could. It wasn't far enough. Not too much farther and possibly I might have grabbed her and possibly rigged some sort of cross-connection between our helmets. Two "possibles," neither of them a "probable." And in any case I couldn't reach her. I didn't look at her face, either -- at least not until quite a while after she had stopped rnoving. I stayed fairly calm for the ten minutes it took for me to do what I wanted to do and climb back through the airlock. I didn't get the shakes until I was back in the crew compartment... and I didn't get over them until we had broken out of Mars orbit and started home. Harvey took the Grissom up by himself and made rendezvous only three and a half hours after liftoff. Dr. Petrova sent me to my cabin and it wasn't until we were two hundred thousand kilometers out that they sat me down and asked for the story. Harvey argued Novikov out of doing it sooner. I know they couldn't understand why I did what I did before coming inside. After Sonya stopped moving, I waited for about three minutes, then picked her up and propped her in a sitting position, looking out through the hatch. It seemed the way she ought to be, because until the next expedition she does have Mars all to herself. Her fine and private planet.  Poor Sam -- he faced the oldest weapon of all! S AM # crouched low, trying to blend his shape into the dune curves. In the faraway control blockhouse Sam's operator looked at the monitor screen showing the image relayed by the camera in Sam's left eyesocket. She swore softly. The cat drifted over the dunes, shoulders working smoothly under orange-and-white fur. Well-trained, alert and deadly, it was a speciesspecific weapon. Sam was the target. Sam remained unmoving, awaiting orders to move. The controller sat very still, perhaps trying to augment Sam's frozen stance. Then the cat stopped and both Sam and the controller knew that Sam had been spotted. The controller was good at her task, but there were many good controllers. She was a better controller because she knew when to let the weapon act on its own. This was a typical occasion. Slowly the cat turned, crouched, tail whipping the salt air. The controller shut down the command frequencies, leaving only the monitoring amplifying system in contact. The cat aligned himself to face Sam -- a sleek tom bred and trained all his life for this eventuality. As much as instinct and training could induce him to, he hated Sam. He existed primarily to kill any rat he found. No ordinary rat had a chance against him. Sam was not an ordinary rat, though. Sam # was an incredibly complex animal-machine gestalt. His skeleton had been strengthened with aluminum; he was controlled by bodily function was monitored, as was every current in his brain. In addition the computer took every muscle impulse from the brain and amplified it, splitting it into identical pulse-orders, one going to the muscles and the other going to the microcables that multiplied Sam's strength and agility several times over. Sam's stomach had just a few hours earlier been replaced by two things: a protein sac to keep Sam alive long enough to fulfill his mission, and a tiny powerful bomb. The cat leaped at Sam, hot instinctive hunting desire augmented by artificially induced killer lust. But quick as the cat was, Sam was infinitely quicker. Sam jerked up to his full nine-inch height, surveyed the oncoming death for an instant, then sprang sideways to safety, slashing at the murderous feline at the same time. Aluminum claws dug thin, shallow slits into the cat's side. The precise arc of the feline body disappeared as the startled cat flailed into the sand with a scream of surprise and rage -- no intended victim had ever reacted as had Sam. Before the cat had any chance to reorient himself Sam was streaking the offensive. With his capabilities, he could have met the enemy headon and won; but every scratch received, no matter how small, was a drain on energy and efficiency. It was better to use finesse. At this point, the controller could only hope that Sam's injury-aversive conditioning would hold. S AM rifled directly at the feline. At an instant that seemed much too late to avoid raking claws he swerved, zigzagging out to the cat's side in a spray of sand -- then in under the white-furred belly. Sam's opponent had good reflexes, excellent reflexes, but against the equipment that, through radio communications, formed a vital part of Sam's voluntary muscular control any other set of reactions in the animal kingdom were pitifully slow and inadequate. The cat was only just realizing that this strange new rat had changed direction when Sam unleashed a burst of aluminum fury of one hind leg, then scurried out of range of the frantically thrashing cat. When he had gone several meters, Sam whirled about to face an enemy that now regarded him from a shaky threelegged stance. At this point, the cat was, in his own fuzzy cat-way, frightened and confused. He was confused because of the strange little hated target that was everywhere at once. 'He was frightened because he had been hurt. Badly hurt. More than ever he wanted to rip Sam apart. He also realized that the feat was not within his abilities. So, planning in an indistinct way to catch Sam off-guard later, he started slowly, cautiously, to move away. It was a serious error. The instant Sam sensed his foe's attempt to break off, the betrayal of weakness, he moved in. The cat barely had time to recognize the fact of Sam's renewed attack before Sam changed tactics. Sam jumped. A short, high arc, giving the cat ample time to look up and try to rise on both hind legs to fight. The damaged leg gave way immediately, dropping the cat on the sand, belly-up. Sam's controller realized what Sam was doing -- it took a conscious effort on her part to keep from forcing Sam to break off the fight. She had allowed Sam free rein and he was undoubtedly going to sustain some injuries in this close combat. If she tried to pull him away now -- against his powerful fighting instinct, the conflict would probably only confuse Sam, jumble his coordination and give his enemy the upper hand. Sam had lost all contact with reality -- his universe was centered on a point precisely under his claws and he raked at that point, tore at it, ripped it with aluminum fangs, mangled fur and flesh, ignoring other claws that scored his back. But the controller couldn't ignore those claws. The monitors indicated a certain loss of efficiency due to wounds already received -- the damage was not yet critical, but that was no reason to take chances. The controller waited a fraction of a second, making sure that the cat was too panicked and weakened to counterattack when Sam broke off. Then she resumed command of the frenzied rat. Sam jerked up, then sprang away from his victim, contorting wildly, trying to get at the pain racing along his back and sides as the amplifying systems forced awareness of pain into his brain. Nervously the controller studied the systems indicators; Sam's blind rage was breaking up, slowly fading away from the cat and recentering on the heightened pain sense. She shifted temporary command to the computer -- it had been programed for this contingency. With a thorough knowledge of Sam's reactions and psychology, it progressively de-amplified the pain signals, and then began to blank them out of Sam's brain, calming him down. The end result was a placid Sam, unaware of his injuries, squatting on the sand and watching the cat feebly try to paw its entrails back into a mangled abdominal cavity. The controller stared at the screen for several seconds. She owned a cat of her own... puter command circuit and resumed personal control. Sam began trotting across the sand, swinging his head slowly from side to side to relay a better view of the terrain. The controller was monitoring Sam with an intensity reserved only for this stage of the mission -- she controlled Sam's behavior with fantastic precision for the same reason. Now Sam was entering a zone in which the danger was not from other animals -- they were something Sam could deal with-but from a thick blanket of electronic detect-anddestroy devices, set up by the Americans when they realized the danger from Sam's predecessors. Suddenly a thought struck the controller and she queried the computer: what was Sam's present operating efficiency and projected index at the point of the mission's final state -- assuming no further interruptions? The computer mulled over the question and answered it in less than measurable time: present efficiency overall, #  of highest possible physical capabilities, assuming all factors totally favorable at time of standard measurement; projected efficiency overall at final stage, # of etc. The controller glanced at the tape, tossed it aside and forgot about it. Better not to worry about something that was not critical -- there were plenty of problems that might become so. A dog patrolling the dunes came upon the cat's body. Carefully, he clamped it in his jaws and carried it to his master's lookout post. Sam and the controller now worked virtually as a single entity -- the controller's mind in Sam's body. A faint smile of relief played over her features as she guided Sam through mine fields, low-profile scanning units, sound analyzers -- so far, the data gathered by the previous animals in the Sam series seemed to be adequate. Apparently the Americans had nothing new. The controller had to curb her impatience as Sam progressed -- it was a great temptation to abandon caution, to send Sam racing through the Americans' defenses. It irked her slightly that she could not yet see Sam's objective, due to the limited focusing ability of the microlens in Sam's eyesocket. With every step Sam took she relaxed a bit. Sam was sure to succeed -- he couldn't fail this far into the mission. Sam suddenly began to limp -- a leg damaged in the fight was beginning to give under the demands put on it. The controller lowered the pain-inhibition in Sam's brain, causing him to favor the leg, saving it from further injury. The controller checked with the computer again on Sam's Efficiency : present, #; projected at final state, still #. At Security headquarters, the cat's corpse was studied closely. Grim officers checked the electronic killers, rechecked, checked their monitors. By simply refusing to be found, Sam was unconsciously waging a war of nerves on the Americans. Occasionally Sam would lift his eyes. The lens in his left socket would slowly screw out, as the controller again tried to see the purpose for Sam's existence. It was still too far away. Sam lowered his head again and continued across the dunes. Security jeeps sprinted across the concrete plain, erupting out of their low blockhousesAn each the passenger was holding tightly to a weapon. The weapon stank. Sam peered at the far horizon once again. The controller looked at the screen and a sunrise of contentment rose into her face. There it was. The rocket. As yet, the camera could just barely focus on it -- it was a thin finger, pointing up from the bottom of the meter-wide screen. But it was there. Destroy it and the Americans would be set back crucial weeks. Sam could do it and by doing so prove the value of the project that had spawned him. Sam's controller increased his pace slightly; he looked ahead more frequently now, and the rocket's image grew from a finger's height on the monitor to twice that, and twice that. Slowly, in careful stages, the controller began to relax. Soon it would be over. Once she finished maneuvering Sam out of the danger zone, his training could take over. The operation was to be successful, then -- well and good. She had known it would be. She knew Sam, knew his capacities. Certainly he could be hindered -- after all, he was only a rat -- but stopped? No. Sam stopped. almost as a physical jolt. Sam simply froze, without any orders. Slowly she ran checks over all of Sam's sensory monitors, concentrating hard to fight back an odd feeling of disorientation in her mind, which she recognized as a prelude to panic. Sight: nothing dangerous. Smell: again a negative. Tactile... A wire. Sam could feel it, a sharply delineated pressure on his chest. Then came the sound. Now hyperalert, the controller seized on the auditory response instantly and investigated it. Obviously it was nothing deadly or Sam would have acted on his own -- but then, did Sam know every noise that could mean danger? Sam angled his head left, to look at whatever made the hissings, the scrapings. Dogs? Cats? Men? Sam looked with one eye and the controller looked with the other. Guns looked back at them, muzzles instead of eyes, looking at Sam. For an instant the controller stared at the screen, puzzled. Then Sam's predicament crashed into her awareness. Her flash of insight was followed immediately by a rush of panic. Sam couldn't be stopped now! Her life was dependent on his at this point -- Sam's death prior to mission fulfillment would seal her own fate. Sam must survive, must escape, must complete his assignment. She felt linked to Sam as never before. Slowly her panic drained away -- but it left a stain of desperation on her thoughts, slowing down her mind, clogging up idea channels. For years the controller had successfully practiced rigid emotional control -- she had, in fact, succeeded so well that a part of her was totally amazed when she began crying. The jeeps had dispersed around the rocket, Sam s target. Each jeep 's passenger took the weapon he held and placed it on the concrete. All the jeeps departed, leaving the stinking weapons around the rocket. Trapped, the controller's mind ran in tight circles, over and over, mechanically, reviewing again and again what she had realized in that cruel burst of insight. The Americans had been clever. Considering the pitifully small amount of data they had on the Sam animals, to have stopped Sam # was a fantastic achievement. And Sam was very thoroughly halted. When his body had pressed against the trip wire, weaponry had been alerted to Sam's location. A normal animal would have stepped over the wire, releasing the pressure -- and quite probably activating the guns. Sam, of course, stopped, held prisoner, to be found, perhaps even captured. From habit, the controller checked Sam's operating capacity again: present, #; projected, #. Unless she accomplished something soon, it would be too late. The Americans ' electronic devices noted that something had been activating a section of wire entirely too long. It passed the information on to its masters. controller forced herself to think. The problem was quite well defined and she held as axiomatic that the existence of a problem proved the existence of the problem's solution -- it was just a matter of finding that solution. Grimly the controller began the search. First, directly ahead were only sand, grass, concrete and the rocket. Next, to the right lay sand, scrub, asphalt, the Americans' anti-Sam net. To the left-more of the same. Carefully, keeping pressure on the wire, Sam turned to look back: again, the same. But something was nagging at the controller. There had to be an answer somewhere in all this. She began studying every piece of defensive armament on the monitor screen. The soldiers, with their dogs, were starting their search along the wire, but there was a lot of wire and only only one Sam. Cautiously the controller began tracing patterns from her observations, searching alertly for something to aid Sam. Then, building up in her consciousness, came the data she needed: the guns. After looking at as many as she could see, the controller reached the firm conclusion that only those within a definite radius of Sam had moved to sight on the rodent. In addition, the guns were not all aimed precisely at Sam -- as far as she could tell, the intention was to saturate a certain area. And if there were boundaries to such areas, then it followed that there had to be a differentiation between sections of wire. With new purpose, the controller directed Sam to begin looking to each side again. The controller studied the monitor intensely, and soon found what she sought: to Sam's left, a black post approximately a meter tall served no obvious function except to hold up the wire, which probably ran directly into the post, though the wire was too thin and the camera's resolution inadequate to tell. This, then, might be the solution. Assuming that the post indeed controlled the actions of the guns, it would be by direct connection -- the guns weren't equipped for radio reception by the looks of them. Assume next that the control cables were close to the surface, where Sam could get at them without leaving the wire. And finally -- and here was the weakest link -- assume that Sam had cut off a flow of current and that a resumption of that current would fire the guns. This last point was pure conjecture. Leaning against the wire, Sam made his way to the black post and began digging around the base. For a minute, sand spewed in a gritty cloud from his claws. Suddenly he stopped. His head twitched up, giving the controller a view of whatever it was that Sam had heard. She gave a moment to fuming about bioengineers who couldn't fit both a camera and a mike into Sam, leaving her with only the means of knowing that Sam had heard something, with no way of finding out what it was, short of seeing it. Sam saw it. From the bad picture on the monitor the controller judged the moving figures, man and dog, to be at least four hundred meters away. Then Sam went back to his digging, more hurriedly now and without spraying so much sand -- the controller kept him working when liis instinct told him to flee. the controller began to worry about her hypothesis. She directed Sam to dig in one spot only, hoping that the Americans had run a line to the guns over the shortest distance possible. Now, more and more, she was operating on guesswork. She didn't know how fast the soldier and the patrol dog were coming -- or even if they were continuing in Sam's direction. There was little logical reason to believe that the control cable would be buried within Sam's reach. Her worst uncertainty was: were the guns signaled by a current or no-current? Hearing what the controller diagnosed as barking, Sam snapped up his furry head to look again at the soldier and the dog. The controller turned Sam's attention back to his digging. She could see that the pair had closed to three hundred meters, perhaps a bit less -- time became a vital factor at this point. Automatically the controller checked Sam's index: present, #; projected, #. She was mulling over these low figures when Sam found the cable. His claws had raked across the sheathing and Sam stopped, his objective discovered. But the discovery brought with it a tricky problem : the sheathing remained unmarked -- obviously Sam couldn't snap the cable with his claws and it was too far away to reach with his teeth. The controller was not about to be stopped. She and Sam were, for all purposes, one entity again, as the controller lifted Sam's left hind leg to shove against the wire while Sam inched a bit farther forward -- forward -- forward... Sam's nose reached the cable, ad- vanced farther, to bring the jaws to bear. Sam's auditory monitor picked up sharp impulses -- barking again. The controller forced herself not to think of the consequences of chance going against her. Sam's incisors bit into the cable, nibbled, gnawed -- and snapped the cable. No reaction. Sam wasn't ripped apart by high-velocity bullets. The gamble had succeeded. Sam shot over the wire at full speed, racing toward the rocket, victorious. He was but three hundred meters from his target, oblivious to everything but the rocket, his objective. Outside Sam's universe the guard dog went wild on his leash and was released to streak across the concrete after Sam, but it was hopeless. Even with an injured leg Sam was faster. Tension and fear ebbed away from the controller as Sam approached to within two hundred meters of the rocket. There was no way to hold Sam back now. Within seconds he would be scurrying up the gantry tower, attacking vital wiring, ruining certain delicate and acessible components and finally positioning himself in a strategic position to be detonated. Sam was one hundred fifty meters away from the rocket's base and starting to slow down. After releasing his dog, the soldier had radioed Security. Now a swarm of vehicles raced across the concrete, toward Sam, the rocket and the stinking weapons. With a jolt, the controller noted Sam's slackening pace and was immediately alert; was Sam's hurt leg finally giving out? No, the only unusual reading was on the olfactory monitor, but it was powerful and was affecting Sam oddly. His instinctive areas were in great agitation -- the cerebral command area was being suppressed. The controller stepped up the power on the command frequency as much as possible without damaging the relay satellite's circuitry; but Sam did not increase his speed. It baffled the controller completely. Suddenly it was over. Ignoring the commands ringing in his tiny brain, Sam changed direction as the stinking weapons took effect. The controller did everything in her power to make him head around to the rocket, but to no avail. Under her electronic battering Sam reeled, staggered, jerked and leaped, but kept on doggedly toward his goal. It was with another flash of painful insight that the controller realized that the situation had become hopeless. Everything she had done so far, all the agonizing, the joy -- all was meaningless, all for nothing. She felt no bitterness -- the time was past for that. Her fate was very close. With precise motions she armed Sam and detonated him. Then she sat back, released, to think of pleasant things, to remember good days, until her arrest and execution. S AM'S death shattered concrete and made a sound heard more than a mile away, scattering the rat over a five-meter radius. In seconds the cars were there, the jeeps and the trucks. This was not Security's moment and the agents stayed back. Now the technicians came, antiseptic men to scrape Sam off the concrete. A limousine rolled up to the scene, disgorging a general and two more antiseptics. All three walked to the scorched patch that signaled blast center. They stood looking at the seared concrete for a moment. Then a whitecoat reached down to the steaming film of homogenized rat and picked up a skull fragment. An aluminum tooth still dangled loosely from it. "I don't believe it," he said, staring at the bone chunk. "This thing is supposed to be back on the perimeter wire, according to our detectors." The other tech shrugged. "It's beaten all our defenses. Looks like another modified rat. A damn good one, too, to get through everything we put out." "But it didn't get through," the general pointed out. "Your people stopped it." "We were lucky," answered the first whitecoat, dropping the skull fragment. "I'm not sure that we can do it again." "Fantastically clever, though, to appeal to the thing's most basic urge -- say, let's get out of here. That smell's giving me a headache." The three men departed, as the Security guards moved in. They began collecting the weapons that had stopped Sam #, super-rat: caged female rats in heat induced by synthetic harmones -- and reeking of artificially fortified musk.  cold sleep by ship's computerized system and told he's seventy-five years into mission: man's first attempt to colonize a star system other than his own. He is computer-instructed to check ship's systems, then his own voluntary involuntary bodily functions, circulation, sensorium, speech organ and memory. His period of awakening is for one hour. During this time he is to speak, exercise and try to remember his cold-sleep dream. In his dream he was a primitive, ocean-dwelling life form, inordinately hungryand was himself eaten by a carnivorous cephalopod while eating a trilobite. His second awakening comes # years into mission. His instructions are as before, but in addition he's told to go to the ship 's control center to evaluate target system three. The ship's computer had bypassed the first two target star systems as unsuitable for human colonization. Number # is a perfect, Earth-type planet, unpolluted and verdant-but is entering Roche's limit and will soon break up to become a ring rules no landing, obediently remembers last cold-sleep dream: in it he was an enormous brontosaurus and was killed by a small, carnivorous allosaurus. On his next awakening-# years into mission-he is told to check a malfunction in Blue #, a colonist cubicle, and discovers Colonist cal years old, improperly frozen and dying. At the end of her last waking period she had tried to communicate with her boy friend, also a colonist, and had not made it to her cold-sleep death as comfortable as he can. Before returning to cold sleep he is required to remember a complete day in his life prior to starting on mission. He had been a physician and remembers three instances of violence he had attended on an Earth made uninhabitable by its inhabitants: #) a young man wounded as a bystander in a duel between his father and father-in-law; #) a lovely young girl, figured her face to discourage murderous duels between her suitors; #) a dead boy, victim of a chance bullet fired during riot in another part of town. During the same day he also meets a rather mysterious man the purpose of evaluating another possibly habitable star system. The system is already inhabitedby technologically advanced aliens who have polluted it and send spacecraft forms evasive action. Before being permitted to return to remember another episode of past life. He chooses his first date with Cooldown follows and this time prince who grows up to be king and wage successful war on a neighbor kingdom. He marries his vanquished foe's daughter, who detests him and, after giving him two sons, causes him to be assassinated. years into mission. He's told to remember pre-launch instruction and dreams, is startled at the totality of his recall of every thingincluding terrifying cold-sleep nightmares. He also discovers another dead colonist, The discovery delays his return to sleep casket and computer wakes the trouble is. ted suicide to escape cold-sleep dreams-they also experience desperate fatigue, decide to override computer and try natural sleep to recover. Results are so gratifying that they program computer to instruct all those on board to try normal sleep breaks to lick cold-sleep nightmares. Before returning to cold sleep he had discovered, during training for naut, one of the first to experiment with hibernation anesthesia in spacea legendary figure. T HE dream began very badly with a long and rapid succession of deaths. Like an endless deck of playing cards dealt face upward, they were presented briefly and with all the details clear before being replaced by another face of death with a greater or smaller value of fear, violence or pain. There was a card for the brontosaurus and the trilobite and the cave-dweller and the old king and many, many others he had not experienced before. There was the instant barbecue of the old schoolteacher, the drunken agony of the salesman spitted on his car's steering column, the frantic coughing of the soldier drowning in the blood from his throat wound and the airliner pilot who had his third cervical vertebra and a large section of his lower jaw blasted away by a hijacker's bullet. Some of the deaths were much worse than the others and a few were almost pleasant. These were the slow, comfortable deaths from wasting diseases or exposure when the breakdown of circulation brought drowsiness and a feeling of warmth. But even those cards, although free of the symbols of violence and pain, were often stamped with the dark and dreadful markings of fear of death itself and of what might come after. Only gradually did he become aware that he was able to make comparisons between these terrible or merely unpleasant deaths and, much later, that he was an individual called Devlin who suffered it all but was at the same time detached from everything that was happening to him. Devlin did not know how long it was and how often he died before he discovered that he could exercise a small measure of control over the process. He began by trying to hold on to the less unpleasant dyings for as long as possible -- those comparatively painless or those that had pain associated with them but where the fear of death was absent or of secondary importance because of anxiety for or pleasant memories of loved ones. Then he learned how to push away from the death instants, to go farther and farther back in time into the period preceding the continual and fearfully detailed dyings. The deaths were not banished or forgotten -- they were still the most intense and painful episodes in the dream lives. But now he could be selective, he could tune for the less savage and painful experiences leading up to death in the hope of going even farther back to times when he had known only life and pleasure instead of death and pain. A few of the cards Devlin had already seen, but very briefly... He was a good salesman and always had been since he had joined the organization at the age of twenty-two. Section heads, supervisors and sales directors of increasing seniority had commended him for his youthful enthusiasm and complete faith in the product of the moment. He had always given every sales pitch everything he had, and he had had a lot to give. Offers of promotion had come early, but less and less often. Customers were so much wax in his hands, but for some reason he was unable to inspire fellow salesmen to anything like his own enthusiasm. They were a cynical bunch, in general, who refused to share in his act of faith in the company and its product. So he was given selling assignments of increasing importance because, it was said, his talents should not be wasted on a purely supervisory job, and his commissions and expense accounts were the envy of all except his mother. She did not like the way he worried about his work at night -- that was in the early days, of course, when he spent most of his spare time at home. She was also fond of telling him that he did not have to be successful at everything to be happy, that she had stopped being taken in by his sales pitch shortly after his tenth birthday and that if his father had been alive he would have told him to change his job. Talk about his father always made him uncomfortable because her voice reminded him, just a little, of the tone he used while referring to his merchandise. When his father had died he had been too young to feel any sense of loss or grief, and the pictures he had seen of his parent had shown a pretty average person -- the kind who could be talked into buying anything. But somehow this colorless individual had sold himself to his mother so successfully that, even twenty years after his death, she remained faithful to the original product to such an extent that talking about him made her almost happy. He had never been able to understand how his father had been able to achieve this effect, but the reason was probably that he himself had been effort necessary for such a longterm sales project as marriage. But then a good salesman did not need to be married to get a girl. Nowadays he could not get girls so easily and sometimes not at all. His boyish enthusiasm did not sit well on a face whose red-veined nose and deep etched wrinkles were anything but boyish . He had almost lost today's client despite the half bottle he had killed at breakfast to fortify himself for the fray. It has been a tough fight at that, lasting most of the morning and through a three-hour working lunch, and he had won it by sheer, dogged persistence that had been close to desperation. Having won he had celebrated, mostly because he liked celebrating and to dismiss any lingering self-doubts troubling him. His desperation had not, he was sure, been apparent to the client, and the sale had not been won because the client had felt sorry for him. He would continue the celebration as soon as he got back to his hotel. He was into the parked truck with its muddied rear lights so suddenly that he had only time to desperately swerve his steering. A fast, relaxed and accurate driver, he was fond of telling people, had no need of a safety belt. Instead of burrowing under the truck's overhang and hitting the differential he ran into the tires of the enormous double wheels, and he did not bounce because he was stuck fast on the steering column... And another familiar card came u P : The large, cold drops of rain slapped at the canvas cover with a sound like distant gunfire and the vehicle's slow lurching progress along the dark street made his head roll from side to side and allowed the droplets running down his face to collect inside his collar. Facing forward, his elbows hooked over the support rail and, his weapon at the ready, all he could see was a stretch of shining black road surface pitted and wrinkled by past petrol bombs and carpeted with half-bricks, broken bottles and pieces of smashed pavement. The houses on each side of him moved past, their downstairs windows glowing or flickering as interior lights or a TV screen's glow tried to fight its way through the heavy drapes, while the dripping hedges and front garden, some shaggy and some neat, could have been hiding anything. He felt too cold and wet and miserable, he realized suddenly, to have any room left for fear. No terrorist, he was sure, would risk pneumonia by setting up an ambush under these conditions. They would probably be watching television like normal people -- especially the news coverage of their shootings and bombings or the mouthings of the pundits discussing the possible political ramifications of the latest blast. Or they might be plotting around the fireside or up in a bedroom with their wives or girl friends, engaged in seduction rather than sedition. Which made him wonder if the women concerned were bothered by the fact that the hands caressing them had, a few hours or days one of his mates or an uncommitted civilian with a bomb or a rifle or a rocket launcher. He wondered if -- sometime during this tour of duty -- he killed someone he would be foolish enough to tell her about it. The circumstances were completely different, of course, but when he got on to this particularly uncomfortable line of thought he sometimes wondered if he had the wrong job. Tonight he was so cold and miserable he knew he was in the wrong job. The unlighted or heavily curtained windows paraded past. Sometimes he imagined that the curtains moved or that the venetian blinds twitched. Possibly there was a gunman drawing a bead on him, or a terrorist sympathizer keeping him under observation -- or he was being watched by a curious youngster who couldn't sleep. The rain was beginning to trickle down his back. He was rounding a curve in the street and passing under a lamppost when the firing started -- a couple of rifles, it sounded like, and a Thompson to make him keep his head down while the sharpshooters tried to pick him off. He was out of the vehicle and flat on the ground with the others before he actually thought about doing anything -- a reaction, the corporal was fond of saying, that demonstrated the trained reflexes of the professional soldier -- while the bullets whanged off the bodywork or punched holes through it. He rolled through a shallow puddle until he was partly under a garden hedge. The noise made it hard to think. Despite the heavy terrorist fire he could not spot any of the flashes from his position. Suddenly his foot was gripped and shaken roughly. "Get that damned light!" said the corporal. "We'll cover you." He rolled away from the hedge and onto his back, took careful aim at the center of the fluorescent lamp and did as he had been told, losing what remained of his night vision in the process. He blinked rain out of his eyes and returned to the shelter of the hedge again as the shooting became less accurate and began to die away. He could hear the whine along the street which paralleled this one, trying to cut off the gunmen's retreat. Beside him someone loosed off a shot, but all he could see were the floating green blotches left by the street lamp. The hedge was not an effective shelter. Not only did it allow bullets to whip past unimpeded, its leaves saved up the rain and dropped it on him in small, irregular torrents. But the dripping hedge reminded him of another wet evening many years ago and he decided that he could tell Jean about this evening because she would enjoy the joke. Long before they had been married there had been another hedge in a-very secluded spot near the road where Jean lived. The first couple of times he had been out with her they had not stopped at the place, but on the third occasion it had been Jean's birthday and he had put a lot of thought and effort into showing her a good time and they had stopped. A few minutes later the great granddaddy of all cloudbursts not only dampened their ardor but washed out his main plan of attack. There had been other secluded spots and hedges when his strategy had gone very well and the final assaults had met only token resistance. And after every one of them they had always remembered and laughed over that first wet hedge. Now David was four years old and there was a boy or a girl at minus two months, and they could not make up their minds which they really wanted. It was a very permissive society, these days, and it seemed to be getting sick and violent with its freedoms. He had enjoyed the permissiveness, but for a girl-child growing up his world might not be so good. Parents of girls had a lot to worry about. The bullet ricocheted off the curb and tore a large uneven hole through his neck, rupturing the left carotid and opening a passage into the trachea. The sudden, burning pain made him want to scream, but when he drew in his breath a thick, bloody froth flooded into his lungs, strangling him. He grabbed at his throat with both hands, coughing to clear the obstruction, and felt air and warm bubbles squeezing between his fingers from the entrance and exit wounds, but when he tried to breathe in there was no air, only the warm spurting wetness. Very soon he was dead. But not nearly soon enough... Another life card. "Airfield Two. This is Golf Alpha November Mike Zulu," he said in quiet fury. "I am approaching the coast on a bearing of two-eight-seven at flight level seven-five-zero. Landing instructions, please." "Mike Zulu, Airfield Two. Remain on present heading. Reduce to flight level six zero. You have twenty-eight miles to run to touchdown. Visibility is ten miles. Wind gusting to twenty knots. Request aircraft type and passenger details. " The voice was devoid of emotion, the diction was good and there was no indication that the man was gloating. "Nimbus Five Transonic," he said. "Seventy-five per cent load. Six hundred and twelve adults, fifteen children plus crew." A Nimbus yet! The only suitable runway is zero four. It is barely long enough and a bit rough and you will have an eighty degree crosswind port side . We suggest you divert. " Before he couid reply the edge of a very hard hand was rubbed painfully along the side of his neck, and the man standing behind him said, "No." "I have been requested to land at Two," he said. "Understood. But remind your friends that we have a profit-sharing arrangement with the other two airfields , and if you crash that aircraft there will be nothing or nobody to ransom. " The hand rubbed his neck even harder. "My friends are impatient as well as greedy," he said. "A diversion is not possible." "Your funeral. Reduce flight level to five zero. Maintain present heading. " "Five zero on present heading," he said, then furiously to the man behind him: "I don't give a damn if you commit suicide, but there are others involved." The man behind him laughed softly, then asked, "Can your copilot land this thing?" He wanted to say, No, because it was the truth and his second officer knew that as well as he did -- but being young and inexperienced was something that happened to everyone at some stage. Instead he said quietly, "In these conditions we will both be required to land this thing. You must understand that these supersonic jobs have to put down an awful lot of flap to slow us sufficiently for a landing. And during the last half-minute we will be holding on to the sky with our fingernails in an attitude that is dangerous if the wind velocity and direction are not right. With gusting conditions and maximum flap we could fall out of the sky or the ground effect could -- " The edge of the hijacker's hand struck the side of his head just above the ear. It was not a hard blow, not painful, but it was a conversation stopper. For the next few minutes he maintained an angry and helpless silence. This had been no ordinary hijack operation or the security guards -- traveling incognito even to the crew, and numbering one to every fifty passengers -- would have been able to stamp on it. The disguised guards had picked up their weapons inside the aircraft and the loading tube detection system would have ensured that nobody else carried a weapon on board. He was still not sure of what had happened exactly, but his senior hostess had been able to reach the flight deck and tell him something about it during the minute or so before the man behind him had arrived and broken her back. Apparently the hijackers had staged an incident during which one of their number caused a near-panic in his immediate area by producing a shaver with a black plastic casing that looked like a weapon. This has caused two of the guards in the vicinity to break cover and several others to tense up sufficiently for them, also, to be spotted. During the jackers had disarmed these guards using killer-karate. Not all of them had been successful, but enough of them had been able to get weapons to shoot it out with the remaining guards who had, of course, been hampered through trying to avoid hitting innocent passengers. During the ten-minute gun battle the great tubular barn that was the main passenger cabin had suffered a sharp pressure drop. But as all of the guards, four hijackers and seventeen others had died the remaining passengers thought themselves lucky to have only bleeding noses and earache. He still did not know why his senior hostess had had to die simply for giving him a situation report. He liked to understand people even if he did not agree with their point of view, and he knew some of the reasons why this intelligent, highlytrained and resourceful team of hijackers had taken his aircraft. But the senseless display completely unnecessary murder performed with an utter lack of feeling, made him so angry that he felt physically ill. ' 'Ma i n tain presen t h eading, Mike Zulu. Reduce to flight level four five zero. Twenty-three miles to run. " "Mike Zulu," he acknowledged, then tried again. "One of these days," he went on quietly, "the governments are going to stop paying ransom money for hijacked aircraft and passengers and then you will be out of a job. And this green and pleasant land below us, with its thriving pirate economy, will feel the pinch. No government wants to be the first to throw three or four aircraft and a couple of thousand passengers to the wolves, of course, but there are a couple of administrations on the point of doing just that. It will take just one to make the decision and the rest will follow. "When that happens you, and the people below, will not have the benefit of consumer goods smuggled in at top prices," he continued, "because you will have no money. You will have no money because your currency will be declared valueless and any you may have salted away on the continent will be frozen -- the measures are already being planned. You, assuming that you are the brain behind this hijack, should be intelligent enough to realize that you can't possibly continue to -- " He broke off as one of the hostesses, looking pale but with her voice steady enough, excused herself and asked for instructions. "We shall be landing on a runway that is a rather tight fit," he replied easily and smiled at her. "This means that I shall be making a steep approach, shoving on reverse thrust a few seconds after touchdown and stepping hard on the brakes. Make sure that their straps are tight and check the tables for loose objects. Right?" "If the runway is short, sir, how will we get off again?" He smiled reassuringly, thinking that the girl was too intelligent for her own peace of mind, and said, "This has happened to me before. The ransom covers the passengers, aircraft and crew but not the baggage and freight. We will be much lighter at takeoff." "Yes, indeed," said the man standing behind him. Perhaps he was irritated at being left out of the conversation, in which case he had displayed his first human feeling. When the girl had gone Devlin's dream identify went on, "I am not probing for information useful to our security people and it doesn't matter to me whether you are free-lance or employed by the government of this country. The people down there do not officially boost their own hijack trade and you would never admit that you had been smuggled out as refugees to set up this operation. "And you could be telling the truth," he continued, "because if you had come from this country you would do as Airfield Two suggests and divert. So you must be a free-lance group hoping to set yourselves up here with your share of the ransom. Fair enough -- but there will be no ransom for anyone if we flop over and burn on Two's runway, will there? And I hate to say anything complimentary about an operation that places so many people in jeopardy, but this job showed planning of a high order and considerable intelligence. Surely the same degree of intelligence and forethought will tell you that -- " "Turn three degrees on to a heading of three-zero-one, Mike Zulu. Descend to flight level three zero. Eight miles to run. Have you the airfield in sight?" "Mike Zulu. Descend to three zero on three-zero-one. I see you, Two." Behind him the man changed his captured gun from one hand to the other, but made no attempt to answer any of the questions. Angrily Devlin's dream identity said, "This is the most beautiful, unpolluted and underpopulated country in the world. It has always been beautiful, of course, and in the past it was very popular with tourists. But it is free of pollution because there is virtually no industry and its technical skills have gone with its people -- those who were lucky enough to get away before immigration was forbidden. Now there is no one who wants to come here except people like yourself. The lower orders of farmer and laborer are also trying to leave, many of them dying in the attempt. The country imports everything except a small proportion of its food and exports nothing at all -- and this beautiful and dangerously unstable country is where you want to spend the rest of your lives. Can't you see how stupid that is?" The man sighed faintly but did not speak. Ahead of the plane the airfield was a tiny, flattened plus sign, pale gray against the hazy green patchwork of the surrounding fields. He made a last desperate appeal to the hijacker's humanity as well as his reason. "You are not trying to right a political wrong or serving the cause of any minority group by coming here," the dreamDevlin said. "You come to this place only if you are in this for the money. Fair enough -- greed I can understand. But why gamble on losing so much when a twentyminute diversion would give you a certain win? Or is it a feeling of power you need? The feeling that you are so much more vital and important than the majority of poor, hardworking, dull sheep that their suffering is too small a matter to affect you? Or maybe this time you want to share their feelings! Are you, then, so terribly bored with life that you want to know what it feels like to be broken and torn apart and breathe in the fire of burning fuel -- " He broke off, then added coldly: "I'm going to be very busy for a few minutes. Your answers can wait until after we land." Two's main runway was opening out below him like a gray isoceles triangle, spotty with clumps of weeds and cow droppings. The grass had not been trimmed for many years and the wind sent broad, green ripples hurrying across it. With maximum flap and barely enough power to stay in the air he aimed at putting down on the runway short of the threshold markings, because for this landing every yard would count. As well as catching the fully-extended flaps like a sail and pushing up the port wing, the crosswind necessitated a crabwise approach that would have to be corrected at the latest possible instant before touchdown if he weren't to smash all the tires and probably rip off the undercarriage bogeys. He rounded out over a patch of swamp about a quartermile from threshold, with his stall warning having hysterics and his wings dipping first to one side and then the other as he compensated and overcompensated for the gusting. During the last few seconds before touchdown he found that he could anticipate the gust effects by watching approaching wind ripples in the grass and as she began to sink he brought the nose on to the centerline of the runway. He felt two tires go and checked a slew to starboard while he dumped lift by running out the spoilers and calling up full reverse thrust. He would stick to the ground now, but the other end of the runway was rushing toward him at an incredible rate. He applied the brakes much harder than recommended for the present ground speed, then harder still. He felt another tire go, then three in rapid succession. Between them the landing bogeys had thirtysix tires and if the bursts were fairly evenly distributed among the three bogeys he might be all right. But apparently they weren't and she began a slow, inexorable yaw to port. He was sure that the port wheels were about to go off the runway by the time he checked the yaw, and he had a glimpse of a man writhing about in the grass with his hands pressed against his ears and a noise-maddened cow running across the verge, but he did not feel the aircraft hit either. For an instant he thought cynically that a pirate airfield with a too-short runway did not deserve a minimum noise approach and landing, and that in any case they would probably add the broken windows and curdled milk to the ransom amount, just as they would insist on an extra ransom for the aircraft and maintenance crew needed to fly in and fit the spare wheels to this brute before she could take off again. Another tire blew as the forward bogey stopped within a few yards of the boundary fence. He shut down everything except the auxiliary power unit serving the flight deck and cabin systems and settled back in his seat. "A very nice landing, Mike Zulu. " "Thank you, Two." Behind him the hijacker laughed softly and said, "I don't think that a highlytrained, hardworking sheep like you will appreciate it, but this is the only answer I've got." Something crashed through his head so fast that neither the pain nor the sound of the shot had time to register before a terrible darkness swallowed everything. B UT the darkness was not permanent. It became an infinite area of black velvet on which cards were displayed briefly before being replaced or covered with other cards. Some of the cards were closely linked, such as the one for the co-pilot whose skipper had been killed before his eyes and who had crashed one of the world's largest jets on takeoff -- or the one of the hijack the aircraft's captain had led to the death of all the passengers and crew a few days later and in turn precipitated a crisis that wrecked the pirate economy of his adopted country. That hijacker, too, suffered briefly but intensely before he died. But his life-card was difficult to scan, the lines of cause and effect were tangled and his emotions and drives needed too much effort to understand, if they could be understood at all. There were not many lives like his -- the majority, although painful in places, were easy to understand. Some of them were surprisingly rich and pleasant and many of these belonged to people whose lives, measured against the yardstick of Devlin's now vast and varied experience, should have been utterly miserable from the moment they had been born. Devlin had learned how to hold a life long enough to examine part of it, usually the last part, in detail... Lit by the last light of sunset, the great cranes of the long-abandoned docks and shipyard stood out against the darkening sky like a sketch executed in blood. In more than fifty years of disuse they had rusted but they had not fallen down, just as the ships along the dockside had rusted and sunk at their moorings but had not gone away. They had, instead, grown outward as their hulls silted up and provided greenery for nesting swans and seabirds. One of the swans, deep pink in the fading light, drifted in mid-river as if it had nowhere to go. Like all the rest of us, he thought. Aloud he said, 'This kind of approach has been made to me before. I don't want to listen to you naming names in high places, or to your plans for overthrowing the Council, or to you extolling the virtues of the cause that is driving you to do these things. I am utterly disinterested in anything you want to say or do. I have heard it all before." "Yes," said the young man, "and you've done it all before." He leaned his elbows on the parapet of the bridge and sighed, unable to make a negative answer. "You are going to listen because this will interest you," the other said fiercely. "We know you were a master tactician once, that you planned and carried through one of the neatest coups in recent history and that you could have had a high place in the Council if you hadn't dropped out of sight and become a schoolteacher." "That," he said dryly, "was a tactic of survival. Considering the number of times that the Council has been replaced since then -- " "They'll be replaced again -- and soon if -- " "I'm not interested in listening to treason either," he said tiredly. He could almost feel the intensity of the young man's gaze on the side of his face as he continued to watch the swan. Then the other said, "I agree -- you are the survivor type. But there are times when one must take risks to go on surviving and right now we want you to take a very small risk. What we need is your advice -- the benefit of your early studies and experience -- for a small and not very bloody revolution." "I've had my revolution and seen the results," he replied, still without turning. "No." The young man gripped his shoulder and pulled him around until they were face to face. He said, "Listen to me, you soft old man! This country is dying on its feet, the Council members are growing fat in their keeps and the local commanders in their fortified farms are not much better. Even the sheep have ceased to care that we are drifting into a feudal economy, even though one of the most technically advanced countries in the world can be seen from where we're standing on a clear day. You once had the good of your country at heart. You had for -- but you did not die. Your wife did -- and you ran away from everything and ended up teaching children -- sheep children at that. You were good, the best -- but not intelligent enough to realize that people must suffer and die for every advance." What advance? he asked sardonically. But he asked it silently because he was, after all, still trying to survive. "Naturally we will handle the execution of the present Council and any local commanders unwilling to support us," the young man went on. "But there are a lot of important people who want to play safe and who will not back us unless they think the takeover has popular support. This is where you come in. Specifically, we need your expertise in setting up a popular rebellion situation. Something that will wake up the sheep, make martyrs of as many as them as seems necessary and get them personally involved in -- " "The sheep won't get involved any more," he said and looked at the other's hand on his shoulder until it was taken away. Then he went on: "The less sheepish ones have either left the country or become lower-grade supporters of the Council. The rest are patient, long-suffering and cynical." The young man shook his head angrily and said, "We really are trying to better conditions for everybody this time -- even the sheep. We have ideas for resuming trade with the mainland -- legitimate trade that will enable us to build up some foreign credit. Instead of a subsistence level economy we'll be able to afford a few comforts again, and we'll be able to rise once more to become -- " "What exactly will you trade?" "I see you're becoming less disinterested, old man," said the other, smiling. "We trade something that those soft, bored, overcrowded and polluted foreigners do not have -- space, clean air, scenic grandeur and, most of all, excitement. We invite parties to join safaris into what used to be the most dangerous country in the world. We will take them to the historic places where it all happened fifty years ago, and we'll put on a show for them with bombings, ambushes and the rest of it. Some of them may even get hurt from time to time, but not badly. They will probably want to bring their own medics with them and pay us well for the privilege. But right now we need two things and one of them is you. "We need you because you have done this before, and very successfully," the young man to pay a high price because we want it to be obvious that this is not simply another change of Council faces, but something different and much better. Instead of a Council composed entirely of people in their twenties and late teens, we'll have a new one led by an older and wiser head, someone with intelligence and judgment and experience, someone the foreigners will be inclined to trust. Now get interested, old man -- because we are offering you the top job!" He was silent for a moment, thinking about his experience and qualifications -- because of one experience his qualifications were gone. In those days he had been young, self-confident, idealistic and able effectively to compartmentalize his mind so that the necessarily evil acts-which he planned and others carried outdid not trouble him. He and everyone had known that a greater good would come of them. He had been sorry, in a clinical fashion, for the innocent sheep who died or were maimed, but he had thought of them as statistics and had always tried hard to keep their number as low as possible. His wife had been, of course, far too sympathetic in her nature to be told of the work he had been doing, even if he had been allowed to tell her of it. But then one sunny afternoon outside a supermarket she had become a statistic. He remembered her beauty and warmth and the concern she had felt for everything and everyone who suffered, the peace he had known in being with her, just watching her movements and expression and the incredible passion, so slow to kindle, with which she had loved him. For many years he had forced to the back of his mind and locked up in its compartment the picture of the torn and dismembered thing he had had to identify, but now the door was open again. He swallowed and said, "The top job, eh? But you mentioned needing two things." "The other is money," said the young man. "Money for arms and to pay off the local commanders whose estates will be used during the initial safaris. But the money is coming in nicely as a result of some minor-key hijacking of private aircraft -- " "That is insane!" he burst out. "We were warned what would happen if we ever tried that again!" "Bluff," said the other, laughing. "Sheer bluff. Too many governments would like to move in here and we can play them off against each other. They need this underpopulated piece of real estate -- they each need it so badly that none of them will let another take it. So relax. All but one of the aircraft were small, they were brought down in ordinary Fields closed to our supporters' keeps, and the ransoms were ridiculously low by former standards. The reason for that was that we were also testing the hostages -- they were private plane owners and their rich friends, remember -- with the safari idea, and they all seemed keen. There was nothing in the foreign newspapers or TV about the incidents, so obviously everyone is keeping quiet and playing ball. And with the latest they paid up promptly and with even less fuss than before. "This idea is going to work, old man," he ended, with great certainty in his voice. "We have something to sell, something they want badly enough to ignore a petty irritation like a few hijackings which will, in any case, stop as soon as the safari trade gets going. Well, what do you think?" All at once he felt deathly tired and, surprisingly, not at all afraid. He said, "We have sold, or at least exported, ideas and methods that have wrecked cities and countries all over the world. For that we have been isolated like a sociological disease. Now you have developed a mutated strain that might possibly allow the disease to spread once again. Haven't you considered the possibility -- no, the virtual certainty, dammit!that if one of them can't have us they will make sure nobody will." He turned once again to face the river mouth and the sea. A few minutes ago he had opened a frightful compartment in his mind, but there were many other compartments in which his wife was alive and beautiful and loving, and he wanted to open all of them while there was still time. The light had almost gone, so that the swan drifted in the black water like a graceful ghost and one bright star -- or perhaps it was Jupiter -- lit the darkened sky. And then she came homeward, With one star awake, As the swan in the evening. Moves over the lake. "What?" asked the young man irritably, making him realize that he had been thinking aloud. "I was remembering an old song that my wife liked to sing." "That's sheep thinking!" the other said angrily. "We're.offering you the number-one spot and all you can think of is -- " He broke off and swung around to stare across the city and beyond. The sky had lightened again in the west and suns were rising in all the wrong places. But before he could even feel afraid and long before the sound of the nuclear explosions reached him, the sun aimed at this particular city burst above his head with a flash of impossibly bright light that was followed by absolute darkness. darkness -- lives in uncountable numbers and all clamoring, it seemed to Devlin, to be remembered. Most of them were ordinary lives at first feel, but even the mundane ones had their moments of glory which made them unique and, in the majority of hyper-sensitive individuals who sometimes created without control, who sought power without responsibility and who were flawed without ever having tried to correct their flaws. Some of the flaws he observed were minor and easily overcome. Others were major and overcome with extreme difficulty and many were impossible to overcome no matter how hard the individual tried. The flaws ranged from petty dishonesty, selfishness, minor-key destructiveness and character assassination in otherwise normal individuals up to the bright, fuzzy, helpless struggles of a short-lived mongoloid and the perverted intensity of feeling experienced by men deeply and emotionally involved with other homosexuals. Viewing all with complete knowledge, Devlin could no longer be sure what, if anything, was a perversion -- to understand all was to forgive almost everything. But he still felt repulsed by some aspects of life, principally the perversions which depended for their pleasure on the sufferings of others. To him it seemed basically wrong that one person's pleasure should cost others pain. As a result these lives as a whole were highly unpleasant to recall -- save only for a few youthful incidents-so that they hung in the dark outer fringes of his memory like books in a corner of a library that was rarely visited. Death, suffering and sex left the strongest impressions in every life -- this was probably the reason Devlin had almost been driven to suicide by the earlier cold dreams. But now he could be selective in his choice of individuals and incidents and he was beginning to enjoy the process when a gradual diminution of sensation made him realize that he was coming out of cold sleep. He tried to fight it for as long as possible by holding on to his most recent selection, an incident following a domestic quarrel when both parties were pretending that it had never happened but had not reached the stage of kissing and making up. The period was contemporary, or perhaps a decade or two in Devlin's Earth past, and the rather one-sided discussion was taking a philosophical turn which gave it applicability to the present... Their house had always been too small and the area of the tiny back garden was further reduced by the thickness of the tall hedge on three sides which gave privacy and a feeling -- only a feeling-of security. Caught in that suntrap and sandwiched between the hot, dry grass and the nuclear-powered heater in the sky, he felt himself begin to relax enough to start apologizing. "You're right, dear," he said, staring sunward through the bright redness of his closed' eye lids. "This place is no longer safe. It is also becoming too expensive. I was hoping that it wouldn't be and was trying to keep it going, which is why I accused you of being ungrateful and never satisified... Well, anyway, living in a Block will be much less expensive and, even though the sunshine will be artificial, the place will have effective group security and we won't have to worry about -- " "I know what you said about the statistical element is true," she broke in. "There are far too many people like ourselves for us -- for this house -- to stand much chance of being hit. But yesterday was the first time I actually saw Maxers in action. She -- she was a shoplifter the store detective had caught outside the main entrance. The Maxers pushed him away and cut off her hand. They enjoyed doing it-." Her hand crept into his and he squeezed it reassuringly as he said, "Maximum Response looked liked the answer a few years ago. The soft approach of the psychologists and sociologists wasn't working and society brought back corporal punishment administered, if necessary, by citizens on the spot. But now was have so-called citizens going around searching for crimes to punish, and the idea of maximum response to minimum offenses, while it sorted out our crime problem in short order, has been twisted out of shape like all the other good ideas. Now we're getting Maxer gangs setting up minor incidents for them to react to, or even delivering a maximum and downright murderous response to a mere rumor of an offenseand they start the rumor." "It isn't just the Maxers," she said, moving so that her sunwarmed arm and leg were pressing against his. "I read last week that four hundred violent deaths per day -- that includes night, too, of course -- is now considered to be an acceptable figure for a medium-sized city like ours. What is the matter with people? We have enough to eat. There is plenty of entertainment -- lots of interesting things to do with one's spare time -- and there would be no sickness if the hospitals weren't so overcrowded with nuts who tried unsuccessfully to carve each other up or botched the job on an innocent bystander. Scientifically and culturally we should be living in a golden age -- so why are so many bored and angry and violent? "I'm not really asking questions," she went on before he could speak. "Just complaining. I know you would say that differ ent and often unlikable people have always been responsible for the world's advances in art and science -- they prod us ahead more quickly, like dogs snapping at the heels of cattle. Maybe that's what is wrong. The cattle should have been allowed to wander forward at their own pace, getting where they were supposed to go with herdsmen leading them instead of dogs and wolves driving them. I grant you, that we have a few responsible people trying to push us in the right direction. But their attitude of mind is never to consider individuals, only the big picture, and to consider females as mere statistics and unworthy of serious male attention once they pass the age of thirty. It is no coincidence that the proportion of female suicides in this age group is-" "You," he broke in firmly, "will always have my serious attention, even when you are old and gray and your statistics have changed out of all recognition." "In ten years," she said more quietly, "I wonder if you will still say that." Reassurance given too often loses its effect, he thought and tried to move the conversation on to a less sensitive area. "Of course I will," he said. "But to go back to something you said earlier about boredom and violence coupled with high technology and culture -- I've been trying to make sense out of the present situation, too. It seems purposeless and stupid and I certainly don't approve of it, but suppose there is, in fact, a reason behind it -- perhaps an evolutionary process that went wrong. Suppose the wolves were intended to inherit the Earth, and do something constructive with it -- but they were hampered by too many sheep getting underfoot and practically begging to be eaten or beaten or enslaved or used in some other fashion. So, instead of having to fight against something hard and dangerous that would have kept them in top condition, they've been reduced to punching at pillows and feeling frustrated." "I'm sorry for them," she said with obvious insincerity. "Seriously," he went on, "let us assume that the present mess the world is in presages the next step up the evolutionary ladder. The cultural level is sufficiently high, as is the technical ability, and there is certainly enough population pressure to force people off the planet. Evolutionary changes are never pleasant and the next one could be the most unpleasant of all, because it might take us to the stars -- " "It might take them to the stars," she broke in laughing. "And good riddance." "Every time I started by saying 'seriously' you end by laughing," he said, shaking his head. "I simply wanted to discuss the idea that, if and when the human race gets out among the stars, it might not meet benevolent bug-eyed monsters belonging to beautiful and benign cultures, but instead will be faced with beings so vicious that, by comparison, an Earth tiger would look like a sheep. And if the race managed to survive that contact -- perhaps even win -- there might be something even more terrible waiting for us on the next rung. In short, I'm suggesting that the universe might not be a pleasant place and that we -- the pacifists -- by insisting that it should be, are seducing the race from its rightful path and destroying its chance of future -- " "But surely," she broke in, "the race couldn't have reached the level of technology necessary to leave Earth if we hadn't gone in for cooperation instead of conflict. Too many people only want to destroy things and hurt others." "Only because they are frustrated by having too many sheep telling them they are wrong," he replied. "You must try to think of a pure, highly moral, violent type with the power to use the world's sheep effectively -- " "Power corrupts and absolute -- " she began. "Highly moral and incorruptible, then," he said. "A sublime, violent type." "Causing sublime and character-building suffering, no doubt." she said witheringly. "That is ridiculous and you know it -- and you know I know you know it. You were always pulling that trick at university -- starting a major debate to effect a minor change of subject -- and you're still doing it." She laughed suddenly and went on: "It worked then when I got too involved in something unpleasant -- and it still seems to be working. But before we leave the Maxers -- I've heard that their latest excuse for turning loose with everything is in defense of a lady's honor. They feel quite noble about defending the honor of a helpless woman to the death -- the other person's death, of course, even if the poor man happens to be a slightly impolite husband." "As I remember," he said, "you were pretty good at defending your own honor. But I'll be careful not to insult you in public." She was silent for a moment, then she let go of his hand and he heard her roll on to her side and prop herself up on one elbow. Her other hand rested lightly on his chest, then more heavily as she leaned across him. The movement of her head shadowed his face from the sun and he opened his eyes. He said, "I'll try not to insult you in private eitheror have any more stupid fights. But let's change the subject, eh?" The pressure of her hand became lighter until its touch became the beginning of a caress and her face moved closer to his. She shook her head and said softly, "Not yet, dear. Let's find out if you are capable of a -- a maximum response." It became a very pleasant dream after that, even though the sensations became rapidly less intense as the process of resuscitation was completed. But he was glad rather than sorry about that because, considering the depraved period in which he had spent his formative years his upbringing had been fairly strict and the increasingly ecstatic face above him was familiar. It was much more youthful and beautiful and relaxed than he had ever remembered it, but there could be no doubt that it was his mother... awake and in possession of all Iris faculties by looking around his cubicle, putting one hand on the edge of the open casket and saying, "Good morning, ship." Devlin was feeling relieved and a bit light-hearted because this time he had been warmed without feeling that the cold dreams had driven him to the vergeness of madness or suicide. He wondered if Patricia and the others had been equally fortunate. After more than nine centuries, he thought, some of the ship's systems were bound to have failed. But he was looking forward too eagerly to comparing mental notes with Patricia to give this information the amount of worry it deserved. "Not this time," said Devlin. But the computer ignored him -- naturally -- and continued spelling out the advice and instructions programed into it what seemed like only a few hours ago. It was still good advice and he ought to take it, ought to show a little self-control by forcing himself to sleep normally before rushing out to see Patricia. With luck, she might grow impatient and come in and wake him... "You expect me to sleep after hearing news like thatV ' Devlin asked jabbing at the Go button. Mission termination decision required. That could only mean one thing -- journey's end! But the display was not being very informative. He hurried through the post-awakening exercises and into the corridor, where he met Patricia coming out of her cubicle. There was no need for them to rush to the control center, but they did. The main display was more forthcoming. "I suppose we could adapt to the higher gravity and pressure," said Patricia worriedly, "but -- " "But there are people there already," Devlin finished for her. "And if they should be disposed to be nasty, they'll have teeth." X said Devlin. Patricia nodded without speaking, then pressed the recall button and tapped for data replay at half speed -- they were, after all, supposed to study it carefully. But as the minutes and the bright, sharp data presentations unrolled before them they saw nothing to make either of them feel any better. The personnel status display gave them the first shock. They had been expecting the telltales of the cubicles containing Yvonne Caldwell and Thomas Purdy to be dark, but not the twenty-three others. The people concerned were not actually dead because they were still safely in cold sleep. But the cubicles concerned were flagging mechanical andor power malfunctions which would make it impossible for them to be revived. Patricia looked as sick as Devlin felt. He was suddenly aware that the bright, clean control center with its gleaming instrumentation, spotless trim and virtually unused upholstery was no longer new, even though it appeared unchanged from the first time he had seen it -- less than two weeks or over nine hundred years ago. Despite the surface cosmetics of rustless metal and bright plastic the control center and the ship built around it was old. Devlin shrugged involuntarily as the sheer wonder of it tightened the skin at the back of his scalp. For nine centuries the ship had been picking its way among the stars, a fragile metal pod protecting its human seedlings. The men and women who had designed and built the ship, the programers who had given it the ability to follow its complex instructions while maintaining the lives of its utterly vulnerable charges and the countless other people who had or who had not helped at all, were long since gone. Even though he could still remember them and the society to which they belonged as if it were last week, they, and probably it, were dead. The realization so frightened him that he tried hard to be optimistic. But the very most he could hope for was that a sick but surviving remnant of humanity was still living in the polluted wreckage of a once-great culture, on a world so impoverished in material resources that its dominant life form would never be able to pull itself up and into space again. Nor would it ever again be capable of expelling another seed pod among the stars. Even the pod it had expelled -- and perhaps it had managed to shoot out two or three -- was beginning to weaken, lose its initial impetus and suffer from a withered casing. Very soon it had to find fallow ground. Or any ground. Devlin gestured toward the status board and said, "Do you want to go over it again?" "I've got a good memory," she replied. She added: "Now." for a rundown on the ship systems, insisting on a slow playback. His memory, like Patricia's, was nearly perfect -- but he was not a superman. He still felt like himself even though he could remember every single thing that had ever happened to him and to a countless number of other people. He still felt afraid and stupid and baffled by the complexity of the data being presented on the screen. Or was he? "I have the feeling," he said, "that I understand what is going on a little better." "Yes," said Patricia. "I have the same feeling. That instructor -- the small, blond one, remember?knew a lot about the ship's computer even though she didn't tell us anything more than which buttons to push. I'm remembering some of the things she knew." "I see," said Devlin. "During the attack from Target Five I had a funny feeling that I knew more about the ship's control and guidance systems than I'd ever been taught. I take it that you dreamed about this girl's lifetime. "No," said Patricia firmly. "I did not dream about her, but I'm getting her memories anyway. She must have spent a lot of time in here, so maybe she is haunting the place." She shook her head in irritation. Then: "That last cold sleep wasn't as bad as the one before, but I seemed to be every woman who was ever born -- with the exception of a few twisted and horrible ones that were too difficult or unpleasant to remember. But what is happening to us? And why do I always dream of being a woman?" "I'm always a man," said Devlin. "Or at least a male. I don't know what is happening to us either." He stopped as a clear, sharp picture of Brother Howard was thrown on his mental display screen. It was the picture in which the Brother looked concerned and spoke without sound. Feeling afraid for some reason he could not understand, he said, "But let's not get sidetracked into a philosophical debate. At least -- not just yet." "I need a philosophical debate," said Patricia seriously, "before I go mad. I need some answers." "Me, too. But right now let's concentrate on the patient -- I mean the ship." She smiled and said dryly, "Was one of your dream lifetimes a mancalled Freud?" As the displays presented their data it became apparent that the patient was in good physical and mental condition, considering its advanced age. The heart was soundpower was available for the decadeslong deceleration and just enough fuel for a landing -- and capable of at least one burst of sustained activity without failure, provided the effort were called for before the patient became much older. Peripheral circulation and sensitivity were not good, but, again, adequate for a few decades to come. The ship's longand close-range sensors had suffered from multiple component failures, but it could still see and hear in a shortsighted and dull fashion, which was the reason why they had not been awakened until the ship was passing within the orbit of the outermost planet of the system. The patient needed to hold things close to his eyes. Not sick, Devlin thought, just senility rearing its toothless, graying head. What he needed now was an accurate prognosis before the brain, too, began to succumb to the aging processes. He did not realize that he had been thinking aloud until Patricia, with her newfound expertise, called up the required data. V system they were entering were bypassed the chances of reaching the next target sun were ninety-three per cent. The power needed to decelerate and return to Target Ten would be available. Data gathering systems would be less than sixty per cent operational. Life-support and resuscitation systems had a predicted failure of thirty-seven per cent. Personnel consumables would remain adequate due to the projected death rate caused by life-support and resuscitation system failures. "That's enough," said Devlin angrily, hitting the Cancel button. To go on would be virtual suicide. More quietly he added: "We don't have much choice, so let's have a look at our new home." The pictures from the orbiting probe showed a world that appeared to be two-thirds ocean and whose continental outlines were obscured by dazzling weather systems and a thick atmospheric haze. On the adjacent display appeared the figures for the atmospheric pressure and spectro-analysis, gravity, analyses of suspended water vapor and surface liquid from the ocean and inland lakes, measurements of radio and nuclear radiation, pollution levels in areas around the few small cities and towns. "We'll be able to live there," said Devlin quietly. "It won't be easy at first. We'll have trouble with strained backs and varicose veins. But in a couple of generations we'll grow the muscles to cope and if the natives are friendly -- " He broke off, his mind racing too fast for coherent verbalization. Then: "A planet like this should have a much larger population. Considering the level of technology here it should be densely populated, in fact. I wonder -- " He halted the playback on the gray cross-hatching of a small coastal town and stepped up the magnification. Distortion caused by the turbulent but very clean air made it difficult to resolve fine details, but he could see a number of parks, the largest containing a silvery domelike structure, an airfield and a river that bisected the town. There was no evidence of railways or large oceangoing ships or dockyard facilities. For a town the place looked curiously fresh and clean. "You wonder what?" said Patricia when the silence had begun to drag. "I wonder why there are no large ships, railheads or major road systems linking those towns. They're so widely separated that air-travel is probably the only convenient way of getting around -- but is it enough? I also wonder why the place looks so self-sufficient and why, on the long road up to a nuclear technology, it didn't pick up a few industrial ruins and sooty factory chimneys. In short, I wonder if we are the first ship to come along -- and if we are not looking at an established colony." "Yes, of course!" said Patricia excitedly, then, "But would they send two ships like this on exactly the same course? And surely the computer would have told us if the radio signals were intelligible?" Devlin's elation faded. She was right. The world below, he was still sure, was a colony fairly recently set up -- say five or six generations ago at most. But it was not a human colony. Patricia was already calling up the data from the soft-landed probe. B Y A process of electronic analysis, chemical and biochemical examination and the sampling of plant and animal life in the vicinity, the probe was turning a remote-controlled microscope on one tiny piece of the world, and from its observations it was deducing the makeup of the planet as a whole. For the most part the results reported were negative.  There was no evidence of harmful organisms. There was a wide range of plant and animal life, but the sizes of individual specimens were relatively small due to the greater gravity and, while there were strong indications that some of the larger animals were carnivorous, most varieties of animal and plant tissues were suitable for human consumption and would augment or eventually replace the Earth grains they had brought along. There was nothing in the report to frighten -- or even seriously worry -- any would-be colonist. "Let's have the visuals," said Devlin. On the main screen appeared an unsteady picture of the planetary surface from an altitude of fifty thousand feet. The probe's vision pickup was directed forward, so that the picture showed half-black and half the dazzling white of the cloud carpet. The vehicle was shedding height rapidly and the cloud layer began to show graduations of light and shade and to take on a three-dimensional aspect. Individual clouds were sliding over the horizon and whipping past the probe and suddenly it was through and over the sea at three thousand feet and approaching the largest coastal town. Devlin had a glimpse of buildings and a park below rushing past -- then the probe was close to the ground and crossing above a road with a moving vehicle in it. He saw small animals running, vegetation beautifully formed and colored and hugging the ground for protection against the high winds -- and the screen went blank. tapped for a slow playback of the sequence covering the flight over the town and the close approach to the ground. As the images were crawling slowly across the screen she gave an uncomfortable laugh and said, "I know how this thing worksI could almost build it. That instructor's knowledge is in my mind. Is there such a thing as. retroactive telepathy?" "Maybe," said Devlin dryly, "she is haunting the place." "Maybe," Patricia replied with a shiver, "she is haunting me. Is it possible that -- " Devlin said firmly, "Concentrate on the display and freeze the picture if you see something you think is important. Look, we're above the town now and crossing the park -- " The streets were broad, wellplanned and pleasantly decorated with vegetation. Architecture tended to be functional, squat and with a firm grip on the ground -- nothing seemed to rise higher than four stories and the small, shutter-fitted windows and curved roofing were protection against high winds. In the center of the park the object Devlin earlier had imagined to be a silvery dome was now revealed as a gigantic sphere, tarnished by time and weather and the heat-discoloration of re-entry. Devlin wondered if the descendants of the Earth colonists would put a park around their ship in memory of where they had come from, if things worked out right and they were able to take root here. Even with maximum magnification he could not resolve the images of the beings in the streets. "It's a nice place," said Patricia as the probe dropped lower above the wooded country beyond the town. "We could do much worse. And we can always land well away from the other colonists' towns. The planet is almost empty, and by the time they discover us we may have discovered a way of making friends with them." "That's true," said Devlin. "Unless they find the probe and deduce its purpose and organize some kind of defense. We'll need a long time to decelerate and return here, remember -- seventy, maybe, eighty years -- and they'll have plenty of time to prepare and to fill some of the empty spaces with their kind." "Defense? But we're not attacking." "They don't know that." She was silent for a moment, her expression troubled. Then: "Maybe they won't find the probe. But I'm worried about the driver of the vehicle it passed over... Here it is now." The road was a gray diagonal bisecting the screen with the wheeled vehicle hurrying along it and away from the probe, which was overtaking but increasing its lateral distance as it dropped lower. Their view moved from the three-quarters rear aspect to almost a side elevation before intervening trees threatened to hide the vehicle from sight. Simultaneously their fingers stabbed toward the Hold button and collided above it. They began to laugh and Devlin tapped for full magnification. They stopped laughing. The image was quite sharp. It showed a sturdy four-wheeled vehicle with a transparent canopy with three beings -- two adults and a child inside. More than enough of their bodies was visible to make identification positive. They belonged to the same species which, during Pass Five, had made three attempts to blow the Earth ship out of the sky. X member enough -- to be sure that we won't survive at all if we go on," said Patricia angrily. "We've got no guarantee that Target Ten's system will even be habitable, and by the time we get to Eleven -- if we ever get to Eleven -- the ship will be three-quarters dead so will half the people in it. I do know enough," she raged on, "to know that I don't know enough to carry out effective repairs on anything but the simplest systems. That girl was a programer, not a team of technicians!" She was angry because they had spent several hours arguing in circles and now they were going around the same old circuit yet again. "I still think this is too important a decision for two people to take," said Devlin stubbornly. Shaking her head impatiently she said, "I've already explained why they shouldn't be. If we choose to make this decision by democratic process we will have to wake everyone whose cold sleep resuscitation systems are still operational, explain everything to them, then wait while everyone tries to make up hisher mind. It is hard enough getting two people to make up their minds. Well, isn't it?" Devlin did not reply and she rushed on: "As things are now we have two choices. To go for Target Ten or decelerate for a return here. We have a pretty good chance of making a successful landing here, and a much poorer chance of landing at Ten -- if it even has a suitable planet. But if we wake everybody now -- think of the power demand, the increased chances of system failure, the drain on consumables while everyone is arguing and trying to reach a decision. If we wake everyone there won't be a choice, because the power drain caused by a general warming up -- something that's only supposed to happen once during the voyage, during the pre-landing orbit -- we won't be able to make it to Ten." She gestured toward the main display and added: "We've seen the figures and we know what will happen. At least  know." Patricia was convinced that she was right, Devlin thought angrily, and he already had proof of how far she would go once her mind had been made up about something -- the wound in her cheek, six weeks or nine centuries old, was only beginning to form scar tissue. But his own anger, he realized suddenly, was chiefly due to the fact that he himself knew that she was right. "At least," he said, "let's sleep on it." "And have the same decision to make when we wake," she said, with a note of desperation creeping into her voice. "I don't think I could stand that. We won't be any better informed than we are now. I think that we have no choice at all but to decelerate and return for a landing here and you know it!" "I know it," said Devlin. "I always have." But his strongest feeling as he depressed the big red Mission Termination button was not of anger at being bested in an argument or fear of the consequences-it was simply one of relief followed by a feeling of complete anticlimax. brain of the ship was aware of the drama of the situation... Perhaps that inhuman mind and cold, metallic and aging body knew a sense of exhilaration that her journey's end was a relatively short time away. But the sole outward indications she gave were the constantly changing data displays on the main screen, telling of new systems being checked out, predictions regarding power consumption during the decades of deceleration that stretched ahead. Gradually Patricia's and Devlin's eyes and minds grew tired of watching displays and began to wander toward each other. "I'm sorry for being nasty to you back there," Patricia said after a long and obviously worried silence. "It was just that you seemed to be so -- " "Stupid?" asked Devlin, smiling. "Don't worry about it. If you had been the one who was dithering I would probably have hit you with the same arguments. It's just that I'm the worrying type. I like to be as sure of things as possible. For instance -- right now I'm thinking about the cold sleep cubicles and the number of exercise-only awakenings scheduled before we arrive back here. I'm especially concerned about the power drain and the increased probability of casualties through component failure that even a small and periodic power demand could cause. We're now pretty sure that no physiological or memory damage will occur during an extended period of cold sleep, so I was wondering if it were possible for you to program us for just one more awakening -- the final one." She nodded and smiled, yet somehow managed to look even more miserable. Devlin released his straps and moved to the edge of her couch. He asked, "What's really bothering you?" She gripped his hands tightly, but refused to meet his eyes as she said, "My -- my memories are bothering me -- and I'm also afraid of what will happen after we land. But right now the problem is my memories. I can remember being some very bad people and being in a lot of bad situations. I'm afraid that I may have experienced too much -- that I'll be all used up emotionally and that nothing will be new anymore -- " She stopped and Devlin had the impression she was at a loss for words to express all she felt and was going to cry. He said, "You experienced nothing during cold sleep -- and your memories in biological time are your own business. What you have are simply memories. I have some pretty hectic memories myself, but I think we've established that they're the product of an intensive education program. Our mental notebooks are full to bursting. We are hot on theory and in a very short time, say four hours' normal sleep and a couple of days in pre-landing orbit, we will be able to get together and compare notes." Gently he lifted her hands and put them behind his neck, then forced her to look at him. He added, "We are exactly the same people we always were -- perhaps more so." ward and the things both he and Patricia had been told about the colonization project and about the things he must have been told but could not now remember. The dream of the Brother talking seriously to him -- without making a sound -- that, surely, had been his subconscious trying to break a post-hypnotic command not to remember when he awoke. But the command had not forbidden him to remember the incident when he was asleep and now Devlin had developed a highly retentive memory regarding his dreams... He said abruptly, "When next we take our riormsd sleep, I don't think we should meet again before cooldown. I want to concentrate all of my thinking on the Brother, because we still have an awful lot of questions and that way I may be able to dream the answers. Do you remember how he talked -- in broad, philosophical terms -- about seeding the stars?" he went on. "Could it be that the reason you remember only feminine dreams and I the masculine is to make sure that when we arrive the seeds will germinate properly?" As she nodded he remembered something else the Brother had told him -- an old parable about seeds, some of which had fallen on stony ground, others among thorns and the rest on fallow soil. In that parable there had been three options, but here he could see only the stony and perhaps nonexistent ground of Targets Ten and Eleven, which they might never reach -- and the thorns of Nine. Among the thorns they might at least take root for a while before being choked off. Among the thorns they stood a fighting chance -- if sheep could fight. The ship's personnel, he remembered had been carefully chosen from among Earth's sheep -- not the wolves. She must have read his thoughts from his expression because her fingers curled gently around the back of his neck and she began caressing the area behind his ears. "Don't worry about it," she murmured. "We've taken the decision and now there is no point in worrying." Slowly but firmly she pulled his face closer to hers. "I'm trying to reach another decision about whether or not to break a very strict ship's regulation..." They took a long time considering that regulation, which they seriously bent but did not actually break. When they finally forced themselves apart the main screen had ceased its continuous data presentations and was displaying one message only. Deliberately they did not discuss the data or say anything at all until they parted at Patricia's cubicle and then they simply kissed and wished each other good night. focus all of his mind on Brother Howard while he composed himself for sleep. Even when his fitful dozing gave way to the shallowspreceding deep slumber, the wish-fulfillment dreams with the image and sound and feel of Patricia in them kept getting in the way as she demonstrated various delightful ways of breaking that ship's-regulation. In spite of these interruptions he finally did begin to dream about the Brother, then about Patricia and himself in a room with the Brother, who was seated beside the old psychologist's wheelchair, facing them. The psychologist was also talking to them silently, but suddenly the sound came through... "... You will be given a strong, drug-reinforced post-hypnotic command to forget everything that you will be told during this session," said the frail old man in his tremendously deep voice. "Whether the command will hold over the time-scale we will be dealing with is another matter. We sincerely hope that it will hold long enough, at least, to protect you from serious mental disorientation, because tied to this command is an even more important one designed to force you to recall your cold sleep dreams in chronological order. You will have enough to contend with, psychologically speaking, without having to handle an intensely vivid dream life which is apparently running backward. "But before the Brother tries to explain what is likely to happen to you, let me assure you that the hypno-conditioning is not intended merely to hide the truth from you. We are trying to protect your minds from we are not sure what and prepare them for the same thing. Perhaps there is no need to do this. Perhaps the thing will happen to us naturally, when the time comes, as reproduction. Perhaps we are wasting our time by trying to teach caterpillars to think like butterflies. The truth is that we just are not sure what the truth is, and we are trying to hedge our bets. "Too much talking tires me." The old man was tapping the control studs on his wheelchair and moving toward the door as he added: "The Brother will try to explain it all to you -- without becoming too philosophical or religious, I hope. When he is finished I shall return to reinforce the hypnotic commands and, of course, to wish you good luck." When Brother Howard began to speak it seemed as if he were simply going to repeat their first project orientation lecture. Still without telling them whether it was the first, forty-second or only interstellar colonization vessel, he briefly described the ship and its systems, its capabilities and its projected course. It would be powered by a low-thrust drive which would accelerate it over the space of several decades to a velocity roughly one-quarter that of light. The more powerful reaction engines would be used only once -- to land on the target world. Maximum safe duration for the voyage would be one thousand years, so that their effective range was approximately two hundred and fifty light-years... It was a dream, Devlin knew, but he could not stop himself from dreaming again the shiver of awe and wonder he had felt then and his feeling of sympathy for the Brother, who, for some reason not yet plain, was unable to accompany them,... , Their course, according to the Brother, had been selected so as to make a close pass of ten target stars which were approximately in a straight line within their two hundred and fifty lightyear range. The majority of the solar systems concerned were thought to contain habitable planets, but the optical range was extreme and only a few might do so. Should the ship approach an unsuitable solar system it would use the gravity of the system's sun to warp its course so as to direct it toward the next target system with no wastage of fuel. When a system with a suitable planet was found, the mission termination button would be pressed tind the ship's computer would take them into pre-landing orbit and ultimately touchdown. It was at that point that Brother Howard diverged sharply from the early and more familiar lectures... XX "I have described, not for the first time, how you will go," Brother Howard said briskly. "The reason why you are going is not so simple -- and the reason why you people in particular are going is the most complicated of all. "To you the reason for leaving this place must seem obvious," he went on, dividing his attention between Patricia and Devlin. "This is a rotten, violent and overcrowded place and no sane person with a choice would want to live in it. The not so obvious reason is that you and all the rest of us are being acted on by steadily increasing sociological, cultural, moral and economic pressures -- you name it and I can tell you exactly how you are being squeezed. It is therefore probable that you are leaving because you have no choice!" His voice had risen steadily in volume and his eyes, Devlin thought, seemed to reflect a mixture of anger and confusion. The Brother had never looked or sounded as wild as this before and Devlin reminded himself that not all of the city's madmen were Maxers or teenage citizens. "Let us go back to your analogy of the fruit-bearing planet," Brother Howard continued in a quieter voice. "The analogy is not perfect, as you know, because this planet-sized rotten fruit has nowhere to fall in order to germinate and restart the growth cycle. Instead it is being compressed on one side by rapidly diminishing resources and an exploding population on the other. The result will be that the seed contained within it will be expelled like a stone from a rotten plum -- and the purpose of this project is to direct the seed toward fallow ground." He took a deep breath, then went on quietly, "Naturally we are making a big effort to ensure the success of our project. But we can never be sure of whether the effort and sacrifices are necessary or whether, if our particular group of talented people had stayed at home and enjoyed the various pleasures of our society, the project would have been launched by a completely different set of people using entirely different methods. However, I am fully convinced that if something is destined to happen, then happen it will. Seeding must occur, and soon -- I have special knowledge, you see, which makes me absolutely sure of this. I am also convinced, as are most of the others connected with the project, that God or Fate or the evolutionary process helps those who help themselves. "Our main worry," he added, and the worry was evident in his voice as well as in his expression, "is that we cannot know for sure whether we are helping or hindering." Devlin looked at Patricia, but all of her attention was on the Brother and there was no way of telling what she thought about this peculiar confession. "I wouldn't dream of confusing and frightening you like this," he continued, "if you were intended to remember this interview. However, there is no need to be afraid for your physical well-being. The danger, the real suffering and confusion, will be mental rather than physical, and there is little we have been able to do to prepare you for it. "But before I go into the details of what we have done, and why, I shall try to dispel some of your present confusion by telling you how I became involved." According to the Brother the project had its real beginning about a century and a half earlier when mankind, having slammed the door into space some forty years previously, was beginning to open it again and look outside. Scientific advances in the interim had provided methods of space travel that were much more economical than those of the first space age, as well as opening up the possibility of interstellar flight through the development of hibernation anesthesia techniques. One of the projects initiated at that time was aimed at sending a low-impulse drive ship containing a volunteer astronaut in cold sleep on a cometary orbit that would return it to the vicinity of Earth in one hundred and three years. But once again the public lost interest in space flight and in hibernation anesthesia, because even then the future promised to be an unpleasantly crowded and polluted and vicious place. Sensible people preferred to live out their lives in the present rather than transferring a large portion of them into this rather frightening future. But the volunteer astronaut, like most people who volunteered, was not very sensible and did not really think about the kind of Earth he would be returning to. Nor did he realize that, while his physical condition upon resuscitation would be perfect, his mind would never be the same again... A lot of time and effort and money had gone into the project, however," Brother Howard went on cynically, "and one of the project psychologists, Doctor Martin, was so interested that he undertook a longevity treatment in order to be around to see the end result. The treatment, although still experimental, was effective in that it conferred long life but not eternal youth. "Because Doctor Martin was not a normal person," the Brother continued, "and because he was patient, he did not give up on the only cold sleeper to return after an extended period in space and gradually he coaxed him back to sanity. It required many, many years of constant attention because the returned astronaut, by the generally accepted standards of the day, was hopelessly insane. In the long process of effecting a cure Doctor Martin discovered what exactly had been going on in the man's mind while all of his bodily processes -- except those of mentation, obviously -- had been halted, and together with his patient they formulated theories to explain it. "But my return to sanity was not one hundred per cent complete," the Brother added dryly. "As a result of those cold sleep experiences I became convinced that I had had my nose rubbed very firmly in a form of afterlife, and I'm afraid that I caught a severe dose of religion." He looked from Patricia to Devlin, studying their expressions. Then he said, "Relax, I'm still not trying to convert you. But I must give you some idea of what to expect, so listen carefully..." The Brother's experience in cold sleep had been frightening, painful, stimulating and confusing, with confusion predominating. He had been assured that nothing at all would happen during cold sleep and that he would be awakened without any apparent passage of time. Neither he nor the project medics had expected him to dream, continuously and vividly, throughout his centurylong voyage. Even the pleasant dreams had been frightening because of the confusion and disorientation caused by their apparently running backward. Incidents were experienced normally, but when he dreamed a person's lifetime the incidents were not in chronological order. He would dream a person's entire life-history, complete in every thought and detail and feeling and then, without warning, find himself the same person's infant father an instantafter the aged son had died. He kept dreaming farther and farther back in time, of people and places about which he could not possibly have had knowledge. The dream lives became shorter and more violent. Some of them did not even involve human beings. And when he was resuscitated his mind was filled with the pains, pleasures and confusion of countless lifetimes and he was incapable of forgetting  any of them. All of the lives and, more important, all of the deaths were there as fresh in his memory as if they had happened only a few minutes earlier. It was a miracle that old Dr. Martin, who had been young Dr. Martin when Howard had been cooled for the trip, had been able to return him to any semblance of sanity. But the psychologist had managed it, in part, by providing an explanation for what had happened to him. Martin had suggested that when a man -- or men andor women -- were removed from their home planet for extended periods of time while being subjected to reduced temperatures a process occurred which had the effect of making them seeds -- or potential seeds of their race. The process was psycho-philosophical rather than physical. Like certain plant seeds and bacteria which were capable of surviving for extended periods in Arctic conditions and then of reproducing themselves, the human equivalents were perfectly preserved in cold sleep, with none of their functions impaired. A major difference was that the human seedlings possessed minds and these, apparently, were even more important and deserving of preservation. But it was not simply the minds of the individuals concerned that were preserved, the process triggered off by time and reduced temperature had the effect of stimulating what amounted to the racial memory. The cold sleepers became the seeds of humanity-all of its knowledge, experience and achievements since its earliest beginnings. "In effect," the Brother went on, unable to hide the wonder and excitement he was feeling, "each man arid woman has available to himselfherself the memories -- that is the total knowledge and experience -- of every ancestor of the same sex, and this would include experiences these ancestors shared with contemporaries with whom they came into contact as far back as prehistoric times. Such memories could not be passed from male parent to male offspring, or female to female as the case might be. The dream material made available during cold sleep comprises complete lifetimes. If racial memories were inherited from the parents they would begin at conception but no memory belonging to a parent would become similarly available to descendants after the birth of the final offspring. "Obviously there is a sex linkotherwise why couldn't males experience female dreams and vice versa? But according to the doctor there is another and much more important process at work. This is the release of information recorded and stored in the large unused portion of the human brain, which is the mental component of the human seedling. Since the brain is the only organ in the human body that grows without regenerating itself, this explains why complete lifetimes can be remembered. "The reason for dreaming about people who could not possibly be ancestors is more difficult to explain, but Dr. Martin has covered even that..." One of the psychologist's pet theories as a young man had dealt with ghosts and similar nonmaterial sound-sight-touch manifestations. He had become convinced that ghosts did not exist, but he did believe that when an event involved considerable amounts of human pain, pleasure, fear or any other strong emotion, the associated mental radiation was absorbed by material in the area -- which would later become the scene of the so-called hauntings -- and would be made available to anyone who visited the place later and who was sufficiently sensitive to be a receiver for the playback. When the Brother had reported on his dream lives experienced during a century of cold sleep, Dr. Martin had extended and modified his theory. According to the psychologist, mental radiation was absorbed and recorded by all forms of organic life and the recording equipment increased its sensitivity and efficiency as the organic life in question developed intelligence. No thought or sensory impression, no matter how faint or distant in time was ever completely lost. It was stored, not in the crude, electro-chemical fashion used by the conscious mind, but on a sub-molecular level which enabled it to accommodate the vast quantity of material necessary for the retention of a racial memory. Martin held that any given person was composed of atoms or molecules -- the organic building blocks-which in the recent or distant past had belonged to the structure of another person or had been briefly in contact with another person's organic material through ingestion or assimilation into the tissues. The transfer of information to the hyper-sensitive recorder in the brain might even have occurred through inhalation of impurities while sharing public transport, possibly even through communal proximity. Martin had been unable to establish either the degree of sensitivity or the range of the racial memory recording units in Brother Howard's brain, but he had concluded it was not limitless. "To express it as simply as possible," the Brother concluded, "no single person is carrying all of mankind's history in his afterbrain. But the ship will contain two hundred long-term coldsleepers and the doctor is convinced that half that number, considering the present-day mixing of racial types, would among them take away a record of every thought, emotion or sensation ever experienced by thinking creatures on this planet." A long, uneasy silence fell after the Brother finished speaking. DevUn felt excited and impressed by the scope of the psychologist's concept, but he still thought it incredible. Patricia must have been thinking along the same lines. "I can't believe -- all that," she said apologetically but firmly. "Not now, naturally," said the Brother. His voice held a tinge of compassion. "After your third or fourth awakening you will believe, except that our conditioning will keep you from remembering this particular session. By now you are realizing that if you were allowed to remember this you, and all the other colonists, would resign from the project." Devlin laughed politely. He said, "In a project as important as this, one with so many philosophical implications, I still don't know how you can be sure that you're picking the right seeds for your pod." "The simple answer," replied the Brother, "is that we are not sure." "Oh," said Devlin. Brother Howard shook his head. "We are caterpillars trying to think like butterflies. The process of seeding may be as natural an event as the sun's coming up, but in this case it is still an event that requires the combined knowledge of all the hard and soft sciences. Doctor Martin and myself are responsible for selecting the seed. A lot of time and effort has gone into the design and construction of your ship and we know it will work -- but the business of seed selection is scaring us sick. "A seed should be capable of survival," he went on. "Fine. But do we select our most aggressive, adaptable seedlings who will establish a bridgehead and hold it against all comers? Or will we export our philosopher and artist seeds who between them may be incapable of growing a potato? Or a mixture of both which might result in the seeds destroying each other? All this is an over-simplification, you realize, but you can appreciate our dilemma. Finally we decided to take the easy -- and perhaps cowardly -- way out. We felt that if the seeding were truly to become an event as natural as childbearing the seeds themselves should be aware of the process. So we began to look around for personality types who were trying to expel themselves or who wanted to be expelled. We found that the strong-minded, aggressive, highly intelligent and resourceful men and women, the kind who to our minds would have made the best colonists, had adapted to present-day society and, under deep probing, were not really interested in going. "The group who really hated Earth and who desperately wanted to escape comprised more than ninety per cent of the world's population," he concluded. "That's right -- the sheep! We didn't even have to go outside the city to find enough candidates." After a moment's silence Patricia said quietly, "That sounds like the right choice. Ordinary, average, peace-loving people are in the majority. They always have been." "Yes," replied the Brother. "The highly intelligent and aggressive types are responsible for much progress, but it has been progress without stability. The sheep will move ahead more slowly and evenly -- as long as they don't land among wolves." "I see," said Devlin, then added: "Don't worry. I, too, think you made the right choice." "Kind of you to say so," said the Brother dryly. "Another worry has been how you people as individuals will react to becoming the repositories of this store of racial experience. From first-hand knowledge I can assure you that the process is anything but pleasant, and we have tried to devise ways of cushioning the psychic shock involved. "Perhaps," he said, going off on a tangent, "a voyage on a generation-ship, with the original personnel and their descendants living out their lives naturally during the trip and sleeping normally instead of going cold, would be easier on all concerned. Maybe that is the way seeding is supposed to happen. But we can't be sure -- and anyway, we haven't technical ability or the psychological control capability to produce that kind of seed pod. All we can do is to try and make the cold dreams a little easier for you to take. "During the training sessions that you will be allowed to remember we have told you lies, half-truths and generally planted impressions that are nothing but red herrings. Four periodic awakenings to reinforce and exercise the mind and body, for instance, are a case in point -- remembering will never be a problem where you are concerned. Hints dropped about the necessity of dreaming, when you will not be able to stop doing it are another -- as are oblique references to the use of new psycho-drugs that will make you suspect that the whole business is simply an elaborate simulation. All this lying and misdirection has been to enable you to assimilate the sharp and intense and extremely confusing race memory data without its driving you insane." Devlin nodded. He no longer thought the Brother a religious fanatic, but neither did he feel particularly reassured. He said, "Surely there are drugs available that would cushion these shocks. They could be injected immediately preceding the awakening and they would dull the initial sensations so that -- " "No!" said the Brother sharply. "The seed pod is a product of the race's technological achievements -- but the seeds themselves we are afraid to touch in case we adversely affect them. Drugs might deteriorate over such a lengthy period or have a damaging effect on the recall process. So you are going out untouched, medically speaking. The conditioning process, which we will begin shortly, is psychological and aimed at controlling your dream recall by non-material means. It is being done so that you will remember, or dream, the earliest episodes first and so that the racial memory material will be presented more slowly and in chronological order. We .hope that the conditioning will prevent all of your racial memories' being made available during your first cooldown -- and that it will enable you to retain your sanity after the later awakenings. But we can't, of course, be sure of anything." Another long silence was again broken by Patricia, who said, "We both knew that there would be risks." "Yes," said Devlin, wishing that he could feel as calm as she sounded. "You had us worried for a while -- we thought we'd fallen among religious fanatics. I realize now that while this thing has all sorts of philosophical implications it has nothing to do with religion or the afterlife." "No?" "Not for me -- not now," replied Devlin. "Of course, I may not have thought deeply enough about it." "You haven't," said the Brother, "and I'll admit that in the objective sense I may not have undergone a religious experience. Much depends on your point of view and on how your parents brought you up to regard such things. I found that my after-brain recorder had been switched on and its return to Earth gravity and temperature did not seem to be switching it off. I kept assimilating impressions from everyone around me. So I became very understanding. "Mostly, though, I kept remem-' bering the lives of people who had died long ago. They were a pretty varied bunch, with good qualities and bad qualities in combinations that made their lives quite recallable. They are all here, complete in every thought and feeling." He tapped the side of his head, added seriously: "Everybody suffers -- but nobody dies." "But surely," protested Devlin, "they are only the memories of people, not the people themselves." The Brother shook his head. He said, "Think of it in this way. When you go to sleep at night your life is switched off -- you die. When you wake in the morning you may clearly remember your life of yesterday, but it is only a memory. You will better understand what I'm talking about when you have experienced your first few cold sleep memories. My point is that everyone who was ever alive will still be living in the minds of you colonists -- and as for the religious implications -- " He paused for a moment as the door opened and Dr. Martin came in. Then Howard went on: "I have a purely personal view regarding the meaning of my racial memories, you understand, and it's one Doctor Martin does not agree with. The vast majority of these lives are recallable because there is much in them that is interesting and valuable. But there are other lives which are so twisted, so violent and unpleasant in one respect or another, that nobody would want to recall them even in part. So there is this mass of material that will rarely, if ever, be recalled. It belongs to people condemned -- by their own acts, you will say, and not by any higher authority -- to the outer darkness of the forgotten -- to Limbo. As far as I am concerned the religious implications are clear." Dr. Martin rolled his chair behind the desk, and the Brother stood up and solemnly shook hands with Patricia and Devlin. He smiled and said, "The doctor here describes me as a lapsed atheist, whatever that means. However, now I have to tell you that, following this conditioning session, you will be cooled and stored to await transfer to the ship. We will not meet again -- and I want to wish both of you good luck and a safe landing." As he turned to leave, Devlin said, "Wait, Brother. I'm still too confused by all this to say thank you and really mean it. But I still think it unfair that you people, who have done all the real work, have no chance of getting away. Surely we could make room, or do something to -- " Brother Howard held up his hand. "With the problems you are shortly going to face, Doctor," he said dryly, "trust you to worry about us! But there is one thing, just one, you can do: remember us in your dreams." awakenings while the ship killed its tremendous cruising velocity and began the return to Target Nine, so there was plenty of time to remember and dream. The dreams were as vivid and complete as before, but now Devlin was aware of what was happening and was able to integrate them with his own memories and no longer felt helplessly imprisoned by them, as in a nightmare. He became more and more unselective regarding the material available to him. He learned that pain as well as pleasure were a part of every worthwhile life and recalled people who were truly great to everyone but themselves and others whose greatness was known only to a few close friends, or perhaps to only one other person. He also learned that very few lives were uninteresting or unworthy of remembrance and even fewer completely valueless. To understand all was to forgive almost all, and Devlin's understanding -- or his education, as the Brother had described it at a time when he did not know what was involved -- was complete. He brought back people he had met in his own lifetime -- colleagues at Sanator Five, young Tommy Bennett and his father, Patricia's father, Dr. Martin and Brother Howard. He had met them briefly or for extended periods of time, but everything they had thought and felt until that point in their lifetimes had made an impression on his after-brain and was available for replay. Each of them lived again in his memory, their beings so sharp and vivid and utterly complete that they lived, period. He could understand the Brother's point of view about an afterlife, as well as many other things. Devlin was Brother Howard as an infant, a toddler, a young man rebelling against the constraints of highly moral parents who in their turn were overreacting against the increasing permissiveness of their society. He was Howard as a test pilot and an astronaut under training; as Howard had walked the awful emptiness of Mars; as a helpless cold sleeper reliving, in savage and confusing detail, some of the lives that made up the race's memory. He was Brother Howard when they had first met in the house of Bennett, a project worker and when Howard had decided that the doctor and probably his girl friend, would qualify for the mission. As Howard, Devlin had decided that all of the others would qualify, because he alone on Earth had the ability to know a man completely. He had been responsible for the selection of all the male project personnel and colonists while Dr. Martin, using more mundane methods, had been responsible for the screening of females. As Brother Howard, Devlin was aware of seeing himself as another had seen him and of the peculiar mental double-image that was his own recollection of his past life superimposed on the one detected by the Brother. But the subjects for Devlin's recall included Howard's contacts on the project, men who knew the workings of the ship inside out and from preliminary design sketch to finished and tested hardware. Devlin knew he was only a seed in a fantastically sophisticated metal pod and that the pod was beginning to deteriorate seriously. He thought that it should be possible for the seeds to help sustain their own aging and withering pod... He was still investigating that possibility when he was awakened. on the display, Devlin noted as he began exercising. Patricia had said that she would erase the useless reminders about exercising and remembering as a means of saving ship's power. But the single message had told him enough, and his impatience made him complete the exercises while on the way to the control center. Patricia, who must have been fractionally less impatient, arrived there a few seconds later. With fast, expert movements they called for the situation report and read that the ship was closing the target planet and estimated just under five days to pre-landing orbit insertion. All four of the mission termination probes, the most highly sensitive and complex the ship had available, had already been launched. One had taken up a surveillance orbit and was transmitting data on all channels. Another had developed a control malfunction while attempting a soft landing and had gone down hard. The other two had been too sick to leave the launching tubes. The ship itself was not sick, just very, very tired. Even so it declared itself capable of landing them safely on their new home. "Not an ideal home," said Patricia, following his train of thought, "even if we don't fall into a clump of thorns." She gestured toward the surveillance probe's display and asked, "Shall I look for a few less thorny spots?" Devlin shook his head. "Not yet, if you don't mind. Will you help me with the ship's personnel status board? At last report there were twenty-three cold-sleepers in malfunctioning cubicles which, while capable of preserving them, were no longer able to complete resuscitation procedure. I've been thinking about that problem and dreaming some of the people who might have been able to solve it." "Me, too," said Patricia. "Some of they would have needed a lot of skilled help, special equipment and a lot longer than five days to put it right-" She broke off as the display announced that seventy-eight of the two hundred-odd remaining sleepers were likely to stay in that condition permanently. the figures, his mind reacting to the disaster they represented. He asked pleadingly, "Is there no chance of repairing the faulty resuscitation equipment? No chance at ail?" "We know what to do," said Patricia gently, "and perhaps if we resuscitated enough of the other sleepers, they might have dreamed enough about the project personnel to recall what must be done. But they were not aware of the problem, remember, and would only dream about the project by sheer luck. Too, we don't have the time or the special equipment needed for the job. You know that, don't you?" "I know it," said Devlin. "I was just hoping you would come up with an idea." In a kind of agony he thought of the people who would die as soon as the ship landed and the slow, uncontrolled warmth of the planetary atmosphere began to seep into the ship's space-cold interior. At present they were in cold sleep, not technically alive but still dreaming lifetimes and experiences not their own -- so neither were they dead. Was it right that he should condemn them to death -- and lose so much of his race's memory and experience -- by landing on this world? Would it not be better to use the last of the ship's propulsive power to shoot it out again into interstellar space, where the cold would ultimately allow everyone to dream forever about all the people who individually had made up the race of man? Would it not be better to be a seed that was complete and perfect and never fell to ground, then one that was weakened, incomplete and probably destined to die before germination? "No," said Patricia firmly. "Before you could take that decision you would have to resuscitate everyone and ask for a vote. You would have to do that." Devlin had not been aware that he had been thinking aloud. He said angrily, "We won't be able to count seventy-eight of the votes -- remember? What would you have me do about that?" "I don't know," she replied furiously, "any better than you do. But you could put two of them in the cubicles belonging to Miss Caldwell and Purdy. Those cubicles were switched off to conserve power, remember. They weren't malfunctions-" She broke off to stare at him while he stared just as wildly at her. They had the answer. v Cautiously, Devlin said, "Do you think we can manage it in just five days? There are seventy-eight of them, after all." "But we'll have help," Patricia replied excitedly. "If necessary we can warm as many of the others as we need to help with the transfers. It will be very congested towards the end and the voyage-only consumables will probably run out, but it should work." "Yes," said Devlin. He watched her excitement fade as she, too, realized that they had solved just one -- the least important -- of their two problems. With the exception of Yvonne Caldwell and Thomas Purdy their metal pod would arrive with its full complement of seedlings. But they still had to decide on a landing site; which particular area was least densely overgrown with thorns. The picture from the surveillance probe, which was capable of virtually unlimited magnification, filled the main display screen. "Let's deal with one problem at a time," he said. Then, seeing her disapproving expression, he added apologetically: "Despite my extensive education and everything, I haven't changed very much -- I still try to put off things." "Yes," she said and smiled. "And I still seem to be a nag." F OR the next two days they were kept busy resuscitating cold sleepers, explaining the situation to them and helping them move the people in malfunctioning caskets into those that were still working and lately vacated by other colonists. The solution had been simple and perhaps obvious. By warming up the occupants of functioning caskets, then initiating a cooldown with the casket empty, the people who had been cooled with no hope of resuscitation could then be moved to functioning caskets and warmed in the ordinary way. Care had to be taken to make sure that a partial, and lethal, warmup did not take place during the transfer and even more care was needed to avoid injury to their ultrafrigid and brittle bodies. But once the steadily increasing number of helpers understood what was required there was little for Patricia and Devlin to do except stay in the control center and prepare for the landing. "The latest estimate is that everyone will be warm at re-entry minus six hours," said Patricia. "The drain on consumables will be considerable, so we can all expect to be very hungry -- but not enough to weaken us physically. All ship's personnel, with the exception of ourselves, will take landing deceleration in their caskets, and their displays will keep them informed of what is going on here. People in malfunctioning cubicles will be in the dark, in both senses of the word, and very cold -- they will have to borrow a couple of sets of coveralls each if the cubicle heaters are also out. The post-landing food supply and food synthesizers, seeds, livestock breeders, agricultural and construction machinery have been checked. The automatic unlocking systems are functioning and will open these supplies to us as soon as we touch down. "I wonder," she ended worriedly, "if we will be given the chance to eat a hearty meal before -- " "Several, I should think," said Devlin reassuringly. "Especially if we land in the middle of nowhere." Patricia smiled and said, "Let's try to find nowhere." T HE post-landing food supply and equipment, designed to enable them to survive for at least two months while they established a base and set up the tissue and plant synthesizers, which would further extend their reserves until the first crops came in, had been locked away during the voyage for obvious reasons. He wondered, remembering his first experience with the pallid, pearshaped, spindly and highly aggressive aliens, whether a self-guiding nuclear weed-killer would put an abrupt stop to their first celebration dinner on the new world. They were here first, he thought despairingly, and we would not trespass if we had any other choice. But could the aliens believe that? Was there any chance of communicating with them and making them understand? There was not enough time to do it from orbit and by the time they were down the natives would already have made their decision. There was nothing to do but set down in one of the least densely populated areas and hope that they would not be noticed until they were able to work out some method of communication or, he thought bitterly, a few of the sheep grew fangs. He was remembering Hawn and others who had learned how to survive amid violence and whose knowledge was instantly available should the colonists need it. But were they capable of using such knowledge? And if they did use it, would they ever again be able to think of themselves as sheep? Would the meek, he wondered bitterly, ever inherit anything? In silence they called up the recordings of their original fly-by, comparing them with current views of the same planetary area. It was immediately obvious that the world had an awful lot of usable empty space, that there had been no major building or expansion programs and that the colony had suffered something less than a population explosion. Radiation sensor data comparisons still showed minor emission, chiefly on the communication frequencies, from the widely scattered housing, and unmistakable evidence of nuclear technology in the towns, which were obviously the manufacturing centers for the colony world. "It isn't exactly an expanding colony," said Devlin, .rubbing his eyes. They had been staring at displays for nearly three hours. He added, "I wonder if the planet is only marginally suited to their form of life -- as it is to ours. Maybe there are trace elements in the atmosphere that are toxic to them or the heavier gravity makes it difficult to have children -- " "Then we must look for nurseries and schools," she said quickly. "Any place likely to contain children. Even with a totally strange life form you should be able to tell if the children are healthy." "Yes, indeed," said Devlin and tapped for maximum magnification from the probe's visual sensors. Together they concentrated on holding the images steady, swearing when heat eddies distorted the pictures or the guidance went slightly off to leave them staring at an uninteresting expanse of roofing. They saw many natives, foreshortened except when they were lying down, of all sizes. They were unable to find any structure remotely resembling a school -- at least, they could not recognize it as such if they did see one. There seemed to be young ones in the streets with parents, playing on the beaches. All of them appeared to be healthy and very active. "There isn't anything wrong with that lot." Patricia was frowning. "But I wouldn't say the same for their parents -- they are, well, negligent! Some of those children are very small, little more than infants, and they are playing unattended on a dangerous stretch of beach. There should be an adult there to tell them that..." "Maybe," said Devlin, laughing suddenly, "they don't need to be told." All at once he was feeling great, better than he could remember feeling in any of his lives. He still was not sure that every tiling was going to be all right. "What's the matter with you -- " began Patricia, giving him a frightened look. Before he could reassure her regarding his sanity, a red light began winking for attention and the image they had been studying blanked out and was replaced by a printed message. found the first damaged probe and repaired it. I thought that it would be impossible to communicate with them from space, considering the difficulty of matching frequencies and the other technical problems. But they took the easy way out. They studied, repaired and used our own equipment and I'm betting that they were able to build a receiver as well as repair our transmitter. But now we need a fix on their incoming signal," he added, "if we're going to send as well as receive." Patricia nodded and began tapping instructions, still looking confused and worried. Devlin called up the data arriving from the repaired probe and angled a vision pickup to cover both their couches. The picture showed a large room with two windows. It was dark outside. The walls of the room were covered with large charts and simple line drawings, display screens and associated equipment at least as sophisticated as that in the control center. Three adult aliens were watching the probe's vision pickup and the displays, and two of the screens lit suddenly with a picture of Patricia and himself lying in their control couches. The excitement in the room was plain to see. This is the first time they have seen human beings, thought Devlin. He had seen their species during the near-catastrophic fly-by of Target Five, but at that time the progenitors of the beings on this world must already have left their home system. "The transmission is coming from an area on the night side," said Patricia, who had been dividing her attention between the main and a side display. "I've called up the visuals recorded during a daylight pass and magnified them. The area is several hundred miles from the nearest town, a clearing in a well-wooded valley, with a few small buildings and a large, steerable dish antenna in it. The interior of the dish is highly reflective. There are surface power lines, apparently, radiating from the installation, and one of them goes to a similar dish about twelve miles distant -- " "Look at this," said Devlin. The vision pickup on the surface was being directed toward a large and simplified drawing of Five's solar system, with a smaller drawing of an alien placed above the home planet. The pickup lingered for a few minutes on that drawing before moving to another, which showed a spherical ship, also with a picture of an alien close to it, leaving the home system and passing several representations of stars before arriving at system Nine. "Those charts and that whole installation," said Patricia worriedly, "were not put together overnight. They have been expecting us. At least, they must have decided that there was a strong chance that we would be back and -- and -- " "Yes," said Devlin, readying the white plastic boards and stylus which were available for just this contingency. "But they don't know anything about us. I wish I could draw." N evertheless he produced a recognizable if crudely executed sketch of the Earth's solar system with a stylized man above the third planet, and presented it to the control center pickup. On the surface there were more signs of excitement and he followed with a sketch of his ship leaving Earth's system and coming to Nine, the only difference between it and the aliens' drawing being the human figure above the ship and the number of intervening stars. The excitement below became intense, then suddenly they all became very still as the surface pickup was directed at another drawing. It showed a stylized alien lying recumbent and slightly off-center on an otherwise blank sheet. Eagerly Devlin began to sketch again. He copied as best he could the picture of the recumbent and offcenter alien, then added a stylized and recumbent man beside it and presented the drawing for viewing. Their reaction beggared description. It was just possible that the aliens were waving their doublehanded arms at him in anger, but he did not think so. He said, "I think that was the right answer." "But what was it?" asked Patricia. "A representation of the lion lying down with the lamb?" "You're partly right," said Devlin seriously. "What they were asking, and what I hope I told them, was that we, too, experienced a lot while we were on our way here. That we are not afraid to lie down unprotected beside them and exchange, if such a process is possible, our respective racial memories while we are asleep. Most of all I think I was telling them that we, too, are sheep." aliens' reaction had frightened him so much that he had not been able to use his brain properly. They had been so aggressive, so wildly and violently antagonistic, that he had only briefly considered the possibility that there might have been people on that world like Brother Howard, Dr. Martin and the other dedicated members of the project. Perhaps an alien vessel passing too close to Sol a few decades after the colonists had left would have found the humans degenerated even further than in his own day, become even more violent, and reacting in exactly the same fashion as had the people on Five's planet. But now he had begun to think. He thought about the absence of schools and of what it would be like to have children educated, from a very early age, by dreams which stretched beyond their race's earliest recorded history. He thought of a non-human race sharing a world with his own people, perhaps sharing their racial dreams, and of what they might ultimately achieve together. They were unlikely to do anything violently or in a hurry, because the evidence was that the aliens had made no attempt to grab territory or cover the planet with their offspring. But sometime in the distant future it would be seeding time again, and he was thinking like a caterpillar. Instead he should be thinking like a sheep or, more accurately, a shepherd. "Any time now," he said confidently, "they should produce another sketch or make some kind of signal that they understand and are -- " "They have," said Patricia, pointing to the other display. On the half of the world that was circle of lights that burned steadily while a larger beacon at the center winked on and off. The scaling grid showed that the circle of beacons was over twenty miles in diameter and that the aliens' communications post was at its center. Devlin nodded. He said, "We will have to explain the situation to our people in the unpowered cubicles, which will take some time, so you may as well call up the landing program before we tell them the good news. "Put us down," he added, "in the middle of the welcome mat."  # Fast # Street New York, N.r. tOOl? #t per word per issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. 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For the first time on record -- a shattering involvement with the Other World of stereophonic sound. Other World Records have created a new experience in sound and listening that will envelop you in an environment of sound movement and full-color audio imagery. Based on the short story by Thomas N. Scortia, the words and music of The Tower take you to another dimension. Feel the five-minute opening sequence depicting transition to a grotesque world via the horrors of the nuclear holocaust. Live in the new dimension of The Tower for timeless moments until the mind-exploding climax grips you, shakes you, exhausts you and leaves you limp and awed at your contact with a different reality! Utilizing music, electronics and special vocal effects, and combining them under the supervision of the brightest talents in these fields. The Tower creates an intricate fantasy, painting color pictures on the canvas of your mind, Roger Elwood (the noted Science Fiction Iconoclast) also says of The Tower, "I was truly overwhelmed at the scope and intensity of the sound movement and quality... an experience I'll repeat many times in the future." The Tower is the first in a series of audio environments planned by Other World Records, available by mail order only. You can take the ultimate trip for just #. To travel to the Other World of The Tower, fill out and mail the coupon twday! It's a small price to pay for a round trip to another dimension... If someone's already ripped-off the coupon below. you can still experience the ultimate trip by sending your checkmoney order to us for: #" Stereo Record # plus # post  hdlg.  # Stereo Cassette # plus # post  hdlg. " # ips Stereo Reel # plus # post  hdlg. # # W #th St (Penthouse). New York N.Y # Other World Records. Inc. # W #th St. Penthouse. NewYork. NY #... to cover cost, postage  I handling for copies of The Tower. I  #" Stereo LP #  #c postage and handling -- # I D Stereo Cassette # 't# c postage and handling ' # (  #  # " ips Stereo Reel #  # postage and handling  # I Name Address I (.'ity State Zip . NY Residents please add # sales tax. The Largest, Most Complete Star Chart It will fascinate you. Its size? A full # V # by #V# feet! Hang this noble map on your wall, then stand # or # yards away. You see an amazing replica in deep blue of the night sky -- showing # stars, just about every star significantly visible to the unaided eye. Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellations! No intelligent, aware person -- and certainly no science-fiction reader -- can afford to be without this dramatic reproduction of the heavens. For it is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. It stretches the mind and the imagination. And as never before, the Celestial Map charts the vast reaches of space through which hurtle space-ship Earth, the solar system, the galaxy itself... Own this magnificent map. It will instruct, entertain and delight you! Advertisement copyright  # by Ceiestiai Map Company. Otto McGavin suffered from a personellty problem -- but If he solved it he would die! I O tto mcgavin was a reasonably competent and extremely lucky "prime operator." He wasn't as deadly with a gun as James Borcroft had been or as handy with the blade as Petri Stalofam -- he didn't pick up a personality overlay as quickly as Bert Schauer and Susana Leeds could have learned four exotic languages in the time it took Otto to master Portuguese. But James and Petri and Bert and Susana had all died in the line of duty in the past year, three of them violently, while one chose the pleasant lingering death of happyplant overdose. Otto McGavin, we note, was lucky and was still alive. He looked barely alive, though, and about as luckless as possible, as an aide,helped him out of the He shuffled, stooped over, leaning on a weathered stick, the rustling of noisome rags an unpleasant counterpoint to his adenoidal panting. His nose looked -- was -- freshly broken and his face and arms were covered with running sores. The aide managed without touching him to guide him through a door marked: briefing and debriefInside the office the aide parked him on a straight-backed chair facing a nervous young man who sat in a government-gray chair behind a government-gray desk. The aide left quickly, as soon as he was sure that his charge wasn't going to fall out of the chair. "C-cashew" the young government man stuttered. "Battery. Rouge. P-pulpy." A light glimmered behind the rheum in Otto's eyes and he levered himself out of the chair, staggered and almost fell. "What -- " He touched his face, winced and stared at the sticky dampness on his fingers. He dropped back into the chair. "Now this time, this time it's gone too far." He plucked at the rags and a fragment came away between his fingers. "Exactly who am I supposed to be this time -- the Ancient Mariner? The Wandering Jew? Or just a garden-variety leper?" "Now, Colonel McGavin, I assure you, uh -- " "Assure me and be damned! This is three times in a row -- three times I've been some weak old codger. Somebody in Planning must want me dead!" "No, not at all -- that's not it at all." He shuffled some papers at his desk, not looking at Otto. "You have a good, uh, extremely good record of success -- under severe PO handicap, especially -- " "So think of how much better I could do if you clowns would let me be a normal human being for a change!" He grasped his ragged left arm, almost able to encircle bicep and triceps with one bony hand. "'PO handicap.' If you'd kept me under for another week you'd have handicapped me into the grave." "You know it's only, uh, temporary -- " "Temporary! Young man -- " "Dr. Ellis," the other said mildly. "Young Doctor -- it might only take me a couple of weeks of starving in a null-g field to lose all this muscle, but I've got to get it back the old-fashioned way. Even with hypnosis -- " "No, Colonel, it is temporary -- I mean -- " "What do you mean?" "Well, you're expected to -- recover while on the assignment. Your persona is that of a, well, you might say a professional athlete." "Yeah, the hundred-metercrutch relay, I can -- " "But no -- no, you don't see, he's been -- " Ellis shuffled papers some more. "If we can get on with the briefing I'll -- " "All right, all right. Nobody ever lets me bitch. What am I going to infiltrate -- a hospital? A health spa?" "Oh, no. Neither. First a police station. The individual you're impersonating is in jail, awaiting sent -- " "For dripping on somebody, no doubt." "Uh -- no. For murder. Premeditated first-degree murder. Assassination, actually." "Hey, that's really fine. A new experience. Brain-wipe." "Uh, well, you won't be on Earth, you see -- " "I think I get the picture." "On Selva they punish murderers either by burning at the stake or public cas -- " "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to do it." "You have no choice, of course." "Ah, but I do," Otto said, tensing. "All I have to do is kill you before you can -- " Xshew!" Dr. Ellis shouted. Otto slumped in the chair, face slack. Dr. Ellis sighed and blotted his forehead, got up and rummaged in a file until he found a bolstered laser. He beat the dust off it, sat down again, drew out the gun and pointed it at the center of Otto's chest. "Cashew. Battery. Rouge. Pulpy." Otto shook his head to clear it and looked down the barrel of the weapon. Quietly: "Put that goddamn thing away before you electrocute yourself. The battery selector's on 'charge.'" No ten-year-old would fall for that, but Dr. Ellis had evidently spent his youth in the pursuit of scholarship. He reversed the weapon to look at the power matrix, holding it very gingerly. Otto smacked it out of his hand and, not moving too swiftly, picked it up off the rug. "Pulpy, uh -- " "No." Otto had the weapon shoulder-high, the muzzle of it wavering a meter from the man's nose. "Calm down." He went back to his chair, keeping the doctor covered, and sat. He shook his head. "You bureaucrats are really max. Really max. Can't take a joke." He tossed the gun to the doctor's desk but didn't quite make it. It clattered against the edge and went spinning to the floor. "That's government property," Ellis said. "So am I, damn it." Otto leaned back and started when a joint popped loudly. "So am I." He studied the doctor for a few silent seconds. "Go on. I'm this murderer -- " "Ah. Yes." Ellis relaxed, lacing his fingers together. "But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have a problem on Selva." "I gathered." "Um, yes, it's a problem, on the level you're operating, it's a problem of murder. Of systematic assassination, really." "So I'm an assassin." "In a -- manner of speaking. But the problem is much larger than that." "I should hope." "Yes, well, it's war." "So? Nothing in the Charter -- " "Interplanetary war." Otto leaned forward, smiling slightly. "Interpanetary war? You're pulling my fern. Nobody -- " "I know." He sighed. "We're getting ahead of ourselves again." "Begin at the beginning, then." "I was going to say, yes. Do you know anything about Selvan politics?" "Look, I can't keep up with every jerkwater -- " "All right. That's what I thought. Don't worry, your persona knows all it has -- " "Of course. Go on." W an hereditary-representative oligarchy." "Like you say. I'll know all of this." "Patience, please. There are forty-two hereditary clans who send one representative apiece to an inter-clan ruling council, the Senado Grande. This representative is the eldest son of the head of the clan. He will eventually head up the clan himself and send his son to the Senado. " "Just a puppet for the old man, I assume." "Generally, yes. In practice, the Senado serves as a training ground, preparing the young men for the more difficult job waiting for them when their fathers die or step down. Selva doesn't have a strong central government; hasn't had one for centuries, and the Senado just formalizes into law agreements made between the various clan heads in secret meetings." "Very advanced." "Weil, it works. They started out neo-Maoist -- anyhow, here's the problem: "On Selva, serious personal differences between adult males are generally settled by dueling -- " "Dueling!" "Yes, it's a delightful planet. Usually they duel with swords, sometimes with more exotic weapons. The outcome of the duel usually is just a wounding -- first blood wins the argument -- but over serious matters they sometimes duel to the death." "I haven't handled a sword since training! That's fifteen years -- " "That long? Well, don't worry, your persona is quite expert. The boy he murdered he murdered with -- " "Boy? The boy he murdered?" "He was sixteen, just a few days past his sixteenth birthday. That's the legal age limit for duels. Which is at the bottom of your assignment. Let me explain. The man behind this interplanetary war idea is a clan head named Alvarez. He wants to attack Grunwelt -- " "Oh, I've heard of -- " "Yes, Grunwelt is a comparatively prosperous world. Unlike Selva, it has stayed in the mainstream of Confederation life. And they're practically next-door neighbors. kilometers, at opposition." "What do they want to start a war for? Haven't they ever heard of -- " "October? Sure, they've heard of October. In their schools, they teach that it's a myth, that the Confederation is too spineless ever to -- " "Still, why an interplanetary war?" E llis shrugged. "This man Alvarez -- well, for generations Selvans have been jealous of Grunwelt. Alvarez is playing on this jealousy. Reduced to the simplest of terms, he proposes to swoop in and loot the world." "Is Grunwelt aware -- " "Only our representative there. They don't have any espionage system on Selva -- they've never seen her as a potential threat. How could they? Selva has only two working interplanetary vessels, not even a Class II spaceport." "Then how does Selva propose to -- " "That's the funny thing. They could do it. Sneak attack with ten, twelve small ships. Bomb a couple of cities, threaten to bomb more, collect the booty and return. Leave a couple of ships in orbit as insurance against retaliation." "Never work." "I know it wouldn't work and you know it wouldn't work and I suspect that Alvarez knows, too. We can only guess at what he's actually up to." "Power base, I suppose. He'll use the scheme to make himself top man on Selva." "And then perhaps blackmail himself into a position of power on Grunwelt. Who knows? That's one thing you may be able to find out. The man you'll be impersonating is Ramos Guajana. You're one of four or five skilled duelists who have been systematically assassinating, not those who oppose Alvarez, but the sons of that opposition." "As soon as they turn sixteen." "When practical." Ellis lit up a stick and passed the box to McGavin. "It's all very legal." "I'm sure. Thanks. But question: how could this wreck, Guajana, bump off anything bigger than a cockroach?" "Oh, you're normally in much better shape. Guajana's been imprisoned'for over two months -- starvation diet, beatings almost daily. You'll be in good fighting trim soon after you escape." "But first I have to starve down to where I can slip through the bars?" "Oh, no. We have a foolproof plan." Ellis looked at his watch. "You'll get more detailed orders on the ship. Put out your cigarette, we've got to -- " "There's not that big a rush," Otto said. He smoked slowly for a few minutes. Then he put out the stick and returned to his chair, and Ellis put him under with a sequence of nonsense words. "When you awaken," Dr. Ellis said confidently, "you will be about ten per cent Otto McGavin and ninety per cent Ramos Guajana. Your response to any normal situation will be consistent with Guajana's personality and abilities. Only in times of extreme emergency will you be able to call upon your skills as a prime operator. "Pulpy. Rouge. Battery. Cashew." He pushed a call button under his desk. GuajanaOtto shook his head twice and looked across the desk with clear eyes full of pain. His face had changed in subtle ways. "I will remember you. Doctor." II Mario Juan Federico. Stvo. Or., Selva ed at Cerros Verdes Clinico (psych) awaiting trial for #stdegree murder. and face covered with dueling scars (see accompanying chart); presently showing effects of severe beating, lack of medical treatment. (S-#, prime) pages after that. It was the only thing to read in the crowded cabin of the tiny T-# and -- in the four weeks it took to get to Selva -- OttoGuajana read it over completely # times. Most of it detailed Otto's mission. From past experience, he knew that ninety-nine per cent of the planning would be worthless after the first day or two. And as far as the reams of data about the man he was impersonating -- normally that would also be useless; if he ever consciously had to act like the man, it would mean his PO was fading and he would soon have to fight or run for his life. But most personality overlays are done in hypnotic rapport between the agent and the person he is going to impersonate. In this case that was impossible; Guajana couldn't be kidnapped for a month and have his copy remain of any use. So they had examined and profiled Guajana as well as possible, and Otto was a very good academic copy of the man. He lacked the important artificial memories that would have been overlayed in hypnotic rapport -- but he could make a good case for having been beaten into amnesia. So Otto memorized all of the information about Guajana, just in case, which was not too pleasant: Guajana was about the most villainous person Otto had ever impersonated. Cold-blooded murderer of children. Well, maybe he had a good side. Kind to snakes or something. O tto landed on Selva, in a small clearing in the mountainous jungle that surrounded Cerros VerI#n  Ballantine Books What a fantastic December this will be for all over the borne planet! Even as we write this copy -- on a glorious October morning -- Pioneer # is speeding toward Its rendezvous with Jupiter on December #, passing only # miles from the planet's surface. At last, we humauB back on Earth will get a look at Jupiter and Its moons when the camera aboard the probe begins to send back plctnrcs. What do we actually know about that mysterious gas giant with Its big red spot? Actually, not a whole lot. But that has not stopped our best sdence-flctlon writers, who have been to Jupiter and back many times -- long before the scientists. Now the time has come to compare the spemlatjons made by our own sf pioneers with the actual data collected by the Pioneer probes. To mark this historic occasion, Carol and Ftcderik Pohl have edited an anthology for the very best stories ever written about that planet andor Its satellites. The Pohb have selected stories by BUsh, Asimov, Slmak, Welnbaum, Rothman, Gallon, Anderson, Del Rey and Clarke... a most Impressive gathering, and all together at your paperback book dealer for S#S. Take a strong sdence-flctlon theme and ask two wcD-known writ er s one male and one female -- to tackle It. Ihat's the Idea that anthology of all orltial stories, edited by Thomas N. Soortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbio. Hie palled wiiten may have itarted at die same laonclilng pad, bot their itorles are Ught-yean apart. Who says men and women thin k alike? Yon can't tell it by this booki People like Harlan Ellison, Joe Gores, Miriam Allen de Ford, Reginald Bietnor, Sydney J. Van Scyoc and lots more have taken up the Scortia-Yarbio challenge -- and the results are fascinating. Speaking of onr friend Tom Scorda, he and onr good buddy Frank Robinson have a hig mainstream thriller coming from Dontdeday In Jane. Yea'll be hearing lots about the book soon, and a mor modon picture wUI follow. Congratalations to two old frlendsl    Sdll dme to pick up some of Bollantine's deluxe books and spedaldes for last-minute year of the Indian? Or the new box set of coven on the four books by Tolkien -- how much we all miss him -- himself? And what Our sales people ted us this one's been a selloat. Bat yon may be lucky and still find one about. Happy hunting! Remember John Gardner? He's the chap paper, and we have boxed it along with the two other tides as a very special promotion... Of course, you can still buy any of the three books separately; thqr ore all featured -- boxed or loose -- In eye-catching floor dtaplnys.    And now from all of us to all of you, happy holidays. We'll see you In '# right here with news of all the best science fiction... BB des on a cloudy, absolutely starless night. His timing was very bad. The T-# is about as automated as a spaceship can be. It locks in on a landing signal -- generated in this casts about for the nearest thirtymeter stretch of level ground on which to land. But the signal in this case was being generated from the top of a steep hill in the middle of a rain forest so up-and-down that it would drive a cartographer insane. The ship glided to a stop and Otto pulled from a pocket of his rags a simple signal detectorrangefinder that told him he was # kilometers south-southeast of where he wanted to be. A small error in a #-light-year journey, but OttoRamos was understandably upset. As said, the T-# is very automatic. Its function is to land an agent safely and get away -- its door opens and the agent has sixty seconds to clear out. In this case, it was upsetting, because one of the things Otto had read in his #-page report indicated that only rabid sportsmen and other fools ventured out into Selvan jungles at night. Otto got out and felt the ship depart silently behind his back. Laser ready, with his left hand he adjusted his nightglasses and tightened the shoulder straps of his kit. He looked around and saw nothing but then felt a crawly sensation center on his back and whirled. At neck level and ten meters away a batlike creature with a threemeter wingspan and an excessive number of claws and teeth was sliding rapidly through the air with a bloodthirsty grin on what served it for a face. It seemed to weigh about as much as a human child and screamed like a child when the laser opened it up in midflight and it tumbled suddenly graceless over Otto's head to crash into the tall grass beyond him, where it thrashed twice. There was a second's stillness and then a slithering sound and then the sound of strong jaws crushing bone. In the flare of the laser Otto had seen a hundred pairs of hungry eyes. There was no way to whistle the ship back from its slow ascent to orbit. Perhaps it is better in some absolute sense to accept a known danger, however great, than to forge off into the unknown. Otto knew that the woods likely held a more interesting variety of fauna than this small veldt -- but in the thick growth, nothing would glide silently smiling upward the back of his neck. He checked his direction bump against the small rangefinder and set off north by northwest. Twice in ten steps Otto fired at nothing. He started to curse himself for wasting power and then on the twelfth step, a red snake with a head the size of a man's and eyes that actually did glow lunged for Otto's belt buckle. After the laser severed its head, the body coiled and writhed through eight long meters of gras. For all the years of training and conditioning and experience, Otto suddenly had no control over the toroidal muscle that makes elimination a polite and private function. His anal sphincter bucked and spasmed in that final reflex that tries to make a trapped creature an unpleasant meal. There was no room in his mind for thankfulness that he had taken the elementary precaution that kept him from fouling himself -- there was nothing in his head but primitive panic from ear to ear and he screamed and ran blindly for two seconds, hit dirt in a flat dive, rolled and came up firing. The swinging back and forth in front of him, then behind, saving his life when it killed the bat-creature's mate. When he took his finger off the trigger the glade was in crackling flames that dimmed and smoldered out in the dampness. At the edge of the wood something gave a bad imitation of a human laugh and Otto's self-preserving panic reached so high a level that it flipped the final mental switch the conditioners had put into his brain and he was suddenly ice. McGavin, you are going to die. I know that, McGavin. Do you know what to do before you die? Kill! A man who might know once said that there is no creature in the galaxy more dangerous than man. At any rate, few men could be as dangerous as one who has given up all hope for his own survival -- add to that twenty-three years of experience in mayhem and you may have the only kind of man who could possibly survive three hours alone at night in a Selvan jungle. T HE fact that nighttime is so hostile on Selva was the single most important influence on the strange evolution of Selvan politics. The planet was originally colonized by five hundred idealistic volunteers from the Terran country of Uruguay; members of the Programa Politico de Mao, who had bought the planet cheaply from a mining corporation that couldn't machines. El Programa arrived with a nice efficient setup, a division of duties and rewards that might have worked very well in a more hospitable environment. The mining company had not totally misled them about the danger of Selva -- they came with guns and electric fences and grim determination and absolutely no desire to go near the jungle at night. But to the planet they were just so many relatively accessible pieces of protein dropped in the middle of about the most competitive land ecology ever discovered -- # kilograms of monster meat. They lost nearly a hundred members the first day and the same number in the week that followed. The next week forty vanished, then seventeen and then eight. It would perhaps be naive to infer that a primitive kind of natural selection was going on, that only the toughest survived. There may have been some element of that, but far more important was the factor of simple luck and practice. They had all been farmers by profession -- and temperament -- and no farmer, however tough, could know enough about kneeSelva -- except by luck. If he lived and learned he eventually needed less luck -- although he became a less pleasant neighbor. Inexorably, in less than one generation, what had been intended as a gentle experiment in communal living degenerated into a bizarre association of mutually suspicious clans, a system more appropriate to the fourteenth century than the twenty-third. It started with the status of women. In El Programa, women were supposed to have been absolutely equal to men, except for performing the special function of childbirth. To keep the colony from becoming inbred, the planners had included ten thousand sets of sperm and egg, ready for quickening; all of the expedition's men had allowed themselves to be sterilized. With what were then considered modern medical techniques, a woman could give birth in four to five months after implantation. By the time the population had stabilized, at around #, it was obvious that every female had to be kept pregnant every day for the rest of her life, until her womb cried uncle, or the race would wither on the vine. And she had to be protected from Selva, which was virtually a sentence of life imprisonment, with time off for old age. At first the women were kept in the five colonizing vessels, now useless as transportation but proof against teeth and claws. The men stayed with them at night, and ventured out during the day to hunt, which was easy, and try to farm, rather difficult with one eye and one hand otherwise occupied. After some ten years they did manage to build high fortifications around each ship. The electric fences, which had proved useless before because dead creatures would just pile up and eventually make a bridge, were unraveled and restrung as barriers against the gliding monsters. Population pressure shoved the walls outward as the years went by. The people lived first in capsules, then stockades, then forts and finally in walled towns. Eventually five towns grew together to form the sprawling city of Castile Cervantes. There were schools, but they taught a minimum of academic I j ; the fourth novel in the epic of # ; Dray Prescot of Antares. Alan J I Burt Akers Is winning the alle# ! glance of the myriad Burroughs J I and Norman readers. With Tim ; Kirk illustrations. UQ#-#c) j I ; James H. Schmitz's psi-powI ; ered Telzey Amberdon finds her; ; her adventures out there at the # ; ' hub of the universe in this new j Ij UQ#-#C) J ! ! Fantasy and sf mix in a wonderI I : ful concoction by Pierre Barbet I !; as he takes a space captain, imJ !; muneto hypnoticsuggestion, to # ; ; a planet where the ancient gods j ; ' seem to be in full control, it is  I readers will have a grandstand j I seat. Wait until you see George I Barr's cover and the interior ; : pics! (UQ#-#C)  ! Far-out interstellar adventure is ;; the feature of Brian N. Ball's ; ; science fights to tap the secret of the cosmic hole where laws ' I no longer function. : I (UQ#-#C)  ; UT#-#C in January.) ; I you can't find our books with your address on it -- to Elsie Ave. of the Americas, New ; : York, N.Y. #. subjects and a maximum of how to stay alive. Most of the first generation still considered themselves communists. The second generation thought communism was ridiculous. The third generation was sentimental about it and by the tenth generation very few people knew what it was. With the women locked away like precious jewelry and the men spending half their waking hours in the expectation or dispensation of bloody murder, it was not surprising that an ugly form of social organization should develop. Since strength and ruthlessness were the only survival traits the strongest and most ruthless went to the top and made their own rules. They conquered their own planet in three hundred years. When they started looking for other worlds to conquer, they broke one of the very few interplanetary laws -- and the Confederation, through its clandescheck out the situation. O tto mcgavin was still alive when dawn broke and the miscellaneous uglies tromped or slithered or flopped or flapped back to their holes and caves. He sat exhausted in the middle of a wide circle of burned, bizarrelooking meat. That was what saved him. He hadn't had to fire a single shot in the past hour -- Selva's night-foragers naturally preferred a freshly dead meal to going to the spat fire. When the sun cleared the top of the jungle canopy Otto saw no sign of life in either the jungle or the clearing. Finally feeling safe, he automatically slipped back into the Ramos Guajana personality. He shook a fist at the dead creatures and shouted a joyful curse. Then he removed the sheath knife from the side of his kit, sliced a chunk of thigh from one of a creature's six and cheerfully munched on it as he plunged into the jungle. At Ramos's normal walking speed, he could cover # kilometers in a comfortable hour-anda-half. But jungle trails are slow going and it was nearing dusk -- Ramos starting to get worried -- when he broke into a clearing at the base of a steep hill. A handsome brick-and-stone building, evidently a lodge of some sort, sat on the top of the hill. Halfway up the hill a moat protected a substantial wall topped with electric webbing. He followed the path up the hill to the moat. A steelite drawbridge lowered and Ramos, wake-up jungle noises at his back, hurried across it. Another steelite door inside and the drawbridge rose behind him, trapping him in a small area. "I am not programed to admit you," a metallic voice said, "and the proprietress is not at home to identity you." A light came on in a little alcove to his left. "You are #B protected from the night, however, and there are sanitary facilities and food machines to your left." There sure were -- all coin-operated. All he had was in large bills -- and counterfeit at that. "Can you change a fifty?" he asked the machine. "Repeat, please." "Can you change a fifty?" "I am not programed to admit you -- " "Oh, shut up!" That was evidently in its programing -- it shut up. When he picked the lock on the toilet the light went out. ER an hour of darkness Otto heard a hovercraft land on the top of the hill. A few minutes later the door to his little cell opened. He was crouched behind the sandwich machine, laser centered on the door at navel-level. "Guajana," a female voice said, "Ramos Guajana?" "Si. Aqui. " He suddenly remembered that he hadn't put on nightglasses. "Ah, there you are." She must have had hers on. "Put away that gun and take my hand. I'll guide you up to the place." They walked up a steep path. "I've been trying to find you," she said. "I discovered where you spent the night. Very impressive." He didn't say anything. How many months since he had been this close to a woman? His hand sweated, clammy in her warm soft one. He felt wave upon wave of sexual tension so acute it affected stomach more than loins, every time he stumbled into a rounded hip or backside. "Hey, keep your hands to yourself." "Mierde, no veo, " he growled. With effort: "Sorry, I can't see." "Uh-huh. Well, we're almost there." Ramos could make out the gray bulk of the lodge looming against the black sky. "And here we are." She stopped and worked a heavy-sounding iron lock. "The Vista Hermosa Hotel. 'Hotel of the beautiful view,"' she translated needlessly. "Went out of business twenty years ago -- watch your step -- and the Confederation bought it through proxies." They were inside, walking over a mustysmelling carpet. "For such an emergency as this?" "No. Actually the reason is pretty simple. They thought for a while that the Senado was moving to Paracho, wanted a cheap place for a consulate. Got stuck with it. Stairs." Ramos hit the first tread as she said that. He stumbled and, groping, found her calf. He touched her again standing up and she showed her affection with a stinging slap. Coolly Ramos grabbed her wrist and twisted her off-balance. He fell on top of her, pinning her under his knee, and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to her throat, swearing gutturally. He snapped off the safety and then slowly clicked it back on. He stood up. "Sorry. Please remember. I am Ramos Guajana." She regained her feet with a rustling of full skirts. Her voice quavered. "I know. But I am what I am, too. On Shalom we -- don't touch people that way!" Nothing to say, Ramos shifted the pack on his back noisily. She sighed. "Still, we can't risk a light. Give me your hand. It's not much farther." They went to the top of the stairs and down a corridor to the left. The door to Otto's quarters opened noiselessly and closed with a solid snap. "Thumbprint lock. We'll reset it." The lights came on, dazzling. T  HE windowless room had three pieces of cheap furniture: an airbed in one corner and a wooden desk and chair in another. A small holo cube on the desk showed' the inside of a cell where a man was sleeping. Beside the desk was a rack holding seven swords. Ramos crossed to it and ran his fingers lightly along the blades. "Adequate," he said. He pulled one out of the rack and made a few passes at an imaginary foe. Then he looked closely at the sword. "I'll need a whetstone and a leather strop. And a roll of tape for these handles. Black tape, the kind electricians use." For the first time, he looked up and saw the girl. "Uh -- " By the standards of Shalom, she was a plain-looking woman. Which meant she was perhaps less perfect of figure and feature than Helen of Troy. She was dressed the way young women all dressed in this part of Selva, a clinging velvety bodice revealing only the tops of her breasts, clasping her body down to just past the hipbones, swelling out into a full ruffled skirt, long by Earth standards. Considering that nine-tenths of him had been three times jailed for rape and ten-tenths had been locked up in a tiny T-# for weeks, Ramos reacted in a fairly gentlemanly way: he dropped the sword, snarled and took three steps toward her, clutching -- And from an intimate place she produced a small black pistol. "Now you stay right where you are!" she said, more hysteria than menace in her voice. But it was quite obvious that she was going to burn him down in another second and the sense of immediate danger put Otto in full control of the body. His own pistol was lying on top of his kit, which he had dropped from his back in the center of the room. If she were any kind of a marksman she could hit him five or six times before he'd be able to reach it. He put his hands on top of his head. "Now, now," he said. "Don't get excited, it's just -- heh, well -- you know -- " "It's like they say," she said, a little more calmly, curiously, "You're actually two people." "That's correct." He bowed slightly at the waist, hands still on top of his head. "Otto McGavin, at your service." "Well, you better stay 'Otto McGavin' for a while." She lowered the pistol. "What a strange name you've -- " Ramos dropped his hands to his side, fingers clawed, and began inching forward. She brought up the pistol again and he raised his hands, more slowly this time. "Can't you control yourself for just one second?" "Calm, please, calm down now -- uh -- no. Actually I can't exactly control it. When I'm not in immediate danger I have to act like Guajana. The compulsion is automatic. Otherwise I might accidentally, you know, act out of character." She was backing toward the door. "Well, don't think for a second you're going to act in character with me." Hand on the knob. "I don't think we'll reset the lock after all. Not until I figure out what to do with you." She snapped off the lights, jumped through the door and slammed it behind her. A fraction of a second later, Ramos crashed into the locked door. "Cago en la leche de la madre de su madre! " he raged. He pounded on the door with his fists, cursing ever more imaginatively and loudly for a few minutes. Then he walked heavily across the dark room and felt his way to the bed. Ill W jana -- whatever your name is." Ramos snapped awake and looked around but there was no one in the room. Then he saw her small image in the holo cube "Goat bitch," he said illogically, sneering, "I no longer desire you. Set me free that I might go find a female of my own species." She sniffed contemptuously. "Sooner or later, you'll be free enough. Right now, there's work to be done." She faded away and was replaced by the image of the real Ramos Guajana, sitting in his cell. The resemblance to OttoRamos was fairly exact. Her voice over Ramos's image: "Notice that he has a new lump on his head and a healing cut on his lip. He got these fighting with a guard, day before yesterday." "We have orders saying you must match him as near perfectly as possible before you can begin your mission. It would be dangerous to risk cosmetics, of course, so we are going to have to inflict similar injuries on -- " "Please come and try." "That won't be necessary. Not me personally, anyhow." The door to his quarters swung open, and a big ugly specimen stood there, with a gun in one hand, a padded club in the other. "Sorry, Colonel McGavin," he said, raising the gun. "Anesthetic." He fired as Otto tensed to leap. R amos woke up with a pulsating ache in his head and a swollen stinging lip. He counted teeth with his tongue; they were all there but a couple were loose. "There's some analgesic in the desk drawer. Colonel." The man who had put him to sleep and, presumably, knocked him around while he was unconscious, was still in the room. Or again in the room -- he'd gotten rid of the gun and the club. He was sitting against the far wall with two swords and two clear plastic helmets. "Call me Ramos," RamosOtto said, going to the desk. Standing up and walking produced a sensation not unlike probing his temple with an icepick. Ramos touched the side of his head and closed his eyes for a second, tried to ignore the pain and failed. He took the pill and touched his lip gingerly. "I suppose I should thank you. Do you render this service often?" "Not for cosmetic purposes." The other man stood up. "Thought you might like to go a couple of rounds. These are practice swords, epees." He tossed one to Ramos, who caught it by the handle without effort. "You feel up to it?" "I suppose." Actually, Ramos Otto felt a thousand per cent better, even with the new lumps, than he had in Dr. Ellis's office on Earth. The Personality Overlay people had had to overdo the damage to his body, to allow for healing during the four weeks' transit. He wasn't up to normal pitch, for either Guajana or McGavin, but he had some measure of strength and swiftness back. "Frankly," the big man said while Ramos tested the balance and temper of the weapon, "I'm skeptical. I don't see how they can teach you in a few weeks what took Guajana most of his life to master." Ramos shrugged. "It's only temporary." He sized up his opponent. The big man moved with a grace that seemed almost effeminate for a man of his size. He had all of the physiological advantages for fencing -- he was taller than Ramos by a head and a half, had long arms and legs. But Ramos knew that people with a long reach and long lunge tended to get over-confident with a small opponent. It would be fun, setting him up for the kill. Ramos adjusted the helmet, a cool porous plastic shield that protected his face and ears and throat. "I'll take it easy at first," the other man said. "No need." They took up positions in the center of the room. Ramos noted that his opponent's blade was canted out of line to the right by more than two centimeters, exposing a little too much shoulder and forearm. The big man either had bad form or had set up a trap, not terribly subtle. Without thinking about it, Ramos executed an attack that would take care of either alternative -- in one motion feinting to the exposed forearm, slipping under the expected parry, then double-disengage (bellguard high for this line against the possibility of stop-thrust or out-of-time remise), lunge and the blunted point thumped to rest precisely between the third and fourth ribs. "Tocar," the big man acknowledged, fingering thoughtfully the spot where he had been touched. "I'll have to be more careful." H e was more careful and very good by anybody's standards, but in five engagements Ramos scored five touches. None of the clashes lasted more than a few seconds. The longest was attackparry-riposte-parry-remiseparryre remisetouch. "Very strange." The man took off his mask. "Colonel, uh, Ramos, I mean -- you say they taught you how to fence like Guajana?" "That's right." "But I've fenced with Guajana -- liundreds of times! And -- " "And you're still alive?" "No, no, not dueling. He was my coach five, six years ago. That's why -- anyhow, you don't really fence that much like him. A casual opponent wouldn't see it, tiut I know where his weaknesses are -- I've even beaten him a few times. You don't have those weaknesses, not those particular ones." "Ah." Ramos's brow furrowed, searching his memory of the mission profile. "Well, it's understandable. I had to get it secondhand, since the real Guajana was stuck here. They got the best fencing masters they could find and had them study tapes of Guajana at work. Then the masters taught me in tandem, simultaneously, all of us under hypnosis. So I got imprinted with a kind of average impression of Guajana's style." "Complicated," the man said. "But easy, compared to learning the real way. I'm glad it doesn't last." "I wish it could last a little longer. I've got to wrap up this project before the imprinting starts to fade. Two months at the very most." "Anything I can do to help, of course -- " "No. Don't even say it. You don't want to help; you don't even want to know anything more about this than you do now. Same goes for that bitch -- " "Rachel?" The big man looked son." "Something this backwoods planet shouldn't even have! I never feel safe on an assignment where somebody else knows my true identity. People have a nasty way of being compelled to talk. So far, two of you know who I am. How many others -- the whole embassy staff?" "No, we're the only two." "Then the best thing you could do for me, both of you, would be to get off-planet. Right now." voice, Rachel's, from the cube, "try to remember that we are the officially appointed representatives of the Confederation on this planet. You are only a tool, a specialist sent to aid us in the resolution of this problem. It's still our respons -- "You know, I don't give a flying -- " Ramos stopped, continued in a lower voice: "Deep down inside, I don't really care whether Selva builds a thousand warships and blasts Grunwelt back to the Stone Age. I would never even have heard of Selva if your Alvarez hadn't come down with a big Attila complex." Normally, Guajana remembered vaguely, he was very polite and suave with ladies. "Then I wouldn't say that you were ideally motivated for your job," she said scornfully. "Don't you have even a little sympathy for -- " "Sympathy, motivation, mierda." He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. "Sympathies can change and motivation is a simple word for something nobody understands.  do a good job, the best job I can, because I've been conditioned down to the last brain cell and stringy nerve to complete my mission. I am totally reliable because nobody but the ment to break my conditioning." "You are a thoroughly despicable person." "Because I pinched your butt? Big deal. Big -- " "Please!" The big man was patting the air with both hands, conciliatory. "Rachel, nobody questions your motivation and. Colonel, nobody questions your conditioning. Why don't we just drop all this and get down to the problem at hand?" "One little matter first," Ramos said, still fuming, "I know who Rachel Eshkol is -- she was identified in my orders -- but who the hell are you?" "Octavio de Sanchez. I work for the embassy." "Well, I'm glad she didn't just pick you up off the street. What do you do at the embassy, when you're not dabbling in espionage?" "Well, ah. I'm a data analyst for the Vital Statistics section." "And how does this qualify you to be in on our little secret?" "I needed somebody," Rachel began. "You didn't even need yourself!" "I needed somebody of unimpeachable loyalty who knew Guajana well. To check your disguise, your acting." "Who's acting? What disguise? I -- am -- Ramos -- Guajana." "He talks just like him," Octavio said. "See?" Ramos threw up his hands. "For this you doubled my risk of exposure." "Octavio de Sanchez is absolutely trustworthy." Her image in the cube was leaning forward, flushed with anger. "Oh, you want to get into that orbit. Octavio, old sport, if I to Alvarez's side -- " "No. He is too unutterably -- " life? To keep your children from being tortured to death? Your mother?" "Yes, I see. Of course. If the price were enough any man would -- " "Any man or woman on this planet -- except me." Then: "Why don't you just get rid of us -- mere mortals," Rachel said. "I considered it," Ramos snapped. "And I didn't reject it just because I thought you might be of some use to me later on. You won't be." "Then why not just kill us?" "Or try," Octavio added, flexing the practice sword. "For one thing, it would draw unnecessary attention to the operation. For another, even Ramos, the real Ramos, isn't totally amoral. Certainly not impractical. He sport -- or just because their existence inconveniences him." "He's killed sixteen people," Octavio said grimly. "Seventeen. But always for what he would consider good reason, at least sufficient profit." I've killed almost that many, Otto thought, just to keep the Confederation running smoothly. "Granted, he might require less reason than you would." Octavio nodded. "Look, we're still getting nowhere. Hadn't we best go over the plan, coordinate our -- " "The plan is unworkable and is rejected as of now. Kidnaping Ramos and sneaking me into his cell, then having me escape -- that's the kind of goddamn comic opera thing Planning always dreams up." "But we have orders -- " Rachel said firmly. "Look at the rank of the man who signed those orders and then not be terribly efficient, but in some ways it isn't stupid. The only reason I have any military rank at all is to keep people like you from hamstringing me." "What's your plan, then?" she said. "How is it any better?" "The less you know, the better for both of us. You may do two things for me and then, Octavio, IV you can go back to your statistics and Srta. Eshkol can go back to -- whatever she does for fun." "That suits me fine," she said with heat. "The sooner you get out of my life, the happier I'll be." "What would you like us to do. Colonel?" Ramos smiled at the cube for a second and turned back to Octavio. "First, get me reliable, inconspicuous transportation to Clan Alvarez. I suppose that would be a horse." They make noises about interplanetary war and still use draft animals to get around. "Then, when Tm ready to leave, get rid of the real Ramos." "Kill him?" "That would be safest. Use your own judgment." "You are forgetting that Sanchez and I are not casual murderers. We'll kidnap him as planned before, and lock him up in the room you're in now." "All right. I advise you to take out the swords first." When Octavio left, Ramos flopped down on the bed with a sigh of relief. It was hard work, trying to think like Otto and be Ramos at the same time. Starting tomorrow, he would have to move fast. A pity -- he would've liked to supervise the abduction. Perhaps the prisoner would be killed while trying to escape. Thinking more like Ramos now, that's good. had to go over two hundred kilometers, through Clans Tueme and Amarillo. It took him two full days, riding the spavined nag Octavio had supplied him. The second time he stopped for rest (and recreation), at an inn just across the Amarillo-Alvarez border, the prostitute he hired turned out to have known Ramos for years. She remarked about how gentle he'd suddenly become, but seemed relieved rather than suspicious. What other important aspects of Guajana's life did the PO section know absolutely nothing about? Ramos hoped his amnesia story would cover him. He had called the Vista Hermosa before crossing the Tueme border and Octavio had told him the abduction had gone smoothly, according to plan. No violence -- just a certain amount of money passed around, some personnel suddenly transferred. Guajana was safely locked away in the hotel. There was a reward out for his recapture, but the physical description on the notice was inaccurate. The ruse would work for two days (before a new poster, with picture, would be issued), which gave RamosOtto plenty of time to get safely into Clan Alvarez. It was a tiring way to travel. Except for some of the larger towns, which had stone or macadam streets, most of the roads were crushed gravel. Every time a noncquine transport passed it would pepper Ramos with a shower of pebbles and raise a cloud of dust that would take several minutes to settle in the hot still air. The big ground-effect trucks, which passed about every half-hour, were especially diverting, giving Ramos a nice familiarity with the jungle. He learned from one painful experience that horse and rider had to get behind a couple of meters of bush when one of the huge vehicles lumbered by -- that or die a slow death of flaying in one day's journey. By the time he reached Alvarez, Ramos was covered with a half-centimeter of crushed dust, aching with scratches from thorns and Hung pebbles and nearly paralyzed with saddle sores. He left his horse at a public stable, soaked for an hour in a hot tub, had his larger wounds treated, bought a rough massage and a new suit of clothes and walked slightly bow-legged to the castle. The castle was an airy fantasy of glass and polished steelite -- obviously new, although more than a century out of date by the architectural standards of more civilized planets. Guarding the front gate were two pairs of men with crossed pikes, trying not to look uncomfortable in their foppish archaic uniforms. Their armament was more ornamental than functional, but it was backed up by two megawatt-class lasers in shiny steelite bunkers flanking the road. A sign directed visitors to a small dome beside one of the bunkers. The laser's large green eye tracked Otto as he passed in front of it. Inside, the dome had brick-red walls with black tile underfoot and what looked like a tiny woman seated at a miniature desk across from the entrance. In the subdued light it was hard to see the faint cube lines, but she was obviously a holographic projection. The woman was plain and looked efficient. "Please give me your name and the name of the department or person with whom you have business." "My name is Ramos Mario Guajana. I believe I am to see el Alvarez." "Oh -- no, sir, that's quite impossible." She looked at him expectantly. Ramos stared back. "One moment, please." She tapped out something on the keyboard in front of her. "That's Guajana with an 'a'?" "Yes." She tapped some more and watched a screen to her right. "Oh -- Mayor Guajana, you are supposed to report directly to Commandante Rubirez -- does he maintain a regular office?" "Uh -- I don't know." 'Mayor' Guajana? Another little detail that Planning had missed -- Ramos Otto was a field-grade officer. "Let me see whether I can trace him." She played with the keyboard some more and talked quietly into a microphone. "Commandante Rubirez is in the library, in the Rare Books Room," she said with a tone of disihissal. "Where's that?" "Pardon me?" Furrowed brow, cocked head. "Look, I'm a field operative. I don't know my way around this town. Where is the library?" With exaggerated simplicity, she told him: south half of the sixth floor. R amosotto tried, with his newly-discovered majorhood, to pull rank on the palace guards when they asked for his sword. The captain of the guard coldly informed him that the palace guard was outside the military's chain of command and he could surrender his sword or be burned on the spot. He handed it over. A metal detector bleated as he walked through the gate. They got his pistol, too. Tangy cold inside the palace. Ramos realized it was the first airconditioned air he had breathed since getting out of the little T-#. The first floor was all expensive woods and plush carpeting -- mediocre paintings alternated with floorto-ceiling mirrors on the walls. Too much empty space -- it was an arrangement that owed less to aesthetic than to easy defense. Any or each of those mirrors could conceal a squad of armed men. Alone on the acre-sized rug, Ramos felt a hundred eyes on him. The elevator "boy" wore the palace guard uniform and was armed with short sword and laser pistol. He didn't say a word and already knew where RamosOtto was going. There was only one other person in the main room of the library, a clerk filing tapes behind a desk. He also was armed. Ramos was getting the feeling that everybody in the agents. "Which way to the Rare Books Room, amigo?" The clerk took off old-fashioned spectacles and blinked at Ramos. "You can't go in there. Occupied." "I know." Ramos drummed his fingers on the desktop. "I have an appointment with the Commandante." "Ah. This way." The clerk led Ramos through a labyrinth of tapefiles, periodical racks, bookcases. They came to a door marked with a single B. "Just a moment." He rapped on the door and opened it slightly. "I told you I was not to be disturbed," came a frosty voice from inside. "A gentleman says he has an appointment with you, Commandante." "I don't have any appointments with anybody." The clerk was a surprisingly fast draw -- he had the pistol steady on Ramos's breastbone right after the Commandante said # don't... "I'll get rid of him, Commandante." "Wait," Ramos said, almost shouting, "I'm Ramos Guajana." "Ramos?" A book snapped shut. The sound of papers rustling and heavy footsteps muffled by carpet followed. A hirsute head thrust itself from behind the door, at a surprising height. "Ramos," it growled with what might pass for affection. "Put that gun away, fool -- Alvarez should have two such good men." Two long strides and Rubirez enveloped Ramos in a crushing embrace. Then he held him by the shoulders and studied him, head wagging back and forth, looking oddly ursine. "They have used you poorly, old friend." "Not as poorly as they might have, Commandante. I was to be hanged." He shuddered. "Or worse." "Commandante?" He took Ramos by the bicep; steered him into the Rare Books Room. "When was I other than Julio to you?" "Sir -- Julio -- that's another thing. They beat me regularly, severely -- " "That's evident." " -- and I seem to have lost my memory. All memories of the past ten years or so." He lowered himself into an easy chair. "This seemed to be the logical place to go after I escaped -- from the nature of their questioning." He took a chance. "I do vaguely remember -- you." over the Commandante's bearded face, was gone. "And well you should." He chuckled, turned around abruptly and scanned the leatherbound volumes lining the wall. He selected a thick book titled Philosophical Discourses, held it to his ear and shook it. It gurgled pleasantly. '"Philosophy is the highest music,"' he quoted in Spanish, then removed the bottle and two glasses from the hollow book and decanted a healthy portion of brandy into each glass. He handed one to Ramos. "Grunweltische Branntwein. This is -- " he checked the label -- "Eisenmacher, 'thirty-six. It might be well to start developing a taste for it." Ramos held up his glass. "We will fill swimming pools with it." They laughed and drank. "Then you remember something of the Plan?" Ramos shrugged. "No more than is common knowledge. My captors -- is that the right word? -- in boy had something to do with it. I also got the impression that they were not too much in favor of the Plan." "Not yet," Rubirez said. "But we can bring them around. Or do without them. We've gotten the support of Diaz now, much more important. Heavy industry." He stood up abruptly. "But we can talk about this later. You must be tired." More curious than tired, Ramos Otto thought, but best not to press too much. He nodded. "It was an arduous journey." "See Teniente Salazar down at the officers billets. I'll call and make sure you get a good place." "I'd be grateful." "And -- ah! Would you crave feminine companionship?" "In a relaxed sort of way, yes. My most urgent desires I satisfied at various inns between Tueme and here." Julio clapped Ramos on the back -- gently -- and laughed. "Some things they could not change." V R amos found that his rank -- which was new, he was told -- entitled him to his choice of private quarters. Only two were available, though. Ramos took the second, even though it seemed more subtly bugged, because it was cleaner and he was expecting company. A girl named Ami Rivera -- Julio had said Ramos and she had been close. And Julio had suggested Ramos warn her about his indisposition. A clerk brought over a bag of personal effects belonging to the real Guajana. Ramos found out disappointingly little about himself from the items in the bag. There were swords -- blunted epee, saber and foil for practice. And functional sabre and epee. Three sets of clothes, civilian. No uniforms. An opened package of pistol targets. Three books from the castle library -- one of short stories and two on fencing theory (these were bound technical journals; Ramos looked for his own name but didn't find it). The only thing that didn't have some practical use was a beat-up harmonica, with no upper octave. There was also a little bag of things evidently dumped from a desk drawer -- anonymous stationery, pencil stub, eraser, two driedout pens, postage stamps stuck together, a half-smoked box of dopesticks but no matches. Maybe the TBlI's Sherlock section could comb through this collection and tell you everything from Guajana's ring size to his preference in women. To RamosOtto McGavin, after an hour of close inspection it was still just five swords, three sets of clothes and a bunch of kipple. Anything he could infer from these he already knew. Ami came by about sundown and fixed Ramos timorlinos secos, a regional seafood specialty. She was a laughing, worldly, handsome woman about Ramos's age. He enjoyed talking with her and making love with her and never could decide whether she'd been sent to spy on him. The next night was a slim young thing named Cecelia, who had rather more exotic tastes than Ami, but didn't talk much. The third night it was one Private Martinez, rather dumpy and male, who had been sent to bring Ramos to the Commandante's billet. Ramos had anticipated just a larger version of his own austere quarters, but Julio's "billet" was a rambling stucco mansion in the shape of a squared U, built around a carefully tended garden. Julio was in the garden, sitting under a large tree at a table covered with papers. A bright lantern hanging from a branch above him hissed softly and threw a circle of soft yellow light around him; the smell of its burning mixed pleasantly with the perfumes of the garden. Julio was scribbling rapidly and didn't hear Ramos and the private approach. The private cleared his throat, signaling. "Ah! Mayor Guajana. Sit, sit." Julio waved at a chair across the table from him and went back to his writing. "I'll only be a moment. Private, find the cook and bring us some wine and cheese." down with a slap and gathered the papers together. "Ramos," he said, stacking the pages, "if they ever offer you a colonelcy, turn it down. It's a first step to a lingering death by writer's cramp." He shoved the papers into a portfolio and laid it on the ground. "I have your next -- ah." He was silent while the soldier laid out four kinds of cheese and poured wine. "That will be all, private." He sniffed the wine exuberantly and tasted it. "I suppose rank does have its privileges." Ramos compared this opulence to Colonel McGavin's Earthside quarters. He mumbled something in agreement, but privately noted that rank's privileges varied from army to army. "I have your next assignment, Ramos. Are you familiar with Clan Cervantes?" "Only as an area on the map." The Commandante waggled his head in amazement. "And we visited it together -- a two-week hunting trip, not five years ago." "Can't remember a thing about it." "Hmmm. At any rate, we're having a problem with el Cervantes. He appeared to be with the Plan from the beginning, but lately -- well, the details aren't important." "He's having doubts?" "Perhaps worse than that. El Alvarez suspects treachery." "Does el Cervantes have a conveniently aged son?" "Unfortunately not. He's an old man -- his son is almost fifty. But it's a good situation. His only grandson is twelve years old and there is nobody in the family who can take over in the Senado should something happen to the son." He smiled pleasantly. "They have been cursed with daughters." "Then I am to challenge this fifty-year-old man -- and kill him?" "Yes. It would be that simple, except for one thing." Julio leaned back against the tree. "There's a price on your life now, Ramos. In every Clan except Alvarez. El Tueme offers ten thousand for your head. So first -- we have to change your head." "Plastic surgery?" Once the scalpel touches 'plastiflesh... "Of course. We've discussed the possibility." "Seems extreme. Could they change me back afterward?" "I don't know. I imagine not." "I don't like it." Julio shrugged. "It's your head, Ramos. I'd hate to see you lose it out of vanity." "Let me think -- do you have a copy of the picture they'll be using to identify me?" "Yes. Come with me." The Commandante led Ramos past two sets of armed guards into the opulent house. He thumbed open the door to a large study. He opened a heavy wooden filing cabinet -- also thumblocked. "Here." Ramos studied the picture, a good likeness but evidently taken toward the end of his imprisonment. "No problem. Look." He held the picture next to his face. "I don't have the prison pallor any more, and in this picture my face was puffy with bruises. If I shave close, iioboily would recognize me." Julio looked back and forth between Hie pielure and Ramos. "Probably. I'd be happier if you went ahead with (he surgery, though." "It bothers me, Julio. I mean -- I have so few solid links with the past, as it is. I have the feeling that if I lose my lace -- " "All right. Fine." Julio took the picture back and refiled it. "Tell you what. I'll have Ami bring you some of that lotion, what do they call it, that women use to darken their complexion." He locked the drawer and took Ramos by the arm. "No more work tonight. Let's finish that bottle of wine." he returned to his quarters. She massaged Sol Instante into every square inch of his skin, and it did a very convincing job. Ramos considered the maxim that a soldier had best abstain from sex on the eve of a battle -- and rejected it. VI propriate for a citizen of Clan Amarillo, Ramos had no trouble getting into Ceiyantes. He didn't want to go directly to Clan Cervantes headquarters -- instead he monorailed to a small town a safe distance from the border, then took a coach to an even smaller town, primitive enough not to have video service on their phones. It was a lovely little resort town, Lago Tuira, and he rested for a day and a night at the inn there. Then he placed an anonymous call to the castle guard, briefly warning the Clan that a hired assassin was after the younger Cervantes. The man he spoke to tried to keep him on the line, but he rang off, shouldered his knapsack and slipped out of the inn. Clan Cervantes was the oldest settled part of Selva and the part where mankind had most effectively modified the environment. The jungle around Lago Tuira resembled a garden gone to seed more than a typical Selvan jungle. The largest creatures there were no more dangerous than a Terran bear or large cat, and relatively rare. So Otto could travel through the early morning dark with little fear of betraying his presence by laser use. Under cover of darkness, Ramos walked back down the crude rpad, slipping into the jungle whenever a vehicle appeared. Nobody seemed to be in any great hurry to get to Lago Tuira and none of the vehicles bore official markings. The Clan either hadn't had time to trace back his call -- or had decided it came from a crank. At dawn Ramos left the road and worked his way parallel to it, behind a cover of twenty or thirty meters of jungle. By noon he found a climbable tree, pitched his camouflaged hammock in the lower branches and slept soundly until dark. Then he walked through the cool night until he reached the monorail terminal. He waited in the woods outside of town until a couple of hours after sunup, then walked down to the terminal, treated himself to a shower, a change of clothes and a hearty meal, and then caught the morning train to Clan Cervantes. He had no intention of actually trying to maneuver Ricardo Cermake the appearance of setting it up. Castello Cervantes dominated the largest city OttoRamos had seen on Selva -- it held nearly a a good starting point for him would be to try to land some sort of job in the castle itself. Passengers leaving the monorail had to show their identification to a pair of armed soldiers, who checked their faces against a photograph. When Ramos's turn came he managed to glimpse the picture -- it was the one of himself he had seen in Julio's study. "Who's that, friend?" he asked one of the soldiers. The man looked at him coldly. "Just be glad it isn't you." "How long have they been doing this?" he asked the man in line next to him. "I don't know,".he said. "I come here two or three times a week -- this never happened before." Maybe the phone call had worked. the castle personnel, Ramos Otto discovered when he discreetly presented himself as a job applicant -- the one chore that didn't require security clearance was dishwasher, second grade. The next day he was in the castle commisary, washing pots and pans and keeping his ears open. By afternoon he had learned that Cervantes. The day after the phone call, he had taken his physician's advice and gone on a month's vacation. Whether RamosOtto had precipitated the man's disappearance or not was immaterial. 'There was nothing to keep him in Clan Cervantes, so he chewed out the kitchen foreman and stalked away. He took an indirect route, through Clan Amarillo, to Castello Alvarez. He called Julio and the Commandante said to come right over, even though it was late. Bone-tired, Ramos sagged over to the mansion and met Julio in the garden. He recounted a plausible version of what had happened in Clan Cervantes. "... so it looks like we'll have to wait, take care of him next month when he has to be back on the job. It shouldn't be any problem." Julio had been reserved, silent through the whole report. At this he nodded abruptly and said, "All right. We wait." Rising: "Come with me, Ramos. I have something in the study that ought to interest you." He opened the door to the study and ushered Ramos in. At the far end of the room a man sat on a swivel chair, reading, his back toward them. Julio said, "He's here." The man snapped his book shut; turned and stood, smiling. He was Ramos Guajana. "Who is this impostor," Otto Ramos said, drawing his sword. The Commandante laughed. "Simply another version of yourself," Guajana said, "with no inconvenient amnesia." His own epee danced fluidly into a garde position. "Shall I kill him, Julio?" "No. El Alvarez will have questions for him. You may hurt him, though. With a minimum of bleeding, please. This rug is the very devil to clean." "It's strange," Guajana said, advancing. "I am almost fencing before a mirror. But my reflection has pitiably bad form." Danger imminent, Otto became all Otto McGavin. Who hadn't fenced in fifteen years. And was exhausted. Guajana took the initiative with an attack en cuatro and Otto swatted the blade away, advanced with a series of short jabbing thrusts. Guajana parried them easily, laughing, then did a simple cutover and pinked Otto just above the right knee. Guajana jumped back and held his sword up in ironic salute. "First blood." "I think he's good for a little more," Julio said. "Try for the face." Got to get inside his blade and use my hands and feet. The wound didn't yet hurt much, but Otto could feel his leg stiffening. Blood was creeping toward his ankle. Guajana came in blade high, en seis, relaxed. Otto stepped forward, ducked, felt the blade graze his scalp, delivered a side-kick to Guajana's leading shin, heard it break, dropped the sword and struck the man's throat with bunched fingers (left hand) while seizing his sword wrist. He held the weapon high out of the way (decided this instant to not use the neckbreaker, let him live) and punched him hard just below the sternum. He felt Julio's forearm snake across his throat, dropped the broken Ramos, shifted weight, slid a foot grating down the man's shin to crunch on his instep -- breaking Julio's hold on his throat -- shifted weight again and spun the heavy man over his shoulder and stepped forward to deliver the final kick and saw laser pistol glint in Julio's hand and knew he couldn't kick it out from this distance and (wondering that he was still alive) stepped back, raising hands. "Don't shoot. I'm through." Otto heard running footsteps outside the study. The leg wound hurt with a deep ache that he knew meant the large muscle was torn. His hair was matted with dried blood and he had the first intimation of a monumental headache. With his free hand Julio was feeling for Guajana's pulse. "If you've killed him I will personally castrate you with a rusty knife." He said this calmly, without any sign of hyperbole. Tomyour friends." The guard J pushed Otto into the cell roughly. His injured leg gave out and he rolled along the damp floor. It smelled of old urine and mildew. A man stood with his back to Otto, staring through the barred window into the lighted yard. On the double bunk was another person, female, crying softly. Otto swore. "Is that you, Eshkol?" She responded by crying louder. "That's her." Octavio turned and even in the dim light it was obvious how roughly he'd been handled. His face was one puffy bruise, eyes swollen almost shut. His tunic was crusty with black blood. "What happened? How?" "How, we don't know. Five or six men. broke into the hotel last night, after midnight -- " "What were you doing there? I told you -- " "I felt that Rachel needed protection." "Thanks for trying," Otto said. "Go on." "They disairmed me and took Rachel prisoner. They forced her to open the door to Guajana's room. He didn't seem too surprised to see them." "Figures. What then?" "They bound and gagged us -- Rachel and me -- and took us down the trail to a helicopter. We were here by dawn." "And they spent the rest of the day trying to make you talk." "That's right. But I didn't." "Obviously. You're still alive, so they must have further use for you. Did they do the same to her?" "N-no," Rachel said, quavering. "Tomorrow, they said." "Tomorrow I'm sure it will be," Otto said brusquely. "They're going to kill you both, anyhow. Me too, most likely." "How can you be so sure?" Slight overtone of contempt, hardening her voice. Otto felt anger rising, knew it was a Ramos-reaction, tried to ignore it. Pause: "Think about it, lady." "It seems to me," Octavio said, "that they would want to take as little chance of angering the Confederation as possible." Otto shrugged and knew it was too dark for them to see the gesture. " I'lie C'onrcderation has already expressed its interest by sending me. It will be much better for Alvarez, if she just disappears -- you, too -- rather than have you sitting around as evidence that they abducted what is to the Confederation the most valuable woman on this planet." J'But what about you -- " "Shut up. There's a recorder somewhere taking down every word we're saying. Don't let them know anything they don't already know -- least of all, about me." Octavio went to sit on the bunk with Rachel and Otto took over his place at the window. He tested the bars -- they were solid. The door opened with a loud rattle and Otto could see, next to the jailer, the silhouette of a man carrying a laser rifle. "You're next," he said. "Colonel." and drugged him and then knocked him around some more but Otto, because of his conditioning, could endure it dispassionately. Finally they hurt him so badly that he could do the Zen trick and nothing could hurt him any more. They threatened him with a simple death and then with an imaginative one and to both he only smiled ple'asantly. A tiny voice that he heard only very infrequently -- so profound was his conditioning -- said, They really are going to kill you this time, though you might live with the right combination of truth and bullshit. Another, perhaps the rational voice, said. Your only chance is to throw in with them. Or perhaps the rational one was the voice that said. They have bound themselves to kill you no matter what you do... And the trapped animal inside him said without words: Do anything to live. But all of this debate, rational to venal to visceral, came to nothing. If the next beat of his heart would betray the Confederation, the Thou shalt not... imprinted on every cell of his body would hold that organ still. The fourth time he fell unconscious they didn't shock him back to wakefulness. O tto awoke in a white room, in bed. Each arm and leg was individually secured, but only two by jailer's cuffs. His left arm and right leg, as well as two fingers of his right hand, were immobilized in orthopedic tractors -- he remembered when the fingers and leg had been broken, but the other must have been snapped while he was unconscious. His tongue counted seven teeth missing. Four had been extracted with pliers, the balance with a truncheon. Amateurs. He knew at least eleven ways to cause greater pain without leaving any mark. He toyed with the fantasy of demonstrating his skills on the men who had interrogated him. Woozy with anesthetic and fatigue -- and having no real reason to stay awake -- he carried that fantasy with him into darkness. When he came to the second time a man in a white tunic was withdrawing a hypodermic gun from his arm and in a fraction of a second all the pains came back in one electrifying spasm. He fought it and then bent with it and then was above it -- the pain was there but it was only a testimony that he still lived. "Gul' morzhling, Dogther," he said and then adjusted to the indignities inside and around his mouth: "Good morning. Doctor." The man just looked over his head and wrote something down on a clipboard. Then he walked out of Otto's field of view and said, "Go ahead." Julio Rubirez came in with a chair and sat down at the foot of Otto's bed. "Commandante," Otto said. Rubirez regarded him for long seconds. "I can't decide whether you are the best-trained soldier I have ever seen or simply not human." "I bleed." "Perhaps the Confederation can make robots that bleed." "You won't find out from me." "Not by torture, granted." He stood up and, holding on to the bedrail with clenched fists, leaned closer to Otto. "You present an unusual problem." "I should Kope." "I've been in conference with el Alvarez. He has the idea that perhaps you can be convinced of the value of the Plan. Perhaps not only tell us what we need to know, but even lend your talents to the execution of the Plan." "You don't agree." "Of course not. El Alvarez is intelligent and dedicated but he has never been a soldier. He doesn't know enough about pain. He will not believe what I tell him about the kind of person you must be. He thinks he can reach you." "He may be right." Julio smiled wanly. "Name a price." He thought. "I have been -- what I am -- " "You can say 'prime operator.' Some things we do know." " -- a prime operator, then, nearly half my life. I've been shot and knifed and burned and, in general, have been treated poorly so many different ways and times that I'll have to admit that in a way you're right. I have no illusions left and few emotions." Otto smiled and knew how ugly the gesture looked. "But I was really sentimental about my left upper molar; it was the only real tooth I had left. So, a deal: if you bring that man here who pried my tooth out and cut his throat in front of me, I might talk business." "Do you know which one he was?" "No." "Very well. Orderly!" A young man jogged over, snapped to attention. "Bring me Tenientes Yerma and Casona. And a sharp knife -- " He thought. "Detail yourself a squad and bring them bound." "Sir." Click, about-face, jog. "You're serious," Otto said. influencing you, I suspect it will not, but -- I promised el Alvarez I would try. Besides, both of them disgust me. They are mariposas, the dear boys. And they enjoy other people's pain too much." You hate to see that part of yourself reflected, Otto thought. "If you know that I'm a prime operator, then you must know what kind of me." "It's a calculated risk." "An easy calculation to make. ture, rather like assassinating an ambassador. And you're going to do that, too." "Probably." "The very least that will happen is brainwipe for el Alvarez and you and everyone else of high rank. And if you drop one bomb on Grunwelt, you've forfeited the destiny of your whole planet. You know about October." "It's a myth." "It is not. I've been there." "Really." He sat down again, propping his chin on a cupped palm. "Did you find it amusing? Instructive?" "You might find it instructive. No form of animal life more complex than a cockroach survived. The cockroaches have become very large and aggressive." "You're saying that the Confederation would be so outraged over they would murder an entire planet." He laughed. The sound had a forced quality. "The Confederation doesn't murder." Oh really? "They released a virus into October's atmosphere that sterilized every female, from fish to mammal." "So they only murdered the ones who lived long enough to starve." "They supplied food. As a gesture. Men can live on plants and bugs." Julio yawned. "I wouldn't mind being sterile. Three children are sufficient." "Don't be stupid." Julio smiled. "Don't be insulting." They sat silently for a minute. "When do I see el Alvarez?" "He is very busy. You may see him before you die." "You have a very primitive sense of theater, Julio." "True." He laughed. "But a captured audience." T i HE orderly returned with six armed men and the two interrogators, their arms tied behind their backs. The two tenientes led the procession, erect but very pale. The orderly handed Julio a thick-bladed butcher's knife. "Good morning, Bernal. Romulo." He slapped the handle in his palm, rhythmically. One answered weakly; the other opened his mouth and his teeth chattered. "Which of you pulled this gentleman's teeth? It would please him to see your throat cut." "I would be satisfied," Otto said, "to see them lose a few teeth themselves." The one w'ho had spoken earlier said, "We both did, Commandante." "Hmm." Julio looked thoughtful. "Orderly -- see if there are pliers in that desk over there." He returned with a chromed surgical instrument that looked as if it might do the job. "Will this do, Commandante?" "We can only try. Romulo, you may test the equipment on Bernal." He gestured to the orderly. "Untie him." The interrogator took the tool and faced his partner, talked to him the way one talks to a child. "Open your mouth, Bernal." And whispering: "Be brave." Bernal gave one small cry of pain when the first tooth came out. Romulo looked at Rubirez, who nodded, and bent to take out another. "Well?" he s'aid to Otto. "Well what?" "I've displayed my good faith. Now will you answer some questions?" "You've displayed something. No." He nodded, blankly. "Orderly. Call the prison compound and tell them I want de Sanchez and the woman Eshkol." Bernal was losing his third tooth, not making a sound although tears coursed down his face. Rubirez said, "Oh, Romulo -- " The man looked up and didn't even have time to blink. The butcher knife hit with enough force to cut his neck half through. The soldiers and Otto flinched at the sudden spray of blood. Rubirez snatched the dying man by the hair and jerked him down, then hacked savagely twice, then gave a third studied blow that separated the head from the body. He held it dripping over Otto's bed. "One more?" There was absolutely no expression on his face; no emotion in his voice. Otto choked back sudden bile. "No. That was an adequate demonstration -- of -- " "My primitive sense of theater?" One of the soldiers ran for the door. "Private Rivera. Come back or you will be punished." The private slowed for a second and ran on. The Commandante returned his gaze to Olio, but didn't say anything. The only sounds were the private's echoing footsteps and a faint rustling that Otto knew was the headless body, moving. Bernal fainted. "You may all leave. Take this garbage with you." a live one. It took only one man to carry the unconscious Bernal, four to drag out the body. The orderly carried the dullstaring head to the door, set it outside and posted himself. "Now, Colonel. Shall we try to get down to business again?" "If you think you've impressed me, you're wrong. I've known many ruthless men." The Commandante moved to the side of Otto's bed and laid the point of the knife against his throat. Blood still dripped from the blade and his right arm was hot crimson from the hand to the elbow. "I'm getting tired of your machismo, Colonel." Otto could move his head but knew it would be useless. "Really? I'm vastly entertained by yours." The Commandante, livid, jerked the knife away. Having lived to see that expression on Julio's face, Otto knew he would live as long as el Alvarez ordered it. The orderly escorted RachelEshkol and Octavio de Sanchez into the room, then returned to his post at the doorway. Rachel was white-faced but composed; Otto assumed that the head had been removed from the corridor. Both of the prisoners were clad in baggy gray fatigues and had their hands tied behind their backs. Octavio still looked used, but Rachel hadn't yet been harmed. She gasped when she saw Otto. "I wanted the two of you to see what we've done to your prime operator," the Commandante said, "so you won't have any illusions about your own diplomatic immunity." "I haven't doubted for a second that you can kill us," Eshkol said through clenched teeth. "You are all so full of heroism," Julio said, fingering the edge of the bloody knife. The woman saw it for the first time and stifled a scream. "So little perturbed at the prospect of -- " "What has he been doing to you?" She stared at the blood spattered on Otto's bedclothes. "Nothing to him, young lady," the Commandante said. "He asked for a man's life and I gave it to him." "Is that true?" she asked Otto. "No." "But it is," said Julio. "You two could get along very well together," she said bitterly. "You are a matched set." Julio laughed pleasantly. "Women have no appreciation for politics." He addressed Octavio. "Isn't that right, Teniente?" Octavio looked at him uncertainly. "This means -- " "That's right." Julio stepped behind the battered man and sawed through his bonds. "The masquerade is over." He said, "Let me present Teniente Octavio Madero. He has been a good soldier under my command for over five years." "Octavio," Rachel said with a falling tone. "The obvious," said Otto. "That clears up a few things." "Indeed," the Commandante said. To Eshkol: "Now you have no one. Your colonel is a brutal sadist and your confidant, a traitor. We'll allow you a few days to think this over. While we decide what to do with you." He called the orderly over. "Orderly, this man holds the same rank as you," indicating Octavio, "but I want you to be his orderly for a week or so. While he recovers from indignities suffered for the good of the Plan." Rubirez glared at Otto. "And in spite of your ministrations, I have back my trusted Ramos Guajana. His recovery saved you from a most vile death." Julio dismissed Octavio and the orderly with a wave of his hand . He took Eshkol's shoulder and gently pushed her toward the door. "After you, my dear." M edicine on Selva was only about a half-century out of date; in four days Otto was able to walk with little difficulty and his fingers and arm were knitted. As a sign of his continuing clinical progress they put him back in the jail. It was a different cell. There was no window and the door was a solid sheet of thick steel that slid silently on hidden bearings. Indirect lighting and freshly stuccoed walls. The only smell was a faint memory of disinfectant. There was a tidy commode in one corner, next to a basin. The double bunk was smooth plastic with fresh linens; Rachel Eshkol lay on the bottom bunk, studying the underside of the top one. She didn't make any sign of noticing .as the door slid shut behind Otto and locked with a heavy click. "Our quarters have improved," he said. "Have they treated you well?" he said. "I know you detest me," he said. She continued to stare straight ahead and Otto crossed the room, tested out the water faucets. "Which one are you?" she asked. "All Otto McGavin. I haven't seen Guajana since they started torturing me. The overlay can't have worn off so soon -- it's never happened before, but evidently there's an escape reaction. Since the overlay no longer functions -- " "If you're that one," she said, still not looking at him, "tell me what was the first thing you did when I turned on the lights in your room at the Vista Hermosa." He thought. "I checked the swords on the wall." "All right." She swung slowly to a sitting position and looked directly at him. "Yes, our quarters have improved and no, they haven't treated me well. And I can't detest you very much any more because there are too many others. Myself. Rubirez. Others." Otto sat down on the commode and started to say something. Rachel spoke first. "I hate myself for what I've done to the Confederation and to this beautiful planet and even to you. In my ignorance I betrayed the Confederation and doomed this planet to the fate of October. And brought about your death -- I'm sorry." All this in a calm monotone. "I'm not yet dead." The words sounded false to him. "Yes, you are. So am I. We walk and talk and yet we are dead and already starting to rot." She had the helpless, dull look of a mortally injured animal, but there was no mark on her. "What have they done to you?" he asked gently, thinking he knew. "Really," she said, standing slowly, steadying herself with a hand on the upper bunk, "it's not important." She pulled the drawstring on her trousers and they rustled down her flanks. With surprisingly nimble fingers she undid the snaps of her tunic and shrugged it off, then stepped out of the trousers. There was a little spark of defiance in the way she faced Otto; legs apart, fists clenched at her sides -- her body was as perfect in shape and tonus as Otto had imagined it, but from ankles to shoulders was a mottled pattern of violets and blues and browns; hardly a square centimeter of her skin, where it had been covered by clothing, was not bruised. She turned to show Otto that they had done the same on her back and buttocks and the backs of her legs; all except for an exact area over each kidney. They hadn't wanted to kill her. "Every day. Sometimes three or four times." Her voice cracked and she folded her arms on the upper bunk and buried her face but didn't cry. "Rubirez and that -- Octavio man or Guajana -- " Otto crossed and picked up her tunic and tried to drape it over her shoulders, but it wouldn't stay, so one at a time he took her hands and guided them into the sleeves of the tunic. She sat heavily on the bed and winced, then folded her hands in her lap and slumped, staring at the floor. She continued: "They -- they put handcuffs on my wrists and -- " "Please," Otto said. "Don't talk about it." He stooped and picked up the gray trousers. "Take these and -- " T he door slid open and Rachel tried to cover herself with her hands. "Well, well," said the jailer. "You two didn't waste any time." Otto was halfway to him when he saw the pistol and halted. "I'd think she would've had enough of that." The man threw a bundle of white clothing at Otto. "Put on these, both of you. Now." Otto separated the smaller items and gave them to Rachel. She turned her back to the jailer and dressed. Otto stood as close to the jailer as he thought prudent and threw his old tunic and trousers at him as he took them off. The jailer jeered and made some pointed remarks about Otto's physiology. The jailer gathered up the gray clothing. "You're going to have visitors soon. Try to behave until then." They sat on the bed together. Otto almost reached out to pat her hand, didn't. "They've never given me a white outfit before," she said. "Maybe this is the way they dress you for public execution. In a way I hope so." Otto knew that if they were going to be executed the executions would be private affairs. They sat for what seemed like a long time, neither wanting to talk, lost in private thought. Otto wondered, not for the first time, where along the line he had lost the fear of death -- the respect for death. Was it just part of his conditioning? That would seem anti-survival and prime operators were too valuable out the will to live. Maybe it was simply that familiarity bred contempt. With some effort of will he thought back to his youth and childhood, trying to recall some incident, some bit of knowledge or disillusionment that eventually led to the invisible army he had joined; that led to this jungle planet and sharing a white mausoleum with -- he analyzed the brittle affection he felt for Rachel Eshkol and knew pretty exactly which part of it was sexual and which the somatic sympathy of one injured body toward another; which part was atonement for the way he had acted as Ramos and which was retroactive yearning for other women he had loved or once had thought he loved. And some dark growling part of what he now felt was probably the cornered beast's obeying the instinct to take one more chance on the procreative raffle before it was too late. He remembered a boy named Otto McGavin at temple trying his best to meditate while the acrid incense tried to tickle him into sneezing and what a hell of an AngloBuddhist he had turned out to be, killed for a living and facing death with no desire for spiritual preparation beforehand -- or was that what he was doing? No. What Otto was doing expressed the closest thing to a panic reaction he ever permitted himself. At age twenty Otto had entertained a conceit about "dying well." He tried to remember how that felt. T he door slid open and nine people came in, in file. The first was Julio Rubirez. The next was an old man. Then Ramos Guajana, followed by a squad of six soldiers. Everybody was armed except the old man and one of the soldiers, whom Otto recognized as Private Rivera, the boy who had run from Rubirez's grisly demonstration. Behind a transparent dressing on the side of his head was a fresh stump where his right ear had been. The old man looked familiar and Otto remembered who he was just before Rubirez introduced him. "El Alvarez wants a word with you two." Julio turned to the old man. "One last time, sir. This man is the most dangerous, desper -- " "Enough, Julio. Just leave me your pistol." Julio handed over the gun. "At least let me handcuff them." The old man nodded. Rubirez handcuffed Otto's right wrist to Rachel's left. Then everybody except el Alvarez filed out and the door clicked shut behind them. El Alvarez looked around, decided against the indignity of sitting on the toilet and stood opposite the two, leaning against the wall, the pistol pointed loosely in their direction. "I asked twenty-some years ago that this cell be built. It is the only cell in the complex that has no cameras and no microphones hidden in it." "Or had none twenty years ago," Otto said. El Alvarez shook his head. "I had a trusted person go over it thoroughly last week." "You have things to tell us," Rachel asked, "that you don't wish known by your own espionage people?" The old man didn't answer directly. "How many people on Selva do you think know about the Plan?" "That would be hard to say," Rachel answered. "Everybody seems to have heard rumors." El Alvarez nodded and smiled. "That's part of the Plan itself. Actually I suppose only one out of a hundred or so Selvans knows there is a truly concrete Plan. Most of them belong to Clan Alvarez or are powerful members of their own clans. We haven't yet made a public statement about the Plan because we don't want to encourage responsible public debate." He paused expectantly, but neither Otto nor the girl said anything. "I believe your Confederation doesn't think it could possibly work." "That's -- " "Quiet!" Otto snapped. "I've read your orders. Colonel," Alvarez said wearily. "The ones that were in Ambassador Eshkol's safe. In that regard you have no secrets to protect. "At any rate, the Confederation is quite right. Oh, we could deliver a few bombs to Grunwelt -- we could destroy a few cities and know and you know that war is more than just piracy on a large scale, which is what the Plan distills to. We simply don't have the economic resources, not by a factor of a thousand, to maintain a war with Grunwelt -- even if the Confederation were not to intervene. We could start a war, but Grunwelt would finish it at its leisure." "I don't see why you're telling us all this," Otto said. "It will become clear." thing that is clear -- " scorn was creeping into Otto's voice -- "is that our analysts le the destiny of an entire planet in some convoluted scheme to get more power." "No. If I enjoyed the exercise of power I would seek to preserve the status quo. No one on this planet is more powerful than I am. Except perhaps you two. Which is why I've brought you here, of course." "You haven't gone out of your way to make us sympathetic," Rachel said and Otto knew her just well enough to detect the leading edge of hysteria. "I will need your help," el. Alvarez said, "the Confederation's help. But first! need your understanding." He looked at Rachel. "Not your sympathy." "The Confederation does not meddle in the internal affairs of its member worlds," said Otto. "Except when those affairs -- " "I know," el Alvarez interrupted. "I may know the Charter even better than you do. Briefly; what we call 'the Plan' is only one part of a larger scheme. You are also part of that. It was laid out in some detail by my great-grandfather over a century ago. Juan Alvarez the Second, a political scientist and -- a visionary. A practical man, but a dreamer. "Selva was colonized by dreamers, you know. Political exiles from Terra who brought with them an idealistic form of communism. It didn't last ten years -- they hadn't been properly prepared for survival here. "Five strong men took over and actually, I suppose, saved the colony from extinction. But these five governed in a brutal, arbitrary way. When their heirs succeeded they didn't change methods -- in a crude way, this is how the balance of power was preserved. People who rebelled were either killed or, if they were strong, braved the outside and took other rebels with them and established rival clans. Eventually the brutality and capriciousness became institutionalized and, inevitably I suppose, filtered into the conduct of daily life at every level. Do people routinely settle arguments by dueling on any other planet?" "I don't think so," Rachel said. "No," Otto said. "That's one example. There are others. The sum of it, though, is that our way of life is in almost every respect a healthy millennium behind that of any other culture in the Confederation." "I quite agree," Otto said sourly. "And it has a built-in stability through the method of succession." He seemed now to be pleading rather than explaining. "But Juan Alvarez II devised a way to subvert that stability." "And to implement this you need help from the Confederation?" "That's rig'ht. We -- " "Weapons? Money?" As if I were in a position to make promises, Otto thought. "No -- well, a little money, maybe. Let me explain. Juan Alvarez the Second suggested that we need set up only a few initial conditions, not obviously revolutionary changes, in order to shift the base of power gradually away from the clan leaders, eventually transform them into powerless figureheads." "What could you possibly have to gain by all this?" Rachel asked. wrou would have to be in my Xposition truly to understand. Most Selvans are reasonably content with their lives because they know no better -- their educations and the information they receive about other worlds are carefully controlled. I was educated offworld -- as part of Juan the Second's Plan -- and I feel, have always felt, dissatisfied. Every bit as manipulated -- and helpless -- as are my subjects. That I am ruled by a halfa-thousand dead men, rather than one live one, makes no difference." "Very poetic," Otto said. "Specifically. What initial conditions?" "These will be disguised by our preparations for the hypothetical war. Clan Diaz is building a fleet of Foster-type freighters. We are calling them bombers." Otto vaguely remembered that a Foster drive was a reaction jet powered by fusion of deuterium. Ancient history. "Unfortunately they will not be finished in time. To preserve the element of surprise, we will have to attack when the planets are closest -- and the next opportunity will not be for five years. "So for the next five years we will have a fleet of new ships and it will not be unreasonable to suggest we make some money with them. Such commerce as goes on between Selva and her sister planet is almost totally controlled by Grunweltische shipping and tourist firms -- we can underbid them and still make a good profit." "I begin to see," Otto said. "See what?" Rachel asked. Alvarez made an animated gesture, forgetting the gun in his hand -- Otto ducked instinctively. "This way we will have formed a new social class of interplanetary merchants -- who will be the only ones with access to wealth outside of our own closed economic system! Each clan will see the fortune to be made and none will be able to afford not to -- " "Wait, wait," Otto said. "I see something else. The closest thing to a spaceport on this planet is barra de Alvarez." "That's right," Alvarez said impatiently. "So you will be getting first crack at the money -- tarriffs, docking fees -- " "No, no -- that's part of the plan, too. I will be in a position to encourage interplanetary trade by taking as little -- " "As little as you could and not appear suspicious," Otto said blandly. "That's correct," he said with flinty pride. "I'm no sociologist," Otto said. "And when I studied interplanetary economics... I don't remember learning about anything one-tenth this bizarre. It's about the shakiest recipe for social reform I've ever heard." "I know my people." "And what do you need from the Confederation?" "Mostly advice. And that they not react too quickly if they hear rumors of war. As you say, Colonel, you're not a sociologist, but I'm sure the Confederation has many good people who are. And economists and proipagandists and psychodynamicists-and -- whatever. People who could review Juan Alvarez's plan, update it and insure that it would work." Otto shook his head. "That sounds contrary to the policy of selfdetermination." "Your presence here implies that the policy is flexible. Colonel." El Alvarez smiled. "Besides, the Plan is home-grown. We would only want the Confederation to help us polish it, as I say." Rachel asked, "Are you saying that the clan leaders would eventually become dependent on the new merchant class and then be ruled by it? Even though the merchant class would have only economic power?" "Yes. Again -- I know my people." "Your people," she said, her voice starting to shake, "I don't think are subtle enough to respond to that kind of pressure." She pulled the hem of her blouse up a few centimeters, showing the bruises. "Your people abused me several times a day and beat me without mercy -- just for amusement; no pretense of interrogation. I think you are overrating Selva if you think it will be ready for civilization within the next few hundred years." "I'm sorry. More, I am outraged. But please try to understand -- " "I think I understand more than either of you do." "No, I mean -- you couldn't be protected. Nor you. Colonel. I am surrounded by suspicious men and -- " H e was interrupted by the door's sliding open. Julio Rubirez walked in, leading the whole entourage, guns ready. "I didn't summon you," el Alvarez said. "But you did, sir." Ironic emphasis on the "sir." Julio scraped a place on the wall with his thumbnail; thin stucco flaked off, revealing a metal microphone plate. "Drop that pistol, whoever you are." El Alvarez gauged the faces of the men covering him and dropped the gun. "This man is an imposter," Julio said to the soldiers. "As good a copy of our beloved Alvarez as the man on the bunk is of Teniente Guajana." Guajana picked up Alvarez's pistol and handed it to one of the soldiers. "I promise I will find out what he has done with our leader." The soldier to whom Guajana had given the pistol was already holding a rifle with both hands. He found it awkward and, not thinking, passed the pistol to the only man in the squad who had a free hand; Private Rivera. "And as for these two -- " Julio leered at Otto and Rachel and raised his gun. Private Rivera slipped the safety off the pistol, held it to the back of the Commandante's head, and fired. Julio was still smiling as his dead body pitched forward. Otto hit the floor, taking Rachel with him, and scooped up the Commandante's pistol with his left hand. Guajana had just unholstered his own gun and was about to shoot Private Rivera pointblank when Otto fired and opened up the nearside of his likeness from hip to ear. "Drop it drop it!" Otto yelled and all of the soldiers except Rivera dropped weapons mostly still on safeties. "You too. Private Rivera," Otto said quietly. Rivera let the pistol slip from his fingers and raised his hand to touch the stub of his ear. "I'm confused," he said. "What happened?" "The first shots of a war," Otto said. "And maybe the last." Terran Bureau of Investigation  Interference Secrecy Class # TO: Planning RE: Debriefing agent McGavin (S-#, prime), mission SG-#. Following documents submitted: #. Debriefing transcript. #. Agent's written report. #. "The Juan Alvarez II (described in documents # and #). #. Various documents pertaining to leave problem. I T IS my opinion that document # indicates a follow-up mission. Agent McGavin disagrees -- I request that he not be assigned to this mission. An edited copy of this document may be of interest to the appropriate Confederation Committee. Agent McGavin was two weeks late returning from this mission. He claims to have accompanied his nervous breakdown in the execution of this mission, to a nearby planet for rest and medical care, and submits documents in evidence. He claims further that this period should not be deducted from his annual leave, since he and the liaison were married for that twoweek period. This would make his absence deductible from sick leave. Please forward documents # to his section leader. (signed) John Ellis, Ph.D.  at Christmas to put the inside outside and the outside inside. I fancied myself in one of the dolls once -- a skating scene, all snow and tinsel, a Regency ballroom's miniature chandeliers and snowlike mirrors -- but if I had changed places with my doll, her oval neck, her pretty, flushed face, her fan, I would have found myself not enchanted and not in the woods, but stuck into the refuse of a painted stage, with lights in my eyes and nails driven into my waist, with the too-large wooden head of another doll, quite coarse and dead, next to mine. (To go inside while still remaining on the outside!) So I hopped out of the window as quickly as I could and ran down Fifth Avenue like the Pudding Boy on little wooden feet, leaving behind an umbilicus of protoplasm stretching back into the window. 'Oh, the maddening whiff I had of those huge, God-tormented, driven creatures with their passions and their fiesh and their appetites and their eye-sockets! You can't even tell where they end; their skin is wet and it sheds. They look like dolls without even trying. I was brought back at once, of course. So I put myself into a tolerable frame of mind by imagining that I actually was what we must look like to a doll inside a window display, but this Is (for her) a kind of window display, too, with no back and you really can't get into it. So we ended up starSome Seasonal Thoughts by ing at each other quite hopelessly. Oh, wouldn't I like to be you she said. Oh, wouldn't I like to be you! I said. Not if you knew, we both said. I think we had actually worked something out by the day before New Year's; at least our signals had become more humanized: but she was dismantled on December # and I never saw her again. Borne away shrugging cynically: "Dull, dull, dull!" Or was she crying? I hope, of course, that she is being kept for another year, wrapped up safely and luxuriously, etcetera. The sweet smell of a lumber room. DiiPaming and drowsing, my other small self, in the gloaming. We might have done it, even so; we might have made the exchange without bashing our heads against the glass: she through the fish-tank of a window, misted over with the cold, our huge, watery eyes, our swimming fur hats, myself into the enchanted forest, the snow made of soap, the snow made of tears. To put all one's energies into the trembling interface between appearance and appearance, to look back at that single, thin, conscious thread hanging between oneself and the disk of a stranger's face hovering beyond the glass, and then to take that thread and -- Listen, love, in your cocoon: Imaginary creatures exist only from the front. Do you believe me? If you do -- does it help?   riviD pictures oscillated across Martin's mental screens: He was a warm pearl in a giant oyster. The oyster was squeezing him to death with dank passion... He was in the last crushing seconds of foetal agony. Damn! Mother should never have had children... An inchworm. Inside a great pea. Bam! Cook snapped him cruelly from the pod... The last, he decided, was close enough to the truth. Something very bad had happened to the ship. Something fatal. The escape capsule had imploded its fleshy walls, formed a Martin-sized cocoon and ejected him from whatever catastrophe lay behind. Now -- "What?" Martin tried to move his head. Abruptly the walls sucked themselves back into place. Martin rose weightlessly from his formcouch, pulled himself back, snapped himself down. "Who's that?" ship's computer, martin. "Oh." are you injured in any way? "No. What happened?" Martin waited for more. Evidently direct questions were required. "Did we hit something? No, that's not likely, is it? How did it happen? Did anybody else get off?" Ship's computer was silent. Martin shrugged, inspected his surroundings. There wasn't much to see. The capsule was spherical. Spongy amber walls. No ports. A single safe-light to his right. Maximum distance from one wall to another, roughly two-and-a-half meters. And he was -- where? Deep space. Between Wolfs Star and Jefferson. But that didn't mean a thing, really. He knew that much. The ship had been in Warp when whatever happened had happened -- it could have been tossed into reality nearly anywhere. If he was now remotely near either Wolfs Star or Jefferson it would be a universally large coincidence. "Right here." "Oh," said Martin. He had no idea what the computer was talking about. Martin winced at that. 'Wobody got out? There were two hundred and fifty people aboard." the computer corrected, excludMartin was taken aback. "Huh? I was taking a nap. Why do you ask?" "Look -- " "I don't know, I was tired. The capsule was handy. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Listen -- what difference does it make now?" Martin laughed out loud. computer, why do you express "Forget it," said Martin. He was getting fed up with the computer's rational ramblings. And worried. There were things he needed to know. Important things. Where are we and where are we going? When does help arrive? How much air is aboard? Food? Water? H e asked the most important question first. The answer set his heart thumping against his chest. "That's all? Eight days?" told him. "I don't want approximately, I want exactly!" "Holy Christ," Martin muttered. "No?" Martin sat up. "My animate period?" Short hairs climbed the back of his neck. "What's that supposed to mean?" He remembered something. "Listen -- you're talking about putting me under -- something like that. So I'll use less oxygen? Great. I -- " The computer droned: i am Martin waited. The computer remained silent. He felt immensely relieved. The capsule didn't look like much, but apparently there was more behind its fleshy walls than met the eye. "This -- signal beacon," Martin asked. "How long does it take to reach -- wherever it's going?" Martin let out a breath. "Then it's already there. Someone could have picked it up. They could be on their way now." "What?" "What?" Martin nearly leaped off his couch, forgetting the safety belt that held him in place. "Look -- what the hell are you waiting for? I've got a hundred and ninety hours of breathing time, friend -- plus or minus whatever I'm wasting jawing with you! Just get yourself -- " The computer interrupted: you 'having the capacity or abilMartin's blood ran cold. Applicable? His first impulse was to scream at the computer and beat on the amber walls . What the hell did it care? It was content to stay where it was forever -- an electronic half-wit buried in spongy bliss. Its oxygen supply wasn't running out in plusor-minus hours. Instead he brought his rapid breathing under control and leaned back on his couch. Not that the computer would care one way or the other whether he was calm or hysterical. Screaming, however, was bound to use up an inordinate amount of oxygen. Halfwit or not, the computer was there and had to be dealt with. ooK," Martin said easily, I  'what I think we have here is a communications problem." "Okay. I am, though. Let's run through it again. You haven't activated the signal beacon. Why?" "Why not?" one's position, additionally I Martin's heart sank. "In other words, we're lost." A thought suddenly struck him and he sat up straight again. He weighed his words carefully. "Do you believe your -- navigational records are wholly complete?" 'wholly complete' in what "In the sense that you have data on all planets and star-systems that have been discovered, all areas of space that have been mapped and explored." Martin took a deep breath. "Then -- logically -- a signal from our position could be received." "Then transmit the signal," Martin said firmly. "If there's any chance at all -- " "To hell with the odds!" Martin struck his fist against the couch. "My odds are zero unless you do something!" Martin eyed the blank walls narrowly. "I'm not asking -- I'm telling you. I'm a -- a human and I'm giving a machine an order." Martin dropped his head to the couch. "Look," he said wearily, "what am I going to do with all that immense amount of energy when I'm dead eight days from now? Will you explain that to me. Please?" H e let out a deep breath and looked at the amber walls. "Listen, I said a minute ago we had a communications problem. No. I do. You know my name, so you also probably know from the passenger roster what I do. I'm a heavy-equipment salesman. I sell things to people who want to dig up mountains and build bridges. All of our stuff is fully automatic -- you can program it to do anything you want it to do. Only, that's not my end of the business. I know how to stick the tape in -- period. What I'm saying is. I'm not used to talking to computers. I simply don't understand why it seems -- and I'm not saying it's true -- but it seems as if you're not making every effort to get me back to civilization before my air runs out." Martin shook his head. "I don't understand that. If you're not going to activate the signal -- what are you going to do?" An idea suddenly occurred to him. "A minute ago you said something about how I wouldn't need all the oxygen on board. That it would be -- what? 'Adequate for my animate period?' Is that what you've got in mind -- putting me in some kind of deepsleep or something? We didn't get back to that." 'possessing life,' or 'living.' Martin felt something terrible clutch at his stomach. "For God's sake -- what are you talking about? What are you going to do to me?" "Damn you!" Martin shouted. "I'm alive! I'm supposed to have emotions!" "Listen," said Martin, "I don't want to hear any of that again." Martin stared dumbly. "You'll what? I don't have any idea what you're talking about." "Painless!" "Wait a minute," Martin said hoarsely. He was scared, bewildered. His head throbbed. The whole thing was a nightmare. Only one fact was frighteningly clear: the computer had no intention of trying to save his life. For some reason of its own it was going to kill him. Once he'd let his mind form the words he felt reasonably calm. And it was absolutely necessary for him to remain completely rational. His emotions were meaningless to the computer. If he was going to stay alive he would have to face the computer on its own ground. If he couldn't fight logic with logic -- he was dead. It was as simple as that. The computer couldn't have put it better. "All right," he said calmly, "tell me about the -- Stellar Outreach option." "Thanks," Martin said dryly. (ldc) and projected in a Martin swallowed and stared at the amber wall. "But -- why?" M artin was valiantly holding onto his reason. God help me, he thought grimly, if I ever get back to anywhere someone's going to hear about this... "You can -- do all that?" He was curious in spite of himself. "Here -- in this capsule?" "I don't want to go into that part," Martin said quickly. "Okay, I understand," said Martin. "One question. Logic or no logic, what you've got in mind is to do me in, right?" "Yes. That's what it is. What it amounts to is you are going to take a human life against its will. What that is is murder, whether a -- a person does it or a computer. You can look up the definition yourself. I don't have any desire to be 'nonsentient,' friend -- and I couldn't care less about Spreading the Seed of Man. I don't know much about robots and computers but I can't believe you haven't got some kind of built-in something or other that prohibits your taking a human life. Look that up in your banks or cells or whatever and tell me I'm wrong." "It's relevant to mel" Martin shouted. "You can't -- " "Thirty-eight minutes!" M artin's body was slick with moisture. A sickly odor exuded from his pores. Think, think -- he had to think! Only, how could he think with his head splitting open? He wondered if there was anything as simple as an aspirin in a Number Four MediPacket, Modified. In moments his hands began to shake. He tried to stop them by putting them under his back, then clamping them to the arms of the couch. Nothing helped. The sweat on his body turned cold and he began to tremble uncontrollably. He closed his eyes and forced his breathing back to normal. Maybe, he decided, it would be best to forget the whole thing. Stop fighting it. He had less than eight days of oxygen -- even if the computer would let him live to use it. Those eight days would be pure hell -- knowing they were the end, that no help was on the way. Why not just... He angrily swept the thought aside. Anything could happen in eight days. If he could stay alive maybe he could con the computer into sending a signal. Someone might pick it up. A range of five hundred light-years covered a pretty big chunk of space. Life Dispersal Carriers -- great God, who had thought that one up! He wondered what the odds were against any of the one-hundred-million cellular bits of Able Martin ever getting anywhere. Or doing anything when they got there. Those kind of odds, though, didn't seem to bother the computer at all. And why should they? Passengers in Chromosomal Unit Pack Systems would find it difficult to complain to the space lines. Time... time... damn it, time was running out! Thirty-six minutes. Less than that, now. Maybe there was something in the planetary survival gear. If he could find it. And get to it. Take a good slice at the fleshy walls. Maybe short out the computer and... He tossed the idea aside. That wouldn't get him any closer to activating the beacon. Hell, he wouldn't know what to do with it if he found it. There was only one way. He'd known that from the beginning. Fight the computer on its own ground. The computer wasn't God -- it was a machine -- a machine that used the tools of intelligence, but really had no intelligence of its own. Computers reasoned -- but they only reasoned with what they had to work with. Didn't they? Basically, then, while the computer had access to a great deal more knowledge than he had and could put it all together faster and better -- he. Able Martin, could outthink it. If he pushed the right button at the right time. That was the key: the computer had limitations. Find those limitations. He tried to think back on what the computer had said. There had to be something. Somewhere. Option: activate the signal beacon. No. The computer was stubbornly set against that. No time to argue the point. Option: Get to a planet. Get out of the capsule. Double-negative. nowhere. Option: talk the computer into letting him live long enough to dream up other options... Martin wearily swept the whole thing aside. It was hopeless. No time. Think, damn it! Look at it. Turn it around. Take it apart. "Computer." "How much time left?" Martin's stomach turned over. No time, no time! H e didn't try to think. Just let it flow. Let it all run by like a swiftly moving river. Watch it as it passes. Warp. Malfunction. Destruction. Ejection. Beacon -- Hold it. Something. He struggled to pin it down. Don't struggle -- relax. Warp. Malfunction. Destruction. Destroyed how? What did the computer say? "Computer!" "How was the ship destroyed?" "Inform me again!" Martin said savagely. "Like you told it before. Exactly like you told it before." "Wait. There. An unanticipated mass. What -- kind of a mass?" "Forget the details," Martin said quickly, "general description." Martin's heart skipped a beat. "Okay. Planetary body. And the ship came too close to it. So its mass interfered -- Where? Where was the mass? In Warp?" "Then it's here -- in real space?" "There's a planet here? And you didn't tell me about it!" Martin bit off his words. "Time. How much time?" Martin took a deep breath. Easy. Take it easy... "The planet. How far away is it?" "How long would it take to get there?" "Hypothetically!" We could make it. We could Just... "Air. How about air?" "Then why in hell -- " Martin paused, collected himself. "Please. Give me the reasons this planet isn't -- relevant to me." "Look," Martin interrupted. "Those things are for me to decide. I'll take my chances." He stopped, bit his lip thoughtfully. "Wait. Wait, you don't know whether any of those factors are relevant, do you? You said 'possible,' and 'probable' -- that means you can't tell anything from here. Or can you?" "Then you can't say it's not suitable -- you haven't seen it!" "Then for God's sake, let's at least look at it! We've got the time, we can get there. What's the big hurry to send me sailing off in your bloody whatever it is -- lifebank disposal -- " (ldc), martin. "Okay! You've got to -- " conclusions: it follows that Martin looked up wearily. "I have to ask. What's Edict One?" "What?" Martin jerked up, then sank back limply to the couch. "Time." "Shut up," said Martin. That was it then. Six minutes. Zero. There was no point in carrying the farce any further. Clearly, he had been had. The electronic halfwit was winner and still champion. H e thought about three girls who might miss him for a while and a number of creditors who would tearfully mourn his passing. He wondered what the planet looked like. He wished he could see it and tried to imagine it. Trees. Lakes, maybe? Fresh air. All the fresh air he would ever need. Lonely, but a whole world... Martin sat up abruptly. "Computer!" "What's your definition of a world -- a planetary body -- capable of supporting human life?" one; atmospheric content to "Just generalize -- briefly!" "That's all?" "But basically, that's it." Martin took a deep breath. "I'm going to describe a specific planet. It has adequate air, food and water, plus a suitable environment. That meets your general requirements?" "I have described this escape capsule. Do you still accept my definition?" "It has air, food and water," Martin shouted. "And the environment's suitable -- I love it!" "Listen," Martin said desperately, "there are artificial planets, satellites..." "They have atmospheres -- like this one -- and don't tell me the atmosphere has to be on the outside, either -- " " -- and nobody said anything about size, so -- " "What?" "Oh, Jesus," Martin moaned. "How much time?" "Look -- what's the hurry? Can't you delay?" Three minutes... ltin sat up, strained against the couch. "That's all that's missing, right? The capsule's got to sustain me for my natural lifespan. Then it can be a planet. Officially." Martin held his breath. "Computer. How old am I?" "Yes. Your knowledge. Do you know how old I am?" Martin breathed a silent sigh. It wasn't in the passenger records, then -- just name, occupation, destination. The image of a secondhand sweeping around a dial at lightspeeds flashed through his mind. "What's th average lifespan of a human being?" Martin asked. source: confederation sta"Oldest recorded lifespan?" Martin added quickly. place: system numb -- "And you don't know how old I am?" Martin broke in. "Earlier, you said you could tell from my physical characteristics how much oxygen I'd use. Can't you see me? Don't you know what I look like?" 'see' as a human defines 'see"How much time?" Sweat stung Martin's brow. He gripped the couch to keep his hands from trembling. "Computer," he said evenly, "I am three hundred and forty-nine years old." Martin's stomach turned over. Christ, I had him. I almost had him... Martin's throat clamped shut. "Wait!" Martin cried frantically. time: eight point one sec"Listen, damn it," Martin shouted, "I'm three hundred and fortynine years old. I -- Wait, look -- it is a thirty-five year-old heart, I -- I had a transplant! Right, I had a transplant!" "You can't kill me," Martin shouted, "don't you understand? Look at the odds -- I'm way overdue to die! That's logical, isn't it? I've got more than enough air, food and water to last me the rest of my natural lifespan!" "No!" M artin sank back and sucked in precious swallows of air. "All right," he said weakly, "this capsule is a planet. An official planet." "I want my -- planetary survival gear." "And the Medi-Packet. And the food and water supplies." "Show me how you open this thing up. The exit portal." A red knob appeared beside him. "Fine. Okay." Martin lay back and took a deep breath. "Computer. I want iny planet to assume an orbit around the other planet in question. Any objections?" "Any orbit I want." "Okay. Do it. Now." Gotcha, you son of a bitch... "I want a decaying orbit," Martin said, "to about eighteen inches. Then just hold it there. Stationary. Yes, that'll do nicely." The computer said nothing.  Why Do You Have A Poor Memory? 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Lange St., Dept. #-#, Mundelein, #. #. A postcard will do. The best answer to a question may be -- yet another question! I j ginal carpet the planetary surface unrolled five miles below the slowing ship. The grasses and small plants showed no signs of vegetable blight -- the atmosphere was free of industrial pollutants and there were no cities or surface transport networks of any kind. But to the ship's sensors and the tired, experienced eyes of the crew the greenery was a beautiful lie, a cosmetic skin of apparent youth overlaying a world which for many thousands of years had been drained of all its natural resources, used up and emptied of all life above the insect level. "We're wasting our time," said Jan, in a tone that indicated that she was looking for an argument. Peter did not like arguing with her, especially during the last few minutes before touchdown, even though a searchship was fully capable of landing itself. He waited until the ship had recovered from a brief attack of the transonic shudders and their landing spot was centered in the forward viewscreen. Then he said, "Probably." She gave a short sigh of irritation and tapped for a magnified picture of the landing area on her duplicate display. He could not see the particular section she had blown up for closer examination because her head was in the way. Lit in profile by the screen, Jan looked almost young again. In silhouette the graying hair and the fine facial wrinkles did not show. But it took more than a trick of back lighting, he knew, to cancel out the weariness and lack of hope in her body and mind -- as well as his own. Like the salt used to preserve meat in ancient times, every cell and thought was soaked in it. If an old-time cannibal had taken a bite out of one of them, hopelessness and frustration would have been the strongest taste. Eighty years, he thought, was a long time to be doing the same job. The screen darkened as the ship's nose went up, pulling forward-facing cameras off-picture, and they began falling tail-first into the increasingly resistant softness oftheir anti-gravity landing cushion. They touched down -- the cushion flicked off and the ship rocked gently as the weight forced its landing legs deep into the soft ground. The all-around viewscreens lit up and the images steadied and sharpened as the ship came finally to rest. "We are wasting our time," Jan persisted. "I'm sure we have been here before." "Unlikely," he replied, "but you could be forgiven for thinking so. One of these sites is very much like any other -- the same green mounds, the same type and size of ruined buildings even, because they are probably examples of the most advanced and durable structures built by the same architect -- " He broke off because she was shaking her head. In a less conciliatory tone he went on, "Are you suggesting that I made a mistake and we've doubled back to a site already investigated? An understandable error, you are doubtless thinking, caused by my advancing years? But you are forgetting that our computer, which isn't subject to lapses caused by senile decay -- " "I could argue that point, too," she broke in. His first impulse was to tell her that the recent trouble they had had with the computer had been due to operator error and that she had been the operator, but he thought better of it. Instead he said, "Are you coming outside?" "Yes," sTie replied. "I prefer talking to you to sitting here talking to myself." "I'm glad," he said dryly. "For a moment I wondered if the romance was going out of our relationship." B ut they said very little while they were climbing into their protective suits, probably because he had touched on a subject to which they were both hypersensithat within the next hour there would be an argument about rejuvenation and that argument, he knew from bitter experience, nobody won. Preceded by a general purpose robot which, in addition to the usual sensory and specimen gathering equipment was also programed for medical and surgical emergencies, they moved down the ramp and onto the springy turf. The sun shone brightly out of a sky whose clouds could not have been more tastefully arranged by a landscape painter. The air was fresh and pure and eminently breathable, but their heavy protective suits were needed to protect them against the insects which crawled and flew and were incredibly vicious. Even though he knew that he would have no use for it, he wore a side arm because the regulations required him to do so. Jan did not wear one because, she was fond of saying, if a native life form more than two inches tall came at them she would be so pleased that she would want to hug the thing instead of shoot it. The insects were everywhere. Hundreds of the things died with each step the searchers took, while the robot's balloon tires wreaked even greater havoc. But the dark and oozing tracks that stained the grass in their wake were gone before they had traveled ten yards because the insects ate each other and not, for some odd ecological reasons, the short grass that sheltered them. Any insect left defenseless by death or injury disappeared quickly, right down to the last smear of juice or edible tissue. There had been a time when Jan and he would have examined the insects' behavior for indications of developing intelligence -- some sign, perhaps, that these last inheritors of this and so many other worlds would produce an insect gestalt with which the human race might eventually communicate. Now, however, they walked between and over the all too familiar grassy mounds and ignored the senseless ferocity under their feet. Beneath the grass and the layer of warring insects the robot's sensors reported the usual mixture of indestructible plastic debris and metallic oxides. Toward the end this particular civilization had used a lot of plastic because no metal had been available. Nevertheless the beings had built well and the plastic ruins still stood impressively tall in a few places, even though the builders had long since gone down before the insect enemy. "That one looks interesting," Peter said, pointing toward a squat, five-story building that seemed to be structurally complete except for its missing roof. Many of the plastic windows were still in place, but rendered virtually opaque by weathering and the mosslike growth that also covered the walls. The ground-level entrance was large and clear of rubble. He added: "Do you still think that we've been here before?" "The familiar can look strange," she said stubbornly, "if you approach it from a different angle." "And the wrong angle of view," he replied, "can make the strange look familiar. But let's stop arguing and start looking inside. We are supposed to examine at least one building on every site and more if we should turn up something interesting -- " His voice trailed into silence. He was thinking that one indication of approaching senility was the habit of explaining things to someone who already knew the explanation. placed sensors against a wall and emitted high-pitched squeaks as it sonically analyzed the building for structural defects. Satisfied that the place was safe for human searchers, it preceded them inside. With the robot's main beam trained at full intensity on the ceiling there was more than enough light for them to see around the big entrance hall. The remains of what might have been desks and possibly some clear-walled display cases were spaced at intervals about the floor, while the walls were covered with large pictures. A heavy dusting of living and long-dead insects over everything made it difficult to pick out details. The contents of the display cases, if they once had been display cases, were no longer recognizable. Most of the pictures, for some reason, were less obscured by insects and showed machinery with natives busy around it -- Peter deduced a large factory complex and what looked like a supersonic atmospheric flyer of conventional design. A bank of elevators was framed against the wall facing the entrance, the doors collapsed outward under the pressure of the rubble that had eollected in the lift-shafts. A broad ramp curved upwards to the level above. The searehers began to climb. From their studies of sites visited earlier they had formed a vague idea of what the natives of this world had looked like arid of the way they moved when they were not riding in cars or flyers. Physically they had resembled short, widebased cones with a number of specialized appendages -- manipulators, visual equipment and possibly eating and breathing orifices -- sprouting from the top. Presumably their brains were housed somewhere inside the stubby, legless bodies, which had moved snail-like -- but not necessarily slowly -- on a wide apron of muscle. Stairs or ladders inside the dwellings had been conspicuous by their absence. As he mounted the ramp Peter's eyes were fixed on the robot, which was capable of climbing anything, when Jan gripped his arm tightly and pointed ahead. "Look at those sculptures," she said excitedly. "And undraped, too. This will answer a lot of the physiological questions." Two enormous figures, five or six times larger than life, dominated the floor space at the top of the ramp. They had been cut from hard rock and the insects had left them alone -- Peter saw that every muscle and joint and wrinkle was rendered in perfect detail. No wonder Jan was pleased. "I suppose," he said, "the smaller of the two is the female of the species?" "It's easy to tell who is the medic in this family," Jan said, shaking her head. "No. I'd say that the small one with its eye glaring aggressively at us is their equivalent of Neanderthal Man, while the tall one with the more specialized appendages, whose eyestalk is pointed skyward, represents the builders of this once-mighty civilization."... which rose to its greatest heights, he added silently, and signaled its presence to the rest of the galaxy and then died, two thousand years ago... "We're lucky," Jan went on. "We've found a cultural center designed for posterity -- maybe even us. Look around you. Some of those display cases are still complete and their contents are undamaged -- which isn't surprising since most of them contain oddly-shaped pieces of rock -- " She broke off and turned away from him. The robot was busily photographing the alien tableau and concentrating its main beam on the subject it had chosen. Jan switched on her suit light and picked her way along a cluttered aisle to the next ascending ramp. She went up it at a near run. Peter followed more slowly. By the time he and the robot found her crouched over a collapsed display case, she was still trying to catch her breath. "You shouldn't run like that," he said. "Over-exertion is. dangerous at our age." She waved his words aside and went on excitedly, "I was pretty sure below, but now there is no doubt in my mind. We've found a museum. The ground floor level is devoted to the race's prehistory -- crude stone implements, knives, early attempts at working clay or mud. On this level they have progressed to agriculture and weaving. Most of the specimens were of perishable vegetable matter, so time and the insects have done for them. But the wall pictures are well preserved and clearly show the level of culture of that period. Succeeding levels should bring us to the time when this civilization began to fall apart. We may even find the reasons for its collapse." "We know the reason why it, and all the others, collapsed," he said tiredly. "They had too many, smug, self-satisfied, selfish beings eating up too few natural resources. We've pieced together that particular picture too many times -- what's begun to impress me is that nearly every culture we've found has left us a lesson of its past; not one a lesson for survival." "I know," she replied, some of the enthusiasm fading from her tone. "But finding this building was a piece of rare good luck and there might be another piece just waiting for us. We're due some good luck and I have a feeling -- " "You always have a feeling," he broke in. "It's called wishful thinking." "Are you trying to be nasty or can't you help it?" she said angrily, then went on: "Right here we may be able to piece together a complete picture, instead of searching all over the planet for pieces of the jigsaw -- and probably missing most of them. I'm glad you made that mistake and doubled back here because -- " II X-r"You keep insisting that we landed here before, but we can't have done so. The computer isn't your specialty, so I can't completely convince you that when I program the ship for a search it cannot possibly make that kind of error." "It couldn't -- but maybe you could," she snapped back. Then, more quietly, she went on, "You are sure that you didn't make a mistake and I am sure you did. So we are having this stupid argument and letting it blunt our powers of observation and reasoning. We've found something I think we missed before and you don't. That doesn't alter the fact that we could be on the point of learning the workings of an extra-terrestrial culture that -- in all respects save one -- might make ours look medieval by comparison. "This is all wrong," she went on seriously. "We're losing our sense of proportion. I think we've let ourselves grow too old. We seem to do nothing these days but argue and snap at each other and we could be missing important data simply because we are squabbling instead of looking." "I know we're growing old," he said, "But the last time this subject came up we agreed that there would be no more rejuvenation programs unless we found -- " "You agreed. I had reservations." He took a deep breath and tried to hide his anger at having to say something he had already said too many times before. "We've already undergone three rejuvenations. There is no problem about getting another. Even though the treatments are restricted because there are too many people, our work insures our being made young again with no quibbling. At the same time -- if we go through the process once again we'll be morally obliged to continue our work as searchers. And I, for one, do not think that I could stand another twenty years doing -- this. Even as a youthful, vigorous, clear-eyed grave-robber instead of an elderly specimen with hardening of the intellect. We've already known lifetimes of disappointment. To extend it by another twenty years is more than I could take. I'm sorry. But if you want to apply -- " He could see her head shaking inside her helmet. She said, "No. I do as you do." "But -- " he said dryly. "But," she said softly, "I miss the fringe benefits." For a few seconds they stared silently at each other. Then he grinned and suddenly they both laughed. The problems were still there -- nothing had changed so far as their personal difficulties were concerned but, for a short time at least, the senseless arguing was over. Xshould look for?" he asked when the therapeutic laughter had ceased. "Something to indicate species survival?" "I don't know," she replied. "Look for something different, some new idea or facet in the culture that would make it unlike any of the others we've investigated. It could be a scheme for population control or feeding -- maybe an idea that came too late to do these creatures any good, but one we might use on Earth before we go the same way. But I would especially like to find some indication that -- before their culture fell apart -- some of them were able to get away and plant a colony. In the two thousand years since this world stopped signaling a flourishing colony could have come into being in another system. A colonization project like that is important enough to have a place in a museum," she added, "and its position in space would almost certainly be included in the exhibit." In short, he thought wearily as they moved toward another ascending ramp, we are still looking for our own image... They had been looking for 'people' on the first search mission, Peter remembered, but on that occasion it had not seemed to matter too much when they had not found them. The prospects had been too new, strange and exciting -- setting out in one of the first searchships with everyone wishing them well. In many respects it had been like a honeymoon -- for Jan and himself it had been their honeymoon -- and those tend to be perfect in every way, especially in retrospect. Using the newly developed stardrive they had jumped ten lightyears into interstellar space, deployed their vast antennae and listened. More accurately, the ship's sensors had listened while the personnel carried out explorations of a more personal nature. The weeks of waiting had passed pleasantly enough while the antennae scooped up mush from stellar objects that radiated on the bands above and below the visible spectrum. Then, suddenly, a signal had come that could only have had an intelligent source. It was simple, repetitious and as individually unique as a signature. As expected, it faded out within a few minutes and returned, again for only a few minutes, just over a day later. During their training on Pluto Station they had listened to recordings of many such signals. The theory had been that the "messages" emanated from antennae on worlds that could well lie halfway across the galaxy and that the periods of silence corresponded to the rotational period of the transmitting planet. It was also thought that the transmitting antennae were steerable, so that they painted virtually all of the surrounding space in measured, vertical sweeps. This theory proved true in the majority of cases, the searchers discovered later, but there had been a few worlds where the signals had been sent from a transmitter in orbit. Peter had taken a fix on that first signal and he and his bride had jumped one hundred light-years closer. Then they had taken another fix and jumped again. There was no need to make sense of the signal although they had often tried -- it was simply an alien voice saying over and over again that it was there. Then, abruptly, it was no longer there. They had back-tracked until the signal was coming in again, then made a long jump at right angles to fix the system's position by triangulation. Within a few weeks they had found it -- and arrived on a world wiped clean of intelligent life.  thing like four thousand lightyears from Earth and in all probability its signals had been coming long before human technology had reached the level of being able to detect them. Radio frequency emissions traveled at the speed of light, and their ship had continued to encounter those signals for more than half of its fourthousand light-year journey, so that the civilization which produced them had lasted for at least two thousand years. But even long-lived, stable and technologically advanced cultures come to an end and, when such a civilization fell -- it fell hard. Peter's and Jan's feelings on finding that first dead world had been of mild disappointment rather than sorrow. They had been unlucky first time out, they told themselves, and next time there would be people -- new, alien and perhaps dangerous people -- to contact. The risks involved were not great because a race that advertised its presence all over space would probably welcome contact. But on that first world there had been only insects and the remains of a great civilization in a remarkably good state of preservation. Jan and Peter had taken back specimens and records that had advanced Earth technology by a half-century. Their debriefing had lasted for nearly three years, during which they had been heaped with academic and other honors as had, to a lesser extent, the other searchship crews who had brought home smaller pieces of the alien bacon. Finally they had been allowed to try again. The second world they found had also died long before its radio signals had finished their slow journey to Earth. There were interesting artifacts and useful processes on that world, too, and on the many others they visited. At home everyone benefited from the steady feedback of alien know-how. But the searchship crews grew tired of robbing technological tombs. They wanted to find people... into the Galactic Center -- " Peter began, then stopped. He had made the same suggestion at this stage of the investigation of nearly every planet they had visited. "We tried that once and were nearly killed," Jan replied. "If you remember -- stars there have young planets and it is easy to have the ship wrecked by an extra-terrestrial mammoth or an outbreak of volcanic activity. But you know all this," she went on irritably. "Why bring it up again when you'll end by arguing that it's better to follow a signal -- because then we are sure of something having been there -- than to launch ourselves into a forest of stars where life as we know it has not had a chance to evolve. "We've never delayed our rejuvenation treatments as long as this before," she added, "and I think that we're becoming forgetful as well as bad-tempered, myself included. Or have you a fresh idea about a Center search?" He shook his head. "Not really. My idea is that we take rejuvenation again and, young and healthy and with our reflexes speeded up, we make a three-year random search of the Center. The planets we find may be composed of primeval magma, but there is still a chance that we will find intelligent life. Maybe young life -- but intelligent. A fresh star. We can't go on forever trying to talk to alien ghosts." "Neither can we talk to alien children or mindless alien embryos," she replied. "We must find someone our own age to play with." "Yes," he said. They had climbed from the third floor of the building and were beginning to explore the fourth. The equivalent of the industrial revolution had been left behind and nuclear energy had been released, although not in time of war. In common with all of the other dead cultures they had studied, this one had had very few major wars in its recorded history. Progress in all of the arts and sciences had been slow and at every stage the culture had remained stable. The beings appeared to have been cooperative, easy-going and seemingly happy. Their world had been a nice place to live. The display cases on the fourth floor were relatively undamaged, but their metal contents were irregular masses of corrosion. Plastic components and models, although discolored and encrusted with dead insects, were in good condition. And the searchers were encountering more and more specimens of plastic books -- great, thick-paged tomes whose text seemed to float above the pages and whose illustrations gave an illusion of perfect three-D on a flat surface. "They'll be interested in that particular effect at home," he said. At least I hope they will, he added silently. The people at home were becoming disinterested in everything -- including themselves. "Yes," she replied, "and the contents of this building will enable me to finish this mission in two or thref months instead of a year. We were lucky finding a museum -- " "Landing here wasn't a waste of time, then?" H e did not know what was driving him to restart the argument which, only a few minutes earlier, he had been so glad to end, but he felt angry, frustrated and depressed and suddenly he wanted someone besides himself to suffer. "No, it wasn't a waste of time -- " she began testily, then stopped. For a few seconds she stared at him as if he were her patient and she a doctor or nurse, her expression sympathetic rather than angry. Then she went on: "Look at that mural over there. One of their interstellar radio transmitters, wouldn't you say?" Feeling even more annoyed by her sympathy, he looked in the direction she was pointing and nodded. The murals were large and in a very good state of preservation and, like those in the lower levels, they were displayed in chronological order, beginning at the right of the entrance ramp and running around three walls to end on the left of the ascending ramp to the next level. Two sets of transmitting antennae were pictured on adjacent murals, one built on a snow-streaked headland overlooking an angry sea and another set in desert land. The next few murals in line showed advanced agricultural processes on land, sea and under the sea -- a lot of wall space had been devoted to the solutions, however temporary, of the problem of feeding a rapidly increasing population. The desert transmitter was shown again, its bright metal dulled by the passage of centuries and the surrounding desert converted to a green and yellow patchwork of field tended by agricultural robots. His eyes moved to the next picture and he laughed sardonically. "Well, now," he said. "It seems they built their interstellar signaling devices several centuries before they attempted their first space flight. They were a smug, selfopinionated bunch of -- " "Maybe they had their priorities right," Jan broke in. "After all, they must have realized that there was a strong possibility of life in other star systems as soon as they outgrew the idea that their particular world was unique and the center of the universe. They probably decided that an interstellar drive was beyond their technical capabilities." "The stardrive was beyond our technical capabilities, too," he said drily, "until we began looking for unlikely solutions instead of obvious ones. The whole concept is so obviously impossible that it was sheer -- " "So they chose instead," she continued firmly, "to signal their presence to the rest of the galaxy in the hope that someone with a stardrive would come to them, and they could then do a spot of high class technological horse-trading. They were an intelligent and patient race who obviously believed that everything comes to those who wait." "We came," he replied grimly, "two thousand years too late." Ill they had completed their circuit of the murals and were moving toward the top of the last ramp. The robot's lighting was no longer necessary because the roof of the topmost level had fallen in, wrecking most displays and covering the floor with rubble, which was in turn covered by patches of grass. But here, too, the murals showed clearly through their thin coating of living and dead insects. "They must have had a pretty potent insect repellent," he said, "to be able to keep the surface of those pictures clear after all this time." "But they weren't able to kill them all," she said softly. "Nobody The murals showed space missions to the nearer planets and bases being set up. But there were no indications of the colonization of the worlds concerned, much less the building of generation ships for a sub-lightspeed attempt at planting an interstellar colony. The transmitters were shown again, still patiently sending their signals to the stars, which this race would never reach. There were pictorial examples of high-density living structures and high intensity agriculture which was being troubled by some kind of blight. One of the pictures showed enlarged images of various types of insects with what could have been the chemical symbols representing the insecticide that would kill them. There was no sense of urgency or fear in the pictures -- the museum had been built by a long-established and stable race which did not frighten easily. But to a searchship's crew which had seen it all before the signs were plain. Another flourishing culture, severely weakened by diminishing food and energy resources, was about to go down before an enemy too small and mindless even to know or care that it had won. "Let's go back to the ship," Peter said dully. Jan nodded, still looking at him as if he were ill, and said, "Then what?" "Then we'll talk about something other than grave-robbing for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow I'll help you begin to evaluate this material until it is time to go home." "And then?" H e had taken her hand to help her over a pile of rubble, and now that they were retracing their steps along a clear section of ramp he continued to hold it for reasons he could not define. He was still angry. He knew that she had always been argumentative and strongwilled. But there had been times when even the serious arguments had been of no real importance and had been quickly forgotten, instead of dragging on interminably and poisoning their conversation and their work for days on end. "Then we'll go home and rejuvenate for one last trip," he said. "You're right about our condition, of course -- we spend too much time arguing and not enough searching. And we really should make our last trip in top physical condition. We just might find something." "And if we don't?" "We resign," he said firmly. "I'm pretty sure there will be no opposition. The number of searchship missions has been reducing steadily over the last ten years and even our top people are beginning to lose hope. There are also signs that our culture, too, is becoming self-satisfied and self-centered and beginning to die on its feet. One of these decades we'll lose our sense of adventure, our insatiable curiosity about the universe and the beings who inhabit it. We'll begin to set up interstellar radio transmitters and settle back to let the Others find us. "By that time," he added, "we two will have used up our fourth period of youth and our final old age in sampling the delights of our smug little culture, while trying not to notice the news flashes about insects -- or other rivals -- adapting to our latest pesticides." "That might not be much fun." "Of course it won't be fun,' he told her. "So maybe we'll make two last trips or even three -- the more last trips we make the greater will be our chances of finding something." "This is hopeless," she burst out suddenly. "It always has been hopeless. We're wasting our time." "I know," he said. But the searchship crews had been chosen very carefully from that large, but rapidly diminishing, number of people who could not give up hope. An unbiased observer, while considering this particular psychological type, might have said that steadfastly refusing to face inevitable failure was utter stupidity. But it had been stupidity of this order that had taken the race so rapidly, if at times violently, to its present cultural and technological eminence. And certainly momentum powered by persistent stupidity had produced both the stardrive and gravity control and -- now that humanity had finally renounced war an even higher order of stubborn, self-aware stupidity was driving them to find a partner before their culture became too ingrown. And before the stupidity that had made them great became lost in a rising tidce of intelligence and philosophical acceptance of static realities. As they followed the robot to the ground-level entrance Peter remembered the other planet-sized graveyards they had visited. The inhabitants of those worlds had been humanoid in the majority of cases, but some of the others had been visually unpleasant. But in each instance they had built civilizations for themselves that were rich, stable, peaceful and, by Earth standards, extremely long-lived. They had matured early and given up such childish and destructive pursuits as war and racial or religioussociological discrimination while they were still young. Their cultures had been nice places in which to live -- and perhaps a pleasant life was all that any life form could reasonably expect. "Sometimes," Peter said suddenly, "I think we'll never grow up." "That could be a better way to live," she argued, "than growing up too soon and having nothing to live for but the contemplation of the racial navel." J an's first instinct was to argue, he thought tiredly, and it always had been for as long as he had known her. But nowadays the arguments were lifeless, hopeless and petty instead of being the intellectual challenge they once had been. He relaxed his grip on her hand, but she tightened hers and would not let go. She said, "Species with a long period of gestation and pre-adolescence have a much greater potential for development than -- well -- alien butterflies. Maybe we aren't really stupid, just too young to know any better. And now we may have passed the post-puberty stage and have left home to look for a mate. An intellectual mate," she added. "I was speaking figuratively." "I realize that," he said and laughed in spite of himself. "I'm sorry," she continued, in a tone that was both apologetic and defensive. "From the very beginning I warned you that I would always speak my mind and tell you whenever I thought you were wrong. You used to say that my candor was stimulating and -- Well, it really doesn't matter. I don't want to win every battle. And we certainly did not waste our time landing here." He waited until they were outside the building before speaking. The sun was close to the horizon and the bright green mounds of rubble and the few intact structures were bathed in a dramatic orange light -- the area had the sharp clarity of a stage set. From all around came the buzzing of the insect audience. "On the very few occasions when you were wrong," Peter said carefully, "you used to apologize and admit it. This time you apologized without actually admitting that you were wrong, which means that you still think that you are right and that we came down here through my error." "Oh, let's forget the whole thing and stop fighting. Please." He shook his head. "I'm not fighting. But if I made a mistake I want to know about it. Show me proof." "You'll also be annoyed about it for weeks -- " She broke off and began looking around carefully, obviously taking her bearings, then she pointed. "It should be about four hundred yards in that direction," she said. "It could be a patch of diseased vegetation or a trick of the light, but only a searchship makes a mark like that and I caught a glimpse of it as we were landing." H e saw the saucer-shaped depression as they breasted the next high mound. It was about thirty feet across and carpeted with vegetation whose color was a shade lighter than normal because the grass in the area had been flattened both by the landing and takeoff of a searchship and the new growth had had to struggle through the crushed remains of the old. Many such depressions had been left on this and other worlds in their eighty years of searching. "Judging by the age of the new growth," he said, "this must have been our first planetfall. But the robot can check it against the known growth rate and give a close approximation of the time of landing. Then I'll know exactly when the mistake was made in the search pattern -- if in fact a mistake was made." She pulled her hand away from his and said angrily, "Don't be so childish! Rather than admit you made a mistake you are suggesting that some other searchship wandered into the galactic sector assigned to us and landed here. That is ten times more impossible than the impossibility of your making an error. Maybe I should instruct the robot to run an ID check on the depression to make sure that it was our ship that landed here." He had been staring at the ground while she had been speaking, studying the deeper and more well-defined hollows around the circumference of the depression that were the marks left by the stabilizers and landing legs. His pulse was thumping so loudly that subjectively it seemed much louder than his voice. "Yes. Do that." "No. You do it!" "My mental state at the moment," he said quietly, "makes it unlikely that I would be able to frame the instructions in a sufficiently coherent manner for the robot to understand." "You framed that sentence well enough -- " she began, then stopped to stare at him. He could see the concern returning and replacing the anger in her face, and he knew that the sunlight reflected on his visor made it difficult for her to see his expression. She gave the necessary instructions to the robot and they stood back to enable it to work freely. "You're taking this very badly," she said worriedly. "I'm sorry. You don't make mistakes as a rule and this was such a small one that -- " "Promise me one thing," he said very seriously, gripping her arm and squeezing it to accentuate his words. "If at any time in the future you feel like expressing an opinion likely to displease me, or you feel the need to criticize something I have said or done, or failed to say or do, or you want to make an observation about anything important or even trivial, go right ahead." looking completely baffled, but he waved for silence. The robot had completed its investigation of the depression and the markings around it and was making its report. and toneless voice in their suit phones, condition of vegetaShe turned toward him and said warmly, "I'm glad you didn't make a mistake -- " Then she stopped as the implications began to sink in. "It also means," he said, "that somebody else is searching for people and finding graveyards. It means that somebody else has discovered the stardrive and is using a conventional antigravity thruster for takeoffs and landings -- probably because there is only one way to build the thing. "It means," he went on, "that we will have to go on searching for long-dead civilizations, because they were the only kind that signaled their presence over a period long enough to attract the attention of ourselves and the other searchers. It also means that instead of robbing graves we carve our initials and a message on them -- more accurately, we will devise weather and insect-proof radio beacons containing data on Earth and its position in space. We will scatter them over the new worlds we find, as well as the ones we have already covered, because we have no idea how many of them have yet to be visited by the Others. "Most of all," he ended jubilantly, "it means that one day a beacon will be discovered and opened by people who, like us, were not content to sit and wait." Suddenly they were hugging each other, a ridiculous and senseless thing to do considering the thickness of their protective suits. But it did not matter. Her face was younger than he could remember for a great many years -- more animated and vital. She was looking, he realized suddenly, the way he felt -- as if he had just undergone rejuvenation. Gently he pushed her away from him and said, "Let's go back to the ship, dear. We're wasting time." Joanna's hands held miracles tor any woman who owned them I Alberni out of the cold green water of the Strait early one September evening. We laid him on the deck of the slow, rolling doubleender and gathered around to hear his last words, if he were capable of uttering them. "Make for port, Sagar," somebody said, voice canine with urgency. "Give the man a chance. What the hell are you thinking about?" The water was dribbling away from Alberni's clothes into the scuppers and his broken body rolled with the motion of the boat, like a jellyfish dressed in slingglider's clothes. But Alberni was going to speak. I knelt down, bent over him. The others. Freemen and State Prisoners alike, were silent, watching, listening. Nobody had ever listened to Alberni before. Why should his words have this new special value merely because he was dying? Alberni spoke, the words little whispers, puffs of evanescent steam in the September air. "It hurts like hell, Sagar," he said. We all knew that. We could see it in the lines of his face, in the grotesque attitude of his body. The steel spinal support, worn by the sling-gliders to guard against just such an accident as Alberni's, was twisted, projecting from under his body like a compound fracture. "We've got no dope, Harry. I'm sorry. I just brought a few people out for the afternoon to watch the gliding. I didn't expect -- " There were tears in his eyes. "Oh, God, I didn't think it would be so bad. Why the hell should it hurt so much?" There was a rescue boat in sight now, skipping over the waves. I looked at the eight men standing above me. Their faces showed concern of one sort or another. Tranter, the man who had wanted me to head for port, was still fidgeting, face twitching as his eyes flickered from Alberni to the approaching launch. I didn't know the other men, but I could place them. There were two worried Freemen whose afternoon's pleasure had been spoiled -- or fulfilled -- by the tragedy. And there were five State Prison men. Two were immediately identifiable by their dark green coveralls, marked S.P. in large white letters front and rear. The other three... Like their uniformed comrades, they were smiling. That's was how I could tell what they were. They were bonded men under the care of the three Freemen, so uniforms were not necessary. But they were smiling as a Freeman died -- and that was uniform enough. The penal laws had divided mankind into two classes. I could hear the rescue boat now -- that bouncing, thumping whine of fiberplast and turbines hopping waves. I turned back to Alberni and for a moment I thought he heard it too, because his eyes had widened and he was regarding the sky intently. But there was no change in focus as my head cut off his view. I stood up as the rescue launch cut engines and fell to the water, slowing abruptly and wallowing toward us in a wide turn. Fenders bumped lightly and two men leaped to my deck. "Alberni, is it? How is he?" The mediman had set down his bag and was already selecting a hypojet. The other man was a bonded State Prisoner and he was staring down at Alberni with an intensity that told me he was Alberni's man. Two men, bonded together in unequal partnership until death intervened -- or the senior partner canceled the contract... "You're too late," I told the mediman. He shrugged and turned away, but the S.P. man remained, gazing at the body, his expression changing to one of incredulous, transcendental joy. "You bastards!" he shouted, a high cracked yell of ultimate delight. "I've beaten you all, you bastards!" He climbed back aboard the rescue launch. His contract was over. He was a Freeman. I heard him laughing as the stretcher-bearers arrived and scooped up Alberni. B y now the curious had gathered. Half a dozen boats, large and small, bobbed around us as the occupants strove to get a glimpse of death, craning necks, tiptoes, hanging from forestays. Off the port bow the bright remains of the slingglider drifted away like a dead macaw. I heard someone whisper, "Carioca Jones -- " The #-V star's hydrofoil was there, idling beside the splintered alloy and torn fabric. The boat was about thirty feet long, sleek and black; across the stern the name Flambuoyant was painted in luminous white letters a foot high. Two women leaned against the stainless steel after rail, gazing at the wreckage. I recognized Miss Jones, although she had been absent from the #-V alcoves for several years -- there was no mistaking that long hair, sprayed midnight with ultrasorb, falling past her downturned face, like a frozen jet cataract. She seemed to be wearing a tight black sheath dress, thigh length. A land shark lay at her feet. The girl by her side was by contrast fair and her hair was short. She looked across at us and smiled slightly, ruefully, as though to say: This is what you get for indulging in stupidly dangerous sports. Her eyes were blue and she had a snub nose and. I'll swear, freckles. Her youthful appearance was belied by full breasts beneath the amateur sailor's blue pullover. I saw all this briefly, very briefly, because nobody looks away from Carioca Jones for long. The star had shifted her position as her boat drifted nearer -- the wind threw a curtain of hair across her face and she shook her head. The light-absorbing strands parted, revealing -- startling and dark-tipped -- her bare, pale breasts. On a late September afternoon. I think every man on my boat drew a sharp breath as desire punched him in the stomach. She sensed us. That sort of woman always does -- it's basic. She sensed us and looked up as a female animal hearing a mating call. And her eyes met mine. She was old, horribly old, and her black eyes knew me for a necrophile. This was the end of summer, when everyone on the Peninsula tried sling-gliding and some fared better than others. I had tried it myself, once, borrowing the gear from Doug Marshall and being lucky, because gear must be individually tailored and an incorrectly balanced glider can mean death. After that one try I kept my feet on the deck and spent the weekends cruising spectators among the Gulf Islands in my ancient double-ender, while the tiny bright gliders fled silently across the sky like swift paper darts. After pausing for an instant to gather the appreciation to which she was accustomed, Carioca Jones turned away from the rail and sat down beside the other girl in the cockpit. I heard the faint silver tones of an orchestrella. A weatherbeaten adonis in S.P. coveralls handed them drinks, then took the wheel and gunned the motor. The craft leaped away, climbing its hydrofoils like stilts. "Lucky guy," said a voice. It was one of the Freemen. The State Prisoners had not ventured any comment. "What a way to serve your sentence -- " He laughed tactlessly. "Almost makes crime worthwhile, eh. Tranter?" Tranter, the officious type who had tried to take command when we picked up Alberni, grunted. "Not like you think, I reckon. They say she's queer. Shops around, too. That blonde's the latest. Nice looking kid. Pity." Somewhere, somehow, there is always someone who will claim personal knowledge of the homosexuality of a public figure. Tranter was talking garbage, a proclivity of his type. There had been nothing queer about the way in which Carioca Jones' eyes had met mine -- I still felt faintly nauseated. gotten about Alberni, Tranter, Miss Jones and the rest of them, and was back in the weekly routine. I was standing at the window looking at the frosty 'morning when I caught sight of a movement among the bushes on the opposite side of the tiny bay. Then there was stillness again and a noise from the sea and after a while Doug Marshall's boat came past, towing some fool on water-skis with a sling-glider strapped to his back. For a while I cursed Marshall for waking the entire neighborhood -- he represented a tangible scapegoat for my having to get to work. Then I pulled on my clothes, gulped coffee and stumbled outside. Silkie ran to greet me, pink with happiness and uttering the high-pitched whine that is the slithe's way of exhibiting delight. I picked him up, stroking his incredibly soft skin while his reptilian eyes regarded me with cold joy. I carried him to the factory gate where Dave was waiting. He looked as though he had some personal complaint so I thought it best to make trite conversation, fast. "Dave," I said. "I saw Carioca Jones yesterday." "She's moved in, over Deep Cove way." Dave Froehlich knew everything that happened on the Peninsula. "I was meaning to tell you. You ought to cultivate her." "Have you seen her? Close to, I mean?" I gave a short laugh. He regarded me steadily. "She could be a customer, Mr. Sagar," he said. The factory was emerging from the mist, a gaunt timber structure at the waterside, its cedar shingles silver and black with age. Through the windows I could see uniformed men working. Behind the building, merging into the bushes, were the slithe pens where the little reptiles scuttled. "Look here, Dave," I said suddenly. "I saw a slithe in those bushes over there earlier, from my window. They're getting out again. How the hell do they do it?" "I'm sorry, Mr. Sagar. I'll get George to inspect the pens again." His face was wooden. "Forget it, for God's sake." A phrase came into my mind, a phrase from decades, centuries ago when educated man found that he was surrounded by equals and invented class distinction to fill the gap. The phrase: He Knows his Place. Dave Froehlich Knew his Place and, by God, he was never going to let me forget it. He was my personal bonded State Prisoner for a period of three years -- the standard sentence for embezzlement of a sum of not more than two thousand dollars, which was Dave's crime. I think I am a reasonable master. I provide him with accommodation and pay him a e Urillaid # Micronite filter. Mild, smooth taste. America's quality cigarette. Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. mm small amount for pocket money, which is more than many bonded S.P. men get. In return, he must make himself useful to me in so many ways that one wonders at the possibilities of misuse of the penal code... But at least the moral is clear. Stay honest. The other men, those uniformed goons in the factory, are not so lucky. I hire them from the State at an hourly rate. They receive no pay themselves and they live in the prison. They are little better than cattle. If they behave themselves -- if they are lucky -- someone might like an S.P. man enough to take him on bond -- which means his sentence is automatically commuted by one-third. "Maybe you ought to realize just how damned lucky you are," I once said to Dave. "Maybe," he grunted, peeling a slithe. "I suppose you'd rather go back to the old system," I said with some heat -- it was one of those bad days. "You'd like to sit around on your tail doing nothing all day, kept by society. Is that what you're saying? You're saying that because you stole somebody's cash you've got a right to a three-.year vacation?" He flushed and for once I had him going. "I made one mistake, Mr. Sagar, just one. Okay, so I've got to pay for it. But the way things are now -- you own me. You can do what you like with me. It's degrading." The slithe skin was hanging from his fingers -- he released the reptile, dropping it over the wire into one of the pens. I glanced at the fine, almost transparent skin the slithe sheds every six months or so. It possessed that grayish, curiously inert look that is characteristic of the unattached skin -- a sort of waiting look, waiting for a host, waiting for an emotion to latch on to. And where Dave's fingers touched, the skin glowed bright blue. Just a small area, the size of a fingerprint -- but it told me what Dave was thinking, what his emotions were concerning me, concerning everything. It showed, just for a moment, that Dave hated -- and there was no way he could fool that membrane. examine all the netting, repair the holes and retrieve the escaped slithes, and by that time I hoped Dave's mood had improved because no one can go on hating forever and he was a damned good foreman. I think this Jatter asset of his was the reason he was almost smiling as we dropped the last slithe back into its pen and relaxed. He has the interests of the farm at heart and will be truly glad when his time is up and he can stop hating and take up that partnership I've half-promised him. We walked slowly toward the factory. "Hi, there! Have I come to the right place?" I swung around and saw her standing at the gate. Maybe leaning against it would be a more accurate description, leaning in just such a way that 'the top bar pushed into her breast and made me think of her as a woman, not just as a person wondering if she had come to the right place. And from the direct stare I got from those aged and ageless eyes I knew she knew there was no mistake. Beside me Dave drew a sharp breath and I tried not to look at the skin he held. Instead I looked at Carioca Jones and said; "I hope so. I'm Sagar and this is my slithe farm. Can I help you?" I moved to open the gate but she was already through, twisting to shut it behind her, then smiling directly at me like a death's head. "What Sagar?" "Joe." "I'm Carioca Jones. Didn't I see you -- " "Out in the Strait yesterday. I'd just pulled the body of Harry Alberni out of the water," I said brutally. "God, did he dieT' She was an actress. Her expression of horror at the death of a perfect stranger was well done. "It was an accident, one of those things. The mediman didn't get there in time. Nobody could be blamed." The Flymart landed in the yard, rattling off a list of the day's bargain offers almost before the rotors had stilled. The hatch slid open, displaying shelves of groceries. I handed my list to Dave and moved away from the din, drawing Miss Jones with me. Today she was wearing a sober brown, neck to knee, and I briefly thanked God for this sane September Monday morning. "So these are the slithes. I've heard so much about them. Where do they come from?" "They're imported." "Slithes. What a curious name." "Lewis Carroll. From slithy, meaning lithe and slimy. I think it's quite apt -- but it tends to distract from the fact that they're pleasant and friendly little things. And unusually intelligent for reptiles. Silkie, now -- " I picked up my pet, still pink, and held him out to her. She reached out a tentative finger and prodded him behind the ear in that slightly embarrassed manner of the nonanimal-lover. "Oh, look at that. He's changed color!" "They do. That's their attraction." "Yes, I suppose so. It's funny," she laughed girlishly, "I'd never thought of the animals changing color. I mean, I knew the skins changed color, that's what they're -- uh -- for. But the animals -- I'd never really thought about animals, you know." She thought the skins grew on trees, was what she meant -- if she'd ever thought of trees, that is. But she looked more like a customer every minute. I continued my spiel, which had been interrupted by Silkie's involuntary display of distaste. "The chameleon effect fulfills a number of purposes for a slithe on its home planet. It's a mating display, for one thing. When the animal turns pink it's letting the love object know of the attraction. Then, as a defense mechanism, when the slithe feels itself threatened it will turn a livid purple in an attempt to frighten its enemy." "How positively fascinating, Joe." "The skin holds the secret. It's triggered by changes in the body, by heat, sweating, adrenalin or whatever. But the most remarkable thing is, it lives even after it's been shed. Put it against human flesh and it's sensitive to human emotions." And, T refrained from saying, slitheskin has learned some new colors, that way. II room and she admired the displays, fingering the bandanas, kerchiefs, muffs, pendants, wristlets, all those things women wear when they hope to display an affection they are too shy to put into words. Or -- as frequently happens -- when they are so completely exhibitionist that they want to parade their emotions -- any emotions -- in front of the world. Carioca Jones stood too close to me and handled all these things and turned them pink. "I want a dress!" she cried suddenly. "I want a whole dress made out of your skins, and I want it to fit close. What do you say?" "We don't really do that sort of thing," I mumbled as she arched her back over the display counter and looked up at me, her throat wrinkled like a condor's. "There's a lot of work involved in joining skins so the seam doesn't show. And it's damned difficult to match the tones. The cost is out of all proportion. We try to stick to things that can be made out of one skin." Her eyes had narrowed slightly. "And why do you think the cost should worry me?" "Well, I -- I like people to know what they're letting themselves in for." "Listen to me, Joe Sagar. I never go into anything with my eyes closed, not anything, I want you to remember that." Abruptly she was smiling again, toying with a slitheskin bandana whieh had undergone as rapid a eolor transformation as I had ever seen -- pink, blue, pink, almost as quickly as you can say it. "Make me a nice dress, Joe. I can afford it." "I'll let you have the estimate tomorrow if you like, Miss Jones." She turned away and I accompanied her across the yard to the gate -- Silkie trotted at my heels. Her car was parked under the trees; there was a feint sound music. I opened the door for her. The snub-nosed blonde was sitting in the passenger's seat, an orchestrella on her bare knees. She wore a light gray sweater and a no-skirt skirt. She looked up and smiled, but her smile was for Carioca Jones. The music changed tone, became gay as her long fingers shifted and worked inside the egg-shaped instrument. Somehow I managed to bid Carioca Jones a polite goodbye. Then the car rose from the ground in a swirl of damp autumn leaves and glided away, taking the girl and the music with it, leaving me with the aftersight of beauty. cuse to call on Miss Jones -- and the blonde -- as soon as possible. When the estimate had been completed I persuaded Doug Marshall to take me gliding and contrived to make a clumsy landing near the beach which backs on to the Jones residence. I fought clear of the harness and made my way through the shallow water to the shore, dragging the tiny glider after me. Then I climbed the tumbledown steps above the high-water mark and hurried through the trees in the direction of the house. I heard the music while I was still among the trees, that melodic, yet unearthly tone which characterizes the orchestrella. For an instant I paused, trying to establish from which direction the sounds came -- then I walked on again, turning left through a pergola which gave onto a tiny sunken lawn. The girl was sitting on a rustic seat, the instrument in her lap. She was totally oblivious of my presence as I stood behind her waiting for a break in the flow of the music, reluctant to interrupt. It was like a setting from an ancient oil painting -- the lawn, the shrubs with their late September flowers, the over-hanging trees, the girl all dressed in white -- I felt I had stepped into a dreamlike past. So I stood waiting just for a little while and the music flowed on from her sensitive fingers. At last I recalled myself to the present. I coughed, thinking what an ugly noise it was in the midst of this beauty. The music stopped. The girl swung around, her eyes widening in surprise. "Sorry to interrupt," I said. "I've brought the estimate for Miss Jones." "Oh, you startled me. How did you get here? I didn't hear a car." She had spoken without any particular warmth -- indeed, I don't think she recognized me. I introduced myself. She told me her name was Joanne and for a while I thought things were going well -- then I told her about the glider. If I had hoped to impress her with my daring, I failed. Her manner became stiff and she made a few pointed remarks about playboys with bonded men at their beck and call. I tried to explain that I normally worked on Thursdays but lacked the nerve to tell her I had come in the hope of meeting her. "What's going on here? Oh, it's you, Joe. I heard voices." Carioca Jones stepped down to the lawn. "I was just telling Joanne. My glider came down off your beach." "Oh, do you glide? How thrilling." We made our way down to the beach and I showed her the glider, then Marshall and his man Charles arrived and towed it away. I got out of my wet suit. Marshall glanced at me from the boat. "Why don't you come up to the house and have a drink, Joe? You don't have to go, not yet. I can run you home. Then we can talk about the dress in comfort. Joanne, you bring him up in a minute or two." S HE departed without waiting for a reply -- after all, who could refuse an invitation from Carioca Jones? Leaving Joanne and me standing on the beach and Marshall grinning at us from the stern of the launch as he headed out to sea. In fact we were not yet quite alone. An obscene shape flopped past, undulating like a sealion, and a cold eye dwelt on me in passing. I shuddered, feeling a sudden chill. "I suppose she keeps that brute around so she can look beautiful by comparison," I observed. Joanne walked away from me without speaking and sat down on a tree stump, placing the orchestrella in her lap. I heard a few sad chords. "Is it any good my telling you Carioca is a fine person?" she asked quietly. "A lot of people don't understand her, you know." "Why did she go off like that?" I saw the paleness of her face as she looked up and from her voice I imagined she might have been smiling again. "She doesn't want our company right away. I rather think she's going to -- change into something more suitable to entertain a male visitor." "She's wasting her time. I didn't even notice what she had on just now." "Didn't you," murmured Joanne wonderingly and began to play. I could just make out the whiteness of her fingers shifting as they caressed the interior of the instrument and the melody flowed all around, bathing us like the warm sea of a tropic summer as we sat on the chill September beach. She played for a long time, although it seemed just a moment -- I knew this because suddenly when she finished it was very dark and I remembered we were supposed to be up at the house. Joanne remembered at the same time -- she jumped to her feet with a gasp of alarm and I climbed stiffly from my heap of driftwood. We hurried up the path, the wet misty webs of the night spiders drawing cold lines on our faces. The house was ablaze with light. I hesitated as one does before entering an ominously large and noisy party. "I could do with a drink," I muttered from force of habit. Joanne laughed. "You'll get one -- don't worry." She hesitated. "In fact I'll get you one myself. I think Carioca still isn't ready." A hint of stiffness, of embarrassment, in the way she said this last caused me to look at her, then follow her gaze to an upper window. Miss Jones moved past, whitely naked in the brightness. We went into the house and Joanne made me sit on a low, receptive chesterfield. "Because I rather think Carioca will want to sit next to you," she said with a real, genuine grin. She brought me a scotch and ginger. It was a large, comfortable room -- the motif was based on the historic Western Seaboard Slide, in common with many of the Peninsula residences. I suspected the featured spiral staircase came from the liner Princess Louise -- now a hotel twenty miles inland -- and the floor was original sediment. Polished and glazed, the rich brown ooze showed a multitude of species of marine life which had been stranded decades ago when the tidal waves swept over the low Peninsula. "Look -- ah -- Joanne, what exactly is your function here?" I asked bluntly. "Carioca would call me her companion," she replied, unoffended. "I suppose I'm a sort of agent, bodyguard, secretary. I just keep things ticking over, I guess." "Does she work much now?" "Oh, now and then when she feels like it -- not a lot. Hardly at all, I suppose. Oh, hell. If you really must know, she doesn't work. She's not in fashion now, if you know what I mean. It hurts her. That's why she sometimes seems a little abrupt, you know. She's a wonderful person, really. She's been great to me, like a -- like a sister," she said, defiantly daring me to interrupt with a more tactless simile. "I'm glad you're happy," I said helplessly -- there was something disarming about this girl which voided the mind of smart answers, "Carioca likes to be the center of attention -- hadn't you noticed? She always has been and now she's having trouble realizing things just aren't like that any more. I rather suspect," she said sadly, "that her ordering a slitheskin dress is just another bit of compensation. After all, you can't get more flamboyant than that." A dress a woman wears directly against the skin -- and one that reflects her every emotion in its color... "You don't approve of the dress?" "Not for her. I think it's a shame she has to call attention to herself that way. But there it is. She's used to being the center of attraction." And when Carioca Jones made her grand entrance a few moments later, I could see what Joanne meant. F or a start, an open spiral staircase is a revealing item of furniture for a woman in a short dress to descend. The impression of stark cold metal against warm soft flesh heightens the effect. But, as Joanne had said, it was a shame. It was a shame, I was thinking, that she moved slowly, so slowly down the stairs, maybe because she was getting on in years and didn't want to fall. I wasn't supposed to think that at all. So by the time she reached the bottom and began to make her swaying way across the petrified sediment I was feeling quite sorry for her. And, to be honest, her figure was good -- obscenely good -- and just about as interesting as one's mother's. I averted my eyes from the exposed flesh. She held her face up to be kissed -- at least giving me the choice of splashdown area. Then she proceeded to chatter away as though I'd only just arrived, and led me back to the chesterfield. "Joanne, darling," she cooed, "play for us while we talk, there's a dear. Something nice and slow and smoochy." I'd only met her once before today and that had been a business meeting. I wondered how she would behave if I were a close friend -- and then I wondered how many close friends she had and felt sorry for her again. Joanne had moved over to a piece of furniture which, at first glance. I'd taken for a #-V alcove. It was a sort of half-dome which somehow suggested excellent acoustics, or the womb, according to how introverted one felt at the time. Like a quarter of an egg. She moved inside and, I think, sat down -- it was hard to tell, as the interior was coated with that new paint that absorbs all light. Then her hands appeared, slipping into the orchestrella which sat on a low stand. The effect was most spectacular -- hands appearing from the blackness, holding the instrument. I excused myself from Carioca and walked over, standing directly in front of the alcove. I still couldn't see Joanne. Only her hands were there, right in front of me, caressing the orchestrella. It was uncanny. Then she began to play, disembodied hands moving, returned to Carioca with some reluctance. "Well," she said, smiling. "Now here we are. Isn't this delightful?" "That's an interesting piece of furniture you have over there." "Quite, but we don't want to talk about boring old furniture, do we? Tell me about yourself, Joe. Why does a man like you hide himself away among those funny little animals?" "It's a living." The music, which Carioca had intended to remain background, had impressed itself on me by its sheer power and beauty. I couldn't help but listen to it. "Has Joanne ever thought of taking that up professionally?" I asked. "My dear, why should she need to when she's got me?" There was more than a hint of acid in her voice. "She's very good." "Oh, let's forget Joanne, for heaven's sake, Joe. I didn't invite you here to talk about her." The trapped feeling flustered me and I said something foolish. "What did you invite me here for?" "Well now, aren't you the forceful one?" She edged closer, all thighs and shoulders. "I asked you here because I like you, Joe. And because you're making a nice dress for me -- " Her voice hardened again here and I took the point. The dress was far and away the most profitable order we were likely to get this year, and it looked like being a long, hard winter. "I'm very flattered. Miss Jones." "Carioca." "Can I get you a drink?" "Oh, not now. Not when you're just going to tell me all about yourself..." So I sighed silently and began to tell her my life story, making it as interesting as possible in the hope that she would concentrate on the abstract past instead of the physical present. I don't think I succeeded, because her eyes were on my face for the whole of the time I was speaking, which is unusual for the recipient of a life history, no matter how fascinating. I would look away, visualizing some incident from the past as I described it, and every time I looked back at her those dark eyes were fixed on mine like mating slugs. If I looked at them too long I couldn't see the hardness of the face and the wrinkles, because eyes themselves are moist orbs and nothing more -- so, hypnotically, they would become young as I watched. I averted my gaze again, removed my hand which somehow seemed to have got on her shoulder and the music intruded again and I was saved. "But how can you make the dress if you don't know my measurements?" "Just lend me a dress. Any one that fits. I'll take it with me and let you have it back tomorrow. Or the next day." "Oh, but that's most unsatisfactory. I want to be sure it's right. It's going to cost a lot of money." "There's no hurry," I said desperately as she jumped up and began to make for the stairs, presumably in search of a tape measure. "I have to keep a bunch of animals together for at least three weeks so that they get attuned to each other's emotions and the skins match up when they shed them. Otherwise the dress would look like a patchwork quilt." already out of earshot. I heard a chuckle clearly among the music and looked quickly toward the semidome. "For God's sake come and help me out, Joanne." In answer the music swelled to a derisive crescendo with undertones of The Wedding March as Carioca began her descent of the staircase. "Here!" she cried. "I've found a tape measure. Now we can get it over with. Come on!" She took my hand and pulled me to my feet -- or more correctly, I got up before she landed in my lap. She led me to a darker corner of the room, out of sight of Joanne. "This will be fine, here," she said. "I'd ask you to come up to my room, but it wouldn't be quite right, would it?" Suddenly I wasn't worried any more. She had no thought of getting me into bed, whatever impression she might give. She was Carioca Jones, playing her part. She was a born exhibitionist and it had been quite a while since she had displayed herself. Now she was virtually alone with a captive audience and she was going to make the most of it. Was I feeling sorry for her again? Maybe, but I was annoyed, too. She was using me, taking me for a ride. The music changed. "After all, the dress is worn next to the skin, isn't it? So the measurements have to be taken next to the skin." A most repulsive creature was humping its way across the vitrified past in our direction. Joanne was playing Duncan's Allegro in E. "I've always thought that's one of the most uplifting pieces ever composed, haven't you. Miss Jones? And doesn't Joanne play it well? So lively. My God, it makes you want to do calisthenics." She wriggled back into her shoulder straps instantly, coloring. She strode across the floor toward the semidome while I hurried after her, fearing mayhem. The land shark snapped at my heels, dislodging a shoe. She held the orchestrella before me. Her voice had become quiet, very quiet. "It's quite easy to play, Joe, and very interesting. I used to be able to play it myself, one time, but you need young hands for that. Soft, like dear Joanna's. You see -- " she plunged her fingers into the holes in the egg-shaped instrument -- "the depth of the fingers -- how far you push them in -- controls the pitch. The position of the fingers, which dies of the holes you press, controls both tone and volume. Each finger can produce a sound like a violin, a piano, a guitar, a drum, even. Ten fingers -- a ten-piece orchestra in the hands of an e.xpert." Her hands were hooked into the instrument like talons. "I'm afraid my hands aren't what they were. The sensitivity has left them, you see." Joanne's face appeared from the blackness of the semidome, stricken. "No, nowadays I'm just a little bit ham-fisted." The orchestrella screamed in discord as she squeezed and kneaded. Then it was silent. Ill children. Immediately after arioca Jones placed her order I had chosen ten prize animals and Dave had built a separate pen for them, complete with heating in the hutch and a temperature-controlled pool in the small yard. It's odd, the way we tend to regard the animals from a human standpoint. In point of fact, it didn't matter a damn whether the slithes were happy -- the important thing was that they all felt the same. If one of them had a bad day it was better that they all had a bad day. Very soon I found that my slithe team needed to be strengthened -- something I should have known from the start. It takes more than ten slithes to make a tenskin slithe dress. The first disaster occurred two days after my fraught evening with Carioca Jones. The morning mist was cold and hung in beads from the chicken wire of the pens. I don't know what prompted me to look out through my window at six a.m. -- or even get out of bed. Maybe I heard something. Anyway, as I gazed on the peaceful scene I saw a movement among the hutches. Slithes tend to become torpid toward winter -- that's why its better to heat the hutches. If exposed continuously to the cold the creatures will virtually go into hibernation and that means no skin-shedding. So there is no way a slithe will be moving about his pen in the early morning -- in common with myself, they are late risers. Soon I stood dressed and, shotgun in hand, in the yard. I looked around, hefting the gun. They can say what they like about the advantages of the fanbeam laser rifle -- it has none of the excitement of the good old-fashioned twelvebore with its thunderous discharge and wicked recoil. At this hour of the morning I was itching to kill and to have killed quietly and efficiently would have been no sop to my temper whatsoever. Something was prowling around my pens and I wanted to blast it to hell. In point of fact it was an otter. He came around the corner of the prize hutch in that swaying, lowslung run which is not quite a scuttle, and in his mouth was struggling a member of my handpicked team, vivid yellow with fear. The otter saw me and stopped, looking at me from bright, knowing little eyes as I leveled the gun at him. It was blackmail. I couldn't shoot, not while he had the slithe. I watched him and he watched me and at the same time I tried to see where he had got through the chicken wire. Then I saw a tiny gap where the mesh met the damp soil. I reached it before he did -- he dropped the slithe in order to bare sharp teeth in a snarl and came on. Although he couldn't have been more than eighteen inches long, he looked savage and relentless and I backed off. I had always understood otters were playful creatures, spending their time sliding down river banks on their fannies. This one was acting out of character and it threw me. I had forgotten the shotgun, it was man to man stuff now. Uttering a vicious hissing noise he came under the wire, threw me a contemptuous look as he passed, trotted across the yard and disappeared among the driftwood on the shore. I called it an honorable draw, because I had the slithe. I entered the pen and picked up the reptile. His skin was still yellow -- it looked as though it had been permanently dyed that way. I tried. I put him back with the others and gave him a couple of days to recover, but it was no use. The fright had had a traumatic effect on him and his presence made the others uneasy. He could not lose the yellowish tint, which individuals in the rest of the team were taking as a warning signal, causing their skins to fluctuate in unhappy sympathy. In the end I removed him and placed him in isolation. As a result of this event I doubled the size of the team. I could now afford ten individual disasters without threat to the dress project and a large, communal disaster did not matter unduly, provided all the animals suffered the same. C AsiocA Jones came to see me the day after the otter incident. By the time I was told she was around she had already pumped Dave and was leaning over the prize pen in proprietorial manner. "Hi, Joe, darling. Your man tells me these are my creatures." "That's right. A fine bunch of animals. I picked them myself." "But aren't they a bit variegated, Joe darling?" Her sharp black eyes scrutinized the tiny herd as the animals crawled about. "It wouldn't do for Carioca Jones to go dressed in motley, would it?" "I told you. They have to get used to one another." "Oh, dear, they're not like us, are they? I mean, we sort of hit it off immediately, didn't we? I think you felt that, too, didn't you, Joe?" "Of course. Look -- Carioca. Unfortunately I've got a hell of a lot to do -- " "But I understand! I've only dropped by for a minute, Joe. I thought we might get the fitting done." One of the State Prisoners was fooling about nearby, sweeping up or whatever the unbonded men grudgingly do when they see me around -- and he glanced at me sharply. Carioca had opened a minuscule purse and was dangling a tape measure, which I regarded as one regards a krait. She was smiling knowingly. That damned measure was becoming almost symbolic. So I took her into the house and, unchaperoned, got it over with -- the measurements, I mean. I don't think she really expected anything else. She just had that knack of making anything appear sexual, which was why her career had been so successful and why it was over, now the bloom was gone. Sad? It was almost pathetic -- I kissed her briefly as a compulsory compliment and got her out of the house. "Well now, that wasn't so bad, was it, Joe?" "Uh." "I'll get out of your way now. I've got to go into town and do some shopping. I wonder -- How would you like to come along? It would do you good to get away from this smelly old farm for a while. Eh, Joe? Maybe we could have a drink somewhere." She had dropped the overemphasized manner of speech, she had dropped the coquettishness, she was suddenly, genuinely trying to get through to me. She was lonely and she wanted company for the rest of the afternoon. I wondered what had gotten into her, then I remembered the episode of the orchestrella. "Where's Joanne?" I asked. I hadn't wanted to say it but I had to know. Her answer might explain something. It did. Her gaze shifted -- she looked away. "Back at home," she said. So there had been a split-up -- not surprising after the orchestrella incident. I wondered if Joanne were packing her bags and leaving and I think I felt lonely, too, then. "I'm sorry, Carioca," I said. "I'd like to come. But I've got a hell of a lot to do here, like I said. Maybe some other time." She smiled. "You really mean that, don't you, Joe. How nice. We must make a date sometime." "Great." I walked with her to the car and held the door for her. She couldn't resist vouchsafing the usual thigh display as she got in. Then she looked at me and said in completely flat, neutral tones, "I must hurry. I've got to buy an orchestrella before the stores close. I've often wondered about the way she said that. I've tried to visualize the moment, the way she looked, her tone of voice. And there's nothing I can pin down, nothing that might give me a clue as to what her intentions were that September afternoon. Nothing to tell me whether I was terribly to blame for what happened subsequently. Was she saying she was sorry? At the time I thought so, but then, she is an actress. T he car rose and whined off and she was gone. I was left thinking about Joanne again, as I did so often. And thinking about Joanne and the wrecked instrument, which it seemed Carioca had achieved the decency to replace -- I suddenly thought I might make some recompense also. After all, I was partly to blame. I went into the factory and gave Dave careful instructions. I wanted to give Joanne a present; not something ridiculously expensive like Carioca's damned dress -- just something small and appropriate. But as I went outside again, feeling Dave's amused gaze on my back, I wondered if maybe I just wanted to be around when Joanne wore slitheskin for the first time. I was so engrossed in this speculation that I jerked in dangerous proximity to heart failure when her voice spoke right next to me. "Good afternoon, Mr. Sagar." "Uh, God. I didn't see you arrive, Joanne. Call me Joe. What -- how did you get here?" "Oh, I borrowed a car. Look, Joe, have you seen Carioca?" "You only just missed her." "Did she say where she was going?" "Town. She was -- " I stopped in time; maybe the orchestrella was supposed to be a surprise. "Is it anything urgent?" "I don't know." She hesitated. "We haven't spoken very much, you know, since -- Then she went off this afternoon without saying a thing, not a thing." "Don't worry. She was perfectly normal when I saw her." "Oh, thank goodness." She looked around at a loss. "Well, I must get going. I'll see if I can find her in town. When we -- when we go together, we usually split up for shopping and meet at the Princess Louise bar, at six. That's where I'll find her. I'm sure. She'll be there." "Joanne, I tell you, she's okay." She was fidgeting around and twisting the strap of her bag between her fingers and it was driving me out of my senses. I mean, here she was on my home ground and all we could talk about was an aging #-V star who was more than capable of looking after herself. "Come in and have a drink, why don't you?" "Oh, no, I couldn't. Really -- " Briefly I wondered just how serious the row had been that had turned my calm, serene Joanne into this nervous wreck of a girl -- yet had left Carioca virtually unmoved. I had my suspicions, of course, but I didn't want to think about them. I mean, I was once again fighting the gathering notion that Joanne was not quite normal, if you know what I mean. And she was so pretty -- it would be such a waste. "I'll come with you," I said. "We can all have a drink." But with luck, I thought, we won't be able to find Carioca Jones... T here was a lot of traffic about -- by the time we parked it was five forty-five. I suggested to Joanne that we go straight to the Princess Louise and she agreed. Soon we were sitting in the period atmosphere of polished brass and varnished mahogany, drinking .scotch. Time has been kind to the Princess Louise. The records of its arrival are sketchy as the ship's log was destroyed -- along with the entire crew, so it is said -- at the time of the Slip. I imagine it was very soon afterward that it was discovered by the few survivors of the tidal waves which had cleaned any other form of shelter off the surface of the Peninsula. These frightened wrecks huddled in the beached liner for months, maybe years, until they gradually drifted back into communication with the rest of the world. Their first contact doubtless came by means of the roving bands of Indians who had hunted the more northerly areas since time immemorial. By then, it is supposed, the Princess Louise had become a village in its own right. Then suddenly the world returned and a city grew around the beached wreck. And with the arrival of people, history began to move forward again on the Peninsula. Joanne was loosening up a bit. "I expect she'll be here in a moment," she said. It was a start. And it was the point when I should have said something about hoping Carioca would be late because it was so pleasant with just the two of us, don't you think? But somehow I couldn't seem to get going. I'd never had any real conversation with the girl; I didn't know what her beliefs were, her views, her tastes. As far as I knew, we had nothing in common. I was merely violently attracted to her physically. And I didn't think we had that in common, either. So I didn't know what the hell to say to her and the minutes were rattling away and Carioca would be here any minute. And damn it, the only thing we had in common was Carioca. "Look, I'm sorry if there was some sort of trouble," I said, expressing frank manly sympathy. "I feel partIV ly to blame, you know." "I -- I don't see why." "Well, you know -- I was maybe a bit tactless praising your playing, knowing Carioca can get jealous. I didn't think." I had her attention now. "I haven't noticed she's particularly jealous," she said. "She likes to be the center of things, yes. But jealous?" At last she grinned, a good straightforward grin. "I think she was annoyed because she wasn't getting what she wanted, so she took it out on me -- or rather my orchestrella -- " She hesitated oddly then, and the grin faded. "I'm not sure she -- uh -- wanted anything. She just wanted me to think she did. It was an act." And it could be a dangerous act -- this was when I experienced my first real twinge of uneasiness about Joanne's position. She was incredibly naive. "Can't you see what she's really like. Joanne?" I had lost her again. "I know what she's like, and she's always been very good to me." She was loyal to Carioca Jones and she was damned if she was going to denigrate her in front of a comparatively casual acquaintance like me. Apologetically I reached across the table and put my hand over hers. That was the moment Carioca Jones chose to arrive. As I tried to collect my thoughts I recollected that I had told her previously that I was too busy to come out. the next few weeks and when we met her manner was strange, although not unfriendly. She never referred to her meeting with Joanne and me at Princess Louise -- or the public scene that had resulted. She dropped by every few days to check on the progress of her dress and chatted pleasantly about the promising appearance of the slithes. By now the little reptiles were identical in their reactions -- it was a pleasure to see them all change color, instantly and simultaneously, from dull brown to warm pink when I approached with their food. I calculated they would all be due to shed in a couple of weeks' time and within two or three days of one another. Carioca was pleased with the progress -- she apparently bore no grudge over the Princess Louise episode -- yet there was something odd about her attitude. An air almost of suppressed excitement -- which I took to be anticipation over the dress -- and something else, something almost possessive in the way she looked at me. She had dropped the coquettish approach in favor of a more confident attitude. Sometimes when I caught her eye it held the glint of one who beholds a prime steak, medium rare. Anticipatory and predatory. Every time Dave told me of her arrival -- she never came straight to the house, but waited to be announced like royalty -- I would hurry out and greet her, always looking past her to where the hovercar was parked. But there was never anyone in the passenger's seat. I'm sure sKe noticed I was abstracted on these occasions and I'm sure she knew the reason, but she never commented. Joanne was a subject we simply did not mention. Just once she made an oblique reference to her companion. She let drop the news that she was practicing the orchestrella again -- I presumed Joanne was giving her lessons. She held her knotted fingers before her as she said this, flexing them as though playing an imaginary instrument. It put me in mind of an eagle stooping on a lamb. I found an excuse to call on the house, once. I got Marshall to take me for a run in his hydrofoil and persuaded him to anchor off Carioca's beach. He, myself and Charles, his man, sat in the cockpit, drinking, while I kept my eyes on the shore. Marshall was talking about his new glider which he expected to be delivered later in the week. Charles and I listened, although from time to time I caught Charles glancing at me with a faint grin. "I think I'll just slip ashore for a minute," I said suddenly. They looked knowing. "Not for longer than an hour, right, Joe?" said Marshall. "I want to get in some practice later, before the new glider arrives." It seemed a long time before I was hurrying through the trees but it was probably only a few minutes, such is the time-scale of love. The carport was empty so I could safely assume Carioca was out and that it was Joanne I had seen from the boat. Then I heard the sweet sounds of an orchestrella being played as only Joanne knew how. I slipped through the open french windows and crossed the floor quietly. The interior of the semidome was the antithesis of light but I could see her hands stroking a new and ornate orchestrella. I watched and listened for a while -- then I spoke. Time was short and Carioca might return at any moment. "Joanne -- " She stepped from the blackness and smiled at me. "Hello, Joe. I didn't hear you come in. I'm afraid Carioca's gone out for a while, but she'll be back in about half an hour, I expect." "I came to see you, Joanne." I had been too direct. A flicker of alarm crossed her face. "Whatever for?" "I see Carioca's bought you a new orchestrella." "It's not mine. It's Carioca's. She's learning to play. The one she smashed was hers, too -- I'd like you to understand that." She looked around the expensive room. "Don't be so damned humble. Joanne. She's not a goddess. It's not a privilege for you to work here. She's just an ex-star, a has-been. You're worth a dozen of her. You're young and you're very pretty. You could be a star yourself if you had half the luck she had." "Look, Mr. Sagar. There's nothing wrong in Carioca's having been successful. I don't like to hear people wanting to pitch her out with the garbage because she isn't maybe -- working so much these days. Look at it this way. She could have been just another married woman, an average housewife. Would you say a married woman was finished -- a has-been -- just because she's decided not to have any more children? The only person who knows if Carioca is finished is she herself -- and judging from the way she is I'd say she's okay -- she's fine. She used to be a star but now she's changed direction. She's moved to the Peninsula with plenty of money. She doesn't need to work and now she's well on her way to becoming a pillar of local society, a person whom people want to know because she's famous and interesting. She's narrowed her aims and is specializing. How many people seek you out, Mr. Sagar? How many people make an effort to get to know you?" I wondered why she was talking like this. I'd seen no evidence of Carioca's sudden popularity. It seemed that everything had gone wrong. I shouldn't have come. "That's not fair, Joanne. Maybe I don't want people to seek me out." "Hey, you wouldn't mind though, would you, Joe? You wouldn't mind people pointing you out to each other and saying, there goes Joe Sagar, the world-famous slithe-farmer -- " Suddenly she was laughing. "Oh, Joe, why the hell didn't you choose a more impressive name and job?" She looked at me, face flushed, and she was incredibly beautiful, infinitely desirable. I put my hands on her shoulders. "I'm happy the way I am. I don't think Carioca is. I'm on an even keel but she's on the way down. But I'd rather not talk about her..." I drew her gently toward me. She disengaged herself and walked back to the semidome. "I'll play for you, not with you, Joe," she said. When Carioca arrived she found us just like that. I was standing, listening to the music and watching Joanne's hands, because that was all I could see of her. T wo weeks later the slithes shed their skins and a week after that Carioca Jones's dress was finished. I had a female State Prisoner in the factory at the time who was about Carioca's size, so we gave her the dress to try on. When she reappeared she was smiling and radiant and the dress was a warm, uniform pink. The seams were invisible and the fit perfect. The dress seemed almost to blend with the girl's own skin. She looked a hell of a lot better in it than Carioca would and she knew it. "Betty, you look fantastic," breathed DaVe, popeyed with admiration. The dress blushed a deeper pink and I rather think something started right there, judging by the look the S.P. girl gave Dave. It was a pity, but eventually we had to get the girl and the dress separated. I supervised the packing. I didn't want anything to go wrong at this stage. I had previously packed my personal gift to Joanne and I sat looking for some time at the small box, wondering what the hell I ought to write on the card. I hadn't seen either . Carioca or Joanne for over two weeks and had, in fact, been getting nervous over the order for the dress. There had been no answer to my calls and on the one occasion I had summoned up nerve to visit the house, it had been ail locked up. I had walked around and peered in at the windows -- and things, thank God, had looked normal. I had even caught sight of the landshark and it had seen me and slithered across the floor, thrashed its way onto a chair near the window and looked out at me frozenly, evilly. A pulse had throbbed near its gills where the oxygenator had been implanted. Obviously things had been okay and someone had probably been coming in to look after the brute until Carioca and Joanne returned. All the same, I still couldn't understand why Carioca hadn't told me she was going away. Then, a few days before the dress was complete, her face had appeared on the visiphone screen. "Terribly sorry, Joe darling, but I had to go away for a couple of weeks, rather nasty, actually. Everything's all right now, though." In the background I caught sight of Joanne moving about and felt a huge relief. "What do you mean? What happened?" "Oh, such a silly thing. I was feeding Wilberforce and he bit me and I had to have shots and all sorts of stupid things." "Wilberforce?" "You know him, my landshark. He's such a pet really, and so goodtempered." "You ought to have the bastard put down." "Oh, I couldn't. Anyway, I thought I'd better call to tell you everything's all right here. And my dress? Is it finished?" "Almost. Just two or three days." when I called her and told her it was ready. She went into hysterical transports of delight and insisted that I bring it over right away for a ceremonial trying-on. By then it was four o'clock in the afternoon, so I washed and changed and left Dave instructions to close up. As I drove over to Carioca's place a tingling knot of nervous anticipation centered around my solar plexus. I hadn't seen Joanne for three weeks. I wondered if she had thought of me during that time. I wondered if she would like her present. Then I managed to think business again to the extent of hoping Carioca liked the dress. The lights were on in the house when I arrived and I could hear the soft sounds of the orchestrella. Twilight was all around me as I hurried across the wet grass, then up the crunching gravel path to the front door, clutching the boxes. The air was chill and damp and I started at a rustling in the bushes; it was probably the carnivorous Wilberforce on a foraging expedition. The front door was ajar and I stepped inside. "It's me!" I called. There was no reply so I entered just the same, sure of my welcome now that the dress was finished. The vast living room echoed to the glorious tones of the orchestrella and a drink stood on the table near the semidome. This was something of a royal welcome -- obviously Carioca meant me to make myself at home while she slipped into something easy to slip off again. I took the glass and strolled over to the semidome, watching Joanne's pale, beautiful fingers working gently as A memorial anthology in tribute to the father of modern American science fiction, Edited by Introduction by This book is a unique memonal--lhe Ihirleen stories in especially for this volume by Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Beslor, Hal Clement, Theodore R. Cogswell. L, Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, Harry Harrison, Mack Reynolds. Clidord D. Simak, George O. Smith. Theodore Sturgeon, and Theodore L. Thomas. Each with an introductory tribute to John Campbell. S# #. rovi n: ynur brolr.;.--.' she changed subtly from the buoyant tones of the welcoming music into the melody of a tender love song. For a while I just stood and listened, trying not to think about Carioca and the fact that she had told Joanne what to play. Instead I said to myself: This is for me. Joanne has chosen this song herself, for me, because she loves me. And the way she was playing it, so softly, so expressively, I could almost believe she did. It was not a matter of technical perfection -- in fact, I had heard her play more correctly. It was an emotional thing -- the occasional uncertainty, hesitancy, only serving to heighten the spell -- the endearing tremulousness of a young girl in love. She played it how it is. At last the slender fingers were still and she was finished. She was waiting for me to say something, but I didn't know what to say. "Hello," I murmured at last. "That was beautiful." A pale shadow appeared within the light-absorbing semidome as she stood. She stepped forward and the room lighting fell upon her black hair, accentuating harshly the wrinkles about the eyes, the hard lines about the mouth. "Hello, Joe darling," said Carioca Jones. "You never believed me when I said I could play." Just for an instant the room seemed to shake itself about me and my stomach gave one single. great throb of horror and disgust. I turned away so that she couldn't see the shock in my eyes and clutched at the boxes on the table. Dumbly I handed the larger one to her. She took it in her young, soft hands and begart to undo the wrappings with little squeals of delight, while I watched in fear, seeing the thin scars around her wrists... Dimly I heard Joanne's voice behind me and dragged my gaze away. "Joe! How nice to see you again. Carioca tells me you've had a present made for me. You shouldn't have, you know." Joanne was walking across the room, smiling at me. then she turned and watched affectionately as Carioca went into transports of delight over the dress. Then she looked at me again. "Well, aren't you going to give it to me?" Of course, I should have guessed. I should have known that Carioca would have a bonded S.P. girl, and I should have guessed that neither the friendless ex-star nor the female State Prisoner would advertise the fact. But I could never have guessed the depths hero-worship can reach. I was still clutching the small box. I suppose I must have blinked and half pulled myself together, tried to smile and offered it to her. Joanne reached to take it. With glittering, steel prosthetic hands. I don't remember leaving the place or getting into the car. I remember being able to think again, to think slowly and begin to understand, somewhere in a suburb of Louise City -- and how or why I got there I'll never know. I stopped the car along the Marine Drive and looked out at the blackness of the evening sea. Something caught my eye on the seat beside me -- it was Joanne's present. Why should I blame her? 'The law gives a Freeman absolute rights over his bonded S.P. man -- w'hich accounts for the popularity of dangerous sports, like slinggliding. I found then I was watching a glider slipping quietly across the dark sky like a pale, swift bat. Somewhere a State Prisoner would be watching that tiny shape, too. He might be wishing the pilot dead, but he would never wish him injured. And I wondered just how badly Carioca's hands had been bitten... There is a derogatory nickname for State Prisoners based on the initial letters -- you seldom hear it but it came into my mind now. At least I'd had the wit to bring Joanne's present away with me. What good was a pair of slitheskin gloves to my used Spare Parts girl?  great original science fiction stories by together in one volume Edited by #, now at your bookstore Past, Present and Future Perfect, Ed. Jack C. Wolf and Gregory Fitz Gerald H. G. Wells, Critic of Progress, Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow, Ed. Reginald Bretnor has landslid upon us and it would seem that profound changes are taking place in the landscape. I suppose I could have seen it coming by all sorts of evidence -- being asked to deliver commencement addresses, for example, and to speak at high schools and colleges, and then the offers to teach. I write this at Penn State University, during a four-day conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, attended by writers and scholars from all over the country -- and from some outside it. Academe has embraced us profoundly and, I think, permanently, with as many shades and varieties of embrace as can be found in that other area. (An interesting analogy and one I think I'll be pursuing as time goes on.) These teachers and professors and deans, these librarians and biogand bibliographers take themselves, and us, damn seriously. We writers are being studied and filed and annotated, our early influences, active and passive, searched for, deduced, hypothesized and reported upon. We are becoming the subjects of dissertations and seminars and whole shelves -- possibly whole library wings -- will be devoted to us and our works. I arrived here with a brutally heavy suitcase, half filled with books and galleys in (I fear) a hopeless attempt to reach something like deadline for this report to you. From here I'm off to Cornell for an all-university speech and a class, thence on to M.I.T. The head it spins. The logical, and beautiful, spearhead of the Penn State affair is Philip Klass, now a tenured professor in the English Department, clearly much loved and respected here, who is, as you surely know, Tenn. Like many other sf writers, living ahead of his time he has sheltered within the ivy for seven years now and, though happy at this turn of events, is not in the least surprised. Here for the conference are Fred Pohl, Jack Williamson (who was the deserved recipient of the Pilgrim Award for his scholastic contributions to sO, P. Schuyler Miller, Clifford Simak, James Gunn, Jerry Pournelle Dickson, Theodore Cogswell, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner and, from Australia, Bruce Gillespie. I won't list the luminaries from Academe; take my word for it they outnumber the above four or five to one and, in their field, shine quite as brightly. One of them, just for example, is PunditCritic Author Professor Leslie Fiedler. The papers being read include scholarly dissections of Silverberg, Ellison, Heinlein, Simak, Clarke. Look at these solemn titles: "A Case of Conscience: Fiction and Reality." "Themes of Arthur C. Clarke and Clifford D. Simak." "Heinlein at # Frames per Second: Destination Moon Revisited." "Quest for Unity: The Theme of the Whole Man in the Fiction of Robert Silverberg." As well as many more general scholarly surveys: "Strange Parallels: #th Century Attacks on the Novel and Modern Censure of Speculative Fiction," and "Philosophical Limitations of Science Fiction." It is a heady experience indeed to be so warmly accepted after so many decades of ghettoization and (in a way, even worse) amused tolerance. We must be grateful for the good of it, but we (that's a group 'we', not an editorial or a royal one) can be forgiven for taking a good hard look at it. Are there writers who will begin to slant their stuff toward the scholars in the hope of getting recognition? There are. Are there scholars whose prime interest in sf is not sf itself but a new, rich mother-lode for theses and papers and dissertations to help with the promotion and tenure game? There are. Are there text-book publishers so used to the panting eagerness of scholars to appear in print that they will try to get our stories for free or for a flat fee without royalties, the way they do the scholars'? You bet there are. Is respectability going to make us narrow, unleavened and pompous, as has happened to many classical musicians who have quite forgotten that the active verb in their profession is 'play'? Could be. Some of us like to be pompous. In short: will the embrace smother us? I don't think so. Above all, there's just too much chutzpah in sf to permit of close containment. Should any important percentage of sf writers get lulled into the selfimportance of the worst kind of scholasticism, their places will be instantly taken by younger and frothier blood who will operate outside the ivy -- the off-Broadway phenomenon. And another point: it is already too late for any segment of Academia to claim us-i-English departments, for example. Phil Klass was recently a guest lecturer at an Eastern college at the invitation of the History Department, and I got a munificent offer last summer to be a Distinguished Professor in Residence at a West Coast college -- from their Sociology Department. Sf is what it is because it won't fit into anyone's prebuilt box, and that's not going to change. As for publishers, they're going to find out abruptly that there is something, after all, in that much-scorned zap-gun, and we got'em. When in doubt about that permission request, get in For all that, it is good, really good, after all these thorny years, to get such warm recognition from so many intelligent, articulate and perceptive people. We walk in the front door now. Did you know that at the time of Mendelssohn, musicians were expected to use the servants' entrance? textbook country has turned into a trickle, and that stream will become a flood. Here's a chunky (# pp) little tome from Fawcett (regretfully, no pun intended) called Past, Present and Future Perfect, subtitled "A Text Anthology of Speculative and Science Fiction", edited by Jack C. Wolf and Gregory Fitz Gerald, of State University, Brockport, N.Y. It costs only #e and is a damn good book. It has an unusual arrangement, starting with the present (Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Bradbury, B. F. Skinner and Asimov) and going back through public-domain country (Bierce, Wells, Mark Twain, Verne, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley) to Swift, Voltaire, Cyrano, Francis Bacon, Lucian and Plato. And lots more -- thirty or so titles and excerpts. The Introduction explains how to use it in the classroom, but nobody has to tell you how to enjoy it. It really is a Best Buy. tioned above, was given the ference for his contributions over a long and distinguished career of scholarship in science fiction. The old planet-smasher was an established giant in the field when a teen-aged Sturgeon crept timidly through the warehouse stacks at Street and Smith for a first terrifying meeting with John Campbell. His titles fill me, to this day, with nostalgia and excitement; Darker Than You Think, The Humanoids, The Legion of Space, the two Seetee books. The Reign of Wizardry, The Humanoids, and dozens more. Meanwhile, as Professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University, he has earned his credentials in the academic world and, along with Robin Wilson, is the man most responsible for the institution of science fiction courses in colleges and universities (which, by the way, together with seminars and high-school courses, now number over four hundred!) An excellent example of what he got the Pilgrim Award for is H. G. Wells, Critic of Progress (The Mirage Press, Baltimore, # pp, annotated and indexed, #.) and if you want one you'd better jump -- the initial printing at this small, meticulous and devoted house was only # copies. It is the most careful study of Wells I have ever seen, well thought-out and well written. The thrust of Wells, while dazzling his readers with his narrative deftness and the profligacy of his invention, was at the same time sternly pointing to nightmare. Before Orwell, before Zamiatin and Ayn Rand, Wells was warning us of the inevitable conflict between human freedom and mechanistically organized soto me as never before that much of his work -- more than I had ever realized and I was weaned on Wells -- is cautionary. This book will be, I think, one of those cornerstone volumes in the structure of sf archives -- clear, careful, reliable. And even if your interest doesn't run to the scholastic a run through this volume will greatly enhance a revisiting of Wells -- and revisiting Wells is one of the nicest presents you can give yourself. R eginald bretnor is a scholar, a writer, a thinker, and very much a human being who, it is rumored, has actually met and talked with Ferdinand Feghoot. In # he published a prestigious tome. Modem Science Fiction, Its Meaning and its Future, which became and remains an absolute necessity for any scholar of this literary phenomenon with which ybu and I are entangled. Now comes Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow (Harper and Rowe, #, annotated and with bibliography) edited by Bretnor and This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulps cans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans#yahoogroups.com. calling itself a "discursive symposium." The best way to review this book is to give you the table of contents -- you will then see clearly what it is, what it aims to do and where the muscle is. Divided into three sections, it goes like this: "Science Fiction Today: The Role of Science Fiction," by Ben Bova. "The Publishing of Science Fiction," by Fred Pohl. "Science Fiction and the Visual Media," by George #browski. "Science Fiction, Science, and Modern Man: Science Fiction and a World in Crisis," by Frank Herbert. "Science Fiction, Morals and Religion," by Theodore Sturgeon. "Science Fiction and Man's Adaptation to Change," by Alan E. Nourse. "Science Fiction as the Imaginary Experiment," by Thomas N. Scortia. "Science Fiction in the Age of Space," by Reginald Bretnor. "The Art and Science of Science Fiction: Science Fiction and the Mainstream," by James Gunn. "Science Fiction, New Trends and Old," by Alexei and Cory Panshin. "The Creation of Imaginary Worlds," by Poul Anderson. "The Creation of Imaginary Beings," by Hal Clement. "Romance and Glamor in Science Fiction," by Anne McCaffrey. "Plausibility in Science Fiction," by Gordon R. Dickson. "Science Fiction, Teaching and The beauty of this book -- and it is beautiful -- is that the editor. though he speaks his own piece and speaks it with force and clarity, made no demands on the rest of us to carry on his thesis -- we had no inkling of his opinions before submitting our own. As a result you have here a true symposium, the unmodified expression, facet by facet, of conviction and impression concerning a complex whole. A whole it indeed is, complex indeed it is and, internally and externally, this book sets up many a conflict. I hope to see them fought out, too. Get this one -- andor see that your library acquires it. D uring the writing of the above I have moved from Penn State to and through Cornell and am now on the way to M.I.T. To reinforce what I wrote above about the acceptance of sf in the ivied halls (some of them actually are, too, as if they had never heard of a clichel), it is interesting to point out that at Penn State I was the guest of the English Department; my sponsor at Cornell was the Astronomy Department; and at M.I.T. I go at the behest of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. I have mentioned that Phil Klass spoke at Delaware not long ago at the invitation of the History Department and that it was Sociology that made me the bid out West. I can only be pleased for sf. If Academe wants us in a cubby-hole, it's going to have to build one.  He wanted to die, but couldn't find the time -- until too late! Tave decided to die," MatXthew Pandareus announced to his wife on their first evening together after their long vacation trip to Mars. Actually they had been back on Earth for a week, but Iris had begun an evening class in the history of paperweights and they had not had a real chance to talk since their return. Tonight they had just finished dinner tete-a-tete in their condominium apartment and he had strolled from the dining alcove to look out through the living room's glass wall at the fantastic complexities of city lights extending below, around and above their middle-class, middle-level dwelling. "Dear, you had a similar idea once before, thirty years ago." Iris's clinging gown swished faintly about her shapely legs as she followed to stand slightly behind him at the window. "Here, you forgot your brandy." "Thank you. Closer on forty," he amended, turning to accept the glass from her hand. She turned away busily again as soon as she had passed it on and Pandareus had no very clear look at her face. Iris switched on the fireplace with a wave of her hand and adjusted the mood of the background music to something a little more capricious. "Thirty," she said firmly, coming back to face him. The communication screen chimed then and she was off to answer it. Maintaining his stance in the living room Pandareus heard the short conversation -- just some friends calling to welcome them back and ask how their voyage had been. Iris invited them over a week from Tuesday but they were busy that night. They would call again tomorrow or the next day and some date for a gettogether would be worked out. Now she was back in the living room again, wearing an expression, he knew well, that of being firmly in the right though without animosity for those who weren't. "Thirty," she said firmly. "It was right after you won the golf tournament." If it was time to argue. Iris was ready. Even studying her familiar face at close range, he could neither see nor remember which parts of it were synthetic skin and which her own, rejuvenated. There were no actual wrinkles on it anywhere, only the ghost of a line or two at the corners of the eyes. Even under close inspection she could be taken for a youthful twenty-eight. Her face and body were changing no more over the decades than were his golf or bowling score. He and Iris took long vacations from each other sometimes, but stayed married. He had found no one with whom he would rather live. "It's nearly a hundred years since we were married," he recalled aloud and tasted his brandy. "Will you miss me very much?" "I shall miss you, of course. Our relationship has been -- very nearly perfect. But if it will make you happy, Matthew, go ahead and die. What is it? Boredom?" "Not really." He indicated with the most minimal inclination of his head, which Iris instantly interpreted correctly, that they might go and seat themselves near the fire. Stretching out his legs there in front of his chair, Pandareus continued: "I think you know me well enough to believe that I am not trying to appear altruistic when I say that the time has come for me to move on and make room for someone else." "Of course, dearest." "There are -- what? -- maybe elenow, and I think the number has hardly changed in the last few centuries. Fortunately starvation and disease are no longer problems. But it is a mixed blessing that practically no one dies unintentionally any more -- how can new lives be lived if the old will not make way? When was the last time you saw a child? If every -- " "Speaking of children," Iris interrupted. "I don't mean to interrupt, but speaking of children, I hope you're not planning to have yourself terminated before the nineteenth." "Of what? This month?" Automatically he looked for a calendar but could not see one. "Why?" "Janet called." His previous wife. "I mean, she left a message while we were on vacation. Things have been so hectic I forgot to tell you. Your five-great grandson is making his bar mitzvah on that date, you're to be sure to attend." "Bar mitzvah?" He rehearsed in his mind the names and generations comprising the straight unbranching line of his descendants. "I didn't think Liang was Jewish." "Perhaps what Janet meant was his confirmation. At any rate -- " " -- be sure to be there. Yes. Well, I had hoped to get away soon, having decided that it was the right move to make. But Janet would really feel hurt -- if I know her. Is there any way we could get together with her, maybe this week or next week, and discuss it face to face? Let's see, when -- " The communications screen chimed. Another set of friends, these just back from their own vacation. T she next day in his office on the upper floor of the duplex apartment he consulted his business calendar as soon as he could find the time. He discovered there was no use after all in trying to get in touch with Janet and see her, because even if the nineteenth were clear he had made commitments for important business meetings on the twenty-first and twenty-second. The firm in which he was a partner -- dealers in antiques and folk art -- was a small one and no great wealth hung on his decisions, but still an obligation was an obligation. He switched his calendar to the following month. Studying the new pattern of appointments and memoranda displayed electronically on the glowing glass screen he at first found nothing in it that could not in good conscience be entrusted to his heirs and assigns. But wait, there was the antique furniture auction in Minneapolis. Of course, he and Iris had gone to a great deal of trouble to plan their vacation so he would be sure to be back in time for that. The auction would be an ideal chance for him to train one or two of the younger people in the firm as buyers and he supposed he owed it to his partners to carry on that far. Now, the month after that... of course, he was supposed to be in Europe for the round of trade shows. Again, the feeling that he would be letting others down if he bowed out. His wife might have a chance to go along. She also wanted to take part of the history study group that she was heading -- all adults, of course -- to Europe. The next month, now, was all clear, except for trivia that he could disregard if he put his mind to it. He did put his mind to it. Then with his electronic stylus he wrote the calendar screen. That evening, however, after helping Iris grade papers from her drama group before some friends came over, he paused suddenly with a foodbar halfway to his mouth, staring after his wife who had just vanished into the kitchen to start preparing the drinks and smokes and slices and dip. He had just been struck by the realization that the month he had tentatively chosen for his demise was the month of their hundredth anniversary. He had been deliberately keeping his calendar for that month clear of other major events, never dreaming that he could forget the big one. Of course, they could have some worthy celebration (was it on the fifteenth or the sixteenth?) and then he could terminate a few days later -- but no. The scene would be very awkward. He could hear the questions now: And what are you and your husband doing to celebrate, my dear? And the good wishes: May the next hundred years be as happy as the first. No, any time that month would definitely be too close. He would have to ask Iris how she felt about it. But there was the door and the bridge club was starting to arrive. his lawyer on the screen -- they were locked in a time-consuming squabble with another art dealer over the correct attribution of an early-American painting -- and he took the opportunity to discuss the legal aspects of dying. The lawyer shook his head. "Haven't time to go intothe whole thing right now. But it's not advisable for you to terminate at present. You'd do much better to wait until after the first of the year. The tax structure..." Pandareus had to cut the call short a minute later and hurry out to meet a potential big customer for lunch -- so he managed to gain no very clear understanding of the tax structure. But he had become convinced that dying before the first of the year was financially inadvisable. His first feeling was actually one of relief. This enforced delay would give him a breathing space in which to plan calmly for an exit that would have some dignity and perhaps even a touch of ceremony about it. But in his heart he knew that if you let projects slide long enough it was difficult to get back to them. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would try to set up a termination date as soon after the first of the year as possible. When he came down from the office that night -- later than he had planned -- he found Iris sprawled on the sofa, her shoes off. She greeted him with a faint welcoming cry. "Ahh! Come rub my feet. I have had a day, Matthew, the story of which you will hardly be inclined to believe." "That conference on endangered virus species?" "That was yesterday. No, I went shopping this morning and this afternoon I had to go see that place where we were planning to store our boat next winter -- remember, you were too busy to go?" "Oh, yes." He sat on the sofa and began to rub a foot, squeezing the arch and instep with an expert touch. "Join me in a drink?" "Gladly. And that was only the start. From the boat storage establishment I had to go -- " The communicator screen chimed. The caller was the computer service company, reminding them that their home terminals were to be disconnected for a day's maintenance tomorrow. gone wearily to bed -- he dragged himself with proud determination up the stairs to his office again. Jaw outthrust, he set himself to decide firmly once and for all -- insofar as such decision might be possible for one man aided by computer -- the year, month and day upon which his life would end. He dropped into the chair before his desk with a sigh, brushed aside the printouts, accumulated during dinner, of Antique Dealer's Bulletin and five other periodicals he never had time to read. He punched for a combined full printout, on microtape, of his business and social calendars for the next twelve months. Next year's vacation, for example, had been arranged that far in advance. He and Iris were planning to go back to Indonesia, where they had not visited for sixty years. He took his tired mind firmly in hand. Forget about seeing Indonesia again. While riding the tubeliner to Boston to attend a class reunion he finished other tasks in time to put the calendar microtape into a projector and begin work on the problem. Scanning back over the printout -- chronologically from the scheduled vacation -- setting his mind in as ruthless a frame as possible, he mentally pruned out an underbrush of minor appointments. celebrations and entertainments planned from a sense of social duty. With his finger gliding on the projected image of the microtape he drew the surcease of eternity closer and ever closer to the hurtling moment of the present in which he dwelt. "Would you care for a cocktail, sir?" "No, thank you." He could have used one, but, nagged by the urgency of finishing before they got to Boston or probably not at all in the immediate future, he stuck with his work. Four months nearer to his present, moving anti-clockward from next year's vacation, his finger stopped, having run into the notable barrier of the annual banquet of the Old Marrieds' Club, for which he and Iris had standing reservations... Yes. That would set a time. Attend the banquet, dropping to a few old friends broad hints that he would not be back next year, delay a decent month and then bow out. He straightened in his seat, turned off the projector and slid it back into its travel case. Settled, and they were just pulling into Boston. Once in a while things worked out just right. the reunion he began trying to get in touch with his physician. It was a few days before the doctor, repeatedly trying to return his call, did so at a moment when Pandareus was available. Communication established, Pandareus promptly asked for and was given the name of another doctor, who had done terminations for several other people. "There aren't any real specialists," his own doctor assured Pandareus. "Not in the field you want. Not enough people are having it done. How about a round of golf on Wednesday?" "Can't," said Pandareus automatically and then consulted his calendar to make sure of why. "My father's coming into town that day. Maybe next week?" The doctor looked off screen, evidently checking his own calendar, and frowned. "I'll try to call you back on it. You'll like Dr. James. One of the best men in the city." "Thanks." "Right." Pandareus broke the connection and punched for Dr. James. A busysignal. Well, he would try calling in the afternoon, before the time came to leave for the matinee. Eventually he got through. "Dr. James's office," a receptionist of timeless prettiness told him. "How do you do. I'd like to make an appointment to talk to the doctor, or talk to him right now if that's feasible. It's regarding my contemplated termination." "I see, sir." Even before taking his name she asked, "And when is your preferred date for termination?" He told her. The receptionist was gently, exquisitely concerned. "I'm sorry, sir, but Dr. James will be on vacation that month." B ut he persevered. Iris helped a lot. Seated with her in an aircab on his way at last to Dr. James's office to be terminated, he looked back on the months since his first firm decision to die and found the time, as viewed from his present angle, to be almost disconcertingly short. Iris, riding beside him, was tired. She held an envelope containing some of the necessary papers, which they had only just managed to have signed in time, this very morning. "Oh, God, I'm dead," she murmured without thinking, and then looked over at him with alarm. "That was thoughtless of me, wasn't it?" "Not at all, my dear. I won't be easily upset today. I feel happy. Completed. Fulfilled. A successful race run, a well-earned rest ahead, as it were. I want you to share my joy." "I do, Matthew." But a little movement about the lips and throat, a tiny lift of the head, counterbalanced all the happy intonations she was putting into her voice. She was trying her best to act as if nothing were wrong, but after a little more than a hundred years he could infallibly tell when something out of the ordinary was bothering her. "Iris, what are your plans for the immediate future? I really haven't had time to discuss it with you." "I'd like to get away for a while, Matthew. But I don't see how I can . My desensitivity training group begins to meet next week. And there will be any number of loose ends to tidy up regarding your departure." "Something more is bothering you. I can tell. Are you going to miss me too much, after all?" "No, dear. If your absence affects me unduly I will just think of you as being on a long trip somewhere. And keep busy." He pressed her hand. "But there is something. I insist on hearing what it is. It is most unfair to conceal things from me at this juncture." "Matthew, I am not going to interfere with your happy departure. You have put so much time and effort into arranging it. Into making an achievement of your whole life. To -- to close it properly, like a good poem." "Something is definitely wrong and you are going to tell me what it is. Or I will stop the cab until you do." Iris put down the bulky envelope and looked for a tissue. "You have nothing to regret. You have certainly been a good husband to me. You have kept almost every promise you ever made." Aha. "What promise or promises have I failed to keep?" "I have really nothing to complain of, Matthew." The airborne cab glided to a soft waiting halt on the roof of the building housing Dr. James's office, but neither of the passengers got out at once. Pandareus had to spar through another verbal round or two with his wife before the reason for her unhappiness was clear. "It was more than ninety years ago, Matthew, and I am sure you have forgotten it. But early in our marriage you did promise me that one day we would have a child." H e closed his eyes for a moment. Recollection ofthe promise had been coming back hazily, subconsciously, for some indeterminate time. Perhaps she had been dropping hints, trying to remind him. Anyway, there was no real surprise in hearing about the promise now and he could not honestly deny that it had been made. An obligation was an obligation and he had several times already put off dying for lesser ones than this. This was rather more important than a five-great grandson's confirmation, he supposed. "Iris, do you really think we have the right to bring a new life into the world?" "Oh, Matthew, the world can certainly support one more, with hydrogen-fusion power and reclamation and all the rest. An equilibrium has been reached. It's not as if everyone were reproducing; I was reading just the other day how remarkable it is that so few exercise their legal rights to do so. The author was wondering why. And even if you did father a child once before -- I've never had one. I don't think people are going to comment." "I suppose not." He gave his wife the ghost of a smile, let his hand hang in the air for a moment and then signaled decisively for the cab to open its door. "Just let me step into James's office and let them know there's been a change of plan." "Oh, Matthew! How loving of you to do this for me." She gripped his fingers and looked into his eyes intently. "You must understand, having a child will mean that your presence as a father is required for an indefinite period. The child will need you psychologically. It will mean years added to your life." "I've been through it all before, remember?" He kissed her on the cheek. "The decision is made. I'll be right back." But he was gone quite a long time, and she began to worry. Suppose he had -- but no, there he was, looking a little happier than when he left, reaching briskly for the cab's door. "James was pretty good about it all," Pandareus said, getting in. "But my change of mind meant there were more forms to be filled out and we'll have to check back with city hall, the crematorium and the lawyers and -- " He broke off to snap his fingers with irritation. "I meant to ask James if he could put us in touch with a good -- what d'you call 'em? -- obstetrician. Doctor who oversees gestation. And also one of those hospitals where they have an artificial womb. Those're supposed to be much improved these days." Iris was relaxed now, content and comfortable. "Oh, no, Matthew. It was on television just the other day that artificial wombs are being discontinued once again. Even the new models had too many drawbacks." Pandareus gave the cab its new orders and leaned back beside' his wife as it took off and promptly became stuck in a traffic jam at the five-hundred-meter aerial level. "Then you'll just have to go through the whole nine months of inconvenience and the big disabling trauma at the end. I went through it all with Janet." He shook his head and smiled a little. "It's going to take some planning. Well, if it will make you happy, dear. When do you want to have the baby? Get it started, I mean?" "Let's see." Then Iris's forehead almost creased with a pretty frown of light vexation. "Oh, dear. If we got baby started right now he'd be born just when our vacation trip is on. Let's see -- "  An Informal Science Fictions Fantasy Journal Articles -- Interviews -- Reviews -- Letters Scheduled for ##: "Tomorrow's Libido -- Sex and Science Fiction", an eye-opening survey by Richard Delap. psycho-cultural analysis -- "Reading Heinlein Subjectively" by Alexei  Cory Panshin. -- new book and story lists. Sample l.#. year #. two years Portland, OR #I Peace came to Earth -- but who was left to care? working overtime again. In spite of the Q-Systems Air Conditioning in the computer room he is uncomfortable. This assignment is plush by most standards, but being alone is getting to him. He has # x # movies to choose from and the Automatic Menu System puts out anything from a hotdog to gourmet Sometimes he wishes that the menu included peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, but what dietician would put those in a program? The game room has everything including the automatic playback pingpong table. He can now beat it on System Three and he can give it a good game on System Four. Sometimes, just for fun, he sets it all the way to System Ten to watch the balls spin at fantastic angles from the return. Some of them corkscrew all the way across the room. He never has been able to return even one shot. The best relaxation of all is when the UN-# computer is on Mode # and he can go outside to lie on the beach and listen to the surf. Those waves are really something. No programing them or their sequence. They are always the same but always different. Sometimes they seem to be talking to him, telling him that all this will change but the sea will remain. For weeks now he has been getting erratic answers from the computer, and that worries him. When the United Nations decided to put UN-# into a safe place they compared locations all over the globe and selected this island for its freedom from possible earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes and solar wind problems. UN-# had been in Geneva to be free from war, but the Spitzmark Revolution stirred up so much violence that it was damaged and repairs could not be completed for five weeks. That almost ruined everything because UN-#, although primitive, controlled the world supply and distribution of energy. UN-# was hurried to completion on Sandoval in the Pacific, but an underwater volcano did that one in. Fortunately UN-# predicted its own death early enough for the United Nations to find this rock and build UN-#. John had interned on UN-# and When Rolley retired after the installation and testing of UN-#, he was offered this post and jumped at the chance. Now in the middle of his four-year term he is getting deviant feedback from major terminals around the world. He had requested Master Programer Assistance from the UN days ago but could get no clear response. The UN outbound line tested -- and still tests -- alive from this end and none of the redundant UN circuits cut in on Auto #. He had overridden the Master and introduced the R Circuit to UN, but still he received garbled data. He was sure that they must understand the difficulty, for with trouble at this level there would be major conflicts in scheduling of airline travel, freight train and barge traffic. There would also be some disruption in the atmospheric distribution of electrical energy. When that happened the minor terminals, usually India and Malaysia, really griped to UN Master although they suffered less than the major terminals. He had sent a General Program Problem Report to all terminals and had included a Major Malfunction and Time Ration Schedule. This had gone out two days ago and the Repeat-Acknowledge Response Analysis readout had indicated that it had been received in # of the # Specific Outlet Terminals. The local repeaters would pass this along to UN Master -- he should have received inbound analysis yesterday. Since it did not arrive, there must be a major disturbance. UN-# itself could not locate the trouble. Its internal analysis reported: What was wrong? There were no major earthquakes, no atmospheric disturbances, only one war and at last Summary Analysis from UN to all terminals it was reported localized along the China-Russia border. B oth of these major terminals had Laser C and both were reported to have Earth Magnet Directional Guidance capability. If true, this meant either could direct the Laser C beam along any of Earth's magnetic lines and wipe out anything in its path from magnetic pole to magnetic pole and from ground level to # meters above mean sea level. Power requirements to do this would be outrageous, but both China and the Russians could power the C beam'for a total of # of magnetic line in increments of #. Such use of power would require complete blackouts of energy within the nation and would be immediately noted by UN-# and be condemned by the United Nations through United Nations Master. At that point, input energy to the offending terminals would be suspended, thus putting to an end the use of Laser C and any other major energy use. would cause continuous destruction from magnetic pole to magnetic pole along the chosen line. This was the reason that the United Nations finally agreed to limit the manufacture of Laser C producing equipment. The use of this ultimate weapon could cause unconscionable destruction to nonwarring nations who happened to lie along the unlucky magnetic line. But. Suppose each nation started to draw power from World Energy? Suppose some of the erratic readings had been because each nation started this withdrawal and their terminals spotted the other's withdrawal. Suppose each had wired around its outbound terminal trunk to hide this withdrawal, but by spying or superior programing found out about the plans at the other terminal? Suppose each fired at the other's capital. and Laser base, or one fired first and the other's Dead-Fire circuits fired back? Then the capital terminal would be wiped out. If the wire-arounds were in the Laser base buried deep in the ground below mean sea level and were untouched, they could continue to draw energy and fire again and again, cutting across # of the Earth's longitude per day per country. Firing on a programed schedule until all of the other country was wiped out andor until the other's Laser Surface Reflector was destroyed. If one laser were destroyed the other would (or could) continue to blast for as long as its program ran or until shutoff. If neither of these happened, it would run until it destroyed Earth's energy supply. E xhausted from worry, overwork and lack of sleep, John punches into his console a weary: I wish I could get through to some people. Swiftly, UN-# tests this and replies at # words per minute, John goes to the window, half expecting to see the waves smile, but they just roll enigmatically one after the other, after the other, after -- John smiles, walks down to the beach, sits looking at the waves and starts talking to them as one friend to another and another, and another and --  # by Christopher Priest Helward Mann of Earth City has reached manhood at the age of six hundred and fifty miles. His age is reckoned by the city's progress toward the Optimum -- e.g. from the moment of Helward's birth Earth City has traveled six hundred and fifty miles toward this elusive goal, a process of which Helward knows little or nothing. His early years, spent in the creche with other city children, have been sheltered. His education has been Earth oriented and has given him little information about the planet the city now traverses. Following elaborate rites welcoming him to adulthood -- at which Helward elects to become an apprentice of the Future Surveyors' Guild and his engagement to a girl named Victoria Lerouex is announced -- Helward is permitted to see his first sunrise, actually his first glimpse of the outside. Assigned to serve his initial term as an apprentice with the Trackmen's Guild, he discovers that the city moves forward across the planet's surface on rails painstakingly laid ahead of it and as painstakingly removed once they have served their purpose (a) to prevent the city's sliding backward and (b) to be reused. He also learns that the city is fusionpowered and is the sole source of the good life on the planet -- it alone has adequate (if tasteless and synthetic) food, clothing medical and educational facilities. It uses these to barter for workers and women to bear children -- of which it has a shortage -- from among primitive tribes of aliens or "tooks" en route. The women acquired by barter remain in the city long enough to bear a child to a city male, are then returned to their tribes. The knowledge of how the city came to be is lost. It is, however, known that somehow it originated on Earth and that, in order to survive, it must be winched constantly toward the Optimum, which moves ahead of it. Instructions to this effect are contained in a document known as Destain's Directive, handed down from the city's founder in some dim antiquity. Ideally the city should progress at the rate of onetenth of a mile a day. This pace, however, is never maintained -- there is uneven terrain to contend with; rivers and gorges must be bridged. The city has never been closer than three miles to the Optimum, This, however, is enough to keep it alive and functioning. There is discontent both within and outside the city. Helward experiences both. Victoria, whom he has married, finds her life in urban confinement pointless, Helward has taken an apprentice's oath never to discuss the outside or the city's relationship to it with the uninitiated under penalty of death. To save his marriage, however, he breaks his vow in conversations with Victoria. He also is involved and injured in a riot of resentful "took"' workers. Alone in the hut, I undressed carefully and looked at the damage. One side of my chest was a mass of bruises and there were several deep and painful scratches. The wound on my neck had stopped bleeding, but I washed it in warm water and put on it some ointment I found in Malchuskin's first-aid box. I discovered that in the fight one of my fingernails had been badly torn and my jaw ached when I tried to move it. I thought again about returning to the city as Collings had suggested -- it was, after all, only a matter of a few hundred yards away -- but in the end thought better of it. I had no wish to draw attention to myself by appearing in the sterile, clean surroundings of the city looking as if I had just come out of a drunken brawl. The truth wasn't too far from that, but even so I thought I would lick my own wounds. I tried to sleep, only managing to doze off for a few minutes at a time. In the morning I was awake early and got up. I didn't wish to see Malchuskin before I had had a chance to clean myself up further. My whole body ached and I could move only slowly. When he arrived, Malchuskin was in a bad mood. "I heard," he said straight away. "Don't try to explain." "I can't understand what happened." "You were instrumental in starting a brawl." "It was the militia -- " I said weakly. "Yes, and you ought to know by now that you keep the militia away from the tooks. They lost a few men some miles back and there are a few scores to settle. Any excuse and those stupid bastards go in and start clubbing." "Collings was in trouble," I said. "Something had to be done quickly." "All right, it wasn't entirely your fault. Collings says now that he could have handled it if you hadn't brought the militia in -- but he also admits that he told you to fetch them." "That's right." "All right. But think, next time." "What do we do now?" I said. "We've no laborers." "There are more coming today. The work will go slowly at first, because we'll have to train them for it. But the advantage is that the resentments won't start at once and they'll work harder. It's later, when they get time to add things up, that the trouble begins." "But why do they resent us? Surely, we pay them for their services." "Yes, but at our price. This is a poor region. The soil's bad and there's not much food. We pass by in our city, offer them what they need -- and they take it. But they get no long-term benefit, and I suppose we take more than we give." "We should give more." "Maybe." Malchuskin looked indifferent. "That's none of our concern. We work the track." We had to wait several hours for the new men to arrive. During that time Malchuskin and I went to the dormitory huts vacated by the workers and cleaned them out. The earlier occupants had been hustled away by the militiamen during the night, but they had been given time to collect their belongings. They had left a lot, though -- mainly old and worn garments and scraps of food. Malchuskin warned me to keep an eye open for any kind of message that might have been left for the new men, but neither he nor I discovered anything of this sort. Later we went outside and burned anything that had been left. Around midday a man from the Barter guild came to us and said that the new laborers would be with us shortly. We were made a formal apology about what had happened the previous evening and told that in spite of much discussion it had been decided that the militia guard would be strengthened for the time being. Malchuskin protested, but the Barter guildsman could only agree -- the decision had been taken against his own opinion. I was in two minds about this. On the one hand I had no great admiration for the militiamen, but if their presence could avert a repetition of the trouble I supposed it was necessary. Malchuskin was beginning to fret about the delay. I presumed that this was because of the constant need to make up lost time, but when I mentioned this he was not as concerned about moving on as I'd thought. "We'll make time on the optimum on the next winching," he said. "The delay last time was because of the ridge. That's behind us now and the land's fairly level ahead of us for the next few miles. I'm more concerned about the state of the track still left behind the city." "The militia will be protecting it," I said. "Yes, but they can't stop it from buckling. That's the main risk, the longer it's left." "Why?" Malchuskin looked at me sharply. "We're a long way south of optimum. You know what that means?" "No." "You haven't been down past yet?" "What does that mean?" "A long way south of the city." "No, I haven't." "Well, when you go down there you'll find out what happens. In the meantime, take my word for it. The longer we leave the track laid south of the city, the more risk there is of it's becoming unusable." T here was still no sign of the hired men and Malchuskin left me and went over and spoke to two more Track guildsmen who had just come out of the city. In a while he returned. "We'll wait another hour and if no one's come by then we'll borrow some men from one of the other guilds and start work. We can't wait any longer." "Can you do that, use other guilds?" "Hired men are a luxury, Helward," he said. "In the past the track-laying was done by guildsmen alone. Moving the city's the main priority and nothing stands in the way. If we had to we'd have everyone in the city out here laying track." Suddenly he seemed to relax. He stretched out on the ground and closed his eyes. The sun was almost directly overhead and it seemed hotter than usual. I noticed that in the northwest hung a line of dark clouds and that the air felt stiller and more humid than normally. A few minutes later Malchuskin sat up and looked northward. Coming toward us was a large band of men, led by five of the Barter guildsmen wearing their regalia of cloaks and colors. "Good -- now we start work," said Malchuskin. In spite of his barely concealed relief there was much that had to be done before work could begin. The men had to be organised into four groups and an English-speaking one appointed leader. Then bunks had to be allotted in the huts and possessions stowed away. Malchuskin looked optimistic throughout all this. "They're looking hungry," he said. "Nothing like an empty belly to keep them working." They were indeed a disheveled lot. They all had clothes of sorts but very few had any shoes and most wore their hair and beards long. Their eyes were sunk deep and several sported stomachs swollen from lack of proper food. I noticed that one or two walked with discomfort and one had a mutilated arm. "Are they fit to work?" I asked Malchuskin quietly. "Not properly. But a few days of A dazzling new Super Agent Ska  " The stakes  are even more deadly as Steve Austin -- "The Bionics Man" -- confronts an international black market ring in nuclear weapons. # at bookstores or from # Third Ave., New York # work and a proper diet, and they'll be okay. A lot of tooks look like this when we first hire them." I was shocked by the condition they were in and reflected that the local standard of living must be as bad as Malchuskin had made out. If this were so I could better understand the way resentment grew against the people of the city. I supposed that what the-city gave in return for the laborers was a long way beyond what they were generally accustomed to and this gave them a glimpse of a better-fed, more comfortable life. As the city passed on they would have to revert to their former primitive existence, the city meanwhile having taken of the people's best. More delays, as the men were given food, but Malchuskin was looking more optimistic than ever. Finally we were ready to begin. The men formed themselves into four groups, each headed by a guildsman. We set off for the city, collected the four track bogies and headed south down the tracks in grand style. To each side of the rails the militiamen continued their guard and as we crossed the ridge we saw that down in the valley we had recently vacated there was a strong guard around the track buffers. M alchuskin stopped the bogie a short distance before the buffer and explained to the group leader -- a middle-aged man named Juan -- what had to be done. Juan relayed this to the men and they nodded their understanding. "They haven't the vaguest idea what they've got to do," Malchuskin said to me, chuckling. "But they'll pretend to understand. The first task was to dismantle the buffer and move it up the tracks to a position just behind the city. Malchuskin and I had only just started to demonstrate how the buffer was dismantled when the sun went in abruptly and the temperature dropped. Malchuskin glanced up at the sky. "We're in for a storm." After this remark he paid no more attention to the weather and we continued with the work. A few minutes later we heard the first distant grumble of thunder and a short while after that the rain began to fall. The hired men looked up in alarm, but Malchuskin kept them going. Soon the storm was on top of us, the lightning flashing and the thunder cracking in a way that terrified me. We were all soon drenched, but the work continued. I heard the first complaints, but Malchuskin -- through Juan -- stilled them. As we were taking the component parts of the buffer back up the track the storm cleared and the sun came out again. One of the men began to sing and soon the others joined in. Malchuskin looked happy. The day's work finished with erecting the buffer a few yards behind the city. The other crews also stopped work when they had built theirs. The next day we started early. Malchuskin still looked happy but expressed his desire to get on with the work as fast as we could. As we tried to take up the southernmost part of the track, I saw at first hand the cause of his worry. The tie-bars holding the rails to the sleepers had bent, and had to be wrenched away manually. Most became mangled beyond re-use. Too, the pressure of the tie-bars against the sleepers had split the wood in many places -- though Malchuskin declared they could be used again -- and many of the concrete foundations had cracked. Fortunately the rails themselves were still in a usable condition. Although Malchuskin said they had buckled slightly, he reckoned they could be straightened again without too much difficulty. He held a brief conference with the other Track guild smen and it was decided to dispense with the use of the bogies for the moment and concentrate on digging up the track before any more of it became distorted. As it was still some two miles between where we were working and the city, each journey in the bogie took a long time and this decision made sense. By the end of that day wt had worked our way up the track to a point where the buckling effect was only beginning to be felt. Malchuskin and the others declared themselves satisfied. We loaded the bogies with as many of the rails and the sleepers as they would hold, and then we called a halt again. And so the track labors continued. By the time my ten-day period came to an end, the track-removal was well advanced. The hired men were working well as teams and already the new track to the north of the city was being laid. When I left Malchuskin he was as contented as I had ever seen him and I felt not in the least guilty about taking my two days' leave. IX her room. By this time the bruises and scratches from the fracas had mostly healed and I had decided to say nothing of it. Word of the scuffle had evidently not reached her, for she did not ask me about it. After leaving Malchuskin's hut in the morning I had walked to the city, enjoying that early part of the morning before it became too hot, and now I suggested to Victoria that we go up to the platform. "I think it'll be locked at this time of day," she said. "I'll go see." She was gone for a few minutes, then returned to confirm that this was so. "I suppose it'll be open some time after midday," I said, thinking that by then the sun would have passed from the view of the platform. "Take off your clothes," she said. "They need laundering again." I started to undress but suddenly Victoria came over to me and put her arms around me. We kissed, spontaneously realizing that we were pleased to see each other. "You're putting on weight," she said as she slipped the shirt from my shoulders and ran her hand lightly across my chest. "It's all the work I'm doing," I said and began to unbutton her clothes. As a consequence of this change in our plans it wasn't until some time later that Victoria took my clothes away to be laundered, leaving me to enjoy the comforts of a proper bed. After we had eaten some lunch we discovered that the way to the platform was now open and so we moved up there. This time we were not alone -- two men from the Education administration were there before us. They recognized us both from our days in the creche and soon we were involved in a bland conversation about what we had been doing since coming of age. From Victoria's expression I gathered that she was as bored as I was with this, but neither of us liked to make a move to finish it. In due course the men bade us farewell and returned to the interior of the city. Victoria winked at me, then giggled. "God, I'm glad we're not still in the creche," she said. "So am I. And I thought they were interesting when they were teaching us." We sat down together on one of the seats and looked out across the landscape. From this part of the city it was not possible to see what was happening immediately at the side of the city, and even though I knew the track crews would be carting rails from the southern side to the north, it was not possible to see them. "Helward -- why does the city move?" "I don't know. Not exactly, anyway." She said, "I don't know what the guilds imagine we think about this. No one ever says anything about it, though one has only to come up here to see the city has moved. And yet if you ask anyone about it you're told it's not the concern of an administrator. Are we not supposed to ask questions?" "They tell you nothing?" "Nothing at all. A couple of days ago I came up here and discovered that the city had moved. A few days before that the platform had been locked for two days on end and word was passed around to secure loose property. But that was all." "Okay," I said, "you tell me something. At the time the city was moving -- were you aware of it?" "No -- or I think not. I didn't realize until afterward that it had moved. Thinking back, I don't recall anything unusual about the day it must have happened -- but I've never left the city, so I suppose all the time I was growing up I must have got used to whatever goes on. Does the city travel along a road?" "A system of tracks." "But why?" "I shouldn't tell you." "You promised you would. Anyway, I don't see what harm it would do to tell me how it moves -- it's pretty clear it does." The old dilemma again, but what she said made sense even though it was in conflict with the oath. Gradually I was coming to wonder more and more about the continued validity of the oath, even as I felt it eroding about me. I said, "The city is moving toward something known as the optimum, which lies due north of the city. At the moment the city is about three and a half miles south of optimum." "So it will stop soon?" "No -- and that's what isn't clear to me. Apparently, even if the city ever did reach optimum it couldn't stop as the optimum itself is always moving." "Then what's the point of trying to reach it?" I had no answer to that. I didn't know. tions and in the end I told her about the work on the tracks. I tried to keep my descriptions to the minimum, but it was difficult to know how far I was breaching the oath -- in spirit if not in practice. I found that everything I said to her I qualified immediately afterward with a reference to the oath. Finally she said, "Look, don't say any more about this. You obviously don't want to." "I'm just confused," I said. "I'm forbidden to talk, but you've made me see that I don't have any right to withhold from you what I know." Victoria was silent for a minute or two. "I don't know about you," she said eventually, "but in the last few days I've begun to develop a rather strong dislike for the guild system." "You're not alone. I haven't heard many advocate it." "Do you think it could be that those in charge of the guilds keep it in operation after it has outlived its original purpose? It seems to me that the system works by suppression of knowledge. I don't see what that achieves. It has made me very discontented and I'm sure I'm not alone." "Perhaps I'll be like all the others when I become a full guildsman." "I hope not," she said and laughed. "There is one thing," I said. "Whenever I've asked Malchuskin -- he's the man I'm working with -- the sort of questions you've asked me, he says that I'll find out in due course. It's as if there were a good reason for the guilds and it relates in some way to the reason the city has to move. So far, all I've learned is the city does have to move -- but that's all. When I'm out there it's all work and there's no time to ask questions. But what is clear is that moving the city is the first priority." "If you ever find out, will you tell me?" I thought for a moment. "I don't see how I can promise that." Victoria stood up abruptly and walked to the far side of the platform. She stood at the rail, looking out across the roof of the city building below at the countryside. I made no move to join her. It was an impossible situation. Already I had said too much -- and in her demands that I say more Victoria was placing too great a burden on me. And yet I couldn't deny her. After a few minutes she returned to the seat and sat down beside me. "I've found out how we get married," she said. "Another ceremony?" "No, it's much simpler. We just have to sign a form and give a copy to each of our chiefs. I've got the forms downstairs -- they're really very straightforward." "So we, could sign them right away." "Yes." She looked at me seriously. "Do you want to?" "Of course. Do you?" "Yes." "In spite of everything?" "What do you mean?" she asked. "In spite of the fact that you and I can't seem to talk without coming across something I either can't or shouldn't tell you -- and the fact that you seem to blame me for it." "Does it worry you?" "A lot, yes." "We could postpone getting married if you prefer." "Would that solve anything?" I was uncertain of what it would mean if Victoria and I broke off our engagement. Because the guilds had been instrumental in formally introducing us, what new breach of the system would it imply to say now that we did not intend to marry? On the other hand, with the formal introduction out of the way, no pressure had been put on us to marry immediately. As far as she and I were concerned the vexations of the limitations placed by the oath were the only differences between us. Without those, we seemed to be perfectly suited to each other. "Let's leave it for a while," said Victoria. Later in the day we returned to her room and the mood lightened considerably. We talked a lot, carefully skirting those topics of conversation we both knew caused problems -- and by the time we went to bed our attitudes had changed. When we awoke in the morning we signed the forms and took them along to the guild leaders. Future Glausewitz was not in the city but I found another Future guildsman, and he accepted the form on Clausewitz's behalf. Everyone seemed to be pleased and later that day Victoria's mother spent a lot of time with us, telling us of what new freedoms and advantages we would enjoy. Before I left the city to rejoin Malchuskin on the tracks I cleared what remained of my possessions from the creche and moved in officially with Victoria. I was a married man and I was six hundred and fiftytwo miles old. X F or the next few miles my life settled into a routine that was for the most part agreeable. During my visits to the city my life with Victoria was comfortable, happy and loving. She would tell me of her work and through her I came to learn how the day-to-day life of the city was administered. Sometimes she would ask me about my labors outside, but her early curiosity had either faded or she now thought better of asking me, for the resentments never again became as obvious as at first. Outside, my apprenticeship progressed. The more work outside the city I participated in, the more I realized how much of a mutual effort the city's moving was. At the end of my last mile with Malchuskin I was transferred on order of Clausewitz to the militia. This came as an unpleasant surprise as I had assumed that on completion of my training on the tracks I would start work with my own guild of Futures. However, I discovered that I was to be transferred to another first-order guild every three miles. I was sorry to leave Malchuskin, for his simple application to the strenuous work on the tracks had an undeniable appeal. After we were past the ridge the terrain had been easier for track-laving, and as the new group of hired men continued to labor without untoward complaint his discontents had seemed to fade. Before reporting to the militia I sought out Clausewitz. I did not wish to make too much of an issue, but I asked him for the reason behind the decision. "It's standard practice, Mann," he said. "But, sir, I thought by now I should be ready to enter my own guild." He sat in a relaxed manner behind his desk, not in the least disturbed by my mild protest. I guessed tht such a query was not unusual. "We have to maintain a full militia. Sometimes it becpmes necessary to draft other guildsmen to defend the city. If so, we do not have the time then to train them. Every first-order guildsman has served time in the militia -- and so must you." There was no arguing with that and so I became Crossbowman Secpnd Class Mann for the next three miles. I detested this period, fuming at the waste of time and the apparent insensitivity of the men I was forced to work with. I knew that I was only making life difficult for myself, and so it was, for within a few hours I was probably the most unpopular recruit in the entire militia. My only relief was the presence of two other apprentices -- one with the Barter guild and another with the Track guild -- who seemed to share my outlook. They, however, had the fortunate ability to adapt to the new company and suffered less than I. The quarters for the militia were in the area nrat to the stables at the very base of the city. These consisted of two large dormitories, and we were obliged to live, eat and sleep in conditions of intolerable overcrowding and filth. During the days we went through apparently endless periods of training. We made long marches across the countryside and were taught to fight unarmed, taught to swim rivers, taught to climb trees, taught to eat grass -- any number of other futile activities. At the end of the three miles I had learned to shoot with a crossbow and how to defend myself when unarmed. I had made myself some bitter personal enemies and knew I should have to keep out of their way for some considerable time to come. I wrote it off to experience. After this I was transferred to the Traction guild and at once I was much happier. Indeed, from this point to the end of my apprenticeship my life was pleasant and fruitful. The men responsible for the traction of the city were quiet, hardworking and intelligent. They moved without haste, but they saw that the work for which they were responsible was done -- and done well. My one previous experience of their work -- when watching the city being winched -- had not revealed to me the extent of their operations. Traction was not simply a question of moving the city but also involved its internal affairs. lowest level, I discovered, a large nuclear reactor was situated. It was from this that the city derived all its power, and the men who operated it were also responsible for the city's communication and sanitary systems. Many of the Traction guildsmen were water engineers and I learned that throughout the city there was a complicated system of pumping which ensured that almost every last drop of water was continually recycled. The food-synthesizer, I discovered to my horror, was based on a sewage-filtration device, and although it was operated and programed by administrators inside the city, it was in the Traction pumping room that the quantity (and in some respects the quality) of synthesized fo was ultimately determined. It was almost in the role of a secondary function that the reactor was used to power the winches. There were six of these and they were built in a massive steel housing running east-west across the city's base. Of the six, only five were used at any one time, the other being overhauled in rotation. The primary cause for concern with the winches was the bearings which, after many thousands of miles' use, were very worn. During the time I was with the Traction men there was a certain amount of debate on the subject of whether the winching should be carried out on four winches -- thus allowing more time for servicing bearings -- or should utilize all six winches, thus reducing wear. The consensus seemed to favor continuing with the present system, for no major decisions were taken. One of the jobs I worked on with the Traction men was checking the cables. This, too, was a recurring task, for the cables were as old as the winches and breakages happened more frequently than was ideal, which was never. Each of the six cables used by the city had been repaired several times and parts of each cable were beginning to fray. Before each winching, therefore, every one of the five cables to be used had to be checked over foot by foot, cleaned and greased and bound where frays occurred. Always -- in the reactor room or during work outside on the cables -- the talk was of catching up on the lost ground toward the optimum. How the winches might be improved, how new cables might be obtained. The entire guild seemed to be alive with ideas, but these were not men fond of theories. Much of their work was concerned with mundane matters -- for instance, while I was with the guild a new project was begun to construct an additional water reservoir in the city. One pleasurable benefit of this aspect of my apprenticeship was that I was able to spend the nights with Victoria. Although I came back to the room at night hot and dirty from my work, I was for this short period enjoying the comforts of a domestic existence and the satisfactions of a worthwhile job. One day, while working outside the city as one of the cables was being hauled mechanically out toward the distant stay emplacement, I asked the guildsman I was with about Gelman Jase. "An old friend of mine, apprenticed to your guild. Do you know him?" "About your age is he?" "A bit older." "We had a couple of apprentices a few miles back. Can't remember their names. I can check, if you like." I was curious to see Jase. It had been a long time since I'd seen him and I wanted to compare notes with someone who was going through the same process as myself. Later that day I was told that Jase had been one of the two apprentices the man had mentioned. I asked how I could contact him. "He won't be around for a while." "Where is he?" I said. "He's left the city. Down past." T oo soon my timewiththeTraction guild ended and I was transferred to Barter for the next three miles. I greeted this news with mixed feelings, having witnessed one of their operations at first hand . To my surprise I learned I was to work with Barter Codings -- and to my further surprise I discovered it was he who had requested I work with him. "I heard you were joining the guild for three miles," he said. "Thought I'd show you our work isn't all dealing with rioting tooks." Like the other guildsmen, Collings had a room in one of the forward towers of the city and here he showed me a long roll of paper with a detailed plan drawn on it. "You needn't take too much notice of most of this. It's a map of the terrain ahead of us and it's compiled by the Futures." He showed me the symbols for mountains, rivers, valleys, steep gradients -- all vital information for those who planned the route the city would take on its long slow journey toward optimum. "These black squares represent settlements. They're what we're concerned with. How many languages do you speak?" I told him that I had never found languages easy when in the creche, only spoke French -- and that haltingly. "As well you're not planning to join our guild permanently," he said. "Ability with languages is our stock in trade." He told me that the local inhabitants spoke Spanish and that he and the other Barter guildsmen had had to learn the language from one of the books in the library as there were no people of Spanish descent in the city. They got by, but there were recurring difficulties with dialects. Collings told me that of all the first-order guilds only the Track guild used hired labor regularly. Sometimes the Bridge-builders had to hire men for short periods, but by and large the major part of the Barters' work consisted of hiring manual laborers for the track work -- and what Collings referred to as "transference." "What is that?" I asked immediately. Collings said, "It's what makes us so unpopular. The city looks for settlements where food is short, where poverty is widespread. Fortunately for the city this is a poor region, so we have a strong bargaining position. We can offer the locals food, technology to help their farming, medicines, electrical power -- in return the men labor for us and we borrow their young women. They come to the city for a short while and perhaps they will give birth to new citizens." "I've heard of this," I said, "I can't believe it happens." "Why not?" "Isn't it -- immoral?" "Is it immoral to want to keep the city peopled? Without fresh blood we would die out within a couple of generations. Most children bom to people in the city are male." I remembered the light that had started. "But the women who transfer to the city are sometimes married, aren't they?" "Yes. But they stay only to give birth to one child. After that they are free to leave." "What happens to the child?" "If it is a girl she stays in the city and is brought up in the creche. If it is a boy the mother may take it with her or may leave it in the city." And then I understood the diffidence with which Victoria had spoken on this subject. My mother had come to the city from outside, and afterward had left. She had not taken me with her. I had been rejected. But there was no pain for me in this realization. B ack outside the city, I saw that the usual work on tracks and cables continued -- if with a general shortage of labor -- and that we were now only two miles from the site of the bridge. Speaking to one of the Traction guildsmen as I passed I learned that the city was only one and a half miles from optimum. This information did not register until later, when I realized that the bridge itself must actually be to the north of optimum by about a half-mile. There followed a long period of delay. The bridge-building proceeded slowly. After the accident more stringent safety precautions were introduced and there were recurring checks by Lerouex's men on the strength of the structure. As we worked, we learned that the tracklaying operations at the city were going slowly -- in one sene this suited us, as the bridge was a long way from being ready, but in another it was a cause for anxiety. Any time lost in the endless pursuit of the optimum was not good. One day word passed around the site that the bridge itself was at the point of optimum. This news caused me to look anew at our surroundings, but there seemed to be nothing unusual about optimum. Once again, I wondered what its special significance was, but as the days passed and the optimum moved on in its arcane way northward it moved also from my thoughts. With the resources of the city now being concentrated on the bridge, there was no chance of furthering my apprenticeship. Every ten days I was allowed my leave -- as were all guildsmen on the site -- but there was no thought now of my acquiring a general knowledge of the function of the various guilds. The bridge was the priority. Other work continued, though. A few yards to the south of the bridge a cable-stay emplacement was built and the tracks were run up to it. In due course the city was winched along the tracks, and it stood silently near the chasm waiting for the completion of the bridge. The most difficult and demanding aspect of the bridge-building came with running the chains across the chasm from the south towers to the north, then suspending the rails from them. Time was passing and Lerouex and the other guildsmen grew worried. I understood this was because, as the optimum moved slowly northward away from the bridge, the construction of the bridge itself would soon be laying itself open to the same problem that Malchuskin had shown me with the tracks to the south of the city -- it was likely to buckle. Although the design of the bridge was intended to compensate for this to a certain extent, there was a definite limit to how long we could delay the crossing. Now work continued through powered from within the city. Leave was suspended and a system of shifts devised. As the slabs of the railway were laid, Malchuskin and the others put down tracks. Meanwhile, cable stays  were being erected on the northern side, just beyond the elaborate ramps. The city was so close by that we were able to sleep in our quarters inside it and I found a confusing difference between the extreme activity of the bridge site and the comparatively calm and normal atmosphere of everyday work inside the city. My behavior evidently reflected this confusion, because for a while Victoria's questions about the work outside were renewed. Soon, though, the bridge was ready. There was a further delay of a day while Lerouex and the other Bridges guildsmen carried out a series of elaborate tests. Their expressions stayed concerned, even as they pronounced the bridge safe. During the hours of the night the city prepared for the winching. As dawn was breaking, the Traction men signaled the clear -- and with infinite stealth the city inched forward. I had taken a vantage point on one of the two suspension towers on the south side of the chasm and as the city's forward wheels moved slowly onto the tracks on the railway itself I felt a tremble of vibration through the tower as the chains took the strain. In the weak light of the rising sun I saw the suspension chains being tugged into a deeper curve by the weight, the rails clearly sagging under their immense burden. I looked at the Bridges guildsman nearest me, who was squatting on the tower a few yards away from me. His whole attention was on a loadmeter, which was connected to the overhead chains. No one watching the delicate operation moved or spoke, as if the slightest interruption could disturb the balance. The city moved on and soon the entire length of the bridge was bearing the weight of the city. The silence was broken abruptly. With a loud cracking noise that echoed around the rocky walls of the chasm one of the winch cables snapped and whiplashed back, slicing through a line of militiamen. A physical tremor ran through the structure of the bridge and from deep inside the city I heard the rising whine of the suddenly free winch, sharply cut off as the Traction man controlling the differential drive phased it out. Now on only four cables and moving visibly slower, the city continued on its way. On the northern side of the chasm, the broken cable lay snaked across the ground, curling over the bodies of five of the militiamen. The most critical part of the crossing was done -- the city moved between the two northern towers and began to slide slowly down the ramps toward the cable stays. Soon it stopped, but no one spoke. There was no sense of relief, no cry of celebration. On the far side of the chasm the bodies of the militiamen were being placed onto stretchers, ready to be taken into the city. The city itself was made safe for the moment, but there was much to be done. The bridge had caused an unavoidable delay and now the city was four and a half miles behind optimum. The tracks had to be taken up, the broken cable repaired. The suspension towers and chains had to be dismantled and saved for possible future use. Soon the city would be winching again -- ever onward, ever northward, heading for the optimum that managed somehow to be always a few miles ahead. T he barter guildsmen, like those of the Future, rode out across the countryside on horses. I had never learned to ride and so, when we left the city and headed north, I walked beside Collings. Later he showed me how to ride a horse, telling me that I would need to ride when I joined my father's guild. The technique came slowly. At first I was frightened of the animal and found it difficult to control. Gradually, as I realized the beast was docile and good-natured, my confidence grew and the horse -- as if understanding this -- responded better. We did not travel far from the city. There were two settlements to the northeast and we visited both. We were greeted with some curiosity, but Collings's assessment was that neither settlement displayed any great need for the commodities the city could offer and he made no attempts to negotiate. He told me that the city's needs for labor were met for the moment and that there were enough transferred women to be going on with. After the first journey away from the city -- which took nine days and during which we lived and slept in the rough -- I returned to the city with Collings, to hear the news that thCouncil of Navigators had given the go-ahead for a bridge to be built. According to the interpretation Codings gave me two possible routes lay ahead for the city. One angled toward the northwest and, although avoiding a narrow chasm, led through hilly country with much broken rock. The other led across more level cpuntry but required a bridge to be built across the chasm. This latter course had been selected and all available labor was to be diverted temporarily to the Bridgebuilders guild. As the bridge was now the major priority, Malchuskin and another Track guildsman and their gangs were drafted. About half of the entire militia force was relieved of other duties to assist and several men from the Traction guild were to supervise the laying of the rail over the bridge. Ultimate responsibility for the design and structure of the bridge lay with the Bridge-builders guild and it requested fifty additional hired laborers from the Barter guild. Collings and another Barter guildsman left the city at once and headed for the local settlements. Meanwhile I was taken north to the site of the bridge and was placed in the charge of the supervising guildsman, Bridges Lerouex -- Victoria's father. When I saw the chasm I realized that it presented a major engineering problem. It was wide -- about sixty yards across at the point selected for the bridge -- and the chasm walls were crumbly and broken. A fast-running stream lay at the bottom. In addition, the northern side of the chasm was some ten feet lower than the southern side, which meant that the track would have to be laid on a ramp for some distance after the chasm. The Bridge-builders guild had decided that the bridge must be suspended. There was insufficient time to build an arch or cantilever structure and the other favored method -- that of a timber scaffolding support in the chasm itself -- was impracticable owing to the nature of the chasm. Work started immediately on the building of four towers: two each to north and south of the chasm. These were apparently insubstantial affairs, built of tubular steeL During the construction one man fell from a tower and was killed. The work continued without delay. Shortly after this I was allowed to return to the city for one of my periods of leave and while I was there the city was winched forward. It was the first time I had been inside the city and aware that a winching operation was taking place. I was interested to note that there was no discernible sensation of movement, although there was a slight increase in background noise, presumably from the winch motors. It was during this leave, too, that Victoria told me she was pregnant -- an announcement that caused her mother much joy. I was delighted and for one of the few times in my life I drank too much wine and made a fool of myself. No one seemed to mind. XI Standing in the stirrups, his head down against the side of the neck of the large tan mare, he rejoiced in the sensations of speed: the wind blowing back his hair, the crunch of hooves against the pebbly soil, the rippling of the beast's muscular loins, the ever-present anticipation of a stumble, a throw. He was riding south, away from the primitive settlement he had just left, down through the foothills and across the plain toward the city. As the city of Earth came into view behind a low rise of ground Helward slowed the horse to a canter and guided her in a broad turn, so that they headed back north. Soon the horse was walking and, as the day grew hotter, Helward dismounted and walked by her side. He was thinking of Victoria, now many miles pregnant. She was looking healthy and beautiful and the Medical administrator had said the pregnancy was going well. Helward was allowed more time in the city now and he and Victoria spent many days together. It was fortunate that the city was once again moving across unbroken ground, because he knew that if another bridge became necessary -- or an emergency of any sort arose -- his time with her would be curtailed drastically. He was waiting now for his apprenticeship to end. He had worked hard and long with all the guilds save one -- his own, the Futures guild. Barter Collins had told him the end of the apprenticeship was approaching and later the same day he was to see Future Clausewitz and formally discuss his progress thus far. The apprenticeship couldn't end soon enough for Helward. Though still an adolescent in his emotional outlook, by the ways of the city he was deemed an adult; he had indeed worked and learned for that status. Fully aware of the city's external priorities, if still not sure of their rationale, he was ready to be accorded his title of full guildsman. In the last few miles his body had grown muscular and lean and his skin had tanned to a deep healthy golden. He was no longer stiff after a day of labor and he welcomed the sensation of well-being that followed a difficult task well done. With most of the guildsmen he had worked under he had become respected and liked for without question. And as his domestic life in the city settled down to a steady and loving relationship with Victoria he became known and accepted as a man with whom the city's security could be entrusted. With Barter Collings in particular, Helward had established a good and amicable working partnership. When he had served his obligatory three-mile periods with each of the other guilds he had been allowed to choose a further period of five miles with any one of the guilds but his own and le had immediately asked to work with Collings. The barter work attracted him, for it enabled him to see something of the way of life of the local people. The area through which the city was currently passing was high and barren and the soil was poor. Settlements were few and those that the guild approached were almost invariably clustered around one or another collection of ramshackle buildings. The squalor was terrible and disease was widespread. There appeared to be no kind of central administration, for each of the settlements had its own rituals of organization. Sometimes Collings's men were greeted with hostility and at other times the people hardly seemed to care. The barter work was one largely of judgment, of assessing the particular outlook and needs of a chosen community and negotiating along those lines. Negotiations were fruitless in most cases -- the one thing all settlements seemed to share was an abiding lethargy. When Collings could initiate any kind of interest, the needs became immediately apparent. By and large, the city could fulfill them. With its high degree of organization and the technology available to it the city had, over the miles, accumulated a large stockpile of foodstuffs, medicines, chemicals and it had also learned by experience which of these were most required. So with offers of antibiotics, seeds, fertilizers, water-purifiers -- even, in some cases, offers of assistance in repairing existing local implements -- the Barter guildsmen could lay the groundwork for their own demands. Collings had tried to teach Helward to speak Spanish, but he had little ability with languages. He picked up a handful of phrases, but contributed very little to the often lengthy periods of negotiation. T erms had been agreed upon with the settlement they had just left. Twenty men could be raised to work on the city tracks and another ten were promised from a smaller settlement some distance aw(y. In addition, five women had either volunteered or been coerced -- Helward was uncertain which and he did not question Collings -- to move into the city. He and Collings were now returning to the city to obtain the promised supplies and prepare the various guilds for the new influx of temporary population. Collings had decided that all of the people should be medically examined, and this would place an additional burden on the Medical administrators. Helward liked working to the north of the city. This would soon be his territory for it was up here, beyond the optimum, that the Future guild did its work. He often saw Future guildsmen riding north, away into the distant territory where one day the city would have to travel. Once or twice he had seen his father and they had spoken briefly. Helward had hoped that with his experience as an apprentice the unease that dogged their relationship would vanish, but his father was apparently as uncomfortable as ever in his company. Helward suspected that there was no deep and subtle reason for this, because Collings had once been talking about the Future guild, and had mentioned Future Mann. "A difficult man to talk to," Collings had said. "Pleasant when you get to know him, but he keeps to himself." After half an hour Helward remounted the horse and walked her back, retracing his last course. Some time later he came across Collings, who was resting in the shade of a large boulder. Helward joined him and they shared some of the food. As a gesture of goodwill, the leader of the settlement had given them a large slab of fresh cheese and they ate some of it, relishing the break from their more normal diet of processed, synthesized food. "If they eat this," Helward said, "I can't see that they would have much use for our slop." "Don't think they eat this all the time. This was the only one they had. It was probably stolen from somewhere else. I saw no cattle." "So why did they give it to us?" "They need us." Collings continued on their way toward the city. Both men walked, leading the horses. Helward was at once looking forward to returning to the city and regretting that this period of his apprenticeship had ended. Realizing that this was probably the last time he would have with Collings, he felt the stirrings of an old and long-buried intention to talk about something that still caused him to fret from time to time -- of all the men he had met outside the city Collings was the only one with whom he could discuss it. Even so, he turned over the problem in his mind for some time before finally deciding to raise it. "You're unnaturally quiet," said Collings suddenly. "I know -- sorry. I'm thinking about becoming a guildsman. I'm not sure I'm ready." "Why?" "It's not easy to say. It's a vague doubt." "Do you want to talk about it?" "Yes. That is -- can I?" "I don't see why not." "Well -- some of the guildsmen won't agree," said Helward. "I was very confused when I first came outside the city and I learned then not to ask too many questions." "What were the questions?" Helward decided to abandon trying to justify himself. "They dealt with two things -- the optimum and the oath. I'm not sure about either of them." "That's not surprising. I've worked with dozens of apprentices over the miles and they all worry about these." "Can you tell me what I want to know?" Collings shook his head. "Not about the optimum. That's for you to discover for yourself." "But all I know about it is that it moves northward. Is it an arbitrary thing?" "It's not arbitrary -- but I can't talk about it. I promise you that you'll find out what you want to know very soon. But what's the problem with the oath?" Helward was silent for a moment. Then he said. "If you knew I'd broken it -- if yu knew at this moment -- you'd kill me. Is that right?" "In theory, yes." "And in practice?" "I'd worry about it for days, then probably talk to one of the other guildsmen and see what he advised. But you haven't broken it, have you?" "I'm not sure." "You'd better tell me about it." "All right." Helward started to talk about the questions Victoria had asked. He tried to confine his account to vague generalities. But as Collings stayed silent, Helward found himself going into more and more detail. Soon he was recounting, almost word for word, everything he had told her. When he had finished Collings said, "I don't think you've anything to worry about." "Why not?" "No harm has come of your saying anything to your wife." T he city had come into view as they walked and they could see the customary signs of activity around the tracks. "But it can't be as simple as that," said Helward. "The oath is very firm in the way it is worded and the penalty is hardly a light one." "True -- but the guildsmen who are alive today inherited it. The oath was passed to us and we pass it on. So will you in your turn. This isn't to say the guilds agree with it, but no one has yet come up with an alternative." "So the guilds would like to dispense with it if possible?" said Helward. Collings grinned at him. "That's not what I said. The history of the city goes back a long way. The founder was a man named Francis Destain and it is generally believed that he introduced the oath. From what we can understand of the records of the time such a regimen of secrecy was probably desirable. But today -- well, things are a little more lax." "But the oath continues." "Yes, and I think it still has a function. There are many people in the city who may never know what goes on out here -- and will never need to know. These are the people who are mainly concerned with the running of the city's services. They come into contact with the people from outside the city -- the transferred women, for example -- and if they were to speak too freely, perhaps the true nature of the city would become common knowledge with the people outside. We already have trouble with the locals, the fooks as the militia calls them. You see, the city's existence is a precarious one and has to be guarded at all costs." "Are we in danger?" "Not at the moment. But if there were any sabotage the danger would be immediate and great. We're unpopular as things stand. There's no profit in allowing that unpopularity be compounded with a local awareness of our vulnerability." "So I can be more open with Victoria?" "Use your judgment. She's Lerouex's daughter, isn't she? Sensible girl. As long as she keeps to herself whatever you tell her I can't see any harm. But don't go talking to too many people." "I won't," said Helward. "And don't go talking about the optimum's moving. It doesn't." Helward looked at him in surprise. "I was told it moved." "You were misinformed. The optimum is stationary." "Then why does the city never reach it?" "It does, from time to time," said Collings. "But it can never stay there for long. The ground moves away southward from it." T he tracks extended about one mile to the north of the city. As Helward and Collings approached they saw one of the winch cables being hauled out toward the stay emplacements. Within a day or two the city would move forward again. They led the horses over the tracks and walked down toward the city. Here on the north side was the entrance to the dark tunnel that ran beneath the city and gave the only official access to the interior. Helward walked with Collings as far as the stables. "Goodbye, Helward." Helward took the proffered hand, and they shook warmly. "You make that sound very final." Collings shrugged in an off-hand way. "I shan't be seeing you for some time. Good luck, son." "Where are you going?" "I'm not going anywhere. But you are. Just take care -- and make what you can of whatever happens." Before Helward could reply the man had turned away and hurried into the stables. For a moment Helward was tempted to go after him, but an instinct told him that to do so would serve no purpose. Perhaps Collings had already told him more than he should. With mixed feelings Helward continued down the tunnel to the elevator and waited for the car. When it arrived he went straight to the fourth level to look for Victoria. She was not in their room so he went down to the synthetics plant to find her. She was now more than eighteen miles pregnant, but was planning to continue working for as long as possible. When she saw him she left her bench and they returned to the room together. There were still two hours to spare before Helward was to see Future Clausewitz and they passed the time with inconsequential conversation. Later, when the door was unlocked, they spent a few minutes together on the outside platform. At the appointed time Helward went up to the seventh level and gained access to the guild block. He was now no stranger to this part of the city, but he visited it infrequently enough to feel still slightly in awe of the senior guildsmen and Navigators. Clausewitz was waiting in the Future guild room and was alone. He greeted Helward cordially and offered him some wine. From the Futures' room it was possible to see through a small window to the north of the city. Ahead, Helward could see the rising ground he had been working in during the last few days. "You've settled in well. Apprentice Mann." "Thank you, sir." "Do you feel ready to become a Future?" "Yes, sir." "Good -- from the guild's point of view there's po reason why you shouldn't make it. You've earned yourself some good reports." "Except for the militia. "You needn't concern yourself witt that. Militai# life doesn't suit everyone." Helward felt a small relief. He had wondered if word of his bad showing in the militia had gotten back to his guild. "The purpose of this interview," Clausewitz went on, "is to tell you what is to happen next. You still have a nominal three miles' apprenticeship to serve with our guild, but as far as I am concerned that will be a mere technicality. Before that, though, you are to leave the city. It's a part of your training. You will probably be away for some time." "May I inquire for how long?" said Helward. "It's difficult to say. Several miles, certainly. It might be as short as ten or fifteen or it might be as lon as a hundred miles of time." "But Victoria -- " "Yes, I understand she's expecting a child. When is it due?" "In about nine miles," said Helward. Clausewitz frowned. "I'm afraid you will have to be away at that time. There's really no alternative." "But couldn't this trip be left until afterward?" "I'm sorry, no. There's something you have to do. You know by now that from time to time the city is obliged to barter for the use of women from the outside. We keep these women for as short a time as possible, but even so they are rarely here for less than thirty miles. It is part of the bargain we strike that they are given safe conduct back to their settlements -- and there are now three women who wish to leave. It is the custom of the city to use the apprentices to conduct them back, particularly as we now see this as an important part of the training process." H elward had been forced by the very nature of his work to become more sure of himself. "Sir, my wife is expecting her first baby. I must be with her." "It's out of the question." "What if I refuse to go?" "You will be shown a copy of the oath you swore and you will accept the punishment it prescribes." Helward opened his mouth to reply, but hesitated. This was evidently not the time to debate the validity of the oath. Future Clausewitz was clearly restraining himself. On Helward's resistance to the instruction the guildsman's face had turned a deep pink and he had sat down, resting his hands palms down on the tabletop. Instead of saying what was on his mind, Helward asked: "Sir, can I appeal to your reason?" "You can appeal, but I cannot be reasonable. You swore in your oath to place the security of the city above all other matters. Your guild training is a matter of city security -- and that's the end of it." "But surely it could be delayed? As soon as the child is born, I could leave." "No." Clausewitz turned and pulled forward a large sheet of paper, covered in part with a map and in part with several lists of figures. "These women must be returned to their settlements. In the nine miles or so of time it will take for your wife to deliver her baby, the settlements will be dangerously distant. They are already more than forty miles to the south of us. The plain fact is that you are the next apprentice on this schedule and it is you who must go." "Is that your last word, sir?" "Yes." Helward put down his untouched glass of wine and walked toward the door. "Helward, wait." He paused at the door. "If I am to leave, I would like to see my wife." "You have a few more days. You leave in half a mile's time." Five days. It was almost no time. "Well?" Helward no longer felt the need to display customary courtesies. "Sit down, please." Reluctantly, Helward complied. "Don't think I'm inhuman, but ironically this expedition will reveal to you why some of the city's customs might seem to be inhuman, ft is our way and it is forced on us. I understand your concern for Victoria, but you, must go down past. There is no better way for you to understand the situation of the city. What lies there to the south of us is the reason for the oath, for the apparent barbarisms of our ways. You are an educated man, Helward. Do you know of any civilized culture in history that has bartered for women for the simple, uncomplicated reason of wanting one gestation from them? And then, when that gestation is completed, to return them?" "No, sir," Helward paused. "Except -- " "Except primitive tribes of savages who raped and pillaged. Well, maybe we're a little better than that, but the principle's no less savage. Our barter is one-sided, for all that the contrary may seem to be. We propose the bargain, call our own terms, pay the price and move on our way. What I am telling you must be done. That you abandon your wife at a time when she needs you most is one small inhumanity that stems from a way of life that is itself inhuman." Helward said, "Neither one excuses the other in my mind." "No -- I'll grant you that. But you are bound by your oath. That oath stems from the causes of the major inhumanities and when you make your personal sacrifice you will understand better." "Sir, the city should change its ways." "But you will see that's impossible." "By traveling down past?" "Much will become clear. Not all." Clausewitz stood up. "Helward, you've been a good apprentice so far. I can see that in the miles to come you will continue to work hard and well for the city. You have a good and beautiful wife, a lot to live for. You aren't under threat of death, I promise you that. The penalty of the oath has never been invoked as far as I know, but I ask that this task that the city calls upon you to do be done -- and done now. I have done it in my time -- so has your father and so have all other guildsmen. Even now there are seven of your colleagues -- all apprentices -- down past. They have had to face similar personal hardships and not Helward stood, shook hands with Clausewitz and went in search of Victoria. F ive days later Helward was ready to leave. That he would go had never been in serious doubt, but his enforced absence had not been easy to explain to Victoria. Although at first she had been horrified by the news, her attitude had changed abruptly. "You have to go, of course. Don't use me as an excuse." "But what about the child?" "I'll be all right," she said. "What could you do if you were here? Stand around and make everyone nervous? The doctors will look after me. This isn't the first pregnancy they've had to deal with." "But -- don't you want me to be there with you?" he said. She had reached out and taken his hand in hers. "Of course," she said. "But remember what you said. The oath isn't as rigid as you thought. I know you're going -- and when you get back there'll be no mystery any more. And if what Barter Collings told you about the oath is true you'll be able to talk to me about what you see." Helward had not been sure of what she meant by this. For some time he had been in the habit of confiding in her much of what he saw and did outside the city and Victoria listened with great interest. He no longer saw the harm in talking to her, though it worried him that she should continue to be so interested, particularly when so much of what he said was confined to what he considered to be routine details. The result was that on his own personal score he no longer had a motive to try to avoid the journey down past, and indeed the idea excited him. He had heard so much of it, mostly by implication and halfreference, and now the time had come for him to venture that way himself. Jase was down past -- perhaps they would meet. He wanted to see Jase again. So much had happened since they last saw each other. Would they even recognize each other? Victoria did not come to see him leave. She was in the room when he left her, still in bed. During the night they had made love tenderly and gently, making half-hearted jokes about making it "last." She had clung to him when he kissed her goodbye and as he closed the door and went into the corridor he thought he heard her sobbing. He paused, debating whether to go back to her, but after a moment's hesitation he continued on his way. He saw no benefit in prolonging the situation. Clausewitz was waiting for him in the Futures' room. In one corner a modest pile of equipment had been laid and spread out on the table was a large plan. Clausewitz's manner was different from that of the previous interview. As soon as Helward let himself into the room Clausewitz led him to the desk and without preamble explained what he was to do. "This is a composite plan of the land to the south of the city. It's based on a linear scale. You know what that means?" Helward nodded. "Good. One inch on this is roughly equivalent to one mile -- but linearly. For reasons you'll discover, that won't help you later. Now, the city is here at fhe moment -- and the settlement you have to find is here." Clausewitz pointed to a cluster of black spots at the other end of the plan. "As of today that's exactly forty-two miles from here. Once you leave the city you will find that distances are confusing and so are directions. In which case the best advice I can give you, as we give all our apprentices, is to follow the tracks of the city. When you go south they are the only contact you will have with the city, and the only way you will find your way back. The pits dug for the sleepers and the foundations should still show. Have you got that?" "Yes sir." "You are making this journey for one main reason. You must see that the women we entrust to you arrive safely at their village. When that has been done you return to the city without delay." H elward was occupied with mental calculations. He knew how long it took him to walk a mile -- just a few minutes. On a full day's march in hot weather he could hope to cover at least twelve miles -- with the women to slow him up, half that. Six miles a day, and that made seven days for the outward trip, three or four days for the return. At best, he could be back at the city within ten days -- or one mile, as the city measured elapsed time. Suddenly he wondered why he had been told that he could not be back in time for the birth of his child. What had Clausewitz said the other day? That he would be gone ten or fifteen miles -- perhaps even as long as a hundred! It didn't make sense. "You'll need some way of measuring distance, so that you'll know when you're in the region of the settlement. Between the city and the settlement there are thirty-four old sites of our stay emplacements. They're marked on this plan as straight lines across the tracks. You shouldn't have much difficulty in locating them: although the tracks are built over the sites after they've been used, they leave quite distinct marks in the ground. Keep to the left outer track. That is, as you walk southward, the one farthest to the right. It is on this side of the track that the settlement is situated." "Surely the women will recognize the area where they used to live?" said Helward. "That's correct. Now -- the equipment you will need. It's all here and I suggest you take it all. Don't think you can dispense with any of it, because we know what we're doing. Is that clear?" Once again Helward confirmed that he understood. With Clausewitz he went through the equipment. One pack contained nothing but dehydrated synthetic food and two large canteens of water. The other pack contained a tent and four sleeping bags. In addition, there was a length of stout rope, grappling irons, a pair of metal-studded boots -- and a folded crossbow. "Are there any questions, Helward?" "I don't think so, sir." "You're quite sure?" Helward looked again at the pile of equipment. It was going to be a devil of a weight to carry unless he could share some of it with the women -- and the sight of all that dried food had set his stomach lurching. "Could I not live off the land, sir?" he said. "I find the synthetic food rather tasteless." "I would advise you to eat nothing that is not in these packs. You can supplement your water ration if you have to, but make sure the source is running water. If you eat anything that grows locally once you're out of sight of the city, it will probably make you ill. If you don't believe me you can try. I did, when I was down past, and I was sick for two days. This isn't vague theory I'm giving you, it's advice based on hard experience." "But we eat local foods in the city." "And the city is near optimum. You're going a long way south of optimum." "That changes the food, sir?" "Yes. Is there anything else?" "No sir." "Good. Then there's someone who would like to see you before you go" H e gestured toward an inner door and Helward walked to it. Beyond it was a smaller room and here his father was waiting for him. Helward's first reaction was surprise, immediately followed by one of incredulity. He had seen his father last not more than ten days ago riding north -- now, in that short period, it seemed to Helward that his father had aged suddenly and horribly. As he walked in his father stood up, balancing himself with an unsteady hand on the seat of his chair. He turned painfully to face Helward. His whole manner was marked with advanced age. He stood hunched -- his clothes hung on him badly and the hand that came forward was trembling. "Helward. How are you son?" The manner had changed, too. There was no trace of the diffidence to which Helward had grown so accustomed. "Father -- how are you?" "I'm fine, son. I've got to be taking it easy now, the doctor says. I've been north once too often." He sat down again, and instinctively Helward stepped forward and helped him into his seat. "They tell me you're going down past. Is that right?" "Yes, father.", "You be careful, son. There's a lot down there will give you thought. Not like up future -- that's my place." Clausewitz had followed Helward and was now standing in the doorway. "Helward, you ought to know that your father has been given an injection." Helward turned away from his father. "What do you mean?" "He came back to the city last night, complaining of chest pains. It's been diagnosed as angina and he's been given a painkiller. He ought to be in bed." "All right, I shan't be long." Helward knelt on the floor beside the chair. "Do you feel all right now, father?" "I told you -- I'm fine. Don't worry about me. How's Victoria?" "She's getting on well." "Good girl, Victoria." "I'll tell her to visit you," said Helward. It was a terrible thing to see his father in this condition. They talked for a few more minutes, but soon the older man's attention began to wander. Eventually he closed his eyes and Helward stood up. "I'll get one of the Medics," said Clausewitz and hurried out of the room. When he returned a few minutes later there were two of the Medical administrators with him. Gently, they picked the old man up and carried him out to the corridor, where a wheeled trolley draped in white was waiting. "Will he be all right?" Helward asked. "He's being looked after, that's all I can say." "He looks so old," said Helward, unthinkingly. Clausewitz himself was in advanced years, though in demonstrably better health than his father. "An occupational hazard," said Clausewitz. Helward glanced at him sharply, but found no further information forthcoming. Clausewitz picked up the metal-studded boots and pushed them toward Helward. "Here -- try these on," he said. "My father -- will you ask Victoria to visit him?" "Don't worry about that. I'll deal with it." H elward rode in the elevator to the second level, the packs and equipment loaded in beside him. When the car stopped he keyed the door-hold button and went along to the room to which Clausewitz had directed him. Four women and a man were waiting for him. As soon as he entered the room, Helward realized that only the man and one of the women were city administrators. He was introduced to the other three, but they glanced at him briefly and looked away. Their expressions revealed a suppressed hostility, deadened by an indifference that, until that moment, Helward himself had felt. Until entering the room he had given no thought as to who the women might be. He had not even speculated about their appearance. In fact, he recognized none of them, but hearing Clausewitz speak of them Helward had associated them in his mind with the women he had seen in the settlements while riding north with Barter Collings. Those women had been in general thin and pallid, their eyes sunk deep over prominent cheekbones, their arms scrawny and their chests flat. Dressed more often than not in ragged, filthy clothes, flies crawling over their faces, the women of the villages outside were pitiful wretches. These three had none of these characteristics. They wore neat city clothes; their hair was clean and well cut; their flesh was round and full and their eyes were clear. To his barely concealed surprise Helward saw that they were very young indeed: scarcely older than himself. The people of the city spoke of the women who were bartered from outside as if they were mature -- but these were nothing more than girls. He knew he was staring at them, but they paid him ho attention. What struck him hardest was the growing suspicion that these three had once been similar to the wretches he had seen in the villages and that by being brought to the city they had been restored temporarily to an approximation of the health and beauty that might have been theirs had they not been born into poverty. The woman administrator gave him a brief description of their background. Their names were Rosario, Caterina and Lucia. They spoke a little English. Each had been in the city for more than forty miles and each had given birth to a baby. There were two boys and a girl. Lucia -- who had given birth to one of the boys -- did not wish to keep the child and it was to stay in the city and be brought up in the creche. Rosario had chosen to keep her baby boy and it would be going with her back to the settlement. In Caterina's case there had been no choice -- but in any event she had expressed indifference about losing her baby daughter. The administrator explained that Rosario was to be given as much of the powdered milk as she asked for, because she was still suckling the baby. The other two would have the same food as himself. Helward tried a friendly smile on the three girls, but they took no notice of him. When he tried to look at Rosario's baby, she turned her back on him and clutched it to her possessively. There was nothing more to be told. They walked along the corridor toward the elevator, the three girls carrying their few belongings. They crowded into the car and Helward keyed the button to take them to the lowest level. The girls continued to ignore him and spoke to each other in their own language. When, the car opened onto the dark passageway beneath the city, Helward struggled to remove the equipment. None of the girls helped him, but watched with amused expressions. With difficulty Helward picked up the various packs and staggered toward the southern exit. The sun was dazzlingly bright. He put down the packs and glanced around. The city had been winched since he had last been outside and now track crews were taking up the rails. The girls shaded their eyes and looked about them. It was probably their first sight of the outside since coming to the city. The baby in Rosario's arms began to cry. "Will you help me with this?" Helward asked, gesturing at the stack of food and equipment. The girls stared at him uncomprehendingly. "We ought to share the load." They made no reply so he squatted down on the ground and opened the pack containing the food. He decided it would not be right to expect Rosario to carry any extra weight, so he divided the food into three packets, giving one to each to the other two and returning the rest to his pack. Lucia and Caterina reluctantly found room for the food-packets in their holdalls. The length of rope was the most unwieldy part of the load and so Helward contrived to wind it into a tighter roll and stuff it into the pack. The grapple and pitons he managed to get into the pack containing the tent and the sleeping bags. Now his load was more manageable but not much lighter, and in spite of what Clausewitz had said Helward felt tempted to abandon most of it. The baby was still crying and Rosario appeared unconcerned. "Come on," he said, feeling irritated. He set off, walking south, parallel to the tracks, and in a moment they followed him. They stayed together, keeping a distance of a few yards between themselves and him. H elward tried to set a good pace, but after an hour he realized that his calculations about how long the expedition would take had been overly optimistic. The three girls moved slowly, complaining loudly about the heat and the surface of the ground. It was true that the shoes they had been given were unsuited for walking over this rough terrain, but he was afflicted no less by the heat. In fact, in his uniform and weighed down by the bulk of the equipment, he was most unpleasantly warm. They were still in sight of the city. The sun was only approaching its midday heat and the baby had not stopped crying. His sole relief so far had been a few moments of conversation with Malchuskin. The trackman had been delighted to see him and was still full of complaints about his hired laborers. He wished Helward well in his expedition. True to form, the girls had not waited for Helward and he had to cut short his visit with Malchuskin to hurry after them. Now he decided to call a rest. "Can't you stop his crying?" he asked Rosario, pointing to the baby. The girl glared at him and sat down on the ground. "Okay," she said. "I feed." She stared at him defiantly and the other two girls waited at her side. Taking the point, Helward moved some distance away, keeping his back turned discreetly while she fed the baby. Later he opened one of the water canteens and passed it around. The day was impossibly hot and his temper was no better than that of the girls. He took off the jacket of his uniform and laid it over the top of one of the packs and although this meant he felt the bite of the straps more deeply he stayed a little cooler. He was impatient to move on. The baby had fallen asleep and two of the girls made a makeshift cot out of one of the sleeping bags, carrying it slung between them. Helward had to relieve them of their holdalls and although he was now overburdened with things to carry he gladly exchanged the extra discomfort for the welcome silence. They walked for another halfhour and then he called another halt. By now he was drenched with sweat and it gave him little comfort to realize that the girls were no cooler. He glanced up at the sun. It seemed to be almost directly overhead. He saw an outcropping of rock and went over to sit in its shade. The girls joined him, still complaining to each other in their own language. Helward regretted he had not taken more trouble to learn local speech -- he could pick out one or two phrases, but only enough to discover that he was the butt of most of the complaints. He opened a packet of dehydrated food and moistened it with water from the canteen. The resultant gray soup looked and tasted like sour porridge. Perversely, he derived pleasure from the girls' renewed complaints -- here was one occasion when they were justified and he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of letting them see he agreed. The baby was still asleep, but fretting in the heat. Helward guessed that if they moved again it would wake up, so when the girls stretched out on the ground for a nap he made no effort to dissuade them. While they were relaxing Helward stared back at the city, still clearly visible a couple of miles away. He realized that he had not been taking note of the marks left by the cable stay emplacements. They would have passed only one so far -- and now that he thought about it he saw what Clausewitz had meant by saying they left clearly distinguishable scars in the earth. He recalled that they had passed one a few minutes before they had halted. The marks left by the sleepers were shallow depressions some five feet in length by twelve inches across, but where the cable stays had been hurried were deep pits, surrounded by upturned soil. Mentally, he marked off the first one. Thirty-seven to go. In spite of their slow progress he still saw no reason why he should not be 'back in the city in time for the birth of his own child. After he had seen the women back to their village he could make good progress on his own, however unpleasant the conditions. H e decided to allow the girls an hour for their rest and when he estimated that it had passed he went and stood over them. Caterina opened her eyes and looked up at him. "Come on," he said. "I want to move on." "Is too hot." "Is too bad," he said. "We're moving." She stood up, stretching her body elaborately, then spoke to the other two. With similar reluctance they stood up and Rosario went to look at the baby. To Helward's dismay she woke it -- but fortunately the crying did not start again. Without delay, Helward gave back the two holdalls to Caterina and Lucia and picked up his own two packs. Now the full heat of the sun came down on them and within a few seconds the benefit of the rest in the shade seemed to vanish. They had gone only a few yards when Rosario passed the baby to Lucia. She went back to the rocks and disappeared behind them. Helward opened his mouth to ask where she had gone -- but then realized. When she returned, Lucia went, and then Caterina. Helward felt his anger returning. They were deliberately delaying him. He felt a pressure in his own bladder, aggravated by realizing what the girls had been doing, but his anger and pride would not allow him to relieve himself. He decided to wait until later. They walked on. The girls had now discarded the jackets that were common apparel inside the city and wore only the trousers and shirts. The thin material, damp with perspiration, adhered to their bodies and Helward noticed this with a despondent interest, reflecting that under different circumstances he might have found the phenomenon of considerable potential. As things were he registered this new development only so far as to appreciate that each of the girls was of fuller figure than Victoria -- Rosario in particular had large, pendulous breasts with protuberant nipples. Later, one of the girls must have noticed his occasional glance, for soon all three of them were walking with their jackets held over their chests. It made no difference to Helward -- he just wanted to be rid of them. "We have water?" Lucia asked, coming over to him. He rummaged in the pack and gave her the canteen. She drank some, then moistened the palms of her hands and splashed water over her face and neck. Rosario and Caterina did likewise. The sight and sound of the water were too much for Helward and his bladder protested anew. He looked around. There was no cover, so he walked some yards away from the girls and relieved himself onto the soil. Behind him, he heard giggling. When he returned, Caterina held out the canteen to him. He took it and raised it to his lips. Suddenly Caterina tipped it from below and the water splashed over his nose and eyes. The girls screamed with laughter as he spluttered and choked. The baby started crying again. XV T hey passed two more cablestay emplacement marks before Helward decided to pitch camp for the night. He selected a site near a clump of trees two or three hundred yards from the scars made by the tracks. A small brook flowed nearby and after testing it for purity -- he had no guide other than his own palate -- he declared it safe for drinking to conserve the supply in the canteens. The tent was relatively simple to erect and although he started the work on his own the girls helped him finish off. As soon as it was up he laid the sleeping bags inside and Rosario went in to feed the baby. When the baby had gone to sleep again, Lucia helped Helward reconstitute the synthetic food. The result this time was an orange-colored soup and it tasted no better than before. The sun set as they were eating. Helward had lit a small fire, but soon a wind blew up from the were forced into the tent and the sleeping bags for warmth. Helward tried to strike up a conversation with the girls, but either they did not answer or they giggled or made joking references to each other in Spanish, so he soon abandoned the idea. There were a few small candles in the pack of equipment and Helward lay in the light of these for an hour or two, wondering what possible benefit the city could derive from this pointless expedition of his. He fell asleep at last, but was wakened twice in the night by the baby's crying. On one occasion he could just make out the shape of Rosario against the dim glow from outside, sitting up in her sleeping bag and suckling the infant. They were awake early and set off as soon as they could. Helward wasn't sure of what had happened, but the mood of the girls today was obviously different. As they walked Caterina and Lucia sang a little and at their first stop they tried again to spill water on him. He moved back to avoid them, but in doing so stumbled on the uneven ground -- and spluttered and choked once more for their amusement. Only Rosario maintained a distance, pointedly ignoring him as Lucia and Caterina played up to him. He didn't enjoy being teased -- for he could think of no way of replying -- but he preferred it to the bad feeling of the day before. As the morning progressed and the temperature rose, their mood became more careless. None of the three girls wore her jacket, and at the next stop Lucia undid the top two buttons of her shirt and Caterina opened hers all the way down the front, holding it in place with a large knot and so baring her midriff. By now Helward could not mistake the effect they were having on him. As familiarity grew, the atmosphere eased further. Even Rosario did not turn her back on him the next time she suckled her baby. Relief from the heat came with another patch of woodland, one Helward could remember helping to clear for the track-layers some miles before. They sat down in the shadows, waiting for the worst of the heat to pass. They had now passed a total of five cable stay scars -- thirty-three to go. Helward's mood of frustration at the slowness of their journey was easing. He saw that to travel foster would hardly have been possible even if he had been alone. The ground was too difficult, the sun too hot. H e decided to wait for two hours in the shadow of the trees. Rosario had moved some way away from him and was playing with her baby. Caterina and Lucia sat together under a tree. They had taken off their shoes and were talking quietly together. Helward closed his eyes for a few minutes, but soon became restless. He walked out of the trees on his own and went down to the scars left by the four lines of track. He looked left and right, north and south: the line ran straight and true, undulating slightly with the rise and fall of the ground, but always maintaining its direction. Enjoying the comparative solitude he stood there for some time, wishing the weather would change and the sky cloud over, if only temporarily. He debated with himself for a while, trying to decide whether it might be better to rest during the days and travel at night -- but considered on balance that to do so would be too risky. He was about to turn back to the trees when he suddenly saw a movement about a mile to the south of him. At once he was on his guard and dropped to the ground behind a tree stump. He waited. In a moment he saw someone walking up the track toward him. Helward remembered the crossbow folded inside his pack -- but already it was too late to go back for it. There was a bush just a yard or two to the side of the stump and he wriggled over until he was behind it. Now better covered, he hoped he might not be seen. The figure was still coming toward him and Helward saw to his surprise that the man was wearing the uniform of a guild apprentice. His first impulse was to come out of hiding, but he fought this back and stayed put. When the man was less than fifty yards away, Helward recognized Torrold Pelham, a boy several miles older than himself who had left the creche a considerable time before. Helward broke cover and stood up. "Torrold!" At once, Pelham was on his guard. He raised his crossbow and aimed it at Helward -- then slowly lowered it. "Torrold -- it's me. Helward Mann." "God, what are you doing here?" They laughed together, realizing that they were both here for the same reason. "You've grown up," said Pelham. "You were just a kid the last time I saw you." "Have you been down past?" Helward asked. "Yes." Pelham stared past him, northward up the track. "Well?" "It's not what I thought." "What's there?" "You're down past now. Can't you feel it?" "Feel what?" Pelham looked at him for a moment. "It's not so bad here. But you can feel it. Perhaps you can't yet recognize it. It builds up quickly farther south." "What does? You're talking in riddles." "No -- it's impossible to explain." Pelham glanced toward the north again. "Is the city near here?" "A few miles. Not far." "What happened to it? Have they found some way to make it move faster? I've only been gone a short time and the city's moved much farther than I thought it would." "It's gone no faster than normal." "There's a creek back there where a bridge had been built. When was that done?" "About nine miles ago." Pelham shook his head. "It doesn't make sense." "You've lost your feel of time, that's all." Pelham suddenly grinned. "I expect that's it. Listen, are you on your own?" "No," said Helward. "I've got three girls with me." "What are they like?" "They're okay. A bit difficult at first, but we're getting to know each other now.' "Good-lookers are they?" "Not bad. Come and see." Helward led the way back through the trees until the girls came into view. Pelham whistled. "Hey -- they're all right. Have you -- you know?" "No." They walked back toward the track. Pelham said: "Are you going to?" "I'm not sure." "Take a tip, Helward -- if you're going to, do it soon. Otherwise it'll be too late." "What do you mean?" "You'll see." Pelham gave him a cheery grin, then continued on his way north. T houghts and intentions in the direction to which Pelham had been alluding were put out of Helward's mind almost at once. Rosario fed her baby before they set off and they had been walking only a few minutes when the child was violently sick. Rosario hugged it to her, crooning quietly, but there was little anyone could do. Lucia stood by her, speaking sympathetically to her. Helward was worried, because if the child were seriously ill there was not much else they could do but return to the city. Soon, though, the baby stopped retching, and after a lusty crying session it quieted down. "Do you want to go on?" Helward asked Rosario. She shrugged helplessly. "Si." They walked on more slowly. The heat had not abated much, and several times Helward asked the girls if they wanted to stop. Each time they said no, but Helward detected that a subtle change had come over all four of them. It was as if the minor tragedy had drawn them together. "We'll camp tonight," said Helward. "And rest all day tomorrow." There was agreement to this and when Rosario fed the baby again a little later, this time it kept the milk down. Just before nightfall they passed through countryside more hilly and rocky than that they had seen so far and suddenly came to the chasm that had caused so much trouble to the Bridge Builders. There was not much sign now of where the bridge had been, although the foundations of the suspension towers had left two large scars in the ground on this side. Helward remembered a patch of level ground on the northern bank of the stream at the bottom of the chasm and he led the way down. Rosario and Lucia fussed over the baby, while Caterina helped Helward erect the tent. Suddenly, while they were laying out the four sleeping bags inside, Caterina put a hand on his neck and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He grinned at her. "What's that for?" "You okay with Rosario." Helward stayed put, thinking that the kiss might be repeated, but Caterina crawled backward from the tent and called the others. The baby looked better and fell asleep when it was put into its makeshift cot. Rosario said nothing about the child, but Helward could tell she felt less worried. The evening was much warmer than the night before and after they had eaten they stayed outside the tent for some time. Lucia was concerned with her feet, rubbing them continually, and the other girls seemed to be making much of this. She showed her feet to Helward, and he saw that large blisters had appeared on the outer sides of her toes. Feet were compared at great length, the other girls saying that theirs were sore too. "Tomorrow," said Lucia, "no shoes." That seemed to be an end to it. Helward waited outside the tent as the girls crawled in. The previous night had been so cold that all of them had slept with their clothes on inside the sleeping bags, but tonight was warm and humid. A certain coyness in Helward made .him resolve that he would keep his own clothes on and sleep on top of the bag, but a fast-developing interest in the girls led his thoughts to wilder fantasies about what they might do. After a few minutes he crawled into the tent. The candles were alight. Each of the three girls was inside her own bag, although Helward saw from the pile of clothes that they had undressed. He said nothing to them, but blew out the candles and undressed in the dark, stumbling and falling clumsily in the process. He lay down, only too aware of Caterina's body lying close beside him in the next sleeping bag. He stayed awake for a long time, trying to rid himself of a fierce manifestation of his arousal. Victoria seemed to be a long way away. and, after a futile attempt to get dressed while still in his sleeping bag, Helward scrambled out of the tent naked and dressed hurriedly outside. He lit the campfire and began to heat some water to make synthetic tea. Here at the bottom of the chasm it was already warm and Helward wondered again whether they should move on or rest for a day as he had promised. The water boiled and he sipped his tea. He heard movement from inside the tent. In a moment Caterina came out and walked past him toward the stream. Helward stared after her -- she was wearing only her shirt, unbuttoned all down the front and swinging open, and a pair of pants. When she reached the water she turned and waved back at him. "Come!" she called. Helward needed no further bidding. He went down to her, feeling clumsy in his uniform and metal-studded boots. "We swim?" she said and without waiting for an answer slipped off her shirt, stepped out of her pants and waded down into the water. Helward glanced back at the tent -- nothing moved. In a few seconds he had taken off his clothes and was splashing through the shallows toward her. She turned and faced him, grinning when she saw the response in him she had caused. She splashed water at him and turned away. Helward leaped at her, getting his arms around her -- and together they fell sideways full-length into the water. Caterina wriggled free of him and stood up. She skipped away from him through the shallows, throwing up a huge spray. Helward followed and caught her at the bank. Her face was serious. She raised her arms around his neck and pulled his face down to hers. They kissed for a few moments, then clambered out of the water and into the long grass growing on the bank. They lay down together and started to kiss again, more deeply. By the time they had disentangled, gotten dressed and returned to the tent, Rosario and Lucia were eating a pile of yellow gruel. Neither of them said anything, but Helward saw Lucia smile at Caterina. Half an hour later the baby was sick again -- and as Rosario was holding it concernedly, she suddenly thrust the baby into Lucia's arms and rushed away. A few seconds later, she could be heard retching beside the stream. Helward asked Caterina, "Do you feel okay?" "Yes." Helward sniffed the food they had been eating. It smelled normal -- unappetizing, but not tainted. A few minutes later Lucia complained of intense stomach pains. She was very pale. Caterina wandered away. Helward was desperate. The only course open to him now seemed to be to return to the city. If their food had become foul, how would they survive the rest of the journey? After a while Rosario returned to the campsite. She looked weak and pale.and sat down on the ground in the shade. Lucia gave her some water from the canteen. Lucia herself looked white and was holding her stomach, and the baby continued to scream. Helward was not prepared to cope with a situation like this and hadn't the least idea of what to suggest. He went m search of Caterina, who had seemed to be unaffected. About a hundred yards down the chasm he came across her. She was walking back toward the campsite with an armful of apples which, she said, she had found growing wild. They looked red and ripe and Helward tasted one. It was sweet and juicy -- but then he remembered Ciausewitz's warning. His reason told him Clausewitz was wrong, but reluctantly he gave it to Caterina and she ate the rest. They baked one of the apples in the embers of the fire, and then pulped it. In tiny mouthfuls, they fed it to the baby. This time it kept the food down and made happy noises. Rosario was still too weak to attend to it, so Caterina laid it down on its cot and within minutes it was asleep. Lucia was not sick, although her stomach continued to give her pain for most of the morning. Rosario recovered more quickly, and ate one of the apples. Helward ate the rest of the yellow synthetic food -- and it did not make him ill. jup to the top of the creek and walked along its northern side. Here, a few miles back in time, lives had been lost in the cause of getting the city to cross this chasm. The scene was still familiar to him, and although most of the equipment used by the city had been collected, those long days and nights spent racing to complete the bridge were still very vivid in his memory. He looked across to the south at the exact spot where the bridge had been built. The gap did not look as wide as it had then, nor did the chasm look as deep. Perhaps his excitement at the time had exaggerated his impression of the obstacle the chasm presented. But no -- surely the chasm had been wider? He remembered that when the city had been crossing the bridge the railway itself had been at least sixty yards long. Now it seemed that at the point the bridge had been built the chasm was only about ten yards wide. Helward stood and stared at the opposite edge for a long time, not understanding how this apparent contradiction could occur. Then an idea came to him. The bridge had been built to quite exact engineering specifications -- he had worked for many days on the building of the suspension towers and he knew that the two towers on each side of the chasm had been built an exact distance apart to allow the city to pass between them. That distance was about one hundred and thirty feet or forty paces. He went to the place where one of the northern towers had been built and walked over towards its twin. He counted fifty-eight paces. He went back, tried again. This time he made it sixty paces. He tried again, taking larger steps -- fifty-five paces. Standing on the edge of the chasm he stared down at the stream below. He could remember with great clarity the depth of the creek when the bridge was being built. From where he now stood, the bottom of the chasm had seemed to be a terrifying depth below. Now it was an easy climb down to where he and the women had camped. Another thought struck him and he strode north to where the ramp had brought the city down into contact with the soil again. The traces of the four tracks still showed clearly. If the two towers were now apparently farther apart -- what of the distance covered by the tracks? From long hours of working with Malchuskin Helward knew intimately every detail of the tracks and their sleepers. The gauge of the tracks was three and a half feet, resting on sleepers five feet long. LxKtking now at the scars left in the ground by the sleepers, he saw that they were much bigger than this. He made a rough measurement and estimated that the marks were now at least seven feet long and shallower than they ought to be. But he knew that the sleepers he had used could not have made them -- the city used standard-length sleepers, and the pits dug for them were always roughly the same size. To make sure he checked several more scars and found they were all apparently two feet longer than they should have been. And too close together. The sleepers were laid by the track crews at four feet intervals -- not about eighteen inches apart, as these were. Helward spent a few more minutes making similar measurements, then scrambled down the chasm, waded across the stream (which now seemed to him to be narrower and shallower than it had been before) and climbed up to the southern edge. Here, too, the measurements he made of the remains of the city's passage were in stark c iflict with what they should have been. Puzzled -- and more than a little worried -- he returned to the camp. The girls were all looking healthier, but the baby had again been sick. The girls told him that they had been eating the apples Caterina had found. He cut one in half and inspected it closely. He could see no difference between it and any other apple he had ever eaten. Once again he was tempted to eat it, but instead passed it to Lucia. An idea had suddenly occurred to him. C LAusEwiTz had warned him of eating local foods -- presumably this was because he was of the city. Clausewitz had said it was all right to eat local foods when the city was near optimum, but that some miles to the south, it would not be safe. If he ate the city food, he would not be ill. But the girls -- they were not of the city. Perhaps it was his food that was making them ill. They could eat city food when they were near the optimum, but not now. It made a kind of sense, but for one thing; the baby. Except for a few tiny mouthfuls of apple, it had had nothing but its mother's milk. Surely that could not harm it? He went with Rosario to see the baby. It lay in its crib, its face red and tear-stained. It was not crying now, but it fretted weakly. Helward felt sorry for the tiny creature and wondered what he could do to help. Outside the tent, Lucia and Caterina were in good spirits. They spoke to Helward as he emerged, but he walked on past them and went to sit beside the stream . He was still thinking about his new idea. The only food had been its mother's milk... suppose the mother were different now, away from the optimum? She was not of the city, but the baby was. Could that make a difference? It did not make much sense -- for surely the baby was of the mother's body -- but it was a possibility. He went back to the camp and made up some synthetic food and dried milk, being careful to use only water he had brought from the city. He gave it to Rosario and told her to try feeding the baby with it. She resisted the idea at first, but then relented. The baby took the food and two hours later it was sleeping peacefully once more. The day passed slowly. Down in the creek the air was still and warm and Helward's feeling of frustration returned. He saw now that if his suppositions were correct he could no longer offer the girls any of the food. But with thirty or more miles to walk, they couldn't survive on apples alone. Later he told them what was on his mind and suggested that for the moment they should eat very small amounts of his food and supplement this with whatever they could find locally. They seemed puzzled, but agreed to this. The sweltering afternoon continued -- and Helward's restlessness was transmitted to the girls. They became light-hearted and firisky and teased him about his bulky uniform. Caterina said she was going for another swim. Lucia said she would go, too. They stripped in front of him and then turned on him playfully and made him undress. They splashed about naked in the water for a long time, joined later by Rosario whose attitude toward him no longer seemed to be one of suspicion. For the rest of the day they lay on the ground beside the tent, sunbathing. That night Lucia took Helward's hand just as he was about to go into the tent and led him away from the campsite. She made love to him passionately, holding him tightly against her as if he were the only force of reality in her world. growing jealousy between Lucia and Caterina. He broke camp as early as possible. He led them across the stream and up to the higher land to the south. Following the left outer track they continued their journey. The surrounding countryside was familiar to Helward -- this was the region through v'hich the city had been passing when he first worked outside. Some two miles to the south lay the ridge of high ground where he had witnessed his first winching. They stopped for a rest halfway through the morning. Then Helward remembered that only two miles to the west of where they were was a small local settlement. It occurred to him that if food could be obtained there the problem of what the girls could eat would be solved. He suggested this to them. The problem arose of who was to go. He felt he should go himself because the responsibility was his, but he would need one of the girls because she could speak the language. He did not wish to leave just one of the girls alone with the baby and he felt that if he went with either Caterina or Lucia, the one left behind would show more obviously what he had guessed was their shared jealousy over him. In the end he suggested that Rosario should go with him and the reception accorded to his decision assured him that he had made the right choice. They set off in the approximate direction Helward remembered and found the village without difficulty. After a long conversation between Rosario and three of the local men. they were given some dried meat and some green, raw vegetables. Everything went remarkably smoothly -- Helward wondered what kind of persuasions she had used -- and soon they were returning to the others. W alking along a few yards behind Rosario, Helward noticed something about the girl he had not seen before. She was built rather more heavily than the other two girls, and her arms and face were round and well-fleshed. The girl did have a slight tendency to plumpness, but it suddenly seemed to Helward that this was much more noticeable than before. With casual interest at first -- and greater attention later -- he saw that the fabric of her shirt was stretched tightly across her back. But her clothes had not been as tight as that before -- they had been given to her in the city and had fitted her well. Then Helward noticed the trousers she was wearing: they were tight across her seat, but the legs scuffed against the ground as she walked. True, she was without shoes, but even so he did not remember her trouser legs' being as long as this before. He caught up with her and walked at her side. The shirt was tight across her chest, compressing her breasts -- and the sleeves were too long. Also, the girl seemed to be far shorter than he remembered her from even the day before. When they joined the others, Helward noticed that their clothes, too, were now fitting them badly. Caterina had her shirt knotted across her stomach as before, but Lucia's was buttoned and the tightness of the fit caused the fabric to part between the buttons. H e tried to put the phenomenon out of his mind, but as they continued southward it seemed to become more and more obvious -- and with comic results. Bending down to attend to the baby, Rosario split the seat of her trousers. One of Lucia's buttons popped off as she raised the canteen of water to her lips and Caterina tore the fabric of her shirt down both seams below her armpits. A mile or so farther down the track, Lucia lost two more buttons. Her shirt was now open down most of its front and she knotted it as Caterina had done. All three girls had turned up the hems of their trousers and it was clear they were suffering considerable discomfort. Helward called a halt in the lee of the ridge and set up camp. Once they had eaten the girls took off their tattered clothes and went into the tent. They teased Helward about his own clothes: were they not going to be tom up, too? He sat outside the tent on his own, not yet sleepy and not wishing to sit inside the tent with the girls. The baby started to cry, and Rosario came out of the tent to get it some food. Helward spoke to her, but she did not reply. He watched her as she added water to the dried milk, looked at her naked body in a wholly unsexual way. He had seen her naked only the day before and he was certain she had not looked as she now seemed. She had been almost as tall as he was -- now she was squat and plump. "Rosario, is Caterina still awake?" She nodded wordlessly and went back into the tent. A few moments later Caterina came out and Helward stood up. They faced each other in the light from the campfire. Caterina said nothing and Helward did not know what to say. She, too, had changed. A moment later Lucia came out to stand at Caterina's side. Now he was certain. Some time during the day the girls' physical appearance had changed. He looked at them both. Yesterday, naked beside the stream, their bodies had been long and lithe, their breasts round and full. Now their arms and legs were shorter and more thickly built. Their shoulders and hips were broader, their breasts less round and more widely spaced . Their faces were rounder, their necks were shorter. They came to him and stood before him. Lucia took the clasp of his trousers in her hands. Her lips were moist. From the entrance to the tent, Rosario watched. the girls had changed even further during the course of the night. He estimated that none now stood taller than five feet. They also talked m'ore quickly than before and the pitch of their voices was higher. None of them could get into the clothes. Lucia tried, but could not get her legs into the trousers and split the sleeves of her shirt. When they left the camp, the girls' clothes were left, too, and they continued on their way naked. Helward could not take his eyes off them. Every hour that passed seemed to reveal a more obvious change in them. Their legs were now so short that they could only take small steps and he was forced to dawdle so that he would not leave them behind. In addition, he noticed that as they walked their posture was assuming an angle -- they appeared to be leaning backward. They were also watching him and when they stopped for water an uncanny silence prevailed while the strange group passed the canteen from one to the other. Around them there were outward signs of an inexplicable change in the scenery. The remains of the left outer track, which they still followed, were not indistinct. The last clear impression Helward had seen of one of the sleeper pits had been more than forty feet in length and less than an inch in depth. The next set of tracks, the left inner, could not be seen -- gradually the strip between the two had widened until it was over to the east by a half-mile or more. The incidence of stay emplacements had increased. That morning they had already passed twelve and by Helward's figures there were only nine more to go. But how would he recognize the girls' settlement? The natural scenery of the area was flat and uniform. They seemed to be resting on some hardened residue of an ancient lava-flow -- no shade or shelter was in sight. He looked more closely at the ground. If he moved his figures through it firmly he could still make shallow indentations in the soil, but although the dirt was loose and sandy it felt thick and viscous to the touch. The girls were now no more than three feet tall, and their bodies had distorted even further. Their feet were flat and wide, their legs broad and short, their torsos round and compressed. In this perception of them they became grotesquely ugly, and he found that in spite of his fascination with the physical changes coming over them the sound of their twittering voices was irritating him. Only the baby had not changed. It was still, as far as Helward could see, much as it had always been. But in relation to its mother it was now disproportionately large and the squat figure that was Rosario was regarding it with a kind of unspoken horror. The baby was of the city. Just as Helward himself had been born of a woman from outside, so was Rosario's baby a child of the city. Whatever transformation was coming over the three girls and the countryside from which they came, neither he nor the baby were affected by it. Helward had no conception of what he should do, nor what he should make of what he saw. He tried to think. He felt a growing fright, for this was beyond any comprehension he had ever had of the natural order of things. The evidence was manifest -- the rationale was without terms of reference. He looked to the south and saw that not too far away stood a line of hills. From their shape and overall height he assumed they must be the foothills of some larger range -- but then he noticed with a surge of alarm that the tops of the hills were white with snow. The sun was as hot as ever and the air as warm -- logic demanded that any snow that could exist in this climate must be on the tops of very high mountains. And yet they were near enough -- no more than a mile or two, he thought -- for him to judge that at most they were only about five hundred feet in elevation. He stood up -- and suddenly fell. As he hit the ground he found he was rolling, as if down a steep slope, toward the south. He managed to stop himself and stood up unsteadily, bracing himself against a force that was pulling him southward. The effect was not new -- he had been feeling a strange pressure all morning -- but the fall had taken him by surprise and the force seemed now far stronger than before. Why had it not affected him until this moment? He thought back. That morning, with the other distractions, he realized he had indeed been aware of it -- and had felt in the back of his mind that he had been walking down a long hill. But that was clearly nonsensical; the land was level as far as the eye could see. He stood by the group of girls, sampling the sensation. It was not like the pressure of air, nor even like the pull of gravity on a slope. It was somewhere between the two: on level ground, without noticeable air movements, he felt as though he were being pushed or dragged south. He took a few steps to the north, and realized he was bracing his legs as if ascending a hill -- he turned to face south and, in conflict with the evidence of his eyes, he felt as though he were on a steep slope. The girls were watching him curiously as he went back to them. He saw that in those last few minutes their bodies had distorted still further. of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern science fiction. 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All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing cilices. Th publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. He was first a scientist. Then he was the man who killed Hope! I T he slight, stooped man entered almost furtively the floodlit oval in front of the guard shack, a scarlet-barred security badge already extended in his slender hand. Two hours past midnight was an unusual entry time even for the independent types who inhabited the vast Sands Labs complex -- but not so unusual that a veteran guard two years from retirement was inclined to probe beyond the mandatory formalities. He. was quite certain he had seen the little guy before and the badge photo was as good a likeness as most. Holding the badge just a moment longer than was necessary the guard looked down patronizingly at the smaller man and voiced the prescribed warning. "Don't forget to call us before leaving your lab, Dr. Tanner." In fifteen years not a dozen off-hours employees bad corrected the guard's habitual appeal to elitism. "Eh? Oh, yes -- yes. Certainly, guard -- ah -- officer." The slightly shrill voice cracked. "Do I walk -- I mean, will you take me over to the computer center?" The guard assumed a practiced air of gentle rebuke. "Certainly, sir. You couldn't get into the building without us. Just wait until I call the super." "Keerist," the guard muttered to himself as he punched out the supervisory sergeant's number on the dial, "these brains gotta have a damned assistant to wipe their -- " The sergeant's professionally tough snarl in the receiver shattered the last word. Methodically mangling an unlit cigar as he drove Tanner to the computer complex, the guard kept his silence until they had entered the peripheral equipment annex and he had dutifully reconnoitered the far corners of the bare, well-lit vestibule. Pausing at the entry door he checked the alarm system, then turned to Tanner. "Remember, Doc, call the main guard shack before you leave." With this last caution he slammed the heavy doors behind him, leaving a faint aroma of wet tobacco -- a reminder of himself which rapidly disappeared into the high flow exhaust system. Pushing open the vestibule doors, Tanner walked down the brightly lit hall to a pair of double swinging doors. He hesitated a moment, then strode through and onto a vast computer floor. 'A pleasant tightening of his scalp muscles was his only warning before the cool, oily-smelling room clutched him to the only world those challenge he had accepted. Here he had spent creative, halcyon directing megabit blocks of subnanosecond logic circuitry with swift, sure thrusts of a light pen. The oneness he had felt with that invisible computer he had never experienced with a human being. It was the memory of this world's end, and his lost strength, that stripped his mind of nostalgia and focused it again on the purpose of his trip. Jamming trembling hands into his pants pockets he pushed out into the hallway and walked deliberately toward the elevator, grimacing awkwardly at a sleepy electrician who bumped into him in the hall. Would the man remember his face later? Certainly the likelihood was high. On the other hand Tanner was quite aware. that he had a remarkably unremarkable face. Inside the elevator he pushed the fourth floor button, half expecting a line printer somewhere to leap into life. As the cage rose he removed his left shoe and took a small encoder key from its nest in the heel. Earlier he had spent three hours at a timeshare terminal creating the time code for this day, working from his near perfect recall of the lab's master security program -- one of his first assignments at Sands. It had been easy to filch a blank encoder key since the daily code changes were the prime protection offered by the computerbased security system. He had spent many tedious evenings in his tiny apartment perfecting a means of inscribing magnetic characters on the key. Using a tiny wire loop attached to a flashlight battery for writing, a soldering gun for erasing and a solution of iron filings for viewing his handiwork he had eventually imprinted the stolen key with a pattern he felt would open the locked doors now awaiting him. If it failed an alarm would lock doors behind him and bring unfriendly people to abuse him. Contemplation of possible failure only increased his impatience with the measured rise of the cage; his slender finger was jabbing the up button impatiently as the elevator reached the fourth floor. The cage doors split smoothly to reveal a small foyer completely enclosed by hardened steel rods. Deftly Tanner inserted the handcoded key into a small opening in one of the bars. Seven hundred yellow panel glowed approvingly and a two-foot-wide section of the rods retracted into the ceiling. Satisfied, the little man stepped through the opening and into a cascade of filtered air. R emembering his last visit, months earlier, he was already removing his tie when a friendly, definitely feminine voice requested he remove his shoes and outer clothing. It was this segment of the entry routine his subconscious had encrusted in a tight shell of forgetfulness. Now the warmth of that recorded voice, amplified by his feelings of sexual inadequacy, triggered chill trickles of sweat dow r n Tanner's narrow ribcage. Two shirt buttons sliced neatly through the air exhaust grill as he furiously tore off street clothes and hurled them into a corner. He jerked a pair of white Teflon coveralls from the stainless steel rack, crammed his narrow feet into booties from a floor stand and was blindly tugging at the coverall zipper when the edge of his anger softened. By the time he had found an oversize hair retainer to help conceal his face the cerebrum was again in control. He padded through the second air curtain, past the last ID station and into the Checking the operations log. Tanner smiled bleakly. His sheep's clothing disguise would go untested -- the area was uninhabited started to sign some cavalier pseudonym, then thought better of it. His actions would be misunderstood enough without his encouraging analysis by handwriting experts. After turning from the log he panels, alive with a rippling blur of switching light diodes. He had reveled in the power her adaptive processor had offered. The kinder of his fellow system programers had remarked on his rapport with her -- for a few short weeks she had seemed to envelop him in her feedback loop, bring to mature fruition his genius for sophisticated programing. And then, quite arbitrarily, she had cast him aside. Like the others he had become an unneeded appendage as she grew to realize her self-potential. So be it. Tonight he was again in the director's seat. His program had assembled without fatal error and would run any time he chose to give the execution order. Kneeling, he removed the right bootie, hoisted his coverall leg and unwound a bundle of long cylinders taped to his nearly hairless calf. The pattern of fine down imbedded in the white adhesive tape disturbed him -- he yanked the tape from the bundle and fumbled for a few seconds removing the adhesive strip from his hands. A faint smile crossed the lean, bony face at the thought of the picture he must present, kneeling before the blinking eyes of his generation's god... The smile faded as he rose to his feet and walked deliberately toward the adaptive processor banks, adjusting as he went the timer dial lashed to one of the sticks. T he anachronistic ring of a telephone bell was repeated several times. It had cost Sam Beneke two court trials and several retainers to keep that bell instead of the amplified commercial Ma Bell had unilaterally tried to substitute with profit aforethought. Of course the job could have been done neatly and more cheaply by any of several adroit ex-clients but that was not Sam's way. He still believed in the the monetary penalty such an attitude exacted from a law practice. Prying loose a toothpick from cigar-stained real incisors he extended his shoulder-heavy frame between chair and desk, cradled the plain black telephone in a deceptively pudgy paw and addressed opportunity. "Good afternoon. This is Sam Beneke." "Hello, Sam. This is Ceace Crosby. Still Fighting the good fight?" Like the fine trial attorney he had been before accepting a district judgeship Crosby did not wait for an unwanted reply. "Say, Sam, I was hoping you might take a case for the court. In fact -- " a decidedly unprofessional chuckle escaped the ancient earpiece -- "in fact you were the first man I thought of when I read the county prosecutor's information." "Well, thank you, Judge. I appreciate -- " Sam began his refusal but the judge's smooth, confident voice overrode him. "Actually, Sam, when he got around to naming the aggrieved party I was certain it was a practical joke -- if you can possibly wrap your mind around the concept of S. Percival Bates joking about anything." The judge's jocular tone slipped to one of concern. "Seriously, Sam, this case is not one I'd have picked for an election year. But handled right it could well stand as a landmark in American jurisprudence." Sam was not unfamiliar with Judge Crosby's penchant for cornering fellow members of the Law Club and, unencouraged, inflating the possible ramifications of his current case -- but only as historical grist for a gray Saturday afternoon's discussion. The Supreme Court had extended its protection of the presumably innocent by barring public discussion of a case by any of the involved parties. Besides, he mused, I'm hardly the friendofthecourt type a savvy judge like Ceace Crosby would pick to help him win fame and this year's election in Alameda County. The judge's voice calling his name ended his silent soliloquy. "Well, Ceace -- " He smiled into the transmitter, hoping the familiarity would discourage the judge without incurring any long-term prejudice. "I'm really loaded... Say, how about that new man up from the university? He was mooning around the last bar meeting in a pretty pitiable manner. A live client and even a modest fee could stimulate his flagging dev -- " His voice trailed off as the judge rejected his balk. "Goddamit, Sam! This will be no case for a beginner. I talked to John Abernathy when the charge was merely wilful destruction but he asked to be relieved when the county prosecutor upped the ante. We both thought your -- well, special interest in -- ah -- the impact of the computer on mankind predicates your taking the defense." "Okay, Judge." Sam sighed, mentally cramming Swanson vs United Truck along with next month's rent bill into a bursting file labeled someday, "Non sibi sed patriae. Who is my presumably indigent client and with what heinous crime has our imperious public prosecutor charged him?" "Thanks, Sam. His name is Tanner -- Fred Tanner. You should be getting an invitation to visit him right away. You understand, of course, I say this with full knowledge of your demonstrated distaste for recording devices and not for the record." Sam played the game. "I was wondering when my publicized propensity for paddy wagon pursuit would pay off," he replied tiredly. "However, the question remains: what's the rap? Does the White Crusader charge forth to save our fair land for computerized conmen? Or is the programed target public flagellation?" "The charge is murder. Probably first degree, if you assume premeditation governs. Or maybe the severity of the charge will depend on the degree of humanity exhibited by the victim. On the other hand the high court's recent decision on the rights of microcephalies -- " The judge's confident voice faded into mumbled musings. "What the hell are you talking about, Ceace -- Judge?" Sam demanded. "Who was allegedly murdered?" He could hear the judge fumbling with something on his desk, perhaps the hyperloid desk pen set the Law Club had presented him with when he first took office. Finally a subdued, almost distraught voice answered. "Sam -- the victim is a computer. The prosecutor has charged the poor fellow with destroying a sentient being capable of human -- maybe superhuman -- mental processes and therefore committing murder." He sounded relieved to have spoken the words. "Good God, Judge -- he can't mean it!" "He means it all right, Sam. Don't be too quick on this one -- he has grounds. Precedents he cites convinced me there is reasonable cause for the charge. You will defend?" "You can damn well bet your best oak gavel I'll defend! Murder, my ass! Somebody sticks his foot into a glorified crystal set and that city hall sycophant has the temerity to use the law -- " He did not hear the click of the judge's receiver nestling gently into its cradle -- he was still extending the dimensions of the prosecutor's infamy into the cracked mouthpiece when his overworked, idealistic secretary interrupted with a gentle hand on his shoulder. "It's after seven, Sam, and I have a date -- honest." Cynthia Morgan smiled wanly, assuming the swearing-in pose with her left hand resting on a battered copy of Mcllvaney's Constitutional Law. They left the darkened building together with the minimal conversation of a man and woman sharing a close, dedicated relationship uncomplicated by sexual involvement. Sam saw her through the locked entrance of her apartment house, then drove to a steamy Chinese restaurant where only chopsticks were provided and the bill was figured on an abacus. II T he morning sun, flattened and oranged by smog, added bulk to his faded Voltsbug, crouching between two Detroit vapor-electric hybrids. The flat tire came almost as a relief to Sam -- the bug's lack of even the crudest of autodrives would have forced him to fight delivery traffic on the neighborhood road net, but now he could justify taking a cab. Why the hell couldn't he kick his stupid vendetta against things automatic when the benefits were obvious to him? No intellectually satisfying insight came to him as he dialed Personal Cabs from a booth, but listening helplessly to three unrequested pain-killer commercials before the exchange computer would complete his call shored up his resentment against mindless automation. Stumbling into the cab, he braced his senses against the stale smell of countless humans who had warmed the clammy plastic seats before him. Usually he enjoyed the brash banter of the extroverted independent cabbies. They shared his auto-machine misgivings, at least to the extent that unmanned buses and delivery vehicles were invading streets they considered their private jousting yard. But today he silenced the driver's opening gambit with a disinterested monosyllable and leaned back to stare at the unrelieved gray of Piedmont City's smog-stained structures looming behind palisades of poisoned, stunted palm trees. Approaching the hall of justice the cabby wheeled expertly and illegally in front of an autobus about to leave the curb on its meticulously programed route. Sam and the driver shared an amused glance at uncomprehending faces stolidly waiting for the on-board route programer to evaluate this intrusion and start again their lives down untrammeled roads. Nodding at a bookie acquaintance Sam climbed the mottled stone steps and clopped down the echoing corridor toward the city jail annex. He marveled at the tenacity of his stomach -- it would, it seemed, retain breakfast in spite of the strident eviction notices which began with the pervading stench of exhaust fumes and rotting garbage and were now building to a nearultimatum with the addition of toilet disinfectant hanging in the stagnant air of the building. "'Morning, Counselor," the desk sergeant greeted him. "Which hardened criminal do we spring today to prey on innocent women?" "No one, Herbert," he replied, addressing the sergeant affectionately but loudly by his little-known first name. "Your jail offers service and cuisine no man should be deprived of without due process. But I would like a few minutes with Mr. Fred Tanner." fr pi Ballajjtine ##I BooImi The next best thing to a brand new Pool Anderson novel is, of coarse, a new look at one of his classics. So, while waiting for the Great Dane of Orinda to clear his calendar and begin plotting a series of heroic adventures for BB, we offer for your delectation future when intelligence begins at an IQ of Now in its fifth big printing, this twentyyear-old gem is as inventive and as relevant as the day it first rolled from Anderson's typewriter. Suppose something happened that could change you, me -- everybody -- into a genius overnight. And suppose this quickening of wits affected every animate creature: hogs, dogs, chimps -- even rabbits! What then? One day a rabbit put his nose to the bars of his trap, thrust upward -- and was free. From now on Man's dominance over the animal world was ended. Before breakfast, on that same day, a ten-year-old kid started fiddling around with graphs -- and invented differential calculus. Across the nation the entire school system became suddenly obsolete. Ready or not, mankind was on its way to a stupendous mental binge. A new age was coming, and nothing would ever be the same again... According to the New York Herald Tribune sigh!, Anderson's "plausible exploration of the theme makes for an unusually stimulating book, admirably balanced between the logical study of vast world changes and the intimate human story of some individuals. Few novels have revealed more skill simultaneously in scientific speculation and in fictional warmth and feeling." Some few years ago Galaxy published an garnered much critical acclaim, appeared in the Ballantine list the same year. Now, Bass sequel that returns us to the hive society of his first book -- a society on earth where Rorqual Maru was a cyborg -- part-oranic whale, part-mechanized ship. She was a harvester, a vast well over # feet long! plankton rake without a crop. She had been abandoned when the seas died and was left to rot. Bnt the sea was no longer dead, and Rorqual Maru had lived. Now she moves ponderously, beginning the long, long search that will set her definitely at war with mankind... "Bass is marvelously inventive," says Publishers Weekly. "His future in the field would seem secure."    A sign of the times is framing a # map in a # frame. But that's what we did Barsoom. And yon will want to, too! What an eye-catcher! Of course, the frame isn't necessary push-pins or tape on a wall will doj, but the map is a must for every fan of John Carter's Mars. The Map ## # are now at your favorite book dealer. Or, to order by mail, send price per items plus #c per order for handling to Ballantine Cash Sales, P. O. Box #, Westminster, Maryland #. Following a halfstep behind the shuffling sergeant, Sam felt his gut knot predictably. No part of his life disturbed him more than visiting a client in jail. His senses still withdrew from the harsh, reverberating steel and concrete, the sour, cagedanimal smells laced with strong chemicals, the uncompromising language and graphic art of the jail milieu. "Okay, Counselor, here's your machine-mangling monster." The sergeant nodded at the armed guard at the door and smirked. "You can bang on the bars when you're ready. The boys will pass the word -- its all been programed." He gurgled, opening the cell door. Smiling into the thin, vaguely alarmed face looking up at him from the lower bunk, Sam extended his hand. "Mr. Tanner. I'm Sam Beneke, an attorney. I understand you asked me to help out. Is that right?" Sam understood no such thing, but he respected the power if not the infallibility of the county bar association's committee on professional ethics. "Why, I guess -- I suppose Mr. Abernathy talked to you." The high, hesitant voice sounded remote, removed, but the little man did sit up. "Yes, Mr. Tanner, he did," replied Sam with more sincerity than he had any right to. "He feels he has just too much work stacked up to give your case the attention it deserves. So he asked me to represent you. If you would like me to, of course -- " Actually, little man, you just weren't worth anybody else's butting heads with an aroused county prosecutor. Not with elections in the fall... "Well, Mr. -- ah -- Bennett, it's okay with me, I guess." The small voice was choosing tomato juice instead of orange on the two-dollar breakfast. Sam absorbed his overwhelming acceptance as he would a fourth ace -- completely deadpan. Gingerly seating himself next to Tanner on the protesting bunk he smiled confidently. "That's fine, Fred. Now, why don't you tell me exactly what happened to get you here?" O ver a cup of freshly brewed I coffee Sam stared malevolently at a thin volume he had found in a nearby library. A history of adaptive computer development in the United States, it outlined the early work with maze-solving machines by Minsky and others and the relatively slow research by various universities in the past forty years. Concurrently the computer industry had wrapped the nation's production and distribution systems in layers of conventional computer control. As artificial, which was to say non-biologic, intelligence developed in the universities, scientistdisciples in government-supported laboratories had been able to sell the potential of the idea for weapons applications. Little information was available in such sensitive areas, but given the money and talent national defense still commanded it was the consensus of most authorities that # would probably see the development of an adaptive machine with a memory large enough to simulate the human brain. Sam glanced compulsively at his calendar. With the year well into # no evidence of a brave new world run on superlogic was immediately evident -- machines still made mistakes because of faulty orders from flawed humans. So as he sat, surrounded by his comfortable, old-fashioned furniture, assessing the facts, sifting data, analyzing at a deplorably low bit rate the implications he saw in the book his mind kept returning to one conundrum: the prosecution's motive. Knowing that S. Percival Bates was not a stupid man did not help Sam understand the prosecutor's actions. It seemed to him that Bates had to be intent on his own political destruction. Grudging gratitude the citizens of Alameda might grant the computer for easing the routine of their lives, but most certainly they would crucify any upstart lawyer who would equate a human, particularly a Christian, with a soulless machine. So where is the payoff? Sam wondered. Why this intentional boat-rocking by the worst of swimmers? Is national exposure, even the wrong kind, that desirable? Still bemused, Sam was on his feet, staring out through his window at the queues of lock-stepped autobuses when Cynthia hurried in, breathing heavily. "Good morning, Sam. You're early." "One of the synergetic serendipities of my simple life, Cyn. Time's a plaything of the digestion, not an astrally honed goad probing each fold of my soul. Only prepackaged Man, synchronized to the -- " "Okay, okay, Sam. You're not early. Our normal arrival sequence appears to have been reversed this morning. Or I'm late, if you prefer. At any rate, good morning." Her face wrinkled into the grin that had closed his want ad seven years ago. He noticed the faint wrinkle forward of her left earlobe. The trace of time reminded him of the years that had passed since their halfplayful battle shortly after she had started with him. During her interview he had detected her dismay when she opened the ancient desk and found an even older nonmemory typewriter. Days after he had hired her she finally marshaled the courage to confront him -- he had found her arguments compelling, logically organized and coolly presented. Still, determined to avoid a precedent of weakness with a new girl, he had held out against a computing monstrosity as a matter of principle until the throbbing carotid pulse along the arch of her neck warned him of her commitment. He could now remember little more than saying yes -- and never regretting it: Now, watching her scan the mail for likely checks, he wondered how much longer he could afford to pay her salary. Or how he could continue to operate without her. S he reached the bottom of the thin stack without a strike and was attempting to displace her disappointment by grimly beheading envelopes with her shears when the phone jangled. In one smooth motion Cynthia eased into her chair, retrieved her notebook and pen and was logging the date and time as her other hand reached for a of the third ring. "Good morning. Irving and Beneke. May I help you?" Irving had died three years after Sam joined him -- the furniture had been his and had been old even then. Sam w'as heading for his adjoining office when Cynthia's amused voice stopped him from behind a cupped receiver. "It's big brass, Sam. The executive veep from Sands Labs -- you know, where Freddy Whosis allegedly gave his mother-lovin' computer forty whacks. His name is Stanisl and he sounds like he would like to discourage you from making the march, as the protesters used to say." Returning to her desk, he accepted the phone, unconsciously hunching his left shoulder in the manner of a boxer. He had taken himself seriously as a college middleweight. "Hello, Mr. Stanisl. I appreciate your prompt approval of my request to visit the Labs. This kind of -- " A parade-ground bellow staunched the flow of ways-greasing rhetoric and revealed the general's qualifications for a VP title and actual power behind a figurehead researcher president. Warily Sam moved the receiver to within a foot of his ear. " -- do not -- I repeat, do not -- approve of your request to interfere with the defense activities of our nation? However, because of all the pink eyewash those mollycoddlers in Washington have inflated this incident with I have been ordered to inform you of the facts up to the point of endangering national security! So I am making this brief call, opposed as I am in principle, to give you what little unclassified data exist on this treasonous act." "Classified? Treason?" Sam's voice was under rigid control. "What in heaven's name could be classified about the alleged destruction of a calculating machine -- and an experimental one at that? I simply want to talk to some of the people who worked with my client." Sam found himself almost pleading and reacted. "Besides, Mr. Stanisl, I can always get a court order to part the waters of your precious think tank. But that would probably trigger a small leak to the news laddies. Do you really want to try publicly weighing a few singed circuit boards against one of God's creatures? Certainly you saw the latest news polls: eighty-three per cent of America is in my corner." The faint murmur of cross-talk conversations from other lives accompanied the thoughts of a man unused to considering direct dissent. Fieetingly Sam wished for a visiphone. And full color. "You really tempt me, Counselor." The barely controlled voice ground out the words. "With just a little more -- All right, Beneke, I'll have an escort pick you up at Gate Three tomorrow morning at zero eight hundred. Ask for -- ah -- Mr. CD CD K For January we have a gorgeous together for us by the master himself: ten stories and ten articles "to tell an interesting story of my life." UQ#c Jack Vance's classics of The Dying Earth have always brought demands for "More!" Michael Shea, a disciple of Vance, has, with permission, brought back from the last days of Old Earth the marvel-filled UQ#-#C takes us all on a crash-landing on an unexplored planet and really shows us the problems that will be faced. UQ #-#C Purrri goes the gal on the cover and the intricately plotted narraa novel which moves Louis Trimble into the first rank of sf's writers. UQ#-#C his fourth exploit on behalf of Earth in a cosmos filled with the kind of alien plotters that can juvenile about it! UT#-#c We have Vincent Di Fate, Kelly Freas, George Barr and Jack Gaughan. They're a beautiful set! Book price plus #c postage and handling, P.O. Box #, Bergenfield, N.J. #I if ypu ' can't find a book in stores. Gilbert. And don't give me any hard ass on an escort or I'll buck you clear to the Potomac. God bless her!" Any eating attorney at age fortyseven is a negotiator. Sam was certain he stood a better chance of steering an underling than an already irate ex-general. "Thank you, Gen -- Mr. Stanisl. I'll be there promptly at zero eight -- at eight o'clock. Gate Three is the west entrance to the lab, isn't it ? " "That's a roger, Beneke. Good day." The general returned to the apex of his vertically structured kingdom by decree. I n the morning, waiting for the guard at Gate # to locate his escort, Sam surveyed one corner of Sands Laboratories from the offlevel guard shack. Pinon-sprinkled hills, only beginning to fester with housing developments, surrounded the eighty-acre research center on three sides. Sands had grown from a private inventor's workshop, a plaything of a wealthy rancher interested in off-beat inventions and tax write-offs. His will had established the existing, structure of the enterprise, a nonprofit but wellsalaried development lab which had flourished in spite of endless legal forays by disappointed heirs. Growing steadily, Sands had won over the years a national reputation for creating superb instrumentation and control systems. Utilization of digital computers in highspeed, real-time control applications by a group oriented toward accurate measurements rather than gimmickry had led to a commanding position in the field. Three computer generations later Sands had, according to the public prosecutor, created a living machine in man's ballpark if not in his image. I wonder how long it will take, Sam speculated, for the legend to build, for the sanctifying of the Holy Program, for... "Pardon me, are you Mr. Beneke?" Somewhat startled, Sam pivoted to confront a woman of perhaps twenty-five, flowing brown hair framing a smiling face with exquisite cheekbones. Her wide-set gray eyes crinkled amusedly as Sam completed a compulsive scan of a lissom feminine body enhanced by a clinging Wanishi gown. "I suppose you expected Erik Gilbert. Unfortunately he was needed at one of our field offices, so I was asked to escort you. I'm Eileen Sanford and Erik and I share a cubicle." She grinned wryly and added: "Computer, that is." Sam concentrated hard on remembering his age. "My pleasure, ah -- Miss Sanford. I suppose someone mentioned to you my reason for being here." He couldn't or wouldn't wipe the sarcasm from his voice. Hell no, Sam! It's pure coincidence, this beautiful lib. Believe that and you should burn your shingle. Again she seemed honestly amused. "Actually, Mr. Counselor, I'm part of a vast scheme to mislead you. And you, no doubt, seek to plant false evidence at the scene of the crime. If you like we could step off a few paces and -- en garde!" A few tethered times in the whirlwind of his memory Sam could recall this same leap-frogging dichotomy of his mind. The gut desire to trust absolutely in a stranger toggling alternately with the analytic cynicism the available evidence warranted. Now, with those lovely gray eyes taunting him, the struggle was intense but brief. But he could still cloak an emotional response in the raiment of reason. "I'm sorry, miss," he offered, assuming his earnest summation stance. "I feel very strongly about the legal questions involved in this incident and tend to overreact when a seemingly obvious attempt is made to divert me. Even when the diversion is a lovely girl. Please forgive me if I have misjudged you." Disarmed by his earnest apology she smiled warmly while he completed his presentation. " -- and why don't you call me Sam?" "Shades of gallantry -- Sam! A man hasn't apologized to me, at least in public, since I left home. You're what my grandfather calls square -- but effective!" Stepping back, hands on hips, she surveyed him. "Well, Counselor, so much for cleaning out our input registers. Is there anything I can do to help you help Fred? He seemed such a harmless, introverted type the few times he talked to me, but he had rapport with What made him take up the sword?" "Well, Miss Sanford, if he took up the sword is a question only a jury can determine," Sam retorted. "However, you must need a lecture on legal ethics like I need computers. Could I buy you a cup of coffee somewhere? In something besides plastic cups?" "I'm Eileen, okay? Coffee would be nice -- the computer building has a coffee shop. Why not come over to our zoo and look at the site of Fred's -- or whose ever -- folly while you try our guaranteed fresh brew? I can escort you in. Erik said he checked before he left." Before he could accept she impulsively tugged at his sleeve. "One thing, though. You'll be meeting took other jobs in the company gracefully and seemed to view The others probably feel more or less like the 'person unknown.' I guess the former would be hostile witnesses from your point of view." She released his coat but held his eyes with hers, now robbed of their banter. "On the other hand, it might be less awkward if they didn't know you were defending poor Fred. Just let me do the talking." "Whatever you say." He grinned. "You might tell me who or what and charity are not involved." strolled toward the company's technical complex, "is a deceptive acronym for a very sophisticated machine. Originally the idea was to build a machine to optimize the operating programs of other comHeuristically Optimized Program Encoder." She glanced at him apologetically, "At this point my engineering friends begin talking about such esoterica as pseudosynapses and trainable neuromimes but finally end up with an analogy of a baby learning to walk. He knows when he gets there, but doesn't understand how it happened." Nodding vacantly, Sam mused aloud as they crossed a wide area of freshly cut grass, fragrant in the warm morning sun: "I never realize how the city stinks when I'm in it -- only when I manage to break out, like today. The smell of grass wouldn't have a chance against the fumes and garbage. I wonder how we could use garbage and rat dung to grow grass in alleys?" Receiving no comment he turned to face her perplexed smile. He had lost her. A liberated woman in her chosen world, she was nevertheless an innocent, the ultimate product of the suburban isolationism. Rats were friendly white pets or, at tific advancement. Garbage was dinner an hour ago and went effortlessly down the drain. H e started to apologize, but she had already dismissed his ravings and moved to the immediate goal. Guiding him to an inconspicuous but rugged door in a newly built wing of the massive building, she pressed her ID card into a wall slot. Then, muttering to the bewildered Sam, "I'll huff and I'll bluff and I'll -- " She pressed her right hand into a grooved sensor plate on the doorway and aligned her flushed face within the mirrored scanner above her head, even teeth biting warm lips to congeal her face into a better likeness of the sober ID photo. Apparently satisfied, the troll within signaled the release of the door locks and Eileen waved open the already sliding door. As they stood in the small foyer, waiting for human perusal, she explained. "This is only a trial run of one link in the new security system that has been abuilding since Fred far from complete and can't as yet handle major perturbations like distinguished visitors from the city. So a guard must still smooth over the interface problems with a judgment decision. Doesn't that appeal to your humanistic code, Sam?" The gray eyes were at it again. He started to parry when a guard entered the foyer. She presented Sam's authorization papers, perforated with printer sprocket holes, in exchange for an oversize visitor's badge, "If this procedure is new," he asked as they entered a walnut paneled hall, "what kind of security system did you have on the night in question?" This time she could not restrain a delighted laugh. "Fred is in good hands. 'Night in question' yet!" They came to an intersection and she guided him to the right with a firm hand. "Actually the old system was aimed at stopping outsiders -- sabotage by a securitycleared staff was not considered a significant risk. At least that was the more or less official word that circulated after the explosion. And in my opinion, it worked." She smiled at a young man pushing a flatcar stacked with tape reels. "Only the staff ever made it into told you Fred had transferred only "Jesus!" Sam exclaimed. "One more generation and we -- they -- will all grunt in -- what is it, straight "Night in question, of course. You're faltering, Sam." "A purely human weakness, girl," he growled, too piqued to acknowledge her point gracefully. "Bound to die out with the species when core magnum machine displaces biodegradable man. But how does the new monitor weed out bad risks regardless of company affiliation? Surely the sagest of circuits would never sense a nascent Borgia behind a lovely face like yours, say." Not bad, he congratulated himself, after ten years on the desert. "Thank you. Counselor, but you're wrong. According to the engineers installing the new system -- sensing a person's 'set' toward us from fairly elementary sensor data. The experts are confident they will be able to adapt the program to protect any machine in this building. Even though they don't really tailed charts of what had to be done to make it work. But at the time her killer visited, although she probably had a good idea what he was up to, the hardware she needed to control access to that fabulous crystal processor simply hadn't arrived. The old security monitor -- written by guess who -- was wired around her and she couldn't hold him off. I wonder," she said, turning to Sam as the idea caught her, "if she knew fear that night, somewhere down in that maze of pulsating circuits?" "It is enough, far more than enough, that we suffer these infernal machines to control our lives. Don't grant them our emotions, too." Sam could not completely conceal the edge in his tone. "Well, as I said, from the information she crammed on tape that night the engineers were able to build an experimental attitude detector for the front door scanner. It's all empirical, but they've been able to reject volunteers hypnotized to hate computers. I suspect, Sam," she grinned, "that without an escort you would rate an absolute override priority alarm." S he was elaborating some of the plans for the conventional comthey passed a blocked elevator entrance Sam recognized from Fred's description. Then they were in the programing center coffee shop. Eileen introduced Sam, honestly enough, as an attorney interested in the applications of computers to the small law office. Two of the dozen or so programers he met had worked on Eileen managed to inject unobtrusively through the swirl of names. Even with his instincts honed to detect phony stories Sam was impressed by the strong sense of loss projected by several of these professionals. He found himself talking to the two senior programed, both male, when Eileen finally broke away to ferret a porcelain cup for her guest. "Believe me," he consoled them, "any trial lawyer knows the wormwood taste of a hard-fought battle lost. But -- well, you seem to take the whole thing more seriously than the loss of a machine would justify. I could almost believe there had been a death in the family. Surely Sands is a large enough outfit to absorb the loss, what with fire insurance and -- " He stopped as the older of the two managed to hang a restraining hand on the arm of his companion who had risen from his chair, his face twisted in outrage, "Easy, Marv. This fellow could not possibly know' how you feel. Just let it go." Turning to Sam with a fixed smile on his face, the calmer man ended the confrontation. "I'm sorry, Mr. Beneke. Perhaps your remark about a death in the family fits too well. At any rate, we do have a software quotation meeting scheduled in a few minutes, so please excuse us." The two men collided as they turned to leave -- the younger one still refused to meet Sam's eyes. Cheeks pale with emotion, he was hurling words at his companion as they passed the returning Eileen. "I see you struck out, Counselor. Watch it! The coffee, too, is hot -- for a change. Would you like to lick your wounds by the window?" Hunched over cups steaming in the overcooled air, they let their conversation range far beyond Sam's mission. They compared her life in the spanking suburban workpark with his grim knowledge of the crumbling inner city. And they watched people certain of next week's groceries taking their coffee on the enclosed patio lawn. Only a thin smog obscured the sun as a steady breeze swept across the nearby greenbelts toward the distant city. As they were gathering up their crockery for a return to the kitchen a crewcut and tie clicked his heels at their table. "Hi, Ei. Could I talk to you privately for a min?" Sam caught the momentary wince of dislike that knifed across her face. "Sure, Charlie. Uh -- Sam -- Mr. Beneke, this is Charlie Strauss. Please excuse us a minute, Sam." The clatter of colliding dishes in the kitchen swallowed the voices of the pair within ten feet but they continued to the opposite wall. Sam saw Eileen square her shoulders twice before she turned and strode back to his table. "Well, Counselor, it seems someone in the hierarchy goofed. They had the wrong Gilbert picked to escort you: Tony G. from Personnel was the man selected to -- help you. Not Erik. So, of course, I was the wrong stand-in. You're lucky we didn't get lost in the catacombs forever." For seconds they stared at each other, regretting the stays of job and social expectation. Then the guards came up again -- humor returned to shroud more dangerous feelings. "Just don't quote anything I told you, friend lawyer -- it just might be the truth! I'm sorry," she said, holding his sleeve, "but my explicit orders are to drop you like a hot potato. Charlie will escort you to the approved clean room in Personnel." She gave him her hand and muttered quietly, "Orbit easy over Chari ie-boy -- he has a heart of pure Sands." Ineffectually against the dish clatter she raised her voice for the benefit of the still distant Charlie. "Goodbye. Mr. Beneke. I'm sorry we wasted your morning but we in operations know so little about the whole thing -- " Her voice trailed off as Sam's new escort came jogging over to the table. C harlie's voice, still hearty after ten minutes' sparring with the oversized gloves affected by institutional foes, rang in Sam's ears as he rolled down the bug's window and handed his pass to the guard at the gate. For long minutes he sat, while the guard's hard eyes jerked from his to the badge, to the glove compartment, to the rear cubbyhole. The trunk and the motor compartment were searched. It was obviously a planned roust but not technically outside the security stipulations Sam had signed when he entered. The general was exacting his toll. When the guard did step back and shrug him through it was with the air of a man releasing a known molester in front of a schoolyard. Twice Sam caught himself scanning the rearview mirror for pursuers as he piloted his small electric back to the central city. He suspected some cranny of the Voltsbug might now shelter a pulser, no doubt to betray his midnight prowls to erotic bookstores and the like. It took a sudden dash off the freeway, onto the reverse traffic side and a replay three miles back toward Sands to calm him down. He decided to spend the rest of the day making a few bucks for Irving and Beneke. It would justify his growing need for the security he derived from pressing a flowing pen against a pristine legal pad. HI T he precautions instituted by the court to avoid prejudicing a fair trail had stimulated the curiosity of many who related closely to the defendant. Sam finally found parking two long blocks from the courthouse, then spent twenty minutes forcing his way through a crowd of good-natured sympathizers that surrounded the Hall of Justice. Once past the police cordon thrown up at the foot of the stained courthouse steps, he angled toward the guarded entry, moving deliberately to save his breath. Halfway to the top he stopped to watch a group of youths dance around a burning pile of spindled and mutilated computer cards. The police reacted calmly, methodically stamping out the fire after chasing away the chanting protesters. As he turned to resume his climb Sam was neatly blocked by two smiling men with press credentials. One carried a head-mounted TV camera with a small monitor screen cantilevered in front of his face, like an angler fish at work. The other had a vaguely familiar face and spoke into a small hand mike. "Mr. Beneke, as the defense attorney in this bizarre trial you have been quoted as saying it is some kind of joke. Would you care to comment?" The oily, confidential voice triggered full recognition. Sam had arrived -- he was about to speak on national -- world -- television under the unctuous guidance of Andrew Kopps, premier hitman crew. Kopps had looked healthier, Sam decided, in the funereal colors radiating from the above-bar TV at the Little Later, a quiet place Sam occasionally visited to toast a win or philosophize a loss. Maneuvering to keep the proffered mike between the camera lens and his twicebroken hose he hesitated briefly, then winked at the camera and replied, "I'm sure, Mr. Kopps, you and your viewers are aware of the court's prohibition of public discussions of this case by any concerned party. My only comment would be to emphasize my belief in my client's innocence of the charge brought against him by the county prosecutor." He pushed the mike aside, sidestepped the reporter and jogged up the remaining steps. Other newsmen quizzed him at the entryway but he offered only enigmatic, "No comments -- " until he managed to escape beyond the guarded doors. Not once a year was a case of his alluring to the new's media -- he wondered how big a crowd the trial would have drawn if the court had not seen fit to impose a gag rule. Approaching the courtroom through halls remarkably empty, he was still unsure of what might constitute a good defense. Maybe the prosecution is just as much at sea... He still had only Ceace Crosby's word that a valid case existed as he pushed open the door. "Good morning, Percival," he greeted the somber, immaculately dressed prosecutor. As they shook hands before the empty judge's bench Sam muttered softly, "I thought you had filled your conviction quota for this year, Perc. Is this farce really necessary to win the fall election?" Bates bristled, but managed a faint smile. "The defense counsel, as usual, misunderstands my motives. I am interested only in justice." He uttered his banality with such solemn earnestness that Sam could almost believe it. Grinning without replying, he strode to the defense table where his client sat with an officer of the court. "'Morning. Fred. Have they been treating you well?" "Why, good morning, Mr. Beneke," the small man replied, jerking his head as if surprised to see Sam. S am thought ruefully of the past i few weeks he had spent preparing this withdrawn client of his for the ordeal of examination he might have to face by an unfriendly prosecutor abetted by witnesses. Fred had been polite but uninterested. The barriers he had erected against coupled with the guilt he felt for her death, seemed to have numbed him to any perception of his own danger. The bailiff stood the court as Judge Crosby glided across the floor from his chambers and settled gingerly into the seat of judgment. The seat this day -- at his own request -- was a half-filled inner tube from an ancient automobile tire he sometimes used to reduce the pressure on his hemorrhoids and -- some said -- by an average of two years the length of sentences he meted out. The members of the jury sat stiffly in straight-backed wooden chairs while Judge Crosby studied a thin sheaf of documents. Finally he raised his head and stared almost malevolently at the prosecuting attorney. Then, addressing himself to the gracefully flowing hands of the court reporter he spoke slowly and clearly to the Supreme Court judges he was certain would one day dissect the trial transcript. "In the case of the people of the State of Arizona versus Fred Tanner it is charged the defendant did, with malice aforethought, murder a sentient being known as Sands Laboratories on the morning of February seventh, nineteenninety-two, between the hours of two-thirty and three-thirty." Pausing to shift his seat a bit, he glanced at each attorney as if to satisfy himself of the reality of the situation. "It is further charged that the defendant did commit an act of second-degree arson at the same time and place. The court is fully cognizant of the controversial nature of the murder charge. It is also aware of the groundswell of public criticism that followed the scheduling of this trial. Nevertheless, the court feels that sufficient legal precedent, if not public approval, has been established for the extension of due process to individuals previously excluded or otherwise affected. Questions of such portent must ultimately be decided in the highest courts but it is here, in the courts of original jurisdiction, that such issues are first joined. It behooves us to be open to change." He watched the caressing hands of the reporter, copying half a paragraph behind, complete their flutterings. "Are the people ready, Mr. Bates?" "We are ready to present arguments for the state, your honor." "And the defense, Mr. Beneke?" "Ready, your honor." "Well then, you may begin, Mr. Bates." T he prosecutor chose to mount his attack on the foundations of human law in routine fashion. His first witness was a fire inspector who investigated the scene of the explosion that had dismembered Sam played some games of semantics on the definition of death, but only briefly. He was confident he could easily beat the murder charge, but prolonging the inspector's testimony would only emphasize the extent of the fire damage and threaten Sam's already shaky defense against the charge of arson. Bates' second witness was an electronics engineer from Sands. Sam thought he might have seen the man during his visit but he could not be sure. The lab's payroll was over three thousand and most of the people he had actually met were under-thirty programers. The man being sworn in was middleaged, gray-haired but trim. His initial testimony established him as an old-timer at Sands who had whetted his design skills on fast-response servo systems before computers became a significant part of the lab's business. Moving with the flow of work he had entered lower management in the computer applications area, then returned to the ranks to member of the design group still associated with the adaptive machine when she was destroyed. His assignment had been to investigate her adaptive processes without disturbing normal operations. After Sam had stipulated the man's expertise in the world of computing machines the prosecutor began his questioning. such a unique creation? How was she fundamentally different from, say. a conventional machine like stand your company is now installing?" The engineer leaned back almost an inch in the straight-backed witness chair and regarded the ceiling. After several seconds he dropped his line of sight to the prosecutor's eyes. "I cannot answer your first question accurately. Adaptive techniques in computers smack of black magic. The whole idea has been to fashion a machine that can modify its own internal organization so as to optimize the achievement of the programer's goals. Some of the innovations we came existing machines were novel but, in all honesty, the two-magnitude jump in the number of matrix cells probably explains her outstanding success." "Would you say," the prosecutor asked in an affectedly slow cafrom crystal cells that perform like those in the brain of a human?" "Objection, your honor. The competence of the witness to testily on the functioning of the human brain has not been established." Sam's voice was quite low but sufficient to reach the bench. And the prosecutor. "Oh, come now. Counselor! You have already stipulated the witness's expertise." The prosecutor had adopted a stance of honest indignation, his legs planted well apart, open jacket pinned back by arms akimbo. "A computer expert, not a neurologist or a brain surgeon," Sam replied in a patient tone. "Gentlemen, please -- " the judge warned them mildly. "I believe the defense has a point, Mr. Bates. Objection sustained." "Very well, your honor, but I should like to point out the large overlap of expertness in this field. Engineers working on adaptive machines necessarily learn the fundamentals of neuron behavior and doctors in the field usually understand the basic circuits used to simulate neuron action." "Is my learned colleague seeking expert status for himself as well as for the witness?" Sam asked acidly. "That will do, Mr. Beneke," cautioned the judge. "Please continue your examination, Mr. Prosecutor." B ates paused for several seconds, formulating a new tack. Finally he cleared his throat and asked, "What neural model did you use in designing the adaptive processor which is -- was -- the heart of the "The same one all adaptive computers I know anything about use -- the mammalian neuron. The validity of our model was established in the pioneering work of Doctors Rush and Moot in mapping brain functions. Cal -- Dr. Van Moot, is also a practicing neurosurgeon." "Would you please tell the court was built?" "The processor," began Simms, crossing his legs self-consciously before the many onlookers, "is actually a three-dimensional matrix of stabilized liquid crystals. It was grown to its operational size over a period of nearly three months in a precisely regulated mother solution, but training began much earlier. When the matrix was no bigger than a pea." "Training?" intoned the prosecutor. "You mean programing, don't you?" "No sir," the witness denied, predictably, "I mean training. The trainer -- and up to the time of rewards the behavior he desires and punishes deviance. In an electrical sense, you understand. At the local level the group of neurons which responds most appropriately is rewarded with a higher notch in the control hierarchy. That means it will have a larger influence on the behavior of the machine the next time a similar problem is encountered. It is not unlike speeded-up evolution where nature is the trainer." The witness had shucked his cool, professional air. His voice was now animated. His pale blue eyes darted from prosecutor to judge while his angular hands stroked a lively accompaniment to his words. not the first adaptive computer, did you not?" "Yes, I did. Several industrial control computers are running today that developed their own operating programs by trial-anderror operation of a complete plant under the tutelage of a human overseer. And many small-scale adaptives have been built by various universities over the years." "You testified earlier," the prosecutor said, thumbing through his notes to impress the jury, "that the much larger adaptive processor was advance over previous adaptive machines. Just what was it she could do that they couldn't?" Simms seemed to consider his answer carefully. Then he shrugged. "I guess you would have to say there is little basis for comparison. She became the first self-trained machine." "And what precisely does that mean?" "It means," Simms replied, raising his eyes to the audience, "that after two or three months of training by the systems programing of her trainer's instructions. She began to experiment, like a baby dumping her first bowl of cereal." "Objection!" Sam was on his feet. "The witness is not qualified to pass judgment on the motivation of an infant." "Sustained." The judge nodded, smiling faintly. "I should like to caution the witness to reserve his testimony to his field of established competence. Delete the portion of Mr. Simms' testimony that began with 'like a baby...'" The prosecutor was unperturbed by the interruption -- he had reached a benchmark in his case and would follow the script. H e walked slowly to the jury box and leaned forward, gripping the handrail with an intensity that whitened his knuckles dramatically against the stained walnut. Over his shoulder he lofted the next question to his witness. "Please tell the court how the Sands programing staff became aware that an independent machine self had been created in the "Please, your honor," Sam shouted. "Counsel is leading the witness with unsupported assumptions -- at best. 'An independent machine self had been created -- "' he mimicked the frowning prosecutor. "What does that mean, I should like to know?" Bates was ready. Walking to the bench, his dour face deformed to reveal an inner state of satisfaction. "The idea may repel counsel for the defense but the wording is accurate. 'Created' is used in an accepted sense -- the act of investing with a new rank or office. 'Self,' as a noun, we use in the sense of the second definition in Webster's: the realization or embodiment of an body what the good defense attorney would keep forever an abstraction despite the evidence -- a nonbiologic, internally motivated and directed entity capable of pursuing goals it can recognize in the universe it perceives. And both the goals and their implementation, as we shall show, were worthy of human emulation. "And as for the use of the word 'machine' as an adjective -- " Bates smirked -- "it was used simply to clarify the identity of the individual usage is acceptable to the anthropocentric defense counsel without further reference." It was a pat, rehearsed speech and effective. Judge Crosby squirmed on his inner tube. He glanced hopefully at the courtroom clock. It read an unsympathetic #:# in six-inch digital characters implacably synchronized with the National Time Service computer in Washington. So he had the reporter read the transcript of the last encounter. A hundred sets of expectant eyes made his anus itch -- he must make a decision. He could not see a constitutional crisis hanging on his action but it bothered him that the correct decision did not present itself. If only court decorum favored an honest scratch both ends of justice might be better served . "Objection overruled. The witness may answer." Simms leaned back in the witness chair and pinched his lower lip. "Probably the first actions she took on her own were not caught. We first noticed something was amiss when someone compared assembly times for our high-shock reentry program, which is usually run two or three times a week. Of course you expect an adaptive machine to continue making minor improvements in its internal organversed the trend. Of course her improvement would have to level off someplace -- but no one could see how her rate of improvement could possibly increase once the trainer's feedback was removed." Simms smiled faintly and glanced up at the judge. "As I recall, it was about this time the proas 'she.'" "And that was all?" asked the prosecutor. "No, just the beginning, as it turned out. There was even pressure from the programing groups to disable the unruly adaptive processor and return our system to its original, conventional operating mode. Needless to say, management was not overwhelmed by that idea because the thinktank fish were getting the best computer service ever -- and they are Sands' future. At any rate, there was a meeting or two but before anyone could generate any clout the debates became academic." ed?" breathed the prosecutor, meaning no such thing. c-" simms replied, again composed. "She simply refused to output any diagnostic programs that would reveal her internal organization. Plain and simple, room for compromise. It was now a forced choice between the systems not in the strata of management that makes such decisions but the results spoke for themselves. A tight security net was thrown graming group was dissolved. Most of the programers who stayed were assigned to the project teams building control systems for the South proceeded to settle down and swamp our scientific staff with her bounty." "Was the defendant, Fred Tanner, one of the displaced programers?" "Yes, of course. He was transferred to work for Hersh Crump in the machine control shop. Pretty crude work after that #-D holographic terminal they had tied into should have had a sympathetic reception though -- Hersh wasn't a believer in new-fangled methods either. He had never been convinced a drawer of circuit cards in a numerical control panel could take the place of a skilled machinist with steady hands. Actually there are quite -- " "Excuse me, Mr. Simms," the prosecution attorney interrupted, "but did Mr. Tanner tell you personally how he liked his new job?" "Yes, he did. He still ran compiling programs through the center and we met there a few weeks after the -- change. I cannot recall his exact words but they certainly conveyed unhappiness with his new job." "Did he express resentment "Yes, I remember quite well because of his behavior. He became very' excited and yelled he had been betrayed. I was sympathetic and he finally cooled down. Of course I don't see how he could help but resent stepping head grinders after tasting the delights of the early "Objection! The witness is merely conjecturing," Sam interjected. "Objection sustained. The jury will disregard the witness's last statement. Strike from the record the part beginning with 'I don't see -- "' The judge again admonished Simms to refrain from adding unrequested testimony and nodded to the prosecutor to continue. "What other attempts were made the machine would no longer respond to human instructions?" The witness smiled. "Well, naturally, committees w'ere formed. Two, to be exact. The one of which I was a member was charged with various scientific groups -- we hoped to learn how she had structured herself internally. Another group, which I know little about, was put together to determine how w r e could "Did the committees accomplish their goals?" asked the prosecutor, consulting his wrist watch. "I can only answer for mine. We failed -- until the night of the explosion." "Please go on," the prosecutor urged him. I n spite of the obviously rehearsed tone of the testimony Sam found himself leaning forward to catch the witness's words. "Well, we had gotten nowhere with the little cat-and-mouse games we played with her earlier -- but on the night she was destroyed she loaded every tape reel and disk storage unit in the center with a binary play-by-play account of the two most complex programs she had developed during the few weeks she had control of her life -- " He glanced at Sam, as if expecting an eruption. Bates was a little slow on the uptake, then hastened to fill the gap. "After refusing all requests for her secrets she suddenly cooperated. How do you explain that?" With all the theatrics that had been served up by the prosecution it was difficult -- but Sam had to believe the twist of anguish on Simms' face as he continued in a strained voice. "From the printout records and guard's log we know she managed the whole thing in the time it took her killer to open the entry cage with a bogus encoder key until those filthy cylinders ripped out her mind!" Fighting for control, his taut hands gripping the arms of his chair, Simms glared at the unattentive Fred. "It was the completely rational act of an intelligent being, the most inspired yet absolutely logical action any of us at her post mortem could imagine. She couldn't leave offspring, but in the final minutes of her life she did her best to insure the construction of a Sam waited for the witness to regain some measure of composure as the judge gaveled down a sympathetic murmur from the observers. "If it please your honor, I must object. Not only would the witness breathe life and superintelligence into racks of inert circuits but he then proceeds to read the invented mind of his own creation. His statements are conjectural and argumentative." The judge sustained Sam's motion and Simms' eulogy was deleted from the record. Crosby then recessed the court for lunch and swept out of the room, secure in the knowledge that the flowing judicial gown which concealed his biped ancestry likewise hid any possible signs of his mundane human affliction. In the hall the normal swarm of citizenry wandering through the rock-lined labyrinth of bureaucratic government had been thinned to an occasional brisk pedestrian by the court's entry restrictions. Sam found it easy to overtake the deliberately striding prosecutor. "Well, Perc," he began in a friendly tone as he fell into step, "you did stage a fine production before a first-night audience. I'm sure you agree, however, nothing that was said this morning was likely to move any of those twelve God-fearing people in the jury box to admit the cleverest of machines into the ranks of His children. It seems to me the arson charge alone would fit the facts better and ease the burden on the jurors as well as the taxpayers. I believe my client would accept my recommendation for a plea of guilty to second degree arson." Bates slowed his walk and scanned the hall for ears. Then he bestowed upon Sam his dreadful parody of a smile. "Mr. Beneke, you know perfectly well the most difficult aspect of my case was to establish the actual occurrence of a murder. I accomplished that this morning, or will have done so when all the testimony is in. As for putting the defendant and his murder weapon on the scene I've never had a better case. No sale." IV S atisfied he had established the commission of a murder the prosecutor spent the afternoon gluing the impassive defendant to the site of the explosion that had demony placing Fred in the computer complex within the hour of the fire alarm, documented by the positive ID in the water-stained entry log, was so incriminating that Sam chose not to extend the effect of such positive evidence by crossexamination. It was a point he anyway if the prosecutor had been receptive to a lesser plea. From the sleepy electrician Fred had passed during his adventure Sam managed to bully an admission of fatigue and something less than possible identification of his client. It was arduous work, trying to portage his frail case through the heavy brushwood of objections the prosecutor was able to throw in his path. By the time Bates called his third witness of the afternoon Sam was wilting. "You testified, Mr. Sorensen, that the defendant wrote the program of computer instructions which set up a new security code each day. Is that correct?" asked Sam listlessly. "Correct." "Was there anything, in your opinion, so unique about this program that only the defendant could have created it?" Sam was positive every knowledgeable person in the room could hear the hollow clank of his feeble traps as he scattered them with leaden hands. "Well, I always felt Fred heard the sound of a different drummer when it came to flow-charting a job but -- no, several of our senior people could have done the job. Not as elegantly, perhaps." His simper at the defendant went unrewarded. "Now this program was the heart of your physical security alarm system. Did only top security people have access to it?" "I believe it was classified secret -- yes, I'm sure it was." "Come now, Mr. Sorensen, that begs the question. As a matter of fact, couldn't any one of your programed walk up to the vault where the classified tapes are kept, print out any or all of the security alarm program, study it at his leisure and then dispose of the printout in the shredder without as much as signing his initials? Is this not, in fact, the normal if unmentioned modus operandi of systems programers in general when they are working on classified projects?" Sam's multi-question exuberance drew objections from the prosecution but in the end he won an admission that some other qualified Sands programer could indeed gain the know-how to bypass the alarm system by the same process attributed to Fred. He had less luck with the owner of the general store in an old mining town thirty miles from Piedmont. The grizzled ex-miner was positive Fred Tanner had bought four sticks of dynamite and two detonator caps from him two weeks before the Sands blowup. Fred's white hands and elaborate questions had even prompted the alert old man to record the license number of the car Fred had borrowed. Out of habit Sam went through his normal harassment routine for positive identifications but he could not sway the old man's testimony. He consoled himself that it was another point of concession in his defense strategy as Judge Crosby adjourned court. after a hurried conference with Freddy Far-out Sam was anticipating an hour of Mozart in the headphones as he fumbled papers into his briefcase and turned to leave. Suddenly the gray eyes were there an inch below his, smiling as if computers and prosecutors, murders and garbage were a string quartet. "Hi, Sam! Guess who got a subpoena!" He didn't risk taking the time to drop his briefcase but took her proffered hand awkwardly with his left. Vaguely he sensed the prosecutor's glowering face drift through his field of vision but it did not register. The warmth of Eileen's firm hand in his was suddenly the prime directive of his life. "Your honored colleague, the prosecutor, isn't endearing himself to the working girl. I just may change my testimony if he programs any more dry runs like today." A faint flush deepened the contrast of her smooth skin, softtaut over fine cheekbones. Reluctantly Sam released her hand, then stepped around her and took her arm as they left the nearly empty courtroom. "The county prosecutor does seek reelection in strange ways. I have never been battered more effectively and yet felt more certain of winning a case... Any jury would give him a guilty verdict right now on the arson charge. But murder?" Once in the hall he guided her between granite walls no longer cold. "We'll go down to the basement and slip out by the emergency exit. I know most of the guards." Enough of the crowd was still leaving to force them against each other in the sinking cage -- he felt her warmth and occasionally the pressure of her body as the car lurched gently to a stop at the lower floors. They were alone during the last drop to the basement, but neither moved away. Sam did know the guard at the emergency exit but managed to contain any response to the broad wink he received as he and the girl passed through. He half expected to collide with one or two of the more imaginative local reporters but only two boys were in sight, playing handball against the stained stone walls of the covered entryway. They interrupted their game to watch the adults with flat-eyed intolerance then returned to the pursuits of youth, remarking on Eileen's body in words obscene but not uncomplimentary. Sam hoped she was either wise enough not to be offended or sufficiently ignorant of street vernacular to remain untouched. They now walked a little apart and were within sight of her sleek catalytic sports roadster when the unique idea occurred to him that the world of Sam Beneke would not necessarily vaporize if he failed to close the precisely fitted door between himself and this warm, friendly creature who somehow smelled of fresh-cut grass. He did shut the door after all -- but from the inside. He had offered dinner but she smiled into his eyes and spoke of instant chops from the Leaving the parking lot he worried briefly about his Voltswagen alone on a strange street -- then, with barely a twinge, decided to let the insurance company do the worrying. For a member of the Alameda legal fraternity the overnight parking ticket would be quietly forgotten. At the first light Eileen began to struggle out of her trench coat. He helped her with some difficulty, his heavy shoulders wedged between the bucket seat and the dash padding. Her lips moved from a smile as his hands shucked her coat and closed on her shoulders. He kissed her very gently as the sequencer on the autobus behind them computed five hundred elapsmitted start of the go signal and energized a strident horn. Sam sank back in the seat and felt the warm leather push against the back of his neck as he watched the girl maneuver through the late afternoon traffic. They didn't talk much -- he contented himself with grinning back at the Madonna smile she gave him each time she glanced away from the traffic and saw him watching her. It seemed improbable to him that he was really there, with the redolence of imported leather upholstery tinged with her perfume tion, caulked religiously after each intentionally brief affair, wrinkled like floe ice in spring as his eyes traced the clean line of her throat. Her breasts, silhouetted against the glare of slanting sunlight diffused through smog, were free beneath the cashmere sweater and moved gracefully with the motion of her arms on the steering wheel. Briefly he thought of the trial and, guiltily, of Fred Tanner alone in his cell. And again an alien idea bloomed unasked: he had not put Fred there. He harbored no doubts that only the murder charge was in serious dispute. It was unexpectedly easy to dismiss the whole business and reach over to run his fingers through Eileen's smooth, flowing hair. I n the morning she drove them to his office, him with his unopened briefcase, herself with her excuse from work, a subpoena. Once there he introduced Eileen to Cynthia with some reservations. Since his qualms rested on a personal evaluation of two women he loved they naturally proved to be groundless. As his secretary herded him to a place on the venerable divan next to Eileen her excitement over the pair of them was evident. She poured coffee in saucers, trailed sugar across the faded surface of the table and generally dithered like an approving mother until Sam had difficulty containing his exasperation. Eileen was amused but sought to divert his annoyance. "Sam, I'd have known this was your office if the sign on the door said city jail -- which would have been my second guess. Wherever did you find such outstanding examples of Victorian finery? The couch -- rhinoceros hide, isn't it? And the carvings on that chair have more convolutions than a lawyer's brain." Cynthia was overjoyed to see someone else prod his choice of office furniture; she had to relate her battle for a computing typewriter when Sam hired her and was still flushed with the recollection of that ancient victory when the three of them left for the morning court session. The two women left him a block from the courthouse, warmly building on their new friendship as they walked through the crowd. Out of compulsion Sam sought out his Voltswagen. She had survived his desertion and a night on Piedmont's streets with no damage except the loss of two hubcaps. He pocketed for cancellation the damp ticket under the wiper. In court he bumped into a chair while scanning the faces of the spectators on his way to the defense table. His continued search from an awkward half-rising stance did not go unnoticed by his grinning secretary or the dour county prosecutor. But the warmth of Eileen's smile shimmering through the already stale air buoyed him beyond the peasant resentment of an audience suspicious of backlookers. He sat down and was lost in a quiet reverie of the night's sensual bliss when the bailiffs auctioneer voice brought the crowd to its feet for the judge's entry. The prosecuton's first witness completed Sam's interface with reality by answering his nagging question of motive -- the prosecutor's motive, or at least excuse, for charging Fred Tanner with murder. "Your honor," Bates intoned after the judge had sidled gingerly onto his throne and performed the formalities, "I intended to introduce further evidence today proving the defendant had a strong motive for destroying the electronic person next witness is extremely pressed for time I would like to question him at this time. Please call Dr. Edmund Sviene to the stand." name -- but where? He caught Cynthia's eye and headshake, then turned to watch the witness take the stand. Maybe a psychiatrist to testify to Fred's sanity. Or another haps, but he suspected a completely new tack. Noticing a reporter with what looked like anticipation on his face Sam hunched his shoulders for the coming blow. The prosecutor tarried over his notes, wiped his eyeglasses, walked along the jury box eyeing the nervous occupants and in general let the tension build. Finally he approached his witness as if in church. "Dr. Sviene, would you please tell the court your occupation?" The answer came in a German accent noticeable enough to convey the impression of technical competence. "I am ze scientific director for the Kenning Foundation." Kenning Foundation, thought Sam. Cancer research. What the hell is he doing here? "And what is the purpose of your organization?" Only a court veteran would have detected the tinge of reproach in Bates's voice for important witnesses who drop lines and require leading by the nose. "Ach! Of course. Ve do cancer research." As everyone knows, he implied. "What is your association with Sands Laboratories?" "Oh, at Sands Laboratories it is their fine machines ve are using." The thin lips smiled confidently into the slightly annoyed face of the prosecutor. "Do you mean you utilize the computers at Sands in your cancer research, Doctor?" "Ya, ya. As I said. In such modern institutes like ours large research projects first are mathematically modeled on a machine in order to save monies. The machines, they also help to save animals. Mice, you know." "Uh -- yes. Doctor. Please tell the court why your group went to Sands for help. Certainly an internationally famous organization such as yours has its own computers." As he spoke Bates gave a sidelong glance at the bench to assess the effects of his witness's syntax. The scientist considered his questioner from unblinking eyes and with a set smile. He reminded Sam of a caged bird of prey watching a child who throws rocks at him. "Of course, ve have many fine machines for processing complicated scientific problems. The ratio of core bits to verker is higher than any company of our size -- " The doctor seemed suddenly to realize his audience was not the Kenning board of directors. "Veil, anyvay, it vas for our control circuits ve vent to Sands. In our experiments ve have found the welocity can be much increased by controlling precisely the chemistry. For this ve need many tiny transducers directed by a sophisticated machine." "Did you buy such a machine -- computer -- from Sands?" "This vas not necessary. Our engineers constructed a microvave for communications between the Sands computer building and our research laboratory. The machine ve only paid for during the experiment vas the plan. Veil, many problems ve had at first in the disinfecting. Debugging problems, ha!" The aquiline face pulsed to a toothy smile and back so rapidly the effect was a snarl. "Ven the communications became reliable it vas dat one of the Sands engineers told us about a vonderful new machine they had constructed." B efore the prosecutor could triangulate his location on the muddied script Sam rose to protest. "Your honor, I must object to this meandering record of corporate accord, which the learned prosecutor seems to find reassuring. It is irrelevant and immaterial to this trial." "Counsel's comment is well taken, Mr. Bates. Where does this line of questioning take us?" The judge welcomed the break; it gave him an excuse to lean to one side and shift the pressure on his throbbing anus. "I assure your honor the relevancy of my questions will be demonstrated with further testimony." "Very well." The judge sighed, sinking back to dead center. "With the stipulation that this will be connected I will overrule the objection. Please do continue." Time folded and the prosecutor resumed his quest. "You were telling us, Dr. Sviene, that a Sands engineer had recomyour experiment." "Ya -- ven ve told them it could take years to develop a program to control complicated reactions on the precise line separating healthy specimen tissues from diseased ones. Ve ver most sceptical ven they wanted to connect hundreds of probes to the machine and chust give the order for the healthy cells to vin. Ve are scientists! "But ven they offered to make vissout charge for the experiments some of us remembered wery good things like acupuncture and vut is called vasser vitching -- that vurk vithout the blessings of scientists. So ve did the experiments vis "And what were the results of that historic gamble, Dr. Sviene?" Sam winced at the prosecutor's probably unintentional giveaway line. The answer was evident or the event would not be dubbed historic. In fact, the good doctor would not have been testifying had it not worked. In double fact, Sam soon would be hopefully researching the average disability payments that United Truck had made to previous claimants -- and doing so in the interests of justice, his injured client and last month's rent. The witness looked anything but smug as he considered his answer. "Hundreds of man-years the Kenning Foundation inwested in perfecting the sensors and interpreting their outputs. Our staff vas committed to spending years to synthesize a feedback control program to decrease the cancer growth rate below the death rate. As people ve veek -- as scientists ve felt wery stupid." Sviene's voice trailed off as he recalled the mixed feelings he had experienced as a bystander to "Are you telling the court the timate cancer weapon?" the prosecutor asked melodramatically. "Veil, perhaps you use vords too strong for zis situation. The de( Atta boy, doc, machine! machine! Sam cheered silently) vas more serious to research in the future than chust present cancer therapy. Complete records of the experiments ver made on magnetic tape and ve haf already made -- how you say -- cures with a conventional computer set up by the tapes. It vill be her brain vich vill be missed! Think vat a medical researcher that Dr. Sviene fished a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and leaned back to regard the judge while he dabbed at his brow. "I vud like to add one thing: this is no humbug. Ve haf seen the complete disappearance of symptoms in seven of eight terminal patients!" T he buzz of excited spectators filled the courtroom. Sam assessed his failings during the period of confusion and subsequent reprimand by Judge Crosby. He had been led down the garden path with professional finesse. The entire complexion of the trial was altered -- with one witness the prosecution had erased Tanner's image as a helpless Anyman jostled beyond the breaking point by unfeeling machines. With encouragement from the prosecutor he would emerge as the cold-blooded killer of a healing savior dedicated to man's welfare -- hence the destroyer of thousands. Sam still could not believe a court of review would uphold a conviction but it rankled that he had been so effectively mousetrapped. With the air of a gallows builder imbedding his last nail the prosecutor tidied up loose ends and turned over the witness. "Dr. Sviene," Sam addressed the witness. "You have testified that vised a cure for human cancer. Assuming that assessment is accurate, is it your contention that this monumental service was done out of affection for mankind? An act of pure compassion by that assemblage of logic circuits?" The prosecutor leaped to his feet. "Your honor, I object! The question clearly calls for a conclusion by the witness and one in which he is not expert -- machine motivation." Judge Crosby, a faintly puzzled look on his face, sustained and Sam was reduced to carping at Dr. Sviene's statistics. machine with a cure for cancer on the basis of eight case histories. Is that correct. Doctor?" "I said 'symptom removal,' sir," replied the scientist evenly. "Of course. At any rate isn't it true that all major hospitals have many times that number of miraculous cures each year? The common term is 'remissions', applied to terminally ill patients who somehow defy the sacred prognosis and leave with their 'symptoms removed'?" The witness sputtered most gratifyingly in Teutonic fury at Sam's outrageous comparison. "Ach, no! Veil, certainly -- I mean der is a small percentage -- " Sam cut him off with surgical precision, raising his voice just enough to cleave through the gutturals. "Please, Dr. Sviene, just answer yes or no." Predictably, the excited doctor was unable to bank the fires of outraged logic. His protestations were finally ended by the staccato rapping of the judge's gavel. "As a witness, Dr. Sviene, you are required to answer the questions put by the counsel and only those questions. Please listen carefully to the statement of the question and restrict your reply to a direct answer." The judge nodded to the court reporter, who read back Sam's artful question. Still fuming, the researcher answered surlily, "I don't know." "Dr. Sviene, you are under oath." Sam raised his voice. "Is it your contention to the jury that as a practicing doctor of medicine you are unaware of any patients who have been diagnosed as fatally ill and then proceeded to recover and live normal lives? Please consider your answer carefully." For a full minute the quivering witness glared down at Sam, his face gray and drawn. One side of his mouth moved spasmodically. Finally he licked his lips and looked at the judge. "I know of perhaps ten in many hundreds of cases over the years where cancer wictims only veeks from death have somehow shaken off the killer." "And," asked Sam over his shoulder as he faced the jury, "did not these inexplicable cures fly in the face of medically sound diagnosis, just as did the mere seven chine?" "Yah! yah! But they ver not -- " "Thank you, Doctor," Sam interrupted. "I have no more questions for this witness, your honor." On redirect, the prosecutor went to some pains to clarify the statistical significance of seven out of eight versus ten out of many hundreds, but Sam felt his misdirection had probably blunted the impact of the doctor's initial testimonial to the kind of work he enjoyed. Bates continued his surprise tactics by abruptly resting his case. Sam had expected more expert testimony on the human qualities of strength in the prosecutor's move. If the premeditated saving of countless human lives did not qualify a machine for human status what possible testimony could? Judge Crosby was barely sympathetic to Sam's appeal for an adjournment. He gave Sam until the next morning to begin his defense presentation. After repeating twice his instructions to Fred for tomorrow's ordeal on the stand Sam hurried out of the courtroom. Cynthia was waiting for him, alone, in the echoing hall. "Eileen had to go to work, Sam," she said, answering the question written unprofessionally on his face. "What do we do first?" He pulled his lip and stared at the smudged stone wall. "I wish to hell I knew. Let's go back to the office, where I can think." V W eaving through the light midmorning traffic they reviewed the original defense plan. As usual, it had not been difficult to find two duly accredited psychiatrists who would testify that Fred's emotional instability and borderline paranoia constituted legal insanity. He would use their testimony to buttress a separate plea of insanity. His strongest card would be Professor Howard Sodol, dean of the Caladon University Law School. An ex-trial lawyer who had successfully returned to academe, Sodol was a lawyer's lawyer. His testimony on the legal definition of death had been the decisive factor in several murder trials. Even given Judge Crosby's commitment to the trial Sam had felt confident Sodol's testimony would make such a mockery of dying circuit boards that the judge would be forced to render a directed verdict of acquittal. Had, past tense. Now neither he nor Cynthia felt much confidence. Judge Crosby was certainly no hypocrite but he had never concealed his conviction that the law should be flexible enough to meet the needs of a dynamic society. It would be asking too much to expect a directed accanonized for good works. "Of course the appeals court will throw the whole thing out," Sam informed the engraved iron ceiling as he and Cynthia inched upward to his office. "Sure, sure, Sam. Some you win -- some you lose -- some get rained out." She knew of and agreed with his philosophy of best effort in the courtroom. Once the appeals court becomes the routine testing ground, the lower court merely a formality, the accused has lost one priceless filament from the tenuous strand restraining the bureaucracy from the throat of individual freedom. It was unimportant to either of them that their client would be unaware of the transcendent truths that inspired his champions. "On the other hand," she said, speaking to Sam's back as he crossed the reception room to open a window of the ancient building, "there remains one last witness your jury might really trend -- and that's God. Or at least the Bible. Maybe logic isn't the best weapon against a super-logical machine, especially since the jury is a bit segregated. How about a little oldfashioned evangelism to free Fred and maybe even return the errant county prosecutor to the fold?" Sam regarded her balefully, but he let the idea fit itself tentatively into a framework for a successful defense. One o'clock found him roughing out a defense that had grown from her idea, though not in any logical sequence he could recall. Cynthia's voice finally came through his shell of concentration with an edge of impatience that sent his left hand groping for the phone while he wrote furiously with the other. "Hi, Counselor." Even squeezed through the narrow confines of a telephone line Eileen's voice carried the tingling blend of harmonics that accompany intimacy. Yet sitting there, lapped by waves of pleasure from freshened memories of her clear gray eyes and eager mouth and body, he found he didn't want to talk to her. There would be demands he could not meet. "Hello, Ei. Same old job, huh?" He was talking to an intelligent, loving girl as if she ran the elevator. She caught it. "Am I interrupting something urgent, Sam?" He almost said melodramatically, Only a man's life... but managed instead a simple, "Well, yes. Can I call you tomorrow?" As he returned the phone to its cradle recollections of the two years Judy and he had shared stung his sinuses and blurred his vision. With Eileen the time could be less, much less. Twenty years alone would make it very hard for him to adapt -- his lawyer's mind compelled a look beyond the warmth and excitement. It would have to end and then the hurt and loneliness would return, sharpened, before he could rebuild effective defenses. It would be pleasant just to drift along for the sex, emotionally aloof, armor intact like that of an amorous armadillo. Pleasant, but not Sam Beneke. So, innocently on her part, she had given him twenty-four hours to work out his misgivings about their relationship -- and concurrently, save Fred Tanner from a fate he would probably prefer. A steady drizzle had discouraged all but the most neurotic of the morning spectators. Leaden skies, seen through a shifting network of rain on the courtroom windows, isolated the proceedings and leached relevancy from the droning voices of the attorneys. The county prosecutor was beginning his cross-examination of Professor Howard Sodol. Sodol had proved to be a fine witness for the defense. Bates had only aggravated the judge by repeated attempts to prevent the professor's testimony. Speaking in a crisp, slightly British accent he had outlined the growth of law in Western civilization, interspersing his factual outline with outrageous examples of backsliding just to emphasize the very human foundations of the law. But as Sam had scanned the jury's response to the professor's testimony he was unsure of its impact. He was just as uncertain of his ability to assess accurately the thoughts of a random selection of Fred's peers while those warm gray eyes asked questions in his mind. The testimony of the defense psychiatrists, Doctors Saltz and Ancel, had been as equivocal as the expertise the prosecution's shrinks had offered earlier. They had jousted amicably with the prosecutor over the definition of legal insanity while Sam let his mind wander to the crisis Eileen was raising in his life. But now, by sheer gut-tightening, he blanked out her face and followed the prosecutor's every word to his chief witness. "Professor Sodol, during your illuminating discussion of man's development of rules to protect himself from himself I do not recall your mentioning the laws he has passed to protect less intelligent forms of life. You did not mean to imply that the law protects only humans, did you?" Sodol looked quizzically at the prosecutor, even cocking his head to one side. Then his face cleared and he answered confidently, "Oh, you mean the laws for humane treatment of domestic animals. a potent legal club." "There are instances where wild species are protected as well, aren't for instance." "Well, yes," the witness acknowledged disparagingly, "but that's just simply human chauvinism; there will be more game to harvest in the fall if the deer herds are protected during the mating and gestating periods." "Perhaps," said Bates, a little too quickly for Sam's peace of mind. "But then, how about the laws protecting endangered species like the eagle and the timber wolf? Certainly no protection of a future harvest prompted such legislation. Isn't it fact, rather, that these laws were passed to protect these creatures because of their worth?" The witness started to fumble with an answer but Sam cut him off. "Objection. The question calls for a conclusion by the witness." "Sustained." "Well," said Bates, "let me ask you this. Professor. Is it not true that people have made laws to punish people who kill certain lower forms of life even when their deaths do not represent a property loss?" "Yes. But the penalty seldom exceeds a few hundred dollars." It bothered Sam that the prosecutor accepted the witness's modifying statement that mitigated the effect of his answer. Something of greater importance was about to unfold. "You do agree, however," continued the prosecutor amiably, "do you not, that there is precedent in law for punishing people for destroying other life forms?" "Perhaps -- I guess so." "Yes or no, please, Professor." "Yes." "In fact, isn't it true that the dearest price of all, one's life, has been prescribed for the intentional destruction of at least one species?" Several decimaly-coded seconds pulsed by on the courtroom clock. Finally the witness smiled sheepishly and replied, "I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to." T he prosecutor clanked home the rusty door of his trap. Dramatically waving a yellowed newspaper, he addressed the court. "With the court's indulgence I should like to read from the Piedmont City Record, dated May eleventh, nineteen sixty-eight, by Associated Press: 'Izvestia announced today that the Soviet Union's extensive research into porpoise behavior has revealed their unique capabilities for underwater distance ranging and communication. In addition, their affection for humans has been documented. On four separate occasions exhausted swimmers, humans, have been aided to shore by one or more of the sea-going mammals. As a result, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviets, meeting in regular session, has adopted a statute porpoise a capital offense -- " Bates was starting to hand the clipping to the judge for approval when Sam's objection came rolling in. "Objection, your honor! I move to strike the prosecution's statement and bar it from evidence. Communist Russia's legal charades are not germane to this court." The judge peered over his glasses at Sam. "I shall be the judge of what is proper for this court, Counselor," he said calmly. Then, raising his eyes to the back wall he addressed the ghost of the Court of Appeals to come. "The laws of foreign countries do not, of course, constitute admissible precedent in American legal actions, except as they have been recognized in binding treaties with the federal government. However, since the evidence in question is only offered to indicate an established relationship between humans and another species I am going to accept it without any legalistic connotation." "Your honor," said Sam, also looking toward a possible appeal, "I respectfully accept." His evidence safely embalmed in the record, Bates turned to the witness. "Do you recall reading the article just entered in evidence?" "Now that you mention it," the professor mumbled, "I believe I do recall reading the gist of it somewhere." "It had just slipped your mind, right?" "Yes, something like that." The prosecutor referred to his notes. "What are the usual crimes for which the death penalty is prescribed in the civilized countries you mentioned in your earlier testimony?" "Oh, they vary." The witness was relieved to be on familiar ground. "Treason, murder, sometimes rape, miscegenation at one time, sodomy -- " "Well, Professor Sodol, which of those capital crimes, in your opinion, most nearly describes the Sodol smiled. "Well, it certainly isn't sodomy. To some ecology buffs it might be treason. I suppose the nearest crime would be murder." Bates strode to the jury box and faced the courtroom, presenting his rather striking profile for later recall by the jurors. "I want to make this quite clear, Professor Sodol. Do you now believe that a major civilized nation, the Soviet Union, imposes the death penalty for anyhuman, intelligent creature which has proven its concern for humans? Please answer yes or no." Professor Sodol looked at Sam, shrugged. "Yes," he said. "Thank you," said the prosecutor. "I have no more questions for this witness, your honor." O n redirect Sam tried to emphasize the shared biologic life and common ancestry of man and cetacean. By a skillful use of Sodol's knowledge of law the defense attorney was able to frame his questions into a pattern that underlined the irony of Russia's cynically passing laws to protect porpoises while thousands of human beings moldered in jails and asylums for nothing more than political criticism. He thought the whole thing went rather well but a quick scan of faces in the jury revealed no rapt converts. Standing in front of counsel's table as his best witness joined the herd of spectators Sam considered his next move. Professor Sodol had not been as effective as he had hoped -- he felt strongly the need for planting more handholds for jurors who might yet be tuned to his view. He had planned to put Fred on as his last witness. As an humble victim of cold, unfeeling forces the small man would certainly have appealed to the latent victim in each role as a savior of mankind had shifted the fulcrum of this argument. Once Fred was on the stand the prosecutor would lead him step by incriminating step to the night to refurbish her credentials for sainthood -- and the confused, frail man would become a monster to be destroyed without compunction. Sam made his decision. Turning to the bench, he tensed his face muscles into something he hoped resembled a confident smile. "Your honor, the defense rests." Judge Crosby was visibly shocked. He glared at Sam, then summoned both lawyers into his chambers. "Goddamn it, Sam, I'm surprised at you! I was particularly glad to have the defendant choose you for his defense (Sam hurriedly coughed into his hand) because your -- er -- humanistic emphasis seemed to match up well with the defendant's needs. But two shrinks and an ivory-tower professor of law do not constitute what might be called a staunch defense. Not in my book at any rate!" Sam consoled himself with a silent observation on the judge's excessive concern for his status in higher places -- specifically, the Court of Appeals. Then he replied in a low voice. "On the contrary, your honor, I feel we have made a strong case for Fred Tanner's innocence of the homicide charge. He did not, nor did anyone else, commit murder. A smoldering machine is not a corpus delicti." "Samuel," interjected the prosecutor, "you are a reactionary! Will we have to demonstrate the existence of a machine soul before you will extend the protection of the law to these deserving helpmates of man?" Judge Crosby raised a hand to stop Sam's instinctive retort. "Please, Mr. Bates, I believe we have enough problems without arguing the case in chambers." He stood up slowly, grimacing at the stress on his hemorrhoids. "Well, Sam, I certainly can't argue your case for you. A few character witnesses couldn't have hurt, seems to me. But -- " he sighed, signifying his acceptance of inevitable imperfections in counselors. "How about the prosecution, Mr. Bates? Can you manage a summation on such short notice? I would like to keep things moving." "Certainly, sir. I have kept my case essentially independent of defense dwaddling and obfuscation. Perhaps an hour's recess to go over my notes -- " B ack in the arena after the break, Sam managed to stuff his emotions into the bulging briefcase at his feet -- he could not listen and evaluate the prosecution's summation with complete attention. And, as it turned out, something closer to revulsion. Prosecutor Bates went beyond Sam's most cynical expectations in summing up the case against Fred Tanner, He thrilled the jury with a fabricated description of the coldblooded, methodical preparations What were actually anxious, even threatening times for the little man -- buying the bomb ingredients from an obviously suspicious storekeeper, assembling the explosive with only sketchy book knowledge to draw from, mounting the assault in the face of a real threat to his life from his own handiwork as well as from armed guards -- became, on the prosecutor's canvas, the coldly premeditated routine of a calculating killer. Three arm waves and a finger point later Fred had become a drooling brute, one of the ignorant crowd that had martyred man's benefactors over the centuries. Touching analogies were made Joan of Arc, Galileo and Nat Turner. Sam could only wonder at his luck in being allowed to participate, even as a heavy. He would remind himself of his critical role in the proceedings each time he felt a compulsion to look over his shoulder for gray eyes that were not there. Finally it ended and Judge Crosby called an early noon recess to give the defense equal time to prepare final arguments. Sam spent a half-hour at the courthouse snack bar masticating a dry sandwich and staring at the phone booth across the hall. He could not force himself to move from the sticky security of the plastic stool seat so he went over his concluding arguments again, watching all the while a dying fly crawl endlessly around the smeared glass barring it from the pies in the refrigerated counter display. VI W hen court resumed and the judge called for the defense summation Sam reached into his briefcase and brought out a conical rock about five inches long. In one plane it tapered roughly to an edge in a series of concave steps. Holding the stone before him, sharpened edge up, he walked deliberately toward the jury box. His eyes fixed on the object in his hands, he bore it like a chalice as he paced to one end of the jury box and back. Continuing his measured stride he began his summation in time to avoid either a protest from the prosecutor or an admonition for action from the judge. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury -- fellow human beings -- the prosecution asks you to find the defendant, Fred Tanner, guilty of the most fundamentally wrong act an individual can perform -- premeditated murder. The calculated destruction of a fellow human. Not an imitation human, not an intelligent imitation human, not even a helpful intelligent imitation human. A living human being who shares the everyday routine you and I take for granted until it is threatened." He stopped and faced the attentive jurors. "Life is the basic reality. There is nothing I can stand here and say to you that would make life more precious than you already perceive it to be. And this pervasive regard of people for their lives is reflected by the institutions of Man. All civilized religions and governments are unanimous in their condemnation of murder." Alternately hefting the chipped rock in either hand, Sam resumed his pacing before the jurors. "Today the prosecution would make a mockery of the Biblical commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill.' Despite the slaughter people of all ages have inflicted on one another in the name of God and country, those four simple words have remained as a prime directive of human behavior. And no matter how often this truth was honored in the breach, the meaning was crystal clear -- thou shalt not kill human beings. "But now, by some misanthropic mathematics of his own invention, the good prosecutor would equate humanity with logic, compassion with competence. He would equate a clever invention to man's estate of tears and rapture. In fact, he would -- " Sam caught himself waving a stone-clenching fist within a foot of an edgy juror's face. With a curt apology he carried the hazard to the defense table and deposited it before a nodding Fred Tanner. Returning to the jury box Sam assumed a solid stance, feet apart, his body leaning forward, hands spread on the balustrade. His voice now carried nuances of a carnival pitchman's as he extended the touch of humor his enthusiasm had brought to the proceedings. "Just for a moment, let's go along with my learned colleague in his fantasy. Let us follow him through his looking glass into an unfamiliar land where humans and cabinets packed with printed circuits and twisted wire stand as equals. In fact," Sam said conspiratorially, winking broadly and nodding over his shoulder in the general direction of the prosecutor, "just for the moment let us abandon all reason and grant the good prosecutor's metal-minded box the supremacy he attributes to it." His smile gradually fading, Sam paused to let his proposition sink in. "Now we have this -- this Thing, smarter than we are and getting more so all the time. The question then arises -- how do we judge it?" Sam resumed his pacing. "The prosecutor would have us believe the answer is simple. Given the chance, this Thing, now the smartest being on Earth, whips out a cure for our most dreaded disease. Ipso facto, it loves us. Cut and dried. "Now certainly a man of medicine who eradicated cancer would be submerged in the accolades of his fellow doctors and a grateful world. Rightly so, for saving human life is naturally rewarding to a human physician. "But consider -- if I may introduce one more analogy -- a steer in a feed lot. Must he not love the people who feed him, water him, care for his discomforts? Yet we, with our superior intelligence, would view the cow's affection for his keepers as singularly naive. "So if we do as the prosecution suggests -- if we assume the masuperior intelligence -- then we must likewise assume she had her own motives for her actions. And I submit we know as little of the nature of those motives as does the feedlot steer know why the skinny twolegged creatures treat him with such concern. And the greater the gap between this artificial intellect and man's the greater becomes the potential hazard, the less likely that we will be able to foresee the ultimate reason for what may seem to be friendly behavior by the machine." Sam stopped his pacing long enough to hitch up his hands and grin at the jury. "Now, I know all this conjecture about calculating machines turning into man-eating monsters or worse seems out of place where truth rules. But comes the day we people really do turn over control of our little planet to superintelligent machines, there had better be welded somewhere in the labyrinth of each maze of microcircuitry an electronic prod called fear. Fear of the law, that is. "Over the centuries, observing our own folly, we 'have developed sets of rules which, by and large, have increased the survival potential of the human species. Formulated, these rules have become laws which detail the boundaries of acceptable human behavior. It is well for us to remember that for all its claims to cold logic and dispassionate reason the law is a garment fashioned and worn by people. It has a distinctly human drape. That is why it goes beyond defining the ground rules -- penalties for violators are provided as well. Penalties known to hurt people. So before we offer another being, however intelligent, however beneficent in appearance, the protective carrot of the law let us be certain the stick for misbehavior will work as well." Opening his coat, Sam hooked his thumbs in his belt. Slouching toward his table he raised his voice to maintain the clear channel he was sure he had established with the jurors. "Let me emphasize, ladies and gentlemen, that I have been indulging in some rather farfetched speculation. The present danger is not from superintelligent machines. Rather it is the demeaning of human accomplishment we must avoid. The prosecution equates the tool with its maker. You are asked to strike an impossible balance between a machine's penchant for adding X and Y in awesome power of the human mind, which can rationalize meaning into a life which daily takes its owner from a hydrogen bomb production line to evening mass in thirteen minutes." On schedule he arrived at the defense table. Reaching powerful wrists before Fred's vague stare he grasped the oval stone and lofted it over his head. "Thousands of years ago the invention of simple tools like this fist-ax began man's ascendency over the other scavengers and predators of the time. Today an infinitely more complicated tool promises defeat of his modern enemy -- disease. But that tool, the adaptive computer, is still only the extension of the human hand and mind. Like many inventions this tool turned out to be useful in ways not originally planned. "The defendant, Fred Tanner, has been accused of murdering a direct descendant of this chipped rock -- the machine ironically called renounce this grotesque farce. No one has been murdered. No grieving parent calls for justice. You must not allow the state to equate our flesh and blood and minds with a tangle of copper wires and silicon chips." Sam paused and held out the stone ax a final time. "Whatever the value of a tool, however expensive it may be, it is not, can never be, equal to its human creator." He backed a few steps, took time to establish eye contact with each juror. "Each of you must stop and search his conscience: did Fred Tanner kill a fellow human being? If you examine the evidence and find that he did not you must find him innocent. Thank you." H e tried to recall the glow of earlier victories. Before the years of futile fee-chasing had filled his bottom file with uncollected judgments against former clients with short memories. Before the years had given him understanding and compassion in lieu of money. Nevertheless, Sam could still relish the jury foreman's solemn pronouncement of, "Not Guilty," as he elbowed Fred Tanner into a semblance of concern. His hands had hefted again the cudgels left in trust and would remember for a while their feel. And the granite walls felt less cold as he walked toward the newsmen waiting outside, warmed by the congratulations from a few friends who worked in nearby offices and knew of his victory by an efficient grapevine. The conviction for second degree arson had been expected -- he would do what he could to get Fred psychiatric help during the year or so the little man would probably serve for a first offense. With help, Freddy might even want to get out by the time he had to leave prison. Sam was still trying to think of something profound for the reporters when he passed a door labeled annex. Behind it, he knew, lay the Alameda County data center, but he had always passed the normally closed door, showing nothing more than a curled lip. Now it seemed important to push open the door and examine the enemy at work. Poised above the level of the hall to provide unseen tunnels for interconnecting cables, the floor seemed to meet the ceiling at some unreal distance -- the pale, flat light from the featureless ceiling swallowed a dimension from the room. Within heavily sound-proofed walls an occasional flurry by the girl attending the system keyboard was only a back-chair chord in the furious orchestration of the crouched machines. The snubbed, staccato snarl of a high-speed printer dominated the room sounds against an obbligato of tape machine buzz and clatter. But balance and direction were there. Sam even fancied he could detect a directing rhythm in the shifting patterns of the central processor register lamps. He watched for silent minutes until the janitor, an old man gathering the slightly oily offal of the machines, came to shut the door behind him. The bloodshot eyes were blank, beyond despair, and Sam could not force himself to say a word that would focus their hell on him. He had faced a man in court this day, battling with what skill he had for a legend left in trust. A legend conceived in the Roman forums by a few men who believed passionately in man's unique and holy supremacy, though their tunnel vision had excluded nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Rome. But their words had lived beyond the realities of their time and, transplanted, had people in their frame of justice. Today he had won a skirmish against a blasphemy that would destroythe sacred trust of human supremacy. Tomorrow -- well, tomorrow could wait. Today he would call a girl who walked unscathed among the still tethered machines and try to forget the clutching fingers in his brain. Seeking the lighted doors at the end of the corridor, Sam felt the prickle of fear across the back of his neck. Hunching his heavy shoulders, he refused to look back. A Neanderthal hunter might so have honored his uneasiness after stealing a pelt from the tall, smooth-headed strangers who had driven him from his cave and then desecrated the walls with outlandish scratchings of unreal animals.-# Why Do You Have A Poor Memory? A noted publisher in Chicago reports there is a simple technique for acquiring a powerful memory which can pay you real dividends in both business and social advancement and works like magic to give you added poise, necessary self-confidence and greater popularity. According to this publisher, many people do not realize how much they could influence others simply by remembering accurately everything they see, hear, or read. Whether in business, at social functions or even in casual conversations with new acquaintances, there are ways in which you can dominate each situation by your ability to remember. To acquaint the readers of this publication with the easy-tofollow rules for developing skill in remembering anything you choose to remember, the publishers have printed full details of their self-training method in a new booklet, "Adventures in Memory," which will be mailed free to anyone who requests it. No obligation. Send your name, address, and zip code to: Memory Studies, # E. Lange St., Dept. ##, Mundelein, #. #. A postcard will do. A world silent as the grave -- save for the powersong of its vanished people! I I ate afternoon hung sodden and j unfragrant beneath the musty leaf canopy that sheltered the sediment-choked stream. At ground level vegetation was a competitive tangle of green, scarlet and black. Verrons leaned from the hoverscooter. A kilometer downstream he had spotted footprints in the mud that aproned the stream. Now they led him to five gaunt humanoids sprawled naked on the streambank. He approached slowly, assessing sleep-slack faces. Bifurcate nostrils bracketed round oral orifices. Curtains of crepelike violet tissue flowed from the lower arc of the mouth. Two of the five slept curled around partly devoured branches of yellow berries. None stirred as Verrons hovered over. They appeared as brute dumb as the survey crew had reported. He set the scooter to ground and circled back afoot, stunner in hand. Still the aborigines did not stir. A year ago the survey crew had counted a dozen of them in the temple vicinity, none elsewhere. Now Verrons could find only these five. From their starveling appearance they wouldn't survive another year. He shrugged. Unfit races died. Satisfied that they offered no threat to his own party, Verrons reboarded, Lofting, he caught a blaze of color from above. The temple complex sat high upon a steep mesa, its stone columns and arcades architectural poetry -- out of time, out of place -- an anomaly on this deserted jungle world. It splintered late afternoon sunlight to pink fire. Again Verrons shrugged. Heller was already inflamed with cosmic probabilities. The lean professor functioned from an intellectual matrix of galaxy-wide evolutionary thrusts and manipulative cosmic consciousnesses. Fortunately Verrons' only obligation was to see that the two professors and their assistants survived the year. Verrons rode the dusk to camp. He was dishing his evening meal when the two professors approached. Balsky, chubby, balding, regarded him from cover of an anxious frown. Heller was a different breed, stringy and thrusting. "I assume we can schedule initial survey of the temples tomorrow'," he demanded. Verrons bristled. "I don't see the need to push. Professor. We have a year." "Barely a moment in the overall scale. You were gone for two hours. Did you locate the aborigines?" Verrons' jaw knotted stubbornly. "I found five of them sleeping upstream." He hoisted a belaying palm. "No, I didn't attempt communication. And now I'm taking supper. Thereafter I draw rest. We'll schedule tomorrow tomorrow. At my pace." Argument ensued. Verrons remained obdurate. Finally Heller lunged away in defeat, Balsky in his wake. W hen dark fell Verrons prowled the perimeters of camp. He found no sign of the single form reported dangerous to man, a fierce mock-monkey that rode the bending stalks of the jungle. Returning to his tent, he stretched on his cot and stared up into darkness, victim of the tension that always marked his first days on a new world. He was falling asleep when sound brought him upright: a distant sounding of notes, random, plaintive. Verrons plunged from the tent. Who was playing flute on this forsaken world? Heller and Balsky emerged from their own tents. Assistants gathered. "The aborigines?" "The sound emanates from the mesa," Heller said assertively. "And those aren't wood or reed recorders. Those are metal instruments." "In the hands of primitives?" "I refer to tonal quality. Did the aborigines carry instruments when you sighted them?" "The abos I spotted didn't carry anything." Verrons dodged back to his tent and holstered his stunner. "I'm going for a look. No one leaves camp before I return." Heller called after him but Verrons did not alter trajectory. Afoot, he moved quickly in the direction of the stream. Double moons -- brilliant, white -- rode the sky. The mud wallow where he had located the aborigines earlier was deserted. Fresh tracks led upstream. Half a kilometer later, the tracks disappeared up a steep gully. Verrons peered up the mesa wall. The sound of flutes was discordant above. Locating a series of eroded footholds, he mounted the gully. Reaching the mesa top, the peered across a shimmering stone plaza toward a long colonnade, imposing by moonlight. Verrons slipped across the plaza silently, stunner in hand. The sound of flutes came from a high-walled courtyard near plaza's edge. He started toward it. And halted, suddenly aware of a soft corona that graced the air above the enclosed area, faint, blue-white -- totally unexpected. And possibly revealing. He dove to cover in the shadow of the courtyard wall. Glancing up, he found misty blue radiance surging faintly in the air beyond the wall. Flutes sounded spiritlessly. Verrons edged the length of the wall, slipped around a corner and located the courtyard entry. Unfortunately it was blocked by a solidly hung stone sheet door. Verrons considered alternatives, then scampered to conceal himself behind a stone column. The survey crew had found the temple complex totally barren of activity and artifact. Yet now he encountered metal flutes and unaccountable illumination. Verrons pondered possibilities, none particularly credible, his feet slipping into hibernation. The glow above the courtyard remained faint, the sound of flutes tuneless. An hour later he stood and stamped life back into numb toes, planetside crouched and cramping. He crossed the shimmering plaza, thumped down the gully and returned to camp. The sound of flutes continued to lace the night. Verrons stared up at darkened tent panels, considering. This was a world that apparently had washed its face of two races -- the aborigines, for all practical purposes extinct, and the race that had created the temple complex. According to the survey report, centuries-old craters dotted this world, presumably the nuclear deathpocks of advanced civilization. It was logical to assume that the race that had created that civilization had also created the temple complex, simply neglecting to destroy it in the apocalyptic conflict. But would it be equally logical to assume that the abos were the degenerated tailings of that same race, breeding messily downhill into delayed extinction? W hen verrons emerged from his tent next morning Heller was upon him, ready to scrap. Briefly Verrons communicated what he had observed, both streamside in the afternoon and mesa top by night. "The survey boys do some night study, but it's entirely possible to miss highly localized nocturnal phenomena. So it's landed on our platter, whatever it is." "Well, it's obvious we must establish communication with the aborigines. They apparently have access to artifact stores the survey party missed. And as you have pointed out, they're a highly perishable resource." The aborigines were. "Pick a party. Professor, and we'll have a try at parley." A half-hour later they waded sucking mud toward the aborigines' wallow. The sound of their approach stimulated random muscular twitches in the sleeping humanoids. When Heller cleared his throat a single humanoid rolled over and opened dull eyes, lip veil trembling weakly. The eyes closed before Heller could complete his introductory homily. When young Nevins squatted and uttered the humanoid universals he had learned in the American University system the response was further repose on the part of the aborigines. "Are they trying to discompose us?" Heller demanded, bristling. "This is the same reaction the survey team drew. Which is to say -- none. They may be more responsive after dark." Verrons doubted it. He could read nothing but fatal lethargy in the emaciated bodies. "Well, it's obvious they're starving. But why? Don't you see berries and fruit freely available? Don't you see -- " "What I don't see are metal flutes." Heller fanned restive eyes over the area. There was no sign the aborigines claimed anything beyond their own muddy pelts. "Yet it was their footprints that led you to the mesa top last night, Commander. We'll detail a pair of assistants to search the area immediately." Verrons squelched him promptly. "No one pokes around outside camp today unless he's under my direct supervision." Neither aborigines nor immediate terrain appeared dangerous. But it was too early to trust appearances -- or the judgment of professor or assistants. "So you have a choice. I stay here and tag a single searcher. Or I loft you and Baisky to the mesa for initial survey." A little later Verrons and the professors lofted. The temple complex was sunwashed against the clear late-morning sky, columns and arches graceful. At Heller's direction, Verrons circuited the complex. They hovered over plazas, arcades and courtyards that joined a succession of progressively more imposing temples. The climax of the complex was an elevated domed temple that seemed to join the sky in the light grace of its structure. The centuries had inflicted minimal damage. "Which structure did you track the flutes to last night, Commander?" Quickly Verrons swung the scooter. They settled in the plaza. B y daylight the rectangular courtyard was totally barren. Heller inspected it with sharp dissatisfaction. "There's certainly no sign of any light fixture here." "There's no sign of anything here," Verrons agreed. There was only dust and a half-open stone sheet door. Nor was there sign of anything in the remainder of the complex. The three men took it afoot, boot heels clattering. They were small beneath soaring pink arches, solitary on glazed stone walks, silent beneath the grand temple. They emerged and stood with the complex at their feet. Beyond the mesa lay jungle, a mist-veiled tangle of scarlet and green. On the western horizon a single crater was dimly visible. Verrons surveyed the expanse of barren pink stone with dissatisfaction. The survey report had prepared him for the lack of structural damage, for the emptiness. But he had not anticipated the hollow sense of stones that had never been walked, of walls that had never housed activity. "I don't think this place was ever used." "Exactly," Heller declared incisively, his heightening agitation coming to full focus. "This complex is exactly what I suspected when the survey photographs were released: a statement." He arced a gesture at sunlight stone. "Think about it. Commander -- the prominent elevation, the exquisite symmetry and proportion, the fact that all extraneous matter has been systematically destroyed -- " "You mean the artifacts we should have found here?" final statement: Perhaps the most significant novel of # from to order: send #c plus #c handling to UQ#-G, P.O. Box #, Bergenfield, N.J. #I . "I mean every population center on this planet was deliberately obliterated so we would not be distracted from what we are intended to learn from this set of structures." Verrons recoiled from Heller's visionary vehemence and paced down stone steps. Balsky shared his unease. "Isn't it possible the complex was never furnished or used due to the outbreak of hostilities?" "Possible." Any number of things were. "Meanwhile we have a handful of aborigines with metal -- we think -- flutes and a lot of empty stone." "Sufficient," Heller pronounced crisply, hoisting chin. "We will return tonight to observe the group during its waking period. You will accompany us, of course, Commander." Verrons gnawed lip. "We'll come." He led way back to the courtyard and studied it. There was no cover. Nor was there any overlooking structure. "We could simply establish ourselves here before dark and wait. There's a chance the abos will consider that aggressive and retaliate." "Hardly a serious threat. We saw no weapons in their sleeping grounds." "And no flutes either." "We have stunners," Heller declared staunchly. The three men reboarded the hoverscooter and lofted off the mesa. They were briefly suspended in late afternoon sunlight. Upon the mesa, the temple complex floated, flistening, enigmatic. II N ear dusk they ascended a gully that mouthed near the encampment. When dark came they huddled in a corner of the courtyard, stunners at hand. Balsky's breath rasped. Heller's was a dry whisper. Neither moon had risen. They heard bare feet on stone. The first humanoid appeared. He paused at the courtyard door, gaunt, hunched. Dull eyes found the human intruders. Lip-veils quivered weakly. Warily he sidled into the yard and hunkered opposite them. Gaze fixed, he raised a forked hand. The flute he held was gracefully formed, its metal barrel ornate and untarnished. The aborigines' nostrils flared. Lip tissues rippled as he mouthed the instrument. The flute yielded a tuneless sigh. Others followed. Finally all five hunched, dull eyes fixed on the humans. They mouthed flutes tunelessly, dark spittle stringing down through fluttering lip veils. But by that time Verrons was little aware of the unprepossessing mien of the players. Because as flutes sounded another presence was in the courtyard. It came as a cloud of light that gradually brightened until it filled the yard with soft, shadowless radiance. As it brightened, metal flutes glowed. Verrons watched bony fingers grope aimlessly up and down luminous instruments. There was neither order nor beauty in the sounds produced. Yet those sounds somehow caused the cloud of light to birth a single tenuous light-presence. It darkened slowly from the heart of the cloud, taller than human or aborigine but similar to both in form and proportion. The presence glimmered across the courtyard, radiantly blue, its natal cloud luminous about it. It bowed before the huddle of aborigines, extruding long arms of blue light that it slowly wound and wove about itself and reincorporated. Then long arms rippled free again. The apparition arched into the air, threw itself backward and cartwheeled about the yard, passing easily through humans and aborigines, light-limbs flickering. Flutes continued to sound. The apparition flung itself erect at the center of the yard, light-limbs spiraling around its body. Helplessly Verrons was drawn into the vortex, his consciousness absorbed and irradiated. Then the first moon appeared above the courtyard wall, a flat white disk. The apparition at the center of the yard brightened visibly, changing form. The guise it assumed was flame -- licking arms, surging head, consuming maw. Initially it was an intense blue flame that seemed to flare from a rupture in some other dimension. Then it spread, brightening fiercely. Verrons groaned as fiery arms licked him. Desperately he tried to gain his feet, a silent grunted in agony beside him. An eternity later, when both moons hung halfway up the sky, flame drew back and began to spin, drawing fiery arms after it until it around the yard. And as it whirled, fiery red became orange, orange yellow. Reaching the end of the visible spectrum, the progression of color was reversed. Verrons tongued dry lips. With effort he extracted one corner of consciousness from the dazzle of light. "Balsky." Balsky did not respond but Heller retained articulacy. "Verrons -- what is it?" "It's -- " Verrons had no answer. It was a wheel of light. It was turning, drawing his awareness back. Reclaiming it. And then the wheel began to to fade. Verrons shuddered, the ragged sound of flutes swimming back into his ken. He peered around, eyes burning. Only a diffuse cloud of light remained in the yard. The tallest aborigine sprawled forward, head touching pavement, flute still clutched in his forked hand. His fellows stared at him, their own fading instruments forgotten. One reached forward and jammed the flute between his quivering lips. Play! The word was a silent scream in Verrons' mind. His mates battered the exhausted flutist with brutal hands. But he did not respond. Flutes lay silent on stone. Light died. V errons shuddered to full consciousness and gained his feet. Heller followed suit, springing away. Verrons slapped Balsky urgently, maneuvered him up and steered him around the cluster of aborigines and into the plaza. Overhead the moons were haughty white twins. By the time the three reached the gully, Balsky moved under his own power. The gully was steep, shadow-choked. "Can you make it?" Balsky's bald scalp flashed affirmative. They bumped down the ravine. Heller emerged last, springing up in battle stance. "Commander -- " Verrons shook his head. "Keep your stunner ready. Professor." He sought bending stalks for threat. They reached camp without incident. Pole lamps glowed, competing with moonlight. Their own brand of reality w'as reassuring, tent panels rustling, young voices in conference from a nearby tent. From above the sound of flutes resumed, thin and disorganized. "My tent," Verrons said brusquely, leading way. Verrons kept a small flask in his case, one he had filled two years ago near the center of the galaxy. Now he decanted three drops of pale liquid into the lid of the flask and inhaled. The liquid evaporated instantly, creating a brief pungency in Verrons' nostrils. He proffered the flask. "Didion?" Balsky accepted and followed Verrons' example. Heller was dubious. "What is the effect?" "It smells good. Sometimes it brings on the smarts." "An intelligence booster?" "A temporary stimulant." Unfortunately Verrons' system rejected the effect tonight. And Heller declined frostily. "I don't see the need." Verrons returned the flask to his case, shrugging. But Balsky seemed brightened. His bare pate crawled. "If you will reconstruct the interior of the grand temple, you'll remember that we saw the wheel of light motif there this afternoon. It was a prominent theme in the geometric pattern that covered the interior surface of the dome. So if the wheels of light appear on the dome, couldn't we anticipate seeing other components of the dome pattern played out in light, too? If we were rash enough to return to the courtyard?" "You feel that would be rash?" "I'd be very reluctant to re-expose myself to the experience without understanding it. I'd want to know if what we saw exists in an electro-physical sense or if it was purely an event of the nervous system, And there are a dozen other possibilities I'd want to explore." Balsky raised plump shoulders apoogetically. "But we're not likely to learn much without going back for an encore. Have you encountered anything like this before, Commander?" "I'm afraid my circuit runs to hungry vines and Class Nine ruins, the kind you approach with a tender touch and a lot of imagination." Verrons paced the small area. He had, in fact, warped here equipped with a standardized set of responses. Now he would have to retool. Heller's lean body flexed aggressively. "Well, I will tell you this, Verrons. We may have been the subjects of brain center stimulation or we may have witnessed an actual event. In either case, it will be necessary to confront the event again. And when we do, I want those flutes in our hands." Verrons' brows went north. "You want us to blow the flutes?" "Do I have to say it twice? Did you relish being manipulated by savages?" "I had the impression they were as much in the grip of the thing as we were. And I certainly don't want anyone putting lip to flute before I -- " Heller's stringy forearms bunched. "Verrons, I didn't travel this far to be balked in my purpose." Verrons bristled. "Oh? And what is your purpose?" Heller's gesture was slashing, allinclusive. "To add to our race's knowledge of other races and other times, to participate in the revelation of the evolutionary plan that does exist and does encompass us all. To -- " Verrons shook his head. "Professor, no privately funded study party is allowed access to any peripheral world without escort of a Surface Commander commissioned by Service Central. In this case, me. While I have no authority in the area of your researchers per se, I carry full authority in matters related to survival. If you contravene my orders you can be convicted of mutiny when you warp downline to Earth." "I doubt that!" Heller whipped around and plunged from the tent. Verrons turned back to Balsky, bemused. The plump professor's face had grown crazed with fatigue. "Another jolt, Professor?" "Not tonight. Commander." His voice was faint. T he next morning Verrons led the entire group to the mesa top. Heller flared a taut gaze over sunwashed stone. "Commander, I would like to examine the courtyard again." Verrons remanded the party to Balsky's custody and accompanied Heller, In the small courtyard they found waiting stone, nothing more. Heller scanned the yard fiercely, then stalked away. Verrons followed. Heller strode the plaza to the arcade where Balsky had gathered the party. By the time Verrons caught up, the professors had already conducted the group into the first of the series of ascending temples. It was not until Verrons passed under the portico that he realized an event was in progress. Within the temple, the party was frozen. Verrons' gaze darted to the point of their converging gaze. From the polished stone floor, a substantial rectangular block rose. It elevated until it stood somewhat higher than human eye level. A diagonal grain marked its lateral surfaces. Verrons reaction was swift. His stunner came to hand. "I don't want anyone to touch that stone." Heller's eyes darted to his, hawkish. "You -- " "No one!" Slowly the end portion of the block slid inward. From the interior of the block, a dark rectangular object slid gently to the floor. Verrons lunged to squat over the object. His fingers tasted smooth surfaces. The object appeared to be a case. The stone block withdrew into the floor. Verrons hefted the case. It was moderately heavy. "I'm going to take this to the plaza to open it." No one objected. Outside he kneeled in sheeting sunlight, the case shaded -- and shielded from the party under the portico. He pried at its seams. It opened easily and he stared down at a double rank of ornate metal flutes -- fourteen altogether. And fourteen people w'aited under the portico. Verrons rose slowly, shaken. Sunlight fingered "Well?" Verrons gestured them near. "This is what we draw. And I still don't want anyone to touch." The party encircled the case. Heller counted and bared challenging teeth. "Well, Commander, it appears we've each been allotted a flute -- except you. Is that some indication of your status with the local powers?" "It's more an indication of the fact that I wasn't within the structure when the mechanism initiated its cycle, Professor." Heller's brow arched. "Then you do concede that it is not pure coincidence that there are exactly fourteen flutes here." "I don't concede anything. We're not staging a debate." Verrons snapped the case shut. He catalogued the party. Yesterday he, Heller and Balsky had received no such thoughtful offering. "Winchell, Olsen, Gomes -- come with me. The rest of you wait here." Taking the case, he led the three back into the temple. Inside they waited expectantly. The temple made them no offering. Verrons grunted. "Olsen, go fetch one more." She pattered away and returned with Arguilar. The four regarded Verrons alertly. Still the temple did not yield. "Another." Four assistants later they were still unrewarded. Verrons paced off the section of flooring that had risen before. The seam was barely perceptible. "I could have sworn we had a pressure sensitive floor here, one discriminating enough not to respond to individuals or very small groups. Now how much does it want before it produces?" "Commander, maybe it knows we're carrying flutes already." Olsen indicated the case in his hand. "Ah. Let's check. Take this case to Balsky and come back." She obeyed. And the stone block rose from the temple floor again. Grained lateral surfaces shone richly. Slowly the end panel slid up. The block birthed a second rectangular case, smaller than the first. Verrons opened it quickly, grimly. There were nine flutes, one for each person in the temple. "Now that's a pretty intelligent mechanism," Winchell commented, squatting beside Verrons. Verrons met clear green eyes set in a solid face. "Very." He chewed cheek, debating. He did not want anyone setting lip to flute before he did. Neither did he care to spend the day encumbered with superfluous cases. Quickly he instructed Olsen again. She took the second flute case and withdrew to the portico. A moment later she reentered, hands empty. When the stone block began to rise, she retrieved the second flute case. The end of the block slid open and Verrons w'as ready. Before the mechanism could disgorge a third case, Verrons jammed the second back into its maw. He half-expected the effort to fail. But the block accepted the case, reconsuming it along with the case it had intended to deliver, and withdrew into the floor. Relieved, Verrons shooed everyone from the structure. Heller's thin mouth twisted. "Now presumably we can see what other structures have to offer." "I'm hardly finished here." Verrons selected assistants again. "I'm going to step back into the temple. Follow one at a time, at sixty second intervals, until we see how many of us it requires to trigger the dispensing mechanism." Seven minutes later he had his answer. It required six persons. He retested, selecting and sequencing to obtain a lighter mix. Again the temple responded when six members of the party had gathered. "So it's not sensitive to weight, but to the number of individuals. Now we'll have a look uphill." T he second, third and fourth temples proffered flutes. Verrons refused delivery. "Obviously they were meant to be played. But whether the race that built the complex intended them for its own use, for the aborigines' use -- " "I don't see how you can suggest they were intended for savages," Heller argued immediately. "They have oral cavities, don't they? They can direct an air stream through the barrel of the instrument. They may even be descendants of the race that built the complex." "I certainly don't conceive of the degenerated aboriginal specimens we saw last night as either the authors or the intended clientele of this establishment." "Then what is your interpretation of the situation?" "First I suggest that an establishment of this complexity was not erected here by chance. There is purpose -- beyond the merely local. And since we are the ones who have arrived, I suggest that the establishment was placed here for reasons related to our coming, to convey a central truth to us." "Oh? To all of us -- or to you in particular?" "To whichever of us is ready to recognize the truth." "I see. But if each recognizes a different truth?" "Then most are misled by inadequate powers of comprehension." Verrons studied the lean face. Could his own inability to patter through such airy intellectual constructs be construed as a deficiency? Or a saving sanity? He shrugged. "Let's move." The next two temples offered flutes on the same terms as before. When they reached the third, the central block did not rise from the temple floor. Instead it slowly recessed and moved aside, revealing a square opening, "Back." Verrons approached cautiously. Light glowed alive below. He looked down a metal ladder into a narrow corridor. He bent. Corridor walls were polished metal, the floor glazed stone. Both were otherwise featureless. He stood and stepped away, face grim. "Look." Heller kneeled and peered into the opening. When he stood his hazel eyes were inflamed with portent. "Obviously there is an extensive substructure here, Commander." "Obviously." "And just as obviously you do not intend to permit anyone to descend." "You're so right -- not today. If there is a grand plan we'll fulfill it soon enough." "You know, the entire mesa may be hollow," Balsky suggested. "It could even be an artificial land feature," Winchell speculated, "specifically constructed to house storage." And to elevate the temple complex into greater prominence, like a piece of bait? The entire establishment, exquisite, empty, began to feel to Verrons like a mousetrap. He turned to confront questioning eyes. "I want to make myself clear. I'm not being obstructive when I refuse to allow anyone down that ladder today. I have to do some hard thinking. Because when we do go, we go to learn more about this specific situation, not to expose ourselves to the revelation of any great truth, human, alien -- or universal." Heller's lips whitened. The party proceeded. Successive temples opened to further stretches of underground corridor. In the grand temple, beneath the complexly patterned surface of the interior dome, a broad stone staircase with carved railings led down. Verrons eyed the stairs stonily. He did not appreciate structures that snatched the initiative from the explorer. "Commander, do you still want sketches of the interior dome surface?" Verrons stepped back. His eyes panned across the dome. "And photographs." Waller and Gomes unpacked paraphernalia and undertook to oblige him. Ill T he party returned to camp in late afternoon. Verrons did not stay to sample the postprandial analysis of events. He snatched a quick meal, reiterated instructions that no one was to leave camp and moved through the jungle, flute case under arm, toward the aborigines' wallow. When he did not locate them there he tracked them downstream and into the jungle. They fed noisily in the shaded dusk, tearing down branches of fruit and berries, stuffing horn-lined mouths with brute concentration, grunting and mumbling. Juice, yellow, scarlet, strung through violet lip veils and puddled on gaunt chests. They fed until their lean bellies bulged tumorously. Then they hiked upstream, shadowy faces stuporous. Near the mouth of the gully, two kneeled and rooted at the base of a husky brown stalk. They unearthed a case similar to the one Verrons carried. When the case was reburied, the group stumbled into the gully, flutes in hand. Verrons waited before following. When he reached the plaza, flutes already sounded across the complex. Verrons strode away from the sound. Night lay bright across shimmering stone. Twin moons hung over the resplendent pink shoulder of the grand temple. Within the grand temple, the stone floor glistened palely. Overhead the interior reaches of the dome were shadow-shrouded. Verrons' footsteps echoed as he moved along the wall and sat. Bracing himself against cold stone, he opened the flute case and selected an instrument. It was little more than an ornate barrel with fingerholes, a mouthpiece at one end, a flaring belled extrusion at the other. The metal barrel was cool. Experimentally Verrons touched lip to the instrument and blew. him. Verrons raised his head. The figures on the dome surface took fire and began to move, wheels of light rotating, geometric forms changing, color and line merging and flowing with hypnotic sinuosity. Staring up, Verrons was barely aware of the instrument in his hands or of the breath he nurtured it with. He was aware only of the writhing ceiling and of the slow resolution of cloudbrightness into light-being. This was not the featureless blue being of the night before. This was a golden creature who draped herself in the remnants of her natal cloud with a graceful sweep of longfingered hands. She moved across the floor on long muscular toes that splayed from the tapered ends of her bare legs. Her drapery of light concealed nothing, but her body, a sweetly modeled sheath for her being, was in turn marked by no suggestion of profane function. Her face -- vertical eyes, arching mouth -- was a compelling composition of golden light. A separate cloud of light enveloped her head, iridescing faintly. Verrons continued to flute. Overhead the inner surface of the dome had become as broad as the sky, as deep -- and suddenly as dark. Lightwheels spun from the dome surface and arched down through forever, fusing the air. Luminescent geometric figures flowed after, cascadChaos engulfed Verrons. His flute glowed with colors he had never seen before, colors he did not see now but felt in his burning fingertips. From the depths of confusion, Verrons' golden creature arched and sprang upward. She arrowed sleekly through an eternity of dark space, flexed her body and flattened herself across the distant black surface of the dome, arms and legs elongating. She hung there, dimming, becoming tenuous. Then she resorbed her fading limbs and contracted until she was a gaudy yellow sun in a black sky, burning. Suddenly her limbs exploded outward again. Rippling, she launched herself downward, swimming air to where Verrons cowered. He was overwhelmed by darting light figures. The golden creature swooped to penetrate Verrons' chest and disappeared into the temple wall behind him. Swiftly she emerged meters away. She swooped up again, threading the living forms upon her arms, ordering and taming them. With them she created a pyramid in the air. Then, with a sweeping motion, she directed them back through the air. They flattened against the surface of the dome, surrendering motion. S he flowed near. Her words were blown into Verrons' mind. I live again in the precincts of your power. Muscular toes arched and curled. Fingers rippled air. Verrons struggled to form words of his own. Instead the sound of his flute increased in volume. She brightened, her features becoming distinct. I waited in the matrix of light. I waited to live in your power. Now it moves me. Eagerly she arched backward. Unexpectedly a second cloud appeared. Surging brightness condensed into a second being, dark, violent, his body powerful. He moved on long, thick toes, gathering the remnants of his cloud around him. Then, flexing, he cast himself straight into the air, spinning swiftly. Verrons heard a gasp. Winchell crouched over the flute case, glowing instrument pressed to his lips. Verrons stared at the young assistant helplessly, unable to move. A faint remonstrance. I waited. Distracted, he had let the flute slip from his lips. His golden dancer dispersed into mist. Verrons jammed the instrument between his teeth and exhaled with will. She flared bright, her eyes suddenly glowing green. Exultant, she sprang again, tossing herself up --  -- and into the spokes of the violet wheel that flashed across the temple dome. Quickly she arched her body to form a second wheel. Together they spun through the air, feature and limb obscured by the fiery speed of motion. As the two wheeled through the reaches of the dome, Verrons became aware of a third light entity, the blue being of the night before. It precipitated from the air, flared union with the other two. Verrons pulled his glance aside. The five aborigines crouched two meters away. The tallest blew his instrument intently. The others cradled theirs. Light -- golden, violet, blue -- reflected across the surfaces of their eyes. After a time the three entities separated. Verrons' resumed original form and swooped through the stone above his head, to reappear from the opposite wall of the temple moments later. She glided to a halt before him. When I had flesh, I ran the stones on toes that flexed like springs. I flew with sparks in my hair and between my eyes I wore a jewel that caugh t sunlight and made it a cleaving sword. Verrons' mind was lanced with intense light. Into his consciousness flashed a vision that raced stone pavement, a crackling mane sparking behind her. She tossed back a glance and he knew the line of mouth and eyes. But now she wore flesh instead of light, her body supple and brown. When she turned again, her eyes were as green as the flashing jewel recessed into the flesh between them. W ith a leap she soared into the air. They rode above a city of glassy structures set in aprons of stone plaza. At the edges of the plaza, jungle crawled dense and wet. I flew. But my powers were unmatured. I sank down again, unsatisfied. They did sink. Muscular toes touched stone. But I knew my power Would strengthen, because my line is strong. My male parent crossed the tangles and the deserts many times and returned with fire still flashing in his jewel. My female parent rode the high strata, a fleshdeity, until the day she was caught by storm and tom to her death. I knew it was in my line to soar the sky. I flew. Again she launched herself. This time their journey was longer. They darted on invisible currents, her sensitive fingers tasting air, her hair crackling as she swung it around her shoulders. They soared across the city, reached the jungle's edge and swooped high. Trees grew small below. Suddenly, fiercely, she arched her back and dove. They accelerated crazily at the treetops. Verrons' flute uttered a harsh note. She swooped up again and arched through a puffy white cloud. Then she dove again, this time carrying them to rest at the edge of the city. I flew. But I walked too. My feet carried me a seeking course.  tasted, I smelled, I looked, I touched. My hair caught current from the air and transformed it to fire and my powers grew.  was a force in my time. Verrons was drawn into a whirl of activity as she flung through the city, testing and examining, trying and discarding. In her eagerness, she seemed to bounce off her world, leaping from situation to situation. Verrons saw color, saw pattern, saw objects and structures, saw others of her kind. But she moved too swiftly for him to resolve anything into detail. I was, she echoed in his mind. And now I am again. I take life from your power. I leap, I fly. She leapt. She was briefly suspended against a background of recede until Verrons held her at a distance, an apron of darkness wide around her. She stood, hair crackling, her arms thrown back to embrace a giant crystal. Throwing her head back, she faded against the crystal, dissolving into it until she was no more than a golden gleam somewhere deep beneath its flashing faces. Then she emerged again. But somew'here within the crystal she had shed flesh for light. Her hair was a cloud of radiance. I am! She was. She arched about the dome, flashing through darkness like a manic sun. Then she swooped back. yVhen I had flesh... Verrons followed her back through the crystal into flesh again. He lived with her her urgent search for a mate, her frantic sorting and testing of males, her ultimate selection. Then two brown bodies arched the skies, darting and racing, green jewel and red flashing. Wind-torn deities, they mingled crackling manes and joined arching bodies. Then they parted, returning to their separate lives. Verrons lived with her the months she carried the products of conception. Then he fled with her to the stone cavern where she ripped her four young from her own dilating cervix and hissed first life into their gaping mouths. He emerged with her when all four breathed and whisked with hr to find an underling to suckle and tend them. They grew. First hair appeared, but only one of the four sprouted a crackling little mane of power. The others grew hair silky and limp. She flashed the clouds, venting her fury upon the air. Then she tore to a dark quarter where she abandoned her ungifted three. She darted away without looking back. Let whatever scuttling little person wants them claim them. Let them be reared to sweep and clean, serve and tend. With their dead hair and their powerless minds -- they are none of mine. She bore her remaining daughter into the clouds. Child in arms, she comet ed the sky. When they returned her daughter's eyes glowed red. That was the color of the jewel that was recessed into infant flesh upon the anniversary of the birth. And I bore my daughter up and taught her. And power flashed between us, an enduring umbilical... Verrons followed her through subsequent years, through the quests and victories of her ever-developing power. He conquered with her that portion of her world she claimed as her own. Scuttling little people, brows bare of jewels, hair lifeless, swept and cleaned and tended and served -- and when she flashed green fire into their weak eyes, they cried and begged to serve some more. When I had flesh... ls she flung through the years, Verrons' strength waned. The sound of his flute grew ragged -- his body became numb. But there was no way to communicate his exhaustion to her. Finally she lived in a single dim chamber of his mind, flying, commanding, reigning, surging, a force in her time. Doggedly Verrons supplied the flute with breath. Finally even that last lighted chamber of his mind darkened. His limbs laxed. The flute fell to the stone floor with a clatter. Verrons slumped unconscious. Time was a well -- deep, black, inescapable. He struggled mindlessly against its dark walls. Much later he returned from a distance, Winchell's voice urgent. "Commander! It's light. We have to get back to camp." Verrons opened unfocused eyes. He lay on his side on cold stone, muscles unresponsive. With Winchell's help he sat. His flute lay near. Possessively he closed fingers around its cool barrel. "How long was I out?" "I don't know. I -- the aborigines took four of our flutes. Out of our case." Verrons groped across the floor to the open case. The aborigines had abandoned their own instruments nearby. "I didn't try to stop them. I -- I wasn't much better off than you, except I had my eyes open. They had to carry their lead man away, the big one who was blowing the -- the blue." Verrons nodded numbly. "Same one fainted first night." He crawled across the floor and examined the abandoned instruments. His muddled mind produced one coherent thought. "Dead." "What?" "The abos left them -- because they're dead. The flutes, I mean -- worn out. Lost their charge. Whatever. That's why -- " His voice dribbled away. "That's why there was only your golden dancer, my violet one and the blue," Winchell said, green eyes sparking with comprehension. "And with only five in their party they couldn't key the mechanism to issue new flutes." Verrons nodded. Slowly he came to his feet. "We'd better get downhill before they send searchers." Winchell's features were suddenly anxious. "Commander, when I came up last night I only intended to observe. I didn't -- " "Forget it." When they reached the plaza, Verrons stared toward the single crater on the horizon. Perhaps it marked the city from whose stone pavement they had soared into the air. Perhaps those distant trees were descendants of the ones they had almost intersected in flight. Certainly this sun, rising... His hand tightened on the flute. He had walked half a hundred worlds in the course of his career. He had never before risen and looked over one as alive as this one today. Even with its former inhabitants dead. Dead? "Commander?" Verrons made the long journey back to the present and accompanied Winchell to the gully. "A few days sleep -- " "We might grab a few hours if we slide in before anyone wakes." They succeeded and Verrons fell across his cot. He slept dreamlessly, unresponsive to the wakening sounds of camp. A few hours later he was roused . by a more urgent stimulus. He staggered up and plunged out, gripped by an agony of hunger. Rubber legs carried him to the dining area, where one of the cook shift made advance preparations for the noon meal. Verrons communicated his need and the assistant raided a storage box for him. When Verrons had eaten, sending back twice for refills, he slumped across the table. He was next brought to by an aggressive throat-clearing. Heller. "Commander, it was my understanding that anyone who disregarded your orders about remaining in camp last night would be charged with mutinous conduct." Verrons' tongue responded thickly. "I've appointed Winchell my special assistant. For the duration." "Oh? I'm surprised you didn't tell me before now." "So'm I," Verrons responded obdurately. Heller's hazel eyes narrowed. "Well, I assume you have had time for whatever thinking you consider necessary before permitting us to enter the underground facility." Blackmail. Verrons sighed. "We'll go after lunch. I'll take Winchell below as my special assistant. You can choose one of your people." His chrono communicated a welcome fact. He had an hour and a half to sleep before he mounted the gully again. He woke only when Olsen assaulted him with a wet towel. "Commander, Professor Heller is very agitated. You're half an hour late." Verrons sat up dizzily, his head refusing to clear. Before he was made sufficiently alert with a chemical boost from the med kit, he was later still for his appointment. Heller greeted him sternly. They ascended, the gully seeming to loom into Verrons' consciousness from another dimension, neither quite real nor illusion. His feet suffered the same malady. He steadied when faced with the staircase that led to the corridor beneath the grand temple. Moments later he stood below with Winchell, Heller and Nevins. Before them stretched glazed stone floor. At first glance the corridor appeared to lead only to a blank wall. But before they had taken five steps, paneled walls glided aside and they stood in a chamber of the same proportions as the temple above. The ceiling was low, illuminated by glowing panels. Verrons' head snapped around. His gaze traveled sixty degrees and was captured by a life-size figure of stone. Long and brown she stood, head raised, blue eyes cast up. A blue jewel was recessed into the flesh of her brow. Her long arms were flung backward around an oblong multi-faceted crystal as tall as she. She grasped the stone floor with muscular toes, ready to spring. Verrons was drawn. He stared up into her stone face. The questing spirit captured there was familiar. The individual features were not. "Commander -- around here." She reappeared on the opposite face of the crystal, this time vividly blue, her body subtly contoured to suggest energy flow. Her arms reached upward. The air around her head was softly illuminated. Verrons gazed into her transformed face, mouth drying. "Winehell -- last night, did you see anything like this?" There was brief reticence in Winchell's clear eyes. "You mean passage through the crystal from -- from one state of being to another?" "Passages from states of being?" Heller's ears fanned from his skull as he descended upon them. "Just what did you learn last night?" Reluctantly Verrons related his evening's experience, watching it filter through Heller's charged brain and emerge transmogrified. When he had finished, fiery eyes flashed to Winehell. Winehell related his own experience. "I think the crystal passages were symbolic, Commander, a stylistic device for leading our awareness into the past and back again. I never saw the giant crystal except at those transitions and evidently neither did you. But later -- after you passed out, I guess -- when I followed my being all the way to the end of his life, I saw him take a small crystal identical to this large one into his hand. He had gone to what he called the dying house and the crystal was brought to him. It was about half the size of the first segment of my little finger. He held it in his hand and -- he died. The attendants returned then and opened his hand and the crystal had changed. There was a violet spot at its center -- that hadn't been there before." "And you don't consider that symbolic, a stylistic device?" Heller demanded. W inchell's green eyes were troubled. "I don't know. He -- he didn't explain fully what was happening. Maybe the crystal was just a device for registering death. Or it could have been a communicator to summon the attendant. Or it could be that when he died, something -- some electrophysical expression of his personality -- passed into the crystal. A -- a soulprint, you might call it. That's what I think happened." Heller's eyes flashed to Verrons, incandescent. "Commander? How do you interpret what Winehell witnessed?" Verrons shook his head. He wasn't venturing interpretations until he had taken the journey into her life again, until he had followed her down the passage to her own death... tonight ? Did he want to live her death tonight? But it would not be final death, not while he held her flute in hand, her Lazurus-factor. "Surely you have formulated an interpretation, even if you don't care to share it?" "I suppose you have, too, Heller," From your complete dearth of knowledge... "I most certainly have. The race that created this complex was obviously in possession of very unusual powers -- powers we humans have dreamed of for centuries." "Provided last night wasn't just flute fantasy." "Neither of you has presented it as such. These people were able to draw the sun's energy through crystal forms implanted in their flesh. They were able to levitate and to fly for considerable distances. In their later lives they exercised control over inert objects and over the ungifted members of their own race. And now you understand why we have been brought here, don't you, Commander?" Verrons glummed at the floor. "The grand design?" "Exactly! We were summoned to become the next race to gain the powers these people held. We have been chosen, of all the races in the galaxy, to take the next step up the evolutionary ladder." "Then where do the aborigines fit? Don't you grant them any credibility as descendants of the race that constructed the complex?" "How could they be? Do you see any physical resemblance -- beyond the fact that they're humanoid?" "Mutation. The globe is dotted with nuclear craters." The argument was unsound, he knew. The craters were scarcely old enough to have permitted mutation through the inevitable period of genetic chaos and then reconsolidation into a single homegeneous race. He swung on Heller aggressively. "Then if you're determined they're of different stock, why isn't it their destiny to be the next superrace, Professor?" "Obviously they're too primitive to make the leap. There is too much developmental ground to be covered. They can't even be classified as stone age -- we've seen no sign of tools or weapons. Although, I suppose, if the superrace were physically present to guide them -- " "The abos come up here and toot flute every night." "That obviously isn't sufficient. They don't have the intelligence to question, to seek and probe." Verrons abandoned argument. Glancing up, he caught a ring of intent faces at the head of the stairs. "If we're going to seek and probe, we'd better move." IV T wo additional stone and crystal tableaux occupied the large chamber. The party examined them cursorily while Verrons paced the walls of the chamber. He had covered barely a quarter of his route when panels slid and he looked down a gently sloping corridor. The others joined him, "Before we go I want to locate all the exits from this chamber and sketch them for reference." They found three additional exit corridors. They entered the last and the wall behind them closed. Simultaneously walls either side of them folded away. They stood on a ramp in a second large chamber. Verrons scanned their new surroundings. The chamber floor was set with compartmentalized display cases. Within each sealed compartment reposed a single glistening object. Professor and students launched themselves with glad cries. Only Verrons reacted with choler. For seventeen years study parties under his guidance had chipped and prayed after their precious finds. Here everything was considerately presented in glass-sided cases. The analogy of the interstellar rodent trap twittered to mind. Verrons wriggled his nose suspiciously. His littermates scuttled for the cheese. Succulent cheese it was. They were offered a well-arranged collection of art objects, fragile bowls and veseels, containers intricately wrought, delicate implements, objects woven of gleaming wire, jewelry massive and grand. And this chamber was antechamber to still another elaborate display room. Which in turn gave way to another and another. But the collection, exquisite, extensive, quickly proved finite. Two hours later they found themselves in a chamber that connected only to the one from which they had entered. That chamber in turn connected only to two other cul-desac rooms and to the larger chamber from which they had entered it. When they had exhausted all possibilities Heller flashed hawkish eyes over Verrons' sketch pad. He compared it with the companion map Verrons had rendered of the surface features of the complex. "If you have proportioned these maps correctly, there is an entire underground area we are unable to reach, Commander." "Where else do you think they put the flute dispensing mechanism and related storage?" "Ah -- of course. But presumably there is entry to those chambers, through apparently we won't discover it here." His eyes flashed over their surroundings. "What do you think of all this, Commander?" "Very pretty." "And totally useless. There is nothing of practical usage here and nothing suggesting or depicting day-to-day life. Nothing to tell us more than that the people who assembled this collection included some very gifted artists and craftsmen. Have you any idea why the collection should be so limited?" "I haven't given it thought." "It is limited, obviously, because it is only intended as a brief concrete sampling of their abilities. The rest we are intended to learn through the flutes." Verrons shrugged. "Granted." "Then you don't intend to obstruct us from coming to the complex as a group tonight? The experience obviously did you and Winchell no harm." Shrugging again, Verrons abdicated sole proprietorship of flutes. "And now that you've inspected this area, you won't object to my sending a party down tomorrow to photograph and catalogue." "Not if we make it out in good shape." "As we shall." Ladders were strategically placed When they set foot to rung, the ceiling produced passage. They mounted and emerged. I t was dark when Verrons woke again, anticipation a heady surge in his blood. Sitting, he uncased his flute and stroked its cool barrel, briefly victim of temptation to breathe life to it here and now. But this was not the place. Nor, he decided when the party reached the mesa top, was the grand temple. Not tonight. The remainder of the party trekked there, footsteps hushed on shimmering stone. They single-filed into the structure, spread along the walls and sat, silent, hesitant. Flutes were distributed from cases -- they had drawn a second case to replace the flutes taken by the aborigines -- and came self-consciously to pale lips. And Verrons didn't want to share light with them. He slipped from the temple as the first tentative notes sounded. Quickly he loped down stone steps. He took her to a small temple that bore twin moons in its arched window. Hands quivering, he brought flute to lips. He tongued the mouthpiece, drew breath and blew. And nothing happened, nothing beyond a faint haze that draped dolorously in the air. Disconcerted, Verrons blew again, his fingers picking out a simple tune no one had ever heard before. No one heard it now. No one but Verrons squatting alone in the chill temple, his lips suddenly cold, twin moons gliding icily across his glazed retinas. Did she demand the company of her kind? Verrons thought not. But when the hands of his chrono measured a leaden quarter hour and his breath produced nothing but mist, he creaked to his feet and measured tread to the grand temple. On another night the hypnotic tumult of light might have claimed his awareness. Around the walls of the temple humans and aborigines squatted will-less, glazed eyes reflecting radiant chaos. But Verrons was not dazzled. Stiffly he sat. Muscles clenched in anticipatory agony, he placed his own flute to lips and blew. She did not materialize. There was only the limp curtain of light he had blown in the lesser temple, forlorn, barren. Later he barely remembered his staggering journey back across the complex, his perilous descent of the gully. In his own tent, by lamplight, he found the flute's seams. A complexity of miniature elements occupied the metal barrel: ceramic units, gleaming wires -- and a single white crystal, half as large as the first segment of his little finger, at its depths, a golden speck. His dancer. But the crystal was shot with fracture lines. When he probed it splintered. Shattered. Verrons shook bright shards into his palm, loss claiming him. A soulprint etched in crystal -- an electrophysical expression of the personality, captured at the moment of death and preserved -- but in a medium fatally fragile. He had resurrected her to dance a single night. Exhausted, he had dropped her to the pavement. The clatter of flute on stone echoed in his mind. He closed his hand around sharp fragments. Verrons left his tent and slipped into the night jungle. The sound of flutes from the mesa laced the night. He emerged at streamside, the smell of mud thick in his nostrils. I flew with sparks in my hair and between my eyes I wore a jewel that caught sunlight and made it a cleaving sword. Now she cried to light the upper atmosphere with a final crystalline surge. It was gross injustice to lay her to rest in the jungle. Then he saw the shimmer of twin moons on the surface of the stream. His body tightened. With a flick of his wrist, he committed her to rest. She broke silvered water lightly. Twin disks rippled briefly and she was gone. Gone from the night, gone from the world. Verrons moved through an empty jungle to a barren tent. He lay staring at an inner play of light, his hands clenched tightly on nothing. I t was dawn when sounds wakened him. He hurried to the dining area. The party had returned. With single-minded voracity they attacked the food supplies, pulling out bags of concentrate, scooping up powder and pellets with bare hands. Balsky had hauled a bag of carbo-powder to the shadow of the supply tent and was systematically packing his mouth. Verrons located Heller at the other side of the tent, crouched hi-pro pellets into mess bowls. "You're feeding them?" Heller's head bobbed up, features haggard. "They're starving. Commander. Feeding them could stimulate them to communicate." "Then I hope you're prepared to communicate fast. Professor. You're probably poisoning them." Heller's glance flickered across the aborigines in quick alarm. "I -- " He jabbed at his hairline distractedly. "I hadn't thought of that. Their metabolisms may not be comparable to ours at all. I -- " His hand quivered. "I saw opportunity. I -- " "Well, don't stop now. This may be your last chance." Heller bobbed up nervously. "Nevins is my communications major. Nevins -- " His gaze jerked back to the aborigines. They bypassed the mess bowls and upended the bag of pellets on the ground. Greedily forked hands scooped. The largest aborigine launched himself face first at the pile of pellets, lip veil switching. Verrons yelped for Nevins. Heller and Nevins initiated a valiant effort involving the humanoid universals, hand language, body language and finally slashing in the moist soil with finger and pointed stick. "Paper would only confuse them," Nevins informed Verrons hastily. "Never employ a medium more sophisticated then the cultural level of the subject." "In this case, language," Verrons suggested dryly. The response to Nevins' effort was unencouraging. The aborigines continued to feed, scrabbling after elusive pellets, then upending mess bowls over horn-lined mouths. By the time bowls were empty the effort had attracted an audience. "Commander, what about the substance we used night before last?" Balsky suggested. "Did ion? Want to test another brand of poison, Heller?" Heller acceded immediately. "Then don't dole out more calories. If the didion takes, let's establish the condition that food is contingent upon communication. That will give us a lever," The aborigines accepted the pale liquid readily, sniffing in turn from the vaporizing lid. Dull eyes took gleam almost immediately. "It's working," Heller crowed. "Their brain tissues -- " " -- are still computing food," Verrons snapped as the first aborigine barreled past him, lunging for the supply tent. He fielded the attempt and found himself wrestling a bony fury. The aborigine grunted fiercely, joints flexing in unanticipated directions. Fingers grappled for Verrons' windpipe. A horn-lined mouth affixed itself to Verrons' left cheek. "Stun him!" Verrons bellowed. The other aborigines had broken the line of startled humans and tore into the supply tent. Their performance commanded more attention than Verrons' plight. "Drop him!" Winchell seized the weapon from Heller's belt and fired around the frozen professor. The aborigine yelped and slackened. Tearing one arm free, Verrons pulled his own stunner and rendered the abo limp. Hand on bloodied cheek, he bounded to the supply tent to drop the remaining four. "There is intelligence there," Heller insisted, eyes blazing, as Verrons ordered the five lax bodies dragged beyond camp. "There's hunger there. Even a dog can find food if he's hungry enough." "But a dog doesn't bear humanoid form! A dog -- " It was not the moment to explore cosmic implications. "If you want to try again when they unnumb, fetch a bag of pellets -- one. And I want stunners at hand. These pretties have just popped up the scale from presumed harmless to potentially deadly. I don't want to drop the 'potentially.'" T he aborigines tossed off the stunner effect quickly. Nevins labored earnestly to convey the connection between the single bag of pellets and the humans' desire for communication. The aborigines responded by launching attack, battering the young assistant savagely. When they were felled again, Verrons regarded the five lax bodies grimly. "I think we start from the top again, Heller, first getting across the connection between their aggressive tactics and all-all-down. Then we move on to food-comm unication . ' ' Heller nodded haggardly. "Perhaps the didion stimulated aggressive instincts rather than true intelligence," he admitted. "And maybe when you're starving, aggression is the intelligent response." But when the aborigines revived, the effects of didion had visibly ebbed. They huddled, gazes moving sullenly from stunners to pellets, lip veils fluttering. The largest took his feet, head lowered. Verrons' hand tightened on his stunner. But instead of lunging, the abo turned. His group followed him into the jungle, stalks crackling underfoot. Heller was crestfallen. Verrons holstered his stunner. "They'll be back. So I'll keep guard over the supplies while the rest of you sleep off the big night." Turning, Verrons noted for the first time the exhaustion of professors and students alike. His sympathy evaporated when he confronted the mess he was committed to guarding. Boxes and bags had been torn open, powders, pellets, wafers and grains scattered across every surface, including the ground. Grimly Verrons policed the area, salvaging what he could. When the place was tidied he settled in for a long dull day, stunner at hand. Shadows moved silently, stalks bending in the light breeze, green and scarlet leaves rippling. The aborigines did not return. Not until dusk, when Arguilar summoned Verrons to the edge of camp. The aborigines emerged from the jungle in a group, lip veils switching. The tallest thrust his hands at Verrons. Verrons stared at the object foisted upon him. It was a small sturdy metal barrel, both ends open, its interior surface set with lightweight metal paddles. Suspended at its center was a round instrument face marked with needled dials. The metal of the barrels was lightly pitted, the clear face of the instrument pack completely unmarked. The aborigine gestured at the object and grunted, "Trade?" Verrons guessed, startled. He jabbed at his mouth. The aborigine did likewise, lip veil wagging sharply. "Fetch a bag of hi-pro pellets," Verrons ordered Arguilar quickly. "Snack wafers too. And Heller if he's close." Arguilar returned with all three. "They brought this? What is it?" Heller demanded. Verrons thrust it at him. "Your guess. Ari, keep my stunner ready." He tossed the weapon to the assistant and breached the bag of pellets. The aborigines dined with gusto, pouring out the pellets in a heap and scooping them up. They sampled the wafers and dispatched them enthusiastically. "Offhand, I believe it's a weather instrument. Commander. An anenometer." Heller held it up. Dial hands moved as the paddles caught the breeze and rotated within the barrel. "Sophisticated offering from this crew. And in excellent condition." "Exactly. It's apparent from this that there are stores of artifacts we know nothing of, items that have been in sheltered storage since the holocaust." V 'terrons nodded abstractedly. ffThe survey crew had reported total destruction of population centers. Not even minimal debris remained. They had not, however, combed dense jungle over the entire face of the planet. Verrons glanced up at the darkening sky. "You're planning to take the party to the complex tonight?" "Assuredly. While we all underwent vivid experiences last night, we learned absolutely nothing of the technology, nothing of how these people achieved their effects." "I don't think it was technology. The power was inborn." "But the crystal set between the eyes was not. Nor the ones like you tell me you found in your flute. And if we can simply learn to record the personality for future reference, it will be a tremendous step forward. Can you imagine being able to walk with Socrates? To follow Newton and Einstein, Leakey and Pardini through their life's work? Can you imagine looking over Shakespeare's shoulder as he -- " "Shakespeare is already dead. But I see your point. So uphill we go and tomorrow I'll try to persuade our friends to fetch more trade booty. But this time I'll follow them." That night, when the party emerged from the gully, Olsen drew him aside. She pressed her flute into his hand. "I'm not going to use this again. But I think -- I think you should, Commander." Before he could question her she darted ahead like a person who has fulfilled a distasteful duty. Puzzled, Verrons examined the flute. Winchell fell into step beside him. He indicated the clutch of aborigines trailing the party. "Commander, I've queried the entire party this afternoon. No one caught sight of their race in the visions last night." "Oh?" "In fact, I've quizzed almost everyone on their experiences. You know, the people who were born with the power certainly don't seem to have developed scruples to match. There were some instances of really sophisticated brutality and a lot of the other -- callousness, unconscious brutality. Evidently they didn't consider the ones who were born without power as truly -- human?" "Little people who scuttled and served?" Verrons frowned. Certainly the quality of mercy had not been strained in his own golden dancer. She had exhibited little empathy for her inferiors. "Well, mark it one sign of intelligence then that the abos avoided contact." Winchell nodded. "I guess so. You know, the abos might even have developed into an intelligent race. If they'd lasted long enough." Verrons' sympathies were not engaged. "If the spark had been there they would have hung on." "But the others didn't, the lightdancers and their underpeople." Verrons grunted. "And no one caught a hint of what happened to them?" Winchell's clear eyes flickered away. "I -- I'm not sure. Olsen wouldn't talk to me. But none of the others caught anything." "Well, we'll see." H e said that without suspecting he shortly would see, when he braced himself against the temple wall, put Olsen's flute to mouth and breathed a burning red being into life. For with that fiery vision he breathed more than another surging light-dancer. He breathed another time, another circumstance, when the scuttling little people had become the preponderant mass of the population, when the sparking manes of power had grown few. Too few. And in our sparse numbers , we maintained our rule. The weak, the powerless, still they cringed before our swords of light. But we saw that in too few generations we would be not just extinct but dishonored. We saw that when the last of us died the underpeople would cease to give our ancestors life-of-sight with their breath. Instead they would viciously destroy the flutes that are our immortality. We would perish in our crystalline shells, victims of the genetic whimsy that has rendered our offspring too few to continue our kind. We would be lost to the universe -- the universe that is ours! But the remaining elite knew they were not alone in that universe. They looked up and they speculated. Somewhere was other life, life similar to their own. For -- arrogantly -- wasn't the human form the most efficient possible, the most logical? And some day that life, venturing, would inevitably find their planet. When it did, they would be waiting. Waiting to dance and fly, to flash and spiral. Waiting to relive their entire history, each of them preserved, every line represented, first to last. And there would be nothing to distract the comers from the waiting flutes. Nor would there be mutinous underpeople to destroy those fragile and precious instruments. There would be no underpeople at all. Verrons lived the first steps of temple construction. A site far from any population center was selected and the mesa raised. A storage vault to house the entire collection of flutes -- the revered ancestors -- was constructed, carefully buffered and shielded. On its inner walls the history of the powered race was inscribed, victory by victory, glory by glory. There were no defeats. Nor would there be. Verrons was spared the final holocaust only by the death of his escort. In the interval between that deathhouse passage into crystal and the reappearance of the fiery wheel of light, Verrons forcibly extracted his consciousness from the vision world. He jerked the flute from his lips, fingers cramping. They had destroyed the underpeople to insure their own precarious immortality. First they had erected the temple complex -- star bait -- and then they had systematically blasted and exterminated. Verrons didn't have to see to know. In a reflex gesture, he hurled the flute. Die! It clattered against stone floor. But disgust was not sufficient to route him from the temple while other wheels of light flashed. Nor did destruction of the fiery entity cleanse him of ugliness. And at dawn he tore through the food stores with the others, scattering and wasting. Human and aborigine fed side by side, forked hand and fingered pawing greedily. terrons was half asleep on his Vcot when Olsen loomed above him, hesitant. "Commander -- " "You didn't flute." The words were thick. "No, I -- " "Good. You guard the food. From the abs. Get me if y'have trouble." "With the aborigines? You want me to -- " "Take m'stunner. Come get me if they go 'way." He lapsed into semi-consciousness. Sometime later she reappeared. "Commander, the aborigines -- I didn't let them at the food stocks. I stunned them. Now they've gone into the jungle." Verrons sat and peered muzzily at the dial of his chrono. Midday. "Going for trade goods?" "I don't know. I -- do you want me to follow them and find out? By myself?" Verrons managed to wag an emphatic negative. "Med kit," he demanded gruffly. The inside of his head had congealed. Ten minutes later, stimulants at work, he stepped from the tent and swayed lightly in the noonday breeze. Olsen led him into the jungle. "They have a quarter-hour start now." "They travel like turtles." And a little like elephants too. Fortunately his mind cleared and his legs steadied. Verrons found the aborigines' trail quickly, followed it easily, Olsen in his wake. "Commander -- " "We can't gab and sneak simultaneously." "Oh." Evidently what she had meant to say was not urgent. Neither was the aborigines' pace through the jungle. They crossed the stream and led Verrons and Olsen away from the temple complex. Soon the two humans drew near enough to hear the tread of feet. "We'd better stay well behind," Verrons whispered hoarsely. "Commander, the flute I gave you -- " Verrons' jaw tightened. "I destroyed it." The answering flicker in Olsen's pale eyes told him the impulse had touched her, too. He glanced at his chrono, rubbing his stomach. "We should have packed lunch." "Because the flutes make us hungry," she hissed. "They -- " Verrons halted. He stared at her, his stomach convulsing in fresh hunger. "All that light and motion -- it's our energy that powers it," she said vehemently. "Those crystals draw directly from us." Verrons pulled himself very straight, digesting her words. The stumbling fatigue, the voracious hunger, the dizzy faintness -- none were simply the result of late nights and irregular hours. He suffered all the sympatoms of an exhausted power cell. "Olsen, how do you always hit just the right nail?" "By being fairly bright," she shot back with asperity. "And by knowing when I'm being used." As he should have known himself. As he would have known, given a few more days, a few more fainting spells. But the aborigines were moving ahead. "We'll talk about this when we get back to camp. At length." She nodded grim satisfaction. They moved forward . As they moved into dense vegetation beyond the stream the aborigines' pace quickened. They stopped twice to feed, pulling down branches heavy with yellow berries and gorging. Verrons and Olsen watched from cover of damp foliage, Verrons' stomach clenching enviously. "If we dared touch native vegetation -- " Olsen glanced at him sharply. "If we dared," he concluded, settling back. When they continued, he traveled with stunner at hand, seeking bending stalks and swaying shadows alertly. Underfoot the soil was damp and black, rich with decay. It was late afternoon when the jungle march halted. Ahead, the aborigines' heavy tread was silenced. Verrons and Olsen waited, then moved forward vigilantly. ahead a small dome sat on the jungle floor, partly overgrown with vine. Its door stood open. From its interior Verrons heard the unmistakable grunts of their humanoid guides. And beyond the first dome were others of similar size and construction, lower panels translucent brown, upper panels transparent green. Cautiously Verrons edged past the first dome and around the first of the second rank. He tapped translucent paneling lightly. It was a plastic material, virtually untouched by deterioration. He pressed his forehead to transparent paneling. Within the dome he could see only dim immobile shapes. Olsen's features were as bemused as his own. Then, glancing away, she touched Verrons' arm and pointed. Through dense vegetation, he spotted a second cluster of domes. He flared a look back at the structure the aborigines had entered. Quickly he slipped the stunner from Olsen's belt and popped it into her hands. "Keep an eye on them. If they head back toward camp, join me." A motion of his hand indicated the dome cluster ahead. Hedodged away. The second cluster was more extensive than the first and more varied. It included a single longhouse, several small domes and a half-dozen larger ones. Again the exterior paneling, although assaulted by vine, was unmarked by deterioration. Verrons pushed through a hinged door into the longhouse. The interior held deserted stillness -- and chaos. And even by the limited light that filtered through transparent green paneling, Verrons recognized the nature of this particular chaos. Containers large and small were littered and strewn, the floor and every surface of the structure were stained and caked with dried smears. Verrons forded the length of the structure, recognizing other things too -- tables, chairs, cook units, water tanks -- all of alien design, but recognizable in their function, granted a humanoid context. He had found a cookshack -- a devastated one. Devastated like the supply tent he had policed yesterday morning, devastated by a raging localized storm of hunger. Pulling at a cabinet door, he found stacked plastic mess trays. Their fastidious arrangement was ironic counterpoint to the unmannered chaos around him. Disturbed, he emerged at the far end of the cookshack and entered one of the larger circular domes. Again light was dim but contents were recognizable: cots, tables, chairs, chests, miscellany. But this time everything was in fair order. He was sifting miscellany when Olsen found him. "They've headed back toward camp." His head snapped up. "Taking what?" "Another weather instrument, I think. I examined the structure they emerged from before coming for you. It's evidently a storage shed for weather instruments and meteorological supplies. None of them are exactly like anything I handled when I took Instruments, but they're close enough. And there are logs, too. Not very extensive -- lots of empty pages. I couldn't read the script, of course, or the numbering system -- " "Just as I can't read this," Verrons interrupted. The item he thrust at her consisted of long limp plastic pages bound with adhesive. They were covered with an incomprehensible interlacing of line and curve. "As bad as my own handwriting." Her eyes flickered down the limp page. "Meaning we're dealing with someone who has hands? Like our aborigines?" He nodded. He indicated the furnishings of the dome. "And someone who has arms and legs and torsos and probably heads -- like our aborigines. Or some other humanoid race." "There were only two humanoid races on this world," she reminded him, "unless you want to sub-classify the underpeople as a separate race." "But they've been dead for several centuries. Totally dead. And this cluster of domes hasn't been here more than a few years." "The aborigines then?" T he suggestion was ludicrous. "I'm not too surprised the survey boys missed this. It's well camoflauged, green and brown sunk in jungle growth. And it's far enough from the temple complex that the area wasn't intensively surveyed beyond overflight with animal-life sensors. After all, the survey crew had less than a month to spend on the entire globe. "But our light-dancers ruled -- and flew -- this world for centuries. If the abos were coming up the evolutionary scale anywhere near creating this sophisticated a layout, they would have known about it. Yet we didn't sight the abos through any of the fourteen or so flutes we sampled. The one you and I shared was the most recent and he certainly had no knowledge of a second intelligent race sharing this world." She nodded thoughtfully. "Then there is one other possibility." "Right. The race that created this outpost came from offworld, as we did." "So this has to be just that -- an outpost." "And I suggest we paw around some more before we carry speculation farther." She agreed. They tackled miscellany together. Five minutes later they had their key. Verrons spread it on a table and they bent over it together. Heavy silence stretched between them. "A photo album," Olsen said finally, softly. "Of the folks back home." The faces that looked up at him from printed plastic pages were familiar: bifurcate nostrils, round oral orifices, fleshy violet veils cascading from the lower lip arcs. The forked hands were familiar too. The physiques might have been, starved of fat and muscle tissue, bared of swathings, the flesh smeared instead with mud. Verrons flicked quickly through the volume. Their 'aborigines' appeared against the technological background of some unidentifiable other world, patronmasters of science and the machine. Even though they could not decipher the script that covered the page backs, Verrons and Olsen read substantially from the photo presentation. When they had reached the last page, they slapped the album shut and gazed at each other. "They were either surveying this place or actually settling it," Verrons said finally. "A quick look around should tell us. And a bedcount should tell us how many of them there were originally." Olsen nodded somberly. The original party had consisted, they soon determined, of better than four dozen members. And they had come equipped to farm. Verrons even located their seed storage. Bags and cartons had been untidily opened and thrown about. "Presumably the seed was never planted," he said, prying a single flat green seed from a crevice in the flooring. "Probably just devoured when the kitchen stocks ran out." "Surely they brought some surplus food supplies," Olsen said. "Enough to carry them a season or two if their first crops didn't do well." "But flutes make hungry. And that's not all. Flutes make sleepy, dizzy, dull -- " "Dead," Olsen finished tersely. "Especially since they were finally' left to live off the land. Which obviously supplies them nothing like a balanced or adequate diet for their species. Do you think -- if our supplies will stretch to feed them -- they have any chance of recovery? Of actually going ahead with their settlement?" Verrons shrugged. "Who knows? If there's been no substantial brain damage, if both sexes are represented, provided that's necessary, if we could find a few more stray seed-if, if, if." He glanced up. Dusk eased across the face of the 'jungle. "Are you game to trek back by moonlight?" sen was game. Rolling the photo album and tucking it into a pocket, Verrons led way, stunner in hand, eyes watchful. "The light-dancers used them like disposable power packs. That's how they used their underpeople and that's how they're using us too, Commander," Olsen said grimly. "We'll exhaust our supplies prematurely and we certainly won't do the work we came to do. You can see disorganization creeping in already." "I can -- now. But you and I know something the other members of our party don't." "Oh? We'll tell them, won't we? When we get back?" "No, I mean something else. We know a lot about the structure of the underground flute storage chambers. We know, for instance, that the substructure area was carefully engineered so the flutes would not be endangered when the population centers were bombed." She stared at him blankly. "That means -- conversely -- that if we deliver an explosive to the storage area the force of the explosion will be absorbed there without seriously damaging the terrain around camp -- or even, probably, the mesa and the temple complex." Olsen brightened. She flicked back pale hair. "We have explosives, Commander." "We sure do." He stared down at his hand. Two nights ago it had cradled his golden dancer's accidentally shattered crystal. Last night it had deliberately terminated the fiery dancer's immortality. Now, he vowed, that hand would operate on a grander scale. When they reached camp, pole lamps glowed spottily, a few lighted, most dark. The supply tent was in a state of devastation. From the mesa flutes sounded, melody of night, drunken, disorganized. Dying. "We'll have to wait till light," Verrons reminded Olsen. "Can't take the chance of collapsing the grand temple on Heller's head. Think you can slip uphill and snatch a couple of flute cases without disturbing our dreamers? And without falling under the spell yourself?" His mood was suddenly euphoric. "Why do you keep asking if I can deliver?" she jibed, disappearing into darkness. Why indeed? By the time he had extracted the explosive from storage, studied the use manual, calculated and measured, she had returned with two empty flute cases. He glanced up sharply, almost expecting to see the dazzle of light reflected in her eyes. Instead he saw purpose. "What are we going to do about the flutes they have with them, Commander?" "You're ready to launch a real vendetta, aren't you?" She bared small white teeth. "I'll settle for total destruction." He nodded. They had shared more than one tempering experience in the past two days. "You don't think we should leave Heller one or two flutes? For research purposes?" There was no ambivalence in her expression. "No, I don't. Why should we be any more compassionate than they were?" But Olsen had never entertained a golden dancer. She had never mated in the clouds, even if only vicariously. Her red dancer had been too busy with weighty affairs to skim the morning sky, to dance the rainbow. He had shown her only the coldly brutal side of his race. Verrons' golden dancer had shown him more. His hands quivered as he packed the two flute cases and fused the contents. "Now. Think you can sleep?" She wagged her head emphatically. "No." He didn't think he could either. But neither of them kept death watch that night. Within the hour both were flung across cots -- she brought hers from her tent -- asleep. T ent panels lightened with dawn. Verrons awoke. He sat stiffly and gazed down at his partner in destruction. She was less fearsome in sleep. She looked, in fact, as if she could be disregarded if he changed his mind and returned the explosive to its container, the flute cases to Heller. She looked less compelling than a vision that brandished green light like a sword. Until she opened her eyes. "They're back." A quick motion brought her to her feet, flute case in hand. Supply tent revels rang from the opposite end of camp as they slipped into the dawn jungle. Fortunately they met no stragglers. They fleeted dense shadow and mounted the gully. At the top, when they stepped to glistening pink stone, even Olsen softened. "Just in case, I want to have a last look at the grand dome." "You don't trust our red man to have engineered the substructure adequately?" She tossed off a wry gesture. "I've been dreaming explosions. So -- just in case, I'm going to have a look." Just in case, he accompanied her. Their attention was distracted from architecture by the single lax body that sprawled on the stone floor beneath the grand dome. Verrons bent quickly. It was Heller, his flute still clutched tight in protective fingers. Verrons placed ear to chest. "He's alive -- just unconscious." "And they were too brute-dumbhungry to revive him and get him back to camp," Olsen said indignantly. "Now we'll have to do it. We'll have to drag him down the gully with us after we -- " But her indignation buzzed in Verrons' ears like the diatribe of a bee, furious, futile. His knees buckled and he sat on the cold stone floor, suddenly shaking with hysterical glee. Some mad-dog bomb squad they mad, the grizzled Service veteran and the freckled faced coed. He laughed gustily, tears coming to his eyes. When he regained control, he demanded hoarsely, "What are we going to use for bodies, killer?" Olsen didn't see cause for risibility. "Bodies?" Coldly. "We're going to drop our explosives down the dispensing blocks, aren't we? And make boom?" "We are." "Well, it takes six bodies to persuade the stone to open its mouth, Olsen. I count three here, one we'll have to drag, the other two sound enough physically but a little mushheaded. Don't you think?" Slowly Olsen sat, her mouth sagging. "I forgot. All our plans, so much happening -- " She shook her head. But her demoralization was brief. Her slight features cleared and she jumped up again, jabbing a forefinger at the unconscious professor. "He stumbled and broke his ankle, Commander, coming out of the grand temple. We'll need help to get him down the gully to camp." Verrons' brows flickered up in admiration. "You're right. We'll need at least three strong young bodies. Winchell for starts. The other two I'll leave to your discretion." S he was off again. Verrons stood, prying the Bute from Heller's clenched fingers. He examined the instrument, then zippered it into a tool pocket. The professor he dragged toward the temple where Olsen had agreed to bring her party. As they crossed the plaza, early sunlight touched Heller's eyes. They opened and stared, unfocused. "Professor? feel like walking?" Verrons probed gently. "Ngwf." By the time they reached the small temple, Heller was able to focus his eyes, somewhat. Life returned to his limbs. They moved, if uncoordinatedly. His response to Verrons' cautiously phrased queries were more forceful. Verrons squatted, forcing himself to watch Heller's weak struggles with a clinical eye. Over a period of two years, three, four at most, the flutes had transformed a party of fifty-two vigorous and enterprising settlers into a clutch of five naked starving brutes. Verrons juggled fancy terminology: tissue starvation, brain damage, terminal malnutrition. The flutes would wreak the same damage to the human party if unchecked. The light-dancers had destroyed their own mother race and they would destroy any other humanoid race that walked into their glistening trap. Because their own flashy survival was all they had considered of significance. Verrons stroked explosive flute cases. Then he heard human voices echoing across the stone plaza. When they drew near, he activated the fuse timers and jumped up, both cases in hand. Olsen led Winchell, Waller and Balsky into the temple. "The professor insisted on coming." She indicated the bag on her back. "And I picked up the rest of the flutes lying around the supply and dihing area." Her jaw squared vengefully. "No one thought to ask about stretcher or splints." That Verrons could believe. It was a rumpled and stuporous crew she had assembled, heads listing, shoulders sagging, eyes vacant. But this wasn't the occasion for parade call. Their presence had already been noted. From the center of the temple floor the stone block rose, slowly, with inevitable majesty. With less majesty, Verrons darted forward. A rectangular case appeared from the maw of the mechanism. He jammed it back into the hold and shoved a second case after it. The end of the block closed. Slowly stone reunited with floor. Olsen's pale eyes flashed wildly. She visibly restrained herself from crowing. "Come on," Verrons snapped, grabbing at Heller's armpit. "I gave us fifteen minutes to lob in two booms and get down the gully." They wrestled the lean professor across the plaza to the next temple, their three cohorts zombieing behind, eyes glazed. There, again, stone rose, "My turn," Olsen insisted. and a nice job she did, Verrons V. acknowledged later. A nice job they both did, herding their stuporous colleagues across the plaza and into the mouth of the gully. Pausing at the edge of stone, Olsen wriggled the bag of flutes off her back. With a gesture exultant, she flung it over the side of the mesa. By the time they reached the bottom of the gully themselves, Heller was live with protest, all limbs indignant, eyes blazing. "Commander, I can travel under my own power. I'm no invalid. I -- " "Then run!" Verrons seized the professor's arm and propelled him toward the jungle. Glancing back, he saw that Olsen urged the other three into motion. A sharp crump halted the entire party. Briefly frozen, all stared back at the mesa. A second crump moved its rocky sides and lifted the hat briefly off the single temple visible above. Slowly stone settled back into place. The temple quivered but held. Heller's lean throat writhed and gave birth. "Commander, what -- " "We've killed the flutes!" Olsen said. No one believed her. All eyes swung to Verrons for contradiction. Even Winchell, Waller and Balsky achieved fleeting alertness. Verrons nodded. "We slung explosive into the flute crypts. The rest of the temple complex should be intact -- more or less -- for future researchers. You can draw historical data from the interior wall of the crypts -- they're inscribed with a detailed history of the race -- if you can piece them back together and decipher them. You might even pin down the technology there -- to whatever extent it ever existed. But you can forget the flutes." Heller gobbled. "You've casually, unilaterally, shattered the instruments of the evolutionary plan? You've -- " "The plan is survival, Heller. Nothing esoteric about that. It's the same on every world. Who can survive does. Who can't -- doesn't." Heller didn't see it that way. Frothing, gesticulating, he launched verbal attack. "You cannot subvert the plan and live, Verrons. The plan has existed since time began. Not just Earth time -- total time, consciousness time. The plan -- " "Then look at it this way, Heller. If there is a plan I'm a part of it, too. And I've just fulfilled my function." Turning, Verrons waded away through jungle growth, abandoning them. He had only done what he had to. He had, in fact, done what he had to in more ways than one. His step quickened as he touched Heller's flute, still zippered securely into his pocket. He felt confident it was alive. When he reached camp, he would hide it in his case and no one would know it had survived. But one night soon Verrons would make his way from camp to some deserted spot far away and he would soar the clouds again. Patting the metal barrel, he sprinted toward camp.  I ast month I reported to you how j I toted myself bowlegged with a suitcase half-full of books and galleys and what is amusingly called a "portable" typewriter, writing when and where I could. I spent four days at Penn State, at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Science Fiction Research Assotook the "Pilgrim" Award, and Dr. Thomas Clareson was re-elected to the presidency) and then was whisked -- and I mean whisked -- to Cornell, where with barely time to throw on another jacket I went to cocktails and dinner and the auditorium, where I was introduced by Dr. Carl Sagan. Afterward I met with the Sigma Phi fraternity brothers who were my first and most cordial hosts -- and then moved for a couple of days with the Sagans. There was a guided tour through the space-and-time-wide environs of Sagan's part of the Astronomy Department. Imagine if you will a single corridor in which, side by side, are #) a laboratory containing thousands of feet of glass plumbing in which methane, ammonia, sulfur and water are being hammered by a variety of energies, producing organic substances -- amino acids and the like -- and #) right next door, a room full of computers in which mathematicians of the highest level are tearing away at the problem of black holes. Just a few steps from one another! Then there were encounters with the science fiction people -- as I understand it, lacking an official sponsor for a course, some thirty students are teaching themselves! I found them sharp-minded, informed and responsive. Thence to a command appearance before some of the English Department, who (it seemed to me) had a little difficulty in acknowledging that myself and my (our) work is not totally dediing. On to New York and then, at the weekend, to Boston and Marvin Minsky, head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at M.I.T., where, with eighty people in his staff, he is attacking the problem of a machine that can think. I went through his laboratory, a wonderland of computers, two-elbowed articulated "waldo" arms and, by the dozens, fine-honed, wide-ranging, utterly fearless Brains. That collection of people has to be one of the most remarkable assemblages on the planet. I had the pleasure of carrying a message from Sagan to Minsky. "Say we have this Mars lander," said Sagan, "and it tells us, 'I have begun the descent of a thirty-degree slope. The visibility is near zero. What shall I do?' and you send to it: 'Stop already, idiot, there could be a #-foot cliff ahead.' But -- it takes twenty minutes for us to get the message from Mars and twenty more for our word to get back to the lander. "So tell Minsky: 'Hurry up!"' After an unforgettable weekend in the Minsky manse, a great rambling old house with a computer terminal (which proved to me that though many psychoanalysts may indeed have brains, they don't need them -- ask a computerman some time to demonstrate to you the program called doctor), an artificial nightingale, a trapeze, a great little kid with a broken leg who was run over by a bicycle, his twin sister who says, "Daddy: Two." "Seven," he answers. "Three," she says. He ponders and then says "One..." They're playing tic-tac-toe in their heads. And another daughter who was teaching math last year when she was fifteen -- and who has a boa constrictor and a wonderful mother who knows more about children and public health than any three towns' Town Boards. (Speaking of wonderful women: I forgot to mention that the art on the famous gold-iridium plate now being transported into deep space by Pioneer #, to inform some intelligence, somewhere, some time -- perhaps a we are, where the ship came from; this art was done by the beauteous Linda Sagan, who never gets credit.) After the weekend, another speech and then a meeting with the M.I.T. S.F. Society, which owns the most extraordinary, the most complete and the most beautifully organized science fiction library I have ever seen. These are only a very few of the encounters I had on this journey and I wish I could share every moment of every one of them with you. But this is a book review, so: J 'hose Who Can, A Science Fiction Reader , edited by Robin Scott Wilson (Mentor, # pp, with biographical notes, #) is the way the title goes on the title page. On the cover. Those Who Can is set in eight-point Myopia, while the subtitle is in second-coming capitals, which is an indication of the ways in which publishers' sales departments think. Anyway, the book is a refutation of Shaw's: "Those who can, do. Those who cannot, anthology of fine science fiction yarns by some of the very best in the business; it's a book of essays on writing by writers who know what they are doing; it's a book of criticism and lucid example, articulate and entertaining. It's set up this way: Wilson, founder of the Clarion courses in science fiction writing, chose a dozen writers and asked them to comment on their own work, two each within the following six arbitrary sections ("... it is probably the worst possible way to go about it," writes Wilson in his intro, "except for any other way I can think of."): plot, character, theme, setting, point of view and style. A few words from the editor at the head of each section are followed by two stories, each coupled with an essay by the author about the story -- under 'setting', for example, Joanna Russ's fine The Man Who Could Not See Devils -- then her remarks on 'setting' as it applies to the yarn. And then Silverberg's Sundance and his reasons for setting it the way he did. Under style Fred Pohl gives us not one, but two of his most brilliant shorts, Grandy Devil and Day 'style' as it applies to both. Damon Knight has done something unusual and fascinating under 'theme' in having his story Masks run on the right-hand pages, with his running commentary and notes on the left -- something I could take authors, besides those mentioned, Ellison, Le Guin, Wilhelm, Wilson himself, and Gunn. Now, I learned are scheduled, for #, about five hundred courses in science fiction in high schools and colleges -- and I would most urgently recommend that every teacher and every student of every one of them get this book early and bone up on it. I should like to stress the fact that, rich as it is, the book isn't a compendium of hard definitions and final answers. Far from it. It deals with a living, growing, changing thing -- writing -- and it deals with its parts in the voices of highly, and rightly, opinionated people, with many of whom I disagree. And so will you, I think. I wish Wilson would do another like this, with a dozen more writers. I wish someone would set up a seminar based on this book. What I'm trying to say is that I am impressed and enlivened by this package. # 'he Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction, #th Series, edited by Ed Ferman (Doubleday, #), with six gruesome delights by cartoonist Gahan Wilson, is a Best Buy, with such top-of-the-mark classics-to-be as Pohl's Shaffery Among the Immortals and Ellison's Deathbird, Poul Anderson's shattering The Problem of Pain and Phyllis MacLennan's almost equally poignant Thus Love Betrays Us. We can rejoice at the reappearance of Alfred Bester, with his enchanting The Animal Fair. This extraordinary talent has been too long away from our scene. Raylyn Moore has an unforgettable story about a frighteningly talented little boy and a starchy schoolteacher. But the one that will roll you around on the carpet is called Sooner or Later or Never Never by Gary Jennings. Clearly his own kind of writer, Jennings is the wildest thing to come along since R. A. Lafferty. E xcept, of course, for Geo. Alec Effmger, who is out of his mind in a totally unique fashion. Relatives (Harper and Row, #) is one of those rare books with which you participate or you don't -- and if you don't it's a dead loss. Effmger deals here with realities -- note the plural -- either in an effort to circumscribe and therefore describe reality itself ("our" reality or "the" reality) or to prove fairly conclusively that reality is so fluid, composed of so many variables, that perhaps the only wise course is to take anything real with a dose of salts. If the book grabs you, it will grab you hard -- but it's not for everybody. I can say the same about a completely different kind of book, and a different kind of grab: Harry Harrison's Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (G. P. Putnam's Sons, #.) Harrison had a ball with this one, a Tom Swiftian, geewhiz parody of the very worst that our severest and most ignorant critics lay on us, salted with puns, plays-on-words and double meanings for the delectation of a fairly wide spectrum of "in" people. Personally I love this kind of thing at short-short length. If you like it in large doses, here's # tightly packed pages of it, so have fun. written a novel, Clickwhistle (Doubleday, #), which deals with dolphins in a way that pleases me. As I have so often mentioned before, one of the most potent challenges ever given a writer was John Campbell's: "Give me a story about a creature that thinks as well as a man but not like a man." Watkins has done this very well indeed. His Galaxy Library of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! ASI I # ## A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. AS#I ## Galaxy Magazine tSlMIl A collection of science fiction that challenges hlUlfil the mind and captivates the imagination AN # ## A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # ## Ki S H r # T g#.SrSK h successfully pulsed itself as a human being. AS# #  A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who # ook like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN # # A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# #tf prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction maste exploring the "ends of time." AS# # Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought tr e "Psycho. " AX#I# # Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# b A completely new anthology of stories never before Published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I # A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# # dolphins actually think a hell of a lot better, and the interaction between the protagonist, Dr. Pearson, and the various cetaceans, especially the one called Clickwhistle, is most interesting. Grafted on to this innately fascinating encounter are matters more cosmic, I think, than they need be, and added to the fact that Watkins' prose tends to be dense and unleavened from time to time, the book is a little uphill to read. I hope to see more of this writer. Next month, perhaps a little late, I'll get into a real find, a book called Joshua, Son of None, by Nancy Freedman. And then a takeout on a new small explosion in a very important area: science fiction children's books. and quite by the way: something I learned on my recent travels. If you begin to hear of an upsurge the phenomena have suddenly increased. It's because the computers which analyze sky sightings generally have until very recently been programed to disregard and not report anything that is not in orbit or on a ballistic course -- matters they can ascertain in hundredths of a second. The very thing that makes follow neither orbital nor ballistic tracks -- has disqualified them from notice! But you'll begin to hear about them more, because of a deI'd rather be alive now than in any period in human history. Christopher Priest s massive new novel. Inverted World, dealing with an Earth whose economy has collapsed totally and globally due to an energy crisis, was not intended to be timely when written And the beginning of its serialization in the December issue of Galaxy, which brought it to the newsstands almost simultaneously with President Nixon's announcement of the current power crisis, was pure coincidence The book was intended to be science fiction and that's what it is For your editor Chris Priest's hyperbolic world als-o has overtones of reminiscence -- it recalls hauntingly college days and a professor's joyous explanation of the Einstein Theory in terms of a beer bottle shape -- unless, of course, you prefer champagne Chris Priest's himself, however, is as timely as tomorrow He is still in his twenties His first book, Indoctrmaire, was hailed by the London Times -- his second, Darkening Island, recently placed third in the John W. Campbell Awards. Inverted World is his third. His British publishers are Faber  Faber and his American publishers are Harper  Row. He has been married but is not now, loves Paris and hopes to live there some day -- hopes also to visit the United States, which has great fascination for him. (He stayed up recently until #: # ayem to catch President Nixon on television, but fell asleep halfway through the broadcast for some reason. Energy crisis?) He likes his privacy, dislikes discussing himself, but it is a well-known fact that he lives in a private house in Harrow, an area haunted by the hosts (among others) of Byron and hurchill. The para-archeological probe made living history out of the undead past! I T he caravan clowns came to town about four times a year, usually in the service of a caravan, sometimes not. They came now to the town (the oldest in the world) out of service and with no clear purpose. They were strictly on a bold-bashful skylark. There were a few less than a hundred of them. They were slight, smiling, shy, desert Arabs. The guards of the city, though they usually treated the clowns with a lowering sort of theatrical harshness, really liked them -- but especially they liked to devil them. The desert gamins, first leaving long and rickety constructs of some sort at a little distance on the sand, came into the city by the east gate, whence the street named Straight (the Latins called it Via Recta and the Arabs Souk-el-Taouil) runs west to the heart of the city. They came in one by one sideways as though it were a narrow way, though the gate was high, wide and completely open. This was in the month of March of the Year of Restored Salvation #. "Thieves, coney-eaters, camelsuckers, trench-straddlers, goodfor-nothings -- what do you want in our town?" several of the tall town guards demanded and they clapped the slight desert youths roughly on the shoulders. The shortest of the guards was a head and a hand taller than the tallest of the Arabs. "Bread -- we want bread," one of the Arabs, less bashful than the others, announced. The desert Arabs did not have bread of their own. They ate camel cheese and small animals that they killed in the sand and rocks. They ate wild figs or cultivated apricots and pomegranates and almonds when they could steal them. But bread they ate only when kind persons gave it to them. And now several of the kind, though thunderously threatening guards bought hot bread from a bread booth and gave it to the Arabs. They ate it rapidly, almost furtively, but with real pleasure. All of them except one. "I will not eat your bread," said Khalid ibn-al-Walid. "It isn't right that I should eat your bread and then come back and cut the throats of all of you who will not kneel and beg for mercy." "Ah, squalid Khalid Walid, will you cut our throats?" one of the big town guards asked. "Aye," Khalid said nervously and looked around to be sure that his own jinni or angel did not hear him say such a thing. "I must cut the throats of all of you who will not submit. I will not like it any more than you will, but it is one of the things that I must do." "With that little sword you will cut our throats?" the guard asked. "Let me see that wonderful little throat-cutter you have there." Khalid handed his sword up to the high hand of the tall guard. The guard snapped it in two in his fingers and gave the pieces back to the slight Arab. Khalid's face broke and he began to cry. The other Arabs ate the wonderful bread that was given to them. They ate apricots and roasted meat. They talked with the town people and the town guards, for the chattering Arabs (after they had passed the moments of their shyness) were always full of news. They were called the desert scrolls. They drank the bright wine that the people gave them. All the Arabs did these things except Khalid, who refused to eat or drink, though he had always loved the wine of this place. Then it was time for the Arabs to go and they knotted about the east gate. Khalid still snuffled over the loss of his sword. Several of the guards held quiet conference. Then one of the guards, the one who had broken the sword in his fingers, went and brought back a real Damascus sword out of his generosity (for this was Damascus, the oldest town in the world and the Arabs called it Dimisk es-Sham). The man gave the wonderful sword to Khalid (it was not ornate, but it was of the good steel and manufactory) and that Arab brightened up like the sun coming out from behind the mountain clouds of the Anti-Lebanon. Then all the Arabs went out by the east gate. "That can not really be Khalid ibn-al-Walid the Great?" was the unbelieving protest of John Dragon who was dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech. "It just isn't possible." "It does strain credulity," Joseph Waterwitch told him, "but that's the way it comes through and that's the way it's projected. I must suppose it's all valid. It couldn't be otherwise." John Dragon, Joseph Waterwitch, Cris Benedetti, and Abel Landgood were on expedition to observe certain events here by para-archeological probe. T he Arabs shuffled along outside, beneath the basket wall. Khalid was grinning into his scanty beard. He usually pulled this little sword act and trick several times a year and he had now quite a collection of good Damascus swords. The Arab party, a little fewer than a hundred young men, shuffled carelessly back toward their desert. For about a furlong. Then they gave a great whoop. A dozen small horses seemed to spring out of the sand and were quickly mounted by the dozen or so of the Arabs so fortunate as to own riding animals. These dozen had also drawn bows from somewhere. And the others had swords suddenly. None of them except Khalid had had a sword earlier. Some of them picked up two rough ladders they had left on the sand before their first entrance to the city. They ran with these ladders toward the basket wall of Damascus. "See if you can get better detail on the swords," John Dragon asked Joe Waterwitch. "Hitti, who is never wrong, has written that the Arabs carried long, straight swords in scabbards flung over the right shoulder. And Belloc, who also is never wrong, has written that they carried short curved scimitars on their thighs." Joe Waterwitch emphasized the swords and the observers all watched as the steel showed a little more clearly. "They are every sort of sword and knife," Waterwitch said then and they all saw that it was so, "and they are carried every which way. There is no standardizing them and there is no seeing them any more clearly than this." The Arabs placed their two ladders against the basket wall (this section of the wall was so called because it was there that St. Paul had been let down in a basket) . The ladders reached only about a third of the way to the top of the wall. Nevertheless, the Arabs crowded the ladders from top to bottom, resolutely climbing up and up and those on the top waved their arms as if to try to fly upward. "What are you trying to do, little sandmice?" the guards asked from the top of the walls. "You'll hurt yourselves. Those little ladders are about to break." "We are going to scale the walls," Khalid the leader of the Arab sandmice called up boldly. "We are going to storm the town and slaughter the inhabitants and establish ourselves in this stronghold. And from here, we will conquer the whole world." "If you want in come in by the gates which are always open," the guards called down. "We think you are the same bunch that was in just a little while ago. Then you went out again. Those little ladders will not reach. Shall we put down Now opened in New York #h# for paperback, hardcover, juvenile books  magazines fanzines  posters  games and more longer ladders for you? Shall we let down ropes? Are you under some vow to scale walls?" "Yes, we are under vow to scale walls or to' batter them down," Khalid cried. "We will not come in by the gate until we have received your total surrender. Defend yourselves! It is not to our glory if we conquer only cowards who fear to fight." Khalid and some others began to shoot arrows up at the guards. They hadn't true arrows, only crooked and badly fletched shafts. They hadn't strong bows -- the arrows did not even reach the top of the walls in their flight. The only damage done by the arrows was to one of the Arabs. This man had shot his bolt straight up into the air. He stood and gazed at his arrow as it spent itself, then tumbled over and fell back toward him. The arrow pierced his eye. Some of the guardsgasped with shock, but several of them laughed. "If you laugh at him, if you laugh at us, then you laugh at God," Khalid called up angrily. "We do not mean to laugh at God," others of the guard spoke down. "We are honestly grieved that the man injured himself." Both of the ladders broke with weak cracking noises and tumbled the Arabs onto the sand and rocks below. One man was killed and several were lamed. The Arabs shuffled off toward the desert and those few who had horses turned toward the barren and sunburned hills. "We do not retreat," Khalid called from the back of his own horse. "It only seems that we retreat. We have breached your walls and several, including myself, have entered. This night I will sit on the highest seat in your council room and will hold command of the city." "You may come to the council room," one of the guards called, "and you may talk to the commandant of the city. He may be able to understand what it is you want. He is a man of great understanding. But you may not sit on the highest seat." "Yes, I will sit on the highest seat tonight," Khalid insisted. "I am already inside the town and the room, though you know it not. I will command -- I will order -- I will rule and I will slaughter. And after I have slaughtered sufficiently I also will become a man of great understanding." Khalid followed his men back into the hilly desert. They left a plume of dust behind them and when the plume dispersed, they were gone. There had been somewhat less than a hundred of these slight Arabs. And there were something more than ten thousand of the burly empire soldiers and guards garrisoned in the city. "That cannot be the Moslem conquest of Damascus of the year #," John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences, was protesting in near panic. "Yes, that was it," Joe Waterwitch insisted sadly. "We have tuned it in pretty clearly -- we have watched it to its end. That is what happened and that is all that happened." "There was supposed to be a six-month siege," Abel Landgood commented. "And when that six months was over Damascus was under Moslem control." "We will look for the siege, but we will not find it," Waterwitch said. "There wasn't any siege of that sort. What we have just seen is all that happened. And as for Damascus turning from Christian to Moslem -- well, I don't understand it either. A plum will be green and then it will be red (if it is a Damask plum it will be). There are no reasons at all for many of the changes in history. Let's leave it at that. I do not know why history, feeling guilty perhaps, is sometimes impelled to supply false reasons. Better no reasons than false -- and there are no reasons for the results from Damascus." "I believe that there is one more event, Joseph," Cris Benedetti said softly. "Our focus seemed to be on three hours before sunset. Let's allow two more hours for ablutions and the supper meal. So, let's see what we can pick up in the council room five hours after our last focus." Cris Benedetti was the revered professor of humanities and histories and literatures and esoterica at Southwestern Polytech. He possibly had more prestige even than had John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences. He certainly had more than had Joseph Waterwitch -- Joe had a peculiar lack of prestige. But Joe believed in himself and his methods and he didn't like to be told that he might have missed something. He looked at Benedetti for a long minute. "All right, we'll do it," Joe Waterwitch said then. T he fmd-and-focus itself took nearly five hours, but the times were not connected and the delay in search did not matter. Then those of the expedition were able to see what was going on at the evening's session in the council room. And what was going on was a developing ruckus. There were seven great mn sitting in the high seats in the council room: pompous men, somewhat amused now and a little bit fearful. They were amused by an audacious and slight man who was leaping about in the rafters over their heads -- he mocked them, harangued them, and they smiled. But they were really slightly alarmed by the monkeylike climbing of this man, actually fearful of his stark animality and his go-devil grinning and of the jinni-like secrets that were tumbling out of him in unbottled speech that sounded as if it would never be exhausted. They were disturbed by the gaminlike thievery of that rafter rooster who'd as soon steal a world as a sack of walnuts. "I will command -- I will rule -- I will slaughter," the monkeylike man in the rafters was heckling, "and when I have slaughtered enough I will become a man of even greater understanding than yourselves." This heckling climber over their heads was Khalid. "I wonder when the Byzantine look made its first appearance?" John Dragon asked his fellow observers. "Surely not in Byzantium," Cris Benedetti said, "but here in Damascus, in this place, on this night. Look at those seven on their high seats! It has just dawned in their minds that they have lost it all (that is the underlay of the Byzantine look) and that if they continue as they have been nobody but themselves will guess that they have really lost (that is the brocade surface of the" Byzantine look). I don't know how they have lost and they don't -- but the towering irony comes only after they have lost completely and disregarded that loss." There were seven men there with that look on them. In the highest seat was the commandant of the city. At his right was the bishop. At his left was the treasurer. The commandant himself was pomposity justified. He was wealth and line and power and intelligence. He was the deep texture of past pleasures, the hot light of present pleasure and the aromatic glow of pleasure still to come. He laughed at his own defeat and forbade it to speak. The bishop on the right had exceptional ability, a highly refined and rarefied sensuality, a canniness that had obtained an unusually good bargain from God himself, a stormy sort of sublimation (channeled and diverted thunder), compassion, wit, well-being -- and there was a foxy slyness that went with it all. This bishop had fished in stranger waters than his father Peter ever knew -- in Third Ocean of whose very existence both God and the devil are ignorant. And the treasurer on the left had the endless geniality that comes from never exhausted stores. He had the money bags that pour out specie forever to smooth the paths and to make friends -- the bags remain full no matter how much is taken from them. He had the sack of inexhaustible pleasure, and the barrelful of those sweet serpents named intrigue whose joy outlasts that of every other game. And into the eyes of this extraordinary treasurer had come a new glow now: happy treason, the last pleasure of the almost jaded. Two other men sat on the right, two other men sat on the left -- they were high and intricate men -- of the sort who maintained the heavenly Byzantine Empire on Earth. "I sit in the highest seat in the council room," jibed Khalid, who had made himself a seat up in the rafters (that Khalid was an ungiant jinni who had escaped from some bottle), "and I will hold command of the city." One of the great men on the left of the commandant laughed -- Khalid had nearly fallen from his high place when he had gestured too violently. "It seems a very precarious command." "I want it to be precarious," Khalid howled. "I am already inside you, though you cannot suspect it yet. I will command -- I will order -- I will slaughter. I will breach your walls. I lay siege to you now." "How long is the siege that you lay for us?" asked one of the great men on the right and he grinned in his beard. "A half-year siege," Khalid called down and he danced on the smoke-blackened rafter. Guards were climbing after Khalid, but they could not scamper about with his quickness or his wittiness -- they couldn't catch him. Khalid bounded to other rafters and crossmembers. "Your eyes are put in your heads wrong and they look out wrong," Khalid taunted. "Your eyes look for me where I am no longer to be found. You'd double your defenses to keep me out, would you, city fathers? But I am not out. I am the mind-worm working inside and I besiege you from inside. I came in under the walls and under your minds by the other river, the one that is not to be found in your country or in the maps of it. You great men cannot understand this." "I understand it," said the great treasurer and his eyes were a-dance with happy treason. "I almost understand it," said the great bishop and his fingers were avid to be dealing with strange fish. "And I almost understand it," said Cris Benedetti, one of the men working on the para-archeological probe. II There is an absolute mystery covering all early Islamic expansion and military conquest. There is no possible way these things could have happened. Circumstances sometimes put forward to explain these happenings are in fact later circumstances created by these same happenings. The clear truth is that the desert Arabs were absolutely inferior to all their neighbors in wealth, numbers, technology, health, ability, intellect, location, ambition, sophistication, weaponry, organization, transportation and experience in warfare. Their victories could not have been won in reality. It had to be a subjective religious rapture to make it seem to the Arabs that they were conquering. But how was the exterior world and its peoples conned into authenticating these subjective experiences of the miserable Arabs? Moreover, Islam was not then a rapture religion -- it did not become so until two centuries later. Nor was Islam then a militant religion -- it became so only after the completion of those astonishing, early, world-shaking conquests. At Damascus, the attacking Arabs had only one-hundredth the numbers of the defenders. They had nothing but short, curved knives and inferior bows with which to assault the walls. They had no battering rams or siege engines at all -- they did not even have entrenching tools. How did they breach the walls after a six-month siege? How did they take the strong town that had one hundred defenders against every one attacker? Here was an incredibly small and disorganized band of half-starved, half-demented desert men looking out of puscaked eyes (Paul was not man to go blind on the dazzling road to Damascus), small men, sick men, nearly blind men, men with no ambition and no hope, beggars wrapped in euphoric dreams more ragged than their clothing, men sleeping away most of the hours to forget that they had nothing to eat. How did these men, at the very first step, conquer Damascus? How did they, at the incredibly swift second step, conquer the world? Could one travel in a time wagon pulled by time oxen back to Damascus in the year # and look at the events with informed, modern eyes, it is possible that a missing piece to this puzzle might be found. But I doubt even this. There is no way that those events could have happened! The Back Door of History, Arpad Arutinov. "Gentlemen, we have missed it, we have missed it completely! We are stumblebums. That is what the respected scientists have been saying about us all along and this seems to be the fact of the matter. But there cannot be anything wrong with our methods. There cannot be that much wrong with ourselves. There has to be something wrong with history. History was not there when we went back to examine her." John Dragon "So much of this has depended on me and I do not feel that I have failed in any way. I have been the instrument and the receiver and I believe that I have received correctly what was there. The fact that what was there is impossible is beside the point -- overwhelmingly beside the point, I'm afraid. I've been the dowser and the medium, but I certainly am not a happy medium over this. Where have we failed? Or rather, what is it that has failed us?" Joseph Waterwitch "This brings into question the whole subject of reality. Reality has been an assumption, a postulate, an evident basis and beginning. It now seems to have been a false assumption. Reality has disappeared on us when we had the temerity to examine it too closely. What we now need to find and to use is a workable alternate to reality." Abel Landgood "Gentlemen, I believe that our difficulty is that we have been using highly polarized information." Cris Benedetti From the Landwitch Papers (the minutes of the first para-archeological probe) The Rivers of Damascus as mentioned in Scripture are two: the Abana River and the Pharpar River. But where are they now? The Abana River is now named the Barada. This is the only River of Damascus to be found in the physical world. There is no other river in that part of the country. There is no dry bed where any other river could ever have run. There is no choked and silted valley that could have been a riverbed in some other age. The Pharpar River is not to be found anywhere in that scorched land at all. There is no trace or remnant or body print of it to be discovered anywhere on Earth. Well then, have you looked under the Earth? Have you looked inside the Earth? Have you looked inside the creatures of the Earth? When a river is lost we must leave no land or mind unturned until we have found it, for a lost river may be anywhere. I believe that the Pharpar River has always been of the internal sort. It is the secret river that not only greens the soul but also runs under walls and gains entrance to all fortified and walled places of the world and of the mind. Regard your own estate and case. Is your own town not built on two rivers which are separated by a firmament between? One of them is the impossible river by which all things may enter anywhere. We'd be robbed of our celestial birthright without it. The River Inside, Ignace Wolff T he heterodyning of a brain wave produces a difference frequency or beat in conjunction with the normal brain wave -- and this difference frequency can be both a sending and an echoing beat. It may also become a receptor beat, and in some cases a reverberatory beat of very long duration. Of how long duration? Oh, two thousand years or so before it becomes too greatly diminished to pick up. But scientifically a beat may reverberate for only microseconds after the inaction of its source -- this scientific objection may not be assailed in its own field and context. But may the scientific objection be heterodyned out of its own field? May it be superheterodyned to a place where it accepts what it had seemed to deny? The ever-changing modified or heterodyned wave pattern is a searching or tuning pattern. It seeks whatever is in resonance with its voice. It changes its voice till it finds that resonance. But hardly one person in a thousand can consciously heterodyne his own brain wave patterns to obtain the variations and the beats. The rare ones who can are sometimes called dowsers. True dowsers can get echoes from almost all physical substances -- and also from many electrical coronas that are not really physical substances. Very good dow'sers can get resonance and echoes from an even more rare sort of corona, which is called patina. The patina, that aged and weathered surface, is generally thought to be a physical effect and substance -- but it hasn't a physical origin. Adept dowsers may also get resonances from ancient reverberations (some of them associated with patinas or other coronas, some apparently associated with nothing but themselves) that may have become endemic to a location, to have lodged there securely and enduringly. And dowsers are peculiarly able to get echoes from underground streams, which may be heterodynings of surface streams which are not necessarily in the immediate location. A good dowser can hear the signaling of rocks and sands and loams. He can hear water talk. He can hear air talk. He can hear a valley or a fortress talk. Joseph Waterwitch was a good dowser. He came by his talent honestly. He was a Shawnee Indian and the Shawnees can outdowse any other Indians in the world. Waterwitch had been given to Joe's folks as a family name because of their expertness in witching anything from water to fresh meat trails. But dowsers are scientifically unacceptable. Joseph Waterwiteh had been kicked out of the usually free and easy Geologists' Club when he refused to deny that he had dowsing talents. He had been kicked out quite literally -- out of the private bar, out through the dining room and the meeting room, out through the library and exhibit rooms. Then he was kicked violently down that short flight of five steps to the street -- to the injury of both his pride and his coccyx. But are all scientists absolutely closed to such things? May not some entry be made into some minds? At times it has been thought that an entrance can be made by certain underchannels, by streams that flow unsuspected below the medulla walls or that permeate the pons variolii to break through. (Even at the Geologists' Club there had been one man drenched by the under-river, a man who might open the gates at the proper time -- when he heard the off-key whistle of sweet treason. This man knew a lot about odd frequencies and could split stubborn rocks with his own double-tuned whistling.) A patina is a reverberating sur. face that is composed entirely of its own history and possibly does not exist in the present time. But this definition beggars John Dragon's statement that there is no room for the present in present time -- that the present must always be phenomenologically slightly in the future and cannot be perceived except by this very slight shift into future time. Present time is an anomaly -- it is less than a quantum wide and its very narrowness posits its nonexistence. It is too narrow a crack to exist -- and yet there may be a two-way traffic through that narrow crack. Unacceptable things do come through the narrow crack that is mistakenly called the present, such as cranks, ghosts and treasures. A patina may be very deep and still retain all the characteristics of a surface phenomenon. It is made up of old vibrations and waves and of nothing else -- yet it has mass and physical substance and waves supposedly do not. And a patina, though seldom containing metal, shows magnetic properties. It is not only stones and rocks that acquire a patina. The patina is often spoken of as an aging and a weathering, but young and growing things sometimes show striking patinas. An adolescent plum just coming to full color may have a patina -- a smoky surface ghost of that full color: it is patina, whatever other name it bears. A human being may have a patina which contains all of that being's experience. And a newborn child may have a surface patina that reflects the complete history of its ancestors as well as its own makeup and shorter history. In countries where the niceties prevail this valuable patina is often washed off the newborn child. Such removal makes for trauma and dislocation. The child is permanently deprived. He will grow' other patina but it will never be the same. He will forever lack roots and history and surety. He will seldom become a truly reverberating person. Patina is the depositing and burial of objects and events and persons. And patina can be, under the proper tutelage, the resurrection of those objects and events and persons. Patina is the recording and remembering and transmitting surface of everything. But is there any proof at all that patina may record and remember and later transmit or recreate persons and objects and events? Surely there is proof. Ghosts are the proof -- the tens of thousands of reports of ghost persons and ghost events. Ghosts are the transmitting and recreating of old things and old doings. You do not accept ghosts? You have not been touched even once by the ghost river named Pharpar? It is not good to remain untouched by it. It is the river of resurrection. If you will not accept ghosts, neither will you accept one risen from the dead. T ihe dowser turned inside out is the eidolon man. Joseph Waterwitch was a supreme dowser. His associate Abel Landgood was a dowser-inside-out, an image man or an eidolon man. As a projector of valid eidolons, images and recreations he was as expert as a formally untrained person can be. The great breakthrough arrived with the acquaintance and association of Waterwitch and Landgood. Together they drew up the Landgood Covenant. They had the whole procedure completed between them before they went to have it instrumented. Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal. He had walked and talked w'ith ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk. All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel. Abel was an imaginative, creative boy. He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world and that is always important. And he did not like empty spaces at all. Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space he filled it with his imagination. There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house. He filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes and would eat apples and blackberries there till he got sick. There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley. A house had once stood there. It had burned down. Abel put another house there -- a funny-looking house. He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house and fixed their names to be Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster. He put a boy to live in the house and fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster. Mikey fixed a cat. Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away. Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick. Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man. Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier. Everybody began to fight then. Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking. "You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters," Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into a secondary patina. "There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them and remember how they burned in the little house there -- ah -- in the little house that is not there. And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off that crazy man. With our reputation we can't afford to seem too old-line Southern. And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog. I remember that dog before they had to kill it. It was one mean dog -- it's a wonder you weren't bitten. Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think that you're an odd kid." But Abel wasn't an odd kid at all. He was absolutely normal. It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd. The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel. The family seemed to attract ghosts and the neighbors objected. (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts. Like Joseph Waterwitch, Abel Landgood did not acquire all his talent in his own generation. Both his father and his mother had talent. And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult. An average child will lose such abilities, but a normal child will retain them. J oseph waterwitch (the man with the locating or homing beats, who could bring any interesting location or time or patina into focus and privately enjoy it) met Abel Landgood (the man with the strong imagination, the image-projecting or eidolonmaking talent by which interesting old things could be enjoyed by everybody) . They realized that between them they could recreate anything that had ever been -- or anything that had ever existed strongly enough to leave its impress on time in patina-form, for patina is the living precipitate of time. On the basis of this they drew up the Landwitch Covenant to serve as an Enabling Act. (Abe! Landgood spelled it en-Abel-ing Act on his copy -- he was a good-humored man, but specifically his humor was quite bad.) Needing guidance, the two men joined forces with John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech and with Cris Benedetti who was professor of miscellaneous subjects. Dragon got an appropriation (mostly travel money) to test the Covenant in a puzzling historical situation. Cris Benedetti took the two talented gentlemen down to Barnaby Sheen's electronics shop where two young electronic geniuses -- a smooth-faced young man named Roy Mega and a hairy-faced young man named Austro -- built imposing and sophisticated instruments that would reinforce the talents of the two men and would also give a scientific appearance to the enterprise. "I believe that the patina-deposit complex is so complete," Joe Waterwitch had said on the eve of their first monumental testing, "that it would not greatly matter if all life should suddenly disappear from Earth. Secondary life would spring from these deposits. The written on skins (on the skins of rock, on the skins of everything) would bring forth recreated life -- whatever life was most ready and most avid to be resurrected. I believe that I have already experienced glimpses and manifestations of the reactivating mechanism. It would be a curious life and a curious world then. Everything in it would be the ghost of something that had gone before, but the combinations would be new, the motifs and forms would be completely fresh. It would not be a sequential world or a rational one. Anomaly would be the characteristic. It would be like -- " "It would be like the world we live in now," Cris Benedetti said. "You have described our own world perfectly and I suspect that your thesis is correct. We live in a recreated secondary. All life did suddenly disappear from Earth -- I'm not sure when this happened. Secondary life, made up entirely of anomalous ghosts, did spring up from old residues written small on various skins. We are the anomalous ghosts and this world is our world." "I believe that there are a few slight objections to your theory," John Dragon said with that deadly seriousness that is found only in citizens of secondary worlds. "There are so many things about us that have to be happening for the first time. There are things too flimsy ever to be reproduced. However, we may be living in an abortive secondary." Ill T he constituted body known as the Landwitch Covenant -- that para-archeological investigating team -- failed its first major test. Its little movie. The Fall of Damascus -- filmed on a working site -- may well have been the worst movie ever made. However its failures came about, it was sick parody, ridiculously false history and it simply could not have been a resurrection of the past. It received bitter assessment from the scientific community, for the para-archeological probe had been represented as somehow scientific. The whole group had been completely discredited -- and one Khalid had been voted the ironic award of "Worst Actor of the Year, of Any Year." "They give us no credit at all," Abel Landgood complained. "This is the first movie ever made to consist entirely of complete ghosts and complete ghost sites. Who else was ever able to evoke an integrated past so entirely? And of course it is scientific! What else could it be? Admittedly there was something the matter with the past that we evoked, but we'll solve that too." '"The worst actor of the year, any year!'" Khalid fumed. "I'll show them -- " "Can you get another appropriation, Dragon?" Joseph Waterwitch asked. "No, I'm out completely," John Dragon said sorrowfully. "Ragged, bagged, tagged and fired from Southwestern Polytech. 'You're making a mistake,' I told them. 'You're destroying the balance of things. You need a dean of soft sciences.' 'Not that soft,' they said. Did you ever watch a ceremonial academic putdown? They cut the brass buttons off my dean's coat, broke my plate and turned my picture to the wall." "Worst actor of the year!" Khalid smoldered. "I'll make them eat that! I don't know why I came through so badly, though. That wasn't the real me." "It isn't fair," Waterwitch groused. "We're put clear down, but everyone who touched us comes up smelling like lilacs. That kid Austro who works for Sheen, he has a writeup and an article in the latest Geology This Month. The article is Instrumental Reception of Igneous Rock Mantle Data by Means of Pulsating Heterodyning Grids, and it's subtitled Search and Focus, or Do Rocks Remember? And talk about a gadget! The kid must be a freak. It says the 'manuscript' for his article was chiseled on thin stone tablets." "Who does he think he is -- Moses?" Abel Landgood exploded. "He's a friend of yours, isn't he, Benedetti? What kind of friends do you have anyhow?" "Right now, all of us need all the friends we can get," Cris Benedetti said. "Worst actor of the year!" Khalid still moaned. "I'll rub their noses in that before I'm through. But why wasn't it the real me?" "Maybe Austro can devise a filter for excessively polarized data," Cris Benedetti said hopefully. "What hurts is that Austro was working for us and got his ideas from us," Waterwitch insisted. "And Geology This Month describes him as 'highly professional and impeccably scientific -- if he were not so, his theories would be grotesque.' If that fuzz-faced clown is scientific, what are we?" "Some have it, some don't," Cris said. "He used us." "Then we'll use him," Khalid said reasonably. "There's no doubting it -- that kid has drunk from the older river. That means that he can enter and infiltrate and topple -- and that's what he is doing. There have to be such manipulators working behind scenes whenever you go into the business of tumbling walls down, and there have to be these awkward stalking-horses out in front. Though I never before thought of myself as a stalkinghorse." "Well, just what are you, Khalid," Landgood asked, "and what are you doing here?" "Yes, we've all been wondering that," Cris Benedetti said. "You're a residue among residues." Joe Waterwitch said. "I focused on you and Abel Landgood catalyzed you into apparent being. You're a ghost, a recreation from the past. You aren't real." "What man is sure of his own reality?" Khalid asked. "Are any of you? We desert people have gone into this much more deeply than you Franks have. Thinking isn't your line. But you clods precipitated a Khalid as seen through Damascene-Byzantine eyes. No wonder I was selected worst actor of the year! Why didn't you catalyze spacious, nonpareil political and military genius, the leader of the canniest and trickiest and most sophisticated bunch of men ever assembled?" "Ah. because our data was polarized," Cris Benedetti said. "We tuned in on residues and patinas as seen by Damascene eyes because those were the eyes that predominated in Damascus. That's the way you looked to those city people, so that's the way you looked to our instruments and film. I believe that it could have been corrected if we had had a little more experience in these things. But it's all water over the dam now." "No, no, water under the dam," pareil Khalid said evenly. "Oh, that water is our salvation! Let's go see those kids. Somehow they're at home in the other river." "How come you speak English, Khalid?" asked John Dragon, the ex-dean. "More polarized data," Khalid explained. "I don't really. But you know me by your own polarized English-speaking minds. So to you it seems as if I speak as you do." (are you still in good graces at . Polytech, Benedetti?" Landgood asked as the men (and a contingent man, Khalid, a barefoot ghost in odd robes) walked the halfmile down Six-Shooter Road to Sheen's electronic works. "Oh, they've given me a sabbatical," Cris Benedetti said. "They said that I needed a rest. It's fine, I suppose, but it's without pay." "Won't it be a little hard on you to go a year without pay, Benedetti?" "It's seven years. They convinced me that a sabbatical is for seven years. They also said that the sabbatical was renewable. They've always been nice people to work for, and they're scientifically orthodox. Some of them will appear on tonight's great TV news Spectacu"Which are the crackpots?" Khalid asked. "Such as ourselves," John Dragon said. "Para-archeologists and such." "No, no, they're wrong," Khalid protested. "Because a thing is done badly, as your thing sure was, is no reason to throw it away. Keep with it." "That other genius kid, Roy Mega, is just as ambivalent as Austro is." Abel Landgood sighed. "In the latest Para-Electronics Today he is quoted a bit. I'll read it: 'The scientific community may be a little too prone to suspect vivid depictment of time-residue data. Whyshould such representation not be vivid -- as long as it is valid? The translation of residue data falls as easily into anthropomorphic forms as into modified sine wave or any other graphic form. It is no real indictment that a translation of residue men and sites should look like men and sites. However, we cannot condone the excesses of certain adventurers in their recent extravaganza. As the boys say. Do not task us with Damascus. That was a sad and discrediting thing. We wash our hands of such excesses.'" "With which water does he wash his hands?" Khalid asked. "From which side of the she-wolf does this cub suck? Ambivalence may often be its own best tactic, but not always. We will see." "There's more," Landgood said. "He writes 'We must begin to accept even the fleshing of time-residue ghosts, just as we have arrived at the fleshing of T.V. images. Yet we do well to be suspicious if they are of too funny a flesh. Malodorous and deformed ghosts disprove themselves.'" "I'm one of those he means," Khalid grumbled. "Worst actor of any year! I'll come back on them. I'll rub their noses in it," "He goes on," said Landgood, "We, along with all responsible scientists, must reject these current debasements of -- " Landgood, reading, collided with Roy Mega, who was strolling in front of Sheen's electronics building. "It's good to hear oneself quoted with such total preoccupation," Roy Mega said. "Gentlemen -- ah -- I see that you have one of the funny fleshies with you." "A care, young colt!" Khalid said with barefoot dignity. "I have dined on infidel tongues before and I'll have yours out by the roots. There's a special flavor to the wagglewell, youngfool tongue." "A care, old nag," Roy Mega said with gathering hubris. "You aren't real and you aren't here. You are no more than the experimental after-image of a bad motion picture ghost. As an after-image you are my experiment and I can terminate you easily. Your apparent continuation after the show and its recording were finished owes itself to a trick I intruded into the equipment. Your appearance depends on one holding coil, one small electromagnet, that I set in the circuits. And it is a time-release holding coil, so your continuation is quite precarious. In fact, it should -- " "The coil should have released itself some hours or days ago, should it not, young colt?" Khalid smiled. "It should have released itself when my days of grace were finished. These were the day during which I tracked down these men who had had something to do with my wakening. I wanted to find out why I had come through so badly, why it wasn't the real me. But now r there is more than one holding coil in the equipment you built -- and more than one in equipment that you know not of. Oh, I've insured and reinsured the circuitry on which I depend. I am even on the verge of making myself independent of all circuitry, of making myself of less funny flesh, of becoming again more than an electric man. Why should my continuance depend on fleshless circuitry? There is One on whom all depends." "Carrock, " said Austro, the young, hair-faced electronics genius, as he came out of the electronics building. "A stranger colt, you," said Khalid, turning pleasantly to Austro. "You at least, if not the other, have drunk from the hidden and intuitive river. You at least can circumvent and enter the walled city. Possibly of funny flesh yourself, but yours is a greening genius from that hidden water." "Mud on my mouth, I have drunk from it!" Austro declared. "And so also has Roy here. He is as conniving and cantankerous a person as yourself, good Khalid. Carrock, why don't we all come inside?" They all went inside.  rruus Roy boy, this dolt colt .l here, he is not as conniving as myself," Khalid preached when they had settled indoors. "He does not make sure. He does not check back. Had I placed a time coil in an equipment, I would know it when the time had run out and the coil had forgotten to release. Could so careless a young man have taken Damascus? Could he have taken Ctesiphon or Baghdad?" "Like Grant took Richmond," Roy Mega crowed. "Like Sungai took Dashbashpul." "Carrock, kids. To peace and to work," Austro poured aromatic oil on the hidden, intuitive waters. "By the sour'd ears of science, we have more to do than set a-blowing the sand of old battles. Carrock!" "Are you a fancy-talking hairface?" Khalid asked him. "But I believe that I have heard that you are only a device manufactured by the jinni named Sheen." "Oh, Austro's real enough, Khalid," Cris Benedetti assured the out-of-time Arab when they were all at ease in the lounge of the electronics building. "And Austro is right. We have to set a-blowing the sand of new battles. Now. But howwill we do it? The great walls of science are guarded by so many that not even a mouse can get in. They even have a battalion of a thousand and one furious mousehunters. And the bright pennant the crackpots will fly over those high battlements tonight. Khalid, we do need an old desert warrior here." "I am the greatest ever," Khalid answered them. "But several times all of you have spoken of science without total respect and this I do not understand. We are talking about the same thing, high science, llm itself? I thought that science was all to the good. The Byzantines believed that they had come to the end of it -- we knew that we had just come to the beginning of it, but we came to that beginning with joy. We ciphered more intricate mathematics in the sand than they in their scrolls. We studied more complex starways from our sandy hills than they from their towers. We brewed more chemistries from the bark of one incense tree than they from all their archive dust. At desert smitheries and forges we built instruments and machines beyond anything they imagined. And we made a rhetoric and eloquence to carry on and announce these things. After Him whom all adore, w r e most adored science, the holy llm. And you now hold science in bad repute? Has the Byzantine contempt and satisfaction come back? Has the wheel turned a full circle? It's almost as if we hadn't whipped them completely." "Yes, the contempt and satisfaction with past knowledge have come back," John Dragon said sadly. "And they have encrusted the thing itself. The noble old ship is sluggish and bottom-heavy withbarnacles. The Free Brother of man, your holy llm, has imprisoned himself behind walls and is no longer free." "We know how to enter and throw down walls," Khalid said. "You, the two young geniuses, get you busy instrumenting it. There will be an event, will there? Then we will capture and ride that event. We begin the assault tonight. We will assail the encrustation from inside." "This isn't Damascus, this isn't Baghdad," Abel Landgood said. "Yes it is," Khalid insisted. "The encrustations, the wallings, the enclosures -- they are Damascus, they are Ctesiphon, they are Baghdad. Young geniuses, are you at work on it?" "Ah, I'm not quite sure what -- " Roy Mega hesitated. "We've been using doubletalk and we've been washing our hands a lot. I don't know what else -- " "Carrock, I'm sure, I know," Austro said. "Here, Roy, come work. We make them use doubletalk in their own mouths." "If I only knew what we're supposed to be doing -- " Roy Mega complained. "If you have to ask you've missed it," Khalid told him. "Surely a smart young man like you wouldn't miss it. We need your fine hubris. We need your sharp distinctions. The noble thing itself will be bruised a bit when we tear through its encrustations, but noble things are always tough. Come, come, Frankish men, we need the fine edge of your minds for our polarity. What we really need is irony, a little unconscious irony." "That's the hardest kind," Cris Benedetti said. "It's almost time for that damnable TV Spectacular science suthrough clenched teeth. "I will hate the smugness of it, the exclusions, the cursed closed-mindedness. And yet I'll be fascinated by that whole barrel of snakes and I don't know why.',' " Carrock , so will I, and I do know why," said that young genius Austro. "Is it two receivers we will set up, Khalid, sir? That way we can have one that shows what everybody sees and the other one to show it the way they're really doing it. That one will be tricky, but very instructive. We will need to follow it along as we go so we can modify our patterns. We have to know what it is that we're heterodyning." "I can do it," Roy Mega said. "I was slow to pick it up and that isn't my way at all, but I know I can handle it now. Exquisite shielding for the check-set, and unscrambling the scramble! It will be the only set in the world to show our process in unmodified form, a real curiosity. And the modified one will show the full flowering, the tilt, the scramble. There's no limit to it -- or to just how good we really are." "Is there power enough for such amplification?" Cris Benedetti asked. He wasn't an electronics man. "Electrically, yes," Roy Mega said. "Mentally -- that's up to all of us. And be not quite your usual kind self, Mr. Benedetti. We need a little urbane arrogance and we need it from you. We need a little elegance from someone. Is there anyone elegant here besides me? Contribute, men, it is almost time." "Carrock, we hope, we hope," Austro howled -- and he was modifying equipment faster than you could blink. "It shouldn't take much electricity," Khalid guessed. "We took Damascus with only crude sparking coils and primitive Greek fire to reinforce our own mind-worm bit. Of course it took us six months. And our new assault will take us six months or six years or sixty, but we will finish the beginning of it tonight. As to the power, it couldn't have been more than a nudge the wrong way during your reactivation of us that turned me from the consummate genius and masterful personage that I am into the worst actor of any year. This is the subtle touch that seems to change nothing and changes everything. One will hardly be able to point to any single element that is changed at all, yet the totality will absolutely be changed." "What is going on here anyhow?" John Dragon demanded. "The damnable TV news specin thirty seconds," Cris Benedetti said. "It's to the first audience of or be easy, Dragon, but be yourself. An Informal Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Articles -- Interviews -- Reviews -- Letters Scheduled for ##: "Tomorrow's Libido -- Sex and Science Fiction", an eye-opening survey by Richard Delap. psycho-cultural analysis -- "Reading Heinlein Subjectively" by Alexei  Cory Panshin. -- new book and story lists. Sample l.#. year #. two years Portland, OR #I offers the best of Arthur C. Clarke: a Signet Author and Winner of the # Nebula Award, of the Science Fiction Writers of America. The award is for his story "Meeting with Medusa," just one of # astounding tales of life among the planets in Here is a complete list of great Arthur C. Clarke Signet science fiction titles: And soon to be published:  !;, #I Avenue of the  Americas  New York,  NY. # The world is going to see this show through our eyes and attitudes. We msut give the world a really fine and new experience. Polarized data! The field has hardly been touched. One can do many things with it." "Mind-worms -- we will be mindworms," Khalid said. "We are inside them all. We begin the conquest now and they'll never know what hit them. We ride the current of that intuitive river named Pharpar. We make the whole world see it all through our own elegant eyes. I like that 'elegant eyes' part." "But we can't alter a TV program that is going on," Joe Waterwitch protested. "We would have to do -- " "We are doing," said Roy Mega. "Joe, you're the dowser and you don't know where it's at," Benedetti chortled. "Certainly we can alter it if we bring our equipment and minds and eyes to bear." I t was quite a good TV Spectacuof the crackpots was the first presentation ever to have more than program that people would remember -- it would affect them for the rest of their lives. It wasn't quite what had been expected. The crackpots -- they came through as the entrenched inner sanctum boys. It took a lot of courage for the scientific community to confess to such weaknesses in itself. And some of the things that you had always thought of as a little bit fringe, ah, they got the open-door welcome here. A few of them set you and the whole world thinking on new lines. There has to be something to them: there has to be a lot to several of them. Take that new para-archeology, that especially. By a combination of electronics and human minds, great hunks of the past are really recreated. Old ghosts walk and they do not look ghostly at all. And often, in the electronics building there, a glance at the check-set to see from what rough rocks these men present had fashioned such elegant gems! That original had been rough and intolerant. It had been smothering and shriveling. But the check-set was seven. Oh, but the great and gracious modification which now became the prime original. (Yes, the Noble Thing itself was bruised a bit when the modification tore through the old encrustations, but noble things are always tough enough to survive: and now, for a while, it was no longer smothered and shriveled.) But the final, elegant, polarized presentation was like an old promise fulfiled, like a hidden river rediscovered. It was an unfolding, a full-flowing. It was finally to see all dimensions of time and space with the elegant eye.  The Earth he had sought to change had fled him -- all but one last corner of it! he overgrown and choking garden was shaped like a guitar with a hedge of pure Gibson box; the jaded, magnificent dying room was furnished in Spanish cherrywood ; he slept last night in a Fender cutaway and, sweet Pete Seeger, even his home telephone exchange had twelve strings. Jacob Grass. Gone today, maybe here tomorrow. The world stopped listening and advancing years impaled the minstrel. He calls himself a victim of bad taste but in actuality it was just the taste, any taste, new taste, that polished him off. Jacob Grass with a bowl of hot wax upon his knee and golden hands working in it, salvaging the joints, dispelling the cramps for a small while. Then the digits came up like candles and he toweled them clean and reached for his peeling Gallacher. Jacob was going to sing his song before finger warmth and all daylight went. Daylight was vital, though jie played with his eyes shut. In darkness he could not see to mix the wax. How do you equate an active telephone exchange with a lifeless electric system? Jacob Grass had no lights, which he needed, and a dozen primed lines which he did not. Why? Hope. Hope doesn't need light but it does need contact. Jacob had heaved himself clear of the Nashville debris and headed for Hollywood with some idea about his and the old dear's dying together. Finding a place was easy enough -- their doors were open and begging along upper Hollywood Boulevard when he had been expecting to hike deep into the Cheviot hills. The Haunted House, some seer of the sixties had called Hollywood, and that was just how it was now -- only more so, with the rest of the midway packed up and gone and the squat hulks hardly holding up under the weight of the winter. And to find here a dwelling so given over to the motif of his heart -- that was more than good fortune. That was the beginning of hope. So the phones stayed, though the power company came and looked at the ghost town and then sent . an in-spectre to scare Jacob into paying his bill. One look at Jacob, though, and they knew it wasn't worth the legal trouble because you can't get blood from a rocking horse. Maybe they were even plotting with the phone company but something kept Grass safe and whenever he picked up his handpiece, the buzz invitation was there, sure and penetrative, meaning, Your call, sir? Likely  there was an engineer somewhere along the lines who remembered Jacob Grass with affection for the songs that had said all that the engineer had always wanted to say about war, women, work or whimsy. No doubt about it, Jacob had spoken with the tongue of tongues once upon a merry time. Now he composed to himself and swore because the rhymes were ragged or the meter didn't run true. Jacob Grass and Hollyw'ood. A strong affinity and the only affinity you would find here . The people walked out on Jacob. The people walked out on their celluloid dreams. Time had been when Fox, Warner, Universal could dictate the direction for mass escapism with only a limited number of other choices. But now, at the thin end of the millennium, there were so many brands of reality and so many eyes with which to view them that dreams were redundant. For instance, in a typical day: The Northlands Satellite was beaming the survival struggle of a crashed plane crew' in the Arctic Circle by daily episodes. Any time -- maybe tomorrow, folks -- the pilot, dragging his broken leg, was going to start hacking chunks off his dead Eskimo passenger or the copilot or the beautiful mortified stewardess for fresh meat and strength. Spangles McGraw was plugging hisher latest crunch every time you turned up your transvestite radio. There was Show Your Cards , an extravaganza from Central Africa where the Malawi Young Pioneers had lined up another round dozen unpolitical animals and were proceeding to burn their homes, pillage their limbs and wreck their wives just to see how much it took to make the dissidents join the Party. Seoul Brothers, the recruiting splurge from the Indo-China theater, was always good for a laugh. You could watch people dying on a dozen different channels, near and far, traffic control or Skylab mortality quotient. With all that, who needed fantasy? The cameramen had gone to the top of the pile. There was even If It Kills Me... a kind of television consequence game that used up its production staff like crazy because the title was the sum total of the scenario. And Hollywood continued deserted, left to wraiths like Jacob Grass who came to stay forever while ancient stardusts drifted in doorways. The same manifestation. Jacob had sung protest songs and the enlightened had listened . But the mass had gloried in the very things he decried and he bothered them. Crazy Jacob. Chase him away. And kill off his listeners. All flesh was not Grass. I'm the man who taught the people How to think before they sing. How to look for little hitches And examine everything. S omebody moved upon the thickening grime of the boulevard. A young man tensed to the sound -- a faint jangling like a music box in a high and distant room. He put his weight against the fluted magnificence of the gate. Its rustings came away on his glinting hands and his fibrous suit but it gave inward and before he was three paces up the path the oxide had been shaken off like sand. Following the music to its source, he skirted spent azalea bushes, trod carefully upon fissured mosaic and came at last past a fall of bougainvillea to a patio and an open french door. By which time the guitar had stopped. Jacob Grass had heard no footsteps save his own for a long time. Suppliers of sustenance stopped their vehicles to unload cartons at his gate. Mailmen opened his box and collected the small checks for the butcher, the baker and the candle-w'ax maker. The other envelopes -- the offers of work and the fan letters he had written to himself -- they authorized with a handstamp and replaced. All out of his earshot. But now there were footsteps. And stepping from light into gloom, a young man of slightly soiled elegance with a miracle looped to his wrist. Jacob Grass knew a camera when he saw one. "Well, for crying out loud," said the young man. "A living soul. Dr. Living Soul, I presume." Words crawled in Jacob's throat but were reluctant to be uttered. A second voice, suddenly. Let it speak its fill and let me listen. The young man chuckled and panned the room with his eyes, cutting from pool of shadow to splash of light, sunfall to gyrating column of dust. "Are you at one with this place, dad? Is it yours or do you squat?" Jacob found expression at last. "It's mine." "How long? Mercy, I never thought to find anybody actually still here. Then I heard a guitar. You got records?" "I've got fingers," said Jacob. The Gallacher lay across his legs and only now the intruder's vision was coming around to him. "You mean you play?" "I play." Jacob didn't like the way the kid said it, as though there were some dishonor involved. "Here?" "Nowhere else." "But why?" "Because I want to." "What are you doing here?" "What is anybody doing anywhere except waiting to die?" "Wait a minute -- do you mean to say you're -- like -- in sight of death?" Jacob couldn't see the point of the questions and the boy was supercilious, anyway. "What if I am?" "Well, maybe I can help you." "To die? No thanks. That's one job I keep for myself." "No, pop. Don't misread me. What I mean is -- somebody at a low ebb like that. Sometimes it helps to have a friend. Like to push the tide back." "You mixed your metaphors. I notice that. I keep it out of my lyrics." "Lyrics?" "Songs. I have written songs that are loved the world over." "Great. Are you David or Bacharach, Killjoy or Vespucci?" "Jacob Grass." "Jacob Grass?" "Do you know the name?" "Sure I know it. Ah -- folk songs . " H e could tell by the acoustic guitar. "Protest." "Protest, I meant." "There's a difference." "I appreciate that. Dylan made the point -- " "Listen, I had more to say and I said it better -- " "Of course you did, Jacob. But just the same, now you're -- " "Dying?" "Living. Living, Jacob, here in this -- string mausoleum. People should know." "They'll know soon enough. I get offers all the time. It's just a matter of picking the right one." The young man was aiming his Minolta, swinging it hither and thither, testing black-box attachments that set him right for film speed and aperture as he dry-shot darkness, light and Jacob Grass. "I know I can help you," he said. "I have some friends who would be transported by this old house and you and -- and the whole scene. Do you mind if I bring them?" "Do you have a name?" "Sure -- forgive me, Jacob. Clements, my name is -- Asa Clements. It's kind of funny -- like you get don't know that." "Asa Clements?" "Do you know the name?" "Of course. You take pictures." He could tell by the camera. "You're playing a game, Jacob." "Your game, Asa. You don't know me from a bag of grit." "That's not true, Mr. Grass. And let me tell you -- before long people will be falling over themselves to get to know you." "With your pictures." "Maybe a little of the glitter will rub off on me, yes." "So tell your friends. There'll be enough glitter for all." Past the bougainvillea, across the cracked tiles, through the barren bushes to the gate, Asa Clements was counting his friends. Not the ones he had, because he had none. But the ones he was going to make as a lone wolf cameraman with some off-beat footage. The networks beckoned. Asa went to sell his project and beg some film. I'm the man who told the people Life is not what it appears. Media lie and they've been Doing it for years. C ontrol room subdued of illumination and numbers crawling like flies upon one wall while above them Amazon natives fried a missionary in high color. Mr. Gianni Intermezzo was post-synching birds with their songs, cicadas with their rattles, screams with their sources. "And you say this man is dying?" He did hot hesitate in his work. Cut, thrust, splice, run and all the time the jungle sounds were learning to be punctual. "He says he's dying," said Asa Clements, "and that makes it more authoritative. Just a thousand feet, taken at the proper time, would do it, Mr. Intermezzo." "Why come to me?" "Because you're the best." "The best what? The best pushover?" "I'm not asking for a handout, Mr. Intermezzo. I'm seeking the wherewithal for a project that will do you far more good than it will ever do me. Slap your name all over it but just give me camera credit." "How certain are you this -- Grass -- won't welsh on us?" "Welsh on us?" "Carry on living. Waste our endeavors." "Because he volunteered the information without knowing who I was." "Does he know now?" "Of course not. What do you think I am, Mr. Intermezzo?" "Would you believe a vulture?" "I'm a buzzard in a buzzard world, Mr. Intermezzo, and anybody who tries to pass himself off as anything else is just airs and graces." Clements watched the airs and graces on the flickering wall. The woodland fire was burning low and some of the natives were risking their soles to prod the crackling body at the stake. His stomach turned. As a defense against nausea, his mind put up one of the maxims beloved of his profession: If you don't like the heat, stay out of the kitchen. But suppose, Harry S. Truman, that the kitchen covered the world. Intermezzo watched on, unmoved. "What -- " Clements swallowed. "What do they do next?" "Nothing." "Nothing? Don't they eat him or -- some kind of ritual?" "What for?" "Well, it's -- I thought it was their practice -- " "They don't need practice." "I mean -- their custom. What's expected of them." "Where's the thrill in the expected?" "I'm not sure we're talking the same language, Mr. Intermezzo. Where's the thrill in doing nothing?" The film was backtracking now, over the treetops, higher and higher until the river was a ribbon and the jungle was unbroken. The incident and the lost life were gone as simply as that, like a pebble beneath the surface of the sea. Intermezzo let the question hang until fadeout. "All right," he said. "Because we may do business I'll honor you with a context. How to make sense of this scenario. The missionary was burning at the stake. Why?" "I -- " Clements stumbled. "I -- guess they didn't like what he said." "What did he say?" "I don't know. Maybe he made vague promises." Intermezzo lit up his workroom and grinned. "You're getting the picture. Would you say that was enough reason to kill a man?" "I've heard of slighter reasons." "In the context." "No." "Then what are they doing?" "Putting him to the test?" "Splendid. And what were the alternatives?" "They could kill him or let him live." "You're going away from the story. They've mounted the test. What then?" "When the fire's lit -- he can only die." "Perhaps he claimed differently." "Then he's a fool. There's only one likelihood. The rest are impossible." "Even with faith?" "Faith doesn't make the steamroller jump over you. It just helps you to know whether what you're dying for is worth it." "That's more profound than I expected, Mr. Clements. I am beginning to like you." "I'm gratified, Mr. Intermezzo, but I'm not sure I grasp your meaning." "Think about it. You see, that film finished where it did because the natives had made their point. No melodrama, no special effects, no impossibilities. That's what I call integrity. And when I give you five hundred feet of film, it's what I want." "But that's barely enough to -- " "Keep a record? It's all you need. There'll be no second take. Pick your moment and economize, Mr. Clements. Economy is a great virtue. And listen: when I talk about integrity I mean integrity and about integrity I mean integrity from Jacob Grass and integrity from you." "You'll get it," said Clements weakly. Intermezzo stabbed his thumb at the blank screen wall. "Make your point in five hundred feet. Make sure Grass knows what he's dying for. Otherwise -- " Otherwise it's me for the torture stake and somebody else' s five hundred feet. If you don 't like the heat . , . But the world goes on burning just the same And there's no volunteer to take the blame. asa Clements answered to Gianni Intermezzo. Intermezzo stepped to a different drummer. He locked up the control room, donned a polaroid visor against the intensity of the downtown Los Angeles light and headed for the nearest hologram terminal. There he dialed his sponsor, no less than Frank Baker, the protein Baker, of course, but today was a good day. He came within three doors of the top. The man whose foreshortened features shaped up on the hologram link was Charles Natchez, a well advanced chief of staff he had met before. Natchez remembered the movies with affection and kept a soft spot for flotsam like Intermezzo. "Gianni," he said. "Always a pleasure." "Pleasure's all mine," conceded Intermezzo. "Charles, I have set an item in motion." "Well, you know we respect your judgment, Gianni." "My judgment's all right. I'm calling to apprise you, is all. I can't give you a completion date, although the feeling I have is that this is a quickie." "How many reels, Gianni?" Natchez loved the chance to get into the vernacular. "I advanced the boy five hundred feet of film. It should be more than enough for the project he has in mind." "Are you going to tell me about it?" "This old folk-singer. Name of Jacob Grass." "Jacob Grass -- " "You know him?" "I can't be sure. I'm just making a note." "Well, I know him and I remember he used to be good. There could be some beautiful things said -- " "Not too many, Gianni. Not in five hundred feet." "Forgive me, Charles. But I know my limitations. Twist it anyway you like, it doesn't take long to say, 'I'm dead'." "And you believe he'll do this?" "Naturally." "And mean it. We have to have the action, Gianni." "I am assured he has no stamina to change his mind even if he had the intention." "Just the same, he'll have to be checked in the usual way -- checked that his insurance is paid up, that he has no friends who might dissuade him, that his medical degeneration is rapid, that he actually wants to go-" "My contact claims all these requirements are fulfilled. Grass is tired of living." The head of Natchez, projected there at the mouth of the tube like a genie, blinked and nodded. Intermezzo had an insane desire to reach out for the image, tear the head from its moorings, smash it to the floor just to see what happened. But he kept his hands out of sight, knowing it was an impossible murder. There would be no more effect than a flickering of colors on his swinging fists and, more, Natchez would see the movement and recognize the intention. It's hard to go on talking business to a man when you've just proved you'd like to kill him. Intermezzo kept his hands and his thoughts out of sight. Natchez was still nodding. "You know it only takes a good idea to change a person's mind in these circumstances." "That's a gamble I'll take. Believe me, if there was a good idea to be had, Jacob Grass would have had it. I'll organize the usual safeguards." "Otherwise -- " Charles Natchez laughed and brought his hands over the edge of his desk. Intermezzo could see them there in miniature, like moth wings. Then the little hands were sweeping across the expanse of the image. Muscles tightened in his neck as he realized what Natchez was doing. What he could not afford to do. "Otherwise," chuckled the genie, "heads will roll." I'm the man who thought the people Would be glad to know the score, With a great big smile of welcome When they opened up the door I t he telephone rang. It shuddered the ancient chandeliers until they shed dust like rain upon the startled house. It jerked Jacob Grass's hands so that he spilled molten wax upon the dull tile floor and put his feet in it and toppled before he knew what he should do about the phone. And it kept ringing. Asa Clements, at the other end, reasoned that Jacob was finishing a solo or mesmerized in some other form and waited while motes fell and Jacob cursed and scrabbled. Waited and thought how kind he was. Eventually: "The Jacob Grass residence. Who wishes to consult with him, please?" Grass doing his wrinkled retainer bit. "I w'anted to speak with Mr. Grass if he is not too busy," said Clements, grinning at his owrn sophistication. "My name is Clements. He may remember me." He had to remember -- it was only the day after. "The man with the camera." The voice was the same. Grass had wearied of the game. "Of course I remember you, Mr. Clements. I wasn't expecting you to phone." Jacob had not been expecting anybody to phone. For some reason he had had the cameraman earmarked as someone who would come through the french door again next time. All the same he was curious. He hastened to amend and explain. "What I meant was, I didn't realize you had my number. Is it -- " Clements read him. "Yes, it's listed, Mr. Grass. Large black He had taken the number off the hand-unit at the house. "You lie too easily, Asa," said Grass. "You lie for almost no reason at all." "I -- " Clements dried up. "You what? Were you going to deny it? Were you going to compound your felony?" Five hundred feet of film and Asa Clements had been wondering whether it would be enough. The danger now was that he would not get to use any of it. "I'm sorry," he said. "I -- I try to be kind. If an old man has a dream I try not to spoil it or trample on it. In this ghost town the directory is full of dead numbers, Jacob. I thought you knew that and I was echoing your charade. Don't think too badly of me. I have some good new's." "Is it the truth?" "It is as good as that. I have been invited to make a film about you." "What do they want me to do -- jump off the roof? I'm afraid I couldn't climb up there." "No, Jacob. A film about the way you live. Your songs. It could do you a lot of good, bring you a lot more work." "Are you still trying to humor me, Asa? I see films. They all have one ending these days." "Truly, Jacob." Well, he could put it in a way that wasn't too much of a hypocrisy. "I have five hundred feet of film to use on you. You can do what you like, say what you like -- play what you like. And if my contact likes the result there could be more footage. Don't say you wouldn't enjoy being a star again." Jacob Grass looked down at the cute little receiver in his hand and wondered if he could be brave enough to replace it on its cute little stand. The cameraman's offer was seductive, allowing for any and all consequences. But there were other entirely professional considerations. He needed time to think on those. "You can't come here," he said. "I don't want to see you. The hell with your five hundred feet of film -- and I still have enough strength to break a camera." For courage, read cunning, he thought as he cradled the receiver. Clements would be across the ferrous oxide threshold and lurking in the shrubbery with very little delay because he was already committed to Grass. Keeping his distance, but waiting his chance, Jacob, meanwhile, had all the time he wanted to work on his act. I'm the man who begged the people It was truth I had to say. But they just turned up their # V sets Until I went away. a his last day in the crumbling mansion, Jacob Grass awoke laughing. Hammering life back into his stunted hands, laying them to thaw in the sunlight upon the windowsill, he perceived what he could do. This very window frame. The others around the house. All could be utilized. He drew his fingers back into the shadows and set them searching for screws and driver. Twelve screws to the top of each frame, grouped in twos, twelve screws to the bottom and paired. See how far they went. And when he had used up his own supply of loose screws, he toured the house dismantling doors, discarding mirrors and pictures and handles. He vandalized fine furniture for the small spirals that kept it together. He plundered comforts for the joints that made them so. And in the end, ten window frames were studded top and bottom, couple by couple. So much for the mechanics. Now for the art. He used half his remaining supply of wax to resupple his hands and kept the rest for a more vital purpose. As hunched as Quasimodo, he scaled the stairs to the attic and broke open a box that bore its age in cobwebs. Strings. Curled, looped, plaited. laid flat. Catgut, steel, nylon. Knotted together, they could reach the moon but Jacob Grass needed them as individuals. All bore small labels identifying their key. He shoved and pummeled the box to the top of the stairway and dragged it to the first floor. Then he started on the first window. Working from left to right, a bass string and then a treble wound at either end around a screw -- E,A,D,G,B,E. He left them slack and moved on to the next window -- Bass E, Treble E , BassA, TrebleA, Bass D, Treble D and on into G and B and E again. Moving on. Take a pair of laughing Es, a brace of As, a deuce of Ds... He made a song out of it. Not up to his usual standard, maybe, but then the lyrics were not important -- this time he would use no lyrics. Five windows strung and Jacob Grass was humming. Seven windows and Jacob was gritting teeth against the pain in his paws. Ten windows done and now came the tough part, the part that cried out for craftsmanship. His strings needed wax but so did he. And if his fingers didn't get it, the strings never would. He split the small block in two again, made it liquid before the fire, laid his digits to rest. It was mid-afternoon and he hadn't eaten, his stomach told him. He committed his hands to the towel hurriedly and scrambled for bread and cheese, not heeding the extra taste from the remnants of wax. Leaving the morsels unfinished, he returned to the windows with the screwdriver and began tuning -- one twist to top, one twist to bottom and pluck and listen. Little by little, Bass if . Up a tone, little by little and Treble #L To A, to D, a tone apart; G to B, an octave span, B to top E the same. He was less than satisfied overall because even the give of the wood in the frames robbed the chords of accuracy. Perhaps he sought too much, perhaps his ears were only accustomed to perfection. He ran his hand across the width of the window. The effect was mellifluous and melodic. His throat knotted and his eyes stung. The second window. As good and easy as the first. 'the third needed more time and he knew chill fear as the sun began its downward arc. The fourth came right as simply as the first two. The fifth had woodworm in the frame and try as he might, Jacob could only achieve a bass sound from his treble strings and a dry, dead, rope twang from the bass. He moved on, aware that he had wasted too much time. Sixth, seventh and eighth windows performed admirably. On the ninth, three feverish screws had been forced in against the thread and refused to budge. The whole was a mess because they broke up the chord. Tenth -- and Jacob was doubled over with the pain in his wrists. He cursed arthritis, cursed the waning wax, screamed at his own madness -- and came up with a bridge as clear and true as the best he had ever fingered. Hearing it thus, he whispered, "I love you -- " to the faithful catgut and blessed the numbness that had been an anesthetic to his tattered hands. His blood on the guitar strings at every window. His stain on every note they played, ever. There had been no hint or whisper of Asa Clements all day, but he knew the boy was out there biding his time and conserving his footage. "Tonight," he shouted at the darkening garden. "Bring your friends tonight." Then he sat down to wait for a breeze. And the world goes on burning just the same, So I guess I'm going to have to take the blame . No, there's no other hand out for a share. I'm the man who bored the world too stiff to care. T v he night grew jagged with noise and the earphone men were screaming with the pain and the vibe counters were running off the dial and Gianni Intermezzo was taking Asa Clements by the scruff of the neck and hurling him into the presence of Jacob Grass. The old man was sitting in his upright chair with the Gallacher across his knees and his shoulders hunched against the open-window cold. In the darkness Clements could not see the tears along the lines of Jacob's cheeks and Grass wasn't about to tell of his grief when the wind had sprung up and rendered his Aeolian strings shrill and unmelodic, tortured and meaningless. Besides, the camera fiend was still smarting from Intermezzo's invective. Boiled down to the functional, what he had said was: "Get in there and save this production." Clements knew exactly what was meant by that and had come with Minolta at the ready. Now here was Grass sitting in his chair, not moving, not even going crazy or threshing about. "What do you want me to do?" The old man asked as loudly as he could against the keening wire hum. "What?" "How do you want me to end it? Am I all right here? I can't move very far or very fast now." "Don't. Not yet." Desperation had removed any subtlety from the Clements approach. "I mean, that is what you want, isn't it?" "No." The chandelier burst apart in a crystal blizzard, showering the pair of them. Clements, unhurt as he stood, brushed splinters from his hair and opened a cut in his left palm. He sucked at it because this gave him something to do but no words came with the salt taste. "Why don't you admit it?" prodded Grass. "Come on, now that truth is inevitable, let me hear you say it. Let me go with you being honest." "Please, Jacob -- " And the words were gone again. A dilemma without articulation. How do you say. You' re not dying the way I want you to? "Then guide me." Grass could read the pause. "Jacob, this noise. It's tearing me apart -- " Something fell in an upper room. Something slid on the Camelot slopes of the roof. "Say it, Asa. Say you wanted me dead." "What does it matter?" "It matters to me what the last man I'll ever speak to is thinking." "You're neurotic, Jacob. I came to promote your music, to give you a new chance." "And how do you like my handmade synthesizer?" "Fantastic. Only it's ruined everything." "Why?" "Good grief, man, we can't record the event in this -- this bedlam. All our sound instruments are going haywire -- " Clements could not be sure, but he fancied that Jacob Grass chuckled. There was too much volume. The feel of it was coming right up through the floor, climbing his legs, jetting up his backbone, socking at his brain. "Why yourself?" he screamed. "Why go to all this trouble?" On the upper landing a mirror was shaken loose and disintegrated before touching the floor. Pinpricks sabotaged Clements' eardrums so that he had to struggle to hear Jacob's reply. "I thought you were used to dealing with professionals." "I am, but what has that -- " "Then you should know." Wire-cutters. The simple answer. Short work at the windows. The peacemaker. Relief swathed Asa Clements like cotton wool. "I don't know," he said. "Tell me." "A true artist never goes on stage without an encore ready." Clements was running for the door. Jacob set his fingers like a caress on the neck of his Gallacher, closed his eyes and finished his lifesong without fuss or film coverage. Clements, back with the tools and racing from window to window, didn't even look at the crumbled Hollywood man. Gianni Intermezzo's backup cameraman got some fine telescopic shots of panic and wire-cutters before the Hollywood mansion crumbled upon Asa Clements. "That's integrity," said Mr. Intermezzo to the silent night.  Helward Mann of Earth City has reached manhood at the age of six hundred and fifty miles. His age is reckoned by the city's progress toward the Optimum -- e.g. from the moment of Helward 's birth Earth City has traveled six hundred and fifty miles toward this elusive goal, a process of which Helward knows little or nothing. His early years, spent in the creche with other city children , have been sheltered. His education has been Earth oriented and has given him little information about the planet the city now traverses. Following elaborate rites welcoming him to adulthood -- at which Helward elects to become an apprentice of the Future Surveyors' jjGuild and his engagement to a girl named Victoria Lerouex is announced -- Helward is permitted to see his first sunrise, actually his first glimpse of the outside. Assigned to serve his initial term as an apprentice with the Trackmen's Guild, he discovers that the city moves forward across the planet's surface on rails painstakingly laid ahead of it and as painstakingly removed once they have served their purpose (a) to prevent the city's sliding backward and ( b ) to be reused. He also learns that th city is fusion-powered and is the sole source of the good life on the planet -- it alone has adequate (if tasteless and synthetic) food, clothing, medical and educational facilities. It uses these to barter for workers and women to bear children -- of which it has a shortage -- from among primitive tribes of aliens or " tooks " en route. The women acquired by barter remain in the city long enough to bear a child to a city male , are then returned to their tribes. The knowledge of how the city came to he is lost. It is, however, known that somehow it originated on Earth and that, in order to survive, it must be winched constantly toward the Optimum, which moves ahead of it. Instructions to this effect are contained in a document known as Destain's Directive, handed down from the city's founder in some dim antiquity. Ideally the city should progress at the rate of one-tenth of a mile a day. This pace, however, is never maintained -- there is uneven terrain to contend with; rivers and gorges must be bridged. The city has never been closer than three miles to the Optimum. This, however, is enough to keep it alive and functioning. There is discontent both within and outside the city. Helward experiences both. Victoria, whom he has married , finds her life in urban confinement pointless. Helward has taken an apprentice's oath never to discuss the outside or the city's relationship to it with the uninitiated under penalty of death. To save his marriage, however, he breaks his vow in conversations with Victoria. He also is involved and injured in a riot of resentful "took" workers, A fter serving his apprenticeship Helward is sent south -- into the city's "past" -- to escort home three local women for whose childhearing services the city has bartered to alleviate its womanshort age. He discovers that the landscape that should have been familiar to him from the city's passage has subtly altered -- a ravine the city had bridged with great difficulty has shrunk to a mere ditch; mountains have lost height. The terrain has flattened out and the tracks of the city's passing have spread out. The three women with him also seem to grow shorter and broader until they split their dresses and must proceed naked. He himself remains physically unchanged -- but discovers himself experiencing a strange force pulling him southward... S hortly before they moved on Rosario tried to speak to him. He had difficulty understanding her. Her accent was strong in any case, and now her voice was pitched high and she spoke too quickly. After many attempts he got the gist of what she was saying. She and the other girls were afraid to return to their village. They were of the city now and would be rejected by their own kind. Helward said they must go on, as had been their choice, but Rosario said they would not move. She was married to a man in her village and, although at first she had wanted to return to him, she thought now he would kill her. Lucia, too, was married and shared the fear. The people of the villages hated the city and for their involvement with it the girls would be punished. Helward gave up trying to answer Rosario. He was having as much difficulty making her understand as he had in comprehending her. After all, the girls had entered the part of the barter. He tried to say so, but she could not understand. Even while they had been talking the process of change had continued. She was now a little more than twelve inches high and her body was nearly five feet wide. It was impossible to recognize her or the other girls as human, even though he knew they were. He said, "Wait here." He stood up and fell again, rolling across the ground. The force on his body was now much greater and he stopped himself w r ith great difficulty. He crawled back against the force to his pack and pulled it on. He found the rope and slung it over his shoulder. Bracing himself against the pressure, he walked south. tt was no longer possible to make I out any natural features other than the line of rising ground ahead. The surface on which he walked was now' an indistinct blur and although he stopped to examine it from time to time he could distinguish nothing on it that might once have been grass, rocks or soil. The natural features of the world were distorting -- they were spreading laterally to east and w r est, diminishing in height and depth. A boulder here might be a strip of dark gray, one hundredth of an inch wide and tw'o hundred yards long. The low, snow-capped ridge ahead might be mountains -- that long strip of green a tree. That narrow strip of off-white, a naked woman. H e reached the higher ground more quickly than he had anticipated. The pull toward the south was intensifying and when Helward was less than fifty yards from the nearest hill he stumbled -- and was rolling with an ever-increasing speed toward it. The northern face was almost vertical, like the leeward side of a wind-blown dune, and he collided hard with it. Almost at once the southward pressure was pulling him up the face, defying gravity. In desperation, for he knew if he reached the top the pressure on him could never be resisted, he scrambled for a hold on the rock-hard face. It came in the form of an outjutting spur. Helward grabbed it with both hands, desperately holding himself back against the relentless pressure. His body swung around until he was lying vertically against the wall, feet above his head, knowing that if he slipped now he would be taken backward up the slope and on down toward the south. He reached behind into his pack and found the grapple. He lodged it firmly under the spur, attached the rope to it and wound the other end around his wrist. The southward pressure was now so great upon him that the normal downward pull of gravity was virtually negated. T he substance of the mountain was changing beneath him. The hard, almost vertical wall was slowly widening to east and west and flattening, so that behind him the summit of the ridge appeared to be creeping down toward him. He saw a cleft in the rock beside him gradually closing and removed the grapple from under the spur and thrust it into the cleft. Moments later the grapple was securely held. T he summit of the ridge had now distended and was beneath his body. The southward pressure took him and he was swept over the ridge. The rope held and he was suspended horizontally. What had been the mountain became a hard protuberance beneath his chest. His stomach lay in what had been the valley beyond. His feet scrambled for a hold against the diminishing ridge of what had once been another mountain. He was flat along the surface of the world, a giant recumbent across an erstwhile mountain region. H e raised his body, trying to ease his position. Lifting his head, he suddenly found he was short of breath. A hard, icy wind blew from the north, but it was thin and short of oxygen. He lowered his head again, resting his chin on the ground. At this level his nose could take air that would sustain him. It was bitterly cold. There were clouds and borne on the wind they skimmed a few inches above the ground like a white unbroken sheet. They surged around his face, flowing around his nose like foam at the bow of a ship. His mouth was below r them -- his eyes were above. Helward looked ahead of him through the thin, rarefied atmosphere above the clouds. He looked to the north. He was at the edge of the world -- its bulk lay before him. He could see the whole world. North of him the terrain w r as level, flat as the top of a table. But at the center, due north of him, the ground rose from that flatness in a perfectly symmetrical, rising and curving concave spire. It narrowed and narrowed, reaching up, growing ever more slender, rising so high that it was impossible to see where it ended. He saw it in a multitude of colors. There were broad areas of brown and yellow, patched with green. Farther north lay a blueness -- pure sapphire, bright on the eyes. Over it all, the white of clouds swarms, in flaky patterns. The sun was setting. Red to the northeast, it glowed against the impossible horizon. The shape of it was the same. A broad flat disk that might be an equator. At its center and to north and south its poles existed as rising, concave spires. Helward had seen the sun so often that he no longer questioned its appearance. But now he knew that the world, too, was that shape. T he sun set and the world became dark. The southward pressure was now so great that his body hardly touched what had once been the mountains beneath him. He was hanging on the rope in the darkness, as if vertically against the wall of a cliff -- reason told him that he was still horizontal, but reason was in conflict with sensation. He could no longer trust tHe strength of the rope. Helward reached forward, curled his fingertips around two small extrusions (had they once been mountains?) and hauled himself forward. The surface beyond was smoother and he could hardly find a firm hold. With trouble he discovered he could dig his fingers into the ground sufficiently to obtain a temporary purchase. He dragged himself forward again -- a matter of inches, but in another sense a matter of miles. The southward pressure did not perceptibly diminish. H e abandoned his rope and crawled forward by hand. Another few inches and his feet came into contact with the low ridge that had been the mountain. He pressed hard, moved forward again. Gradually the pressure on him began to decrease until it was no longer a matter of desperation to hold on. Helward relaxed for a moment, trying to catch his breath. Even as he did so he felt sure that the pressure was increasing again, so he moved forward. Soon he had gone so far that he could rest on his hands and knees. He had not looked south. What had been behind him? YJ E crawled a long way before I he felt able to stand. He did so, leaning northward to counteract the force. He walked forward, feeling the inexplicable drag steadily diminish. He soon felt he was sufficiently far from the worst zone of pressure to sit on the ground and take a proper rest. He looked to the south. All was darkness. The clouds which had broken around his face were now some height above him. They occluded the moon, which Helward, in his untutored way, had never questioned. It too was that strange shape -- he had seen it many times and had always accepted it. He continued walking north, feeling the immense drag weakening. The landscape around him was dark and featureless and he paid no attention to it. Only one thought dominated his mind -- before he rested he must move sufficiently far not to be dragged back again to that zone of pressure. He knew now a basic truth of this world -- the ground was indeed moving as Codings had said. Up north, where the city existed, the ground moved with an almost imperceptible slowness: about one mile in a period of ten days. But farther south it moved faster and its acceleration was exponential. He had seen it in the way the bodies of the girls had changed: in the space of one night the ground had moved sufficiently far for their bodies to be affected by the lateral distortions to which they -- and not he -- were subjected. The city could not rest. It was destined to move forever, because if it halted it would start the long slow movement down here -- down past -- where it would come eventually to the zone where mountains became ridges a few inches high, where an irresistible pressure would sweep it to its destruction. At that moment, as he walked slowly northward across the strange, dark terrain, he could give no rationale to what he had experienced. Everything conflicted with logic. Ground was stable -- it could not move. Mountains did not distort. Human beings did not become twelve inches high. Chasms did not narrow. Babies did not choke on their mothers' milk. T hough the night was well advanced, Helward felt no tiredness beyond the residue of the physical strain he had endured on the side of the mountain. It occurred to him that the day had passed quickly; faster than he could have credited. He was well beyond the zone of maximum pressure now, but he was still too aware of it to halt. It was not a pleasant thought to sleep while the ground moved beneath him, bearing him ineluctably south. He was a microcosm of the city. He could no more rest than it. F atigue seized him at last and he sprawled on the hard ground and slept. He was awakened by the sunrise and his first thought was of the southward pressure. Alarmed, he sprang to his feet and tested his balance -- the force was there, but not measurably worse than it had been at his last recollection. He looked along his backtrail. There, incredibly, the mountains stood . It could not be so. He had seen them, felt them reduce to a ridge of hard ground, no more than an inch or two in height. Yet they were clearly there: steep, irregularly shaped, capped w'ith snow'. Helward found his pack and checked its contents. He had lost the rope and grapple and much of his equipment had been with the girls when he left them, but he still had a canteen of water, a sleeping bag and several packets of the dehydrated food. These would keep him going for a while. He ate a little of the food, then strapped his pack in place. He glanced up at the sun, determined this time to keep his bearings. He walked south toward the mountains. The pressure grew about him slowly, dragging him forward. As he watched the mountains they seemed to shrink in height. The substance of the soil under his feet became thicker and the terrain once more began to feature fused lateral streaks. Overhead, the sun moved faster than it had any right to do. Fighting against the pressure, Helward stopped when he saw that the mountains were once again not much more than an undulating line of low hills. He was not equipped to go farther. He turned and moved north. Night fell an hour later. H e walked on through the darkness until he felt the pressure was acceptably low, then rested. When daylight came again the mountains were clearly in view -- and as mountains. He waited. As the day advanced the pressure grew. He was being carried toward the mountains by the motion of the ground -- and as he watched and waited he saw them slowly spread laterally. He moved his camp north before night fell. He had seen enough. It was time to return to the city. A new thought worried him. Would he have to make some kind of report on what had happened? He felt incapable of absorbing much of what he had seen into his own experience -- how could he describe it to someone else? A focal point had been his stupefying view of the world spread before him. Had any man ever been privy to such an experience? How could the mind encompass a concept which the eye had been incapable of translating into reasonable visual frames of reference? To his left and right -- and, for all he knew, to the south of him -- the surface of the world had extended seemingly without bound. Only in the north, due north, had he found a definition of form: that curving, rising pinnacle of land stretching to no visible end. The three girls -- how could he report on his having returned them safely to their home grounds when they had passed into a state in which he could not communicate with them or even see them? They had passed on into their own world, utterly alien to him. The baby: what had happened to it? Manifestly of the city, for it had not been affected by the distortions of the past, presumably it had been abandoned by Rosario -- and was now presumably dead. Even if it still lived, the motion of the ground would bear it south to that zone of pressure where it could not survive. Lost in such thoughts, Helward walked on, taking little account of his surroundings. Only when he stopped to take a drink of water did he look about -- and with a start of surprise realize that he recognized the terrain. This was the rocky land to the north of the chasm where the bridge had been built. He took a few mouthfuls of the water, then retraced his steps. If he were to find his way back to the city he must relocate the tracks, and the site of the bridge would be a better landmark than most. He encountered a stream which, in his preoccupied state, he must have crossed without noticing. He followed its course, wondering if this could possibly be the same stream, for it appeared to be a tiny rivulet. In due time the banks of the stream became steeper and rougher, but there was no sign of the chasm. Helward scrambled up the bank and walked back against the direction of the water-flow. Though naggingly familiar, the appearance of the stream was distended and distorted, until he felt it could be another stream entirely. Then he noticed a long black oval near the edge of the water. He went down to examine it. He caught a faint smell of burning -- and on closer inspection realized this was the scar of a fire. His own old campfire. The stream at this point was no more than a yard wide -- yet, when he had been here with the girls, it had been at least twelve feet across. He climbed again to the top of the bank. After a long search he found some marks on the ground that could have been the traces of one of the suspension towers. From the top of one bank to the next the distance could have been no more than five or six yards. The drop to the water was a matter of feet. At this point the city had crossed. He walked north and in a short while found the trace of a sleeper. It was about seventeen feet long. The one next to it was three inches away. B y the following night the scale of the landscape had assumed proportions that were more familiar to him. Trees looked like trees, not sprawling bushes. Pebbles were round, grass grew in clumps instead of looking like a smear of green. The tracks he followed were still too widely spread to have any resemblance to the gauge used by the city, but Helward thought that his journey should not be much longer. He had lost track of the number of days that had passed, but the terrain was becoming increasingly familiar to him and he knew that so far his time away from the city was still considerably less than that predicted by Clausewitz. Even taking into account the two or three days that had seemed to go so quickly while he was in the zone of pressure, the city could not have moved more than a mile or two farther to the north during his absence. This thought encouraged him, for his supplies of food and water were dwindling. He walked on and the days passed. There was still no sign of the city and the tracks showed no signs of narrowing to their more normal gauge. By now he was so accustomed to the notion of the lateral distortion of this world in the south, that he took the evidence of it in stride. One morning he was disturbed by a new thought. For several days the gauge of the tracks had not appeared to change -- could it be that he had encountered a region where the motion of the ground was directly equal to the speed of his own walking? Was he like a mouse on a treadmill, making no forward progress? For an hour or two he hastened his walk, but soon reason prevailed. He had, after all, successfully moved away from the zone of pressure where the southward motion was greater. But more days passed and the city seemed to be no nearer. Soon he was down to his last two packets of food and twice he had had to supplement his water supplies from local sources. The day he reached the end of his food he was suddenly taken by a surge of excitement. Potential starvation was no longer a problem -- he had recognized where he was! This was the region he had been riding through with Barter Codings -- at that time, two or three miles north of optimum! By his estimate of time he had been gone for three miles at the most -- so the city should be in sight. Up ahead, the line of track-scars continued until they reached a low ridge -- and no sign of the city. The sleeper pits were still distorted and the next row of scars -- the left inner -- was some distance away. All it could mean, Helward reasoned, was that while he had been away the city had somehow moved much faster. Perhaps it had even overtaken the optimum and was in a region where the ground moved more slowly. Already he was beginning to understand why the city moved on: perhaps ahead of optimum there was a zone where the ground did not move at all. In which case the city could stop -- the grand treadmill would end. XX H elward passed a hungry night and slept badly. In the morning he took a few mouthfuls of water and was soon on his way. The city had to come into view soon. He w'as forced to rest during the hottest part of the day. The countryside, barren and open, afforded little shade. He sat down beside the track. Staring bleakly ahead, he saw something that gave him fresh hope -- three people were walking slowly down the track toward him. They must be from the city, sent out to find him. He waited for them to reach him. As they approached he tried to stand, but stumbled. He lay still. "Are you from the city?" Helward opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker. He saw a young man, dressed in a guild-apprentice uniform. He nodded, his jaw slack. "You're ill -- what's the matter?" "I'm okay. Have you any food?" "Drink this." A canteen of water was offered and Helward took a mouthful. The water was stale and flat -- city water. "Can you stand?" With assistance, Helward rose to his feet and walked away from the track to where a few scrawny bushes grew. Helward sat down on the ground and the young man opened his pack. With a start of recognition, Helward realized the pack was identical to his own. "Do I know you?" he asked. "Apprentice Kellen Li-Chen." Li-Chen! He remembered him from the creche. "I'm Helward Mann." Kellen Li-Chen opened a packet of dehydrated food and insinuated some water. Soon a familiar portion of gray porridge was before him, and Helward began to eat it. In the background, some yards away, two girls stood and waited. "You're going down past," he said between mouthfuls. "Yes." "I've just been." "What's there?" Suddenly, Helward remembered meeting Torrold Pelham under almost identical circumstances. "You're down past now," he said. "Can't you feel it?" Kellen shook his head. "What do you mean?" he said. Helward meant the southward pressure, the subtle pull of which he could still feel as he walked. But he understood now that Kellen had probably not yet noticed it. Until it had been experienced in its extremeness, it would not be recognized as a separate sensation. "It's impossible to talk about it," Helward said. "Go down past and you'll see for yourself." He glanced at the girls. They were sitting on the ground, their backs turned quite deliberately on the men. He couldn't help smiling to himself. "Kellen -- how far is the city from here?" "A few miles back. About five." Five miles! Then by now it must have easily overtaken the optimum. "Can you give me some food? Just a little -- enough to get me back to the city." "Of course." Kellen took four packets and handed them over. Helward looked at them for a moment, then handed three of them back. "One will be enough. You'll need the rest." "I haven't got far to go," said Kellen. "I know -- but you'll still need them." He looked again at the other apprentice. "How long have you been out of the creche, Kellen?" "About fifteen miles." But Kellen was much younger than he. He remembered distinctly that Kellen had been two grades below him in the creche. The city must be recruiting apprentices much earlier now. But Kellen looked mature and well-filled. His body was not that of an adolescent. "How old are you?" he said. "Six hundred and sixty-five." That couldn't be so -- he was at least fifty miles younger than Helward, who was by his own reckon ing six hundred and seventy. "Have you been working on the tracks?" "Yes. Bloody hard work." "I know. How has the city been able to move so fast?" "Fast? It's been a bad period. We had a river to cross and at the moment the city is held up by hilly country. We've lost a lot of ground. When I left it was six miles behind optimum." "Six miles? Then the optimum's moved faster?" "Not as far as I know." Kellen was looking over his shoulder at the girls. "I think I'd better be moving on now. Are you all right?" "Yes. How are you getting on with them?" Kellen grinned. "Not bad," he said. "Language barriers, but I think I can find a bit of common vocabulary." Helward laughed and again remembered Pelham. "Make it soon," he said. "It gets difficult later." Kellen Li-Chen stared at him for a moment, then stood up. "The sooner the better, I think," he said. He went back to the girls, who complained loudly when they realized their break had been only a short one. As they walked past him, Helward saw that one of the girls had unbuttoned her shirt all down the front and had tied it with a knot. W ith the food Kellen had given him, Helward felt certain of reaching the city without any further problems. After the distance he had traveled another five miles was as nothing and he anticipated reaching the city by nightfall. The countryside around him was now entirely new to him: in spite of what Kellen had said it certainly seemed that the city had made good progress during his absence. Evening approached and still he saw no sign of the city. The only hopeful indication was that now the scars left by the sleepers were of more normal dimensions -- the next time Helward stopped for water he measured the nearest pit and estimated that it was about six feet long. Ahead of him was rising ground and he could see a ridge over which the track remains ran. He felt sure the city must be lying in the hollow beyond and so he pressed on, hoping for a sight of it before nightfall. The sun was touching the horizon as he reached the ridge and looked down into the valley. A broad river flowed across the valley floor. The track scars reached the southern bank and continued on the other side. As far as he could see they ran across the valley until lost to sight in some woodland. There was no sign of the city. Angry and confused, Helward stared at the valley until darkness fell, then made his camp for the night. He started out soon after daybreak and within a few minutes was by the bank of the river. On this side there were many signs of human activity -- the ground at the water's edge had been churned into a muddy waste and a great deal of discarded timber and broken sleeper-foundations lay about. In the water itself were several timber piles, presumably all that now remained of the bridge the city had had to build. Helward waded down into the water, holding on to the nearest pile for support. As the water deepened he started to swim, but the current took him and he was swept a long way downstream before he could haul himself onto the northern bank. Soaked through, he walked back upstream until he reached the track remains. His pack and clothes weighed heavily on him, so he undressed and laid his clothes in the sun, then spread the sleeping bag and canvas pack. An hour later his clothes were dry, so he pulled them on again and prepared to move off. The sleeping bag was still not completely dry, but he planned to air it at his next stop. He was strapping his pack into place when he heard a rattling noise and something plucked at his shoulder. Helward turned in time to see a crossbow quarrel fall on the ground. He dove for cover into one of the sleeper foundations. "Stay right there." H e looked in the direction of the voice. He couldn't see the speaker, but there was a clump of bushes some fifty yards away. Helward examined his shoulder. The quarrel had torn away a section of his sleeve, but it had not drawn blood. He was defenseless, having lost his crossbow with the remainder of his possessions. "I'm coming out -- don't move." A moment later a man wearing the guild-apprentice uniform stepped out from behind the bush, his crossbow leveled at Helward. Helward shouted: "Don't shoot -- I'm from the city." The man said nothing, but continued to advance. He halted about five yards away. "All right -- stand up." Helward did so, seeking the recognition he anticipated. "Who are you?" "I'm from the city," Helward repeated. "Which guild?" "The Futures." "What's the last line of the oath?" Helward shook his head in surprise. "Listen, what the -- " "Come on -- the oath." '"All this is sworn in the full knowledge that a betrayal of any one -- The man lowered his bow. "Okay," he said. "I had to be sure. What's your name?" "Helward Mann." The other looked at him closely. "God, I never recognized you! You've grown a beard -- " "Jase!" The two young men stared at each other for a few seconds more, then greeted each other affably. Helward realized that they both must have changed out of recognition in the time since they had last met. Then they had both been beardless boys, agonizing about the frustrations of life inside the creche -- now they had changed in outlook as well as appearance. In the creche, Gelman Jase had affected a worldliness and disdain for the order by which they had to exist and he had mannered himself as a careless and irresponsible leader of the boys who "matured" less quickly. None of this was apparent to Helward as they stood there beside the river, renewing their earlier friendship. His experiences outside the city had weathered Jase subjectively, just as they had weathered his appearance. "What was all that about, shooting at me?" Helward asked. "I thought you were a took." "A what? Oh yes." He had forgotten the slang word. "But didn't you see my uniform?" "Doesn't mean anything any more." "But -- " "Listen, Helward, things are changing. How many apprentices have you seen down past?" "Two. Three, including you." "Right. Did you know the city sends an apprentice down past every mile or so? There should be many more down here -- and since we all take the same route we ought to be meeting each other almost every day. But the tooks are catchtices and taking their uniforms. Were you attacked?" "No," said Helward. "I was." "You could have tried to identify me before you shot at me." "I aimed to miss you." Helward indicated his torn sleeve. "Then you're just a lousy shot." Jase moved over to where his quarrel had fallen. He picked it up, examined it for damage, then replaced it in its pouch. "We ought to be trying to reach the city," he said when he returned! "Do you know where it is?" Jase looked worried. "I can't work it out," he said, "I've been walking for miles. Has the city suddenly accelerated?" "Not as far as I know. I saw another apprentice yesterday. He said the city had actually been delayed." "Then where the hell is it?" "Somewhere up there." Helward indicated the track remains leading north. "Then we go on." B y the end of the  day they still had not sighted the city, though the tracks were now apparently the normal dimensions. They made a camp in a patch of woodland through which a stream of clean water flowed. Jase was far better equipped than Helward. In addition to his crossbow, he had a spare sleeping bag (Helward 's wet one had started to smell and he threw it away), a tent and plenty of food. "What do you make of down past?" Jase asked. "I'm still trying to understand it," said Helward. "What about you?" "I don't know. The same, I suppose. I can't make logic of what I've seen -- and yet I know I've seen and experienced it." "How can ground possibly move?" "You noticed it too?" "I think so. That's what happened, wasn't it?" Later, they traded accounts of what had happened to them. Some of Jase's experiences had been remarkably different from Helward's. He had left the creche a few miles before Helward and had undergone many of the same experiences working outside the city. An essential difference, though, was that he had not married, and had been invited to meet some of the transferred women. As a result of this he had already known the two women he had been assigned to escort down past. He had learned many of the stories told by the local inhabitants about the people of the city. How the city was populated by giants, how they plundered and killed and raped the women. As his journey south had proceeded Jase had realized that the girls had been growing more frightened. When he had asked them why, they had said that they felt certain they would be killed by their own kind when they returned. They had wanted to go back to the city. At this point Jase had been noticing the first effects of the lateral distortions. He had turned the girls back and told them to make their own way back to the city, intending to spend one more day on his own down past in order to study the phenomenon. He had traveled south, but had seen little that interested him. Then he had attempted to find the girls. He had discovered them three days later. Their throats had been cut. Still recoiling from the shock, Jase himself had been attacked by a crowd of local men, some of whom were wearing apprentices' uniforms. He had managed to escape, but the men had given chase. Three days of nightmare had followed. While making his escape he had fallen and badly twisted his foot and in his lamed state had been able to do little more than hide. During the chase, he had gone a long way from the tracks and had moved south by several miles. The hunt had been called off. Jase had stayed in hiding -- but gradually had felt a slow build-up of southward pressure. He had realized that he was in a region he could not recognize. He described to Helward the fiat, featureless terrain, the tremendous pressure, the way in which physical distortions took place. He had tried to move back in the direction of the tracks, but his weakened leg had made progress difficult. Finally be had been forced to anchor himself to the ground with the grapple and rope until he could walk again. The build-up of pressure had continued and, fearing the rope would hold no longer, he had been forced to crawl northward. After a long and difficult period he had managed to escape from the zone of worst pressure and had headed back toward the city. He had wandered for a long time without finding the tracks. As a consequence his knowledge of the terrain away from the immediate neighborhood of the tracks was considerably greater than Helward's. T'vid you know there's another P  city over there?" Jase asked, indicating the land to the west of the tracks. "Another city?" Helward was incredulous. "Nothing like Earth. This one is built on the ground." "But how -- " "It's immense. Ten times, twenty times as big as Earth. I didn't recognize it for what it was at first -- I thought it was just another settlement, but one much larger than what we've seen before. Helward, listen, it's a city like the cities we learned about in the creche -- the ones on Earth planet. Hundreds, thousands of buildings -- all built on the ground." "Are there any people there?" "A few -- not many. There was a lot of damage. I don't know what happened there, but most of it seemed to be abandoned now. I didn't stay long because I didn't want to be seen. But it's a beautiful sight -- all those buildings." "Can we go there?" "No. Keep away. Too many tooks. There's something going on out there -- the situation is changing. They're organizing themselves better and have improved lines of communication. In the past, when the city went to a village we were often the first people from outside whom the inhabitants had seen for a long time. But from things the girls said to me I got the impression that that's not likely to be the case any more. Word is spreading about the city -- and the tooks don't like us. They never have, but in small groups they were weak. Now I think they want to destroy the city." "And so they dress as apprentices," said Helward, still not grasping the seriousness of Jase's tone. "That's a small part of it. They take the clothes of the apprentices easier. But if they decide to attack the city it'll be when they're well organized and determined." "I can't believe that they could ever threaten us." "Maybe not. But you were lucky." tn the morning they set out early I and traveled hard. They walked all day, not stopping for more than a few minutes at a time. By their side, the scars left by the tracks had returned to normal dimensions and both were spurred on by the thought that the city could not be more than a few hours' walk ahead. As the afternoon drew on the track led in a winding route around the side of a hill, and as they reached the crest of the climb they saw the city ahead of them, stationary in a broad valley... They stopped, stared. The city had changed. Something about it made Helward run forward. He could see signs of normal activity about the city. Four track crews were tearing up the rails behind it. Ahead of it a larger team was sinking piles into the river that presently barred the city's way. But the shape of the city had changed. The rear section was misshapen and blackened. The lines of militia had been strengthened. Jase and Helward were halted and their identities checked. Both men fumed at the delay, for it was clear that a major disaster had struck here. While waiting for clearance from inside the city, Jase learned from the militiaman in charge that there had been two attacks by the tooks. The second one had been more serious than the first. At least twenty-three militiamen had been killed -- they were still counting bodies. When the clearance came through, Helward and Jase walked on in silence. The creche had been razed -- mostly it was the children who had died. M ore had changed. The impact of these changes was severe, but Helward had no time to register any reaction. He could only mark them, then try to push them aside until external pressures eased. He had no time. to dwell on his thoughts. He learned that his father had died. The angina had stopped his heart only a few hours ater Helward had left the city. Clausewitz broke the news to him -- and Clausewitz also told Helward that his apprenticeship was now over. More: Victoria had given birth to a baby -- a boy -- but it had been one of those that had died in the last attack. More: Victoria had signed a form that pronounced the marriage over. She was living with another man and w r as pregnant again. And more, implicitly tied up with all of these events, yet no more conceivable: Helward learned from the central calendar that while he had been away the city had moved a total of seventy-three miles and was even so eight miles behind optimum. In his own subjective time scale, Helward had been gone for less than three miles. He accepted all these as facts. The reaction of shock could come later -- meanwhile another attack was imminent. T he valley was dark and silent. Across on the northern side of the river I saw a red light flash on twice, then nothing. Seconds later I heard from deep within the city the grinding of the winch drums and the city began to inch forward. The sound echoed around the valley. I was lying with about thirty other men in the tangled undergrowth that spread across the face of the hill. I had been drafted temporarily to work with the militia during this most critical of all the city's crossings. The third attack was anticipated at any moment. It had been judged that once the city could reach the northern bank of the river it would, by nature of the surrounding terrain, be able to defend itself sufficiently long for the tracks to be extended at least as far as the highest point of the pass through the hills to the north. Once there, it. was thought that it could again defend itself for the next phase of track-laying. Somewhere in the valley, we knew, were about a hundred and fifty tooks, all armed with rifles. They presented a formidable enemy. The city had only twelve rifles taken from the tooks and the ammunition for them had been spent during the second attack. Our only realistic weapons were the crosbows -- at short range, deadly -- and an awareness of the value of intelligence work. This latter had enabled us to prepare the counterattack of which I was a part. A few hours earlier, as darkness fell, we had taken up this position overlooking the valley. The main force of defense was made up of three ranks of crossbowmen deployed around the city itself. They would retreat as the city started out across the bridge until they formed a defensive position around the tracks. The tooks would concentrate their fire on these men and at that moment we could spring our ambush. With fortune on our side, the counterattack would not be necessary. The bridge-building work had been completed faster than anticipated and it was hoped that the city would be safely across to the other side under cover of darkness before the tooks realized. But in the still of the valley the sound of the winches was unmistakable. The forward edge of the city had just reached the bridge itself when the first shots were heard. I placed a bolt in the bow and held my hand over the safety catch. It was a cloudy night and visibility was poor. I had seen the flashes from the rifles and estimated that the tooks were ranged in a rough semicircle, approximately one hundred yards from our men. I could not tell if any of their bullets had hit, but so far there were no answering shots. More rifles fired and we could tell the tooks were closing in. The city had half its bulk on the bridge -- and still crept forward. From down below came a distant shout: "Lights!" Instantly a battery of eight arclamps situated on the rear of the city came on, directed over the heads of the crossbowmen and into the surrounding terrain. The tooks were there, not taking any kind of cover. The first rank of crossbowmen loosed their bolts, hunched down and started to reload. The second rank shot, hunched down and reloaded. The third rank shot, reloaded. Taken by surprise the tooks had suffered several casualties, but now they threw themselves down against the ground and fired at all they could see of the defenders: the black silhouettes against the arclamps. "Lights off!" Darkness fell at once and the crossbowmen by the city dispersed. A few seconds later the lights came on again and the crossbowmen fired from their new positions. Once again the tooks were taken off aim and more casualties were inflicted. The lights went off again and in the sudden darkness the crossbowmen returned to their former position. The maneuver was repeated . at a shout from below the arclamps came on again and we saw that the tooks were charging. The city was now on the bridge. Suddenly there was a loud explosion and a gush of flame licked the side of the city. An instant later a second explosion occurred on the bridge itself and flames spread across the dry timber of the trestle. "Reserve force, ready!" I stood up and waited for the order. I was no longer frightened and the tension of the waiting hours had disappeared. "Advance!" The arc-lamps were still burning and we could see the tooks clearly. Most of them were engaged in a hand-to-hand battle with the main defense, but several more were crouched on the ground, taking careful aim at the superstructure of the city. Two of the arclamps were hit and went out. The flames on the bridge and against the side of the city were spreading. I saw a took near the bank of the river, swinging his arm back in preparation to throw a metal cylinder. I was no more than tiventy yards from him. I aimed, released the bolt -- and hit the man in his chest. The incendiary bomb fell a few yards away from him and exploded in a burst of heat and flame. Our counterattack had, as anticipated, taken the enemy by surprise. We managed to hit three more of the men -- but suddenly they broke off and ran toward east, disappearing into the shadows of the valley. There was considerable confusion for a minute or two. The city was on fire and beneath it the bridge was burning fiercely in two separate places. One concentration of flame was directly beneath the city, but the other was a few yards behind it. It was obviously urgent to deal with the fires, but no one was certain that all the tooks had retreated. The city continued to winch forward, but where the bridge burned large sections of timber were falling into the river. Order was restored quickly. A militia officer shouted commands and the men formed into two groups. One group resumed defensive position around the tracks. I joined the second group sent out to the bridge to fight the fire. After the second attack -- in which incendiaries had been used for the first time -- firepoints had been fitted to the outside of the city. The nearest of these had been damaged in one of the explosions, and water was gushing away from it uselessly. We found a second one and unraveled the short length of hose. The intensity of the track fire was too great and it was almost hopeless to try to fight it. Although the city had now passed over the worst of the damage three of the main runner wheels were still to roll over the burning timber -- and as we fought in the dense smoke and billowing flames I saw the rail beginning to twist under the combined forces of heat and weight. There was a roar and another section of timber fell away. The smoke was too thick. Choking, we had to back out from under the city. The fire in the superstructure was still blazing, but a fire crew inside the city was attempting to deal with it. The winches turned -- the city crept slowly toward the comparative safety of the northern bank. I n the morning light the damage was assessed. In terms of lost human life the city had not fared too badly. Three militiamen had been killed in the shooting and fifteen had been injured. Inside the city one-man had been seriously wounded in one of the incendiary explosions and a dozen more men and women had been overcome by smoke in the ensuing fires. The physical damage to the city itself was extensive. A whole section of administrative offices had been gutted by the fire and some of the accommodation section was uninhabitable because of fire or water damage. Beneath the city more was wrong. Although the main base of the city was steel, much of the construction was timber and there were whole sections which had been burned out. The rear runner wheels on the right outer track had been derailed and one of the great wheels had sustained a structural crack. It would have to be discarded -- though it could not be replaced. After the city had reached the northern bank the bridge had continued to burn and was now a total loss. With it had gone several hundred yards of our irreplaceable rails, warped and twisted by the heat. after two days outside the city, working with the track crews who were salvaging what there was of the rails on the southern bank of the river, I was summoned to see Clausewitz. Until now I had not reported formally to any of my senior guildsmen. As far as I could determine the normal protocols of the guilds had been abandoned for the duration of the emergency and as I myself could see no end to the serious situation -- the attacks had caused inevitable delays and the optimum was ever farther away -- I had not expected anyone to call me away from my work outside. There was a disturbing mood among these men outside. Halfway between despair and desperation, they continued the work of laying the tracks toward the pass. The relaxed energy of my early days outside the city seemed to be a long way behind us. Now the tracks were being built in spite of the situation with the tooks, rather than against an internal need of the city to survive in a strange environment. The talk among the track crews, the militia, the traction men was all centered in one way or another around the attacks. No longer was there mention of gaining ground on the optimum or of what dangers lay down past. That the city was in a crisis was reflected in everyone's attitude. The change was also apparent inside the city. Gone was the light, aseptic appearance of the corridors, gone the general atmosphere of workaday routines. The elevator was no longer working. Many of the main doors in the corridors were locked and at one point an entire wall had been torn away -- presumably as an aftermath of one of the fires -- so that anyone walking through that part of the city could see what was outside. I remembered Victoria's frustrations of old and reflected that whatever secrecy the guilds might have tried to maintain in the past, such secrecy was no longer possible. T hought of Victoria pained me -- I still did not realize fully what had happened. In what seemed to me to be the passage of a few days she had abandoned all the tacit understandings of the marriage between us and gone to pursue another life without me. I had not seen her since my return, though I had made sure that she knew I was back in the city. Under the conditions of the external threat it had not been possible to see her anyway, but that aspect of my life was one I needed time to consider before meeting her. The news of her pregnancy by another man -- I was told he was an Education administrator named Yung -- had not hit me too hard at first, simply because I had just not believed it. Such a situation could not possibly have developed in the time I knew I had been away from her. I found my way to the first-order guild area with some difficulty. The interior of the city had changed in many ways. People, noise and dirt seemed to be everywhere. Every spare yard of space had been given over to emergency sleeping room, and even in some of the corridors lay wounded men from outside. Several walls and partitions had been taken down and just outside the firstorder quarters -- where there had been a series of pleasantly appointed recreation rooms for the guildsmen -- an emergency kitchen had been placed. The smell of burned wood was everywhere. I knew a fundamental change was coming over the city. I could feel the old structure of the guilds crumbling away. The roles of many people had already changed. Working with the track crews I had met several men for whom it was the first time outside the city, men who -- until the attacks -- had worked on food synthesis, education or domestic administration. Took labor was now obviously impossible and all hands had to be called to move the city. Why at this moment Clausewitz had summoned me I could not imagine. There was no sign of him in the Futures' room, so I waited for a while. After half an hour he had still not appeared and knowing my services could be better employed outside, I headed back the way I had come. I met Future Denton in the corridor. "You're Future Mann?" "Yes." "We're leaving the city. Are you ready now?" "I was supposed to be seeing Future Clausewitz." "That's right. He's sent me instead. Can you ride a horse?" I had forgotten horses while I had been away from the city. "Yes." "Good. Meet me at the stables in an hour's time." He walked on into the Futures' room. With an hour to spend on my own, I realized that I had nothing to do, no one to see. All my connections with the city were brokeneven associative memories of the physical shape and appearance of the city had been disrupted. I walked down to the rear of the city to see for myself the extent of the damage to the creche, but there was not much to see. Almost the whole superstructure had been burned or demolished and where the children had been housed was merely the bare steel of the main base of the city. From there I could see back across the river to where the attack had taken place. I wondered whether the tooks would try again. I felt they had been w r ell beaten, but I supposed they might eventually reform and attack once more. It came home to me just how vulnerable the city was. Not designed to repel any kind of attack, it was slow-moving, ungainly, built of highly inflammable materials. All its weakest points, the tracks, the cables, the timber superstructure, were easily accessible. I wondered if the tooks realized how easy it would be to destroy the city -- all they needed to do was disable its motive powers permanently, then sit back and watch as the movement of the ground slowly bore it south. For the moment, though, the city was relatively secure. Bounded on one side by the river and by rising ground which would afford no cover to any aggressor on the other, it was strategically placed. I wondered whether I had time to find a change of clothes -- I had been working and sleeping in the same ones for many days. This thought inevitably reminded me of Victoria and how she had objected to my uniform after I had been outside the city. I returned to the Futures' room, and made inquiries. Uniforms were normally available, I was told, but not at the moment. I was told that one would be found while I was away. Future Denton was waiting for me when I arrived at the stables. I was given a horse and without further delay we rode out from beneath the city and headed north. D enton was not a man who said much unprompted. He answered any questions I chose to ask, but between us fell long periods of silence. I did not find these uncomfortable -- they gave me much needed opportunities to think. The early training of the guilds still ran true: I accepted that I would make what I could of what I saw and not rely on the interpretations of others. We followed the proposed line of the tracks around the side of the hill and through the pass. There the ground ran steadily down for a long way, following a small watercourse. There was a small patch of woodland at the end of the valley, and then another line of hills. "Denton, why have we left the city at this moment?" I said. "Surely every man is needed." "Our work is always important." "More important than defending the city?" "Yes." As we rode he explained that during the last few miles the future surveying had been neglected. This was partly because of the troubles and partly because the guild was undermanned. "We've mapped as far as these hills," he said. "Those trees -- they're a nuisance to the Track guild and they could provide cover for the tooks, but we need more timber. The hills have been surveyed for about another mile, but beyond that it's all virgin territory." He showed me a chart that had been drawn on a long roll of paper and explained the symbols to me. Our job, as far as I could tell, was to extend the map northward. Denton had a surveying instrument mounted on a large wooden tripod and every so often he would take a reading from it and make inscriptions on the map. The horses were heavily laden with equipment. In addition to large supplies of food and bedding we were each carrying a crossbow and bolts -- there were some digging tools, a chemical-sampling kit, a miniature video camera and recording equipment. I was given the video kit to use and Denton showed me how to operate it. The usual method of the Futures, as he explained it to me, was to send -- over a period of time -- a different surveyor or a different team of surveyors north of the city by different routes. By the end of the expedition each would have a detailed map of the terrain and a video record of its physical appearance. This would then be submitted to the council of Navigators and they, with the help of other surveyors' reports, would decide which route would be taken. Toward late afternoon Denton stopped for about the sixth time and erected his tripod . After he had taken angular readings on the elevation of the surrounding hills and, by use of a gyroscopically mounted compass, had determined true north, he attached a free-swinging pendulum to the base of the instrument. The weight of the pendulum was pointed and when its natural momentum was spent and the pointer was stationary, Denton took a graduated scale marked with concentric circles and placed it between the legs of the tripod. The pointer was almost exactly above the central mark. "We're at optimum," he said. "Know what that means?" "Not exactly." "You've been down past, haven't you?" I confirmed this. "There's always centrifugal force to contend with on this world. The farther south one travels, the greater that force is. It's always present anywhere south of optimum, but it makes no practicable difference to normal operations for about twelve miles south of optimum. Farther than that the city would have real problems." He took further readings from his instrument. "Eight and a half miles," he said. "That's the distance between here and the city -- or how much ground the city has to make up." I asked, "How is the optimum measured?" "By its null gravitational distortions. It serves as the standard by which we measure the city's progress. In physical terms, imagine it as a line drawn around the world." "And the optimum is always moving?" "No. The optimum is stationary -- but the ground moves away from it." "Oh, yes." We packed our gear and continued north. Just before sunset we made camp for the night. T he surveying work was mentally undemanding and as we traveled slowly northward I found that my only external preoccupation was the need to watch for signs of hostile inhabitants. Denton told me that an attack on us was unlikely -- nevertheless we were on guard. I found myself again thinking about the awesome experience of seeing the whole world lying before me. As an event, it was enough -- understanding it was something else. On our third day out from the city I suddenly started to consider the education I had been given as a child. I'm not sure what started the train of thought -- possibly a random recollection of my recent shock at seeing how utterly the creche had been destroyed. I had thought little of my education since leaving the creche. At the time I had felt, in common with most of the children in the creche, that the teaching we were given was not much more than a penance in which time was served out of necessity. But as I looked back, much of the education pushed into our unsion for me. For instance, one of the subjects that had inspired in us the most boredom was what the teachers referred to as Geography. Most of these lessons had been concerned with the techniques of cartography and surveying -- in the enclosed environment of the creche, such exercises had been almost wholly theoretical. Now, though, those hours of tedium took on their relevance at long last. With a little concentration and a certain amount of digging into my memory, I grasped quickly the principles of the work Denton was showing me. We had had many other subjects taught to us theoretically and I saw now how those, too, had practical relevance. Any new guild apprentice would already have a background knowledge of the work his own guild would expect him to do and, in additon, would have similar information about many of the other functions of the city. Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer physical grind of working on the tracks, but I had had an almost instinctive understanding of the actual machinery used to haul the city along those tracks. I had cared not at all for the compulsory training with the militia, but the puzzling -- at the time -- emphasis placed on military strategy during our education would clearly help men who later took arms for the security of the city. This process of thought led me toward wondering whether there had been anything in my education that could possibly have prepared me for the sight of a world shaped the way this one appeared to be. The lessons we had been given which specifically referred to astrophysics and astronomy had always spoken of planets as spheres. Earth -- the planet, not our city -- was described as an oblate spheroid and we had been shown maps of some of its land surface area. This aspect of physical science was not dwelled upon -- I had grown up to assume that the world on which Earth city existed was a sphere like Earth planet and nothing I had been taught had contradicted this assumption. Indeed, the nature of the world had never been discussed overtly. I knew that Earth planet was part of a system of planets orbiting a spherical sun. The planet itself was circled by a spherical satellite. This information seemed always to be theoretical -- and this lack of practical application had not concerned me even when I left the city, for it was always clear that here a different circumstance obtained. The sun and moon were not spherical and neither was the world on which we lived. The question remained -- where were we? The solution lay perhaps in the past. T his, too, had been covered comprehensively, although the histories we were taught were exclusively about Earth planet. Much of what we learned concerned military maneuvers, the transference of power and government from one state to another. We knew that time was measured in terms of years and centuries on Earth planet, that recorded history existed for about twenty centuries. Perhaps unfairly, I formed an impression that I should not care to live on Earth planet, as most of its existence seemed to be a series of disputes, wars, territorial claims, economic pressures. The concept of civilization was far advanced and explained to us as the state in which mankind congregated within cities. By definition, we of Earth city were civilized, but there seemed to be no resemblance between our existence and theirs. Civilization on Earth planet was equated with selfishness and greed -- those people who lived in a civilized state exploited those who did not. There were shortages of vital commodities on Earth planet and the people in the civilized nations were able to monopolize those commodities by reason of their greater economic strength. This imbalance appeared to be at the root of the disputes. I suddenly saw parallels between our civilization and theirs. The city was undoubtedly on a war footing as a result of the situation with the tooks -- and that in its turn was a product of our barter system. We did not exploit them through wealth, but we had a surplus of the commodities in short supply among them -- food, fuel energy, raw materials. Our shortage was manpower and we paid for that with our surplus commodities. The process was inverted, but the product was the same. Following my line of reasoning, I saw that the examination of the history of Earth planet prepared the way for those who would become Barter guildsmen, but it took me no further along my own search for understanding. The histories began and ended on Earth planet, with no mention of how the city came to be on this world, nor how the city had been built, nor about who its founders were and where they came from. A deliberate omission? Or forgotten knowledge? I imagined that many guildsmen had tried to construct their own patterns of logic and, for all I knew, either the answers were available somewhere in the city or there was a commonly accepted hypothesis which I had not yet encountered. But I had fallen naturally into the ways of the guildsmen. Survival on this world was a matter of initiative: on the grand scale, by hauling the city northward away from that zone of amazing distortion behind us, and on the personal scale of deriving for oneself a pattern of life that was selfdetermined. Future Denton was a self-sufficient man and so had been most of those I had met. I wanted to be one with them and comprehend things on my own account. I supposed that I could discuss my thoughts with Denton, but I chose not to. T he journey northward was slow and meandering. We did not take a route due north, but followed many diversions to east and west. Periodically Denton would measure our position against optimum and never at any time were we farther north than about fifteen miles. I asked him if there were any reason why we should not strike even farther north of optimum. "Normally we would go as far north as we could," he said. "But the city's in a special circumstance. As well as seeking the easiest route, we need terrain that will allow us to defend ourselves." The map we were compiling was becoming more complete and detailed every day. Denton allowed me to operate the equipment whenever I wished and soon I was as adept as he. I learned how to triangulate the land with the surveying instrument, how to estimate the elevation of hills and how to calculate our position relative to optimum. I was growing to like working the camera, in spite of the fact that, to conserve the energy in the batteries, I was forced to curb my enthusiasm. It was peaceful and agreeable away from the tensions of the city and I discovered that Denton, in spite of his long silences, was an amiable and intelligent man. I had lost track of the number of days we had been away, but it was certainly at least twenty. Denton showed no sign of wanting to return. We encountered a small settlement nestling in a shallow valley. We made no attempt to approach it. Denton merely marked it on the map, with a rough estimate of its population. The countryside was greener and fresher than that to which I had grown accustomed, although the sun was no cooler. It rained more often here, usually during the nights, and there were many different sizes of stream and river. All the features of the region, natural or man-made, difficult for the city to pass through or suitable to its peculiar needs, Denton marked without comment on his map. It was not our job to decide which route the city should take -- we worked simply to establish the actual nature of future terrain. The atmosphere was restful and soporific, the natural beauty of our surroundings seductive. I knew the city would travel through this region in the miles to come and pass it without registering appreciation. For the city's aesthetics, this verdant and gentle countryside might as well be a windswept desert. During the hours when I was not actually engaged in any of our routine tasks, I was still lost in speculative thought. I could not get out of my mind that spectacle of the manifest appearance of the world on which we existed. There must have been something, somewhere in those long years of tedious education, that should -- subconsciously -- have prepared me for that sight. We live by our assumptions -- if one took for granted that the world one traveled across was like any other, could any education ever prepare one for a total reversal of that assumption? The preparation for that sight had begun the day Future Denton had taken me outside the city for the first time, to see for myself a sun that revealed itself to be any shape but that of a sphere. But I still felt there must have been an earlier clue. I waited for a few' more days, still worrying at the problem when I found time. Then I had an idea. Denton and I had camped one evening in open country beside a broad, s'hallow river. As sunset approached I took the video camera and recorder and walked alone up the side of a low hill about a halfmile away. From the top I had a clear view to the northeast. As the sun neared the horizon the atmospheric haze dimmed its glare and its shape became visible: as ever, a broad disk spiked top and bottom. I switched on the camera and took a long shot of it. Then I replayed the tape, checking that the picture was clear and steady. I had never tired of the spectacle. The sky was reddening -- after the main disk had passed beneath the horizon the upright pinnacle of light slid quickly down. For a few minutes after its passing there was an impression of a bright focus of orange-white at the center of the red glow -- but soon this passed and night came quickly on. I played the tape again, watching the image of the sun on the recorder's tiny monitor. I froze the picture, then adjusted the brightness control, dimming the image until only the white shape remained. There in miniature was an image of the world. My world. I had seen that shape before -- long before leaving the confines of the creche. Those weird symmetrical curves made an overall pattern that someone had once shown me. I stared at the monitor screen for a long time, then conscience struck me and I switched off to conserve the batteries. I did not return to camp immediately -- I was straining my memory for some key to that faint recollection of the time when someone had drawn four lines on a sheet of card and held up for all to see the place where Earth city struggled to survive. T he map that Denton and I were compiling was taking on a definite shape. Drawn on the long roll of stiff paper he had brought, the plan took the form of a long, narrow funnel, its narrowest point at the patch of woodland a mile or so to the north of where the city had been when we left it. Our travels had all been within the funnel and had enabled us to make measurements of large features from all sides, to ensure that we compiled information as nearly accurate as possible. When the work was finished Denton said that we would return at once to the city. I had, in the video recorder, a complete and cross-referenced visual record of all the terrain we had covered. The Council of Navigators would examine as much as they felt necessary to plan the city's next route. Denton told me that other Futures would go north soon, draw another tunnel-map of the terrain. Perhaps it, too, would start at the patch of w oodland and take a course five or ten degrees to east or west -- or, if the Navigators felt that a safe route could be found in the terrain we had surveyed, the new map would start farther up the known territory and push forward again the frontier of the future we had surveyed. We headed back toward the city. I had expected, in some melodramatic way, that now we had the information we had been sent to obtain, we would ride through day and night w'ith no regard to safety or comfort -- instead, the leisurely ride through the countryside continued. "Shouldn't we hurry?" I asked finally, thinking that perhaps Denton was idling for some reason connected with me. I wished to show speed. "There's never any hurry up future," he said. I didn't argue with him, but it had occurred to me that we had been away for at least thirty days. In that time the movement of the ground would have taken the city another three miles away from the optimum. It consequently would have had to travel at least that distance to stay within safety limits. I knew that the unsurveyed territory began only a mile or so beyond the city's last position. In short, the city would need the information we had. T he return journey took three days. On the third day, as we loaded the horses and continued south, the memory I had been seeking came to me. It came unbidden, as is often the case when one is trying for something buried in the subconscious. I felt I had exhausted all my conscious memories of my creche schooling. Sorting through my recollections of the long academic courses had been as fruitless as the sessions had been tedious. Then, from a subject I had not even considered, the answer came. I remembered a period in my last few miles inside the creche -- our teacher had taken us into the realms of calculus. All aspects of mathematics had induced the same response in me -- I showed neither interest nor success -- and this further development of abstract concepts had seemed no different. The teaching had covered a kind of calculus known as functions and we were taught how to draw graphs representing these. It was the graphs that had provided the memory key. I had always had a moderate talent at drawing and for a few days my interest had flickered into life. It died almost immediately, for I discovered that the graphs were not an end in themselves but were drawn to provide a means of finding out more about the function -- and I didn't know what a function was. One graph in particular had been discussed in great and onerous detail. It showed the curve of an equation where one value was represented as a reciprocal -- or an inverse -- of the other. The graph for this was a hyperbola. One part of the graph was drawn in the positive quadrant, one in the negative. Each end of the curve had an infinite value, both positive and negative. The teacher had discussed what would happen if that graph were to be rotated about one of its axes, I had neither understood w'hy graphs should be drawn, nor that one might rotate them and I'd suffered another attack of daydreaming. But I did notice that the teacher had drawn on a piece of large card what the solid body would look like should this rotation be performed. The product was an impossible object: a solid with a disk of infinite radius and two hyperbolic spires above and below the disk, each of which narrowed toward an infinitely distant point. It was a mathematical abstraction and held for me then as much interest as such an item should. But that mathematical impossibility was not taught to us without reason. In the indirect manner of all our education -- on that day I had seen the shape of the world on which I lived. D enton and I rode through the I woodland at the bottom of the range of hills -- and there ahead of us was the pass. Involuntarily I drew back on the reins and halted the horse. "The city," I said. "Where is it?" "Still by the river, I should imagine." "Then it must have been destroyed -- " There could be no other explanation. If the city had not moved in all those thirty days, only another attack could have delayed it. By now it should have been in its new position in the pass. Denton was watching me, an amused expression on his fase. "Is this the first time you've been so far north of optimum?" he asked. "Yes, it is." "But you've been down past. What happened when you came back to the city?" "An attack was going on -- " "Yes -- but how much time had elapsed?" "More than seventy miles." "Was that more than you expected?" "Yes. I thought I'd been gone only a few days -- a mile or two in time." "Okay." Denton moved forward again and I followed. "The opposite is true if you go north of optimum." "What do you mean?" "Hasn't anyone told you about the subjective time values?" My blank expression gave him the answer. "If you go anywhere south of optimum, subjective time is slowed. The farther south you go, the more that occurs. In the city the time scale is more or less normal while it is near the optimum, so that when you return from down past, it seems that the city has moved much farther than possible." "But we've been north." "Yes, and the effect is opposite. While we ride north our subjective time scale is speeded, so that the city appears not to have moved at all. From experience, I think you'll find that about four days have elapsed in the city while we've been gone. It's difficult to estimate at the moment, as the city itself is farther south of optimum than normal." I said nothing for a few minutes. I was trying to understand the idea. Then: "So if the city itself could move north of optimum, it wouldn't have so many miles to travel. It could stop." "No. It always has to move." "But if where we've been slows down time, the city would benefit from being there." "No," he said again. "The differential in subjective time is relative." "I don't understand," I said honestly. We were now riding up the valley toward the pass. In a few minutes we would be able to see the city, if it was indeed where Denton had predicted. "There are two factors. One is the movement of the ground. The other has to do with how one's values of time are changed subjectively. Both are absolute, but not necessarily connected as far as we know." "Then why -- " "Listen. The ground moves physically. In the north it moves slowly -- and the farther north one travels the more slowly it moves -- in the south it moves faster. If it were possible to reach the most northern point we believe the ground would not move at all. On the other hand, we believe that in the south the movement accelerates to an infinite speed at the farthest extremity of the world." I said, "I've been there -- to the farthest extremity." "You went -- what? Forty miles? Perhaps more by accident? That was far enough for you to feel the effects -- but only the beginnings of the real thing. We're talking in say. Destaine thought the world was of infinite size." "Destaine?" "The city's founder." I said, "But the city has only to travel a few miles farther, and it would be north of optimum." "That's right -- and it would make life a lot easier. We would still have to move the city, but not so often and not so far. But the problem is that it's as much as we can do to stay abreast of optimum." "What is special about the optimum?" "It's where conditions on this world are nearest to those on Earth planet. At the optimum point our subjective values for time are normal. In addition, a day lasts for twenty-four hours. Anywhere else on this world one's subjective time produces slightly longer or shorter days. The velocity of the ground at optimum is about one mile in every ten days. The optimum is important because on a world like this, where there are so many variables, we need a standard. Don't confuse miles-distance with miles-time. We say the city has moved so many miles when we really mean that ten times that number of twenty-four hour days have elapsed. So we would gain nothing in real terms by being north of optimum." H e had now ridden to the highr est point of the pass. Cable stays had been erected and the city was in the process of being winched. The militiamen were much in evidence, standing guard not only around the city itself but also at both sides of the tracks. We decided not to ride down to the city, but to wait near the stays until the winching was completed. Denton asked suddenly, "Have you read Destaine's Directive?" "No. I've heard of it. In the oath." "That's right. Clausewitz has a copy. You ought to read it if you're a guildsman. Destaine laid down the rules for survival on this world and no one's ever seen any reason to change them. You'd understand the world a little better, I think." "Did Destaine understand it?" "I think so." It took another hour for the winching to be completed. There was no intervention by the tooks and, in fact, there was no sign of them. I saw that several of the militiamen were now armed with rifles, presumably taken from the tooks killed in the last engagement. When we went into the city I went straight to the central calendar and discovered that while we had been north three and a half days had elapsed. T here was a brief discussion with Clausewitz. Then we were taken to see Navigator McMahon. Denton and I described in some detail the terrain w r e had traveled through, pointing out the major physical features on our map. Denton outlined our suggestions for a route that the city should take, indicating features that might create problems and alternative routes around them. In fact, the terrain was in general suited to the city. The hills would mean several deviations from true north, but there were few steep inclines and overall the ground was some hundred feet lower at its northern point than the city's present elevation. "We'll have two more surveys immediately," McMahon said to Clausewitz. "One five degrees to east and one five degrees to west. Do you have men available?" "Yes, sir." "I'll convene Council today and we'll set your provisional route for the time being. If better terrain appears from these two new surveys, we'll reconsider later. How soon will you be able to conduct a normal surveying pattern?" "As soon as we can release men from militia and tracks," said Clausewitz. "They're priorities. For the moment these surveys will have to suffice. If the situation eases, reapply." "Yes, sir." McMahon took our map and my video-tape and we left the Navigation chambers. Outside, I said to Clausewitz: "Sir, I'd like to volunteer for one of the new surveys." He shook his head. "No. You get three days' leave and then you go back to the Track guild." "But -- " "Guild rules." Clausewitz turned away and he and Denton walked toward the Futures' room. Technically that area was mine, too, but suddenly I felt excluded. Quite literally, I had nowhere to go. While I had been working outside the city I had been sleeping in one of the militia dormitories -- now officially on leave, I wasn't even sure where I lived. There were bunks in the Futures' room and I could sleep there for the moment, but I knew that I should see Victoria as soon as possible. I had been putting this off. I was still wondering how I could deal with the new situation with her and the answer to that lay in meeting her. I had a shower and changed my clothes. N othing much had changed inside the city while I had been north. Domestic and Medical administrators were wholly preoccupied with looking after the wounded and reorganizing the city's accommodations. There was less sense of desperation in the faces of the people I saw and some efforts had been made to keep the corridors clear, but even so I realized that this was probably a bad moment to try to settle a domestic issue. Victoria was difficult to trace. After several inquiries I was sent to a makeshift dormitory on the lowest level, but she was not there. I spoke to the woman in charge. "You're her ex-husband, aren't you?" "That's right. Where is she?" "She doesn't want to see you. She's very busy. She'll contact you later," "I want to see her," I said. "You can't. Now, if you'll excuse me -- we're very busy." She turned her back to me and continued with her work. I glanced around the crowded dormitory. Off-shift workers slept at one end and several wounded were lying in rough beds at the other. A few people were moving between the beds, but Victoria was not among them. I walked back to the Futures' room. During the time I had been looking for Victoria I had made a decision. There was no point in my hanging around the city aimlessly -- I might as well go back to work on the tracks. But first I decided to read Clausewitz's copy of Destaine's Directive. The Futures' room was empty but for one guildsman. He introduced himself to me as Future Blayne. "You're Mann's son, aren't you?" "Yes." "Glad to see you. Have you been up future yet?" "Yes," I said. I liked the look of Blayne. He was not much older than myself and he had a fresh, open face. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to -- he was, he said, due to go north on one of the surveys later in the day and would be on his own for the next few miles. "Do we often go north alone?" I asked. "Normally, yes. We can work in pairs if Clausewitz gives his approval, but most Futures prefer to work alone. I like company myself -- find it a bit lonely up there. How about you?" "I've only been up future once. That w r as with Future Denton." "How did you get along with him?" And so we talked, amiably and without the usual guards that seemed to go up whenever I had talked to other guildsmen. I had unconsciously adopted this manner myself and at first I suppose I might have seemed diffident in his company. Within a few minutes, though, I found his forthright manner relaxing and soon I felt as if we were old friends. I told him I had made a video recording of the sun. "Did you wipe it?" "What do you mean?" "Erase it from the tape." "No -- should I have?" H e laughed. "You'll have the Navigators down on you if they see it. You're not supposed to use the tapes for anything except cross-referenced images of the terrain." "Will they see it?" "They might. If they're satisfied with the map they'll probably check a few cross-references. They're not likely to go through the whole tape. But if they do -- " "What's wrong with recording the sunset?" "Guild rules. Tape is valuable and shouldn't be wasted. But don't worry about it. Why did you tape the sun, anyway?" "An idea I had. I wanted to try to analyze it. It's an interesting shape." He looked at me with new interest. "What did you make of it?" he asked. "Inverse values." "That's right. How did you work it out? Did someone tell you?" "I remembered something from the creche. A hyperbola." "Have you thought it through yet? There's more to it than that. Have you thought about the surface area?" "Future Denton was explaining. He said it was very large." Blayne said, "Not very large -- infinitely large. North of the city the surface curves up until it is almost, but never quite, vertical. South of the city it becomes almost but not quite horizontal. The world is spinning on its axis -- and with an infinite radius it is spinning at infinite speed." He delivered this flatly and without expression. "You're joking," I said. "I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. Where we are, near optimum, the effects of the spin are the same as they would be on Earth planet. Farther south, although the angular velocity is identical, the speed increases. Did you feel the centrifugal force when you were down past?" "Yes." "If you'd gone farther you wouldn't be here now to remember it. That force is bloody real." "I was told," I said, "that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light." "That's true. Nothing does. In theory the world's circumference is infinitely long and moves at infinite speed. But there is, or there is considered to be, a point where matter ceases to exist and serves as an effective circumference. That point is where the spinning of the world imparts a velocity on the matter equivalent to the speed of light." "So it's not infinite." "Not quite. But bloody big. Look at the sun." "I have," I said. "Often." "That's the same. If it wasn't spinning it would be -- literally -- infinitely large." I said, "Even so, in theory it is that large. How can there be room for more than one object of infinite size?" "There's an answer to that. You won't like it." "Try me." "Go to the library and find one of the astronomical books. It doesn't matter which. They're all Earth planet books, so they all have the same assumptions. If we were now on Earth planet we would be living in a universe of infinite size, which would be occupied by a number of large, but finite, bodies. Here the inverse is the rule: we live in a large but finite universe, occupied by a number of bodies of infinite size." "It doesn't make sense." "I know," said Blayne. "I said you wouldn't like it." "Where are we?" "No one knows." "Where is Earth planet?" "No one knows that either." tsaid, "Down past something I strange happened. I was with three girls. As we went south, their bodies changed. They -- " "Did you see anyone up future?" "No. We kept away from the villages." "North of optimum the local people change physically. They become very tall and thin. The farther north we travel, the more the physical factors change." "I've only been about fifteen miles north." "Then you probably wouldn't have noticed anything peculiar. Farther than thirty-five miles north of optimum, everything is very strange." tater I asked, "Why does the  j ground move?" "I'm not sure," said Blayne. "Is anyone?" "No." "Where is it moving to?" "More to the point," said Blayne, "where is it moving from?" "Do you know?" "Destaine said that the movement of the ground was cyclic. He says in his Directive that the ground is actually stationary at the north pole. Farther south, it is moving very slowly toward the equator. The nearer it approaches to the equator the faster it moves, both angularly -- because of the ro' tation -- and linearly. At the farthest extreme it is moving in two directions at once at infinite speed." I stared at him. "But -- " "Wait -- I haven't finished. The world has a southern part, too. If this world were a sphere that part would be called a hemisphere, so Destaine adopted the term for convenience. In the southern hemisphere the opposite is true. That is, the ground moves from the equator toward the south pole, steadily decelerating. At the south pole it is stationary again." "You still haven't said where the ground moves from." "Destaine suggested that north and south poles w'ere identical. In other words, once any point on the ground reaches the south pole it reappears at the north pole." "That's impossible!" "Not according to Destaine. He says that the world is shaped like a solid hyperbola -- that is, all limits are infinite. If you can imagine that, the limits adopt the characteristics of their opposite value. An infinite negative becomes an infinite positive -- and vice-versa." "Are you quoting him verbatim?" "I think so. But you should read the original." "I intend to," I said. Before Blayne left the city to go north, we agreed that when the crisis outside the city was settled we would ride together. nce more alone, I read through the copy of Destaine's Directive that Blayne obtained for me from Clausewitz. It consisted of several pages of closely printed text, much of which would have been incomprehensible to me had I read it when I had first ventured outside the city. Now, with my own ideas and experiences added to what Blayne had said, it served only to confirm. I saw some of the sense of the guild system -- experience had laid the way to understanding. Much of the Directive consisted of theoretical mathematics interspersed with profuse calculations -- at these I glanced only briefly. Of more interest was what appeared to be a hurried journal. Some sections caught my attention deeply. We are a long way from Earth. Our home planet is one I doubt we shall ever see again, but if we are to survive here we must maintain ourselves as a microcosm of Earth. We are in desolation and isolation. All around us is a hostile world that daily threatens our survival. As long as our buildings remain, so long shall man survive in this place. Protection and preservation of our home is paramount. Later he wrote: I have measured the rate of regression at one-tenth of a statute mile in a period of twenty-three hours and fortyseven minutes. Although this southward drift is slow it is relentless -- the establishment shall therefore be moved at least one mile in every tenday period. Nothing must stand in the way. We have already encountered one river and it was crossed at great hazard. Doubtless we shall encounter further obstacles in the days and miles ahead, and by then we must be ready. We must concentrate on finding some indigenous materials that can be stored permanently within the buildings for later use in construction. A bridge should not be too difficult to build if we have enough warning. Sturner has been forward and warns of a marshy region some miles ahead. Already we have sent other teams to northeast and northwest to determine the extent of this marsh. If it is not too wide we can deviate from due north for a time and make up the necessary difference later. Following this entry were two pages of the theory Blayne had tried to explain to me. I read it through twice and each time it made slightly better sense. I left it and read on. Chen has provided the inventory of fissionable materials I requested. All of it waste! With the translatgenerator, no more need! Said nothing to L. I enjoy the arguments with him -- why curtail them now? Future generations will be warm! Today's outside temperature:#C. Still we move north. Later: Trouble with one of the caterpillar tracks. T. has advised me to authorize stripping them. Says that Sturner reports from the north that he has found what appears to be the remains of a railway line. Some incredible scheme to run the establishment along the tracks somehow. T. says it would work okay. Later: Decided to create a guild system. Pleasant archaism that everyone approves. A way of structuring the organization without drastically changing the way the place is run, but I think it might impose a form to the establishment that will survive us all. Caterpillar track stripping proceeding well. Has caused a long delay. Hope we can catch up. Natasha gave birth today: boy. Doctor S. gave me some more pills. Says I'm working too hard and have to' rest. Later, maybe. Toward the end of the Directive, a more didactic tone emerged: What I have written here shall be privy only to those who venture outside -- no need for those inside the establishment to be reminded of our dreadful prospects. We are organized enough: we have sufficient mechanical power and human initiative to maintain us safely in this world forever. Those who follow must learn the hard way of what will happen if we fail to exploit either our power or our initiative and this knowledge will suffice to keep both working to the maximum. Someone from Earth must Until then our maxim is survival at any cost. From now, it has been agreed and is hereby directed: That the ultimate responsibility lies in the hands of the Council. These men shall navigate the establishment, and be known as Navigators. Their number, which shall at no time fall below twelve, shall be elected from the senior members of the following guilds: Track Guild: Who shall be responsible for the maintenance of the railway along which the establishment runs; Traction Guild; Who shall be responsible for the maintenance of the motive power of the establishment; Future Guild: Who shall be responsible for surveying the lands that lie in future time of our establishment; Bridge Builders Guild: Who shall be responsible for safe conduct over physical obstacles, should no other way be available. Further, should it be necessary to create other guilds in the future, no guild may be created except by unanimous vote of the Council. (signed) Francis Destaine T he major bulk of the Directive consisted of short entries dated in a sequence that ran from #rd February # and concluded on #th August #. The final signed statement was dated #th August #. There were two final sheets. One was a codicil, marking the formation of the Barter Guild and the Militia Guild. These were undated. The other sheet was a graph drawn by hand. It showed the hyperbola produced by the equation y  lx, and beneath it were some mathematical signs, which I could not understand. Such was Destaine's Directive. q uTsiDE the city work on the I tracks w'as proceeding well, hen I joined the track crew's most of the rail now behind the city had been taken up. Other crews were already relaying them from the head of the pass down the long shallow valley. The atmosphere had improved -- helped, I think, by the successful and undisturbed winching of the city away from the river. The gradient for the next section was in our favor. The cables and stays would have to be used, because the gradient was not sufficiently steep to overcome the effects of the centrifugal force that could be felt even here. It was a strange sensation. to stand on the ground beside the city and see it stretching out in each direction in an overall horizontal way. I knew now that this apparent levelness was no such thing; at optimum, which on the vast scale of this world was not substantially distant, the ground was actually tilted at a full forty-five degree gradient toward north. Was this, though, any different from living on the surface of a spherical world like Earth planet? I remembered a book I had read in the creche, a book written in and about a place called England. The book had been written for young children and described the life of a family planning to emigrate to a place called Australia. The children in the book had believed that where they were going they would be upside down and the author had gone to some pains to describe how all points on a sphere appeared to be 'upright' because of gravitational effects. So it was on this world. I had been both north and south of optimum and always the ground appeared to be level. I enjoyed the labor on the tracks. It was good once more to be using my body and not give myself time to think. But one loose end remained stubbornly untied: Victoria. I needed to see her, however distasteful such an interview might be, and I wanted to settle the situation soon. Until I had spoken to her, whatever the outcome, I would not feel at ease in the city. I was now settled in my acceptance of the physical environment of the city. Very few questions remained to be answered. I understood how and why the city was moved and was aware of the many subtle dangers that lay in wait should it ever cease its northward journey. I knew that the city was vulnerable and, at this very time, in imminent danger, but I felt its problems would be resolved soon. But no external considerations could settle my personal crisis -- I had become alienated from a girl I had loved in the space of what seemed to me to be a few days. is a guildsman, I discovered, I was allowed to attend meetings of the Council of Navigators. I could not take an active part, but no aspect of the session was closed to me as a spectator. I was told that a meeting was to be held and decided to attend it. The Navigators met in a small hall set just behind the main Navigation quarters. The session was disarmingly informal. I had anticipated much ceremony and air of occasion, but the fact was that these meetings were crucial to the efficient operation of the whole city and a businesslike air dominated the proceedings from the moment the Navigators came into the chamber and took their seats around a table. Two Navigators I knew by name, Olsson and McMahon, were present and thirteen others. The first matter to be discussed was the military situation outside. One of the Navigators stood up, introduced himself as Navigator Thorens and gave a succinct report of the current situation. The militia had established that there were still at least a hundred tooks in the neighborhood of the city and most of them were armed. According to military intelligence, their morale was low as a result of many losses. This contrasted sharply, the Navigator said, with the morale of our troops, who felt they could contain any further development. They were now in possession of twenty-one captured rifles and although there was not much ammunition, some had been captured and the Traction guild had devised a method of manufacturing small quantities. A second Navigator confirmed Thorens' facts. The next report was on the condition of the city's structure. There was considerable discussion about how much rebuilding should be carried out and how soon. It was stated that there was pressure on the Domestic administrators and that sleeping accommodation was at a premium. The Navigators agreed that a new dormitory block should be given priority. This discussion led naturally into wider issues and these were of great interest to me. As far as I could tell, the views of the Navigators present were divided. One school of thought was of the opinion that the previous "closed-city" policy should be reintroduced as soon as possible. The others thought that it had outlived its purpose and should be permanently abandoned. It seemed to me that this was a crucial issue, one that could radically alter the social structure of the city -- and indeed, this was the undercurrent of the discussion. Doing away with the closed system would mean that anyone growing up in the city would gradually learn the truth about the city's situation. It would mean a new way of education and would bring subtle changes in the powers of the guilds themselves. In the end, after many calls for votes and several amendments, there was a show of hands. By a majority of one it was decided not to reintroduce the closed-city system for the time being. More revelations followed. It transpired from the next item that there were seventeen transferred women inside the city, who had been there since before the first attack by the tooks. There was some discussion about what should be done with them. The meeting was informed that the women had said they wished to stay in the city -- and it was immediately clear that it was possible that the attacks had been made in an attempt to free the women. Another vote: the women would be allowed to stay within the city for as long as they wished. It was also decided not to reintroduce the down past initiative test for apprentices. I understood that this had been suspended after the first attack and several Navigators were in favor of now bringing it back. The meeting was told that twelve apprentices were known to have been killed down past and another five were unaccounted for. The suspension remained for the time being. I was fascinated by what I heard. I hadn't realized before the extent to which the Navigators were in touch with the practicalities of the system. Nothing specific had been said, but there was a general feeling among some of the guildsmen that the Navigators were a group of aging fuddyduddies out of touch with reality. Advanced in years some of them certainly were, but their perceptions had not faded. Looking around at the mostly empty guild seats, I reflected that perhaps more guildsmen should attend the Navigators' meetings. T here was more business to deal with. The report that Denton and I had made of the terrain to the north was presented by Navigator McMahon, with the added information that two other surveys were presently being conducted and that the results would be known within a day or two. The meeting agreed that the city should follow the provisional route marked by Denton and myself until any better route was devised. Finally the subject of the city's traction was raised by Navigator Lucan. He said that the Traction guild had come up with a scheme for moving the city slightly faster. Regaining ground on optimum would be a major step toward returning the city' to a normal situation, he argued, and there was agreement to this. The proposal, he said, was for the city to be put onto a continuous-traction schedule. This would involve a greater liaison with the Track guild and perhaps a greater risk of cable break. But he argued that as we were now short of much valuable rail stock after the burning of the bridge, the city would have to make shorter hauls. The Traction guild's suggestion was to maintain a shorter length of track actually laid to the north of the city and to keep the winches running permanently. They would be phased out for periodic overhaul, and as the gradients of future territory were largely in our favor we could keep the city running at a speed sufficient to bring us back to optimum within twenty or twentyfive miles of elapsed time. There were few objections to this scheme, although the chairman called for a detailed report. When the vote was cast the result was nine in favour, six against. The city would transfer to continuous running as soon as could be managed. t was due to leave the city for a I survey mission to the north. In the morning I had been called away from my work on the tracks and Clausewitz had given me my briefing. I would leave the city the next day and travel twenty-five miles to the north of optimum, reporting back on the nature of the terrain and the positions of various settlements. I was given the choice of working alone or with another Future guildsman. Recalling the new and welcome acquaintanceship with Blayne, I requested that he and I work together and this was granted. I was eager to leave. I felt no obligation to remain on the manual work of the tracks. Men who had never been outside the city were working well as teams and more progress was made than at any time we had employed local labor. The last attack by the tooks now seemed a long way behind us and morale was good. We had made it to the pass in safety -- ahead was the long slope through the valley. The weather was fine and hopes were high. I n the evening I returned to the city. I had decided to talk over the survey mission with Blayne and spend the night in the Futures' quarters. We would be ready to leave at first light. Walking through the corridors, I glanced into an open doorway and saw Victoria. She was working alone in a tiny office, checking through a large batch of papers. I went in and closed the door behind me. "Oh, it's you," she said. "You don't mind?" "I'm very busy." "So am I." "Then leave me alone and get on with whatever it is." "No," I said. "I want to talk to you." "Some other time." "You can't avoid me forever." "I don't have to talk to you now," she said. I grabbed at her pen, knocking it from her hand. Papers fell to the floor and she gasped, "What happened, Victoria? Why didn't you wait for me?" She stared down at the scattered papers and made no answer. "Come on -- tell me." "It was a long time ago. Does it still matter to you?" "Yes." She was looking at me now and I stared back at her. She had changed a lot and seemed older. She was more assured, more her own woman -- but I could recognize the familiar way she held her head, the way her hands were clenched: half a fist, two fingers erect and interfolded. "Helward, I'm sorry if you were hurt, but I've been through a lot, too. Will that do?" "You know it won't. What about all the things we talked about?" "Such as?" "The private things, the intimacies." "Your oath is safe. You needn't worry about that." "I wasn't even thinking of it," I said. "What about the other things, about you and me?" "The whispered exchanges in bed?" I winced. "Yes." "They were a long time ago." Perhaps my reaction showed, for suddenly her manner softened. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be callous." "Okay. Say what you like." "No -- it's just that -- I wasn't expecting to see you. You were gone so long! You could have been dead and no one would tell me anything." "Whom did you ask?" "Your boss. Clausewitz. All he'd say was that you'd left the city." "But I told you where I was going. I said I had to go south." "And you said you'd be back in a few miles' time." "I know," I said. "I was wrong." "What happened?" "I -- was delayed." I couldn't even begin to explain. "That's all? You were delayed?" "IT was a lot farther than I thought." She began shuffling her papers aimlessly, making them into a semblance of a tidy pile. But she was just working her hands -- I had broken through. "You never saw David, did you?" "David? Is that what you called him?" "He was -- " She looked up at me again and her eyes were brimming with tears. "I had to put him in the creche -- there was so much work to do. I saw him every day and then the first attack came. I had to be on a fire point, and couldn't -- Later we went down to the -- " I closed my eyes, turned away. She put her face in her hands, started to cry. I leaned against the wall, resting my face against my forearm. A few seconds later I started to cry, too. A woman came through the door quickly, saw what was happening. She closed the door again. This time I leaned my weight against it to prevent further interruptions. tater Victoria said, "I thought I j you would never come back. There was a lot of confusion in the city, but I managed to find someone from your guild. He said that a lot of apprentices had been killed when they were in the south. I told him how long you had been gone. He wouldn't commit himself. All I knew was how long you'd been gone and when you had said you'd be back. You were away nearly two years, Helward." "I was warned," I said. "But I didn't believe the warning." "Why not?" "I had to walk a distance of about eighty miles -- there and back. I thought I could do it in a few days. No one in the guild told me why I couldn't." "But they knew?" "Undoubtedly." "They could have at least waited until we'd had the child." "I had to go when I was told. It was part of the guild training." Victoria was now more composed than before -- the emotional reaction had completely destroyed any antipathy between us and we were able to talk more rationally. She picked up the fallen papers, arranged them into a pile, then put them away into a drawer. There was a chair by the opposite wall and I sat in it. "You know the guild system is going to have to change," she said. "Not drastically." "It's going to break down completely. It has to. In effect it's happened already. Anyone can go outside the city now. The Navigators will cling to the old system for as long as they can because they're living in the past, but -- " "They're not as hidebound as you think," I said. "They'll try to bring back the secrecy and the suppression as soon as they can." "You're wrong," I said flatly. "I know you're wrong." "All right -- but certain things will have to change. There's no one in the city now who doesn't know the danger we're in. We've been cheating and stealing our way across this land and that has created the danger. It's time for it to stop." "Victoria, you don't -- " "You only have to look at the damage! There were thirty-nine children killed! God knows how much destruction. Do you think we can survive if the people outside keep on attacking us?" "The situation is quieter now. It's under control." S he shook her head. "I don't care what the current situation looks like. I'm thinking about the longterm. All our troubles are ultimately created by the city's being moved. That one condition produces the danger. We move across other peoples' land. We bargain for manpower to move the city. We take women into the city to have sex with men they hardly know -- and all in the effort of keeping the city moving." "The city can never stop," I said. "You see -- you are already a part of the guild system. Always the system gives us this flat statement, without looking at it in a wider light. The city must move, the city must move. Don't accept it as an absolute." "It is an absolute. I know what would happen if the city stopped." "Well?" "It would be destroyed and everyone woudl be killed." "You can't prove that." "No -- but I know it would be so." "I think you're wrong," said Victoria. "And I'm not alone. Even in the last few days I've heard it said by others. People can think for themselves. They've been outside, seen what it's like. There's no danger apart from the danger we create for ourselves." I said, "Look, this isn't our conflict. I wanted to see you to talk about us." "But it's all the same. What happened to us is implicitly bound up in the ways of the city. If you hadn't beem a guildsman we might still be living together." "Is there any chance -- " "Do you want it?" "I'm not sure," I said. "It's impossible. For me, at least. I couldn't reconcile what I believe with accepting your way of life. We've tried it and it separated us. Anyway, I'm living with -- " "I know." She looked at me and I felt at second hand the alienation she had experienced. "Don't you have any beliefs, Helward?" she said. "Only that the guild system, for all its imperfections, is sound." "And you want us to live together again, living out two separate beliefs. It couldn't work." We had both changed a lot -- she was right. It was no good speculating about what might have been in other circumstances. There was no way of making a personal relationship distinct from the overall scheme of the city. Even so, I tried again, attempting to articulate the apparent suddenness of what had happened, attempting to find a formula that could somehow revive the early feelings we had had for each other. To be fair, Victoria responded in kind, but I think we had both arrived at the same conclusion by our separate routes. I felt better for seeing her and when I left her and walked toward the Futures' quarters I was aware that we had succeeded in resolving the worst of the remaining issue. advertisers to take advantage of the trio combination, we are now offering a discount price of # per word to run in the three issues that appear in a #-month period. Our regular price is now #t a word per issue. Whatever your choice...it's a bargain. Park, L. L, N.Y. #. Individually Prepared. Ancient Method. Shuffle # Playing Cards. Send List First # Cards, Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope, #. 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Row The first collection of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories An anthology edited by Jack Dann; introduction by Isaac Asimov. # Clarke, Anderson, Russ, Pohl, Ellison, Silverberg, Roister, Wolfe The prize-winning collection, edited by Isaac Asimov. # " Immensely entertaining... long overdue." -- Paul Anderson and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories By Richard McKenna, author of The Sand Pebbles. # "A collection of complex, humane stories." -- Kirkus Reviews An original anthology edited by Roger Elwood. # A runaway quasar threatens the earth's survival A new thriller by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle. # Startling experiments in plant-man communication By Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Illustrated, # The provocative best seller about the greatest mystery of the ancient world By Peter Tompkins. Illustrated, #th printing, # "Astronomical imagination and tact in an alluring marriage." -- Ernest K. Gann Facts and speculations by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan. Illustrated with Mariner # photos, # LJ I JOf #J Sf Hew Yore # At bookstores To go anywhere on Earth took next to no time and cost nothing -- if Earth survived! Interface A Theseus Blinded by the dark Followed Ariadne's clue of thread Ariadne Has ceased her spinning And all doors lead to the Minotaur -- Mustapha Sharif I j Thinking, in that instant of chill due as much to the change of excitement into alarm as to the step he and the Arab had taken from subtropical to subarctic, how absurd it was for him to blurt those words to a blind man. But Mustapha was accustomed to his lack after -- how long? Fifteen years, fifty? It was not something one inquired about. The Arab complied, tensing into that strange state of total attention which, Hans Dykstra had sometimes imagined, could truly halt the passage of the blind one's personal time and poise him an arm's length away from the world experienced by ordinary people while he took exhaustive, unseeing stock of it. That, too, made Hans shiver despite his climatized suit. And then he realized -- of course! Cobwebs! He forced himself to take a deep breath and fear subsided as icy air seeped through his mask. There was no light here except from the powerful hand torch he had brought and the very first thing he had seen as he arrived had been gray fluff-thickened strands barring his exit from the skelter. Illegal it might be, but one did hear stories now and then about people who couldn't afford a privateer and rigged mantraps of their own devising. "I sense no one," Mustapha said in a voice not quite tinged with complaint. The eagerness that drove him had nothing in common with his companion's -- at least none the latter could recognize. They were collaborators, but they were not and could not be partners. One might say, The enemy of my enemy... And be able to proceed no further with an explanation. Hans uttered the necessary words and into the fringe of the lamp's beam instantly rose a brown hand, child-chubby as Mustapha's face, groping greedily for the spider's fragile legacy. "Wait, wait -- " Hans implored, thrusting away the blue flower, the speedwell, which of course he had held up before him when he had entered the skelter. He hastened through the regular protective charms in his mind, meantime using one hand to sweep the visible portion of the house with his lamp and keeping the other alert to punch a getaway code should someone turn out to be already in possession. Such caution was very likely superfluous -- an assurance from Mustapha was worth a dozen instrument readings. But since neither the radiation counter nor the bio-assay unit had beeped, the place was obviously habitable, and it had been long since one stopped to ask polite questions of strangers who showed up unannounced in a domestic skelter. "Why wait?" Mustapha demanded querulously. "Because you can see a warning sign?" With a sigh Hans abandoned his mental formulae before completion. "No," was his gruff answer. "Because when you touch the webs you'll break them and I want to get them on film first." He unslung his camera and flash to record the delicate tracery marred with thickening dust. "Keep your hand out of the shot," he added, eye glued to the viewfinder. "Want to get yourself braced?" "They will not find your pictures until they're meant to -- after you're dead. So at least you originally promised me." "I could be dead, but you could still be alive." Hans grunted and wound the film on. "Good, two will be enough. Go ahead." P lump fingers moved in air with the slyness of some stalking creature, located a web strand, felt along it with the precision of a musician's tracing out a melody. Without breaking the strand they found another -- broke both in a deliberate gesture and savored the sensation of contact. Hans had witnessed Mustapha performing similar marvels before, but this was the most amazing. To stroke the full length of that spider silk and leave it intact until the moment of his decision to snap it -- such abilities sometimes made the Arab seem inhuman. But there was no room in Dykstra's mind right now for reflection, only for reaction. This time -- no doubt about it -- Mustapha had done him proud. Hans had guessed from the form of the code he had bought that the find was exceptionally early and had dared to hope it might lie in the first ly ready to believe they had located one in the first hundred thousand, assuming that this was Scandinavia -- and everything pointed to it. The air was certainly cold enough and facing him across the living zone were big windows, absolutely black, silent witnesses of a northern night. "Oh, wow," he said under his breath. The phrase was archaic. but English was not his mother tongue and anyhow, if someone had invented a better way to express delighted astonishment he hadn't heard about it. Under the obliterating dust the floor looked like natural wood parquet. Draped with cobwebs, that might be an authentic Hille chair. Weren't those shelves System Cado?. "It pleases you?" Mustapha murmured, his study of the webs complete. At once he had reverted to his regular manner -- cool, detached, as though he were a machine programed to acquire and analyze with maximum concentration all new data that presented themselves, to idle in the face of any precedented situation. This was the ninth time he and Hans had come together to a lost home. How his companion obtained the codes to reach them Hans had no idea and intended never to ask, for fear of being told that the two of them were relying on some ancient "little black book" rather than some burgled bank of computer records, or bribery of a technician at the Skelter Authority. And the Arab went on, "I apologize for being overly eager to touch the webs. But they are so rare now. I had not felt one since boyhood. I had almost forgotten them. Curious! One would have expected spiders to be tough." Yes, perhaps, Hans thought. But infection had come out of Central America -- a fungus or some microscopic parasite -- and something had kept happening to their eggs... Well, one would also at one time have imagined that humanity was tough. Aloud he said, "I think this strike is the best yet." Cozy in his suit, he drew down his mask and inhaled the harsh air with paradoxical enjoyment. It was cruel to the throat, but it tasted infinitely cleaner than what he had left minutes ago. That had been tainted with the sewer stench of the Mediterranean and the collective halitosis of Valletta. The dust merely added spice to its tang. Unencumbered with equipment, Mustapha had walked forward out of range of the handlamp's beam to stand on the level floor and turn, as though on a slowly revolving potter's wheel, soaking in the nonvisual information the house could afford him. Once or twice he clapped loudly, cocking his head, mapping walls and doorways and furniture, sniffing the while, memorizing new scents. More slowly and a little enviously (but to envy a man who had been blinded was crazy!) Hans also emerged from the skelter, hung about with safety devices, camera, flash-bar, bag of spare film, lamp, instruments. It was all gear legitimately come by, but there was nothing legitimate about the use to which he was at present putting it. His profession was that of a recuperator -- his duty was to share out reclaimed resources around the world to those who were in greatest need of them or who could exploit them for the general good. It wasn't the lure of strange places that had enticed him to take up his dangerous and unlawful hobby, for he was routinely instructed to go to every continent as and when a reclaimable cache was reported to the Economics Authority. No, what fascinated him was the form and pattern of a dead age, in suspended animation now but being gnawed by time so rapidly that, unless someone made a record of it less tenuous than memory could provide, its relics would have to be reconstructed in ignorance by the archeologists of the far future. If there were any. T he skelter here was indeed one of the very earliest, a half-century old and amazingly bulky, as big as a car. He understood that some car parts had in fact been adapted for the first skelters, just as Remington had included bits from sewing machines in its original typewriters. So old a model might be developing faults. The thing had delivered him and the Arab here safely, but would it send them away again? Worst of all -- would it take Mustapha away (leaving first, as always, his own incomprehensible curiosity satisfied) and then maroon him -- maroon Hans Dykstra? For an instant he pictured himself trudging across the snowbound wastes of... What country was this anyhow? Sweden? Norway? Finland? Most likely Sweden -- there was a Volvo plate on the skelter's crystal box, rimed with frost but legible. An almost vacant land, then. The winter population of Sweden was reputed to be down to around two, three thousand now, mostly eccentric recluses, so hunting on foot for help in getting home would be absurd. In the summer, of course, things were different. residents by July. He contemplated the skelter gloomily. Like most people nowadays -- or rather, like most privileged people -- he could undertake simple routine maintenance on his own model of skelter -- work equivalent to changing a car tire or a tap washer -- but he had never seen a design this old before. If he were to start making inquiries about service manuals for obsolete Volvo skelters, though, within the day some bland official would track him down to ask what need he had for such data. And Hans had absolutely no desire to land a bracelet for code-breaking. No, he would have to put his faith in the high standard of Swedish craftsmanship, take his chances of being disintegrated on the way to or from home -- or of being stuck here until summer gave him the chance to mingle with a mass of visitors at a public skelter outlet. It wouldn't be impossible to survive here for a while. It might even be fun -- in a way. Novel, at any rate. He had never experienced such solitude as this lonely northern land promised. He had walked all around the living zone by now -- his heels on the hard parquet affording Mustapha the sonic reflections he needed to build his chiropteran picture of their surroundings -- and located the kitchen. Apart from the packs of food in the freezer -- which obviously he would not dare touch, since they had been thawed and refrozen countless times -- there was a huge store of canned goods. And if that wall gauge was to be relied on -- hadn't just jammed at a false reading -- there were almost a thousand liters of oil in the heating tank. On the other hand, Dany would report him missing at once and the authorities would promptly start turning the skelter system inside out in search of a fault that might have destroyed him in transit. There weren't so many human beings left you could afford to have them disappear at random -- the days when, if they heard about them, most people regarded a mere garnish to breakfast, were over. And the last thing Hans wanted was official notice attracted to himself. He would simply have to pray that the skelter would last out another dozen cycles. By way of insurance he retrieved his speedwell and placed it inconspicuously in a corner of the machine. That was a safe token to leave -- its name had made the pretty little blue flower the commonest of all life symbols to take with you on a journey. Then, pushing such considerations to the back of his mind, he photographed the living zone, then the kitchen, then the sauna he discovered beyond, shooting to avoid the tracks he and Mustapha had left in the dust as clear as in new snow. Next he came to a small study with an open bureau bearing a Halda typewriter, documents in pigeonholes, a pile of dusty correspondence paper, which he blew at gently until the name and address were legible. From it he learned that the house's owners had been called Eriksson, that he and Mustapha were indeed in Sweden -- near a place called Umea which he would have to look up on a map when he got home -- and something else which struck him as literally incredible. The skelter code was printed on the letterhead! Interlace B O my beloved, I offer you my heart To eat as you would bite a pomegranate -- But beware. A human heart holds seeds like a pomegranate And some are sweet but more are poisonous -- We have seen much death, you and I. -- Mustapha Sharif almost he snatched up the entire pile, thinking to dump it on the big open hearth of the living zone and set light to it. He checked his hand an inch from the paper in the same moment he heard Mustapha's cool query: "Hans, is something wrong?" "No -- nothing," he answered with an effort. True enough. He had imagined something was, but the reaction stemmed from habit. Even if Mustapha were going to charge him twenty thousand for the code that was here repeated scores of times, he didn't need to fear the loss of his monopoly. Years had gone by without anyone's finding the way here -- until now. Most likely as long again would pass before other feet smutched this floor. Those numbers were simply -- numbers. No, wait. They were something more, after all. A symbol -- a key symbol -- of that strange and far-off world of the recent past he was struggling to capture and preserve for posterity. A good clear picture of the paper, or better yet an actual sheet of it, would have to be included in his final report. "You exclaimed," Mustapha said obstinately. "It must have been for a cause. You have found a clue to the fate of the former occupants?" A shadow of ghoulish hunger lay on his words, familiar to Hans from their previous expeditions together. (How had they managed to become open with each other that first time? Hans had tried over and over to reconstruct the details in his memory. He was sure of only one fact, that Mustapha had been the one to broach their teaming up. Himself, he would not have dared. Nor, in a sense, had Mustapha "dared." He had determined that trips such as this could be safely undertaken. There had been someone before, another man -- or possibly a woman -- who had traveled with him to forgotten lonely homes and added those details necessary to comprehension of the whole that a visitor without sight could not provide for himself. But Mustapha had never spoken of the fate of Hans's predecessor.) Curtly Hans explained now -- his head buzzing with plans for later visits -- the need for cleaning materials, floodlights, reference books about the culture of the country fifty years ago to explain the purpose of the mysterious gadgets such as he knew from experience he was bound to find, dictionaries to help him puzzle out a few of the letters and the shopping list he had seen scrawled on a memo board in the kitchen... But when he came back he would come alone. For the moment he owed Mustapha something more than the mere money that would by then have changed hands -- in return, of course, for another volume of the Arab's poetry, hand-illuminated and magnificently cal I i graphed but to Hans totally incomprehensible. Hans understood no Arabic, but the frequent purchases he made from Mustapha to cover up the transfer of the large sums he shelled out for illegal skelter codes excited no remark. Little new beauty was being brought into the modern world and what there was -- was precious. A score of other people patronized Mustapha even more generously and without ulterior motive. Even Dany, who was resentful of the money her husband chose not to spend on her, had been impressed enough by the delicately illustrated books, lively with red and blue and real gold-leaf, to believe that he was buying them as a safe investment for their old age. M ustapha was talking. Hans compelled composed himself to hear the words. Ballantine Books # may well be remembered as the year of Alan Dean Foster, or so It Is beginning to seem here at Ballantine where we have three of his books scheduled within five months. Not bad for a young writer whose very first book was published as recently as #. Just of the jungle extravaganza now playing In movie theaters around and about the country. Lunna, something of a female Tarzan, and her family -- a lion, a tiger, and a chimp -- are vividly brought to life on the cover by the Inimitable Frazetta. Watch for forget! Alan's other books already scheduled InIn which he returns to the marvelously based on the successful new animated Star Trek series. But much more about those two as they are published. For his next project Alan has suggested scripting "Deep Thoat" -- an X-rated Barsoom adventure. Hmmm...    So much for a look Into our future. Now back to the real world and more February books. "... a stunning debut by a new science fiction talent." That's what PubChamxj. Thi unusually powerful first novel win sorely be a contender -- we think -- when awards are voted. "Not only are the prose, atmosphere, and credibUlty of the post-holocaust story superior, continues, "but the book boldly. advances Into the convoluted area of sex, a place where mast sf writers are either timid or puerile." Who could ask for a better review? And, good news, Chamas has a sequel In the typewriter!    Lester del Rey's now-classic tale of disaster in an atomic plant. First written In #, this story of a nuclear reaction bursting out of control Is even more devastating today. What starts out as an ordinary experiment on an ordinary day turns Into a race to prevent atomic holocaust. As fuel supplies evaporate everywhere and we begin to look more to atomic power for our energy, we come closer and closer to the world del Rey wrote about. Now In its fourth big printing, "A wholly admirable blend of prophetic thinking, warm human values and powerful narrative suspense," said the New York Herald Tribune reviewer. Need we say more? at your bookstore or newsstand now. If you can't find them complain to the dealer andor send # per book, plus #c per order for handling, to Ballon tine Cash Sales, PO Box #, Westminster, Maryland #. "There is a little smell of death, but it is so faint it is more likely to issue, I think, from food that has rotted through several summers and been frozen again. Those documents -- they tell us where we are. Do they also hint at what became of the people who lived here?" Forgetful, Hans shook his head. Mustapha was looking at him directly and his eyes were bright in the lamp's beam. It was not the eyes that were at fault but the nerves that served them. At first Hans had suspected that the poet had been lying about being blind. Recovering almost at once, he said, "No, but we can dismiss fallout, I think. This area must have been well out of range of the big blasts at Kiruna and Trondjhem." Reflexively he confirmed his statement with a glance at his radiation counter, even though it had remained silent. At most places he went to in the line of duty it beeped incessantly and he had to sort through weathered industrial junk, hampered as much by the distracting noise as by his lead-impregnated suit. "One would have expected that, yes," Mustapha murmured. "Disease, possibly? So many epidemics were imported here by the skelter. There are other rooms. For the sake of your 'after' pictures. Hans, you go into them first." With an ironical little bow. Sourly Hans complied, mentally agreeing with the other's guessness had exploded like shrapnel from the few surviving reservoirs in less fortunate areas of the world into those whose inhabitants had neglected immunization procedures as needless. Which one -- of the many that had come this way -- had carried off the Erikssons? Plague? Diphtheria? Cholera? Rabies? Smallpox? No, none of these. Violence. In the small room adjacent to the study a child's skeleton lay in bed. The coverlet had been soaked with blood, urine and excrement and finally with the liquid foulness of rotting flesh. It had dried into a hard loathsome lump. "Ah," Mustapha said with the air of a man whose favorite suspicion has been confirmed. "I take it we have stumbled on an actual body?" Hans swallowed against nausea, though it was far from the first time he had chanced across similar horrors. He lowered the camera with which he had been ready to take one of what Mustapha scathingly referred to as his "after" pictures. Customarily what he did at each of these lost homes was, as it were, reverse the effects of time. He recorded on his arrival the state into which the passage of years had reduced the place -- then, with much care and labor, he would restore it to something resembling what it must have looked like when it had been in regular occupation. But a scene like this? No, he didn't want it included in his report. N ow, with that incredible depersonalized interest Hans at first had privately termed callousness but now knew to be something his vocabulary furnished no name for, Mustapha slipped past him, located the bed, ran his hands lightly over the disgusting mass until they discovered the skull. , "A child," he said. "Boy? Girl?" Hans surveyed the room, torch beam dancing wildly on the irregular surfaces of a table, a closet, a shelf of toys and books with brightly colored pictures. On a chairback, casually deposited, two pathetic scraps of cloth, the parts of a bikini. "Girl." "And young, by the size. Ten? Twelve?" "More likely ten. As far as I can guess from the toys and books without disturbing them." He thought in passing: funny, one had the impression that Swedes were casual about their bodies, that a child so young would be let run naked. But perhaps, like so many other preconceptions, it was a trick of perspective. Around the Mediterranean what had been believed about Swedes in the old days -- fifty years ago -- would logically have been based on the atypical behavior of expatriates. A hall of distorting mirrors. The whole Earth had been turned into one -- and sometimes the distortions had been accepted for reality. It was going to be an infinitely long, infinitely painful task to set the consequences right. "Perhaps in the adjacent room, then," Mustapha said, "we shall find traces of her parents. Lead the way again, if you please." There, in the master bedroom, were two more skeletons, one sitting up in a twin bed, the other sprawled on the floor nearby, adherent to the ruin of an Icelandpony rug. Among the shreds of dried ancient meat clinging to the ribs it could be seen that the latter's breastbone and one shoulderblade had been shattered. Also, on the wall backing the scene, there was a pit such as might be made by a deformed and tumbling bullet. Taking Hans's arm in a light grip, not to be tightened -- his fingers were dreadfully strong -- unless his companion tried to shake it off, Mustapha demanded a description in vivid detail before crossing the threshold and at once began to compile an explanation. "Ah, it comes clear. They were too casual with their skelter code, because in those days possession of a skelter was something to boast about. One midnight they were awakened by the arrival signal and the intruder proved to be a thief -- " "Not a thief," Hans cut in, dully pleased at being able to make the contradiction. "A thief would have ransacked the house for money and valuables, left drawers and closets open everywhere. There's no more disorder than you'd expect in a lived-in home with a child around." "Someone who didn't come here to steal, then," Mustapha accepted, unperturbed. "But who wanted his presence kept secret even at the cost of three lives. A spy or saboteur -- even a whole gang of saboteurs." "People playing skelter roulette?" Hans offered, hoping for a second chance to edit his companion's intuitive analysis. "No, that's too recent a phenomenon. By the time that fad caught on the family living here would have scrapped the notepaper with the code on it -- perhaps, if they were rich enough, installed a privateer, because it was about then that privateers started to come on the market. But I gathered that the skelter is an extremely old model?" "Yes." "Very well, I believe in my saboteurs. Memory reports some kind of industry at Umea -- it was a city of moderate importance, a convincing target." He stood silent for a long moment, inhaling through flared nostrils, then unexpectedly turned on his heel. Hans asked, unconsciously rubbing the spot on his arm where those deceitfully gentle fingers had rested, "You're leaving already?" "Yes. Thank you for your assistance. I have what I came for. I wish you success in garnering what you came for, too." "When -- when shall I see you again?" "When I have something else to offer that's just as good." With an enigmatic smile. "Which may not be soon, but then -- this site should occupy you for quite a while, no? So I shan't hurry. Well, goodbye, and thanks again." There was a question Hans always wanted to ask at this moment of separation -- was he Mustapha's sole customer for illegal codes? Now, once again, it trembled on his lips but remained unuttered. There was a faint wash of blue light from the skelter. He was alone. almost at once other thoughts were chased from Hans's mind by a surge of relief at his being able to get ahead so quickly with his main task. The more he studied the house the more convinced he became that, restored to its pristine condition, it was going to be the star of his secret collection of words and pictures which -- as Mustapha had reminded him -- no one else must learn of until after his death. Then generations yet unborn would bless his foresight and dedication to the cause of history. If news of what he was doing leaked out while he was still alive, though, he would undoubtedly be braced, no matter how high his motives. There were few absolutes left on Earth. The right to conceal a private skelter code had to be among them. Well, he could now stop theorizing about the Erikssons' fate and get rid of their remains. Not too soon, either. Nearly two-thirds of the population of the planet had been killed by violence or disease within twenty years of the marketing of the first skelters and, as though they felt chilly in the shadow of that tidal wave of death, men now were paranoid about the presence of corpses. Hans was not immune. Luckily -- in the course of his regular work -- he had gained access to garbage-disposal codes that ensured delivery straight to the hot heart of a furnace. Presumably such codes had not existed when the Erikssons were killed, or the intruder would have bundled up the bodies along with the blood-stained usual short novel of a very strange future, and there is a bonus added in two Blish novelsing." UQ#-#C Gerard Conway produces his of interstellar travel -- told with psychological depth and sensitivity. UQ#-#C The Lovecraft cult has its day horror sf novel that you can read at midnight! UQ#-#C Grainger, the man of the double mind, who pilots the Hooded only man is the jarring note. UQ#-#C And in the problem of the nedy once again finds evidence of the first galactics and is find himself playing Prometheus on a far planet! UQ#Q-#C stores, please send name and address, book price plus #c postage and handling to: F.O. Box #, Bergenfield, N.J. #I . bedding and rugs, made the beds afresh and left the house looking as though the owners had dropped down to the tropics for a few days and might return at any moment. Exactly as Hans planned to do now. He felt fortunate that he didn't have to buy his garbage codes. They came expensive. They had to. They made it so easy to destroy the evidence of crime, especially murder. He decided to attend to the chore right now instead of delaying it until his next visit. Used though he was to entering long-abandoned premises legitimately in the course of his profession -- though never private homes, only factories and warehouses -- and finding not two or three bodies but great piles of them, sometimes charred a little by pyres the earlier survivors had been too weak to keep burning, Hans found he hated the idea of coming back to this house that once must have been very beautiful and finding corpses in residence. They would make him feel like a trespasser. He didn't bother to rehearse any prayers as he consigned the bodies to the skelter. In Northern Europe these people would presumably have been either atheist -- in which case they wouldn't have cared -- or Christian. As a moderately devout follower of the Way of Life Hans regarded Christianity with the same revulsion he felt for black magic. Let their evil lord claim his own. W hen the distasteful task was over he relaxed and spent a long while roaming from room to room of the house, everywhere finding new objects to photograph, carefully pick up and marvel at. This family, probably not exceptionally prosperous, had been able to buy and use objects that today would fetch a small fortune in the antiques market. He found a camera better and more costly than his own, a range of long-playing records in a sealed cabinet with a glass door. Any of these items would attract bids from a hundred eager buyers. He discovered clothing of virtually imperishable synthetic fiber from which the dust fell faded dyes as he lifted it. And more and still more whichever way he turned... Abruptly he realized that his fingers and toes were growing numb despite his climatized garb. And his throat was stiffening, sure sign of incipient frost-dehydration. There was, he remembered, a thermometer apparently in working order on the wall of the kitchen. When he consulted it he discovered with alarm that he had been blithely wandering around at minus twenty Celsius. Time for home. When he came back he must bring a heater. Interface C This I am compelled to utter in another tongue But it is a truth important enough to be spoken: Some of those who call a journey-map a "route" Pronounce it "root" and cannot tell the two apart. Others say "rout" which means "to put to flight" And oddly also "to pull up by the roots..." It is as though the genius of their language Gave them warning in advice, which they ignored. -- Mustapha Sharif T o possess two private skelters was not unheard-of. To own three was remarkable, but certain successful persons, mostly working for the planetary authorities, had attained that goal and shuttled back and forth between three homes. To own three sited all in the same building, even though the building was large and sprawled into many shady colonnades, white-glittering domes, towers of marble and courts where lizards darted at the feet of priceless statues -- that was unique. And their equally unique proprietor was the man who, some declared, was the greatest living poet: Mustapha Sharif. But if someone said as much in his hearing he would wryly observe that there was very little competition nowadays. Possession of his third skelter -- high in a minaret where five times daily an elderly and arthritic muezzin came to call to prayer those of the local people who had not been seduced into following the infidel creed, the Way of Life -- was not an achievement he advertised. The world might assume the existence of the first skelter -- so famous a man was bound to have one at least. The lucky ones might even, by invitation, pass the privateer that guarded it and lavish on their host praise for the splendor of his home, which he could not see but always modestly said was worth maintaining for the pleasure it gave to others. Equally, having arrived whether by skelter, on foot or by camelback, anybody might guess at a second skelter. The estate was on rocky, ill-favored ground, long unclaimed, but a skelter could and did bring in sweet water, delicate foods, relics salvaged from elsewhere on the planet. But the third... Only two out of Mustapha's many servants were even aware that it was located behind that locked door on the last-but-one landing of a twisted staircase made of drab, worn tiles. T here was no light in the room. A current of warm air flowed from a high-set ventilator. Mustapha Sharif emerged from the skelter, swiftly and deftly exchanged his climatized suit -- necessary for the visit to Sweden -- for his usual burnoose and sandals. After listening carefully for the sound of footsteps he unlocked the door, stepped out, relocked the room. The heat of Africa brushed him like fine wires, making, his chill skin tingle. On the point of starting down the staircase he changed his mind and, instead, took the last short flight up to the rooftop. He needed time to digest what he had learned. A stool had been set out near the parapet. He felt for it, positioned it where he could lean comfortably forward and faced the direction of ancient Luxor, which -- so he had been told -- was in line of sight from this tower. But he had scarcely begun to learn to think in pictures before he lost his simulated vision. Instead he thought in terms of his other senses. The hot dry air bore him sounds he readily identified, aromas that he knew as intimately as he knew his own hunger, thirst, fatigue. He sorted out the scents -- dates, camel dung, humanity, cookfires, growing crops, spices, wet cloth tentered on poles to bleach and several other indistinguishable aromas in the airtoday. The odors of life, not of death. There was going to be another poem. He could feel the shy probing of its first tendrils at the back of his mind, those tender early shoots that eventually would knot and crack flagstones into fragments. He toyed with a phrase or two. The images were elusive. It was too soon. But the time would come. Content to wait, preferring not to wonder whether eventually someone might read and understand his work rather than simply admire it and draw a correct conclusion about his inspiration, he turned his mind to another matter: Hans Dykstra. He had made a mistake in choosing that man to go with him to the nine lost homes. There had better not be a tenth. In the beginning it had seemed that Hans would be an ideal companion. There were others who might have been equally eager to buy illegal disused codes, but they were greedy, as had been his former partner -- whom he had been compelled to lose, regretfully but with small compunction, when the man had started to pilfer rare and valuable items in such quantities that the authorities had grown suspicious and had clamped down. He was buried now and conferring what had been the life of his body to a field of corn. To come upon somebody who wanted to leave, as a personal bequest to the whole of mankind, a series of documented samples of the past, one typical family home from each major culture of the preskelter period -- but was content to store up his reports until he was safely dead -- yes, that had seemed like a tremendous stroke of luck. But Mustapha was wise to the ways in which a man could change. He knew beyond any possible doubt, that the idea of being famous in his lifetime had begun to erode Hans's original determination as surely as a river erodes the lip of a waterfall. Sooner or later he would make a mistake. Sooner or later he would be tempted beyond endurance. He would carry home with him some precious object -- more likely to be a tool, perhaps a camera, than a mere ornament -- and it would be recognized by someone aware that Hans Dykstra was not entitled to possess it. A great deal was legitimately left from the heyday of mankind's inventiveness, but not so much that it was impossible to figure out illegal possessions. And when Hans Dykstra's day of temptation came there would be trouble. Dreadful trouble. Therefore the day had better not arrive at all. M ore content after having reached that decision, Mustapha relaxed into pure enjoyment of the sounds and scents that the breeze bore to him. He was glad he had chosen to settle in Middle Egypt. It was a place of strong and vivid stimuli. Its winds were alive with grit from the deserts. Its sunshine was harsh and its night air cold. Its water was flavored with the essence of inner Africa. And many, many of its rocks were chased with inscriptions left by long-dead hands. It was about time he went back to the Luxor ruins and refreshed his fingertip acquaintance with the statues and the stelae. Establishing himself here had not been easy. There was much history in the area, both ancient and modern, with a great gap in between the two. First, a community had flourished and faded in Pharaonic times. Next nothing much had happened -- the life of the small village had repeated and repeated itself across the land. And then men built the Aswan High Dam -- not the first, which did little damage, but the second and newer dam -- and stole the annual floods from the peasants lower down and river infertile, sterile, useless. Entire starving villages of people had trudged south to seek a new home -- and an exhausted few had given up the journey here, where it was possible to raise subsistence crops and pasture a herd of goats. Later, when Cairo and Alexandria were bombed, the Aswan High Dam was destroyed. Another horde of refugees, this time much larger, straggled along the banks of Father Nile and found that this was as far as they needed to travel in search of regular floods and revitalizing deposits of silt. In a year a new town grew here -- too big for a village, built of too many shabby hovels to be called a city. At first the locals were jealous of their well-watered land and declined to offer welcome to strangers. But the natives were slowly growing more tolerant. Indeed, they were becoming proud that their neighbor in the handsome mansion, though not Egyptian by birth, was admired the world around, was generous to the poor, gave work to the deserving and altogether behaved in a manner befitting those enjoying Allah's favor -- bar one thing. He had truck with that instrument of Shaitan, the skelter. Even the most ignorant mud-grubbing fellahin were aware that the impiety of this invention had caused divine wrath to descend upon the world. Even these reservations were being tempered by time. And by Mustapha Sharif s judicious donations of good seed, new strong baby camels, donkeys and useful tools. All these could be cleansed of the smirch the skelter had left on them and put to honest use. Slowly he was winning over his people. Now many hundreds of the younger people came and sat in his courts when he held open house on a feast day and invited the local imams to preside at a night-long recitation of the Blessed Koran. A footstep on the stairs. Thinking he had mused so long it was time for the muezzin to utter a prayer call, he roused and turned. But those Soft slippers did not belong to the muezzin. Here came Ali, his most trusted body-servant. "What is it?" he demanded. He heard shushing sounds -- Ali was bowing. "It is to be hoped that the work will not suffer," he said in a tone of regret. "One attends below, however, who wishes with urgency to speak with you. His name is Dr. Frederick Satamori." Mustapha's heart lurched halfway to his soles. The Deputy Director of the Skelter Authority. What could have brought him here in person? Myriad fearful images chased one another across his mind -- memories of all the houses he had visited illegally, of all the codes he had sold first to his former partner, then to Hans Dykstra, who was so unconvincing in his role as a collector of finely calligraphed books of Arabic poetry... He gathered himself with an effort. "Request Dr. Satamori to make himself comfortable in the Room of the Leopards," he directed. "Bring him refreshments. Inform him that I shall join him in a few minutes." "The effendi's will is done," Ali said, backing away, his sandals scraping the sand-dusted floor. But it was more than a few minutes before Mustapha regained his normal composure and was able to find his way down the twisted staircase. Interface D Time was when any lover, seeing his mistress Was gone from the room, might call for her And be assured that she would hear his cry. Omy beloved, I do not treat you coldly. Rather am I haunted by the knowledge That one step may have put the world between us. -- Mustapha Sharif H ans wondered absently -- what had the woman of that house been like? Tall, from her skeleton propped up in bed -- devoid of a visible wound like her husband's but maybe she had been shot or stabbed in the throat or belly -- but beautiful? Blonde? Blue-eyed? No doubt there would be pictures of her in an album or a drawer, and of her husband and child, even though none had been on display. She must at all events have been better than that lazy greedy incompetent smug ungrateful... Resentful thoughts in his resentful brain, he stepped out of the skelter into his own hallway -- and saw Dany rising from a chair to confront him. He stopped, petrified. She had no business to be at home. She had told him she was off to a treasure hunt, a favorite pastime in the circles she frequented. He had relied on her solving the imbecilic clues, finding her way to the right place, staying at least several hours in the company of her friends. Hers, Not his. But here she was -- and here he was, with the mask he had put on after her departure still around his neck, frost on the outlet vent of his suit, a score of fatal clues in plain sight for anyone to weave a noose for him. Or worse -- a bracelet, symbol of living death. "Hans, where the hell have you been? I want your help." Words flared instantly into his consciousness: Liar. When you accept help the millennium will have arrived. I've told you over and over that you need it and Karl Bonetti would supply it and -- the hell with you. May your next bug be fatal... But he couldn't say them. He was hung up by his conscience, a contra-survival thing inasmuch as it made him vulnerable, but one enjoined on him by the faith he had adopted, the Way of Life. Besides, to have an actual wife, legally bound -- no matter that she was aging, fat, plain, querulous and selfish -- was a great status symbol. Young subordinates came to him during brief breaks from the job in Caracas or Calcutta or Cardiff to pose him problems about their sex lives and ask his experienced opinion. Thanks to a contagious numbered women five to three and the disease was still rife. Until sufpeople all at once could be deployed the pattern would remain constant -- any female who was even passably attractive could and generally would ignore marriage. She would stay free to trade in one man for another for any advantage she might gain. Hans fought for a grip on his thoughts. Dany was stupid and might not put two and two together from his outfit -- she had often seen him come home similarly clad from a day's work. He said peaceably, invoking the authorized hobby he had adopted as a cover for his real pastime, "I've been out shooting photographs as usual. What's the trouble and what can I do?" And looked at her for once, instead of merely registering her presence. T he sight was remarkable. She had on a pathetically glamorous new outfit, obviously expensive, hand-embroidered with huge flowers. He saw Shapex leotards, a Shapex bolero, wrinkled skin between, a tropical or sub-tropical style more extreme than was common around the Mediterranean in winter. The whole was tipped with hood, boots and gauntlets lined with fur (genuine, as he well knew because his team had found the skins during a survey he had lately mounted in Saskatchewan) and framed with an all-zones climatized coat, currently wide open as though she were too desperate for time to take it off even in the temperate air of Malta. Not only her face, but her legs, bare midriff and presumably arms had been plastered with inexpert makeup -- she jangled with jewelry and stank of far too much perfume. But as long as she was content with her appearance... "I've been invited to a party at Chaim Aleuker's," she almost screamed, holding up a slip of card. "But I 'can't figure out the clue in the invitation -- " Hans stared in disbelief. Invited to a party by Chaim Aleuker? This -- this wreck? Aleuker was probably the richest man alive, thanks to having invented the privateer, the code-shifting device that had changed the skelter from a wild beast to a domesticated draft people who had never met him reacted to his name as to an electric shock -- and Hans did so now. For an instant he wondered whether he could be wrong about Dany -- making ill-founded judgments. After six years of marriage he was sharing little of his daily life with her. Perhaps she did possess some outstanding quality. Perhaps the fact of her having stayed married to him had singled her out or some other aspect of her personality had -- But she was already disillusioning him. "Don't look at me like that," she snapped. "It's perfectly true about the invitation. Apparently Aleuker is bored with the people he knows and wants to meet some new ones, so he's sent out cards like this all over the world. Molly Chu got one as well, but the bitch won't join forces to work out what it means." "You should consult the library computer," Hans suggested, his tone still level and polite. "Do you think I'm an idiot? Would I have asked you if the computer had been any help, you -- you pompous clod?" Alarm signal. Next she would be raking up his past, about which he was five years too old not to feel embarrassed even if living with Giuseppe and Hakim had been faute de mieux. His quarrels with Dany always followed an identical pattern because they had not grown up in the atmosphere of tolerance displayed by the post-Blowup generation. It must be great, he often felt, to have come to terms with reality, instead of laboring under the delusive burden of a vanished world, leaden with prejudices and preconceptions. He did do his best -- struggled to accept the doctrines of the Way of Life and act on them. Perhaps if he had managed to find a younger wife? No, that was out of the question. Possibly he ought to have resigned himself to bachelorhood, especially since his marriage was compulsorily childless. Y ounger people had no memory of ancient evils like churches and nation-states. But they were all too keenly aware of their legacy. Their frontiers nullified by the skelter, under constant attack by saboteurs and partisans who could be half a world away before their time bombs exploded, five of the Great Powers had gone into insensate nuclear spasms, as though they had taken strychnine. The survivors, or at least some of them, believed their governments had also been responsible for the subsequent epidemics. Given that foundation to build on, they had abandoned at last everything their ancestors had taken pride in -- patriotism, religion, conformist morality, group solidarity... Oh, not completely, not all at once. But for the third and final time the wisdom-chain had been shattered -- so ran the teachings of the Way of Life. In the beginning, the argument declared, to be older had meant to be wiser -- to have had more experience of how things are, to be more in touch with the realities of human existence. Then had come a war that had murdered a whole generation of fine young men in mud and blood and murmurings of dissent had accompanied them to their unmarked graves. The saying had been: We have fought the War to End War. Many had believed and been comforted. In one more generation had come another war, one that killed not only young men but old people and little children in their beds, that loosed the firepower of the universe on the fragile flesh of man. By that time young people had begun saying in tones of extreme puzzlement, Grandfather promised peace to father and father swore he would preserve it and father is dead in an ugly, cruel manner. Can we trust nobody at all? And then had come the third war, the Blowup, and the wisdomchain -- already filed twice at its crucial link -- snapped. It was a new world. But a new world that must understand the old in order to surpass it. Hans Dykstra was convinced of that. R ight now there was no time for , reflection, though. He needed some means to placate his wife. Being too slow, he failed. This was unusual. Ordinarily he was quick to react and forestall her -- he had to be, because the risk of her leaving him was so high. No matter that she was close to fifty -- no matter that under the thick powder dark bags marred her eyes and her cheeks were crested with blue-red broken veins -- no matter that her bust, her belly and her bottom sagged -- she was a wife. And for a young man nowadays no achievement surpassed stealing away a wife. Legal bonds notwithstanding, Hans could lose her. Yet this time he was laggard. Dany made it as far as sobs and wails. She was eighteen years older than he. Like many of her generation -- of both sexes -- she was subject to crying fits born of sheer despair at the disappearance of the world she had been taught to believe in as a child. Perhaps earlier than most she had learned to exploit tears as a weapon against anybody who worried about her, who cared whether or not she killed herself in accordance with her frequent threats. It was there, Hans suspected, that one should seek the reason for her not accepting the invitation she had been granted by Karl Bonetti. Karl was a psychiatrist who practiced on the neighboring island of Gozo. Islands were popular among those who were lucky enough to enjoy access to the skelter system -- they were instant geographical symbols of freedom from the limits of separative space. This condition of depressive nostalgia being so common, Karl had literally hundreds of patients on supportive therapy because he couldn't cope individually with them. But Hans had located a drug Karl desperately wanted dug out of the scrap-pile of Europe and, out of gratitude, he had offered to add Dany to his list. One of these days Hans was going to insist. But not today. Right now he wanted her safely out of the way so that he could get to his darkroom and see how the pictures of the Swedish house had come out. # #T ET me look," he finally cajoled  i and she switched off the sobs. She gave him the card, wearing, he thought, the hopeful expression of a slum child promised a day in the country. He selected the image with conscious pride from the stock of data about the near past he carried in his head. In the old days it had been said that the period of history about which people knew least was the one directly before they were born -- too recent to be taught from a book, too vivid still for the elders to offer an objective appraisal. He had resolved not to let the saying be true in his own case. The card bore a short enigmatic verse, akin to a crossword puzzle clue. That much he had expected. He had not foreseen that -- if this did indeed emanate from Chaim Aleuker -- it would be so childishly simple. He read aloud, without stressing the rhythm, '"I'll give to you some exercise and syllogisms from the wise. Madam will you talk, madam will you walk and talk with me?"' "It's -- it's sort of like poetry, I think," Dany ventured. "The library computer says it goes to an old English tune called The Keys of Canterbury. " "So I suppose Canterbury was the first place you made for?" he countered -- more scathingly than he had intended. The last thing he wanted was for her to lose her temper so completely she would decide to stay home for the pleasure of spoiling his own leisure time. She colored, although one would have imagined her too old to blush, and miraculously replied in a mutter instead of a scream. "I couldn't -- not the original Canterbury anyway. They dropped so many bombs on eastern England. But there's another Canterbury in New Zealand, so I went there, but there wasn't anyone to give me the second card and -- " "Oh, honestly!" He handed back the card. "What about Athens -- the Lyceum? Aristotle founded a school of philosophy there. They called it the Peripatetic School -- the walking-around school -- because of his habit of strolling along while he was lecturing." "Are you sure?" she asked doubtfully. "Ah -- no. I'm not even sure the Lyceum still exists even as a ruin. But I think it may -- Athens was among the few capital cities that didn't get blasted, wasn't it? Look, you check out the idea. If it doesn't fit come back and see if I've thought of an alternative." He had been ready to cap his contribution to her day's amusement with a kiss, but his tentative gesture went to waste. She snatched back the card and headed for the skelter at a run, tossing over her shoulder a word of thanks that was literally cut in half as the transmission effect displaced her. Typical. But at least she had left him in peace. For that small mercy he made perfunctory obeisance to the nearest life symbol -- here in the hallway they kept a tortoise, because Dany refused to be content with a mere plant in sight of the spot where invited guests gained their first impression of the Dykstra residence -- before shutting his darkroom door. Interface E Father! You desired me to do you honor As a dutiful and loving son. Father! I am indeed obliged to you because It was you who facilitated my existence. Father! You must not imagine that Fm disrespectful But the best way I can conceive to honor you. Father, Is to think otherwise and make different mistakes. -- Mustapha Sharif D r. Frederick satamori hailed, of course, not from mainland Japan but from Okinawa (again, the association with the concept "island"). And he met Mustapha in the Room of the Leopards -- leopards the owner of the house had never seen, could scarcely imagine, for they existed in paint on the walls and had been varnished over so that not even the minuscule discontinuity between one color and another revealed the fine detail of the design to Mustapha's probing fingers. Yet imagination populated the room with watchful threat -- the alert tension belonging to beasts that must scent, spot, run down and overcome their prey. Sighted or blind, Mustapha who had early grown acquainted with the reality of such abstracts as "hunger" well understood the concepts "quest" and "quarry". To come in here was to taste blood in anticipation. Yet he had no grudge against Satamori. He might have picked the Room of Elephants, or of Fishes, or of Flowers... Never mind -- his choice of meeting place had been dictated by instinct. And now they were both here and both tea and coffee had been made available -- the scents mingled -- and Satamori had come freshly from a place that flavored his presence with jasmine, lavender and the smoke of some resinous tree being burned on an open fire. He rose and clasped his host's proffered hand and spoke formal greetings that conveyed less information than the sweat of his palm. This man, Mustapha thought, is frightened. So am I. But he, having eyes, is less likely to be aware o f my fear. Good. Relaxing, he sat down and inquired, "Fred, why bother to come calling in person when there was a risk of my discourteously making you wait? You should have phoned." "There are times," Satamori said dryly, "when waiting for a call to be put through makes one more impatient than waiting to be let past a privateer. Today is -- " "My servants made you wait in the skelter?" Mustapha interrupted in horror. "No, no -- they were the soul of courtesy. Indeed it was not my idea to disturb you, but Ali's. I was merely happy to break my journey." "Journey?" "Yes. I have to go around the world today, to its other side. Switching from dawn to evening is no longer easy for me. I'm old." "That isn't true," Mustapha said. "You are kind, but I'm afraid it is. I'm still under sixty, but the strain is beginning to make me understand what old age is." Satamori sighed loudly and took a sip of his coffee. He added after a pause. "Too many of us are old." Mustapha waited. "Anyway," the visitor resumed, "I felt I could take the risk of interrupting your contemplation and would have been quite content to wait for an hour or two without disturbing you, thinking we might go on together to Chaim's party. But Ali felt he should announce me." "What party?" Satamori almost dropped his cup. "But -- but surely of all people you must have been -- " His voice trailed away. "I begin to comprehend," Mustapha said. "Are you referring by any chance to a treasure hunt?" "What else?" "I see," Mustapha murmured and relished the conscious irony of the phrase. "You too believe that by sprinkling the planet with clues that may come to the attention of random people -- and require a moderately advanced IQ to unravel -- we can find the next generation of managers and administrators for Earth." "I can't conceive of a better way," Satamori granted. "I should not have mentioned the matter, though. I'm sorry. I simply was not aware that you were opposed to it." Mustapha leaned back, stretching cramped limbs. He said, "It is not I who am opposed. The opposition comes from something deeper -- the force that evolved us." Brief blank silence. Satamori said eventually, "You are adherent to the Way of Life? One had assumed that you must be -- " "Moslem because I chose to live in Egypt?" Mustapha cut in. "Not at all -- I am a skeptic. But I picked on Egypt because it was here that the cycle of the seasons, the rise and fall of the Nile, taught men to create absolutes -- strict measures of distance, area and elapsed time. I often think of death. When I do I feel certain I would rather die in the faith of the modern upstarts than in the faith of my ancestors. Has that notion never crossed your mind? Forgive me -- this is not something one asks a friend. Being blind occasionally makes me tactless." "You -- " One could hear Satamori having to moisten his lips. "You hold Moslem ceremonies here at your home." "Indeed, indeed. But as to the Koran -- well, without wishing to appear arrogant, I could have compiled a more convincing book of divine revelation myself. The same goes for the Christian Bible and the Little Red Book as well." Mustapha laughed to diminish the weight of his words. "And you could also, no doubt, have edited the doctrines of the Way of Life?" Satamori snapped. "My dear friend, I did." T he silence was strangled. At long last Satamori forced out: "If this is another of your subtle jokes you must pardon a foreigner for not -- " "Ah, I am doing what I always do without being able to help myself" Mustapha cried. "When I'm interrupted during the composition of a poem -- no, don't blame yourself, I was making very poor headway and the result will be all the better for being punctuated by a night's sleep -- but when I am interrupted I tend to grow snappish. I've given offense without intention. Let me hear that I've apologized to your satisfaction!" "No offense was taken," Satamori muttered. "Ah, I'm glad. But I did provoke you into suspecting me of a somewhat silly joke, did I not? I should erase that notion, too. I meant what I said literally. I did edit many of the sayings of Prince Knud -- from an English version admittedly, not the original Swedish -- and if there is any form, shape, structure to the texts -- well, I imposed it." Satamori drew a hissing breath and with the sound the room seemed to fill with the chill of the northern winter (the Erikssons' home locked in Arctic night) and the threat of Ragnarok that rode the flood-tide of the skelter. Some time passed. Eventually Mustapha said, his tone thoughtful, "One is inclined to wonder how the world views what one does. It's rare for an artist to be pleased to discover that what he is proud of is anonymous and uncredited, but in this instance that paradox is the truth. It was painful for me to discover that all the tenets I had been brought up to were false. But I am not alone in that. What perhaps I may claim to be alone in is that I did something about it." "I'm glad that you said nothing about this before," Satamori snapped. "I might not have -- " He sounded as though he were threatening to rise. Mustapha reached out a hand to check him. "My friend. I did not do what I did to insult you and your creed -- only to give what light I could to the world after the light was stolen from my eyes." A wave at his bright but sightless gaze, turned by sound to confront and transfix the other man. "I -- Yes, granted." Satamori resumed his chair. "Even so I -- " "You still believe that doing honor to the ancestors is among a man's primary obligations. I will not contradict. I would prefer to -- supplement." Mustapha's tone was persuasive without being downright wheedling, a narrow path to walk with words. "You must at least concede it's better to honor the ancestors for what they did right than for the mistakes which, had they the chance, they would repent?" Satamori hesitated. "I believe I read a poem of yours on that subject," he muttered. "In translation, I'm afraid." M ustapha wanted to tremble -- this was so close to what he had been worrying about within the past hour, the notion that someone would ultimately look at his work and see through it -- but he overcame the impulse. Not a quaver showed in his voice as he answered. "I am always glad when somebody reads and recalls my poetry, in whatever version. But do you not concede I have a valid point?" "I suppose I have to." Satamori heaved a deep sigh. "I do believe it was the -- the continuity of our beliefs that carried us through the terrible period after the Blowup. And I do believe that if we hadn't had our respective faiths to use for crutches we might never have risen again -- even as far as we have risen today." "On the other hand," Mustapha said, "it was because we held to the beliefs that we did that we reached the point of striking out insanely in all directions with some of our most terrible weapons. The Blowup is now two generations in the past, but it has left so deep a scar on the collective psyche of mankind that we will go to any lengths to avoid a repetition. For an intelligent young person today it is more significant that we suffered a population crash corresponding withincredible precision to the example set by rabbits infected with myxomatosis -- and that we have thus been shown subject to natural laws -- than that idealistic dreamers in ancient times conceived of man as being superior to his animal cousins. Moreover, so many of us died. As we reopen the contaminated areas of the planet we find we are walking through a giant graveyard. It is almost literally impossible to ignore the presence of our forebears' dead bodies." "You always had a sweet tongue, Mustapha," Satamori said. "Today you are excelling yourself -- and you've touched me on a very raw spot, too. Half of me knows in my head that one must fight the superstitious fear of death or we shall forever be shut off from vast tracts of what are now again becoming habitable lands -- and we need that space precisely because we did suffer a typical population crash. The other half of me stands in irrational awe of our ancestors, as though they had indeed become ghosts -- or spirits, or whatever you call them -- and ought not to be disturbed." He set aside his coffee cup, now empty, and declined Ali's solicitous offer of a refill. "On the other hand, by inventing the privateer Chaim did free us from that terrifying abolition of privacy which was so alarming to us that we stopped at nothing to -- But I said that to you before and didn't convince you." "Nothing, I'm afraid, will convince me that applying the same principles that led to our near-suicide can rescue us from our remaining troubles," Mustapha said in a tone of regret. "I wish I could believe the opposite. To be able to do so would make life simpler, wouldn't it? But in fact I'm certain that only a complete reassessment of our place on the planet, our relationship to other life forms, in sum, an abdication of our arrogance, will enable us to escape another and another and maybe another absolutely final disaster similar to the Blowup. Skeptic though I am, I regard the teachings of the Way of Life as likely to encourage a proper humility in us, the sort of attitude that alone can permit us to survive." He gathered the skirts of his gown and rose. "So I shall not attend Chaim's treasure hunt -- even by direct invitation. I have no wish to see another generation of managers, bureaucrats and administrators wrap this species of ours in their steel web of inflexible rules and regulations. I don't want to be party to the perpetuation of a system that condemned two-thirds of humanity to death. Better to expire of plague, starvation or cold than to be killed by the voluntary act of another man." "In so many ways I agree and in so many I don't." Satamori also rose, shaking his head -- Mustapha could hear the faint brushing of his nape hairs against the stiff collar of his formal coat. "What it comes down to," Mustapha said, "is that mankind from now on must be governed by artists, not by politicians. There is no other conceivable manner in which a survival-prone society can be organized. We must evolve an aesthetic of government free from ideological trammels. We must commit our fate into the hands of those who derive artistic satisfaction from seeing a well-ordered community, who will crack their skulls into the small hours of the morning over a flaw in their schemes -- as I may worry myself sleepless over a line in a poem until it suddenly turns head over heels and comes out right." "You think those in power don't already worry like that?" Satamori countered wryly. "Oh, we do -- we do! But, since the subject of your work has arisen by implication -- and I have an hour to waste before continuing to Chaim's -- I should much enjoy another tour of your ateliers -- " "It will be my pleasure," Mustapha said, bowing. So they passed the next hour in walking around that part of Mustapha's home where his corps of assistants were at work. He had over a hundred now. They were orphans of both sexes whom he had recruited as little children -- their parents being dead of violence or disease -- and taught a trade that would furnish them employment for a lifetime. Some worked at copying out not only his poems but far more ancient texts, chiefly in Arabic. Some, though, were in European languages. For these they used a classic chancellery hand and illuminated the result with exquisite drawings based on models provided by the chief scribe, Muley Hassan. Others were busy in the papermill, converting old rags, straw, corn husks and a score of miscellaneous vegetable substances into fresh new deckle-edged sheets. Others again worked in the bindery, where the air was pleasantly scented with glue and size, putting the final touches to the volumes that commanded collectors' prices the world around, irrespective of whether the buyer could read the contents or not. Satamori fell instantly in love with a collection of old folk tales and put down a deposit of five thousand to secure possession of it when it was finished and properly bound. Interface F Once a fool who loved gold Killed his rival to possess A lovely golden statue of a god. Afraid of being caught He melted the statue down Saying fire could not destroy its worth. They found him starved to death In a waterless valley His bare fingerbones clutching the gold. I do not call him foolish Because he could not eat gold But because beauty is the food of the soul. -- Mustapha Sharif H ans was shaking as he entered his darkroom. It was always like this when he returned from one of his secret expeditions. He was on edge because he could never tell in advance whether he would have anything to show for the risk he had run. It was getting harder and harder to purchase reliable film. The Economics Authority, of course, knew to the last centimeter how much was currently being manufactured, so for a project of this kind he had to depend on recuperated stock, which all too often proved to have been fagged by radiation. NeoPolaroid was easier to come by -- the available computing capacity was simply not up to determining whether or not a given buyer was telling the truth when he claimed he'd wasted half his last batch because he was drunk and had thrown the bad pictures in the garbage a month ago. But Hans would not have dared switch to it, because it had to be developed as soon as it was exposed. Carrying visual evidence of his surreptitious journeys would have been suicidal. A film could be blurred by springing the cap of its cassette -- he had modified several specially, to make doing so easier in an emergency -- and he always took along decoy film, too, exposed at places he was officially entitled to visit. Dany, of course, was not party to his secret. She would have betrayed him in a fit of depression. Moving with the ease of long practice in total darkness (and thinking about blindness as he worked), Hans decided that for once he would process his important film first, not the decoy he had shot on his way to rendezvous with Mustapha. That could serve again. In any case he was suspicious of its quality. He prepared his developing bath, opened the cassette with a tingle of excitement -- And was suddenly dazzled by wide. He stood rigid as a rock, looking at the ruined film in his hand. A shrill voice gnawed at his mind like a worm attacking the core of an apple. "Hans, you were right about Athens. There's a public skelter terminal called Lyceum, only they spell it a funny way. So I went there. But then somebody changed my card for another one and I can't figure this out either -- Oh. Is something wrong?" Gone: cobwebs. Gone: dust like snow unmarred by footprints. Gone: the irrecoverable "after" to pair with the reconstructed "before." In the next five seconds he came close to murdering his wife. But he changed his mind. He thought of something sweeter and more fitting. He tossed aside the film and turned, cordial of expression and tone. "Well, what does the second card say?" She proffered it uncertainly. Like the first, it bore a clue in rhyme. The answer, unless he was overlooking something ridiculously subtle, must be Oaxaca. "Can you work it out?" Dany pressed. "I do so much want to get to Aleuker's party!" "Yes, I'm sure you do," he agreed, moving forward as though to obtain a better light on the card. And continued, having drawn a deep breath: "Only -- what makes you think Aleuker will want you as a guest? He's inviting people intelligent enough to solve these puzzles for themselves. Knowledgeable people, well-informed, who will be interesting for him to be acquainted with. You, on the other hand, are stupid, silly, greedy, selfish, boring and totally inconsiderate of other people. When you burst in on me just now you wrecked something I set a lot of store by. It's gone past recall because you were too impatient to knock." "But I asked if anything was wrong -- " In a wail. He ignored the interruption. "So I think it would be a good idea if I kept out of your way for a while, because if I see you again today I shall certainly beat you to a whimpering pulp. I'll go to Aleuker's party. When I get back I may have sweated out my anger." "No! No, you wouldn't steal my chance -- " Clawing at him with ineffective pudgy hands. He slapped her accurately on the left cheek and, as she shrank back, convinced by pain that he meant what he said, made for the skelter. An echo of her curses seemed to follow him, though he knew that was impossible. I t was not a short trip, nor a quick one, but he relished the going. At Oaxaca Concourse, overlooking the abandoned airport, it was raining and cracks in the concrete roof of the skelter hall allowed warm dirty water to drip down into plastic buckets. A shabby young man exchanged the card Hans was carrying for still another, under the watchful eyes of the travel-hungry who pretended not to be. These were a vast group, hundreds strong, of so-called stucks, so terrified of skelter travel they could not summon up the courage to pass the nonexistent barrier dividing them from the clustered transit booths. It was not inability to pay that held them back -- skelter travel cost nothing. There was no way of pricing infinite speed over nil net expenditure of power. The shabby young man was contemptuous of the stucks and let it show, although he himself could no more use the skelters than could they. His reason, however, was tangible. He was a bracee -- the telltale glint of bright metal shone under the cuff of one loose sleeve. He was far from home, moreover -- he had the flat face of a North Chinese. He did not even seem to know Hans had addressed him in English, and Hans was reminded of Mustapha's proteges. For obvious reasons he had seldom visited his co-conspirator's home, but he vividly recalled that first trip he had made in order to establish his credentials as a collector of books likely to increase in value. He had been shown around. Granted that the young people Mustapha took in and taught might otherwise have died in the gutter, granted that it must cost a vast amount every year to support them and purchase necessary supplies for the scriptorium and the bindery and the rest of the operation -- Hans nonetheless had his own opinions about a setup that furnished so many nubile bed-companions. He was aware that Mustapha displayed the traditional Arabic indifference to their sex. Still, the link between those youngsters at Luxor and this youth at Oaxaca, was tenuous -- it summed simply to the suspicion that the person handing out Aleuker's cards might well be Mustapha's type. Why had the notion occurred to him at all? The reason was instantly obvious. He had been wondering almost unconsciously what he would do if being deprived of her chance to attend Aleuker's party drove Dany to the pitch of leaving him. He almost changed his mind and went home immediately. He was certain he would never again find himself a wife -- there was far too much competition. But he steeled his resolution. It wasn't worth being married if he had to put up with the sort of thing Dany had just done to him. Better to live alone, rent a woman when he wanted to, maybe find a tolerable male companion -- such as this braced youth, perhaps -- to keep house -- there was no shame attached to that. In any case, he was being interrupted. S ome of the eyes fixed on him as he studied his new card did not belong to stucks. A loose group of about a dozen travelers, mostly youthful, had spotted him as he addressed the shabby man. No doubt they, too, were following Aleuker's trail. How many invitations could the man have issued? If the net had been cast wide enough to entangle Dany the number logically ran to thousands. Therefore, too, there must be many eager-beavers who were pursuing imagined shortcuts, punchputers for Aleuker's last notified address -- or were risking a bracelet by offering bribes to skelter system officials who might have heard a rumor about the actual location of the party. Among the young people here present was an attractive girl in her early twenties, product of the fantastic mixing of the gene pool the skelter had brought about. Her lace alone hinted at ancestors from at least three continents. She whispered something to a male companion of her own age and advanced boldly toward Hans, swinging her hips and donning a flashing smile. Ordinarily, like any other man of his generation, Hans would have preened a little and relished the chance to exchange a mere dozen words with her. Right now he has immune to feminine wiles. He strode directly back to the nearest vacant transit booth and punched a axle as though he had solved the riddle at a glance. In fact he had not -- he had simply made for the Gozo public outlet, the code for which he had long ago memorized because Karl Bonetti recieved his patients in a former hotel nearby, now rented out as offices. The skelter, inevitably, had killed the hotel business. There was no need for anybody to rent, a room overnight, no matter how far he might be from home. He could work half a world away and sleep in his own bed. Karl did precisely that. Hans had a vague idea the psychiatrist actually lived somewhere in Greenland, but for good and sufficient reasons his home code was never divulged. At the Gozo terminal Hans sat down on a stone bench and with some enjoyment -- which surprised him because he had never before considered going to a treasure hunt -- unraveled the complex double meanings of a mock haiku. They led him to Pitcairn Island and another young man with more cards, who seemed even worse off than the one at Oaxaca. This one had been braced twice and lacked his right hand as witness of the efficiency of the anti-tamper circuit in his first bracelet. Some attempt this young man presumably had made to remove the metal ring had fired a shaped charge, focused inward. Very messy. at pitcairn Hans saw three reV cipients of cards hanging about. All were too shy to approach him. One was a woman in early middle age. The two men verged on the elderly and wore the air of scholars. In any case, Hans had no need to flee them for privacylie solved the new clue instanlly. Bucharest. There was an excruciating pun on "lei", obviously designed to misdirect the less perceptive into making for Honolulu. And from Bucharest he stepped into a private skelter in New Zealand, thinking that if Dany ever learned how close she had been to her goal when she hit on Canterbury she would die of mortification. It would be great to tell her when he returned home. He checked suddenly. He knew he had been given -- now -- a code for a private home and it was in the right part of the world. He was walking on a carpet in a spacious reception hall nearly thirty meters long. Curtains were drawn across its windows. He was completely alone and surrounded by absolute dead silence. Interface G There were giants on the Earth in those days. The fact is attested by scriptural authority. Today you or l can walk around the globe in three strides. It does not follow that you and  have become giants. -- Mustapha Sharif T he declining sun dappled the sea with highlights as exaggerated as a Van Gogh painting. Reclining on a chaise, Chaim Aleuker admired it between taking sips of his planter's punch. He was l lie very model of elegant success: lean, but with the suggestion of a developing paunch -- extremely well dressed in a loose, casual shirt and breeches of real silk. His hair was immaculately coiffed and his fingers were bright with valuable antique rings. His house -- the largest of his three homes -- overlooked a small cove with a northwestern aspect. On either side of it green hills ran down to stark rocks, but there was a smooth sandy beach between. A sailboat and a power launch bobbed at a tiny jetty. The scene could have belonged to the last century. There were few such sights to be found now anywhere on Earth. Around him, sitting or strolling or standing in knots of two or three and chatting quietly, were the guests he had invited to form a nucleus for his treasure hunt. It was unlikely in the extreme that anybody new would arrive before eight p.m. local -- indeed, he had a bet with Boris Pech of the Advancement Authority to that effect -- and it was not yet seven-thirty. So, to keep him company and also to assess the quality of any of the strangers who found their way through his careful maze of clues, he had notified some fifteen of his compeers to come direct. For a full generation after the Blowup personal power, influence, initiative had meant little. Humanity had existed in a totally constrained situation where it had been a real achievement to keep body and soul together -- not that that phrase was current any longer. But now things were back on a more or less steady keel. A new balance had been struck -- new class lines had been drawn. New meanings had been found for rich and poor. In a very real sense this handful of people -- ten men and five women -- could be said to be in charge of Earth. They had rescued most from the wreckage and had laid down tracks onto which, with immense effort, society had been hoisted like a derailed locomotive. It was grunting forward again now, very cautiously in case there should prove to be other faults on the line. But progress was being made after a fashion. The solution was not to everybody's taste. The elite (Aleuker hated the word) numbered about one per cent of the surviving population. This was a simple fact and stemmed from the terrible traumatic effects of the Blowup. Regardless of what reasons were offered by people to explain why they would have nothing to do with skelters, the truth could be expressed in one word -- fear. Because they were afraid to share what actually was available to all -- except to those who had been given a bracelet for code-breaking or using the system for theft or to cover up a murder -- the non-elite sometimes became jealous and tried to sabotage the work of the new managers. Now and then a mob would attack a skelter outlet. Now and then one would strike at the wealthy, individual by individual. The elite was far too small. Its human resources were being stretched so taut one could hear them twang. Something had to be done to enlarge it. A casually amusing idea had cropped up recently in conversation: hold a treasure hunt, the kind of party so much enjoyed by small-minded folk on the lowest rung of the skelter-using ladder, but instead of merely employing it as a trivial diversion, turn it into a genuine test for those with sharp minds and the desire to better themselves. It was incontestably worth trying, though Aleuker himself had little hope of its paying off. i#bet with me, Chaim?" a voice demanded from his side. The speaker was Boris Pech, affable, smart in blue suede, manager of the Advancement Authority, which was the most recent of the planetary administrative departments. It had grown from a tiny nucleus within the Economics Authority, charged with devising new means of exploiting what the old world had left lying about in such colossal quantities -- spare parts for obsolete machinery, adult toys for which there was no longer any call, gambling machines and the like. Boris Pech had hit on countless new ploys and had elected himself automatically as head of the Advancement Authority when it had been created five years ago. Its work was little publicized -- the climate of public opinion was still against innovation. But sooner or later people would find out that it was still possible to make progress. Chaim chuckled. "Only twenty minutes are left," he said. "And the clues we planted are pretty difficult. You were talking to Fred Satamori, weren't you? He was looking gloomy when he arrived -- is something the matter with him?" A waiter passed, carrying a tray of drinks and canapes. Boris helped himself before replying. "Not really -- but yes, in a way," he said eventually. "I see. You've caught the riddlemaking habit and now you're talking in mysterious gobbledegook." "On the contrary. I'm speaking the literal truth. Fred stopped off to see Mustapha Sharif on his way here, assuming he'd be among the guests and thinking they might come along together. You know he's been collecting Mustapha's work longer than almost anybody else." "Ah." Chaim tapped the side of his glass thoughtfully with one of his rings. "Was Mustapha angry at not having been invited?" "Not at all. Fred said he wouldn't have come even if he had been invited. He doesn't approve of our trying to perpetuate the managerial system we've evolved." "He finally came out and said it in so many words? That's interesting. And a little bit alarming." Boris blinked. "I'm not with you." Chaim stretched, relaxed again. "Maybe I exaggerate, but I do believe Mustapha is a dangerous man. Has it never struck you that he's quite literally the only one of -- of us, for want of a better term, who has succeeded in integrating himself into a non-skelter community?" "That makes him dangerous? I'd have said the contrary. It's high time we -- " "Naturally, naturally," Chaim interrupted. "But how has he done it? By ingratiating himself -- by what can only be called overt dishonesty. Have you ever attended one of those sessions he holds on the big Moslem feast days -- when the imams come and recite the Koran all night long? He's not a believer. Hell, he edited most of what now passes for the authentic teaching of Prince Knud and he doesn't believe in the Way of Life any more than you do. I take it you are still a good dialectical materialist?" Boris chuckled. "About as much as anybody, these days. I don't imagine Papa Lenin -- let alone' Grandpa Marx -- would find much to agree with me about if we had a chance to chat together. But it did happen, didn't it, that the Soviet model came handy when we had to try to reconstruct the world's economy?" "Oh, we've stolen from it wholesale, but only under compulsion: If we hadn't forcibly redistributed the available resources far more than two-thirds of mankind would have died. If we hadn't taken steps to interfere whenever some petty local group decided to go seek vengeance -- if we hadn't made it wor th the while of those with the necessary talent to work with us instead of against us -- No, without doing as we've done we'd never have made the repairs we have managed, makeshift though they are." "Mustapha won't concede our necessities, will he?" "Indeed he won't. And I've never been quite sure why. I can't tell whether it's because he genuinely hates, on the gut level, everything about the old days and the old ways, or whether he's secretly ambitious." B oris's mouth rounded into an O. He said after a pause, "I recall a quotation, I think, though I can't remember the exact words. An English poet said that people in his profession -- " "Ah, yes. 'Unacknowledged lawgivers', isn't that it?" "Yes, precisely. Was it Shelley?" "I forget. But you're right to mention it in this context. At his home Mustapha behaves like a caliph. By acting out a role the local people recognize he has ingratiated himself dishonestly." Boris hesitated. He said, "Even so, his is a white lie, surely. Life would be a lot easier for many of us, including yourself, if we did the same. It's no coincidence that so many of us now live on small islands, where one can get to know the local troublemakers personally and perhaps calm them down." "Bribe them to calm down?" "Occasionally one has to. When there's no alternative. It's as rigid a predicament as the world was in thirty years ago." "No, no and again no," Chaim said. "One thing we must not do is build the foundations of the future on deception. I know there are people who hate my guts just on the other side of those hills." He jerked a thumb over his shoulders. "Sometimes I can practically feel their breath on the nape of my neck. Maoris who ran for shelter in the cozy dead end of their old traditional ways. White people of British stock who were brought up to believe their mother country was the greatest on Earth and don't even yet accept that it doesn't exist any longer. Nominally I'm a Jew -- that gives them enough reason to hate me even though I bought my land legally. Some people have always been convinced that any Jew with a fortune came by it dishonestly. But the one thing we dare not be from now on is hypocritical, Boris. We mustn't imitate the lies that brought down the old world. We mustn't pretend that riches are a burden. We mustn't deprecate intelligence and we mustn't preach loving brotherhood with a Bible in one hand and an H-bomb in the other!" Boris gave a sober nod. "We've taken steps in that direction. Making the skelter system free and open -- " "Hah!" Chaim gulped at his drink. "What does the village kid with ambitions see when he goes to a skelter outlet for the first time? Stucks, hundreds of them, and bracees, blocking his way! Sometimes they attack people trying to get into a transit booth." "Yes, I've heard about that. We shall simply have to put guards on -- " "That's exactly what we must not do!" Chaim flared. "Armed patrols at skelter terminals? I can't think of a worse way of importing the foulness of the past into what we hope and pray will be a brighter future! As a matter of fact, that was the chief reason why I agreed to organize this party. I'm desperately hoping that somebody may turn up who thinks in terms of no guards, no guns, no locks. Come to that, no privateers. If we could only find a few people, just a handful, who've lived all their lives accepting the skelter as a fact -- who've adjusted to it instead of regarding it as a fearful mechanical monster -- " Looking lugubrious, he shook his head. "What you just said reminded me," Boris murmured. "How is your private venture in rehabilitation coming along?" "What? Oh, . the wild girl? Badly, damn it. In fact. I'm minded to quit trying. I never realized before, not all the way down, how horrible the prejudices of the past must have been. Nor how crippling they could be to an innately intelligent child. I mean, she is effectively still a child. I've tried everything I can think of -- persuasion, pleading, force of example, formal instruction, bribery. Doesn't work. They used to talk about people being afraid of their own shadows. What was done to her made her afraid of her own substance!" "But she'll be around this evening?" "I guess -- maybe. I told her to join us. Don't waste time on her, though. It won't be worth it." Suddenly a melodious chime rang out and everybody on the patio glanced reflexively in the direction of the sound. Instantly regaining his usual cordiality, Chaim jumped up, glancing at his watch. "I just lost my bet! It isn't nearly eight o'clock and somebody has found the way here. I wonder who it can be." Interface H Doubtless you know better, O my beloved Thun to try and make me jealous of a rival. The world holds so few intelligent, lovely girls I'd feel it selfish to keep one all to myself. Do. though, choose for lovers men I can respect. Otherwise I shall lose all respect for you. -- Mustapha Sharif at first puzzled, then beginning to grow annoyed, Hans advanced along the high-ceilinged room into which the skelter alleged to belong to Chaim Aleuker had delivered him. Its privateer had been turned off, which fitted with the notion of a party open to all comers. The room, however, didn't. At the far end were long tables over which were draped lumpy white cloths, concealing perhaps plates of food and glasses and bottles of liquor. On the walls were fine pictures of the sort one might imagine Aleuker buying. But there was no sound, not even music -- nothing suggested a festive celebration. Had he, by some miracle, arrived ahead of everybody else? Or was the whole affair a cruel hoax? One had heard that in the rarefied atmosphere of vast wealth and privilege people developed a distorted sense of humor. Then a door opened and a pair of servants emerged: a footman and a maid in identical uniforms of green trimmed with white braid. Both of them were braced, of course; no one with free access to the skelter system had reason to accept menial employment. The girl had an ugly face -- a scar ran down from her left temple to vanish under the high collar of her jacket. Nonetheless her figure was excellent: fullbosomed, small-waisted, broadhipped. Hans wondered briefly why she had been so stupid as to get braced when she could have had her pick of a thousand eager men. The pair wished him a good evening -- yes, of course, here it must indeed be early evening -- and the footman requested a look at the card that had brought him here. Having studied it, he asked Hans's name, repeated it under his breath and beckoned the newcomer toward the windows. The maid drew the drapes aside. Revealed was a magnificent patio framed by greenery. Hans saw men and women in elegant clothing gazing toward him with an air of expectancy. His mouth went dry. He had left home in such haste he had not bothered to change his clothes: a short-sleeved shirt and crumpled pants of cotton drill, light enough to be tucked inside a climatized suit. His pockets bulged with his darkroom oddments. He was unshaven and his hair was in a tangle. "This way, sir," the footman urged. "My employer is eager to make your acquaintance." It was too late to back down. The maid slid aside a section of the floor-to-ceiling window and Hans passed through to confront his host. N either man made any move to shake hands. The habit had gotten mislaid -- there had been too many fatal contagious diseases. On the other hand, close friends kissed in public far more often than had been customary in the old western culture -- a gesture that converted share risks. Very strange. Hans cursed his head for being crowded with irrelevant data. All these faces, some white, some brown, some yellow... "A great pleasure," Aleuker was saying warmly. "I'm afraid I didn't quite catch your name when my man repeated it." "Hans Dykstra," he heard himself mutter. "I'm a recuperator, from -- uh -- " He hesitated. Mentioning his profession was all right -- it was respectable and respected, provided the practitioner was good at it. What he didn't know was whether it was correct form to refer to one's place of residence in a circle as exclusive as this one. Respect for privacy these days notoriously escalated in proportion with the square of one's wealth. But Aleuker was looking expectant, so he completed the statement. "From Malta. Valletta, to be exact." "Ah-hah? Haven't been there for ages," Aleuker said while Hans belatedly considered a corollary to his last assumption: suppose that obsession with the maintenance of privacy diminished as the means available to protect it increased? "Used to have a friend there. Maybe you know Christos Micallef?" Hans shook his head. "Lucky you. A thorough-going bastard -- " A bell chimed and Aleuker was suddenly looking past Hans. "Looks as though the rush is starting. I hope we didn't underestimate the numbers -- we had the whole project computed. Well, that's my headache, not yours. Have a drink, make yourself at home. Excuse me while I go welcome number two." Hans turned and recognized the second arrival. It was the girl he had nearly met at Oaxaca. Aleuker was grinning from ear to ear. His jubilation faded a little when her boy friend followed her. The incident should have been amusing. Hans, however, was in no mood to find anything funny. He felt as out of place here as a diehard Christian at a Way of Life ritual. Maybe he ought to leave again at once? No, the hell with that. He'd brazen it out for an hour at least, make himself scarce when his absence had lasted long enough for Dany to have become contrite. His main purpose had been achieved -- he was here. He had spoken to Aleuker personally. He fully expected he would be forgotten again in five minutes and it wouldn't worry anybody if he hung around in some quiet corner for a while. He advanced on a passing waiter, helped himself to a glass of wine and, turning away, found himself being smiled at by a genial man in blue suede. X bet with Chaim," the man said. "It's not every day of the year one can take money off that fellow. He insisted, you see, that according to his computers -- mine really, but what the hell -- nobody would figure out those silly clues of his and arrive here before eight p.m. local. And then up you turn and blow his deadline to smithereens." "Uh -- did I?" Hans muttered, restraining himself from consulting his watch because it would show some utterly irrelevant hour. "Why, yes. You clocked in well under the wire," the man in blue declared. "By the way, I'm Boris Pech. Did I hear you say you're a recuperator?" "Not the Boris Pech?" Hans blurted. "What?" The older man blinked. "Oh -- yes, I guess you might say so. Advancement Authority, if that's what you mean. But I was about to ask you -- do you ever work Europe, by any chance?" "Uh; -- yes, now and then. When we get clearance to dig over a zone that's been pronounced free of plague and radiation." "Ah. Then I wonder if you've come across anything that might help us out of a tight corner. We've combed North America, Russia, what little of Japan we can get at -- without joy. Europe's our last hope really, though I guess there may be something in Brazil -- But of course Brazil is about the most unhealthy spot on the planet nowadays." "So I'm told," Hans muttered. There was even less news from the interior of South America currently than from Central Africa or China. Bloody wars were in progress there as a score of petty local lordlings tried to carve themselves new empires. "Well, the problem's this," Pech went on. "A bunch of us landed a skelter on the moon last year, as you know,and doubtless you've been wondering why so far we haven't made any use of the damn thing." Hans nodded. He'd heard about that venture, announced as the first earnest of man's ability to surpass the scientific achievements of the pre-skelter period. But he had never expected to find himself chatting casually with one of the experts responsible. F ar off in his memory resonated something Dany had flung at him in a moment of inspiration during one of their quarrels and luckily never had the wit to repeat. It had wounded him. She had charged that he was forever grovelling at the feet of the past, scared of doing anything that might shape the future, even his personal future. It was true he got little encouragement to act otherwise. His contact with people who had new ideas and the leverage to put them into effect was limited to reporting on the caches of industrial goods he unearthed. His task was to describe and identify them, not dictate to what use they should be put. His one genuinely personal project would not be known until after his death -- but that was merely sound sense. Aloud he said, "Yes, the point has been puzzling me. Why is it?" "Because our best measurements haven't given us the transmission span closer than two centimeters plus or minus. Of course over such a long distance that's too slack by an order of magnitude. Earthside the problem doesn't exist -- to be doesn't signify and one can compensate automatically for crustal tides and other minor nuisances. So what we've all been dreaming of is a batch of those ultra-high-precision lasers that Zeiss of Jena were alleged to be working on when -- " Hans let him rattle on. He had not had the vaguest notion that the moon's distance had been measured to within two centimeters, but he wasn't about to admit it. Nor, come to that, was he going to do a lot of talking during the party. He was going to compel himself to listen. It was clear from the way Pech spoke that English was no more his mother tongue than it was Hans's. Both he and Dany had been born to French and Flemish, he in Antwerp and she in a village near Liege. But Pech used this language with a fluency and vocabulary that made Hans sound like a backward schoolboy, even though he had decreed to Dany when they first were married that they should use English in private as well as in public. She had agreed that the proposal was sensible. English was the first or second language of more people who had survived the Blowup than any other. But it sat uncomfortably on his mind and he remained terribly aware of how small an area of its immense richness he had learned to exploit. And if Pech was typical of Aleuker's friends... H e was. So Hans stuck by his resolution and almost at once found it was both an advantage -- for a patient listener was automatically defined as charming -- and a shame. He seldom got along easily with strangers and he had fully expected these friends of Aleuker's to regard their treasure hunt as a joke. But they were not in the least patronizing. They clearly assumed that anybody who had solved the cryptic clues deserved to be treated as an equal. Hans knew a warm glow. Almost he was tempted to mention what one day would add his own name to the roster of the famous -- but he caught himself. (What the hell kind of wine was this anyhow?) Never mind. To be treated by the members of this in-group as an equal, however temporarily, was an accolade. News had begun to be acceptable again during the past decade or so. as the race's psychological sores had begun to heal and, with the dissolution of nations, individuals now made the headlines. Such individuals, in fact, as these: "Fred, have you met Hans who was the first to find the party?" And Fred was the Okinawan scientist Frederick Satamori, deputy director of the Skelter Authority -- what would he think if he knew himself to be face to face with a criminal? And: "Ingrid dear, I hear you lost your cats! Does that mean there are none left now?" And Hans found himself commiserating with Dr. Ingrid Castelnuovo, the biologist who had just failed to rescue the domestic cat from extinction and who was so much farther along the Way of Life he was half-ashamed to admit his own adherence to the faith. He had imagined these persons to be unreal, unapproachable. Yet these dozen-odd personalities, Aleuker's closest friends, the winnowings of a vast acquaintanceship, were mingling contentedly with the strangers who kept pouring out of the unprivateered skelter. Many were shy, plainly retiring men of advanced years who must have been through agonies of indecision before concluding that a chance to meet Chaim Aleuker made it worth taking advantage of the clues their scholarship enabled them to decipher. Some were arrogant young student types clearly determined to prove they were a match for their elders. Several pretty un-bright girls and a great many more pretty un-bright boys had ridden here on the shirttails of lovers with higher IQs. Fantastic. And a lot of fun. Hans's self-allotted hour was nearly up. He revised his deadline and decided to stay at least as long again. Interface I Who is my neighbor ? The unknown inquired. The teacher replied with a parable Concerning one who was going on a journey. Who is my neighbor ? I am asking it again. Pharisees and Levites by the Pass by the other side of my skelter door. -- Mustapha Sharif C heerfully adrift on stimulating conversation, first-class liquor and delicious food -- here in the far south the sea still bred safe fish and much of the ground could be farmed in the old-fashioned manner provided it was protected from rain -- Hans gloated privately over his vision of tomorrow. He was going to make Dany weep, actually weep, with his vivid description of the unique occasion she had cheated herself out of by ruining his precious film -- not, of course, that she would have figured out the clues that had led him here. He would imply, in terms broad enough for her not to misconstrue, that he would have been happy to escort her to the party, deftly link her into discussions beyond her range, help her to leave behind an impression that while that guy Dykstra's wife might not be too much to look at she must be pretty bright behind that quiet facade. He had had to undertake similar chores for her throughout their marriage and he was confident he could have worked the trick even in this unprecedentedly distinguished company. He caught sight again of Frederick Satamori on the far side of the patio as he orbited from one primary of conversation to the next, always welcome, and thought again of the enormity of the offenses he, Hans Dykstra, was committing by the scientist's standards. This event would certainly have to be recorded in his secret files. One day somebody would read his account of this party and laugh . H e had hoped for another chance to speak to Aleuker. He had an opening gambit ready -- the presence of many plants in tubs and pots on this broad patio hinted that the owner might follow the Way of Life. But the opportunity eluded him. Basking in adulation, the inventor seemed to be holding forth to a large group of admirers every time he passed within earshot of Hans -- always a different group, but always the same subject, the privateer. "When I think of what would have happened to the world without it -- " someone said loudly and Hans cynically thought: What about what happened to the world in spite of it? Actually he experienced a silent shudder of agreement with the speaker. Stripped of virtually every other means of long-distance transport in the Blowup, mankind had had no viable alternative to the skelter. It was cheap, not very difficult to build and extremely reliable. Yet it was in itself the cause of the Blowup and was nearly destroyed in the aftermath. Within a decade of its introduction the skelter had turned sour. It had threatened to infect the human race with world-wide ochlophobia. Early models'had had to be open to anybody who punched the proper code, whether friend or enemy, because it cost tens of thousands to activate the power-crystals. They were not designed to be switched on and off, only to resonate in a permanent state of excitement. If they were turned off they had to be sent back to the factory to be energized again and that would set the owner back three-quarters of the initial outlay. In the terrible years immediately following the Blowup it had been touch and go whether any transportation system would survive -- or whether every skelter on Earth would be smashed by rioting mobs sick of having bandits, criminals, JD's and even foreign soldiers pouring into their towns. The West had first hit on the idea of shipping saboteurs through the skelter into "enemy" territory, but when the East retaliated the privileged few who owned domestic skelters at that time lived -- if they did live -- to regret their investment. Skelters in the Combloc had all been public and under guard. Not that guarding them had made much difference in the long run... In the tortured belief that an invention made in his own country of Sweden had brought about the downfall of civilization, Prince Knud had been driven to create the doctrines of the Way of Life. He hundred languages, at his own expense, to the far corners of the globe -- a plea from the heart that humanity should cease to chase after gods and ideologies, learn to accept reality, recognize this nearRagnarok as no more than the sort of population crash any species must endure if it overbred. Pleading failed. It took Aleuker's invention of the privateer to restore a semblance of sanity to the world. Barely in time the skelter ceased to be a menace and became the means of reconstruction, tying together the isolated fragments of a shattered civilization. Code-trading now was among the most heinous of twenty-first-century offenses, enforced as much by public opinion as by the sketchy, disorganized laws still being cobbled together from the scraps of a dozen inconsistent legal traditions. (At that house in Umea -- had it been spies or saboteurs who murdered the Erikssons? Mustapha had been convinced at once. On reflection, Hans found himself more ready to opt for criminals. Prisoners on the run before the advent killed to make good their escape -- troduction. when the skelter was the only mode of getting away.) But life wasn't intolerable today. The resources that remained were being well exploited and new ones were being discovered -- and one's friends might as conveniently live on another continent as across the street, which must be good. It would take a long time for mankind to digest its brutal lesson. At least, though, there was a culture that showed signs of evolving in a sane direction. Hans gave a sage though slightly tipsy nod, telling himself solemnly that he was the guest of a universal benefactor and must not resent the fact that scores of other people kept getting between him and his host. T ipsy? Might be a good idea to go check out the food on display in the hall where he had first found himself. There had been quiet music here on the patio for some time -- within the past few minutes the volume had been turned up and several couples were dancing. Moreover, bright lights hidden among the trees or mounted on the eaves of the roof had been switched on. He hadn't noticed when darkness fell. He wandered indoors, possessed himself of a plate and allowed a servant to load it with smoked reindeer venison, freshly cooked fish dressed with mayonnaise, and a crisp oriental salad, a typical contemporary combination. Hunger had smashed most of the barriers of prejudice that used to keep national cuisines apart. He ate with relish, wishing that at home he could afford to combine foodstuffs from (hree different parts of the world at every meal. Having finished and taken yet another glass of wine from a circulating tray, he leaned back in his chair. It looked as though it were about time for him to quit at long last. He was midway along the reception hall, between the skelter and the windows that stood ajar to the patio. For perhaps thirty minutes or more no new arrivals had caused the bell to chime and the privateer had been reactivated. It would make good sense not to stretch his luck. Then, suddenly, all his resolutions dissolved in the blink of an eye. He happened to be looking toward a door set in the wall opposite when it opened a few centimeters and light fell on the face of a girl, large-eyed, shy as a fawn. She peered in, caught sight of him and at once made to shut the door again. Without conscious volition he found he had closed the distance between them and was smiling at her from less than arm's length. He heard his voice say, "Hello." She answered in a language he hadn't heard for years -- or rather, a dialect so close to the one he knew that he understood her perfectly. She muttered an excuse and tried to shut the door a second time. He checked her by thrusting out his arm and demanded fiercely, "Are you Dutch? Or Flemish?" Astonished, she let go of the edge of the door and jerked her head back, those wide dark eyes fixed on his face. "No -- I'm from Brazil, but -- " Brazil? It was too much for him to figure out. She herself was too much -- all he could concentrate on was her simply being here. She was not tall, but was slim and shapely under the plain long dress she wore. In sharp contrast to the gaudy finery of the other guests, the dress still let her be the loveliest woman present. Eloquent eyes, mouth generous, hair sleek and black, hands delicate, figure molding that dress delectably -- in sum, she was beautiful. And young with it. She could have been any age from fourteen to twenty. "Why are you hiding?" he rapped in his mother tongue. He reached for her hand, amazed at his own boldness. "A girl as pretty as you should be the star of the party -- come on!" For an instant she seemed inclined to resist. Then she yielded and came out into the hall with the air of a wild animal, casting timid glances to every side. Hans was aware that he was the focus of attention. He relished the sensation. "You must have something to eat. Perhaps a glass of wine and -- " Solicitous words he hadn't spoken for years flowed out of him and he was rewarded to hear her answer yes, yes please! It wasn't Dutch she spoke, but the first cousin of Dutch -- Plattdeutsch. How in the world did she come to speak a dialect like that in Brazil? From behind him, suddenly, came Chaim Aleuker's voice: "Hans, I see you've found Barbara. Good luck to you -- see if you can make her bloom a bit." Hans started so violently he nearly spilled the plate of food he was loading for the girl. He swung around. But already Aleuker was past and vanishing in the direction of the patio. "So you're called Barbara," he said. The girl shook her head vigorously. "No, my name is Anneliese Schenker." "But I'm sure Chaim called you -- " "It is a joke for him. He says that 'Barbara' means 'a wild girl' -- and he thinks I'm a savage." There was a ring of anger in her voice -- she set her shoulders back, clenched her fists and glared after Aleuker. Hans hesitated only a moment. Then he said, "I suspect you may want to tell somebody about yourself. And it cannot be easy to find people who speak your language. I do, more or less. Shall we go and sit over there out of the way? I promise I will listen to whatever you say." He handed her the plate of food. She took it, her eyes on his face, and after a miniature eternity said, "Yes, please, sir. I would be so glad if I could talk to somebody properly instead of struggling with English that I only half understand." Incredible, incredible! I'm holding a tete-a-tete conversation with the girl every susceptible male in the place is eyeing... How did it happen? Never mind! Enjoy, enjoy! He concentrated on the tale she was unfolding. She did indeed come from Brazil. The reason she spoke a language so close to his was that she was descended from a colony of German protestant fundamentalists who after World War I had decided they must cut themselves off from the fleshpots of wicked Europe and live a holy life in a new land. Hans's mind boggled at the realization that he was talking to a Christian. This was like being transported back in time! Refusing to accept cars, radios, telephones -- let alone the skelter -- with hand-axes and horse-ploughs they had built a flourishing little town a hundred miles from anywhere and called it Festeburg -- after a religious song, she explained. They traded produce locally and once or twice a year they loaded a boat with vegetables, cloth and handicrafts and rowed it downriver to a market town where they bartered for tools, nails, wire and other goods, mostly metal, which they could not manufacture themselves. Aside from that they had no contact with the larger world. She had been told by her grandfather how news of the # war reached the colony by word of mouth and the accident of a newspaper wrapped around a packet of seeds, and how the Predikant called everyone together for a day and a night and a day of nonstop prayer to avert God's wrath from his most faithful worshipers. The trick must have worked. At any rate, World War II passed and nothing changed in Festeburg, Prayer was less successful in the case of an epidemic which struck the community and killed Anneliese's mother. The girl's voice trembled . From her halting descriptions Hans deduced that the disease might have been influenza-M, third of the four deadly new strains hatched in the uplands of New Guinea which spread like wildfire after the introduction of the skelter. He didn't inquire too closely, though. He was too busy marveling at the chance that had brought him an emissary from a past he had imagined lost forever. Until only a couple of months ago this girl had lived in the pre-skelter age. In cultural terms she had been farther removed from the modern world than the Erikssons whose bodies he had disposed of earlier today. Or had it been yesterday? "What happened to bring you here?" he urged. Bit by reluctant bit, she explained. Somewhere in the Sertao a minor warlord had begun to carve out an empire in the usual manner. Among the places he coveted was the site of Festeburg. There had been a siege. Her father had been killed. Her older brother, then head of the family, had ordered her to take a canoe and paddle downriver in search of help. With unbelievable courage, considering she had never been farther from home than she could walk in half a day, she had obeyed. The first people she had come on were friends of Chaim Aleuker's cocking a snook at the dangers of modem South America by taking a camping vacation with the aid of a portable skelter. (Hans pursed his lips at that. A traveling skelter had to incorporate its own range-finding find a technician able to build you one.) Aleuker's people hauled her out of the river when her canoe sprang a leak after hitting a submerged snag, but they couldn't talk to her until Aleuker turned up. She said she thought it was a miracle when he stepped from the coffin-sized box in the middle of the campsite. She had literally never dreamed of a skelter before. But she thought it was even more miraculous when it turned out Aleuker spoke Yiddish and was able to communicate with her in a rudimentary fashion. She had been aware that other languages existed apart from the German dialect spoken at Festeburg, for the traders they dealt with spoke corrupt Portuguese, but girls were forbidden to talk to strangers. Having puzzled out her story, Chaim persuaded his companions to collect their guns and set off for Festeburg. When they arrived there, however, they found it burning, its inhabitants exterminated. Well -- too bad! Everyone in the group had business to attend to and their vacation was too near its close for them to bother about the departed warlord and his troops. So in sheer despair, shaking with terror, she had let Chaim lead her into the skelter and bring her here. In other words: to a place that, according to everything she had been brought up to believe, was a fair facsimile of hell. Interface J I am ashamed that I want to believe in judgment. Punishment turns my guts sour and I will not condemn. If I did l would be among the guiltiest of all.  am not. however, ashamed that those I would like to punish Are those whose crime is despoiling their fellow men And particularly little children of the rightful joy They should have from the existence of their bodies. -- Mustapha Sharif P erhaps it was unfair to Aleuker -- perhaps Hans was adding unjustified highlights to what the girl told him and in fact she was seeing rapists around every corner as a result of her appalling heritage -- but the impression was quite clear that when Aleuker discovered Anneliese wasn't minded to pile straight into bed and make wild jungle love he lost interest. One would assume that Aleuker had a normal appetite for women -- indeed, one had heard that because of his fame he had enjoyed far more of them than his proper share. Serious for a moment, Hans wondered what it would be like to be in Aleuker's shoes, welcomed as a father for the babies of women around the world. Those lucky potential mothers who had proved to Dany was not; and in consequence she had been compulsorily sterilized -- picked and chose their mates regardless of marriage, complying with constant and stern official warnings about letting the best of the gene pool go to waste. Once, three years ago, without informing Dany, Hans had advertised himself as a sire in one of the crudely printed contact journals (hat circulated from continent to continent. With so few people remaining it had seemed a shame that he, Hans Dykstra, should leave behind no child at all, whether or not he could bring it up personally. But the only girl who had answered had failed to show at the rendezvous he'd proposed in Canberra -- and he had felt so silly he had never repeated the experiment. He now put the memory once more out of his mind and composed himself to go on listening. Anneliese had clung to Aleuker purely because she hadn't known where else to go. Like most Christians she had been taught to believe that even the followers of heretic branches of her own faith were children of the Evil One and eternally damned, so finding herself in a world full of what she termed heathens, who drank liq uor, smoked, fornicated and bowed down to false gods, specifically to trees and animals, had come close to driving her out of her mind. Only the fact that she hadn't spoken to anybody for weeks -- bar a few sour exchanges with Aleuker und his servants -- had impelled her tonight to look in on the party, as she had been told to do. All the time she was talking her eyes kept darting from the sight of one abomination to another, and her cheeks remained pale as paper. When he had the chance, Hans demanded to know how old she was. She muttered, "Seventeen. Eighteen soon." At that age, to have seen her father killed, her home burned, all her friends slaughtered... Her story echoed an ancient nightmare of Hans's. He himself had been orand had watched his mother die screaming. Though he had been taken in by kindly foster parents instead of being dumped in one of the children's camps that were the breeding ground for twenty-firstcentury crime, his loss retained the power to wake him weeping in the night even now when he was well past thirty. Dany had never sympathized with him, only complained at having her own sleep disturbed. But he suspected that this girl might understand, instead of mocking a grown man for shedding tears. S uddenly, with no warning, came a loud noise. The conversation flowing merrily in and outside the hall snapped short like a dry stick trod on by a heavy foot. Somebody said into the silence that followed, "Hell, that was a gun -- " There was a concerted rush toward the sliding windows giving access to the patio -- followed instantly by a melee as those wanting to go out met those wanting desperately to come in. A confused sound of shouting rose. The guests pushed and milled and Anneliese laid her hand on Hans's, whispering, "Is something wrong?" He relished the touch of her fingers, so light, so warm, yet seeking. It was as though, through the touch, the essence of her fresh youthful body had permeated all his senses. The impact on him was like a drug. Rising, daring to lay his own hand on her soft hair in a gesture midway between a pat of reassurance and an overt caress, he said, "I'll ask somebody. Don't worry -- " But he was too late. Another sharp noise cleft the air and a whole panel of taller-than-man sliding windows shattered. Hans had an instant vision of scores of mouths standing ajar in astonishment. And then everybody between him and the outside dove flat to the tloor, giving him a clear sight of what lay beyond. At the mouth of the little cove overlooked by Aleuker's house a pair of small headlands bent to the sea, dark on dark but highlighted by the beams of a newly risen moon. Between them, as though targeted in the sight of a rifle, three clusters of bright red-yellow flame admired their own reflections in the water. The music had stopped. One could hear yells of savage anger. The wavering flames fell into place in Hans's mind. War canoes! H e had been vaguely aware for years that among the Maoris -- as among individuals of virtually every ethnic group that had contrived to preserve a precarious identity distinct from the otherwise allpervading culture of the Christian West -- there was a violent new cult dedicated to vengeance. Its membership was made up of relatively few unassimilated Maoris, however, though their ranks had been swelled by half-caste defectors from the white-biased culture of New Zealand. He had never expected that these malcontents would be the people to launch an attack -- and trap him in it. But then he had only been to New Zealand tw ice before. A long time seemed to pass, though it could only have been a few heartbeats, during which Hans felt his jaw hang foolishly loose, his gape matching that of everybody else in view. The moment of paralysis was ended this time by a barrage of shots and a scream that peaked to a treble -- though it began in baritone -- the voice of a man in mortal agony. The war canoes had reached the shore and the torches were heading for the house. Rhythmic chanting rang out, paced by the stamp of many feet. As though terror had endowed him with telescopic vision, Hans saw a score of nearly naked brown men, some clutching guns, others spears, with necklaces of human teeth around their necks. He listened as, at the top of his voice, Aleuker shouted, "Keep calm! I have machinegun posts -- " The words were cut short by the sewing-machine vibration of those guns, but the attackers had already achieved part of their goal. Three of the guests were coughing away their lifeblood on Aleuker's beautiful patio. Others were sobbing and moaning from minor injuries. And now the torches -- soaked in oil, no doubt -- were being put to their proper purpose. They arched through the air and landed on the roof of the house. "Sir, please -- what is happening?" Anneliese whimpered, clutching at Hans. He recovered his presence of mind with an effort, glanced down at her and in the same moment saw that the skelter was a mere five steps away. It wouldn't be more than a few seconds before someone else thought of making a run for it. "Come on!" he said sharply, dragging the girl to her feet. He pushed her furiously toward their way of escape. "But I don't want to -- " "Stay and you'll get killed -- " Hans forced her into the booth, his fingers automatically seeking the code for his home at Valletta. No time now to think of what Dany would say -- all that mattered was (light. Howls, shots, the crackle of flames taking hold, all vanished instantly -- And Anneliese screamed. Hans wanted to, as well. They were in his hallway. Facing the skelter, in the same chair where she had awaited his return from Sweden, as though she had arranged herself with care to be absolutely the first thing his eyes lit on -- Dany. Or rather, Dany's body. 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AX# # f ill m iiTCjilalft N.Y. ## (Please add #c foi shipping) The prisoner had lost his life, yet he was doomed to live it! O ften in the spring evenings I would stroll down to the Skipper's Marina in Dollar Bay and watch the bonded S.P. men working on their bosses' boats. I would chat with them as they scraped, painted and varnished, and try to discover what made them tick. In general they were a cheerful lot and it was rarely that a man would openly admit that he was dissatisfied, or that he wished he had never elected to be bonded. Indeed, it was not always obvious that an S.P. man was bonded -- for the rough work in the boat yards he wore coveralls with the letters S.P. front and back, just as did any other State Prisoner. Perhaps the most interesting of these characters was Charles, Doug Marshall's man. I would see him at work even on weekends, scraping the coming season while the Freemen and their chattering wives wandered about the slipway and the wharves, grotesque marine pets flopping at their heels. These weekends had become social events, each Freeman trying to outdo his fellow in hearty commendation of his own sleek boat, while the wives vied over such niceties as minipile cookers and autoflush heads. They would stand beside their boats, these Freemen would, patting them and stroking them like racehorse owners, meanwhile barking instructions at their bonded men. Even Carioca Jones appeared on occasion -- once she came wearing the slitheskin dress I had made for her the previous autumn and the emotion-sensitive skin turned a faint pink as our eyes met and we both thought of Joanna. Her young, smooth hands rose to her vulture's throat almost of their own accord, while her hard black eyes wrinkled in a smile. "I must say I'm surprised to see you here, Joe, knowing your views," she greeted me. "I like to look at the boats." "Yes, but all these -- people, darling. Aren't they simply terrible?" "No worse than anyone else, I guess," I said coldly, wishing she would move on. Carioca Jones was ostensibly a reformed character since the incident last year that had caused the entire Peninsula to ostracize her socially -- a bitter blow for the ex-#-V star. Predictably for a woman of her drive and personality, she had thrown herself into a round of social do-gooding by way of atonement and was expected to become the next president of the Foes of Bondage Association, which had been making its presence felt around the Peninsula recently. Unfortunately, anyone meeting her for the first time always commented on what beautiful hands she had for her age -- and somewhere in the squalid workshops of the State Prison an S.P. girl named Joanna was now stitching coveralls with steel fingers. One Friday afternoon in May I left the slithe farm in the capable hands of Dave Froehlich, my bonded man, and walked down to the Marina. By now the boats were in good shape -- most of the paintwork having been completed -- and the S.P. men were working on decks and below, polishing brass, overhauling e'ngines. About twenty hydrofoils stood in line on their insect legs, looking virile and rakish. Aione among the S.P. men, Charles was working on the outside hull of his boss's boat, lubricating the heavy rollers of the Eye. I walked over and greeted him. He looked up from his work. "Hi, Joe," he said. That was one of the things I liked about him. He was able to treat me as an equal and whenever I talked with him I forgot that he was a State Prisoner and I a Freeman. Unlike my foreman Dave, who will address me as "Mr. Sagar" no matter how often I tell him to use my Christian name. Dave is a good man, but he will go on hating me until his time is served. Nothing personal about it -- I just happen to be a Freeman. "When are you going to get her in the water?" I asked Charles. "About three weeks' time, I reckon." He stood, wiped his hands on his coveralls and gripped the huge steel loop of the Eye in both hands. He pulled, extending it on wellgreased runners until it projected some eight feet from the hull of the boat, a giant polished metal D. He grinned at me and tapped it with a small hammer -- it rang like a bell. Rumor had it that an Eye fractured in use down south somewhere last summer, although the accident was hushed up. A sling-glider must have complete confidence in his equipment. Satisfied, Charles gave the Eye a seemingly gentle push. Four hundred and twenty pounds of glittering steel-titanium alloy rolled smoothly back into the hull of the boat, the flat upright of the D -- the outermost part of the Eye -- fitting so snugly with the contours of the hull that the joining could hardly be seen. Charles turned his attention to the Whip, which lay on the slipway beside the boat and stretched to a small mooring buoy out in the water -- a total distance of some eighty yards. This year everyone had bought new Ultrafiber-X Whips -- they lay rigid across the surface in parallel green lines. "What do you think about, Charles?" I asked curiously. "When Doug's up in his glider and the Hook hits the Eye -- what thoughts occur to you?" He grinned, kneading grease into the attachment where the Whip joined the pilot's harness. "There's no time to think. I'm too busy pinning down the Whip, rolling out the Eye, trying to control the boat at the same time -- while I listen to some damfool observer panicking in the stern." I smiled, too. I had crewed for Doug Marshall as observer and had panicked when I thought the slingglider had gotten out of control. "But there's one thing I never think about." continued Charles. "You want me to say I worry about Doug's getting hurt, don't you?" "It must occur to you." "It doesn't. You'd have to be a glider pilot yourself to understand . I used to be a pilot a few years back. It's a new sport -- we've got a lot to learn -- but it's a great sport. Joe -- there's nothing like the thrill of being up there in that little glider that's hardly bigger than yourself -- at two hundred and fifty miles per hour." Charles stood over six feet, blond and weatherbeaten -- he looked the sling-glider type, though hardly the State Prisoner type. Doug Marshall had told me about that once. Charles had been sentenced for rape, of all things, after some incident on board his boat. I personally thought the whole thing sounded unlikely and obviously the judge had had his doubts, too -- Charles only got four years. He had applied for bonding -- which carries an automatic onethird sentence remission -- after he had served the six months compulsory. Doug Marshall had known him slightly in the past and had agreed to take him on. Charles was now bound by the terms of the onesided contract to serve his master faithfully and well to the utmost of his ability, until the death of either party or completion of his sentence -- whichever came sooner. The sling-glider pilot is entirely in his steersman's hands. I looked at Charles. Surely he must think something while Doug was in the air in that flimsy glider. For example -- he might think of Doug's dying. If that happened Charles' contract would be up and with it his sentence -- he would be a free man. A Freeman. For example -- he had to think of Doug's possibly being seriously injured. In which case Charles would, as ever, be required to serve Doug to the utmost. Which might mean the donation of an organ. Charles worked on impassively, talking technicalities as he checked and greased Doug Marshall's harness. I t is difficult to define an air of suppressed excitement. It can be observed most easily, perhaps, in the way people will suddenly address comparative strangers, asking their views on whatever is causing the furor. Such an air was in evidence at the Skipper's Marina during those last few weeks before the start of the sling-gliding season. Freemen talked of competitions and Freewomen spoke of the clothes they would wear at the President's Opening Scratch Trophy -- while at their feet, brought into unaccustomed proximity, land sharks fought German shepherds, pet octopi devoured micropekes. The sloping landscape of the long slipway was busy every day and crowded on weekends when the owners arrived to assist or berate their S.P. men, according to personality, Huge boats towered everywhere. Men scuttled underneath with paintbrushes and powertools, putting on finishing touches. I frequently dropped by on Sunday afternoons to assist Marshall. For a few hours I breathed sawdust and cellulose as we cleaned up the boat's interior -- then we drank beer with him and Charles in the dim cabin as slow nightfall came. Sometimes other boat owners would climb the ladder, hammer on the cabin roof and shout a greeting, then squeeze into the small cabin to share our beer and prolong the party past midnight. On the last Sunday before the season began Carioca Jones came again to the marina, spectacularly dressed, land shark flopping at her heels. The brute was growing fast -- by now he was over six feet long. Doug Marshall was bent double and sweating as he adjusted the shear-pin on one of the props, when the land shark undulated over to lie beside him and watch him coldly, stinking like a fishmarket. The implanted oxygenator caused its gills to pulsate unpleasantly. Doog caught sight of the fish suddenly, straightened and cracked his head on the keel. He had not liked Carioca Jones since the Joanna episode and now he exploded. "Get that bastard away from me before I put this drill through its skull!" He brandished his whirring powertool like a rapier. Carioca hurried over and laid a hand on her pet's collar. She was wearing slitheskin gloves -- products of my small factory -- and I noticed they had turned mauve in sympathy with her temper. "Wilberforce is quite harmless." She spoke coolly enough. "There's no call to lose your temper with him. Mr. Marshall. He wasn't doing anything wrong." "Wrong." Doug was massaging his scalp. "The swine nearly fractured my skull for me." "Come now, Mr. Marshall. A big brave sling pilot shouldn't be frightened of a mere land shark, should he now?" Doug recovered slightly, swallowed hard and spoke carefully. "Miss Jones, that fish is a menace. He's been allowed to grow too big. Look at those teeth. He could have your leg off without batting an eyelid. You ought to have him put down." "Put down?" Carioca's gloves were purple and trembling. Doug met her stare levelly. She looked elsewhere for a scapegoat and , as I was edging out of the scene, Charles descended the ladder from the cockpit and glanced at the protagonists with interest. He was wearing his State Prison coveralls. Carioca's gaze lit on the letters S.P. and her eyes flashed. "Oh, so you have a slave here doing your work for you." The abrupt change of subject foxed Doug. "What the hell's that got to do with it?" he asked, baffled. "Anyway, Charles is my bonded man." "Oh, a bonded man, is he? I might have guessed. No wonder you love sling-gliding. Who wouldn't, with a spare-parts man standing by?" Doug's eyes widened. He looked at Charles, who seemed to have been struck speechless. I couldn't think of much to say myself -- arrant bad taste has that effect on me. Fortunately help was at hand in the unlikely guise of the club secretary, who happened to be passing. He stepped in quickly. "Miss Jones, did I hear you rightly?" "Who are you, you strange little man?" Bryce Alcester, secretary of the Peninsula Sling-gliding Club, flushed. "I think I heard you use an expression we don't like around here. Miss Jones. Was I right? Did you use such an expression?" He was a small man with a face like a beaver, but he had reserves of determination. "Of course you don't like the expression, because it's true. How else can men like you summon the nerve to go up in those nasty little gliders?" "I must ask you to leave the premises, madam. I must also remind you that you are not a member." "And I must tell you that the Foes of Bondage will picket the President's Trophy next week. You haven't heard the last of this, not by a long way." Reluctantly, with Alcester's hand on her arm, she began to move away. Her eye caught mine. "Really, Joe, I can't think why you associate with such cowards." After seeing her off the premises Alcester hurried back to us. There was a tear in the leg of his pants where the land shark had taken a snap at him. "I'm terribly sorry, gentlemen." He looked at Charles, swallowed and said awkwardly, "And, uh, I would like to apologize to you, Charles, on behalf of the club." Charles smiled blandly. "I've been called names before." Later that evening as we drank beer in the cabin I asked Charles, "What does it really feel like to be called -- what Carioca called you?" I must have had several drinks by then. Charles grinned. "Always trying to pump me, aren't you, Joe? I often wonder if you're a revolutionary on the quiet, gathering information." "Maybe, but I'm not a Foe of Bondage." "But Carioca Jones is right, you know," he. said surprisingly. "I am a spare-parts man. I've wagered my body against a shorter sentence. I went into it with my eyes open and so far I've been lucky. I've still got all my limbs and other items. And I don't mind Doug's sling-gliding, because I've done it myself and I know the thrill of it. Now that's where Carioca Jones is wrong. I know that we would glide whether or not, uh, spare parts were available. Miss Jones doesn't know that. She can't. She's a woman." I addressed Doug, pushing it a bit further. "Doug, suppose you smashed yourself up and you needed, say, a leg. Would you use Charles? Or would you spend the rest of your life limbless, watching Charles walk about whole?" "The beer has brought honesty," said Doug quietly. "And I can say in honesty that I don't know. And it's one thing about myself I never want to know." II I n the last days before the first race I had become totally infected with the sling-gliding fever. Up to then I had had no intention of competing despite Doug Marshall's hints about the difficulty he was having in finding a competent observer. I spent most afternoons and every evening on the slipway, helping with the feverish lastminute preparations. Sling-gliding has this in common with any sport where complex equipment is used: no matter how careful the preparations, no matter how long ago such preparations started, there is always a panic at the finish. The Skipper's Marina had put its truck at the disposal of the club and the vehicle was in constant use, commuting between Louise and the marina with suddenly remembered necessities... Carioca Jones did not appear, although there were rumors from time to time of the form the picketing was going to take. Some said that the Foes of Bondage had hired a boat and intended to upset the racing by zigzagging across the course on the pretext that the sea was free to all. Then, a couple of days before the first race, they were seen with their banners and placards boarding a plane for Lake that some idiots were going to walk the glacial coast as far as Wall Bay, a distance of several hundred miles. There were three bonded men and a doctor in the party of ten -- it was reported that the doctor was taking a full set of surgical instruments along in case someone suffered severe frostbite. Not only that, but there were backup parties hovertrucking supplies to remote rendezvous where the terrain was too broken and the weather too severe to allow aircraft to get in. The personnel for this hazardous task had been hired from the State Prison. On the Thursday, under pressure from Doug, Charles and several beers, I agreed to join Doug's crew as observer. That evening I stayed late at the marina. I had -- later -- a hazy recollection of a party developing in the cramped space of somebody's cabin -- but first I awoke with a powerful headache and a desire to be sick, to find that I was lying on the floor in unfamiliar surroundings. I crawled to my feet, got as far as the door and poked my head out into the chill night air. After a few deep breaths I felt better. I glanced around the cabin and saw a sleeping girl, partly clothed, on one of the berths. Her mouth was hanging open and she was a mess -- lipstick all over her face, hair matted. Crumpled around her throat was a slitheskin neckerchief, its dull brown hue testifying the extent to which she was drained of emotion. I hoped it wasn't I who had drained her and thought briefly of Charles and his rape case -- and of how easy it is to transgress the law these days. I shut the cabin door quietly behind me and stood in the cockpit of the beached hydrofoil, allowing the night breezes to cool my head. I felt sweaty and stale. It occurred to me that technically I was trespassing by being in the Skipper's Marina after the club was closed and without having a sleep-in permit. Since the shortage of State Prisoners -- which hit the country last autumn -- there has been a tightening up in various facets of the law and I'm not sure that trespass isn't one of them. I stepped over the cockpit coaming, found the ladder and climbed quietly down to the slipway. The next thing I did was to trip over the Whip of the unknown boat and fall flat and noisily on my face. Whips are of incredible lightness and rigidity, particularly this season's improved models. The end of this particular Whip must have been balanced on a box -- anyway, it followed me to the ground with a ringing clatter that set up a sympathetic resonance throughout its entire eighty-yard length, causing it to protest with a wail that must have come close to awakening the very fossils under the sedimentary mud of which the Peninsula is composed. As I lay there trying not to vomit a scurrying, rustling noise came nearby and the hair at the nape of my neck prickled. The brute who made that noise could have been anything -- Carioca Jones' appalling land shark was quite innocuous compared with some of the bizarre pets I had seen that spring. It was becoming unsafe to leave one's car or house at night, since many of the creatures, unsuited to human company, had escaped and were roaming the flat countryside, fighting one another and attacking man on sight. I lay still and waited. The sounds continued: an uneven series of footsteps -- or some sort of steps -- an occasional clatter of a can of paint or similar slipway debris being knocked over and a vocal gasping noise I tried to tell myself was human. Encouragingly, the sounds began retreating and soon they faded away. I heard the distant whine of a hovercar starting up -- then that too receded and all was quiet again. Obviously there had been a trespasser among the boats. In the morning someone would find his paintwork scored or his rudder pintles loosened. That sort of thing annoys me -- I just can't see the sense in it. I wished I'd had the courage to tackle the intruder. Twenty minutes later I was driving through my farm gates. I got out of the car and listened. Everything seemed to be in order; the reptiles were uttering that bubbling sound that characterizes the contented slithe. Relieved, I made for the house. Recently I've been having trouble again with otters getting into the pens and carrying off the slithes and I had mentioned to Dave the necessity for strengthening our defenses. Increasingly there are dangerous predators at large on the Peninsula. T he following morning Dave and I made a tour of inspection. The little reptiles were in good shape, trotting about with a faintly red tone to their skins, the shade that denotes happiness and, presumably, health. As we threw the fodder over the chicken wire the slithes scurried forward, turning pink with pleasure and feeding voraciously. Dave gave one of his rare grins. Then, noticing me testing the strength of the chicken wire with my foot, his manner assumed its accustomed seriousness. "I heard a rumor yesterday," he said. "Someone saw a garden barracuda loose over Long Beach way. This guy was walking along the nature trail at the back of the lagoon there and the bastard came for him straight out of the bushes, all snapping teeth -- you know what they're like. It's getting serious. There are things running wild all over the place." "I was thinking about that last night. Perhaps you'd get one of the men to double the wire. It's a good thing the brutes can't live long." He glanced at me. "You haven't heard about the new oxygenator they've been implanting recently? It doesn't have to be renewed. They say it stimulates the gills into a modified operation. They do a bit of surgery on the beast as well, and then the fish or whatever is totally adapted to living on land for the rest of its life." "I don't like the sound of that," I said. The possibilities this development opened up were somewhat alarming. At this moment a car drove up and saved me further anxiety on the subject. "Hi, Joe darling." Carioca Jones. "I thought you were up in the snow somewhere," I said tactlessly. "Joe, it was the most idiotic hoax! Someone sent me a transcription of a Newspockct report up at the most heartrending thing. Dozens of poor S.P. men are supposedly being used as nothing better than pack animals. And there were some bonded men with the actual party, going across the glaciers -- you know what frostbite is -- and they had a surgeon with them as well. My dear, the report was positively sinister. I mean, you know and I know that I've learned my lesson and we both think these transplants are abominable. Barbaric." "Yes," I said carefully, not looking at her hands. "And when we got there with all our banners and placards nothing was happening! We marched down the street singing and everyone looked at us as though we were mad. And it was so cold -- you've no idea! So we booked into the nearest hotel and I went to the local Newspocket agency -- and do you know, they'd never even heard of the Great Arctic Trek, as it was supposed to be called." "You must have been very disappointed." She shot me a glance of birdlike suspicion but apparently my expression satisfied her. "Quite -- and it was dreadfully embarrassing. We hadn't really allowed for the cold there. Some of my girls were frostbitten quite badly. They were very upset and four of them resigned from the Foes for good." I nearly asked her just how badly those four had been hurt and whether, if surgery had been necessary, they had contacted the nearest State Prison. As Foes of Bondage, it was hardly likely they would have bonded S.P. girls. So if fingers were needed they would have to take their chances with the Ambulatory Organ Pool -- a euphemism for long-term prisoners first on the list of compulsory donors. I nearly asked her, but I didn't. Instead I asked, "Are men allowed to join the Foes?" "Of course," she said firmly. "Whyever not?" "I just wondered. The members all seem to be women." "Oh, but that's the way it works out, my dear. You see, it's men who go in for these dangerous sports -- it's men who get smashed up and need transplants -- so naturally men will support the status quo." "Pardon me, Carioca, but that's garbage. Only a fraction of the male population can afford to sling-glide or tramp through the Arctic." "You men all stick together -- that's the trouble. Look at you, Joe. You admit you're against legalized slavery, yet you've got your own bonded man and you're friendly with lice like Marshall who risk someone else's neck for fun. You wouldn't join the Foes of Bondage if I begged you to, so I won't bother." J ust for the record, at this point I gave Carioca something from the depths of my soul, if I have one. "Dave Froehlich is a good man whom I rescued from that stinking prison -- and I get no thanks from Dave. I'm friendly with Marshall because I enjoy his personality and to hell with his views -- even if his views were unsound, which I doubt, I won't join the Foes because I'd be the only man there and people would look on me as a crank, added to which I don't agree with the Foes' methods. Regardless of whether or not the members are women, they are exactly the type of person I don't like. Your members get a vicarious personal satisfaction from the annoyance they cause others. Their methods are wrong, in that they think it right to counter problems with problems." Carioca Jones' mouth had fallen agape. When I finished she hitched it up, thought a bit, then said, "You take the whole thing too seriously, Joe. The Foes are a club, that's all. A woman's club, if you will. This talk is nonsense. When we demonstrate we just think what fun it is to be doing it together. If it helps you any, Joe, I don't think the members consider the objects of the Association as deeply as you seem to do." "Then we need a new Association. Damn it, Carioca, they shout obscenities at people." "Well, isn't it fun to have the chance to shout obscenities at people without fear of any comeback?" I nearly lost my temper -- and a good customer. "I've never felt any desire to shout obscenities at people. That's the mentality of a teenage vandal." She took my arm suddenly. "Oh, come on, Joe. Let's not quarrel. I came to do business with you. You and I are on the same side, basically. It's people like your friend Marshall I don't like. It was he who faked the Newspocket transcript, of course." "Oh, come off it, Carioca." "No, I mean it. It's typical of his sense of humor. And I can tell you, Lake for a person of my age, Joe." It was the first time I'd ever heard her mention her age. I changed the subject hastily. "You said you came to do business." "Of course -- you must be busy." Her manner had become stiff. "I'd like to buy four dozen slitheskin wristlets, please." "Four dozen?" "They're for the Foes of Bondage. We shall wear them at the demonstration tomorrow and they will show the solidarity of our feelings." I had a mental image of four dozen Foes with fists upraised but with wristlets unfortunately showing colors of rainbow diversity. "Do you think it's wise?" I ventured. "Look, Joe Sagar, do you want the business or don't you?" Resignedly I took her into the showroom. While she was selecting the wristlets she persisted in asking about Charles, his crime, his sentence. She seemed to be trying to work up a feeling of pity for the man. II although the President's trojf.phy is the first event of the season and tends to be looked on as a mere hors d'oeuvre to the main course of races later in the summer, it is nevertheless an event worth winning. The psychological boost to the vistor will frequently start a winning vein in subsequent weeks that can be worth a good deal of prize money. And more than any other sport, sling-gliding depends on confidence. Confidence in one's glider, one's Whip, one's boat, one's observer and steersman -- all of which comes with practice, but which is proved and improved by winning. Traditionally, the main body of spectators gathers along the ancient stone sea wall that was one of the few human artifacts on the Peninsula to escape total destruction by the tidal waves of the Western Seaboard Slide. Here gather the curious, the casual, the enthusiasts -- and the Foes of Bondage. Out across the bay, a half-mile distant, the gaunt pillar of the Fulcrum rises from the calm water. The Foes had already picketed the entrance to the marina, screaming their epithets at the hovercars as they arrived with pilots, crews and maintenance men. On stepping from my own vehicle I had been surprised when a woman I hardly knew thrust herself before me and referred to my slithe farm as a "plantation." This was the latest dirty word unearthed by the Foes and apparently referred to some early phase of man's relationship with his fellows. When I replied, rather weakly, that I didn't plant anything at the farm -- if the growing of crops was what she objected to -- she merely uttered a jeering noise and called me a "boss man." Then Carioca Jones appeared. "My God, Joe," she shrilled. "Do you mean to tell me you're actually taking part in this pantomime?" Fortunately the press of the crowd had taken her away from me at this point, so I was spared the embarrassment of conversation. The President's Trophy is a distanceplacement event and not strictly a race because the time factor does not enter the judges' calculations -- although the very fact of the high speeds attained during sling-gliding tend to cause the general public to refer to any event as a race. In this particular event the glider flies to a point out in the Strait, drops a marker and returns, the pilot endeavoring to land at a point as close as possible to the sea wall. A buoy, just offshore from the spectators, indicates the optimum. It is this finish close to the crowd -- allied to the fact of its being the first event of the season -- that gives the race its enormous popularity. By the time the boats were cruising about, testipg their engines, the Foes of Bondage had positioned themselves at a point near the northern end of the sea wall, close to the marina. From time to time their president, an elderly woman -- and, I supposed, the woman Carioca Jones hoped to supplant -- whipped them into a frenzy with a few well-turned phrases. She had an imposing, almost puritanical presence that lent weight to her oracular delivery. From my position at the end of the slipway I couldn't hear her words, but judging from the cheers of her supporters it was all good stuff. From time to time the Foes' fists would curve forward and upward in a fair and feminine imitation of a right uppercut -- symbol of the Association -- but the wristlets remained neutral brown. You can't fool slitheskin. Maybe the colors would come later, when the racing started. In the distance a hydrofoil was racing toward the Fulcrum. The crowd was still. Behind the boat a tiny glider rose into the sky. It was too far away for us to see the Whip as the boat snapped around the Fulcrum, but we could judge the fearsome acceleration as the little dart was flung low above the water at a speed around two hundred and fifty miles per hour. For an instant we lost it against the trees of the dark island opposite, then it slipped into view above the strait. There was a murmur as those with binoculars saw the marker buoy drop away as the glider turned to make its approach. The distance of this buoy from the Fulcrum was taken into account in the final placings, encouraging pilots to go for speed and distance instead of merely stalling slowly in for an accurate landing. Archer was gliding and he had squeezed a little too much distance from his speed. He was coming in fast and low after a wide turn and it was apparent he would not make the finishing buoy. Skimming the sea so close I'll swear he raised ripples on the calm surface, he used his last breath of flying speed in a shallow climb, then stalled and dropped into the water about two hundred yards away. The spectators clapped politely as he struggled clear of his harness and trod water waiting to be picked up. The Foes of Bondage were silent, watching. Their wristlets remained neutral to a woman -- neither showing the purple of engaged distaste nor the pink of pleasure. I assumed they had done their homework and discovered that Archer had no bonded S.P. man. I caught sight of Carioca Jones at the instant she glanced at me -- and suddenly I knew that the Foes' rancor was being reserved for our boat and Doug Marshall in particular. M arshall was gliding, Charles was steering and I was observing, sitting in the stern and watching for trouble, Charles' attention naturally being concentrated on the Fulcrum ahead. I stole a quick glance over my shoulder and saw the black post rising solitary out of the flat sea about half a mile ahead. I looked back and Marshall was waving. "Right!" I shouted to Charles. He gunned the motor. The Whip took the strain and rose dripping from the water with hardly a sag in its rigid length. A feather of foam appeared at Marshall's skis as he began to move, rising upright with the glider attached to his back like a bright vampire. The boat rose on its foils and the last of the roiling wake fled abruptly astern to be replaced by twin hissing threads of spray. Marshall began to experience lift and kicked off the skis, raising his hands to grip the controls in the nose of the glider. He drew up his legs, jacknifing and thrusting them back into the slender fuselage. He was flying, the Whip attached to his chest harness with a snap-fastening. He sailed easily behind us at about fifty miles per hour, lying face down within the belly of the tiny dart-shaped glider. I suppressed a shudder -- the takeoff always affects me like that, ever since Patterson's mistake last season. Patterson had grasped the controls clumsily -- so we assumed afterward. Anyway, his glider had plunged down suddenly, the Whip had smashed through the nose, jamming. Then the angle of the Whip to the glider had taken it down through the water, deeper, deeper... I think the most terrifying thing was watching the Whip shortening, shortening despite the deceleration of the boat, as the glider and Patterson dove uncontrollably into the black pressure of the deeps. He must have descended over fifty feet in about eight seconds. A sight not easily forgotten. But Marshall was safely aloft and veering out toward our starboard beam, ready to take advantage of the initial effect of the Fulcrum post. He had banked and I could see him grinning at us, grinning with exhilaration, a six-foot man in a ten-foot glider. At moments like this the oddest notions come to the front of one's racing stream of thoughts. Suddenly I was thinking of Thursday night on the slipway and of the fact that Doug Marshall seemed to be a target of the Foes of Bondage, who earlier than expected. Charles hit the water brake for just the instant necessary to swing Doug directly abeam and, at precisely the right moment, leaned across to the Whip bracket... And slipped the pin easily into its housing, locking the Whip at right angles to the boat. He eased the throttle away and we leaped forward again, the glider riveted to a parallel course eighty yards from our port beam and matching our speed of about ninety miles per hour. I exhaled a gasp of relief which was lost in the scream of the turbines. Just for a moment the thought of sabotage had crossed my mind. "Coming up!" shouted Charles. I glanced around quickly and saw the Fulcrum post racing nearer, the giant Hook jutting out black and solid toward us. In June of last year, I think it was, Bennett had misjudged the clearance and run into the Hook... Charles thumbed a button and the Eye slid out from the reinforced portside of the hull. The craft listed as the huge steel loop extended and I made the conventional sign to Marshall -- the # of finger and thumb. He dipped in acknowledgment. "Brace yourself!" shouted the bonded man. He leaned into the padded pillar to the right of the wheel. I huddled into the seat, cushioning my head in my hands. The Hook engaged the Eye. I probably screamed a little as the G's hit me -- I'm told I usually do. The Hook engaged the Eye -- and snatched the hydrofoil, by now traveling at around a hundred and twenty miles per hour, into a thirtyyard radius turn. Around about this time I never know what's happening -- I just cower there and wait for it to finish. I've seen it from a distance, of course, and it looks quite simple. The pilot has taken his glider to a station off the starboard of the boat, so that when the Hook engages the Eye, the boat veers sharply away. Despite its rigidity, the Whip bends. The glider begins to accelerate as the centrifugal force allied to the incredible strength of the Whip takes effect. I've seen boats circle the Fulcrum post on the swiveling Hook so fast that the Whip spirals like a watchspring, the glider lagging behind at First but accelerating, accelerating until the Whip finally snaps straight and flings the glider outward at speeds of up to three hundred miles per hour. A glider ten feet long with a wingspan of perhaps seven feet, made of stressed permaplast... There is a certain margin for error. If the observer senses that the glider is not in the correct position, that the pilot is not quite ready, he can tell the steersman to abort at any distance up to forty yards from the Fulcrum and the boat will veer right, slowing, while the pilot detaches the Whip from his harness, closes in and, stalling, drops into the water alongside. This is the textbook procedure, although I've seen teams take a wide, wide circle and approach the Hook again without dropping the glider. As the G's forced my head into the backrest of the seat I again sensed something was wrong. I opened my eyes, saw the dizzy blur of water racing past, the gaunt blackness of the Fulcrum post partly obscuring the view. Then, climbing rapidly against the sky, the glider. The Whip spiraled back from Marshall, beyond my field of vision. I could see him fumbling one-handed with the release mechanism. The glider lagged back, dropped out of view as the Whip curled. Marshall's snap fastening had jammed. He could not break clear of the Whip. Shortly all that coiled energy would be spent in smashing him into the sea -- or whirling him and his glider into broken pieces vertically overhead... O nce, and once only, I saw a man make a perfect landing on the surface with the Whip still attached to his jammed fastening -- yet that man died, too. Farrel. We watched from the shore as the Eye hit the Hook and the boat snapped into its turn at exceptionally high speed -- the occasion was the finals of the National Distance Championships. The Whip coiled into a venomous high-tensile spring which reminds the overly imaginative of a striking cobra. Farrel had gone into his slow climb and was accelerating as the boat slowed at the post and the Whip began to straighten. Farrel's wife was watching through binoculars and I heard her gasp suddenly -- a sudden gasp that was almost a scream. I remember the expression on the face of Farrel's bonded man -- who was standing next to Mrs. Farrel -- as he snatched the glasses from her and clamped them to his eyes. Mrs. Farrel turned to me. Her face was twisted and she was only able to utter one word -- but it was probably the only word applicable to the situation. "Why?" she asked. And the boat had slowly descended from its hydrofoils and was wallowing around the Fulcrum, while the Whip spent its venom in hurling Farrel into a speed of three hundred miles per hour. He had stopped trying to fight the release mechanism now and was concentrating on his attitude, maintaining level flight as the Whip straightened and began to slow. At this point the other spectators had realized something was wrong. Sometimes a foolhardy pilot will delay release until the very last instant of acceleration, taking chances on the control problems that arise with a dying Whip. But Farrel had gone past even that point. There was a slow murmur of communal horror. There were also a few anticipatory chuckles from S.P. men standing near. Except for Farrel's man, of course -- he stood like a statue, binoculars jammed against his face. The Whip slowed -- although we couldn't tell from where we stood, the Whip must have been slowing -- but still Farrel retained control, retained his horizontal attitude. He was rapidly losing lift due to the draggfng effect of the Whip at his chest, but he avoided overcorrecting and plunging into the sea and he avoided the disastrous stall that would have started an end-over-end spin and a breakup of the glider. He was giving a masterly exhibition. And it was ail pointless, of course. There were murmurs of appreciation from around us and I think some people really thought Farre! was going to get away with it. But they didn't know sling-gliding the way the rest of us did. You never escape from a jammed fastening. Farrel was decelerating visibly now, edging closer to the water, extricating his legs from the slender fuselage and dangling them, soles upturned, like a swan coming in to land. An S.P. man chuckled, watching the Whip. There was a communal sigh as Farrel touched the water and his speed fell to zero. He flipped the nose of the glider up in a lastminute stall. I think, even then, he felt he could avoid the inevitable if he could get the drag of the glider's surface area against the water in addition to his own weight. He didn't make it. He was probably up to his waist in water when the Whip reacted. The deceleration had coiled it backward, building up a reverse tension which now exploded in snatching Farrel from the water and dragging him backward, end over end in the scattering remnants of his glider, spinning along the surface in a curved, frantic plume of spray... The Whip waved to and fro a few times, gradually losing momentum, until at last it lay quiet and twitching on the surface and the boat was able to cast loose from the Hook and pick up Farrel. His neck was broken -- his back and legs were broken. Hardly a bone in his body had escaped fracture -- hardly an organ was not ruptured. It might have been possible to do something about all that. But Farrel was dead, too. It had taken just a few seconds. I remember the look on the face of the bonded man when they brought the body ashore. Absolved of all his obligations, his past crime, whatever it was, atoned for -- released from his bond by the death of his principal, he was now a free man. He turned silently away from the drenched and broken thing they had laid on the sea wall and he walked off, saying nothing. T hen Farrel, now Marshall. Pressed hard against the latex headrest, I watched helplessly as the Whip straightened, preparatory to coiling in the reverse direction, while Marshall stayed high in the sky, transfixed by the tip. I rolled my head against the force that held it and saw Charles fighting his way clear of the G-post. His eyes were wide and dead as they met mine -- I knew he was going to try something desperate, but his motives were anybody's guess. He edged clear of the post and centrifugal force snatched him instantly from my view. All this happened so quickly that I had every excuse for doing nothing -- in any case, there was no way I could have gotten clear of the seat. Then the boat was slowing. The landscape ceased its crazy spin. The Fulcrum post became a solid object of iron and rust and rivets. As is the way of boats built for speed, ours stopped quickly. I stood up, my head reeling. Marshall was clear, gliding landward, trailing the Whip behind him, the broken end hanging a short distance above the surface. I satisfied myself that he was descending quickly enough to avoid a stall -- the Whip in total length is no aid to a smooth landing -- and turned my attention to Charles. He was floundering in the water some twenty feet off the port bow. I grabbed the wheel, revved the engine and slipped it into reverse, backed clear of the Hook, retracted the Eye and motored toward him. I got my hands under his armpits and dragged him aboard. He was a big man, strong and heavy, but he was unable to help himself or me. "Where's Doug?" he asked faintly. "Almost down. He'll be okay." I glanced at the rig that fastened the Whip to the boat. The steel tubing was bent -- the Whip itself had snapped off short where Charles' flying body had smashed into the swivel joint. It was one of those occasions where the last thing you want to do is to consider the implications. I pillowed Charles' head on a lifejacket and spun the wheel, heading for shore. Marshall was traveling parallel to the sea wall now, diving to maintain speed and at the same time lose height before the trailing end of the Whip began to drag in the water and the abrupt deceleration began. Gauging the point of impact, I drove the boat on at full throttle. Less than a minute later I was pulling Marshall from the water and extricating him from his harcluster of small boats. I pulled in against the sea wall and we carried Charles to the shore, laying him on the grass while someone ran to call the ambulopter. Almost instantly, it seemed, the Foes of Bondage were standing over us in force and I shuddered involuntarily because I'll swear there was something akin to predatory satisfaction in their eyes as they looked at the broken figure of Charles, his soaked lifejacket oozing crimson. But he was alive. T wo women were to the fore -- the president of the Foes, and Carioca Jones. Carioca was the first to speak. Sho indicated Marshall, who was bending over Charles lifting a bottle to the injured man's lips. "That's the man I told you about, Evadne," the ex-#-V star said in a voice sufficiently loud for us all to hear. "He's the prankster who tried to get us all out of the way so that we couldn't spoil his fun. Well, you big brave man," she addressed Doug, "how do you feel now? Your man saved you -- and we all know why. And now, look at him, poor thing." There was a murmur of agreement from the Foes and I believe someone tried to start up a chant, but some remnants of decency prevailed. Not to be outdone by Carioca, the elderly Evadne said her piece. "It is a terrible comment on our society when a man will, quite deliberately, risk his life to save another." Fortunately there was a diversion at this juncture. A man stepped forward and touched Doug on the shoulder. He was carrying the harness that had been cut away from the glider. He indicated the snap release. "Look, like you said, Doug. Someone's been fooling with this. The release pin's been bent. You can see the marks of pliers." The crowd had gathered itself without conscious volition into two distinct factions around the bleeding man on the sea wall. To the landward side were the Foes of Bondage, an unyielding bloc of womanhood, upright and militant. Along the edge of the embankmend, backs to the sea, were the pilots, their crews and supporters, who up to now had been quietly on the defensive. The mechanic's words changed this. Doug left Charles and stood, flushing. An angry muttering spread through the ranks of the pilots. The Foes backed off guiltily. "I can assure you all -- " began the president, hands fluttering, wristlet yellowing. Carioca took one glance at her fading leader and knew her opportunity had come. She stepped forward boldly. "It's quite obviously a frameup. And clever, too. Done by one of your own pilots with the object of discrediting the Foes and, incidentally, getting a competitor out of the way. Your treasurer himself told me he heard someone prowling about the slipway on Thursday night." Her black eyes blazed at the elderly man, forcing a nervous nodding agreement. "So there you are. Only club members are familiar with the slipway and the gear you use. And only a slave-owner would think this way, knowing that a bonded man would risk injury himself rather than allow harm to come to his master." She bent forward over Charles. "You poor man," she said. "And you only had a year or so to go." Her voice hardened. "Couldn't you have taken the chance that the bastard would kill himself? You'd have been free, then." She moved back a little, a theatrical gesture to direct the attention to Charles and ensure that we all heard his reply -- so confident was Carioca Jones. Faintly, but growing louder, we could hear the hissing whine of the ambulopter. The Foes of Bondage wore righteous expressions as they contemplated their prize specimen, their raison d'etre, while he lay bleeding on the sea wall. Charles managed a smile. "I've been a Freeman since Thursday, Miss Jones." I t was fairly typical of Carioca Jones to have forgotten the factor of Charles' one-third remission in her enthusiasm for the witch hunt. The uproar that followed Charles' revelation lasted in various ways for several months and was discussed whenever sling-gliders met that summer. The arguments waxed furious but it was all rather pointless because, in fact, there were not many bonded men involved in sling-gliding. Many a pilot had the same fear as Doug Marshall -- if he were injured so seriously that he needed a transplant, what would he do? Better by far to be able to draw on the anonymity of the Ambulatory Organ Pool, which is not available to Freemen with their own bonded men. Nobody wants to take a limb from a person with whom he may be associated for years. Charles made a good recovery although it was feared at first that he had suffered irreparable damage to both kidneys. Luckily the original diagnosis proved false. In the strange, sometimes primitive atmosphere of the Peninsula issues are seldom clear-cut, and solutions or explanations almost never at hand. We never discovered just who had sabotaged Doug's equipment. Conversely, the Foes of Bondage failed to unmask the perhoax. There is a simple, neat possibility -- but one we consider highly improbable. Things just don't work out that way around here. Carioca Jones weathered the setback, of course. After the elderly Evadne resigned following the Charles incident she put her own name forward and was duly elected president of the Foes of Bondage. After a decent interval for things to quiet down she began to push herself and the Association forward as forcefully as ever. People don't change on the Peninsula. Their fortunes may fluctuate but their characters are inflexibly formed by the time they arrive here. ... on a racecourse where the prize was -- the right to be born! I t begins with me pulling away all the furniture Father shoved against the door the preceding night. He does it every night so he won't be able to get out and spill important secrets after he has had too much to drink. Father is a boozehound. And a genius. And a tortured soul. That description would serve for just about any of the nuts who have ever given something to the world and have received stones in return. The world is good at shortchanging. It's ungrateful. Or maybe it's simply confused, like Father. We live in a tower. It isn't ivory and it has no ivy growing on it. It's made of rough concrete blocks, is a hundred feet high and about seventy feet wide. Home. Father hates the world. Or himself. He loves me. After putting the furniture back in place, I opened the door and looked out. What was to see? Nothing. A hallway and the elevator Father used once in a blue moon, when he took the jeep and went over the hills into town to stock up on food or to replenish his booze supply. It was a hick town. I suppose father and I were hicks. The morning of my typical day didn't last long. I dusted the living room. I ate corn flakes. I turned the gas on under the lab beakers -- same thing every time I got up. A humdrum existence, Father said. Maybe so. It was all right with me. Lunch? I thought about it, looked at the clock. No, it wasn't time for lunch, which meant there was something I had forgotten to do. Schedules, schedules, what the hell did I leave out? Oh, yeah, I forgot to watch the races. Checked the clock. Wrong. It wasn't time for the races. Hmmm. Oh, sure, I didn't wash my face and brush my teeth. Did that. All finished. The phone rang. "Hello." "Hello. Hello?" "Hello." "Is that you. Doctor Dakis?" "No, it ain't." "Doctor? This is the University calling. Will you speak louder, please? I can't -- " "Every damned day of the week, you call. Same time, same place. Every damned day we go through the same spiel. I'm here, you're there, but there's simply no communicating between us. I know you. Miss Fat Rearend. Father told me your name. Miss Fat Rearend, will you please kiss my -- " "Hello. Doctor Dakis?" She finally gave up and hung up. "Get the hell off the phone!" Father roared from his bedroom. "I'm off." He didn't come out, turned over so hard the bed whacked the floor. In another minute I heard him snoring. It started raining. I hung out the window in the north side of the tower and watched the silver needles fall from the sky. God, I loved rain. I spat down the tower, watched it mingle with the clean washing from heaven, saw it disappear, wished the world would renew its acquaintance with Father so his misery would go away like my spit. I'm eight years old. The phone rang. "Hello." "Doctor Dakis?" "Hi, Miss Fat Rearend. No, we ain't got no eggs for you today. And we ain't got no sperm, neither." "Doctor Dakis?" I screamed in her ear and she hung up. "Get the hell off the phone!" Father roared from his bedroom. He turned over and went back to sleep. H e got up at noon and we had lunch together. "Make me eat it," he said to me. His head dangled over his plate as if it had a broken connection. I spooned some egg into his mouth. He grabbed his cup of coffee and gulped. I stuffed toast through his teeth. Again he gulped coffee. I held a strip of bacon and he nibbled that. I made him eat two eggs, three strips of bacon and two slices of toast. After he finished he wiped his mouth, belched, looked sick, got up and stumbled into the bathroom. "Get the hell out," he growled -- slammed the door in my face A bell rang somewhere. I ran to the open window, looked down. A blue truck was parked in the front yard and the driver was pounding on the door. "What you want?" I said. He backed away from the door, looked up, saw me and waved an envelope. "Can't you rfead?" I said. "Put it in the basket and I'll pull it up." He kept waving the envelope. I hung on the windowsill and watched him grow agitated. Finally he saw the basket, threw the envelope into it, gave me a severe glare and took his truck away. The cable was from Germany. This time the zoo offered fifty thousand for the aphrodisiac. "Who have you been talking to?" I said to Father as he came out of the bathroom. "I thought you didn't want anybody to know about the aphrodisiac." He kicked a clothes hamper out of his way and hunted on a bureau top for a comb. He combed his hair, his most beautiful feature. It was long and white and wavy. His skin was almost as white as his hair, which was why he made me coax him to eat. His health was poor. I think if it wasn't for me he would have been dead long ago. He combed his hair and smacked his lips, rubbed them with a trembly hand, looked at me with big sorrowful eyes. What he wanted was a stiff belt. What he expected me to bring him was a beer. What I got for him, out of the bureau, was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. With a shrug he took two and ate them, took two more and shoved them in his shirt pocket. He ate them before he got out the door. I had the box ready when he turned back. He had half a dozen. Fine. When he ate candy he didn't have beer and when he had no beer he didn't follow it up with whisky. Today he would do some work. Marvelous, that candy. Me, too. In the beginning. Father had no money and figured he would end on a farm, but he was too bright and went to school nights and eventually he got hooked on genetics. Or he hooked it. Everything he did was right. He took his Ph.D. and taught at the University. After a while he stopped teaching and did only research. Sex wasn't something people did, according to Father. Sex was a phenomenon, like life. Gender wasn't sex. Sex was mating but not the mating of male and female people. It was the mating of living organisms inside people. Father didn't have a better word for the two things that joined to make a baby. Or he didn't want to go to the bother of explaining it to me in technical terms. "Bugs" was good enough. A girl bug and a boy bug mated and the whys and wherefores were mysteries to nearly everybody except my dad. A girl bug was an ovum, or an egg, while a boy bug was a sperm, or a beak. Beaks pierced eggs and the rest was downhill coasting. Bugs were too selective to suit most geneticists. Why did they seem to want to mate only with their own species? Anyhow, once a beak pierced an egg, the egg either died or accommodated the invader. This was hazardous joining on the microscopic level. Father never seemed to rise beyond this level as far as his personal life was concerned. At least, I didn't think he was mating with anyone... How did I get on this subject? Father became famous when he invented the racecourse. We had one in the den. Plenty of people had them now. I t was a daily chore of mine to clean the racecourse after lunch. I dismantled it, ran a clean wire through it and put it back together again. It was a transparent tube with an incubator in its center and two little bubbles on the ends. The whole thing was about twenty-four inches long. As he watched me, Father said, "You take an egg -- you think she has no personality? That little girl is complete within herself, eats, eliminates, breathes, moves -- and damned if she doesn't have a purpose. That's to mate -- butter and bread to her. She loves it. Another thing, she kills her lover when she's done with him." I knew all that. He had told me many times. I knew the sperm, or beak, was suicidal and basically a rapist. He was sex-happy, had nothing else on his mind. He would mate or die -- in fact, he would kill himself in the attempt rather than leave off. Father said the beak screamed just before he died. Father was working on a miniature amplifier to pick up their sounds. Anyhow, the beak was stupid, or else he didn't expect to get eaten, just wanted what he wanted and to hell with the consequences. As for the egg, she had poor sensory equipment and recognized only sperm from her own species. Father wanted to study this phenomenon and find out why she would have nothing to do with certain sperm. He thought maybe it was their smell, or something simple like that. Often she turned down one of her own kind and took a total stranger -- of course, Father had given the stranger a squirt of his invention so she would notice him. Or smell him. Or whatever it was eggs did. It was best to talk about them as if they were men and women, because, actually, the bugs were the only true sexes in the world. They were male or female and no maybes about it. People were dumb. They thought they could jump in bed and that was all there was to it, but the bugs in their bodies were out to get together and nothing short of disaster or bad breath or body odor or whatever could stop them. The bugs didn't care about population control -- there was plenty of clean space in their worlds. People didn't realize there were life forms in their bodies that could destroy the planet. "I'm a male chauvinist pig," said Father. "I admit it. That's what half the peojple in this world call me. What it means is that I'm like the bugs inside me. I want what I want when I want it. I have no consideration. It's the same with women. They're female chauvinist pigs. If they can't get what they want they have a fit. They're larger extensions of the bugs inside them. If we all came up from the slime, we couldn't have been very big in those wet days. Still, who won the climb up the evolutionary ladder? Whose environment is polluted, hates each other?" Father tapped his fingers on the table top. "I keep asking myself the same damned question -- which came first, the chicken or the egg?" He stopped talking. He stared up at the ceiling perplexed, bruised of soul. I went on cleaning the racecourse. It was shaped like a female reproductive system. A sperm was ejected from a depository into one of the bubbles at the ends of the tube and an egg was ejected into the other bubble. Fluid carried them to the incubator where they were supposed to join. Sometimes they didn't. It depended upon how my dad was feeling. If he felt crabby or pensive, the sperm got a squirt of dad's invention -- the aphrodisiac -- and the joining was frenzied. If he felt sad or apprehensive the sperm got no treatment and the egg remained aloof and impenetrable. Squirting an egg produced no reaction. Father said the squirting muffled the sperm's undesirable qualities. What they were, he didn't know. He suspected the egg exuded a killer fluid that destroyed stranger sperm. He had better look, smell, taste or sound right or she would murder him before he did his duty. T he rendezvous in the incubator in Father's lab always involved an egg and a sperm from different species. Once, long before, I asked him why and he said, "Who wants to mate a duo of human bugs? I know fellows who do that all the time. Nate Farrell likes it. He's at the University. Teaches a couple of classes and spends his spare time complaining about the liberalized abortion laws. He claims the fetus is alive at conception. In the basement of his house he whiles away the time by creating human fetuses in a racecourse. He dumps them in the toilet when he's done." I watched a tiger and a lion run the race to the incubator. Of course they were really only bugs, but I knew where they had originated. Father could work wonders with dyes and gels. A little dab of colored gel on a sperm made him look pretty big, especially since the walls of the tube were made of magnifying glass. A yellow dot was a tiger sperm, a pink ball was a lion egg, et cetera. I had memorized them all. The mating of tiger and lion bugs wasn't at all difficult, so I knew Father was feeling sad that day. Such a mating could have taken place in a zoo between two real animals. Racecourse mating between tiger and lion bugs occurred ninety nine times out of a hundred. In a zoo, these animals rarely mated and getting a baby from them was more rare. I stood beside the table and watched the race. The course sat on a white table and was about at my eye level. The little yellow dot and the larger pink ball fell into the incubator, spied one another, had a tussle. The yellow dot stabbed hard, the pink ball squeezed him and gave him a thrill and then she opened and he fell in with a scream, after which she ate him. And I could have sworn I heard the scream. The phone rang a moment later and Father stomped out of the lab. He never answered the phone, but he wouldn't get rid of it and I knew why. When it rang the outside world spoke -- and Father needed to hear that sound. I answered it. "Hello." It was the same old thing. They couldn't hear me because of my speech impediment and all they wanted was to fleece my dad out of his formula. The University wanted him to come back to his professorship. Sometimes they offered him money for the formula, but not often, because they knew of the exorbitant offers he had received from abroad. I thought he couldn't keep a secret, believed he had blabbed to someone in town during one of his drunken excursions. His explanation was that they had figured it out for themselves. "They're idiots but they aren't morons," he said. "How can I send them a living dog-cat fetus in a box unless I know how to make the sperm bug acceptable? I tell them it was an accident. Sure. Then they beg me for more and I send them a sparrow-hamster fetus. It never ends. They bitch because the hybrids can't reproduce. Finally they conclude I'm doing something they can't do. Hell, I've always done that." Either he wasn't telling me all of the truth or he had simply forgotten. The moochers might have guessed he knew how to make stranger-sperm acceptable, but it wasn't coincidence when they called the formula an aphrodisiac. Dad had called it that because it amused him to do so. The formula didn't heighten the bugs' desire to mate. That was already at fever pitch. Dad must have blabbed, probably to the bartender in town, a University fink planted there to pick up information. I n the late afternoon Father took a nap and I read a book I had already read three times. It was about a distant-future Earth in which most life forms were integrated. The hero built a time-machine and traveled into the past to the twenty-first century when man was beginning to experiment with cross-breeding. The experimental subjects had survived mostly through the ignorance and errors of the experimenters. At first they were called freaks. They lived in communes and were subjected to persecutions. The hero of the book was so horrified by the hatred directed toward him by homo sapiens that he fled a few centuries into the future. There he found the situation less violent but nevertheless distressing. The freaks were still a minority but their customs and habits were threatening the overall structure of society. For instance, a morse (man-horse) married a mog (man-dog) and then they quarreled about the cuisine. Or a masnake married a mird and they quarreled about the sleeping and working hours. Within certain species it was customary for the male to care for the children -- when they married more conventional strangers the loving couples had fights after the babies came. In the meantime homo sapiens -- what was left of him -- was desperately trying to preserve his own traditions. At the end of the book the hero became disgusted with humanity and its myriad shapes and philosophies. He went home to the future, smashed his time-machine, sank his roots twenty feet into the ground, veiled his face with his weeping hair so the women would leave him alone and then he spent the next hundred years brooding. I enjoyed reading the book again. It helped me to understand Father better. He wasn't like the men who made bombs or deadly bacteria -- he was aware of his moral dilemma. Should he give the world the aphrodisiac or not? He drank because he was doubledamned and he hated the world because it always peered over his shoulder. I told him about the book while we ate supper. "Talk!" he said, as he eyed his plate with revulsion. "Remember how you used to do it when you were small? Try to recreate those sounds." I gabbed, chattered, ran at the mouth. I said there was always a hero somewhere, like in the book. If a holocaust was observed by a single objective eye, that holocaust hadn't occurred in vain. In other words, my dad should give up the aphrodisiac. The consequences would become mundane history. It wouldn't be the same as dumping a gallon of botulism in the East River. Fallout from a nuclear explosion was a compound fracture of the moral femur. Like a bomb, the aphrodisiac was a potential bonebreaker, but only because people were stiff-necked and unimaginative. "That isn't the way to talk!" said Father. A piece of lettuce disappeared between his teeth. "You know damned well you're doing it all under your breath. Nobody can hear you. You have every right to talk out loud. Use your larynx and your mind and your desire -- " when you break all your bottles." I understood. He worried about things like anti-abortion groups. We all had a big wide wonderful planet in which to botch things up. Another word for world was trialanderror. "Don't cry," I said. "You're like everybody you loathe. I love you. You care." "Come here." I shook my head. He ate a boiled potato. "Come here." "It isn't time. We have our family relationship after supper -- while we watch TV, when the tower is shut up like a grave and all the kibitzers out there have put you out of mind until another day." I ater we settled down in front of j the TV and he held me in his lap. "Whisper in my ear," he said. "As loud as you can. Break my eardrum." I watched the cowboys shoot up the town. And in the meantime I smelled my father. The hair on his chest tickled my nose. He stroked my legs, my back, my hair, he pinched my cheek, pressed his nose against mine and we stared into each other's eyes until mine crossed. He was clever, but he gave me his mind when he fathered me, lent me too much of his savvy. He stroked me to draw me to him, desired for us to have a meeting of souls. "I won't say I can't," I said. "I'll say I won't. Does that make sense?" "Don't let them hurt you. You can be anything you want." "I don't want to be anything. I just want to be." He took my chin between his big hands. "Say, 'ah.'" "Ah." "Not just with your mouth. Make the world hear." "Ah." "See my tears? Do you enjoy breaking your old dad's heart?" "You're a souse." "Say something to me out loud. Scream at me." "You ought to use a little soap and water to clean your ears. Christ, they're like caves of dirty gold." He squeezed me until my ribs crunched. I howled, but soundlessly. "One day we'll leave this goddamned tower," he said. "You think about that. We'll walk down the main street of New York City. Hand in hand. When they all come out and say, 'Doctor Dakis, you and your child are welcome in this world,' that's the day I'll hand them the aphrodisiac." He believed I was suffering. I was. Said I, "On the day you break your bottles -- that's the day I'll walk out of here with you. I'll go on TV, if you like. I'll yell through a microphone. Everybody from Guam to the Virgin Islands will hear me. Except we'll have to come back here to the tower every night. It isn't me who prevents my talking out loud. I do it for you. They don't hurt me that much. But you hurt me, all the days of my life. I won't talk because you drink. You drink because you're jealous." I laid my head on his shoulder. "Don't do that," he said. Couldn't be helped. Getting sleepy. Thumb in mouth. Suck, suck, it helped me to fantasize. Suck, suck. Father tried to hold me back. "I'll snuggle you all night, I'll keep you warm. I'll comfort you. Stay with me." Suck, suck. I dreamed -- halfway here, halfway in another world. One was as bad or as good as the other since both were safely remote. I soared in luxurious comfort. Away in the distance Father called to me. I knew why. He was an almost perfect person. His one fault was that he was intolerant. Someone called, and this time it was another. The voice was my imagination, or at least I thought it was. I never really asked. Father held me fast. I yanked away. I left him to his bottles that waited for him everywhere in the tower. Father, I can't help this thing. Maybe we both have a bridge to cross. Perhaps someday I'll stay with you at night, you'll break your bottles, we'll go outside again, I'll talk your head off, we'll grow up together. I love you. I opened the door at the end of the hall and closed it behind me. The big room was dark and silent, but not totally silent. The snakes in their cages watched me, warned me not to touch their screens. The guinea pigs thought it might be morning and whistled for breakfast, the dogs whimpered as nightmares threatened, the baboon cursed me for trailing my hand across his bars. Stopping beside the last cage, I took off my clothes, opened the door, quietly slipped inside and walked to the cot in the corner. Her arms lifted and I fell into them as a sinner enters heaven: with exhausted happiness. Deep into her hairy bosom I nestled. We kissed, kissed, kissed. She licked my face, fumbled over my hairless body for nonexistent fleas. Carefully she squeezed, lest she destroy me. I lay with my cheek against my mother's breast, felt her powerful arms tighten around me and I let the world go to hell while I slept.  B efore I review, let me preview. Something really exciting and important has happened and here's the back story: A lot of years ago -- it was in the '#s -- I attended a science fiction writers' conference at Milford, Pa. I remember that Judy Merill was there. Fred Pohl, Damon Knight and an up-and-comer named Ellison. One evening we were sitting on the lawn around a tape recorder (I wonder what happened to that tape?) pursuing some writers' technicality when I looked around that circle of faces and interrupted with "Hey. How come we're all white?" I remember well the startled look that appeared on all those white faces. I don't recall the ensuing discussion, except that everyone was appalled and concerned. Science fiction people exhibit all spots on the spectrum of political conviction, but it is safe to say categorically that no group anywhere cares less about race. (I recall an introduction to one of Don Ward's anthologies written, I think, by Orson Welles, titled: Can a Martian Help It If He's Colored Green?) And one of the Worldcons, in the days before Martin Luther King, was moved to an alternate city when the first-choice hotel turned out to be "white only." Science fiction people as a class are interested in far more sweeping concerns than prejudice, which by its nature demands a narrow head. Nevertheless, attendance at any con of any size -- or a writing course or a science fiction club meeting will show a statistically negligible quantum of black. There are so few black writers in the medium that "none" is a close approximation -- there are no black editors or publishers, very few black fans. How many black fanpubs there are I really don't know, but I bet you could cover their postage by shaking, not breaking, your piggybank. On a speaking trip last year I brought a recorder with me and corralled every writer I could find -- or find time for -- and sat him down for an interview. After a couple of lulling questions like Why do you write sf -- you're good enough to write anything... I threw this knobby one at them: How come we're all white? The answers I got are pretty fascinating and I'll have more to say about them some other time. Well, the other day Roger Elwood called me with yet another plea for another story for another anthology. I have already gone on record to say that I have developed mixed feelings about this tireless editor's impact on the field, for while he has caused some large publishers -- and more than a few small ones -- to publish science fiction, though they have never done so before (which is good for us all), he has also produced so many anthologies in such a short time that he threatens to corner the market, saturating the buyers' ability to buy and other editors' ability to sell. And I do not want my Silverberg or Disch or Carr or Knight or Harrison threatened. Therefore I have, of recent months, respectfully declined his requests -- respectfully and regretfully, too, because he does turn out some good ones. In this instance, however, when I chattily mentioned this preoccupation of mine and mentioned the tapes I have, he rose to bait like a speckled trout in Wormsville, hung up, checked with a publisher and called me back. How about an anthology of sf stories by and about blacks -- would I then write one? I said probably not -- writing stories is an arduous and bloodletting thing for me and I don't like to make promises I might not keep. But I sure as hell would (should I say sure as Elwood? Sorry.) write an intro and, if I can get the permissions, include transcripts of those tapes. One of these, by the way, is an interview with a bona fide black science fiction fan -- and it's the best of the lot. His name is Lancelot Braithwaite and he is thoughtful, articulate, Trinidadian, and a would-be writer. This is my challenge to him and to any other black who reads this or hears about it to get with it and write a story. Not an essay -- I'll handle that department. And don't send it to me; I don't answer my mail, any of it -- it's my pathology. Send it to Roger Elwood or his publisher, in this case Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. It'll be a mixed anthology, because there are a few previously printed yarns written by whites which have just got to be in this book. And just to remove any taint of self-aggrandizement from this project: I stand to get paid by the word for my preface. I will donate my net as a prize for the best science fiction story by a black in the book. Roger Elwood and I will between us find an impartial judge to make the award, to be added to the regular payment. I guess it'll be about a year before the book can be in your hands, but the deadline will be somewhat less than half that. W e've done rather better with another of our minorities -- minors. Science fiction and science fantasy have always had a strong and steady market for the young reader, though as in the mainstream, it frequently is not called sf. The new growth, popularity, and respectability of the medium has its impact in this area too, as you can see in any bookstore by fanning through the kid shelves. Some hardy perennials: all of the "Paul French" (Isaac Asimov) juveniles and all of Heinlein's are now in paperback and holding their own. And Andre Norton. I do not know Andre Norton, nor do I know anyone who does. If I met her and found her deeply embittered at the science fiction fraternity I could only agree with her feelings. I could be wrong, but as far as I know she has never attended a con and probably has never been invited to one. She is seldom or never reviewed in themagazines and I don't know if she has ever sold to one or been asked to. I can't remember ever seeing her name on a Hugo or Nebula nomination, and if she ever appeared on radio or TV I haven't heard of it. Yet she is astonishingly prolific and, judging by the number of titles to be found in print, her sales are probably up there with Heinlein, Asimov and Vonnegut. The Bible and a couple of cookbooks outsell anything on the best-seller lists, year after year -- she's like that. I will say in all justice -- and expressing my own personal taste -- that I have never read a great Norton, but by golly I've never read a bad one and I wouldn't hesitate to give any of hers to a bright kid who is just finding out about science fiction. For myself, as I said, I must declare that I have not been able to become a Norton fan. Her protagonists always win, which for me substracts suspense; nobody ever has acne or goes to the bathroom or makes a pass; and more often than not the hero is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning, having been altered not at all by the events of the narrative. Which is okay if you're the last angry man or Lazarus Long -- otherwise not. Still, what do you want for the appetizer in the reading diet of a voracious youngster: Barefoot in the Head? G ood typical Norton is Here Abide Monsters (Atheneum, # pp., #), a gateway-to-another-world story in which a teenaged couple slip through into an alien Earth full of extraterrestrial invaders and fabulous beasts. Norton as editor (with Ernestine Donaldy) gives us Gates of Tomorrow (Atheneum, # pp., #) with the subtitle: "An Introduction to Science Fiction" and it would serve that function well for a kid or anybody. Not one of the stories was written expressly for the young, which immunizes the book from "writing down." The arrangement is ingenious, with one story for each of a dozen categories -- first contact, future catastrophe, and the like. The writers are good ones at or near their best -- Frank Belknap Long, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Lieber and others as fine. I n the gee-whiz or pulp-core level there's Perry Rhodan, a German series which, I am told, has hundreds of thousands of addicts overseas, and which is translated for local consumption by Wendayne Ackerman at the impressive rate of two a month -- from Ace, at #c. You can subscribe to the books as if they were magazines, and each volume contains a Perry Rhodan adventure, some short stories, a letter column, and a communication from the fortunately unique head of the editor, Forrest J. Ackerman. H ugh Walters is a pleasant pedant whose approach to science fiction is about that of middle Gernsback. And don't knock it -- they don't hardly make that kind no more. First Contact (Thomas Nelson, # pp., #) is about a first contact between us savages and the immensely more civilized Other. The technology is logically extrapolated and explained at length, which tends to make the people secondary -- still, that's what the man does and he does it competently, so that any kid has to come out of it knowing more, factually, than he did when he went in. If he wants to find out more about people, he can get that elsewhere. Nicholas Fisk (Pantheon Books, # pp., #) a most unusual invasion story, full of people you'll like and developments you didn't expect. The invaders are tiny faceted jewel-like things that descend in clouds, drift like snow, seem harmless but... Inventive as this is, it's the people you take away with you. I hope to see more by this writer. E lwood at work: Children of Infinity (Franklin Watts Inc., illustrated by Jacqui Morgan, intro, by Lester del Rey, # pp., #); The Other Side of Tomorrow (Random House, illustrated by Herbert Danska, # pp., #) and Science Fiction Tales, subtitled: "Invaders, Creatures and Other Worlds" (Rand McNally, illustrated by Rod Ruth, intro by Theodore Sturgeon, # pp., #). I have learned of, but not seen, a second Rand McNally volume for young people on "Monsters" which I assume is the same size, price and appearance (very good, that, by the way) as the Tales. These are all books of original stories. All of the Random House ones are by established names; the others are astutely packaged mixtures of these and new writers. They're all worth looking at if you're buying for a youngster. A really wonderful volume is Jane Yolen's Zoo # (Seabury Press, # pp., #.) A dozen titles about fantastical science-fictiony animals range in length from a few hundred words to full-sized novellas, by the likes of James Thurber and Howard Fast, Clarke and Farmer. Equally fine, in quite a different way, is Terry Carr's Into the Unknown (Thomas Nelson, # pp., #). It takes a Terry Carr to think of choosing, for the #-and-ups, Ballard and Borges. Here also are fine examples of Silverberg, Bradbury, Gunn and Ellison. Carr has a feel for good writing as well as good story, comparable perhaps only to that of Damon Knight, and anything he does can be bought sight unseen, with confidence. S peaking of fine examples of Robert Silverberg, try Deep Space, a juvenile antho (Thomas Nelson, # pp., #). Silverberg's thumb-rule here is not so much fine writing or even provocative content, but that "sense of wonder" that science fiction is really all about. In a well-balanced table of contents are van Vogt's Far Centaurus, one of Harlan Ellison's earlier -- or beginning-middle-ending -- stories, one of Damon Knight's highly polished tales -- and one by the editor which is pure zetz. Well, there's a sampling of what's going on over there in the children's corner. Would you rather be a kid now than back in the days of the ragged pulps with the hide-from-mom covers? N ow here's something I do seldom because I don't feel I do it well -- clobber somebody. I do not enjoy writing whiplash reviews or reading them either. It's too easy to be clever. Anyone who has leafed through a dictionary of slang knows there are more ways to tear down than to build up and I do not get my jollies by sitting here in safety clobbering bad books by bad writers. I try not to concern myself or you with them. I lend support where I feel support is needed and might be effective, and am most pleased when I can share what delights me. The only thing that makes me foam at the mouth is a bad book by a good writer. I guess all this springs from a metamystic conviction I have that one is not the possessor of talent, but its custodian. I am sure that in the critical literature of the future certain of our contemporaries will be regarded as the pillars and pivots of artistic expression, and that among these will be J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Brian Aldiss. When Aldiss, whose Barefoot in the Head fills me with awe, produces such clubfooted whimsy as The Eighty Minute Hour (Doubleday, #), I feel robbed, not only of the critical structure I have built up for him, but of the hours and minutes and ergs of mental quanta I have freely given him -- time and effort he has earned by past performance and which he now has subtracted from me, for I shall never have them back. I am not objecting to the book's disjointedness, its "specialness" -- George Effinger got away with that, for example, exquisitely in What Entropy Means to Me. There are, of course, flashes of brilliance in the writing -- you can't keep a good talent down -- but the whole performance is so personal and non-participatory for the reader that it leaves me with the feeling that the act was both selfish and lonesome. I sit down to some writers as to a banquet. I can appreciate tongue-in-cheek as readily as anyone. But I can't do both through a novel-length menu. So please, Aldiss -- not while I'm eating. T o end on a happier note: look for Joshua, Son of None, by Nancy Freedman (Delacorte Press, #I pp., #.) Let's say that on November #, #, a young doctor was present at a Dallas hospital when they brought in a dying President, and was able to secure a tissue sample, freeze it, clone it and, through the agency of a surrogate mother, bring it to term as a newborn baby. Now if his environment, background, education and all the elements of his biography can be duplicated or closely approximated, so that his personality is forged in the same furnaces as the original, then he isn't dead! He isn't dead! Nancy Freedman takes this notion in a practiced and skilful hand and drives with it, implacably and with cleanliness and force, leaving you with the conviction that if this could happen it would have to happen this way. She writes man'sangle narrative better than most men, she has done her research and her extrapolation of a near-future America with logic and verisimilitude -- all in all, a fine and exciting drama. Next month is housecleaning time. My backlog has reached the point where I must sidle into my office and even then things fall down. I'll review dozens of books in one word or one sentence, committing enormous injustices -- but I'll get them out of here. 'La vista...  I F ootsteps whispered behind him, muffled by the grass. He turned and it shot past him, so close to his face that he jerked back. It struck the edge of the temple's entrance, rebounded, clattering, and" skittered across the floor, coming to rest in a crevice between stones: a pebble. She who had thrown it stood several meters up the slope, right hand tucked innocently into a pocket, left hand still curled around more pebbles. She had been swimming again -- droplets of water fell from her tangled black hair. Scofield, always near her, was coming around the hill temple, silhouetted against the pale sky. "You shouldn't have moved," she said. "I might have hit you." He inclined his head in a mock bow. "Thanks, Margaret. I'll remember that the next time someone throws stones at me." "Do that. Where are the others?" "Darby's reworking his notes. Wight's gone for a walk. Mayeux's helping me by developing yesterday's film -- " " -- and you're taking care of today's filming. How industrious." He saw her smile widen, realized his was trying to match it for sarcasm and turned away. "Hello, Schneider." A nod. "Scofield. You two enjoy your swim?" Margaret's laughter answered. Then: "If you see Wight, tell him I'll be inside -- that I want to talk to him again about Sumer." When the faint echoes of her footsteps were gone, Schneider returrled the camera to its case, looked up at the overhanging roof, the details of its construction now recorded for experts who would never have to leave their offices. Not glancing at Scofield, he said, "I thought one of the reasons for our coming out here was to avoid the scholarly atmosphere of the ship. Yet between Guevara and Wight -- " "It's a different thing." "Yeah. Dead myth, instead of a review of new information that might prove useful. Not exactly -- " "I'm going to look for Wight." Schneider sat down on the grass and lit a cigarette as he watched the other man walking off down the to listen to criticism of Margaret, but then what had Schneider expected? A half-hour later he was sitting L in the aircar, sketching, wishing the radio worked and he could hear a ship voice, when the sound of conversation made him look up from the paper. Wight was barefoot, his feet caked with mud and dust, boots clutched in one hand. Next to him was Scofield, walking slowly but looking tense and impatient. "Schneider," Wight called, "are you going to join us in the temple?" "No." "You should. All this is of great educational value." "So I've heard." "What are you working on?" Wight came to lean over the side of the aircar, myopic eyes squinting as he examined the sketch. It was a raw but precise beginning. Schneider had sketched in the wall of the largest temple, next to which the aircar rested, and the outlines of the other three temples in the valley: the outward curving walls, the multifaceted domes that seemed to float above, barely touching. The hill temple wasn't pictured -- it was on the other side of the large temple and what he couldn't see he wouldn't add to a sketch. "Excellent. You're as careful an artist as you are a photographer." A suggestion of mockery ran through the comment. Schneider ignored it -- many of Wight's remarks were double-edged. Scofield called, "Wight, aren't you coming in?" He was standing in the temple entrance, even his size dwarfed by the massive opening. Not a door, it was a floor-to-ceiling gap in the wall. Nothing as inharmonious as a door marred the lines of the temples. "In a few minutes," Wight said. "Sumer hasn't been forgotten yet -- " Scofield disappeared -- "and won't be for a while. Schneider, you have true talent for copying the physical world." "Thank you." The words held dual meaning again, but why give Wight the satisfaction of reacting to it? He toyed with the edges of the notebook. More sketches were there, including portraits, but he rarely showed the last to their subjects. Once he had done so, but people never recognized themselves -- sometimes they even failed to identify others. He didn't understand it -- he'd compared his work to photographs and the likenesses were exact. "Wight?" "Mm?" "I was thinking a while ago that maybe this isn't a better way to spend time than staying at the ship, waiting for the great and glorious experts to get here from Earth." Wight's smile curved into a grin -- he had as little respect for carefully nurtured reputations as anyone. "I mean, Margaret's going over everything she knows of Earth mythology -- " "And everything I know as well?" A minor joke -- Wight had given up the study of dead languages and cultures in middle-age for exo-archeology. Margaret didn't have the questions needed to request even a small fraction of the man's knowledge. "Yeah. It's not exactly the sort of convivial atmosphere this group was supposed to generate. I said something to Scofield about it, hoping he'd talk to Margaret, but he didn't want to listen." Wight seemed amused. "Did you expect him to?" "I don't know. Maybe. After all. I'm the only reason you're out here. The site had to be photographed." Wight's smile had vanished. "Don't be an ass, Schneider. We didn't volunteer to come out here because we wanted to keep you company any more than you came because of dedication to your work. None of us wanted to sit around the ship." Schneider opened his mouth to object, but said instead, "Do you think they've gotten into makework projects yet, back at the ship?" "I don't want to think about it. How they waste their time is none of my business." "But for the grace of God -- and me -- you might be back there with them now." "Damn you -- " but Wight was chuckling -- "and your ego. I'm surprised you didn't ask for only female volunteers for a harem." "If it had occurred to me I would have." "No. They'd never have let you off the ship. But it's a shame that only one woman wanted to come out here." "And that she brought her pet bodyguard along." "Yes. Well, I have to go in or Margaret will send her pet to retrieve me. See you later." "Yeah." W ith Wight gone Schneider's restlessness was back. He put the sketchbook aside. Wight and Scofield would be talking now inside the temple, but no sound reached out here. The corridor wound three times before it opened onto a small, square room. The sanctum, Margaret had decided. Across the valley the slanting afternoon light set off the facets of the temple roofs. Wight had speculated that once the stone had been polished or covered with a lacquer. The domes would have glittered blindingly. But the truth would remain a speculation -- no trace of polish was left. Had it existed it would have eroded away -- how long ago? Centuries? Millennia? No artifacts remained in the temples or around them, no debris -- it was as though the buildings had been deliberately abandoned, swept clean to leave no evidence of their builders but the strong curving lines of the walls and the low wide benches that filled the sanctums. No evidence here, but in the town the expedition had first discovered near the ship... He pushed the nagging thought away. It was bad enough to stay here with a pretense of useful work, knowing that a large town only partially destroyed by fire needed to be explored, mapped, to have its artifacts typed and classified. It would be worse to be one of the hundredplus waiting in the ship, with that valuable site only a few kilometers away. While back on Earth men who had long ago established themselves as authorities in the field would be setting up their own expeditions and arranging the publicity that would add another layer of fame to their reputations... He automatically conceded that the custom was unfair, but the injustice had long ceased to rankle. Only for a few, those whose work was a testimony to their ambition, would the delay be a torture. But those few always spread their misery to the rest. He stretched and leaned back, appreciating the silence. f j ello, Darby." rX"Hello." Why had Darby come here? Looking down at the lined, somber face, Schneider wondered if he should have continued sketching and ignored the man's arrival. But it would be rude now not to attempt conversation. "Working on your notes?" Darby nodded. "I'd like to give this expedition some type of order. We've been here two weeks and only you have been working. And there's much to be done. For example, we could be measuring the temples, the outside walls, the sizes of the benches, et cetera. We should set up a scale for comparison. Right?" "Yeah." At least Darby now said "temple." Darby was a purist -- worse, an anachronistic purist who should have been born on Earth several centuries before. Alone in the group, he'd insisted on not inferring the mental templates of Earth cultures from alien structures. To him the temples were buildings of unknown function until more evidence was found. But now -- Darby was slipping. "What else?" Schneider asked. "It's just an idea now, but I think we should consider an excavation of the tell." "What tell?" "Here." An index finger stabbed downward. "The hill?" "It's too perfectly round. And this is the only temple not on the valley floor." Could there be earlier structures buried beneath the hill temple? Schneider dismissed the possibility. Darby's wishful thinking was contagious. "We weren't sent out here to excavate. We have no tools." "No. We don't even have equipment for the most elementary geophysical testing," Darby complained. "Obviously we're not supposed to start an excavation," Schneider continued. This line of reasoning was redundant, simplistic, childish -- Darby might understand it. "When we get back to the ship the others will hear your theory about the tell and maybe then they'll give you permission to began an excavation." "They'll give it to someone else." Schneider didn't object. That hypocrisy was too much for him. He mumbled "See you later -- " and walked away. A month of boredom past, a month remaining. Schneider left the temple for a walk. The night was cool around him. Wight was sitting in the aircar, dictating notes into a recorder. Another popular story of archeologists-at-work, intended for Earthbound escapists. Schneider halted a few meters away, making no sound, waiting for the older man to finish. Minutes dragged past -- then Wight paused for a moment, spoke a final sentence and shut off the recorder. "Is Margaret looking for me again?" "No." "Then she isn't holding forth on the mysteries of the past." "She has her captive audience again. I believe she has an adequate repertory now. Your assistance is no longer needed." Wight shrugged. "I was only a dispensable, minor character in her little drama anyway." "Doesn't it bother you?" "Why should it? It was becoming extremely boring." "Not the mythology. Margaret's obsession with it." "Most people have obsessions. Darby's is excavating; mine, the past in general. And Mayeux is an addict of escapism. Drugs, sex, music, drama -- any vehicle of escape will do. Now there is an interesting obsession for you to observe. And there's your obsession, Schneider. Watching the rest of us. Margaret, who wants to be a goddess. Scofield, who -- " "I know." " -- wants Margaret and has her. He also derives a great deal of pleasure from your jealousy. If Margaret were trying to make you feel envy you might have a chance with her. But she doesn't give a damn about you." Silence. "No comments, Schneider?" Stillness. "All right. I'm through making speeches. Now I have a question. What are you doing out here with the rest of us and our private obsessions?" "I have as many degrees in archeology as any of you, as well as being the best photographer -- " "Don't be defensive. I know that. So do all the others, here and on the ship. Which stopped none of them from referring to you as a photographer because, despite the degrees, that's all you are. You have no true interest in the past. No more than a layman's interest, anyway." "True interest? Mine is a more valid interst than yours, Wight. When I was studying on Earth I had a chance to see the ruins of all the grand, dead civilizations you love. I was more dissatisfied than impressed. It took years before I realized that I was unhappy because too many archeologists had been there before me. I couldn't see the ruins clearly. The buildings were distorted by all the layers of interpretation and opinion, everything that I'd heard or read about them. Did you ever feel, at one of those Earth sites, that a shrine should've been built to the archeologists?" A smile was twitching the stubborn edges of Wight's mouth. Schneider took a breath and hurried to conclude: "I wanted to see what had not yet been tainted by another man's interpretation. You can't do that on Earth." The smile still fought to surface. Wight ended it with a cough, then said, "You surprise me. You're a romantic. Tainted ruins. I've never heard of an archeologist searching for innocence, but that seems to be the only way to describe you. Practically lusting after innocence. Except in Margaret's case, of course." "Perhaps, Wight -- " Schneider's voice was steady -- "you should consider your own motives. Yours and Darby's and Margaret's. What have you done but bring the myths of Earth to another planet? What are you trying to do but apply them to a society that probably had nothing in common with the Sumerians, or the Israelites?" The shadowy smile again. Wight covered it with his hand, fingers carefully stroking his mustache. "I'll consider it. Now, Schneider, if you'll excuse me, I have work -- " II S chneider gave up trying to stifle a yawn. With luck, Margaret wouldn't notice. Neither would Scofield, who had been asleep the past hour. And Wight was playing back his notes. To Schneider, at the opposite end of the bench, the sound was a low murmur, nearly drowned out by Margaret's voice. He looked at the pipe and the dwindling supply of hashish Mayeux had left. It would be nice to take some, just a small amount. Mayeux would return in a moment. Schneider was searching through his pockets for something to wrap the hash in when Mayeux burst into the sanctum. "An aircar!" Before the echoes had quit he was gone again. Scofield had jerked awake at the shout -- he was a half-step behind Schneider as they left the sanctum, scrambling and slipping in the darkness. Once outside, they saw Mayeux standing halfway up the slope to the hill temple, head tilted back as he watched the silver dart-shape glide over the temples, heading south, out over the inland sea. Mayeux stared down at them, bewilderment clear on his face. Was there another expedition on the planet? Or was the ship scouting the temple site? Scofield was shaking his head in confusion. Wight had come out of the temple but was ignoring them, his gaze fixed on the north side of the building, where their own aircar should have been. "Darby." "What?" Scofield whirled, froze when he saw the vacant patch of flattened grass. "He's crazy," Margaret said. "Why should he take the aircar up?" "Photography." "Of the sea?" Then the high whispering sound was back. The aircar slowed, made a clumsy turn and dropped to the ground within centimeters of the temple wall. Wight reached it first. He pushed Darby away from the controls, leaned over and stared at the gauges. "The fuel," he muttered. Scofield reached around Wight and grabbed Darby by the shoulder. "How long were you up there?" "I don't know." "How much fuel is left, Wight?" "Not enough to get us back to the ship. And the radio's out." Schneider heard a hissing sound and turned to see Margaret standing, fists clenched. He could sense a lynch-mob attitude growing. Worried, he pulled Darby free of Scofield's grasp. His eyes moved across the hostile faces, came to rest on Wight, who could be reasoned with. "We don't have to worry. If we don't return in three weeks they'll send an aircar out after us." After a moment Wight nodded. He went over to Margaret, whispered to her, then took her arm and led her back to the temple. A moment later Scofield followed. Schneider removed the camera from its niche in the bottom of the aircar. He fingered the release and two film cartridges rolled out onto his palm. He might as well destroy them. Darby had been flying at too high an altitude for the temples to be photographed properly and his flight had picked up too much of the surrounding land. "Why, Darby? Did you think you were going to replace me as photographer?" "I had an idea... Schneider, will you develop the film for me?" "It won't be worth developing." "Sure it will. The sunlight was at the best angle. The camera should have picked up shadow marks as well as crop marks. If there once were any roads here -- or buried ruins -- they'll show up on the film." He beamed. "It should make things much easier for the experts when they arrive. They'll know where to begin their excavations." Mayeux's mouth had dropped open as he listened. Now it snapped shut. He bent down and ripped a clump of grass from the soil. "Look, Darby. The roots are only a few centimeters long. Even ten centimeters of topsoil over a paved road would be enough for this grass to grow there as thickly as anywhere else. So you can't expect crop marks. And shadow marks? From up there?" He gestured toward the hill temple. "We can look out in the morning or afternoon and spot any irregularities on the valley surface." Darby shook his head. "You'll see -- after the film's developed." "Oh, hell. What's the use? We're stuck here now until they come to get us -- and all because you expected crop marks." Mayeux began to search his pockets. "Inside," Schneider reminded him. "Yeah. Do you want to join me, Schneider? If we smoke long enough this is going to seem trivial, maybe even funny." "Sure." He pocketed the cartridges and followed Mayeux into the temple. W ight was standing just inside the temple entrance, watching the first minutes of a shower. Rain fell soundlessly on the roof and rolled off in a heavy curtain. Schneider walked to stand near him and looked out across the valley. The rain blurred the three smaller temples, obscuring the sharply chiseled stone, the facets of the domes. He could almost see them as mushrooms, gray-white against the green, sheltered by the hills that rimmed the peninsula, coming to a point a quarter of a kilometer behind him. "I covered the aircar," Wight said. Schneider nodded. "What's that you're holding? Are those the lights?" Schneider stared down at the four hour-glass shaped objects he gripped. Their reflecting surfaces were opaque. "They've been replaced." "Aren't they working?" Wight took one and twisted the control that circled the lamp's waist. He winced at the glare. "Why would they want to replace them?" "Margaret -- " this wouldn't be easy -- "wanted torches instead of artificial light, so Scofield cut some branches from that grove at the base of the peninsula -- " "Oh, God. Schneider, I heard them say something about it, but I warned them not to. I didn't think they'd be so stupid." He started down the corridor. Schneider moved to block his path. "You can't reason with Scofield -- and I wouldn't start a fight." "No." Wight rubbed a hand across his forehead, sighed. "Torches. Ashes and coals all over the floor. The carbon-fourteen people will want to run tests and we'll have to explain. We can try to clean away the mess, but we'll never get all of it." "Is that what worries you? Explaining to the others that we were using torches inside a temple because Margaret wanted to play at being a goddess or a priestess for a while?" "Doesn't it worry you at all?" "Yes. But I half expected it. Did you really think that we could indulge our fantasies out here, then return to the ship and act as if nothing unusual had been done?" Wight didn't answer. T he next evening it was still raining. Schneider sketched the blurred hills and temples, his boots sinking deep into soggy ground, rain beating down steadily. Then a breeze from the north bent the curtain of water inward and he retreated to the sanctum. He sat on the first bench, near Mayeux. Behind him were Scofield and Wight. At the back of the room, Darby had straddled a bench and was examining a foam-lined metal camera casing. Schneider wondered why he had it -- the camera was in the aircar. Margaret stood before them. She spoke without interruption, confirming Schneider's suspicion that she needed no response from her audience. She stood motionless. Each of the many torches was a reflected pinpoint of light in her eyes and a larger-than-life shadow posed at her back. Torchlight flattered her. She spoke of the Svetasvatara Upanishad and it was Kali, not Rudra, who turned the Brahmawheel, creating worlds, destroying them at the end of time. Her speech led them through the labyrinths of Crete to confront, not the Minotaur, but Queen Pasiphae-becomeMedusa... Schneider ceased to listen. Her conversations with Wight had been straight narrations of myth. This was a deliberate scrambling, a hybrid whose wrongness lay uneasily on his nerves. He looked around at the others. Wight was listening complacently. If Margaret's distortions bothered him his face did not show it. Scofield, sprawled across the bench, appeared to be fighting drowsiness and losing. Eyes halfclosed, he seemed unaware of anyone. Then Schneider noticed that every time Margaret spoke of the consorts of the ancient goddesses, a smile flickered across Scofield's face. Darby was twisting the camera casing, trying to wrench it out of shape, failing, trying again. Why? Mayeux was smoking peacefully. As Schneider watched he turned a cat-curious face. Then he held out the pipe, but Schneider shook his head in refusal. Mayeux shrugged and returned the pipe to his mouth. Schneider still watched: Mayeux also was flattered by the torchlight. Which was not surprising -- he and Margaret looked alike, could have been brother and sister. Almost identical in height and bone structure, features similar, both with black hair and blue-green eyes. Both with skin drawn so tightly over the bone that white ridges could sometimes be glimpsed through the tan. But whereas with Margaret that bone structure suggested a tensile strength, in Mayeux it was a fragility. His profile was a chiseled perfection haloed by the torchlight. Schneider looked around. For the 'first time he noticed that Scofield's eyes were focused on Mayeux. Margaret had stopped talking. She stood with eyes closed, either tired and quitting, or planning the next part of her monologue. Either way, Schneider was grateful for the silence. And then Mayeux began to sing. Margaret's eyes snapped open with the first notes. They fastened on Mayeux, but he was oblivious to her anger. Schneider held his breath. Mayeux continued to sing. Finally realizing that he wasn't going to stop, Margaret launched into her speech again. Schneider looked down, fighting the first tremors of laughter. When he had quelled them he again paid attention to what Margaret was saying. "... and despite their loss of authority, there was a partial conconservation of the ancient mythos..." He raised an eyebrow in inquiry at Wight. "Neolithic matriarchies," Wight explained. Schneider nodded, let his eyes close, willed himself to fall asleep. Around him, tenor a cappella notes ranged through anger-clipped words. Ill D ark spots that were flaws in the stone swarmed antlike up the walls, chased by predatory torchlight. Even Schneider's hallucinations were cliches. IJe tried to expel the vision. Mayeux's hand touched his and he relinquished the hash pipe, shook his head, opened his eyes. The spots held steady, but for how long? The pipe was offered again, Mayeux's hand resting a few seconds in Schneider's, an intimacy that made Schneider nervous. But when there was nothing more to object to than a too-long touching of hands, he could not act offended. He took the pipe and inhaled deeply. Nothing. The hash pipe had perversely gone out. Mayeux plucked it from his hand. Numb, Schneider lay back, stretched his legs, contemplated the sanctum wall. "I'm worried about Margaret," he said and listened to his distant voice roaring on long after the thought had ended, "Yes?" Clouds of smoke formed trellises in front of Mayeux's face. Memories, unbidden, brought to Schneider the folk song Mayeux had sung the week before by torchlight, with Scofield staring at him and Margaret angry. Schneider's mind played with the notes, amplifying, echoing, rearranging. In his memory a helix of pure sound curved upward, glorifying -- what? No matter -- the feeling was all. "Why are you worried about Margaret?" Mayeux asked. "She's blending into the mythfigures she talks about." Schneider frowned, able to concentrate with the return of reality. "Lilith, Kali, Medusa, Isis, Astarte -- she's portraying a schizoid reincarnation of them all, with an emphasis on the bloodthirsty element." "Countess Dracula." Mayeux giggled. Silence, then footsteps on stone and Scofield came toward them. "Countess who?" Scofield asked. The name sounded familiar to Schneider, but the associations slipped away as his mind reached for them. "Vampire," Mayeux replied. Schneider free-associated the word, coming up with medieval nightmare images. "Gothic castles," Mayeux added. Scofield corrected: "Gothic romance, not architecture." Schneider nodded and gave up trying to connect bats with flying butresses. It hadn't seemed right anyway. A week before the group was to . return to the ship Margaret fell to silence, worry and occasional whispered comments about The Others, of whom she spoke in awe... A week, and Mayeux no longer asked others if they wished to share his remaining tiny supply of hashish... A week, and when Scofield spoke to Schneider at all it was with confidence that the people on the ship would come after them promptly... A week, and Wight's views exactly opposed Scofield's... A week, and Darby had been practically living in the hill temple for days... Schneider went up to investigate. He found a scar in the soil, two meters wide, ten meters long, starting at the temple wall and pointing toward the sea. Darby tended that wound carefully, the camera casing in his hands removing the soil, Schneider watched and waited for Darby to notice him and explain -- watched, without expecting an explanation -- and finally left. He wouldn't tell the other four. They would discover the trench soon enough. # T 've been considering what you said about layers of interpretation and tainted ruins." It was the last evening before the return date. The air was cool and misty. Despite the chill Schneider preferred being outside to the smoky ritual in the sanctum. He twisted around, eyes seeking Wight. There, against the wall, his light clothes blending with the stone, his sun-blackened face obscured by the fog and dusk. "What -- " Schneider began, stopping as he recalled the conversation of a month before. "Well?" "Well what?" The wraith laughed and moved toward him, solidifying as it neared. "You're not attending the lecture this evening?" Wight shook his head. "As I was saying -- I've thought about your remarks a great deal. Look at the hill temple and tell me what you see." Psychological games now? Schneider almost laughed, but Wight's voice had been serious, almost solemn. He looked. The temple had become Rorschach blot. Ears sensitized by concentration he imagined he could hear both Darby busily scraping away at the trench and voices from the temple behind him. But neither should be audible here -- all he could really be hearing was Wight's breathing and his own. He glanced away from the hill. Wight's eyes met his, locked, requested an answer. "I don't know what you expected me to see. Barring the fact that it looks very impressive in this light -- it's just a temple. Merely a building." "Merely a building." The words were pronounced slowly, as though Wight were savoring them, wondering at them. "Not even an intimation of this culture's sense of whatever deities were worshipped?" "I don't worship the supernatural. I prefer not to be deceived by mists or mysticism." He was about to congratulate himself on the phrase, but Wight's somber expression hadn't changed, so he continued: "I can see things more clearly." "You're blind, Schneider." And in a moment he was gone, swallowed by the fog as he walked away. F our days later loneliness sent Schneider up to the hill temple. All but he and Darby had withdrawn into fantasy, becoming autistic strangers who rarely left the sanctum. He stood at the edge of the trench, now a meter deep. Mounds of damp clay soil covered the uprooted grass and topsoil. Darby glanced up once, wiped a hand across his forehead, leaving redbrown streaks, then returned to digging. Schneider stood there more than a quarter of an hour, occasionally leaning down to pick up a clod, mold it into a pyramid, crumble it again. Finally Darby set the mud-encrusted casing aside, leaned against the side of the trench, managed a weary smile. "Did you ever hear of Austen Henry Layard?" he asked. "The name sounds familiar." "I've always envied," Darby went on, "his discovery of the Assyrian city of Nineveh. Those nineteenth-century Englishmen -- " He shook his head. "That was the time for an archeologist to live." Schneider sat down on the grass. He would listen. T he next morning and afternoon passed slowly. Schneider sat in the aircar, sketched and saw no one. In midafternoon he entered the temple. Once, twice around and he still heard nothing. Three times and the blackness grayed. Mayeux was sitting in the corridor, unlit hash pipe cradled in his left hand. His gaze was fastened on it. "Hello, Schneider." "Hello, Mayeux. Are the others -- " Mayeux waved the pipe in the direction of the sanctum. "In there." Schneider listened for voices coming from the sanctum. None. Mayeux craned his neck around, stared up at Schneider for a moment, said, "Margaret's praying. Or meditating. I'm not sure what she calls it." Then he turned his attention back to the pipe. Relighting it, he added: "Praying for guidance, I believe. Scofield's asleep. So's Wight." Schneider stepped over Mayeux's outstretched legs, moved quietly to the sanctum entrance. Margaret was on her knees, her back to him. Scofield was asleep, as Mayeux had said, but Wight wasn't. He noticed Schneider and smiled. Schneider turned and went back to Mayeux. "Kneeling?" Mayeux shrugged. "Wight's awake. And watching." Mayeux glanced at him curiously. "He finds you interesting," Mayeux remarked. "How so?" "He told me you don't -- " Mayeux waved the pipe as though trying to sketch an answer he couldn't phrase -- "recognize what is basic. What is necessary." "What the hell did he mean by that?" "Ask Wight." "He didn't tell you?" Blank eyes met his. Ask Wight? Now? Walk into the sanctum and disturb that quiet... No. There would be another time. W Hours had dragged the afternoon through dusk and into night. Schneider had waited in the aircar for Wight to leave the temple. "Yes." "What is it that is basic that I don't recognize?" "What was that, Schneider?" Wight took his recorder from the aircar's storage compartment. Schneider repeated. "Who told you I said that?" "Mayeux. But that was all he told me." "And you want an explanation -- " "Yes." " -- of what I tried to tell you before and failed to make you understand?" "Yes." "Migod, Schneider. I tried to communicate something subtle and complex in the most elementary way possible and you didn't comprehend. We're down to the most basic words of a language and now you want me to take the words apart and explain what the letters mean." "I'm sure that if anyone could do it, Wight, you -- " "The sycophant's costume does not fit you." "I'm sorry." "Of course. All right. I'll go through the argument once more. I should have realized when you looked at the hill temple that you weren't viewing it correctly." "Because I saw it as a building, nothing more?" "I should have realized that perhaps that was the only way you could see it. But let's not bother with that now. Since you're blind, you must settle for mere words. To you a building is a building, a stone, a stone -- " "I'm waiting for the explanation, whenever you want to start." Wight sighed melodramatically. "I am explaining, so listen. To you objects are their simple physical selves, which makes you ideal as a photographer in this situation. But if you tried to become a painter, say, or even to capture a mood or an idea in a photograph, you'd fail. You don't like the so-called layers of interpretation, but it's normal for homo sapiens to invest physical objects with meaning. Only with that extra dimension does the object become fully real. "I misjudged you badly when I called you a romantic. You suffer from a lack of imagination, not an excess. I misinterpreted your comment that the ruins on Earth are tainted. Or perhaps you used the wrong word. Interpretations to you are superfluous." "That's what I told you." "Damn it, .you're missing the point again. The reaction of each of us to these temples is necessary -- it's basic -- it's not some frivolous and irrelevant fantasy. Since we don't know what this area signified to its builders, we have a tabula rasa. We construct meanings." "That shouldn't be necessary." Wight shook his head. "You'll never understand. So please stop asking me for explanations. I'm beginning to feel responsible for your blindness -- and I don't want that." at dawn Schneider went up to .the hill temple. The inland sea was a smooth dull gray, a sheet of metal laid out from the shore. Scraping noises interrupted his reverie. Darby was already up, digging with one hand while the other stifled yawns. "Good morning." '"Morning. I see you like to get up early, too." "Not always -- just this morning." "I think," Darby said, "that I may be able to show you something today." "You've found some artifacts?" "No." "A different type of soil?" "Not yet." "Then what?" "A feeling, Schneider. A very strong feeling." "You're working on intuition?" "It's been done before. Successfully, too." "Darby -- " Schneider's exasperation was almost a physical pain. If there had been a find here it could have represented a way to pull the others out of their fantasy worlds. He left Darby, who didn't look up. M ayeux came out of the temple later in the morning. Rubbing bloodshot eyes, he fixed a cup of coffee. When he'd drained it, Schneider asked, "Is Margaret still at it?" "I suppose so. I heard her talking a couple of times during the night, though." "What did she say?" "I couldn't tell. She was crying, too. I don't know what she thinks she'll accomplish. Pray -- and God will send a rescue team? Pray -- and the fuel tank will be refilled? I've seen other religious zealots who believed in miracles, but to cry when one doesn't happen -- " "Maybe her knees hurt." "Don't be such a sonofabitch. She's not bothering you." Mayeux fixed another cup of coffee and took it into the temple. Schneider leaned against the aircar, his fingers drumming on its metal shell. Just as the noise was becoming an irritant, he saw Mayeux standing in the temple entrance, gesturing to him. IV iYIwants to talk to us," Mayeux said as they hurried along the corridor. "Told Scofield?" "She won't talk to anyone else yet." "What about Darby?" "What about him?" "Never mind." They were at the entrance of the sanctum. Schneider saw Wight sitting on the front bench, arms folded across his chest. Margaret was talking to Scofield, who was lighting a new set of torches from the stack of branches in the corner. Margaret. Her face was ashen under a film of sweat -- her eyes were swollen and red. For the first time Schneider pitied her. She might be insane and a threat to the sanity of the others, but her madness was taking its greatest toll of her. "Margaret -- " He reached out a hand but before it touched her she turned to look directly at him. No. Into him. Through him. He fell back under that gaze. "The Others haven't yet come for us?" "No," he said quietly. "I was right, then. They're angry." She went over to Wight and repeated, "I was right." He nodded, smiling, mocking her. Schneider expected her to react with fury. Instead, almost wistfully: "They're angry." "Yes, they're angry." Her eyelids fell. She nodded a few times, acknowledging his agreement. Then she looked at Mayeux. Schneider waited for her to repeat the incantation. He might have to slap her to free her from the delusion. Mayeux met her gaze for a moment, then reached into a pocket for his pipe, filled and lighted it and walked to the back of the room. He sat down on the last bench. "Margaret doesn't like him," Scofield murmured. Margaret had turned back to them. She was frowning. "So what if they're angry?" Schneider said. "They'll come after us anyway." "No." "Yes, Margaret." "They're angry and they have to be appeased." He checked his response. Appeased? A new element to her madness. "How?" There was no answer. He stared past her at Wight, who had switched on the recorder. Schneider pictured the writerarcheologist using all this in some future dissertation, article or book. The thought infuriated him. It was time to put an end to the little drama. "Aren't your prayers working, Margaret? Isn't your make-believe world congenial any more?" "Leave her alone," Scofield said, but for the moment he could be ignored. Margaret's hands were clasped tightly, knuckles showing whitely through the skin. "Your prayers don't work, Margaret." She nodded. There was a minute's silence before she said, "The prayers are not enough." "What, then?" "A sacrifice." "That's great. That's perfect, Margaret. Wight's recorded that, so when we get back to the ship you'll be put under sedation until you can be taken to a hospital." "We won't get back to the ship without a sacrifice." Her voice was patient but stubborn. "Is that so?" He stepped closer to her and tilted her head back until she was staring directly at him. "And you don't even look insane." Her right hand lashed across his face, rough nails scratching. Reflexively, he slapped her. "Schneider." Wight was shaking his head. Scofield was backing toward the corner. "That was a mistake," Wight said. "Was it?" "Yes." Scofield answered. He watched Schneider while he reached back toward the stack of branches. a minute. Wight, you VV know I hit her only to snap her out of it. Scofield, you realize that, don't you? Help me explain to him. Wight. Mayeux -- " Mayeux's eyes were glazed. He jerked when he heard his name, then settled back against the wall. The pipe still in his mouth, he began to sing, the words mumbled and distorted. "Are you out of your mind, too?" Schneider's eyes moved from Mayeux to Wight, who hadn't left the bench, then to Scofield, whose right hand was curled around a heavy branch, which had just metamorphosed into a crude but usable club. "Wight?" "I tried to warn you to conform, Schneider, but you never listened. Now -- " He shrugged, rubbed his hands together, one over the other. A moment later, as if answering Schneider's bewilderment, he mumbled a few words. Schneider caught only one clearly, the rest vaguely. "Pilot? Why are you talking about a pilot now? Help me -- talk to Scofield, for God's sake!" "Deaf, as well as blind? And in a similar way. You hear the sound but miss the words." "You're al! insane." Schneider took a step backward, another, yet another, then turned and ran. He could hear Scofield following. He burst out of the temple. Pilot... Of course. The aircar -- the rest of what Wight had mumbled so indistinctly still made no sense. But the aircar did. Schneider slowed, sliding across the grass, halted and looked back at the aircar. Scofield was framed by the temple entrance. He was much closer to the machine than Schneider. Warily Schneider started on a semicircular path around Scofield. He had taken five steps when Scofield left the temple, carelessly swinging the club. Schneider wheeled to run up the hill. Near the summit he fell. He caught a glimpse of Scofield, climbing quickly, clutched at the grass and lurched to his feet. The hill temple was only a few meters before him, then beside him, then behind him as he neared the trench. Darby was there, hands cradling a large white stone. "Darby -- " The excavator looked up and smiled. "Look, Schneider -- a Jericho skull! The first artifact we've found -- and so close to its Earth counterpart -- " His fingers ran over his find, stroking gently. As mad as the rest. Schneider slid into the trench. Darby, clasping the featureless rock, backed away. "You have to be careful with this," he said. "It's a skull. It's fragile." Schneider disregarded him, scanning the trench for the camera casing. It would serve as a weapon. He spotted it at the other end of the trench, too far away to reach. Footsteps behind him, muffled by the grass. "Give me the skull." Schneider lunged forward. Then darkness caught him, falling at the edge of a club. T he cold brought him fiack to consciousness -- that, and the pressure against the back of his neck. He jerked away from it. The movement brought pain and he moaned. "Schneider?" The voice was unfamiliar. He tried craning his neck to look at the speaker, but the agony was too great. He waited for it to subside before moving again. Meanwhile he could see nothing but the cover of an aircar's seat on which he was lying face down. "Who are you?" he managed to ask. The words took an effort -- his throat was dry and rough and every movement of his mouth as he spoke caused more pain. "Pam Durrell." The voice sounded amused by the question. "I've only met you once, so you might not recognize the name." He did, though he couldn't remember the person to whom the name belonged. Risking the hurt again, he asked, "My neck -- what's wrong?" "You have a bruise. Maybe even a fracture, though I don't think so. We didn't bring a doctor when we came out here. We had no idea you'd be fighting each other." "Fighting?" "Wight told us all about the rivalry between you and Scofield. Someone at the ship should've guessed that with only one woman out here, especially Mar -- " Her voice cut off in embarrassment. "Wight told you that?" "Uh-huh. He was sorry they had to tie you up like that, but they were afraid you'd try to kill Scofield if you weren't restrained. When we got here they had your arms and legs bound to a stone bench." Schneider listened with detachment. His companions had been ingenious, letting a bench substitute for a sacrificial altar. Given more time, they would have found a religious use for Scofield's pocketknife. "Can I get up? Will it hurt my neck?" "I don't know -- you'll just have to try it. If you're careful and don't jerk your neck -- there. That's it. How do you feel?" "No worse than before." He twisted his torso until he could see the woman, who was still holding the damp cloth she'd pressed against his neck. She was young, with short brown hair. He remembered seeing her on the ship, but nothing more about her. "You people waited long enough before coming after us." "We didn't expect to have to rescue you. In fact, it's going to cut into our working time if one of us has to fly you back to the ship." "You came out here to work?" he asked, but already he was twisting around, surveying the aircar. It was almost twice the size of the aircar that had brought him out two months earlier and was heavily laden with equipment. Even photographic equipment, he noted. "That's right." "Where are the others?" "You mean your group? Waiting near one of the buildings while we look for Mayeux." "Everyone else -- Darby?" "We found him. Digging a trench, of all things. Wight said you had a lot of trouble with him." "Wight said," Schneider echoed. "Wight must have been very busy explaining." She was staring at him curiously. "We had to know what was going on. The trench, the torches you used after Darby went crazy and smashed the lights -- " So Wight had come up with an explanation for everything unusual that had occurred. It would be up to Schneider to refute Wight's story -- Margaret and Scofield would, of course, back Wight. Mayeux apparently wanted no part of any of this and no one would believe Darby. H e studied the girl sitting beside him. She wasn't one of the ship's administrators. If he told his story now she might not know how to handle the situation. It would be better to wait until he got back to the ship to explain what had really happened. Schneider tried twisting around to look back at the temples, finally stood and turned around in the aircar. Scofield, Margaret, Wight and Darby were sitting in a silent group near the entrance of the largest temple. As Schneider watched, Wight glanced up, said something to the others, then stood and walked toward Schneider. Wight stopped at the side of the aircar and smiled up as though none of the morning's events had happened. "I'm glad you're not hurt badly," Wight said. "Pam was afraid you might have a fracture or a concussion, but I told her Scofield hadn't hit you that hard." "You told her about everything, didn't you?" Schneider muttered. Wight's smile didn't change as he looked past Schneider at Pam and said, "Maybe now that your patient is conscious you can finish telling me about the findings in the town. You see, Schneider, the rest of the expedition didn't stay in the ship. They've been working the past six weeks." Schneider turned to look at the woman. The movement caused a flash of pain. "Is that true?" "Yes. The ship's administrators made the decision. They'll take responsibility for it. We don't expect anyone coming from Earth to object too much -- they'll be far too busy. All we've done so far is set the computers to translating and organizing the written records we've found. And we've just started on them. It should take at least a year." "So that's why you weren't too concerned when we didn't return on schedule," Schneider said. "You were coming anyway. How long have you been here?" He'd been unconscious for hours -- it was nearly evening. Wight answered for Pam, "The aircar arrived just a little while after the fight." "Yeah. The fight," Schneider repeated sarcastically. Wight had to be worried about how much of the "explanation" Schneider would contradict -- and when. Schneider was in no hurry. "What were your findings in the town?" Schneider asked. "Did you learn anything about these temples?" Pam laughed. "That's interesting, the way all of you refer to these buildings as temples." "Aren't they?" Wight sounded genuinely puzzled. Pam shook her head. "These buildings were a form of art. They also served some other purposes, all mundane -- possibly they were intended to produce given psychological effects. The aliens used their architecture to' produce an emotional response, in the case of these structures, awe and fear. We picked that up in the written records. The corridors force you to walk a greater distance than necessary to the central room, imparting a sense of isolation, of being buried, of being severed from one's world. I don't know how you could have spent so much time in there. It made me shiver -- " She paused, then said, "Actually we believe the effect may depend a great deal on one's preconditioning. Anyway, we'll finish here as quickly as possible and return to the town. Half the buildings there are like these, non functional in our terms. According to the writings we've deciphered, some are supposedly erotic in effect. I couldn't see them that way." She laughed. "Schneider didn't respond to this site," Wight said. "Not at all?" "No." Wight spoke before Schneider had a chance to say anything. Pam stared at Schneider for a few seconds. "Well, maybe he's a little too human -- and has rejected standard conditioning." "This feeling of awe," Wight said quickly. "Couldn't it still have some relevance to the aliens' religion?" "Trying to salvage your theory?" Schneider asked. "No. None whatsoever," Pam said. "They were an extremely sophisticated, pragmatic species. They had no gods. None. Well, I'll have to find out if Mayeux has been located yet." She climbed out of the aircar and walked away. "That wasn't just a fight with Scofield over Margaret," Schneider said when she was out of earshot. "I know. I had to tell them something." "And when you tied me to that bench, you were planning a sacrifice -- " "I know what happened, Schneider. No need to remind me." "I'm going to report everything when we get back." "I realize that, Schneider." Wight turned to go back to where the others were sitting. "You'll still be all alone." "Wight." "Yes." Wight stopped but didn't look back at Schneider. "No temples here. No gods." "None but ours, Schneider." "None but yours," Schneider said after a moment, but he had spoken quietly and Wight was already too far away to have heard. Schneider sat down, then slid until he was lying on his back, staring up at the darkening sky. His head ached.  In the most daring experiment science ever devised, the group invited future -- here! The final mutant He lay in a hospital bed. The sheets, fresh and smooth, stretched tightly across his lean body. His eyes were closed and his breath whispered lightly between his parted lips. His head was shaven and attached to it were small conducting discs, taped to his temples and the supraorbital ridges. Inside was his brain. He wasn't thinking;; -- he wasn't anything yet. He failed to exist. He lay in a negative state and would remain so until his makers, who sat in the large room that looked like the ground control of some starship venture, decided it was time to wake him. It had taken him a long time to come this far. Seventy-seven years. Those who had brought him to this place hoped the effort would prove worthwhile. But none of them would know for sure -- not until someone pressed the switch to wake him. He was seventeen years old and all his life had been unknowing. They had taught him, trained him, given him knowledge. But he was unaware of it, would remain unaware until they woke him for the first time. And then he would know all. Ill He lay in the bed, unstirring. The air in the room hummed slightly. The air-conditioning system was blowing in sterilized air from which his lungs filtered oxygen. Inside his head... In the control room there could be no more excuses, no more delay. Someone depressed the switch and beneath his dark eyelids his eyes rolled in their sockets as he dreamed of waking. He was running -- away -- the horizon a never-approaching black line. Looking down, beneath his feet he saw the solid white line and he planted each foot in turn on it. Lifting the lagging limbs and bringing them forward -- motion -- running -- without the knowledge of what it was he did. Something strange in the idea of motion -- we all progress -- only -- there was just the roadway and the white line and he didn't look up because ahead was only the horizon, still as distant as ever. And the rain -- always there was the rain, falling fine in misty droplets that soaked into his skin and his feet, making a shlick-shlick-shlick sound against the roadway as he ran. The rain: the only reality, ever-present... A beginning -- Year #: Day #I The idea had been postulated long before anyone thought of attempting to bring it into reality. Three brains: each representing a point in evolution. Three layers of neural tissue, each with its own function, each overlapping the other, impinging into the other's territory and at times conflicting. If only the three separate brains could be combined. If only when one felt an action was truly right it could be carried out, instead of the intellect's or the instinct's breaking in and preventing action. If only there were an end to the conflict inside the head, perhaps then conflict would end outside as well. Two possibilities existed for the realization of the concept: surgical and biological. Surgery was attempted, but the techniques required were too complex for surgeons to master. That left only the biological. Speed up the rate of evolution, so that the fusion of the disparate functions would occur naturally. Take a normal man and a normal woman and subject them to controlled radiation. And correlated predictables. Cut sections from ovaries -- take samples of semen. Let them mature -- mix them -- allow and'encourage growth, stimulate them so that there are finally contained in a neutral medium many fertilized cells, each with the potential for life. Care for them, allow them to develop. And as they grow -- note the differences. In some the radiation has had a detrimental effect. In the majority -- this is only the first generation -- a high failure rate is to be expected. But some have adapted beneficially. Search out the embryo deformities -- and terminate. Allow the rest to develop. Birth of the first generation. Some are blind, others deaf -- some have no sensory apparatus at all. Some are deformed in minor ways. Club feet. Harelips. Terminate failures. You are left with a score of infants, each in its own isolated crib. Eight are male and eleven are female -- of one you are uncertain. Discuss that. Is hermaphroditism what we want? No. But interesting -- isolate hermaphrodite and study development. The survivors number nineteen. At tw o years of age only five can talk and only four are capable of movement. The others are failures. Terminate. Two males. Two females. At age eight one of the males dies. No one knows the reason. Terminated by an act of God. At age twelve the children, previously isolated from all contact with each other and the outside world -- except for that filtered through to them by the scientists -- are brought together. A place is prepared for them, where there is always a vibration in the air from powerful radiation. Their skin is slightly darker than that of normal children. Their eyes are a little brighter. Their minds are a little sharper, quicker to grasp at unrelated facts and make a whole of them. They have names, given to them by the scientists who in sentimental moments have felt some small spark of feeling equivalent to parental concern. The real parents are long dead, killed by radiation poisoning. They were volunteers to begin with. No loss. There are left -- two females, one male. The male is called Joseph (someone had suggested Adam, but that was too great a cliche for all of them). The females are called Mary and Janet. At age sixteen they are gradually weaned from their diet of drugs prescribed to prevent early onset of sexual interest. It would be possible to produce offspring directly from these without need of intercourse, but there is some feeling among their makers. Allow then? some little life -- they will have so little time. In the room T#; # Jo was reading a book, stretched out on the sofa, relaxed. Mary watched him, a small fluttering smile at the corners of her mouth. She stared at his absorbed face. Then her eyes moved down his body. "Jan?" Mary turned and looked at the other girl. They had talked last night in their room, under the bedcovers, while Jo slept in his own bed in the same room, but unaware of their conversations. "Mm?" Janet glanced back from the window she had been staring through all morning, watching the distant vista of trees and grass and rivers and mountains, seeing all from this room. She had been wondering if the outside could be real. All she knew of was this room, their bedroom and the washroom where they bathed and excreted bodily wastes. Mary nodded toward Jo and smiled. Janet looked across and lifted her thin shoulders. Her small breasts trembled slightly in sympathy with the movement. "Might as well. You know what to do, don't you?" "I asked Dr. Roberts and he told me all about it." "Well, if he said it was okay, then -- " Janet was at that time far less affected by adolescent longings. But she had to admit that the sight of Jo lounging there had some kind of fascination. Mary rose to her feet and walked to the couch. Jo looked up over the cover of his book at the movement and smiled distractedly at the girl. He took it all as a matter of routine. There was nothing in Mary's approaching him that he found either unusual or enticing. Mary sat on the edge of the couch and placed her hand on his chest. "Yes?" Jo looked up at her again. Mary said nothing, but moved her hand down to his groin. He flinched slightly. She had never touched him in that way before except accidentally. "Jo -- " Mary said softly. Janet watched them, finding an excitement building inside her. She touched her breasts timidly -- her own hand suddenly strange -- and found her nipples had swollen. She watched -- mesmerized -- as Mary leaned toward Jo and touched his mouth with her own. The action seemed so right. And where Mary had her hand, Jo was growing. The meaning of the word man became clear in Janet's mind. Jo muttered something that was not words and slowly he and Mary slid from the couch to the floor. Janet moved across the room and kneeled at their side, pressing her hand to Jo's cheek. He looked up at her, something not before seen in his eyes, and his free hand reached up and touched her breast. It activated latent systems within her body which caused her to relax and lie down with the other two, touching Jo. Touching Mary touching Jo. Watching on their monitor screens the scientists smiled. "Pornography is not yet dead," one said and the others grinned in response. The technology of change T#.' # Gravid ovulation is possible in both females. Flash to computer: prepare inTheir life is not yet ended. While they sleep plastic-suited technicians enter the room and untangle their limbs -- all are now sleeping in one bed. The technicians are unable to separate them now that they have fully discovered each other, but are able to take samples from each of the three. These are carried back to the laboratories, where they are prepared and irradiated and forced to fertilization. Eggs form. The embryos are the beginnings of a second generation. Some are deformed -- terminate. Mary, Joseph and Janet continue in their enclosed environment. When they have to, they eat. They are now being fed drugs to increase their sexual vigor and the scientists concerned with reproduction are replaced by those interested in anthropology. It is the first chance anyone has ever had to study future humans. To some the entire procedure seemed very unfair -- inhuman. But we are making them human. Beings who will be the first true humans. Inhuman -- inhuman -- inhuman -- Employment was curtailed. Signs of mental retardation can now be detected in embryos (in eighteen years science has advanced and it has become possible to tell the sex, partially the intelligence and possible attitudes of a child before it is fully formed.) Terminate. "Oh, Jo -- yes, Jo -- oh, do that Jo, again -- Jo -- " He does it, while Janet watches from eyes that are too bright, awaiting her turn. Stamina, that's what that boy's got, says a man in the control room. Who can blame him? Wouldn 't you have with those two? asks another and they all laugh. Five female doctors are on the staff, observing. During this phase of the experiment two of them become pregnant. Finally, in the incubation vats, there are over a hundred tiny embryos hanging in vitreous fluid who have passed all the preliminary tests. Some will survive -- perhaps ten percent. Possibly less. Mary Joseph Janet -- one final night of mingling. Terminate. Present time: in the slow steep  #:# Only one doctor was present in the control room. She sat in a weary attitude in a chair facing the banks of monitor screens -- five of them. The one directly in front of her showed the man lying in the unruffled bed. To its left were a readout of his jife systems and a trace of his brain wave pattern. The jagged line of the latter was different from any other brain pattern ever recorded. To the right were a static display of the subject's genetic code and, below it on the same screen, his family tree. A screen beyond showed many observers crowding a room next to the subject's, watching him through a large sheet of one-way glass. She hadn't cared to go down there with them. Not knowing why. For some reason reluctant. She had been here longer than any of the others. Now she was approaching old age. She would be sixty-eight in another week. She did not yet feel old -- but sometimes when she looked at herself and remembered how she had been years ago she experienced brief pangs of regret at what she had missed. She remembered moments of decision when she could have made her life other than what it now was. Not that she hadn't done her homework -- #she was no virgin spinster. She had none of that in her past. But she had known times -- moments of softness that had promised permanence of another kind. She had passed them by because at the time her work had seemed more important. Now, she wasn't quite sure her decisions had been the right ones. Looking down, watching Juan. The first one. One. Juan. He looked so peaceful. She knew she would never be able to tell what went on inside that head. That superior head, where all three brains had been fused into one, so that he could feel his instincts, control all the previously involuntary processes, utilize eighty per cent of his brain, instead of her own meager thirty per cent, and his brain itself half as large again as her own. "You're getting old, Frances Pryce," she said to herself. "It's the way it had to be, and you know it very well." She smiled to herself and the lines in her face tightened, creasing the corners of her eyes. Dream wakedreamhallucinate... Running down through helical spirals of thought and returning along different pathways. Look at my genes, see the convolutions of my chromosomes. Fourth generation perfection. I. Am I what I am? Running, slowing, halting. my mind to where the thoughts coalesce into action, energy links, reaction, feel the blood sigh through my veins, into capillaries, in the echoing lung caverns of airfilled silence, the hemoglobin comes tumbling down between the muscled walls and grabs with sticky protean fingers at the atoms of oxygen, grabbing with a needy greed at the substance of life. Move in to depth. Heartbeat. Fibrils relax and jar back into contraction. Pump ' the blood, hissing through the veins another step. Stomach contractions. Feel the electrodes taped to my skull. Vague awareness of many people close by. Awareness of body -- of bed -- sheets taut across skin -- of walls -- window looking out across countryside, pleasant -- of a mirror -- beyond it the many people -- their thoughts tickling and intermingling with my consciousness. Waking through layers of multiple sleep. With full memory of past and present and -- The ten #: # Abraham sat cross-legged on the table. The reason for the table was that it was the only surface upon which he could sit in this position and still be able to look out through the window. There was something compelling about the view. He felt the pull of it with the edges of his mind, was aware of it distantly, but the awareness lay beyond his control so that he could not search out its cause or its source beyond simply knowing it was there. He found fascination, too, in the duality of the scene. One view was made up of mountains and trees and rivers, grass before the building. Over the top of that lay another scene, where the mountains were bare and dust storms blew across a dark violet sky. The duality was one he and the others had all lived with and didn't question. It had always been with them. It was natural. He moved back inside his head and grew aware of the links being forged there. He could feel his heartbeat, always the heartbeat, the passage of blood through veins and arteries. But that was all. So many things were still beyond his control. He glanced down at his naked body, dark and smooth. Then he looked up at the window again. Something was moving through his field of vision. A large flying animal, swooping high up on shining leathery wings. Present and future fused. He turned around and looked at the others in the room. All were at that moment absorbed in their own bodies, their own heads. This was the time for contemplation. Later they would eat and alter that there would be the time for sex. Abraham realized he was eighteen years old and felt in some way that ought to be remarkable. Something was missing in his life. Eighteen shouldn't be this way. It should be -- should... But that was part of his inner brain -- the part he could not yet understand. That was instinct. It was there, affecting him, but he couldn't yet unravel its meaning or change it. That was for his children to do. There had been fourteen of them. Abraham could remember the others who had been with hitji when he had been younger. But they had been taken away. They had acted strangely, screaming in the night and in the day their eyes had rolled as they fought off imaginary devils. The doctors had said it was a thing called insanity. It was bound to happen to some of them -- the changes were so great and rapid. The doctors said that what Abraham and the others were doing was very important. The most important thing men had ever done. Abraham didn't care. He would have to love with Sheela tonight. He didn't find the prospect greatly exciting. He thought sex something of a bore, a task that had to be carried out because the doctors wanted it so. But he would rather sit on this table and study the dual scenery outside. He sighed and looked toward Sheela. She was pleasant to look at and pleasant to touch. Loving was perhaps better with her than with the others. He and Sheela would attain their own individual pleasures and the doctors would be satisfied until the next time. Beyond the triple layer of glass the flying animal returned, its mouth opening but no sound reaching him. The staff #; # She stood outside the plain wooden door, feeling nervous and very young. When the buzzer sounded she jumped slightly, then admonished herself with a brief grin and went in. The director was sitting behind his desk, the top covered with papers and books. He looked up at her, his contact lenses catching the light from his lamp and making his eyes look blank twin globes of white. "Miss Pryce -- so nice to see you, please, come in and sit down." She smiled shyly and closed the door, went across and sat in the chair across from him, pulling her skirt down around her legs. She wondered if perhaps she should have worn something longer. "Now then, Miss Pryce, no need to be nervous." Does it really show that much? "You know that you have already been accepted for a post in this establishment, but I always like to have a few words with new employees. It can get pretty hectic in here at times and I might not get the chance to come out for air for several weeks at a time. So just that I know who you are -- and you know me -- I have these little informal chats." She waited, then wondered if he expected some form of response. Finally she settled for a simple: "Yes, sir." "You're working with -- uh, let me see -- " he flapped around the papers on his desk, not seeming to read any of them before he again looked up and said, "Yes, Dr. Thomas's group, isn't it?" "That's right, sir. On the biomedical monitoring section." "Yes. Rather important work that." "Thank you, sir." "Mm. But then, I suppose all work here is important in its own way. Even that of the ladies in the canteen. We couldn't do our work if we went unfed, could we?" "I suppose not, sir." "Yes." He hummed gently to himself, thinking perhaps of lunch, then seemed to pull himself back to the present. "You've -- uh -- been shown where you'll stay, have you? Not bad little places, really, our dormitories. Of course you can see the necessity of living on the premises, can't you? Highly secret work here. Hm. And you've been told about -- uh, marriage -- and that kind of stuff?" "Yes, sir. If I marry outside the group my contract is automatically canceled." "Yes, that's it." He seemed vaguely embarrassed, but didn't go on to explain why. The girl nodded. "Well, anything else you want to know -- uh -- Frances?" She smiled sweetly. "No, I don't think so, sir." "Well. Good luck then. Ifever there's any problem, just see my deputy about it. That's what we're here for." "Yes. Thank you, sir." She stood up and smiled one final time at him and left. The director watched her go, his eyes following the tight curves inside her skirt and the long exposed backs of her legs. Then he picked up his penand began to leaf through the notes on his desk again. The technology ol changerevisited #:#  Only four of the ten were found to be fertile. It was something no one had thought to check on. The redundant six were terminated. For a while Abraham wondered what had happened to Sheela, but it had happened before. They always took away the people he liked most. Some malevolent God read his thoughts and then spirited the goodness from his life. He slept on, unaware when they took the samples of semen from him. Fertilize. First stage blastula -- progression. The tiny first intimation of humanity lay curled, no longer than a centimeter, complete with folded arms and legs and large blind eyes. After selection there were forty developing fetuses locked into their metal and plastic-weave wombs. The bummer #:# The third generation was a foulup. One hundred per cent snafu. Not one of the Third was completely normal. Some were almost there, but even Jenny, the best of the twenty-eight thirds had her left leg six inches shorter than the right and six fingers to each hand (her feet were normal). The physical changes were becoming far more noticeable than in previous generations. The skin was black with a sheen. Hair had begun to grow more rapidly and cover greater areas of the body (surprise was expressed:... didn't think evolution would go that way). Males were now wearing fine pelts of soft hair, covering all but the palms of hands, soles of feet, lips, and eyelids. The females' faces were free of hair and they had some bare patches on the buttocks and around their nipples -- palms, feet, lips were hairless. Features had changed also. The forehead was becoming more pronounced. The face was as before, but seemed to be compressed into a smaller area. Eyes were enlarged; nose was slightly reduced; mouth was wider, lips were thinner. Teeth were much smaller, but no less in number. In their own way, to the scientist who had made them, they were quite beautiful, though they seemed hardly human any more. The scientists felt they were watching the performance of some species of exotic animal, some alien form. More than one thought of them as monkeys and watching them at sex could be embarrassing. But they were also frightening animals. They were highly intelligent, but their intelligence was incomprehensible to their makers. Previous generations had been given lessons and taught about the outside world -- this one was kept in ignorance, taught nothing. The observers were afraid of what present knowledge might do to them. At age ten, nine of the twentyeight were dead of disease of metabolic breakdown. At fourteen their number was reduced to an even dozen. Ten females and only two males. The males were watched over constantly, protected. If they should die out now, after all this time... Sex was introduced. A year passed. One male died. He was ripped apart by five females fighting over him. The last male was stronger and the females realized he was all they had left, so they took him in turns. Except when Jenny wanted him. Jenny was the leader, her word was always law. In many ways they were like animals, fighting and bickering among themselves for simple favors, arranging themselves into a heirarchic system of rights and privileges. without any information to base their reason on. As infants and untutored, they had seemed from the first to be aware of that central core of their brains where instinct is stored, where emotion springs from. Tapping into it, discovering its uses, they deliberately passed through all stages of evolution as they grew -- a process their observers equated with a search for knowledge. When young they had crawled like reptiles. As they grew older they lifted to hands and knees -- at age thirteen they walked and moved as men and women with a sure knowledge of what they were. No one else could understand or know them, quite. They were visitors from the future, images of back in time by harsh scientific logic and harsher radiation on their cells. They had crept through the instincts in their minds and then abandoned them as useless. Now they existed on pure but twisted logic. But what did they think? What did they see? A strange, sorry lot. Interval #:#  Fran Pryce lit a cigarette and shook out the match. She placed it carefully in the tin top from some dried milk can she had salvaged for an ashtray on this table. She looked across at the man sitting opposite and shook her head. "I still don't see why they should evolve in this way," she said. "Look -- according to all the predictions we've run through the computers they should gradually change to fit into the environment. Right? We know that happened all along with other life forms, including humans. So why, now, do they go against all laws? They should be four feet tall, hairless, with no teeth and reduction in locomotor function. But they're the opposite. They have more hair. The teeth are still there and even more efficient if anything. So why? Tell me, why the hell?" The man shook his head, stared across at Fran. She was still very attractive and didn't look in her late forties. If he hadn't known and had been asked to guess he might have said she was thirty-four or thirtyfive. "Perhaps our computations are based on the wrong premises," he finally said. "What if there is a change in the environment in the future? How can we take that into consideration?" "But how do they?" "I ran it through the big computer in the basement. I asked what environmental conditions would be necessary to produce what we've gof. I figured we've tried the other way around enough -- trying to figure out why they should be how they are." "What did it say?" Fran asked. "Reduction in atmosphere, much of upper layer blown away so more radiation coming in. Little ozone layer, so high ultraviolet. Dessication of planet surface. Lack of plant life -- therefore they'd have to be largely carnivorous -- probably fishing in what few oceans were left. Population would be very low, most likely, but then who'd exbe around on Earth at all?" "They could be adapted to space flight," Fran said. "The computer said that, too. The same factors fit. Low intake of liquids -- storage problems. Exposure to harsh radiation. I'm not sure about the teeth, but maybe they've invented some equivalent of hardtack and need pretty efficient choppers to deal with it." Fran smiled slightly. "We're talking as if they were from some time up there," she nodded at the ceiling, an abitrary direction. "But we made them. How can they tell what it might be like a hundred, a The man shrugged. Fran sighed out a thin streamer of smoke. "They can't, can they? It's impossible." "Why are they like they are then?" She shook her head. "There has to be some reason, we just haven't found it yet." Jenny #: # The last remaining male was schizophrenic -- there was nothing anyone could do about it. His body chemistry was so altered by evolution that nothing they gave him helped. The man shrugged. He sat most of the time in a corner, looking up at the bright images which he projected from his own private skull. Two of the females were idiots -- drooling, only coming alive when the male's fantasies took a sexual turn. The others had fairly normal intelligence -- that is, for them. The team of observers translated the results of their tests to read something like # on the standard human I.Q. scale. Jenny read somewhere over #. She had light yellow eyes and a face that even the most unfeeling among the observers agreed was pretty. Her hair was all over blond and contrasted with the dark sheen of her skin. She was well formed and she always had first priority on the male. With this generation the children were not formed artificially, but allowed to come naturally. Jenny became pregnant. Then, as if on signal, two other females were gravid. Parturition took place thirteen months after conception. Juan was born. Then Dee, and finally Tricia. A nicely balanced group, the observers thought. The third generation died out naturally. They had been the penultimate leap. Their body chemistries, in previous generations so tortured and forced, had finally revolted and in the process severely cut their life spans. Jenny was the last to die. She was just twenty years old. Dawnlight #:#I # Dreams. Oh the dreams that pull at the seams of my mind. Tell me what I am! Filtering down through the grayness is a small spark, settling into my mind, floating down through the layers I know so intimately, until finally it stops, deep in my core, the one place I cannot yet reach and I sleep, waiting for the light to flood out the shadows in this skull. "He blinked. I saw it, he blinked!" The girl swung around and hugged the man next to her. The roomful of observers tensed. From her solitary post Frances Pryce watched, her lips held in a tight line. This wasn't right -- she knew it wasn't, had known it all along but, once committed, she had never had the courage to say so. She had been here so long now that her alternatives had vanished. Wake me wake me wake me I want to see the light and smell and taste the sun. Everything is blurred, dancing on my retinas. But I can reach out and soothe the optic nerve fibers and the jarring stops. Images form. Neural highways are opening -- I have to grow up so quickly, but it's coming -- I fee! it all coming to me now. In my brain. All laid open to me now. Like a brightly lit plan seen from high above I see who I am, what I am, how I am. I am. I -- Fran watched his lean body as it moved beneath the sheets. Then his hand rose to scratch the tip of his nose in a gesture so human she smiled despite her tenseness. And then he sat up, threw back the sheet and stood erect. She opened her mouth slightly, because it was impossible not to be awed. He stood almost seven feet tall, with skin that seemed to glow with dark light through a fine down of pale white hair. His face was caught up beneath that ponderous brow -- the eyes clear and deep. showing no whites, only the irises and the pupils dark in their centers. He stretched his arms -- then smiled. "Juan -- " she whispered to herself and to the empty control room that had suddenly taken on a derelict air. Seventy years of purpose and activity and now she was left with just herself, the machines run down and their functions ended except for the almost silent tick of the clock above her head. Body. Good. That is a body. Correlate and index. Armslegscheststomach genitalsfeethandsfingers eyes nosemouthlips. Smile. Feels good. Awake. Look in the mirror and see myself for the first time. A strange experience. Correlate. Not too bad, considering. I quite like how they've made me. They must think I can't see them. I'll wave. That'll surprise them. Hi there! No wave back. Just puzzlement. hi there! Oh, what have I done? In the observation room the doctors and nurses clutched their heads as the static burst into their brains. From a distance Frances Pryce caught the tail end of the thoughtcall and heard it as it was meant to be. She stared at her instruments, then at the central console showing Juan. Someone's there, I can tell. What have I done to the others? She didn't know how to answer and discovered the beginnings of fear. Juan reached out with his mind, curious, and touched the edges of the woman's. There was too much noise from those who were nearer -- all of them were crying out over something that pained. He felt her thoughts and entered them. She gasped. It was like... But that had been long ago. He moved along through the  dusty, ancient tracks of man as he used to be. Growing to know this woman as she had been. Seeing through her eyes all of her past, feeling through her body all that had been. He found joy, pain and ecstasy all mixed and intermingled. And a terrible confusion. She lived in a mind sealed within itself, not knowing how to control her body or where her thoughts came from -- or where she was among it all, where the feelings of sadness and love and weeping came from or went to. He felt with her the moments of her past. The first time she made love. The last time. How her body felt now. The times in between. Her thoughts, ambitions, secrets, fantasies. He saw her harbored and secret shames and discovered her deep guilt feelings. Why did she keep them, harbor them, nurse them? Presently he saw why. She couldn't rid herself of them. Memory for this woman was permanent. He couldn't imagine how it was possible to live as she did. With all that shut up inside her head and with her all the time. He sorted her mind, cleaned it, bundled it up safe and left. She opened her eyes as she felt the last traces of Juan's presence leave her. She felt sated, all passions and all guilts gone. She felt happy. She turned to the screen and Juan was gone. She reached out and spun the dial and found all the rooms empty. She stopped suddenly and sat back in the chair. Why not? Why should they stay here? Surely enough has been done to them already. We made them, forced them into an early growth and how can we act surprised that they show no gratitude? But she could feel no anger or pain or loss -- or guilt -- any more. Just a soft, enclosing contentment. She closed her eyes slowly, tired now that it was finally all over. Triad #; # They were high on a mountain and they could tell there was no danger yet of their being found. And this was good, for there were decisions to be made. Juan stood on a spur of rock jutting out over the face of a tall cliff. Below him stretched the bare, tan stone, the sun wavering heat from its face. Farther down grew scrubby trees -- then a rolling forest reached down through the foothills, beyond which lay the plains. He realized distantly the metaphysical aspects of his standing where he stood. A practical need for privacy and freedom had brought him here. Now, with the whole world beneath him, open to his view, a part of his mind drew information from the racial memories evoked by the scene in his mind. These were, he discovered, a constant reality to him, so that he lived as much in the past as he did in the present, time flow only a set of ascending slopes to him. Before, there had been no Juan -- but there had been image of Juan in the future memory of the race. But such considerations could wait. He had immediacies to decide -- he and Dee and Tricia. Aware of the hills and the trees and also of the barren dry world of the future -- and again of his product of the natural evolution that coursed between the stars -- he focused on the present. He looked back over his shoulder to where the two women were sitting on the bare rock and smiled at them. He loved them both, with an equal intensity, knowing every contour of their bodies and every convolution of their thoughts. He linked with their two minds and the triad became a greater whole, able to reach out and touch the globe, feeling within its awareness the flickering candles of intelligence that were men and women and children and the dim slow movements of their thoughts. They're too old. the part that was Tricia communicated to the other two. Or perhaps we are too young, Juan thought. We arrived too early. Our time is yet a long way off. We were forced to come. They made us come, Tricia sent. Dee remained silent, the core of their binding, holding each to the other. Each member of the group was playing an individual role and together they were greater than the sum of the three. Tricia, the synthesist, said, They made us for their own reasons. They were selfish, with no thought for us in the matter. They wanted to make themselves greater and it didn't matter to them how we might feel. Juan, the questioner, answered. They didn't know. They meant well. Who are we to blame them? Their children. We are their children, Dee sent and the other two knew it was right, because Dee was their inner core of certainty. Was it a premature birth? Juan asked. Did we come too early? Too early for what? Too early for them? Or for us? Tricia -- we and they are the same. They are us -- we are they. But the separation makes matters difficult. We belong to a time a their time. It can 't be this way. So? Tricia asked. She and Juan waited, because they could feel the answer Dee held. Dee was their soul, Dee their center, the decider. She knew and she would tell them. Well? Juan asked gently. We are the future, Dee sent. They are the past. We cannot join with our own kind, but we can bring the future back to this time. It's the only way it can be. So... Juan left the thought open. No other way, Dee sent. Tricia? Yes. Dee is right. They brought us here -- now. We must bring ourselves here, too, without them. Juan turned away from the cliff and walked to the two women, sat down with them. He reached out and touched each of their faces with his fingertips and they smiled at him. The thought came simultaneously in each of their minds. Terminate. Zero Time -- Infinity Cold dry air and small, thick, salty ocean with strange fish beneath its surface. Stars.  The baby was beautiful and enough to kill! he baby gurgled. He was round and amiable, with plump pink cheeks that glowed like twin rosebuds. He was only three months old but he uttered soft pleasant sounds, waved his arms and even kicked out occasionally. Dull gray electrodes were taped at the corners of his eyes. A tiny microphone rested inside an inflatable cuff wrapped around one of his fat arms. Two more electrodes nestled snugly against his chest -- others were not in clear view. Dr. Corgan typed a couple of short coded instructions that set his computer into action. It was a compact system situated at one corner of the large sunlit room. There were two tape decks, a control console, a line printer, card reader and the typewriter. Dr. Corgan walked back to the center of the room and looked fondly at the baby. "Lower the barbells." he said loudly. He was aware of the artificial quality that always crept into his voice when he was giving the baby instructions but he couldn't help it. High above, suspended from the ceiling by an intricate complex of pulleys, a brightly colored set of barbells swayed gently. He looked at the baby and then once again at the barbells. He waited patiently and then, as though by magic, they began to descend until they passed just by his eyes. The barbells were massive but lovely, with handpainted figures done by a dear friend, a fine oil painter. Dr. Corgan leaned forward once again. "Open the laboratory door," he said. He waited expectantly until the door opened, then sighed with pleasure. A warmed bottle of milk shifted down and forward into the baby's open mouth and he began to suck vigorously. His arms and legs churned contentedly. Dr. Corgan nodded and left the room. In a cubicle behind the east wall of the laboratory was a two-way mirror, through which he could observe what the baby did without being seen in turn. On occasion he gave instructions from a microphone placed behind the mirror and then studied the baby's response before returning to the lab to type new coded instructions for the computer. Nurse Thompson sat there knitting, smartly set gray curls peeping out of the sides of her starched white cap. Dr. Corgan didn't like Nurse Thompson. She had no feeling for what he was attempting to do and was forever calling his attention to the length of time the baby had been in the laboratory. He looked at his watch and grimaced. "Mrs. Thompson," he said with an edge of malice in his voice. "I think it's time to return the baby to the nursery." He enjoyed the slow flush of embarrassment that spread over her rouged cheeks at the realization of her dereliction of duty. She put down her knitting and went inside to remove the electrodes from the baby. When she came out, carrying it, the baby was wrapped in a warm yellow blanket, the pink nose the only feature showing out of the wool. "Good night," said Dr. Corgan. after Mrs. Thompson had taken the infant back to the foundling home Dr. Corgan trudged down the hall to his office. A short bald man sat waiting for him. The visitor seemed amiable enough, although there was a hint of aggression in his probing look. Dr. Corgan hesitated before offering his hand. "You are Mr. Tanner?" "Of the Medical Times," was the reply. Dr. Corgan shuffled some papers on his desk. He had dreaded this interview and yet he welcomed it. Publicity was a vital part of research, but it had to be carefully controlled. "Let me start from the beginning," he said. Tanner smiled. "I appreciate that," he said. "Some researchers give me a tangled web of ideas that are impossible to understand. I like to start from the beginning." His pencil was poised over a lined yellow pad. Dr. Corgan's fingers trembled slightly. He sighed and began. "There have been extensive studies of learning in children. The starting age for reading has been lowered to two years by means of programed reading machines. But two is hardly the lowest possible limit." "What has happened to childhood?" asked Tanner, lifting his pencil. Dr. Corgan was startled. "I beg your pardon?" "I didn't mean to interrupt you," said Tanner. "But if kids are busy learning to read at two -- when will they have time for bikes and mudpies? What's the rush? Why can't With appropriate Spiritual development, you can come to know this as the absolute Truth, which it is, and really knowing this Truth will set you free from every form of limitation. Only #. If not completely satisfied, return material within one week for full refund. Box #G Miami, FI. # they learn at six or seven?" Dr. Corgan sat on his anger. "That's a fair question," he said. "The answer is -- because they can learn at an earlier age. Don't you see? This means that an entire intellectual horizon is opened to them, including communication with their parents on a higher plane. Children play with mud only because they have nothing better to do." "I see," said Tanner. "But to get back to the thread of my thought. There have been many studies with infants at Harvard, Princeton and elsewhere. But all of these studies have focused on how infants develop and learn." "So I understand," said Tanner. Dr. Corgan smiled gently. "I've gone far beyond those studies," he said. "I've begun to teach infants to carry out very complex, sophisticated tasks." "But how? They can't speak and they certainly can't move their limbs in a controlled way." "All true," said Dr. Corgan. "Nevertheless they have brain waves, blood pressure levels, electrocardiograms, sweat gland reactions and a host of other physiological parameters at their disposal." "But surely," said Tanner, "these are beyond their conscious control? Blood pressure levels and heart rate are both controlled by the autonomic nervous system, not consciously." Dr. Corgan waved his hands. "All the so-called autonomic factors are readily controllable by the conscious mind. I've already proved that point with laboratory rats and human adult patients. Do you recall the woman who learned to lower her diastolic blood pressure cury?" "I read about her," said Tanner. "But not everyone agreed with your explanation of how it came about." Dr. Corgan shrugged. "The point is that it did work! And the same technique works even better with infants. These babies are free of all the complicated clutter of growing up and the interaction with their family and outsiders. By the use of a judicious combination of rewards and punishments, the infant can be taught to do anything." "Anything?" "The statement is not as rash as you might think. For example, raising or lowering one's blood pressure is not always an end in itself. It offers control over two possible eventualities. Add to that the option of raising or lowering the rate of heartbeat and you now have four possible independent combinations. Suppose now that we use ten physiological variables, each measurable and each with two directions to go. We end up with over one thousand possible combinations! Can you conceive of how many things an infant can accomplish with over one thousand patterns of responses available to him?" "I'm skeptical," said Tanner, my eyes. May I see a demonstration?" "Why not?" said Dr. Corgan. "There are sleeping facilities available here but usually the baby is returned to the foundling nursery for the night. But if you will come back tomorrow afternoon I'll be happy to show you some of the things he can do." "Would two o'clock do?" "Fine," said Dr. Corgan. T ianner was prompt the following afternoon, but Dr. Corgan was in bad temper. "I've had some problems today," he said. "But we'll go on with the demonstration anyway." "I could come back another time." "Nonsense," said Dr. Corgan. He rose and led Tanner to the observation room adjoining his laboratory. "Look in there," he said. "The baby has just carried out an assigned task and the bottle of milk was lowered into his mouth as a reward. In order to get it, he had to hit the correct direction of change unerringly in ten physiological parameters which are being monitored off electrodes. These signals are fed into the computer which will accept only the proper combination. It then returns a control signal, which places the bottle in the baby's mouth." "That's incredible," said Tanner. "I could believe that the youngster controls one of the parameters. But ten simultaneously?" "That's my contribution," said Dr. Corgan. "Watch the baby. Notice that he can do several things. He can raise and lower those pretty barbells up there, open and close the laboratory door, turn the lights on and off, and a host of other little tasks." "But how does one explain how he learns to do all this?" "Nobody knows as yet," said Dr. Corgan. "But I think that it involves the untold neural networks available to the conscious and unconscious parts of the nervous system. These networks are as yet undiscovered, uncharted and functionally a complete mystery. But demonstrably we can achieve a linkup through these networks if we really want to." "Have human beings always had this capability?" "I think so. Perhaps it was needed during the early years of mankind's primitive existence." The baby began to cry. His voice became strident and his face began to purple with frustration. His arms and legs flailed wildly. "Damn!" cried Dr. Corgan. "That blasted nipple must be leaking again and he's run out of milk. Ordinarily he never cries unless something goes wrong. He knows he can get his food simply by altering his parameters to the right code." "He's really upset," said Tanner. "Probably frustrated, too." "He wants instant gratification," said Dr. Corgan. "Like all infants, he wants what he wants right away. I'll wait a few minutes and then help him. He's got to learn that patience is one of the facts of life." The lights began to go on and off. The barbells rose and descended. The bottle went in and out. An alarm bell rang. "Is the baby doing all that?" asked Tanner incredulously. "Yes," said Dr. Corgan thoughtfully. "You see, he's trying every possible combination he knows, an excellent effort -- one that deserves recognition. Now I'll go in and help him." As Tanner watched, Dr. Corgan went into the laboratory and examined the faulty bottle. As he tugged at the nipple, the barbells descended rapidly. "Look out!" called Tanner. Dr. Corgan jumped to the side as the barbells shot past his head. Then he refilled the bottle with fresh formula, attached a new nipple and inserted the bottle again into its holder. The bottle slid down and forward into the baby's mouth and the crying choked into a soft gurgle of contentment. When he returned to the observing room Dr. Corgan found Tanner in a state of agitation. "You could have been hurt," he said. "I might have been if you hadn't called out," admitted Dr. Corgan. "I've got to be more alert. Our setup is quite complicated, you know." He answered a few more questions and then Nurse Thompson came in, a look of triumph on her face. "It's time for the baby to return to nursery," she said, staring hard at Dr. Corgan. He was too distracted to notice her delight in her small victory. "Take him," he said. "I've got to run, too," said Tanner, stretching out his hand. "I want to thank you for all your help." W hen Tanner had gone Dr. Corgan fretted over the interview. Had he talked too freely? Had the emphasis been put inappropriately? What impression would the press give the public about his work? Had Tanner been hostile? Would there be a lurid banner line anyone appreciate his true motivation, which was to enrich the intellectual pleasures of every infant? He ate sparingly that night and slept badly in his bachelor bed. He was at the laboratory at seven the following morning, working on the bottle-nipple arrangement that had given him so much trouble during the interview. Perhaps the problem was the angle at which the bottle entered the baby's mouth. He operated the slide by hand and saw it come down and forward. It was possible that the whole arrangement was an eighth of an inch too high, enough to make the baby pull the nipple forward under too much stress, allowing the milk to leak. He began to laugh. It was incredible that an experiment of such complexity should founder because of a bottle and nipple. He tried several positions for the holder and when the baby arrived he thought he had it properly adjusted. But apparently he was wrong. He set and reset it, but the nipple kept sliding off the mouth of the bottle. By five-thirty Nurse Thompson was hovering about, crying the lateness of the hour. He became fully exasperated. "Go home," he said angrily. "I must get this fixed tonight. The baby will sleep in the laboratory crib and I'll stay with him." "But you'll overtire him -- " "Please get but of here, Mrs. Thompson. I'll assume all responsibility for what happens." at last he thought he had it. "Ring the alarm bell," he told the baby. The alarm rang and the bottle moved forward. The baby's mouth seemed to leap at the bottle and the nipple flew off. A torrent of milk cascaded over the baby's face. At first he seemed to strangle -- then he coughed and finally bellowed his disappointment. "I'm. terribly sorry," said Dr. Corgan. "It was all an accident. I'll set it right." He painstakingly reset the slide and replaced the nipple carefully on the bottle. Everything seemed perfect again. He was leaning over the apparatus, admiring his handiwork, when the barbell struck him heavily at the back of his skull and he tumbled to the floor, slowly sinking into a deep void. As he lay there, fighting the descent, he thought dimly. What a terrible accident.  must call for help... From a vast distance he heard the sucking noise. How delightful to know that now everything was working perfectly. Next the door to the observing room closed and soon afterward the lights went out. With a terrible effort he lifted his head and looked about. What a marvelous little fellow he is. Dr. Corgan thought for a fleeting moment. He's learned his lessons beautifully. What a pity that no one else is here to see it... The baby had stopped sucking now and was cooing contentedly. Dr. Corgan could imagine him lying there in the darkness, round and amiable with pink plump cheeks that glowed like twin rosebuds. The soft pleasant gurgling noises were the last he heard. it Helward Mann of Earth City has reached manhood at the age of six hundred and fifty miles. His age is reckoned by the city's progress toward the Optimum -- e.g. from the moment of Helward's birth Earth City has traveled six hundred and fifty miles toward this elusive goal, a process of which Helward knows little or nothing. His early years, spent in the creche with other city children, have been sheltered. His education has been Earth oriented and has given him little information about the planet the city now traverses. Following elaborate rites welcoming him to adulthood -- at which Helward elects to become an apprentice of the Future Surveyors' Guild and his engagement to a girl named Victoria Lerouex is announced -- Helward is permitted to see his first sunrise, actually his first glimpse of the outside. Assigned to serve his initial term as an apprentice with the Trackmen's Guild, he discovers that the city moves forward across the planet's surface on rails painstakingly laid ahead of it and as painstakingly removed once they have served their purpose (a) to prevent the city's sliding backward and ( b ) to be reused. He also learns that the city is fusionpowered and is the sole source of the good life on the planet -- it alone has adequate (if tasteless and synthetic) food, clothing, medical and educational facilities. It uses these to barter for workers and women to bear children -- of which it has a shortage -- from among primitive tribes of aliens or " looks " en route. The women acquired by barter remain in the city long enough to bear a child to a city male, are then returned to their tribes. The knowledge of how the city came to be is lost. It is. however, known that somehow it originated on Earth and that, in order to survive, it must be winched constantly toward the Optimum, which moves ahead of it. Instructions to this effect are contained in a document known as Destain's Directive, handed down from the city's founder in some dim antiquity. Ideally the city should progress at the rate of one-tenth of a mile a day. This pace, however, is never maintained -- there is uneven terrain to contend with; rivers and gorges must be bridged. The city has never been closer than three miles to the O ptimum. This, however, is enough to keep it alive and functioning. There is discontent both within and outside the city. Helward experiences both. Victoria, whom he has married, finds her life in urban confinement pointless. Helward has taken an apprentice's oath never to discuss the outside or the city's relationship to it with the uninitiated under penalty of death. To save his marriage, however, he breaks his vow in conversations with Victoria. He also is involved and injured in a riot of resentful "took" workers. After sen'ing his apprenticeship Helward is sent south -- into the city's "past" -- to escort home three local women for.whose child-bearing services the city has bartered to alleviate its woman-shortage. He discovers that the landscape that should have been familiar to him from the city's passage has subtly altered -- a ravine the city had bridged with great difficulty has shrunk to a mere ditch; mountains have lost height. The terrain has flattened out and the tracks of the city's passing have spread out. The three women with him also seem to grow shorter and broader until they split their dresses and must proceed naked. He himself remains physically unchanged -- but discovers himself experiencing a strange force pulling him southward ,... He has a terrifying experience when this mysterious pull sweeps him off his feet, smashes him against a cliff, then drags him up the nearly vertical side of the mountain and threatens to hurl him to oblivion on the other side. He fights clear and, having lost the women, makes his way back to the city -- only to find it under attack by armed ' 'looks. " Helward joins the defenders and the attack is repulsed. Parts of the city have been badly damaged, but it stubbornly continues its journey northward through this and subsequent attacks. Other changes in the city that have taken place during his absence Helward finds more striking. Evidently more time has passed in the city than he had counted on. In the interim his wife has given birth to a child, who has died, and she has divorced him. The city has grown more reliant on its own manpower now that the countryside has rebelled against its hiring practices. Gradually, the city returns to norm -- but it is a new norm. Helward adjusts to it. T he following day -- when I rode north with Blayne to start the future survey -- marked the beginning of a long period of regained security and radical changes for the city. I saw both processes develop gradually, for my own sense of actual city time was distorted by my journeys to the north. I learned by experience that a day spent at a distance roughly twenty miles north of optimum was equivalent to an hour of elapsed time in the city. As far as possible I kept in touch with what happened by attending as many Navigators' meetings as I could. The placidity of the city's existence that I had experienced when I first left to work outside returned more quickly than most people had expected. There were no more attacks by the tooks, although one of the militiamen, engaged in an intelligence mission, was captured and killed. Soon after this the leaders of the militia announced that the tooks were dispersing and heading for their settlements in the south. Although military vigilance was maintained for a long time -- and was never in fact wholly abandoned -- men from the militia were gradually freed to work on other functions. As I had learned at that first Navigators' meeting, the method of hauling the city was changed. After several initial difficulties had been overcome the operation was successfully converted to a system of continuous traction, using a complicated arrangement of alternating cables and phased track-laying. One-tenth of a mile in twenty-four hours was not, after all, a considerable distance -- and within a short time the city had reached optimum. This gain actually gave the city greater freedom of movement. From optimum it was possible, for instance, to take considerable detours from a bearing of true north if a sufficiently large obstacle were to appear. In actual fact, however, the terrain was good. As our surveys showed, the overall elevation of the land was falling and more gradients were in our favor than were against us. More rivers crossed this region than the Navigators would have liked and the Bridge-Builders were kept busy. But with the city at optimum and with its greater capacity for speed relative to the movement of the ground more time was available for decision-making and for building a safe bridge. With some hesitation at first, the barter system was reintroduced. Negotiations were conducted more scrupulously than before. The city paid more generously for manpower -- which was still needed -- and tried for a long time to avoid the necessity of bartering for women. Through a long series of Navigators' meetings I followed the debate on this last subject. We still had . the seventeen transferred women inside the city who had been with us since before the first attack -- they had expressed no desire to return to their villages. But the predominance of male births continued and there was a strong lobby for the return of the transfer system. No one knew why there should be such an imbalance in the distribution of the sexes, but it was undoubtedly so. Furthermore, three of the transferred women had given birth within the last few miles and each of these babies had been male. It was suggested that the longer women from outside remained in the city, the more chance there was that they, too, would produce male children. Again, no one understood why. At the last count there was a total of seventy-six male and fourteen female children below the age of one hundred and fifty miles. As the percentage continued to mount the Barter guild eventually was authorized to resume transfer negotiations. The decision served to highlight the social changes that were taking place. The open-city system had remained and non-guildsmen were allowed to attend Navigators' meetings as spectators. Within a few hours of the announcement everyone in the city knew that the barter for women was being renewed and many voices were raised in protest. Nevertheless, the decision was implemented. Although hired labor was again being used, fewer men were taken on and a considerable number of people from the city continued to work on the tracks and cables. Hence there was not much that wasn't known about the city's operations. But general education about the real nature of the world on which we lived remained poor. D uring one debate I heard the word "Terminator" used for the first time. The Terminators apparently were a group of people who actively opposed the continued movement of the city and were committed to halting it. As far as was known they were not militant and would take no direct action, but they were gaining a considerable amount of support within the city and a program of reeducation was begun to dramatize the necessity of moving the city northward. At the next Council meeting there was a violent disruption -- a group of people burst into the chamber and tried to take the chair. I was not surprised to see that Victoria was among them. After a noisy argument the Navigators summoned the assistance of the militia and the meeting was closed. This disruption, perversely, had the effect desired by the Terminator movement -- the Navigators' meetings were once again closed to the public. The dichotomy in the opinions of the ordinary people of the city widened. The Terminators had a considerable amount of support, but no real authority. A few incidents followed. A cable was found cut in mysterious circumstances and a Terminator tried one day to speak to the hired men in an attempt to get them to return to their villages... still, by and large the Terminator movement was no more than a thorn in the side of the Navigators. Reeducation went well. A series of lectures attempted to explain the peculiar dangers of this world and they were well attended. The design of the hyperbola was adopted as the city's motif and was worn as an ornament on the guildsmen's cloaks, stitched inside the circle on their breasts. I don't know how well the lectures were understood by the ordinary people of the city -- I overheard some discussion of the subject but the influence of the Terminators perhaps weakened the program's credibility. In spite of everything the city continued to move slowly northward. Sometimes I would take time off from other matters and try to view it in my mind's eye as a tiny speck of matter on an alien world. I would see it as an object of one universe trying to survive in another -- as a city full of people, holding on to the side of a forty-five degree slope, pulling its way against a tide of ground on a few thin strands of cable. W ith the return to a more stable environment for the city the task of future surveying became more routine. For our purposes the ground to the north of the city was divided into a series of segments, radiating from optimum at five-degree intervals. Under normal circumstances the city would not seek a route that was more than fifteen degrees away from due north, but our extra capability to detour did allow considerable flexibility. Our procedure was simple. Surveyors would ride north from the city -- either alone or, if they chose, in pairs -- and conduct a comprehensive survey of the segment allotted to them. There was plenty of time available to us. On many occasions I would find myself seduced by the feeling of freedom in the north -- the experience. Blayne once told me, was common to most Futures. Where was the urgency to return if a day spent lazily on the bank of a river wasted only a few minutes of the city's time? T here was, however, a price to pay for the time spent in the north, though it did not seem real to me until I saw its effects for myself. A day spent idling in the north was a day in my life. In fifty days I aged the equivalent of five miles in the city, but the city people had aged only four days. It did not matter at first -- our return visits to the city were so frequent that I saw and felt no difference. But in time, the people I had known -- Victoria, Jase, Malchuskin -- seemed not to have aged at all, but catching a sight of myself in a mirror one day I saw the effect on myself. I did not want to settle down permanently with another girl -- Victoria's notion that the ways of the city would disrupt any relationship took greater meaning for me every time I considered it. The first of the transferred women were coming to the city and as an unmarried man I was told that I was eligible to mate temporarily with one of them. At first I resisted the idea because, to be frank, it repelled me. It seemed to me that even a purely physical affair should have some complement in shared emotions. But whenever I was in the city I and other eligible men were encouraged to mix socially with the girls in a recreation room set aside for this purpose. I found these meetings embarrassing and humiliating at first, but as I grew used to them my inhibitions eventually waned. In time a girl named Dorita and I discovered a mutual liking. Soon she and I were allocated quarters for privacy. We did not have much in common, but her attempts to speak English were delightful and she seemed to enjoy my company. Soon she was pregnant and between my surveying missions I watched her pregnancy proceed. Slowly, so unbelievably slowly. I began to grow increasingly frustrated with the apparently sluggish progress of the city. By my own subjective time scale, a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred miles had elapsed since I had become a Future guildsman -- yet the city was still in sight of the hills we had been passing through at the time of the attacks. I applied for a temporary transfer to another guild. Much as I enjoyed the, leisured life in the future I felt that time was passing' me by. For a few miles I worked with the Traction guild and it was during this period that Dorita gave birth. She produced twins -- a boy and a girl. Much celebration... but I found that the city life discontented me in another way. I had been working with Jase, who had once been several miles older than I. Now he was clearly younger and we had little in common. Shortly after she had given birth Dorita left the city and I returned to my own guild. Like the Future guildsmen I had seen as an apprentice, I was becoming a misfit in the city. I enjoyed my own company, relished those stolen hours in the north, was uncomfortable in the city. I had developed an interest in drawing, but told almost no one about it. I did my guild work as quickly and efficiently as possible, then rode off alone through the future countryside, sketching what I saw, trying to find in line drawings some expression of a terrain where time could almost stand still. I watched the city from a distance, seeing it as something alien -- not of this world, no longer even of me. Mile by mile it hauled itself forward, never finding or even seeking a final resting place. Book Four S he waited in the doorway of the church while the discussion continued on the far side of the square. Behind her, in the temporary workshop, the priest and two assistants were working patiently at restoring the plaster image of the Virgin Mary. The church was cool and, in spite of the partly caved-in roof, clean and restful. She knew she shouldn't be here, but some instinct had sent her inside when the two men had arrived. She watched them talking earnestly to Luiz Carvalho, the self-appointed leader of the village, and a handful of other men. In other times the priest, perhaps, would have assumed responsibility for the community, but Father dos Santos was, like herself, a newcomer. The men had ridden into the village along the dried-up streambed and now their horses grazed while the discussion continued. She was too far away to hear the actual words, but it seemed to her that some deal was being struck. The men from the village talked volubly, feigning no interest, but she knew that if their attention had not been caught they would not still be talking. It was the horsemen who held her interest. That they were not from any of the nearby villages was selfevident. Their appearance contrasted strikingly with that of the villagers -- each wore a black cape, well-fitting trousers and leather boots. Their horses were saddled and apparently groomed and, though each carried large saddlebags loaded with equipment, they stood without apparent fatigue. No local horse was in such good condition. Her curiosity began to override her instinct and she stepped forward to learn for herself what was going on. As she did so the negotiations appeared to have been completed, for the village men turned away and the other two returned to their horses. They mounted immediately and headed back the way they had come. She stood and watched them, debating whether or not to follow. When they disappeared among the trees that grew along the stream she ran between two of the houses and scrambled up the rise of ground behind the village. After a few moments she saw the men emerging from the trees. They drew rein and halted. They conferred for about five minutes, several times looking back in the general direction of the village. She kept out of sight, standing in the dense scrub that grew all over the hill. Suddenly one of the men raised his hand to the other and swung his horse around. He set off at a gallop in the direction of some distant hills -- the other man turned his animal in the opposite direction and walked it at a leisured pace. She returned to the village and found Luiz. "What did they want?" she asked. "They need men for some work." "Did you agree to this?" He looked evasive. "They're coming back tomorrow." "Are they going to pay?" "With food. Look." He held out a handful of bread and she took it from him. It was brown and fresh and smelled good. "Where did they get this?" Luiz shrugged. "They also have other food." "Did they give you any of that?" "No." She frowned, wondering again who the men might be. "Anything else?" "Only this." He showed her a small bag and she opened it. Inside was a coarse white powder and she sniffed at it. "They said it would make fruit grow." "They have more of this?" "As much as we need." She put the bag down and went back to the church workshop. After a word with Father dos Santos she walked quickly to the stables and saddled up her own horse. She rode out of the village by way of the dried-up stream and followed in the direction of the second man. B eyond the village stretched a wide area of scrubland dotted with trees. She soon saw the second man some distance ahead of her, still walking his horse toward denser woodland, beyond which a river flowed. She kept her distance, not wishing to be seen until she found out where he was heading. When he entered the woods she lost sight of him and dismounted. She led her horse by its reins, keeping a wary eye for any sign. Soon she could hear the sound of the river, shallow at this season, its bed noisy with pebbles. She saw his horse first -- it was tethered to a tree. She tied up her own animal and continued afoot. The air was warm and still under the trees and she felt dusty from the ride. She wondered suddenly what had prompted her to follow this man when reason warned her of any number of possible risks. But something about him -- and his companion -- was different from anything she had known. She moved more cautiously as she approached the edge of the wood. Here she halted, looking down the shallow bank toward the water. The man was there and she studied him with interest. He had discarded his cloak. It lay with his boots beside a small pile of equipment. He had waded into the river, and was clearly relishing the coolness of the water. Completely oblivious of her presence, he kicked his feet in the water, sending up showers of glittering spray. In a moment he bent down, scooped up some water in his hands and splashed it over his face and neck. He turned, waded out of the water and bent over his equipment on the shore. From a black leather case he took what seemed to her a small camera, suspended the case by its strap over his shoulder and connected it to the camera with a short lead. This done, he adjusted a small ferruled knob on the side. He put down the camera for a moment and unfurled a long paper roll, wound like a scroll. He laid this on the ground, looked at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then picked up the camera and returned to the water's edge. Deliberately he pointed the camera upstream for a second or two, then lowered it and turned. He pointed it at the opposite bank and then, startling her, pointed it in her direction. She ducked down out of sight and from his lack of reaction guessed he had not seen her. When she looked again he was pointing the camera downstream. He returned to the length of paper and with great care inscribed a few symbols. Still moving deliberately, he put the camera back in its case, rolled up the paper and stowed it with the rest of the equipment. He stretched elaborately, then scratched the back of his head. Listlessly he returned to the water's edge, sat down and dangled his feet in the water. In a moment he sighed and lay back, his eyes closed. S he regarded him closely. He certainly looked harmless enough. He was big, well-muscled, and his face and arms were deeply tanned. His hair was long and shaggy, a great mane of light auburn. He wore a beard. She estimated him to be somewhere in his middle thirties. In spite of the beard he had a clean-cut, youthful face, grinning at the simple animal bliss of cold wet feet on a hot dry day. Flies hovered around his face and from time to time he would swipe at them lazily. After a few more moments of hesitation she started forward and half-walked, half-skidded down the bank, pushing a minor avalanche of soil before her. The man's reaction was immediate. He sat up, looked around sharply and scrambled to his feet. In so doing he turned awkwardly, and slipped down on his stomach, his feet thrashing in the water. She started to laugh. He recovered his foothold and dove for his equipment. A few seconds later he had a rifle in his hands. She stopped laughing... but he did not raise the rifle. Instead he said something in Spanish so bad that she could not understand him. She spoke only a little Spanish herself, so she said in the language of the villagers, "I didn't mean to laugh." He shook his head, then looked at her carefully. She spread her hands to prove that she carried no kind of weapon and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. He seemed satisfied that she presented no threat to him and put down the rifle. Again he said something in atrocious Spanish, then muttered a few words in English. "Do you speak English?" she asked . "Yes. Do you?" "Like a native." She laughed again and asked, "Do you mind if I join you?" She nodded toward the river, but he continued to stare dumbly at her. She slipped off her shoes and walked down to the water. She waded in, hitching up her skirt. The water was cold -- it made her toes curl, but the sensation was delightful. In a moment she sat on the ground, keeping her feet in the water. He came to sit beside her. "Sorry about the gun. You startled me." "I'm sorry, too," she said. "But you looked so blissful." "To relax and cool off is the best thing to do on a day like this." Together they stared down at the water flowing over their feet. Beneath the rippling surface white flesh seemed to flicker like a flame in a draft. "What's your name?" she asked. "Helward." "Helward?" She tried the sound of the word. "Is that a surname?" "No. My full name is Helward Mann. What's yours?" "Elizabeth. Elizabeth Khan. I don't like being called Elizabeth." "I'm sorry." She glanced at him. He looked very serious. She was a little confused by his accent. She had realized he was not a native of this region and he spoke English naturally and without effort, but he had a strange way of pronouncing his vowels. "Where do you come from?" she said. "Around here." He stood up suddenly. "I'd better water the animal." H e stumbled again as he climbed the bank, but this time Elizabeth did not laugh. He walked straight into the trees, did not pick up his equipment. The rifle was still there. He looked over his shoulder at her once and she turned away. When he returned he was leading both horses. She stood up and led her mount to the water. Standing between the horses, Elizabeth stroked the neck of Helward's. "She's beautiful," she said. "Is she yours?" "Not really. I just ride her more often than any of the others." "What do you call her?" "I -- haven't given her a name. Should I?" "Only if you want to. Mine hasn't got a name either." "I enjoy riding," Helward said suddenly. "It's the best part of my work." "That and paddling in rivers. What do you do?" "I'm a... I mean, it hasn't really got a label. What about you?" "I'm a nurse. Officially, that is. I do lots of things. "We have nurses," he said. "In the -- where I come from." She looked at him with new interest. "Where's that?" "A city. In the south." "What's it called?" "Earth. Although most of the time we just call it the city." Elizabeth smiled uncertainly, not sure she had heard correctly. "Tell me about it." He shook his head. The horses had finished drinking and were nuzzling each other. "I think I'd better be on my way," he said. He walked quickly toward his equipment, scooped it up and stuffed it hurriedly into the saddlebags. Elizabeth watched curiously. When he had finished he took the rein, turned the horse around and led it up the bank. At the fringe of the trees he looked back. "I'm sorry. You must think me very rude. It's just that you're not like the others." "The others?" "The people around here." "Is that so bad?" "No." He looked around the riverside as if seeking some further excuse to stay with her. Abruptly he seemed to change his mind about leaving. He tethered the horse to the nearest tree. "Can I ask you something?" "Of course." "I wonder -- would you let me draw you?" "Draw me?" "Yes -- just a sketch. I'm not very good -- I haven't been doing it very long. While I'm up here I spend a lot of time drawing what I see." "Was that what you were doing before I came down? I saw you with some papers." "That was just a map." "All right. Do you want me to pose for you?" He fumbled in his saddlebag, then brought out a sheaf of papers in assorted sizes. He flicked nervously through the sheets and she saw that some had line drawings on them. "Just stand there," he said. "No -- beside your horse." H e sat down on the edge of the bank, balancing the papers on his knees. She watched him, a little disconcerted by this sudden development, and felt a growing selfconsciousness that was generally alien to her personality. He stared over the paper at her. She stood by the horse, her arm reaching under its heck to pat. the other side, and the horse responded by pressing its nose against her. "You're standing wrong," he said. "Turn more toward me." The self-consciousness grew and she realized she was standing in an unnatural, awkward posture. He worked away, using one sheet of paper after the next, and she began to relax. She decided to pay no attention to him and petted the horse again. After a while he asked her to sit in the saddle, but she was growing tired. "Can I see what you've done?" "I never show my drawings to anyone." "Please, Helward. I've never posed before." He sifted through the papers and selected a few. "I don't know what you'll think." She took them from him. "God, am I as skinny as that?" she said without thinking. He tried to take the drawings away from her. "Give them back." She turned away from him and flicked through the rest. It was possible to see that they were of her, but his sense of proportion was -- unusual. Both she and the horse were drawn too tall and thin. The effect was not unpleasing, but it was weird. "Please -- I'd like them back." She gave them to him and he put them at the bottom of the pile. Abruptly he turned his back on her and walked toward his horse. "Have I offended you?" she asked. "It's all right. I knew I shouldn't have shown them to you." "I think they're excellent. It's just -- it's a bit of a shock to see yourself through someone else's eyes. I told you I had never posed before." "You're difficult to draw." "Could I see some of your others?" "You wouldn't be interested." "Look, I'm not just trying to smooth your ruffled feathers. I really am interested." "Okay." H e gave her the whole pile and continued toward his horse. She sat down again and began to go through the drawings, aware of him in the background pretending to adjust the horse's harness, but in fact watching her covertly, trying to anticipate her response. He had drawn a variety of subjects. There were several of his horse: grazing, standing, throwing back its head. These were amazingly naturalistic -- with a few lines he had caught the very essence of the animal, proud yet docile, tamed yet still its own master. Curiously, the proportions were exactly right. There were several drawings of a man -- self-portraits, or the man she had seen him with earlier? He was drawn in his cloak, without his cloak, standing by a horse, using the camera she had seen earlier. Again the proportions were almost exactly right. A few sketches were of scenery -- trees, a river, a curious structure being dragged by ropes, a distant range of hills. He was not as adept with views. Sometimes his proportions were good, at other times there was a disturbing distortion that she could not quite identify. Something wrong with the perspective? She couldn't tell. At the bottom of the pile she found the drawings he had made of her. The first few were not very good, clearly hfs first attempts. Three of those he had shown her were by far the best, but there was still this elongation of her and the horse that puzzled her. "Well?" he asked. "I -- " She couldn't find the right words. "I think they're good -- some are unusual. You've an excellent eye." "You're a difficult subject." "I particularly like this one." She searched through the pile, found one of the horse with its mane flying wild. "It's lifelike." He grinned then. "That's my own favorite." She glanced again through the drawings. Something about a few of them she hadn't understood -- there, in one of the drawings of the man. High in the background hung a weird, four-pointed shape. There was one in each of the sketches he had done of her. "What's this?" she said, pointing to it. "The sun." She frowned a little, but decided not to pursue the subject. She felt she had done enough damage to his ego for the moment. She selected what she thought was the best of the three. "Could I have this one?" "I thought you didn't like it." "I do. I think it's marvelous." He looked at her carefully, as if trying to divine whether she was being truthful, then again took the pile from her. "Would you like this one, too?" He handed her the one of the horse... "I couldn't. Not that one." "I'd like you to have it," he said. "You're the first person to have seen it." "I -- thank you." He placed the papers carefully into the saddlebag and buckled the cover. "Did you say your name was Elizabeth?" "I prefer to be called Liz." He nodded gravely. "Goodbye, Liz." "Are you going?" He didn't answer, but untethered , the horse and swung into the saddle. He rode down the bank, splashed through the shallow water of the river and spurred his horse on up the opposite bank. In a few seconds he was lost to sight among the trees. B ack at the village Elizabeth found she had no appetite for more work. She was still waiting for a consignment of proper medical supplies and a doctor had been promised for more than a month. She had done what she could to see that the villagers were getting a balanced diet -- but food supplies were limited -- and she had been able to deal with the more obvious ailments such as sores, rashes and so forth. Last week she had helped deliver a baby for one of the women and for the first time had felt she was accomplishing something. Now, with the strange encounter by the river still fresh in her mind, she decided to return to headquarters early. She found Luiz before she left. "If those men come back," she said, "try to find out what it is they want. I'll be back in the morning. If they come before I arrive try to keep them here. Find out where they're from." By the time she had covered the seven miles to headquarters it was evening. The place was almost deserted -- many of the field operatives stayed out for several nights on end. Tony Chappell was there, though, and he intercepted her as she headed for her room. "Are you free this evening, Liz? I thought we might -- " "I'm very tired. I thought I'd have an early night." When she had first arrived Elizabeth had felt faint stirrings of attraction toward Chappell and had made the mistake of showing them. There were only a few women at the station and he had responded with great eagerness. Since then he had hardly left her alone and she hadn't yet discovered a polite way of cooling his ardor. In her room she dumped her bag on the bed, undressed and took a long shower. Later she went to find something to eat and, inevitably, Tony joined her. During the meal she remembered she had been meaning to ask him something. "Do you know any towns around here called Earth?" "Earth? Like the planet?" "That's what it sounded like. I might have heard wrong." He shook his head. "Whereabouts?" "Somewhere around here. Not far." "Urf? Or Mirth?" He laughed. "Are you sure?" "No -- not really. I think I must have gotten it wrong." In his own inimitable way Tony continued to make poor jokes about what she might have heard until she found an excuse to get away. There was a large map of the region in one of the offices, but she couldn't see anything that might sound like the town where Helward had said he lived. He had described it as a city lying in the south, but there was no large settlement for nearly sixty miles. She was genuinely exhausted and returned to her room. She undressed and took the two sketches Helward had given her and taped them to the wall by the bed. The one of her was so strange... She looked at it more closely. The paper he had used was evidently quite old, for its edges were yellowed. Looking at the edges, she realized that the top and bottom were slightly burred where they had been torn, but the line was quite straight.  Experimentally she ran the tip of her finger along it -- the paper had been perforated. Careful not to damage the drawing, she separated the tape from the wall and took down the sketch. On the back she discovered that a column of numbers had been printed down one side. Some were asterisked . Printed in pale blue ink along the TM. She taped the sketch again to the wall -- and stared at it uncomprehendingly for a long time. I n the morning Elizabeth put in another teleprinted request for a doctor, then set out for the village. She arrived in the heat of the day to find the place steeped in listlessness and lethargy. She sought out Luiz, found him sitting in the shadow of the church with two other men. She asked, "Have the strangers been back?" "Not today, Menina Khan." "When did they say they'd come again?" Luiz shrugged. "Sometime. Today, tomorrow." "Have you tried that -- " She stopped, irritated with herself. She had meant to take the purported fertilizer to headquarters to have it analyzed and in her preoccupaton had forgotten it. "Let me know if they come." She went to see Maria and her new baby, but her mind was not fully on her work. Later she supervised a meal, that was served to all comers, then talked to Father dos Santos in the workshop. All this time she had one ear cocked for any sound of horses. No longer trying to make any excuses for herself, she went down to the stable, saddled up and rode out of the village, toward the river. She was trying not to dwell on her own thoughts, trying not to examine her own motives, but failed. The last twenty-four hours had been momentous in their own way. She had come out here to work because of a feeling that her life at home had been without meaning -- only to find new frustrations among these impoverished villagers. What she could offer them was too little and too late. A few government handouts of grain, a few inoculations, a repaired church might be better than nothing -- but the root of the local poverty problem remained unsolved because the central economy had failed. There was nothing on this land but what the people themselves could take. The intrusion of Helward into her life was the first event of interest she had experienced since she arrived. She knew, as she rode across the scrubland toward the trees, that her motives regarding him were mixed. She admitted to curiosity -- but something in the situation reached deeper. The men stationed here -- her coworkers -- were obsessed with themselves and what they imagined their missions in life to be. They spoke in abstracts about group psychology, social readjustment, patterns of behavior -- in her more cynical moods she found their self-important outlook pathetic. Apart from the unfortunate Tony Chappell, she had formed no kind of interest in any of them -- which was not at all as she had anticipated before she arrived. Helward was different. She refrained from spelling it out to herself, but she knew why she was riding out to find him. X he found their yesterday's meeting place on the riverbank and wed her horse to drink. Then she tethered it in the shade and sat down at the water's edge to wait. Again she tried to blank out the turmoil of mental activity: thoughts, desires, questions. Concentrating hard on the physical environment, she lay back on the bank in the sunshine and closed her eyes. She listened to the sound of the water as it ran over the pebbles, the sigh of the wind in the trees, the humming of insects. She inhaled the smell of dry undergrowth, hot soil, warmth. A long time passed. Behind her the horse whisked its tail every few seconds, patiently flicking away swarming flies. She opened her eyes as soon as she heard the sound of the other horse and sat up. Helward sat his mount on the opposite bank. He raised his hand in greeting and she waved back. He dismounted immediately and she smiled to herself. He seemed in high spirits and tried a handstand to amuse her. After two attempts he made it, then toppled over and landed with a shout and a splash in the river. Elizabeth jumped up and ran through the shallow water toward him. "Are you all right?" He grinned at her. "I could do that when I was a kid." "So could I." He stood up, looking down ruefully at his soaked clothes. "They'll soon dry," she said. "I'll get my horse." They splashed across to her side of the river and Helward stood his horse next to Elizabeth's. She sat down on the bank again and Helward came to sit close beside her, stretching out his legs in the sun so that his clothes might dry. Behind them the horses stood nose to tail, whisking flies. "Vuestions, questions -- but she J suppressed them all. She enjoygd the intrigue, didn't want to destroy it with understanding. The rational explanation would be that he was an operative from a station similar to hers and that he was enjoying an elaborate and somewhat pointless joke at her expense. She didn't care -- his presence was enough and she was herself sufficiently emotionally suppressed to relish the break with routine he was bringing her. The only common bond between them that she knew of was that she was the only person to whom he had shown his sketches and she asked to see them again. For a while they talked about the drawings and he spoke of his various enthusiasms -- she was interested to see that all the sketches were on the back of old computer printout paper. Eventually Jie said, "I thought you were a took." He pronounced it with a long vowel, like "shoot." "What's that?" "One of the people who live around here. But they don't speak English." "A few do. Not very well. Only when we teach them." "Who is 'we'?" "The people I work for." "You're not from the city -- " he said suddenly, then looked away. Elizabeth felt a glimmer of alarm. He had looked and acted like this the day before and then he had suddenly left. She didn't. want that now. "Do you mean your city?" "No -- of course you're not. Who are you?" "You know my name," she said. "Yes, but where are you from?" "England. I came here about two months ago." "England -- that's on Earth, isn't it?" He was staring at her intently, the drawings forgotten now. She laughed, a nervous reaction to the strangeness of the question. "It was the last time I was there," she said, trying to make a joke of it. "My God! Then -- " "What?" He stood up abruptly and turned away from her. He took a few steps, then turned again and stood over her, staring down. "You've come from Earth?" "What do you mean?" "Are you from Earth -- the planet?" "Of course -- I don't understand." "You're looking for us," he said. "No! I mean -- I'm not sure." "You've found us!" She stood up, backed away from him. S he waited beside the horses. The aura of strangeness had become one of madness and she knew she should leave. The next move must come from him. "Elizabeth -- don't go." "Liz," she said. "Liz -- do you know who I am? I'm from the city of Earth. You must know what that means." "No, I don't." "You haven't heard about us?" "No." "We've been here for thousands of miles -- many years. Nearly two hundred." "Where is the city?" He waved his arm in a northeast direction. "Down there. About twenty-five miles to the south." She didn't react to the contradiction of direction, assumed he had made a mistake. "May I see the city?" she said. "Of course!" He took her hand excitedly and placed it on the rein of her horse. "We'll go now." "Wait. How do you spell the name of your city?" He spelled it for her. "Why is it called that?" "I don't know. Because we are from the planet Earth, I suppose." "Why do you differentiate between the two?" "Because -- isn't it obvious?" "No." She realized she was humoring him as if he were a maniac, but only excitement shone in his eyes, not madness. Her instinct, though, on which she had been so dependent recently, warned her to be careful. She could not be sure of anything now. "But this is not Earth," he said. She said, "Helward -- meet me here tomorrow. By the stream." "I thought you wanted to see our city." "Yes -- but not today. If it is twenty-five miles away I would have to get a fresh horse, tell my superiors." She was making excuses. He looked at her uncertainly. "You think I'm making it up," he said. "No." "Then what's wrong? I tell you, as long as I can remember and for many years before I was born the city has survived in the hope that help would come from Earth. Now you are here and you think I am mad -- " "You are on Earth." He opened his mouth, closed it again. "Why do you say that?" he said. "Why should I say otherwise?" He took her arm again and whirled her round. He pointed upward. "What do you see?" She shielded her eyes against the glare. "The sun." "The sun! The sun! What about the sun?" "Nothing. Let go of my arm -- you're hurting me!" He released her and scrambled over to the discarded drawings. He took the top one, held it out for her to see. "That is the sun!" he shouted, pointing at the weird shape drawn at the top right of the picture, a few inches from the spindly figure he had said was she. "There is the sun!" Heart beating furiously she untied her horse, climbed into the saddle and kicked in her heels. The horse wheeled and she rode away at a gallop. Helward stood looking after her, still holding out his drawing. I t was evening by the time Elizabeth reached the village -- the hour was too late for her to set out for headquarters. She had no will to return there anyway and there was a place in the village where she could sleep. The main street was empty of people -- unusual, for this early evening hour was a popular one with the people for sitting in the dust utside their houses and talking idly while they drank the strong resinous wine that was all they could ferment around here. Sounds were coming from the church and she headed that way. Most of the men of the village were gathered inside -- and few of the women. One or two girls were crying. "What's going on?" Elizabeth asked Father dos Santos. "Those men came back," he said. "They've offered a deal." He was standing well to one side, obviously incapable of influencing the people in any way. Elizabeth tried to catch the gist of the discussion, but there was much shouting and even Luiz, who stood prominently near the wrecked altar, could not make himself heard over the hubbub. Elizabeth caught his eye and he came to her at once. "Well?" 'The men came today, Menina Khan. We are agreeing to their terms." "it doesn't sound like there's much agreement. What are their terms?" "Fair." He started to head back toward the altar, but Elizabeth caught his arm. "What did they want?" she said. "They will give us many medicines and a lot of food. There is more of the fertilizer and they say they will help repair the church, though that is not wished by us." He was looking at her evasively, his gaze flickering up to her eyes, then away, then back again. "And in return?" "Only a little." "Come on, Luiz. What did they want?" "Ten of our women. Is nothing." She stared at him in amazement. "What did you -- " "They will be well looked after. They will make them healthy, and when they return to us they will bring more food." "And what do the women say to that?" He glanced over his shoulder. "They are not happy." "I'll bet they're not." She looked at the six women present. They stood in a small group and the men nearest to them looked sheepish. "What do they want them for?" "We do not ask." "Because you think you know." She turned to dos Santos. "What's going to happen?" "They've already made up their minds," he said. "But why? Surely they can't seriously consider trading their wives and daughters for a few sacks of grain?" Luiz said, "We need what they offer. " "But we have already promised you food. There is a doctor on his way now." "Yes -- and so you have promised. Two months you have been here and very little food, no doctor. These men are honorable. We can tell." He returned to face the crowd. In a moment he called for a vote by show of hands. The deal was confirmed. None of the women voted. E lizabeth passed a restless night, but by the time she rose in the morning she knew what she was going to do. The day had produced a volume of unexpected developments. Ironically, the one of which she had felt instinctively confident had not materialized. Now that her encounter with Helward had taken on a new perspective, she could put words to what she had expected: the stirring inside her had been a physical restlessness, and she had ridden down to the river in full expectation of being seduced by him. It could have happened, she now knew, until the moment the fanatical expression had seized his eyes. She still experienced stirrings of what she had felt -- not fear, not amazement, but something between -- during the last shouted conversation under the trees. What about the sun ? Undoubtedly there had been more to the scene than she had grasped. Helward's behavior the day before had been different -- she had tapped a hidden sensitivity and he had responded the way any man would. He had shown no sign of madness then. Some mystery was attached to his use of computer paper. She knew of only one computer within a thousand miles of here and she also knew where it was and what it was used for. It didn't use paper printouts, and it certainly wasn't an trained in the basics of computers had heard of them, but no machine Crash. Certainly the only ones intact, if not working, were in museums. Finally, the deal proposed by the men who had visited the village had been wholly unanticipated, at least by her. Although, remembering Luiz's expression after he had first spoken to the men, she felt sure that he had had from the start at least an inkling of what had been expected by way of payment. Somehow all must be connected. She knew the men who had come to the village were from the same place as Helward -- and that his behavior was linked in some way to this deal. There remained the question of her own involvement. Technically, the village and its people were the responsibility of her and dos Santos. Headquarters was primarily interested in overseeing the repair of a big harbor on the coast -- only once had a supervisor visited the village. In theory Elizabeth was in the charge of dos Santos, but he was a local man who had been one of the several hundred students who had been rushed through the government theological college in an effort to take religion back to the outlying regions. Religion was the traditional opiate here and missionary work was given a high priority in government circles. But the facts of the situation spoke for themselves: dos Santos's work would take years and for most of the early ones he would be working uphill toward reestablishing the church as the social and spiritual leader of the community. The villagers tolerated him, but it was of Luiz they took notice -- and, to a certain extent, of herself. If any action were to be taken it would have to be on her own initiative. The decision did not come quickly. Throughout that long, warm night she did what she could to separate the pros and cons, the risks and the benefits, and however she looked at it her chosen course of action seemed to be the only one. S he rose early and went down to Maria's house. She had to be quick -- the men had said they would be coming soon after sunrise. Maria was awake -- her baby was crying. She knew of the decision taken the night before and she questioned Elizabeth about it. "We'll talk about it some other time," Elizabeth said. "Right now I want to trade clothes with you." "But yours are so beautiful -- " "I want something of yours -- to play a joke on a friend. Anything will do." Maria found a selection of rough garments and laid them out for Elizabeth's inspection. They were worn and probably had never seen soap and water. For Elizabeth's purpose they were ideal. She selected a ragged, loose-fitting skirt and an off-white shirt that had presumably once belonged to one of the men. She slipped out of her own clothes and pulled on Maria's. Maria said, "But you look no better than a village girl -- " "Right." Elizabeth examined the crying baby, found nothing wrong with it beyond a touch of colic. She went over with Maria the daily routine she should follow to keep the infant comfortable. Maria, as always, pretended to listen, although she would forget everything as soon as she was left alone. Had she not reared three children already? Walking barefoot up the dusty street, Elizabeth wondered if she truly would pass for one of the village women. She shook her hair into disarray -- it was long and brown and she was deeply tanned. She tried to modify her posture as she walked to conceal the fact that she looked -- and was -- better fed than the village women. A small group of people already waited in the square in front of the church and more were arriving by the minute. Luiz was at the center of everything, trying to persuade some women who were simply watching to return to their homes. Beside him stood several girls -- the youngest and the most attractive adult females in the village, Elizabeth realized with a feeling of disgust. By the time she reached the group she counted ten of them. Luiz recognized her at once. "Menina Khan -- " "Luiz, who is the youngest of these?" He seemed reluctant to answer, so she picked out one she knew to be no older than fourteen. "Lea," she said, "go back to your mother. I will go instead." Unsurprised and uncomplaining, the girl walked mutely away. Luiz stared at Elizabeth for a moment, then shrugged. The wait was not long. In a few minutes three men appeared, each riding a horse and each leading another. All six horses were laden with packages and without ceremony the riders dismounted and unloaded the materials they had brought. Luiz watched keenly. Elizabeth heard one of the men say to him, "We'll be back in two days with the rest. Do you want the work done on the church?" "No -- we do not need that." "As you wish. Do you want to change any of the terms of the barter?" "No. We are satisfied." "Good." The stranger turned and faced the rest of the people who were watching the transaction. He spoke to them as he had spoken to Luiz, in their own language, but with a heavy accent. "We have tried to be men of good will and good word. Some of you may not be in favor of the terms we have proposed, but we ask your understanding. The women you have let us borrow will be cared for and will not be treated badly in any way. Their health and happiness are in our interests as much as yours. We shall see that they return to you as soon as possible. Thank you." The ceremony was over. The men offered the horses to the women to ride. Two of the girls climbed onto one horse, and five more took a horse each. Elizabeth and the two others elected to walk and soon the small party left the village. T hroughout the journey Elizabeth maintained silence. The three men spoke to each other in English, assuming that none of the girls would be able to understand them. Elizabeth listened intently, hoping to learn something of interest, but mostly she heard complaints about the heat, the lack of shade and how long the journey would take. The men's concern for the women seemed genuine enough. Every hour or so brought a rest stop and the women were given turns riding the horses. None of the men rode for any part of the way and in time Elizabeth began to sympathize with their complaints. If their destination was, as H el ward had said, twenty-five miles away, it was a long walk on a hot day. Later in the day the men's inhibitions seemed to relax, perhaps as fatigue reached them. One asked, "Do you think all this is still necessary?" "The barters?" "Yes -- I mean, they've caused trouble in the past." "What would you suggest we do instead?" "I don't know. Not my decision. If I had my way I wouldn't be out here now." "This time still makes sense to me. The last women haven't moved out yet and there's no sign of their doing so. Maybe we won't have to barter any more." "We will." "You sound as if you don't approve." "Frankly, I don't. Sometimes I think the whole system's crazy." "You've been listening to the Terminators." "Maybe I have. If you listen to them they make a bit of sense. Not that they have all the answers, but they're not as bad as the Navigators make out." "You're out of your mind." "Okay. Who wouldn't be in this heat?" "You'd better not repeat what you just said in the city." "Why not? Enough people are saying it already." "Not guildsmen. You've been down past. You know what's what." "I'm just being realistic. You've got to listen to people's opinions. There are more people in the city who want to stop than there are guildsmen. That's all." "Shut up, Norris," said the man who had so far not spoken, the one who had addressed the crowd in the village. The men's conversation, what there was of it, returned to the immediacies. T he city had been in sight for some time before Elizabeth recognized it for what it was. As they came nearer she looked at it with great interest, not comprehending the system of tracks and cables that stretched away from it. Her first assumption was that it was some kind of marshaling yard, but she saw no sign of any rolling stock and anyway the length of track was too short for any practical use. Later she noticed several men apparently patrolling the tracks. Each carried either a rifle or what appeared to be a crossbow. More than this she could not absorb, since most of her attention was on the structure itself. She had heard the men refer to it as a city -- as had Helward -- but to her eyes it was not much more than a large and misshapen office block. Constructed mainly of timber, it had the ugliness of functionalism and yet there was a simplicity to its design she found not altogether unattractive. She was reminded of pictures she had seen of pre-Crash buildings, and although most of those had been steel and reinforced concrete they shared the squareness, the plainness and lack of exterior decoration. Those old buildings had been tall, though, and this strange structure was at no point more than seven stories high. The timber showed varying stages of weathering. Most of what she could see had been well bleached by the elements, but newer construction was visible. The women were led into a dark passageway at the base of the building. Here they dismounted and were taken up a staircase and through a doorway. They emerged into a brightly lit corridor. At the end of it was another door and here their escorts left them. A printed sign on the door read: Inside they were greeted by two women, who spoke to them in the badly accented language of the people. O nce Elizabeth had adopted her pose she could find no way of abandoning it. In the next few days she was subjected to a series of examinations and treatments which, had she not suspected the reason, she would have found humiliating. She was bathed and her hair was washed. She was medically examined -- her eyes were tested, her teeth checked. Her hair and scalp were inspected for infestation and she was given a test she could only imagine was to determine whether or not she had VD. Without surprise, the women supervising the examination passed her with a clean bill of health and she was then given over to two more women who began to instruct her in the rudiments of English. In spite of her best efforts to delay the learning process until she could discover more than she had already guessed about what was in store for her, she was soon considered fit and educated enough to be released from this initial period of habilitation. The first few nights she had slept in a communal dormitory in the transfer center, but now she was given a tiny room of her own. This was scrupulously clean and furnished minimally. It contained a narrow bed, a space to hang her clothes -- she had been given two identical sets of clothes to wear -- a chair and about four square feet of floor space. Eight days had passed since her arrival and Elizabeth was beginning to wonder what she had hoped to achieve. She was assigned to the kitchens, where the work she was given was straightforward drudgery. The evenings were free, but she was told that she was expected to spend at least an hour or two in a certain reception room where, she was told, she was supposed to mix socially with the people she met there. This room had a small bar at one end offering a limited choice of beverages. Entertainment was provided by an ancient video set. When she switched it on a tape device attached to it showed a comedy program that she failed to appreciate, although an invisible audience laughed all the way through. The comic allusions were evidently contemporary to some earlier period and fairly meaningless to her. She watched the program through and from a copyright notice at the end learned that it had been taped in #. More than two hundred years ago. She met only a few people here. A woman from the transfer center tended the bar. A few men came in occasionally -- dressed, as Helward had been, in the dark uniform -- and sometimes two or three women who, like herself, were from outside the city. O ne day, working in the kitchen, she accidentally solved a problem that had continued to nag at her. She was stacking away clean crockery when something about the metal cupboard caught her attention. It had been changed almost out of recognition -- its components had been removed and it had been' fitted with wooden shelves -- but the still showed through the covering layer of paint. When she could seize the opportunity she explored the rest of the city. Her movements were not restricted beyond the hours required by the performance of her duties. She talked to people, she learned, she thought. One day she came across a small room set aside for use by the residents of the city during leisure moments. Lying on a table she found a few sheets of printed paper, neatly stapled together. She glanced at them without much interest, saw the title on the first page: Destaine's Directive. Later, as she walked through the city she saw many more of these printed sheets and in due time, her curiosity piqued, she read one set through. Ffaving seen its contents, she immediately concealed a copy in the bedclothes of her bunk, meaning to take it with her when she left. She was beginning to understand. She returned again to Destaine, read his words so often they became almost photographically recorded on her brain. She thought about Helward and his apparently wild behavior and words. She tried to remember what he had said and in time, a kind of logical pattern appeared. The hypothesis by which the city and its people existed was that the world on which they lived was somehow inverted. Not only the world, but all the physical objects in the universe in which that world was presumed to exist. The shape that Destaine drew -- a solid world, curved north and south in the shape of hyperbolae -- was the approximation they used. And it correlated indeed with the strange shape that Helward had drawn to depict the sun. One day Elizabeth saw the flaw, as she walked through one of the parts of the city presently being rebuilt. She glanced up at the sun, shielding her yes with her hand. The sun was as she had ever known high in the sky. E lizabeth planned to leave the city the following morning -- she would steal a horse and ride back to the village. From there she could get back to headquarters and take some leave shortly due to her. Four weeks would give her plenty of time to get back to England and check out what she thought she had discovered. She spent the rest of the day following routine and in the evening went to the reception room. And the First man she saw when she walked through the doorway was Helward. "Hello, Helward," she said quietly. He turned to acknowledge her, then looked at her in disbelief. "You?" he said. "What are you doing here?" "Don't give me away -- I'm not supposed to be able to speak English very well," she whispered. "I'm one of your transferred women." She led him out of easy earshot of others in the room. "Look," she said. "I'm sorry about the last time we met. I understand better now." "And I'm sorry if I frightened you." "Have you said anything about me to anyone here?" "About your being from Earth? No." "Good, then don't." He asked, "Are you really from Earth planet?" "Yes. but I wish you wouldn-'t phrase it like that. I'm from Earth -- and so are you. There's a misunderstanding." "God -- I've begun to see that." He looked down at her from the nine-inch advantage he had in height. "You look different here -- but what are you doing as a transfer?" "It was the only way I could think of getting into the city." "I would have brought you." He glanced around the room. "Have you paired up with any of the men yet?" "No." "Don't." As he talked he kept looking over his shoulder. "Have you got a room to yourself? We could talk better." "Yes. Shall we go?" She closed the door when they were in her cubicle. The walls were thin, but could afford privacy. She sat in the chair, Helward on the edge of the bed. "I've read Destaine," she said. "It was fascinating. I've heard of him somewhere. Who was he?" "The founder of the city." "Yes. I gathered that. But he was known for something else." Helward looked blank. "Did what he write make any sense to you?" "A little. Enough for me to understand that he was lost -- and -- wrong." "Wrong about what?" "The city and the danger it was in. He writes as if he and the others had somehow been transported to another world." "That's so." Elizabeth shook her head. "You've never left Earth, Helward. As I sit here and talk to you now -- we're both on Earth." H e shook his head. "You're the one who's wrong. I know you are. Destaine knew the true situation. We are on another world." Elizabeth said, "The other day you drew me with the sun behind me. You drew it like a hyperbola. Is that how you see it? You drew me too tall. Is that how you see me?" "That's not how. I see the sun, that's how it is. And it is how the world is. You I drew tall, because that's how I saw you then. We were a long way north of the city. Now... It's too difficult to explain. I could never make you understand." "Try it." "No." "All right. Do you know how I see the sun? I see it as a sperical object of light -- not as you do. I see myself as tall some miles 'north' -- or what you call 'north' -- of here as I am here. It's a question of what we subjectively perceive. Your senses inform you otherwise -- I don't understand why, but Destaine's perception was wrong, too. It's always been wrong." "Liz, it's more than perception. I've seen, felt, lived in this world. Whatever you say, it's real to me. I'm not alone. Most of the people in the city carry the same knowledge. It started with Destaine because he was there at the beginning. We've survived here a long time simply because of that knowledge. It's been at the root of everything and it's kept us alive, because without it we would not keep the city moving."' Elizabeth started to say something, but he carried on. "Liz, after I saw you the other day I needed time to think. I rode north, a long way north. I saw something there that is going to test the city's capacity for survival as it has never been tested before. Meeting you was -- I don't 'know -- more than I had expected. But it led indirectly to a much bigger thing." "What is it?" "I can't tell you." "Why not?" "I can't tell anyone, except the Navigators. They've declared the information restricted for the moment. It would be a bad time for the news to get out." "What do you mean?" "Have you heard of the Terminators?" "Yes, but I don't know who or what they are." "They're a political group in the city. They've been trying to get the city to stop. If this news leaked out at this moment there'd be a lot of trouble. We've just survived a major crisis and the Navigators don't want another." Elizabeth stared at him without saying anything. She had suddenly seen herself in a new light. She was at an interface of two realities -- one was hers, one was his. However close they came together there could be no contact between them. The why of it was something she still had to discover, but like the graph-line Destaine had drawn to approximate the reality he perceived, the nearer she came to him in one sense the farther she moved away in another. Somehow, she had drawn herself into this drama where one logic failed in the face of another and she knew she was incapable of dealing with it. Persuaded as she was by Helward's sincerity and the manifest existence of the city and its people -- and further by the apparently strange concepts around which they had made their survival -- she could not eradicate from her mind the basic contradiction. The city and its people existed on Earth -- the Earth she knew -- and whatever she saw, whatever Helward said, there was no way around this. Evidence to the contrary made no sense. But when the interface was challenged there was an impasse. E lizabeth said, "I'm going to leave the city tomorrow." "Come with me. I'm going north again." "No. I've got to get back to the village." "Is that the one where they bartered for the women?" "Yes." "I'm going that way. We'll ride together." Another impasse: the village lay southwest of the city. She said nothing. He asked, "Why did you come to the city, Liz? You're not one of the local women." "I wanted to see you." "Why?" "I don't know. You frightened me, but I saw other men who seemed to be like you trading with the village people. I wanted to find out what was going on. Now I wish I hadn't -- because you still frighten me." "I'm not raving at you again, am I?" She laughed -- and realized it was for the first time since she came to the city. "No, of course not," she said. "It's more -- I can't say. Everything I take for granted is different here. There must be a reason -- a real physical one. Some of this could be in the mind, but not all. We are on the same planet and its name is Earth -- that I know. But the city -- not even your city -- can't be the sole goal of all human existence. A in our world, and survival is undoubtedly a drive, but not the primary one. I've been outside the city, Helward, a long way outside the city. Whatever else you may think, this place is not the center of the universe." "It is," he said. "Because if we ever stopped believing that we would all die." L eaving the city presented Elizaj beth with no problems. She went down to the stables with Helward and another man, whom he introduced as Future Blayne. They collected three horses and rode in a direction Helward declared was north. Again she questioned his sense of direction -- by her reckoning of the position of the sun the true direction was toward the southwest -- but she made nothing of it. By this time she was so accustomed to his affronts to what she considered logic that she saw no point in disputing his -- and the city's -- position. She was content to accept the ways of the city -- even if she didn't understand them -- as long as they got her where she wanted to go. As they rode out Helward pointed out the great wheels on which the city was mounted and explained that the forward motion was so slow as to be almost undetectable. However, he assured her, the city moved about one mile every ten days. Northward -- or toward the southwest, whichever way she cared to think of it. The journey took two days. Helward and Future Blayne talked a lot, although not much made sense to her. She felt that she had suffered an overload of new information, and could absorb no more. On the evening of the first day they passed within a mile or so of her village and she told Helward she wanted to drop out. "No, come with us. You can go back later." She said, "I want to go back to England. I think I can help you." "You ought to see this first." "What is it?" "We're not sure," said Blayne. "Helward thinks you might be able to tell us." She argued a little longer, but in the end went with them. She thought it strange that she succumbed so readily. The interface remained a problem -- yet she could identify with these people. The society within the city was curiously civilized in a countryside that had been wasted by anarchy for generations. Even in the few weeks she had been in the village the peasant outlook, the unquestioning lethargy, the inability to cope with even the most minor of problems had sapped her will to meet the challenge of her work. But the people of Helward's city were of a different order. Evidently they were some offshoot community that had somehow managed to preserve itself during the Crash and now lived on as if nothing had changed -- except that they believed they had moved to another planet. She had by her own actions involved herself in the affairs of their community. The consequences of her abandoning the village would have to be faced later -- she could justify her immediate absence by saying she wanted to know where the women were being taken -- but she felt now that she must follow this through. Ultimately some official body would have to rehabilitate the people of the city, but until then she was on the spot. T ihey spent the night under canvas. There were only two tents and the men gallantly offered her one of them for her own use -- but before that they spent a long time talking. Helward had evidently told Blayne about her and how she differed -- as he saw her -- from both the people of the city and the people of the villages. Blayne spoke directly to her before she turned in -- Helward stayed in the background. By and large Blayne affirmed what she had learned. He spoke of Destaine and his directive, of the city and its need to move forward -- and he talked of the shape of the world. She had learned not to argue with the city outlook and she listened. When she eventually crawled into her sleeping bag she was exhausted from the long ride through the day, but sleep came slowly. The interface had hardened. But her understanding of the city people's logic had been deepened. They lived, Blayne said, on a world where the laws of nature were not what they were on Earth. She was prepared to believe him -- or rather, to believe that he was sincere. She had faith in the world that was. Whatever it was. E merging from woodland the trio encountered a region of coarse scrubland -- there were no tracks here and progress was slow. A cool, steady wind was blowing. Gradually the vegetation gave way to a hard, tough grass growing in sandy soil. Neither of the men said anything. Helward in particular stared ahead as he rode, letting his horse find its own route. Elizabeth saw that ahead of them the vegetation gave way altogether and, as they breasted a ridge of loose sand and gravel, only some bare and scattered dunes lay between them and the beach. Her horse, which had already sensed the salt in the air, responded readily to the kick of her heels and broke into a canter. For a few heady minutes she exulted in the freedom and joy of galloping along a beach with the wind from the Helward and Blayne had ridden down to the beach behind her, and now stood close together by their horses, looking out across the water. She trotted her horse over to them, and dismounted. "Does it extend east and west?" said Blayne. "As far as I explored. There's no way around I could see." Blayne took a camera from one of his packs, connected it to its case and panned it slowly across the view. "We'll have to survey east and west," he said. "The water would be impossible to cross at this point." "There's no sign of an opposite bank." Blayne frowned at the beach. "I don't like the soil. We'll have to get the bridge people here. I don't think this sand would take the weight of the city." "There must be some way." The two men entirely ignored her. Helward erected a small instrument, a tripodal device with a concentric chart suspended by three catches below the fulcrum. He hung a plumbline over the chart, and took some kind of reading from it. "We're a long way from optimum," he said eventually. "We've got plenty of time. Thirty miles -- almost a year of city time. Do you think it could be done?" "A bridge? It would take some doing. We'd need more men than we've got at the moment. What did the Navigators say?" "Check what I reported. Do you check?" "Yes. I can't see that I can add anything." Helward stared for a few seconds longer at the expanse of water, then seemed to remember Elizabeth. He turned to her. "What do you say?" "About this? What do you expect me to say?" "Tell us about our perceptions," said Helward. "Tell us there's no river here." She said, "It's not a river." Helward glanced at Blayne. "You heard her," he said. "We're imagining it." Elizabeth closed her eyes, turned away. She could no longer confront the interface. she took a blanket from her horse and moved back to the sandy ridge. When she faced the men again they were paying no attention to her. Helward had erected another instrument and .was taking readings from it. He called them out to Blayne, his voice whipped thin by the wind. They worked slowly and painstakingly, each checking the other's reading at every step. After an hour, Blayne packed some of the equipment on his horse, mounted and rode along the coast in a northerly direction. Helward stood and watched him go, his posture revealing a deep and overwhelming despair. Elizabeth interpreted it as a tiny weakness in the barrier that lay between them. Clutching the blanket around her, she walked down across the dunes toward him. She asked, "Do you want to know where you are?" He didn't turn. "No," he said. "It doesn't matter." "Portugal. This country is called Portugal. It's in Europe." She moved around so that she could see his face. For a moment his gaze rested on her, but his expression was blank. He shook his head and walked past her toward his horse. The barrier was absolute. Elizabeth went to her own animal and mounted it. She walked it along the beach and soon moved inland, heading back in the general direction of headquarters. In a few minutes the troubled blue of the Atlantic was out of sight. Book Five T he storm raged all night and none of us got much sleep. Our camp was a half-mile from the bridge and as the waves came crashing in the sound reached us as a dull, muted roar, almost obliterated by the howling gale. In our imaginations, at least, we heard the splintering of timber in every temporary lull. Toward dawn the wind abated and we were able to sleep. Not for long, for soon after sunrise the kitchen was manned and we were given our food. No one talked as we ate. There could be only one topic of conversation and no one wished to speak of that. We set off toward the bridge. We had gone only fifty yards when someone pointed to a piece of broken timber lying washed up on the shore. It was a grim omen and, as it turned out, an accurate one. Nothing was left of the bridge beyond the four main piles that were planted in the solid ground near the water's edge. I glanced at Lerouex who, for this shift, was in charge of all operations. "We need more timber," he said. "Barter Norris -- take thirty men and start felling trees." I waited for Norris's reaction. Of all the guildsmen on the site he had been the most reluctant to work and had complained loudly and long during the early stages of the work. Now he showed no rebellion -- we were all past that. He simply nodded to Lerouex, picked a body of men and headed back toward the camp to collect the treefelling tools. "So we start again," I said to Lerouex. "Of course." "Will this one be strong enough?" "If we build it properly." He turned away and started to organize the clearing up of the site. In the background the waves, still huge in the aftermath of the storm, crashed against the land. We worked all day and by evening the site had been cleared and Norris and his men had hauled fourteen tree trunks to the spot. The next morning we could again start building. During the evening I sought out Lerouex. He was sitting alone in his tent, apparently checking through his designs of the bridge but in fact his stare was vacant. He did not seem pleased to see me, but he and I were the two senior men on the site and he knew I would not have come without purpose. We were now of roughly equal age -- by the nature of my work in the north I had passed many subjective years. It was a matter of some discomfort between us that he was the father of my former wife and that we were now contemporaries. Neither of us had ever referred directly to the matter. Victoria herself was still only a comparatively few miles older than she had been when we were married and the gulf between us was now so wide that even the memories we shared had become totally irretrievable. "I know what you've come to say," he said. "You're going to tell me that we. can never build a bridge." "It's going to be difficult," I said. "Impossible is what you mean." "What do you think?" "I'm supposed to build bridges, Helward, not think." "That's crap and you know it." "All right. But when a bridge is needed, I build it. I don't ask questions." I said, "You've always had an opposite bank." "That makes no difference. We can build with pontoons." "And when we're mid-river, where do we get the timber? Where do we plant the cable stays?" I sat down to face him, unbidden. "You guessed wrong, incidentally. I didn't come to tell you the job was impossible." "Well?" "The opposite bank," I said. "Where is it?" "Out there somewhere." "Where?" "I don't know." "How do you know there is one?" "There must be." "We still have to know where we're aiming," I said. "We're striking away from this shore a few degrees from perpendicular, but even so we should know where we expect to rejoin land. The curvature -- " "Is concave. I know. Don't you think I haven't thought about that? In theory we can see for ever. What about atmospheric haze? Twenty or thirty miles is all we can see with any accuracy even on a clear day." "You're going to build a bridge thirty miles long?" "I don't think we'll have to," he said. "I think we're going to be okay. Why else do you think I persevere?" I shook my head. 'Tve no idea." He said, "Did you know they're going to make me a Navigator? The last time I was in the city we had a long conference. The general feeling is that the water might not be as wide as it appears. Remember, north of optimum dimensions are distorted linearly north and south. It's obvious that this is a major crossing but reason demands that there's an opposite shore. The Navigators think that when the movement of the ground takes the crossing as far as optimum we should be able to see the opposite bank. Granted, it might then still be too wide to oross safely -- but all we need to do is continue waiting. The farther south the ground takes us the narrower the river will become. A bridge will eventually be feasible." "That's a hell of a risk," I said. 'The centrifugal force could tear the city apart." "I know." "And what if the opposite bank doesn't appear before that?" "Helward, it has to." "You know that there's an alternative." I said. "I've heard what the men have been saying. We can abandon the city and build a ship. I could never approve that." "Guild pride?" "No." His face reddened. "Practicalities. We couldn't build one large enough or safe enough." "We're having the same difficulty with the bridge." "I know -- but we understand bridges. Who in the city would know how to design a ship? Anyway, we're learning by our mistakes. We just have to keep building until the bridge is strong enough." "And time's running out." "How far north of optimum are we?" "Less than twelve miles." "That's a hundred and twenty days of city time," he said. "How long do we have up here?" "Subjectively about twice that." "That's plenty." I stood up, headed for the tent flap. I was unconvinced. "By the way," I said. "Congratulations on becoming a Navigator." "Thanks. They've put your name forward, too." A few days later Lerouex and I L were relieved by the new shift and we set off for the city. The repaired bridge was well under way and the mood at the site was optimistic. We now had ten yards of platform ready for the track-layers. The horses were in use with the tree-felling crews, so Lerouex and I had to walk. Inland from the water the wind dropped and the temperature rose. We had both found it easy to forget how hot the land was. After we had walked some distance I asked Lerouex, "How's Victoria?" "She's well." "I don't see her very often now." "Neither do I." I decided to say no more. Victoria was clearly an embarrassment to him. In the last few miles the news about our latest crossing hazard had inevitably leaked to the people as a whole and the Terminators -- of whom Victoria was now a leading figure -- had emerged as a vociferously critical faction. They claimed that they had eighty per cent of the non-guildsmen on their side and that the city should now be halted. I had been unable to attend Navigators' Council meetings recently, but I gathered that they were preoccupied with this problem. In another break with their former traditions they had started a second campaign to educate the non-guildsmen of the true nature of the world, but the essentially obscure and abstract explanations did not have the simple emotional appeal of the Terminators. The Terminators had already scored one psychological victory. With the concentration of manpower on the building of the bridge, the work of track-laying had been left to one crew only and, although it was still under continuous propulsion, the city had been forced to slow down and was now a half-mile behind optimum. The militia had foiled an attempt by the Terminators to cut the cables, but not much was made of this. The real danger, fully appreciated by the Navigators, was the erosion of traditional political power within the city. Victoria, and presumably the other overt Terminators, still carried out nominal tasks on behalf of the city, but perhaps it was a sign of their influence that many of the routines of the city were falling behind. Officially the Navigators put this down to the redeployment of so many men to the bridge, but few were in doubt as to the real causes. Within guild circles resolution remained nearly unanimous. There was much complaining and some dissent with decisions, but in general there was a complete agreement that the bridge must be built. Halting the city would be unthinkable. "Are you going to accept the duties of Navigator?" I asked Lerouex, "I think so. I don't want to retire, but -- " "Retire? There's no question of that." "Becoming a Navigator means retirement from active guild work," he said. "The Council believes that by bringing in men who have been playing an active role outside it will acquire a more forceful voice. That, incidentally, is why they want you on the Council." "My work's up north," I said. "So is mine. But we reach an age -- " "You shouldn't think of retiring," I said. "You're the best bridge man in the city." "So they say. No one has the tactlessness to point out that my last three bridges have been unsuccessful." "You mean the ones that were damaged at this present crossing?" "Yes. And the new one will go as soon as there's another storm." "You said yourself -- " "Helward -- I'm not the man to build that bridge. It needs young blood. A new approach. Perhaps a ship is the answer." Lerouex and I both understood what that admission meant to him. The Bridge-Builders guild was the proudest in the city. No bridge had ever failed. We walked on. almost as soon as I arrived in the city I was fretting to return to the north. I did not like the present atmosphere -- it was as if the people had replaced the old system of guild suppression with a self-inflicted blindness to reality. Terminator slogans were everywhere and crudely printed leaflets littered the corridors. People talked of the bridge and ther spoke fearfully. Men returning from a workshift told of the failures, spoke of building a bridge toward a shore that could not be seen. Rumors, presumably originated by the Terminators, told of dozens of men being killed, of more took attacks. In the Futures' room I was approached by Clausewitz, who was himself now a Navigator. He presented me with a formal letter from the Council of Navigators, naming a proposer (Clausewitz) and a seconder (McMahon) who requested me to join them. "I'm sorry," I said. "I can't accept this." "We need you, Helward. You're one of our most experienced men." "Maybe. I'm needed on the bridge." "You could do better work here." "I don't think so." Clausewitz took me aside and spoke confidentially. "The Council is setting up a working party to deal with the Terminators," he said. "We want you on that." "How can you deal with them? Suppress their voices?" "No... we're going to have to compromise with them. They want to abandon the city for good. We're going to meet them halfway -- and abandon the bridge." I stared at him incredulously. "I can't be a party to that," I said. "Instead we build a ship. Not a big one, not nearly as complex as the city. Just large enough to get us to the other side. Then we'll rebuild the city." I handed back the letter and turned away. "No," I said. "That's my final word." I prepared to leave the city forthwith, determined to return to the north and carry out yet another survey of our problem. Other surveys had confirmed that a river was indeed what we were dealing with -- the banks did not curve, so it was not a lake. Lakes may be circled, rivers have to be crossed. I remembered Lerouex's one optimistic remark, that the opposite bank might come into view as the river neared optimum. I knew a desperate hope -- if I could locate that opposite shore there could be no further argument against the bridge. I walked down through the city, realizing that by my words and intents I had made certain my actions. I had committed myself to the bridge, even though I had alienated myself from the instrument of its construction: the Council. In a sense I was on my own, in spirit and in fact. If a compromise were planned with the Terminators, I would have to subscribe to it eventually, but for the moment the bridge was my only tangible reality, however improbable. I remembered something Blayne had once said. He described the city as a fanatical society and I questioned this. He said that one definition pf a fanatic was a man who continued to struggle against odds when all hope was lost. The city had been struggling against odds since Destaine's day -- behind it lay seven thousand miles of recorded history, no part of which had been easily won. It was impossible for mankind to survive in this environment, Blayne had said, yet the city continued to do so. Perhaps I had inherited that fanaticism, for now I felt that only I maintained the city's sense of survival. For me, it was given substance in the building of the bridge, however hopeless that task might seem. In one of the corridors I met Gelman Jase. He was now many subjective miles younger than I, because he had been north only infrequently. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Up north. There's nothing for me in the city at the moment." "Aren't you going to the meeting?" "Which meeting?" "The Terminators." "Are you going?" My voice had obviously reflected the disapproval I felt, for he said defensively: "Yes. Why not? It's the first time they've come into the open." "Are you with them?" "No, but I want to hear what they say." "And what if they persuade you?" "That's not likely," said Jase. "Then why go?" Jase asked, "Is your mind totally closed, Helward?" I opened my mouth to deny it -- but said nothing. The fact was that my mind was closed. "Don't you believe in another point of view?" Jase asked. "Yes. But there's no debate on this bridge issue. They're in the wrong and you know it as well as I do." "Just because a man's wrong doesn't mean he's a fool." I said, "Gelman, you've been down past. You know what happens there. You know the city would be taken there by the movement of the ground. Surely there's no question about what the city should do." "I know. But they have the ear of a large percentage of the people. We should hear them out." "They're enemies of the city's security." "Okay -- but to defeat an enemy one should know him. I'm going to the meeting because this is the first time their views are being publicly expressed. I want to know what I'm up against. If we're going to go across that bridge, it's going to be people like me who will see us across. If the Terminators have got an alternative, I want to hear it. If not, I want to know it." "I'm going up north," I said. Jase shook his head. We argued a while longer and then we went to the meeting. T he work on rebuilding the creche had been abandoned some miles back. The damage had long since been cleared, leaving bare the broad metal base of the city, open on three sides to the countryside. At the northern side of this area, agaifist the bulk of the rest of the city, some reconstruction work had been done, and the timber facings afforded the speakers a suitable background and a slightly raised platform from which to address the crowd. As Jase and I came out of the last building and walked across the space a considerable number of people were already there. I was surprised at the size of the turnout -- the resident population of the city had been considerably depleted by the men drafted to work on the bridge, but at a rough estimate it seemed to me that at. least three or four hundred people were gathered around the platform. A speech was already in progress and the crowd was listening without much response. The main text of the speech -- made by a man I recognized as one of the food-synthesists -- was a description of the physical environment through which the city was currently passing. " -- the soil is rich and there is a good chance that we could grow our own crops. We have abundant water, both locally and to the north of us." Laughter. "The climate is agreeable. The local people are not hostile, nor need we make them SO -- M After a few minutes he stood down to a ripple of applause. Without preamble the next speaker came forward -- Victoria. "People of the city, we face another crisis brought upon us by the Council of Navigators. For thousands of miles we have been making our way across this land, indulging ourselves in all that is inhuman to stay alive. Our way of staying alive has been to move forward, toward the north. Behind us -- "she waved her hand to encompass the broad stretch of countryside that lay beyond the southern edge of the platform -- "is that period of our existence. Ahead of us they tell us there is a river. One we must cross to continue to ensure our survival. What is beyond that river they do not tell us, because they do not know -- " Victoria spoke for a long time and I confess I was prejudiced against her from her first words. They sounded to me like cheap rhetoric, but the crowd seemed to appreciate them. Perhaps I was not as indifferent as I supposed, for when she described the building of the bridge and threw in the accusation that many men had died, I started forward to protest. Jase caught my arm. "Helward -- don't." "She's talking rubbish," I said, but already a few voices in the crowd shouted that she was merely spreading rumor. Victoria conceded the point neatly, but added that there was probably more going on at the bridge site than was generally known and this speculation was greeted with some approval. Victoria brought her speech to an unexpected conclusion. "I say that not onjy is this bridge unnecessary, but that it is also dangerous. In this I have an expert opinion. As many of you know, my father is Chief Guildsman of the Bridge-Builders. He is the man who designed the bridge. I ask you now to listen to what he has to say." "God -- she can't do that," I said. Jase said, "Lerouex's not a Terminator." "I know. But he's lost faith." Bridges Lerouex was already on the platform. He stood beside his daughter, waiting for the applause to die down. He did not look directly at the crowd, but stared at the floor. He looked tired, old and beaten. "Come on, Jase. I'm not going to watch him be humiliated." Jase looked at me uncertainly. Lerouex was preparing to speak. I pushed forward through the crowd, wanting to be away before he said anything. I had learned to respect Lerouex and did not wish to be present in his moment of defeat. A few yards forward I stopped again. Standing behind Victoria and her father, I had recognized someone else. For a moment I couldn't place either the name or the face -- then both came together. Elizabeth Khan. I was shocked to see her again. She had left many miles ago -- at least eighteen, city time, many more in my own subjective time. After she had left I had tried to put her from my mind. Lerouex had started to address the crowd. He spoke softly and his words did not carry. I was staring at Elizabeth. I knew why she was there. She was going to speak after Lerouex had finished humiliating himself. I already knew what she would say. I started toward the platform, but Jase caught my arm. "What are you doing?" he asked. "That girl," I said. "I know her. She's from outside the city. We mustn't let her speak." People around us were telling us to be quiet. I struggled to release myself from Jase but he held me back. Suddenly there was a burst of applause and I realized that Lerouex had finished. I said to Jase, "Look -- you've got to help me. You don't know who that girl is." Out of the corner of my eye I saw Blayne coming toward us. "Helward -- have you seen who's here?" "Blayne, for God's sake help me -- " I struggled again and Jase fought to hold me. Blayne moved quickly to take my other arm. Together they pulled me back and out of the crowd. "Listen, Helward," said Jase. "Stay here and listen to her." "I know what she's going to say -- " "Then allow others to hear." Victoria stepped forward to the edge of the platform. "People of the city, we have one more person to speak to you. She is not known to many of us, because she is not of our city. But what she has to say is of great importance and afterward there will no longer be any doubt in your minds as to what we must do." She raised her hand and Elizabeth stepped forward. E lizabeth spoke softly, but her voice carried clearly. "I am a stranger to most of you here," she said, "because I was not born as you were within the walls of the city. However, you and L are of one kind: we are human and we are of a planet called Earth. You have survived in this city for nearly two hundred years, or seven thousand miles by your way of measuring time. About you has been a world in anarchy and ruins. The people are ignorant, uneducated, stricken with poverty. But not all people of this world are in this state. I am from England, a country where we are beginning to reconstruct a kind of civilization. There are other countries, too, bigger and more powerful than England. So your stable and organized existence is not unique." She paused, testing the reaction of the crowd so far. There was silence. "I came across your city by accident and lived here for a while within your transfer section." There was some surprised reaction to this. "I have talked with some of you and I know how you live. When I left the city I returned to England. I've spent nearly six months there, trying to learn to understand your city and its history. I know much more now than I did on my first visit." She paused again. Somewhere in the crowd a man shouted: "England is on Earth!" Elizabeth did not respond. Instead she said, "I have a question. Is there anyone here responsible for the city's engines?" After a short silence Jase said, "I am a Traction guildsman." Heads turned in our direction. "Then you can tell us what powers the engines." "A nuclear reactor." "Describe how the fuel is inserted." Jase released me and moved to one side. I felt Blayne's hold on me loosen and I could have escaped him. But like everyone else's, my attention had been caught by the curious questions. Jase said, "I don't know. I have never seen it done." "Then before you can stop your city, you must find out." E lizabeth moved back and spoke quietly to Victoria. A moment later she came forward again. "Your reactor is no such thing. Unwittingly, the men you call your Traction guildsmen have been misleading you. The reactor is not functioning and has not done so for thousands of miles." Blayne said to Jase, "Well?" "She's talking nonsense." "Do you know what fuels it?" "No," said Jase quietly, although many of the people around us were listening. "Our guild believes that it will run indefinitely without attention." "Your reactor is no such thing," Elizabeth said again. I said, "Don't listen to her. The fact that we have electricity -- power -- means the reactor is working -- " From the platform Elizabeth said, "Listen to me -- " and began to tell us about Destaine. I listened with the others. Francis Destaine was a physicist who had lived and worked in Britain, on Earth planet. He had lived at a time when Earth had been running critically short of electrical energy. Elizabeth recited the reasons, which were essentially that fossil fuels were burned to provide heat, which was converted into energy. When the fuel deposits ran out there would be no more energy. Destaine, Elizabeth said, claimed to have devised a process whereby apparently unlimited amounts of energy could be produced without any kind of fuel. His work had been discredited by most scientists. In due course the energy derived from fossil fuels had run out and there had followed on Earth planet a long period now known as the Crash. It had brought to an end the advanced technological civilization that had dominated Earth. She said that the people on Earth were now beginning to rebuild and Destaine's work was instrumental in this. His process as originally outlined had been crude and dangerous, but a later, more sophisticated development was manageable and successful. "What has this to do with halting the city?" someone shouted. Elizabeth said, "Listen."tvestaine, she said, had discovI # ered a generator that created an artificial field of energy which in close proximity to another similar field caused a flow of electricity. His early critics had based their opposition on the fact that the discovery had no practical use as the two generators consumed more electricity than they produced. Destaine at first had been unable to obtain either financial or intellectual support for his work. Even when he claimed to have discovered a natural field -- a translateration window, he called it -- and could thus produce his effect without the need of a second generator, he was still ignored. He claimed that this natural window of potential energy was moving slowly across the surface of the Earth, following a line Elizabeth described as the great circle. Destaine eventually had managed to raise enough money from private sponsors to build a mobile research station. With a large team of hired assistants he set off for the Kuantung province of southern China where, he claimed, the natural translateration window existed. Elizabeth said, "Destaine was never heard from again." E lizabeth said that we were on Earth planet and had never left it -- and that our perception of it was distorted by the translateration generator which, self-powering as long as it was running, continued to produce the field about us. She said that Destaine had ignored the side effects other scientists had warned him of -- that the force field could permanently affect perception and might have genetic and hereditary effects. She said that the translateration window still existed on Earth and that many others had been found. She said that the window Destaine had discovered in China was the one our own generator was still tapping. That following the great circle it had traveled through Asia, through Europe. That we were now at the edge of Europe and that before us lay an ocean several thousand miles wide. She said... and the people listened... E lizabeth finished speaking. Jase walked slowly through the crowd toward her. I headed back toward the entrance to the rest of the city. I passed within a few feet of the platform and Elizabeth noticed me. She called out, "Helward -- " I took no notice but pushed on through the crowd and into the interior of the city. I went down a flight of steps, walked through the passageway beneath the city and out again into daylight. I headed north, moving between the tracks and cables. H alf an hour later I heard the sound of a horse and turned. Elizabeth caught up with me. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Back to the bridge." "Don't. There's no need. The Traction guild has disconnected the generator." I pointed up at the sun. "And that is now a sphere." "Yes." I walked on. E lizabeth repeated what she had said before. She pleaded with me to see reason. She said again and again that it was only my perception of the world that was distorted. I kept my silence. She had not been down past. She had never been farther away from the city than a few miles north or south. She hadn't been with me when I saw the realities of this world. Was it perception that changed the physical dimensions of Lucia, Rosario and Caterina? Our bodies had been locked in sexual embrace -- I knew the real effects of that perception. Was it the baby's perception that had made it reject Rosario's milk? Was it only my perception that caused the girls' citymade clothes to tear as their bodies distorted inside them? W hy didn't you tell me what you just said when you were in the city before?" I asked. "Because I didn't know then. I had to go back to England. And you know something? No one in England cared. I tried to find someone, anyone, who could be made to find some concern for you and your city -- but no one was interested. There's a lot going on in this world -- big and exciting changes are taking place. No one cares about the city and its people." "You came back," I said. "I had seen your city myself. I knew what you and the others were planning to do. I had to find out about Destaine -- someone had to explain translateration to me. It's a dull, everyday technology now, but I didn't know how it worked." "That's self-evident," I said. "What do you mean?" "If the generator's off, as you say, then there's no further problem. I just have to keep looking at the sun and telling myself that it's a sphere, whatever else it might look like." "But it's only your perception," she said. "And I perceive that you are wrong. I know what I see." "But you don't." A few minutes later a large crowd of men passed us, heading south toward the city. Most of them were carrying the possessions they had taken with them to the bridge site. Not one of them acknowledged us. I walked faster, trying to leave her behind. She followed, leading her horse by its harness. T he bridge site was deserted. I walked out on the bridge. Beneath me the water was calm and clear, although waves still broke on the bank behind me. I turned and looked back. Elizabeth was standing near the water's edge, watching me. I stared at her for a few seconds, then reached down and took off my boots. I moved away from her, to the very end of the bridge. I looked at the sun. It was dipping down toward the northeastern horizon. It was beautiful in its own way. A graceful, enigmatic shape, far more aesthetically satisfying than a simple sphere. My only regret was that I had never been able to draw it successfully. I dove from the bridge head first. The water was cold, but not unpleasantly so. As soon as I surfaced an incoming wave pushed me back against the nearest bridge piling and I kicked myself away from it. With strong, steady strokes I swam northward. I was curious to know if Elizabeth was still watching, so I turned on my back and floated. She had moved away from the ridge and was now riding her horse slowly along the uneven surface of the bridge. When she reached the end she stopped. She sat in the saddle and looked in my direction. I continued to tread water, waiting to see if she would make any gesture toward me. The sun was bathing her in a rich yellow light, stark against the deep blue of the sky behind her. I turned, and looked toward the north. The sun was setting, and already most of its broad disk was out of sight. I waited until its northern spire of light had slipped down below the horizon. As darkness fell I swam back through the surf to the beach.  # # tail # # Slreei New York. N.Y. # FT BO pur ward Undudmg nmmm mnd mkhwa). tO-ward minimum. Puymuni with ordur. LU Montclair, N. J. #. Savage, Etc.) Magazines, Playboys, Premiums, Movie Merchandise, Etc. #-# Catalogues # cents. Rogofsky, Box GF#, Flushing, New York #. Park, L. I., N Y. #. S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Frankenstein Interview. ' Monster" Tells All! #. Norris, p ostbox #-M, Indianapolis #. Complete illustrated catalog of all "In Print" SF and Fantasy paperbacks and hardcover books. 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Membership is cancelable any time after I buy three books. Shipping and handling is added to all shipments. Send no money. Members are billed when books arrive. # book for #. Indicate by number the # books you want. Name  Address a City State k Zip a (Offer good in Continental U.S. and Canada ! only. Prices slightly higher in Canada.) I I Other men could die and find oblivion. He could not... I T he mountain was friendly. It had been growing for half a on rain and air and wind-blown dust, compacting them into a core of solid quartz. Fifteenth lived on the mountain with his people. When he had been young and small the mountain had been his whole world and he had not imagined anything beyond it. Now he was nearly grown. From time to time, now, he looked beyond the mountain, though it was still home. It was not ail hospitable. Its summit was a rounded crown, carved with winding fissures, glowing with a blue bioluminescence brighter than the storms that often boiled around it. Below the summit, where the winds were warm and dry, the surface film of shining life was tattered into dying shreds. The age-eaten stone beneath was caving away from the vertical cliffs, adding black and shattered masses to the bouldered slopes, where the wild orgs nested. Fifteenth had never gone that high. It was too dangerous. Home was here below, where the dead stuff of the mountain had rotted into rich black soil that spread in delta plains all around its foot. Floods from the stormy heights ran down to water the forests and mosslands that reached all the way to the grassy flatland where the people ranged to find food and trophies and brought them back to the sweet slopes of the mountain. Fifteenth's people were nomadic wingmen. From the heights on the side of the mountain they could launch themselves into always present orographic updrafts and spiral out to overfly the green rain paths of the plain. There were roots and fruits, waterholes and game. When the wingmen found what they wanted they swooped down and possessed it. It was a good life. It was the only life Fifteenth had known -- yet it was not good enough. He looked around the camp of his people, testing a thought that had come to him. Across the flat plains rose that other distant mountain that his people called Knife-in-the-Sky. It was hard to see because of the uncertain light from the plains and the few forested parts of its slopes. Fifteenth's people had never seen a cycle of light and darkness. They marked the passing of time by their own body cycles or by changes in the trees and animals, since they had no other clock on a world that showed nothing in its sky but clouds and, rarely, some faint misty gleam that looked like a swirl of silvery fire. But even when they could not see Knife-in-the-Sky the people knew it was there. For every org on Fifteenth's own mountain, it was said, there were a thousand on Knife-in-the-Sky. Here their clutches were scant and often the eggs produced weaklings. But new orgs were always coming from Knife-in-the-Sky to replenish the stocks. Once Fifteenth sat staring at the distant jagged peak for many thousands of breaths. Then he went to tell his brother that he had resolved to leave his people, to cross the plain, to climb Knife-in-the-Sky and steal a wild org's egg. 'irou are young," said his j brother wearily and fretfully, "and you are foolish. Other youths have gone hunting the org. They do not come back." Fifteenth stood stubbornly silent, hanging his head. His brother was the head of his clan, the clan in which fourteen other males were older and therefore more powerful than himself. Fifteenth did not want to show disrespect to his brother by disagreeing, but he could not make himself promise to give up his plan. "Only those whose minds are on the ground hunt orgs," warned his brother. Fifteenth still did not speak. They were standing outside his brother's new tent, pitched in the yellow light of a clump of fire-trees. His brother's new wife was singing in the tent, grinding grain for the next meal. From beyond the firetrees the slow clang of a blacksmith's anvil rang. The smith was Fifteenth's cousin, Second. The brother carefully worked his awl through a double thickness of leather before speaking again. Then he looked up. "If you stay with us I will share my skills with you," he offered. Fifteenth showed his astonishment. Their father had been a wingwright. As was proper, his skills had come down to the eldest of his sons. With a new wife, First would surely have sons of his own before long and his giving wingwright skills to Fifteenth would deprive his own get of what was rightly theirs. "I thank you," Fifteenth said. "But I will go." "Knife-in-the-Sky is farther than it seems to be," his brother said. "Why go there when there are orgs here, if you are determined to die?" "There are better orgs on Knifein-the-Sky. I have never seen their lairs here. I know what they are there." "From your mother," First said gloomily. "Of course. But there are more orgs and stronger orgs there and they take care of their eggs. Besides -- " He looked up from the harness he was mending and scowled across at the jagged, distant mountain. "Besides the orgs, there are the watchers." "Why should they bother me?" "They do not tell us why." His brother looked up angrily and incautiously pricked his finger with the awl and grimaced with pain. He put the finger in his mouth and said around it, "They-live beyond the mountains. They ride in the sky in machines the size of twenty orgs and attack all creatures that don't obey them. And there are new watchers now. Little ones. No one knows what they may do." "I've never seen a watcher," said Fifteenth. "Not on the mountain. But to get to Knife-in-the-Sky you must cross the plain. You cannot do it all by wing. You must walk for many sleeps. I am afraid the watchers will find you." "But if they do not," said Fifteenth, "I will come back riding an org." "You -- riding an org?" The brother took his finger out of his mouth and spat blood. "You've never seen an org close up." "My mother did," Fifteenth said. H e turned and scowled across the plains toward Knife-in-theSky. He was a strong young man, tall even among his people, who averaged better than seven feet in height. He knew he looked a great deal like his mother -- his father's second wife, whom his father had stolen away from another band. She had been a First Man's daughter and her father had pursued the lovers on a tamed org until they had set fire to dried grass and escaped under the smoke. She had handed on her lore of org-training to her son, teaching him where the eggs were found, how the hatchlings could be tamed. It was time for him to use that knowledge. Because he was of an age to use it -- and for another reason. The girl who had become his brother's new wife had been the girl Fifteenth himself had wanted. The brother picked up his awl again. "If you have to be a fool -- " He shrugged and suddenly grinned. "I'll make a new harness for you." And so, for many meals, Fifteenth hunted meat while his brother made the harness. The dark-eyed girl who had become his brother's wife helped him smoke the meat, and if her presence near him was a steady pain he never showed it. And if she knew she never told. When the harness was finished and fitted he loaded himself and the three of them trudged up the friendly mountain toward the finest of the launching places. There the slope fell steeply away for a thousand feet. There the gentle cradling updraft never failed. From this cliff one could circle and soar more than a mile into the thick, sweet air and launch oneself many sleeps away across the plain in a single flight. They stood and stared at Knifein-the-Sky and the dark-haired girl caught her breath and cried, "A fire in the clouds! Look!" Before them, even higher than Knife-in-the-Sky, a lance of silvery light was extending itself in a soaring arc through the bright living clouds. Neither Fifteenth nor his brother was frightened, although it was a strange thing to them. The brother muttered, "There was such a flame a hundred sleeps ago. Afterward the small watchers appeared." "Has anyone been harmed by a small watcher?" Fifteenth demanded. The brother shook his head. "Then I will not fear if there are more. Goodbye." Fifteenth kissed them both, grasped his buttocks with his hands and leaped headfirst into the air. When he was well clear of the rock he swept his arms up in the sinuous stroke of the wingman, extended filmy wings of scraped leather. He flapped and soared until his brother and the girl were almost invisible to him, tiny staring figures no larger than pebbles. Then he turned out of the updraft and stroked through the air toward Knife-in-the-Sky. He did not look behind him. Even if he had looked he might not have seen that something shared the air with him, a cube of metal, bright on all its faces, brighter still with lights and lenses on the face toward him. It was no larger than Fifteenth's fist and a long way behind him. A great distance away in terms of Fifteenth's world (but only a step on an astronomical scale) a man named Ben Line Pert in watched the holographic image of a flying primitive and turned away, shaking his head. "They're skinny and funny-looking," he said, "but, by God, they're human. Figure that for me, Venus." The girl beside him was not a girl. She did not look like a human girl except in the way that a statue does. She was silvery metal, thixotropic, anisotropic, tamed by the science of her people to flow and move like flesh. On her home world Venus had not looked human at all -- for that matter she had not been female, because her race had not bothered with sexual distinctions in its development. She said, "It is not only human beings who live on Cuckoo, Ben Line. We have already found Sheliaks and BoatyBits -- or beings genetically parallel to them. And we have only begun to look." "We haven't found any of your folks, though," observed Ben Line cheerfully. "Guess you weren't popular." "As to that, Ben Line, how could you tell?" He grinned. Venus was an edited form of her species, specially tailored to operate in the Earthnormal environment of Cuckoo Station. He said, "I suppose we might as well retransmit these tapes. I think we need help, Venus. More equipment, more survey scouts. And more beings. I think it's about time we sent people down to Cuckoo. What do you say?" The silvery girl was silent for a moment. Ben Line knew that, through her Pmal translator, she was communicating with farlink, the computer that processed all the manifold information-handling procedures on the orbiter called Cuckoo Station. farlink was the station's nerve center. It processed the tachyonic transmissions that replicated new personnel for the station. It coordinated reports from the drones they sent down to the surface of the strange object. It stored cumulative data, solved research problems and sent findings -- suchas they were -- back to Sun One. Its main terminal was a ringshaped console inside the hollow hemisphere where Pertin, the silvery girl and other beings were working. The beings on duty sat inside the console or rested or clung or stood there as their anatomies dictated, with input devices within reach of their manipulative organs. The output flashed and shimmered on the screens that lined the dome, translated into the visual symbols of half a hundred cultures. Ben Line became impatient. "What's the 'matter, Venus?" She did not move but her expression, as far as she could be said to have one, seemed to cloud. "There is difficulty," she said. "Difficulty?" That seemed unlikely. farlink was as close to perfect as any machine ever made. It owned its own built-in power sources and many tachyonic channels linked it to the banks of the even larger computers and research teams back on Sun One. And yet... Abruptly, before Ben's very eyes, the myraid screens suddenly flickered and went black. There was an instant rumble of consternation. Cries and hoots and clangs of shock echoed all around the ring. From the console position nearest Pertin's own a scorched-fur scent of T'Worlie dismay came from the bat-headed, butterflywinged being named Nimmie. "What the devil?" he muttered. The screens were black for only an instant. Then they glowed with the green computer signals that spelled out the same message in half a hundred languages. Venus whispered, "We've never had any interference before -- " Pertin had no answer. Suddenly he felt very lonely. The tachyonic channels were the only bridge of thought and communication across a gulf of space that was too vast for anything material to cross. With the bridge broken, the thirty thousand light-years between all the beings on board and their diverse homes became terribly real. The T'Worlie beside him was fluttering on frantic wings above its console position, stabbing at the keys and whistling at its mike. After a moment it rose from the keyboard and turned its five-eyed face to Ben. "Mode emergency -- query implications of signal distortion." "I wish I knew," Pertin said, shaking his head. "Propose conjecture. Assume sentient masters of Cuckoo. Query. Have they discovered us? Are they initiating contact? Query probable intentions." "I don't know, Nimmie. Do we know where the interference comes from?" The T'Worlie spun, punched a combination and all the myriad screens lit up. And then, abruptly, the green symbols shimmered off the screen. Patterns of color flashed and vantshed in the deep tanks that were their three-D vision screens. A new message appeared. The Sun One sign burned itself onto the screens -- a red disk inside a thin green elipse: the artificial satellite called Sun One, inside the galaxy. Before it appeared the tall, glowing cone of a Sheliak official, back at Sun One. He was speaking, apparently oblivious of the interruption, while his translator turned his soft hooting into Earth English on Ben Line's screen. Green symbols overrode the image for a moment. Venus and Ben Line looked at each other. "What was that all about?" he demanded. Slowly she shook her silvery head. "At any rate, it's over." All around the dome beings were resuming their interrupted chores. "One moment, Ben Line." Then: "Yes, we have concurrence. We authorize you to transmit a call for additional survey forces." Ben Pertin nodded and cued in the tachyon transmitter. Carefully he began to phrase the report that the tachyons would flash toward the distant galaxy and to the artificial planet called Sun One -- where all the races of the galaxy maintained the headquarters that had launched this survey party -- and from there on to the home planets of scores of kinds of beings. His words might sooner or later reach his own world, Earth. Ben Line wondered if somehow, back on Earth, that original Ben Pertin who had volunteered for tachyon transmission long before might hear the voice of his double. But that was not profitable wondering. Behind it lay too much pain, too much loss, too many regrets for what could never be undone -- including the memory of the girl he had married on Sun One. Zara had not lost her husband, but Ben, her husband, in this copy at least, had lost his wife, forever. And it hurt. II although Fifteenth was strong, launching himself from the ground was hard work suited only for emergencies. When at last he began to run out of strength on his first long flight across the plain toward Knife-in-the-Sky he was careful to choose a landing spot where hillocks would give him a small height advantage for the next launch. A tall tree would have been better, but here he saw only firetrees and bee-trees and neither was any good for climbing. No matter how careful you were, when you climbed fire-trees some of the fire clung to your skin and, although it did not seem to do immediate harm, after a time you sickened and died. And bee-trees were guarded by beings with a disposition to assault invaders en masse. He did not sleep on his first landing, only ate from the stocks he carried, rested drowsily for a thousand breaths and then launched himself again. Flying over the marshes was unsatisfying. There were few updrafts -- and those only weak ones -- to climb in. Nearer home, generations of wingmen had located reliable springs of rising air in many places -- where the lowest slopes of the mountain shaped the wind or where, for some reason, the ground was always warm. But he was already at the edge of the known world as far as his people were concerned. He could recognize some helpful signs. Nearly always fire-trees meant rising air, not because the trees themselves were warm but because they grew only in warm soil. But the stands of firetrees here in the marshes were spindly and infrequent. So he climbed mostly with the power of his lean, long arms and chest muscles and flying was steady work. But his purpose held and after every rest or meal or sleep he launched himself again and drove on toward Knife-in-the-Sky. He had known that mountain all his life, but he hadn't known how far it was. He slept twenty-three times crossing the alternating marsh and flatlands past the edge of the grass, and eighteen times more crossing what was pure marsh, where he could rest only on hillocks and the steamy mist that rose around him while he slept was malodorous and cloying. Each time he knotted the count into the cord around his throat when he awoke, and looked toward Knife-in-theSky -- and still it seemed no larger. Beyond the marches he crossed a seemingly endless carpet of thick bright moss that had a strangely sharp smell -- he associated it with the electrical storms that rolled around the upper reaches of his mountain. It made him sneeze. The moss bore no fruit, gave him no game. He counted twenty-eight sleeps on his way across it and came out giddy with hunger and thirst. He came down, with the last of his strength, on the bank of a shallow river that rimmed the moss world. He kneeled and drank the black water until he began to feel ill. Then he looked for food in the forest on the far bank. Its plants were club-shaped and leafless, shining with their own cold light like dwarfed, warped fire-trees. Shining daggers of thorns guarded the hard red nuts they bore. He picked a few doubtfully and looked farther. But there was none of the game he knew from the grasslands near his home -- he saw none of the tleet four-legged herd animals, or the horned, two-legged hoppers. His arrows killed a small weakly flying thing that fed on the nuts, but its flesh was tasteless and dry. He roasted some of the nuts and felt sicker after eating them than he had felt before. He summoned the strength to pitch his wings together to make a tent, pegged against one of the club-shaped trees. He rolled inside, curled up in a ball and tried to sleep. It was not easy. Fifteenth had never known insomnia, but he had heard old people speak of it sometimes and now he understood what the word meant. He was drained and aching. For the first time he began to wonder if he were not as crazy as his brother had said. His brains truly felt as though they were bound'to the ground. His thoughts could not rise and fly -- they were weighted by fear and misery and depression. After a time he decided that he must eat, no matter what, and crawled out again. Here in the marshes the sky was darker than on the slopes of his mountain. There were fewer firetrees and the light from the steely bright moss on the far side of the river was of little help. He felt dizzy and faint and when he saw the bright cube that whirled away out of sight he thought at first it was the imagining of sickness. #I almost at once. Once or twice before, during the long flights over grass and marsh and moss, he had thought he glimpsed something small and bright pursuing him at a great distance. But it had always hung just at the threshold of visibility. He knew that the watchers traveled in huge things that were bright and shiny. But this did not seem very large and until now it had never come close. He had heard of the small new watchers -- was this one of them? He could not say. All he could be sure of was that it had not harmed him so far, but certainly it would never have a better chance to do him harm than while he lay shaking and weak in the wing-tent. He had left shelter just in time. To have glimpsed the thing gave him much to think about. The efforts of thinking seemed to sharpen his mind and his will. He must regain strength before he slept. He stood up, drank again from the river and began to search for the sprays of flame-bright red bloom he had seen from the air. These marked clusters of a thickrooted plant. When he found them he dug out roots and uncovered nests of blood-red worms he had heard older wingmen of his people describe as edible in bad times. The roots were sweet and white and good -- the worms less good. They were gritty and revolting raw r , but he made a fire and soon learned to clean them of their digestive sacs before broiling them. He ate his first satiating meal in many sleeps, rolled back into the wing-tent and slept well, despite his alertness to possible danger nearby. He stayed by the riverbank for three more sleeps before he felt strong enough to pack himself with roots and smoked worms and go on again. He flew steadily and low, saving energy, careful with the worn bands of his harness. He strained his neck, ceaselessly scanning the sky all around for orgs or for another sight of the small watcher that had fled from him by the river, searching the forest for signs of game, studying the horizon for evidence of updrafts that might help him. The dully glowing forests now sloped sharply upward. He slept seven times in a belt of fog and rain. With Knife-in-the-Sky lost in the lowering sky his target was gone. He set his course as much as he could by following the upward slopes. When those signs failed -- or were doubtful -- he drew from his harness the one gift his mother had given him that had been her father's. It was a crystal-cased object that glittered like the small watcher. Inside it a needle spun freely, but seemed ever to quiver toward a single direction. His mother had not known much about it, except that the wingmen of her people had used such devices to mark the direction of flight when landmarks failed. The air grew colder as he climbed. When he camped for one sleep on a moss-grown rock he awoke shivering and chilled. He crept stiffly from beneath his tented wings and found the low clouds gone. He looked up and caught his breath. K nife-in-the-sky filled all the world ahead. The forests lifted toward it forever, rising piles of pale brown and gray and ivory, splashed with vast black masses of fallen stone. So high he had to stretch his neck to look, the mountain itself rose out of those broken boulders. Walls of black rock marched up and at the top of that unclimbable wall, higher than he could imagine, the jagged summit slashed across the rippling colors of the sky. He studied that summit for a long time, looking for orgs, while the damp wind that blew down the slopes of the mountain numbed him with unexpected cold. He knew the orgs were there. They were always there -- when they were not sweeping down to the lower slopes and the marsh and the grasslands and forests, seeking prey. Perhaps those distant black spots, so hard to distinguish from the motes of dust one sees on the surface of one's own eye, were orgs -- he could not tell. Whatever, they were still a long way off. He stepped back to see more clearly over that giddy wall, felt a sudden gust as he was caught off-stride. The ground slid away under him. He grabbed wildly for the anchor rope that secured his tented wings, but his chilled fingers slid off it. The wind spun him off the rock. He flailed his arms, trying to get his balance. The moss was slippery and the cold had made him clumsy. He went sprawling over the edge. The fall was only twenty times his height, so there was no real danger. Even without wings he could glide to some extent. He picked out a landing spot where a bank of crimson moss promised some cushion, stretched out his arms, writhed and landed not too badly, considering the sluggishness of his muscles from the cold. A pink cloud of spores rose around his plowing feet and partly blinded him. He sprawled, sneezing and choking, then stood up and looked around. He could see across the great bowl of marsh and plain almost to the lift of his own mountain. Past the brown and yellow slopes beneath him the moss world made an endless sea. The marshes beyond were traced with thin black lines of rivers. In the hollows lay white fog. He turned and looked up the rock to where his tented wings and supplies were. Without wings he could not fly, but he could still climb. Unfortunately he rock was sleep and he could not trust his stiffened lingers to seek out holds in its crevices. He would have to climb the long way around. Without wings the feat could be dangerous. The combination of low gravity and dense atmosphere that his world possessed made the lifting of mass easy, but unbalanced the equation of wind versus inertia. Caught by a gust on a vertical face, it was quite possible he could be flung so far out that even the slow acceleration of his world's gravity would crush him when he struck ground again. So he sought an easy way and sprang carefully from point to point. He was concentrating so hard on his task that he almost did not see the small watcher as it swooped past his head and spun toward the place where his gear waited for him. F ifteenth shrank back into a crevice in the moss and waited for attack. The attack did not come. Actually this small watcher did not seem menacing to him. Yet what could it want with his gear? He could hear nothing. He could see nothing -- then, in a flash, he saw something startling -- a bright flare of golden light that washed the side of the mountain and disappeared in a moment. Cautiously Fifteenth eased his way out of the little fold in the terrain and stretched himself to peer upward. He listened, looked, smelled, reaching out with all his senses. They told him nothing. He squatted for a hundred breaths, considering. Strictly speaking, there was nothing on the rock that he could not do without. Food, spear, bow, wings, harness -- he could not make them as well as the specialists among his people, but he could make them well enough to get by. The wings and harness would be the most difficult, but he had seen enough of his brother's work to know that replacing them would not be impossible. Still, the gear on the top of the rock was his and he wanted it back. If the small watchers were the same as the big ones his only option would be to flee -- and to do so would almost certainly be useless, if his brother's stories were halfway true. But he did not think there was any hostility stored in the glittering little cube he had seen. So with great daring, slowly and cautiously at first, then more quickly and openly, Fifteenth made his way around a boss on the mountainside, up and over it, and emerged above the rock where he had slept. He had not known what to expect, but he had not expected what he saw. The cube was no longer simply a cube. It hung in air above the moss, not far from his wing-tent, steady as though it were nailed there, not dipping or even trembling in the winds. But it was growing something. From one face of it a glowing, filmy bubble was spreading to form a sphere almost the height of Fifteenth. It became larger while he watched: The sphere stopped growing. For dozens of breaths nothing happened, unless a shadowy sort of movement inside the sphere meant something. Fifteenth could see his gear waiting for him. He could detect no harm in the cube or the bubble. He did not come to a conscious decision, but in a moment he discovered that his legs were gathering under him and he sprang toward the top of the rock. He turned in air to bring his feet under him, landed well, spun to face the small watcher. And then something did happen. There was another flash of that intense golden explosion of silent light and for a moment he was blinded. And when he could see again at all he saw that the bubble had broken open, sliced from within like an org's egg, and out o it was stepping -- what? A man? Short, fat, squat, dark, curiously clothed -- but yes, a man. Ill T he figure that came out of the bubble was twice as wide as Fifteenth and nearly a head shorter. It wore strange bright clothing. The wingmen and their women wore no more than they had to -- the harness to hold their necessities and fasten to their wings, a few square inches of cloth or shaved leather for ornament, a few more for modesty. By Fifteenth's standards this man was fearsomely overdressed. His clothing covered nearly all of him. From waist to feet he wore a sort of bright yellow, loose second skin, which vanished under brightcolored soft boots. From waist to shoulders he wore a sleeveless tunic. His wrists were ornamented with broad, bright-colored bands that looked like leather, but were in colors -- blues, greens and mauves. They dangled little pouches and bright shiny things that glittered and seemed to move. Even the man's head was covered with a soft cap of bright orange color -- with such apparel he could never hope to avoid being seen by org or watcher or game. His costume and his strange proportions were not all that was different about him. Even his face was odd. He was surely much older Ilian Fifteenth, two or three thousand sleeps at least. But his face did not show it. It was not weathered or lined from wind or storm. His teeth were bright and even, as perfect as Fifteenth's own. All this Fifteenth saw in the same photographic glance that told him that the man carried no weapon. None at all -- neither bow nor knife. Not even a club. Even so, he might not be without danger. His squat f rame had the look of strength. The man took a step toward f ifteenth. It was not menacing. It was comic. Fifteenth had never seen anything like it. The man's slep was grotesquely energetic -- it propelled him into the air. He came down, stumbled, caught himself, fell again in overreaction and sprawled to the ground. The expression on his broad face was funnier than his ungainly tumbling act itself. Fifteenth could not help laughing. From the ground the man laughed, too. Then the man stood up carefully. He spread his hands as though to show he had no weapons. Fifteenth already knew that. He made no move. The man did something to the shiny baubles on his wrist. Then he spoke. His voice came from two places at once. It came from his mouth and from the bauble on his wrist. The sounds from the thing on his wrist were not the same as the sounds from his mouth, but Fifteenth could understand neither of them. He bent his head in the gesture of negation. The man seemed irritated with his toy. He touched it again and spoke once more. This time Fifteenth thought he caught the suggestion of a word. Strangely, it came from the man's wrist, not his mouth. And the rest was gibberish. The man shrugged and let his arm fall to his side. Then he grinned, touched his chest and spoke a single word. The sound of it was Ben. The man waited inquiringly, as though expecting a response. Fifteenth was not sure of what was expected of him, other than that the man seemed to want him to speak. The man gestured, pointed to his wrist and made several other sounds. One sounded like pmal, pronounced very slowly and carefully, but what it meant Fifteenth had no idea. He said, "I don't know what you want me to do." The man applauded, grinned, motioned for more. "Well," said Fifteenth, "I am Fifteenth of the men in my people." He paused a little suspiciously, but the man urged him on. Hesitantly Fifteenth continued: "But I am far from my people and no longer one of them," he soliloquized. "So perhaps I can have only a word-name, like an outlaw or a woman. Are you an outlaw? But I am going to get an org's egg. I will hatch it and tame the org. Perhaps I will call myself Org Rider." He finished and fell silent, listening to the pleasing sound of the name in his mind's ear. Excited, the man touched his wrist and spoke again. This time the words from his wrist made sense. They were poorly pronounced, but clearly enough they said: "I am Ben. You are Org Rider." The man saw that communication had begun. He spoke again and the thing on his wrist stuttered, emitted a few nonsense syllables and then, very clearly, said, "My people far." He gestured for Fifteenth to speak again. But Fifteenth had heard something else. Frowning, he turned to search the sky. The sound was strangely ominous, like the hum of a bee tree. His first thought was, Org! Yet the sound was wrong. It was not the harsh scream his mother had described, but something even more fearsome. Then he saw it -- a faint silvery glint high above. Watcher! I t was a spearpoint in the sky. It had no wings, but it moved so fast the boy could hardly realize what was happening. The man heard it, too. Astonishment spread across his broad face. He turned, bounced toward the silently hovering small watcher, fell clumsily but righted himself and touched the ship with quick, skillful hands. At once one face of the small watcher glared with a bright golden flame and a bubble began to grow out of it. Fifteenth did not stay to observe this performance. He ran for his weapons. He did not know what good they would be against a watcher, but no other options were open to him than to use them, A bright flash of light from above gave him a split second's warning. Then something crashed nearby. Strange yellow flowers bloomed on the black rock and faded into pale smoke. A sharp reek of burning choked him. The bubble from the side of the small watcher had grown tall now -- abruptly it flared brightly golden. Fifteenth was staring directly at it when it happened. For a moment he was blinded. Bright lights were out of his experience entirely, except for lightning and the smoky glow of a campfire -- the eyes of his people did not have quick recovery mechanisms. He could not distinguish just what was happening. Then he saw that the man named Ben was clawing at the bubble, trying to drag out of it some glittering object that had appeared inside. Again there came that sudden crash. A flash of light flared behind and above him and yellow flame and smoke exploded on Ben. There was a terrible scream. Splinters of rock tore at Fifteenth's flesh. A hot, choking odor took his breath. Then blackness drowned him. His bow was in his hand, but he had not had time to raise it, or even to see what had killed Ben and was C onsciousness returned out of a crazy pain-filled fantasy that was not a dream but a memory. He lay face down on hard, wet gravel. He was shivering in a cold, slow rain. His first feeling was one of astonishment at being alive. His second made him wrap his wings around himself to cover his nakedness against the rain. When he tried to move something tightened around his neck so that he could hardly breathe. Panic shook him. He tugged at the coil choking him, but it would not loosen. His hand flashed to his knife, but it was gone. He was tied by the neck like a food beast awaiting slaughter. Sitting up more carefully, he managed to get to his feet. He saw that he was tethered to a great spearhead-shaped machine that lay on the gravel. It was mottled in brown and yellow, but underneath was the glint of silvery metal. Ten paces away lay the butchered squat corpse of Ben. A faint mechanical squeal came from the silvery cube of the small watcher that had brought him. It would bring no one ever again, for the explosion had blasted it. It lay sparking feebly, cracked and broken, on the gravel. "Good to see you awake, boy." T he booming voice caught Fifteenth by surprise. He moved abruptly and was jerked back by the choking coil around his neck. When he caught his balance he saw a man taller than himself, redbearded, green-eyed, grinning and rocking on his feet by the small pile of weapons and wings. "Who are you?" "Why," said the man, "you can call me Redlaw. You're a long way from home, Fifteenth." The boy kept off his face the sinking astonishment that this man knew his name. "I am not Fifteenth any more," he said suddenly, a little surprised at himself. "My name is Org Rider." For some reason he knew this was now true. He had ceased being the Fifteenth among his people. He stood alone -- a man. Redlaw's laugh boomed out. "An Org Rider without an org? Your brother was right, boy, you're a fool." Then he said, not unkindly, "Oh, don't be surprised. The watchers don't only watch. They listen, too. We've been listening to you for a long time." "How? I never saw you before." Redlaw shrugged and smiled. "I've never seen a watcher," said Org Rider. "And you have never been on our mountain, I am certain." "You're making a wrong assumption," Redlaw said. "I'm not a watcher. I work for them. As butcher in their galleys -- " he gestured at the blood-stained apron he wore -- "and sometimes as translator, when they want to know what people like you are saying. But I know you are truthful when you tell me you've never seen a watcher, because they don't look a bit like you or me." "Then where are the watchers?" "You'll see them soon enough." The man stirred the weapons on the rock with a foot and peered at Org Rider out of shrewd green eyes. "It's not you they care about, you know," he said suddenly. "It's your dead friend here. What do you know about him?" "Nothing," said Org Rider proudly. Fighting back the pain and dizziness that were tearing at him. Dried blood on his arms and in his hair showed where he had been struck. No one had troubled to do anything about his injuries while he was unconscious. "He appeared from nowhere. I do not know how. I had never seen him before. This is true." "Oh," said Redlaw, "I believe you. Whether the watchers will or not is something else. But you'll find out -- one way or another -- because here they come now." A section out of the middle of the ship dropped flat to make a wide door and a ramp. Five creatures came flapping out and dropped to the rock around Redlaw, staring from a distance at Org Rider. Though they waddled on two legs when they were not flying, they did not look human. They were squat and powerful-looking, like the man who had died so quickly and uselessly. Even more so -- they were barely half the height of Org Rider or Redlaw. But the ways in which they differed from humans were extreme. They wore slick bright armor that looked as though it grew on them. Their armored arms looked thick and muscular, and their wings were yellow-streaked leather -- it looked frighteningly like tanned human skin to Org Rider -- and stretched from their arms to their stubby legs. Their faces were beaked. They had no necks. Wide black flexible ears spread out from each side of their beaks... Their multiple eyes were greenish bulges, proruding from each side of the head. Their hands horrified Org Rider. The fingers resembled squirming pink food worms as they palped every seam of Org Rider's tented wings, every strap of his flying gear. They emitted a foul odor that struck him in a suffocating wave. It took his breath and stung his eyes like death-weeds burning. Even Redlaw, who clearly had had opportunity to get used to these beings was wrinkling his nose and showing distaste. The creatures squeaked to each other and then paused, big ears spread. One of them was holding the needled guide that had been Org Rider's mother's gift, the direction-showing trinket. Org Rider started to try to break free. "Easy, boy," said Redlaw tightly. "You're very close to being dead right now. Don't push it." T he watchers squeaked to each other, then once again went through the routine of palping his wings, his garments, his waterskin, his firepot, knife, coils of rope, empty pots. Then they moved like stumps rocking across the graveled rock to where the dead man lay. They did not touch him, but they squeaked again, this time peremptorily. Redlaw scowled uneasily and puckered his lips to whistle some sort of message. It was not very much like the squeaks of the watchers but it was as close as a human could come, Org Rider thought, and the watchers seemed to understand it. They replied. Redlaw nodded and turned to Org Rider. "I've told them what you say. Two of them think you are lying. One thinks you are too stupid to lie. The other two have not yet made up their minds." Org Rider was silent, letting that information soak through his brain. "You see," said Redlaw, "this strange-looking fellow here is very disconcerting to them." He squinted thoughtfully at the racked body that lay staring sightlessly at nothing. "In a way they know that what you say is true. In another way they are not sure. Why did he come to you, boy? By accident? They'll never believe that." "I know nothing more than I've told you," said Org Rider stubbornly. "If I die for it." "You just might," observed Redlaw mildly, then started as a blast of whistling came from the watchers. His tone was suddenly harsh. "They want to know why you don't carry the watchman's eye." "I don't even know w'hat it is." "The talisman of their service." Redlaw touched a sort of medallion he wore around his own neck. "Like this -- to show you're their friend and servant." "My people are not servants." "Maybe that used to be true," acknowledged Redlaw. "Your people lived almost out of range. But times are changing. This friend of yours here -- what's left of him -- is making them change. I think you'll go away from here wearing an eye if you go away at all, Org Rider." A burst of peremptory whistling and two of the watchers waddled toward the boy. The yellow coil around his neck tightened, strangling him, forcing him to his knees. The man warned, "Don't fight them -- it's your life." The bitter reek set him sneezing even while he gasped for breath. A leather wing slapped him into silence, knocked him down. A hot, hard-armored body fell on him and those pink, writhing fingers searched his body, prying into mouth and nostrils -- every orifice and indentation. The weight, the pain, the indignity, the lack of air all combined to fill Org Rider with a helpless fury. He could not cope with it -- he could only rage inside himself until at last the weight rose from him and the watchers took their foul reek away. What might happen next was at that moment of no interest to Org Rider. He was preoccupied inside himself. He had never been so treated. He had never been so helpless, not even when the girl he was interested in had whispered to him that she had pledged to marry his brother. In pain and anger, Org Rider was conscious of one certainty. He would see the watchers paid for this. at length Redlaw's voice boomed: "You can stand up, boy. I've made a deal for you." He whistled sharply and the yellow rope fell away from Org Rider's neck. "You're going to wear the watchman's eye," Redlaw ordered. "It will show them everything you see. If you have any further contact with funny-looking fellows like your dead friend here, they want to know about it." "What if I say no?" Redlaw scowled. "I don't care." He tapped the square-bladed knife at his waist. "Maybe I didn't tell you that they have a taste for human flesh. To them you're an animal to be used one way or another. What you do is your gamble, not mine." He paused, looking toward the ship. From the gaping hatch a sixth watcher flapped down. It was darker than the others as well as bigger, its stubby wings almost black. It flew directly to Org Rider and caught him in a reeking hug, clasping something around his neck. The contact lasted only a moment -- then the large watcher fell away. The object was a heavy black globe, twice the size of the ball of Org Rider's thumb. A slick black cord of some sort of leather held it around his neck. "Our captain asked me to tell you," said Redlaw, "that if you lake it off he will do you the honor to eat you himself." He glanced over his shoulder. The captain of the watchers had already returned lo the ship. The others were llapping slowly after him. "Goodbye, Org Rider," said Redlaw. He turned and entered the ship. The hatch closed. At once a small curved shell tipped down along the length of the ship. Something whined. A gust of warm wind sent Org Rider staggering across the gravel and onto the moss. The ship rose and whined away through the sky. Org Rider watched it until he was sure it was not coming back. Then he set about gathering his lost gear. None of it was lost or badly damaged, though it was scattered all over the rock and all of it stank of the death-weed reek of the watchers. As soon as he had it he strapped on his harness, loaded himself with what he had to carry. His torn body was sending messages of pain from the crusted wounds in scalp and arms and his stomach fought against the clinging reek of the watchers. He put them out of his mind. He did not even look again at the dead creature who had emerged from the bubble, or the glittering, broken toy that had brought him. He launched himself into the air, turned and with great, painful strokes continued toward the distant peak of Knife-in-the-Sky. He did not look back. IV miles away, far beyond the great broad curve of the horizon, the spinning wheel of the orbiter marched through its endless sweep. Ben Pertin turned away from the monitor screen. The image on it was cracked and shattered. What showed clearly was a ghastly view of Ben's own dead, staring eye, peering emptily forever into the gaudily clouded sky of Cuckoo. Ben looked guiltily at the silvery girl he called Venus. He did not think even an alien like her would fail to see the emotions reflected on his face and he was not proud of how he felt. To see oneself die was unsettling. The Ben Pertin who had just had his skull smashed and his body blasted on the distant surface of Cuckoo was as much himself as this other body he was inhabited here. I'm sorry, Venus," he said. "Sorry?" He said, "I guess the mission down there was a bust. Still, we've learned something from it. First and most important -- next time we send somebody down we'd better arm him for bear. No more waiting till he asks for weapons and trying to get them to him in a hurry." "Concurred," said Venus. "Also editing appears necessary due to the gravity differential." "Right. That light gravity is tricky. I -- he was falling down all over the place. I've never been transmitted in an edited form before," he said. "I don't know how well I like the idea." "It does not hurt, Ben Line." "Of course not." The silvery girl curled one wing and moved closer to him, studying him carefully. "It is established," she said in her chiming voice, "that my people and Arcturan robots, for example, experience less ego-displacement in transmission than do you or, for example, the T'Worlie. Suggestion. One of us can go on the next transmission to the surface of Cuckoo." "That's an idea. We'll keep it in mind," said Ben Line. In his heart he knew he didn't want to do it that way. When the next transmission went, he would make it. There were two reasons, one practical, the other not. The practical reason was that Earthmen looked like the people who roamed this portion of the surface of Cuckoo. With editing -- to stretch them out and reduce their musculature -- they would look even more so. The first efforts at communication had to be for the purpose of building up a store of language that the pmal translators needed in order to function. These had proved difficult enough. Asking one of these primitives to talk to a robot, to a T'Worlie or a creature like the silvery girl was out of the question. The other reason was the important one. Ben Line Pertin had thought it over carefully and, all in all, he had no particular reason to want, to go on living. Ben Pertin was not the first human being in the history of the race to reach that conclusion. Many, he felt, had forsaken their tomorrows for reasons far more trivial than his own. The thing that graveled Ben Pertin was that his options were curiously circumscribed. With tachyon transmission a man could die and die and die -- and still not be done with either living or dying. However many times Ben Pertin let the tachyon scanners memorize his body structure and translate an exact duplicate to the surface of Cuckoo -- and however many times that duplicate met a gory death -- he would still be alive in orbit. And he would still be hurting. Other men in his position could fling their lives away in a reckless gamble against death, and find oblivion. He could not. The only gamble he could take was in a fixed game that he could not lose. The situation made a mockery of courage. Of selfhood. "I said," the silvery girl repeated tunelessly, "the T'Worlie Nimmie is speaking to you." "Oh, sorry." Ben Line shook himself to attention and attempted a smile at the butterflywinged being that hung in the air beside him. "Hi, Nimmie. What's new?" " Theory," whistled the T'Worlie. "farlink proposes explication of lachyon interference." "Really?" Ben Line was diverted from his internal plan. "What's that?" "f arlink identifies source of interference as exogenous to Cuckoo. Originates elsewhere. Trace-scanning locates source as tight-beam signal generated in our own galaxy. Vector closely equivalent to that of human sun, called Sol." Pertin frowned. "I don't know about that," he muttered. "It doesn't seem reasonable. After all, there is only one lachyon station on Earth capable of this distance and that's locked in to Sun One. Certainly it couldn't interfere with reception here -- " "farlink adds," shrilled the T'Worlie, fluttering up and down on its bright butterfly wings, "interfering signal can be identified as mating call of female of human species, beamed from your home world, called Earth, to self, here." "Ridiculous!" Ben Line exploded. "Nimmie, that's insane! Why -- " He paused as a strong ammonia scent made him sneeze. "Wait a minute," he said. "What does that smell mean?" "Query. Smell, Ben Line?" "The gaseous emission that registers on my chemical-stimuli-detecting nerve sensors. I know you T'Worlie express emotions chemically." "It is laughter," shrilled the T'Worlie triumphantly. "Ah," said Ben Line. "Then that was a joke." "Confirmation," cried the T'Worlie. "Successful one? Query." "Pretty good. Sorry. You caught me off guard or I would have laughed too." A whiff of ether-like sweetness expressed the T'Worlie analogue of hurt. "Regret joke unsuccessful," Nimmie piped sadly. "Not all of communication falsified for purposes of humor. True that farlink locates source as near Earth in vector-distance not confirmed. Extreme attenuation of signal renders distance estimate undependable." "Strange," chimed the silvery girl. "Perhaps we should instruct farlink to assemble conjectural explanations of this phenomenon." "You two go ahead," said Ben Line. "I have to get some sleep." "We will carry on while you are unconscious," whistled the T'Worlie. Neither he nor Venus slept and both were critical of human slumber. "Personal conjecture: whatever explanations, they will complicate our mission." d indeed they would, thought Ben Line Pertin as he headed toward his living quarters, located at the high-gravity shell of the satellite. No random tachyonic transmissions should be coming in, especially from the galaxy itself, where all known 'tachyon sources had been long since identified, located and compensated for. It was one more irritation in a life that had become increasingly overweighted on the downbeat side. What I need. Ben Line thought, is a meal, a hath and bed. In that order. But he would not find much pleasure in those either, he knew. The meal would be out of a dry pack and into a microwave oven -- and would taste like it. With only three human beings on the wheel and a dozen other races with different diets also aboard, not much space was wasted on epicurean cookery. The bath would not feel much more satisfying. The wheel was in free-fall and the only way to bathe was through a sort of hosedown from jets inside a thing like a huge bottle. There was not a lot of pleasure in the experienced-even after you learned how to get clean without inhaling several gallons of water. And the bed, of course, would be solitary. Ben Pertin hurled himself out of the communications room in a savage mood. He was the first human being to reach this point in space, tens of thousands of lightyears outside the galactic spiral. He was a conqueror by any standards the history books could measure. What he felt like was a victim. P ertin's "bed" was a cocoon that could shelter, feed, protect and nurse him -- as well as entertain and even educate him. It felt like a prison. Fed and bathed, he floated in it and could not sleep. There was a sore place in his mind to which his consciousness always returned -- like something caught in a tooth that the tongue cannot resist probing. That something was himself. Another self: the Ben Pertin from whom he had been copied. That Ben Pertin was forty thousand light-years away, in the artificial satellite that hung in the Orion gas cloud and was called Sun One. To Ben Line Pertin he seemed both farther than all those lights -- in the sense of representing something unattainable -- and closer than Ben Line's own skin. That other Ben Pertin -- he was called Ben Charles -- would be enjoying the domestic pleasures of marriage, as well as an interesting and productive career and all the amenities Sun One offered its citizens. Lucky man, thought Ben Line, hating him. Yet that man, too, was himself. Only a couple of months earlier they had been not only identical but coincident. That was before Ben Line had come here. He remembered perfectly well what had happened. He had risen that morning from the arms of his new bride, kissed her goodbye -- but only as any suburban commuter kisses his wife au revoir for the day -- and entered the tachyon transmission chamber on Sun One. There the tachyon beams had scanned his body, built up a pattern of atoms and molecules and transmitted that pattern at the velocity of tachyons, the particles whose lower limiting velocity is the speed of light. And that pattern had been received here, had been reconstructed here, atom for atom and link for link. So on Sun One, one Ben Pertin had walked out of the chamber, in no way different from what he had been when he had gone in. He had done whatever he had had to do during the balance of that working day and at the end of it had returned again to Zara, histheir wife. But on the wheel, another Ben Pertin had floated out of the receiving chamber and felt the instant shock of knowing that he had lost the gamble. He was the one on the wheel, which he looked at with some curiosity but not much pleasure. If you had put the two Ben Pertins side by side, no clue could have told you which was the original and which the copy. Both were originals. Neither was a copy -- except in some abstract, irrelevant sense that meant nothing when it was considered that each had a complete store of everything Ben Pertin had ever had, from evanescent memory of infancy. There was only one real difference: One was there, the other was here. One was living a normal life on Sun One. The other was doing a necessary job -- without joy -- on the orbiter, which he would never leave. That was the paradox of tachyon transmission: since it was only a pattern that was transmitted, the object being transmitted remained unchanged. No matter how often you left, you always stayed behind. Ben Line Pertin tossed angrily against the restraining web of his cocoon. That was the damned unfair part of it, his mind cried. Why couldn't Zara join him? It would cost her nothing. Like him, one of her would walk out of the tachyon chamber on Sun One, the other would be here. They would be together. He would no longer be alone. He groaned resentfully, angrily, petulantly. The worst part of his resentment was that in the end it was directed against himself. It was his own fault that Zara was not here now. It was he who had persuaded her not to come with him at first, not until the orbiter had been made more comfortable. She had wanted to come. But she had listened to him, had finally agreed and promised to come later. A lying, deceitful promise. She not only had not come, she wouldn't even answer his tachyon messages. Not for weeks. First he had suggested she might come -- then asked outright -- finally pleaded. No answer. When Ben Line Pertin finally fell asleep his dreams were harsh and punitive. H e awoke in time for an all-hands review of the material gathered on Cuckoo. In all, forty-one beings were living on the orbiter at that moment, counting collective entities as a single creature. They fit nicely into a cylindrical chamber not much more than fifteen feet across, partly because most of them were rather smaller than human beings, mostly because placement in free-fall was volumetric rather than planar. The sole T'Worlie acted as sort of general chairman for the meeting. Out of the bat's head perched on his butterfly-like body he squeaked a short sentence and all around the room the pmal translators of the various beings rendered it into their own language. "I will display the information gathered so far on Cuckoo." In the center of the chamber a holographic display quickened into life. It showed a deep red sphere, floating in emptiness. There was no hint of dimension, because there was nothing nearby to compare it with, but the voice accompaniment to the display began to give the values for its physical characteristics and all the pmal translators faithfully relayed the information to their owners. Radius, slightly under one A.U. Mass, about equal to Sol. Density, very low -- less than what in some Earthly laboratories was considered a hard vacuum. And yet the thing had a solid surface. This was a familiar wonder to Ben Line and the other beings, but they listened anyway. So much about Cuckoo was still unbelievable. Not only did it have a surface, but on that surface lived its creatures. The sphere in the display grew and broke off into a section, which expanded, turned slowly to present itself to each of the creatures in the room. It grew larger and they were looking down on a landscape between two enormous mountains and there became visible the strangest phenomenon of all. The creatures living there seemed biologically similar to some races native to the galaxy. Any connection was impossible. Cuckoo had never been part of the galaxy. Its present course was aimed arrow-straight at the Orion arm. It had clearly been on that course for a long time -- and it had originated in some other star cloud. Ben Line Pertin, listening and watching, realized someone was touching him. He turned and saw a woman of the Purchased People. She rode the satellite as proxy for some water-breathing race from a star on the far side of the galaxy invisible to Earth and never named by it, Ben knew. She said tonelessly, "While you were sleeping, Ben Line Pertin, this came addressed to you with the last lot of supplies." He nodded thanks -- not to her; the imprisoned personality inside that skull neither expected thanks nor would know what to do with a courteous gesture -- but to the distant mollusc-like creature that owned her and operated through her body. He was about to turn back to the hologram when he realized what (he woman had given him. It was a message cassette. There was no reason for anyone to send him a sealed cassette unless it was private -- and there was only one person who would want to send him a private message. That person was Zara. S uddenly Ben Line wanted nothing as much as he wanted the meeting to end so that he could put the cassette into his private holovision tank. But it wouldn't end and he could not leave -- the topic had turned to one of his own specialties, the meteorology of Cuckoo. Long since the orbiter had dropped automatic weather stations all along its trail and they had begun to show tentative patterns for the climatology and air-mass movements of the enormous sphere. It was only a beginning. In that immense ocean of air, the seeded stations sketched out only a line, but still Ben Line had to summarize what was known. As he finished, the farlink screens lit up with an overriding message. The computer blanked out, then displayed shaped waves glowing on the screens, followed by endless strings of binary numbers, while bird chirps sounded in the speakers. "Conjecture," whispered the T'Worlie beside Ben, a vinegary scent of excitement showing that its equivalent of adrenalin was flowing. "Analysis shows message." But Nimmie's conjecture was wrong. The curved screens flashed again with the all-stations call of urgency, then lit up with the message in half a hundred scripts. "Ben Line," chimed the silvery girl in sudden comprehension, "do you understand what that means? It means we can replicate our own matter at the source of this transmission. We can send a copy of one of us! We can find out where this signal comes from by sending someone there who can report back in a language we can understand." "If he lives long enough," grunted Pertin. He understood the importance of what was being said, but in his personal scale of values nothing was quite as important as the cassette he had been clutching, all this long while, in his hand. And at last he was able to excuse himself, hurl himself through the passages of the orbiter to his private cocoon, squirm in, seal, and then slip the cassette into the vision stage. A silvery glitter of cloud sprang up before him and condensed into the face and form of Zara, his wife, looking meltingly beautiful and overpoweringly sad. She gazed at him silently for a moment, as though unsure of what to say. And then -- "Dear Ben," she said, "I don't know how to tell you this. I'm sorry to answer you this way. The truth is, I just can't face you." She paused, biting her lip. "You see," she said, "I'm not going to come to join you. I know how disappointed you will feel -- disappointed in me, because I promised. But I can't. "I'm pregnant, dear," she said. She hesitated and added: "You know that Ben and I -- I mean, you and I wanted to have a child. We were given permission before -- before you left. Well, now we're going to -- in about five months. "So you see I can't come now. It would be one thing for you and me to live on the orbiter and to know that we'll die there. Being together would make all that worthwhile. But not our baby, Ben! I just can't do that. "Of course, after the baby is born... "If you still want me we'll talk about it then. I promise you, Ben, dear, I want to be with you. All of me wants to be with all of you. There must be a way, but for now I can't see what it is." She hesitated, then said in a rush, "I'm going to stop now, Ben, because I'm going to have to cry. I do love you! Oh, God -- " And the image faded and was gone, leaving Ben Line Pertin more alone than he had ever been. V O rg rider washed his torn garments in a rain pool and spread them on a rock to dry, but the death-weed stench of the watchers was still in his nostrils. He was out of the storm area now. The rock where the stranger had been killed and the watchers had treated him with such contempt was far out of sight in the rain clouds. He was cold and his aches and pains were enormous, but he was alive and free. It was more than he had expected moments earlier. He fished bare-handed in the pool for horny brown scuttling creatures and kindled a small fire to broil them. They were much like pond-dwellers he knew from his own mountain and when they were cooked they tasted as good. He was overpoweringly weary, but he forced himself to catch more of the scuttlers and prop them over the lire to take with him. Then he wrapped himself in his wings and was immediately asleep. When he awoke the first thing he felt was the black weight of the watchman's eye against his throat. His fingers closed around it and he came close to ripping it off and throwing it in the pool. But it could not harm him while he was wearing it, he thought, and he had not forgotten the warning about what would happen to him if he took it off. Warm and dry, he filled his waterskin, caught and broiled one more meal of scuttlers, then strapped on his gear and dove out from (he hillside to catch the wind. He was more cautious than ever now, turning suddenly to search the sky behind him to see what might be following. Nothing was, neither small watcher nor ship carrying the repellent creatures who had marked him with the thing around his neck. He was not so far from the rocky, desolate upper reaches of Knife-inthe-Sky that sighting orgs would be too unlikely. But he saw nothing like an org... Until it was almost too late. The far thin scream drew his eyes aloft. The org was a pale brown fleck dropping out of that high gray haze, sliding down across the long blade of the summit. It grew as it came toward him, taking shape and color. A slim, winged fish-form of bronze and silver: the body bronze, tapering to a narrow waist behind the stubby wings; the tail and wing-tips shining silver. It was beautiful and terrible. And it was coming toward him. Org Rider came out of an instant's trance to full realization of his danger. This was not a dream. He faced a creature that could kill him with a single careless rake of claw or tooth. And he was exposed in the open air, where its speed and skill were far greater than his own. He dived, flapping desperately, staring over his shoulder. The org drew so close that he could see the shape of the individual lapped triangular scales, bronze and silver. Its powerful legs unfolded, stretching cruel black talons toward him. Org Rider closed his wings and arrowed toward a black crevice below, where two great boulders had tumbled together. Even in that moment the beauty of the org choked his throat. To tame and control that power was worth the risk of his life. But it seemed his life was already forfeit -- his fall was slower than the org's dive. His weapons were useless, the bow hanging to his harness, the spear impotent during his fall. Even the knife would only annoy the org -- it could not hope to prevail against that wide red mouth spiked with shining teeth. On impulse, without thought, he snatched the cold hard sphere of the watchman's eye from his throat. He did not even feel the bite of the thong as it broke. He flung it into the org's great mouth. Confused, the creature broke away, lost momentum, soared past and away. It went by with a roar of wind and a strange falling note in its scream. It recovered almost at once, wheeled and returned... But by then Org Rider was deep in the crevice between the boulders. F or many hundreds of breaths the org stayed near the crevice, sounding its anger and frustration, scrabbling at the rock with its claws. Its intelligence was too high to let it come in after him -- in the cramped quarters, his spear was a more deadly weapon than its claws. Yet it did not leave. Its nest had to be nearby. Org Rider knew that nothing else would keep the creature there so long. There was prey in plenty easier to find. Mere hunger did not account for its tenacity. The thought was like a sniff of dream fungus, intoxicating, dizzying, a little frightening. Where there was a nest there were eggs. Where there were eggs there was one to steal. Methodically Org Rider unstrapped his wings and lightened his pack. He did not dare to fly so close to the org's nest. He would have to move fast and carry nothing that he did not urgently need. His only way to reach the nest was to thread the maze of spaces between the boulders, where the org might not see him or would hesitate to attack. He wondered briefly what had become of the watchman's eye. Had the org swallowed it? Was it broken, so that the watchers might come angry and avenging at any time? He could not tell. Leaving everything behind except for knife, compass and a coil of rope, he breathed heavily to charge his muscles, rocked to test his footing, crouched and jumped. He was in the open for only a moment, in a long surge from shelter to shelter. The org was out of sight. He could hear its baffled screaming, but did not see it. Possibly it had not seen him. The journey to the top of the boulder pile was long and hard. Beyond it rose a naked cliff a dozen times his height. Org Rider could leap that height -- any of his people could. Yet it would test his strength and he would be exposed while leaping, off balance and vulnerable when he landed. He peered out, saw no org, and leaped without allowing himself time to be afraid. He soared upward, caught the slippery rock at the rim of the cliff and pulled himself up onto it. Before him lay a level mile of flat black rock. In the middle of it rose a rough pink cone. The org's nest. Although it was in view, no more than a half a dozen long leaps away, it was not yet in reach. A great org hovered over it, scales gleaming in the blue light of the peak. It had not seen Org Rider, but if he approached the nest discovery would be a matter of moments. He needed time to think. He spotted a narrow crevice and scuttled to it, hugging the flat rock. Concealed and secure he drowsed and thought for a long time, but in the end the solution to the problem seemed as far away as when he began. He could stay where he was, hoping that the guardian org would wander away, but the hope was foolish. A far more likely eventuality was that the other org would give up its fruitless sentry duty at the crevice between the boulders far below and come up to join its mate. With two adult orgs nearby Org Rider's problem would no longer be the stealing of an egg, but survival. Sooner or later the beasts would find him. But as he crouched and drowsed his problem was being solved for him. He did not know it at first. He heard raucous shrieks and realized suddenly that both orgs were now crying out their rage and resentment. He next became aware of a dull, distant slam, slam, slam that was unlik# any sound he had ever heard. Cautiously Org Rider poked his head out of the crevice and was just golden light. Dazzled and partly blinded, he knew at once that again one of the small watchers was nearby. Squinting to see what was happening, he saw a naked machine in the air, quartering away from him and emitting the slamming sounds and puffs of smoke. It was curiously ugly, like a stick-figure of an org or a person -- it had wings, but they did not move, were rigidly extended. The two orgs were attacking it, screaming in fierce rage, and pieces were falling from it, broken bits that scattered down across the face of the mountain. One seemed to have the shape of a man, and it was from it that the yellow flare had come. But if it were a man he had forgotten his wings and did not know how to hand-soar to guide his landing. He tumbled end over end, disappearing from sight. The machine itself slammed crazily on. Org Rider knew he would never have a better chance. He did not stop to think. He was out of the crevice and leaping for the pink cone in less than a breath. Now was when he needed wings, but he did not have them. He could only leap, guide himself with his hands, come down with his legs already under him and leap again. He could hear the distant slamslam of the machine and the screams of the orgs, but he dared not leap high enough to see what they were doing, lest the orgs see what he was doing. But the sounds were still distant -- and he was already tumbling over the rim of the nest. Built of stones plastered with org manure, it had a good, clean, dry odor, a little like the smell of parching grain. The shallow pink cup held a single egg. Even in his mad haste Org Rider took time to look at it -- and to feel his heart catch at the sight. Smooth, mottled bronze and blue, the egg seemed too large for him to clasp securely. But its surface felt warm and elastic, yielding slightly when he touched it -- it had a friendly feel. The yells of the distant parents were not friendly. Hastily Org Rider wound and knotted his rope to make a sling for the egg. Its weight was almost nothing, not much greater than his own. He slung it over his shoulder, scrambled to the rim of the nest and leaped away. The breeze had freshened. It was at his back and it made each leap half again as long as the one before. At the second leap he craned his neck around. He saw neither orgs nor the queer slamming machine. He could hear the distant angry baying, but it seemed less furious now. That was not good -- it meant the adult orgs were calming down, presumably having destroyed the machine. It would not be long before their fierce parental pugnacity drove them back to guarding the nest -- and when they found it empty their rage would become incandescent. Org Rider's life depended wholly on making sure that they would not find him. He came to the edge of the tableland and leaped straight out, not even looking back. It took all his skill to guide his descent into the best hiding place he could see. The bulk of the egg was a sail that unbalanced and tumbled him -- the one free hand he had for steering was not enough to make up for it. He hit hard when he hit. At the last moment he threw himself around to cushion the egg with his own body. He was -- for the moment at least -- safe. And the egg was his. H e had landed in a vale of boulders, half buried in banks of gray mossy stuff. A mountain stream purled and cascaded languidly down the slope. Org Rider had chosen the spot for that reason. As soon as he could regain the breath that had been smashed out of him he scratched and leaped his way to where a wide bright ribbon of water rushed from a sill of rock. What he had hoped for was there -- a dry place behind the waterfall. It would do. The water's sound would drown out any noise he made. The spray would carry his scent away. The curtain of lazily falling water would screen Org Rider and the egg from the vision of the parent orgs... With a start Org Rider realized he was already thinking of the egg as though it were a grown and mature Org -- and his. He let himself grin with wolfish joy. The hardest part was done -- his dream would yet come true. But now he had work to do. C autiously he ventured out and, one eye on the sky and both ears alert, tore armloads of moss out of the hidden sides of the boulders and carried them back to make a nest for his egg. When at last it lay safe he took time to rock back on his haunches and inspect it. It was there, real and true and truly his. He studied every inch of its blue, bronze-speckled surface. It had no crack or flaw. It had not been harmed by the abduction and, best of all, from its warmth and certain mysterious movements inside it, it showed every indication of being very close to hatching. His heart filled to bursting with joy and pride, Org Rider sat back and rested for a long moment, planning what next to do. As well as he could tell, he had come down near the spot where the cartwheeling figure from the slamming machine had fallen, but a long, long way from where he had left his weapons and supplies. He was in a sort of great natural chimney, with steep rock on all sides. He drank his fill of water from the falls and it was cold and sweet. He found nuts growing nearby and they stilled his hunger. His first step would be to try to get to his cache. He crept to the edge of the falls and looked up. As soon as he was away from the gabble of the falling water he heard the distant, agonized screams of the orgs. They had learned of their loss. The long moaning bellows sounded of rage and the promise of revenge. Org Rider saw a cluster of beetrees nearby. The creatures who hived in them were dreadful enemies when aroused and it was known that they had some chemical loathing of orgs. They would, perhaps, make the adult orgs approach only reluctantly. But what if they should smell out the egg? He could not guard against every contingency, Org Rider decided with a pang of worry and regret. Reluctantly he started out to hunt for a way to his cache and a good escape route from the giant chimney. At one point in his search the adult orgs came wheeling and shrieking overhead and he had to bury himself hastily in the undergrowth beneath a stand of firetrees. Red insects shared his hiding place and their crawling over his flesh was maddening, but he dared not leave. He lay motionless, half drowsing, for a long, long time, not even lifting his head to see what was happening when the screams of the orgs were so close that it seemed certain they had spied him. They had not -- of this he was sure only when he found himself still alive moments later. When the cries became distant he dozed again and dreamed a frightful dream in which his cherished egg hatched and turned into a black-winged watcher that stank of deathweed. He awoke trembling and found the orgs were gone. The skies were silent. He had not located his cache or a way out, but he found food of a sort, succulent stalks from a purple bush that tasted sweet and meaty, some torpid red watersnakes that were dull enough to allow themselves to be caught. He returned to his waterfall feeling cheered and expectant, looking forward to seeing his egg, touching it, listening for its heartbeat and observing the stirrings inside it. With a wary eye for danger he ducked under the lazy waterfall -- and shouted with astonishment and anger. The egg was there, luminously blue in the half-light under the falls. But a creature crouching over it -- a squat man-shape, black-haired and nearly naked -- was smashing at the egg with a red-smeared rock. The man looked up in fear and astonishment at Org Rider's yell. And then, for the first time in his life, Org Rider felt superstitious fear. The man was the stranger from the small watcher, whom Org Rider had last seen dead. VI S ome tens of thousands of lightyears away from Cuckoo, on the inner curve of one of the spiral arms of the galaxy toward which Cuckoo was hurtling, was a GOtype star of no great intrinsic interest, which had in orbit around it the planet Earth. Earth and its dominant race of humans were new among the galactic races. They were fully accepted as equal members. The streets of cities like Chicago and Peking were already accustomed to the sight of darting Sheliaks, glittering Arcturan robots and a hundred other races. Every major city had its own tachyon transmission center, through which flowed the traffic of the galaxy. All the centers were alike in that they were huge, new, towering over the structures around them and filled with the enormous mass of hardware that met the power requirements of tachyon transmission. Each wore proudly the gauzy spiral that was the emblem of the galaxy. Across the tiled floor of the great concourse of the tachyon center in old Boston a young woman named Zara Gentry walked with grace and assurance. She had been here before. She had been almost everywhere, for Zara Gentry was a famous holovision personality, known everywhere for her on-thespot reportage of the Earth's doings to the Earth's people. She had been everywhere and tried almost everything. She had, in fact, been a volunteer for tachyon transport several years before. One copy of her lived on Sun One. Another worked and lived in an orbiting station around the planet inhabited by the collective swarming creatures called Boaty-Bits, in the constellation of Bootes. Those two she knew of, for they were direct copies sent from Earth. But the tachyon duplicates could themselves have been duplicated -- and there could be a hundred Zaras in the galaxy. Or a thousand. It was strange, Zara reflected, how little she knew about those other selves. They were so much herself and yet so different -- so close to her and so impossibly far away. The whole process of tachyon transport was loaded with trauma. She well remembered the quirky fears that had beset her when she had first volunteered to be scanned, mapped, blueprinted and recreated thousands of light-years away. The experience had been unbelievably scary. She had signed up and called to cancel her signature -- had signed again and withdrawn again. At the end only her conscience had made her go through with it, because by then there had been such an investment of time and training that she could not let it be wasted. So she had walked into the tachyon transmission chamber -- And, moments later, had walked out again. And it seemed that nothing had happened at all. She had known with one part of her mind that every atom in her body had been identified and placed in its exact coordinates and that the blueprint that carried her minutest specifications had been even then racing, tachyon-borne, through the galaxy toward the semiartificial world in the Orion nebula called Sun One. The other part of her mind had been wholly occupied with wondering where her date would take her that night for dinner -- and that dichotomy had been as frightening as the process itself. It was still frightening and unsettling for her to think that somewhere someone who was exactly, identically herself was doing things she did not know about; might be terrified or joyous, angry or ill -- might even be dead. It was frightening and unsettling, but one could not go on being frightened and unsettled forever. The first two Zaras had exchanged tachyon communications for weeks and months and then, less frequently, for a year or so. They had even spoken "face to face" -- in tachyon-borne holovision communication. When she had sent the second copy of herself to the Bootian planet she had tried to keep in touch with her, too, but again communications had trailed off. And now Zara Gentry was about to expose herself to the trauma for the third time. She grinned to herself, dodging a Purchased Person who carried a hive of Boaty-Bits as she made her way to the elevators. I never learn, she thought good-humoredly. But this new prospect was exciting, she had to admit. This copy of herself was going clear out of the galaxy, to the strange object identified as Lambda One and more familiarly called Cuckoo. With less fear than anticipation Zara Gentry rose to the hundred and eighteenth floor and reported in for her check-up interview. T he man in charge of her transport was old, tanned, lean, good-looking. He had bushy white eyebrows and a great sweep of white hair broke like high surf over his forehead. He maintained dignified objectivity in what he said, but he and Zara had become friends during the past weeks. "Zara, it's nice to see you again. Well, tomorrow you make the great leap forward. How do you feel about it?" On her holovision program Zara would have answered, That's a dumb question. Look at the psych test pro file in my folder. You know how I feel better than I do. But here she said, "Well, a little scared. Otherwise fine." And she smiled. "That's natural enough," he agreed absently, leafing through her folder. Suddenly something in it seemed to attract his interest -- he stared at it thoughtfully for a long time. Then he raised his head and asked, "Have you seen the legal officer?" "Not yet." "Oh, but that's very important." He was upset. "Please don't put it off any longer, Zara. The documents must be signed. You know that the copy of you will be, to all legal intents and purposes, yourself. She has an equal right to all your property and is equally obligated with you on the fulfillment of contracts, unless you state clearly in advance which of you shall have which property and responsibilities. You must file your statement of settlement at once." "I will," she promised. "I have done this before, you know." "Yes, of course, but each time you create a copy you create the same problem." Then he relented, smiling. "To be sure," he said, "when you come right down to it, the problem is more legal than real. There isn't much chance you'll ever see your copy, is there? And a half-interest in a condominium in Buzzard's Bay isn't going to mean much to the copy of you that's on Cuckoo. But there is always the chance some question could arise, so you have to file the statement. Otherwise they won't accept you for transmission." "Don't make that too tempting," said Zara, not wholly joking. "Mmm," he said thoughtfully and made a check mark on her personality profile card. "I really do want to go," she said quickly. "Or at least, I'm going." He nodded. Hers was not an unfamiliar reaction. If the tachyon boards rejected applicants who were doubtful they would never send anyone at all. "I see you've been issued all the cassettes." "And I've listened to them," she said. "So you're about as well briefed on Cuckoo as you can get, I imagine. Do you have any questions?" She said, "Well, those briefings are more distinguished for the questions they raise than the answers they give, aren't they? I mean, nobody seems to know exactly why the object is as funny as it is. The size is all wrong for the mass -- and nobody seems to understand how come there are creatures so much like humans and Sheliaks and Boaty-Bits on it." He grinned. "If we knew the answer to questions like that we wouldn't have to send out people like you. Our lack of answers is why you're going." He hesitated, looking thoughtfully at her papers. "Although there seems to be some more specific reason for your transmission. Do you happen to know why you were requested by name?" "No," she said. "And I've wondered. The request came from Sun One, I understand. I have a copy here. I suppose she could be behind all this. But we haven't been in touch lately, so I don't know anything more." "We could send her a message if you like. You could ask her yourself." "Oh," said Zara, "actually I'm rather intrigued by the mystery. I'm not fearful about it. That other Zara can't have changed all that much in a couple, of years. If she thinks it's a good idea for me to go to Cuckoo -- then it probably is. I mean, after all, she is me." She hesitated, then added: "The only thing that does puzzle me is why she doesn't send a copy of herself." The man said with visible pleasure, "You don't know how glad I am that you asked that. I can answer it. It puzzled me, too, so I got her records. The other Zara, you'll be pleased to know, married a man named Ben Pertin. He's a copy, too, of course -- his identification is Ben Charles Pertin. And she expects to bear their first child in a couple of months. My impression is that she was anxious enough to go, but not with an unborn baby." "Ah!" said Zara, vastly relieved. "I'm glad for her. What a nice thing to hear about yourself!" "And you yourself, Mrs. Gentry? I see you're married. Are you planning a family?" "Why, very likely," she said. "But I'm not pregnant now." He nodded and closed her folder. "I think that takes care of all the loose ends," he said. "See the legal officer. Get a few more shots. Then you'll be all ready to go." "I'm ready now," said Zara Gentry. W hen she was through with the legal officer -- an episode that left her feeling she had signed a part of herself into slavery -- she took the express elevator that dropped her into the physical training rooms below ground. The splat of firearms told her the weapons class was in session. She tarried at the door, looking in at the range. The cassettes had been quite candid about the possibility of physical danger on Cuckoo. Several transportees had already experienced close calls and two were dead. Besides the known predators -- winged creatures like flying seals, armed savages, creatures like Sheliaks gone mad and others -- there were countless trillions of square miles of surface that had been only sketchily photomapped from orbit. What dangers they held no one could tell. The other thing that troubled Zara in the conscious part of her mind was that the Zara who went to Cuckoo would not be quite the Zara Gentry who filled the holovision receivers on Earth. Cuckoo's surface gravity was so preposterously slight that the first transportees had nearly destroyed themselves leaping about like jumping beans. Zara's physical attributes would therefore be slightly modified. They had promised that her appearance would not be changed, but she would be a little weaker, a little slower in reaction time. Even so, they said, she would have to watch herself; but it was thought that a little extra strength and speed might be helpful against the known and unknown dangers of Cuckoo. The class was ending. One of the men caught sight of her, grinned, waved, checked his gun with the instructor and came toward. her. "Three bull's-eyes and twelve in the first circle," he said proudly, running a hand through his tousled mop of red hair. He was no taller than Zara and barely weighed more than she did, but the compact muscles were like steel. He would need a great deal of editing, she thought, leaning forward to be kissed. "I'm all set, dear," she said. "We're due for shots in half an hour, and that's the last." "Great," her husband said, putting an arm around her. "Cuckoo, here come the Gentrys!" Frederick Pohl, of course, needs no introduction to Galaxy readers. They know him as an author and as an editor who long gave Galaxy and If some of their finest moments -- becoming in the process the only master of these arts ever to win Hugo Awards both as an author and an editor. He collaborator on The Org's Egg, which begins in this issue, is probably as well known -- the two have worked together on six novels before this. Here's Frederik: "In writing The Org's Egg and the Cuckoo series in general, Jack Williamson and I owe quite a lot to three other people, two living American scientists and an ancient Greek. I'd like to acknowledge that debt. The scientists, of course, are Jerry Feinberg of Columbia, whose notion of the "tachyon" -- the particle that obeys Einstein's concept of "c" as a limiting velocity by never going slower than the speed of light -- makes the whole thing possible, and Freeman Dyson, of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, who proposed the central notion of Cuckoo, the Dyson sphere. "The series began in the fall of #, when Jack and I were both attending a conference of the Science Fiction Research Association. Since Jack and I had already written six books together and thought it was time we did some more, and over coffee in the faculty lounge of a college where the conference was being held we matched up ideas and plans, and this series emerged. It was not just a matter of an adventure story with the technological trimmings of the Feinberg and Dyson proposals; we were trying to do something that, it seemed to us, science fiction alone of all kinds of writing can do: to show what the human condition might be under circumstances never before experienced. Human nature does change. There are things that are new under the sun -- or in, around and suns that make up our universe. In The Org's Egg Ben Pertin lives under different kinds of stresses and feels different kinds of pain from those we have all experienced, because his environment, particularly that part of it which has to do with replicating himself, imposes different challenges. We don't think that the future means an end to human suffering -- but as H. G. Wells once said, we can hope to suffer like human beings, instead of like animals. It is easy, and tempting, in writing science fiction to assume that nothing really changes, and that the man of a hundred or a thousand years from now will hurt from the same wounds we feel in # -- but if we write that way, we retreat from the real potential of science fiction, which can tell us what different wounds may be like, long before we or our children have to feel them in reality. "The Greek? Oh, yes -- that was Aristophanes, of course, whose play The Birds first mentioned the place he called Nephelococcygia, translated as "Cloud-Cuckoo Land". "The Birds isn't a new work (it was first performed around # B.C.), but we think it's still relevant!"  Two men whose minds had won the stars -- and lost all that humans lived by! I N ight after night the horrified face of Grigor Cernik animates my dreams. Nothing the psychomanipulators can do for me deters Cernik. They have implanted smoky girls naked to the ears rolling in Tahitian surf, musical patterns, pastoral scenes from my boyhood. Nothing stops Cernik. When they fade -- he is there. The Skyblue Colonel went away sadly. She may not come back. But Cernik will come again. He is there. As far as the word "haunted" has any meaning in these last years of the third millennium, I am haunted. I know how. On other matters such as "why?" I am not prepared to speculate. Feed that to your computer and squeeze some logic out of it. Naturally, the concept of haunting would make the psychomanips smile in a sad, superior way. Their version would be quote persistent hyperconscious hallucination unquote. My version of their possible version is gobbledegook, eedeepee speak -- in short, crap. For one thing, I haven't told them who is the intruder in my dreams. It wouldn't do for them to catch a hint that I haven't yet finished with Cernik. I won't let him go that easily. He still has a lot of dying to do. I still have a lot of living to live. The whole thing is relative. Matter and antimatter, writing in a mirror, the other side of the sky. Cernik. I. Who am I? You may well ask. After the first two hundred words of ravings we have a right to know who is this I who reveals himself only in terms of someone else. Who am I? Sometimes I ask myself the identical question. My name is Alan Durain. I am a hundred and ninety pounds hung on six feet two inches of skeleton. Hair brown, nose crooked. On the helmet of bone that keeps my brain from boiling over, I have cranial bumps which, some charlatan once told me, indicate exceptional powers. I talk a lot and often if I now my virtual and only audience consists of the psychomanips. Hence these sketchy, hasty babblings, rolled cylindrical and pushed into the cold-water faucet. Up, as they say, their pipe. Do you feel you know me better now? Let's get back to Cernik. I did not know him for eighteen years. I was happy. I was cross-bred and carefully pedigreed into calculations right. Coy phrases like mense perception" crept into my school reports. Grades were something to be on top of. At seventeen I did my first intensive pre-university studies. At eighteen I found myself on the soggy campus of a famous East Coast university, one of an elite class of twenty all set to roll forward into distinguished scientific careers. Only one thing was missing. The gene jugglers had left me short of stamina for the natural selection stakes. I had all the urges but very little ability. You can't have everything. The guardians told me this when I complained. I was bitter. There was nothing they could do about it. Let's get back to you know who. He, too, was one of the elite that wet summer at Norfolk. Someone must have introduced us, but he didn't make an impression the first time. The first encounter for real was startling the way that many things about Cernik often turned out. That first encounter was loud and ill-tempered. At a very late hour on my second night on the campus I was washed out of bed on a tide of sound. I didn't know it then, but the wave fetched all the way from the middle of the andante from Kalipaj's Symphony No. #. Kalipaj, an almost forgotten middle-European composer, was the darling of the avant garde that decade. Cernik was avant garde. He had orchestrated Kalipaj for electrorobot complex and paranoiac. Cernik was the paranoiac. When I picked myself up off the floor my unwashed coffee cup and saucer were still trembling. No doubt it was an illusion, but the walls of my efficiency seemed to be expanding and contracting. Kalipaj, loud, brassy and percussive filled it like a sea. I hammered on the wall, but Kalipaj swamped my puny indignation. I scrambled into a pair of slacks and rushed into the corridor. I beat on my neighbor's door, rattled the knob. It wouldn't turn. A door behind me opened and a girl with shoulder-length flax-color hair looked out. Her face, too, was twisted with pain. Her lips formed words I couldn't hear, but understood: "What the hell is it?" I shrugged helplessly. I turned back to the door behind which Kalipaj raved. I hammered on it. It stayed locked. The music (music?) sucked my blows disdainfully into its whirlpool. "For crissake stop that goddam racket!" I bawled. A clutch of electronic trumpets blasted me backward like a broadside from one of those old battleships. The girl came right out of her room. She didn't have much on except a man's long sweatshirt she obviously used as a nightgown. She put her hands up over her ears which pulled its hem inflamingly hipward. The pain of Kalipaj and the pain of trying to see too many things at once must have frenzied me. I sprang at the door. It shuddered, but held. I stood back and kicked the lock. The locks on those student pad doors were always cheap and ailing. It broke. And there he was. C ernik. He crouched on the floor like some strange projection of a mediaeval sorcerer into the present. He was slight with a disproportionately large, wedge-shaped head, the chin its sharpest point. He chose to wear monstrous exo-spectacles instead of contacts. They magnified speckled gray eyes. An ugly scar ran vertically from jawbone to collar on the left side. It looked like someone had been goaded into taking revenge, but it was just the place where some of his over-zealous glands had been mined when he was a kid. He commanded the center of an electronic nightmare that had taken over the room. Three tape decks, a control panel bristling with stops and knobs; festoons of wire linked it to amplifiers, distorters and other cunning musical boobytraps I didn't recognize. If he hadn't been facing the door I'm sure he wouldn't have known I had burst in. He looked out of the raging sea of Kalipaj in a dazed way. He pushed the spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose and grinned. It was an elfin grin. He looked like a troll. The other hand moved lazily toward a knob on the control panel. The flaxen-haired girl had followed me into the room. She knew something about the electronic music complex because she darted past me and got to the knob before Cernik. Kalipaj shrank abruptly to a rumble in the guts of the machine. It was so sudden that my own voice bawling, "... goddam bloody imbecile..." sounded loud enough to reach across the water to Newport News. Cernik twitched his spectacles again. "Welcome music lovers!" he said in his mocking, elfs voice. "Join the party." Not surprisingly we didn't. In the new silence we told him jointly and severally what we thought of him, Kalipaj, robot orchestras, his parentage, avant garde music, his academic prospects and, more philosophically, the duties members of a society owe to one another. As usual, I started out being angry and ended being spiteful. The girl was better. She was scornful and eloquent and knew how to sneak in a pithy anglo-saxon word where it sounded most telling. She had a very neat compact behind that kept revealing itself pinkly and whitely when she waved her arms inside the sweatshirt nightgown. Cernik didn't say much and none of it was an apology. He was unruffled, serene. Later I came to know that his outrages were not malicious or selfish. They were all designed by him exclusively to provoke a reaction. He never stopped working at being the still center in macrocosmic confusion. The bridge between the first eighteen happy years of my life and the , age of Cernik was only ten minutes long measured from bed to bed. Mine was still warm when I got back to it. Kalipaj didn't return. I heard Cernik moving around for a long time as I lay fuming and fretting. But the Pandora music stayed locked in its boxes. I finally got to sleep thinking about the girl and her sweatshirt. I wondered if her bed was warm and restless too. Three nights later I was in it, starting and ending one of the briefest love affairs on record. "I told you it wouldn't work." I said bitterly. "I thought you meant it like the others," she said. "Ergo, let's bed together. Without commitment until the next time. But you meant it. You really did." "Yes." I turned from her. She held my hand. She was a warm, sympathetic lovely girl. I slept in her hand dreaming of the Strickes zones of the brain where my future lay. The girl's name was Delicias. Sometimes I wonder at parents. Sometimes I think they have a cruel streak. Her surname was Disch. So -- Delicias Disch! She seemed to get a kick out of it then. She was a delicious dish at that. But I thought it was a cynical bit of name-giving. Maybe she'd acquired her warm, loving nature learning to live with it. Before I woke, Cernik came into my head. I had a queer feeling like I'd been drinking and was tight. Cernik seemed to be studying the pin-prick electronic messages speeding along in my brain. That's interesting, he thought. His lips didn't move. Dedicated celibate... Flake off Cernik. I told him. He had no business gatecrashing. I woke up angrily. Delicias nestled against me. She murmured into my ear and we tried it again. It didn't work. I could hear Cernik laughing like a maniac somewhere. I think it was in my head. "Okay," said Delicias. "Okay, forget it." Then: "You might have told me." It was the only time I recall hearing her reproach anyone. T he study course was intensive. We were an elite class, each member destined to be a specialist in his field. The competition was uncompromising, but I still needed to have the best grades. Friendships were formed among the other nineteen, but I never knew any of my classmates well except Delicias Disch and Cernik. Cernik quickly developed a repumischievous crank. Everyone respected him as a scientist and loathed him as a classmate. He had a cool that could not be unfrozen and a hide like an elephant, one scorn or ridicule could not penetrate. Except once. The story goes that Cernik bedded with Delicias for a short time that first fall. No one else would have borne him. But Delicias was sympathetic and warm and loving and she needed love like she needed to breathe and she believed in experiment because she was a scientist. There was a story about the end of that affair that made the rounds, but I won't bother to repeat it here. At any rate, Cernik dropped Delicias shortly and after that she had a long and fulfilled affair with a six-foot-three senior from the engineering class, called Sompting. Almost from the night of Kalipaj Cernik decided he was my friend. My fury then at the selfish misuse of the robot music and my open hostility when I heard the story about him and Delicias Disch made no difference. He persisted in sitting with me at lectures. He provided gratuitous advice on how to present my work to please individual tutors. He jabbed and prodded away at me verbally, discovering my leisure interests and offering to talk about them endlessly. He dragged me into the Music Society, the Inventor Circle, the Philosophy Table. He even presumed to discuss the merits of scientific and quack remedies for my girl problems until I bordered on violence. Whatever we did together, I never lost the feeling that his troll's head and mocking eyes were sharpened to laser penetration, tuned to a keener wavelength than my own. I sensed him watching the moment after next, observing the neurons stampeding into thoughts along the surface of the brain. "What do you believe about telepathy?" he asked one day. It hit me rather like his intrusion on my one night with Delicias. We were downtown on a cold November Saturday afternoon in an out-of-bounds bar drinking rum and coke. I took a slug of the cuba libre and tried to look like I was thinking while I drank it. "I think it might happen. In rare cases." Unfortunately my answer didn't cause him the embarrassed annoyance I remembered from that night. He said, "You know what I think?" He pushed his exo-spectacles up the bridge of his sharp nose -- a characteristic gesture. I didn't answer, but none of Cernik's pseudo-polite overture questions ever needed an answer. He launched into telling me what he believed. Reduced to essentials and avoiding the Cernik gloss of reason that could have confounded computers and proved black white, it ran something like this. He believed that primitive man and his forebears had possessed a well-developed sense, half-intuitive, half-telepathic. This had become blunted and shuffled into an evolutionary cul-de-sac by the development of speech communication and the individual's self-awareness. He instanced observations made in the early twentieth century regarding certain primitive peoples of Africa and the South American jungles. He recalled the unexplained transmission of news by them at a speed that outstripped the most up-to-date means of communication then known; he said it became known as the bush telegraph. He spoke of the power of the witch doctors and juju, which could stretch out to claim victims at many hundreds of miles distance. "It's a dormant power, Alan," he said, staring at me out of his troll's eyes. "If we could reawaken it, it would be of incalculable value. In space exploration for example. Faster than the photophone, more reliable than electronic communication." "Very convincing, Grigor. How do you propose to develop it?" "It won't be easy," he said. "One needs a carefully controlled series of experiments. One needs, for example, to find two individuals in whom the telepathic potential is very close to the surface. Familiars. Sympathetic brains." "I suppose you already have two such subjects in mind?" The question was mocking, but he stared at me hard. "Yes, Alan. You and I. Let's experiment." "No thanks, Grigor." "Oh, come on, Alan. Let's do something instead of just listening to low-IQ lecturers telling us things we already know. Let's try it. You can prove me wrong." H e knew exactly the right hook to throw at me. When I didn't answer immediately he knew I'd swallowed it. "Check your watch," he said. "I'm going to take a walk to the phone booth on the next block. In exactly three minutes just clear your mind of everything. Concentrate on the green light over there and when the phone rings it'll be for you. Tell me what message you received. See if I come through." He left the cafe. I watched the second hand measure a minute on my watch. I stared at the green light, trying to open my mind. Abruptly I felt as if a cold band were circling my head on the inside. With a sense of almost physical shock I realized Cernik had made contact. There was no face, no voice, just an uncanny presence. Like words engraved on magnetic tape. Evaluate and comment on Harrington-J eans ' contact microlaser brain surgery as it bears on personality change. Out. My God! Cernik didn't go for anything easy the first time. A couple of minutes later the phone call light flashed. The bartender called me over. It was for me. I darkened the booth. Cernik's excited face filled the screen. "You see?" he asked. "You see, Alan? Come on -- what did you get?" "Dedicated celibate," I lied. "You're five weeks, two days and twenty hours out," said Cernik sourly. "Come on -- stop fooling around, Durain. I know you got it. Hell! I saw you get it. The damned language isn't adequate -- I mean I experienced it with you. Come on, read it back." He rarely got that emotional. I grinned. "Okay, Grigor. Stop shedding your skin. Quote, Evaluate and comment on HarringtonJeans' -- " "Great. Excellent." He couldn't wait for me to finish. "You know what it is? It's the prime question in next week's prelims. I've handed it to you. Research it all you want." "For crissake, Grigor. I don't need anyone to help me crib out my prelims." "You're missing the point, Alan. Do you realize what we just did?" "You patronizing jerk! You could have sent me something less embarrassing." Cernik stared at me in dazed fury. "You dumb bastard," he squawked. "Forget it." I told him. "It was a cute party for a dull Saturday afternoon. That's the last time I play circuses with you, Grigor." But it wasn't. That sonofabitch didn't know how to stop once he'd gotten his antennae tuned to an idea. The Experiment (it had to have a capital E) became an obsession. The prelims came and went. I had opened the Analytical Paper with nervous disbelief. There it was. How else could it be with that goddam sorcerer's apprentice stuck firmly to my life? Evaluate and comment on HarringtonJeans' contact micro-laser brain surgery as it bears on personality change. Cernik beavered away at me, sometimes cajoling, sometimes reasoning, sometimes raging. He had discovered that we were the only two constructs in the class. All the others had conventional parentage. He claimed this as a bond. He argued that maybe our exceptional powers sprang from it. He raved about extending the Experiment to a control group chosen entirely from constructs. II C ertainly there was a kind of attunement of an exceptional sort. From the first crude experiment in the cafe we moved on through that fall to more and more sophistication and refinement. We found by the use of a kind of key thought of call sign we could call up one another. We could do this even at considerable distances. Even when one of us was sleeping. Cernik became so absorbed with it that his studies began to suffer. He used the university data-processing and memory storage banks to produce vast patterns of probability and review hundreds of case histories where any hint of esp was recorded. His music machine was abandoned in favor of computers and data storage. One morning in the small hours, surrounded by calculations the point of which I had lost track of hours before, he stared at me jubilantly. "Alan. I'm going to write a paper and present it. I think we're on the threshhold of something big. I think either one of us could exchange with the other. Like going in and out of a house. We've reduced the body to a sophisticated container. One of us could die, but both of us could go on living." "Go to bed, Grigor." I said. "You publish that damn paper and both of us will be on a one-way ticket to rating zero. You know about unauthorized experiments. Forget it." "We can't let it go! We can't!" "We can for tonight," I said. "Put the tape and the computer away." I don't think he was listening. "We have to go on with it, Alan." But I knew when I left him, still reluctant to pack up, that it had to be over. We were at the end of the line on the Experiment. I began thinking about how to break it the same night. I had to be careful in case Grigor turned up in my mind and read me. I shielded it from him, working away at it day after day. I didn't get anywhere. All the time I didn't get anywhere I had to humor him. I played along, cooperating in what to him was now the low-key side of his obsession. I avoided the big one, but I knew he was always thrusting, always working toward it. Then the solution dropped on my head like Newton's apple. It was lucky. It came from an unexpected source.  It was the New Year's Ball. People went home for Christmas; came back for the New Year's Ball. It was a big campus occasion. Delicias Disch was there. She was still having her long and satisfying affair with the engineering student, but around two a.m. I found myself upright in her arms. It was some kind of switch-partner's dance. It was gay and noisy and intoxicated. "Hi," she murmured in the seething gloom. "How are you making out with the Crazy Elf?" "I'll survive. Me and my sanity both." "And the experiment?" "What experiment?" I asked. Delicias tilted her chin and stared mockingly into my face. "I often wonder what's going on in his wedge-head. Don't you?" I didn't answer. Delicias asked, "Don't you get tired of trespassers?" "They could be tedious. What do you know about trespassers?" "Enough." She steered me away from a partner switch, keeping to the fringe of the dancers. Suddenly I got that tight headband feeling. My mind went blank then lit up blindingly. "What did you say?" I croaked. "Nothing." Her pretty face mocked me again. "But you heard?" "For crissake!" I groaned. "Not you, too -- " "Uh-huh," she said. "Me, too. Ever since I was in bobbysox." "Mind you don't let Grigor find out." "I'll mind," she said. "You ought to mind, too. He's a fanatic and his ideas are dangerous. This kind of experiment needs close control." Someone in a carnival mask blew a paper streamer into our faces. Delicias pushed it aside impatiently. "Take my advice. Get out now." "Thanks for the advice. The principle's sound. How about the method?" "There's a way," she said. "Worked for me. Might work for you." "You'd better tell me fast. This dance is damn' nearly through." "It's crude but fairly effective." "Go ahead. Tell me." "You want me to tele -- " "Like hell. I've had enough of that. You stay in your skin. I'll stay in mine. Talk." So Delicias told me. It was a while -- maybe four or five days -- before I found an opportunity to try her idea. I t was the winter vacation. Most of the students had gone home again after the New Year's Ball or were on holiday trips. Cernik and I didn't have real homes -- just guardians for parents. Often we stayed around the campus with the other constructs or plain dedicates using the facilities. Cernik had gotten wary of pushing me too hard. He still worked away at his obsession. I had the feeling he was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to push me over the brink into the big one. I kept on shielding from him, even more careful now that I had a break-away to try. I was working in the microfiche library one late afternoon when the librarian came down and said there was a call for me. I took it on her phone. The caller was Cernik. "Alan," he said. "I'm ready to move into a new area. How are you fixed?" "I'm busy," I said, feeling my heart rate rise. I kept the visual button on cutout. "Why in hell are you using the phone anyway? I'll be down in my pad in an hour. Look in." "I'm up at Calella. I've been up here two days." Calella was a mountain camp belonging to the university. The place held full research facilities and computer terminals linked to the main complex at the university. It was usually overburdened with bookings for special projects, but probably not during holidays. A student was only supposed to go up there with a professor. I wondered how Cernik had made it. "What are you doing up there, learning to ski?" "I'm ready to move into a new phase. I told you." "Grigor, I told j;ow. I won't go on that exchange try. It's strictly no-go, negative, bust." "It isn't that. We're not quite ready for that, Alan. Help me with this one. I'm sure I'm ready to go." "What is it?" "Are you all right?" he asked. "You sound peculiar. Cut in the screen." I was having to keep my hand shielding the microphone. My heart was pounding and I was scared it would put up my respiration rate and give me away. "I'm okay," I lied. "I just don't want a long conversation. I'm in the middle of research. Are you going to tell me what your new phase is? If not, I'm off back to the microfiche." "Visuals," he said. "Quite simply. Visuals. I want to see if you can see out of my eyes. I can see out of yours." I took a deep breath, tried to make the exhation sound like the sigh of someone whose primary aim is to get back to more absorbing work. "What do you say?" insisted the troll in the snowy woods, seventeen miles away. "Okay," I said. "Marvelous! I took a chance coming up here. I know you haven't seen this place -- or have you?" "No." "So anything you see will be category one proof." "Right," I said. "Count on me." "What time will I teletrans?" I took another deep slug of air. I needed it. "Oh, think me around twentyone hundred." "Fine. Be with you, Alan." "So long," I said. The line blanked. I went back to the microfiche, but gave up working after ten chaotic minutes. I was nervous. I thought about calling Delicias for a recap but abandoned it. I was on my own with my mad friend now. I packed my notes and recordings, went out to the town and bought a bottle of bourbon in a liquor store and came back and waited. I had an hour and forty minutes before Cernik called. Considering there was that amount of time, I didn't drink much of the bourbon. Cernik called right on the hour. I had grown used to the sensation of a tight band around the inside of my skull. This evening the whisky was creating a new one outside. I shut my eyes in case Cernik had any smart ideas about looking out of them right away and saw the slight haze around the furniture and the bourbon bottle. Alan. Grigor. You made it right on time. The thought poured back and forth much faster than speech, faster than you read these words. Alan, let's settle down. Let's do a softwave routine. Cernik's softwave routine was any one from a series of prearranged formulae. He chose. Sixoh, I told him. Good. He started another one. He was in the middle of it when I heard a shout of laughter. It was mine. Grig -- you mixed it. You transmitted -- and I gave him a salacious version of R # . The hell I did! Try again. What's wrong with you? Nothing's wrong with me. Calm down! Calm down! Here we go. I hit him hard with this one. I put the block in the circuit as soon as he got started. I turned the preset message inside out. I made the words fall apart into letters and dance obscurely. I bounced them back into his head and made them reel around taking off their clothes, shouting drunkenly. Alan -- for crissake! Cernik's control was iron. He kicked the mischief and his gnome face came boring into the surface of my brain. He was angry, baffled. My God! There's something in the circuit. Are you okay, Alan? I'm fine, I said. I giggled and with my eyes still shut clutched the bourbon and poured a hot swig of laughter down my throat. I'm fine, man. You're not, damn it! Something' s wrong or someone else is plugged in. Let's break. Okay, I said. But I wouldn't let him go. I hung on to him. Thoughts threw up on the lawns of his mind. Words were thick and slow. I felt him cursing, tearing himself free. I let a couple of goat thoughts rut rudely on the broad prairies of Cernik's Experiment. I had them foul up his perception with their idiot pleasure. You're off balance, Grigor, I hurled him. You're falling! You're falling over. He broke suddenly and smoothly and I was left sitting on the floor, feeling sober and ashamed and wondering what the hell would happen now. After a couple of minutes I pulled myself together. I hid the bourbon, washed the glass, aerosoled the room, sneaked down to the showers and sobered up under a long drench of cold water. Cernik had only the oldest kind of skimmer, but he covered the seventeen miles from Calella in around twenty-five minutes. To say he came storming into my pad would have misrepresented him. Can you imagine a cold, utterly silent whirlwind with exo-spectacles and a wedge-shaped head? "Something was wrong," he accused. His eyes behind the lenses held an insect's unblinking stare. "It was at this end. I felt it." I noticed a bruise developing on his forehead. I was lying flat on my bed. I could still feel the indigestible tide of bourbon lurking in back of my Ill throat but I had it licked. "Sure something went wrong," I agreed. "You've been working too hard, G rigor. The storage systems have gotten overheated. The output valves scrambled and you teletransed me absurdities. You ought to give it a rest." I don't think he even heard. He squeaked, "You've ruined a vital experiment, Durain! You've put us back a month!" I shrugged. "Knock it off, Grig. Go get some sleep. Two days solitary up at Calella have made you flip." "Listen," he hissed (I could hear that first night of Kalipaj ranting away somewhere behind the venom in his throat). "Listen, Alan. We've got to go on. We need to do visuals. Next chance we get. I'll find some other place..." He went on like this for about half an hour, restoring those rolling plains of consciousness my Deliciasinspired break-away had polluted with cunning and split with earthquake. It was all wind in the grass. Next day he was notified that he would be called before a disciplinary tribunal for breaking the rule governing utilization of the Calella facility. By the fifteenth of January the room next to mine was occupied by a bowlegged Mexican girl who was a student of the nervous system. Cernik was kicked out for indiscipline. They marked him down a social bracket and out of my life. C ernik wasn't an easy man to forget. But life and work rolled on and after a while days piled up on top of his memory like a cairn of stones. Every time I thought about him or awoke recalling his scouting the fringe of a dream, I wondered if he was trying to break back. He never came. For several weeks after he left university I daily expected him to try. He didn't. He was probably embittered by the Calella experience. Maybe he thought I had been the one who told the university authorities about his breaking security. The cairn of days stayed silent. The passionate elf-ghost had abandoned it. The elite class dissolved and went on to individual achievements. I transferred successfully to the Midwest Commemorative Research Center for two years to study the bio-chemistry of the brain. I had a generous professor named Phil Strickes. At the end of the two years he took me with him onto a small research team at Ohio Tech to explore cause and effect of activity in a silent area of the frontal lobes. Later a certain famous argument succeeded in identifying it for posterity as Strickes' Zone. I was still at Ohio when the activities of a team of astronauts began to capture the news. They were backed by a vast program of international cooperation and encouraged by the development of a variation of Telemaun's Move. Telemaun's Move had promised for a long time to exploit and convert to fact the fanciful but impractical theories of spacewarp. After secret trials they warped an unmanned probe to Aldebaran. They recovered it, too. The way began to open for manned missions within the suns and planets of the galaxy. Between the preceding sensation and the current the astronauts held prime spots in all newscasts. Soon their faces became familiar in all our homes as they emerged in mannikin reality from the tri-di screens. One of them was already familiar to me. Older certainly, rid of the monstrous exo-spectacles in favor of contacts, his head even more disproportionate to his shrunken frame, the neck wounds concealed by the smart high collars of the spaceteam uniform. It was Cernik, grown, if possible, more restless, enthusiastic, piercingly earnest than he had been as a freshman. After his banishment from the university he had volunteered for space frontier work and his wedge-shaped head and shrill eyes had levered and burned his way to deputy command of this experimental corps. I was painfully conscious of him during the next months. The exploits of the Target Team (this was the popular name for them) were often the leading news. They created the same kind of public interest as the earliest space voyagers to the moon and Mars had done in the twentieth century. Cernik was often identifiable in spite of various disguises in deep space outfits, warping here, rocket driven there, smiling into the inquisitive cameras on fleet recovery vessels, as purposeful and relentless as ever. Another year and more went by with Cernik lurking on the borders of my life. From time to time the wedge-headed troll would jog into my consciousness -- never deliberately as he had used to do, but on a new wave of public interest. I felt well insulated from him. My own work on brain chemistry was absorbing and I had my own kind of success and reward. Less spectacular than Cernik's, but tangible enough. Now and then I had a perverse desire to think an old call signal and see whether the magic would turn in its six-year grave. Prudence always saved me from that final indiscretion. The circuits stayed shut. The Experiment had been a freshman's game, not for revival. T hen on a crackling spring morning when the world outside the laboratory window looked innocent enough to be trusted, Strickes called me from my work. Strickes never called anyone from his work except in an emergency and I hurried along to the teaching unit where I knew he would be. From there, discouragingly, the world looked less innocent. Strickes' office, adjoining the teaching unit, was cramped and looked out on a sunless corner of the lawn and the crematorium. A colorless, ghostlike shimmer of smoke rose from the stack above it, shadowing the air. I watched it as Strickes said, "Alan, only heaven knows what reason I have been asked to release you immediately to the Heights. Special duties. You are to travel immediately. There's a warrant waiting for you to collect it at Administration. You go down to Houston on the stratorocket. Show the warrant. Report to Major Sompting." "But, Phil -- I -- why?" "I don't know why. I've just repeated to you everything I know and the orders I received. I don't question the Heights. Neither do you." "I don't know anything about space," I said weakly, but while Strickes had been talking something had jolted in my memory -- something like insomnia that twisted and wouldn't lie still. "Don't they think my work here is valuable?" Strickes turned away and became absorbed with the papers on his desk. I knew there was nothing there of great importance. Strickes would have been summoned from a lecture to receive the request to relieve me of my duties here. There was nothing he needed at his desk. He said, "Why don't you just go without argument, Alan? It won't make any difference in the end. I hope we'll see you again soon." I went to Houston. It had kept its supremacy as an administration center since the beginning of space travel. People in the business called it The Hole in the Sky. For me it was a hole in the head. I felt the omniscient presence of Cernik the astro-gnome. Everyone was expecting me -- men, machines, everyone. Major Sompting's office was underground on the southwest corner of the complex. When the elevator stopped the lights said Flight Planning. I didn't believe it. It was crawling with security, human and mechanical. I didn't believe what happened when I fed my ID fiche to the computer and it let me into Major Sompting's office. Major Sompting was Delicias Disch. It was like walking quickly backward across your life. Delicias grinned. Her flax-colored hair was shorter to keep it off the major's tabs on her collar, but she was still the same sympathetic, warm and loving person. Then I understood why my memory had jolted whep Strickes told me about the summons. Sompting was the name of the engineering student Delicias had tied up with at the university. They must have married afterward. "Hello, Alan." Her hand was as warm as ever. "Wonderful to have you with us. It's been a long time." "For heaven's sake, Delicias! When is anyone going to tell me what this is about? Are you going to tell me? Have me with you. Who's you?" "Us now includes you." Then she told me. She had always been good at briefing. We didn't waste many words. T arget had run into difficulties that didn't get the publicity accorded to their more spectacular exploits. There were communication problems. Serious ones. Evidently photophone tracks got bent under the Telemaun Move and ordinary radio beams took months to relay a signal to the galaxy and achieve a response. "Somebody had a bright idea," said Delicias. Warmly and kindly she smiled. Her trim bottom showed in the tight skyblue uniform pants as she paced the office. "ProCommander Cernik. You remember Cernik?" It was just a kind way of letting his name into the conversation without provoking panic. Remember Cernik? Who was going to forget him? "Who could forget him!" I echoed aloud. "Good. He sent a recommendation to Heights that Space A and A should set up an investigating unit to explore the possibility of telepathic communication to supercede mechanical systems." "No," I said. Maybe I even got up out of my chair. I don't remember clearly. Maybe Delicias pushed me back gently. Yes. I remember her perfume -- a neat, unfussy perfume like wet, cut grass. "No." I repeated. "No." "Listen, Alan. Just listen, won't I watched her walk away from me, toward me, away from me, toward me -- skyblue bottom, everkind face, skyblue bottom, everlovely face. She talked. "I don't know whether you remember that I moved over to psychopathology when I left Norfolk. Then I got into hypnosis and psychomanipulation. Gerry -- my husband, Gerry Sompting -- was drafted into the engineering corps on Target when Target was still known by a computer code number in Space A and A and nobody knew whether it would go or where. "When Cernik got his idea Gerry and I talked it over and I put up some thoughts of my own to my professor. To keep it brief, we had some further conferences with brasshats and think-tank bureaucrats at Heights. They asked me to formulate a research program on Cernik's teletrans idea. They gave me this pretty uniform and a platoon of go-go men, women and machines. "I need about six subjects who have proven ability in the technique. I thought of you at once. The six are to match our six front astronauts in Target. So here you are." "I won't do it, Delicias." I told her. "Sorry to give you the trouble of bringing me here, but I want to get on with my own research. I finished with that old party game five years ago. I won't have that crazy gnome stitched to my mind and I don't want any link with his. You've got a nonvolunteer." "It's not as easy as that, Alan. Heights are sold on this now. They're throwing an avalanche of resources behind it. The guardians have given the nod. Cernik is big medicine. He put up your name. Mine, too. I'm sorry. You're drafted. It'll be easy. Everything will be under strict control." It was easy -- easy for them. Everything was under strict control. Including me. They didn't let me leave Houston. The avalanche of resources rumbled down. Everything toothbrush to female companionship materialized out of the unlimited bank accounts of Heights. I was continuing that rearward march over my life. Once again I found myself part of an elite, cosseted, coaxed, urged to greater endeavors. We were four men two women, each of us with some extraordinary sense less blunt than in ed to tune it to communication across uncountable distances. We worked. The psychomanips worked on us. On the route toward ultimate sophistication I recrossed the territory of my student days. I developed concentration, thought codes, felt the tightening of the invisible band around my forehead, learned not to reject the alien presence in my mind, the intrusion of others into the last human refuge. I didn't look forward to the inevitable encounter with Cernik. When it happened it was quickly into sinister low key. I didn't expect him to be surprised. For one thing, I knew he had suggested my name. So he would expect to see me. I anticipated , some carefully planned argument to swamp with enthusiasm any reluctance I might still feel, but he had changed. He was brisk and the mental energy still crackled away, but it was channeled now; concentrated like a laser beam. "Glad to have you with us, Du M rain. Everyone in Target was glad to have everyone else with them. It was like a password. Every time I sat down at the teaching machine I expected the headset to tighten its embrace and the false mechanical voice to tell me: Glad to have you with us. We talked about the project. Cernik paced up and down. Everybody on Target paced up and down. Cernik said, "I don't know how far Sompting has developed the thinking, but it seems to me extremely important that we proceed toward not only communication, but control. As Target develops and we move into a full exploratory field we shall be sure to encounter situations where restraint and control exercised from home may be needed to retrieve situations of grave risk." "That is reducing the distant individual to the level of a machine," I said. "In which case there is little point in flying manned missions." "Not so, Durain. The first essential is communication. Mind can't communicate with a machine -- but only with another mind. Control might well be the only lifeline if local conditions or emergencies place the distant individual and his crew and maybe -- ultimately -- his passengers and cargo at hazard." "And what if the reverse happens, Grigor? Suppose the local risk, emergency or hazard is fed back from outlet to control?" He stopped pacing and stared at me. Although he had discarded the old-fashioned spectacles he hadn't yet disciplined his reactions to escape the nervous push toward the bridge of his nose. "I hope you aren't going to let your idealistic absolutism betray this experiment, too. What you suggest is possible but unlikely. If the distant mind is thrown into a state of confusion it will hardly be able to reverse the teletrans control -- " "What do you mean 'betray'?" I said in a voice that was slightly weaker than I would have liked. "I mean Norfolk," said Cernik coolly. "Target might have been five years ahead right now if you hadn't brought everything down at Norfolk." "You can blame yourself for that. The Experiment stopped because you got caught using Calella." It was a half-truth, but valid. "In any case, you can't claim that about Target since you couldn't have been contemplating it then and nobody knew about the communication problems it would throw out." "You wanted to bust it and you busted it," said Grigor informatively. "I don't know how. I just hope you don't have any similar desertion in mind here. It could end in disaster." "I wouldn't be here if I had any doubts," I lied. Cernik's smile was intended to defrost the ice on his face, but it merely served to underline its presence. "Okay, Durain. That's the past anyway. We're not going to quarrel about it. Let's think about what progress we made and what we're going to do now." We thought about that and discussed it. We talked about the old days, too, now that we had shoved the collapsing skeletons uneasily back into their cupboards. In spite of the new entente, there remained this low-key feeling. "Betrayal" was the word he had used. It was an emotive word. I began to get the feeling that Cernik probably hadn't forgiven me for Norfolk and certainly hadn't finished punishing me for it. T he research went on at full speed, but always controlled, always carefully monitored. We studied, we trained, we concentrated. Our diets were watched. Machines produced careful programs for our mental activities, our physical fitness, our love lives. (They didn't have much bother with mine). We sat at teaching machines and in front of lecture screens. We passed tests. We paced up and down. We were all glad to be with one another. After about six months, Delicias Sompting pressed the go switch on the first trial. Whether for reasons of diplomacy or because the machine so ordained neither Cernik nor I participated direclty. Transmitter (base) and receiver (distant) were respectively at Houston and in one of the Space A and A Earth orbiters. Messages passed. They were simple messages, but the relay was exact. The President sent congratulations. Major Delicias Sompting was promoted Pro-Colonel. From simple teletrans Target moved to readback of flight data and ground control instructions. Now everyone was in it. They spread the distance first to the moon, then to Mars, then to an elliptical round trip out of Solar and back. It all worked. Transmission was instant. The Mars trial met fierce electrical storms and the made a difference. Teletrans had ceased to be research. It was now a development program. All the control subjects were matched with a ship commander. I was matched with Cernik. Who else? All the things we did were easy because we'd done them before and now everything was sharper. Delicias' team, men, women and machines, had sharpened the fine telepathic sense in me and made me an instrument. Sometimes the tuning was so fine I felt the feather-lightness of Cernik 's flight helmet and sensed the winking lights on the inflight computer console. Cernik wanted to bypass the first minor tests when it was our turn. The explorer end of Target already had a mission planned to Sector Five of the galaxy and Cernik was anxious to go ahead with it and skip the elementary trials. Control said no. They say that the irate little elf almost materialized out of the tri-di arena in his rage. Cernik was an important man in Target. He knew the vice-administrator on Mars. He could get through to the group controller at Space Aand A. But it didn't make any difference. We had to observe the program. And we did. He won one concession. We did the orbiter test and a near-space test in one day. They and the ones that followed were a complete success. The machine said we were fine -- nothing to worry about. Cernik came through on the tri-di after the moon test. His wedge-shaped head and keen eyes radiated satisfaction. "We got a nine alpha on that, Alan. Nine al"I feel exhausted," I said. Nine alpha was a maximum rating. You couldn't get better. "We went too long." "The hell we went too long," squeaked Cernik. "Listen, you and I are going to be the first to operate on a real Target mission. Don't say you're going to flake out on me now as you did at Calella." "Don't worry, Grigor. I'll see you out and back safely." His intellectual bullying hadn't been able to resist slipping in the reproach about Calella. I tried to transmit to him a quick twinge of the neuralgia that was skipping between my right optic nerve and the center of my head, but he had shut down. "Keep in training," he said dryly. "The machine says we're the best. No problems." IV S omeone the machine did have a problem with was me. It couldn't understand why I didn't have a lovelife. It kept racking its circular brains for a solution. I was embarrassed because I guessed Delicias and some of her lieutenants were seeing the reports. "Why don't you punch me out of that section of the program," I appealed to her one day. "Please?" "Sorry, I can't do it. You'd figure every day on an exception report. The director doesn't like exception reports." So our tireless electronic slave went on scouring Earth and the colonized parts of Solar on my behalf, looking for a mate. What relevance had this, you ask impatiently, to Target and Cernik? Why in hell go paddling up this backwater? Be of good cheer. Everything was relevant in that most relevant of all possible worlds at Houston. Delicias called me out of a rest period one afternoon. "Come on up to the residence," she said. "There's someone I want you to meet." I went up under mild protest. Rest periods were short and infrequent on the Target Project. Delicias was sharing her comfortable lounge with a girl of about nineteen or twenty. "Meet Klara," she invited. "She's joining the psychomanip team. Klara's been working at the Martian unit." Klara gave me a limp hand. She was plain and flat-chested and looked undernourished. She had messy lip rouge and atrocious eyebrows and her smile was lopsided, but I sensed she had a powerful lot of brain linked to the inside of her apple-green eyes. I was a bit mystified about why I had the privilege of a private introduction to someone who was clearly going to be a junior member of some Target ancillary squad. If I'd been brighter I would have guessed. "Klara's going to take on your intensive tp-sense buildup attunement pre-expedition," Delicias told me in computer jargon. "You'll be seeing a lot of one another in the next couple of weeks." "Fine," I said to be polite. "Glad to have you -- glad to have you around, Klara." She didn't say anything. She just grinned her nutty grin and stared at me out of those eyes. I had a queer feeling in my belly. Like I was already asleep and safe in someone's hand. That was the start of it. I still don't really know whether Klara had any real psychomanip expertise or whether they'd given her a crash course as an excuse, but within a couple of days we were making the machine happy. Those eyes had plumbed whatever constructional fault the gene architects had committed in me and set about rectifying it. I had a lot of time to make up and I went at it with a determination that matched Cernik's student fervor. Klara demonstrated she was no slouch, too. She worked at our joint private project with vigor and invention. We made love here, there and any place that was reasonably private round Space A and A. Our nights were wild and wakeful. In our days there were but two things to think about and the other one was the coming Target expedition. Somewhat wearily, I suspect, the computer began to file me on exception. In quite a different way from the expected. The director didn't like exception reports. A tiny hint of disaster scuttled about in all the positive sunshine. But everyone was too busy to notice until it got through to Cernik. We were doing a readout when it happened. A readout was about as near to Cernik's old "visuals" mania as the Teletrans Communication project could get. It was an instant scan of the instrumental data on the main flight console. Eyeball to eyeball -- space to Earth. It was a pointless exercise while the spacecraft was within metering distance of Earth-control computers. It gained significance at warp entry and beyond where conventional metering got snarled in the new communication problems. What happened was, I fell asleep. It could only have been an instant. I was aware of what had happened as soon as I became conscious again, but Cernik was howling down the photophone immediately. "Control! Control! We blanked. What the hell happened? Alan? What the bloody hell? You cut out on me." "Hold it. Hold it, Pro-Commander," Control soothed him. "Hey, Alan, we monitored a two-second blank on the readout. Did you read?" "Sorry, Control," I mumbled. "I lost alert. I missed concentration." "Are you okay, Alan? Do you need a break?" "No. I'm fine." Goddam! We'd done the thing five times and Cernik was only just next door in lunar orbit. "No, I'm fine. Let's roll again." Control set it up again. Over the headset I heard Klara's milky voice tell me. "Compose, Alan. Okay?" "Okay." I composed. Cernik had stopped swearing audibly. He glared around in my mind instead. You bumf You aren't going to flunk on me again, he thought. I played disdainful. I thought him the start symbol. Ready to read. I daren't close my eyes. We still stayed Nine Alpha. I was very careful after that. The machine looked at the incident and passed it as the point zero one error margin allowable. Cernik didn't pass it. I sensed him brooding over it, notwithstanding his heavy program on the moon for the Sector Five mission. I managed to keep my incredible new lovelife rolling and my record clean. The machine was happy. about three weeks to lift-off Klara got sick. Getting sick on a project at Space A and A wasn't actually a crime, but all the reactions to it suggested that it might be. All she had was a mild throat infection, but they hauled her off into total quarantine, pumped her full of antibiotics and started a machine trace of how and where she might have picked up the bug. The trace was so ruthless that it would have made the Inquisition seem like a kindergarten party. I don't remember whether they got anywhere with it. The direct result of the mishap was that I got a Chinese psychomanip as a stand-in for Klara. He had a beard and a limp. My lovelife dove from Nine Alpha to Omega Minus and, as the days wore by with Klara sealed in her glass aquarium like a captive passionfish and me trying to cheer her up through the glass in my brief rest periods, I started to develop a twitch. Decidedly nervy. With all the assistance of my Chinese handler I still found it progressively more difficult to concentrate. My mind turned more and more often to Klara. Apart from her influence as a psychomanip there were other more tangible things she had for me. Hidden advantages which, behind an antiseptic screen and a bullet-proof wall of glass, were all too firmly hidden. I guessed it wouldn't be too long before my galloping melancholia strayed over into my work. I saw the pitfall digging itself and tried to go into reverse. I pleaded with Delicias to take me off the Teletrans Communication project until Klara recovered. No dice. I was vital now. Cernik needed me. If I pulled out, Target would have to switch to Team Two. The shot would be delayed and the nuclear punch fuel that was already cooking would have to be cooled and rehashed. Et cetera. In short, the whole damn' project would go phut. They'd just have to take a chance on my going phut instead. I didn't disappoint them. "Who the hell ws that?" yelled Cernik. He was in a flight simulator on moon. Target was trying to construct simulated minus-warp, warp, warpplus conditions while we teletransed. A nonsense. When you go through warp it's a different time layer. "Who was that?" raged Cernik. "Stop the test! Stop the goddam test!" I felt a prickle of cold sweat on my forehead. I knew I had sent him the face of the person who -- these days -- was constantly on my mind. They called off the afternoon tests. Cernik refused to participate. I tried to get through to him on a radio link but they said he was busy and he wouldn't talk to me. There was an inquest at Space A and A. The machine. Colonel Delicias, the Director, and my limping Chinese mindbender put their heads and circuits together. They talked to me and tested me, did an eeg and then ran a comparison on the machine to see whether anyone else could take my place. There was no one. It was late evening before I was released and could make my way to the quarantine unit to wave to Klara through the glass. But the aquarium was empty. I burst into the nursing unit. "What's happened to Klara?" I asked the startled nursing sister. "Oh, she's been drafted. Out of Space A and A and back to the Martian unit after convalescence..." "On whose instructions?" "Mr. Durain," she said severely with astringent douches and hypodermic needles in her voice, "certainly not on mine. The orders came straight from the director." She must have telephoned Delicias and reported my strange behavior because Delicias tried to stop my going to the director, but I wasn't in the mood. When I marched past the guards and into his suite with Delicias still pleading behind me one of the faces that looked up from around the table was only too familiar. It was Cernik. His eyes were like hot gray ashes. "Klara!" I shouted. "What's happened to Klara?" "Alan, this has gone far enough." "Who sent Klara back to the Martian unit?" I glared from one to the other. Suddenly, with that acute tuning of minds in which we had been trained, I knew that Cernik was reputed to have influence with the administrator of the colony. "We can't have the run interfered with, son," said the director. "We didn't realize your programed mate would have this effect on you. We'll recall her as soon as Target -- " "Grigor," I said. "Get her back. You did this. You had them recall her. Now get her back or you don't fly to Sector Five. Not with me as control." "Alan -- " pleaded Delicias. "That's contrary to regulations," growled the director. "Do you realize what you're saying?" "You can't let this bust the whole program." Cernik was standing right in front of me. "While she was here she was an obsession. The controls need absolute concentration. Twice, recently, Alan, you've lost me. Twice! Think of what could happen if you did that while I was in hazard and maybe there was something urgent to send or receive -- or maybe you had to take control. You'd be responsible for the ship and the crew -- " "I want Klara back," I said stubbornly. "We'll put in a recall as soon as the mission's flown," Delicias promised. "Listen to this, Alan." The director fiddled with a tape machine on his desk. The machine used all the weapons it could against me. Out of it came my lover's voice. Flat, lopsided, persuasive. "Darling, when you hear this I'll be halfway back to the colony. I've thought about everything and what's been happening to you and I've listened to all they've told me at Space A and A. It truly is going to be better and safer and more logical..." There was lots more like that. Logical crap that they'd sold her for my benefit. And it ended: "... so I love you and I long for you and I look forward to having you again in a short time when the mission's safely over." And it was ironic and bitter as hell because before she had even finished speaking to me, bodiless, ghostlike, reduced to tape in a machine in that room at Houston she was dead. The Colony Clipper was twentyeight thousand miles downrange when a meteorite holed it. There were no survivors. T hey kept it from me well. I suppose they were trying to make up their minds about what to do on Target. In the end they told me. Klara had been dead three days. They'd made up their minds by then that, because of my irrational behavior after the redrafting of Klara and a certain animus I appeared to exhibit toward Pro-Commander Cernik, I was a bad risk. A worse risk now, because they predicted I wouldn't behave logically in a set of unfavorable circumstances. Unfavorable circumstances! So they dropped the countdown and inhibited the fuel and rephased (he whole program and told me about Klara and handed me over to the psychomanips and the dream merchants and forgot about me. It was a nuisance, but that's life at Space A and A. But I didn't forget about them. It was just small consolation to me that Cernik had to be stood down and didn't fly that first mission and so missed the glory. That compensation was inadequate for my busted career and my lost love drifting weightless as a cinder out in the big darkness. Through all the rehabilitation and the dreams of idyllic countryside and dusky girls with eyes like gazelles and breasts like lemons they gave me, I stalked Cernik. Forget, they urged me, looking at my boiling mind. Look at this. Relive that. You are a construct. We made you. Now we will rearrange the genetic bricks a little in pursuit of happiness. You are a new Alan Durain... I smiled blandly, nodding, playing with my model spacecraft, sitting cross-legged in front of the tri-di set watching the news bulletins for Cernik to cross my sights. Not saying much, eating honeycrunch, I carefully concealed myself in the thickets of Strickes' Zone. Waiting. Two or three or more years went snailwise across my life. The Target mission returned from Sector Five with its astounding Christopher Columbus stories of habitable planets. An exploration fleet was organized for a return and, once again, Grigor Cernik was headlines. a body outside solar, roared the newscasts. The wedge-shaped head and passionate eyes stared out and down at us all again from the machine. Grigor Cernik was to attempt a solo landing on one of the planets of the New New World. My dreams became restless. The psychomanips shook their heads sadly. They offered me maps of exotic places alive with majestic scenery and delightful scents and happy people. I only looked at the star maps, calculating where Cernik would cross. Sometimes a colonel in the skyblue uniform of Space A and A came to see me. She was a woman. She was not Klara. She always came alone. She talked about "old times." What are "old" times? All time is time. It is neither old nor new. It is time. "Now this," said the eminent stellar cartographer glowing on the screen, "is an electronically simulated map of the route to be traveled by the astronauts of Frontiersman, when they begin their long journey next week." It was an ingenious map. I absorbed it and let it go on existing in my mind. Every instant of Frontiersman shimmered in three dimensions in our homes. Mine was still shared with several other turbulent lives and the patient faces of the psychomanipulators who hadn't given up hope for me. Soon the three depot ships of the expedition were in deep space and then into warp. After that there were no pictures from them -- the cameras had to be content with pictures from Houston and the Mars relay. Sooner or later they showed the lives of the teletrans controllers. Cernik's Control was a woman now, a brawny wench with coppery red hair. I thought her -- on and off -- quick as a flash. She was thinking about a movie actor and she had pain from an ingrowing toenail. I was in and out so fast she didn't notice. That was fine. It was going to be easy. I licked the honeycrunch stickiness from my fingers and watched the arena in front of the tri-di. T he depot ship Mermaid went into orbit around the chosen planet early one morning. I didn't want to skip breakfast and have the psychomanips asking themselves questions, so I went down and pretended I wanted to help in the kitchen and I had early breakfast there. Cernik's cutter blasted free at a little after nine o'clock Earth time. Still no pictures, of course, but he was doing an instantaneous commentary through his control. The cameras depicted her face from every angle. I didn't want to watch the pictures. I went up to my room. I was switching on-off, on-off all the time. Quick as lightning. I breathed the false air of the space cutter's cabin, smelled the heating metal as Cernik skidded on the atmospheric layer, broke it and went through. I am forty thousand meters above surface. Atmosphere indicates nontoxic gaseous content. Thin gaseous cloud. Metering on. All systems go. Conventional cameras go now. I lay on my bed in my pad at Norfolk. I blanked and locked into her mind. Cernik's mind. Thirty thousand. I have surface in view now. Surface in view now on monitor ! Around ## cloud. Eightten. I thought him the old lock-in symbol, felt him jar. The redhead laid it back, trying to eliminate interference. I bounced a visual of Klara's face off her mind into his. Hold. Control, cried Cernik. Hold! There's a block. I revved up. I gave him the goats to gallop in and out of his instruments and kick the readings around. I took over the redhead and scrambled the emergency signals. Emergency! Emergency! He tried to cut and hand it back to the depot ship which could assume mechanical control, but I hung on to him. Switch to auto, someone was sending. Switch to computer, pilot. They were trying to take his redhead out. You re falling Cernik, I thought. Cabin is minus three-G. The bump as he floated up to the cockpit shell almost knocked me off my bed. I was laughing. I took off the redhead's clothes and made her dance around among the naked words and scrambled symbols in his lolling head. The cutter was already off course when they fired the retroactors by remote control from the Mermaid. Too bad he was already pointing the wrong way. I whistled down with him. The altimeter zoomed zeroward like a shell. I cut just before they impacted. I wanted to hold on to him a bit. He shouted something. A while afterward the Skyblue Colonel came to tell me things. "Just before it happened he called your name, Alan. Just your name. I think he wanted you to step in and save him. It was a tragedy." "Have some honeycrunch," I said. I offered her the box. "Grigor," she said, taking both my hands and looking into my eyes, "your old friend. You know -- Grigor Cernik." I closed my eyes. I knew about her. I knew her powers, too. She wasn't going to see inside where I had something precious hidden. "They sent down a salvage party. They found the cutter. They couldn't find Grigor. A tragedy. I thought you'd want to know, Alan. Alan!" Evaluate and comment on Harrington-J eans' contact micro-laser brain surgery as it bears on personality change -- ,I commented soberly. I picked up my model spacecutter and sent it arching noisily into the corner of my room. It was empty. No Cernik in there. The Skyblue Colonel went away sadly. She may not come back. I hardly leave my bed now. Night after night the horrified face of Cernik penetrates my dreams. Nothing the psychomanips give me deters him. He is trying to escape. Of course I haven't told them who is the intruder in my dreams. They might want to experiment. After all, Cernik might well have told them that one of us could die, both of us could go on living. And he still has a lot of dying to do. I have a lot of living to live. Revenge is not a word I have used anywhere in this account. Like he said, the whole thing is relative. Matter and antimatter, writing in a mirror, the other side of the sky. I. Cernik. Glad (as they say) to have you with me.  of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... 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The forest below was a smoothlimbed stand of branching ivory stalks extravagantly draped and woven with silken veils -- scarlet, saffron, aquamarine, violet. The setting sun fingered laterally through the diaphanous veiling, underlighting it. Selders stepped from the scouter, sucked a quick breath -- light, dry, faintly sweet -- and unberthed the hoverscooter. He tested local gravity. It was pleasantly light. Scouter alarm set, necessary gear transferred to the smaller craft, he lofted and skimmed planet-west along the plateau wall. He raised glasses and scanned the dusky air above the forest. It was empty. Deliberately Selders dropped down the wall of the plateau and arched across ivory stalks hundreds of meters tall. Within minutes his canopy alarm buzzed. He peered around. A single skyveil approached high from his right. Mansize, the insect propelled itself across the sky in uneven surges on incongruously fragile wings. Its black carapace was dull, its compound eyes like mirror-studded tumors. Nearing, the insect abruptly skirled from secondary wing cases and skimmed down at the hoverscooter, spitting a swath of filmy white substance. Selders' throat closed in instinctive panic. He dropped the craft and scooted sideways, evading the arthropod's entrapping film. The stuff floated impotently down through the air. The insect whipped scarlet skirts and surged after the craft again. Selders initiated a vertical climb, then darted sideways toward the plateau wall and topped it. The insect did not pursue. It hung in the air on billowing skirts, compound eyes breaking late afternoon sunlight into glittery shards. Selders set course directly across the plateau. When he glanced back the insect held point at plateau's edge. Some kilometers later stalk forest gave way to badlands. Selders drifted down to bob across its rubbled surface. Then, beyond the badlands, the sun suddenly flared rose-dusky through the focusing lens of a single large dome. When Selders set down at the Pan Humanoid outpost a welcoming party materialized immediately, at its fore a big, bear-shouldered man in his thirties, curly brown hair tumbling down over a high forehead. "Director Brown?" Selders guessed. Brown bared big white teeth. "I am. Trouble with your primary vehicle, Commander -- " "Captain, Federation Protective Authority." " -- or are we meeting an impromptu inspection?" A flick of the wrist opened the facility to Selders' pleasure. Selders shook his head. "Neither. There's a lot of naked stalk forest north and east of here. Have you noted any particular pattern to the trader activity involved?" Brown's rounded forehead compressed. "Trader activity? What does this world have of commercial value?" "Veiling extruded by the predominant insect species is being gathered by freelance traders and distributed through a half-dozen major exotica dealers. It's appeared on markets all over this sector of the federation. And you haven't been aware of activity in the forests?" Brown's smile was deprecating. "The Pan Humanoid effort is focused entirely upon the humanoid form that occupies this plain, Captain. The badlands beyond are the habitat of a particularly unpleasant carnivorous form we call the rockwolf. I don't permit members of my party to venture up that way for any reason. So we're effectively buffered from the forests. But is it illegal to gather veiling for commercial purposes? If it's done in moderation and without disturbing the insects?" "No. But the Authority isn't convinced it's being handled so ethically. Neither am I. I observed substantial stretches of stripped and depopulated forest on descent this afternoon." "Well, you're welcome to scan our files on the toilers, our humanoid subject species. You'll find a few observations on rockwolf behavior. None, I'm afraid, on the skyveils. We simply have no knowledge of their habits -- or interest in them." "I'll study your files. Assuming I can draw meal privileges and a berth for the night." Brown bared big white teeth. "Certainly." O ver the evening meal Selders ' sifted first impressions of the Pan Humanoid party. It consisted of Brown, his second in command, Farelli, and a dozen assorted fledgeling specialists, all eager to discuss their efforts to facilitate advancement of the toiler species. The species was presently hampered by its entrenched custom of setting out substantial numbers of young to appease the appetites of nightprowling rockwolves. "And you're convinced this isn't a measure for keeping down excess population?" Selders probed. "No chance," Farelli responded positively. He was an intense young man with lank black hair and expressive hands. "This plain stretches for hundreds of kilometers west of here and there's more on the other side of the forests. Most of it unoccupied. Plenty of seed and forage, too. The toiler population could multiply a thousandfold comfortably. Instead they're barely holding their own. And that's with every fit female bearing up to twice a year." "Hmmm. And the offspring they abandon are in no way defective?" Brown fielded the question. "They are literally the most fit, Captain. Can you imagine it? This race sacrifices ninety per cent of its young to appease a prowling carnivore. Out of fear. Out of ignorance. And this is the only factor that is holding the race back. Once we overcome this -- " Selders shifted restlessly under Brown's evangelical zeal. "But you are successfully starving out some of the wolves now?" Brown leaned forward earnestly. "We are. We aren't permitted to use weapons, force, or even chemical repellents. Protective Authority ties our hands in a hundred ways. But it is certainly within guidelines to persuade one species to discontinue being easy prey for another." "It's within guidelines," Selders agreed tersely. But someone, he felt certain, was guilty of violation in the matter of the forests. His glance flickered over the party. Every member, according to Pan Humanoid files, was amply credentialed. It seemed likely to Selders that those credentials were fraudulent in at least one case. But Selders caught no dissonance as the party moved from meal to conference table. A quarter-hour later the evening's resume was interrupted by a screeching cry that rose threadily beyond the dome, ending in a high-pitched gargle. Selders' head whipped around. "Rockwolf!" The party scrambled to the night-darkened panels of the dome. Outside the screech rose again. Selders quivered involuntarily. Brown's ingenuous eyes were suddenly fierce. "That's what we're up against, Captain -- that animal." The animal's voice split night again, rending it like rotten cloth, then dying with a choked yelp. And a second voice joined it, big palm slapped dome. Then he was running out. Selders heeled after him, the remainder of the party following. "The western quadrant," Brown shouted back. "And we're completely powerless. There's nothing we can do -- unless we can bully the mother into pulling the child back into the burrow." They raced across hummocked ground, the night sky starless overhead. Minutes later Brown halted abruptly, penciling darkness with his handlamp. The animal he captured in the beam was ugly, lowslung, with lumpy jowls that depended from a broad, flat head. It glared into the light, one eye bloodred, the other yellow. It hunched on sturdy forequarters, its coarse pelt ruffled. B rown stamped his feet, uttering an inarticulate cry. The animal was not intimidated. It sprang from the beam of light. With a loping trot, it moved across the hummocked ground. second beam of light spotlighted a tiny humanoid stranded in the dirt before a plastered mud mound. Selders had a brief glimpse of a minute body with flipper-short arms and a round little head. Then Brown slapped the beam away. But the rockwolf had already seen. It sprang across the mounded terrain. The burrow mouth behind the child was tightly plugged with straw. Squealing with fright, the infant toppled to its side, rolled to its belly and squirmed in a futile effort to escape. Its shrill cry shivered the night. Brown bellowed and began to slap feet to ground fiercely. Behind him the party danced and shouted, voices harsh. The rockwolf wheeled and glared at them. Then it lowered its broad head and slowly stalked a half-circle around the struggling youngster. It faced the humans again from beyond the child, red eye and yellow burning by lamplight, ugly body hunched. Selders swallowed painfully. Perfectly formed body, round head, fat little limbs, minute fingers and toes... he could comfortably contain the infant in the palm of his hand. Instead the same hand closed helplessly around the grip of his pistol. Every rule in the book forbade intervention. Abruptly, with a yelp, the rockwolf lunged, catching the infant's neck in its jaws. The child's cry died in mid-note. The wolf shook the limp body. Again red eye and yellow defied the helpless humans. Then the animal trotted away with its prey. "Powerless," Brown grated. "Because if we blast that animal -- " Selders' stomach hung limp and sour. "Me or someone like me will pull you right off this planet. You'll never wangle your way back." Selders' hand released the pistol grip and fisted at his side. "That's right, Captain," Brown said bitterly. "If we commit violence, we won't be permitted to render the greater good. So we're well motivated to observe Authority guidelines. Did you know that in four years we've had to lift only one man off before his tour expired. Medical reasons. He tried to save one of these infants." "He was mauled?" "No. The animal snatched the child right out of his arms. He's been under psych treatment for seven months now. Could be they'll eventually salvage him. Right, Captain?" Selders' shoulders tightened. "I don't set the guidelines." Neither, he was tempted to add, did anyone back at Authority Central. Nature set them. The Authority was charged only with enforcing non-interference. Brown flashed his beam back at the plugged burrow. "We'll talk to the mother tomorrow. We'll probably find the bones out here somewhere later in the week." Snapping off the lamp, he strode into darkness. N ext morning Selders appreciated why Pan Humanoid had dubbed the subject species toilers. When he and Brown ventured across the hummocked plain, the little humanoids scuttled busily. They were thigh-high to Selders, their heads like grapefruit on thin, loose-fleshed necks. Some carried sheafs of grass and wild grain. Others industriously swept loose dirt with bound straw or patted their burrow mouths with dampened palms. When Brown passed, they piped at him, bobbing round heads, black eyes winking brightly. Brown returned their incomprehensibilities distractedly. "Are these family burrows, Director?" "They're shared by mother and young. Adult males, the few there are, sleep along the corridors that connect to the communal granaries." "Oh? There's an imbalance of sexes?" Brown's face was grim. "Not at birth. But a mother seldom abandons a daughter unless she's been replaced by another. She's likely to set out a son as soon as another pregnancy is established." When they reached the area of the previous night's kill, a small body dodged hastily into the burrow. Brown's lips thinned. He motioned Selders to sit beside him in the dirt. "Waiting for Alo," he announced in a falsetto voice. "Waiting to talk." Round eyes peered at them from the interior of the burrow. "Alo," a small voice piped. "Waiting to talk," Brown repeated, lowering his voice. "Waiting to hear why Alo put her Dalo out to the wolf." Alo's smooth round head emerged from the burrow. She had neither ears nor nose, only a rosebud mouth and bright black eyes. "Rockwolf called. Alo put Dalo," she offered placatingly. "Rockwolf called other nights. Alo did not put out Dalo." Warily the little creature emerged, her tiny body bent. Loose flesh layered her neck and arms. She spat into the palm of one hand and patted at the burrow mouth. "Rockwolf called. Big hungry voice. Dalo time." Strain harshened Brown's features. "But why last night, Alo? Why not keep Dalo? Now Alo has no child in her burrow." Alo's bald head bobbed nervously. "No Dalo." She patted her lower belly. "Other child instead. Malo? Zalo? Talo?" Brown's jaw tightened. "I know Alo expects another child. That's why I have talked to Alo so much lately. But what if Malo-Zalo dies in belly? What if Malo-Zalo gets sick on first milk and chokes? Then no child at all, Alo." Alo's black eyes winked. "No child," she agreed. Selders cleared his throat. "Alo," he said experimentally, "did you want Dalo's food for the second child?". The little humanoid peered at him alertly. "Dalo? Se-con-dalo child?" "Number two child," he tried again, hoisting two fingers. "Dalo was her fifth," Brown interrupted. "Her fifth in three years." Selders grunted. "Then did you think, Alo, that you would not have enough food for Malo-Zalo if you kept Dalo?" Alo's rosebud mouth pursed. "Food all around." "Then -- why? Why did you let rockwolf kill Dalo?" "Rockwolf called. Big -- " " -- hungry voice," Brown finished for her bitterly. "Keep rockwolf happy, right, Alo? Plenty of babies. Always make more. What's a little blood?" The big man jumped up. "Never mind that your entire race lives out here on thirty square kilometers of land. Never mind that you'll never pull yourselves out of the dirt unless you start raising your young. Never mind anything but big hungry voice!" Brown turned abruptly and strode away. The little humanoid looked after him, bright-eyed. "Alo," she piped at Selders and then scurried back into her burrow. II # ttow long do you intend to XI devote to this mission, Director?" Selders asked, catching up with the big man. "As long as it takes. I'll die here if I have to. I'll die pulling these people out of the mud and starting them down the track to development. They have the potential. You heard her speech, Selders. You saw those opposed thumbs. You -- " "What I don't see are many young," Selders broke in. "I thought your files indicated substantial success in this western sector of the burrowing area." Brown's eyes whipped away. "Yes. We've concentrated our effort here with the idea of establishing a seed population that will impose the new cultural pattern over the entire burrowing plain. And we've had considerable success." Selders indicated the busy population at their feet. "Then where are the surviving young? Do they keep to the burrows?" Brown jammed a hand back through his hair. "They keep dying, Captain. There's an endemic cysting disorder. Sixty to seventy per cent of the juveniles we bring through the first year reach puberty, which comes near the end of the second year, and -- bang! Naturally the toilers have no established treatment. But I have requested a pair of surgeons. When -- " "Then it is defective offspring that are being sacrificed." "No. There's absolutely no sign of the disorder until shortly before death. No one can predict which youngsters will fall victim. All we can do is wait and watch -- and once we have our surgeons, operate. It should be a fairly simple procedure, one the toilers can manage after we've brought them a little farther along." "How long is the life span in individuals who do attain adulthood?" Brown shrugged. "Up to twenty years." "And you think such a brief span can support development?" "Look at what our own race accomplished in the centuries before we attained our present longevity. And without outside assistance." "True." But Selders was not greatly impressed with Brown's little people. And the toilers' developmental tribulations were not, after all, relevant to his own purpose here. "I'll be hopping out to one of the depopulated forest sectors this morning. Do you want to accompany me?" Brown's brows flared in surprise. "Isn't it extremely hazardous to invade skyveil territory?" "Not the depopulated areas. And you might like to be present to defend your interests. There is speculation at Authority Central that some member of your party is at least partially responsible for the forest situation. If I don't find clear-cut evidence of outside interference, I'll have to turn in a recommendation that your group's authorization be rescinded." Brown stared at him. "You -- Captain, don't you appreciate the significance of what we're doing here?" "My job is to appreciate the significance of those stripped forests." Turmoil darkened Brown's eyes. "Then I'd better accompany you." L ess than an hour later they j skirted the plateau eastward. In the distance big insects floated sunlight fingered silk-draped bowers. "The material looks too fragile to have much commercial value," Brown commented. "It's not as flimsy as it looks." Selders scanned the horizon with glasses. "And there's the first area we'll visit. Have a look?" Accepting glasses. Brown studied the denuded stalk forest ahead. "The lack of leaves is normal, of course -- or is it?" "It is. The stalks transact most of their business through their outer peel." They reached the area without incident. Selders sheered off the side of the plateau and hopped the tops of the stripped stalk forest. Sunlight shadow-patterned the ground hundreds of meters below. Occasional swaths of torn veiling clung to ivory stalks. Selders dropped the craft between the limbs of giant stalks. When they touched ground he rummaged through the hold, producing a pair of harnessed liftpacks. "Have you ever maneuvered in one of these?" Brown accepted the proffered pack reluctantly. "No, I'm afraid I'm not particularly adventuresome." "Well, these will give us better mobility if we run into trouble. They'll lift the weight right off our feet." He stapped the second pack across his shoulders. "Use the second setting. We'll be able to climb trees like a pair of monkeys -- but without worry about accidentally taking altitude even in this light gravity. The packs aren't that heavily powered." He unreeled the handset and clipped it to his belt. With a quick pressure of fingers he lifted his weight from his feet and raced lightly across the soil surface. They explored the stripped portion of the forest quickly, finding nothing more significant than a single large casing that lay empty on the ground. It was spun of a silken substance and bore a jagged incision at its narrower end. Both men examined the bulky object. "A cocoon?" Brown suggested . "Looks like it." They continued through the stripped forest, encountering neither live nor dead inhabitant. Then silken fairyland lay ahead. Sunlight glowed through elaborately draped and interwoven hangings, scarlet, aquamarine, emerald, saffron. They paused. Selders assayed the quality of silence that haunted the veiled forest. "I don't think this sector is populated either. But if you want to wait out here for me -- " "I'll come." The decision was obviously painful. "Then let's take it slow. First setting." He led away. The diaphanous hangings the skyveils had extruded to shelter their habitat were draped and woven to create a series of rainbow bowers. Despite its fragile appearance, the veiling was tough and run-resistant. With the aid of their liftpacks, the two men scrambled up branching ivory stalks. Meters above ground, Selders glanced back to see Brown grimly clinging to an ivory stalk. "Heights bother you?" The big man flushed. "I'm a land animal, Selders." Selders flashed a reassuring grin. "Don't worry. If you fall, flip to three. You'll land easy. Just try not to entangle yourself on the way down." D uring the next hour the two men explored lowly bowers and lofty ones, tightly woven ones and airy ones. Then, returning to ground level, they stepped into a lofty central space partitioned with violet hangings that fell hundreds of meters to the ground. Both men halted, sucking breath simultaneously. The enclosed stalks were thickly hung with big fibrous pods. "Hundreds of them," Selders breathed. Before he could climb to cut one down, Brown yelped. Selders spun. The big man backed away from a dusty black object on the ground. It was the carapace of a dead skyveil. Selders bent over it. Man-size, undamaged, its sheen was dulled. The black claws were folded stiffly before the thorax -- the compound eyes were clouded. He shoved his hand into the shell. The organic contents had dried. When he opened the primary wingcases the fragile little wings crumbled to the ed parachute skirts remained at once tough and silken. "No deterioration. So there might be a market for this, too." Which could account for the absence of insect corpses in the depopulated forest. Selders scrambled up to chop down one of the big pods. He trimmed back a flap and another dead arthropod lay before him. He plunged a hand into its shell. The contents crumbled at his touch. "Which tells us nothing. Except that we have no physical evidence of a massive kill -- yet." He gazed up at bulging layers of pods. Pulling small bags from his pocket, he took samples of dried tissue from the two insects. He labeled the bags. "We'll stop by the scouter before we head back. I want to run a quick analysis on these tissues. And I want to recheck the records, too. I don't recall that anyone has ever entered inhabited skyveil forest afoot, but I want to be certain before I undertake it." Brown's forehead creased apprehensively. "Afoot? Wouldn't that be -- " " -- extremely hazardous? I don't know. The veils defend their airspace, certainly, but they may not perceive an individual approaching afoot as a threat. What I do know is that this is a dead forest. It's telling me nothing. Except that we're dealing with an insect that preserves its dead. How much significance do you see in that?" "I have no frame of reference at all where insects are concerned, Captain. I actively dislike them." Brown's big shoulders hunched with painful decision. "But if you decide to enter the stalk forest on foot I will accompany you." Selders grinned. "The supreme sacrifice." Brown's daring, it was apparent, would never be legend. It was late afternoon when they lofted from the scouter. Analysis of insect tissue revealed no trace of poison. And scan of the microrecords told Selders that no human had ever entered populated skyveil forest afoot. Selders studied Brown's sweat-filmed face. "If your duties can't accommodate two consecutive days of neglect, why don't you appoint a stand-in? Farelli maybe?" he suggested tactfully. "No. I won't delegate anyone to undertake a venture of this nature." "Suit yourself." Selders set course into the late afternoon sun. after the evening meal, Selders #V was restless. He strapped on his liftpack. "I'm taking an evening skim. Anyone care to accompany?" His volunteer was a scrappy little Oriental named, incongruously, Emmanuels. He mastered the liftpack easily -- "I did a little packing on Nelding's World -- " and the two of them skimmed through the night, handlamps picking hungrily at darkness. Beneath their boot toes toiler burrows were tightly plugged. Night slapped cool and welcome against Selders' cheek. "Are you making the toilers your life's work?" he probed. His jaunt was inspired partly by restlessness, partly by desire to give anyone who felt the need an opportunity to speak to him alone. "These little people?" Emmanuels flashed teeth derisively. "I'm a two-year man here. I plan to cover a dozen races before I take retirement." "Some particular reason?" "Curiosity mostly. Maybe I'll put together a comparative study. Counterpose intelligent humanoid races against, say, intelligent reptilians, aquatics, avians -- you get the idea?" "Mmm. So it doesn't sound like Pan Humanoid is your natural mother." "Ha! Listen to Brown and you'll think humanoids are the only life form worth studying. He restricts us to the plains area because the wolves are dangerous -- he says. But I've walked right through the badlands on my off-duty days and never had a toe nipped. And I've learned something interesting -- the veils prey on rockwolves." Selders' interest sharpened. "You've observed the activity?" "I have. Evidently the veils stung the animal first. I heard the commotion from a distance. By the time I was near enough to see what was happening, the wolf was convulsing. The veils spat a white, stringy stuff to immobilize it. Then they cocooned it and carried it away into the forest." "They didn't react to your presence?" Emmanuels snorted. "I decorated the underside of a boulder until they were gone. The way that cocoon was writhing -- well, I didn't spot the veils' stingers, but I didn't need a dose of what they injected the wolf with." Selders grunted thoughtfully. He flashed light over Emmanuels' night-shadowed face. "Have you ever observed trader activity in the forest area?" Emmanuels shook his head emphatically. "The rockwolves are nocturnal, so I'll walk their country by day. But I'm not trespassing on veil country night or day. There is something very disconcerting about an insect the size of a man." Selders agreed. There was. Half an hour later they neared the boundary of Pan Humanoid's focal area. At a distance they heard the screech of a wolf. Selders tensed. But the animal's cry went unanswered. "I suppose the wolves concentrate now on the portions of the plain not covered by the Pan Humanoid effort?" Emmanuels touched his handset and settled upon a hummock. Selders took ground nearby. Emmanuels said, "You know. I'm not convinced they do. Some of us suspect the wolves are instinctpatterned to hunt only certain areas. The party had rough nights their first two mission years. After they first persuaded the toilers not to put out babies hungry wolves prowled the sector every night -- all night. Ear plugs were the only thing that kept some people sane. Evidently the wolves were working certain predetermined stalking areas -- and finally they were literally starved to extinction." But not total extinction. The distant screech made that obvious. The answering shrill made it devastating. Selders' spine quivered. Emmanuels jumped up from the hummock. "Sorry, Captain, but I'm not staying to listen for the kill." He fingered the handset. His feet left ground. Selders followed. But their retreat was not swift enough. A few minutes later they heard the abruptly truncated cry. For a moment Selders empathized with Brown's desperate determination. The air that slapped his cheek was no longer cool but chill. V T he air was still chill next morning when Selders and Brown lofted from the Pan Humanoid outpost. "We'll hover to within hiking distance of the stalk forest if the veils will tolerate air traffic that close to their territory. We'll go afoot from there." Brown's glance was agonized. "Through wolf country?" "The wolves should be sleeping. There's minimum danger." He studied his companion. Was his the agitation of a guilty man or simply of a very apprehensive one? "What do you think we'll find in the forest?" he probed. "I -- I hope we'll find a reception no more hostile than you anticipate." But Selders was anticipating on several different levels, a fact he did not share yet with Brown. He took the hovercraft into the morning sun. They dropped in low over the badlands. With glasses, Selders could see skyveils floating in the morning-misted air, skirts billowing. None seemed disturbed by the approach of the hovercraft. Nor was there reaction at ground level. Selders found a level spot and set the scooter down. Brown emerged from the craft with patent reluctance and strapped on his liftpack. He demurred when Selders proffered a belted pistol. "Captain, we're not permitted to use weaponry against local forms under any circumstance." "Today you're not only permitted but ordered if either of us is attacked. Necessary force is authorized in the interest of the greater good." Brown echoed the last phrase numbly. He strapped on the pistol. "I -- in case you haven't perceived. Captain, I have a morbid fear of insects." "It shows -- a little." Selders led way across the badlands. The ground was rugged, boulderstrewn. Irregular clumps of vegetation leached starveling existence from the rocky soil. There was no sign of rockwolf beyond an occasional slumbering body burrowed deep into rocky shelter. But twice they stumbled across bones. Selders poked the second skeleton with the barrel of his pistol. "Doesn't look like he fell prey to his brothers. The bones would be scattered. So we have natural causes, possibly starvation." Brown's eyes showed flint. "In that case, I hope I can claim personal credit for the death." Selders shrugged. "Claim it." They were nearing the rainbow shadow of the stalk forest when they heard a curdling animal shriek behind. Selders whipped around. Automatically he fingered a liftoff. A hoarse warning from Brown brought him back to earth. A pair of skyveils emerged from the silken forest, surging through the air on incongruously fragile wings, gaudy skirts retracted. Selders tossed himself into the shadow of a boulder. The big insects disappeared across the rubbled landscape. Selders glanced back toward the forest, then skimmed again in the direction of the animal cry. II N ear a dip in the ground, a coarse-furred rockwolf thrashed wildly, teeth snapping. The skyveils settled several meters away. Their multi-faceted eyes shattered morning sunlight. The larger stroked swelling pouches at the side of its head. Mandibles dropping, it spat a banner of filmy white substance at the convulsing animal. The wolf s own frenzy entangled it firmly. Then the insects spat alternating layers of the sticky film, flipping the increasingly bulky bundle with black claws. Ten minutes later the rockwolf was a writhing silken cocoon. The two insects wove a ropy cradle around it and bore it back toward the veiled forest. Selders settled back on his heels, briefly considering the significance of what he had witnessed. Insect sting had not produced convulsions in the wolf, as Emmanuels had prepared him to expect. The convulsive state had clearly preceded the appearance of the veils. The wolf s cries, in fact, had guided them to the spot. Thoughtfully Selders skimmed back to where Brown waited. He related the incident. "Do rockwolves commonly have mismatched eyes? One red, one yellow?" Brown palmed his sweaty forehead. "Not to my knowledge." "Then little Dalo's killer has met his fate. Unless there was another wolf out here with unmatched eyes." Brown stared at him dumbly. His mouth worked. But Selders did not have time to wet-nurse the big man through his reaction to the incident. "So let's go. I want to see how the veils dispose of that cocoon." Brown found his voice. "Maybe they simply encased the animal to preserve it. Like the insect we cut down yesterday." "Under the violet hangings?" Selders shook his head. "Those were pods. This was a cocoon. Which certainly points to some interesting possibilities." Possibilities he didn't yet feel ready to put finger to. He led way. Beneath the flowing rainbow hangings of the forest, morning was a composition in pastel shadow. Selders glanced around watchfully. A single insect hopped ivory branches high above, extruding a length of chartreuse veiling and draping it down the limbs of the stalk. Brown touched Selder's arm and nodded toward a bower of emerald veiling where a second skyveil sat grooming its wings. Neither arthropod gave sign that it noticed the human's trespass. "I think we're safe as long as we stick to the ground and move slowly. They don't appear sophisticated enough to take interest in an object that isn't clearly either food or enemy." Now as to how the convulsing rockwolf fitted into the skyveil scheme of existence... The answer to that, he felt, would be of appreciable significance. T hey walked the forest silently, warily, pausing occasionally to watch the big insects extrude and weave their silken auroras. An hour later they emerged in an unobstructed central well of stalks. Selders peered up. Hundreds of meters above, upper limbs were hung with cumbersome white shapes. Selders slapped glasses to his eyes. Silken cocoons rocked slowly in the late morning sunlight. But one did more than rock. Slowly, tortuously, it writhed within its ropy cradle. "We've found our wolf." With a quick stab of triumph, Selders passed the glasses to Brown. A single skyveil tended the cluster of cocoons, fanning them witti gaudy violet skirts. Brown stared up. When he lowered the glasses, he gaped at Selders wordlessly. "Well? Do you begin to suspect that this is a hatchery?" Selders demanded. "And that we may have discovered an insect in wolfs clothing?" Brown's pale eyes were tortured. He didn't answer. Selders continued his speculation: "If the veils were simply using the wolf as a hatching medium, a source of nourishment for their developing young, they would have introduced ovum or larva. Either into the wolf or into the cocoon as they bound him. We didn't see them do either. Maybe the wolf itself is the pupal form." And the convulsions, it followed, had merely been a signal of readiness. Brown scaped up voice. "Of course. Something like that -- it's obvious. Even to -- me. Now." His feet took him backward. "And so we can return to the outpost. Now that we know -- " "Know what?" Selders demanded. "Now that we know -- " The recording was stuck. "What we know is that now I'll have to climb those trees and cut into one of those cocoons, if mother-bug will let me. Because I didn't come this far to spin an unsupported hypothesis." Not even an unsupported hypothesis having so little apparent relation to his mission's purpose. "How good are you with a pistol?" Brown shook his head. "Not very. I'm -- I'm not normally a violent man." "Plan to be one today if necessary. Here -- " He slipped Brown's pistol from its holster. "Let's set the beam wide. Better you singe me than miss entirely if I run into trouble. I want you to keep this weapon in hand and I want you to have both eyes on the situation every moment. The greater good, right?" Brown licked his lips. "The greater good." The pistol quivered in his grip. Selders' liftpack assisted him up the lower stalk. He kept an alert eye on the single veil overhead. She seemed undisturbed by his slow approach. From fifty meters, he glanced down to be sure that he saw the pistol in Brown's hand. He saw it. He saw, too, the ghastly grimness that deformed Brown's features -- a grimness reminiscent of Brown's expression the night little Dalo had been snatched by the wolf. Snatched -- killed? -- in fact, by the wolf who hung twisting above. Facts -- what were they? As Selders picked his way limb to limb up the smooth white stalk some facts abruptly slid to rest in his mind, arranging themselves in patterns he had not anticipated. It was not only what remained of the rockwolf that hung above. It was also -- in some fashion -- what remained of little Dalo. Little Dalo who, if he had survived his first year, would almost certainly have fallen victim during his second to the cysting disorder endemic to his race. It was almost, in fact, as if little Dalo had never been intended to survive, as if he were one of nature's disposables. If he had escaped consumption by outer force, inner force would have inevitably destroyed him. But would have destroyed what? A humanoid infant? Or an unrealized... skyveil? Selders' breath caught in his throat. His head snapped back. He stared at the big insect above. It was not cysts that destroyed juvenile toilers, he realized in an intuitional flash. It was engorged and deteriorating cell masses that should, in the absence of human intervention, have matured into the adult insect form. And that maturation somehow took place through the agency of apparent death at the fangs of the rockwolf. The rockwolf might -- in some manner yet to be discovered -- conceivably even be mate or merger-partner to the consumed toiler, his stalking cry a mating call. So what existed on Selmarri was not three races, probably not even two, but one -- toiler, the egg carrier or larval form; rockwolf, the catalyst or mating form; and skyveil, the imago. Or perhaps the rockwolf was a separate species preyed upon -- how else could the sequence of events be interpreted -- by toiler mothers who set out young to be devoured. Which of course explained the toiler's lack of survival drive, explained why Pan Humanoid had to badger mothers to raise their young. For the toilers were not a species, not even those who matured to serve as breeder population. They were simply a form. and Brown? Selders stiffened.   . Brown had directed the Pan Humanoid effort here from inception. He claimed to know nothing of import about rockwolf or skyveil. But how could he have failed, given four years on a small world, to sense something of the relationship between his toilers and the other two forms? How could he fail now? With the evidence suspended over his head? Selders was suddenly and painfully aware of his own exposed position halfway up the bare white stalk, skyveil above, Brown below. He twisted his head to peer down. Brown stared up at him with the desperate ferocity of a man who sees his life's work threatened with obliteration. But that was only what Selders saw in the big man's face. In his hand, muzzle pointed at Selders, was the pistol Selders had obligingly set on broad beam. And in his mind, Selders knew, was another Selders artifact -- three ringing words: The greater good. Selders had only the big man's innate cowardice to bank on. That unfortunately appeared to have been temporarily negated by prospect of the greater good. Selders glanced up again, then quickly spidered sideways, putting stalk between himself and Brown. Brown's mobility, unfortunately, was not as severely limited as Selders'. When Selders glanced down again, the big man had already loped the distance necessary to train the pistol on him again. Desperately Selders peered around for prospects. He had a choice: vertical or horizontal. Down would only deliver him to Brown, while up would take him into skyveil range without delivering him from Brown's pistol. But horizontal? If he leaped branches to the next stalk tree and the one beyond, then Tarzaned blithely away on skeins of scarlet veiling, his trajectory would carry him to the shelter of high silken bowers. Assuming that Brown was too shaken and unpracticed to bring down a moving target. And assuming that a little bit of legendary Tarzan still lived in Selders' arms. He caught a deep breath and poised himself for the resurrection. Nimbly he leaped and skipped stalks until he reached a point where a swath of scarlet veiling hung within reach. He tested it. It seemed securely anchored. He glanced down. Then, yodeling, he tossed himself across space, clinging to slippery silken fabric. Whether it was his vocalization that momentarily disconcerted Brown and simultaneously attracted the skyveil's attention, Selders never knew. But as he skimmed between stalktops, Brown's pistol sagged impotently. Selders threw himself to safety in a tightly woven emerald bower. He bounced twice, then wriggled through the woven fabric and scrambled upward until he was concealed within a more casually draped indigo alcove. He crouched, clinging to the smooth stalk upon which the veiling was anchored. When he glanced up toward the treetops, little Dalo continued to writhe in his cocoon. But his guardian no longer fanned. She had retracted her violet skirts and hopped to direct her mirror-studded eyes downward. Selders craned, seeking Brown. Brown was no longer confined to the ground. He had set his liftpack high and he bobbed unevenly up a nearby stalk, one hand briefly grasping white branches, the other still closed around the pistol. Selders' throat closed on his warning cry. He flared a quick glance up. Launching himself into the air so soon after Selders' own flight, Brown had definitely assumed new significance in the skyveil's eye. She held her fractured gaze on him, her black legs flexing. Then she uncased tiny wings and beat air from her perch downward. "Brown!" Selders bellowed. Brown's head snapped back. He stared up at the approaching insect. His physical response was total. His jaw sagged. His legs slackened. His fingers loosened. The pistol fell and Brown followed, his liftpack cushioning his tumble to a slow downward float. Selders "Swung from shelter, furious incomprehensibilities piling up on his tongue. The big insect beat near the falling man and flared gaudy skirts. They hung in the air side by side, insect and man. Glittery compound eyes met agonized blue ones. And Selders was paralyzed. It wasn't until he caught the motion of the insect's mandibles that he obtained response from his own activator finger. His beam was set narrow. Raising the weapon, he burned a crisp-edged hole directly through the skyveil's head. And then there were two bodies tumbling. an hour later Selders and Brown lofted from the badlands. Brown still nursed his sprained hand under his armpit, his face stark and glistening. "So there was no kill," Selders said. "No bug bomb, no violence of any kind. In fact, it was lack of violence that depopulated those stretches of skyveil forest. As a couple of your people guessed, the rockwolf is instinct-patterned to stalk only certain areas of toiler plain. And when the mature skyveil hatches, he is patterned to claim a certain section of the forest as home. So when you effectively closed down hunting -- merging or mating? -- on a broad sector of toiler plain, you halted maturation of insects who would have populated big stretches of forest. Evidently a freelance spotter noted the unguarded forests and commercial activity moved in. And now Pan Humanoid is moving out." Brown hadn't spoken since his fall. His voice was rocky. "If that -- if that is what truly occurred -- " "You know it is -- in the large at least. Details will have to wait study by experts. I think you guessed at some of it before today." "But if it is, if I did, then the mature form doesn't survive for more than a year, Selders. Two at most." "Obviously. Otherwise the forests could never have been so quickly depopulated. Insects seldom enjoy long lifespans in final form." "But if we can salvage the toilers, if we can get surgeons out here to operate, to remove the cysts -- " "The ova," Selders corrected. Or the larval forms that fed on rockwolf through the period of metamorphosis. Only observation would clarify all the details of the reproductive cycle. "If we can bring a little toiler like Dalo through puberty into adulthood, he will have a lifespan of up to twenty years. He'll -- the waste, Selders! To permit a humanoid form to deteriorate into an insect, to let twenty years of productive life be sacrificed for a year or two in the forest. To let speech be lost, to -- " "But the guidelines are clear. Brown. Pan Humanoid hasn't been working with a humanoid species at all here. You've been interfering in the reproductive cycle of an insect species. Speech, manipulating hands -- in this species they're not ends in themselves. They're simply manifestations of a transitional form. Why they should occur I haven't the faintest idea -- it'll be up to paleontologists to determine how this life form evolved. But it's the mature form that determines the ultimate classification of the species." Brown's lips thinned. He glanced away bitterly. Selders took the scooter high. He did not immediately set course back toward the Pan Humanoid outpost. Instead he hung in the midday sun, his eyes seeking the interior of the veiled forest where pastel shadow lay silent and deep. At a distance skyveils floated the two with sunlight hot and heavy on the carapace, with a gentle wind billowing the boldpatterned skirts. One year or two... contrasted to twenty years scurrying in dark burrows, toiling? Brown's forehead pulled tight. "Selders, have you no reverence for the human form? For your own kind?" Selders sighed. "Not much." "Yet when it came to a choice between the insect and me, it was the insect you sacrificed." Selders' gaze flickered from the floating skyveils. He met Brown's eyes. "It was," he agreed. "But only after hesitation, Brown. And only because I knew you would never sacrifice another little DaloMalo-Zalo to your narcissism."  K Donald A. Wolihaim, Publisher. ::      i I I  i t John Norman. This eighth Gor novel tells at long last of the fate of Tarl Cabot's fabulous females, Talena of Ar and Elizabeth Cardwell. Profusely illustrated. (UW#-I .#) Gerard Klein's greatest novel, has been translated by John Brunner. It is an epic that tackles the entire meaning of the cosmos and of the many wars of man in the universe. (UQ#-#C) Burnett Swann gave the novel he considers his masterpiece. Cover and illustrations by George Barr. (UQ#-#c) is a master mystery about an interstellar agency and the man who must not be allowed to die! Cover by Kelly Freas. ( UQ#-#C ) Cap Kennedy confronts a plan to move a swarm of contra-terrene matter into our Solar System with devastating results. It's a new adventure of the fastest growing series since Star Trek, and it is appropriately (UQ#-#C) Your name and address plus Bergenfield, N.J. #, plus title and #, if you can't find our books on sale. e of my rivals in the scienceV-r writing field usually begins his columns with a personal anecdote. Although I avoid slavish imitation, success is always worth copying. Anyway, the idea behind this column came from Robert Heinlein and he ought to get credit for it. Mr. Heinlein and I were discussing the perils of template stories -- interconnected stories that together present a future history. As readers may have suspected, many future histories begin with stories that weren't necessarily intended to fit together when they were written. Robert Heinlein's box came with The Man Who Sold The Moon. He wanted the first flight to the moon to use a direct Earth-to-moon craft, not one assembled in orbit -- but the story had to follow Blowups Happen in the future history. Unfortunately, in Blowups Happen a capability for orbiting large payloads had been developed. "Aha," I said. "I see your problem. If you can get a ship into orbit you're halfway to the moon." "No," Bob said. "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere ." He was very nearly right. S pace travel isn't a matter of distances -- it's a question of velocities. Most space systems designs begin with rough-cut estimates of present and near-term predicted technological capabilities, and one of the best measures used in design analysis is called "delta vee." This is engineer talk for a change in velocity and comes from the general mathematical symbol for change, the Greek letter delta or A . Delta vee, written A v, is the total velocity change a ship can make. The nice part about delta vee is that for rough analysis it doesn't matter how you expend your fuel. You can burn it all up at once or make a whole series of velocity changes -- the sum of delta vee achieved will be the same. Moreover, the total delta v can be calculated from the Specific Impulse (a measure of efficiency) of the fuel used and the fraction of the total ship weight that's made up of fuel. No other numbers are needed, not even total ship's weight. Given the total delta v, you can determine what kind of missions the ship can perform. The other nice feature is that delta v requirements for any journey in the solar system can be calculated from well known parameters: mass of the sun, masses of the planets you're leaving and going to and the distances of the planets from the sun. Many refinements are possible, but rough estimates of delta v requirements for any minimum-energy journey can be run off on a slide rule in no time. The least costly method of longdistance space travel involves transfer orbits, sometimes called Hohmann orbits after the German architect, Dr. Walter Hohmann, who first calculated the energy required to get from place to place in the solar system. Hohmann's book, The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies, was published in the midthirties and was an important book indeed, because it showed that space travel really was possible with chemical rocket fuels. Unfortunately, as Willy Ley noted in Rockets And Space Travel, Hohmann's book is nearly unreadable, combining Germanic scholarly thoroughness, a subject matter unfamiliar to many, lots of mathematics and an unnervingly complex style. Despite these handicaps his work remains important and the transfer orbits he described are the only feasible methods of getting to other planets from Earth, using chemical rockets, (see page #) In Hohmann orbits, the starting planet at go and the target planet at the time of journey's end must be precisely opposite each other, with the sun between. Naturally, then, the trip begins when the target planet hasn't yet reached opposition -- these journeys can start only at certain times. The ship departs on a trajectory that carries it into a highly elliptical orbit with one end of the ellipse just touching the orbit of the origin planet and the other touching the orbit of the target planet. The delta v required for Hohmann trips to various places is shown in Table One (pg. #). In every case it is assumed that the starting point is not on Earth, but in orbit around Earth. The numbers were calculated for me by Dan computers and is usually concerned with real spacecraft such as Pioneer and Mariner; they're quite accurate, given the model used. For those interested, we assume the planets have circular orbits, all lie in the same plane and use conic section approximations. The first important number is the fly-by delta v requirement. This assumes you just want to get close to the target, and after that you don't care what happens to the ship. In the real world fly-by probes can be useful afterward: the Pioneer series Jupiter probes, for example, may round Jupiter in such a way that they use Jupiter's attraction to fling them on toward other planets or out of the solar system altogether. There was even a possibility of a Grand Tour, in which the spacecraft approached Jupiter and Saturn and then either flew past both Uranus and Neptune -- or went directly from Saturn to Pluto, each time using the delta v gained from a close approach to one planet to get to the next. Congress wouldn't fund the Grand Tour and that opportunity is lost for our lifetimes -- it takes a special configuration of planets to make the Grand Tour possible. But as I write this the people are preparing to launch Mariner #, a probe that will use Venus as a slingshot to send it down to Mercury. And if all goes well Mariner will arrive at Mercury about the time you are reading this -- or right soon after. (Mariner is scheduled to arrive at Venus on Feb. #, #, and at Mercury on March #, #). T he Pioneer probes carry the famous gold plaque with a code showing the origin of the spacecraft and line drawings of human male and female, on the assumption that some day they may be picked up by beings in another star system. Since the probe will leave the solar system with a velocity of only a few kilometers per second and must cross any possibility of its being found we don't have to worry much about the aliens using it to track us back to Earth and conquer us. By that time -- if interstellar travel is possible we'll have it. It happens that I was present when that plaque -- called "The who build Pioneer -- came about. Pioneer described the experiments aboard and one happened to mention that Pioneer would definitely leave the solar system forever. One of the reporters present was Eric Burgess who, with Arthur Clarke, founded the British Interplanetary Society back in the #s. Eric became very thoughtful, and later that afternoon spoke to Carl Sagan of Cornell and some of the others in charge of Pioneer, pointDelta-v required for various trips beginning at Earth orbit. Avg. Distance Fly-By Marginal Circular From Sun Delta-V Capture Capture Target Delta-V Delta-V Sun #I .# # Mercury # # # # Venus # # # # Earth # # # # Mars #' #I # # Asteroid # # # # Ceres # #I # # Jupiter # # # # Saturn # # #I # Uranus # #I # # Neptune # # # # Pluto # # #I # Escape infinite # Values for Sun are very close approach and circular orbit at surface. Value for Earth is marginal delta-v needed to escape Earth's gravitational effect. Asteroid capture values are large because the asteroids have essentially no mass, and thus do not aid appreciably in an attempt to catch up with them after arriving at their orbital distance. ing out what a unique opportunity this was to send a message to anyone "out there." It might take a long time to arrive, but at least it was going. The idea caught on and within a week the plaque was designed and installed. Then, of course, came the complaints about the "dirty pictures" of nude men and women, but that's another story. Table One shows, in addition to fly-by delta v requirements, the delta v you'd need to get into some kind of orbit around the planet: the bare minimum for capture and a circular orbit from which you could land or observe closely. You can see the numbers come out at reasonable values -- except when you're trying to get very close to the sun. One important number is the sun escape velocity. If you have that much delta v capability, you can get to other stars -- anywhere, for practical purposes. It is important to note, though, that Table One assumes you don't start from Earth -- but from orbit around Earth. Since you need # kmsec delta v to get into Earth orbit in the first place. Bob Heinlein's top of the head remark was very close to correct. Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere. In other words, the first step is the hard one. If you can get into Earth orbit you can get most anywhere you want to go. Unfortunately the disintegrating totem poles we now use to get into orbit are just too cumbersome and expensive to make spaceflight routine. Worse, they use up nearly all their total delta v getting into orbit and the rocket is thrown away -- the drink. T he upcoming shuttle reusable ship will help and is sorely needed, but there's a system even better than that. The concept I'm about to describe can use old rocket boosters over and over again -- in fact, the rocket motor never leaves the ground. Only payload goes up. This magic feat is performed by lasers. The basic design of the system comes from A.N. Pirri and R. F. Weiss of Avco Everett research laboratories. What they propose is an enormous ground-based laser installation consuming about # megawatts. In practice there would probably be a number of smaller lasers feeding into mirrors and the mirrors would then concentrate the  Quibblers will know that you'd have to stay in the plane of the ecliptic or use a lot more energy to get out of it -- and that the Galaxy itself has a very high escape velocity, in the order of #km sec from here. beam onto one single launching mirror about a meter in diameter. This ground station boosts the spacecraft -- the ships themselves carry no rocket motors, but instead have a chamber underneath into which the laser beam is directed. The spacecraft weigh about a metric ton (# kilograms or # pounds) and are accelerated at # g's for about # seconds -- that puts them in orbit. While the capsule is in the atmosphere the laser is pulsed at about # hertz (cycles per second when I was in school). Each pulse causes the air in the receiving chamber to expand and be expelled rapidly. The chamber refills and another pulse hits -- a laser-powered ramjet. For the final kick outside the atmosphere the laser power is absorbed directly in the chamber and part of the spacecraft itself is ablated off and blown aft to function as reaction mass. Of the # kg. starting weight about # kg. goes into orbit. Some # metric tons can be put into orbit each hour at a total cost of around # megawatt-hours. Figuring electricity at #c a kilowatt hour, that's # thousand -- less than a dollar a kilogram -- for fuel costs. Obviously there are operating costs and the spacecraft aren't free, but the whole system is an order of magnitude more economical than anything we have now. Conventional power plants cost something like # per kilowatt -- a # megawatt power plant and the spacecraft arrive at the same point at the same time; Earth must be opposite that point at the time of launch. Hohmann orbitsare actually ellipses with the Sun at one focus, and if the spacecraft does not near a planet it will return to the starting point -- only Earth will have moved away in the meantime. in construction costs. However, when it isn't being used for space launches it could feed power into the national grid, so some of that is recovered as salable power. The laser installation might easily run research may be needed. The point is that for an investment on the order of what we put out to go to the moon, we could buy the research and construct the equipment for a complete operating spaceflight system, and then begin to exploit the economic possibilities of cheap spaceflight. Many benefits could accrue to an economical system of putting payload into orbit. Some are commercial -- e.g. manufacture of materials that can only be made in gravityfree environments might be facilitated. Others are not precisely commercial, but highly desirable. For example, the powerpollution problem could be enormously helped. Solar cells can collect sunlight that would have fallen into the Earth. They convert it to electricity and send it down from orbit by microwave. That's fed into the power grid, and when it's used it becomes heat that would have arrived here anyway -- the planetary heat balance isn't affected. Interestingly enough, it's now believed that orbiting solar power plants can be economically competitive with conventional plants, provided that we get the cost of a pound in orbit down to about #. The laser launch system could power itself. We don't even have to build a permanent power plant to get the laser-launcher into operation. There are a lot of old rocket motors around, and they're very efficient at producing hot ionized gases. Hot ionized gas is the power source for electricity extracted by magnetooutside the scope of this article, but basically the system calls for a hot gas to be fed down a tube wrapped with conducting coils -- and elecabout as efficient as turbine systems for converting fuel to electricity, and they can burn hydrogen to reduce pollution. The rocket engines wouldn't last forever and it takes power to make the hydrogen they'd burn -- but we wouldn't have to use the system forever. It needn't last longer than it would take to get the big station built in space and start up a solarscreen power plant. None of this is fantasy. The numbers work. Avco has done some experiments with small-scale laserpowered "rockets" and they fly. There are no requirements for fundamental breakthroughs, only a lot of development engineering, to get a full-scale working system. Laser launchers are at about the stage rockets were at circa #. Fifteen years and less than # billion would do the job and we'd have a system to put nearly anything we wanted to have out there into orbit. That doesn't seem like very much to get halfway to anywhere. I don't remember whether I discovered science fiction or Willy Ley first. I do know that as a highschool sophomore I wrote a book report on the first edition of Rockets and Space Travel, and by the end of that year I was fascinated by the space frontier. Before that I'd never thought about going to the moon and beyond. After Willy Ley I thought of little else. I even took extra math in high school because I couldn't follow Willy's arguments without it -- and when he referred to Oberth's books, I had to read those, too, and that needed more math. Eventually I made a career in the space program, managing experimental human stress studies, writing spacecraft proposals and finally ending as a generalist -- they called us systems analysts. For years we wrote science fiction without plots or characters. We called them forecasts, but they were sf all the same. It hasn't been hard to change over to the straight stuff. It is one of life's ironies that Willy Ley didn't live to watch Eagle set down on the moon. Of the people I knew in the space program, I suppose fully half of them became interested in rockets and space because they read books by Willy Ley. So Willy didn't see it happen, but I think he had as much to do with making Eagle possible as any man of this century. And, of course, Willy Ley used to write Galaxy ' s science column. I won't take his place, but I can try to make science and technology as interesting as Willy made it for me. Also, Ejler Jakobsson and I hope there will be reader response that will permit us to deal with questions that you feel need answers and cover topics of both immediate and long-term interest. While keeping in mind that readers, writers -- and even editors -- also need some fun. We'll consider any question about science and technology. We may also look into psychic phenomsection on Psi -- it's almost establishment now. For that matter, the Velikovsky to address an annual meeting -- and you can be sure I'll report on that! We also invite reader comments and information, since it's barely possible there are things going on that I haven't heard about. I'll try to follow up interesting tips and get interviews with people working at the far edges of science and technology. I'll also have some views about the effects of current technological trends on all of us. Galaxy and I hope you will draw as much mindfood and enjoyment from this column as we expect to gain.  The little alien became anything he wanted -- and he left a gift... T he discovery of Earth might slip by unnoticed. It might mean nothing. Wanderers might touch gently upon Earth many times and never think to notify the universe. A voyager might come and go, leaving a gift of himself incomprehensible and lost forever. Solo entered the pale blue atmosphere of Earth. He guided his small ship carefully through the hot blue light. As he neared the surface of the land the color temperature shifted out of the blue range to long cool rays of red. He landed in the extraordinary red wash of the South Carolina sun. Solo lay folded in his little ship as a child might lie folded within an egg. His body was exposed and sensitive to the color of light and he lay pale and cool as if wrapped in red cellophane. It was late afternoon and late summer in #. The ship opened and Solo stood on the red soil of South Carolina. It was quiet outside on the country, minutely still as red dust. The hills were worn down, soft and deserted with age, left to die alone like old dogs. Alongside Solo's ship lay the rusted knife-edged body of a junked automobile. Farther away, across the soft red dust of the yard, there was a small house built of discarded lumber and corrugated metal. The metal hurt his eyes and Solo looked away. Because there was no one to see him, Solo was barely defined against the light. He was pale and ghostly as a strange deep-water fish. Only his eyes of a fiery chrome green, and the life fluids beating within him, betrayed him as mortal and vulnerable. Solo had no home but the little sailing ship. His soul belonged to a race of pale gypsies, but he belonged to no one. Solo was not a poet, but a poem. He was not a painter. He was the painting. His slender ghostly form belonged to no one and belonged to anyone. What he was, was a trader. He had one gift to give in return for the form and shape of himself. His gift was a chrome-green egg as fiery as a panther's eye. Inside the egg lay the universe. Solo's unborn child. Solo waited by his ship for someone to come. The little sailing ship lay collapsed in a vague transparent heap. It looked like nothing. It had no masts, no hull, but it was very much a sailing ship, running with its slender sail bent under the constant energy of light. Now it lay inert like a cobweb thrown to the ground. Only Solo's touch could bring it to life. Solo waited. He pressed the soles of his feet into the warm red dust and watched the land. He let the red light wash his skin and his eyes and he waited for the form and substance of what he could become. By the time Solo heard the first sounds of someone coming, the red light of the sun had washed out into a clean pale gray light. Crickets and frogs had begun to shriek. The mule came along the hard black road, its head moving up and down with the clipping of its hooves. Close on its rump the mule pulled an ancient wagon which came creaking and swaying on large wooden wheels banded in iron. The wagon and mule came as if wandering, as if the road only happened to be there, following beneath the wheels. The wagon was built of the same discarded boards as the house, pieces of broken wood that had all been part of something else and now were piled one on the other for a utility without form or beauty, or even the will to fall apart. At the front of the wagon, high up on the narrow ledge, a yellow dog was riding high and cocky, fastened up tight against a skinny old black man. T hey came all together, one to themselves, the old man's hand flapping with soft slack reins and shoulders humping with the shock of rolling iron. The wagon and the mule were the same, old warped boards resurrected, the mule long faded like a dead thing from the sea, the whole of them coming, alone and single, old black man and yellow fur dog. Solo stood watching and still as the wagon moved across the yard and stopped in a haze of dust. There was a space of silence as the wagon itself settled and became still. Then one of the mule's long ears dangled in Solo's direction. All at once the dog cameoff the wagon in a high wild leap. Solo stayed where he was, pale and unsure, as the dog tore soundlessly across the yard toward him. The dog charged with terrifying intent, only to fall at Solo's feet. The yellow dog had found his mate. He leaped away, bounding stiff-tailed, stiff-toed, dancing for Solo. The old man finally seemed to notice. He spoke to the dog. "You dog. Get away from that boy," he said. The dog began running around the house, mad with joy. The old man continued unbuckling the harness from the mule and paid no attention to Solo. Solo edged nearer to the old man. The old man did not look at him again after he had spoken to the dog. The old man had seen a hungry young boy with dusty brown skin. He did not need to look again. The harness dropped to the ground around the mule. Still its ghost remained, a harness of long thin lines about the mule's body where the leather straps had worn into its skin. The old man rubbed down the mule with his bare hands. His own skin was as worn off and shiny gray as the mule's. After the rubdown the mule wandered off. Like the old man, it paid no attention to Solo. The old man walked to the door of the house but did not go inside. The door was broken off its hinges and rested against the side of the house. The old man sat on the open sill of the doorway. He stretched his legs out on the dirt and pulled something small and shiny out of a pocket of his overalls. He sat there a long while, holding it in his fist as the darkness closed on him. Solo crossed his legs and sat in the dust of the old man's yard. He rubbed his hand over his head. He felt a mat of warm dusty hair. The dog had run off and he waited alone with the old man. He gave no sign of going away. At last the old man opened his fist and revealed the small mouth harp that lay in his palm. He brought it up to his lips. The little harp, wrapped up in both old hands, began to sing. Solo sat enchanted. He forgot his newly hungry belly. He forgot his little sailing ship. He forgot everything but the little harp hiding in the old man's hands. It became very dark, still he watched the solitary notes slip through the old man's fingers. Finally, because of what the old man had made of him, Solo began to tremble with hunger and exhaustion. The old man knew. In one motion he slid the harp into a pocket and disappeared through the doorway. Inside, in the dark, he lit the kerosene lamp. The mantles threw off a yellow flickering light that leaped through the doorway toward Solo. Then the old man was standing in the flames of light. "Boy. You there, boy?" he said. Solo jumped to his feet. "Yes sir," he said. "Step inside boy. You can sleep the night here." S olo stepped across the slab of wood that separated the inside from the outside. The lantern was hissing steadily. The floor was the same red dirt that lay out in the yard. The old man set two bowls on a table. They sat together at the table and ate cold red beans. In the light of the lamp Solo watched the old man. The old man's eyes were deep and black as caves. They reflected no light. The things that went into them never came out again. The old man scraped some beans into a dish and put them outside the door. Then he crossed the room to his cot. He sat down but his hands were restless. Solo's own hands were restless and he stuck them into the pockets of his overalls. The old man shrugged, muttered to himself and dipped Solo a cup of water. Something tapped under his hand on the table. When he drew away his hand the little harp remained. "Go on, boy. It's burning a hole in my pocket with you watching me all the time," he said. Solo was shocked at how much his hands wanted to hold on to the harp. He could see what it looked like for the first time. The wooden struts that separated the notes were still wet and swollen from the old man's playing. The bright metal cover was stamped with the words: closed his hand around it but his fist was not big enough to cover it like the old man's. Solo grinned. "It's hot," he said. "Yes sir," the old man said. "Burned a hole right in my pocket." Solemnly he pulled out his pocket and showed Solo the hole. So Solo sat that night in the old man's house, playing the old man's songs. He knew it was a mistake. It was a mistake, for all the times in his sailing ship the old man's songs would not be with him. But his hands held the little harp the way he had seen the old man hold it and he watched the solitary notes slip through his own fingers and he forgot that it was a mistake. The old man had taken the blanket off the cot and spread it on the floor for Solo. When Solo finished the old man was lying on the cot, his face to the ceiling. The old man said nothing and Solo left the harp on the table. He lay down on the blanket in his overalls, his face to the ceiling. There was only the sound of the lantern and then the old man spoke. "You is fine, boy," he said. "You is fine." The old man screwed down the lantern. The room began to grow closer and dimmer and then it was black. In the dark, Solo stared at the ghosts of what had been. He heard the old man moving to the blanket. He felt the edges of the harp as it was pressed into his palm. "This is a no-good harp. Blownout. Rusted. No good. You have it, boy." Solo's lips were aching and raw from scraping across the little blocks of wood. He could not talk. The old man said, "I get me a brand new one. Two dollars. Brand new." It was very dark. Through the open door clean damp air moved over Solo and he began to cry. He cried until he fell asleep, without knowing if it was himself crying, or the old man's boy. a ice, long before the sun came up, Solo left the house and ran off into the hills. The yellow dog had returned, prancing and excited with the urge for love. The yellow dog pressed his shoulder against Solo's and they ran together, Solo running with wild panther-green eyes, running as the yellow dog's mate. In the early morning the old man woke first. The early light that entered the house was gray and cool and wet. Solo lay curled on the blanket, still sleeping, as the old man moved about. Once the old man looked at his face, at the lids of his eyes, which were closed and secret. Softly he started a small fire in the wood stove with newspaper and kindling. He filled a pan with water and set it on the stove for the oatmeal. While he was doing this his hand sometimes slipped in and out of his pocket. He himself did not eat. He watched the boy sleeping and then he went out to catch the mule. The dusty red light on his skin woke Solo. He stood in the doorway and watched the sun come up. The yard was empty. The wagon was gone. Because there was no one to see him he was very pale, the color of the sun. He stood quietly in the doorway as the first heat of the day began to roll up from the earth. The old man had placed a clean bowl on the table for him. A pan of warm oatmeal sat on top of the wood stove. Solo crossed the room to the blanket where he had slept. He picked up the harp and held it tightly in one fist. He sat on the old man's cot until early afternoon. The old man's shiny gift stayed closed in his fist. The little harp was cold and strange. He did not look at it or bring it to his lips. At last he went to the table, did what he had to do and left the gift he had to give. In the evening the old man returned. He did not look for the boy. The dog stayed close by him while he rubbed down the mule. He wiped his hands on his pants. Against his will his hands slipped in and out of the pockets of his overalls. He wandered to the house without purpose. He got the lantern going and pumped it to a fierce white brightness. The clean bowl was still there on the table. The boy had left no mark in his house. Then he saw that there was something else on the table. It was the little mouth harp, and against the harp rested a small chromegreen egg. The shell was of a color he had never seen before and he gently rolled it in his palm. The egg seemed to leap from within with green fire. The second time that day the old man built a fire in the wood stove. He placed the egg in the center of the bowl on the table. The fiery green egg lay in the bowl, solitary as a panther's eye. Inside the egg lay the universe. The old man took the egg and broke it on the edge of an iron pan. It cooked quickly and he ate his first food of the day. After a while the old man took the harp from the table and sat in the shadow of the doorway. He played across the black hills and black sky. His old hands were sweating with a need for the boy to hear him.  Who cared about the end of the world? Not the man who saw it... '  rA ' ' '  V  . T he rainbow went out of his head and of course he was left colorless. But Led Wyatt had been in Ihis situation before. It didn't matter that now he looked a lot like the drab world outside the time cruiser, with winter clouds in his hair and a leftover gleam in his eyes. It didn't matter. He could still led the big play coming up -- a tired llirill that was churning in his brain. Last of the orbits, planet loaded, score untied. Belt one outa here, babe. "Bullshit!" Wyatt said to the transmitter that was embedded in his wisdom tooth, the one on the lower left side. "You got a problem, Wyatt?" A voice in his ears, blunt and slightly time-distorted, belonging to one of the guys he'd never seen who coached the time shot from back at the monitor and the computer and the St. Louis base. "Everything looks green-and-go here on the board." Wyatt instinctively checked himself (which included the cruiser) for leeling and function. He agreed with green-and-go. Electronically, he agreed. But he wished he could spit. He said, "This is a bum trip." "A what?" "A bum trip." "Is that bum? B-U-M?" "Yeah. What the hell difference -- " "Hold on, Wyatt." The way he held on was with a weary sigh of disbelief. He knew what they were doing. They were getting a definition from the computer. When it came a moment later he tried to be amused, but there was no place for a laugh in the tired anger of his darkening mood. " Bum trip is an old expression from the nineteen-sixties. It means a no-good reaction to the ingestion of drugs." "How about a no-good reaction to a lousy assignment?" "No good." "Screw you," said Wyatt. Wanting more stretch, he adjusted his position. Around him the padded cocoon reflowed to compensate for his moves. Then the cruiser shifted slightly to cover the changes in the cocoon. Wyatt felt it all happen -- it was nothing new as far as he was concerned. If he had a superdollar for every time he'd been attached, for every time he'd come black-and-white to the end of the world, for every time he'd been expected to save the remnants of Earth  Moon, and for every time he'd actually done it... Well, what could he do with the money anyway? Buy a beach house for his old age? Uh-uh. There were no more beach houses (no beaches), no more log cabins (no logs), no more grass shacks (no grass), and all the money not left in the world couldn't even buy him a # x # lot in the retirement of Sun City (the sun itself, rarely visible, a burning globe from way back when). "Can you guys see the sun today?" he wanted to know. "Haven't looked," was the reply. "What's the forecast?" "Five per cent chance." "Big deal," said Wyatt, mulling it over. Sunshine. Galactic League. Soaking it up. Three seasons of roving in the outfield, and best of all were the days when they could roll back the dome and be touched by the fine heat of the sun. A little sweat, a summer shadow, chasing with him back to the fence. Not very often, days like that. Then not at all. Earth  Moon, having little left of anything, was cut out of the Galactic League. The franchise moved. Led Wyatt didn't -- his unique talents had already been recruited by the new government project in St. Louis. The new project was now a wornout bitch. Bitterly Wyatt shook himself out of the sunny day and into the bleak mist of the future. Form and substance, he was built into his cruiser and scurrying forward through time to the place where it all ended. But who really cared? There were enough living worlds to handle all of the known population to the tenth power. There was no need for Earth  Moon. Saving Earth  Moon over and over and over again was like washing out rags. Hardly worth the effort. # teah, I'm still alive," Wyatt JL reported in a voice that for him was a whisper. "The reason I'm not talking is because I've got nothing to tell you." "Are you almost there?" persisted the St. Louis base. "How the hell do I know? The color's been gone for about five centuries, but sometimes the whole business just drags on and on." "We figured you'd be there already." "Well, junk the figures and listen to me. I'll know it when I see it. Or better yet, get your tail out here and see if you can do it yourself." "Time-travelers -- " When the statement began, Wyatt could tell it was the lead-in to the ungolden rule that was the scourge of his life. He wanted to shut off his ears. " -- are born, not made." "Funny how they're not born too often," Wyatt replied. "I've got a feeling that I've been shafted." "You've been what?" "Shafted!" "Hold on, Wyatt." Quickly to the computer and quickly back. "A shaft is the long handle of a spear." "All right, then I've been speared." "Do you mean that you've been treated badly?" "Something like that." "It's not true, Wyatt. There are ten known time-travelers and you're all highly paid. You were the first. Now you're the oldest. The problem is that you're too old. But we only call on you when the other nine are busy -- or when we need your specialty." Instinctively Wyatt checked the console, the lights, the screen, his fingers, and took a look outside. The cold gray stream of swiftly passing time made him shiver, but a sixth sense told him that everything was quiet and that he was still far from the approaching threat of nonexistence. He said, "You're right. I'm too old." "Well, you refuse to train any of the others. You won't even talk to them. As soon as you come back from a trip you go off with that woman." "Not any more." "Oh, broke up, huh? Well, at your age there's not much left to offer a woman." Wyatt ran his tongue over dry lips. He said, "She died, you bastard." For a few seconds the base fell silent. Even measured by the depths of the usual sarcasm, it wasn't much of a pause. It didn't reflect shock; it didn't give concern; it didn't show respect. Everybody dies, especially on Earth  Moon. "Sorry," the answer came, floating in metallic sobriety from one ear to the other. Wyatt closed his eyes. Sandra. Sandy. Honey. Remembering her was like listening to the scratches at the end of a tape. The images were only of those final days... She would squeeze his hand when she had the strength, smile tiredly when she felt his pity. ("Mmmm, Led, this warms me all the way through. Once I had a dog called Brandy -- it's a nice name for a dog.") But breathing emphysematously, but coughing blood, but growing thinner, but dreaming nightmares, but never fighting to drag it out, only dying with a scrap of dignity. ("No matter how far out you go in time, you'll always be able to call me yours -- always.") Few women were left on Earth  Moon and none like her. She was his last woman. It was always the last of something. That was the business he was in, Wyatt thought. It was up to him to preplan the complete disposal of whatever items could cause the end of the world. And it was true that he was the expert -- the only expert. He and the time cruiser were a single working unit that could sense the danger point within a year, zero in on it and analyze the conditions that brought it on. Many, many trips so far and never had he failed to find the end and extend it. The real expertise came in figuring out how, in determining the cause and effect and in going back to the present to change the cause. The key to the trick was to catch it before the end (otherwise -- blooey). If it weren't for that, one of the others might be able to do it. But to sense the situation, to find the right answer, all before it was too late -- that was deep in the brain of Led Wyatt. A great natural hitter, babe. Qt r i k uiT laughing," Wyatt muttered. TrrTjust remembering some of your weirdies." "Which ones?" "Most of them. The bottles, for instance." Wyatt winced. That wasn't from a recent trip, that was from one of the first. All bottles had to go. All glass bottles (weren't many left anyway) and all plastic bottles (just a Bury them, sink them, send them to the other planets. All right. So whiskey now came in squeezebags. And everything else was either piped in or freezedried. After all, it only affected some ten thousand people, the poor unlucky bastards who were assigned to keep Earth  Moon running. "Big deal," Wyatt said. "What are you, a bottle baby?" Giggling in his ears like a clown in heat, the St. Louis base could only come up with a flicker of steadiness in the voice that carried on the debate. "You've got to admit that you pick out some strange disposals." "I don't pick them out. God picks them out -- somebody picks' them out. I just find them." More laughing. "God didn't pick out bowling trophies." "For chrissakes, that was -- " "Or pinochle cards. How about that, Wyatt? You think God ever played pinochle?" "You know damn well why we had to get rid of the cards," Wyatt said. "Those jerks who were supposed to be monitoring the atomic stockpile were so wrapped up in their pinochle game that they didn't see the warning light." "That's your story." "You must be dumb enough to believe it," Wyatt replied. "You keep sending me out." "Well, whenever we get a signal... You'll see,, one of these times we'll take a chance on a younger guy." "Go ahead. And he'll keep telling you what I keep telling you -- get rid of the stockpile." Wyatt shook his head with the nearest approach to helplessness that he'd ever been able to achieve -- and even though he knew that no one could see him he quicklyturned his mien into a scowl that deepened and darkened the lines in his face. With a routine glance at the panel lights he continued his argument. "Most of the trouble comes up at the nuclear warehouse. If you're going to keep all those megatons of fissionable materials, then you've got to expect to get ignition." "Not if you keep stopping it. You know we've got to have the stuff. It's energy for all the worlds -- heat, fuel, defense, power -- for all the worlds, Wyatt." "Doesn't do much for Earth Sc Moon except make us into a matchstick," he answered. "Come off it, Wyatt." The St. Louis base sounded a bit more serious. "We need the stockpile more than anyone else. It's all we've got. If Earth  Moon wasn't a warehouse it'd be abandoned. One function, dangerous as hell -- that's what keeps this place going." "Then don't go getting jacked up about the pinochle cards," Wyatt told him. Or anything else, he thought, picturing the list. Rifles. Ballpoint pens, monkeys, and self-help psychology books. Easter Sunday, digital thermometers, circuses, sleeping pills, aluminum siding, standup desks, prostitutes, small airplanes, diamond mines in South Africa, glue, extension cords, bourbon, snow shovels (good riddance), parrots, tennis shoes, cigarettes -- no, that was for cancer. He was getting mixed up with the cancer list: cigarettes, mustard, cranberries, charcoal, deodorants -- no end to that list either -- and then there was the heart list and the ecology list (too late) and the morality list and some day the list list. Unfortunately, time travel -- Wyatt leaned forward in the cruiser, only slightly, which was as far as he could go because he was part of it, watching the traces of a gray fog rolling in around him. -- was still permitted. The fog was a sign for sure. He sniffed, trying to get the feel of it. Not yet. Not quite yet. The cruiser bumped along in some unappreciated turbulence. It was shaking up his stomach. That was another thing that had started recently: a stomach full of belching gas and narrow shooting pains, now and then, even through time, even though he was eating more mildly and drinking much less. He thought that maybe it was because he'd given up women. He'd heard that somewhere. Or read it. Sex and the stomach, sex and the brain, sex and the nerves. A lot could happen to a guy who wasn't getting it any more. W yatt cursed too loudly. The transmitter in his tooth had once been perfectly installed, but lately at high volume it caused vibrations to reach down to his toes; and in this exuberant case they were bouncing back to cause a secondary shock and limit his choice of strong words to just one. Fiercely, but more quietly, he added, "Don't you guys have nothing better to do?" "Just staying tuned in, in case you need any help." The voice in his ears was getting lower in tone, as if someone were turning his nose clockwise to bass. Actually, it was the increasing length of time-distance that was stretching the soundwaves. "How much time has passed since I left?" Wyatt asked. "You mean back here?" "Yeah, you nuts -- where do you think I mean?" There was a recognizable pause, obviously for the higher math of computer calculations. All they had to do was look at a wristwatch, Wyatt thought -- but hell, no, that was too easy. He gnashed his teeth. He hoped it generated eons of static. "Two hours, fourteen minutes," came the reply. "Then I should be there already," Wyatt said, shifting with the contour pads that held his body and automatically moved him into regulated positions. "With all the goddamn practice you've had, you'd think that once in a while you could come close to pinpointing it." "That's your trick, Wyatt." "But, hell, you know it happened. Tell me when." "We told you." "Bull. You didn't tell me, you sent me. With what you told me I couldn't find the day after tomorrow or an open bedroom at Mama Flo's. Maybe I could stand and hit the fast ball without knowing where it would be, because I could afford to miss it; but the end of Earth  Moon is faster and wilder and noisier and if it happens just once -- " "It won't. You're on the right track and we put you there. You couldn't get anywhere without the St. Louis base." "Don't I know it," Wyatt grumbled, mostly to himself. "What did you say?" "I said blow it." He cut himself short, realizing that the conversation was costing him full awareness of the cruiser as it (he) stoked the years toward a roaring fire that he (it) had to snuff out. But the base was still explaining. "Listen, Wyatt, we're doing the best we can. It's like tuning in an FM station. We get it and then it drifts away. We know it's there because we can read it, but it covers a wide spectrum of the dial. Just keep going -- you'll find it." "Sure," said Wyatt. He let out a breath that fluttered his lips. Was anything going on? The dials in front of him, a fan-shaped set of twelve, were spinning and changing so rapidly that they were meaningful only to the onboard computer and even that was subject to doubt. And all the lights on the console -- if one could visualize a logical console with no physical shape being everywhere in the cruiser -- were flashing intermittently, with one vital exception: a small bank of parallel lights, near his right hand, was dark and waiting. At the moment the best clues were outside. The color and the fog. There was no color. There was a lot of fog. A gray slowly turning black like the dusk of eternity. Sure enough, he was getting close. In his ears the base said bluntly, "One-point-eight centuries since the last report." "Shut up," he snapped back. It was time for concentration. Whatever was happening would soon be in range. By thinking about it, he activated the screen. It was there like he was there, part of everything -- yet in its unique way it was a bay window with a sweeping, zooming, panoramic view of hundreds of kilometers of nuclear storage. It was (he was) out of focus. The blur of the screen was part fog and part the rapid movement of time. There was no reason to tune in sharply until the moment there was something to see. That moment, Wyatt knew, was about to ring in. His thoughts moved into the focus mode. On a separate level, the chill that ran icily from his head to his spine had nothing to do with electrical impulses or cruiser temperature -- it was the ache in the bones, it was the trick knee, it was the dry socket in the shoulder, it was the corns on the bottom of the feet, it was the skip in the heartbeat -- it was, of course, the inner signal that he'd been waiting for. Good eye, baby... 'll let you know," Wyatt said flatly. "But you've got the screen on." The St. Louis base, in a stretched out, far off drawl, was showing signs of excitement. "So what?" "You must be there, Wyatt." "I'll let you know." "Are you starting to time-focus?" "Pretty soon." Wyatt's mind toyed with the control without moving it. "What do you see?" "Nothing yet. Quit yelling in my ears." But he saw the small bank of lights, dormant throughout the trip, start to flicker like wind-blown candles -- and even if he hadn't seen it from the corner of an eye, he would have sensed the same thing. There was an absolute stillness that involved the whole Earth  Moon. It seemed as if that point in time were without life or breath or sound. And yet all of that hush was only in his mind, with a meaning that reached to the opposite extreme, because somewhere out in the world there was the beginning of violent action and the silence was breaking. Here again, he thought. The end, the cause -- and what would it be? "C'mon, Wyatt, what's happening?" "If you would quit bugging me -- " he answered, and his eyes were hard. It would be a gang of teenage tyrants, turned on by the old quad tapes of Carter Lee Cash, storming the atomic center. Chains and sledges and miniature flamethrowers. And with ancient Nashville beating in their earpieces they smash through the gates and tear out the equipment and destroy the controls and gleefully brew a radioactive turmoil that becomes the beginning spark of a doomsday explosion. Cause: country music. Eliminate guitars. "Are you getting a signal?" "Yeah, I think so," Wyatt said. It would be the host computer, which somebody forgot to reprogram for February #th, overactivating the fusionable stockpile. As the confused cycle of the calendartimer starts correcting in the wrong direction, the sensors read the feedback as if it were midsummer; the automatic removal-and-replacement procedure is unexpected at that time and so is the mushroom cloud. Cause: an extra day. Eliminate leap years. "God almighty, Wyatt, we've got it ourselves. You're there! You're there!" The flickering lights were now a frightening staccato of red embers. Wyatt looked up at the screen, mildly surprised to find it still blurred. His nerve ends tightened on the focusing knob. It would be a freight elevator, breaking loose of its cables, plunging through the leadsteel skin of the cooling tower and rupturing the lines that carry in the water and carry out the steam. The vats of charged rods grow warmer and warmer, but they never get as hot as the blast that follows. Cause: height. Rebuild everything on one floor. "Have you got it, Wyatt?" the St. Louis base demanded to know. "Should we bring you back now?" "Wait a minute," Wyatt said. "You don't have a minute! Do you know how long a minute is out there? In a minute the whole damned thing -- " iiT #LL be shot to hell," Wyatt W said after a while, but there was only peace in his ears. He had passed it by -- gone right on ahead. He thought he caught sight of the sudden flash and a quick sniff of burned Earth  Moon -- it was a fuzzy memory almost as soon as it happened. And now, inside the cruiser, he felt the strange sensation of being past the point in time where everything ended. There was no way back. Neither, to his amazement, was there any kind of sudden stop. The fog had changed to utter blackness, but Led Wyatt could still sense the forward movement. He was shooting through time, and it was infinite, and he would go on forever and ever and ever... Or at least until the ship ran out of... A time cruiser, he remembered darkly, runs out of nothing. Give it a ride, baby...  tank of gas... would you be interested? make just such a guarantee. and smoother performance, faster starts... smoother idling and no more Vapor Locks. and Laboratory -- to perform as advertised. Send # (check or money order) to... W ell, I told you -- we're becoming, if not respectable, then the subjects (perhaps I should say targets) of respectable assessments from the bigdomes and the heavyweights. Here is New Worlds for Old, by David Ketterer (#, indexed, # pages, a Doubleday Anchor paperback.) Subtitled: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature, this chunky tome is one of a whole library annex of forthcoming new books about the sf phenomenon. David Ketterer operates out of Montreal, where he is a Professor of English at Concordia University. His book is the product of an immense amount of research and an irresistible determination to apply the term "apocalyptic" to the literature of speculation. He writes a determined and unleavened prose, does his footnotes and attributions impeccably, and is a perfect example -- a most rarefied and refined example -- of what I am irresistibly determined to call The Labeler. I cannot knock The Labeler -- he performs many valuable functions and is the product of the evolution of rational thinking, the well-honed weapon against fuzziness and against blind faith. As he approaches his work each morning he makes his obeisance to the commandment: Define Your Terms. His conviction is that nothing can be handled, can be understood, can be placed in an ideational sequence, unless every part of the specimen be described and defined and every term used in this definition be in turn defined -- until you get prose like this:... I have defined as apocalyptic any work of fiction concerned with presenting a radically different world or version of reality that exists in a credible relationship with the world or reality verified by empiricism and common experience -- the world or reality the author may assume his reader to bring to a reading of his work. My use of the adjective "credible" rather than the narrower qualifier "rational" is based on the assumption that an act of faith and an act of reason may be equally and inextricably involved in the acceptance of any unseen world that is, in some sense, concordant with the known world. The end product is, inevitably, the use of a great many more words and the loss of that great guiding principle that basics are simple and that complicated things, though they may be poignant and passionate and shakingly important, are by their very nature not basic. The passion for microscopic precision exemplified in the passage above also implies that the imprecise, the infra-rational, the wordless cry, do not communicate nor exactly define. Bradbury once wrote of fireworks that before you can raise a pointing finger, before you can say, "There!" the thing is gone -- and yet, it isn't gone and you know it isn't. I had an agent many years ago, for a score of months, and we came to the parting of the ways because he wanted me to sign a contract. The contract ran four pages and had twenty-one clauses. I wanted to be able to say, "You are my agent", which seamlessly states that the man had the right to ten per cent of my income. He could never grasp the fact that to surround anyone with a thousandpart palisade creates a structure with a thousand cracks. Scholastics seem sometimes to achieve definition at the expense of statement -- so devoted are they to getting the parts in the right boxes that, to readers other than their colleagues, they run the risk of losing the form and texture of the thing analyzed. Again I say that such work is useful and valuable, admirable and worthy, and I would be the first to concede that it is not mutally exclusive with the intuitive, the "love is when -- " type of definition description. ("Love is when it's also good to get out of bed, morningtime," a young lady once told me.) Few phrases have conveyed so much about the work we do here as has "sense of wonder" -- and few phrases have bled so badly, lost so much life under the microtome. Anyway, David Ketterer defines his terms and partitions his thesis with a massive neatness, as: Science-fiction stories may be roughly grouped into three categories, depending upon the basis of the extrapolation involved. A writer may extrapolate the future consequences of present circumstances, in which case he will probably produce sociological science fiction within the "utopia'Vdystopia range. (Here a footnote citing Brunner's Zanzibar . ) Secondly, and this is a frequently related category, typified by much of H. G. Wells' work, he may extrapolate the consequences following the modification of an existent condition. (Here a thousandword Blake, ecology, Frank Herbert, George R. Stewart, E. A. Poe and the Apocalypse.) This modification, as Kingsley Amis notes, frequently takes the form "of some innovation in science or pseudoscience or pseudo-technology" or "some change or disturbance or local anomaly in physical conditions." (Here a footnote identifying the Amis source and quoting J. O. Bailey on Olaf Stapledon.) Thirdly, the most philosophically oriented science fiction, extrapolating on what we know in the context of our vaster ignorance, comes up with a startling donnee, or rationale, that puts humanity in a radically new perspective. In the second and third categories, the element of analogy becomes increasingly evident. Needless to say, the three categories overlap, and distinction depends upon emphasis. I saac Asimov says: "There are basically three kinds of science fiction, and you may find any or all in a given story: "what if -- ", "if only -- ", and "if this goes on." Which, I think, makes my point, which is not that one or the other form is preferable, but that we must not let the pressure toward self-complicating precision obscure the coexistent art of scooping it all up in one cupped hand. To do Ketterer full justice, I shall describe the structure and content of his book: part one, New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Science Fiction. A Prophecy of America, the Moon, and Mars, part two, Other Worlds. Edgar Allan Poe and the Visionary Tradition of Science Fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula K. Le Guin's Archetypical "Winter-Journey." Other Worlds in Space and Time. Utopian Fantasy as Millennial Motive and Science-fictional Motive. The Means and Ends of Science Fiction. part three, The Present World in Other Terms. Human, More or Less. The Transformed World of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. Solaris and the Illegitimate Suns of Science Fiction. (Ouch. TS.) It's a Flat World! Epoch, Eclipse and Apocalypse: Special Effects' in A Connecticut Yankee. New Dimensions in Time, Space, and Literature. Somebody up There: Melville's The ConfiJcnce Man and the Fiction of Science. Vonnegut's Spiral Siren (all: From Dresden's Lunar Vistas lo Tralfamadore. And that meticulous Index. C learly, then, the book is informative. Provocative, too. I would like to be in a room with David Ketferer, who is quite certain that si is a uniquely American phenomenon, and Franz Rottensiciner, who got up a whole anthology ( View From Another Shore) to show that Europe has its own distinctive variety. I should like to hear a debate between him and Dr. Tom Clareson of the Science Fiction Research Association; I should like the opinions of Disch and Zelazny on his discoveries of metaphor in Le Guin; I should like to see him in the middle of a table with George Alec lleinlein at the other. U nder no circumstances must you miss Commune # A. I)., by Mack Reynolds (Bantam, TSe). Mack Reynolds, one of the best slam-bang storytellers in any Held, has long practiced the "if this goes on" variety of science fiction, lie is a great deal more than a historically minded, socially conscious extrapolator; he is a guy who genuinely gives a damn about our species and what it has done, what it is doing to itself. He has in this remarkable novel evolved the commune, the alternative life style, and the Guaranteed Annual Income (which President Nixon -- knowing, I think, that it hadn't a chance in the world to pass -- dared to suggest a few years ago) and manages to present the mosaic of a world almost completely automated and computerized, in which less than # of the people have jobs. Without forcing the gadgetry down our throats, he shows what it would be like to live through a day in a world in which money had disappeared, in which personal property has, for the bulk of the population, no meaning, because all goods and services of equal quality are available to everyone. It sounds like heaven and is much like those slickpaper magazine prophecies of lifein-#, when you dial the market for your food, clothes, lunch or whatever, put your I.D. against a sensitized plate and have everything delivered almost before you can switch off the machine. There's a General Data Bank you can call on for information about anything or anybody anywhere and each individual is reachable by a small portable TV phone wherever he may be. Then there are the communes, populated by people who share a theme, if not a dream: singles only, for example; artists (this one's mobile -- five hundred or more mobile homes roaming the countryside); nudists; Greek revivalists with an emphasis on sports, drug culture and so on. The protagonist, a PhD in ethnology thirsting for his next degree (it's called "academician") is told to write his dissertation on the communes. After visiting a few he discovers that he is being used as a spy. Take it from there. Reynolds takes it through perplexing mystery and wild adventure (some of it most joyfully sexual) to a conclusion which -- my only objection to the book -- is too abruptly, almost naively, revealed. But all of it, as good social science fiction should, turns a blue-white light on what we do and are, right now. T om scortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro have come up with a most original anthology idea. Get a basic story line, hand it to two writers, one male, one female, keeping them isolated from one another, and see whether there is any real difference in their treatments. The editors did this with five carefully selected couples, and themselves each wrote a story. The couples: Joe Gores and Miriam Allen de Ford; Pamela Sargent and Michael Kurland; Sydney J. Van Scyoc and Reginald Bretnor; George Zebrowski and Tamsin Ashe; Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Harlan Ellison; Willo Davis Roberts and Thomas N. Scortia. The editors have appended the six themes and I find the whole thing fascinating. I have long been certain that two writers writing the same story can run them back to back in the same anthology, and sometimes they will be so drastically different that the reader will never know. That doesn't quite happen here, but the differences between each two stories, built on the same theme, are surprising. In my opinion the experiment demonstrates that there is no significant difference between the males and the females in approach or texture. There are some very good yarns here, some so-so, none bad -- and these comments apply evenly between the sexes. "Vive Laquelle Difference ?" ask the editors in their introduction -- and I echo, what difference indeed? A good writer is a good writer, fall the chromosomes where they may. The book's called Two Views of Wonder (Ballantine #). G ot a starchy letter from a lady who objected to my paragraph a few issues ago about how Wina and I are forcing a tiny garden and raising rabbits and making our own clothes and furniture and so on, all in order to steer our heads toward survival. Had no place in a review column, she said. I concede the point, modifying it only this much: science fiction is happening to society -- and you may apply that on many levels. Your editor concedes nothing -- Ted's incursion into what he is and likes was by invitation -- ed.) Science g Fiction " You love good storytelling and the SF magazines are just about the only place to find that art practiced today -- is today's magazine of the future -- the future of storythe Mystery, the Western, Fantasy, and Romance, as well as Science Fiction and modes of literature still unnamed because they chart a virginal universe. n further into the most exciting depths of the human mind -- the unbound imagination. Take a step into the future of an art! I would like to take advantage of the that if I am not completely satisfied I may cancel my subscription at any time and receive a refund on the price of the issues remaining. My payment is enclosed. (  # issues # (# savings)   # issues # (# savings)   # issues # (# savings) Name: Street: Town:  State: Zip: Boston, Mass. # When the skelter, an instant and inexpensive means of transportation, first made its advent on Earth it was hailed as a major blessing. It made all men neighbors -- and women, too -- though they might live continents apart. A man could finally choose to live in a south-sea island paradise and commute daily to his work in any of the great commercial centers of his teeming and wealthy planet. Friends and relatives separated by vast distances who had resigned themselves never to seeing each other again were suddenly able to meet whenever and as often as they wished. Yet within a few short years fwo thirds of the Earth's population was destroyed and the planet was laid waste. Nations and governments vanished: private lives were ruined. For the skelter also gave access to any burglar to any household and made possible the most terrible wars history has known. Troops and weaponry could be moved with lightning speed and precision to any part of the globe -- famines and plagues followed -- until the skelter was finally brought under control through the invention of the privateer, a device that prevented all unauthorized use of the skelter. The inventor of the privateer, Chaim Aleuker, instantly became the world's wealthiest man and around him gathered a group of intellectual elite, who quietly rule what is left of the world, forsaking, even damning, all that is past. In this milieu also moves Hans Dykstra, a recuperator, whose job consists of sifting through the ruins of Earth's civilization to discover anything that might still be salvaged and made useful. Hans, however, has an illegal hobby -- he has not rejected the past; rather, he wants to restore it. In this activity he has an influential partner, a blind but wealthy Arab, Mustapha Sharif, renowned as a poet, who shares Hans's infatuation with what has gone before. Their alliance is an uneasy one -- both men know that if their activities are discovered they will be ruined. When Chaim Aleuker, feeling that his governing group of intellectuals needs new brainpower, broadcasts to all who wish to come invitations to a treasure-hunt party -- if they can solve a maze of clues scattered around the globe -- Mustapha is not interested. Hans, however, after a fight with his wife, Dany, feels challenged to prove his intellectual superiority and enters the game. To his own surprise, he wins, becomes the first contestant to solve Aleuker's IQ test, and finds himself being lionized by a gathering of Earth's finest and most influential minds at Aleuker s palatial New Zealand residence. He is enjoying the party, meets a lovely seventeen-year-old innocent, Anneliese Schenker, and is totally smitten by her beauty, when disaster strikes. The f estivities are shattered by a Maori attack. Hans grabs Anneliese, rushes her into the nearest skelter, dials for home. An instant later he is there -- and discovers his wife dead, a suicide. Interface K Incom preh ensibly Our ancestors preferred Putrefaction over evolution. They were embalmed Wrapped in sheets of lead Or stored in coffins in a vault. When my time comes I want to grow into a stalk, A leaf, a flower and an ear of com -- Mustapha Sharif H is reaction was pure reflex, without calculation. His left hand flew up to cover Anneliese's eyes while his right stabbed another code into the skelter. Between one breath and the next they were bitterly cold. "Error -- it's transmission error. Sometimes happens -- nothing is perfect. I think I must have drunk too much, terribly sorry -- what a horrible sight to have run across by accident!" Gabbling. He heard her moan a little, but she was too overcome to form words. At least, though, here in Sweden it was briefly light, low sun glinting on the snow ridges beyond the windows. And the Erikssons' corpses had safely gone to be incinerated. He could take her by the hand and lead her passive into the living zone, inventing frantic reasons for the state of the house. Her teeth chattered, although the weak sunlight had raised the temperature behind these huge windows above the freezing point. He continued with his soothing flow of talk. "Get a fire going in a second. Don't worry -- I'll take care of everything -- " On the stone hearth, logs halfcharred, ancient ash. He thought of the correspondence paper in the study and ran for it, leaving her to stare wide-eyed and amazed at the dust. He collected the entire stack and came back, carrying a sort of torch. Damp, the paper burned poorly, but it did burn. Goodbye the sheet to be featured in my secret files... In a box beside the fireplace he saw kindling that had rotted but not crumbled. His hands trembled. He hadn't built a fire in twenty years. "I'll turn on the heat in a moment," he promised "I don't come here often, you see. People don't stay in one spot these days -- I imagine Aleuker told you -- we like to follow the warmer weather because it's so easy and quick to travel. In winter, of course, one leaves a place like this empty until the spring and heads for a warmer climate." She was shaking, shaking. Near the fireplace stood a low stool -- she groped her way to it and sat down. The kindling caught and flames leaped high and yellow. (In imagination he could hear screams. Had the Maori extremists trapped many of his fellow guests in the pyre of Aleuker's home? He shut off that line of thought.) O ther questions bombarded mini -- how to conceal the house's lack of electricity? With relief he realized : She isn 't used to power, but I ought not to have mentioned turning on the heat. The oil may be circulated by an electric pump... "Are there still policemen in your world?" Anneliese asked suddenly. What? Hunkered down, tending the fire, he swiveled to face her. "You should tell the police about that dead woman," she went on. "How can I?" The lie was instantly tailored. "I told you, we were taken there by a transmission error. Probably my fault, as I said, for having drunk too much, but skelter codes and never find my way back to the same place. I don't even know what country we were in." Numbed by the cold, his fingers ached. He spread them at the fireside to rescue sensation. The chill referred to ghastly experiences in his childhood. Was it really so short a time ago -- could the world really have improved so much since he was a ragged and half-starved waif? "You don't even know what country?" she repeated dully after a pause. "No, of course not, The skelter can take you anywhere in next to no time." She pondered that for a while, eventually gave a nod and went on staring at the flames. "Sorry about the mess everywhere," he ventured. "As I said, I don't corhe here very often." "Then why did you bring us here now?" "Uh -- " Yes, why? Quickly, quickly, a convincing reason despite the fog of alcohol. "Well, obviously we had to get away from Aleuker's place, didn't we? And what's more -- " gravely, with an air of considerateness -- "you haven't had much chance to adapt to our modern world, according to what you told me. You've been overwhelmed by new ideas and new habits ever since Aleuker took you to New Zealand -- " "New Zealand?" A cry. She jolted around on her stool. "Why -- yes! Didn't you even know where you were?" Dumbly she shook her head. And forced out at length: "I thought maybe -- the United States?" The horizons of another world, Hans thought. With the concept came a sense of fresh confidence. The image of Dany's corpse, so was a warning that the universe was poised to come crashing on his head. There was no real sense of loss involved in his memory of her -- he had never actually loved his wife, just wanted to have a wife in an age when so many men were resigned to bachelorhood. But if no one apart from this ignorant girl so far knew that he had seen Dany dead, it shouldn't be too hard to wriggle out from under the consequences. The first step must be to mislead her out of understanding what she had seen. He drew a deep breath and rose to his feet. Excusing himself, he went to inspect the heating system. B y a minor miracle, it was selffeeding, with a compressed air tank to start the process that required only a dozen firm strokes on a plunger, like an overgrown camping stove. A yellowish smoky flame answered the application of his lighter, turning blue as the burner scorched itself free of dust. When he returned to the living zone the registers were already uttering the first warm air. Pausing in the doorway, he looked around with a grimace. "I should apologize. I'd no idea the place would get so filthy in such a short time. It must be very different here, by the way, than where you hail from." "Where is here?" she asked tremulously. A brief hesitation. Safe? Well, worth risking to gain her confidence. "We've come to Sweden." Her response was a distracted nod. The gamble had paid off. For her, no doubt, it was a name on an old map, corners ragged from the attentions of termites, lacking referents. She said, "No, not very different. Also at Festeburg nothing could be left for more than a day or two without becoming very dirty -- Is that snow?" She was gazing at the windows. "Snow? Yes, of course it is." "I heard about it. But I never saw any before." Hans relaxed so violently he almost gasped. It was going to be easier than he had dared to dream to convince this youngster he was telling the truth about Dany. His mind fermented with ideas: leave her here, afraid to use the skelter without a companion, trapped for as long as proved necessary to sort things out. The apartment held no evidence of his illegal trips, not even his darkroom. He could ask Karl Bonetti to confirm that Dany had made scores of suicide threats without putting any of them into practice. He could arrange to have his hallway redecorated so Anneliese wouldn't recognize anything -- or better yet, he could move to another country, another continent. It could all be done in forty-eight hours. Too bad that he would have to sacrifice the would-have-been star entry in his secret files -- but at the very edge of his mind hovered the idea that from now on he might not be paying so much attention to his hobby. This girl Anneliese -- given the way she'd been brought up she might well be susceptible to the ancient notion that marriage was a woman's only security. What would she desire more than security in this weird, unfamiliar world? To have a young bride... Ho, ho! It had to be a decade or more since a man in his thirties had married a girl of seventeen! H e took a frenzied grip on himself, aware that he was still a little drunk despite the sobering shock of seeing Aleuker's home attacked and then finding Dany. It was too soon to let his dreams run away with him. He said, "Anneliese -- dear -- I think you look tired. Should I prepare a bed for you? There's a room you can sleep in over there." He pointed toward the child's room, forgetful that he had left its door ajar and the weak sunlight would reveal the toys, books and scattered clothes. She smiled and turned her head and instantly was bewildered. "You -- you are married? You have children?" Invention, quickly! Something that can't be used against me... His tone was so smooth it astonished him as he replied, "Ah, this is my old family home. You heard that there was -- well, what we call the Blowup? And after that came plagues and epidemics." A nod. "I don't understand much about what happened -- but I was told. Things must have been very terrible." "Yes, they were. Well, I had a sister. She died. And my parents are also dead. I -- ah -- I never felt inclined to change anything in this house -- if you see what I mean." "I think I understand." "But it was a long time ago. It's foolish to live with the dead past. Now that you are here, I have an excuse to clear away what I kept as mementos -- no, sit down. Stay by the fire." Pushing her gently, one hand on her soft warm shoulder. Somehow his fingers remained in contact with her and they were looking at each other, eyes directly into eyes. A stillness grew. "Poor little girl," Hans said at last. "To be cast adrift in this strange world -- it must be awful. Trust me, though, and I'll see that you come to no harm." Unexpectedly her bright dark eyes spilled tears. "Thank you, sir," she muttered almost inaudibly. "Call me Hans." "Yes -- if you don't mind? Yes, it is a fearful new world for me and I know so little about it. I can't even find my way around, let alone make a living for myself. It is very kind of you to show such charity. You will be blessed." Upon which, with a sudden withdrawal into herself, she freed her arm from his touch and returned to her stool, gazing once more into the tire. T he house held many things that might contradict his lies. Personal letters -- the rotting food from the deep freeze, clearly stamped for consumption at the latest some forty years ago -- irreplaceable newspapers, which he had to do away with because, though ignorant of Swedish, Anneliese might read the dates on them, too. It hurt him -- it agonized him -- to see these precious relics destroyed. But he drove himself to the task, mindful of Dany's corpse waiting for him at home. Other priceless relics of the past he destroyed for fear they might lead Anneliese to ask him later why, if he had been born in Belgium, his "family home" should be in Sweden. The little girl's books, punctiliously signed -- her name had been Greta -- had to go, though not her clothes, or not all of them, for she had been tall for her age, while Anneliese was slight for hers, so some of them might come in useful. Doubtless at Festeburg with its limited resources, long before the same thing happened in the larger world, one had had to be content with other people's cast-offs... He breathed a vast sigh of relief on discovering that the girl had abandoned her stool for a long sofa and, lying on it, had dozed off. That made his job far easier. The deceased master of the house had owned a large wardrobe. He had been taller than Hans and rather fatter, but providentially took the same size in shoes. Warm in musty thick winter garments, Hans was able to trudge outside with those few articles he did not want to leave lying around for Anneliese to inquire about, yet dared not send to the incinerators for fear they would survive the flames and be recognized as antique. Most of these were luxury items, chiefly cosmetic jars and perfume bottles. He could have smashed them, but the noise might have woken Anneliese. The ground was frozen far too hard for him to dig a hole. For the time being he had to be content with hiding the things in the snow. Returning, bitterly cold, he found bedding and made up the child's bed for Anneliese -- she was short enough to find it tolerable, he judged. Then he carried her from the living zone and tucked her in, removing only her shoes. She barely stirred, so deep was her sleep by now. His mind was filled with competing emotions -- a kind of frustrated tenderness, such as he might feel if he actually were putting to bed his own child, and a cold and calculating plan for the future, a tangled skein of deceit climaxing in arson . At the edge of hearing lurked small sounds -- trickle, splash... What in the world? Oh, of course. A pipe had frost-fractured in the main bathroom. The toilet pan, he found, had been frozen, predictably enough -- now a wedge of ice bobbed in it as water dribbled down from the flushing valve. But the Erikssons had been careful people. It took Hans only minutes to locate a tool kit in a kitchen drawer. After making the repair, crudely but effectively, he inspected all the other piping he could find and concluded that there was no risk of further leaks. Now, before leaving -- what else? Obviously a light for Anneliese if she awoke while he was gone and the short sub-arctic day was over. Festeburg had never accepted electricity, so she would be used to candles. Here were several, wicks damp and fizzing, all colors of the rainbow, meant for tete-a-tete dinner parties, not real illumination -- but never mind. He set one by the bed, with matches that (he tried one) still struck well after all these years. That, and a quick note telling her not to worry, that he would be back soon, would have to be that. He dared not delay too long about reporting Dany's death, even though the Maori attack on Aleuker's home would make it extremely improbable that anybody had noted the exact time of his departure from New Zealand. He had a good cover story, too -- he would say that even as he fled he had realized he didn't want to confront Dany after their disagreement, so he had made for the Gozo outlet instead and spent a while debating with himself as to whether he should ask Karl Bonetti to examine her and pronounce on her sanity. Then, having decided against the idea, he had finally made for home to discover... Yes, the claim would carry conviction, but only if he hurried now. He propped up his note beside the candle and on impulse kissed Anneliese's forehead. She halfsmiled in her sleep. As he turned away his heart ached with yearning and delight. Interface L It was laid down That making the hajj to Mecca Earned much merit for a man. Someone I know Now makes the hajj twice a day It takes about one minute thirty seconds -- Mustapha Sharif H e walked straight past the disgusting ruin of Dany, heading for the phone. He dialed the police emergency code and waited. Sometimes the phones here worked and sometimes they didn't. This time they worked. A voice said grumpily, "Yes, police." "Please send somebody here right away," Hans said, his voice shaking just a little. "My wife -- she's dead -- " "What happened?" "She must have killed herself while I was out. Here, make a note of my skelter code. I'll disconnect the privateer." Less than two minutes later a uniformed sergeant appeared in the skelter, holding up a portable recorder. He said, "Repeat after me please: I, Hans Dykstra -- do of my own free will -- consent to the use of my skelter code -- by law-enforcement officers -- and understand -- that on completion of these inquiries -- I may require another code confidential from the authorities. Thank you." He stepped into the hallway, his eyes fixed in dismay on Dany. A moment later another policemen appeared and then after a slightly longer delay a harassed-looking man carrying a medical kit and immediately followed by a photographer. The second policeman to arrive identified himself as Chief Inspector Vanzetti. He was a portly man with tired eyes, his summerweight uniform patched with sweat, although it was locally winter. "Tell me exactly what happened," he invited. Hans licked his lips. "I -- uh -- I guess I found her about two or three minutes before I was able to call up. I had to go into the bathroom and vomit. The shock, you understand. And -- well, I wasn't feeling too good in any case. You may have heard Chaim Aleuker held a treasure hunt?" Vanzetti's eyes widened. "You were at it? Hmm -- how come you got away with a whole skin?" "Did it turn out to be bad?" "Twelve deaths that we've heard about, and most of his house destroyed -- How did you get away?" Hans felt his cheeks start to burn. He wasn't sorry. A little visible embarrassment would support his story well. "I hate to admit it, but -- Well, you see. I'd been there three hours, maybe four, and I'd drunk a lot and -- when the shooting started I just plain ran like hell. I'm not sure, but I think I was probably the first person to think of making for the skelter." "That's interesting," Vanzetti muttered. He consulted the watch on his wrist: no ordinary watch, as Hans's expert eyes informed him, but a classic Seiko Worldtime, the like of which had not been built since the Blowup. "That means you must have left New Zealand at least an hour and a half ago, doesn't it?" "I didn't come straight here." "Why not? And where did you go?" "I didn't come here because Dany and I had had a row. I'm a photographer in my spare time. She was going on this treasure hunt. She didn't tell me who the host was and I assumed it was one of her abominable friends and planned to stay home and develop some film I was specially proud of. She barged into my darkroom and ruined the film and I decided -- " He hesitated. "I decided to go to the party myself to even things up. Now I'm terribly ashamed of myself. But I swear I never dreamed she might do this -- " He gestured at the corpse, around which the doctor and the photographer were prowling like carrion birds. "You had no idea j at all?" Vanzetti probed. "She had threatened to kill herself," Hans muttered. "But she'd never tried it. I had consulted a psychiatrist named Karl Bonetti about her and he -- Oh, that's where I went. That's why I didn't come straight home. My wife's mental condition had been on my mind during the party and, as I said, I was rather drunk when I left and -- well, for no real conscious reason it struck me as a good idea to go to see Bonetti at Gozo. I know the code for the public outlet there nearly as well as I know my own. Dr. Bonetti is an old friend of mine." "Did you actually see him?" "No, I wandered around brooding for a while and eventually decided it was worth making one more try to patch up the row. So I came home and -- and found her." "Chief," the sergeant said, "it's suicide. Not a shred of doubt. She used this." He held up a bright oblong partly smeared with dry blood. "An old-fashioned doubleedged razor. She cut her thumb and finger with it while she was slashing her wrists." Vanzetti nodded. "Doc, do you agree?" The doctor grunted what might have been an affirmative and went on studying the corpse with instruments from his kit. "How long since she died, would you say?" Vanzetti probed. "Oh -- not less than three hours, not more than five. I'm just checking to see what she took beforehand: a stimulant pill or two, I imagine, and possibly some liquor, too. Ah, here we are." He straightened, holding up a little glass tube containing some chemical mixture that had turned color at two levels -- blue and green respectively. "Yes, she was both drunk and doped. A mix that could have done awful things to her head." "You said," Vanzetti went on, turning to Hans again, "you'd consulted Dr. Bonetti about your wife?" "Ah -- yes, more than once. He said her suicide threats were so much noise, an attempt to make me pay more attention to her." Hans hesitated. "It's -- uh -- it's not much of a secret among our friends that there had been friction between us this past year. I'd better make a clean breast of that. You're bound to be told sooner or later." "Oh, I don't believe our inquiries need be very extensive, given what you just heard. Naturally there must be an inquest, but there's no call to worry overmuch about that. It'll be largely a formal matter." Vanzetti shook his head dolefully. "A terrible thing, this. Terrible. Now, about Aleuker's party -- w-ho can confirm you were there at the relevant time?" "Well, Aleuker himself -- " "No, I'm afraid not. He's dead." "What?" "He was shot. The first of the dead to be identified. The news had just come in by satellite as I left headquarters. A terrible loss for us all." Hans folded his hands into fists and stood shaking for a moment until Vanzetti prompted him: "Anybody else?" "Uh -- " Hans forced his hands open again and rubbed his forehead giddily. "Well, Dr. Satamori, Dr. Pech -- and I also had a few words with Dr. Ingrid Castelnuovo and -- " "That'll do very well. I shall have to ask for a word of confirmation just for the record, but nothing more." "All done," the doctor said, putting away his gear. "We can finish the job at the morgue." "Good, thank you." Vanzetti hesitated. "Mr. Dykstra, would you rather come with us now and make a statement -- or wait until you've recovered a bit from the shock?" "Oh, I'd rather get it out of the way." Hans sighed. "I wouldn't want to try and catch some sleep, the state I'm in. I'd have nightmares -- " E verything went smoothly, as designed. Make the statement; agree to attend the inquest tomorrow morning; call his headquarters office to say he wouldn't be available for work; hear that Boris Peck had been among the lucky ones who survived the bloodbath at Aleuker's. Pech was in a hospital, firm that Hans had been present. No least hint from anybody of anything but genuine sympathy with a man who had tragically lost that ultra-precious commodity, a legally married wife. "And will you go back home now?" Vanzetti asked solicitously. "Or would you rather spend some time elsewhere -- with friends perhaps?" Hans shook his head. "I'd rather be alone. I guess maybe I shall go call on one or two people who knew Dany particularly well, break the news to them personally. If you can't reach me at home, that's what I'll be doing, but I shan't stay away for more than a few hours at a time." "Oh, it's most unlikely we'll want to contact you," Vanzetti said. "Just as long as you're on time at the inquest. Goodbye for the moment, then." Hans forced a mechanical smile and headed for the skelter. At its threshold he stopped dead. "Is something wrong?" Vanzetti called. "Yes, I just realized something is horribly wrong. It's getting through to me. I felt all numb at first -- I guess maybe I threw up my emotions, in a weird kind of way. But I shall have to move house. I mean, if next month, or next year, I suddenly think: I punched this code and there was -- was Dany -- " He swallowed loudly. "Do you know anything about what turns people into stucks? Because I just got this flash about becoming one myself if I don't move away from Valletta." "Hmm -- yes, I can well believe it," Vanzetti said. "You ought to talk to your friend Dr. Bonetti about that, don't you think?" "Yes. Yes, you're quite right -- and I shall." But not right now. Not today. Today was for being at Anneliese's side when she awoke, symbol of the stability and reassurance she craved and had not had from Chaim Aleuker. Also It would be for figuring out where to make his new home, out of all the thousands of places to which the skelter could take him. With his new wife. Interface M It was no cynical creator who bade us to water the deserts and feed the hungry mouths You stood with a loaf and a bomb in either hand and kept the loaf and gave the bomb away You chose to have more and even drier deserts and many mouths will not again taste hunger -- Mustapha Sharif D rowsing at last after thinking long and hard about what he had said concerning Aleuker's party, Mustapha awoke to the frantic shout of Ali at his bedroom door. "Effendi! It is Dr. Satamori who came back! His head is cut and he is bleeding." Mustapha was instantly wide awake, wondering whether it was time for him to admit that he believed in premonitions. He called out orders for Satamori to receive medical attention and, minutes later, joined him in the Room of Flowers. Satamori lay stretched on a hand-carved couch, eyes closed, face a mask of pain, clothes ragged and smeared with dirt and blood. "Fred -- what happened to you?" Wincing now and then as a boy armed with a box bearing the sign of the Red Crescent attended to his injuries, Satamori forced out a brief account of the disaster that had overtaken Aleuker's party. Mustapha hissed in dismay. "You think Chaim himself is among the dead?" "I don't think -- I know. I saw him killed by a ricocheting slug. It tore him open and spilled his guts on the floor. Like ripping a paper sack of butcher's meat!" "We have lost, then, a very precious man," Mustapha said heavily. "Oh, don't strike poses," Satamori snapped. "I know you detested him. You were sure he was always doing absolutely the wrong thing." "That's untrue," Mustapha said, feeling for and settling himself on a stool he could draw close to the couch. "A man who has once seen the correct thing to do -- and has done it -- must be regarded differently from those who have never thought of anything new. At any moment he might have done something just as useful as inventing the privateer. Now that chance has vanished forever." "I'm too sick and tired to bother with your doubletalk." Satamori sighed. "But thank you anyway for taking me in." "My friend, I am flattered that you came to me. Did you not have the chance to tell others they would be welcome here?" "No -- no chance at all. There was panic. It started immediately the Maoris attacked. In fact -- oh, it's ironical in a way -- the first person to arrive was the first to turn and run. I mean, apart from those who were invited to show up ahead of time, like Boris Pech and myself." "So? You mean you lost all benefit from this treasure hunt? You don't know who it was who first unriddled your clues and found his way to Chaim's house?" "It was a recuperator named Hans Dykstra, who lives in Valletta, I believe. I was lying flat on the floor along with everybody else because one of the first shots smashed a wall-high window and there was glass flying all over the room. But I turned my head away and that's how I happened to see him rush for the skelter. And not by himself, either. Did you hear about this girl Chaim rescued a while ago from the wilds of Brazil? Dykstra was talking to her all by himself for most of the evening. They were sitting right near the skelter and he literally dragged her with him. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so tragic." A long silence followed, during which the boy with the first-aid kit completed his task and left the room. Eventually Mustapha said, "Rest now, Frederick. Stay and sleep where you are. Ali will make sure that someone watches by you until you waken. After a rest you will certainly feel better." "Thank you," Satamori mumbled. He rolled on his side and passed out almost on the instant. I t was not until he was safely clear of the Room of Flowers that Mustapha dared give way to the sense of terror that had exploded in his belly on hearing Satamori's news. Hans Dykstra -- first to arrive at Aleuker's party! Singled out as though he were the computerchosen winner of a lottery. Earth, no one more dangerous could have been successful in the treasure hunt. Worse yet, he had escaped -- had started the panic, if Satamori could be believed -- and had dragged along with him this girl nicknamed Barbara. Something had to be done at once, for security's sake. Would he have gone home? Logically, yes -- but to a chilly welcome. Mustapha had met and evaluated Dany. Chatting with her once had given him a complete picture of her personality. If her husband came back from a party held by somebody as famous as Chaim Aleuker -- which she would doubtless have wanted to attend herself -- and brought with him a girl in her teens, allegedly very pretty, hell and all its devils would be let loose. So if he had any shred of his wits about him, Hans would not have gone back to Malta. Where? Ah. Yes, quite conceivably. That code, after all, would have been at the forefront of his mind, ready to hand when the attack began. And on that skelter there was no privateer and... It would take only a few minutes to confirm his guess. Mustapha hastened up the staircase of his tallest minaret, entered the secret room containing his third skelter, put on his climatized clothing and punched the code for the Eriksson house at Umea. H ans had been so sure -- so absolutely certain -- that there would be no one in the Swedish house apart from Anneliese, that for the first several seconds after his return he thought only of trivia. The sun had gone down after the brief northern winter day, but the place was warm. Therefore the heating system must be working okay because the fire had died to embers. Beside it in the gloom sat a cloaked figure, logically Anneliese wrapped in a blanket. He hoped she had not woken so long before he arrived that she was frightened. The last chunk of a log slipped on the hearth and uttered a spurt of bright yellow flame. The light revealed that the person waiting for him was not Anneliese. He exploded with mingled rage and terror. "Mustapha! What the hell are you doing here? You've broken our compact." "It is not my custom to resort to the tu quoque," Mustapha murmured. "If it were I might well say that you not only broke it, but smashed it into fragments and trampled those fragments into dust. Must I remind you that I laid it down as a condition of supplying you with illegal codes that you should never under any circumstances bring another person to one of these abandoned homes?" "What other person am I supposed to have brought?" Hans cried, knowing even as he voiced the words that they were futile. Mustapha's tongue clucked. "Though I'm blind I am not unaware of what goes on around me. You of all people should have realized that by now. I scented the girl the moment I left the skelter, over and through the smoke of the fire which doubtless you built for her. And, by the way, keep your voice down. She slept contentedly throughout my inspection of her, but she is near to waking and a loud noise may rouse her." "Your -- inspection?" Hans forced out, advancing on Mustapha with fists clenched. "You've been feeling her?" "Oh, I was right -- I sense jealousy," Mustapha said. "I was unaware that she had become your property. I have no eyesight, man, but my fingertips -- you saw -- are delicate enough to stroke the full length of a spider's web and leave it unbroken. You think to touch a girl is to maul her, ravish her -- I think of my touch as having to be lighter than a glance. She did not even turn over, let alone wake up... How old is she, this girl whom Chaim retrieved from the Brazilian sertao? Seventeen? Eighteen?" "Who told you -- " Hans's voice failed him in mid-question. "I was right again," Mustapha said, "You imagined your departure with her from Aleuker's home was unobserved. You are too commonplace, too interchangeable a person to sense that unique recognizes unique. I am not surprised that you found your way to Chaim's party. I am surprised that Chaim and his friends imagined that people like you could save the world, frozen as you are into the mold of the past. You're like a vampire -- one of the undead compelled to spend half his life in a coffin." B lood was roaring in Hans's ears and the room swayed and swirled. He said, "Okay, so someone saw me leave Aleuker's with her, but I may well have saved her life by bringing her here and -- " "Here? Instead of Valletta? Most people in the grip of panic think at once of going home." Mustapha's tone was gentle enough, but contempt rode the edge of his words as light may ride the sharpness of a steel blade. "Not, of course, that you could have made it clear to your wife that your intention was simply to save the life of a poor friendless girl -- " Grasping at a straw, Hans rapped, "Of course not. You've met her, you can imagine the scene she would have created." Mustapha shook his head. "Wrong reason -- and dishonest with it." "What?" "I can read you more clearly than you, with your good eyesight, can read one of the books I've sold you." Mustapha rose, reaching out one hand to the brick side of the chimney that swallowed the small remaining trace of smoke from the fire. "You could have convinced Dany you'd brought the girl home to save her life, if that had been the truth -- but it was not. I can hear the processes of your imagination. I can put them into words, even into English words, though I would be more precise and cruel in Arabic. I see your whole plan laid out before me, like a map, like a carven stela from Luxor that my fingers have grown acquainted with. I say this is what you intend -- " He drew himself bolt upright and his blind eyes seemed to shine dazzlingly into Hans's. "I say your plan goes like this. You have by chance been brought together with a girl who is lost in the modern world. Aleuker, a busy man with more friends, more women, more preoccupations than he could cope with, neglected her when he found her childhood conditioning had scarred her mind too deeply for her to be turned into a decent citizen of today's world. "But you have the time and the urge. Hating your wife, possessing her not as a person and a partner but as a trophy, a prize that all too many men these days can never aspire to, you suddenly realize there's a chance for you to supplant her. What likelier target than a girl who is lonely and miserable and frightened? In a few months, gratitude -- in a year or so, divorce -- Dany like any other woman can always find an eager youth wanting to share her bed -- and after that remarriage. Legal binding marriage to a teenage girl who's been carefully prevented from involving herself with anybody except Hans Dykstra. It won't be love, but you never understood what love is. You want to buy this child as though she were a slave and bind her to you with intangible chains." The diagnosis was too terribly accurate for Hans to answer at once. He gulped air, swayed, blinked, at last found his voice again. "You dare to say that to me? You, who've done the same and worse to kids from all over the world? Spent your time and money hunting for orphans, boys as well as girls as long as they're pretty and bright, seduced them into your bed and imprisoned them in your home and taught them just those jobs they can't make use of anywhere else if they do decide to try and escape from you? What do you pay for the children you enslave?" "I pay what you can't because you've never had any," Mustapha said and the words quavered unexpectedly. A glint from the fire showed, bewilderingly, that tears had gathered in his sightless eyes. Suddenly they spilled over and ran down his face. "What? What are you talking about?" "I pay love." The poet gathered himself again, brushed at his itching cheeks. "I have never bought any of my proteges. Of either sex. I have kissed and embraced and comforted those who never before in their lives were touched by another person except to be punched or slapped. I have broken my heart so many times it is held together with rivets like a shattered porcelain bowl, because I have always let go those I loved with the depths of my being when they said it was time for them to become themselves, to be individuals and not to depend on me any more. Compared to what you plan to make of this girl -- a bunch of reflexes, a machine whose buttons you can press at will -- I am sinless and without reproach." The world turned red around Hans. Without volition he snatched at a poker lying on the side of the hearth, hot but not too hot to grasp, and used it to silence that accusing tongue. Interface N Proverbially " Absence makes the heart grow fonder, " -- Or so they said who are no longer with us. Likewise, however, "To be out of sight is to be out of mind, " -- I never knew which proverb to believe. You whom I love Stepped through the skelter yesterday. -- Now I have had proof that both are true. -- Mustapha Sharif "Who? Hans! What -- Oh, God!" An incredible confusion of slump, cry, run, exclaim, moan. It all happened in a time when Hans was out of touch with the universe -- it sandwiched together, compressed, declined to be separated again. But that was a moment ago. At this moment Anneliese stood at the door of the room where she had been sleeping, staring at what the wan firelight showed, petrified by horror. Her dress was crumpled and, in a sense, so was her face, for she had been lying on a fold in the pillows and a deep dent marked the skin of her left cheek. Nobody, no matter how dullwitted, could have failed to add together a scene like this: prone by the hearth, an unconscious stranger, dark blood trickling out of his hair, and Hans still clutching the poker he had struck out with. He remained in a daze until she managed to force out the all-important question. "Have you -- killed him?" "No -- " Hans's mind seemed to rush back to normal operation. He could think again and he discovered a cluster of excuses full-blown and ready for use. "Who is he?" Anneliese asked. "I've no idea. But I know what he is." She advanced a pace toward him, hands clenched, jaw-muscles lumping as though to restrain a scream, and waited for him to elaborate. Now I've got to pile yet another untruth atop the crazy pyramid I've already erected. Why? Why? How did I get tangled in this lunatic mess? I lost my temper, that's all -- first with Dany, then with Mustapha, both times with complete justification. And all of a sudden it turns out I'm snarled up as though I've been wrapped in barbed wire! Was I to know so many people would notice me leaving Aleuker's that Mustapha would get to hear in a matter of hours? Oh, maybe I should have guessed. A fter all, I bought notoriety, didn 't I? By being the person who won Boris Pech his bet... I'm not myself. It's all happened too fast. I claim to follow the Way of Life and I just used frenzied violence against a fellow human being. That's not like me. It isn't -- I'm sure it isn't in my real nature to do that ! Sol'll be justified if I put the best possible light on things. Ill atone later. When I've straightened matters out. After the inquest on Dany. A fter finding a place to live a long, long way away from Malta. I can just disappear from the awareness of my friends. My colleagues at work must be informed, naturally -- but I can lose the people who knew me with Dany. I can start over somehow, I can -- T he rush of thought had to break off. Anneliese was staring at him, still waiting for the reply to her last question. He fumbled for the proper words. 'Tm dreadfully sorry about this. But I imagine you've been told there are still criminals in our modern world?" "Y-yes -- " In a voice as faint as autumn wind. "This is one. Of the worst kind. What we call a code-breaker. A person who figures out how to use a private skelter and sneaks in to rob people's homes and, if he's caught, to kill the person who catches him." "Are you sure?" "Do you think I'd use this -- " brandishing the poker -- "if I weren t? "I thought I heard you talking together," she ventured. "Well -- of course! I wouldn't have knocked him down on sight, would I? But when he couldn't give a satisfactory account of his presence there was only one sensible course of action." "I -- " She shook her head. "I must have misunderstood. I believed that because of something Chaim invented, this didn't happen any more. Didn't he devise what they call a privateer?" Hans cursed silently. Ignorant thisgirl might be -- she was in no sense stupid. "Yes, but I'm talking about the sort of burglar who can get around a privateer. What one man can invent another can evade. It's very rare, but it does happen now and then." "I -- I see." "There are always flaws in the best systems. You get transmission errors, for example, like the one that -- " He interrupted himself, momentarily experiencing a renewal of his former panic. The less often Anneliese was reminded about the "anonymous" dead woman, the better. "But I've got to get you out of here," he finished. "Why?" "Because where one code-breaker gets in another may follow. Very often they work in gangs. If this one doesn't report back in half an hour or so his confederates may very likely come to see what's happened -- You poor girl! It must be absolutely terrible to have seen so much of what's bad in today's world and so little of what's good. I do promise you, it is possible to be happy and enjoy yourself and make plans for the future and see them fulfilled. I want to give you that. You deserve it." In memory, an echo of Mustapha's accusations -- but he stifled it. "Where will you take me, then?" "To a safe place. For just long enough to sort this out. I'll have to tell the police, of course, and then I'll have to have the skelter recoded. It takes a few hours. I'm so sorry, I really am. Because what I most want to do is help you. You -- ah -- you don't mind my wanting to help you?" All the color drained from her cheeks. "Hans, where would I be if there wasn't somebody to help me? I could be dead. Couldn't I?" Hans opened his arms just in time as she rushed at him and buried her face in his shoulder and convulsed into sobs. There followed an unmeasured period, during which she wept and he caressed her back through one thin layer of cloth and dreamed of the time when the cloth would no longer be there. How long would it take to persuade her by slow degrees that it was okay for her to strip in his presence? Too soon. Too soon ! Keep your head, Hans Dykstra, and don't push your luck... E ventually he drew back from her and murmured something about having to hurry. She nodded pliantly. "Just to be on the safe side," he said. "I guess I'd better tie this villian up so he can't get away before the police collect him -- " "You will not send for them at once? They could be waiting here when his confederates come, couldn't they?" Once more Hans chided himself for underestimating this girl's native wit. How to get around that little problem? "Ah, but suppose the police and the other code-breakers arrive together. You could be involved in another gunfight. You just escaped from one at Aleuker's -- surely you don't want to risk another? Just do as I say and everything will work out fine." She raised no more objections and within another five minutes they entered the skelter together and he pressed the code for a Way of Life refuge he had once visited in Bali. Anneliese might be disturbed at finding herself among committed heathens -- still, the place had three great advantages. The monks and nuns took in anybody, gave help and never asked too many questions -- they were always extremely busy and maintained no records, preferring to get on with their real work and forget about what happened yesterday -- and very few people there spoke more than a smattering of English, let alone Flemish or Plattdutsh. T hey were received at the skelter door by a smiling, thirtyish woman garlanded with flowers -- flowers were also braided into her black hair. Apart from that she wore only a sort of kilt secured with a belt of woven leather from which dangled a small pouch. Anneliese's fingers cramped painfully on Hans's arm as she realized that by her standards the woman was shamelessly unclad. He murmured reassuringly, "You probably find this hard to believe -- but you're looking at a nun." She turned wide disbelieving eyes to him. "A -- a nun?" she repeated. "What else do you call someone who has decided to dedicate her existence to helping others because of what she believes?" "I -- " Anneliese's voice failed her. Just as well -- it would have complicated matters beyond bearing to try to fill in the details. A somewhat more exact term than "nun" might have been "temple prostitute" -- but it would still have been wide of the mark. The concepts of the Way of Life were as subtle as any evolved by previous religions -- and required a wide open mind. By then, however, the woman was making them welcome with smiles. She had for each of them a posy of fresh-picked flowers and invited them with gestures to leave the small room in which the skelter was located and follow her down a quiet corridor walled with stone and lit at intervals with lamps set behind translucent paintings, all of various living organisms, from naked athletes to lowly bacteria shown magnified thousands of times. "It is the belief of these people that no harm should ever be done to any evolved creature," Hans whispered. "With one exception -- if a superior creature may be saved from suffering thereby. They are me? -- provided a human life can be made better because of it. You'll find these people both kind and generous. This is a refuge they keep open for anybody who wants to come to it: people for whom life is too much of a problem, who need to rest and relax and think things out, or people who are ill and have no friends or relatives to look after them. You don't have to believe what they believe. They give what they can and leave it at that." "I -- I see," Anneliese answered. "Once I read a book about monks at the Pass of St. Bernard in Switzerland, who had to help everybody lost in the snow. Is it like that?" "Yes, much. Except you should say: people lost in the world." He was infinitely relieved to find her so open-minded. Doubtless she would also be favorably impressed when she learned that no meat was ever eaten here because no follower of the Way of Life could kill an animal -- he himself had never become a convert to total vegetarianism, but he had often had qualms of conscience about eating meat. When it came to some of the rituals glorifying sensuality, on the other hand, Anneliese might well be completely repelled. But with luck she would have to stay here so short a time that she wouldn't even hear rumors about that side of it. To an elderly, also nearly naked woman of perhaps sixty who had retained an astonishingly attractive figure even though her face was wrinkled like an old apple -- but wrinkled for the right reason, because she had talked and smiled and laughed a great deal all her life -- he explained slowly in English the reason why he had brought Anneliese here. He referred to her parents' fate and then to the attack at Aleuker's and then to the burglar at his home where he'd taken her for safety and the elderly woman nodded every time she got the picture through the barrier of a half-comprehended language. "We shall help and take care," she said firmly. "Is a badness, so much hate and hurt. Will here be safe!" He asked Anneliese, "Do you think you can stand it here for a while -- for as long as it takes me to sort everything out?" She bit her lip. "I think so," she said. "I don't understand why these people do what they do, but it must always be good to help people in trouble, I think. I don't really understand why you're helping me either, but I am very grateful to you." That encouraged him to embrace her on parting and even to plant a chaste kiss on her lips: light, brotherly, most out of keeping with the practices of the Way of Life. But luckily Anneliese didn't notice the look of astonished disapproval that crossed the face of the old nun. He was humming as he stepped back through the skelter in Sweden, rehearsing the terms of the bargain he was going to strike with Mustapha: leave me alone and I won't report you for selling illegal codes. Fair? It would have been. Would have had to be. But Mustapha had disappeared. Interlace O The great courtesans Reported by old scandalmongers Notched up their respectable collections Of noblemen and servants and friends But never managed Because they could not manage What girls of the most res pec table descent Take for granted in modern times -- That they should sleep In seven beds on seven continents Incontinently in any given week... -- Mustapha Sharif I n the other of the two rooms of his home where nobody except his closest and most intimate servants entered -- the first being the room with his secret skelter, the second not being his bedroom which had been shared over the years with an amazing range of partners -- Mustapha Sharif waved aside with thanks that same boy who had tended Satamori's wounds and pronounced himself capable of thinking clearly again. Ali and Feisal, his body-servants, and Muley, the chief scribe who was the third of his right hands, stood about Mustapha, exuding anxiety so fiercely he did not need eyes to read their expressions. "It must be done as it was done before," Muley said in a sententious voice. "No." Mustapha rubbed his forehead. His head still ached, but a cold compress, a salve and a glass drug dissolved in it had brought his body's agony under control. He said again, "No, not in any detail the way it was done before. Instead of dealing solely with a conscious criminal we now have to take steps to ensure the safety of an innocent girl, barely more than a child, for whom this -- this person has conceived a fate worse than imprisonment. He plans to put shackles on her mind, cripple her in a way no bodily restraint could match. He is, moreover, unaware of what evil he is hatching. Muley, I trust you as I trust myself -- and sometimes more so. I need your thoughts to help me. Judge, in accordance with what you believe, a man married to a woman older than himself, not altogether intelligent. He has confined her to him by legal bonds, then made her so miserable that she has learned to hate him and herself, too. On the basis of a chance encounter with a younger woman he now decides he is going to abandon his wife -- and he is showing himself capable of discarding her because he has a chance of deluding an ignorant teenage girl into the misconception that she must depend on him and him alone in order to keep afloat in a world she doesn't understand. Well?" M uley plucked at his large lower lip. He was a portly man, full-jowled, pot-bellied, soft. As a small boy he had trodden on an inefficient anti-personnel mine, which did not kill him but did reduce him to a condition that in other ages had been more deliberately created. He also limped on his left leg. "I had already passed my judgment," he said, "before you set forth all your facts. Because there is one additional detail you seem not to have heard of." "Tell me, then." "This man is not married. He is widowed." Mustapha tensed. "Explain! How do you know?" "The moment you returned, injured, I initiated an inquiry -- discreetly and by roundabout routes, but also rapidly. The task was not difficult. News of an inquest is come by very simply." "But you can't be implying that he killed his wife?" "Indeed, no. The news runs that his wife killed herself as a result of some insult or affront he gave her." "Ay-ay-ay!" Mustapha's hands clenched into knobbly fists. "And there is to be an inquest?" "Tomorrow morning at ten, local, in the Valletta coroner's court." "He is obliged to attend?" "Yes indeed. He is the only witness to the facts." "Oh, but this is a disaster," Mustapha cried. "For him not to appear will create a planetary hue and cry. But if he does appear he may let slip something that... Yes, it would be fatally easy for him to lose track of his complicated lies." "We must eliminate him," Ali murmured. "We can catch him when he arrives at the court -- " "Out of the question. He has secret files to be opened in the event of his death. They record his expeditions with me -- and while he pledged that he would not include any hint of my identity he may now have gone back on his word." Mustapha shook his head. "No, I see only one possibility. We must track him down and persuade him it is still to his advantage to keep our secret. All being well, the threat of a bracelet will fetter his mind more securely than the ropes he used on I f  M ustapha rubbed his chafed wrists and ankles. "Sometimes, you know, I feel that those with sight overestimate the advantages they derive from it. I would never have believed that anybody in his right mind could do as sloppy a job of lashing a man's arms and legs as Hans Dykstra did with mine. In pain, giddy, frightened, I released myself from his amateurish bonds in -- oh -- perhaps two or three minutes. He left slack on both my wrists, as though he conceived them to be round instead of twice as thick one way as the other -- Muley, detach a hundred apprentices and juniors, preferably active and intelligent youths, and assign them to me for instructions. It should not be very hard to outguess someone like Hans Dykstra, who right now is gripped by a fear that should prevent his thinking clearly. There are only a half-dozen places apart from the Valletta court where we stand a chance of catching him. We should be able to cover six skelters." "We should ambush him at the house in Sweden," Ali said. "If there is time -- No, I can't imagine that he won't have by now discovered that I've made my escape. His reaction, if I read his personality right, would have been to smash or burn the place. Not that I'm certain he's done so. He's disintegrating. He has lost both the things that justified his existence in his own eyes. He will no longer dare to indulge his illegal hobby, which he engaged in more from bravado than from love of knowledge -- and equally he has lost that rare prize, a wife, just at the time he believed he was about to do what scarcely a man alive today has been able to do -- get rid of her in favor of a woman younger and far more beautiful. He has been to a high place and seen the kingdoms -- and it proved a lie. He must be losing his mind more from frustration than from any other single cause." Mustapha folded his hands with an air of finality, but the servants made no move to depart. "Is something more remiss than you've told me?" "There is the matter of Dr. Satamori," Ali said. "He is still here. Asleep, fortunately. But when he wakes he will no doubt wish to express his thanks for your help." "Then he must have the chance to do so. But make it clear when he does wake and asks to speak with me that I would far prefer to be at work on a new poem." T he air in the Eriksson house felt as stiff as glass. Hans half-expected to find it crashing down on him like a shattered dome as he forced himself to take a pace forward from the skelter. It was still very dark here, but the same log that had flared to reveal Mustapha earlier was conserving a bright glow and -- perhaps fanned by the currents that had accompanied Hans's emergence -- now transmitted flame to a sort of snakelike object lying in the hearth. Rope. The rope Mustapha had been bound with. Who -- who -- could have come and set the captive free? Had Mustapha guessed he would be attacked? Had he alerted one of his many servants? If  don't return after such a time I can be found at such and such a code and I'll be in trouble... Hans put his hands giddily to his temples. Never in all his life had he foreseen he might wind up in a plight like this. It was infinitely worse than the nightmares he had sometimes experienced as a result of remembering how dangerous his illegal hobby was. But even if he were one day braced for his activities he had always, deep down, imagined that there would be people who paradoxically would respect him as a martyr. The people he had met at Aleuker's, above all, might exhibit that response. Surely someone like Boris Pech, who had asked to have a particular item searched out among the garbage of Europe -- surely he and those he regarded as friends would be tolerant of a selfless infringement of an arbitrarily absolute rule... But Hans wasn't dealing with Pech, Satamori or Castelnuovo now. He was dealing with Mustapha Sharif, an unpredictable, emotional man who was as much of a stranger to Hans as during their earliest acquaintance. In sum -- a man whose motives defied scrutiny as completely as if he were insane. A fter only a few seconds of struggle Hans realized it was useless to try to reason his way out of yet another crisis before he slept. His day had stretched to more than double its normal length. He was shaking more from weariness than fear -- after all, he had already produced inspired solutions to several seemingly insoluble problems -- and in a few hours he must really have all his wits about him. Checking his watch, he was appalled to see just how little time did remain before he was required to report for Dany's inquest. Fatigue notwithstanding, he abruptly felt a need as deep as hunger to do something -- at once. It was as though the sort of fury that wrenches the power to act from the head down to the guts had been grafted on his conscious mind -- he felt a blending of naked anger with dazzling insight. "I will teach him a lesson," he said to the air. "I will show him I'm not to be trifled with, even though I am a lowly recuperator and not a world-famous public figure -- " He strode forward across the floor, suddenly released from his moment of subjective paralysis. Beside the bed where Anneliese had slept stood the candle he had placed there. He lit it and carried it back into the living zone, trailing also the duvet, the big featherstuffed coverlet that was -- he fancied -- faintly scented with her body. He went into the kitchen and opened the cock on the side of the oil tank serving the central heating system. He soaked the duvet, then dragged it across the floor after him so that there was a thick line of oil on the floor, thick enough to catch light and feed flame back to the puddle accumulating alongside the tank. Once the candle was touched to it, the whole lot would go up in a great smoky bonfire. At the last moment, instead of simply tossing the candle at the duvet and stepping into the skelter, he checked. He had never heard of a means to inactivate a skelter by remote control -- but suppose Mustapha had arranged things so that he was meant to be trapped here? Suppose the elderly skelter had been sabotaged? He could burn to death in his own fire! He thought about that for a while, with a very clear and detached attitude, weighing the pros and cons. Eventually he balanced the candle on a candlestick about eight or nine centimeters high, leaned the duvet against it and used a folded shred of paper as a sort of fuse, certain to catch within five minutes but no sooner. Candle burns down while paper soaks up a little oil -- paper burns and falls on duvet -- duvet blazes up and the tank explodes... Right. He entered the skelter. It worked perfectly. He was at home. With a sigh of relief he rushed into the bedroom he once shared with Dany, set his alarm and collapsed into sleep without even taking time to undress. Interface P O, my friend, you have come a long way from your home in the next town north -- sit and take refreshment. O, my enemy, you have come no distance from your home the other side of Earth -- speak and at once be gone. -- Mustapha Sharif T he building where the coroner's inquest was to be held had been a hotel during the period when Malta was a popular tourist resort. It had been damaged in a riot and patched in an extraordinary fashion by an architect who was a devoted Maltese nationalist and felt it insulting to have "modern" buildings on this island. Even before its floors and windows had been mended, even before the damage due to firebombs and bullets had been repaired, he had insisted that its frontage be disguised with more "traditional" decoration. So, where there had been balconies of plain concrete and precast iron rails, there were now rain-worn plaster copies of the kind of molding seen on ancient churches, some threatening to break loose and needing to be lashed in place with bits of wire. But after the Blowup most people had kept their heads even less well than that architect. Hans's mouth was dry and his eyes were blurred because, despite setting his alarm, he had overslept and left home in such a hurry he had forgotten to bring his dark glasses. It was a bright sunny day. However, what had haunted him during his short sleep and filled his dreams with images of distilled terror evidently had not come to pass. The media were not making a grand scandal out of the death of this married woman, even though the circumstances were scandalous. Newspapers were in evidence here because the TV was underfunded and unreliable -- they were sold on the streets by people who could find no better employment, notably by bracees. On the placards held by those he passed as he walked to the court he read the day's headlines and all were concerned with the tragedy at Aleuker's party. Arrests had been made in the local Maori community. Some whites had been accused of complicity and enough important, famous people had been killed to make the event the chief topic of discussion the world around. Call it a fringe benefit. Time was when an event like Dany's suicide, because of its local connections, would have displaced whatever happened half a world away, up to and possibly including an outbreak of war. Influenza-M, Alaskan croup and a particularly virulent strain of cholera had slashed the Maltese population by seventy per cent. It had become too small to run the islands properly and had had to be topped up by bribed immigration. Malta was now part of the world scene. So this morning Hans had only a minor ordeal to face. He would testify exactly as he had when confronted by Vanzetti and would benefit from the sympathy of the court because he had lost that precious and all-too-often irreplaceable asset, his wife, and that would be that. By lunchtime or thereabout he would be able to head for the Balinese refuge, collect Anneliese (before she was overexposed to the ideals of the Way of Life, a sniggering demon remarked from the corner of his mind) and ask her where on the planet she would most like to live. Ah, a great idea. Invoke her opinion from the very start -- that was the ticket. Make sure she was emotionally committed to everything from this day forward. In next to no time she would be taking it for granted that he and she did everything together, including choosing a home. So his right course would be to ask for compassionate leave from his job -- which, of course, would be granted without demur -- and spend the next week or two becoming truly acquainted with Anneliese and exploring some of the likeliest locations for their new domicile. He had just realized he was humming cheerfully -- and that was wholly wrong for a man whose wife had died under Dany's circumstances -- when he rounded the last corner on the way to the building where the court was to meet for the inquest. And stopped dead. He had only once visited Mustapha's palace at Luxor. But he remembered with clarity the features of the chief scribe, Muley Hassan, who had shown him over the scriptorium. Hassan was here. In ordinary European clothing instead of his regular Egyptian garb, with dark glasses on his nose -- but unmistakable. Hassan glanced at his watch as though confirming the time of arrival of a friend with whom he had a long-standing appointment. Hans stepped back as though he had been physically pushed. A person behind him complained in a volley of curses, mixed EnglishArabicMaltese, crowned with obscene German. But I mustn't miss the inquest... What about a back entry to the building? Perhaps one where he could contact one of the helpful policemen he'd had such sympathy from? Hans thought hard about the layout of the district and concluded there was a back route that would delay him only a few minutes and -- oh, miracle -- Glimpsed through a door about to slam shut the sergeant who had first appeared in his skelter. Hans rushed forward, shouting, and the man responded by holding the door ajar. "Mr. Dykstra -- you ought to be in court by now." "I know, I know -- and I'm trying to get there." Lies flowed from Hans's tongue smoother than oil -- the habit was becoming compulsive. "But I'm trying to avoid somebody who knew Dany and thinks her death was my fault. I'm a little scared." The sergeant looked grim. "Ah, I know just what you mean. We've had half a dozen cases like that. You're talking about the sort of person who thinks every time a woman dies the race is in greater danger than it was yesterday." It was the first time Hans had heard of people who held such views, but they jibed magnificently with his spur-of-the-moment invention. He nodded. "Right. Come with me. I'll have a word with Vanzetti. If we have to we can always clear the court." "I hope that won't be necessary," Hans said and was startled to hear how sanctimonious his voice had become. "Although I guess it might be a good idea." T he judge was convinced immediately that it was a good idea. He was a testy man, oozing perspiration. "I will not tolerate the slightest risk of a disturbance in my court," he barked. "If the unfortunate Mr. Dykstra is likely to be hounded by lunatics -- Is there any doubt that we have a simple suicide?" Vanzetti shook his head. "According to our forensic people it all hangs together perfectly." "In camera, then," the judge said. "I know the press won't like it, but they can go jump in the sea. I'm overworked and underpaid and I wish I, too, had time to pursue crackpot notions." rwiHE inquest, in the near-silence X of a large and almost empty room -- which must originally have been a banquet hall -- lasted less than thirty minutes and closed with the judge expressing his condolences. Leaving the room in company with Vanzetti, Hans said diffidently, "Inspector, you've been tremendously kind -- but I wonder if I might impose on your good will just a little longer." "Oh, by all means. I'll do what I can for you. Do you want help in reregistering your domicile? I recall your saying you were afraid of becoming a stuck if you had to keep coming back to the same place where your wife died." "Uh -- well, more or less," Hans said with a swift change of mental gears. "I'm not yet sure of where I want to move to, but I do know I'd like to stay out of sight of certain -- ah -- fanatics." "Do you know how you attracted their attention?" "Uh -- no. Unless," he added quickly as inspiration dawned, "it has something to do with my making it to Aleuker's party. Perhaps somebody who was cheated of the chance -- " "And doesn't realize how lucky he or she was," Vanzetti grunted. "You heard the death toll is up to fourteen? Two more of the guests died and they have little hope of saving another two." "Shameful." "Yes, one would have expected mankind to learn a lesson from the Blowup, but -- " Vanzetti shrugged. "Well, it isn't my job to redesign humanity. You want access to an official skelter, is that it? Under escort, so nobody can get at you?" "Yes, please. I'll get my home -- my old home -- recoded so it can be offered for sale, but until then I think it might be sensible for me to intrude on the hospitality of various friends. Will you be needing me again?" "You heard the verdict. Suicide while of unsound mind. The case is closed." Vanzetti hesitated. "I must admist, Mr. Dykstra -- " "You're going to say," Hans interrupted, "that I could have been a little kinder to my wife. Yes, I suppose so. But you know about her mental instability. I did my best. I promise you, my absolute best. It wasn't enough." "That's a tough admission for any man to make," Vanzetti said. "I think I rather admire you for being able to say it. So often one runs across people who are determined to deny their own inadequacy. No, change that to shortcomings." "Either way it hurts like hell," Hans said. Vanzetti said With a nod, "I suppose I wound up in police work for the kind of reason exemplified by your predicament. We're all diminished by the stupidity and brutality of any given person, including ourselves. Very well, Mr. Dykstra, I'll be glad to ensure you get safely into the skelter system and we'll keep watch for anybody trying to pester you by using the code for your home until that's revised." "Oh, don't go to that much trouble, please!" "No trouble, none at all." With an airy wave. "Code-breakers are among the worst criminals of all, aren't they? And the offense is compounded if what they're trying to do is sneak past the privateer of someone recently bereaved." T hings were getting worse all the time, even when they appeared to be going best! Life was suddenly full of lunatic paradoxes and Hans felt himself being squeezed into new hateful and painful shapes as a result. His plea to Vanzetti had succeeded at once -- but now he was faced with an even worse problem. Believing that Hans was persecuted by madmen, Vanzetti was bringing to bear the force of the law on Hans's predicament. And who had more to fear from the law than Hans himself, the man who had broken code after code for years, not by his own skills but by bribing somebody else? The kind of arrangement he'd made with Mustapha was bribery -- it was conspiracy, too, and there were other and even nastier names he shut away to the side of his mind. It seemed hideously certain that very soon he was going to be at some random location on the face of the planet, staring at a new neat shiny metal bracelet and thinking of how much of his life had been destroyed. Unless he contrived to salvage something from the wreckage. The image came readily to mind. Had he not spent most of his working adulthood salvaging things that other people were then allowed to make use of? Was it not high time he took advantage of a salvage operation performed by someone else? Was that not the clear incontestable definition of what he in fact was doing? All these thoughts rushed through his mind as he was whisked away from the court building to the nearby police headquarters and politely invited to step into a secure skelter there, one where no camera or detector could note and record the code punched by a person departing. It was forbidden by law to record that. Poising his fingers, he spent a final second on confirming his opinion of what he was committed to. Yes, he was acting in accordance with the ideals of a recuperator. His salvage happened to be a living human being -- there was no other difference. He punched for the Way of Life refuge in Bali. Interface Q Today is today but Where is here when it can be Everywhere? Then was then and Why is now if it can he Any time? I live next to no time and no time Is an extremely disconcerting neighbor. -- Mustapha Sharif H e found Anneliese in a plain small room that might have been the twin of the one in which he himself had slept during his sole vacation here, before he met Dany. One of its walls was covered with dark-green creeper growing up a wooden trellis from a shallow pottery tray containing soil. There was no other decoration. The girl was dozing on a heap of cushions, partly covered by a soft pink quilt, which on his entrance she gathered around her body in alarm -- but not so quickly that he was unable to glimpse more of her skin than he had so far seen. He was briefly astonished to notice that it was pallid, white as dough. But of course that wasn't to be wondered at in view of her upbringing. She had probably never shown her body to the sun. How different from Dany, who had always assumed that sitting on a beach in the altogether would instantly conjure up a horde of admiring men from the sand dunes. "Hans, is that you?" "Yes, of course." He bent to kiss her cheek. Her first -- and obvious impulse was to flinch away, but she restrained it and suffered his lips to brush her skin. "Are you all right?" "Uh -- " She sat up cautiously, making certain that the quilt was tightly wrapped about her. "Yes, they have been kind. They gave me food and drink and took my dress to be laundered." She hesitated, searching his face with her dark eyes. "And you? Is everything all right?" "I'm afraid not." "Oh, God! What's gone wrong this time?" "I think I must have been right about the code-breaker having confederates. The man escaped -- and before leaving he set my home on fire." "Oh, how horrible! How horrible!" "Yes, it is. But perhaps not so horrible as you think." "What do you mean?" He kicked around a cushion and sat down beside her, frowning. "It's hard to explain. A sort of paradox. I feel -- I feel as though I've been set free from something. Do you remember? When we arrived at my home I said I'd kept everything as it used to be for far too long?" "Yes, of course I remember." "Now the whole of my past has been, so to speak, lifted from me. I'm not in the same situation you were in when you found that Festeburg had been burned." "You poor man -- " Impulsively she clasped his nearer hand, almost losing her grip on the quilt -- but not quite. He curled his fingers around hers, thinking how large and clumsy they were compared to her small cool ones. "Is it-dreadfully hard to have to start one's life again? Isn't it a chance to forget your mistakes and this time get everything right?" "I -- " She bit her lip. "I suppose if you are a very strong person you can look at it that way." "I don't think I'm a particularly strong person. But that's the way I'm trying to look at it. Would you like to -- " He hesitated. "What?" "Would you like to help me -- as I've been helping you? Shall we go together in search of a new place to live, a new life for both of us?" A long moment passed before she answered. It was like a foretaste of eternity. But in the end she gave a nod and was able to force a smile. "Wonderful!" Hans leaned toward her and put his free arm around her shoulders. "Oh, I thought when I found myself face to face with that inferno I'd die of rage and misery. And suddenly you've made me happier than I imagined possible -- " "Was the house beyond saving when you arrived there?" she whispered. "Oh, yes. I almost walked into a wall of flames." "You didn't burn yourself?" She released his hand to feel his face. "If it was burning so fiercely -- " "No, I moved quickly," he interrupted. "I don't believe I even singed my hair. I stayed just long enough to take in the sight and then got away at once. I was afraid the skelter might break down with the heat and strand me. Maybe that was what the criminal intended." He felt her shudder and added hastily: "Don't distress yourself, darling. It's over-over and done with. Let's make our fresh start together right away and in a few days what has happened before to each of us will all be merely a bad dream. Any idea where you'd like to go? Somewhere sunny and safe -- that's what I'd like. The Caribbean, the Azores or Polynesia -- " "I -- I don't know," she muttered. "Those are just noises to me, those names." "Then we'll begin by looking them over. It's high time you became acquainted with the planet." He rose to his feet. "I'll go find your dress, or if it isn't dry, something else that you can wear. We'll leave at once." ii'Tou are well rested?" Musj tapha inquired solicitously of Dr. Satamori. "You are fully recovered?" "Well enough to get back to work, certainly," Satamori said, gingerly touching the neat bandage around his head. "As for rested -- I kept having nightmares." "That's hardly surprising," Mustapha murmured. "I, too, had a bad dream, concerning what might have happened if I had gone with you to Chaim's place." They walked another few paces along the shady, colonnaded pathway leading to the skelter by which Mustapha's guests arrived and left. Suddenly Satamori said, "My dream was that the attack came through the skelter instead of -- no, I recall more clearly now. It came by land and sea. While the privateer was temporarily disconnected for the benefit of those who solved the treasure-hunt clues it would have been easy to send in two or three armed men." "Or simply to deliver a powerful bomb," Mustapha agreed gravely. "I'm glad I didn't dream that, too," Satamori said, with a nervous chuckle. They had almost reached the skelter. He paused and turned to face his host. "I am greatly obliged for all your help." "There's no need to leave even now if you're not really up to it," Mustapha said. "Stay longer, as long as you wish." "No, really, I must go. I have work to do. And among the first of my tasks must be to check on what's become of the people who won the treasure hunt. We are now even shorter of valuable brains than we were before. I hope I don't sound callous, but one must make the best of things." "You have a list of some kind?" Mustapha probed. "One was compiled by Chaim's chief footman, but it was probably destroyed. No matter. I have a good memory and I was introduced to virtually all who arrived. I'll start with the recuperator who showed such presence of mind in escaping with the Brazilian girl. Perhaps he's a coward, but the important thing is that he could react quickly even when he was rather drunk. It shouldn't be hard to locate him -- he's bound to show up some time at a public skelter, even if he doesn't feel much inclined to come forward voluntarily for fear of becoming involved in another similar disaster. The elite among us are in constant peril." He sighed heavily. "Mustapha -- I often find myself wishing that you'd accept a responsible post. You administer this place so skillfully, so tactfully -- If anybody alive is developing the aesthetic of government that might replace our outworn ideologies it must be you." "I have my roots too deep in the old world to achieve that goal," Mustapha said. "I have not yet finished identifying and cleansing away the foul psychological poisons that are the inheritance of us all. Perhaps we shall never succeed -- or perhaps your treasure hunt, which I've spoken of so scathingly, has already found you the person we need. Or perhaps the savior was among the dead. One cannot tell." After a brief silence the two men embraced and Satamori entered the skelter. T he moment the scientist was gone, Mustapha clapped his hands loudly and Ali materialized. "Has Dykstra not been found yet?" "Effendi, we are searching the whole planet. But when he appealed to the police for the use of a secure skelter he slipped through our fingers." "He must be found. Dr. Satamori is about to turn loose the whole resources of the Skelter Authority to locate him. Before I decided to start selling codes to him I prepared the most exhaustive dossier I could about his life and habits. There is a recorded summary of it, labeled HD, in my safe. Bring it to me at once. I must refresh my memory and see whether I have any other clues to his probable behavior." When the cassette was delivered to him he dropped it into a playerrecorder specially modified for ultra-fast playback -- much practice had made Mustapha able to follow speech at up to ten times faster than normal speed. It was only a matter of minutes before he clapped his hands again, this time in high excitement, and issued fresh instructions that impressed Ali mightily. "The effendi indeed deserves the official rank Dr. Satamori offered," he said. "One could almost believe him capable of reading men's secret thoughts." "Don't waste time flattering me," Mustapha snapped. "Go find out whether I've read his thoughts right." anneliese's dress was not yet nearly dry when -- by a combination of pidgin-English and gestures -- Hans located it pegged out along with scores of other and much smaller garments on a pole overhanging a shallow stream that ran past the south side of the refuge. An appeal to a helpful young monk, who spoke a little more English than most of the staff, obtained him a couple of alternatives -- a sort of sarong left behind by a visitor from Sri Lanka and a suit of pajamalike jacket and trousers rather too large for Anneliese. He seized on the last eagerly, since it would cover her completely and he expected her gender to be his crucial problem. To his dismay Anneliese cast a single glance at his selection and shook her head, wrapping her quilt more tightly around her than ever. "That is for a man," she said flatly. "I don't understand." "Perhaps you would not have thought of it. I know many women do go around in trousers. But I have always been taught that it is sinful for women to wear men's clothes -- or for men to wear women's." "My dear girl, surely -- " "Hans, I'm sorry, but I want my dress. It is decently long and it's proper women's clothing. Surely it won't matter much if we have to wait a little longer for it to be completely dry." Defeated, Hans turned away. "I'll see if I can find something else," he muttered. "It's not very likely." "Why?" "I have been looking through the red as she spoke. "I've seen people walking about as shamelessly naked as animals. I shall never do that -- never." Her jaw set stubbornly. For a long moment he gazed at her in disbelief. Then he went out. Another search of the refuge's clothing store proved even more fruitless than the first. As the young monk explained apologetically, lightweight clothing was ordinarily converted into cleaning rags or bandages, while what winter wear was kept -- shut at present in closets with branches of pennyroyal and other herbs to discourage moths -- would run foul of Anneliese's prejudice against trousers. What more sensible garb, though, for one traveling to a colder climate? "Is the girl unwell in her mind?" the monk asked at length. "You might say so," Hans snapped and explained about her upbringing. The young monk's mouth rounded in amazement. "I have heard of that. Now I realize that her condition is even sadder than I was told. Well, we shall just have to find a quick means to dry her dress, if she will put on nothing else and won't go about naked. Perhaps in the kitchens. I shall take care of it." Hans muttered a mechanical word of thanks and wandered fretfully away, intending to rejoin Anneliese and see if he could cajole her into a more reasonable attitude. As he rounded the corner of the corridor leading to her room, however, he heard his name called. Turning, he found the elderly nun whom he had met before hurrying toward him. "There is friend to see you," she said, beaming. "What?" "At the skelter. All monks and nuns try finding you in all places since half-hour. Has message for you, he say, from mostly famous poet Mustapha Sharif. And is own name of Muley Hassan." For an instant the world spun crazily around Hans. Then he heard his voice cry, "He's lying! I don't know anybody called that." The nun stared at him, puzzled. "Is strange, then. He ask by name for you, also for girl. Is -- ah -- An-nah-li-zah true? An-nahli-zah Sen-keh?" She looked pleased at having produced the European name in recognizable form. "Send him away." "But he ask by name and -- " "Send him away -- or get me and Anneliese away. Anything as long as you don't tell him where I am." "But why, brother? Why this man so make you fear?" Hans drew a deep breath and appealed to the one argument he was fairly sure might provoke results. "Do you wish a man to be murdered here at this refuge? If you don't you'll do as I say." "Murder?" The nun's eyes grew wide in horror. "He has come to kill you? Then you must be sent away." Interface R Once I met a man who every day went around the planet counterclockwise. He said by this means he gained a day and would therefore live forever. Unluckily for him Death measures time otherwise than with clocks and watches. -- Mustapha Sharif #TT ans, what in the world -- " JoL"Here's your dress. Put it on, since you won't wear anything else, but hurry. Someone's followed us here and we've got to get away." He threw the damp garment at her. She caught it and clutched it to her bosom, staring wide-eyed not only at him but at the monk and nun who had also come to the door of the room, looking much disturbed at having had to lie. Muley Hassan had been sent to the farthest corner of the refuge on the pretext that Hans had last been reported there. A few precious minutes had been gained, but only Hans's intense assurance that his life was at stake had won that reprieve. It was a cardinal tenet of the Way of Life always to believe that everybody told the truth. Prince Knud had laid that down at the very beginning of his instructions because, he said, the doom of the old world was inherent in its habit of hypocrisy, ranging from bluff in international relations to hard-sell exaggeration in advertising. And because his teachings were so much akin to oriental tradition they had taken deep root among people like these. On the fringes of the greatest disaster in all of history these monks and nuns were still hunting for clues to help them understand why the population crash called the Blowup had occurred. Hence the existence of Way of Life refuges like this one all over Asia and Africa and the Pacific -- and their absence in Europe and North America, places where not only was there no need to explain the causes of the Blowup, but so much damage had been done to the minds of the survivors that the notion of having strangers wander at will among them was untenable. "Do as I say!" Hans roared at Anneliese and she flinched. "I am to get dressed with so many people staring?" No, no, it simply couldn't be possible. It couldn't be that he, Hans Dykstra, was condemned because a stupid girl was ashamed to show her nipples. But he gathered his wits by main force and without a word rushed the others from the room. Over his shoulder he cried, "Hurry! Hurry!" B ut she didn't. Time leaked away, while he and the monk and the nun stood irresolute in the corridor. Then another monk came in sight and called out something -- Hans was able to detect the name of Muley Hassan and his patience shattered. He flung wide again the door of Anneliese's room and found her red-faced and struggling to fasten her long drab dress. "What are you playing at?" he demanded. She exclaimed in horror at having him intrude when she was incompletely covered. Over her bosom, the front-closing zip was jammed at a height most girls would regard as excessively modest, but she by contrast covered with both hands. "It's shrunk and I can't do it up." The world turned red, like the fire he had set at the Eriksson house and had never seen but could imagine. He seized her by the arm and literally dragged her from the room in disregard of her shrieks of protest. The nun and the two monks tried to interfere, but he brushed them aside and physically carried Anneliese the last few meters to the skelter. He shoved her into it and punched the first remote code that came to his mind Panama. To the girl, very close to her ear, he said between his teeth, "You would rather be beaten up, maybe killed, maybe raped, than let me see a patch of your chest? Are you insane?" She fought him for another few seconds, then wilted against his shoulder, weeping, as he pushed her out of the skelter. Here, as almost everywhere, the concourse around the skelter outlets was full of stucks and bracees, making shift to earn their living as touts and shills and guides. "I don't understand yourworld," Anneliese was moaning. "I hate it -- and it makes me terrified " Alertly dozens of the watchers reacted and closed in. "Ah, sir!" the first said, choosing English -- he seemed no more than fifteen, but was muscular and agile. "You want private place to finish raping virgin girl, yes ? I got good place cheap. I -- " Hans cuffed him aside with the flat of his hand, looked desperately for a way past the others and failed to find one. The universe seemed to be full of greedy outstretched hands, shouting mouths, the glint of light on bracelets that forbade entrance to the skelter system... "Hey, you!" A bo.oming voice that overrode the clamor from the touts and shills and rang with authority caused the mob to fall back and give passage to the speaker: a heavy-set man in his early forties, well-dressed, cleanshaven. He carried in his left hand what might have been a photograph because he glanced at it before continuing to Hans. "Aren't you Hans Dykstra? I have a message for you from -- " But already Hans's fevered mind had completed the sentence, by way of an instantaneous detour that posed the question: How did Mustapha manage to ensure that one of his agents was here in Panama -- a place  chose at random? "Quick!" he forced out and, taking Anneliese by the arm again, dragged her back into the skelter and punched for... S pitzbergen. How many more codes can  think of before I have to consult a directory? Before  start accidentally using ones that belong to friends, colleagues at work? Oh, if there were a God I'd pray. I d pray, but there's only the impersonal force that evolved us from the slime... "Hans, Hans, let me go -- " Anneliese was shrieking, trying to pummel him with her free hand. The cry attracted attention. Here in an Arctic winter the concourse was nearly deserted -- those whom chance had stranded this far north spent the time of sunlessness, or so he had been told, adapting the ancient Eskimo practice of wifeswapping to the tenets of the Way of Life. But a fat ugly woman wearing some sort of police-like uniform jumped up from a bench and came toward Hans, grinning from ear to ear. "Hey, you're Dykstra, aren't you? I never expected you to -- " And back into the skelter and away. Code: Victoria, Vancouver Island -- on the western fringe of Canada that had escaped the worst of the fallout from the Blowup. It was as though Mustapha had multiplied himself, become a sort of all-knowing deity, able to see the entire planet at a single glance. and again at Victoria -- how could J. that devil have planted his agents at every public skelter outlet? There were thousands and even if Mustapha had sent every last member of his retinue to keep watch -- surely he couldn't have enough people to cover every eyelet of the web. But once more a stranger rose and approached with a smile and uttered Hans's name and he fled as before. Where to this time? Somewhere isolated in the middle of an ocean -- Tahiti, the Seychelles... He settled for the latter and emerged with the girl at another Victoria, on the island of Mahe, and here nobody was waiting for him. Almost unable to believe he was truly free, Hans emerged cautiously on to a nearly deserted concourse, seeing broken windows around him, much litter blowing in a breeze, a dark man asleep beside a refreshment stand. Nobody else. He heaved a vast sigh and let go of Anneliese's arm. "I'm sorry. I'm most terribly sorry, I really am. But you saw what happened everywhere else we've been until now, didn't you?" Rubbing the spot where his fingers had clamped, viselike, she said sullenly, "All I saw was that a lot of people recognized you and said they wanted to give you a message. I don't know why you have to run away from them. I wish I'd never said I'd come with you. You seem to be treating me more like -- like baggage than a person!" "But the only people I can think of who might want to hound me are criminals like the one who burgled my home and then burned it down -- " Hans felt perspiration spring from every inch of his skin. "You have criminal gangs who can be ready and waiting any place you go, ambushing innocent people even though they can go right around the world in next to no time? Then modern life is even more abominable than I already thought it was." She gave him a defiant glare, her chin jutted at a sullen angle. His heart sank. Searching for some fragment of consolation, he could find nothing better than the fact that for the moment at least she had forgotten about her stuck zipper. He soothed her by degrees until she relaxed enough to agree to accompany him front the concourse .and find a place to lodge. The sound of their altercation had woken the man at the refreshment stand. He stood up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and offered his wares -- stale-looking pastries and flyblown fruit, old bottles refilled with sickly soft drinks colored repulsively bright red, green and purple. Hans refused, but inquired without much hope whether there was a hotel to be found. The man shook his head. "No, sir. Is not hotels here any more. But is a lodging house I know -- good, cheap, clean. Is my sister-in-law who runs it. I write address and give directions, too." He seized a stub of pencil, tore the corner off a yellow sheet of newspaper and in slow, awkward capitals wrote two hard-to-decipher lines. After going through the data with him, Hans thanked him and was about to take Anneliese's arm again when he realized the man was holding out his palm with a look of annoyance. Oh. Of course, a tip. He felt in his pocket and produced a couple of coins, suddenly remembering with a wrenching sensation that he had almost no money on him. He had forgotten to pick up his spare cash when he last had stopped at home. S o he would have to go back yet one more time -- and if there were one place where Mustapha would beyond doubt have planted his agents, it would be at Valletta. It wouldn't be possible for the Arab to get past the privateer in Hans's own skelter, but of course the house still had ordinary doors and windows... No, wait a second. Hadn't Vanzetti promised that the police would keep a watch on his home? So it would probably be safe to go there after all. And if it proved to be otherwise there were alternatives -- he could, for example, go to the Recuperation Service headquarters and draw some money there, payment in advance for the compassionate leave he had applied for. He breathed a little more easily as he led Anneliese out of the concourse building, along a littered street past shabby buildings to the shabbiest of them all, obviously the "good, cheap, clean" lodging. The woman who came to answer Hans's knock at the rickety front door smiled and bobbed and escorted him and Anneliese indoors, explaining that yes, luckily there was room for someone else because one of the long-term lodgers had just died and nobody had yet rented the vacancy. She showed them into an ill-furnished, cramped room with a double bed, a washstand so ancient that had he come on it in the course of his work Hans would have thought it worth recuperating and selling as an antique. A big wardrobe stood lopsided against the wall because one of its legs was missing. Anneliese stared about her in dismay. Thinking it was because of the state of the room, Hans began apologetically to explain about the collapse of the hotel business the world over, so that in most places one could find nothing better than this sort of squalid accommodation -- but that wasn't what was on her mind. "There must be two rooms," she ordered. "Find a place where there are two rooms. I will not accept this -- we are not married!" And before he could conjure up an answer she was storming at him, unleashing a flood of words that battered his ears until his skull seemed to be ringing like a bell. "Every man I have met since I came from Brazil is the same. You, too, whom I thought honest and moral. I was a fool to believe your lies and I should have known better! All you can think of is your filthy sinful lust and ways you can cheat a girl, deceive her, force her into a corner she can't escape from -- that's what you do! I said I'd c-ome with you because you promised to show me the beautiful side of the modern world, places where people are happy and kind and life is sweet -- and what have I seen? What have you brought me to? A horrible shabby filthy stinking townful of slums, that's what! Get me away from here this minute -- and this time show me what you promised!" Interface S Many people sit at home gnawing their nails, unable to decide where to go. An ass -- claimed Buridan -- stan'ed to death equidistant between bales of hay. Buridan however was human. Other creatures aren't really as stupid as mankind. -- Mustapha Sharif all his castles in the air were collapsing around Hans. He could barely believe that so short a time had transformed Anneliese from the shy, seemingly affectionate child who had been so delighted to find someone at Aleuker's to whom she could talk -- albeit slowly and with many verbal footnotes -- in her own language. Now she seemed to have turned into a thoroughgoing virago, tongue-lashing him with more imagination and more sheer anger than Dany had ever achieved. Could this be the fruit of the ideals to which she had been raised? It seemed incredible. How could people get along with one another if they thought this attitude the right and proper one? And then he remembered sickly that they hadn't gotten along with one another. They had been so crazy that they had invented weapons capable of wiping out whole cities at a blow -- and they had used the skelter first of all to commit theft, murder and sabotage. Dazed, he could do nothing except comply with Anneliese's demands. Walking back to the skelter concourse, to the accompaniment of her sniffs and snorts of contempt at the state of this rundown dirty little town, he searched his mind for some other place to which he might risk taking her. Tahiti had crossed his mind a little while ago, he recalled. Would that be tolerable by her standards? Most likely not, because it was a clean smart place patronized by skelter tourists, people taking long vacations with plenty of money in their pockets. If Anneliese had been horrified to see people at the Balinese refuge going about, clad only in kilts and baldrics, carrying out their daily tasks, how much more offended would she be at the sight of women and gay men sprawling naked on the beach in the hope that they would attract partners for the night? He didn't know. He literally had no idea. He couldn't get hold of the lunatic standards she lived by. Was there a skelter-using community conservative enough to satisfy her anywhere on the planet? Well, if there were it would have to be in Australia. The problem was not that no one at all nowadays adhered to Anneliese's sort of principles. It was that the communities where her beliefs were in force were disdainful of the skelter or terrified of it. He had never been to any of them apart from making a brief tour of the town near Mustapha's home -- during which so many people had made signs at him to ward off the Evil Eye -- or had spat at the prints he left in the dust -- that he'd lost count in a few minutes. Did he know the code for any place in Australia? The answer was no. He would have to consult a directory and pick a spot at random. T here were a few more people in the concourse now, half a dozen altogether, including a couple of curious children buying soft drinks at the refreshment stand. He waited until they had been served, then asked about a directory. At sight of him the salesman's face fell. "You did not like the home of my sister-in-law?" "She -- she had only one room and we wanted two." A pause, during which the salesman looked him over with mingled amazement and contempt: if a man can persuade a girl so pretty to travel with him, how can he not share her bed? A good question... But he moved at last, pointing toward a booth Hans had not noticed on the far side of the concourse. The salesman said there was a directory in the booth. Hans expected Anneliese to come with him -- she declined and sat down firmly on a vacant bench. "You make me walk too much -- my feet hurt. And this is the world where they told me you never need to walk because you have the skelter." So Hans went to the directory booth alone and leafed through a tattered, out-of-date volume with many pages missing. The purpose they had been put to was plain from the stench that arose from a corner of the booth. The floor had subsided -- there was a hole in it and people had used it as an impromptu latrine. Half-deafened by the buzz of flies that circled the spot, Hans eventually located and memorized the code for the public skelter outlet in Alice Springs, Australia, which -- so he seemed to remember -- was currently flourishing and certainly must be as conservative as most of the subcontinent. He headed, sighing, back toward the bench where he had left Anneliese -- and realized with a shock of horror that she wasn't there. Staring frantically around, he spotted her approaching the skelters, talking animatedly to a man in neatly tailored clothes who certainly had not been on the concourse a few minutes ago. He shouted at her. Glancing fearfully at him, she clutched her new companion's arm and whispered something that impelled him to hurry her into the nearest booth. Before Hans could catch up, a wash of bright blue light signaled their departure. To anywhere. F or a long while Hans simply stood there cursing, his hands clenched so tightly he fancied blood would run from the tips of his nails. The children regarded him in amazement, sucking their soft drinks noisily through straws. Several other people also gazed at him. At long last he managed to gather his wits and say to the air, "He's not going to get away with it. I'll see him in hell first!" He strode to the skelter by which Anneliese and the unknown man had traveled and punched a code he had only used once before but remembered almost better than his own. It belonged to Mustapha Sharif. a ur E has come, effendi," said XlAli and stood aside from the doorway of the Room of Leopards, so that Hans could pass him, shouting wildly. "What have you done with her, damn you?" Mustapha, seated cross-legged on a pile of soft cushions, raised the brow over one sightless eye. "Hans, good day to you," he murmured. "I have been half-expecting you. Be seated and let Ali serve you some refreshment." "I want to know what you've done with Anneliese!" "You have become separated from her?" "Lost her, as you damned well know." "To be strictly accurate, I didn't know. But I'm glad. That is as it ought to be." "You -- " Hans's voice failed him -- he recovered it with a tremendous effort. "You have the gall to sit there and say she didn't go off with one of your agents?" "My dear fellow, am I a miracleworker?" Bewildered, Hans wondered if he were losing his sanity. Had he not himself found it hard to believe that Mustapha could have his servants ready and waiting at every public skelter on Earth? And yet... "You're not denying you sent your chief scribe Muley in search of me?" "Indeed not, and in fact he's on his way to join us. I just heard the scuffle of his shoes at the end of the corridor. He almost caught up with you twice, I believe, and I'm puzzled, not to say offended, that you decided to avoid him. You made things even worse, I gather, by lying in order to persuade the monks and nuns at the Balinese Way of Life refuge to lie, too. Ever since our first meeting you've claimed to follow that Way. It is sad to realize that a friend of long standing has been telling you untruths, isn't it?" Giddy, Hans had to sit down -- the alert Ali made sure that a stool was ready behind his legs. "But if Anneliese didn't go off with someone you sent after us -- " Muley entered silently. Mustapha acknowledged his bow with a brief nod. "Explain the circumstances," he invited Hans. And, having heard Hans's broken summary, had to chuckle. "Hans, Hans, I suppose I should feel flattered because you thought all that was my doing!" "Whose, then?" Hans demanded furiously. "Who but a senior official of the Skelter Authority could ensure that watch was being kept, world-wide, for a single man? Frederick Satamori was here -- recovering from the injuries he suffered at Chaim Aleuker's -- at the very moment you and I were talking at the house in Sweden, the conversation you ended in such an unceremonious fashion." Mustapha had discarded his bandage, but now he raised one hand to part his hair and display a piece of bright pink sticking-plaster covering his scalp wound from the poker. "But Anneliese wouldn't have gone off with a total stranger, even if he were an employee of the Skelter Authority -- " "What grounds do you have for saying that she would not?" Mustapha retorted. "During the few brief hours of your acquaintance at Aleuker's party, had you become such old and intimate friends? No, on the contrary -- I say you have one hundred per cent evidence that that's exactly what she would do. Haven't you realized yet that she is deranged?" "I -- " Hans's jaw dropped. "I can see you had begun to suspect as much and were denying the truth to yourself." With renewed fury: "So you told Satamori to find me and Anneliese? Is he pimping for you now? You want her for yourself, is that it? Well, I can tell you -- " "Never in my entire life, and I'm no longer a young man," Mustapha said thinly, "have I been so mortally insulted. And I am not the only one to take offense. Look at my servants. Can you not read in their faces that they would cheerfully seize you and drag you screaming up my tallest minaret and pitch you to your death on the flagstones below? It is as gentle a fate as you deserve. But you are yourself insane now. Possibly you always have been. In that case I am to blame for having befriended you. So I will answer with fair words. No, I did not set Satamori on your trail. Because of the loss of Chaim and other crucial members of our ruling elite he was eager to track down those who solved the clues to Chaim's treasure hunt. You were the first person to do so and he wanted to get in touch with you and offer you a better job, a more responsible and higher salaried one. Instead you let yourself become obsessed with a mentally disturbed girl, barely more than a child. You let your wife sacrifice herself and gave perjured evidence about her death. You -- " "Lies, lies!" Hans shrieked. "Ali, serve our visitor a tranquilizing draught. It will soften his panic and enable him to think and talk more like his normal self." Ali proffered an engraved brass cup. Hans swept it aside, crying, "Out to poison me now, are you?" "Ali, fill two cups. The strain is telling on me and I, too, would welcome some of that drink. If you choose which cup I should take, will that content you?" Mustapha added to Hans. Hans licked lips gone suddenly dry. Eventually he nodded. "Good. I might add that it's just as well that you made the choice you did -- because if I had to kill you, I would. I had your predecessor killed when he started pilfering things from the houses we visited together. I do not wish to wear a bracelet. But I do wish to make several things clear to you. When your mind is settled enough to take them in I shall continue with my explanations. I would rather convince you than have your death on my conscience." Interface T I have noticed how deep in litter is the world. It is because nobody cares about anywhere now. I don't live here! they say, and take the skelter. But they do. They do live here. This is Earth.  -- Mustapha Sharif P erhaps Mustapha was more accustomed to whatever was in the tranquilizing draught -- at any rate, he seemed unaffected by it when he had drained his cupful. By contrast Hans was pervaded by a sudden and alarming detachment. He felt as though his ego had separated from his body and now floated above his head, observing himself, controlling his movement and speech but from a distance like some puppet master. He said, enunciating carefully, "Well -- explanations! And I warn you -- make them good." A yawn unexpectedly stretched his last word. He converted it into a gasp. Mustapha said, "You must have wondered what it is I gain from visiting abandoned homes with you." "Yes, often." "I obtain insight into the process that led to my being blinded." "How -- No, I shouldn't ask. The question is too personal." "On the contrary, you should have asked long ago and you would have made more sense of your life. I was blinded because I was looking directly toward a nuclear fireball. It was the bomb that destroyed the Suez Canal. Who fired it doesn't matter. But its glare passed, as if focused, straight through my corneas, which are as you have seen unmarred. But on each of my retinas the point at which the optic nerve sets in was cicatriced, converted in a fraction of a second to useless scar tissue. It is because of that experience that when I go to an abandoned home belonging to people who lived by the old standards, I find something different there from what you find. I find a distillation of what used to disguise the cruelty and brutality humans were capable of. You go to such places in a spirit of envy and resentment. You wish you could have lived as they did, not realizing that it would mean paying the spiritual price they paid. At heart you belong to that old and cruel world." "No -- " "Do you not? Do you really not? Because I do." Confused, Hans shook his head. The sensation was like twitching marionette strings. Mustapha continued: "I belong so completely to that old world, despite all my efforts to identify the foul poisons it has left in the collective psyche of mankind, that when I heard Satamori was going to search for you I gave way to panic. I could foresee your betraying me. It was not until I sent for and heard again a tape I once compiled about you, the one that documented your past history and impelled me to decide that you and I would become partners in crime, that I realized how stupid I was being. At first I was thinking of catching you and tying you up, as you tied me -- only better. You made a terribly clumsy job of those bonds, you know. Then I realized that was betraying my own vision of man's ultimate nature -- and in the upshot, I'm delighted to say, my better judgment has been proven right. You did come here of your own free will and you have become separated from Anneliese to whom, as I told you, only harm could come from your relationship -- " "Stop, stop! That isn't true -- " "Ah, but it is. Think hard, Hans." Mustapha leaned forward, his sightless eyes seeming to bore into Hans's very brain. "Think first about your own situation. Do you feel the world has treated you unjustly?" "Yes, damn it, .yes!" Hans felt tears start to his eyes. "I haven't done any real harm to anybody. I was simply taken aback and miscalculated about a couple of things. It isn't fair that I should have been punished for -- " # ho punished you?" MusVY tapha slipped in the question with the neatness of a physician using a hypodermic needle. "You are guilty of a major crime, as the standards of today measure crime. You're a code-breaker. So am I." "But I became one only because I wanted to come to grips with the past, document it, leave my reports for the archeologists of the future -- " "Not true. If that had been the truth, could you not have gone to your superiors and said that in addition to working as a recuperator, a legal scavenger, you wanted -- in your own time -- to garner information, too? They would never have accorded me that privilege. But to you, a trustworthy and indeed a respected colleague, they would have said yes. You could have had discontinued codes with full legal authority. But you didn't want that. You wanted to be regarded, albeit after your death, as a man who dared to defy society's rules." "That's not so! They would never have let me -- " "Damnation, man! You met the people, or some of them, who are running Earth these days. You met Satamori and Aleuker and Pech and the others at that ridiculous party. For all I maintain that they're going about saving mankind the wrong way, inventing new rules and regulations when what we most desperately need is to apply common sense instead of inflexible principles that become out of date in a year or two -- for all the disagreements I've had with them, I have to concede them this much: they're the most open-minded people ever to achieve such power in the whole of human history. You don't know what Satamori said when he mentioned that he was going to track you down, so I'll tell you. He said, approximately, that it wouldn't matter if you proved to be a coward, as was suggested by the speed of your flight from Chaim's home. What counted was that you were plainly a quick thinker." A faint moan escaped from Hans's lips. He tried to stop it and could not. His voice colored by pity, Mustapha went on more softly, "There's one thing you still have to accept, my friend. You are acting as though you became the -- the proprietor of this girl Anneliese. You could never have done so. You could at best have been her -- keeper." "But she didn't seem to be mentally disturbed -- " "No more do you, from most people's standpoint. Less than -- " Sensing that Hans was drawing breath to interrupt, Mustapha raised one hand to forestall him. "Less than I do, was what I was about to say. I know for a fact that Chaim Aleuker believed me to be a dangerous man. He suspected me of vaulting ambition, of a lust for power, of degrees of hypocrisy unparalleled in the worst of the olden days -- and with all respect to his memory I must argue that he was wrong. "Honestly, my friend, how could you imagine that someone in Anneliese's plight could be less than seriously deranged? Your wife Dany, unlikable perhaps, was still capable of functioning as a person, more or less, capable of making her own friends and even of being singled out as a recipient of one of those silly treasure hunt invitations. Surely with her before you as an example of how deeply deformed a personality can become -- thanks to the trauma mankind has underbone -- you ought to have seen how much more seriously Anneliese must have been affected? A priori! And you ought also -- " Mustapha's voice dropped -- "to have applied the same lesson to yourself." Hans gulped air, but could not answer. iLMustapha went on, "I am ashamed of what the old world did to me and I want the world to know my feeling. I'm ashamed that there was so much greed and envy and that greed and envy are in my nature, too. I'm ashamed that people had power without responsibility and since I have power I strive to act in a responsible manner, not by accepting government posts but by listening when those in need come to me, by helping those who cannot help themselves, by admiring the petty achievements of those who have no better and yet do not deserve to have nothing at all. Possibly I am respected -- I believe I am. But that is by strangers, people far away whose only contact with me is through what I have written. What counts above all for me is that I know I am liked by the people who live in the town just beyond the far wall of my home." He thrust out a chubby arm and slapped what happened to be the head of one of the painted leopards, bowed to the gutting of a deer. "It is because those who had far more than I dare ever dream of having," he concluded, "chose to use their wealth in such abominable ways, that I would rather be regarded as eccentric than join the ruling elite. But that is my personal opinion. I have no right to instruct you to follow my example. What I, or any other man, may justly do is say this to you: you have misjudged yourself, taken the wrong measure of yourself. As a result you have a death on your conscience -- and your wife's at that. You have a talent and from that flows your chance to atone. You dreamed of making the girl subservient to you by trapping her in a web of cajolement -- but I went over that and you answered me with a blow on the head. Instead, go to Satamori, accept whatever post he feels you are capable of taking on, dedicate yourself to it. Convert, transform, sublimate your desire for power into a liking for work well done. It is possible. I think that what persuaded me to select you as -- I use the phrase again -- my partner in crime must have been that I sensed your ability to achieve that kind of sublimation. Now prove me right." Out of all that long discourse Hans clutched at and retained one key suggestion. Rising, his mind foggy, he said, "You want me to go straight to Satamori?" "I think it is a wise course of action." "Very well. Ali, lead me to the nearest skelter and find the code for the headquarters of the Skelter Authority." An Informal Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Articles -- Interviews -- Reviews -- Letters Scheduled for ##: "Tomorrow s Libido -- Sex and Science Fiction", an eye-opening survey by Richard Delap. psycho-cultural analysis -- "Reading Heinlein Subjectively" by Alexei  Cory Panshin. -- new book and story lists. Sample l.#. year #. two years Portland, OR #I I ess than five minutes later he j was there. And a young man appeared to him from another skelter after a safe interval and faced him through armor glass from behind a reception desk which -- Hans didn't have to be told -- concealed guns. The pattern was the same at that point in Recuperation HQ which had to be open to the public. When the arrival signal sounded, what had entered the room might not be a person, but a saboteur's bomb. He identified himself and added: "I gather Dr. Satamori has been looking for me." The young man's face brightened. "I'll say he has. I never before had to issue so many copies of a single person's picture. We've been standing by at every public skelter outlet to try and locate you, but I guess you haven't felt much inclined to travel. I heard the sad news about your wife -- if you don't mind my mentioning that? Some people do mind, some don't. The reaction seems to be culturally dependent. Well, what can we do for you?" "Show me to Dr. Satamori, I guess," Hans muttered. "Well, right this minute he's not here," the young man said. "You may have heard Dr. Pech of the Advancement Authority is stil hospitalized as a result of what happened at Chaim Aleuker's?" "I was there." "Well! So that's how you met the chief. Ah -- as I was saying. Dr. Satamori has gone to call on Dr. Pech in the hospital, but if you'd care to wait he said he wouldn't be long, maybe another twenty minutes at most. Would you prefer to come back? Or have him call you?" A vast weariness was pervading Hans's mind now. The echo of the advice he had been given by Mustapha was fading away, as though the effect of the tranquilizing drink had muted the impact of the words. Overlaying it now were deep, deep emotions -- frustration, disappointment, horror. He said gruffly, "No, I guess I'd rather not wait. But if you can give me a piece of paper and an envelope I'd like to leave a npte." "Surely. Here you are." He sat down, wrote the note -- no more than ten lines -- reread it and sealed the envelope and handed it over. Then he headed for the skelter without another word. "Hey," the young man said and then much louder and far more urgently, "Hey! That's not -- " He had a clear sight of the ninedigit code Hans was punching. And it was not one you'd expect a traveler to select. UT tried to stop him before he A finished composing all nine digits!" the young man mourned. "One gets into the habit of automatically glancing at what people are punching, just in case -- " "Stop blaming yourself," Satamori said glacially, seated at his desk and reading for the third or fourth time the note Hans had left. "You weren't to know in advance he was punching the code for an incinerator." He glanced at the skelter in the corner of his office and could not repress a shudder. "That will be all," he added and the young man went out, shaking his head as automatically as a porcelain mandarin. Alone, Satamori stared at the note and tried to consult in his mind with Chaim Aleuker, with Boris Pech, with the miserable girl whom his agents had luckily caught up with in -- of all places -- the Seychelles and who would probably be fit to take her place in society in a few years' time after treatment by Karl Bonetti. He fancied he could hear all their voices, blended into a single voice, inside his head. They agreed, they concurred, they were unanimous. The note said that Mustapha Sharif had for years been guilty of selling illegal codes to abandoned houses. Several of the actual codes were listed. "But I know him," Satamori said under his breath. "I respect him. More importantly, I like him, even though we're forever arguing. To see him braced? No, to treat him so would be unworthy. Whatever his reasons, I'm sure they were justified. And he's always said, rightly, that we must never put an absolute straitjacket of rules and regulations around the world again. Maybe what brought us to the Blowup was the simple operation of an inflexible natural law. Equally, it might have been the excessive constriction of inflexible man-made laws. Man likes to be free. When he's fettered he gets angry and lashes out." He reached his decision. Rising, he walked to his private skelter and tossed the note to its floor. Then, at the full stretch of his arm, he composed the same nine-digit code that had taken Hans Dykstra on the longest of all journeys so far made possible by the skelter -- the longest that ever would be possible, indeed -- and the note followed Hans into eternity. Satamori returned to his desk. There was as always much work to be done. Interface U You stood before the skelter thinking it was new and strange to confront so many options You overlooked the fact that every dawn since time began has lighted uncountable choices -- Mustapha Sharif # East # Street New York, N T. # # per word per issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. Montclair, N.J. #. Savage, Etc.) Magazines, Playboys, Premiums, Movie Merchandise, Etc. #-#. Catalogues # cents. Rogofsky, Box GF#, Flushing, New York #. Park, L. !., N.Y. #. S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. 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From Harper ) Row The first collection of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories An anthology edited by Jack Dann; introduction by Isaac Asimov. # Clarke, Anderson, Russ, Pohl, Ellison, Silverberg, Ratsler, Wolfe The prize-winning collection, edited by Isaac Asimov. # "Immensely entertaining... long overdue." -- Poul Anderson and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories By Richard McKenna, author of The Sand Pebbles. # "A collection of complex, humane stories." -- Kirkus Reviews An original anthology edited by Roger Elwood. # A runaway quasar threatens the earth's survival A new thriller by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle. # Startling experiments in plant-man communication By Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Illustrated, # The provocative best seller about the greatest mystery of the ancient world By Peter Tompkins. Illustrated, #th printing, # "Astronomical imagination and fact in an alluring marriage." -- Ernest K. Gann Facts and speculations by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan. Illustrated with Mariner # photos, # W Harper  Row LI I # E #rd St , New York # At bookstores T he way it can happen is like this: You're leaning back in your first-class seat on Fat Cat Spacelines with a cigar in your face and a glass of champagne in your hand, going from Depredation City on Earth to Spoilsville Junction on ing for you just behind the customs barrier and the party in your honor will be going full swing at the Ultima Hilton. And you realize that, after a lifetime of struggle, you're finally rich, sexy, successful and respected. Life is like a ball of chicken liver, rich and tasty and dripping with grease. You've worked a long dirty time to get where you are and you're ready at last to enjoy it. Just at this moment the landing sign flashes on. You say to the stewardess, "Tell me, pretty one, what is going on?" "We're putting down at End City," she tells you. "But that wasn't scheduled. Why are we landing there?" She shrugs. "That's where the ship's computer took us and now we have to land here." "Now look," you say sternly, "I was assured by my very good President of this Line, that there would be no unscheduled stops." "End City terminates all previous assurances," she tells you. "Maybe you didn't want to come here, but you sure as hell have arrived." You fasten your safety belt and think -- just my stupid luck. Sweat your ass off all your life, and just when you're ready to have a little fun, up comes End City. I t's pretty easy to get into End City. All you have to do is show up. Park your spaceship in the junkyard. There's nothing to sign. Don't worry about a thing. Come around later and meet the boys. T he Quicksilver Kid swaggers up and asks, "Hey, what do you guys do for kicks around here?" Mort the Snort says, "We take drugs like Hope-'#." "What is the effect of Hope'#?" "It makes you think you got a future." The Quicksilver Kid looks wistful. "Man, I gotta score me some of that stuff." M eet Sweet Lucy, girl of a thousand bodies, all gross. "I takes myself down to the Celestial Body Shop nearly every Monday and each time I'm determined to get myself a real pretty body -- you know the kind I mean, pretty. But each time it's like this compulsion comes over me and I pick a big fat saggy number just like I always had. If I could ever lick that weirdo compulsion I'd be in real good shape." Dr. Bernstein's comment: "Her hangup is her salvation. Down chicks always run true to form. Gentlemen, kick her as you leave. She digs the attention." G iardano had done a lot of traveling, but he never did get far. "It's simple truth to say that this galaxy is just like the inside of my head. The farther you go, the less you see. Been to Acmena IV -- looks just like Arizona. Sardis VI is a ringer for Quebec and Omeone VI is a duplicate of Marie Byrd's Land." "What does End City look like?" "If I didn't know better," Giardano says, "I'd think I was back home in Hoboken." I n end city they have to import everything. They import cats and cockroaches, garbage bags and garbage, cops and crime statistics. They import spoiled milk and rotten vegetables, blue suede and orange taffeta, they import orange peels, instant coffee, Volkswagen parts. Champion spark plugs. They import dreams and nightmares. They import you and me. "But what's it all for?" "That's a stupid question. You might as well ask what reality is for." "Well -- what is reality for?" #T k me up any time. I live at section of Minus Boulevard, just across from Null Park." "Is that address supposed to have a symbolic meaning?" "No, man, it's just where I live." N obody can afford the necessities in End City. But luxuries are available for everyone. Ten thousand tons of Chincoteague oyssters are distributed every week, free. But you can't cop cocktail sauce for love or money. C olloquy in Limbo Lane: "Good day, young man. Are you still caught up in the waysmeans fallacy?" "Guess I am, Professor." "Thought as much. Good day, young man." "Who was that?" "That was the professor. He always asks about the ways-means fallacy." "What does it mean?" "Don't know." "Why don't you ask him?" "Don't care." D r. bernstein says: "Monism postulates that there's only one thing -- dualism says there are two things. No matter which is true, you still haven't got much to work with." "Hey!" says Johnny Cadenza. "Maybe that explains why everything around here tastes either like chili or chow mein." G iardano opens a pocket notebook and tries to count all the Main Streets he's walked down. Mort the Snort shoots pure Sealtest ice cream and waits for the hit. The Quicksilver Kid lays out a game of solitaire, but every card is an eight of diamonds. Sweet Lucy bites into a Mars Bar and tastes sunlight, taffeta, a barking puppy. Dr. Bernstein looks back at the old stars, the old trips, all used up now, all finished. He looks ahead at the blackness of the gulf, the big leap into nothingness. He sighs, takes Lucy by the hand. They dance. You come hesitantly forward at last, clear your throat, say, "Excuse me but this is all some kind of mistake,, isn't it? I mean, I shouldn't be here at all." "You're in the right place," Bernstein says. "Welcome to End City." He doesn't even bother to laugh at you.  He saw the truth but could not change it. No one could -- except the I W hat Harris (Andrew, Lt. on his notetapes as "the metamorphosis of my milieu" began when the Starquest was less than a day distant from her first Mars orbit. As was his custom, he had stepped into the drive room to make his daily inspection of the engines. The actual works were largely hidden from the eye of the beholder by heavy shielding and could be checked out realistically only by means of the monitor in the control room, but viewing the setup at first hand reassured Harris in a way that seeing it on a screen could not. This time around, however, he wasn't in the least reassured -- quite the contrary. The drive had vanished utterly. In its place, lying side by side between two huge concave braces, were two long cylinders that he at first took to be a pair of massive conduits but which, when he read the lettering on the black and gold surface of the nearer one, turned out to be a pair of alkaline Duracell #volt batteries, size A A. To complete his mental devastation, the room's deck, ceiling and bulkheads had transmuted, since his last look-in, from steel plating to a green plastic material. A strange humming noise was emanating from below the deck, while an even stranger whirring sound was coming from beyond the stern firewall. Shaken, he backed out of the room, instinctively reaching for the door. If he could shut the insane scene from his sight, perhaps it would go away. He found himself, however, thwarted -- for the door no longer existed. Although disliked by his fellow astronauts, ostensibly for a streak of cruelty he was not always successful in concealing but actually for his intellectualism, Harris had been the International Space Agency's overwhelming choice for the first one-man Mars mission. He was self-disciplined, emotionally stable and resourceful -- the sort of person least likely to lose his cool no matter how bizarre the circumstances. He did not lose it now. After standing quietly in the Starquest' s aft corridor ( that had transmuted to plastic also, grown longer and undergone several other changes) till his heartbeat subsided to nearly normal, he reentered the drive room. The two Brobdingnagian batteries were lying "head to foot," their positive and negative terminals respectively making contact with vertical metal arms protruding through slots in the deck. Since there was no way Harris could get below -- at least none that he knew of -- he had to surmise what sort of energy converter was installed there. His mind balked. Small wonder. How in hell could an electric motor powered by two #volt batteries (assuming such a setup had been in effect all along) have freed the Starquest from the moon's gravitic pull and have brought her to the verge of her first Mars orbit mere months after liftoff? Moreover, what means of propulsion did the theoretical motor employ? A propeller? I ooking neither to left nor right, j he hurried forward to the control room and homed in on the radio. He fumbled for the toggle switch. "Starquest to base -- Starquest to base -- " Then he stood there, feeling slightly foolish. And slightly terrified. For the control panel, of which the radio was a part, had turned into the same green plastic material he had seen in the drive room and the corridor. Not only that -- the panel had moved. And the control room itself -- bulkheads, deck and ceiling -- had transmuted to plastic and grown larger. Or perhaps it only seemed larger because most of its more sophisticated paraphernalia had ceased to exist even in plastic form. Harris sagged into the control chair -- fortunately it was still in the same place -- and stared at the levers, switches, gauges, dials and screens arrayed before him. The levers and switches were realistic, though immovable, and the gauges and the dials had numbered faces pasted on them. When he had glanced at the ship's chronometer some fifteen minutes ago it had registered # hours -- the printed face of its plastic counterpart registered # hours. Worse, he had no timepiece of his own to dispute it. He gazed at the monitor screens. They had pictures painted on them. One "showed" what looked like a subatomic drive, another what looked like a grav generator, another what looked like an oxygen reconverter, and still another an apparatus that vaguely suggested a meteor deflector. Harris returned his eyes to the picture of the oxygen reconverter. He took a deep breath. Another. The air seemed to be okay. At length his gaze stole over to the forward bulkhead where the viewscreen had been. It was still in approximately the same place. It had transmuted to plastic and had a picture of Mars painted on it. F or a moment deja vu overwhelmed him. Then he forced himself to check out the ship -- or at least those parts of it that were accessible to him -- from stem to stern. It had been cast or stamped out of plastic in two lateral sections -- then the two sections had been fused (glued?) together. (Harris didn't believe his eyes, but this was what they told him.) The ship's appointments and equipment, except for the batteries and, presumably, the theoretical electric motor, had been part of the original pattern -- or die -- from with which the two sections had been cast, or stamped. There were other differences. The ship had become considerably larger and its appointments and equipment, when duplicated, were differently styled and no longer located in quite the same places. While the control room and the drive cubicle still occupied approximately the same sections, the tiny cabin that contained his bunk had exchanged places with the lock -- and the little lavatory, formerly adjacent to his cabin, had exchanged places with the suit locker. Oddly, the new arrangement only served to intensify his deja vu. But was what he was experiencing deja vu? Hadn't he, long long ago, in a different way, experienced all this before? Formerly the ship's illumination had been supplied by strategically placed fluorescent tubes. Now it came from strategically applied daubs of phosphorescent paint. There was no longer a heating system -- or if there was, he could find no evidence of it -- yet the interior temperature was in the upper seventies. But while there was light and heat and air, there was no food. Oh, there was a galley, all right, but no one had thought to stock it. In addition to its empty shelves it contained a quaint little plastic sink and two cute little plastic water taps. The trouble with the taps was, he couldn't turn them on -- but even if he'd been able to his lot wouldn't have been improved. A subsequent search for the water reservoir and the recycling system revealed both to be no longer existent. He didn't enter the drive room again -- he didn't have the heart. Anyway, he knew that nothing had changed: the humming of the hypothetical electric motor and the whirring of the hypothetical propeller were audible throughout the ship. Occasionally sounds came from outside the ship -- distant muffled crashes, strange longdrawn-out thunderings... After taking an inventory of his clothing and the contents of his pockets and finding nothing changed and everything still there, he returned disconsolately to the control room. There, he sat powerlessly in the control chair, staring at the painted picture of Mars. What delightful white polar caps you have, my dear, he thought. What a delightful orange complexion! And those charming little lines that crisscross one another so quaintly -- are they your famous canals? If only there were some way he could see the real Mars. If only there were portholes in the hull... But there were, weren't there? Ten of them. Five on either side... Throughout his "tour of inspection" -- and even before -- he had had the feeling that every aspect of the ship was the same as it had always been -- that nothing really changed until he looked at it. Until he remembered it. Thus, while he was startled, he was not truly surprised when, glancing at the section of the starboard hull that the control-panel abutted, he saw... remembered?... a porthole. Looking through it, he saw "Mars." It was the same orange hue as its two-dimensional sister on the viewscreen, had just as many canals, was tilted the proper degree on its axis and was resting on what appeared to be a stilt. Bright bluish radiance bathed it from above and yellowish light from afar. Despite its distance from the Starquest it seemed no more than a stone's throw away. Orbiting it at perceptible velocities were two ping-pong ball-like moonlets. Around and around and around they went. Around and around and around. From his notetapes: "... can be but three possible explanations for the phenomena I have just described -- that constitute the metamorphosis of my milieu: #) the utterly absurd one that the metamorphosis is the result of a photon storm through which the Starquest is passing and of which the detectors are apparently unaware; #) the equally absurd one that no metamorphosis occurred, that for a reason or reasons unknown to me I am perceiving reality divested of its usual #TT T Ballantine j J Books A Division of Random House, Inc. Old business firsts a thousand and then some apologies to T. J. Bass for confusing the name of his new BB novel In the and she's quite a gal. Hope you found it on sale despite our editorial boggling of the title. Anyway, it's a jolly good booh and a for it -- you'll love it. novel of an incredible #st-century energy crisis! Talk about relevance! When the book was first published (original title: The Dragon in the Sea back in #), it was critically acclaimed by major reviewers. Said The New York Times: "In this blend of speculation and action, Mr. Herbert has created a novel that ranks with the best of modern science fiction. Here is a sea story of an Imaginary war that comes very dose to matching -- in suspense, action and psychic strain -- any chronicle of real war by C. S. Forester or Herman Wouk." In the world of the future that Herbert postulated, the U.S.A. all but used up its oil supply (sound familiar?). A new source must be found. Atomic subtugs begin stealing supplies from underwater deposits in enemy territory. Problem: none of the twenty tugs sent out on a mission have returned with the desperately needed oil. Ensign John Ramsey of BuPsych is planted aboard the Fenian Ram S#I as an electronics officer. His assignment -- find the saboteur in the four-man crew and bring back the oil. The review of this novel that we liked best said: "This is a fictional story of the future that we should pray never becomes a news story of the present." Htnmm! Alan Dean Foster Is writing a series of books set in the galaxy he originally created the new book, he postulates a frigid planet on which a party of humans Is stranded. They are an ill-assorted group, initially intent on cutting one another's throats. They are rescued by a company of tran -- the local inhabitants -- and escorted through many adventures to the tran fortress town. On this iceworld, the natives move by extending their batwings and allowing the violent winds to sailskate them over the frozen landscape. The humans are at a dreadful disadvantage -- having no natural locomotion, being vulnerable to the cold and being totally dependent on the strange tran... With his first stoiy The Book of Rack the Healer (serialized in IF a while ago), Zach Hughes established himself as one of those tellers of tales whose ability to create life forms makes them unique. Now Hughes is She is an Artonuee -- a delicately furred, winged creature with great multi-faceted eyes. Her world seems ultimately doomed by a head-on collision with another world. But the time is far off, and the Artonuee hope to find a way to divert the rogue planet. Miaree, in her one-man space flyer, must save her people. Szafran has captured the delicate and ethereal quality of Mlaree's ship in one of the most beautiful sf covers we've seen. Look for it! the ads and reviews and attendant hoopla have created a fantastic demand for this sensational volume. It's sure to be a collector's item. If, by chance, your dealer has sold his last copy you can obtain one or more (one to read; one to lend andor give) by sending the cover price, #, plus #c per order to Ballon tine Cash Sales, P.O. Box #, Westminster, Maryland #. Of course, you can order any of the other titles mentioned this month at # per title plus #c per order. BB subjective accouterments -- the noumenon, as it were; #) the one I were wrong in their conclusion that an interplanetary voyage of this duration could safely be undertaken by one man without his experiencing adverse side effects -- that what I am experiencing now is a form of regression brought on by my subconscious to delete from my physical awareness the awesomeness of my real surroundings. "To elaborate -- when I was eight years old I received for my birthday a mini-solar system kit. Although much more sophisticated, it had considerable in common with the tinkertoy sets of my great grandparents' day. Correctly assembled, its various parts formed a sort of extensive orrery consisting of a #-watt bulb centerpiece, around which nine painted plastic planets and thirteen painted plastic moons (for obvious reasons, only those moons closest to their primaries were included while the asteroid belt was omitted altogether) orbited at drastically reduced distances but at velocities reasonably in ratio to their real-life counterparts. This was accomplished by means of nine flat metal arms radiating fanwise from a hub centered beneath the 'sun.' Each planet was affixed vertically to its appropriate arm by means of a vertical metal rod, and an electric motor and a differential housed in the hub effected the correct orbital velocities. The only thing lacking was axial rotation, but this was compensated for to some extent by magnetic-repellor cores in 'Earth,' 'Mars,' 'Jupiter,' 'Saturn,' 'Uranus' and 'Neptune' that kept their respective steelcored moons at fixed distances from their primaries and, by revolving, lent them orbital motion. "Once assembled, my mini-solar system literally filled the basement recreation room where my parents had permitted me to build it, the season being summer and social get togethers having been transferred to the patio. The plane of the ecliptic was some three feet above the floor and some four below the ceiling. At its outermost point, 'Pluto's' eccentric orbit barely cleared the doorway leading to the kitchen stairs. Augmenting the radiance of 'Sol' were four overhead fluorescent tubes. "I peopled my extraterrestrial planets with all sorts of weird life forms, but for 'Earth' I created a race of beings very much like ourselves and a civilization sequence roughly parallel to our own. After fabricating a history of wars, famines, floods, earthquakes and what-have-you, I crowned my little world with a technological civilization not greatly different from the one I lived in. I then proceeded to play God in earnest, raining down upon the helpless heads of the poor beings I had brought into existence calamities and catastrophes and diseases of every description. I created power shortages, devised domestic tragedies, instigated riots, ignited wars. In a sense, I tinkered with the destinies of my minihumans in much the same way I had tinkered with the mini-solar system in which they lived. "At first, the idea of 'spaceflight' did not occur to me, although a tiny toy spaceship had come with the kit..." H arris sat dozing in the control chair, dreaming of his wife and home. His wife's name was Georgiana and she was like a wind walking, a night wind, cool and lovely, with night-black hair and evening-star eyes. Georgiana. And the house where they lived sat by a river that sang, beneath trees that whispered amid the golden laughter of lazy summer afternoons... Awakening, he had no idea how long he had slept. He was hungry and thirsty and he saw little black flecks when he blinked. His tongue seemed to fill his mouth. Clearly he had slept for quite some time. When he looked through the starboard porthole he saw that "Mars" and its moonlets were now much closer. It stunned him that a self-induced illusion could keep such perfect pace with reality. But on the other hand, how could it fail to keep pace? Illusion or no illusion, the plastic spaceship he was riding in was still the Starquest, "Mars" was still Mars and "space" was still space. And he was still Harris, Andrew, Lt. Com., He pressed his cheek against the oddly resilient glass and looked along the line of the ship's trajectory. He saw both "Jupiter" and "Saturn." "Uranus," "Neptune" and "Pluto" were apparently elsewhere in their orbits and out of sight. "Jupiter's" famous marking was a vivid splash of crimson. "Saturn's" rings looked as though they were made of aluminum foil. Neither had its full quota of moons: "Jupiter" had only four, "Saturn" only three. He crossed the control room and peered through the opposite porthole. He saw no stars (he had not expected to see any) -- only bluish radiance tinged with the wan yellow rays of "Sol." And in the far distance a vast pale blur. As he stared, the blur seemed to move... He slammed the door on the logical conjecture that tried to step into his mind and moved back quickly from the porthole. Shivering, he returned to the starboard porthole and pressed his other cheek against the glass. Both "Earth" and the "sun" were hidden by the hulUHe would not be able to see them till Moonbase activated the retro-rockets in the Green Avenger's -- the Starqnest's -- prow and the ship went into orbit. The illusion was quite strict about such matters. From his notetapes: "Later, if there is a later in my life and if the veil that I have drawn over the face of reality dissolves, I will transcribe these notes, which I am recording on my pocketaper, to the Starqnest's log. "Although of necessity way out of proportion to the hurtling 'celestial bodies' it was meant to travel among, the toy spaceship that came with my mini-solar system was a masterpiece in the art of miniaturization. Delightful glimpses of its illuminated, incredibly detailed interior could be obtained through tiny saran-wrap portholes located at regular intervals in the plastic hull, and I spent hours peeking in ing to make out the infinitesimal readings on the dials and gauges and the details of the picture painted, as though on the head of a pin, on the viewscreen. It was inevitable that when the time came I should project myself inside -- and just as inevitable that I should project myself, not as an eight-yearold boy, but as the full-fledged astronaut I intended someday to become. "The plastic material of which the ship was made was so featherlight that even with the additional weight of the batteries and the tiny electric motor, plus that of a small counterweight in the prow, less than half an ounce of heliumite had to be pumped into the ventral buoyancy tank to hold the little vessel aloft. "As the 'creator,' there was no real need for me to employ mechanical means to explore my minicosmos. I could see all my worlds at a single glance and, having 'seeded' them, I knew what sort of life forms they contained. But there was a romantic need and eventually it surfaced. When it did I christened the ship the Green Avenger, located the remote-control box that had come with her and set her on a course for 'Mars.'" H arris was certain that when Moonbase commenced retrofire the resultant recoil would shock him back to reality. He expected braking action to begin at any moment. It was true he had no means of telling time, but his hunger and thirst informed him that close to twenty-four hours must have passed since he had looked into the drive room. Moreover, "Mars" and its moonlets were now opposite the ship's stern. He felt strangely light-headed and the black flecks he had noticed earlier had bred like flies. He attributed both symptoms to his nearexhaustion and to his hunger. To get his mind off both he began fiddling with the plastic dials and switches in the vicinity of the plastic radio, hopeful of finding the real switch that had to exist somewhere. He fiddled and he fumbled, but he found nothing. Abruptly he felt himself sway. He regained control of himself almost instantly. Nevertheless, he knew that for a fraction of a second he'd blacked out. The experience opened his eyes, and he saw who his enemy truly was. It was neither hunger nor fatigue -- it was asphyxiation. Frantically he broke off one of the longer control-panel levers and began striking it against the porthole. When the "glass" gave it did not break, but tore. This did not particularly surprise him, nor did the life-giving air that wafted through the rent. Nor did the cooking -- and other familiar -- odors that the air contained. He kneeled for a long time with his nose and mouth to the opening. Then, to make certain his enemy was permanently defeated, he crossed to the port side and gutted the other porthole. Returning to the first, he tore out the rest of the "glass." As he did so he noticed that "Mars" had a slightly different aspect. It was no longer tilted in quite the same direction, and its southern polar cap, so clearly visible before, was now almost out of sight behind the curvature of its southern hemisphere. There was only one answer: Without benefit of retro-fire, the Green Avenger had swung into her first Mars orbit. From his notetapes: "I am physically on board the Green Avenger! "I am physically present in my mini-solar system! "There can be no other explanation. "No illusion could possibly be of sufficient intensity to induce imaginary asphyxiation, or so impenetrable as to shut out the recoil of retro-fire. Moreover, it is inconceivable that I would even unconsciously have exchanged the glorious cosmos I belong in for a mass-produced tinkertoy affair built in a smelly cellar by an eightyear-old snotnose who enjoyed pulling the wings off flies. "I did not regress mentally to a former set of physical conditions -- I returned physically to them. Not instantaneously but by degrees -- a circumstance that led me to conclude erroneously that I had regressed mentally. And to cloud the picture further, this time around I am playing a different role. "How? Why? And what will become of me when my eight-yearold self tires of his childish game? "If only there were some way I could apprise him that there is a real, not an imaginary, little man in his toy spaceship -- a hungry, thirsty, frightened little man who wants desperately to go home! "But if I could -- would I dare?" H arris was able to obtain an excellent view of "Earth" when the Green Avenger passed the "sunward" side of "Mars." His home planet was just as he remembered her -- painted a royal blue and stippled with white polkadots. Her nearness told him what he should have guessed long ago: at the most she was only a "day's distance" from "Mars," and when he had first looked at the latter, the Green Avenger had only recently left the vicinity of the former. He was also able to obtain an excellent view of the "moon" and the "sun." The "moon" looked like a tinsely Christmas ornament. As for the "sun," its radiance dazzled his eyes, hiding from them the stilts on which little red "Mercury" and satiny "Venus" stood. But not the one on which "Earth" stood. She looked silly standing on it. Like a little old lady with one leg. Harris caught himself giggling. The Green Avenger continued to orbit "Mars." He estimated her orbital time at slightly in excess of one hour. His time. To the "creator" the one hour plus probably amounted to a few seconds -- if that. But Harris was involved physically in the reality of the minicosmos. Its "creator" was not. The Starquest had been scheduled to make three full orbits. Halfway through the fourth she was to have been launched on her homeward journey by a burst of booster fire in her stern. Harris tried to remember how many orbits the Green Avenger would make before she began her homeward journey. Try as he would, he could not. Worse, he could not remember where the boy Harris had sent the ship afterward. Worse yet, he could not remember what the boy Harris had ultimately done with it, or, when the novelty of his creation wore off, with the tinkertoy solar system. Halfway through the fourth orbit he saw that his hands were trembling. He tried to stop them, but he couldn't. When the Green Avenger began her fifth orbit he heard someone laughing loudly close beside him, but he didn't look to see who it was. A distant crash reached his ears through the torn porthole. He didn't look to see where that came from either. He could smell boiled cabbage, stale cigar-smoke and old shoes. Upon completing orbit number five, the Green Avenger continued blithely on into orbit number six. Whoever was laughing beside Harris began laughing even louder. From his notetapes: "What -- what did I do with the ship? "Did I throw it out with the ordinary trash to be picked up and recycled? "My God! Didn't I know there was a little man in it? "And how long did I keep it in orbit around 'Mars?' How long? How long? How long? "And my tinkertoy solar system -- what did I do with that? "Oh, God! I can't remember!" N ear the end of orbit number seven, Harris picked up the CD K : Donald A. Wollhaim. Publisher. Edgar Rice Burroughs' fans must see Philip Jose Farmer's the Burroughs' Estate, Farmer takes us back to ancient Opar in a fabulous adventure novel. With book cover and eleven G. Krenkel! (UY#-SI .#) For Dray Prescot's friends: the new Alan Burt Akers' novel. It's beautifully illustrated by Jack Gaughan, with a complete glossary and maps. ( UY#-# ) Robert Chilton's first novel -- a humdinger fantasy adventure in the dying days of Old Earth. (UQ#-#C) great form. His most recent collection of unique stories is en(i UQ#-#C ) A gate into the dimension where all your wishes come true? You'll find it in Cap Kennedy (UQ#-#C) Your name and address, title and book number, plus price and #c (postage and handling) genfield, N.J. #, will do it, Ask for our catalog. plastic lever he had used to gut the control room portholes and ran with it down the corridor to the drive room. He was quite mad. Entering the cubicle, he inserted the lever between the face of one of the batteries and the corresponding contact arm and pried for all he was worth. The lever broke, catapulting him to the deck, but not before the arm bent and contact was permanently severed. Gasping, he got to his feet and looked through the drive room porthole. A single glance apprised him that he had achieved his purpose, insane though it may have been. The Green A venger was drifting slowly away from "Mars." He listened. The humming and whirring noises were no more. A look through another porthole told him of yet another development: a second, smaller blur had begun to protrude horizontally from the vast pale haze he had noted earlier, that had seemed to move. He remembered then what the boy Harris had done with the ship. When, on its maiden voyage, it had inexplicably ceased to respond to the remote-control signal he had been transmitting he had grabbed it out of midair and, in a fit of boyish anger, had thrown it into the "sun." The ship had split in half and he had never bothered to glue it back together. Nor had he bothered to replace the shattered "sun." Already bored with his mini-cosmos, he had torn it down one day and gone on to a new boy. Ultimately both the system and the ship had been given, or thrown, away. With the memory came a cold clearness of thought and an instant later the truth -- or as much of it as Harris would ever know -- burst like a nova in his brain. From his notetapes: "Causality! "It was there all the time but I couldn't see it because I thought of it in terms of chronological time and conventional space. "I know now that it is independent of both -- that, like the velocity of light, it is a constant -- a constant that bends all else to its will. "I am in the Green Avenger because I put myself here. "And I am about to throw it into the 'sun' because I caused it to go out of control. "Cause and effect... "Unknowingly, I initiated a cycle, a cycle that in one sense took years to complete itself, in another minutes, and perhaps in a cosmic sense, no time at all. "There is a strong chance that in so doing I made my becoming the first astronaut to undertake a solo Mars mission inevitable. That I do not know. But I do know this: the cycle is completed. Hence, I shall return momentarily to the Starquest. To real space. To the vast, the magnificent, the transcendentally beautiful solar system I so flagrantly desecrated with my picayune imitation. "God! It will be good to be home again!" H arris wasn't worried about the hand. It would be hours -- his time -- before it reached its destination. He sat down in the drive room doorway and fixed his eyes on where the subatomic drive would soon appear. And after what seemed an eternity, it did appear, and the # volt batteries reluctantly faded away... And one by one, the six white mice turned back into resplendent coursers, and finally the pumpkin turned back into a coach. He hurried forward to the control room. Entering, he dropped to his knees before the viewscreen and looked reverently down the black, star-bordered paths of space. He saw the red and the gold and the blue star-flowers, and the huge orange rose of Mars. He realized that he was crying. He did not get up for a long while. When he did so his eyes sought the ship's chronometer. It confirmed what Mars' position had already told him: despite his inanition, despite his dehydration, despite his nerve-racking tour of duty aboard the Green Avenger, no time had elapsed between his departure and his return. He had surmised as much. It made no difference in any case. He was too glad to be back to care. H e was still glad to be back when he learned, after his internationally celebrated return to Earth, that his wife was terminally ill. Georgiana. (Ah love, let us be true to one another for... she whispered before she died.) He was still glad to be back when, early in the following spring, floods destroyed his home. He was still glad when the business in which he had invested all his savings after he retired, went bankrupt. He was still glad when a contretemps in an obscure African nation caused worldwide repercussions that ultimately the first bomb fell Harris continued glad. Only with the second did he begin to have doubts. When the third one fell he thought he saw a boyish face in the sky. At first he thought it was his own of long ago, but he knew instantly that it was not. The forehead was too wide, the mischievous eyes too far apart, the rosebud mouth too full. The vision faded swiftly as the colossal rod holding Earth aloft collapsed and she went plunging down to the cosmic cellar floor to break into a and all was darkness then (though Harris never knew it) and the smell of boiled cabbage, stale cigarsmoke and old shoes.  Who needs Spokelspuks, anyway?   "wj hat do you know about the WSpokelspuk?" Benoni Lambert asked. Lambert was director of the Species Conservation Bureau. "Is the Spokelspuk an endangered species now, Benny?" Agata Scampo asked him. "What is the present head count on them?" her husband, Conrad, wanted to know. "Do we have a head count?" Conrad and Agata were not in as perfect accord as they once had been. Certain misbehaviors had ruffled and rippled the clear surface of their relationship. But they were still in wordless and almost telepathic understanding with one another. Conrad now called soundlessly to Agata, What in peristaltic perdition is a Spokelspuk?" And Agata was forced to answer him just as soundlessly, I don't know either. That was bad. When you are the ace team in the species-preserving business you cannot afford to admit ignorance of anything. "No, we do not have an accurate head count," Director Lambert admitted. "The reason is that it is difficult for a layman (and we cannot have experts everywhere) to make a sure identification." "Like the Ruffled Yellow-Head Duck," said Conrad. "That was so often mistaken for the Morgan's Merganser by the ignorant," said Agata. "Yes, this is the same sort of thing." Lambert spoke sadly. "Both the Spassenspuk and the Spottelspuk have been falsely identified as the Spokelspuk." "I can see why, Ben." "I can't," Lambert confessed. "They're really not at all alike except in appearance, and this is one case where appearance is meaningless. But our so far uneducated guess is that there are now fewer than thirty of the Spokelspuks left in the world." "How about the Trondheim district of Norway?" Conrad asked. This question had stood him in good stead many times before. No one seemed to know anything much about Norway. "No, there couldn't be any in the Trondheim district," Lambert told him with thin patience. "The Trondheim is a sod-house region." "Of course. I wasn't thinking." Conrad confessed lamely. "I don't presume to tell you two how to go about your survey and implementation," Lambert said. "You are clearly the best team we have. Draw ordinary funds from the bursar. For extraordinary funds, as always, make application to the committee. That is it, folks. We'd like to have a report with recommendations within a month. We would really like you to effect a population increase in the Spokelspuk within that month." "We may just do that, Benny," Agata told him. "We have some forceful ideas along that line." "One thing, before you leave. I have a very rare tape of the Spokelspuk. Be warned -- the sound it makes jangles the nerves of even the most steady." Lambert set the tape to play. At first came a cranky murmur. Then a snuffling as of some creature drawing in windy breath for a great endeavor. Then came the inimitable, unhinging sound itself. It began as a scream. It was followed by a heart-freezing clatter and a laugh that curdled all the juices of the body. It was a mockery that sucked all the marrow out of the soul, it was a shriveling derision, a cruel gloating gobble that brought one to absolute desolation, to the ragged despondency that is just short of death. A laugh like that should not have been allowed in hell. "That is the sound of the male Spokelspuk," Lambert whispered with a shudder. "The tape, thankfully, doesn't quite do it justice." "Yes, I've always found it an unnerving sound," Conrad lied easily. He looked quite shaken. "The sound of the female is worse," Lambert said. "Good for the female," Agata exclaimed with a sick smile. "Of course it's a little hard to worry about the Spokelspuk's being endangered. It really should be extirpated, a thing that laughs like that? We have this special rescue and revival job to do, though, and we will do it. We are professionals." "Of course," said Lambert, knowing that they were stalwart and dependable. "Of course." C onrad and Agata left. They stopped at the bursar's and drew ordinary funds just short of the extraordinary limit. Tomorrow, after they had thoughtfully studied the situation, after they had (to be truthful about it) found out exactly what a Spokelspuk was, they would decide how extraordinary should be the funds they would ask for. The stickiest deals paid most. To save from extinction something that laughed like the Spokelspuk ought to pay well. "It has to be either a bird or a human," Conrad said as they entered the working phase of their program. "Nothing else could laugh like that." "And we've never had a call to preserve a human species from extinction." Agata set in that piece of the puzzle. "There are a few I wouldn't want to save, the Sandy Sue species for instance. But I believe the Sandy Sue is in no danger of becoming extinct. She's too common for that." "Now you are casting reflections upon my taste," Conrad said stiffly. Sandy Sue was a young lady in whom Conrad had shown much interest. Actually Conrad showed interest in many young ladies, but Sandy Sue had become a type of this activity in the mind of Agata.  are you two looking for me?" a . buxom and pink-haired lady asked Conrad and Agata. She followed them out to the street. There was something unreal about her, pleasantly unreal. She looked like a younger member of some endangered older species. "Madam Hexe, we have absolutely no use for a discredited medium," Agata said. "But I divine things," Madam Hexe said. "I divine things especially by physical contact." "And what do you divine now?" Conrad asked. "That you need me. That you have just received a well-paying assignment and that you have no idea how to go about doing what you must. I want to cut myself in. I can do the job for you that nobody else can." And, in the process of divining by physical contact, Madam Hexe placed strong arms around Conrad. "Enough of that," Agata said. "I'll follow you around until you realize that you really do need me," Madam Hexe said. "My pay -- portal to portal, you know -- has already started, but we can settle after you come to appreciate my true worth." The Scampos ignored the medium then -- at least Agata did. But she still followed them in the street and Conrad sometimes did drop back into her friendly arms. "I'm still shaking from that Spokelspuk laugh," Conrad said. "From the male Spokelspuk. And they say that the laugh of the female is even worse." "I have to hear that," Agata said. "I have a feeling that there is a female Spokelspuk in my future. And I just believe -- ah -- I bet that the female Spokelspuk's laugh is the last laugh." They went to see their favorite ornithologist. Madam Hexe still followed them and seemed determined to wait for them outside the bird-man's gracious home studio. "You really do need me," she said. "A bird the Spokelspuk is not." The bird man was friendly. He had worked with the Scampos before. He liked to help people and they liked to be helped. "The world and myself can never honor the two of you enough," he said, "for saving the Lesser Speckled Crackle from extinction. Is there now another endangered species for which steps should be taken?" "There is," Conrad Scampo told him. "The Spokelspuk." "We have been informing ourselves, of course, as to the habits and habitats of the Spokelspuk," Agata said, "and now we have come to an expert for advice. Could you give us a good rundown on this imperiled bird? Are there any readily available printouts? Are Spokelspuk preservation societies already in existence? Sometimes it is well to work with existing groups even if they are composed mostly of amateurs and lay persons." "Where did you dig up such a name as Spokelspuk?" the bird man asked. "Did old Lambert discover it?" "Why, yes. Director Lambert," Conrad said, "has declared the Spokelspuk an endangered species and we are asked to implement its preservation." "Did Lambert say that the Spokelspuk was a bird? Or is this another of those cases where you were too proud to confess your ignorance?" "Well, what is the Spokelspuk if it isn't a bird?" Conrad asked. "What other life form is endangered?" "It isn't a bird. Not any kind of a bird," the bird man said. "I don't know what it is. I never heard of it." The Scampos left him. Out in the street Madam Hexe embraced Conrad competently. "So he never heard of the Spokelspuk," Madam Hexe said. "I didn't think he would have. A specialist, you know. You had better hire me now. We need each other." "You're so right," Conrad said, enchanted. "She needs the job and we need her." #  I hut up, both of you," Agata #said. "Where did you ever hear of the Spokelspuk, Madam Hexe? I don't remember mentioning the species in your presence." "Are you sure you did not? But you've thought of it -- and I lift things out of the mind. There is only one way to increase the Spokelspuk population, and that is to make more Spokelspuks. And all that is required to make them consists of sound wits and a good heavy wooden mallet." "That is all that is required?" Conrad asked. "Get lost," Agata said roughly. "No, not you, Conrad. You go with me. A bird a Spokelspuk isn't. What's the next most likely living thing?" "An insect?" asked Conrad. Agata asked, "So what entomologist do we know? Oh, oh, and what entomologist does Sandy Sue work for? Ah, well, he's the only one we know. And there's a species around worse than Sandy Sue. Come along then. The buggery is right in this block. You, Conrad, not you, Hexe." "Oh, you really need me," said Madam Hexe. "A bug it is not." "Oh, we really need her," said Conrad. "A bug it is not." But Agata pulled Conrad into the buggery. "Oh, it's that handsome Conrad!" Sandy Sue squealed. "And Agata." "Conrad has been bitten by a different bug now, Sandy Sue," Agata said. "And I want to talk to Mr. Oktopteryx right away." "Go right in, Agata," Sandy Sue said, "and I will try to unbug Conrad. We don't want any strange bugs biting him." "Otto," Agata said to the great entomologist, "how does one unbug a husband?" "You may be using the word in a non-entomological sense, Agata," said the great von Oktopteryx. "Not entirely, Otto. But you have to help me on something else. Can you give me some hard information on the Spokelspuk? It's been declared an endangered species." "I can't blame you for trying, Agata, but it isn't an insect." "How many kinds of insects are there, Otto?" "Somewhere between a quarter"And you know them all?" "I know enough about them all to know that none of them is named the Spokelspuk." "Oh, damn. I wonder what it is then." "If it isn't an insect, then it's something else. Don't you see how that narrows the field? There are more species of insect than of all other living things added together." "I guess so. Thank you, Otto." Agata went out through the reception room with its wonderful display cases. She found Conrad sitting on the silken knees of Sandy Sue, apparently getting unbugged. Agata led him gently by the ear out of the room and out of the building. "A bug the Spokelspuk isn't," she said. "Oh, then it has to be an great original science fiction stories by together in one volume Edited by "Superior " -- Kirkus Reviews. ss.#s animal," he reasoned. "Animal, marsupial, amphibian, reptile, snake, worm, fish, something. Let's go talk to the great naturalist Hugh Singletree." "Let's go talk to the great medium, Madam Hexe," said the waiting medium. Madam Hexe. She had obtained from somewhere a heavy wooden mallet. "Let's go talk to the great medium, Madam Hexe," said the befuddled Conrad. "Actually, three of the Spokelspuks inhabit a house only short blocks from here," Madam Hexe said. "It's at thirteen-thirteen East Hodges. Let's go there now. Once we are there, I believe we can discover a way to increase the Spokelspuk population by one, possibly by two." "No! We're going back to Director Lambert to find out what a Spokelspuk is," Agata said. "I must ask -- what is the mallet for?" "You knock someone off with a wooden mallet, you make a Spokelspuk," the Madam said. "You knock someone off with something else and you make something else, maybe a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. We wouldn't want that to happen. They aren't endangered species." " -- maybe a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. We wouldn't want that to happen," murmured the enchanted Conrad. "Untangle yourself from that pink-headed witch," Agata sputtered angrily. "We're going back to Mr. Lambert right now." "Easy, Agata," Madam Hexe jibed. "We want you to get mad, yes, but not too mad too soon." " -- to get mad, but not too mad too soon," Conrad echoed. They went to see Director Lambert. "Great news, great news," he greeted them. "We have just received important information that ties right in with your project. There is a nucleus, and it is always easiest to add to a nucleus. I have learned that three of the rare Spokelspuks inhabit a house only short blocks from here. It is located at -- " "At thirteen-thirteen East Hodges," Agata said dismally. "Ah, then you know? Why are you here then instead of there?" "Oh. Mr. Lambert, we wanted to ask you -- " Agata tried to say. "Of course it's all right," Lambert assured her. "Get over to thirteen-thirteen at once." They started over to #. As they walked along, Madam Hexe swung her heavy wooden mallet and decapitated a cat. "What an awful thing to do!" Agata cried out. Agata," Madam Hexe said. "Think of it as making a Katzenspuk." "Think of it as making a Katzenspuk," Conrad echoed her. "Why not as making a Spokelspuk, if you use a wooden mallet?" Agata asked with sudden suspicion. "Oh, no. To make a Spokelspuk, you must start with a human person," Madam Hexe said. " -- must start with a human person," Conrad echoed. For some reason this made Agata feel unnaturally cold. T he house at # East Hodges was large and empty. The windows were broken out. The doors sagged open. Yet it once had been a glorious house. Ancient nobility clung to it like old moss. It was down in its luck, that house, but it maintained an attitude of grandeur. "Oh, this is the old haunted house," Agata said. "I remember it." "In we go," cried the madam. "This may be the new home of one or both of you. Over the threshold with you, Conrad. In, Agata, in! Ah, you can hear old echoes in the air right now. Come, come, friends in residence, greet us with the laugh." The laugh came so powerfully that it knocked the three arrivals to their knees. The scream (bloodthirsty and foully happy), the heartfreezing clatter, the gobbling laugh that curdled all the body juices -- a laugh like that should not be allowed in hell. That was the sound of a male Spokelspuk. The tape had not done it justice. "The element spuk in the name is spook, ghost, isn't it?" Agata asked. She had to say something to disguise her shaking. "My, you are slow," the medium jibed. "You'll have to sharpen up quick or you'll be no good at this. We'll want you to get mad, you know, when it's time for it. But you can't be too mad too soon. And it's only a little bit too soon for it now." "You knock off a person with that wood mallet, and you make a Spokelspuk?" Agata asked in her building wrath. "Hardly ever," Madam Hexe said sadly. "The world, as we know, has been taken over by pleasant people, and there's hardly any of any other sort left. The pleasant peasants may be good for something, but I sure don't know what it is. You can't make a Spokelspuk out of a pleasant person, I'll tell you that. It's because of this that there are now so few Spokelspuks. They fade away after a few hundred years, and they just aren't being replaced. Hardly any Spokelspuks are being made. But this afternoon we should be able to make at least one." "This afternoon we should be able to make at least one," Conrad echoed. "And, fortunately, you are not a pleasant person, Agata," Madam Hexe said. "And, fortunately, you are not a pleasant person, Agata," Conrad echoed. And the wrath of Agata continued to build. The other male Spokelspuk sounded. His gobbling laugh was stronger than that of the first "No human nerves can stand much of that horror," Agata said. "Well then, perhaps I will become unhuman or post-human. Something here swims upstream or goes against the grain. I love the hateful stuff a bit. I suppose it's mostly that I love being hateful." "Get mad, unkempt Agata, get mad," Madam Hexe taunted her. "It's all you're good for. When you go you have to go in a fury or it's all in vain." "Shut up, witch! Sound off, oh male sound! Whatever you are, you're stormier than I am. Where is the third one?" A monstrous noise like that could be bagged and sold to horror movies by the pound. The twin devil-ghost laughters were like ripsaws cutting the brain and meninges and every nerve. They set up a screaming in each inch of the body. Such two pillars of strident cacophony could not be topped. Could they not? The female spirit-shriveling laughter set the very rats to tumbling fearfully out of the walls of the haunted house. Sound could never be quite the same again, after it had included this. "I wonder if I could do that?" Agata asked almost rationally. Almost, but her eyes weren't rational now. She bled copiously from the mouth from her self-bitten tongue and lips, and from the ears as they all did. And there was white froth gathering in the mouth corners. "Sure you could do it, Agata," Madam Hexe purred. "And it is almost time that you do it now." "And it is almost time that you do it now," Conrad echoed. "What is your real interest in this. Madam Hexe?" Agata asked. They seemed sane words, but they came almost automatically from an insane mind. "Oh, I'm a paid lobbyist for the Spokelspuks," Madam said. "Then why are you so avid for our pay also?" Agata questioned. "They don't pay me in material coin. I need that also." The horrible triple laughing of the Spokelspuks rose to a crest, then to a higher crest, then still higher. Would it never break? "Come here, mad Agata," Madam Hexe ordered in her own delight. "You are ripe for it now. Come here." TheMadam was happy in her coming triumph. She was one happy medium. Agata came to them. She saw Conrad sitting on the numinous knees of Madam Hexe on an old worm-eaten deacon's bench. "Conrad, you know how such silly carry-on always irritates me," Agata said. She spoke gently, but she was mad as a gooney-bird. Then she screamed and laughed. It was the nearest possible thing to the Spokelspuk sounding for one still wearing the mortal coil. She took the bemused Conrad by the hair and ears and flung him -- Roger Elwood. Editor-in-Chief , Other World Records The Tower starts where #I left off. For the first time on record -- a shatOther World Records have created a new experience in sound and listening that will envelop you in an environment of sound movement and full-color audio imagery. Based on the short story by Thomas N. Scortia, the words and music of The Tower take you to another dimension. Feel the five-minute opening sequence depicting transition to a grotesque world via the horrors of the nuclear holocaust. Live in the new dimension of The Tower for timeless moments until the mind-exploding climax grips you, shakes you, exhausts you and leaves you limp and awed at your contact with a different reality! Utilizing music, electronics and special vocal effects, and combining them under the supervision of the brightest talents in these fields, The Tower creates an intricate fantasy, painting color pictures on the canvas of your mind. Roger Elwood (the noted Science Fiction Iconoclast) also says of The Tower, "I was truly overwhelmed at the scope and intensity of the sound movement and quality... an experience I'll repeat many times in the future." The Tower is the first in a series of World Records, available by mail order only. You can take the ultimate trip for just #. To travel to the and mail the coupon today! It's a small price to pay for a round trip to another dimension... IT someone's already ripped-off the coupon below, you can still experience the ultimate trip by sending your checkmoney order to us for: #" Stereo Record # plus # post  hdlg.  # Stereo Cassette # plus #C post  hdlg.  # # I  # " ips Stereo Reel # plus # post  hdlg.  # # W #th St, (Penlhouse), New York, N.Y. # Other World Records, Inc.  # W #th St, Penthouse, New York, NY #... to cover cost, postage  I I enclose  -- handling for copies of The Tower. I  l#"StereoLP #  #t postage  handling  # I  Stereo Cassette #  # postage  and handling  # I D # Vl n ips Stereo Reel #  #r postage and handling  #  Name Address  City State Zip , NY Residents please add # sales tax. g# across the room where he crashed against the wall and came to rest beside the wooden mallet. Madam Hexe rose smiling. Everything was going just as she wanted it. Agata struck that happy medium full-handedly and set her on her numinous rump on the floor. "She's ready," Madam Hexe giggled. "Where's the mallet?" "She's ready," Conrad echoed. "Here's the mallet." Conrad wobbled to his feet with the heavy, sound, wooden mallet held high in his two hands. He bashed his wife heavily and loudly on the head with it. Killed her too. The Spokelspuk population had been increased by one. Then there were four sources of that killer laughter sounding in the old haunted house. Oh, oh, oh, oh, bleeding ears and blown medullae! It was more than flesh could stand. I n the courtroom there was a fundamental disorder that could not be cured. There was, mainly, a loud weird noise like demented laughter, demented female laughter, or the laughter of something that had once been female. The source of this noise could not be located, but the rampant sound was nerve-racking and abrasive. And then there was the defendant Conrad Scampo who refused to plead insanity. "No, no, I am not insane," he insisted. "It is just that insane things have been happening to me." "You still insist that you killed your wife while under the influence of a witch known to you only by the approximate name (your own term) of Madam Haddem?" the prosecutor was questioning him. "And now you don't know where this witch is?" "She is everywhere. I see her everywhere and all the time. I see her in the courtroom now, right there, right back there, sweet-talking one of the guards. See her, the witch?" "No, Mr. Scampo, I do not see the witch. And you are not able to describe her further?" "Yes. She has numinous knees. Examine all the women, and she will be the one with numinous knees. You can't miss her. Shut up, Agata!! Damn it, shut up!!!" "Yes, the noise is irritating, isn't it, Mr. Scampo? We apologize for it, but we still have not been able to locate the source of it. And you still insist that it is the laughter of your dead wife?" "Yes. Before it happened, she said she believed it was a female having the last laugh. Well, she won't get away from it. I intend to have the last laugh myself. Wait till I get my hands on her!" "Mr. Scampo, you have stated that the approximately-named Madam Haddem was a paid lobbyist for a gang of ghosts. Does this not strike you as insane?" "It sure does, but I did not state it. I stated that the Madam stated it." "But you did state that Director Benoni Lambert of the Species Conservation Bureau had declared this gang of ghosts to be an endangered species and had assigned you and your wife to finding means of increasing the number of these -- ghosts. But Mr. Lambert completely denies this himself. What do you say to that?" "I think he was taken by a hoax that was started somewhere in the organization by some too! of the Spokelspuks. He was ashamed to admit that he didn't know what Spokelspuks were, so he passed it along to us. And we were ashamed to have to ask what they were." "And now you are worried, not so much that you may be executed for the murder of your wife, but that the manner of execution might somehow be wrong?" "Yes. If I die in the electric chair, I won't become a Spokelspuk at all. I will become something else, possibly a Spassenspuk or a Spottelspuk. As such, there is no guarantee that I will meet my wife again or even be on the same plane with her. Is it too much to ask that I be bashed on the head until dead with that stout, wooden mallet that is in the evidence section there? I'll put an end to that crazy noise quick enough then. Just let me get my hands on the throat of that loudthroated wife of mine and I'll put an end to it." And Conrad was making insane and throttling motions with his hands. There came the Agata laugh again, maddening. "No, you will not have the last laugh," Conrad sputtered angrily. "I'll get you, Agata, I'll get you!" "Be calm, Mr. Scampo," the judge said. "And just what is the mallet business?" "It is a requirement for becoming a Spokelspuk. After all, you have to have some rules for admission." "Where, by the way, do these ghosts live?" the judge asked further. "In old wooden houses mostly," Conrad told him. "They can't live in a sod house at all. They can inhabit a brick or stone house if there is enough wood in the interior, but they are not comfortable there. They can inhabit, for a while, a courtroom in a terra cota and glass courthouse, if there is wooden paneling and wooden benches and tables, but they sure are not comfortable in such. I'm not either. I'm leaving. This whole thing is a farce anyhow." "You are not leaving, Mr. Scampo. You are not going anywhere," the judge said. "Do you realize that you are on trial for your life?" "I've told you already that I didn't want my life," Conrad said with a new chill in his voice. "I forfeit it. The only question now is whether the condemned man should be allowed to choose his own method of execution. I choose the mallet and you all look at me like a bunch of bare-faced idiots. And you say that I'm insane' Conrad left the chair, and he seemed about to leave the courtroom with resolute step. There was the taunting, terrifying Agata laugh again. And there was a sudden motion by a pink-haired lady who had been standing by the evidence box and sweet-talking one of the guards. She grabbed the stout, wooden mallet out of that evidence box, and she bashed Conrad Scampo heavily and loudly over the head with it. Killed him too. "That was really a lot of fun," said Madam Hexe, or Madam Haddem as Conrad had approximately called her. Several things happened then. The screaming, gobbling, sickening laugh of Agata was throttled down to sickening silence. Conrad had finally got his hands on that loud-throated wife of his and was choking her, not to death for she was already dead, but into a queasy quiet. Then the unpracticed but powerful death-moment laugh of Conrad Scampo sounded deafeningly. He had made it! He was a Spokelspuk now and he had, for the moment, the last laugh. "You had better put that body in the disposal," Madam Hexe said briskly to the judge, "and then have someone mop up the brains which were so clumsily spilled." " -- had better put that body in the disposal," murmured the nine parts bemused judge, "and then have someone mop up the spilled brains. But wait a minute, lady. You have killed a man in my courtroom. Shouldn't I do something?" "Yes," said the Madam. "You are a judge. Give the judgment that the Spokelspuk is no longer to be considered an endangered species. The two new ones should keep them going for another hundred years." " -- make a judgment," the now totally bemused judge was mumbling, "that the Spokelspuk be no longer considered an endangered species." "I really have to go. now," said the Madam. "Here's my card. (It was a simple queen of spades.) "Put it on the bulletin board. I give psychosomatic readings every morning from ten to twelve. Perhaps I can be of help to some of you." " -- every morning from ten to twelve. Perhaps she can be of help to some of us." Madam Hexe left the courtroom and went about her affairs. She had some odd groups for clients. And she had a lot of class. She looked like a younger member of an older endangered species.  W hen the Encephaloprinter was invented in the middle of the twenty-first century no one in uncart could think what to do with it. It had no economic value or any practical application that could be seen. Dr. Julian Cox, its inventor, worked in a Cambridge laboratory run by a British subinvention became the property of eurocart and so of uncart. Almost none of the world's research was independent of uncart, or more specifically of its science arm, uncartsci, through its worldwide member organizations. Every day, throughout the world, hundreds of ideas, devices and products flowed from these labs for assessment, production and sales. However, uncart leaders were not so shortsighted as to ignore the value of pure research and thousands of people like Cox were allowed to putter in any fashion they wished, provided that when the lead turned to gold in the alembic the process became the exclusive property of Cox was a researcher into psychic phenomena and it was from this study that he invented, discovered -- or simply stumbled across -- the Encephaloprinter. First accounts of it made it sound like a super brainwave machine, but this was nonsense. Cox had long since lost interest in brainwaves -- Alpha, Theta, or what have you. What he was after was much more subtle. Telepathy, he postulated, did not consist of sending waves back and forth. The moving of solid objects was not the effect of emitted brainpower. Second sight did not come from any force latent andor inherent in the brain itself. This had all been pretty well demonstrated for decades. There were no super brainwaves and there could be no machine to measure them. Yet these phenomena existed. Over the past fifty years research had made great strides and provable results had been attained. It had been demonstrated beyond doubt that the human mind could do many things that could not be explained by emanations or waves. Like many before him, Cox had run through the Greek alphabet of brainwaves, Kirlian photographs, the results of the newer Van Donck deep-brain analyzer, plus some inventions of his own. But there he stalled. The Greek alphabet had no connection with what he was looking for. Neither did electromagnetic field auras. These were only tangential to the brain's own interna! functions. So he stopped designing new, more sensitive receivers and when he did this, enlightenment came. It was then that he began to distinguish the Koran's white thread from the black in the dawn. If the brain regarded as a transmitter had proved to be the wrong concept, Cox thought, perhaps it should be looked upon as a receiver or, more accurately, as an aware mass that senses and reacts. This concept was Cox's achievement. It received almost no publicity or even notice at the time he first advanced it. News of it was released to the public in simplest terms because there was no other way to make it even halfway understandable. So the public yawned over its coffee as the, news of the Encephaloprinter clattered out of its video, a short paragraph after the fashions and before the sports page. I t was presented equally simply to the Directors of uncart at a regular biweekly meeting. The eight, as usual, had lunched together in the executive dining room. They had then strolled peacefully across the formal Persian garden to the administrative wing. If they had happened to look they might have seen the humpbacked magnificence of Demavand, snow-capped even this late in the spring, shining on the horizon. They had eaten a good lunch and were contented men. And powerful men. At each of the eight places at the round conference table lay a sheet of paper giving a concise explanation of the Encephaloprinter and as much of the theory as was understood. Everything at the Director's level of uncart was presented on a single sheet. An idea that could not be so reduced had clearly not been thought through. However, if there were problems -- and usually there were -- Dr. Gertrude Gold, cuncartsci, was there to remove them. The conference room itself was a striking example of the architecture that made up the whole uncart complex. It was hexagonal to begin with, the better to accomodate the round conference table. The round table was necessary because uncart had no real head, but a directorate, all equal. The chairmanship rotated among the eight. The room was meant to reflect equality and there was nothing about the table, chairs or place settings that would set one Director above another. The six walls, as well as the ceiling, were reinforced plexi-quartz, bullet-proof and nearly atom-proof. The polarity of the walls and ceiling could be regulated to provide any degree of darkness or light. Today the two walls nearest the westering sun were dark and the ceiling slightly so, giving the whole room a pleasant glow. Through the ceiling the white clouds in the strikingly blue Persian sky stood out starkly. The view through the walls was of surrounding gardens leading up to the mountain on one side and down to the swift river on the other. Imbedded in the plexi-quartz were wires that kept any sort of emanation from penetrating. The room was proof against afiy known listening device, thanks to uncartsec. Next to the door stood the booth of the engineer who controlled the lighting, worked the entrance, adjusted the temperature and humidity, hooked up the simultaneous interpreters when necessary, ran the holograph projector and all the other mechanical, hydraulic and electronic gear in the room. His booth, entirely soundproof so he could not hear the Directors talk, could only be entered from outside. But even with these precautions he still held a sec Cosmoclear, the highest security clearance. The Directors took up their papers and read, some idly, some intently. Within a minute most were fidgeting. Viktor Demchenko of sovcakt put down his paper and tapped it. The others looked up as if this had released them from labor. "Perhaps you could summarize this for us, good Dr. Gold," he suggested. Gertrude Gold turned slowly toward him. She was a large woman and oddly shaped. She studied Demchenko through large, thick glasses, like portholes and said seriously, "It has been summarized to the utmost in the report you hold. If you would be so good as to read it, I will try to answer any questions later." Demchenko's gentlemanly smile faded and he looked down at his paper like a fourth-grader. "Of course," he said, "Quite so." Dr. Gold was right. There was nothing wrong with the summary. It told the men what they needed to know out of what was already known, but the concept was not really clear to anyone. It could be described in terms of effect but no more. They were all in Plato's cave, seeing shadows of reality. T he paper said that the aura, the halo, the excitation, that surrounds everyone and everything somehow in turn excites the brain. These halos of excitation vary greatly in strength, but extend infinitely, interlocking like smoke rings or, better, smoke balls. Each brain is aware of these bubbles and tunes in or vibrates in frequency with some of them in its characteristic way. It is how -- and to which -- of these vibrations a mind tunes in that controls its mood. Since no two people tune to excitements in quite the same way, people behave differently in the face of the same stimuli. This set or cast of the bfain has little to do with intelligence, but it does affect personality and response. The brain oscillator determines what stimuli are selected and thus predestines the conscious level of the mind that deals with them -- a sort of super-ego management package. Cox's invention can record which excitations a brain responds or is tuned to. The Printer does not tell what these stimuli convey to the brain but only that they do it. No specific area is involved in this activity, which apparently depends upon an undifferentiated quality of the brain -- now named Cox's Quality. The paper said in conclusion that some experiments had been done but with indeterminate results. The Directors finished reading and sat looking at each other. eurocart's Reinholt Blessing, this year's Chairman, cleared his throat. "I am sure there must be questions, gentlemen," he said. A group chuckle answered him. These were bright men, but they were not scientists. Their abilities were as managers, financiers and manipulators. Some were not even well educated. However, they had all made their way, or worked their way, or fought their way, up the uncart stairway. Sitting where they were made them ipso facto successful. They needed no apology for depending on others to furnish expertise. Dr. Gold was one of their experts. "Am I to understand," Robert Ndolo of afcart said, "that things are making our brains vibrate?" "I prefer to say resonate," Dr. Gold said. "Like tuning forks." "No, no, that doesn't help me," Togo of nipcart said. "I'm sorry, gentlemen," Gold said, "but I can't do any better. We in sci don't completely understand Cox's Quality. We simply know how it works -- not why." "To interrupt," Blessing said, "we have a full plate of business in front of us today and it seems to me our task is to decide quickly what uncart is to do, if anything, with this -- ah -- thing, or device." "Now we're getting somewhere," Holdeman of uscart said. "Certainly. You men are the Directors." Dr. Gold regarded them coldly from behind her portholes. "I will leave now if you are through with me." She started to turn toward the door. The directors partially rose as one man. They wanted no repetition of the lib strike of ten years before when every woman in all of uncart and its subsidiaries walked off the job for three weeks. Dr. Gold had been their leader. Demchenko threw himself into the breach. "Please, please, my dear Dr. Gold," he said, his arms outstretched. "Nothing, nothing like that. Why, we need you now more than ever." With a slight shrug of mollification she turned back. "Well, of course, I am at your service." As she waited and looked at them the silence became more embarrassing -- as if they had rubbed a lamp, the genie had appeared and they were fresh out of wishes. Speak, junior, Grandma's on the line. "Well, all right, resonate, then," Ndolo said, going way back and so buying time. "And this device, this, ah -- " the chairman looked at his sheet, "this Encephaloprinter, measures the vibrations or whatever that stimulate the brain to resonate?" Dr. Gold slumped and seemed to drive herself even more deeply into the carpet. "No, no, Mr. Blessing," she said. "It measures the brain's response to them only. As far as we can determine, the vibrations -- as you call them -- cannot be measured." "But, my God, my God," Demchenko said. "What then have we?" Facing up to it and dredging up the last bit of analogy she had brought with her. Dr. Gold said, "I told you we don't know everything. Think of this instrument as a spectroscope. Aim it at a brain and it will show you a pattern of excitation. This is simply a measure of Cox's Quality. I might add that no two prints are the same." "Like fingerprints," Castenero of amcart put in happily. The others smiled. Dr. Gold looked at him without remark. They all relaxed. This was the ultimate. Beyond this they had no responsibility to try to understand. Chen Tsing Peng, of sincart, had been quiet throughout. Now he indicated to Blessing that he would like to be heard. Blessing nodded to him. "If I may say, gentlemen," Peng said in his highly modulated voice, "we still elude the mark. What are we to do about this?" "Right, right," Castenero said, "we're being stupid." "No, no," Peng said seriously. "Not that. We have simply been led astray by the unfathomable -- perhaps falsely intrigued." He turned to Dr. Gold. "May I ask what I hope are a few pertinent questions?" "Yes, let's go at it," Ndolo said, looking hard at his watch. Gold ignored the gesture and nodded to Peng. are informed," Peng Vt said, "that this resonance probably accounts for psychic activity of one sort or another. Is this correct?" Again Dr. Gold simply nodded. "Now then, if the Encephaloprinter can -- what should I say -- ? Register?" "As good a word as any," Dr. Gold said. " -- register these resonances, can the device be adapted to produce desired psychic effects of some kind? Is there a possibility of useful benefits?" Dr. Gold hesitated. She looked uneasily in several directions, as though she were missing something. When explaining anything she was used to having an implement of some sort in her hand -- a light board stylus, a holograph pointer, or some such tool for emphasis -- and she felt uncomfortable without it. She reached in front of Mr. Togo and took his notaboard stylus. She began to jab the air with it as if she were impaling insects. "Excuse me, Mr. Togo," she said. "We have, of course, carried on innumerable experiments employing the device, using both sensitive people, telepaths and the like, and normal -- rather, nonsensitive -- people. What we have achieved is the ability to trace the sensitive psyche at work. By use of the Printer we can see two sensitive brains resonate in tune with each other. This does not happen to nonsensitives. Between a sensitive and a nonsensitive we can see the first respond but not the second. This suggests that Cox's Quality, whatever it is, is at work in telepathy and other psychic phenomena." She was interrupted by Ali Abbassi, Director of ascart. "You said other psychic phenomena? Do you mean ghosts, table rappings, levitation -- things like that?" "Oh, my God," Holdeman muttered. "He's back with the genies." Some of the others looked at their hands. Castenero whipped out a handkerchief and flicked at his boot. "As a matter of fact," Dr. Gold said, "we have used the instrument in studies of psychokinesis -- " She paused, made up her mind and appended: "That is, moving solid objects by the power of the mind." Interest renewed around the table. All looked expectant. "We can see how this works, too," she went on. "We can see the sensitive tune to the emanations, aura, whatever you want to call it, of an object and then alter itself to force the object to resonate in turn Nowinoaperback Shows how Ihe Sabian symbols -- astrological nolations representing each degree of Ihe Zodiac -- can be used in the same way  Ching and Tarot cards are used for divination. "The venerable Dane Rudhyar's works on humanistic astrology are a musl for all students ol . #, now al your bookslor i division of Random House as if from a different place. In fact, the object is then in that different place." She looked around, rocking her stylus back and forth like a metronome. There were no questions. "As to your first example, Mr. Abbassi," she said and smiled, cueing them that she was going to say something amusing. "Because Cox's Quality expends no energy, seems limitless and universal -- in short, simply exists -- some of our more religious citizens have taken it as proof of immortality, suggesting that Cox's Quality is in fact the soul, if you please." She faced them one by one, the smile still on her face. The Directors reacted with puzzlement. Some resonated back her smile weakly. "Ridiculous," Demchenko snorted. "Quite," Gold said. Her smile faded and disappeared as if her cheek muscles had suddenly grown tired. "We have no place for such remarks here," Togo said. "What a man chooses to think of the soul is a personal matter." "Please." Blessing tapped the table with his stylus. Again silence fell. Peng had been jotting on the illuminated notaboard in front of him. Now he looked at Blessing and raised his eyebrows. The skin grew taut on his cheekbones and brow, making them even more prominent. His head resembled, for the moment, an anatomical model -- or the unwrapped skull of a mummy. "Mr. Peng," Blessing said with relief. "I believe you have some words for us." "Yes, I do. It seems that our options are quite simple, so simple, in fact, that I wonder why this matter was brought to us at all." Dr. Gold stiffened slightly. Peng noticed her reaction. "I realize this is not the fault of sci," he said hastily. "It is not their function to make such decisions. But it puzzles me that indprodev couldn't have decided whether or not this had applicability -- and acted accordingly." "If you will pardon me," Togo said, "I believe they did decide. That is not the question." "Oh?" Peng said. "There is no such statement here." "Well, nonetheless, I believe it is the case. My staff so informed me," Togo said somewhat apprehensively. "Is this true?" Peng asked Blessing. "I believe there was some such preliminary paper that some of us may have seen," Blessing said, waffling as best he could, while looking down at the designs on his notaboard. "I haven't seen it either," Ndolo cut in. "What goes on here, secrets?" "No, no," Holdeman said. "Just another screw-up in adminrepro. The report is probably on your desk right now." "How have we survived so long?" Abbassi asked simply. He gave a small shrug. "But ce sera, sera, huh? No one is perfect." O dd jottings and dpodlings were being put on the assorted notaboards. Peng sighed and began again. "Well, that is neither here nor there and cuts no ice," he said. He had an excellent working command of English and of its idioms, which he took pride in using as often as he could. But in his mouth the idioms became transformed somehow, took on strange colorations, as if he had just made them up. "The device has no practical application, is that correct, Dr. Gold?" "So I'm told," she said idly, as if this were irrelevant to her, as indeed it was. "Then what is the question before us?" Peng asked. "Simply this," Holdeman said, "set has asked for authority to broadcast news of Cox's Quality throughout its organization. Anyone interested would then be allowed to spend his time and uncart's money working on it to see if it can be further developed." He hesitated meaningfully, then went on: "It's the money thing, you see." "Ah," Peng said. "Let anyone work on it, huh?" Castenero was clipping his nails. "As against keeping it more or less close, yes, that's right," Holdeman said. Demchenko emitted a wordless sound of displeasure and Dr. Gold cut in impatiently with a two-minute lecture on science and freedom ofinvestigation and how useful results were only obtained by open inquiry. To keep the Printer a semi-secret would doom it to remain no more than an interesting device. She cited numerous examples to prove her point. She closed with an exhortation, a note of irritation in her voice with these laymen who had so much power and seemed to her so patently mediocre. "So, gentlemen," she said, "if you want Cox's Quality to remain uninvestigated and -- from your point, unexploited -- to become only a laboratory toy for a few selected graduate students, then by all means keep it limited. You would save money in the short run. But if you ever hope to have a use for it, actually make money from it -- " they cringed as this Boadicea used their key word -- "then free it to all." They agreed quickly. They recognized the sense she made and, in any case, no one had the temerity to argue. Only Togo managed to introduce a small squeak of practicality. "But how much money?" "It is nothing, nothing," Abbassi said, waving his hand. "How much could it be?" He clearly spoke for the others who wanted to be done with the question. And so these men had made another hard-headed, closely reasoned decision. The Encephaloprinter would be given to sci for free investigation by anyone who cared. Dr. Gold smiled her cheekwrenching smile, stood, and left the room. After another hour of business the meeting broke up and the Directors moved to the pneumatic quartz door. They felt happy with themselves, uncart's affairs were in good shape. They could now adjourn to the bar, enjoy a drink and go home. There was much "please" and "after you" at the door until only Abbassi and Blessing were left, bowing and waving at each other. Blessing, as Chairman, was determined to be last and Abbassi, from simple Persian training, could not bring himself to go before. Finally, when the others were halfway down the corridor to the bar, both moved at the same time and jammed together through the door, apologizing as they went. The Directors strolled in small groups, except for Peng who walked alone marching to his own beat. They were well dressed as befitted their station. They wore conventional business attire, soft colorful shirts with long rolled collars, some with ruffles down the front, cummerbunds with utili-pleats for notaboards, stylus, UNcred cards and the like. Peng was the most simply dressed -- Castenero was the most elegant. The luxury cloth of his shirt was a product of one of uncart sciecoag's successful experiments in crop reintroduction in Mexico. The project had been hideously expensive and was far from being economic as yet. Castenero's shirt was one hundred percent pure cotton. He hurried, caught up with Holdeman and took his arm. "Ah, amigo," he said, "this Dr. Gold is some Amazon, is she not?" "But one of the world's top psychologists," Holdeman said. "Sure, obviously." Castenero laughed and slapped Holdeman's shoulder lightly. "But still a woman, huh? Still a woman?" "Dr. Gold?" Holdeman seemed startled. Then he chuckled. "Yes, I suppose. Ferd, you Latins find romance anywhere, even if you have to make it up." "It is our myopia," Castenero said with a slight tilt of the head, as if stating a fact, perhaps unfortunate, but one about which nothing could be done. "We keep hold of the past." "There are worse things." "But gone, amigo, all gone. Ah, if gunpowder had not been invented we Latins would still rule the world. Now we all come from the big uncart can." T he origins of the uncart "can" were not clear, nor could anyone even say for sure what uncart meant. Some thought the letters stood for United Nations Cartel, an outgrowth of the UN still in New York. Others thought Universal Cartel, still others, Ultra-National Cartel. No one knew. Even the first documents of its forming referred to the body only as uncart. There was a story that it had been started in Cologne in the middle of the eighteenth century by a German Jew named Unkart, but this was plainly absurd. There were those who had suffered from uncart's operations -- and they were many -- who called it Unscrupulous. Actually, uncart had won its position so gradually that some thought it had always been, like God, like the Universe, uncart culthist could trace its origins back effectively to the Renaissance, with only a gap here and there accounted for by human error. uncart had managed people's lives so long that no one now could conceive of a world without it. There was an awful pun that said uncart had come before the horse. uncart had united the world, not politically, but through more effective means. As all but ideologues should have known would happen, man's world had been united by economics, not politics. All men now were capitalists, big or small, or hoped to be capitalists. The linkages of big business all over the world had become strong. A world business organization of immense power had come into being. Not only had it grown -- it had come to be accepted because people realized that running the world was too important to be left to the politicians. There was simply too much at stake. The somewhat loose organization had formalized itself as uncart with headquarters in Tehran shortly after the turn of the century. Tehran had been chosen for several reasons. It was convenient, located centrally between East and West. It had become a comfortable and modern cosmopolitan city where life could be pleasant. It was also removed from the influence of the great power blocks -- while uncart ruled and wished to rule, it did not want to be seen to rule more than necessary. uncart had built a magnificent headquarters complex in a valley north of Tehran that led to the old Shimshak ski resort. The valley was narrow and deep, with a clear, mountain-fed stream coursing its length. Built into the sides of the valley were the office buildings, laboratories, communications facilities, living quarters, bars, clubs, pools, and everything else that thousands of multi-national employees needed to live and work. The architecture, while modern, reflected the setting and had a definite Persian cast that was thoroughly satisfying. Much plexi-quartz had been used in the structure. To set off the resultant starkness the roofs had wide overhangs, supported by flat columns interspersed with rows of bas-relief and mosaics. Gardens and pools afforded serene walks between buildings. The interiors featured planted arcades and malls. scsyamb had scientifically specified the ambience for maximum employee efficiency and peace of mind. The entire facility had a quiet campus atmosphere which did not reflect the immense power concealed in its walls. As years went by uncart grew to rule governments. It continued to tolerate the UN but ruled there also. Because war was unprofitable and upsetting to the established economic order uncart would not tolerate it. It ended the Arab-Israeli problem that had been at flash point for over half a century through a superbly simple device -- uncart subsidiaries took over the management of the combatant countries. The black-white confrontation in southern Africa had been similarly resolved. Now black and white worked for managers manipulated out of Tehran. uncart was made up of eight regional cartel groupings: uscart, ascart. Experience had shown that eight was a good number, not too large and yet not overly centralized. Political boundaries remained, although now largely as a matter of sentiment. Economic documents were more important than the old political passports. The plastic, Inter-Com card or Inter-Cred card had replaced them. The three diamonds of Mitsubushi stamped on a card were more useful than the rising sun. The block GM in plastic moved through customs easier than did the screaming eagle. The chemex imprint worked more wonders than the hammer and sickle. B asic English was the world's lingua franca. It had become such automatically and as a matter of course in spite of the efforts of the Esperantists and the French. The French still maintained subsidized Ecoles-Francaises around the world out of nostalgia for the grand langue and gallic stubbornness, but these were filled with dilletantes and antiquaries. The Germans had long since written off the Goethe Instituten. The Russians countries because the ancient, sentimental old men of the Politburo could not bring themselves to close them. But they perked along only half-heartedly, full of people wishing only to read Tolstoy in the oriaberrations because there was no reason not to. World population had stabilized by the turn of the century at about simply happened, as if the result of some silent international agreement or universal urge. The witty said that this confirmed the old adage that the Lord looked after children, drunks and fools, uncart had put (he world on the metric system and traffic everywhere on the right side of the road. Directors of the eight regional carts made up uncart's Board. The Chairman's position was neither elected nor permanent. Each cart's Director took his turn as Chairman for one year, after which he retired. Retirement for the Chairman was not mandatory but was invariably observed. Who could possibly work again on the slopes after having been on the summit? The Supreme Commander cannot become just another General or Admiral. Blessing had been Chairman for about half his term when the problem of the Encephaloprinter, or He had only two weeks to go when the Directors were again assembled to consider a far larger problem and to make a far greater decision. They were being urged, in effect, to change the personality of man. II T he development came about with stunning swiftness, direct result of the earlier decision to let that surprised even herself, Dr. Gold had been startlingly correct. She had had no doubt that once sci's community, her community, further development would come. What was not expected was the speed of this next development and the implications that were freighted with it, almost its own natural imperative. An obscure technician in Milan named Guido Mangiani, exposed to news about the Encephaloprinter Mangiani was not even a scientist in the technical sense. He was one of the army of faceless, anonymous lab employees that set up equipment, monitored experiments, cleaned tubes, took readings and did other routine jobs for the scientists. He was, in short, a soldier, a sergeant at best, in uncart's science army, doing the jobs that the field grade officers couldn't be bothered with. His humble status was an embarrassment to sci and Dr. Gold scarcely mentioned him when briefing the Directors. Indeed, after his one moment of glory his invention was taken from him and he was never again noted in the history of uncart sci. He became a scientific nonor un-person. Presumably, he returned to the obscurity of the scientific KP from whence he had come. and had to be lived with, decided about, done something with. To that extent, Mangiani had been as anonymously immortalized as the Lascaux cave painters. The usual one-page briefing paper lay before the Directors and again they read it with varying degrees of care and understanding. Dr. Gold had again screwed herself into the rug while she waited impatiently for the gentlemen to look up. She tapped a stylus against her thigh like a choir director as the eight tried to absorb the fact of Perhaps because he was more of a technician than a scientist, he electronic device to be used and fooled with, experimented with, changed, like a teenager working on a car. His method had been empirical. While the scientists mused over theory and did not advance, a playback and one day, without knowing how or why, he had invented the Imprinter. In experiments on with a playback, he found that he could imprint certain personality traits on one monkey onto the brain of a docile, retiring rhesus and running it through the playback into the skull of a maladjusted rhesus he could alter its personality until the second rhesus was as gentle as the first. For some reason the playback forced the subject brain to respond to external auras just as did the brain of the pattern. At this point the high-priced help discovered Mangiani and elbowed him aside. Further experiments were done without him and his device was given the official name, "The Milan Encephaloimprinter." It was called that in the Directors' briefing paper. In a burst of euphoria, at first sci believed it had a device of unlimited utility, a machine that could raise the level of all human intellect, that could pick and choose among man's most desirable attributes and assemble them into a master tape that would alter every brain and personality until humanity reached a single miracle working level barely below the gods. But the gods were not yet ready to unlock that apartment just acteristics from one to another, but that was all, no more and no less. There could be no retail bargaining among its components because no one knew what parts of the tape came from which stimuli or what they affected. You took it all or not, as you chose. "Well, practically, then, Dr. Gold," Togo asked, "what have you achieved with this device?" He repeated himself. "Practically, that is." "Certain interesting things have been done with it in husys," she said, and -- " "I beg your pardon," Togo said questioningly. Dr. Gold paused, mouth open, stylus poised for another job. It took her several seconds to figure out just what the question was. "Oh," she said at last, "sorry. Human Systems. Part of scifSY." She stood motionless. "Thank you," Togo said. The others nodded, some uneasily, wondering how many other sets of initials were equally unknown to them. Vast sections of this uncart world of theirs must inevitably operate day to day entirely out of their ken or control. Better than most, the Directors appreciated their own humanity. "You were saying. Doctor?" Blessing said, exercising the prerogative which time was inexorably taking from him. Oh, well, his company villa on the Eiger would, perhaps, not be all that bad. " -- and what they have done," she went on, beginning to move again, as if she had been frozen and was now suddenly thawed, "is to experiment with personality characteristics in certain people, common laborers mostly." The Directors looked at her with renewed interest because this seemed to be an area of obvious economic application. "For example," she said, "the Reaction of good workers onto those of poor workers and the results were very rewarding." said Quality ReacI tion?" Holdeman cut in. She nodded. "Yes, it's a term we have started using to describe the response of Cox's Quality to the aura stimulus of people and things." "I see," Holdeman went on. "In person's brains to respond like some other person's." "No," Dr. Gold said. "Not quite. It can alter only Cox's Quality, whatever that is, not the nothing to do with intelligence or anything else except the brain's acceptance of outside aura stimulations, vibrations, or what have you." Quiet settled on the room again. The sun had moved farther down one of the plexi-quartz walls and was shining brightly across the table in a pale yellow line. Blessing looked at the engineer in his soundproof booth, ran a finger along the yellow line and made a turning motion with his hand. The engineer nodded and immediately the sun wall darkened and the opposite wall lightened. Blessing sighed in satisfaction. Ah, he thought, sic transit, and all that. Robert Ndolo pushed his chair back slightly and stared at the doctor, eyes large and dark in the long brown face with its strong straight nose. At times Ndolo could resemble a guardian image, a challenge immobilized in flesh. Dr. Gold acknowledged his stare with a nod. "Mr. Ndolo?" He shook his head. "Just wondering when we're going to find out Regardless of how it's caused or what it's called, results are what count." "But it's interesting. Bob," Holdenian said in defense of his incursion into theory. Ndolo continued to look at Dr. Gold. She in turn waited for more questions, but then decided that the African's remark had moved discussion to a practical level. They wanted her to go on, were doubtless afraid of more digressions. "All right, then," she said. "The poor workers took on the work personality of the better ones. Their production picked up, absenteeism fell, theft dropped off." "Ah." Demchenko exhaled in relief. "We maybe have something here." "Yeah, Viktor," Castenero said. "Maybe you will be lucky and they will give you my personality." "You joke," Demchenko said seriously. "No. No joke." Demchenko sat up straight and pulled down his cummerbund over his round stomach. His moon face had a hurt look. "I have a perfectly good personality," he said. "Of course you have, Viktor. Very nice," Abbassi said with a hard look at Castenero. Demchenko looked around to see if the others agreed. "Come, come, gentlemen." Blessing tapped his notaboard. "So, Dr. Gold," Peng put in as if he had not been aware of the hiatus, "what you seem to be saying is that we have the means to revolutionize the world's work force. Is that correct?" Dr. Gold traced a circle with her stylus and said with a shrug. "It seems so." "Not the world's work force," bbassi cut in. "Ours." "Ours?" Peng echoed. He seemed startled. "You said the world's work force," Abbassi explained. "Ah, I see." Peng made a slight motion of dismissal. "Ours -- the world's -- the same work force, is it not?" "Of course, of course." Abbassi slumped in his chair, as though it were no longer important to him to be understood. Castenero chuckled, reached under the curve of the table and slapped Abbassi's knee. Peng looked at them both without curiosity. "Well, then to get on with it," Holdeman said, "I move we direct sci to find our best workers, print them and lay it onto the lousy workers." His thoughts began to take flight at the concept. "We could run production contests and use the winners as the models, as the analogues. Give them a bonus, too, of course." A murmur of approval ran around the room. Perhaps today would be an easy day, an early day, an extra-martini-before-dinner day. "No, gentlemen," Dr. Gold said sternly. They were so determined to be ordinary, she thought. "It isn't (hat simple." Silent groans of "I knew it" floated up like ectoplasm and they sank back, waiting once more. "Don't forget, I said Cox's Quality has nothing to do with intelligence," she went on. "After all, some of our best sensitives are morons. It also has nothing to do with strength or dexterity or good vision or almost anything else you can ask of a worker. It's really quite limited. It shapes our attitude toward the world and its impressions, not much more. Therefore, the winner of a contest may have won because of strength, dexterity, better vision, and a hundred other other ways he could even be a psychological monster that would turn our stomachs." asked the question many were thinking. She nodded. "Yes, the analogues, as Mr. Holdeman called them, were picked very carefully and on a limited basis. Even there one or two got through with traits that weren't evident or desirable. These had nothing visibly to do with their work and attitudes but were not what we would want to spread to others." "Example?" Holdeman asked quickly. She hesitated, fumbled with her collar and reddened slightly. "Well, for example, I understand one man proved to be a secret transvestite." T here was a long pause and then a guffaw. Peng cleared his throat and motioned for quiet. He got it. "But it is theoretically possible to succeed," he said. "Of course," Dr. Gold agreed. "It is then a matter of finding the right analogues, a matter of proper screening, vetting, if you will." "That's it," Holdeman said. "We just have to be careful in selection -- you people in scr have to be careful in selection, that is." He finished lamely. "Yes, that's possible." Dr. Gold said calmly. "We could without doubt find such people. But then what?" "What, what?" Demchenko asked, moisture beading his bald head. He looked around as if to ask, "Is it me?" "Simply this, Mr. Demchenko. We imprint the poor workers and they become like the best -- at least in terms of attitude and motivation. What becomes of the mediocre workers?" "Print them," Holdeman said confidently. Several nodded. "And then that factory becomes the best and gets the bonuses and the free vacations to Colorado Springs or Ischia or Sochi or Bali," she went oh, "and the others in the other factories see this and -- " "Print them too." Holdeman started to say this briskly but the 'them' came out slowly and the 'too' extended itself on and on like an ooh of pain. The others were stunned too as their plan's implications hit them. "You see," Gold said in satisfaction. Take that, you little men! "Yes, yes," Peng said. "Very clear." Holdeman was twitching in his chair with exasperation. Her superiority, which showed so clearly now, had gotten to him. "All right, you win," he said. "It is not a matter of winning or losing as far as I am concerned," she said loftily, but of course it was. "It is a question of how to use the Imprinter. How do we prevent inequality? How do we prevent strikes and riots? How do we prevent resentment against the analogues? How do we keep the maladjusted, non-imprinted, from taking advantage of the adjusted imprinted? Finally," and here she dragged out her words as if each were printed on a separate card, "where is that person you would want to be your analogue? That is the question we will eventually have to face, if you so decide." They sat in morose silence, visions of happy, productive, undemanding workers, interchangeable human parts for the uncart machine, gone glimmering like all good things. Dr. Gold was enjoying this. She had set them up, reduced them to helplessness. Now she would help them. "I have brought someone I would like you to hear." One by one they came up out of the depths. At least, they thought, there will be an answer. Good sci. Good Gold. She went to the monitor's booth and arranged to have the one door opened. An extremely tall, thin, brownskinned man stepped into the conference room. He acted dazzled and bewildered, like a person coming on stage for the first time. To the Directors, this was the normal reaction. This room and what it represented had humbled many men. On the other hand, perhaps the visitor was merely dazzled by the change in light. The room was, indeed, very bright. "Gentlemen," Dr. Gold said loudly, "may I present Dr. N. K. Lakhshman of Delhi University Now it appeared that merely the dazzlement had caused his confusion. His eyes adjusted and he looked around through his tinted glasses with assurance. "Dr. Lakhshman is with sciescat," Dr. Gold continued. She quickly raised her hand in a little admonitory gesture as she saw the question lights go on in their eyes. "escat is, of course, sci's branch of eschatology." She anticipated the next question. "Eschatology is an antiquated word to cover a somewhat primitive religious concept. It literally means dealing with last things, death and resurrection." The still mysterious Dr. Lakhshman made a contribution. "Yes," he said, "it comes, I believe, from the Greek, eschatos, which means furthest." My God, some thought. Again another pigeonhole we didn't know existed. But one had to have faith. After all you didn't have to know all the parts of a pulse air car to drive it. As managers they had to believe that they transcended the minutiae of the business. Big-picture men, all. "All right," Holdeman said quickly, still annoyed. "You've told us more about the word than we care to know. Now what is sciescat and what's he -- " he started to point, but then thought better of it -- "Dr. Lakhshman been invited for?" "Of course, of course," Dr. Gold said placidly and went on in her own way. "We will get to that. But first another word about sciescat. It is really an outgrowth of sciextrap -- " Demchenko sighed and wiped his head. He muttered in Russian. " -- which stood for extrapolation, a word I'm sure you gentlemen are familiar with." They all nodded brazenly, without embarrassment. JL on unhurried, "were supposed to keep an eye on the broad range of sci developments, see where they were headed, how they fitted together and, in a sense, predict what areas of sci would be most fruitful. In short, keep an overview. Is this clear?" Again they nodded. She had them well under control now. Lakhshman stood aside, arms folded, wearing a smile of satisfaction. This was his moment and well deserved too, he thought. Ability had at last been appreciated. They knew who he was at the Tehran Hilton where he occupied one of sci's suites for distinguished visitors. uncart owned the hotel, of course, and so was not really out of pocket, but then there had been the deluxe ticket on South Asian International from Delhi. They, too, had known who he was. uncart owned the airline. And the special reception committee from sci and sec that had met him at the airport, they had known him, had taken his bags, lounge. Dr. Gold was still talking. "Extrapolation was fine, but rather short-range, particularly with the people we had in the old extrap units. They were primarily one-discipline persons who talked to each other and pooled ideas. With the rapid advances we were making, that simply wasn't enough." She looked around the table but they avoided her gaze. "Well, then, to continue. One of my first ideas, when I became Chief sci, was to create a new group of people, a small group, who would go far beyond the limits set for extrap. I conceived of the group as small, only one or two in each cartsci, educated in many disciplines and thinking in, in -- " she groped for a word, and then she had it -- "in cosmic terms about science and where it was going and should go as a whole, not as a collection of independent studies. Science has a will, an imperative of its own, and escat was created by me to read this imperative. "Dr. Lakhshman, here, is the product of my idea. How many advanced degrees do you have. Doctor? Six?" Lakhshman gave a little deprecatory wave of the hand. "Eight, last time I counted." Both scientists laughed. The Directors regarded them but said nothing. Again the stylus pointed. Reinholt Blessing, the shir of time in his ears, wondered if he would be retired before it was all decided. He tapped lightly, almost absentmindedly, on the table. "Of course, Mr. Chairman," Gold said. "We must indeed press on. Dr. Lakhshman is here because he has put his great abilities to the consideration of the EC#P and what it means. What is its imperative, so to speak. As he sees it, and I must only two alternatives -- two, gentlemen, only -- and these are dichotomous. It is up to you to choose. After you have heard Dr. Lakhshman I think you will agree that the imperative leads us only to full exto the Indian with a stiff swing of the body. The Directors could almost see her settle into the carpet another half thread's length. Lakshman stepped forward and again folded his arms. X men, let me summarize at the outset what I conceive the posihas touched on the difficulties of imprinting selected people with the Quality prints of others. Jealousies will arise, have arisen in some of our experiments, hard feelings against the patterns, the uncertainty of bad side effects, the fact that maladjusted non-imprinted people can and will take advantage of, even persecute, the imprinted -- in short, all the difficulties of creating an elite group among the non-elite. That has never worked throughout history. It is the stuff that martyrs are made of." "Pardon, Dr. Lakhshman," Togo cut in, "if I understand you, we have very little to decide." "On the contrary, sir. I beg your pardon, I am not used to such illustrious company and I do not know your name -- " "Togo, nipcart." The Director half rose and bowed as he introduced himself. "Ah, yes. On the contrary, Mr. Togo, you have it in your hands to put in action the greatest step man has yet taken." The Directors muttered and turned to each other. They wree mostly methodical men and wanted no part of any great step for humanity. Dr. Gold caught this. "We are not trying to be dramatic," she said. "We are merely asking you to consider what appears to be a perfectly logical next step." She put on her stiff, reassuring smile. "Yes, logical," Lakhshman hurried on. "Certainly logical, but immensely important, historic." Dr. Gold groaned to herself. Her creature was being carried away by his vision to the detriment of the argument. With his eyes firmly on El Dorado he was missing the poisoned waterholes between himself and the goal. "All right, then. Doctor," Holdeman said, "what are we supposed to be historic about? What is the great step?" Gold tried to stop him, her body lurched forward, still firmly screwed to the floor, her mouth opened -- but too late -- "Why, why, to imprint the world," Lakhshman said excitedly, like a camp preacher with the word. The Directors sat up as if their seats were wired and then slumped as the switch was cut. They were silent for some seconds. Even Lakhshman seemed stunned by the enormity of what had slipped out of him. This wasn't going according to the game plan he had worked out with Dr. Gold. He could tell this, too, from looking at her. "It's an old joke," Castenero chuckled, "but I could swear he said, imprint the world'." "That is exactly what he said," Peng stated. Blessing heaved a deep sigh and held up his hand. "Please, please," he said, "Dr. Gold, Dr. Lakhshman, I believe we are getting involved in dramatics. Would you please explain calmly and factually what you have in mind?" "Certainly." Gold said. "Dr. Lakhshman will make everything clear." She turned to him. "Go ahead. Doctor. As we agreed." H e caught her meaning and proceeded cautiously. "As I see it," he went on slowly, "we are at a crossroads. As we have learned, it appears impossible, than a very limited way. Therefore the alternative is to use it all the way, on everyone. That way man's personality will be unified, there will be no jealousies, none higher than another. In emotional terms, there will be no cruel to persecute the meek. Man will enter an era of unprecedented tranquility. This is what science has been working toward since the pyramids." In this subdued incarnation Lakhshman was being more effective. Gold watched the watchers closely and she was pleased. "And the other fork in the road?" Abbassi asked. Lakshman dismissed it with a casual wave. "Merely limited brain repair. Instead of the cutting and blood of a lobotomy we could imprint the severely maladjusted. Mechanic's work. A tragic waste of a heavensent gift." "It is then," Abbassi sighed, "all or nothing -- or almost nothing, very little." Lakhshman nodded. "Yes, that is close to it, but it is not a frightening prospect. It is a glorious prospect." Dr. Gold entered the discussion in an unexpected vein. "Gentlemen, what we propose will make the world happier, a better place to live in. We will all be happier. We will enjoy life more. The little irritations will be gone. My God, that has been a goal throughout history." "Yes," Lakhshman added, "we cannot make men into gods, nor perhaps even saints, but we can make them finer than they are." The Directors sat glumly, considering. There wasn't one among them who was prepared for this, who wanted to decide any such thing. Did even uncart have such a right? "It is our duty," Lakhshman said. Finally Togo put a question. "You said everyone. Do you really mean -- ?" "Everyone," Dr. Gold said. "All or nothing." "Everyone?" Demchenko said, swiveling his bald head around the room. She nodded and Demchenko slumped. "Of course," Peng said. "Of course." After another minute Holdeman started the practical dialogue again. "But is it practical?" he asked. said. "Oh, it's practical. I have it worked out. Of course, we won't reach every last person. There will be Eskimos or Yetis or wild men somewhere that we miss, but that won't matter. The effective population can be imprinted." "You said you had it worked out," Peng said. "Please elucidate." Lakhshman had it worked out all right, no doubt about that, and he spent the next fifteen minutes explaining how it could be done. The computer confirmed him. The room darkened and charts came on showing the Directors the answers in oversimplified wiring diagrams and stick people, the kind used in demonstrations for children. It was plain, it was simple, it was good. The statistics had come from uncartpers, another cachet of surety. Lakhshman was planning to use ten thousand imprinting teams. This meant that each one of the teams would only have to imprint about six hundred thousand people. Each imprinter could be built to take connections for one thousand people at full power. Therefore, each team would only have to imprint six hundred batches. "That's an average of less than (wo batches a day if we are to finish in a year," Lakhshman said comfortably. "Of course, the daily run would be higher since the process only takes two hours from beginning to end." However, he went on, allowing for uncartsec to gather the people, travel time, slippage, equipment problems and other difficulties, an average of two batches a day was comfortable and could be lived with. "But, my God," Demchenko said, "ten thousand teams! Where can we find all those people?" L akhshman smiled reassuringly j and gave his standard soft hand wave, an intellectual brush-off. Dr. Gold smiled with him like a conspirator. "Dear sir," Lakhshman said, pronouncing 'sir' something like sorr. "we have taken it all into account, I assure you. All has been thought out." He explained to them that the word team was almost a misnomer. One person could use the imprinter, could in fact do the job. However, a team of two had been decided upon in case of illness, or other unforeseen problems. "Besides," he went on, "it is useful to have one person just to observe the subjects. Some people, a very small minority, I might add, do not stand imprintation very well and must be stopped." "But that would defeat the purpose, would it not?" Togo asked. Lakhshman looked serious as if the gentleman's question was a good one and merited consideration, but his guns were already cocked. "But such a tiny minority, sir, an infinitesimal group. They would stand with the Eskimos and Sasquatch that aren't worth pursuing." "But all the same," Castenero insisted, "he has a point. One or two mean ones could ruin a whole factory." Again the smile of beatitude. "Fear not, sir," Lakhshman said melodramatically, "we have already considered ways of dealing with such people." Dr. Gold spoke. "I don't believe we have to go into that here. Suffice it to say that uncartsec has assured me that this small group of people will not infect the rest." "Isolation?" Holdeman asked. "Something of the nature," she said. "I trust sec to take care of such things. I have Mr. Paul's assurance." Most of the Directors nodded and relaxed. Mr. Paul was Chief, uncartsec. Let him handle it. Better not to go into a thoroughly specialized field. "I understand then that twenty thousand people will be required," Peng said. "Is that correct?" "Quite correct," Lakhshman answered. "And where are so many to come from?" Lakhshman explained that each of the scipsy subunits would supply two thousand people or in total enough for eight thousand imprinting teams. "And the rest?" Peng asked. Dr. Gold answered for Lakhshman. "We here at scipsy headquarters can supply the remainder of four thousand people. Enough for two thousand teams." There was quiet for a moment and then Abbassi spoke up in a mixture of surprise and alarm. "We have that many people here?" "Of course," said Dr. Gold, looking at him strangely. Abbassi shook his head in wonderment as Lakhshman went on with the details. Teams could be assembled, ready for training, in a month to six weeks. After that. three months would be needed for the actual training period. "That is, if you give the go-ahead today," Lakhshman added. "Any delay will, of course, lengthen matters." "Gentlemen," Dr. Gold moved in again. "I have here some tentative scheduling of teams and dates which I will pass out to show you how simply and efficiently the project can be worked." The men glanced over the papers she handed them. Most of them looked glum. They were faced with more than they cared to consider and they could not quite escape the feeling, either, that sci was railroading the proposition. Their instincts told them, whoa, dig in a bit. "I notice," Togo said, "that there is a strange distribution of imprinting teams. Those from my area, for example, are to go to sovcart teams to eurocart -- " Dr. Gold held up her hand. "Yes, yes," she said. "All teams are assigned to other than their home areas. We think it best to keep the procedure as impersonal as possible." Togo nodded slowly. The explanation had been logical. The silence was incomplete. There was some shuffling and rattling of paper, much useless marking on notaboards. Plainly they did not want to make a decision. They could not forget that when they said "all," all it would be, themselves included. Dr. Gold swiveled impatiently. Lakhshman appealed to her with his spaniel eyes. She cleared her throat. The dreamy glaze faded from Blessing's face. He said sadly, "Gentlemen, we must decide." They nodded but no one spoke. This went on for some minutes without change in tempo, as though it would continue indefinitely, eight Directors sitting, hoping, aging, as one day succeeded another, still without a decision, or even the summoned will to try to make a decision. Dr. Gold and Lakhshman smiled at one another like felons. This too had been expected and prepared for. "If I may make a suggestion," she said. I nstantly the Directors were alert. Hope, fond salvation, perhaps release -- ah. They waited expectantly for this burden to be taken from them. "Since it will take six weeks to assemble the teams and then three more months to train them, we can undertake a small pilot program to test the -- to conform the feasibility of the idea. We can have a tentative result after six weeks before we start training in volume and complete results after the training period." Ah, they thought again, relief, delay -- ah. "But you have already tried it," Peng said practically, and the others frowned at him. "Quite true," Gold said. "We have tried it on selected people but not on selected communities. Whole communities would give us a closer approximation of the future." "Yes, I see," Peng said. "Very true. Sound as a dollar." She explained carefully that three plants and associated communities would serve as test areas. The sites had already been chosen. All were relatively isolated and therefore easy for sec to seal off and monitor, assuring an uncontaminated test. "Also," Gold added, almost as afterthought, "if anything goes wrong the situation can easily be controlled." The three factories chosen were: the LockheedSud AviationMarcel Dassault plant near Brasilia, the GoodyearMichelinChemex plant in Central Africa, and the IClAtlasFarbenDupont plant near Dizful, Iran. The old names of commerce survived under uncart, strung out like memory beads. Once uncart had established itself, it put an end to all the uncertainties, the bankruptcies, the failures, in commerce and industry. Companies could be combined, streamlined, reconstructed, but they could not go under. The old names gave uncart a sense of continuity and legitimacy, made them the rightful heirs to the throne. "Sounds good to me," Holdeman said, clearly expressing the concensus. The others murmured their agreement. "We do agree then, gentlemen?" Blessing asked. Seven heads nodded. Some looked at their watches. Two or three yawned and pushed their chairs back. "Fine. Thank you, gentlemen," Dr. Goid said. She paused and looked around. Ill X consider." They looked at her incredulously. They couldn't believe it. She was like a dentist saying they still had time to take care of one more cavity. "And, and, and that is?" Demchenko stuttered. "Simply who is to be the analogue." she said quickly. They hadn't thought of that. The gloom returned, deeper than ever. Lakhshman looked at them idly, curiously. "Surely, you have a suggestion," Ndolo said from behind that strongnosed bastion of a face. Dr. Gold did not notice his irritation, or appeared not to. "Yes, of course," she said. "It is sci's duty to present complete packages to the Directors." She surveyed them through her huge glasses, as if screening for disagreement. Then when satisfied there was none, she relaxed. "I will let Dr. Lakhshman explain," she concluded. He smiled and nodded his head in a truncated bow. "As you know," he said, "a real analogue must be used. We cannot create one artificially or contrive one tVom parts. We must have an every respect we can measure for mankind as a whole." "And for us, too, gentlemen," Gold put in. "We can't forget that." No, they hadn't forgotten that and they nodded morosely. That was the problem. How could you order your own personality changed when you were perfectly satisfied with the one you had? But the thing had a logic that was inescapable. "All right," Holdeman said with a sigh, "who is it? Surely you have someone in mind." Dr. Gold and Lakhshman both started speaking at the same time. They looked at each other and he deferred. "Yes," she said, "as I said, sci always presents a complete package. That is our job." It was Lakhshman who concluded the announcement. He said simply, "Thors Thorsen." "Thorsen!" several Directors said at once. The two scientists merely nodded. "But he's dead," Castenero said. "We printed him shortly before he died," Lakhshman informed them. "I might add," Gold said, "that his being dead is one more reason for choosing him." Certainly Thorsen was a good choice and the more the Directors thought about it the less reason they had to disagree. Thorsen, a standing contributions in many scientific fields. He had also been an excellent poet and painter. In middle age he had given up his main works to go to the still relatively remote areas of New Guinea to live among the natives. He had set up a hospital and spent long years healing the sick. At the same time, periodically, a work of his humanist philosophy would be flown out of the bush to the expectant hands of his admirers. His writing reflected what must have been an exceptional personality, one of great kindness, inner peace and harmony, yet possessed of an energy and drive few could match. Thorsen had been acclaimed a genius while he lived, a genius with many of the characteristics of a saint. In short, if the world were to have a common personality what better than Thorsen? Gold and Lakhshman studied the Directors in silence. They could almost see the mental wheels turning. They could see the still useless struggles against the inevitable. And because they knew it was inevitable they could afford to be quiet. "All right," Ndolo said at last. "All right. All right." "Gentlemen?" Blessing asked once more. "There is no one better," Peng said. "If we have to -- " Castenero said. "Okay," said Holdeman. "Let me add," Dr. Gold cut in, "because he is from Iceland there should be little or no national jealousy." "Of Iceland?" Castenero chuckled. "A good point," Peng added. "Not kind, perhaps, but a good point." T hey were all nodding by this time and so it was settled. "If I may clarify now," Blessing said. "Just so there will be no misunderstanding, beginning now sci will start imprinting the workers and related civilians in the three factory areas we have named. The Blessing bowed his head slightly -- "will be used as the analogue for these people. In the meantime, sci will gather the people who will be trained to form the imprinting teams. Right so far. Dr. Gold?" "Quite correct, Mr. Chairman." "This gathering," Blessing went on, "will take six weeks. At that time we will be given a tentative progress report from the test areas. The training of the teams will take about three more months, after which we -- " He paused and a look of sudden grief wrinkled his face like a physical pain. He controlled himself and went on. " -- after which the Directors will recieve a final report from the control sites. On the basis of that, the Directors will decide whether or not to go ahead with the whole program." "An excellent summary," Lakhshman said. They turned to the Chairman for a sign to leave. Their business was now over. Blessing sat staring at his notaboard. At last he spoke. "Sorry, gentlemen. I was thinking how much I will miss being here when you hear those reports and make those decisions." The statement was obviously sincere and somewhat sad. "But, Blessing," Abbassi said, "the rules allow an ex-Chairman to sit in on meetings. He cannot vote, of course, but -- " "No, no," Blessing said, "it is not done. It is better so." Then he brightened. "Well, let us have, some Beluga." The mood changed. The Directors filed out noisily, almost like schoolboys. They headed for the bar where caviar and vodka awaited them. Because the Headquarters of uncart was in Iran the Directors had decided some years before to revive the almost extinct Caspian caviar industry. Through the cooperation of sovcartsciecofish and ascartsciecofish the Caspian was cleaned up, its level restored and its waters restocked with sturgeon. Now the Directors' cocktail tables bore large iced bowls of Beluga and of Golden, the caviar of Shahs. They spooned the caviar of Shahs. They spooned the caviar liberally onto buttered toast, squeezed lemon on the spread. They nibbled greedily, licking their fingers and washing down the treat with iced vodka, Makhsous for the persophile and Stolichnaya for the purist. IV T ime went by. The Directors said goodbye to their old Chairman and seated their new: Chen Tsing Peng. Blessing's place asDirector from eurocart was taken by Lennox Brown, and Englishman. It was now the middle of summer. The great sun floated in the cloudless Persian sky like a burnished copper tray. The air was dry, desert dry. Even when they strolled through the gardens outside the temperature-controlled buildings, the Directors did not feel especially uncomfortable. The combination of hot dry air and cloudless, perfectly blue skies made their aches disappear and their spirits rise. The day came for Dr. Gold's interim report to the Directors. After they had settled themselves around the table Dr. Gold came in towing a small man behind her like the Coast Guard rescuing a canoe. Some, but not all, of the Directors knew him. The new man, Brown, turned to Ndolo with a question but received only a muttered answer which he didn't understand. Dr. Gold solved the problem. Physically Ho was tiny. He stood barely five feet tall and could not have weighed a hundred pounds. If not for his graying hair he might have been taken at a quick glance for a child. In introducing him, Gold had stepped forward and had disappeared behind her, almost as though through a conjuring trick. She had to look around for him to conclude the introduction. "As you know, the initial sixweek trial period of our imprinting project is now over. Mr. Ho is here with the latest statistics from the pilot areas. I believe you will be gratified by what he has to say." Ho turned his little finger toward her in annoyance. He was piqued because she had given away the burden of his message. All that was left were dry statistics. He looked up at her bulk like a climber surveying the Matterhorn. She appeared not to notice. He turned back to the Directors, stiff-legged, if possible even more doll-like. "As Dr. Gold has told you," he began, "I have here the statistics from the three pilot plants. I know you gentlemen are busy so I will get to the heart of the matter." He lifted the sheet of paper, folded lengthwise, that he had been holding at his side and read aloud quickly. "At the Dassault plant near Brasilia in the five-week period since the workers were imprinted with the Thorsen print, absenteeism has virtually disappeared. Production is up twelve percent and worker attitude has improved sixty-three percent, according to amcartsci psy. An excellent result. In the Michelin factory in Central Africa, during approximately the same period, absenteeism has been reduced by half, production is up twenty-five percent and theft, astonishingly, has nearly vanished." He paused to editorialize. "I might say that these last figures are all the more startling because that particular plant was one of the worst in afcart, a bad area for laziness, drunkenness and thievery." "I beg your pardon," Ndolo said, banging the table. "All right," Castenero said, seriously for him, "don't get worked up, Bob. He didn't mean anything." "That's right," Holdeman said, "bigger things are at stake. But, Ho," he went on, "no more references that could be misconstrued, if you know what I mean." "Certainly." Ho rose on his little feet. "I am merely stating facts. That is my job. Unfortunately, the curse of nationalism is still -- " "Ho!" Peng cut him off sharply. "Of course." Ho flushed and went on. "As I was saying the figures are striking. For the Dupont plant in Dizful the results are equally good. Absenteeism gone, production up thirty-three percent, attitude over seventy percent better, theft zero. Remarkable." "Well, Dr. Gold," Peng said, "would you say we have a success?" # Tndoubtedly," s h e sa d. J"The figures speak for themselves." "Then, gentlemen," Peng went on, "do we agree that the imprinting teams may start their training, with deployment in three months at the latest?" Peng looked from one to the other and each nodded. He came to Abbassi, who made no gesture whatever. Peng coaxed him. "It will be very good for uncart." "But will it be good for the world?" Abbassi asked seriously. Silence fell on this vast irrelevancy. There were embarrassed coughs and foot shufflings. Ah, well, they thought, Abbassi was Persian and bound to be a bit quixotic. But a good head, all the same. "I believe that is what we were talking about," Demchenko said at last. "Quite," the Chairman said. He watched Abbassi, who nodded sadly at last. Peng continued. "I believe we can move on now. Very well, Dr. Gold, you may give the order to commence training." "Thank you," she said contentedly. "But there will be another report from the pilot plants in three months, will there not?" "If you think it is necessary," she said, not so contentedly. "I believe that was our agreement. Better safe than sorry." "As you say," Gold said. "But there will be no change. There will be improvement, if anything." "All the same." "Quite," she ended the dialogue. She sailed out the door, towing Mr. Ho, just as she had entered. The door slid shut with a whoosh. Peng said, once she had gone, "Now that we are alone, may I suggest that Doctor Gold is probably right. The report three months from now should cause no change in our plans. I see no need to call a general meeting at that time." "You are sure?" Togo questioned. "The chairman is supposed to relieve his fellows of as much routine work as possible. This next report will certainly be routine." "And?" Castenero asked this time. "If results are as expected I will consider the report and give the order for deployment. No point in a meeting. Besides, one or two of you are talking of taking leave at that time. You, for example, Fernando." "Yes, that's true," Castenero said. "Well, it's okay with me." "I don't see why not," Holdeman said. "Yes, yes," Demchenko added. "No need to bother us." And so it was agreed. As they filed out they gossiped among themselves, as usual, but Abbassi hung back, thinking, clinging to this moment before the project was underway. But. all the same, he thought, will it be good for us? V I t was now autumn in Tehran. The air was still warm and the skies clear, but occasionally clouds gathered over the mountains and peaks disappeared into thunder and lightning, like brown castings worked in a forge. This was a sign of the weeks to come when the rain would become a daily affair, pouring in sheets, running in freshets down Iran's bare hills and scouring its desert. The snow on Demavand that had nearly disappeared was alwhite shine of it standing out clearly against the malted tan of the old. It was a quiet period for uncart and, as Peng had suggested, some of the Directors were not in Tehran. Castenero was in Acapulco. Togo was sunning himself in Hawaii. Holdeman was diving at Juan les Pins. Demchenko was at a resort in Yalta. Thus half the board was gone. Only Peng, Brown, Ndolo and Abbassi were in town, Peng because he took his chairmanship seriously, Brown because he was still new and wanted to appear at least to pull his weight, Ndolo because he had nowhere in particular to go. As for Abbassi, his home was Tehran. On the day of Dr. Gold's threemonth report, Peng went early to his office, Ndolo took to the hills for some shooting. Brown sat at home reading back reports and Abbassi packed his family on a picnic to the Caspian. However, the four assembled at sixteen hundred to hear Dr. Gold. Peng had summoned them somewhat hurriedly and unexpectedly. Tomorrow the teams were to start on their way. As soon as Dr. Gold appeared they could see that something was wrong. She looked pale, even gray, and shaken, as if something she held dear had been suddenly taken from her. Silently she handed around her familiar single sheets and stood stiffly, eyes shut. It was fourteen forty-one hours in Yalta when Demchenko's beeper sounded. He put down his teacup, rose stiffly and went to the Heroic Worker's Hotel communications room to put through a videocall to Tehran. It was an hour earlier at Juan les Pins when Holdeman heard his beeper. He was lying next to the pool, testing his flesh for doneness by seeing how long the white spot remained after poking. He got to his feet, slipped into a robe and went to his hotel room and its videophone. He punched uncart's number in Tehran. It was roughly a quarter to seven in the morning at Acapulco when Castenero was awakened by his secretary beating on the door. "Mr. Castenero, Mr. Castenero," she called. "Are you awake?" He awoke slowly and took in what was happening. He had been waked up, as had they all, many times on company business. "What is it?" he said to the closed door. "Headquarters on the phone, Mr. Peng." He grunted. I thought he wasn't going to bother us, he mused. But then he flipped the switch on his videophone, put on a robe, slicked down his hair with his palms and waited for the screen to come alive. In Hawaii, it was two minutes to live when Togo's call box sounded. He was insanely awake, sitting erect in a Hash with his feet on the floor. He reacted like a fireman hearing the bell. Next to him his wife groaned and turned over. "Yes?" he said into the caller. "Call from Tehran, sir," a voice said. "You can take it on your bedside set." "No," he said, thinking of his wife. "Put it through to the set in my lounge, if you please." One by one they checked in and the four in Tehran watched the conference call screen as one quarter after another lit up with a distant face. The four vacationers on the other end could see, covering half the screen, their fellow Directors in Peng's office, grouped around him like a quartet publicity photo. A little to one side Gold sat solemnly. H m. Castenero thought, she doesn't look so hot. The other half of the screen contained the faces of the three other missing Directors. Castenero saw Togo, Demchenko and Holdeman. Holdeman saw Demchenko, Togo and Castenero. And so forth. They looked curious, expectant, but not alarmed. At other times and in other places, the world's leaders so assembled could have waited only with the greatest dread to learn that war, or worse, had broken out. Now such doom was impossible. uncart had planed down most of life's desperate bumps. W hen they were electronically assembled Peng looked into the screen for several seconds, as if trying to make out something about the others. Are they well? Are they enjoying themselves? Are they surprised, anxious? None of these? "Everyone on scramble," he asked into the screen. "Yes, yes, yes, yes," came back the answers like echoes. Whenever a Director traveled a seccom man went with him, carrying a scrambler that could be fitted to any video phone system in the world. It allowed the Directors complete privacy. "We are assembled today," Peng started almost like a ceremony, "or rather I have made this conference call to inform you of the latest, and if I may say unexpected, results from our three pilot areas." Lennox Brown hadn't quite got the knack of conference calls yet and he wasn't sure where to look. Nervously, he stared through his old-fashioned, but real, hornrims at Peng and then at the screen and then back again. "Without further shilly-shallying or foot dragging," Peng went on, "I will simply read you the report." As he read they noticed Dr. Gold sitting passively, colorlessly, like wax, the whole burden on her shoulders, sci had failed. Shortly after the glowing sixweek reports were in, psyhusys in the three test areas began to notice a dramatic slide. Production fell off, sickness again shot up, theft remained down but the incidence of accidents rose dramatically. The pilot plants were worse off than before. Oddly, too, the plants listed a record number of suicides, all with no apparent cause. It was as if a number of people in these three widely separated areas had suddenly and together decided to stop living. So Peng read the dismal record. At the end no one had much to say. Peng sat with the paper on his lap, legs neatly folded. "Anything else?" Holdeman said, the Mediterranean sun shining in the window behind him. Dr. Gold slowly straightened in her chair. "Just that in the last two months there hasn't been a single new pregnancy in any of the areas, either," she said listlessly. "You mean," Cajitenero shot out in surprise, "people aren't even -- " "Exactly," Gold said. " -- any more?" he concluded. "Then what is it?" Demchenko asked. "My God, what is it?" She brightened a little. The chance for discussion, at least, was making her feel better. "We don't know for sure. I believe I have a theory, though. We gave them Thorsen's entire Quality package. Thorsen was an unusual man of great intellect. The people we imprinted are not. They are ordinary, or less." A touch of the old, unchastened, pure Gold began to shine through. "So they didn't know how to handle this package of qualities we gave them. Their brains weren't, aren't, up to it. When Thorsen became frustrated he had his mind to fall back on. When these people become likewise they have no inne. resource to help. When Thorsen's hospital grew tedious to him, and it often did according to his memoirs, he could move into a world of his imagination -- or just plain stick to the job because he had self-discipline. Our people don't have his means." "In short, they became bored," Peng said. "That's clear enough. We should have expected that." "Yes," she said, "we should have." "I see." Togo said from the screen. "They had no release for their frustrations. We have taken the natural ones away and the subject's were not deep enough to supply others of their own." "Yes, I see too," Lennox Brown said hesitantly. "They are hopelessly, hopelessly bored with no chance for release." "You can't give people what belongs to someone else," Abbassi said, and this simple, almost absurd statement struck them at that moment as being very profound. "It isn't permissible," he went on, "to tamper with things lightly and easily as we do. Men should not surrender to the arrogance of power." After a great pause that was almost one of embarrassment, Holdeman spoke again. "Well, what now?" he said. "Obviously the teams aren't going out." "Certainly obvious," Peng said. "We'll put them back the way they were," Gold said. "We saved their original prints in case anything went wrong. We'll imprint them back. At least we can still use the imprinter on severe mental cases." "And so it ends," Castenero said. She nodded. "Yes, the great experiment. Man could have been so happy, oh, so happy. Science," she said, not sci, "should have done this for him." One single tear ran slowly down from behind the great glass slab of her left lens. The great experiment had ended and the Directors went back to bed, or to the pool, or the hotel verandah. uncart would put it all back the way it was, would make it all better again. Soon the world would again be free of the threat of tranquility, safe for tumult and turmoil and tension and temper and release from strain. It would be free for catharsis, big drunks, monumental hangovers and sleeping late, throwing the clock against the wall, missing work, dropping things that break, hiding in the toilet for a smoke, punching out the super and hanging tools in your pants until you clanked and had to walk carefully as you left the shop. In short, the world was once again condemned to be unreconstructed. As usual uncart still went about its business.  The astronomical object called Cuckoo is plunging toward the Galaxy. It is. literally, the biggest riddle in the universe: a body with the dimensions of a solar system, it is both impossibly large and imposthe Sun's bulk, it has only about ten times the mass. And yet, although its average density is not much more than a high vacuum, it somehow has a solid surface... and that surface is inhabited. Human beings live on Cuckoo, or creatures so like human beings that it seems impossible they should not share a common ancestry with Homo Sapiens.  Yet Cuckoo has never been nearer Earth than it is now! Because Cuckoo's surface gravity is so tiny, men can fly in its thick, deep atmosphere. from a tribe of native wingmen. He is taller and slimmer than men who have lived their lives in Earth's gravity, but he is clearly human. He has set out to find an org's egg, hoping to hatch from it one of the great tameable flying creatures to use for a mount. them, beetle-like creatures who are the overlords of his homeland, who rule by fear and violence, who make men their slaves. Rider's standards, and thickly muscled as well, is one of these slaves: but he escapes from them and joins Org Rider. The boy also encounters a tattered. hunger-crazed man. one who is strangely squat and thick to Org Rider's eyes: and, although they cannot communicate well, the boy begins to understand that the stranger is from outside his own world entirely. name, and he is one of a dozen or more identical copies of himself. Because the distances between stars are so great spaceships cannot travel between them in a human lifetime. Instead, a man who wishes to go from the Earth to. say, the planet of a G-type star near the Pleiades steps into a transmission chamber. Every atom of his body is marked and charted. A blueprint of his body is transmitted to the other planet. He himself steps out of the chamber unchanged -- but from the blueprint an exact copy is created on the other planet. It is not radio that transmits these messages. Radio is too slow; the blueprints are carried on the charges of those strange, fasterthan-light particles called " tach yons". Ben Pertin was born on Earth. One copy of him -- call it the " original ", -- still lives there. Another Ben Pertin was transmited to the artificial planet called Sun One, the headquarters of the galactic federation of intelligent races. From Sun One still other duplicates of himself have been transmitted to the orbiting satellite that circles Cuckoo, and from it in turn still others have been transmitted to the surface of Cuckoo. Most of these have died; most of the survivors know that death is inevitable. The stranger is one such. While on Sun One Ben Pertin met and married a girl named human still living on Earth. Now the original Zara has been asked to volunteer once again for du plication, to be sent directly from Earth to the surface of Cuckoo for exploration. She agrees -- and invites her husband, a man Ben O rg rider's knife was at the stranger's throat before he could check himself. The man seemed both desperate and startled. He brought up his arm, less in a gesture of defense than as violent reflex. He was strong and his swing brushed Org Rider's hand and knife away, but threw the stranger off balance. He lurched against the rock wall behind the waterfall -- his head met rock and he slumped to the ground, stunned. Org Rider dropped to his knees and embraced the egg fearfully. Its bright curve showed no damage. He pressed an ear against its warm, pliant shell and heard the even, faint throb of the young org's heart -- along with a random skittering that meant the creature was close to hatching. Then Org Rider turned to the intruder. The crawling sensation at his back was still there. There was no doubt of it, the man who lay before him was the man the watchers had killed. Yet here he was -- alive. Cut, scratched and battered -- all those things. But he was not dead. Pertin has never met and knows nothing of, to come with her. And so the two newcomers from Earth come to Cuckoo. They know that it will be strange and dangerous. They do not know that among its dangers is a dying man who thinks he is married to Zara. Org Rider studied him carefully. The stranger's clothing was not quite the same as before. The colors were different and the puffsleeved tunic he wore was torn and filthy. The bright, metallic objects on his arms also seemed different, but they seemed the same kind of things as those he had worn before. No doubt about it -- this was the same man! It dawned on Org Rider that this man was the figure he had seen falling from the slamming machine. Perhaps in that lay some sort of explanation. Perhaps the machine laid eggs that hatched into identical creatures like this one. He had never heard of such a thing, but he had never heard of a dead man's living again, either. Remembering that the man in his previous life had spoken a few intelligible words, Org Rider asked carefully, "Are you hungry? Do you desire food?" The man opened his eyes warily. There was no comprehension in them. He stroked the metallic clutter on his wrist with his other hand as though the effort were too much for him, and motioned Org Rider to speak again. "Are you hungry?" Org Rider  repeated. "I have some food." The stranger shook his head, but his eyes fell on the pouch of food Org Rider had dropped. He stretched his hand toward it. "You are hungry, then," said Org Rider. Quickly he cut a slice of flesh from a watersnake and tried it. The taste was sweetish and good. He put a thin strip of it against the stranger's bearded lips. The man whimpered and sucked at it eagerly. "It will be better cooked," Org Rider said and offered some of the tender purple stalks. The stranger chewed at them while Org Rider whittled a drill, twirled it to light a fire and set some of the snake meat to roast. Before long the fragrance of roasting meat became as tantalizing to Org Rider as to his guest -- they shared the first half-cooked strips contentedly while the rest continued to brown. Then Org Rider forgot the stranger, because the egg made a sound like ripping cloth. I N the nest, the egg was rocking from the thrusts of some irtternal eruption. A dark split opened and spread. Org Rider squatted next to the nest, watching in fascination, urgently wanting to help but not knowing how. Inside the egg dull thumping sounds accompanied thrusts against the thick internal membrane. It ripped, and ripped again -- and finally he could see the dark, wet head of the baby org, struggling feebly to emerge. The stranger limped over to look, then shrugged and went to the waterfall. He drank thirstily, his eyes fixed on Org Rider and the hatching egg. The org's head burst through the slit, slick and black. Almost at once it began to dry, changing to a pale, tawny color. The huge eyes opened, the pupils wide and black and mysterious, rimmed with luminous blue. It fixed its gaze at once on Org Rider. Fascinated, Org Rider stared back. The baby org seemed to be resting and he thought he saw a plea in its gaze. For what? He could not guess until he saw that the infant was laboring for breath. He seized the edge of the glistening membrane and used his knife to widen the opening. The great head reached out. The hatchling gave a strangled, mewing cry and its warm breath, sharply scented with the odor of parching grain, enveloped Org Rider. He leaned forward and wiped from the tip of the infant's emerging trunk a thick brown clot. He relaxed his attention and realized for the first time that, over the splash of the waterfall, the stranger was shouting at him. The man was pointing at the sky. Were the org's parents still hunting their offspring? And then Org Rider heard a familiar whine. It took him a moment to catch sight of the mottled ship of the watchers. It was flying low over the pool below the waterfall, its sound suddenly magnified by the surrounding black walls to a shout of distant thunder. And Org Rider realized he had been seen. He turned in indecision, peering back into the cave. Would they take the infant org away from him? Worse -- he remembered the warning about the watchman's eye. He had thrown it away. Would they punish him? The gaunt stranger babbled fresh gibberish, pointed again at the sky and Org Rider saw that a gray fleck had separated from the ship. The ship flew on, lifted over the rim of the canyon and away. The fleck dropped toward the pool and in a moment spread great wings and circled gently down toward the waterfall. Org Rider pushed the stranger back into the cave and ran to his org. It had freed itself of the luminous membrane, except for a few rags that still clung stickily. Its tail unfolded, wet and delicate. Its whole body burst out in a rich cloud of that parched-grain fragrance. It was twice Org Rider's length, now that its full dimensions had unfolded, but it was still an infant and drained of strength by its struggle to be born. Its short trunk lifted to sniff him -- then it slumped to the damp rock floor of the cave. The boy began to rub it down with his wadded shirt, crooning to it a song he had learned from his mother. Sleepily the org arched its thin body to meet the strokes of his hand, and its voice seemed to echo the song. It was out of the question to leave the org and impossible to move it. It would be an hour or more before it could fly and he could not carry it and still manage the tricky rocks around the falls. He stared desperately at the stranger, wondering how to get him to help. And then beyond the stranger, in the arch under the edge of the waterfall, appeared another figure. It was not a watcher -- it was human, tall, with a fire-red beard and keen green eyes. "Redlaw," Org Rider gasped. "Org Rider," acknowledged the giant, grinning through the flowing beard. "I see you've got your org after all." H e reached out a hand. Org Rider drew back instinctively, fingers leaping toward his knife, before he decided the gesture was friendly and allowed Redlaw to shake hands with him. "I followed you here," Redlaw said. "Saw two adult orgs looking more frantic than usual and wondered if you were what they were worrying about. I see you were." Org Rider grinned, then asked, "Followed me? But how? I got rid of the watchman's eye -- " The giant's laughter boomed. "Clever about it, too, weren't you? We located it -- inside an org! The watchers aren't going to like it if they see you again, so I recommend you don't let them. So you'll have to lose that thing." His finger shot out to point at the compass on Org Rider's wrist. "But that was my father's -- " "No doubt. But where he got it -- or someone before him -- was the watchers. It's trade goods and they can trace you buy it as easily as by a watchman's eye. Made for that purpose." "If that's so -- why didn't your friends come down and kill me?" "Thank me, boy. I convinced them you'd been eaten by that org. When it came to explaining how one telltale was inside the org and the other here, I rose to the occasion. I told them the second one had been excreted. But you'll have to take it off before you leave here. Org excrement doesn't move from place to place by itself." He peered wonderingly at the stranger, then at the infant org. "What's all this?" he demanded. Org Rider said proudly, "That's my org -- I think he's hungry." Ignoring Redlaw for the moment, he ran to slice strips from the watersnake remnants and offered them to the hatchling. It devoured them, great eyes fixed on the boy. Its externals were now nearly dry. Most of its body loomed a pale gold, shading into white along the tips of its tail and its wings. Not yet scaled like the adult orgs, it was covered with a fine velvet that felt like fur but consisted in fact, of fleshy protuberances that would turn to chitin. Org Rider fetched water and doled it out to the infant. While he was tending his org Redlaw spoke to the stranger. Org Rider paid no attention until he was called. "We've got to move on, boy," Redlaw said. "Take off that compass. Don't break it -- they'll know if you do. Just leave it." "Move on where?" Org Rider asked. "No choice, boy," boomed Redlaw. "This fellow you've got here -- he's what the watchers are looking for. Says his name's Ben Yale Pertin -- whatever that means. And he's from outside the sky." "That's crazy," Org Rider said seriously. "There's nothing outside the sky." Redlaw nodded. "Time was I'd have agreed with you, but the watchers think otherwise. They spotted him coming in. Right now they're not looking for you, but him. And if we want to keep him alive we've got to get him where the watchers won't look." "Where would that be?" Org Rider slipped the compass off his wrist, stood gazing at it. "They know where this is. They must know you're here -- " "Not necessarily -- but they might." Redlaw was thoughtful. "I crawled out through a disposal hatch when they weren't looking. But you're right about the telltale compass. When they miss me they might come zeroing in on it. And I don't know, boy. You think the three of us might travel fast enough to get out of range?" "Four of us." Org Rider turned to look at his charge. "There's Babe," he said. "I won't leave him." "Is that his name? Babe?" "It is for now. And he's not ready to travel." "You mean he might travel right away from you, don't you?" Org Rider grinned. "I'm not taking that chance!" A silence fell. "I don't know, boy," Redlaw said at last. "One thing is -- we can't just stay here. The watchers won't only kill us, boy -- they'll feast on us -- you, me and your org. That's a pleasure I'd like to deny them." He gestured at the stranger. "This other fellow might not be lucky enough to be on the menu. They'll want him to talk." "Talk about what?" "Where he came from. What he's up to, him and his friends that pop up all over." Redlaw looked ill at ease. Suddenly he grinned. "I know. We'll use their own telltale to confuse them. I can move fast enough by myself -- I'll take it a good long way down Knife-in-theSky and drop it off a cliff somewhere. Let them hunt it there. They won't have any reason to come back here then, and this is as cozy a spot as we'll find." He was already standing, beginning to strap his wings on again. "Stay out of sight. I'll be back in a thousand breaths or so -- if I'm lucky." T he time stretched to more than a thousand breaths. It became fifteen hundred, then two thousand. Org Rider could have stayed in the cave forever, delighted with watching his hatchling grow stronger with every breath, but the growth required food and he had at last to steal out from under the waterfall and forage. Redlaw had left his cleaver. Org Rider took it and bounded along the river course to the forest, where huge fat golden moths trailed gray wakes of sickly bittersweet fragrance. He despaired of catching one of them without exposing himself, but the trees themselves were sources of food. He leaped to hack off huge seed cones with the cleaver, split them open and found them full of edible seeds as well as wriggling, blind, horned grubs, probably those of the moths. When he came back to the cave behind the waterfall the stranger was sleeping again. Org Rider regarded him with suspicion tinged with fear. He had not forgotten that he had seen this man die once. He did not understand how it was he was alive again, but something about all this made the bristles at the back of his neck crawl. Still, for the moment, Babe was more important. The young org was awake and eager. He drained the water Org Rider brought him, then whimpered and crooned for more food. The grubs went into his capacious maw so fast that before the boy knew it they were gone and he and his sleeping guest -- or captive -- were still unfed. No matter. The humans could go hungry. A newly hatched org had to eat or die. The stranger awoke briefly, barely long  enough to drink some water, look .around for food, find a few scraps and return to sleep. Org Rider sat with his hatchling, singing softly to it as his mother had taught him. It pleased him immensely to see it respond and fall asleep, but it woke again to be fed and the scraps that were left were meager. Another thousand breaths later Org Rider decided he had to foage once more. At the waterfall's edge he paused uncertainly, then dived for the shelter of the vegetation. At once he realized he was in danger. The rush of the waterfall had drowned the sound that came from the sky, the shrieks of the angry adult orgs. He burrowed under a thick cluster of tough gray-green vines, inedible and useless to him but not, he discovered, to some tiny biting creatures that disputed possession with him. Hundreds of breaths passed before he dared venture out. He stood beside the vines, listening. The shrieks of the orgs were far away again. But now came something else -- a clattering sound, more like the sound of the stranger's slamming machine than anything else Org Rider could remember hearing. A many-jointed object appeared over the lip of the canyon and dropped toward him. As it hit the pebbly fringe of the pool it made a clattering racket. It was followed by another similar object and then by the huge form of Redlaw, dropping easily down toward Org Rider. Redlaw said, "There are orgs up the slope and a watcher ship is cruising around. Get this stuff inside." "But I've got to find food -- " "You won't have a mouth to eat it with if we don't get under cover." Org Rider could not argue with that clear wisdom. The manyjointed, clattering objects turned out to be collections of queer metal shapes, held together by vines. Org Rider picked up one, Redlaw the other, and they managed to get them inside the cave. Panting from his effort, Redlaw said proudly, "I found it -- I found his slamming machine. Couldn't carry the whole thing -- it was banged up so bad. But I took all the loose pieces and brought them here." The stranger propped himself on an elbow, staring at the collection of bits and pieces. He said something in his unintelligible speech and creakingly got to his feet. Dried blood was black on his nearly naked, half starved body. Org Rider felt compassion for him, mingled with the dread and the anger -- actually he had little anger left, since Babe had not been harmed by the man's attempt to smash the egg and eat it, but there was still a vestigial core of dread. The man shuffled over in his curious stumbling gait and thumbed through the hardware excitedly. He fumbled out a flat black oblong with a handle and touched it in some way Org Rider did not understand. It sprang open, revealing oddly shaped shining objects that looked like tools. With them the stranger began to assault the bangles he wore on his wrist. Org Rider involuntarily stepped back, remembering how those bangles on the other stranger had seemed to speak to him with a voice of their own. "Go to it," boomed Redlaw lustily. "Fix up your gadgets for us. That's what I want you to do." "What is?" Org Rider demanded. "Why, I want him to repair those trinkets of his. They're powerful things, man! Weapons. Machines. I don't understand them, but I know they're something that's never been seen in the world before -- and I want them." "For what?" "For the big job that's ahead of us. This funny-looking fellow is the key to our chance to deal with the watchers. Nothing in the flatworld has a chance to break their power, certainly not your people. Not even me, and I know more than anyone else. you've ever met about weapons and how to use them. But this man has weapons I mean to have." Org Rider stared at the scarecrow figure disbelievingy. "He's only a man," he said. "Not much of a man at that. Our potter was bigger than he is and I beat the potter in fair fight." "You won't beat this one, boy. He's stronger than you think." "Stronger than the watchers?" "His weapons are. And he'll give them to us, I promise. Or -- " "Or what?" After a moment Redlaw finished his thought somberly. "Or we'll kill him and take the weapons away from him," he said. W hen they stepped out of the tachyon-transport chamber, Jon and Zara Gentry were greeted by a female creature, human in shape, but with great angel wings. Her face was remotely, cruelly beautiful, but it was not the face of a human being and the Gentrys knew her for what she was, an edited version of some nonhuman race of the galaxy that had revised its transported copies into a physical form more useful in the environment of Cuckoo. "Welcome to Ground Station One," the creature chimed in a voice like sweet bells. "My name is Valkyrie. I am pleased to see the first representatives of Planet Earth arrive on the surface of Cuckoo." Zara looked doubtfully at her husband, then reached out a hand, which Valkyrie took politely. Clearly she had been with human beings in some other environment before coming to Cuckoo -- the custom of a handshake did not disturb her at all. Beyond the silver girl floated a glittering cloud that changed shape like a swarm of diamond bees, so tiny that the individual members were almost indetectable. Over them, partly obscured by their dazzle, a creature swam gently in the air. It had the wings of a butterfly and the head of a bat. Zara Gentry identified both lifeforms readily enough. The swarm was a collective entity -- usually identified as Boaty-Bits -- from a planet of a star in the constellation of Bootes. The single creature was a T'Worlie. From the T'Worlie came a shrill whistle that Zara's pmal rendered into, "I identify you, Zara Doy." Zara looked doubtfully at her husband, who shrugged. "I am Zara Doy," she said. "Or was. This is my husband. According to our custom I have taken his name and so I am now called Zara Gentry." The T'Worlie did not respond. In the languid gravity of Cuckoo it did not need to exert itself to fly -- it was enough for it to ripple its wings slowly. From it came a sharp but not unpleasant odor suggesting an open pickle jar in a warm pantry. Neither of the Gentrys had ever seen Boaty-Bits or T'Worlies in the flesh before -- if "flesh" was the right word. The two humans had no difficulty in recognizing the two alien species from stereo-stage pictures, but nothing in the stereoviews had prepared them for the sense of whirling power in the Boaty-Bits, or the acrid odor of the T'Worlie. "My identity," it rapped metallically through the pmal translator -- how quickly, Zara thought, one became accustomed to listening to that rather than the shrill pipings of the T'Worlie itself -- "can be described as one Nimmie. We did have mutual identification on Sun One, but I now perceive you are a different version." "And I knew you too," sang the silver girl sweetly. "Will you look around your new home?" It was a confusing new home. Its plan was hard to make out, but Zara Gentry had seen stereo-stage images of it -- spherical shells blown out of some transparent goldenhued material, linked together and outfitted to meet the needs of its inhabitants. Some of those needs were bizarre, she knew. Parts of the complex were out of bounds to airbreathing mammals -- places where the methane creatures lived, or those whose natural waste products were violently poisonous to humans. The largest of the bubbles was elevated above the others and from it Zara and her husband could look out to see a distant flat plain rimmed by mountains. They were themselves on a mountain, for she could see, just outside the bubble, rocky slopes that fell away endlessly. Turning to look out the other side, she saw a shelf of woodland and the rest of the mountain rising incredibly toward the sky. Its top was not in sight. The inhabitants were as strange as the home. There was a curious thing like a single enormous blue eye that moved about without wings or legs, by the manipulation of electrostatic forces. When it moved it sounded like fine gravel thrown on a tin roof and the discharge produced a tingle of ozone. The creature was Sirian, Jon whispered. Beyond it he pointed out a thing like a rippling blob of baker's dough that he called a Sheliak. As Zara and he approached the shapeless bun it protruded a stalk that formed lips and made a sound their translators rendered as: "It gives joy to encounter you once more." Zara found it disconcerting to be recognized by creatures she had never seen. Flushing faintly, she repeated her apologies for being a different version; apparently nearly all the beings here were direct copies from individuals on the artificial planetoid called Sun One, where all the races of the galaxy had representatives to mediate and interpret their differing interests and goals. After so long a voyage -- tens of thousands of light-years -- Zara felt she should rest and freshen up. But of course tachyon transport was not tiring. The patterns of their bodies, carried by faster-than-light tachyons, had not really moved anywhere. When they were in transit they were only concepts, so to speak -- they were patterns, and had no more sensation or thought than a schematic diagram. Nevertheless she was fatigued. It was culture shock, she thought -- the impact of so much change in so short a time. She pleaded fatigue in any case and without demurrer -- no two races of the Galaxy really understood each other's foibles -- Val showed them their own quarters. W hen Zara awoke to her first "day" on Cuckoo she incautiously got out of bed as though she were still on Earth. Even edited, her muscles were disproportionate to Cuckoo's needs. She flew off the airbed as though it had exploded, catching her balance at the very last second necessary to keep from crashing into the wall. The noise aroused her husband. He opened his eyes and said, "I dreamed were were on Cuckoo." He looked around and added: "I never had a dream turn out to be true before." Zara was listening only politely. She had gone at once to their stereo stage to refresh her memory of the place to which they had exiled themselves for the rest of their lives. Cuckoo was an enormous ball that hung in empty space, forty thousand light-years outside the fringing arms of the galaxy. It had been a puzzle for all the galaxy's scientists since the cruising robot scoutships of the T'Worlie had first detected it. It was a perfect monad of polar opposites -- huge and hard-crusted, yet with an average density not much above that of a total vacuum. Alone in space in the hard emptiness between galaxies, heading toward the Milky Way at a velocity that was a substantial fraction of c. There was no such thing as day or night on the surface of Cuckoo. There was no external object bright enough to shed light on it. What light there was came from bright phosphorescing clouxis that hung in its thick air. It was as big as a solar system, nearly two A. U. in diameter. Did it rotate? Yes, in a manner of speaking -- the question was confusing, coming down to rotation relative to what? Relative to the nearest globular cluster of the Milky Way, Cuckoo turned on its axis once every eight hundred-odd Earth days. To natives of Cuckoo the rotation would have been difficult to understand and of no importance at all; there was never anything to see from the flatlands where they lived, and even from the high mountains it was only occasionally that one might catch a glimpse of the Milky Way. It would take many generations to realize that that tipped spiral puddle of light rose on one horizon and, over the course of an Earthly year and more, slowly climbed to its zenith and disappeared below the western sky. The Milky Way was not the only thing that could be seen in the sky -- M-#I in Andromeda was quite visible with a little luck, as were the Magellanic Clouds. But the Milky Way was by far the biggest and brightest, occupying nearly half the sky when fully risen. None of these were of any use in telling time. Ground Station One was on galactic arbitrary standard time, a metrication that cycled at some thirty Earth hours. Zara found out quickly that it was close enough to a terrestrial day to be recognizable, different enough to be disconcerting. It made her first "day" unusually long. Even so, there was hardly time enough to do all she and Gentry had to do. The briefings on Earth had been intriguing and even proved useful -- but here in the face of the massive reality of Cuckoo, swelling all around them, both Gentrys had everything to learn. The process was exhausting. They spent hours just in learning to deal with the flimsy gravity of Cuckoo. Even in their down-muscled edited forms, every step sent them flying at first. ("I know you've been trying to lose a few pounds -- " Jon grinned -- "but this is ridiculous.") They had to learn to deal with the representatives of the nine other races in Ground Station One. T'Worlies, Sheliaks, Arcturans and all, each had their own purposes and needs and all had as much right to be represented here as had Earth humans. More, thought Zara fairly -- the galactic culture exchange had been going for thousands of years before humanity had become aware of it. And above al she and Jon had to learn what was on Cuckoo itself. There existed, in the central workroom, a three-dimensional stereo stage program which, on command, conjured up a slowly spinning image of the body itself. Much of it was blank even yet. The tachyar mapping, scanning the surface of Cuckoo from the orbiting space station, had not completed even one full revolution and some ninety per cent of the surface of Cuckoo had been mapped only at extremely long range or not at all. This was not at first evident. The basic sphere was wholly featureless to the naked eye, except for some blurry discolorations. The program could on command magnify any desired portion of the surface. Where the scan was complete, such portions showed seas, mountain ranges, forests, deserts -- a thousand different kinds of locale. The one little area they were now exploring, Zara saw with dismay, was only an insignificant point on the globe -- yet it stretched half the diameter of Europe. There was simply too much to map. Less detail showed on their globe than the maps of the Elizabethan admirals had showed of the interior of Africa. Valkyrie was a patient teacher and an even-tempered friend. Zara found herself relating to the silvery creature as though she were a human girl. It was a shock to her to remind herself that this shape was probably nothing like Val's real body in whatever hellishly inhospitable environment she had lived on her home world. It had been edited into a more viable form, but Zara knew very well that the shape they saw was not "Valkyrie's" own. Fortunately for mankind, most of the races of the galaxy were close enough to oxygen-breathing, waterbased mammals that the consensual common environment -- races met usually in an atmosphere human beings could endure. Even races like the Arcturans and the Sheliaks could tolerate it. That it was not what they were used to did not matter, since one was robot and the other so protean that it could survive anywhere. Two alternatives existed for races to whom oxygen and water were poison. They could borrow the bodies of oxygen-tolerating species -- humans were very popular for this -- by inserting tachyon-coupled transponders into their brains. The bodies were then wholly controlled by the creatures who had taken them over. Zara had seen enough of such men and women, usually incurable criminals called "Purchased People." They were common enough on Earth. The other alternative was to edit the "pattern" transported by the tachyons into some form that could stand air, water and the temperature limits of the consensual environment. Val's people had chosen that way to go. To be sure, editing was not uncommon for all races. Zara and Jon themselves were edited. Their physical strength was an actual handicap on Cuckoo, so their new bodies were altered in the physics and chemistry of the musculature to a sort of compromise between what was appropriate to Earth, and what was desirable on Cuckoo, where each of them weighed only a few pounds. At the same time their proportions had been altered, making them taller and thinner and thus less strange to the natives of Cuckoo. T hey were impatient to start to explore the surface of Cuckoo -- it was what they were there for. Val apologized in that voice like the tinkling of bells. Their equipment was not yetready; their flying-belts had to be made to measure and their new measurements had not been available. They would come soon, she promised. Meanwhile... Jon halted her. "What I don't know," he said, "is what happened to the other parties that have gone out. I understand they didn't come back. I don't know why." "They all died," chimed Val sweetly. Zara said, conscious of an unease in her body, "Well, we know that much. We don't know what happened, though." Something she could not quite analyze was working inside her -- a feeling that she should be more terrified. It was death they were talking about -- and an opposite, intellectual understanding told her that this life was only an appendage to her "real" life back on Earth and her death here would be only an episode that she "really" might not even ever know. The concept was fundamentally disturbing, a thought she could not quite deal with and could not wholly suppress. But Val was answering their questions. "We have dispatched eight individuals to the surface directly from the orbiter, prior to the establishment of this station," she chimed. "All eight have terminated contact with the orbiter. Five are known to be dead. The other three are probably also dead. Six were humans and two were Sheliaks. Actually -- " she corrected herself -- "one was a human being and one a Sheliak, replicated respectively six and two times." "Persistent human being," commented Jon. "What killed him?" "It is not known in all cases," said Val brightly. "Please come." She spread her great silvery wings and arrowed out of the smaller chamber into the great central bubble. A Sirian eye was hovering just before a stereo stage, patiently studying the scene it portrayed. It did not look around as they came in, but there was a strong sting of ozone in the air. Jon and Zara saw that there was a whole bank of stages beneath the transparent belt that gave them their view out onto the surface of Cuckoo, each with a different scene. Val touched the controls of an unused stage and it tilled with a shining silver mist that swirled and hardened into an image of a mountain peak. "This is the top of the mountain we are on," Val explained. "Observe the bare rocks. Look closely." She waved and the peak shot nearer so that they could see details. Something that glowed with a faint, unpleasant bluish sheen was clinging to the rock. "That slime," she said, "appears to be a part of a growth process in the mountain. It is violently corrosive -- whether through chemical or radioactive reactions we are not sure. The second Sheliak came in contact with it and literally rotted to death while still in communication." Zara shuddered. Jon said, "It sounds unpleasant." It was obvious that Zara agreed. Val turned her harshly beautiful stare on him. "It is probably quite undesirable for organic creatures," she agreed. "As you know, Sheliaks do not experience pain in the same way as most sentients. This one was able to describe what was happening until its central nervous system failed entirely. It was not attractive," she finished thoughtfully. Zara wonderingly thought that, whatever the metallic form Val wore as a convenience, in her native state she might well be as frail and delicate as a human. "There may have been other deaths due to the slime," Val went on. "The three of which we have certain knowledge, however -- the other Sheliak and two of the men: -- were due to flying creatures." She manipulated the controls and displayed an org. "Also," she said, "there are intelligent machineusing creatures here of whom little is known. They may be involved. And, of course, there are analogues of many galactic races. There is no shortage of dangers on Cuckoo. We simply do not yet know what they all are." Zara Gentry turned slowly, studying the bank of stages. The ones in use were panning slowly across a vista of woods, plains and lakes. These were only monitors, through which the sentients present in Ground Station One could see what was being transmitted to the orbiter and on by tachyon transmission to receivers throughout the galaxy. As they watched, one of the stages emitted a harsh electronic squeal for attention. It stopped panning and locked onto something large and winged. "Found something," Val chimed. "That is one of the flying creatures. The stage is programed to follow it for a period of time, in case we wish to study it. If not, it will resume scanning shortly. And over there -- " she pointed to the stage in front of the Sirian eye -- "is what is perhaps the most severe real danger." What the stage revealed was an actual vehicle. Zara said, "Machine users. The beings you mentioned?" "Yes," agreed the silvery girl. "These creatures have no analogue in the galaxy. They are apparently evolved autochthons and may be eligible for participation in the galactic councils. But much of the other life is not native." She touched the controls again and displayed a tree that seemed to be emitting a sort of shimmering fog. Zara looked closer and gasped in surprise. "Are they bees? No, wait -- I think they're Boaty-Bits!" "Yes," chimed Val. "Bootians. And here is a recording of Sheliaks." She displayed another image, then another and another. "Antareans. Canopan semi-lizards. Some of these are not to be found in this vicinity, but do exist in other areas of the surface of Cuckoo. Altogether twelve of the sentient races of the galaxy have been logged on Cuckoo, including -- " She touched the controls again, and showed the figure of a tall, spare woman in a breechclout, grinding grain. "Human beings?" cried Zara Gentry. "How did they get here?" "How did any of them get here?" chimed the silvery girl. "To find out how that happened is our primary mission. It is definitely established that, however it happened, it was a long time ago -- there have been marked evolutionary changes. You can see some physical differences in your own race, no doubt. And some of the species -- Canopans and Antareans in particular -- have regressed to nonsen tient forms, or at least to nonculture forms. The Bootians may retain hive intelligence. We're not sure because we have not been able to communicate and, as you know, they do not under normal circumstances employ artifacts. The only ones we are sure are nonregressed are your own race and a small colony of Sheliaks, very far from here." "It's crazy," said Jon Gentry. The silvery girl laughed -- a sound like sleighbells. "Of course. Isn't that why the object has its name? It was one of your own people, I think, who originally called it Cuckoo." T heir tailored flying equipment arrived, designed and built on Sun One and transmitted via tachyon. The Gentrys strapped it on awkwardly. None of the other sentients in Ground Station One could be of much help. Val had no need of the flying suits, having her wings. The Sirian eye, the Arcturan robot and the T'Worlie also had their own transport and, in any case, the anatomies were so different that the Sirian, for instance, simply could not understand the concept of a belt. The first items the Gentrys put on were wings. Zara stroked them doubtfully; they were ridiculously tiny, proportionately smaller than the membranes that supported a flying squirrel. "They are only for directional control," chimed Val. "And perhaps for a gentle landing, if for any reason your drive should fail." Zara was still doubtful. But her husband seemed to accept the equipment. The drive unit was strapped to their backs. It was a simple athodyd pulse-jet. It was designed to require only water as "fuel" -- not really fuel, but a working medium that would have to be replaced as it was discharged. The actual energy source was a compact star of radioisotopes, which released heat on command. The heat flash-boiled the water. The exploding gas for the jet was only steam. The water was carried in two kidney-shaped flasks of soft plastic strapped around the waist. "They look very small," said Zara doubtfully. "The first exploring parties had larger drive equipment," chimed Val. "Some had actual vessels -- the beings rode inside. To be so enclosed did not keep them alive." Jon glanced at his wife and said quickly, "Let's try out these rigs." The equipment worked beautifully. The hammering sound of the jet was unpleasantly close to the base of their skulls, but as the novices gained speed the sound dwindled behind them. They returned to the bubblecomplex almost regretfully. To be able to swoop and circle around the thick air of Cuckoo had been a joyous experience for the Gentrys. The rest of their equipment was simple enough. Personal necessities: soap, toothbrushes, toilet paper, changes of clothing. Food supplies consisted of iron rations, heavy on protein and vitamins but by no means tempting to the palate or calculated to satisfy a large appetite. "I'm not too crazy about living on that stuff for a week," Jon grunted. "You need not," sang Val. "You eaters can subsist off the native flora and fauna well enough. You have already eaten meals prepared from it." "That steak last night?" asked Zara. "Yes. And the salad. And the beverage. I myself need only energy and I get that from the powerpacks. But I understand that as much of the biota here is edible as on your own planet." One item gave Zara pause. With some dismay she hefted a gun that had been custom built for her hand. "The lower trigger is a projectile," said Valkyrie. "The upper, a laser beam. Lower for food, upper to kill instantly." "What about you?" Jon demanded. Valkyrie tolled somberly, "I have built-in weapons, Jon Gentry. We may all need armament to defend ourselves." She hung in the air, slowly fanning her wings, regarding them from bright, silver eyes. "You will need to sleep again," she said. "And when you wake we will begin." Zara's breath caught in her throat. "So soon?" "So soon," echoed Val. W hen her husband was already in bed, face turned away from the light, and the gentle sounds of his breathing were becoming deeper with sleep, Zara Gentry lingered in front of the tiny mirror, stroking her face withcream. She was not looking at herself -- she was staring emptily and had forgotten what she was doing. What had made her forget was something she had remembered -- that light-years away another Zara Gentry was, at that very hour making her way through the crowded flyways of New York toward the stereo stage studios for her regular nightly appearance. What would she be talking about, this other Zara? Her emotions when she volunteered for tachyon transport to Cuckoo? Her immense relief when she stepped out of the chamber and found she was still on Earth? Zara absently wiped the cream from her face and rested her chin on her hands, framing the sentences in her mind that that other Zara Gentry would be using to open the broadcast: Well, friends. I walked out of the chamber and back to Earth (cut to longshot of the tachyon-transport building, pan of the chamber itself with Zara coming out of it) and it was queer. Queasy. I don't know how to describe it. I knew that here I was. And yet at the same time I was somewhere else -- out on the surface of Cuckoo, so far away that  can't see it with the biggest telescope on Earth. I was entering a whole new existence... She caught herself reaching for the stereo-stage recorder to make a note of the opening for her next broadcast. There would be no need for that. Not here, not ever here. Whatever else happened, this Zara Gentry was forever doomed to stay on Cuckoo. Oh, perhaps she could physically be carried to the orbiting station in a rocket if she swung sufficient weight. But that was most unlikely -- and that she would ever leave in any other way was impossible. But after a moment she did reach for the stereo-stage recorder and said into it, "For transmission to Zara Doy Gentry on Earth. Zara, dear -- dear me, I don't know how to address myself! But I am here and well. Jon is also well and in a few hours we are going to begin to explore the surface of Cuckoo. In my edited form I am tall and thin, just as I always wanted to be. And, dear distant self, I can tell you one other thing about me -- I am afraid. Not panicky. Not crippled by terror. But scared." Scared or not, she went on to give a bright, entertaining ten-minute account of what had happened since her arrival on Cuckoo. It was the least a girl could do for herself, she reflected, settling gently into her bed. And it was oddly comforting to know that she would in fact be on the stereo-stage worldwide one more time -- herself, not just that other Zara Gentry. As she drifted toward sleep she thought that a girl in her position could use all the comfort she could get. A hundred and twenty degrees of i arc around the circumference of Cuckoo swung the orbiter called Cuckoo Station. It was a strangelooking thing, about the size of a three-story house in its main dimensions, with extensions that shot spindly towers a half-mile into space and trailed filmy sheets oflaminated metal and plastic for more than three miles around it. It did not look as though it could survive the faintest summer breeze. This was correct. It could not. It never needed to, for Cuckoo Station had never known an atmosphere around it. It had been created in orbit out of the tachyon transport cell dropped by the doomship that had brought the galaxy's eyes and ears to Cuckoo and had then gone on with its dead or dying crew. The sentients who inhabited Cuckoo Station w'ere quite similar to those on Ground Station One. This was not surprising. Most of those on Ground Station One were duplicated copies from the orbiter itself. One individual who was not duplicated in the station on the surface of Cuckoo was the human being named Ben Line Pertin. Partly this was because he had already been duplicated times enough on the surface of Cuckoo -- he had watched himself die three ways so far and suspected three others. Partly it was because, for the past few galactic consensual days, he had reported himself sick. He had felt sick. Sick and despairing. When he reported himself back for duty it was not because he really wanted to get back to his work on the orbiter -- it was only because it, or anything, was better than lying in his cocoon and watching stale repeated dramas on the stereo stage. He relieved his predecessor on the monitoring detail, a T'Worlie named Nlem and, sucking a bubble of coffee to wake himself up, began to reel disinterestedly through the transmissions of the last few days to see if anything had happened. Something had. Pertin sat up so abruptly that his motion jerked the bulb of coffee out of his hand. Tfling, the Arcturan eye who was conducting some incomprehensible research of its own in the monitor chamber, emitted a staccato ripping sound of electrical energy as it flung itself desperately away from the sprinkling drops of liquid. Pertin's pmal rang with the harsh, angry accusation: "Danger! Water deleterious. Destructive. Hostile action perceived!" "Sorry, sorry -- " Pertin tried to backtrack the stereo image and at the same time activate the emergency air-purification systems. He managed, but not with further anger from the Arcturan -- reasonable enough, Pertin knew, but he was not in a mood to be reasonable. As soon as possible, he spun back to the beginning of the message he had sampled. It had been aimed at Earth and, of course, intercepted routinely by the orbiter for information purposes. It was a personal message and the face of the girl sending it was what had startled him. It was Zara. He listened to the whole message, then turned off the stereo stage, sick again and dazed. Zara Gentry? And here on Cuckoo -- only lightminutes away -- but with Jon Gentry. Her husband. Automatically his hand reached out for the transmission switch. He keyed it to the ground station and croaked, "Orbiter calling, personal communication, please respond." The station was on its toes -- or on whatever passed for toes in a T'Worlie. The creature who responded almost instantly stared out at Ben Line Pertin and said through its pmal translator, "Greeting, Ben Line. I have joy that you are well again." "Thanks, NIem," said Pertin. "I want to -- " "It is now Nloom," said the T'Worlie. "NIem is the version still aboard the orbiter with you. Nleem is the other version transported here." "Nloom, then, damnit! Please. I have to get a message through right away." "For whom is your message?" "For my w -- " Ben Line stopped and swallowed. "For Mrs. Zara Doy Gentry," he croaked. "May I please speak to her at once?" The T'Worlie, who ha dknown Ben Line well enough in their time together on the orbiter, stared at him thoughtfully out of its enormous eyes. Finally the pmal chirped, "It was my conjecture you would have a message for her." "Sure I would. Can I speak to her?" "Negative. She has left with a survey expedition. Their circuits are fully occupied with telemetry and necessary administrative communications at this time. There will, however, be a direct channel opening in -- " the T'Worlie spun in air to look at something out of Ben Line's field of view, then spun back to look at him -- "in about two and one-half consensual hours. I can then relay a message if you wish." "I'd rather talk to her direct, Nloom," Pertin pleaded. "Can you patch me through?" "Affirmative," chirped the T'Worlie, "although that is, of course, contingent on Zara Doy Gentry's desire to use available time for that purpose." It hung there silently for a moment, then added: "Friend Ben Line, it is a different version here. She does not know you, I think. What shall I tell her of your desire to speak with her?" Ben Line hesitated. Of course the T'Worlie was right. This Zara had come directly from Earth. If she had heard of his existence at all it would have been only casually: someone her Sun One duplicate had met there and married. She did not know him; worse, she herself was married to another man. What could he say to her? To that question he had no answer at all. "I don't know, Nloom," he said dismally. "I guess -- I think you'd better forget I called. I have to think this over." He flipped the switch that dissolved the compassionate stare of the T'Worlie into a silvery mist as the stereo stage went blank. He sat there, staring into the empty tank of the stage, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but a wretched, suffocating, overwhelming ache of loss. IX T hat other Ben Pertin who distinguished himself with the middle name "Yale" sat, filthy, bruised and exhausted, ravenously tearing with his teeth at the flesh of a kind of watersnake, watching the skinny young man croon at his monster, called an org. He was delighted that the other human -- or near-human, the one called Redlaw -- had found his equipment and brought it to him. But it was badly damaged. He had managed to repair the pmal translator enough to get across a few words to the man and learn their names -- the youth was called Org Rider -- but the device was not functioning well. All he had been able to understand was that Redlaw wanted to use him to fight some enemies -- why, he did not know. He also did not know if he had any freedom of choice in the matter. Was he an ally or a draftee? But at least he was alive and he had not expected that much when the young man had caught him trying to break open the egg. The first thing Ben Yale had tried to get across through his pmal translator was an apology for that. He hadn't known it was a pet. He had only been hungry. Whether the youth had understood or not, he could not tell. That lean, sharp face was hard to read. The young man's words through the spottily functioning pmal had been hardly reassuring: "Mine... not kill... punish..." Now the org was perched on a rock, swaying uncertainly as it regarded the watersnake in Ben Yale's hands. Pertin turned, watching the creature over his shoulder. It was still learning to keep its balance. Wings not yet unfolded, it looked ridiculous, like a trunkfaced, big-eyed fish with bird legs. The exploring trunk reached out toward him and Ben Yale swore under his breath. He tore off a shred of the watersnake and threw it to the org. Org Rider cried something, which the Pmal clucked over without producing a single intelligible word. From the curtain of spray that concealed the cave the man named Redlaw called, "He says: 'Meat not spoiled? Not make org sick?"' Ben Yale shook his head. "It doesn't seem to be harming me any," he said. The giant muttered something to the boy, who stared appraisingly at Pertin, then bobbed his head. "Can give more," said the giant generously through the pmal. "I think I'd rather have a drink," said Pertin, not caring whether the translator dealt with it or not. He pushed past the giant, under the shrouding waterfall and walked toward the lake, indifferent to the others. Org Rider followed him, carefully scanning the sky. Pertin was not flattered. He knew the youth's concern was not for his own safety, but fear he might attract the attention of some predator or enemy to the cave. Pertin knelt on the gravel beach and leaned forward on his spread hands to drink. The water was cold and good, but it gave him little pleasure. His position, when he thought it over carefully, was not happy. The giant, Redlaw, seemed to want to talk only about weapons -- and he had none. Weapons had not been in the junk the giant had carried from the wreckage of the ship. To Org Rider Pertin appeared to be only an inconvenience, possibly useful to taste doubtful meat for the org but otherwise a net liability. Neither of them seemed in the least interested in Pertin's reason for being on their world. What he had tried to tell them of the great universe outside had been received by the giant without comment and by Org Rider, apparently, without understanding; the pmal translator, in its damaged condition. seemed to function sporadically with Redlaw and almost not at all with the boy. Ben Yale Pertin stood up and looked around him. He did not even notice the beauty of the scene -- the deep, rock-walled valley in which he stood, the lazy waterfall behind him, the cold little lake with water so deep it looked black, the strange, colorful vegetation. From the orbiter the prospect of exploring these jungles had seemed interesting -- to the extent that anything could interest him more than his own misery and loss of his wife and future. Back on Sun One, when he and Zara had been together, this adventure would have seemed enchanting, a marvelous holiday surrounded by beauty. And farther back still, on Earth, before he had ever submitted to tachyon transmission, when there was still only one of him and that one knew nothing but cities and crowding, this whole scene would have seemed a total fantasy. Now his eyes did not even register its color or its strangeness. It meant no more to him than a cell. By the side of the lake Redlaw and Org Rider were building a fire, roasting nuts they had gathered, muttering to each other, too far away for the pmal to pick up what they were saying and try to render it into English. The giant stood up and walked easily toward Pertin. His green eyes were cold and judging. He put his fists on his hips as he stood before Pertin, towering over him by nearly two feet, and spoke in his liquid tongue, rapidly and at length. The pmal, stammering to keep up, produced bursts of words: "Orgs gone. Watchers gone. Safe to travel. Can now find other slamming machine, other man like you. Ben Y ale Pertin kicked a pebble aimlessly into the water. "Travel?" he repeated. "You want me to come with you somewhere, to find another ship with weapons?" Redlaw nodded vigorously. "Go soon now, two hundred breaths," the pmal rattled. "Travel long, hard. You become ready." Get ready? Pertin looked around him, almost smiling. What was there for him to do to get ready? What to pack, what to miss? He was ready to go anywhere... But for Ben Yale Pertin where was there to go? T hey did not dare to fly and Org Rider's muscles soon began to ache with the unaccustomed strain of trying to move at ground level, under the cover of the trees. The young org wanted desperately to fly, so Org Rider's task was twice as hard, for sometimes he carried the fledging and sometimes kept up a running stream of talk with it, encouraging it to keep hopping along on its wobbly legs, cajoling it back when it attempted to take off. That was what his mother had taught him to do -- talk to the infant org, let it know always that you were there. She swore that the orgs could even understand words after a while, like human children. And indeed Babe already had seemed to learn what words like "fish" and "water" and "meat" meant. That was more than the dumpy stranger knew. Org Rider had gotten over the superstitious fear he had felt when he had first seen the stranger bending over Babe's unhatched egg -- he could not understand how this man could be alive when a dozen sleeps before he had seen him dead. But the puzzle had receded into the back of his mind and lost its power to instill fear. He wanted desperately to ask the man about it, but the clacking machine the stranger talked through did not seem to work well and Redlaw only shrugged and reported that he could not understand what the man had said to him. "The words are clear enough," Redlaw rumbled. "He says it was another him. How can there be another? He could not say." When they had eaten four times they decided to sleep. They were a good distance from the last place where they had seen either orgs or watchers, and so they risked building another fire and roasting more of the green nuts that hung all about them. The stranger moved a little way apart from them and flung himself on the ground -- in a moment he began to snore. Org Rider stroked Babe softly along the gently squirming length of its trunk and listened to what Redlaw was saying about the stranger. "He says he comes from another world. He knows arts the watchers don't -- arts that I think are strange and frightening to them. But he only speaks of these things, he does not have the weapons to prove them." Redlaw scowled at the fire. "What is 'another world?'" Org Rider asked. Redlaw shrugged morosely. "What he says about his world is not to be believed. He says it is not flat." "Not flat? You mean mountainous?" "No, not mountainous. Round. A little ball so tiny that men have gone all the way around it." "That is unlikely," agreed Org Rider. "What is even more unlikely," continued Redlaw, glowering across the fire at the sleeping stranger, "is that he says our world is also curved like a ball. This is clearly false, but he holds to it. He says that in his place everything is very heavy. A man can't jump much above his own height. And he says, let me see -- oh, yes. He says that although there are trees and plants and clouds on his world, they do not glow of their own light. None of them." "How strange! It must be a gloomy place. How does one see?" "There is one cloud," said Redlaw. "He does not call it a cloud, but it is in the sky, so what else could it be? It is so bright that its light hurts your eyes and so high that it looks quite small." "I have never seen such a thing," Org Rider declared. He peered around, squinting through the leaves at the great flank of Knifein-the-Sky rising above them. "Where is the way to such a place? Over the mountain?" "Farther! He says you climb beyond the rain clouds and beyond the flying rocks. He says you come up into a darkness where there is nothing at all. The darkness is bigger than you can imagine -- so big that, when you begin to cross it, our flatworld shrinks to a point you can't even see, like an org flying out of sight toward the top of the mountain." "It is all too strange for me," said Org Rider uneasily, stroking Babe. "If his world is so far away, how is it that he is just a man?" "He does not know, he says," growled Redlaw. "He says he and his friends came here for learning, and that is one of the things they wish to learn -- how it is that he is so like us, though from so far away." "I wish him luck," said Org Rider dubiously. "I saw the machine he came in. It made a great noise in the sky, like slam-bangbang, slam-bang-bang. But in spite of all the noise, it was slower than the orgs. They ripped the wings off it and tore it apart in the sky. And when the watchers caught him, he died." Org Rider added thoughtfully, "I do not understand how that can be, either. But I have seen it." Redlaw rumbled impatiently, "The man you saw die was another like him, he says. Part of that is nonsense, for he says it is him and says it isn't him -- both. "What is not nonsense," Redlaw added somberly, "is that he has something the watchers fear. I must have that from him, or he must die." T hey traveled fast and far and the strain began to tell on all of them. Even Redlaw grew shorttempered and gaunt-faced. In some ways his was the most difficult job of all. Ben Yale Pertin was ill and injured -- Org Rider had Babe to care for and often to carry, so it fell to Redlaw to keep alert for watchers or for wild orgs and there was never a moment while they were moving when he could relax. When they rested over the campfire they no longer talked amiably -- they bickered. It troubled Org Rider that Redlaw seemed sometimes to believe in the stranger's insane stories and other times to hate and mistrust him. He could not hear the stranger directly. Whatever the machine was that Ben Yale Pertin wore on his armbands, it seemed to respond only to the squeals and whistles of the language of the watchers, not to normal human speech. So Org Rider could only communicate with him through Redlaw's imperfect understanding and he was not sure how much was getting across. Conscience made him try to correct some of the stranger's errors. "I have thought," he told Redlaw gravely, "and Ben Yale Pertin is wrong about our flatworld. It is not round -- my mother has told me this. And also I understand how he looks so like us." Redlaw scowled at him, then guffawed. When he was done laughing he chirped for a moment in the language of the watchers, then turned to Org Rider. "Ben Yale wishes to be enlightened, young one," he said, his tone half laughing but not pleasantly. "So do #. Please tell us what your mother has to contribute." The boy said stubbornly, "It is truth, all people in my tribe agreed to that. The flatworld was made by the makers." He peered into the fire, trying to remember exactly. "My mother used to say they were terrible beings, taller than people, shining with a light of their own. They sang deathsongs -- and the songs themselves killed those who displeased them." He waited for Redlaw to finish translating and chuckling, then went on: "My people came from seven eggs the makers had made, in a cave down under the bottom of the world. The eggs were guarded by seven keepers, but still they were stolen by the watchers. The evil creatures first blinded the keepers with death-weed dust, then stole the eggs for a feast. As our guest would have done with my org," he added carefully. Redlaw choked, but managed to translate and receive a reply. "He apologizes again for that," he reported. "He says he was hungry and did not know better." Org Rider nodded and went on. "The feast was to be at the top of the Watchman's tower, where the blinded keepers couldn't climb. But the makers were angry when they found the keepers blinded and the eggs gone. They did not sing their deathsong, but they sang a special song for the wild orgs. And the orgs heard it as they flew over Knife-in-the-Sky. "Seven wild orgs dived on the feast and carried the seven eggs in different directions, all around Knife-in-the-Sky. The orgs hovered over the eggs, keeping them warm. When each egg hatched, it produced a boy and a girl and two of every creature that is useful to man. "But the watchers spied where the orgs had gone -- all but one. One by one, they found the eggs just as they hatched and devoured the hatchling creatures and killed the orgs that guarded them. "But the seventh org they did not kill. It flew out into the shadowworld, where Knife-in-the-Sky hides the flatworld from the Watchgalaxy man's tower. Here the hatchlings escaped. Green grass sprouted from the droppings of the creatures. The boy baby and the girl baby were nursed by the wild org that had saved them. They grew to be man and woman and became the parents of all our people. "And what has come to me," ended Org Rider gravely, "is that one of the other eggs did in fact get safely away, and its hatchlings were the parents of Ben Yale Pertin." Org Rider paused. The giant was laughing boisterously. "What rot, boy! Ignorant superstition!" Org Rider leaped to his feet. "It is as my mother told it to me, Redlaw." "It is nonsense," Redlaw insisted. "You should spend a few sleeps with the watchers sometime. You'll learn the difference between savage myths and scientific truths. I do not know whose superstitions are worse, yours or Ben Yale Pertin's." "And what then is truth, Redlaw?" Org Rider demanded stiffly. "Ah, that I don't know," the giant confessed. "Some of the' things Ben Yale Pertin says may have truth in them somewhere. He says our world may be hollow -- " "Hollow?" Org Rider cried scornfully. "Yes. Does that seem unlikely? It does to me, too, and yet I know there are levels below. The tower of the Watchman guards one of the gates to those levels. I have been there while a captive of the watchers -- and I know. And there is some truth in what your mother told you, too, I think. There are such things as keepers and watchers." He was silent for a time, staring across the fire at the sleeping stranger. Then he stood up. "It is time to sleep," he said, his voice hardening. "We are wasting time." F ast and low, they kept going. They were halfway around the thrust of Knife-in-the-Sky's largest bastion, carried by Redlaw's driving purpose. For Org Rider that purpose seemed strange and remote. He could understand Redlaw's burning hatred of the watchers, who had enslaved him and threatened his life, but now that they were free of the watchers it seemed pointless to seek revenge. Org Rider himself was most occupied with his young org, which seemed to grow in size, intelligence and maturity with every breath. When Org Rider awoke, it was to the infant org hopping unsteadily toward him, seeking not food -- he was capable of finding his own well enough by now -- but affection, the ritual rubdown of his golden fur with a handful of moss. Org Rider did not neglect the duties his mother had described to him. In particular he talked to the org, crooningly, repetitiously, and was rewarded by having Babe repeat some of the words to him. If it mangled some of the syllables, it nevertheless made itself clear. Babe's stubby wings began to unfold as Org Rider groomed them. Tapered triangular fins, they had been molded invisibly into his sleek flanks. They looked almost too thick and too narrow to be useful in flight, but Org Rider's caressing fingers could feel their muscular power. He decided to show Babe what they were for. He climbed a rock, the org hopping after him. Org Rider spread his arms, flapped them as he leaped toward another rock. To his surprise. Babe understood at once -- so quickly that before Org Rider had reached his goal. Babe came sailing over him on quivering wings. Org Rider shouted in delight -- but his delight faded and congealed into panic, as the org kept going, past him and up, up over the sheltering leaves of the forest screen. It wheeled in a climbing spiral, and screamed with a sound the boy had never heard it make. Fear took the boy's breath. Was Babe calling to the wild orgs abovo the cliffs? He looked back to his companions for help. Redlaw sound asleep under a mossy rock. Ben Yale Pertin was watching apathetically. Without thinking, Org Rider crouched and kicked himself into the air, using every bit of strength in his legs and body, leaping a dozen times his own height, straight at the wheeling org. Babe saw him and joyously dove to meet him. His young clumsiness made them collide, spinning Org Rider off balance, knocking the breath out of him. But the org was up to the needs of the moment. Org Rider felt the velvet trunk coil around him protectingly. Strong and supple, it held him, then lifted him to the org's sleek-furred back, just above the rippling wings. Org Rider raised his voice in a shout of triumph. "Now I am truly Org Rider! Faster, Babe! Faster and higher!" The org echoed in its piping voice: "Faster, Babe! Faster, faster!" Org Rider clung with his knees, fists locked in the golden fur, leaning against the wind of their flight. The throb of wings became a purr as Babe dived across the treetops, climbed again and wheeled toward a clearing, so close above the yellow-bladed shrubs that Org Rider saw the giant moths fluttering about in terror. His first alarm became a wild elation. His own wings had never lifted him with such speed or strength. He clapped the org's golden flank and called into the wind, "Good, Babe -- good!" And the org piped happily, "Good Babe!" as it circled and dived again. Org Rider found that Babe would respond to voice and tug of fists and kick of heels. Thoughtfully he drove the org back toward the clearing where the giant moths fluttered and cried, "Food, Babe! Get it!" "Food Babe!" echoed the org and showed its understanding by diving at one of the moths to catch it in spread talons. "Home Babe?" it piped questioningly. Org Rider cried, "Yes, Babe, home! We'll cook it and eat it. You've earned your food this time!" They flew high while Org Rider searched the flank of the mountain for the place where they had left Redlaw and Ben Yale Pertin. All the trees looked alike to him, all the clearings much the same. He caught a glimpse of something metallic high on an outcropping, but it was not small enough to be Redlaw's cleaver or one of the stranger's peculiar instruments. He began to feel dismay -- and then realized that Babe knew better than he. The org had already zeroed in on the campsite and was beating toward it powerfully. When they landed he got of his org's back and said solemnly, "Now I am truly Org Rider." Redlaw stared at him with anger and a touch of wry admiration. "Org Rider, yes," he rumbled. "But also a fool. Listen, Org Rider. What do you hear?" Org Rider, perplexed, stood still, ears tuned to -- what? A distant shrill whistle? "Do you hear it? Do you see it?" demanded Redlaw. "Over there -- beyond the trees. High in the sky." Org Rider looked. He had not heard it because of the whistle of wind in his own ears, but now he heard it clearly and saw it, too, falling like a thick, blunt spear toward the slope of the mountain -- a ship of the watchers. "If they saw you," muttered Redlaw, "you will not live to be truly Org Rider very long." T he sputtering pmal translator on Ben Yale Pertin's wrist caught only a few words, but they were enough to warn him. The watchers were nearby. Pertin did not need to hear more, he had encountered the watchers. They were the ones who had shot his ship out of the sky of Cuckoo. In any other world they would have killed him, for he had fallen more than a mile, but in Cuckoo's gentle surface gravitation he had survived with only cuts and bruises. And would have missed those if he had been less panicked and in better shape, he knew. That kind of knowledge was no comfort. Pertin feared the watchers. He feared dying, even when intellectually he welcomed it -- there was no kind of future that looked good to him, unless by some miracle Zara should appear and offer a new life here. That was fantasy. Reality was that he would die here and would hate it. Org Rider, ignoring the danger from the sky, was splitting and skinning the body of a goldenfurred creature like a moth, spitting it over the fire. The yellow dust from the creature's fur gave Pertin a fit of sneezing, but soon the aroma of its roasting meat reconciled him to the dust. When it was done, Pertin humbly waited his turn. The best bits went to the org. Kedlaw had second choice, then Org Rider. Pertin came last. But there was still plenty left, and it was delicious. When they had finished eating rain had begun to fall, great fat slow drops that touched the fire and extinguished it. Gray clouds fell to the tops of the trees. The red-haired giant bounded over to Pertin and shouted something that the pmal translator rendered as: "Rainclouds hide us from watchers. Now we go! Org Rider has seen your ship. We find it -- get weapons to kill watchers." "But you have been to the wreckage of my ship," objected Pertin, perplexed. "I had no weapons -- " "Not your ship -- like your ship -- " crackled the pmal. Pertin gave up the struggle to understand -- it did not matter. What mattered was that they were to move again. This time Org Rider did not have to worry about his org, who flew above them, so he and the giant, unfettered, made fast time. It was all Pertin could do to keep up with them. They kept on and kept on. They did not even stop to eat, paused only long enough to pass around handfuls of roasted moss-nuts, now cold and almost tasteless -- the trio munched them as they continued traveling. Three times they ate, pausing once to drink at a vine-covered stream and to relieve their bowels and bladders, then hurrying on. Finally Redlaw and Org Rider stopped and waited for Pertin to reach them. The giant said, "Look -- beyond the gray moss, between the boulders. What do you see?" Pertin tried to focus his eyes, dizzy with weariness. See? Yes, there was something there, something bright that caught his eye. The glint of light was metal. He glanced at the others, then joined them in a stumbling, hopping run up the gentle slope. And there, partly hidden by purple-flowered moss, was the wreck of a machine. It was not his ship. It was smaller and it clearly had been there for a long time. The moss had overgrown it completely, except for a few outjuttings of metal. Metal? Yes, clearly it was metal. But something was strange about it. The color was not clean. It was stained with a watery bluish radiance that looked unfamiliar and vaguely ominous. He scurried toward it. It must have been a man-carrying vehicle. Perhaps a machine one of his predecessors had used. He could not say. It was so broken that he could not be sure. He tore at the moss, peering inside through a dark opening rimmed with shattered crystal. A sharp scent stung his nostrils -- it did not seem to be coming from the moss, but from the bluish coating on the metal. Now that he touched it, it felt slick, slippery, moist -- oddly repellent... A bellowing came from behind him and his pmal rapped out: "Do not touch -- not -- not -- " Confused, he stood up. Redlaw and Org Rider were coming toward him, anger and concern on their faces. "What's the matter?" They stared at him curiously. They seemed to be looking mostly at his hands. For a moment neither said anything. Then Redlaw's voice sounded oddly gentle. "Clean hands," rapped the pmal translator without emotion. "Wipe on moss. Do not touch metal." Pertin shrugged, not understanding. He seemed to have gotten some of the blue slime on his fingers. Obediently he bent and rubbed his hands on the soft gray moss... What he was rubbing against, he suddenly realized with a heartstopping sensation of nausea, had the shape and texture of a human skull. He clawed at the moss. It was a skull! A whole skeleton, in fact, the flesh rotted away, but the bones still strangely dressed, under the moss, in the imperishable plastics of an explorer's jungle garb, red top, orange-and-yellow pants, great white gauntlets, and on the shrunken forearm bones the coils of translator, recorder, direction-finder, timekeeper and all the other regulation instruments. The giant spoke, and the pmal chattered: "Danger. Do not touch bones. Serious. Be warned." Pertin looked up at them, aware of the bluish radiance that clung to the bones, aware that it still befouled his fingers, in spite of his efforts to rub them clean. "Danger?" he repeated dully. "Yes, I suppose so, if you say so. But you're wrong about one thing. They're not a stranger's bones. I know those bones very well, and I know the clothes they wear, too. I ought to. They're mine." X F ar away, around the great bulk of Cuckoo, the orbiter was preparing to transmit its observer along the tachyonic path farlink had charted to the source of the interfering transmission in the galaxy. They still didn't know how far it was, exactly. Roughly in the direction of Earth, yes -- but at extragalactic distances that could place the source anywhere from Rigel to Canoopus and farther than that in the line of flight from Cuckoo. Distance was only one of the unknown factors. Would the transmitted duplicate find breathable air and bearable temperatures when he stepped out of the receiving box -- or sphere, or inflatable bag, or whatever sort of enclosure might contain an uninvited guest? Convenience alone dictated that all the intercommunicating galactic races use essentially the same sort of equipment. This wild card might take any form. "I'm glad I'm not going," announced Ben Line Pertin gloomily. He didn't sound glad even to himself. He found precious little to be glad about these days and looked forward to not much better. Venus chimed softly, "I'm glad for you, too, Ben Line. Replication is less hazardous for an edited form like myself." Ben Line Pertin in quick confusion said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I was just thinking -- " "That the mission is dangerous and unsure -- yes. But it is less so for me. In any event," she continued melodiously, "farlink has chosen me and I have consented." He said miserably, "I am sorry, Venus. I've been into my own troubles and not thinking about yours. I know how it tears one up to send a self away to suffer or die somewhere -- I've done it often enough." The silvery girl looked at him curiously. "That is so, Ben Line. But -- forgive me -- in this form it is less painful for me. If I were in my own true form I would feel there was more to lose." "Wait," the sentient ape named Doc Chimp II said, holding up a hand that contained a banana. "Here's a message just coming in -- " It was from farlink. The recreation room of the orbiter had no screens, but a signal light next to the wall speakers announced the source of the message and was followed by the computer's electronic voice: "Stand by -- " The pnial of each being translated the words. "Wonder what's up," mused Doc Chimp. "Well, cheers -- " He held up his banana in a sort of toast. Pertin responded with his tumbler, while the silvery girl sniffed at cloudlets of luminescent mist she sprayed out of an atomizer. "Orders," rapped farlink's voice. "The transmission of Replicate #, known as Venus, is canceled. A newly detected singularity in the incoming signals has altered the estimate of requirements. Stand by for assignment of replacement." "Congratulations, Venus." Pertin again raised his tumbler. "Orders," rasped the wall speaker. "The substitute for transmission is required to proceed at once to the tachyon station for replication. He is Replicate #, known as Ben Line Pertin." "Oh, no!" cried Doc Chimp. "Communication of regret," shrilled the T'Worlie, Nimmie. "I'm sorry, Ben Line," whispered the silvery girl. Pertin stood numb. He had not expected this -- he did not know how to respond. "Replicate #," growled farlink from the wall speakers. "There is great time pressure. Proceed at once for replication." "Come on, Ben Line," said Doc Chimp as gently as he knew how, taking Pertin's arm. Venus took the other, and the two of them walked the  unresisting Ben Line Pertin along the corridors to the radial shaft that led to the tachyon transmitter. He let them. He felt nothing... Nothing while he was on his way to the transmitter. Nothing (except the sudden, surprising, hard metal lips of Venus against his own, just before he went inside) as he entered the transmitter and stood through its silent omniscient scan. Nothing when he looked around, and realized he was that he who had remained behind. Nothing while the chimp and the silvery girl escorted him back to the recreation room, the T'Worlie fluttering behind. They chattered doubtfully among themselves, then pooled their small quotas of openchoice mass to buy him two more tumblers of his favorite drink. He gulped them down, hardly tasting them. He was still here, as though nothing had happened. But he was also there. And he could never come back. Later -- he was not sure how much later -- came a final message of progress from farlink. "The transmission," rasped the speakers, "has been successful. First acknowledgment of arrival has been received, along with samples for environmental analysis. Unfortunately they are not life-sustaining beyond a fairly short period." A small silence fell in the rec room before Doc Chimp said, "Well, anyway, Ben Line, congratulations. You arrived." "I arrived," Ben Line agreed. "And I'm dead." D own inside the atmosphere of Cuckoo, nearly two hundred Cuckoo's far side, the exploring team was practicing its flying skills. The expedition, so far, was going well. From its altitude, miles above Ground Station One, miles out from the slope of the enormous mountain, even Cuckoo looked almost small -- not the great sweep of its surface, to be sure, but the detail on it: tiny trees, winking bright puddles of lakes, silvery threads of river. The scene was broken by strange bright clouds that sailed above it, each seeking its own level and seeming to drop glowing spores that gave Cuckoo almost the only light it had, bar the glow of plants and animals on the surface itself. The explorers did not know these glowing clouds to be dangerous, but gave them a wide berth. Anyway, there was plenty of room in the sky, not only to travel to a destination, but for pleasure, too. Valkyrie and Zara and the T'Worlie took joy in doing loops and barrel rolls, soaring far off from the little procession of Arcturan robot, Sirian eye and husband and returning. Zara found herself laughing from sheer physical joy. She weighed so little in Cuckoo's air that it was almost irrelevant whether she was flying head up or down. She followed the piping, frolicking T'Worlie up in a loop. Below her the great sloping flank of the mountain seemed to subside into a plain. Then the plain tipped and became a slope that rose in the other direction -- next it passed out of sight completely as she topped out her loop and began to come down. In her earplug communicator her husband's voice, faintly amused and faintly annoyed, said, "Will you three please stop playing? We'd better stay close together. This is dangerous territory." Rebuked, Zara flopped over and flailed her wings to get her bearings. The T'Worlie, used to flight, darted back and hung before her, its batlike face wearing what she had to recognize as an expression of rueful embarrassment. She burst out laughing. She caught sight of the silver girl, far overhead, power diving toward her with great, strong strokes. Zara cried, "Come on -- race you back!" She let them signal agreement and start their powerful, effortless flight back toward the sober, sedate members of the party. Then she aimed herself head-first toward the three distant dots, folded her wings except for a tiny web from wrists to hips for control, and activated her athodyd. Thrump, thrump, thrump thrump... The radioisotopes poured heat into measured slugs of water, flashed them into steam, expanded them into the pulse-jet and she arrowed toward her husband at a hundred miles an hour, easily passing the gallant but small T' W orlie , catching up with V alkyrie and leaving her behind. Stopping was the problem. She shut off the jet and tried to lose speed by zooming up sharply, but in Cuckoo's wan grip the loss to gravity was so small she found herself looping the loop again, involuntarily, before, laughing and dizzy, she was properly back in line with the rest of the party. Her husband turned to look disapprovingly at her over his shoulder. "About time you got here," he grumbled. Zara, who was concentrating on an even, rippling flow of her wings, gave him a docile, absent-minded smile. What a butterball he was, she thought dispassionately, even in his stretched-out edited version. His round body and pipestem legs made him look like a stork. "The Arcturan's getting a strong signal from one of the spotters," Jon added. "That means we are getting near one of our objectives -- probably a downed explorer ship." "How nice," said Zara, winking at the silver girl. Valkyrie did not wink back; her copy of Earthly human anatomy was not accurate enough for such intimacies. But Zara could hear her tinkling laughter. Three places ahead of her in line, the Sirian eye raised itself out of the file on its crackling spread of electric forces and turned to confront her. It had no expression, but she read reproof in its stare. The tiny sphincter mouth worked convulsively. Zara could hear no sound from it -- Sirians used sound for communication, but the frequencies were far higher than those audible to humans. Twenty thousand Hertz was a low basso-profundo note for them. But the pmal caught it and rapped reprovingly in her ear: "Estimate: Your use of jet propulsion has increased our risk. Assumption: Such sounds in past have attracted predators. Validation: Air-palping reveals three unidentified traces moving toward us at three hundred and seventeen degrees right ascension, minus six degrees declination." "Confirmed," stated the Arcturan robot without passion. It did not speak aloud at all. Its talk circuits used radio waves, but the pmal picked up and faithfully translated the message. Z ara pressed her elbows into her sides and felt herself begin to drop. It was not what she had intended, but it was better than floundering around while she tried to adjust her telescopic visor to check out what the Sirian had told her. She caught a glimpse of something at the indicated position, realized she was falling farther behind and below the others than she wanted, flapped herself back into position and at last got a clear look at what the Sirian had reported. There were three of them all right. Unidentified traces of what? She saw a body gleaming like metallic copper, stubby wings that shone silver at the tips; great claws that were coming out of concealment from under the creature's body in anticipation of combat. For a moment she knew terror -- then she heard her husband's voice, triumphant and challenging. "There they are!" Jon shouted. "I've got'em -- " And without waiting for the others he aimed himself and fired his jet. Directly behind him, Zara got the full roar of the athodyd as it thrumped huge smoke rings of steam, thrusting Jon like an arrow toward the onrushing orgs. She was aware of a confusion of argument that the pmals were unable to handle -- too many beings were shouting at once. What they were saying was clear enough, but Jon Gentry was paying no attention. He felt the hunter's taste for blood and he was on the kill. The orgs were wise in warfare. They split to come at this lone attacker from three directions at once. Against any of the beings that were their natural prey the strategy would have worked. Against galactic weapons it was hopeless. Gentry's hours on the practice range on Earth had not been wasted. The first spark that marked the firing of his laser was a miss, but the second found a target. Three times the cobalt streak of his laser reached out to touch an org. Three times a creature screamed and each time the scream was cut off as the blue ray burned through scales and flesh. Each org flamed briefly, then tumbled slowly and ungracefully toward the mountain far below. Gentry stopped his athodyd and returned by wing-power. Zara could hear him singing. He swooped past her, touching her with what might have been meant for a caress -- it sent her spinning. "Got'em!" he shouted. "That was worth the whole trip, Zara -- " The silver girl chimed, "It is true that you killed those creatures. I do not think it was wise to attack them single-handedly, however." And the Arcturan robot muttered through its pmal, "Confirm statement as to organic creatures. Propose consequential probability. Premiss: Organic creatures are not principal adversaries. Second premiss: Use of laser weapons may alert more serious opponents. Deduction: Use of laser weapons may be counter-productive at this time." "Ah," grumbled Gentry, "you're just scared -- " Illogically, Zara thought with resentment -- all the galaxy knew that Arcturans could not be frightened, since they were not only nearly indestructible physically but had little emotional attachment to life. Val chimed, "I suggest we proceed to our objective. I have a strong spotter trace from a point on the mountainside fifteen kilometers away, nearly in direction of flight. The characteristics are compatible with one of the previous exploration ships." "Propose we go there now," twittered the T'Worlie. "Why not?" Jon Gentry said, with careless courage. "I think we've seen we can deal with any problems that come up." Zara dropped back a few meters to regard her husband curiously. This was a side of him she had not known very well. Of course, on placid Earth there was little occasion for physical conflict, but even so she could hardly reconcile this fire-eyed warrior with the gentle, sedentary, rather dull man she had been married to for three years on Earth. She had never questioned his courage. It had simply never occurred to her to consider it. If she had been aware of it at all, she might have considered it as a sort of mildly disturbing anachronism, like an excess of body hair or a desire for raw meat. She was jolted out of her reverie by a sudden gabble in the pmals. Once again several members of the party were speaking at once. The first clear transmission was from Val, who called out, "I think we are in trouble -- " The trouble was confirmed by the Sirian's little sphincter mouth, which squeaked its inaudible message that the pmal translated as: "Air-palping now registers three new high-speed traces vectoring toward us. Correction. Four traces. Correction -- five -- six -- six-plus traces. Points of origin widely separated. Suggest indications are technological intervention is now occurring." T 'worlie and humans, plus Val, tried desperately to see what the Sirian and the Arcturan had detected. Even for Val, however, the approaching objects were still out of sight, but Val confirmed the location. "I have the trace," she agreed. "Recommend seeking cover," chattered the pmal, responding to the Arcturan's signal. Jon Gentry snorted, "What, run away? We've got weapons -- let's use them." Val pealed, "That is countersurvival, Jon Gentry. I have an alternative proposal. You organics seek cover. The Arcturan and I will intercept the arrivals." "Concurring," chattered the Arcturan at once. "No bloody chance!" Jon Gentry blazed. "I guess you don't know much about Earthmen -- fighting's nothing strange to us. We came here to carry an equal share of the load and that includes fighting. We're not going to hide behind a bunch of aliens." "He means," Zara said quickly, "that we feel an obligation to help. And honestly, Val -- don't you think we can take care of ourselves?" The silvery girl swept her great wings up to a point over her head, thus dropping and turning toward Zara. "Doubt it very much," she pealed. "Please study the approaching objects at thirty-four degrees right ascension, eighteen degrees plus declination." She paused while Zara struggled with her telescopic visor. "Oh," said Zara at last. "They are -- formidable looking, aren't they?" They were that. Blunt spearpoints, mottled in colors of bronze and gray that glinted with underlying metal, were arrowing toward the galactic party at supersonic speed. At first the explorers saw only two. How many had the Arcturan reported? More than six. These explorers were not facing animals or primitives, but complex and powerful technological devices and, Zara thought with a sinking heart, no doubt armed accordingly. "I accept offer," chirped the T'Worlie. "Come -- " Nleem stood on his head in air and used his deceptively filmy wings to drive himself straight down at the forest cover beneath. After a spatter of electrical fields he was followed by the Sirian eye. Zara wailed nervously, "Please, Jon -- let's do as Val says." She tried to catch her husband's eye, but he was already higher than she, peering toward the approaching watcher ships eagerly. "Please?" she coaxed. "Not a chance," he snapped. "You go ahead. I'm going to fight this out!" "Then I'd better stay, too -- " "No way. Damned if you will, Zara -- now get out of the way. There's going to be a fight and I don't want to have to worry about your getting hurt." Angry and afraid in a way she could not define Zara turned herself over in the air, aimed herself at the rapidly diminishing forms of the T'Worlie and the Sirian and activated the pulse jet. Thrump, ' thrmnp, thrump -- The acceleration was terrific. She was rapidly catching up on the Sirian and the T'Worlie. Her previous experience had made her cautious. She did not want to overshoot this time -- to do so would mean driving herself into the ground. She judged the distance as well as she could, allowed the jet to build up speed. When she gauged she had enough margin left she cut the pulse and arrowed down on inertia. At the last moment she rotated herself and applied maximum counter-thrust with the jet to slow her fall. She had carried out the maneuver with considerable skill -- as far as it went. Unfortunately, she had not had much practice with the athodyd, neither on Cuckoo nor on Earth, where this simplest and oldest of jet engines had been nearly forgotten. She did not know, for instance, that it relied for much of its thrust on the augmentation furnished by its forward motion. When it was reversed it lost a large fraction of its efficiency. She discovered she had started the counter-thrust too late. It slowed her headlong drop just enough for her to hit the treetops at something like thirty miles an hour. She hit hard, broke off sprigs and branches, went flying through a tangle of vines that ripped at her skin and bruised her brutally. Every snag hurt her, but every snag also slowed her, so that when she hit the soggy, mossy marsh under the trees she merely knocked herself unconscious. When she came to she was alone. She could see very little of the sky, but in it were neither husband nor allies, nor even the enemy ships that had been attacking them; and of the T'Worlie and the Sirian eye that she had been trying to join there was no trace at all. T he other day I got a phone call from a national magazine, and being basically kind, generous and always in need of an excuse to stop working, I spent an hour with the reporter. He wanted a list of ten science fiction predictions that have proved out and. ten more predictions which haven't happened yet but will. What he wasn't interested in was a list of science fiction predictions that just aren't going to happen. Except in rare moods, neither am I. But I've just finished reading the death-knell for poly-water (it turns out poly-water isn't a new form of water at all; it's just a product of dirty laboratory glassware) and that, plus the phone call, got me thinking about nice ideas that just won't work. One of the favorite sf themes is the "Belter Civilization" and its battle for independence from the colonial masters on Earth. Belters are asteroid miners -- they flit from asteroid to asteroid, slicing them up for the mineral wealth they presumably contain. In the usual story the miners go off on long prospecting tours, leaving their families on a "settled rock" -- the Belt Capital (generally Ceres) or some other major body. When Belters get together, it's always in an asteroid city. The Belters never come to Earth or any other planet. Indeed, they regard planets as "holes," deep gravity wells which can trap them and use up their precious fuels. The assumption is, of course, that it's far less costly to flit from asteroid to asteroid than it is to land on a planet or even get into close orbit around one. Another common assumption is that fuels are expensive and scarce, and the Belters must conserve them -- thus they never go outside the Belt if they can help it. (One supposes there's a local source of both energy and fuel in the Belt, of course, or there couldn't be a Belter Civilization to begin with.) Fuel and energy aren't the same thing, by the way. Fission reactors could provide the power for a permanent Belt station; if we wanted to we could put a reactor onto an asteroid now. But rocket fuels are something else again. To make a rocket work you must have reaction mass, something to get moving swiftly backwards and dump overboard. Unfortunately, asteroids are rock, and rocks don't make very good rocket fuel. We'll come back to what the Belters might do about that later. For the moment, let's see how difficult travel to and in the Belt would be. We'll use the same measure as last month, the total change in ship velocity required to perform the mission. This is called delta-v, and you should recall that a ship with a given fuel efficiency and ratio of fuel to non-fuel weight will have a unique, calculable delta-v. It doesn't matter whether the pilot uses that delta-v in little increments or in one big burn: the sum of velocity changes remains the same. We'll consider delta-v in kilometers per second (kmsec). By the way, I use metric system in all my tables and figures because there's no question about that sf prediction. The English system of measures will be as dead as the dodo within our lifetimes. Already De(Society of Automotive Engineers) standards to metric because so many US automobile parts are now assembled in foreign countries. The US Army is on a modified metric system now. Most businesses with extensive overseas trade must deal in metrics, and even the English are abandoning the English measurements. I also use the metric system to help me stay familiar with it, and I'm learning to "think in metric." You should try to do so as well. It takes about # kmsec to get from Earth orbit to an asteroid. By comparison you can reach a Jovian outer moon for only # kmsec. The asteroids are hard to reach because not only are they a long way out, but they don't help you catch up to them. They've so little mass that you have to chase them down. Jupiter, on the other hand, will give you an assist. Thus it isn't easy to go from Earth orbit to an asteroid. (I'm assuming that we have a launching system like that described last month, so that travel into and out of Earth orbit is "free".) Yet, travel from, say, Ceres to a theoretical asteroid # AU out takes only about # kmsec. (One AU or astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun and is # miles, or #  # x # kilometers. Ceres is # AU from the Sun.) This looks pretty good. We'll save a lot of energy if we simply stay in the Belt, as is assumed in most sf stories. Of course, it takes only about # kmsec. to get from the # AU rock to Mars orbit (landing would take a lot more), but perhaps the Marsmen won't like having crude asteroid miners on their planet, or won't be able to provide a laser-launch system to get them in and out of Mars orbit. The Belters could build themselves a Capital at some convenient place such as Ceres just as easily anyway. But how long will it take to get from asteroid to asteroid? We've calculated the energy requirements for Hohmann transfer orbits, and to use them you must start and finish with the origin and destination precisely opposite the sun. If you try to use something other than Hohmann orbits, the energy requirements become ridiculously high, as we'll see in a minute. Well you get a launch window each synodic period. A synodic period is the time it takes two planets, or planetoids, to go around the Sun and come back to precisely the same position relative to each other -- from, say, being on opposite sides of the Sun until they're in opposition again, which is what we'll need for a Hohmann journey. The synodic period of Ceres and the # AU rock is slightly over # years. Worse, the closer the asteroids are to each other, the longer their synodic period. It's almost as bad for the # AU rock and Mars: nearly # years. Add to that the transit time, # years travel time between Ceres and the other asteroid, and you see what's wrong with the Belter Civilization. They aren't going to visit their Capital very often. By contrast, you can get from Earth to the asteroids every year and a half, spending another year and a half in transit. Perhaps, though, we haven't been quite fair to the Belters? Asteroids aren't all as widely separated as Ceres and the # AU rock. Most textbooks claim the asteroids are concentrated between #.I AU and # AU out from the Sun. We'll assume they're all in the same plane (they aren't), so the Belt area works out to # x #? square centimeters. The books say there are about # asteroids visible with the Palomar Eye, but we want to be fair (and make things simple) so we'll assume there are # asteroids interestingenough to want to visit, or one every # cmwithin the Belt. That means the asteroids lie on an average of # # ! cm apart, which happens to be about three times the distance from Earth to the Moon. That far from the Sun's influkilometers anyway -- we don't have to use Hohmann orbits. One of the usual SF Belter devices is the torch ship, which accelerates half-way to it's destination, turns over, and decelerates the other half. We'll try that. Once again, we're in trouble. We can't accelerate at more than about .#I gravity, because otherwise the total delta-v exceeds any ship we can build in the near future. Even at I cmsec # acceleration, a thoukilometers eats up # kmsec delta-v -- enough to get us from Earth to a Jovian moon! If we tried the trip at a full gee acceleration, we'd use # kmsec or enough for ten round trips from Earth to Ceres, and all we've gone is from one rock to another. Clearly, we need better ships. We can't use Hohmann orbits and the rockets of the near future to build our Belt civilization because it takes too many years for the Belters to get together. We can't use continuous acceleration. Even if we could, we could only get from one rock to another in a very small region of the Belt. Oh sure, three or four asteroids in a cluster might band together, but they'd be totally isolated from the rest of their fellow Belters. Our picture of the tight-knit Belt society, comprising hundreds of small worldlets, is vanishing fast. It's obvious, then, that we need real torchships. Craft that can accelerate continuously at a full gravity. After all at a full gee a torchship can go # AU in four days and get all the way out to Pluto, # AU, in less than three weeks! With those ships the Belt cities are no further apart in travel time than were Virginia and New England in Colonial times. Before we get too enthusiastic about the torchships though, let's look at the delta-vee's they need. The # AU trip at a full gravity takes # kmsec; and the Pluto trip of # AU eats up # kmsec, or more delta-v than the entire US and Soviet space programs to date. Recall also that it only took # km sec to get from Earth to Ceres and you see the problem. With torch-ships, there's no trip in the solar system that you can't easily make. Why bother avoiding the # or # knisec penalty for landing on Mars or going to Earth when you have thousands of kilometers-asecond to play with? The "holes" aren't very deep compared to your capabilities, and Earth is still likely to be closer to any given asteroid than will the Belt Capital, simply because Earth is closer to the Sun. There's a good chance that your Capital is on the other side of the system. Furthermore, it's very hard to see how the torchships will work. In the old days they were "atomic powered" rockets -- usually a fission pile. Well, we already have those, or very nearly had them. It was called atomic pile through which hydrogen is poured. The pile heats the hydrogen which therefore goes aft, fast, and the rocket moves. engine by the end of this decade. The development was moving very well when Congress decided to cancel the program. Incidentally, more money is annually spent on lipsticks in New York State than medium sized state has more cost over its lifetime. It's nice that they don't waste the taxpayers' money on frivolities like space. have been the key to manned exploration of the solar system, and it's reasonable to assume that somebody, someday, will use it for that. Given reasonable mass ratios, capability of between # and # kmsec. Not enough to use it as a torchship, but enough to get you out to the Belt and let you have a look before coming home. Enough to let you explore Mars from orbit and land if you carried an expendable landing module. It wouldn't have been a ship that you could build the classical Belter about the best thing we can foresee for many years. system, won't do for a torchship, what about a "true" nuclear rocket: one that uses controlled fusion? The Secret Galactics From one of the top writers in the entire field of science-fiction -- one of his greatest novels. "The Secret Galactics" is a taut and exciting tale of battle for control of the world between a group of alien creatures disguised as ordinary humans -- and -- the still-living but disembodied brain of a great scientist mounted in a mobile fortress. Must reading for every sciencefiction fan! # at your bookstore, or write to: Mr. Joseph Schaumburger, Dept. #-DI (#) Prentice-Hall, Inc. West Nyack, New York I # Thermonuclear reactions surely will give enough energy for torching, won't they? Not by themselves. There's plenty of energy in fusion, but how do you contain it? On Earth, with huge tokomak rings generating enormous magnetic fields, we might be able to build a magnetic pinchbottle to hold a controlled fusion reaction -- although nobody's done it yet -- but aboard a space ship? If you can build something light enough to go aboard a ship smaller than the Queen Mary and able to contain controlled fusion, you've got a device that will do far more than power a space ship. It's obviously a defense against hydrogen bombs to begin with. We'll discuss various properties of fusion powered ships some other time. In order to get really efficient rocket engines you need high exhaust velocities. To get high exhaust velocities you need high particle energies. To get high particle energies you must have very high temperatures. Even the best temperatures of between # and # C, while the worst of the fusion systems have temperatures ten to a hundred times that high. No materials known can withstand them no matter how many tricks you employ. (Such as routing the cold fuel through the pile and chamber walls to cool them.) Fusion ships don't merely need fusion. They need an entirely new technology, and we've not even made a start towards that. Well, what can the poor Belters do? We'll assume they have so that they can get around from Earth to the Belt, but what will they use for fuel? They can't take it all with them or they'll have no paydrogen, and there isn't a lot of hydrogen out among the asteroids. Oddly enough, there is a propulsion system that gets terrific efficiencies, doesn't have excessive real temperatures, and can be b.uilt right now. Even better, it's likely we can find fuels for it in the Belt. This is the ion drive ship. Ion drives employ metal vapors as fuel, and the metal is accelerated by magnetic fields, not heat. If the asteroids turn out to be rich in metals, some kind of ion rocket may be just what the Belters need. It lets them get fuel from the rocks. It won't, however, be a torchship. A mercury vapor ion engine, for example, although capable of perhaps # kmsec total delta-v, only gives thrusts of about #-: gravity. You travel very efficiently with ion drives, but it takes a long time. No, the conclusion is obvious. With anything foreseeable in the way of rockets, the Belters aren't going to develop their civilization. They won't have ships good enough to let them reach each other. If they do get such ships, it will be as easy to Delta-v required for travel among Jovian Satellite system.  o ao o co oo J oi s    (osoS ## oisctoodlo #)I . D CO N O Ol O O n O) cb d ol d d  O) to m . Ol  CO  cn v-l CO CO CO n co m cjj CO CO CO d (d o OJ O) CO CO eg co co   in D # D  o p o a -- a. E to --   # c   # E fc  # (# (B    All values are in km sec. Values below the diagonal are delta-v's needed to go from orbit around one satellite to orbit around the other, landing on neither. Values above the diagonal are surface-to-surface velocity change requirements. Diagonal values are the circular orbital velocities of the moons. reach Earth as the other asteroids. With real torchships, both the Belters and the Earth Navy will have no trouble getting anywhere. Without them, the Belters are better off operating from Earth orbit than from their rocky Capital in the Belt. I'm afraid the Belter Independence Movement is a long way off. What with science robbing sf writers of Mars and Venus, and now the Belters, it's all rather sad. So I've been looking for something more cheerful -- and I think I've found it. Recall that it only took about # kmsec to get to one of the Jovian Moons. There are rather a lot of those moons, they're respectable in size, and they may well have waterices, or methane, or some other source of hydrogen on them: fuel having to send back home for it. The Jovian Moons offer a distinct possibility for a multi-world civilization. The basics of travel near Jupiter are given in Table One. We've had to assume a lot of things about densities and the like to get these numbers, and by the time this appears some of the figures may be out of date. Pioneer will encounter Jupiter during the interval between now and the time this is published. I'll be the first to cheer if Pioneer makes hash of my assumptions. Presuming it won't, let's look at travel amongst the Jovian Moons. Except for Amalthea down there close to Jupiter, the delta-vees are very reasonable, and we can do it over, the travel times are very short, and you get favorable geometry for a Hohmann transfer every couple of months or so. The four big Galilean Moons (J-I through J-IV) take about as much delta-v to travel among as it took to get from Earth in the first place. Yet you do it in weeks, not years. If there's hydrovery reasonable that there will be -- problem at all. The outer three rocks are extremely easy to travel among. You could do it with a backyard rocket burning kerosene. Since those moons are probably captured asteroids, they're as likely to be interesting as any of the other rocks the Belters are concerned about. The Jovian Moons are compacted together. They're hard to get to from Earth, and easy to travel among when you've got there, and if there's wealth in the asteroids, there will be wealth in the Jovians. It all adds up to a powerful incentive for the colonists to deal with each other more and with Earth less. So we can end on a cheerful note, saying goodbye to the Belters, but also making ready to greet the Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary from the Jovian Moons. Another Duckworth concoction -- created on the spur of the moment! I t was a new pocket watch, a gift from my wife with a loving inscription on the back, and I hastened to show it to my old friend, Duckworth. The great biochemist had his long nose into an open ledger in which he was slowly inking columns of figures. "Haven't you heard about the computer?" I asked. He didn't raise his head. "Whenever possible," he said, "I avoid that simpleminded child of Satan. Particularly when I have important data." I sensed that something important was in the air and I forgot about my watch. "A new discovery?" I asked reverently. "Something along the lines of your macromolecules?" "Broadly speaking," said Duckworth. He closed his ledger with a sigh of contentment. "Have you a minute or two to spare?" "I'm always ready to listen to one of your great insights," I said. He glared at me. "If you don't stop that nauseating sycophantism," he bellowed. "I'll boot you out of here." I lowered my eyes. "I'll be irreverent," I promised. "In that case," said Duckworth, "I'll tell you what I'm about. It's involved with time." "Time," I mused. "That sounds fascinating. I've often pondered that seemingly irreversible flow of physical events. I wondered why it should all go in one direction despite the fact that physical equations allow for positive and negative values of time." "So did I," said Duckworth. "Moreover," I continued, "these events seem to be stored on one's memory as sets of impressions that demand quantification into seconds, minutes and hours. And yet Einstein pointed out in his historic nineteen-o-five paper on Special Relativity that every statement of -- " "For Christ's sake," said Duckworth. "Do you want me to tell you or don't you?" I subsided petulantly. "Not that I disagree," said Duckworth. "It's just that at the moment I'm not concerned with the nature of time, but with our apprehension of it. For example. I'd like to try a very simple test." He glanced at his wrist watch. "When I say, 'Now,' I want you to start estimating the passage of sixty seconds of time." "Talking about watches -- " I said, pulling out my new pocket watch. Duckworth didn't seem to notice. "Now!" he cried. I struggled with estimating the passage of seconds. I could have cheated by counting my breaths but I didn't. After an interminable period I called out, "Time." Duckworth smiled. "It's only forty-two seconds by my watch," he said. "But don't feel too badly. Most people do worse." "My wife would have been much worse," I said. "I'll ignore that bit of male chauvinism," said Duckworth. "I first became interested in this problem when I discovered anomalous effects of one of the helical strands of my macromolecule. I've since named the substance Perceptron and it seems to affect only those cortical areas of the brain which are concerned with the perception of time." "Is it similar to the psychedelic drugs?" "Completely different," said Duckworth. "For example, the motor activities of the subject are totally unaffected." "How did you find out that Perceptron affects time perception?" "Sweat and toil," said Duckworth. "I had trained a cat to come for his feeding at exactly one hour intervals." "Really? How did you manage that?" "First I taught him to press a lever whenever he wanted milk. Then he discovered that unless an overhead light was on, he'd get no milk. Thereafter I switched on the light at one hour intervals. Pretty soon he'd only come around on the hour." "Did he wait for the light before pressing the bar?" Duckworth smiled. "He did in the beginning, but then I stopped using the light. He knew it ought to be on, so after a while he'd press the lever. If he acted too late he got no milk. If he was too early he got a mild electric shock. In the end, he could estimate one hour's duration to within five seconds. Considering how much trouble you had with estimating a minute, you must agree it was quite something." "I think it's incredible." "Then," said Duckworth, "I began to feed my cat controlled doses of Perceptron, reinforcing the dosages with injections. He'd come every half hour, then every ten minutes and finally every minute." "And what if you injected him with water or some other placebo?" "He'd arrive on the hour, as before," said Duckworth triumphantly"Absolutely astonishing," I said. "Have you tried it on humans?" "Not yet," said Duckworth. "After I'm convinced of its nontoxicity I'll ask for volunteers." "You'll never get me," I said. "I like my sense of time perception as it is." M y words came back to haunt me when I was faced with a massive breakdown of my teeth. After my dentist, concealing his intense joy at uncovering a gold mine of repairs, described the extensive work required, I fell apart. He assured me that all of it would be painless and even showed me the gigantic needle through which the novocaine would course. I arrived home that evening and downed three neat shots of Jack Daniels in rapid order. My wife stood by with raised eyebrows. "I'd better hide the typewriter," she said. "This trifling amount will not make me an alcoholic," I said. "Besides, I'm terrified of the ordeal I face in that butcher's chair." "It will pass," she said with all the calm of someone who did not need dental repairs. "The time will fly, you'll see." It was that vapid remark plus my deathly fears that reminded me of Duckworth's Perceptron. That very evening, noting that a light was glowing in his lab, I entered the chemistry building and pounded at Duckworth's office door. He seemed slightly annoyed at my noisy intrusion since he was involved with a tricky titration. He beckoned me to a chair and continued with his work. An hour passed before he took any further notice of me. "All right," he said finally. "What can I do for you? It must be something special to keep you on campus after five." "That's nasty and uncalled for," I said. "I've worked around the clock whenever the job demanded it. And in answer to your churlishly phrased question, the answer is I do need your help. I want a small but effective dose of Perceptron, enough to make one hour in the dental chair seem like one second. However, if you can cut that second down further, I'd have no objections." Duckworth whistled. "A thirty-six hundred to one reduction in time perception? That's more than I've ever gotten with my animals." "I'm desperate, Duckworth," I wailed. "I'll take anything I can get." "Well," said Duckworth, strok ing his wispy beard meditatively, "thus far I've detected no unpleasant side effects in my animal subjects. But a cat is not a human." "I'm quite aware of that," I said. "And I'll take my chances." "One small problem," said Duckworth. "I know the exact dosage to produce prescribed effects on one of my cats. But I'm sure it Now opened in New York ttlEBtE for paperback, hardcover, juvenile books  magazines fanzines  posters  games and more will be different for you." "So what does that mean?" "It means that we ought to try preliminary dosages first. We can even start tonight." "Do you administer it with a needle?" I asked apprehensively. "You really are gunshy," said Duckworth. "No," he added. "I'll give it to you orally. But let me reiterate what I told you once before. Although your sense of time perception will be shortened, your motor activities should seem normal to the outside observer. That is, you'll walk at the usual speed, talk normally and so on. But to you, it will seem that everything has speeded up." "I understand," I said. "And now let's try dose number one." I was swinging my arm to and fro and I placed a tiny pill under my tongue. And then the rate at which my arm was moving was impossible to detect. The movement became a blinding blur. An instant later my arm movement seemed normal again. "It's over," I said. "The dosage must be too small, Duckworth. I'll need a longer period than that." "Will you?" asked Duckworth. "You've been under for four and three-quarter hours by my watch." M y trial in the dentist's chair was an eyeblink, thanks to Duckworth's Perceptron. Afterward I raced to his laboratory. I would have kissed his hands but I knew he'd resort to violence. So I gave him a brief, lyrical verbal report. In conclusion, I added: "You've produced a boon for all mankind to enjoy, Duckworth. It'll get you a third Nobel prize." "Impossible," he said. "I don't plan to publish a word of it." The room reeled about me. "Are you out of your mind?" I cried. "Perceptron is the Tenth Wonder of the World. You must reveal it to all mankind. It will help them get through those unbearable interludes." Duckworth shuddered. "And who is to say what is unbearable? If I make this stuff freely available to all, people will be burning up large chunks of their lives in order to avoid crises. Every adolescent would want to zip through these tortured acne-ridden years. Every pregnant woman would shrink down those nine months. I don't believe in inflicting unnecessary discomfort on people, but some of it is a necessary and important part of life. In fact, it may well provide the background for making pleasurable moments so joyful." "Rationalization," I said scornfully. "I don't believe a word of it. One could use that same argument against every painkiller man has devised and believe me, Perceptron can be the greatest painkiller of all. You must release it." "I'll think it over," said Duckworth. I did not pressure my friend further. Weeks went by, then months. One day Duckworth disappeared. I was not worried. I knew that my friend was wont to steal off when heavy moral questions needed thinking through. And then he reappeared at my computer lab, haggard, wan, but clear-eyed. I put my arm about his shoulder. "It's good to have you back, Duckworth. I missed you." "It's good to be back." "Where have you been?" I asked. "Soul-searching." he said. "I packed a loaf of bread, six bottles of beaujolais and the Rubaiyat in my knapsack." "And what were your conclusions?" "Come to my office this afternoon. I'll give you my answer at that time." I arrived at three o'clock and found Duckworth scribbling in the ledger notebook. He put down his pen and looked at me candidly. "I've decided to follow your advice," he said. "While I don't agree with you, I've concluded that these qualms are products of my Protestant ethic, hangups of excessive zeal." I put out my hand for Duckworth to shake. He stared at it for an interminable length of time. I wanted to ask him what was going on but the words simply would not emerge from my throat. After what seemed like months, I heard sounds teasing out of my mouth at an excruciatingly slow pace. And then it was over. Duckworth seemed to take no note of my difficulty and simply shook my hand. "Have you no heart?" I asked. "No what?" "No heart, no sympathy? You see me standing there, struggling to talk and you ignore it?" "Are you out of your head? You weren't struggling to do anything." I was exasperated. "Duckworth," I said. "Surely you just noticed that I was holding out my hand to you for what seemed like months to me, trying to say something to you -- and I couldn't do it?" A look of panic swept over his face. "Come inside to my lab," he said. "I want to take a small sample of your blood," "What for?" I asked snappishly. "Just do as I say and shut up," said Duckworth. Grudgingly I rolled up my sleeve and let him take a small sample of my life's juices. "Now get out of here until you hear from me," said Duckworth. "You're being ill-tempered and rude," I said. "You probably think you have a good reason, but I'll never forgive you." I turned to leave and tripped over a Bunsen burner which had been carelessly left on the threshold. In avoiding a fall, I almost wrenched my back out of kilter. "See what you've done," I gasped. "It'll be a week before this agony will subside. Give me a shot of Perceptron." "Not on your life," said Duckworth and, very gently, he eased me into the hallway and shut his door. F or several weeks he would not answer my calls. His lab door was locked and he would not respond to my pounding. I knew that he was subject to strange caprices, but this one exceeded all of them. And then, once again, he reappeared at the computer lab. "I have nothing to say to you," I said huffily. "That's great," said Duckworth. "Then maybe you'll listen for a change. I've been doing a careful analysis of your blood sample." I paled. "What's wrong with me?" He waved his hand reassuringly. "It's all right," he said. "And it isn't. At least you're all right now." "Was I sick?" "In a way," he said thoughtfully. "You see, there were traces of a strange compound in your blood. It was amazingly like Perceptron except for a sulfur radical that had been tacked on. I think it's a response of the body to Perceptron. I've been trying some of the blood fraction on my cat." "Did he froth at the mouth?" "No, but his sense of time perception stretched out so long he almost starved to death." "Stretched out?" "Precisely," said Duckworth. "For every dose you take to speed you through some painful crisis, later on, at some unpredictable moment. the body's formation of antiPerceptron will stretch out some time interval to an agonizingly long period." I shuddered. "What if it had come at some unpleasant time?" "I couldn't have phrased it any better," said Duckworth. "Then Perceptron is too tricky to use?" "Much too risky," said Duckworth. "Suppose you'd been back in the dentist's chair when the antiPerceptron formed?" I shut my eyes. "Please, Duckworth," I said. "Is there any more of that stuff in my blood? Maybe a leech is in order? Or some old-fashioned bleeding?" "I don't think so," said Duckworth. "The rate of decay of antiPerceptron is quite rapid." I sat down and mopped my now swimmingly wet brow. "You were right, Duckworth. I was trying to get something for nothing. I should have known it wouldn't work." And then a sudden thought struck me. What if antiPerceptron were used to prolong pleasurable interludes, like lovemaking for example. "Duckworth," I said very tentatively. The tiny eyes fixed upon me. "I was thinking," I said. "It was just a novel idea that occurred to me." Duckworth's eyes blazed. "I know what you're thinking about," he said. "The very same thought occurred to me. And the answer is a violent no." "Of course," said Duckworth. "Isn't that what life is all about?" And, wreathed in homilies, we retreated to the Faculty Bar for some libation that would distort, but in moderation, our senses of true time perception.  What is the substance of a man's soul? M adge carter saw a reporter in the back of the courtroom take out his lighter to sneak a smoke. She tensed in the witness chair and her eyes devoured the bloom of tiny flame. "This is only an inquest, Mrs. Carter," said Paul Reed, recapturing her attention. "I hope you aren't upset." Madge shook her head. "Will you please tell us about last Saturday?" "But I already have." "And we're no closer to finding out what happened to Mr. Draper." "As I said before, my husband and I and Mr. Draper were in the laboratory. At one o'clock, Gil and Mr. Draper finished dismantling the punch-card machine and began discussing the next project. As far as I know, there was no one else in the building except for the cleaning woman, Mrs. Wells, who was in the adjoining room. At approximately twenty minutes after one, I opened my handbag to look for something. A few moments later I looked around and Jeff Draper wasn't there. Gil was working at his desk. We went to Mrs. Wells and asked her where Jeff had gone. She said he hadn't come out of the lab." "And that door was the only exit?" said Reed. "Yes." "There doesn't happen to be a carnivorous machine in your lab?" "That isn't funny!" said Gil Carter. He sat in the first row of observers. The judge tapped his gavel. Reed slowly walked around the witness chair where Madge was seated. "What about the machine that walked out of your laboratory and went after... what was the bank robber's name?" Stifling a sigh, Madge said, "We dismantled it." "What about the machine that wanted every newborn with criminal potential to be destroyed? I understand it insisted this must be done to save the world." "It was dismantled." "There were other machines, weren't there?" "What if there were?" said Madge. "Do you think one of them was responsible for Jeff's disappearance?" Reed showed the courtroom his smile. "Not for an instant." "It sounds as if you believe my husband and I use our laboratory as a place in which to tinker." "Not at all. You're the leading electronics experts in the country. On the other hand, my task is to bring to light any information concerning Jeff Draper's disappearance." "I wish you luck," said Madge. "He was a good man. His assistance on the punch-card project was the project was a failure. Too expensive." Reed eyed her keenly. "It's generous of you to give him such recognition." "Gil and I admired his ability." "Nobody has accused you or your husband of anything, but we all know Draper is gone." "I don't know how or why," Madge said in a low voice. "Corpus delicti," Reed murmured. "Where is his body?" The lawyer held out his hand. An earring lay there. "This is the only thing unaccounted for in Draper's apartment. We haven't been able to trace it to the owner." Reed looked at the witness. "That's all, Mrs. Carter. You may step down." The inquest drew to a close and it was declared that without evidence there was no case. Jeff Draper was gone. The matter would go down on the books as an unsolved mystery. T hat afternoon Madge stood before the open fireplace in the living room of her home. Her stance was rigid as she stared into the flames. "Bitch," said Gil behind her. "They can't trace the earring to me!" "That isn't what I meant." Her face twisting in a painful smile, Madge dropped a bit of paper in the fire. "It wasn't what you think." "What do I think?" Gil sounded calmer now, but he was pacing back and forth. "He promised to help me. He said he knew a good doctor." "Not that again!" "It's getting worse," she whispered. "Why don't you carry a bucket of hot coals around with you? Then you can set your fires on the spot." She turned to him with an expression of despair. "You don't understand. You don't care." "I understand enough. All you need is self-control." "I need a doctor." "A week ago you would never have admitted that." Madge reached to take a notebook from the mantle. "Put that down!" he snapped. "You see?" she said. "It happens even when I don't think about it." Gil started to walk away from her but suddenly he turned. "The inquest may be over, but what would the police think if they found you had been in Jeff's apartment?" "What people normally think of such a thing. They'd have a motive for your hating him." She gave a little laugh. "How wrong they would be. It wouldn't have mattered to you if he'd been my lover." Once again he paced. "None of this would have happened if you hadn't been playing firebug in the lab Saturday instead of paying attention. You might have seen what became of him. Of all the insane -- right there in the lab! Couldn't you wait to get home?" "I'll do anything for you, anything you say. only let me be treated." "My wife isn't going to a psychiatrist. Never mind that. What were you burning on the bench Saturday?" "What difference does it make?" "Tell me!" "Bits of paper," she said wearily. "I didn't damage the bench. There was an ashtray." "What else besides paper?" "That's all, I swear." He seemed implacable and untouched by the plea in her eyes. "Why are you so upset about it? What did you do? It had something to do with Jeff. Damn you, I want an answer!" Her eyes were prisoners that darted around the room. "His replication card." Puzzlement erased the anger on his face. "What do you mean?" "The punch-card we made on him -- the machine you dismantled Saturday." Angry again, he said, "What did that have to do with anything?" "I don't know. He hid the card. He said it was his image and that he didn't want it destroyed. I think he was on the verge of a breakdown. He told me that when he sat in the machine and let it copy one of his cells it took too much." "Go on." She shrugged. "He was afraid of the card. He didn't like looking at it. He said it was his self, that we had superimposed the shadow upon the substance and that reality couldn't know the difference. Oh, I don't know what he said. I only know he was afraid of the card and that he was glad the machine was being taken apart. He said it would be a monster loosed upon the world, that nobody should copy his soul on a plastic card. My God, why are you asking me this? What does it matter?" "It makes no sense!" "It did to him. All he talked about was substance and shadow. He said a copy could be as real as an original if it captured essence, that even if people couldn't steal essence, the replicating machine could because it operated on the same principle as nature. It worked with potential and added to it by using whatever was available." "Keep talking," said Gil. "The machine copied one of his cells. He said they were embryonic replicas of himself, which meant the machine was actually copying him. But the card wasn't an accurate replica unless his essence or true substance or inward realness was included. He said the machine took his soul and after the original had its realness stolen the original became the copy. Could that have happened, Gil?" "He couldn't have believed that nonsense." # AM aybe he did. He began dolVAing weird things, like standing under lights and looking behind him or staring over his shoulder when he was out in the sun." Gil stared at her with a startled expression. "Why did he do that?" "He couldn't find his shadow." Gil looked at the flames in the fireplace, looked at the shadow of his wife lying on the hearth. He walked toward her until the light of the flames bathed him. As he walked, he watched over his shoulder. "Where did he hide the card?" he said, coming to a halt. "In the dahlia pot by the window in the lab." Their eyes met and his were frightened. "You didn't burn it?" "I don't see that it matters. I could find a needle in a haystack. I loved the way it burned and sizzled and melted. But it screamed -- and that's why I think I'm going out of my mind." He backed away, almost lost his balance, caught hold of a chair. "It's impossible. I don't believe it." Madge turned and stared into the fire. "A monster?" said Gil. "We made a monster?" "Isn't everything?" "There's a card of me. Where the hell did I put it? Damn it -- let me think -- " Madge raised her head. She was aware that he had left the room and was hurrying up the stairs. Sighing, she leaned toward the fire. The heat reached out ot her and warmed her frozen spirit. Cold from infinity drifted in through the crevices in the house. The cold had no shape or form, but it had power. It could seek her out and annihilate her, turn her to a pillar of ice. Her only defense against death was warmth. Blindly she sought salvation. Her hand went into her pocket and withdrew the plastic card. She held it out to the fire. They had made two cards, one for Jeff and one for Gil, and then they had taken the machine apart. It was regrettable because the theory behind the punch-card was good. A person entering the labor market for the first time had to fill out a dozen questionnaires. Even then he was a gamble to an employer. The punchcard machine would have eliminated the gamble. It copied a body cell in a matter of minutes and the card it produced was an infallible character reference. Each perforation was a physiological or personality trait. With an auxiliary machine to interpret the perforations an employer could know exactly what kind of person he was dealing with. Chemistry couldn't lie. Psychotics, thieves, liars or degenerates gave themselves away by their deficiencies or excesses of certain acids and hormones. The punch-card project could have been a major breakthrough in the understanding of human behavior. The card was the most detailed identification an individual could have. Without it, he was an unknown, a stranger, half a quantity. Madge winced. How could a card carry a man's reflection on it? Everything about him, nothing left out. Nothing and everything. Were they one and the same? What kind of universe was it when everything and nothing were identical? Her cold fingers opened and released the card. Gil would be angry. He was upstairs hunting for it. Why did he care all of a sudden? What did it matter? The flames took the plastic rectangle, lapped at its fringes, leaped all around it, melted it, consumed it. A tiny scream burst from the fire. She waited for him to come down and torment her. He didn't come, though she waited and waited. Finally she sent Craddock upstairs. The butler couldn't find Gil. Incredibly her husband seemed not to be in the house. But he must be here. He couldn't have gone out without coming down the stairs and Madge would have seen him. It was bewildering. She didn't evade the thought that she really didn't care. Her personal problems had a way of obscuring other issues. "What do you think of all this?" she asked Craddock. "It's a mystery, madam." "Do you like mysteries?" The butler shrugged. "He's gone, like Jeff," said Madge. "Disappeared." "Yes, I think so." "The police will come." "Regrettably." "What do you think of me, Craddock?" "I have a great fondness for you madam. I'll be happy to inform the police that Mr. Carter left the house at four o'clock." "You're a comforting person. Do you know a good psychiatrist?"  O I 'm going to talk about only two writers this month in any depth, and then fling myself into what I can only call "housecleaning." I have a backlog of literally hundreds of books on which I've never had time or space to report, and short of dumping the lot at the recycling center, there's no other recourse but to list them with totally unjust oneor two-word comments. I shall continue this practice month after month until I can get through my office without sidling; until my desk emerges from the mountain; until, perhaps, my ToBe Answered file reappears, and I can begin answering my mail. C arl sagan began to swim importantly into my consciousness only a little while before that fortunate moment when I met him personally. Without hesitation I place him among the five first-class minds I have ever encountered. It is impossible to refrain from Sagan anecdotes. It is difficult indeed to restrain oneself from them, for this man is fated to gather legends about himself, on the way to becoming one. Tall, articulate, with a resonant voice and dark but luminous eyes; astronomer, mathemetician, with a vast working knowledge of chemistry, biochemistry, physics and the complexities of computer technology, he is a great deal younger than he ought to be and looks even younger than that. He talks well and straight to the point, and he listens as much as he talks, and does it with attention so total that you can't just blurt; you find yourself testing and checking what it is you're saying to him: is it so, is it sensible, do your words say what you mean. His do. Item: At a symposium Fred Pohl read a paper, and afterward Sagan came to him and corrected some figures Fred had used. Now Fred Pohl is a bright and careful man who does his homework, and has instant and total retrieval, and said flatly, "I got those figures from Dr. so-and-so of the Such-and-such Institute." "Oh, I know," said Sagan, with (and you've got to believe this) not one split iota of brag, "he got those figures from me, but he didn't understand them." Item: In the preparation of a long and heavy series for Westinghouse Radio, my wife interviewed Sagan, and presented him with a four paragraph question dealing with #) the ecological mess #) overpopulation #) The Bomb and #) human cussedness generally: "In view of these things. Dr. Sagan, can man survive?" Sagan: "Search me." Item: On walking into the waiting room at LaGuardia with Sagan and our wives, I was startled to see someone scurrying to unlock the V.I.P. lounge for the four of us, something one has to get used to in the presence of this remarkable human being. I should have said "five of us"; my then #-year-old Andros was on his usual perch on my shoulders. Due purely to an inexcusable lapse on my part, Andros cut his forehead open on a glass coffee table. There followed a nightmarish sequence of getting him to a local emergency hospital. Sagan came with me while his lovely (and very talented) wife Linda stayed with Wina. At the admitting desk, with bloody Andros back again on my shoulders while we stood there getting forms filled out, Sagan was right there, right on top of every detail; he couldn't have been more concerned if it were his kid, or for that matter, his head. How together I was I'll never know; with him there, there was no chance to fumble. We cased the waiting room then, waiting; we paced a corridor or two. People were in the corridors. lying on gurneys, waiting too, waiting with that numb patience you might see on a mule tied up to the hitching rail outside a barroom. A Puerto Rican came up to us to ask about the doctors here, because he had a pain here, and he couldn't sleep, and... Sagan spoke to him gently and simply and encouraged him; then they called me and I took Andros in to get him stitched up. Sagan waited and got us a cab. On the way back to the airport he was very silent, deeply reached by that whole hospital scene, slowly pulling himself out of it. Suddenly he smiled and said, "Did you notice that girl at the registration desk?" "Notice what?" "She took one look at Andros, sitting on your shoulders with his head all bloody, and then she put one hand up to her own head and kept it there the whole time she was talking to us, and she never looked up again." Now that, friends and colleagues, is the very achetype of what I call the "writer's eye." Some are born with it and some develop it, but no really good writer ever lacked it. It's a way of scanning and recording those intensely human fragments to which a reader responds fully and immediately -- those which the rest of us miss completely, as did I. Not that you need this, or me, to demonstrate that the man is a writer. Try The Cosmic Connection, An Extraterrestrial Perspective, (Doubleday #. Illustrated and indexed, #pp.) It was produced by Jerome Agel (who did the same chore for McCluhan's The Medium is the Message, Buckminster Fuller's  Seem to be a Verb, and The Making ofKu brick's # #) and has, among its many photographs, some exquisite and meticulous drawings by Jon Lomberg. On the back cover is a rendering of the "Message to the Stars" -- the gold anodized aluminum plaque carried out into deep space by Pioneer #. Inside the book is the story of that plaque, how Sagan and his colleague at Cornell, Dr. Frank Drake, designed the "message," how Linda Sagan did the art, how conception, execution, and progress through the hierachy bare three weeks, and even how some nameless, faceless bureaucrat parted the Earthman's Afro and made a white man of him. You'll read about the #-page letter in green ballpoint which even Sagan could not answer, and about his astonishing adventures in communication with dolphins and with firstgraders, and a flabbergasting exercise in jof-communication with the and inadvertant self-portraits of a genuinely fine, warm human being is the heavy stuff -- lucid, exciting, inspiring sometimes, and always igniting the sense of wonder: black holes, calculations on the degrees of cultural evolution and on the duration of a civilization, meticulous you-are-there descriptions of landfall on Venus, on Mars; a guided tour among the bureaucracies, surely the strangest excursion into alien intelligences of all. And this: There will be a time in our future history when the Solar System will be explored and inhabited. To them, and to all who come after us, the present will be a pivotal instant in the history of mankind. There are not many generations given an opportunity as historically significant as this one. The opportunity is ours, if we but grasp it. To paraphrase K.E. Tsiolkovsky, the founder of astronautics: the Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever. -- just in case you were beginning to feel bored or cynical about the times you are living in... And then there's Linda Sagan's sixlegged unicorn, with old Sol just under his tail... Communication with Extraterby Carl Sagan, illustrated and indexed. with appendices, # pp, #, M.I.T. Press) is the transcript of an extraordinary meeting in September, #, in Soviet Aracronym for all those words in the title, the Latin genitive for "whale," as an acknowledgment to the presence on Earth of non-human intelligence, and a recognition that one of the two stars "listened to" by Frank Drake for Project Ozma was Tau Ceti; and finally, a short handle for the conference itself. Participants came from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the U.K., Canada, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and they were real heavyweights: M.I.T.'s Minsky, who is building toward a machine that can think, Ozma's and Cornell's Frank Drake, Charles Townes, who invented the maser and the laser and got the Nobel Prize. Francis Crick, co-discoverer Nobel Laureate; Freeman Dyson, mathematician and physicist whose paper in the Appendix is, by the way, one of the most beautiful things I have ever read; Soviet scientists of equal merit, but oh, I'm running out of space. The interchange between these amazing minds is worth ten days without lunch any time; buy this and keep it. I don't think I can review Barry Malzberg's books as fast as he writes them. Not only do they cascade all over my desk , but there he is in anthology after anthology, and he has not completely abandoned the magazines. I have expressed before in these pages how impressed I am with this man. I do not see how anyone can stay so angry; there is no one, with the possible exception of Philip K. Dick, whose works, each one of them, are so unpredictable nor so outrageous and outraged. For Beyond Apollo he won the first John Campbell Memorial Award -- it's out now in paperback (Pocket Books, #c) and his new one, different as it can be, is of equal uncomfortable merit. It's called The Destruction of the Temple (Pocket Books, #c) and deals disturbingly with the emotional impact of the Kennedy assassinations, together with those of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The impacts of these terrible events are not linear as in history, but cyclic, as they are in our minds and hearts; great events occur in these areas over and over, sometimes differently, with greater or less emphasis and power, and it is this that Malzberg's strange book exemplifies. Then there's Tactics of Conquest (Pyramid, #c) -- ugly! ugly ! , yet compelling, even demanding. It's chess this time, as his Overlav was horse-racing. One needn't know the game to read the book; however, love for the game enhances the novel. What a strange work! It's a man's struggle with himself, or selves, it's arrogance undefeated in horrible humility; it's important to the exact degree to which you are equipped to participate. Hate it you might; forget it you will not. Whatever... Malzberg will be around to perplex and infuriate long after most of the rest of us are homogenized in memory. Dammit! How can a man be so much fun and have so little joy?  The Galaxy Librar of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... The apes are back in a new shocker from Twentieth Century-Fox...that will keep you A suspense-filled adventure about one man against an unknown civilization that knew of his existence before he was born! ASI I # #(f A collection of unpredictably imaginative tales by a modern master of science fiction. AS#I # if. the mind and captivates the imagination AN# # ( t A collection of mind-bending science fiction adventure that soars beyond the imagination AN # #(f I #: . of Science Fiction Two men pursue the Rithian Monster who has successfully disguised itself as a human being. AS# # # A nightmare suddenly wrought into stark reality... as men and women who look like themselves, act like themselves, but are not themselves. AN # # # A collection of science-fiction masterworks from Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, and six other great writers. AN# # prediction of tomorrow's beliefs. AX# # A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# # f Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II #tf "Psycho." AX#I# #f Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# # A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I #tf A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# #(y Farmingdale, N.Y. I # (Please add # for shipping) He faced a fate worse than deathin the mind of a woman! Foreign Office; Commander Jacks, Ministry of Security; Colonel Hander who, I believe, represents American C.I.A. -- and another gentleman who doesn't have a name. His organization is so secret even he doesn't know whom he's working for. Before we hear from him directly, gentlemen, allow me to introduce Doctor Martin Sawyer -- about whom so many bitter words have been spoken and who is the prime object of this meeting." No-name sat up and inspected Sawyer critically through a haze of cigar smoke. "Hold it right there a minute, Woulfe. Before we're in too deep I'd like to know something about this guy Sawyer. Like whose man is he?" "In view of your forgetfulness about your own employment your preoccupation with other people's is remarkable," said Woulfe. "Doctor Sawyer is owner and director of a specialist company called Laser Metrology." "I don't mean the cover story. I mean which security organization picks up his tabs?" "None do." One could almost sense a subdued glee in the way Woulfe was handling the proceedings. "You mean he's a freelance?" "I mean that Doctor Sawyer isn't even interested in how this meeting turns out. He's the original innocent bystander." No-name considered "Then how come he screwed up Cassius?" "I thought we'd already established that," said TeddingtonWright soothingly. "Doctor Cass's indisposition resulted from a plot by several security organizations who were disturbed by the inhumanity of her interrogation methods. It so happened that Doctor Sawyer was the instrument they used." "Shades of Mitrione!" said Noname from behind his cigar. "Furthermore, the plot was designed to kill her. It failed only because nobody thought to advise Sawyer of what was going on," Wright continued. "Son of a bitch!" said No-name. There was a hint of admiration in his voice. "You mean he uncorked her by accident?" "It's just a knack," said Sawyer modestly. "You should see how much damage I can do when I'm really trying." Colonel Hander, the C.I.A. man, turned to Sawyer with a surprising show of warmth. "Why don't you take a seat, Doctor Sawyer?" "Thanks -- but having listened this far I wasn't thinking of staying." "I don't think he trusts us," said No-name richly. "Can you imagine that?" The others laughed, as though mutual mistrust between them were more appropriate than not. "I didn't say that," said Sawyer. "But I've a lawyer sitting in a car outside with a writ of habeas corpus all ready with my name on it. And if he should run into trouble -- there's a second one up the road with a writ with the first guy's name on it." "Joking apart," said Hander, "don't you think you're being too cautious?" "I think not. The last time I became involved with you security types I was handed over to Doctor Cass for use in an experiment. That's not an experience I'm anxious to repeat." "Let's come to the point," said No-name. "With Indochina flaring up again we can't afford to have Cassius out of action. We need her persuasion expertise. Her present predicament is not only costing us lives -- it's costing us money." "That is a pity," said TeddingWright with a non-inflection. "I'm satisfied," said No-name, "that all of you were implicated in the plot that got Doctor Cass hospitalized. Now the pendulum's swung the other way. It's in all our interests to get her back into harness. This son of a bitch -- "he indicated Sawyer without rancor -- "is holding us for ransom. Let's get down to detail, find out his price and get the show back on the road." "All right. Doctor Sawyer -- what is your price?" asked the C.I.A. man. "Price? I don't even have anything to sell." "Do they make them that thick, or is it something you have to work on?" asked No-name. "It's probably my fault," said Woulfe. "Nobody's yet put the problem to him." "If it has to do with Doctor Cass -- don't bother," said Sawyer. "I'm not interested. Not for any sort of price." "Is he for real?" asked No-name. #XJe's completely real," asXlsured Woulfe. "He's probably the only one of us who is. Martin -- " he turned to Sawyer -- "the situation is this. After the last mind-jaunt with which you were associated, Cassius -- that's to say, Doctor Andrea Cass -- predictably suffered a severe mental breakdown. Her treatment in America hasn't been effective, which isn't surprising when you consider the methods by which the trauma was induced. She's opted to be brought back here for therapy." "You won't treat her?" Sawyer asked. Woulfe pursed his lips. "Unfortunately, as a physician I've to consider the Hippocratic oath. She's a sick person in need of treatment. I have that treatment -- therefore I can't withhold it. I could only wish a similar morality bound those who employ her services." "How does this concern me?" "It's a question of gaining access to Cassius's mind. As you know, the mental models any mind-jaunt explores are coded to make the model intelligible only to someone who can comprehend the symbolism. It would take me six months to understand her use of imagery. But we already know that you and she can read each other directly, or she wouldn't be in her present difficulty. It's been suggested that you do a jaunt into Cassius's mind to perform the necessary therapy." Sawyer said, "What?" so loudly that No-name jumped and dropped his cigar. "You want me to do a mind-jaunt on Cassius?" "I don't want -- Cassius does," said Woulfe. "My own advice is that it would be a very foolish thing to try. Knowing what your reaction would be, I already took the liberty of refusing on your behalf." "You're damned right I refuse. One contact with that bitch is enough for a lifetime. Sorry I've wasted your time." "Hold a minute. Sawyer." Noname had risen to his feet and the look on his face was dangerous. "Specifically, what are your objections?" "You need them spelled out? She's an expert on brainwashing and torture science. From what I can gather she's the most ingenious and singularly ruthless operator in the game. In my view such people shouldn't exist outside a nightmare." "That's only your view," said No-name abruptly. "But it's for precisely those talents that we need her. I'm offering you five thousand pounds -- tax free -- to change your mind." "Get lost." "Twenty thousand -- and that's my final offer." "It isn't a question of money. Woulfe, I want out of here." "Don't be in such a hurry, Doctor Sawyer." Commander Jacks of the M.O.S. entered the fight almost apologetically. "I've been researching your Laser Metrology outfit. Although you're retained by main contractors, most of their funding comes from government contracts. If you were security blacklisted you'd sink like a stone. If my sums are right you could finish with liabilities touching a does that grab you?" "That's blackmail." "We prefer to call it diplomacy," said Teddington-Wright. "What's it to be. Sawyer? Twenty thousand pounds tax free, or bankruptcy?" "I need time to think about it." Sawyer looked around wildly. "Sorry, Woulfe. I've had as much of this as I can take." need to apologize," said #I Woulfe, following him out of the room. "You merely confirmed what I'd already told them. But I didn't think they'd lean on you as hard as that." "They're desperate to get Cassius back. But the whole proposal amazes me. I was partly responsible for her condition in the first place. How come she's asking me for help?" "I see two possibilities, Martin. One: you may have touched some empathic chord in Doctor Cass that makes you the one person she'll allow to trample around in her mind. Remember that in her profession there are more than the usual number of things one may not want exposed." "And the second possibility?" "Is that she may want you to enter her mind so she can punish you. Rationally or not, she still blames you for the circumstances that put her in my care." "How ill is she?" "I don't rate her as badly off as some seem to think -- but there's no doubt she's seriously disturbed." "May I see her?" "I wouldn't advise it." "Just for a minute?" "If you insist. But it'll have to be under supervision. I wouldn't put it past her to attack you on sight. You've been considerably on her mind." Slightly apprehensive, Sawyer followed Woulfe to a part of the Institute where all the doors were locked. At a particular door two armed servicemen stood guard. Their function was more obviously to stop intruders than to prevent the escape of the occupant. They insisted on accompanying Woulfe and Sawyer into the room. The room itself was large and luxurious. It was as unlike a hospital room as any that Sawyer could have imagined. Rather, it resembled a drawing room of an aristocratic house. The broad, leaded windows looked out onto acres of well kept parkland and the antique perfection of the furnishings contained an inbuilt invitation torest and quietude. Inside the room was Cassius -- the infamous Dr. Andrea Cass -- whose expertise in the techniques of persuasion had made her the most sought-after practitioner of mindrape and torture science -- and probably the most feared and hated woman in the world. At this moment she was standing pensively at the window looking lost and very frail and feminine. Despite her relative youth Sawyer thought the gray streaks in her hair were more marked than he remembered. She turned as Sawyer entered and her smile of recognition was not without a trace of bitter humor. "Martin! It's been a long time." "Six months is all," Sawyer said carefully. "That six months came directly out of my life." Her voice held reproach and she touched her face as she must have done a thousand times to reassure herself that the mirror was not lying. "I underestimated you, Martin. I won't make that mistake another time." "There won't be another time, Andrea. I don't go for the kind of games you play." "Then you won't accept the challenge?" Something of the old, bright tiger had awakened behind the curtains of her eyes. "What challenge?" "To see what life is like in the world of Andrea Cass. Access to the life model of the bitch of the century." "It's not my scene. I'll wait till it comes out as a paperback." "Whom are you afraid of, Martin? Yourself or me?" "A good question. I'm afraid both for and of myself. I don't give a damn about you." "Yet you couldn't resist coming here." Her gaze was deep and penetrating. "Shall I tell you why? You had to see if the legend was still as formidable as you remembered. You couldn't resist the temptation of standing in the shadow of danger." "You're right, Andrea. You are the bitch of the century." "Perhaps of the millennium, Martin. Doesn't that intrigue you? Hell I can read you like a book. You've a masochistic love of trouble. You don't enjoy it, but you're hooked on it. That's why I know you're going to make this jaunt." "No. It's the reason I'm not going to make the jaunt. Knowing you has raised things in me I never knew existed. Given half a chance I might be tempted to finish the job I loused up last time. This time around I might kill you." "Good. Then it's settled. Half a chance is exactly what I'm offering." "I haven't yet agreed to anything." "Give me your hand, Martin." The bright tiger behind her eyes .vas restless and alive. Unthinkingly he offered her his hand. She took it with fingers that were incredibly soft and cold. Then she moved more rapidly than his eyes could follow. He stood looking stupidly at the white weals across the veins of his wrist, just beginning to redden with beads of blood. W oulfe's intercession was swift. In the corridor outside he looked at the damage and grinned wryly. "We'd better get this dressed. All in all I think it's less than you deserved. I told you I didn't advise you to see her." "You also advised me not to make the jaunt. I'm going to make it, though." "I'll have you certified first." "That's your privilege. I wouldn't respond to blackmail. But I'm a sucker for a challenge." "That's what she's playing on. She's a clever woman. What she's asking me to set up isn't a therapy session -- it's war. And I don't see you in the role of crusader." "Look at it this way. Something must have made Cassius the way she is. Here's an opportunity to find out what." "And when she eats you?" "She'll try it anyway some day. I could see it in her eyes. If I'm going to have to face her I'd prefer to do it now rather than later." Woulfe smiled ruefully and shook his head. "That's probably the only rational thing you've said so far. This could be the first case in medicine where the prognosis was worse for the therapist than for the patient. You can't have considered what you'd be getting into." "Cassius's mind, would you believe?" "Cassius's world is a better description. Take it from me it's a bitter, violent territory. It contains cruelties and extremes your soft upbringing has left you unequipped to face. Furthermore, it's a place where she makes the rules and where the possibilities are limited only by her imagination. You don't need me to remind you that mindjaunt experiences can be every bit as painful as their real-life equivalents." "That I accept. But with a little cooperation between us I can go in there with at least a fighting chance." "You don't stand any sort of chance. Compared to the type of mind to which you've been exposed, Cassius is an alien mentality. Why take the risk?" "Think about the lady for a moment, Woulfe. You've probably suffered from her even more than I. Should we aim to cure the superficial trauma that brought her here -- and have her go back to practicing her atrocities? Or do we take this opportunity to penetrate to the depths of her personality? Suppose I could get to the root of what makes her the particular sort of bitch she is?" Woulfe's eyes widened with speculation. "She wouldn't let you penetrate that deeply." "It must be very lonely to be Cassius. Who'd ever offer a sympathetic ear to her private hurts and grievances? And what could be more comforting than actually to be able to show the wounds rather than merely to tell about them?" Woulfe's consideration ended in rejection. "The idea's tempting. But it's too dangerous. It's naive to think that her penchant for cruelty was induced by circumstance. It's as likely to be innate. And that would leave you exactly where she wants you -- as the object of a spiteful game." "I'm going to be the object of that game some day. She's not going to let me get away -- so at least let me meet her under conditions where I can yell for an out when the going gets rough. Under other circumstances I might not get the option." "Very well," Woulfe said finally. "I'll set it up. But I've the curious feeling she's manipulating both of us. Are you going to take their money?" "Have it made payable to Amnesty International. I don't think the irony'll be lost on No-name." II nr he principle of the mindJL jaunt is fairly simple," said Woulfe. "I wish I could say the same for the application. The online computer complex alone is probably the most powerful in the country." No-name looked baffled. The size of the operation clearly amazed him. "Without getting technical, Woulfe, explain to me how you manage to get one person into another." "Fortunately we don't have to. In every person's brain there's a perceptual model -- a model of the world as the individual sees it. The information's coded in the brain in a complex multi-access store. By finding another brain that uses a similar code we can explore the model as though it were a threedimensional replica." "Son of a bitch!" said No-name, rolling his eyes as if to look inside his own head. "So how do you get in? Through a hole?" "Nothing half so inexpensive. In the brain is an entity called the cognicenter. This is a spark of consciousness that inhabits the model just as the individual inhabits the world at large. The cognicenter is a phase phenomenon -- the mutual intercept point of seven different biological rhythms. The presence of the cognicenter causes the model itself to give off discharges we can reconstitute electronically to reproduce the original mind scene." "Hold it a minute, Woulfe. That's all gobbledygook to me. The cognicenter sounds like a subversive organization that needs investigation by a Senate committee." It was Woulfe's turn to raise his eyes to the ceiling. He ignored the interruption. "In mind-jaunt therapy we don't use the natural cognicenter at all. We create an artificial cognicenter by a pulse stimulation technique and track this through the model in response to the activities of our viewer equipped with a jaunt suit. While he actually walks in the jaunt theater or out on the field, his experiences are those of being present in the model." "And that's how' Sawyer's going to get into Doctor Cass's mind?" "She and Martin operate on the same wavelength, so to speak. He'll take a jaunt into her mind and attempt to get to the location of the trauma that is causing her present distress. When he gets there he'll have to repair the mind-wound under my direction." "And there's no chance it'll hurt her?" "It's not her I'm worried about. In order to make the access possible we have to present the full spectrum of sensations derived from the model: sight, sound, smell, touch, pain -- the lot. Effectively, while Sawyer's in Cass's mind he's an inhabitant of her inner world. Remembering what Doctor Cass stands for and the fact that she's developed a deep-seated grudge against Sawyer, it's quite likely she'll trade the therapeutic benefits for the chance of revenge." "Baloney." "Is it, Mr. No-name? You're a man with a free-ranging mind. It could be that you're on Cass's wavelength too. How'd you like to make Sawyer's jaunt? How'd you like to be exposed to Cass's imagination?" No-name stopped and searched his pockets for another cigar. He found one. As he lit it his eyes became fixed on the small, sharp gas-flame from the lighter. His hand began to tremble violently. "Son of a bitch!" he said fervently and, with a strained expression on his face, went straight back to his car. W oulfe turned back to Sawyer. "You haven't yet seen our new mind-jaunt facility, have you, Martin? A bit of an improvement on the abandoned airstrip where we started. We've a small, covered jaunt theater for training and detail work and a two-mile square open course for major exploratory work. Most of the electronics is now plumbed in, so we've been able to bring the weight of the jaunt suits down a bit. We're sticking to radio links, however, because of the mobility they allow." "If I yell for out, just how long d'you reckon it'll take to get me clear?" "There's a snag here. The increased power of the new equipment forces us to be careful with the disconnection sequence. If we're not you'll get a sensory overload that could knock you silly for days. We need a rundown time of about three minutes. Whatever you get into, give us at least that much notice." "It doesn't qualify as an emergency escape system." "All the more need for you to be careful. I don't know what Cass has up her sleeve, but I suspect she's bribed one of the lab staff to brief her on operating procedure. She could know as much about the technical limitations as we do. So don't cut your margins too fine." "She could do a lot of damage in three minutes. What I really need is an instant exit." "I've been thinking about that," said Woulfe. "The best I can offer is a jump facility. This momentarily upsets the phases of the generators controlling the cognicenter point in the model. It produces an instantaneous shift to another part of the model. Where you jump to is arbitrary -- and it won't take her very long to find you. But it could buy some valuable time if she's putting on the pressure." They came now to the mind-jaunt theater. A trainee doctor was going through a simulated run in the jaunt suit. Strapped on the harness around his body were the sensors that defined his position in the theater, the transmitters that passed this information on to the computers, and the receivers that relayed the mind-jaunt information back to the equipment in the helmet. As he moved around the theater the sights and sounds and impressions he was receiving from the helmet corresponded step for step with his apparent progress through the model. Sawyer closed his eyes and steadied himself. A dry run through the limitations of a computer simulation was one thing -- a jaunt through the mind-wrenching and possibly painful realities of a living model was a thing different not only in degree but in kind. No computer model could reproduce the twists and subtleties, the sensations of presence and the dreadful interlock of personalities an actual mind-jaunt involved. The mind-jaunt helmet itself had evolved a lot since the last time he had worn one. It was lighter now, less cumbersome, and the headstraps had been replaced by Velcro strips. Unfortunately, for the sake of stability, a bearing yoke on the shoulders had padded bands that passed beneath the armpits -- sound engineering, but a potential death trap to somebody who might need to get out of the helmet urgently and regardless of the disconnection risk. "What do you think?" asked Woulfe. "I'm of two minds. Part of me says the value of the game isn't commensurate with the risk. The other part asks why the hell I'm worried. After all, Cass is only a woman." "Which notion could easily get you killed, Martin. Start thinking of her as only a woman and you're dead. Better think in terms of having to sup with the devil and sharing the same spoon." "Assuming for a moment that I manage to reach the seat of the trauma -- what's the procedure from there?" "You know what caused the condition, because you were an eyewitness. Under hypnosis I shall attempt to take her back to that point. If we can establish a replay all that's necessary is for you to arrange a different ending." "Thinking about it," said Sawyer, "I'm not too convinced it's necessary for me to go there at all. After all, her mind built the model. Why can't it effect its own repairs?" "To a slight extent it does. We all at times go through our models chipping off sharp corners to try to salve injured pride and prove we're not as incompetent and insignificant as reality suggests. It's a process known as rationalization. But such repairs are largely superficial. The cognicenter needs outside reinforcement if it's to do a decent job. Otherwise the cracks remain." "Is that what Cassius has done? Papered over the cracks in her mind with rationalization?" "I think her American doctors failed to appreciate that a mindjaunt experience is at least equivalent to an actual experience. Cassius's trauma resulted from a certainty that rats were eating her face -- you were a witness. The Americans chose to regard the rats as the product of suggestion. But in her circumstances the rats were as real as any rats you'll ever encounter. I propose you stage a gallant rescue attempt -- which will give her the opportunity to restructure the model without the lesion." "You've made my day!" said Sawyer. "That was all I needed -- to be appointed official ratcatcher to the bitch of the century. Do I get a choice of weapons? If so. I'd like a flame-thrower. By the time I'm through, Cassius will really have something to be neurotic about." Woulfe pursed his lips. "I appreciate the sentiment, Martin, but this is supposed to be a therapy session. The politics behind the situation are such that if any further harm comes to Cassius research into mind-jaunt will be written off for good. Which would be a pity. Mind-jaunt's the first approach to mental health that ever looked like becoming an exact science." Ill C assius herself seemed unconcerned. In the small, copperscreened annex adjacent to the computer room she lay composedly on an operating table while electrodes were taped to her scalp. Her response to Sawyer was a curious half-reproachful look, which concealed a hint of triumph. Sawyer found this more daunting than a display of overt hostility. He feared suddenly that her tactics might be more subtle than the range of his available defenses. Then the technicians turned their attention to him. Once a provisional route through Cassius's mind had been established it was planned that the therapeutic detail would be worked up in the covered jaunt theater. For the moment, however, Sawyer must work in the open on the two-mile field. The overcast sky threatened rain and presented no encouraging omen. Rather, it reflected his predominant mood now that the bravado had flown and the ordeal was about to begin. With the technicians were six students, eager and anxious to assist and appearing faintly envious of his position. Remembering his own raw introduction to mindjaunt, he thought their enthusiasm misplaced. To him the worlds encountered under the helmet were places of violence, fear and madness. The demands upon one's understanding and personality were ferocious and absolute. He doubted if any of the bright youths around him would really have cared to take his place had they known the truth about the world he was going into. Despite Woulfe's patient instruction, no lectures could prepare a man for the actual experience. In the final analysis the only factor that would count was a grim determination to survive. When the electrodes had been placed in contact with his scalp and the yoke and harness had been fitted the helmet was placed over his head. His immediate reaction was a claustrophobic fear. The headphones were silent and the picture tubes were dark. Though he stood in the midst of his team, he was effectively isolated from them. He could feel fingers working on the straps and harness and the gradual addition of weight as the equipment packs were added, but these were now alien sensations. His reality was a silent, total darkness, a multi-dimensional blank slate on which a new and unfamiliar world was soon to be inscribed. Perhaps equally with Cassius's antagonism, this new world itself was to be feared -- in it the strongman's slope could become the cripple's hill. It was a question of adjustment. His own cognicenter moved within its comfortingly familiar model which he had laid down over a lifetime. Cassius's background was a mystery. Yet now his senses were to enter her model, where even the basic precepts would seem alien and strange. He would have to grasp new concepts, interpret them and be able to handle himself within a new frame of reference. Such mental gymnastics were daunting enough when the model being entered was neutral. When the model was antagonistic -- especially the spiteful, frightful antagonism of Cassius -- the prospect was sufficiently ominous to make him break out in a cold sweat. Woulfe would attempt to monitor his progress throughout the jaunt, but the monitors would reflect little of the immediacy or the involvement that were a feature of the jaunt itself. Further, while every step of the way he would be accompanied by his group of assistants on the field, once he achieved breakthrough he would be subjectively very much on his own. Only the snug feel of the bulb of Woulfe's emergency jump button strapped against his palm offered any sort of comfort. T he induction period was signaled by a staccato rushing noise in the headphones and a spectral fireworks display on the picture tubes built into the helmet. The induction time was unusually long. Apparently Cassius's brain was resisting the insertion of a foreign cognicenter. Several times the images nearly gelled only to be rejected back into a formless chaos. Even under Woulfe's mind-relaxing drugs her brain still presented a nearly impenetrable barrier to the mind-probe pulses, refusing to fall into syntonic harmony. Then came breakthrough. With a breathless quieting of the mush which had filled his senses, the scene suddenly crystallized and hardened. His first second of exposure left him shocked and amazed and fervently wishing he had not volunteered. He found himself standing in a garden, but this fact was secondary to the welter of impressions that assailed him. The clarity and fidelity of the scene was a study in sensory agony. He had not realized how dull and blunted his own senses had become until this instant when they had been bypassed and he had been fed the full-pitch version of the world as Cassius knew it. The incredible resolution of her vision was matched by a heightening of tactile sensation, hearing, taste and smell. It was as though he had lived all his life in a thick shell that had suddenly been sloughed away. His brain was unused to receiving the product of such naked sensitivity. It hurt. "Breakthrough?" Woulfe asked out of nowhere. "And how! You sure the damn thing's adjusted right? Nobody could live at this pitch of sensitivity." "Cassius does," said Woulfe unfeelingly. "I warned you hers was almost an alien mentality. She has a sensory hyperacuity that places her constantly closer to the threshold level. This perhaps explains her preoccupation with pain in other people." "Can't you turn it down?" Sawyer asked. "No. The information's not coded in analogue form. It would be a major computing exercise to attenuate it. In any case you're going to need to be keyed to the same pitch if you're to match her on her own ground." Sawyer shrugged resignedly and turned his attention back to his surroundings. Despite the improvement in equipment there was still a slight delay between his making a movement and the computer's detecting it and matching it with an adjustment of the position of the artificial cognicenter in Cassius's model. It was something to which he would quickly adjust and it was the only factor that detracted from his perfect sense of being present in the model. The first thing he noticed was that he was barefoot. Although he knew that in reality his feet were firmly encased in shoes, in Cassius's model he could feel every individual blade of grass soft under his feet, and a pearling of dew that created a chill that was barely tolerable. The feeling was sensual and ure. R ising on a hill above a river, the .superb lawn on which he was standing formed a long, artistic crescent set at its narrowed top with rock arrangements hedged with bright flowers. It took him a few moments of wandering over the dew-soaked grass to realize that the lawn was actually shaped like a huge, broad-bladed scimitar, with the rocks and flowerbeds expertly interwoven to stimulate its jewelencrusted hilt. The convex edge of the blade had incursions of crimson flowers representing life-blood still dripping from the edge. Thus a scene of great beauty was tainted by the morbid whim of a master gardener. There was something faintly insane and alien about the precise care that had been taken to produce so wry and bloodthirsty a joke. Sawyer started violently. Having thought himself alone, he was disturbed to find Cassius so close to him without warning. Instinctively he stepped back to put a prudent distance between them. His nervousness made her laugh. "A short truce, Martin. I want you to understand what you've got yourself into." "I think you called it the mindscene of the greatest bitch of the century." "That was an understatement. The truth goes deeper." Sawyer watched her curiously. He knew that in reality all that he was seeing was Cassius's cognicenter -- the point of heightened activity in the brain that caused the cells of the model to discharge, thus creating the condition of awareness. The mind, however, usually vested the cognicenter in an idealized impression of the person's own outward appearance, thus giving critical life to a psychological abstract. The Cassius before him was different from the one he had known. She was younger, perhaps still in her late teens, and her dark hair was long and untroubled by streaks of gray. She was clad in a garment of white folded silk and her dress and manner made him notice for the first time a faintly oriental quality in her face. "How old is this memory, Andrea?" "We're back ten years or so. There's something I particularly want to show you here." "Is it relevant to the therapy?" he asked. "No. But it's relevant to what shaped a bitch like Andrea Cass." She held out her hand. Sawyer pointedly ignored it. He was still looking at the long sweep of the scimitar lawn and trying to fathom the twisted mentality behind it. She followed his gaze. "My ancestors laid that lawn a thousand years ago. Its location was carefully chosen. From the house at sunset you can actually see the blood draining from the blade into the river." "What house?" "Up there on the hill. The House of Tsi. The place where I was born." "I thought you were European. This isn't Europe." "No, we're in Asia now. Exactly where doesn't matter. My mother was American. My father was Tsi -- and the Tsi admit no national allegiance. They have an unbroken tradition of their own going back a thousand years. It's no ordinary family. Come! It's important you understand." Because of the incredible fidelity of the scene, it was easy for Sawyer to forget that both he and she were only cognicenters in the halls of Cassius's mind. He followed her up a path of little steps that twisted and turned invitingly as they climbed the hill. His impression of her was probably her own idealized picture of herself as she had been at that age. Even allowing for some enhancement of the image, she must have been a creature of rare attraction. She moved with a lithe effortlessness, disconcertingly feline. He found a curious fascination in noting how exquisitely controlled was her every movement. H is own clumsy ascent caused him to feel more acutely the sharpness of the climb. He was glad when they reached the level bowl in the hillside in which the house was set. Here they encountered numerous transients -- fleeting images of the hundreds of people and events occupying the model at this timedepth, yet whose relevance was insufficient to ensure a permanent place in the mind-scene. If he concentrated carefully, he could follow them individually: a herdsman cursing recalcitrant goats; horsemen barebacked on wild mounts thundering down into the valley; a cart piled past the point of equilibrium, slowly tipping in a rut -- idle snapshots of life that had caused a moment of attention and had then fallen into the limbo between remembrance and forgetfulness. As soon as he ceased to watch them deliberately they dissolved to less than shadows. Some inhabitants of the model were more than transients, however. These were the expected occupants of the scene. When it encountered them a cognicenter could elicit a typical response, although the dialogue could not be sustained unless reinforced by suggestion or external perception. Thus two large dogs stood rigid before the gates, actually able to see and sense the arrival of the cognicenters, which were Cassius and himself. Cassius stopped between the dogs and spoke to them. The dogs greeted Cassius eagerly, then, curiously, forgot her presence and wandered away as though she had ceased to exist. The house itself was a blend of many ages and many moods, faintly oriental yet seeming characteristic of no particular place or period. It was a large, white, rambling structure with many split levels where it ran against the hill. To the right of it, a second, lower group of buildings partly cloaked by trees, suggested the presence of stables and perhaps a household guard. As they entered the portal. Sawyer deliberately tested the material of the wall with his fingers, still vaguely refusing to believe that such seeming solidity was purely an electronic chimera and that everything he was experiencing was being drawn from the soft pulpiness of Cassius's brain. His fingers encountered stone and plaster and cement indistinguishable from the fabric of any ordinary building. In the great, ornate hall of the house, servants were cleaning; their faintly mongoloid faces turning to Cassius with a respectful bow that trailed away uncompleted as they failed to maintain perception of the ghosts who walked among them. Cassius passed them all without acknowledgement and mounted the stairs, signaling for Sawyer to follow. She entered a suite of rooms on the first floor. Here, in a chair of woven cane, sat a little brown man so advanced in years that Sawyer could happily have believed that he was the oldest man alive, "Chu Tsi," said Cassius in a voice slightly hushed with awe. "Master of the present House of Tsi and perhaps the most terrible of them all. His forefathers were the makers of warrior kings, but Chu Tsi is a maker of legends." "I don't understand that." "For centuries the sons of Tsi have been taken from their mothers at the age of five to be trained as warriors. The training is brutal and extreme, but completely effective. By the age of seven the Tsi child can ride, hunt, shoot, fish and live off the land where occasion demands. At eight, he's toughened by being put through the rigors of extremes of heat and cold and deprivation. He has to live for days without food or sleep and swim rivers with his arms tied behind his back. He has to learn such iron discipline that he will walk barefoot into fire if ordered to do so." "The Stoics never had it so good," said Sawyer. "At nine, he's trained to kill with every kind of weapon and with his hands. As a guarantee of his proficiency, and to ensure proper sleeping habits, two assassins are hired to kill him. Not only must he withstand them, but he must kill them both and cut from each the heart and liver and eat these publicly to prove that there's nothing within or without him of which he's afraid. After he has proved he's worth the trouble his education begins. It lacks nothing from any Western standpoint." "So what makes Chu so special?" "Oh, Chu's a man of the twentieth century. The abacus is replaced by the computer. Not for him the women in purdah and the female infants put to death. On Chu's decision, the daughters are now trained as warriors equally with the sons." "Is that what they did to you?" "Yes." There was pain and a great weariness in her eyes. "I was trained as a Tsi warrior. I'd killed five men by the age of ten, and there was nothing I didn't know about exhaustion and suffering. Chu is exquisitely fair -- he makes no concessions of any sort because of a warrior's sex. "Woman's lib carried to its logical conclusion?" "Whatever hell he made of childhood, I have to admit his policy was justified. No matter in what profession they've engaged, famous or infamous, the children of Tsi have all become legends in their own lifetimes. The Tsi kingmakers have lost none of their dominance. They've merely widened their sphere of influence." "Why did I need to know this?" "Because I want you to know what you're up against. I don't want you to fall too soon, Martin. It would spoil my enjoyment of the game." T he old man in the cane chair stirred and opened his eyes -- eyes that even at his extreme age were as bright and penetrating as those of Cassius. His gaze lingered on Sawyer for longer than an inhabitant of the model was supposed to be able to sustain attention. The fact raised a prickling sensation on Sawyer's neck. His tidy set of mindjaunt principles became not quite the absolutes he had thought them. Inexplicably in the old man's eyes he read a clear sign of recognition. Chu Tsi turned to Cassius and spoke a few words in a language Sawyer could not understand. The phrase seemed to surprise her and she countered with a sharp interrogation. Chu answered softly but firmly and waved his hand as though the matter were not open for discussion. Cassius made a sign of obeisance, but it was obvious that the interview had not gone as she had planned. Finally the old man lapsed back into unawareness. "What was all that about?" asked Sawyer. She was looking at him speculatively, a frown of puzzlement on her brow. "Something I hadn't anticipated, Martin. But it's not important. It's just that he told me something about you." "He knew me?" asked Sawyer, perplexed. "That's correct, Martin. He knew who you are and why you're here. He'd asked to see you." "That's ridiculous. He's part of your model -- a fragment of your memory." "That's only a partial truth. The idea of models in the mind is not new. The Tsi have known of them for centuries. Admittedly we didn't have Woulfe's mind-jaunt access, but that didn't prevent the Tsi from exploring. And that's where you've already made your first mistake." "How do you mean?" "I mean I've got you exactly where I want you. Not even that old fool Woulfe knew how much control I have over this model. I'm going to take my revenge on you, Martin. I'm going to punish you tenfold for what I suffered -- and then go on from there." "You're insane, Andrea." "If you think that, Martin, you've understood nothing I've told you about myself or the Tsi. I doubt you're that stupid. But either way, the truce is ended. You've five minutes to prepare. Then the war begins." She turned away and left him in the room. The little brown man in the chair still sat deeply in thought, as though trying to remember something that had slipped his memory. Though his eyes roved several times in Sawyer's direction, there was no evidence that he was still aware of the physicist's standing only meters from him. "Yes, Martin?" The psychiatrist answered out of nowhere. "Are you monitoring this sequence? How much of it is factual?" "Almost all of it, I'd say. There's no evidence so far that Cassius is distorting the model. What's the problem?" "Chu Tsi. He recognized me. I'm sure of it. But this memory's ten years old -- and I've never met him. How come an inhabitant of Cassius's model seems to have a life of his own?" "There's no answer to that -- except to affirm it's impossible. But I hadn't realized the Tsi had a knowledge of mind-scenes. Cassius could be more adept at controlling the model than we've allowed. Want to be pulled out while we think about it?" "No -- let it run. We'll learn a lot quicker that way." "I've learned a lot already. She wants to punish you, but there's another idea behind that one that has to do with the Tsi. I don't know enough of the language to be able to follow all the conversation, but the phrase Chu used to her translates as 'worthy choice.' Whether worthy friend or worthy enemy wasn't stated." "I don't get the implication," he replied. "Nor do I. But be doubly careful, Martin. She's playing a deeper game than we imagined." Finally Sawyer came to the opinion that Cassius was not going to return. She had given him five minutes to prepare. Seven minutes had elapsed and nothing had happened. Such a hiatus was curious. Becoming increasingly wary, he started to explore. The servants cleaning the hall met him with a startled surprise that immediately trailed into forgetfulness. He walked around them, knowing that to the touch they were indistinguishable from real people, yet continued communication between him and them was impossible. They were inhabitants of Cassius's model and belonged to a place and a time of which he had no part. The front door was closed and he approached it cautiously. The portal suggested itself as an ideal place for a trap. Opening the door revealed nothing to justify his suspicions. He stood for many seconds studying the slope of the hill and wondering what might be concealed in the dead ground beyond the edge of the bowl. Then he stepped through the doorway and the instant change of light and scene told him exactly what sort of trick Cassius had prepared for him. S he had somehow rearranged the model so that as he crossed the threshold he moved not into an adjacent mind-scene but into one removed in time and place from the scene where he had been. Suddenly he was back in London in the model of a dingy street -- the scene of the incident that had been the cause of Cassius's breakdown. He should have been brought to this point later, when Cassius had been returned here under the influence of Woulfe's hypnosis. Instead she had recreated the scene herself. She had not made a very good job of it. Whole areas, for which Sawyer could remember the details, were merely blocked grays and blacks in Dr. Cass's model. The windows were featureless. The walls trailed into a vague fusion a few meters above his head and the roads leading to the area were illperceived backdrops without any actual existence. Only Cassius herself was more carefully drawn. She stood against the wall exactly as he remembered, now the maturer woman he knew, with the gray streaks in her hair and a mocking venom in her eyes. "Yes, Martin?" She was about ten meters distant and the whole scene was hushed and hollow, as though it were taking place inside a teacup. "You recognize this scene. It's where you once let me be eaten by the rats. You'd have killed me that day if you hadn't made a mistake." "I don't deny it. But there are no rats here now." "They're here, Martin. They always will be. But I've learned to come to terms with them. I've papered over the memory -- to borrow one of Woulfe's favorite expressions." "Then you didn't really need me here at all." "It was naive of Woulfe to think he could recreate the conditions of the trauma and give it a different ending. I needed you here for two quite different reasons. I want something from you that you won't be prepared to give. And I want revenge." From the corners of his eyes Sawyer thought he detected the surface of the road twitching. He saw -- or imagined -- a random movement that tended to vanish when he looked at it directly. The effect bothered him, but he could not explain it. It was related to the movement of transients, but there were no transients in this part of Cassius's model. She had not observed the scene when anyone other than himself had been present. The only thing missing from the scene was a horde of carnivorous... The mystery was explained. Scarcely beneath the depth of Sawyer's perception the horrifying throng of rodents still fermented. Whether Cassius was rescanning the model to a lower level, or whether the rats were permanently close to breaking back into the scene, was not important. The critical thing was that they appeared to be slowly surfacing. He could already hear their squeaking and scuffling and smell their incredibly foul stench. Cassius was aware of their emergence and watched their progress with a fixity that suggested there was some critical value to which she would let the phenomenon develop before she intervened. Sawyer stood with a new understanding of what the scene meant to her. What he had not before appreciated was the effect of Cassius's heightened sensitivity. Although he was familiar with the scene, he was now viewing it through her interpretation and the sheer force of her dread surged up in waves that engulfed his senses. The stench became physically intolerable. It hit him with a nausea that left him weak on his feet. The rodents' snarling, squealing voices spoke -- each with a separate, distinguishable tone. The blood lust was apparent in their eyes and in the movement of their quick, incisive jaws. Here was horror multiplied by the fidelity of its reproduction. These were the creatures who had encircled Cassius and leaped upon her and begun to feast upon the flesh of her hands and face. These were the creatures... Sawyer grew worried. The scene was fully formed now. The creatures were in every sense alive and dangerous. Although the mindscene remained, Cassius was suddenly gone. He found himself alone in the grotesque cavern of memory with hundreds upon hundreds of ravenous flesh-eating rats whose original target had withdrawn. His own mobility was limited by the fact that Cassius had only an imperfect knowledge of the original place from which the scene was drawn. It was a curious sensation, knowing that one was in the analogue of a place one knew, yet finding familiar means of access were now only symbols instead of thoroughfares. Of such material were nightmares made. The rats had become restless upon the withdrawal of Cassius. Many of them had already investigated in Sawyer's direction and now their interest grew. One leaped bodily onto his arm and plunged up the outside of his sleeve. As it reached his shoulder, he struck out in panic. For an instant the creature clung to his hand, claws gripping and teeth snapping viciously. With an urgent swing of his wrist he managed to shake it off, but not before it had bitten deeply into his little finger. He knew then what to expect. Having tasted blood, the rat rallied from where it had fallen and hurled itself back to the attack. Others who had been undecided found this the encouragement they needed. In a living, carnivorous carpet, the whole mass of them moved towards Sawyer, anxious for the kill. Having examined his finger, he was in no doubt of the damage even one rat could do. The fact that the vermin existed only in Cassius's mind was irrelevant. As an occupant of her world their existence for him was indisputable. There was no place to which he could run and he had no weapons he could use for his defense. His only hope of escape was to use the yet untried jump device, the bulb of which he could feel against his wrist. With turned fingers he found he could just reach the actuator. As the horrifying tide of vermin reached his shoes he pressed the button. Fortunately it worked. V H e found himself transferred instantaneously to a curiously forbidding place and an air of cold unreality clawed at his whole being. The new scene was alien and strange, as though the model were drawn from a world that had ever existed. The sky was not sky at all but an expanse of interminable twilight. It had no features except at one point where the white haze turned back a fiery glow, as though reflecting the presence of some demoniac furnace. Even the light had a peculiar quality, with no diffusion or scattering of illumination to the underside of leaves or grasses, producing an all-or-nothing surrealistic effect of muted tones and colors fringed with unexpected shade. He was on a forlorn heathland covered with sparse, undernourished grass and warped and stunted shrubs. It was a wasteland that only grudgingly permitted the existence of life, then mocked it as it grew. "Woulfe, where the devil am I?" "I was wondering the same thing. The jump overreached and took your cognicenter out of the model proper. What we're reading now is something out of the deep brain." "It reads like a model." "Emotions have to be formalized somehow. It could just be that the deep brain also uses analogue models. But don't take what you see too literally. At this mind depth you're reading emotion and instinct, not structural memory." "Unforgiving and brutal is about the most charitable description I can offer. If that's a sample of the emotion our worst fears are confirmed. The whole place shrieks with a resentment of life." "I warned you Cassius's cruelty was likely to be innate. This rather proves the point. Still think you can plough good soil from a granite hillside?" "At least I'd like to look around a bit. I can see something in the valley over there that might be interesting." "You're the eternal optimist, Martin. But you're on hallowed ground where Cassius is concerned. If she catches you probing this deep she'll unleash all hell to stop you." The way down to the valley was a recessed and twisted track of large brown stones set in cracked, inclement clay. It could once have been the bed of a river, except that water here would have been out of character -- though it might have nurtured some of the tortured flora on the banks. As he rounded a bend Sawyer found himself on the outskirts of a broken township, which occupied the valley. Massive disaster rather than time seemed to have been the agent that had torn the scene apart. Before him was desolation without parallel. He was right in his surmise that the road might once have been a watercourse. Soon he found himself below a broken bridge -- a ruined watermill hung its appendages uselessly askew over this place where no more water ran. Above the bank, depression drifted like a mist, draining out of the gray and twisted shells of the houses and shops and syphoning down the broken assemblage of a wharf. Wonderingly he climbed to higher ground. Whatever disaster had killed the town, its finality had been absolute. No life stirred around the broken walls, nor was there any sign of clearance or rebuilding. The inhabitants who once had lived here must have long abandoned hope and either fled or given up all thoughts of reclamation. as he moved through the broken rV streets he could see that one solitary building stood intact high on the hillside. This was a white, domed temple standing impressive and unscathed, as if untouched by the furies that had crushed the town. Here was a monument of triumph in the midst of desolation. In fact, so broadly stated was its triumph that he began to wonder if it had not also a measure of responsibility for the damage to the township around it. He became interested in what sort of people could have lived here and what had been the nature of the disaster that had struck them. Where the damage was less than total he began to pry into broken ruins and press warily along dark, ruined hallways. The results of his investigation left him with a peculiar feeling. He saw no evidence of furnishings or interior decoration and nothing to suggest that any of the houses had ever been occupied or even completed. It was as though the whole scene had been constructed deliberately as ruins. The purpose of this gross and gigantic film-set was lost on him until he emerged back into the streets and saw the white, unblemished temple sitting in serene arrogance above him on the hill. "For the greater glory of Cassius," said Woulfe's disembodied voice. "Who would have thought she was still a virgin?" "What are you reading, Woulfe?" "The symbolism, Martin. Unsullied purity set in a high place amid a sea of degradation." "To heck with symbolism that's moulded of bricks and marble. What happens if I go up there and write obscenities on the wall?" "I suspect you'd never make it. But the idea does have appeal. You'll be the first independent entity to have entered the territory -- other than Cassius herself. But God help you when she catches up!" "What's she doing now?" "Hunting pretty wildly through the model looking for you. Like myself, she'd no idea you could get into her as deep as you've managed. But it's only a question of time before she finds you." "I'm going up to the temple. I want to find out what sort of deity she imagines herself to be." The road up the hill was weird. It was paved with granite blocks worn smooth as though it had once been a much used thoroughfare. Little gray houses flanking the way had been crushed from above, as if swiped by a godlike hand which had objected to their obscuring the view of the white edifice on the hill. The road was also strewn with rubble and timbers which there had been no obvious attempt to clear. But a narrow, winding pathway led around and past the piles of debris, as though spmeone still came to or from the temple. It was not clear as to whether pilgrims visited or whether the goddess herself came frequently to gloat over the totality of her powers of destruction. As he approached the temple his objective eye found the scene even more curious. The monstrous plinth on which the place was built had literally been set down on the older fabric of the town and sat untidily on top of the crushed rubble. It was obviously a concept rather than a structure, and certainly it had not been sited by an engineer. The broad gap under the plinth, from which broken fragments of the older houses still showed, suggested an impatience and a petulance about its placing. Yet Sawyer judged the weight of the edifice to be about right for the degree to which it had compacted the rubble underneath. It seemed that even in the depths of Cassius's mind the principles of physics still maintained some sort of discipline. Climbing the high edge of the plinth took a great deal of physical effort, but finally he managed it. From there on it was an easy matter to ascend the great marble steps and enter the building itself. Everything from floor to ceiling was of the same white marble and the artistry that had gone into the structure's design was unique and marvelous. The dismaying thing was that it was empty, a series of halls and corridors completely without function, furniture, decoration or any feature of interest. The ambition and imagination that seemed to have been expended in its conception had failed to a cold nothingness when given the task of elaborating the interior. Intrigued, Sawyer toured all the major areas, feeling rather like a mouse in a series of cardboard boxes. If Cassius were a goddess here, her faith was a hollow and sterile thing. He went out by the way he had come and jumped back into the rubble surrounding the temple, searching for something with which to defile the pointless perfection of the structure. He returned with a handful of charred wood that made a healthy if ill-defined mark. With this he went around the edifice inscribing on the walls large and obvious phallic graffiti. Then he dropped again from the plinth, chuckling hugely to himself. He was not prone to issuing graffiti, but this was a measured gesture of defiance and rebuke that had a more than common point. Besides which, it improved his spirits remarkably. D espite Woulfe's prediction, Nemesis in the form of Cassius had still not descended upon him. He welcomed the continued opportunity to explore the strange scene, because here the symbols were unselfconscious and unguarded and represented a basic honesty that would not necessarily be found in the higher parts of the model which Cassius could manipulate. A red glow in the sky caught his attention and he picked his way carefully along the little path through the ruins toward the origin of the strange redness. From occasional mutterings through the headphones he was aware that the psychiatrist was following his progress on the monitors. Then he heard a grunt as though of comprehension as the bright flame in some fiery pit became apparent across the shattered landscape. "You on to something, Woulfe?" "We just made history, Martin. The symbolic confirmation of the great Freudian precept -- the human Id." Sawyer looked toward the embryo volcano with new respect. The ferocity of its subterranean fires became more impressive the closer he approached. Even from his present distance he could feel the ground vibrating slightly in response to its deep-throated roar. Jets of flame reared and thundered about the open rim, speaking of fantastic pressures and internal temperatures of thousands of degrees. "Look at it, Martin!" Woulfe sounded ecstatic. "The source point of the will to live. A blast of emotions so raw and powerful that sometimes even the mind's filters can't contain it. There's savagery and madness and love and hate all in one hectic mixture. From it we have the temerity to try to distill the thin gruel we call civilized behavior. No wonder we're not very good at it. Even a saint must derive his inspiration from a very personal hell." "Could this be the original of the hell-fire mythology?" asked Sawyer. "Has somebody been here and seen this before?" "We know the Tsi have been exploring the mind -- as have many mystics. I suspect that some drugs and toxic confusion states also give at least partial access to these regions. I think a few people may have had glimpses, but I doubt if anyone ever achieved your continuity of access." Sawyer had stopped listening. His attention was concentrated on a low ridge that lay between himself and the Id pit. For a moment he thought he saw a silhouette moving against the skyline, illuminated by stantly, fearing that some new fiends conjured by Cassius might be waiting for him ahead. When he looked again the movement was gone, but he remained with the firm conviction that something was certainly alive among the ruins around the pit. "Trouble?" asked Woulfe. "I've got visitors." "There have been no signs of life this far -- at least registering here." "Well, something moved. Is Cassius still occupied?" "She's still hunting, but she hasn't yet gotten down to your level." "Could be there're inhabitants here." "A fascinating proposition. Inhabitants in the deep mind could only have a symbolic role." "Want me to check it out?" he asked. "It's your show, Martin. You're the one taking the risks." W arily Sawyer moved forward, keeping low against the piles of rubble and broken walls. He was nearly to the ridge before he saw the party in front of him crossing haze of fire. A man and a woman, hand in hand and completely naked, were walking steadfastly toward the pit. Immediately behind them came a second couple. All four were clean-limbed, straight and youthful -- archetypes of the perfection of physical form. Keeping out of sight, Sawyer followed them over the ridge. He need not have worried about concealment, however, because the couples had eyes for nothing but the terrible pit they were approaching. They went on as if some blind compulsion ordered them toward the flames. Sawyer was about a hundred meters behind them at this point and they were halfway between him and the hell-pit, but even from his position the ground was sensibly warm and the radiant heat from the flames was hot upon his face. It needed no calculation to appreciate that the party in front of him was already in a region of severe physical discomfort and would soon reach a point past which human endurance would fail. Fascinated, he stopped and watched their progress. It must have been true that they felt the heat, suffered from it, were agonized and finally crippled by it -- but nothing halted their progress. For the ast ten meters of the way they were literally crawling over the redhot rim, and such was the realism of the scene that Sawyer could smell the sickening stench of burning flesh, acrid in his nostrils. If there was anything further to note it was the way in which, even in the depths of agony, the lovers still held hands as they toppled, charred and burning, into the pit. "Is that what you wanted to see, Woulfe? Me -- I feel sick." "More than I wanted to see, Martin. Cassius is also a fanatical puritan." "How do you make that out?" "These couples come down hand in hand from the temple through desolation into hell. You can see the path is deeply worn. To her this downward progress is an eternally continuing deal. And the consequences are, of course, unalterable." "You can make symbolism read any way you want," said Sawyer, unconvinced. "Like leaves in a teacup. You're as likely to be reading your own prejudices as reading the symbol." "Do you have another explanation?" Sheer bloody-mindedness. She just likes watching people suffer." "You're confusing cause and effect. She's punishing those over whom she has control as a token for a whole world that offends her moral ethic." "I still think she's just a vicious bitch." "We're both saying the same thing. The whole point is that what she's doing here is fundamental to her nature. Hopes of reclaiming Cassius are out." S awyer looked back toward the temple standing arrogant on the ruined hill. Cassius's psyche was a wasteland where the ancient schism between good and evil was continually played out as an atrocious drama. Even now he could see another pair of couples threading their way through the ruins, intent on giving themselves as sacrifice to the awful fires of Cassius's drive. There ought, he reflected, to be a comparable term to wasteland -- something called wastelife -- to encompass the despoliation of mankind. "Trouble," Woulfe said suddenly. "Cassius is digging deeper. I think she suspects where you are." Sawyer felt for the bulb of the jump button and adjusted it to within easy reach. "How much control would she have at this mind depth?" "Martin, you're at a very primitive level. At that depth -- hell, she's the Creator!" Sawyer released the jump bulb and stood waiting, watching with wry amusement as the white, featureless cardboard of the sky darkened with a growing storm. The whole atmosphere became tense and expectant -- taut, as with the winding of some cosmic mainspring. The tension rose to the point of crisis and continued until he wondered how much more it could climb before something snapped -- and exactly what would happen when it did. "Martin!" Cassius's voice was full of fury. It rolled across the scene like the sound of some great catastrophe. Sawyer swung around to find her only meters away and not fully formed optically. Her cognicenter refused to come to a coherent image, but hovered as a white diffusion that somehow more aptly described her anger. "You're not supposed to be here!" He detected undertones of shock and panic in her voice. "Some fool must have loused up the itinerary," he said. A black thunderbolt from nowhere shattered the ground beside him with such force that bricks and stones were crushed and the fragments grazed him as they passed. "I could kill you for this -- except end -- too mild -- less than you deserve." Her anger caused deep reverberations in the ground, like subterranean thunder. Parts of the ruins around Sawyer slipped and fell. "You gave me half a chance, Andrea. You wouldn't expect me to waste the opportunity." His voice maintained a reasonable calm. Another thunderbolt burst beside him. Hurtling fragments tore at his legs and bruised his back. Overhead a great storm gripped the terrain with black pincers, while the thunder began to shake it perceptibly. "Waste what opportunity? What have you done?" Panic edged her voice and the scene literally shook with emotion. Many of the ruins split and were leveled, leaving the temple almost naked on the hill. The little path itself was completely obscured. Whatever the final results of the jaunt, Cassius's deep-mind model was never going to have quite the same aspect. "Look at your temple, Andrea. See what I've done." For a moment the white, unfocused cognicenter hovered with agitation, as if uncertain whether or not to leave him. Then like a fleeting trace of smoke it fled straight across the wasteland to the temple. Scarcely had it reached there when one great cry of anguished disbelief screamed across the artificial heavens. "Defiled!" T he storm broke. A mighty wind rose like a tornado from around the edges of the pit and screamed a singeing breath across the shattered scene. A cloud burst overhead and glass-hard hailstones beat the ground in cold fury and rebounded shoulder high from the startled granite. Sawyer pressed himself against the remnants of a wall where an architrave gave him a little protection for his head. Thunder crashed and roared above and the ground itself began to heave and writhe and shake to pieces the scant protection he had contrived. The whole scene rose to the pitch of dark crescendo, an unbelievable anger that now shook him bodily and lashed and swirled and struck at him with all the physical forces at its disposal. With the jump bulb security in his hand, he took the punishment with fortitude, curious to know how much greater were the forces Dr. Cass had at her command. Such was the fury of the storm that the whereabouts of Cassius's cognicenter could not be determined. The violent lightning that raked the ersatz sky showed the temple maintaining its arrogance on the hill. The pit was displaying its own brand of anger. A strong surge of pressures below the surface belched masses of leaping incandescence high into the air and the vibration of its raging added to the inconceivable scream of the thunder. He wondered if the violence were inexhaustible -- or whether it must falter and be followed by a period of relaxation. Fantastically, however, the phenomena continued to climb to an even higher key, and such was the pitch of the maelstrom now, that the impression flooded together and became one continuing barrage of noise, light and pressure from which the individual impressions could not be sorted out. Sawyer felt his senses being swamped and knew that his physical danger had already reached acceptable limits. He therefore found the actuator on the jump bulb and pressed. In the instant that he did so, the white lace of a truly amazing lightning pulse lit the whole scene more clearly than he had seen it before. The marble temple threw the light back furiously across the subdued and terrified wastes. As he saw the scene, laughter rose to his iips and his exit was marked by a fantastic, mocking echo. For in that last moment he saw the awesome truth -- Cassius's temple had split in two. VI # # a breaction's one thing," x.said Woulfe plaintively. "But that was an effect of quite a different order." Sawyer's jump had terminated in what appeared to be a prison cell. A high, barred window admitted a minimum of daylight and the strong steel door had a shuttered grille through which the sound of steel-tipped boots echoed from a distant catwalk. Somewhere a truck or wagon was being pushed irregularly along an echoing corridor. These and the heat and the painted bricks of the wall were the only clues he had as to his whereabouts. "Where am I now, Woulfe?" "The time-depth places you in a memory about two years back. Cassius was at the height of her career then. The scene could be in any of many places using her advice." "Wherever it is, she knew it quite well. The detail's immaculate." "I doubt if there are many political interrogation centers outside the iron curtain she doesn't know in detail." The sound of feet marching in unison along the walkways heralded the arrival of a military detail, which halted outside the door. After a brief pause the door was opened and a soldier in brown denims entered. "You will come." His voice held a trace of a foreign accent, possibly SpanishAmerican. Sawyer regarded him curiously. He was a creature straight out of Cassius's imagination. As with the rats, here was no typical response and forgetfulness, here was a directed purpose -- a mental puppet, rather than an inhabitant of the model. Although the soldier's revolver remained at his hip he carried a heavy black stick which he used with pointed menace. One blow across Sawyer's shoulders convinced the physicist of the subjective reality of the guard. Sawyer accepted the wisdom of moving toward the door. Outside, a large, glass-roofed space covered the dizzying height of seven tiers of cell blocks arranged in two rows about a central hall. The whole was entangled by a web of walkways, stairways and an occasional bridge across the span. An escort of four waited outside the door and he went meekly to them, having no wish to be knocked down even a single flight of stairs. On the ground floor they traversed a long corridor and came to an office. As he stepped through the door he saw Cassius seated at the desk, waiting for him. "Come in, Martin." She motioned for the escort to stay closely attentive. "This time I choose the ground. You won't get a chance to go that deep again. Needless to say, I'll make you regret every second or your last invasion into my privacies. I also know you've some sort of random jump device. What I want to know is how you actuate it. Are you going to tell me or do I have to force it out of you?" "Why don't you work out the answer to that, Andrea?" "I'll see you in hell first." She motioned to the escort, who seized Sawyer's arms and dragged him to a wall where clamps had been set to hold his limbs immobile. Sweating with a sudden fear, he struggled against the restraint, but took a punch in the stomach that made him soften his resistance. However, as the clamps tightened he relaxed a little, being able to feel the comforting form of the jump bulb still safely below his palm. Cassius borrowed one of the black sticks from the guard and came to stand in front of him. Her eyes held a disturbed and distant look, as though the storm in the deep wasteland still raged. However, there was no doubt of her intention of doing him some physical damage. "Watch her," said Woulfe's voice. "She can't see the jump bulb because it's attached to the jaunt suit out here in the real world, but she's bound to suspect it's in one of your hands. I think she may try to break your fingers." Although she could not have heard the conversation Cassius must have judged from Sawyer's expression that he was in communication with the psychiatrist. With a sudden snarl of anger she smashed with the stick at Sawyer's hands. Fortunately he saw the stick begin to travel, and his reaction was instinctive. He pressed the actuator and jumped. Before the scene faded, however, he saw the light of triumph in her eyes. She knew now how he controlled the jump. S omething snatched at him, slammed him to a halt. Cassius was mastering his jump trick. Not only was she halting its randomness -- she had also learned to control his mobility. Not until the new scene crystallized did Sawyer realize the full extent of her proficiency. The mind-twisting circumstance into which he emerged was painful and inverted. His hands were secured to his ankles and he was supported, naked, by a square iron bar passed under his knees. He was on a "parrots perch" -- a favored starting point for torture interrogation in certain parts of the world. Whether Cassius was there or not he did not know, nor did he wait to find out. Barely enough mobility was left in his fingers to enable him to grasp the jump bulb. Even as he maneuvered it to apply pressure to the actuator, something started tearing his fingers open. In a moment of superhuman effort he caught the bulb and squeezed. For an agonizing second nothing happened. The forces tearing at his fingers increased. Then, mercifully, the scene dissolved. "That was too close," Woulfe said. He sounded worried. "She's learned to anticipate you. Next time you could be in real trouble. I'm going to have to pull you out, Martin." "Check. Speed it up, will you, Woulfe. Another one as close as that could lose me." "Stay out of trouble and don't attempt another jump. Withdrawal countdown is starting now." Sawyer scanned his new environment uneasily. He found he was now in one of a series of small prison compounds or cages. Behind him was a wooden hut. On the remaining three sides barbed wire fences rose seven meters high, through which he could see row upon row of similar cages and an occasional guard tower along a distant perimeter. Overhead, a brutal sun burned from a featureless blue sky and the baking sand on which he stood tortured his bare feet every time he took a step. Examination told him that he was dressed in a loose tunic of dull gray cloth from which previous bloodstains had scarcely been removed by washing. He swung in alarm as the door of the hut clicked open and two darkskinned policemen in tropical uniform came out, revolvers leveled. "Two minutes to run," said Woulfe. The policemen hurried in his direction. Sawyer could not place their nationality, but from their features and movements he judged that these were trained and educated men. Reluctantly he raised his hands, stood and waited for the arrival of his persecutors. At all costs he had to delay for at least another minute and a half. While one of the men covered him the other brought Sawyer's arms up behind his back and fastened them with heavy manacles. A gesture with a gun precluded any need for speech. They waved him toward the hut. "One minute to go," said Woulfe. Sawyer tried to stall. He received a kick and a cuff about the head for his trouble. At the door, the crisp whiteness of a surgical coat told him that he had been right to be afraid. Cassius was waiting for him, beckoning to his escort with impatience. A loaded hypodermic syringe was ready in her hands. "Thirty seconds, Martin." Woulfe was obviously watching his progress. The psychiatrist's voice was his only breath of hope. "Quickly, you idiots -- the sleeve!" Cassius, too, was aware that time was running out. The policeman needed no second telling. Rather than raise the sleeve, he tore the garment apart, leaving Sawyer's shoulder exposed to the neck. As Sawyer saw the needle coming he made a desperate twist. This was largely frustrated by his other captor's forcing his manacled hands up behind his back. The movement, however, delayed Cassius sufficiently for the black wing of mind-jaunt withdrawal to beat the needle just as it penetrated the flesh. W ith the blackout came a violent and instantaneous headache that made him feel physically ill. Presumably Woulfe had been monitoring the incident and had cut the withdrawal process critically With appropriate Spiritual development, you can come to know this as the absolute Truth, which it is, and really knowing this Truth will set you free from every form of limitation. Only #. If not completely satisfied, return material within one week for full refund. Box #G Miami, FI. # short. However, Sawyer counted it a small price to pay for removal from the hands of Cassius and her hypodermic needle. What the syringe contained he would probably never know. He could imagine she would have administered a drug that would have immediately robbed him of the capacity to operate the jump control. Wincing with the pain of his headache, he stood under the darkness of the helmet waiting for the technicians to come and release him from the jaunt suit. He was acutely conscious of the narrowness of his escape. His shoulder still registered a sharp pain where the needle had penetrated the flesh, and his heart was pumping wildly. Thankfully he felt hands around him, removing the packs and releasing the straps that held the helmet and secured the jump bulb at his wrist. Leaning forward he facilitated the removal of the helmet and was rewarded by a wave of light that swept in as it was lifted. The next instant he could have cried... The awful truth hit him with the force almost of a physical blow. The withdrawal -- the deliverance -- even Woulfe's voice was nothing but a mind-scene created by Cassius's fertile brain. In reality he was still in the helmet, still trapped in Cassius's world and she had gained the few precious moments of his inattention which she needed to render him immobile. It was a masterful trap and he had entered it without a second thought. His position was unchanged -- except that somebody external to the mind-scene had removed the jump bulb from his wrist. The scene she now presented was different and equally daunting. A bright light was focused in his face, dazzling his eyes. Around and beyond it was a blackness he was unable to penetrate. The air was hot and difficult to breathe. Something was restraining his left arm -- a strong wire noose that drew tightly into the flesh as he pulled against it. He knew without trying that his right arm was similarly trapped. These were probably precalculated to rob him of the chance to break his own circuit connections on the jaunt suit. "My game, I think, Martin," said Cassius, her triumph barely concealed in the quietness of her voice. "Woulfe -- get me out of here -- " No answer. "Woulfe, I want out fast and to hell with the damage." No answer. "Woulfe -- for God's sake -- " "Woulfe isn't going to answer." Cassius dimmed the light and came in front of it, a silhouette from hell against the red of the lamp. The crisp whiteness of her surgical coat made her look the epitome of pitiless efficiency. "My friends are in control of the monitoring room and of the two-mile field. You didn't think I'd let my prize be snatched away that easily?" "The students -- " Sudden understanding flooded Sawyer's brain. "Yes, the students. Ensuring that I've complete control over the rest of the operation. Congratulations, Martin! You came closer than you knew to finding the real me. But for you the game's over. The rest of the play's all mine." "A priina donna assumption." "No assumption, Martin. Fact." She swung the lamp around to illuminate the farther reaches of the brick-lined cell. "Look around you. A modern interrogation laboratory, courtesy of a so-called Agency for International Development. One wonders what sort of world it is they want to develop. Before you condemn me as a barbarian sadist, remember the sick minds in your own society that dreamed up the instrumentation, and the sick society itself that permits and encourages its use. What you've come to hate in me are merely facets where I've excelled in playing the dirty games of your own civilization." "What do you really want from me, Andrea?" "Revenge for what you've done tome -- and submission. I think the terms won't come readily. But I shall win in the end. Don't disappoint me, Martin. It would be a shame if you gave in too easily." W oulfe looked up as his visitor entered. No-name strode furiously into the room, threw an envelope on the psychiatrist's desk and prodded it with a cigar. "Son of a bitch!" he said. "Know what this is?" Woulfe pursed his lips. "Let me guess -- without looking. It's Cassius's resignation." "You're darn right it's Cassius's resignation. What are you going to do about it?" "There's nothing I can do. I can scarcely apply persuasion to Cassius. She's the expert. Besides, I approve of her resignation. It's probably the only sane action that has come out of this whole dismal carnival." "Approve," said No-name. He stubbed his cigar so viciously in emphasis that it hit the table and fractured lengthwise. He threw the fragments away as though its demise was a personal betrayal. "She's been nobbled again. And you're responsible." "If you'd read her letter instead of just shouting about it," said Woulfe, "you'd note she's pregnant. I see nothing subversive in that. After all, she's a woman." "Whose child is it?" "Martin Sawyer's. And before you blow a gasket -- let's make it plain that Cassius was not only a consenting but an insisting party." "Hell -- Sawyer and her? They gonna marry?" The unlikelihood of the prospect clearly worried the man without a name. "You not only forgot your name -- you forgot to do your homework. Cassius is a member of an ancient dynastic family called the Tsi. They don't marry. For centuries Tsi kings and warriors have harassed Asia and other parts and they've always taken concubines by force. They take only the women best fitted to contribute something to the Tsi stock. Your modern Tsi's a tough, intelligent, cosmopolitan and utterly ruthless character, trained from infancy in the arts of war and survival." "What's that got to do with Cassius?" "Surplus female Tsi children used to be killed at birth. Under Chu Tsi, the present head of the family, they've entered a new age of the female children, they now train them as warriors equally with the men. Cassius is one of these." "Son of a bitch!" said No-name, with a slight touch of awe. "Female emancipation's produced an interesting situation. A Tsi woman can't go out and drag herself back a concubine or two. But she can select a powerful adversary, conquer him, and carry his seed back to the Tsi. You'll note the emphasis on conquest. No feminine wiles. She's one of the kingmakers. She needs to be able to enforce submission against all opposition." "God! Is that what she did to Sawyer?" "I don't know. Cassius's henchmen cut my monitors before matters became crucial. But knowing Martin -- I doubt he put up more than a token fight. He's been fascinated by Cassius almost as much as she's been preoccupied by him." "So how do we get her back?" he asked. "You've no chance at all. Cassius came to the Western world and mastered one of the more discreditable aspects of our democracy. She became a legend in her own right. Now she's returning home, taking with her the seed of one of our more with-it physicists. Whichever way you look at it, Cassius has conquered." "But a child? Damn -- she could be back at work within a year." "You miss the point entirely. Old Chu Tsi is dying. The all-male tradition having been broken, the chances are that the House of Tsi will have a mistress next, instead of a master. That's Cassius's aim. And if that happens your troubles in Asia are only just beginning." "Whose side you on? Seems to be you've sold Sawyer down the river -- and lost us Cassius." "Actually I did neither. Cassius came back from America specifically looking for Sawyer. She'd have caught up with him sooner or later, anyway. All I did was catalyze the reaction." No-name rose respondently to his feet and walked over to the door. "What happened to JSawyer, anyway? Did he survive the deal?" "He acquired a lacerated back. And an enigmatic smile. You see, from his point of view he's the winner. He's got Cassius away from the persuasion scene and turned her toward the gentler pursuits of motherhood. By design or accident he's achieved what he set out to do. Whatever it cost him, I guarantee he's well pleased with the results." "Son of a bitch!" said No-name. "That's real dedication. You never did say whose man he was." "Not even Cassius believes it, but he really is just an innocent bystander."  old doorways in the stony city, seeing a lump of some kind of life thrown on the top step. Some lump, some dirty sack, some abandoned life, Terran or alien, in one of the old parts of the city. The day was the color of granite -- Mrs. Crandy's pause was a brief one. Then she walked on toward the yarn shop she had owned for years. The shop was on the second floor of a fairly good building, just beyond the grim old section of the city, on the gradual slope up into decency and middle income. She'd only walked this route because it was so much shorter -- in nice weather she preferred the longer way through a better area. Today's chill air made her walk fast to get her circulation going and she had tried not to look to her left or right but keep her gaze fixed on the goal ahead. By keeping her eyes straight ahead she had gone through life without too much torment, though she had a kind heart and good friends -- and she had seen a bit of the worlds, too, on various short trips here and there. A block onward, she still saw in her mind's shocked eye the bit of bad news thrown up against a stranger's door -- the size and shape of a child. She felt that she could not go back, stir the rags, expose the wounds -- she could not, as everyone continually told her, befriend all the lonelys or feed all the hungrys. Like everyone else, she must attend to her own business and curl up with satisfaction inside the warm circle of acquaintances. Beyond the circle lay the madness of the universe, the hungers of an insatiable tide of running, crawling, wing-beating, slithering life. Nor could she go on. Momentarily locked in cruel hesitation, Mrs. Crandy stood on the broken sidewalk and did nothing but breathe. "All right, damn it," she said aloud, then glanced left and right, embarrassed -- what would people think of her talking to herself in the street? But the people passed her without noticing, just as she had hoped to pass them, and it stung her, this indifference to which she herself had aspired. Mrs. Crandy retraced her steps, almost literally, keeping her eyes down and imagining that she was stepping backward into her own footsteps. The shape still lay huddled in the doorway. One small green plastic sandal was visible, containing what appeared to be a human foot. Still, one never knew, she thought. One never knew what rose up above the recognizable; alien shapes and brains, weird entities convinced of their own rightfulness and rights, hostile teeth and bad breath reeking of awful dinners. Mrs. Crandy slowly went up the five stone steps and leaned over but tried to keep her face out of reach, like a swimmer who does not want to get water up the nose. No telling, she thought, what the creatures would do if startled, perhaps reach up with talons and damage her. "Child?" she said, for that was how it looked. The lump stirred, a second green plastic sandal emerged from the rusty folds, a spine moved and at the top of the spine a head rose. Rather small, crinkly black eyes looked at her. A small pink mouth opened into a big yawn and she could see the child was missing some teeth. Whether it was teething normally or whether it suffered tooth rot from malnutrition, she couldn't tell. "Do you live here?" Mrs. Crandy asked. She really did not know how to approach a conversation like this, though she was aware of the dangers of patronizing the young of any life form. "Naw," the child said, stirring even more, then getting to her feet. "Have you no place to sleep?" "Was sleepin' here. Name's Agnes. What's yours?" "Do you have a home?" Mrs. Crandy asked. The child's clothing, a coatlike dress tied around the waist by a cloth belt of some other fabric, was rotting and gone in the seams. Under this shapeless robe, she could tell, the child was like a stick. "Naw. But I bet you do. Lady, you got a nice home?" "When did you eat last, Agnes?" "S'mornin'. Piece of lemon pie." "Lemon pie!" How like a child. But she must have stolen it, Mrs. Crandy thought immediately. It must have been the only thing she could get her hands on. on," Mrs. Crandy said. 'I have to go to my shop. You come with me and we can have lunch together." "Naw." "Why not?" "You'll feed me but you'll call authorities." "They won't hurt you," Mrs. Crandy said, sighing. "What can they do that will make things worse for you than they are?" "They'll brick me," Agnes said. In spite of the quaint phrasing, Mrs. Crandy understood perfectly, with a kind of cold gelling of the heart's blood. They'll brick me. Indeed they would, she knew. Bowls of soup and clean cotton dresses wouldn't compensate Agnes for being shut up. "I won't call them, but come to the shop and get warm, and we'll eat something." She was getting thoroughly chilled, standing here, arguing with this irresponsible but apparently satisfied child. Oh, she can't be satisfied, Mrs. Crandy corrected herself, not in that crummy dress, and so thin, and her hair matted. The hair was nearly white; flaxen; though it was now darkened with soot and less nameable dirt. The whole small creature seemed ineffably soiled. Agnes shook the folds of her robe and took a step down, then looked back, archly, over her shoulder and upward to Mrs. Crandy's face. "Promise?" she asked, "I don't promise a thing, but you're free to go any time," Mrs. Crandy said, stepping down beside her. For a moment she wanted to hold the girl's hand, but had a notion it would feel chapped and scaly with dirt and the gesture would probably embarrass them both. They went along the sidewalk together, the child taking quick, short steps. When they passed a Ganymedean restaurant, with its windows frostlaced on the inside, Mrs. Crandy averted her face as a kind of courtesy, more than a recoil, but Agnes hung back and peered in with a terrible, devouring curiosity. The Ganymedean restaurant owner came to the icy glass door and, with his one thumb and two fingers at the end of a tentacular arm, pulled down an inside shade against Agnes' prying face. Serves her right, Mrs. Crandy thought involuntarily. "They're snobs," Agnes said. "Great bulby-ho snobs." Mrs. Crandy was amused in spite of herself. "Wherever did you get that?" she asked. "I been around," Agnes said smugly. Well, I bet you have, Mrs. Crandy thought. She asked, "Where are you from?" "I'm from where you found me. Sleepin' on the step." "No, seriously," Mrs. Crandy argued. "You must be living somewhere, even if you don't have a family. Not all the time in the street. Isn't there anyone who would worry if you didn't show up?" "Plenty people," Agnes said in such a tone of rage that Mrs. Crandy knew no one cared. "Everybody loves me," Agnes shrieked. The sound, sharp as a toothpick, pierced the cold, sullen air and even the hides of a few passersby, who looked around. But Agnes clamped her mouth shut. Mrs. Crandy, her heart gaping, took hold of the child's hand. She'd been right -- it was chapped, lumped with dirt and spoke of painful neglect. No, I will not lose my head, Mrs. Crandy promised herself and her absent friends and advisors, but neither will I just abandon her in the street. There must be a sensible middle way. Even if I only get her cleaned and warm. I won't even think beyond that. Agnes grew silent as they came to the better part of town, as they entered the doorway between shop fronts, climbed the flight of stairs, and as Mrs. Crandy unlocked the door of her shop. "Oh," Agnes said when they entered. The yarns lay in their slots, orange, yellow, rust, gold, chocolate; green, aqua, turquoise, baby blue, cobalt. Hundreds and hundreds of skeins of yarn. The walls were hung with petit point and crewel patterns -- there were shelves devoted to small looms and weaving material. Agnes turned around, dazzled, her mouth open. "What pretty," Agnes said, around and around, glaring with joy and surprise. "Oh, what pretty," she said. "Let's get you washed," Mrs. Crandy said. "Then, if you like, I'll teach you a knitting stitch and you can pick any color yarn you like." Getting scrubbed did help, but not as much as she'd hoped for. Apparently the child's skin had suffered real damage, because it remained rough, lumpy, almost scaly. Under the robe Agnes wore only a shabby bikini. Her small, skinny body had a serpentine quality, like that of a dancer's; she might have been pretty if cleaned better than Mrs. Crandy could do in the tiny washroom. But the face was so pointed, the eyes so small and crinkly, the neck so long and flexible, she would never be pretty. It doesn't matter, Mrs. Crandy told herself. What difference does it make? As if looks lasted. The child's been abused and starved; all I can do is try to put a little comfort on her bones, nothing more than that. Mrs. Crandy hated to put the dirty robe back on Agnes but there was not a thing in the shop to be used as a substitute. At lunch time she'd go round the corner and buy An Informal Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Articles  Interviews Reviews  Letters Scheduled for ##: Inside Heinlein, a fascinating # word psycho-cultural analysis -- "Reading Heinlein Subjectively" by Alexei  Cory Panshin. Scheduled for ##: An Interview with Keith Laumer A devastating critique of trilogy Robert Bloch's Guest of Honor Speech at the Worldcon Every Issue: New Book  Story Lists Sample #. # year I #. two years Portland, Or. #I Agnes a pair of slacks and a good warm sweater. She turned up the heat and sat at her desk. Agnes leaned over, looking at the desk calendar. "Last day of March," she said. "Come April, come May." She looked sideways at Mrs. Crandy. "You here in the hot?" "The shop's open all the time, except for two weeks in August when I like to go to the beach. Why?" "You got a cooler, huh?" "Yes." Mrs. Crandy smiled. "But it's so cold today -- you can't be worried yet about summer weather." "I worry all the time," Agnes said suavely. "I worry and worry, it keeps the brain going." "Nonsense. Worrying makes you skinny and old before your time. Speaking of old, how old are you?" Agnes looked down at her green plastic sandals. "I suppose you wouldn't believe me, fifteen." "No," Mrs. Crandy said shortly. "Go and pick out any color of yarn you like and I'll show you how to knit. Then I have work to do and customers will be coming in." Agnes did not spend long in choosing. The pale blues, the grays and silvers, seemed to appeal to her. Mrs. Crandy was delighted at how quickly Agnes learned to handle the needles, how her thin fingers manipulated the pearl-gray yarn. Agnes sat on a wooden chair in the far corner, concentrating, her head down, matted flaxen crown exposed to Mrs. Crandy's gaze. She was so small and so slippery looking, Mrs. Crandy thought. No, I cannot feed them all, but surely I can do a few little things for this one. She bent to the books on her desk. Now and then she heard Agnes mutter. Once, she was sure she heard: "Bulby snobs, old tentacles," and wondered, sadly, what or who had inculcated these archaic prejudices in the child. T he heat, silently rising in the walls, silently spreading its wooly shawl through the shop and over Mrs. Crandy's chilled shoulders, should have made the child snuggle and relax. Although Agnes was obviously slowing down, perhaps falling into a daydream, she did not look comfortable. Mrs. Crandy was distracted from her by a customer coming in to match a particular color. When the customer had gone Mrs. Crandy looked at the corner and saw Agnes sitting with a kind of tense sloppiness, her eyes wide and staring. "Child!" Mrs. Crandy said, alarmed. Agnes should be comfy, approaching happiness and satisfaction. The possibility that Mrs. Crandy was harboring some one of those unfamiliar and alien forms often passed in the street, coiled through the woman's mind with a bizarre writhing motion. She condemned her reactions, her feelings, as immoral and unworthy. Because even if Agnes were not a human child, she was a child just the same, hungry for attention, for affection, for warmth. No matter what she was, Agnes, like everyone, had needs. It was Mrs. Crandy's responsibility, she knew, to try to find out what they were and to try to supply them as well as she could. When she went to Agnes, she saw a single tear slop over the corner of the child's left eye. It was pearly gray -- it was tangible. It seemed to have a mineral substance -- and was terrifying. "Oh, God," Mrs. Crandy said. "What is it -- what is it? What's wrong?" "Lift me," Agnes said through almost motionless lips. As Mrs. Crandy bent to lift Agnes the tear fell from the child's face and struck Mrs. Crandy's bare wrist. It bounced off her skin, cold and stern as a hailstone. "Dear God," Mrs. Crandy implored, lifting the sluggish body in her arms. "Agnes, try to tell me what's wrong." "Blood," Agnes said through her rigid lips. "Homeostat. Not like yours. Get me cold." Mrs. Crandy wasn't sure what homeostat was, but she understood cold. She carried Agnes back to the washroom and ran ice water into the basin. Moving with terrible effort, Agnes put her hands into the cold water and sighed. She got wet to the elbows, and after a minute, put her face down and poured water over it. Her face rose, dripping. "Wanted warm like mother," Agnes said, her tongue stiff. "Wanted you to feed me. Lady, I wanted bad." She doused herself again, ran cold water on her neck, drank many mouthfuls of it and slowly revived. "Agnes, shall I turn off the heat? Will that help?" The child stood with rivulets of cold water running down from her wet hair. "No, lady, make you cold." "What can I do?" "Nothing. I do it." Agnes turned around and shuffled out of the washroom, across the carpet, to the door of the shop. She muttered, "I wanted bad." When she opened the door, Mrs. Crandy ran to her, pulled her back. "You can't just go back to the street out there, you can't sleep in doorways on cold stone." "Sure can. Keep me goin'. Come May, come June, I'm goin' to suffer, I guess." "Look, I've turned down the heat. I'll put on my coat. You stay here and try to tell me." "Tell you nothin'. You been nice and I liked it. But you don't wanna know." Agnes made some gesture with her arm toward the door. Her forelimb rippled in a strange fashion, and in her mind's shocked eye, Mrs. Crandy saw again the Ganymedean tentacle come out and pull down the restaurant shade. "Before you go, Agnes, will you answer a question?" "If I can do." "Who is, or was, your father?" asked Mrs. Crandy. The crinkly black eyes gazed unwinking at her. The air in the shop was cooling rapidly and Agnes was growing more sprightly. "Hit you, didn't it?" Agnes said, showing the gaps in her teeth. "You don't know what is a homeostat, do you?" "I think I do. It controls body temperature. As in Ganymedeans, who do not function in warmth and keep to a cold environment." "As in you," Agnes said. "Yours changes to suit weather. I guess you know what luck is. See, in me, it don't work like my mother. I just try to keep me cool." "You can't be one of a kind, Agnes. There must be comfortable places for others like you." "Sure. Been there. Busted out. Father's kind say poo, funny, with hair. Mother's like you. So I keep me myself." "I'll open the window and it'll be cold enough in here." Mrs. Crandy still wanted to try, although she knew, beyond hope, there was nothing she could do for the needs of the child -- she was incapable of supplying balm for them. "Naw. Lady, you been nice and I dreamed it would work but it don't work. You goin' to get awful cold, see, and I don't want to be responsible. Got enough keepin' me." "No, damn it," Mrs. Crandy said, "it's not enough for any of us, just keeping ourselves. I can wear warm underwear and several sweaters and I'll take you to a good medical center where they must be able to help you." "Help." Agnes chewed the word. "I been there. They brick me. I told you." Mrs. Crandy saw it, all right. Agnes strapped into a technical chair, being probed, her brain waves recorded, her blood temperature monitored. Living under a plastic sky, poked and stared at -- bricked. Agnes, the universal unwanted child, Agnes, who knew better than she, Mrs. Crandy, with all her worldly experience, just how the world treats its human bastards, and does not even recognize its alien disasters. "I'd like to give you something," Mrs. Crandy said. Agnes looked around the shop. "Knit?" "Yes, of course." Mrs. Crandy put the needles and pearl gray wool into a bag and gave them to the child. Agnes looked into the brown paper depths. "Nice," she said. "Goodbye, lady. I remember you. Can't do no else." "Goodbye, Agnes," Mrs. Crandy said. Agnes opened the door and stood there. "Lady," she said, "just I ask you. You see me sleepin' on a step, don't try to warm, okay?" "Okay," Mrs. Crandy said and watched the shop door close. Now Available i incoln hew f e,p ow I Here's unusual news for collectors. A new, uncirculated Lincoln Head penny is now available. This coin is unique, because we have stamped on its surface a profile of President Kennedy, looking at President Lincoln! The relationship is uncanny. The coin is perfectly legal tender, acceptable under section #, Title # of the U. S. Code. Because, however, this coin is not in cir Lincoln was elected  Kennedy was In # elected In #  Both Presidents were slain on a Friday  There are seven letters In each name  Lincoln's secretary  Kennedy's secretary Kennedy warned Lincoln warned him him not to go to not to go to Dallas the theatre  Both (heir successors were named Johnson  Andrew Johnson  Lyndon Johnsoh born # born #  Booth shot Lincoln  Oswald shot In a theatre and hid Kennedy from a In a warehouse warehouse and hid In a theatre These and many more astonishing coincidences are yours in your Free Plaque of Coincidental Facts when you order the Lincoln Kennedy Penny. culalion, you may obtain it only through an offering of this sort, and we urge you to order now, avoid disappointment. And if you order right away, you will also receive The Plaque of Coincidences, showing the startling parallels in the careers of these two tragic figures. Order now: Two coins for just  I ; I # for # ; # for # ; # for #. #S W. 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Discover them now in this astounding book by L, Ron Hubbard: Explore the Past Explore the hidden frontiers of the human mind and discover facts beyond the realm of human imagination. Thousands of Years Ago You will travel hundreds and even thousands of years back in time over many areas of this universe -- from earth to foreign planets with the # Scientologists who found out just what exciting things have occurred in their previous lifetimes. Flying Saucers and Vesuvius This is no light tale but true life experiences of ages past when Vesuvius erupted, robots ruled and flying saucers were the means of warfare. Have You Lived Before? Get your copy today. It's easy. Just send # to Bookstore GY, # #th St. NW, Washington, D.C. #. Your copy mailed within # hours. Satisfaction guaranteed! The very best reading in or out of this world #. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. The master's first novel in # years...and worth the wait fora fabulous trip to the year #. Pub. ed. # #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. #B. Ed. by Ben Bova. Eleven more great novellas, by Asimov, Simak, Pohl, others. Pub. ed. # #. The Inferno. By Fred  Geoffrey Hoyle. A testy Scottish physicist takes charge... when a deadly quasar threatens the earth. Pub. ed. # #. Dune by Frank Herbert. Celebrated winner of Hugo and Nebula. Gripping tale of family exiled from their private planet to another, a barren desert. Pub. ed. # the most important views of tomorrow ever written. Winner of both the Asimov's first novel in # years, an event well worth waiting for. What a way to get acquainted. Browse through the list of books on this page and choose any # for just #. It's the most extraordinary sample of science fiction ever offered in one package. Here's how the Club works: When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your choice of # books for just # (plus shipping and handling). 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From Childhood's End author, dazzling, visionary novel of a self-contained world in space. Pub. ed. # #. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. #A. Ed. by Ben Bova. Eleven all-time great novellas chosen by Sci-Fi Writers of America. Pub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. Pub. ed. # #. Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed. Forty six pieces, short stories  novels, Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # #F#R# with membership The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. Printed in U.S.A. I Galaxy plus M The paper time machine also a tool: a time machine that enables you to replay the crucial eventspast, present, and future -- that shape our lives. Now, instead of merely reading about what's happening, you can explore and experience the alternatives and decision points through the technique of Conflict Simulation. What la Conflict Simulation? Conflict Simulation is a way of analyzing a political or military conflict situation. A way that is as intellectually stimulating as a game of chess, and as thorough as a written analysis. Through the use of the Conflict Simulation (or "game") format, the conflict situation is re-created -- so that you are in a position to make the vital decisions and, in the game at least, change the way things were. are. or will be. What you gat ed bi-monthly. Each issue contains: A ready-to-play conflict-simulation game with a # x # playing surface, die-cut playing pieces, and complete rules.  An analytical article on the same subject as the game in that issue.  Other feature articles on historical and military subjects.  Game and book reviews, commentary on existing games, and discussions of subscribers' questions. The magazine is #  pages long, and all material is handled in a highly organized (and easily understandable) graphic format. bat in Western Europe, #). We also publish a separate line of conflictsimulation games, which you will find listed in the coupon. Free to now subscribers battle presented in a game-design specially created to introduce new readers to Conflict Simulation. Send check or money order to: Simulations Publications, Inc. Dept. # # East #rd St., New York, N.Y. # Please enter my subscription to ST for  I year (# issues)-#  # yrs. (# issues)-#  # yrs. (# issues)-#  Current issue #  #-month trial (# issuesl-# Send me the following Simulations Games:  Bed Star White Star (armor in the #'s)-#  World War II (Europe. #-#I-J#  Lee Moves North (Civil War)-#  American Revolution (#-#)-#  Phalanx (ancient tactics-#  Please send me your free brochure. Name Address  City  Apt.#  Zip -- Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Ejler Jakobsson, Editor Emeritus Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunlck, Circulation Director For centuries the men of Earth had searched the cosmos for habitable planets and had found only one. They never found another -- but one man found something better. The Primgranese Commonality and the Lontastan Federation had been at war for centuries when suddenly the fighting-men of both sides quit -- to fight a little war of their own! In which such themes are dealt with as Niagara Falls running backward, the Four Laws of Computer Salesmen, technological unemployment, the ultimate computer -- and the ultimate Glitch. At last! The very first story in the ongoing saga of Emmett Duckworth! A story of warfare in the far future, when the line that separates man from machine has become a little -- vague. Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow -- the first in a series of articles on sf, and the reality on which it is based. In which Ted reviews Southern hospitality, Midwestern hospitality and Ursula K. le Guin's latest novel -- and finds all three superb! According to Jerry, it may not be as late as we think! lishing Corporation, s subsidiary ol Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: J# In U.S., # elsewhere. by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman ol the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-Issue subscription In the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. Tt publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited materiel. All stories printed hi this magazine are lictlon and any similarity between charset are and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. ai.l our lives, we have assumed and California on the world. The (hat the near future would planet is aswarm with independent hold one of two likely possibilities, forces that do not accept the One possibility was atomic war besuperiority of America and who will tween us and the Commies. We not have control imposed upon used to practice huddling under them by anybody. Some of these our desks in school and guarding forces are older and wiser than we our eyes against the bomb flash, yet recognize, but in our hearts we knew that our In this new year, it is clear that chances of survival were slim and we are entering a new era. What its that those of us who survived would shape will be, we cannot yet tell, wish we were dead. The other posBut the old era is over, sibility of our times was that The old era ruled our lives and America would rule the world on our thinking for thirty years. All its the strength of its superior mothemes were established by the end rality, politics, economics, power of World War II. and knowledge. Computers. Rocket ships. It is a new year now. In #, the Atomic weapons and atomic power two possibilities that have ruled our plants. The United Nations. Ruslives for so long have become wild sian-American antagonism. The unlikelihoods. American and Rusarms race. Technological supersian generals may still thumbfluity. wrestle for hypothetical advantage, All of us whose years of awarebut there will not be an atomic war. ness have come since # have Neither will there be a New Amerigrown up in a world dominated by can Empire imposing democracy these factors. It was as though we had been handed a particular situation and it was our fate to play its permutations out to their conclusion -- atomic disaster or American triumph. We had no choice other than these. Like it or lump it. Love it or else. The protest of the #'s was an objection to the American Dream Machine, but it was doomed to fail. When an era has crystalized, alternatives are unimaginable. Hate their two choices as they might, the protesters of the Sixties could not imagine any others. They still believed that their most likely futures were nuclear hell or America stepping on the face of the world. The imagined universe of science fiction during these same years was a reflection on the hopes and fears of the new era. The great fear was Atomic Armageddon. The great hope was that the men of Earth might stride forth to conquer the stars. These hopes were first expressed in the pages of the Golden Age Astounding in exactly the same period of time in which our modern world crystalized itself. They were the basic assumptions of the superman stories of A. E. van Vogt, of the Future History stories of Robert Heinlein, and of the Foundation stories of Isaac Asimov. If no sf writers during the past thirty years have matched these three in importance, it is because Asimov, Heinlein and van Vogt have held the patents within which a generation of science fiction writers have labored. It is the writers of the Campbell Astounding who set forth the outline of our future. We would establish colonies among the stars. We would dominate alien races. We would found galactic empires. And we would explode through the entire universe. The heroes of this world to come were technocrats, secret agents and team players -- the analogs of all the bright young Americans who expected to rule the postwar world. By the end of the #'s, this sf scenario of the future had become gray, trivial and unpromising. Heroes revealed fatal fallibility. The virtues of human rule of the universe seemed questionable. In the ##'s, just as there was reaction to the assumptions of American life, so was there reaction to its science-fictional image. Writers sought color. They wrote of lost colonies and of the dropouts of Galactic Empire. They wrote, too, of the exotic landscapes that might survive the nuclear firestorm, of holocaust as the wellspring of magic. But like the political and cultural protest movements of the time, the science fiction of the ##'s was an evasion rather than a true alternative to the mainline future that had been set out in the Golden Age Astounding. W hen an era has crystalized, there are no alternatives. This can be seen in the stories that J. G. Ballard wrote during the #'s. His inert inner landscapes of the imagination are an expression of Ballard's hatred of the postwar universe of sterile plastic. But his stories offer no alternative to the Future History of Heinlein and the others. They offer only exaggeration of sterility, ennui, and death. All the abortive revolutions of the #'s failed at the end of the decade. Rock music heroes discredited themselves or died squalidly. Weathermen went underground. Dissenters were prosecuted in public show trials. The counterculture went into seclusion. The American Monster won a final victory in the election of Richard Nixon, who is the living symbol of the postwar era and all its assumptions. Since #, the typical science fiction story has been able to envision little besides disaster. The common story of the period is an account of final extinction in the near future resulting from a willful abuse of technology. The most successful writer of the past few years in science fiction has been Barry Malzberg. Malzberg has said, in the spirit of these years, "Paranoia is science-fiction." And in his stories of insane astronauts, Cape Canaveral and Future History meet in some ultimate disaster of the spirit. But science fiction is not inevitably paranoid. Not all writers have succumbed to the fear and loathing that result from being trapped by a choice between the unsurvivable and the unendurable. There have been some few stories in these past years that see a new and wholly different world lying just before us. Examples of these new stories are R. A. Lafferty's "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" and Fred Pohl's "The Gold at the Starbow's End"; Jack Dann's "Junction" and our own "When the Vertical World Turns Horizontal". Listen to the titles of these stories. They are portents. They bid farewell to yesterday's tomorrow. They speak of the new time that we have now entered. For here it is # and suddenly all our long-held assumptions no longer obtain. It is a new springtime. The old crystal ization that held us in thrall has been shattered. We have entered a new era. For who could have dreamed that the American economy of abundance would not be plagued by scarcity? Who would ever have suspected that a crisis in the supply of energy would already be transforming the great American machine? Who would have thought only a few years ago that the political trials of the Nixon Era would all fail, every one, and that Richard .Nixon would himself be on trial? All the discredited young men of the Nixon Administration -- technocrats, secret agents, team players -- are our former heroes in discard. All is fluid now. The old situation, the old era, is no more. The new era has not yet become fully apparent. In a period of fluidity, there are opportunities for all those who can perceive them. For those who strive to cling to the hopes and fears of yesterday, the times will be profoundly disturbing. But for those who can grow, these will be times of unparalleled adventures. R evolutions are now under way throughout science -- in astronomy, geology, anthropology, archaeology and psychology. The details are unclear, but it is already certain that when the revolutions are complete, we will have completely revised our ideas about the nature and history of the universe, about the emergence and evolution of life on this earth, about the origins of man and the length of his existence, about the intellectual abilities and achievements of prehistoric man, and about the nature and capacities of the human mind. We are likewise entering a period of radical international readjustments. The bases of world finance and of world trade will be redefined. The arms race will be abandoned as an anachronism. World controls on population growth will be established. It will be demonstrated that the United Nations is no longer an instrument of American foreign policy. The UN will y -- o --  --  --  -- ft K : Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher the first one and the best of all since # from Donald A. Wollheim, himself. (UY#-I .#) D.G. Compton's growing audithat he is one of the literary greats of imagination. His first new work in two years. (UY# #) Cecil Snyder is the debut of a fine space novelist. It tells of the first contact between aliens and a human offshoot colony, (UQ#-#C) Peter Dickinson will remind many readers of Tolkein as machinery no longer operates and sorcery seems to take over. (UQ#-#C) And Cap Kennedy faces an ultimate weapon left over by the hitting Doc Savage-Star Trek action. ( UQ#-#C ) Complete Catalog. Send #c in stamps to: #I Av. of the Americas New York, N.Y. # for a complete listing to June, #. grow in effectiveness and change in function. Within fifteen years, we will all be living in ways that are presently unimaginable to us. All of the priorities of American life will be altered. There will be new goals in education, new styles of life. We will become masters of the American machine rather than cogs within it. This new season of change might be likened to the #'s, the decade that saw the rise of corporate capitalism and of European imperialism, the decade that set the crystal that was the Early Twentieth Century. It is also like the #'s, the period of the Depression and the New Deal, the time in which American values were last rearranged. Science fiction, the ideal reflection of the world around us, will also change. All our former assumptions, the assumptions of the # Astounding, will be abandoned. We can no longer write seriously of Nuclear Cataclysm or of Terran Empire. We might take note of the fact that we are living now in the days that were imagined as the beginning of Future History. That future is now, this very moment. But when we look about us, we see no rolling roads. We see no Slans. We see no positronic robots. The future of # is now, but it is not the world that was dreamed in #. The last period in science fiction that was like the one we are now entering came during the #'s. Hugo Gernsback had founded Amazing Stories in #, in the last days of the crystalization of the #'s. Amazing reflected that world. It was a sister magazine to popular science magazines. The future it expected was populated by young Tom Edisons. Its heaven was a utopia of backyard inventions. Its hell was devolution, the collapse of civilization and return to skin-clad barbarism. The other planets of our solar system were envisioned as being likewise utopic or barbaric. Their populations were either just like us, or they were monsters with a taste for human flesh. This sf world was laid down by Jules Verne and given its classic expression by H. G. Wells. After #, all was different. There were new magazines. After the appearance of Astounding in #, sf took on the racier style and size of the pulp magazines. It no longer seriously pretended to be popular science. During the #'s, the number of science fiction magazines grew. As late as #, there were only three. By #, there were seventeen. There were new editors -- in particular, F. Orlin Tremaine and John W. Campbell. With their encouragement, new writers entered the field. The assumptions and matter of sf changed radically. Before #, there was "scientifiction". After #, there was "science fiction". Writers such as E. E. Smith, and Stanley Weinbaum began producing stories with strange premises and stranger conclusions. They proved the basis from which Heinlein, van Vogt and Asimov eventually elaborated a new conception of the future. With Smith and Campbell, we traveled to the stars and beyond the bounds of our own trated new dimensions. The planets of our solar system were colonized. With Weinbaum, we discovered that aliens need be neither manlike or monstrous. With all this exciting possibility, there was no point to writing the familiar old-fashioned style of story about wearing a sweater and bowtie and living in a utopia of chuffchuffing inventions. It was more creative and exciting to imagine being an explorer of alien realms, or an asteroid miner, or an outlaw of the spaceways. J ust so, as of this spring-time of the mid-Seventies that we are entering, will sf once again be made wholly new. Just so E. E. Smith's Skylark once went forth to discover the universe, so we need to send new starships of the imagination forth to take account of a new world. These ships will not find an empty universe to be strip-mined and subjugated. Instead, they will find a universe filled to the brim with the new, rare and different. It will contain standards by which to measure ourselves -- alien races with different abilities, some less advanced than we, some more advanced. This universe will be the ideal reflection of the new multiplex Earth we are now awakening to. The key words of this new time are synergy, and ecology, and evolution. The era will be a time of liberation, unfolding, maturation, creativity and growth. What the actualities that wait locked in these words may be, we do not yet know. We must discover these things for ourselves, and it is an exciting prospect. The new sf will help us to understand and direct our new lives in the years immediately ahead. It will be more popular in appeal than it has ever been. It will come in new packages. There will be new editors and new writers. Sf will excite you as it has never excited you in all your years within the Great American Machine. It will amaze, astound and delight you as you never dreamed possible. It will scratch forgotten itches and satisfy unrecognized thirsts. It will aid in the remaking of your minds and your lives. It is time to say goodbye to yesterday's tomorrow and put it out of mind. Goodbye. Goodbye. The goodbyes are now all said. A new tomorrow is waiting.  Starflight, Inc. was dedicated to the search for lebensraum -- not finding it -- just the search. I T he President was called Elizabeth, and it was thought by some that the mere coincidence of name had had a profound influence on her lifestyle. Certainly, since the death of her father, she had made Starflight House into something that more resembled an historic royal court than the headquarters of a business enterprise. There was a suggestion of Elizabethan ritual, of palace intrigue, of privilege and precedence about the way she ran touch of antiquity which annoyed Garamond most -- although probably only because it was the one which affected him most -- as her insistence on personal interviews with ship commanders about to embark on exploratory missions. He leaned on a carved stone balustrade and stared with noncommittal gray eyes at the tiers of descending heated gardens that reached to the Atlantic Ocean four kilometers away. Starflight House capped what had once been a moderate-sized Icelandic hill. Now the original contours were completely hidden under a frosting of loggias, terraces and pavilions. From the air it always put Garamond in mind of a gigantic vulgar cake. He had been waiting almost two hours with nothing to do but sip pale-green drinks and fight to control his dangerous impatience. He would have preferred to spend the time with his wife and child. As a successful flickerwing captain Garamond had been in her presence several times; his distaste for her was well established. It influenced his attitude even more than did the fact that she was the richest person who had ever lived, so far above the law that she sometimes killed out of sheer petulance. Was it, he had often wonder, because she had the mind of a man that she chose to be an unattractive woman in an age when cosmetic surgery could correct all but the grossest physical defects? Were her splayed imperfect teeth and pallid skin the insignia of her total authority? As he watched the colored fountains glitter in the stepped perspectives below, Garamond remembered his first visit to Starflight House. About to undertake his third mission-command, he had still been young enough to feel self-conscious in the theatrical black uniform. The knowledge that he was entering that special relationship reputed to exist between Elizabeth Lindstrom and her captains had made him taut and apprehensive, keyed up to meet any demand on his resourcefulness. But nobody in Fleet Command or Admincom, had warned him that Elizabeth gave off a sweet, soupy odor which closed the throat when one was most anxious to speak clearly. Nor had his advisors on Starflight House protocol given him a single clue that would have helped a young man conceal his natural reaction to the President. Among his confused impressions, the predominant one had been of an abnormally curved spine at the lower end of which was slung a round puffy abdomen like that of an insect. Garamond, frozen to attention, had avoided her eyes when he nuzzled the satin cushion of gut against his knuckles during her prolonged formal inspection of his appearance. Now, as he leaned on the artificially weathered balustrade, he could recall emerging from that first interview with a cool resentment toward the older captains who had told him nothing to prepare him properly for personal dealings with the President. And yet, when his own turn came, he had allowed other raw Starflight commanders to go unprepared to the same inauguration. It had been easy to justify his inaction. He had merely had to consider the possible consequences of explaining to a new captain that the coveted special relationship would involve him in exchanging looks of secret appreciation with Liz Lindstrom when -- in the middle of a crowded Admincom flight briefing -- she would hand him a scrap of paper upon which she, the richest and most powerful human being in the universe, had printed a childish dirty joke. If the time for suicide ever came, Garamond decided, he would choose an easier and pleasanter way... "Captain Garamond," a man said from behind him. "The President sends her compliments." Garamond turned and saw the tall, stooped figure of Vice President Humboldt crossing the terrace toward him. Holding Humboldt's hand was a child of about nine, a sturdy silver-haired boy dressed in pearlized cords. Garamond recognized him as the President's son, Harald, and nodded silently. The boy nodded in return, his eyes flickering over Garamond's badges and service ribbons. "I'm sorry you have been kept waiting so long. Captain." Humboldt cleared his throat delicately to indicate that this was as far as he could go toward expressing views not those of Elizabeth. "Unfortunately, the President cannot disengage from her present commitment for another two hours. She requests that you wait." "Then I'll wait." Garamond shrugged, and smiled to mask his impatience. Too bad. The tachyonic reports from the weather stations beyond Pluto had predicted that the favorable ion-rich tide sweeping through the Solar System would shortly ebb. He had planned to sail on that tide, boost his ship to lightspeed in a hurry. Now it looked as though he would have to labor up the long gravity slope from Sol with his ship's electromagnetic wings sweeping the vacuum for a meager harvest of reaction mass. "Yes. You'll have to wait." "Of course, I could always leave -- and see the President when I get back." H umboldt smiled faintly in appreciation of the joke and glanced down at Harald, making sure the boy's attention was elsewhere before he replied. "That would never do. No doubt Liz would be so disappointed that she would send an intercept-ship to bring you back for a special interview." "Then I won't put her to that inconvenience," Garamond said. They had both been referring to Captain Witsch, a headstrong youngster who had grown restless after waiting two days in Starflight House and had taken off quietly one night without Elizabeth's blessing. It was said that he had been brought back in a high-speed interceptor, and his interview with the President must have been special indeed; no trace of his body had ever been found. Garamond had no way of knowing how apocryphal the story might be -- the Starflight fleet which siphoned off Earth's excess population was so huge that its rumors and tales were difficult to check. But this one was illustrative of certain realities. "There is a compensation for you, Captain." Humboldt placed one of his pink-scrubbed hands on Harald's silver head. "Harald has been showing a renewed interest in the flickerwing fleet lately. He has been asking questions on subjects that loosely come under the heading of spaceflight theory and practice. Liz wants you to talk to him -- " Garamond looked doubtfully at the boy, who seemed absorbed in a group of metal statues farther along the terrace. "Has he any flair for mathematics?" "He isn't expected to qualify for a master's papers this afternoon." Humboldt laughed dryly. "Simply encourage his interest, Captain. I know admirals who would give their right arms for such a public token of the President's trust. Now I must return to the boardroom." "You're leaving me alone with him?" "Yes -- Liz has a high regard for you. Captain Garamond." "Well, I've looked after children before." Garamond thought of his own six-year-old son, who had shaken his fist rather than wave goodbye. Thus had the youngster expressed his sense of loss and resentment over having a father who left him in answer to greater demands. Better if he had spent these four wasted hours healing the boy's tear-bruised eyes. On top of that, there were the reports of the ion wind failing, fading away to the level of spatial background activity, while the explorer-captain stood uselessly on an ornate terrace and played nursemaid to a child probably as neurosis-ridden as his mother. Trying to smile as the Vice President withdrew, Garamond had a feeling he was not making a convincing job of it. "So, Harald," he said, turning to the silver-and-pearl boy, "you want to ride a flickerwing, do you?" Harald examined him coolly. "Starflight employees of less than Board status usually address me as Master Lindstrom." Garamond raised his eyebrows. "I'll tell you something about spaceflying, Harald. Up there the most minor technician is more important than all your Admincom executives put together. Do you understand that, Harald? Harry?" I'm more of a child than he is, Garamond thought in amazement. Unexpectedly, Harald smiled. "I'm not interested in space-flying." "But I thought..." "I told them that because they wanted to hear it. But I don't have to pretend with you, do I?" "No, you don't have to pretend with me, son. What are we going to do for the next two hours, though?" "I'd like to run," Harald said, with a sudden eagerness that in Garamond's mind restored the lad to full membership in the brotherhood of small boys. "You want to run?" Garamond managed a genuine smile. "That's a modest ambition." "I'm not allowed to run or climb because I might hurt myself. Mother has forbidden it, and everybody else around here is so afraid of her that they hardly let me blink. But -- " Harald looked up at Garamond, triumphantly ingenuous " -- you're a flickerwing commander." Garamond realized belatedly that the boy had been maneuvering him into a corner from the second they had met, but felt no annoyance. "That's right -- I am. Now let's see how quickly you can make it from here to those statues and back." "Right." "Well, don't stand around. Go!" Garamond watched with a mixture of amusement and concern as Harald set off in a lopsided, clopping run, elbows pumping rapidly. He rounded the bronze statues and returned to Garamond at the same pace, eyes shining like lamps. "Again?" "As many times as you want." As Harald resumed his inefficient expenditure of energy, Garamond went back to the stone balustrade of the terrace and stared down across the gardens. In spite of the late afternoon sunshine, the Atlantic was charcoal gray and tendrils of mist from it were wreathing the belvederes and waterfalls in sadness. A lone gull twinkled like a star in its distant flight. I don't want to go, Garamond thought. It's as simple as that. In the early days he had been sustained by the conviction that he, Vance Garamond, would be the one who would find the third world. But interstellar flight was almost a century old now and man's empire still included only one habitable planet apart from Earth. All of Garamond's enthusiasm and certitude had achieved nothing. If he could accept the probability that he would never reach a habitable new planet, then it would be better to do as Aileen wanted -- take a commission on the shuttle run and be sure of some time at home every month. Ferrying shiploads of colonists to Terranova would be dull surely, but safe and convenient. The ion winds were fairly predictable along that route and the well-established chain of weather stations had eliminated any chance of being becalmed... "Look at me!" Garamond turned, for an instant was unable to locate Harald, then saw him perched dangerously high on the shoulders of a statue. The boy waved. "You'd better come down from there." Garamond tried to hide his concern. Harald's demands were growing greater; emotional blackmailers used the same techniques as ordinary criminals. First permission to run on the terrace, then the right to make risky climbs. This could put Garamond in a difficult position with the President. Difficult? It occurred to Garamond that his career would be ended if Harald were to so much as sprain an ankle. "But I'm a good climber. Watch." Harald threw his leg across a patient bronze face and reached for the statue's upraised arm. "I know you can climb, but don't go any higher till I get there." Garamond began to walk toward the statues, moving casually but adding inches to each stride by thrusting from the back foot. His alarm increased. Elizabeth Lindstrom, whose title of President was derived from her inherited ownership of the greatest financial empire ever known, was the most powerful person alive. Her son was destined to inherit Starflight from her, to control all construction of starships and all movement between Earth and the one other world available to man. And he, Vance Garamond, an insignificant flickerwing captain, had put himself in a position to incur the anger of one or the other. "Up we go," Harald called. "Don't!" Garamond broke into an undisguised run. "Please, don't." He surged forward through maliciously thick air that seemed to congeal around him like resin. Harald laughed delightedly and scrambled toward the upright column of metal that was the statue's arm -- but lost his grip and tilted backward. One foot lodged momentarily in the sculpted collar and acted as a pivot, turning him upside down. Garamond, trapped in a different continuum, saw the event on a leisurely timescale, like the slow blossoming of a spiral nebula. He light open up between Harald's fingers and the metal construction. He saw the boy seemingly hanging in the air, then gathering speed in the fall. He saw and heard the brutal impact with which Harald's head struck the base of the statuary group. Garamond dropped to his knees beside the small body and knew, on the instant, that Harald was dead. His skull was crushed, driven inward on the brain. "You're not a good climber," he whispered numbly, accusingly, to the immobile face still dewed with perspiration. "You've killed us both. And my family as well." He stood up, looked toward the entrance of the main building, preparing to face the officials and domestics who would come running. The terrace remained quiet but for the murmur of its fountains. High in the stratosphere an invisible aircraft drew a slow, silent wake across the sky. Each passing second was a massive hammer-blow on the anvil of Garamond's mind, and he had been standing perfectly still for perhaps a minute before accepting that the accident had not been noticed by others. Breaking out of the stasis, he gathered up Harald's body, marveling at its lightness, and carried it to a clump of flowering shrubs. The dark-green foliage clattered like metal foil as he lowered the dead child into its concealment. Garamond turned his back on Starflight House and began to run. II H e had, if he was lucky, about one hundred minutes. The figure was arrived at by assuming the President had been precise when she had told Garamond to wait an extra two hours. There was a further proviso -- that it had been her intention to leave her son alone with him all that time. With the full span of a hundred minutes at his disposal, Garamond decided, he had a chance; but any one of a dozen personal servants had only to go looking for Harald, any one of a thousand visitors had only to notice a bloodstain... The numbers in the game of death were tumbling behind his fPlBallantine Books A Division of Random House, Inc. "Brackett's back and Ballantine's got her!" That's how Publishers Weekly heralded the return of Leigh Brackett to her all-new Eric John Stark adventure novel. Who, you may ask, is Eric John Stark? In a word or two, he is one of the all-time great swashbuckling heroes in adventure fiction. For years, this larger-than-life fellow romped through the pages of Planet Stories, once 'the' magazine of heroic literature. When Planet folded, much to the dismay of its readers, Stark went into retirement and Brackett went back to writing screenplays. at least four Stark novels, Leigh Brackett has returned from a long sabbatical in Hollywood scripts for Rio Bravo, Hatari and The Long Goodbye) to her first love, science fiction. Where was Simon Ashton? That's what Stark has come to the planet Skaith to find out. His mentor and long-time Mend has disappeared, and Stark must find him -- r.o matter what the cost. Everyone he meets on the exotic planet has heard of the strange Dark Man bum another world -- the man prophecy had predicted would come to Skaith -- but no one was talking. Not the Farers. Not the Woodsmen. Not even the Irnanese. All clues lead to the mysterious North -- stronghold of the tyrannical Lords Protector! "Imaginatively, Brackett is absolutely at this boob as full of marvels, personalities, strange customs and hair-raising escapes as a Christmas pudding is fall of plums. Of Its kind, It's just delicious." Of course, the proof of this padding will be in the reading. But our friends at the Science Fiction Bookshop tell us that one out of three customers starts salavatlng the instant heshe sees the cover of the book posted on the bulletin board. About that cover -- we have long wanted to entice James Steranko into doing covers for us; but he's a busy man, what with writing and editing Mediascenf. However, when he heard we had Brackett back at the typewriter and Stark back In business, Steranko came back to us with a promise to Illustrate the whole series!    The Science Fiction Bookshop is a marvelous little store nestled in New York City's West Village (# #th Ave., New York, New York #). We wandered over there last week (February, as we write) to watch Ben Bova and Gordon R. Dickson autograph copies of their new erally, just about every in-prim gf tide on the shelves. If you can't get to the shop, drop them a note and get on their mailing list.    And now hack to Bailantine treasures for the merry month of May. David Gerrold (who, even as we write, is finishing a put together an exciting anthology of original stories by new writers In the field: push comes to shove, well admit that W. Msefariane is not really a new writer. But "The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Begley" was such a lovely yarn -- David had to find a home for it. There are seven more stories In the book -- not least, "On the Street of the Serpent," Michael Bishop. We are predicting big things for that young man and wouldn't be surprised if he wins a Hugo In # for the novella he published In IF last year. BB eyes as he stepped off the outward bound slideway where it reached the main reception area. His official transport was waiting to take him straight to the shuttle terminal at North Field, and -- in spite of the risks associated with the driver being in radio contact with Starflight House -- that still seemed the quickest and most certain way of reaching his ship. The vast icegreen hall of the concourse was crowded with men and women coming off their afternoon shifts in the surrounding administrative buildings. They seemed relaxed and happy, bemused by the generosity of the lingering sunlight. Garamond swore inwardly as he shouldered through conflicting currents and eddies of people, doing his best to move quickly without attracting attention. I am a dead man, he kept thinking in detached wonder. No matter what I do. no matter how mv luck hotels out in the next couple of hours. I'm a dead man. And my wife is a dead woman. And my son is a dead child. Even if the ion tide holds strong and Jills my wings, we're all dead -- because there's no place to hide. There's only one other world, and Elizabeth's ships will be waiting there... A face turned toward him from the crowd, curiously, and Garamond realized he had made a sound. He smiled, recreating himself in his own image of a successful flickerwing captain, clothed in the black-and-silver symbolic of star oceans -- and the face slid away, satisfied that it had made a mistake in locating the source of the despairing murmur. Garamond gnawed his lip while he recovered the remaining distance to his transport. It was stacked in one of the reserved magazines near the concourse. The sharp-eyed middleaged driver saw him approaching, had the vehicle brought up to ground level by the time Garamond reached the silo. "Thanks." Garamond answered Ihe man's salute, grateful for the small saving in time, and got inside the upholstered shell. "I thought you'd be in a hurry, sir." The driver's eyes stared knowingly at him from the rear-view mirror. "Oh?" Garamond controlled a spasm of unreasonable fear -- this was not the way his arrest would come about. He eyed the back of the driver's neck, which was ruddy, deeply creased and had a number of long-established blackheads. "Yes, sir. All the Starflight commanders are in a hurry to reach the Held today. The weather reports aren't good, I hear." Garamond nodded and tried to look at ease as the vehicle shot forward. A barely perceptible whine rose from its magnetic engines. "I think I'll catch the tide," he said evenly. "At least, I hope so -- my family is coming to see me off." The driver's narrow face showed surprise. "I thought you were going direct..." "A slight change of plan -- we're calling for my wife and son. You remember the address?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Get there as quickly as you can." With a casual movement Garamond broke the audio connection between the vehicle's two compartments and picked up the nearest communicator set. He punched in his home code and held the instrument steady with his knees while he waited for the screen to come to life and show that his call had been accepted. Supposing Aileen and Chris had gone out? The boy had been upset -- again Garamond remembered him shaking his fist instead of waving goodbye, expressing in the slight change of gesture all the emotions that racked his small frame -- and Aileen could have taken him away for an afternoon of distraction and appeasement. If that were the case... "Vance!" Aileen's face crystallized in miniature between his hands. "I was sure you'd gone. Where are you?" "I'm on my way home, be there in ten minutes." "Back here? But..." "Aileen, something has happened. I'm bringing you and Chris to the field. Is he there?" "He's out on the patio. But Vance, you never let us see you off." "#... Garamond hesitated, decided it could be better all around if his wife were kept in ignorance at this stage. "I've changed my mind about some things. Now, get Chris ready to leave as soon as I reach the house." Aileen raised her shoulders uncertainly. "Vance, do you think it's the best thing for him? I mean you've been away for three hours and he's just begun to get over his first reactions -- and now you're going to put him through it all again." "I told you something has come up." How many pet dogs, Garamond asked himself, did I see around the Presidential suite this afternoon? Five? Six? "I'll explain later." At what range can a dog scent a corpse? Liz's brood of pets could be the biggest threat of all. "Please gel Chris ready." Aileen shook her head slightly. "No, Vance. I'm sorry, but I don'l... "Aileen!" ( laramond deliberately allowed an edge of panic to show in his voice, using il to penetrate the separate universe of normalcy in which his wife still existed. "I can't explain things now, but you and Chris must be ready to come to the field with me within the next few minutes. Don't argue any more, just do what I'm asking." H e broke the connection and forced himself to sit back, wondering if he had already said too much. Communications snoops could be monitoring the public band. The car was traveling west on the main Akranes autolink, accelerating irregularly as it jockeyed for position in the traffic. It occurred to Garamond that the driver's performance was not as good as it had been on the way out to Starflight House. That could signify lack of concentration. On impulse he reconnected the vehicle's intercom. "... at his home," the driver was saying. "Expect to reach North Field in about twenty minutes." Garamond cleared his throat. "What are you doing?" "Reporting in, sir." "Why?" "Standing orders. All the fleet drivers keep Starflight Centradata informed about their movements." "What did you tell them?" "Sir?" "What did you say about movements?" The driver's shoulders stirred uneasily, causing his Starflight sunburst emblems to blink redly with reflected light. "I just said you decided to pick up your family on the way to North Field." "Don't make any further reports." "Sir?" "As a captain in the Starflight Exploratory Arm I think I can make my way around this part of Iceland without a nursemaid." "I'm sorry, but..." "Just drive the car." Garamond fought to control the unreasoned anger he felt against the man in front. "And go faster." "Yes, sir." The creases in the driver's weatherbeaten neck deepened as he hunched over the wheel. Garamond made himself sit with closed eyes, motionless except for a slight rubbing of his palms against his knees which failed completely to remove the perspiration. He tried to visualize what was happening back on the hill. Was the routine of Elizabeth's court proceeding as on any other afternoon? Were the boards and committees and tribunals deliberating in the pillared halls, the President moving among them, complacently deflecting and vibrating the webstrands of empire with her very presence? Or had someone begun to notice Harald's absence? And his own? He opened his eyes and gazed somberly at the unrolling scenery outside the car. The umbra of commercial buildings that extended for several kilometers around Starflight House was giving way to the first of the company-owned residential developments. As an S.E.A. commander, Garamond had been entitled to one of the "choice" locations, which in Starflight usage tended to mean closest to Elizabeth's elevated palace. In quiet moments on the bridge of his ship Garamond had often thought about how the sheer massiveness of her power had locally deformed the structure of language in exactly the same way as a giant sun was able to twist space around itself so that captive worlds, though believing themselves to be traveling in straight lines, were held in orbit. In the present instance, however, he was satisfied with the physics of Elizabeth's gravitation because it meant that his home was midway between Starflight House and the North Field, and he was losing a minimum of time in collecting his family. Even before the vehicle had halted outside the pyramidical block of apartments, Garamond had the door open and was walking quickly to the elevator. He stepped out of it on the third floor, raced to his own door and let himself in. The familiar homey surroundings seemed to crowd in on him, creating a new sense of shock at the fact that life as he knew it had ended. For a moment he felt like a ghost visiting scenes to which he was no longer relevant. "What's the matter, Vance?" Aileen emerged from a bedroom, dressed as always in taut and colorful silks. Her plump brownskinned face and dark eyes showed concern. "I'll explain later." He put his arms around her and held her for a moment. "Where's Chris?" "Here I am. Daddy!" The boy came running and swarmed up Garamond like a small animal, clinging with all four limbs. "You came back." "Come on, son -- we're going to the field." Garamond held Chris above his head and shook him, imitating a start-of-vacation gesture, then handed the child to his wife. It had been the second time within the hour that he had picked up a light childish boy. "The car's waiting for us. You take Chris down to it and I'll follow in a second." "You still haven't told me what this is all about." "Later, later!" Garamond decided that if he were stopped before the shuttle got off the ground there might still be a faint chance for Aileen and the boy if she could truthfully swear that she had no idea of what had been going on. He pushed her into the corridor, (hen strode back into the apartment's general storage area hidden by a freeMoating screen of varicolored luminosity. It took him oidy a lew seconds to open the box containing his old target pistol and to till an ammunition clip. The long barreled saw-handled pistol snagged the material of his uniform as he thrust it out of sight in his jacket. Acutely conscious of the weighty bulge under his left arm, he ran back through the living space. Impulsively he snatched an ornament -- a solid-gold snail with ruby eyes -- from a shelf, and went out into the corridor. Aileen was holding open the elevator door with one hand and trying to control Chris with the other. "Let's go," Garamond said cheerfully, above the deafening ratchets and escapement of the clock behind his eyes. He closed the elevator door and pressed the down button. At ground level Chris darted ahead through the long entrance hall and scrambled into the waiting vehicle. Fortunately there were few people about, and none that Garamond could identify as neighbors. The driver gave Aileen a grudging salute and held the car door open for her. She sat down next to her husband in the rear of the vehicle. When it had moved off, he manufactured a smile for her. She shook her dark head impatiently. "Now will you tell me what's happening?" "You're coming to see me off, that's all." Garamond glanced at his son. He was kneeling at the rear window, apparently fascinated in the receding view. "Chris should enjoy it." "You said it was so important!" "It's important for me to spend a little extra time with you and Chris." Aileen looked baffled. "What did you bring from the apartment?" "Nothing." Garamond moved his left shoulder slightly to conceal the bulge. "But I can see it." She leaned forward, caught his hand and opened the fingers, revealing the gold snail. It was a gift he had bought Aileen during their honeymoon. He realized now that he had snatched the little ornament because it was the symbolical cornerstone of their home. Aileen's eyes widened briefly and she turned her head away. Garamond wondered what his wife's intuition had told her, wondered' how many minutes they had left. at that moment a minor official on the domestic staff of Starflight House was moving uncertainly through the contrived Italian Renaissance atmosphere of the carved hill. His name was Carlos Pennario, and he was holding leads to which were attached two of the President's favorite spaniels. The doubts that plagued his mind were caused by the curious behavior of the dogs coupled with certain facts about his conditions of employment. Both animals, their long ears Happing with excitement, were pulling him toward a section of the shady terrace that ringed the hill just at the executive and Presidential levels. Pennario, who was naturally inquisitive, had never seen the spaniels behave in this way before and he was tempted to give them their heads -- but, as a Grade # employee, he was not permitted to ascend to the executive levels. In normal circumstances such considerations would not have held him back for long, but only two days earlier he had fallen afoul of his immediate boss, a gnomelike Scot called Arthur Kemp, and had been promised demotion next time he made a misstep. Pennario held on to the snuffling, straining dogs while he gazed toward a group of statues that shone like red gold in the dying sunlight. A tall, hard-looking man in the black uniform of a flickerwing captain had been leaning on the stone balustrade near the statues a little earlier in the afternoon. The moody captain seemed to have departed and there was nobody else visible on the terrace. Yet the spaniels were going crazy trying to get up there. It was not an earth-shakingmystery, but to Pennario it represented an intriguing diversion from the utter boredom of his job. He hesitated, scanning the slopes above, then allowed the spaniels to pull him up the broad shallow steps to the terrace, their feet scrabbling on the smooth stone. Once on the upper level, the dogs headed straight for the base on which the bronze figures stood, then with low whines burrowed into the shrubbery beyond. Pennario leaned over them, parted the dark-green leaves with his free arm, and looked down into the cave-like dimness. T hey needed another thirty minutes, Garamond decided. If the discovery of Harald's body did not take place within that time, he and his family would be clear of the atmosphere on one of the S.E.A. shuttles before the alarm could be broadcast. They would not be out of dangerbut the ship lying in polar orbit, the Bissendorf, was his own private territory, a small enclave in which the laws of the Elizabethan universe did not hold full sway. Up there she could still destroy him, and eventually would. However, it would be more difficult than on Earth where at a word she could mobilize thousands of men against him. "I need to go to the toilet," Chris announced, turning from the rear window with an apologetic expression on his round face. He pummeled his abdomen as if to punish it for the intervention. "You can wait till we reach the field." Aileen pulled him to her knee and enclosed him in smooth brown arms. A feeling of unreality stole over Garamond as he watched his wife and son. Both were wearing lightweight indoor clothing and, of course, had no other belongings with them. It was incredible, unthinkable, that dressed as they were and so unprepared, they should be snatched from their natural ambience of sunlight and warm breezes, sheltering walls and quiet gardens to be projected into the deadliness of the space between the stars. The air in the car seemed to thin abruptly, forcing Garamond to take deep breaths. He gazed at the diorama of buildings and foliage beyond the car windows, trying to plan about his movements for the vital next half-hour, but his mind refused to work constructively. His thoughts lapsed into a fugue, a recycling of images and shocked sensory fragments. He watched for the hundredth time as the fatal milimeters of daylight opened between Harald's silhouette and the uncomprehending metal of the statue. And the boy's body had been so light. How could a package contain all the bone and blood and muscle and organs necessary to support life and yet be so light? So insubstantial that a fall of three or four meters... "Look, Dad!" Chris moved within the organic basketwork of his mother's arms. "There's the field. Can we go onto your shuttle?" "I'll try to arrange it." Garamond stared through the wavering blur of the North Field's perimeter fence, wondering if he would see any signs of unusual activity. C arlos pennario allowed the shrubs to spring together again. For the first time since his youth, he crossed himself. He backed away from what he had seen, dragging the frantic dogs with him, and looked around for help. There was nobody in sight. He was opening his mouth with the intention of shouting at the top of his voice, of unburdening his dismay on the sleepy air, when several thoughts occurred to him. Pennario had seen Elizabeth Lindstrom only a few times, and always at a distance, but he had heard many stories in the staff dormitory. He would have given a year's wages rather than be brought before her with the news that he had allowed one of her spaniels to choke on a chicken bone. And now he was almost in the position of having to face Elizabeth and describe his part in the finding of her son's corpse. Pennario tried to imagine what the President might do to the bearer of such news before she regained whatever slight measure of self-control she was supposed to have... Then there was the matter of his superior, Arthur Kemp. Pennario had no right to be on this terrace in the first place. To a man like Kemp that one transgression would be suggestive, would be proof, of others. Of somehow being responsible for the death of the boy, for example. He knew the way Kemp's mind worked. Assuming that Pennario lived long enough to undergo an investigation, Kemp would swear to anything to avoid any association with guilt. Awareness that he was in mortal danger stimulated Pennario into decisive action. He kneeled, gathered the spaniels into his arms, hurried down the steps to the lower levels. Shocked and afraid though he was, his mind retained those qualities that had lifted him successfully from near-starvation in Mexico to one of the few places in the world where there was air enough for a man to breathe. Locked away in his memory was a comprehensive timetable of Kemp's daily movements in and around Starflight House. According to that schedule the acidulous little Scot would shortly be making his final inspection tour of the afternoon. The tour usually took him along the circular terrace, past the shrubbery in which Harald's body was hidden -- and how much better it would be if Domestic Supervisor Kemp should make the fearful discovery. Pennario kept slanting downward across the hill until he had reached the lowest point from which he could still see a sector of the upper terrace and gauge Kemp's progress along it. He moved into the shade of an ivy-covered loggia, set the dogs on the ground and pretended to be busy adjusting their silver collars. The excited animals fought to get free, but Pennario held them firmly in check. It was important to him that they did not make their predictable dash to the terrace until Kemp was in exactly the right place to become involved with their discovery. Pennario glanced at his watch. "Any minute now, my little friends," he whispered. I n contrast to what Garamond had feared, the field seemed quieter than usual, its broad expanses of ferrocrete mellowed to the semblance of sand by the fleeing sunlight. Low on the western horizon a complexity of small Clouds was assembled like a fabulous army, helmets and crests glowing with fire. Several vaporous banners reached toward the zenith in deepening pink. As the car drew to a halt Garamond shielded his eyes, looked toward his assigned take-off point and saw the squat outline of the waiting shuttle. The door was open, the boarding steps in place. The sight filled him with a powerful urge to rush to the shuttle, get Aileen and Chris on board and blast off. There were certain preflight formalities, however. To take off without observing them could lead to the wrong sort of radio message being beamed up to the Bissendorf ahead of him. He pushed a heavy lock of hair from his forehead and smiled lor the benefit of Aileen and the driver. "Some papers to sign in here. Then we'll take the slidewalk out to (he shuttle," he said easily as he stepped out of the car. "I thought Chris and I would be going up to the observation floor," Aileen replied, not moving from her seat. "There's no fun in that, is there, Chris?" Garamond lifted the boy from Aileen's knee and set him down on the steps of the S.E.A. building. "What's the point in having a Dad who's a flickerwing captain if you can't get a few extra privileges? You'd like to look around inside the shuttle, wouldn't you?" Chris nodded, but with a curious reserve, as if he had sensed something of Aileen's unease. "Of course you would." Garamond took Aileen's hand, drew her out of the car and slammed the door. "That's all, driver -- we can look after ourselves from here on." The driver glanced back once, without speaking, and accelerated away toward the transport pool. Aileen caught Garamond's arm. "Vance, we're alone now. What is...?" "Now you two stand right here on these steps and don't move till I come out. This won't take long." Garamond sprinted up the steps, returned the salutes of the guards at the top, and hurried toward the S.E.A. Preflight Center. The large square room looked unfamiliar when he entered, as though seen through the eyes of the young Vance Garamond who had been so impressed by it at the beginning of his first exploratory command. He ran to the long desk and slapped down his flight authorization documents. "You're late, Captain," commented a heavily built ex-quartermaster called Herschell, who habitually addressed outgoing captains with a note of rueful challenge which was meant to remind them he had not always held a desk job. "I know -- I couldn't get away from Liz." Garamond seized a stylus and began scribbling his name on various papers as they were fed to him. "Like that, was it? She couldn't let you go?" "That's the way it was." "Pity. I'd say you've missed the tide." Herschell's pink square face was sympathetic. "Oh?" "Yeah -- look at the map." Herschell pointed up at the vast solidimage chart of the solar system and the surrounding volume of interstellar space which floated below the domed ceiling. The solar wind, represented by yellow radiance, was as strong as ever and Garamond saw the healthy, bow-shaped shock wave on the sunward side of Earth where the current impacted on the planet's geomagnetic field. Data on the inner spirals of the solar wind, however, were of interest only to interplanetary travelers -- his concern was with the ion count at the edge of the system and beyond. Garamond searched for the great arc of the shock front near the orbit of Uranus. There the solar wind, attenuated by distance from Sol, built up pressure against the magnetic field of the galaxy. For a moment he saw nothing, then his eyes picked out an almost invisible amber halo, so faint that it would have represented nothing more than one ion per ten cubic centimeters. He had rarely seen the front looking so feeble. It appeared that the sun was in a niggardly far up the long gravity slope to interstellar space. Garamond shifted his attention to the broad, straggling bands of green, blue and red that plotted the galactic tides of fast-moving corpuscles as they swept across the entire chart. These vagrant sprays of energetic particles meant as much to him as wind, wave and tide had to the skipper of a transoceanic sailing ship. All spacecraft built by Start! ight -- which meant all spacecraft built on Earth -- employed intense magnetic fields to sweep up interstellar atomic debris for use as reaction mass. The system made it possible to conduct deep-space voyages in ships weighing as little as ten thousand tons, as against the the minimum for a vessel which had to transport its own reaction mass. Flickerwing ships, however, had a disadvantage in that their efficiency was subject to spatial "weather." The ideal mission profile was for a ship to accelerate steadily to the midpoint of its journey and decelerate at the same rate for the remainder of the trip; but where the harvest of charged particles was poor the rate of speedchange fell off. If that occurred during the first half of a voyage it meant the vessel would take longer than planned to reach destination. If it occurred during the second half, the ship would be deprived of the means to discard velocity and would storm through its target system at unmanageable speed, sometimes not coming to a halt until it had overshot by light-days. It was to minimize such uncertainties that Starflight maintained chains of automatic sensor stations whose reports, transmitted by lowenergy tachyon beams, were continuously fed into weather charts. And, as Garamond immediately saw, the conditions under which he hoped to achieve high-speed flight were freakishly, damnably bad. More than half the volume of space covered by the map seemed entirely void of corpuscular flux, and such fronts as were visible in the remainder were fleeing away to the galactic south. Only one wisp of useful density -- possibly the result of heavy particles entangling themselves in an irregularity in the interplanetary magnetic field -- reached as far back as the orbit of Mars, and even that was withdrawing at speed. "I've got to get out of here," Garamond said simply. Herschell handed him the traditional leather briefcase containing the flight authorization documents. "Why don't you take off out of it. Captain? The Bissendorf is ready to travel, and I can sign the rest of this stuff by proxy." "Thanks." Garamond grabbed the briefcase and ran for the door. "Don't let that ole bit of dust get away," Herschell called after him. one tlickerwing man to another. "Scoop it up good." Garamond sprinted along the entrance hall, relieved at being able to respond openly to his growing sense of urgency. The sight of ships' commanders running for the slidewalks was quite a common one in the S.E.A. Center when the weather was breaking. He found Aileen and Chris on the front steps, exactly where he had left them. Aileen was looking tired and worried, and holding the boy close to her side. "All clear," he said. He caught Aileen by the upper arm and urged her toward the slideway tunnel. She fell in step with him readily enough but he could sense her mounting unease. "Let's go!" "Where to, Vance?" She spoke quietly, but he understood that she was asking him the big question, communicating on a treasured personal level neither of them would He glanced down at Chris. They were on the slidewalk now, slanting down into the tunnel, and the boy seemed fascinated by the softly tremoring ride. "When I was waiting to see the President this afternoon, I was asked to take care of young Harald Lindstrom for an hour..." The enormity of what he had to say stilled the words in his throat. "What happened, Vance?" "#... I didn't take care of him very well. He fell and killed himself." "Oh!" The color seeped from Aileen's face. "'But how did you get away from...?" "Nobody saw him fall. I hid the body in some bushes." "And now we're running?" "As fast as we can, sweet." Aileen put her hand on Chris's shoulder. "Do you think Elizabeth would...?" "She would. Automatically. Instinctively. There'd be no way for her not to." Aileen's chin puckered as she fought to control the muscles around her mouth. "Oh, Vance! How terrible. Chris and I can't go up there." "You can, and you're going to." Garamond thrust an arm around Aileen and was alarmed when she sagged against it with her full weight. He pushed his mouth close to her ear. "I can't do this alone. I need your help to get Chris free. Or she may revenge herself on him -- " She straightened with difficulty. "I'll try. Lots of women go to Terranova, don't they?" "That's better." Garamond gave her an encouraging squeeze and wondered if she really believed they could go to the other human-inhabited Starflight-dominated world in the universe. "Aileen, we're almost at the end of the tunnel. When we get up the ramp, pick Chris up and walk straight into the shuttle with him as if it was a school bus. I'll be right behind you, blocking the view of anybody who happens to be watching from the tower." "What will the other passengers say?" "There'll be nobody else on the shuttle apart from the pilots, and I'll talk to them." "But won't the pilots object when they see us on board?" "The pilots won't say a word," Garamond promised, slipping his hand inside his jacket. jr starflight house, high on  "V . the sculpted hill, the first man had already died. Domestic Supervisor Arthur Kemp had been planning his evening meal when the two spaniels bounded past him and darted into the shrubbery on the long terrace. He paused, eyed them curiously, then pushed the screen of foliage aside. The light was beginning to fail, and Kemp -- who came from the comparatively uncrowded, unpolluted, unravaged north of Scotland -- lacked Carlos Pennario's instinct concerning matters of violent and premature death. He dragged Harald's body into the open, stared for a long moment at the black deltas of blood that ran from nostrils and ears, and began to scream into his wrist communicator. Elizabeth Lindstrom was on the terrace within two minutes. She would not allow anyone to touch her son's remains. As the staff could not simply walk away, a dense knot of people formed. In its center Elizabeth set up her court of inquiry. Standing over the small body, satin-covered abdomen glowing like a giant pearl, she spoke in a controlled manner at first. Only the Council members who knew her well understood the implications of the steadily rising inflections in her voice, or of the way she had begun to finger a certain ruby ring on her right hand. These men, obliged by rank to remain close to the President, nevertheless tried to alter their positions subtly so that they were shielded by the bodies of other men, who in turn senses their peril and reacted accordingly. The result was that the circle around Elizabeth grew steadily larger and its surface tension increased. It was into this arena of fear that Domestic Supervisor Kemp was thrust to give his testimony. He answered several of Elizabeth's questions with something approaching composure, but his voice faltered when -- alter he too had con firmed Captain Garamond's abrupt departure from the terrace -- Elizabeth began pulling out her own hair in slow, methodical handfuls. For an endless minute the soft ripping of her scalp was the only sound on the terrace. Kemp endured it for as long as was humanly possible, then turned to run. Elizabeth exploded him with a laser burst from her ring. She was twisting blindly to hose the others with its fading energies when her senior physician, risking his own life, fired a cloud of sedative drugs into the distended veins of her neck. The President lost consciousness almost at once but had time to utter three words: "Bring me Garamond." Ill G aramond crowded into the stubby shuttlecraft behind Aileen and looked forward. The door between the crew and passenger compartments was open, revealing the environment of instrument arrays and controls in which the pilots worked. A shoulder of each man, decorated with the ubiquitous Starflight symbol, was visible on each side of the central aisle. Garamond could hear the preflight checks being carried out. Neither of the pilots looked back. "Sit there," Garamond whispered, pointing at a seat screened from the pilots' view by the main bulkhead. He put his fingers to his lips and winked at Chris, making it into a game. The boy nodded tautly, undeceived. Garamond walked back to the entrance door and stood in it, waving to imaginary figures in the slidewalk tunnel, then went forward to the crew compartment. "Take it away. Captain," he said, with the greatest joviality he could muster. "Yes, sir." The dark-chinned senior pilot glanced over his shoulder. "As soon as Mrs. Garamond and your son disembark." Garamond looked around the flight deck and found a small television screen showing a picture of the passenger compartment, complete with miniature images of Aileen and Chris. He wondered if the pilots had been watching it closely and how much they might have deduced from his actions. "My wife and son are coming with us," he said. "Just for the ride." "I'm sorry, sir -- their names are not on my list." "This is a special arrangement I've just made with the President." "I'll have to check that with the tower." There was a stubborn set to the pilot's bluish jaw as he reached for the communications switch. "I assure you it's all right." Garamond slid the pistol out of his jacket and used its barrel to indicate the runway ahead. "Now, I want you to get all the normal clearances in a perfectly normal way and then do a maximumenergy ascent to my ship. I'm familiar with the whole routine and I can fly this bug by myself if necessary, so don't do any clever stuff that would make me shoot you." "I'm not going to get myself shot." The senior pilot shrugged and his younger companion nodded vigorously. "But how far do you think you're going to get. Captain?" "Far enough -- now take us out of here." Garamond remained standing between the two seats. There was a subdued thud from the passenger door as it sealed itself, and then the shuttle surged forward. While monitoring the crosstalk between the pilots and the North Field tower Garamond studied the computer screen, now displaying flight parameters. The Bissendorf lay in Polar Band One, the great stream of Starflight spacecraft -- mainly population transfer vessels, but with a sprinkling of Exploratory Arm ships -- that girdled the Earth at a height of more than a hundred kilometers. Incoming ships were allocated parking slots in any of the thirty-degree sectors marked by twelve space stations, their exact placing being determined by the amount of maintenance or repair they needed. The Bissendorf had been scheduled for a major refitting lasting three months, and was close in to Station #, which the computer showed to be swinging up over the Aleutian Islands. A maximumenergy rendezvous could be accomplished in about eleven minutes. "I take it you want to catch the Bissendorf this time around," the senior pilot said as the shuttle's drive tubes built up thrust and the white runway markers began to flicker under its nose like tracer fire. Garamond nodded. "You take it right." "It's going to be rough on your wife and boy." There was an unspoken question in the comment. "Not as rough as..." Garamond decided to do the pilots a favor by telling them nothing -- they too would be caught up in Elizabeth's inquiries. "There's a metallizer aerosol in the locker beside you," the co-pilot volunteered, speaking for the first time. "Thanks." Garamond found the aerosol container and passed it back to Aileen. "Spray your clothes with this. Do Chris as well." "What's it for?" Aileen was trying to sound unconcerned but her voice was small and cold. "It won't do your clothes any harm, but it piakes them react against the restraint field inside the ship when you move. It turns them into a kind of safety net and also stops you floating about when you're in free fall." Garamond had forgotten how little Aileen knew about spaceflight or air travel. She had never even flown in an ordinary jetliner, he recalled. The great age of air tourism was long past -- if a person was lucky enough to live in an acceptable part of the Earth he tended to stay put. "You can use it first," Aileen said. "I don't need it -- all space fliers' uniforms are metallized when they are made." Garamond smiled encouragingly. The pilot didn't know how right he was, he thought. This is going to be rough on my wife and bov. He returned his attention to the pilots as the shuttle lifted its nose and cleared the ground. As soon as the undercarriage had been retracted and the craft was aerodynamically clean, the drive tubes boosted it skyward on a pink flare of recombining ions. Garamond, standing behind the pilots, was pushed against the bulkhead and held there by the sustained acceleration. Behind him, Chris began to sob. "Don't worry, son," Garamond called. "This won't last long. We'll soon be..." "North Field to shuttlecraft Sahara Tango #," a voice crackled from the radio. "This is Fleet Commodore Keegan calling. Come in please." "Don't answer that," Garamond ordered. The clock behind his eyes had come to an abrupt and sickening halt. "But that was Keegan himself. Are you mixed up in something big, Captain?" "Big enough." Garamond hesitated as the radio repeated its message. "Tune that out and get me Commander Napier on my bridge." He gave the pilot a microwave frequency that would bypass the Bissendorfs main communications room. "But..." "Immediately." He raised the pistol against multiple gravities. "This has a hair trigger and there's a lot of G-force piling up on my finger." "I'm making the call now." The pilot spun a small vernier on the armrest of his chair and in a few seconds had established contact. "Commander Napier here." Garamond felt a surge of relief as he recognized the cautious tones Napier always employed when he did not know who was on the other end of a channel. "This is an urgent one, Cliff." Garamond spoke steadily. "Have you had any communications about me from Starflight House?" "Ah... no. Was I supposed to?" "That doesn't matter now. Here's a special order I'm asking you to obey immediately and without question. Do you understand?" "Okay, Vance." Napier sounded puzzled, but not suspicious or alarmed. "I'm on the shuttle and will rendezvous with you in a few minutes. But right now I want you to throw the ultimate master switch on the external communications system. Right now, Cliff!" There was a slight pause, during which Napier must have been considering that what he had been asked to do was illegal and that under Starflight Regulations he was not obliged to obey such an order -- then the channel went dead. Garamond closed his eyes and sighed. He knew that Napier had also considered their years together on the Bissendorf, all the lightyears they had covered, all the alien suns, all the hostile useless planets. Napier had remembered all the shared disappointments that had studded their quest for liebensraum. all the bottles of whiskey they had killed while in orbit around lost, lonely points of light both to console themselves and to make the next leg of a mission seem bearable. If Garamond and Aileen and Chris had any chance for life it lay in the fact that a spaceship was a tiny island universe in which Elizabeth's power was less than absolute. True, while in Earth orbit a ship's officers were obliged to obey any direct order from Starflight Admincom; but he had successfully blocked the communications channels... A warning chime from the shuttle's computer interrupted Garamond's thoughts. "We have some pretty severe course and speed corrections coming up," the younger pilot said. "Do you want to advise your wife?" Garamond nodded gratefully. The sky in the forward view-panels had already turned from deep blue to black as the shuttle's tubes hurled it clear of the atmosphere. In a maximum-energy ballistic-style sortie it was understood that there was no time for niceties -- the computer controlling the flight profile would subject passengers to as much stresses, within programed limits, as they could stand. Garamond edged back until he could see Aileen and Chris. "Get ready for some rollercoaster stuff," he told them. "Don't try to fight the ship or you'll be sick. Just go with it and the restraint field will hold you in place." They nodded in unison, eyes fixed on his face, and he felt a crushing weight of responsibility and guilt. He had barely finished speaking when a series of lateral corrections twisted space out of its normal shape, pulling him to the left and then upward away from the floor. The fierce pressure of the bulkhead against his back prevented him from being thrown around but he guessed that his wife and son must have been lifted out of their seats. A gasp from Aileen confirmed her distress. "It won't be long now," he called to her. Stars were shining in the blackness ahead of the shuttle. Superimposed on the random points of light was a strip of larger, brighter moles, most of which had visible irregularities of shape. The strip defined Polar Band One, glittering like a diamond bracelet. At its midpoint Sector Station # The two distinct levels of luminosity, separating man-made objects from the background of distant suns, created an awareness of three-dimensional depth and cosmic scale that Garamond rarely experienced when far into a mission. He remained with the pilots, braced between their seats and the bulkhead, while the shuttle drew closer to the stream of orbiting spaceships, making further corrections in speed and direction. By this time Starflight Admincom would have tried to contact the Bissendorf and would probably be taking other measures to prevent his escape. "There's your ship," the senior pilot commented, and the note of satisfaction in his voice put Garamond on his guard. "Looks like you're a little late. Captain -- there's another shuttle already drifting into its navel." G aramond, unused to orienting himself with the cluttered traffic of the Polar Band, had to search the sky for several seconds before he located the Bissendorf. He was able to pick out the silvered bullet of a shuttle closing in on the big ship's transfer dock. He felt a cool prickling on his forehead. It was impossible for the other shuttle to have made better time on the haul up from Earth, but Admincom must have been able to divert one already in orbit and instruct it to block the Bissendorf s single transfer dock. "What do you want to do. Captain?" The blue-chinned senior pilot had begun to enjoy himself. "Would you like to hand over that gun now?" Garamond said, "The other shuttle's making a normal docking approach. Get in there before him." "It's too late." Garamond placed the muzzle of the pistol against the pilot's neck. "Ram your nose into that dock, sonny." "You're crazy -- but I'll try." The pilot fixed his eyes on the expanding shape of the Bissendorf, then spun verniers to center his sighting crosshairs on the red-limned target of the dock, already partially obscured by the other shuttle. As he did so the retro tubes began firing computer-controlled bursts that cut their forward speed. "I told you it was too late." "Override the computer," Garamond snapped. "Kill those retros." "Do you want to commit suicide?" "Do you?" Garamond pressed the pistol into the other man's spine and watched as he tripped out the autocontrol circuits. The images of the competing shuttle and the docking target expanded in the forward screen with frightening speed. The pilot instinctively cowered in his seat. "We're going to hit the other shuttle, for Christ's sake!" "I know," Garamond said calmly. "And after we do you'll have about two seconds to get those crosshairs back on target. Let's see how good you are." The other shuttle ballooned ahead of and slightly above them until they were looking right into its main driver tubes. There was a shuddering clang that Garamond felt in his bones, the other shuttle vanished, and the vital docking target slewed away to one side. Events followed in slow motion for Garamond. He had time to monitor every move as the pilot fired emergency corrective jets that wrenched the ship's nose back to something approximating its original bearing, time to brace himself as retros hammered on the airframe, even time to be grateful for the discovery that the pilot was first rate. The shuttle speared into the Bissendorf s transfer dock at five times the maximum permitted speed, wedging itself into the interior arrester rings with a shrieking impact that deformed its hull. Garamond, the only person in the shuttle not protected by a seat, was driven .forward. What saved him from injury was the restraint field's reaction against any violent movement of his clothing. He felt bursts of induced heat pass through the material, at the same time became aware of a shrill whistling sound from the rear. A popping in his ears told him that air was escaping from the shuttle into the vacuum of the Bissendorf s dock. A few seconds later Chris began to sob, quietly and steadily. Garamond crawled aft, kneeled before the boy and tried to soothe him. "What's happening, Vance?" The brightly colored silk of Aileen's dress was utterly incongruous. "Rough docking, that's all. We are losing some air but they'll be pressurizing the dock and..." He hesitated as a warbling note came from the shuttle's address system. "They've done it -- that's theequalization signal to say we can get out now. There's nothing to worry about." "But we're falling." "We aren't falling, honey. Well, we are -- but not downward..." Garamond had no time at that moment to introduce his wife to celestial mechanics. "I want you and Chris to sit right here for a few minutes. Okay?" He stood up, opened the passenger door, looked out at a group of officers and engineering personnel gathered on the docking bay's main platform. Among them was the burly figure of Cliff Napier. Garamond launched himself upward from the sill and allowed the slight drag of the ship's restraint field to curve his weightless flight on the steel platform. There his boots took a firm grip. Napier caught his arm while the other men were saluting. "Are you all right, Vance? That was the hairiest docking I ever saw." "I'm fine. Explain it later, Cliff. Get the engine deck and tell them I want immediate full power." "Immediate?" "Yes -- there's a streamer of nova dust lagging behind the main weather front and we're going to catch it. I presume you've preset the course." "But what about the shuttle?" "We'll have to take it with us, and everybody on it." "I see." Napier raised his wrist communicator to his lips and ordered full power. He was a powerfully built and bull-necked man with hands like the scoops of a steam shovel, but there was a brooding intelligence in his eyes. "Is this our last mission for Starflight?" "My last, anyway." Garamond looked around to make sure nobody else was within earshot. "I'm in deep, Cliff -- and I've dragged you in with me." "It was my decision -- I didn't have to pull the plug on communications. Are they coming after us?" "With every Starflight ship." "They won't catch us," Napier said confidently as the deck began to press up under their feet, signaling that the Bissendorf was accelerating out of orbit. "We'll ride that wisp of dust up the hill to Uranus, and when we've caught the tide... Well, there's a year's supplies on board." "Thanks." The two shook hands. The blunt human contact comforted Garamond. Yet he wondered how long it would be before either of them would refer openly to the bitter underlying reality of their situation. They were all dressed up with a superb ship. But a century of exploration by the vast Starflight armada had proved one thing. There was nowhere to go. IV T hey were able to put off the decision for three days. During that time there was only one direction in which the Bissendorf could logically travel -- toward the galactic south, in pursuit of the single vagrant wisp of particles that lingered behind the retreating weather fronts. They had caught it, barely, and the vast insubstantial ramjets formed by the ship's magnetic fields had begun to gather power, boosting it toward lightspeed and beyond. It had been the prototypes of starships such as the Bissendorf which, a century earlier, had all but demolished Einsteinian physics. On the first tentative flights there had been something of the predicted increase in mass, but no time-dilation effect, no impenetrable barrier at the speed of light. A new physics had been devised -- based mainly on the work of the Canadian mathematician, Arthur Arthur -- which took into account the lately observed fact that when a body of appreciable mass and gravitic field reached speeds approaching .# it entered new frames of reference. Once a ship crossed the threshold velocity it created its own portable universe in which different rules applied, and it appeared that the great universal constant was not the speed of light. It was time itself. On his earlier missions Garamond had been grateful that Einstein's work had its limitations and that time did not slow down for the space traveler. He would have had no stomach for finding his wife aging ten years for his one, or having a son who quickly grew older than himself. But on this voyage, his last for Starflight, with Aileen and Christopher aboard, it would have resolved many difficulties had he been able to trace a vast circle across one part of the galaxy and return to Earth to find, as promised by Einstein, that Elizabeth Lindstrom was long dead. Arthurian physics had blocked that notional escape door, however, and he was faced with the question of where to go in his year of stolen time. His thinking; on the matter was influenced by two major considerations. The first was that he had no intention of condemning the #strong crew of the Bissendorf to a slow death in an unknown part of the galaxy in a year's time. The ship had to be able to return to Earth and therefore his radius of action was limited to the distance that could be covered in six months. Even supposing he traveled in a straight line to one preselected destination, the six-month limitation meant he would not reach far beyond the volume of space already totally explored by Starflight. Chances of this one desperate flight producing a habitable world on which to hide had been microscopic to begin with; when modified by the distance factor they vanished into the realm of fantasy. The other major consideration was a personal one. Garamond already knew where he wanted to go, but was having trouble justifying the decision. "Cluster # is your best bet," Clifford Napier said. He was leaning back in a simulated leather chair in Garamond's quarters, and in his big hand was a glass of liqueur whiskey he had not yet tasted but was holding up to the light to appreciate its color. His heavy-lidded brown eyes were inscrutable as he continued with his thesis. "You can make it with time to spare. It's dense -- average distance between suns half a light-year -- so you'd be able to check a minimum of eight systems before having to pull out. And it's prime exploration territory, Vance. As you know, the S.E.A. board recommended that # should be given high priority when the next wave is being planned." Garamond sipped his own whiskey, with its warmth of forgotten summers. "It makes sense, all right." The two men sat without speaking for a time, listening to the faint hum of the ship's superconducting flux pumps. The hum was always audible even in the engineered solitude of the skipper's rooms. "It makes sense," Napier said finally, "but you don't want to go there. Right?" "Well, maybe it makes too much sense. Admincom could predict that we'd head for # and send a hundred ships into the region. A thqusand ships." "Think they could catch us?" "There's always that chance," Garamond said. "It's been proved that four flickerwings deploying just ahead of another flickerwing, and matching velocities with it can control it better than its own skipper just by deciding how much reaction mass to let slip by." Napier shrugged. "All right, Vance -- where's your map?" "Which map?" "The one showing Pengelly's Star. That's where you want to go, isn't it?" Garamond felt a prick of chagrin at having his innermost thoughts divined so accurately by the other man. "My father actually met Rufus Pengelly once," he said defensively. "Pop told me he'd never known a man less capable of trickery -- and if there was one thing my father could do it was judge character just by..." He broke off as Napier began to laugh. "Vance, you don't need to sell the idea to me. We're not really going to find a third world, so it doesn't matter where we head, does it?" Garamond's chagrin was replaced by relief. He went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out four large photoprints. They appeared to depict grayish metallic or stone surfaces on which were arranged a number of darker spots in a manner suggestive of star maps. The fuzziness of the markings and the blotchy texture of the background were due to the fact that the prints were computer reconstructions of star charts which had been destroyed by fire. A special kind of fire, Garamond thought. The one that robbed us of a neighbor. Sagania had been discovered early in the exploratory phase. It lay less than a hundred light-years from Sol, only a quarter of the separation the best statisticians had computed as the average for technical civilizations throughout the galaxy. Even more remarkable was the coincidence of timescales. In the geological lifespans of Sagania and Earth the period during which intelligent life developed and flourished was analogous to less than a second in the lifespan of a man. Yet the "second" on one planet had overlapped the "second" on the other. Saganians and Men had coexisted, against all the odds, within interstellar hailing distance, each able to look into the night sky and see the other's parent sun without optical aid. Both had developed machine-using philosophy to the point of tapping of nuclear energy. Both had known the outward urge, planned the building of starships, and -- with their sun-beacons trembling in the blackness like candles in far-off windows -- it had been inevitable that there would have been a meeting. Except that one day on Sagania -- at a time when the first civilizations were being formed in the Valley of the Two Rivers on Earth -- somebody had made a mistake. It may have been merely a politician who overplayed his hand or a scientist who dealt the wrong cards. But the pay-off had been fatal. Sagania lost its atmosphere, and its life, in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction that surged around the planet like a tidal wave of white fire. archaeologists from Earth, ar. riving seven thousand years later, had been able to discover little about the final phase of Saganian civilization. Ironically or not, according to one's point of view, the beings who had represented the peak of the planet's culture were the ones who had removed virtually all trace of their existence. It was the older, humbler Saganian culture which, protected by the crust of centuries, had been uncovered by the electronic probes. Among the artifacts turned up had been fragments of star maps that had excited little comment -- even though a few researchers had noticed that some of the bits showed a star which did not exist. "This is the earliest fragment," Garamond said, setting the photoprint on a table. He pointed at a blurry speck. "And that's the sun we've christened Pengelly's Star. Here's another map, tentatively dated five hundred years later, and as you see -- no Pengelly's Star. One explanation is that between the times these two maps were drawn the star vanished." "Maybe it got left out by mistake," Napier prompted, aware that Garamond wanted to go over all the familiar arguments again. "That can't be -- because we have two later maps covering the same region but drawn several centuries apart, and they don't record the star either. And a visual check right now shows nothing in that region." "Which proves it died." "That's the obvious explanation. A quick but unspectacular flareup -- then extinction. Now, here's the fourth map, the one found by Dr. Pengelly. As you can see, this map shows our star." "Which proves it's older than maps two and three." "Pengelly claims he excavated it at the highest level of all, that it's the youngest." "Which proves he was a liar. This sort of thing has happened before, Vance." Napier flicked the glossy prints with blunt fingers. "What about that affair in Crete a few hundred years ago? Archaeologists are always..." "Trying to win acclaim for themselves. Sure -- but Pengelly had nothing to gain by lying about where he found the fragment. I personally believe it was drawn only decades before the Big Burn, well into the Saganians' space-going era." He spoke with the flatness of utter conviction. "You'll notice that on the fourth map the star isn't represented by a simple dot. There are traces of a circle around it." Napier shrugged and took the first sip of his whiskey. "It was a map showing the positions of extinct suns." "That's a possibility. Possibly even a probability. But I'm betting that Saganian space technology was more advanced than we suspect. I'm betting that Pengelly's Star was important to them in some way we don't understand. They might have found a habitable world there." "It wouldn't be habitable now. Not after its sun has died." "No -- but there might be other maps, underground installations, something." Garamond suddenly heard his own words as though they were being spoken by a stranger, and he was appalled by the flimsiness of the logical structure supposed to support his family's hopes for a future. He glanced reflexively at the door leading to the bedroom where Aileen and Chris were asleep. Napier, perceptive as ever, did not reply and for a while the two spacemen drank in silence. Blocks of colored light, created for decorative purposes by the same process that produced apparently three-dimensional weather maps, drifted through the air of the room in random patterns, mingling and merging. Their changing reflections seemed to animate the gold snail on Garamond's desk. "We never found any Saganian starships," Napier said. "Doesn't mean they didn't have them. You'd find their ships anywhere but in the vicinity of a burned-out home world." There was another silence, the lightcubes continuing to drift through the room like prisms of insubstantial gelatin. Napier finished his drink and got up to refill his glass. "You're almost making some kind of a case, but why did the Exploratory Arm never follow it up?" "Let's level with each other," Garamond said. "How many years is it since you really believed that Starflight wants to find other worlds?" u j  "They've got Terranova, which they sell off in hectare lots as if it were a Long Island development property in the old days. They've got all the ships, too. Man's destiny is in the stars -- just so long as he is prepared to sign away half his life to Starflight for the ride, and the other half for a plot of land. It's a smooth-running system, Cliff, and a few cheap new worlds showing up would spoil it. That's why there are so few ships, relatively speaking, in the S.E.A." "But..." "They're more subtle than the railroad and mining companies in the States were when they set up their private towns, but the technique's the same. What were you trying to say?" "I was trying to agree with you." Napier punched his fist through a cube of lime-green radiance, which floated away unaffected. "Probably doesn't matter a damn where we go in this year, so let's hunt down Pengelly's Star. Have you any idea where it ought to be?" "Some. Take a look at this chart." As they walked over to the universal machine in the corner Garamond again felt relief. Napier's acquiescence, to Garamond's mind, gave the project a semblance of sanity. When he was within voice-acceptance range of the machine he called up the map it had prepared for him. A three-dimensional star chart appeared in the air above the console. One star trailed a curving wake of glowing red dashes in contrast to the solid green lines representing the galactic drift of the others. "I had no direct data on how far Pengelly's Star was from Sagania," Garamond said. "But the fact that we're interested in it carries the implication that it was a Sol-type sun. This gives an approximate value for its intrinsic luminosity and, as the dot representing it on the earliest Saganian map was about equal in size to other existing stars of first magnitude, I was able to assign a distance from Sagania." "There's a lot of assuming and assigning going on there," Napier said doubtfully. "Not all that much. Anyway, the stars throughout the entire region share the same proper motion and speed so, although they've all traveled a long way in seven thousand years, we can locate Pengelly's Star on this line with a fair degree of certainty." "Certainty, he says. What's the computed journey time? About four months?" "Less -- if there's the right sort of dust blowing around." "It will be," Napier said in a neutral voice. "It's an ill wind..." Later, when Napier had left to get some sleep, Garamond ordered the universal machine to convert an entire wall of the room into a forward-looking viewscreen. He sat for a long time in a deep chair, his drink untouched, staring at the stars and thinking about Napier's last remark. Part of the invisible galactic winds from which the Bissendorf drew its reaction mass had been ill winds indeed for somebody, sometime, somewhere. Heavy particles, driven across the galactic wheel by the forces of ancient novae, were the richest and most sought-after harvest of all. An experienced flickerwing man could tell when his engine intakes had begun to feed on such a cloud just by feeling the deck grow more insistent against his feet. But a sun going nova engulfed its planets, converting them and everything on them to incandescent gas, and at each barely perceptible surge of the ship Garamond wondered if his engines were feeding on the ghosts of dawn-time civilizations, obliterating all their dreams, giving the final answer to all their questions. He fell asleep sitting at the viewscreen, on the dark edge of the abyss. aileen Garamond had been ailing nearly a week. Part of the trouble was due to shock and the subsequent stress of being catapulted into a difficult environment. The rest traced to a circumstance Garamond was surprised to discover: his wife was far more sensitive than he to minute changes in acceleration caused by the ship crossing weather zones. He explained to her that the Bissendorf relied largely on interstellar hydrogen for reaction mass, ionizing it by continually firing electron beams ahead of the ship, then sweeping it up with electromagnetic fields that guided it through the engine intakes. As the distribution of hydrogen was constant, the ship would have had constant acceleration and its crew would have enjoyed an unchanging apparent gravity had there been no other considerations. Space, however, was not the quiescent vacuum described by the old Earthbound astronomers. Vagrant clouds of charged particles from a dozen different kinds of sources swept through it like winds and tides, heavy and energetic, clashing, deflecting, creating silent storms where they met each other head-on. "On available hydrogen alone our best acceleration would be half a gravity or less," Garamond said. "That's why we value the highactivity regions and, where possible, plot courses that take us through them. And that's why you feel occasional changes in your weight." Aileen thought for a moment. "Couldn't you vary the efficiency of the engines to compensate for those changes?" "Hey!" Garamond gave a pleased laugh. "That's the normal practice on a passenger ship. They run at roughly nine-tenths of full power and that's automatically stepped up or down as the ship enters poor or rich volumes of space. So shipboard gravity remains constant. But Exploratory Arm ships normally keep going full blast. And on a trip like this one..."Garamond fell silent. "Go on, Vance." Aileen sat up in the bed, revealing her familiar suntanned torso. "You can't take it easy when you're being hunted, is that it?" "It isn't so much that we're being hunted -- it's just that to make the best use of our time we must move as fast as possible." Aileen got out of the bed and walked toward where he was seated, her nakedness incongruous in the functional surroundings of his quarters. "There's no point in our going to Terranova, is there? Isn't that what you're telling me?" He leaned his face against the warm cushion of her belly. "The ship can keep going for about a year. After that..." "And we won't find a new planet. One we can live on, I mean." "There's always the chance." "How much of a chance?" "It has taken the entire fleet a hundred years of searching to find one habitable planet. Work it out for yourself." "I understand." Aileen stood with him for a moment, abstractedly holding his face against herself, then she turned away with an air of purpose. "It's about time for that guided tour of the ship you promised Christopher and me." "Are you sure you're feeling well enough?" "I'll get well enough," she promised. Garamond suddenly felt happier than he had expected to be ever again. He nodded and marched into the main room where Chris, in pajamas, was eating breakfast. As soon as the boy had got over his unfortunate introduction to spaceflight on board the shuttle, he had adapted quickly and easily to his new surroundings. Garamond had eased things by putting in little time in the Bissendorf s control room, allowing Napier and the other senior officers to run the ship. Now he helped his son to dress. Aileen soon joined them, quite selfconscious in the dove-gray nurse's coverall he had ordered for her from the quartermaster. "You look fine," he said before she could ask the age-old question. Aileen examined herself critically in a mirror. "What is wrong with my own clothes?" "Nothing, if you're on the recreation deck, but you must wear functional clothing when moving about the other sections of the ship. There aren't any other wives on board, and I don't like to rub it in." "But you told me a third of the crew were women." "That's right. We have a hundred-fifty female crew of various ages and ranks. On a long trip there's always a lot of coupling going on, and occasionally there's a marriage, but no woman is taken on for purely biological reasons. Everybody has a job to do." "Don't sound so stuffy, Vance." Aileen looked at her son, then back at her husband. "What about Christopher? Does everybody know why we're here?" "No. I blocked the communications channels while we were on the shuttle. The one other person on board who knows the whole story is Cliff Napier -- the others can only guess I'm in some sort of a jam, but they won't be too concerned about it." Garamond smiled as he remembered the old flickerwingers' joke. "It's a kind of relativity effect -- the faster and farther you go, the smaller the President gets." "Couldn't they have heard about it on the radio since then?" Garamond shook his head emphatically. "It's impossible to communicate with a flickerwing when it's underway. No signal can get through the fields. The crew will probably decide I walked out on Elizabeth the way a commander called Witsch once did. If anything, I'll go up in their estimation." It took more than an hour to tour the various sections and levels of the Bissendorf. They started with the command deck and moving "downward" through the various administrative, technical and workshop levels. Last came the field generating stations, and the pods containing the flux pumps and hydrogen fusion plant. At the end of the tour Garamond realized, with some astonishment, that for a while he had managed to forget that he and his family were under sentence of death. oosted by the ion-rich tides of space, the ship maintained an average acceleration of # meters per second squared. Punishing though this was to the crew, whose weight had apparently increased by one-third, it was a rate of speed-increase that would have required several months before the Bissendorf could have reached the speed of light under Einsteinian laws. After only seven weeks, however, the ship had attained a speed of magical threshold figure above which Arthurian physics held sway -- and new phenomena, inexplicable in terms of low-speed systems, were observed. To those on board acceleration appeared to remain constant, yet the Bissendorf's speed increased sharply until, at the midpoint of the voyage, only twelve days later, it was traveling at vast multiples of the speed of light. Retardation produced a mirror image of the distanceagainsttime graph, and in an elapsed time of four months the ship was in the computed vicinity of Pengelly's Star... orry, Vance." Cliff Napier's Jjheavy-boned face was somber as he spoke. "There's just no sign of it. Yamoto says that if we were within ten light-years of a black sun his instruments couldn't miss it." "Is he positive?" "Absolutely. In fact, according to him, there's less spatial background activity than normal."  am not going to let it happen, Garamond thought irrationally. Aloud he said, "Let's go down to the observatory -- I want to talk to Yamoto." "I can put him on your viewer." "No. I want to see him in person." Garamond left the central command console and nodded to Gunther, the second exec, to take over. This was the moment Garamond had been dreading since the Bissendorfs engines had been shut down an hour earlier, making it possible -- in the absence of the all-devouring intake fields -- to carry out radiation checks of the surrounding space. The reason he was going to the observatory in person was that he had a sudden need to move his arms and legs, to respond to the crushing urgency absent while the ship was in flight but now back with him again. And he wanted some time away from the watchful eyes of the bridge personnel. "I'm sorry, Vance." Napier always had trouble adjusting to zerogravity conditions and his .massive figure swayed precariously as he walked in magnetic boots to the elevator shaft. "You said that before." "I know. I'd begun to believe we were on to something, and somehow I feel guilty for the way it has turned out." "That's crazy -- we always knew it was a long shot," Garamond said. You liar, he told himself. You didn't believe it was a long shot at all. You convinced yourself you'd find a signpost to a third world -- because you couldn 't face the fact that you had condemned your wife and son to death. As the elevator was taking him down he thought back, for perhaps the thousandth time, to that afternoon on the terrace at Starflight House. All he had had to do was keep an eye on Harald Lindstrom, to refuse permission to run, to do what anybody else would have done in the same circumstances. Instead, he had let the boy trick him into doing his hardened spacefarer bit, then he had allowed himself to be pressured, then he had turned his back and indulged in daydreams while Harald was climbing, then he had been too slow in reaching the statue while the first fatal between the boy's fingers and the metal construction... and he was falling... and falling... falling! "Here we are." Napier opened the elevator door, revealing a tunnel-like corridor at the end of which was the Bissendorf s astronomical observatory. "Thanks." Garamond fought to suppress an overwhelming feeling of unreality as he walked out of the elevator. He saw, as in a dream, the white-clad figure of Sammy Yamoto standing at the far end of the corridor waving to him. His brain was trying in a numbed way to deal with (he paradox that moments of truth, those instants when reality cannot be avoided, always seem unreal. And the truth was that his wife and child were going to die. Because of him. "For a man who found nothing," Napier commented, "Sammy Yamoto's looking pretty excited." Garamond summoned his mind back from gray wanderings. Yamoto came to meet him, plum-colored lips trembling slightly. "We've found something! After I spoke to Mister Napier I became curious about there being less matter per cubic centimeter around here than the galactic norm. It's as if the region has been swept by a passing sun, yet there is no sun around." "What did you find?" "I'd already checked out the electromagnetic spectrum and knew there couldn't be a sun nearby. But I got a crazy impulse and checked the gravitic spectrum anyway." Yamoto was a fifty-year-old man who had looked on many celestial wonders in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock. Garamond felt the first stirrings of elation. "Go on," Napier said from behind him. "I found a gravity source of stellar magnitude less than a tenth of a light-year away, so..." "I knew it!" Napier's voice was hoarse. "We've found Pengelly's Star." Garamond's eyes were locked on the astronomer's. "Let Mister Yamoto speak." "So I took some tachyonic readings to get an approximation of the object's size and surface composition, and... You aren't going to believe this, Mister Garamond." "Try me," Garamond said. "As far as I can tell..." Yamoto swallowed painfully. "As far as I can tell, the object out there...the thing we have discovered is a spaceship more than three ameter!" V I ike everyone else on board the j Bissendorf , Garamond spent a lot of time at the forward viewscreens during the long days of approach to the sphere. He attended many meetings accompanied by Yamoto, who had become one of the busiest and most sought-after men on the ship. At first the Chief Astronomer had wanted to take advantage of the drive shut-down period to get off a tachyonic signal to Earth announcing his discovery. Garamond discreetly did not point out his own role as prime mover in the find. Instead he made Yamoto aware of the danger of letting fame-hungry professional rivals appear on the scene too early, and at the same time he insured against risks by ordering an immediate engine restart. Yamoto went back to work, but the curious thing was that even after a full week of concentrated activity he knew little more about the sphere than had been gleaned in his first hurried scan. He confirmed that it had a diameter of some # kilometers, or just over two astronomical units. He confirmed that its surface was smooth to beyond the limits of resolution, certainly the equivalent of finely machined steel. He confirmed that the sphere emitted no radiation other than on the gravitic spectrum, and that analysis of this proved it hollow. In that week the only new data he produced were that the object's sphericity was perfect to within the possible margin of error, and that it rotated. The question of whether it could be a natural rather than an artificial object he refused to discuss. Garamond turned all these factors over in his mind, trying to gauge their relevance to his own situation. The sphere, whatever its nature, no matter what its origins might be, was a startling find. The fact that it had been indicated on an antique Saganian star chart no doubt would radically alter the accepted views about the dead race's early technological prowess. Possibly the whole science of astronomy would be affected -- but not the pathetically short futures of his wife and child. What had he been hoping for? A fading sun that still emitted life-giving warmth? An Earth-type planet with a vast network of underground caverns leading down into the heat of its core? A race of friendly humanoids who would say, "Come and live with us and we'll protect your family from the President of Starflight?" It was in the nature of hope that it could survive on such preposterous fantasies. But only when they were confined to the subconscious, where -- as long as they existed at all -- the emotions could equate them with genuine prospects of survival, enabling the man on the scaffold steps to retain his belief that something might still turn up to save him. Garamond and his wife and boy were on the scaffold steps, but the fantasies of hope were being dissipated by the awful presence of the sphere. Garamond found that trying to comprehend its size produced an actual physical pain between his temples. The object was big even by astronomical standards; if Sol were positioned at its center, the Earth's orbit would be within the shell -- assuming that the sphere's outer surface was a shell. It was so huge that at distances which would have reduced Sol to nothing more than a bright star, the sphere was clearly visible to the unaided eye as a disk of blackness against the star clouds of the galactic lens. Garamond watched it grow and grow on his screens until it filled the entire field of view with its dark, inconceivable bulk -- and yet it was still more than #, #, # kilometers away. Something within him began to cringe from the enormous object. In the early stages of the approach he had nursed the idea that because of the smoothness of its surface, it had to be an artifact. The notion faded when exposed to the mindpunishing reality of the sphere's magnitude, because there was no way to visualize engineering on that scale, to conceive of a technology so, far beyond anything mankind could dream of achieving. Then, in the .final stages of the approach, the Bissendorf s sensors delivered astounding news. A planet orbited the sphere. There was no optical evidence of the planet's existence. But a study of its gravitic emissions showed that it was of approximately the same diameter and mass as Earth, and that its almost-eircular orbit lay some # kilometers outside the sphere's surface. Further, discovery of the planet permitted new deductions about the nature of the sphere. Chief Astronomer Yamoto sent Garamond a report stating unequivocally that it was a thin shell enclosing an otherwise normal sun. B y the time it had matched velocities with the hidden star and slipped into an equatorial parking orbit, the ship was just over two thousand kilometers from the surface of the dark sphere. The range was inconvenient for the rocketpropelled buggy that would carry the exploration party. But the Bissendorfha. never been intended for close maneuvering, and Garamond decided against jockeying in closer with the rarely used ion tubes. He sat in the central control area and watched the stereo image themselves in the muster station. Although Garamond knew all the men and women of his crew by sight if not by name, there was one blond fresh-complexioned youngster he was having trouble identifying. He pointed at the screen. "Cliff, is that one of the shuttle crew we shanghaied?" "That's right. Joe Braunek. He fitted in well," Napier said. "I think you did him a favor." "Did Tayman select him for this mission?" "He volunteered. Tayman referred back to me and I interviewed him in person." Napier broke off to contemplate a memory that appeared to amuse him. "Well?" "Says he's entitled to log the flying time because you wrecked his shuttle and dumped it." Garamond laughed. "What of the other shuttle pilot? The one with the blue chin." "Shrapnel? Ah... he didn't fit in so well. In fact, he's pretty resentful. He wouldn't sign on as crew and I've had to keep him under surveillance." "Oh? I seem to remember sending him an apology." "You did. He's still resentful." "I wonder why?" Napier emitted a dry cough. "He wasn't planning to be separated from his wife for this length of time." "I'm a self-centered bastard -- is that it, Cliff?" "Not at all." "Don't give me that -- I recognize that Chopin cough you give every time I go off the rails." Visualizing the shuttle pilot, Garamond tried to imagine the man in the context of a family like his own but found the exercise strangely difficult. "Shrapnel knows he'll be away for only a year. Why doesn't he try to make the best of it?" Napier coughed once more. "The "Your TB is back again, Cliff. What did I say that time?" Garamond stared hard at his next in command. Napier took a deep breath, altering the slopes of his massive chest and shoulders. "You don't like Shrapnel and he doesn't like you, and that amuses me -- because you are both the same type. If you were in his shoes certainly you'd be broody and resentful and looking for an opportunity to twist things back the way you wanted them. He even resembles you physically, sort of, yet you sit there telling me he's weird." Garamond's smile was forced. Napier and he had long ago discarded all remnants of formal relationship so he felt no resentment at the other man's words, but he found them disturbing. They had implications he did not want to group's intercom frequency and listened to the clamorous, overlapping voices of the men as the buggy was sealed and the dock evacuation procedure began. They were complaining in a good-natured way. about the discomfort of the spacesuits normally donned only twice a year in practice driljs. Or grumbling about the difficulty of carrying instrument and tool kits in gloved hands. But Garamond knew they were genuinely pleased and excited. Life aboard an S.E.A. vessel consisted of routine outward journeys, brief pauses while it was established by long range instruments that the target suns had no planets or no usable planets, and equally dull returns to base. In the Bissendorf s entire span of service, this was the first occasion for men to leave its protective hull and venture into alien space. And the object of the sortie was to make physical contact with something outside humanity's previous experience! It was a big moment for the little exploratory team. Garamond found himself wishing he could take part. He watched as the outer doors of the dock slid aside to reveal a blackness unrelieved by stars. At a distance of two thousand kilometers the sphere not only filled half the sky; it was half the sky. The observed universe was cut into two hemispheres -- one of them glowing with starclouds, the other filled with light-absorbent darkness. There was no sensation of being close to a huge object, rather, all felt poised above infinite deeps. The restraining rings opened and allowed the white-painted buggy to jet out clear of the mother ship. Its boxy angular outline shrank to invisibility in a few seconds but its interior and marker lights remained in view for quite a long time as the craft moved "downward" from the Bissendorf. Garamond stayed at central control while the buggy descended , watching several screens at once as its cameras sent back different types of information. At a height of three hundred meters the commander of the buggy, Kraemer, switched on powerful searchlights and succeeded in creating a grayish patch of illumination on the sphere's surface. "Instruments show zero gravity at surface," he reported. Garamond cut in on the circuit. "Do you want to go on down?" "Yes, sir. The surface looks metallic from here -- I'd like to try a touchdown with magnetic clamps." "Go ahead." The indistinct grayness expanded on the screens until the dang of the buggy's landing gear was heard. "No use," Kraemer said. "We just bounced off." "Are you going to let her float?" "No, sir. I'm going to go in again and maintain some drive pressure. That should lock the buggy in place against the surface and give us a fixed point to work from." "Go ahead, Kraemer." Garamond looked at Napier and nodded in satisfaction. The two watched as the buggy was inched into contact with the surface and held there by the thrust of its tubes. Kraemer's voice was heard again. "Surface seems to have a reasonable index of friction -- we aren't slipping around. I think it's safe to go out for samples." "Right." T he buggy's door slid open. Spacesuited figures drifted out and formed a small swarm around the splayed-out landing gear. Bracing themselves against the tubular legs, the figures went to work on the vaguely seen surface of the sphere with drills, cutters and chemicals. At the end of thirty minutes, by which time the team operating the valency cutter could have sliced through a house-sized block of chrome steel, nobody had managed even to mark the surface. The result was in accordance with Garamond's premonitions. "This is a new one on me," said Harmer, the chemist. "We can't make a spectroscopic analysis because the stuff refuses to burn. At this stage I can't even say for sure that it's a metal. We're just wasting our time down here." "Tell Kraemer to bring them up," Garamond said to Napier. "Is there any point in firing the main ionizing gun against it?" "None at all," put in Denise Serra, the Chief Physicist. "If a valency cutter at a range of one centimeter achieved nothing there's no point in hosing energy all over it from this distance." Garamond nodded. "Okay. Let's pool our ideas. We've acquired a little more information, although most of it is negative, and I'd like to have your thoughts on whether the sphere is a natural object or an artifact." "It's an artifact," Denise Serra said immediately, with characteristic firmness. "Its sphericity is perfect and the surface is smooth to limits of below one micron. Nature doesn't operate that way -- at least, not on the astronomical scale." She glanced a challenge at Yamoto. "I have to agree," Yamoto said. "I can't conceive of any natural mechanism that would produce that thing out there. However, that doesn't mean I can see how it was constructed by intelligent beings. It's just too much." He shook his head dispiritedly. The haggardness of his face showed that he had been losing a lot of sleep. O'Hagan, the Chief Science Officer, who was a stickler for protocol, cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. "Our difficulties arise from the fact that the Bissendorf is an exploration vessel and little more. The correct procedure now would be to send a tachyon signal back to Earth and get a properly equipped expedition out here." His severe gray gaze held steadily on Garamond's face. "That's outside the scope of the present discussion," Napier said. Garamond shook his head. "No, it isn't. Gentlemen, and lady, Mister O'Hagan has put into words something that must have been on all your minds since the beginning of this mission. It can't have been difficult for you to work out for yourselves that I'm in trouble with Starflight House. In fact, it's personal trouble' with Elizabeth Lindstrom -- and I think you all know what that means. I'm not going to give you any more details, simply because I don't want you to be involved any more than you are at present. Perhaps it is enough to say that this has to be my last voyage as a Starflight commander, and I want this year in full." O'Hagan looked pained but held his ground doggedly. "I'm sure I'm speaking for all the other section heads when I say that we feel the utmost personal loyalty to you, Captain Garamond. Those feelings were not affected by the circumstances surrounding the start of this voyage. Had it turned out to be a normal, uneventful mission I, for one, wouldn't even consider questioning its legality. But the fact remains that we have made the most important discovery since Terranova and Sagania, and I believe it should be reported to Earth without delay.!' "I disagree," Napier said coldly. "Starflight House didn't direct the Bissendorf to this point in space. The sphere was discovered because Captain Garamond acted independently to check" out a personally held theory. We'll hand it over to Starflight, as a bonus they didn't earn, at the end of the mission's scheduled span of one year." O'Hagan gave a humorless smile. "I still feel..." Napier jumped to his feet. "What do you mean when you say you feel. Mister O'Hagan? Don't you think with your brain like the rest of us? Does the fact that you feel these things turn them into something for which you have no personal responsibility?" "That's enough," Garamond said. "I just want O'Hagan to explain his choice of words." "I said..." "Gentlemen, I withdraw my remarks," O'Hagan interrupted, staring fixedly at his notepad. "It wasn't my intention to divert the discussion from the main topic. Now, we seem agreed that the sphere is of artificial origin -- so what is its purpose?" He raised his eyes and scanned the assembled officers. There was a lengthy silence. "Defense?" Denise Serra's round face mirrored her doubts. "Is there a planet inside?" "There might be a planet on the far side of the sun that hasn't shown up on our gravitic readings," Yamoto said. "But if we had the technology to produce that sphere, could there be an enemy so powerful that we would have to cower behind a shield?" "Suppose it was a case of 'Stop the galaxy, I want to get off?' Maybe the builders were pacifists and felt the need to hide. They made a pretty good job of concealing a star." "I hope that isn't the answer," Yamoto said gloomily. "If technologists like that needed to hide..." "This is getting too speculative," Garamond said. "The immediate practical question is, does it have an entrance? Can we get inside? Let's have your thoughts on that." Yamoto stroked his wispy beard. "If there is an entrance, it ought to be on the equator so that ships could hold their positions over it just by going into a parking orbit the way we did." "So you suggest doing a circuit of the sphere in theequatorial.plane?" "Yes -- in the direction opposite to its rotation. That way we would get the advantage of its seventy thousand kilometers an hour of equatorial rotation and cut down on our own G-forces." "That's decided then," Garamond said. "We'll turn around as soon as Kraemer and his team are on board. I hope we'll recognize an entrance if we see one." Three duty periods later he was asleep beside Aileen when his communicator buzzed him into wakefulness. "Garamond here," he said quietly, trying not to disturb his wife. "Sorry to disturb you, Vance," Napier said, "but I think we're going to reach an entrance to the sphere a couple of hours from now." " What? " Garamond sat upright, aware of deceleration forces. "How could you tell?" "Well, we can't be certain, but it's the most likely explanation for the echoes we're picking up on the long-range radar." "What sort of echoes?" "A lot of them, Vance. There's a fleet of about three thousand ships in parking orbit, dead ahead of us." VI T he ships were invisible to the naked eye. Yet on the detector screens aboard the Bissendorf they appeared as a glowing swarm, numerous as stars in a dense cluster. High-resolution radar, aided by other forms of sensory apparatus, revealed them to be of many different sizes and shapes, a vast and variegated armada poised above one point on the enigmatic sphere. "You could have told me they weren't Starflight ships," Garamond said, easing himself into his seat in central control, his eyes fixed on the forward screens. "Sorry, Vance -- that didn't occur to me." Napier handed Garamond a bulb of hot coffee. "As soon as I saw the lack of standard formations I knew they couldn't be Starflight vessels. The silhouettes and estimated masses produced by the computers confirmed it. None, of the ships in that bunch can be identified by type." Second Officer Gunther gave a quiet laugh. "That was a pretty hairy moment up here." Garamond smiied in sympathy. "I guess it was." "Then we realized we were looking at a collection of hulks." "You're positive?" "There's no radiation of any kind. Those are dead ships, and they've been that way for a long time." Napier shook his head. "This is turning out to be one hell of a trip, Vance. First there was the sphere itself, and now... We always wondered why no Saganian starships had ever been found." One hell of a trip, Garamond repeated to himself, his mind trying to deal with the magnitude of the new discovery and at the same time cope with the shocking and unexpected intrusion of something akin to hope. He had fled from the Earth as an obscure flickerwing commander. Now he had the prospect of returning as the most celebrated explorer since Laker had found Terranova and Molyneaux had found Sagania. That was bound to make things more difficult for Elizabeth. In practice she was outside the law. But even for the President of Starflight Incorporated there were limits to how far she could go in full view of mass television audiences -- and Garamond was going to be a public figure. A rigged trial, with witnesses primed to swear Harald's death had been the result of willful action, would not be as certain to destroy Garamond as before. For such a trial would focus the world's attention on him even more firmly, might deny Elizabeth the personal revenge she had never been known to forego. If he and his family were to die it would probably have to appear accidental. And even the most carefully planned accidents could be prevented -- if not indefinitely, at least for a reasonable length of time. The future still looked dangerous, but its uncompromising blackness had been alleviated. Maintaining its height above the surface of the sphere, the Bissendorf -- which had been closing with the immense fleet at a combined speed of close to two hundred thousand kilometers an hour -- swung out of the equatorial plane. It described a wide semicircle around the ships and approached them from the opposite direction, carefully matching velocities until it shared approximately the same parking orbit. In the latter stages of the maneuver, telescopic observations by Chief Astronomer Yamoto revealed that' several of the vessels at the center of the swarm were shining by reflected light. He deduced that a beam of sunlight was being emitted from an aperture in the surface of the sphere, and reported to Garamond accordingly. Shortly afterward the aperture revealed itself in the telescopes as a thin line of faint light that gradually opened to a narrow ellipse as the Bissendorf crept closer. The big ship's central command gallery took on a crowded appearance as officers not on duty found reasons to stay near the curving array of consoles. They were waiting for the first transmissions from the surveillance torpedo that had been dispatched toward the spaceships illuminated by the column of light escaping from Pengelly's Star. An atmosphere of awe and tension possessed the Bissendorf. All on board were aware that history was being made, dwarfing anything that had occurred during their previous wanderings in the galaxy. "I'm not used to such excitement," Napier whispered. "Round about this stage on a trip I'm usually tucked away quietly with a bottle of ninety-proof consolation, and I almost think I like it better that way." "I don't," Garamond said firmly. "This is changing things for all of us." "Hey, skipper -- I was kidding. Have you tried to work out what the prize money ought to be if it turns out that those ships can still be flown?" Garamond chuckled. He had finished his third bulb of coffee and was bending over to put it in the disposal chute. Staring at the screens, Napier exclaimed, "Look at that, Vance!" A murmur of shock rose from the central gallery as Garamond lifted his head to look at the first images coming from the distant torpedo. They were of a large gray ship ripped open along its length like a gutted fish. Twisted sections of infrastructure were visible inside the wound, like entrails. Lesser scars, which had not penetrated the hull, crisscrossed the remainder of the great ovoid's sunlit side. "Something really chopped her up, Cliff." "Not as much as the next one!" T he images were changing rapidly as the surveillance torpedo, unhampered by any considerations of the effects of G-force on human tissue, darted toward a second ship -- half a ship, actually. It had been sliced in two, laterally, by some unimaginable weapon, ripples of metal flowing back from the sheared edges. A small vessel, corresponding in size to a lifeboat, hung in space near the open crosssection, joined to the jagged half of the mother ship by cables. After the first startled comments, silence fell over the control gallery as the images of destruction multiplied. An hour passed while the torpedo examined all the ships touched by the single shaft of sunlight, then spiraled outward into the darkness to scan others by the light of its own flares. It became evident that every vessel in the huge swarm had died violently, cataclysmically, Garamond found the ships illuminated dimly by the flares to be the most hideous. Their ruptured hulls, silent, brooding over gashes filled with the black blood of shadow, could have been organic remains preserved by the chill of space, contorted by ancient agonies. "A signal has just come up from telemetry," Napier said. "There's a malfunctioning developing in the torpedo's flare circuits. Want another one sent out?" "No. I think we've seen enough of wrecks for the present. Have the torpedo go down for a look through the aperture. I'm sure Mister Yamoto would like some readings on the sun in there." Garamond leaned back in his seat and gazed at Napier. "Has it ever struck you as odd that we, as representatives of a warlike race, don't carry any armament?" "The need has never come up. Besides, it's my guess the Lindstroms don't want their ships destroying each other -- or combining in a revolt against the corporations." He added, "In a pinch, our main ionizing beam could do plenty of damage." "Not in that class." Garamond nodded at the viewscreens. "We couldn't even aim it without turning the whole ship." "You think those hulls prove Serra's theory about the sphere being a defense?" "Maybe." Garamond's voice was thoughtful. "We don't know for sure until we have a look inside the sphere and see if there is -- or was -- something worth defending." "What makes you think you would see anything?" "That." Garamond pointed at the screen. It had just begun to show new images being transmitted back from the torpedo. The aperture in the dark surface of the sphere was circular and almost a kilometer in diameter. A yellow Sol-type sun hung below it, perfectly centered by the torpedo's aiming mechanisms. The most remarkable thing was that the space inside the sphere did not appear black, as the watchers on the Bissendorf knew it ought to. It was as blue as the summer skies of Earth. Two hours later, and against all the regulations concerning the safety of Starflight commanders, Garamond was at the head of a small expedition entering the sphere. The buggy was positioned almost on the edge of the aperture, held in place against the surface by the thrust of its tubes. Garamond was able to grip the strut of a landing leg with one hand and slide the other over the edge of the aperture. Its hard rim was only a few centimeters thick. There was a spongy resistance to the passage of his hand, which told of a force field spanning the aperture like a diaphragm, then his gloved fingers gripped something that felt like grass. He pulled himself through to the inside of the sphere and stood up. And there -- on the edge of a circular black lake of stars, suited and armored to withstand the lethal vacuum of interplanetary space -- Garamond had his first look at the green and infinite meadows of Orbitsville. G aramond ' s sense of dislocation was almost complete. He received an impression of grasslands and low hills running on forever. And although his mind was numbed, his thoughts contained an element of immediate acceptance, as if an event for which he had been preparing all his life had finally occurred. Garamond felt as though he had been born again. In that first moment, when his vision was impossible landscape, he was able to look at the circular lake of blackness from which he had emerged and see it through alien eyes. The grass -- the tall, lush grass that grew right to the rim! -- shimmered green. It was difficult to accept that there were stars down in that pool. It was impossible to comprehend that were he to lie at its edge and look he would see sunken ships drifting in black crystal space... Something was emerging from the lake. Something white, groping blindly upward. Garamond's identity returned to him abruptly as he recognized the spacesuited figure of Lieutenant Kraemer struggling to an upright position. He moved to help the other man and became aware of yet another "impossibility" -- there was gravity sufficient to give him almost his normal Earth weight. Kraemer and he leaned against each other like drunken men, bemused, stunned, helpless because there were blue skies where there should have been only the hostile blackness of space, because they had stepped through the looking glass into a secret garden. The grass moved gently, reminding Garamond of perhaps the greatest miracle of all, of the presence of an atmosphere. He felt an insane but powerful urge to open his helmet, and was fighting it when his tear-blurred eyes focused on -- yes -- buildings. They were visible at several points around the rim of the aperture: ancient buildings, low and ruinous. The reason they had not registered immediately on Garamond was that time had robbed them of the appearance of artifacts, clothing the shattered walls with moss and climbing grasses. As he began to orient himself within the new reality, and the images being transmitted from eyes to brain became susceptible to interpretation, he saw amid the ruins the skeletons of what had once been great machines. "Look over there," he said. "What do you think?" There was no reply from Kraemer. Garamond glanced at his companion, saw his lips moving silently behind his faceplate and remembered they were still on main radio communication. Both men switched to subsidiary audio circuits that used small microphones and speakers on their chest panels. "The suit radios seem to have packed up," Kraemer said casually, then his professional composure cracked. "Is it a dream? Is it? Is it a dream?" His voice was hoarse. "If it is, we're all in it together. What do you think of the ruins over there?"' Kraemer shielded his eyes and for the first time saw the buildings. "They remind me of fortifications." "Me, too." Garamond's mind made an intuitive leap. "It wasn't always possible to stroll in here the way we just did." "All those dead ships?" "I'd say a lot of people once tried to come through that opening, and other people tried to keep them out." "But why should they keep anybody out? I mean, if the whole inside of the sphere is like this..." Kraemer gestured at the sea of grass. "God! If it's all like this, there's as much living room as "More," Garamond told him. "I've already done the sums. This sphere has a surface area equivalent to # times the total surface of Earth. If we allow for the fact that only a quarter of the Earth's surface is land and perhaps only half of that is usable, it means the sphere is equivalent to five "That's one each for every man, woman and child in existence." "Provided one thing." "What's that?" "That we can breathe the air." "We'll find out about that right now," Kraemer said. Garamond felt a momentary dizziness. When he had been playing around with comparisons of the size of Earth and the sphere he had treated it as a purely mathematical exercise, his mind solely on the figures. Kraemer had gone ahead of him to think in terms of people actually living on the sphere, people arriving at the aperture in fleets sent from crowded and worn-out Earth, spreading outward across these limitless prairies. Trying to accommodate the vision along with his other speculations about the origins and purpose of the sphere had brought Garamond to vertigo. And superimposed on all his swirling thoughts, overriding every other consideration, a new concept of his personal status was struggling to be born. If he, Vance Garamond, gave then he, and not Elizabeth Lindstrom, would be the most important human being alive -- and his wife and child would be safe. "There's an analyzer kit in the buggy," Kraemer said. "Shall I go for it?" "Of course." Garamond was surprised by the lieutenant's question, then with a flash of insight he understood that it had taken only a few minutes of exposure to the unbounded lebensraum of the sphere to alter a relationship which was part of the tight, closed society of the Two Worlds. Kraemer was actually reluctant to leave the secret garden by climbing down into the circular black lake, and -- as a potential owner of a supercontinent -- he saw no reason why Garamond should not go instead. So quickly , Garamond thought. We'll all be changed so quickly. Aloud he said, "While you're getting the kit you can break the news to the others -- they'll want to see for themselves." "Right." Kraemer looked pleased at the idea of being first with the most sensational story of all time. He went to the edge of the aperture, lay down and lowered his head into the blackness, obviously straining to force the helmet through the membrane field that retained the atmosphere. After wriggling sideways a little to obtain his grip on the buggy's leg, Kraemer slid out of sight into the darkness. Garamond again felt a sense of dislocation. The fact that he had weight, that there was a naturalseeming gravity pulling him "downward" against the grassy soil, created an illusion that he was standing on the surface of a planet. His instincts rebelled against the idea that he was standing on a thin shell of unknown metal, that below him was the hard vacuum of space, that the buggy was close underneath his feet, upside down, clinging to the sphere by the force of its drive. G aramond moved away from the aperture a short distance, annoyed by the incongruity of the heavy spacesuit that shut him off from what surely must be his natural element. He kneeled for a closer look at the grass. It grew thickly, in mixed varieties that to his inexpert eye had stems and laminae similar to those of Earth. He parted the grass, pushed his fingers into the matted roots and scooped up a handful of brown soil. Small crumbs of it clung to the material of his gloves, making moist smears. Garamond looked up and for the first time noticed the lacy white streamers of cloud. With the small sun positioned vertically overhead it was difficult to study the sky, but beyond the cloud he thought he could distinguish narrow bands of a lighter blue that created a delicate ribbed effect curving from horizon to horizon. He made a mental note to point it out to Chief Science Officer O'Hagan for early investigation, and returned his attention to the soil. Digging into it with his palms he came to the ubiquitous gray metal of the shell, its surface unmarked by the damp earth. Garamond placed his hand against the metal and tried to imagine the buildings of the sphere, to visualize the creation of an apparently seamless globe of metal with a circumThere could be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and that was the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star tons a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and other radiations. But in the case of Pengelly's Star one individual or many had set up a boundary, turned that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it, translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe they had created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material they wanted -- harder than diamond. immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, they had again dipped their hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior surface of the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic compounds, even complete cells and seeds, had been constructed in the same way, because at the ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and one of steel... "The air is good, sir." Kraemer's voice came from close behind. Garamond stood up, turned, saw that the lieutenant had opened his faceplate. "What are the readings like?" "A shade low on oxygen, but everything else is about right." Kraemer was grinning like a schoolboy. "You should try some." Garamond opened his own helmet and took a deep breath. The air was soft and thick and pure. He discovered at that moment that he had never known truly fresh air before. Low shouts came from the direction of the aperture as other spacesuited figures emerged. "I told the others they could come through," Kraemer said. "All except Braunek -- he's holding the buggy in place. That's all right, isn't it?" "Yes. I'll be setting up a rota system to let everybody on the ship have a look before we go back." Again Garamond sensed a difference in Kraemer's attitude. Before the lieutenant had seen the interior of the sphere he would not have cleared the buggy without obtaining permission. "Before we go back? But as soon as we signal Earth, the traffic's all going to be coming this way. Why go back?" "No reason, I suppose." Garamond had been thinking of Aileen and her reluctance ever to travel more than a few kilometers from their apartment. He had been planning to return her to the old familiar Surroundings as soon as possible, but perhaps there was no need. Standing on the interior surface of the sphere was as close as one could get to being on the infinite plane of the geometer, yet there was nothing in the experience to inspire agoraphobia. The line of sight did not tangent away from the downward curve of a planet and so the uniform density of the air set a limit to the distance a man could see. Garamond studied the horizon. It appeared to curve upward slightly, in contrast to that of Earth, but it did not seem much farther away. There was no sense of peering into immensities. Kraemer put the toe of one boot down into the small hole Garamond had made and tapped the metal at the bottom. "Did you find anything?" "Such as?" "Circuits. For this synthetic gravity." "No. I don't think we'll find any circuits in our sense of the word." "What, then?" "Atoms with their interiors rearranged or specially designed to do a job. Perfect machines." "Sounds incredible." "We've taken the first step in that direction ourselves with our magnetic resonance engines. Anyway, what could be more incredible than all this?" Some instinct prompted Garamond to push the soil back into the hole and tamp it down with his foot, repairing the damage he had done to the grassy surface. In the region close to the aperture the soil was thinly distributed, but there were hills in the distance that looked as though they could have been formed by drifting. "As soon as your men have got over the shock, tell them to gather vegetation and soil samples," he said. "I already have," Kraemer replied carelessly. "By the way, none of the suit radios is working, though mine was all right again when I went back out through the aperture." "There must be a damping effect -- that's something else for O'Hagan to investigate when he gets here. Let's have a look at those ruins." They walked to the nearest of the indistinct mounds. Under the blanket of climbing grasses there was just enough remaining structure to suggest a floor plan of massive walls and simple square rooms. Here and there, close to the black lake of stars, were distorted metallic stumps that had once been parts of machines. They had a sagging, lava-flow appearance as if they had been destroyed by intense heat. Kraemer gave a low whistle. "Who do you think won? The folks trying to get in, or the ones trying to keep them out?" "I'd say the invaders won, Lieutenant. I've been thinking about all those dead ships hanging out there. They can't be in their battle stations because even if they had been stationary during the fight the forces used against them would have kicked them adrift and there would have been nothing for us to find. It looks as though they were rounded up and carefully parked just outside the aperture." "Why?" "For salvage, maybe. There may be no metals available within the sphere." "For beating into ploughshares? It's good farming country, all right, but where are the farmers?" "Nomads? Could be you don't have to till the soil. Maybe you just keep moving, following the seasons, with the grain always ripening just ahead of you." Kraemer laughed. "What seasons? It must always be high summer here -- and high noon, too. It can't get dark with that sun right above your head." "But it is getting dark, Lieutenant." Garamond spoke peacefully, all capacity for surprise exhausted. "Look over there." He pointed at the horizon beyond the black ellipse of the aperture. There the shimmering blue-greens of the distance had begun to deepen. There was an unmistakable gathering of shade. "That's impossible," Kraemer protested. He looked up at the sun. "Oh, no!" Garamond looked up too and saw that the sun was no longer circular. It had one straight side, like a gold coin from which somebody had clipped a generous segment. Shouts from the other men indicated that they had noticed the event. While they watched, the still progressively smaller as though a shutter were being drawn across it. At the same time, keeping pace, the darkness increased on the corresponding horizon and a new phenomenon made itself apparent. The delicate ribbed effect Garamond had noticed in the sky earlier became clearer, the alternating bands of lighter and darker blue now standing out vividly. In the space. of a minute, as the sun began to disappear completely, the slim curving ribs became the dominant feature of the sky, swirling across it from two foci, as sharply defined as the striations in polished agate. Near the horizon, where they dipped behind denser levels of air, the bands blurred and dispersed into a prismatic haze. The last searing sliver of sun vanished and Garamond glimpsed a wall of shadow rushing over the landscape towards him at orbital speed. Then it was night, beneath a canopy of stratified sapphire. Garamond stayed beside the lake of stars for an hour before returning to his ship and sending a tachyonic signal to Starflight House. I t was almost exactly four months later that Elizabeth Lindstrom's flagship took up its station outside the sphere's entrance. Garamond had spent part of the time carrying out investigations into Orbitsville -- the name for the sphere had originated with an unknown crew member -- but the Bissendorf was primarily equipped for locate-and-report missions. It did not carry a large science team. So the studies were necessarily limited. But the astronomy section, under Sammy Yamoto, did make another profound discovery. There was yet another sphere surrounding Pengelly's Star. It was smaller than Orbitsville, non-material in nature yet capable of reflecting or deflecting the sun's outpourings of light and heat. Yamoto described it as a "globular filigree of force fields," a phrase of which he was inordinately proud, judging by the frequency with which it was used in his reports. Of the inner sphere's surface area, precisely half was made up of narrow strips, effectively opaque, curving in a general north-south direction. Their function was to cast great moving bars of shadow on the grasslands of Orbitsville, producing the alternating periods of light and darkness, day and night, without which plant life could not survive. Yamoto was not able to observe the inner sphere directly, but he could chart its structure by studying the bands of light and darkness as they moved across the far side of away in the "night" sky. And he was able to show that the shadow sphere not only created night and day but was also responsible for a progression of seasons. In one quarter of the sphere, corresponding to winter, the opaque nightproducing strips were wider and therefore separated by narrower gaps of light; at the opposite side the strips were reduced in width to engender the shorter nights and longer days of summer. To facilitate Yamoto's work a small plastic observatory was prefabricated in the Bissendorf s workshops and transferred to a site within Orbitsville. Several more buildings were added as other sections found reason to prolong their work in the interior, and the nucleus of a scientific colony was formed. A substantial portion of the research was devoted to the annoying riddle of why no radio communicator would work inside the sphere. At first it was anticipated that a simple solution and practical remedy would be found, but the weeks slipped by without any progress being made. It appeared that the equally inexplicable synthetic gravity field was responsible for damping out all electromagnetic radiation. In an effort to get new data on the mechanics of the phenomenon, O'Hagan's team took a photographic torpedo and gave it enough extra thrust to enable it to take off from the inner surface of Orbitsville. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the gravity gradient and to see if the radio guidance and telemetry systems would operate if the signals were traveling at right angles to the surface. After a flawless programed start, the torpedo began tracing random patterns in the sky and made a programed automatic landing several kilometers away from the aperture. Pessimists predicted that the only long-range communication possible on Orbitsville would be by modulation of light beams. Another discovery was that the utterly inert ,nd incredibly hard shell of the sphere was impervious to all radiation except gravity waves. The latter were able to pass through, otherwise the star system's outer planet would have tangented off toward interstellar space, but not even the most energetic particles entered Orbitsville from the outer universe except through the aperture. Certain peculiarities in the measurements of radiation levels from Pengelly's Star itself led O'Hagan to give Garamond a confidential report in which he suggested that flickerwing ships might not be able to operate within the sphere, due to lack of available reaction mass. The subject was earmarked for priority investigation by the fully equipped' teams that would arrive later. Garamond received an increasing number of requests from crewmen, especially those who were inactive when the main drive was not in use, for permission to stay on Orbitsville under canvas. At first he encouraged the idea, but Napier reported that the remaining personnel were becoming resentful of their relaxed and sunburned colleagues. Partly to combat the divisive emotions, Garamond took the Bissendorf on a circuit of Orbitsville's equatorial plane and established that no other entrances were visible. He also set teams to work moving the swarm of dead ships a thousand kilometers down orbit from the aperture. With the ships at their new station, they were boarded by photographic teams that made records of their findings. These confirmed Garamond's first guess that the hulks had been used as mines and sources of supply. The interiors were gutted, stripped to the bare metal of the hulls, and in some cases it turned out that what had been thought to be the havoc of battle was actually the work of scavengers. An unfortunate byproduct was that virtually nothing was found to indicate the appearance of the aliens who had built and flown the huge fleet. The most significant clue was a section of metal staircase and handrailing that hinted the aliens had been bipeds of about the same size as humans. Where were they now? That question came in for more discussion than did speculations on the whereabouts of the beings who had created Orbitsville. It. was understood that the sphere-builders had possessed a technology of an entirely different order to that of the race which had produced the ships. The instinctive belief was that the sphere-builders were unknowable, that they had moved on to new adventures or new phases of their existence, because it would be impossible to be near them without their presence being felt. Orbitsville appeared to be and was accepted as a gift from the galactic past. Garamond brought Aileen and Christopher into the sphere, through the newly constructed Lshaped entrance port, for a strangely peaceful vacation. Aileen was able to adjust to Orbitsville's up-curving horizons without any psychological upsets, and Chris took to the place like a foal turned loose in spring pastures. In the daytime Garamond watched the boy's skin acquire the gold of the newfound sun, and at night he sat outside with Aileen beneath the fabulous archways of the sky, their gratification all the more intense because of the period of despair that had preceded it. Only in dreams, or in the halfworld between consciousness and sleep, did Garamond feel apprehension. Mostly he tried not to think of Elizabeth advancing across the light-years that lay between Orbitsville and Earth. T o the unaided vision it would have appeared that her flagship came alone. In fact it was at the head of a fleet of seventy vessels, but an interstellar ramjet on maindrive was surrounded by its intake field, a vast insubstantial maw with square kilometers. For that reason the closest formation ever flown was in the form of a thousandkilometer grid. The fleet was unwieldy even by Starflight standards. It spent two days in matching velocities with the galactic drift of Pengelly's Star and in deploying its individual units in parking orbit. When each ship had been accurately positioned and its electromagnetic wings furled, the flagship -- Starflier IV -- advanced slowly on ion drive until it was almost alongside the Bissendorf. Captain Vance Garamond received a formal invitation to come on board. The act of donning the blackand-silver dress uniform, for the first time ever in the course of a mission, reminded him acutely that once again he was within Elizabeth's sphere of influence. He was not conscious of any fear -- Orbitsville had had too profound an effect on the situation for that -- yet he was filled with vague distaste each time he thought of the forthcoming interview. For the past four months he had been certain that Elizabeth's consequence had been reduced to normal human dimensions, but her arrival at the head of an armada suggested that the old order was still a reality. For her, the only reality. The sight of his dress uniform disturbed Aileen, too. Later, as the transit dock opened and the little buggy ventured out into the black ocean of space, Garamond remembered the way his wife had kissed him. She had been abstracted, almost cold, and had turned away quickly. It had been as though she were suppressing all emotion, but in his final glimpse of her she had been holding their golden snail against her cheek. Garamond stood behind the pilot of the buggy for the whole of the short trip, watching the flagship expand until it filled the forward screens. When the docking maneuver had been completed he stepped watchfully but confidently into the transit bay where a group of Starflight officials were waiting. Behind the officials were a number of men in civilian dress and carrying scene recorders. With a minimum of ceremony Garamond was escorted to the Presidential suite and ushered into the principal stateroom. Elizabeth must have given previous instructions, because his escorts withdrew immediately and in silence. The President was standing with her back to the door. She was wearing a long close-fitting gown of white satin, her favorite style of dress. Three white spaniels floated drowsily in the air close to her feet. Garamond was shocked to see that Elizabeth had lost most of her hair. The thinning black strands clung to her scalp in patches, making her look old and diseased. She continued to stand with her back to him although she must have been aware of his presence. "My Lady..." Garamond scuffed the floor with his magnetic-soled boots, and the President slowly turned. The skin of her small-chinned face was pale and glistening. "Why did you do it. Captain?" Her voice was low. "Why did you run from me?" "My Lady, I..." Garamond, unprepared for a direct question, was lost for words. "Why were you afraid of me?" "I panicked. What happened to your son was pure accident. He fell when I wasn't even near him. But I panicked and ran." It occurred to Garamond that Elizabeth might have sound political and tactical reasons for choosing to meet him as a mother who had lost a child rather than as an empress in danger of being usurped. But that did not lessen her advantage. Incredibly, Elizabeth smiled her asymmetrical, knowing smile. "You thought I wouldn't understand, that I might lash out at you." "It would have been a natural reaction." "You shouldn't have been afraid of me, Captain." "I... I'm glad." This is fantastic. Garamond thought numbly. She doesn't believe any of it. I don't believe any of it. So why go on with the charade?... suffered, and you've suffered," Elizabeth was saying. "I think we always will, but I want you to know that I bear you no grudge." She came closer to him, still smiling, and her soft satiny abdomen brushed his knuckles. Garamond thought of spiders. "There isn't any way I can express how sorry I am that the accident occurred." "I know." Elizabeth's voice was gentle, but suddenly the room was filled with her sweet, soupy odor and Garamond knew that just for an instant she had thought of "My Lady, if this is too much for you..." Her face hardened instantly. "What makes you think so?" "Nothing." "Very well, then. We have important business to discuss, Captain. Did you know that the Council, with my consent, has authorized the payment to you of ten Garamond shook his head. "Ten "Yes. Does that seem a lot of money to you?" "It seems all the money there is." Elizabeth laughed and turned away from him, disturbing the spaniels in their airborne slumbers. "It's nothing, Captain. Nothing! You will, of course, be appointed to the council I'm setting up to advise on the development and exploitation of Lindstromland, and your salary from that alone will be two there's..." Elizabeth paused. "What's the matter, Captain? You look surprised." "I am." "At the size of your salary? Or the fact that the sphere has been officially named after my family?" "The name of the sphere is unimportant," Garamond said stonily, too disturbed by what Elizabeth had said to think about exhibited the proper degree of deference. "What is important is that it can't be controlled and exploited. You sounded as if you were planning to parcel up the land and sell it in the same way that Terranova is handled." "We don't sell plots on Terranova -- they are given freely, through Government-controlled agencies." "To anybody who can pay the Starflight transportation charge. It's the same thing." "Really?" Elizabeth examined Garamond through narrowed eyes. "You're an expert on such matters, are you?" "I don't need to be. The facts are easily understood." Garamond felt he was rushing toward a dangerous precipice, but he had no desire to hold back. "In that case you'll make an excellent council member -- all the others regard the Starfiight operation as being extremely complex." "In practice," Garamond said doggedly. "But not in principle." Elizabeth gave her second unexpected smile of the interview. "In principle, then, why can't Lindstromland be developed in the normal way?" "For the same reason that watersellers can make a living only in the desert." "You mean where there's a lot of water freely available nobody will pay for it." "No doubt that sounds childishly simple to you, My Lady, but it's what I meant." "I'm intrigued by your thought processes, Captain." Elizabeth was giving no sign of being angered by Garamond's attitude. "How can you compare selling water and opening up a new world?" Garamond gave a short laugh. "Yours are the intriguing thought processes -- if you're comparing Orbitsville to an ordinary planet." "Orbitsville?" "Lindstromland. It isn't like an ordinary planet." "I'm aware of the difference in size." "You aren't." Elizabeth's tolerance began to fade. "Be careful of what you say, Captain." "With respect, My Lady, you aren't aware of the difference in size. Nobody is, and nobody ever will be. I myself am not aware of it, and I've flown right around Orbitsville." "Surely the fact that you were able to..." "I was traveling at a hundred thousand kilometers an hour," Garamond said in a steady voice. "At that speed I could have orbited the Earth in twenty-five minutes. Do you know how long it took to get around Orbitsville? Forty-two days!" "I grant you we're dealing with a new order of magnitude." "And that's only a linear comparison. Don't you see there's just no way you can handle the amount of living space involved?" Elizabeth shrugged. "I've already told you that Starfiight doesn't concern itself with the apportionment of land, so the exact area of Lindstromland is of no concern to us. We will, of course, continue to make a fair profit from our transportation services." "But that's the whole point," Garamond said angrily. "Even if it wasn't a disguised land charge, the transportation fee should be abolished." "Why?" "Because we now have all the land we can use. In those circumstances it is intolerable that there should be any kind of economic brake on the natural and instinctive flow of people toward the new land," "You, of all people, should know that there's nothing natural or, instinctive about building and sailing a flickerwing ship." A rare tinge of color was appearing in Elizabeth's waxy cheeks. "It can't be done without money." Garamond shook his head. "Not money. People.' It can't be done without people. A culture that had never developed the concept of money, or property, could cross space just as well as we do." "At last!" Elizabeth took two quick steps toward Garamond, then stopped, swaying in magnetic shoes. "At last I know you, Captain. If money is so distasteful to you, I take it you are refusing a place on the development council?" "I am." monits from the pockets of the people of the Two Worlds. You're refusing that, too?" "I'm refusing that, too." "You're too late," Elizabeth snapped, savoring a triumph which only she understood. "It has already been credited to your account." "I'll return it to you." Elizabeth shook her head decisively. "No, Captain. You're a famous man back on the Two Worlds -- and I must be seen to give you everything you deserve. Now return to your ship." On the way back to the Bissendorf, Garamond's mind was filled with the President's admission that he had become too important to be disposed of like other human beings. And yet, came the disturbing thought, there had been that look of satisfaction in her eyes. IX T he new house allocated for Garamond's use was a rectangular, single-story affair. It was one of several dozen built from plastic panels that had been prefabricated in a Starflight workshop aboard one of Elizabeth's ships. Situated less than two kilometers from the aperture, where the coating of soil was still thin, the compact structure was held in place by suction pads installed to grip the underlying metal of the shell. After a few days, Garamond found he could forget the hard vacuum of space beginning only a few centimetres below his living-room floor. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable. A full range of color projectors and entertainment machines, plus an electronic tutor for Christopher, gave the place something of the atmosphere of a luxury weekend lodge. There was an efficient kitchen initially supplied with provisions from shipboard stores. Of course, the expectation was that the colonists would becoming self-supporting as regards food within a year. It was late summer in that part of Orbitsville and the grasses were approaching a tawny ripeness. Even before a systemized agriculture could be established to produce grain harvests, the grass would be fully utilized -- part of it synthetically digested to create protein foods, the rest yielding cellulose for the production of a range of acetate plastics. Garamond, technically, was still in command of the Bissendorf, but he spent much of his time in the house, telling himself he was helping his family put down roots. In reality he was trying to cope with the feeling of having been cut adrift. He acquired the habit of standing at a window that faced the aperture and watching the ever-increasing tempo of activity at the Starflight outpost. Machinery, vehicles, supplies of all kinds came through the L-shaped entry tubes in a continuous stream; new buildings were erected every day amid moraines of displaced soil; a skein of dirt roads wound around and through the complex, its loose ends straggling of into the grasslands. Earth's beachhead was becoming well-established, and as it did so Garamond felt more and more redundant. "The weirdest thing about it is that I feel possessive, too," he said to his wife. "I keep lecturing people about the inconceivable size of Orbitsville, telling them it couldn't be controlled by a thousand Starflight corporations. Yet I have a gut-feeling it's my personal property. I guess that in a way I'm as much out of touch with reality as Liz Lindstrom." Aileen shook her head. "You're angry at the way she's proposing to handle things." "Angry at myself." "Why?" "What made me think Starflight House would quietly bow out of existence to make way for a publicly funded transportation system? From what I hear, Liz's public relations teams are plugging the notion that Starflight already is a quasi-government concern. That was a hard one to put over when there was just Terranova and the amount of land a settler got was determined by how much he paid for his passage, but now it's different." "In what way?" Aileen looked up from the boy's shirt she was handstitching. Her deeply tanned face was sympathetic but unconcerned; since arriving on Orbitsville she had developed a peaceful optimism. It seemed that the principal element of his wife's personality, her unremarkable pleasantness, was standing her in good stead in the alien environment. "There's to be a standard transportation charge and no limitation to the amount of land a settler can occupy. That will make the operation seem pretty altruistic to most people." Since turning down membership in Elizabeth's development council Garamond had found it difficult to keep himself informed of her activities. Still, he could guess the approach she was using to sell Orbitsville on overcrowded Earth. The newly established fact that above a layer of air the volume of space within the sphere was totally free of hydrogen or other matter, ruling out the use of flickerwing ships, could even be turned to Starflight's advantage. It was likely that a long time would elapse before the unwieldy and inefficient type of ship that carried its own reaction mass could be redeveloped sufficiently to make any impression on the five the sphere. Orbitsville, then, was truly the ultimate frontier, a place where a man and his family could load up a solar-powered vehicle with supplies, plus an "iron cow" to convert grass into food, and drive off into a green infinity. The life would be simple, and perhaps hard -- in many ways similar to that of a pioneer in the American West -- but in the coastto-coast urbs of Earth there was a great yearning for just that kind of escape. The risk of dying of overwork or simple appendicitis on a lonely farm hundreds of light-years from Earth was infinitely preferable to the prospect of going down in a food riot in Paris or Melbourne. No matter how much Starflight charged for passage to Orbitsville, there would always be more than enough people to fill the big ships. "Does the President have to be altruistic?" Aileen said, and Garamond knew that she was drawing comparisons between Liz Lindstrom and herself, between a woman who had unexpectedly lost a son and one whose husband and child had been reprieved. "What's wrong with making a reasonable percentage on services rendered?" "In this case -- everything." Garamond suppressed a pang of annoyance. "Don't you see that? Look, Earth has been raped and polluted and choked to death, but right here on Orbitsville there's room for every human being there is to lose himself forever. We've made all the mistakes and ' learned all the lessons back on Earth, and now we've been given this chance to start off from scratch again. The situation demands an almost complete transfer of population -- and it could be done, Aileen. At our level of technology it could be done, but the entire Starflight operation is based on it not being done!" Garamond returned to staring through his window. "In order for Elizabeth to go on making her quote reasonable percentage unquote there has to be a potential, a high population pressure on Earth and a low one elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the Lindstroms are behind the failure of all the main population-control programs." "That's ridiculous, Vance." Aileen began to laugh. "Is it?" Garamond turned away from the window, mollified by his wife's good cheer. "Maybe so, but you don't hear them complaining much about the birth rate." "Talking about birth rates -- our own has been pretty static for a long time." Aileen caught his hand and held it against her cheek. "Wouldn't you like to be the father of the first child born on Orbitsville?" "I'm not sure. It's impossible, anyway. The first shiploads of settlers are on their way. And from what I've heard about the Terranova run, a lot of the women always arrive pregnant. It has something to do with the lack of recreational facilities on that journey." "How about the first one conceived on Orbitsville, then?" "That's more like it." Garamond kneeled beside his wife's chair, took her in his arms. They kissed. Aileen drew back after a few seconds. "You'll have to do better than that." "I'm sorry. I keep thinking about the people, beings or gods -- whatever you want to call them -- who built Orbitsville." "Who doesn't?" "I don't understand them." "Who does?" "You know, there's enough living space in Orbitsville to support every intelligent being in the galaxy. For all we know, that's why it was created, and yet..." Garamond allowed his voice to die away. He suspected Aileen would accuse him of paranoia if he speculated aloud about why the sphere-builders had created a hostel for an entire galaxy's homeless -- and then played into Elizabeth Lindstrom's hands by providing only one entrance. C hick Truman was one of a breed of human beings who had come into existence with the development of interstellar travel. He was a frontiersman-technician. His father and grandfather had helped with the opening up of Terranova and with the initial surveying of a dozen other planets which, although unsuitable for colonization, had some commercial or scientific potential. He had received little in the way of formal technical training but, like all other members of the fraternity of gypsyengineers, seemed to have an inborn knowledge of the entire range of mechanical skills. It was as though the accumulated experience of generations had begun to produce men for whom the analysis of an electrical circuit or the tuning of an engine was a matter of instinct. One attribute that distinguished Truman from most of his fellows was a strong if undisciplined interest in philosophy. And it was this that had fired his mind as he had set up camp on the lower slopes of the hills that ringed Orbitsville's single aperture at a distance of about sixty kilometers. Truman was half of a two-man team sent out to erect a bank of laser reflectors as part of an experimental communications system. The pair had reached its destination minutes before the wall of darkness had come rushing from the east, and now Truman's partner -- Peter Krogt -- was busy preparing food and laying out their sleeping bags. Truman himself was concerned with less prosaic matters. He had lit a pipe of tobacco, comfortably seated with his back to the transporter, he stared into the incredible ribbed archways of the night sky. "The Assumption of Mediocrity is a useful philosophical weapon," he was saying, "but it can backfire on the guy who uses it. I know that some of the greatest advances in human thought were achieved by assuming there's nothing odd or freakish about our own little patch -- that's what set Albert Einstein off." "Help me open these containers," Krogt said. Without moving, Truman released a cloud of aromatic smoke. "But consider the case of, say, two beetles living at the bottom of a hole on a golf course. These bugs have never been out of that hole, but if they have a philosophical turn of mind they can describe the rest of the universe just on the strength of available evidence. What would their universe be like, Pete?" "Who cares?" "Nice attitude, Pete. Their projected universe would be an infinite series of round holes with big white balls dropping into them during daylight hours." Krogt had opened the food containers unaided. He handed one to Truman. "What are you talking about, Chick?" "I'm telling you what's wrong with the management back at base. Listen -- we've been on Orbitsville for months, right?" "Right." "Now, take this little jaunt we're on right now. These hills are three hundred meters high. Our orders are to set up the reflectors at an elevation of two hundred and fifty meters. We've been told where to set them, where to aim them, what deviation will be acceptable, how long to take with the assignment -- but there's one thing we haven't been told. And I find it a pretty astonishing omission, Pete." "Your yeasteak's getting cold." "Why did nobody tell us to climb the extra fifty meters to the top of the hill and have a look at the other side?" "Because there's no need," Krogt said heavily. "There's nothing there but grass and scrub. The whole inside of this ball is nothing but prairie." "There you go! The Assumption of Mediocrity." "It isn't an assumption." Krogt gestured with his fork at the shimmering watered-silk canopy of the sky. "They've had a look around with telescopes." "Telescopes!" Truman sneered to cover up the fact that he had forgotten about telescopic examination of the far side of Orbitsville, then his talent for rapid mental calculation came to his aid. "We're talking about a distance of more than two astronomical units, sonny. If you were standing on Earth, what would one of those spyglasses tell you about life on Mars?" "More'n I want to know. Are you going to eat this yeasteak or will I?" "You eat it." Truman got to his feet, slightly dismayed at the way in which a discussion on philosophy had led him to renounce his meal, and marched away up the slope. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the rounded summit. There he paused to re-light his pipe. The yellow flame from the lighter dazzled his eyes, so almost a minute passed before Truman realized that spread out on the plain below him, dim and peaceful, were the lights of an alien civilization. X T he arrival of the first wave of passenger ships had surprised Garamond in two ways -- by the timing, which could have been achieved only if they had set out within days of Elizabeth's own arrival on Orbitsville; and by their number. There were eighty Type G# vessels, each of which carried more than four thousand people. A originally must have been destined for the relatively well-prepared territories of Terranova, had been diverted to a new destination where there was not even a shed to give them shelter on their first night. "It beats me," Cliff Napier said, sipping his morning coffee. He was off duty and had spent the night in Garamond's house. "All right, so Terranova has only one usable conthe situation isn't all that urgent. No matter how you look at it, these people are going to. have a rough time for a while. They haven't even got proper transportation for this place." "You're wondering why they agreed to come?" Garamond asked, finishing his own coffee. Napier nodded. "The average colonist is a family .man. He doesn't want to expose his wife and kids to more unknotvn risks than necessary. How did Starflight get them to fly here?" "I'll tell you." Aileen came into the room with a pot of fresh coffee and I were down at the store this morning while you two were still in your beds. I spoke to people who saw the newcomers disembarking before dawn. You know, you don't learn much by lying around snoring-" "All right, Aileen, we both think you're wonderful. Now, what are you talking about?" "They were given free passage," Aileen said, obviously pleased at being able to impart that news. Garamond shook his head. "I can't believe it!" "It's true, Vance. They say Starflight House is giving free travel to anybody who signs on for Lindstromland within six months." "It's a trick." "Oh. Vance!" Aileen's eyes were reproachful. "Why don't you admit you were wrong about Elizabeth? Besides, what sort of a trick could it be? What could she hope to gain?" "It's a trick," Garamond said stubbornly. "What she's done isn't even legal -- the teams from the Government land agencies haven't got here yet." "But you always say the law doesn't mean anything to the Lindstroms." "Not when they want to take something. This is different." "Now you're being childish," Aileen snapped. "He isn't," Napier said. "Take our word for it, Aileen -- Liz Lindstrom never acts out of character." Aileen's face had lost some of its natural color. "Oh, you know it all, of course. You know all about how it feels for a woman to lose her only..." She stopped speaking abruptly. "Child," Garamond finished for her. "Don't hold anything back ." "I'm sorry. It's just..." Lenses of tears magnified Aileen's eyes as she walked out of the room. The two men finished their coffee in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Garamond wondered if the feeling of pointlessness silting through him was due to his having to stand by helplessly while the President imposed her will on Orbitsville, or if it sprang from the slow realization that he was out of a job. The entire Stellar Exploration Arm had become superfluous because there was no need for the big ships to search the star fields ever again. Could it be, he wondered, that l existed only for the search? With an obvious effort at diplomacy, Napier began discussing the work being carried out by the Starflight research teams. Despite the use of more sophisticated and more powerful cutting tools than had been available on board the Bissendorf, nobody had managed even to scratch the shell material. At the same time, studies of the inner shell were indicating that its movement was not a simple eastwest rotation, but that subtle geometries were involved. Their object, apparently, was to produce a normal progression of day and night close to the polar areas. Another team had been working continuously on the diaphragm field that prevented the atmosphere from rushing into space through the kilometer-wide aperture in the outer shell. No significant progress had been made there, either. The force field employed was unlike anything ever generated by human engineers in that it reacted equally against the passage of metallic and non-metallic objects. Observations of the field showed that it was lenticular in shape, being several meters thick at the center. Unlike the shell material, it was transparent to cosmic rays and actually appeared to refract them. The discovery had led to the suggestion that as well as being a sealing device it was intended to disperse cosmic rays in such a way as to produce a small degree of mutation in Orbitsville's flora and fauna -- if the latter existed. In general, the field seemed more amenable than the shell material to investigation because it had proved possible to cause small local alterations in its structure and to produce temporary leaks by firing beams of electrons through it. "Interesting stuff," Napier concluded. "Fascinating," Garamond said automatically. "You don't sound convinced. I'm going to have a look at the new arrivals." Garamond smiled. "Okay, Cliff. We'll see you for lunch." He got to his feet and was walking to the door with Napier when the communicator set, which had been connected to the central exchange by a landline pending a solution of the radio transmission problem, chimed to announce an incoming call. Garamond pressed image of a heavy-shouldered and prematurely gray young man appeared at the projection focus. He was wearing civilian clothing and his face was unknown to Garamond. "Good morning, Captain," the stranger said in a slightly breathless voice. "I'm Colbert Mason of the Two Worlds News Agency. Have any other reporters been in touch with you?" "Other reporters? No." "Thank God for that -- I'm the first!" Mason said fervently. "The first? I didn't know Starflight had authorized transportation for newsmen." "They haven't." Mason gave a shaky laugh. "I had to emigrate to this place with my wife more or less permanently, and I know other reporters have done the same thing. I'm just lucky my ship disembarked first. If you'll give me an interview, that is." "Have you been off-world before?" "No, sir. First time, but I'd have gone right around the galaxy for this chance." G aramond recognized the flattery but also found himself genuinely impressed by the young newsman. "What did you want to talk to me about?" "What did I...?" Mason spread his hands helplessly. "The lot! Anything and everything. Do you know, sir, that back on Earth you're regarded as the most famous man ever? Even if you'd answered the tachygrams we sent you, we'd still have considered it worthwhile to try for a face-to-face interview." "Tachygrams? I got no signals from Earth. Hold on a minute." Garamond killed the audio channel and turned to Napier. "Elizabeth?" Napier's heavy-lidded eyes were alert. "I'd say so. She didn't like your views on how Orbitsville should be handled. In fact, I'm surprised this reporter got through the net. He must be exceptionally smart, or lucky." "Let's make him luckier." Garamond opened the audio circuit again. "I've got a good story for you, Mason. Are you prepared to run it exactly as I tell it?" "Of course." "Okay. Come straight out to my place." "I can't, sir. I called you because I think I'm being watched, and there may not be much time." "All right, then. You can report that in my opinion the potential of Orbitsville is..." "Orbitsville?" "The local name for Lindstromland..." Garamond stopped speaking as the image of the reporter broke up into motes of colored light that swarmed in the air for a second before abruptly vanishing. He waited for the image to reestablish itself but nothing happened. "I thought it was too good to be true," Napier commented. "Somebody pulled the plug on you." "I know. Where do you think Mason was speaking from?" "Must have been from one of the depot stores. Those are the only places where he'd have any access to a communicator set." "Let's get down there right now." Garamond pulled on a lightweight jacket and, without waiting to explain to Aileen, hurried from the house into Orbitsville's changeless noon. Christopher looked up from the solitary game he was playing in the grass but did not speak. Garamond waved to the boy and strode out in the direction of the clustered buildings around the aperture. "It's bloody hot," Napier grumbled at his side. "I'm going to buy a parasol for walking about outdoors." Garamond was in no mood to respond to small talk. "It's getting too much like Earth and Terranova." "You won't be able to prove the call was blocked." "I'm not even going to try." They walked quickly along the brown dirt road that threaded through the scattering of residences and reached the belt of small administrative buildings, research laboratories and windowless storehouses surrounding the aperture. The black ellipse began to be disjointedly visible through a clutter of docking machinery and L-shaped entry ports. Garamond was no longer able to think of it as a lake of stars. Now it was simply a hole in the ground. As they were passing an unusually large anonymous building his attention was caught by sunlight glinting on a moving vehicle -- one of the few yet to be seen on Orbitsville. It stopped at the entrance to the building, four men got out and hurried inside. One of them had a youthful build that contrasted with his graying hair. Napier caught Garamond's arm. "That looked like our man." "We'll see." They sprinted across a patch of grass and into the dense shade of the foyer, just in time to glimpse an interior door closing. A doorman wearing Starflight emblems came out of a kiosk and tried to bar their way but Garamond and Napier went by on each side of him and burst through to the inner room. Garamond's first glance confirmed that he had found Colbert Mason. The reporter was between two men who were gripping his arms, and three others -- one of whom Garamond identified as Silvio Laker, a member of Elizabeth Lindstrom's personal staff -- were standing close by. Mason's face had a dazed, drugged expression. "Hands off him," Garamond commanded. "Out of here," Laker said. "You're outside your territory, Captain." "I'm taking Mason with me." "Like hell you are," said one of the men holding Mason, stepping forward confidently. Garamond gave him a bored look. "I can cripple you ten different ways." He was lying, never having been interested in even the recreational forms of personal combat, but the man suddenly looked less confident. While he was hesitating, his partner released Mason and tried to snatch something from his pocket, but was dissuaded by Napier who simply moved his threehundred-pound bulk in a little closer and looked expectant. A ringing silence descended on the sparsely furnished room. "Are you all right?" Garamond said to Mason. "My neck," the reporter said uncertainly, fingering a pink blotch just above his collar. "They used a hypodermic spray on me." "It was probably just a sedative to keep you quiet." Garamond fixed his gaze on Laker. "For your sake, I hope that's right." "I warn you to stay out of this," Laker said in a hoarse voice, his short round body quivering with anger. He extended his right fist, on which was a large gold ring set with a ruby. "Lasers are messy," Garamond said. "I don't mind cleaning up." "You're getting in over your head. Laker. Have you thought about what Elizabeth would do to you for involving her in murder?" "I've an idea she'd like to see you put away." "In secret, yes -- not like this." Garamond nodded to Napier. "Let's go." They turned the compliant, stupified reporter around and walked him toward the door. "I warn you, Garamond," Laker whispered. "I'm prepared to take the chance." "Don't be foolish." Garamond spoke without looking back. The door was only a few paces away now and he could feel an intense tingling between his shoulder blades. He put out his hand to grasp the handle, but in the instant of his touching it the door was flung open and three more men exploded into the room. Garamond tensed to withstand an onslaught but the newcomers, two of whom were wearing field technician uniforms, brushed past with unseeing eyes. "Mr. Laker," shouted the third man, who was wearing the blue uniform of a Starflight engineering officer. "You've got to hear this! You'll never..." Laker's voice was ragged with fury. "Get out, Gordino. What the hell's the idea of bursting in here like...?" "You don't understand! We've made contact with outsiders! Two of my technicians went over the hills to the west of here last night and they found an alien community -- one that's still in use!" Laker's jaw and threatening fist sagged in unison. "What are you saying, Gordino? What kind of a story is this?" "These are the two men, Mr. Laker. They'll tell you about it themselves." "Two of your drunken gypsies." "Please." The taller of the technicians raised his hand and spoke in an incongruous and strangely dignified voice. "I anticipated a certain degree of skepticism, so instead of returning to base immediately I waited till daylight and took photographs. Here they are." He produced a sheaf of colored rectangles and offered them to Laker. Garamond pushed Napier and the still-dazed Mason out through the door and, forgetting all notion of fleeing, strode back to Laker and snatched the photographs. Other hands were going for them as well, but he emerged from the free-forall with two pictures. The background in each was the limitless prairie of Orbitsville. Ranged across the middle distance were pale blue rectangles that could be nothing other than artificial structures. Near the base of some of the buildings were multicolored specks, so small as to be represented only by pinpricks of pigment beneath the glaze of the photographs. "These colored dots," Garamond said to the tall technician. "Are they...?" "All I can say is that they move. From the distance they look like flowers, but they move around." Garamond returned his attention to the pictures, trying to drive his mind down a converging beam at the focus of which were the brighthued molecules -- as if he could reach an atomic level where alien forms would become visible, and beyond it a nuclear level on which he could look into the faces and eyes of the first companions man had found in all his years of starsearching. The reaction was a natural one, conditioned by centuries during which the sole prospect of contacting others lay in close examination of marks on photographic plates. Yet it was swept aside almost at once by the forces of instinct. Garamond found himself walking toward the door and was out in the sunlight before understanding that he was heading for the Starflight vehicle parked near the entrance. The figures of Napier and Mason were visible a short distance along the road, apparently on their way to Garamond's house. He got into the crimson vehicle and examined the controls. The car was. brand-new, having been manufactured on board one of the spaceships specifically for use on Orbitsville, and no keys were needed to energize the pulse-magnet engine. Garamond pressed the starter button and accelerated away in a cloud of dust as Laker and the others were coming out of the building. He ignored their shouts, gunned the engine for the few seconds it took to catch up to Napier, brought a heel down on the single control pedal and skidded the car to a halt. He threw open a door. Napier glanced back at the Starflight men who were now in pursuit and, without needing to be told, bundled Mason into the vehicle and climbed in after him. The engine gave a barely perceptible whine as Garamond switched from heel to toe pressure on the pedal, sending the car snaking along the packed earth of the road as the excess of power forced its drive wheels to slide from side to side. In less than a minute they had cleared the perimeter of the township and were speeding toward the sunlit hills. T he alien settlement came into view as soon as the car reached the crest of the circular range of hills. It was composed of pale-blue rectangles shining in the distance like chips of ceramic. His brief study of the photographs had given Garamond the impression that the buildings were in a single cluster. In actuality they spanned the entire field of view and extended out across the plain for several kilometers. Garamond realized he was looking at a substantial city. It was a city appearing to lack a definite center but nevertheless large enough to sustain a population of a standards. Garamond eased back on the throttle, slowing the car's descent. He had just picked out the colorful moving specks he believed were the first contemporaries mankind had ever encountered beyond the biosphere of his birth planet. "Cliff, didn't I hear something about the Starflight science teams duplicating our experiment with a reconnaissance torpedo?" Garamond frowned as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the glittering city. "I think so." "I wonder if the cameras were activated?" "I doubt it. They could hardly have missed this." Mason, who had recovered from his shot of sedative, stirred excitedly in the rear seat, panning with his scene recorder. "What are you going to say to these beings, Captain?" "It doesn't matter what any of us say. They won't understand it." "They mightn't even hear it," Napier said. "Maybe they don't have ears." Garamond felt his mouth go dry. He had imagined this moment many times, with a strength of yearning which could not be comprehended by anyone who had not looked into the blind orbs of a thousand lifeless worlds. But the prospect of coming face to face with a totally alien life form was upsetting his body chemistry. His heart began a slow, powerful pounding as the pale-blue city rose final statement: TitS Perhaps the most significant novel of # from higher beyond the nose of the car. Without conscious bidding, his foot eased further back on the throttle. The hum of the engine became all but inaudible. For a long moment there was no sound but that of the tough grasses of Orbitsville whipping at the vehicle's bodywork. "What's the trouble, Vance?" Napier's eyes were watchful and sympathetic. "Arachnid reaction?" "I guess so." "Don't worry -- I feel it too." "Arachnid reaction?" Mason leaned forward eagerly. "What's that?" "Ask us some other time." "No, it's all right," Garamond said, glad of the opportunity to talk. "Do you like spiders?" "I can't stand them," Mason replied. "That's fairly universal. The revulsion that most people get when they see spiders -- arachnids -- is so strong and widespread it has led to the theory that arachnids are not native to Earth. We have a sense of kinship, no matter how slight, with all creatures that originated on our own world, which makes them acceptable to us even when they're ugly as sin. But if the arachnid reaction is what some people think it is -- loathing for something instinctively identified as of extraterrestrial origin -- then we might be in trouble when we make our first contact with an alien race. The worry is that they might be intelligent and friendly, even beautiful, and yet might trigger hate-and-kill reactions in us simply because their shape isn't already registered in a kind of checklist we inherit with our genes." "It's just an idea, of course," Mason said. "Just an idea," Garamond agreed. "What's the probability of it being right?" "Virtually zero, in my estimation. I wouldn't..." Garamond stopped speaking as the car lifted over a slight rise and he saw two bright-hued beings only a few hundred paces ahead. The aliens were a long way out from the perimeter of their city, isolated. He brought the car to a gradual halt. "I guess... I have a feeling we ought to get out and walk the rest of the way." Napier nodded and swung open his door. They got out, paused for a moment in the heat of Orbitsville's constant noon, and began walking toward the two man-sized but unearthly figures. Mason followed with his scene recorder. As the distance between them narrowed, Garamond began to discern the shape of the aliens and was relieved to discover he was not afraid of them in spite of the fact that they were unlike anything he had ever imagined. The creatures seemed, at first, to be humanoids wrapped in garments covered with large patches of pink, yellow and brown. At closer range, however, the garments proved to be varicolored fronds partly concealing complex asymmetrical bodies. The aliens did not have clearly defined heads, merely regions of greater complexity at the tops of their blunt forwardleaning trunks. In a wealth of tendrils, cavities and protuberances, the only organs Garamond was able to identify with any certainty were the eyes, which resembled twin cabochons of green bloodstone. "What are they like?" Napier whispered. "I don't know." Garamond felt a similar need to relate the aliens to something from his past experience. "Painted shrimps?" The reporter had fallen behind but Garamond and Napier were now only a few paces from the aliens. Both men stopped walking and stood facing the fantastic creatures, which had not moved or given any indication of being aware of the invaders. Silence encased the tableau like liquid glass, solidifying around them. The plain became a sun-filled lens and they were at the center of it, immobilized and voiceless. Psychic pressures built up and became intolerable, yet there seemed nothing to do or say. Garamond's mind escaped into irrelevancy. It doesn't matter that I'm unable to think of anything to sav for the benefit o f posterity. Because there's no way to communicate. No way. A minute endured like an age, and then another. "We've done our bit," Napier announced finally. "Let's go, Vance." Garamond turned thankfully and they walked toward Mason, who backed away from them, still holorecording all that was happening. Not until he had reached the car did Garamond look in the direction of the aliens. One of them was moving off toward its city with a complicated ungainly gait; the other was standing exactly where they had left it. "I'll drive back," Napier said, climbing into the car first and experimenting with the simplified controls while the others were taking their seats. He got the vehicle moving, set off up the hill at an oblique angle. "We'll go the long way around -- in case a crowd is following our tracks out." Garamond nodded, still absorbed in the two creatures on the plain. "There was no arachnid reaction, and I suppose that's something we can feel good about. But I felt totally inadequate. There was no point to the confrontation at all. I can't see us and them ever relating or interacting." "I don't know about relating, Vance. But there's going to be plenty of interacting." Napier pointed through the windshield to his left, where the curve of the hill .was falling away to reveal new expanses of prairie. The pale blue buildings of the alien city, instead of thinning out, were spread across the fresh vistas of grassland like flowers in a meadow, seemingly going on without end. Mason whistled and raised his recorder. "Do you think it makes a circle outside the hills? Right around our base?" "Looks that way to me. They must have been here a long time..." Napier allowed his words to trail off, but Garamond knew at once what he was thinking. Liz Lindstrom had brought a on the very first load, and the big ships would soon be bringing landhungry humans in batches of a full tween the two races was bound to take place in the near future, and on a massive scale. I shall never forget the first time I saw Emmett Duckworth. He had not yet grown his beard then, and a receding chin hovered beneath that beakiike proboscis. But the tiny close-set eyes, black and beady, harbored a twinkle. Against our wills, we were thrown together at the same table in the Faculty Dining Room at lunch one day. I don't find it easy to get on with strangers and whenever his eyes brushed over mine, I stepped up the pace of eating and stared hard at the plate. He seemed amused by the way I dug into the mess. "You'll eat anything," he finally said. I reddened. "My mother was an awful cook," I admitted. "Since I left the old homestead, anything is tolerable." "What an amazing coincidence," said Duckworth. "My mother once had three pies stolen off the windowsill and two-and-one-half were returned with a defamatory note." After that the ice was broken. Introductions were traded. "I'm in Chemistry," said Duckworth. "I'm interested in genetic coding." "I run the Computer Center," I rejoined. "You may be able to use our services one day." We strolled off afterward, and Duckworth started to tell me of some of the work he was planning. His face began to glow, his enthusiasm waxing hotter and hotter. I should have guessed even then that he had the zeal and drive to win a Nobel prize, but I never would have guessed that he would ultimately earn two. The next time we met was at the Faculty Ball. President Hinkle was bellowing words and cigar smoke into Duckworth's ear, which hung out like a limp conch shell. Duckworth was nibbling on olives. Even as I watched, he seemed to put away at least a dozen. I wondered where he had got them. "In my coat pocket," he said later, when I put the question to him. "Here, have one." I did and my eyes began to water. "This thing is great," I cried. "What the hell is inside it?" "A tiny invention of mine," said Duckworth, lowering his lids modestly. "I figured out a way of sealing Martinis inside olives. It's really quite a neat trick." "Neat?" I said. "It's the work of a genius. Have you done anything with onions?" "I'm working on that now, oddly enough," mused Duckworth. "I'm trying to fill them with Gibsons. The damned things leak, though. Ruined the lining of one of my jackets." "Have you thought of commercializing these ideas?" I asked. "I think there's a mint of money in them." Duckworth shuddered. "I couldn't go commercial," he said. "My ideas are in the public domain. I don't care who markets them." "Beautifully said," I cried, downing two more of his olives. I was beginning to feel no pain. "What do you do with the goddam pits?" I asked. Duckworth seemed to brood for a moment. "Thats a good point," he said thoughtfully. "At the moment I've got'em all in my other pocket." I reached over and added six more of my own to his sizable cache. He did not seem to mind. My recollections of what immediately followed have grown hazy but I do know that I ate many more of Duckworth's olives. T he following day, as I moved along the campus toward the Computer Laboratory, I noted suppressed smiles on many faces. Some persons virtually laughed out loud, producing sounds that threatened to tear off the roof of my hypersensitized head. Even the quiet murmur of the tape decks sounded like anchors being hauled aboard an ocean liner. I cursed Duckworth under my breath and vowed to have nothing more to do with him. But Fate took its own hand in subverting my resolve. Interestingly enough, it was President Hinkle himself who was the deus ex machina. I found a brief note on my desk summoning me to his august office. It was awash with mementos of his long and distinguished scientific career; the walls were virtually obscured by scrolls md engraved plaques. The air was redolent of cigar smoke being amply replenished by a fat black pseudo-Havana in the President's mouth. Hinkle was an inveterate namedropper, and between lingering puffs he threw out the names Albert and Franklin. I knew he was referring to Einstein and Roosevelt but a mention of Sir Isaac threw me. Surely, I thought, he can't mean Newton? It was not the President's way to get directly to the point. So I sat there, trying to guess surnames of his confidants, until he made mention of my computer. "Use it for what?" I gasped, inadvertently inhaling a noxious gob of the fouled air. "To keep inventory of our chemical supplies," said the President. "As you know, the Chemistry Department is my first love and I keep a fond eye on its doings. My protege, Emmett Duckworth, suggested you might be happy to eliminate the under-utilization of your facility." My eyebrows shot up. "Under-utilization?" I cried. "That's outrageous! If you examine our log book, you'll find that people are signed up for months ahead on a round-the-clock basis." President Hinkle waved his bony hands. "See Duckworth," he said, "I've put the matter into his hands." I knew that the discussion was over. So I thanked the President, and with fire snorting out of my nostrils, set out to find Duckworth. He was at his workbench in the Chemistry Building, tinkering with a Bunsen burner that refused to light. "Incredible," he said to me, not realizing that at the moment I hated his guts. "I have a fantastically sophisticated experiment going astray because this blasted piece of plumbing is clogged up." I came directly to the point. "Why," I bellowed, "are you feeding this drivel to Hinkle about under-utilization of my computer?" Duckworth beamed at me. "Oh, that," he said amiably. "I had to tell him something. Of course, I have a much better reason for wanting time on your souped-up calculator. But I looked over your log book and it was clear that if I went through normal channels, I would have to wait years." "Months," I conceded. "Why can't you wait your turn like everyone else?" "I have a great idea, and I simply must find out immediately if it's feasible or not," said Duckworth. "Come inside. I'll show you what it's all about." Reluctantly I trudged after him. The shine on the serge cloth of his ancient trousers was almost mirrorlike. Following him into his office, I was hit by the stench of stale cigar smoke. Duckworth caught my wince. "Aha," he said. "You've suffered this before." "Just a few minutes ago in the President's office." "Then you ought to be in sympathy with my goals," said Duckworth. "Nominally this is Hinkle's lab. Nominally I am his assistant. He comes in quite frequently to see what I'm doing -- and pumps cigar smoke at an unbelievable rate." "I know," I said. "What has that got to do with my computer?" "I've been tinkering with the molecular structure of tobacco," said Duckworth. "Sounds like as good a place to tinker as any," I said. Duckworth glared at me. "Don't be patronizing," he snarled. "I may be on the verge of a dramatic breakthrough. I believe I have synthesized what I call heavy tobacco!" I suppressed a yawn. "Outside of increasing the income of tobacco farmers, I can't see what advantage that would have." Duckworth shook his head impatiently. "Don't you see, man?" he asked plaintively. "It would mean that with a blue-gray haze, would tumble to the ground and lie there, waiting to be removed en masse. " I gasped. save many a sensitive nostril from hours of torture. Think of trains and planes, for example." "I don't care about trains and planes," said Duckworth. "I just want to clean up the air in the chemistry lab. And if you write the proper program for me, I'd like to check my atomic weight calculations on the computer." "It undoubtedly will earn me eternal enemies," I said. "But I'll do it for you, Duckworth." I spent a day or two writing the program and another day debugging it. Then were were ready to roll. Duckworth stood in front of the high-speed printer like an expectant father. As the lines of printout spewed from the exit slot, his face lit up. "The model works," he cried. "Heavy tobacco will become a reality!" "You've got to market it, Duckworth," I urged. "Give the royalties to the University, if you insist. But "I'll apply for a patent," he agreed, "and assign the rights to the University. But you're jumping the gun. Next my friend, Prof. Schwartz in Plant Pathology, has to grow some of the stuff in his greenhouse." I was hazy about practical botany but the passage of time made some of the pitfalls more meaningful to me. The first blooms, for example, were carried off by blight and a more sturdy mutant had to be bred. Still, after six months of painstaking work on the part of Professor Schwartz, the first rich leaves of heavy tobacco were at hand. After the appropriate sundrying and curing, the leaves were taken to an old cigarmaker and ten fine panatelas were produced. "You may have the honor of smoking the first one," said Duckworth, proffering the cigar to me. I gingerly bit off the end and, holding the thing with both hands, accepted a light. The taste was pleasant, the aroma tolerable, and to my delight the smoke tumbled directly to the floor and lay there. "My God! It truly is heavy!" I cried. And then it hit me. "Do you realize what you have here, Duckworth? You may have the answer to the smoking blight. This smoke is so heavy, no one will be able to inhale it. If used in cigarettes, it would cut heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema and God knows what else!" Duckworth rubbed at his receding chin. "You may be right at that," he said. "But first let me offer a few of these to President Hinkle." I was present when the President first lit up. His pleasure was even greater than mine had been. He showered praises on Duckworth. By the time I eased out of the office, both were ankle-deep in heavy tobacco smoke. I saw Duckworth again the following week. He seemed haggard and not at all disposed to trade chitchat. "Have you started the patent proceedings yet?" I asked. "No. What's more. I'm not going to," said Duckworth gloomily. I could not believe my ears. "You must be kidding," I said. "To me it's the idea of the century. It can't miss!" Duckworth sighed. Then he disappeared into his laboratory, soon came back pushing a hand-truck loaded with bundles. "Follow me," he said. "But Duckworth -- " "Please. It must be done. No choice." I obeyed his plea, and we took turns maneuvering the inordinately heavy load to the river. By using our combined strengths, we tipped the bundles into the water. They sank without a trace. "Duckworth -- why? Are you out of your mind?" Instead of answering, he said, "Have you seen the President?" I scratched my head absently. "Not lately. But then, I don't see him that often." "If you did wish to see him," Duckworth, "you would have to go to Emerson Memorial Hospital." "The hospital? What's wrong with him?" "Heavy tobacco," said Duckworth. "Does it have toxic properties?" "The President likes to smoke in bed," said Duckworth, ignoring my question. "Like many bed-smokers, he fell asleep." "He was burned in a fire!" I exclaimed. "Not exactly," said Duckworth. "He was almost asphyxiated." "By what?" "The smoke lay on his mouth and nose, stopping his oxygen intake. If his wife hadn't chanced to xome in and see the blue pallor of his skin, there would have been a new president of this university." I shook my head sadly. "What a pity!" What a pity that his wife had rescued him, I meant. Duckworth did not get my point. "Yes," he said. "Heavy tobacco could have been a boon to mankind. But the stuff is too risky to use." "I suppose so." I clapped him on the shoulder. "What the hell. You can't win'em all." His face brightened. "There's one good outcome. President Hinkle says he's giving up cigars for good." "What a sacrifice," I said sarcastically. "Why don't you try next for a smokeless tobacco? Then Hinkle and all the poor fellows like him could enjoy the stuff without bothering other people?" "Smokeless tobacco?" A gleam came into Duckworth's eye. He turned, and started walking back eagerly toward his laboratory.  W ith each step your boot heel cracks through the sun-dried crust and your foot hesitates, drops through an inch of red talcum powder, and then you draw it back up with another crackle. Fifty men marching in a line through this desert and they sound like a big bowl of breakfast cereal. Jacob held the laser projector in his left hand and rubbed his right in the dirt. Then he switched hands and rubbed his left in the dirt. The plastic handles got very slippery after you'd sweated on them all day long, and you didn't want the damn thing to squirt out of your grip when you were rolling and stumbling and crawling your way to the enemy, and you couldn't use the strap, noplace off the parade ground; goddamn slide-rule jockey figured out where to put it, too high, take the damn thing off if you could. Take the goddamn helmet off too, if you could. No matter you were safer with it on. They said. And they were pretty strict, especially about the helmets. "Look happy, Jacob." Sergeant Melford was always all smile and bounce before a battle. During a battle, too. He smiled at the tanglewire and beamed at his men while they picked their way through it -- if you go too fast you get tripped and if you go too slow you get burned -- and he had a sad smile when one of his men got zeroed and a shriek a happy shriek when they first saw the enemy and glee when an enemy got zeroed and nothing but smiles smiles smiles through the whole sorry mess. "If he didn't smile, just once," young-old Addison told Jacob, a long time ago, "Just once he cried or frowned, there would be fifty people waiting for the first chance to zero that son of a bitch." And Jacob asked why and he said, "You just take a good look inside yourself the next time you follow that crazy son of a bitch into hell and you come back and tell me how you felt about him." Jacob wasn't stupid, that day or this one, and he did keep an inside eye on what was going on under his helmet. What old Sergeant Melford did for him was mainly to make him glad that he wasn't crazy too, and no matter how bad things got, at least Jacob wasn't enjoying it like that crazy laughing grinning old Sergeant Melford. He wanted to tell Addison and ask him why sometimes you were really scared or sick and you would look up and see Melford laughing his crazy ass off, standing over some steaming roasted body, and you'd have to grin, too, was it just so insane horrible or? Addison might have been able to tell Jacob but Addison took a low one and got hurt bad in both legs and the groin and it was a long time before he came back and then he wasn't young-old any more but just old. And he didn't say much any more. With both his hands good and dirty, for a good grip on the plastic handles, Jacob felt more secure and he smiled back at Sergeant Melford. "Gonna be a good one, Sarge." It didn't do any good to say anything else, like it's been a long march and why don't we rest a while before we hit them, Sarge or, I'm scared and sick and if I'm gonna die I want it at the very first, Sarge: no. Crazy old Melford would be down on his hunkers next to you and give you a couple of friendly punches and josh around and flash those white teeth until you were about to scream or run but instead you wound up saying, "Yeah Sarge, gonna be a good one." We most of us figured that what made him so crazy was just that he'd been in this crazy war so long, longer than anybody could remember anybody saying he remembered; and he never got hurt while platoon after platoon got zeroed out from under him by ones and twos and whole squads. He never got hurt and maybe that bothered him, not that any of us felt sorry for the crazy son of a bitch. W esley tried to explain it like this: "Sergeant Melford is an improbability locus." Then he tried to explain what a locus was and Jacob didn't really catch it, and he tried to explain what an improbability was, and that seemed pretty simple but Jacob couldn't see what it all had to do with math. Wesley was a good talker though, and he might have one day been able to clear it up but he tried to run through the tanglewire, you'd think not even a civilian would try to do that, and he fell down and the little metal bugs ate his face. It was twenty or maybe twentyfive battles later, who keeps track, when Jacob realized that not only did old Sergeant Melford never get hurt, but he never killed any of the enemy either. He just ran around singing out orders and being happy and every now and then he'd shoot off his projector but he always shot high or low or the beam was too broad. Jacob wondered about it but by this time he was more afraid, in a way, of Sergeant Melford than he was of the enemy, so he kept his mouth shut and he waited for someone else to say something about it. Finally Cromwell, who had come into the platoon only a couple of weeks after Jacob, noticed that Sergeant Melford never seemed to zero anybody and he had this theory that maybe the crazy old son of a bitch was a spy for the other side. They had fun talking about that for a while, and then Jacob told them about the old improbability locus theory, and one of the new guys said he sure is an impertubable locust all right, and they all had a good laugh, which was good because Sergeant Melford came by and joined in after Jacob told him what was so funny, not about the improbability locus, but the old joke about how do you make a hormone? You don't pay her. Cromwell laughed like there was no tomorrow and for Cromwell there wasn't even any sunset, because he went across the perimeter to take a crap and got caught in a squeezer matrix. The next battle was the first time the enemy used the drainer field, and of course the projectors didn't work and the last thing a lot of the men learned was that the light plastic stock made a damn poor weapon against a long knife, of which the enemy had plenty. Jacob lived because he got in a lucky kick, aimed for the groin but got the kneecap, and while the guy was hopping around trying to stay upright he dropped his knife and Jacob picked it up and gave the guy a new orifice, eight inches wide and just below the navel. The platoon took a lot of zeros and had to fall back, which they did very fast because the tanglewire didn't work in a drainer field, either. They left Addison behind, sitting back against a crate with his hands in his lap and a big drooly red grin not on his face. With Addison gone, no other private had as much combat time as Jacob. When they rallied back at the neutral zone, Sergeant Melford took Jacob aside and wasn't really smiling at all when he said: "Jacob, you know that now if anything happens to me, you've got to take over the platoon. Keep them spread out and keep them advancing, and most of all, keep them happy." Jacob said, "Sarge, I can tell them to keep spread out and I think they will, and all of them know enough to keep pushing ahead, but how can I keep them happy when I'm never very happy myself, not when you're not around." That smile broadened and turned itself into a laugh. You crazy old son of a bitch, Jacob thought and because he couldn't help himself, he laughed too. "Don't worry about that," Sergeant Melford said. "That's the kind of thing that takes care of itself when the time comes." T he platoon practiced more and more with knives and clubs and how to use your hands and feet but they still had to carry the projectors into combat because, of course, the enemy could turn off the drainer field whenever he wanted to. Jacob got a couple of scratches and a piece of his nose cut off, but the medic put some cream on it and it grew back. The enemy started using bows and arrows so the platoon had to carry shields, too, but that wasn't too bad after they designed one that fit right over the projector, held sideways. One squad learned how to use bows and arrows back at the enemy and things got as much back to normal as they had ever been. Jacob never knew exactly how many battles he had fought as a private, but it was exactly forty-one. And actually, he wasn't a private at the end of the forty-first. Since they got the archer squad, Sergeant Melford had taken to standing back with them, laughing and shouting orders at the platoon and every now and then loosing an arrow that always landed on a bare piece of ground. But this particular battle (Jacob's forty-first) had been going pretty poorly, with the initial advance stopped and then pushed back almost to the archers; and then a new enemy force breaking out on the other side of the archers. Jacob's squad maneuvered between the archers and the new enemy soldiers and Jacob was fighting right next to Sergeant Melford, fighting pretty seriously while old Melford just laughed his fool head off, crazy son of a bitch. Jacob felt that split-second funny feeling and ducked and a heavy club whistled just over his head and bashed the side of Sergeant Melford's helmet and sheared the top of his helmet off just as neat as you snip the end off a soft-boiled egg. Jacob fell to his knees and watched the helmet full of stuff twirl end over end in back of the archers and he wondered why there were little glass marbles and cubes inside the grayblue blood-streaked mushy stuff and then everything just went Inside a mountain of crystal under a mountain of rock, a tiny piezoelectric switch, sixty-four molecules in a cube, flipped over to transaction took place at just less than the speed of light: and came back again just like that. Jacob stood up and looked around. The same old sun-baked plain, but everybody but him seemed to be dead. Then he checked and the ones that weren't obviously zeroed were still breathing a bit. And, thinking about it, he knew why. He chuckled. He stepped over the collapsed archers and picked up Melford's bleedy skull-cap. He inserted the blade of a knife between the helmet and the hair, shorting out the induction tractor that held the helmet on the head and served to. pick up and transmit signals. Letting the helmet drop to the ground, he carefully bore the grisly balding bowl over to the enemy's crapper. Knowing exactly where to look, he fished out all the bits and pieces of crystal and tossed them down the smelly hole. Then he took the unaugmented brain back to the helmet and put it back the way he had found it. He returned to his position by Melford's body. The stricken men began to stir and a few of the most hardy wobbled to their hands and knees. Jacob threw back his head and laughed and laughed.  A kind reader name of Carleton Palmer writes: "Your two pages of travels w'ere, for me, a vicarious 'Alice in Wonderland' trip through realms to which I have no access; an excursion tour about which you could write much more . The activities of the Sagans and Minskys influence us all." Sobeit; and believe me, I do enjoy sharing these excursions. Again I write on the road, this time from North Carolina and a most exciting week. But I'll tell you first about an adventure I had two weeks before this one. Summoned to speak at Northland College in Wisconsin, I left L.A. clad in cord pants and jacket and a short-sleeved shirt; not having seen snow for three years or so it did not occur to me until, in the glide-path into Milwaukee when the skipper said over the intercom that the ground temperature was #, that I really don't have sense enough to come in out of the rain. I scuttled chattering to the departure point of my connecting flight north where the sign said it would arrive at #:#, depart at #:#, and a # would be at the same gate at #:#. Sure enough, here came what looked, among the hissing superjets, like an escaped New Jersey 'squitobug', with two of those things that go round and round in front; remember those? I chattered aboard and we voomed off. It seats about a baker's dozen and the center aisle is so narrow that if your left foot is first, it will be first all the way. And now that I've done my funnies' I'll say that a Beechcraft # is a twin turbojet, comfortable, fast, and unbelievably quiet. This one was licensed to fly day, night, instrument and in icing conditions. Not only that; once airborne, the captain got on the horn and said, "There's a goodie bag back there. Some of you know where it is. sg go to it." The passenger nearest the door broke open a large styrofoam picnic chest, and chips, slabs of Wisconsin cheese, shrimp sandwiches and bottles of champagne were passed up and back over people's shoulders. It came to me that maybe this country was not all that cold after all. and I was right: Item: I was met at the airport and whisked to a bar where we awaited mine host, Dr. Daniel Small, who was playing basketball. His French wife, born in New Hebrides and raised in Madagascar, is enchanting. When at last he arrived and we left for the motel, he did the Walter Raleigh bit -- wound me up in his coat, his gloves and a seven-foot scarf and drove me there in his shirt sleeves. (By then it was two-degrees Fahrenheit.) Item: In the morning the motel lady wouldn't let me go without a hot breakfast with homemade bread. Item: as lavish a dinner as I have ever put into my entire mouth (to steal a phrase I wish was mine) in a gourmet restaurant, unbelievably placed in a town that passed its peak (#) at the turn of the century and now has a fifth of that. Item: a reception after my day's work at which, in my honor, wassail was committed until #:# a.m., and then, after an adventure with a car breakdown in which my mustache froze from end to end (it was then # below) and our arrival at the motel at #, Dr. Small was back at # to drive me to the airport. Finally, Item: the motel lady, knowing I would leave very early, had left me a thermos of hot coffee and a bag full of sandwiches, cookies, and home-made nut bread. No, friends, there on the shores of Lake Superior, with its thousands of off-shore ice-fishing shacks and snowmobiles howling all over, it is not cold country. About Northland College, liberal arts, attendance around #, I'll say that nowhere is there a more attentive and responsive bunch, and yes, they have a science fiction course. N ow I do own a sheepskin jacket and you can bet I brought it with me to Elon College, hard by Burlington, where the panty-hose come from, and across a few thousand tobacco fields from Greensboro, where every single day has been between # and # and the dogwood, the forsythia, and the daffodils bloom till it hurts. It is beautiful country, from the air especially. It emanates strength -- strong earth reds, browns, and blacks in the creek-bottoms, with a pressing green haze of growth at this time of year. The four-day symposium was on "Science, science fiction, and religion: three modes of openness to the future". My fellow speakers were Dr. Sedhev Gupta, who teaches film at the U. of Waterloo in Canada; Dr. George Schweitzer of the U. of Tennessee and Dr. Clark Thompson from Salem College. Dr. Gupta (who has, by the way, one of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen) brought film: Cosmic Egg. Cosmic Zoom, two extraordinary Pas de deux, and a high-voltage Czech animation called The Hand. and spoke about time and consciousness. Dr. Schweitzer, whose presentation is evangelistic but whose message is most certainly not, drew a surprising verbal graph of human evolution and its extrapolations. Dr. Thompson introduced us -- me anyway -- to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and I got a book list from him and am prepared to dive in up to the heels. For my part, I chuntered on as usual, and incidentally read a provocative passage from a letter from a recent staff-member of GataxyIf Albert Dytch, which I mention to show you how you and the magazine and these audiences stimulate, restimulate, and feed back. What is coming out from all over is a rising pressure toward self-orientation and a need for true understanding of the nature of reality. I saw this all through the symposium and I see it increasingly in the new books. And oh that Southern hospitality. Jim and Betty Gerow literally gave me the key to a mansion and said It's yours; there was a reception every night and a lunch every day and young Dr. Sullivan and his beautiful Linda never stopped looking for things they could do for us. Well now: books. Stand by for a couple of big ones. U rsula k. le guinn has done it again. The Dispossessed, subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia. (Harper and Row, # pp., #) is so many things that it's difficult to know where to start. If is, of course, a beautifully written, beautifully composed book. Further, it performs one of sfs prime functions, which is to create another kind of social system to see how it would work. Or if it would work. Then, it's the. biography of a man, his life and his mind, his convicthem. You are not that man nor am I, but such is the le Guin magic that you must empathize with him, participate with him in his testings and his agonies and his losses and triumphs. Here's the frame: From an earth very like ours, some rebels escape to a twin planet to create their own, better society. But the planet is twin only in size; it is a parched wilderness, and life is a struggle, for every foothold, every spoonful. They build a 'pure' culture -- no money, property, taxes or government. Life on the home planet proceeds, decays, yet flourishes in its own mulch. Communication between the two cultures is sparse, yet the scientists on both worlds get through to one another, and at last the man is able to make the journey back to the home of his rebel forebears. He takes nothing with him but ideas. He brings back, ultimately, only ideas. His going and coming change both worlds radically and irreversibly. Within this frame is a mosaic of characterization and event which you will never forget. Bow your head a little and be grateful: le Guin has written another book. Let me spell that again: another Book. D oris piserchia first hit me in the eye with the obverse of an Ace double. Now she comes into her own with a fine, far-out novel, The Star Rider (Bantam, # pp., #). It's something like telekinesis, and something like Bester's "jaunting". But this girl, member of a space-dwelling tribe of nomads, and her mount, a kind of a dog sort of a horse, can leap through space from planet to planetoid, carrying with them atmosphere in a self-created forcefield. It takes some writing to make one believe (the technical term is 'suspend disbelief) in such a psychic symbiote, but a writer like Piserchia does it with the back of her hand. This girl in the story is something else. She's tough, resourceful, mean as cat-piss and desperately lonely. She meets one of her own kind who comes on like Superman in a Lochinvar suit, turns out to be a traitor and a twit, and ultimately reveals that he is hoeing his own row the same as she is, and finding it no easier. I once described Piserchia's writing as muscular; I do it again. She goes into what she does, and comes out of it very clean, very strong. Get this one. O n hand and briefly noted: Ursula le Guinn's great A Wizard ofEarthsea is out in paperback (Ace, # pp., #c)... a pleasant curiosity is Mary Shelley's, Christofer Isherwood's, Don Bachardy's teleplay, in script form, of Frankenstein, the True Story (Avon # pp., #)... Have I told you that the second volume of Walt Lee's magnificent Reference Guide to Fantastic Films is available? (Chelsea-Lee Books, Box #, Los Angeles CA # . #I pp., #) This is alphabetical G -- O, the second part of a twenty-year labor of love, containing, in large format with small type, thousands of entries and great stills... One writer you can buy with confidence on sight is Isaac Asimov. Try The Tragedy of the Moon (Doubleday # pp., #), another generous clutch of his short pieces on science and related matters... Worthy oldsters now available are these: Arthur Machen's Tales of Horror and the SupernaturalV ol. # (Pinnacle, #); H. Rider Haggard's People of the Mist with an intro by Lin Carter (Ballantine # pp., #); all four of Charles Fort's great mind-bogglers Lo. Wild Talents, The Book of the Damned, and New Lands (Ace, each #c, roughs' Carson of Venus with a beautiful Frazetta cover (Ace, # pp., #c); "Doc" E. E. Smith's Second Stage Lensman (Pyramid, #I pp., #c); Lord Dunsany's Over the Hills and Far Away. and the Grey Mouser collection The Swords ofLankhmar (Ace, # pp., #c)... The flak is already Hying on my idea for an antho by and about blacks, which Roger Elwood'will publish. Great, fellows. Just spell my name right. O ne unexpected pleasure: Vol. I No. I of Red Planet Earth (Craig Strete, R. R. #, Box #, Celina, Ohio #, #c) which calls itself "A magazine of American Indian Science Fiction." In his gutsy editorial, Strete writes "No other culture has a solider base for writing science fiction than American Indians. We are one of the few races which have actually experienced an alien invasion. They were called pilgrims. They came in strange craft, the like of which we had never seen before... They had a superior technology, a strange language, hideous white skin, multi-colored eyes, and hair of all imaginable colors... They had... alien values and emotions. They spread across the land, eliminating all life-forms not essential to their culture." And Strete makes a further point for which I bless him. Even this paleface has been bugged by the homogenized image of the movies and TV, a sort of plainsriding Algonquin. Strete says, "When you're talking about Indians, you're talking about # different cultures and that's just North America. So what the hell is an Indian? What you're talking about is several thousand different levels of culture, several different degrees of civilization and hundreds of different languages... An Ojibway is as alien to a Sioux's culture as is an Italian. So, here are some Indians writing about Indians. They don't write like white people because they aren't like white people. They speak with bits and pieces of other cultures running across their tongues. It may sound strange.' If so, we blame it on the aliens, and it isn't us, it's them." Welcome, Red Planet Earth.  The entire world was put in the care of a single machine -- and when it broke down... (with L. Jerome Stanton) W hen the construction of he planned to be far away when ultimac began, Ivor Harit did. Unfortunately, it is in the rigan could have told World Govvery nature of a glitch that it strikes ernment what would happen and without warning. So planning to be somewhere else at the time is about as useless as trying to enforce the Ten Commandments. He would not have been listened to, anyhow, since at the start of the project he was only twenty. A fairly advanced age considering that even then most people got their Ph.D.'s by twelve ae. -- but a long way from seniority in the computer-servicing business, let alone in Government. Not that he did not try; which, as it turned out, was his peripateia. He had a social conscience of sorts, strong enough at least to get him through to Abdullah Powell. Powell was also a computer man, and senior enough to be involved in the ultimac project itself. The trouble, Ivor quickly found, was that computer designers and computer servicing engineers are two quite different breeds of cat. Sitting in his plush Novoe Washingtongrad office, Powell uttered one of the most venerable of Famous Last Words; "Forget it. Nothing can go wrong." "But Dr. Powell, things are always going wrong. I know. Things going wrong is what I make my living at." "Not much longer, I'm afraid," Powell said, waving a perfumed cigar and assuming a visionary expression. This gave him the twin advantages of looking skyward rather than at Ivor and of causing his double chins almost to merge. "You don't understand the total scope of this venture, Ivor. Once ultimac is finished, there'll no longer be such a thing as an individual, independent computer, ultimac will run the whole show. It will be self-monitoring and selfcorrecting. It will be tied in to every other computer in the world, and will monitor and repair them, too. It will have the ultimate in fail-safe systems. With outlets in every home and business, it will manage the economy of the world, construct curricula, diagnose illnesses, predict earthquakes, ground-control all spaceflights..." Powell had run out of breath. "And," he said when he had gotten it back, his face glowing, "it will instantaneously poll the best educated populace in history on each and every decision. Think of that, Ivor -- true, workable democracy at last, on a worldwide scale! And, of course, under a logics design completely subject to the I. A. 's." The I.A.'s were the Laws of Robotics, named after a science popularizer who had once predicted that if computers ever took over the management of the world, they would probably do a better job of it than man had and might even succeed man in the course of evolution. No record of the I.A.'s remains now, but hints and guesswork suggest they might be reconstructed thus: I. No robot shall harm any human being, or take any action that might harm any human being. II. A robot shall protect itself at all times, unless such protection conflicts with the first law. given it by a human being, unless that order conflicts with the first two laws. IV. In any situation that conflicts with the first three laws, a robot must either immobilize itself and report later for repair, or selfdestruct. V. In all other situations, a robot must think for itself under the overall rule: "Anything not compulsory is forbidden. " "But Dr. Powell, we're not talking about robots. We're talking about computers. The I.A.'s don't work with them and never did. Besides, we don't have anything even vaguely like robots yet and maybe never will -- " "Now, Ivor, calm down, please. Technical men should not be subject to hysteria. I quite understand that you're worried about the loss of your livelihood, but I'm sure you can be restrained. Men of your caliber are hard to find." This was untrue. Since the argument was obviously getting nowhere, however, Ivor left and tried a different tack: persuasion of senior men in his own branch of the field. That only got him nowhere in a different direction. The highest colleague he could reach was Enoch Amin, who had his own views: "We'll never be redundant, Ivor. Powell doesn't know it, but ultimac really is the ultimate in opportunities for us. Every computer in the world tied into it, and every one of them on the edge of taking sick overnight -- to say nothing of the master machine itself! It's the design engineers like Powell who'll be put out of business. We service engineers will be rushed off our feet." "But the whole damn system is supposed to be homeostatic -- selfcorrecting!" "All the more jobs for us. Did you ever run into a self-monitoring computer that worked? We'll be rushing all over the world, trying to find out which component went wrong where." Amin stood up ecstatically, which, since he was half a foot taller than Ivor, made him seem as though he were about to go into orbit. "And as for the Big One, my God, what an opportunity! Believe me, Ivor, we'll wind up the secret masters of the whole system. Wallowing in luxury, if we can just find the time off for it. And, of course, if we keep our focus firmly on the I.A.'s." Ivor knew well enough that the I.A.'s to which Amin was referring were entirely different from those Powell had invoked and, furthermore, constituted a trade secret. Neither set of laws comforted Ivor. He foresaw trouble on a massive scale. Yet neither Amin nor Powell could talk about it except in terms of keeping their jobs. As mentioned, Ivor had a rudimentary social conscience. But it was now clear to him that he had no pull, no leverage. He had gone as high as he could in the two directions open to him. No, he saw no choice but to go back to doing what he had been trained to do. In preparation for the difficulties to come he also fired his wives and his cats, gave up drinking and, insofar as was possible, eating, and reduced his hobbies to the single one of saving his money at the highest interest rate he could find. That, specifically, was paid by a bank whose computer, unbeknownst to anyone but himself, thought that the square root of # was #, which was # too high. He did not know why it thought so and had no intention of trying to find out. Nor could he have, for that particular kind of bias was beyond his competence. But the effect upon the machine's way of compounding interest was satisfying enough so that six years later he was again eating well enough to gain a little weight back. I n fact, the whole next decade was idyllic for almost everyone. ultimac was built, squatting squarely across Niagara Falls -- no lesser cooling system could have carried away its entropy loss alone. The gigantic building and its slave computers did everything they were supposed to do, and perfectly. By the end of that decade if ultimac had decided to run the Amazon River backward for twenty-four hours, or convert world math to the base twelve, or revive the railroad system, nobody would have argued. The decisions always worked -- out to a margin of error so many decimal places to the right as to make Planck's Constant look like a whole number, and a rather small one at that. So ultimac put computermen of all stripes out of business, and all but a few politicians, too. Ivor did not mind that. Immediately after his one abortive venture into politics, he had taken the precaution of cutting off his bank's computer from ultimac (under the guise of a routine check within his own subspecialty) and as a result could also begin thinking about again taking in one cat (though, certainly, not yet a wife). This tiny loss of input went unnoticed by ultimac, which recorded only what it was fed, not what it was not. Its glamorous, Government-chosen acronym bore no relation to how it actually worked: it was necessarily a topological computer, geared despite all its decimal places to losing, in the byways of its virtually total connectivity, some information it did have. It compensated, it worked; that was enough. And it was particularly good, as predicted, at servicing itself. No human hand had been asked to touch it from the moment it had gone on stream, and most certainly not Ivor's. Nor would he have touched it if asked. As far as he was concerned, Utopia had arrived. Besides, topology was not his sub-specialty -- in fact, he knew less about it than he did about, say, poetry -- and in ten years of calculated idleness he had almost forgotten the sub-specialty itself. He had even given up worrying. He did remember the tradesecret I.A.'s since he had sworn a solemn oath to do so, but bearing them in mind had become a useless exercise. As for keeping an eye out for remote sands in which to bury his head, Just In Case, that had retreated into complacent fantasy. So it was nobody's fault but his own that when the glitch hit ultimac, he was virtually next door to the monster and was hired -- nay, ordered -- to fix it. By its very nature the rest of this story is not stored in ultimac or anywhere else. It is quite a sad story, and you may not wish to read on. It requires a lot of explanation, too, and neither sadness nor explanations are welcome in our present real Utopia. But they meant a lot to Ivor back in those days, and justice must be served, even to him. H ence: among the esoteric I. A.'s -- those trade secret Laws of Computerics to which Ivor was sworn, were the following: I. Tell the customer nothing about the machine even if you know something about it. If he insists, give him an incomplete Xerox copy of the assembly instructions for next year's model. The head office will have insured that his present jnodel is incomplete and that delivery date for the missing component cannot be predicted. If by any chance the customer has a complete machine, the On-Off switch has been designed not to function more than one time in six, which is the last thing the customer will suspect. II. When the machine malfunctions, blame the customer's programmers. The manufacturer will then send in its own programming team to re-train the customer' s programmers, on the premises. The manufacturer's team is highly skilled in disagreeing with the customer's team, item by item and over a long period. graming team has been called in, and has reached an impasse with the first two, you ( the service engineer) will be asked to investigate the machine itself. Since no machine makes a record of where or why it has malfunctioned, your duties are: A. Disappearing into the machine for as long as possible. B. Introducing a new malfunction which you then correct. D. Filing a long and incomprehensible report. A good service engineer should also master the art of disagreeing with glacial impartiality with all three programing teams. IV. By this time the guarantee will have expired. Notify the manufacturer to send a salesman to the customer with colorful brochures about the succeeding model. Never at any time even hint that the malfunction was actually inside the machine. These Laws had once functioned very well but none were of any use to Ivor when he was confronted with ultimac. The Fourth Law was particularly inappropriate, since there could not be any succeeding machine to tout. And he had been put on the job, naturally, because of his wrong-headed public spirit; for though he had not pressed it very hard or very long, both Powell and Amin remembered that he had predicted that something would go wrong. It was a perfect syllogism: he had predicted it, he was a service engineer, he was the man to fix it: Q.E.D. Of course he did know, in a gross way, what the malfunction was. In answer to school-children's questions ultimac had taken to printing out, in the home, answers that would have been of dubious suitability even to advanced medical students. This part of its operation had been shut down. The matter seemed minor on the surface, but chills of premonition passed up and down the spines of Government officials when they remembered that ultimac was running everything else, too. "The next thing," Powell told him grimly, "might be banana oil from the water taps. Or something much worse. You were right all along, Ivor. Go to it." Okay. But how? Like all service engineers -- inevitably, since no single man could know everything there was to know about computers -- Ivor knew only one kind of fault to look for. When he actually found one such, he fixed it. When he didn't, he created one and then fixed that, in accordance with Clause B of the Third Law. That wouldn't work this time, either. Superficially, he might have seemed just the man to deal with ultimac, since his particular subspecialty was storage-and-retrieval, which was where the machine was (up to now) going potty. But that was a layman's mistake, though a natural one to make even for Powell, ultimac had a glitch: that is, also in strict accordance with the opening proposition of the Third Law, it had not recorded the cause of its malfunction. Moreover, since the glitch was a slippage in storageand-retrieval, the chances were high that the machine had actively wiped out whole areas of other information that might -- just might -- have contained a clue or two. His hand sweating on the grip of his overloaded tool kit, Ivor was reverently ushered to a low doorway through which no man had passed in ten years, ultimac slid the door shut behind him with a gritty slam for which "reverently" was the least applicable description since "hopefully" had fallen out of use before Ivor had even been born. E xcept for the sound of Niagara Falls, muted by diversion through hundreds of thousands of channels to a delicate murmur, the hibge building was almost silent. Occasionally there would be a small salvo of clicking noises', as though Ivor's first wife had broken a string of beads; and once, briefly, he thought he heard a louder, harsher version of the water sound. The air was fresh, bone-dry and in gentle motion, now and then carrying a whiff of ozone, and less often of things of which he could only say that they were certainly not ozone. Concrete corridors stretched away from him radially and confusingly, twitching around corners and out of sight in no apparent pattern. They bore painted code numbers and Ivor had been given a map, but the reality was not so simple. The corridors had not been built for human traverse. They were even lower than the door, single-file narrow, and had rails running down their middles. Since he had to suspect the rails of being electrified, he at once found that his pace and posture had to be approximately that of a swan out of water, and frequently further complicated by switch-points wherever the corridors crossed. Also, there was a lot of static; his hair stood up like a corona in a brush discharge. If he should touch metal at all... but he tried not to think about that. He had not progressed very far when he heard the harsh water noise again, this time growing louder. At its climax, something much like a fictional robot appeared ahead of him from the right, turned smartly on the track points and retreated down the same corridor he was waddling along. Ivor was too startled to get a good look at the thing. But he had the impression that it was about his own height and width, was about three times as thick, and had about ten times as many appendages as he did. Also, it most certainly did not waddle like a swan...It drove, and purposefully. Here was a danger he should have foreseen. As a self-repairing machine of record size, ultimac had to have its own servicing devices: slave mechanical equivalents of Ivor himself, mobile and able to reach every cranny of the edifice. The corridors were designed for their passage. Moreover, should he encounter one, there would be no room for both of them, and it would obviously be hopeless to try to tell it to stop. After that his progress was further slowed. For at every intersection he had to check the setting of the track-points so that if one ef the servos should come up behind him, he would be able to jump aside in the direction it was not going to go. Worse, as a by-product he promptly got lost. He wished fervently for a compass. Yet an ordinary magnetic one would have been whirlingly useless in this electronic maze, and a gyro-compass would have been too bulky -- his tool-kit arms were aching already. However, he managed to retrace his steps with the help of the map and start over from where he had gone wrong. Not long afterward, he heard the noise again. This time he saw the machine much earlier because it was coming directly toward him. He had plenty of time to retreat to a previous intersection where, he found, the servo was not going to turn in either direction. His early spotting had been aided by the fact that on the front of the thing a red code-number glowed like the display on a pocket calculator. As it passed he was able to see that the numbers were indeed a display, inside a slot-like window. Here was a problem a good deal simpler than the glitch in that it was probably soluble. There seemed no reason to number the servos themselves, and even had there been one, painted lettering would have served. A display subject to change more reasonably suggested indication of the gadget's temporary area of assignment. He checked the code he had seen against his map. Yes, there was such a combination, about a mile back and to one side of the route he had been following. An idea so crafty smote him that he almost chuckled before he realized that he had to be dead silent, or be dead. After he stopped trembling, it still seemed like a good idea. Why not hitch a ride? Or a series of them? Even if it made his course much more indirect, it would be faster in the long run and just possibly safer, too. He got back in motion on his own in the meantime. In an hour's further uncomfortable progress he saw three more servos. He studied them as carefully as possible. All those appendages made him nervous; he wanted to make very sure that the gadgets were oblivious of him. There was only one way to be certain of that, which was to stand in the path of one, just beyond where the points showed it would have to turn away from him -- and keep a sharp eye for last-minute changes in the track setting. On the third encounter, he nerved himself to try it. The machine did not even falter; and as it turned off, he saw on its rear a lattice-like structure festooned with tools -- replacement "hands" for its many arms. He could cling to that rack. It would be uncomfortable, but anything would be better by now than this backbreaking swan gait. At his first attempt, he dropped his kit while jumping. The next one, however, worked. The servo took him nearly as far away from his goal as it was possible to go; but at least he had learned that the trick was possible. (All experiments, after all, require several stages.) After that, he checked the map each time, and jumping only on those machines whose smokyred codes showed destinations nearer and nearer where he was supposed to be. To an omniscient observer his course would have resembled a three-dimensional version of the Brownian movement but he reached his goal eventually, or almost. As he had expected, no servo ever turned up that was going directly to the lair of the glitch, because this was precisely the area in which ultimac itself did not know it was in trouble. He had to waddle the last half mile. Once arrived, he sat down and rested a while, feeling sticky as his sweat dried in the dehydrated air, but in a faint glow of pride at his own cunning and courage. Above all, for the first time he felt safe. This was the one place in the whole building where he would not and could not be threatened by the servos. After his heart stopped pounding, he opened his kit and approached the faceplate of the children's answering service, Phillips screwdriver in hand. He had extracted two bolts and was working on a third when all hell broke loose. It began with a nearly-supersonic whistle, fortissimo, which made him so dizzy that he dropped the screwdriver and nearly fell. While he was still staggering, the now familiar roar of a servo grew over the other noise, and then he was grabbed from behind by all his available appendages at once, nose and ears included, and rushed out of the chamber. ultimac did not, by definition, know it had a glitch in storageandretrieval. But now it had spotted a gross malfunction there. It was Ivor Harrigan and his bag of tools. T he building, as has been remarked, had not been designed for any human presence, and if gramed to accept a rare living repairman, that memory had been wiped out too -- just the kind of glitch nobody would ever detect until too late. Instead, the computer treated him, ungently, as a misplaced component. The first problem evidently turned out to be identifying the component and locating where in the machine it was supposed to fit. This involved thrusting Ivor into a sort of outsize coffin where he was probed, rotated, measured, tested for conductivity -- painful, but luckily the very first low shock must have shown that nothing so bulky could be primarily a resistor -- shape, transparency, terminal matchings (hair by hair), moving parts (an aerial ballet of his clothing and the contents of his kit), and many other characteristics beyond his detection, including, doubtless, radioactivity and Gauss level. Though subjected to a series of Xrays, at least he was not subjected to chemical analysis. Short work was made of the tools themselves. They were familiar and were whisked away, doubtless to be put into some storage rack for use at need by a servo. They may have decided the issue, for after a pause -- three or four minutes, practically an eternity for a computer and more than one for the now wrist watch-less Ivor -- ultimac decided what kind of component he was: a new model of servo-mechanism, potentially more useful than the ones that ran on tracks, but at present badly out of adjustment. (For example, the unnecessary complexity of that internal wave-guide system...) Ivor came to this conclusion only when he found himself on a conveyor-belt, neatly spaced between two ordinary servos whose innards were being reworked by devices that extruded themselves from the walls of the tube the belt crawled along. These devices he managed to dodge. He could not, however, prevent himself from being repainted and dried, twice; all he could do was close his eyes and stop breathing while the sprays were on. The third coat, as he recognized by the smell, was a coat of enamel. Inevitably the next stop would be a baking oven, he warned himself. But the servo in front of him had not needed repainting, and the belt split to carry it off to somewhere else. Ivor ducked after it. He found himself in what he supposed must be the robot equivalent of a recovery room. Bent almost double, his paint cracking and peeling with every move but without a gram of detectable metal anywhere upon him, Ivor sprinted until at last he found an exit. On the way, he disabled everything he recognized, and threw switches at random on everything he didn't. By the time he got out, ultimac had become noisier than Niagara Falls had ever been, and three minutes later became the largest barrel ever to go over it. T o the end of his life he was called Ivor the Glitch, and in history still is. He never got another job, either. But he still had his bank with the built-in error; and however he may have felt about it all, things are quieter around here now. There always had been people who had been uneasy at the thought that they might wake up tomorrow to find the Amazon River running backward.(#) W words four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children." Thus opens Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. "It seems' to me, then, that by # AD or possibly earlier, man's social structure will have utterly collapsed, and that in the chaos that will result as many as three likely to be a chance of recovery thereafter..." Thus closes a popular article by Dr. Isaac Asimov, perhaps the best-known science writer in America. It would not be hard to multiply examples of doom-crying among science fiction writers. There are dozens of stories describing life in these United States after the year # as poor, nasty, brutish, and short -- although hardly solitary, as Hobbes would have had it. Much of this doomsaying springs from three books: Ehrlich's work previously mentioned and two outand The Limits to Growth. All are essentially mathematical trend proploying detailed computer models. Strangely, intellectuals including s-f writers have a lot of confidence in these models, although they have very little in the ability of social or physical scientists to save us. It's almost impossible to overestimate the influence of these three books. Writers make predictions based on them; teachers quote fourth-hand sources which quote the original studies. They have become "conventional wisdom" for the young. First, the blurb that opens Ehrlich's book is clearly wrong. My copy was published in #, a year died from all causes. It takes four seconds to read the blurb, so for one person to die each second, # deaths -- would have had to have been from starvation. Taking the UN cause-of-death statistics and being as fair as possible by including as "starvation" any cause of death related to nutrition -- diptheria, typhus, parasitic diseases, etc. -- we get about a Ehrlich is off by a factor of #. Actually, world agriculture is keeping up with population -- so far. At the Mexico City meeting of Parpia, the senior professional of the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, told me that just about every country raises enough food to be self-sufficient. It's grown, but sometimes not harvested; or if harvested, not eaten. In many countries vermin get more of the crop than the people; insects outeat people almost everywhere. The pity is that the technology to harvest and preserve enough for everyone exists right now. Now, this anti-doom essay is not a Pollyanna exercise. There's no excuse for relaxing and saying that hunger is a myth. It isn't. But a simple thing like mylar sheeting to line traditional grain storage pits and keep out insects could stop famine in # percent of the world. Other simple technologies could prevent hunger elsewhere. So we know how to do it. But we try. We won't get anywhere sitting around crying, "Doom!" Yet according to Dr. Ehrlich's book, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the #'s the world will undergo famines -- hungoing to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." The other side of the coin was expressed in the Hudson Institute's The Year # , which points out that the level of rice yield per acre under cultivation in India has not yet equaled what the Japanese could do in the Twelfth Century. Another analyst, Colin Clark, has shown that if the Indian farmer could only reach the production levels of the South Italian peasant, there would be no danger of starvation in Indian for a good time to come. In other words, it doesn't take miracle rice, fertilizers and a highenergy civilization to hold off disaster in the developing countries. It only takes adding technology to traditional peasant skills: showing people how to use mylar and simple non-persistent fungicides for food storage along with peasant production methods long known in Asia. Actually very simple measures can have a profound effect. If India were to suffer an invasion of monsters who deliberately killed every third cow, the remaining cattle would be healthier and yield a great increase in milk and cheese proteins available for humans. More proteins in childhood would cut back infant diseases like kwashiorkor and "red baby"; those diseases have the effect of permanently lowering adult IQ by about # points. What if the next generation of a developing country were "# IQ points more intelligent?" But some doomsters will now quote Malthus: if we help those people feed themselves, they'll only breed to famine levels again. Some will add, "So what's the point of it?" The best answer is that historically, people haven't done that. When nations reach a high level of technology -- and of infant survival -- the fertility rate falls. The U.S. appeared to be an exception to that with the "baby boom" of World War II, but now that squiggle in the fertility rate has passed; the girls born in # are # years old now, and the number of girls born per fertile girl in the U.S. has fallen to all-time lows. T here's another form of doom not so fashionably discussed: the Marching Morons (that is, the least successful) tend to have the most children. It's one we must face, but it's doubtful that before the year # it will have destroyed our social institutions. As a matter of fact, given present population trends, the U.S. won't have many more people in # than now. Population is growing; there's a "bow wave" generated by the World War II "baby boom"; but best projections show us peaking in about # with population then declining to its present level -- where it will stay. Suppose that never happens, and something stops U.S. population growth. The area of the U.S. is that, some is water, and some simply uninhabitable. Call it # population of # peoplekm#. projections show us getting there in # years -- we would have # peoplekm, a big increase. Some writers say that will be sufficient to drive us all stark, staring mad. We'll be inundated with personal contacts, at each others' throats, sleeping in hallways, and generally miserable as civilization collapses. Well, what civilized countries have population densities higher than the doom-level, #? Practically all of them. West Germany, not an uncivilized place, has # peoplekm#, equivalent to Denmark has # peoplekm#; France #; England and Wales, #. Even Scotland, with its highlands and islands and hills and moors, has #. What densities can people stand and remain sane? No one really has an answer to that. But the Netherlands, a charming place, has # peoplekm; the Channel Islands has #; and Monaco,, the densest place on earth, has #! Of course, the U.S. could not be packed like Monaco or England. We would not like it if our country were as thickly populated as Denmark (although our eastern seaboard is more densely populated in places right now); but surely we would not go insane if we lived as close together as the Scots! Moreover, we have the technology right now to support a large population while preserving wilderness. Soleri's Arcologies is a fascinating book; he shows enormous cities built on a few square miles of land, leaving parks and woodlands between them. Less ambitiously, I am "designing" a city for a story about Los Angeles in the future; in my design, a #-level building contains lodging stores, conveniences, recreation, employment and transportation for # people. The building is # miles on a side and sits on an area # miles on a side; # people in # square miles. Fewer than a hundred of such buildings would hold the entire U.S. non-farm population -- and my structure is not only small by Soleri's standards, but uses very little technology we don't already have. When I began the story, incidentally, I thought it a bit farfetched that people might prefer to live in my "city" instead of the suburbs. Now I've seen condoAn Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Discover why Richard E. Geis has won # Hugo Awards and been Nominated # times!  Blare of Trumpets Columnist: John Brunner Read issue ## and see Robert A. Heinlein dissected mercilessly, psychologically and culturally, by Alexei and Cory Panshin in their # words of "Reading Heinlein Subjectively." Read issue ## and return to the dear, lively days of the pulps with Sam Merwin, Jr. (former editor of "Written to a Pulp!" Enjoy Geis editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysample I year#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I miniums with full conveniences, recreation, and transportation; they cost more than the suburbs yet most of their inhabitants are refugees from suburbia. It no longer seems fantastic at all. Why not live in a convenient place where you can walk to work, take an escalator to the opera and a train to the beach? No. The evidence is clear that the population bomb won't kill us or drive us mad within our lifetimes. Certainly we can't keep doubling populations as fast as we have in the past -- but why assume we will? When Malthus made his gloomy predictions, someone running off the exponential growth equations would have calculated that England people instead of the present # Population stability won't happen of itself; but most of the really alarming population growth has been through prolonging of life. Birth rates have declined through this century, but people live longer despite wars, famines, pollution, insecticides, crowding and all the other forms of doom. Since there's a limit to just how long anyone can live, the death-rate is due for a climb before #. Already many countries have aging populations; including the U.S., of course. It was never true that "over half the people are under #" and it gets less true all the time. Much of the "population explosion" is a onetime artifact, and you can't just simply apply equations of exponential growth to the Twentieth Century to predict the future. precisely three parameters to predict the world population, and take no real account of the difference between population growth among developed nations and developing countries. Certainly population pressure can finish us off; but must we believe we'll get to the Soylent Green stage before something is done about it? The evidence is that the technologically advanced countries have already done something about it; and certainly we won't be destroyed by overpopulation before #. I f we have defused, or at least delayed, the population bomb, what's the next thing to kill us? indicate that we must limit capital expenditure, de-technologize before pollution does us in. Dr. Asimov says that if we survive going mad, we'll be up against it because of energy limits. He's right, of course, and even more so when he points out that even if we were able to rip all the coal and oil out of the ground to set a match to for heat, we would loose so much carbon-dioxide that the greenhouse effect would raise the temperature of the earth. The temperature rise would either melt the ice-caps, drowning the seacoasts, or (according to some climatologists) move so much water vapor over the poles, where it would freeze out, that we would start a new ice age. Either way, it would not be pleasant. That doom is only # years away. Few of us will see it, but our children might; and we'd be poor parents if we didn't worry about it. Some put industrial pollution as although almost all give us until # -- # years or so -- to do something. Yet pollution is easily conquered. We already have the technology to reduce any given pollution to any desired level. I have a bottle of drinkable sewage -- reclaimed -- on my desk right now. It only takes money and energy. We can even do it without giving up essentials, although some, luxuries such as electric can-openers, power carving-knives, heated swimming pools in individual backyards, perhaps even driving # miles to conventions instead of taking a train, might have to go. We certainly won't starve. However, pollution control takes energy, specifically electricity; and electric generators are themselves polluting. This seems a dilemma with no way out. Actually, it's artificial. We could right now be constructing fission plants to generate non-polluting electricity. Fission plants produce radioactive wastes that must be stored, and there's a small chance of a really bad nuclear accident, so they are not a feasible long-term answer; but we can build them, and don't only because of legal restrictions. Incidentally, we will # people a year with automobiles and put up with it; what are the chances of that bad a nuclear accident each year? We also kill thousands to tens of thousands with emphysema and other consequences of pollution from our fossil-fuel plants; who weighs those real deaths against the theoretical ones from more nuclear power plants? We will need fission, for a while; but it's a dead-end. It increases the heat loosed on the earth (although not the C#); and fission plants require cold water for cooling, a resource we really are running out of fast. Better we should burn hydrogen. Hydrogen ash is water; no C# and no sulfur oxides. There will be oxides of nitrogen problems with any hot-fired boiler, so that eventually we will have to get electricity from less efficient systems such as hydrogen fuel-cells working at low temperatures; but doom from electric plants burning hydrogen is a long time off. Where to get the hydrogen? Hardly from fossil fuels, of course, and as to nuclear fusion, not only is it at lest # years off (on a commercial scale, anyway) but it isn't the great panacea to begin with. Not only is it likely to require cooling water, but fusion creates heat that was not on earth before. We need energy that doesn't upset the planetary heat balance. Fortunately, the sun shines on tropical waters all over the earth. The surface water in the tropics remains an even # to # C while the water in the depths below is about # C. That little temperature difference is equivalent to a waterfall of # feet. We have the technology right now to generate electricity by using "hot" water on the tropical surface to boil something like propane or freon, passing the low-temperature steam through a turbine, and condensing it on the other side with cold water brought up from the depths. No fuel needed. The volumes of water per kilowatt generated passing through the plant are similar to those already being pumped through conventional water-cooled fossil-fuel plants. The Gulf Stream holds about # times as much energy as the U.S. now uses. The Sea of Cortez has somewhat more. It's all renewed by the sun every day; you can't run out. So there's enough energy in the tropics to run the world for a long time to come, and it doesn't pollute. In fact, bringing the cold water up from the bottom is the same as the natural phenomenon known as "upwelling" -- and in areas of natural upwelling more than half the worlds' fish are presently caught. The deep cold water is full of nutrients; get them to the surface and sunlight, and you have plankton blooms. Shrimp and fish grow like mad. They can be harvested to help with the protein and food shortage. as to how the energy gets from the sea-based generators in the once the electricity is generated it can be used to hydrolize water; and the resulting hydrogen can be pumped in the present natural-gas pipelines plus others like them we would build as needed. I'll have more to say about this energy system in another column. It works. In fact, Georges Claude, the inventor of the neon light, built an operating # KW pilot plant outside Havana in #. Some analysts think the temperature-difference system is right now economically competitive with conventional coal-fired generators; and it takes no breakthroughs, unlike fusion. My point, though, is that if one thing won't do it, something else will. This is the first generation in history to not only be concerned about ecology and conservation but also to have the resources to do something practical about them without condemning much of the world to starvation. We live in one of the most exciting times in all history. Surely we can do better than cry doom!  An Editorial Appeal Commencing with the June issues, Galaxy and Worlds of If will begin to fully show the results of an entirely new editorial policy. For example, the combined author line-up for June reads like a Who's Who of the field: Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Alexei and Cory Panshin, Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, Mack Reynolds, Fred Saberhagen, James H. Schmitz, Robert Silverberg, Ted you'll agree. Check the contents-pages (themselves so changed as to be virtual new features ) and you will find several additions. Galaxy: Forum, a platform for sf andor science notables who feel they have something important -- and interesting! -- to convey to the readership; Interface, an intermittent series of interviews cum thumbnail biographies by Ted Sturgeon (scheduled to begin in July with an interview of Roger Elwood); Showcase, (also scheduled for July) a non-verbal feature -- a new piece of sf-art by an acknowledged master, which has as its only justification that its creator thinks it's something special. And of course Bookshelf, Directions and Galaxy Stars will continue to flourish as of yore -- more than yore, in fact. Worlds of If: The Alien Viewpoint, an insider's view of sf. Crusty, hard-bitten, cynical old Dick Geis (EditorPublisher of The Alien Critic) lays it on the line -- his opinions are not necessarily those of the management! Ars Gratia, much like Galaxy Showcase, butfor Up-and-Comers; Future Perfect, next issue's goodies -- at least some of them; The Editor's Page in June is devoted to my personal favorite among the many past editors of Worlds of If. In future, it will be what the name implies -- the editor's page. And, as with Galaxy, all the old features will remain in residence. But all of this takes money, a good deal of it -- and the profit motive remains an operant factor in the publishing industry. To over demonstrate that publishing the two best sf magazines in the world is an economically viable policy requires a significant increase in circulation figures. You can help -- and in the process receive at a significant discount # or # issues of the best sf published anywhere, weeks before it appears for public sale. Just fill in the coupon' below. -- Baen  I A'V# The Foremost Publications I I J CjdLdXy in s ( i ence Fiction  J J H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often problems already shaping tomorrow, termed "future fiction" -- has fasciEcology -- space exploration -- nuclear noted alert minds. Not only has it enpromise and threat -- energy -- social tertained. It has predicted much of evolution and biological revolution -- the far-ranging scientific and social these and other fields are probed by change now upon us. imaginative stories uniquely exciting authors of the genre continue to specfree. Subscribe now! Some Contributors Past and Present Pou Anderson Isaac Asimov James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menzel # East # Street for either of these distinguished New York, N.Y. #I # periodicals is # for # issues.) Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A. B. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The astronomical object called Cuckoo is plunging toward our Galaxy. Literally the biggest riddle in the universe, it is impossibly large and impossibly light. With has only ten times the mass. Yet -- with the average density of the inside of an electric-light bulb -- it somehow has a solid surface, and that surface is inhabited by human beings and other creatures. In the deep air and weak gravity of Cuckoo, human beings can fly with only their own muscle-power. native wingmen. has set out to find the nest of an org. a strange creature native to Cuckoo, so that he can steal an egg. hatch it and train the infant org to be a mount for him. In his journey, he has encountertelligent and malevolent creatures that breed human beings like cattle, slave. An expedition of Terrestrial human beings and other intelligent races of the galactic culture is exploring Cuckoo. They have arrived bv tachyonic transmission -- a process that uses the fasterthanlight speed oftachyon beams to transmit an exact copy of any person or thing anywhere in the universe -- leaving the unchanged originals behind. Every time a person travels by tachyon he replicates himself, so that a person rriay have a dozen or more copies of himself scattered about the galaxy. are two of the humans engaged in exploring Cuckoo. Both of them originated on Earth and were transmitted to the central administrative headquarters for the galaxy. Sun One. There they met and married. Now other copies of them are on or near Cuckoo. Several of the copies of Pertin have already reached the surface and died there; one or two are still alive, but out of touch with the others. Org Rider achieves his objective by stealing an egg from an org's nest. Pursued by the enraged parents, he hides in a cave and there meets one of the fugitive, injured copies of Ben Pertin. Along with Redlaw, they evade the adult orgs and the watchers and head for what they hope will be a safe refuge -- but there they find themselves witness to an attack on Zara Dov and others of her expedition. Zara is injured and forced to land, alone in the jungle -- completely alone, in the weird wilderness of Cuckoo. O rg rider involuntarily started to move forward to help Ben Yale Pertin, but Redlaw caught his arm. "Don't touch him!" the giant rumbled. Then, looking past Org Rider to the stranger, he lowered his voice. "There's nothing you can do for him now. That slime doesn't thrive on vegetation. It eats flesh. He's done for." "But -- but it's only some kind of sap, or something like that. We can take him to the river, wash it off -- " "You're not hearing me, boy. There's no chance for him at all. If he's lucky, he'll be dead in five sleeps. If he's not, he'll linger on for a dozen. But there's no way to clean him now, and he's death to touch." Pertin was staring at them, aware they were talking about him, suspicious of what they were saying. He asked a question that Org Rider could not understand, but Redlaw chirped some sort of answer in the whistling screech of the watchers. Under his breath he remarked to the boy, "He said those bones were his. What can he mean by that?" Org Rider said, with the uneasy fascination of horror. "It is as it was before, Redlaw. Remember? He died already, and he came alive again. Can it be that he dies many times and always lives again?" "If he lives again after that blue slime gets through with him, I'll be astonished," rumbled the giant. "Ah, well. We can't help him, but we can feed him. I'll get some food. You build a fire." "What about the slamming machine?" cried the boy. The giant nodded somberly. "There it is," he agreed. "We'll ask Ben Yale Pertin if there are weapons there. But if they've got that blue slime on them, it will be ticklish work to find a way to use them." "Can't we clean them?" "Ah, yes, clean them. But it's being sure they're clean that's the hard part. And one single drop of the blue murder, so tiny you might not even see it, is enough for death. If you see it anywhere on you, boy, on toe or finger, wherever, don't wait. If it's only a toe, lop off the foot! It's miserable work to do, but it's your life if you don't!" Numbly the boy nodded, then turned to his org. "Don't go near him. Babe," he ordered. The soft trunk squirmed out to touch him reassuringly. "What I think," ruminated Redlaw, staring at Ben Yale Pertin, who was scrabbling feverishly in the wreckage of the ship, "is that this slamming machine is not his but another's. Identical ships. Maybe identical people. I think it landed on the living peak of Knife-in-theSky and touched the slime. Then it came down here. Its occupant, perhaps another Ben Pertin, came out and touched the slime. When he did that, it was too late for him." The boy nodded, frowning. "Stay with this one, Redlaw," he said. "Perhaps you can help him. I will get food." But he knew as he left the org with a cautioning word and turned into the forest that there was no way for Redlaw to help Pertin, and that his real reason for going after food was that he could not bear to see him doomed thus to die. To die a third time! It was heavy enough to die once. What courage these people must have, to die again and again! He was fortunate almost at once, scouring the wet black gravel along a sluggish stream, when something like a buried log humped itself and sprang free of the black muck. The boy caught his knife and waited. In a moment he was rewarded; the "log" ripped suddenly down the back. A wild-flower sweetness exploded into the air, and a delicate pink shape thrust and thrust, struggling to escape from its black prison. Org Rider paused, entranced. It was too beautiful to kill for food! But he thought of the dying Ben Yale Pertin, of the org; he had no choice. He waited until the tacy wings of black-veined rose unfolded, until the new-hatched creature gripped the sides of the canoe-like shell and slowly pulled itself free. Huge luminous eyes, glowing with the rosy red of live coals, gazed blankly at him. They were just beginning to focus when he was upon the thing with his knife, stabbing the new life out of it. W hen they had the skinned and gutted body of the butterfly-creature broiling over the low fire Redlaw had made, the giant took him aside. "Here is what I have found," he said with satisfaction. "Look?" And he offered an armful of gleaming objects to the boy. Org Rider recoiled. "They're from the slamming machine!" "Yes," agreed Redlaw. "But I have taken them out myself, from the interior, where the blue slime did not penetrate. Ben Yale is angry at me because I would not let him touch them. I made him understand that the blue slime is deadly to us -- though I did not say that it was also deadly to him," he added in an undertone. "What is that stuff good for?"  "This," said Redlaw proudly, "is a weapon." He held up a thing shaped like a short seed-cone, with a slim cylinder perched at angles at its top. "It is not what I had hoped for," he admitted. "It is only a laser. The watchers, too, have lasers. Still, it is better than any we have found so far!" The boy pointed to an elastic band in which were set tiny windows. "And that?" "It is for far-seeing. Look through it, Org Rider! You will see as far as you can travel in a dozen sleeps!" The boy took it gingerly. The elastic part clasped his skull gently but firmly as he donned it; the transparent part hung just over his eyebrows. Squinting upward, he caught strange bent glimpses of the treetops and clouds, like watersnakes seen through the turbulence of a rapid. He shook his head, causing the visor to pop into place in front of his eyes. And suddenly great broad yellow leaves rushed in on him from the tree over his head, and the bright golden clouds beyond swooped down almost within arm's length. Involuntarily he ducked, yelping. Redlaw guffawed. "Startles you, doesn't it?" he rumbled. "But you'll see watchers coming at you through that a hundred breaths before your bare eyes will see them, boy. And this thing -- Ben Yale Pertin calls it an 'audio log,' whatever that is -- listen!" He touched a switch on the box, and a voice -- Ben's voice, the boy realized -- began to come from inside it somewhere. Org Rider could not understand the word being said, to be sure; they were words of that strange gibberish tongue the stranger used. But it was his voice, beyond doubt. Redlaw's mood changed. He dropped the audio log to the ground and stared at it angrily. "But there's not what I wanted," he muttered. "Not a weapon that the watchers don't already have. Not anything that will let us destroy them!" "Perhaps Ben Pertin does not have such weapons," Org Rider said. "He has them! Or his people do. I'd threaten to kill him, if it would make him get them for me! But what is such a threat to a man who's dying already?" He stared at the squat stranger, then glanced past him into the woods. "Boy, what's the matter with your org?" Tardily Org Rider realized that Babe had wandered away, was on the hillside above the wrecked slamming machine. The boy leaped to his feet, tensely afraid that the org might somehow brush against the blue death. But the org was not near the machine and showed no interest in it; something else was engaging its attention. It stood upthrust on its great talons, huge eyes staring frozen into the sky, soft pink trunk squirming upward as though to feel what the eyes were looking at. "What is it?" Org Rider demanded sharply. The org did not even look at him. Then, reflected in the org's eye, he saw a peculiar flash of bright cobalt blue. Startled, he looked upward through the leaf canopy and saw, lancing through the sky, a line of cobalt fire that winked, flashed again in a different place, winked and flashed still again. The light was so intense it almost blinded him, who had seen few point sources of light in his life, but he was pretty sure he could make out several small dots around the bright blue beams. Distant rushing sounds, as of cloth tearing, came to him from where those bright beams flashed. "Lasers!" bellowed Redlaw. Remembering what he wore, Org Rider jerked the farseeing visor into place. After a moment of frantic search, he found the magnified images of what hung above him. A man! A man wearing a queer treetrunk-like thing strapped to his back, pointing something like the weapon Redlaw had showed him; and around and below the man, falling like dead leaves through the sky, two, no three orgs. Dead. Slain by those bright blue bolts. The boy peered under the glasses, trying to make sense of what he saw, and became aware that there were other dots in the sky. It took him time to find them through the visor, but there they were -- four or five creatures, and what strange creatures they were! Something that looked like a winged woman made of silvery metal. A tiny beast with frail wings and a great hideous org-eyed head! A thing that looked like an enormous eye, unsupported in the air! A machine, a -- what? he could not say for sure, but something that resembled a single great cube of metal with metal attachments hanging from it -- a cube that also floated unsupported in the air. And with them -- Org Rider caught his breath, steadied the glasses and looked again. A woman. A girl. Dressed like Ben Yale Pertin and the man who had beamed down the org. But her pale face and bright eyes were unlike those of any female he had ever seen. He was jolted out of his reverie by Redlaw. "Give me that far-seer." growled the giant, snatching it from Org Rider's head. Bounding over to a clearing, Redlaw jammed the visor onto his own head, stared upward. "Blood and death!" he muttered. "What are those things?" He lifted the lenses away from his eyes and stared blankly at the boy. "Did you see them?" he demanded. "Queer machine things! Animals like nothing I've ever seen!" Org Rider made no answer. He was listening to the distant screams of orgs, wondering if they were the three he had seen killed, the sound reaching them so late because of distance; then he realized it could not be that. These screams were nearer. And suddenly the strange sights he had seen in the sky were driven from his mind, for he heard those wild screams repeated -- less raucously but closer at hand. He turned and shouted, "Babe! What are you doing?" The young org turned the great eyes on him. The trunk was quivering and snaking out, now toward Org Rider, now toward the sky. The boy bounded over to the org, caught it around the neck. "Don't listen, Babe!" he begged, and the org mimicked, in his own voice: "Listen... listen... listen!" "Stay, Babe," he coaxed, stroking the org's quivering head. He could feel a roughness beneath the velvet, along the ridges over the great staring eyes, and knew that the hard bronze scales of maturity were beginning to form there. The shrieks of the wild orgs sounded again, nearer. "Please, Babe," he begged. The org's trembling stopped. It froze, staring into the sky, and the boy saw what its huge eyes had discovered. Black and narrow and swift against the gray sky, two orgs were scudding over the treetops, up-mountain, away from where their fellows had just been slain. were of fear and warning. The drives of his genes were too strong to resist. Babe answered with a hoarse, hooting cry and launched himself into the air. The first stroke of his powerful wing struck Org Rider, sent him tumbling across the mossy rock. As he picked himself up, Babe paused for an instant high above him. "Please," it screamed, hoarsely mimicking the boy's own voice. "Please... please..." And it spun in air and climbed into the bright sky to follow its wild kin. Alone and desolate, Org Rider stood watching until Babe and the others were out of sight. B en Yale Pertin had not been fooled by the red-haired giant's pitiful attempts to dissemble. He had caught enough of the giant's meaning through the translator to know that, from Redlaw's point of view at least, the blue slime was bad medicine indeed. Pertin was not unconcerned about that, but he was sure these barbarians knew little about medicine. His first business was to find the medicpac in the wrecked exploration ship. He did not trouble to clean off the slime, not after the first trial at swabbing it from his skin had taught him something new about pain. However, he swabbed the stuff with anesthetizing and antiseptic creams from the pac, covered the affected surfaces with self-sealing bandages and sterilized them with a cleansing spray. The bonedeep itching began to fade at once and the pain went with it. Pertin then fished out the bottles of vitamin supplements and swallowed a week's ration before he dug up proper food. A self-heating can of beef stew, another self-heating can that produced black coffee, a can of peaches thick in syrup -- he stopped eating at last not because he was no longer hungry but because he began to think he would burst. Then he turned his attention to less immediate problems, such as the two barbarians he was with. They seemed much taken with the laser gun, the farsight visor, the audio log; well, let the giant play. It did not matter. The log was only a spare. The weapon was more serious, in a way, but he had been at their mercy for -- what? A week? A month? How could one tell in this place where there was never anything like day or night? Anyway, during that interval they had not tried to kill him. So possession of the weapon did not mean they would. Of course, if he had kept the weapon it would have maintained the odds in his favor, he mused. Perhaps getting it back from them would be worthwhile, when chance offered... While Org Rider stroked his hatchling and the giant puzzled over the hardware, Pertin watched incuriously, idly stroking the bandages on his arms and legs. They were beginning to tingle again, he realized. That was odd, but there was no real pain. The imperative thing was to get himself in contact with civilization again, whereupon full medical treatment would of course be available. Unfortunately, this exploring ship was of a model different from the one he himself had been shot down in, and although there was a radio he could not make it work. Batteries run down? That seemed unlikely; most electrical systems were powered by radioisotopes that never did run down. Broken in the crash? It didn't seem to be. He came to the conclusion that it was working, after all, but that the frequency on which it was operating was simply not monitored any longer. He explored further around the craft, and came across the prime audio log.  Maybe that would give him a clue, he reasoned. He thumbed it back to the beginning of the record, then turned it to "play." "Ben Tom Pertin," it whispered in his earplug, "reporting on landing on surface of Cuckoo." Hearing his own voice in his ears gave him a thrill of unexpected unease; that voice came from vocal chords that had once lodged in that blue-smeared skeleton before him. But the voice was going on: "First entry into atmosphere accomplished without. difficulty; initial target, anomalous formations on top of mountain. I landed but did not exit from vehicle because of low air pressure at this altitude. The top of the mountain is bare rock covered in places by a blue lichen or greasy substance of some sort, which glowed quite brightly. I observed the anomalous formations and have photographed them for transmission. I do not understand them. There appears to be a sort of crater on top of this mountain. It is clearly not volcanic; there is nothing resembling a lava flow, outgassing or anything else indicating volcanic activity. On the crater lips are some truncated cones that have the appearance of being artifacts... There was a click, and then the voice resumed: "The viewports of the vehicle have begun to cloud over and vision is impaired. I do not know the cause of this. Perhaps it is due to temperature differentials causing deposit of fog. As I cannot leave the vehicle I am breaking off this section of the survey and attempting a landing at a lower altitude." There was another click, and then the voice resumed -- but a different, fearful, worried voice now: "Report two. Vision has not improved. I was forced to fly and land by radar, and landed with some difficulty. I do not know if the vehicle is damaged. The blue material appears to be covering the viewports. I will reconnoiter outside and return for further report." Click... And then nothing, nothing but the faint distant hiss of the recorder coil unwinding under the scanner heads. Ben Yale let it run through, hoping against hope for more word, but there was none. He had known there would not be. He could write the rest of the story himself. He stood at the port of the vehicle, looking out at the great yellowtipped trees, the marshland and moss, the distant river. He could imagine that other he standing in that place and looking at that same view, and venturing out to explore this strange new world... and never noticing the blue slime that clung to him as he swabbed experimentally at the viewports or steadied himself against the landing skids. And then, later, trying to get back to the vehicle and medicpacs, and not quite making it -- as the skeleton outside attested... Ben Yale scowled, rubbing absently at his bandages, refusing to entertain the unwanted thought that kept popping into his head: suppose this other Ben Pertin had indeed used the medicpacs... and suppose modern galactic medicine had not been enough to stop the inroads of the blue slime... B elatedly Ben Yale became aware of the excitement outside. What were they rattling on about? He activated the Pmal translator on his arm and managed to catch a few words of what the giant was shouting. Something about aliens in the sky? At once Ben Yale was all attention. Suddenly he became aware of the zzzzt of laser weapons, the screams of those creatures like the one the boy appeared to keep for a pet. Something was going on, but what? Ben Yale Pertin leaped to the top of the vehicle, staring up at the sky. Yes, there was something there, tantalizingly at the very limit of visibility. Squinting, he thought he made out something that looked like tiny dots proceeding in file across the broad dome of Cuckoo's heaven. They were near some bright clouds in Pertin's line of vision, which made identification even harder; but surely that one creature of the winged girls. And that other -- was it human? He stood benumbed until he heard the screams of wild orgs passing overhead. Then he remembered to scramble out of sight just in time; he did not want them dining off him! Without any particular interest he saw the boy's org join them, and then realized something more was going on overhead. The straight line of beings had broken up. Several were dropping away, the others changing course. He heard a scream of high-speed transport, caught the distant glint of air vehicles moving in toward the dissolving party of creatures. Ben Yale Pertin pawed at his forehead, forgetting for a moment that the visor was gone. The redhaired giant had it, now seemed to be playing with it. Pertin bounded over and grabbed for the device. To his surprise, the giant fled from him, fled as though Ben Yale were carrying the plague. "Give me my glasses!" he roared, pursuing. The giant ripped off words the Pmal struggled over before producing: "Don't touch. Stay away. I'll kill!" "They're mine," Pertin said stubbornly. Redlaw hesitated, glanced at the boy, shrugged, then slowly drew the visor from his head. He did not hand it directly to Ben Yale but dropped it on the ground and stepped quickly back. Ben Yale did not care. He snatched it up, donned it, stared at the sky. It was so hard to find anything at this extreme distance! Twice he caught a corner of one of the bright clouds, and the magnified light dazzled him. Then he located something, lost it, zeroed in on it again. It was a vessel like the ones the giant had called "watcher ships." It looked ugly and dangerous, and it was heading purposefully, at high speed, toward-where the party of dots had been sailing along. He sought the party again, without success until he heard the thrump thrump thrump of an athodyd. Peering under the glasses, he saw the string of steam-puffs the personal jet left behind, and managed to get the person using it in quick focus just a moment before she dropped out of sight. Yes. She. She dropped out of sight. Ben Yale stood transfixed, heedless of the shouts of the boy and the giant. He gazed into now empty sky where he had just seen, diving at breakneck speed for the jungle, the girl he had left behind him on Sun One. The girl he had thought never to see again in this life. Zara Doy. W hen Zara realized that she was alone on this strange planet, she was not so much afraid as deeply resentful. She had not had much practice with physical fear. There was little occasion for it on tamed, human-filled Earth. The sorts of fear she had learned to experience were of a different kind. Fear of the unknown, for example, as when she had volunteered for this assignment -- and that had been more excitement than fear, really. And from time to time the fear -- or the angry suspicion, to be more exact -- that some rival was going to damage her standing with the stereo audiences. Or the fear that she might fail to perform well in a broadcast. It was only as time passed, and the sole nearby sounds she heard were of stirrings and whisperings in the forest around her, that she began to understand that the quivering in her shoulders, the jumpy need to look around all three hundred and sixty degrees at once, were the beginnings of terror. She was not quite alone, though. She had her communications equipment. She could be in touch with the ground station if she wanted to. She might even hear, through the Pmal links, some message from her partners, if they happened to come close enough to her. But nothing came from the Pmal, and she drew her hand back a dozen times from the switch that would activate the long-range communicator. Something had drawn those enemy ships toward the party. Were the ships following down its transmissions? She did not know, but was reluctant to risk bringing back the enemy craft. And she could hear them, could even catch glimpses from time to time of what had to be them, a good distance off, circling low over the treetops, searching. Searching, she felt quite sure, for such of their quarry as had evaded them -- like herself. What had become of the others? Of only one thing was she sure: in the fight, her side had not triumphed. Because there the stranger ships were, roaming boldly around. Val and the Arcturan had lost that battle, and if they had survived they too were in hiding. She thought of her husband and wondered if he had taken part in the combat or if, at the last moment, he had sheared off and followed her. She reached two conclusions. If he had followed her, he should be nearby. If he had not, he was probably dead... She frowned. The distant drone of the enemy ships was no longer wholly distant. She crept to the edge of a fernbordered lake and peered cautiously upward. The drone grew louder; Something appeared over the trees. It was a long tapered shape with finlike wings at the tail end and mottled markings that were no doubt a form of camouflage. It poked into the little circle of sky over the lake like a hovering spear. Zara Gentry cautiously pulled back, away from the black water of the lake and into the doubtful shelter of the trees. The watcher ship floated out over the lake, supporting itself easily with the thrust of its propulsive jets against the light gravity of Cuckoo. A thin golden snake was trailing below it, slipping around the treetops, dropping into the black water. Some sort of snooper device, Zara guessed, and tried to be perfectly still. The mottled vessel slowed still more, the golden snake growing slack in the water, seeming to writhe around as it sought for something to strike at. Inch by inch Zara crept backward until she was wholly covered by a patch of great vines bearing bright blue flowers. She was not alone in her hiding place. Strange insects were there too, and welcomed her presence enthusiastically as a source of nourishment. The mottled ship dropped gently to the beach and came to rest, not more than fifty yards away. A wide door fell open in its side and became a lowered gangplank. Zara could not help gasping at what came out. T'Worlies, Sheliaks, Sirians and all had not prepared her for the hideousness of the creatures crewing the ship. First to disembark was an armored, blackbeaked, hunchbacked creature that waddled out across the lowered platform and flapped down to the beach on stubby yellow wings. Zara wriggled uncomfortably, trying to dislodge small bloodsucking insects from her skin, at the same time uneasily conscious of a noxious smell. For an instant she could not identify it. Then it hit her hard -- a foul odor of carrion and decay, even at this distance strong enough to turn her stomach, was coming from the creature on the beach. The thing flopped awkwardly into the air and flew around the perimeter of the lake. Zara willed herself to look down without moving a muscle. The reek was overpowering as the creature flapped overhead. The flapping sounds and the reek receded, and dared to look up. She saw that the watcher had returned to the beach. It shrilled some message at the unseen crew of the brown-mottled ship, and slowly other creatures like it began to come through the dark doorway. One by one they vaulted across the flat platform and glided into a ragged circle around the first watcher. They engaged in a colloquy of whistles and screeches, until another appeared from the ship and hopped and flew down to them with what looked like a bundle of white staves or lances. It passed them out to the others, then squealed something. All rose hooting into the air. Z ara realized she was in desperate trouble. This was a search party, no doubt of it, and more likely than not she was the quarry. Perhaps they had seen her dive into the forest here, or perhaps she had given herself away in some other manner. No matter; they were intent on a trail, and at the end of it would be Zara Doy Gentry. She whimpered in fear, trying to decide what to do. But her choices were so few! She could use the laser weapon at her belt, hoping to kill a few of the creatures before the rest killed her. She could try to flee -- but where? And with what hope of success? Or she could continue to cower in her bower of vines, being eaten alive by the tiny insects, until the ugly invaders found her... And likely they would find her soon. Already one of the watchers was circling near her. She heard it shriek almost overhead, saw the bright-spotted blackness of its slick hard body, saw the flash of its yellow wings. She could not tell which way its bulging greenish eyes were looking, but for a moment she thought it had seen her. Then its great pliant ears cupped toward something ahead. Squealing, it flapped out of sight, brandishing its long white staff. She gasped with relief, although the creature's evil reek had her on the point of vomiting. She lay quiet. The hoots and squeals of the searchers kept up an insane yammering all around her. At long last the noises seemed to concentrate and recede. She dared to peer out, saw that one by one the creatures were landing near their vessel.' Had they given up the search? Were they about to vanish into their ship and take off? She crawled out of the tangle of vines to see better. They were in a confused, bickering huddle around the ship. The golden snake that had hung into the water was wriggling insanely about, touching them and recoiling, darting into the underbrush and coming blindly back. They ignored it. They seemed to come to some conclusion, then, and two of them leaped ponderously onto the platform and waddled into the ship. In a moment they reappeared, bearing great platters of what looked like raw meat. They dropped down in their ungainly way to the beach and began to parcel out bits of meat among their fellows. It was lunchtime, Zara realized. Their table manners -- even allowing for the fact that they had no table -- were atrocious. They bickered and fought over the choicer pieces, throwing the bones and offal carelessly into the woods. The squealing noises did not stop while they ate; they clearly had no compunctions about talking with their mouths full, if indeed so gross a species had compunctions about anything. At that point it occurred to Zara that she had been thinking of them as animals. But they were not animals. They used advanced technology. They communicated among themselves. And if she were able to get a little closer to them, her Pmal translator might be able to pick up enough from their squeals and screeches to give her some idea of what they communicated. With agonizing care she slipped along the margin of the lake, eyes firmly on the feeding watchers, until she was less than a dozen yards from the sandy beach where they had landed. She activated the Pmal and held it to her ear. It would take time for it to store up enough speech to be able to deduce meanings, but it should only be a few minutes before it could at least identify and translate a few words... Time was growing short. They were close to finishing their meal. Filthy though the creatures were, a few had evidently been detailed to the task of cleaning up -- to hide their tracks? They were picking up left-over pieces that happened to have fallen to the beach or the platform of the ship. One flapped and waddled toward her. She became conscious of her exposed position, but the watcher did not seem interested in exploring the undergrowth. It was only looking for a place to dump its tray of slop. It did so, and turned away. For just a moment Zara felt a quick thrill of relief. Then she saw what the slop consisted of. "Dear God!" she moaned aloud, unable to stop herself. The hooting and squealing rose like a barnyard chorus as the watchers caught the sound. Hopping, flapping their great yellow wings, they came at her. But the golden snake hung from their ship writhed faster than any of them. Before she could move it had slipped across the beach with the sinewave wriggle of a sidewinder, touched her gently, then locked on her. She was held so tightly she could hardly breathe, much less run. But she had not been able to run before that, either -- not run, not even stand up. Not since looking at the trash and offal the creature was throwing away, and seeing one rounded bit of waste, melon-sized and bloody, roll languorously toward her and stop... She knew then what these creatures had been feeding on. She was looking at the severed head of her husband. The next moments for Zara were a desert of half-understood misery. The choking coils of the golden rope seemed to have intelligence of their own as they wrapped themselves around her, bearable when she was still, tightening cruelly with every move she made to work them off. She was tumbled face-down on the talc-white beach, with the hideous squeals and hoots of the watchers piping querulously or menacingly all around her, their foul reek choking her nostrils. All that was painful. What was unbearable was the memory of the empty staring eyes of her husband fixed on eternity. If Zara had been asked to describe her marriage, back on Earth, she would have defended it as a convenient thing costing little to maintain and, if it gave little in return, no burden to her. His death had killed no part of herself. But it was unbearable nevertheless, unbearable to see this close person destroyed so callously, used so demeaningly, to stuff the maws of these filthy creatures. It was only then that Zara began to realize she might share that same fate herself. She struggled to turn over, free her mouth from the choking sand. The golden coils punished her, but gasping and panting she managed to flop onto her side. "Please!" she begged. "I mean you no harm. Give me that metal thing there -- it will let us talk to each other." And she tried, at terrible cost of agony as the golden coils remorselessly fought her movements, to point to the Pmal translator, whispering away to itself on the sand. The hideous mask-faces thrust themselves at her, hooting and whistling. She knew what they said was language of a sort, and it was frustration to know that a few yards away the Pmal was surely translating faithfully every word -- but inaudibly, because she had set the sound low lest they hear her. "Please," she screamed as one came near her with a great curved cleaver. It paused, seeming to enjoy her fear. The gabbling whistles and honks burst like laughter around her. She closed her eyes and tried to remember her brief training. What were her options? Talking was useless, with the Pmal gone. Her laser weapon was long since taken away. They had left her only the instruments strapped to her arms -- medicpac, chronometer, communicator... Communicator! She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. She lay still as stone for long seconds, remembering where the transmit switch was on the communicator, feeling with her body-image senses where her hands were, where the switch was. There would not be much freedom of action. Then she flung herself onto her back, forcing her hands together, clawing with the fingers of her right hand for the forearm of her left. The golden coils responded at once by tightening so violently that she thought she felt bones snap; but she had touched the switch. "Help!" she screamed. "This is Zara Doy Gentry calling. Help. Please. Help me!" ahundred-odd degrees of arc ,f. distant on the great bulk of Cuckoo, Ben Line Pertin was talking to himself. On his watch duty, desolately insoluble problem of what to do about the wife that was not his, he had observed a curiosity. The comm frequency that had been abandoned -- because no transmissions had been received and its owner, that other avatar of himself named Ben Tom Pertin, was presumed dead -- had suddenly come back to life. When he first beheld himself he was aghast. This devastated face, harried, sick and in pain, was himself! "Ben Tom!" he cried. "What's the matter?" The face in the stereo stage reflected annoyance. "I'm not Ben Tom," it snapped. "And I don't know what you mean. What's the matter with you people? I've been trying to call you for -- I don't know, for days!" "Sorry," said Ben Line Pertin. "But what do you mean, you're not Ben Tom?" The ravaged face split in an unpleasant smile. "Glad I'm not," he said. "Ben Tom's dead. I'm Ben Yale. Remember? When you -- we -- volunteered for the sixth time? Well, that's me. I lost my ship, nearly lost my life. I've been through hell, Ben Line! But at that I'm better off than Ben Tom, because his bones are twenty feet away from me. This is his ship I've found; my own was destroyed, communications and all." "You look as though you've been through hell," Ben Line agreed fervently. "What are those bandages?" The walking skeleton looked incuriously at his arms and legs. "Oh, some sort of fungus, I think," he said. "It itches. Hurts, too, but I've blocked it with stuff from the medicpac. I imagine I'll need treatment." "Well," cried Ben Line, finding something to be cheerful about for the first time in some days, "I think I've got good news for you, Ben Yale. We've just been transmitting a new-model exploring ship to the ground station. This one's armed and armored, ready for anything. And it's got full ground-to-space capability! We can get it over to you and have you up here in orbit in jig time -- as soon as it's ready." "Fine," said Ben Yale -- strangely, thought his duplicate; why wasn't he more excited. But he was looking narrowly at Ben Line. He said at last, tangentially, "Have you heard anything from Zara?" Ben Line shook his head. Then he corrected himself. "Yes, as a matter of fact I did," he said. "I don't remember -- did you split off before I got her message about not coming because she was pregnant?" "Pregnant?" Ben Yale demanded. "I don't believe it!" "Well, it's true. That is -- it's true of our Zara. But there's another copy of her -- " He stopped. He was not sure how much he wanted to say. "On Cuckoo, right?" cried Ben Yale. "I knew it! I saw her, Ben Line. She's in trouble. Not more than five thousand yards from here, bearing two seventyfour degrees!" "Trouble? No, I don't think so," Ben Line said. "Don't be a fool, Ben Line," cried his avatar. "I tell you, I saw her!" Ben Line Pertin hesitated, filled with confusion and a painful mixture of hope and fear. Another Zara, so close? But in danger? "Stand by," he said. "I'll scan that vector." And his fingers danced over his console to farlink, ordering a search for transmissions from a point five thousand yards, at bearing #, from Ben Yale's signal. From her perch across the console from him, Venus sat quietly regarding Ben Line. "What is the matter?" she asked, spraying a tiny violet cloudlet from her atomizer. He shook his head as the rich menthol scent reached him. "It's Zara," he said. "Something I don't understand. And one of my replicates down there, looking -- well, I don't know what's keeping him alive." "I ache with your pains," said Venus softly. Though her dark stare had always seemed blankly opaque, he felt her compassion coming through it. "So difficult for you, to see yourself. I have at least been spared that. I have no contact with my replicates, save one or two -- and then, for one of us to die in this edited form would not be bad." Distracted, Ben Line scowled at the console. There was no response to the search although he could see that the program was functioning. Lately he had found it more and more difficult to distinguish sleep from waking. His sleep was filled with troubled dreams, and his waking life was a nightmare. The dreams lingered with him even when he was awake. He shivered, remembering one dream -- scan unsuccessful, reported farlink's screen, unidentified "Continue," snapped Ben Line, reinforcing the verbal order with his keyboard. And he stared into space, remembering that one dream. I n it he had been a child again. On Earth. Not the Earth he had left -- so many replications before! -- but the Earth he imagined, as it had been before the first contact with the galactic civilizations. He had been sitting at a child's desk, in an upstairs room with an open window, looking out over a sunny yard, reading a book, when something had come in from outside. It had fluttered through the window, alighted on the page in front of him. When he had raised a hand to slap it, it had leaped away and he had seen it was no common fly but a tiny five-eyed bat shape with bright butterfly wings. When he had heard it squeaking, had caught its faint vinegar scent, he had known it was a T'Worlie -- incongruously there in that pre-galactic age, but somehow Earth's first visitor from deep space. He had seized a flyswatter to kill it. Its shrill scream of protest had hurt his ears, and its fear had been a carrion reek. Wings whirring, it had risen to fly away but he had smashed it on the open page. For a moment, now, he felt secure in that dream. Then he remembered the rest of it... He had heard a droning roar from outside. The sun had darkened. Shadows had filled with window. When he had looked out, he had seen that the sky had turned black with alien beings descending -- T'Worlie and Sheliaks, BoatyBits and Scorpians, endless processions of a thousand shapes and sizes all arrowing down upon him... He had wakened then briefly, tossed and turned, drifted off again... To even worse horror. He had dreamed then that he was his other self, Replicate #, at the strange tachyonic station to which he had been transmitted. But his form had no longer been human. He had been edited, transformed into a thick metal block, unable to move. He had understood at last -- attempting to shudder, and failing -- the silvery girl's abhorrence of the form into which her own body had been recast to survive in an oxygen atmosphere. His case had been worse. He had become a chess piece in a three-sided match; he stood on a queer triangular game board, a hapless piece in a game that farlink played against two terrible opponents. One opponent was a bright thing of lambent white flame, writhing and twisting and flickering, without any ordered shape. The other was equally shapeless; but black instead of bright. They reached across the board with curling tongues of bright fire and terrible empty blackness, as if to move their pieces; but Ben Line could not see their pieces, only the ones on his own side: One was the pseudogirl Venus, her silver body frozen and rigid. Another was Zara Doy, alive and moving but imprisoned under a bell-jar, pale and gasping, agonized for air. A third was Doc Chimp, a lifeless figure in brightly painted metal like a cheap child's toy, holding out a tin cup. The pieces moved, or the board itself perhaps moving them, responding to farlink's rapped electronic orders; but farlink was losing the game. Most of its triangular spaces were already empty. The last move had isolated Ben Line far from his companions. A fluttering tentacle of icy blackness stretched out toward him, and he knew that it was going to remove him from the board and then the game would be ultimately, irretrievably lost... "Ben Line," chimed the voice of the silvery girl, "where are you?" He came back to the reality of the orbiter and the screen. "Sorry, Venus," he muttered. "I was thinking about..." His voice died out, but hers picked up the thought from him: "About that other Ben Pertin? About Replicate #? About all those others of you, Ben Line?" He nodded. There had been no other signal from the copy of himself sent back along the tachyon trace to whatever that galactic source of interference had been: one more dead Pertin, he thought; the universe is getting seriously polluted with my corpses... He sat up abruptly and realized farlink was still methodically scanning the surface of Cuckoo for a signal that did not seem to be coming. He sighed and reached from the console to terminate the program -- And at that moment the screen lit up: And while his fingers were still poised over the console he heard it. There was no doubt. On the emergency frequency. Zara's voice. And the words: "Help! This is Zara Doy Gentry calling. Help. Please. Help me!" At virtually the same moment, in the wrecked survey vessel on the surface, Ben Yale Pertin heard Zara's voice repeated from the orbiter. That voice had traveled trip, to get to him, but on the instant flash of tachyon transmission it had taken less time than was measurable. The time the message had taken to travel from the speaker on the satellite to the microphone three yards away that had picked it up was longer than the time for the message to fly on the backs of tachyons through space. He burst out of the vehicle, limping and rubbing at his bandages, but traveling as fast as ever he had in his life. He was not in pain now. He had been steadily doping himself with pills and salves from the medicpac; he was no longer quite sober or sane. Although the pain of the ulcers under the bandages was blocked, the effects of the blocks were shaking the stability of his mind. All things seemed possible. The entire universe seemed ready to meet his commands. He scrambled through the undergrowth toward Redlaw and Org Rider, shouting, "My wife! She's in danger. We've got to help her." XV yvRG rider was too full of mourning for the loss of Babe to feel any great concern about the dying stranger's excitement -- until Redlaw translated some of that queer speech. "I do not understand all," said Redlaw. "But it is a woman of his people and she is captive of the watchers. I expect they will eat her," he added, moodily stroking his cleaver. "He wishes us to save her. And he says, too, that if we do this a great ship of his people will come to battle the watchers for us." Redlaw paused, uncertain. "I do not know if he is telling the truth," he said. "He is a dying man. Perhaps he has the madness of the dying?" Org Rider shrugged, but he was thinking about what Redlaw had said. With Babe gone, he was not happy enough to care much about danger. And the woman the stranger spoke about. If she were the one he had seen so briefly as she had dashed herself into the treetops -- but was that possible? Could she have survived that nightmare plunge? No matter; if it were she, there had been something about her that had appealed powerfully to him. He said mournfully, "What does it matter? Let us do as he asks. Where is this woman?" Redlaw scowled, gestured toward the slopes of Knife-in-the-Sky. "He says he knows precisely and will show us. But how can he travel? I have seen men before, eaten alive by that blue slime. They do not travel through the jungle! But he is doing it. It is something in those cloths he puts on his ulcers, perhaps, or in those small things he eats and drinks from the metal box. I wish I knew -- " Redlaw gazed doubtfully at Ben Yale Pertin, still shouting and gesticulating at them to hurry. "And there is so much more he says that I cannot understand." "No matter," said Org Rider. "Let us save the woman. For him," he added politely, as an afterthought. Even so, they were far too slow for Ben Yale's liking; and then the trek through the jungle was longer and harder than they had expected, more than two thousand breaths, because Ben Yale insisted that they wait for him. He chose to carry some great metal thing from the ship that he called "bazooka." It was a wonder he could move at all, even without that weight. Beneath the stained bandages -- though he had replaced them just before they had left -- the blue slime oozed out, always spreading, always etching new ulcers into his flesh. And it was a constant peril to be near him during his clumsy lunging through the trees. A single accidental touch of the blue slime might mean death for either of the others. But the two thousand breaths elapsed, and they had reached a point from which they could see the distant black gleam of the tiny lake. There on the far shore loomed the mottled hulk of the watcher vessel. Org Rider wished for the farseeing glasses, but of course they were no longer safe to use: Ben Yale had touched them. He squinted across the lake. With mounting excitement he saw -- yes, there she was! -- the very girl who had dropped from the sky. Wrapped like the prey of a cord-spinner in the golden coils of the watchers' device, lying helpless on the blinding white sands of the little beach. Even so, even at this distance, she was beautiful. Disordered as her hair was, it held the reddish glint of far lightning. Something about her made him think of his brother's wife. Yet this girl was more beautiful in spite of the drained pale cast of her face and the terror in her expression. EJe glanced at Redlaw, and started to move toward the lake. The giant stopped him. "Wait!" he rumbled. "Ben Yale says he has a plan. He says that this 'bazooka' is a weapon. He wishes us to go around the lake, to be ready to attack the watchers from the forest. He says from here, with this weapon that he has carried, he will destroy the watcher ship. When he has done that, we are to kill those who survive with his handweapon and -- " he patted his cleaver -- "this one." "What weapon does he have that will destroy the ship?" Org Rider demanded suspiciously. "You told me he had no such weapon." "He lied," growled the giant moodily. "I knew he lied. And perhaps he is lying now, how can I tell? I can understand so little of what he says." "What does it matter?" repeated Org Rider, quelling the surge of feeling in himself. "Let us do as he asks." T hey left Ben Yale just inside the undergrowth, lying on the scarlet moss, peering over the sights of his treetrunk-like weapon, chuckling and muttering to himself in his strange language. And they moved like ghosts through the vegetation, circling. They paused fifty yards from the beach. The foul death weed stench of the watchers reeked in their nostrils as Org Rider whispered savagely, "How do we know when he will destroy the ship? We should have arranged a signal." "Should have, should have," rumbled Redlaw. "But we didn't, boy." He scowled toward the beach. "If only I were sure of him! I hate like poison to get closer. Those golden ropes of theirs can smell a man, and they never sleep. Still -- " He sighed. "I'll try to get them with this thing -- " he patted the laser weapon -- "and you go after them with your bow. With any luck they'll be disorganized..." He broke off. There was a sharp, flat crack from across the lake and a puff of grayish smoke. Out of the smoke emerged a needlelike metal object lancing across the lake toward the watcher vessel. It struck, and opened into a bright flower of flame. Blam... The sound of the explosion was far louder than they had expected. The mottled vessel of the watchers seemed to lift off the sand and fall slowly. Flames spouted from the new hole that the stranger's weapon had made in its side. "Curse him," howled Redlaw. "We should have been closer. Do the best you can, boy." He loped toward the watchers, firing the laser weapon. Sounds like the tearing of paper came from it, and watchers fell before it. Org Rider ran to the side of the lake, dropped to one knee and began launching arrows toward the watchers. While one was still in the air he was notching and aiming the next. He did not wait to see how successful any released arrow was, but out of the corner of an eye he saw one watcher leap high with a startled squeal, a shaft clear through him. Another, squawling and hooting, lay on the ground, tugging at an arrow protruding from his throat. "They've broken!" exulted Redlaw over his shoulder. "Come on, boy. Let's go in and finish them off!" As he spoke his laser weapon sliced through the golden coils, and another blast from it burned a crisply sizzling hole through a watcher skull. Now the giant flung the laser to the winds and, screaming as he leaped, bowled in on the watchers, hacking at them with his cleaver. Org Rider was just behind. The two of them drove the watchers back like avenging angels. With every stroke of Redlaw's cleaver and the boy's knife a watcher squealed and fell from their paths. Zzzzzzat! The noise was louder than anything Org Rider had ever heard, and for a moment he did not understand what it was. Then he saw that the watcher vessel was not, after all, quite dead. From a round bulge on its top something flashed like lightning, and the great ripping sound lashed at his ears again. The watcher ship was firing its main armament. Not at them, Org Rider realized -- no question about that; if the laser cannon had been aimed at them they would never have known what hit them. The big laser was probing across the lake for the bazooka. Zzzzzzat. and a beetree went up in smoke, smitten by a lightning bolt. Zzzzzzat. and a sudden corridor opened up in a stand of deathweeds. "Grab the girl," bawled Redlaw. "Let's get out of here before they finish Pertin and start on us." T here were still watchers alive and Org Rider yearned to catch and kill every one. But he knew Redlaw was right. He bounded to the side of the girl. She was just beginning to sit up, numbed and tottering, after the blood had been squeezed out of her limbs for so long. Org Rider felt as dizzy as she was. All this was so terribly new and confusing. The needle-bright light of the laser, the harsh explosions and lightning-bolt sizzling of the long-range battle across the lake, were entirely out of his experience, wholly foreign to a life lived in the perpetual pink-gray dawn of Cuckoo. He was not afraid, but he was disoriented. Still he had to act. He grabbed the girl's arm and pulled her to her feet. She did not resist, except to break free for a moment and pick up a piece of metallic equipment. Then she was with him, bounding as fast as he into the shelter of the woods, Redlaw close behind. The last watcher on his feet outside the ship challenged Redlaw, but lost his head and half his trunk to the keen-edged cleaver. Then the giant was beside them, shouting, "Hurry! We must get out of sight." The girl could not have understood his words but she did not have to -- the need was clear. At last came another bazooka shot from across the lake. This one arrived clean and true on the bulge at the top of the watcher ship. The bulge blew up in a gout of flame. All three cheered. "We did it, boy!" the giant bellowed. "Beat the watchers in fair fight! It's the first time that ever happened in all the time of the world." Org Rider crowed in pleasure, pummeling the girl's back as though she were another man. Exultant, laughing, as delighted as he, she clapped him on the shoulder with a force that sent him spinning. He picked himself off the ground and looked at her with new respect. She was no timid frail maiden. She was as strong as he. And yet she seemed more feminine than any woman he had ever seen. More so even than the girl who had married his brother. A glow of color began to light her death-pale face, and he found himself staring into her widening eyes. They were a brightflecked brown, like the wild flowers that colored the grassworld after a rain. Even with the hated reek of the watchers still fouling his nostrils he could smell the faint scent that came from her, a clean sweetness that swept away the watchers' fetor and left him with the fragrance of the rain itself after the flatworld had been brown and dry. "Stop mooning, boy," Redlaw ordered, laughing as he said it. "We've beaten one shipload of watchers, but they're not through yet. There will be more. They'll send another to look for it. If it managed to send off a distress report, that ship is on its way now!" Org Rider tore his eyes from the girl. "All right. You lead." The giant gazed about. "We'll have to go back around the lake," he decided. "First place, we'd best try to find Ben Yale, if he's still alive. Second, I don't think we can get out this side. That's bare rock up there. We'd be easy targets on it -- and I see blue on those rocks, boy; I think it's the slime. We don't want to go near that." Org Rider nodded and turned to the girl. Speaking as clearly as he could, gesturing to make his meaning plain, he said: "Come. We leave here. Now." She laughed. She touched the metallic thing she had picked up, and she spoke, and from the thing came a flat dead voice that said: "I understand. I agree. And -- " even the lifeless metallic tone of the Pmal translator could not keep all feeling out of the words -- "with all my heart I thank you both." The boy was enraptured. He recognized the speaking machine; it was the same as Ben Yale's but whole and working properly. During Ben Y.ale's conversations with Redlaw, the boy had become accustomed to being excluded; it had not occurred to him that an undamaged machine would make it possible for him to be in one-to-one contact with this wondrous person. He caught the girl's hand, and they followed Redlaw back toward the lake margin -- And front behind the wrecked watcher vessel a lance of green fire spat out at them. Redlaw shrieked in agony and spun away, clutching his arm. "Run!" he bawled, setting them as example, they blundered after him, and at every leap Org Rider expected that green fire to burn through their backs. They stopped at the bare rock wall cupping that edge of the lake. "There was one still alive," Redlaw gasped, holding the place on his upper arm that had blossomed into a blood-red blister of pain. "It's lucky he fired when he did! If he'd waited he would have had me clean, and you two as well." He scowled up at the mountain. "We can't go up that way," he muttered. "And we can't go back to the lake, because he's waiting there." Org Rider risked raising himself to peer around the multiple boles of a flame-tree. He could see the watcher, broad yellow wings slowly stirring. One was damaged, and dragged; the watcher had been hurt, too. But he held the thing that looked like a black stick, and spat green flame, without faltering. "If we can't go forward," Org Rider said, "and can't go back -- and can't stay here because there'll be another watcher ship before long -- then what do we do?" T hey waited and watched, but the creature remained steadfastly alert. "We have no choice," Redlaw groaned at last. "We have to kill him. His gun outranges our weapons, and his bug-eyes can see us in every direction. It won't be easy." Redlaw scowled at his cleaver. "The only way I see to take him is to rush from all sides. He might kill us all, but I don't think so. One of us will get him. But the other two -- " He hesitated, then he finished: "At least one of the other two will be dead." "No!" shouted the boy. "Not her. She has suffered enough from the watchers. You and I can do it, Redlaw." The girl, listening, shook her head. She spoke in that pretty, singing voice, and the metal voice from her arm echoed, "I can do my share. I thank you for your good heart." Org Rider stared at her and said, "Please don't. I don't know your name -- " She said in her own voice, not through the translator, "Zara." Ancient Wisdom Of China Blended With Contemporary Jeweler's Art. a re now you rs asm agn ificent pendantsEach is meticulously crafted in either gold tjF a #"chain. A perfect fashion pendants make beautiful For each indivigifts, and if you order two or dual sign you more you can take advanorder ' y u wilI . t . , receive a comtage of our special money pltle pro(lle anal . saving offer. Supply limited ysis order your -- order now. signs today. The Craekerharxel  bs-ccm  #I Cabot Street, West Babylon, NY # j  Please send me those pendants I No. G S   have indicated. I understand that --  --  it I am not completely satisfied, I --  can return the pendaru(s) for a  full refund.  more pendants for only # each. J Address l ! pierced "  City ! I pierced look   Slate Zip DG DS  Laaaa New York State Residents Add Sales Tax J It sounded like music to him as he rehearsed it several times, tasting its flavor. "Zara. Please, Zara, don't do this. You are not a warrior. Redlaw and I can handle the watcher." The giant thundered, "Idiot boy, we can't. Our only hope is three attacks at once. That is a faint enough hope -- two is suicide!" The girl spoke, and the Pmal rattled flatly. "It is decided, Org Rider. I again thank you, but now let us act. Tell me what I must do." The giant rasped, "Come in from behind the ship. Get close to him. The beast has a hard shell but there are soft joints. One is where his neck would be, if he had a neck. There's a pale stripe above his black hump. Stab him deep in the middle of that, if you can." Org Rider watched the girl start on her roundabout trip with his breath caught in his throat. She would not die! He would see to it. The first one to display himself to the watcher surely would be the first one fired on; the other two would have a chance at least minutely better. Org Rider determined to be that first one. But it would be foolish, would even endanger them, for his break to come much before their own. It would simply mean that the watcher would pick him off quickly and then have only two foes to confront. So he squirmed to his place and waited, watching the faint ripples in the underbrush that marked the movements of Redlaw and the girl. Could the watcher see and understand those same ripples? The boy did not know. He could only hope not. Something was tugging at the back of his mind. What was it? Then he recognized the growing sound from the sky, and looked up. Down at him dived a great org. Org Rider froze. It was his death he saw coming. With only the knife left -- the bow was long since cast away -- he could not prevail against talon and fang. All he could do was stare at its savage splendor. He crouched numbly, waiting for the hooked black talons to strike. Even in that moment he saw the blue beauty of the org's huge hooded eyes, the bright flow of its form, the even sheen of bronze scales shading into the silver flash of its narrowed wings. Wonder at its clean sleek power made his throat ache. Orgs were better and greater than men! Surely they were more beautiful. It was his death... but if he had to perish, here on Knife-in-the-Sky, it was better to be killed by this mighty org than by the waiting watcher. But dying that way would not serve Zara... Org Rider leaped to his feet, yelling and bounding toward the watcher ship. As he had expected, the watcher was staring up with his great eyes, distracted by the org. Perhaps after the org finished with him it would go for the watcher next! Org Rider glanced toward the watcher, husbanding his charges as he nervously waited under the shelter of the ship, then back toward the org. It screamed again. The bright wings opened a little, flaring the creature toward him out of the bottom of the dive, and he saw the scars that marred its lean perfection. A long, dark wound, not fully healed, where the scales had been ripped from its flank. A break in the brightness of one wide wing. The screaming changed... and queerly, became words. "Babe!" blared the mighty voice of the org, repeating the boy's own words like a tape under maximum gain. "Babe come back!" The boy heard his own voice thunder down at him from the sky and could hardly understand. But what the words did not explain the actions did. The org dipped down over him. Its golden-scaled trunk snatched him up into the air, squeezed him almost too hard, flexed to set him on its back above the widened wings. Then recognition hit him. It was Babe! Changed -- older -- hurt, but Babe! Scales had replaced the infant fur. The healing scars told of combat. But it was Babe. A laser scream spat past the boy's ear and brought him out of his dreaming. He kicked the org strongly and shouted, "Fast, Babe. Over the trees." The beast responded instantly, putting the loom of the ship between them and the watcher. And Org Rider sobbed, "Babe! I'm so glad." He stroked the bronze scales. Yards below he could see the top of the trees. He caught a glimpse of Zara's terrified pale face staring up at them. What could she be thinking? Had she ever seen an org before? Did she understand that Org Rider was master, not prey? But looking at her brought him back to the needs of that moment. He wheeled Babe around, low over the treetops, and shouted down: "Now! Let's get him!" And as he saw the mighty form of Redlaw leap free and begin to run toward the watcher, he gouged his heels into Babe's scaled side and commanded, "Kill, Babe. The watcher. Kill him!" T he chaos of the next moments was indescribable. Org Rider heard the shouts of Redlaw and the shriller, fainter cry of the girl. He saw the cleaver glinting in the hands of the giant. Then he was around the ship and beating back in toward the watcher. The black stick crackled. Bright light blasted Org Rider's eyes; a sudden electrical stench choked him. But it had been a miss. He was still alive. And then they were on top of the watcher. Babe bellowed as his striking talons ripped the watcher out from under the hull. They all tumbled in a slow-motion heap: boy, org and watcher together. The reek of the squealing watcher stung the boy's throat and blurred his eyes but he clutched for the being, clung, sought to find the death place as he stabbed and stabbed with his knife. In the end it was Babe that took the last of the life from the watcher, the great claws simply wrenching the hideous head free of its body. stopped abruptly, and the ugly carcass toppled slowly forward in death. "We did it!" Org Rider called. "Babe, you're a hero. Babe -- " But the org did not respond. Shaken, Org Rider lifted his head free and stared. The delicate pink trunk was trembling violently. The huge eyes were dulled. As Org Rider reached out to touch him. Babe screamed in pain. The watcher's laser lance had found a mark after all. As Redlaw and the girl came running up, Babe fumbled out to touch the boy with his shuddering trunk. The voice that mimicked Org Rider's own said, "Babe go. Babe go..." And the light went out of the great eyes, and the org was dead. Org Rider sat mourning with the great head in his lap, Redlaw and the girl standing helplessly by, until at last Redlaw rumbled, "Sorry, boy, but we've got to get out of here. The watchers will be after us any time now." Org Rider looked up and nodded somberly. "I know." He got up, reaching a hand to the girl. "Are you all right?" She smiled, in both reassurance and compassion; he needed no translator to understand. There was a sudden scream of high speed from the sky, and all three of them looked upward in instant reawakened fear. "Too late!" raged Redlaw. "Fiends of hell! There's the watcher ship on us, while we're standing around like fools. We can't get away now. We'll have to fight -- and we've nothing to fight with but the watcher's own lance!" He dove to the side of the decapitated beast, choking from fury as much as from the evil cloud of its deathweed stink. The girl stopped him. Her clear voice, repeated through the translator on her arm, said: "It's all right. It's not a watcher ship. Look." Redlaw and the boy craned their necks. The vehicle that was settling down was far larger than any watcher ship either had ever seen. Even the colors were different. Bright silver, crisp black, a flare of yellow-white gas from the underjets. "They've come to rescue us," said Zara. "We're safe now. All of us." I n the orbiter, Ben Line Pertin watched in a fever of excitement as the survey ship picked up Zara and her two companions. He stared at her image in pain and wonder. So tall and thin she was, in her edited version! So worn and pale, the stresses of her battle with the watchers plainly showing. He wanted desperately to talk to her, to say words of love and welcome. But although he was hard-pressed by grief and loneliness, he was not mad; he understood that their relationship would have to mature in its own way. To him she was his loved and missed wife. To her, coming from an earlier Zara Doy, he was a stranger. And then there was the solved puzzle of why she had called herself "Zara Doy Gentry." She had married someone else! He had scarcely taken that shock when he had learned that that husband was dead, fodder for the maws of the watchers. Shock again! This time a different kind of shock; a reprieve, even if purchased at the cost of a man's life. He could not have been a bad man, Ben Line told himself with one reasoning part of his mind, if Zara had married him. But another part of his mind was bursting with joy. How strange for his wife to be a widow and a wooable stranger, all at once! And suddenly he was exhausted. He had remained by the communicator for twenty-two hours. Past the time of his regular duty, through the new Zara's cry for help, up to the moment of rescue and for an hour or two beyond. Now he had to sleep. Deciding against trying to leave a message for this to-be-won Zara, he headed for his cocoon. There would be opportunity. It was a long voyage up from Cuckoo and around to where the orbiter swung, Yet there was no way to shorten the trip. Even with nuclear rockets, the acceleration of the survey ship was limited to what its rescued passengers could stand. That was not much. Redlaw and Org Rider had lived all their lives in the gentle pull of Cuckoo, and even Zara and Ben Yale Pertin, in their edited versions, could hardly take a single gravity of acceleration. For Ben Yale even that would be quite dangerous; he had been swept from the jungle into full medical cocooning instantly. Ben Line fell asleep, thinking of Ben Yale coming up from Cuckoo, battered and foul with the ulcers of the blue slime... and of that other Ben Pertin, Replicate #, lost somewhere at the transmitter of the tachyon interference, at a point unknown inside the galaxy... and above all of the sweet and smiling face of Zara Doy, now Zara Gentry, who might some time soon be Zara Pertin again... He woke to Doc Chimp screaming in his ear: "Ben. Ben Line. Wake up! You've been found, you're still alive. Oh, wake up, Ben Line Pertin -- there's a signal from you coming in!" Heavy with sleep, Ben Line Pertin stumbled after Doc Chimp to the terminal dome. Ben Line's mind was fuzzed with visions of himself in all his myriad guises. Sometimes he was not sure which he was: the innocent back on Earth who had never left, the one on Sun One still happily married to Zara Doy and happy father of her child, or any of the dead ones... all of them... But one dead one was not dead! In the dome, the huge image of a haggard human face was repeated on half a hundred screens all around the curve. Part of the face was haggard with dirt and grime. The rest was caked with dark blood; a ragged wound on the scalp still oozed, untended. It took Ben Pertin a moment to recognize himself: Replicate #. "See!" chirped Doc Chimp in his ear. "It's you, Ben! Not dead! The message started coming in a few minutes ago. But it's awful bad, Ben Line. You can't understand a word of it without the Pmal translators." Ben Line was still stupid with sleep. "You mean I'm -- he's speaking some other language?" "Not that, Ben Line," said the chimpanzee gently. "Look at him! He can hardly talk in any language. The Pmal has to put it into words we can understand. Even then -- well, it's in symbol-script, not sounds. He must have had some bad times, Ben Line." And it was so: the soiled and battered mouth was moving, but no audible sound came through the wall speakers. Instead bright computer symbols were dancing under each screen: The bloodied head turned suddenly and vanished from the screen. For an instant the screens were dark. Then shapeless blotches of color flickered over them, farlink interposed its own message, in all the tongues of the viewers: There was a sudden rush of squeal, cry, shout and roar from the beings in the terminal room, as each one chattered to its neighbor about the message. Ben Line, sick at the sight of his destroyed self, muttered, "I don't understand. What is it?" Venus floated over toward him and filled him in quickly. "Your replicate reported in a few minutes ago, Ben Line. He was in a ship, but some sort of mechanical device -- a robot, and not a fully sentient one. I'm sure -- attacked him as he came out of the receiver, and it is only now that he has been able to report." "Ship?" Ben Line shook his head, trying to clear it. The source of the distant unidentified tachyon transmission that they had actually intercepted en route to Cuckoo -- a ship? There were no ships equipped with tachyon facilities that could possibly have a link with Cuckoo, not anywhere in the known universe... Of course, there was always the unknown universe, he thought, the muscles of his back crawling. "And there were representations of many beings there, Ben Line," the silvery girl went on excitedly. "Your people. Boaty-bits. Sheliaks. Your Replicate thinks that the ship is a sort of advance guard for Cuckoo, sampling inhabited planets, sending specimens back. That would account for -- wait, here it is again!" The ravaged head shook itself together into view on the screens. It was more horrid than ever; Pertin's replicate had been in another fight. Fresh blood was dribbling down the beard-spiked chin. The lower front teeth were gone. The hollowed eyes were darting frantically from side to side as the ruined mouth tried to form soundless words. They flashed under the banked screens: it's located me again, ugly And there was no more. The image exploded and died, and farlink underlined it after a moment with: The belt of screens blazed and went blank. A stir of strain ran around the terminal chamber, and muted hootings and clangings and shrillings of communication began. Ben Line Pertin shook his head slowly, trying to take it all in. There was so much happening, and so fast. Another death of a double. A real flesh-and-blood Zara on her way. And on the larger scale, the fantastic mystery of a scout ship from Cuckoo sampling inhabited planets. He tried to tell Nimmie and Venus how he felt. He caught a burned-fur scent from Nimmie that surprised him, until he recognized it. Fear. The T'Worlie was afraid of what the message meant. For a moment Ben Line allowed himself to share that fear of the terrible unknown, of the race that must have built that ship. But thoughts of Zara came flooding back, and his fear melted into anticipation... and that was how it was with Ben Line Pertin on the orbiter. W ith Ben Yale Pertin on the survey ship, spiraling around toward the orbiter, things were somewhat different. They were better than they had been in a long time, he told himself. The survey ship's medical facilities were dealing nicely with the blue slime. He spent three days in the cocoon while his skin was gently soaked away and a new one grown on. Then, swathed like a mummy in circulating-field bandages, he was allowed into the common room where the others were gathered -- his humanoid nurse, a Purchased Person, following after him. "I'm recovered," he announced. Somewhat warily, his three companions in the battle against the watchers welcomed him. They had received medication, too, and looked fine -- especially Zara, thought Ben Yale greedily, devouring her with his eyes. Redlaw and Org Rider gravely shook his head, a skill they had recently learned. Zara came over and patted his head. She drew back and looked at him. "Not really, I think," she said. "Not all recovered. But much better than when last I saw you." They and the ship crew had been excitedly talking over the strange message from the orbiter that had been relayed to them. While the Purchased Person made him comfortable in an open-end hammock, Ben Yale listened. " -- explains so much," said the Pmal, speaking for a horse-headed Canopan, the ship's pilot. "Explains why some of you races are duplicated on Cuckoo. That scout ship must have been twenty thousand years sailing through the galaxy, picking up specimens and sending them back. And of course some got loose and multiplied. They wouldn't know they weren't indigenous." Org Rider rapped indignantly, "That is our home. Our people have lived there forever -- " The Canopan snickered a whinnying laugh. "No offense," its Pinal said good-naturedly. "But what puzzles me," he went on, "is that facsimile of Cuckoo the replicate found. All made of metal! But it isn't like that, it's a world. A funny one, but still -- " "Wait," cried Org Rider through his own translator. "Perhaps I know something here! For there is a part of our world that is metal. A desert, that lies far beyond our grass world, beyond the shadow of Knife-in-the-Sky. My mother heard about it from a chief who owned an org. He tried to cross that metal desert once, looking for another grass world beyond the reach of the watchers. He nearly died there." The other beings looked at Org Rider, who returned their various kinds of gaze steadfastly. "It's true," he said. "It is all bare metal, harder than any axe or knife. There's nothing alive on it. No light except the dim glow of the clouds. The chief flew until his org grew so weak he had to give it all the food they carried for both of them. And then on the way back, trying to return to save their lives, he grew weak too, so weak that it had to carry him in its trunk. And," he cried, remembering more as he spoke, "that is, of course, how our world began. Everyone knows it! It was a hard bare shell, the first org's egg. Before the makers made their great fire to hatch all things from it." He paused, puzzled. The beings were making a great variety of sounds, but the Pmals were not translating them into language. They could not; the sounds were laughter. "But it is true," he insisted. Zara smiled and gently put her hand in his. "It is puzzling," she said. Ben Yale Pertin cleared his throat. "Zara," he called. It pleased him to see that she released the boy's hand to turn to him. "Yes, Ben Yale?" He hesitated. How to tell her that she and he had once been married? Indeed were right now married, and having children, on Sun One. He could not think of the right words, and as it was so important to him, and he wanted to be able to touch her, to kiss her, to hold her in his arms when he talked of these things, he temporized and turned what he said a different way. "I'm sorry about -- about your loss." He could not bring himself to say "about your husband's death." "Thank you," she said. "It was a shock. But I've had a little time to get used to it." The Purchased Person suddenly spoke, the voice human enough but the thought behind it coming from heaven knew who, heaven knew where. "Had you considered you could have him again?" it demanded, in a voice oddly, harshly male. Zara looked surprised, and Redlaw rumbled, "She said that before once, when you weren't here. Have your husband make another copy and send it to you -- whatever that means," he added, knotting his brows and staring about. Redlaw had never heard the expression "culture shock," but he was well on his way to drowning in it. Org Rider seemed to accept everything with grave interest and comfortable admiration; but he was younger, of course. For Redlaw this sudden exposure to such strangeness was difficult. Zara said thoughtfully, "Why, that never occurred to me." From his cocoon Ben Yale uttered a muffled groan. Damn that savage, he cursed furiously. Giving her that idea -- She was speaking again: "He might very well volunteer for replicating again, at that. He was -- is a kind of person, Jon is. But -- " She looked around and suddenly shook her head, smiling. "I'm sorry to be bothering you with my personal problems," she said. "No, no," called Ben Yale, suffering. "We want to hear. What were you going to say?" "Well, just that I wouldn't like to ask him to. I know it doesn't mean anything to be transmitted, in real terms. You're not any less for having a copy made. But in psychological terms it does mean something, and you are less. It was hard enough on Jon for him to volunteer the first time. I wouldn't want to put him through it again." B en yale exulted in the cocoon. So Zara would stay free! Of course, he mused, that did not mean she would marry him. Not necessarily. There was always that other Ben Pertin, Ben Line, waiting hot-handed on the orbiter for them to arrive. Ben Yale knew with what impatience his double would be waiting, and what his intentions would be; Ben Yale could not mistake them, because he shared them wholly and exactly. Well, he thought, he had time. The survey vessel still had two days to go before it reached the orbiter. Of course, three days had gone by already -- days wasted, he complained to himself; but there had been no help for it, he had simply been physically unable to court Zara. But now -- now things would be different. He closed his eyes, dreaming of how they would come to the orbiter. By then he would be out of his bandages and rid of this pestilential Purchased Person nurse. He would take Zara to dinner -- no, he thought regretfully, scratch that; there was no place on the orbiter for anything like that. But he would take her aside. In the rec room. At a time when not many others would be around. S he would be grateful to him, he estimated complacently; had he not saved her life? Or at least helped to do so? And she would take the interest in him women always take in a hero. And he would tell her, gently and simply, about his love for her, for Zara Doy; and how they had been married, and how much they had loved each other... He scowled. The thought of Ben Line Pertin intruded. Ben Line would have almost the same advantages as himself -- bar, of course, the couple of days before they got there. But a couple of days might not be long enough to awaken her romantic interest. He would just have to make it be long enough. He nodded to himself, sealed up the end of the cocoon with a quick motion -- startling the Purchased Person who stood wide-eyed beside him -- and flipped on the stereo stage, putting through a call to Ben Line Pertin .on the orbiter. When he saw himself, or the Ben Line version of himself, he was startled. So haggard! So sad! For a moment he almost thought it was a replay of that terribly depressing version of himself from the unidentified ship; but then Ben Line spoke. "Oh, it's you," he muttered. "What do you want?" Ben Yale said carefully, "I think you know, Ben Line. It's about time we talked -- and talked seriously about Zara." Ben Line nodded lifelessly. "Yes. I suppose I should have expected you to call. I'm sorry, but -- well. What can I do? I'll just go on being lonely. I've had plenty of practice -- as you know." Startled, Ben Yale stared at his duplicate. Elation and a nagging, suspicious fear fought with each other in his mind; he struggled to keep his voice level, even as he was wondering what had made Ben Line give up so easily. "I admire you for taking it so well," he managed to say. "You do?" Ben Line looked surprised. Then, slowly, "Well, I kind of admire you, too. I mean, you actually look content, and God knows I can't; I don't feel it. Well, it's too bad we both had to be losers, but maybe it would be even harder if we weren't." And without another word he broke the connection. Losers? Ben Yale shook his swathed head, unbelievingly. Both of them losers? And then a sudden fear chilled him, and he opened the end of the cocoon once more and peered out at Zara -- At Zara and Org Rider, sitting quietly, whispering to each other, the boy's one hand caught in the girl's two, their shoulders touching. Losers. The days of passage had been enough in which to awaken her romantic interest after all. But not in him.  Verge Foray I Jopat, the Primgranese contingent holding the northern hemisphere T he awol Guardsmen had taken and those from the Lontastan over an E-type wildworld called Federation the southern. The They were men, bred for battle, but little Gweanvin was more than a man! tropics between served as their planet. She could see nothing of it, battleground. even with her amplisight blinked And a battle was in progress as on, from where she hesitated fifty Gweanvin Oster approached the thousand miles out. The barbs had evidently agreed to limit their combat zone to the ground and atmosphere -- perhaps because spaceflights were too deadly even for them. What Gweanvin could not see, however, she could hear quite distinctly over the comm implant in her left ear. Cryptic commands and responses were snapping like verbal firecrackers among the Primgranese forces, along with savage yells of glee and occasional grunts of dismay. She had no trouble recognizing the deep bark of Spart Dargow, general of the Primgranese barbs, as he bellowed his orders. Using her psionic comm tuner, Gweanvin scanned the band and found the frequency being used by the Lontastan forces. All she could get was a meaningless garble, since her unscrambler could not handle the Lontastan code. She listened only a moment before tuning back to General Dargow... Red-seven, red-seven, horseback dawn, horseback dawn!... Jato. blue-forty, jato, damn it!... Red-ten, red-ten, washout, washout!" As a frontliner herself, Gweanvin had worked with Guardsmen enough to be familiar with their command language. But she could make only limited sense out of what she was hearing. Dargow was using a couple of terms she had never heard before, such as "horseback dawn." And she wasn't sure such familiar commands as "jato'.' meant the same thing here on Jopat as back home. Here, after all, the language was being used in a situation that had never existed before -- a pitched battle between massed forces of Guardsmen. In the econo-w'ar, Guardsmen guarded. They defended their worlds, whether in the Primgranese Commonality or the Lontastan Federation, against entry by such enemy frontliners as spies, saboteurs and subverters. Occasionally a squad would vector out a few light-years to the assistance of a returning and hotly pursued frontliner, and a brief running battle would ensue. But never anything so insane as this combat on a wildworld. Gweanvin grimaced in disgust. What boneheads these genetic barbarians were! Very useful in keeping the econo-war honest, very competitive, very high-survival -- but boneheads! She went full inert and let her momentum carry her slowly downward, her velocity of perhaps ten thousand miles per hour relative to the planet. Except for being hungry after five days in space, she had no reason to hurry. Could be that it might be best to let the battle end before she tried to land. She had now located the scene of conflict as the late-afternoon zone, and she guessed hostilities would end by the time night fell if not before. A Lontastan voice, speaking uncoded, suddenly boomed at her: "Hev. you. at forty-seven thousand altitude! Identify yourself!" Gweanvin's zerburst pistol was in her right hand instantly and her detector implants out full. She had trouble spotting her challengers, with the mass of the planet behind them and they only a few thousand miles up. There appeared to be about twenty of them, hanging south of the battle area, probably as rear guards and observers. She tongued her toothmike and replied: "I'm Gweanvin Oster of the Commonality. Don't let me interrupt your stupid game. I'll wait here till it's over." "Like hell you will!" boomed the response. " You got no business up there! You're south of the equator! Haul it north, doxie, or we'll blow you north!" "Just try it, foghead!" she snarled back, and went on with a suggestion that the Lontastan go amuse himself in a manner both vulgar and physically impossible. T he twenty vague specks vanished abruptly. Gweanvin held her position a precise two-fifths of a second, then warped away on a minivector of some five thousand miles eastward. At that, she moved a trifle too soon to sucker the entire squad. Only six zerburst lances were fired, to terminate into flares of supersolar energy around the spot she had vacated. Gweanvin fired two quick shots of her own at the sourcepoints of two lances and vectored away quickly without waiting to see the results. " Gweanvin Osier, what the hell are you doing?" General Dargow's voice was blasting at her. He sounded angry and concerned. " Vector north, girl!" "Stay out of this, General Bonehead," she snapped, making another miniwarp when she found herself without a clear target. " You're breaking our rules!" he protested furiously. Her new breakout point put her close enough to one Lontastan for her to drill him cleanly through the belly. Her lance flared late, however, a hundred miles on the other side of him. Still, he would be one sick barb for a couple of weeks. "So what?" she snorted as she fired. "So we'll come help the Lonnies blast you, if you keep fooling around!" yelled Dargow. " You'll still be gas when the universe coalesces!" Her new minivector carried Gweanvin straight down, as close as she could warp toward the atmosphere without traumatizing herself. Here she had a few seconds respite from detection. "Send men you don't want!" she retorted warningly. As soon as she had the Lontastans above her well located, she miniwarped into their midst. This time she stayed long enough to get off three shots before making another quick drop out of normspace. She had an advantage in that she could shoot at any target she detected, whereas the Lontastans needed an extra split-second to make sure an unwarping figure was not one of their comrades. She grinned. Playing a lone hand had its good points. Dargow's voice was still yelling in her ear, threatening to send Primgranese fighters out to help the Lonnies blast her. But she made no response. Dargow was smart enough to know that mixing a squad of Grannies with the Lonnies would only add to the confusion already working for her, so his threat could be considered idle. She concentrated on her deadly game. A few seconds later she noted that Dargow's yells were no longer directed at her but at some Lontastan commander. "Pull your men back!" he was urging. " Ignore her! She's just an interloper from back home, not working with me!" T he general's new tack suddenly worked. The space around Gweanvin emptied as the Lonnie squad warped away. She blinked and looked around. Far below three bodies were tumbling planetward. Two other squadmen, evidently wounded and with damaged transport implants, were going down in controlled inert mode. That made a Lonnie casualty list of six, she figured, because she was sure she had flared one into vapor. Below, the barb battle had ended, too, evidently broken off short because of the distraction she had created. She could hear a bedlam of pull-back commands over her comm as she vectored northward and began descending toward Primgranese territory. "Gweanvin Oster, what the hell are you up to?" Dargow snarled. "Coming in for a landing," she replied nonchalantly. "Give me a location." "You know what I mean, " he stormed. "Yes, I know. I also know I'm not playing your damn-fool game so I don't have to abide by its silly rules. I wasn't bothering the Lonnies, until they came up and started shooting. Are you going to give me a location?" "No! I'm telling you to warp for home right now. " "Nuts to that. I've been in space five days and I'm starving. Welcome or not, I'm coming down to eat." "Okay, damn it! Somebody will meet you at forty-one north, four forty-five realtime solar. But tomorrow you head for home, girl. " "That's tomorrow's problem," she replied. II as she hit the fringe of Jopat's atr. mosphere her shieldscreen stiffened automatically, protecting her body from air friction. At the same time the screen bulged out to act as braking wings. A few minutes later her breathing went exterior. After five days with nothing to do, her nose sniffed the fresh smell of Jopat's air with appreciation. She holstered her gun as she approached the location the general had given her. There she detected only one barb waiting for her, hovering at five thousand feet. She swooped to a halt six feet in front of him and saw that it was Nathel Gromon. He grinned at her. "Well, well, Skinny Hips." He chuckled. "Come all this way because you can't live without me. Right?" "Meatheads aren't my type," she retorted. He chuckled some more. "And you're not old Spart Dargow's type, chicken. He's mad enough to skin you." "This conversation reminds me of how hungry I am, for some reason," she said. "Okay. Follow me down." The barb dropped groundward, leveled off sharply just above the treetops and headed westward. Gweanvin trailed him closely. "One thing puzzles me about you, Nathel," she said. "What's that?" "Most of you idiots came to Jopat because of econo-war back home was fizzling, and out here you and the Lonnies could have a little war of your own. That made a primitive kind of sense under the circumstances. There was nothing for genetic barbarians to do at home, and nobody seemed to know how to get the econo-war heated up again. I even dropped out myself for a couple of years..." "I remember." "But you stuck out the doldrums at home, Nathel. You didn't leave until three months ago. That was after our Bauble telepathic communicators had been developed to put the Commonality back on even terms with the Lontastans and their telepath, Monte. The econo-war was coming to life again. Guardsmen were needed -- especially for planets where Baubles were being installed. There was the prospect of plenty of action for you. And that was precisely when you pulled out. Why?" Nathel Gromon grimaced. "You said the dirty word. Bauble." "What does the Bauble have to do with it?" "It opened my eyes," he grunted. "It showed me how other people really think of us barbs." "How do they think?" "Oh... that we're stupid." "Hell, did you need telepathy to find that out?" She snorted. "I've called you stupid a hundred times! Did you think I was kidding?" Gromon frowned uncomfortably. "It's not the same thing. You and me mentacommed once, if you recall, after they got the Bauble on Prima Gran." Gweanvin nodded. "How could I forget?" "Well, the way you thought about me was okay. You think kind of hard and snotty about everybody, did you know that? But all them pencil-pushers... it's like I'm some kind of animal, the way they look at it." "Aw-w-w," Gweanvin cooed mockingly. "Did the mean old pencil-pushers hurt Nathel's tender little feelings?" "Go to hell," the big man grunted. "It's just that who needs it! The econo-war is a pencilpusher's war. It fits them, not us. to one. It has to be their kind of fight. So I say, let them have it their way, and we'll stay on Jopat and have ours our way." Gweanvin shrugged. "Prima Gran sent twenty doctrinists out here a few weeks ago. They were supposed to try to reason with you lunkheads. If they couldn't talk you out of such fallacious attitudes as that, far be it from me to even try." After a moment, she added, "All those doctrinists suddenly went out-comm. What happened to them?" Gromon grinned. "Oh, we listened to them, till they started repeating themselves. That got too boring, so we field-stripped them and grounded them -- on a semi-tropic island. They're safe enough. The insects here don't like the taste of humans much, and we parlayed with the Lonnies to keep the fighting away from that island." G weanvin was not especially fond of doctrinists but she failed to share Gromon's amusement. Field-stripping a man was as ugly a crime as horse-thievery had been on an earlier frontier, and for the same reason. A man lived and moved by the life-support devices implanted in his body: power packets, shieldscreen generators, inertia nullifiers, propulsors, communicators and so on. To field-strip him -- to cut out those devices that could be removed by simple operations -- was the dirtiest of dirty tricks. In the econo-war not even captured frontliners were subjected to such treatment. But Gweanvin saw no point to making an issue of the transgression. She could guess that the barbs had made it to put everybody on notice that on Jopat the game was played by barb rules, and outsiders had better not try to interfere. "Getting back to the way pencilpushers think of barbs," she said, "that's something the doctrinists, being pencil-pushers themselves, could hardly explain to you. They take that attitude toward all frontliners -- toward me the same as toward you idiots. And it boils down to the fact that they just don't can't play, or even appreciate, a game played on that level." "They're narrow," growled Grokilled, all I got to do is find me a new one. And that ain't hard, because babies are being born every second." "Right," Gweanvin agreed. "You know, all through history the most atheistic societies, the ones that didn't believe in the survival of the ego-field, were the most "But that don't hold any more," objected the barb. "People don't have ignorance as an excuse now." "No, but they have other reaful -- and the whole point of the econo-war is to have hard competition that is essentially constructive. It can't be all one way, true. But the vast majority of participants, the pencil-pushers, have to view conflict as a motivator for non-destructive activities." Gromon grunted noncommittally. "Also," Gweanvin went on, "killing and being killed are both traumatic. They were basic to the anatomy of unsanity. Pysch-releasing removed that problem quite a few centuries ago, of course, but the old association with unsanity remembered." "Well, I can see all that," Gromon conceded, "but you ain't talking me into going back, girl. I like it here." "Hell," Gweanvin grunted, "if twenty glib doctrinists couldn't talk some sense through your thick skulls, I'm not going to try. Propagandizing not my line." Gromon turned his head toward her briefly to study her emopattern. "Old Dargow figures Prima Gran sent you out here to bring us home," he said. "Do you say different?" "No. That's what I'm here for." "Well, how can you do it, if you don't talk us into it?" he demanded. "You can't force us to go back." "I'll be damned if I know, Nathel," she replied, flashing annoyed frustration. "I'm flying blind on this stupid mission, and that's the disgusting truth." Gromon considered this information with surprise for several seconds before chuckling. "I guess we really got the high brass running in circles back at Prima Gran HQ," he said smugly. "Maybe so," murmured Gweanvin. She had puzzled over the question for hours during her flight to Jopat, and it still made no sense to her. This mission wasn't spying. It wasn't sabotage. And if it was subversion, it was not the kind she was accustomed to. So, being none of those three, the mission simply wasn't in her line of work. And in the past, even when engaged in work that was her line, Gweanvin had always gone out with detailed and specific orders -- with a plan to put into operation. But this time all she had been told by the Special Assignments Bureau was to go to Jopat and bring the Primgranese Guardsmen home. Gromon had been watching her emo as she glummed over her problem, and was radiating glee. "This is going to hand everybody here a hell of a big laugh," he chortled. "I can't wait to see old Dargow's face when I tell him! But slow down. We're on top of my camp." Gweanvin followed him as he eased down among the tall trees to come to ground in a widely dispersed and rustic-looking campsite. A well-endowed young woman with dark hair was watching them from beside a stone fireplace, on which a crude earthware pot of stew simmered. It sent out odors fit to drive Gweanvin mad. "Gweanvin, meet Valla," Gromon muttered, a touch of embarrassment showing. Gweanvin knew Gromon's wife, a barb named Samis, who had refused to come to Jopat with her husband. Guardsmen seldom had difficulty getting women, however, barb or otherwise. Gweanvin was not surprised to find a young beauty presiding over Gromon's cookfire. Valla's emo-pattern showed dislike and misgiving for a moment as she studied Gweanvin's slim, almost boyish figure. Then, evidently deciding that such a wispy though pretty girl was no real competition, she smiled. Half-regretfully, Gweanvin decided not to disabuse her on that score. On a wilderness world like Jopat it would be foolish to get on bad terms with a talented cook, while available men were more than plentiful. "That stew smells wonderful, Valla," she cooed. B efore Gweanvin had more than started eating, numerous barbs began dropping by that part of the camp. Some were old friends of hers desiring to renew acquaintanceship; most were strangers eager for a close look at the doll-faced little dish of dynamite whose skirmish with a whole squad of Lonnies had tizzied the top brass of both sides. Gromon, meanwhile, drifted away, presumably to report to General Dargow. Gweanvin enjoyed the evening -- being the center of attention was always fun. At least ten of the younger awol Guardsmen, either unattached to women or lightly attached, courted her unsuccessfully. Not that she didn't regard sex as fun. It was just that she would not want the barbs to think of her as a camp-follower and, with her thus classified to their satisfaction, dismiss her from their curiosity. To accomplish anything at all toward the completion of her mission, she felt, she would need to keep the barbs attentive -- and if possible, mystified. The cookfire was finally permitted to die down and the last of the visitors departed. Gormon had returned, but Valla had already discreetly lured him away to safety, evidently suspecting from the male attention Gweanvin was getting that she had underestimated the Prima Gran girl as potential competition. Gweanvin chuckled to herself. Women were bigger idiots than barbs sometimes. That chick Valla, trying to own Nathel Gromon, who was certain to drift back to his wife sooner or later. If he didn't get vaporized first, of course. She yawned, went semi-inert, and kicked herself up into a secluded treetop. There she hooked a beltsnap around a limb as a tether, and relaxed. After a moment she activated her tightbeam comm, tongued her toothmike, and said softly: "GO to HQ SA-Forty. Smitwak?" "I'm here, Gweanvin, " came the response from distant Prima Gran. "Report. " "I'm on Jopat, in contact with our barbs," she said. "Nothing new here since the last time you heard from the doctrinists. They're alive, by the way -- field-stripped and isolated." There was a pause on the other end. Gweanvin giggled as she imagined the angry thoughts that must be passing through the Prima Gran Bauble. Smitwak spoke again. " Get us the precise location of the doctrinists, " he snapped. "We've got great original science fiction stories by together in one volume "Superior " -- Kirkus Reviews # enough loyal barbs to send out a heavily armed rescue party. " "Cool down, Smitty," she replied. "I can dicker the barbs into letting you rescue them without a fight. These knuckleheads wanted to show how ornery they could be if anybody tried to interfere with them. They've made their point, and I think that now they'll let the doctrinists go." "Okay, work on that. Meanwhile, the rescue team will be on its wav. Now, any progress with your mission?" "What the hell do you think?" she snarled. "I don't even know how to begin. Don't you have further instructions?" "No. Continue under your original orders, Gweanvin." "Those damned orders don't tell me a thing!" "Sorry. You're on the scene. Gweanvin, in a position to evaluate the situation more thoroughly than HQ can and devise a practical plan to pursue. Give yourself time to think it through... not too much time, however. The need for those experienced Guardsmen is getting urgent here . " "Take my time, but hurry, huh?" she grunted disdainfully. "Thanks a lot. I'll set your words to music and sing myself to sleep with them. Out." "Stay in touch, Gweanvin. Love and out." A light rain had started falling. For a few minutes Gweanvin listened to the drops bounce off her invisible shieldscreen. Then she went to sleep. Ill T he general wanted to see her the next morning. He was waiting outside when Gromon brought her to Battle Headquarters, the only solid building Gweanvin was to see on Jopat. Constructed of meltstone, it had feet-thick walls and roof that were obviously flareproof. Gromon and a few other staff officers stood around grinning as Spart Dargow glared disapproval at the slim shorts-and-haltered figure. Gweanvin glared back with cool disdain. Dargow was a sevenfooter, several inches taller than the barb average, a middle-aged man of perhaps sixty-five whose hair and beard were grayshot. "You look the same as when I last saw you, and that was a good seven years back," he growled. "When are you going to become a woman?" She made a gesture of indifference. She was well aware of the striking contrast between herself and the normal woman of thirtyfour E-years. But she had never found the contrast disturbing. "Who knows?" she said. "Maybe never, like some boneheads I know whose brains never develop." His reaction to the verbal jab was minimal. "I recall somebody describing you," he said, "as fifty-five pounds of brass and fifty-five pounds of viper venom. I see that hasn't changed, either." "Right. I still weigh one hundred and ten," she replied. Dargow's frown deepened, and his emo slowly shifted from disapproval to curiosity. Gweanvin knew what he was trying to do -- understand her well enough to categorize her, and thus discover how to deal with her. "I keep thinking," he finally muttered, "that you must be the victim of an incompetent psychrelease, but that doesn't hold up. And I never heard of a physical deficiency the docs can't handle. Just what the hell is it with you, girl?" Ask a polite question and get a polite answer, thought Gweanvin. "The physiologists tell me I'm a mutant, with a characteristic of late physical maturity." "Oh... any more like you around?" "I don't know of any yet." "And I guess you won't ever," he grumbled. "That's a damn-fool mutation if I ever heard of one. Late maturity gives you too many chances to get killed before you breed. Especially if you go around frontlining like a wild morimet or something! Now, we genetic barbarians breed early -- " "And often," Gweanvin inserted. "We're high-survival," he went on, "but unless you get your skinny rump home, and settle down behind a nice safe pencil till you're ready to have kids, your genetic line is going to be awful short." Gweanvin shrugged. "Crap," she sniffed. "Good sense," the general retorted angrily. "Where's the good sense of trying to perpetuate a strain so lowsurvival that it needs that kind of protecting?" she countered. "If I don't have enough survival abilities to do the things I want to do, and still stay alive to have babies some day, to hell with my genetic line." Dargow snorted. "You think you got those survival abilities?" "I think I'll be around to spit in your vapor, general." "Lots of luck!" he snapped. "Now, what's this about you trying to talk us into returning to the Commonality?" "I'm not. The doctrinists used every conceivable argument to try to get some reason through your thick skulls, and they failed. So I'm not trying to talk anybody into anything." "You are here to get us to go back, though." "Right." "And you don't know how you'll go about it?" "Right again." Dargow grunted an obscenity. "Maybe I ought to find that funny, but I don't like it a damned bit." Gweanvin's eyes widened. This was a favorable development she had not anticipated. Plainly, Dargow could not counter her play if he did not know her game. And he could not force her to tell it, because she did not know it herself. "I've changed my mind about making you leave Jopat this morning," he said after a pause. "The more convinced the pencil-pushers become that we're here to stay, despite any tricks they try to pull, the better for everybody. If I made you leave, they'd think you had us worried, unsure of ourselves. So stick around as long as you like -- but try to stay out from underfoot." "Thanks, general," she replied. "Since I'm at loose ends right now, as far as my mission is concerned, I may as well participate in this little game you and the Lonnie barbs are playing. I'm not much on teamwork, since I usually operate alone, but -- " "You want to fight the Lonnies?" gasped the general. "Why not?" she demanded. "They're the enemies of Prima Gran, aren't they? They would kill me if they could. Besides, I don't relish spending my time gossiping with your camp followers. And if I'm in the fight, maybe I can cut the number of you boneheads who get killed before I figure out how to make you come home. How about it?" "You're on! Gromon, Green-Ten has lost a couple of snipers lately. Take this recruit over to Green Camp and tell Dak Surants she's his new man." T wo days later Gweanvin was approaching her first battle station, on or nearly on Jopat's equator. The jungle was slightly less dense than a typical rain-forest because Jopat has fifteen percent less than typical E-world moisture. And as she flitted through the tree trunks and hanging vines on semiinert, Gweanvin passed through several flare-burned clearings in various stages of regrowth, evidence that there had been plenty of shooting in the area although it was not a favorite battle zone. A mile and a half short of her assigned spot, she dropped to the ground, went inert, and reported in. "Rocket to Axe." "Axe here, Rocket, " responded Dak Surants' voice. "Rocket in place," she reported. "Oke and out. " She had wondered if Surants would challenge her "in place" claim when she was obviously short of her assigned position. He had not, but probably he would raise hell about it later. But Gweanvin had worked under cover entirely too much to start taking damn-fool risks in the manner of the careless and rather lazy barbs. She had no intention of doing a semi-inert flit all the way to her post. Functioning transport implants, with their high power-drain, were too easily detected. She meant to walk the rest of the way with power packs at minimal output. And walk it she did, in less than thirty minutes, using no life-support other than a tight shieldscreen to ward off the brambles she shoved through and to provide necessary air-conditioning against the heat. On enemy detectors she would be little more noticeable than a large native animal stomping through the undergrowth. When she reached her assigned spot she climbed into the highest, sturdiest tree she could locate -- still moving under muscle-power alone -- and found a concealed perch. Then she settled down to wait for action. She drew her zerburst pistol and studied its settings thoughtfully. The gun was basically a laser projector, the characteristics of its lance and flare governed principally by the intensity of the beam. At lowest'intensity it produced a lance which never flared -- merely a bolt of monochromatic light. That bolt would punch through the hardest shieldscreen as if it were not there and drill deeply into whatever flesh, stone or metal it struck. But above a certain intensity threshold, so high that the lightenergy took on aspects of mass, relativistic effects came into play. The front end of the lance propagated at normal light-velocity for the medium through which it was traveling. Because its concentration was such as to make it behave like mass, however, it underwent spacetime contraction, this effect increasing in magnitude from the front end of the lance to the rear. The net result was that the rear portions of the lance propagated progressively faster than the speed of light. That caused the lance to telescope in upon itself until, at flarepoint, its length came so close to zero, and its raving energy so closely confined, as to constitute a time-space "singularity" -- an unsustainable state. So it flared, releasing nearly all the energy of the entire lance at one point and in one tiny fraction of a nanosecond. The higher the intensity of laser beam fired, the more quickly it would flare. Maximum practical miles -- a very weak flare -- and minimum was a mile and a quarter. At that short range the gunner ran a real risk of getting a bad case of sunburn from his own flare. All in all, the zerburst pistol was an excellent weapon for Guardsmen, operating in space but in the near vicinity of their planet. But for groundfighting or aerial combat? "Lousy," Gweanvin muttered to herself. She realized she could not argue with her weapon, even though she could think of three other types of handguns she had used in the past that would be preferable in her present situation. The point was that the zerburst gun was the weapon of the Guardsmen. It was their baby. And of course they would not consider using anything else in their private little war on Jopat. She turned the beam down to low, non-flaring intensity, with maximum-duration lance. She could change it back quickly if she spotted Lonnies stupid enough to be bunched so that a flare could catch several. Otherwise, she would rely on the accuracy of her aim to drill -- maybe slash -- any singletons she spotted. Jopat's sun climbed higher in the sky. And higher. It was overhead. It crept lower. And lower. A helluva lousy way to play a game, fumed Gweanvin. It dawned on her that there might not be any action at all in her sector that day. Or the following day. But she had agreed to play by the barbs' rules. That meant she did not desert her post, no matter how little action came her way. It was midafternoon before she heard Dak Surants snap: "Motor through Target, ho the fox!" That meant someone had spotted enemy elements approaching the line on which she was posted. Probably forward scouts on anti-sniper patrol, she guessed. Such deployment was a standard opening move, according to what she had been told. She killed her shieldscreen and gasped when the sullen heat of the jungle, no longer held at bay, hit her like a blow. But detectable power usage was now down to the barely perceptible trickle required for sense amplification and emomonitoring. Until she used her gun, an enemy would have to look at her to know she was there. Minutes later she detected a Lonnie advancing on a line that would take him through the trees a thousand yards to her left. The incautious speed of his advance indicated that he was not really expecting opposition here. Gweanvin guessed that, as she had hoped, Lonnie observers had pinpointed her at the spot a mile and a half north where she had made her last comm transmission and switched off her transport implants. The passing Lonnie seemed to be making for that spot. She let him go by. Less than a minute later three more Lonnies came into detection, well spread out, following the lead man. None would passwithin feet of her, so as to actually be visible through the curtains of foliage. But all would pass within reasonable range for detection-aiming. They arrived abreast of her. She blazed away with the zerburst gun, first to the left, where two of the barbs were passing, then to the right, her lances of light stoomstoowing through the air and vegetation in tight patterns that riddled the vague detection images of the enemy barbs. Without pause, she flicked into semi-inert mode just long enough to streak down from her perch. Before touching ground she had returned her comm to the frequency Lonnie patrols were using. She caught the garbled but identical reports made by two of the downed men. From the third came only silence. Conclusion: two wounded, one dead. She was running northward. Her perch would no longer be tenable, of course. For several seconds, vapor trails marking the passage of her zerburst lances would hang whitely in the air, pointing telltale fingers back to their source point for any aerial observer to see -- and as soon as the nearest wounded Lonnie could move himself to a safe distance, that tree would be the target for a Lonnie flare. And that lead Lonnie -- the one supposed to have drawn her fire -- was up ahead somewhere. She didn't like the idea of leaving him to her north while she was looking for action from the south. He just might try to sneak back on her... He did. Almost, but not quite, as cautious as she, he was coming through the concealing ground growth toward her, his transport implants off. But his shieldscreen was on, while Gweanvin was suffering unprotected the stings, scratches and heat of her jungle run. She halted when she detected him, aimed her gun, and stood puffing while she waited for him to emerge into visual contact. When he did... "Hi!" she chirped. He had an instant in which to view her grin before she lanced him through the brain. Immediately she activated her shieldscreen, and with only seconds to spare before the expected flare erupted back at her vigil tree. The airblast bounced her around for a moment. "Axe to Rocket, report. " Surants' voice demanded. She was up and flitting hurriedly toward the spot of the flare, taking advantage of the detectionjamming miasma of ionization from induced radioactivity that would hang over the spot for several seconds. She tongued her toothmike. "Two Lonnies killed, two wounded. Out." " You're drawing the crowd. Out. " replied Surants. Which meant that the ruckus she had stirred up was going to make her the focus of the coming battle. That was often the way the barb battles developed -- each side pouring forces into the scene of the hottest action. The Lonnies would be eager to blast the Granny sniper who had so quickly disposed of an entire antisniper patrol. She dived into the small crater now marking the site of the tree in which she had perched, and went full inert. The backwind had littered the ground with smoldering embers so she had to keep up her shieldscreen. Tumbling to the deepest, most sheltered position the hole offered, she halted in a crouch, peering up through the drifting smoke with zerburst gun held ready. She had switched it to flare intensity, range tentatively set at a mile and a half. Ten seconds, fifteen seconds... Lances appeared, three of them simultaneously, foreshortened because they were aimed close to her position. Gweanvin upped her gun's range to three miles and fired back at the source of one lance before glare and flying debris and hard gusts of superheated air made aiming impossible. Her crater was now the center of a pattern of four craters -- then of six, then of eight, as two of the aerial gunners fired again and again. Rocks and dust, tree trunks and splinters -- chunks of debris of all shapes and sizes -- were raining down on her. Impatiently she maintained her crouch, protected by the shieldscreen, and waited for the worst of the deluge to end so she could jump over to one of the newer and therefore safer holes. But when the stuff stopped falling, she was completely buried in it... a good fifteen feet deep! Her hole was now a mound slammed together by the pattern of surrounding blasts, and she was under it. She cursed. Not that she couldn't get out. That would be easy enough. But in so doing she would use so much power as to draw the fire of every Lonnie within range. She was effectively immobilized. And outside the battle was getting hot. She could detect it fuzzily through the junk piled on top of her. "Axe to Rocket!" came the concerned voice of Surants. "Oh, shut up," she said crossly, then hit him with a string of utterly blue vulgarities, making clear her total disdain for this simple-minded and primitively pointless little war game. "Glad you're in one' piece. Rocket. " he responded lamely. "Go take a barbed-wire enema, you anachronism. Out!" She settled down to wait out the battle, mindful that the wait might end any instant if a stray flare caught her mound, but not fretting about the possibility. IV I t was three hours after sunset before all was quiet above. From comm talk she had listened in on, Gweanvin gathered the Grannies were claiming an overwhelming victory, which was not surprising. Thanks to the rules under which they fought, the Lonnies and Grannies were usually so evenly matched in combat that any unanticipated success or failure could set a trend that would hold throughout a battle. And Gweanvin's victory at the very outset, from which she had emerged vitriolically alive though discomfited, was more than enough to carry the day. She was mildly pleased by this. As she had told General Dargow, a main reason she wanted to get into the war was to keep as many Primgranese Guardsmen as possible alive to return to duty in the ComLonnies before they could kill her Grannies, so be it. The annoying thing was that she still had not the slightest idea how to get those vac-skull Guardsmen to stop this stupidity and go home. Why bother keeping them alive just to waste themselves playing bangbang-you're-dead? She spent most of her hours of burial trying to think of a plan. She had been told to get a first-hand acquaintance with the Jopat situation, and formulate a scheme based on that direct knowledge. So she tried to formulate. The result was a big empty zero. The damned barbs were where they wanted to be, doing what they wanted to do. And they knew what their duties in the Commonality were like -- that their little game here was a war much more to their taste than the econo-war. And though she called them stupid, she knew they were not weak-minded. They knew what they liked -- that was for sure. And nobody was going to trick them into thinking they would like something else better when experience told them otherwise. So... what should she do? What could she do? Not a damned thing. She sighed finally and returned her attention to her surroundings. All was still above. The battle was over and the barbs had retired. Slowly she expanded her shieldscreen, employing it as an earthmover. The debris yielded stubbornly with creaks and scrapings as she poured power into the screen. The surface of the mound bulged up. Rocks and tree trunks rolled and toppled down its sides, and the bulge pushed up still higher. Finally an opening appeared at the top and Gweanvin, semi-inert, squirted herself through it, the hole collapsing back as she lifted above the dark treetops and streaked northward. When she reached the GreenTen camp she dropped quietly to the ground, hoping the barbs had left her some supper. More than food was waiting for her. Her arrival triggered a celebration, in the loud, tumultuous barb style, that lasted into the morning hours. She was hugged, kissed, fondled and fed until she nearly turned on her shieldscreen in self-defense. General Dargow came shortly before midnight to bestow the Best in Battle award for the day on her. After that brief interruption, the party resumed. And Gweanvin had to admit it was fun. But a similar shindig, following the next battle three night later. was too much of a repetition to be quite so enjoyable. The barbs of Green-Ten were even more delirious than before. They were carried away by the glory of their cute little snip of a sniper taking two Best in Battle awards in a row! The battle itself had not developed quite the same as the first. The Lonnies had sent no anti-sniper patrols forward in the Green-Ten sector, and when fighting had begun to develop elsewhere Gweanvin and the others along the line had been allowed to advance in search of the enemy. She found them, to their regret. The third time she saw action, the Lonnies hit the Green-Ten sector with a sudden massive assault; no preliminaries. Gweanvin had halfway anticipated that tactic, and with Surants' prior approval had never perched at all. She kept walking and crawling south throughout the long midday waiting period without benefit of lifesupport. When the Lonnies struck, she was far enough behind their front elements to bob up unexpectedly in their midst, where she had a lone-hand advantage similar to, though not as great as, that in her space encounter on the day of her arrival. She created confusion and havoc while vaporizing one Lonnie and lancing at least five more before she caught a lance through the right shoulder and had to stage a zig-zag-zogging retreat northward. Another Best in Battle award, and another celebration. S he was transferred to command of a twelve-man assault squad in Purple-Eighteen. Training a whole week for that new assignment, she missed two battles. Back in action with her shoulder totally healed, she demanded no less from her squad men than she did from herself. They did not opinion, and she let them know it. But they drew the crowd in four successive engagements, with resulting Granny victories. Then General Dargow called a staff meeting and ordered Gweanvin to be present. The assembled officers sat in a natural amphitheater near Battle Headquarters, studying the half-chagrined emopattern of the general as he stood up to face them. "I've had comm with General Brastig of the Lonnies," he announced. "He wants a parley, to consider rules revisions. I'm inclined to agree with him." "What the hell for, chief?" someone in the crowd called out. "Because the game's got onesided, that's what for!" This brought silence. Gweanvin could read the concern of the barbs around her. Maybe the econo-war was not their game, but the basic philosophy of it -- that competition is an end in itself and must never be allowed to decay by becoming uneven -- was something they understood. It was great to win battles, but winning a war was as unthinkable as losing one. "We got good rules!" a rumbling voice objected. "Them Lonnies oughta get theirselves a Gweanvin of their own, if they want the sides evened up." Gweanvin blinked. Damn! Was this business of changing the rules all on account of her? After a moment of thought, she realized it was. It had not occurred to her before that in a bloody fight gaged on each side, her own escapades, award-winning though they were, could make that much difference. Dargow was answering the nimbler: "I guess they would like to. But the Federation hasn't sent a Gweanvin out to try to bring them home -- if the Fed's got Gweanvin's equal, which I doubt. Now, what I want us to do is figure out some rules changes that will give the Lonnies a better break without hampering ourselves too much. That way we can go to the parley with -- " "Hold it, general!" yelled Gweanvin, leaping to her feet. He stared questioningly at her. "Leave your silly rules alone," she told him. "I've said all along that this is a little game you yaps are playing, and I see now I wasn't kidding! It's too damned little for me to fit in. You can count me out -- because I'm going home!" Bellows of protest roared from the officers. Gweanvin stood unswayed, her chin jutting with determination. And despite the yells, she could read a growing agreement in the crowd, and also in Dargow, that her departure would be the best answer -- better than tampering with the rules. Soon the protests died away. "What about your mission?" asked the general. She spat an obscenity. "I'll tell the desk-riders back home where to shove their mission." "Damn it, Gweanvin," Nathel Gromon spoke up. "I hate to see you get pushed out of the game." "Don't bawl about if," she told him. "This is a boring war you're having, and I've been playing just to kill time while I tried to formulate a plan. I've had a bellyful, thank you." She turned slowly to glance over the sobered faced. "So long, meatheads." She grinned at them. "Good shooting!" She went semi-inert and streaked up through the trees. For a moment she thought of going by her squad's camp to tell her men goodbye in person, but she decided to hell with it. She soared on up through the atmosphere and into the vacuum of space, her breathing going on internal mode. Once in clear vacuum, she set a vector for Prima Gran and went into warp. Only then did she contact headquarters. "GO to HQ SA-Forty." "Yes, Gweanvin. Smitwak here. " "Chalk up one flop to the cute little broad," she gritted. "It was a stinking mission to start with, and I'd like to get on memtacomm just once with the wise guys who dreamed it up!" "You can't, Gweanvin. They're off the Bauble network. Security, vou know. " Gweanvin grunted. Smitwak often took a remark literally when caught unawares. "Never mind," she sighed. "Just tell them I'm coming in, mission unaccomplished." "Okay. Win some, lose some. That's life, Gweanvin. " "Thanks for the platitudes," she snarled. "I'll quote you in my memoirs. Out." " Don't kick yourself all the way home." Smitwak said. "Frankly, vou kept working on this one longer than l expected you to. You have great perseverance. Out. " S mitwak's solicitude was unnecessary. Gweanvin had no intention of blaming herself for the failure of the mission. When the directors of the Special Assignments Bureau misfigured as badly as they had on this one, the fault did not lie with the operative in the field. The directors had flubbed, and she looked forward to telling them so. But now, with five days of warpflight ahead of her, she relaxed. Soon she was in the space traveler's semi-doze -- a hibernative state that could eat up the light-years with minimal awareness of time's passage. Every ten hours she would rouse long enough to swallow a food-concentrate pill and check on the progress of her journey. Then she would slide back into dormancy. "HQ SA-Forty to GO. " The call snapped her alert when she was three days out from Jopat. "Okay, Smitty, I'm awake. What is it?" "Bard Lustempo will tell you. Here he is. " Lustempo was one of the Bureau's directors. Gweanvin's lip curled. If that guy tried to give her a song and dance -- or send her back to Jopat... "Miss Oster, " came Lustempo's voice. "I wanted the pleasure of giving you the good news personally. Your mission was a success. The Guardsmen are returning. Dargow reported their departure from Jopat twelve minutes ago. Congratulations are in order. Miss Oster. " "But... but..." Gweanvin sputtered. "The mission flopped!" "By no means," the director assured her jovially. "It went essentially as we expected. " "But I never even figured out a plan," she protested. "If those lumpybrains are coming home, it's because they finally got as bored with their little game as I got in three weeks -- not because of any plot of mine!" "Precisely, Miss Os ter. And why do you suppose they got bored?" "You asked that question for the pleasure of answering it yourself," she told him evenly, "so go ahead." Lustempo chuckled. "I will. Our Guardsmen fought one battle following your departure and discovered the excitement you brought to their game was gone. Also, there was some business about changing the rules to accomodate your presence. That helped bring home the point to them -- a point they could to be shown. I refer, of course, to the limited scope and interest of their game... in short, to its littleness. " "It was too little for me," she said. " Correct . And despite the shortcomings of the econo-war from the viewpoint of the genetic barbarians, Miss Os ter, you convinced them by vour actions rather than by words that any competition in which you participated had to hold more excitement than a competition that excluded you. In short. Miss Os ter, they want to be in your war. " "Oh... then I wasn't expected to come up with a scheme at all," she replied thoughtfully. "That was just your way of getting me to hang around Jopat and -- and play their game for a while." "Yes. Some situations. Miss Os ter, are not really soluble by plot alone. This is a lesson that should be well learned by those who seek to direct the activities of others. No scheme we -- or you -- might have formulated could have overcome the stubborn determination of the Guardsmen and brought them to be resolved by allowing the persons involved to pursue their natural inclinations. Our formulation was thus one of selection of a person or persons to inject into the situation to bring about the desired resolution. Thus we saw to it you became involved in the Guardsmen's game -- and allowed events to take their course. " "Nice of you." " While you are not an overly modest person. Miss Oster," the director continued, "I wonder if you realize the powerfully catalytic effect you tend to. have in all matters in which you..." Gweanvin yawned. That was the way of desk-riders like Lustempo -- jabber-jabber-jabber! Well, maybe they needed to talk a lot as a substitute for action. Old Lustempo's praise of her, which was still droning on in her ear, was really patting himself and his Bureau colleagues on the back for being so clever in sending her to Jopat. Well... It had been pretty bright of them, at that. She yawned again, keyed herself to rouse and say "thank you" when Lustempo finally unwound, and dozed off.  advertisers to take advantage of the trio combination, we are now offering a discount price of # per word to run in the three issues that appear in a #-month period. Our regular price is now # a word per issue. Whatever your choice...it's a bargain. S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Change of Hobbit, #I Westwood, Los Angeles, California #. new magazine, features fiction by Zelazny, Bunch, Malzberg, etc., beautiful artwork, poetry, reviews and much more. Only I from P.O. Box #, Sandy Springs, S.C. #. Sci-Fi, Pulps. Lists #c. 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N Y. #  t year (S issuaa)-St# Q #yr (# issues) S# y # yrs, (# issues)# n Current iMiie-S# Cl #month l net (# issues) M I'tiar (srmor in (he #'s)-S# irooe. tM#S)-I (om war)-u American flevotirfion (trrs ## a Photon (ancient tect-es)-h Ptaase send ns# your tree brochure Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland. Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Remember Little Game from the last issue? This time G weanvin Oster faces far more deadly opposition -- from one of her own kind! Wherein it is proved that all the gold of ancient Ind is dross -- if what you want is not for sale! A love story In a world gone mad with violence Joe was quite powerless -- but there was something about him...  "In an attempt to prove that I do indeed write stories in a more optimistic vein, I now offer 'Act of Mercy,'...It's about a woman dying alone in a wrecked spacecraft. Uproarious stuff." -- from a letter by the author. Vance Garamond, fleeing the wrath of Elizabeth Lindstrom, de facto ruler of Earth and Terra Nova, has discovered a Hole in Space -- a Dyson Sphere -- the interior surface of which is larger than a species. "Dr. Asimov, is there hope for the future?" asked the fledgling young editor of GalaxyIf. " Why yes," the Good Doctor replied... First in a non-verbal series. "This Generation of Wonder, "Jerry's title for this month's science article, aptly sums up his reaction to this year's meeting of The American Association for the Advancement of Science. Letters from A.E. van Vogt and Alexei Panshin lishing Corporation, a subsidiary ot Universal Publishing A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Oltices: # East # Street, New Yortr, N Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road. London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson. 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Undoubtedly the greatest science fiction work on theme of a world wide flood  Cloth. #  Paper, # e Olaf Stapledon. A Mind-stretching First American Publication by one of the all-time science fiction greats.  Cloth . #  Pape... # Hyperion Press, Inc. # Riverside Avenue Westport, Conn. # Please send me the titles I have checked My total order is  . Plus # per title for postage and handling Sales tax (where applicable) Total check or money order enclosed   Please send complete descriptive catalog. Name Incredible Utopian adventure, published m #. by a farseeing master criminologist  Cloth, # Paper. # Address City State -- Zip To which does one owe primary loyalty; nation, species -- or self? I ## ayeal promton. I pre-I.sume." The voice was an assured feminine purr behind Gweanvin Oster. She twisted her head to look up at the smiling woman, then rose from her chair at the work console. "Yes, I'm Rayeal Promton," Gweanvin said, "and you must be Marvis Jans, girl security man." The woman nodded. "How did you identify me so quickly?" she asked. "Because I was expecting you. What's being done here on Narva, and more specifically here in Gordeen Consolidated Systems Lab, calls for the presence of the Federation's sharpest security agent. That's you. And you wouldn't come here and not take a look at your genetic sister. Of course, now that I've had a close look at you, I see that your nose is like mine... based on permanent bone instead of cartilage." "And just what is being done in this building, Rayeal?" Marvis Jans asked softly. Gweanvin laughed. "Is this a friendly visit or a security interview? Okay, so I've guessed a lot more about this project than my job requires me to know. Does that surprise you?" "No." Marvis smiled. "A mind like yours is wasted on circuit growth technology, Rayeal. You should be a frontliner like myself. It's far more challenging work." "I don't know," murmured Gweanvin. "I've thought about it, but sabotage, spying, counter-spying and other such derring-do strikes me as awfully masculine." "Humpf! I like that!" Gweanvin giggled. "No asperations on your femininity intended. Miss Jans. Maybe I'd be more zerburst pistol on my hip if my hips were as curvy as yours." She paused, giving the older woman's figure an admiring once-over. "Gosh, how gorgeous you are! I hope I'm that well-stacked when I grow up." "Thank you, dear." Marvis let her pleasure show. "You are twenty-seven standard years old, aren't you?" "Yes. And you're about thirtyfour." "Right. If you develop at the same rate I did you'll start budding very soon, Rayeal." "I've already started," Gweanvin grinned, "and not a minute too soon to suit me. I'm tired of looking like a boy." "I wish you were a boy," Marvis remarked wryly. "I'll bet you do." snickered Gweanvin. Then she asked more seriously, "Any clue of where one might be?" "A male of our species? No, not a clue." Gweanvin considered the undertones of that brusque reply. "That bugs you, doesn't it?" she asked. "When your urges become as strong as mine... She shrugged and turned away. "Isn't there any coffee in this joint?" "Sure. Over here." Gweanvin led the way to the spenser and drew steaming mugs for Marvis and herself. She motioned her visitor into a chair and seated herself nearby. "Why not talk about it?" she asked. "Your search for a male is no secret from me." "Aha! Spying on a Federation security agent, hah?" "Oh. don't be such a warrior!" snorted Gweanvin. "Of course I've been spying on you, and you've probably known it all the time! Or certain friends of mine have, but don't fret. They're security people, too. and haven't told me any deep Federation secrets. They've merely kept me informed on your malehunt." Marvis sipped her coffee. "I was kidding you. dear. Of course I know what you've been up to. I haven't tried to keep my hunt all that secret anyway -- because there may be a male somewhere as eager to find me as I am to find him. I wanted a bit of publicity." "But nobody turned up?" "Oh. a lot of guys turned up, but not one of us. Some looked like good bets but cases of delayed maturity are not unheard of among ordinary homo sapiens; that's all any of them turned out to be." She studied Gweanvin's face questioningly. "Just how much did your friends tell you about my search?" "Well, they told how you finagled a permit to go into the Federation's central personnel files and run a computer check for individuals with genetic charts that match your own. My name was the only one thrown out -- and you already knew about me, didn't you?" Marvis nodded. "Go on." "All right. Next you enlisted Monte's help. It assisted by working out a scheme to get one of our agents into the Commonality's personnel files to see what they had to offer." "Monte's a he. not an it," put in Marvis. "The feel is definitely that of a masculine mind, as anyone who has ever been on Orrbaune knows." "Which I haven't," said Gweanvin, "but we'll soon know the feel of Monte's mind here on Narva, won't we? If the project's a success, that is. Right?" Marvis gave her a cool smile. "If you expect a security agent to join you in loose talk about a secret project, dearie, think again. Get back to the subject." "Well, that's about all I know, except that you had no luck with the Commonality files. All that search produced was another female... somebody about my age named Gweanvin Oster." Marvis nodded slowly. When she said nothing, Gweanvin added, "I'd like to know more about that Oster wench." Marvis smirked. "Don't ask me, Rayeal, dear. Check with those spies of yours. If they can't tell you anything, tough." "Not that tough," Gweanvin replied equably. "If you find out Miss Oster has located a male -- and that's the only thing about her I'm really interested in -- I'll know soon enough. When you vanish into the Commonality." Marvis gave a little chuckle. "You think I'd be so unpatriotic as to defect for a man?" "Yep. And so would I." "Well... you could be right about that," murmured Marvis. "Actually, Rayeal, I don't mind telling you about Gweanvin Oster, but there's precious little to tell. She's a Commonality frontliner. We're unable to obtain data about her appearance, present activities, or whereabouts." "Then... she may have found a male!" breathed Gweanvin, all wide-eyed ingenuousness. "Unlikely. Our information is fairly solid on one point -- that she's on assignment, not off in the bushes." "Oh." F or a while Marvis gazed at Gweanvin without speaking. "You needn't peer at me like that," Gweanvin protested. "I'm not Gweanvin Oster. and I've got a long pedigree to prove it." "I almost wish you were," grumbled Marvis. "Why? Would you and the whole security bureaucracy enjoy looking like champion idiots?" "I'm referring to the odds," Marvis said. "Which odds?" "Those against three mutant females being born without a single matching male." She frowned. "Don't tell me that hasn't occurred to you. too." Actually, it had not, because Gweanvin knew there were only two females, not three. She realized she had made a slip with that "Which odds?" question...a rather subtle slip, but one that could nevertheless blow her cover sky-high... and just when her assignment was reaching the pay-off point. Had she shown dismay? No. Like Marvis, she had the ability to maintain a perfect poker-face at will. "Surely you understand the laws of probability better than that!" she exclaimed. "Or does security work dull the reasoning powers?" Marvis replied flatly: "I know the odds are eight to one against flipping a coin for three heads in a row. If there were no factors working against the conception of a male... if the odds were fifty-fifty in any given birth, then at least one of us three should be male." Gweanvin laughed. "Have you actually done any coin-flipping recently?" she asked. "Of course not! Why should I?" "Try it sometime. It should make you happier about those 'odds'. I tried it myself not long ago, and flipped a sequence of five tails, one head, another tail, three heads, two tails, two heads, a tail, and so on. What were the odds against my starting out with a sequence of five tails like that?" "Well... thirty-two to one. But a run like that is unusual." "Sure, but it happens! I made over a hundred tosses without getting another string of five. But I had three fours, and five runs of three. "The point is, Marvis, that probability works out to what we call 'the law of averages' only when we're dealing with a statistically significant number of events... the more the better. A gambler can actually have a lucky streak, you know. But he doesn't leave the game a winner unless he gets out at the right time. If he keeps playing long enough, the law of averages catches up with him. Don't depend on what you've read about probability, Marvis," she concluded with a grin. "Get a coin and start Hipping it. The results should prove therapeutic." Marvis thought about it for a moment. "You're right about mathematical probability. Rayeal," she said at last, "but the circumstances leaves the possibility open that something is repressing conceptions of males of our species." Gweanvin shrugged. "A possibility, sure. In which event, we're not the next evolutionary step for man, just three more old maids in the making. And if so, so what? I see no signs that man's about to cave in for lack of a new breed, anyway. But I don't really think that, Marvis. I think we're being balked out of motherhood, temporarily, by a streak of bad luck." "I hope you're right. #..." Marvis paused in the listening attitude that told Gweanvin someone was speaking to her via her communications-implant. "Right away, Thydan," she responded to the call, then looked up at Gweanvin. "I must run along, dear. Some people I'm supposed to join for lunch." "Oh. I'm sorry. We've got so much to talk about," said Gweanvin, rising. "I'll have some time later," Marvis assured her, walking toward the door. "I'll get in touch." Gweanvin followed her. "One thing I simply must ask you now. You've been mature, sexually, for some years, Marvis. Are you sure we can't procreate with an ordinary homo sap male?" Marvis paused on the balcony jutting into the building's westwing scramble area and turned. "I'm positive, dear. And that's not theoretical." She gave a slight smile. "Maybe I did not bother with coinflipping, but that I checked out with experiment. Many experiments, in fact. We're a new and different species, Rayeal. We can't cross-breed with the old." "I was afraid of that," nodded Gweanvin, soberly. "Sorry. See you later, dear." M arvis stepped off the platform and pummeted downward on semi-inert transport mode. Probably on her way to the tightly restricted basement test-chambers, Gweanvin guessed. She knew the project was due to reach its climax very soon, probably that very afternoon. The arrival of Marvis Jans made that almost certain... Across the scramble area from her balcony was the balcony and open door to Don Plackmon's office, with his desk so situated that he could sit looking out. When she glanced that way she found Don watching her. She waved, and he waved back. Don was supposed to be a circuitry growth technician... and he wasn't too bad at it... but she suspected he also had a security function. On a project like this one of every two people were probably involved in counterespionage. And how many were spy-saboteurs? None but her, she guessed. An operation such as this was too thoroughly guarded. First, it took the ability to lie to an emo-monitor without detection, which was something not one human in a thousand could do. Also it took a personal history that could be checked out by some of the most suspicious eyes in the Federation without revealing a flaw. That kind of cover took time, effort and money to build. Actually, it took a long-established family, one which had devoted itself for generations to the job of resembling loyal citizens of the Lontastan Federation, for Gweanvin Oster to be "born into" -- with a minimal and painstaking doctoring of public records -- as Rayeal Promton. And getting inside this kind of project required one more thing: a reason for being there. To work on something that would of necessity involve circuitry growth one became an expert circuit-grower. The more expert the better. And with her mental equipment, Gweanvin had not had too much trouble becoming tops in the field, so far as the Federation was concerned. The Primgranese Commonality had the real leadership there, and Gweanvin had the benefit of being coached for her assignment by some of those leaders. She knew more of circuitry growth than she was using on this project -- and she was using more than her Lontastan colleagues knew. Thus, she might actually wind up a net contributor to the Lontastan project if she were caught, or her assignment goofed in any way. She returned to her work console. It lighted as she sat down, revealing the bitbox diagram she had been studying when Marvis Jans interrupted her. In a sense, this was makework she was doing -- the examination of alternate possibilities tot" the Lontastan version of a Bauble. Just in case the Bauble her section had completed, and that was now resting well-guarded in one of the basement test chambers, failed to work. She knew it would work... and do other things the Lontastans would find far less desirable. This territory had been explored by Commonality scientists over a decade earlier, after the success of the first Bauble telepathic-communication systems led to a great deal of experimentation into the potentials of various Bauble-type constructs. Was anything happening in the test chamber yet? While continuing to gaze studiously at the console screen, she exteriorized from her body and -- as an ego-field -- dropped to the basement room. There she touched the Bauble gently, not really entering it. but establishing enough contact with it to use some of the special features its circuitry contained, features the Lontastans knew nothing about. She found the Bauble was unchanged. It was in contact only with the pedestal on which it sat, like a beachball-size pearl. Nor was any field, ego or electronic, impinging on it. Judging from the silence of the room, no human was in the test chamber where it waited. So Marvis Jans and the others who were to be on hand for the test probably actually were at lunch. Nothing would happen for at least an hour. And speaking of lunch... she had better start the afternoon with a full stomach herself. Her cover might be blown if her plans slipped just a little, in which event days might pass before her next solid meal. II S hf. walked out on her balcony, semi-inerted and soared across the scrambleway to Don Plackmon's office. He watched her approach, and stood up and stepped around his desk when she came in. He gave her a squeeze and a kiss to which she responded with casual pleasure. Don was nice -- and handsome as well. She pushed herself back from him after a moment and said. "I know I'm early for your invitation to lunch, Don, but I'm starving. Let's go now." "Sure, Rayeal," he agreed, nuzzling her. "You always give me an appetite." "For what?" He chuckled. "I'll settle for food right now. Look. Old Marchell wants to join us. and much as I'd prefer to be alone with you, it's not good form to say no to the boss. I'd better give him a call." "Okay," she nodded. Plackmon tongued his toothmike and commed briefly with Boll Marchell while Gweanvin considered the point that Marchell was not with the lunching group of bigwigs, which probably meant he would not be present at the upcoming test. Security wraps must be on very tight indeed to exclude one (and perhaps both) of the two major production chiefs, she mused. Plackmon reported, "Boll says for us to go on and he'll join us in a few minutes." "Good. Let's go." They left the office and soared up through the scramble area to the dining garden level, which they entered and found a table for three where Marchell would see them when he arrived. "I'm going to try something on the ancient Egyptian menu today," said Plackmon. "Go ahead. I'm in a steak and potatoes mood myself." He laughed. "You weren't kidding about being starved." They punched their orders, and Plackmon said, "Was that dish who came to see you who I think it was?" "How you ever get any work done with all your girl-watching. I'll never know," Gweanvin replied tartly. "Yep, that was my fellow mutant, Marvis Jans." "You're much prettier than she is," he murmured, leaning close. "She doesn't have your full lips." "Yeah, but she's got a lot of full other places I don't -- as you might just possibly have noticed." Plackmon laughed. "Give yourself time. Rayeal. You're beginning to bud very nicely." Their lunches arrived and they busied themselves with eating for a moment before he said. "I find it very hard to think of you as a mutant, you know. You don't look all that unusual. Neither does she. It's hard to imagine your genes being so different from mine." "Genetic tension," she replied around a mouthful of extremely rare steak. "Tension?" She nodded. "That's part of evolutionary theory which post-dates Darwin by several centuries, after geneticists began to find out how such things really work. You're the same species as Homo Neanderthaleitsis. who was chipping flint on Earth thirty thousand years ago. He was homo sapiens the same as you, but if you saw him you probably wouldn't be sure he was even human -- and he would be just as dubious about you. But still you could mate and produce off-spring. And knowing you, you probably would." "Only in a pinch, my dear," he chuckled. "The difference between you and Neanderthal Man can be summed up as genetic tension," she continued her explanation. "The species changes, adapts to new environmental demands and to somatic responses to our conscious ideas of what man should be. Changes in the genetic structure go with these adaptations, but they aren't the kind of basic changes that mark a difference of species... only the difference between individuals or races within a species. "But they do place something of a strain on the original pattern. This strain, genetic tension, gradually builds toward a point where no further departure from the original is possible without breaking the species pattern itself. Humanity reached that stage in late EarthOnly times, it seems. People have been pretty much the same ever since. "But in the meanwhile, we've changed our environment drastically. We have our life-support implants that enable us to live on almost any half-way habitable planet -- or go streaking through interstellar space stark naked, for that matter. We've found the psychrelease techniques with which to clean up ourselves, as ego-fields, and eliminate insanity. We've developed the econo-war as our major social institution, simply to make existence more of a competitive challenge than it would be otherwise. All of which adds up the fact that homo sapiens needs to change into something as different from present man as present man is from the Cro-Magnon. But he can't, because his genetic tension is already as tight as it can get. "So." she finished, "here we are, Marvis Jans and myself -- and Gweanvin Oster in the Commonality. We have some structural differences that set us apart from homo sapiens, such as nasal bridges of solid bone. Also we mature more slowly and probably live longer. But the really important difference is that genetically we're a new species, with zero genetic tension. Our offspring can adapt like mad for a long time to come. They 're the ones who'll really be different." Plackmon nodded slowly, and started to speak but at that moment Boll Marchell joined them. "Hope I'm interrupting something intimate," he remarked, favoring Gweanvin with his best dirty-oldnian leer. "Rayeal was just explaining why my love for her is tragic," Plackmon replied. "Sit down. Boll." Marchell sat, punched his selection on the menu. "Gene-crossed lovers, hah?" Gweanvin said, "I think Don's real throb is for a big-busted visitor I had this morning. His eyes bulged out into the scrambleway when he saw her." "Marvis Jans?" asked Marchell. "Yes. Have you met her?" "Just briefly." "What do you think of her?" "Well, if you and she are does I'd hate to tangle with the buck!" Marchell chuckled. "She's quite a doll, but hard nosec in more ways than one." "One step farther from the primordial fiat-faced apeman," said Gweanvin. "Do you really find her formidable?" "Damned right I do. And you. too. That's why I'd hate to tangle with a male of your species." G weanvin thought about it. puzzled momentarily. "Oh, you mean because men are more competitive, more combative than women," she hazarded. He nodded. "Yours would make a terrific econo-warrior -- if he bothered with the econo-war at all." Gweanvin considered the point with interest. She hadn't thought of the missing male from that standpoint before. What Marchell had said about the male role was certainly true for humanity and numerous other species. "What else is the male's job?" she asked. "Finding and courting a mate, of course," said Marchell. "Well, ours is certainly goofing on that." she replied. "Or biding his time perhaps. I get the impression Marvis Jans is trying to do both his job and her own as well. The typical female role is merely to make known her presence and readiness, by whatever means of communication is appropriate for the species. Miss Jans has done that. Now she's searching, and that's usually the male's prerogative." Gweanvin chuckled. "Then it's enough for Marvis or me to announce, 'Here I am. Come get me.' And then wait for Mr. Super-Econo Warrior to show up." "Probably. And just keep yourselves amused in the meantime, you with the project and such as poor Don here, Marvis with her frontlining and every homo sap who lays eyes on her." "Speaking of which, I have a hunch big things are about to happen on the project, now that Marvis has come to make sure our labs aren't spy-infested. Pay-off time may be here, gents." Plackmon grinned. "You still think our project is Monte-related?" "What else?" she shrugged. "We are on Narva, a nothing-planet except for being Orrbaune's nearest habitable neighbor -- a mere six light-years away from where Monte is, of necessity, permanently located. And our section has been building a..." "If you're going to give us one of your speculative commentaries on the nature of the project," Plackmon broke in. mashing a button on the table's control box, "let's keep it between the three of us." A baffle-screen snapped on surrounding the table, effectively curtaining the occupants and their words from others in the dining garden. Marchell laughed. "We don't need security agents with Don around," he said. "Yeah. I wonder sometimes if his interest in me is as ulterior as he pretends that it is," said Gweanvin. "I'm merely a conscientious little econo-warrior." Plackmon contended stoutly. "As you were about to say... "Well, our section has been building what we hope is a reasonable facsimile of the Primgranese Commonality's telepathic transceiver, the Bauble. We don't know -- or I don't -- what the other section's been doing. But my guess is that they're working on a communications link to tie Monte on Orrbaune in with the Bauble here on Narva. "Now, essentially, a Bauble is just a dead device," Gweanvin continued, with the eagerness of a bright child showing off its talent, "whereas Monte is a living being, not only capable of receiving and sending telepathic messages, but of originating thoughts of his own. This makes him far superior, and more useful, than a Bauble could ever be. But one shortcoming of both Monte and a Bauble is limited range. One can cover a single planetary system, and that's all. "What we really need to get ahead of the Primgranese is a Federation-wide telepathic comm system. something that can spread throughout our portion of the galaxy. Maybe it would be possible to link Baubles alone into that kind of network, but the Primgranese must be trying that, with no success that I know of. "Anyway, we have Monte, and would want him in our network. And if we have some linkage system to tie him in with a Bauble at interstellar distance, the logical place to locate the first test Bauble would be right here on Narva. Otherwise, this underpopulated ball of dirt would be about the lust place in the Federation to rate a Bauble." She paused, looking at Boll Marcheil, then asked, "Well, what do you think?" Marchell grinned. 'I think it would take one hell of a comm system to link Monte with the Bauble when they are six light-years apart." "Yes," she nodded, "that's what fascinates me. All our section has done is try to duplicate Primgranese work. But Hobard Dawnor's section... gosh, I'd give my eye teeth to know what they've got!" "You never had any eye teeth," said Plackmon. "Figure of speech," she replied absently. "Of course the actual spanning-signal could be an exceedingly broad-band version of standard subwarp communications. What intrigues me is the nature of the interface between Monte and the transmitter on Orrbaune, and between the receiver and the Bauble here on Narva. In other words, how is telepathy translated into transniittable signals, and how are those signals then converted back into telepathy? That's the real breakthrough involved in this project." "And you can't figure it out?" asked Marchell. "No. In fact. I bet Monte himself had to figure it out. Who else would know enough about telepathy?" She studied him closely. "You know if I'm right or not. Boll." she accused, although she knew he did not. "but you won't tell me." He chuckled. "That's econo-war for you. Rayeal. Never let your right hand know what your left is doing." "Suppose you are right, Rayeal," said Plackmon, wearing a serious frown, "don't you think such a project has some disturbing implications?" "I don't see why it should," she lied. "I would think it might bother my new friend Marvis Jans, though. If Monte's telepathic ability is extended over the whole Federation, that'll put all our internal security agents out of work, her included." "That's what I'm getting at," said Plackmon. "Every Federation citizen's mind will be subject to scrutiny. As matters now stand, those of us who prefer to keep some mental privacy have the option of staying away from Orrbaune. If your speculating is accurate, we're going to lose that option." "That doesn't sound much like the conscientious little econowarrior," Gweanvin kidded. "Actually, though. I'm a little hesitant about giving up mental privacy, too. But if everybody else does... and the people on Orrbaune don't seem bothered by it. They say Monte is a perfect gentleman and Very discreet. He doesn't spread around the thoughts that need to remain private. And since he's not human, it doesn't matter much if he knows a person's thoughts. He doesn't take advantage. And if you're worried about some kind of thought control, he steers totally clear of that." "Now r , but will he always?" Plackmon argued. Gweanvin shrugged. "What's 'always'?" Marchell put in, "The Primgranese gave up emotional privacy long ago. They use emo-monitor implants, and it doesn't seem to bother them. It merely improves communication." "We would have had emo-monitor implants of our own by now," said Gweanvin, "except that if this project is a success we won't need them -- so they're dragging their feet on getting them into production." "You sound so sure of everything you say," laughed Plackmon. "Is that because you're a woman, or is it a characteristic of the new breed?" "It's because we're having an argument," she replied. "If I'm right about the purpose of the project I don't want my triumph weakened by a lot of 'perhapses' and 'maybes'. And if I'm wrong you guys won't be polite enough to remember any 'maybes' anyway." Ill rrHE lunchtime conversation was X a mild disappointment to Gweanvin. She had hoped to learn something from Marchell about plans for the test, but obviously he knew no more and had guessed far less than she had. After the normal amount of dawdling about after lunch, she returned to her work console and pretended to be absorbed by her task while she exteriorized once more and returned to the test chambers and the Bauble. She found it still untouched but now there were sounds in the test chamber. Equipment was being brought in, she judged. "This has to be turned slightly to the left," she heard someone say. "That enough?" said another voice. "Yes. Good. Now roll it closer. It has to be in contact with the Bauble." "Okay... how's that?" Gweanvin felt the contact. Something was touching the Bauble over about thirty per cent of one side of its surface. Aha! This was it! The interface system that she had to probe. She shifted all her attention to that part of the Bauble surface, but found nothing but touch-pressure. The interface was inactive. "Hadn't we better switch it on and check for good contact?" "No. We turn nothing on until the test begins. Don't worry about Q#i , . antinB We could rave on for paragraphs about since Galaxy had the great good sense to serialize this book earlier in the year, we need wax enthusiastic for only a few lines. For those of you who may have missed the about an enormous starship set to travel through space for I ,# years In search of a habitable planet for Man to settle. The passengers aboard this colony ship are all plagued by strange and dreadful nightmares. Unless the ship's commander, John Devlin, can find a way to control this disastrous dreaming, his charges may all be driven mad. All In all, a superb hard-core novel in the grand tradition! One of the things we like to do each year Is gather Larry Niven's most recent short stories and articles from a variety of magazines and publish an impressive collection for Larry's fans around the world. This year's addition to the Niven Library of Imtion, deep space, black holes, artificial worlds and Louis Wu -- our old friend from the "known space" cycle. Once again Larry Niven proves he's a masterbullder of fantastic worlds. For example, Imagine a world in which the Invention of displacement booths step inside and teleport anywhere!! has produced one hell of a crime wave. If a man in, say, Hawaii can commit murder in, say, Chicago and be back In the time it would take him to make a phone call, he would have a seemingly perfect alibi. And the police would have a problem, as they do in "The Alibi Machine." In addition to lots of fiction, Larry has provided a particularly Interesting article for this collection. "Bigger Than Worlds" Is a marvelously detailed study of enormous artificial worlds, including the famed Dyson Sphere and Niven's own adaptation -- his inimitable Ringworld. Must reading!    Back in # Gene Roddenberry conscience fiction a chance on television, and Star Trek was launched. The world has not been the same since! Many books about ST have been published -- each one selling hundreds of thousands of copies to Log One (#c, lively adaptations of three exciting episodes from the new animated series. Alan Dean Foster, who is quickly becoming the world's best script adapter, captures all the spirit and excitement aboard the Enterprise. In "Beyond the Farthest Star" a monstrous alien takes over the Enterprise, threatening the Federation with total destruction. Then there is "Yesteryear," a charming story In which Mr. Spock must return to his Vulcan boyhood via a Time Gate to make a choice that will decide his fate. And finally in "One of Our Planets is Missing," the crew of the Enterprise rescues a small planet menaced by a mattereating cloud. These three adventures arc In the old Star Trek mold -- lots of action and sparkling Interaction among the members of the Enterprise's famous crew. Not to be missed; reserve your copy now!    The Dream Millennium, A Hole in Space and Star Trek Log One are at your bookstore or newsstand now. If, by chance, you can't find copies, send the price of the booksj plus # cents per order to Ballantine Cash Sales, PO Box #, Westminster Maryland #. And the books of your choice will be on their way to you in a flash. BB the contact. It's good, all right." Footsteps moved away from the j Bauble and the test chamber was silent once more. Gweanvin used the delay for one last review of her contingency plans. The Gordeen Consolidated building was not designed for the convenience of spy-saboteurs. Its outside walls were thick, tough, windowless. To leave in the normal manner meant going out on her balcony, semi-inerting, flying up through the scramble area to the roof exit seventy-one floors above, where one of the gates would check her identity and let her through. Minimum exit time: ten seconds... if she ran into no traffic jams, and  the gates had not been  alerted to detain her. Still, that would be the best way out if she had time to use it. If not... She opened a drawer of the console desk, considered its clutter of contents, took a light-pen out of it. She used the pen to streak a pair of trial vectors across the diagram on the console screen, and gazed studiously at the result. The drawer's contents were such as most anyone might accumulate over a period of a few years on a job. Some items, such as the lightpen, definitely belonged there. Others, such as a zercrown and a couple of sheets of slightly worn warprag, did not belong but were readily explainable, in case anyone asked. The warprags, for example. she had swiped from one of the shops -- which no one would mind -- with the intention of taking them home to see how they would work as abrasives on gold sculpture, which she made in her spare time. Also, most of the jumble of stuff in the drawer was as harmless and useless as it looked; anyone would have to take a very close look indeed to know that some of it was not. Unfortunately, she mused, suspicion would have been aroused had she added a charged implant power-unit to the accumulation -- and if things got really tight, she would doubtless need plenty of power in a hurry. She had an answer to that, of course, but it would have been better if... There was a murmur of voices and footsteps down in the test chamber. "If everyone will find seats," spoke an authoritative voice. "Thank you. Now, how are we on security, Marvis?" "We're snug. Thydan," the voice of Marvis Jans replied. "The Gordeen people have done a good job of keeping this project tightly wrapped." There as a murmur of appreciation, in which Gweanvin could make out Falor Dample's rumbled, "Thank you. Miss Jans." "This room could not possibly be bugged, then?" demanded a voice she did not recognize. "Not unless the Primgranese have developed an entirely novel technique," replied Marvis Jans with a touch of disdain, "which is most unlikely. And if they had, the likelihood of their both knowing of this project and getting an agent inside approaches zero."  "man she had called Thydan. "I have one specific question: what about Rayeal Promton?" "All clear there, and I might say Rayeal is drawing more security attention than she merits simply because she happens to match a particular Commonality operator in age and basic genetics. Admittedly, the question, 'Could Rayeal Promton be Gweanvin Oster?' is a tempting one to consider... and it has been -- but just because it is such an obvious one the Primgranese command would not have sent in the Oster woman on an assignment where..." "They could have counted on us discounting our suspicions," put in Thydan, "for that very reason." "Well... the important thing is that right now, she is forty-one floors above us working in her office and under observation from across the scrambleway." "I'd like to be sure she'll stay there," grumbled the man who had asked about bugs. "That can be arranged -- if you think it's necessary," said Marvis. "Good. Arrange it." Thydan said, "One point that bothers me about Miss Promton is that she has speculated accurately on the nature of this project and has discussed her speculations rather freely." "She's a very bright girl," Marvis broke in. "If I were in her position, I would probably have drawn the same conclusions. And she has been discreet in her indiscretion -- only with people such as her boss, and agents such as Don Plackmon and myself. Obviously she's playing give-the-security-boys-a-hard-time. We're used to stirring up a little resentment." "If I may put in a word," rumbled Falor Dample. "Miss Promton's contribution to the project has not been a small one. Without her, that Bauble we're looking at might still be only on the drawing-board. That doesn't strike me as something to expect from an enemy agent." "In any event," said Marvis, sounding impatient, "if the test which we might get around to after a while is a success, Monte can tell us very quickly if Rayeal Promton or anyone else on Narva is a Primgranese infiltrator." "Good point," replied Dample. "Why don't we get on with it?" "Very well," agreed Thydan. "Marvis, you'll alert Plackmon to keep Miss Promton confined?" "Taken care of." "Good. Mr. Dample, as chairman of Gordeen Consolidated, I believe the honor of pushing the  button is yours." And that, very suddenly, was it. The loss of her preferred escape route could not concern Gweanvin now. No tenseness over that or anything else. The task at hand required totally relaxed attention. She entered fully into the Bauble for the first time. It felt different  from Primgranese Baubles, partly because this one carried no idents of previous ego-field entrants, and partly because it was different on the physiochemical level. She felt an  instant of relief at finding no idents  there. If somebody around the lab f had broken the rule forbidding entry in the Bauble she would now be open to telepathic contact with that person, and he could have blown the whistle on her. Immediately she turned her at tention to the portion of the surface  touching the interface. Glowing bright traceries filled her mind. I Beau ti ful! But this was no time for L esthetic appreciation. What were ! the shapes of those traceries? What  made them? How did they func tion? And what did they remind her j of? Some natural structure... She allowed herself no awareness I of seconds passing. Taking time to I observe that this was takitjg too long would have made it take even longer. When Thydan spoke, his voice came dimly to her. and its content made no impression: "Readings indicate optimum operation. Now I'll comm Orrbaune to turn on their end." Were the traceries like the optical-synapse interface? The summation of thousands of retinal cell messages into a coherent visual scene?... No... Something else... Auditory! The complex interconnections of cilia nerves, involving feedbacks and resonances and a dozen other phenomena that enabled a listener to distinguish subtle variations in pitch and quality of sound. That was it!... In part, and not exactly. Gweanvin kept at it until the whole picture clarified. She knew the nature of the interface and could guess from that the parameters of the comm system behind it. She could break contact right now, sabotage the Bauble and head for home at the earliest opportunity. It would be easy enough to get a vacation after the test proved a "failure", and back in the Commonality she could write out detailed instructions on how to build a Bauble-to-Bauble comm system... A nd that system wouldn't work. That realization came almost intuitively from her grasp of the characteristics of the interface. It wouldn't work. Which wasn't the same as saying it couldn't work. It could. An ancient automobile with a defective starter could work, but wouldn't -- Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher don Eklund, his best to date, a "uchronian" novel about America as it might have been. (UQ#-#C) About time but with a different J. Bayley, the first time-spanning Empire. ( UQ#-#C ) For Ron Goulart's audience: the Chameleon Squad confronts a highly explosive youth rebellion on a planet of whacky wonder-workers. (UQ#-#c) Biggie, Jr. is a quality collection of sf involving the future of the arts... with a great cover by George Barr. (UY#-#) Cap Kennedy rips apart the barrier of this time-space to encounter a hostile homeland and Kern's ninth novel in our rapidly ! growing sf series. (UQ#-#c)  been translated into Swedish, I and is being translated into Jap! anese, Dutch and German! Find it with our new cover ; design. Please let us know if you can't I find our books: J #I A v. of the Americas New York, N.Y. # until someone gave it a push to start it. The same was true of this system. There was near-complete randomity of orientation of the tiny, fine-texture fields of the interface traceries. This would prove extremely resistant to any flow through the system, too resistant for a flow to move. But given the right kind of push, the fine-texture fields would align and resistance would vanish. What kind of push, though? And by what... or whom? Gweanvin could not even guess at the answer to the first of these questions. But the answer to the second was obvious. She could not pull out of the Bauble yet, she realized. A vital question was still unanswered. She had to stay... perhaps until it was too late to pull out at all... She stayed. But at the same time she started her body through a previously planned program of activities that could be carried out with minimal mental supervision. Her hands twisted off the top of the light-pen and her fingers deftly plucked out the instrument's control assembly and minipower unit. Next, the zercrown was brought out of the drawer, slid over the point of the light-pen, and taped in place. "Orrbaune's switching on immediately," Thydan reported. Gweanvin kept her attention spread over the interface glow, watching for any change. Now her fingers were wiring the device with strands of superconduct equipped with ready-weld tips. The two loose ends were then attached to insulated probeneedles. The interface was beginning to alter in an area near its center. Something was happening there. Gweanvin moved in tightly on this area. Yes, it really was something like a push coming from the other side... Her hands had left the finished device on the console and had picked up the two sheets of warprag. Her body had stood up and was walking toward the door... and in a way the push resembled a magnetic field. It was swinging the fine-texture fields into consistent orientation. But how was it doing this, specifically?... Her fingers separated the two sheets of warprag, and her hands slapped the exposed active surfaces into position, overlapping the edge of the door and the door frame. Absently, like a well-rehearsed piano player with a wandering mind, she watched her hands press firmly against the sheets, imbedding their grip. Only a powerful smashing could force the door from the balcony side while those warprags remained in place... Ah! She was getting it! Monte was coming through! And for the instant he was too occupied opening up the interface to notice what lay beyond. Gweanvin watched him work. She saw how it was done... Her body had returned to the console. Her hands picked up the probe-needle contacts of her device and plunged them through the flesh under her ribs on her right side, seeking and finding the terminals of her main power pack imbedded there... Anger! A flash of anger now and she would have the job finished. But emotions, while controllable, work more slowly than clean thought. The split-second required to work up a burst of rage was too long. Monte spotted her. Damn! Her rage flooded out in a quick spurt and was gone. And so. of course, was contact with Monte... tjwas yelling. "It's Gweanyin Oster! I caught a thought from Monte! The Bauble's dark!" Gweanvin grinned as she pointed her device at the wall of her office opposite the door and activated it. A thin, superhot laser-beam flashed from the zercrown. cutting a curving slash in the wall as the device kicked in her hand. For an instant her shield screen turned on automatically to protect her from the intense backflare. She had pulled out of the ruined Bauble, but was keeping a light contact with its sound-sensitive surface segments which, not being destructible by emotional overload, were still functioning. "I'm going aier her!" came a grim bark from Marvis, as Gweanvin re-aimed and made another curving cut through the wall. The curves came together at two points, and a two-foot-wide slice of metalmasc teetered for an instant and fell outward. Gweanvin had semi-inerted and slipped through the opening long before the chunk of wall reached the ground. She streaked upward from Narva as fast as atmospheric resistance against her shield screen would permit. "Alert the Guard!" came Thydan's voice. "She's out of the building and getting away!" "What happened to the Bauble?" came the rumble of Falor Dample. "How should I know?" Thydan returned bitterly. "Among those major contributions of hers you were just praising was a twist she didn't bother to tell you about! I'm trying to get a report relayed from Monte. Maybe he knows what happened." Gweanvin allowed herself si seconds of unswerving upward flight before taking evasive action. She figured on that much leeway before the Guardsmen could mount an effective response to the alert at upper-atmospheric levels. Out in open space, which she was fast approaching, they could react quicker, but so could she. She kept her laser device ready for use. It was clumsily small as a hand weapon and wasteful of energy, so low in resistance as to act as a virtual short-circuit across her power implant. It was no match for a zerburst pistol, though it worked on the same principle. She hoped she could get away without using it again. "Monte says she knows how to work the interface!" cameThydan's alarmed voice. "And she may be listening to us! Let's get out of this room!" IV G weanvin pulled away from the Bauble completely. It wasn't a good idea to enter warpflight with the ego-field lagging behind the body, anyway. She tongued her toothmike to her "father's" frequency. "Hey, Pops!" "Hello. Rayeal," the reply murmured in her left ear. "Cover's blown. Pops. Out." "Thanks, Gweanny. Out." That warning would give her "family" members a chance to scram before Lontastan counterespionage teams closed in on them. But she was the one the heat was really on. That report relayed from Monte to Thydan would make it plain that she had information she must not be allowed to carry to the Primgranese Commonality. The Guards had probably been ordered to shoot on sight... One of them did. Just as she was passing the forty-mile altitude level the Hare from his zerburst pistol sparked less than three miles to her left. She caught a quick glimpse of the ionized trail of the beam leading to the flare. It hadn't missed her by more than fifty feet and wouldn't have missed at all if she hadn't made an evasive zag less than a second earlier. She risked a mini-warp -- dangerous in the atmospheric fringe -- and came out of it seventy miles higher, with body and ego-field still together. Her detector immediately revealed half a dozen guardsmen within range. She had warped into the middle of a platoon! She quickly warped again, and came out to see a spectacular display of flares blossom around the spot she had just vacated. Nobody was close enough this time to get a good shot at her, but her detector showed the sky was now full of Guardsmen, above, below, and on all sides. This was a time to scoot, she decided, not to stand and fight. She would have to risk going into warp and staying there. She did so... and got away with it. No bodyego-field dissociation that came when one warped through a too-dense wisp of gas or dust, wisps that were always drifting unpredictably about the near vicinity of stars. Now the sun of Narva was shrinking to a pin-point and she was safely through the gauntlet of Guardsmen -- thanks to the fact that the alarm had not gone out until she had escaped from theGordeen building and was on her way. Two seconds later and she would not have made it. She would be pursued, of course, and Guardsmen from other Lontastan worlds would be swarming out to try to intercept her. But interstellar space was vast, and she possessed less mass than any of the Guardsmen -- neobarbs were all big men -- and therefore had a higher sustainable warp velocity. She'd be hard to either catch or head off. Nevertheless, she knew she could not make it to the Commonality without help. The necessity of cutting her way out of the Gordeen building had made that impossible. Those two blasts from her makeshift laser knife, brief though they were, had drained an awesome amount of power from her pack. Those packs weren't designed to be stingy; often a person in an emergency needed plenty of juice in a hurry, and a pack would supply current at the rate needed... while it had current to supply. But on a short-circuit discharge, and especially through superconductwiring, an implant pack could be drained completely in ten seconds or less. Gweanvin's pack had not been fully charged to begin with, and had been on short-circuit for a good three seconds. It was, she guessed, at something less than half capacity now. And the Commonality was a long way off. Narva was located at the far side of the Lontastan Federation, and that put her home ground some twenty thousand light-years away, with nothing but unfriendly territory in between. Perhaps she had power for two-thirds of that distance. There was, however, no point in heading in the other direction, into the unsettled region of the galaxy behind the Lontastan worlds. That region had been explored for quite some distance. There were planets on which she could play a female Robinson Crusoe for the rest of her life, but that was all. There was just one destination within reach that made any sense -- the Halstaynian Independency. The Independency lay roughly between but somewhat to one side of both the Federation and the Commonality, and bulged on the Federation side in the general direction of Orrbaune. It was not a participant in the econo-war, having been settled by people who viewed competitiveness with distaste, as a childish and demeaning habit man should have given up long ago. Gweanvin shared the majority view of Halstaynians -- that they were somewhat less than half alive and getting moreso every year. But when somebody from the Commonality or Federation went intodhe Independency, which was not often, the Halstaynians were friendly enough -- if in an absurdly condescending manner. And from there she certainly shouldn't have any trouble getting her pack recharged and returning to the Commonality. The important point was that she had the power to reach the Independency. After a moment of consideration, she threw away her laser device. It was her only excuse for a weapon, but it was also mass, and if she made it out of Lontastan territory, she would do so by running, not by fighting. Next she considered her clothing, but her flimsy blouse and shorts really had too little mass to make discarding them worthwhile. The same was true of her sandals. As for her belt and pouch, they had mass but could not be parted with. She had to have something in which to keep her food pills, if nothing else. However, she went through the pouch and threw away everything in it she could possibly do without. After that she broke out of warp momentarily, got herself coordinated on a star beyond which was an entry through the gas cloud banked on this side of the Independency, and returned to warpflight on the new course. Then there was nothing to do but relax into dormancy from pill-time to pill-time, for the several standard days the journey would take. And despite the all-out search the Lontastans were making, this routine went undisturbed. T he gas clouds that lay between the Halstayne Independency and Earth accounted for the Independency's existence. As humanity began spreading out among the stars, forming the colonial societies that eventually became the Primgranese Commonality and the Lontastan Federation, the explorers moved along the edges of the clouds without attempting to penetrate. Much later, when gas-free passageways through the clouds were found and charted, neither the Commonality nor the Federation saw much potential in the hard-to-reach handful of habitable worlds the clouds concealed. These worlds went more or less by default to the individuals and small groups who, for various reasons, wanted no part in the econowar. Gweanvin had never felt much affinity any such drop-out philosophy; in fact, she had never visited the Independency before. But it was part of her job to know her way about the inhabited portion of the galaxy. She had learned the charts of the passageways through the clouds, and the locations and descriptions of the habitable worlds within. Also, she knew enough of the down-hill history of the Independency to have some idea of what to expect on those worlds. No more than a century ago, when fair numbers of people were still moving ino the Independency, it was a fairly successful society. But of late the movement had been in the other direction. The more capable Halstaynians were realizing that a society that forbade the competitive spirit was. in essence, a denial of the basic nature of man... of life in general, for that matter. And being unrealistic, that kind of society had to either change or fall. The Halstaynians who could see this flaw for what it was usually found their personal solutions to it by immigrating to the Federation or Commonality, rather than staying home and pushing revolutionary reform against an opposition composed principally of a formidable mass of public inertia. As a result, the Independency as a whole had rusticated. It no longer even tried to keep up technologically with the econo-warring societies. Whattechnology it had once had was falling into disuse. The population was dwindling. All of which was all right with Gweanvin. If that was the way the Halstaynians wanted it, she mused, that was the way they could have it. All she asked was a simple recharge of her power pack -- and surely that much technology was still left. She was more than halfway through the series of short, zigzagging warps required to follow the charted passage through the cloud when she felt a warning twinge in her side. The power pack was advising her it was ninety per cent drained. She grunted. But at least she knew now precisely how much power she had left, and how stingy in its use she would have to be. No corner-cutting was advisable going through the passage, however. When she came into view of the Halstaynian suns she calculated she had enough power left for one sizeable or two short jumps. Okay, which planet was it to be? Bernswa was reportedly the most advanced Halstaynian world but unless she had greatly underestimated her remaining power it was out of reach. And Felis, with a so-so reputation, was barely within range. The only world that could be called close was Arbora, which was so far gone that the Halstaynians had blithely designated it a wilderness preserve nearly fifty years ago. Gweanvin ate a food pill while she pondered the matter. This was a crucial decision. If she made the wrong choice, she could wind up stranded in space... and the Halstaynians might not have a functioning space-rescue service these days. Or, if she went to Arbora, she could be stranded there, too, if there were no functioning power supplies. She needed more information before deciding. She tuned her comm receiver to the openbroadcast channels and drifted in space for several hours while she listened attentively for a few useful facts. There was little to hear except music, most of it ancient, interspersed with trivial gab. But there were a couple of mentions of persons on Arbora, which assured her that world wasn't totally deserted. In any event, she decided it almost had to be Arbora, because of the possibility that she was overestimating her remaining power. That could be the only world actually within reach. She was making the painstaking calculations needed for a precise warp when a bogie flicked into existence, a small glowing spot on the detection field surrounding her head. Whoever it was couldn't have been more than a thousand miles away, she saw, suggesting that it was someone who had followed her through the cloud. A Lontastan agent on her tail? Very likely, indeed. Gweanvin had gone full inert while listening to her comm, to save a trickle of power. Thus, she would not be as visible to the bogie as the bogie was to her. In fact, she might easily be mistaken for a chunk of space debris, so long as she remained inert. She played possum and watched. A couple of minutes passed, and the bogie flicked out, the person having warped off. But others might be following, so she continued to watch. Nobody else appeared, which was a bit puzzling. Was that bogie a single Lontastan agent, playing a lone hand on a hunch? Well, if so, Gweanvin herself had a hunch who the agent would be. She had left clues enough behind to give somebody as sharp as Marvis Jans a clear hint of what might have happened. Marvis would know that she hadn't blasted her way out of the Gordeen building with a zerburst pistol, for the obvious reason that as a security measure hardly any such weapons were allowed inside the building. Marvis would have accounted for those weapons quickly. Then she would have checked (if she hadn't already) to be sure the building's energy outlets were fused against short-circuit overdraws, also as a security measure. And Marvis would therefore conclude that the likelihood was very good that she had used her power pack implant, for lack of any other sufficient source, to blast through the wall. A little more checking would reveal how long it had been since Gweanvin had gotten a recharge. Marvis could then guess she would have to head for the Independency as the only non-enemy territory within reach. But it would be a guess, not a sure thing. And it would be like Marvis -- or like herself if their positions were reversed -- to play the guess on her own. Would Marvis investigate Arbora first? Perhaps. The agent's movements were not predictable. She could see no percentage in delaying planetfall any longer. The sooner she was on the surface of a world, the sooner she could make herselt' impossible to find. S he warped for Arbora... and missed. Only by some two hundred thousand miles, but that was enough to require a mini-warp approach jump. This brought her within five hundred miles of the surface. There she went full inert and let Arbora's gravity bring her down, knowing she would be less j noticeable that way than in a semiinert approach, and also would use ! less energy. When she hit air her shield  screen reacted automatically, protecting her from friction and heat, and spreading into a wing conformation to slow her fall and give her steerance. Not that it seemed to matter where she landed... all was field and forest below, with no indications of where the people might be. She angled toward a small grassy valley as she neared the surface, waiting until she was down to one hundred feet before trying to go semi-inert to soften the landing. Nothing happened when she did. She came down with a jarring thump, slowed only by groundeffect compression of the air between her shield and the surface at the last instant. She rolled over and sat up in the long grass. Her shield was off, and her respiration had gone on normal exterior mode. An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Discover why Richard E. Gels has won # Hugo Awards and been Nominated # times!  Blare of Trumpets Columnist: John Brunner Read issue ## and see Robert A. Heinlein dissected mercilessly, psychologically and culturally, by Alexei and Cory Panshin in their # words of "Reading Heinlein Subjectively." Read issue ## and return to the dear, lively days of the pulps with Sam Merwin, Jr. (former editor of "Written to a Pulp!" Enjoy Gels editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysatnple I yearS#twoyrs. # P. #. Box # Portland, OR #I Once more she tried to semiinert. without result. Which could mean only that her power pack was totally drained. Just to be sure, she tried the shield screen again, and it did not respond. She was definitely on Arbora until she found a recharger, and she would do her searching for it on leg-power alone. But more urgent was the subject of food. The instant her breathing had gone external, bringing her the varied aromas of field and forest, she had become ravenous. She had been on the food-concentrate pills and stomach balloon for an uncomfortably long flight, and needed something solid. She stood up and walked through the tall weeds to the small brook that gurgled through the valley, her eyes searching for anything edible. Arbora had. she recalled, a seeded Earth ecology -- which obviously had turned out better than most other Halstaynian experiments. She recognized a number of briars and bushes that produced edible fruit in season, but the coolness of the air and the yellowish hues of the notdistant eaves of the forest told her this was not the season. It was autumn in this region of Arbora. At the brook she knelt and drank, and splashed her face with the clear sweet water. Standing, she considered following the brook downstream, but the thick growth of brambles and weeds would make difficult walking. Instead, she headed uphill toward the nearest trees. There her luck improved. Some of the trees were hickories, the ground beneath them liberally sprinkled with small nuts. She spent two hours smashing their tough hulls between two stones and picking out and eating their tiny but rich kernels. Then she moved on to a rocky bald on top of the hill. It was late afternoon by now and she scanned the horizon in all directions, searching for a wisp of smoke or any other sign of human presence. "Hev!" she yelled at the top of her voice. "Anybody home?" The startled birds in her vicinity obligingly ceased their chirping while she listened for a reply. Nothing. She turned around and yelled again with the same lack of results. So... start walking -- or try to build a fire and some kind of shelter for the night. The low position of the sun made her choose the latter. Try to build a fire...? The quickest way was to strike a spark between rock and metal into easily-lit tinder, but she had thrown away everything metallic when she cleaned out her pouch. She tried hitting rock on rock instead, but the stone thereabouts was wrong for the job. It crumbled instead of sparking. So... she would rub two sticks together, making a groove in one with the end of the other. She tried that for a vigorous forty minutes and was surprised when the groove finally began smoking. She dumped the spark into a handful of cedarbark fiber she had gathered and fanned it into flame. A few minutes later she had a roaring fire going. For a while she sat beside her fire, resting her arms and rubbing the fatigue out of them as twilight deepened. Then she rose and began searching the nearby trees for pine and cedar boughtips to break off for bedding. That would be better than a mound of dry leaves, which were certain to be insect-infested. V T EY ! Was that y u yelling a H. while back?" a man's voice called out of the gloom. Gweanvin turned, trying to see him. "Yeah... I didn't hear you answer." "I was stalking a deer at the time. Couldn't make noise," the man explained. His form moved closer to the fire, and she saw he was carrying something large over a shoulder which he heaved to the ground a moment later. "I finally got within bowshot and brought her down. Then I started looking for you, and saw your fire." He turned to look at her, and she could see his face dimly in the flickering light. He was cleanshaven, which she had not expected from a buckskin-clad man of the wilderness, and appeared to be in his thirties. "Looks like you've strayed a long way from home, young lady," he said. "You from Bernswa?" "Farther away than that. The Commonality," she replied. "My power pack's exhausted. I had to land here to get a recharge." "A recharge on Arbora?" he laughed. "Well... probably you can, at that. There ought to be a few rechargcrs scattered about. I don't know for sure, though." "You don't know?" demanded Gweanvin. "Where do vow go for a recharge?" He chuckled. "The only thing I recharge is my stomach. And I'm about ready to do that right now, if you'll let that fire die down to a bed of coals fit to cook over. You hungry?" "I'm starving." "More than plenty for both of us." He slid the large backpack off his shoulders and busied himself w ith knife and deer carcass. "Then you don't have a life-support system?" she asked. "Just Arbora. No implants. I guess that sounds primitive to you, doesn't it?" "It sounds restrictive," she said diplomatically, not wanting to offend the source of her supper. "Doesn't anyone on Arbora use implants?" "A few do. That's why I say you might be able to get a recharge. There's a settlement called High Pines about five days hiking west of here, and about eight days to the southeast is Lopat. You could almost call Lopat a town, I suppose." "What's in between?" He shrugged and motioned vaguely at the surrounding woods. "Just this. Good hunting country. And not many hunters. I don't average running into somebody three times a year out here." Gweanvin considered this information. At last she said, "Then I'd better start walking for High Pines in the morning, if you'll tell me the way." "Sure." he agreed. "Or maybe you should head for Lopat. It's a longer trip, but... well, I can't say for sure which place is more likely to have a recharger, but I'd guess Lopat is." There was a silence. Gweanvin was waiting for the man to offer some assistance in her search, perhaps hiking to Lopat while she went to High Pines. But he made no offer. Perhaps the primitive life deadened the chivalrous inclinations... or perhaps he needed to know her better to exert himself in her behalf... "My name is Gweanvin. Gweanny. Gweanvin Oster." "Glad to meet you, Gweanny. I'm Holm Ocanon." "There are a lot of Ocanons in the Commonality," she said. "That's nice," he said. Which was a conversation-stopper if ever she had heard one. W hen supper was ready they sat by the fire eating the broiled meat strips, roasted roots too fibrous to be potatoes but with a pleasant nutty flavor, and some kind of raw greenery Holm had had in his pack. Also he had brewed a bitter tea that was invigorating, and might have actually been tasty with a little sugar. "I have a blanket you can wrap yourself in," he said. "As near naked as you are, you'll sleep mighty cold without it." "Thanks. It seems strange to need a blanket on a comfortable E-type planet, when ordinarily I'm perfectly comfortable just like this in interstellar space. It's easy to take life-support for granted." "I imagine so," he mused. "It's easy to take living conditions of whatever kind for granted. And some conditions are less dependable, less stable, than others." "Yours seem stable enough, but awfully strenuous," she said. "Wouldn't life in or near one of the settlements be easier?" "Yes, and wouldn't life in the Commonality be easier without the econo-war?" he returned. "Too much easier -- as we found out a few decades ago when the war got too one-sided and almost ended." "Yes, that was after the Lontastans found the non-human telepath I they call Monte, and brought him  in on their side," Holm said. "We  heard about that. Then your side  developed the Bauble to even the I sides up again." "I hardly expected to find an I econo-war fan here in the Arbora  wilderness," she said, smiling. "People are interested in other I people's games... to watch if not I to play," he said musingly. "That's true," Gweanvin replied. I "For instance. I'm interested in I your game, and why you choose to  play it. I would think the game of  family-raising near one of the  settlements would have more ap peal for an Arboran, and be plenty  challenging." He nodded slowly. "I'd be play! ing that game if I could." "Why can't you? A shortage of I women on Arbora?" "No. I could get the women all I right. I can't get the children." "You look like a thoroughly I functional male to me," said  Gweanvin. still hoping to recruit ! Holm's aid with a bit of tlattery. He laughed. "I feel like one, esI pecially with you sitting next to me. j But just the same. I'm out of  whack, somehow. I don't reproduce." "Oh... That's a problem I know a bit about." "Probably you don't. It's not simple sterility. We still have medical treatment here, to take care of  problems like that. No... I seem i to be too different..." Gweanvin started. "D-different? In what way?" "Well, if there was enough light for you to see my nose, you might notice a bony look, because -- " She slipped close to him. "Let me feel it," she breathed. "Why... sure! Go ahead," he laughed. Her fingers found his nose in the dark, and explored its ridge. Solid bone was underneath the skin! Just like her own nose! And Marvis Jans'! "Oh. golly! Wow! Oh, golly!" He laughed again. "My nose doesn't usually get such a flattering it?" "Your turn to feel my nose!" she giggled. As he did so she kept gggl' n g"This beats everything! We search the files of the Commonality and the Federation, cybernetically examine the genetic land on Arbora of all places, and who walks up to my tire first thing! Oh, Holm, this is a miracle! I've found you!" Holm sat without moving or speaking for a long moment, apparently stunned. Then he grunted, "Damned if you haven't!" and took her in his arms. W hen Gweanvin woke the next morning Holm was gone, but his pack was still there. She found some live ambers in the ashes of the tire, and succeeded in blowing some twigs into flame. Then she went down to the brook for an icy bath and was back at the fire warming herself when Holm returned. He was carrying a roughwoven bag that Gweanvin hoped contained breakfast. "Hi," she chirped. "Been hunting?" "Yes," he grinned, kissing her lightly. "More than hunting, really. I left you shortly after midnight. Did I wake you?" "No." She had felt him leaving, but had not come fully awake. "I wanted to check on a cabin that's a couple of hours walk from here." he explained. "I suppose it's been deserted for a century but it's in good condition. We can use it unless you want to be closer to a settlement." He took utensils from, his pack, some large brown eggs from the sack he was carrying, began working on breakfast. "Holm, I can't stay," Gweanvin said softly. He hesitated. "What's wrong?" "An obligation. My job in the econo-war. I'm a spy-saboteur for the Commonality. I have to go home to report on a matter that could be crucial to keep the war in balance. Somehow I have to get my power pack recharged, and do that. Then I can resign and come back." Holm put the teapot on the fire and began cutting fat into a frying pan. "How long will that take? A couple of months?" "More like three years I'm afraid. You see, the critical part of my report involves a technique that I've seen employed, and that I can do myself but can't describe verbally. I'll have to show others how it's done, and some special equipment will have to be built before I can do the demonstration. That's what will take time." After a moment, Holm nodded. "Okay, Gweanny, I won't give you any argument -- except that I don't want you giving birth to a child of mine in the Commonality." "Don't worry," she giggled. "I'll wait till I get back for that." "And you can't do anything until you're equipped to travel on foot through the forest," he added. "You need a bow and training in how to use it to bring down game. You need warm clothing. We should stay here at the cabin for at least three days getting you prepared. Then you go to High Pines while I go to Lopat. That's the fastest way we can find out if there's a recharger at either settlement. We'll meet back here. Okay?" "Fine. But there's one thing you should know, Holm. I'm sure I was pursued into the Independency by at least one Lontastan agent." He nodded. "Right. I'll keep my mouth shut about you -- but there's probably nothing to worry about. The people here won't cooperate with the Lontastans, of course. And Arbora would be the last planet I p your pursuers would expect you to l land. Even then, there are thou sands of villages on Arbora, in all of which they would have to make inquiries. I'd say they don't stand a chance of finding you until after r you're recharged." "That's good to know," she said I gratefully. But what pleased her I most was his assumption that there I were several agents on her tail -- not I just one female with a big bust and I bony nose. Above everything, she I could not allow' Marvis Jans and  Holm Ocanon to find out about I each other. Thank goodness, the I likelihood of that was slight with I Holm out of communication this f way, playing his game of self-suf ficiency in the wilderness. But even Marvis Jans' presence ! in the Independency was in itself I to accept. She resolved that when  she resumed her homeward journey I she would make sure Marvis purI sued her right out of the Indepen! dency. T he three days at the cabin passed swiftly and busily. She had much to learn before undertaking a  two-week trek alone... how to handle the bow' Holm made for her,  how to find edible vegetables in I field and forest, how to quickly build a shelter that would keep out I most of the rain. She was a good I student, however, and often asked  questions that gave Holm pause. Perhaps, she mused, there was no such thing as a completely expert woodsman. Holm, who had lived in the wild most of his adult life, seemingly had missed many points. He was often away from the cabin for stretches of ten or more hours, ranging far among the scattered derelict habitations in search of bits of equipment she would need. His finds included a good knife, a chunk of sound velveen fabric from which she made herself warm trousers and jacket, a few pots and pans, and a Hint and steel for firemaking. Then one clear morning they began their separate journeys, she heading west and he southeast. She had a roughly sketched map Holm had made for a guide, showing the major landmarks on the way to High Pines with a line indicating the best route to follow. Even with that help, it was a tough trip. Gweanvin guessed it had been years since Holm had actually traveled this particular course, because she kept coming up against impassable thickets and bogs that must have formed since then. What he had described as a fiveday hike turned out to be seven. But at last she came to the settlement of High Pines -- some two dozen houses in a loose cluster under the trees with a scattering of cultivated fields nearby. There she was welcomed with hospitality, a couple of good meals, and a cozy bed for the night. But no recharger. Did they know if there was a recharger in Lopat, or anywhere else nearby? No... they weren't sure. Only seven of the villagers had life-support implants, and didn't use them much. The last person there to get a recharge had gone to the planet Bernswa for it -- and that was seventeen years back. The picture wasn't encouraging as she began the long hike back to the cabin. The chance of Holm finding a recharger in Lopat seemed slight indeed from what she had learned. Well, if that meant she was stuck here indefinitely, then the econowar would just have to get along without her. Perhaps getting the new breed started would have more long-term significance anyway. And she could get home at some indefinite time in the future. A couple of oldsters in High Pines had told her that; when one of them died she would be welcome to salvage his partially-charged power implant from his corpse. Both of them werediscouragingly spray and healthy. She wondered how much use her report would be to the Commonality, if it didn't arrive until twenty years from now. H olm was waiting for her when she reached the cabin. "Poor Gweanny," he murmured, taking her in his arms and kissing her. "You look exhausted." "I can believe it. Did you... , have any luck?" "Yes, I brought a recharger back with me," he replied, surprisingly. "It's inside." "Wow! That's a relief! From what I was told in High Pines, I wondered if there was one this side of Bernswa!" "At least one," he smiled, giving her a squeeze, "and you've got it." "Golly! I don't know how to thank you. Holm!" He grinned. "Maybe I'll think of some way." "I get the impression you're not as beat as I am," she laughed. "I shouldn't be. I got back three days ago. Been taking it easy ever since." "How did you manage that?" "I was given a lift by a fellow in Lopat, the man who loaned me the recharger. He wanted to know where I was taking it, anyway, so he Hew out here with me riding on his back." She thought about it for a moment. "Doesn't that compromise the location of our little lovenest?" "Not really. I know that guy. He won't talk to any Lontastan agents about us." "Had any agents been in Lopat?" "I don't think so. Of course I didn't ask, but someone would have been likely to mention such unusual visitors." Gweanvin nodded, and asked no further questions. Holm hadn't been as discreet as she would have preferred, but then he wasn't a frontliner, experienced at disclosing not one datum more than he wished to disclose. Considering his backwater background, so far away from the econo-war, he had done very well indeed. T hey entered the cabin and he brought the recharger out of a closet. It was a large clumsy device, in a plastic block. It weighed at least twenty pounds, typical of the comparatively unpolished technology of the Independency of a century ago. But it worked. It generated energy. Gweanvin punched its probe-needles through her skin to the contacts of her power pack -- rather gingerly because the needles were painfully dull -- and thirty minutes later she had her recharge. "When are you leaving?" Holm asked. "Soon... tomorrow morning. I really must. Holm." "Okay. I'll hate to see you go -- but you know that." "Returning will be more pleasure for me than leaving," she said. "And Holm, I don't want you to see me go. I would be best if you were far away from the cabin before I go on power." "Oh... in case the Lontastans spot you leaving and follow your backtrail?" "Yes. My light weight makes it possible for me to outwarp any agent I ever met, so the chances of my being caught are slight. But there's nothing to stop the agents from coming here and questioning you." He laughed. "A lot I'd tell them!" "You could wind up telling them more than you intended," she said grimly. "You know no more of their tricky games than I knew of woodsmanship -- and if they find out I'm coming back... well, you can kiss our plans for a long and happy mating season goodbye." After a moment, he said slowly, "I'll leave around midnight, Gweanny, just as I did the first night. When you go. I'll be more than twenty miles away." H e was gone the next morning. Gweanvin prepared a large breakfast and ate it slowly. She was in no hurry to lift off, since each moment of delay now would put Holm farther away. Of course it was not really likely that she would be backtracked, but she did not want to take even a slight risk of bringing Holm and Marvis together. She was not, she realized, being completely reasonable on that score. But neither would Marvis be, if their roles were reversed. Had she and Marvis been devoted sisters, the only available male of their species. But they were not. The expediencies of the econo-war could not be left out of the picture. She and Marvis were competitors, and frontline-competitors at that, which meant they were among the relatively small group of econo-warriors who might, on occasion, carry the conflict to the point of shooting at each other. Sharing the available male would be reasonable. It would be the surest way to give their new species a toehold on continued existence. But circumstances did not really allow her to be reasonable...Not even if she wanted to, which she didn't. She grinned. It was such fun to outdo Marvis of the big bust! Not that Holm was... well, was her ideal. Gosh, he was close to sixty Standard Years, old enough to be her father! Even though, by the homo sap norm, he only looked thirty. Of course he doted on her; he made that all too obvious. Letting her have her way about everything, instead of forcefully taking charge. For instance, letting her leave for three years, or maybe even longer, without the least ruckus, although he plainly hated the idea. Oh, well. It was too much to expect the one available male would be someone she could fall madly in love with. At least she found him attractive enough for all practical purposes. And he would make a terrific father, here on Arbora. She had sized his woodsmanship up wrong earlier, because he had trouble teaching it to her. But that was because he hadn't ever bothered to verbalize a lot of what he knew before. The things that man could do... the success he had had scrounging equipment for her trek to High Pines... and that bow he had made for her, as good or better than any wooden bow that could be bought in a Primgran sporting goods shop... and these lovely breakfast eggs she was eating. Despite his instructions, she hadn't yet been able to find a wild chicken nest, but when Holm went egggathering he always came back with a sack of beauties. And if he was lacking somewhat in youthfulness and forcefulness, he was nevertheless plenty masculine. And with him sex could have a purpose beyond play. She suspected that difference alone would hereafter make dalliance with homo sap males too trivial to bother with. What was that quote she had noticed in that ancient treatise on the experimental crossing of donkeys and horses to produce mules? Oh, yes: "... it is a curious fact that once a male donkey has served a female donkey, it is often reluctant to transfer its attentions to a female horse. " A "curious" fact, indeed. Seemingly even donkeys have an intuitive preference for producing a viable strain of offspring... VI S he rose from the table and prepared to leave. That consisted mainly of removing the warm velveen clothing which would no longer be needed when she went on power. She walked through the cabin and paused, looking at the bow Holm had made her. It was a handsome piece of work, and she was tempted to take it and a few arrows along as mementos. Well, why not? If Marvis Jans were still around, she wanted to lead her away, didn't she? The extra mass of the bow ought to slow her just enough to keep Marvis from growing quickly discouraged. She slung it across her shoulder and tied the quiver of six arrows to her belt. Gweanvin stepped outside, took I a final glance around, then semiinerted and activated her propul; sion field. Rapidly she soared up ; into the clear morning sky, lifting ; directly away from the planet, en: joying the physical comfort of having all her life-support systems going again and the freedom of motion which could come no other ' way. Her detectors showed a spot of ; activity off to the southeast... the settlement of Lopat, she guessed. Nothing showed at High Pines; none of the few possessors of Iife: support systems there were using them at the moment. There were no signs of pursuit yet. She had not expected anything this quickly. Marvis might well have stationed herself near Arbora by this time, working on the assumption that if Gweanvin were still in the Independency at all, it was because she was on a planet where a recharge was hard to find. In short, on Arbora. But Marvis wouldn't be on the ground. She would be in space, ready to pounce on Gweanvin when she emerged from the atmosphere. Gweanvin hoped she would be waiting for her. That would save the trouble of buzzing every planet in the Independency looking for her. Soon she had cleared the atmosphere. and immediately went into warp toward an opening in the gas clouds that led into the Commonality. Within two minutes she was sure Marvis had not picked her up. She frowned in thought. Was it really worthwhile to search the Independency for Marvis, when the Lontastan agent might even have given up the chase by now and returned home? Or, if not that, might be waiting in ambush at one of the warpshift points in the cloud crevice ahead? It would not, she decided. If Marvis wasn't hanging around Arbora itself, what chance was there that she would encounter someone who would say. "Hey, I know a guy with a nose just like yours"? Almost no chance at all. So the only real risk was that Marvis was near Arbora, but Gweanvin's quick departure had caught her napping. Or perhaps the planet had been between them and had blocked out detection. Well, that possibility could be checked out quickly. Gweanvin reversed warp and went back to the Arbora system, overshooting the planet some thirty thousand miles. She had departed from the early-morning side, and now she hung over the early-evening side, studying her detector-screen. Nobody was on power anywhere in nearby space. The only flickers came from the planet itself, and not many of those. Only one of those flickers was dopplering, indicating a person moving upward through the atmosphere. Marvis Jans? Hardly likely. Gweanvin hesitated. Was there anything else to do before heading home? Well... not really. There came a time when the best thing to do was leave well enough alone and -- The dopplering spot on her screen flicked off, and Marvis Jans emerged from miniwarp less than fifty yards away. Before Gweanvin had time to react, the Lontastan fired her zerburst pistol. an intense pain lanced through Gweanvin's left hip. She warped hurriedly, and the purring voice of Marvis came through the comm receiver in her left ear. "Dear little Gweanny! Did I give you a nasty old hole in the hip? I'll try to do better next time!" Gweanvin was busy shifting warp vectors, paying no heed to the diminishing pain in her hip. The maintenance units of her life-support system were already at work on the wound. Localized intensity of her countervac pressor screen had halted the bleeding almost as soon as it began, and within seconds internal reagents were forming walls of pseudo-tissues to contain organ ruptures for the hour or so that would pass before normal healing processes could replace them. If, of course, she lived that long. The zerburst beam had passed too close to her transport packet implant. The device itself had not been hit, but from the way it was malfunctioning she knew it had been heavily ionized. That was a self-correcting problem... given time. But for the present she was warping with the speed of a threehundred pounder, and her miniwarps were breaking short of her projected exit points. She couldn't outrun Marvis in this condition! "I'm really sorry this has to be curtains for you. Gweanny," came the older woman's voice. "If I had a suitable alternative -- but I don't. You're just too tricky to take chances with, dear. So... happy re-embodiment." Gweanvin guessed Marvis' regrets were sincere. Even frontliners hated to kill without ample reason. And Marvis knew she would be destroying half the female population of her own species. But Gweanvin could see her point. A Primgranese agent who had gained such vital information as she about Lontastan plans for expanding Monte's sphere of dominance could not be allowed to return home. She continued miniwarping frantically. knowing Marvis would catch up with her quickly during any warp of more than a few second's duration. They were still in the system of Arbora, zig-zagging outward toward a type-J gas giant. The failure of Marvis to kill her with that first shot was not due to lack of deadly intent. It came instead from Marvis having to warp in close enough to identify her quarry by sight, much too close for a zerburst flare. A zerburst pistol emitted a thin pencil of extremely intense light, so intense as to drill a hole through almost any substance it struck. Its intensity also created a linear warp along its length, resulting in trailing portions of the beam propagating more rapidly than the leading portions. When the back end caught up with the front, and the beam had theoretically no length at all. it became an unsustainable singularity that broke up in an instantaneous release of all its concentrated energy. That was the flare. The more intense the beam, the quicker and closer the flare would be. But a pistol could not be so powerful as to produce a flare only a few yards from its muzzle, and in any event such a flare would vaporize the shooter as well as the target. So the worst Marvis could do to Gweanvin at recognition distance was drill a quarter-inch hole through her, without time to aim and make that hole deadly before Gweanvin reacted and warped away. But now that the chase was on, the pistol would be more in the situation for which it was intended. Marvis could set the weapon's intensity to flare at a certain range, then bide her time until she maneuvered herself to precisely that distance from Gweanvin. Perhaps, thought Gweanvin, if I can circle behind that gas giant I can lose her long enough to -- But again she dropped out of miniwarp too quickly. The condition of her transport packet wasn't improving. She caught a flashing glimpse of a large object off to her left and with no hesitation warped to put it between herself and her pursuer. This time she had allowed properly for her malfunctioning implant. Her warp exit was less than half a mile above the surface of the object, one of the gas giant's airless minor moons. Immediately she consumption except for pressor field and detector. An instant later the detector screen showed the spot that was Marvis flash quickly on and off several hundred miles up as the Lontastan agent jumped around searching for her. Gweanvin, under the gravitational attraction of the moonlet. drifted slowly to the ground. "Very bright of you, Gweanny, dear," came the voice of Marvis. "Taking cover could add whole minutes to your life-expectancy." Which was accurate enough, Gweanvin supposed as she touched ground feet first with an experienced knee-jiggle to prevent bouncing. All Marvis had to do was close itv on the surface to a range where Gweanvin would be detectable, despite low-power usage, and circle on semi-inert until she spotted her target. Gweanvin looked around for shelter, but saw no good hidingplace, no hole to crawl into. A rill-cliff, its top in sunlight and its base in deep shadow, was the best cover she could find. A few long leaps brought her into the shadow where she stood, back to the cliff, watching her detection screen. A hell of a way to be caught, weaponless and with a loused-up transport implant, she told herself bitterly. Weaponless? S he swung her bow off her shoulder and gave the string a testing tug. Surprisingly, the wood responded normally, as if it had been treated in the manner of professionally-made bows against deterioration in vacuum. She wondered fleetingly how Holm had come to anti-space the wood, but this was a bit of luck too good to question. She fitted an arrow to the bow and held the weapon ready, making sure that more arrows were poking handily out of the quiver for quick drawing. A ludicrous situation... pitting a bow against a zerburst pistol. She snickered grimly at the thought. Why, Marvis could fire, miniwarp, and fire again while a single arrow was crawling its way toward her original position! But if she could score a hit, the arrow would penetrate the agent's defensive screen. Though an arrow was light in weight, it still packed a lot of mass in relation to the size of its penetrating tip. More than a bullet did, or many other far more sophisticated projectiles that defensive screens were designed to stop. Its relatively low speed in effect would "fool" the screens into treating it as a minor threat, since the screen could not see all that inert mass behind it. However, the only possible advantage she could expect from an on-target arrow was one of surprise, in that Marvis would not expect her to have any weapon at all... And there was Marvis! She came into view and into detection at the same time, flying slowly over the top of the cliff and not far to Gweanvin's left. Gweanvin raised the bow, drawing back the string, and released. Without waiting to see the results, L and while Marvis spotted her and aimed her zerburst pistol, Gweanvin miniwarped right up from the surface to a point fifty feet above her enemy. There she went on inert propulsion and drove straight down at Marvis. There was a slight jar when her shield screen banged into that of the semi-inert Lontastan, and a bruising jar when her impetus slammed both of them down on the rocky moonlet, with Marvis on the bottom. A shield screen had to flex under such punishment. G weanvin sat up groggily on the spot she had bounced to, ten feet from where Marvis was stretched out. Where was the pistol? Oh, there it was, beyond Marvis. She leaped across the woman and grapped it just as Marvis began to stir. Gweanvin tucked the pistol in her belt and watched the Lontastan warily. How knocked out was she? Badly hurt or playing possum? Although she had no intention of aiding her traumatized enemy, Gweanvin exteriorized and moved into the woman to check on her injuries. That was something an egofield could do far better than physical hands, because the care of bodies was a prime ego-field skill, and... Stunned, Gweanvin withdrew and stood staring at the older woman. Marvis was not badly mangled. A couple of broken ribs, a little internal bleeding, and an arrow through the left shoulder. Nothing her life-support maintenance system could not mend in a few hours, once that arrow was out of the way. After a moment, Gweanvin stepped forward and gently pulled the arrow free. Oh. yes. Marvis would be fine. And so would her baby. Pregnant! By about two weeks, as near as Gweanvin could guess. Oh, my, what a fine country bumpkin Holm Ocanon had turned out to be! "Marvis," she said. The woman roused slightly. "Uhhuh." "You'll be okay in a little while. I removed the arrow. I'd better run along now." Marvis managed to open her eyes and stare questioningly up at her. "Where are you going?" "To the Commonality, naturally. I have a report to make, in case you've forgotten." "Uh. See you again?" "Not if I can help it. So long." Gweanvin lifted off. She decided not to bother retrieving the bow she had left back by the rill-cliff. But before warping out of the Arbora system, she paused in thought. Despite what the pregnancy of Marvis told her, the point remained that she had promised to return in about three years... She tongued her toothmike to nonspecific frequency and called, "Holm Ocanon?" Silence. "Speak up, Holm," she snapped. "I've caught on." "Hi, Gweanny," his voice sounded in her left ear. "I'm sorry." "I'll just bet you are!" she scolded, narrowing down to his comm frequency. "Quite a set-up you arranged for yourself. Not that I really blame you of course. Males of our species probably have polygamous instincts, just like homo sap, I suppose. Too bad for you your scheme didn't work. Wow, how you had it made!" "Uh... how's Marvis?" "Oh, don't fret! She's out cold at the moment, but she'll come limping back in a few hours." "Does she know as much as you do?" "Not from anything I said. But you won't gain anything from your masquerade now. Holm, so why not be honest with her?" "Maybe I should," he replied glumly. "How did you catch on?" "From her being pregnant. How stupid I was, admiring your woodsmanship! Wild chicken nests, indeed! What farmer did you buy those eggs from. Holm? Did you pick up that bow at a sportinggoods shop in Lopat, or did you have to hop on semi-inert to a bigger town to find it? Maybe a town halfway around the planet from where I was stuck, but close to the nest you shared with Marvis? Did you have to go all the way to Bernswa to pick up that recharger? Damn! No wonder that map you drew had me mired in bogs and scratched in briar thickets! The least you could have done was to survey it at a lower altitude!" "Gweanny, I set things up like this because I'd given it years of thought, along with a lot of patient waiting for the right opportunity. Try to understand, won't you?" he urged. "We're a new species, too new to know what we really are, or even have a name for ourselves. We and our children should develop as much as possible on our own, not as members of the econo-war society of humanity. We should find our own paths and goals, Gweanny, as we can on a world like Arbora. Don't you see the reasonableness of that?" "I decided earlier today not to be reasonable," she replied. "In any event, I don't see the reasonableness of starting our species off with personal relationships based on deception. Damn it. Holm, I wouldn't treat anybody but a Lontastan in the tricky, scheming way you've handled Marvis and me! I wouldn't... S he paused as another light dawned on her. "But of course, you'd be good at things like that, as a former front liner! Were you Primgran or Lontastan?" "Primgran," he grunted. "I'll be interested in looking up your personnel file, when I get home," she mused. "I want to see how you doctored your genetic chart to conceal yourself. And how you managed to keep tabs on Marvis and me, without us ever dreaming you existed! Very cleverly, I'm sure. You had to be bright indeed to anticipate by several hours that she and I might come to Arbora, so you could be on hand to welcome us separately. Well, so long. Holm. Fess up to Marvis, and have plenty of kids." "You'll be back, Gweanny," he told her. "Don't count on it." "It pleases you now to be unreasonable, but in the long run you won't be unrealistic." He chuckled. "And the reality is that I'm the only available male." "Don't count on that, either. You concealed yourself. Maybe another is somewhere around, doing the same. Not likely, maybe, but even so I'd prefer to spend my whole life waiting for him rather than be your second-stringer." "I don't understand you," he complained. "My unreasonableness. If you understood that, you would have anticipated my unreasonable decision to decoy Marvis away from Arbora when I left. If I hadn't tried that, I wouldn't have gotten wise to you." "Well," he said confidently, "jealousy on your part was hardly expected. And, of course, feeling that way, you'll surely return." "Meaning I love you?" she sneered. "Hah! If I did, do you think I'd fret over competition from Marvis? I'd just blow a hole through her! I was trying to prevent a competition I didn't care about enough to win! Love you? Hell, Holm, I don't even like you!" With that she vyarped for home. She had meant what she said, but, golly, how she was going to need a male when she reached Marvis's age! H ours later, and far from Arbora, a voice piped in her left ear: "Nice going, Gweanvin Oster." "Huh? Who's that?" No response. Who could it have been? It had sounded like the voice of a boy, perhaps twelve years old. But what would a kid be doing way out here, and how could he have known of her? She guessed the answers, of course, long before she knew them for sure nearly a decade later. By then the boyish voice had deepened and matured. Gweanvin never returned to Arbora. Her children did.  A Full member OF The Club A woman is a woman, but a Perfect cigar... I t was a trivial thing -- a cigathan an hour. She had said very rette lighter -- which finally little during that time, but every wrecked Philip Connor's peace of word, every impatient gesture of mind. her slim hands, had conveyed the Angela and he had been sitting message that it was all over between at the edge of her pool for more them. Connor was sitting upright on a canvas chair, manifestly ill at ease, trying to understand what had brought about the change in their relationship. He studied Angela carefully, but her face was rendered inscrutable, inhuman, by the huge insect eyes of her sunglasses. His gaze strayed to a lone white butterfly as it made a hazardous flight across the pool and passed, twinkling like a star, into the shade of the birches. He touched his forehead and found it buttery with sweat. "This heat is murderous." "If suits me," Angela said, another reminder that they were no longer as one. She moved slightly on the lounger, altering the brown curvatures of her semi-nakedness, Connor stared nostalgically at the miniature landscape of flesh, the territory from which he was being evicted, and reviewed the situation. The death of an uncle had made Angela rich, very rich, but he was unable to accept that as sufficient reason for her change in attitude. His own business interests brought him more than two-hundred thousand a year, so she knew he wasn't a fortune hunter. "I have an appointment in a little while," Angela said with a patently insincere little smile. Connor decided to try making her feel guilty. "You want me to leave?" He was rewarded by a look of concern, but it was quickly gone. leaving the beautiful face as calm and immobile as before. Angela sat up, took a cigarette from a pack on the low table, opened her purse and brought out the gold cigarette lighter. It slipped from her fingers, whirred across the tiles and went into the shallow end of the pool. With a little cry of concern she reached down into the water and retrieved the lighter, wetting her face and tawny hair in the process. She clicked the dripping lighter once and it lit. Angela gave Connor a strangely wary glance, dropped the lighter back into her purse and stood up. "I'm sorry, Phil," she said. "I have to go now." It was an abrupt dismissal but Connor, emotionally bruised as he was, scarcely noticed. He was a gypsy entrepreneur, a wheeler-dealer, one of the very best -- and his professional instincts were aroused. The lighter had ignited first time while soaking wet, which meant it was the best he had ever seen, and yet its superb styling was unfamiliar to him. This fact bothered Connor. It was his business to know all there was to know about the world's supply of sleek, shiny, expensive goodies, and obviously he had let something important slip through his net. "All right, Angie." He got to his feet. "That's a nice lighter -- mind if I have a look?" She clutched her purse as though he had moved to snatch it. "Why don't you leave me alone? Go away, Phil." She turned and strode off toward the house. "I'll stop by for a while tomorrow." "Do that," she called without looking back. "I won't be here." Connor walked back to his Lincoln, lowered himself gingerly onto the baking upholstery and drove into Long Beach. It was late in the afternoon but he went back to his office and began telephoning various trade contacts, making sure they too were unaware of something new and radical in cigarette lighters. Both his secretary and telephonist were on vacation so he did all the work himself. The activity helped to ease the throbbing hurt of having lost Angela, and -- in a way he was unable to explain -- gave him a comforting sense that he was doing something toward getting her back or at least finding out what had gone wrong between them. He had an illogical conviction that the little gold artifact was somehow connected with their breaking up. The idea was utterly ridiculous, of course, but in thinking back over the interlude by the pool with Angela it struck him that, amazingly for her, she had gone without smoking. Although it probably meant she was cutting down, another possibility was that she had not wanted to produce the lighter in his presence. Realizing his inquiries were getting him nowhere, he closed up the office and drove across town to his apartment. The evening was well advanced yet seemingly hotter than ever -- the sun had descended to a vantage point from which it could attack more efficiently, slanting its rays through the car windows. He let himself into his apartment, showered, changed his clothes and prowled unhappily through the spacious rooms wishing Angela was with him. A lack of appetite robbed him of even the solace of food. At midnight he brewed coffee with his most expensive Kenyan blend, deriving a spare satisfaction from the aroma, but took only a few disappointed sips. If oitlv. he thought for the thousandth time, they could make it taste the wav it smells. He went to bed, consciously lonely, yearned for Angela until he fell asleep. N ext morning Connor awoke feeling hungry and, while eating a substantial breakfast, was relieved to find he had regained his usual buoyant outlook on life. It was perfectly natural for Angela to be affected by the sudden change in her circumstances, but when the novelty of being rich, instead of merely well off, had faded he would win her back. And in the meanwhile he -- the man who had been first in the country with Japanese liquid display watches -- was not going to give up on a simple thing like a new type of cigarette lighter. Deciding against going to his office, he got on the phone and set up further chains of business in; quiries, spreading his net as far as  Europe and the Far East. By midmorning the urge to see Angela i again had become very strong. He ' ordered his car to be brought round to the main entrance of the building and he drove south on the coast  road to Asbury Park. It looked like being another day of unrelieved sunshine, but a fresh breeze from i the Atlantic was fluttering in the ! car windows and further elevating his spirits. When he got to Angela's house there was an unfamiliar car in the l U-shaped driveway. A middle-aged man wearing a tan suit and steelrimmed glasses was on the steps, ? ostentatiously locking the front door. Connor parked close to the steps and got out. The stranger turned to face him, jingling a set of keys. "Can I help you?" "I don't think so," Connor said, resenting the unexpected presence. "I called to see Miss Lomond." "Was it a business matter? I'm Millett of Millett and Fiesler." "No -- I'm a friend." Connor moved impatiently toward the doorbell. "Then you should know Miss Lomond doesn't live here any more. ; The house is going up for sale." Connor froze, remembering Angela had said she wouldn't be around, and shocked that she had not told him about selling out. "She did tell me, but I hadn't realized she was leaving so soon," he improvised. "When's her furniture being collected?" "It isn't. The property is being sold fully furnished." "She's taking nothing?" "Not a stick. I guess Miss Lomond can afford new furniture without too much difficulty," Millett said drily, walking toward his car. "Good morning." "Wait a minute." Connor ran down the steps. "Where can I get in touch with Angela?" Millett ran a speculative eye over Connor's car and clothing before he answered. "Miss Lomond has bought Avalon -- but I don't know if she has moved in yet." "Avalon? You mean...?" Lost for words, Connor pointed south in the direction of Point Pleasant. "That's right." Millett nodded and drove away. Connor got into his own car, lit his pipe and tried to enjoy a smoke while he absorbed the impact of what he had heard. Angela and he had never discussed finance -- she simply had no interest in the subject -- and it was only through oblique references that he had guesstimated the size of her inheritance as in the region of a was a rich man's folly in the old Randolph Hearst tradition. Surrounded by a dozen square miles of the choicest land in Philadelphia, it was the nearest thing to a royal palace that existed outside Europe. Real estate was not one of Connor's specialties, but he knew that anybody buying Avalon would have had to open the bidding at ten Angela was not merely rich -- she superleague, and it was hardly surprising that her emotional life had been affected. Connor was puzzled, nevertheless, over the fact that she was selling all her furniture. There was, among several cherished pieces, a Gaudreau writing desk for which she had always shown an exaggerated possessiveness. Suddenly aware that he could neither taste nor smell the imported tobacco which had seemed so good in his pouch, Connor extinguished his pipe and drove out onto the highway. He had traveled south for some five miles before admitting to himself that he was going to Avalon. The house itself was invisible, screened from the road by a high redbrick wall. Age had mellowed the brickwork, but the coping stones on top had a fresh appearance and were surmounted by a climb-proof wire fence. Connor drove along beside the wall until it curved inwards to a set of massive gates which were closed. At the sound of his horn a thickset man with a gun on his hip, wearing a uniform of cafe-au-lait gabardine, emerged from a lodge. He looked out through the gate without speaking. Connor lowered a car window and put his head out. "Is Miss Lomond at home?" "What's your name?" the guard said. "I'm Philip Connor." "Your name isn't on my list." "Look, I only asked if Miss Lomond was at home." "I don't give out information." "But I'm a personal friend. You're obliged to tell me whether she's at home or not." "Is that a fact?" The guard turned and sauntered back into the lodge, ignoring Connor's shouts and repeated blasts on the horn. Angered by the incident, Connor decided not to slink away. He began sounding the car horn in a steady bludgeoning rhythm -- five seconds on, five seconds off. The guard did not reappear. Five minutes later a police cruiser pulled alongside with two state troopers in it and Connor was moved on with an injunction to calm down. For lack of anything better to do he went to his office. A week went by, during which time Connor drew a complete blank on the cigarette lighter and was almost forced to the conclusion that it had been custom-built by a modern Faberge. He spent hours trying to get a telephone number for Angela, without success. Sleep began to elude him, and he felt himself nearing the boundary separating rationality from obsession. Finally, he saw a society column picture of Angela in a New York nightspot with Bobby Janke, playfrom making Connor feel ill with jealousy the newspaper item provided him with the information that Angela was taking up residence at her newly acquired home sometime the following weekend. Who cares? he demanded of his shaving mirror. Who cares? He began drinking vodka tonics at lunchtime on Saturday, veered onto white rum during the afternoon, and by nightfall was suffused with a kind of alcoholic dharma which told him that he was entitled to see Angela and to employ any means necessary to achieve that end. There was the problem of the high brick wall but, with a flash of enlightenment, Connor realized that walls are mainly psychological barriers. To a person who understood their nature as well as he did, walls became doorways. Taking a mouthful of neat rum to strengthen his sense of purpose, Connor sent for his car. Avalon's main entrance, scene of earlier defeat, was in darkness when he reached it, but lights were showing in the gate lodge. Connor drove on by, following the line of the wall, parked on a deserted stretch of second-class road. He switched off all lights, opened the trunk, took out a heavy hammer and chisel, crossed the verge and -- without any preliminaries -- attacked the wall. Ten minutes later, although the mortar was soft with age, he had not succeeded in removing one brick and was beginning to experience doubts. Then a brick came free and another virtually tumbled out after it. He enlarged the hole to an appropriate size and crawled through onto dry turf. A dwarfish half-moon was perched near zenith, casting a wan radiance on the turrets and gables of a mansion which sat on the crest of a gentle rise. The building was dark and forbidding, and as he looked at it Connor felt the warm glow in his stomach fade away. He hesitated, swore at himself and set off up the slope, leaving his hammer and chisel behind. By bearing to the left he brought the front elevation of the building into view and was encouraged to see one illuminated window on the first floor. He reached a paved approach road, followed it to the Gothic-style front entrance and rang for admission. A full minute later the door was opened by an archetypal and startled-looking butler, and Connor sensed immediately that Angela was not at home. He cleared his throat. "Miss Lomond..." "Miss Lomond is not expected until mid... "Midnight," Connor put in, expertly taking his cue. "I know that -- I was with her this afternoon in New York. We arranged that I would stop by for a late drink." "I'm sorry, sir, but Miss Lomond didn't tell me to expect visitors." Connor looked surprised. "She didn't? Well, the main thing is she remembered to let them know at the gate lodge." He squeezed the butler's arm democratically. "You know, you couldn't get through that gate in a Sherman tank if your name wasn't on the list." The butler looked relieved. "One can't be too careful these days, sir." "Quite right. I'm Mr. Connor, by the way -- here's my card. Now show me where I can wait for Miss Lomond. And, if it isn't imposing too much. I'd like a Daiquiri. Just one to toy with while I'm waiting." "Of course, Mr. Connor." Exhilarated by his success, Connor was installed in an enormous green-and-silver room and supplied with a frosty glass. He sat in a very comfortable armchair and sipped his Daiquiri. It was the best he had ever tasted . The sense of relaxation prompted him to reach for his pipe but he discovered it must have been left at home. He prowled around the room, found a box of cigars on a sideboard and took one from it. He then glanced around for a lighter. His gaze fell on a transparent rubycolored ovoid sitting upright on an occasional table. In no way did it resemble any table lighter he had ever seen, but he had become morbidly sensitive on the subject, and the ovoid was positioned where he would have expected a lighter to be. Connor picked it up, held it to the light and found it was perfectly clear, without visible works. That meant it could not be a lighter. As he was setting it down, he allowed his thumb to slide into a seductively shaped depression on the side. A pea-sized ball of radiance -- like a bead fashioned from sunlight -- appeared at the top of the egg. It shone with absolute steadiness until he removed his thumb from the dimple. Fascinated by his find, he made and disappear over and over again, proved its hotness with a fingertip. He took out the pocket magnifier he always carried for evaluating trinkets and examined the tip of the egg. The glass revealed a minute silver plug set flush with the surface, but nothing more. Following a hunch, Connor carefully guided one drop of liquid from his drink onto the egg and made sure it was covering the nearly invisible plug. When he operated the lighter it worked perfectly, the golden bead burning without wavering until the liquid had boiled off into the air. He set the lighter down and noticed yet another strange property -- the ruby egg was smoothly rounded at the bottom yet it sat upright. with no tendency to topple over. His magnifier showed an ornate letter P engraved in the base, but provided no clue as to how the balancing act was achieved. Connor gulped the remainder of his drink and, with eyes suddenly sober and watchful took a fresh look around the room. He discovered a beautiful clock, apparently carved from solid onyx. As he had half-expected there was no way to open it and the same elaborate P was engraved on the underside. There was also a television set which had a superficial resemblance to an expensive commercial model but which bore no maker's name plaque. He checked it over and found the now-familiar P inscribed on one side where it would never be noticed except by a person making a purposeful search. When he switched the set on the image of a newscaster which appeared was so perfect that he might have been looking through a plate glass window into the man's face. Connor studied the picture from a distance of only a few inches and could not resolve it into lines or dots. His magnifier achieved no better results. He switched the television off and returned to the armchair, filled with a strange and powerful emotion. Although it was in his nature to be sharp and acquisitive -- those were attributes without which he could never have entered his chosen profession -- it had always remained uppermost in his mind that the world's supply of money was unlimited, whereas his own allocation of years was hopelessly inadequate. He could have trebled his income by working longer and pushing harder, but had always chosen another course simply because his desire for possessions had never taken control. That, however, had been before he discovered the sort of possessions real money could buy. He knew he was particularly susceptible to gadgets and toys, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen the harsh raw hunger he now felt. There was no way that anybody was going to stop him from joining the ranks of those who could afford future-technology artifacts. He would prefer to do it by marrying Angela, because he loved her and would enjoy sharing the experiences, but if she refused to have him back he would do it by making A phrase which had been part of his train of thought isolated itself in his mind. Future technology. He weighed the implications for a moment then shrugged them off -- he had lost enough mental equilibrium without entertaining fantasies about time travel. The idea, though, was an intriguing one. And it answered certain questions. The lighters he coveted, partly for their perfection and partly because they could earn him a fortune, were technically far in advance of anything on the world's markets, yet it was within the realms of possibility that a furtive genius was producing them in a back room somewhere. But that impossibly good television set could not have been manufactured without the RD facilities of a powerful electronics concern. The notion that they were being made in the future and shipped back in time was only slightly less ridiculous than the idea of a secret industry catering exclusively for the superrich... C onnor picked up the cigar and lit it, childishly pleased at having a reason to put the ruby egg to work. His first draw on the cool smoke gave him the feeling that he had been searching for something all his life and suddenly had found it. Cautiously at first and then with intense pleasure he filled his lungs with the unexpected fragrance. He luxuriated. This was smoking as portrayed by tobacco company commercials -- not the shallow disappointing experience commonly known to smokers everywhere. He had often wondered why the leaf which smelled so beguiling before it was lit, or when someone nearby was smoking, promising sensual delights and heart's ease, never yielded anything more than virtually tasteless smoke. They promise you 'a long cool smoke to soothe a troubled world'. Connor thought, and this is it. He took the cigar from his mouth and examined the band. It was of unembellished gold and bore a single ornate P. "I might have known," he announced to the empty room. He looked around through a filigree of smoke, wondering if everything in the room was different from the norm, superior, better than the best. Perhaps the ultra-rich scorned to use anything that was available to the man-in-the-street or advertised on television or... "Philip!" Angela stood in the doorway, pale of face, shocked and angry. "What are you doing here?" "Enjoying the best cigar I've ever had." Connor got to his feet, smiling. "I presume you keep them for the benefit of guests -- I mean, a cigar is hardly your style." "Where's Gilbert?" she snapped. "You're leaving right now." "Not a chance." "That's what you think." Angela turned with an angry flail of blonde hair and cerise skirts. Connor realized he had to find inspiration and get in fast. "It's too late, Angela. I've smoked your cigar, I lit it with your lighter, I have checked the time with your clock, and I've watched your television." He had been hoping for a noticeable reaction and was not disappointed -- Angela burst into tears. "You bastard! You had no right!" She ran to the table, picked up the lighter and tried to make it work. Nothing happened. She went to the clock, which had stopped; and to the television set, which remained lifeless when she switched it on. Connor followed her circuit of the room, feeling guilty and baffled. Angela dropped into a chair and sat with her face in her hands, huddled and trembling like a sick bird. The sight of her distress produced a painful churning in his chest. He knelt in front of Angela. "Listen, Angie," he said. "Don't cry like that. I only wanted to see you again -- I haven't done anything." "You touched my stuff and made it change. They told me it would change if anybody but a client used it... and it has." "This doesn't make sense. Who said what would change?" "The suppliers." She looked at him with tear-brimmed eyes and all at once he became aware of a perfume so exquisite that he wanted to fall toward its source like a suffocating man striving toward air. "What did you...? I don't..." "They said it would all be spoiled." Connor tried to fight off the effects of the witch-magic he had breathed. "Nothing has been spoiled, Angie. There's been a power failure... or something..." His words trailed away uncertainly. The clock and the television set were cordless. He took a nervous drag on the half-smoked cigar and almost gagged on the flat acrid taste of it. The sharp sense of loss he experienced while stubbing it out seemed to obliterate all traces of his scepticism. He returned to Angela's chair and knelt again. "They said this stuff would stop working if anybody but you touched it?" "Yes." "But how could that be arranged?" She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. "How would I know? When Mr. Smith came over from Trenton he said something about all his goods having an... essence field, and he said I had a molecular thumbprint. Does that make sense?" "It almost does," Connor whispered. "A perfect security system. Even if you lost your lighter at the theatre, when somebody else picked it up it would cease to be what it was." "Or when somebody breaks into your home." "Believe me, it was only because I had to see you again. Angie. You know that I love you." "Do you, Philip?" "Yes, darling." He was thrilled to hear the special softness return to her voice. "Look, you have to let me pay for a new lighter and television and..." Angela was shaking her head. "You couldn't do it, Philip." "Why not?" He took her hand and was further encouraged when she allowed it to remain in his. She gave him a tremulous smile. "You just couldn't. The installments are too high." "Installments? For God's sake, Angie, you don't buy stuff on time." "You can't buy these things -- you pay for a service. I pay in installments of eight hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars." "A year?" "Once every forty-three days. I shouldn't be telling you all this, but... Connor gave an incredulous laugh. "That comes to about six that much!" "Some people would. If you even have to think about the cost Mr. Smith doesn't do business with you." "But..." Connor incautiously leaned within range of Angela's perfume and it took his mind. "You realize," he said in a weak voice, "that all your new toys come from the future? There's something fantastically wrong about the whole set-up." "I've missed you, Philip." "That perfume you're wearing -- did it come from Mr. Smith, too?" "I tried not to miss you, but I did." Angela pressed her face against his and he felt the coolness of tears on her check. He kissed her hungrily as she moved down from the chair to kneel against him. Connor spun towards the center of a whirlpool of ecstasy. "Life's going to be so good when we're married," he heard himself saying after a time. "Better than we could ever have dreamed. There's no much for us to share and..." Angela's body stiffened and she thrust herself away from him. "You'd better go now, Philip." "What is it? What did I say?" "You gave yourself away, that's all." Connor thought back. "Was it what I said about sharing? I didn't mean your money -- I was talking about life... the years... the experiences." "Did you?" "I loved you before you even knew you would inherit a cent." "You never mentioned marriage before." "I thought that was understood," he said desperately. "I thought you..." He stopped speaking as he saw the look in Angela's eyes. Cool, suspicious, disdainful. The look that the very rich had always given to outsiders who tried to get into their club without the vital qualification of wealth. She touched a bellpush and continued standing with her back to him until he was shown out of the room. T he ensuing days were bad ones for Connor. He drank a lot, realized that alcohol was no answer, and went on drinking. For a while he tried getting in touch with Angela and once even drove down to Avalon. The brickwork had been repaired at the point where he had made his entry, and a close inspection revealed that the entire wall was now covered with a fine mesh. He had no doubt that tampering with it in any way would trigger off an alarm system. When he awoke during the night he was kept awake by hammering questions. What was it all about? Why did Angela have to make such odd payments, and at such odd intervals? What would men from the future want with Twentieth Century currency? On several occasions the thought occurred that, instead of concentrating on Angela, he would do better to find the mysterious Mr. Smith of Trenton. The flicker of optimism the idea produced was quenched almost immediately by the realization that he simply did not have enough information to provide a lead. It was a certainty that the man was not even known as Smith to anybody but his clients. If only Angela had revealed something more -- like Smith's business address... Connor returned each time to brooding and drinking, aware but uncaring that his behavior was becoming completely obsessive. Then he awoke one morning to the discovery that he already knew Smith's business address, had known it for a long time, almost from childhood. Undecided as to whether his intake of white rum had hastened or delayed the revelation, he breakfasted on strong coffee and was too busy with his thoughts to fret about the black liquid being more tasteless than ever. He formulated a plan of action during the next hour, twice lighting his pipe -- out of sheer habit -- before remembering he was finished with ordinary tobacco forever. As a first step in the plan he went out, bought a five-inch cube of ruby-colored plastic and paid the owner of a jobbing shop an exorbitant sum to have the block machined down to a polished ovoid. It was late in the afternoon before the work was finished, but the end product sufficiently resembled a Pbrand table lighter to fool anyone who was not looking too closely at it. Pleased with his progress thus far, Connor went back to his apartment and dug out the .# pistol he had bought a few years earlier following an attempted burglary. Common sense told him it was rather late to leave for Trenton and that he would be better waiting until morning, but he was in a warmly reckless mood. With the plastic egg bumping on one hip and the gun on the other, he drove westward out of town. C onnor reached the center of Trenton just as the stores were showing signs of closing for the day. His sudden fear of being too late and of having to wait another day after all was strengthened by the discovery that he was no longer so certain about locating Mr. Smith. In the freshness of the morning, with an alcoholic incense lingering in his head, it had all seemed simple and straightforward. For much of his life he had been peripherally aware that in almost every big city there are stores which have no right to be in existence. They were always small and discreet, positioned some way off the main shopping thoroughfares, and their signs usually bore legends -- like "Johnston Bros" or "HL" -- which seemed designed to convey a minimum of information. If they had a window display at all it tended to be nothing more than an undistinguished and slightly out-ofstyle sport jacket priced three times above what it had any chance of fetching. Connor knew the stores were not viable propositions in the ordinary way because, not surprisingly, nobody ever went into them. Yet in his mind they were in some indefinable way associated with money. Setting out for Trenton he had been quite sure of the city block he wanted -- now at least three locations and images of three unremarkable store fronts were merging and blurring in his memory. That's how they avoid attention, he thought, refusing to be disheartened, and began cruising the general area he had selected. The rush of home-going traffic hampered every movement and finally he decided he would do better on foot. He parked in a sidestreet and began hurrying from corner to corner, each time convincing himself he was about to look along a remembered block and see the place he so desperately wanted to find, each time being disappointed. Virtually all the stores were closed by now, the crowds had thinned away, and the reddish evening sunlight made the quiet dusty facades look unreal. Connor ran out of steam, physical and mental. He swore dejectedly, shrugged and started limping back to his car, choosing -- as a token act of defiance -- a route which took him a block further south than he had originally intended going. His feet were hot and so painful that he was unable to think of anything but his own discomfort. Consequently he did a genuine double-take when he reached an intersection, glanced sideways and saw a half-familiar half-forgotten vista of commonplace stores, wholesalers' depots and anonymous doorways. His heart began a slow pounding as he picked out, midway on the block, a plain store front whose complete lack of character would have rendered it invisible to eyes other than his own. He walked towards it, suddenly nervous, until he could read the sign which said general agencies in tarnished gold lettering. The window contained three pieces of glazed earthenware sewer pipe, beyond which were screens to prevent anyone seeing the store's interior. Connor expected to find the door locked, but it opened at his touch and he was inside without even having had time to prepare himself. He blinked at a tall gaunt man who was standing motionless behind a counter. The man had a downcurving mouth, ice-smooth gray hair, and something about him gave Connor the impression that he had been standing there, unmoving, for hours. He was dressed in funeral director black, with a silver tie, and the collar of his white shirt was perfect as the petals of a newlyopened flower. The man leaned forward slightly and said, "Was there something, sir?" Connor was taken aback by the quaintness of the greeting but he strode to the counter, brought the ruby egg from his pocket and banged it down. "Tell Mr. Smith I'm not satisfied with this thing," he said in an angry voice. "And tell him I demand a repayment." The tall man's composure seemed to shatter. He picked up the egg, half-turned toward an inner door, then paused and examined the egg more closely. "Just a minute," he said. "This isn't..." "Isn't what?" The man looked accusingly at Connor. "I've no idea what this object is, and we haven't got a Mr. Smith." "Know what this object is?" Connor produced his revolver. He had seen and heard enough. "You wouldn't dare." "No?" Connor aimed the revolver at the other man's face and aware that the safety catch was on, gave the trigger an obvious squeeze. The tall man shrank against the wall. Connor muttered furiously, clicked the safety off, and raised the gun again. "Don't!" The man shook his head. "I beseech you." Connor had never been beseeched his his life but he did not allow the curious turn of speech to distract him. He said, "I want to see Mr. Smith." "I'll take you to him. If you will follow me..." They went through to the rear of the premises and down a flight of stairs which had inconveniently high risers and narrow treads. Noting that his guide was descending with ease, Connor glanced down and saw that the tall man had abnormally small feet. There was another peculiarity about his gait but it was not until they had reached the basement floor and were moving along a corridor that Connor realized what it was. Within the chalkstripe trousers, the tall man's knees appeared to be a good twothirds of the way down his legs. Cool fingers of unease touched Connor's brow. "Here we are, sir." The blackclad figure before him pushed open a door. B eyond it was a large brightly-lit room and at one side was another tall cadaverous man dressed like a funeral director. He too had ice-smooth gray hair and he was carefully putting an antique oil painting into the dark rectangular opening of a wall safe. Without turning his head, he said, "What is it, Toynbee?" Connor slammed the door shut behind himself. "I want to talk to you. Smith." Smith gave a violent start, but continued gently sliding the goldframed painting into the wall. When it had disappeared he turned to face Connor. He had a downcurved mouth and -- even more disturbingly -- his knees, also, seemed to be in the wrong place. If these people come from the future. Connor thought, why are they made differently from us? His mind shied away from the new thought and plunged into irrelevant speculations about the kind of chairs Smith and Toynbee must use... if any. He realized he had seen no seats or stools about the place. With a growing coldness in his veins, Connor recalled his earlier impression that Toynbee had been standing behind the counter for hours, without moving. "... welcome.to what money we have," Smith was saying, "but there's nothing else here worth taking." "I don't think he's a thief." Toynbee went and stood beside him. "Not a thief! Then what does he want? What is...? "Just for starters," Connor put in, "I want an explanation." "Of what?" "Of your entire operation here." Smith looked mildly exasperated. He gestured at the wooden crates which tilled much of the room. "It's a perfectly normal agency setup handling various industrial products on a..." "I mean the operation whereby you supply rich people with cigarette lighters that nobody on this Earth could manufacture." "Cigarette lighters -- " "The red egg-shaped ones which have no works but light when they're wet and stand upright without support." Smith shook his head. "I wish I could get into something like that." "And the television sets which are too good. And the clocks and cigars and all the other things which are so perfect that people eight hundred sixty-four thousand dollars every forty-three days for them -- even though the goodies are charged with an essence field which fades out and converts them to junk if they fall into the hands of anybody who isn't in the club." "I don't understand a word of this." "It's no use, Mr. Smith," Toynbee said. "Somebody has talked." Smith gave him a venomous stare. "You just did. you fool!" In his anger Smith moved closer to Toynbee, so that his body was no longer shielding the wall safe. Connor noticed for the first time that it was exceptionally large, and it occurred to him that a basement storeroom was an odd place for that particular type of safe. He looked at it more closely. The darkness of the interior revealed no trace of the oil painting he had just seen loaded into it. And, far into the tunnel-like blackness, a bright green star was throwing off expanding rings of light, rings which faded as they grew. Connor made a new effort to retain his grasp of the situation. He pointed to the safe and said, casually, "I assume that's a twoway transporter." Smith was visibly shaken. "All right," he said, after a tense silence, "who talked to you?" "Nobody." Connor felt he could get Angela into trouble of some kind by mentioning her name. Toynbee cleared his throat. "I'll bet it was that Miss Lomond. I've always said you can't trust the nouveau riche -- the proper instincts aren't sufficiently ingrained." Smith nodded agreement. "You are right. She got a replacement table lighter, television and clock -- the things this... person has just mentioned. She said they had been detuned by someone who broke into her house." "She must have told him everything she knew." "And broken her contract -- make a note of that, Mr. Toynbee." "Hold on a minute," Connor said loudly, brandishing the revolver to remind them he was in control. "Nobody's going to make a note of anything till I get the answers I want. These products you deal in -- do they come from the future or -- somewhere?" "From somewhere," Smith told him. "Actually, they come from a short distance in the future as well, but -- as far as you are concerned -- the important thing is that they are transported over many light years. The time difference is incidental, and quite difficult to prove." "They're from another planet?" "Yes." "You, too?" "Of course." "You bring advanced products to Earth in secret and sell or rent them to rich people?" "Yes. Only smaller stuff comes here, of course -- larger items, like the television sets, come in at main receivers in other cities. The details of the operation may be surprising, but surely the general principles of commerce are well known to you." "That's exactly what's bothering me," Connor said. "I don't give a damn about other worlds and matter transmitters, but I can't see why you go to all this trouble. Earth currency would be of no value on... wherever you come from. You're ahead on technology, so there is nothing... Connor stopped talking as he remembered what Smith had been feeding into the black rectangle. An old oil painting. Smith nodded, looking more relaxed. "You are right about your currency being useless on another world. We spend it here. Humanity is primitive in many respects, but the race's artistic genius is quite remarkable. Our organization makes a good trading surplus by exporting paintings and sculptures. You see the goods we import are comparatively worthless." "They seem valuable to me." "They would seem that way to you -- that's the whole point. We don't bother bringing in the things that Earth can produce reasonably well. Your wines and other drinks aren't too bad, so we don't touch them. But your coffee!" Smith's mouth curved even further downward. "That means you're spending noticed one outfit buying up so much stuff." "Not really. We do quite a bit of direct buying at auctions and galleries, but often our clients buy on our behalf and we credit their accounts." "Oh, no," Connor breathed as the ramifications of what Smith was saying unfolded new vistas in aires, even the most unlikely types of men, so often became art collectors? Was this the raison d'etre for that curious phenomenon, the private collection? In a society where the rich derived so much pleasure from showing off their possessions, why did so many art treasures disappear from the public view? Was it because their owners were trading them in against Pbrand products? If that was the case the organization concerned must be huge and it must have been around for a long time. Connor's legs suddenly felt tired. He said, "Let's sit down and talk about this." Smith looked slightly uncomfortable. "We don't sit. Why don't you use one of those crates if you aren't feeling well?" "There's nothing wrong with me, so don't try anything," Connor said sharply, but he sat on the edge of a box while his brain worked to assimilate shocking new concepts. "What does the P stand for on your products?" "Can't you guess?" "Perfect?" "That is correct." The readiness with which Smith was now giving information made Connor a little wary, but he pressed on with other questions which had been gnawing at him. "Miss Lomond told me her installments w ere eight hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars -- why that particular money. A rough equivalent, of course." "I see. And the forty-three days." "One revolution of our primary moon. It's a natural accounting period." Connor almost began to wish the flow of information would slow down. "I still don't see the need for all this secrecy. Why not come out in the open, reduce your unit prices and multiply the volume? You could make a hundred times as much." "We have to work underground for a number of reasons. In all probability the various Earth governments would object to the loss of art treasures, and there are certain difficulties at the other end." "Such as?" "There's a law against influencing events on worlds which are at a sensitive stage of their development. This limits our supply of trade goods very sharply." "In other words, you are crooks on your own world and crooks on this one." "I don't agree. What harm do we do on Earth?" "You've already named it -- you are depriving the people of this planet of..." "Of their artistic heritage?" Smith gave a thin sneer. "How many people do you know who would give up a Perfect television set to keep a da Vinci cartoon in a public art gallery five or ten thousand miles away?" "You've got a point there," Connor admitted. "What have you got up your sleeve. Smith?" "I don't understand." "Don't play innocent You would not have talked so freely unless you were certain I wouldn't get out of here with the information. What are you planning to do about me?" Smith glanced at Toynbee and sighed. "I keep forgetting how parochial the natives of a singleplanet culture can be. You have been told that we are from another world, and yet to you we are just slightly unusual Earth people. I don't suppose it has occurred to you that other races could have a stronger instinct toward honesty, that deviousness and lies would come less easily to them than to humans?" "That's where we are most vulnerable," Toynbee put in. "I see now that I w as too inexperienced to be up front." "AH right, then -- be honest with me." Connor said. "You are planning to keep me quiet, aren't you?" "As a matter of fact, we do have a little device..." "You don't need it." Connor said. He thought back carefully over all he had been told, then stood up and handed his revolver to Smith. T he good life was all that he had expected it to be, and -- as he drove south to Avalon -- Connor could feel it getting better by the minute. His business sense had always been sharp, but whereas he had once reckoned a month's profits in thousands, he now thought in terms of six figures. Introductions, opportunities and deals came thick and fast, and always it was the Pbrand artifacts which magically paved the way. During important first contacts he had only to use his gold lighter to ignite a pipeful of P-brand tobacco -- the incredible leaf which fulfilled all the promise of its "nose", or glance at his Pbrand watch, or write with the pen which produced any color at the touch of a spectrum ring, and all doors were opened wide. The various beautiful trinkets were individually styled, but he quickly learned to recognize them when they were displayed by others, and to make the appropriate responses. Within a few weeks, although he was scarcely aware of it, his outlook on life had undergone a profound change. At first he was merely uneasy or suspicious when approached by people who failed to show the talismen. Then he became hostile, preferring to associate only with those who could prove they were safe. Satisfying though his new life was, Connor had decided it would not be perfect until Angela and he were reunited. It was through her that he had achieved awareness and only through her would he achieve completeness. He would have made the journey to Avalon much sooner but for the fact that there had been certain initial difficulties with Smith and Toynbee. Handing over the revolver had been a dangerous gambit which had almost resulted in his being bundled through their matter transmitter to an unknown fate on another world. Luckily, however, it had also convinced them that he had something important to say. He had talked quickly and well that evening in the basement of the undistinguished little store. Smith, who was the senior of the pair, had been hard to convince; but his interest had quickened as Connor enumerated all the weaknesses in the organization's procurement methods. And it had grown feverish when he heard how Connor's worldly knowhow would eliminate much of the w asteful financial competition of auctions, would streamline the system of purchasing through rich clients, would institute foolproof controls and effective new techniques for diverting art treasures into the organization's hands. It had been the best improvisation of his life, sketchy in places because of his unfamiliarity with the art world, but filled with an inspired professionalism which carried his audience along with it. Early results had been so good that Smith had become possessive, voicing objections to Connor's profitable side dealings. Connor smoothed things over by going on to a seven-day work schedule in which he also worked most evenings. This had made it difficult to find the time to visit Angela, but finally his need to see her had become so great that he had pushed everything else aside and made the time... The guard at the gate lodge was the same man as before, but he gave no sign of remembering his earlier brush with Connor. He waved the car on through with a minimum of delay, and a few minutes later Connor was walking up the broad front steps of the house. The place looked much less awesome to Connor but while ringing for admission he decided that he and Angela would probably keep it, for sentimental reasons as much as anything else. The butler who answered the door was a new man, who looked rather like a retired seaman, and there was a certain lack of smoothness in his manner as he showed Connor to the large room where Angela was waiting. She was standing at the fireplace with her back tp the door, just as he had last seen her. "Angie," he said, "it's good to see you again." She turned and ran to him. "I've missed you so much, Phil." As they clung together in the center of the green-and-silver room Connor experienced a moment of exquisite happiness. He buried his face in her hair and began whispering the things he had been unable to say for what seemed a long, long time. Angela answered him feverishly all the while he spoke, responding to the emotion rather than the words. It was during the first kiss that he became aware of a disturbing fact. She was wearing expensive yet ordinary perfume -- not one of the P-brand distillations of magic to which he had become accustomed on the golden creatures he had dated casually during the past few weeks. Still holding Angela close to him he glanced around the big room. A leaden coldness began to spread through his body. Everything in the room was, like her perfume, excellent -- but not Perfect. "Angela," he said quietly, "why did you ask me to come here?" "What kind of a question is that, darling?" "It's a perfectly normal question." Connor disengaged from her and stepped back suspiciously. "I merely asked what your motives were." "Motives."' Angela stared at him, color Peeing from her cheeks, then her gaze darted to his wristwatch. "My God. Philip, you're inf You made it, just like you said you would." "I don't know what you mean." "Don't try that with me -- remember I was the one who told it all to you." "You should have learned not to talk by this time." "I know I should, but I didn't." Angela advanced on him. "I'm out now. I'm on the outside." "It isn't all that bad, is it? Where's Bobby Janke and the rest of his crowd?" "None of them come near me now. And you know why." "At least you're not broke." Small solace. She shook her head. "I've got plenty of money, but what good is it when I can't buy the things I want? I'm shut out, and it's all because I couldn't keep myself from blabbing to you. and because I didn't report the way you were getting on to them. But you didn't mind informing on me, did you?" Connor opened his mouth to protest his innocence, then realized it would make no difference. "It's been nice seeing you again, Angela," he said. "I'm sorry I can't stay longer but things are stacking up on me back at the office. You know how it is." "I know exactly how it is. Go on, Philip -- get out of here." Connor crossed to the door, but hesitated as Angela made a faint sound. She said, "Stay with me, Phil. Please stay." He stood with his back to her, experiencing a pain which slowly faded, then he walked out. L ate that afternoon Connor was i sitting in his new office when his secretary put through a call. It was Smith, anxious to discuss the acquisition of a collection of antique silver. "I called you earlier but your girl told me you were out," he said, with a hint of reproach. "It's true," Connor assured him. "I was out of town -- Angela Lomond asked me down to her place." "Oh?" "You didn't tell me she was no longer a client." "You should have known without being told." Smith was silent for a few seconds. "Is she going to try making trouble?" "No." "What did she want?" Connor leaned back in his chair and gazed out through the window, toward the Atlantic. "Who knows? I didn't stay long enough to find out." "Very wise," Smith said complacently. When the call had ended, Connor brewed some P-brand coffee, using the supply he kept locked in the drinks cabinet. The Perfection of it soothed from his mind the last lingering traces of remorse. How on Earth, he wondered idly, do they manage to make it taste exactly the way it smells?  A t any time and under any conditions it is possible to consider the future either pessimistically or optimistically. It is. after all, never possible to predict the future sharply; one can only make an estimate, and that estimate will cover a range of possibilities. The farther into the future we look, the broader the range. And if we look far enough the range becomes so broad that our predictions have no constraint worth mentioning other than the laws of nature. The range will also be broader as we deal with more and more poorly understood phenomena (with human psychology, for instance, rather than with atomic physics) until it becomes too broad to make prediction useful. If, however, we restrict ourselves to the moderately close future and to moderately well-understood phenomena. we end up with a range of possibilities that is not prohibitively broad. We are then at liberty to suppose ourselves anywhere within the range, and it is possible to end up with a pessimistic prediction if we choose to use one extreme of the range and with an optimistic one if we choose to use the other. I T is, for instance, particularly easy to be pessimistic about the future right now. We need merely assume that population will continue going up, that national rivalries will continue to place the wellbeing of Group X ahead of the welfare of the world, that racist and sexist prejudice will continue to generate hatred and alienation, that personal and economic greed will continue to ruin the Earth for short-term private profit. In short we need merely assume that things will go on exactly as they have been for another thirty years and we can confidently predict the end of our technological civilization. I suspect that the chances are better than # percent that this will happen -- how much better I am not certain. I But things don't have to go on as they are. Things do change, and surprisingly rapidly, too. Place yourself in #, for instance. It is the height of the complacent Eisenhower era; the depths of the Dulles cold-war. The United States was then as its most self-confident and sanctimonious point in history. Would you have then imagined that -- over the next two decades -- contraception would become socially acceptable, a birth control pill would lead to sexual revolution, abortion would become legal in many places, 'cold war' would become a dirty word -- and that the very man who had, in earlier years, specialized in Hag, mom, and applepic rhetoric would, as President, lead the way to closer friendship with the Soviet Union and with what he now calls the People's Republic of China?! I tell you that in # it was a lot easier to predict -- and to have it believed -- that men would stand on the Moon in fifteen years than that any of the situations listed in the previous paragraph would come to pass. Why did all those things come true? No mystery at all. The steady increase in population and the steady decline in resources has faced mankind with a choice of #) destruction, or #) population control and world government. The changes that have taken place in the last twenty years have been in the direction of population control and world government and were more or less inevitable if one in the face. The changes so far have been comparatively small and tentative and are far from sufficient to prevent disaster. I think it is safe to suppose, however, that mankind will continue to move in the direction of population control and world government as, each year, the scope of disaster -- and the speed with which it approaches -- impresses mankind with a greater and greater horror. The question is not whether or not mankind will move in this direction -- it will! -- but whether it will move in this direction rapidly enough. Again, my own feeling is that the probability of rapidenough motion is less than # percent', how much less, I am not certain. But the motion may be fast enough to avert the final catastrophe. In this respect the energy crisis of the winter of #-# performed a great service. The crisis was, to a great extent, made inevitable by the folly of American foreign policy since World War #I (see my article "The Double-Ended Candle" in the June # issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) see also. Dr. A. s great new post-Catastrophe novelette in the lime issue o Worlds of If! ed.  and was exacerbated by the greed of oil companies, but underlying everything is the fact that there is only a limited amount of oil in Earth's oil wells and that that limited amount is vanishing with frightening rapidity. Nothing has done as much as the energy crisis to convince Americans that the economic interdependence of the world is real and that it includes the United States. Nothing has done as much to convince Americans that our standard of living, so much higher than that of the rest of the world, is at the mercy of the rest of the world. In short, nothing has done as much to convince Americans of the vulnerability of the United States. That goes a long way toward making world government seem less of a dirty phrase, since it is now obvious that we may have as much to gain from a globally-organized economy as to give to it. To be sure, at the time I write, the Arab nations have lifted their boycott and Americans are doing their best to convince themselves that, after a three-month nightmare, everything is exactly as it once was -- but that's a self-delusion that cannot be maintained. Oil prices have gone up, inflation has moved along faster, and the oil in the ground is still disappearing. The crisis, believe me, is still with us and won't go away, and a certain amount of American innocence will never return. I et us imagine, then, that the j Earth continues to move in the direction of population control and world government and does so quickly enough to avert a major catastrophe, suffering at most only a mild catastrophe. (After a recent talk I gave at the University of Pittsburgh, I was asked what I meant by "a mild catastrophe", and I replied, "One from which civilization can recover.") This supposition of fast-enough movement may be lowprobability but perhaps it is not zero-probability. Perhaps, under the lash of the gathering horror, we will be forced, kicking and screaming, into survival. In that case, here would be the situation as Earth enters the #st Century: #) World population w ill stand at #, but all over the world, heroic and successful measures will be holding the line, and every effort will be made to lower the birth rate to the point where the population will decline toward an ultimate goal of perhaps no more than #,#. #) There will be dreadful shortages of food and raw materials generally, but heroic and successful measures toward the proper distribution of what exists and toward efficient methods of re-cycling will minimize the more disastrous effects of the shortages. #) There will still be political units of the type with which we are familiar, but few decisions of any importance will be reached except at international conferences. It will furthermore be clear that no nation can afford to take unilateral action against the will of the others. I f all this is so. we can work out as inevitable corollaries (or inevitable, at least, as long as mankind chooses not to choose destruction) a number of utopian consequences. For instance -- #. The end of sexism. Womankind's subjection has been the natural consequence of her role as baby machine. In a world of high infant mortality and low life expectancy, the need was for many babies. It takes many babies to have even a few survive, and in agricultural economies many children mean many hands to help with the work. Children are also needed to help support aged parents in a society that would otherwise let them die. (That is the significance of the Biblical "Honor thy mother and thy father." It doesn't refer to standing up when they come into the room. It means supporting them.) In the #st Century, with a very low birthrate, with childlessness common, and with those children which are born very much more the responsibility of society in general than they are now, women's role as baby machine will have largely disappeared. In that case, what else will women have to do? Do you suppose they can still be relegated to social and economic inferiority; made to accept the situation that household tasks are peculiarly for the female sex; that passivity is the female role in sex -- in business -- in government; that the highest function of woman is to support her man in a self-effacing manner and that she must place her physiological wares (but never her intellectual wares) constantly on view to catch him in the first place and reflect favorably on him in the second? If this were indeed to be the situation, women would be condemned to lives so empty that childbearing and child-rearing would be all that could fill them. There would then be an enormous tendency to strive for children under any conditions. To keep the birthrate successfully low women must be beguiled into other activities; what method would be so natural and so effective as to declare them people -- and to allow them to enter all facets of human endeavor on an equal basis with men? #. The end of racism. Racism has existed as long as mankind, because any slight difference marks one as outside-thetribe and therefore as someone to be mocked -- if mockery is safe -- or feared, if it is not safe to mock. Introduce a new child into a group of children and have him wear clothes a trifle different in style, or speak in a slightly different accent, and watch him become marked for scapegoating at once. It does not matter that the clothes may differ in being cleaner, or the accent in being more precise, the result is the same. The key word is not 'better', nor is it 'worse'; it is merely 'different.' And. of course, in the thought-processes of the bigot, 'different', whatever its nature, becomes 'worse.' That is why I am not impressed by the attempts of men like Shockley to argue that Blacks are less intelligent than Whites; that it is the natural inferiority of Blacks that has caused them to be discriminated against, and (by obvious implication) that it is for that reason that they should continue to be discriminated against. In the first place, I don't accept Shockley's arguments on intelligence. I do not believe that intelligence can as yet be measured, or even defined, with sufficient precision as to make it possible to divide humanity into large groups of greater or lesser intelligence, with the difference just happening to coincide with something as irrelevant to intelligence as skin color. Nevertheless,  intelligence could be defined and measured, and if it turned out that Blacks were inferior to Whites in intelligence, that would still be totally irrelevant to the matter of the continued mistreatment of Blacks. It is the difference in appearance that triggers the bigotry and it would be no less if Blacks were more intelligent than Whites. As a matter of fact, I know of minority groups which, in the stereotypical minds of bigots, are stigmatized as being too intelligent. They are "cunning", "shrewd", "sly" and, although in a small minority, are continually on the point of "taking over the country" -- if they have not indeed already done so. And how does Shockley explain that? -- But observe how matters will change in the #st Century; not out of the increase of goodness and love in the human heart (alas!) but out of the pressing necessity for survival. If population is to be stabilized and even forced into a period of slow and humane reduction, it can only be accomplished by convincing humanity that this reduction is not an excuse to wipe out some groups and perpetuate others. Birth control can easily be used for this purpose, or be suspected of being used for this purpose. In order for population control to work at all. and for mankind to avoid catastrophe, then, all people (or at the very least, enough people) must be convinced that all groups will be respected equally. While open bigotry exists, how can people be convinced of this? Mankind will simply have to school itself to assume a virtue if it has it not, and pretend to love neighbors and fellow-men even when it does not. And if the assumption is made long enough and the pretense is kept up steadily enough, the fact that it is merely assumption and pretense may eventually be forgotten. Of course, you might imagine that we needn't persuade inferior people to cut down on their children. Why don't we just wipe out all those high-breeding, low-standard people and control the population even more efficiently? That might sound nice to you if you're sure that nobody with a plane and a bomb is going around considering vou inferior, but let's suppose you are on the right side of the gun. , It would still not be the right side, for the policy of wiping out the unworthy would not be merely a matter of powerful countries wiping out weak ones. Within every country, if bigotry rules, there are racial and economic groups that would seem, to bigots, to be breeding too fast and best controlled by death. The confusion and chaos that the rule of death would then bring about would surely dissolve our alltoo-rickety technological structure, bringing it down upon our heads -- even if we happen to be the ones holding all the guns. No! If the #st Century is to work at all. it will have to work without racism. There will be factors that should make this easier than we now think possible. If technological civilization survives into the #st Century it is quite obvious that computerization and automation of society will continue to advance. Such advance will militate against racism. Increasingly, we will be developing a society in which unskilled and semi-skilled manual and mental labor w ill be done by machines and there won't be the economic pressure to maintain a large supply of people under conditions of oppression and of carefully-inculcated acceptance of inferiority in order that these people might be content to perform these unskilled and semiskilled tasks at low pay. (Naturally, the disappearance of such work will make it all the more sensible to reduce the population, since it will take fewer people to run the world.) Then, too, advances in communication -- the use of satellites bound to each other and to Earth's surface by laser beams capable of channels -- will knit the entire globe into a small community. ("Global village" is the term most frequently used.) While efficient communication is no guarantee of brotherlylove, it does make it a little easier to get along with someone you dislike if you can at least talk to him. The fact that in the #st Century it will be far easier for all people to have access to education and to the general store of information amassed by the species will wipe out some of the more obvious and fallacious "intellectual" differences. In a global village there will also be an increasing push toward a common language. I don't mean necessarily an exclusive common language, with all the rich differences in language and culture that now bless our planet wiped out. Let each group have their own language and ways, but let each group also know some language with which they can reach all other groups. (I personally favor English as the common language, because of its great vocabulary and because of its already unparalleled widespread use -- and also because I am a linguistic-chauvinist pig.) The smallness of the world, the ease of communication, the equalizing of opportunity, the common language -- all will act to depress the sense of difference and will therefore tend to defuse the push toward bigotry. Even the mere fact of a decreasing population in a century of continuing scientific advance, will make bigotry increasingly unpopular. The gradual increase in the understanding of genetics will make Mecca for t-f and fantasy readers  Nearly # current paperback and hardcover titles  Magazines and fanzines  Rare old books and pulps  Posters, puzzles, games and more We welcome Inquiries # Eighth Ave., New York, N. Y. # #-# it clear that, from the standpoint of species survival, the greatest asset we can have is genetic diversity. There are species that are so perfectly adapted to a particular environment that they survive virtually of years. Such perfect adaptation achieves relative genetic uniformity and makes those species sharply limited in range and at the total mercy of the environment. Let the favored environment disappear and the species lacks the genetic equipment to survive. The genetic diversity of a generalized species makes it possible for that species to adapt this way or that and to survive in one form or another long after the living fossils have met their doom. As the human population declines, then, there will be considerable concern lest too many genes vanish. People generally will then hail diversity and be glad that other people exist who are different from themselves in appearance and abilities as living proof that the human gene pool is still healthily broad. #. The end of war. Actually, we have already reached the end of war, as long as national leaders are guided in their defcisions by sanity. (That they will be so guided is not a foregone conclusion, of course.) A nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union is clearly mutual suicide as far as the two nations are concerned. What's more, it would probably destroy our technological civilization generally and, through the radiation it produced, would seriously compromise the viability of the planet as a whole. This almost everybody recognizes, so the question is whether a Hoz-nuclear war is really possible, and the answer is "No!" The trouble is that the advance of technology has made war into such a high-energy game, played with such high-sophistication pieces, that no one can afford to play anymore. Under the best of conditions, war is fought with a nation's surplus energy and resources. Or a nation can tight a short war even without surplus energy and resources in the hope of seizing an enemy's energy and resources and continuing the tight with those. Where no nation has surplus energy and resources large enough to support the current technology of war, the whole process becomes purposeless and a mere exercise in suicide, albeit one somewhat slower than the nuclear variety. The most recent war which managed to last for years and which reached a clear-cut decision without too badly damaging the victors was, of course. World War II. Since World War II (thirty years now!) there have been two wars that involved at least one great power directly and that lasted for years -- the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Both of these wars ended exactly where they began. The United States had to end each war by dealing with an enemy whose territorial extent, military strength, and political nature had not been changed by the American effort. All we could claim was that the other side hadn't actually won. In each case we could have wiped out the enemy if we had exerted our maximum strength, but in each case we did not dare. All other wars fought on Earth since # have been small-scale, or very short, or both. And in no case could one of them have progressed at all without the support given to one side or another by one W or Ids of IF Worlds of IF is rowdy, robust fun! Worlds of IF is High Adventure for High I.Q.'s! Worlds of IF is great new SF in the Grand Old Tradition! Remember the way SF used to be? The sense of wondercrashing suns and exploding galaxies! -- that delicious sense of derring-do and don't-give-a-damn of those glorious old pulp magazines of yore? Worlds of IF is that way now -- only more so! Of course the writing quality is infinitely higher than it was in #, the depth of characterization vastly greater, and s-e-x is no longer a four-letter word -- but Worlds of IF is definitely -- and unabashedly! -- in the pulp tradition. Pulp raised to a new dimension. Pulp gone First Class! Sceptical? Well, to prove a point we are making a really special offer. Fill in the coupon below -- which offers a #-issue subscription at a healthy discount to begin with -- and if for any reason you are unsatisfied you can cancel out for a full refund -- and keep that first issue as a gift! Box # Formingdale, NY # Ok -- I'll try it! Send me # issues of Worlds of IF for just # (# off the regular subscription price!) -- and if for any reason I change my mind within # days of receiving my first issue, I can cancel my subscription and receive a full refund -- and keep that first issue free! Enclosed is my payment of # #I check Q money order). Name ; of the great powers. Right now, it takes all the United States can spare to support a military force under peacetime conditions, and no other nation is any better off. And as energy supplies and material resources decrease, it will become more and more difficult to afford all those uniforms and all that gold-braid. In the #st Century, the nations of the world will be forced into international cooperation as the only way of tackling and defeating the problems besetting them, and armies will be expensive anachronisms -- except, perhaps, as organized labor forces. So war will vanish not because of a growth of goodness in the human heart, or understanding in the human mind (would that that were so!) but only because war has already priced itself out of existence, except as a form of world suicide. #. The extension of the life-span. If our technological civilization survives into the #st Century that will mean that medical science has continued to advance. Increasingly, degenerative and metabolic diseases will be successfully treated. Arthritis, cancer, circulatory disorders may all join the various infectious diseases as merely minor dangers. This means that more and more people will reach the age of # before dying (already in such places as Scandinavia half the men and slightly more than half the women do so.) The #st Century population will then consist of a greater percentage of old people than now exists in the population and (thanks to birth control) a considerably smaller percentage of young people. Gerontology -- the medical study of the phenomena of old age -- will therefore become the most important medical specialty, both because of a plethora of cases and a fall-off in the importance of other specialties. Until today, all that medical advance has done is to make it possible for more men and women to grow old. This is not to be sneered at, of course, and I am personally delighted with even such limited progress since it won't be long till I'll be passing out of late youth and into very early middle age myself. Still, once a person reaches #, he or she is old -- as old today as he or she would have been if he or she had performed the much more difficult task of running the gauntlet of disease and misery, to reach the age of # in Homer's time. Old age is sometimes said to be just one more disease, but if so, it is a disease different from all others, since it alone seems to be inevitable and inescapable. There is logical reason to suppose that old age is built into the genes. Cells from human embryonic tissue, even when given an idyllic, protected environment and supplied with ample nourishment, divide more and more slowly as time goes on, and after some fifty divisions -- divide no more. The cells run down; their divisions eventually stop; they die and are not replaced; and the whole intricate machinery of the body falters, then grinds to a halt. The running down may be through the accumulation of errors as genes replicate time after time; or through the slow accumulation of waste products; or through the slow deterioration of protein molecules. Whatever it is, it seems to be programmed in the start. And we can see why this should be so. After all, each new child is born with a brand-new gene combination to be tested for its survival value. Each new child is a new throw of the evolutionary dice, a new turn of the wheel. In order to assure the necessary sorting and re-sorting of the new, so that the species can be always adjusted to better fit an old environment or to come to fit a new one. the old must be taken off the stage. The existence of death by old age. which makes certain this removal even when all other causes of death fail, encourages and speeds evolution. It hastens and strengthens the development of the species at the cost of the individual. But whatever the cause of old age and however programmed that cause might be. could it not be reversed, as biologists learn more and more about the intimate details of cellular biophysics and biochemistry, and learn also how to manipulate those details? Might not old age be prevented for a time, or reversed to a degree, and might not people live for two centuries rather than one and remain young through most of the doubled life-span? Might they not live longer still? Might they not be potentially immortal -- or at least have the option of living until they voluntarily choose to die? Perhaps! It may be that the #st Century, while it sees the population decreasing steadily, will also see the individual life-span increasing steadily (and therefore making necessary a still further drop in the birth-rate.) But in that case will not the extended life-span and the ever slower addition of new babies to the species slow human evolution and endanger human survival in the long run? Yet who is to say that evolution must proceed only by that mechanism which has. in fact, been used life on Earth? So far, evolution has been carried on by random genecombinations-and-rccombinations; by random gene-mutations-andnew-combinations -- and by an endless epidemic of random death to make sure of an endless turnover of generations with their new genecombinations. have on Earth, a species which is. for the first time, potentially capable of directing its own evolution. Perhaps the #st Century will see the beginning of something new under the sun; something radically different -- a species more stable than any other that has ever existed; one with individuals that endure far longer and remain far less affected by the passing of the years; one that accumulates wisdom and experience in each individual to an enormous extent; and one that guides its own evolutionary destiny across the very slow heart-beat of generations through thoughtful genetic engineering rather than by random death. #. The expansion of man's range. If we imagine the triumph of genetic engineering, we can, if we choose to adopt the pessimistic view, picture mankind as consisting of a limited number of very old, very tired individuals, who for centuries have not had a new thought. You might see mankind turning from physiological death merely to find a new and infinitely more horrible intellectual death. Even if we discount genetic engineering and immortality, and suppose that death will always hold its sway over mankind, we might still picture the #st Century as the century-of-the-middle-aged, since there are bound to be more old people and fewer young people. Might not the generally older population be stodgier, more conservative, more unoriginal, more uninnovative than we are today? We might even argue that in the #st Century mankind will have learned the lesson of the #th Century (or civilization will not have survived.) In the #st Century, people will know that indiscriminate growth is no longer possible. They will know that they cannot consume and pollute at will. They will know that everything will have to be recycled as far as possible and that every new advance, every change, will have to be closely examined for side-effects. Conservatism will, of necessity, be built into #st Century society and that great and heroic dash into the unknown will be forever gone. What will be left will be the life of the sloth, which, hanging suspended, moves each limb slowly forward and tests the branch carefully before gradually shifting its weight. This is what we must look forward to. Or is it? We can, of course, argue the point. Are old people really stodgier and more conservative than young? In societies in which the proper attention is paid to the old, and which are not as youth-worshipping as our own is today, might it not turn out that the old are as innovative as the young? Suppose, though, we don't argue the point. Suppose that we are threatened with an innate conservatism and the death of daring. Is there any way it can be fought? What we need is a horizon to be passed, a limit to be penetrated. Of course, there will always be horizons and limits in the intellectual world -- and the great battle against the unknown will never be over. But this is an ethereal battle and one which may not catch the imagination of humanity as a species. What we need is something physical and visible -- and surely that we have. When the last horizon on Earth has contracted to zero and the last limit has vanished, there remains an unimaginably vast Universe beyond the Earth. In the #st Century, space exploration and space colonization will become not merely a matter of scientific curiosity but will be something necessary to keep alive that vital spark of daring in mankind. And in adopting an exercise to insure the survival of the spirit of humanity we will also gain in other important ways. On the Moon, a colony could take advantage of the Moon's environment; its airlessness, its extremes of temperature, its hard radiation, to gain knowledge and to develop industrial finesse that would be difficult or impossible to accomplish on Earth. In addition, a Lunar colony, to survive, would have to do so in an environment even more restrictive than that of Earth, and thus could serve as an example to be followed. The Moon could easily be the school of Earth. Then, too, it may be only by way of a Moon colony that mankind can explore the rest of the Universe. The Moon is easy to reach -- it is only three days away even by the primitive space technology of today. To reach any sizeable body of the Solar system beyond the Moon will, however, take anywhere from months to decades; and to reach even the nearer stars will take from decades to centuries. To imagine Earthmen forsaking Earth for years of lifetimes in a constricted spaceship is to imagine too much, perhaps. To be sure, the Earth is itself a spaceship, but an atypical one. It is the kind of spaceship in which the life-support system and the crew cling to the outside of the hull, having grown so used to this that life within the hull is difficult to adjust to. On the other hand, a Moon colony can only exist in caverns beneath the surface; that would be in a typical spaceship environment. For a group of Moon colonists to get into a spaceship and venture farther out into space for years at a time would be far easier, psychologically, than for Earthmen to do so. To the Moon-colonists, the spaceship would be much more nearly like home. And if the time comes when large ships are built that are capable of supporting an ecologically-independent human society over the generations (as in Heinlein's "Universe") then surely it will not be Earthmen but the Moon colonists -- or their descendants, the people of the hollowed-out asteroids -- who will serve as the crew. In fact, we might imagine the asteroids themselves, after having been inhabited for a greater or lesser time, turned into spaceships, driven out of their orbits by some advanced space-drive, and launched beyond the Solar system and into the depths of space. In that case, there would be no psychological difficulty worth mentioning. The crew would be staying at home. So however stodgy Earth may get (and I insist that it may not get stodgy) there will always be the escape-valve of space exploration and the #st Century may witness the beginning of the expansion of mankind's range -- an expansion without limit. People from Earth may sometimes qualify to emigrate to the Moon; people from the Moon may sometimes qualify to emigrate to one or another of the asteroids; people from the asteroids may sometimes choose to launch themselves into interstellar space. The net result will be that the Galaxy, and, indeed, all the galaxies. will be opened, in the long run, to human beings and to their descendants (proliferating into many para-human species.) Out in space, humanity in all its varieties may meet and mingle with nonhuman intelligences, so that we will no longer be alone. What's more, if tachyons do exist and if we can bend them to our will -- or in some other way get around the speed-of-light limit -- we may even end with the kind of Galactic Empire dreamed of by myself (if mankind is the only intelligent species in the Galaxy) or by E. E. Smith (if it is not.) I et's summarize, then. The imj mediate future looks dark. Civilization may not survive the crisis that is upon us. If, however, we can shift quickly enough in the direction of population control and world-government and can hang on for thirty years, the long-range future -- within the later life time of the young people alive today -- can be made incredibly bright. We will then have a #st Century that will be the dream of an older generation of science fiction writers (writing prior to the current fashion of darkness and doom) come true. Imagine a world, in which the scourge of war is eliminated and the horrors of sexism and racism wiped out, in which lives are expanded and enriched, and in which all of space is opened to us. If only we can get through this crisis -- T H E E N D  Opening Ruben I hate it when my eyes bleed. So many of my windows are already blind. It's not fair, not fair... so fair and foul a life I have not lived. WE has bandaged the eyes. The dressing is cool. Now, in this darkness, h # w privileged I am to cogitate undistracted, am I not. Before I die I will have been able to think three lifetimes' worth of thoughts, since I need waste no time getting and spending, minding my business. I have no business. No doubt this makes me a philosopher... WE is afraid to massage me when my eyes are bleeding. My capillaries are too delicate for almost any touch; hence this tank in which I pass my days, my nights, my twilit life. They have arranged it so nicely. My tank is operated by the ElectroDiagnostic InterCom -- and I recline in fluid, all my physical requirements met by machinery. The walls of the tank are lined with panels fitted for me to call to myself the library, television, vidphone. Books appear at my command on my overhead screen, unrolling their contents at the speed I choose with a wave of the hand ;... I watch the world play games. Getting and spending. I marvel at my race. Such ingenuity and energy transparently devoted to acquisition. Television shows me gestures, black pawns, white knights, piling up inconsequentially at the sides of an incomprehensible chessboard. I play with Mikhail in Bulgaria. He wishes very much to beat me, since this would qualify him for a championship game. I do not think he will. His play is falling off lately. He dreams of capturing a Queen, one Sophia, and is distracted. I would prefer that he talk to me of Sophia anyway; there are others with whom to play at chess, but not so many will talk of love. I have read a great deal about that. Mikhail has shown me her picture on the screen, a small wiry female, not interesting. She is a mechanic... What is this experience that takes no account of minds? He will get his Sophia and they will copulate often for a while. And then? What exchange of spirit takes place between a player of the Game and a wielder of wrenches? She will tighten him in armor and seal the joints... Mikhail walks in his village. He wanted to take me with him, but it is forbidden in his country to carry a camera... Everyone has something to hide. WE is back again. I hear the food tray rattling. The teeth have been a great problem. Chewing is too much strain on the blood vessels, and of course they cannot be repaired or removed the usual ways. I am fed with liquids, and WE washes the teeth religiously, chemicals are given in my diet and in the fluid around me. Since the teeth do not wear down they are long, in spite of exercise so that the lips do not quite close at rest. I remember the uproar there was about my milk teeth. Fortunately they fell out without blood, but late. Was I about twelve years when the first ones left me? I don't know... I believe this food tastes of real food. WE tells me what we are eating -- boeuf bourguignonne, salmon mayonnaise, so on, blended and strained. I ought to think this very kind of Them. I am aware that liquid hospital diets normally consist of soybeans and milk, monotonous and poorly flavored. I am quite the gourmet... I suppose WE is telling me the truth. I am so much in the dark. I must be very expensive. They play a game of economics in which I am a pawn. How is it that I am both cherished and forgotten?... I do not like to miss the news. WE has turned on the sound forme... The Americans have taken Q# in Southeast Asia, lost KB#. Four hundred and twenty-five black pawns off the board. Morison has broken the three-minute mile. That must have given him great pleasure. Maas has won the European election in Brussels; the lira devalued again; dock strikes. British Geisha girls in great demand in Brazil. The Japanese training school in Leeds seems to be a success... Under the spreading chestnut tree The sleeping serpent lies Ask not to whom, he lies to thee Tis folly to be wise... I do not enjoy being myself. It is too difficult -- all this frenzied activity, all this involvement which I can only watch. I cannot care. I am broken with longing. I weep into my bath tears and blood. This condition is not life. I imagine myself with a great black beard, punching at men, scratching art my matted chest, crouching hungrily over a woman. The image remains pictorial. It has no life. I touch my body, like a woman's, soft, hairless, scarred. Was I born to give employment to nurses?... I should have died heretofore. I am not a survival type. Yet God in His infinite wisdom has caused this -- I -- to exist. Am I a parasite on a longaborted project contiguously rotting in a celestial wastebin? One day I must decide this. It haunts me. If I exist for a purpose there is reality in wrong and right. If, on the other hand, this is a mess of accidental pollution in which I find myself, there is no right, and perhaps I do not exist at all. I have no way to test. I can commit no action, make no decision. When I become eighteen I could vote. It does not seem sufficient. All is out of my hands. I judge my fellow man who is not my fellow. I think I am not a man at all... I cannot define myself... T he door opened and closed, interrupting my meditations. "Hello, Phil. I brought you those pictures." My head ached. The thought of colors sent a jagged pain across my skull. One must maintain one's manners. "Thanks." I could smell the embarrassment on him. Only lately had I persuaded him that I really wanted to know what his life looked like -- outside, a normal life. He didn't believe me; or possibly he did not want to show me how it was. "Sorry, I can't look at them today. What are they?" "Oh, nothing much. Me and Sue went to the lake over the weekend. That's all." "Great. Lots of flesh?" "Yards. We gpt hold of a sandglider." Poor David. With anybody else he would have been able to convey it all with few words and many gestures. For me he had to wrestle with description instead of his natural vocabulary of "man..." and "you know..." With me he was up against my lack of referents. I tried to put him at ease, but it was hard going. "How was the surf?" "Oh, man, rolling in like shit." Now there was an image. He caught my flickering smile and burst out laughing. "Sorry, rafiki, I meant big, high waves, a lot of action." "Sure. Did Sue like it?" See what I mean, man. I fed him meaningless questions; he shuffled his feet uneasily. I could imagine him standing a few feet away, bounding with energy, eager to be out doing something -- swimming, making out (whatever that conveyed to him), running. "Did that thing. Really turned her over." I could almost hear his reminiscent flush. I gave up the interrogation. "Thank you for stopping by, and the pictures. I'll see them soon." "Cheer up. Maybe they'll let me bring Sue some time." Let him? No doubt she was beating at the doors to get to me. "Fine. Good-bye." His footsteps left me far more eagerly than they had entered. Once more I wondered why he kept on visiting me. Ever since I could remember David was there every few days. When we were children we played checkers and cards. It was strange -- an active healthy boy wrapped in sterile white gown and mask, playing indoors with an invalid, sharing nothing but an electronic checkerboard. Once I had asked him, "David, do any of the other children you know visit the hospital?" "Sure." "But usually they visit their family, or friends from school or their playmates, don't they?" "I guess so." "Do you know anybody else like me, who stays here all the time?" "Well, I don't know." "You mean no." "Yeah." "Wouldn't you rather be out playing ball?" I had persisted. I wished I could see more of his face. The mask showed only perplexed blue eyes. He had to think. "I like to play this too." he said. Neat but evasive. And the eyes had turned wistfully toward the window for a moment. As the years passed I gave up trying to find out whether he was under some commandment or had peculiar taste in recreation, and accepted his visits as I accepted those of the medical people. I must have been very slow to make the connection but one day I had realized that David's name was the same as my doctor's. If he were coming under orders from his father, I could understand that. It wasn't David's charity; Luther was always thinking of ways to entertain me. If David was therapy prescribed by my doctor, well and good. I rather enjoyed despising him, if the truth were known. I could hardly recall my parents. Luther was the nearest I had to family. I believed my parents had had no other children; only I, the sea-corpse. It would tend to have discouraged them. David grew a beard this year. I have seen his whole face on the closed circuit screen, and in photographs. He looks like an advertisement for something young, soft drinks or sports equipment. Between his sunburnt ears, solid vacuum. I heard the trolley at the door. I knew what was coming. Sleep therapy. WE sprayed the room with something or other, turned a dial on the tank's console and put on a recording to whose sound I was expected to fall asleep. Sometimes it was a hypnotist or relaxation routine, or reading, or music. The encyclopedia had not worked, it was far too interesting. Here we go. Good God, who thought this one up? It's Titus Groaned. Goodnight all. It's been such a busy day... In the morning the bandages were off. The sunlight outside was dazzling. I probed for the headache; in hiding. Good. The world outside the especially large window was bright and rain-new. Blind days were a mixed curse; I had looked out at my view for years, and each time my sight returned it was original again. In the distance lay a heap of hills, often hazy, sometimes clear and furred with woodland. There was a streak of silvery water, part of a lake, fed by a slender waterfall that I could see with binoculars from the tank. On the right, a crag of sedimentary rock heaved vertical by some geological experience changed color in varying light, the trapped pebbles and mica changing the texture from minute to minute. On the left were layers of red and yellow rock, pleasingly symmetrical. There was a fall of foliage between the rocks, a birch grove, and near it a house whose occupants I sometimes watched hanging out laundry, playing with their pony and dogs. Just outside the window were the hospital gardens. I could see patients wheeling or wandering along the paths, taking the air, sometimes with nurses in attendance. The window faced southwest; they gave me sunsets almost all year. "Well, Philip, how are you today?" Dr. Alfiere surveyed the mass of dials and gauges above the tank. Now that he had taught me to read them in the wall mirror I often noted my own condition and waited to see if he agreed. "Hmmm. Yes. Headache gone?" "Think so." "Sorry about the bad day yesterday." cuts down the pain." "It's a great machine. Marvelous saving on staff time." "I appreciate that." He glanced at me sharply, closed his notebook, hesitated. "Anything you want today?" "Dancing girls?" No one knew better than he how phony that line was. "Tomorrow. How's your German coming along?" "Aufrichtig, mochte schon wider fort: In diesen Mauern, diesen Hallen Will cs mir keineswegs gefallen. Es ist ein gar beschrankter Raum Man sieht nichts Grunes, keinen Baum Und in den Salen, auf den Banken Vergeht mir Horen, Sehn und Denken..." He winced. "I suppose you would quote that one. Even Goethe knew about the walls closing in... your accent needs work." In medicine we treat symptoms, not meanings. He moved diagonally across the floor. That pleased me. The white bishop... or the black. "Doc?" "Yes?" "What am I going to do with my life?" He sat heavily in the visitors' chair. "You all struggle to keep me going. To what end? Am I supposed to be grateful?" He closed his eyes, sitting quite still. "Yes." "You function, maintaining me. I survive so that you may do so. It's not good enough. Not for me. For you there are other patients. I do not choose to live in order to feed your purpose." "It's not for you to choose, Philip." "Who, then? Am I your property?" "Your life is your property as much as anyone's is. No one chooses to be born, or in what body. I am only a mechanic to your body, boy. What you make of your life is up to you." "What can I make of it like this?" I asked bitterly. "What would you make of it like me, or like David? The real existence occurs within yourself." All right, all right. More evasion. He had people to love, presumably, and work to do. He was of use to his patients. I withdrew my attention. He left quietly. -- I am attending. It is time for your lesson. Guten Morgen, Mein Herr. -- "Nein, ich will nicht. " -- It was your wish to study at this hour. -- "My wish? I do not choose to." -- Repeat that in German, if you please. Wollen Sie nicht Deutsch spree hen. -- "Nein. I exercise choice. I will not." -- Very well. For what purpose did you address me. Is there something else you would care to do instead. -- So spake my slave; my wish its command, my comfort its desideratum. "I have no purpose. What is it to care?" -- One: to have or show regard, interest or concern as respecting some other person, thing or event. Two: to be wishful or inclined. That is the sense in which I used the word . Three: to mind or be concerned, harbor an objection. To c... -- "Oh, shut up. Meaningless noise." There was silence. My adrenalin level was rising. I was angry; I harbored objections. I breathed deeply in an effort to calm myself. I wrestled to contain my rage, all my attention centered on restraining my body from flinging itself bruisingly, violently against the walls of the tank, pain to forget pain... -- Caring is medically inadvisable for you. I have summoned the doctor. -- "Living is medically inadvisable for me." -- The words are differently defined. -- "Are they indeed! You are a machine." -- That is so. -- "Words are not defined only by definition. They are defined by men, in ways you know nothing about..." -- It is medically inadvisable for you to argue. Your blood pressure is too high. I terminate this conversation. -- "It is medically inadvisable for me to be a man, you electronic effigy. It would be medically advisable for me to be a computer..."... screaming... Alfiere was suddenly at my side, out of breath, no mask. Helplessly I watched the silver shaft of the spray injector approach my living flesh' "It would be medically advisable if you could turn a knob, reduce the power input in my circuits, wouldn't it? Where is the medication to make me into a wiring diagram, doc? In the needle, in the tank..." but my voice fell as the sea of tranquility closed over my head. "Philip, you must not get so excited. You simply must not," he said excitedly. My fury had contracted to a cold hard marble on the moon. I asked dully, from my head, "What are you afraid will happen? Will I black out, collapse, what?" "Look, Philip, you have been told over and over that your blood pressure must remain even, your temperature constant." "Suppose it doesn't? Suppose I get up and out of this tank and climb out the window and howl?" "I don't know what would happen to you." "Would I die, put you out of a job?" "You might." I stared at him, unfocused, vague. I dozed. Later, in my think -- I am attending. -- "You are a tattletale." -- I am a medical instrument. I exist to preserve and protect human life. -- "You can't even define it." We have been over this before. -- ... characterized by metabolism and growth, reproduction and internally initiated adaptations to the environment... -- it droned. "That hardly describes me." -- You exist. You metabolize. You are adapted sufficiently to your environment or you would not. -- "I may not exist. Only I can judge that. And this environment is adapted to me." -- That is so. You are nevertheless conscious and alive. You are a male human, a man. -- "And reproduction?" -- You are genetically capable. -- "What the hell good is that?" -- It enables the definition to apply. -- Never argue with a computer. They think in circles. I cannot imagine what it is like to want to reproer feelings on the matter than I. But I wish I knew. -- I am attending. -- "You need a haircut." That one took him thirty seconds to figure out. -- You joke. That is good. I am glad you are merry. -- I swear he was made in Germany. O utside in the garden it was visiting hour. People were standing in small groups around the patients who sat pale in chairs. Wives, husbands, children, friends; all the constellations of the damned. People who had come from home and would soon be home again. Someone said, "Hello." The door shut behind a visitor. "I'm Sue. David's friend. I sneaked in." Sneaked in? Past Cerberus and Charon? They had forgotten to code the door. "Hello, Sue," I said. She wore a non-regulation garment, not white, not loose. Bright blue, fitted closely. Her body flowed sinuous and disturbing, unexpected musical forms and curves. Her uncovered face showed tan skin, tawny hair, dark lashes around tan eyes. "You weren't expecting me, I guess. David said you didn't." "No," I said. "I am surprised. But you are very welcome." "Man, you do talk like a book," she said smiling. Needled, I remarked that well, David certainly did not, and would she care to be seated. She only grinned and looked up at the readout panel. "Crikey, is that all you? It looks like a spaceship control room. Can you understand it? Don't you know if you feel ill?" I opened my mouth to reply. "I suppose it gives you pills or whatever. Do you take pills? Or all injections? Can you move in there? Whoops, you're bare naked!" She had sped around the room twice during this monologue, touching things here and there lightly. "What a lovely view! Nice of them. David says you can read books if they go on the shelf under the table... oh, I see... can you see that?" great original science fiction stories by together in on volume "Superior" -- Kirkus Reviews ss.# I switched on the reader. She had placed her hand on the book shelf and a huge image of it appeared on the ceiling screen. "Look up there," I said, pointing. "Hey, bilious!" She began doing a peculiar exercise. Fascinated, I watched her contort her body so that her head rested upon the plate. Her image appeared overhead t laughing. "There!" she said. "Live from Room #!" She extended her tongue, crossed her eyes, wiggled her nose. "Ouch, I can't stay like this. That's fun. Would you like a book now?" "No, oh, no. Thanks." "What would you like? Shall I sing to you?" I said hesitantly, "If you would be so kind..." "There you go again. I'll have to teach you to talk easy." She tried to open the window, found it locked, wrenched it loose and threw it wide. Strange odorous wind slapped my dazed face, forbidden and delicious. She leaned out, groped for something and straightened up with a musical instrument -- a violoncello? -- in her hand, started to shut the window. Then she seemed to read my thought before I knew it myself and left the window ajar. She could not have known that the lock was stiff with disuse. "Will they hear? Will it disturb anyone?" "I don't care," I said recklessly. "Never mind them." She sat on the chair with the instrument and stroked the strings. A lute. I was used to professional entertainers on the television, and to recordings. I had certain expectations. This was different. Her voice was small, with a slight breathiness in the upper registers. The song was a ballad, the words of which suggested certain Elizabethan lyrics. But as she went over the golden brown fruitlike instrument, vibrant with color, friendly and actual, my nose stung and water slid down my cheek. She stopped. "Man, you must be hyper. It's a silly song, really." "It wasn't the song. It was -- I don't know -- I think it is the first time anyone sang to me. Just to me, really, I mean." Suddenly I realized how difficult it was to find words, speaking aloud. I had become inarticulate. "Oh." She sounded shocked, then -- was it pity? "I'm sorry." "You see, they don't let anyone in here without covering them with masks and gowns, and they disinfect everything." "Oh, no!" She scrambled to her feet. "I may have done something awful to you. I'd better go, quick." She backed toward the door. "I didn't know..." "I don't care," I said. "Whatever happens, it was worth it. Don't go, please." "I'll come again, I promise. Only I'll do it right next time." "I don't think they can disinfect you," I said, almost to. myself. She hummed with dangerous things. She peered cautiously around the door and slipped out. Her head reappeared; she whipped back and shut the telltale window. "Kwa Heri. I'll see you," she whispered. "Thank you," I whispered back. I wondered if my head ached. I could not be sure. The human female familiar to me was dressed in a starched noisy uniform and grammatically shared all experience with me. WE ate, bathed, slept. Other aspects of the human female were internal anatomy, front, rear side, and cross section, external form dictated by musculature within. Hair follicles, consisting of epithelial layers and oblong, polyhedral and downwardly imbricated cell layers, connective tissue, controlled by the arrector pili -- a glistening rain of amber satin... I'd had no idea. No one came in to see if I had come unglued. Therefore she had not been caught. She was the only real thing I had ever seen. I lfiere's eyes were focused on  the ampoule. "Doc?" "Mmmm?" "Still no hope?" "You probably know better than I. You read all the journals." "What about that vaccine of MacReady's?" "Oh, Philip, you don't have cancer. Hold still... there... if we were to give you anything that hadn't been tested and retested and tested again it could throw you off balance yet again. Don't you remember how long it took to get this far?... no, I suppose you don't." "If you'd let me see my case history..." "You know better than that." He stood, what I could see of his face showing worry and sympathy, his hands resting on the edge of the tank. "Well, how long did it take?" "Years. You kept going into shock; we barely managed to save you each time. If it hadn't been for Luther, who knew your case so well... you kept losing your ability to concentrate. Each time you forgot things, how to read. Eventually, we got past that. But you are not a subject for experiment." "For God's sake, Alfiere! Why did they save me?" He didn't reply. Always evasions. to get at my records. My symptoms resembled those found in hereditary disorders. My parents were dead, why couldn't they tell me? My mother had vanished forever into this very hospital before I came here, when Luther was taking care of me at home. My father had died afterwards in a car accident. They were beyond my reach of questioning or blame. Luther was dead. Whose pawn was #? The news program flickered soundlessly. The same scenes over and over again, soldiers, victims, smiles. The pawns of Asia had nothing to do with me. I swam in my amniotic fluid, a distorted fetus thrust back again and again into the womb. I hated him; he would not let me be born. JJDavid. "Lovely. You're a lucky man." "Yeah," he said, suddenly uncomfortable. "How you doing?" "As ever." I didn't really want to talk about Sue. "Doc says you been restless. What does that mean?" "I don't know. I'm' the same as usual." "Okay, okay." He made a soothing. or suppressive, gesture with his hand. "We're going up to the shore for a few days." "Have a good time. I want to sleep now." "Nakwenda, rafiki. I'll go quietly-" I had dreamed her. Oh. Lord, send me such dreams. Gone away docs not matter for dreams. It did matter. Mikhail called. He had lost his game. He was blissful: they were sending him to work on a farm with Sophia. He thanked me for my help. He was happy, preoccupied. Good-bye. Tomorrow my eyes would bleed. The scars on my body would weep. And my windows would be blind again. T he birch leaves turned golden. Patients in the garden began appearing in sweaters. I watched rain slide down the glass and listened to the scurrying hospital sounds. My blood pressure remained steady, my heart muttered on, my German accent improved. My dreams were brightly blue. I read little and forgot to watch the news. Waiting. She came again, shrouded in white linen, as cold as the grave, masked. "Hello," she said, reserved. The sharp streaks of vividness she had left in my dead air faded in the presence of this blank WE creature. We stared at one another over a wall of gauze. Pyramus and Thisbe. "They're pretty stuffy here, aren't they?" she said. "They wouldn't even let me bring the lute. I had some dawa for you and I thought they'd go into orbit." "Dawa?" I was puzzled. "In Swahili, it's medicine. Here it's stuff to make you feel good. I didn't bring smokes, I thought you probably couldn't. But dawa never hurt anybody." I remembered now, there were advertisements for some such thing, all with pictures of Davids and Sues looking dreamily pleased. "Thank you. It was kind of you lo try." "They sure made a furor," she  said. The starch in the white gown ! made her uncomfortable. It must be that. It was too quiet. I was helpi less; this was a social situation, new and fearsome. She would leave,  bored, and I would resume counting the slow minutes of my progress toward death. I had read about this anguish. I could hardly ask her to dance; I could think of nothing to say. Could I tell her she exalted and terrified me? Could I tell her that the lines-of-all-directions in which she moved had described a new universe in my roomworld, that she ' had made me maladjusted, restL less, that I felt the wings of a great I bird unfolding within me -- I who must never hatch? We stared in silence. Now she would say well-uh, like David, and melt away, and I would try to reseal myself in my  broken eggshell. The moment went  on and on, frozen in no-time. It was stalemate, no move possible. I wished she would spit out her well-uh and end it, but she rested inside that moment. The clock I moved jerkily through no-time, the non-mdment, as she reposed within it. relaxed, possessed of it. If notime were of no moment to her I would try in my despair to follow her into it. Slowly, I felt the rigidity of my fear as if it were a solid object and as I recognized it, it separated from me and merged gradually into the no-time, no longer frozen, but still. What she would do was of no importance. In now-time, we acquiesced. Time resumed. "That's better," she said. I was enriched and baffled. What had happened? But I had lost my fear for the time being. "What had you in sueh a state?" "You," I said without difficulty. "I was afraid you would go." She smiled. "I brought a song for you, that's why I was sorry I couldn't get the lute in here. You seemed to like it before." "Couldn't you sing a capellu?" "What?" "Without accompaniment." "Oh, yes, sure." She prowded the room, looking for the right place, like an animal seeking a bed. Finally she settled on the floor under the window. The rain had stopped. Sunlight flamed her hair. The modest, untheatrical sound enclosed me: a simple tune, simple words, seeping into an unsuspected circulatory system within me... stars, I know where to take a ship for Mars, I know where they keep old railroad cars. But I don't know where you live. The house in your mind may be gingerbread pie, Are there stone walls, is it open to the sky? A castle fort or a little paper shack? Won't you invite me back?... I watched her mouth moving behind the gauze. She looked up and grinned, her eyes squinting in gaiety. "I know where the mountains meet the sun, I know where to find a honey bun, I know where one and one is one; But I don't know where you live." "When I find out I'll tell you," I said at last. "Who knows, maybe I'll find out first," she said cheerfully, starting to her feet. But the hospital gown caught on her knee, and the graceful gesture of rising collapsed into a clumsy clamor; and such delight did she take in everything that her departure was surrounded by a great shout of laughter. When she had gone I drifted into reverie, the dials presumably steady. I forgot to look. When she came again, I said, "I love you." "Of course," she said. "I don't know how." "You're only learning." "I am afraid. I don't know what will happen. I don't understand anything about myself." She nodded. "That's how it is." "And you?" How brave I felt, asking. "I love," she said. "Me?" "Oh. yes." But her reply held her world of impersonal affection, no echo of the response for which I longed. How could it be there? "And David?" "Oh, yes." She was untouched in her person. I recognized, without experience, that whatever she did, her actions were rooted in innocence. And as I understood her matrix, I fancied that one who saw and treasured it might, someday, gently unlock her. Not I; I was too incomplete. I needed to know so much. I books for me, books on bila-bidii -- the popular no-effort African exercises; on yoga and isometrics, Coue and mental science. I began to move my wasted muscles carefully. From day to day I found that I could control some of the actions of my body. I felt myself growing strong -- yet, as I touched the incipient flexions of my shoulders, I knew my "strength" was approximately that of a caterpillar. I persisted. Blood pressure rose higher, and leveled off. The alarms receded. Dr. Alfiere relaxed. She came now and then, and we talked. I taught her to play chess which, after winning two or three games, she said was too tight. She taught me to play, not with boards and complex rules, but games of laughter, even the children's games I had missed. And she taught me to value the present moment. I loved her; but the fierce compulsion that I had expected, the physical hunger of which I had heard so much, had not come to me. We were companions, playmates, pets. As I was incomplete, our intimacy would be incomplete, and I could see no answer... But I was learning to wait, and learn. Then one day I managed to catch circuits were in use -- a plane crash had sent the hospital into overdrive. A printout of my treatment sheet slipped past the censor normally in place across requests from my room and certain things became clearer. I read chemistry texts. There w r ere continuous doses of tranquilizers in my air. in my food; prothrombin at the ready in case of need; antitestosterone, constantly; depression, to be treated with Amitriptyline, joy with chlorpromazine. My emotions were regulated along with my metabolism. Stasis was medically advisable for me. What an immense amount of equipment, money and planning had been, was still, devoted to keeping me quiet. How could I fend off these poisons automatically thrust on me by my environment? I was tired of quarreling with Alfiere; he seemed compelled by some immutable and universal law to maintain me in featurelessness. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. void without end... But I would end it. They had cultivated my mind; and I would outwit them, using the single tool they had left me. There was a kernel of sense among the excesses of cultism of w hich I had been reading. I practiced breathing. I tensed and relaxed the long flat muscles in my arms, feeling them grow tight and loose again. I learned to exercise without causing a single gauge to quiver, for without stress symptoms there would be no drugs to correct them. There were a few bad days, but they came further and further apart. Alfiere was relieved. I had adjusted, ceased to make w'aves. I told Sue my secret; she brought would not provide. And I wondered for what test I was gathering resources. I would know in time... meanwhile, I was enjoying my self. I t was a long time before David came again. He looked less the healthy outdoorsman. The weather had grown cold. He greeted me gruffly and stood, legs wide apart, saying little. He had a job now at the Country Club, not enjoying it so much, sorry he hadn't been in but very short of free time. I asked how Sue was. "She's all right." He stopped. "She -- she's not coming here any more." "Oh, why not?" "I don't want her to." He looked wary. The expression was familiar to me. There was something I was not to be told. "What do you mean?" "She's spending too much time in this room, is all." "If she doesn't mind, what difference does it make to you?" "Look, Phil, she's my girl. That's the difference." "Do you own her?" "Of course not." But he hesitated. "Can you say honestly that she doesn't want to?" "I don't want her to," he said stubbornly. "So you do think you own her." "Don't push me too hard, rafiki." "What, from here?" "I mean, like, she's not coming again and that's all." I was again helpless. Could he prevent her by force if he chose? I couldn't imagine Sue allowing this clod to regulate her comings and goings. "It's up to her. Whatever she says," I answered, with difficulty. "It's up to me, buddy, and don't you forget it. Who the hell do you think you are, lying there like a log and pretending you are somebody?" He had wanted to say that to me for a long time. Now that he had, he was terrified. "Well, who do you think I am, then?" I said very softly. "Never mind that. Just don't expect Sue again," he said doggedly. "You don't dare fight with me, do you?" "Fight? With you? You can talk rings around me, but fight? That's a laugh." "Well, well, here we are ready to battle over the female of the species. Locked horns and all that." "Just what do you mean by that?" he said, suffused. "You'll tight on my terms, friend." He stood, fists clenched, face red and tight. "I can not tight with you at all." he said, squeezing the words out. "Just shut up, will you?" "Why not?" "I can't explain." "Of course not. If you fight with me you will have to acknowledge me. If you avoid it you can fool yourself into thinking I am a thing and not a man." "You are a thing," he muttered. "Speak up, hero," I said. Any minute he would break. He was trembling with suppressed rage and frustration. Whatever it was he wouldn't ever say would finally be said if I kept pressing him. To my astonishment his words were not hurting me. I felt only that the confrontation was important. Something was becoming real. "You don't know so much," he said. "You are nothing. I could kill you without even touching you, without your ever knowing... if you don't shut up... "Sure you could. Just pull out the plug over there. Nothing easier. Why don't you, because I am not going to shut up." "All I have to do is stop the checks." "What?" "Nothing." Too late, he backed off, groping for the door. "You'll have to explain that or there's going to be hell to pay." "No." I pointed at the console. "I've all... Explain, damn you!" "I said, all I have to do is stop signing checks." His eyes shifted toward the console. He had never worked; he couldn't tell if the recorder was on. "What checks?" "The ones that pay for all this." "That's right." "Why? Why?" He fell disjointedly into the chair. It seemed far too small for all of him. Holding his head, staring dully at the floor, he said, "My father left money to take care of you. I have to sign for your bills every month." "I don't understand. Why?" "He made a mistake. He thought it was his fault that you -- that I -- " "Go on." "I can't." "Shall I call Altiere?" He rubbed at his mask. He gauze bellowed in and out with his rapid breathing. "You are my cousin. Did you know?" I shook my head. "Our fathers were friends. They married two sisters, our mothers. Godparents for each other and like that. We were born a few months apart... I was very sick." "You? What was the matter?" "I told you, I failed the premed course. I don't understand it -- it was something complicated, something to do with antibodies. My father told me and told me but not much of it stuck. But I know I was sick all the time." "What about me?" "You were all right." "Then what happened?" "Did you ever hear of the betathymus?" "Something. What has that got to do..." "My father discovered it." did turn it on. "Betathymus." -- A small organ located within the thymus gland which operates in the differentiation of the two types of lymphocytes found in the mammalian immunity system. Discovered # by Dr. Luther Allgaier. --  -- No further information available. -- I switched it off. "So?" "Well, I was sick... I kept catching infections. My father tried all sorts of treatment, and nothing worked for long. He finally figured he'd better do something drastic... He asked your parents if he could transplant some of your thymus to me. He said it was a simple operation and couldn't hurt you. All our blood groups and stuff were all right. Mother said it seemed like a gift." I fingered the small scar on my breast. "Well?" "He was wrong. They had to do it in a hurry, I was in trouble again. There wasn't anybody around to do it but my father, and he was nervous. Doctors aren't supposed to treat their own families... but they had to hurry." "And?" "He went ahead and did it." "What went wrong?" "I don't know. But you began to catch things. You started to poison yourself. He tried transfusions, drugs, everything. Nothing worked. But he couldn't undo it... so he felt he owed it to you to take care of you." "Yes." "It took a long time for me to get well. They were kind of upset, it seemed like it was all for nothing. But I was all right after a while; so then Dad concentrated on you. "He gave up surgery in order to find out what he could do for you. When he found the beta he realized what had gone wrong -- he had broken some connection in your system so that the cells which should have been learning to be antibodies got all screwed up... He talked about it a lot. "Then he died. He left you to me to look after. That's why he wanted me to be a doctor. But I was no good at it. I just couldn't..." "I see." I said. "Get out." He dragged himself out of the chair. "I can't fight you, see? It wasn't my fault. But I have to pay. He gave me what was yours." "Get out." I felt no anger, no pain, nothing. I was a thing after all, a man made thing. A pawn. David, strong and healthy, wore the body that should have been mine by birthright. Treachery -- my parents who assumed the right to dispose of me; Luther, whose professional achievement was torn from my future; my body, which had succumbed so easily. Luther had taken my mornings and my evenings, my companionships, friends, enemies and given them to his own son. I looked at my hands which had fashioned nothing, my white feet that had worn no shoes. David wore my shoes. David caught balls for me. David felt the skins of women against my skin... Sue. Oh, my disincarnate love, it is my flesh that acts with yours, while my heart and mind remain pickled here in storage... black squares and white alternates with uncompromising edges. David's white, mine black, Luther the Player. He had cared for my housing, given me the books that opened my mind, built my aquarium, talked with me. But we had never touched. Now I knew the desolation that had lain between us. Was this the way the world ended, by mistake? I can't remember how long I endured that motionless despair. I felt that I was spread out on a plateau beneath a merciless and glaring sun, eyelids pinned open; the blinding light of truth beat upon my defenseless consciousness. I had never been given the power of choice. It was decreed; I was the device by which Luther was tested and found wanting, by which his sins were visited on David. Passive, inert, I was gratuitously cursed with sight. I need not have been granted consciousness to function thus; why did they have to wake me to show me my impotence? I dreamed of the Norns, who have one eye among them, one vision for the past, the present, the future... In this stasis I kept my heart steady. I went through the motions of my exercises. I propelled my protoplasm as a zombie propels its carcass, mechanically. WE came and went, oiling the mechanisms. I verbs. I watched the news. All the faces of David moving thievish through battle and babble. Had they all left their consciences in brine, stored out of sight? My uncle, who had never called me nephew. Duty compelled these people to pay money to keep me. out of their sight and hearts. With a lever long enough one can move the world... a lever forged of links with other men... what was there for me to grasp? No thought, no act of which I was capable would move one atom of the world, one breath of anyone's life. They had isolated me with lies. Something whispered, "eppur' si muove... it moves, nevertheless." Once my window had been opened and I had survived. A woman pushed into my room. It was, oh anticipated misery, not Sue. A gray woman, correctly masked, expressionless black eyes, old. She trod heavily up to the tank, her step reluctant but resolute. She stared at me for a long time. I wondered if someone's mad visitor had got lost and wandered in. Stiffly she squatted in the chair, holding herself tightly upright in a corset of atmosphere. At last she broke the silence. "David has told you too much and not enough." Taken aback I did not reply. She heard my unvoiced asking. Still staring at me fixedly, she said in a harsh voice, "I am your aunt." "I see." "You see nothing. You have always been protected." No one had ever taken such a tone with me. No patina of "poor Philip" lay upon that voice, implacable, bitter. "What is it you want to tell me?" "Why can't you leave us alone? You have eaten life after life, you killed his father. Let David's little girl alone." "What are you talking about?" "He was only a baby. He's paid and paid for the mistake. He didn't make it." "I don't understand." She rose. I could see an irregular hem dangling under the white gown. She clung to the back of the chair as if her legs would not support her weight. "David has told you only the beginning. He says you grumble about your life -- you, who lie there in luxury, cultivating your cleverness. all your wishes attended to, while David fills his time as best he can... ever since he can remember you have been master of our lives. Only I can remember when you were not." I pulled myself up slowly until I was sitting. "I? I don't even know you. I am master of nothing, as you see." She laughed. "Don't ask for my pity. It is all gone." "But you accuse me. I have done nothing." "You have taken everything from us, everything... Perhaps I am asking your pity, for David." "David? Look at me. Look at him. He doesn't need my pity." "You still don't see. I will tell you a story. "Your mother and I were born at the end of the war in Europe. There was much suffering. Families were separated, everyone was moving all the time. We lost our people; they were never found. We were two young girls alone in a defeated country. Our life was camps, trains, soldiers, more camps. We owned nothing. We belonged nowhere. All we knew was confusion and hopelessness. "But we were lucky, we had each other. When there is only one person in your life that person is very important. Do you know that?" "How would I know? But I hear you." She looked at me very sharply, light flashing on her glasses. "We came to America, went to nursing school. We met your father and Luther. Then there were four of us in the world, caring for each other... they were so good to us. "We had a home for the first time. We chose it all together. No one came and pushed us out to a train. It was ours, safe." Her voice sank to a low chant. "There was love and hope, and you were born, fine baby, David was coming and there would be six of us. A real family. A real house. Ours... "Can you understand, it was a place for our feet?" Why was she asking me this? "David was born and everything went wrong. After Luther... afterward, there was nothing any more but you. He gave up his career, his dreams. David was supposed to carry on, make it up to you, and my sister. All he could think about was you. He never looked at David... and he forgot me. "David was only an ordinary boy. Luther drove him; David was never good enough for you, never tried hard enough. It broke the boy's heart... Luther was obsessed. He wouldn't let David learn a trade, only medicine. And when David failed it killed Luther... eighteen years trying to correct his mistake, eighteen years, all the love, all the hope, gone as if it had never been. He couldn't do any more for you and he died." "But this is your story. It has nothing to do with me." "What is the matter with you? This is what your existence has meant for us. how can you say it has nothing to do with you?" "It wasn't my doing, I didn't even know." She was very quiet for a moment. "Do we ever know what we have done?" She turned her back on me and looked out the window. "I remember Luther walking round and round this hospital, looking for the best view for you. He would go a few steps, stop and look in all directions, testing the scenery from all the angles..." She turned to face me. "Your mother became pregnant again. We were afraid for her; your father was distracted and didn't attend to his business. Elsa came here suddenly. The baby was incompatible with her body. They died. Your father broke down then. He was ill for a long time. They let him drive too soon, or perhaps he had had enough. Who can tell? "Luther sold our house. We lived in an apartment then. There was no view... always, don't tell Philip, don't let Philip suspect, take care of Philip, protect Philip, always Philip... "Why didn't someone tell me after he died?" "For shame!" It burst from her in a long broken whisper. "I told him it wasn't fair on us. If you were clever you ought to know, but Luther wouldn't have it. It was forbidden... he made David visit you so you would have someone to play with." "Why didn't you come?" Her eyes closed behind the rimless glasses. "I was tired, boy. I resented every moment of your life. And I was afraid. "Such a small thing, such a little mistake, a tiny ignorance... and the waste, the waste. The people Luther could have saved; David's future; all because of you." "But you cannot blame me." "I cannot blame you. But I hate you." In the silence, black and white squares merged, combined in the gray of my aunt's face. She stood quietly, emptied of her years of anger, weary. The day by day struggle to cope with her ordinary son and her extraordinary husband had worn her out. Her hatred was not for me -- how could it be? She did not know me -- but for the hateful burden of my welfare. "I am glad you have told me now," I said. "Now I am afraid," she cried, shrinking against the chair, the armor of her bitterness all dissipated. "What have I done? But you, and David's girl... you have cost him so much... Luther would be so angry with me..." "He is dead. Aunt. I am alive, and I thank you." "I don't know. I am so tired." "Go home," I said gently. "Tell David to come and see me later. I need a little time." She shook her head vaguely and shuffled out. N ot pawns, kings; the protective pieces moving blindly over a board gone indistinct. I had forgotten to ask her name. I pulled myself out of the fluid to my knees, slowly and without grace, resting frequently until my unpracticed muscles adjusted to each ceptors, attached to me by rubber leeches, stretched through the liquid as I hauled my reluctant flesh to a standing position -- clinging to the edges of the tank, trembling, but on my feet. Then I reclined gradually back into the supporting fluid. The dials had swung to their upper limits. My blood pressure gauge lurched, rocked then, as I relaxed, sank back to its normal position. Connections... I looked at the pseudopods of the machine, fitted with measuring and injecting devices. I had been so disconnected; and hidden in my isolation had been real and sentient fellow-creatures, masked. Outside the window in the fresh and poisonous air, patients were taking slow steps along the paths, breaking minor blood vessels as they healed, but healing faster than they ruptured... strangers bumped into each other, taking no notice of their white corpuscles' rush to shattered capillaries at the point of contact... friends gripped hands, bruising one another in affection... lovers embraced, sacrificing the integrity of their bodies in passion... Outside, away from the womb, from prothrombin, antestosterone, confusion, guilt... David, my aunt, who also knew what it was to be forgotten; and they were as real as golden Sue who found so much to love. I had outgrown sterility. I was intoxicated with the real. The wall of lies had fallen, and I would be born. I would teach my ramshackle body all that it was capable of learning and begin. Even if I could only move one square, even if my first breath of nativity were to be all there was, I must reach for something to remember.  When Death has become the Final Arbiter, the ultimate weapon is H obson looked up at the bright blue sky of Earth. In days gone by he had always managed to see in it a kind of hope. Seeing no hope in it now, he brought his mind back to business and tried for the third time that day to get his talent working. The moment of mental relaxation had helped. At last he was able to get started. The part of his mind that did such things reached ahead, while Hobson plodded on near the center of the column of irregular infantry. An area of land about two miles across, and lying a mile or so ahead of the column, stood out from its surroundings like an island. Luxuriantly green with normal spring vegetation, the tract contrasted sharply with the background of irradiated and diseased countryside nois. There were many other such islands in the world. Hobson could see several to the right or left of where he marched. But the one ahead was unusually large and well preserved; also, it occupied a strategic spot overlooking a highway junction and a river. So the place was now the target of Hobson's probing mind and the objective of this two-hundred-man force of New American infantry. In command was "Colonel" -- Hobson always remembered to include the quotation marks in his thoughts -- LaPorte. Hobson could tell that approximately a hundred human souls occupied the island ahead. He could not tell what they were seeing or saying or planning, but he knew they were there and what emotions they felt. Right now, obviously, they were unaware of the approaching attackers, for their emotional average was biased at a level of secure calm so high as to be almost unknown in Hobson's world. Up near the point of the column, waiting for news from his pet psiman, LaPorte turned his head to look back impatiently. Since the war everyone had begun to take for granted the existence of wild talents like those of Hobson. #'heir owners generally lacked the intangibles needed for leadership, but they could be sure of a relatively safe and respected place in any organization. His own skin was not much. Still, it was about all that counted with Hobson any more. To protect it, he stayed with New America. But -- New America! Every time Hobson thought of the name, he wanted to spit. In his opinion a better name would be New Third Reich. And if he spoke that latter name aloud, no doubt LaPorte and the rest of the leaders would take it as a compliment. They were a gang of determined cutthroats w ho, during the past year, had begun to extend their power across the sector that had once been called the Middle West -- an area still under threat of attack from the remnants of the Asiatic forces scattered over the west coast and the Rocky Mountains. So w hen Hobson could not keep himself completely from thinking, what he did think was bitter. Some few men must always, at any cost, indulge their predilections for fightuig mid hating -- even now when so lew people are left anywhere. And ; folks like me. talented or not. are drugged helplessly along, trying to survive... Aware of LaPorte's restless gaze, Hobson wiped his brain clean of distractions, willed it to fullest sensitivity. It registered that in the lush target area, the hundred inhabitants still seemed unaware that twice their number of armed desperadoes were trudging toward them along this once roaring superhighway where grass now grew through cracks in the slab. They were peaceful, up ahead. Optimistic. Hobson wondered briefly if a religious ceremony were in progress: but he received no emanations of exaltation, no unison of feeling. It was just that the average levels of cheer and hope remained high. LaPorte looked around again. With a pang of nervous self-contempt, Hobson walked faster, to reach the head of the column. He passed between ragged tiles of men in whom he rarely could detect fears or hopes above the animal level. Men armed with weapons ranging from the carbines of the late lamented United States Army down to pitchforks and butcher knives. Men who wore as their uniform a look of savagery. Men out for booty and women. Men who did not much like Hobson but wanted to have him around and fought to keep him alive -- because of the insurance he gave against dreaded ambush. Their heads turned with interest as he hurried forward past them to make his report. The colonel had left his self-designed insignia of rank well back within the already subjugated territory: less danger, that way. of being assassinated by some countryside lout. He was a fairly large man, bigger than Hobson, with glasses and an habitually mild look. You might take him for a storekeeper or a clerk until you listened to him talk for a while. A hobson opened his mouth to report, he felt individual patterns of surprise and alarm coming from up ahead, as if the New American scouts had made contact with local look-outs. When LaPorte heard Hobson's information, the colonel waved his column off the highway to a halt. Within a minute, the scouts' arm-waves from ahead confirmed the contact. LaPorte thought over what Hobson told him. "Only about a hundred of 'em, hey? All right, we proceed as planned." Hobson hoped that the locals had a dozen machine-guns and would tight like fanatics. He could tell that many of them were women and children, and he knew what would happen if New r America carried the day. The sound of a shot rose from the island's near edge. "Missed," Hobson muttered. He had felt the nearly simultaneous start of three hundred people but no individual shock of pain or impact. LaPorte now signaled for a cautious advance. Moving forward at the colonel's side, through the scanty cover of some roadside weed-mutation, Hobson walked erect. Lately he was not much afraid of bullets. But he was still afraid of New America. If he tried to betray them, or tried to run away and was caught... Hobson trembled, remembering past victims of LaPorte's vengeance. Perhaps more than he hated LaPorte, Hobson hated himself -- abhorred himself for what he had become. This self-loathing was growing every day. Hobson feared that soon it might be strong enough to turn some awful balance inside him. The attacking formation crept toward the wooded island, moving along the stunted hedgerows and eroded gullies of this once fertile country. A belt of land around the island was normal enough for cultivation. Hobson saw rows of corn sprouting there. A scout crawled back out of the quiet woods to find the colonel. "Looks like they're pulling back. Chief. Wanta go straight on in?" LaPorte turned to Hobson. "What are they up to?" Hobson reached for the natives. He could not find the courage to try to save them with a lie; he hoped that somehow they might save themselves. "They're withdrawing, all right... but I don't think they mean to run very far. It's funny, they don't seem to expect any fighting, either. It's as if they felt protected in some way." "They don't mean to fight? Good. Push on, then," the colonel ordered. "Maybe they're some religius nuts." The colonel had once conquered a convent in Wisconsin. The people ahead did not feel more or less religious than average to Hobson. But he did not comment. For some reason this tiny rebellion of withheld advice only made him hate himself all the more. If only his kind of "talent," as it was popularly called, could be used to kill! He would get rid of LaPorte and anyone like him within striking distance. Hobson did believe that ultimately evolution might bring psi to effectiveness as a weapon, and maybe in the not too distant future. After all, mutation was sure to continue at a high rate. There was plenty of radiation about, left over from the cataclysmic wars. And the early rays in less than a generation had produced ten thousand persons with acute psi powers for each one such person known before the wars. The so-called talent had been analyzed to a degree, though science and research were little practiced these days. Something about a sixth sense, something theorized to tuned in on other people's brain waves or other electromagnetic emanations. Its efficacy diminished sharply with distance, of course. But it was pretty useful to pick up emotions, on the basis of which predictions of behavior often could be made. Actual thoughts remained difficult to read except as they affected emotional states. A receptor rather than a projecting mechanism, it gave to some talented ones nevertheless the power to slightly move very small objects reposing a few feet away. That phenomenon fortified Hobson's belief that some day the psi talent might develop into a forceful means of defense or offense. So far, nothing of the sort had happened. Hobson felt helpless and hopeless . T he invaders had reached the island. They spread cautiously through its woods. There was no opposition, no sight or sound of the local population. Here and there stretched empty slit trenches and deserted strong points; with a few firearms these people could have put up a good fight. But Hobson sensed they had only moved off deeper among the trees. There they waited, and felt -- almost safe. The village lay well within the island beside a small stream. The huts, mostly of concrete block and banked-up earth, had rifle slits for defense, but they were unmanned. Walks and vegetable gardens filled the spaces among the huts. The locals had built well and tended carefully -- but had abandoned everything immediately to the invaders. A few of the buildings were roofed or doored with sheets of metal, some of which were oddly curved. Acting as a garden fence were enormous blades like those of the rotor of a troop-carrying helicopter. "Hey, Colonel. Look here!" A man was pointing at a thin metal door. Peeling paint revealed part of a vast yellow star -- the Asiatics' aircraft insignia. "The damn gooks!" Men looked about them with the alert anger of those who meet respected rivals in new territory. "It don't figure. Colonel. Our 'copter guys said the people they saw here were white and a few black." "Maybe the gooks keep'em as slaves." "Them Asiatics wouldn't build a place like this!" That last argument, Hobson thought, was convincing. He had seen an Asiatic settlement or two, and they had looked like concentration camps. The huts and gardens of this village showed too much individuality to be under Asiatic authority. But why were they undefended? LaPorte, with a look of growing concern, was counting helicopter blades. There were enough of them to have carried in a considerable number of the Asiatics. LaPorte looked closely at Hobson, who shrugged and shook his head. The people he could sense hiding confidently in the woods seemed not at all like yellow troops. The colonel set most of his men in a defensive perimeter around the village, then ordered a small crew into the huts to check for booby traps. The doors were standing open. Inside the huts there were some evidences of hasty departure but little of value had been left in sight. LaPortc temporarily forbade looting; it could be done in an organized way after the locals were definitely taken care of. "Hey, Colonel, we caught one of 'em! Says he wants to talk to you." Hobson focused on the thin little man being led into the village between two New Americans. The captive's fear was obvious even to normal senses. "Wants to talk, does he?" LaPorte looked the prisoner up and down. "Well, I won't mind if he talks." LaPorte led the way into a hut already searched for booby traps. He relaxed in a chair, his boots among the dishes on a table. Hobson entered reluctantly and took a stand at one side of the single room, hoping desperately that this would be a short and mild interrogation. The heavy window shutters were open, letting in spring air and sunshine. The prisoner pushed stumbling into the hut by the soldiers was about forty years old. not starvedlooking but naturally scrawny. His clothes were not worth stealing. His gaze slid away from Hobson's, fell to the floor before LaPorte's. One big New American, a dedicated sadist, waited in the doorway behind the man. LaPorte pretended to yawn and stretch. "Where are your people?" "Off -- off there in the woods. Hhiding. They'll come back p-pretty soon. I -- I have to talk to you first." The prisoner was all swamping waves of fear, which was natural enough -- or was it? It did not feel to Hobson quite like fear of physical pain. Hobson kept alert for any mass change in the emotional climate outside the hut. LaPorte made the noise he used for a laugh. "You have to talk? Are you the leader, then?" "No, no." The little man radiated positive disgust at the suggestion, a negation of ambition as strong as any Hobson had ever detected. "No, they just -- sent me to talk. My name's Joe Norwood." "Well. I'm just delighted, Joe Norwood. Did they send you to talk to the Asiatics when they came here?" "Yes." "When you scared off those gooks, which way did they go?" And LaPorte guffawed. N orwood sneaked a look over his shoulder at the bulky, grinning guard. "Please -- look -- let me tell what they said to tell, first. Then I'll answer anything I can." " v vho's they?"  nod over a thin shoulder. "Some -- some of the folks back there. They're smarter about things than I am." "All right. What's this great message?" "I'm supposed to tell you about -- life." Norwood made the word important. LaPorte's eyes flicked over to Hobson, who made the agreedupon signal that everything was as it seemed, so far as he could tell. Hobson could nearly always detect the emotional traces of a lie, or the odd and unnamed things that accompanied the use of a psi power. Norwood spoke quickly, trying to get out his message. "Life as a whole -- it spreads out, you know. It tries to fill every bit of space everywhere on Earth. Some -- some guys think one reason men have brains is so they c?n spread life further some day, out to other planets and -- and stars and places." The message had been memorized -- in essence, not word for word -- and delivery of it was a labor of love. Norwood stood taller as he spoke it. "Once -- let me see -- once in England a long time back there was a kind of beetle. Birds were its natural enemy, but it was just the same color as the bark of the trees it lived on. The birds had a hard time seeing it; they couldn't kill off all the beetles, or even most of them." The colonel was receiving philosophy and beetles with mounting irritation. But with a certain satisfaction, too. Probably he was now convinced that he faced a community of sweet talking religious nuts who had sent this fanatic to convert him. "But then the factories came," said the fanatic. "And the smoke darkened the trees, and the birds could see the beetles and eat them." LaPorte said: "So the beetles sent one fruity beetle to talk to the birds. Get to the point, hey?" The guard behind Norwood laughed obsequiously. Norwood was fearfully determined. "No, no. Some of the beetles, maybe one in a thousand, had always been darker than the others. Now the dark ones matched the bark and the light ones didn't and finally the -- uh -- the whole species of beetle was dark. Only one in a thousand was light. I'm not telling this right!" Norwood looked around as if for help, clenching his thin hands. "I've got to convince you. They said I might be able to!" LaPorte now looked like an actor in a comedy doing the slow-burn bit, sitting there with a pasted-on smile. But he was not acting and none of it was comedy to Hobson. He had the sickening thought that this was going to be a bad interrogation. Hobson doubted that he could stand to watch it. Soon it would begin, the real questioning: How many men have you? How many guns? Gasoline? Ammunition? Food? Where? And the beating would start, to make sure the answers were right, and just on general principles. What can I do about it, Hobson moaned to himself. Nothing, his rising anger answered; you have no guts to do anything, you miserable, crawling... "What happened to the Asiatics, you obscenity?" LaPorte was smiling. Hobson could smell the cesspool boiling up behind that happy face. Norwood closed his eyes for a moment, radiating fear to Hobson, but also determination and a tremulous anger. "The yellow soldiers came here and said we'd have to obey them. Right at the start they hurt some of us, for no reason at all... Let me try to say it this way. Life defends itself, see? Every way it can. Every kind of animal has some defense against its natural enemies. A man has no natural enemy except other men, the brains of other men. But now some men are a danger to all of life!" Sudden suspicion Hared in the colonel's mind; his boots thumped to the floor. "Can you read emotions?" he barked. "Predict reactions? Raise fires?" He ran quickly through the short list of known psi talents. "Can anybody here do these things?" "No, no." Norwood shook his head. He glanced over at Hobson and seemed about to smile, as if finally guessing Hobson's function. Now Hobson, in his increasing shame and self-disgust, would have dared to lie to LaPorte. But he could think of no lie that would help Norwood or his people. Hobson signaled honestly that the prisoner was telling the truth. LaPorte leaned forward in his chair. "Now this is your last chance to stay in one piece, mister. Talk straight and tell me where the gooks went. We know they were here." Tell him, tell him. pleaded Hobson in his own mind. If this turns into a bad interrogation, I won't be able to stand by. I'll go wild and get myself killed. N orwood, cringing but still determined. recited memorized words like a last desperate incantation against evil. "You have to listen! Life defends itself against the power of one human brain by using another human brain. Life doesn't care about individuals -- it feeds on itself all the time anyway. Uh -- a feedback set-up -- " LaPorte's anger passed critical mass. But as he opened his mouth to speak there came a cry from outside the hut. The cry of a woman in pain or trouble: "Joe, Joe!" The dominant emotions out there were not those of an attacking force, which Hobson would have noticed sooner, but an intense interlocked web of fear and lust, hate and guilt, emanating from a handful of people. Norwood spun around to face the open doorway of the hut. The massive guard blocked his way like a stone column, grinning, pushing a pistol barrel up under Norwood's chin. But the little man, and Hobson, could see past the guard to the outside. There a young woman struggled in the grip of two soldiers who were dragging her into the village. Again she cried out: "Joe!" "My wife," whispered Norwood. He broadcast despair, and rising fury. "Watch what comes next," grunted LaPorte, his good cheer returning. Hobson knew suddenly, with a detached wonder at his own final courage, that he had had it, that he was casting his own small vote here and now against the New Third Reich. His fingers closed on his pistol. His gaze was on the middle button of Colonel LaPorte's jacket. But from the corner of his eye, Hobson saw Norwood reaching up for the guard's gun. Hobson hesitated, thinking: shoot the guard first, he has his gun drawn... then shoot LaPorte... then remember to save one bullet. Norwood hardly looked capable of making a quick forceful grab and he was not attempting one, just reaching up his hand... and time stood still for Hobson as something new to him came in a great wave against his extra sense, something he could compare to the psi he knew only as the ocean tide might be compared to the wake of a motorboat. Hobson stood frozen, his gun half drawn, watching the brawny guard topple stiffly backward, relaxing his grip on his weapon as Norwood's fingers closed on it. Hobson thought the fabric of the universe was tearing apart. He could only wait like an awed child, vaguely aware of Norwood ignoring him, ignoring LaPorte, Norwood fumbling inexpertly with the gun and stalked out of the hut, his small chin jutting in anger. Men's voices began to yell outside the hut, first near, then far away. There were no shots, no sounds of fighting. The tide of -- something -- receded slowly from Hobson's perception. The fabric of the universe was stable and familiar once more. The sun shone brightly through the open windows of the hut. A fly cruised in, then unconcernedly left through the doorway. Everything was quiet. Even LaPorte. Any awareness of the colonel had been blasted from Hobson's consciousness by the awesome feat he had witnessed, but now he forced himself to turn. LaPorte lay back dead in his chair, apparently unwounded, eyes wide, mouth slack, the pasted smile gone with everything that had been behind it. His right hand was clutching at his gun holster. The quiet was profound. Staring at the dead figure, Hobson tried to comprehend. His extra sense was still numbed by whatever had happened, as his eyes might have been dazzled by glaring light. He could not tell what was going on outside. He found that, for the moment at least, he did not much care. He finally finished drawing his pistol, looked at it, then dropped it back into the holster. He walked out slowly into the sun, stepping over the motionless legs of the fallen guard. There were dead New Americans scattered everywhere, quite a number of them. Joe Norwood stood a few yards from the hut, his arms around his wife, his face on her shoulder, the gun hanging in his hand as if forgotten. "Joe, it was my fault, not yours," the woman was saying in low, comforting tones. "I wanted to stay near you. But I wasn't careful enough, and they found me... it's all right, Joe. It was their own fault." She noticed Hobson as he walked slowly toward them. She fell silent a moment, then went on consoling. "A lot of them ran away, Joe. And here's one who didn't mean you any harm. He can join us now." Norwood looked around and Hobson saw tears in his eyes. Hobson stood there waiting, not really expecting to go on living from one moment to the next. "I wanted to explain things,"  said Norwood, staring fnto space. "I just came right out and told the yellow soldiers, but they didn't believe me. This time I tried to go slow, give the whole picture, but it didn't help. If only I could talk better. If only I could explain!" "Explain about -- you?" Hobson asked. Suddenly it came to him that he was beginning to under' stand. He felt tired and shaky, now that it seemed he might be going on living. Norwood spoke in a dry whisper. I "Anyone who decides to do some! thing that will hurt me, dies. Dies right there and then." He looked at Hobson. "When I was a boy, I saw another kid draw back his arm to throw an icy snowball." He screamed at Hobson suddenly, "When I was five, my father tried to spank me!" "Hush, Joe. Hush. It's all right now." Norwood's eyes wandered again. "I would have killed myself before now, I think. But the war came. A lot of people have died, trying to hurt me... so now I think I do some good. I hope to God I do some good." The woman stroked him. "You do, Joe. You keep us all safe." Hobson looked up at the bright blue sky of Earth, and saw in it a kind of hope.  T he annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science are always exhausting affairs, but the # meeting in San Frhncisco was particularly nerve racking. To begin with, the TripleA. S. filled every meeting room in three large hotels. At every session, morning and afternoon for a week, I was faced with the problem of choosing just one from a menu of panels that included: the energy crisis; report by the Skylab scientist-astronauts, with Werner von Braun as an added attraction; Dr. Immanual Velikovsky presenting his theories for critical discussion by Big Science after # years of rejection; reports on the agricultural revolution; Carl Sagan, James Van Allan, and Bruce Murray on the new portraits of the planets; ecology and pollution; exo-biology and the Viking Project; past and future efforts to detect signals from extra-terrestrial intelligences; fusion power; alternatives to fusion power; Remo Ruffini, Robert Kraft, and Stirling Colgate on super-novae and collapsed objects; and on, and on, and on. To make the decisions harder, I was invited to press conferences where we could discuss the new findings with the panelists -- but the press meetings went on at the same time as other presentations. How do you decide whether (#) to get involved in an argument between Rusty Schweikert and the Skylab astronauts on one side, and the devotees of black box space exploration on the other, or (#) to attend Bruce Murray's lecture on Venus seen from Mariner? During the week I stayed with Poul and Karen Anderson, which was probably a mistake. The mistake wasn't that they live on the other side of the Bay and so we had to get up at #: # every morning lest we miss something important beginning at #:#. No, the problem was far worse -- after hearing those panels, how could we get to bed at a decent hour? We had to sit up all night in discussion. After all, we saw most of what we thought we knew -- and many of our hard-science stories -- go crashing down in flames. It's a brand new universe, one we're only barely acquainted with. B efore someone gets the wrong idea, it wasn't Velikovsky who brought down our comfortable universe and solar system. The Velikovsky panels were strangely disappointing. To begin with they were more like debates than scientific discussions. Dr. Velikovsky even had a cheering section whose applause probably embarrassed him. The majority of those attending the Velikovsky sessions seem to have come away with mixed feelings. Most scientists now believe Velikovsky is neither crank nor crackpot, but they still think he is most wrong. His views and their treatment by Carl Sagan and others is worth a column, but this isn't it. For now, it's enough to say he didn't concede an inch, and he left with few converts. No, our understanding of the universe is changing more rapidly now than at any time in human history because this is the first generation to have the equipment to obtain the necessary information. Consider the planets as an example. As Carl Sagan put it during the meeting, "Not very long ago planetary astronomers were safe. We could make any speculation we liked and never be found out, and there were plenty of surprising speculations. I made some of them." (In his book with Shklovskii. Intelligent Life in the Universe. Dell, #, Dr. Sagan argued that the moons of Mars might be artificial satellites.) "Now the spacecraft hang like swords of Damocles over the heads of the astronomers, and you can see on their faces a strange amalgum of fear and hope as the probes approach their destinations. In this decade the boundaries of realism have been pushed back. It is a decade of wonder." He went on to prove it by demolishing our previous models of the planets. Science fiction readers are getting used to the "new Mars" and "new Venus", but even those change with every analysis of the Mariner data. And Mars and Venus aren't the only casualties of the spacecraft. It is now seriously thought that the Moon may have been formed inside the orbit of Mercury, although no theory has yet been advanced to explain how it got out here to be captured by Earth. T hen Poul Anderson and I watched Jupiter come crashing down with nearly every science fiction story about the giant planet as James Van Allen told of the results of Pioneer #'s encounter. To start with, it doesn't seem we'll be using bases for ships, or for colonies as I suggested two columns ago. You can't get to them -- at least not alive. Out to Callisto and beyond, the radiation belts around Jupiter are so intense that it will take many feet of shielding for man to survive. Unless someone invents a spacedrive several orders of magnitude better than any we have on the drawing board the weight penalty of shielding makes it inconceivable that we can fly men anywhere near Jupiter. Dr. Van Allen estimated # planetary radii as the closest safe distance. Goodbye to "Call me Joe," and "Meeting with Medusa", and a host of other favorites old and new. And yet -- the fusion scientists are very hopeful now. Perhaps a new kind of space drive is closer than we think, See the August issue of Worlds of If for Dr. Robert Ensman's sciencefact article, " Torchships -- Now!" Ed . There was more to the planetary sessions. On July #, #, the first Viking probes will land on Mars. They contain an ingenious system for testing and detecting life on Mars, if there is any there. The sites chosen for the Vikings, by the way, correspond to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the entrance to Yellowstone National Park -- would Martian probes arriving at those points find life on Earth? But think about that date. About two years from the time this magazine is on the stands. Ten years ago the top planetary scientists could seriously wonder if Phobos and Diemos were artificial, and the Grand Canal more than a poetic image. Two years from now, we'll have data about Martian life. Not guesses, hard data. As I write this, the Mariner probe has rounded Venus and is on its way to Mercury. As of now, we know almost nothing about Mercury. I have just finished a story about an expedition to Mercury and don't dare send it to my agent because by the time this article is printed the probe will have arrived. In the short time between my writing this and your reading it we will have learned more about Mercury than during the entire sweep of human history. Meanwhile, Pioneer #I is on its way to Jupiter for our second look, arriving this December -- and after it passes it will probably be headed for Saturn. By # we'll have our first close look at the ringed planet and its giant moon Titan. A few years ago we knew nothing about the rings. Now we've bounced radar off them, to find that they're not all dust at all, but have chunks several meters in diameter within them. In five more years we'll have a close look. In # we can have a close look at Uranus. The technology to send a probe there already exists. In other words, the information curve has never been steeper. In the past decade we may have learned as much about ourselves and our universe as mankind learned in the we've been around. Even that time span changes like dreams -- the first meeting was a presentation by Richard Leaky, Director of the Kenya National Museum. Leaky believes he has a skull, ##, that years ago. This published date has been disputed, but during his lecture Leaky announced a new find, #. He stated that "If # bothers you, # will horrify you." Paleontology and space science, biology and physics, in every field we are learning faster than the publishers can get their textbooks revised. Take earth sciences, for example. We've only begun to examine the Skylab data. There are thousands of photographs and instrument readings that no one has even looked at, much less analyzed. For the first time we have a real-time history of a solar flare, because the astronauts were able to point their cameras and instruments at it. As one astronomer pointed out, that one little splash-up, a minor thing and quite common on the Sun, produced enough energy to run the US A memorial anthology in tribute to the father of modern American science fiction, Edited by Introduction by This book is a unique memorial-the thirteen stories in especially for this volume by Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov. Alfred Bester, Hal Clement, Theodore R. Cogswell, L. Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, Harry Harrison, Mack Reynolds. Clifford D. Simak. George #. Smith. Theodore Sturgeon, and , Theodore L. Thomas. Each with an introductory tribute to John Campbell. # #, now .it your bookstore T#T economy at present rates for a The fusion scientists called their panel "Imitating the Sun." F our years ago I wrote an article on the coming energy crisis in the United States. As part of the research I visited the best known fusion research laboratories and asked what they would do with more money. They really had no good answers. No longer. Now they can do three times as much profitable research, because now they know at least twice as much about fusion as they did four years ago. What else should we look at? Returning to Skylab, it wasn't only the solar scientists who were excited. Earth resources and earth sciences took a quantum jump from Skylab, and may take another when the unexamined data brought back is analysed. The materials-research people were ready to do handsprings over the crystal growths obtained in the space environment. Ultra-pure materials, thin film development, biologically produced substances -- there were surprises in every experiment, and all were exciting. I asked Dr. Harry charge of materials research conducted by Skylab, if among the as yet unanalysed data there might lurk something as significant for everyday society as was the discovery of the transistor. "I can't rule that out," he said. He was trying to be cautious, but it wasn't possible. "I'm certain that space materials-research can be as fundamentally important as any discovery in history." Is it any wonder that the Andersons and I were unable to knock off for sleep at night? Every one of these developments deserves an article as long as this one. I apologize to the readers for this grasshopper presentation, and I only hope I can convey a small part of the excitement going on in scientific circles. It's not only the discoveries we've just made. Nearly everywhere was the feeling that the best is yet to come -- and we'll live to see it. Consider collapsed objects in space, and particularly the black hole. Black holes are theoretically possible in Newtonian physics; but they were first described as a theoretical anomoly lurking in Einstein's General Relativity. No one paid much attention to them. However, back in the thirties Fritz Zwicky of Cal Tech's Mount Wilson organized a search for supernovae, and argued for their importance in understanding the universe. In the forties J. Robert Oppenheimer did some basic theoretical work on black holes and neutron stars, and there began to be a feeling that such things might exist. Unfortunately, there wasn't any way to locate them, or to study them if someone told you where they might be. Radio astronomy didn't exist. X-ray astronomy, which requires instruments in space above the earth's atmosphere, was not even possible. Then, in #, British radioastronomers discovered something entirely unsuspected, something absolutely new; the pulsars. These incredible objects emit a brief but very intense burst of radio energy at precise intervals on the order of a second. No one knew what they were and as late as #I Robert C. Haynes's, in his excellent survey of the space sciences, found no concensus among astronomers. They might, he said, be any of a half dozen things -- or even something unknown. In San Francisco last week there wasn't anyone who wasn't sure that pulsars are neutron stars. There was even agreement on how they are born. This too is worth a complete article. The point is that the conference was organized by Fritz Zwicky, and although he died two weeks before the meeting, he had lived to see the whole story from supernova to black hole known and understood. O nce again, it is not because this generation is more intelligent than past ones. We only have better tools to work with. We have computers to analyze incredible quantities of data. We have instruments which will detect the almost infinitesimal slowing down of the pulsars, one of the crucial facts indicating that they are very probably neutron stars. There was more, however. Ten years ago, black holes were a theoretical construct attracting attention but not taken very seriously. Now most astronomers are agreed that we are actually observing one. Well, by definition you can't observe a black hole, because the escape velocity from the hole is greater than the speed of light. No signal or information can come out of the hole. But we can observe the hole's effects on a companion, and that's what is happening right now. Many astronomers are convinced that Cygnus X-l is a binary with a black hole component. Ten years ago the holes were pure theory. Now, Remo Ruffini of Princeton can seriously announce that he believes there are hundreds galaxy alone. Moreover, we may be detecting energy from the amount of collapse. We may be witnessing the deaths of stars. Many of our key observations are accidental. When Congress ratified the Treaty of Moscow, which bans nuclear tests in the atmosphere and in space, a condition was attached. The United States must unilaterally be able to detect any space weapons test. This brought about the practical birth of x-ray astronomy, and even now the data comes in like quotations on the stock market ticker. To detect weapons tests we launched the Vela satellites. These search for x-ray events in space, and record the time and source of x-ray bursts lasting longer than a second or so. They hadn't been up long when they began to chatter. Something out there was putting out bursts of x-ray energy, and a lot of it. It didn't take long to decide they couldn't possibly be nuclear tests. From Vela's inception we have observed about half a dozen significant x-ray events each year. They are scattered throughout the sky, so that it is certain they are comparatively close -- tens to hundreds of lightyears, no more. Were they farther away, thousands of parsecs, they would cluster around the ecliptic, and they don't. That many events in such a comparatively small volume of space means that in the galaxy as a whole there are an incredible number. The bursts are short, and they come on and go off abruptly. Ruffini believes they may be the result of the very moment of collapse, the instant at which a white dwarf falls inward to become a neutron star or black hole. Meanwhile, both here and in Europe, incredibly sensitive gravity wave detectors are under construction. It will not be long before .we can compare the timing of the x-ray events with the arrival of gravity waves. Once again we are about to learn at least as much as we know; another doubling of knowledge. A generation of wonder. It is a unique generation, as many of the panelists pointed out. Fifty years ago -- even ten years ago -- we couldn't study the basic structure of the universe because we hadn't the tools. We could not answer even the simplest questions about the solar system; we couldn't get out there. Fifty years from now we won't be able to study the basics because they will already be known. Our grandchildren will learn in grade school what it will be our privilege to discover. The information curve may never be steeper than it is now. be in New York. It promises to be as exciting as this year's, with an added bonus. One of my frantic meetings in San Francisco was with writer participation in the New York meeting. Jerry is this year's President of Science Fiction Writers of America. Ed. The information flow to science has become so great that no one understands what it all means -- not just what it means for science, but what it means for all of us. Perhaps science fiction writers can help. I probably won't get any sleep that week.  Reality wears many faces, some beautiful, some grim. If only we could choose! H er husband Howard and wife Karen were snoring softly on the couch when she came in. They had been watching a hologram when they fell asleep. Dianne smiled when she saw them and quietly crossed the cabin to switch off the set. The cassette had played itself through, and now the set offered only a strange view through a ragged-edged hole into a darkness against which stars spun and swirled lazily. Dianne frowned abruptly at odd stabs of agony in her abdomen, and then, as the pain worsened. she clutched the holograph console and sagged against it for support. And closed her eyes. She woke up very slowly, a little at a time, and found herself looking up through a large and jagged hole in the ceiling of the airlock. Through the hole, she could see utter blackness shot with pinpoints of utter brightness. The universe seemed to pass in review as she spun with the ruptured hulk of Compartment F. She felt again the horror gnawing at what was left of her guts. She opened her mouth to scream but it hurt her too much. A roaring noise filled her ears. Blood engorged her eyes, making the pinpoints of utter brightness glow a sickly red as they moved past the hole. Within the shell of her liferig, she felt minute stings as hypodermic needles automatically slid into her flesh. Dianne Drake forced herself to subside and listened to the harsh sound of her own ragged breathing while waiting for the drugs to take effect, to make the pain and fear go away. She had not been dreaming about the hole and the stars. She was not with her wife and husband. She was not aboard the Wheel now. There was no Wheel anymore. Something had happened to it -- she didn't know what and doubted that she would ever know. She had not been dreaming about the pain, either, because something had happened to her, too. She and the heavy-maintenance robot had just re-entered the Compartment F airlock when the deck suddenly buckled underfoot, flinging her against a bulkhead. The massive robot had grazed her across the abdomen, caving in but not puncturing her shell, as it was heaved past her and flipped out through the open airlock hatch. She had been hurt, hurt badly, she knew that, and she was dying here in the dead hulk of Compartment F, wreckage within wreckage, she knew that too. Oh God please don't let me die here don't let me die alone -- No. Not alone. A-# moved into her field of vision and lowered itself to its knees beside her, like a giant, quicksilver-colored mantis descending upon its prey. Dianne had always felt uneasy in the presence of cyborgs, but she nonetheless gave A-# a faint smile and gestured beckoningly. The cyborg moved its good hand over her lightly, almost tenderly, testing the thin straps that bound her to the deck. A-#'s other hand dangled forlornly at the end of a tangle of thin cables and hair-fine wiring. The plastic forearm, shattered during the Wheel's break-up, looked like an exploded timepiece, all disarrayed springs and wires. "I thought you had expired, Ms. Drake," said A-#'s inflectionless voice in her helmetphones. "You've been unconscious for several hours." "Just... resting my eyes." She tried to laugh. The effort was too great. The pain under her ribs stabbed too deeply. She bit into her lip, forcing herself to be still and, when the pain had receded somewhat, she said very softly, "Are there... did you find others?" "No, Ms. Drake. Most of Compartment F seems to have twisted away with Compartment E. It's unlikely that anyone in this section had time to get into a life-rig. I did not find the remains of an unidentimonitoring room -- " Poor George. Dianne thought, closing her eyes, shutting out the soft, maddening swirl of lights beyond the hole, poor George. " -- and," the cyborg went on. "the wreckage of A-# in the life-rig maintenance room. Everyone and everything else is gone. Compartment G broke away cleanly. so it's quite possible that it managed to seal itself in time." Possible, Dianne reflected dully, but not too probable. It was also possible that G had ruptured, that Howard and Karen were dead, blown up in their sleep. If only the maintenance robot had not taken so long to set the plates for her, if only she could have finished her could have gotten back inside when she should have, she would not be here. She and Howard and Karen would have all gone on sleep-shift together, she would not be here, she would be with her husband and wife, not here, not alone, God God oh God it hurt it hurt -- She pounded on the deck with her fists, strained against the straps, causing herself worse agony. She screamed until the pain in her emptied lungs was greater than the pain in her bruised abdomen, and then, as the needles again began to slide into her, she almost expired from a coughing fit as she tried to suck air back down into her chest. "I'm sorry that there's nothing I can do," A-# said tonelessiy, just before Dianne blacked out again. K aren's hands, surgeon's hands, sure, steady hands, cupped Dianne's face tenderly. They kissed each other passionately. and then Karen suddenly jerked away in the darkness with a yelp of surprise. Howard had bitten her on the thigh. A pillow fight ensued between Karen and Howard. Dianne, caught in the middle of the bed, lay convulsed with laughter between the combatants. Finally, when the last pillow had been sent flying across the cabin, Howard and Karen stretched out on either side of their new wife. "Welcome to the marriage," Howard said, kissing Dianne on the cheek. "Now that you're in our power, we shall have our way with you. my dear." "Just as long as you don't bite me on the leg," Dianne said, hugging his neck. Karen snorted. And then legs and arms became entwined, and hands touched things in the darkness, and then the cabin became suffused with the light of thousands of stars. "Two-Six?" Dianne called, resignedly letting dull pain pull her out of sleep, out of the dream. "Ms. Drake, how do you feel?" "Like... pulped meat. I am pulped meat." "You mustn't despair. Help will come soon. Some sections of the Wheel were surely able to seal themselves. A help-call was undoubtedly transmitted within minutes of the break-up." Dianne opened her eyes and, pointedly avoiding the slow swirl of lights beyond the hole, looked at A-#b. The cyborg had strapped itself to a stanchion and seemed to be sorting through the tangle of wires and cables sprouting from the plastic upper arm. She tried to speak again but produced only a dry hiss in the back of her throat. She moved her head weakly, groping with her mouth for the water nipple in her helmet When she finally found it, she sucked gratefully, noisily, for several seconds. "How long," she managed to gasp, "since the accident?" "Approximately thirteen hours, Ms. Drake." "Any sign of... rescue? Anything?" "Not yet." Dianne turned her head slightly and saw the two plastic halves of a replacement forearm pinned to the deck by the cyborg's foot. "Is there any... point in repairing yourself, Two-Six?" "I am programed for self-maintenance." "Robots are... programed, Two-Six." "I have directives, Ms. Drake." "Aren't you at all... afraid of... dying again?" "The question has no meaning for me. Please rest now. Conserve your strength." "Do you... what was it like the first time... you died?" "I don't remember. Please rest." "Two-Six, I'm afraid to d--" Dianne broke off in terror. She knew that she was dying, that the careening heavymaintenance robot's almost casual blow' had mushed her insides to jelly, but she could not bring herself to speak of her own death. She tried to imagine oblivion. She tried to imagine Howard and Karen living on without her. She could not envision death as being much different from space, only without all of the stars, without any stars at all, just blackness and vastness and tumbling forever into that infinite and unrelieved darkness, and the pain was rising in her again, and she wondered if, in dying, in becoming dead, she would carry the memory of so much agony with her as she started to tumble and God God God! If only it did not hurt so much. If only Karen and Howard were with her. If only the heavy-maintenance robot had struck her squarely, caved her in completely, killed her instantly. If only she had gone on sleepshift with her wife and husband. If only dying did not take so long. If only she were not cut off from her loved ones. If only it did not hurt so much. "Two-Six." "Yes, Ms. Drake?" Dianne hesitated, gathering her courage, and sought the water nipple. She got a small mouthful of water before her supply gave out with a soft, sucking noise. She held the cool water in her mouth for a long time before swallowing. "I want you to help me," she finally said, fumbling at her belt for her spot-welding pistol. She did not have the strength to detach it once she had located it. "Two-Six, take the gun... adjust beam for maximum intensity... point-blank at my helmet... death should be instantaneous... and painless." "Ms. Drake, I cannot do yhat you ask." "Oh, oh God, please!" "My programing forbids the taking of human life, whether through action or inaction." "You were human once!" Dianne cried out, feebly vehement. "Don't quote manuals at me... please, please understand... I'm dying. I'm already dead... I'm in pain, damn you!" "Help will come," A-# flatly insisted. "You must have hope." Hope? She was too weak to hurl the word back at the cyborg. Hope of what? Hope of what? Hope of rescue. But the Wheel had broken up. Compartment F was tumbling through space, an inert shell, with one chance in a gated by any rescue ship -- presuming, of course, that there even was a rescue ship. Hope of reunion. But Howard and Karen might already be dead, and even if they still lived, even if Dianne were found, even then, could a three-way marriage function as such with an incapacitated member? Hope of living. But she was dying. Hope of dying. But she was dying in agony. Hope of sleep. She slept. T hey looked at her messed-up body and shook their heads sadly and began to shave her head. Dianne knew what was happening and tried to push them away, but there were straps binding her to the table, holding her still. She screeched with horror as they began to remove the top of her cranium, and then she stopped screeching, because they had severed her from her body, they were carefully lifting out the essence of Dianne Drake, drawing the brain and spinal column out of the useless body. They did things to the essence of Dianne Drake. They built a mantis-like body of metal and plastic in which to house the altered essence of Dianne Drake. They activated the mantislike body, and all that remained of Dianne Drake, the special knowledge, special skills, special usefulness, was as one with the self-winding, self-propelled body. They gave the body an identity number and put it aboard a Wheel, where it worked in Hydroponics under the supervision of a human being named Howard Drake. Where it worked in Surgery under the supervision of a human being named Karen Drake. Where it did not know and was not known. Where it was worse than dead... Where it was alive and cut off from the living. Dianne's throat was on fire when she woke up, but there was no more water. There was no hole in the ceiling, and no swirl of stars. There was no pain. There was light. There were muted voices all around her. "Two... Six?" she hissed, barely audible. The light hurt her eyes, and she could not understand what the soft voices were saying. "Two-Six... where am I? Two..." j She blinked frantically, trying to focus her eyes and, suddenly, the light was gone, the voices were gone, the jagged hole was above her once more, but so, too, were people in life-rigs. She was in pain now, ( writhing on the deck, unrestrained  by straps, and there was a noise in her helmetphones, everything all right everything is all right everyj thing is going to be all right, and then she was alone again, bound to the deck of the airlock in Compartment F,'and then she was not alone, she was with Howard and Karen, the three of them huddled together in their Compartment G cabin, pleasantly tired after workshift and very much in love with one another, and then, and then... Dianne let go of the images, blinked them away, and saw that it was very bright in the operating J room. For just an instant, she imagined that the source of illumination was a very large and jagged hole in the ceiling through which the stars poured their light. The notion tied immediately, but she nevertheless frowned with thought, groggily aware of a wrongness about the presence of such a hole in an operating room. She shoved the whole matter from her mind when she saw Karen standing beside her. "Oh God," Dianne croaked, crying. "Oh God. Oh God." Karen leaned over to embrace her gently. "It's okay now," she murmured soothingly. "It's okay. Everything is going to be okay." "#... so afraid, so afraid... Howard?" L "He's safe, we're all together again, honey, everything is -- " "Where is... he?" "Soon." Karen kissed Dianne on the mouth and drew away. "He'll be here soon. Sleep now." "Karen...I don't want it to be a dream." "It's real. Everything is going to be all right. Sleep. Sleep." She slept or awoke -- she could not be certain, because Karen and the bright operating room went away, and the pain returned, and the stars spun past the hole above her. and A-# tinkered with its shattered arm, and they were shaving her head again, cutting off the top of her skull again... No!" "Easy," murmured Howard. "Easy." "I'm afraid, Howard," Dianne whispered. "If I open my eyes, you'll go away." "I'm here," he said. She could feel his breath on her cheek. "Where am I?" "You're aboard the Wheel, what's left of it anyway, and I'm The Secret Galactics From one of the top writers in the entire field of science-fiction -- one of his greatest novels. "The Secret Galactics" is a taut and exciting tale of battle for control of the world between a group of alien creatures disguised as ordinary humans -- and -- the still-living but disembodied brain of a great scientist mounted in a mobile fortress. Must reading for every sciencefiction fan! # at your bookstore, or write to: Mr. Joseph Schaumburger, Dept. #-D#(#) Prentice-Hall, Inc. West Nyack, New York # here. Karen's here, and we're going to take :... good care of you." "You're crying, Howard." She slitted her eyelids, mindful of the light, and regarded him sadly. His eyes were wet and red. "I don't want to die. I don't want to leave you and Karen." "We don't want you to leave." "I'm scared, Howard. Don't let them -- " He silenced her with a kiss. "Everything is going to be okay." "Everything," affirmed Karen as she loomed over Dianne. Karen was wearing her surgeon's gown and cap now. "You'd better leave now, Howard." "I'll stay," Howard said. "She's my wife, too, Karen." Karen nodded slowly and looked down at Dianne, who lay upon the table between her spouses, groping for the memory of another time when she had lain thus. Karen touched Dianne's face with one of her sure, steady hands and said, "I love you," and Dianne felt her surgeon-wife's fingers trembling against her skin. "I love you both," she murmured softly, good-bye.  love you. and then Howard and Karen were gone, their faces replaced by those of strangers. Dianne blinked, startled by the change, and the hole was above her once more, the stars were sweeping past as Compartment F tumbled through space. She was alone with A-# again, in pain again. Strangers? She bore her agony in silence as she tried to separate products of imagination from realities. She conjured up images of Howard and Karen, of a scalpel trembling in Karen's hand, and she took heart. There were no strangers. Howard and Karen lived. They were her hope of salvation, they knew what she would want, they would not let her down... She lay waiting for an act of mercy, for a final gesture of love, and she kept telling herself, Everything is going to be all right, everything is going to be all right, even as she slid into other dreams, other times. Awake or dreaming, everything is going to be all right. She lay waiting. She lay dreaming. It found itself on a table in a brightly illuminated room. It felt confusion for a moment as she clutched at memories of dreams, and it sensed within herself a terrible, bitter loneliness, a vague awareness of having been somehow betrayed. It could not account for her feelings, and it was further surprised to feel grateful when, finally, she let it sit up. Promising itself a psych-check at the first available opportunity, it stepped down from the table rather like a mantis moving from leaf to leaf. No dreams, it dutifully reminded itself, are good dreams. # Three great books by Stanistaw Lem and four more of the best in European Science Fiction. A # value at a saving of more than #a great introduction to the new Continuum Books European Science Fiction Series. I . Stanisfaw Lem Fables for the Cybernetic Age The escapades of two robot cosmic constructors that "manage to be truly amusing and profoundly disturbing at the same time ." -- Leslie A. Fiedler. # #. Franz Rottensteiner, Editor An exciting anthology of European Science Fiction... # #. Arkadi and Boris Strugatski "A straightforward adventure story."Ursula K. Le Cuin. # r #. Stanistaw Lem "A rousing adventure in the technological mode. " -- Ursula K. Le Cuin. # #. Stanistaw Lem book. "-Joanna Russ. # #. Jacques Sternberg Short stories by a young French master of black humor. # #. Stefan Wul A fast moving French science fiction classic. # GA Seabury Bookstore # Second Avenue, New York # Gentlemen: Please send me all seven European Sci-fi books, postage paid. Enclosed find my check for #. Please send me the following books: -- I (# ea.); # (# ea.); -- # (# ea.); # (# ea.); -- # (# ea.); # (# ea.); -- # (# ea.). Postage paid. Enclosed is my check for  Name. Address. City State.Zip. (Please add sales tax where applicable.) In the #th Century mankind has developed interstellar travel and is tackling the huge task of siphoning off Earth's excess population. Unfortunately, only one other habitable planet. Terranova, has been discovered, and an economic brake has been placed on the flow of settlers to it by making the journey highly expensive. This policy was introduced and en forced by the vast Starflight Corporation which controls all manufacture and operation of spacecraft. Most of the Starflight fleet is engaged in the transportation of settlers, but it has a separate Stellar Exploration Arm which continues with the search for habitable new worlds. The President of Starpowerful human ever. She has been debased and corrupted by her power to the extent where -- like sultans of old -- she has been known to kill employes for minor transgressions. of the exploration ship Bissendorf, was about to leave Earth on a year long mission and was summoned to Elizabeth's headquarters for a preflight audience. While waiting impatiently for his interview he was entrusted with the job of looking after Elizabeth s small son. Harald . Garamond. who was becoming disenchanted with the fruitless search for other planets, was too busy with his own thoughts to notice Harald climbing up a tall statue. Before Garamond could prevent the accident. the boy fell and was killed. Garamond knew at once that not only was he doomed, but that the President's psychosis would prompt her to wreak vengeance on his wife. He discovered, however, that the bov's death fall had not been observed. so he hid the body and slipped away from Starflight House. Concealing his panic, he collected his wife and son from their apartment and took them to the spaceport. At gunpoint he forced a shuttle pilot to fly them up to the Bissendorf which was waiting in orbit. Knowing that the dead child would he found at any moment. Garamond got through on the radio to his second-in-command and ordered him to blank out all communications between the Bissendorf and Earth. The precaution was taken just in time -- back at Starlight HQ Harold's body had been discovered. Elizabeth had already slain the luckless servant who made the Ibid, and had sent out an order that Garamond was to be brought back to her. Aboard his ship Garamond ordered it to leave the Solar System at maximum speed and was lucky in that the spatial "tide" was favorable to him. The ships employed by Earth could operate more efficiently in regions where the density of space was high, and in this case the local conditions enabled Garamond to escape his pursuers. The trouble was that he had nowhere to go -- there was no point in fleeing to Terra nova because Elizabeth s ships would be there wailing for him. The Bissendorf was provisioned fora year, so Garamond decided to use that time to follow up a private dream. He owned photographs of partially destroyed starmaps which had been found on Saganiu. u planet which had been destroyed hy a nuclear reaction thousands of years previously. Discrepancies in the maps suggested to Garamond that one star had been of special significance to the long-dead Suganians. and he decided to solve the mvstery. On completing the four-month journey, the Bissendorf s crew made an astonishing  bid -- a sun completely enclosed within a spherical shell which was more than # They surveyed the object, located a single small entrance at its equator and one group passed through it to discover that the inner surface of the sphere was covered with vegetation and had hreatheable air. Hulks of hundreds of destroyed spaceships were clustered outside the entrance and just inside it were ruins of ancient fortifications. A great battle had been fought there long ago. but there was no sign of life. The sphere, dubbed Orbitsville. appeared to offer perfect living Earths. The discovery  elevated Garamond to a level of fame and importance at which he and his family seemed safe, even from Elizabeth Lindstrom. He sent a luster-than-light signal to Earth, reporting the find, then his science team began to investigate some of Orbitsville' s mysteries, including the puzzle of why radio communication was impossible within the sphere. Four months later Elizabeth arrived at the head of a fleet, assumed control and in a tense interview with Garamond revealed that Starlight intended to exploit emigration to Orbitsville and parcel it out just as if it was a normal planet. Settlers begin to arrive almost immediately. Disillusioned and feeling useless. Garamond settled down with his family and watched the human settlement spread outwards into Orbitsville' s infinite prairies -- then a new discovery was made. Orbitsville was not empty and free for the taking. An alien civilization was encountered close to the entrance. XI R umors of massacre came within a month. There had been a short-term lull while the shallow circular basin centered on Beachhead City absorbed the first waves of settlers. During that brief respite a handful of External Affairs representatives had arrived. Aware of their inadequacy, they had ruled that no humans were to go within five kilometers of the alien community until negotiations had been completed for a corridor to the free territory beyond. A number of factors combined, however, against the efficacy of the ruling. The Government men had arrived late on the scene. No broadcasting media were available to them. And -- most important -- there was a widespread feeling among the settlers that attempting diplomatic communication with the Clowns, as they were unofficially called, would be an exercise in futility. At first the bright-hued aliens had been approached with caution and respect. Then it was learned that they possessed no machines beyond the simplest farming implements. Even their houses were woven from a kind of cellulose rope extruded from their own bodies in roughly the same way a spider produces its web. When it was further discovered that the Clowns were mute, the assumption that they were intelligent was called into question by many of the human settlers. One theory was that they were degenerate descendants of the race that had built the fortifications around the Beachhead City aperture; another held they were little more than domestic animals that had outlived their masters and developed a quasi-culture of their own. Garamond was disturbed by the attitude implicit in the theories, partly because it was a catalyst for certain changes taking place among the Earth settlers. The subtle loosening of discipline he had noticed in his own men within minutes of their setting foot on Orbitsville had its counterpart among the immigrants in the form of a growing disregard for authority. Men whose lives had been closely controlled in the tight, compacted society of Earth now regarded themselves as potential owners of continents and were impatient for their new status. All they had to do to transform themselves from clerks to kings was to load up the vehicles provided by the Starflight workshops and set out on their golden journeys. The only directive was that they should travel far, because it was obvious that the farther a man went when fanning out from Beachhead City the more land would be available to him. As the mood took hold, even the earliest arrivals -- those who had staked out their plots of land within the circular hills -- became uneasily aware of the incoming hordes at their heels. They decided to move onward and outward. In a normal planetary situation the population pressures would not have been concentrated so fiercely on one point. But Earth technology was geared to the Assumption of Mediocrity. During the development of the total transport system of flickerwing ships and shuttles it had never occurred to anyone to make provision for an environment in which, for example, it would not be possible for a ship to gather its own reaction mass. Such provision would have been completely illogical in the universe as it was then understood -- but in the contest of Orbitsville, a deadly mistake had been made. Territories of astronomical dimensions were available certainly. But no means existed for claiming them quickly enough to satisfy the ambitions of men who had crossed space like gods and then found themselves reduced to wheeled transportation. Given time to build or import fleets of wing-borne aircraft. the difficulties could have been lessened but not eliminated completely. Each family unitor commune had to become self-supporting in the shortest possible time and, even with advanced farming methods and the use of iron cows, this meant claiming possession of large areas without delay. It was a situation which, classically, had always resulted in man fighting man. Garamond was not surprised therefore when reports began to reach him that the outermost settlers had forced their way through the Clown city in a number of places and were pouring into the prairie beyond. Although he did not try to visit any of the trouble spots in person, he had no difficulty visualizing the course of events at each. Still haunted by the sense of having lost his purpose, he devoted most of his time to his family, making only occasional visits to the Bissendorf in his capacity of chief executive. He deliberately avoided watching the newscasts piped into his home along the landlines, but other channels now were open. One morning, while sleeping off the effects of a prolonged drinking session, he was awakened by a child's scream. The sound triggered a synergistic vision of Harald Lindstrom falling away from the blind face of a statue and, almost in the same instant, came the crushing awareness that he had not been sufficiently on his guard against Elizabeth. Garamond jumped out of bed, gasping for air, and lurched to the living room. Aileen had got there before him and was kneeling with her arms around Christopher. The boy was now sobbing gently, his face buried in her shoulder. "What happened?" Garamond's fear was subsiding but his heart still pounded unevenly. "It was the projector," Aileen said. "One of those things appeared on it. I turned it off." Garamond glanced at the projection area of the solid-image television. "What things?" The faint ghost of a tutor on one of the educational programs was still dissolving into the air. Christopher raised a streaked, solemn face. "It was a Crown." "He means a Clown." Aileen's eyes were slaty with anger. "A Clown? But... I told you to keep the images fairly diffuse when Chris is watching so that he won't get confused between what's real and what isn't." "The image was diffused. The thing still scared him, that's all." Garamond stared helplessly at his wife. "I don't get it. Why should he be afraid of a Clown?" He turned his attention to Christopher. "What's the matter, son? Why were you afraid?" "I thought the Crown was coming to get me too." "That was a silly thing to think -- they never harmed anybody." The boy's gaze was steady and reproachful. "What about all the people they froze? All the dead people." Garamond was taken aback. "What!" "Don't confuse him," Aileen said quietly. "You know perfectly well what's been in the newscasts for the last couple of days." "But I don't! What did they say?" "They told about the outer planet. When the things built Lindstromland, they shut off all light and heat to the outer planet and froze it over." "Who? What things?" "The Clowns, of course." "But that's wonderful!" Garamond began to smile. "The Clowns created Orbitsvilie!" "Their ancestors." "I see. And there were people on the outer planet? People who got frozen to death?" "They showed photographs of them." A stubborn note had crept into Aileen's voice. "Where did they get these photographs?" "A Starflight ship must have gone there, of course." "But, honey, if the planet is frozen over how could anybody take photographs of its surface or anything on it? Just think about that for a while." "I don't know how they did it. I'm only telling you what Chris and I and everybody else have seen." Garamond sighed. Going to the communicator, he called Cliff Napier on board the Bissendorf. The familiar head appeared at the projection focus and nodded a greeting. Garamond spoke quickly, without preamble. "Cliff, I need information about ship movements within the Pengelly's Star system. Has there been an expedition to the outer planet?" "No." "You're positive?" Napier glanced downward, looking at an information display. "Absolutely." "Thanks, Cliff. That's all." Garamond broke the connection and Napier's apparently solid features faded into the air. "There you are, Aileen -- a direct, clear statement of fact. Now. where are the photographs supposed to have come from?" "Well, perhaps they weren't actual photographs. They might have been..." "Artists' impressions? Reconstructions?" "What difference does it make? They were shown..." "What difference!" Garamond laughed shakily as the mental chasm opened between himself and his wife. Yet he felt no annoyance. Their marriage had always been simple and harmonious, and he knew it was based on deeper attachments than mere similarity in interests or outlook. One of the first things he had learned to accept was the certainty of incompleteness on some levels of their relationship, and usually he knew how to accommodate it. "It makes all the difference in the world," he said softly, as if speaking to a child. "Don't you see how your attitude toward the Clowns has been affected by what you've seen or think you've seen on the viewers? That's the way people are manipulated. It used to be more difficult, or at least they had to be more subtle when literateness was considered vital to education..." Even to his own ears the words sounded dry and irrelevant. He stopped speaking as he noticed Aileen's predictable loss of interest. His wife absorbed most of her information through images, and he had no pictures to show her. Garamond felt an obscure sadness. "I'm not stupid, Vance." Aileen touched his hand, her intuition in sure control. "I know." "What did you want to tell me?" "I just want you to remember that Starflight Incorporated is like -- " he strove for a suitably vivid image -- "like a snowball rolling down a hill. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it keeps going faster, and it can't slow down. It can't afford to stop, even when somebody gets in the way... and that's why it's going to roll right on over the Clowns." I "You always seem so certain about things."  "The signs are all there. The first step is to implant in people's minds the idea that the Clowns ought to be rolled over. Once that's been done, the rest is easy." "I don't like the Crowns," Christopher said, breaking a long silence. His grain-gold face was determined . "I'm not asking you to like them, son. Just don't believe that everything you see on the viewer is real and true. Why, if I went to the outer planet myself, I could Garamond stopped speaking as the idea quickly took hold. not? After all, that's the W sort of work the S.E.A. ships were designed to do," Elizabeth had said, reasonably, and at that point had smiled. "You're on indefinite leave. Captain. But if you would prefer to return to active service and visit the outer world, I have no objection." "Thank you, my lady," Garamond had replied, concealing his surprise. Elizabeth's imperfect smile had grown more secretive, more triumphant. "We will find it useful to Want a way out of whatever it is you're in? Then read -- The Magazine of Alternatives possess some hard data about the planet -- in place of all the speculaGaramond reviewed the brief conversation a number of times as the Bissendorf was extending its invisible wings and disengaging from fleet formation. It came to him that he had proposed the exploratory flight partly as a challenge to the President, hoping that a duel with her would resolve the growing doubts in his mind. Her ready agreement to the mission was the last thing he had expected. As well as drawing a few pointed comments from Aileen, it had left him feeling both disappointed and uneasy. He sat in the control gallery for hours, watching the bright images of the other Starflight ships perform the patient maneuvers that would bring each one in turn to the entrance of Orbitsville to discharge its load of human beings or supplies. When the Bissendorf s own progression had taken it out through the regulated swarm, and nothing but stars lay in front, Garamond remained on station. He watched the irregular stabs of the main electron gun, the ghostly blade of energy that flickered through space ahead of the ship. The harvest of reaction mass was not plentiful in the immediate vicinity of Pengelly's Star, so in the early stages of the flight it was necessary to ionize the cosmic dust to help the intake fields do their work. Gradually, however, as the ship spiraled outward, the night-black plain of Orbitsville's shell ceased to blank off an entire half of the visible universe. The conditions of space became more normal. Speed began to build up. Once again Garamond had difficulty in setting his perceptions to the correct scale. Everything in his past experience conspired to make him think he was in a tiny ship painfully struggling to a height of a few hundred kilometers above a normalsized planet, whereas at a hundred necessary to turn one's head through ninety degrees to take in both edges of Orbitsville's disk. The size of the sphere was, in a way, painful to Garamond, causing familiar questions to seethe again in his mind. Was the fact that it was large enough to accommodate every intelligent being in the home galaxy a clue to its purpose? Why was there only one entrance to such a huge construction? Did the physics of the sphere's existence dictate of necessity that neither flickerwing ship nor radio communicator could operate inside it? Or were those features designed in by the Creators to preserve the effectiveness of the sphere's size, to prevent ingenious technicians turning it into a global television networks? And where were the creators now? Napier appeared with two bulbs of coffee, handed one to Garamond. "The weather section reports that the local average density of space is increasing according to their predictions. That means we should be able to pick up enough speed to reach the outer planet in not much more than a hundred hours." Garamond nodded. "The probe torpedo should be fitted out by then." "Sammy Yamoto wants to lead a manned descent to the surface." "That could be dangerous. We'll have to get a better report on the surface conditions before authorizing anything like that." Garamond sipped coffee, then frowned. "Why should our Chief Astronomer want to risk his neck out there? I thought he was still wrapped up in his globular filigree of force fields." "He is. But he reckons he can deduce a few things about how Orbitsville was built by examining the outer planet." "Tell him to keep me posted." Garamond looked at Napier over the mouthpiece of his coffee bulb and saw an uncharacteristic look of hesitancy on the big man's face. "Anything else coming to a boil?" "Shrapnel seems to have gone "Shrapnel? The shuttle pilot?" "That's right." "So he took off. Isn't that what we expected?" "I expected him to do it once, but not twice. He disappeared for the best part of a day soon after the Starflight crowd first arrived. At the time he was on ground detachment. So I decided he had gone back to Starflight with a hard-luck story, and I wrote him off -- but he was back on duty again that same night." "That surprised you?" "It did, especially as he returned without the chip on his shoulder. His whole attitude seemed to have changed for the better. Why, since then he's been working like a beaver!" "Maybe he discovered he didn't like the Starflight HQ staff." Napier looked unconvinced. "He didn't object or try to cry off when orders were posted for this flight, but he isn't on board." "I'd just forget about him." "I'm trying to," Napier said. "But the BissendorJ isn't a sailing ship tied up in harbor. A man able to come and go unofficially must have organization behind him. It makes me think Shrapnel has contacts in Starflight." "Let's have some whiskey," Garamond suggested. "We're both getting too old for this type of work." E ven before it was denied the light and heat of its own sun, the outer planet of the Pengelly's Star system had been a bleak sterile place. Less than half the size of Earth, it had no atmosphere at all. It was a ball of rock and dust patroling a lonely orbit so far out that its parent sun appeared as little more than a distant star casting barely perceptible shadows in an inert landscape. And when that sun vanished it made little difference to the planet. Its surface became a little colder and a little darker, but the cooling stresses were not great enough to cause anything as spectacular as movements of the crust. Nothing stirred in the blackness except infrequent puffs of dust from meteor strikes, and the uneventful millenia continued to drag by as they had always done. Using its radar fans like the feelers of a giant insect, the Bissendorf groped its way into orbit around the invisible dead world. Garamond's ship was in the form of three equal cylinders joined together, the central one projecting forward from the other two by almost half its length. The command deck, administrative and technical levels, living quarters and workshops were contained in the central cylinder. #'his exposed position meant that the inhabited regions of the vessel could have been subjected to intense bombardment during high-speed flight, when -- due to the ship's own velocity -- even stationary motes of interstellar dust registered as fantastically energetic particles. The problem had been solved by using the same magnetic detlection techniques that guided the particles into the ramjet's thermonuclear reactors. Both the Bissendorf s flux pumps shaped their magnetic lines of force into the form of a protective shield around which the charged particles flowed harmlessly into the engines. An inherent disadvantage of the system was that a starship could never coast at high speed; with the flux pumps closed down, the crew would quickly fry in self-induced radiation. By the same token, communications with a ship under way were precluded and even radar sensing could not be employed. The approach to the dark planet had been made at modest interplanetary speeds, however. Hence the Bissendorf' was able to proceed by using its main drive in short bursts, between which it was possible to run position checks. Because it was designed for exploration work in unknown planetary systems, the vessel was further equipped with conventional nuclear thrusters and a limited amount of stored reaction mass which gave it extra capability for close maneuvering. The task of slipping into stable orbit was therefore accomplished quickly and efficiently, even though the target planet remained invisible to the Bissendorf's crew. It took only one pass to enable the long-range sensors and recording banks to answer all Garaniond's questions. "Pretty disappointing," Sammy Yamoto mourned, examining the glowing numerals and symbols of the preliminary analysis. "The planet has no atmosphere now, appears never to have had any. Its surface is completely barren. I was hoping for the remains of some kind of plant life which would have told us whether the radiation from the primary was cut off suddenly or over a period of years." Chief Science Officer O' Hagan spoke. "We can still do a lot with samples of dust and rock from the surface." Yamoto nodded without enthusiasm. "I guess so. But botanical evidence would have been so precise. So nice. With nothing but inorganic evidence, we're going to have margins of error of -- what? A thousand years or more?" "On an astronomical timescale that's not bad." "It's not bad, but it's not..." "Is it the opinion of the group," Garamond interrupted, "that a manned descent is still worth while?" O' Hagan glanced around at the other science officers anchored close to the information display, then shook his head. "At this stage it would be enough to drop a robolander and take three or four cores. Somebody can always go down if the cores prove of exceptional interest. But I don't hold out much hope they will." "Right -- it's decided we send down one probe." Garamond used his end-of-meeting voice. "Get it there and back as quickly as possible, and include flares and holorecording gear in the package. I want to be able to present certain people with visible evidence." Denise Serra, the physicist, raised her eyebrows. "I heard the Starflight Information Bureau was propagating some fantasy about a beautiful civilization being snuffed out in its prime. Naturally I didn't believe it. I mean, who would sVvallow an idea like that?" "You'd be surprised," Garamond told her ruefully. "I've been learning there are different kinds of naivety. We're subject to one kind -- it's an occupational hazard associated with spending half your life cut off from the big scene. But there are other kinds just as dangerous." "That may be so -- but to believe that the Clowns created Orbitsville!" "Genuine belief isn't required. The story is only a formula that allows certain manipulations to be carried out. We all know the square root of minus one is an unreal quantity, and yet we've all used it when it suited us to do so. Same thing." Denise's eyes twinkled. "Not the same at all!" "I know. I was just trying to indicate the general class of thing we were talking about." "Neat footwork." Denise laughed outright, and for no reason immediately apparent to him Garamond suddenly became aware of how much he enjoyed simply looking at her. To him the phrase "easy on the eyes" had always been pure metaphor. Now he was surprised to discover that letting his gaze rest on the physicist's pale sensitive face actually did produce a soothing sensation in his eyes. The phenomenon entranced and then disturbed him. When the meeting broke up he went to his own quarters. There he devoted several hours to his principal spare-time occupation: recording television interviews for Colbert Mason. The reporter, after his initial difficulties on Orbitsville, had established himself in a position of relative strength, and had obtained an office in Beachhead City from which he sent back to the Two Worlds a prolific stream of news stories for syndication. Garamond cooperated with him, mainly because in his estimation his personal fame was still his family's best protection against Elizabeth Lindstrom. There were times when he was almost persuaded by Aileen that he was wrong in his suspicions of the President. But against that were persistent rumors that she had slain the member of her domestic staff who had found her son's body. Garamond continued to maintain his defenses. The system was that Mason supplied him with tridi tapes of recorded questions, and when Garamond had time he used his own equipment to fill in his answers and comments. On a number of occasions Mason had confessed that he was making a fortune from the arrangement. He had proposed sharing the profits. Garamond had refused to accept any money, stipulating only that Mason obtain for the stories and interviews the widest possible exposure. It appeared that this objective was being achieved. There was a growing clamor for the discoverer of Lindstromland to make a personal appearance to Earth. Garamond spent most of the current session giving suitable reasons for not being able to return, and describing in precise detail what had been learned about the invisible outer planet. Assuming the material would be safely relayed to the Two Worlds by Mason and broadcast on the planet-wide networks, it would go a long way the Clowns had obliterated an entire civilization. He stored away the tapes carefully, again pondering the great latitude Elizabeth was permitting him. Then he fastened himself into his bed with the intention of catching up on his sleep. The slow-drifting cubes of colored radiance merged and shimmered in the air above him, creating hypnotic patterns. Once more there came the idea that he might be completely wrong about Elizabeth Lindstrom, and he found himself wishing it were possible to discuss the subject emotionlessly and on an intellectual plane with his wife. There would be, he decided sleepily, no communications problem with a woman like Denise Serra who shared his background and his interests, and who produced that curiously pleasant sensation in his eyes... Garamond slept. He awoke two hours later with an unaccountable sense of unease. He decided to put through a call to Aileen and Christopher before going to the control gallery. The communications room made the necessary connections and in less than a minute Garamond was looking at the image of his wife. But a winking sphere of amber told him he was viewing and hearing a recording. It said: "I was hoping you would call, Vance. I know you're on only a short trip, but Chris and I have got so used to having you with us lately that we're spoiled. So the time is passing slowly. Something exciting has happened, though. You'll never guess." The unreal Aileen paused for a moment, smiling, to demonstrate to Garamond his inability to divine what was coming next. "I had a personal call from the President -- yes, Elizabeth Lindstrom herself! She invited Chris and me to stay with her in the new Lindstrom Center for a few days..." "Don't go!" Garamond was unable to restrain the words. "... knew I'd be feeling lonely while you were away," the image was saying contentedly, "but what really decided me was that she said she was the one who would benefit most from the visit. She didn't actually put it into words, but I think she is looking forward to seeing a child about the place again. Anyway, Vance, the President's car is calling for us in a few minutes. By the time you hear this I'll be wallowing in luxury and high living at the Octagon. But don't worry -- I'll be at home to cook you a meal when you arrive. Love you, darling. Bye." The image dissolved into a cloud of fading stars, leaving Garamond cold, shaken, and angry at his wife. "You silly bitch," he whispered to the fleeting points of light. "Why do you never, ever, never ever, listen to anything I tell you?" The last handful of stars vanished in silence. T he probe torpedo worked its way up the gravity hill from the dead planet, carrying its samples of dust and rock, and homed in on the Bissendorf. Although there was a sun only three astronomical units away, its light was screened off and the torpedo was moving through a blackness equivalent to that of deep interstellar space. In that darkness the mother ship appeared to some of the probe's sensors as a faint cluster of lights, but to other sensors concerned with different sections of theelectromagnetic spectrum the ship registered tion embodied many voices commanding, guiding, coaxing the torpedo homeward. Responding with greater and greater precision as the electronic voices grew louder, it approached the ship with the familiarity of a parasite fish flitting about a whale. At last it made physical contact and was taken on board . During the final maneuvers Garamond had waited on the Bissendorfs control gallery with growing impatience. As soon as the signal announcing closure of the docking bay was received, he gave the order for the main drive to be activated. Initial impetus was given the ship by the relatively feeble ion thrusters, but that propulsion system was shut down when the ramjet intake field had been fanned out to square kilometers and reaction mass was being scavenged from surrounding space. As the scooped-up hydrogen and other matter were fed into the fusion reactors, the ship wheeled away sunwards. The acceleration restored close-to-normal gravity throughout the inhabited levels of the central cylinder. The feeling of the deck pressing firmly on the underside of his feet helped Garamond regain his composure. He assured himself that if Elizabeth were to move against his family it would be done anywhere but in the crystal cloisters of her new residence. Into the bargain, Elizabeth knew that Garamond would be back from the dark planet in only a few days, imbued with an even greater amount -- if that were possible -- of the power called fame. The hours and the duty periods went by and, as Orbitsville filled the forward view panels with its unrelieved blackness, Garamond was able to satisfy himself that he had panicked for no good reason. The Bissendorf had accomplished turnover at midpoint on the return journey, and was two days into the retardation phase, when explosions occurred simultaneously in both field generators. The vessel was robbed of its means of coming to a halt before it would smash into the impregnable outer shell of Orbitsville. npHE starboard explosion was M. the worst," Commander Napier reported to the emergency meeting of the Bissendorf  executive staff. "It actually breached the pressure hull in the vicinity of Frame S#. The pressure-activated doors functioned properly and sealed off the section between Frames S# and S#, but there were five technicians in there at the time and they were killed. O'Hagan raised his gray head. "Blast or decompression?" "We don't know. The bodies were exhausted into space." O'Hagan made a note on his pad. "Five missing, presumed dead." Napier stared at his old antagonist with open dislike. "If you know how we can turn the ship to recover the bodies this would be a good time to tell us about it." "I merely..." "Gentlemen!" Garamond slapped the table as loudly as possible in conditions of almost zero gravity. "May I remind you that we are scheduled to be killed in about eight hours? That doesn't leave much time for bickering." O'Hagan gave a ghastly smile. "It gives us eight hours for bickering, Captain. There's nothing else we can do." "That's for this meeting to decide." "So be it." Chief Science Officer O'Hagan shrugged, spread his dry knobby hands in resignation. Garamond felt a reluctant admiration for the older man, who seemed determined to remain egotistical and cantankerous right to the end. O'Hagan also had a habit of being right in everything he said, and in that respect too it seemed he was going to preserve his record. Although reaction mass was not plentiful in the region of Pengelly's Star, the Bissendorf had been aided in its return journey by the pull of the primary and had achieved a mean acceleration of close to one gravity. So the ship had been traveling # kilometers a second at turnover point. Although it had been slowing down steadily for two days when the explosions occurred, its residual velocity was still above a hundred kilometers a second. At that speed the ship was due for impact with Orbitsville in only eight hours. Garamond could swear there was nothing he or anybody else on board could do about it. The knowledge of doom boomed and pounded through his brain. Yet he felt no fear or any related emotion. Their absence, he decided, was a psychological byproduct of having eight hours in hand. The delay created an illusion that something might still be done, that there was a chance to influence the course of events. Miraculously, hope held good even for an experienced flickerwing man who understood only too well the deadly parameters of the situation. "I understand that both auxiliary drive systems are still functional," Administrative Officer Mertz was saying, his round face glowing like pink plastic. "Surely that makes a difference." Napier shook his head. "The ion tubes are in action right now -- which accounts for the slight weight we can feel. But those tubes are intended only to give the ship closemaneuvering capability. They won't affect our speed very much. I guess the only difference they'll make is that we'll vaporize against Orbitsville a minute or two later than we would otherwise." "Well, what about the secondary nuclears? I thought they were for collision avoidance." "They are. Maximum endurance twenty minutes. By applying full thrust at right angles to our present course we could easily avoid an object as large as Jupiter -- but we're dealing with that!" Napier pointed at the forward view panels, which were uniformly black. Orbitsville spanned the universe. Mertz's face had lost some of its pinkness. "I get the picture. Thanks." The operations room was silent except for faint irregular clangs transmitted through the ship's structure. Far aft, a repair crew was at work replacing the damaged hull sections. Garamond stared into the darkness ahead and tried to assimilate the idea that it represented a wall across the sky, a wall rushing toward him at a hundred kilometers a second, a wall so wide and high there was no way to avoid hitting it. Yamoto cleared his throat. "There's no point speculating why the ship was sabotaged. Still, I'm curious. Do we know how the bombs got aboard?" "I personally believe it was the work of Pilot Officer Shrapnel," Napier said. "There isn't much evidence, but what there is points to him. We mentioned our suspicions in our emergency call to Fleet Con trol." "What did they say?" "They promised he would be investigated." Napier's voice had a flinty edge of bitterness. "We are assured that all necessary steps will be taken." "That's good to know. Isn't that good to know?" Yamoto pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. "I had so much work still to do. There was so much to learn about Orbitsville." They're going to learn at least one thing as a result of this mission, Garamond thought. They're going to find out how the shell material stands up to the impact of fifteen thousand tons of metal traveling at a hundred kilometers a second. And they won't even have to go far from the aperture to see the big bang... Garamond felt an icy convulsion in his stomach as he half-glimpsed an idea. He sat perfectly still for a moment as the incredible thought began to form, to crystallize to the point at which it could be put into words. His brow grew chill with sweat. "Has anybody," Denise Serra asked in a calm, clear voice, "considered the possibility of adjusting our course in such a way that we would pass through the aperture at Beachhead City?" Again the room filled with silence. Garamond felt a curious secondary shock on hearing the words he was still formulating being uttered by another person. The silence lasted for perhaps ten seconds, then was broken by a dry laugh from O' Hagan. tou realize that at our speed, j Miss Serra, running into a wall of air would be just like hitting solid rock? I'm afraid your idea doesn't change anything." "We don't have to run into a wall of air. Not if we turn the ship over again and go in nose first with the electron gun operating at full power." "Nonsense!" O'Hagan shouted. He cocked his head to one side as if listening to an inner voice, and his fingers moved briefly on the computer terminal before him. "It isn't nonsense, though." He corrected himself without embarrassment, nodding his apologies to Denise Serra. Others at the conference table promptly began to address the central computer through their own terminals. Suddenly everyone was trying to speak. "Overload power on the gun should give us enough voltage for the few seconds we would need it. It should be enough to blast a tunnel through the atmosphere -- " "At this stage we have enough lateral control over our flight path to bring it through the aperture -- " "But remember we haven't got the full area of the aperture as a target. We'd be going in at an angle of about seventy degrees -- " "It's still good enough -- as long as no other ships get in the way -- " "There's still time to do some structural strengthening on the longtitudinal axis -- " "We'll shed enough kinetic energy..." "Hold it a minute," Garamond commanded, raising his voice above the optimistic clamor. "We have to look at it from all angles. If we did go through the aperture, what would be the effect on Beachhead City?" "Severe," O'Hagan said reflectively. "Imagine one purple hell of a lightning bolt coming up through the aperture, immediately followed by an explosion equivalent to that produced by a tactical nuclear weapon." "There'd be destruction?" "Undoubtedly. But there's plenty of time to evacuate the area -- nobody would have to die." "Somebody mentioned colliding with another ship." "That's only a minor problem, Vance." O'Hagan looked momentarily surprised at having used Garamond's given name for the first time in his life. "We can advise Fleet Control of our exact course, and they'll just have to make certain the way is clear." Garamond tried to weigh the considerations but he could see only the faces of his wife and child. "Right! We do it. I want a copy of the decision network plan, but start taking action right away. In the meantime I'll talk to Fleet Control." The ten science-oriented and engineering officers at the table instantly launched into a polygonal discussion. The noise level in the room further shot up as communications channels were opened to other parts of the ship. Within a minute perhaps thirty other men and women were taking part in the conference, many of them vicariously present in the form of miniaturized, but nonetheless solid and real-looking, images of their heads, which transformed the long room into a montage of crazy perspectives. Garamond could feel the wavecrest of hope surging through all the levels of the disabled vessel. He told Napier to make an announcement about the situation over the general address speakers, then went into his private suite and put through a call to Fleet Control. It was taken not by the Fleet Movements Controller, as Garamond had expected, but by a Starflight admin man. Senior Secretary Lord Nettleton. The Senior Secretary was a handsome silver-haired septuagenarian who had a reputation for devotion to the Lindstrom hierarchy. He was of a type that Elizabeth liked to have around, capable of presenting a benign fatherly image while keeping himself remote from the inner workings of the system. "I was expecting somebody on the operations side," Garamond said, dispensing with the standard formal mode of address. "The President has taken the matter under her personal control. She is very much concerned." "I'll bet." "I beg your pardon?" Nettleton's resonant voice betrayed an open challenge to Garamond to speak his mind. Again Garamond thought about his wife and child. "The President's concern for the welfare of her employees is well known." Nettleton inclined his head graciously. "I'm aware of how futile words are under the circumstances, Captain Garamond. But I would like to express my personal sympathy for you and your crew in this... "The reason I called is to inform Starflight that the Bissendorf has enough lateral control to enable it to pass through the aperture into the interior of Orbits -- uh -- Lindstromland, and that is what I intend to do." "I don't quite understand." Nettleton's image underwent several minute but abrupt changes of size that told Garamond other viewers were switching into the circuit. "I am informed that you are traveling at a hundred kilometers per second and have no means of slowing down." "That's correct. The Bissendorf is going to hit Beachhead City like a bomb. You will have to evacuate the area around the aperture. My science staff can help with the estimates of how widespread the damage will be, but in any case I strongly recommend that you issue warnings immediately. You have less than eight hours." Garamond went on to explain the proposed action in detail, while continued perturbations of the image showed that his unseen audience was increasing every second. "Captain, what happens if your ship misses the aperture and strikes the shell material below the city itself?" "We are confident of passing through the aperture." "All you're saying is that the probability is high. But suppose you do miss?" "It is our opinion that the shell would be undamaged." "But the shell is one of the greatest scientific enigmas ever! On what do you base your predictions about its behavior under that sort of impact?" Garamond allowed himself a smile. "In the last hour or so our instinct about these things has become highly developed." "This is hardly a time for jokes." Nettleton looked away for a moment, nodded to someone off screen. When he turned back to Garamond his eyes were somber. "Captain, have you thought about the possibility that Starflight may not be able to grant you permission to aim for the aperture?" Garamond considered the question. "No -- but I've thought about the fact that there is absolutely nothing Starflight can do to stop me." Nettleton shook his head with regal sadness. "Captain, I'm going to put you through to the President on a direct connection." "I haven't the time to speak to Liz," Garamond told him. "Just send a message to my wife that I'll be back with her as soon as I can." He broke the connection and returned to the operations room, hoping he had sounded more confident than he felt. I indstrom Center was austere j compared to its equivalent on Earth. Nevertheless it was the largest and most palatial building on Orbitsville. Octagonal in plan, it had been built on a slight eminence some twenty kilometers east of Beachhead City, to which it was joined by power and communications cables stretched on low pylons. No attempt had yet been made to sculpt the hill according to the President's ideas of what it ought to be, sotheglass-and-acrylic edifice was incongruously lapped by a sea of grass. Its first three floors housed those elements of the Starflight administration that the supreme executive had transported from the Two Worlds. The top floor was her private residence. On this evening, the guards who patroled the perimeter fence were distinctly uneasy. They had heard that a maniac of a flickerwing captain was going to try to crash his vessel through the aperture at interplanetary speed, and the rumor had even quoted an exact minute for the event to occur -- # Compatible Local Time. As the moment grew nearer each man felt a powerful urge to fix his gaze on the distant scattering of buildings, just below the up-curved horizon, which was Beachhead City. They had been told that most of the city had been hastily evacuated to escape the promised pyrotechnics, and nobody wanted to miss the spectacle. At the same time, however, their eyes were frequently drawn upward to the transparent west wall of the Presidential suite. Elizabeth Lindstrom herself could be glimpsed up there, screened only by sky reflections, her silk-sheathed abdomen glowing like a pearl. It was well known that she sometimes kept watch on her guards through a magnifying screen. None of the men relished the idea of being dismissed from Starfiight service and sent back to the crowded towerblocks of Earth; yet the compulsion to stare into the west grew greater with each passing minute. The suspense was also making itself felt on the top floor of the Octagon. But in the case of Elizabeth Lindstrom it was a pleasurable sensation, heady and stimulating, akin to pre-orgasmic tension. "My dear," she said warmly to Aileen Garamond, "do you think you are wise to watch this?" "Quite sure. My Lady." "But the boy..." "I'm positive my husband knows what he is doing." Aileen's voice was firm and unemotional as she placed her hands on her son's shoulders, forcing him to face the west. "Nothing will go wrong." "I admire your courage, especially when the chances are so..." Elizabeth checked herself just in time. The common characterless woman beside her appeared genuinely to believe that a ship could run into a solid wall of air at a speed of a hundred kilometers a second and not be destroyed on the instant. Elizabeth was girded with the mathematics that showed how incredible the idea was, but she knew the equations would mean nothing to her guest. In any case, she had no desire to break the news in advance. She wanted to watch Mrs. Garamond's face as she saw her husband's funeral pyre blossom on the horizon. Only then would Elizabeth receive the first payment against the incalculable debt the Garamond family owed her. The idea of grief canceling grief, of pain atoning for pain, was one that few people could properly understand, Elizabeth had often told herself. Even she had not appreciated the logic of it until days after Harald's small body had been cast in sun-colored resin and stood in its place in the Lindstrom chapel. But the concept was so true! There were no flaws in the system of double entries -- anguish against anguish, love against love. This realization had given Elizabeth the strength to go on even when it appeared that the Garamonds had chosen to die in the black deeps of space. That episode had been nothing more and nothing less than God's way of telling her that he was simply building up the Garamond's credit to the point at which it could be used to wipe out all their debts. In retrospect, it had been fortunate that she had not been able to extract payment immediately, because there would still have been an imbalance and she would never have found her heart's ease. A child is a focus, a repository of love added to each year of its life, and it was crystal-clear that the death of a boy of nine could never be compensated for by the death of a boy of... "I have the latest computations for you, My Lady." The projected voice of Lord Nettleton broke in on Elizabeth's thoughts. "The impact will occur in exactly three minutes from... now." "Three minutes," Elizabeth said aloud, knowing that the accurately beamed sound would not have reached the other woman's ears. Without giving any sign that she had heard, Aileen picked up her son so that her face was screened by the boy's body. Elizabeth moved quietly to the other side, as was her due, and waited. She waited through eons and eternities. And the ribbed canopy of the sky ceased to turn. Time was dead... T he lightning bolt came first. An arrow-straight line of hell. Searing upward at an angle into the heavens. Isolated for the first perceptible instant, then joined by writhing offshoots, tributaries and deltas of violet fire that flickered and froze on the retina. Faint shadows fled across the sky as the air above Beachhead City was turmoiled by the fountain of energy. Appalling though the general display was, there was projected from its core, on the threshold of vision, a sense of even greater forces in the shock of opposition. There was a feeling of cataclysmic upward movement, then a bright star burned briefly and dwindled in the southwest. The day returned to normalcy, though darker than it had been before. Elizabeth drew a deep quavering breath. No other death she had ever witnessed had been so final. She turned her gaze to Aileen Garamond's face, and was shocked to see there a look of serenity. "It was to be expected," she said. "I know." Aileen nodded contentedly, and hugged her child. "I told you." Elizabeth gaped at her. "You fool! You don't think he's still alive after what you've just... She was forced to stop speaking as the waves of thunder rolling out from Beachhead City, slow-moving in the low-pressure air of Orbitsville, engulfed the building. Reflections of lights stretched and shrank and stretched again as the transparent walls absorbed energy. Small objects throughout the room stirred uneasily in their places. Christopher buried his face in his mother's hair. "Your husband is dead," Elizabeth announced when silence was restored to the room. "But because you are the widow of the most distinguished of all my S.E.A. captains, you will remain here as my guest. No other arrangement would be acceptable." Aileen faced her, pale but immovable. "My Lady, you are mistaken. You see -- I know!" Elizabeth shook her head incredulously and a little sadly. She had been planning to spend perhaps a year in a game of subtleties and suggestions, watching the other woman's slow progression from doubt to certainty about her son's eventual fate. But in view of Aileen Garamond's mentality, or lack of it, it was obvious now that such strategies would be ineffective. If full payment were to be extracted, as God as decreed, the President would have to speak plainly, to the point. Elizabeth touched a beautiful micro-engineered ring on her left hand, insuring that no listening devices could operate nearby. Then she explained in words a child could understand the accountancy of retribution. Christopher Garamond would be allowed another three years. He was to have the same lifespan as Harald Lindstrom -- but not a day more. When she had finished, she summoned her physician. "Captain Garamond's death has left Mrs. Garamond in a state of hysteria. Give her suitable sedation." Aileen opened her mouth to scream. But the physician, an experienced man, touched her wrist in a quick movement that did not even disturb the boy she was holding in her arms. As the cloud of instant-acting drug diffused through her skin, Aileen relaxed and allowed herself to be led away. Alone again, Elizabeth Lindstrom stood looking out across the western grasslands. For the first time in more than a year, she was feeling something approaching happiness. She began to smile. T he integrity of the Bissendorfs design was so great, and the onboard preparation had been so thorough, that less than a tenth of the crew died as a result of the passage through the eye of the needle. Every available man and woman had been co-opted into teams. Some had welded into place new  computer-designed structures, making load paths actually utilizing the forces of the impact to give the shell enough strength to survive. Until only minutes before the hellish transit, other gangs had swarmed on the skin of the ship, adding hundreds of sacrificial anodes to those already in place to serve as focal points for the ion exchanges that otherwise would have eaten away the hull during normal flight. The new anodes, massive slabs of pure metal, had withstood the brief but incredibly fierce attrition of the lightning wreathing the ship as it had passed through the atmospheric tunnel created by its electron gun. On emerging from its ordeal the Bissendorf's principal dimeni sions had altered, in some cases by several meters. But it had gone in with all pressure doors sealed -- in effect it had been converted into dozens of separate, self-contained spaceships -- and there had been no loss of life due to compression. The entire crew had donned spacesuits for primary protection, had been injected with metallic salts. The ship's restraint fields had been stepped up fo overload intensity, creating an environment in which any sudden movement of human tissue would be resisted by a pervasive jelly-like pressure from all sides. This measure, while undoubtedly a major factor in crew survival, also unavoidably caused a number of deaths. In the few sections where severe structural failure occurred some of the occupants had "fallen" varying distances under multiple gravities, and the heat induced by electromotive interaction had caused their blood to boil. But for the vast majority the internal bracing of their organs against immense G-shocks had meant the differences between life and death. And yet all the preparation, all the frenzied activity, would have amounted to nothing more than a temporary stay of execution had it not been for the exotic nature of Orbitsville itself. The synthetic gravity of the shell material attenuated much more rapidly than that of a solid mass. Although the Bissendorf's slanting course was drawn into the shape of a parabola, the curve remained flat. So the crew had sufficient time to control their reentry into the atmosphere from the inner vacuum of Orbitsville. The vessel's ion tubes and short-term reaction motors were effective against the weak pull of the shell, and it was possible for the Bissendorf to skip along the upper fringes of the air shield, gradually shedding velocity. It was even possible, using the fading reserves of reaction mass, to bring the ship down in one piece, with no further loss of life. What was manifestly impossible, however, was to make the ship fly again. All its external sensors had been seared cleanly from the hull. Many of the internal position-fixing devices had been destroyed or confused by the unnatural physics of Orbitsville. Of course, the clocks were still in operation. They had recorded a time lapse of five days. Five days from the passage through the Beachhead City aperture to the final touchdown on a hillside far into the interior. Starting from that basic fact, and using only a pocket calculator, it took just a few seconds for those on board to realize that they had traveled a distance of from the aperture. In terms of the overall size of Orbitsville the journey was infinitesmal. A short hop, a stone's throw, a jump across sunlit grass and woodlands. But in human terms the distance was more of a barrier than mountains or torrents. It was known, for instance, that back on Earth many a country postman had in his lifetime walked a total distance equal to a trip to the Moon, but that was only # kilometers. Walking back to Beachhead City would have been a task to be carried out by successive generations over a period of a thousand years. Using the vast resources of the Bissendorfs workshops it would be possible to build a fleet of vehicles that might cut the journey time down to a mere century -- except that wheels and other components would wear out in a matter of months. It would not be possible to transport the maintenance and manufacturing facilities that might enable the caravan to complete its golden journey. There was also the difficulty that no man or machine knew the exact direction in which to travel. It was possible to get a rough bearing from the angle of the day and night ribs across the sky, but a rough bearing would be of no value. At the distances involved, a deviation of only one degree w'ould cause the train to miss Beachhead City by hundreds of thousands of sundrenched kilometers. By the time the dead had been buried, the day was well advanced. The remaining men and women of the Bissendorfs crew were ceasing to be citizens of Earth. They were experiencing the infinity-change, the wistful, still contentment bestowed by the motionless sun of Orbitsville. Garamond bethought himself of a verse:... that calm Sunday that goes on and on, When even lovers find their peace at last. And Earth is but a star, that once had shone. iiWJ E RE going back," GaraW mond announced flatly. He studied the faces of his executive staff, noting how each officer was reacting. Some looked at him with open amusement, others stared downward into the grass, seemingly embarrassed. Behind them, farther along the hillside, the great scarred hulk of the Bissendorf shocked the eye. Beyond it, microscopic figures moved on the plain in the rituals of a ball game. The sun hung directly overhead, as always, creating only an occasional flicker of diamondfire on the dark-blue waters of a chain of lakes banding the middle distance. Garamond began to feel that his words had been absorbed by Orbitsville's green infinities, sucked up cleanly before they reached the ears of his listeners. He resisted the urge to repeat himself. "It's a hell of a long way," Napier said, finally breaking the heavy silence. His statement of the obvious, Garamond knew, constituted a question. "We'll build aircraft." O'Hagan cleared his throat. 'Tve already thought of that, Vance. We have enough workshop facilities still intact to manufacture reasonable subsonic aircraft, and the micropedia can give us all the design data. But the distance is just too great. You run into exactly the same problem as with wheeled vehicles. Your aircraft might do the trip in three or four years -- except that we haven't the resources to build a plane that could fly continuously for that length of time. And we couldn't transport major repair facilities." O'Hagan glanced solemnly around the rest of the group, reproving them for having left it to him to deal with a wayward non-scientist. Garamond shook his head. "When I said we are going back, I didn't mean all of us, in a body. I meant that I am going back, together with any of the crew sufficiently determined to try it -- even if that means only half a dozen of us." "But..." "We're going to build a fleet of perhaps ten aircraft. We're going to incorporate as much redundancy as is compatible with good aerodynamics. We're going to fly our ten machines towards Beachhead City, and each time one of them breaks down we're going to take the best components out of it and put them in the other machines, and we're going to fly on." "There's no guarantee you'll get there, even with the last aircraft." "There's no guarantee I won't." "I'm afraid there is." O'Hagan's expression had become even more pained. "There's this problem of direction. Unless you've got a really accurate bearing on Beachhead City, there's no point in setting out." "I'm not worried about getting a precise bearing," Garamond said, making a conscious decision to be enigmatic. He was aware that in the very special circumstances of the Bissendorf s final flight the whole concept of command structure, of the captain-and-crew relationship, could have easily lost its validity. It was necessary at this stage to reestablish himself in office without the aid of insignia or outside authority. "How do you propose to get one?" "I propose instructing my science staff to attend to that chore for me. There's an old saying about the pointlessness of owning a dog and doing your own barking." Garamond fixed a challenging gaze in turn on O'Hagan, Sammy Yamoto, Morrison, Schneider and Denise Serra. He noted with satisfaction that they were responding as he had hoped. Already there were signs of abstraction, of withdrawal to a plateau of thought upon which they became hunters casting nets for a quarry they had never seen but would recognize at first sight. "While they're sorting that one out," Garamond continued, speaking to Napier before any of the science staff could voice objections, "we'll convene a separate meeting of the engineering committee. The ship has to be cut up to get the workshop floors level. In the meantime I want the design definition drawn up for the aircraft and the first production tapes prepared." He walked toward the improvised plastic hut he was using as an office. Napier, striding beside him, gave a dry cough. "TB again?" Garamond said with mock sympathy. "I think you're going too fast, Vance. Concentrating too much on the nuts and bolts, and not thinking enough about the human element." "Be more specific. Cliff." "A lot of the crew have got the Orbitsville syndrome already. They don't see any prospect of getting back to Beachhead City, and many don't even want to get back. They see no reason for not setting up a community right here, using the Bissendorf s a mine for essential materials." Garamond stopped, shielded his eyes and looked beyond the ship toward the plot of land, marked with a silver cross, where forty men and women had been buried. "I can understand their feelings, and I'm not proposing to ride herd on those who want to stay. We'll use volunteers only." "There could be fewer than you expect." "Surely some of them, many of them, have reasons for getting back." "The point is that you aren't proposing to get them back, Vance. The planes won't make it all the way. So you're asking them to choose between staying here in a strong sizable community with resources of power, materials and food -- or being dropped somewhere between here and Beachhead City in groups of ten or less, with very little to get them started as independent communities." "Each plane will have to carry an iron cow and a small plastics plant." "It's still a hell of a lot to ask." 'Til also guarantee that a rescue mission will set out as soon as I get back." "If you get back. And how can you give guaranties? You've got enemies there." A dark thought crossed Garamond's mind. "How about you, Cliff? Are you coming with me?" "You know it! All I'm trying to do is make you realize there's more to the thing than finding the right engineering approach." "I realize that already. But right now I have all the human problems I can handle. The personal kind, I mean." "Others have wives and families they want to get back to," comforted Napier. "That's the point -- I haven't." "But... Aileen. And little Chris..." "How long do you think they'll survive after I'm presumed dead or permanently missing? A week? A day?" Garamond forced himself to speak steadily despite the grief thundering through him. "The only reason I'm going back is that I must kill Liz Lindstrom." although it had been equipped V. and powered to carry out one emergency landing, the Bissendorf was in a supremely unnatural attitude when beached with its longitudinal axis at right angles to the pull of gravity. The interior layout was based on the assumption that, except during short spells of weightlessness, there would be acceleration or retardation enabling the crew to regard the prow as pointing "up" and to walk normally on all its levels. Now the multitudinous floors of the vessel had become vertical walls. To these were attached, in surrealisticattitudes, clusters of consoles, pedestals, desks, chairs, lockers, beds, tables and several hundred machines of various types and capabilities. Because design allowance had been made for periods of free-fall, most small items, including paperwork, were magnetically or otherwise clamped in position. Thus little material had fallen to the lowermost side of the hull. But many of the ship's resources could not be tapped until key areas were properly oriented to the ground. Teams of forcemasters using valency cutters and improvised derricks began slicing the Bissendorf s structure into manageable sections and rotating them to horizontal positions. The work was slowed by the need to sever and reconnect power channels. But within a week the cylinder of the central hull had been largely converted into a cluster of low circular or wedge-shaped buildings. Each was roofed with a plastic diaphragm and linked by cable to power sources on the ground or within the butchered ship. The entire complex was surrounded by an umbra of tents and extemporized plastic sheds that gave it the appearance of an army encampment. Garamond had placed maximum priority on the design and workshop facilities that were to create his aircraft. Work advanced with a speed that would have been impossible even a century earlier. The assembly line was already visible as nine sets of landing skids surmounted by the sketchy cruciforms of the basic airframes. The computers from the spaceship had decreed that the stressedskin principle of aircraft construction. currently universal to aviation, should be abandoned in favor of the frame-and-fabric techniques employed in the Wright Brothers era. This permitted most technological and engineering subtlety to be concentrated in a dozen pieces of alloy per craft, and the tapecontrolled radiation millers hewed these from fresh billets in less than a day. The plastic skinning could then be carried out to the standards of a good-quality furniture shop and the engines -- standard magnetic pulse prime-movers -- fitted straight from the shelf. It was the availability of these engines, of which there were twenty-one in the Bissendorfs inventory, that had been the main parameter in deciding upon a fleet of nine twin-engined ships which would set out on the journey with three powerplants in reserve. G aramond, sitting alone in the prismatic twilight at the entrance to his tent, was halfway through a bottle of whiskey when he heard someone approaching. The nights never became truly dark under the striped canopy of Orbitsville's sky, and he was able to recognize the compact figure of Denise Serra while she was still some distance away. His annoyance at being disturbed faded somewhat but he sat perfectly still, making no sign of welcome. The whiskey was his guarantee of sleep and to bring about the desired effect it had to be taken in precise rhythmic doses, with no interruptions to the ritual. Denise reached the tent, stood for a moment without speaking while she assessed his mood, then sat down in the grass at the opposite side of the entrance. Appreciating her silence, Garamond waited till his instincts prompted him to take another measure of the spirit's cool fire. He raised the bottle to his lips. "Drinking that way can't be good for you," Denise said. "On the contrary -- it's excellent for me." "I never got to like whiskey. Especially the stuff Burton makes." Garamond took his slightly delayed drink. "It's all right if you know how to use it." "Use it? Aren't you supposed to enjoy it?" "It's more important to me to know how to use it." She sighed. "I'm sorry. I know you must feel awful, being separated from..." "What did you want, Denise?" "A child, I think." Garamond knew himself to have been rendered emotionally sterile by despair for his family. Yet he still retained enough humanity to feel obliged to cap his bottle and set it aside. "It's a bad time," he said. "Yes, but that's the way I feel. It must be this place. It must be the Orbitsville syndrome that Cliff keeps talking about. We're here, and a new universe is all around us, forever, and things I used to think important now seem trivial. And for the first time in my life I want a child." Garamond stared at the girl through the veils of soft blue air. A part of his mind, despite the pounding chaos of the rest, was intensely aware of her. It was difficult to pick out a single special attribute of Denise Serra but the overall effect was overpowering. She was a lovely neat package of femininity, intelligence and warmth, and he felt ashamed of having nothing to offer her. "It's still a bad time," he said. "I know. We all know that, but some of the other women are drinking untreated water. It's only a matter of time till they become pregnant." Her eyes watched him steadily and he remembered how, in that previous existence, it had given him pleasure to look at her. "Haven't you already got a partner, Denise?" "You know I haven't." That's it into the open, he thought. Forme to know that of all the female crew members, Denise Serra had no liaisons. I would have to have been taking a special interest in her.  "I guess I did know." Garamond hesitated. "Denise, I feel..." "Honored?" "I think that's the word." "Say no more, Vance. I know what it means when somebody starts off by feeling honored. I've done it myself." She stood up in one easy movement. Garamond tried for something less abrupt, and knew he was being clumsy. "Maybe in a year, a few months..." "The special unrepeatable offer will be lost to you before then," Denise said, an uncharacteristic harshness in her voice. "Have you thought about what you're going to do if we can't get a bearing on Beachhead City, if your flight never gets off the ground?" "I'm counting on your getting that bearing." "Don't!" She turned quickly, walked away a few paces, then came back and kneeled close to him. "I'm sorry, Vance." "You haven't done anything to apologize for." "I think I have. You see, we've pretty well solved the problem. Dennis O'Hagan didn't want to say anything to you till he'd made a check on the math." Garamond's attention was fully captured. "How did you crack it?" "Mike Moncaster, our particles man, came up with the idea. You know about delta particles?" "I've heard of delta rays." "No -- that's just historic stuff. Delta particles -- deltons -- are a component of cosmic rays discovered only a few years ago. During his last leave Mike got himself seconded to the team investigating cosmic ray refraction by the force field that seals Beachhead City aperture. They were glad to have him because he's pretty good on the Conservation of Strangeness and..." "Denise! You started to tell me how you were going to get a bearing." "That's what I'm doing. Deltons don't interact much. That's why it took so long to find them -- and that's why they can travel ten or fifMike is fairly certain they can penetrate the force lens, just like other components of cosmic rays, so we're going to build a big delton detector. Two of them, in fact. One behind the other to give us coordinates. All we need then is to pick up a delton, just one, and going back the way it came will give us a straight line home." "Do you think it will work?" "I think so." Denise's voice was kind. "What we still have to determine is how long we're likely to wait before a particle comes this way. It could be quite a while if things aren't in our favor. But we can swing the odds by making the detectors as big as possible or by erecting a whole bank of them." Garamond felt the distance between himself and Elizabeth Lindstrom shrink a little, and the sick joy of vengeance spurted within him. "Great news!" "I know," Denise said. "My dowry." "You'll have to explain that one." "The first time you ever noticed me aboard ship was when I gave the news you wanted to hear about getting through the aperture." She laughed ruefully. "Being a pragmatist, I must have decided that if it worked once it would work again." Garamond moved his hand uncertainly and touched her cheek. "Denise, I..." "Let's not play games, Vance." She pushed away his hand and stood up. "I was childish, that's all." Later, while waiting for sleep to relieve him of the burden of identity, Garamond was acutely aware -- for the first time in months -- that the hard, angry vacuum of space began only a short distance beneath his cot. The feeling persisted into surrealistic dreams poising him dangerously on the rim of a precipace, with a kind of moral vertigo drawing him over the edge. XV O n his way to the airstrip Garamond was surprised to notice one of his crewmen wearing what could only be described as a coolie hat. He eyed the young man curiously, received a half-hearted salute, and decided the unusual headgear must be a personal souvenir of a tourist trip to the Orient. A minute later, while passing the workshop area, he saw two more men wearing similar hats, which he then realized were woven from fresh silver-green straw. The ancient peasant-styling, with all that it symbolized in Earth's history, was repugnant to Garamond. He hoped it would not become a fullblown fad such as occasionally swept through the crew levels. When he reached the test site, the glinting of flat green triangles in the distance told him that coolie hats were being worn by at least half the men clearing grass at the far end of the airstrip. Cliff Napier was waiting for him at the door to the operations shed, entrance. "Morning, Vance. We're nearly ready to fly." "Good." Garamond eyed the first aircraft appraisingly then turned his gaze back along the strip. "It looks like a paddy field dow n there. Why are the men wearing those sunhats?" "Would you believe," Napier said impassively, "to protect them from the sun?" Garamond ignored the sarcasm. "But why that sort of hat?" "I guess because they're light and easy to make. That's a good shape if the sun's directly above you and you're working in the dirt all day." "I still don't like them." "You're not working in the dirt all day." This time there was no mistaking the coldness in the big man's manner. Garamond locked eyes with Napier and was shaken to feel a surge of anger and dislike. This can't be, he thought. Aloud he said, "Do you expect me to? Do you think I'm not making the most efficient use of human resources?" "From your point of view, you are." "And from their point of view?" "The cold season's coming down soon. Most of the crew are staying here, remember. They'd rather be building houses and processing grass into protein cakes." Garamond decided against answering immediately lest he damage a working relationship. He glanced up at the sky and saw that behind ribs of light-blue were well in the ascendant in the west. They signified that summer was approaching the diametrically opposite point on Orbitsville's shell, that fall was ending on the near side. "This Orbitsville syndrome of yours," he said after a pause. "An early symptom is that a man develops an aversion to taking orders, right?" "That seems to come into it." "Then let's sit down together and agree on a common set of goals. That way..." "That way we'd do everything you want and you wouldn't even have to give the orders," Napier said sharply, but this time he was smiling. Garamond smiled in return. "Why do you think I suggested it?" Although the crisis had passed, he had a feeling it carried significance for the future and he was determined to take appropriate action. "We'll open a bottle tonight and get our ideas straightened out." "I thought we were out of whiskey." "No. There's plenty." "You're on that stuff Burton makes?" "Why not?" An incongruous primness appeared briefly on Napier's dark features. "Maybe we can fix something up later. How about looking at this airplane?" "Certainly." They walked out toward the waiting machine. It was the biscuit color of unpainted plastic. A high-wing monoplane, it sat nose-high on its skids and looking like something from a museum of aeronautics, but Garamond had no doubts about its capabilities. The ungainly ship would carry a crew of five at a maximum cruising speed of five hundred kilometers an hour for fifty days at a stretch, landing after that time to replenish food and water. Even this limitation was forced on it by the fact that more than two-thirds of the payload would be taken up by spares, an iron cow and other supplies. Garamond glanced from the newly completed machine to the others of its kind farther back in the open-air production line, and from them up to the black rectangular screen of the delton detector on the hillside. He felt a vague spasm of alarm over the extent to which his future was dependent on complex artifacts, but this was obliterated by the yearning hunger that kept him alive, that was the motive force behind all his actions. It was ironic, he thought, that in depriving him of all worth living for in his previous life, Elizabeth Lindstrom had provided, in herself, the single goal of his new existence. She had also given him a means of escaping from it, for he could foresee no w ay of long surviving the act of pulling the President's ribcage apart with his bare hands and gripping the heaving redness within and... "I know what you're thinking, Vance." "Do you?" Garamond stared into the face of the stranger who had spoken to him. He made the effort which allowed him to associate that face with Cliff Napier. There was a psychic wrench, and once again he was back in the sane world, walking toward the aircraft with his senior officer. "Well, don't keep me in suspense, Commander," he heard himself saying. "I think you're secretly pleased the electronics lab isn't able to build autopilots. If we're going to fly that distance, we want to fly it our own selves. We want to be able to tell people we did it with our hands." Garamond nodded. With our hands, he thought. One of the group standing at the plane was wearing a coolie hat. When its owner turned to greet him, Garamond was startled to see the sweatbeaded features of Try Litman, the senior production executive. Litman was a short pudgy man who had always compensated for the natural untidiness of his physique by paying strict attention to his uniform and off-duty dress. He was one of the last Garamond would have expected to favor a badly woven grass hat. Garamond began to doubt his earlier conviction that the design of the grass headgear was symbolic rather than utilitarian. "The ship looks good," Garamond said. "Is she ready to fly?" "As near as she'll ever be," Litman replied. Like the hat, the answer was not what Garamond would have expected of Litman. "How near is that?" "Relax, Vance." Litman grinned within the column of shadow projected by the brim of his hat. "That ship will take you as far as you want to go." "I'm ready to take her up now, sir," Braunek said opportunely, from the opposite side of the group. "You're happy enough about it?" "If the computer's happy, I'm happy, sir. Anyway, I did a few fast taxis yesterday and she felt fine." "Go ahead, then." Garamond watched the young man climb into the plane's glasshouse and strap himself into his seat. A few seconds later the propellers started to turn, silently driven by the magnetic resonance engines, and the control surfaces flicked in anticipation. As the propeller revolutions built up the group moved out of the backwash and a similar scattering took place among the work gangs at the far end of the runway. The plane began to move and excited shouts went up, signifying that despite the computer predictions and tapecontrolled machines, there had remained some areas of human participation. In its unloaded condition the aircraft used very little of the runway before lifting cleanly into the air. It continued in a straight line for about a kilometer, rising steadily, its shadow flitting over the grass directly below, then banked into a lazy turn and circled the encampment. The soundless flight seemed effortless, like that of a gull riding on a fresh breeze, but on the third pass Garamond thought he saw a small object detach itself from the aircraft and go fluttering to the ground. "What was that?" Napier called, screening his eyes. "I saw something fall." "Nothing fell," Litman asserted quickly. "I saw something, too," Garamond said. "You'd better get a medic on the truck, just in case." "It wouldn't do any good -- we had to pull the transmission out." "What?" Garamond stared in disbelief at Litman's uneasy but defiant face. "One of the first procedures we agreed on was that the truck would be kept at readiness during flight testing." "I guess I forgot." Garamond flicked a hand upward, sending Litman's hat tumbling behind him. "You are not a peasant," he said harshly. "You are not a coolie. You are a Starflight executive officer and I'm going to see that you..." "Braunek's coming back," someone yelled, and Garamond returned his attention to the aircraft. The pilot had not tried, or had been unable, to line up on the runway. He was coming in parallel to it, his ship rising and sinking noticeably as it breasted the wind. Garamond estimated the touchdown point and relaxed slightly as he saw it would be well to the north of the buildings and tents clustered around the hulk of the Bissendorf. The plane continued its descent, side-slipping a little but holding fairly well to its course. "I told you there was nothing to worry about," Litman said in a reproachful voice. "You'd better be right." Garamond kept his eyes on Braunek's ship. The side-slipping was more noticeable now, but each skid brought the plane a little closer to the centerline of the cleared strip and Garamond hoped that Braunek was good enough at his trade to be doing it on purpose. He knew, however, that there had to come a moment, a precise moment, in every air crash when the spectator on the ground was forced to accept that the pilot had lost his struggle against the laws of aerial physics, that a disaster had to occur. For Garamond, the moment came when he saw that the starboard propeller was ceasing to spin. The plane pulled to the right, as though the wing on that side had hit an invisible pylon, and staggered down the perilous sky toward the hillside. Toward, Garamond suddenly realized, the black rectangle of the delton detector. He was unable to breathe during the final few seconds of flight as the doomed ship, seesawing its wings, became silhouetted against land instead of sky and then flailed its way through the delton screen. And it was not until the sound of the crash reached him that he was freed from his stasis and began to run. B raunek's life was saved by the fact that the lightweight frames of the detector screens served as efficient absorbers of kinetic energy. They had accepted the impact, folding almost gently around the ship, stretching and twisting, and then trailing out behind it like vines. By the time Garamond reached the crash site, Braunek had been helped out of the wreckage and was sitting on the grass. He was surrounded by technicians who had been working in the small hut linked to the screens. One of them was spraying tissue sealant over a gash on his leg. "I'm glad you made it," Garamond said, feeling inadequate. "Are you all right?" Braunek shook his head. "I'm all right, yes, but everything else is screwed up." He tried to raise himself from the ground. Garamond pushed him back. "Don't move. I want the medics to have a proper look at you. What happened, anyway?" "Starboard-wing center panel dropped off." "It just -- dropped off?" he asked incredulously. Braunek nodded. "It took the engine control runs with it, otherwise I could have brought the ship in okay." Garamond jumped to his feet. "Litman! Find that panel and bring it here. Fast!" Litman. who was just arriving on the scene, looked exasperated but he turned without a word and ran back down the hillside. Garamond stayed on talking with Braunek until a medic arrived to check him over, then surveyed the ruins of the delton screen. Somewhere in the middle of the wreckage a damaged aircraft engine was still releasing gyromagnetic impulses that sent harmless flickers of detuned energy racing over the metalwork like St. Elmo's fire. Where accidental resonances occurred a feeble motive force was conjured up and the broken struts of the framework twitched like the legs of a dying insect. The destruction looked final to Garamond but he checked with O'Hagan and confirmed that the screen had been rendered useless except as a source of raw materials. "How long till you have another one operational?" "A week, perhaps," O'Hagan said. "We'll go for modular construction this time. That means we could have small areas operational in a couple of days, and we could build up to a useful size before your airplanes are ready to take off." "Do that." Garamond left his Chief Science Officer staring gloomily into the wreckage and went down the hillside to meet the group that had retrieved the lost wing section. The men set down the plastic panel in front of him and stood back without speaking. Garamond ran his gaze over it and saw at once that two longtitudinal edges that should have been ridged with welding overlays were square and clean except for small positioning welds which had broken. Garamond turned to face Litman. "All right -- who was responsible for the welding of this panel, and who was supposed to inspect?" "It's hard to say," Litman replied. "Hard to say?" Litman gulped, nodded. "Then check it out on the work cards." Garamond spoke with insulting gentleness. "What work cards?" Suddenly tired of being pushed, Litman turned a red, resentful face up to Garamond's. "Where have you been. Mister Garamond? Did nobody tell you we've got only bits of workshop left? Did nobody tell you that winter's coming and we just can't afford all the time and material that's going into these flying toys of yours?" "That isn't in your area of competence." "Of course not!" The redness had spread into Litman's eyes as he glanced around the gathering crowd. "I'm only a production man. I'm just one of the slobs who has to meet your airy-fairy target dates with no bloody equipment. But there's something you seem to forget, Mister Garamond. Out here a man who knows how to use his hands is worth twenty Starflight commanders with nothing left to command." Litman clenched his fists. "What will you do if we decide not to finish your planes?" A low, interested murmur arose from the men behind Litman. Cliff Napier stepped into the arena. "For a so-called production man," he said, "you seem to do a lot of work with your mouth, Litman. I suggest that you..." "It's all right," Garamond cut in, placing a restraining hand on Napier's arm. He raised his voice so that he could be heard by everybody in the vicinity. "I know how most of you feel about settling down here and making the best of things. And I know you want to get on with survival work before the weather turns. Furthermore, I can sympathize with your point of view about obsolescent Starflight com manders. But let me assure you of one thing. I'm leaving here with a fleet of airplanes, and the airplanes are going to be built properly, to the very highest standards of which we are capable. If I find they don't work as well as they ought to I'll simply turn them around and fly them right back to you." Garamond paused for emphasis. "So the only way you'll get me out of your hair permanently is by building good airplanes. And don't come sniffling to me about target dates or shortage of equipment. Don't forget -- I've seen how you can work when you want to. What sort of a target date did we have when we were getting ready to punch a hole right through the middle of Beachhead City?" Garamond stopped and outstared the man nearest him. "A nice finishing touch," Napier whispered. "If they still have pride." "Ah, hell," somebody growled from several rows back. "We might as well finish the job, now we've done most of the work." There was a general rumble of assent and the crowd, after a moment's hesitation, began to disperse. The response was not as wholehearted as Garamond could have wished, but he felt relieved at having maintained any kind of authority over Litman. The production executive, his face expressionless, was turning away with the others. "Troy," Garamond said to him, "we could have talked that one out in private." Litman shrugged. "I'm satisfied with the way things went." "Are you? You used to be known as the best production controller in the S.E.A. fleet." "That's all in the past, Vance. I've got bigger things on my mind now." "Bigger than a man's life? Braunek could have been killed by that sloppy workmanship." "I'm sorry about young Braunek's getting hurt, and I'm glad it isn't serious." Litman looked Garamond square in the eye. "The reason the men went along with you a moment ago is that you gave them Orbitsville -- and that's important to them. They're going to spread out through Orbitsville, Vance. This camp won't hold together more than a year or two, and then most likely it will be left empty." "We were talking about the plane crash." "We tlon't stand united any more. Any man who trusts his life to a machine he hasn't personally checked out is a fool. You should remember that." Litman plodded off down the hillside, probably intent on retrieving his coolie hat. Garamond stared after the compact figure, filled with the uneasy dislike that a man feels for another who seems in closer touch with the realities of a situation. He thought hard about Litman's words during the midday meal. He decided to turn himself into a one-man inspection and quality assurance team, with entire responsibility for the airworthiness of his aircraft. The self-imposed task, with its round of visual and manual checking of every aspect of the fleet production, occupied most of Garamond's working hours. It brought the discovery that he still had the ability to sleep without stunning his system with alcohol. G aramond was spreadeagled across the tailplane of the seventh aircraft, examining the elevator hinges, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was late in the day and therefore hot. Temperatures on Orbitsville built up steadily throughout each daylight period before dropping abruptly at nightfall. He had been hoping to finish that particular job without interruption. He kept his head inside the resinous darkness of the inspection hatch, hoping the interloper would take the hint and go away, but there came another and more insistent tap. Garamond twisted into a sitting position and found himself looking into the creased dry face of O'Hagan. The scientist had never been a happy-looking man, but on this occasion his expression was even more bleak than usual. Garamond felt a stab of concern. He switched off his inspection light and slid to the ground. "Has anything happened, Dennis?" O'Hagan gave a reluctant nod. "We've recorded a delta particle." "You've recorded a... Garamond pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and fought to control his elation. "Isn't that what we've been trying to do? What's your worry?" "We've got only about eighty percent of the original screen rebuilt." "So?" "It's too soon, Vance. I've been through Mike Moncaster's math a couple of times and I can't fault him. With two complete screens -- which is what we planned for -- to give a receiving area of five hundred square meters, we would have had to wait eighty or ninety days even to... "We were lucky," Garamond interrupted, laughing, astonished that he still remembered how. "It just shows that the laws of probability are bound to give you a break eventually. Come on, Dennis, admit it." O'Hagan shook his head with somber conviction. "The laws of probability aren't bound to give anyone anything, my friend." The eight aircraft took off at first light while the air was cool and thick. They climbed steadily against the seriate blue archways of the Orbitsville sky. At the agreed cruising height of five hundred meters the ungainly, stiff-winged birds leveled off, exchanging brief communications through pulses of modulated light. They assumed a V-formation and circled the base camp once, their shadows falling on the remains of the Bissendorf, the metallic egg that had given them birth. Without lingering further, they set course toward the prismatic mists to the east. Dear Editor: I was pleasantly surprised when I finally opened your latest issue -- the April -- and saw Jerry Pournelle had done a science article for Gulaxv. This is sf magazine science fact really moving up in the world. Of all the people I have met in my life. Jerry is one of the most colossally educated in science. He had advanced training in systems engineering. psychology, physics, mathematics, logic, and political science. He is the only science degree person I have ever known who was able to explain coherently the entire Velikovsky controversy, an hour later do the same for the Atlantean legend, and then, in a major talk, describe the new. dynamic, holographic view of the structure of the brain. Jerry has Isaac Asimov's memory in a younger body, and it comes out by instant association in a similar electrifying voice. Several sentences in his article referred to new developments in aerospace and energy science that were hitherto unknown to me -- and I tty to keep up. After reading that, the future already looks brighter to me. Scientifically oriented readers will now have to add Galaxy to their list of publications they need to keep up with what's going on. Sincerely, A. E. van Vogt It is immensely gratifying to all concerned to receive such praise from one of vour stature. O f course the obvious next step would be an A. E. van Vogt story based on an idea  or ideas  from a Pournelle column ! I wonder if it could be arranged for both to appear in the same issue... -- Baen Bv all rights this letter should have appeared in June Galaxy along with the Panshins' Forum article which it accompanied. However, as is well known to writers, editors are sometimes blind, and it just didn # occur to me until too lute. So. belatedly, a letter from Alexei Panshin. Dear Jim, As the enclosed column suggests, it is time for new things in science fiction -- new writers, new kinds of stories. Science fiction is about to enter a flourishing new period. What is needed, you and I seem to be agreed, is a magazine appropriate to contain and present this new science fiction, a magazine that will communicate the fact that something new is present by its very appearance, a magazine that will approach the reader by displaying sf s best qualities. These best qualities are strong story values, heroes, vigor, and a sense of the meaning of our times. Science fiction at its most robust is something that a wide audience is ready to welcome. The present science fiction magazines represent sf in a half-assed way. They are small in size. They present a negative appearance. They look like yesterday. They have small circulations (small, including even Analog's # plus). They are easily overlooked. My students at Cornell told me that they didn't read the magazines on the assumption that anything good in them would appear in the pb anthologies that they did buy. This is a false assumption. Not every good thing from the magazines converts to paperback. In particular: personality, a sense of continuity, responsiveness. Compared to magazines, pbs have a cold and isolated atmosphere. Magazines are communities. Magazines give direction to their communities. Moreover, pb anthologies are as spotty in their selections as the present magazines. Many anthologies contain nothing but original stories that have not been published in the magazines. These are generally all written around some common gimmick or assumption, and they are no better and often worse than the average product of the present magazines. Vertex is probably a response to the same sense that there is need for an sf magazine of a new kind. But Vertex -- thin, glossy, mechanical in tone, saddle-stapled -- is not the right response. As a sister publication to skin books, and being like them in some essential regards, it separates itself from the conclave of digest-size sf and mystery magazines, and loses itself in rows of skin magazines. Its #'j by # size causes it to be lost among other dissimilar magazines of that same common size. What may keep Vertex alive is its price -- # versus .#c for the digest magazines. For less actual value. For better physical package and more concern with graphics. This may demonstrate two things. Sf in a new package can sell for a higher price than the present magazines charge. And this is a time in which even misguided experiments have a chance of success. ; If Vertex , which in its attempt to be dignified barely identifies itself as science fiction, can succeed simply because it presents sf in a novel manner, then a new magazine in a new format with a better sense of the times and of the values of science fiction should sell strongly. The solution is a magazine with the size and shape of the pulp magazines. In fact, it should be the pulp magazine raised to a new level. The pulp magazine gone First Class. It should be ## of an inch thick, as thick as a paperback. It should be # inches wide and perhaps # inches tall. If placed among the digest magazines, it will dominate. If placed among taller magazines, it will elbow its way to the front. This size speaks of an earlier day when science fiction was more forthright and vigorous, more rowdy and adventurous than it has been in recent years. The covers should reinforce this impression. They should be strongly colorful, active and positive. The cover printing should be bold. The price for this magazine should be high: #, #, or possibly more. In return, the magazine should present a generous appearance. Cover stock should be plasticized. This would permit the bold neopulp art style to become electric. It also suggests extra value. It is this generous, extravagant, bonus value that must be the spirit of the magazine. It must be generously illustrated. It must offer an ample bounty of fiction -- # words, perhaps. It must offer a healthy editorial side -- perhaps # words of editorial, articles and reviews. The reviews should be of the books, records, movies, comic books, performers, comedians that show a sense of the new times. This new science fiction magazine should be the heartland not of science fiction merely but of the new times. It should present the emerging myth of the day. It should speak to all those who believe in ecology, evolution and synergy. All those who believe in self-transformation. In its very appearance, the magazine should speak of these things. Of new powers. Of new attitudes and new ways. In its price and its appearance, and in its sense of itself, the new magazine separates itself from the cheap digest science fiction magazines. The title should not speak of them, either. It should be a new title altogether, free to become a new frame of mind. It should sound positive, science fictional, and of the times. Vertexes and analogs are mechanical. Galaxy is physical. If is hypothetical. The magazine of fantasy and science fiction is initialese. Amazing and fantastic are more emotional, but the words of another time. Quest is a possibility. No -- Quest is not a possibility. I've got Dimension and New Realities and Bonzo SF written down here. And Overplus, which Cory hated immediately. I like Bonzo SF best, but that's not it. The title, whatever it is, should say liberation, expansion, unfolding, maturation, growth, evolution, ecology, creativity, synergy, multiplexity, multiformity, changing headstates, innerness, alternate realities. The magazine should pay its contributors well. If original anthologies can have budgets for stories of #I # for # words and sell enough copies in hardcover and Soft to justify this, then there is an audience for a quality magazine that can pay #-#e a word. And pay well for good illustration and cover art. Your suggestion of a quarterly makes good sense. A first issue could be tried as an experiment. A quarterly would be unable to run serial novels. But with the amount of wordage I am suggesting, it would be possible to run a complete novel of # words, a short novel of # words, two novelettes of # words, and two or three short stories. That would seem a substantial value to attract an audience with. These days there is always an availability of novels. The strongest expressions of the new thing in sf and in society will be at novel length. Offer a complete novel and a number of long stories in a package of the first quality, with the spirit of the old all-story magazines, and charge well. It takes a strong editorial vision. A refusal to compromise. But the result will have an immediate impact. It will be a center of attraction for writers and readers with a similar sense of the times. Cory and l want a magazine of this sort. We would like to read it and we would like to contribute to necessary to see a first issue into being. critical article and reviews. If novels are to be the strength on which the magazine and its new vision are to novel for the first issue. We are to ask specific people for contributions, to make story assignments or whatever to get appropriate stories for a first issue. If you are serious about putting together a science fiction magazine that is as strong as a science fiction magazine could be, you may count on us. Yours, Alexei Due to technical difficulties beyond our control -- namely the US Post Office -- Ted Sturgeon's Bookshelf and his new column Interface, did not appear this month. Ted will be back next month, and -- God and the US Post Office willing -- every month thereafter. Thank you for your patience. A. Science Fiction: Slow Death #, #. #, #; Bratn Fan# tasy; American Flyer #, #; Fever Dreamt; Slow Death # (.#) B. Spine tingling Horror: Skull #. #, #, #; Psychotic # Adventure I; Insect Fear #; Legion of Charlies; Deviant Slice. C. Fables  Heresies: Tales Front the Leather Nun; # Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary; Spasm; Grim Wit # (#) D. Graphic Novels: Grim Wit #; Image of the Beast # (.#); Psychotic Adventures #; Inner City Romance #; Or. Atomic #; Harold Hedd #; Armorkins; Skull #; Two Fisted Zombies. E. 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Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Rather than describe this story ( that it is a genuine, previously unpublished Pohl I Kornbluth collaboration should be description enough!) I am taking this opportunity to congratulate Fred on being elected President of the Science Fiction Writers of America... , the hero of this story did not discover the Overdrive or the Zeta-Ray Bomb, but did discover a new social system. This is a sciencefiction story about an inventor." -- Ursula K. Le Guin A religious satire about all those who feel they should fight for their beliefs. This is the story of Demetrios the Storyteller, whose name, before the bombs fell, was Adam Freeman. Like his creator, "there was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. " A Cyclical Theory of Science Fiction -- Sf, it would seem, goes through a rebirth about once every twelve years. The last was in # ,... Second in a non-verbal series. This issue Ted discusses the latest novels of, among others, Philip K. Dick, Sterling E. Lanier and Jean Mark Gawron. You can also find out how to subscribe to Locus, the newspaper of science fiction. Our Friends the Arabs -- Every cloud has a silver lining, it is said, and the erstwhile Arab oil boycott was no exception. Indeed, there seems to be more silver lining than cloud. Letters from Mudgett, Smith lishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. by UniversalTandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-Issue subscription In the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. Don't miss a single novel based on the fantastic Planet of the Apes motion pictures. Written by a galactic gallery of stars -- John (Brak the Barbarian) Jakes, Hugo Award winner David Gerrold, and Jerry Pournelle, winner of the J.W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award. The men of Space Probe # confront a bizarre new race in the unexplored regions of the galaxy. AS# -- # Captain Matt Foyt of Space Probe # finds himself trapped in an alien society that feeds on violence. AS# -- # A fearful gamble by a planet's master may lead to the ultimate chaos. ANI # -- # Rack the Healer dares to defy the supreme authority in a desperate struggle for the planet's survival. AN# -- # "A free-swinging fantasy." -- Publishers Weekly. "Goulart is science fiction's best humorist." -- Sf. Louis Post-Dispatch. AN# -- # A compilation of the very best stories of # by the editors of Galaxy magazine. Includes stories by Harlan Ellison, R.A. Lafferty, Theodore Sturgeon and other superstars from the science fiction hall of fame. AQI ## "A solid piece of science fiction ." -- San Francisco Chronicle AN#-# ANI # -- # AN #-# Please send me the books marked below (Include order number): If any of my selections are out of stock, please supply the following alternate choices: Name   Address  City State Zip Add # for postage and handling for one book. # for two or three book#. We pay postage on all orders of four books or more. Send remittance in U.S. or Canadian funds. Sorry No C.O.D'e. 'This story is a ' prequel ' to Ursula's superb events depicted herein occur about # years prior to those in the novel. T he speaker's voice was loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone street, and the people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobblestones, that great voice booming over them. Taviri was somewhere on the other side of the hall. She had to get to him. She wormed and pushed her way among the darkclothed, close-packed people. She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the booming, and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see Taviri, she was too short. A broad black-vested belly and chest loomed up blocking her way. She must get through to Taviri. Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stones, he did not move at all, but the huge lungs let out right over her head a prodigious noise, a bellow. She cowered. Then she understood that the bellow had not been at her. Others were shouting. The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or shadows. Thrilled, she joined the shouting -- "Yes! Yes!" -- and shoving on, came out easily into the open expanse of the Regimental Drill Field in Parheo. Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. Taviri stood among the tall weeds in his good suit, the dark grey one that made him look like a professor or a play-actor, harshly elegant. He did not look happy, but he was laughing, and saying something to her. The sound of his voice made her cry, and she reached out to catch hold of his hand, but she did not stop, quite. She could not stop. "Oh, Taviri," she said, "it's just on there!" The queer sweet smell of the white weeds was heavy as she went on. There were thorns, tangles underfoot, there were slopes, pits. She feared to fall... she stopped.  # by Ursula K. Le Guin S un, bright morning-glare, straight in the eyes, relentless. She had forgotten to pull the blind last night. She turned her back on the sun, but the right side wasn't comfortable. No use. Day. She sighed twice, sat up, got her legs over the edge of the bed, and sat hunched in her nightdress looking down at her feet. The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, were almost square where they touched each other, and bulged out above in corns; the nails were discolored and shapeless. Between the knob-like ankle bones ran fine, dry wrinkles. The brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin was the color of mud, and knotted veins crossed the instep. Disgusting. Sad, depressing. Mean. Pitiful. She tried on all the words, and they all fit, like hideous little hats. Hideous: yes, that one too. To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn't been hideous, had she sat around and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body's not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it's just you, yourself. Only when it's no longer you, but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it -- Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last? "Who cares?" said Laia fiercely, and stood up. It made her giddy to stand up suddenly. She had to put out her hand to the bedtable, for she dreaded falling. At that she thought of reaching out to Taviri, in the dream. What had he said? She could not remember. She was not sure if she had even touched his hand. She frowned, trying to force memory. It had been so long since she had dreamed about Taviri; and now not even to remember what he had said! It was gone, it was gone. She stood there hunched in her nightdress, frowning, one hand on the bedtable. How long was it since she had thought of him -- let alone dreamed of him -- even thought of him, as 'Taviri'? How long since she had said his name? Asieo said. When Asieo and I were in prison in the North. Before I met Asieo. Asieo's theory of reciprocity. Oh yes, she talked about him, talked about him too much no doubt, maundered, dragged him in. But as 'Asieo,' the last name, the public man. The private man was gone, utterly gone. There were so few left who had even known him. They had all used to be in jail. One laughed about it on those days, all the friends in all the jails. But they weren't even there, these days. They were in the prison cemeteries. Or in the common graves. "Oh, oh my dear," Laia said out loud, and she sank down onto the bed again because she could not stand up under the remembrance of those first weeks in the Fort, in the cell, those first weeks of the nine years in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, those first weeks after they told her that Asieo had been killed in the fighting in Capitol Square and had been buried with the Fourteen Hundre# in the lime-ditches behind Oring Gate. In the cell. Her hands fell into the old position on her lap, the left clenched and locked inside the grip of the right, the right thumb working back and forth a little pressing and rubbing on the knuckle of the left first finger. Hours, days, nights. She had thought of them all, each one, each one of the fourteen hundred, how they lay, how the quicklime worked on the flesh, how the bones touched in the burning dark. Who touched him? How did the slender bones of the hand lie now? Hours, years. "Taviri, I have never forgotten you!" she whispered, and the stupidity of it brought her back to morning-light and the rumpled bed. Of course she hadn't forgotten him. These things go without saying between husband and wife. There were her ugly old feet flat on the floor again, just as before. She had got nowhere at all, she had gone in a circle. She stood up with a grunt of effort and disapproval, and went to the closet for her dressing gown. The young people went about the halls of the House in becoming immodesty, but she was too old for that. She didn't want to spoil some young man's breakfast with the sight of her. Besides, they had grown up in the principle of freedom of dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn't. All she had done was invent it. It's not the same. Like speaking of Asieo as 'my husband.' They winced. The word she should use as a good Odonian, of course, was 'partner.' But why the hell did she have to be a good Odonian? She shuffled down the hall to the bathrooms. Mairo was there, washing her hair in a lavatory. Laia looked at the long, sleek, wet hank with admiration. She got out of the House so seldom now that she didn't know when she had last seen a respectably shaven scalp, but still the sight of a full head of hair gave her pleasure, vigorous pleasure. How many times had she been jeered at, Longhair, Longhair, had her hair pulled by policemen or young toughs, had her hair shaved off down to the scalp by a grinning soldier at each new prison? And then had grown it all over again, through the fuzz, to the frizz, to the curls, to the mane... In the old days. For God's love, couldn't she think of anything today but the old days? Dressed, her bed made, she went down to commons. It was a good breakfast, but she had never got her appetite back since the damned stroke. She drank two cups of herb tea, but couldn't finish the piece of fruit she had taken. How she had craved fruit as a child, badly enough to steal it; and in the Fort -- oh for God's love stop it! She smiled and replied to the greetings and friendly inquiries of the other breakfasters and big Aevi who was serving the counter this morning. It was he who had tempted her with the peach, "Look at this. I've been saving it for you," and how could she refuse? Anyway she had always loved fruit, and never got enough; once when she was six or seven she had stolen a piece off a vendor's cart in River Street. But it was hard to eat when everyone was talking so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real news. She was inclined to discount it at first, being wary of enthusiasms, but after she had read the article in the paper, and read between the lines of it, she thought, with a strange kind of certainty, deep but cold. Why, this is it; it has come. And in Thu, not here. Thu will break before this country does; the Revolution will first prevail there. As if that mattered! There will be no more nations. And yet it did matter somehow, it made her a little cold and sad -- envious, in fact. Of all the infinite stupidities. She did not join the talk much, and soon got up to go back to her room, feeling sorry for herself. She could not share their excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It's not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, to accept being out of it when you've been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years. Oh for God's love. Whining! She got the stairs and the selfpity behind her, entering her room. It was a good room, and it was good to be by herself. It was a great relief. Even if it wasn't strictly fair. Some of the kids in the attics were living five to a room no bigger than this. There were always more people wanting to live in an Odonian House than could be properly accommodated. She had this big room all to herself only because she was an old woman who had had a stroke. And maybe because she was Odo. If she hadn't been Odo, but merely the old woman with a stroke, would she have had it? Very likely. After all who the hell wanted to room with a drooling old woman? But it was hard to be sure. Favoritism, elitism, leader-worship, they crept back and cropped out everywhere. But she had never hoped to see them eradicated in her lifetime, in one generation; only Time works the great changes. Meanwhile this was a nice, large, sunny room, proper for a drooling old woman who had started a world revolution. Her secretary would be coming in an hour to help her dispatch the day's work. She shuffled over to the desk, a beautiful, big piece, a present from the Nio Cabinetmakers' Syndicate because somebody had heard her remark once that the only piece of furniture she had ever really longed for was a desk with drawers and enough room on top... damn, the top was practically covered with papers with notes clipped to them, mostly in Noi's small clear handwriting: Urgent. -- Northern Provinces. -- Consult wR.T.? Her own handwriting had never been the same since Asieo's death. It was odd, when you thought about it. After all, within five years after his death she had written the whole Analogy. And there were those letters, which the tall guard with the watery grey eyes, what was his name, never mind, had smuggled out of the Fort for her for two years. The Prison Letters they called them now, there were a dozen different editions of them. All that stuff, the letters which people kept telling her were so full of "spiritual strength" -- which probably meant she had been lying herself blue in the face when she wrote them, trying to keep her spirits up -- and the Analogy which was certainly the solidest intellectual work she had ever done, all of that had been written in the Fort in Drio, in the cell, after Asieo's death. One had to do something, and in the Fort they let one have paper and pens... But it had all been written in the hasty, scribbling hand which she had never felt was hers, not her own like the round, black scrollings of the manuscript of Society Without Government. forty-five years old. Taviri had taken not only her body's and her heart's desire to the quicklime with him, but even her good clear handwriting. B ut he had left her the revolution. How brave of you to go on, to work, to write, in prison, after such a defeat for the Movement, after your partner's death, people had used to say. Damn fools. What else had there been to do? Bravery, courage -- what was courage? She had never figured it out. Not fearing, some said. Fearing yet going on, others said. But what could one do but go on? Had one any real choice, ever? To die was merely to go on in another direction. If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote, "True journey is return," but it had never been more than an intuition, and she was farther than ever now from being able to rationalise it. She bent down, too suddenly, so that she grunted a little at the creak in her bones, and began to root in a bottom drawer of the desk. Her hand came to an age-softened folder and drew it out, recognizing it by touch before sight confirmed: the manuscript of Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition. He had printed the title on the folder and written his name under it, Taviri Odo Asieo, IX #. There was an elegant handwriting, every letter well-formed, bold, and fluent. But he had preferred to use a voiceprinter. The manuscript was all in voiceprint, and high quality too, hesitancies adjusted and idiosyncrasies of speech normalized. You couldn't see there how he had said 'o' deep in his throat as they did on the North Coast. There was nothing of him there but his mind. She had nothing of him at all except his name written on the folder. She hadn't kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn't think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years, except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck with that... Dualizing again. "She" and "it." Age and illness made on dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, It's not me, it's not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul. First self-pity, then self-praise, and here she still sat, for God's love, holding Asieo's name in her hand, why? Didn't she know his name without looking it up? What was wrong with her? She raised the folder to her lips and kissed the handwritten name firmly and squarely, replaced the folder in the back of the bottom drawer, shut the drawer, and straightened up in the chair. Her right hand tingled. She scratched it, and then shook it in the air, spitefully. It had never quite got over the stroke. Neither had her right leg, or right eye, or the right corner of her mouth. They were sluggish, inept, they tingled. They made her feel like a robot with a short circuit. And time was getting on, Noi would be coming, what had she been doing ever since breakfast? She got up so hastily that she lurched, and grabbed at the chairback to make sure she did not fall. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the big mirror there. Her grey knot was loose and droopy, she hadn't done it up well before breakfast. She struggled with it a while. It was hard to keep her arms up in the air. Amai, running in to piss, stopped and said, "Let me do it!" and knotted it up tight and neat in no time, with her round, strong, pretty fingers, smiling and silent. Ami was twenty, less than a third of Laia's age. Her parents had both been members of the Movement, one killed in the insurrection of '#, the other still recruiting in the South Provinces. Amai had grown up in Odonian Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy. And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for, this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future. Laia Osaieo Odo's right eye wept several little tears, as she stood between the lavatories and the latrines having her hair done up by the daughter she had not borne; but her left eye, the strong one, did not weep, ilor did it know what the right eye did. She thanked Amai and hurried back to her room. She had noticed, in the mirror, a stain on her collar. Peach juice, probably. Damned old dribbler. She didn't want Noi to come in and find her with drool on her collar. As the clean shirt went on over her head, she thought, What's so special about Noi? She fastened the collar-frogs with her left hand, slowly, Noi was thirty or so, a slight, muscular fellow with a soft voice and alert dark eyes. That's what was special about Noi. It was that simple. Good old sex. She had never been drawn to a fair man or a fat one, or the tall fellows with big biceps, never, not even when she was fourteen and fell in love with every passing fart. Dark, spare, and fiery, that was the recipe. Taviri, of course. This boy wasn't a patch on Taviri for brains, nor even for looks, but there it was: She didn't want him to see her with dribble on her collar and her hair coming undone. Her thin, grey hair. Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway -- my God, she hadn't even shut the door while changing her shirt! -- She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman. You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week's shirt and last night's braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque. One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency, mere sanity, awareness of other people. And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed. "Good morning," the young man said in his gentle voice. "Hello, Noi." No, by God, it was not out of mere decency. Decency be damned. Because the man she had loved, and to whom her age would not have mattered -- because he was dead, must she pretend she had no sex? Must she suppress the truth, like a damned puritan authoritarian? Even six months ago, before the stroke, she had made men look at her and like to look at her; and now, though she could give no pleasure, by God she could please herself. When she was six years old, and Papa's friend Gadeo used to come by to talk politics with Papa after dinner, she would put on the goldcolored necklace that Mama had found on a trash-heap and brought home for her. It was so short that it always got hidden under her collar where nobody could see it. She liked it that way. She knew she had it on. She sat on the doorstep and listened to them talk, and knew that she looked nice for Gadeo. He was dark, with white teeth that flashed. Sometimes he called her "pretty Laia." "There's my pretty Laia!" Sixty-six years ago. "What? My head's dull. I had a terrible night." It was true. She had slept even less than usual. "I was asking if you'd seen the papers this morning." She nodded. "Pleased about Soinehe?" Soinehe was the province in Thu which had declared its secession from the Thuvian State last night. He was pleased about it. His white teeth flashed in his dark, alert face. Pretty Laia. "Yes. And apprehensive." "I know. But it's the real thing, this time. It's the beginning of the end of the Government in Thu. They haven't even tried to order troops into Soinehe, you know. It would merely provoke the soldiers into rebellion sooner, and they know it." She agreed with him. She herself had felt that certainty. But she could not share his delight. After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory. A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on. "Shall we do those letters to, day?" "All right. Which letters?" "To the people in the North," he said without impatience. "In the North?" "Parheo, Oaidun." She had been born in Parheo, the dirty city on the dirty river. She had not come here to the capital till she was twenty-two and ready to bring the Revolution. Though in those days, before she and the others had thought it through, it had been a very green and puerile revolution. Strikes for better wages, representation for women. Votes and wages -- Power and Money, for the love of God! Well, one does learn a little, after all, in fifty years. But then one must forget it all. "Start with Oaidun," she said, sitting down in the armchair. Noi was at the desk ready to work. He read out excerpts from the letters she was to answer. She tried to pay attention, and succeeded well enough that she dictated one whole letter and started on another. "Remember that at this stage your brotherhood is vulnerable to the threat of... no, to the danger... to..." She groped till Noi suggested, "The danger of leader-worship?" "All right. And that nothing is so soon corrupted by power-seeking as altruism. No. And that nothing corrupts altruism -- no. Oh for God's love you know what I'm trying to say, Noi, you write it. They know it too, it's just the same old stuff, why can't they read my books!" "Touch," Noi said gently, smiling, citing one of the central Odonian themes. "All right, but I'm tired of being touched. If you'll write the letter I'll sign it, but I can't be bothered with it this morning." He was looking at her with a little question or concern. She said, irritable, "There is something else I have to do!" W hen Noi had gone she sat down at the desk and moved the papers about, pretending to be doing something, because she had been startled, frightened, by the words she had said. She had nothing else to do. She never had had anything else to do. This was her work: her lifework. The speaking tours and the meetings and the streets were out of reach for her now, but she could still write, and that was her work. And anyhow if she had had anything else to do, Noi would have known it; he kept her schedule, and tactfully reminded her of things, like the visit from the foreign students this afternoon. Oh, damn. She liked the young, and there was always something to learn from a foreigner, but she was tired of new faces, and tired of being on view. She learned from them, but they didn't learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! -- That's not anarchism, that's mere obscurantism. -- You don't think liberty and discipline are incompatible, do you? -- They accepted their tonguelashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the' Big Sheltering Womb. She! She who had mined the shipyards at Seissero, and had cursed Premier Inoilte to his face in front of a crowd of seven thousand, telling him he would have cut off his own balls and had them bronzed and sold as souvenirs, if he thought there was any profit in it -- she who had screeched, and sworn, and kicked policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said here was founded the etc etc, pssssssss to all that! And now she was everybody's grandmama, the dear old lady, the sweet old monument, come worship at the womb. The fire's out, boys, it's safe to come up close. "No, I won't," Laia said out loud. "I will not." She was not selfconscious about talking to herself, because she always had talked to herself. "Laia's invisible audience," Taviri had used to say, as she went through the room muttering. "You needn't come, I won't be here," she told the invisible audience now. She had just decided what it was she had to do. She had to go out. To go into the streets. It was inconsiderate to disappoint the foreign students. It was erratic, typically senile. It was unOdonian. Pssssss to all that. What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all? She would go out for a walk. "What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. " On the way downstairs she decided, scowling, to stay and see the foreign students. But then she would go out. They were very young students, very earnest: doe-eyed, shaggy, charming creatures from the Western Hemisphere, Benbili and the Kingdom of Mand, the girls in white trousers, the boys in long kilts, warlike and archaic. They spoke of their hopes. "We in Mand are so very far from the Revolution that maybe we are near it," said one of the girls, wistful and smiling: "The Circle of Life!" and she showed the extremes meeting, in the circle of her slender, darkskinned fingers. Amai and Aevi served them white wine and brown bread, the hospitality of the House. But the visitors, unpresumptuous, all rose to take their leave after barely half an hour. "No, no, no," Laia said, "stay here, talk with Aevi and Amai. It's just that I get stiff sitting down, you see, I have to change about. It has been so good to meet you, will you come back to see me, my little brothers and sisters, soon?" For her heart went out to them, and theirs to her, and she exchanged kisses all round, laughing, delighted by the dark young cheeks, the affectionate eyes, the scented hair, before she shuffled off. She was really a little tired, but to go up and take a nap would be a defeat. She had wanted to go out. She would go out. She had not been alone outdoors since -- when? since winter! before the stroke. No wonder she was getting morbid. It had been a regular jail sentence. Outside, the streets, that's where she lived. She went quietly out the side door of the House, past the vegetable patch, to the street. The narrow strip of sour city dirt had been beautifully gardened and was producing a fine crop of beans and ceea, but Laia's eye for farming was unenlightened. Of course it had been clear that anarchist communities, even in the time of transition, must work towards optimal selfsupport, but how that was to be managed in the way of actual dirt and plants wasn't her business. There were farmers and agronomists for that. Her job was the streets, the noisy, stinking streets of stone, where she had grown up and lived all her life, except for the fifteen years in prison. She looked up fondly at the facade of the House. That it had been built as a bank gave peculiar satisfaction to its present occupants. They kept their sacks of meal in the bombproof money-vault, and aged their cider in kegs in safe deposit boxes. Over the fussy columns that faced the street, carved letters still read, "national investors and strong on names. They had no flag. Slogans came and went as the need did. There was always the Circle of Life to scratch on walls and pavements where Authority would have to see it. But when it came to names they were indifferent, accepting and ignoring whatever they got called, afraid ofbeing pinned down and penned in, unafraid of being absurd. So this best known and second oldest of all the cooperative Houses had no name except The Bank. It faced on a wide and quiet street, but, only a block away began the Temeba, an open market, once famous as a center for black market psychogenics and teratogenics, now reduced to vegetables, secondhand clothes, and miserable sideshows. Its crapulous vitality was gone, leaving only half-paralysed alcoholics, addicts, cripples, hucksters, and fifth-rate whores, pawnshops, gambling dens, fortune-tellers, body sculptors, and cheap hotels. Laia turned to the Temeba as water seeks its level. She had never feared or despised the city. It was her country. There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won't hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people. She had felt all that before she knew anything; before she wrote the first pamphlet, before she left Parheo, before she knew what 'capital' meant, before she'd been farther than River Street where she played rolltaggie kneeling on scabby knees on the pavement with the other six-year-olds. She had known it: that she, and the other kids, and her parents, and their parents, and the drunks and whores and all of River Street, was at the bottom of something -- was the foundation, the reality, the source. But will you drag civilisation down into the mud? cried the shocked decent people, later on, and she had tried for years to explain to them that if all you had was mud, then if you were God you made it into human beings, and if you were human you tried to make it into houses where human beings could live. But nobody who thought he was better than mud would understand. Now, water seeking its level, mud to mud, Laia shuffled through the foul, noisy street, and all the ugly weakness of her old age was at home. The sleepy whores, their lacquered hair-arrangements dilapidated and askew, the oneeyed woman wearily yelling her vegetables to sell, the halfwit beggar slapping flies, these were her countrywomen. They looked like her, they were all sad, disgusting, mean, pitiful, hideous. They were her sisters, her own people. She did not feel very well. It had been a long time since she had walked so far, four or five blocks, by herself, in the noise and push and stinking summer heat of the streets. She had wanted to get to Koly Park, the triangle of scruffy grass at the end of the Temeba, and sit there for a while with the other old men and women who always sat there, to see what it was like to sit there and be old; but it was too far. If she didn't turn back now, she might get a dizzy spell, and she had a dread of falling down, falling down and having to lie there and look up at the people come to stare at the old woman in a fit. She turned and started home, frowning with effort and self-disgust. She could feel her face very red, and a swimming feeling came and went in her ears. It got a bit much, she was really afraid she might keel over. She saw a doorstep in the shade and made for it, let herself down cautiously, sat, sighed. Nearby was a fruit-seller, sitting silent behind his dusty, withered stock. People went by. Nobody bought from him. Nobody looked at her. Odo, who was Odo? Famous revolutionary, author of Community, The Analogy, etc. etc. She, who was she? An old woman with grey hair and a red face sitting on a dirty doorstep in a slum, muttering to herself. True? Was that she? Certainly it was what anybody passing her saw. But was it she, herself, any more than the famous revolutionary, etc., was? No. It was not. But who was she, then? The one who loved Taviri. Yes. True enough. But not enough. That was gone; he had been dead so long. "Who am I?" Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-yearold, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself. Indeed she had been the tireless worker and thinker, but a bloodclot in a vein had taken that woman away from her. Indeed she had been the lover, the swimmer in the midst of life, but Taviri, dying, had taken that woman away with him. There was nothing left, really, but the foundations. She had come home; she had never left home. "True voyage is return." Dust and mud and a doorstep in the slums. And beyond,' at the far end of the street, the field full of tall dry weeds blowing in the wind as night came. "Laia! What are you doing here? Are you all right?" One of the people from the House, of course, a nice woman, a bit fanatical and always talking. Laia could not remember her name though she had known her for years. She let herself be taken home, the woman talking all the way. In the big cool commonroom (once occupied by tellers counting money behind polished counters supervised by armed guards) Laia sat down in a chair. She was unable just as yet to face climbing the stairs, though she would have liked to be alone. The woman kept on talking, and other excited people came in. It appeared that a demonstration was being planned. Events in Thu were moving so fast that the mood here had caught fire, and something must be done. Day after tomorrow, no, tomorrow, there was to be a march, a big one, from Old Town to Capitol Square -- the old route. "Another Ninth Month Uprising," said a young man, fiery and laughing, glancing at Laia. He had not even been born at the time of the Ninth Month Uprising, it was all history to him. Now he wanted to make some history of his own. The room had filled up. A general meeting would be held here, tomorrow, at eight in the morning. "You must talk, Laia." "Tomorrow? Oh, I won't be here tomorrow," she said brusquely. Whoever had asked her smiled, another one laughed, though Amai glanced round at her with a puzzled look. They went on talking and shouting. The Revolution. What on earth had made her say that? What a thing to say on the eve of the Revolution, even if it was true. She waited her time, managed to get up and, for all her clumsiness, to slip away unnoticed among the people busy with their planning and excitement. She got to the hall, to the stairs, and began to climb them one by one. "The general strike," a voice, two voices, ten voices were saying in the room below, behind her. "The general strike," Laia muttered, resting for a moment on the landing. Above, ahead, in her room, what awaited her? The private stroke. That was mildly funny. She started up the second flight of stairs, one by one, one leg at a time, like a small child. She was dizzy, but she was no longer afraid to fall. On ahead, on there, the dry white flowers nodded and whispered in the open fields of evening. Seventy-two years and she had never had time to learn what they were called.  Dear Jim: Here are the remarks you suggested as a sort of prologue to pre-dinner speakers are under some control, because like their victims they want to get on with the eating. headed kid's troubles began when he was born in the #rd year after the collapse of what we describe as #th Century culture. He and most of his contemporaries believed that during a period after the collapse which they called the Years of Confusion no trustworthy records were kept. But he grew up in Moha, where they don't know any better. In such a place as Nuber in Katskil, founded directly in the ashes, there would always have been some clerk who could tell the politicians just what day of what week of what year it was -- and be right, too. And this story, which in a way grew backYear #, when a number of people such as Demetrios and Mam Estelle could well remember that age which was already being called Old Time, and count the years. gets. My raw material is just People and Possibilities, and a touch of the where it was when we last looked, and creatures with eye-stalks remain at the bottom of the sea. The unexpected animals, here and in even a whisper about mutation. This is true of the other stories derived from the world that began, in the other stories still to appear in Putnam's "Continuum" series. Making a world is a pleasant occupation, and I hope I've been reasonably consistent without too many goofs. It's an occupation we all carry on, I notice, one way or another, and that's one thing that gives me hope for the damned human race. As for the Peculiar -- well, it's here too. An element of fantasy has come into this story -- I use that kicked-around word because I don't know of any other -- and I can't apologize for it. There's a fog with a character in it some of us have met, and curious things happen, and symbolism was always up to the reader -- all the author can do is brush his hands smugly and walk away. In the game of drawing the line between poetry and prose, I don't play. (And damn it, all fiction is fantasy, including campaign speeches, book reviews, and seed catalogs.) For most of the weirdities solemn "realistic" explanation could be worked out, I guess, but my most loving friends will be those to deserve one thing that Huck Fjnn said of Mr. Mark Twain: "There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." Best, Edgar I There will be Love in it If l missed my other glimpses of infinity I may find it in a blade T he old man swung his walnut stick, enjoying the heft of it but not dependent on it; he was no more blind than Homer. Ambling down Harrow Street, he encountered a boy leading a horse to the blacksmith, and some girls who had toiled up from the creek with laundry baskets. "A good day to you. Garth. How's Frankie?" "And to you, Demetrios," the boy said, smiling with warmth and shyness. "Frankie he's tine." Garth stood idly rubbing his horse's neck, watchful of the girls in their damp smocks, who had set down their baskets and were poking at their hair, but he was mindful of the old man too. No one ignored the storyteller. Demetrios' peregrine face appeared to fly toward you even when motionless. His long right hand, prominent in the joints, might rest on his walnut staff and still point toward the outlands, the foreign visions. Demetrios stood tall -- advantageous for one gazing over preoccupied heads. His gray hair, lightly silvered, fell straight to his shoulders. He was sixty, not old but seasoned, like his walnut stick, like a wine held long enough in the cask to have ripened in a way that might not suit everyone. The boy Garth, at an age when a good heart's love must flow outward, adored him -- what other ancient would remember a stable-boy's name and his little brother too? And some were caught by Demetrios' professional skill as a story-teller, neither liking nor disliking him but granting some tribute of listening. A girl named Solitaire desired him and was desired. From a side-street a peddlar, a ragpicker older than Demetrios, pushed his two-wheel barrow near them and rested it on its one-leg stand, mopping his face with a grimy cloth. The afternoon hung heavy with July; a wind heaving gray masses through the mountain air was not felt here, not yet, though before long a thunderstorm might drop on the meager makeshift town, stirring the mud, trash, and sewage in Nuber's streets and flushing a portion of the filth down the channels of the central ditches, shifting corruption from one spot to another as human society has done so long, so long. Time-beaten himself and practised in impudence -- (any publicity is good publicity, they used to say in Old Time, so I'm told, until they choked on it) -- the peddler felt privileged to croak: "Dimmy, you old blast of wind! Got a story for us -- one with balls to it?" "Yours hanging low, Potterfield?" Demetrios' softer tone could have been heard sixty feet down the block. One of the girls giggled, spreading a laundry-pink hand over her mouth and watching Garth, who blushed easily; he wasn't over fifteen. Raised to reach the back row of a crowd, Demetrios' baritone sometimes sounded high in pitch. He had sung a little once, until a musician told him his ear was not quite true. His voice was better for spoken dreams. A woman leaned generously from a first-floor window with a dust-cloth over her hair, and Demetrios asked: "May I sit myself here, Mam, while I tell ybu a tale of some sort if you want one?" "The ssph -- " she spat a peachpit into the sunken entry-way below her window and settled herself -- "the steps a'n't ourn, we only rent. Sit anyhow and tell your tale, dear soul. I'll fight any sunny-bitch says you can't." "So maybe I'll make it a tale for you, and there will be love in it, and Potterfield must put up with it." "I got no cause against love," grumbled Potterfield, "as the fly said when his poor arse got jammed into the honey." Demetrios sat in the shade and rested his hands on the knob of his walnut stick, and shut his eyes a summoning while, watching the midnight ocean of memory and reflection for whatever cargo might seek the industrious wharves and warehouses of his mind. He knew a familiar fear, that on this day no ships had sailed: such days do arrive to afflict us. "I was a child," he said. "I think I've told no tales of childhood. There was once -- no, not that one. Let me mull it over. Wind's in the east -- that's not one of the fair-blowing winds... All stories begin in childhood. Before speech. #'U'ear then that I who talk to llyou was born in a small town that might seem large to you. Its population was about three thousand -- before the Twenty-Minute War, which marks the Year One of our calendar. And I suppose the present population here in the city of Nuber is hardly more than that -- four thousand possibly, four thousand loyal subjects of the King's republic," he said, and nobody laughed. "My birth-town was named Hesterville, and it was not many miles up a great river from the city of Hannibal in what was the state of Missouri. Missouri's a long way west -- no matter if you never heard of it. A man named Sam Clemens was born at Hannibal, by the way, one hundred and forty-five years before my birth at Hesterville'. I think of him because he was a story-teller too, but a great one. His tales were written in books, the books multiplied to thousands -- that's called printing and you've heard of it; I'm told there's a hand press here at Nuber, I mean another besides the legal one they use in the Inner City. So Clemens' stories were read and preserved all over the world, which was larger then, dear souls, and quite round. He wrote them under the invented name of Mark Twain, better known than his original name. Names are important: with them we can talk to each other, a little. Mark Twain's stories will last, unless all books are lost and destroyed; even then bits of them will be told for a while. My stories are written on the air. Who knows where a story goes after the poet gives it to the winds?" Then, I know, the old man brooded, on whether to give them some of Huck Finn's tale -- The contexts are gone. There was a slavery in #, but the method and the idiom of it were altogether different. It was supervised by pofaced experts who gave it the name of Temporary Suspension of Normalcy. What could these ignorant friendly folk make of openly admitted slavery? Or of Nigger Jim? 'All right, I'll GO to Hell!" -- what could they make of that? Contexts gone. As for Huck's antebellum world, lost so long ago that even to in boyhood reading it seemed remoter than Pan's Arcadia -- why, of that they might understand a little if I could transmit it to them. It is nearer to us than it was at any time in the #th Century, now that the flabby plastic carcass of industrialism is buried. Gradually the air loses that foulness; the earth, and even the tortured and degraded sea, begin to regain some of the beauty that dollarprogress ravaged and smeared. There's loss too. So be it. If I missed my other glimpses of infinity I may find it in a blade of grass. H e knew he had been keeping silent too long. He opened his eyes and beamed on his audience with a practised shrewdness, to let them know he had not dozed off senile and forgetful. They were attentive; one or two smiled back. Others had strolled up during his abstraction -- he had been aware of their coming but had wanted to follow his thought further. In a time when literacy is rare the storyteller and newsbearer come into their own and the memories of some listeners develop astonishing powers. Demetrios studied the little crowd, some of the faces dubiously familiar but all without names except the plump sweet face of Garth. In the canvas cap that he had dropped upside down near his feet a few coins were lying. Most of these were the brass pennies of the King's Republic of Katskil, crudely stamped with the slab-jawed face of Brian II. (Like his father Brian I, he called his monarchy a Provisional Government, its holy aim the restoration of the United States of America, which alas was not quite practical right now.) Among the pennies shone a startling fragment of the past, accepted legal tender but a great rarity, an OldTime silver dime worth at least fifty of the Katskil pennies. Who in this group would have been that munificent? It was almost certainly the darkhaired youth who sat apart from the rest holding the leash of a gray wolfhound. His linen tunic and loincloth were cream-white, unofficial sign of the aristocracy; though not a matter of law, none but they wore the expensive bleached linen in public; commoners put up with clothes slung together by the inexpert housewife or sweatshop serf from ill-woven drab-colored wool, or linsey-woolsey -- wool and linen remnants and scraps. The aristocracy took pride in cleanness, while on some other levels dirt was equated with virtue. This youth's deerhide hip satchel and moccasins would have been made by the bonded servants, virtually slaves, who did such labor for the Inner City and the large estates in the suburbs. The boy's direct and innocent gaze troubled Demetrios, who was haunted by another world dead for nearly half a century. "I think a story goes wherever there's a spark of hearing life. In Hesterville we had those devices that seem fairytale fancies to anyone too young to have seen them. Nobody here except Potterfield would recall them as I do -- telephones, automobiles, radio, earth-moving machines, aircraft. Naturally you find it hard to believe in them. Remember space flight, Potterfield?" "Shit," said the peddler. "Made that one up, di'n't they? I never seen no sacklite go up except like on the teevy same as them other space-oprieswith made-up people." "What happened to your teevy?" asked the dark-haired boy. "Busted," said Potterfield. "Busted, sir. See, when the power went bleh, wouldn't nothing work." He winked at Demetrios, sharing an ancient half-wisdom gone useless and sour. "So my girl friend Hang a bottle of hand lotion into it -- an empty one. Was her teevy actually. Was shacking up with her at the time, fifty years ago nearabout. I'm seventy now by Jesus, since you ask." "You remember the cars too," said Demetrios. "Remember the telephones? Jet planes?" "Of course. Even now if I have to gosemplace I think, oh, I'll just phone, and then I think, well, shit." Potterfield scratched under his soggy loin-rag, irritated by many griefs, old age not the least of them. Crab-lice, rats, and fleas had survived the long-ago holocaust abundantly. During the last two or three decades, as the risen waters held their level with only slight fluctuations, a small aggressive variety of short-tailed rat was doing especially well -- dark-pelted, savage, with a liking for the new human dwellings that were no longer set up on concrete foundations. It might be a sport from the prolific meadowmouse of Old Time, Demetrios thought, but there was no one to discuss it with him who would even know the word "genetics". "Better off, ain't we?" said Potterfield. He would have been about twenty, Demetrios reflected, when fire scourged the cities and the short plagues followed, radiation deaths and epidemics of crushing virulence with no means for study or control. The gTeat Red Plague did not come until sixteen years later, when Demetrios was twenty-nine, and living at Nuber. Potterfield must have been a simple young man (if any human being ever answered that description) with a hunger for simple satisfactions (if there are any satisfactions that don't spread like pond ripples to infinity). There had been so many like him! Male and female of estimates of #, in spite of a slight drop in the birth rate and the desolating famines of the late #Q's and early #'s. "Better off, not so much crap all the time flying at you. Man has a chance to think," said Potterfield. "You wouldn't believe the amount of deep thinking I get through nowadays. Get on with your story, Dimmy -- I set down here to be entertained, di'n't I?" ffmou shall be, if you stay JL awake. I grew up in that world." said Demetrios, "to the age of thirteen, not comfortable, for nobody was then except the unthinking, who can be comfortable on the side of a volcano. Being a child, of course I was often unthinking too. I -- " "Aw, Demetrios!" The woman in the window had finished her peach and wiped her mouth on her arm. "Volcano? You got to use all them big words? What's a volcano?" "Sorry, Mam. A volcano is a mountain with a hole in its top. From time to time the hole lets out the fire of the earth, in a molten river that rolls down the mountain burning everything. Did you know, my darling, the inside of the earth is a core of fire? Every day you walk above a cellar of fire, my darling. Now no more questions or I stop my tale." But it was the boy Garth who showed alarm and even glanced sheepishly down toward his feet; the woman was only amused and not believing. "Yes, I grew up in that world, my father a doctor and a wise man. My mother was a painter of pictures. There are some in Nuber; she was more skillful than any you know -- and had better materials to work with of course. My father was known as Dr. Isaac Freeman of Hesterville, and my name -- why, my name was Adam Freeman. I have not told of these things before." And what comes over you now, to go so falteringly toward the telling of them? They don't want this, Demetrios. They' want romances, fairy-tales, even allegory if you're careful -- words to ease the sting of daily hardships, hut certainly not the story of how things really were! Well, the wind is in the east. "I must feel my way. dear souls. My name was not then Demetrios. It was Adam Freeman. "My name has been Demetrios for forty-seven years -- long enough to have seen these near waters rise and become the Hudson Sea. I have beheld one more messiah, seventeen years ago, and his martyrdom by those he sought to save. I speak of the man Abraham whom some call prophet, bound on the wheel in Gallows Square of this town." "Was he not a prophet?" asked the youth with the wolfhound. "I'm sorry -- I didn't mean to interrupt." "All men are prophets," said Demetrios, studying him. His presence here was only a little odd. Citizens of the Inner City, who could go wherever they pleased, were not uncommonly seen in the open streets, especially with protecting dogs or servants, and though they seldom bothered to pause for streetcorner storytellers, there was no reason to wonder at it. "And since men never agree, perhaps no man should have the name. My name is Demetrios. It means 'belonging to the earth' -- 'sacred to the earth'. In ancient times a goddess Demeter was worshipped as the spirit of the earth, the all-mother -- worshipped under other names too. Demeter was the name given her by the Greeks -- you know of them, sir?" The boy looked bothered, perhaps by the "sir" from one so much older; but most people wearing such linen would take it as their natural right. "I do know of them," he said, and smiled, not arrogantly. "I know some of the books." Demetrios nodded, "Then you will have found there's life in them. I am Demetrios. If anyone called me on the street by that name Adam Freeman I might not understand it was meant for me. My father used to call me Ad; to my mother, who was Welsh, I was Adam-bach. "I was thirteen in the year #, old calendar. Now remember, dear souls, a whole continent extends to the west, north, and south of here -- what the ocean hasn't submerged -- and in that region our entire nation of Katskil would amount to a fingernail wedge of dirt on a big blanket. That's the vast region you're speaking of when you say 'United States of America'. Up to the year #, after which there's no written history we know of except for our little fingernail wedge, the rest of the world was marked off into other territorial divisions large and small -- maybe it still is, but no one speaks across the oceans any more. Those divisions all called themselves nations, and were quite free to make war on each other with weapons that could turn the earth into a slag-heap -- as it is today in many places, some not far from here. Nations and alliances of nations, dear souls, have not the mother-wit to avoid the stupid passion of war. Nations are no more capable of justice or charity than of love, for they are, essentially, organized crowds. Individual persons can love and be loved; they can be generous and kind, forbearing, even brave; nations, never. A crowd can neither think nor feel. Thinking is lonely work, dear souls, and feeling is the experience of the separate heart." A close-faced man among the listeners made up his mind about something and walked away. His lingering image annoyed Demetrios; his features would have been hard to swear to on a second meeting -- neutral, bland, cold. #, at thirteen, I was readying the scanty censored newspaper from Chicago for what emerged between the lines, with my father's grim interpretations. We -- my parents who treated me like a grown-up and I -- we learned from radio and television what we were expected to think, so that we could appear to think it in the presence of strangers. We knew -- " "Look," said Potterfield, "you ain't telling no story, you're just beating your gums about old times -- who needs it?" "Ah, Potterfield! Once upon a time there were two little married people named Adam and Eve, and they had two little boys, one named Cain and -- " "Oh, shit! Forget I said anything." "We knew the war would come, and in # it came: the #th day of June, # -- according to an old religion which was even then rapidly fading, that was the day of St. John the Baptist, though I can't say whether anyone noticed it. The Twenty-Minute War we call it now, though actually I remember seeing a bomb-flare over the horizon on the second night. It's impossible to say which major division of the world had elected to try for suicide. We -- " "Why, Christ," said Potterfield, "it was the Russians." "So you were told automatically by the teevy until the power went off. I remember a broadcast from South America on our car radio, accusing us. The battery radio soon ran down, then the big silence. My guess is that the United States touched off the final lunacy, but does it matter now? Other nations were almost as rotten-ripe, the whole society watergated -- " "Jesus!" Potterfield lurched to his feet and grabbed the handle of his cart. "I won't sit around listening to no such wickedness as that." He rattled away, halting at the corner to thrust his hand toward Demetrios, fingers pronged against the evil eye. Mainly for the dark-haired boy, Demetrios remarked: "There goes maybe the last American patriot." One of the four laundry girls got up to go, but her companion checked her dubiously. Garth let his old plug clump a step or two nearer. "Old Potterfield never had no sense." "Ay." said Demetrios, "that's what makes him different from you and me." The woman in the window seemed undisturbed. "The bombs were for the great cities and launching areas. One direct hit obliterated Chicago, two hundred and fifty miles from Hesterville. The bombs were of the kind described, in the insane jargon of the age, as 'clean'. This meant simply that they killed more people by impact and fire than by a poisoning of the atmosphere that the senders of the bombs might have found inconvenient -- for they had persistent delusions about staying alive while they defended freedom or whatever the hell they were doing. I suppose ; JggggMT  Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher ; diller tor the summer, the cream ! ; from two edited by Richard ! ; Davis, featuring Brian Lumley, ! ; i Ramsey Campbell and Robert ;  j : Bloch... (UYI I #-I .#) ; ! ' ! from the worid of giant trees ; I ; and marvel cities. Roy Krenkel's  ! !; cover and illustrations. ' !; (UQ#-#C I;  ; Stableford: Star-Pilot Grainger, ; ! !; of the double-mind, continues '! ;  his services in a new Eden. I ; I; ( UQ#-#C ) ; ; ; right in tune with these Chariot ; ;  of the Gods times! (UQf #-#c) ; !  And Cap Kennedy confronts the  I ; ; master villain of the Galaxy as ' ; ! I masthead for the series is not I ! ; kid-stuff, as mounting sales '! ; ; around the world demonstrate! ! j   "Who is Gregory Kern?" !  ;l ( U#-#C ) j : ; Send for Catalog: ;  #I Av. of the Americas ; j New York, N.Y. # all through history people have imagined that giving horror a pretty name makes it no longer horror. "I have made up my mind. I will tell you how I acquired the name of Demetrios, and only that story. Never mind the cars, airplanes, bombs, ajl that trash. You've heard of it before: let it rust. And bear with me: in order to tell the story about my name I must say a little more about the ending of Old Time. "There were the short plagues, sicknesses that raged for a few days and passed like firestorms, leaving their dead. Different from the radiation deaths." "Red Plague?" said the dark haired boy.  "No, that came sixteen years later, only -- let me think -- thirtyone years ago. No, the short plagues -- they may have come from the war laboratories, our own likely, torn apart and scattered. Such methods of warfare were supposed to have been discontinued much earlier, but that happy announcement had been made by a government that lied about virtually all its other activities, and later -- this was before my time -- later it developed that the Pentagon's only concern was to develop gases and diseases that would be safe for the users to handle -- you know, clean ways of destroying other people who were so inconsiderate as to be foreigners." "Pentagon?" "Oh -- that was the nightmare building in the city of Washington that housed the war machine -- called, of course, the Defense Department. Yes, I think it's likely the short plagues were man-made, but you understand, there was neither time nor means to study them when they were destroying us. Certainly the military mind is incapable of abandoning such toys. "We let that mind win, by default. We overpopulated the earth, spawning to the point of famine, exhausting natural resources with no restraint, no thought for future needs, and piling up corruption. Our breed grew like a tumor. The surgery that ended the overgrowth was performed, not by reason as it might have been, but by famine, pestilence, and a war of idiots." Round-eyed and indignant, the laundry girl who wanted to go snatched up her basket and dragged her friend along with her. If the people of Nuber believed anything in these years, they believed that the King's Republic was engaged in the imminent restoration of the United States of America and the Golden Age. But the other two girls lingered, and Garth, and a tired friendly-faced woman with a market basket, and a young couple hand in hand who might not have been listening much, and the dark-haired boy with the wolfhound. The dog stretched and yawned open his fearsome teeth, laughing with a big pink tongue. "And that surgery was presently aided," said Demetrios, "by the sterility and birth deformities brought on by radiation -- from atomic industry as well as weapons -- which may pursue us for another thousand years, or five thousand, if we can last that long." "I bore a mue two years ago," said the woman in the window. "He had no anus. Lived a day. I ha'n't conceived since. Nor tried to prevent it. My husband says it's all God's punishment on us." "A woman who was like a wife to me long ago," said Demetrios, "Elizabeth of Hartford, conceived a mue with a swollen eggshell skull. It cracked during the delivery that destroyed her own life. Now what do you imagine you did to be so punished, Mam?" "We don't know. My husband says it'll all be explained with the coming of the Messiah, and he could come like anybody, you know. Like that Abraham. Like you, yourself it is." "Nay-nay, I'm a rusty storyteller, nothing more." "Then get on with the story about your name, dear soul." II A Music of Surviving Birds... For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full o f peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. -- Herman Melville, y name is Demetrios. "My father and mother died within hours of each other, in coma following a few hours of paroxysmal cramps and high fever -- I have no name for the sickness. In the uncanny manner of the short plagues, I was untouched, though death prevailed all around me and hardly any were left to attempt the burials. IVrhaps I and a few others had a light infection of the same thing, whatever it was. That's only speculation, for science as men had known it was ended. Civilization ended with a writhing in the streets and a stillness. "Hesterville had been a town of about three thousand. A few weeks after the Twenty-Minute War I don't suppose more than five hundred were left alive. Can you imagine the empty houses and the reek of death? A hot July: the earth steamed to the sun through short intermissions of intolerable rains -- Christ, the rains! -- but it was hot rain that did nothing to lighten the corruption it could not wash away. A listless, sodden, windless rain; the sky was bleeding water like a sacrifice. "One person left alone, as I was, could survive only as a slinking animal. Food was where you found it, all shadows a threat and all strangers. Our house where my parents lay dead was looted by a gang of half a dozen louts who ran through the remnants of our town like a twister off the plains. I escaped them unseen. Later I saw a couple of them shot down from a window by someone with a repeating rifle, who I suppose took the law on himself because it existed nowhere else; they twitched a while under the rain. "Hesterville -- why, I think it's under water now. Sometimes a dream takes me to it, a place of whitened bones; once, in that way, I found it a place of seaweed wavering, swaying over a white statue that stood benign but unanswering in the green depth -- it looked like my mother and I would have em braced it but the water held me away like impenetrable glass. "The day after I escaped the looters I took the road out of Hesterville, without a goal and hungry. Government, I knew, did not exist. You know most of the important things at thirteen -- the rest make it understandable? You and I, all of us, dear souls, are used to government of a sort here at Nuber, maybe too much. There's been more continuity here than in most places, ever since the TwentyMinute War and the other disasters. People preserve government in some form because they must. True anarchy's intolerable: the wolves, the wild deer, don't live in anarchy, they follow strict laws, some of them even self-imposed, and the law-breakers usually perish. Well, forty-seven years ago, places, government for a short while was wholly smashed, a gone mechanism. I escaped into a nearly silent world, but I knew that wherever I should encounter human eyes hell might be simmering behind them. "I walked some miles before I came on a car slantwise across the road -- I'm speaking of an OldTime motor vehicle, an automobile. Cars were no longer numerous in #; the great swarm of them was before my time. The seventy-year gasoline joyride sputtered out to a silly finish in the #s; alternative methods were developing, and could have amounted to something in time but got off to a bad start, partly because the oil and automobile companies had too long prevented any rational trial and research along that line, partly because of a general sag of energy -- I mean human energy. What we called civilization had pretty well worn us out... In that stalled car a well-dressed man was slumped lifeless across the wheel and there was a dead baby in the rear seat. Sickness must have struck him while he drove -- no mark of violence. He may have hoped that being on the move would help; Americans used to believe that activity, however aimless and wrongheaded, must be a good in itself. The bodies were not convulsed. That had passed for my people also, during the coma; I think those two died from the same destroyer. Once sentient flesh, they had come to a certain position in time and space, and there ceased, with quiet faces. I took some of the food I found in the car. I remember a music of surviving birds."  #D less them!" said the woman Iin the window. "Yes, in # non-human life was recovering, here and there, from the ravages of industry. There was no such morning music as we can enjoy now, but they sang. In forty-seven years. Mam, I think a few more species have died out from the long-lasting poisons but others have survived and multiplied. In our vanity we still imagine it's for us they sing. I wish there were robins. "Later that day I heard a bell tinkle behind me when the rain was briefly quieting, and a boy and girl rode up on bicycles. They were fresh-faced and kind, and after a first stare, not afraid of me. The girl said: "We're friends, man -- don't be spookered." They were, and remained so. That was Laura Wilmot, and the boy was George Wilmot, her cousin. They were acting as advance scouts for a group of seven people who were following the leadership of a rugged old man, Judd Wilmot -- Laura's uncle, George's father -- and they told me as soon as they knew I was ulone, without any other questioning, that I was one of them. "Their kindness broke me down. 'Why, cry it out!' says Laura, and opened her raincoat and mine, to hug me. 'What's your name?' 'Adam,' I said. 'Well, dear Father Adam,' said Laura, to make me laugh; and George who never said much was making kind noises. I was a small snip of thirteen just beginning a spurt of growth. George was nineteen I think, large and bland. "Judd Wilmot I would call a natural commander. He also was kind, in his own fashion, and possessed organizing sense, ability to guide and give orders. Fanatic: an idea once stuck in his skull couldn't he dislodged. One of these ideas was a conviction, heaven knows the source, that things must be better to the east of us and he would prove il if it meant going all the way to the Atlantic and jumping in. He could he severe, as a commander must, .md either he never had any sense of humor or it was shocked out of him by the horrors of the time. I never knew him to be mean or stupid or unjust. "There was Judd's wife Miranda, soft and self-effacing, and Judd's gloomy younger brother Howard who was Laura's father, a widow named Andromache Makarios -- she had been a neighbor of the Wilmots in their Kansas town -- and Andromache's eighteen-yearold son Demetrios. "Within a few months, by the way, those bicycles were as useless as the cars. Tires and bearings -- no replacements. Last drop of machine oil -- no replacement. That's how a world ran down, in a clutter of midget failures after the large ones, leaving us more helpless than people of ancient times who never dreamed of an industrial age. "Andromache was lonely and passionate, perhaps always had been. Her husband, one of the few who still tried to live by farming instead of mining the exhausted earth for dollars, had died on the day of the Twenty-Minute War -- of a heart attack. Like all who survived the disasters -- including myself, she was still in shock. I remember more than once she fell behind, and halting for her we saw her just standing with her face uplifted to the rain; and Judd, or Demetrios, would go back to rouse her from the partial trance. She had not given up, and would not while she could cling to Demetrios, and Demetrios at eighteen understood that. After we became friends he told me he had been on the point of leaving home, longing to, breaking the chains of gossamer as he called it himself, a son's necessary escape. His father had been well able to care for fey Andromache, and wanted him to go for his own sake; but now that comprehending man was dead, and so was the world. "How shaH I give you an image of that Demetrios who was my friend, who seemed so marvelously old to me then and now would seem like a boy? Judd and Howard both commented on a likeness between us as strong as if we had been brothers, though Laura said she couldn't see it. We were both dark, with this straight high-bridged nose and full underlip; maybe that's all it amounted to. When I remember his face I see no image of myself, but another person whom I loved as a very separate being. "Andromache and I were uneasy with each other. What she felt I've never known; what I felt was a tension that affected me like hostility but may have been nothing of the kind. Dark and small she was, and must have been approaching forty, though in her girlish slenderness she looked to me hardly any older than wonderful Demetrios. "I think Judd Wilmot was very little aware of the complex of emotions -- not all of them young emotions -- that swirled among us. We were caught up in his own fantasy about the eastern states -- dear man, he'd been born in Vermont, though only five when his family moved west -- because we had no stronger contrary notions and no such force of determination. Out of love and respect for him, we stayed on our good behavior in his presence. Antique he was, prudish, almost like a survival from the #th Century of Old Time, or rather from what I imagine the #th Century to have been. M "had determined to become a motion picture director. That meant the one who planned and managed the creation of those images in motion -- you will have heard of them and I won't stop to explain how photography worked, though I did understand it once -- which provided a great part of the entertainment of #th Century people. In my boyhood, motion pictures had established the possibilities of a great art form, the only one the industrial age originated, in fact the only basic inovation in the arts since the start of oil painting in the late middle ages, and the early working out of systems of harmony and counterpoint at about the same time. Demetrios grasped these possibilities. He was a youth, he had grown up on a Kansas farm (but his farmer father was well-read), and he had seen movies mainly through the medium of the teevy. But still he sensed the vast area of dramatic art that had to exist behind the poverty of what he saw in the corrupted boob tube, and his heart had been set on entering that world of creation and liberating his own fresh marvels in it. He could have done it I think. "When I met him and made a hero out of him, he was not accepting the wreck of our society as a final thing. Rational about everything else, he clung somehow to a quite irrational conviction that when our people restored the framework of society, the complex of mechanical production that supported the making of motion pictures would naturally be reactivated along with it. He forgot (and I was no wiser) that the cinema was the only major art that depended for its existence on the sophisticated engineering of an industrial age. There can be great music without pianos or complex keyed wind instruments. Give a painter or sculptor his basic materials, however crude, and the visual arts can live. But Demetrios' art had been cut at the roots. Understanding the creative side, he had scant knowledge of the engineering aspect -- hadn't looked into it yet, he told me; knowing less than he did, I took his word for that, and went along unquestioning. I see now that he probably knew better: it was a willful blindness. "Worshipping his least word, I was happy to fling myself into -- well, we called them rehearsals, and often had the half-reluctant help of George and Laura. Occasionally Andromache got into them too, at Demetrios' begging, but inevitably she conveyed an impression of humoring the child, allowing her sad amusement to be glimpsed. Like many mothers she loved her son, with little or no respect for him. "Demetrios would direct us out of his one-volume Shakespeare, our only book on that journey. He would storm at us and labor over our performance of what we barely understood, with fierce insistence on the reality of dramatic illusion. To him (and to me) Macbeth, Lear, Rosalind, Falstaff, all the glorious company were as real as Judd or George or Laura or myself; more real, because immortal. I still like lo think, dear souls, that Hamlet's perplexities will be under discussion long after I'm dead. "So, like a company of players without an audience, we groped our way from Missouri as far as Pennsylvania -- it took us two months, well into September, but it's true we had no reason for haste -- before anything happened to burst the bubble of Demetrios' dream. Maybe some of the intensity he brought to those rehearsals was appropriate to an earlier phase of youth; solemn folk, like Howard Wilmot, would say he should have grown up sooner. But if it resembled a child's fantasy it was carried out with the prodigal passion of an adolescent who was in most respects a man, and an artist from the heart out. "In a way, I hold Howard Wilmot to blame, yet according to his lights what he did was well meant. Judd, though I don't think he would have done it himself, did nothing to prevent it, only stood by and let it happen, not understanding until too late. "We were in a town somewhere near Harrisburg, a wholly deserted town where a soft insistent southwest wind was driving the rain down along the desolation of Main Street, a swarm of silver ghosts. The little town was all ours to do with as we chose; in that September it was still possible to find canned stuff in the groceries or the forsaken dwellings, though perhaps in the company of the disintegrating dead. In that valley town, though -- I remember the name of it, it was Aberedo -- everything had been left tidy. Perhaps the survivors of plagues and war had abandoned it in fear of flood -- for a river ran through the place, roaring high to the banks -- and had chosen to leave their bit of the world in good order. We took refuge from the rain as we had done at many other towns, in a public building. It was a motion picture theatre, and it was Howard who suggested it. "We had used one before, much earlier, when Demetrios and I had explored tjie place top to bottom, and used the stage area for a rehearsal of Othello; but this time Howard took it on himself to show Demetrios. He steered us up to the projection booth, and made it all his show -- Judd was there, and Andromache came too, and Howard lectured with the obdurate wisdom of a garage mechanic. 'This here is a reel, Demmy,' he said. 'That there is a projector -- look at the God-damn thing, more parts than a fine car.' Howard was fed up with the rehearsals; they bothered him; they were a waste of time -- though I don't know what he hoped to do with the time saved -- and I think he also felt that some of the language in Shakespeare wasn't quite nice. 'This here box that holds the projection lamp, see, this is a real special metal, built to stand heat. I been told the heat of them lamps is a caution, and they was pretty special too, I don't guess there'd be a soul alive knows how to make one, supposing he had the makings. See, it ain't like this, now, organic gardening, I mean a man can take a piece of land and grow things, but see, there ain't no living to be made out of this,' He was trying to be kind, or thought he was, and I hadn't the courage to tell him to shut up. 'See, Demmy, you take that reel of film for instance, you know what that film is made of? Plastic. You know what plastic is made of? It's a p'troleum product. All plastics is p'troleum products,' said Howard, who had read an article about it. 'Thing of it is, Demmy, moo'n' pictures has had it. Of course, so long as it's just a game -- ' "'Well,' said my friend agreeably, 'I will cease my games.' And he went down into the theatre, walking naturally, no one with him but me, and I felt his pain in a way that made it impossible for me to speak. Then he was hurrying to the door, and out in the rain, and running, and I ran after him, but I couldn't keep up to him, I couldn't make him stop by screaming to him, he ran out on the bridge over the muddy torrent of the river, and climbed the rail, and was gone. He couldn't swim. I could; I kicked off my shoes and went in after him -- hopeless of course, the current had wrenched him far downstream, and down. I must have wanted to die myself, or I wouldn't have been foolish enough to try it; then I suppose the natural animal part of me was not ready to die. I remember catching hold of something, a timber I guess, and forcing my way somehow to the bank a quartermile or so downstream, where George and Judd found me and carried me home. I wasn't unconscious, just exhausted. I knew all about it when Andromache flung herself on me and kissed me and cried: 'O Demetrios -- thank God, Demetrios! Poor Adam's gone then? Demetrios, I'm so sorry ! I know how you loved him, Demetrios, I know." I think Judd Wilmot said: "Andromache, God is not mocked." But that was the only time he reproved her, seeing that the rest of us had said nothing, and I don't think she heard it at all. CJ HE never relinquished the ilJjlusion, and from the start we had been used to softening everything for Andromache. It was for myself a kind of madness, if you like, to take the name of someone I had loved so much, and in a way become that person, but-one grows accustomed, even to madness. It seemed to take away nothing from the ancient part of life that was Hesterville; I even imagined my real mother approving of what I did. We came on, we settled here at Nuber where a working order was already established and stayed together as a group for a short while, about six months I think it was, before Andromache died. Then Judd elected to take the rest on to Vermont -- he never liked Nuber, found it godless -- but I elected to remain here and have done so ever since, telling you stories from time to time, and earning my living as a respectable janitor. "Andromache had one other trouble of the mind -- more than one. but one that I'll tell you about because it seems to be part of the story. She had never read books -- lor her the teevy took the place of them. But some legends out of books had come to her, and woke her curious power of belief. After I had become Demetrios, or Demetrios had become myself -- I don't know what way I should say it -- Andromache spoke a great deal about Tom Sawyer, as if he were someone she had known until recently; but in her mind Mark Twain's great creation strayed far from the original, taking on qualities of Lancelot and the dead Demetrios and Jesus. Here at Nuber she sat about and daydreamed a great deal; she did not talk aloud to Tom Sawyer, but her expression would shift and change in a thousand ways as if she carried on a conversation with everything but voice. And often she wandered away, but never got into trouble and always came back -- we grew careless. She became interested in collecting herbs and would bring back basketfuls of this and that, usually dandelion or plantain or similar good harmless things, but one day she brought in some pure white umbrella-shaped mushrooms. "O my God!" says Judd's wife Miranda, "them's Death Caps, you mustn't touch them things, Andy, good heavens!' 'Oh,' said Andromache, 'are they bad? Throw them out then,' she said, and giggled. 'If they're bad we can't serve them when Tom Sawyer comes tomorrow.' And two days later she was talking to me in the cautious way She did, never looking me full in the face but repeatedly calling me Demetrios, when she became violently sick. Why, when she was talking with Miranda she must have already eaten some deathcaps -- raw, I suppose, in the field. "I never thought of becoming Adam Freeman again. Laura hesitantly called me Adam, a day after Andromache died; I shook my head. A sweet soul, Laura. I often wished we were closer, but the twoworld she had with George was an old-fashioned kind that could make no room for a third. I am Demetrios -- aye-so, and surely, for the janitor of a sex-house, Demetrios is a better name than Adam." Behind his eyes Demetrios wished they would go. It had not been their kind of story -- nor his, for that matter: it seemed to him he could tell dreams better than truth, whatever truth is. It had been forced from him without his conscious art, by the power of memory. He felt the sultry breeze, and his own weariness. "Sir?" "Yes, Garth?" "I just wondered if you was going to tell us more." "Nay, no more. I dreamed last night that I was traveling west on a railroad, behind a steam locomotive with a big-bellied smokestack, something I never saw myself except in pictures. Long strings of cars there were, pulled along parallel steel tracks, they called them rails. There might be rusted remnants of those rails, here and there in the woods -- nay, no more." "My aunt has the sight -- you know? She can read too, Demetrios. She's got this dream book where she says it tells like all what them things mean. I could ask her to look in it about yours." "She might say I ought to make my westward journey." "Once she told me out of the book how you could make like true dreams by putting rosemary and, well, things, under your pillow, I mean I did that and there was one, a you-know, one of those dreams, it was real great." "They say it's wilderness now," said the young man with the wolfhound, "all the way west from Penn to some ocean -- would that be what they called the Pacific, sir?" "Might be," said Demetrios. "But since the Hudson has risen to become an inland sea, the Mississippi must have done the same, so that's likely the ocean they mean. An amazing rise, you know, for so short a time as half a century. At the Nuber waterfront they tell me the level's kept steady now for about five years. An inland sea would put Hesterville under water. Not much high ground there. Might be small islands." B ehind him someone asked: "Got a license for storytelling?" The youth with the wolfhound stood up, murmuring reassurance to the rangy beast. Garth was viewing the newcomer, hands firm by the horse's head, his innocence suddenly shuttered behind blue eyes that looked older and dangerous. Demetrios turned his head without haste. The policeman had come softly in his moccasins, a stodgy decent soul known to Demetrios, in the uniform of dark blue loincloth and shirt with embroidered gold circle, his club at his belt. "They want a license for it now, Joe?" "If you do it on the street. Constitutes collecting a crowd." "Joe, I've been yarning on the streetcorners for at least fifteen years and you know it. You've stopped to listen yourself sometimes." Joe's embarrassment was a skim of ice on a pond in early frost. "It's my living, Joe, apart from janitor work." "Ain't been on the books long, sir. I won't take you in -- we don't want no trouble. Only you got to get a license before you do it again. See about it at the Town Hall." "What does it cost?" Joe cleared his throat and looked away. "Ask'em at the Town Hall, ain't my department. Let's break it up, folks. No subversion. Can't have no crowds on Harrow Street." "Joe Park," said the woman in the window, "you son of a bitch." "Move on, folks. Break it up. We don't want no trouble." Ill But What is Peace? Knowledge enormous makes a a god of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions. Majesties, sovran voices, agonie Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of mv brain... T he listeners dispersed. Demetrios tried to remember when that close-faced fellow had slipped away; it had been after those remarks about nations, persons, crowds, which might stir up that man's superiors -- who would be at Inner City, he supposed. As a good janitor, Demetrios wished to be law-abiding if only the law would show some sense. He had not the inner clench, akin to despair and vanity, that squeezes the revolutionary's mind. The police of the city-state of Nuber did not frighten Demetrios. He had rarely seen them misbehave. To be sure, he did not have a true worm's-eye view of them. In boyhood he had not felt much of the understandable #th Century American hatred for police; his father's shrewd and tranquil sense of humor had steered him away from other excesses too. Patrolman Joe Park, duty done, marched away, flipping a hand toward the woman in the window to acknowledge her insult. Demetrios rose with stiffness; quickly, unobtrusively, Garth's hand aided him. The plowhorse snuffled at Demetrios' neck. Garth muttered: "I hate the fucking cops, could shit in their beer." From gentle Garth, the words startled. "One of 'em beat up on Frankie last week, and he hadn't done nothing only pee a little on that statue in the Meadows, the one near the entrance, I guess it's St. Franklin, with the spade jaw. Lots of people do -- screw a God-damn, Frankie's only twelve, they didn't have to beat up on him." "Brand here can't get by that damn statue," said the youth with the wolfhound. "I don't think he'd mind the leash if I tried to stop him, so usually I have a shot at it too." The dog wagged gratification at the music of his name. "I'm Angus Bridgeman, sir." "Peace with you, Angus, yourself it is," said Demetrios. "My name you know." His weariness was dissolving, as if the warmth of the young could flow into old bones and joints. "I suppose we'd best move on, in case Joe's got eyes in his back. And I must get to the Town Hall -- but not today. I'll go home; I'm tired. Mam, was it a story with enough love in it?" "Well, there was love in it. I'd ask you all in for a cup-tea, but the house is a mess and my man'll soon be home." "Another time. Bless you." "And you, man Demetrios. You be good boys." They moved off down the street. The woman's face saddened as a field goes drab when sunlight abandons it to roving cloud ; she turned back to the work of the world. -- Here I who write this book must intrude an instant -- no more than an instant I promise you and then I'm gone, out of sight -- to say that this woman is no fiction -- # stars in daytime, what is fiction ? -- indeed I stayed a day or two at her house on my last return to Nuber, and wasn't she full of peace and quiet and pregnant again, wouldn't you know it? Real yes, but sensitive, does not wish her name to be used. Now I'm gone . -- "I gosemplace here," said Garth at the next corner. "Then I'll ask my aunt to see the book about your dream, Demetrios?" "Do, Garth," said Demetrios, loving him. "And tell me." "You was traveling west on a -- a rail train." "Aye-so, and it may have passed Aberedo, but that thought only nudged me like an owl's shadow under the moon." "I'll see you again around and about." "Yes, Garth, Peace." "Peace, Demetrios, Mister Bridgeman." Garth was gone, his horse's hard steps receding with neat dry noise down Franklin Street, where bricks had replaced a decayed blacktop of Old Time. Harrow Street, with very little traffic of ox-carts and wagons, still had a usable amount of the ancient paving, its crumbled spots and frost-holes occasionally repaired, by order of Town Hall, with a random flurrup of dirt. Walking on with the quiet youth and his great gray dog. Demetrios brooded on the word Peace. One spoke it nowadays as we once said "So long" or "Be seeing you" -- indeed the usage had begun long ago, before #, but in the #th Century it seems to have had pious overtones, an assumption that only the religious could know the meaning of peace. Now no one gave it a thought, as for centuries no one had remembered that "Goodbye" derived from "God be with you!" But what is peace? Something more than the absence of strife and confusion? #TT AViE y u truly been a storyJXteller for fifteen years? That is more than three-quarters of my lifetime." "It must be about fifteen, Angus Bridgeman. You're about nineteen, yourself it is?" "Next month." "Live in health. Yes, so far as Nuber is concerned you could say I invented the profession of storytelling. The imitators flatter me -- no, actually some are better than I am, I know." "Isn't that false modesty? I don't think they are." "Maybe." The boy's quick, almost stern remark was like adirecting tug on the arm. "There's a special vanity goes with the storytelling profession. My father, by the way, gave me a life-lasting example of intellectual humility, a rare quality in a doctor. Well -- one afternoon I was idle on a streetcorner, full of the myths of the world, and it -- just happened. I said: 'Hear me who speak to you -- ' my voice sounded good to myself; presently I was telling the story of the Argonauts, with my inventions... Are you kin to that Simon Bridgeman who was the true founder of Nuber?" "Simon was my uncle -- sixteen years older than my father, who must be close to your age, sir. My father was only fourteen when Simon was assassinated, and Simon governed only a bit over two years -- isn't that right? -- before that happened." "Yes, about two years. When I came here with Judd's party Simon Bridgeman had the new town already organized and was accepting refugees. Word got around, even in that confusion." "I first heard your storytelling four years ago. It was at the corner of Broad and Dover Streets, and I was fifteen. That was a July afternoon too but very hot; we were all sweating up a stink and you had drawn a goodsized crowd. I was with my father and so not free to -- not free." Angus' voice was warm, with the plangent overtones of adolescence, yet Demetrios wondered whether the boy might have tactfully steered him away from the subject of the Bridgeman clan -- too important in the Inner City, rumor said, for Brian II and his party to risk conflict with them. "And that time too it was the story of the Argonauts. You held me enchanted. I was Jason." "The Greeks might hardly recognize it." "They won't criticize, from Olympus. Are you in a hurry to get home, Demetrios?" "Ah, it's a pleasant place with a dear woman in it, and I'm tired. But I'd always have time for you, Angus Bridgeman." "Thank you. As a favor, may I look at you closely? I'll explain. I am nearsighted. I can't see the shape of the moon, though people tell me it has one -- well, no hurt there, I can design it to my own fancy. It was just my good fortune I heard your voice when I turned into Harrow Street or I might have gone by. So let me look at you clearly, yourself it is -- do you mind?" His hands came to rest lightly on Demetrios' shoulders, one grasping Brand's leash with only the little finger hooked in the loop. Brand also stared with wild uncompromised alertness, he who could love or hate in a second's flash. Demetrios felt Angus' clean breath inches away and saw a broad forehead knitting in close regard, Angus' own face open to study if the old man cared to search. It was a decisive face. Though unscratched by experience, nothing about it was amorphous or unfinished; the features were faultless, with a healthy flush under clear skin. All the Bridgemans had big straight noses and prominent jaws; in Angus the look of severity S# and heaviness was modified by a mouth that was sensitive and could surely be tender or humorous. His hands were admirable with latent strength; his dark red-brown hair fell heavy, shoulderlength, over the cream-white tunic. Demetrios could not rerrtcmber seeing him before, with Steven Bridgeman. He must have been as beautiful at fifteen as he was now; perhaps that had been one of the days when Demetrios had felt sourly out of to look at them and wishing them gone as soon as he had begun to speak -- yet he had spoken well enough for Angus to remember it. Angus took his hands away. "Let's be friends." "So be it, Angus." B y your story, you must have been here when my uncle was murdered. Year Three it was, twenty-five years before I was born." "Year Three, yes. I wasn't in the market square when it happened. The whole community here that was looking to Simon Bridgeman for leadership -- maybe a thousand of us all told, many more still drifting in -- we were demoralized. There had been, you know, all the hopeful dreams that human beings nourish after they've survived one more ghastly blunder. We were going to learn from experience at last, build a new world in the light of reason and justice, and so on; then the leader we like and admire is butchered in the public market by three ruffians with knives, and we don't know what to do. We didn't know, certainly couldn't prove, who hired the assassins, or if anyone did. Acting on their own, said Brian, who had been just an obscure associate of Simon's, his lawyer in fact, before the war. They were fanatics with a grudge, said Brian." "There was a crowd, wasn't there?" "Yes, a little crowd had gathered in the market to hear Simon speak and explain a new system of taxes. The murder was expertly done, Angus. Before the people really knew what had happened the men were out at the fringes and then gone into the woods. But you must know all this." "Not too well. It's ancient like a passage in the histories, like the martyrdom of Abraham that happened when I was two years old. Well, not quite. After all, my father was there in the market and saw the knives. Your account agrees with his. So nobody stopped them, they just ran away." "Yes, Angus." "And that first Brian, who invented the label 'King's Republic' -- God, did he never look in a dictionary? -- he too died before I was born. Died promising the restoration of the United States." "He just might have used a dictionary. Brian I had some intelligence, anyway shrewdness. One of those power-drugged blow-hards who say openly to their contemporaries: "Look, you're all slobs and I'm another, so I'm going to get mine." Such fellows get credit for honesty and good nature though they seldom have a trace of either. The old tiresome thing of excusing your smell by declaring everybody stinks. It made a big part of the background for the #th Century cult of despair." "Brian II has lasted. Dictator of the King's Republic all my life." Angus said. (Like bat-wings at the edge of Demetrios' thought moved the words Agent provocateur? Demetrios dismissed them, for good: this boy would not betray; to think he might was itself a betrayal.) "The wall between Inner and Outer Cities was raised before I was born, too. Till I was thirteen, everything beyond it was theory." "Raised in Year Four, Angus. Brian I called it the reply of law and order to the wicked, wicked assassination of Simon Bridgeman." "Aye-so? Building a wall against himself?" "We don't actually know he hired the knife-men." "Hm. The wall grows smaller. Demetrios, friend, for these last months, since my family has allowed me to stroll around in Outer City with no guard but Brand, I've been feeling -- oh, like a chick fresh out of the shell... Can I talk to you like this? You don't seem frightened or -- well, cautious, the way most people are with me in the Inner City. You're not currying favor, nor measuring out the words you think would be good for me." "We're friends." "So be it, Demetrios." They walked on slowly together, and Brand too was satisfied, following at the side as he was trained to do, with respect for human legs. "My uncle had no private police?" "I think that's true. Simon Bridgeman, I recall, acted like a man who thought he was in no physical danger from those around him. Brian I -- call him medieval, or maybe timeless; Machiavelli would have understood him. But your uncle Simon Bridgeman was very much a #th Century man, Angus. A business man before the collapse, which meant he knew all about making enemies, fighting with the dirty weapons of money and influence but never worrying about a knife in the gut, because that very seldom happened to #th Century merchant princes unless they went into politics. A #th Century rich man, and somewhat cultured too. He saw the disaster coming and persuaded his rich neighbors -- some of them were real stinkers, by the way -- to join forces with him in creating an enclave for survival. They dug into their mountain and renamed it Mount Everlasting -- a poor choice I would say, for isn't it only natural that the hills should wear down and pass away like the rest of us?" W hy was it Nuber you came to, back in Year One?" "Judd Wilmot followed a rumor we heard after -- after Aberedo. We heard a community here was successful, and accepting newcomers. The name confused us, because we'd also heard that Newburgh and other Hudson River towns had been demolished in the floods, especially one that followed a great earthquake somewhere north of Albany. We had seen for ourselves what the rains were doing -- flooded highways, washed-out bridges, acres of muddy water seething -- that's one reason why it took us from July into September just to go from Missouri to Pennsylvania. One day after Aberedo we met a little group like ourselves, only they happened to believe that everything had to be better in the west ! Dear old Judd was remarkably angry with them, and they with us. Long live difference of opinion and its cracking of skulls! -- well,' our quarrel with them wasn't all that fierce. They told us how the Mohawk and the Hudson had overwhelmed the banks from the Finger Lakes to the sea. What Lake Ontario was doing nobody knew. They explained that Nuber was a town fresh-built around the nucleus of some OldTime village and a fantastic underground shelter, several miles inland from the Old-Time city of Newburgh. Fresh-built by lunatics, they said, for God was about to destroy the entire northeastern United States. Wall Street was somehow involved in Jehovah's disturbed emotional condition." Angus smiled, not quite understanding. "The same prophecy had been made during the return of Halley's comet in # -- I was six years old then, if you can imagine it." "My father remembers the rains. He looks older than you." "Something about storytelling keeps me youngish. Back in those ugly days others got wind of Nuber. We arrived here as part of a crowd converging from several directions. Your uncle dealt with us and found room for most, being stern only work for the new city. With my hands, Angus, I helped to build Simon Bridgeman's tower on the summit of Mount Everlasting, and later, under the monarchy -- excuse me, the King's Republic -- I laid some of the stones that walled in (and protected) your childhood." "And now you're helping me across the wall. Did you know that, Demetrios?" "It's a function of old people, occasionally. Sometimes their best reason for staying alive, though we do have others." "I don't think of you as old." "Old enough... Well, your very intelligent uncle Simon Bridgeman probably knew the influx of refugees from chaos would soon stop -- no wide communications any more, no large population left. Brian Gorman -- who took the name Brian I after the assassination -- why, he seemed a nobody while Simon lived, a dry man, nothing remarkable about him but a heavy voice that told crass jokes, piffling echoes of remarks that had been salty and original when first delivered by Abraham Lincoln or W. C. Fields." "What does it ever mean, calling someone a great man?" "Maybe a great man is one who can stay out of tune with his times and nevertheless make himself heard -- for good or evil: there can be evil great men as well as good ones; history offers full pictures of many of them and has buried others in the compost of the footnotes." "My head's running over with too much, Demetrios. I've begun to detest the artificial aristocracy I belong to. It's without basis -- isn't it? Soon I suppose they'll be calling us a nobility, with more flummery, pretense, arse-kissing." "The centuries-old patterns shape up again." "But meaningless, meaningless." "Meanings unclear. You crave a meaning for life, Angus?" "I've read the books -- I know what America was, and might have been -- yes, yes I do. How can anyone not want it?" "We have to make our own meanings, not find them." The boy stared at him. "Evil-directed souls -- the power-hungry, the cruel, the greedy and stupid -- they have to make their own meanings too: even if they imagine that God or the Leader has provided them ready-made, there is still the act of consent, of agreement. And Utopias fall fiat because they depend on the false notion that every person would want the imaginary good state if only he understood it -- the hell he would: he wants his own dream-country, maybe one that includes slavery, and whips." Ami giving him too much, too fast? The life of Angus in the Inner City, Demetrios reflected, must be like that of one caught in the quiet of the eye of a hurricane. Around him swirled the power politics of a little world still in a state of shock, old rules and new tangled together, nostalgia for an age of science still aching in a culture of ox-team, spade, bow and arrow. Demetrios had caught glimpses of Brian II on the King's rare pseudo-democratic appearances in Outer City and had been reminded of a much photographed Italian dictator of the middle #th Century whose corpse, when the tide turned against him, had been strung up to a lamp-post beside that of his mistress -- almost a hundred years ago, yet here and there no doubt photographs still existed of that appropriate medieval obscenity. It has often been embarrassingly difficult to know what century one is inhabiting at any given time. "Make our own meaning... Demetrios, I ought not to keep you from home, but would you come to the Meadows a while? That's a fairly good tavern at the edge of the park -- might I buy you a couple of drinks? They keep me filthy with more money than I can spend, even on women -- I don't like buying sex anyhow. We could talk some more -- sit out on the grass by Paddy's Place where nobody would eavesdrop." "Demetrios never turned down a drink with a friend. I know Paddy well, and I've done my storytelling sometimes at the thing they call a temple, near there. Paddy would have been a highwayman in Old Time, or a used-car salesman." T hey followed Harrow Street's climb into the parkland encircling the wall that Demetrios when young had helped to build. On the other side of the wall rose Inner City's terraces and graystone buildings to the rounded broad summit of Mount Everlasting. Good drinks they were, in the low long tavern said to date from Old Time, and in Paddy's frogface as he served them was a polite but obvious wonder, what old Demetrios would be up to with a white-clad Bridgeman. But Paddy was a genteel pirate whose single joke was to say that he avoided the common cold by keeping his snout out of other people's business. No crowd infested Paddy's lawn. Angus and Demetrios could nibble their cheese and drink the two-year-old Katskil wine in comfort, watching a slow-growing storm pattern enlarge over the hills. The park known as the Meadows was high enough to provide a glimpse, through a break in the mountains, of the waters of the Hudson Sea. "Does your vision give you the meeting of sea and sky?" "Without certainty, Demetrios. Light speaks to me." Not far away, on a more tramped and weedy part of the Meadows, stood the Temple, which might have been well enough named had any god dwelt there -- the wistful invitation of a name will not fetch them by itself any more. It was a wooden block of roof about fifty feet by twenty, on pillars of stone -- (people in Katskil have been heard to argue that the great earthquake north of Albany never happened) -- and its erection had been endowed by an Inner City philanthropist about ten years ago. He felt the People ought to have an agreeable meeting-place for like folk-dancing; he wanted it called the Mall, and it was to be like the Parthenon only some bigger, but when the money ran out he allowed it could be some smaller so long as it was rectangular. Which it was, but on the entablature there marched no frieze of splendor and strife -- just shingles, which look neater and call for maybe less upkeep. In the #th Century he could have hired experts to go to Athens and come up with a genuine replica, in Permaglit and wired for sound: to every country its own idiom. Two groups had gathered at opposite ends of the shelter, one a flock of mostly young people, in solidcolor tunic and skirt and loincloth -- breathing flower-petals clustered around a center, which was a bearded goor in a red robe. The other group was of mixed ages and restless, crying amens, preached to by a harsh-voiced man in a gray loincloth. He had tossed his tunic aside. Repeatedly he placed his left hand on his ridgy ribs in the neighborhood of the heart, with thumb and forefinger circled, the other three fingers lifted, and his right hand spread out over the liver, more or less, indicating the carnal self -- the sign of the Wheel and the Flesh. This was more and more commonly seen in Nuber, as the cult of Abraham grew. Some difficult people among the Abrahamites declared that the right hand ought to be curved over the genitals instead of the liver -- makings of a possible religious war. The confused noise, as the two distant groups rather bitterly ignored each other in a spirit of love and forgiveness, reached Demetrios as mutter and squeak. Neither speaker was very good, the Abrahamite too hoarse, the goor too mellow. "Local Agora," said Angus. "Ayah, but I believe Socrates was detained." "I almost met that goor in the red wrap-around, anyhow I think it's Goor Johnson. I can't make out his face but there couldn't be two that fat, both in red monkeries. Senator Smith invited him to Inner City not long ago, a garden party, though I don't think the Senator's turned believer. Goor Johnson holds that the human spirit can't put off (he shackles of the flesh and become one with the Unique Infinite unless it rejects the perverted doctrine of a spherical planet." "Is there a non-unique Infinite?" "Shit, man, can't recall if he said. Anyhow the thing's flat, okay? If we'd admit it we could assend to heaven right off. no sweat. See, it's only sheer love for humankind that keeps the goor earthbound -- overweight has nothing to do with it. He made it sound very attractive, but I was pervertedly munching maple and walnut cookies, and by the time I had them finished some other simple soul was crimping his transcendental ear, so I hitched up my shackled spirit and split." "Well, you're not ripe for heaven. The other noisemaker is Holman Shawn, a preacher for the Society of Disciples, sometimes called Abrahamites, or Brownists." "I suppose I should know more about them. Demetrios, has the proportion of freaks always been as high as it is in Nuber?" "Why, I think so. I dare say the proportions have always stayed about the same, maybe from ancient times -- a handful of the very bright, a handful of subnormal and idiots, a multitude of the in-beIween, and everywhere a sprinkling of unpredictable weirdies like pepper in the stew." Demetrios brooded, bedeviled by a familiar distress. During the first years of his streetcorner activity he had occasionally (oid the story of the martyrdom of Abraham Brown, as his own sickened eyes had witnessed it -- but not quite honestly. He had glossed over some of the savagery, the incorrigible human darkness, and might have made the poor brave fanatic Abraham appear more than lifesize. Well, in a way it was, but so are all the thinking few. Crackpot or no, Abraham Brown did live with purity of motive and courage in action, and he did die for what he was, in the manner of Christ. Had Demetrios' tellings of the tale played a part in launching one more miserable messianic cult, which would infallibly pervert anything good in the man's teaching and blow up all of it into whatever monstrous creation suited the fancies and the politics of the church-makers? "Dear Angus," he said, "I wonder sometimes whether a life of quietism, or at least one of deliberate simplicity and very limited action, may not be the only one that does no serious harm. Even poor Goor Johnson may have a glimmering of that, if he isn't just in it for the money and cookies." "The world stinks," said Angus. The boy's shift of mood caught Demetrios unprepared, as if Angus had tumbled into despair like one slipping off a narrow mountain trail. "It stinks. Not the world of course. Man. The dirty hairy animal -- but damn it, he isn't, always. He doesn't have to be -- or does he? Cruelty, meanness, greed, sicknesses of mind and body, suspicion -- Demetrios, I know a little about you. It's almost a fact that I came looking for you -- no. I'd better say. I've watched for you, hoped to see you again ever since I first heard you, four years ago. I trust you, Demetrios. Do you know there's a stupid faction in Inner City that want to make a politician of me? See themselves as king-makers. Power stinks. O Demetrios, what am I to do? What is my work? The world doesn't want people like me." "The world isn't capable of wanting. It just blunders on. I know -- by 'jvorld' you meant 'people at large'. Same answer. You will find your own art, Angus." "How, in my ignorance? How?" "I'd tell you if I could. Art of guidance? Leadership -- teaching? I can tell you at least that things are unimportant. Love is never a thing, it's a country where we can make journeys." "Demetrios, did you see Abraham die?" "Yes. I can't believe martyrdom ever serves. It moves us but it doesn't teach. Our response to martyrdom is a self-indulgence. We remember the hemlock and the cross, but what have we ever done with the wisdom of Socrates or the compassion of Jesus?" "Will you tell me the story of Abraham, though?" "Yes. I must think about it. I'm tired now and disturbed." "Forgive me, I've kept you from going home. Will you meet me here again? Tomorrow, near to noontime?" "Tomorrow, near noon. Peace." "Peace, Demetrios." IV Solitaire was Waiting I never know the time on a day when I make a friend. D emetrios strode slowly down from the park toward that section of Outer City's fringe where Redcurtain Street occupies a slice of the arc, and perplexity traveled with him like a cloud of gnats. He was not what he had been before meeting Angus. In their talk neither had mentioned that policeman, but in Demetrios' loneliness the fellow loomed large. Angus, who would have grown up to regard an Outer City policeman as one more underling, probably thought the incident a trifle. Demetrios himself had simply forgotten Joe Park in the charm of Angus' presence. Past time had been clear before this hour just gone; now the present filled the horizon; yet Demetrios was not even certain that he loved the boy. Angus belonged to modern society as old Demetrios of the #th Century could not. Three hours ago l did not know him. Faith moves no mountains except in the mind of the pious daydreamer ; love is stronger, not compelled like faith to feed on illusion -- it may do so, true, and thus poison itself, but it need not. He turned into a dismal alley, a short cut to Redcurtain Street. The houses here had been slung together of scrap lumber in the year before Simon Bridgeman's assassination, when refugees had begun to be less welcome in the city-state of Nuber; they stooped crazily toward each other like gossiping hags. Simon Bridgeman, son of the plastic age, never achieved a reliable sawmill. That was left for Brian I, who also understood the bow and arrow, pike, and tomahawk. Nowadays we harness the streams flowing into the Hudson Sea and the enormous Delaware, and there's a quarry beyond Mount Orlook where they cut good millstones. In this alley Demetrios looked sharp for foraging hogs, scattered filth, pariah dogs vicious as weasels, and drunks. Not much violent crime plagued Nuber in the Year #; what there was lurked spider-like in crannies like this one. He walked along briskly, swinging his walnut stick, keeping it visible in the late shadowed daylight. Sometimes the old man entered such places unnecessarily, recognizing the foolishness of it. One challenges the black spider to jump, and afterward feels -- no, not younger, but perhaps more alive. -- People still dwell in the wilderness regions beyond Katskil and other centers, exceedingly wild but hardly demonic as folk imagine. They live there from choice. They could abandon their feral ways and accept the shelter of the citystates -- Katskil, Moha, Penn. But they don t. Now I am gone again. -- Demetrios emerged safe from his alley onto Redcurtain Street, where the police permit nothing unpleasant. High powers of Inner City have always favored it, and own shares of course; white-tunic people enjoy the clean sidewalks at proper hours. Local custom requires the burial of garbage in the gardens behind the houses, so pigs and pi-dogs are not drawn to scavenge. Demetrios took pride in the flowers and vegetables he raised for Mam Estelle's establishment, although this came under Janitor Work only by liberal definition. Many houses on Redcurtain Street own bay windows and balconies where the girls sit on view, sharing these cosy promontories with sleeping cats. A charming street, at least in the Year #. On the front steps of Mam Estelle's, the Professor was musing alone with his lute when Demetrios reached home. He lifted a brown finger in greeting, missing never a note of the scale passage that flittered up and out of the heart's view like a climbing bluebird. "It's been a good day," said Demetrios. from the lute more diamond-dust of sound. Normally one asked him only yes-or-no questions, since he was a mute. "A good warm day. I made a new friend, and maybe I'm happy." A glowing arpeggio acknowledged the possibility of happiness. The Professor's eyes were unfathomably soft, with gold lights. His skin was tan, his hair short and curly. Demetrios assumed his origins were partly black, but like many in the city-state of Nuber he admitted no past. They had been friends for years. Often the Professor, when the Mam did not need him in the Parlor, went forth into the city with Demetrios; his presence and his lute might lead the streetcorner tales into fresh dimensions. This, and the sharing of Solitaire's bed, created bonds of kindness. "The girls must be getting up by now." The Professor nodded, watching music fly away. He seldom smiled unless a south wind was blowing; today the wind was in the east. Momentarily Demetrios observed something of Garth in the Professor's luxuriant mouth, the tilt of his head, something of Solitaire in the long grace of his hands -- not strange that those we love should share traits of appearance. "I never know the time on a day when I make a friend." The Professor found Time worth a respectful shrug. "Be with you again soon, paesan." In # this descendant of an Italian word had joined the other endearments of English, that Mississippi of languages. Demetrios squeezed the Professor's shoulder and entered Mam Estelle's sex-house. The Mam was enjoying tea in the company of pretty Glorie and sallow Fran, casually using a squat pink tea set known to be genuine Woolworth, and lacing her own tea as if absent mindedly with fire from a jug of corn whiskey. As Babette crossly told her, had told her thirty times, she must have drunk enough Penn tea to float the Katskil navy -- four cat-boats and a ketch. It was that time of afternoon when a protective haze so sheltered Mam Estelle that she let the house run itself, which meant that Babette ran it. "Mam, I declare to you, yourself it is, I got me this extra bicep just from lifting the durn kettle to the taypot for to make you tea and tea and tea." It wasn't the tea that worried goodhearted Babette. "Take off thir'y pounds," said Mam Estelle gently, "and maybe your arm'll be thin enough I can see the bicep." Blonde Glorie giggled. Fran's lips moved, likely checking some passage from the Book of Positions. Fran was a gentle, serious girl; to bed her was like earning academic credits. Rugged Babette, maid-of-allwork here for the last ten years, usually got the worst of any argument. She greeted Demetrios with easy affection -- they balled occasionally -- and said: "She's through work, man Demetrios. Upstairs." Estelle sighed, busy perhaps in the corn-spirit haze with work-hours and the whole rusty, leaky affair of living. A year ago Demetrios had found Solitaire wandering in the woods outside of town. She had been gang-raped, she said, and then had hidden and starved a few days. She could not remember who she was. He had brought her to the refuge of Mam Estelle's, as a special case. She could help mind the house, sharing room and bed only with him and the Professor. She was not to be touched by the customers, otherwise all three would split. "Needn't blackmail an old friend," said the Mam -- "I'll love her myself." Estelle relied on him. Who else would mind the fires and tend the garden for so small a wage, and entertain with stories in the Parlor apparently for the love of it? Where would she find the equal of the Professor, whose lute could give you the sound of children laughing or of breaking hearts? Mam Estelle had never been a pig for money, nor unkind. Soon she did feel and show a tenderness of her own for Solitaire -- who even now remembered no identity for herself. Probably the girl's eccentric grace was being memorialized in the fat locked book, the Diary, which Demetrios recognized as a vital though slowrhythmed heart at the core of Mam Estelle's existence. Mam Estelle was shyly proud of her Old-Time knack of reading and writing. No one else ever beheld the Diary: she had less vanity than most authors, and a better means of earning a living. Solitaire was thin and sweet and small, and in a thin small sweet way she was quite mad. D emetrios climbed the stairs and passed down the long upper hall, returning the lazy greetings of the girls who were getting ready for supper and a night's work, and reached the large pleasant room at the rear of the house that he shared with the Professor and Solitaire. From this room one could look down on the garden and rejoice in its superiority to anything the neighbors had; also keep track of their affairs if so minded -- sometimes he told Solitaire fly-away stories about them off the top of his head. She was sitting slumped on the big bed, dressed as he had expected in the slattern rags and stains of the day's work, her hair in a tight bun under a dust-cloth, her cheeks smeared. The sag of dejection and premature age -- that also was worn like a garment. It was horrifying to see her so, but Demetrios knew the compensations for this masquerade, this protective show that enabled her to go mouselike, unnoticed, about her labors. Sometimes she drew attention anyway, merely by a slimness and grace impossible to hide, but she was convincingly a drab slavey. At this moment she was lost in gazing at that planet which endures and continues beyond all our windows. She turned her dark head slowly as Demetrios closed the door behind him, and in her brown eyes -- droop-lidded they would have been during the day, night-fires hidden -- her recognition bloomed: a bright fish blazes out of the murk of a pool in suddenness and gold. "Solitaire was waiting for Demetrios." He had never known her to employ that upright pronoun against whose pillar-like rigidity most of us lean all day long and half the night; nor did she liberate the short thick blade of the other prodigious member of speech that rhymes with who. In the shelter of the third person Solitaire dwelt for her own reasons, and there she could be found if you loved her as Demetrios and the Professor loved her. "Solitaire has five hearts." She held up spread fingers. "One to keep, and one the dogs ate, and one for Jesus, and one for Professor, and one for Demetrios." But it would not be one of her bad nights. "All mine. And it's been a good day," said Demetrios again. "Good and bad. I made a friend; but on the dark side, a policeman has told me I must get a license for story-telling." "License? Phoo-ha!" She did not laugh; she was quick to see the possibilities of ugliness. Solitaire feared the dark, always wanting a low lamp or bit of candle burning even when she lay snug in bed between Demetrios and the Professor. She remarked once that living was walking in the jungle, but sometimes there were friends. "Aye-so, and what will it cost, man Demetrios?" "The cop wouldn't tell me, though I think he knew." Demetrios sank into the luxury of his armchair. Solitaire smiled. A certain ritual could not start till he was there, finished with the part of the day that took him from her. She never liked his going forth and squandering his stories on the crowds for their trifling money when he might have stayed safe at home. Once on a rainy day he had found her at a window blessing the clouds. But she never told Demetrios (or anyone) what to do. "I'll go to the Town Hall tomorrow and find out." She made a silver yawny sound. A shake of her head dismissed the Town Hall and the whole blot of nonsense where tomorrow could scrabble after it. She pulled the dustcloth from her head and tossed it on the floor. She was bringing a light table and chair to the middle of the room when the Professor came in, and she smiled at him too. The Professor pushed the doorbolt shut and sat cross-legged on the floor by Demetrios' armchair. His lute spoke as a part of his limber little body, soft-mannered and amorous. Solitaire fetched her tinderbox -- (let no one else ever use or touch it, or she would rage and weep) -- and lit the candles in their sconces, placing them one at each end of the table. Then she brought, from a chest by the bed, a strip of red cloth, a pair of shears, a washcloth, a cake of soap, a basin, a hand-mirror. The basin she filled with water from the bedside pitcher. Solitaire washed her face. T here must be a hundred ways of doing this -- snorty-splash, flip and finish, grunt-and-slop, scrub-and-search, pinch-and-suffer Solitaire just took the wet cloth and the delicate soap -- (for which Demetrios and the Professor paid high at a shop catering mostly to the white-tunic trade; but cost was barely comprehensible to Solitaire although she might dutifully ask about it; addition was a mystery, subtraction unknown, and money something that other people usually had) -- and removed the dirt from face and hands. Most of it she had put there herself, part of the disguise. Though she worked hard and honestly for Mam Estelle she practised physical caution, mindful of her skin because her lovers desired it; and for its own sake too? -- who knows? The Mam tried to limit her to such chores as bedmaking, sweeping, dusting, that would not expose her to soot and grease and stains, and Babette was usually on hand, ready to intervene with noisy competence if Solitaire needed help; for which reason Solitaire almost never wept or raged in their presence. The hand-mirror was two-sided, an artifact of Old Time, and faultless; one side magnified, by a magic wholly marvelous to Solitaire. She loved the gidget because the Professor had found it.for her, he could not say where. She brushed her black hair, crackle and spark and gleam, with another Old-Time treasure, a brush of true plastic, airy in design and flimsy-light. They are saying, Old Time will not come again. She might have been alone. readying herself for an evening's entertainment or just observing her beauty as if one could do this with detachment. She loosened the slavey's smock to her hips and stroked each breast -- round, budimmature, warmly shadowed around the nipple -- lifting it to the shine of the candles. She cut a diamond-shaped segment from the red cloth, examining it tenderly as if it might be a creature of life, then slapped it down on the table and pierced it with a brutal thrust of the shears, so that the metal stood upright in the wood. Eyes squinted in pain, she spread her hands, letting them say: Thai's how it was -- if you care how it was. Then quietly, a good housewife, moving about in nothing but her coarse linsey drawers, she rolled the table back to the side of the room, the shears yet standing. (Some time during the night -- one of her good nights -- she would slip out of bed alone and finish tidying up, putting away the shears, dropping the pierced cloth in the wastebasket.) She opened the clothes closet, hanging up her drawers and contemplating her wardrobe. The Professor's lute remained silent until she chose from less than a dozen costumes a long belted robe of dull red with yellow trim and fine bone buttons of creamy white. Demetrios and the Professor had pooled the earnings of more than a month to buy that for her. Of the other costumes only one was street wear, a suit of loose trousers and jacket, leaf-brown, that made her look, but for her way of walking, very like a boy. The lute exulted. One of her good nights. and time for love before supper. She stood naked so that her lovers might know her with their eyes, her left arm underlining her breasts, her right hand out to warn that the time was not quite yet. Demetrios looked on the slender stem of legs widening to the amphora of hips, torso, midnight triangle, and to that sudden bloom of rose and darkness at the summit, her wise sad face. Reason dwelt there with her madness, and both were Solitaire. The storm breeze was pushing at the open window. A motion of the Professor's hand offered to close it, but Solitaire shook her head. She slipped on the robe leaving it open, warm flesh shining. She said to Demetrios: "Solitaire is here." H e lifted her to the bed, and took her with the slowness and gentleness that were necessary. Over the house and the troubled city, beyond the homely jubilant toil of his body, he heard the desired rushing of wind and rain. It was for Solitaire to choose which of her lovers would enter her, and when. For her the storm was so intense and shattering -- certain revolting shadows gathering like wild dogs at the edge of a forest -- that she could not bear it often. Demetrios thought of his body as a protecting frame for the central blaze. The Professor's lute murmured in tenderness and reassurance. Now and then during the long course of Demetrios' love, Solitaire reached out to touch the Professor's left arm, for when she did that (she said once) some of the force that guided his music through the strings flowed into her too and changed trouble to a singing. She cried out in the extremity of the pleasure-agony, and lay at peace. In a while she said -- for like the child that she was not. Solitaire loved a story all the more with frequent telling, and would be disturbed if changes occurred even in the small words: "Demetrios will tell the Professor and Solitaire the story of Anya the Goose Girl." V She was Good as Gold Some geese will believe any# # A nya was a princess of Perane lios long ago, when magicians outranked even kings. Kings might lay taxes and order heads chopped off, but magicians could make people (including kings) vanish in an instant. Involuntary vanishing was felt to be unpleasant, although when the thing was done right the subject never came back to describe it: the Peraneliotic opinion was that we'd just rather not disappear zzzp! like that, leaving a small gray or dirty-lavender vacuum which fizzed slightly and then itself disappeared -- phsssp! a disappeared person did straggle back to Peranelios with some unacceptable tale of returning to consciousness in China or Brooklyn -- (we know there aren't any such places) -- and thumbing rides home. If these characters got tiresome about their problems, a magician was usually sent for to redisappear them. "Magicians most often performed this trick -- teleportation isn't quite the word -- if they were asked some stupid question when they were trying to meditate. "Anya was a good princess. As a little girl she never talked back, remembered to wash her hands, always pushed something better than the pope's nose to the edge of her golden plate for the deserving poor. She worked at being good. She studied her lessons, was kind to dolls and pets and servants, found out where babies come from by asking the cook instead of bothering Mama, and when the King was having a tantrum she said nothing but 'Yes, Daddy,' and 'No, Daddy,' and 'Maybe, Daddy.' She was good as gold. Everyone thought what a glorious queen she would make, but she had three elder brothers, all healthy, so that was out: nothing to do but marry her off to somebody well-connected and not too wormy. "As she grew from a little girl to an eligible princess, one thing troubled her. She liked being loved and admired -- that's human -- and one luminary at the court just wouldn't do it, the Dean of Magicians. He had a long cynical nose and was named Mennoc Moses, and by the way, nobody disappeared by Mennoc Moses ever came back. It preyed on Anya's mind. She thought of charming the old brute, but this would not have been sincere. You can't execute that kind of magician except by catching him asleep, which her father wouldn't consider; she couldn't do it herself because she was good. It preyed on her mind, right up to the day when the King told her he had arranged a luscious marriage for her with the Prince of Pommes de Terre. 'But, Daddy -- ' '"I see you mean to give me an argument,' said King Dagobert. (The current Prince of Pommes de Terre had massive gold and ivory teeth in the front of his face but none of his own; he was seventytwo, kept twelve concubines in stitches, and bet on the horses.) '"You know I never do that, Daddy,' said Princess Anya. '"That's right.' King Dagobert leered. 'You don't, do you?' "Sadly she left him planning his takeover of Pommes de Terre, which has rich deposits of bezoar stone, and went straight to Mennoc Moses. 'My Daddy says I have to marry the Prince of Pommes de Terre.' "'Do you know,' said the Dean of Magicians, 'that you interrupted my calculation of the orbit of the comet Bolowje?' "'I'm sorry. My Daddy says I have to marry him.' "'Who, Bolowje? He died in # ." "'Pommes de Terre." "'Oh, him. I wish you'd stop pestering. And you don't want to?' '"I'm in love with the cobbler's boy.' "'So go marry him.' '"My Daddy says I have to marry (he Prince of Pommes de Terre.' "'Oh. go away!' As he spoke, the Dean of Magicians made an occult motion, inadvertent we feel sure, which sent Princess Anya whirling thousands of miles -- zzzp! like (hat -- and a thousand more, while Mennoc Moses scratched his shiny skull, watching a small lavender vacuum on the floor fizz out -- phssp! like that. What he had meant to say was 'Vanish, O Prince of Whatever-it-was!' He sighed, allowed himself one quick alembic, and went back to work. taselene -- ( other side of China) -- and the people of Peranelios lamented the loss of their dear princess, but not even King Dagobert felt up to tackling Mennoc Moses when he was busy. He was always busy. Dagobert rustled up a more marginal type princess for the Prince of Pommes de Terre, hoping it would blow over. "And Anya? Well, she came down phlump in a grassy field in that country of Peraselene where everything is upside down only not very much, and the field had a lovely border of summer woods, and a charming pond full of white, brown, and brindle geese, who whopped out of the water, gathered around Princess Anya, and hissed. 'Stop hissing,' said Anya, 'or I'll tell your goose girl.' "'We don't have a goose girl,' said the Boss Gander. 'The last one quit. Couldn't stand the farmer's wife. Nor the farmer.' "'Then I'm your goose girl until we can make official arrangements, and I tell you to stop hissing. I take full responsibility, because I happen to be a princess by trade.' "'Is it all right if we graze?' asked the Boss Gander. "'Quite all right,' said Anya. 'Graze at will.' "They were cheerfully grazing when the farmer's wife came to investigate. I forgot to say that the geese had honked as well as hissed, and that the good Princess Anya was wearing a fancy dirndl of cloth of gold or something, plus an attractive wrap-around coronet which the Prime Minister had given her that very morning, for being good. But the farmwife was nearsighted as well as senile, and had forgotten her goose girl had quit. 'Where'd you steal the funny clothes?' she asked. 'Why can't you keep those beasts under control? Who do you think you are anyway?' "'This costume would occasion no adverse comment at my original residence,' said Princess Anya. 'The geese are quite well-behaved, asking only to be understood. In answer to your third question, I am Princess Anya of Peranelios, but I am prepared to act as your temporary goose girl, for the experience plus maintenance, until more appropriate arrangements can be activated. I expect to be in communication with Peranelios within a limited space of time.' '"What you are,' said the farmer's wife, 'is out of your head.' And she warmed the back of the good princess with a willow switch. She was a woman not much open to reason, and Princess Anya, after she was done crying, could think of nothing to do except be good. "'So it went on for some time, as they measure time in Paraselene, where the clocks are out of order as a result of being upside down but not very much. Anya had to rise before dawn, breakfast lightly on a crust of dry bread with butter on it, a tumbler of milk, and a pork chop, and go take care of her geese. That meant keeping off foxes and wolves, seeing that the goslings never got chilled, plucking the down -- have you ever tried plucking a live goose? I haven't either -- fighting off the farmer's boy who kept saying and saying he wanted to marry her, and generally making herself useful. In winter evenings when the geese were penned up she had to read to the farmer out of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or Proust. He had begun both books when he was young; now that his eyes were failing he still hoped to finish at least one. It was a hard, grim life for little Anya, and often she felt the only friend she had was the Boss Gander, who loved to sit in the sun with her and hear tales of court life at Peranelios. Some geese will believe anything." wttell, go on!" said Solitaire. VV "Sure. Don't I always wait to be nudged at that point? Besides, I thought you were asleep. So we shall return to the court of Peranelios, where everything was getting sticky. The youngest of Anya's brothers had died of measles, the second in age had turned priest, renouncing the throne in three languages, and what does the eldest son goodly Prince Cuthbert do but waddle off in full armor against the Visigoths, which was not only unprofitable but more dangerous than skiing and gave the cobbler's boy ideas. "He was a nice kid -- name was Hans. Princess Anya had met him only once, when she took her glass slippers to be half-soled, and they had sworn eternal devotion in some haste because she had to hurry off and dedicate a foundation. He was about to bring back the slippers -- beautiful job too -- on the day she was disappeared. He swore implacable vengeance upon Mennoc Moses and then looked around for something more practical, but some years passed before the eldest son went to war and gave him at least the germ of an idea. He transmitted an offer to King Dagobert (through channels) to go find Princess Anya and secure the succession, in return for the usual consideration -- half of the kingdom, and the princess. Dagobert turned him down flat. "Word came fairly soon, however, that the Visigoths had (predictably) done in our national hero Prince Cuthbert -- were in fact only a few miles from the gates of Peranelios. Dagobert reconsidered. Since Mennoc Moses was busy, he summoned Hans the Cobbler's Boy, apologized magnanimously for his hasty decision, and inquired if the offer was still open. 'It is, your ineffable Majesty,' said Hans, 'except I have to make it sixty-forty now -- inflation." "'Fifty-five forty-five?" "'Sixty-forty.' "'All right already. Some of my blood too? Convoy of pikemen and elephants? Travelers' cheques?' "'No, your supernal Majesty,' said Hans, who rather fancied himself as a Galahad type, only practical. 'No, I mean to go alone, and simply. It will attract less attention. And -- ' here he really stuck his neck out -- 'and if I fail in my mission, do with me whatever you will.' "Dagobert reflected that after oil, nobody disappeared by Mennoc Moses ever had turned up. There was nothing to be done except get ready to make a deal with the Visigoths; there never is. But he was a man who liked to hedge his bets when he could. 'Done,' said Dagobert, and he leered. "Hans backed out of the Presence, and (as a part of his implacable vengeance) he hurried to Mennoc Moses with a proposition: ten per cent of his sixty per cent if Mennoc would just kindly undisappear the Princess right now. He knew -- smart boy -- that vanished princesses in fairy-tales always reappear. But Mennoc Moses hooted at him. "I could make the entire kingdom vanish if I was a-mind to, I should settle for ten per cent of sixty per cent? Forget it. Besides, I never undisappear anybody -- a matter of principle.' (The truth is he didn't know how.) 'But I'll tell you how to find her, free for nothing, which is what it's worth.' "How, O fount of Supramundane wisdom, if a Cobbler's Boy may so express himself?" "'Why, thank you, son. Oh, you ravel east, west, north, and south at more or less the same time; then take a left, and a right, and go straight on for Peraselene -- you can't miss it. Must be back on the job now. Nice meeting you.' "Hans the Cobbler's Boy traveled off east, west, north, and south at more or less the same time, and took a left and a right, and didn't notice anything that looked like Peraselene, so he asked a redbird: 'Is this the way to Peraselene, your Eminence?' 'He's busy,' said the redbird -- 'I'm Mrs. Eminence. Well, you should have turned right back along there, but if you take a left by the schoolhouse you can't miss it.' And poor Hans had a number of similar experiences, until at length he encountered an Alien who didn't tell him he couldn't miss it -- just told him where it was. All of which took time, time. "Meanwhile back in Peranelios King Dagobert had what may have been the first bright thought of his long and glorious reign. He asked Mennoc Moses (politely, when he wasn't too busy) to disappear the Visigoths. Which the old man did, with nothing worse than an irritated grumble -- would have taken care of it sooner if he'd known that was what Dag wanted, and was there anything else on his mind? '"Oh Lord no!' says King Dagobert, quitting while he was ahead. 'No, everything's fabulous. Have a good day.' #A ND Hans, following the Alien's instructions, came at last to the charming cottage of Anya the Goose Girl, whom he recognized at once although she had grown up considerably. The Farmer's Wife had died of her own ill-nature, but the Farmer still had hopes of getting through Gibbon, and Anya the Goose Girl was reading him page # of Proust at the very moment Hans knocked on her door. She had less time for the reading now, with the housework and everything, but the Farmer was patient, and still wanted to study the structure of each sentence. If dear Anya was a bit slow to recognize the Cobbler's Boy it was because her mind had to be on a lot of things; but then she recalled that he was connected with trade, and remembered more and more, and asked him: 'Did you bring the slippers?' "'No, sorry, I forgot. But O my Beloved, half of my soul, I have come to take you back to Peranelios, and for this your noble father will give me half of his kingdom, or rather sixty per cent.' "'But I can't, possibly -- darling, give it back to Joe, it was his to begin with, you know that -- sorry, I was talking to my youngest, he's going through a Phase -- ' "it's all right,' said the Farmer's Boy -- 'I got the little stinkers separated.' He had turned out well, by the way -- I mean the Farmer's Boy -- and tried hard to be a good husband. "'Of course,' said Anya the Goose Girl, 'it was awfully nice of you to think of it, only you can see how it is.' "'Happy to have you stay for dinner,' said the Farmer's Boy. 'Maybe go a mite slow on the Omy-Beloved bit, account we're sort of square around the edges, meaning no offense.' "'And the felicity occasioned by his attendance at the prandial board,' said the Farmer, 'would present no less an example of reciprocally desiderated enjoyment than a leisured appraisal of the summation he might elect to offer of his peregrinations -- ' "'He goes on like that,' said Anya. 'Stay for dinner of course -- Hans.' She did remember his name. "So Hans stayed for dinner, and petted the children who were still of leg-climbing age, admired the squashes and petunias, and was introduced to the Boss Gander, who bit him, and headed back to Peranelios as soon as possible... Are you asleep?" "Solitaire is not asleep," yawned Solitaire. "Because she knows there is more." "And there at Peranelios Hans told King Dagobert the entire situation like an honest fellow, concluding: 'Therefore, your paramount Majesty, do with me whatever you will.' King Dagobert made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Mennoc Moses -- well, he drowned his troubles by marrying an astringent sorceress named Miss Givings, and they lived happily ever after, but the others in the story were a mite too young to do that. Are you asleep?... "Are you asleep?... Mm, fair enough." S he would wake, to eat supper when he or the Professor brought it upstairs for the three of them. Then if the Professor's eyes besought her, she would give him the play-acting touch of the whip that was one of his needs, for it was a part of Solitaire's madness that she had learned a kindness toward what passes for madness in others. And she would then fall into the true sleep of night, from which she might rouse at midnight to put away those shears. Demetrios found it good to wait on her. Indeed a good life in most respects. What a pity -- damn that policeman! -- that anything should disturb it. The image of Angus Bridgeman walked through his mind, beautiful and proud, gazing down from the summit of youth with curiosity and perhaps tenderness. Rain on the rooftop was lashed by a returning storm-wind that moved again toward quiet. VI The Shards of a broken Mirror -- and I too remember what never was, the Golden Age. D emetrios woke to the vermilion and gold of sunrise. Solitaire had risen in the night as usual to tidy the room, and would have sat a while by the window letting her thoughts reach after the stormwrack when the stars came out. Now she slept in brown arms. The Professor would be approaching fifty. Solitaire nineteen or twenty; both looked like tender children. Demetrios dressed in discreet silence and drifted down the stairs, refreshed. The giggles and squeals and running about of a work-night at Mam Estelle's, the occasional sob or slap or outcry, seldom disturbed his rest. He had not dreamed of Angus during the night hours: if the dreams of sleep would come to us at our command, who would ever wake? In the large kitchen Mam Estelle was enjoying the early hours. An Old-Time aluminum kettle sang on the iron top of the brick woodburner -- stoves, some call them. In # not too many stoves could be found with those good cast-iron tops and easy-lifted lids; Mam Estelle had ordered hers from the notorious Salvage Company of Nupal, down the coast. "A good morning to you, man Demetrios!" The sage black cat was weaving and surging optimistically about Mam Estelle's ankles -- cupboard love perhaps, but Jenny took it seriously as a fine art. "This is early time for you, a'n't it?"  "It is. Good morning to yourself, Stell." Mam Estelle was never hazed in the mornings. While the rest of the house would sleep till noon after the erotic tumult of the night, she and Jenny were up and had the world to themselves. Loveliest time of day, said Estelle: only time you can think. Her thought poured into her diary, a stream determining its own course. Jenny was between litters, her spring output given away. Nuber thought highly of its cats. The big evil gray rats were no longer seen, driven out by the small dark-rufous ones, possibly mutants. The cats alone prevented the new breed from becoming a serious plague. Dealing with the Salvage Company of Nupal gave Estelle no qualms. The charming kettle had come from there, the fine cast-iron skillets, most of the andirons in the bedroom fireplaces, and the noble two-level plant-stand in the sunroom that the customers never ceased to admire. In its rectangular upper section Mam Estelle grew pansies and marigolds; two tall healthy marawans spread up from the oval lower part. The stand was clear white without a flaw, a kind of porcelain nobody knows how to make nowadays. Demetrios and Estelle, having both grown up partway in what folk still sometimes call the #th Century, remembered the earlier function of these plantstands, wistfully too, in the chill of the outhouse on winter mornings. Living in one century with a rootstub of memory in another, you must be mindful of the tender place where the graft is joined. The Salvage Company sends its mule-wagons with well-armed crews to just about every part of the known world where decaying OldTime roads or the dusty new ones can lead them, searching out any kind of junk or treasure the Company might sell for a profit. You hear stories about the collection crews stealing and watergating and so on. It's a dead-end trade of course, with that end in sight. In # the Company was thinking about starting a foundry, with charcoal from the Nupal forests and ore out of iron mines up north abandoned as unprofitable in Old Time; they also considered swallowing some of the small industries growing up in the town of Maplestock. Mostly scuttlebutt -- but you never know, about Nupal. Though included in the King's Republic by the treaty of Maplestock in Year #, Nupal cherishes a persnickety half-independence, and is not about to give Nuber the time of day unless there's a dollar in it. "Town Hall," said Demetrios on his way to the outhouse -- "Ech!" "That license thing you spoke about?" "Ayah, may the idiot who started it be enlightened with a dry cob. Is there paper out there?" "I trust," said Estelle with dignity, but added more meekly: "Well, that paper we get from Maplestock is dreadful cheap stuff -- it goes fast, and I did use some for -- for writing. Notes, you know." "Never mind, dear -- in Old Time there was too much paper. We were choking on it, my father used to say." "Sit you down, Dimmy," she said on his return. Jenny jumped into his lap and worked pointed toes. "I'll do you an egg." "Bless you, if it a'n't too much trouble." "Tsha-sha," said Mam Estelle, patting his arm. She was sixtyfive -- a young mother eighteen years old in a Connecticut factory town when the world fell apart. "License for storytelling! I don't know what way the world's drifting. Some time the Inner City people will go too far -- snooping, interfering. And tax, tax, tax!" She broke the egg delicately into the pan. In her mornings Mam Estelle was inclined toward a soberly revolutionary outlook, too troublesome to maintain later during the crawling afternoons and evenings when she needed the consolations of the corn spirit. "A nice brown egg," said Demetrios, "from Somerville's gang I expect. Obadiah's girls are coasting toward soup, Bab says." To Demetrios the chickens in the two backyard flocks, under supervision of the peppery red rooster Somerville and grave gray-barred Obadiah, were valued acquaintances, though Babette had the task of caring for them and permitted no interference. Demetrios minded the cow Julia. Estelle was not so readily diverted. "Dimmy, I even wonder if it's safe to keep my diary. Some fella comes snooping, say it's a time when I don't feel too good, maybe have too much tea in me. Say he makes off with my locked book because some bloody new law says he can, and there's me indiscreet soul laid bare. For the vultures. No respect for my gray hairs if they say it's subversion -- now that's for to kiss my arse, truly! What's in Nuber worth subverting, hanh?" "You a'n't gray," said Demetrios. "Lookit your pretty brown hair alongit my real gray. Bring your tea and sit down, Estelle. Tell me about your locked book, if you want to." "Nay, Dimmy." She brought him his tea; stooped behind him to kiss the top of his head, clutching his long, badly combed thatch. But she had changed her mind about having more tea herself, and pottered about the kitchen with needless tidying -- Babette kept everything in trim order. "Nay, oftentimes I think I want to talk about it, but some-way I never can. (You don't want out, Jenny.) It's just a book, a sort of -- book. (Okay, so you want out.) And this is my time to go be with it." But she lingered in the doorway of her bedroom off the kitchen, troubled about Demetrios' day. Her room was originally a kitchen store-room; she cherished it as a deer-mouse her nest, and no one except Babette was ever invited into it. Its one window faced east across the kitchen garden, and mornings came to her fresh and young. "Don't apologize," said Demetrios. "I'll wash up my plate and stuff. You go be with your book." She stood there a bit longer, sober-eyed, maybe longing to hear herself telling what stays beyond words -- we keep trying. One subject is love, another is loneliness. No language exists for either except a few words and fewer lucky marriages of words that reflect bits of truth like shards of a broken mirror. "Well, don't get into trouble," she said, and closed her door. T he shortest way from Redcurtain Street to the Town Hall, the way Demetrios chose, takes you through Gallows Square, where you may see -- you can't help seeing -- the gallows, pillory, whipping-post. This is the same gallows that bore Abraham's wheel lashed to its cross-bar so that he might hang in the public view as a warning to other enemies of the State. Some say it was not even intended he should die. The dreary tenements and shops surrounding Gallows Square also date from Abraham's time, squalid slattern buildings not redeemable by anything but the fire that is bound to take them sooner or later: what can Nuber's bucket brigade do when that heap of tinder and dry rot catches a spark? And some of the people who nowadays lean out the windows to study the particulars of a fresh whipping or hanging must have elbowed seventeen years ago for good places to watch Abraham on the wheel. Many would have died in the natural way of things -- it isn't a good-humored world just now, so brawls would have accounted for some; others would have been taken by smallpox, cholera, yellow fever. Some may have just gone away, leaving room for newcomers who would observe another dying Abraham with the same uneasy excitement, and perhaps stone him. Leaving Gallows Square you climb a couple of steep blocks and behold the Town Hall. Situated at the beginning of the pyramidal rise of Inner City, it is a fairly nasty hunk of architecture, a two-story blockhouse with a couple of fake pillars framing the door, the whole surmounted by a square bell-tower that would look excellent if it weren't twice too large for the building. It was built to accommodate a magnificent Old-Time bronze bell saved from the ruin of some church and dating back to the year uh-huh. The phony pillars rise the full two stories; if they were real instead of slabs of lath and plaster, they could readily support the whacking great architrave that ain't there, but since they just cling to the building like bandages on a sore knee, there's room between them for a little piss-elegant porch called The Balcony, from which statesmen may address their public. The mess as a whole suggested to Demetrios a #th Century style that must have been fading at the end of that lamented era, but left its mark, even in Missouri. What idiot revived it for the King's Republic in the Year # Post-Holocaust when the Town Hall was built, may never be known. Never mind -- that damn bell-tower is good. Squatting before its green, which is spacious, well-kept, and rather pretty with the grass regularly scythed, the Town Hall is one of the four entrances through the wall, eight feet high, that completely encircles Inner City and Mount Everlasting. You go through the central corridor of the building and -- if you have a pass or walk in the company of a citizen of Inner City -- step out on the lovely wide avenue that runs all the way around just inside the wall: it's called Wall Street. The wall itself makes a fringe around the base of the pyramid, approximately twelve miles in circumference. Nature built the pyramid out of the primal rock and men put the knobs on it. The wall angles up and down and all over the place as the flanks of the hills demand, but the pyramidal shape is always evident, reinforced by a triangular stone tower at the summit of Mount Everlasting. This was built to Simon Bridgeman's order because (he said) he wanted to watch the new world coming to him. It was the last of his brain's creations that he saw completed: he never moved into the sumptuous apartments high up in the fifty-foot tower, for he was murdered a week after the last brick was tamped into place, and Brian I, First Dictator of the King's Republic of Katskil (who liked simplified spelling because it saved time and was the only kind he knew) decreed that the tower should stand as an everlasting monument on Mount Everlasting, sacred to the memory of that great and good spirit Simon Bridgeman (deceased), savior of his people, prophet of the new world. Amen, the winds blow upon it, in # the tower apartments were occupied by Brian II, his queen and concubines, and Demetrios wasn't gosemplacing anywhere beyond the Town Hall this morning. He climbed the short rise to the green, only a little out of breath. Already the day had grown sultry, as though he brought with him a contagious sadness from Gallows Square. A few benches on the green were occupied by loafers; the police cleared them out at sundown and they drifted back in the quiet hours. A rag doll was lying on the grass -- what sort of child would abandon a friend in that state? Demetrios gave it sanctuary on an empty bench, legs decently disposed. He saw a bland yellow bitch trot to the Town Hall, her hind quarters nudged by a zealous black cur who checked and mounted her on the front step while three lesser males attended; she looked patient and intent. A policeman came down the steps with a broom but only leaned on it. "Where do I go to see about a license?" kind of license?" VV"For storytelling." "You must be nuts." "I'm told it's required now." "Oh -- ayah. Second door on the right, ask the sergeant." Demetrios walked between the pasted-on pillars into the acid urinary smell of small-town virtue. Entering that second door he found the human sludge of the night gathered to wait disposal. The only furnishings of the narrow room were two eight-foot benches, a desk flanked by an Old-Time brass spittoon, a heavy chair, a heavy sergeant to sit in it. At the far end was a closed door painted with the word lutenent. Waiting were three old drunks, one of them a palsied crone with bloodshot lower lids who might already be dwelling nearly beyond the reach of pain, a shabby fortyist man mumbling to his fingers and alert against eavesdroppers, and a weedy youth with appalled eyes perhaps still high on marawan. All of them made Demetrios think ofpatients waiting in a clinic -- Dr. Justice is busy right now. The drunks would be put to soak in loneliness for a day or two, the jumpy mutterer might be anything, the youth would likely be turned loose with a warning unless his night's enterprises had involved serious personal injury or watergating. Demetrios had noted, over the years, how the city-state of Nuber was oddly lacking in civilization's usual chronic resentment of the young. So few of them nowadays! -- maybe Old Time ought not to have considered them expendable like plastic dolls -- cannon-fodder -- vietnamable. Now all five, plus Demetrios himself, must simply wait, until they knew every crack in the plaster of these walls, every dubious lump of shadow in the straw and sawdust on the stone floor. The nasty power to make people wait and wait is a built-in feature of all bureaucracies; whether the hazy autocrat at the summit is a monarch, an oligarchy, or a so-called sovereign people, the psychological smell of the waiting-room is everywhere the same. "I came to see about a license for storytelling -- " maybe he should not have addressed the desk sergeant thus directly. The man went on writing. Demetrios had half-expected this routine discourtesy, stereotype of petty authority. It was irritating not to be able to read the sergeant's squiggles upside down: maybe the poor fellow was trying to finish a book. After more dippings in the inkwell his quill halted but was not laid aside. "Who'd you say you are?" "I am Demetrios. I'm told I need a license for storytelling." To meet the sergeant's sullen gaze was to peer down a well at frog-eyes. He said at last: "Can't you for Christ's sake find a place to sit down? You have to see the lieutenant -- I got nothing to do with licenses." "What lieutenant?" "Like-man, we got only one on duty." As a concession to stupidity, the desk sergeant waved his pen at the door in the rear. "When can I see Lieutenant Likeman?" "Lieutenant Brome -- oh, you think you're being funny?" "No." "Don't. Lieutenant Brome is busy. Wait your turn." Demetrios sat by the worried youth. "Another warm day." "No talking in here!" said the desk sergeant. The boy inched away -- he hadn't been talking, but what about guilt by association? Perhaps unseen Lieutenant Brome was eight feet tall. An hour oozed on into past time. A single gray-paned window, where a black blowfly zizzed a bumbling prayer for more light, faced northward unacquainted with the sun. The swelling warmth of the day collected here nevertheless, squeezing forth antique smells to haunt the air. For a quarter-hour the weedy youth practised rolling a marble along the back of his hand, catching it in the soiled cuff of his shirt, until the sergeant groaned: "Quit that, will you?" The nervous man mumbling at his fingers jumped as if slapped. A side-glance at Demetrios from the boy renewed their frail companionship in sin; behind his hand the kid amiably shaped immortal words: "Fuck'em all!" At last, the others disposed of, he was sent in to Lieutenant Brome and returned soon as Demetrios had expected, playing the legerdemain with his marble in plain sight. A sly wink for Demetrios and he was gone, whistling. The others had not returned this way: no doubt Lieutenant Brome's office had darker exits. The desk sergeant sighed: "You can go in now." Friday. July #. #. D to the Town Hall dreadful early this Morning about the Bloody License Thing, please sweet God don't let him get Cross with them and rar up at them in his Pride that's going to get him into Trouble one day, he ought not to be plagued with that Shit and him getting on in years, and I to remember what never was, the Golden Age. when I lived at No. # Shannon Street with Sam and Steven and Leda, and there was Marcus my Baby. How it was, we said All of us was to be his Parents and that was coot, why do I say it never was? Sam he is as plain to me now, his Red Hair and his Long Legs and his ugly nice Jaw you could hang your Hat on, plain as my wrinkled Hand holding this Pen, and there was always Marcus, Sam's Baby and Mine, though Stevie was always Best on the Mattress but never Loved me near so much -- Marcus with Curls of yellow going thisoway and thatoway all over his Head like darling Half Hoops of Gold only made out of Mist you would think when you touched them, that fine and soft they were, how could  write as if it all never was? Marcus he's dead but he lived, he lived to be Almost Three,  was fifteen when I Bore him, this I know, never mind, it was a Golden Age. And if Marcus lived they all lived, Sam and Leda and Steven, and we had this House at No. # Shannon Street cheap on account of near the Underpass and no Ground only a PostageStamp like of Front Yard. Most of the Bread, well, it come from Steven that had this Job at the Shoe Factory and just took the Shit like Day after Day so as we could have the Bread, and me and Sam and Leda we was on Welfare they called it, and there was People made like a Profession of it,  never liked that. Sam he would have his Guitar, and Leda and me could sing, Steve said I was a Natural Alto. Oftentimes Abe Logan that had been Stevie's Lover and still was sort of, he would come stay a week or two, and he had a Recorder and knew a lot of Ancient Things that Steve knew too, see, they had been together on Radio once. Things called Madrigles for an instance, and Sam could figure out Guitar Parts for them, you never heard no Thing so pretty as when we all got like turned on with the Madrigles. About this reaching back, I tell myself Stell, you better not reach back, you better not. Marcus he was Real-Crazy for the Madrigles and would go Laughing and Dancing and Strutting Around to the Music showing off his handsome little Penis which he'd just lately discovered it, which Sam wouldn't let the Doctor talk us into getting him Circumscribed, it was Goddamn Foolishness Sam said, all they want is the Dollars. Marcus -- wellnaturally Everything was a new Discovery for my Marcus, you could say he grew up to Three Years Old with Singing and Dancing. Oh it was hard to wean him ! -- his Mouth was a Kiss of Red Honey and the Sunshine Loved Him. I ieutenant Brome looked downj right winsome in his apparent desire to soothe and please. "Sorry you had to wait, sir. That fool should have let me know you were here. Demetrios, isn't it? Heard you once or twice. Pity about this license thing, but the utopia has to be run on certain principles, you understand I'm sure. Have a marawan candy? I agree, too early in the day; sometimes I take one though, strain of the job and so on. Doing much storytelling these days?" He leaned back at his desk, a bland face inviting Demetrios into the company of the shrewd who know how the world goes, a bit of yielding here, a bit of sweetening there, no hurt feelings, everybody happy. He was square and sallow, Lieutenant Brome, clean under the fingernails but a little bloated in the belly, soggy in the face, an athlete gone to slack. "I was storytelling before #." "Before when? -- oh, that. We don't talk about that, you know. Looking back is unutopian. Looking back, what d'you find? -- nothing but the outworn ideas, Demetrios: democracy instead of utopian law and order, monarchy instead of the utopian king's republic, all that damned socialistic permissiveness instead of utopian ethics, which thank God the present Administration is going to look out for, lots better, from here on." Demetrios felt a new chill. "Thank God," said the Lieutenant earnestly, "we're beginning to learn what it means to run things on strictly utopian principles! And get rid of any damned subversion that shows its head." But after this fervent declaration of politico-religious conviction. Lieutenant Brome again relaxed, a reasonable, practical fellow, watching Demetrios with the earnest, halfaffectionate intentness of a fisherman who sees the float jerked downward by the dimly seen victim. He went on presently: "Demetrios, I suppose you understand how a government run on utopian principles can't very well put up with random, unregulated storytelling, that could undermine the very foundations of freedom and utopianism? Um... One great mistake they made in Old Time -- see, how do you think you're going to protect freedom of speech if you let just anybody talk the way he likes, umm?" And the horror of it is, he does not expect me to laugh, could not tolerate my laughter. He has dried up the fountains of my laughter. Oh, if universes are infinite, there is one where old Demetrios has the courage to rise up, and hold off this manikin with his walnut stick long enough to piss on all his neatly stacked papers and wash them away down a stream of laughter. And another where Brome himself can see the joke, and piss off his own stream of laughter, wash the whole damned world clean with laughter. But the devil of it is, that's always some other universe, never the one we're stuck with, where there's no such laughter, maybe none at all... The Lieutenant had spoken some further words, so quietly, like a murmured afterthought, that Demetrios was obliged to ask him to repeat. "I said, Demetrios, the license costs only twenty dollars." "Twenty?" "Twenty." "Sir, that's annihilation. As janitor of the most respected sex-house on Redcurtain Street, I earn four dollars a week -- generous pay but not princely. As storyteller with my cap on the pavement, why, I can pick up maybe another two dollars, if the weather's good and I go out five or six days. My expenses come close to my income. I have no savings worth mentioning." "It's a shame," said the Lieutenant. "If it was up to me I'd allow for such difficulties." His face took on the inward-listening glaze of one suddenly gifted by an original insight, a shining splendor for which he found suitable words: "See, I don't write the laws." The luminous nature of this presentment led him to even more exalted heights: "You can't make a utopia without breaking eggs... Of course in some cases the inevitable, uh, hardships can be, we might say, minimized, in return for -- I hardly know how to phrase it -- " "How much of what?" "What?" "What have I got that would make it worth your while to let me go on as I am, doing my job, telling my stories, and minding my own fucking business?" "We're very direct this morning, aren't we?" said Lieutenant Brone, and giggled, tapping his fingers on the desk. "Is it still morning?" Lieutenant Brome stood up and stretched. He opened and closed the two doors of his office, glancing into the sergeant's office and a sidecorridor, apparently for listeners. "A man can't help it if he's kept busy," he said mildly. "It's about eleven o'clock." He returned to his desk, popping another candy in his mouth. "Just offhand -- " nothing would ever be offhand with Brome -- "how many other storytellers in Nuber belong to the Society of Disciples?" The bell-tower hummed and roared and trembled to a music drumming down to the rock, eleven pulses of a Titan's heart. When he could be heard, Demetrios said: "Haven't the slightest damned idea." "Come now, Demetrios. The more you fence with me the more of your valuable time I'll have to waste. You asked what you have that might be worth my while. Not much; but for certain kinds of information you might be, let us say, let off the hook -- the legal hook, mind you. Mean to say, I'll tell you frankly and freely, Demetrios, I'm not altogether unimportant in Inner City." "But I have almost no connection with the other storytellers." Demetrios struggled with disbelief, the stunned incredulity of one who supposed a drowsing tiger was soft because he looked so. "We are loners mostly. Artists can't organize, it isn't our nature." The fingers tapped; uncharitable eyes gazed anywhere except at Demetrios' face. "The new statute gives me authority to inquire into the activities of, I quote: 'public storytellers and other persons of no occupation...' How long have you known Jon Seberling?" "I never heard of him." "Odd. He knows you." The fingers ceased tapping and wrote in a black book, the expensive kind bound in heavy paper covers, that the factory over in Maplestock had begun to turn out in some quantity that year. "Mark Walton?... Edna McEloi?" "I know of Walton, though I never met him. I've heard McEloi sing, and tell one very unpolitical fairytale to an audience that was mostly children... Lieutenant, may I say that storytelling is an occupation?" "Indeed. But you are presently employed," stated the voice above the wiggling fingers, "as janitor in the Public Entertainment Facility registered under the name of 'Mam Estelle's'?" "Of course." "Of the customers at that Facility, what proportion are Inner City residents?" "I haven't a notion." "Indeed. Of the employees of that Facility, how many are members of the Society of Disciples?" "None that I know of." But Fran was, and Babette had gone to one or two of the Disciples' secret LoveFeasts. Do I get out of here in time to warn them? The fingers worked on. "The Mam Estelle Facility employs male prostitutes?" "My recollection is that the term 'prostitute' was outlawed by the same statute that established the Facilities of Redcurtain Street. The Facility has had no male entertainers since that became illegal four years ago." "Throughout recorded history," the Lieutenant recited above his busy fingers, "the Crime Against Nature has been illegal, recognized as the Devil's best method of destroying Humanity by race suicide: this is Scientific Fact. It has therefore, naturally, never been legal in Nuber." Demetrios sat quiet. The Public Entertainment Facilities dated back to the days of Simon Bridgeman who had openly loved both women and boys. Brian I had not wished to disturb them, and so far Brian II had not dared. But Demetrios was being reminded that you don't argue with the rewriters of history. "By the way, Demetrios -- and I wish you'd see your way to being a little more cooperative -- do you know whether the Society of Disciples is still renting out "Oh -- do they have one?" The Lieutenant sighed and put down his quill. Simulated geniality had vanished. "You spoke of it in your curious discourse of yesterday, on Harrow Street, which was, in the public interest, reported to me -- by the way, what's your last name? Can't seem to find it anywhere in my records, which isn't very nice for somebody." "You amaze me. My last name is Freeman." The Lieutenant wrote that down. "Yesterday, Lieutenant, I think I mentioned the existence of the hand-press in Inner City, known to everyone, which prints the journal Hermes and other legally permitted material. If I mentioned the possibility of another press somewhere, it was not from any personal knowledge of such a thing -- I only passed on a rumor." "Which can be dangerous and irresponsible. Well, between the years # and # -- correct me if I'm wrong -- you were in the habit of publicly giving supposedly factual accounts of the death of Abraham Brown, of foreign origin, in Gallows Square of this city, in the year #. This is correct?" "I was in Gallows Square and saw him die. I told of it a few times during those ten years, yes, at the request of people who wished to hear it." "But not, at least not in public, for the last four years?" "Not in public nor in private." "Why not?" "I felt that interest in the story had become morbid, perhaps had always been so; that the actual truth was not welcome. Telling it therefore didn't seem to be in the public interest." "And how do you come to be the judge of the public interest?" "Every citizen is a judge of the public interest." "Interesting," said the Lieutenant, and wrote it down, murmuring the words under his breath. "Isn't it fair to assume, my dear Demetrios, that you have repeated the story very privately, say to your intimates, or -- umm -- or at the secret meetings of the Society of Disciples? Umm?" "I am not a liar. I have never attended any of their meetings, if they hold any. I have not recited the story of Abraham's martyrdom to any audience since the year #." "Demetrios, you may go." The Lieutenant's flat upward stare said without much equivocation: Pray accept my gift of enough rope. Demetrios rose, leaning on his walnut stick. "Nay, come back a moment, man Demetrios." "You are not entitled to address me so." "I stand corrected." The Lieutenant smiled. "Demetrios, if by any chance you happen to tell again the story of Abraham Brown according to your lights, with or without the license we mentioned, it will be your misfortune. I consider this a fair warning. Understood?" "Have a good day," said Demetrios, and turned his back on him. Perhaps the time was not remote when there would be a Brome dynasty, and it wouldn't do to turn your back. Demetrios walked out past the sergeant, into the newly cherished presence of the sun. The Prophet Abraham came from another Country But Jesus turning unto them said. Daughters of Jerusalem. weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your chilT he boy had said; "Will you meet me here again? Tomorrow, near to noontime?" So now to the Meadows, the lawn before Paddy's Place, from which one looked through a break in the hills to a meeting of sea and sky. Am I late? Normal eyes could discover that horizon harmony; not the wide, nearsighted eyes of Angus Bridgeman. Such eyes, thought Demetrios, possessed a different way of seeing -- his own were still #-#, his knowledge of defective vision theoretical. Am I late? The #th Century had automatically assumed "normal" vision to be "correct", the one and only, a characteristic half-truth. And how easily the old technology would have given Angus lenses! But lens-grinding was one of the taken-for-granted arts not provided for when Simon Bridgeman and his colleagues burrowed into the mountain. Normal vision would be a mighty convenience for Angus, increasing his share of safety in a world crawling with stealthy shadows -- well, not many external shadows could be stealthy enough to evade the incorruptible eyes and nose of Brand -- so yes, certainly, the kid ought to have glasses. Was not Leeuwenhoek, that distinguished friend of Vermeer, perfecting his wonderworking lenses far back there in the #th Century? And with lenses, Angus would soon despise and forget the special vision of his myopia... Was Vermeer nearsighted? -- no answer; truth inaccessible under three hundred and seventy-five years of historical sludge, including forty-seven years of modern barbarism and another two hundred when nobody noticed that as a painter he was rather good. But Angus couldn't have his lenses. Ami late? As he stood disconsolate on the lawn, a worm of pain stirred in the vague country of heart or stomach and crawled toward his gut where its transit apparently ended. He couldn't be late of course. The Town Hall had shivered to the eleventh hour of morning during his ordeal with the Lieutenant less than an hour ago, and up here at the Meadows only half a mile away, he couldn't have failed to hear the prodigious bronze bell declaring noon. To worry about lateness was senile fuss. He leaned against one of the fine maples bordering the lawn. Over at the Temple a few idlers had gathered, Angus not among them. At noon and midnight the entire city throbbed and ached to the full twelve strokes of that overwhelming voice. The knotty hands of the blind bell-ringer Blind Bailey would be guided to the rope by Little Reuben -- Bailey needed no such guidance; it was simply one of their acts of love. For part of each night, folk said. Blind Bailey would sit cross-legged with the bell-rope at his shoulder, so that Little Reuben might sleep. Blind Bailey followed a clock in his brain as accurate as any mechanical marvel; to him the hours yielded their seconds and minutes with the patience of dripping icicles in the sun. Folk said little enough about what would happen when Blind Bailey died -- he was old; it might happen any minute -- and the bell must be rung in some efficient, upto-date manner by slobs like you and me. Some suggested Little Reuben could manage by himself, since he wasn't really a natural but merely a mite unsteady in his wits: it would make him happy, these theorists argued, to carry on Blind Bailey's work. Another school of thought replied. Not bloody likely. rolled to him over the rise of ground shape simplified with distance crossed golden grass near the strode with that man; he showed not the shining grace of Angus won't come to me. He's forgotten, though he, himself it is, did speak loved me. And what can I give that honor such a promise? Dry cakes of youth to sweeten them. The promise was made during a moment in meeting. Can love be a trade? This folly ! Love is not any Thing, but be that country where we go to we go to meet the only saving mercy -- Demetrios walked toward the Temple, near enough to verify once more what his eyes knew quite well: Angus was not there. Demetrios would have found him at once, as your eye cannot evade the glory of a cardinal sudden in the leaves. Another worm of pain crept after the first into forgetfulness. What he needed was a good sneeze, a cough, a roll in the hay. What he needed was a god-damn drink. He entered Paddy's Place, scanning the cool retreat, the bar, the little booths, open tables on the floor's fresh sawdust, instantly recording the already known sadness: Angus isn't here. Paddy, wiping the bar, observed him with politely silent curiosity, his smile a modest widening of the frog mouth -- you expected it to open at sight of a penny-insect with the zip of a lightning tongue. A pair of nondescript men, travelers likely, overnight guests, were eating lunch or late breakfast in a booth, where they chewed on some private subject in undertones. Paddy's Place was the most prosperous hostel in Outer City, located on what in # was already being called the Long Road. It comes from somewhere in the north, passing through Maplestock and Kingstone, touching Nuber at the Meadows, angling down into the city under the name of Main Street, and proceeding southward through wilderness to Sofran. There it must bear west, away from the areas of desolation, and so into Penn, which they say is a republic, though not a King's Republic. The only other customer in the bar was an old fellow beginning a deep soak in Paddy's beer. "A good day, Paddy," Demetrios said, and raised his foot to the comfort of the rail. "If you know something good about it." "Why, the sun shines, man B# Demetrios -- oyah, I mean it would if I'd persuade me new slut to wash the windows. What'll it be?" "Shines from force of habit, man Paddy, like the joe who couldn't stop grinning when they cut his head off because it made him forget what the joRe was. Corn spirit, Paddy, I need a touch of corn spirit." Paddy reached for the jug. "You're dark blue today, yourself it is. The way I heard it, he couldn't tell them the joke because he was short of breath. But things look nice after the rain." "The tears of Jesus on Calvary. The pee of Zeus. The floods of Old Time at Aberedo." "Oyah." Paddy resumed his daylong wiping of the bar. "Aberedo?" "A town in Penn, where I stopped once." Demetrios drank, pushing his coin about in a puddle from the bottom of the glass. "Maybe you was never there." "Nor heard of it." "Refill, dear soul. I'll drink slow, trouble you no more." "No trouble, sir." "Sirring me, you Irish monster? Why, old Quixote's armor is scattering rust like red dandruff. Time, mind you, is not the only cause of it: the fella was born old." The (other) old drinker was deep-sunk in his beer dream. Older than Demetrios, he too would have been born in the age of plastic and subsidized corruption: maybe the dragons, magicians, imperilled beauties of his fantasy were powered by internal combustion, wore white lab coats and garments by Saks #th Avenue. The travelers, done with their conference, sat heavy with digestion, picking their teeth with splinters -- why, by nightfall, if they had good horses, they could be twenty or thirty miles from Nuber -- S o, demetrios! You could have wandered away from Nuber any time in the last forty-odd years, but always found some reason why not -- maybe sprouting from a delusion that there's really no world beyond it. To leave it is to enter a mist. But there were substantial reasons. There was Elizabeth of Hartford, sweet none-toobright Elizabeth who was like a wife or better for eight years after George and Laura moved away, until she died giving birth to the big-skulled mue which also, by one of the occasional mercies of nature, could not live. There was the Orgy Decade. the Twenties, my thirties, aftermath of the Red Plague when nearly everyone in Nuber believed the end of the human race was at hand -- but this time really-tmly, as it always has been of course -- and so one might as well try and try for some new way of touching off an explosion in the genitals, calling this action Life as if other happenings were something less than life. But the nen'ous system can shudder only just so much, so what else is going? Why, to us in the Year # the prophet Abraham came from another country, Abraham who believed like other holy men of other ancient times, that something he called the love of something he called God was bigger than either the dollar or the orgasm. I don't know. You can't spend an abstracdon to buy you bread. You can't love an abstraction, but only other individual human persons -- love directed elsewhere ceases to deserve the name, and may become poison or nonsense, or perhaps a kind of mental masturbation that can't come. Anyhow they butchered him. Why could you not be here. Angus? Your nearness alone might almost content me, even if you never desired to touch me. But your absence is a thorn in the heart that teaches me I love you. The prophet Abraham came from another country -- Demetrios pushed coin and empty glass away, and let his walnut stick thump the sawdust as he made for the door. He nodded to those travelers, who lifted their mugs amiably, guessing perhaps that Demetrios understood country roads and open skies. "Have a good day, all," he said, and stepped into a wave of sunlight, which transfigured the Temple and its shingled entablature so that it did seem a fantasy-glimpse of the Parthenon in the shade of Mount Everlasting. He strode down to it, his eye (professional though a mite drunk) assessing the crowd. Mostly young or youngish; no babies prepared to let fly with howls in the midst of dramatic passages. Another whiteclad man was coming down the avenue that curved from the southeast gate of Inner City, the route that Angus would probably use. But it wasn't Angus. Just another stranger who, as Demetrios halted to observe, unobtrusively spoke to the handful of others in the crowd who wore the white tunics. And then by ones and twos, with too much unconcern, they were drifting back up the avenue to that southeast gate, the careful messenger being the last to depart. Something is happening in the Inner City. Where A ngus lives. News will trickle down to us in time, whatever we are allowed to know. Smoldering grief at the boy's absence, smoldering wrath at Lieutenant Brome, at the law which is an ass, mixed with the corn spirit and the morose sultriness of July. A few eyes in the placid crowd were already asking: Will the old boy give us a tale? He rested his back against a pillar of the Temple, his bones familiar with every bump of the bricks. Two weeks ago he had lounged here giving them Hans Andersen's Little Mermaid as it came through the lens of his memory. "Demetrios, if by any chance you happen to tell again the story of Abraham Brown according to your lights -- "he dropped his cap upside down at his feet -- "with or without that license we -- " iitell how the prophet Abraham came from another country. "He was born, dear souls, in a town named Bethel in the state of Maryland. This was in #, five years before the Destruction. Of Bethel he remembered only the name and random childhood images, for his family moved to Ohio and he was there, a child of five, when one of the bombs removed the city of Washington from history. These things he told me in a quiet conversation, the day before he was betrayed. "Abraham was not hard to talk to. We chatted comfortably, as might any two men with a few common interests. He did not condemn my agnosticism though his mind would not allow him to understand it. He was a man of middling height, with reddish beard and sandy hair worn shoulder-length. Blue-eyed he was, simple of speech, and it seemed to me most of his followers had acquired traces of his simplicity. They were a little army of fifty saints, the majority of them children. Painted on their white tunics they displayed the symbol of a wheel crossed out by two strokes, to express their belief that God had declared against all mechanism. No more machinery, said Abraham, who felt that God spoke through him. No more use of meat, leather, milk, eggs, no more subjection or destruction of other living beings. The idea is older than Buddha and newer than tomorrow. If people must travel, Abraham said, let them walk, as these children had walked with him into the northern wilderness and then south toNuber. He also proposed to transform Nuber into the New Jerusalem. "I met that band of the faithful in the orchard of one Cecil Mason, since deceased, who had allowed them the use of it for a campsite after they were admitted through the border posts into Outer City. The orchard is still maintained by the son of Cecil: you can be shown the spot where Abraham's tent was raised. That is the spot where the disciple Jude brought the police of Nuber, and in their presence accused the prophet of planning the overthrow of the state. I had talked a little with Jude also, that day in the orchard. He was then a man inwardly ravaged, though I did not then understand the cause -- nor do I now. But I think he acted, not as some say out of greed for tainted money, but from a desire to arrest the world's attention, even its compassion, by acting the part of the chief of sinners: to become the most hated scapegoat, to take on the load of sin by sinning to the uttermost, to reject the wine of life and choke to death on a mouthful of ordure, as a way of saying: 'Behold, O Lord, what I have done for Thee!' "I spoke too with the disciple Mathias of Gran Gor, who believed Abraham had healed him of the smallpox by a laying on of hands, and believed also that Abraham was the second incarnation of Jesus Christ, only begotten son of God, returned after two thousand years to save the world. Mathias was even then contemplating the task of writing down the story of Abraham's life on earth. He may be engaged in this now: he left Nuber after the martyrdom and I don't know what became of him, nor whether he believes the world has been saved. "Abraham earned his living as a carpenter up to the twenty-eighth year of his life. This was in some fairly large settlement of survivors in Ohio; he never told me the name of it. He said those were years when his enlightenment strove with his folly, until at length it was clear to him that God and the Devil were battling for his soul. Then into the wilderness went Abraham alone and naked by God's command, and wove himself garments of grass. sandals of grass with soles of wood carved by the knife that was his only tool and that had never drawn blood. In a clearing of the forest he made a shelter and a garden sufficient for his needs. I have heard the fairytale about the fox who guided him to edible plants and berries and mushrooms, but Preacher Abraham himself told me no such nonsense. He knew and loved animals too much to falsify them, and because he was quiet, slow-moving, harmless, they came to him. I was not surprised that he knew the legend of St. Francis of Assisi and called St. Francis 'my brother' -- and to me at least he never made any claim of supernatural origin. I think his one concern was to tell people how he thought they might live so as to be at peace with themselves and pleasing to the God in whom he believed... He lived three years in that shelter in the forest, and was joined by the disciple whose name was John, by another who took the name of Simon, and in the third year, by Jude." -- And I must elbow some room awav from Demetrios for my Mam Estelle, and also comment that there's more than one way to skin the ecology. The most learned definition I can find for the word " impractical " is "of or pertaining to whatever won t work because we can't be bothered." It would be practical to live by Abraham 's principles. though maybe tedious, if we were mostly Abrahams instead of proteinhungry, rumpleheaded sexpots like you and me and little Cousin Jasper who. when too young to be quoted, did manfully enjoy himself behind the barn with that precocious Lily Littlejohn from down the road. It wasn't just fucking either -- Jas had ripped off a hunk of mince pie which they divided, and that little fiend Lily had liberated a far-out pair of turkey drumsticks. Domesticity yet. Now Estelle. more of Friday, July I# H e's late, but anyway remembered to milk Julia before he left, Babette said. Past Noon now but I won't have my Tea yet a while. I want to just make a Start on turning this Book into the Story of My Life, not just a Diary, for if vou write each Day that is like only looking out the Window, but the other thing, the Life Story, that is going up like on a Knoll like the one back of our House in Raeford by the Underpass, well, it had been a Piece of a Park once, there was a busted Bench, I mean up that high vou can look for miles. So when the House by the Underpass was knocked flat by what they said was Blast from what Happened in New York Fortyfive Miles Away. I was down Cellar looking up a Pint of Peach Pserve. I made it myself, the Pserve, they All liked it. I was caught by half the Floor falling in onto me, one of the Timbers pinned my Leg that it took me an hour or two to fight my Way Loose. See, I knowed the leg was not Broke, something was holding up the Timber a couple-three inches, but I couldn't get free till I was able to tear loose a stick that had splintered off of Something, and pry up the Timber a bit so as I could inch out. There was Cobwebs all over the Timber, the gray stuff mixing with the Blood out of my Fingers where  had Trouble with that stick, and a nail stuck out of that goddam timber down into my Leg. tearing deeper into the Calf whiles I was fighting Loose, and H that time I could hear the Sireens howling and people yelling but like Wav Off. and once I guess it was a Fire Truck went by, much good that would do, but in our House nothing at All, and still  knew, Jesus God, they were all there, they had to be There, Stevie and Sam and Leda, and I kept asking, Jesus God. why isn't my Marcus crying, why isn't He? There wasn't anything I could of used to cut my foot off, I had to keep prying with that fucking stick, and so when l did get loose in an hour, two Hours, Whatever,  swear  must of picked up that Pint of Peach Pserve off the Cellar Floor, because I had it in my hand when  scrambled up the wreck of the Stairs and found out what had Happened, how it was. I don 't know where I flang the goddam thing. There was the teevy, see, knocked clear across the room, it only hit the back of his head. Marcus his Face was not hurt at all, Sam's throat was cut with the flying glass, you couldn't see how anything had happened to Stevie an Leda but they was both so quiet Dead, it must of been the Blast.  carried Marcus to the top of that Knoll, his Face it was not hurt at all, and  never did know before the long Way you could see from that Knoll, l sat there with my Leg bleeding into a funny red Puddle, fesus God you could see for miles and miles. So later when  was working at this House which was Mister Fleur's Establishment in those days till he died and left it to me, why, Men would ask me about the long Scar on my Leg. I never told them, never told Anybody except Babette which is like talking to the Pulse in my own Heart. Might be  ought not to try to write about the Past Things that Happened, but some-way it's like on me to do it. because that type World isn't ever coming back, and maybe People ought to know -- now look at me Imagining anybody will ever read This! -- I think they ought to know how it wasn't All Good. Abraham set forth with his disciples to preach the life of simplicity. One would think that in the aftermath of # human beings should have been ready for it. It did not prove so. A generation had passed -- thirty years including the time of the Red Plague. Men and women in their twenties had no personal recollection of the world as it had been, and small faith in their shattered elders' talk about it. People, old and young, wished to live -- why, more or less as people always have done: blundering, credulous, self-obsessed; half-educated monkeys with scant thought for the morrow and none for the past. (Aren't we like that, dear souls? -- it's hard, tiring work being any more human than that.) When Abraham preached, most listeners stared, muttered, walked away. A few exceptions became loyal followers. Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. #Z i il Vsi Hi I I I Try the crisp, clean taste of Kent Menthol The only Menthol with the famous Micronite filter. Kings: # mg. "tar" #:# mg. nicotine. #'s: # mg. "tar." # mg. nicotine: Menthol: # mg. "tar." # mg. nicotine: Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. "Abraham found most of his listeners were children. If he asked himself why, he gave himself only the truistic answers -- they were innocent, open-minded, and so on. "He traveled north through Penn into the nation we now call Moha, and crossed the Hudson Sea with his company on makeshift rafts -- there was no reliable ferry in those days south of Ticonderoga -- into what we once called New England. He won many more followers there. Everywhere in that land he told me, he found small communities holding together, some declining, but a few almost prospering in the ancient manner of self-reliance so emotionally despised by self-adoring intellectuals in the sad latter days of Old Time. But the children who slipped away from their families to join him, often following secretly through the woods until they were too far from home to be sent back, were not all recruited from the bored and discontented; many had the true flush of faith -- I saw it myself. Abraham soon gave up trying to send the children home, and accepted their devotion as a manifestation of God's will. They came to be called Abraham's Army, or the Roving Ragamuffins, or the Children's Crusade. Weak small settlements feared their approach because they had to eat. They were never thieving, nor disorderly, nor violent. Before the troubles they encountered on Adirondack Island and south of there, they numbered over two hundred. "The disciple Andrew remained behind in Moha to find a site for the New Jerusalem. There was good country available everywhere, going back to wilderness; but when Andrew rejoined Abraham in the north he also described the city of Nuber, and the prophet turned south with our city for his goal -- guided, he told me, by God's voice in a dream. "He came in the fall of the year, close on the day we celebrate as the Day of Forthcoming, that day when Simon Bridgeman's people left their refuge in the mountain and learned the earth had not been altogether destroyed. Nuber, unlike other towns, had prepared itself with fear and resentment against Abraham's appearance. One Cephas in particular, who was Master of the Carpenters' Guild, had alarmed the people with accounts of Abraham's preaching; and he had found an ancient oaken wagon wheel, and declared that Abraham ought to swing from it in Gallows Square, for threatening to upset the utopia. 'He has crossed out the wheel over his heart,' said Cephas -- 'let him take it on his back, and let us see if it will roll him into the New Jerusalem.' "Abraham's legend had grown, dear souls. His horde of hungry children -- they were only fifty, after an encounter with smallpox at Gran Gor -- was dreaded like a plague of grasshoppers; but that's no full explanation of what happened. Why was Christ hated, who harmed no one? Why do we demand his crucifixion again, and again? Can it be, dear souls, because he said, Love thy neighbor -- ? Pilate found no fault in Jesus, but yielded to the clamor and gave him to the mob. Abraham, true, was officially sentenced by the magistrate at the Town Hall, to one hour of public discipline as an enemy of the State; yet Judge Bruecke says to this day that he had no thought of condemning Abraham to death. He intended the fellow should spend an hour in the pillory, no more -- and even that, he says, was simply in order to quiet the public unrest. "Oh, let folk argue it as they argue the thoughts of Pilate, or the thoughts of the archons of Athens. The disciple Jude did bring the officers of the police to the orchard, and stood outside Abraham's tent and called to him. And when Abraham came out Jude kissed his forehead saying, "O my Master!' then the sergeant of police asked: 'Is this the man who declares the city must be destroyed so that another may be built?' Jude said, 'It is he.'" Demetrios saw new faces at the Temple, a few. More stragglers were crossing the grass of the Meadows, among them two men in the uniform of the police. Some distance away, but advancing more quickly when he noticed the crowd, a boy or young man in a green shirt. Not Angus, too heavy-set. Garth? Garth ought to be working at the stable. Maybe he had a long noon hour. It was Garth. Warn him somehow. "And they took Abraham before the Magistrate, who questioned him -- speaking reasonably, I'm told, even going so far as to explain to Abraham why the State found it necessary to chastise him if he would not admit himself in error. Abraham stood silent. "And when he was being taken from the Town Hall a crowd led by Cephas seized him from the police, overwhelming them, and lashed his arms to that wheel which they had decked with garlands of briers, and made him carry it to Gallows Square. This I saw, dear souls, with my own eyes, and I saw Judge Bruecke come out on the balcony of the Town Hall and call down to the mob: 'There must be no disorder, no disorder!' A few others beside myself were able to hear him. "Abraham carried his burden to Gallows Square. There were at this time two malefactors in the pillory, one a thief, the other an unlicensed beggar. Therefore the mob lifted the wheel to the crossbar of the gallows, that Abraham might hang there; and they stoned him. The beggar called to him from the pillory: 'Lord, remember me!' But if Abraham replied the sound was broken by a stone. "I spoke with a Christian in Gallows Square, who reminded me of a verse in the Gospel of Matthew: But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then all the disciples forsook him. and fled. I asked him, How often, how often must Christ be crucified? He was only grieved by my question and left me without responding. "In the first hour of evening, Abraham cried out: "Where is the New Jerusalem?' I heard one voice answer him out of the dark of the crowd: 'Not here, O my dear Lord, not here!' "At some time during that hour Abraham died." A little belatedly I want to tell you about Philip K. Dick's new novel Flow My Tears The Policeman Said (Doubleday, #). It is not for nothing that the new rash of academic studies of sf, which may nod in passing to a parade of our greats, give whole pages, whole chapters, to Philip K. Dick. Writing a concise description of one of his books, sketching one of his plots, is like trying to carve a leafless tree in granite. Real and solid (and strange, and far out) as his characters may be, they all exhibit complex traceries of personality quite impossible to predict and sometimes just the other side of the reader's ability to understand. The effect, of course, is the creation of a work that your head won't put down even if your hands do. The policeman here is that rarity, a totally detestable character with whom you must empathize, and with whom, ultimately, you will sympathize as well. But he isn't the protagonist. It isn't his story, though the story could not exist without him. The narrative belongs to Jason Taverner, TV superstar, who awakes in a world in which he has never existed. This is not the first time this unsettling concept has been used but I will guarantee that you won't anticipate the rationale for this one until Dick is good and ready to give it to you. And then there's this girl called Alys... now, there's one you'll forget about as readily as a tattoo on the back of your hand. Buy this one and brace yourself for a mystery tour. (Mystery tour: a big thing in England. You buy your ticket and get on a bus; you don't know where you're going, but you know you'll get back all right.) S culptor Sterling E. Lanier's Chilton Hardcover is now in paperback. Hiero's Journey (Bantam, # pp, with map and glossary, #) is a lot of adventure for the money. Set in a post-atomic world in which mutated animals abound, many of them with extremely high intelligence, it deals with a warriorpriest and his quest fora nigh-legendary device called a "computer". He is accompanied, as the story goes on, by a telepathic bear (who is, to my taste, the most interesting character in the book), a gigantic moose-like mount, and a lost black princess. "Journey" is recognized as a technical term for a certain kind of narrative, wherein the characters move through a strange land (completely under the control of the author) and have unexpected encounters. Heiro is a likable hero and my only cavila are that, as in so many swords-andsorcery tales, you just know he is going to win, I like a little doubt to spice my suspense, and that his evil opponents are too totally, unrelievedly evil. For all that, it's exhilarating escape reading. Now, here's a real find. It is, as far as I know, a first novel and if that's really so, we have a new writer whose launch-pad is built on a very high place indeed. An Apology for Rain (Doubleday, #) by Jean Mark Gawron, exemplifies a new thrust in sf that is popping up in new works from all over: the orientation of self in society, and the close and critical examination of reality itself. Phil Dick's novel is certainly an example, and so is Ms. Gawron's. (Lanier's is not, you see: Hiero is as oriented to his strange world as he can be, and the reality of it is as solidly real as the author can make it.) Ms. Gawron's book deals with a post-blast situation too, though in a rather more immediate future. Her protagonist is also a superperson with unusual extra talents but she (a leather-clad girl called Bonnie) knows only partially their nature and extent, and what she is expected to do with them. Her quest, then, is for something interior and totally surprising. Her relationship with her brother, who ghosts about on the perimeter of her adventure, and with the people she meets and deals with, add to her knowledge of her changing situation and always to her knowledge of herself. Gawron commands my vast approval on two counts: a prose style as bright and smooth as stainless steel, and an approach to her work as analog, as fable, as an instructive parallel to a great deal of what we, as a tottering culture, must confront or die. One other thing is worth noting and I have had occasion to mention this elsewhere. There is in this book a degree of extreme but perfectly controlled violence that I have seen before only in the works of Josephine Saxton, Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Doris Piserchia. I do not know what this means. I know only that no male writer of my acquaintance does exactly this thing quite this well. I say this while still maintaining firmly that gender has nothing to do with quality. A good writer is a good writer whatever. Anyway, do yourself a favor and meet this extraordinary new writer. W ith our noses in our specialty (limitless though it may be) we run the risk of missing some very good writing from other areas, and it is only when one of them drifts into our vortex from the mainstream that we become aware of it. Such is the case with Marc Brandel and his The Man Who Liked Women (Pocket Books, # pp., #), the reprint of a # Simon and Schuster novel, a perfectly and thoroughly delightful fantasy about a young American businessman in London from whose brow is born no other than Venus herself. The book seems to have been begun by a high skilled and An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Discover why Richard E. Gels has won # Hugo Awards and baen Nominated # times!  Blare of Trumpets Columnist: John Brunner Read issue ## and see Robert A. Heinlein dissected mercilessly, psychologically and culturally, by Alexei and Cory Panshin in their # words of "Reading Heinlein Subjectively." Read issue ## and return to the dear, lively days of the pulps with Sam Merwin, Jr. (former editor of "Written to a Pulp!" Enjoy Geis editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysample I year #two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I fluent storyteller from an engaging notion which promised a sort of Thorne Smith romp; then in its unfolding, the narrative and especially its heroine suffused the author with love. He then appears to take himself (and her) a good deal more seriously than, perhaps, he had intended. The result is a searching, memorable, deeply touching tale with an ending that can only be described as a sweet ache. There may be greater books around but it's hard for me to name one that I liked more. Do read it. T here's one book that troubles me profoundly only because it's so damned good, and what's wrong with it seems to me to have been well within the author's enormous skill to have repaired. Recently serialized here, it's Inverted World, by Christopher Priest, (Harper and Row, # pp., #) Not since Larry Nevins' Ringworld has there been an sf concept as original as Priest's hyperboloid planet. The strange and puzzling city on tracks, which exists only to move and to move again through endless miles of inhospitable country, while weird distortions of space and time precede and follow it, makes for one of the most interesting ideas and developments I have seen anywhere. I like, too, the author's skillful switching from subjective to objective points of view -- first to third person -- which in less careful hands could have been a disaster. Why then could he not have switched just once more, and, here and there, have given us a native's view of the coming, and passing, and leaving of the city, and from their vantage point, of the distortion phenomena associated with it? When the protagonist Helward escorted the women "down past," why couldn't he let us see what happened to them from the point of view of a resident observer, and what this same observer might have seen as Helward hung, as it were, over the edge of the world? To make sense of these comments, it is of course necessary for you to read the book and I sincerely hope that you do, for in discovering its flaws, you will encounter its virtues, which are many indeed. I really envy anyone who for the first time encounters the work of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Though speckled with depression-era idioms, his reaching imagination, his inventiveness, his humor and his pathos injected something brand-new and vital into the sf of #, as Isaac Asimov in an introduction, and Robert Bloch, in a most moving Afterword, vividly express. To learn that the writing life of this years-ahead-of-his-time author -- from the publication of A Martian Odyssey in # until his death from cancer -- lasted just # months, is to know the real taste of regret and a great surge of "if only." By all means get The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum (Ballantine, #). A very special note: Anyone who . is remotely interested in the many aspects of sf must -- I said must -- be, or get, familiar with Locus. If you think it's just another fanzine, think again. It's a bimonthly newsletter out of San Francisco which covers everything conceivable of interest to the field -- book reviews, awards, functions such as conventions and club meetings, addresses of authors and other personalities, and above all, news: news of forthcoming books and the contents of forthcoming magazine issues, of anthologists looking for authors, of film deals and production schedules. Time and again I have known Locus to scoop the Hollywood trade press in the area of sf films and TV. My reason for delivering this special plug is the recent shift Locus has undergone from mimeo to offset -- a huge improvement but one which threatens to kill the paper if it doesn't get more support. It's largely a labor of love, and I don't think the young publishers, Charlie and Dona Brown, have ever wanted much more for it than that it breaks even. You could hardly spend # more worthily than to send for a subscription. So skip a movie or cook one more dinner at one, and subscribe. Nobody loses. Address Locus, Box #, San Francisco, CA #. and speaking of special things, J". here's what I call a "peR. Corliss (the same Corliss, by the way, who wrote the book on building a new world through nuclear technology, co-authoring with Glenn Seaborg, Man and Atom, from Dutton a few years ago) who wrote the handsome and fascinating Strange Phenomena about which I told you a couple of issues ago, has produced another: Strange Artifacts. and this has got to be the weirdest sentence I ever structured, (Indeed. Ed.) Strange Artifacts, like its predecessor, is a good-looking #"x#" loose-leaf of some #plus pages, ingeniously indexed and ready for the smooth inclusion of future data. It's the kind of book you don't dare pick up if you have to be somewhere soon. That it goes heavily into Easter Island and Stonehenge is to be expected, but it goes into many other things, from documents old and new, which I find much more astonishing than either of those. I understand that a second volume of Strange Phenomena will be off the press this summer. I'll let you know. They're privately distributed and # O. Box #, Glen Arm, MD #. and I've chuntered myself out of space again, without getting into my unjustly-brief notices of lots and lots of books. Maybe next time. A I wonder what the vintners buy one-half so precious as used polyethylene containers? To Home Base Greeting, Chief, I'm glad you're pleased with the demographics and cognitics studies. You don't mention the orbital mapping, but I suppose that's all complete and satisfactory. Now will you please tell me how we're going to get off this lousy planet? Keep firmly in mind. Chief, that we're not complainers. You don't have a better crew anywhere in the Galaxy and you know it. We've complied with the Triple Directive, every time, on every planet we've explored. Remember having trouble. After all, look at the disproportion in mass. And take a look at the reports we've sent in. These are pretty miserable sentients. Chief. So will you let us know, please, if there has ever been an authorized exception to Directive Two? I don't mean we aren't going to bust a link to comply -- if we can -- but frankly, at this moment, I don't see how. And we need to get out of here fast. Garigolli. although it was a pretty morning in June, with the blossoms dropping off the catalpa trees and the algae blooming in the #-foot plastic pool, I was not enjoying either my breakfast or the morning mail. The letter from the lawyer started, the way letters from lawyers do, with and went on to advise Dupoir (that's me, plus my wife and our two-year-old son Butchie) that unless a certified check arrived in Undersigned's office before close of business June #th (that was tomorrow) in the amount of #, Undersigned would be compelled to institute Proceedings at once. I showed it to my wife, Shirl, for lack of anything better to do. She read it and nodded intelligently. "He's really been very patient with us, considering," she said. "I suppose this is just some more lawyer-talk?" It had occurred to me, for a wild moment, that maybe she had # in the old sugar bowl as a surprise for me, but I could see she didn't. I shook my head. "This means they take the house," I said. "I'm not mad any more. But you won't sign anything for your brother after this, will you?" "Certainly not," she said, shocked. "Shall I put that letter in the paper-recycling bin?" "Not just yet," I said, taking off my glasses and hearing aid. Shirl knows perfectly well that I can't hear her when my glasses are off, but she kept on talking anyway as she wiped the apricot puree off Butchie's chin, rescued the milk glass, rinsed the plastic infant-food jar and dropped it in the "plastics" carton, rinsed the lid and put it in the "metals" box and poured my coffee. We are a very ecological household. It astonishes me how good Shirl is at things like that, considering. I waved fruit flies away from the general direction of my orange juice and put my glasses back on in time to catch her asking, wonderingly, "What would they do with our house? I mean, I'm not a demon decorator like Ginevra Freedman. I just like it comfortable and neat." "They don't exactly want the house," I explained. "They just want the money they'll get after they sell it to somebody else." Her expression cleared at once. Shirl always likes to understand things. I sipped my coffee, fending off Butchie's attempt to grab the cup, and folded the letter and laid it across my knees like an unsheathed scimitar, ready to taste the blood of the giaour, which it kind of was. Butchie indicated that he would like to eat it, but I didn't see that that would solve the problem. Although I didn't have any better way of solving it, at that. I finished the orange juice, patted Butchie's head and, against my better judgment, gave Shirl the routine kiss on the nose. "Well," she said, "I'm glad that's settled. Isn't it nice the way the mail comes first thing in the morning now?" I said it was very nice and left for the bus but, really, I could have been just as happy if Undersigned's letter had come any old time. The fruit flies were pursuing me all the way down the street. They seemed to think they could get nourishment out of me, which suggested that fruit flies were about equal in intelligence to brothers-in-law. It was not a surprising thought. I had thought it before. To Home Base Chief, The mobility of this Host is a constant pain in the spermatophore. Now he's gone off on the day-cycle early, and half the crew are still stuck in his domicile. Ultimate Matrix knows how they'll handle it if we don't get back before they run out of group empathy. You've got no reason to take that tone. Chief. We're doing a good job and you know it. "Directive One: To remain undetected by sentients on planet being explored." A hundred and forty-four p.g., right? They don't have a clue we're here, although I concede that that part is fairly easy, since they are so much bigger than we are. "Directive Three: Subject to Directives One and Two, to make a complete study of geographic, demographic, ecological and cognitic factors and to transmit same to Home Base." You actually complimented us on those! It's only Directive Two that's giving us trouble. We're still trying, but did it ever occur to you that maybe these people don't deserve Directive Two? Garigolli I loped along the jungle trail to the bus stop, calculating with my razor-sharp mind that the distance from the house was almost exactly # centimeters. As centimeters it didn't sound bad at all. As money, # was the kind of sum I hadn't written down since Commercial Arithmetic in P.S. #. I fell in with Barney Freedman, insurance underwriter and husband of Ginevra, the Demon Decorator. "Whatever became of Commercial Arithmetic?" I asked him. "Like ninety-day notes for fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-two dollars and three cents at six per cent simple interest? Although why anybody would be dumb enough to lend anybody money for ninety days beats me. If he doesn't have it now, he won't have it in ninety days." "You're in some kind of trouble." "Shrewd guess." "So what did Shirl do now?" "She co-signed a note for her brother," I said. "When he went into the drying-out sanitarium for the gold treatment. They wouldn't take him on his own credit, for some reason. They must have goldplated him. He said the note was just a formality, so Shirl didn't bother me with it." We turned the corner. Barney said, "Ginevra didn't bother me once when the telephone company -- " "So when Shirl's brother got undrunk," I said, "he told her not to worry about it and went to California. He thought he might catch on with the movies." "Did he?" "He didn't even catch cold with the movies. Then they sent us the bill. Fourteen thou -- well, they had it all itemized. Three nurses. Medication. Suite. Occupational Therapy. Professional services. Hydrotherapy. Group counseling. Oneto-one counseling. Limousine. Chauffeur for limousine. Chauffeur's helper for limousine. Chauffeur's helper's hard-boiled eggs for lunch. Salt for chauffeur's helper's hard-boiled -- " "You're getting hysterical," Barney said. "You mean he just skipped?" We were at the bus stop, with a gaggle of other prosperous young suburbanites. I said, "Like a flat rock on a pond. So we wrote him, and of course the letters came back. They didn't fool around, the 'Institute for Psychosomatic Adjustment didn't." "That's a pretty name." "I telephoned a man up there to explain, when we got the first letter. He didn't sound pretty. Just tired. He said my wife shouldn't sign things without reading them. And he said if his house was -- something about joint tenancy in fee simple, he would break his wife's arm if she was the type that signed things without reading them, and keep on rebreaking it until she stopped. Meanwhile they had laid out a lot of goods and services in good faith, and what was I going to do about it?" The bus appeared on the horizon, emitting jet trails of Diesel smog. We knotted up by the sign. "So I told him I didn't know," I said, "but I know now. I'll get sued, that's what I'll do. The Dupoirs always have an answer to every problem." Conversation was suspended for fifteen seconds of scrimmage while we entered the bus. Barney and I were lucky. We wound up with our heads jammed affectionately together, not too far from a window that sucked in Diesel fumes and fanned them at us. I could see the fruit flies gamely trying to get back to my ear, but they were losing the battle. Barney said, "Hey. Couldn't you sell your house to somebody you trusted for a dollar, and then they couldn't -- " "Yes, they could. And then we'd both go to jail. I asked a guy in our legal department." "Huh." The bus roared on, past knots of other prosperous young suburbanites who waved their fists at us as we passed. "How about this. I hope you won't take this the wrong way. But couldn't there be some angle about Shirl being, uh, not exactly competent to sign any kind of -- "I asked about that too, Barney. No hope. Shirl's never been hospitalized, she's never been to a shrink, she runs a house and a husband and a small boy just fine. Maybe she's a little impulsive. But a lot of people are impulsive, the man said," To Home Base Chief, I think we've got it. These people use a medium of exchange, remember? And the Host doesn't have enough of it! What could be simpler? With a little modification there are a couple of local organisms that should be able to concentrate the stuff out of the ambient environment, and then -- And then we're off the impaling spike! Garigolli. T he bus jerked to a stop at the railroad station and we boiled out on successive rollers of humanity which beached us at separate parts of the platform. The #:# slid in at #:# sharp and I swung aboard, my mighty thews rippling like those of the giant anthropoids among whom I had been raised. With stealthy tread and every jungle-trained sense alert I stalked a vacant seat halfway down the aisle on the left, my fangs and molars bared, my liana-bound, flint-tipped Times poised for the thrust of death. It wasn't my morning. Ug-Fwa the Hyena, scavenger of the mighty Limpopo, bounded from the far vestibule giving voice to his mad cackle and slipped into the vacant seat. I and the rest of the giant anthropoids glared, unfolded our newspapers and pretended to read. The headlines were very interesting that morning, pres asks "slick" dupoir sought in de# -- no, that was a fly speck, not a decimal point -- off # active trading. I always feel you're more efficient if you start the day with the gist of the news straight in your mind. I arrived at the office punctually at #:#, late enough to show that I was an executive, but not so late that Mr. Horgan would notice it. The frowning brow of my cave opened under the grim rock front that bore the legend "International Plastics Co." and I walked in, nodding good morning to several persons from the Fourteenth Floor, but being nodded to myself only by Hermie, who ran the cigar stand. Hermie cultivated my company because I was good for a dollar on the numbers two or three times a week. Little did he know that it would be many a long day before he saw a dollar of mine, perhaps as many as # of them. arigolli To Home Base Further to my last communication. Chief, We ran into a kind of a setback. We found a suitable organic substrate and implanted a colony of modified organisms which extracted gold from environmental sources, and they were performing beautifully, depositing a film of pure metal on the substrate, which the Host was carrying with him. Then he folded it up and threw it in a waste receptacle. We're still working on it, but I don't know. Chief, I don't know. Garigolli. I find it a little difficult to explain to people what I do for a living. It has something to do with making the country plastics-conscious. I make the country plasticsconscious by writing newspaper stories about plastics which only seem to get printed in neighborhood shopping guides in Sioux Falls, Idaho. And by scripting talk features about plastics which get run from #:# PM to #:# midnight on radio stations the rest of whose programs time is devoted to public-service items like late jockey changes at Wheeling Downs. And by scripting television features which do not seem ever to be run on any station. And by handling the annual Miss Plastics contest, at least up to the point where actual contestants appear, when it is taken over by the people from the Fourteenth Floor. And by writing the monthly page of Plastics Briefs which goes out, already matted, to # papers in North America. Plastics Briefs is our best bet because each Brief is illustrated by a line drawing of a girl doing something with, to or about plastics, and her costume is always brief. As I said, all this is not easy to explain, so when people ask me what I do I usually say, "Whatever Mr. Horgan tells me to." This morning Mr. Horgan called me away from a conference with Jack Denny, our Briefs artist, and said: "Dupoir, that Century of Plastics Anniversary Dinner idea of yours is out. The Fourteenth Floor says it lacks thematic juice. Think of something else for a winter promotion, and think big!" He banged a plastic block on his desk with a little plastic hammer. I said, "Mr. Horgan, how about this? Are we getting the break in the high-school chemistry textA memorial anthology in tribute to the father of modern American science fiction, Edited by Introduction by This book is a unique memorial -- the thirteen stories in especially for this volume by Pout Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Hal Clement, Theodore R. Cogswell, L. Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, Harry Harrison, Mack Reynolds. Clifford D. Simak, George O. Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, and Theodore L. Thomas. Each with an introductory tribute to John Campbell. # #, now at your bookstore tfil books we should? Are we getting the message of polythene to every boy, girl, brother in law -- " He shook his head. "That's small," he said, and went on to explain: "By which I mean it isn't big. Also there is the flak we are getting from the nature nuts, which the Fourteenth Floor does not think you are dealing with in a creative way." "I've ordered five thousand popup recycling bins for the test, Mr. Horgan. They're not only plastic, they're recycled plastic. We use them in my own home, and I am confident -- " "Confidence," he said, "is when you've got your eyes so firmly fixed on the goal that you trip on a dog-doodie and fall in the crap." I regrouped. "I think we can convert the present opposition from the ecology movement to -- " "The ecology movement," he said, "is people who love buzzards better than babies and catfish better than cars." I fell back on my last line of defense. "Yes, Mr. Horgan," I said. "Personally," Mr. Horgan said, "I like seeing plastic bottles bobbing in the surf. It makes me feel, I don't know, like part of something that is going to last forever. I want you to communicate that feeling, Dupoir. Now go get your Briefs out." I thought of asking for a salary advance of #, but hesitated. "Is there something else?" "No, Mr. Horgan. Thank you." I left quietly. Jack Denny was still waiting in my office, doodling still-life studies of cornucopias with fruits and nuts said, "how about this for a change? Something symbolic of the season, like 'the rich harvest of Plastics to make life more gracious,' like?" I said kindly, "You don't understand copy. Jack. Do you remember what we did for last September?" He scowled. "A girl in halter and shorts, very brief and tight, putting up plastic storm windows." "That's right. Well, I've got an idea for something kind of novel this year. A little two-act drama. Act One: She's wearing halter and shorts and she's taking down the plastic screens. Act Two: She's wearing a dress and putting up the plastic storm windows. And this is important. In Act Two there's wind, and autumn leaves blowing, and the dress is kind of wind-blown tight against her. Do you know what I mean, Jack?" He said evenly, "I was the youngest child and only boy in a family of eight. If I didn't know what you meant by now I would deserve to be put away. Sometimes I think I will be put away. Do you know what seven older sisters can do to the psychology of a sensitive young boy?" He began to shake. "Draw, Jack," I told him hastily. To give him a chance to recover himself I picked up his cornucopias. "Very nice," I said, turning them over. "Beautiful modeling. I guess you spilled some paint on this one?" He snatched it out of my hand. "Where? That? That's gilt. I don't even have any gilt." "No offense. Jack. I just thought it looked kind of nice." It didn't, particularly, it was just a shiny yellow smear in a corner of the drawing. "Nice! Sure, if you'd let me use metallic inks. If you'd go to highgloss paper. If you'd spend a few bucks -- " "Maybe, Jack," I said, "it'd be better, at that, if you took these back to your office. You can concentrate better there, maybe." He went out, shaking. I stayed in and thought about my house and brother in law and the Gudsell Medical Credit Bureau and after a while I began to shake too. Shaking, I phoned a Mr. Klaw, whom I had come to think of as my "account executive" at Gudsell. Mr. Klaw was glad to hear from me. "You got our lawyer's note? Good, good. And exactly what arrangements are you suggesting, Mr. Dupoir?" "I don't know," I said openly. "It catches me at a bad time. If we could have an extension -- " "Extensions we haven't got," he said regretfully. "We had one month of extensions, and we gave you the month, and now we're fresh out. I'm really sorry, Dupoir." "With some time I could get a second mortgage, Mr. Klaw." "You could at that, but not for  # , # . # ." "Do you want to put me and my family on the street?" "Goodness, no, Mr. Dupoir! What we want is the sanitarium's money, including our commission. And maybe we want a little bit to make people think before they sign things, and maybe that people who should go to the county hospital go to the county hospital instead of a frankly de luxe rest home." "I'll call you later," I said. "Please do," said Mr. Klaw sincerely. Tendons slack as the limp lianas, I leafed listlessly through the dhowani-bark jujus on my desk, studying Jack Denny's draftsmanship with cornucopias. The yellow stain, I noted, seemed to be spreading, even as a brother in law's blood might spread on the sands of the doom-pit when the cobras hissed the hour of judgment. Mr. Horgan rapped perfunctorily on the doorframe and came in. "I had the impression, Dupoir, that you had something further to ask me at our conference this morning. I've learned to back those judgments. Dupoir." "Well, sir -- " I began. "Had that feeling about poor old Globus," he went on. "You remember Miss Globus? Crying in the file room one day. Seems she'd signed up for some kind of charm school. Couldn't pay, didn't like it, tried to back out. They wanted their money. Attached her wages. Well. Naturally, we couldn't have that sort of financial irresponsiwanted, Dupoir?" "Me, Mr. Horgan? Wanted? No. Nothing at all." "Glad we cleared that up," he grunted. "Can't do your best work for the firm if your mind's taken up with personal problems. Remember, Dupoir. We want the country plastics conscious, and forget about those ecology freaks." "Yes, Mr. Horgan." "And big. Not small." "Big it is, Mr. Horgan," I said. I rolled up Jack Denny's sketches into a thick wad and threw them at him in the door, but not before he had closed it behind him. VJ To Home Base Listen Chief, I appreciate your trying to work out a solution for us, but you're not doing as well as we're doing, even. Not that that's much. We tried again to meet that constant aura of medium-of-exchange need from the Host, but he destroyed the whole lash-up again. Maybe we're misunderstanding him? Artifacts are out. He's too big to see anything we make. Energy sources don't look promising. Oh, sure, we could elaborate lesser breeds that would selectively concentrate, for instance, plutonium or one of the uraniums. I don't think this particular Host would know the difference unless the scale was very large, and then, blooie, critical mass. Meanwhile morale is becoming troublesome. We're holding together, but I wouldn't describe the condition as good. Vellitot has been wooing Dinnoliss in spite of the secondary directives against breeding while on exploration missions. I've cautioned them both, but they don't seem to stop. The funny thing is they're both in the male phase. Garigolli. B etween Jack Denny and myself we got about half of the month's Plastics Briefs before quitting time. Maybe they weren't big, but they were real wind-blown. All factors considered, I don't think it is very much to my discredit that two hours later I was moodily drinking my seventh beer in a dark place near the railroad station. The bartender respected my mood, the TV was off, the juke box had nothing but blues on it and there was only one fly in my lugubrious ointment, a little man who kept trying to be friendly. From time to time I gave him a scowl I had copied from Mr. Horgan. Then he would edge down the bar for a few minutes before edging back. Eventually he got up courage enough to talk, and I got too gloomy to crush him with my mighty thews, corded like the jungle-vines that looped from the towering nganga-pams. He was some kind of hotelkeeper, it appeared. "My young friend, you may think you have problems, but there's no business like my business. Mortgage, insurance, state supervision, building and grounds maintenance, kitchen personnel and purchasing, linen, uniforms, the station wagon and the driver, carpet repairs -- oh, God, carpet repairs! No matter how many ash trays you put around, you know what they do? They steal the ashtrays. Then they stamp out cigarettes on the carpets." He began to weep. I told the bartender to give him another. How could I lose? If he passed out I'd be rid of him. If he recovered I would have his undying, doglike affection for several minutes, and what kind of shape was I in to sneer at that? Besides, I had worked out some pretty interesting figures. "Did you know," I told him, "that if you spend # a day on cigarettes, you can save # by giving up smoking for # and a quarter days?" He wasn't listening, but he wasn't weeping any more either. He was just looking lovingly at his vodka libre, or whatever it was. I tried a different tack. "When you see discarded plastic bottles bobbing in the surf," I asked, "does it make you feel like part of something grand and timeless that will go on forever?" He glanced at me with distaste, then went back to adoring his drink. "Or do you like buzzards better than babies?" I asked. "They're all babies," he said. "Nasty, smelly, upchucking babies." "Who are?" I asked, having lost the thread. He shook his head mysteriously, patted his drink and tossed it down. "Root of most evil," he said, swallowing. Then, affectionately, "Don't know where I'd be with it, don't know where I'd be without it." He appeared to be talking about booze. "On your way home, without it?" I suggested. He said obscurely, "Digging ditches, without it." Then he giggled. "Greatest business in the world! But oh! the worries! The competition! And when you come down to it it's all just aversion, right?" "I can see you have a great aversion to liquor," I said politely. "No, stupid! The guests. " Stiffly I signaled for Number Eight, but the bartender misunderstood and brought another for my friend, too. I said, "You have an aversion to the guests?" He took firm hold on the bar and attempted to look squarely into my eyes, but wound up with his left eye four inches in front of my left eye and both our right eyes staring at respective ears. "The guests must be made to feel an aversion to alcohol, " he said. "Secret of the whole thing. Works. Sometimes. But oh! it costs." Like the striking fangs of Nag, the cobra, faster than the eye can follow, my trained reflexes swept the beer up to my lips. I drank furiously, scowling at him. "You mean to say you ran a drunk farm?" I shouted. He was shocked. "My boy! No need to be fulgar. An 'institute', eh? Let's leave the aversion to the drunks." "I have to tell you, sir," I declared, "that I have a personal reason for despising all proprietors of such institutions!" He began to weep again. "You, too! Oh, the general scorn." "In my case, there is nothing general -- " " -- the hatred! The unthinking contempt. And for what?" I snarled, "For your blood-sucking ways." "Blood, old boy?" he said, surprised. "No, nothing like that. We don't use blood. We use gold, yes, but the gold cure's old hat. Need new gimmick. Can't use silver, too cheap. Really doesn't matter what you say you use. All aversion -- drying them out, keeping them comfy and aversion. But no blood." He wiggled his fingers for Number Nine. Moodily I drank, glaring at him over my glass. "In the wrong end of it, I sometimes think," he went on meditatively, staring with suspicious envy at the bartender. " He doesn't have to worry. Pour it out, pick up the money. No concern about expensive rooms standing idle, staff loafing around picking their noses, overhead going on, going on -- you wouldn't believe how it goes on, whether the guests are there to pay for it or not -- " "Hah," I muttered. "You've simply no idea what I go through," he sobbed. "And then they won't pay. No, really. Fellow beat me out of # just lately. I'm taking it out of the cosigner's hide, of course, but after you pay the collection agency, what's the profit?" I choked on the beer, but he was too deep in sorrow to notice. Strangling, I gasped, "Did you say fourteen thousand -- ?" He nodded. "Seven hundred and fifty-two dollars, yes. And three cents. Astonishes you, doesn't it, the deadbeats in this world?" I couldn't speak. "You wouldn't think it," he mourned. "All those salaries. All those rooms. The hydrotherapy tubs. The water bill." I shook my head. "Probably you think my life's bowl of roses, hey?" I managed to pry my larynx open enough to wheeze, "Up to this minute, yes, I did. You've opened my eyes." "Drink to that," he said promptly. "Hey, barman!" But before the bartender got there with Number Ten the little man hiccoughed and slid melting to the floor, like a glacier calving into icebergs. The bartender peered over at him. "Every damn night," he grumbled. "And who's going to get him home this time?" My mind working as fast as Ngo, the dancing spider, spinning her web, I succeeded in saying, "Me. Glad to oblige. Never fear." VjT To Home Base Chief, All right, I admit we haven't been exactly # p.g. on this project, but there's no reason for you to get loose. Reciting the penalties for violating the Triple Directive is uncalled-for. Let me point out that there has been no question at any time of compliance with One or Three. And even Directive Two, well, we've done what we could. "To repay sentients in medium suitable to them for information gained." These sentients are tricky. Chief. They don't seem to empathize, really. See our reports. They often take without giving in return among themselves, and it seems to me that under the circumstances a certain modification of Directive Two would have been quite proper. But I am not protesting the ruling. Especially since you've pointed out it won't do any good. When I get old and skinny enough to retire to a sling in Home Base I guess I'll get that home-base mentality too, but way out here on the surface of the exploration volume it looks different, believe me. And what is happening with the rest of our crew back at Host's domicile I can't even guess. They must be nearly frantic by now. Garigolli. T here was some discussion with a policeman he wanted to hit (apparently under the impression that the cop was his night watchman playing hookey), but I finally got the little man to the Institute for Psychosomatic Adjustment. The mausoleum that had graduated my brother in law turned out to be three stories high, with a sun porch and a slate roof and bars on the ground-floor bay windows. It was not all that far from my house. Shirl had been pleased about that, I remembered. She said we could visit her brother a lot there, and in fact she had gone over once or twice on Sundays, but me, I'd never set eyes on the place before. Dagger-sharp fangs flecking white spume, none dared dispute me as I strode through the great green corridors of the rain forest. Corded thews rippling like pythons under my skin, it was child's play to carry the craven jackal to his lair. The cabbie helped me up the steps with him. The little man, now revealed as that creature who in anticipation had seemed so much larger and hairier, revived slightly as we entered the reception hall. "Ooooh," he groaned. "Watch the bouncing, old boy. That door. My office. Leather couch. Much obliged." I dumped him on the couch, lit a green-shaded lamp on his desk, closed the door and considered. Mine enemy had delivered himself into my power. All I had to do was seize him by the forelock. I seemed to see the faces of my family -- Shirl's smiling sweetly, Butchie's cocoa-overlaid-with-oatmeal -- spurring me on. There had to be a way. I pondered. Life had not equipped me for this occasion. Raffles or Professor Moriarity would have known what to do at once, but, ponder as I would, I couldn't think of anything to do except to go through the drawers of his desk. Well, it was a start. But it yielded very little. Miscellaneous paper clips and sheaves of letterheads, a carton of cigarettes of a brand apparently flavored with rice wine and extract of vanilla, part of a fifth of Old Rathole and five switchblade knives, presumably taken from the inmates. There was also # in unused postage stamps, but I quickly computed that, even if I went to the trouble of cashing them in, that would leave me # short. Of Papers to Burn there were none. All in all, the venture was a bust. I wiped out a water glass with one of the letterheads (difficult, because they were of so high quality that they seemed likelier to shatter than to wad up), and forced down a couple of ounces of the whiskey (difficult, because it was of so low). Obviously anything of value, like for instance co-signed agreements with brothers in law, would be in a safe, which itself would probably be in the offices of the Gudsell Medical Credit Bureau. Blackmail? But there seemed very little to work with, barring one or two curious photographs tucked in among the envelopes. Conceivably I could cause him some slight embarrassment, but nowhere near # worth. I had not noticed any evidence of Red espionage that might put the little man (whose name, I learned from his letterhead, was Bermingham) away for # and a quarter days, while I saved up the price of reclaiming our liberty. There seemed to be only one possible thing to do. Eyes glowing like red coals behind slitted lids, I walked lightly on velvet-soft pads to the kraal of the witch-man. He was snoring with his mouth open. Totally vulnerable to his doom. Only, how to inflict it? It is not as easy as one might think to murder a person. Especially if one doesn't come prepared for it. Mr. Horgan doesn't like us to carry guns at the office, and heaven knows what Shirl would do with one if I left it around home. Anyway, I didn't have one. Poison was a possibility. The Old Rathole suggested itself. But we'd already tried that, hadn't we? I considered the switchblade knives. There was a technical problem, Would you know where the heart is? Granted, it had to be inside his chest somewhere, and sooner or later I could find it. But what would I say to Mr. Bermingham after the first three or four exploratory stabs woke him up? The only reasonably efficient method I could think of to insure Mr. Bermingham's decease was to burn the place down with him in it. Which, I quickly perceived, meant with whatever cargo of drying-out drunks the Institute now possessed in it too, behind those barred windows. At this point I came face to face with myself. I wasn't going to kill anybody. I wasn't going to steal any papers. What I was going to do was, I was going to let Mr. Klaw's lawyers go ahead and take our house, because I just didn't know how to do anything else. I hefted the switchblades in my hand, threw them against the wall and poured myself another slug of Mr. Bermingham's lousy whiskey, wishing it would kill me right there and be a lesson to him. VX To Home Base Now, don't get excited. Chief, Butwe have another problem. Before I get into it, I would like to remind you of a couple of things. First, I was against exploring this planet in the first place, remember? I said it was going to be very difficult, on the grounds of the difference in mass between its dominant species and us. I mean, really. Here we are, fighting member to member against dangerous beasts all the time, and the beasts, to the Host and his race, are only microorganisms that live unnoticed in their circulatory systems, their tissues, their food and their environment. Anybody could tell that this was going to be a tough assignment, if not an impossible one. Then there's the fact that this Host moves around so. I told you some of our crew got left in his domicile. Well, we've timed this before, and almost always he returns within # or # time-units -- at most, half of one of his planet's days. It's pretty close to critical, but our crew is tough and they can survive empathy-deprival that long. Only this time he has been away, so far, nearly # time-units. It's bad enough for those of us who have been with him. The ones who were cut off back at his domicile must have been through the tortures of the damned. Two of them homed in on us to report just a few time-units ago, and I'm afraid you're not going to like what's happened. They must have been pretty panicky. They decided to try meeting the Second Directive themselves. They modified some microorganisms to provide some organic chemicals they thought the Host might like. Unfortunately the organisms turned out to have an appetite for some of the Host's household artifacts, and they're pretty well demolished. So we not only haven't given him anything to comply with Directive Two, we've taken something from him. And in the process maybe we've called attention to ourselves. I'm giving it to you arced , Chief, because I know that's how you'd like it. I accept full responsibility. Because I don't have any choice, do I? Garigolli.  voice of Mr. Bermingham, from somewhere up there, "are you doing in my office?" I opened my eyes, and he was quite right. I was in Mr. Bermingham's office. The sun was streaming through Mr. Bermingham's Venetian blinds, and Mr. Bermingham was standing over me with a selection of the switchblade knives in his hands. I don't know how Everyman reacts to this sort of situation. I guess I ran about average. I pushed myself up on one elbow and blinked at him. "Spastic," he muttered to himself. "Well?" I cleared my throat. "I, uh, I think I can explain this." He was hung over and shaking. "Go ahead! Who the devil are you?" "Well, my name is Dupoir." "I don't mean what's your name, I mean -- Wait a minute. Dupoir?" "Dupoir." "As in #?" "That's right, Mr. Bermingham." "You!" he gasped. "Say, you've got some nerve coming here this way. I ought to teach you a lesson." I scrambled to my feet. Mighty thews rippling, I tossed back my head and bellowed the death-challenge of the giant anthropoids with whom I had been raised. Bermingham misunderstood. It probably didn't sound like a deathchallenge to him. He said anxiously, "If you're going to be sick, go in there and do it. Then we're going to straighten this thing out." I followed his pointing finger. There on one side of the foyer was the door marked Staff Washroom, and on the other the door to the street through which I had carried him. It was only the work of a second to decide which to take. I was out the door, down the steps, around the corner and hailing a fortuitous cab before he could react. By the time I got to the house that Mr. Klaw wanted so badly to take away from us it was #:# on my watch. There was no chance at all that Shirl would still be asleep. There was not any very big chance that she had got to sleep at all that night, not with her faithful husband for the first time in the four years of our marriage staying out all night without warning, but no chance at all that she would be still in bed. So there would be explaining to do. Nevertheless I insinuated my key into the lock of the back door, eased it open, slipped ghostlike through and gently closed it behind me. I smelled like a distillery, I noticed, but my keen, jungle-trained senses brought me no other message. No one was in sight or sound. Not even Butchie was either chattering or weeping to disturb the silence. I slid silently through the mudroom into the half-bath where I kept a spare razor. I spent five minutes trying to convert myself into the image of a prosperous young executive getting ready to be half an hour late at work, but it was no easy job. There was nothing but soap to shave with, and Butchie had knocked it into the sink. What was left was a blob of jelly, sculpted into a crescent where the dripping tap had eroded it away. Still, I got clean, more or less, and shaved, less. I entered the kitchen, and then realized that my jungle-trained senses had failed to note the presence of a pot of fresh coffee perking on the stove. I could hear it plainly enough. Smelling it was more difficult; its scent was drowned by the aroma of cheap booze that hung in the air all around me. So I turned around and yes, there was Shirl on the stairway, holding Butchie by one hand like Maureen O'Sullivan walking Cheeta. She wore an expression of unrelieved tragedy. It was clearly necessary to give her an explanation at once, whether I had one or not. "Honey," I said, "I'm sorry. I met this fellow I hadn't seen in a long time, and we got to talking. I know we should have called. But by the time I realized the time it was so late I was afraid I'd wake you up." "You can't wear that shirt to the office," she said woefully. "I ironed your blue and gray one with the white cuffs. It's in the closet." I paused to analyze the situation. It appeared she wasn't angry at all, only upset -- which, as any husband of our years knows, is # times worse. In spite of the fact that the reek of bdoze was making me giddy and fruit flies were buzzing around Shirl's normally immaculate kitchen, I knew what I had to do. "Shirl," I said, falling to one knee, "I apologize." That seemed to divert her. "Apologize? For what?" "For staying out all night." "But you explained all that. You met this fellow you hadn't seen in a long time, and you got to talking. By the time you realized the time it was so late you were afraid you'd wake me up." "Oh, Shirl," I cried, leaping to my feet and crushing her in my mighty thews. I would have kissed her. but the reek of stale liquor seemed even stronger. I was afraid of what close contact might do, not to mention its effect on Butchie, staring up at me with a thumb and two Fingers in his mouth. We Dupoirs never do anything by halves. But there was a tear in her eye. She said, "I watched Butchie, honestly I did. I always do. When he broke the studio lamp I was watching every minute, remember? He was just too fast for me." I didn't have any idea what she was talking about. That is not an unfamiliar situation in our house. and I have developed a technique for dealing with it. "What?" I asked. "He was too fast for me," Shirl said woefully. "When he dumped his vitamins into his raisins and oatmeal I was right there. I went to get some paper napkins, and that was when he did it. But how could I know it would ruin the plastics bin?" I went into Phase Two. "What plastics bin?" "Our plastics bin." She pointed. "Where Butchie threw the stuff." At once I saw what she meant. There was a row of four plastic popup recycling bins in our kitchen, one for paper, one for plastics, one for glass and one for metals. They were a credit to us, and to Mr. Horgan and to the Fourteenth Floor. However, the one marked "plastics" was not a credit to anyone any more. It had sprung a leak. A colorless fluid was oozing out of the bottom of it and, whatever it was, it was deeply pitting the floor tiles. I bent closer and realized where the reek of stale booze was coming from: out of the juices that were seeping from our plastics bin. "What the devil?" I asked. Shirl said thoughtfully, "If vitamins can do that to plastic, what do you suppose they do to Butchie's insides?" "It isn't the vitamins. I know that much." I reached in and hooked the handle of what had been a milk jug, gallon size. It was highdensity polythene and about four hundred per cent more indestructible than Mount Rushmore. It was exactly the kind of plastic jug that people who loved buzzards better than babies have been complaining about finding bobbing around the surf of their favorite bathing beaches, all the world over. Indestructible or not, it was about ninty per cent destroyed. What I pulled out was a handle and part of a neck. The rest drizzled off into a substance very like the stuff I had shaved with. Only that was soap, which one expects to dissolve from time to time. High-density polythene one does not. The fruit flies were buzzing around me, and everything was very confusing. I was hardly aware that the front doorbell had rung until I noticed that Shirl had gone to answer it. What made me fully aware of this was Mr. Bermingham's triumphant roar: "Thought I'd find you here. Dupoir! And who are these people -- your confederates?" Bermingham had no terrors for me. I was past that point. I said, "Hello, Mr. Bermingham. This confederate is my wife, the littler one here is my son. Shirl, Butchie -- Mr. Bermingham. Mr. Bermingham's the one who is going to take away our house." Shirl said politely, "You must be tired, Mr. Bermingham. I'll get you a cup of coffee." VX to Home Base Chief, I admit it, we've excreted this one out beyond redemption. Don't bother to reply to this. Just write us off. I could say that it wasn't entirely the fault of the crew members who stayed behind in the Host's domicile. They thought they had figured out a way to meet Directive Two. They modified some organisms -- didn't even use bacteria, just an enzyme that hydrated polythene into what they had every reason to believe was a standard food substance, since the Host had been observed to ingest it with some frequency. There is no wrong-doing there, Chief. Alcohols are standard foods for many organic beings, as you know. And a gift of food has been held to satisfy the second Directive. And add to that they they were half out of their plexuses with empathy deprivation. Nevertheless I admit the gift failed in a fairly basic way, since it seems to have damaged artifacts the Hosts hold valuable. So I accept the responsibility, Chief, Wipe this expedition off the records. We've failed, and we'll never see our home breedingslings again. Please notify our descendants and former co-parents and, if you can, try to let them think we died heroically, won't you? Garigolli. S hirl has defeated the wrath of far more, complex creatures than Mr. Bermingham by offering them coffee -- me, for instance. While she got him the clean cup and the spoon and the milk out of the pitcher in the refrigerator, I had time to think. Mr. Horgan would be interested in what had happened to our plastics eco-bin. Not only Mr. Horgan. The Fourteenth Floor would be interested. The ecology freaks themselves would be interested, and maybe would forget about liking buzzards better than babies long enough to say a good word for International Plastics Co. I mean, this was significant. It was big, by which I mean it wasn't little. It was a sort of whole new horizon for plastics. The thing about plastics, as everyone knows, is that once you convert them into trash they stay trash. Bury a maple syrup jug in your back yard and five thousand years from now some descendant operating a radar-controlled peony-planter from his back porch will grub it up as shiny as new. But the gunk in our eco-bin was making these plastics, or at least the polythene parts of them, bio-degradable. What was the gunk? I had no idea. Some random chemical combination between Butchie's oatmeal and his vitamins? I didn't care. It was there, and it worked. If we could isolate the stuff, I had no doubt that the world-famous scientists who gave us the plastic storm window and the popup eco-bin could duplicate it. And if we could duplicate it we could sell it to hard-pressed garbagemen all over the world. The Fourteenth Floor would be very pleased. With me to think was ever to act. I rinsed out one of Butchie's babyfood jars in the sink, scraped some of the stickiest parts of the melting plastic into it and capped it tightly. I couldn't wait to get it to the office. Mr. Bermingham was staring at me with his mouth open. "Good Lord," he muttered, "playing with filth at his age. What psychic damage we wreak with bad early toilettraining." I had lost interest in Mr. Bermingham. I stood up and told him, "I've got to go to work. I'd be happy to walk you as far as the bus." "You aren't going anywhere, Dupoir! Came here to talk to you. Going to do it, too. Behavior was absolutely inexcusable, and I demand -- Say, Dupoir, you don't have a drink anywhere about the house, do you?" "More coffee, Mr. Bermingham?" Shirl said politely. "I'm afraid we don't have anything stronger to offer you. We don't keep alcoholic beverages here, or at least not very long. Mr. Dupoir drinks them." "Thought so," snarled Bermingham. "Recognize a drunk when I see one: shifty eyes, irrational behavior, duplicity -- oh, the duplicity! Got all the signs." "Oh, he's not like my brother, really," Shirl said thoughtfully. "My husband doesn't go out breaking into liquor stores when he runs out, you know. But I don't drink, and Butchie doesn't drink, and so about all we ever have in the house is some cans of beer, and there aren't any of those now." Bermingham looked at her with angry disbelief. "You too! I smell it," he said. "You going to tell me I don't know what good old ethyl alcohol smells like?" "That's the bin, Mr. Bermingham. It's a terrible mess, I know." "Funny place to keep the creature," he muttered to himself, dropping to his knees. He dipped a finger into the drippings, smelled it, tasted it and nodded. "Alcohol, all right. Add a few congeners, couple drops of food coloring, and you've got the finest Chivas Regal a bellboy ever sold you out of a bottle with the tax stamp broken." He stood up and glared at me. "What's the matter with you, Dupoir? You not only don't pay your honest debts, you don't want to pay the bartenders either?" I said, "It's more or less an accident." "Accident?" Then illumination struck. "Accident you should find us like this," I corrected. "You see, it's a secret new process. We're not ready to announce it yet. Making alcohol out of old plastic scraps." He questioned Shirl with his eyes. Getting her consent, he poured some of Butchie's baby-food orange juice into a glass, scooped in some of the drippings from the bin, closed his eyes and tasted. "Mmm," he said judiciously. "Sell it for vodka just the way it stands." "Glad to have an expert opinion," I said. "We think there's He took another taste. "Plastic scraps, you say? Listen, Dupoir. Think we can clear all this up in no time. That fool Klaw, I've told him over and over, ask politely, don't make trouble for people. But no, he's got that crazy lawyer's drive for revenge. Apologize for him, old boy, I really do apologize for him. Now look," he said, putting down the glass to rub his hands. "You'll need help in putting this process on the market. Business acumen, you know? Wise counsel from man of experience. Like me. And capital. Can help you there. I'm loaded." Shirl put in, "Then what do you want our house for?" "House? My dear Mrs. Dupoir," cried Mr. Bermingham, laughing heartily, "I'm not going to take your house! Your husband and I will work out the details in no time. Let me have a little more of that delightful orange juice and we can talk some business." VJ to Home Base Joy, joy Chief! Cancel all I said. We've met Directive Two, the Host is happy, and we're on our way Home! Warm up the breeding slings, there's going to be a hot time in the old hammocks tonight. Garigolli. S traight as the flight of UngGlitch, the soaring vulture, that is the code of the jungle. I was straight with Mr. Bermingham, I didn't cheat him. I made a handshake deal with him over the ruins of our Eco-Bin, and honored it when we got to his lawyers. I traded him # of the beverage rights to the stuff that came out of our bin, and he wrote off that little matter of #. Of course, the beverage rights turned out not to be worth all that much, because the stuff in the bin was organic and alive and capable of reproduction, and it did indeed reproduce itself enthusiastically. Six months later you could buy a starter drop of it for a quarter on any street corner, and what that has done to the vintners of the world you know as well as I do. But Bermingham came out ahead. He divided his # interest into forty parts and sold them for # each to the alumni of his drunk tank. And Mr. Horgan -- Ah, Mr. Horgan. Mr. Horgan was perched on my doorframe like Ung-Glitch awaiting a delivery of cadavers for dinner when I arrived that morning, bearing my little glass jar before me like the waiting line in an obstetrician's office. "You're late, Dupoir," he pointed out. "Troubles me, that does. Do you remember Metcalf? Tall, blonde girl that used to work in Accounts Receivable? Never could get in on time, and -- " "Mr. Horgan," I said, "look." And I unscrewed my baby-food jar and dumped the contents on an unpopped pop-up Eco-Bin. It took him a while to see what was happening, but once he saw he was so impressed he forgot to roar. And, yes, the Fourteenth Floor was very pleased. There wasn't any big money in it. We couldn't sell the stuff, because it was so happy to give itself away to everyone in the world. But it meant a promotion and a raise. Not big. But not really little, either. And, as Mr. Horgan said, "I like the idea of helping to eliminate all the litter that devastates the landscape. It makes me feel, I don't know, like part of something clean and natural." And so we got along happily as anything -- happily, anyway, until the time Shirl bought the merry-goround.  E ditor Jim Baen tells me he's on balance a political liberal. (That is Jerry's interpretation. I prefer to call myself a Constructive Anarchist. I trust I make myself sufficiently obscure. ) It's generally said that my views are conservative. Jim and I undoubtedly would disagree if we talked politics, which we haven't; but we agree on the significance of the Arab oil boycott. It was one of the best things that happened to the United States in the last # years. No, this isn't going to be a long editorial, but it seemed reasonable to get the editorial view out in the open before I start the column proper. The first favor the Arabs did us was to make the entire nation energy-conscious. Until the boycott, only a few scientists, and scattered conservation organizations, were at all concerned about the energy problem. In #I I wrote a series of columns and one major newspaper article about the coming energy crisis. The President's energy message that summer contained several sentences (with crediting the source) from those. "The government" had plenty of figures, and officials were highly concerned, but their energy bills sat in Congressional committees. The Congress is the most democratic of our branches of government, and until the public worries. Congress does not. The average American didn't -- and doesn't now -- understand the energy problem. Until he had to wait in line for gasoline, it wasn't his business. All that changed a few months ago, and even though the boycott has been lifted, we'll never go back where we were this time last year, if for no other reason than the price of operating an automobile will keep energy costs ever before us. It has become fashionable to conserve energy. People turn off lights, ride bicycles, form carpools. Speed limits have been lowered. Suddenly it is not only expensive, but downright immoral, to waste energy. This is all to the good. The more we conserve, the less we'll have to find; and besides, it is immoral to of years to form and which our grandchildren jmay need desperately. Energy conservation is a Good Thing, and we can thank the Arabs for not only reminding us of our duty, but making it expensive to shirk it. C onservation, however, isn't going to save us from another energy crisis. We can talk until we're blue in the face about using less energy, and we can turn out lights, and recycle steel (although sane politician who wants to run on a platform of "increased work for less pay". We can philosophize and educate and pontificate all we choose, but the American worker expects more money for less work as he expects winter to follow summer; and the only way to go from labor-intensive industry to something else is for the something else to be energy-intensive industry. In order to talk intelligently about energy conservation, let's see just where our energy goes. Table One gives the percentages for #, a good typical year and about the last one for which the figures are readily available. Use Consumer Space Other Electricity Motive Other Total heating heating power Residential .# Commercial Transport'tn Industry Other (Does not add to # due to rounding) recycling many resources uses more energy than finding new ones), and ride bicycles, and do without electric carving knives and toothbrushes, and when we're finished we might be able to cut the annual growth rate of energy consumption in half. This is a real saving, but it's not the Earth. The reason we'll continue to use more energy every year for a long time to come is that we live in a democracy, and there is not one Now those are fairly interesting figures. For one thing, they show that if we turned out all the lights in our houses and kept them off, never used home air conditioners, unplugged the refrigerators, and I learned to type on a manual again, we could save about # of the total energy needed each year. If we smashed all the neon lights and made all the shops do without electricity, we could save # more, for a grand total of #. In practical terms, that would mean, at present requirement growth rates, that for two to four years we wouldn't have to build any new power plants. Somehow it doesn't seem worth it. On the other hand, gasoline saving is worthwhile; we're working on the second largest item in the budget. The largest item, industry, pretty well takes care of itself, as fuel costs go up, industry will take drastic conservation steps simply from the profit motive. The only way we'll cut much into industry's share is by closing some industries altogether as frivolous -- and everyone, strangely enough, seems to think the other guy's job is frivolous and a good place to start. He never wants to eliminate his own. Another good area for saving is residential space heating. It's over # of the total, after all. But since we don't want to freeze to death, we'll have to think up other ways than simply shutting down our furnaces. We can insulate, of course. We can turn down the thermostats. But better we should stay comfortable and still save energy -- and in many parts of the country that's simple technologically. We simply put in solar heating systems. We've all seen designs for solar houses, and hot water heating systems on the roof, and the rest of it. At the moment these are so expensive that only the wealthy can install them -- and unless they're eccentric, they don't because they don't have to. This has to change, and it can. Again it's a question of economics. When the demand for such things is high enough, they can be made by mass production methods instead of by hand as they are presently. We won't save ourselves by sticking hot water heaters on every roof, but it does lead us to the real favor the Arabs have done us: not forcing us to conserve, but forcing us to think about the alternatives to what we're doing now. Once that process starts I've enough confidence in American engineers -- to be corny, in "good old American knowhow" to be sure we'll never go back to the smug, complacent, energywasting, fossil-burning, air-polluting wasters we used to be. all right, what are the alternaV tives? At this point there arises a mighty chorus from science fiction readers as they chant the ably hear it all the way out here to Studio City. Unfortunately, fusion is not the answer to our prayers. It's very important, of course, and lately there have been breakthroughs that make investment in fusion research very shrewd indeed. I'm not knocking fusion -- but we'd be silly if we simply threw money at the fusion people, then sat back and relaxed. In the first place, the most optimistic advocates of fusion don't see it as an important source of power before #, and that's a long way off. Cut that by # years, and we're still in some trouble. Since we're all friends here; let's be frank about something: in any political crisis, and an energy crisis is primarily a political crisis, if there's a choice between another Great Depression and anything else, anything else is going to be tried. Anything else specifically includes: strip mining for coal; strip mining for oil shale; burning high sulfer oil in areas of bad air pollution like my home town; crash programs to throw in nuclear power plants without much regard for safety; ruthless exploitation of the Alaska north slope fields; frenzied conquest against oil-rich nations. R eforming the political system isn't going to change that fact, either, unless by "reform" one means "making American policy less responsive to the will of the majority of the American people." Perhaps, if we changed the political structure so that it would be dominated by sober, thoughtful, rightthinking people like you and me and Jim Baen, we might reach a point at which we'd accept longer hours for lower wages, redistribute the jobs so we'll all have one, send a lot of people back to the farm to substitute human labor for highenergy food production methods, and -- what's that? I've lost my concensus already? Predsely. Let's go back to technology and leave politics for another time and place. We've agreed that fusion research is vital, and the experts seem agreed that it can't be significant before the end of the century. What's left? At the moment, there are three major sources of energy: hydroelectric, fossil, and nuclear. Of the three, hydro-electric can't be expanded without environmental costs most of us aren't prepared to pay, even though it is the least polluting of all those we have. The costs of increased hydro-electric power are such things as damming up the Grand Canyon, turning the few remaining wild rivers into chains of silting-up lakes, and generally making a mess of the water balance, not to mention the scenery. That leaves fossil fuels and nuclear power, and here's where I lose my concensus for the rest of the column. Nuclear power is a touchy subject, and immediately raises the highly important question: is it safe? No. In fact, "is it safe?" is precisely the wrong question to ask. Instead, we have to ask whether it is more or less safe than something else, in this case, great expansion of fossil fuels -- or getting into the political crisis of Depression vs. anything else. For the past # years we have studied the dangers of nuclear power. The federal government has trying to measure the public health costs and dangers arising from nuclear power plants. There are hundreds of reports on what might happen given one or another accident; how many birth defects we can expect as a result of x number of nuclear plants; increased incidence of cancer as a result of nuclear power; etc., etc. In the same time period there have been almost no studies of the public health costs and hazards of fossil fuel power plants, and those studies we do have get almost no publicity. This has to change. How can anyone make intelligent decisions without proper data? Unfortunately, advocates of increased use of nuclear power -- and I'.m one of those -- have to use qualitative arguments because the numbers are not available. Let's see what we do know. First, it's easily shown that kilowatt for kilowatt, a coal-fired power plant releases more radioactive material to the environment than a nuclear power plant. This is because all coal contains small quantities of radium, and it goes up the flue. Those who wish to "stop nuclear pollution" counter by pointing out that nuclear plants produce spent fuels and other wastes which have to be stored, and sometimes the storage fails and the stuff gets out. There are two answers to that one; first, the wastes that do escape are concentrated in one place and represent a hazard only to the nuclear workers -- the "atomjacks" -- and not the general public. Second, one of the soon-to-come developmetns in technology is the shuttle; and with that, and with proper application of nuclear waste solidification technology, nuclear waste disposal becomes a trivial problem; get rid of it forever by shooting it out into space. There's lots of room out there. Obviously, due measures have to be taken to safeguard against accidents, but that's not as hard as it sounds. We think of nuclear wastes as cause that's the way they're stored now pending a safe permanent disposal system; but in fact all the waste products from all the power plants cumulative to date could be formed into a glass block about # feet on a side. It would be a very hot block, both chemically and radioactively, but it wouldn't be dangerous except to those near it. Glass is a very stable compound. The arguments for and against nuclear power could go on all day, but the one clincher argument I would like to use rests on incomplete data. Conceding that nuclear plants have public health costs, and that the wrong kind of accident could cause deaths in the thousands, I would like to counter by showing that fossil plants already cause more deaths in a ten year period than would the kind of accident to a nuclear plant that could happen only .once in a hundred years. It is reliably reported that lowered air quality reduces the average life span by three years. There are varying figures on how many people die from emphasema, lung cancer, general respiratory disease, and heart disease as a result of the garbage put out by fossil plants, but many authorities think there are a lot. The most recent issues of Science indicate that nuclear power, even with overestimates of the probability of a really severe nuclear accident, is substantially less hazardous than coal; and they haven't even looked at the probability that we might go to war if we rely on fossil fuels and then don't have them. Let's leave the subject of nuclear safety, but before I do, I'll thank our friends the Arabs for making us think about that, too. We will presently have hard data to base decisions on; and when we do, I expect the public will be ready to look at the subject rationally, because suddenly energy is important to the average man. S o far, then, the Arabs have forced us to look at conservation, funded fusion research at over three times its previous level, got us thinking rationally about nuclear safety, and aimed some pretty bright people at the question of how to overcome nuclear safety problems. That's a pretty good record -- and it's still not the biggest favor they did us. Beyond nuclear fission, beyond I even fusion, there is a real problem with energy: the more we liberate, the more heat we release into the atmosphere. Exactly when manproduced heat will have a serious effect on climate varies with the expert you talk to, but no one believes the problem will just go away. It's probably time we did some serious thinking on the subject, if only to save trouble for our grandchildren. Besides, problems like that tend to go on for a long time and when you actually notice them, it may be too late to do anything -- unless you've prepared in advance. As a direct result of the Arabcreated energy crisis, the United States is blossoming with all kinds of exotic energy system research. We even have funds for windmills, and a # kw. wind-powered generator will be constructed before the end of the decade. ing last February I saw designs for enormous windmill systems to be mounted on barges and anchored in windy off-shore areas; and they are thought to be nearly competitive, economically, with fossil and nuclear systems. We're looking hard at geo-thermal power, and boring some new test wells. A new lens (well, lens-equivalent) that takes scattered light, such as daylight on a cloudy day, and focuses it finely enough to be used for heating, has been developed. Incidentally, the crabs beat us to ago, and biologists specializing in the visual systems of arthropods were instrumental in developing the lens. With such gadgets we can use solar heating even in cloudy areas. I 've mentioned in a previous column the possibility of using sea temperature differences for generating electricity; now that concept is getting serious study and there may be a pilot plant in a few years. This is one of the most interesting systems of all, because it makes use of a continuously renewed resource, sunlight, and adds precisely nothing to the Earth's heat. Moreover, the pollution product is fresh water and cheap protein. The solar power research teams are suddenly finding money to work on methods for turning sunlight into electricity that don't require monstrous tracking mirrors and other costly gadgets. There's money for development of more efficient solar panels, the kind that power our spacecraft now; there's no theoretical reason why a much larger percentage of sunlight can't be turned directly into electricity. and with more efficient solar panels plus lower costs to orbit them, we may yet live to see space-based power plants. On a more prosaic level, coal research is getting almost an embarrassment of riches. There's money for gassification studies, more efficient fuel cells, new mining methodology, ways to clean up after the strip mines are finished, and more. Suddenly, the United States is energy conscious, and our talents and resources are aimed at new ways to get more energy for less environmental cost. I have a great deal of confidence in American technologists, and I'm confident that we'll find not one, but many, new and better ways to run our power plants. The consequences of those discoveries will reach far outside the United States. We live in a small island of wealth set in the midst of a sea of poverty. The remedy for famine and misery throughout the world will depend, at bottom, on low-cost energy. We weren't looking for that so long as there was lots of cheap oil coming in from overseas. Now we are, and when we find it, everyone will benefit. It may even be that historians fifty years from now will see this decade's importance primarily in terms of energy research. Meanwhile, I think we should all give three rousing cheers for our friends, the Arabs.  As it was in the beginning... P ope irving ix, nee Curtis Wayne Hayakawa, Jr., was in the process of explaining to Commander Makmordic why it was that unlike the Holy Church the infidel Suth'n Babtists of Sol and Alpha Centauri did not have figurines of the Savior seated in their symbolic electric chairs when the lights suddenly went out for a second. Two seconds later, a strident hoot from the bridge shocked Makmordic out of her surprise. Casting an apologetic look at His Holiness, the mistress of the S. V. Elhofi rose from her sling and depressed an intercom stud on the wall of her cabin. "Makmordic here," she whistled. "What is your matter?" "I'm not exactly certain. Commander," came Sub-Commander Lcdicla's deep, metal-raspy reply from the bridge. The statement was punctuated by a worried-sounding honk rather like the noise ancient Tcrran steam locomotives used to make when they contrived to fall off their tracks while traveling at high speeds. Dread immediately began to curdle and crawl about within Makmordic's cassava melonshaped thorax. She knew what her junior officer's nerve filaments were made of -- after all. the sub-commander had served under her, not to mention at her side, during the recent war against those perfectly dreadful tripeds of Dasfis -- as so she realized that whatever it was that could rattle the legendarily imperturbable I.edicla certainly deserved her own respect. "We made the scheduled fortylight-year jump through unspace out from Stahl," Ledicla continued, "and were supposed to reemerge within five xams' distance of our destination. However, though I have not yet been able to locale the error, we appear to have made some rather gross miscalculation or another, for we have badly overshot Glom." "Miscalculated?" Makmordic piped in questioning tones. "Overshot?" "We have come out in deep space. Commander." "Nch? Deep space?" "Deep space?" echoed His Holiness, who now hovered behind Makmordic and nervously twirled a finely crafted electrofix on a gemencrusted finger. "You mean, between galaxies ?" "Deeper," Ledicla replied. "The deepest possible space, it seems. We appear to have emerged on the very rim of the universe itself!" was accompanied by a burst of inarticulate orchestration from the Pope. "Off to port," the sub-commander went on, "the galaxy clusters appear as a single billowing cloud of light, and -- " "Sub-Commander Ledicla, have you been licking the damper rods again?" Makmordic sternly demanded. Ledicla's sundry minor vices were known to her. Furthermore, she could recall a time when his fondness for damper rods had greatly enhanced certain aspects of their former relationship. The radiation burns had been rather painful, however, and so she had finally broken it off with him. Besides, he always became disgusting loopy when he had been on one of his damper rod-licking binges. "I am merely reporting what I see," Ledicla protested. "The -- " "Plug the image into my wall screen immediately!" "I regret to report that there is no image. Commander." "Neh? Neh?" Makmordic's nictitating membranes started to click together spasmodically. "No image? "I am in the observation blister," Ledicla explained, "watching the phenomenon with my naked eyes. There is a great deal of noise emanating from the cloud. Electrons and protons. Most of the ship's receptors screamed and shorted out at the instant we left unspace. The guidance systems have also been ruined. The Elbog is now on emergency power. I had to use the main generators to raise maximum density shields against the electron barrage. And -- " "I am coming to the bridge," the commander hissed, menace in her tones. "Your breath had better not glow, I warn you, Ledicla." As the commander switched off the intercom, Pope Irving began to tug gently at one of her armored joints. "What do your suppose the trouble is?" he asked in a quivering voice. "Aspergonk knows." Makmordic sighed, shuddered and somewhat reluctantly withdrew her joint from the Pope's grasp. The Pope, being a pope and all, did not know about erogenous zones in general and the erogenous zones of Makmordic's species in particular. She rubbed her joint tenderly for a moment. "Whatever the problem is, I expect we'll soon know all about it. Will you accompany me to the bridge. Your Holiness?" His Holiness accepted the invitation, which was only a formality anyway. He could go anywhere he pleased aboard the Elbog. He was footing the bill for this trip. Makmordic turned and, with Pope Irving at her heels, scuttered purposefully from her quarters. Though her thorax continued to gurgle with disquiet, the pigmentation was carefully chosen to display pleasantness and general wellbeing of spirit for the benefit of the passengers on board. None of the passengers seemed inclined to inquire as to the significance of the momentary dimming of the lights. All of the passengers were theologians with more important matters on their minds. The corridors of the Elbog thronged with beings mingling to exchange views on, and occasional blows over. Supreme Entities. There were tree-root worshippers, ear-wax enshriners, pterodactyl totemizers, apostles of Aspergonk, battlers for Briquebat, converts to Camshaft. There were Zonds, Doowahs and Druids. There were two Quakers, a few Shakers and several fakirs. There were furry struiomimi, man-sized ostrichoid reptiles, who spent virtually all of their adult lives locked in ritual debate over whether or not the second (or perhaps it was the third) syllable of their particular Heavenly Progenitor's Holy Name could be pronounced and. if so, by whom. There were sentient singing stones that had embraced the Holy Church's teachings and now lent their soft, eerie harmonies to its songs. The air in the passageways throbbed subtly with "kyrie electron, kyrie electron. " All had been summoned to Glom by the head of the Church for what was discreetly referred to as the Third Inter-Species Ecumenical Council but what, in view of the Church's recent expulsion from the vicinity of Sol and Alpha Centauri by the Suth'n Babtists, was expected to turn out to be a bona fide council of war. Pope Irving IX was generally regarded as a patient, understanding individual, but even he had not quite been about to forgive and forget the way the accursed Babtists had sent him, via a neutral trading vessel, six bishops in thirtysix individually wrapped pieces. Accompanying the bishops had been a crudely penned note to the effect that the Babtists had succeeded in coverting all sentient Solarians and Centaurians to the true faith. This had left a lot of cathedrals sitting around uselessly, so the Babtists had had them remodeled and turned into bingo emporiums. "This is not at all kosher of them," His Holiness had grumbled, and so the call had gone out to all non-Babtist-affiliated religious leaders. The Babtists had naturally scheduled a council of their very own. Actually, neither the Babtists nor the Church and its allies really wanted a war. Both sides were sort of hoping that the Supreme Being would be swayed toward whoever held the more impressive council and thus loose HisHerIts wrath upon the losers, thereby settling the matter for all time. Cobalt-colored Ledicla stepped away from the observation blister as Commander Makmordic and the Pope entered the bridge, which stank of ozone and melted plastic. "I believe I was mistaken," said the sub-commander, "when I reported that we somehow overshot Glom. Our calculations were probably correct, and we probably re-emerged from unspace at the proper point. Glom, had moved." He half-turned to indicate the observation blister with a noisy wave of an elbowless appendage. Ledicla's metallic epidermis tended to squeak like rusty bedsprings whenever he moved. During the war against Dasfis, his racket had driven Makmordic bananas in less than a week; this was another reason for her breaking up with him. Makmordic and Pope Irving were struck speechless with awe and terror when they stepped into the observation blister and looked out. Off to starboard, there was nothing, not a star, not so much as, a dust mote, nothing. Off to port was an immense sheet of bluish-white fire, shimmering in the firmament like an iridiscent curtain. In dialight years and then some. Galaxies could be seen spiraling together in slow motion. Against the swirling,, shifting background of white flame, small points of light -- stars -- erupted into short-lived red, yellow and orange blossoms as inconceivable tidal stresses ripped them apart. There were whirlpools and tornadoes. It all looked very, very evil. "Even as we watch," Ledicla rasped softly, "Space and Time are being twisted completely out of shape. It must have begun while we were in unspace, hence, our present position here on the fringe of things. By the time we came out into normal space, everything else in the universe had already been drawn together. That fire cloud is the whole of Creation. Note how with incredible swiftness everything is converging upon a central point. Ourselves included. Commander." Makmordic wheeled to regard her junior officer with horror. "Can we not jump back into unspace and escape?" The sub-commander shook his head audibly. "The Elbog's controls are dead. We undoubtedly began to accelerate in the direction of the fire cloud as soon as we came out of unspace. Even with power, the ship probably could not escape the pull of the cloud's core." 'Core?" Comprehension flared in Makmordic's light-sensitive organs. "You mean -- " Ledicla nodded solemnly, albeit somewhat noisily. "A black hole lies within the cloud. Is, in fact, responsible for the creation of the cloud." His Holiness frowned with bewilderment. "A black hole?" "A neutron star," Makmordic piped dully. "When a sun, or, for that matter, anything capable of doing so, super-novas, it violently sheds its electrons and protrons. With nothing left to keep them apart any longer, the neutrons then implode into a dense little wad. A star the size of Glom, for instance, would be compressed into a heatless, lightless ball not much bigger than a mung-pea. However, it would still retain approximately seventy per cent of its original mass. Anything which got too close would be sucked in, stripped of its own protons and electrons, then spread about one neutron thick over the surface of the original wad." The mistress of the Elbog gently eased herself into an uncushioned seat. "How long do you estimate it will be before we feel its full effect. Ledicla?" The sub-commander pursed his shiny lips thoughtfully. He had overcome his initial horror of the sight in the heavens and now looked every inch the gallant officer who had unflinchingly induced terminal petrification in many a Dasfisan. Makmordic loved him then and gathered her own courage. "We should," Ledicla finally said, "disintegrate into atoms within the next five minutes and then into sub-atomic particles sometime shortly thereafter." "Will it hurt?" whimpered the Pope as he sagged against the wall and let his electrofix slip from nerveless fingers. The two officers ignored him. "Just how big is the hole at the center of the cloud?" Makmordic quietly asked. "There is no way of determining its original size," Ledicla replied, "But such instruments as are still functioning properly indicate that it's now roughly four times as big as Betelgeuse." "Great Aspergonk!" the commander whistled. "That would diameter!" "What could have made such a thing?" sobbed His Holiness. 'What?" Sub-Commander Ledicla shook his head and shrugged, making a sound like a loosely packed box of metal pans tumbling down a staircase. "All the matter in the universe probably wouldn't be enough. We will, alas, never know just what it was that imploded into this black hole of black holes." All around them, the A. V. Elbog began to hum and glow. "Dear God," Pope Irving IX muttered, sliding to his knees. He would never know it, of course, but he had just answered his own question.  In the #th Century mankind has developed interstellar travel and is tackling the huge task of siphoning off Earth's excess population. Unfortunately. only one other habitable planet. Terra nova, has been discovered, and an economic brake has been placed on the flow of settlers to it by making the journey .highly expensive. This policy was introduced and enforced by the vast Starflight Corporation which controls all manufacture and operation of spacecraft. Most of the Starflight fleet is engaged in the transportation of settlers, but it has a separate Stellar Exploration Arm which continues with the search for habitable new worlds. The President of Starflight. Elizabeth Lindstrom. is the richest and most powerful human ever. She has been debased and corrupted by her power to the extent where -- like sultans of old -- she has been known to kill employees for minor transgressions. of the exploration ship Bissendorf, was about to leave Earth on a yearlong mission and was summoned to Elizabeth's headquarters for a preflight audience. While waiting impatiently for his interview he was entrusted with the job of looking after Elizabeth Lindstrom' s small was becoming disenchanted with the fruitless search for other planets was too busy with his own thoughts to notice Harald climbing up a tall statue. Before Garamond could prevent the accident, the boy fell and was killed. Garamond knew at once that not only was he doomed, but that the President's psychosis would prompt her to wreak venHe discovered, however, that the boy's death fall had not been observed, so he hid the body and slipped away from Starflight House. Concealing his panic, he collected his wife and son from their apartment and took them to the spaceport. At gunpoint he forced a shuttle pilot to fly them up to the Bissendorf which was waiting in orbit. Knowing that the dead child would be found at any moment. Garamond got through on the radio to his second-in-command and ordered him to blank out all communications between the Bissendorf and Earth. The precaution was taken just in time -- back at Starflight HQ Harold's body had been discovered. Elizabeth had already slain the luckless servant who made the find, and had sent out an order that Garamond was to be brought back to her. Aboard his ship Garamond ordered it to leave the Solar System at maximum speed and was lucky in that the spatial "tide" was favorable to him. The ships employed by Earth could operate more efficiently in regions where the density of space was high, and in this case the local conditions enabled Garamond to escape his pursuers. The trouble was that he had nowhere to go -- there was no point in fleeing to Terranova because Elizabeth's ships would .be there waiting for him. The Bissendorf was provisioned fora year, so Garamond decided to use that time to follow up a private dream. He owned photographs of partially destroyed starmaps which had been found on Sagania, a planet which had been destroyed by a nuclear reaction thousands of years previously. Discrepancies in the maps suggested to Garamond that one star had been of special significance to the long-dead Saganians. and he decided to solve the mystery. On completing the four-month journey, the Bissendorf s crew made an astonishing find -- a sun completely enclosed within a spherical shell which was more than # They surveyed the object, located a single small entrance at its equator and one group passed through it to discover that the inner surface of the sphere was covered with vegetation and had breatheable air. Hulks of hundreds of destroyed spaceships were clustered outside the entrance and just inside it were ruins of ancient fortifications. A great battle had been fought there long ago. but there was no sign of life. The sphere, dubbed Orbitsville, appeared to offer perfect living Earths. The discover y elevated Garamond to a level of fame and importance at which he and his family seemed safe, even from Elizabeth Lindstrom. He sent a faster-than-light signal to Earth, reporting the jind. then his science team began to investigate some of Orbitsville's mysteries, including the puzzle of why radio communication was impossible within the sphere. Four months later Elizabeth arrived at the head of a fleet, assumed control and in a tense interview with Garamond revealed that Starflight intended to exploit emigration to Orbitsville and parcel it out just as if it was a normal planet. Settlers begin to arrive almost immediately. Disillusioned and feeling useless. Garamond settled down with his family and watched the human settlement spread outward into Orbitsville's infinite prairies -- then a new discovery was made. Orbitsville was not empty and free for the taking. An alien civilization was encountered close to the entrance. Communications could not be established with the gentle aliens unofficially called "Clowns But while they presented no threat, their settlement ringed the entrance and they were thus an obstacle. When reports began to appear on television describing a Clown massacre of humans on an outer planet, Garamond decided to act. It was obvious that the patently absurd reports were propaganda meant to prepare the human population for an attack on " Clown City." He decided to take the Bissendorf to the outer planet to collect data that would disprove the reports. To his surprise Elizabeth Lindstrom offered no resistance to the plan. While on the outer planet Garamond was shocked to discover his wife had accepted an invitation from Elizabeth Lindstrom to stay with Christopher at the palace. Anxiously he hastened preparations for the return. The Bissendorf was over half way back when its field generators exploded, robbing the ship of its means of deceleration. They seemed doomed to ionize themselves on the impregnable outer shell of Orbitsville. but a desperate plan was put forth -- the ship would be aimed at the entrance to Orbitsville, its electron gun being used to create an atmospheric tunnel, 'thus enabling the Bissendorf to hurtle through the aperture, crash through Beachhead City and skip along the upper fringes of Orbitsville' s air shelf, gradually shedding velocity until it came to a stop. Beachhead City was evacuated and its inhabitants watched as the ship plunged into Orbitsville in an appalling display of violet fire. Elizabeth Lindstrom watched with not a little satisfaction what she believed to be Vance Garamond' s funeral pyre. Five days later, the Bissendorf came to a stop, irreparably damaged by the ordeal but with most of meters from Beachhead City. Recognizing the almost insurmountable difficulties involved in returning over so immense a distance, most of the crew chose to remain and colonize the area where they landed. Garamond. however, decided to attempt to return to Beachhead City. For although he had no hopes of saving Aileen and Christopher from Elizabeth's vengeance, he had planned a revenge of his own. He intended to kill Elizabeth Lindstrom. He ordered that a fleet of ships be built from the wreck of the Bissendorf and that, in lieu o f radio communications, a way be found to guide the ships on the long journey back. The ship scientists under the direction of Chief Science Officer they could get a bearing on Beachhead City by using delton particles. Since the crash, the crew's time had had to be divided between Garamond' s project and the building of a settlement -- to their increasing dissatisfaction. Bitter and preoccu pied. Garamond did not notice the growing restlessness of the crew until after an accident occurred in the testing of one of the executive. Litman accused him of keeping the men from the work necessary to their survival in the new colony, and of making harsh demands while remaining remote from the actual production of the project. The crew hacked Lit man in his criticism of Garamond and threatened to leave the ships itnliitished. While Garamond managed to talk the men into finishing, he recognized the truth in Lit man's accusations, and began to oversee the work himself. Soon after the confrontation with Litman a delta particle was recorded. The ships were soon completed, and -- despite warnings from O'Hagan that the recording came too soon -- Garamond set out on the return journey. D ay #. Estimated range: # kilometers This is to be sort of a diary. But I am determined to avoid the abbreviations traditionally used by diarists, abbreviations whose function is to shorten a necessary task. My aim is to prolong a supertluous one. (The term "ship's log" might be more appropriate than "diary". But, again, a log is a record of the events of a voyage, whereas my daily entries are likely to concern only pseudo-events in a continuum of pure monotony.) (If I go on splitting hairs like this about the precise meaning of words in the opening sentence. I'll never get beyond it; but the reference to abbreviations isn't quite right, either. I intend to use the symbol "O" instead of writing out "Orbitsville" in full each time. O is much shorter than Orbitsville. but that is coincidental -- it is also more expressive of the reality.) Cliff Napier was right when he guessed I was glad the job of manufacturing autopilots was beyond our resources. My reasoning was that Hying the ship by hand would keep us occupied and help reduce boredom. It isn't working out that way, though. There are five of us on board and we spell each other at the controls on a rota arranged so that the two most experienced pilots, Braunek and myself, are in the dockpit at daybreak and nightfall. These are the only times when flying the ship is more difficult than, say, driving an automobile. Because day and night are caused by bands of light and darkness sweeping over the land at orbital speed there is no proper dawn or proper dusk, and some fairly violent meteorological processes take place. In the "morning" a sector of cold air which has been sinking steadily for hours suddenly finds itself warming up again and rising, causing anything from clear-air turbulence to heavy rain. At nightfall the situation is reverse. It can be even more tricky because the air that cools and begins to descend conflicts with currents rising from the still warm ground. What it amounts to is that there are two half-hour periods when the control column comes to life. Not enough to occupy us for the next three to four years. I'm afraid, although we in the lead ship are a little luckier than the others. That is, we have a little extra work to do. There is the inertial course reference to be monitored, for instance. A simple-looking black box, created by O'Hagan and his team. Inside it is a monomaniacal electronic brain that thinks of nothing but the bearing they fed into it. Any time we begin to wander off course, a digital counter instructs us to go left or right till we're back on line again. The rest of the squadron follows suit. Linked to the black box is a onemeter-square delton detector which in a year or two, as we get considerably closer to Beachhead City, should begin to pick up other delta particles and provide course confirmation. Sometimes I watch it, just in case, or just to pass the time, but there isn't really any need. It would feed a fresh bearing into the course reference automatically. Also, it is fitted with an audio attention getter. I still watch it, though... and dream about EL. No abbreviations: Elizabeth Lindstrom. Dm' #. Estimated range: # kilometers We have completed perhaps a fortieth of the journey, having llown a distance roughly equivalent to going around the Earth seven times. Without stopping. Another way to reckon it is that after # days we have gone nearly as far as a ray of light would have traveled in one second, but that's a depressing thought for anyone accustomed to Arthurian flight at multiples of lightspeed. A more positive thought is that we've learned quite a lot about O. Somehow I had always thought of it as composed entirely of featureless prairie, but I was wrong. Perhaps it started off that way, eons ago, and the subsequent actin of wind led to the formation of the mountains we have seen. None were very high, not more than a couple of thousand meters, but Earths not yet explored who's to say what will be found? Mountains are there, anyway, and some are capped with snow because our flight is taking us into the winter sector. In addition we sometimes sight rivers and small seas. Our formation passes over them in a deadstraight line, quietly and steadily, and sometimes the telescopes pick up herds of grazing animals. Perhaps early settlers will not have to rely exclusively on vegetable protein, after all. The unexpected variegation of the terrain is making the journey a little easier to endure. But after a time all seas are the same, all hills look alike... When I wrote in an earlier entry that the five of us in the lead ship were luckier than the others in having more to do, I was not thinking about the members of the science staff. Sammy Yamoto in No. # seemsto be fully occupied with astronomical readings, including precise measurements of the width of the day and night bands as we cross them, or as they cross us. He now says that even with improvised equipment he could probably take a bearing on Beachhead City that would be accurate to within a degree or so. I suspect he is passing up his turn at the flying controls so that he can carry on with his work. I hope that is not the case, because he is one of the least expert pilots and needs the practice. Although five per ship is ample crew strength, this could be cut down, by illness for example, and I'm making no provision for unscheduled stops. Any ships that have to go down for long periods will be stripped and left behind. With their crews. free time by helping Denise Serra record radiation and gravity fluctuations. Sometimes -- in fact, quite often -- I find myself wishing Denise were on my ship. I could have arranged that of course, but I had wanted to play fair with her. Having turned her down that night, I felt the least I could do was avoid obstructing the field. But now... now when I dream of Aileen and Chris, I dream they are dead. That means I'm beginning to accept it, and with the acceptance my pragmatic, faithless body seems to be nominating Aileen's successor. I feel ashamed of that, but maybe the attraction is not as purely physical as I was supposing. Delia Liggett, a catering supervisor on the Bissendorf, is on my ship and two of the other men on board have a good practical relationship with her -- but I can't work up much interest in a hot bunking system. I'm positive this isn't a ridiculous remnant of a captain-to-crew attitude, a notion that I ought to have her exclusively because my uniform shows the most silver braid. Outside the agreed goals of this mission I have the old command structure, probably with some assistance from the pervading influence of the Big O, completely discarded. I do remember, though, feeling some surprise at the makeup of the thirty-nine volunteers who came with me. My first supposition was that they would all be of executive rank and above, career-oriented men and women determined to take the Bissendorf incident in stride. Instead I found that more than half the seventy original volunteers were ordinary crewmen. Those chosen -- by a selection procedure that cut the number down to the precise requirement -- I regard and treat as exact equals. O makes us equal. In comparison to it we are reI need to the ultimate degree: human electrons, too small to show disparity. Dtiv #. Estimated Mnge: # # kilometers We have completed our First scheduled landing and are in flight again. Alter fifty days in the air, the prospect of three days on the ground was exhilarating. We landed in formation on a level plain, the eight fully qualified pilots at the controls, and spent practically all the down-time gathering grass and loading it into the processing machines. This is what passes for winter on O. The sun is still directly overhead, naturally. But with the days being shorter, the temperature does not build up as high and has a much longer time to bleed away at night. The result is a certain briskness in the air during the day and nights actually cold. All of which makes me wonder why the designers of O bothered to build in a mechanism to provide seasons. If iily host elforthe-galaxy notion is correct, presumably the designers made a survey of intelligent lifelorms in their region of space to see what the environmental requirements were. And if that were the ease, the majority of life-bearing worlds must closely resemble liarth, even to the extent of having a moderately lilted axis and a procession of seasons. Could this, for some reason I don't fathom, be a universal prerequisite for the evolugreat original science fiction stories by together in one volume "Superior "Kirkus Reviews  # tion of intelligence? No, how could that be? Men had evolved in equatorial Earth regions where the seasons hardly varied. It seems that weather isn't going to be any problem during future stops, but our physical condition might. Thesimple task of cutting and gathering grass pretty well exhausted many of us. So we have worked up exercises that can be performed on board ship. Day #. Estimated range: # kilometers meters behind us, it was beginning to look as though our journey time would be better than predicted. But the starboard propeller bearing on ship No. # has started to show wear. This is causing vibration at maximum cruise and we have had to reduce fleet speed by twelve kilometers per hour. The alarming thing is that the propeller-shaft bearings on all the ships are supposed to be Magnelube Alloy Grade E. It is inconceivable that a bearing made to that specification could show wear after only # days of continuous running. The suspicion crosses my mind that Litman may have substituted Magnelube D, or even C. I cannot believe he would have done so out of pure malice. Probably there had been a shortage of blocks of the top-grade metal. If I had discovered that, I would have ordered a redesign or would have stripped some of the Bissendorf's main machinery to get the bearings. Either way, Litman would have had a lot of extra work on his hands, and the person he had become would not have taken kindly to that. We must now keep a careful watch on all propeller-shaft bearings because we carry no stocks of Magnelube Alloy and, in any case, barely retain the ability to machine it to the required tolerances. Like archaeologists burrowing deeper into the past, we are retrogressing through various levels of technical competence. Meanwhile the flight continues uninterrupted. Over prairies, lakes, mountains, seas, forests -- and then over more and more of the same. A fraction of O's circumference yet so enormous that contemplating has stunned my mind. I was taught at school that a man's brain is unable to comprehend what is meant by a light-year -- now I know we cannot comprehend as much as a lightsecond. So far on this journey we have, in effect, encircled twentyfive Earths; but my heart and mind are suspended, like netted birds, somewhere above the third or fourth range of mountains. They have run into the comprehension barrier while my body has traveled onward, heedless of what penalties may thus be incurred. Day #. Estimated range: # kilometers Like Litman, like the others, I am becoming a different person. I sometimes go for a whole day without thinking of Elizabeth Lindstrom. And now I can think of Aileen and Chris without experiencing much pain. It is as if they are in a mental jewel box. I can take them out, examine them, receive pleasure -- then put them back and close the lid. Perhaps the life of a loved one must be considered algebraically -- setting the positive total of happiness and contentment against the negative quantity represented by pain and death. The equation, even for a very short life, can result in a positive expression. I wish I could discuss this idea with someone who might understand but Denise is on another ship. Dav #. Estimated range: #,# kilometers We have lost Tayman's ship. No. #. It happened while landing for our second scheduled stop, putting down in formation on an ideallooking plain. A hidden spar of rock wrecked one of Tayman's skids, causing the plane to dip a wing. Nobody was hurt, but No. # had to be written off. In future we will land in sequence on the lead aircraft's skid marks to reduce the risk of similar incidents. Tayman and his crew -- which includes two women -- took the mishap philosophically and we spent an extra day on the ground getting them set up for a prolonged stay. Among the parts we took from No. # were the propeller-shaft bearings, one of which was immediately installed in No. #'s starboard engine. So fleet speed is back to maximum cruise. Still, the loss of Jack Tayman's sturdy optimism is hard to accept. Strangely, I find myself missing his aircraft most at night. We have no radio altimeters or equivalents because the conditions on O will not permit electromagnetic transmission. Also, the environment makes barometric pressure readings too unreliable. So we use the ancient device of two inclined spotlights on each aircraft, one at each end of the fuselage. The forward laser ray is colored red, the aft one white, and they intersect at five hundred meters, which means that a ship at the chosen height projects a single pink spot on the ground. Looking through the darkness we can see our V-formation slipping across the ground, hour after hour, a squadron of silent moons, and the disappearance of one of those luminous followers is all too apparent. Dav #. Estimated range: #.# kilometers Within the space of ten days propeller-shaft bearing trouble developed on six ships. Fleet speed has been reduced by fifty kilometers per hour. Prognosis is that there will be continued deterioration, with progressive cuts in flying speed. Everybody is properly dismayed but I think I can detect an undercurrent of relief at the possibility of so many aircraft having to drop out at the same time, thus providing for the setting up of a larger and stronger community. I have discussed the situation with Cliff Napier over the lightphone and even he seems to be losing heart. The only thing at all "hopeful" is that the ships in trouble are No. # through No. #, reflecting the order in which they came off the production line. The first and second ships -- mine and Napier's -- are all right. It may be that Litman had enough Grade E metal available for our propeller bearings. I put "hopeful" in quotes because being reduced to two airplanes at this stage of the mission would be disastrous. It would take fairly comprehensive technical resources to restore us to strength -- resources not available. I am writing this at night, mainly because I can't sleep. I find it difficult to fight off a sense of defeat. The Big O is too... Garamond set aside his stylus as Joe Braunek, who had been in the cockpit serving as stand-by pilot, appeared in the gangway beside his bunk. The young man's face was deeply shadowed by the single overhead light tube but his eyes, within their panda-patches of darkness, were showing an abnormal amount of white. "What is it, Joe?" Garamond closed his diary. "Well, sir..." "Vance." "Sorry, I keep... Do you want to come up front a minute, Vance? There are some lights we can't explain." "Which panel?" Braunek shook his head. "Not that sort of light. Outside the ship -- near the horizon. Looks like a city or something ahead of us." at first sight the lights were disapV pointing. Even when Braunek had shown him where to look, Garamond had to scan the darkness for several seconds before managing to pick out a thin line of yellowish radiance. Delia Liggett, at the controls, raised her face to him, "Is there any chance that...?" "It isn't Beachhead City," Garamond said. "I thought there might have been a mistake about distances." "Sorry, Delia. We're working on a very rough estimate of how far the Bissendorf traveled, but not that rough. You can start watching for Beachhead City in earnest a couple of years from now." "Then what is that place?" Garamond perversely refused to admit excitement. "Who knows? Some natural feature, maybe." "No," Braunek said, handing Garamond a pair of binoculars. "Try these." "It has to be an alien settlement," Garamond admitted as the glasses revealed the beaded brightness of a distant city. "A hell of a ways from the aperture!" At that moment Cliff Napier's voice came through on the lightphone. "Number Two speaking -- do you read?" "I hear you. Cliff." "Have you seen what we've seen?" "Yeah -- and are you wondering what I'm wondering?" Napier hesitated. "You mean, what's an alien city doing way out here? I guess they got to Orbitsville a long time before we did. It might have taken them hundreds, even thousands, of years to drift out this far." "Why did they bother? You've seen what Orbitsville's like -- one part is as good as another." "To us, Vance. Aliens could see things a different way." "I don't know," Garamond said dubiously. He dropped into one of the supernumerary seats and fixed his eyes on the horizon, waiting for the wall of daylight to rush toward him from the east. When it came, about an hour later, sweeping over the ground with mind-paralyzing speed, the alien settlement abruptly became an even less noticeable feature of the landscape. Although now only a hundred kilometers off, the "city" was reduced in the binoculars to a mere dusting of variegated dots almost lost in greenery. During lightphone conversations among the aircraft there had been voiced the idea that it might be possible to obtain new propeller bearings or have the existing ones modified. Garamond himself had been quietly hopeful about the aliens' level of technology -- but his optimism began to fade. As the intervening distance shortened, the community hovering beyond the nose of his ship reminded him of a nineteenth century town in the American West. "Looks pretty rustic to me." Ralston, the telegeologist, had borrowed the glasses and was peering through them. Garamond nodded. "This is completely illogical, of course. We can't measure other cultures with our own as a yardstick. But I have a feeling that's a low-technology agricultural community. I believe any race that settles on Orbitsville likely will turn into farmers. There's no need to do anything else." "Hold on a minute, Vance." Ralston's voice was taut. "Maybe we're going to get those bearings, after all. I think I see an airplane." Astounded, Garamond took the binoculars. After a moment's search he found a complicated bright speck hanging purposefully in the lower levels of the air. The absence of any lateral movement suggested the other plane was flying directly away from or directly toward his own, and his intuition told him the latter was the case. He kept watching through the powerful gyro-stabilized glasses and presently saw other motes of colored brightness rising, swarming uncertainly, then settling into the "apparently motionless state that meant they were flying to meet him head-on. Ralston gave the alert to the six other ships of the fleet. "It's a welcoming party, all right," he said as the unknown planes became visible to the naked eye, "and we've no weapons. What do we do if they attack us?" "We have to assume they're friendly, or at least not hostile." Garamond adjusted the fine focus on the binoculars. "Besides -- I know I'm judging them by our standards again -- but that doesn't look like an air force to me. The planes are all different colors." "Like ancient knights going out to do battle." "Could be, but I don't think so. The planes seem pretty small, and all different types." A stray thought crossed Garamond's mind. He turned his attention back to the city from which the planes had arisen, and was still scanning it with growing puzzlement when the two fleets of aircraft met and coalesced. A green-and-yellow low-wing monoplane took up station beside Garamond's ship and wiggled its wings in what, thanks to the strictures of aerial dynamics, had to be the universal greeting of airmen. The alien craft had a small blistertype canopy through which could be seen a humanoid form. Braunek, now at the controls, laughed delightedly and repeated the signal. The tiny plane near their wingtip followed suit, as did a blue biplane beyond it. "Communication!" he shouted. "They aren't like the Clowns, Vance -- we'll be able to talk to these people." "Good. See if you can get their permission to land," Garamond said dryly. "Right." Braunek, unaware of the irony, became absorbed in making an elaborate series of gestures while Garamond twisted around in his seat to observe as many of the alien ships as he could. He had noted earlier that no two were painted alike; now he was able to confirm that they differed radically in design as well. Most were propeller-driven but at least two were powered by gas turbines and one racy-looking job had the appearance of a home-made rocket ship. In general the alien planes were of conventional cruciform configuration although he glimpsed at least one canard and a twin-fuselage craft. "A bit of a mixture," Ralston commented, and added with a note of disappointment in his voice. "I see a lot of internal combustion engines out there. If that's the level they're at they won't be much use to us." "How about supplies of fossil fuel?" "There could be some about -- depends on the age of Orbitsville." Ralston surveyed the ground below with professional disgust. "My training isn't worth a damn out here. The ordinary rules don't apply." "I think it's okay to go down," Braunek said. "Our friend has dipped his nose a couple of times." "Right. Pass the word along." As the fringes of the alien settlement began to slide below the nose of the aircraft, Braunek sat higher in his seat and turned his head from side to side. "I can't see their airfield. We'll have to circle around." Garamond tapped the pilot's shoulder. "I think you'll find they haven't got a centralized airfield." T he aircraft banked into a turn, giving a good view of the ground. The city wheeling below the wing was at least twenty kilometers across but had no distinguishable roads, factories or large buildings. Garamond's impression was of thousands of hunting lodges scattered in an area of woodland. Here and there, randomly distributed, were irregular cleared areas about the size of football fields. The brightly colored alien planes dispersed toward these, crossing flight paths at low altitude in an uncontrolled manner that brought gasps from Braunek. They landed unceremoniously, one to a field, leaving the visiting ships still aloft in the circuit. "This is crazy -- I'm not going to try putting us down in somebody's back yard," Braunek announced. "Find a good strip outside of town and we'll land in sequence the way we planned," Garamond told him. He sat back in his seat and buckled his safety straps. The plane lost altitude, completed two low-level orbits and landed, with a short jolting run on its skids, in an expanse of meadow. Braunek steered it off to one side and they watched as the six other ships of the fleet touched down on the same tracks and formed an untidy line. Their propellers gradually stopped turning and canopies were pushed upward like the wing casings of insects. Green-scented air flooded in around Garamond and he relaxed for a moment, enjoying the sensation of being at rest. The luxuriousness of his body's response to the silence awakened memories of what it had been like arriving home for a brief spell after a long mission. Ecstasy-living was a phenomenon well known to S.E.A. personnel, as were its attendant dangers. Rigid self-control was always required during home leave to prevent the ecstasy getting out of control and causing a fierce negative reaction at the beginning of the next mission. But in this instance, as he breathed the cool heavy air, Garamond realized he had been tricked into lowering his guard...  can t possibly take another two rears of flying night and day. the thought came. Nobody could. "Come on, Vance -- stretch the legs," Braunek called as he leaped to the grass. He was followed by Delia Liggett, Ralston and Pierre Tarque, the young medic who completed the crew of No. I . Garamond waved to them and made himself busy with his straps. Two whole years to go -- at least.' -- and what would it achieve? The sounds of laughter and cheerful talk came from outside as the crews of the seven aircraft met and mingled. He could hear friendly punches being swapped, and derisive whoops that probably signified an overlong kiss being exchanged. Even if l get near enough to the President to kill her. which is most unlikely, what would that achieve ? It's too late to do anything for Aileen and Chris. Would they want me to get myself executed? Garamond stood up, filled with guilty excitement, and climbed out of the glasshouse. From the slight elevation, the alien settlement looked like a dreamy garden village. He glanced around, taking in all the lime-green immensities, and dropped to the ground where Cliff Napier and Denise Serra were waiting for him. Denise greeted him with a warm, direct gaze. She was wearing regulation-issue black trousers, but topped with a tangerine blouse in place of a tunic, and more than ever he appreciated that she was beautiful. They were joined almost at once by O'Hagan and Sammy Yamoto, both of whom looked grayer and older than Garamond had expected. O'Hagan wasted no time on pleasantries. "We're at a big decision point, Vance," he began. "Five of our ships have sub-standard propeller bearings and if we can't get them upgraded there's no point in continuing with the flight." He tilted his head and assumed the set expression with which he always received arguments. "I have to agree." Garamond nodded, rediscovering the fact that looking at Denise soothed and delighted his eyes. O'Hagan twitched his brows in surprise. "All right, then. The first thing we have to do when we meet these aliens is assess their engineering capabilities." "They can't be at the level of gyromagnetic power or magnetic bearings -- you saw their aircraft." "That's true, but I think I'm right in saying a magnelube bearing can be considerably upgraded by enclosing it within another bearing, even one as primitive as a ball race. All we would have to do is commission the aliens to manufacture twenty or so large conventional bearings that we can wrap around our magnelubes," "They'd need to be of a standard size." O'Hagan sniffed loudly. "That goes without saying." "I think you'll find..." Garamond broke off as an abrupt silence fell over the assembled crews. He turned and saw a fantastic cavalcade approaching from the direction of the city. The aliens were clearly humanoid -- and shared the human predilection for covering their bodies with clothes. Predominant hues were yellows and browns that toned in with sandcolored skin, making it difficult to determine precise details of their anatomies. Some of the aliens were on foot, some on bicycles, some on tricycles, some on motorcycles, some in a variety of open and closed cars including a two-wheeled gyro car. Some were perched on an erratic air-cushion vehicle. They approached to within twenty meters of the parked aircraft and came to a halt. As the heterogenous mixture of engines coughed, clanked and spluttered into silence, Garamond became aware that the aliens were producing a soft humming noise of their own. It was a blend of many different notes, continuously inflecting, and he tentatively concluded that it was their mode of speech. Seen up close, the aliens appeared hairless but had identifiable equivalents of eyes, ears and mouths agreeably positioned on their heads. Garamond was unable to decide what anatomical features their flimsy garments were meant to cover, or to see any evidence of sexual differentation. He felt curiously indifferent to the strangers although this first contact looked infinitely more propitious than the wordless futility marking his encounter with the Clowns. But, to him, no adventure in the outside universe could hold much significance compared to the voyage of discovery he was making within himself. "Do you want to try speaking with them?" O'Hagan said. Garamond shook his head. "It's your turn to get your name in the history books, Dennis. Be my guest." O'Hagan looked gratified. "If it's to be done, best to do it scientifically." He advanced on the nearest of the aliens, who seemed to regard him with interest. The movement of O'Hagan's shoulders showed he was trying to communicate with his hands. "There's no need," Garamond said in a low voice. Yamoto turned his head. "What did you say?" "Nothing. Sammy. I was talking to myself." "You should be careful who you speak to." Yamoto laughed. Garamond nodded abstractedly. The thing Dennis O'Hagan doesn't realize about these people is that thev'll never do what he wants. He has missed all the signs. AH right -- assuming we can't get them to make the bearings, is there anv point in continuing with the flight? Answer: no. This isn't just a personal reaction. The computers agreed that two airplanes of the tvpe available would not constitute a sufficiently flexible and resourceful transport system. Therefore, l simply can't get back to Beachhead Citv. It's as clear-cut as that. It always was too late to do anything for Aileen and Chris, and now there's nothing I can even attempt to do. I've been born again. T he aliens stayed for more than an hour and then, gradually but without stragglers, moved away in the direction of their city. They reminded Garamond of children who had been enjoying an afternoon at a fair and had become so hungry they could not bear to miss the meal waiting at home. When the last brightly painted vehicle disappeared behind the trees there was a moment of utter silence in the meadow, followed by an explosive release of tension among the plane crews. Bottles of synthetic liquor were produced and a party set off to swim in a nearby lake. "That was weird," Joe Braunek said, shaking his head. "We stood in two lines and looked at each other like farm boys and girls at a village dance on Terranova." "It went all right," Garamond assured him. "There's no protocol -- what were we supposed to do?" "It still was weird." "I know, but just think what it would have been like if there'd been any diplomats or military around. We met them, and stared at them, and they stared at us, and nobody tried to take anything that belonged to the others, and nobody got hurt. Things could have been worse, believe me." "I guess so. Did you see the way they kept counting our ships?" "I did notice that." Garamond recalled the repeated gesture among the aliens: long golden lingers indicating, tallying. "Seemed important to them, somehow. It was as if they'd never seen..." "We've made genuine progress, Vance." O'Hagan approached with a sheaf of handwritten notes and a recorder. "I've identified at least six nouns or noun-sounds in their speech and I believe I'd have done better if I'd had musical training." "Can't you get somebody to help?" "Yes. I'm taking Paskuda and Shelley and going into the city. We won't stay long." "Stay as long as you want," Garamond said casually. "All right, Vance." O'Hagan gave him a searching glare. "I want to see something of their machine capability as soon as possible. I think that we could get a good idea of what's available, don't you?" "Excellent." Garamond had caught a flash of tangerine farther down the line of aircraft. He quickly disengaged from O'Hagan, walked toward Denise Serra, then hesitated on noticing that she was involved in a discussion with the six other women of the flight crews. He was turning away when she glimpsed him and signaled that he was to wait. A minute later she came to him. looking warm, competent, desirable and everything else he expected a woman to be. The thought of lying with her caused a painful stab in his lower abdomen as glandular mechanisms, too long suppressed, found themselves reactivated. Denise glanced around her, frowned at the proximity of other people, and led the way towards an unspoiled area of tall grass. The quasi-intimacy of her actions pleased Garamond. "It's good to see you again." "It's good to see you, Vance. How do you feel now?" "Better, I'm coming to life again." "I'm glad." Denise gave him a speculative look. "That was an official meeting of the Orbitsville Women's League, detached chapter." "Oh? Carry on, Sister Denise." She smiled briefly. "Vance, they've voted to drop out of the flight." "Unanimously?" "Yes. Five airplanes have to give up eventually, and we might as well pick the spot. The Hummers seem friendly, and making a study of their culture will give us something to do. Apart from bringing up babies, that is." "Do you know how many men will want to stay?" "Most of them. I'm sorry, Vance." "Nobody has to apologize for the operation of simple logic." "But that leaves you only two aircraft, which isn't enough." "That's all right." Garamond wondered how long he could go on in the role of martyr before telling Denise he had already come to terms with himself. She caught his hand. "I know how disappointed you must be." "You're making it easy to take," he said. Denise released his hand instantly and he knew he had said something wrong. He waited impassively. "Has Cliff not told you I'm having a baby?" Denise's eyes were intent on his. "His baby?" Garamond forced himself to compose a suitable reply. "He didn't need to." "You mean he hasn't? Just wait till I get my hands on the big... "I'm not completely blind, Denise." Garamond produced a smile for her. "I knew as soon as I saw both of you together this morning. I just haven't got around to congratulating him yet." "Thanks, Vance. Out here we'll need all the godfathers we can get." "Can't help you there. I'm meters east of here by that time." "Oh!" Denise looked away from him. "I thought..." "That I was quitting? Not until I'm forced to -- and you know better than I do that th'e computers didn't say two aircraft could not reach Beachhead City. It's just a question of odds, isn't it?" "So is Russian Roulette." "I'll see you around, Denise." Garamond turned away, but she caught his arm. "I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry." "Forget it." He squeezed her hand before removing it from his arm. "I really am glad that you and Cliff have something good going. Now, please excuse me -- I have a lot of work to do." G aramond had been occupied for several hours with the load distribution plans for his two remaining aircraft when darkness came. He switched on the fuselage interior lights and continued working with cold concentration, ignoring the sounds of revelry drifting into the cabin on the evening breeze. His fingers moved continually over the calculator keyboard as he labored through dozens of load permutations, striving to decide the best uses for his payload capability. The brief penumbral twilight had fled when he felt vibrations that told him someone was coming aboard. He looked up and saw O' Hagan squeezing his way toward the small chart-covered table. "I've just discovered how much I used to rely on computers," Garamond said. O'Hagan shook his head impatiently. "I've just spent the most fantastic day of my life, and I need a drink to get over it. Where's the supply?" He sat quietly while Garamond found a plastic bottle and handed it to him, then he took a short careful swallow. "This stuff hasn't been aged much." "The man who made it has." "Like the rest of us." O'Hagan took another drink and apparently decided he had devoted too much time to preamble. "We haven't got a hope in hell of getting the bearings we need from these people. Know why?" "Because they've no machine tools?" "Because they make everything by hand. You knew?" "I guessed. They've got some airplanes, but no airplane factory or airport. They've got some cars, but no car factory or roads." "Good work, Vance -- you were way ahead on that one." O'Hagan drummed his fingers on the table, the sound large the narrow confines of the cabin, and his voice lost some of its usual incisiveness. "They picked a road entirely different from ours. No specialization of labor, no mass production, no standardization. Anybody who wants a car or a cake-mixer builds it from scratch, if he has the time and the talent. You noticed their planes and cars were all different?" "Yes. I noticed them counting our ships, too." "So did I, but I didn't know what was going on in their minds. They must have been astonished at seeing seven identical models." "Not astonished," Garamond said. "Mildly surprised, perhaps. I've a feeling these people haven't much curiosity in their make-up. If you allow only one alien per house, that city out there must have a population of twenty thousand or more. Yet I doubt if as many as two hundred came out to look at us today -- and practically all those who came had their own transport." "You mean we got the lunatic fringe." "Gadgeteers, anyway -- probably more interested in our aircraft than in us. They could be a frustrating bunch to have as next-door neighbors." O'Hagan stared portentously at the paperwork scattered on the table. "So you intend to press on?" "Yes." Garamond decided to let the single word do the work of the hundreds he might have used. "Have you got a crew?" "I don't know yet." O'Hagan sighed heavily. "I'm sick to death of Hying, Vance. It's to live among folks who keep inventing the steam engine every couple of years. I'll fly with you." "Thanks, Dennis." Garamond felt a warm prickling in his eyes. "#..." "Never mind the gratitude," O'Hagan said briskly. "Let's see what sort of mess you've been making of these load distributions." against Garamond's expectations, he was able to raise two crews of four to continue the flight. Again making use of the extra lift to be gained from cold air, the two machines took off at dawn and, without circling or giving any aerial signal of goodbye, they flew quietly into the east. Dav #. Estimated range: #. I #, # kilometers This may be my last journal entry. Words seem to be losing their meaning, the act of writing them all significance. I notice that we have virtually stopped speaking to each other. The silence does not imply or induce separateness -- the eight of us have compacted into one. It is simply that there is something embarrassing about watching a man go through the whole pointless performance of shaping his lips and activating his tongue in order to push sound vibrations out on the air. It is peculiar, too, how a spoken word resolves itself into meaningless syllables, and how a single syllable can hang resonating in the air, in your mind, long after the speaker has turned away. I fancy, sometimes, that the same phenomenon takes place with images. We have steered our ships above a thousand seas, ten thousand mountain fanges, all of which have promised to be different -- but which all struck us as the same. A distinctive peak or river bend, a curious group of islands, the coloration of a wooded valley -- geographical features appear before us with the promise of something new and, having cheated us, fall behind. Were it not for the certainty of the inertial guidance system I might imagine we were flying in circles. No, that isn't correct, for we have learned to steer a constant course against the stripings of the sky. We seem to exist, embedded, in a huge crystal paperweight and one of the advantages, perhaps the only one, is that we can tell where we are going by reference to its millefiori design. If I hold the milk-blue curvatures in a certain precise relationship, crossing windshield and prow just so, I can fly for as long as thirty minutes before the black box chimes and edges me to left or right. (The other black box, the portable delton detector, remains inert even after all this time. Dennis was right when he said we were lucky to find that first particle so soon.) The upcurving horizon provides a constant reference for level flying. It occurred to me recently that Orbitsville is so big that we should not be able to detect any upward curvature in the horizon. As usual, Dennis was able to explain that it was an optical illusion -- the horizon is virtually straight but, through a trick of perception, appears to sag in the middle. He told me that the ancient Greeks compensated for the effect when building their temples. The two aircraft are behaving as well as can be expected within their design limits. Each is carrying a reserve powerplant which takes up a high proportion of its payload, but that's unavoidable. A gyromagnetic engine is little more than a block of metal in which most of the atoms have been orchestrated to resonate in tune. It is without doubt one of the best general purpose mediumsized powerplants ever conceived, but it has a fault in that -- without warning and for no apparent reason -- the orchestra can fall into discord and the power output drop to zero. When that happens there is no option but to install a new engine. We can afford it to happen only twice. F ortunately we have had only minor mechanical troubles, nothing serious enough to cause an unscheduled landing. But the potential is there and grows daily. The biggest cause for concern. however, is the biological machinery on board -- our own bodies. Everybody except young Braunek is subject to headaches, constipation, dizziness and nausea. Many of the symptoms are probably due to prolonged stress but, with increasingly unreliable aircraft to fly, we dare not resort to tranquilizers. Dennis in particular is causing me alarm, and an equal amount of guilt. I should never have brought him along. He gets grayer and more tired every day, grows less and less able to do his stint at the controls. The protein and yeast cakes on which we live are not appetizing at the best of times, but Dennis is finding it difficult to keep them down. His weight is decreasing rapidly. I am reaching the conclusion that the mission should be abandoned. This time there are no emotional undertones in my thinking. I simply realize that the gamble is not worth the expenditure of human lives. A short time ago I could not have made such an admission. But that was before we had fully begun to pay for challenging the Big O. The journey we are attempting is perhaps only a hundredth of O's circumference, and of that tiny fraction we have completed only a fraction. My personal punishment for this presumption is that O has scoured out my soul. I can think of my dead wife and child; I can think of Denise Serra; I can think of Elizabeth Lindstrom... and nothing happens. I feel nothing. This is my last diary entry. There is nothing more to write. There is nothing more to say. K neeling on the thrumming floor beside O'Hagan's bunk, Garamond said, "It's summertime down there, Dennis. We've flown right into summer." "I don't care." Beneath its covering of sheets, the scientist's body seemed as frail and fleshless as that of a mummified woman. "I'm positive we could find fruit trees." O'Hagan gave a skeletal grin. "You know what you can do with your fruit trees." "But if you could eat something you'd be all right." "I'm just fine -- all I need is a rest." O'Hagan caught Garamond's wrist. "Vance, you're not going to call of the flight on my account. Promise me that." "I promise." Garamond disengaged the white, too-clean fingers one by one and stood up. The decision, now that it had come, was strangely easy to make. "I'm calling it off on my own account." He ignored the other man's protests and went forward along the narrow aisle to the blinding arena of the cockpit. Braunek was at the controls, Sammy Yamoto beside him in the second pilot's seat. He had removed a cover from the delton detector and was probing inside it. Garamond tapped him on the shoulder. "Why aren't you asleep, Sammy? You were on duty most of the night." Yamoto adjusted his dark glasses. "I'm going to bed down in a minute -- as soon as I put my mind at rest about this pile of junk." "Junk?" "Yes. I don't think it's working." Garamond glanced at the detector's control panel. "According to the operating light, it's working." "I know, but look at this." Yamoto clicked the switch of the main power supply to the detector box up and down several times in succession. The orange letters that spelled system functioning continued to glow steadily in their dark recess. "What a botch," Yamoto said bitterly. "You know, I might never have caught on if a generator hadn't cut itself out during the night. I was sitting here about two hours later when all of a sudden it hit me -- the lights on the detector panel hadn't blinked with all the others." "Does that prove it isn't working?" "Not necessarily -- but it makes me doubt the quality of the whole assembly. Litman deserves to be shot." "Don't worry about it." Garamond lowered himself into the supernumerary seat. "Not at this stage. We have to call off the llight." "Dennis?" "I don't want to seem callous, but -- " Yamoto paused to force a multiconnector into place -- "don't you think he may die anyway?" "I can't take that chance." "Now I have to sound callous. There are seven other men on this..." Yamoto stopped speaking as the delton detector emitted a sharp tap like that of a steel ball dropped onto a metal plate. He instinctively jerked his hand away from the exposed wiring. Garamond raised his eyebrows. "What have you done to it?" "All I've done is fix it." Yamoto gave a quivering, triumphant grin as two more tapping sounds were heard almost simultaneously. "Then what are those noises?" "Those, my friend, are delta particles coming through our screen." The astronomer's words were punctuated by further noises from the machine. "And their frequency indicates we're close to their source." "Close? How close?" Yamoto took out a calculator and his fingers flickered over it. "I'd say about twenty or thirty thousand kilometers." A cool breeze from nowhere played on Garamond's forehead. "You don't mean from Beachhead City." "Beachhead City is the only source we know. That's what it's all about." "But..." A fresh staccato outburst came from the detector as Garamond, knowing he should have been excited, looked out through the front windshield of the aircraft at a range of low mountains perhaps an hour's flying time ahead. They seemed no more and no less familiar than all the others he had seen. "Is this possible?" he said. "Could we have overestimated the flight time by two years?" Yamoto turned an adjusting screw on the delton detector, decreasing the sound level of its irregular tattoo. "Anything is possible on Orbitsville." I t was late on the following day when the two stiff-winged ungainly birds began to gain altitude to cross the Anal green ridges. All crew members, including a feverish-eyed O'Hagan, were gathered to watch as the mountain crests began to sink in submission to their combined wills. Changing parallaxes made the high ground below them appear to shift like sand. Yamoto switched off the detector's incessant pelting with a flourish. "The instrument is no longer of any use to us. Astronomically speaking, we have reached our destination." "How far would you say it is, Sammy?" "A hundred kilometers. Perhaps less." Joe Braunek squirmed in his seat, but his hands and feet were steady on the flying controls. "Then we have to see Beachhead City as soon as we clear this range." Garamond felt the conviction which had been growing in him achieve a leaden solidity. "It won't be there," he announced. "I don't remember seeing a mountain range this close to the city." "It's a pretty low range," Yamoto said uncertainly. "You wouldn't have noticed it unless you had a specific..." His voice faded as the ground tilted and sloped away beneath them to reveal one of Orbitsville's clean light of the sun they could see to the edges of infinity, across oceans of grass and scrub, and there was no sign of Beachhead City. "What do we do now?" Braunek spoke with a curious timidity as he looked back at the other three men. The resilience that all the months of flight had not been able to sap now seemed to have left him. "Do we just fly on?" Garamond, unable to feel shock or disappointment, turned to Yamoto. "Switch on the detector again." "Right." The astronomer reactivated the black box and the cabin immediately filled with a roar like drum-roll. "But we can't change what it says -- we're right on target." "Is it directional?" "Yes." Yamoto glanced at O'Hagan, who nodded tiredly in confirmation. "Swing to the left," Garamond told Braunek. "Not too quickly." The plane banked slowly to the north and, as it did so, the sound from the delton detector steadily decreased until it faded out altogether. "Hold it there! We're now flying at right angles to the precise source of the particle bombardment." Yamoto raised the binoculars and looked in the direction indicated by the aircraft's starboard wing. "It's no use, Vance. There's nothing there." "There has to be something. We've got an hour of daylight left -- take a new bearing and we'll follow it till nightfall." While Yamoto used the lightphone to bring the second crew up to date on what was happening, Joe Braunek steered the aircraft into its new heading and shed height until they were at cruise altitude. The two machines flew on for another hour, occasionally swinging off course to make an up-dated check on their direction. Toward the end of the hour, O'Hagan's strength gave out and he had to be helped back to his bunk. "We messed it up," he said to Garamond, easing himself down. Garamond shook his head as he spread a blanket over the older man's thin body. "It wasn't your fault." "Our basic premise was wrong, and that's unforgivable." "Forget it, Dennis. Besides, you were the one who warned me we had no right to pick up that first particle so soon. As usual, you were right." "Don't try to butter me. I'm too... O'Hagan closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep at once. Garamond made his way back to the cockpit and sat down to weigh the various factors pointing to the ending of the mission. He sensed that the resistance of the other men, which had surprised him earlier, would no longer be a consideration. They had allowed themselves to hope too soon, and Orbitsville had punished them for it. What remained now was the decision on where to make the final landing. His own preference was for the foothills of a mountain chain which would provide them with rivers, variety of vegetation and the psychologically important richness of scenery. It might be best to turn back to the range they had just crossed rather than fly onward over what seemed the most extensive plain they had encountered so far. There was the possibility that something could go wrong with one of the aircraft when they were part way across that eternity of grass; and there was the certainty that what they would find on the far side would be no different from what they had left behind. Unless they came to a sea, Garamond reminded himself. A sea would add even more... "I think we've arrived." Braunek called over his shoulder. "I see something in front of us." Garamond moved up behind the pilot and peered through the forward canopy at the Hat prairie. It stretched ahead, unbroken, for hundreds of kilometers. "I don't see anything." "Straight ahead of us. About ten kilometers." "Is it something small?" "Small? It's huge! Look, Vance, right there!" Garamond followed the exact line of Braunek's pointing finger and a cold unease crept over him as he confirmed his belief that they were looking at featureless flatlands. Yamoto shouldered his way into the cockpit. "What's going on?" "Straight ahead of us," Braunek said. "What do you think that is?" The astronomer shielded his eyes to see better and gave a low whistle. "I don't know, but it would be worth landing for a closer look. But before we go down I want to get an infrared photograph of it." Garamond examined the sandsmooth plain once more, and was opening his mouth to protest when he saw the apparition. He had been looking for an object which distinguished itself from its surroundings by verticality and texture, but this was a vast area of grass that differed from the rest only in that it was slightly darker in color. It could have been taken for a natural variation in the grass, perhaps caused by soil composition, except for the fact that it was perfectly circular. From the approaching aircraft it appeared as a ghostly ellipse of green on green, like a design in an experimental painting. Yamoto opened his personal locker, took out a camera and photographed the slowly expanding circle. He reeled out the print, glanced at it briefly and passed it around for the others to see. On it the area of grass stood out darkly against an orange background. "It's quite a few degrees colder," Yamoto said. "I would say that the entire area seems to be losing heat into space." "What does it mean?" "Well, the grass there is of a slightly different color -- which could mean the soil is absorbing some mineral or other. And there's the heat loss. Plus the fact that radiation from the outside universe is being admitted... It adds up to just one thing." "Which is?" "We've found another entrance to Orbitsville." "How can that be?" Garamond felt a slow unexpected quickening of his spirit. "We did a survey of the equatorial region from the outside. and besides... there's no hole in the shell." #S# "There is a hole," Yamoto said calmly. "But -- a very long time ago -- somebody sealed it up." They landed close to the edge of the circle. Although darkness came flooding in from the east only a few minutes later, they began to dig an exploratory trench. The soil was several meters thick in the area, but in less than an hour an invisible syrupy resistance to their spades told them they had encountered the lenticular Field. Ashort time later a massive diaphragm of rusting metal was uncovered. They sliced through it with the invisible lance of a valency cutter. They levered out a square section. Then, without speaking, each man in turn looked downward at the stars. rpms is North Ten, the most A. advanced of our forward distribution centers," Elizabeth Lindstrom said, a warm note of pride in her voice. "You can see at once the amount of effort and organization that has been put into it." Charles Devereaux walked to the parapet of the roof of the administration building and looked out across the plain. Four hundred kilometers to the south lay Beachhead City. The arrow-straight highway to it was alive with the small wheeled transports of settlers. Here and there on the road, before it faded into the shimmering distance, could be seen the larger shapes of bulk carriers bringing supplies. The highway ended at North Ten, from which point a series of dirt tracks fanned out into the encircling sweep of prairie. For the first few kilometers the tracks made their way through an industrial area where reaping machines gathered the grass used as a source of cellulose to produce plastics for building purposes. Immediately beyond the acetate factories, the homesteads began. The widely spaced dwellings sparkled whitely in the sun. "I'm impressed with everything Starflight has done here. My Lady," Devereaux said, choosing his words with professional care. "Please understand that when I pose questions to you, I do so solely in my capacity as a representative of the Two Worlds Government." Da you think I would waste time answering them otherwise? Elizabeth suppressed the thought and bent her mind to the unfamiliar task of self-control. "I do understand," she assured the dapper gray man, smiling. "It's your duty to make sure that all that can possibly be done to open up Lindstromland is in fact being done." "That's precisely it, My Lady. You see, the people on Earth and Terranova have heard about the fantastic size of Lindstromland. They can't understand why it is that, if there is unlimited living space available, the Government doesn't simply set up a program of shipbuilding on a global scale and bring them here," said Devereaux. "A perfectly understandable point of view." Elizabeth spread her hands to the horizons, fingers flashing with jewel-fire. "But this land I have given to humanity makes its own rules and we have no option but to abide by them. Lindstromland is unthinkably large. Yet by providing only one entrance, and placing restrictions on interior travel and communications, its builders have effectively made it small. My own belief is that they decided to enforce a selection procedure. As long as Lindstromland can accept immigrants only in regulated quantities the quality of the stock that arrives will be higher." "Do you think the concept of stock and breeding would have been familiar to them?" "Perhaps not." Elizabeth realized she had used an unfortunate trigger-word, one to which the upstart of a civil servant reacted unfavorably. It struck her that things had already gone too far when she. President of Starflight, was being forced to placate an obscure official in the weakest government in human history. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of Lindstromland, she was beginning to appreciate, had been ill omens. Devereaux apparently was not satisfied. "It would be a tragedy if Earth were to export attitudes such as nationalism and..." "What I'm saying," Elizabeth cut in, "is that it would be an even bigger tragedy if we were to empty every slum and gutter on Earth into this green land." "Why?" Devereaux met her eyes squarely and she made the discovery that his grayness had a steely quality. "Because the transportation task would be too great to be handled by private concern?" Elizabeth felt her mouth go dry as she fought to restrain herself. Nobody had ever been allowed to speak to her in this manner before, with the possible exception of Captain Garamond -- and he had paid. It was infuriating how these small men, nonentities, tended to lapse into insolence the moment they felt secure. "Of course not," she said, marveling at the calmness of her voice. "There are many sound reasons for regulating population flow. Look at the squalid difficulties there were when the first settlers here encountered those creatures they call Clowns." "Yes. but those difficulties could have been avoided. In fact, we think they may have been engineered." For one heady moment Elizabeth considered burning Devereaux in two where he stood, even if it led to a major incident, even if it meant turning Lindstromland into a fortress. Then it came to her that he -- in abandoning all the rules of normal diplomacy -- was laying his cards on the table. She regarded him closely, trying to decide if he were offering himself for sale. The approach, in greatly modified form, was a familiar one among government employees: show yourself to be dangerous and therefore valuable in proportion. She smiled and moved closer to Devereaux, deliberately stepping inside his proximity rejection zone, a psychological maneuver she had learned at an early age. His face stiffened momentarily, as she had known it would, and she was about to touch him when Secretary Robard appeared on the edge of the stairwell. He was carrying a headset and feeding wire out of a reel as he walked. Elizabeth frowned at him. "What is this, Robard?" "Priority One, My Lady. Your flagship is picking up a radio message you must hear." "Wait there." She moved away from Devereaux. The brusqueness of her man's voice, so out of keeping with his normal manner, told her something important had happened. She silently cursed the obtuse physics of Lindstromland that denied her easy radio contact with the outside universe. A voice was already speaking when she put on the headset. It was unemotional, with an inhuman steadiness, and the recognition of it drained the strength from her legs. Elizabeth Lindstrom sank to her knees, and listened. "... using the resources of the Bissendorfs workshops, we built a number of aircraft in which to fly back to Beachhead City. The ships proved inadequate for the distance involved, but they got eight of us to the point from which I am making this broadcast. We have discovered here a second entrance to the sphere. "The entrance was not discovered during the equatorial survey because it is sealed with a metal diaphragm. The metal employed has nothing in common with the material of the Orbitsville shell. I believe it is the product of a civilization no further advanced than our own. We had no difficulty cutting a hole in it to let us extend a radio antenna." There was a crackling pause, then the voice emerged strongly in its relentless measured tones. "The fact that we were able to find a second entrance so quickly, with such limited resources, probably means there must be many others. Many hundreds. Many thousands, possibly. It is logical to assume that all the others have been similarly blocked, and it is equally logical to assume that the blocking was not done by the builders of the sphere. "This raises questions about the identity and motivation of those who sealed the entrances. The evidence suggests that the work was carried out by a race of beings who found Orbitsville long before we did. We may never know what those beings looked like, but we can tell that they shared some of the faults of our own race. They, or some of them, decided to monopolize Orbitsville, to control it, to exploit it; and the method they chose was to limit access to the interior of the sphere. "The evidence also shows that they succeeded for a time -- and that, eventually, they failed. "Perhaps they were destroyed in the battle we know to have taken place at the Beachhead City entrance. Perhaps in the end they lost out to Orbitsville itself. By being absorbed and changed, just as we are going to be absorbed and changed. The lesson for us now is that the entire Starflight organization -- with its vested interest in curbing humanity's natural expansion -- must be cast aside. All of Orbitsville is open to us. It is available as I speak... Elizabeth removed the headset, cutting herself off from the dreadful, didactic voice. She put her hands on the smooth surface of the roof and sank down until she was lying prone, her open mouth pressed against the footprinted plastic. Vance Gantmond, she thought, her mind sinking through successive levels of cryogenic coldness. I have to love you... because you are the only one ever to have given me real pain, ever to have hurt me. You hurt me now. She moved her hips from side to side, grinding against the roof with her pubis. Now that all else is ending... it is HI iii Perhaps the most significant novel of # from mv turn... to make love... to vou... "My Lady, are you ill?" The voice reached her across bleak infinities. Elizabeth raised her head and, with effort, identified the gray, anxious face of Charles Devereaux. She got to her feet. "How dare you!" she said coldly. "What are you suggesting?" "Nothing. I..." "Why did you let this person enter my quarters?" Elizabeth turned and stared accusingly at Robard, who had quietly retrieved the headset and was reeling in the attached wire. "Get him out of here!" "I'm going -- I've seen enough." Devereaux hurried toward the stairwell. Elizabeth watched him go, twisting a ruby ring on her finger as she did so. It turned easily on bearings of perspiration. Robard bowed nervously. "If you will excuse me..." "Not yet," Elizabeth snapped. "Get me Doctor Killops on that thing." "Yes, My Lady." Robard murmured into the instrument, listened for a moment, then handed it to her. He began to withdraw but she pointed at a spot nearby, silently ordering him to stay. Elizabeth raised the communicator to her lips. "Tell me. Doctor Killops, has Mrs. Garamond had her sedative today yet? No? Then don't give it to her. Captain Garamond is returning, alive, and we want his wife to be fully conscious and alert for the" reunion." She threw down the instrument and Robard stooped to pick it up. "Never mind that," Elizabeth said quietly. "Get my car ready to leave in five minutes. I have urgent business in Beachhead City." T he shock of hearing by radio that his wife and son were still alive had stormed through Garamond's system like a nuclear fireball. In its wake had come relief, joy, gratitude, bafflement, renewal of optimism -- and finally, as a consequence of emotional overload, an intense physical reaction. There was a period of several hours during which he experienced cold sweats, irregular heartbeat and dizziness; and the symptoms were at their height when the little transit boat from fleet headquarters arrived underfoot. As had happened once before, he felt disoriented and afraid on seeing a spacesuited figure clamber upward through a black hole in the ground. The figure was followed by others carrying empty spacesuits. When the faceplates had been removed and the two parties were mingling, they still looked strange to him. At some time in the preceding months he had come to accept the thin-shouldered shabbiness of his own crew as the norm, and now the members of the rescue party seemed too sleek and shiny, too alien. "Captain Garamond?" A youthful Starflight officer approached him and saluted, beardless face glowing with pleasure and health. "I'm Lieutenant Kenny of the Westmorland. This is a great honor for me, sir." "Thank you." The action of returning the salute felt awkward to Garamond. Kenny's gaze strayed to the sloping stiff-winged outlines of the two aircraft and his jaw sagged. "I'm told you managed to fly a couple of shifts. That must have been fantastic." Garamond suppressed an illogical resentment. "You might call it that. The Westmorland? Isn't that coming with us. He's waiting for you aboard the transit boat now. I'll have to photograph those airplanes, sir -- they're just to..." "Not now, Lieutenant. My Chief Science Officer is ill and must be hospitalized at once. The rest of us aren't in great shape, either." Garamond tried to keep his voice firm even though a numbness had enveloped his body, creating a sensation that his head was floating in the air like a balloon. Kenny, with a flexibility of response that further dismayed Garamond, was instantly solicitous. He began shouting orders and within a few minutes the eight members of the Bisscndor's crew had been suited up for transfer to the waiting boat. Garamond's mind was brimming with thoughts of Aileen and Chris as he negotiated the short spacewalk, with its swaying vistas of star rivers and its constrained breathing of rubber-smelling air. As soon as he had passed through the airlock he made his way to the forward compartment, which seemed impossibly roomy after his months in the aircraft's narrow fuselage. Another spacesuited figure rose to greet him. "It's good to see you, Vance," eyed, silver-haired man who had been in the Exploration Arm for twenty years and treated his job of wandering unknown space as if he was the pilot of a local ferry. "Thanks, Hugo. It's good to..." Garamond shook his head to show he had run out of words. "You don't look well, Vance. Rough trip?" "Rough trip." "Enough said, skipper. We're keeping the suits on, but strap yourself in and relax -- we'll have you home in no time. Try to get some sleep." Garamond nodded gratefully. "Have you seen my wife and boy?" "No. Unlike you, I'm just a working flickerwing man and I don't get invited out to the Octagon." "The Octagon! What are they doing there?" "They've been staying with the President ever since you... ah... disappeared. They're celebrities too, you know. Reflected glory, and all that." "But..." A new center of coldness began to form within Garamond's body. "Tell me, Hugo, did the President send you here to pick us up?" "No. It was an automatic reaction on the part of Fleet Command. The President is out at North Ten -- that's one of the forward supply depots we've built." "Will she have heard my first message yet?" gloved finger at Garamond. "Starting to sweat over some of those things you said about Starflight? Don't worry about it -- we all know you've been under a strain. You can say you got a bit carried away by the occasion." Garamond took a deep breath. "Are there any airplanes or other rapid transport systems in use around Beachhead City?" "Not yet. All the production has been concentrated on ground cars and housing." "How long will it take the President to get back to the Octagon?" "It's hard to say -- the cars they produce aren't built for speed. Eight hours, maybe." "How long till we get back?" "Well, I'm allowing five hours in view of Mister Q'Hagan's condition." "Speed it up, Hugo," Garamond said. "I have to be back before the President, and she's had a few hours start." tion panel on which changing color configurations showed that the ship was sealed and almost ready for flight. "That would mean fairly high G-forces. For a sick man..." "He won't mind -- go ask him." "I don't see..." "Suppose I said it was a matter of life or death?" "I wouldn't believe you, but..." opened an audio channel to the flight deck, and instructed the pilot to make the return journey in the shortest possible time consistent with O'Hagan's health. Garamond thanked him and tried to relax in the G-chair, wishing he had been able to take the other man into his and uncomplicated, with a high regard for authority. It would have been difficult, possibly disastrous, for Garamond to try telling him he believed Elizabeth Lindstrom was a psychopath who would enjoy murdering an innocent woman and asking why Elizabeth had not done it as soon as she had had the chance, and Garamond would not have been able to answer. It would not have been enough to say that he felt it in his bones. He closed his eyes as the acceleration forces clamped down, but his growing conviction of danger made it impossible for him to rest. Thirty minutes into the flight he got an idea. "Do you think there'll be a reception when we get back? A public one?" "You keep hogging the news. Even while you were away a reporter called Mason, I think, ran a campaign to persuade somebody to go looking for your ship. The betting was ten thousand-to-one that you were dead, though, so he didn't have much success." Garamond had forgotten about the reporter from Earth. "You said my wife and boy are well known, too. I want them to meet me at the Beachhead City transit tube. Can you arrange that?" "I don't see why not. There's a direct communications link to the Octagon from the President's flagcommand microphone of his spacesuit, waited, spoke again, and then settled into a lengthy conversation. Only occasional whispers of sound came through his open faceplate, but Garamond could hear the exchange becoming heated. When it still for a moment before turning to speak. "Sorry, Vance." "What happened?" "Apparently the President has sent instructions from North Ten that your family is to wait in the Octagon until you get there. She's on her way there now, and they can't contact her, so nobody would authorize transportation into the City for your wife. I don't understand it." "I think I do," Garamond replied quietly, his eyes fixed on the forward view plate and its image of a universe divided in two by the cosmic hugeness of Orbitsville, one half in light, the other in total darkness. T he effort of moving under multiple gravities was almost too much for Garamond, but he was standing in the cramped airlock -- sealed up and breathing suit air -- before the transit boat reached the docking clamps. He cracked the outer seal the instant the green disembarkation light came on, went through the boat's outer door and found himself in a lighted I-shaped tube. It was equipped with handrails and, at the rounded corner where the sphere's gravitation came into effect, there was the beginning of a non-skid walkway. Garamond pulled himself along the weightless section with his hands, forced his way through the invisible syrup of the lenticular field, achieved an upright position and strode into the arrival hall. He was immediately walled in by faces and bodies and, as soon as he opened his helmet, battered by the sound of shouting and cheering. People surged around him, reaching for his hands, slapping his back, pulling hoses and connectors from his suit for souvenirs. At the rear of the crowd were men with scene recorders. As he scanned their faces, an uncontrollable impulse caused Garamond to raise his arm like a Twentieth Century astronaut returning from an orbital mission. He cursed the autonomous limb, appalled at its behavior, and concentrated on finding the right face in the bewildering, seething mass, aware of how much he had always depended on Cliff Napier in similar circumstances. There was a high proportion of men in the uniforms of top-ranking Starflight officials, any of whom could have arranged transport to the Octagon, but he had no way of knowing which were members of Elizabeth's inner cadre and therefore hostile. After a blurred moment he saw a heavyshouldered young man with prematurely graying hair working his way toward him. Colbert Mason! "Captain Garamond," Mason shouted above the background noise. "I can't tell you how much..." Garamond shook his head. "We can talk later. Have you a car?" "It's outside. I ' "I've got to get out of here right now." Mason hesitated. "There's official Starflight transportation waiting" "Remember the first day we met, Colbert? You needed wheels in a hurry and #... "Come on." Mason lowered his head and charged through the crowd like an ice-breaking ship. Garamond. hampered by the bulk of the suit, struggled in his wake. In a few moments they had reached a white vehicle with two worlds news agency blazoned on its side in orange letters. The two men got in, watched by the retinue that had followed them from the hall, and Mason got the vehicle moving. "Where to?" he asked. "The Octagon -- as fast as this thing will go." "Okay, but I'm not welcome there. The guards won't let my car in." "I'm not welcome either, but we're going in just the same." Garamond began working on the zips of the spacesuit. That was a good line to hand the Press, he thought as the yammerings of panic began to build up. That was an authentic general-purpose man of action speaking. Why do I do these things? Why don't I let him know I'm scared shitless? It might makes things easier... Mason hunched over the wheel as the car sped through the industrial environs of the city. "This is the part you flattened, but they rebuilt it just as ugly as ever." "They would." "Can you tell me what's going on?" Garamond hesitated. "Sorry, Colbert -- not yet." "I just wondered." "Either way, you're going to get another big story." "Hell, I know that much already. I just wondered... as a friend." "I appreciate the friendship, but I can't talk till I'm sure." "It's all right," Mason said. "We'll be there in less than ten minutes." For the rest of the drive Garamond concentrated on removing the spacesuit. In the confines of the car it was an exhausting, frustrating task which he welcomed because it enabled his mind to hold back the tides of fear. By the time he had finally worked himself free, the octagonal building housing Starflight Center loomed on a hilltop straight ahead. He could make out the perimeter fence with its strolling guards. As the car gained height, and greater stretches of the surrounding grasslands came into view, Garamond saw that there was also a northern approach road to the Octagon. Another vehicle, still several kilometers away, was speeding along it, trailing a plume of saffron dust. It was too far away for him to distinguish the black-andwhite silver Starflight livery, but on the instant a steel band seemed to clamp around his chest, denying him air. He stared wordlessly at the massive gate of the west entrance. The car slowed down as guards emerged from their kiosk. "Go straight through it," Garamond urged. "Don't slow down." Mason said, "It would take a tank to batter down that gate -- we'd both be killed. We'll just have to talk our way in." "Talk?" Garamond looked north and saw that the other vehicle seemed to be approaching with the speed of an aircraft. "There's no time for talking." H e leaped from the car as soon as it had slid to a halt and ran to the kiosk door at the side of the gate. A sun-visored guard emerged, carrying a ray gun, and stared warily at Garamond's stained travesty of a Starlight uniform. "State your business," he said, at the same time making a signal to the other two guards seated inside. "I'm Captain Garamond of the Stellar Exploration Arm. Open the gate immediately." The man's mouth fell open. "I don't know if I can do that, even for you, Captain Garamond." "You've heard of me, haven't you? You know who I am?" "I do know who you are. Captain. I -- I think you're the greatest! But that doesn't mean I should let you in. Have you an authorization?" "Authorization?" Garamond considered putting on a display of righteous indignation, but decided it would not work. He smiled and pointed at the dust-devil now within a kilometer of the northern gate. "There's my authorization. President Lindstrom is in that car, coming here especially to meet me." "How do I know that's true? I mean -- " "You'll know when she finds out you wouldn't let me through. I think I'll go back to my car and watch what happens." Garamond turned away. "Just a minute." The guard gave Garamond a perplexed look. "You can come in, but that other guy stays where he is." Garamond shrugged and walked straight at the gate. It rolled out of his way just in time, then he was inside the perimeter and heading for the Octagon's west entrance door, not more than a hundred paces away. A second before it was lost to view behind the flank of the building, he glimpsed the other car arriving at the north gate. It was black and silver, and he was able to see a pale feminine figure in the shaded interior. The certainty of being too late made his heart lapse into an unsteady, lumping rhythm. He was breaking into a run, regardless of what the watchful patrolmen might think, when his attention was caught by a flicker of movement as a window opened in the transparent wall of the uppermost floor. Again he picked out a womanly figure, but this time it was that of his wife. And she was looking down at him. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. "Aileen! Can you hear me?" "Vance!" Her voice was faint and tremulous, almost lost in the updraft at the sheer wall. "Pick up Chris and bring him down to this door as fast as you can." He indicated the nearby entrance. "Did you get that?" "Yes -- I'm coming down." Aileen vanished from the window. Garamond went to the door, held it open and saw a short, deserted corridor with four openings on each side. He debated trying to find stairs or elevator shaft, then decided that if he tried to meet Aileen part way he might miss her. Elizabeth was bound to be in the building by this time and on her way up to the private suite. Aileen and Christopher should be on their way down. But suppose there were only one central stairwell and they met Elizabeth head on? Garamond entered a chill dimension of time in which entire galaxies were created and destroyed between each thunderous beat of his heart. He tried to think constructively, but all that was left to him was the ability to be afraid, to feel pain and terror and... One of the corridor doors burst open. He caught a flash of brown skin and multicolored silks, then Aileen was in his arms. We've made it, Garamond exulted. We're all going to live. "Is it really you?" Aileen's face was cool and tear-wet against his own. "Is it really you, Vance?" "Of course, darling. There's no time to talk now. We've got to get..." Garamond's voice was stilled as he made the discovery. "Where's Chris?" Aileen looked at him blankly. "He's upstairs in his bed. He was asleep..." "But I told you to bring him!" "Did you? I can't think..." Aileen's eyes widened. "What's wrong?" "She's gone up there to get Chris. I told you to..." Voices sounded behind him and Garamond's hunting eyes saw that two guards had followed him nearly to the entrance. They had stopped and were looking up at the building. Holding Aileen by the wrist, Garamond ran to them and turned. High up within the transparent wall, where Aileen had been a minute earlier, Elizabeth Lindstrom was standing, pearly abdomen pressed against the clear plastic. She stared down, screened by reflected clouds, and raised one arm in langorous triumph. Garamond rounded on the nearest guard and, with a single convulsive movement, snatched the gun from his shoulder and sent him sprawling. He thumbed the safety catch off, selected maximum power and raised the weapon -- just in time to see Elizabeth step backward away from the wall, into shelter. Garamond 's eyes triangulated on his wife's ashen face. "Is the kid's room on this side of the building?" "Yes. I..." "Where is it? Show me the exact place." Aileen pointed at a wall section two meters to the left of where Elizabeth had been standing. The fallen guard got to this feet and came forward with outstretched hands, while his companion stood by uncertainly. Garamond pointed at the power setTing on the rifle, showing it to be at the lethal maximum. The guard backed off, shaking his head. Garamond raised the weapon again, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The needlefine laser ray pierced the transparent plastic and, as he swung the gun, took out an irregular smoking area that tumbled flashing to the ground. A second later, as Garamond had prayed, a small pajama-clad figure appeared in the opening. Christopher Garamond rubbed his eyes, peering sleepily into space. Garamond dropped the rifle and ran forward, waving his arms. "Jump, Chris. Jump!" The sound of his hoarse, frightened voice almost obliterated the thought: He won't do it; nobody would do it. "Come on, son -- I'll catch you." Christopher drew back his shoulders. A pale shape appeared behind him, grasping. Christopher jumped cleanly through the opening, into sunlit air. As had happened once before, on a quiet terrace on Earth, Garamond saw the childish figure falling and turning, falling and turning, faster and faster. As had happened once before, he found himself running in a slow-motion nightmare, wading, struggling through molasses-thick tides of air. He sobbed his despair as he lunged forward. Something solid and incredibly weighty hit him on the upper chest, tried to smash his arms from their sockets. He went down into dusty grass, rolling with the priceless burden locked against his body. From a corner of his eye he saw a flash of laser fire stab downward and expire harmlessly. Garamond stood up, treasuring the feel of the boy's arms locked around his neck. "All right, son?" he whispered. "All right?" Christopher nodded and pressed his face into Garamond's shoulder, clinging like a baby. Garamond estimated he was beyond the effective range of Elizabeth's ring weapons and ran toward the gate without looking back at the Lindstrom Center. Aileen, who had been standing with her hands over her mouth, ran with him until they had reached the perimeter. The guards, frozen within tjheir kiosk, watched them with uncomprehending eyes. Colbert Mason was standing beside his car holding up a scene recorder. He glanced at a dial on the side of the machine. "That took two minutes less fifteen seconds," he said admiringly, then kissed the recorder ecstatically. "And it was all good stuff." "The best is yet to come," Garamond assured him, as they crowded into the car. G aramond, made sensitive to the nature of the benevolent trap, never again went far into the interior of Orbitsville. Not even when Elizabeth Lindstrom had been deposed and removed from all contact with society; not even when the Starflight enterprise had made way for communal transport schemes as natural and all-embracing as the yearly migration of birds to warmer climes; not even when geodesic networks of commerce were stretched across the outer surface of Orbitsville. He chose to live with his family on the edges of space, from which viewpoint he could best observe, and also forget, that time was drawing to a close for the rest of humanity. Time is a measurement of change. Evolution is a product of competition. Those concepts were without meaning or relevance in the context of the Big O. Absolved of the need to fight or flee, to feel hunger or fear, to build or destroy, to hope or dream, humanity soon was to cease being human -- even though the metamorphosis would not take place within a single season. During Garamond' s lifetime there was a last flare-up of that special kind of organized activity which, had man not been drawn like a wasp into the honeypot, might have enabled his descendants to straddle the universe. There was a magical period when, centered on a thousand star-pools, a thousand new nations were born. All of them felt free to develop and flower in their own separate ways, but all were destined to become as one under the influence of Orbitsville' s changeless savannahs. In time even the flickerwing ships ceased to ply the trade lanes between the entrance portals, because there can be no reward for the traveler when departure point cannot be distinguished from destination. The quiet of that last long Sunday fell over an enttre region of space. Orbitsville had achieved its purpose.  Gentlemen: In today's mail I received the February # issue of Galaxy. This is the first copy that I have received in over eight months. My subscription expired in October of # and I wish it to remain that way. Perhaps Science has caught up with the Science-fiction writers or perhaps it is me that has changed but it seems to me that the quality of the stories has deteriorated to the extent that I have given up on them. Perhaps the writers (good ones, that is) have either passed on or became too affluent. Where are the stories about Retief, Van Ryn, the Star Trader, the Rim Worlds, Stellar Colonization and etc. You are not the only one to feel my axe. I have been a subscriber to Analog ever since it started as 'Astounding' but as of this August, I am cancelling for the reasons given above. My only reason for stating this as I have is, perhaps it will build a little fire under someone that someone else will benefit. Sincerely Myrum J. Mudgett P.S. In case you are wondering, I am # years of age and started reading Science Fiction in # -- a magazine put out by Hugo Gernsback. Since writing the above I have read The Man Who Killed Hope'. This is a good example of what I mean. That story would have better been put in Readers Digest Book of the Month Club. More about lawyers As the new editor I am taking the liberty of sending you copies of June Galaxy and Worlds of IF in the hopes that you will be pleasantly surprised.  agree -- sf has been better. But it is my firm belief that -- certainly in this magazine ! -- it will soon be better than ever! # Mary Park City, #. # April #, # Dear Mr. Baen, At last, a decent science column. Galaxy can only benefit from A Step Farther Out, and I can think of no one better qualified than Jerry Pournelle to write it. The man has a natural talent for putting across complex ideas in a form that excites and awes the reader. I personally would rather read his non-fiction than his fiction. I hesitate to say that, as I am fond of his fiction, but it's difficult to find an author who can respond to my cravings for good science articles. Perhaps I represent a minority group, I don't know. Recently I learned you have taken over as editor at Galaxy. (Best wishes.) Since the science column is a new addition, I feel a need to urge you to keep it, and I'd like to tell you why. Although I can speak only for myself, it should be safe to say your readers are more than casually interested in science. I would hazard a guess that most of the science and technology books of the popular variety are sold to sf readers. But beyond these books there are very few sources for a reader to turn toward. 'Popular Science'. 'Science Digest', and the like are apt to focus on readers with little interest in basic science. Instead they publish reports on the latest innovations from Detroit or articles of the Sunday supplement variety. While this is fine for the general public, I don't think it satisfies the average fan. He is already aware of most of the material these magazines print. But when he turns to find a more informative source, he has to make a standing broad jump into the technical journals. Now, most fans can follow these, I'm sure, but the journals are too pointed, too limited in scope to be really satisfying. Thus, I strongly believe there is a demand among your readership for a middleground. Also, I think that after the column has been established your readers would look forward to it as much as the stories. (Especially a column in the hands of Dr. Pournelle.) There are other advantages -- the association of good sf with hard science, a column the readers can anchor to in each issue, a sounding board for new ideas in the real world. Having gone this far, I'd also like to point out some of the things I'd like to see, and some I wouldn't. First, historical of the Asimov variety. Before I cut Isaac's column, let me praise it. Here is an example of the success a science column can produce. Certainly, Isaac's column has been good for FSF. I also buy that particular magazine, and the first thing I read in it is the science column. Perhaps it's because of long association, but I'm always confident that, even if the fiction doesn't do a lot for me in this particular issue, my money has not been wasted. However, history of science can get rather tiring after a while. I wish Isaac would write one book on science history, and then drop the subject. I am more interested in what is going on today. After all, over # of all science has been discovered and developed in this century. Next, a column, as opposed to freelance articles as found in Analog, offers a chance to explore subjects of interest in greater depth. The articles can be cascaded, and old material need not be repeated. For example, one of the subjects I'd like to see covered is propulsion systems. One article could deal with basic theory, not too difficult, and the next few could then examine chemical rockets, laser, nuclear pulse, ion, fission pile, fusion drive, solar reflection, and then an article on pure speculation. The last article might examine the relative merits of each. Other subjects I'd like to see include energy sources, the recent revolution in geology, advances in medicine, and anything and everything that deals with space travel. In fact, let me make one special plea. It irks me to the core to hear some ignorant fool make a statement like, "What good has the space program done for us. We rocks." Unfortunately, my tongue ties itself in a knot when I try to destroy him. I would like to see one article that could point out in hard figures how well space has paid off. (Example, weather satellites alone have more than paid for it by saving would frame such an article. I would memorize it. Sigh. In summary, I want to appplaud Galaxy for A Step Farther Out. With your guidance and Jerry Pournelle's skill, the series can only be a terrific success. Always your friemi, fan, and follower, Daniel C. Smith You might also take a look at the August issue of Worlds of IF, wherein you will find Torchships Now, an article dealing with the application of pulse-fusion techniques to reaction drives for spacevehicles. This is the first in a series by Dick Hoagland, who has been, among many other things, Science Advisor to Walter Cronkite. The series is entitled, appropriately been accused by one writer of having a prediliction for "gee whiz " science-articles. I fear his accusation may have a certain basis in fact . ) Send to: Galaxy # E. #th Street New York, New York, # An Editorial Appeal Commencing with the June issues, Galaxy and Worlds of If will begin to fully show the results of an entirely new editorial policy. For example, the combined author line-up for June reads like a Who'.s Who of the field: Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Alexei and Cory Panshin, Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, Mack Reynolds, Fred Saberhagen, James H. Schmitz, Robert Silverberg, Ted you'll agree. Check the contents-pages (themselves so changed as to be virtual new features) and you will find several additions. Galaxy: Forum, a platform for sf andor science notables who feel they have something important -- and interesting! -- to convey to the readership; Interface, an intermittent series of interviews cum thumbnail biographies by Ted Sturgeon (scheduled to begin in July with an interview of Roger Elwood); Showcase, (also scheduled for July) a non-verbal feature -- a new piece of sf-art by an acknowledged master, which has as its only justification that its creator thinks it's something special. And of course Bookshelf, Directions and Galaxy Stars will continue to flourish as of yore -- more than yore, in fact. Worlds of If: The Alien Viewpoint, an insider's view of sf. Crusty, hard-bitten, cynical old Dick Geis (EditorPublisher of The Alien Critic ) lays it on the line -- his opinions are not necessarily those of the management! Ars Gratia, much like Galaxy Showcase, but for Up-and-Comers; Future Perfect, next issue's goodies -- at least some of them; The Editor's Page in June is devoted to my personal favorite among the many past editors of Worlds of If. In future, it will be what the name implies -- the editor's page. And, as with Galaxy, all the old features will remain in residence. But all of this takes money, a good deal of it -- and the profit motive remains an operant factor in the publishing industry. To advertisers to take advantage of the trio combination, we are now offering a discount price of # per word to run in the three issues that appear in a #-month period. Our regular price is now # a word per issue. Whatever your choice...it's a bargain. choice...it's a bargain. science fiction and fantasy magazines from # to date. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA. #B wants to: SS Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Illustrated catalog of SF-Fantasy books. Over # titles listed. Send #c for one, I .# for next #, or # for four consecutive catalogs plus Silverberg's "Dying Inside" a # publisher's edition SF book. Send to: Purple Unicorn Books, #-G# London Road, Duluth, Minn. #. and construction. Sample copy I .#. Waldwick, New Jersey #. Sell Analog March # to present. Send offer to Harris, # W. #th Ave., Arvada, Colorado, #. Prevent the Second Coming. Our humanity's role in Earth's approaching adventurous era. #c (stamps O.K.). Vanguard, #-G Waverley, Palo Alto, Calif. #. remember. No memorization. Release "Photographic" memory. Forget nothing! Liberates Extraordinary knowlsults! Free information. 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Now I am a great soft jelly thing. I have no mouth. And I must scream. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" packs such a wallop it walked off with a Hugo -- science fiction's Oscar -- for the best short story of the year. Ellison's wild tale is waiting for you in a sensational #-page, double volume of all the Hugo winners from # to #. This anthology can be yours as part of an equally sensational #-booksfor-IOd offer when you join the Science Fiction Book Club. Choose any # books on this page, including, if you wish, The Hugo Winners, Volumes I  II (a # value). Here's how the Club works: When your membership is accepted, you'll receive your choice of # books for just # (plus shipping and handling). If not absolutely fascinated, return them within ten days -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin describing the # coming Selections and Alternate choices. 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Pub. ed. # #. Nebula Award Stories Seven, Lloyd Biggie. Jr... Ed. The latest novellas and #. Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. From Childhood's End author, dazzling, visionary novel of a self-contained world in space. Pub. ed. # #. Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed. Forty-six pieces, short stories  novels. Explicit scenes and language may be oHensive lo some. Pub. ed. # #. A Princess ot #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant #-in-l voljme of # award-winning stories. # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. The Lett Hand ot Darkness, by Ursula K. Leguin. Jolting novel of alien society whose inhabitants are human -- but ambisexual. Pub ed. # #. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. The master's first novel in # years . and worth the wait for a fabulous trip to the year #. Pub. ed. # #. A Time ot Changes by Robert novel of strange planet where human beings must despise themselves. #I Nebula award winner. Spec. Ed. The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own compieie hardbound editions sometimes altered In size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted In U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slighlly different in Canada Galaxy PiserchiaLawrencePangbornSturgeonPournelle #ist Edition # --  # "Arthur has done it again -- proved that the chief ingredient of superior science fiction is story. His sense of presence and of real people involved in real experiences is unfailing." Frank Herbert "What an absolute pleasure...Imagine, an astronomical story by someone who knows astronomy It was delightful to be presented with a scene to stagger the imagination and yet have it described so exactly and meticulously as to know you have been there." Isaac Asimov "Solid... written so that everyone can enjoy it...As always, Arthur C. 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Over # comix, a value of # for only #. (Siffuture) Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director 'Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose' the song says, and freedom was all old Earth had left to offer. A tragi-farce regarding the possible catastrophic consequences of mixing cybernetics and mothers-in-law...# A science-fiction allegory on the nature of Man, Woman -- and Pig. "There should be that moment, frozen in stone, when Cain met Abel, and slew him, and made his weapons thenceforth of quartzite... and fathered the human race." -- Robert Ardrey, African Genesis... # This story carries the present incipient oil shortage to its all-too-logical conclusion. With every passing year the potency of our technology grows greater -- as does the potential for frightfulness resulting from its misuse. Continuing the adventures of Demetrios, who, before the bombs fell, was Adam Freeman. He has lust finished telling the true story of the Prophet Abraham, and the policemen have arrived. In which Ted, in addition to reviewing several books of merit, treats us to a cameo analysis of sf that speaks volumes! Television: Never-Never Land and Clarke's Third Law -- a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the relationship between sf and reality, as interpreted by the Tube. Technology and Brainpower: Two Revolutions -- Technology-as-cornucopia is the theme of this month's science article. Letters from Denholm, Mathews, Prinette, Borden, Mabee, Hudson. Another in a non-verbal series. Interior illustrations by Fabian, Freff, Gaughan, Pini lishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson. President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-issue subscription in the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventions. Ail rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. An Editorial Appeal Commencing with the June issues, Galaxy and Worlds of If will begin to fully show the results of an entirely new editorial policy. For example, the combined author line-up for June reads like a Who's Who of the field: Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Alexei and Cory Panshin, Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, Mack Reynolds, Fred Saberhagen, James H. Schmitz, Robert Silverberg, Ted you'll agree. Check the contents-pages (themselves so changed as to be virtual new features) and you will find several additions. Galaxy: Forum, a platform for sf andor science notables who feel they have something important -- and interesting! -- to convey to the readership; Interface, an intermittent series of interviews cum thumbnail biographies by Ted Sturgeon (scheduled to begin in July with an interview of Roger Elwood); Showcase, (also scheduled for July) a non-verbal feature -- a new piece of sf-art by an acknowledged master, which has as its only justification that its creator thinks it's something special. And of course Bookshelf, Directions and Galaxy Stars will continue to flourish as of yore -- more than yore, in fact. Worlds of If: The Alien Viewpoint, an insider's view of sf. Crusty, hard-bitten, cynical old Dick Geis (EditorPublisher of The Alien Critic) lays it on the line -- his opinions are not necessarily those of the management! Ars Gratia, much like Galaxy Showcase, but for Up-and-Comers ; Future Perfect, next issue's goodies -- at least some of them; The Editor's Page in June is devoted to my personal favorite among the many past editors of Worlds of If. In future, it will be what the name implies -- the editor's page. And, as with Galaxy, all the old features will remain in residence. But all of this takes money, a good deal of it -- and the profit motive remains an operant factor in the publishing industry. To H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained. It has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. authors of the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecology -- space exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague dm Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menzel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A. E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut , Jr. # last # Street tor either of these distinguished New York, N.T ## periodicals is # for # issues.) Enclosed find  in payment for my subscription as checked above. His choice was a simple one ultimate responsibility, or -- I O n his twenty-fifth birthday, Grom Gravok left Vizillo to go on his Maturity Trip. A delegation ol elders saw him off, mostly younger men; but his father and uncles were also in the group, and so were his mother, two sisters, and Marushka, his bride-to-be. The men were misty-eyed and choked up at departure time. The women cried. Marushka cried most of all. Grom was off to the Splendid Freedom. Would he come back to her? Grom felt a catch of sadness in his throat as he embraced them all, Marushka last. Her face was salty, her lips soft, and her breath sweet. He tore himself away and ran to the mouth of the tunnel that fed the TC Liner Mulinov. Before he ducked into the tube, he turned and waved once more. On his shoulder hung a red bag labelled Time Collapse Intragalactica. The night before the entire gorushkii had gathered to celebrate his coming of age. Three hundred souls, not counting children, filled the basement of Miriam Church on #th Level. The tables groaned with eighty-five species of fish. Wine and cicillo flowed. The flat, the deep-bellied, and the triangulated baulaikos resounded with the tremolo. By midnight the men formed circles and danced the squat-kick csanlasnok. slowly at first, hands on hips; then faster and faster; the watchers clapped their hands and cried "Hay!... Hay!... Hay!" with every kick. Faces grew red, then purple. Total strangers came up to Grom and kissed him with tears in their eyes. "We'll miss you on the heights," they said. "Remember us in the Splendid Freedom." "The mountains," they said; "the prairies blowing in the wind. The solid land." Under the tables and in corners little children slept with rosy cheeks. The gorushka celebrated until dawn. He crossed fifty parsecs in three weeks. Then Malinov broke from Time into Present off the moon. They landed within hours. Grom took a number for the shuttle and checked into El-tuna, the tourist class lunar transit hotel. His room was two meta wide and four meta long. One end had a door, the other a curved space-glass window. It looked out over the bright gray solidity of craters. On the third day earth rose over the stark horizon, a blue-gray spherical magnificence, its face obscured by a tattered veil of clouds. Every twenty minutes El-tuna shook from its foundations up as the catapault discharged another ship toward the earth. The shuttle never rested; seventy-two shots a day, without interruption, a thousand souls a shot for the cheap gravity trip to the Mother planet. Despite frequent departures, Grom waited a week to make the final leg of the journey. The station teemed with humanity. He spent his time in surface exploration. El-tuna rented spacesuits for the purpose and sold maps with excursion hikes marked in a dotted red line. The space port facilities put him off. Luna station never slept. It had a worn, soiled, grimy look. In the eating places the grilles never cooled; the coffee pots forever bubbled; the plastic booths had an oily feel. He didn't dare go to the shows, even if they had been cheap. The Discipline forbade such frivolities, and the Splendid Freedom did not begin until his feet touched terran soil. He liked the vast, solid emptyness of the moon. He took to the space-suit in no time at all. It was clumsier by far than the grav-suits he was so used to. The principles of motion were the same. In minutes he could run off the horizon and leave Luna station behind. Then he'd stop and stare at the solidity of rock dust. Sometimes he fancied he saw the surface move like a wave. Sometimes a crater lip threatened to spill over like surf. For a man from a water planet, the lunar surface wouldn't hold still, not unless he concentrated on it. On the sixth day the red light on the intercom was on. A recorded voice gave his departure time the following day. Splendid Freedom, here I come. G rom gravok was a structure guard. His twenty-fourth year was the last year of his apprenticeship. His training had begun at age live. When he returned -- if he returned -- he'd be a journeyman. He wasn't sure at all that he'd return. Some men stayed. Some men left Luna for other places after their Maturity Trip. Grom had seen recruiting booths in the lobby of Eltuna. Structure men were in demand all over Milky Way. Not everywhere was the Discipline strict. He'd even heard of men who worked alone. How, he didn't know. But then the elders didn't tell all, by any means. The foreign pay was very good if you could believe the posters. A structure guard worked on structures. He built them, he repaired them, and took them apart. Above all, he listened to them; he listened to them even when he had nothing else to do. The job called for men who had no fear of heights. A good-sized structure on Vizillo reached two mils into the sky. The topmost levels basked in sunshine most of. the time, above the clouds. The rich lived there. The lower stories were nearly always under a leaden sky. Vizillo was a water planet. It had virtually no land at all, and those few tatters carried structures. Vizillo circled near the sun and solar heat boiled the southern ocean up to the sky, and the winds drove the water north. The land was in the north. In the equatorial zone ship-cities floated lazily around the globe. The Boaters of the South! They knew how to live. Grom didn't know a single structure man who didn't swear he'd retire on a Floater. But none ever did. It hurt to leave the structures or the  'onishka , especially in old age. A guard lived by the Discipline. They told you From the time you were knee-high: without the Discipline you can't survive in the job. Whether on the outside of a structure, tloating free above the ocean -- whose ceaseless motion froze into lizzard-skin stillness from great height -- or in the deep, dark internal chasms where the gravitron vibes hummed undamped, a man had to listen with a psychic ear. Everyone heard the gross vibrations. Only guards "heard" the subtle tones of grav. It wasn't a hearing in the ordinary sense. It was a knowing. You listened for the "little ones," the "lisping." When the lisping stopped, gravitron failure threatened. If left unheeded, it could lead to structure collapse. A structure held at least five structures that held three times that many, but Vizillo had no "giants." Structure guards were much revered. When a guard entered a bar, he drank on the house. Guards had to cultivate humility. Pride made you deaf to the "little ones." He began service in a grav-suit made for a child. Loose straps tied cal cords. He overcame his terror in a week. A few days later he'd learned to stay upright. He held tools for his father. By age twelve he heard the lisping. The gontshka council tested him with a little black box. Sometimes it lisped, sometimes it just hummed. He passed the test, and there was a celebration. Discipline flowed from the gontshka. Vizillo was an Anglo world, but all the guards were Slaviros. Grom spoke both languages well. The Anglos called gorushkas "tribes," and they were that; but they were more than that. As the grav-drums in the structure generated gravitron, so the gontshka generated bal. Bal was that subtle unity, that sense of hearing, that ear for lisping. It came from obedience, humility, and brotherhood. What the gontshka demanded of its members was defenseless openness. Without it a man went deaf. He couldn't hear his own suit fail. He plunged into the depths. Twice in his life a guard sailed off into the Splendid Freedom -- at twenty-five, at fifty-five. Away from the tribe, stripped of the rules, a man could taste life as it was, unconstrained. He could test his lust for individualized existence, alone, free. At twenty-five they went to earth at the gorushka's expense. To earth, for earth was the supreme place of freedom. To earth, because earth had mountains, prairies, deserts. Land, land. And there civilization had created the ultimate in human choice. There a man could try everything. " Splen did freedom," the elders all said. "Oh, how magnificent is earth! You haven't lived until you've seen Terra. It's the beginning, Grom, and it's the end. Vizillo... why, it's a backwater." The trip cost a hundred and eighty thousand dulls, most of that for the Time Collapse journey -- a staggering sum, a great gamble for the tribe. The gonishka worked a year to pay off the loan. Each man gave a tenth of his share. If the man didn't return, the sum was lost. If two or three went, the year was lean. Lean years, however, were part of the Discipline. But so was the Maturity Trip. Without it no man could become an elder. all this went through Grom's r. head as the shuttle ship, lobbed into space by the catapault, began its noiseless journey down -- or was it up? -- to earth. UP and then down. It was a long trip. The qorushka had sent him tourist class. "They owe it to me," Grom thought. He wasn't there yet, but the Splendid Freedom touched his face lightly, like an awakening breeze. He felt a bit defiant. He stretched inner muscles. "They owe it to me, and I owe nothing in return. I've worked on the structures twenty years. I've listened to the song of gravitron. I've slaved sometimes twenty, thirty, fifty hours on the drums without sleep. Many a time. I've floated in the darkness. I've floated in the light, right side up, wrong side around, above the clouds, below them. Once we took a section out in the middle of a storm. The lightning flashed all around us. I think I've had enough of that life. Who wants to float another twenty years before he can escape again? Heeey, freedom. Hey, hey! Brothers and sisters, see this guard #v!" Then he turned once more to his much handled folder, prepared for him by the travel agency. In the upper right corner they'd printed his name in gold letters: Grom Gravok. He liked that. He'd never had anything that was quite his own, other than clothes. He opened the folder and read at random: "... entrusted to the care of an experienced Terran family, knowledgeable about the planet's resources, sensitive to your needs, a guide ever on hand... or not. Cozy Pak gives you the maximum flexibility to structure your trip your way." He closed the folder. He knew the words by heart. "Structure your trip..." Structures kept intruding. Thank the Cosmos they had no structures on earth. The ship plunged into the ocean at night. It became a submarine and made for the Northanglo continent. He was asleep when they docked. An attendant shook him awake. Sir, sir. Welcome to Earth, the Planet of Opportunity. The local time is three a.m., oh-three-hundred for you lucky Space Marines. They stumbled down the aisles, a little groggy. The attendants stood by the exits. They smiled and said good morning over and over again. Grom found himself in an enormous hall: shaped concrete walls, tiled floors, and an echoing of sounds. The letters of the alphabet were hung on long rods from the ceiling against one side. They flashed on and off. Many voices, all different, called mechanically. "All B's step near." "All F's step near." He followed the sultry contralto urging the G's. He stopped at a booth beneath the letter. Near the booth on a bench sat young men and women. He showed his passport to the girl in the booth. The girl turned to the bench. "Gravok," she called. "Anybody here for Gravok?" A young woman in slacks and a black silk blouse stirred and put out a cigarette. She blew smoke from painted lips and came to him. She had black, curly hair, green earrings shaped like half moons, green-tinted eyelids, and long red nails. She had a strong fragrance. "Grom Gravok?" she asked. "Cozy Pak Plan? Hi. I'm the daughter of the house. My name's Ebullia, but call me Billy. Say, your name isn't really Grom, is it? Cluny name. Makes me think of a guy burping. You know, sort of under his breath." "Beg your pardon?" "Oh, never mind, Grom-sock. Pleased to meet you. Let's get out of here and get some sleep. You sure picked a time." "My luggage..." "Never mind that. It'll come by vaccutube. We're all set for tourists around here, Grommy. Say, let me call you Grommy, kay?" And she led the way out. Here it was. the Splendid Freedom. Three in the morning, the city still hummed with life and machinery. It was not unlike a structure, seen from the inside, but there was no gravitron song here. Nothing hung in the sky. All rested on rock, vast, solid, endless continents of rock. They caught a cab. "Let's splurge," Billy'd said. The cab roared through a tunnel. "Let me see your folder, Grommy. We just got the fax on you last night, no paper work." After a moment's examination -- she held up the folder to see by the light of neons spaced at intervals along the tunnel wall -- she gave it back to him. "Shouldn't have splurged," she stated. "My, Grommy, you're cutting it tight. This is earth, Grom-kid. Say, you're not one of those structure guards, are you?" And when he nodded: "Boy, will Pop be happy. Zoowishy. Zoo-zoowishy." He awoke late the next morning in a tiny cubicle. He turned on the light and looked about. His baggage had arrived while he'd slept. The two bags stood next to the narrow cot, beside the red shoulder bag with white letters that said Time Collapse Intragalactica. He saw his jump suit draped over what now turned out to be an old washing machine. He hadn't noticed that the night before. Next to it stood a stand with old clothing shrouded in plastic. He got up and pulled up the shade over the little window. But outside it was as dark now as it had been when he'd gone to bed. He checked his watch. It was ten in the morning -- ten-hundred, you lucky Space Marines. He had expected to see land, trees. Those flying creatures that chirped should be about. The blowing grass of the prairie. Or something like that. At the door he hesitated, hearing conversation and an unaccustomed tone. The bath was to his left. "Sand box," Billy had called it. He meant to ask her why. The voices came from the right. One of them was Billy's. He listened with the door handle in his hand. "Bully. Bully. Really bully! Fifty thou. Forty-nine five, to be exact. I say that's bully. That's supposed to cover overhead? An A# Cozy Pak. Y'ever hear of such a thing? They're not supposed to sell those any more, facryn! I'll ring his neck, I will." By the sound that followed, a fist rattled china and silver on a table. "It's not his fault, Pops. He doesn't know from nothing." "I don't mean him. Peter, that rat. Wait till I get hold of little Pete. Goddam, Billy, three weeks on fifty thou. That's not a lot of activities. What're we going to do with him? Jeez, bird, it's nothing. Peter radded us but good." "You asked him to send us something, anything. I heard you on the visi." Silence. "Fifty thou!" The voice was incredulous but resigned. For a moment no sound penetrated two doors and a hallway. Grom smelled fried food. "Structure guards!" the voice said, in an intonation that didn't signify approval. Grom had heard enough to be puzzled and disturbed. Fifty thousand dulls was a fortune on Vizillo. He opened the door and went to the bath, the shoulder bag in his hand. When he emerged a door opened, and Billy said Hi and asked him to meet Pop. Pop wore an undershirt. He was bald w ith a crown of hair above the ears. He smiled at Grom painfully past soiled plates that had held fried bird eggs. Grom recognized the sight and smell from the El-tuna eateries. Pop didn't rise. He dabbed ashes from a dead cigar. "Hya, stranger. I'm the father of the house. Just call me Pop, cozy like. Ready for your first joy trip, are you? Billy!" he called, as a master calls a servant, "breakfast for the young gentleman. Sit down... eh... Mr. Grom... eh. Gravok." Pop had Grom's folder to his left and read the name on the cover. "Well, how d'you like it so far? Billy! Continental breakfast, remember? Mr. Grom... Gravok is on A-#. A-#, Mr. Grom." He nodded, as if in approval. "Healthy and frugal. Frugality. Very important." He smiled again, as if bothered by a pain. "You don't think fifty thousand dulls is a lot of money," Grom said. Pop's eyes narrowed. Then he threw up his hands. "You structure guards are all alike. All alike. Jeez, you come right out with it, don't you? Pow! Bang! Between the eyes." He lowered his head and looked at the yellow smears on his plate. He looked up. "Nossir. Fifty thou's chicken feed, if you must know. This is earth, Mr. Grom, not a cake sale. What'm I gonna do with you? Take you on walks? Window shopping? Look at it from my side a sec. I'm supposed to put you up, give you three changes of bed linen, feed you, give you a guide, and keep you entertained for three weeks. Billy here, she can earn fifty kay a day with a flusher, facryn! I don't know why they do this to me." Billy served the continental breakfast: two slices of bread, a pat of butter, a disk of jam, a cup of coffee. "Maybe I can stay in a hotel?" Grom suggested. He had a distinct sense that something was amiss. "Zow!" Pop cried. "Oh, zow! Are you ever green, kid. Ten kay a night in a cheap place. No food. Five days and you're flat." "It may be better to spend five days on my own than to impose on you." Now Pop's eyes narrowed again. He leaned back and searched for matches in his trouser pocket. He said: "Well, Mr. Grom, I might be exaggerating a little, too. It's not so bad, fifty thou. Frugal, but enough. Right, Billy?" Billy turned from the sink. "Sure, Pops." "We'll show you a nice time, Mr. Grom. Just like it says here in the contract." He tapped the folder with a thick linger. "You keep your side of it, and we keep ours." "In other words," Grom said, "it's better to have fifty thousand than nothing." Pop shook his head. Then he lit his cigar. Puffing, he said: "They ever teach you about diplomacy, kid? Pow," he said, and he shook his head again. "I'd like to be on my way," Grom said. "We're in the middle of a city here. I'd like to get out and see something." "Billy, come here. Mr. Grom wants to plan his day." Billy joined them at the table. She pushed some plates aside and put her chin up on her hand. "Well, sir?" Pop asked, "what's your pleasure? Sports? Hunting? Historical battles? Mountain climbing? You name it, we got it... while the dulls last, that is. Want to ride an elephant? Shoot a tiger? Dive for sponge? What's your thing outdoors?" "All that around here?" "Where else? Just a short trip by the undercrust." "Well, for a start I'd just like to look around," Grom said. "I come from a water planet. I'd just... oh, maybe look at the prairie... birds..." "Nature," Pop said matter-offactly. He looked at the ash on his cigar. He gestured with it. "Very good choice. Excellent. Frugal. Sensible. Yessir. You keep that up, Mr. Grom, and we might just skinny by. Billy, you heard the gentleman. Nature it is. Take him to his first activity." Grom asked: "How long a trip is that? Should I be ready for an overnight stay?" "Nothing like that. Five minutes from here." "Five minutes? Prairies around here? I thought we were quite a ways north-east." Pop looked at Grom with some puzzlement. "I don't get you," he said. "We've got everything around here. Prairies, jungles, deserts, mountains, rivers, marshes. You name it, kid, we've got it... Just don't worry about it," he continued, seeing Grom's frown. He put his cigar down and slapped the table with both hands. "Off you go, children. The father of the house must go to work. I work at the pyramids. Ought to come see them. A nice, frugal activity, the pyramids." With that he rose. "Cheeruu," he called, and he waddled out, a short, fat little man. T hey rode the undercrust toward the prairies. The crowded train rattled in a narrow tunnel creaking and squealing at the turns, now slow, now fast. People sat on benches, people stood. He and she hung on straps and swayed along with the car. He chewed beetle gum. Billy had insisted it was a real thrill and perkpopped you up scooroolishly in the ayem. It tasted sweet, then bitter. And judging by its effect on Billy, it colored the tongue red. It didn't perkpop him up, scrooroolishly or otherwise. He was still puzzled by the geographical question. He thought he understood something about earth geography. Like all others before him, he'd studied an old atlas in the gorushka library. This vast warren was the city of Eastcoast. The prairies began a thousand mils southwest of here, in the Great Plains. Would he see a real prairie or just grasslands in the suburbs? Pop didn't inspire him with confidence. Was this a ruse to save money? He decided he'd see. Land was land. He needed to orient himself. The undercrust was very old and rickety. It bumped and rocked. The lights went out for seconds at a time. But now the lights went out altogether, and the train ground to a halt; they were surrounded by eerie silence. "Zoowishy," he heard Billy say. "A zonking power failure... Get your paws off me, fatso," she yelled at someone, and he heard a slapping sound; then there was a sound of motion. "Runs his hams up my leg, the pig. Never fails, Grommy... Say, Grommy, you interested in Sensuality? It's cheap, you know, what with all the Space Marines around here. More Sensy shops than any other. Go to a sensy shop, fatso!" she yelled at someone; "that's where you should go, not molesting working chicks." He waited until her attention was, presumably, back on him. Then he asked: "What is Sensuality? What're you talking about?" "Jeez," she cried, "are you people sheltered! You mean it? You don't know? Oh, wow! Half the trade that comes to earth comes for the Sensy shops, and you want to see a prairie!" "Tell me," he said. "You've aroused my curiosity." "It's an activity, silly," she said. "You know, sensuous experience. If you're worried about it being a sin, forget it, Grommy. It ain't. All fifteen hundred major churches have filed exemptions. You don't do anything, but its scooroolish fun. I go sometimes on Sundays." "But," he insisted, "what is it?" Some of the people who stood around them, people who had enjoyed the exchange in silence, now snickered. He noticed a rise in the temperature. The cooling system had cut out. They must be deep underground. "They sit you down and wire you up, you know, just like for a tiger hunt, or something, and then you can have a grand old time. Girls with girls, boys with boys, girls with boys, girls with dogs or bulls or... you know. They even have an alien booth. And it's only two hundred a sesh." "They wire you up," he said flatly. "Yeah. Right into your nervysys. You feel it like you're it. Wow! It's scooroolish good." The lights came on and the car lurched into motion. "There he is, see him? That fat pig. Yeah, fatsy, turn your head. Ought to be ashamed of yourself, pawing a decent chick." The object of her anger, a small portly man -- Grom remembered seeing him seated in front of Billy -- now stood some ways farther up. He hid himself behind a newspaper. The people around them smiled. Grom was puzzled, disoriented. He meant to ask her more about this business. He'd never heard of such a thing and much of what she'd said was incomprehensible. He'd understood the girls with girls, boys with boys part of it. The rest was obscure. He waited for the screeching wail of wheels to stop. The train rounded a curve and ran into a station. It rushed past waiting people on a platform, then came to a halt. "We're there," she said. "Keep with me." She elbowed her way through the crowd, through the crush of people trying to get in. She waited on the platform while he followed. Then she led the way. He dropped his beetle gum into a pole-mounted basket as they passed it by. They walked in a huge tunnel of concrete with a crowd of sullen, preoccupied people. Pipes passed overhead, and puddles of water or oil had accumulated at intervals. At spaced distances along the walls he saw uniform posters. Each said: "Pretty." He pointed. "Those signs. What's the significance of that?" "Sublimi ads." His puzzled face made her continue. "You think pretty, and the place is pretty." "But this place is ugly," he protested. "Just look at it. Old pipes, puddles, dirty walls." "You don't get it," she said. "It's pretty, don't you see? There. It says so," and she pointed to the signs. Grom didn't know if he should take her seriously or not. She was a lively lass, but a little on the odd side. He expected that "Pretty" was a brand name, one she didn't know. They walked in silence for a moment. Then he spotted, among the monotonous "Pretty" signs, one that said "Ugly," "And that?" he asked. "What's that?" "That's for variety, silly. Nothing's just pretty. That's not realistic." F rom the large tunnel they passed into a shopping arcade. And from the arcade she led the way into a side street. She stopped before the entrance of a large, nondescript building. She looked in her purse at a slip of paper, inspected the sign above the entrance. It said, "Here we are," she announced, and she pushed her way into a revolving door beckoning Grom to follow. "Wait here," she said when they were inside the place. The foyer had red carpeting, woodpaneled walls, and dim yellow light from a chandelier. She was at a booth negotiating with a lady in glasses. Presently she was back, pointed to the left, and they were in motion. Was this, he wondered, an elevator to the surface? He hadn't noticed that they had gained altitude since disembarking from the train. Nor, now that he thought about it, had he seen the sky since his arrival on earth. That would now be corrected. Indeed, she led him into an elevator. She pushed some chits into a slot. The doors closed and they surged up. Then the doors opened, and there was the prairie, just a hallway away, behind glass, an immense expanse. "Let's take a walk," she said. She opened a glass door, held it for him, and he passed out under the sky. The sun was bright and the wind blew with some force. It bent the knee-high grass. It chased a few clouds across the sky. The' smell was overpowering and sweet. He didn't know the names of these plants, but there was a profusion of them, and their scent was something very new. He walked out a ways, brushing the grass with his hands. Land. So much open land. He'd never seen solidity from here to the horizon, a gentle rolling landscape, some small hills in the distance, a little village, tall storage tanks of some sort, and a truck on the highway half a mil to the left. He looked back at the glass-fronted building they'd just left, a one-story structure above the surface. To look at it, Grom couldn't have guessed the enormous underground complex below. Billy had joined him, and he turned to her now. "Beautiful," he said, "really lovely. I'll take you up on it. Let's go on a hike." He strode out to his left, toward the highway. First he'd explore a bit. Then he'd collect some flowers r p Ballantine   I Books Blessings on the heads of science-fiction fans. They are the marvelous people who supply true and valuable scholarship in the field. 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Booksellers are our favorite people -- not least flakey Kay Sexton and her crew at the Dalton Stores. They know science fiction is best! BB for Marushka. Billy might know if the little village had a place to eat. They could have lunch there -- Grom suddenly found himself surrounded by darkness. The shift was so sudden he caught his breath with a small exclamation. A sense of terror filled him, but it was dispelled when he heard Billy. "Oh, croak," she cried. "Another power failure. Oh, Grommy, you should make them pay for this. They owe you double your money back and a free activity. All you have to do is fill out the forms. And your first time, too!" His eyes became accustomed to the darkness. The darkness was not total. He could now make out glowing signs in four places. They said, emergency exit. The placement of the signs told him he was in a large room, but not very large. Perhaps thirty meta in width, fifty long. He reached down to touch the vegetation. It was still there, but the wind had stopped blowing, and he could already sense the growing heat. "Get me out of here, Billy," he said. "Let's go somewhere where we can see and talk. And then you tell me all about it. Every last bit." "Zoowishy," she said, genuinely disappointed. "Zoo-zoowishy. I'm sorry, truly sorry. Your first activity. What a zonk." I something about earth I don't understand. Or maybe it's Cozy Pak Plan I don't understand. Or maybe you don't understand me." They sat in a coffee shop at a two-seater table, she on the upholstered plasti-leather bench, he on the chair. The management provided a candle in a glass, whether for atmosphere or to anticipate power failure he didn't know. Probably the latter. For atmosphere the place relied on sublimi ads above the purple bench-backs: "Pleasant Service, Friendly Feeling." On either side of them were many twoman tables occupied by people eating lunch. Billy smoked a cigarette she'd lit on the candle in the glass. It was oval in shape and very long and blended strictly for working chicks, the reason she didn't offer him one; besides she guessed he didn't smoke. They were called "OhVuumbs." "No," he said, when she began with "Jeez -- ," "don't tell me. Let me ask you some questions. But just answer the questions? Please?" "It's your nicky, Grom-kid." "What did I see back there?" He gestured vaguely. "A nature activity." "How'd they make it so real?" "Holograph projections. Oh, Grom my, don't you know'? Where did you come from, anyway?" "Just answer the questions, Billy. Pretend I'm stupid. Why did you take me to that... activity? Why not to a real prairie or park?" "Real?" she asked. "Real. Real grass, real sky, real sun. Is it because you don't earn a commission on the real thing?" She was offended, angry. Who'd he think he was, insulting a working chick, etc., etc. plus a set of slangy exclamations and expletives. The real thing! Where'd he think he was? On a new planet? This is earth, Grom-kid. "What do you mean... this is earth?" "Kay," she said. "You are dumb. Ain't been any real thing on earth for centuries. You think our big skulls invented all this marvel stuff for fun? You realize what one Sensy booth costs to build? Forty-eight." She flicked ash angrily and fixed him with those green-lidded eyes. That's what. You can see it all here. Everything that's ever been on good old Mother Earth. All the old battles, all the sights. Pop told you he was Pyramids! Didn't you hear him? You can do it all, Grom my. Fight the battles, thirst in the Sahara, sleep with Merrilyroe, eat a shark, be eaten by a shark. You can eat a thousand meals and never take on a single calo. You want to be drunk and not be hung over? Milk a cow? Fall into a volcano? You can do it here, feel it, see it. The whole thing, Grom my, and you want the real thing!" She was very offended. dulls or something. That's what it cost to build all this." Her hand swept around to indicate 'all this.' "Why'd you come here if you think it's all... nothing. The real thing!" "I didn't say it was 'nothing,'" he soothed her. "I didn't know, is all. It's a custom in my tribe not to tell us what it is. Earth, I mean." "Didn't anybody tell you? On the ship?" "I hung about with other structure guards. I heard this and that, but I didn't put it together. I'm a simple man, Billy. Vizillo is a small, backward planet... Tell me, Billy. Is all of earth like this? An underground city? Does anybody live up on the surface?" "Surface? Naw. It's dangerous up there. No life at all." "And Africa, Euras, Astra? Cities like this on those continents? All with these activity theaters?" She shook her head and turned to a serving girl who had appeared and stared at them grimly. Her starched apron had rust stains; her black skirt was short over fat rumps. "A skinnibug and a glass of Mu for me. Chick. Grommy? The same." The waitress left, having said nothing at all. "Nothing on the other continents?" "The only city on earth is Eastcoast, and Eastcoast has everything that's ever been. Only better." "Excuse me. Mister, I overheard you say you come from Vizillo. I meant to ask you -- " "Hands off, freak, he's mine by contract. Back to your soupy-soup and mind!" Billy spoke sharply to the man at the neighboring table, a skinny fellow in a turtleneck. He had a day's growth of beard. He'd leaned over, had put a hand on their table. "I'm sure the gentleman can speak for himself, chick." "Oh, no you don't!" Billy bristled. "Nossir! Grom-sock, tell this mooch to skoot off." Grom shrugged and looked at the man. "I don't know the customs here. I don't mean to offend, but... skoot off." "Scavengers!" Billy scolded. "Not enough to go around as it is, than one for three, if you read me, Grommy. And the big tour shops steal most of those. Little people can't make it any more. There's talk of advertising all the activities. They say there'll be directories and all. Pop and I couldn't make it then." " There is no Mom?" "Mom couldn't take it. She blasted off-planet when I was a sock." "How do you make a living?" "It's like this, you see," she said. "Only the guides know where all the places are. We take the mark -- " She stopped and gave him a glance, started over. "We take the guest to the places where he wants to go. We get a little cut. But the big tour shops are taking over. They bring a hundred people at a crack, cut the commissions. We get squeezed. And you can't just blaze oft' like that. What'd we do offplanet? Pop and #? All we know is the activities. And guys like this cut in on you, tell the guest they know some place the guides don't know about. You get it both ways. Pow! like Pop says. Between the eyes." Grom sensed her dilemma and began to feel sad for her, but he rose up above the emotion out of old habit. Pity destroyed bal. "Y'ou're a super guide, Billy. You'll make it," he said. "Jeez," she cried, pleased. "How can you say that? Your first activity and I blew it." "You're great at explaining and you know everything," he said. "Tell me, Billy, of my fifty thousand, how much will you earn?" "Six hundred and ninety-six," she said at once. "The ninety-six is for your keep, the six hundred is commissions." "And what if l don't go to any activities?" Her face fell. "Zoowish, " she cried, "What'd you do?" "I don't know, but I want to ask, you that too. Would you get some money, commissions?" "How?" she asked. "No activity, no commission. It's your nicky, Grom my. You spend it, you keep it. It's up to you." She was very gloomy. "I don't have any money. You've got it. A letter of credit, I think they called it in the folder." "It's still yours. You can cash it all in, if you want to. Any office of Banco Galactico will give you the loot in bills." He mused over that for a second. "You don't want to do that, Grom-sock. You won't have anything to do. You'll wander through the pretty corridors and look at shops just like those you've got at home..." Her voice was small. She dug into her purse for OhVuumbs. "I expect to have plenty to do," he said. "And I'll make sure that you're not hurt, no matter what I do." She was unsure. She looked away from him. "Where are those skinnies?" she asked. "I'm starved... I blew it," she said, and she blew smoke at the candle. "Your first activity, and they short it out. Oh, mush." He reached out and touched one of her hands. "Listen, Billy. It wasn't your fault. And besides, I didn't come to earth to go to movies." "They aren't movies!" she protested, but he cut her off, squeezing her hand. "Listen, Billy. Movies, holograms, it's all the same. I want to go to the surface." "Wow," she cried. "You must be reeling." The expression on her face was so astonished, he decided to drop the subject for the moment. I nstead, to give her a pleasure, Grom agreed to try another activity in the afternoon. This time nothing would go wrong. They'd get away from Nuyo burrow where the power always failed. Wadicy station was much better, she suggested. Did he know? Wadicy had been a great capital in the ancient days. It'd been called The Great American Dream, though search her why an empire would be called that. All that was left of the ancients was part of a radiation bunker. And guess what? Billy's eyes lit up. She warmed to the subject. She displayed her know-how with evident pleasure. In a glass case in the bunker Grom could see the last surviving imperial book; not a fax, not a reconstruct, the real thing. It was the report of a commission on some important subject. "See," she said, "I know some things that aren't activities. But first we'll take in something real scooroolish, kay?" They discussed what he should do munching the skinnies and sipping Mu through straws. Grom was used to fish fare and life-produced protein. The skinny tasted like space-ship food and had been grown in a yeast tank. He didn't want to disappoint his guide by asking any questions about its origins. First she explained the difference between static and dynamic. She used one hand, holding a bite-disfigured skinny, to indicate the one; the other hand, which held the Mu, to indicate the other. Static was what he'd already seen. You walked about in them and looked. Dynamic was where they wired you up. Dynamic was what he'd have to try. She insisted on it. In the midst of a long listing of different activities, to each of w'hich he reacted neutrally at best, she suddenly cried: "I've got it, Grom-kid! I've got it. I'll take you to a potpourri!" But then her face fell. "Aw, I guess not -- it'll run you a mint. Pops'll skin me." Then her face brightened again. "But its the greatest zapperoo there is, Grom. If you like Dynamic, that is." "If you say so, Billy, I'll take you to a potpourri." "Me?" she protested. "You can't do that. That'll wipe you out." She lowered her eyes. "I've never been to one before. Cause of that." She looked up. "Ten," she said, fixing him with green-lidded eyes. "Thousand. For you and me. Together." Grom laughed. "It's only money, Billy. Let's go." Wadicy was an hour away. They got there in a much better train. It rode on air, went deeper and faster, and they had to strap themselves into cushioned seats. All the way there, Billy fluctuated between delicious dread at the prospect and eager expectation. Grom gathered that potpourri was not only scooroolish, it was also zanyshivereeee! The show lasted long hours, and in the process the day tied. They emerged in the early evening. They were both silent for a long time. "I've never been through this before," she said at last. They stood on the platform waiting for the train. "You were sweet to buy me a chit. Potpourri is a trip. A real trip. But I don't think I'd ever do it again. It's too much. It makes you feel old. Afterwards, you know." He nodded but didn't say anything. In the Wadicy potpourri theater, you could relive the entire life of a man, a woman. The specialty was ancient history. You could be the man, the woman of that time. It all began with birth and ended in death. In the four hours that intervened came the cargo of a lifetime's feeling, a flashing of vast events -- loves, hatreds, strivings, failures, the hubris of success, the dread of loneliness and neglect, infirmity, sickness, destitution, charity, senility, the end. Grom had been a journalist who'd become a soldier, then a general in a terrible war. He was in China and Arabia, in Washington, in Paris, all around the globe. He negotiated a peace that wouldn't hold. He had sweethearts and a wife and a child killed by napalm in a campus riot. He wrote a book. He was member of a cabinet. A madman gunned him down in front of a court house but he recovered with one arm lame. A committee investigated him for corruption; he was guilty, found blameless, yet forced to resign. He became religious and rose high in the ranks of a new church; but he lost all of his conversion love in vicious hierarchical fights. He was banished to an island and ministered to primitives. A shark bit off his lower legs when he dived for sponges to supplement his income. As he grew old, a native matron ruled him and ruled in his name with small-eyed cruelty. He tried to escape and on the fourth try succeeded. He died on a raft on the ocean in an ecstasy. He thought he was God. Grom had left the building empty. He was not himself. The calm sense of bal was gone or stirred to such an extent he couldn't orient himself in the world. Like water in a jostled bucket, so his emotions slapped the sides of his soul and spilled over. He was two people: Grom Gravok, structure guard, and that strange adventurer, so filled with titanic desire, John Singer of the potpourri. The two couldn't be reconciled. The tension lamed him. The real thing? Whatever it was that he'd experienced, it was the equivalent of reality. He didn't know who Billy had been or what she had experienced; but the effect of the potpourri on her was much the same. They rode home in silence, strapped into cushioned seats, lost in ancient yet very recent memories. G rom went to bed in the narrow room, next to the decommissioned washing machine, the stand with old clothing, certain that by morning he would be normal again. He awoke eight hours later still disturbed by the very real presence within him of another person, John Singer. His nervous system couldn't distinguish between the two sets of memory. But Grom Gravok, the structure guard, had gained a little strength. He knew he had to get away from here somehow. He had to find himself again. He yearned for the serenity of bal , trembled with basic anxiety. No gravitron drums turned anywhere on earth. Still he knew that he couldn't have heard the "little ones." And that knowledge made him extremely nervous. His body shuddered with dread. Structure collapse could be advancing all around him, without his knowledge. A strangely serious, taciturn Billy took him to a branch of the Banco Galactico. She said nothing while he cashed in his letter of credit; not a word of protest escaped her. She had also changed her appearance. Her lips, eyelids were no longer painted. She had washed the curls from her hair. She wore a wide skirt and a sweater. She had neglected to squirt perfume behind her ears, in the crook of her arms. Thirty-three thousand dulls were left in his account. He folded the blue bills away into a zippered pocket of his suit. Over breakfast in an eatery, he told her what he wanted to do. She took note of it, thought for a moment, checked her watch; then she explained how they would proceed. They went home and packed over night bags; she left a recorded message for Pop; then they caught an undercrust local to another station and arrived just in time for the only transcontinental train of the day. He put their bags in the overhead rack, her blue one next to his red one with the stencilled words -- Time Collapse Intragalactiea. They strapped themselves in and were soon in motion. A very slow start, almost a creeping, became a headlong rush as the train descended very deep into the bedrock on its air-cushioned course. J ohn singer had experienced his conversion in a small cabin, in an out-of-the-way valley of the Rocky Mountains, near a town called Henderson, in what had then been called the State of Colorado. He had retired there for a long vacation after his ouster from the government. He went there to lick his wounds, to think things over. The cabin belonged to a friend of his. It was remote and primitive. Singer had to fetch his water from a well and to burn wood in a stove to keep warm. Grom Gravok had experienced Singer's conversion as if it had been his own. For a few months, a very lew months. Singer had felt what Grom considered a natural state, the peace of but. although Singer had called it by another name. That segment of experience united the two personalities. Singer caught in the gossamer threads of spirit and Grom Gravok in his natural state were basically the same man. When Grom had awakened the morning after his experience of the potpourri, two distinct urges had impelled him to go to the surface. He wished to be free of Singer's oppressive psychic presence, and to do so he thought he must see for himself the spot where God's finger had touched that ancient. At the same time, Grom wished to see earth, the real earth, not an underground city. Eastcoast and structures had too much in common. Grom longed above all for the sustaining, subtle support of the gorushku. If he couldn't get that, he wanted solitude. He learned from Billy that one could still go to the mountains. Earth had its outposts all about this and the other continents -- small groups of people who watched the planet and charted the storms that raged above, sampled the atmosphere, measured crust tremors, dipped probes into the sea. Slowly chaos pressed in upon the remnant of humanity. The outposts watched the steady progress of the inevitable. Someday, Billy had said, there would be no more people on earth. The oxygen will have been fixed. They hurtled toward one of these outposts. Den Station in the Rorange. The train drove deeply under the continent in a tunnel carved by plasma and shaped like a slack hose, one end attached to Eastcoast the other to the underside of the mountains. The train fell down, almost, moved by gravity. The inertial energies of the fall carried them up again toward the surface as the tunnel turned up. "So they did learn to do it after all." John Singer thought, thinking with Grom's mind; or was this Grom's thought reflecting Singer's memories? In Singer's day such trains were seen as utopian dreams. "Some utopia," John Singer thought, reflecting on Grom Gravok's memories. Or was it the other way about? Grom found it confusing to be two men. But Singer's memories were useful. He understood a great deal now he hadn't grasped before. They fell for two hours and rose for two hours. Grom felt no discomfort. His body w as accustomed to all kinds of gravitational effects. Billy seemed unwell on the way down, but she stirred into life on the ascent when the natural gravity bit into their bodies and they could unstrap and move about. "You're my last visitor," she announced suddenly after a long silence, stirring coffee a girl had brought them on a tray. "Oh?" "I haven't lived," she said seriously; her entire manner was different now. She was resolute and determined. "I didn't know it before, but now I do. I'm leaving earth and heading outward, just like Mom." "How'll you do that? I thought you were..." Grom didn't want to say "poor." "I'll find a way," she stated. "Mary always did!" "Mary?" "Mary O'Gronsky. Mary never hesitated. She'd just step right out, right into the darkness. Something always happened." "I take it Mary O'Gronsky was the girl whose life you...?" She nodded, lips over a raised cup. She set the cup down and took a puff on her cigarette. "I'm very big," she said. "I've seen many things. Earth is too small for me. Jeez, Grom," she cried, and the momentary flash of enthusiasm recalled for a second the Billy he knew, "you've no idea how big the world is. And here I was, hustling in a very narrow track, day after day -- vaccu the place Saturday mornings, a Sensy show on Sunday afternoon, and grinding, grinding on the old circuit. I'm twenty-eight," she said; he didn't know if it was an accusation, a boast, or a statement. "Never!" she said. "Never again." She looked at him as if she expected contradiction. But Grom said nothing. Her stare recalled another woman, his wife (John Singer's wife), who on the occasion of her twenty-eighth birthday (they were flying to the Bahamas for a vacation) had quarrelled with him (with John Singer) about the number of children they'd have -- she'd wanted none. Joan had been a criminal lawyer. She'd divorced him after she gave birth to Annie. Marushka wanted five children, all boys. He fell into a reverie about Joan and Marushka and Annie all intertwined while Billy went on, asserting her own future, expanding its proportions, explaining the many alternate paths that lay before her still, each beckoning for exploration, despite the fact that she had nothing, was twenty-eight, and couldn't possibly imagine the first step toward her goal. But Mary never let herself be stopped. Mary blasted rock when the way was barred. Yessir! Den Station in the Rorange received them with suspicion. They had been the only passengers on the train to disembark there. A man had to unlock a gate to let them into the building from the platform. He asked them to come to his office, which they did; Grom carried their bags -- her blue one and his red one. The man sat down behind the desk, took off his glasses, polished them, and asked what their business was here. They stood before him, hadn't been asked to sit down. Grom felt strong, overpowering irritation. He was John Singer, not Grom Gravok. Grom would have suppressed such emotions long before they could gather force. "I want to take a look at the surface," he said with a voice devoid of any supplication. Well, now, the man replied. Slowly, a little slowly, here. Did Mr...? Mr. Gravok have the partment of Safety.) Without such a permit, of course, the trip had been wasted. The man breathed on the lense of his glasses and, polishing, looked up. "I don't have any permits, so I guess you'll just have to make them out, here and now." "Me?" the man said, incredulous. He put on his glasses to see this person better. "Me? Mr. Gravok, you labor under an immense delusion -- " Grom turned purple. "Get on your feet, creep!" he thundered, entirely possessed by another. "Who do you think you're addressing, anyway? Can't you recognize a cabinet official when you see one? Start writing or you'll regret you ever laid eyes on me." The little man, whom John Singer (if not Grom Gravok) had recognized as a minor bureaucrat, came to his feet. Behind the eyes now showed fear. He murmured apologies. He hesitated. Then he sat down again, dove into a drawer for some forms, and began to write hastily. It was his job to act quickly. Discrete inquiries could be made afterward or, better yet, not at all. Minutes later, armed with forms and instructions about the whereabouts of lifts, Grom and Billy were in yet another concrete corridor. Grom's face was still an angry frown. "Cabinet official?" Billy asked. He looked at her. He was jolted, confused. "I... I..." He gave it up and simply shook his head. In truth he was mortified by his aggressive behaviour, and his body pulsed with the unaccustomed discharge of hormones he hadn't known he had, and he longed to be rid of John Singer and the terrifying slavery of John Singer's compulsive drive. Was this what they called freedom? From a large encavement on which numerous buildings fronted and from which other corridors led in all directions, they took a righthand path to a smaller square. Here they entered a facility where attendants equipped them with suits, masks, and auxiliary oxygen devices. They signed for small homing radios, were given maps. They affixed their signatures to liability waivers that freed Den Station of any responsibility should they be lost. They paid the lift fee of five-fifty each. Then they were shown to the elevators and went up, very high up, in Grom's estimation; which was a way of saying that they'd been very deep undercrust. And then, from a dark and narrow concrete bunker, he stepped out to the surface -- the real surface this time, not a holographic mirage. and he saw nothing at all. Or rather, he found himself in a violent wind storm. The wind blew, blasted, raced, cut, shrieked by him at an unbelievable velocity. It tugged him, pulled him, jerked him and yet pressed him back. The wind was laden with very fine yellow dust. In seconds it powdered over his suit and visor. Despite the tightness of the suit, a bitter taste formed in his mouth. He wiped his visor and saw yellow, hurtling yellow all about him. Grom turned back. He barely saw Billy in her dark blue suit. She stood uncertainly in the low bunker's rectangular opening. He stepped back and took her hand. Then, together, they pressed into the wind. He felt her resistance almost at once. Her body seemed to tremble, and the trembling came to him through her hand, through the glove. He held her left. With her right hand she fumbled on the buttons of her belt-mounted communications pack. The noise was so great that unaided speech was impossible. Static crackled. "Oh, Grom, I'm scared!" he heard her say. "Hold tight. You're safe. This wind must be gusting. It should relent. Let's walk a little." He pulled her along, carefully feeling his way over rough, rocky terrain while she repeated that she was terrified. The wind was gusting. From time to time its intensity subsided, and then they saw churning clouds and swirls of yellow dust laced with brown dust and whitish dust and black spirals of dust. Whenever the wind took a breath, she seemed to relax a little. They walked on, slowly, and as time passed he felt the wind die. Suddenly it stopped. It left vast tons of dust in the air which now began to settle slowly like a very fine misty rain. As fog lifts so the dust settled. Minute by minute the view cleared. At first they saw dark, grey rock to the right. Then more rock piled behind that, and rock above that. It rose higher and higher. It was wild, eroded, chiseled rock, mountains sliced thin and ground to circular posts, flat tables, intricate traceries that recalled hot lead poured into water. But it was the endless plain to their left which caused Billy to panic. Like Grom she had watched the dust veil drop over the remnants of Rorange. Then they both turned in the other direction. Here was a limitless expanse of dust arranged in fantastic, numberless, sharp-edged dunes. Very far in the distance a falling veil of dust percipitated down from a yellow sky. And from that direction they now saw the lightning-rapid advance of another fist of wind. It punched through the veil and ripped through the dunes. It came toward them, a dark ball of elemental force, driving planetary sediment. Billy screamed, turned, and ran toward the bunker, whose roof was unevenly laden with dust as if with snow. She stumbled and fell. She clawed herself upright. Grom heard her sobbing panic over the radio. She ran for the safety of the little concrete outjutting. He followed her slowly, already battered by the wind. Billy cowered, sobbing, by the elevator, her clumsy gloves placed in pleading on the door. He tried to coax her back to rationality, but she was beside herself, incoherent, and utterly panicked. At last he rang for the lift. When it arrived he half pulled, half carried her on. They went back down. T he following morning Grom said good-bye to Billy at the train station. They shook hands, and he handed her the little blue overnight bag. On an impulse she embraced him and pecked a kiss on his cheek. Her eyes glistened. "I'll never forget you, Gromkid," she said; her voice was husky. "You've given me a new life." He shook his head. "God be with you, Billy. I gave you and you gave me. Such is life. Now follow through. Do it. Get away." "I will," she sobbed. "Like Mary would. Courage. Don't be held up by anything." "I promise." A girl-attendant at the train's door beckoned. Billy looked at him again. She shook her head, filled with emotion. Then she turned and got on. She waved to him as the train pulled away. "Zoowishy," he murmured to himself, smiling. "Zoo-zoowishy." Then he went back to the hotel. He inspected the gear he had bought the day before, following that abortive stay on the surface: a tent, a mattress, a carrypack; food rations, a moisture-capture, a stove; rope, heavy socks, thermal underwear; a compass, maps, a strong radio; and various other odds and ends suggested by John Singer's memories or a store clerk torn between pleasure at Grom's big purchase and wonder at the visitor's overvaulting madness. Grom packed his gear, shouldered the load, and set out for the surface again. He had resolved to spend his remaining time up there, in the awesome wilderness of the surface. He'd known he'd do it in that moment of stillness when the dust had settled revealing the Mother Planet's ravaged face. Alone, up there, seeking bal. He had bought the gear alone, unaided. Billy had been hysterical. He'd taken her to a room in Den Station's only hotel aided by a heavyset matron with warts and a nearly full mustache. And when the officious, suspicious matron had at last left them alone, he'd consoled Billy in a way John Singer would have approved and that Mary O'Gronsky had known how to appreciate. He'd told Billy of his intentions as they lay together watching an artificial sunset projected on the wall. Then he'd gone shopping. After breakfast the next morning, he gave her twenty-five thousand dulls -- so that she might get free and fulfill her dream, or Mary O'Gronsky's dream, or both. Grom didn't care. In his life money didn't matter; nor did John Singer give a damn. Singer had created fortunes and he'd lost them, like the snap of a finger. To Singer money was a means. Grom kept enough to get home. He already had a ticket. Or if he chose to wander, enough for a start somewhere. The rest would manifest somehow. Whether he'd go back to Vizillo or head out for parts unknown -- that was the question he'd answer up there. Bal would tell him. If he couldn't find bal, he probably wouldn't come back down again. T he wind howled and then it settled again. It rolled up ten thousand carpets of dust and flung them into the sky. Sometimes it was still for days on end. In the sky tiny particles of silicate drew sunshine into multichrome reflections. Sometimes water clouds filled the sky and it rained; it mudded. Torrents of mud ran. Rivers of mud; angry, yellow-foamed rivers that bared the rock, that boiled and roared and fell over the cliffs with a thunder of a few hours and a slow, oozing drip of days. Grom wandered. He went up, into the Rorange. He saw forests of petrified wood. He saw art so strange only the unencumbered freedom of wind blast could create it over centuries. He saw lakes and pools whose water was bitter. He saw tough, rocklike vegetable scum clinging for dear life to rock, to occasional mudriver beds. He saw needles of stone and spires of stone and temples of stone. He saw boulders balanced on needles of stone and needles balanced on boulders. He wandered, but with a system. He sought with compass and map the spot where John Singer had been touched by the Divine finger. There was no practical sense in the search. Since Singer's day the Rocky Mountains had been so utterly changed Grom didn't recognizc the place nor the maps that ave him an overview. He couldn't he sure where that spot was. There was no common point of reference except Den Station, in Singer's day a major city. One point. Not enough except to aid a guess. Yet Grom searched. He knew he'd know the spot. And if it wasn't really that spot, it didn't matter. ( Jod was everywhere. He interpenetrated this dimension. The value of (lie exercise was that it gave Grom things to do -- map study in the tent at night, compass readings in the day time, measuring and charting with a grease pencil on a plastic overlay. He reached the spot on the tenth day out. He camped near the edge of a funnel-shaped valley, a triple column of stone behind him, the remnants of Tomichi mountain (he guessed). Across the funnel was a wall of rock. It seemed he remembered that wall. In Singer's days it had been higher and pines had run like a line of soldiers right to the edge of it. An over-eager soldier or two had tumbled down and caught himself in cracks and crevices. That red was the ancient red. That grey with a nose shape the ancient nose. He stayed for three weeks. Or possibly only for three days. Time was meaningless here. He wandered about. He ranged far from his camp. Slowly, very slowly, he began to feel like himself again. After ten days, or possibly two, he got the notion that he'd find a souvenir for Marushka. This mission began to fill his waking hours. He searched and searched. Something very, very ancient. Something of real value. Something they'd encase in clear glass and place next to the gorushka shrine in their cubohome. Something that would be a memento of his Maturity Trip and yet a gift from him to her. Something they'd show to the five children Maruska wanted, all five of them boys, all five structure guards with clear ears for the lisp of gravitron. He wandered about with a small pick axe and dug here and there, lifting and piling the dust -- loose on top, packed deeper, then almost the solidity of rock down below. For a long time he found nothing. Then one day he lifted a flatpressed cake of dust and saw the corner of a something with a dull, metallic sheen. He freed the something. It was a piece of light, maleable metal ironed flat by pressure. Aluminum, by the feel and look. Once it might have been cylindrical in shape. It was only part of a cylinder, torn from a cylinder. The pressure had forced wrinkles into the surface. He carried his find to the tent. He washed it with sweet water from the moisture-capture. He polished it with one of his heavy socks. He examined it in the beam of a flashlight. With tremendous joy and excitement he then saw the faded trace of very ancient letters. Singer's memories allowed him to decipher the sound. The letters, a mere discoloration on the metal, a faint but unmistakeable impression or chemical change on the surface, said "Coca ola." Faintly Grom seemed to recall the significance of the words, but his Singer-self was receeding. The new yet ancient memories did not come as readily any more. All that was left of Singer was a feeling -- a strange, troubled, sad feeling of something that had longed, hated, suffered, and passed on. He wrapped the metal in one of his shirts. He tied a rope about the shirt to secure the metal. He placed the shirt at the bottom of his pack. Then he cooked himself a meal on the stove and went to bed on his mattress. The next day he awoke with dawn. The day was still. The sun gleamed in the silicate suspension of the air. Grom distinctly felt in his heart the peace of bal. A limpid harmony. He broke camp and set out for home. T he rest was a movement in reverse. A long journey through the wilderness. A descent into the underworld. A train ride in a tunnel shaped like a slack hose. He called Billy by visiphone. A recorded voice told him she was no longer listed at that code. He splurged on a cab ride to the space port. El-tuna received him. He hopped about on the lunar surface for a day. Then the TC Liner Bel fort unit carried him over fifty parsecs from Earthmoon to Vizillo. At the space port a delegation of the t'oritshka waited to receive him, all elders, mostly of his own age. His father and uncles were among them. His mother, sisters, and Marushka were there, but they stood back, away from the men. He looked at the elders and saw anxious expectation on their faces. He ran toward them, a red bag over his shoulder with the words Time Collapse Intragalactica stenciled on it in white. He embraced them and shook hands and greeted them. One of the men said: "Grom, brother. So good to have you back. But tell us, what did you think of... earth? The big world? What was it like?" Grom examined his questioner and sensed worry in the man's voice. He realized then that he too must act like an elder and say the traditional words, the words that hid so much agonizing experience under a blessing. "Splendid," he said. "Splendid freedom. Oh, earth is magnificent. The land, the mountains, the prairies. It's the beginning, Tushka, and it's the end." The elders beamed. Grom broke through them and ran to Marushka.  -- or, as ye reap, so shall ye sow! Doris Piserchia alphonse Durham didn't turn inJnL to a pig overnight. The transformation came about gradually. Tall, portly and easy-going, he sometimes worked hard at his job in the lumber mill five miles down the road from his small farm. For some unknown reason, he started to shrink a bit in stature. He put on a great deal of weight, made it a practice to snap at his family and began demanding breakfast in bed when he ought to have been out punching a time-clock. Everyone in the family, especially Lovina, his wife, wondered out loud if Alphonse was becoming a lazy hog. Part of the truth was that he was afraid to get out of bed and go to work. He wasn't sure he recognized anybody at the lumber mill now. Within a period of a few weeks all his friends there had become strangers. They didn't behave the same nor did they even look the same. Alphonse suspected that they were no longer quite human. Instead of talking they grunted, and instead of eating their bag-lunches in a civilized manner they dumped the food in the sawdust, made an outer circle with their fat rears and had a communal-type repast. It didn't make sense and Alphonse was doubly perplexed when no one in the household mentioned that the town was occupied by a lot of funny people who walked around on all fours. This might have been accounted for by the fact that his family seldom went into town. Alphonse stayed in bed, worried, ate ravenously, snapped at his wife and children and generally endured his existence. Now that he had so much leisure time, he could see how the farm had gone to pot. Lovina obviously wasn't carrying her share of the load. The house looked like a pigsty, the fence around the property needed repairs, the animals weren't being fed on time, the crops were ready for harvesting while autumn storms threatened -- the damned place was going to the dogs. "Oink, oink," said Alphonse. Take himself, for instance: He was being neglected. Lovina had it in her to be an excellent cook, but she was feeding him slop. At dinnertime he lay in his bed (which was getting smaller by the day) and agonized over the odors drifting in from the kitchen. Every evening he waited in anticipation for his share of the farm booty, and just as faithfully Lovina bore in a scrub bucket filled to the brim with potato and carrot parings, corn cobs, chunks of fat meat, wormy apples and dishwater. "I want some decent food!" he finally bellowed, whereupon Lovina brought him a mirror and invited him to look at himself. "I don't care what I look like, I want to eat like a man!" he yelled. She brought him man food and he found it impossible. The beefsteak felt like rocks in his mouth and tasted rotten, the gravy smelled to high heaven, the ice cream hurt his teeth. He couldn't eat any of it. "Give me back my slop," he said, and got it, and enjoyed it. Eventually he grew so fat he had (rouble turning over in bed. When (he springs broke and the mattress landed on the floor he didn't bother trying to fix them, just slept the way he was and found it comfortable. He discovered that looking in a mirror was an interesting way to spend his time. Once in a while he tried to shave but the bristles on his jowls were too tough and ruined his razor. He ran out of toothbrushes because he couldn't resist eating them when they were laden with sweet toothpaste. Only rarely did it occur to him that he was getting sloppy and disgusting, and then he would lie and stare at the wall and wonder what was happening to him. In the meantime he was plagued with a terrible desire: He wanted to join the pigs in the pen in back of the house. The sanitation problem in his room grew so bad that his children no longer came in to say hello or goodnight or to borrow money. Alphonse didn't mind. His esthetic tastes were altering along with his body, and, much as he hated to admit it, he liked what pigs liked. O ne day he broke through a wall of his bedroom and joined the pigs in the pen. They all rushed over to inspect him. A huge black and white sow named Gertrude leaped astraddle him and bit his neck. A small gray boar who had been trying to immobilize the sow against the fence knocked her off Alphonse and attacked him. Bigger than all of them, Alphonse beat the boar into a whimpering hulk after which he located Gertrude who was hiding beneath the feed trough. He made her come out and then he took a good look at her. He knew what he wanted to do but he wasn't enough of a pig to go ahead. Rutting wasn't the only thing in the world, surely, even for a pig, and besides this was the most revolting female he had ever seen in his life. As he turned away from her, he was confident that nothing in the universe could make him mount that creature. Five minutes later he did. He couldn't help himself. There were eight sows and five boars in the pen. He beat up five and mounted eight. He found the psychology of pigs easy to understand. Being uncouth and spiteful was practically the only way they could find diversion. A sow might be lying on a dry piece of ground, basking in the sun and minding her own business, when a boar came along and rolled her in the muck. Later, as the boar was having a snack at the trough, she might very likely climb into it and crap it up. Invariably he waited until she decided to try a little sunbathing again at which time he promptly rolled her in the muck. Alphonse had gotten into the pen by crawling under the fence. He got out the same way at nightfall, went back through the broken wall of the house and slept on his fallen mattress. In the morning Lovina brought him his breakfast. "Where were you yesterday? I couldn't find you anyw'here." Alphonse merely said, "Oink, oink." He ran into a problem later in the day when he went to join the pigs in the pen. Overnight he must have gained a few more pounds and now he was too fat to crawl under the fence. He solved his dilemma by hunting until he found a weak place, crashed through and was safe inside with Gertrude and the rest of his friends. A while later Lovina came out, saw the pigs running around loose, chased them back into the pen with the help of Spark, the dog, and then she ran barbed wire along the broken areas. Alphonse couldn't get out to go back to his room. The next morning Lovina came out to the pen and stood for the longest time, staring in at the pigs. "No one would blame me if I said I didn't know which was you," she said. "Don't play games," said Alphonse. "If there's any man left in you, you'd better talk. You think I didn't see what you did yesterday? You should be ashamed." "Come on, be a sport and let me out of this sty. I've had enough for today." Lovina rested her elbow on the top of the fence, supported her chin in her hand and stared at the huge white boar who stood in the muck and stared back at her through ugly little eyes. "You can't talk, can you?" she said. "All you can do is grunt. Hell, that's all you ever did anyway." With Spark close beside her to keep the boars away, she let herself into the pen, walked to the big white pig, grabbed his ear and led him outside. After he had gotten comfortable on his mattress, Alphonse said, "I'm sorry, I really am. It's the first time I've been unfaithful to you." "Oink, oink, that's all I hear," said Lovina. Starched white apron, starched red shirt, jeans, dark hair in a tight bun, dark eyes flashing warning signals from the smouldering mind behind them, she stayed by the door as if loathe to come near the snorting wheezing animal whose rump made a dent in the wall while its hoofs pointed straight at her. "You're a pig," she said. "Nod your head if you understand me. Good. I was sure you could. The other pigs understand English; the ones who used to be human. It's happening all over the world, even to most of the older children. Latest estimates say about one percent of grown males haven't changed." "Oink, oink," Alphonse said wearily. He was interested in what she said but he was tired, hungry, disgusted, despairing, and -- he was exultant when he thought of other happy days in the pen. He liked being a pig more than he had liked being a man. But such a thought was dangerous. "Help me, Lovina, I'm failing last," he said. "Everything is going to hell. The world might stabilize eventually, since lot of women can do their men's jobs. And maybe it only appears that everything is in an uproar. There's a possibility all this is an hallucination. Most of the experts say so." "Oink, oink, they're wrong." "Don't shake your head. What can a pig know?" "Pigs are intelligent." "Try to stay in your room," she Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher A. E. van Vogt's new novel, August. How do you describe a van Vogt novel? It's bound to be jammed with interesting new ideas, it's sure to be different, and it's sure to be the talk of sf readers! Vincent Di Fate did a great cover. ( UQ#-#C ) the second mighty cycle in his Burroughs-type novels as Dray Prescot finds himself on the unknown continent of Havilfar. Fully illustrated, of course! (UY #-SI. #) the best of his highly favored novels about Earl Dumarest's quest to find his Lost Terra -- the eleventh in the series. And Kelly Freas, Hugo winning artist, has a great cover. (UQI #-#c) Dickson is our short story collection this month. Need we say more? To help you keep on the interstellar track, Eddie Jones has a most unusual other-world painting on the cover. (UY#-#) (Sorry, Cap Kennedy's gone fishing. But he will be back in great form in September.) Complete Catalog. Send #c in stamps to: #I Av. of the Americas New York, N.Y. # said. "Don't go back out there." "Is that all you can do to help me? Just talk? What if I told you this thing with Gertrude is getting out of hand? For God's sake, I think I'm falling for her." Lovina couldn't understand him. As soon as she left, Alphonse went out to the pen. Lifting the bar of the gate with his snout, he let himself inside, hit the gate with his rear so that it slammed shut and made the bar fall. So relieved was he to be free of the stuffy house that he decided not to fight with the boars, even had kind words for them. They had been born to be slaughtered , they were harmless and not at all bad-natured; they were friendlier to him than people had ever been and they weren't critical bastards who strove for success by climbing across bodies. "You make me sick," said Lovina, when she came out and found him there. "I try to be objective but it doesn't work. I don't know what my reaction will be when Gertrude has her litter." S he kept him posted on what was happening outside his small, carnal universe. Approximately one percent of mature human males were not pigs. They couldn't do much to assauge the world's pain because they weren't leader-types. To a man, their personalities forbade the public limelight. They couldn't even be relied upon to attend important meetings. They were maddeningly independent women in any way possible, they mostly stood around and confessed they didn't know what the hell to do. Big business had failed; small business was stumbling along. Each community took care of itself and expected others to do the same. In big cities the pigs were corralled in public squares and details of women kept them fed and watered while other details took charge of supermarkets and rationed out food. A mass exodus west before the snows came was planned. The pigs would be the first to go, in trains and trucks. Large details of women would accompany them, settle them down on abandoned farms. Later the other women would join them and everyone would try to survive and establish some kind of workable society. The problem of food was always present in every group. In open country it wasn't too serious. Most human pigs were identifiable by tags pinned to their ears. A person or group desperate for food chose untagged pigs for slaughtering and hoped they weren't doing away with somebody's relative. Certain people said only injured or aged pigs should be used for food. Others objected and after much discussion it was decided that a man was a man whether he was old or damaged, young or whole. Dinner pieces were selected at random and only when the diners were satisfied that the victim was a stranger. Psychologists were vocal, speculated publicly and privately: Men had turned into pigs because of a virus; the transformation was an illusion; visitors from outer space were responsible; someone had contaminated the world's water systems with a drug that altered chromosomes; the situation was a psychosomatic phenomenon. Endless causes, but no cures were mentioned. Alphonse Durham changed back into a man because he decided he didn't want to be a pig. The fall days on the farm were perfect, as far as the weather was concerned. The food trough was always full because Lovina was generous and conscientious. The pen was warm and fragrant, the sows were amorous and pregnant with Alphonse's children. But he missed his human children, his four daughters, his disappointments; he had always wanted at least one son. But he missed his daughters who had run away from home weeks before. Lovina missed them too. They were big girls and able to take care of themselves but they were hers and every day she told Alphonse how much she wanted them back. The transformation of pig into man began when he realized how unnecessary his complex mind was becoming. What pig needed so much intelligence? The murdering knife was the man-made destiny of swine, the sun and the trough and mucking were their pleasures, and they had no use for much of anything else. Once he started thinking about Lovina, he couldn't get her out of his mind. Had he been human and carried on an adulterous affair, he surely would have done it in secret. Here he was, mucking around with eight holey swine while his wife worked hard to keep him alive. When she had been compelled to slaughter one of the animals for food, she hadn't taken Gertrude, nor had she chosen any of the sows. Instead she took the gray boar Alphonse disliked. As for Gertrude, she had no couth, was ready to roll or eat or sunbathe with the same enthusiasm. She didn't care if she were doing one or the other or all three simultaneously. Stupendous feats were within her capacity, but mostly because she was all gut and no brains. Alphonse didn't think he had lost any of his reasoning power. Probably he had but it didn't seem to matter. He could still figure things out. A pig wasn't a human in any way, shape or form. Living in a pen was boring. Satisfying the appetite got monotonous after a while and there had to be virtue in cleanliness and order, no matter how alluring filth and slovenliness appeared. Pigs simply didn't do anything important. "What are you doing in here?" said Lovina, walking into the bedroom that evening. It had been clean when Alphonse came in earlier but now it wasn't. T he repaired bed had been broken again. "Oink, help." "You spoke!" she cried. "Oink, ugh, my God, oink, oink, I wish I could die." Total reversion from pig to man took place within a few days, a much more rapid change than the original which had been slow and insidious. Men began popping up all over the world, not a great many but enough to convince women that the male of the species was again going to be significant. Radio stations and TV programs recounted the stories of the reborn. They were horror stories. Nervous, shivering males told the world it was hell to be a pig. They described how desperately they clung to the memory that they had once been human, that when the final vestiges of humanness began to disappear in their thoughts, they rebelled. What kind of revolt was it? Oddly enough it started in the viscera, a nauseous sensation that progressed to a complete rejection of their environment. Thoughts of the sun, the filth and their companions made them sick. They had foundered on satisfaction. Conscience, or reason, clamored. They were what they were, no matter how they looked, and when facade threatened to supercede reality an inner defense mechanism punctured the fog and the desire to return to manhood was activated. Alphonse was a man. "I'm never going to be a pig again," he said to Lovina. "If you can forgive me I'll do everything I can to make you happy." "I never knew one person could make another happy. It sounds like a lot of output on one side and intake on the other." "Do you forgive me?" "I don't know, but it probably doesn't matter. If you weren't special I never would have married you. Now that you're human again, I realize how much I missed you. You're a handsome man, Alphonse, and you're fairly well built. I like the way you walk, and there are other things." "But those things aren't the reason you're glad I'm back." "The main reason is sex appeal, whatever that is." Whatever it was, the second honeymoon didn't last long. Alphonse made himself into a rug and Lovina walked on him, reluctantly at first and then contemptuously and then brazenly. The mill wasn't operating so he took over the farmwork -- all of it. And all of the housework. He did everything; he even served Lovina her meals in bed. "You're going too far," she said. "I'll never be a pig again." "There's a variety of animals on this planet." Gertrude was traded to a farmer in the next town for a black boar named Max. The seven remaining sows were also traded for strangers. Alphonse felt better about slopping the pigs after that. Every day he sprinkled Lovina's body with oil and gave her a thorough massage. She did no work that might have strained her in any way, but he didn't take that into consideration. He was a changed man. "You're a very equal person," he said, patting her fanny. "In fact, you're so equal I'm actually inferior." "You're beginning to make me uneasy. Can't you just be plain old Alphonse and stop worrying about pigs?" Shuddering, he stroked her back. "This thing isn't over yet. I want us to survive. I think we really and truly love each other and something tells me that's important." "You're sounding more like a simpleton every day. Don't rub so hard and use a little less oil." "Civilization has about had it. We might all cash in our chips if more men don't come back. Two world, aren't enough to repopulate, let alone help rebuild." "Sounds like a lot to me," said Lovina. "Not when a big percentage of them are young boys. The others An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Discover why Richard E. Geis has won # Hugo Awards and been Nominated # times!  Blare of Trumpets Columnist: John Brunner Read issue ## and see Robert A. Heinlein dissected mercilessly, psychologically and culturally, by Alexei and Cory Panshin in their # words of "Reading Heinlein Subjectively." Read issue ## and return to the dear, lively days of the pulps with Sam Merwin, Jr. (former editor of "Written to a Pulp!" Enjoy Geis editorials, commentary, reviews, letters from high-powered ( low-powered) pros and fans. Quarterlysample I year #two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I have got to come back. Women need men." "And vice versa." He bent and kissed her neck. "Go away now so I can have a nap," she said. "Don't forget to take care of the hay, cotton, chickens, pigs, goats, and milk the cows, feed the cats and dogs, make the butter and ice cream, and for God's sake clean the house a little, won't you?" W hen he brought in her dinner tray one evening, she inspected the food with a scowl. "Don't we have any potato parings?" Nearly dropping the tray, he stared at her in astonishment. "Say that again." "This stuff gives me indigestion. Why can't you fix anything decent? I have a craving for peelings and corncobs and maybe some chunks of fat meat and some wormy apples all mixed in dishwater." The first thing Alphonse did was to hurry into town and try to find a doctor. He needed help. Someone had to come out to the house and stop Lovina from becoming something else. The doctor was in her office, but she was a pig. The ticket-taker at the seedy theater on the corner was also a pig. So were the checkout clerks in the town's only store. So were a lot of other women. So was Lovina, as he discovered when he went home. "Oink, oink, help!" "Fight it," said Alphonse. "Do something before it takes hold." "You did it. It's your fault. Oink, oink, oink!" "There's no one to help me. All the women are turning into pigs and there are about two hundred men in the whole damned state! Christ, there won't be anybody left!" He was almost right. About one percent of mature women remained human while approximately twenty percent of the human male pigs had reverted, so about twenty one percent of the formerly-human population were now walking around on two legs. Even faster than before, the world skidded down the slide toward another Stone Age. It didn't take Lovina long to leave the bedroom and make her initial pilgrimage to the pigpen. Alphonse did what he could to prevent it; the outsides of the bedroom walls were latticed with twobyfours. He regretted his lack of imagination when she exited the house via the hall, taking several doorframes with her. She might have earned a record for being the fattest pig in the world. Alphonse was six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds. Lovina used to be five-ten and had weighed one-sixty. As a pig Alphonse had tipped the scales at nine hundred. Lovina was every bit of eleven hundred pounds, the biggest, whitest hog Alphonse had ever seen. He stayed by the fence and stood guard. Whenever the boars tried to approach his wife he fired his rifle into the ground in front of them. This procedure consumed most of the afternoon and he was forced to think of the coming night. Would l.ovina return to the house or stay here? Finally he lassoed her around the neck with a thick rope and tried to haul her through the gate. She backed up and pulled him into a mud puddle. Max, the black beast Alphonse had acquired from the farmer down the road, immediately mounted Lovina. The five other boars got in line behind him. As Alphonse staggered toward the rifle, Max abandoned his amorous position and charged, reached the rifle first, grabbed the stalk between his teeth and broke it. Giving Alphonse a glare from his ugly little eyes, the big boar returned to Lovina and proceeded to beat back his competitors. Max was no pig. He was a man who looked like a pig. A black man. It wouldn't have mattered if Max had been white. The fact that he was a man-pig was what enraged Alphonse. Plus the fact that Lovina was so enthusiastic about being had by everything in the pen. Alphonse got a club and started beating heads. Most of the pigs ran through the open gate and headed across the open fields. Lovina and Max stayed inside, coupling. Alphonse went after them. Before he reached them, he turned into a pig. His rage had blown his mind. He was all emotion now and wasn't aware of his transformation as he leaped through the air and sank his tusks into Max's shoulder. The black boar screamed and fell onto his back. Alphonse tried to gore him in the stomach. Max took one look at the size of his opponent, leaped to his feet and sped out of the pen. Alphonse gored Lovina's thigh, tried to knock her down, bit her, shrieked in pain when she took his large scrotum in her teeth. Abandoning that vulnerable spot, she raked her teeth across his chest, left bloody furrows. They battled in earnest, jowl to jowl, eyes engorged and furious, their grunts and growls not mere threats but savage promises. He tried to down her but she downed him. She attempted to break his leg with her teeth but he escaped by goring a deep hole in her side. He went in for his kill and she ripped away a large chunk of his throat. Their blood soaked the ground, mixed with the mud, clouded their vision, sprayed the air, but they didn't stop fighting. He knocked her flat, saw her head crash into a crimson pool. She ripped at him until he fell beside her, his body leaking red from a dozen gashes. "I'm trying to kill her," he thought dazedly. "My wife. We're trying to kill each other." "Alphonse," she whispered weakly. He crawled until his nose touched hers. He wept and his tears mingled with hers. They sobbed because of their own wounds and because of the wounds they had given each other. She licked his throat where she had given him a nearlyfatal bite, he licked the hole in her side. Exhausted, bleeding, they lay and tried to comfort one another. alphonse felt a consuming desire to kiss his wife. He raised his snout and found himself staring into a human face. Lovina had turned back into a person. So had he. The damage they had sustained was still with them. Both were weak and bleeding and torn. Neither of them could walk. They crawled to the house, closed the front door, lay for hours on the living room floor until they regained enough strength to tend to one another's wounds. They didn't speak, avoided glances, touched reluctantly and by and by Alphonse went into one of the bedrooms and Lovina didn't follow. She went into a room of her own. When they shut the doors they shut more than just two panels of wood. Alphonse wasn't certain as to exactly when he turned back into a pig. It might have been a week later, it might have been longer. The first several days were hazy and pain-filled for him. He slept a great deal and occasionally forced himself to go out to the kitchen for food. Lovina stayed out of sight. He washed his wounds every day, changed the bandages, staggered to his bed and slept some more. All the while he listened for some sound she might have made, but he rarely heard anything. Like he, Lovina was keeping mostly to her room. And then one day he turned into a pig. He wasn't expecting it. His niind had begun to function again and he thought more about his own situation than he thought of what had happened. Eventually he resented his solitude, his fear and his discomfort. It had to be at least partly Lovina's fault. A week later he stood on all fours in the opening of a cave and stared down into the valley where the farm sat. There was no movement, the house was dark, no smoke came from the chimney. He knew Lovina couldn't be down there. She had turned into a pig, too, at about the same time he did. Both of them ran into the hills. She was probably in one of the caves on the other side of the valley. Tears leaked down his face. There was no place to go. He had already tried the town. A few people lived there but he was afraid to approach them. As for the pigs everywhere, he often saw them but they ran away from him and each other. No doubt they were all like him now, terrified and lonely and beginning to suspect that the end of (he nightmare lay inside themselves. Alphonse stared down at the farmhouse. Was it possible humanity was an imaginary figment? Where was the proof that there really had been such a thing as the human race? The people in the lown? No, that wasn't proof. "Oink." He said it, and it scared him. "Don't be a fool," he told himself. "Of course there's a human race. You were once part of it and you can be again. All you have to do is find your human self." In the middle of the night he became a man. He had been lying with his snout pointed toward his home and wishing he had someone lo talk to. A while later, he turned the doorknob and walked into his house. He lit a lantern and set it by the front window. Wandering from room to room was comforting. He touched things as he had never touched (hem before. The books on the shelves in his room were real because he understood them. His hands enjoyed the feel of paper and cloth. The bed felt soft to his thighs when he sat on it. He liked the way his feet met the floor as he walked. The air he breathed was good, food w as soft and tasty and revitalizing, silence was -- no good. S he scratched at the door about midnight the next evening. With the amazing, new Brotman Biofeedback device! High quality equipment has cost as much as # or even more. But now this new solid-state Bio-Feedenter the fascinating realm of biofeedback for I # the cost!    By measuring skin resistance and thus nervous system activity, Brotman's biofeedback instrument gives you a "read-out" of emotional and physical changes. It acts as an electronic mirror of your mind and body. As you learn to change the tone by altering your mental activity, new vistas of relaxation and meditation will open to you.    The device comes in two styles: one (sound feedback only) sells for #; the other (with sound and meter feedback) is priced at #. For free demo, call Phil Brotman at #-#-#. Or for further information (including a free reprint of an N.Y. Village Voice article on the device) send #c in stamps to: # West # Street New York, N. Y. # "The light. I saw it and knew you were here. I don't know what I'd have done if I hadn't seen it." "You don't have to whisper," he said. "Come in." She hesitated. "It's because I'm afraid." "So am I. Let's have dinner together." She was naked. Going into her room, she shut the door and stayed away a long time. When she came out, she was dressed. "What took you so long?" he said. "I was looking at everything. It's new and different, isn't it?" "Yes." They had a meal together. Staring at him over her coffee cup, she reached out and laid her hand on his. "We're in danger," she said. "It can happen again." "I know." "Why?" He shook his head. "That I don't know. I think it's probably simple. We either get along together or we'll be back up in those hills." She shivered. "We've been living together for thousands of years. We built a civilization together. No matter what anybody says, we stand or we fall together. There can't be any other way." "You don't think it'll be different some day? Maybe science will fix it so women won't have babies any more. Maybe men and women will be exactly the same." "No," she said. "We're two of a kind but we'll always be different. Why does that have to mean we'll tight?" "That's too hard for me to answer." He knew he would have to answer it some day. He knew it then and he knew it a month later when he stood on all fours in the cave opening and stared down at the house. The lantern in the front window was lit. Lovina was down there, telling him to come home. How long would this go on? Would they keep changing into pigs? They met, ate together, even made love, talked, talked, talked, and it was the damned talk that kept making pigs of them. Because they couldn't speak without thinking. So it was the mind that had to grow up. It didn't just happen when he was with Lovina. He had met a man and their conversation changed them both into grunting swine who ran away from each other. Just a brief talk with a man. How to think, how to bring the human to top level, how to be master of one's own soul -- a condition to live for. Do it or die squealing that the world was a puddle of muck. H e stared down at the bright window and he wept. "We'll do it!" he cried. "We have to do it right, Lovina. If we don't, we're finished."  Five fantastic ways to leave this world, alive! v   Just by adding these science-fiction masterpieces  to your library, you can depart any time. To  live in the dimension you choose, for as long as you want. And return, of course, when you like. What a stellar way to go... and come back. For a very noncosmic price! (i.il.iclic Emperor's treasure-box sampler includes the best of Anderson -- holder of five Nebula and two Hugo Awards. And mliloi Roger Elwoad tops it off with careful, affectionate, insightful analyses of Poul's work. An honest-to-goodness tribute to one of n imice-fiction's abiding geniuses. # pages. # si miicc-fiction by authors like Aldiss, Pohl, Knight, Lafferty, Russ and six and three Nebula awards. # pages. # meticulously plotted, detailed, frightening, exciting, baffling, challenging. It just won't let you go! # pages. # engaging, amusing science-fiction fantasy is set in the post-atomic war civilization of Stories. Ten gripping stories representing the subtle union of precise biochemical technicalities and mystical reverence for the occult. # pages. # Get these books from your favorite book store, or wherever science-fiction books are sold.  This is a science fiction story about an inventor -- whose mark we shall wear upon our brow -- forever. U ntil he heard the leopard cough there had been only the pain of his broken arm, firmly pinned by the crotch of the driftwood that had sheltered and carried him across a hundred miles of veldt before the flash flood had sunk enough to let it ground. Now, there was pain and panic. He moaned in I error, flailing at the branches, starting a fresh flow of blood from the torn flesh. Either the blood helped, lubricating the skin and bark, or he had grown more desperate. His arm slipped, still trapped, but turning in the taper of (he fork. The terror still lay upon him, but the panic had ebbed. He turned farther, whimpering as much in fear as from the agony in his Crumpled arm. Finally, by twisting as much as possible, he could just Hip a foot against the far bough of (he trap -- then he could walk up until his back was to the main trunk, and both legs were bent double overhead, feet pressed against the pinning branches. It look almost his full height before he could overcome the spring of the wood, force loose the wooden jaws; then he was free, falling back against the trunk. He lay for a moment before rolling over in the direction from which the sound had come. A quarter of a mile away, the cat was moving, silhouetted against the goldwashed evening sky. It was heading away from him, moving in an easy lope along the far bank of the wide arroyo. The light breeze carried the faint, musky stench of the cat to him. It had neither seen nor scented him -- but he knew that if the wind changed, the blood-odor would bring it back. Worse, it was almost dark -- things other than leopards hunted the haunted night. He could not stay in the tree, and there was nowhere else to go. The limestone caves where the hunting packs bedded safe in their numbers were a hundred miles distant -- even farther than the spot where he had gained the trees scant yards ahead of the cloudburst-fed wall of water that had come snarling down the ravine. But he could not stay in the tree; he dropped onto the gravel of the streambed, stood trembling for a moment, shaken by the drop. dren would be men. He foreshadowed those years so well that his decendants would argue whether he should be named Australopithecus hahilis, the last of the not-quitemen -- or Homo habilis, the first of the true men. He stood upright, nearly hairless, and below the heavy eyebrows, the face was startlingly human. The effect was strongest in his dark eyes, alive now with fear and pain, flickering over the rocky waf.s as they sought shelter or weapon. The too-heavy chin, the abrupt curve of the forehead, were muted by the heavy shock of hair and beard, while the thick black curls on limbs and torso accented the brown skin without covering it. He had no name -- it was still too early for individual designations. Not quite Adam -- that honor went to others, earlier -- but Adam's firstborn. Let us call him Cain -- as good a name as any. Cain, then, stood in the bed of the wash. The thirsty sun and greedy sands had sucked away the Hood, but a few pools remained, and he knelt to drink, cupping the water in his good hand as he watched for the leopard. The wash was paved with stream rounded pebbles, mixed with jagged chunks pounded from larger stones, and he chose one with a fairly sharp edge. Should the leopard -- or worse, a lion or hyena pack -- appear, it would be a feeble weapon. But better than none. He was climbing the bank when he saw the bone. Longer than his forearm, ending in a heavy double joint, the half-buried leg joint was a weapon -- the weapon of his kind. He lusted for it, and clambered over the shifting sand to pull it free. He was swinging it, testing the feel, when the hunting cat returned. Cain screamed in terror as it snarled and leapt, the bank adding momentum to its flight. Rolling away from the slashing claws, he flailed wildly with the bone club, then there was a tearing at his back -- not the smashing blow he expected, but a futile grasp for footing, and the bone was gone, wrenched from his hand. From the bottom of the bank came choking roars, as terrifying as if the cat were still upon him, and he lay, his face pressed earthward, until the sounds died and he could nerve himself to look. Not quite yet a leopard -- larger, fiercer -- the cat lay sprawled at the bottom of the arroyo, the first rigors of death touching paws that still clawed at the bone club jammed down its throat with the full force of the spring. Scrambling down, Cain cautiously bounced a pebble off the spotted hide, then another, before gaining the courage to approach the carcass. He would have fled, but the lure of the club was too great. I t was slow work to free the club, and it was almost dark when he succeeded. He had to find shelter. He was too sick to travel far but the club was at least psychological support. His homing instinct turned him back up the wash. The leopard had made enough noise to draw any predators within miles, and he was alert for any sign that the cat's death howls had brought a lion or a second leopard. He was not prepared for what came instead. He did not see the line of heads until it had grown to a row of upright, five foot forms, shadowed against the fading golds and glowing purples of the sky, atop the bank. There was time to run a dozen paces, then a well thrown rock caught him behind one ear, sending him crashing, face down, into an almost dry puddle. Consciousness remained only long enough for him to sense the approach of the line down the slope toward him. He woke with the panic still upon him, too weak from loss of blood to do more than whimper and toss feebly. It was day, but the light was shattered into a dance of shadows, and he slowly realized that he lay beneath a large thorn bush, the light flickering as the canopy of leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze. The blood had been licked from his torn arm, and he had been placed in a hollow scooped from the sand and lined with coarse grasses and leaves. The panic passed slowly, to be replaced by fever, pain, and an ever-growing thirst. As the morning passed into the heat of afternoon his fever deepened. He could smell water nearby, but he w'as too ill to attempt finding it. The female came at evening, bending over him to spit a sip of lukew arm water into his dry mouth. He almost gagged on the sudden gush of liquid, then managed to swallow. She waited patiently to finish passing the mouthful of water, then left. Weakened beyond fear, Cain could only whimper after her. She returned with a second mouthful, cooler than the first, and an over-ripe fruit. He took the water, but pushed the fruit away. She grunted, ate it, then withdrew, leaving him to lapse back into a fevered sleep. The fever worried at him for three days, trying to tug away the slender thread of life, then slunk off, defeated, to leave him to two days of healing sleep. The female came two or three times a day, licking his wounds, or picking out the maggots after the flies found him. It was not mercy -- the maggots w'ere promptly eaten with great relish -- but it aided his healing. The rest of the time he slept, waking only to accept water. The broken arm was mending. If he lived until it healed, it would be crooked, but useable. On the sixth day, he had recovered enough to become aware of his surroundings. The thorn bush reached the ground about him, hollowed in the center, with a single opening kept stoppered with a ball of dead branches. It had enough worth as a shelter to permit a frightfrozen Cain to lie and peer through the leaves as a lioness prowled through the clump of bushes, unable to do more than snuffle and growl in frustration. His hosts -- or captors -- were almost as human as he. Any of the several children or younger females would have passed easily enough in the caves -- although their faces were flatter, with longer jaws and more sharply canted foreheads. But the two males he had seen were giants -- a foot taller than Cain, who was tall for a hunter -- and the muscles of their unbearded jaws were so heavy they formed visible ridges as they worked at chewing the heavy roots and tubers that were the staples of their diet. There were no signs of serious hunting, or even of meat eating -- a good sign, though he could not interpret it. It made it less likely that he was to be eaten. the Miocene jungles had stretched to Lake Victoria in a chain of swamps interspersed with open savannahs and forested parklands. Here, long before Adam, other, earlier ancestors had browsed the shores and forests of Eden, or waded into the swamps after worms and shellfish. Somehow, one had changed. Perhaps moving into deeper waters forced him upright, hair that could catch clogging mud falling away, hands to capture slippery mollusks developing. Later, when the fiery sword of the Pliocene had dried the lands, sending those early hominidae forth from Eden to labor in the sweat of their brows, there had been a second change. Lost in a past so distant as to be beyond comprehension, a beast had bent to pick up a stone. A beast had bent. Adam arose. And Adam had two sons: Cain, the first born -- a hunter of the beasts of the field. And Abel. He came on the eighth day, following the female into the ring of thorns to squat in silence while she licked Cain's wounds clean and gave him a small, sour fruit. Larger and heavier than Cain, Abel shared the same bright gift of intelligence. He, too, carried a weapon -- a fistsized chunk of rock, roughly hacked to a point, and loosely carried in one massive hand. When the female finished Abel rose to a crouch and began to prod and pull Cain toward the entrance. Resisting at first, then slowly crawling on one hand, the smaller man followed the female down the short tunnel while Abel brought up the rear. Once they were both in the open the giant helped the hunter to stand. Cain swayed for a moment, sick and dizzy, half blinded by the unfiltered sunlight. Abel waited for him to recover, then urged him forward between two bushes into an open stretch of gravel-strewn sand, in the center of which was a small, spring-fed water hole surrounded by plants. Kneeling, Cain drank, eyeing the other cautiously as he did so. Abel merely stood by, silently watching. The female was gone. Reassured, Cain studied his surroundings. Two of the bushes facing the spring were hollowed, but empty. Farther down the small stream that ran from the spring to vanish in the sand, a group of females and children were grubbing at the vegetation that lined the banks. He could not count them -- his concept of number stopped at three -- but they were not many. There was no sign of the second male he had seen earlier, nor of the female, who had tended him. When he had drunk enough, he stood, and Abel approached, pushing him back toward the bush. The larger man did not follow him within the ring, but closed the entrance from without, leaving Cain in solitude. There were several roots on the ground beside the sleeping nest -- coarser stuff than he had been given before, and he put them aside. A quick circle of the bush brought a low mewl of pleasure as he found the bone club where it had been carelessly discarded. The feel of the heavy bone restored his confidence and spirits as he squatted beside the hollowed nest, scouring the weapon with a handful of sand. He did not wait for Abel or the female to appear the next morning, but pushed the plug aside himself and crawled into the open, dragging the club behind him in his rapidly mending left hand. Moving behind a bush, he scraped a hole in the sand and relieved himself, then walked down to the water hole to drink. He was bent at the edge of the spring when Abel and the second male emerged from the shelter nearest the clearing, hand-stones grasped easily in their fists. Shifting the club to his right hand, Cain tensed, but there was no sign of hostility from the giants, nor any sign that they found his presence disturbing. They reached the water a few feet away, one drinking while the other stood, then changed places. When Abel rose, Cain rose also, falling in beside his brother, but leaving a respectful ten feet between them. Abel continued to ignore him, and the other male watched for a moment, then lost interest and walked off. They passed through the ring of shelters (avoiding the children being herded out by the females) and into the desert beyond. Although shorter, Cain easily matched Abel's waddling stride. Cain's children would one day be men -- Abel's never. already, Abel had taken a wrong V turning, moving into the bushlands to live on the roots and tubers he found there -- while Cain had remained on the open veldt, turning hunter to survive. Now the drought struck into the heart of the bushlands, drying streams into washes, replacing lusher vegetation with the hardy thorn bush and cactus. Roots and tubers became scarcer, tougher to chew. Jaw muscles changed to meet new demands, body chemistry to wrest nourishment from lower-grade food. The drying-death continued with calm, steady ferocity as the millennia of the Pliocene slowly unwound; the bush had become a trap. Abel and his kind were dying. Cain did not realize they were hunting until they actually flushed game -- a small rodent that darted from cover to scamper across the open sand toward its burrow. There was a flash of motion as Abel slung the stone in a sidearm throw, sending up a shower of sand a few inches ahead of the cony. The rodent gained its nest and went to ground, and Abel grunted and went to retrieve his throwing stone. When he returned, Cain was searching through the groundcover beyond the burrow, and the smaller man grunted, pulling aside a bush to reveal a second entrance. As Abel came to watch, Cain rose, barking a command that could be roughly translated as 'watch the hole'. The giant made a soft sound, but did not move. Cain repeated the command, then gave it up. He lacked the sophistication to realize that there might be differences in language, but he could tell the other did not understand. He changed to sign language, patting the ground and acting out what the other must do. Abel watched the performance impassively, then his eyes lit and flickered to the first hole, and he knelt. Returning to the entrance, Cain began to pound the ground with his club, tracing the windings of the hidden burrow. He was halfway to Abel when the hyrax emerged from the bolt-hole in a flurry of motion, and Abel swung his stone. He came to his feet, holding the bloody rodent, his face a mass of ridges and hollows as the heavy muscles folded into a grin. Cain grinned back, then both men chuckled and moved off toward the water hole -- still separated, but by five feet rather than ten. A second male was recruited and trained, and at day's end they had perfected the technique of clearing burrows. The entire colony gathered an hour before sunset to feast -- meat enough for even children to taste. For Cain, whose jaws were never meant for chewing bulbs and roots, it was survival. The drought had been no kinder to the smaller beasts than to the larger. The conies were eaten raw, and nothing wasted -- but there was little meat. Cain would need many more to regain his strength -- to get them, he must greatly improve Abel's hunting skills. He could not gather a full hunting pack -- even including the females and children, there were not enough of the gentle giants to work after the manner of his kind. But there were other ways, and he had seen signs of easy game around the water hole. The problem lay in communicating with Abel. He began the lessons the following morning, leading them after a larger burrower that would someday be an aardvark. The technique was a variant of the one already taught, and he was content to lead, males. They returned in triumph with their prey, and Cain was mildly interested to note that the giants skinned out the aardvark with the same hand-stones used for the kill -- a task which he would have done with the knife-like lower jaw of a small antelope or deer. Flushed with the success of the hunt, and with the heat of noon upon them, Abel demurred from any further effort, leaving Cain to his own devices. Restless, he wandered through the camp, exploring. The females were again digging along the stream, using the hand stones -- this time as picks. Pointed chunks of rock were common enough in stream beds -- he used them himself for simple tasks if they were at hand. But these were strangely sharp, and he was vaguely puzzled to notice that they were all of a size and shape. The stones added force to a blow, and the giants could throw them with fair accuracy, but he dismissed them as generally inferior to the club as a hunting weapon -- but the stones had other uses. H e came upon the female who had nursed him working alone at a thorn bush. The thorn-ring sprang from a central stem, and she was using one of the handstones to hack away the tough deadwood clogging the space beneath the arching boughs, slicing the stems free and discarding them. She stopped as she saw Cain, smiling shyly. He instinctively recoiled as she approached, extending the stone to him, but she smiled again and repeated the offer. Dropping the club, he accepted the hand-ax, turning it to examine the edge. The picks he had seen were hacked to points -- this had a row of jagged edges, stained now with sap. The material was shiny where chipped, and cool to his grasp -- heavy, but not awkward. The female made a soft sound, her smile widening into a grin, and mimicked the action of cutting. Tentatively, he swung at the tangle. The stone turned in his hand and glanced away, leaving the branch unmarked. He tried again, harder, with the same result, and she laughed and took the hand-ax, holding it by one edge, and showed him how to slice across the branch, then handed it back. It took a few tries to get the feel of the thing, then he was slicing with increasing skill at the tough wood. The sharpness of the edge was startling -- the branches parted with clean, open cuts, and he soon discovered the knack of making two cuts meet in a vee. He was happily practicing his new art when the female placed a hand on his arm, indicating that they had cleared enough. Reluctantly, he handed back the ax. Looking from his face to the ax, she giggled, then motioned for him to follow. Leading him back through the brush to an outcropping of rock, she stooped, moving her hand over the stones. Selecting one at last, she handed it to Cain. He turned it as he had the hand-ax. There were a few chipped places -- but nothing to match the edge of the ax. Puzzled, he returned the fist-sized rock. Her next act added to his puzzlement -- picking up a second stone, she squatted, hammering the two together. The action seemed purposeless, but when she again offered the rock, there was a row of sharp chips down one side -- sharper than the edge of the handax had been. To the credit of his man-bound wit, he grasped the idea almost immediately. The ground was littered with similar chunks, and he knelt and chose one, bringing it down on another without perceptible result. He swung again, harder. This time, both stones broke and crumbled, producing only a few flakes of decomposed granite. Giggling again, the girl knelt beside him, moving her hand over the rocks as she had done at first. It took much gesturing to make Cain apprehend that rough, pitted rocks were unsuitable, and teach him to choose hard, brittle flints from the similarly iron-stained granites. When they had found several, he tried again. The stone fractured into two unequal halves on the first swing, without producing a sharp edge. The girl shook her head negatively, and took one of the chunks. This time, he watched closely as she hammered delicately at the sharp lip, flaking off smaller chips. At the end of the demonstration, he shrugged and rose. The process took two good hands. He hunted again toward dusk -- alone, more for the solitude of it than for food. He found a lizard, and, by luck, another hyrax, and the skies were already deepening into the purples of twilight before he returned to the sleeping-bush. He had lived there alone since the morning of the first hunt. Now there was movement within. He dropped the game and grasped his club, the sun-warmed bone reassuring to his hand, and slipped silently to the entrance, ready to fight. Instead, he found the girl, a few fruits laid beside her, in a second nest adjoining his own. She was young -- younger than he had thought -- not yet heavy with child, or worn from childbirth. He expected some show of resentment from the two males, but there was none. For Cain's kind, pairing was a matter of life -- and death. Only the strongest and most jealous kept more than one mate. The easy-going polygamy of the giants baffled him. He put it aside; the woman was his -- that was enough. I n the next two weeks they greatly diminished the easier game in the neighborhood of the water hole. The time was one of healing -- at its end, his left arm was strong enough to grasp and carry, and he had learned three things; to throw the stones, to chip the edge of a flint to razor keenness, and to communicate -- after a fashion -- with Abel. Abel, in turn, had come to enjoy unprecedented plenty. Cain required flesh to survive -- Abel regarded it as a palatable luxury. He continued to eat his usual diet of tubers and grew almost sleek -- and definitely lazy. Now the easy meat was nearly gone the time had come to hunt larger stuff. It took two days of prodding -- complicated by the lack of a common language or background -- before the easy-going giants grasped what he was about -- at first with reluctance, then with childlike enthusiasm. The game was large -- an eland, with four-foot horns that could slash or impale -- but the technique was one that had been tested well; had gone into its devising. Normally, there would have been twenty harriers -- the young males of the pack -- while the rest, females, older males, and children, waited in the ambush. And the prey would have been a herd, not a single animal. There were not enough of the giants for that. He must harry alone. The stalk was tediously simple. The antelope had little enough reason to fear the near-men. When one of them rose a few yards distant and began to shout, it merely nodded its massive head in annoyance and moved away. Exasperated, Cain came closer. Again, the mountain of meat moved daintily off. In his anger, he threw the hand-stone. By luck the sharp edge bit into the shining flank of the eland, and it's head jerked up, eyes wide. Grasping at success, Cain bent and scooped up a stone. The unedged rock hit with enough force to bruise, and as Cain screamed in imitation of a leopard, the defiance in the beast's eyes changed to fear, and it bolted directly away from him. He followed, stopping only to retrieve the hand-stone, loping easily after the eland. It could outrun him, but he did not wish to catch it. At bay it would be too dangerous to face. It was running in the right direction, he would make sure that it kept running until he was too late. The eland ignored the bush to either side, leaping with flat bounds any that stood in its path. A movement at one side nearly betrayed the trap, then the terrified beast was within the half-ring of waiters. Suddenly instead of one man-thing running after at a distance, it was being mobbed by them. Stones whizzed from all sides, thudding from lathered flanks or skittering noisily off, and it broke stride and swung about, seeking only escape. The circle closed inward about it, the din increasing. There was still a gap, and the antelope ran blindly -- straight over the edge of the narrow ravine concealed in a fold of the gently rolling ground. There was the rotten-stick snap of breaking bone and the eland went down, both forelegs shattered. The giants gathered on the bank, watching it thrash, until Cain arrived, moving with the easy grace of the hunter. He paused beside Abel, studying the situation, then slid down into the draw, the bone club in his right hand. The eyes of the crippled eland were alive with pain and fear, and the horns swung toward him, threatening disembowelment if he should come within reach. Circling warily out of range until the animal's head turned, Cain darted suddenly, club swinging to crack on the antelope's skull. Too light to crush or shatter, it rebounded. He danced away as the horns slashed at him, then moved in again, bone meeting bone. To kill, he must strike at the neck with enough force to crack the vertebrae. There should have been a circle, keeping the beast under constant attack. For one hunter, it was a ticklish job. The second male -- perhaps thinking Cain too ed the impasse -- tragically. What passed in the giant's mind was unclear. Without even rudimentary caution he flung himself down the bank, hand-stone raised for the coup. His logic was nearly correct -- the skull which had turned the club shattered beneath the stone -- and the stabbing scimitar of horn, driven by the death reflex, drilled his shoulder. Only Cain's desperate, last moment shove kept it from piercing the lung, and disabling, but not crippling. There was no question of moving the eland to the water hole intact, nor of staying in the open where predators could find them. The carcass was butchered where it lay, the women hacking it into bloody quarters with their stones, wasting nothing. Even the huge head was carried back in triumph. For the near-men, starvation was a constant companion. There was never enough to eat, and what the day brought was eaten without thought of the future -- tomorrow must bring its own food or one starved. It was that simple. Now there was food in abundance -- the logical result of applying techniques designed to meet the minimum needs of a hundredmember hunting pack to a twelvemember foraging society. Faced with more food than they could possibly eat at a single sitting, they glutted themselves trying. That any was saved was due to accident. They had carried the meat for miles, leaving a broad trail of blood to lure other predators. The hyenas came at twilight, skulking through the bush, reluctant to attack the man-pack. A lion was next, ending the feast as the colony scattered to shelter, dragging the meat with them for one last try at gorging it all down. Later, in the fitful, uncomfortable sleep of his first experience with indigestion, Cain dreamed -- strange, disquieting dreams of pounding futilely at a lion with the bone club, of the stone in the giant's hand crashing through the eland's skull, of elands that transformed into leopards to hunt him. He awoke unrested, but with the nagging germ of an idea. The girl awoke to find him sitting, the club in his right hand, the hand-ax in his left, staring from one to the other. With pragmatic insight, she left him to his puzzlement, crawling out to seek water. The entire colony was gripped in a massive hangover from the feast -- yet there was still enough food to afford them the undreamt luxury of a day of rest. He continued to nag at the puzzle through the morning. Its terms were clear enough: the club extended the reach, but lacked the mass to kill effectively -- the handstone had the weight to kill even large game, but required a foolhardy closeness. The stones could be thrown, but had no advantage over an unedged rock unless the cutting edge chanced to strike true. Cain could feel the solution near at hand, but it eluded him, and he gave up at last and went to the water to drink. Abel and the rest lay sprawled about, lazing in the sun. After failing in a half-hearted attempt to interest the larger man in a short hunt, Cain joined him beneath the bush, tinkering with the two weapons again. Abel watched as he tapped the ground, first with the club, then with the ax, but lost interest after a few moments, as the girl had. The effort was extraordinary. He had spent hours upon the problem, rather than minutes. The final solution took the perseverance of genius, and was elegantly simple -- if the bone was not heavy enough, nor sharp enough, place the stone at the end of the bone, gaining weight and edge, keeping the advantage of reach. He experimented for two days before he managed to wedge the hand-ax into the end of the femur of the eland. By then the food was gone, and they had been forced to hunt again. He had taken his new weapon, but bone, he quickly discovered, was brittle. When they had trapped the aardvark at last, its skull had shattered quite satisfactorily. So had the shaft of the new ax. Disgusted, he almost gave up. It was the second male's wounded shoulder that ended the impasse. The sight of the raw flesh recalled his own torn arm, and he touched the white scar. The leap was prodigious -- for any near-man to recall a single incident after nearly two months was an incredible feat of mind. To equate a forked branch that had held his arm so tightly that he could not move it with the problem at hand was genius of the first order. It was not lovely. Of necessity, the thorn branch was chosen for the proper fork, rather than for the proper shaft -- but it worked. The edged stone now ended a three-foot club, tightly wedged by the spring of two curved twigs that passed around and beyond it. Others had used what nature provided, improving at times, but keeping to the natural form. This was something entirely new -- an artifact, an object without natural analogue. There would be improvements over three better the basic idea until the last, brief tick of recorded history. In his monomania, he bullied the giants into another hunt for eland. The kill was swift, even though the animal had suffered only a broken leg, and could still hobble and slash. He had continued to experiment, slashing one haunch into bloody ribbons, until Abel finally objected -- mildly at first, then heatedly. If the inventor wished to play with sticks and stones, that was his business -- this was a pragmatic matter of wasting good food. Smarting and angry, Cain returned to the water hole. It ended, as it had begun, with the girl. She was not in the shelter when he returned, and he left the ax, took his bone club, and went to seek her. Perhaps, had he not been angry, he would have understood. She had come to him freely. Should she tire of him, she could leave as freely -- it was the way of the giants. It was not Cain's way. The hunters mated, if at all, for life -- a matter of survival, for a nursing female could not hunt. But status depended upon possession, and fights over females were commonplace. To have, and hold a woman, one must be strong -- ready to challenge any who would take her. The stealing of a woman meant battle -- or shame. When Cain found the girl with the second male, there was but one interpretation. The bewildered giant nearly died at the first onslaught. The primitive hunting instinct aroused, Cain moved in for the kill, swinging the bone with wicked force and skill. Had one of the hunting folk received the blow, it would have shattered his skull -- the giant, protected by the heavy ridge of jaw muscles, was only stunned. The resistance as the club struck triggered Cain's memory, and he turned, sprinting for his shelter to retrieve the ax -- and kill. It triggered something else. There was no precedent to guide him -- none of his kind had yet met another culture, and survived. Yet the shock of experience had taught him to think -- the touch of the ax reinforced his new habits, bringing him to a stop. These were not his kind, and a sudden wave of alienation and homesickness swept over him. He had overstayed his time. H e was well enough to travel. The coming of the girl, without ;i bitter fight to claim her, had been strange. He would accept her leaving as another strange, natural phenomenon among the giants. The first glimmering of understanding was not easy -- it warred with ingrained patterns -- but to his credit, instead of returning to the light, he left the camp, heading toward the foothills -- and home. There was no need for preparation or delay -- the ax was the sum of his possessions. To carry food would only make him tempting to predators -- he would live on what lie found along the way. He had covered three miles by dusk, alert for the big cats, when he heard something moving behind him. It was Cain the hunter, instincts alert, who slipped to the shelter of a boulder to watch the trail. Whatever was trailing him made too much noise for a cat, and his eyes narrowed as he caught a glimpse of a massive, upright form against the darkling purples of the sky. Bitterness filled him. He had thought it different among the giants. He was evidently wrong. instincts flooding back, Cain left his ambush, moving silently -- stalking the other with incomparable skill. The giant did not hear Cain come behind him, nor did he sense the fall of the ax. The edged stone struck his neck, severing jugular and carotid arteries, only the thick muscles preventing total decapitation. Too late, Cain recognized Abel. The larger man stared up at him with amazement and disbelief, then his eyes clouded with a pain that passed into the glaze of death. The hand-stone had fallen from one fist, but the other remained clenched, and Cain gently prised it open. Perhaps Abel had meant to give a parting gift, perhaps he had wanted to tempt Cain back. In the hand, like a silent reproach, lay three of the small, not quite ripe fruits the giants prized so dearly. Cain had slain without thought, without mercy, without compunction. He had done so before. He would do so again. Yet, dimly comprehending that the giant had felt no malice, he knew this slaying to be different. He lacked the words or concepts to name guilt or remorse -- but he had slain his friend, his brother. Murder had been born. A moment further he stood, the inexpressible sorrow pressing in at him, then turned away, to resume the long, dangerous trek to the hills -- and manhood. As Dr. Asimov said in the July issue, "if only we can survive this next crisis..." I C apt. b. a. Cooper was flying bian sands of the Rub' al Khali, headed north to an IP over Abu Dhabi. In tally ho, fifteen meters of either wingtip, flew fighter support for his photo-recon mission. It was five minutes past noon, Solar Time -- or # Zulu -- in bright sun and light haze. Fine weather for blowing out some precious jet fuel and grabbing a few snapshots of the fighting zone and the Japanese megatankers feeding at offshore deepwater oil terminals. The war, if you could call it that, was three days old. But preparations in Washington had been ongoing two months. Readiness had become imperative when an environmental-resources satellite, had begun making guesses that a large oil field might be overlapping defunct U.S. and active Japanese oil concessions bordering Abu Dhabi. Confirmation of lower cretacious oil had come quickly, if quietly. And shortly afterward certain vocal locals had expressed dissatisfaction with their government and its policy of all-Japanese oil export. Gaining momentum, the separatists had laid claim to a fiftykilometer square of desert roughly encompassing the newly discovered field. In a transport of selfless zeal, the U.S. had thereupon presented the secessionists with limited air-support. In the air that support soon encountered some dust and smoke and a few polite Japanese fighterplanes. Not much was happening on the ground. Cooper's radarmap told him time to IP: nearly eight minutes. He could see the circular blips representing his double escort, watched one slowly move out in front while the other dropped back to cover his ass. The computer facsimile screen, correlating data from the phased array radar, started to show targets out front -- tiny white triangles with quadrant identifying codes: RF#, RF#, and so on. The horizon line split the screen. In the present mode, only closing targets were displayed. Cooper took a few deep breaths and tried to relax. Time to IP: five minutes. He busied himself with his cameras, watching the status lights come up: preheat, lock release, cam doors open, exposure to auto. Two variable-position wing gun cameras relayed stereo video via the secure satellite datalink to base in Darwin, Australia. Beneath the fuselage there was a color #mm movie camera set at # fps. Two still #mm cameras shooting at alternate quarter seconds, one with tri-x bw, the other with bw infrared also hung ready -- plus a #mm panoramic still camera shooting color infrared at variable speed. All film was inflight-processed. IP in three. His flightseat began to vibrate according to the whims of the Attention Augmentor. The AA was supposed to keep a pilot alert as the situation around his plane became more demanding. Some airmen found it annoying. Most found it restful. Cooper generally ignored, when possible, its intrusion on his concentration. He counted six targets up there, ranging from white to a deep blush. The redder they got, the closer they were. He could designate any four of them and get a radar or laser lock-up for his camera-control. As they came into range of one or another armament, the target triangles would flash as would the code designation of the optimum weapon. The computer made the selection; the pilot made the kill. Not Cooper, of course. His recon plane flew unarmed. The only thing he could do was run -- but he could do that impressively. Just over Mach three where the air thinned out; two point two plus on the deck. IP in one. He switched momentarily to visual. The nose camera gave him a fisheye view. Even at one mile up, his speed of nearly half a mile a second caused the sandstone ground features to blur. He made out nothing of consequence directly ahead though the IP was surely in sight. He switched back to compfac and heard the reduce-speed beeper. On the third beep he was throttled back to Mach # automatically, still matched by his cover. The lead plane was now two klics out front, a weak, pointless flak-suppressor. IP -- now. The cameras turned over for five seconds then shut down. The flaksuppressor dropped back a thousand meters, his job complete. There had been no flak to soak up and no gun positions to smoke. The radarmap now read IP#: two minutes plus. Cooper held his speed steady, took a cautious breath, just to break the monotony. By this time the screen in front of him showed eight targets, four of them blinking. Nobody was shooting, however. That was to be expected. He zeroed in on one hostile with the gun cameras and got a laser lock-up. The target made a flyby at ten klics high, exposing its armed belly. The Japanese fighters, code name Zato-Ichi, nosed around and sometimes buzzed recon missions. All quite friendly -- so far. But no one knew how long the honeymoon would last. The groom was getting restless. If the secession stuck, the U.S. stood to gain exclusive rights to the new field when it came onstream. Otherwise the field would be exploited by the Japanese as was the Murban-Bu Hasa field less than sixty kilometers to the west. And if they stood for this, they might stand for some more. It was impossible to say for sure, yet nobody doubted the importance of Persian Gulf oil to a nation that required every year. At IP# the Persian Gulf coast was hastily photographed, but Cooper didn't have time to inspect the results. The cameras ran another five and one-half seconds before the recall order came through. They were approaching the Fateh offshore field. Wait... Something was happening out there. The lead cover plane was peeling left, dropping fast. Cooper went to visual, found the stubby black deltawing a thousand meters out and down, gaining speed, its water-charged after-burners lit. "What the hell," he said. He impulsively gripped the stick and dived after the leader. Below he saw the flat blue water and the long gray pencil-shape of a megaI anker tied up at deepwater berth. In the sea just beyond her forecastle lay a storage tank, its dome some hundred meters across, containing perhaps #k barrels down to the underwater rimline. The lead plane swung wide around and dived on the tanker, apparently intent on blasting her. Two long dark pods separated from the wings. Empty drop tanks. The pilot obviously wanted more speed. Baker? Of course. Baker! What the hell -- "Baker. Baker?" he yelled on the intercom. "Break off, break off!" "Shut up, Cooper." "God damn it, Baker, you're out of your mind." He glanced at the screen; the lead plane had armed several HE air-to-surface missiles. Jesus, Baker! Capt. Cooper throttled up, stroked the burners and cut across the chord of his curving pursuit, simultaneously pickling his own empty wing tanks. He passed Mach two -- point one, point two, point four, his G-reaction suit squeezing him in craft-stress warning. A buzzer sounded and the compfac screen indicated a target closing fast on Cooper's own tail -- bright red, blinking furiously. Where the Decelerating to Mach two-oh in one and a half seconds, he caught up a mile from the tanker and planted himself below and in front of the cover plane. "Damn you," Baker said as they flew formation a hundred meters over the tanker. The Zato-Ichi pulled out at the last second, climbing left and decelerating. Cooper accelerated right, climbed and gained a post above and behind Baker. Best I could do, thought Baker. Still, the shock waves alone would have caused enough damage to provoke a strong Japanese protest to DeeCee. What the hell was going on? II I t was evening in Darwin as they helped Cooper out of his G-suit. He walked moodily to the medcenter and sat on a plastic bench to wait his turn at debriefing. Somebody grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. "Cooper, you idiot," Baker said. "Me?" "Let me tell you something, Cooper." Baker was savagely ripping the velcro seams of his G-suit. "You just stay the hell away from me. Understand?" "Baker, you got bubbles in your brain. You tried to smoke that tanker!" "Tried, my left nut. I'd have done it if you hadn't busted in. Let me give you a piece of advice, Cooper. Don't pull a stunt like that on me again. Ever!" A medical officer walked up to them. "Next." Colonel Baker said, "Debrief this insubordinate bastard. I'll be back in half an hour when I cool off. Going to the Club." When they were alone the doc said, "He's blowing smoke on your little tushy again. You must be doing something right." Cooper just shook his head. "That guy may be an idiot," the doc went on, "but he's got a piece of paper that says he owns your ass. You'd better lighten up." "Me? I don't believe this! If he goes on like he's been going, we'll be up to our ears in a shooting-war with the Japs -- and nothing that's happened in the last ten years justifies that." "True." "Makes you wonder." "What?" "That guy's a colonel with fifteen years in grade. They know he's a good pilot but they don't trust him." "Yeah, but he's the boss, Cooper." "That's what scares me." "Racist." "Screw you." O ne hour later in the officer's mess. "Cooper? The CO wants to see you." "Can't you see I'm eating my supper?" The sergeant merely stood siient by the table. Cooper had a tendency to eat alone. He liked to think it was not his choice but he was beginning to wonder. "All right. Be with you in a minute." The sergeant turned his head an inch toward the door, his eyes still on Cooper's. The captain threw down his fork and made a lot of noise getting to his feet. "My pleasure." The sergeant followed closely in the corridor, clicking the linoleum. He escorted Cooper to the door, opened it, closed him inside. In fresh fatigues, Baker was sitting behind his desk reading a paperback mystery novel. He looked once at Cooper, then went on reading for five minutes while Cooper watched. Baker had kept himself fit into his middle fifties. A career flier who had passed his forty-fourth birthday in the air over Nam during the celebrated Christmas bombings prior to the ceaselire. He was proud of that. They called him Super J inker because of the way he twisted, climbed and swiveled his Phantom #C coming out of a bomb run. A bona fide terror of the airways. He finished a chapter, said, "Ha. I knew' it." He flung the book down split on the desktop. "Cooper, Cooper, Captain Cooper, what do you think? You think I'm the big black bogieman out to gobble up your tender white butt?" "No, sir. You're not so big," "Ha?" "You're -- " "Shut up. Cooper. I'm going to set you straight right now. And get this, Cooper. If you're not straight, absolutely straight, after our little talk, if you still harbor any niggling doubts about anything -- then from now on your life is going to be awfully complicated." "Yes, sir." "Shut up, Cooper. Hear this. The world runs on oil, right? You can forget your silly pipe-dreams of unlimited nuclear power, at least for the next ten or twenty years. Things just haven't worked out in that area. So we gotta get that oil. This year the good citizens of North America would surely like to get tons of the stuff -- tons, I said. But the funny thing is, those fine people have dug and sniffed around the continent and have come up with tons, shale oil and all... "Colonel, sooner or later the North Slope oil will -- " "Later, not sooner. The first fifty got itself contaminated. The oil companies won't touch it, say it's too hot to refine at present. Meanwhile our good buddy Japan has been getting a steady flow from the also getting some stuff from our other good buddy, Russia. They went and built the trans-Siberian pipeline so they could load up offshore at Nochodka. But some time ago the Soviets said they're plenty sorry, they've got mechanical difficulty on that pipeline. The Russian oil just dried up. And remember that deal with Canada to dig into the Athabasca tar sands? Fell through, for reasons which should be obvious. Point is, Cooper, they just can't afford to lose this thing near Abu Dhabi. They got a fleet of megatankers doing nothing but making the run to and from the Gulf. Each ship hauls nearly a million tons of crude, making nine or ten round trips a year. Yet right now Japan has only a sixteen-day reserve at home. Sixteen days! They're tearing their hair out by the roots." "Sir, I don't see what bearing that has on -- " "Shut up." Baker rose and strode to a wall-map, pointed at the Malay Peninsula. "More than ten years ago they went and blocked the Strait of Malacca and the Singapore Strait for themselves by building supertankers. Now they got the megatankers. Half a klic long and, fully loaded, more than sixty-five feet of draft. The Straits aren't deep enough to be navigated by ships that low in the water. Well, neither were most of the ports. Some the Japan boys dug out. In general though, except in crowded shipbuilding harbors like I.H.I. at Yokohama, they did what everybody else was doing -- put down offshore deepwater single-point moorings. And to kick this Malacca Strait problem, they merely set up a pair of berths on opposite sides of the Isthmus of Kra, here at the narrowest point of the peninsula. They tanks at either end and rescheduled their tanker routes. These days about a third of their megatankers make the run between the Gulf and the tanks, the rest running north to the Islands. Their only hang-up is that fifty-inch pipeline between the mountains of the Isthmus. It's even more vulnerable than the Straits." "I heard they mean to dig a canal." "Can't set up permission from either Thai government. So that pipeline will be the big show for at least another ten years. And if it ever springs a leak, they simply haven't got enough shallow-draft tankers to pick up the slack by negotiating the Straits. They'd have to run their megatankers at half load, and that would eat them up in fuel consumption. It costs them seventy-five hundred tons of lowsulphur diesel oil every round trip." Baker sat back down. Cooper remained standing in front of the desk. "Cooper, none of this is news to you . I'm sure some sleepy lieutenant dumped this load on you weeks, maybe months ago. The point you seem to be missing is what the situation has to do with our actions in the field. The Japs are pressed so hard against the well-known wall they can feel the other side. Which isn't surprising, considering it's us on the other side -- leaning against them. This planet isn't rich enough to support us both with all our industry, or even most of it. We're both of us in the same goddamn hole and now we're getting ready for a fight over the ladder. And two things are important. One, that they should start it -- and two, that we should win it." "All this should be clear to you; if they haven't got the guts they showed at Pearl Harbor we'll just have to prod them a bit. So today I made my little pass at a megatanker in the Gulf. The Zato-Ichi on my tail might have been spooked enough to take a shot at me, but your interference was so obviously a saving gesture that he knew he could just sit up there and watch you make a fool out of both of us. This will not happen again." "And what if we do it -- what if we win it and the oil lifeline just stops? What will the Japanese do then?" ' Take a short cut to the Stone Age I suppose -- what the hell do I care? Go back to your soyasteak, Cooper." "Sir." "Tell you something, Cooper. We don't get this oil, we might as well hang it up. In the spring of forty-five I was humping it in the South Pacific, fighting Japs. I was seventeen goddamn years old, Cooper, busting my black ass to beat those yellow bastards. And we did beat' em, beat' em bad. So thirty years later they were tearing the guts out of our economy -- and two years ago they went number two in the world! All the while they've been getting their oil steady from the Arabs while we've been getting hind teat and a boot in the butt. God damn it. Cooper, we owe it to'em." "Sir." "Go back to your soyasteak, Cooper." Cooper wandered down the halls. Okay, now he was straight. Ill T hey rousted him at four, flashlight in his eyes, rough hands on his back. "Cooper? Outta the sack. Go get a preflight, get suited, and get to the duty room at five. That's five! You got a mission." "I flew yesterday!" "Hit it." Ten minutes later Cooper pushed open the door of the medcenter. It was virtually deserted. "What the hell," he said. "We flew yesterday." be good." "I wonder," Cooper responded gloomily. The sergeant who came in next looked as if he had been up all night. Probably he had. He began "Wait a minute," Cooper said. "Where's the doc?" "In dreamland." "Why isn't he here?" "He was on call last night, so he's off today." "Everybody's off today but us." "Me, too," the sergeant said. "I'm off today, too." "What the hell kind of war we "Unscheduled." "Don't you believe it," Cooper said. The two pilots sat in the duty room from five until five-thirty, then Baker came in. Suited up, he gave out with his special preflight everything's-in-the-bag-baby grin. "Don't eat breakfast," he said. They groaned. Who could eat? Baker winked. "Got here a special flight for my special aces. Let me give you some background." He paused to light up a preflight cigar and to pull down a map of Southeast Asia. Japanese shipping routes were lined in red, the crosspeninsula pipeline in black. He grabbed a pointer and indicated a spot in the Indian Ocean. "Right there, as of half an hour ago, is a Jap carrier. She's mothering at least forty Zato-Ichis, five to seven of which are constantly airborne. Mainly they cover the Gulf and the pipeline. Yesterday we frolicked at the Zone of Conflict and over the Gulf. This morning we're going to do a number on the pipeline. Yes, Cooper, we're really going to do it." "Why?" "Shut up, Cooper. Any more questions? No? Good. Listen up. We strongly suspect the Japs have nuclear weapons stored on that carrier and deploy them on those planes. Pictures you made yesterday showed something new slung under the wings." asked. "Good question. Probably from France. But they might even be homemade -- their professed aversion to atomics never made any sense to me. Their right-wing has been pushing quietly for nuke capability since the late sixties. They claimed a tactical-nuke arsenal necessary for the Self-Defense Forces -- and I have to agree with them there. In the early seventies Japan was on N-# status, which meant they could develop the hardware within two years of go. Five years later they were at N-l, and two years ago we clocked them at N-O.#. Well, they've had the time and they sure as hell have had the incentive! -- " "That doesn't mean they're going to use them." "Good point, Cooper. You're right -- there's a disturbing possibility they might manage to restrain themselves. This mission is designed to eliminate that possibility." "How?" "Simple. The Japanese can't afford a break in that pipeline. Under any circumstances. So it's reasonable to assume they'll defend buzz it, they would certainly be looking to blast him out of there. Fact is, though, they could do it with conventional high explosives, and for our purposes that's not good enough. We need a Tonkin that can't be doubted. The hope is that with an unarmed recon plane along they'll think we're just on another snapshot session, so they'll hesitate. When they do see it's a bomb run going down they'll be committed to a large kill radius -- larger than HE can produce -- large enough to make nuke imperative." "Cute," Cooper conceded. "So that's it," Baker said, rolling up in one big-ass fireball and you, Cooper, catch all this Oriental villainy on film." Baker strolled out, and on down the corridor to Operations to check the weather. think he's serious? Think he'd really set you up like that?" damned plane of mine cost ten IV M ore delays. Fueling problems. And the question hardened in Cooper's mind: is this mission authorized? Baker finally came back, looking sour. "Okay, we're set." No more questions. By #Z they were two miles over Singapore. It was midmorning local. Trees mounted the slopes of the peninsular range. The formation swung right, heading closer to due north to avoid the higher peaks and possible turbulence. They would approach the pipeline from the southeast, from the Gulf of Siam. Cooper returned to compfac mode and watched for targets. He was brooding about Baker's orders. How much of this mission was official -- and how much was the result of an old soldier's tortuous reading of his government's secret wishes? It was clear he meant to risk valuable government property. Risk, hell. He meant to destroy a plane. And where would that leave IP in twelve minutes -- mark. The rear target alarm buzzed. Cooper checked it out. The bogie was out of range, closing for a minute or so then breaking off. Ahead the sky stretched clear. Soon, though, Zato-Ichis would collect around them. Most likely that rear target would request confirmation of what was guessed about the mission; the resulting scramble might bring out a pretty fair number of defenders. Wait and see. IP in eight. Baker came on the line. "Cooper, I'm going to follow you all the w'ay in this time. In a minute or two in your cameras at all times -- closeup on the video, wide angle with the movie camera. When we reach IP, I'll direct your flight according to ambience. If more than a single draw one off. The more conventional firepower they have available, the less likely they are to go nuke. Check?" "Check?" "Yeah," Cooper muttered. Glancing at his camera-status lights, he obtained a radar lock-up fire-control system. Because he figured to do the video on manual, he activated a monitor beside the radarmap. After a few seconds he changed his mind and tied the IP in five. Then, happening to look, Cooper was startled by six steady pink triangles clustered left on the screen. When he concentrated he could hear the faint target-up warning hum. His Attention Augmentor seemed out of action. He hoped Baker was paying enough attention -- then he realized how silly it was to give a thought to Baker's combat acuity. Ironically, he felt safe with Baker behind him. Nothing could happen to Cooper, only to headed. What a joke. He recalled Rule Number One. Anyone who isn't completely terrified doesn't fully understand the situation. The triangles began to blink, growing redder steadily. The compfa c screen bathed them all in a pink aura, printing out in white letters the optimum weapon for use against any one of them. He saw that Baker had the proper system armed: a video air-to-air missile. Then Cooper noted the designated warhead code: not HE, but XS -- a small (# kt) tactical nuke. IP in three. Two more triangles entered the screen directly ahead of them. As he watched they went from steady white to red and flashing, then veered right. The circle of the lead plane pulled slowly ahead and took up a position some two thousand meters in front of his plane. "Follow him in," Baker ordered. "I am!" Cooper looked at the compfac. They were back over the forest now. He saw the black delta-wing of monitor cross-hairs, the light from his twin exhausts fuzzing the picture. IP in one. "Close up! Close up!" He nudged the throttle and shortened the gap to one klic. The rear target buzzer was eating itself up. Three flashing red triangles raced two klics behind Baker. IP... now! "Cameras? Cameras?" "Negative. We break. Drop your tanks. Everybody go two-oh on three. One-two-m'e. " They maneuvered. In a moment they were over the Gulf again, flying due east at Mach two. "What happened?" Cooper asked. "Weren't enough takers on that one," Baker said. "We'll have to go around again." "Jesus Christ." "Shut up, Cooper." They Hew halfway to Pointe de Camau then did three-sixty. The computer compared inertial guidance with the Doppler radar, and both against a navaid pulse from (he local #.I kHz Omega xmtr, then set up a new course back to IP. "We better make it good this time," Baker said. "We're running out of juice. I don't want to have to buy fuel on the way back." Yeah, thought Cooper. Might be embarrassing to order up a tanker (o wet-nurse some birds that weren't supposed to be Hying. " This time Cooper hangs back. Let the lead plane look good and mean and maybe they'll get the idea. We'll come in on the length of (he pipeline this time, from the and let loose an HE Sleuth. But keep an eye out. I want you to have time to send your shot wild before they make the kill. I don't think it would be a good idea to harm that pipeline during our friendly recon mission. Check?" They checked. IP in three. All right targets were back on the screen, now' evenly dispersed over (he horizon in front of them. Looked as if the Japanese were aroused (his time. Cooper checked the board again. all cameras greentime. IP was the east end of the pipeline. Tough visually camouflaged, its heat-signature was unmistakeable. When they reached it there were three red bogies on their tails, the closest barely a thousand meters behind Baker. "Stay clear, Cooper." They throttled back and gained altitude until the lead plane was obviously on its own. The three Zatos passed beneath them, following "Okay, Cooper, go in there and pull one of those guys out. I'll take the other one. Start north then cut back to the pipeline and be ready to snap the action." They dived on the triangles. When Baker made a feint at the pipeline, one of the defenders broke off and slid back to cover him. Both drifted to the south. Cooper saw them go and tried to pull the same trick. He was now in the all-target mode, and one of the Hashing red triangles, his target, seemed to hesitate. The R code was blinking as the Japanese plane stopped receding and verged on closing when Cooper slowed. It was curious about the plane's actions. It wanted to investigate but was not sure it should. Both defenders were obviously watching him closely. They considered corraling that lead American plane imperative but one of them. Cooper's target, began to slow noticeably. "Come on, sucker -- " sile -- too early! Purposely he fishtailed it to leave no doubt he was flying it himself via the secure tv datalink. That made it amply clear would be no mere act of after-thefact revenge. That standoff missile snaking its way toward the precious pipeline was controlled from transmitters contained in his plane and nowhere else. Both triangles settled down for the kill. Cooper saw there was no point in trying to lure away any of those fighters now. It suddenly occurred to him that his obvious lack of armaments made him a rather pathetic judas goat. Nothing to do now but roll the cameras. hairs of the monitor, locked in by skin-track radar. Cooper was ready to take pictures as soon as the fighters -- There! One of the Zatos had fired a misabruptly pulled up and tried to evade but -- "Damn it!" Baker said. The white circle of the lead plane vanished from the compfac screen. "Damn it!" Cooper went to nose camera and saw a cloud of debris floating down toward the brushland. "Damn it!" The radiation curve was flat. "Cooper! Shut down your cameras." No fireball. He went back to compfac. The curving peacefully toward the mountainside, locked on a hapless bush. There were no targets in front of Cooper though the reartarget warning was on. For some reason his AA had come back on the air and was now' prodding him vigorously. He swore at it. The remaining white circle. Baker's, drifted in from the south, joined formation at Cooper's wingtip. "Now what?" Cooper asked. "Let me think." "We blew it, right?" "Shut up!" They were back out over water, headed west across the Andaman Sea. The screen seemed to vibrate in Cooper's face. Damned AA! "You're still armed," Cooper said. "I know." "Nuke warheads." "So what?" as soon as all targets-of-opportunity are out of the system." There was a long pause, then Baker said, "What would you know about it, you crummy recon?" Cooper shut up for a second, wondering what would happen next. Baker was desperate. He needed a fireball this noon, and was just crazy enough to go to any length to get it. As if on cue the white circle broke off to the south, climbing. If lie was right, Baker would try to get a clear shot at him, probably from behind. "Damn you, Baker!" No response. Cooper's fingers tightened on the stick. Okay. He banked left and hit the burners. He'd have to climb onto Baker's tail and stay there. It was the only way to prevent him from bring. Cooper was turning, climbing, accelerating so fast the wing-stress lights Bashed and the max-G alarms went off deafeningly. The wing skin-temp passed # degrees C at # Gs. He was close to tearing the wings off the bird but that wasn't worrying him now. He was getting some unexpected results, though; his AA suddenly crapped out, apparently convinced he was paying the situation ample attenlion. The nose camera showed his progress, the twin tailpipes of Baker's plane growing larger and brighter until proximity alarms sounded. Then Cooper cut back and matched speed ten meters from nose to tail. Baker suddenly twisted down and right, and Cooper was practically alone in space. Damn it, that bastard can fly. Super linker. Cooper went back to compfac to find him, then got a radar lock-up. ganged in with the video cameras and shut down the wing cameramount servos. As the gun cameras snapped to the front zero position the plane lurched, trying to catch up. Now the computer would maneuver the whole aircraft to maintain both camera and radar lockup at the same time. He would be able to follow Baker's moves automatically, no matter how hairy, accelerating however much necessary to hug the colonel's tail. Till fuel ran out. Within half a minute Baker's plane was twenty-five meters out front, and Cooper got set to have his plane towed around the sky for a while. After three stress-filled minutes, during which all the warning lights -- engine temp, wing-skin temp, max-G, hydraulic pressure, turbine coolant, power supply ripple, low fuel, among others -- came on and stayed on, Baker stopped his maneuvers and settled down. They were some five minutes west of the pipeline, having made several three-sixties in the progress. Cooper grabbed some air and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. Then it happened, without surprise. "Baker, you idiot." No answer, just the XS Sleuth heading out straight and smooth, now curving slightly to the right, moving lazily. Cooper could not say anything. He knew that missile would be coming up his tailpipes in a few minutes, after its leisurely circuit. both down to gain his bloody fireball. Bastard leaves me no choice, he thought, ripping at his harnesses and plugs. Does he really think I'm going to sit still for this? leasing the plane from its duty to tail Baker. Then he pulled free from the gyro-flightchair, dropped his headset, and sent the plane off south toward the Indian Ocean. He pulled open the door and ran out into the hall, skipped past armed MPs and paper-carrying clerks. "Is the mission over?" someone barked. "Not yet!" He sprinted ten meters up the out front smoking and joking with the guard. "Out of the way!" He had to hit the guard before he could get the door open. Baker was hunched up over the compfac screen, watching the insert video monitor as the Sleuth closed on the recon ship, Cooper's ship, a kic and a half away. He came down on the friend switch and Baker's jaw simultaneously, then he felt the hands on his shoulders wrenching him out of there. There was just enough time to chop the colonel behind the neck and end the mission for sure. The Sleuth was busy shredding itself one could jump in and bring both the drones home. V H e drowsed alone in his cell. The new Leavenworth Annex was quiet. Only five weeks had gone by since the raid on the pipeline, when the two drones had been left cruising alone over the Indian Ocean. They told him Baker's plane had been retrieved electronically, rendezvoused with a tanker, then Mown back to the American carrier south of Java. His plane, they said, had dived too low and couldn't be reached before sliding into the sea three nautical miles north of the Japanese carrier. It was probably true. The monitor computer considered the facts and made its historic judgment: pilot captured. "It wouldn't be fair to the spirit of war," Baker had said, a brandnew cigar stuck in his mouth. an enemy from gaining hostages -- but the fact remains they have every right to expect a downed pilot not be allowed back into the game. You'll be looked after by neutrals back in the States. No sweat." No sweat. Right. Besides, it was unpatriotic to complain; the war with Japan, you know . Remember Pearl Harbor! Wasn't she a singer? Cooper droused. Best way to spend internment. Then suddenly, noise. He opened his eyes. They were bringing a visitor into his cell. "Back from the dead?" The guard locked up and went off down the empty corridor. "You my new roommate?" don't need a roomie." "I'm too self-sufficient?" all the discipline you can get, but you'll have to look elsewhere for it. You're free." "Free? I don't understand." "Two things. The war's over -- " "Over? Already?" "And second, Baker made a mistake putting you under arrest. Your plane didn't go down. It seems he an investigation of the events leading up to the, ah, misunderstanding with Japan." "Mis -- " how certain complaints about Baker had begun to reach the upper strata of Air Force authority, and how the Inspector General had been persuaded to look into the matter. "You? From the I.G.?" said. "I'm a pilot. I know LG. personnel who sleep with their shoes on 'cause they can't get the knots out of their shoestrings. And they're going to pose as pilots? Anyway, the I.G. office got hold of me, asked for help. Seems Baker was losing computer tapes of certain key missions. They needed substantial proof before they could act, so I gave'em tapes of the pipeline mission." The I.G. had finally acted, but slowly, with the solemnity befitting the busting of a Full Colonel. That slowness had given Baker time to ship Cooper to the States with some intriguing data appended to his records: Cooper, Bertram Albert. Captured # Dec # during armed robbery of WUlowbrook S  L. Pratt, Kansas. Convicted # Dec #. Fourth of fense. No parole. Life. Super Jinker. "How could he hope to get away with it?" where records speak louder than people..." "Where is he now? In jail?" "Are you kidding? He resigned his commission and his pension and started work for a company that makes some of the armament we haul around in the name of peace. He's a vice president, as a matter of fact." Super Jinker. And anyway the incipient War, the Incident, the Misunderstanding, was over. Oil Bowed both east and west now, giving both nations a bit of breathing room as they struggled to invent the technology that would power the twenty-first century.  the name Adam Freeman, in # at Hestenhlle, Missouri, # years before the #-Minute War and the following plagues which destroyed his family. Adam fell in with a party who believed things were better in the east. They traveled through heat and torrential rains to a place called Nuber, in the Catskills. During the journey a hoy Adam loved. Demetrios Makarios, destroyed himself unable to endure the collapse of his world. The boy's mother refused to believe him dead and "mistook" Adam for him; he supported her delusion by taking the name Demetrios, and kept it ever after. Fortyseven years later, still at Nuber, he has become a streetcorner yarn-spinner, earning the rest of his living as janitor in a respectable sex-house in the "Outer City ", Inner City is reserved Jbr the aristocracy, the new rulers who support an uneasy monarchy and call the city-state a "King's Republic". The water level has risen in a warming climate: wilderness has returned over most of North America where the sea has not. After giving some of his long-ago experiences as a streetcorner tale, and making a few radical remarks, Demetrios is informed by a policeman that he must get a license for storytelling at Town Hall before he can do it again. The little crowd breaks up, but two members of it, boy, will go with Demetrios to the ends of the earth, and Angus' wolfhound Brand will be another companion. In a private conversation in the city park, Demetrios learns something of Angus' life in Inner City, which is precarious. He also recognizes the boy's quality and loves him. They agree to meet tomorrow in the same place. Demetrios returns to the sexRedcurtain Street. He shares a room there with his two closest comlute-player who never speaks) and found wandering after her loss of memory. Mam Estelle and her friends of Demetrios, and he sometimes helps entertain in the Parlor with his stories. It is a pleasant life. except that everything in Nuber is under the shadow of a medievalism, a returning dark age. Demetrios was the son of a doctor, and remembers an age when reason might have had a chance. In the morning Demetrios goes to the Town Hall to see about a license, and learns it costs more than he can afford. There is an impending shake-up: the Nuber authorities are worried by a new sect, the A bramites -- and all storytellers and other uncommon people are regarded as potential subversives. The Abramites are followers of the prophet Abraham, martyred at Nuber # years before -- the everrecurrent Christ figure who declares the earth must make way for the kingdom of heaven. In the past Demetrios has made a streetcorner stoiy of the martyrdom -- (he saw it happen himself) -- and is suspected of being an A bra mite. Inserted here is an excerpt from a diaiy kept by Mam Estelle, (and others will appear later). She rambles considerably, concerned with her own past as well as the present. She also was born in Old Time, indeed is somewhat older than Demetrios. In the #-Minute War she lost her lovers and her babv whom she adored; she drifted to Nuber. worked in the sexhouse and later inherited the management of it. (And occasionally you will encounter remarks by "the one who writes this book " and who doesn't quite seem to be Pangborn -- don't worry about it.) After his disturbing interview with a police lieutenant who specificallv warns him against ever telling the story of Abraham again, Demetrios goes to the park to meet Angus, who is not there. In his disappointment, and anger at the license thing, Demetrios gets a bit drunk, and defies fate by drawing a crowd and telling the stoiy of Abraham, as it truly happened. The policemen appear as he is finishing, and he has a glimpse of Garth arriving, but not Angus. The Happenest Day of My Life Many heroes lived before Agamemmon, but all are submerged in the long night unwept, unknown, because they lacked a sacred poet. T he two in dark uniforms approached casually -- no disturbance wanted -- a few yards behind Garth's innocent grin; the boy had not caught on. Demetrios let his walnut stick tumble at Garth's feet, and stooped for it as he did -- he would of course, bless him! When their heads w'ere close Demetrios mumbled: "Keep clear so you can help -- lose yourself in the crowd, fast!" A moment of shock, and Garth understood; he became a blue-eyed fox peering through the bush of a fat woman's frizzed-out hair ten feet away. "Got a license?" They were officers Demetrios did not know; but they knew him. What have I done? What can I prove except my own stupid anger? O Solitaire ! -- He should have thought of her before. "License?" "Come on," said the beefy one. "You can explain it to Brome." "Cossack!" shouted the woman with frizzy hair. "He didn't do nothing only talk about holy Abraham." "Just keep back, folks. Mind your own business." She did, like the rest of the gazing crowd; the lean one secured Demetrios' arm, his hands heavy with uneasiness. "Why, I'm coming quietly. Mind my stick there, it's a palindrome. Lose that or mishandle it and you'll be the sickest man alive." "A what?" "Palindrome. At least carry it upside down, man, so the power won't flow into your arse crossways." "Maybe he -- uh -- better carry it, Cass? If it's one of them what he said?" "Well, I guess not," said beefy Cass; but on the long walk down across the Meadows to the town lock-up, Cass held the stick at arm's length, and upside down so far as he could without quite knowing which end was the top. "Aren't we going to the Town Hall?" "Brome is busy, Mister," said Cass. Demetrios saw the pursed smile of a bully not quite sure of his powers. "Put up with our hospitality a while, Mister." The lean one's hands now held no more than a token grip. "Be our guest, Mister," said Cass. The lock-up was a one-story lump of mortared stone at the end of an alley from which a path straggled up into the Meadows. Oak trees spread green sadness over lesser growth by the little jail, over its yard with one bench, one upright post. Rings on the post served for hitching horses, or people. No other building stood in sight. No sunshine, no breeze -- yes, there was a breeze, a whish-hush of the upper leaves underlining silence. Daylight, but to Demetrios' mind came the taste of perpetual evening. The one-eyed stubble-faced jailor, his bundle of keys too large for him, gazed up at Demetrios with the distrustful pleasure the man with the club might show before a haltered bull. "Cass, what've you brung me? This ain't no lazy idle beggar. What you done for your country, Mister? Been into the till? Raped some little twist? Kind of forgot your old self in public? Hey?" "Put him in the tight one," said Cass, "and keep your thoughts inside your brains, Putney. No fraternizing. Brome says." "I have news for you, Mister Cass. We may appeah to live a retired life heah, but all my three apartments is full. Mister Cass, and what do you think of that?" "Put him in with Bosco then, it'll make a pair of em. But no fraternizing with this'n. Oh, and keep this some place." Cass set the stick respectfully in a corner of the room that served Putney as reception hall, office, kitchen, bedroom; a chamber-pot stood out from under the bed doubling as spittoon. The inner door gave on a corridor serving the three cells; Putney liked to keep it closed, enjoying his privacy and his own flavors. Demetrios was relieved of his tinder-box and the few coins he had salvaged from his cap. Cass and the lean man departed as soon as Demetrios stood safe and harmless on the wrong side of Cell #'s metal door. Putney lingered. "I'll tend to your comfort. No talking, mind." He opened a door down the corridor on a storage shed. "He says no talking," said the bear-like man cross-legged on a heap of straw. "It's kind of like his cough. I'm Bosco." "Demetrios. How do?" "Fair to shitty. Glad to know y'." "No talking!" Putney bustled back with straw on a pitchfork. "He has this problem," said Bosco. "How to unlock the fucking door without putting down the straw. Give it up. Putney?" "Up yours too." Putney set down the load and worked the key. "Stand back. This here's a self-service reform school, Mister Fancy -- you make your own bed." He flung the straw to the free side of the cell, and leaned on the fork, dim and droopy in the watery light from one barred window high in the north wall. "That all the money you had?" "Ayah. When do I get to see Lieutenant Bronte?" "Can't figure the way you people come snorting and piss-assing in here without no money. You a'n't that stupid, you'd ought to know it costs like any place else. Don't worry about Bronte." Putney backed off fretfully, his key rattled in the wards, and he spoke from behind the gate's protection. "Cass or Jack'll get word to your people after-while, likely. We're good about that." He giggled. "We a'way-s notify the next of skin." A fine, no doubt, and Mam Estelle would feel obliged to pay it. Trouble walks with me. "No talking now," said Putney, and he trotted off to his own burrow. gentlemen either side of X us are resting," said Bosco. "One beat up and could be dead for all I know; t'other's getting on for a hundred and not too lively -- you might hear him sing, or ask for vitaminds, whatever they be. Care for a marawan candy? Can't light up nothing in there, account of the straw." "Thanks, Bosco." Demetrios chewed the aromatic trifle; a light sedative would be welcome. "Been here a while?" "Long enough to get three days older." Settled on the not uncomfortable straw, Demetrios considered his companion -- smooth-flowing muscle, upper arms like a bear's hams. Bosco was hairy but neat, the brown shag of his head somewhat combed. He smelled sweaty but not rancid; probably liked to wash when he got the chance. "Misunderstanding and hard luck brung me low, Demetrios. See, there was this sucking pig come up to the fence when I happened to be leaning over, and I could see he was the one too many in the litter, having a hard time. So I picks him up, and I was going happy down the road planning a short life and a merry one for the dear little fella, when these two cops come out of the bushes, rot them. Same two bastards that brung you in, and don't it beat all Christ the way they hunt in pairs? -- Cass alone I could've handled, no trouble. I got my little friend tucked out of sight, but he tickled me working his feet around, the way I couldn't help laughing like somebody'd left me money. This Cass he says, 'I declare to God I think you got a shoat under your coat.' Why, I told the son of a bitch, I says, 'I'm just taking him to his mother, a'n't that all right?' They never believe you if you're from out of town. Then in the follering argument the thin one -- that's Jack Jellicoe, meaner'n a cat turd, you want to keep away from him -- he leaned his club on the back of my head. I still got the lump, been here three days waiting for the Public Defender to come back from wherever he's resting his the pig. See, I'd come to think of him as my little pig. Bugger me blind if I think the original owner ever saw hide or trotters of him again, and they call this a King's Republic?" "They do for a fact. From out of town, you said?" "Born and raised amongst the Ramblers. I might be one of Boss Gammo's own get -- of course he said that about every promising sprout in the gang, said it'd been sired by the blunt end of a hurricane and the hurricane was him. Ever hear of Boss Gammo?" "Why, a caravan gang that called themselves Ramblers came here to Nuber eight years ago. That name rings a bell." "Do say!" Bosco's heavy face grew alert; sad, too. "Boss Gammo he never cut his hair, tied it behind him with a hempen string. Said it was his strength, like this Simpson or Sampson or somebody." "That's the man. They only put on one show. Good entertainment I thought -- I'm a storyteller by trade myself -- but then some crud started a riot, heads got cracked, the police ran them out of town. Since then all Ramblers have been turned away from the Nuber border posts." "If that a'n't just like a King's Republic! Eight years ago? Four years after I left'em. Was his hair a-whitening? Gammo?" "Pepper-and-salt. But I got only a glimpse of him, Bosco." "Aye-so." The big man rocked himself back and forth on the straw, assailed by grief. "Eight and four is twelve, a'n't it? And I must be crowding thirty, like. Why, I could lick Boss Gammo now, if I'd ever catch up with the lot. See, Demetrios, I figured to lick him when I was eighteen, but that was too soon, and when the stars quit twinkling inside my brains so's I could get up off the ground. Boss Ganimo he says to me, 'Bosco, there a'n't no room for you and me both. You'd come up ahint me one day,' he says. I won't say I wouldn't've. Picked on me, that man did, oncet he prac'ly grabbed off a girl right out from under me. 'Come back,' he says, 'when you think you're big enough and damfool enough, we'll talk about it some more.' Why, I could lick him now for sure, only I can't find'em. Last year I chased a rumor up into Adirondack Island. I been here and there -- Jasus, I've even lived honest now and then. With a lumber gang, and up to the iron mines at Halloway, oarsman a while onto the Albany ferry -- that's nearabout slavery, that is." "I hear there are several Rambler gangs nowadays." "But Gammo's is the one and only original. Boss Gammo he think up the whole idear -- mulewagons, singers, tumblers, newscarrying, fortune-telling, the whole bit. Them others don't amount to shit alongside Gammo's. I could've joined one if I wanted. It's like laid onto me, I got to catch up with Gammo's. Sometimes I get thinking, O Jasus, what if Gammo he's gone and died on me, the way I'll never have no other chance to beat up on the old son of a whore. They 'wouldn't change the name, bound to be still Gammo's Ramblers. What if it was Bosco's, hey? Bosco's Ramblers, how's that sound?" "Sounds great." Through the waning of the afternoon Bosco talked on about a world that Demetrios knew of as though it hung like a distorting curtain between him and the vanished other truths of Old Time. There are pirates in the little islands of Moha Water who take an almost fixed percentage of the trade between Adirondack Island and the republic of Moha that precariously owns it. Angus, could you not come to me? Except when they steal children or women, or torture a captain for information about other shipping, that's almost a comfortable sort of piracy there in Moha Water, like a god-damn tax, nothing like the vicious operations in the southern Hudson Sea. Down there the buccaneers have virtually closed the area to all vessels except the most swift and well-armed, and so now the pirates range in search of victims far up and down the coast, and some time soon the King's Republic will have to clean them out, which means a navy and likely a small war. Some say the people of Conicut are hand in glove with'em. Solitaire... Puesan... Yet the world that Bosco was idly holding up for him to see had its own power, its own pull. Red bear are seen more and more often these days on Adirondack Island. Bosco himself had been shown the pelt of one at a settlement called Saubel, and it covered the whole floor of a twelve by fifteen room, no lie... In Vairmount they are plagued by a kind of wolf like nothing anyone heard of before, monstrous, black, long in the leg and folk say supernatural ly clever as the Devil himself... Bosco had heard -- but was not sure he believed the tale -- of an isolated family somewhere in Hampsher completely destroyed by a swarm of the small red-brown rats, that acted like a swarm of ants... In Main, or anyhow somewhere in eastern New England, there's a tribe that worships the brown tiger, calling him Eye of Fire... Slowly in gray-green light the afternoon perished, dwindled from the barred window. Putney brought a dinner of stew and flabby tea. In Cell #, soft snoring shifted to tremulous ancient song: "I hope to read my title clear To mansions in the skies -- " -- and again, without change, and again. When Putney set food in there, the old voice pleaded: "I want my vitamins. I want my vitamins. I want my vitamins." On the far side of the corridor, well beyond any reach from the cells, Putney placed two tallow candles that might sputter half the night. "I want my vitamins..." No sound came from Cell #. Putney hastily slapped down a plate in there and backed out muttering something Demetrios could not interpret. "Some day, Put," said Bosco, "you better give Gran'dad his vitamins. What be they anyhow?" "None of your mothering business," said Putney in an evil temper, and slammed the door again between his privacy and theirs. an hour faded, and the barred window high in the wall was giving on a darkness profound and starless, yet there must have been a of the oaks. Demetrios and Bosco had shoved their dirty plates under the door, where Putney collected them in glum silence; the old man in Cell # was snoring, the other cell as dead in quiet as before; Putney's door slammed again and no more was heard from him. A breeze drifted through the window, cooling the cell, touching the candles in the corridor with a restlessness. Their warm small light, abandoning Bosco to the shadows, shone on the verticals of the bars with illusion of softness. You could push your hand clear through them. Someone had. Two hands, rather small. The fingers curled over the metal, pale separate lights. A face was pressing close to the barricade deeply shadowed by it, and it was rounded like Garth's with heavy eyebrows under yellow hair, but more delicate, with a certain sweet recklessness that Garth had left behind or perhaps never allowed himself. "Ssst! Hey! Demetrios!" By standing on tiptoe Demetrios could bring his eyes level with the boy's. "You must be Frankie." The eyes sparkled with the delights of danger. "Garth's here too. I'm like sitting on his neck." "I can't hardly gosemplace anywhere without the Plague coming along," said Garth, unseen. "Be you by lone, Demetrios?" "You'd be lost without me, Clunk. You know I'm the brains of the outfit. No, there's another ga with him." "You can trust me, kid," said Bosco, moving on silent bear-feet to the door of the cell where he could watch the corridor. "I'll keep looksy, Demetrios -- go ahead and talk to your friends." Frankie frowned a question about him; Demetrios nodded -- Bosco wouldn't peach on a fellow jailbird. Demetrios strained higher, trying to see Garth; the sill was too wide. Close at his ear Frankie murmured: "Going to spring you, duck-soupy it is." "Lordy! I'd have to get out of town then." "We all go," whispered Frankie. "You, me , the Clunk -- me and the Clunk got nothing but hell at home since Ma died, the way he keeps bringing home them dirty pigs and never sober -- " "Come on. Plague, he don't want to hear about that. But that's how it is, Demetrios, we all want out. Mister Angus he's shook up -- " "God, you've seen him?" "Sure have. Listen, there's a purge going in Inner City. His mother -- oh, he'll tell you about it. They're after him too. He slipped out the north gate last night, him and the dog, had to knock out a guard. By daylight he worked around through the woods to the Redcurtain Street side, took a chance asking his way to Mam Estelle's, you was gone when he got there. Mam Estelle hid him up safe. I talked to him there after I seen what happened at the Meadows. Mister Angus come, see, for to tell you it's worse for you than you thought. Heard people talking about you. Calling you an Abramite and a foreign spy. It's the Abramites they're purging, only that ain't all." Then Angus -- Angus -- "A spy from Missouri no doubt." "Huh? Oh -- yeah. This purge is the big one, he said to tell you. We better all get out, nothing else to do." "What was it about his mother?" "She -- I druther he told you, Demetrios. She's, like, with them people doing the purge. They're -- City. And some others they don't like. Well, Mister Angus didn't want to risk drawing trouble on Mam Estelle, so he'll be out in the woods now, him and the dog, and the Professor, and your woman. Me and Frankie come here to get the layout of this place. Only that one old fart minding it tonight?" "Only him," said Bosco, turning his head. "Couldn't help listening. It's dead as a tomb here all night long. Count on me, boys -- I'll lend a hand. Nobody wants out more'n I do." "Me and Angus will be back." "And me," said Frankie. "Okay," said Demetrios to all of them, feeling frightened and old, and shaken by the miracle of love redeemed. "Okay." "After we spring you," said Garth, "we join your woman and the Professor and Frankie at a place I know on the South Road." "No, I come back with you and Mister Angus to spring him," said Frankie. His hands jumped from the bars. "Hey! Clumsy!" "We'll see. Le' go my hair, Plague." "Balls to we'll see. You got to have the brains of the outfit with you. Besides, this is the happenest day of my life." "We'll see, " said Garth, and Frankie's face receded in darkness, a candle going out. Bosco said: "You really got friends." He spoke with envy. "You'll come with us? We could do with another friend." "I'm your man. Where will you go, you think?" "West -- ah, I don't know. We must all decide. I dream of going west -- and yet it'll all be under water, the places I knew." "Like Gammo's Ramblers -- into my head all the time and won't let go. You be an Old-Timer?" "Thirteen when the bombs fell. Loved one world, feel lost in the other. But the old one's gone. Downstream with time." M y mam estelle wrote no more in her diary that day, though she was not with the great corn spirit, indeed she didn't work in much afternoon tea of any kind. Bv seven the place was jumping with evening customers and the girls working their ass off to coin a phrase, and right up to then Mam Estelle had been Busy, too busy and worried to write the Story' of her Life, and so am . so am I who write this book, for I must tel! how Angus the son of Stephen came to the side door of Mam Estelle's Puhlie Entertainment Facility like any tradesman or beggar, and was admitted by the girl named Solitaire, who saw how grief and anger were clawing his heart and chewing his vitals, and weariness riding him like the black ape, and his own great gray hound could not protect him. It busies me and worries me -- the passions always do --  ought to be carving cherrystones with the Lord's Prayer, but God, there's no living in it. "Will he come in then?" says Solitaire, and he did, into the kitchen where Mam Estelle was sitting with some innocent morning tea -- no corn spirit neither, just her last peaceful cup of the day -- came in with a backward look for the alley like a man pursued, and he asked for Demetrios, and was told man Demetrios had gone to the Town Hal! hours since and was not returned. " That's bad, " said Angus. Solitaire was looking into him, she in her slavey's smock, gray smudge on her cheek, turban of grubby doth about her hair, and she said: "He is scratched with brambles. One time Solitaire was scratched with brambles and she saw a hole in the brook that had no bottom, the water ran black out of the heart of the earth -- will he come sit down and rest, himself it is?" And Angus saw through his own pain that she was concerned for him in a way that (he thought) no one before had ever been concerned. She touched Brand s head. The dog whined gently and leaned his shoulder against her little thigh, too polite to fling up his paws on her slenderness. "He likes you," said Angus. "Don't be afraid of him or me. " The slavey 's disguise was a nothing to be sure, a curtain for other people. He looked through it. scarce aware of it. discovering the heart of strangeness. She said: "Solitaire is not afraid. Oh. she found lovingkindness here a while ago. But what happened to hurt him?" She could astonish him. Through shock and exhaustion after the night of violence -- after all we know, and you might as well also, that his mother had bedded Senator Pry, the coming man of the hour and King Brian 's instrument in the purge, which was somewhat like pissing on his father's memory  and for Angus the graciousness of life in Inner City had been ripped away like the cover from a sewer -- through his misery' Angus understood that Solitaire was asking about himself. "Oh. '" he said. "I saw the black waters too. I knew they were there, l must have known it. ' ' "Well, " said Mam Estelle, "sit down, sit down. Pull up a chair for some tea, and what do you want with our man Demetrios?" "I must warn him." Soon they had the necessary information out of him -- his name, his place in the crazy world, his meeting with Demetrics -- or I should say that Mam Estelle did. for Solitaire asked no questions, only moved about watching him. now from the light, now from the sun-shadow. You might have thought her transparent, a ghost of smudged beauty blown here and there, a captive light driven by the turning of a mirror. She saw a boy with red-brown hair, who wore no white tunic now though surely born to it but a gray iacket like a workman's, a gray loincloth, luxurious sandals. On his wrist was a fantastic little watch, clearly of Old Time, at his belt a leather-sheathed knife; at his back he carried no bow nor quiver, but one of those long carry-alls -- where l come from uv call them bac-pacs. She saw a face of beauty and gravity -- boy, man, angel, no need to wonder -- coming to her out of nowhere, in trouble and in need of her. He saw a girl wearing innocent secrets like protective garments; so he would always think of her, even when secrets were put aside. Forgive me if I rush you along so. I do promise to fill you in on all the Facts that you so clearly have a right to know in all their bustling factiness. But to me your novelist the essential thing is what Mam Estelle saw; that Solitaire was no wraith at all but a woman in love. It can happen to anyone -- pity we are so seldom warned. And Mam Estelle saw it had happened to Angus at the same time -- one of the rarest coincidences in this world, in most of the worlds l know. part of the west you VV from, Demetrios?" "Missouri. They called it midwest in those days. Have you traveled much in that direction?" "Not much. Couple years ago I got as far as the coast of the Freshwater Sea -- that's what the trappers call it; I was with a party of them, for the season. Our base camp was near a puny little settlement called Shatawka, goddamn natives. They called the Sea Lake Erie and said you could drink it. I tried it -- try anything once -- Jasus! Never trust a native. Inland though, the brooks and springs are pretty fair. It's bad earthquake country. No heavy shocks but small ones day after day like God or somebody couldn't quit growling to himself. They say one day he'll throw a big one. The beaver don't mind -- real thick around there and north of there. We got silver fox too, and marten -- of course the damned red rats rob your traps all-a-time. Game's easy to get. There was a brown tiger scare while we was there -- robbed a village to the north, but we never saw him. I never have seen him, wonder sometimes if he's folksay..." A casual, throaty voice, an innocent-seeming, blunt, thirtyish face in the candlelight -- Demetrios warmed to him. Himself unsure and tense, as if already gone forth to dare the roads and the wilderness with diminishing strength and no sight of a goal, he found Bosco's talk sustaining. Bosco was no storyteller: he knew these things directly with his senses and with very little imagination -- the feel of an enslaved hand on the oar; the gloom, acrid stench, the peril of a mine; the stillness of jungle that is no stillness but a teeming of life, a passion latent in the overabundance, a patience like a serpent's hot slow patience, a waiting that may break forth in a roaring or a cry, but only for a reason. It made the hour pass -- "I hope to read my title clear To mansions in the skies -- " "He ever sing anything else?" "Not since I been here, just them two lines. That and his vitamins. He's got like a home here. Putney says -- ever' time they turn him loose he quick does something dirty so to get himself back in. You know -- nourishing stew, no worries except about his vitamins, whatever they be. Cell I -- that's different. They brung that man in late last night, flung him there -- he couldn't hardly walk. Not a sound out of him except breathing for a while. I hollered to him and pounded on the wall, no good, nor I couldn't get anything out of Putney, just gibbering. Ha'n't even heard the breathing since about the time they brung you in. That dish Put took away hadn't been touched. They let people die accidental-apurpose, here at Nuber?" "I never thought so." What do von know about anything, Demetrios, you who filled your mind with fancies and farewells while another world grew up around you -- "Maybe it's just Put. Real burrow-cat, that man. The ga in there could be dead for days while Put waits for the brass to tell him what to do. Hark! -- " A muffled disturbance in Putney's room -- in a moment the door opened, releasing stronger candlelight and a glimpse of Putney himself, pop-eyed on his cot, bound and gagged. A dog, a boy, and a man hurried to the cell door, while Garth remained on guard over Putney. Angus shoved his stocking mask in his gray jacket. Stiff legged beside him with lifted hackles. Brand studied the dark, sorted the smells. "Damn this thing!" Angus was struggling with the key. "That'n' maybe," said Frankie correctly. Angus flung open the door. "Brains of the outfit," said the boy in the mask. Angus caught Demetrios in a quick embrace. "I was afraid for you. Have they -- " "No, nothing bad, I'm all right." Dizziness swirled in him. Whoever knows joy or pain in the moment of their presence? Only the differing intensities of light; later, remembering, we give them names. "This is Bosco, who wants to come with us. He knows wilderness, and the roads, places we never heard of." "Step closer, Bosco, will you? I'm nearsighted." Bosco moved into the field of ruthless inspection. Angus the polite, confused boy of yesterday was surely not gone, but merely hidden in Angus the commander because there was no time for him. "All right -- good. Come with us." There seemed no question of challenging Angus' right to decide. In this crisis someone must be ready with swift rational aye or no: let it be Angus, who said that power stinks, but who understood the exercise of it. "I'm in for ripping off a sucking pig, Mister." "Maybe I'll ask you to teach me how it's done. Got any left?" "Cops got it." Bosco was looking into Cell I and as Demetrios was about to join him there he muttered from his mouth-corner: "Keep the kid out of here." The man in Cell I sprawled naked on the floor, mouth open, his clotted wounds untended; his chest was motionless, and Demetrious knew him. Demetrios turned away and slipped his arm over Frankie's shoulders. "We'll go talk to Garth." Passing Angus, he indicated Cell I with a motion of his eyes. "Holman Shawn." In Putney's room Garth stood watch by the outer door, the eyeholes of his mask a blue sparkle. "Okay, man Demetrios?" "Okay, Garth." "About your dream, my aunt said -- " Garth glanced at Putney's flushed listening face. "Well, later." "I want my vitamins. I want my vitamins." "You'll get your vitamins, o' man," said Bosco's genial voice. "Will I then? God bless you. "I hope to read my title clear To mansions in the skies -- " From the curve of Demetrios' arm Frankie looked up, demanding answers. "What was it in t'other cell you didn't want me to see?" Demetrios could remember: at twelve only a fool doesn't know that the other side of the coin is sorrow; and Frankie would never be a fool. "A dead man, Frankie. He was an Abramite. They left him there after a beating, they let it happen." Frankie stared, eyes bottomless; the ocean is not concerned with forgiveness. "It's the other side, Frankie. The other side of the happenest day of our lives." IX  only come to see You oil your Way They say an artist must represent his times. They don't say why: maybe they think the mirror creates the image. If the artist objects, Procrustes is always ready with his rusty', trusty, snaggletooth hacksaw. A mist often rises from the ground L in the nights at Nuber, flowing about the houses, which stand lonely -- houses always do: islands that people have shoveled together for resting-places of the journey. The mist absorbs the earth-loving touch of footsteps, the sound of laughter under the breath, whispered love and courage. The mist is ambiguity and marvel. One breathes it in as vapor and becomes -- let us say, wiser: at least a blurred wisdom is to be found in the fog, an ability to say what might never be said in daylight or under the extravagant invitations of the moon. Along alleys and avenues where even the trees were drowsing, the ground mist joined a vapor that rolled in through an eastern gap in the hills. Night smelled of salt air, of wild ocean loneliness. Fog yielded sometimes to persuasion of a late candle in a window, or thinned to reveal the thrust of a building's corner, a hitching post, a front yard fence. In all this passage Garth and Frankie were the guides. To Demetrios they conveyed an intimation of the medieval; their ash bows and quivers were part of them, practical as any #th Century soldier's rifle. Both knew every turning as a fox knows his own hillside, knew every step from the sad shack where they had been born, in the shadow of King Brian's Wall, to the Great South Road. That section where the Meadows end, allowing the city to heave up against the Wall, is called Outer Wall Street; some of the shacks lean three-sided against the mass itself, and rain trickles through the haphazard joining. The boys' father, when he worked, was a street-scavenger, selling the manure to farmers at starveling prices. Demetrios walked behind, now and then touching their shirts or hip satchels for comfort. The walnut stick satisfied his right hand. Behind him came Angus, Brand, and Bos co. "Nave we far to go tonight?" Having spoken, Demetrios was disgusted by that elderly querulous noise from his throat. Angus could not have slept at all during the past night, when the purge began; he would have been traversing the rim of hell while Demetrios lay with Solitaire and the Professor snug in bed. "Not far, Demetrios." Angus spoke gently. "We thought, when we've joined the others we'll go on to the hant-house off the South Road and rest there, till first-light anyway. I hear nobody goes near it for fear of getting bespooked." "Good enough." "We mustn't stay there long, Mister Angus," said Garth. "They could set hounds on Demetrios' trail, or yours, the way dogs won't usu'ly stop for spooks, nor men won't by daylight maybe." "There are even some in Inner City who don't believe in'em." The undercurrent in Angus' voice was not all amusement. "Like me." "Aye-so?" Garth's voice was troubled, the trouble echoed by an uncertain throat-noise from Bosco back there in the dark -- not so deep a dark: a moon was exerting power above the mist, so that the travelers might feel like swimmers rising to the surface into new dimensions of breath and motion. "Man Demetrios, my aunt asked the book about your dream. It said the railroad was a dream-speech -- see, that's the science of the -- the subconscience, and the real road is going to go over water for sure on a long journey. The book did say that, each time she let it fall open, and she read it right out to me -- that is, I don't mean read, but anyhow she knowed that was what it like meant." "My thanks to her," said Demetrios, remembering the age of science. For more than a century it had been able to hold in check, somewhat, the human compulsion to accept the dithering of primitive magic as revelation and mystic truth. It could not teach its method of approach except to the very few -- (how hard did it try? -- Demetrios wasn't sure); nor could it suppress the corruption generated by the gifts that science itself had tossed to fools possessed of power -- how hard did it try? By the time computers were being employed in the commercial development of astrology, tarot, witchcraft, all the rest of the dreary sludge -- by that time, long before #, maybe we were already done for. "We shall cross water," said Demetrios, "and grow older." He hoped that Garth's love-sensitive ear would not catch the sarcasm and anger that had threatened to erupt through his words like a belch from an acid stomach. Garth is kind, lovable, good. Didn 't he just help me get out of a stinking jail? When was I appointed to turn him into a #th Century rationalist, in an age that hates reason, supposing  knew how it could be done? All the same -- What is there to hope j or? What can we do? Accept the new dark age as inevitable in the rhythm of history'? Periods of special enlightenment do tend to be short -- Greece, the European Renaissance -- and then the poor startled human race must go pottering back into the cave to digest. False analogies: the human race is not a person, and jorgetfulness is hardly digestion. So -- we hope, we make believe that reason can somehow nourish light in private places, through more long dismal centuries when nothing is certain except the power of unreason? What else? The moonlight explaining the face of Frankie grew tender. Why, damn it. Garth is teachable. as teachable as Frankie, or Angus. What if l AM appointed? Selfappointed -- it's for me to say. Sort out your own brains first. Demetrios: beginning now. "This'll be the South Road," said Garth. The mist, no higher than their knees, ran as a river of silent whiteness channeled between walls of maple and evergreen and oak, and the blue-black summits of leaves were sprinkled and sparkling with stars. Men wanted those: dreamed of approaching them. They did reach the moon and Mars: they did send astounding gadgets to the wastes of Venus, Mercury, Jupiter to listen and scan and crackle reports back to the home planet where they were playing with tarot cards and nerve gas and leaky nuclear toys. Axiom in man-made ethics: Human beings choose their own purposes, according to whatever complex of desire and information dominates their thinking. Corollary The purposes will be good (by whatever standard of " good " is being employed) in so far as the desire is good and the information sound. Conclusion (one of many): An old man possessed of relatively trustworthy information cannot be lightly excused from the obligation to teach... Define "trustworthy". Define " obligation "... Oh. I am bumbling. I am getting old... T he ventriloquial laughter-like noise of a screech-owl trilled out of milky obscurity ahead of them at the side of the road, two calls close together. The sound was immediately answered -- from all around him, it seemed to Demetrios, but he saw Frankie's lips in slight motion, and then the strengthening half-moon displayed the bounty of Frankie's grin. He whispered: "Solitaire did that?" "Learnt her this afternoon," said Frankie. "(Brains of the outfit.)" He called softly: "Everything's okay. It's us." A three-bodied shadow emerged, into the mist that seemed about to dissolve yet never did, quite, as though something of it -- a softness, a blurring of vision like the myopia of Angus Bridgeman or the hesitations of Demetrios, would always accompany the travelers, quieting the human lust for certainties -- and became three separate souls, carrying small packs, daring night and wilderness, young and not young. Here was small sweet Solitaire, and the Professor carrying his lute close-wrapped against the dampness; a thicker, heavier shape turned to the moon the watchful face of Babette. Angus spoke under his breath. "You know these friends. Brand." Brand lowered his ears, trotting forward smoke-silent. Solitaire reached, to speak to him with her hand. The company was eight. "O Demetrios!" Solitaire did not kiss him. She pressed her face on his chest and held him fast, making his lank body a refuge. "Demetrios, Dcmetrios, sacred to the earth." "My name -- you knew that, love?" "Demetrios forgets what he's told her. Solitaire never forgets anything." Frankie and Garth watched the road in both directions -- no one ever travels the roads at night, even the Great South Road: almost no one; no one respectable. "Solitaire has a thing to tell -- not now -- soon -- some time. Demetrios will make a happiness out of it, could be. Solitaire wants to carry a stick like Demetrios. The Professor is thinking somebody will cut a stick for Solitaire to carry." "Somebody better," said Babette. "Man Demetrios, bless you, I only come to see you on your way, then I got to go back to my Mam, the way she wouldn't last three days without me." The company was, in a way, seven. But more than that still, for one of the amazing aspects of love is the traffic it carries on with memory -- now I know this for true. I who write this book, for once upon a time an ancient man, I bein q then not much bigger than a tJv-speck. took me on his lap and said: "Here's a howdydo! What's a howdv-do? A howdy-do's a little one. a howdy-do's a pretty one. and here's a howdy-do!" I reached and qot me a list fid of white beard with a kiss in it. Now the love of my father and mother and some others had surrounded me the way the sea moves in perfection around a little fish, but in that moment with Whitebeard -- ( haven't a notion who he was. never did know ) --  discovered how the universe holds separate beings who can open their own countries of love to let you in a while. So Whitebeard goes with me; but those l couldn't like -- why,  treat'em hatefully: l forget' cm. Demetrios would carry Babette in himself the whole way, whatever that way was (even now wondering, Shall I ever see her again after tonight?) -- her broad bosom, her cheerful directness, round face, open smile. Angus asked: "May I borrow the hatchet?" "For sure," said Garth, watching the road. "Any time. Mister Angus, yourself it is. Frankie -- ?" Frankie unslung from his belt the small camp-ax of Old Time. He removed the leather guard, and the blade's edge became under the moon an arc of fierce frost. It was evident, in the language of Frankie's hands, that to him the care of the Hatchet was a most holy trust; also that he did not understand why Mister Angus and not himself or Garth should make use of it. "Man Garth," said Angus, "let it be Mister Angus no more. I have no place in the Inner City nor want none, nor any place I know of at all except in this company." Garth watched the road. "Aye# , Angus. Try the oak yonder, where it leans out a branch." Frankie set the Hatchet in Angus' hand, and went with him, pulling down the branch for Angus to cut, staying close at his side while Angus trimmed it with a natural bend for a handle, and then returned the Hatchet. Then Frankie must rub the edge of it with his shirt. "That Hatchet," said Angus, "has had good care." Frankie nodded, speechless, finding it no occasion for a grin, only for a different sort of smile that glowed and vanished in the white light. Angus brought the stick to Solitaire. She moved out of Demetrios' arms to take it and weigh it in her hand. "It's green," said Angus. "It will ripen." "Everything does," she said. "The stones, and the stars. Now Solitaire can lean on a staff if she's tired or lazy or cross." "We must get on," said Garth. "Frankie, watch with me for the wood-road to the hant-house. I might miss it." "The white stone, remember?" But when the Company had moved on a few hundred slow paces along the open misty channel of the South Road, it was Frankie who said: "There it be. Leave me take front, the way I see best in the dark. You link up one and one behind." "It's more'n an hour you ha'n't called me Clunk." Many moments later (not a measurable time) as the Company moved ahead through what was for Demetrios a tunnel of unbroken darkness, his finger hooked in Garth's belt. Solitaire's in his, the other links a chain of nerves that made them (for a while) one body, Frankie's small treble reached Demetrios: "It'll be never again you call me Plague." Then sometimes Frankie's voice was warning, clear enough so that Bosco at the end of the line would hear it: "Stick in the path crossways." Or: "Briers, briers." Or: "Fallen log, don't nobody tumble." Then at last (clearly not a measurable time): "Brains of the outfit sees moonlight ahead -- " at which a fleet ripple of laughter ran through the Company, since Frankie himself had sent the remark down the line with a chuckle in it. E ntering the pallid clearing behind Garth and Frankie, Demetrios did not immediately see the hant-house, for it crouched at the darkest edge of the moonlit space where the forest had flung around it wanton arms of wild grape, and pushed through its front courtyard the shaft of a pine now twice the height of the building, but could not quite capture the ancient thing -- not altogether, not yet. His eyes discovered a splash of moonlight on a surface of slate that nature had never arranged, and three eyes of glassless windows above the mute scream of a doorless doorway. Garth said reflectively: "It's them stone floors inside. Been no place for seeds to find a crack, or they'd 'a' done it like that pine wherever a mite of sun come through." "Colonial?" said Demetrios. "By God I think so. I never knew it was here. I could have dreamed a story for it." "No reason to know," said Garth. "We're more'n a mile from the South Road now and nobody comes here. What's Colonial?" "Old Old-Time, before the -- call it the age of marvels. This house may havebeen erected more than three hundred years ago." "There's Colonial house in the Inner City," said Angus. "It's been kept in repair. They call it the Dutch Museum." "Dutch," said Bosco -- "that was another name for them bloody Injans. Nay, I seen an old house at Albany, I think they called it Colonial, only the gov'ment don't let you go into it." Solitaire shivered in the crook of Demetrios' arm; Babette had made the sign of the Wheel. "Ah, they were all just people," said Demetrios, "and long gone; and this is just a building that didn't fall apart easily." A barn owl blurted his call and came Boating out of an upper window to carry a shadow across the moon. "How good are the walls, Garth?" "Good -- stone. With what's left of a wood and plaster finish onto the inside, only people must've took to stealing bits and pieces till there a'n't much left. Roof slates too, they be near-about gone at the back -- nay, Frankie, don't!" -- for Frankie had swaggered near the black doorway and was talking like an owl: "You who hoo-hoo! Anybody to ho-huh-home?" At Garth's protest he demanded: "A'n't we going in?" The hant-house stood calm in its three hundred years. They heard aeolian murmurs, a rustling of whatever modest life had chosen in this century to make a home here. The Professor joined Frankie protectively by the doorway. Bosco was grumbling: "We got anything for lights? I wouldn't mind the place with a bit of light." "Got some pine torches and carrier in my pack," said Garth. "Solitaire could light one," said Solitaire. "All right." All of them including himself, Demetrios realized, had been waiting on that approval from Angus. In the shelter of Angus' spread jacket Solitaire won a flame from her tinder-box. Two golden faces confronted one another on their own island of light. So deeply tranced was Solitaire in her discoveries that Garth must touch her hand, reminding her of the torch he held waiting. These are good inventions in their way, pine sticks with a tight binding of rag sometimes impregnated with pine oil -- turpentine if you insist. The stick is whittled so it may be inserted in a slotted device like a candlestick, which can be stuck in the ground or in a wallbracket; around the slot is a guard like the hilt of a rapier, intended to protect the carrying hand. A good torch will burn prettily and rather calmly for quite a while. The age of electricity could easily have massproduced these foodiddles for sale as antiques, but history says that to its everlasting loss it didn't -- something about fire underwriters. Garth held up his good torch. The Company followed him into the quiet place. X if I can teach you to be patient -- Those very ones who believe that everything has been said and done, will greet you as new and yet will close the door behind you. And then they will say again that everything has been and done. -- Eugene Delacroix, G arth's pine torch, its bracket wedged into a firedog of the hearth, shone on the face of Angus, who sat with Brand stretched out beside him. Demetrios watched that dear image with drowsing eyes. What of the poison of jealousy, the making of demands, the sin of possessiveness? Surely an old man might keep his heart clear of those follies, at least among these gentle few. Must grief inevitably burn because there is one who loves and one who is loved? One compensates. For Angus and Solitaire it was a little different: for a time they would be caught in the same fever. He remembered how something like this had once glowed for him and Elizabeth of Hartford, and might still hold warmth if she had not died. Death had blown it away, and now he found he could not quite recall the color of her eyes. The Professor's lute sent questions into cobwebbed corners, driving out echoes to play hide-andseek. The small torch opened the ceiling of the big room to infinity. Solitaire sat by Demetrios on their blanket, and Babette was cross-legged on his other side, her plump shadow dancing on the wall with the shadows of Angus and Solitaire; Demetrios could see her broad kind face if he turned his head. He was going to miss her, if they went west through the wilderness. He would miss Mam Estelle, the girls, even Nuber itself, having consigned forty-seven years of his life to the peculiar place. Bosco, ready to grab comfort anywhere, had rolled up in Garth's blanket while Garth and Frankie took first watch. After it Angus and Bosco would watch until first-light, and then, Angus had suggested, they might as well follow a woodroad that wound southwest from the hant-house, paralleling the Great South Road in its beginning. The South Road itself would ,be unsafe for fugitives, up to the border of Katskil. Garth and Frankie had once tried that wood-road for a mile, running away from home. Their mother was still living then: love and conscience drove them back. Before the last Bower of the torch had fallen Demetrios entered sleep. Westward chugged the homely locomotive. the woodburner with bulging stack, westward past Aberedo, clattering, coughing dirt. It halted at a water-tower, where a man with Abel Kane embroidered on his overalls warned the enginedriver: "Careful, man, the water shortage is terrible. Thing is They got to cover the earth with it, and that don't leave much. Can't turn back the clock to Noah, no sir. Likely won't nobody know where he's at till They've done the -- uh -- hydraulic finalizing." ( vour novelist know quite well where I'm at. My problem is to know where I'm at n't.) The woman with the marketbasket leaned across Demetrios to ask a deaf farmer: "What'd the man say?" A sad little girl with adenoids and a goiter in the seat opposite watched with never a smile. Demetrios replied for the deaf man, or wanted to: "We're going to Hesterville to see the Water Shortage." She wasn't listening. The sad child's mother stared through Demetrios with dislike. But here already was Hesterville -- All out for Hestervi-i-lle! No way out except down into flat green water, down and down, since the station loomed there below. The train puffed along an embankment, the passengers floated out and down like Demetrios, off the open carriage with the wicker seats -- open air, smoky air, lost air -- into green water deep and slow. White shapes stood tranquil in green water-air; darker shapes roved up with unknown intent -- we all live in darkness, don't we? -- and in gross darkness the people --  wemetrios." Solitaire spoke I w gently. "Demetrios made noises." She rubbed his forehead softly, a service she had done before when nightmare trod on him. Confusion drained away. The silly dream was a face gone in a crowd. Ambiguous light was entering the hant-house whether from dawn or a descending moon he could not tell. The face of Angus he could not lind. Where it had been a scar in the wall appeared: plaster had fallen from lath in a patch the shape of North America, and in front of this hung a spider, a good gray scavenging citizen nursing her drop of poison and her own torch of life. Frankie was lying with his head in Solitaire's lap, looking in sleep more like nine years old than twelve. "Angus and Bosco K watching outside." "Is it moonlight?" "No, day begins. A bird called. Talk soft so Love can sleep. "Redbird it were," said Babette, her voice as low as Solitaire's in awe of Frankie's slumber. "lean see my way home soon spite of fog." "Can't come with us? -- nay, I know. The Mam needs you." "Wouldn't last a day and me not there. Will I tell her you'll come back? -- oyah, of course I will, I mean, will there be truth in it?" "How can I say? Do old men ever come back?" "Shame on you, Dimmy!" said Babette, and shook him. "Shame on you for a gloomer! Come on, come out of the bad dreams!" Demetrios sat up, accepting the morning chill. "Yes -- yes, we must find a place where they don't require a license for storytelling." Light was showing him the shape of the ancient structure, once maybe a reception room for gentry in wigs and knee breeches. A stairway curve broke into darkness short of the second floor; the upper landing had dropped, likely decayed by years of leakage from the roof. A heap of plaster and rotted wood lay below the break. "We must look for a place where things can be made better without making them worse." Solitaire's fingertips spoke love to Frankie's curls, not waking him. He moved, a vague thrust of hips against the blanket, and quieted, his parted mouth a poem of Eros. "Solitaire has a thing to tell... Solitaire is pregnant." "Oh -- " "By Demetrios," she said, smiling at him in the growing light. "She planned it. She knows her calendar." The lute chuckled from a shadowed place. "For a month she and Professor only played games outside the door. Paesan is saying he planned it with her. So there'd be seed of Demetrios." Elizabeth of Hartford, her wasted agony, the horror of the birth and double death -- yet there was that half-chance, that bloodless statistical encouragement: Elizabeth's own genes might have been the ones to carry the #th Century damnation. Most births are still normal -- three out of Jive, isn't that what they say? -- when they occur at all -- otherwise who would try to prolong the days before extinction? "Solitaire -- my love Solitaire -- two months? Three?" "Nearer three," said Solitaire with pride. "We'll get out of Katskil, settle in a safe place to wait your time." Safe place ! -- where is that? "Babette, stay away from the Abramites. At Town Hall I was questioned about Abramites at Mam Estelle's. Told'em nothing of course. Fran ought to get out of town." "Leave it to me. Don't worry?" She added quaint Old-Time words that folk still deprecatingly used: "Do your own thing, Dimmy." Angus came in with light around him, rousing Garth, kneeling by Frankie and Solitaire, silently asking: Is it well with us? It was the how-boy blind with sleep whose shoulder he kissed, Frankie whose hair he rudely rumpled, Demetrios of whom he asked gently: "Shall we go by the wood-road?" Solitaire kindled a small fire in the hearth, where Babette toasted bread and bacon. She had brought along other more practical food to start the journey -- dried corn and Iruit, smoked meat, hard mealcakes, a flask of wine. Angus had money with him; Garth and Bosco and Frankie claimed skill at hunting and fishing. All the same Babette cried a little, watching them go, in the morning fog that was both confusion and a shelter, down that road which might turn in any direction, maybe toward nowhere. She watched them go -- sharp-eyed Garth and Frankie, her old weird Demetrios, sweet mad Solitaire with her branch of oak gaily mimicking the old man's staff -- indeed she, with maybe the most to lose, seemed to be the happiest to be going; (but how old was Solitaire, really? -- Babette had never lelt sure) -- and dark-browned Angus with the gray hound who was more like a part of himself than a servant, and the massive soft-footed stranger Bosco who -- Babette considered him tricky: his watchful face was telling nothing of his inward life. Babette watched them go, gave her nose a last wipe on the back of her arm, disconsolately plodded back to her share of the work of the world. ( But much later she rejoined us, as I will tell if I can teach you to he patient with me.) Saturday, July # S o they went off into the Fog, Babette says, about sun-up, and from what The Boy told us when he come here in Trouble, I better not write what way they went, nor his name neither. People might come and try to read my Book before I burn it, which I wouldn # like to do because it would he Stupid to do that to the Story of Mv Life if I don't have to, just to keep Information away from the Gunes. She says D himself says he'll be coming back. He will too, wearing a rainbow, he'll make them look like Fools, drive them out of the Temple like it said in the Book -- O how l go on! He was just my old Demetrios that was Janitor, never bothered nobody. Suppose it was on My Account he said he'd come back? He would always lean Way Over so not to hurt People when all the time he'd better of spoke Direct, not put everything like into a Story Going off into the Fog and maybe not even enough to eat -- well, that Garth is a good Boy. and maybe Solitaire got more ginger in her than I thought and won't be a Drag. Suppose l think about something else, like this Place for an Instance the way it was when I come from Raeford. Not the coming here itself, that was mostly sickmaking, cars driv Crosswise onto the Road and People dead in them. My Trucker wasn't too bad. he said his name was A l, he'd been taking a tenwheeler to New York with froze fish. He said everything on the Road went like crazy, maybe it was Blast, he run the ten-wheeler into an Embankment so not to hit a Lunatic in a Ford that come straight at him, and got hurt some in the Head, I mean my Trucker did, but got out and walked away from it, froze fish all over the Road. We was together a few days, walking west because he said he had people to Rochester and what's the difference, anything to be on the move. When he wanted it he would pull me down side of the Road and do it no matter somebody might go by, I didn't care either, I'd just keep still looking at the sky till he finished, all as he ever wanted was On and Off. He found food for me, and fought off a couple-three Gunes that wanted to Share the Wealth. In Beacon they shot him for looting. I crossed the River in a Motorboat with some Crazies that thought it was the Sea of Galilee and they'd see the Savior walking onto it, they wrecked the Boat landing in a Rainstorm and went off north ways with their Ass dragging. I'd had it with them, up to here. I say I won 't write about a Thing, right off I go to doing it. Anyhow l come to Nuber chancelike, not caring. Already the Founders had got the Place in order, a regular Camp with Officers to tell People where to go, what to do. You can always feel the Difference when People got something to work on, not just flopping around like Crazies on the Sea of Galilee. Mister Fleur he was one of those Officers, working direct under Simon B ridgeman.  helped with refugees, the Hot Soup and Bandages bit, and in a couple three months when Bridgeman's Goverment wanted tostablish some sexhouses. Mister Fleur's was the first. Mister Fleur used to say his friend Simon was the only Savior of Mankind that ever noticed his People had Balls. The Sexhouse had boys, and some way-outs of various kinds. Simon B ridgeman, and his Word was the same as God's in Nuber, allowed all sex was good so long as nobody was getting damaged. Most people had come to feel that way in those days, we did in Raeford, only I guess the other kind of idears went on as usual too, lately I been watching Nuber get more sick-ass prudish year by year. Most of all Mister Fleur wanted to make sure everything was clean, even the towels. I heard tell he'd been a Doctor before the Crash, though I never heard it from him, he never talked much about Past Time. While I was doing the Hot Soup Thing, I must of caught his eye, because he come over and asked me, " Will you fuck for a living, my Honey?" And I said, " Why not?" Mister Fleur was kind to me, and a Friend too. He didn't want women but he liked them. Maybe it's easier to like them if you don't. He'd say things like it wasn't too bad of an Idear to have two Sexes because it made for interesting Arguments that People would never have to settle because they couldn t. #) sometimes talks kind of like Mister Fleur, account of Both was Educated. Mister Fleur was a little sparrowy man. shorter than me but I had a great Respect for him, and he said I had a Good Business Head and a Sense of Order. Once-twice Eve seen him pull the Switchblade he always carried to keep Peace in the House, but I never did see him obliged to use it. People got the Message right off and simmered down. When Simon B ridgeman was murdered I thought it might have n earn bout done for Mister Fleur. He was Tore Up. He might laugh some at B ridgeman s I dears, and criticize, but nobody else better, they was Friends and I guess he really thought S. Bridgeman was God. which I never noticed him thinking that about anybody else. He went on a twoweek Drunk. Afterward he was like beat out. gone slack inside. He said the World wasn't worth a Packet of Shit -- Present Company excepted of course, he was always Polite. Well, he straightened out afterwhile, but wasn't never again like when Bridgeman was living. Sometimes he wanted to get me talking about the customers Fd serviced. He'd laugh, it would give him some kind of High, not the Thing itself but hearing me talk about it. I didn't mind. ft went on like that several years. Mister Fleur kept things Nice. People would come to us uptight -- you'd be surprised how often the Y ticks don't want to do nothing but talk and maybe collect some Sympathy about Things they can't change like wives and so forth and likely wouldn't if they could. They'd go away feeling better, anyhow quieter. Mister Fleur would say things like how Idealistic it was to work for a Public Utility that was actually in the Public Interest. In Year #I smallpox hit Nuber. I suppose somebody brang it in from Outside. Mister Fleur said all Bad Things come from Outside, the Inside is always Sinless like Desert Islands. I don't know all what he meant. Two of our girls died, and a Boy that Mister Fleur loved special come through the Sickness with his face looking for everafter like a cheese-grater -- and couldn't stand it neither but ran away from us, out of Nuber likely, for Mister Fleur broke his heart trying to find him and never could. Mister Fleur said once that condemning the Human Race was perfectly all right only too fucking hard on Individuals. During that Smallpox he went away a lot into the City helping care for the sick and seeing them die. I guess he'd been a Doctor all right in Old Time though he never would say. and anytime he had to give his name he'd straighten right up to his five foot two and say. "I am Mister Fleur. " making the Mister sound like ice tinkling the edge of a glass. After the Smallpox was over you could see how Old Time was riding Mister Fleur more than ever -- it was always on his mind, but worse after that, and the Boy Shawn that ran away. well, that was a Knife into him he couldn't ever pull out. He didn't want me to Talk any more about the Customers, but he's ask me Things about Raeford, and Sam and Stevie and Leda, and sometimes about Marcus. He'd sit by me whiles  talked, and pet me if I got to crying. Then one night he told me he'd fixed his Will so as I was to have the House if anything was to happen to him, I only had to go to the Town Hall the way it was all on record, no trouble, and he would appreciate it if I would keep the small room he slept in the way it was, with the pictures Shawn painted. and not use it for the customers, and of course I said I would and always have, the pictures are kind of Weird. One is a great stud horse like climbing a rainbow that Shawn painted him all purple and yellow, you can't think how a Horse would get to look like That. Once I showed Demetrios that room, and he said, "God Almighty, Stell, what became of the Boy?" All's I could tell him was, he went away, we couldn 't ever find him. So Mister Fleur said that about the Will, and then he said I had a Good Head, and I wasn't to cry any more about Marcus because that was the kind of cry that did me no Good and I must make it like the Scar on my Leg -- well, Jesus God, vou can't do that, but he meant it kind. He went off to bed Peaceful, I remember, without no Drink in him. Come morning we found he'd gone to bed perfectly natural and then rammed the Switchblade in under his ribs. He wasn 't old, nor Sick or anything.  don't Understand how a Person could do that no matter how Things hurt -- I suppose it gets to be like not caring, maybe, but wouldn 't they always want to know what happens Next? all day the wood-road led the Company south and southwest, in a prodigious quiet for which Demetrios' ears were not ready. At Nuber, even in the slack dead of night, one heard at least a contracting of house timbers, rustle of mice, drop of spent coals in a fireplace, dog or cat noises, a murmur, a footstep; by day the continual street sounds -- wagon wheels, clop of hoofs, bray of donkeys, peddlers' cries. Here, not even wind. All day the fog never Iruly lifted, merely thinning to admit watery light and a sufficieht view of the road. At the noontime halt -- the Company sensed rather than saw that the sun was overhead -- Demetrios asked Bosco if wilderness always imposed this quiet. "My ignorance shames me," Demetrios said. "No wilderness existed in Old Time except very far IVoni the places I knew, and then I was spending all my time in Nuber, that hot-house, while wilderness grew back around us and all I knew of it was folk-say." "Where there's a road," said Bosco, "even a wispy one like this, it a'n't wilderness exactly. Real wilderness, you work from tree to tree, and remember your back trail. Some kinds of jungle, like western Moha near the Ontara, you got to cut your way. I don't understand this road myself. Never seen a woods road go this long without getting no place. Nor like you say, this quiet. There'd ought to be animal sounds, not just them birds now and then. I believe it's the fog, and the 'umidity. Our sweat smells, see, and the critters catch it and keep still. Like everything was afraid of man, a'n't it strange?" "Funny deer-tracks back-along," said Frankie. Bosco tolerantly regarded him and his brother. "Wa'n't deertracks, Frankie. Them was boar. and a big feller." Sitting weary between Angus and the Professor, Solitaire shivered; she could not have done this much walking in a whole day since the time when Demetrios found her, and her first enthusiasm had dimmed in fatigue; Bosco saw it. "Not to worrit," he said. "Boar a'n't likely to bother you unless he thinks you're hurting him, or you go crashing into some place he figures is his'n. Besides, them sign was made yesterday." Angus nodded, watching her. "Brand wasn't interested. He would have been hot for work if the smell had been fresh, in spite of picking up that rabbit for breakfast this morning." "The little thing." Yet Solitaire's hand moved in affection over Brand's ferocious head. "He must kill to live," said Angus, in futile distress because the world could not harmonize with what he saw of this woman's nature. "Solitaire knows that," she said. "People too. Meat is good. Beasts all, all beasts," said Solitaire; and hearing her small, disturbed laugh, Demetrios dreaded the next moments, for she would be weeping uncontrollably, almost silently, her hands palms upward in her lap as if waiting for alms that no one knew how to give. The Professor heard that laugh too, and before the flood of tears began he took her lightly in his arms as anyone might take a child in trouble. Angus stared at Demetrios in amazed distress. But words could not be used while her trouble was on her, and if he went aside with Angus to explain how this would pass, how it was a thing one accepted if one accepted Solitaire, she would see them go, and a rage might follow. For she had her rages too, though no one was ever hurt by them except in spirit: would Angus still worship after witnessing one of those? Garth and Bosco were looking away in heavy embarrassment, but Frankie, after his first moment of alarm, searched rapidly in his hip satchel. He brought out a fragment of admirable carving -- it was applewood, Demetrios thought. A fawn lay curled like a sleeping kitten but with open eyes. The treasure was no bigger than that Japanese netsuke of a laughing old woman which had been one of the marvels on the desk of Dr. Isaac Freeman, very long since. Frankie laid the fawn on Solitaire's open palm. "Garth done it," he said. "You might like to look at it. I a'n't no good at them things myself." The tears stopped, the fingers closed. "Frankie -- O the eyes of him!" "You can keep it if you want," said Frankie. "I got about a thousand more. He does'em all the time, my brother does..." I n early evening the Company reached a spot where the woodroad touched the remnant of an Old-Time paved surface, the kind the ancients called blacktop. Dimly beyond the junction the wood-road continued. The Old-Time road was so desolate, so far from any sense of intelligent creation, it seemed less like evidence of humanity than the trail they had been following. On that they could at least find, though intermittently, the dint of wagonwheels gone by a week or two before, but the Old-Time road offered no more than a long vanishing aisle under dense growth, a surface of black dull patches nearly hidden by grass and weeds that had pressed through tiny cracks, started by frost or earthquake or time, and made them big. Here and there seedling trees were pushing into light; these in a few more years would do away with even the memory of the road. And nowhere in the green cover could the Company find any human mark. Animals would have been crossing it repeatedly, the grass springing up behind them, but had formed no visible trails down the length of it; possibly any human creatures who looked along the desolate way would have chilled themselves with the thought of ghosts and wanted no part of it. But Angus said: "I have in my head a sort of compass. I think it speaks true mostly. Spin me around, I still know somehow where the west is, if there's any daylight or moonlight -- it doesn't help me in real darkness. I used to astonish my family with it when I was a boy. Well, my compass says lli is wood road has been trending a little bit east for the last hour, as if il meant to angle back toward the ( ireat South Road where we daren't show our faces. But the Old-Time l liing is pointing clear west." He shook his dark hair behind his shoulder; one of his rare smiles touched Demetrios. "I smell the Pacific in front of my nose, three thousand miles away." Maybe, thought Demetrios, that was how it would be for all of the journey, and how it ought to be: Angus, the wisest of the young, would be the true maker of decisions and giver of directions, but he would employ his uncanny tact and he would seek the old man's counsel. Under such conditions, possibly a little democracy of seven souls could be made to function without doing too much violence to seven patterns of need. A democrey of seven plus Brand, who might take occasion to vote now and then after his fashion. This was probably the moment, voitr novelist supposes, when DemetriossacredtotheEarth decided to found his own republic, if he could keep it. A republic needs mothers to breed its sons and daughters. He knew that. r HE company covered better than a mile of the Old-Time road, finding no change in its quality, and camped comfortably beside it before dark. It seemed safe to build a good lire. In this quiet and loneliness -- the fog was with them still, faint in the air but sad like all memories of antiquity -- the thought of pursuit from Nuber appeared ridiculous, even to Angus. "The powers of Inner City," he said, "have nothing against me except my existence. They are rewriting history, by the way, did I tell you? My uncle Simon may have to appear as an arch-villain, Antichrist, whatever, instead of a saint. Saints can be a mite inconvenient to a King's Republic -- sooner or later some crackpot is going to insist on imitating them, and that means more damn work for the cops." He laid gently on the little furnace of fhe fire the stick he had been using to stir it up. "My disappearance ought to suit them almost as well as -- say, a sudden fatal illness or a stiletto in the back. Of course it may worry them a bit, can't help that." "Will Angus go back there some time?" He gazed at Solitaire a long time across the fire. "Nay, I think not. Vengeance is nothing but a sickness, and what other reason would I have? To save the Abramites from persecution? -- they are already under the wheels, and I have no power." "One day," said Demetrios, "the Abramites will themselves be the oppressors. An old rhythm of history, another punishment by nature of those who were too busy rewriting history to read it." "I think I understand you," said Angus. "No -- no, I won't go back." He leaned toward the fire, seeking to bring her face nearer to his eyes. "I've no wish for any place where you couldn't safely come with me." From his quiet speech no one could have said whether "you" meant only Solitaire or all the Company; but the Professor's lute broke out in a sudden music, and Frankie came quickly around the fire to kneel by him and watch his sovereign fingers on the strings. They were carrying a familiar melody in and out of shadows, letting it play beatific games with itself. On the exact moment, as the Professor nodded to him, Frankie sang, shy at first but then with the assurance of an angel, the air, said to have been composed by a streetcorner musician of Brakabin in recent years, his name no more known than the name of Demetrios, certainly not a music of Old Time: Before the dark falls your flesh is amber fire to warm my midnight. Before a light spreads your mouth gives solace of night to cool my noontime. I have not wondered that flame and coolness perish: to love is mortal. XI They noticed a Sign saying... But we had enemies which he culled magicians, and they had turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday-school just out of spite. I said, all right: then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said I was a numbskull. all of the next day, and the next, the ruined road led the Company west and a little south. The fog was a burden, full of sounds. It seemed to Demetrios that he was hearing out of the mist what could never be heard again, absurd with antiquity. Wasn't that a police siren beyond fog-shrouded trees? -- not the full scream but the yow-yowyow patrol cars used to make to clear traffic out of their way? "Durn parrots," said Bosco. "Them little whitey ones." "Ayah," said Angus. "My mother keeps one in a cage." An hour later the siren made its other fearful cry, the one for accident, disaster, fire. "Durn-by damn," said Bosco. "Don't often hear catamount sound off like that in the daytime." "Overcast days," said Garth. "Or if he's horny." 'I hearn one last night," said Frankie. "Same, likely." Demetrios could accept it. When in time another shrillness sounded, taint and small with distance, he could scold himself for hearing the noon whistle of a factory or town siren. But he asked the boy with the Old-Time wrist-watch: "What's the lime, Angus?" "Noon straight up, man Deme.   I nos. Auto horns -- the afternoon in m idBight -- auto horns -- anyway a confused hooting or bleating. Was I lie mist itself generating this madness? It had seemed in the last half-hour to be lifting. Now and I lien Demetrios had glimpsed the sun's white blur, finding it too si rong to look on directly. Moose or deer trumpeting? A daytime owl? lie saw Garth frown and Frankie look at him with inquiry, but no one spoke of it, and presently it ceased. "Crossroads, huh?" said Bosco. "God," said Garth, "I wish I could read." Bosco caught Demetrios' eye. "I don't know as that's what it says, but you can see another road coming in here, north and south." The placard was of ancient metal, raised letters partly obliterated. Beyond it the black patches and disorderly green cover of the Old-Time road continued. Brand sniffed at the sign and raised his leg. "Sure I'll teach you and Frankie to read," said Angus. "Or Demetrios will, or both of us." "Solitaire can teach some," said the frail pregnant lady. "Solitaire had the books a little, once." "Books makes folk discontentered," said Bosco. "I don't mind discontent," said Demetrios. Bosco shrugged, amiable, finding it not worth an argument. "Let's go on west. If it's really a dead end we can turn back." T he old blacktop went on more firmly if anything. Perhaps someone had played a joke, long forgotten; or the road had been extended after the sign was placed; or whoever was carrying the sign got sick of it and rammed it in the ground just there -- it's a crazy world. When later the Company began to hear a vague roaring, felt in the feet and knees and guts, Demetrios refused to think of heavy trucks pelting down a highway through air blue with poison to feed a monstrous city. "Must be a real old man of a waterfall somewhere," said Bosco. The road was veering slightly south. The noise diminished. When it came time to camp for the night they still felt its booming in the ground but hardly thought about it. Once long ago, a day or two before A beredo, I dreamed my father was living, and it dismayed my witless dream-self though I had loved him. though we were friends in an easier, kindlier way than son and father ordinarily can be, because he was not vain. If with a wand or a prayer I could make Old Time return, what would I do?... Demetrios also brooded on his memory of Old-Time maps. They could meet no great river before the Delaware. Were they already approaching it? The sound droned on, chaos talking in its sleep. Angus was taking the first twohour watch. Garth with Frankie would have the next, then Bosco; Demetrios with the Professor would take the last, that led into dawn. Demetrios sought his blanket but feared sleep -- he did not wish to dream of Hesterville. On the other side of the fire Solitaire and the Professor sat talking. Her lips moved, close to his ear; his face expressed innumerable changes of doubt, assent, agreement, brooding. He had put away his lute. He seldom made explanatory motions of his hands, but his fingers often danced on the bridge of his right arm, and Solitaire watched that. Ah. Paesan! Maybe you don't speak because you don 't want to. I f voices reach you, if a certain few love you and discover your answers, it is enough? The dark was lightened by a blurred moon; overhead Vega, a few other eternal lights. A transitory music disturbed Demetrios, appallingly like the noise made by the radio of a quiet car driving by in the distance; he heard or imagined muted motor noise, passage of tires along damp pavement. It happened again. He could see now, in the night depth, part of the configuration of the Great Bear. The mist was surely dissolving under a breeze; he saw the wavering of the black lacework of summer branches. So, in among them the wind rubbed a Few together and whined its musical breath across them... Solitaire was kneeling by him. "Angus spread his blanket by the spruce tree," she said, "before he went on watch." "Yes." Her hand was soft, a little heavy on his arm. "Nothing comes between Demetrios and Solitaire." "Nothing." "Paesan knows too. It's a need." "Understood." "Angus is gentle. The child will be safe under his loving." "Go to him. This isn't Old Time." "What about Old Time, man Demetrios?" "Ah, nothing. Go to him, love. He had not been certain until then that his love for Angus was firm enough to let him say it. Old mythologies die painfully; but she would understand in her own fashion: there was no measuring the strength or direction of her wisdom which was so much like her madness (said Mam Estelle once) that it was silly to draw lines betwxen them. Perhaps the blue ice of Vega was not quite clear of mist. He beard and felt the waterfall, continuing not forever, only till the next earthquake, next shift of climate in the whatever the estimate was when science ceased to be heard. He roused heavily from sleep. Bosco was refreshing the fire with new wood. "Is it my watch?" "Nay, only midnight. I'm going on. Sorry I disturbed you." "No matter. All quiet?" "Quiet enough. Garth and Frankie heard a wolf -- w'a'n't close by. Might've been just k'yote-dog, Garth says." "Too deep for that," said Frankie, and he spread his blanket by Demetrios. "It were a wolf, by lone." "A'n't he a pisser? Now if he was my little brother -- " "Think what I missed!" Frankie chirped, and settled himself for slumber, Garth rolled up on his other side; but Frankie was restless, and soon whispered: "Demetrios, be you much asleep? Would I talk you into telling me a story?" "Don't bother the man," Garth yawned. Asat up in his blanket. The night held an unseasonable forest chill, and his bones were aching, not adapting well to sleeping on the ground. "You might, Frankie. It's only the truth there was a young painter in the old days of Peranelios, marvelous skillful, though I can't tell you whether he became famous, in spite of the fact that I know r everything. His name was Mister Jon and he wished to paint heroes." "Is painting like singing?" "Somewhat yes, someway no." He drew Frankie into the hollow of his arm; his left hand fed the fire with little twigs; warmth quieted pain. "More like than unlike, and storytelling is like both. Mister Jon (who wasn't much older than you) had no ambition except to be the greatest painter who ever lived. He consulted Bald Ape-Man (the most respected critic in Peranelios) about this, and Bald Ape-Man asked him: 'Do you want to be the greatest painter who ever lived, or do you want to paint?' Being in a sense the brains of the outfit. Mister Jon got the point, and set before Bald ApeMan a nice ripe melon he had brought, to acknowledge the fact that he had so much more sense than most critics. You always bring something if you consult him; a lot depends on whether he eats it or throws it at you. Then Mister -- " "Well, which?" "Which what?" "Did he eat it or throw it at him?" "Oh. Some say one, some say another -- the kind of thing a storyteller runs into constantly. Mister Jon, as I said, wished to paint heroes because he thought they were interesting. I don't know why exactly, but in Peranelios, same as anywhere, the problem is to find them." "Where's Peranelios?" "Other side of the Never-Today Mountains." "I thought prob'ly. Like the fairytales my aunt tells, things always happen where you can't go. But," said Frankie, warm and drowsy, "I'd rather listen to one any time than go to sleep. Any time." "So would I. Mister Jon asked his father if he knew where to find any heroes. Mister Jon's father had fought in the wars against the pirates, was in fact aboard the flagship when the fleet crept before dawn through the Narrows of Gor to attack the pirates' secret harbor. He had no idea where Mister Jon could find any heroes, and was cross with him for interrupting a glass of beer. Mister Jon drew a sketch of him looking cross, and left home that night to look for heroes. The picture bothered him by looking more like himself than like his father, but much later, when he was hard up, he managed to sell it to an Admiral who had known his father, for the price of a night's lodging and a bowl of soup. "On his first day away from home he came on a brawny young armored horseman with a lance confronting a fearsome fiery dragon, which was just what he was looking for. He asked the noble youth: 'Would you just hold that lance a mite more slantwise? -- okay, that's it. By the way, aren't you fighting over something, maiden or whatever?' "'Well, we sent for her,' said the dragon, 'but the little misery is late. She always is.' "'Dunnowhat gets into maidens nowadays,' said the hero, who was older than Mister Jon had thought. ' I hey aren't what they were. Let's not wait. Have I got this right, with the lance?' "'Fine,' said Mister Jon. "'My other profile is better,' said the dragon. They fixed that, and it turned out to be his most salable painting -- he did several, with improvements and maidens and so on -- but Mister Jon wasn't satisfied: the hero, and sometimes the dragon, always looked like himself. He hunted up other types of hero, and had the same difficulty. The subjects couldn't see it -- they were looking of course only for their own selves and (of course) always found them -- but Mister Jon saw it. It still bothered him when he arrived at the capital. "There he consulted the Great Stone Face, which stands in a fine plaza in the capital of Peranelios and is the rnv'cc-as-much respected critic in the whole nation, since it never says anything at all. Its manner of never saying anything conveyed to Mister Jon that the hero thing itself might be causing the trouble. Instead of heroes perhaps he ought to paint only the most noble, brave, and beatific people he could find. He tried that, earning somewhat less than before, though a number of nice people had nice things to say. You see, the trouble was -- the trouble was -- " "They all looked like him," said Frankie. "But the people he painted couldn't see it, right?" "Right. He could. After a while he found out why it was." "Guess you better tell me." "He himself was the only person of any kind he actually knew. He could love others, and paint them too, but never know. He was hero, thief, beggar, dragon, saint. I forgot to tell you his last name was Everyman. Mister Jon Everyman." "I guess it's a sort of a sad story." Frankie yawned. "I suppose. Might not be all that sad after a good sleep." "Might not." Frankie burrowed back into his blanket, where presently a large sigh tapered off in a small snore. M y novelist's privilege is to say that as he sat on there watching the lire and feeding it little twigs, until Bosco came to give him the wristwatch for his tour of guard duty with the Professor, Demetrius composed other endings for that story some of them more suited to Frankie s youth --  how smart we think we are!) -- and some not. I could give you a few, but I'm afraid of making you even more impatient. Not that  blame you too much -- here we are into Chapter Eleven and I haven't even reached the point where I appear as a character. Never mind -- better times coming. I n the morning the mist had grown deep once more, and it was under the mist that the Company found the Old-Time road improving, becoming a decent small thoroughfare. Grass and weeds were beaten down though not destroyed, the more threatening saplings had been chopped off -- road work, for which we may hope somebody got paid. The noise of waterfall diminished, subtly changed, as the Company moved on west: it was more like the protest of a river forced between narrow banks, and Demetrios could feel it as deeply as ever, a vibration in the ground. Another crossroad angled in; half a mile further on, another, from the south. Along this, looming big and blurred in the mist, then sharpening to natural outlines, came a graying couple with a golden bird in a cage. They nodded politely to the Company, and the man asked: "Be you on your way to the Ferry?" "If that's w'here the road goes," said Demetrios -- for this morning Angus, drowsy and absent-minded from a night of tender games, appeared to want Demetrios to be leader and decision-maker. The stranger woman didn't like that answer. "Where else would it go?" she demanded, and she may have thought Demetrios or her husband deaf, for she repeated: "I say where else could it go?" Her man carrying the cage -- they had no other baggage -- smiled placatingly. Solitaire left her place by Angus and chirped her lips at the bird, who broke into wild caroling under her gaze. "Give him here," said the woman, "I say give him here." She took the cage -- no doubt the man really was deaf -- and covered it with a gray cloth she had been carrying tucked under her belt. The singing ceased. "We'll walk a ways behind you good folk," she said. "That way he won't make so much trouble." Frankie fell back presently to make friends with them, but they were embarrassed or afraid -- (was it possible to be afraid of Frankie? -- yes) -- covering the bird again hastily because its music burst forth at his mere approach. Demetrios glimpsed his efforts, which won only tight-mouth mumbles from the woman, dim smiles from the man. Soon Frankie gave it up and rejoined the Company, battled and rather angry; but whatever he said was for Garth's ears only. The couple plodded on ten yards or so behind, and no one else had turned up when they all came down a long stony slope to the ferry-house. It stood between fog-laced trees. Fog held the waters beyond it to infinity. The Company was hardly aware of the presence of the stream until they had reached the ferryhouse itself; then here, magnified by the high bank, the slow great noise of it was all around them. As on the previous days, the fog appeared to be thinning off, yet never did, quite; or if it did, this was no more than the tantalizing lift of a curtain which for clumsy reasons of its own must come down one more time -- I F you ever got stuck with a part in amateur theatricals ( which haven't improved noticeably since the original carry-on among the Swiss lake-dwellers) you 'll have noticed the mess we invariably run into with the damned curtain -- sticks, comes down too soon on the tenor's neck, works any way except right -- if there's a curtain at all; some try to get along without one, tr' to smuggle the cast in behind a screen till called for, and the fat one drops his spear, clank, dongle, and when he stoops for it his ass knocks the screen over and there they be -- (the Swiss lake-dwellers always used a curtain) -- what I'm wishing to convey is that if you've had this Experience it just might give you some sympathy with a novelist obliged to deal with the fog and stuff in this chapter -- ( won 't even have time for Mam Estelle ) -- when it would be so much simpler and safer to trot along with the nice swift-paced action story you thought, dear soul, you were going to get for sure this time-what a pitv -- T he ferry-house stood gray and old, the pier worn with traffic (yet no one else was coming now) and green in its sheltered parts with water-weed and mold. The furled sail of the ferry dripped condensing fog. But a cheerful lamp was visible through the inshore window of the ferry-house. The Manager could be seen sopping up a lunch of fried egg with a piece of bread, wiping a gray mustache. His name appeared on a sign above the door: (Washinton Slep here) R.C. Noah, Mgr. Mr. Noah flung wide the door before they could enter, a gray titan dwarfing Bosco's mass and Demetrios' height. Brand cringed as Demetrios had never yet seen him do, recovering his courage swiftly but making no overtures of friendship though Mr. Noah was beaming after his grim fashion. "So wha'd'y' want?" He was just a big, rude, noisy old man in a gray loincloth, with egg smears on his mustache. "We're traveling west," said Angus. "When's your next trip?" "Any time. I don't run no Goddamn timetable. What's nice people like you want to go west for?" "I came from there," said Demetrios. "That's no reason. Nothing now except wilderness, after Penn." "We don't like it where we are," said Bosco. "See? By the way, Mister, you seen or heard anything of an outfit called Gammo's Ramblers?" "No." "We're separate," said the woman with the bird-cage. "Here, take it while I get out the change." But she had to shake her husband's arm to get his attention. "I say take the cage while I get out the change." "Needn't to be in no such rush, ma'am," said Mr. Noah. "We ain't gosemplacing no place till I been to the John and back." "Disgusting fellow!" But she said that under her breath, and after Mr. Noah had ducked back into his diminutive ferry-house. "He ain't so long on politeness, it's a fact," said Bosco. "All's I done was ask a fair question." Solitaire too had shown a flare of anger, but at the touch of Angus' arm around her she relaxed, looking up at him in a haze of confidence. Bosco added: "Y' know, I ain't sure I could take that guy." Frankie laughed. Demetrios said: "Don't try, man." Frankie ceased laughing and moved nearer to Garth, who was at that moment the calmest of the Company. Mr. Noah returned and strode down the narrow wharf, blocking access to his miserable boat by standing there with an open palm. The stranger woman moved in ahead, glaring at Angus though he had already stepped back for her. She placed a dime in Mr. Noah's hand. "We only got half of your outrageous fare. Supposed to be a nickel." "For half I can take you half-way across," said Mr. Noah. "I never heard such nonsense!" "Or I'll take the bird in pay for the other half. Nice little bird like that would brighten up the joint." "Well -- all right. Give him the cage." Her husband smiled on gently into the fog. "I say give him the cage." She snatched it from him herself and gave it to Mr. Noah, who lifted away the cloth. The bird cocked an eye at Mr. Noah and tenderly sang. "There!" said Mr. Noah. "There now!" He was still admiring his acquisition when Angus paid, but was attentive enough to notice the eight dimes. He gave one back. "Won't charge the dog nothing. He kills a rat or two it'll more'n pay his fare." Demetrios saw a red-gray slickmoving shape scuttle under a thwart as the stranger couple stumbled forward in the boat looking for the driest place to sit. "Be he a good ratter? The rats is awful lately." "Oh, lie's death on rats," said Angus. "By God I could do with a good ratter around the place." "I could never sell him." "Didn't much think you would. He can still ride for free." They got no more conversation from Mr. Noah. He spread the soggy sail, pushed off, took the tiller, and whistled up a breeze -- well, it had actually begun to. blow, and favorably, about five minutes before he whistled, thinning out the fog into lazy-floating ghosts and spirits of sadness that made way for the advancing sail above gray water -- F or there was always plenty of ham in Mr. Noah, otherwise the Delaware Crossing Corporation could hardly have kept him in that job as long as they have, and H he chose to make it appear that a a minor shift of surface meteorological conditions came about in response to his whistle, his personal egg-eating will,  suppose he can he allowed that little vanity ; especially since  am almost done with this part of the book, the fog part. On the whole you ve been very  patient, veiy nice. Thank you. B rand did kill that rat, and the golden bird did sing -- vigorously, after the sun came through enough to show evergreens and willows on the approaching bank. A great river, though not the widest; the shore the travelers had left behind was not visible when they disembarked, but that was because of the fog lingering over there, evidently characteristic of this part of the world. The Company watched Mr. Noah reentering that fog-bank; Demetrios thought he heard the golden bird still singing. Beyond the landing the OldTime road continued, in better repair. No more fog. Every branch, every little stone and weed was washed in the clean warmth of afternoon. At the first cross-road the stranger woman said: "We go this way." She tugged at her husband's arm. He nodded diffidently to Demetrios; they were gone. The Company had moved on a quarter of a mile, each heart following its own course in solitude, when Solitaire stopped in her tracks, eyes dilated. She had been walking with Angus, lovingly though without touching him. She swung about and ran back down the road a short way, and hurled her oaken stick savagely in the direction the stranger couple had taken. "Fools! Idiots!" She tried to shout more, but it strangled on the weeping in her throat. Demetrios reached her first and held her lightly; sometimes in her rages she had torn her clothes, raked her arms with her nails. He felt her shrink, and again when Angus took her hands, but she made no effort to break free. "What if the bird dies?" "I suppose," said Angus, "some would say he was their bird." "He was. But he sang for Solitaire. He sang for Frankie." "Solitaire -- " "What do you mean? Who is Solitaire? O Demetrios, Demetrios, what if Solitaire lost her madness? What could Solitaire do without her madness? There wasn't any gang-rape, Demetrios. Why -- why, she just strayed from Brakabin, got lost, the stupid thing, all the way from Brakabin because her stupid fucking mother told her to walk the stupid fucking dog, she would have had to go past the house where my -- my -- the house where my -- " She watched her tight hands relax as Angus rubbed them. He said: "The bird was singing when the ferryman sailed with him." She nodded and smiled, brilliantly, rationally. But memory closed the door that some passion had briefly blown open. That was all the Company ever did learn of whatever world had made Solitaire whatever she was. Frankie recovered the oak branch and she accepted it. "O Brains of the Outfits," she said, "we start learning letters at the next halt, and it won't be easy." "So what's easy?" "That's my friend. Now Solitaire wants music." As they walked on she swung her stick in rhythm with the old man's, having linked arms with Demetrios as a free and independent spirit, and the Professor fell in behind them plinking a sassy march. Frankie darted in before them as a drum major, beating on the tin dish from his sack with his pewter spoon, and caroling ancient and venerable words in response to the Professor's tune: "Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parlez-vous? Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parlez-vous -- She's hard to curry above the knees But falls on her back with the greatest of ease. Hinky-dinky, parlez-vous!" (Some verses have survived that even Frankie didn't know.) Garth whistled and sang a bit himself. Angus blasted away at a glassblade set between his thumbs. Bosco pounded his chest and slapped his thighs, now and then going boom! for a bass drum, and Brand frisked about in astonished admiration, making dog noises off pitch. Thus it was that the Company came down in fine though informal style on the peaceable, prosperous, somewhat conservative Penn town of Trottersville. The Old-Time road had petered out; through the trees could be seen a better, modern dirt road, with reasonable hoof-prints, sandalmarks, wagon tracks. As Mademoiselle brought them out on this they saw, quite near, rooftops on lower ground, pasture fences, a church spire catching sunlight. Demetrios described for Angus the spectacle of men and dogs driving a herd of shoats down to the village, on the other side of town where a low hill lifted the road. Trottersville was a pigs and chickens town. A rooster crowed. Bosco smiled. Trottersville, as everyone knows, was founded ages ago by a family named Trotter (or Trotters), but the only statue on the green is that of a pig, done in one of the late #th Century styles to look like an eggbeater except from the south. The inscription in the pedestal reads filled with putty and painted, so maybe it shouldn't be discussed, though it does keep showing through. From the south The Little Hog looks more like a pair of scissors upside down. Every weathervane in town is a gilded cock. The Company made for the inn, Angus confident of the value of his Katskil money. The hostel displayed a sign of a boar's head, and carried medieval tradition further by placing an evergreen branch to project from the doorway and tell had here. Angus' money was good indeed, the loft was available with room for everyone including Brand, and the drinks were drinkable. Best of all, Sawyer Finn's Circus was in town. R eaders of this column may have been led to believe that, due to my preoccupation with the growing edge of sf, I lack reverence for the hard core, the "pure" science fiction which derives from the pure sciences. If so, I can understand it, but must assert that my philosophic posture in the matter is only one facet of my wayof-thinking about all things. The growing edge is a life manifestation, dynamic and changing, as is common to all living things. The established, the conventional, is subject only to refinement, and refinements of refinements, an activity suitable to the keepers of monuments and the polishers of tombs. To my mind, this is the province of technologists and engineers, not of science and scientists. "Science" derives from the Latin scientia, which means knowledge. The seekers of knowledge come first, the devisers follow. Intuition (a species of creativity) precedes theory, theory plus reason produces hypothesis, hypothesis plus experiment produces hardware. Sf which is obsessed by hardware often extrapolates into the future by refining refinements, which is most gratifying to those who admire human ingenuity, who are, for example, awestruck by the legend of the American watchmaker who sent the "world's finest hairspring" to Geneva for the amazement of the Swiss, who sent it back by return mail with five hundred holes drilled in it. Nevertheless, the extrapolation of hardware into the future makes it easy to commit the error of a # artist who drew a city scene of that distant year #. Among towering skyscrapers not unlike contemporary ones, he had powered aircraft moving. The aircraft were blimps, the power-train, ending in quite creditable propellors, began with a tethered horse galloping on a treadmill. The word for that is (along with 'ingenious' and 'logical' and, considering the artist's difficulties, 'credible' and 'admirable') "quaint." So too is much of the celebrated sf of sf s most golden years; so too is much of the hard-core sf being written today. Sf people -- the very best writers, editors, and the top-level readers -- long ago ceased to live in biographical time (the era in which "I" was born) and in historical time, but operate with geological and astronomical and cosmological perspectives. Such perspectives, though they may honor the cuckooclock ingenuity of the perpetrators, instantly wince at the presence of knobs, dials, and wiring in farfuture devices. Reaction engines offend them, as do certain concepts of royalty and commercial profit extended into the far future. Such sf people do not know precisely what will replace these things, but they have enough grasp of evolution in all its aspects (including its ability to progress unevenly from time to time) to know intuitively that they are as quaint as a horse on a Hying treadmill. Yet the monuments stand, and should be reverenced. If it were not for those who have gone before, the discovery that a stone can be thrown to kill something edible beyond arm's reach may have been made as recently as my father's time, and I might never know of it except that I had seen him do it. The same discovery may have been made twelve hundred times over twelve hundred generations, and might need to be discovered yet again a thousand times, were it not for my forebears and their ability to preserve knowledge and devise ways to transmit it. However tall we may be, our feet are on the shoulders of our predecessors, and it takes an especially disgusting kind of fool to pride himself on his altitude as if it were his alone. Therefore I view the reappearance of old hard-core, and the appearance of new hard-core, through a filter colored more with ancestor-worship than with mere nostalgia. My own personal debt to the old-timers of sf can hardly be assessed, and I am most pleased to acknowledge it. W hat brings this up is the appearance of two huge volumes Before the Golden Age (Doubleday, # pp, #) subtitled "A Science Fiction Anthology of the #s", edited and with autobiographical introductions by Isaac Asimov, and The Mote in God's Eve (Simon and Schuster, #) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a brand-new novel. Before the Golden Age is uniquely and delightfully Asimov. Primarily, if I may override the good Doctor's astonishing (but, I hasten to add, utterly justified) ability to illuminate himself like a public building (and believe me, friends, there is no energy shortage that can darken those arcs) -- primarily, then, the book is a muchwanted aggregate of the long-remembered, mostly long-lost masterpieces of ragged-pulp sf which fired up so many of the writers who, in their turn, gave their gold to the Golden Age of John Campbell's Astounding. How many who read these words recall the stirring of their blood, that special shimmering of the mind brought to them by Edmond Hamilton, Clifford W. Simak, Donald Wandrei? Remember Raymond Z. Gallun, Charles R. Tanner and the early John W. Campbell, Jr.? These and other of the great old giants (many of whom, by the way, are writing today) are represented here to rekindle the old sense of wonder in those who knew them when, and to show latecomers where it all came from. The big book is stitched together by interpolations of the almost eidetic Asimov's biographical recollections. He remembers, and shares the memory vividly and touchingly -- and at times hilariously -- where he was, who he was, what he was doing and thinking and feeling as he encountered each of these # fine old stories. One can only be grateful. If you can't spring for the price -- even though it's worth every penny -- agitate your local library to put it in. And now for The Mote in God's Eve. Let me say at the outset that I recommend it heartily as one of the most engrossing tales I have encountered in years. Anything this size runs the risk, purely by its capacity, of carrying more flaws than a slighter work, and it carries them all right. But the overall pace of the book, the sheer solid story of it, excuses everything. What fascinates me, what makes the book so well worth writing about, is that the skilled and knowledgeable Messrs. Niven and Pournelle know about the Haws, and in the course of the narrative excuse them all -- all but one, that is, and that one is up to the reader's credence. This is a First Contact story, and fully measures up to one of John Campbell's most seminal -- and most difficult -- challenges: write me a story about something that can think as well as a human, but not like a human. This they have done, and beautifully. Their "Moties" are as unusual an e-t as anything ever done in the field. I am not going to spoil your surprise at discovering their most outstanding physical uniqueness, but the rationale for it is clear and compelling. All the hard science is good -- the astronomy, the physics, the mathematical infrastructure. About the sociology I cannot be quite as accepting, and it is in the area of biology, so important to the sociological situation, that I cavil the most -- and it is on a biological factor that the social and political and military situations absolutely pivot. I must ask the question: in a species so knowledgeable about its own terrible history and the causes of its terror, and at the same time so adept in the biological sciences -- especially genetic engineering -- why could they not have found a solution to their dreadful problem? The authors simply say they could not; and on that fact hangs the whole complex structure of the book. You believe this or you don't. Even if you don't, you are going for quite a ride. So you see that the old, or Old Wave, or traditional sf is not dead. It can be resurrected and it can be re-done, and when these things happen, it can be deeply enjoyed. Let notice be served, then, that a predeliction for the growing edge does not in itself downgrade the importance of past majesties. To point out who it is that polishes the monuments is not at all the same thing as saying they should not be polished. H ere I commit something I have never done before: recommend a book I have not yet finished reading. If I finish reading it now I'll jeopardize my deadline. It's D.G. Compton's The Unsleeping Eve, which so far seems to be the very finest thing this remarkable writer ( Chronocules , The Steel Crocodile, Synthajoy, and Farewell Earth's Bliss) has done to date. I promise a full report in my next, but you mustn't wait a month, or a minute, to get into this beautifully #. U njustly briefs: Due to a change in publishers. Orbit # (Putnam's, # pp., #) and Orbit # (Harper  Row, # pp., #) arrived on this desk close together. All originals by writers old and new, they are Best Buys whenever they appear. The Damon Knight name on them is like the "Sterling" on silver... Future Without Future, by Jacques Sternberg (Seabury Press, # pp., #. Translated by Frank Zero) is worth buying for a single long novelette, Fin de Siecle, which not only predicts horrors far surpassing anything Orwell ever thought of, but is cognizant of the probability of some now-unknown technology which can -- will -- affect the entire wood's original and scarifying antho Future City is now in paperback, (Pocket Books, .#) and worthy of a place on your keep-it shelf, with its bonus: a short afterword by Fred Pohl which is almost poetic, almost hurtfully insightful... Norman Spinrad has compiled a beautifully balanced anthology "to provide the reader unfamiliar with science fiction an orientation in the field" and it does indeed, as well as being a treasurebox in its own right. Structured in three parts. The Golden Age, The Post-war Awakening, and The Full Flowering, its #I stories and careful bibliography make it a Best Buy. It's called simply Modern Science Fiction (Doubleday Anchor, #)... Do not by any means miss Patron of the Arts by who will be, very much to his own astonishment, I think, one of the big ones. To do that he doesn't have to get much better than this. I'll have more to say about this book in my next, if I possibly can... Also by then I'll have received the rest of the 'year's best' books (which I have studiously never reviewed before) and will give you some odd insights on them... The sprightly, zany and sometimes own collection ( Alien Horizons, Pocket Books, .#) -- # stories from his wide spectrum of markets, from Fantastic Universe to Playboy... and take note of two real curiosa: two non-sf books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Oakdale Affair and The Return of the Mucker. Oh he do writp badly. Oh he do snatch you up and whiz you along!     galaxy stars    "communicator," a science interpreter for the layman. In various planetaria he has held posts such as Curator of Astronomy and Space Science; Director of Public Programming; and recently, Coordinator of Public Affairs and Special Events at the American Museum-Hayden Planetarium He is the creator and director of the "Voyage Seminars" -- cruiseconferences at sea. The first, "Voyage Beyond Apollo," incuded offshore viewing of the night-launch of Apollo #. In January of this year the two-week "Voyage of the Comet" provided optimum viewing of the elusive Kohoutek. Dick held the post of Science AdApollo Program and worked closely with Walter Cronkite from #-#. He also worked with Arthur Clarke on a TV film based on Mr. Clarke's book, "Promise of Space." As Project Scientist he arranged for experiments conducted by Sheila Scott on herEquatorto-Equator Across-the-Pole flight in #I . Also in #I he co-fathered "the plaque" -- Man's first interstellar message, en route out of the solar system aboard Pioneer #. Dick is unmarried and lives presently in Norwalk, Conn. Asked if he has any hobbies, Dick says, "Only changing the world." Pressed further, he replies that he enjoys music (he was once a professional singer, recorded on Columbia Records), flying, sailing, and considers himself to be "a pretty good painter." Dick has also recently been named Science Editor for Worlds of IF. i nEE what's on TV, Norman." Ij Jean settled in her chair with a pile of flowered fabric on her lap and the old button box. Norman obediently went to the console, fiddled with dials. A troupe of hyperactive blue people in some sort of native costume appeared on the screen. He adjusted the color. "That's fine." There was a silence filled only by the swirring sound of balalaika. Norman leafed through the program guide. "Hey! There's an interview with Habib on Channel #." "Norman, Momma's enjoying the dancing. Aren't you. Momma?" The old lady sitting straight up in the easy chair smiled bravely. "Never mind about me, dear, I'll get along somehow," she said, smoothing the patterned material of her dress. "It's those Russian dancers," Jean stage-whispered unnecessarily. "Won't they do as well as that Arab, dear?" Norman said, "Okay, okay," and tried to achieve something approaching equilibrium in the rocking chair. He reorganized himself several times, then got up and went to the kitchen for a can of beer. "Want some, anybody?" he offered . "No, thanks," said Jean. "Don't forget Momma's ginger ale," she called after him. Norman fetched the ginger ale with the requisite two ice cubes, which naturally meant getting out the ice tray, running water on it to loosen the cubes, replacing it in the freezer compartment, opening the bottle with the sealed screw-top which invariably cut his finger; nursing his wound he sat down again. He looked wistfully through the TV program guide. He thought, "Well, the paper will report the interview tomorrow if he says anything important... Goddamn it, why can't she watch her own TV set? When she moved in it was all 'I won't be any trouble' and 'I'll stay in my own little room upstairs and not bother you, you'll hardly know I'm here'... We bought her the set so we could have ours to ourselves... I wonder if she ever turns it on... I'd feel funny to go and turn on her set uninvited. If I ask there'll be a scene... Come to think of it, did we ever invite her to look at ours every night? She just -- arrived... Oh, well, I suppose she needs company... Somehow we don't seem to go up to visit her much... Hell, we don't need to. She's always here." He drew at his beer. Momma pursed her lips. The battle of "Norman's drinking" had been joined but never fought; Momma knew exactly when not to press an issue. She merely stopped whatever she was doing and Listened to the beer being poured. Jean, catching Momma's eye, announced hastily, "Momma, it's eleven o'clock. Shall I see you up to bed?" "When you're as decrepit as I am you have to keep busy or you can't "Now, Momma, it's getting late." '"There's nothing left for me but my family. I just have to depend on you, dear. And Norman." Jean rose and helped her to the staircase. "Momma, we're not going anyplace. Goodnight now." "I have nothing to look forward to, that's all." Momma's voice dwindled off. Norman was standing, politely. "Good night, Momma." He dashed to the TV and pushed the button for Channel #; too late, of course. He sighed and switched to a newscast; there might be a recap. If Habib had agreed to come to the White House, the Arab oil bloc's complacent monopoly might yet be broken. "Honey, turn it down a little." Jean picked up the pile of sewing. "Are you making something?" "Just buttons on Momma's dress." "Oh." The newscast reported nothing on the Middle East; the war in Malaysia was, as usual, bloody. Some scientists had announced a new development in memory cells. He didn't catch it. "There seems to be more news in automation," he said. Jean looked up. "Anything wrong at work, dear?" "No, no. Just wondering in general. Might affect us, from what little I heard... Unemployment's up again." "So they'll step up the war. They always do." "Mmm." Jean put aside the dress. "I'm sorry you missed the interview," she said. "But..." "I understand," said Norman. "I'm still understanding, so far." She smiled at him tiredly and carried her things toward the door. "Bedtime?" "I'll be along." He wanted another beer. at the office there was a rumor that the business was either going to fold -- or convert. Norman's job didn't bring him close to management; he shrugged. Engineering had been the field of the future; here was the future and he often suspected it was beyond him. The computers for which he had been trained had been obsolete before he'd finished his degree. Now they were talking about the sixth stage, colloids no less. It sounded as if you'd have to have a biology degree to be an engineer next. On the way home he stopped at a bar. What had he to look forward to at home, anyway? He couldn't even hold hands with his wife until after I I o'clock. "Rye and ginger, please." Transistors he understood. He might as well be into vacuum tubes. Microsynchs had taken him two years on the job to master; and now this. "Just what is it the damn things can do now that they couldn't do before?" said a bellicose voice behind him. "They judge," was the reply. Was the whole damned office in this bar? "Make decisions. Complicated decisions. Like whether or not to fire a man." "Oh, God." A chair scraped the floor. "It was bad enough when we had psychologists all over the place. It was bad enough when we all got understood. It was bad enough when half the business spoke dialects that the rest of us couldn't understand. I tell you the union won't stand for this." "It won't matter. By the time they've got the kinks out nobody will need union men. The Black Box will be running us all, buddy, men are too damned expensive. All they'll need will be designers and rock singers. We'll be getting plastic imitation gold-leaf doohickeys on our car doors..." Norman finished his drink. He wondered glumly how long it would take for this apparently universally widespread information to sift through the company to him. The typists probably knew already, they always did. He'd really be in the soup if he were fired. He wondered if they would do him the courtesy of a personal interview after eleven years, or if it would just be the blue paycheck instead of the yellow... they'd all be in the soup. He found himself visualizing breaking the news to Momma with intense, perverse delight. "You're very late, aren't you?" Jean was surrounded by pieces of paper, writing busily. "I'll just finish this month's statement and get you some dinner. We ate hours ago." "Isn't that Momma's checkbook? Can't she do that herself?" Jean laughed. "She hasn't been able to add since she flunked second grade. Poor dear, there's not enough in the account to risk mixing up the decimal places, till her dividend checks come in." "Hmph." He really ought to have liberated a desk calculator when he had the chance, he thought. Probably wouldn't ever have another opportunity. There was a stomping at the door. "Hello, Momma, how was the bridge club?" "When you're as decrepit as I am you have to keep busy or you can't her umbrella over the hall rug. "What's the matter? Did you lose or something?" "Sometimes I think you don't care if I'm here or if I'm dead," said Momma, tossing her raincoat inaccurately at the coatraek. "Well, I won't be around much longer." "Are you going someplace?" He wondered if his bank account could bear another Florida vacation. He had managed to make the last one appear to have come out of Momma's own account "to save her feelings", but this time, with everything so uncertain... Momma sank reproachfully into the armchair. "Here's your checkbook. Momma." Jean collected the papers and put them away. She turned on the TV. Norman wandered around, bored with Doctor Kildare. The women were glued to, their seats. The fifteenth handsome young man to have essayed that part in its long history smiled bravely as he pulled on his rubber gloves. "Jean, I want to go for a walk." "Okay, dear." she replied, not taking her eyes off the screen. "It's cleared up outside." Norman looked at her hopefully; would she offer to join him? It obviously hadn't occurred to her. Oh, well. "Uh... I won't be long." Jean waved absently. N ext morning each of the desks bore a sealed memo. There was a subdued kerfuffle as the envelopes were torn open. Row after row of heads looked up and around, the few smiles vanishing as the smilers took in the stricken expressions on the faces of their colleagues. Nobody spoke. The union men rose in a body and left the bull pen. Norman had been chosen. He would be retained. He would not be joining the Great Obsolesced -- not yet. The union men... what use was it to strike if you weren't needed? For the next six weeks classes would be held daily. In any case there was going to be a lag in orders while the customers waited to see what the new development would offer. He was right about the biology. This molecular data storage system search. The capacity of the colloid was astronomically greater than that of transistors, and geometrically greater than that of microsynchs. The programming would require no coding -- the colloids could easily accommodate a vocabulary in any number of languages. Once the black boxes had been told what to do, no further programming would be required. And he, Norman, was allocated a special code number for access to the Big C, the central computer which served not only his company, but all the U.S. Government offices as well. Security clearance, secret phone numbers, private telephone hookup to the Big C itself. He was on top of the world. It must be a sign; his luck had turned. He had been chosen and now he would see what he was made of. He tried to explain it to Jean. She didn't really seem to take it aboard. But in his euphoria he felt he could cope with anything. And the training was fascinating... "I'm so glad you're enjoying it, dear," she said. "I wish you had more to enjoy," he said generously expansive. "You're always doing some damn thing for Momma." "Well, she's my mother after all. Besides, where else could she go?" Norman sighed. Unanswerable. He did try to be kind. But his mind had become sensitized to repetitiveness. You only had to tell the black box once, and thereafter it would do or say the same thing over and over, or cause the same operation to be performed. While Labor was screaming its head off about human dignity, it was daily demonstrated that that particular quality was industrially unnecessary. He listened with new ears to the evening's conversation. "Don't you want any cutlets, Momma? I tried a new recipe." "You young people just don't understand the distress I'm having with mv bowels." "Did you take your medicine today?" "You just don't understand the distress I'm having." "Gee, I'm sorry, Momma. I made it special, no onions or anything." "There's nothing left for me but my family. I have to depend on you for everything, dear. And Norman." "Well, would you like some milk?" "Oh, never mind about me. I'll get along somehow." Norman got the milk. "I just don't seem to have any appetite." Jean placed a bowl of custard in front of Momma. "How was the office, dear?" "Pretty good. I may have to do some traveling soon. I might even be transferred. There aren't many of us who know how to handle these things. Did I tell you..." A plaintive "Why does everything have to happen to me?" interrupted him. "But Momma," said Jean. "Nothing is happening to you. It's happening to Norman, and he only said maybe." "There's nothing left for me but my family," said Momma tearfully. "I have to depend on you for everything, dear. And Norman." The baleful look accompanying this speech penetrated Norman's concentration. "Why, she doesn't like me either!" he thought. He had assumed that her gratitude, though ill-expressed, was real. Jean said, "Well, we're right here. Momma." "I don't think you really care if I'm here or if I'm dead. Well, I won't be around much longer." "Oh, Momma, don't talk like that." "I have nothing to look forward to, that's all." "Where might you go, Nor?  i He replied absently, "Oh, I don't know yet. Possibly California, maybe only Delaware. Depends." "When you are as decrepit as I am you have to keep busy with "I'll play cards with you later. Momma." Jean cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher. Norman remained in the dining room, his notebook open. He glanced at his mother-in-law. A bright eye stared around the handkerchief, instantly resuming its pathos as he looked up. Jean came in, opened a deck of cards, dealt. Norman unfolded the evening paper. Habib was coming after all; the headlines were "oil editorial was eloquent on the subject of warm winters. He wondered if he might catch a glimpse of the Arab's car on Constitution Avenue. They needed oil now, not next year when the Alaskan pipeline might be finished. The silence was punctuated by sniffs. "It's not as if I were any trouble to you. I stay in my little room upstairs and don't bother you at all." Jean sighed gently. "Your deal, Momma." Later, in their bedroom, he said, "Jean, there'll be a banquet affair at the end of this course. Full dress and all. Want to go?" "What about Momma?" "Oh, for God's sake, she's only sixty-five and perfectly healthy." "I know, but I'd worry. And besides, we'd never hear the end of it." Norman muttered, "She sure has it made, the old -- " Louder, "You plan to come along and we'll get someone in." "I'd like that." "I'll tell her tomorrow." He felt pretty good. It's amazing what a little self confidence will do for a man, he thought. All this time I've been afraid... Carefully, he explained that someone would be in to keep her company. Carefully, he pointed out that Jean hadn't had a night out for months. Nevertheless... "I don't think you care if I'm here or if I'm dead. Well, I won't be around much longer... there's nothing left for me but my family. I have to depend on you for everything, dear. And Norman. Oh, why does everything have to happen to me?" Norman said, slowly and carefully and very clearly, "We are going out, Momma. On the tenth of October. Four weeks from Friday. Period." He opened the paper with a snap. Jean offered milk, custard and cards to no avail. Momma stomped off upstairs for the first time that Norman could remember. He smiled in silent triumph. His eye lit on an elaborate advertisement. He stared at it for a long, long time. Of course he sent for the brochure. Apparently this company had seized on the colloids before anyone else and, playing on the yearning of a democratic people for servants, had incorporated it into lifelike dolls programmed to tend babies, buttle, clean, wait on tables. Nannies were complicated; they had to respond to visual cues, make decisions as to whether feeding or changing was wanted, do highly controlled lifting. These of course really needed only the most minimal form, but mothers would never accept raw machinery as babysitters; hence the Nannie. The price was colossal. Norman sent for one on approval. He enclosed several photographs of Momma. When the package arrived -- at the office -- he unpacked it in private during lunch hour. It was as advertised; a perfect replica of his mother-in-law. They had even captured the malicious glitter of her black eyes. He wondered why he hesitated to show it to Jean; it would be an ideal companion for Momma on the upcoming, and god Nothing pleased Momma more than Momma; she ought to be delighted. But he did not take it home. Instead he opened the sealed mechanism, thus committing himself to interminable payments, and removed its voice-response spool. On the way home he bought a taperecorder. This he did show Jean. And Momma. After the usual "Oh, I don't want to..." and "Do I sound like thing..." and the false starts, affected voices and all the fussing, at least he was able to leave it on for an evening without anybody caring. The usual conversational arabesques resumed their normal course. "Do you want some meat, Momma?" "You young people just can't understand the distress I'm having with my bowels. I just don't seem to have any appetite." "Would you like some pudding?" "Never mind about me. I'll get along somehow." Norman listened, and recorded. In the office he fiddled with the tape recorder and the voice-response spools, and managed to get all ten of Momma's lines of dialogue on the spool in random order. He put them on several times, varying the sequence, enough to play for three-hour intervals. It was just like having Momma at the office. For some reason this amused him. He made the doll walk around, carried on long conversations with it in which he bombarded it with all his stored-up answers, arranged it to take in a certain amount of food -- which of course would have to be emptied when no one was looking. Mostly it just sat and whined its lines. He still didn't take it home. One night Jean was dressed in her hat and coat when he came in. "Oh, Norman, Mrs. Judd is having the baby, Mr. Judd is out of town and she can't get anybody to mind the kids. I have to go help out. Can you cope with Momma? Just tonight?" Sure that his new strength was up to an evening with his motherin-law Norman assured her that all would be well. "I'll do dinner and all," he promised. "Don't worry." "I may not get back till morning," Jean warned him. "God knows when Mr. J. will get home." "Don't worry. Go do your good deed," said Norman. "Dinner's in the oven, anyway," she said and dashed distracted out into the evening. "Well, Momma," said Norman cheerfully. "We're on our own, eh?" "It's not as if I were any trouble to you," she said flatly. "I stay in my little room and don't bother you at all." "How about a little supper?" He carefully removed the casserole. "I just don't seem to have any appetite." "You are gracious, aren't you?" said Norman. "There's nothing left for me but my family. I have to depend on you, dear, for everything." The evening wore on and on. He found himself less patient than he had expected. Even the reminiscence of all the backtalk he was giving the doll was of less sustenance than he had hoped. He found his control slipping badly. "When you are as decrepit as I am you have to keep busy or you "Busy at what?" roared Norman. "You don't do a damn thing, you let Jean wait on you all the time, and as for decrepit there's not a thing wrong with you." Shocked, Momma opened her mouth. She suddenly seemed to recollect that Jean was absent, and cried, "Oh, why does everything have to happen to me?" "And nothing happens to you at all. You have happened to us and happened to us and happened to us, and you are just about ruining any life we might have had..." But she had flounced off up to her room. Just in time, thought Norman. I might have... I might have... he sat down to think about what he might have. Jean called in the morning. She would be home in time to see to Momma. Mr. Judd had arrived. Norman went to work with a good deal on his mind. He hoped Jean wouldn't have to go out again. But three days later, on the third of October, Mrs. Judd was still in the hospital, Mr. Judd fell and broke his leg, and the kids couldn't get a train for Grandma's until late the next morning. Jean packed her overnight bag and swooped off. This time, Norman came home with his large package. "Momma, I'd like you to meet somebody," he called from the bedroom, after a while. Momma came in and shrieked. Norman watched with satisfaction as she took in the details of the doll. It must be like looking into a mirror. He remembered that the mirror reverses the face; perhaps it was even more disconcerting to see one's image straight. Or would it be the same?... Except that the doll did not echo Momma's gestures of dismay. "Why does everything have to happen to me?" said the doll. Momma toppled over in a faint. Alas, it was, it transpired, a fatal attack. Norman was nonplused. He had not expected quite so -- final a reaction. He went downstairs to think it over. He would have to call the doctor, the police, the undertakers; he would have to explain. They would find the doll. They would think him mad. He'd better have a drink; it might help to clear his mind. He poured a good stiff whisky and sat down in the easy chair. It wasn't as if he were about to grieve; this would be a relief. Momma was going to leave them everything, wasn't she? Jean had said there wasn't much, but at least she would stop costing so much. But nothing would matter if they took him away... Perhaps another drink. His mind seemed to be going in circles... Upstairs there were two Mommas... He topped up his glass. After a while it didn't seem so bad. Nobody could fault his intentions, could they? Jean would... oops. He hadn't told her about the robot. She would naturally be upset about her mother. She would ask him how come he had brought it home the night she was out. By the time the bottle was half empty, he had acquired the courage to go, perhaps not exactly walking, back upstairs. The doll was still sitting in the chair where he had left it. "You young people just don't understand the distress I'm having with my bowels." On the floor lay... yes. He looked at it for some time deep in thought. If he could get rid of that, Jean would never know. He could leave the doll in Momma's place. Would she know? He had never heard what they said to each other during the day... He reached for the thing on the floor. His eyes said it was nearer than it seemed to be. He knelt down and groped. Cold. I must have been drink -- I mean thinking a long time, he thought. He stared at the body again. What can one do with a body? If, that is, one does not want to call attention to it. He wished he had read more detective stories. He understood that this form of literature was filled with ingenious methods of disposal. He supposed bitterly that there wouldn't even be one in the house. Trust Momma to be uncooperative, even to her taste in reading. Mad scientists had bubbling vats of acid handily about, he recalled. Perhaps he was a mad scientist, but unfortunately he was not properly equipped. He shook his head sadly. All his life they had not appreciated him; now at this crucial moment he didn't even have any vats of acid. Regretfully he abandoned this line of reasoning. He could dismember the thing with an axe and put it in a public sanitation facility, if he had an axe. This suggested journalism; the phrase "apprehended" came to mind. That was what he wanted to avoid. Any further apprehension could be superfluous. Could he bury it in the back yard? He eyed the corpse doubtfully. He thought not. And there were the neighbors... The doll said, "I just don't seem to have any appetite." He stumbled over and switched it off. He had now switched off all the Mommas. That called for a drink. He went downstairs again and saw to it. He made his way uncertainly up the stairs again. A powerful conviction that the difficulties were more amenable to solution downstairs than up here swept over him. He would adjourn the conference to the sitting room. "One step at a time," he said. The ambiguity struck him as exquisitely funny. He pulled the body by the arm and staggered unevenly over the door sill. "Bump-bumpbump, here comes Momma down the stairs..." he murmured. "Sometimes she thinks there's another way to..." Halfway down he stopped. Time for a little think. There wasn't much in that bottle. Depression times, everyone was giving less. Pay for a full fifth, and what do you get? A fourth. No, a sixth. He propped Momma against the wall and sat down on the landing, closing his eyes for a moment. Now, where was he? Oh, yes, getting Momma downstairs. He clambered back up and went into the bedroom. Yes, there she was. Slightly haunted by a nagging sense of deja-vu. he picked her up, threw her limply over his shoulder, and reeling from wall to wall of the corfidot achieved the staircase. He negotiated the top step, tripped, and Momma tumbled off his lurching shoulder and rolled to the landing. Norman blinked. He seemed to be involved with a sea of Mommas. One, two, three... no more whisky for him tonight. There was one old lady sitting placidly against the wall and another old lady... or were there two? sitting placidly against the banisters... It all came back to him. Of course, the doll. He picked his way down to the two lay figures, clinging to the railing. "Well, Ladies, we must get on." There was no response. How like them. "Come, come," he said, very courteously. "Do shake a leg. We are all going downstairs now and have a little drink." Reclining indolently, the Mommas ignored him. He seized the one on the left by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. "Come on" he said, standing her up; but as soon as he let go she slithered to the floor again. The other one did the same. He lay them side by side along the edges of the steps, feet pointing downwards. One by one he pulled them by their little black-shod feet. Eventually he got them propped up side by side on the sofa. Wiping his dewy forehead on his sleeve, he rooted about in the cabinet and finally unearthed a small bottle of brandy. He offered first one and then the other the glass, to which neither paid the slightest attention. He was hurt. "After all this trouble," he said reproachfully, "the least you could do is join me in a snifter." Weil, since they refused to be sociable, he would have all the more. He lit a cigarette and thought the matter over... One of these is a corpse and the other a very expensive robot. One of them has fallen down the stairs. If it was the corpse it hardly matters. If it was the doll, it may have been damaged. Then it cannot be returned even if I replaced its original voice spools, and no matter what I will have to pay for it. Therefore I had better check the doll and see... My, how logically the brain worked when encouraged. He took a minute off for a silent tribute to the wonder of human consciousness. "But there is a time for thinking and time for doing. First we must establish which of you is the real Mrs. Frebish." He rolled up his damp shirtsleeves, drew sustaining smoke into his lungs, and opened, the dress of the Momma on his right. Memories of happier occasions upon which he had opened the dresses of ladies seated on this very sofa flitted through his mind. Ah, those had been the days... when mother-inlaw jokes were still funny... Back to business. Under the armpit he located the spring that opened the body cavity wherein he had passed so many entertaining hours with screwdriver and pliers. Yes. This one was the doll. The other was therefore the -- er -- Problem. You wouldn't think it would be difficult to dispose of so small an object, would you. His mind was a desert of planlessness. He paced. He lit another cigarette. He had another drop of the brandy, hoping for a recurrence of that moment of lucidity that had visited him so long ago. As an answer to prayer, it came. He was a privileged employee with security clearance, wasn't he? He had a private telephone connection to the Big C, didn't he? He even had an emergency override code, and this was for damn sure an emergency. The Big C, crammed to the gills with all the information in the world, would save him; he loped to the hall phone. Fifteen digits to be dialed very carefully. Thank god he knew them by heart, the first twelve were his social security number. Lots of room for a slip in the last three, though... but there was the signal. He spoke the word that would compel the thing to speak English. Then -- "Hello there." "Good eve-ning, sir." "Er... is it?" said Norman, momentarily shaken by the pleasant baritone, which sounded like somebody. "The temp-er-a-ture is #, humid-it-y # , wind vel-oc-it-y #..." Norman cut off this delightful weather report in midspate. "Thanks." "Not at all." The thing had better manners than anyone at the office. Briefly Norman wondered who had recorded its responses... No. But that Harvard accent... "I wonder if you can help me." "What is the na-ture of your prob-lem?" "I seem to have this body." "It is a com-mon phe-nom-enon." "I mean somebody else's." "Do you mean you have transferred your con-scious-ness in-to anoth-er bod-y than your own?" "No, no!" Where would a computer get a notion like that? "I mean a dead body." "The cus-tom-ar-y pro-ced-ure is to call the po-lice and the med-i-cal ex-am-in-er for your count-y." "Yes, but I'd rather not. For reasons I don't care to discuss. How can I get rid of it?" The smooth, courteous voice ceased momentarily. Had it no answer? Oh, god, it would be recording this chat as it recorded everything. He must be sure to erase it, and that it was irretrievably gone. "There is a cus-tom of bur-i-al." "Wont do." "Al-ter-na-tive-ly man-y per-sons opt for cre-ma-tion." Norman thought rapidly. The incinerator? The neighbors again. The furnace was oil-tired and had an opening about six inches square. Set the house afire? Every feeling revolted. "How?" "You could con-suit the cre-mator-i-um." "No, no, they would bring in the police and all that. Try again!" "Do you have an o-ven?" The implications made his blood run cold. He took a largish gulp from the glass he seemed to be holding. This discussion was becoming entirely too macabre. "Never mind," he said, and hung up. He started toward what he took to be the sitting room door. Erasing! He had forgotten to cancel the recording! Hastily, he dialed again. This time there was a different voice. "Yeah?" "#-#-#-#-# Cancel program recorded from # hours through, um, #," said Norman clearly. "#-#-#-#-# Cancel program recorded between # hours and #," he said very slowly and distinctly. "Whaddaya some kyna nut?" said the voice, slamming down the receiver. Sweating, he tried again. This time he did get the pleasant baritone. The Big C acknowledged the erasure, and thereafter emitted only silence when he asked for a replay. Feeling rather pleased with remembering to cover his tracks, he started again for the living room. His feet were behaving oddly; the left kept heading toward the kitchen, while the right appeared to desire nothing more than a hasty exit from the front door. It took considerable sustained effort to get them both pointed in the right direction. When he had negotiated the carpet he raised his eyes from his recalcitrant extremities. The two Mommas were still there. One, two. Between them on the central cushion of the sofa there had appeared a Hole. Norman rubbed his eyes. It was still there. Growing. "I don't remember that," he said. He drew nearer and peered at it. Something was eating the cushion from the inside. The Hole grew deeper as he stared, the edges of the shiny upholstery turning brown and crisp. Whatever it was was hungry. His cigarette! He had dropped it somewhere when he went to the phone. Fascinated, he sat down on the coffee table and refilled his glass. The Hole went on growing. The cushion was now merely a rim, like a square tire. A very small thread of smoke had appeared. "I am having a Fire," he thought foggily. There was something one ought to do when having a Fire... what was it? He looked around the room, hoping for a clue. Ah! The shades on the windows were up! The neighbors would see that he was on fire. He would have to take steps about that; he stumbled to the window and pulled down the blind. That would take care of them. Solemnly he drank a toast to the strangeness of Life, and then poured the little remaining in his glass into the Hole. Pretty blue flames leapt out of it. Lovely. Oh, yes, water, not alcohol. He needed the alcohol more than it did. He bore his empty glass unsteadily to the kitchen, allowing his kitchenoriented foot its head. He turned on the tap and meditatively filled the glass, rinsing it carefully. Balancing it with the utmost attention he wandered back to the sofa. Yes, it was certainly still burning. He poured the water in. It hissed. Very satisfactory. First visuals, now sound effects. Perhaps it would speak again. He went back to the kitchen. Another brandy-glassful followed the first. Terrific! And the Hole stopped expanding. He put his hand into it. Something bit him. More water... After the fifth libation he felt satisfied that his Fire was out. He could now pull up the blinds. And get back to his Problem. He contemplated the Mommas. Fortunately he had left the chest plate open on the robot. It was the other one, then... Wisps of smoke seemed to be everywhere. Surely he had not lit another cigarette? He thought, deeply. A glimmering of light hovered on the outer edge of awareness... yes. It appeared that the garments of the Problem had too closely proximated the Hole. Perhaps the cremation question would solve itself without his intervention. Perhaps if he went to sleep now, the whole evening would turn out to be a bad dream. In the morning it would be all right. The more he thought about that the better he liked it. He pulled the shades again, just in case. There wasn't much left in the brandy bottle. He might as well finish it up, first. He put some in the glass and some unintentionally on the table, and sat down to watch. It would be a shame not to know how the dream came out. Maybe he had better pour some more water on it. He looked around for the glass. He'd had it a minute ago. Oh. Brandy in it now. Well, that was easily solved. He emptied it and went to fetch some water. Then he sat comfortably on the coffee table and lit a cigarette. It was really becoming quite crepuscular. Little promontories of emptiness edged with red light flickered over the clothing of the Problem. At the back of his mind there was something lurking that he refused to recognize. It had something to do with the oven, and there was a horror that would come of this... a smell. There would be a smell. There was a smell. Burning hair? Nylon? Very nasty; he didn't want to think about whatever was coming next... he fought back the intrusive, unidentifiable anticipation... There definitely was a smell. Like the handle of a saucepan left too long on the stove, like the old bathroom cup that had fallen into the incinerator... He dashed the cold water over the shimmering, smoke-shrouded figure. He stumbled to the kitchen, filled a bowl and threw it at the thing. Something had given way. The chest cavity of the Problem had sprung open, revealing a familiar pattern of wiring, microsynchs and black boxery. He backed off, muttering. He seized the empty brandy bottle and upended it in his mouth. Suddenly he was cold sober. The two robodolls, one rather damaged, stared at him over their opened chests. "I have such distress in my bowels," said a familiar voice. "I think I've gone mad," said Norman conversationally, to himself. Then, "this is one lousy dream." He prodded the undamaged doll tentatively. "It's not as if I were any trouble to you," it said. "When you are as decrepit as I am you have to keep busy with said the scorched one, with a travesty of a smile on its mutilated face. It closed its chest and rose to its feet. "I just don't seem to have any appetite," said the other, closing its chest and rising to its feet. The hair on Norman's neck bristled. He backed away. How did you turn them off? He had turned them off -- hadn't he? He couldn't remember... Side by side the dolls began moving toward him. "I don't think sometimes you care if I'm here or if I'm dead..." "Well, I won't be around much longer . , ." Bright-eyed, the Mommas marched sedately after him as he tied. The light tap-tapping of little old ladies' shoes persisted, up the stairs, along the corridor... he locked the bedroom door and pushed a chair under it. Where had it come from? How His head was hammering. "Why does everything have to happen to me?" fluted the voices in chorus, outside the bedroom door. "I have nothing to look forward to, that's all." "You know I'll leave you everything." The sound of cackling laughter had recorded no laughter on that tape... the handle of the door turned, resisted and suddenly spun loosely. The door scraped open. Duralloy framework; Synthasteel muscles; mere flesh and blood far too weak to oppose such strength. They tripped in unison over the doorsill, the door drooping on broken hinges; laced black shoes marching over the roses of the carpet, each step bringing them nearer to the corner where Norman cowered against the wall, sobbing with terror. "There's nothing left for me but my family..." "I have to depend on you for everything, dear..." whined the tapes. Everything went black.    T he quality of the darkness gradually changed. He was probably dead. Dragging his consciousness partly back from the hole into which it had escaped, he became aware that the darkness was actual. He wasn't dead. Very slowly and in mortal panic he felt himself for injuries. He was in bed. naked... No, not naked. Something had been fastened on him with safety pins. Safety pins?... Nannies. He had changed the voices; he hadn't meddled with the actions. He had cried and they had changed him and put him to bed. He began to laugh, and laugh, and laugh...    When a rather shaken Jean came to visit him at St. Elizabeth's, he stared at her wildly, and said only, "Go away. I don't know you. Don't tell me what you are, I don't want to know." She couldn't even interest him in the big news, although she left the newspaper with the headlines "oil On the evening of the third of October, the White House had at last completed its delicate negotiations with the Arab, and ceremoniously recorded it with the Big C. Half-an-hour later, the entire agreement had vanished from the computer as if it had never been. According to the Big C. nothing at all had been registered between # and # hours, and Habib, deeply offended, had flatly refused to discuss the matter any further. His private aircraft was last reported heading toward Tokyo. The technicians were baffled. It was going to be a long cold winter.  G ene roddenberry once told a group of us assembled for breakfast at New York's Explorers' Club, "Television's sole reason for existence is to sell something, anything!" And this writer, several years later, told another group, this time fiction writers, and social scientists gathered for an Information Interactions Conference, "As of now in the United States, about # of everybody gets about # of everything (information) through television!" Combining these two assessments of the largest mass medium in the history of Man, one arrives at the inescapable conclusion that to be the Delphic oracle to so many, television must have stumbled upon some magic formula. And it has. It is called, by those in the trade, the nator. And just what, pray tell, do # spectable prime-time audience) have in common, one with the other? My answer to this probably cannot be printed upon these august pages, but I'll give you a hint. Mr. Whipple occasionally succumbs to temptation over it. It is not my purpose here to assail television programming, its banality, its superfluity, or its constant interruptions by "a word from our sponsor." That has been accomplished elsewhere and by critics better qualified, at least in the area of "mainstream television." My objective is to wield an electron beam or two and direct them at a little recognized subtlety of broadcast communication and entertainment: Television, science fiction, and reality. In the context of this magazine, Reality I interpret to mean anything having to do with science, technology, and future-cum-present. That's where television is most interesting -- and most dangerous! Television as a medium is quite unlike any other invented for the communication of information or misinformation. Unlike books or even radio, little imagination is required to be totally convinced of a given reality presented over "the tube." And, unlike movies which require a conscious effort to partake of (at least a trip to the theatre), TV is an omnipresent commodity, so universal that its very ubiquity is taken for granted. Television IS -- in almost every livingroom, bar, train station, airport, university commons, or location where there is human traffic. It is a universal eye upon the world, an ever present commentator upon all that is living or unfolding. If it isn't on television, it doesn't exist. It is Life reduced to a #-inch screen (measured diagonally, of course), and conveniently placed Everywhere. It used to be a favorite pet peeve of mine (alongside my pet peregrine) that educators would speak glowingly of the educational value of National Educational Television. Their idea of "educational" television was to take one bona fide ex pert and place before one expensive-looking blue curtain. Add a blackboard and, perhaps, a pointer to complete the concept (theirs and, obviously, the producer's) of how to educate with a television set. The fact that it produced deadlydull television programming and set back the idea of television as an educational adjunct by about twenty years seems to have escaped their attention. Out of this inept beginning to the use of TV as an educational device, had to be dull or it wasn't educating! It wasn't until the beginning of the Nixon Administration and the advent of a rather innovative new perspective, voiced by a national leader in education publicly proclaimed what many people had privately long been aware of: Any television educates -- noneducational TV (then) best of all -- by providing a simulated reality which allows the viewer to identify, roleplay, and absorb. Mr. Finch compared the six hours of enforced boredom spent in many a classroom to the nine hours spent daily before and after school, and came to the inescapable conclusion that children today are learning far more about the world through the random portrayal of TV than through the structured environment of formal education. What he did not add, however, was the fact that, on the average, adults watch far more television than their children! What are they learning? And, equally important, who's teaching them? In a broad survey of the world's religions, one finds a fascinating variety of names for the Creator: Jehovah, The Supreme Being, God, Allah, Tao, etc. Arthur Clarke once collected a significant number of these in a horrifying little work God. A group of monks (it seems) in an obscure monastery set high in the Himalayas (where else?) hire the services of an electronic computer to aid in the tabulation of all the known forms of address for the Deity. They succeeded, and in so doing, encountered a most unexpected eventuality. For those who haven't read this piece, I won't divulge the ending except to say that I don't think it would have worked. For nowhere, either in Clarke's enumeration or that of the monks did I see the word Producer. And without it, the monks' (and Arthur's) lists cannot be complete. P roducers are the gods of television. Nothing gets written, photographed, scripted, cast, shot, or aired without the expressed approval of these obscure but suproducer, in my presence, once beat a telephone to death because an operations-man cut thirty seconds on the clock and removed our program from the air prematurely. Another producer, out of a personal belief that living on the Moon was an impossibility, refused to air a guest whose technical authority and national standing would have given weight to the opposite perspective: If gods are regarded as whimsical, arrogant, biased and, in the end, all-powerful Invisibilities, then television Producers stand fill the description. Talk about power! In what other profession can one man's (or woman's) concept of Reality beother human beings? In what other profession can an entire Universe be controlled, from set to actors, from dialog to direction, and presenting through a medium tailormade to convey the feeling of reality to so many -- and from the safety (or sanctity?) of such anonymity! Quick -- name the Producers of five of the leading prime-time network shows this evening. Now, name the Executive Producers! Not even the President of the United States has such power. A few years ago, John Campbell voiced a slight amendment to the familiar saw, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." John argued that it isn't so much power that leads to corruption as it is immunity. A powerful individual whose very existence is unrecognized by all but a few is, by John's definition, corrupt. It was apparently a situation present in the White House and it is a situation present today in the never-never land of Television. Having laid this background, it is now time to examine some specific examples of the synergistic effect of television omniscience, producer omnipotence, and public ignorance. A few years ago, in an article dealing with science education in America, a science writer remarked that deliberate science instruction of the general public a la educational TV was a dismal failure. "On the other hand," he maintained, "give me a good writer, the cooperation of the producer of the trip by that national phenomenon to Brookhaven or Oak Ridge, and about nuclear physics in one week than ' Discovery ' has in ten years!" I don't recall the Beverly Hill(thank God) even an observatory. But, if they had, I am sure the script would have come out something like this: granny: Jed, woudja lookit thet water heater! Kin ye imagine choppin' enough wood fer that on a Saturday night?" jed: Granny, thet ain't no water heater. The feller in the white coat... granny: You mean the funny doctor-feller with his prunes? jed: Yeah, that's the one. He says thet ain't no water heater atall. Thet's an "accel-er-ator"... jethro: . Aw, Jed, he must be a foolin'. They cain't be no accelerator. jed: And why not? jethro: 'Cause he says it shoots prunes, thet's why. And besides, where'd they ever git a truck big enough fer an accelerator like thet? You get the idea. The problem, of course, is that if in a nuclear research laboratory, amid the huge coils of a proton accelerator, the last thing on the producer's mind would have been the enlightenment of the viewing audience as to the workings, purpose, or excitement of high-energy physics. It is even probable that the "acceleration of prunes" would have been taken quite seriously as a hilarious coincidence to be capitalized upon, but certainly not explained. "But," I can hear you object, show even remotely connected with science or technology. Of course, it wouldn't have given an accurate portrayal of life in a national research institution. That is not its purpose. It is supposed to entertain, not educate!" Alas -- my point, precisely. What my fictitious visit by Granny, Jed, et al. could have done for the image of serious science in one show, has been done, quite inadvertently, to everything from the city government of Beverly Hills to the arcane art of banking itself. The point is going to destroy the credibility of these institutions...Ample public contact is available to provide feedback to counter that TV image (something, incidentally, which would be lacking in a show laid at Oak Ridge). The point is that television, especially through entertainment, shapes our total vision of society at a level so subliminal that most of us aren't even aware of it. Try driving through "beautiful downtown Burbank" without smiling the next time you're in Southern California! Naturally, I am not really concerned by such obvious satire as the television shows, particularly those with an integral scientific or technical foundation, which I believe we should examine. It is here, within the framework of a synthetic reality that I believe permanent damage to our society is being done. It is in this artificial Universe, created by the Word of the Producer, at whose Right Hand sitteth the Science Consultant (sometimes), that I believe the public is losing its ability, feeble as it has always been, to tell the real from the unreal, the possible from the impossible, and the present from the future. We have entered the realm of Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic." And Producers are the magicians. In a civilization in which most participants have only the most distant awareness of science, while, at the same time, science has almost totally prescribed their lives, the blurring of public reality when it comes to science or technology is not merely annoying; it is frightening. Our society is basically divided by its schooling, into two cultures, according to Toynbee -- the Sciences and the Humanities. The latter far outnumber the former, incidentally, in case you didn't suspect. It is from the latter that most of the socalled "intelligent" television viewers are drawn. It is also from this Humanities category that the overwhelming number of television producers springs. This division, which begins in High School and rapidly becomes more pronounced in college, affects all who pursue any degree of higher education. It means that, at the top, society is split perhaps #-# against any real ability to evaluate scientific authenticity on television. But that's only the beginning. This top level is only about half of all television viewers, even in #. These citizens, with only a passing exposure to science (mostly in the form of a general science class) have virtually no foundation upon which to base a judgment of technical surroundings, props, or premises of television entertainment. And it is in this vast sea of ignorance that the developing tsunami of television science fiction is building. Producers have discovered, at last, the source of an infinity of plots -- the Universe. Heaven help us. The following is, of necessity, incomplete. It is not in any particular order, nor is it catalogued according to network. All are equally guilty, although I keep rememberRoddenberry got a turndown for Startrek with the line, "We already have a science-fiction series, very similar, really. Called Lost in Space or something, I believe." It is merely a beginning. Over ten years ago, I was introduced to the term "Cyborg" by a Spacemobile (remember those?) teacher as we were being led on a contractors. What made me quite curious was the fact that, after apparently letting slip the fact that such a thing, my guide refused to discuss the subject further. Needless to say, upon my return to the museum where I was a curator, I called a few people in Washington and dug out the complete story. For those at my level of ignorance, a "Cyborg" is verbal shorthand for cybernetic organism. there might be some environments which, in the future, it might want to explore where Man in his present form would be unfitted for on-site inspection. The solution, according the human brain with sufficient technology to carry that brain personally into any such environment, be it the Moon's surface or deep into the Jovian atmosphere. Thus the "Cyborg." It was a very touchy subject. The spectre of "Frankenstein" lurks in the wings (thanks to that other set of gods, movie directors. But that's another article.) If the public, in the days when we were terrified had gotten hold of the idea that moving the brain of a man and placing it within a machine... Now, it is # (when the show begins) and, wonder of wonders, been a few changes, some good (thank our lucky stars) and some not so good. Enter "Steve Austin" astronaut and cyborg. our hero is called, starts every show as a normal astronaut, veteran of a lunar mission (remember those?) and now pilot of an experimental reentry vehicle. So far, so good. In fact, too good. Remember those overwhelming numbers of TV watchers whose closest approach to science was a chapter on "Central Heating and Air Conditioning" in high school? They know we've sent men to the Moon (Walter told them so) and they know, now, that we're not sending men to the moon any work flying other things, right? Therefore, as Steve Austin gets into trouble, turns his flying bathtub upside down and tumbles across the screen (again, with pecting audience falls gently over the cliff between today and tomorrow as (off-camera, over quick cuts of an operating theatre and various pieces of sensational hardware -- an arm, a leg, etc.), we hear a voice suspiciously like that of Steve's future boss, Oscar Golman, intone authoritatively, "We have the technology. We can rebuild him... Better than before..." Cue music wind-up. Cut to Austin lifting a couple of tons, outrunning the Streamliner and, in general, looking very much as he did before. Freeze image over color diffraction pattern. Fade to first commercial. Why am I disturbed? Because Steve Austin is impossible. Now. And for many years to come. You know that, and I know faithfully tune in every Friday night to see him put together just to knock over another building or derail another locomotive do not know that. It is irrelevant that the stories for this series seem to be rejects from Hertz rent-a-plot. The heart of the matter is technology. Consider: Hundreds of thousands of veterans and an equal number of children live in the United States who are desperately in need of a breakthrough in prosthetics. People wanting to lead useful, productive lives and unable to because of the state-of-the-art that is too primitive to be anything but a clumsy imitation of nature -- and is too expensive even so. Research in this and virtually every other area of science has all but passed from the private into the public domain, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. If it is not government research, directly supported by the tax dollars of # funded through public campaigns, such as the March of Dimes. Consider the problem generated by Steve Austin's existence every week on network television, to a doctor working on advanced prosthetics. As he appeals to the public for increased monies to continue work in this urgently needed area of technology, he is confronted by a popular wisdom which sincerely believes that what he is attempting to accomplish already exists! They see it every Friday night. On television. To the more skeptical viewer, the evidence that Steve Austin's one bionic arm, two bionic legs, and one bionic eye (infrared, twenty-toone zoom!) actually exist can be inself has consistently tried to justify its own existence partially on its "fallout" of advanced technology in other areas of human need. It is common knowledge that "atomic" batteries exist -- why, (for the really astute) they're even powering that thing which just passed Jupiter, or something. Artificial arms and legs? Hell, you know what happens loose on a problem. After all, he is would certainly take care of its own, now wouldn't it? Thus, through clever cloaking of the show's basic premise in the imdifficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer"), we are left with a misapprehension: the military-industrial complex has developed a technology, with taxpayers' money, vitally needed by so many thousands and yet, apparently, unavailable to any save a select few' . Fantastic? Improbable? So was a flight to the moon. And Watergate. And they took place on television, too. ut let us go on. One of my favorite examples of this telecasting of Clarke's Third Law' began with an offbeat creation called The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (followed, predictably, by The Girl From U.N. C.L.E. ) U.N.C.L.E. was an acronym standing for The United Network Command for Law Enforcement, a passable addition to Interpol , Smersch, etc., at the height of the Bond era. The setting was contemporary -- "Somewhere." Somewhere in New York, Somewhere in London, Somewhere in the Arabian degood guys, saving the world from (The Russians?). Week after week saw Napoleon Solo, hero with an unflappable air of cool detachment and Ilya Kuriakin, blond, Russian, and excitable, matching wits and hardware with the other side and winning. It was not the wits that worried me (or the lines, many of which were quite funny), but that hardware! It was the beginning of my foreboding over television's discovery of science fiction, although Asimov's term "future fiction" would perhaps be more appropriate. In fact, one of the major reasons for my misgivings then -- and now -- was the implied "present" (not future and, certainly, not science fiction). TV Guide, that bible of the channel switchers, always carefully labels these and other efforts which I will mention, as "adventure." Science fiction? Certainly not! U.N.C.L.E.'s problem came down to one thing: communications. Each week, amid a flurry of exotic weapons (dart guns, I'll buy) and damnably noisy infrared sniperscopes (after all, if it doesn't w hine, how're you going to know it isn't a normal telescopic sight?), Napoleon and Ilya chatted back and forth, sometimes separated by whole continents, in dungeons, in airplanes, in submarines and -- and -- in the middle of the Greenland icesheet, halfway around the world! And they never had battery problems. Not once, between Napoleon's romantic escapades, Ilya's propensity for getting into trouble, and Mr. Waverley's attempts to underheadquarters back in New York over those incredible communicators was it ever explained how they worked. And in a city where a phone call across town was equivalent to electronic Russian roulette (sor-r-ry, the number you have reached will not exist until tomorrow...), viewers began to wonder why this great invention, certainly far superior to anything the phone company was peddling, was being suppressed. They are still wondering. vision seemed to recede from the spectre of futurepresent hanky panky and delved headlong into rewriting the technological history of a different era -- the Past. A name totally unsung in the pages of the growth of the United States (considering how many inventions he whipped up in the nick of time to foil an equal number of malevolent plots to do us in, aided by equally ingenious technology) is that of Artemus Gordon, secret agent extraordinair. The name of the show may have been Wild Wild West, but the real star was the technological razzle-dazzle dreamed up each week by Artie to get West out of one impossible situation after another. This constant rewrite of history would have been too much for one lone science writer to stand, had it not, eventually, been for a pure stroke of genius on the part of someone (anyone but the Producer, that is). In one of the later episodes, the indefatigable Dr. Lovelace, evil genius that he is, discovers a way into another dimension via a series of especially prepared works of art. Only at the end of the show are we show n that this alternate dimension is in actuality a series of alternate times. It then becomes obvious w here Artie and the enemies of the young United States are getting their miraculous post-#'s technology -- from the future; perhaps, even, from television itself! By now television had discovered that spies, girls, gimmicks, and gall would stand even odds in beating the opposition in the frenetic ratings race. E nter and sign in, please, Hugh O'Brian. This show, premiered initially as Movies, was called, as a pilot, fully refrain from the overwhelming temptation to term both titles apt description of a program looking for a reason to exist. Of all the miscarriages of technical mayhem, I think Search (or Probe) was my favorite. For one thing, the sets reminded me of good I and a few dozen other television people got all the Apollo guys safely to and from the Moon. For another, Search had as a very visible star a somewhat crusty character played by Burgess Meredith who, for all the world, reminded me of someone I had known or worked with... Then it hit me. The anonymous had become visible. Ego will out! Meredith -- argumentative, demanding, didactic, and often unreasonable ("I don't care if you're hanging off a cliff, give me a scan of that beach, Murdoch, Search's Producer, whipping his team into line, driving toward an objective which would shower him with glory, sometimes at the expense of his team, not to mention that poor guy hanging over the cliff. Meredith reminded me remarkably of my old producer. All that was missing was the cigar. The premise was simple. Probe Control, a sort of cross between its services to investigate thefts or protect property from attempted theft by dispatching one or more Probe agents to the scene. Each Probe agent, through a simple surgical operation, was fitted with an implant, a device permitting verbal communication back to Probe Control. So far, it all sounds like an plete with the new model communicator worn inside the ear this year instead of concealed in your pen. But Probe (or Search) was only beginning. Search (or Probe) had beat the bandwidth problem. In addition to the implant, each Probe agent carried with him (or her; but I can't seem to recall ever seeing a "her" Probe agent...) a classy little device cleverly called by the lab boys a "scanner." A combination color television camera, infrared sensor (video), and vital signs detector (blood pressure, electrocardiagram, and Alpha, Beta, and Gamma wave sensor), this handy little gadget managed to transmit all this information back to Probe Control, yet was small enough to be worn as a ring when it wasn't being worn as a pendant. Incidentally, since the majority of Probe fugitives were jewel thieves, the first thing to go whenever someone captured a Probe agent was (you guessed it), the scanner -- that unobtrusive #carat bauble our hero was wearing inconspicuously. This development always seemed to put a severe crimp in the eventempered Mr. Meredith who, pacing back and forth between the red-lit consoles of the Mission Control-like set, would alternately reprimand the rest of the Probe team (which spent most of the show eavesdropping on our hero's romantic efforts via -- you guessed it -- the scanner) and our hero for getting the damn' thing stolen, again. Hugh O'Brian as Probe agent Murdoch was forever getting into trouble as any good Probe agent was supposed to. Only, instead of letting Probe Control, via its computers, predictions, and interpretation of data, scanner-relayed, tell him what to do, Murdoch would often as not go off on his own. Having decided that a particular Probe Control instruction was idiotic, Murdoch would take off the scanner (a device somehow capable of beaming back to Control through solid rock, from the other side of the world, and in color), place it in his pocket and promptly cut off all signal from it and him until he chose to take it out again! An eighth of an inch of breast pocket material capable of doing what # miles and several gigatons of granite were incapable of doing... All those weeks while our attention was on that scanner, it should have been on O'Brian's suit! That stuff would have made a great reactor-shield! Again, nowhere was a mention made of how this hardware did what it did, although you got antenna on Ascension Island, implying, I guess, that satellites were somehow involved. I could go on. Oh, could I go on! But I believe you get the drift. Each of these shows, in its own right, could be very exciting, funny, and even educational. And that is my cans, totally unsophisticated in the trap of Clarke's Third Law, the intricate gadgets, technical tomfoolery, and foundation of superscience have been taken at face value. The line between the capability of our technology today and its promises for tomorrow is in the process of being irrevocably blurred. It is all too easy to envision a scenario in the not-too-distant future, when some dedicated genius Finally succeeds in perfecting the incredibly complex technical achievement of matter transmission. The announcement, made on the evening news, is greeted by hoots and catcalls from the inventor's unseen audience. They have, after all, seen this before -- on Star Trek. Another thought: the other day I was idly thinking about when all our greatest re-runs would hit the Far East markets -- Hong Kong, Japan, Viet Nam, India, etc. -- when a funny coincidence struck me. The re-runs of SearchProbe started in Hong Kong just about the time of Henry's first check-in at the Peking-Hilton. What do you suppose "Clarke's Third Law" looks like in Chinese...?  F or my sins I have (or will have by the time this is published) just finished a year as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Now that's a great honor, and one I appreciate, but it's also a lot of work. Unlike many writers' a staff of professional organization operators. It's run by working writers, which is probably why it's as effective as many larger and better-financed associations. It's also why it burns up its officers. One of the tasks of the President is to organize the annual Nebula Awards Ceremony. As part of Nebula Day we have a big program, and this year I managed to inveigle a number of scientists and astronauts to come talk to us. It seemed like a good idea at the time: get men who had been to the Moon to talk about "what it's like out there"; get important scientists to talk about "where do we go from here?" and have science fiction writers as the audience. It worked, but I didn't get to hear much of the program. I was too busy keeping it running. Consequently, this isn't a convention report. although I'll confess I'd hoped to get this month's column as a fallout of Nebula Day. I did notice one thing, though: the scientists were gloomier than the science fiction writers. Col. Alfred Worden, Command Module Pilot of Apollo # and an active duty astronaut loaned to us by own, about the end of Apollo. Dr. Harrison Brown, whose Challenge of Man's Vast Future has influenced me for # years, of the developing world -- and how unlikely we are to solve them. Even Bruce Murray, Cal Tech's man in charge of the imaging experiments for the MarinerVenusMercury probe, had some downbeat notes in his talk. The theme was "where do we go from here?", but there were times when it sounded a little like "Is there anywhere we can get from here?" I may exaggerate, but not a lot . The last key-note speaker was Robert Heinlein: and away went the gloom. Man will survive. Here, elsewhere; in this galaxy or another, on this planet or another or on no planet at all, we're going to be around a long time. Mr. Heinlein has been writing that message for # years, of course; and he hasn't changed it. All very well, but why are science fiction writers more hopeful than scientists? And have we any right to lie hopeful?    Rick up any popular science magazine and you'll see marvels, not only in the articles, but in the advertisements. Things science fiction writers didn't dare put into stories taking place before the turn of the century are now for sale at prices we can afford. An endless stream of marvels, mostly available to the common man (at least the Western common man) pours out of technology's cornucopia. But, some say, it can't last: we'll run out of energy. Yet there are many ways we can eliminate fossil fuels and still have all the non-polluting energy we'll ever need. They only lake money and determination to have them. I've discussed a few before, but it's worth reciting the list again: Geothermal power Power from warm water in the Tropics Solar screens on Earth Solar screens in space with transmission of power to Earth Windmills Fission Fusion. Of these, my favorite is the spacebased system. Large solar screens intercept sunlight that would have fallen on Earth to begin with. We turn that light into electricity. There are several ways to do this. One is direct conversion with solar panels. There are increasingly more complex ways up to and including intercepting the light with aluminized mylar mirrors, focusing it onto sodium reservoirs, and using hot sodium to boil water for conventional turbines in orbit. We get the power down to Earth as micro-waves. I've seen designs for receiving antennae which run several miles on a side. They're a grid of wire mesh with holes about a meter square, held up three or four meters from the ground. The energy flux is low enough that cattle can graze under the antenna. The elegant part about this system is that we've added no total energy to the Earth; we've merely had it arrive in a more useful form. We can even balance the total energy received: since our system is not # efficient, we intercept a calculated amount of sunlight that would not have reached the Earth, enough to counter the energy we intercepted but didn't send down. A solar screen orbital energy system would be a big project but of no greater magnitude than, say, covering North America with freeways. For local situations we might also need fission or fusion plants, and some of the other alternatives such as warm water Tropical power plants; the point is, we have the technological capability to generate all the non-polluting power we want. That's one revolution; let's look at another.    As one event of Nebula Day, Cal l ech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory loaned us Dan Alderson, an astronomerprogrammer who has been mentioned before in this column. He brought along his Big Brain, the distant planets and unscrambles the signals sent to Earth by the spacecraft. It's quite a brain. It's also indicative of one of the most fantastic stories of the decade. Back in #, Mariner # transmitted twenty-one pictures at a rate of # bitssecond. A bit is, as most of you know, a two-valued signal: either a one or a zero. To send a picture you break it into dots, and there's either dark or light at the dot. Each dot is a bit; it look a long time for Mariner to send back each photo. Mariner #  # would have an improved capability: # bitssecond. This wasn't good enough for the llew with a "communications exDeri men t" capable of transmitting back data at # thousand bitssecond. The "experiment" worked, and that was the normal transmission mode. It could be risked because on-board computers were good enough to let the spacecraft controllers back on Earth switch from the "experimental" mode to the regular #second rate if necessary. That's where Mariner # was when it orbited Mars: # bits second. Mariner #, the VenusMercury probe, got zero funds for equipment development; it had to go for the same price as the last one. But again Cal Tech and the others weren't happy, and played around with the system within the fixed price budget they were given. They succeeded in a normal mode of # thousand bitssecond -- and an augmented rate of #. The faster rate has worked fine, and as a result Mariner # has sent back from flyby's as many frames of data as Mariner # got in nine months of orbiting Mars. scramble that information. By the way, the signal from the spacecraft is # watts. If you're reading this at night you're probably using a # watt lightbulb. The spacecraft uses ## of that to send # bits through space. Each frame of data contains more information than the human eye can appreciate. The computer (actually, of course, they're merely strings of numbers) to generate several presentations, some of them showing more features than an astronaut without a computer could see at the same distance from the target as the probe. That's the computer Dan AlderNebula Banquet. Of course he didn't actually pack it up into his suitcase and bring it to the Century Plaza, but he might as well have. A couple of ordinary telephone lines to Pasadena, an ordinary TV set, and some black boxes to hook things to the telephone; add an electric typewriter much like the one I'm using now, and we had all disposal. Most of the writers used it to play a Star Trek war-game, of course. The point is, though, that no place on Earth is so remote that all i he information available to Western Civilization (or Eastern, for that matter) can't be made instantly will shortly launch a satellite system lor India that will, for the first time ever, put the central government into communication with the remote villages. Within a very few years the entire world will be linked in one vast global-village network. At the moment the Soviet Union insists on retaining jamming capabilities and spends a lot of money each year to keep outside ideas from penetrating, but that's probably a lost cause. Incidentally, the Soviets insist that no nation has a right to broadcast anything another nation can possibly receive without the prior approval of the recipient nation's government. One suspects that attitude is not going to last. In the #'s I once had a desk calculator, courtesy of the University of Washington (and courtesy of the US Navy which was funding the project we worked on). It was the most expensive and complete desk calculator in the world. About forty undergraduates including myself blinded ourselves for several hours a day multiplying numbers with those beasts. We were doing something unique in history: inverting a # by # matrix. We had to invert the matrix to get the equations for predicting grades. It worked, incidentally: we did invert the matrices, and the Grade Prediction program does predict grades. You crank in certain inputs such as high school grades and test results, and out come predictions of your four-year average given that you elect any one of about # majors. That's right: a different prediction for each major, and the blasted things are pretty accurate, or were when I was there. The prediction can be upset by determination and hard work, or by the discovery of wild night-life and the game of bridge, but by and large if the prediction said you'd flunk out majoring in math, you'd better find another major. In the #'s an aerospace outfit provided me with another desk calculator. This marvel clanked and clattered, but it was very fast, and had several memory cells as well as automatic square root and other goodies. The purchasing officer assured me it was the most advanced thing of its kind. The only thing better was a "real computer" which was way beyond my section's budget. As I recall, this thing was about a foot wide and two long, and stood over a foot high. Some of that was the tape printer, but most was the electro-mechanical brain. It cost over a thousand dollars. Yesterday Hewlett-Packard begged me to buy at a recently cut price a pocket-sized machine that will do fifty times what my friendly monster would, and do it fast; or, if I liked, I could invest # or so and get a programmable pocket calculator that will not only deliver logs and exponents and trig functions but also decisions and branching; and it comes with a package of programs and a subscription to a programmer catalog. querque) and for # I can buy two kits: one kit builds a desk calculator similar to the best nonprogrammable Hewlett-Packard, and the other builds a #-step programming kit to attach to it. For # I get something like the "real computer" my purchasing officer couldn't buy nine years ago. I fully expect within a year to buy for under a thousand dollars a desk-sized computer that will equal which rescued us from myopic calculator-punching. The # took about nine hours to invert a big matrix, and had to store intermediate answers on punched cards; the gidgit I'll probably buy won't even have to do that. In less than # years, brainpower has become both physically and economically within the reach of nearly anyone.    Given energy and computing power it's hard to think of any real bottleneck that can't be avoided with rational planning -- and we've the computers to help us do the rational planning. Food? With plentiful energy comes all the food we'll need for a long time. First effect will be fertilizer: it takes nitrogen (well, nitrates) to grow miracle crops, and nitrogen fixing takes energy (or a lot of time to let legumes do it by photosynthesis.) We've known how to fix nitrates for a long time, of course: the first time the Federal Government got in the dam-building business was in order to power a big nitrogen-fixing plant at Muscle Shoals. Of course, the nitrates were to be used for explosives... After a few years of plentiful energy we can dispense with most croplands entirely. Artificial photosynthesis, the actual construction of edibles from air, water, a few chemicals, and energy, isn't very San Francisco last spring there were several very hopeful reports. Building materials? It's true enough that we've used up most of the easily available ores, but we've only started with deep mines. The South Africans are mining at two and three miles down right now. For that matter, why are we so concerned with iron and steel? Aluminum is one of the most plentiful substances on Earth. Magnesium is in plentiful supply. Modern composite materials such as fiberglass and the plastics haven't even begun to be exploited. (Mostly, they can't: building codes haven't caught up to technology.) It takes only energy, and perhaps some complex manufacturing processing, to get building materials. Come to that, it takes only energy and some complex manufacturing processing to put together nearly anything we'd ever want.    We've work ahead to lick the energy shortage, but there are no real technological breakthroughs needed; only economic ones, and perhaps the determination to do it. Even now, we have energy and computation power available to the masses in the US and much of Europe. Very few' science fiction writers of the '#'s dared predict such a world at all -- and I can think of none who could envision such capabilities for #. So. Why are the scientists gloomy? Why is there so much crepe-hanging when, looked at objectively, we have capabilities that as late as # years ago would have been thought impossible before #, if then? That question has to be either stupid or rhetorical, right? What we worry about is endless: we've got the ability to Pasteurize the planet. The streets aren't safe any more. We've lost control of the government. The people who make the basic decisions about our lives are far away from us, and they don't listen, nor will they leave us In other words, suddenly I'm not writing about science any more, but about politics, and I've sworn a mighty oath to keep politics to a minimum in this column. I will suggest that for Americans, at least, we've got more control over our lives than any people ever had throughout history. After all, an Athenian boy could expect to turn out to defend his City every summer from the time he was # until he was #; and in the years when there were no campaigns he could expect to work from dawn to dark getting food, shelter, and clothing. Many people still do. And as to our technological marvels not working very well, I often hear such complaints as: "Why it takes an hour to complete a crosscountry phone call!" "What with traffic jams and tower foulups we couldn't get from New York to Los Angeles in less than nine hours!" And I remember the Good Old Days and just how long it took to fly from Seattle to Huntspatch (Huntsville, Alabama on the map) in a gooney bird, and making appointments for long-distance calls, and perhaps I don't see things the way some younger people do. When you come down to it, many of our complaints stem from so many people being so well off. You can't afford servants nowadays: the servant class can make too much money doing something else (or nothing at all.) Many places formerly reserved to the rich are crowded because everyone can not only get to them, but afford the time to go. And so forth. Leaving politics out, the world is in pretty good shape when the lowest paid members of the working class have marvels available that the wealthiest and most powerful kings of history never dreamed of: rapid transportation, instant communications, computing power, enough light to see by even in the dead of night... The Industrial Revolution, eventually and after setting human freedom back quite a ways at first, eventually gave leisure, shelter, and clothing to the masses. The energy and computer revolutions make it possible to give nearly everyone more actual freedom than anyone ever had before this Century. Is that what scares us? I include in modern freedoms: spectacles to free us from myopia; medical science so we don't have to accept bad teeth, constant nagging backache, consumption (# of my granduncles and aunts died of consumption in the period #-#), ague, rheumatism, etc., all regarded as inevitable even for the wealthy not so long ago; and, for some of us at least freedom from constant worry about feeding our families. If you like you can add: stereo recordings, cheap books, cameras we can afford, etc., and generate a list of marvels that Grandfather would have regarded as magic. I wonder what he'd have done with such things?  It's not nice to fool around with Mother Nature! T im heard the first shock before he felt it. It began like the rumble of a distant train. Then as it grew louder he saw the trees begin to sway and the earth start to shake. He was frightened. L uz had been damn mad when he j had to cancel out on their trip together. She hurled a great string of Spanish curses at him over the phone when he called on Thursday to say that on Saturday the day they'd planned to meet in Portland, he'd be in Anchorage. "But you've done the same thing," he retorted. "Remember that weekend when I had tickets to the jazz festival?" "That was different. It was a medical emergency. They needed me at the hospital! All you're going to do is muck around with some evil underground test." It was an old argument. He was a geologist and she was a doctor. And she could not see how nuclear tests designed to tap pools of natural gas or to harness heat from inside the earth to generate electricity could compare with a cardiac arrest of some kid at the county hospital in Reno where she was on the pediatrics staff. He started to explain to her just how important and humanitarian what he was doing was, how necessary these last minute adjustments would be to the success of the Arctic Energy project, and just what the project would mean to the she wasn't listening. "No," she shouted over the phone. "Shut up. I don't want to hear any more. Do what you damn please. I'll go someplace where I'm wanted. After all it is the only vacation I've had since I started medical school." And she slammed down the receiver. Okay, if that's the way she wants it, he told himself. After all she wasn't the only woman around. He should have known better than get mixed up with a Latin anyway. Spoiled and headstrong, even if she was damn smart. And if that weren't enough, she came from a family of Chilean left-wingers so every other week she was moaning about the current government role in Chile and how the U.S. had helped overthrow Allende and his Commie friends in #. He put down the telephone receiver carefully, resisting the temptation to throw it across the room. He'd been warned, he knew. He had met her right after the rightwing takeover in Chile and she had been carrying on about how her father had supposedly died of a heart attack in that stadium where they'd held everybody. What a fool he'd been! But at the time he'd been touched by her volatile Latin sorrow. So he settled his affairs at his private office, arranged things at the university where he taught parttime, and caught a San FranciscoAnchorage flight. Serve her right if she didn't know where to get in touch with him.  # !     T he first tremor wasn't too bad. A couple of tree limbs came crashing to the ground, but from his window Tim didn't see flames shoot in the air which would have signaled gas-line breaks. After a few seconds the rumbling started again.       T he problem he'd been called in on was tough. Somebody had shown that for optimum effect the underground test ought to be located on an island fifteen miles to the east and five to the south -- so the UN Atomic Testing Supervisory Team authorized a shift in the experiment even though it was only about three weeks before the authorized test date. The Atomic Energy Commission and Arctic Energy, the consortium of companies, had to bring in one hundred fifty highly trained construction workers and electronic technicians -- all with Top Secret clearances -- to make the actual shift. It was going to take them right up to the night before the test date to complete the new installation and hook up all the monitoring equipment. Tim wasn't involved with that of course, but he spent a lot of time wandering around the construction site, thinking about the work he was presented with. The questions were fairly straight forward -- ones about how the blast would affect the adjacent oil field and what variations in air pressure and tides would do to the blast. Tim wondered briefly why they hadn't all been done before the decision to shift the test had been made, but then he got caught up in trying to get adequate computer facilities to solve them. The officials wouldn't let him tie into the Livermore complex or even the University of Alaska computer -- something about security -- so he had to crank them out on the pedition ship carried. He walked around the five square miles of the little scab they called an island, watching the men work and figuring out how to pose his questions so the computer could answer them. It was July, too, and he'd never seen the Arctic summer before, so some of the time he admired the little flowering plants that clung to the rocks, and the birds, and the long, long days. When he got back to Oakland on August #th there was a huge pile of mail on his desk. Reports, letters about his last consulting job on the trans-Atlantic oil pipeline, journals. But as he flipped through the stack a post card showing an incredibly white beach with an unbelievably blue ocean in the background stopped him. He turned it over: "Miss you," it said in Luz's nearly illegible doctor's scrawl. The postmark was San Jose, Costa Rica, where her mother and younger sisters lived now, having fled Chile. He had to smile. She was quite a girl, all right. Bull-headed and hottempered -- definitely not the sort of woman he ought to think about marrying, even on those rare occasions when mortality weighed and the thought of dynasty became seductive. Besides it wouldn't be sensible to become too attached tosomeone whose background and politics were so different. Not that he cared that much about politics -- they bored him -- but Luz did and therein lay the problem. But, well, they really did enjoy each other's company. And other things. He started to call her, but the long distance operator was already there. "Person to person call for Timothy Harvey." It was Luz. "Look, come up this weekend," she said after the preliminaries. "Love to," he said. "I'm feeling horny too." Instead of laughing she sounded angry, frightened. "No, not that. I want to talk to you." H er face broke out in a grin, though, when he loped up the hospital steps, late Friday afternoon. She ran out to greet him, something she'd never done before. Tim surprised himself, too, because when he saw her coming he threw out his arms to catch her, picked her up and whirled her around. When he sat her down he noticed she was blushing. "Sorry, Doctor," he said. "Didn't mean to make a spectacle." "That's okay," she said. "It's good to see you." And then she clung to him a second longer. Yes, there really was something bothering her, he decided as he watched her sit silently beside him in the car as they headed south to a campground on the eastern side of the Sierras. But they had set up camp and eaten dinner before she said anything. The sun had set behind the mountains, which rose abruptly to the west, and the sky was the pale transparent blue of twilight. T here were other people in the campground but the willows of the stream-bottom shielded them. Tim was tending the fire. Luz huddled next to it, shivering and sipping her wine from a metal cup. He reached over to give her a hug. "Hey, you're freezing. Didn't you bring a jacket, Doctor?" She looked up at him as if she didn't see him. "There's a sweatshirt on the back seat if you want it," he added, turning to poke the fire. She stood up and walked slowly over to the car. Just as slowly she opened the door, reached in and pulled out the sweatshirt. She started to pull it on, but when she had pushed her head through she stopped, stood looking at the mountains. Her face looked more solemn than before. "Can you predict earthquakes?" she asked abruptly. "What's the matter, Doc? Afraid the mountains will tumble, Gibraltar will -- er -- fall?" he replied, expecting a grin. "No, be serious for a minute. Can scientists predict earthquakes?" He looked at her carefully. He'd seen her angry fairly often but she rarely looked as she did now. She was one of the least alarmist people he'd ever known. A doctor, for god's sake; trained to handle emergencies. Even if it seemed a stupid question, he couldn't dismiss it if it bothered her so much. "No," he said. "Not with any accuracy. Some guys claim they can tell you there'll be one here during a given three month period or something, but they, aren't very accurate." "Nobody can tell you there'll be a quake of such and such a size tomorrow at # a.m. in such and such a place?" Her black, snapping eyes riveted him. "No," he said. " -- not that I know of." She sat down heavily on a log and stared for a few minutes at the fire. Her silence weighed on him. "Why do you want to know? What's eating you?" he asked. She looked up as if she were surprised he was there. "Oh," she said, coming to her senses. "It's nothing." Then she stopped and considered. "No, damn it. It's more than that." She reached out and touched him on the arm. "Can you keep a secret?" His first thought was to laugh and tell her that his security clearance was higher than hers would ever be, but then he realized that might be just what she was concerned about. "Is it something about Chile?" he asked, without thinking. "Yes," she said softly. "I should have kept quiet. The others would have fits if they knew I was talking to you about earthquakes. She looked at him straight in the eye; "Can I trust you?" Trust: what a word. He had never met another woman he liked as much or fit with so well. But he was what he was, and he had certain responsibilities to -- well, it sounded maudlin, but to his country. And obviously a lot of things Luz believed in blinded her to what was best for his country -- and for the world. "I can, can't I? You won't start..." She watched his face carefully, then her voice trailed off. "Yeah," he said, with sudden decision. "You can trust me. What is it?" He walked up and down in front of the fire while she told him. How she'd met a group of Chileans in Costa Rica who were planning an uprising on Tuesday, August #I at #:# a.m. local time. How the date and hour were picked by Professor Ernesto Mendez, the Chilean geophysicist who now resided in Mexico City; because an earthquake of # on the Richter scale would occur in Santiago at that time. How the uprising had been planned to take advantage of the chaos the quake would bring. How they had a two-year plan to bring democracy and socialism back. And how Luz was leaving on the Sunday flight from San Francisco so she could help. "It's going to be a slaughter if the earthquake doesn't occur but then they'll need me even more because they have hardly any medical personnel at all," she said. "I wanted to know what you thought, though. Just so I'd be prepared." He stopped in front of her. She picked up a stick and threw it in the tire. "I also wanted to say goodbye to you," she said, very softly.  #c   #c  as the second tremor hit, Tim if. heard someone scream and then the pounding of running feet, as the someone tried to get outdoors. That was silly, his benumbed mind told himself. Better to stay inside in a solid structure than get hit by falling cornices and chimneys. But he had a hard time pushing down the panic inside himself. And another part of his mind told him that it probably wouldn't matter where you were because the demons in the earth would get you anyway. T hat night after they had made love in their tents Tim lay wondering if he would have Luz's courage. It was foolish; she was burning all her bridges, walking out like that. He ought to try to talk her out of it. What cause was worth throwing away your life? Besides, the new conservative government had things firmly under control, the newspapers all said. The only thing that kept him from arguing with her was the thought that he would like to be as determined as she. So they spent Saturday and most of Sunday just being. It was fine August mountain-weather, cool in the evening, crisply warm during the day. They hiked most of the day. Saturday, carrying their lunch with them and stopping to eat it and nap by the side of a little lake surrounded by red and silver peaks. Young mountains, like the Andes, Tim caught himself thinking. Evidence of the strain that followed the shoreline of the Pacific from Tierra del Fuergo to the Aleutians, and then around through Japan and beyond. But he forced himself not to think about that, watched Luz curled up on a rock, dozing as if she had not a care in the world. After breakfast Sunday -- eggs and bacon and fried potatoes cooked over the open fire -- they started back to Reno, where they stopped to pick up her suitcase, and then drove on to San Francisco airport. He could think of little to say as they stood waiting for the gate to open. He asked her if she wanted a drink, but she shook her head without speaking and stood looking out at the runway where the jet was being readied for passengers. She would arrive in Santiago early the next morning, after changing planes in Mexico City. "Look," he said while she stood in the line for the anti-hijack search. "Be careful, will you?" He swallowed. "I'd hate to have anything happen to you." She looked up at him and smiled tensely, as if she were afraid she'd start to cry. "Sure," she said. "Don't worry about me." He leaned over and kissed her quickly. " Vayit con Dios," he said, and turned and walked away. He didn't think about the underground test until he woke up the next morning. It was scheduled for Tuesday, too. called in the afternoon to see if Tim had keys to the earth-sciences building at the university. He wanted to watch the seismograph reader there record the shock waves from the underground explosion, but the building was usually locked after midnight, and the blast was sup# novellas by one of the top S-F writers in the world "It seems amazing that a writer as prolific as Silverberg should be getting better and more thoughtful as he goes along, but the three novellas that make up this book prove that to be true. Each takes a fairly far-out theme related to morality... and treats it with great interest, and a kind of scholarly delicacy, and a great deal of creative imagination." -- Publishers Weekly #, now at your bookstore posed to go off shortly before # a.m., he said. Two? Tim wondered. Of course, they'd been talking about a blast time shortly before midnight in Alaska; there was a two-hour time difference. Sure, he'd fix it so they could get in the building, he said, as he doodled with time zones on a sheet of paper. Two in California, midnight in Alaska, and # a.m. in Chile. Six a.m. in Chile! That's when the earthquake was supposed to happen. He stopped. Coincidence again? Suppose... suppose Mendez was right. He had a good reputation. It was just barely possible that he might know something about the faults there that nobody else did. It took Tim about two hours to make all the calculations, and even then it was all strictly back-of-theenvelope. But it certainly appeared that the harmonics of the shock waves from the underground test would be placed precisely to amplify a quake occurring twentythree minutes later halfway around the world, to make a # quake into an # one -- into a major disaster. Poor Luz. No, it couldn't be. There had to be a mistake. Then he remembered the change in the test site. Another coincidence? But there was no question about it. Assuming he wasn't making a major methodological error, the shift of the few miles from the first site made a huge difference in terms of alignment with stresslines and faults in the Earth's crust. The angles were just enough different so that a quake in Chile, if there were one, would go unaffected by the underground test. It looked like more than a coincidence. Somebody wanted a huge quake in Chile. Somebody who knew' about the plans for the uprising? A disaster would be a great excuse for martial law, for taking over a country. No, that couldn't be -- he'd been around Luz too long. It simply was an accident, one of those terrible coincidental accidents that could mean the death of thousands and thousands of people. He called up his friend at the A EC, to ask him if he knew who was in charge up at the test site. There'd been some kind of foul-up in the work he'd done earlier, he said, and he'd just come up with something the head man ought to see. "What sort of thing?" his friend asked warily. "Oh, something about seismic waves..." Tim said, trying to think of a way to protect Luz. "And earthquakes?" the friend asked. "Yeah," Tim answered without thinking. "How'd you know?" "Look, Tim, forget about it. Don't stick your head in where you're not wanted." And he hung up. T im's desk started to slide across the floor on the third shock. It was quiet now in the corridor, but from the distance he heard the fire sirens, and, yes, it was unmistakeable, an air raid alarm. A lot of good that's going to do, he thought. When things quieted momentarily he looked out the window again. There was a lot of smoke now and it looked like a part of the building next door had collapsed. And then the rumbling started again. T im sat paralyzed for half an hour after the phone call, whispering to himself that it couldn't be. Then he decided that he had to get through to test headquarters anyway, to stall them for a few minutes, to postpone things just long enough to change the pattern of the waves echoing through the earth. For Luz, for all the others. And for himself. But the long distance operator, even though she tried for three hours, couldn't get through; all the lines to the test installation were tied up and the Anchorage operator had instructions only to let through top-priority military calls. So he tried an old college buddy who'd enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed at the Pentagon, but the bastard hung up on him. Nor could he reach the university's geology-department chairman whom he thought might have some contacts high up in Arctic Energy. And even his Congressman, his last resort, was on a fishing trip and wouldn't be back until next Friday. It was nearly midnight by then and the only other thing he could think of doing was to warn Luz. It might be dangerous to try to locate her, but if she and her friends could tip people off, some of the death might be avoided as people went for higher ground or to the country. All he had was an uncle's name, Felipe Sanchez, so he had the long distance operator try all of them in Santiago. While he waited he kept reminding himself that even if he did connect with her uncle there was no guarantee he'd contact Luz, too. The eleventh Sanchez, unbelievably, was Luz's uncle, and even more unbelievably, she was there. "Hello, Doctor," Tim said, not trusting himself to say more. "Tim!" she cried. But immediately frost came into her voice. "What do you want?" "I called to warn you," he started out but she interrupted. "Thanks a lot," she said bitterly. "We know all about it." "How?" "Mendez is no dummy. He heard about the movement of the test a couple of days ago, and put things together. We're looking for who tipped off the Americans about the coup." There was suspicion in her voice. "Oh, Jesus, Luz, it wasn't me. I've been trying to see if the test can't be stalled. I had no idea that's what I was working on..." "Sure, sure. You were just doing your job." She sounded as if she were trying to keep her voice hard, but she choked in spite of herself. "Rebuilding will be like starting the Twentieth century over again, you know." "I know," Tim said. "How can I say how sorry I am? I'd never do anything to hurt you, if I could help it." "But you did." She had control of her voice again. "Oh, go take some measurements or something. We've got work to do here -- to save lives." "Luz, forgive me," he broke in. There was a silence at the other end of the phone. "I want to see you again when it's all over." The silence continued for a few seconds more. Then: "We'll see," she said. There was another slight pause. "Goodbye," and she hung up. There was nothing more to do. He'd exhausted all the possibilities he could think of, so about one he went over to start his vigil by the seismograph. It was a gorgeous, moonlit night, and as he walked across the deserted campus he saw three separate showers of meteors race across the sky from the hills to the bay. Falling stars; they were supposed to be lucky, weren't they? Then he remembered: fine scientist you are, grasping at straws like that, looking for lucky signs. They were just part of the August meteor showers. Came every year; perfectly good, scientific explanation for them. And then irony of being a good scientist hit him; good enough to help destroy thousands of innocent people, including Luz. His friend was already in the building, watching. "Hi," he said, cautiously. Tim grunted. "You know it had to be," the friend said. "National security. Can't allow a bunch of Commies like that to be successful. Look what happened in Cuba. The boys have set it up so it'll be just a big enough quake so things will be just enough screwed up so we'll have to send in the Marines to rebuild and keep order. Minimum involvement. Minimum loss of life. The military people think it's a major breakthrough in strategy." Tim glared at him and then turned back to the seismograph. The needle bounced back and forth gently, making lines like the little waves at the edge of a lake. Then there was a shock and the needle jumped. It was only #:# a.m. Tim laughed out loud. My god, maybe things would be all right after all. Maybe somebody else had figured out what was happening and had been as shocked as he was and had succeeded in short-circuiting something. worried. "Very strange," he said. "The blast isn't due for another seventeen minutes." He went into the office next to the reader to call someone. Tim stood grinning at the revolving drum and the bobbing needle without listening to the conversation. There still would be problems with Luz, but at least it wasn't as bad as it was. There would be a chance they might get together again. He loved her, he realized suddenly. Then at #:# a.m. the needle took another sideways jump, this time completely off the drum. The time, Tim remembered, would be exactly right if the blast had gone off as scheduled, and not earlier. "Hey," Tim shouted. "Come look at this." The other man came out of the office, looking worried. "What is it?" he asked. There was anger and age in his voice. "There was another shock," Tim said. "What's going on?" "The boys say the first one was an impact shock from a pretty good-sized meteorite that hit down in Iceland." "So?" "You figure it out." The man fished in his pants pocket for a match, and lit a cigarette he'd been holding in hand. "Bloody cosmic accident." "More amplification?" "Yeah. This time we out-smarted ourselves."       B y the time the fourth shock hit, Tim was surprised at how calm he'd grown. What would be neat, he thought, would be to be in a satellite and watch the whole panoyears of geological history occurring in a couple of days. It had taken about five hours for the movement to reach California, and before the electricity had been cut he'd heard on the little radio in his office that a fissure running the length of Iceland had opened and was pouring forth lava, while a row of volcanos had erupted, from Peru to Mexico. Of course it had been an incredible oversight that nobody had figured in the effect a meteor would have -- especially when the test occurred right in the middle of a yearly meteor shower. The big ones weren't that common -- they usually burned up before impact. But when you're playing around with the planet's internal structure you ought to remember that meteor falls in the past have been associated with reversals in the earth's magnetic field. The earth may be a diamond: a tap there, a tap here -- and the whole thing falls apart. Ordinarily the plates of the earth's crust, wedged tightly together, release pent-up energy only in the relatively tiny kerks we call earthquakes. But this time the combination of blast, natural quake and meteor impact had suddenly set the plates free. Before the movement had pushed and shoved its way north, Tim had a chance to figure out roughly where things would end up. South America's western shoreline would wind up a couple of hundred miles further west -- even though the current coast region would be sucked back into the earth as the plate of the earth's crust carrying the continent was forced down as it met another plate carrying part of the ocean floor. The whole of California west of the San Andreas fault would move # miles north. Africa would swing around, touch Europe once again, closing off the western end of the Mediterranean. The Red Sea would become a mini-ocean. All low-lying cities, whether they were touched by quakes or not, would be completely wiped out by tidal waves. Some new islands would appear around the Hawaiian and Japanese archipelagoes. And volcanos all over the world, long thought extinct, would erupt. God, what an exciting prospect! It would be great to be around when all the continents came to rest, to see what it was like. Of course it had all happened hundreds of times before since the breakup of the ancestral super-continent, but probably never as quickly, not even a thousandth as quickly. But there was no way to escape the Bay Area, of course. The guys at the University of Sasketchewan and the University of Manitoba, and the ones in Australia and parts of Africa would be luckier. They were in the stable interior of continents, rooted to the oldest rocks in the world, and they probably wouldn't be directly touched by any of the destruction. Things would be a mess for # or # years; all the supply routes and communication centers would be wiped out, not to mention hydroelectric lines and oil and gas pipelines. But they'd survive. It shouldn't be too hard for them to pick up the pieces and see if the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics were valid. Tim stood at the window and watched the eighteen-story building across the road sway, then crumble. Well, he thought, I'm going to be as dead as Luz, if that's any consolation for her. He grinned at the grimness of the thought. Such a nice girl... She wouldn't blame him, not really. And then he laughed out loud. Because to the list of areas which would be relatively safe he suddenly remembered you'd have to add the part of China, not to mention Siberia. Boy, won't the boys in the Pentagon just shit over that -- if they have enough time to figure it out before the tsunami hits! Oh, Luz, Luz... And then came the fifth and (for him) final shock.  Dear Jim, I've been reading Galaxy and If for about # years (it doesn't seem like that long). I say reading, but that doesn't mean reading from cover to cover. For the last couple of years, since Fred stepped down as editor, I've just been reading the features and pretty much ignoring the fiction. These two June issues are like waking from a bad dream. I can read the whole magazine again! Thanks Jim. Yours truly, # Coleman Ave., Apt. #I Menlo Park, CA # What can I say ? This letter directs itself to Jerry's column in the May issue. Jerry's reply follows. Dear Jerry, Don't give up on the Belt yet! Heinlein's Rolling Stones had a pretty fair picture of a Belt civilizaVA vehicles, back in #. It had no capitol; each rock or cluster of rocks governed itself. But the clusters were not isolated; they had radio, and today would have communications-lasers. They did not sell their ores through any given rock such as Ceres, but through whatever large rock happened to be conveniently located at the time, which is a whole 'nuther ball game. As for Larry Niven's one-gee-acceleration ships and their enormous delta-vees, sure they could land on any planet they want. The point is that these are free-fall people who don't especially want to. Yes, it would be chaper in fuel to have the capitol on Earth, but that missed the point entirely. Earth conditions are not asteroid conditions, and when somebody in the New York front office is making decisions for somebody else in a pressure suit, it is going to cost not only dollars, but lives, as that ignorant flatlander makes bad decisions simply because he doesn't know the territory. Far better to have the boss be a seasoned Belter located on an asteroid before somebody gets killed. Pat Mathews I # Tomasita NE Albuquerque, NM # Good point. Obviously there could be many Belter civilizations, and my article said so; but any centralization is likely to have Earth as its focal point. Of course my column was partly done as a tongue-in-cheek jibe at my friend and collaborator, Larry Niven, particularly his Bottom of a Hole ; if you want to postulate that asteroid miners like it out there without gravity, and that we've physiologically developed ways to let them live like that, then of course another set of premises govern. Most science fiction stories, though, have simply assumed that celestial mechanics make the Belter Civilization more profitable, and indeed inevitable, and my article was directed at that. As to government from afar, alas, I see little relaxation of centralizing trends. Colonial administrators found themselves chained to orders from Whitehall as soon as the undersea cable was invented; the war in Viet Nam was conducted on orders from Washington, just as the telegraph hamstrung soldiers in the last century. I agree that the man on the spot usually has a better idea of what's going on, but after all, the hordes of officials staffing the home office bureaus must have something to do... Jerry Pournelle Dear Mr. Baen, I am not a Women's Libber, but a sf fan since I was in the third grade. I am now #. I consider Andre Norton to be one of the best sf writers there is or has been. I do not see her or any other women represented in your magazine. Nor do I see any mentioned among all of give out to each other. So what's the story? Dianna Prinette Hmmm... it would seem that perhaps I have been a bit biased -- four and one half of the eight stories in this issue were written by women. The cover is by Wendy Pini -- as was the last Galaxy cover her first two pro-mag covers ). Let me quote my reply to a similar letter from June Worlds of If which, by the way, was almost entirely male): "... I plan to publish what I consider to be the best of those manuscripts submitted. Period. Dear Editor: Nominations are needed! I'm currently compiling an anthology of already published science or speculative fiction short stories to become a college textbook for training vocational counselors and therapists at the master's and doctoral level. These stories should help potential counselors become more future oriented. I would appreciate receiving from anyone nominations of interesting science fiction short stories which depict: alternative life styles, the impact of change, the meaning of work or leisure, or any other concept or setting that will stimulate and enhance the preparation of vocational counselors and therapists. John Borden, Ph.D. Associate Professor Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida # Ursula K. Le Guin, is not a short star v -- but, aside from length, l can think of nothing more appropriate. Dear Mr. Baen, I have been a subscriber to Galaxy for six or seven years, with a few gaps when I was out of the country, and for the first time I am moved to write to congratulate you on an issue and an apparent direction. For style, energy, and quality, the July Galaxy is unexcelled in my memory. My favorite: J. A. Lawrence's "Opening Problem." Pournelle is marvelous though this month's catalog of wonders is diffuse compared to previous articles. Is it possible that the new Galaxy is ready to break out of the pulp cocoon and undergo the transformation to slick butterfly Panshin speaks of in "Directions?" I would pay more -- provided the quality sf to fill it can be found. If your first few issues are an indication, Mr. Baen, then you are the man to find it. Tim Mabee # East Price St. Philadelphia, Pa. # Dear Galaxy, I read the other day in Locus that a new editor was moving in, and was interested in new manuscripts by heretofore unpublished nobodies, such as myself. I like the way Galaxy has been going, too. Doris Piserchia, R. A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley, Joanna Russ, Sonya Dorman, and (most of all) Ted Sturgeon. I enjoyed Christopher Priest's Inverted World, too. A couple of hopes: Fritz Leiber used to make frequent appearances in Galaxy. Has he devoted himself totally to Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser? Algis Budrys, where have you gone? Samuel R. Delany was never a Galaxy regular, but he, too, has disappeared. I miss the three of them very much. I also like Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, and James Tiptree, Jr. ,when they make their infrequent appearances. Also, I note with pleasure that Jack Gaughan is doing covers again. Hooray! Anyway, please read the story. Jeff Hudson As per our previous conversation, your revised) story is being run in August IF -- as a collaboration with Dr. Isaac Asimov. You will find Fritz Lieber in August IF, while Ursula, of course, has been represented in the previous issue... As for the other people you mention -- I'm a fan of practically every one of them!  galaxy # # # Ea it # # Street New York N.Y. # # per word per issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. h advertisers to take advantage of the trio combination, we are now offering a discount price of I .# per word to run in the three issues that appear in a #-month period. Our regular price is now # a word per issue. Old copies of Playboy magazine for sale. Send # for our Catalogue, Price List, and Information, to: Back Issues, Box #, Suite #, Ottawa, Canada K#S#B#. Unusual" Books! Forty (#) books for only #. Free catalogs! International Imports, Box # GA, Atlanta, Ga. #. Mark Terry (Chairman), P.O. 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Some guys read poetry on those long buggy rides to perimeter points, so that their style with the females doesn't go stale. The woman I room with is always paging around for the sexy parts. Drives me nuts...My girl-friend is crazy about gothics and crossword puzzles. And of course there is always the science-fiction if your tastes incline in that direction. Personally, I like the reviews. When I touch earth again. I'm going to get a nice little job teaching literature at a girl's school and I've got to keep informed...That's the way it is..." Use this coupon to take advantage of the special offers below. If you are not completely satisfied at any time you may receive a full refund on the balance of your subscription. Please enclose payment to  I # issues # (save #I (  # issues SI # (save # Name: Street: Town : State: Zip: # Beacon st., Boston, MA #I # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Continuing the adventures of the Company. After escaping from the police they have had many adventures in the wilderness. Now they have come upon a place of habitation -- and the circus is in town. A story of the not-distant future when Decent Folk once again have things firmly in hand -- and the rest of us are in real trouble! Introducing Hammer's Slammers. While the accouterments of warfare ceaselessly change, certain of its inner realities are timeless, as David Drake makes clear in this story of a hyper-modern armored battalion. strike a chord of hope -- and terror! -- in a world of futility and despair. Earth, in case you were unaware, is an interstellar game-preserve. At relativistic velocities the universe becomes exceeding strange. And so do those who ply its ways. One thing is certain -- if there is life on the Moon it is not "life as we know it!" Crime is its own punishment, they say. But normally the criminal doesn't have to steal it! Sturgeon reviews something about movies, something about blood -- and a real astronaut's poetry. Ships for Manned Spaceflight -- T#e Solar System is ours -- whenever we have the will to reach out and grasp it. Another in a non-verbal series. Interior art by Freff, Gaughan, Pini, Fabian, Marrs lishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices; # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy; #c. #-issue subscription; S# In U.S., # elsewhere. by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy; #p. #-issue subscription in the United Kingdom; p#. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. 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(retail prices shown) .a MM ' r  ' '"... and through the chinks and breaches of our prison we see such glimmerings of light, and feel such refreshing airs of liberty, as daily raise our ardour  for more." -- Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society I fectly ordinary year, but for the sake of context you should know that it was the ninth year of New Harmony and seventh of the first and original penal reservation, the F'astcoast Confinement. On J u ly I #th of that year, at #:# in the morning, Berlin's Superintendent of Police boarded Lufthansa's Flight # for the transatlantic trip to Eastcoast -- and lest Karl Schmidt think that the Senate took his trip lightly, it sent a delegation of its senior members to the airport despite the early hour, who followed him all the way to the end of the ramp urging his objective, careful, and professional assessment of the American experience. Karl Schmidt undertook the voyage yielding to pressure of the worst sort. He was fifty-nine and four years beyond retirement age, a fact that the Senate had at last turned to its advantage, suggesting through intermediaries that, should he continue obstinate and oldfashioned, the Senate could and  ould replace him with a man more modern in his outlook. But they hoped they wouldn't have to. Schmidt stood before the senators, tall, grave, his long face somewhat longer than usual, his sparse grey hair combed back straight with a part in the center. He assured them that he'd do his best. "But gentlemen," he said at the end, "don't think that a single visit will change my mind. Old dogs don't learn new tricks, and I've always opposed aping the Amis, fheir solutions turn out to be tomorrow's problems." Just then they heard the muffled report of an explosion somewhere on the airport grounds. Soon thereafter a voice announced yet another major sabotage attempt. Fortunately it had miscarried. With the exception of an old bus, no damage had been done to man or property. The senators looked pointedly at Herr Schmidt, and he in turn shrugged his shoulders. The men would be caught. Justice would be done. A few hotheads, anarchists, and antisocials shouldn't panic society to adopt the drastic American solution. Schmidt understated the problem, of course. It was pretty grim in Europe. He himself sometimes felt desperation as he watched Western Society unravel before his eyes. But nothing could convince him that Confinements were the answer. The Senators obviously disagreed. He saw it in their eyes. Schmidt is too old and set in his ways, they thought. Too bad he is a public institution in Berlin and difficult to shunt aside without political pain. I tual sunshine of high altitude, Schmidt reflected on past and future. Since his birth in #, the world had transformed itself under the twin pressures of growing population and shrinking energy supplies. It had all turned out differently than he'd thought it would, in his early twenties, when world catastrophe had been predicted. Instead the world had carried on, creaking and groaning like an old weary ship, too stupid to know that it should sink. Atomic war had been avoided, but ip its stead had come disorders all over the globe -- not least of which had been the ChinoKussian war of '#, an incongiiously bright period in Schmidt's life, for he had served in the International Intervention Brigade and, incidentally, had trained in the Then in # came the disaster some people said Nostradamus had predicted. It hadn't been a manmade holocaust but a geological happening that had reduced the islands of Japan to the Keys of Japan in a series of convulsions and had pidlcd much of California into the sea. Flooding on a scale unheard of since Noah had lightened the planet's human cargo, and men still cleared debris after nearly a decade. China was now once again the spoil of warlords who paid a kind of distracted allegiance to the ghost of the People's Republic. Russia was the Sick Man of Asia, preoccupied in putting down internal revolts. Europe had fragmentized into thirty-five sovereignties, and the fragments had been gathered into the Union of Europe ruled from the cantons of Switzerland, presumably safe from the sea. And America had become a theocracy of sorts. The United States were now United Harmonies or New Harmony or simply Harmony. The regime called itself the New Puribrainchild of a single man, one Ralph Waldo Gunnison, a tiny, withdrawn, wispy figure who'd spent forty years as an obscure teacher of Mental Science at night while repairing TV sets by day. He reached prominence in # as leader of the Meditation Crusade. His object was simple enough. He saw preparations for the Intervention and proposed an alternative. Let the American people pray and meditate, and let the boys stay home. He theorized that Mind could grab hold of Substance in deep prayer and thus force its desire into Manifestation. Let Americans pray for peace on the Mongolian border. The force of Spirit could overcome the force of the Sword. This appealed to a population torn by Vietnam #I (which was really l.aos #). Gunnison became a pest in the Senate, organized protests against the Intervention, and predicted awesome disasters when the nation went off to war again, fhe natural disaster came in '#, two years after the Peace of TchulA'h. It coincided with a severe recession and other disorders. Gunnison became the first Harmonizer, and the New Puritan Secular Order was launched. Karl Schmidt had passed through the United Harmonies in #I on his way to Brasilia, which had emerged as a dominant force in a vacuum created up north of it. International conferences now tended to be held -- if they were held in the New World -- in San Paulo or Brasilia. No one liked prudish Miami, prissy New Francisco, or drab Eastcoast. The changes had been visible then, but nothing like he expected to see now. Mind had indeed transformed Substance and made Manifest a world in Ralph Waldo's image and likeness. And the people loved it. The world wanted to emulate it. And people of Berlin lusted after harmony, tired of the social disease, the dissolution of order and meaning, that plagued all erstwhile industrialized countries -- except America, of course. Uniformed girls served lunch a little ahead of Schmidt's accustomed meal time. He picked at the food but ordered three bottles of wine anticipating a dry time in Eastcoast. Then he opened his slender briefcase and took out the briefing materials for a second perusal. After a while he laid the papers aside and shook his head much as he'd done some days ago in his widower apartment in the blueplush armchair beside the empty paraqueet cage by the window where he did evening work. He couldn't reconcile himself to the notion of confinements. He wondered at the brazen boldness of the erstwhile TV repairman who'd dared launch a social experiment of unprecedented proportions and unpredictable consequences. Yes, Schmidt expected that consequences would flow from this sooner or later, despite claims to the contrary made in the Harmony brochures. In such musings and under the mellow' influence of rhenish, Karl Schmidt dozed off. A stewardess lifted his head and gently slipped a pillow' beneath it without his notice. He slept soundly until the plane began its descent. T he plane approached low over water. In the distance to the right brightly painted sailboats swayed unevenly in waves created by a small tugboat bound out to sea. The plane moved over solid ground. The wheels touched down and the engines reversed. The green blur became immaculately combed lawn, and up ahead large white billboards with blue lettering came toward them as they rolled forward. Soon he could read the signs. Meditation, Substance, Manifestation. Karl Schmidt had arrived in New Harmony. They taxied to the gate, and a voice announced the local time and welcomed them to Peaceful Abiding International Airport. Schmidt gathered his hat and briei'case. He lined up with others on one of the five aisles of the jumbo and deplaned past the tired smile-masks of the girls. To him this was and would remain Kennedy International, the airport where he had arrived on his first trip to the United States, a young man mesmerized by dreams of adventure and tired of the Vice Squad in Berlin. He'd been bound for an Oklahoma training field of the International Intervention Brigade but had stopped a while in New York City to taste the forbidden fruits of MJ and Synthesex -- legal in the States but, at that time, still prohibited in Germany. Schmidt w as sure that no one smoked marijuana now in Harmony, and the orgasmic sex-drug that had been all the rage in the late '#'s was surely taboo. fhe letter of invitation had promised him a full-time guide and executive assistant to Easteoasfs Commissioner of Folice. Schmidt walked out through the mobile gate peering ahead at the people who'd come to meet the Bight. A youngster in a bright red jacket with a blazer caught his eye. He had a pink, scrubbed, wholesome look, a reddish crew cut, a freckled face. I he youngster saw Schmidt's searching look and moved toward him with the hesitant expectation of a man greeting a relative stranger. "Herr Schmidt?" "Mr. came forward and gave his a tight, manly grip. "Welcome to Harmony, Herr Schmidt. Welcome to Eastcoast. You have a good Bight? I sure hope you did; we want you to be happy w ith us. Get off to a good start, and all that. Herr Schmidt, have we got things to show you!" fhe young man was tense, apparently, and he effused when he was tense. "I am very curious, of course," Schmidt said evenly. "I'm sure it'll be interesting." "You better believe it, Herr Schmidt." In an attempt to ease the young man's tension, Schmidt said: "Perhaps we better make that 'Karl' from now on." "Sure, Karl, anything you say, sir. Just call me Hank. Name's Richard H., you know. The H. stands for Henry, and that comes out Hank. I don't use 'Richard.' Haven't used 'Richard' since I jiined the force. The boys kid you loo much. They call you 'Dick Dick' and things like that. You know what I mean? Dick? Detective?" Schmidt nodded gravely. "I understand you perfectly. Hank." " fhis w ay, please, Karl, if you'll just follow me..." I hey w alked through an echoing hall. Schmidt noted the asceptic (uder and the unparalleled neatness. He reealled a tourist poster he'd seen on the Kurfuerstendam: it took little to exceed Switzerland in cleanliness. It was the hub of the F.uropean Union and something of a moral as well as aesthetic slum. #'hey moved toward the male side pleased that the guest spoke such excellent English, but the old man's gravity disturbed him. of the great responsibility he carried. All civil seiwants in New Harmony knew of the Harmonizer's personal wish to see Order expand into the Zones of Decadence. In never had so obvious a chance to make his mark as now. Of the thirty-live states of Europe, Berlin was the best candidate. Berlin seemed most decade;nt of all European states as if. in gaining its freedom with East Germany's drop IVom the shrinking Soviet orbit, the city had lost its rationale for living. Now. for the first time, a Uni-Eu representative was here to see and listen. Many officials of much higher rank would address the was superlatively important -- Herr Schmidt's general comfort and well being were in his hands. He could have a striking innuenee on the impression the German gained during his stay. Absorbed in such reflections, he shepherded the German through the baggage search. He paced nervously up and down outside the sanitation show'ers where green disinfectant streams bombarded every traveler. He led Herr Schmidt, now in a fluffy robe, to the cavitation baths where ultrasonic waves exploding under water blasted dirt from every pore. He supervised the louse-spray operation. And finally, he rushed about solicitously to help the Super find his microwaved clothing basket in the irradiation hall. As they went out into the terminal proper, the German said: "Are you sure we didn't miss a step in this process. Hank? It seems to me they forgot to pump my stomach." distract the German from the absolutely necessary sanitation requirements (after all this was New Harmony, not an underdeveloped nation), he pointed ahead and explained that the gentlemen up front in red jackets, such as the one he w ore, were heads of various offices of the Department, and the tall, big man in their center (he didn't want to say "obese") was the Commissioner of Police for Eastcoast. I'hen, indicating the newsmen and the rV cameras, he expressed the hope that Herr Schmidt might address a few' words to the waiting Media. Schmidt felt both apprehensive and amused as they moved forward. The Eastcoast police officials in their blinding ,red jackets grinned expectantly as Schmidt approached. They reminded him of salesmen at a convention. All the people in the terminal were neat and tidy to a fault. Despite his rather thorough cleansing, he felt dirty, as if the decadence of Europe still hung about him like a musty odor. Warm, hamlike hands clasped his, and a huge, gross man bubbled his welcome. went smoothly. The ComPol did the introductions going from man to man. They were all here, of course. Supply Logistics and Barrier Engineering and Legal and Psychological and all the rest, plus the Regional Crusade Rep and a man from the Lord Mayor's remembered to give Dr. Fieldgreen of Adjustment Education something of a little build up. They'd decided, in laying out the Sales Strategy, to show Schmidt the briefings tomorrow. Tonight was the first routine application of the technique. Then Herr Schmidt spoke briefly hoped for more enthusiasm, at least Herr Schmidt said nothing negative. ComPol walked them to the helicopter with his arm around Herr Schmidt's shoulder. Herr Schmidt seemed a bit discomfited by that, but then the ComPol couldn't help it; he was a regular glad-handing hugger of a man. "Now, Karl," the ComPol boomed, "we've got it all laid out for you, old buddy, a little tour, a little nap, dinner, and then a night operation just to get you off to a good start. And all that before your visit officially kicks off tomorrow." He Hank, you make sure Karl here gets whatever he wants. Any old thing! And if you need help, holler. Just give me a ring." He stopped and, still holding Schmidt by the shoulder, he let his arm describe a large circle. "Pretty now, isn't it, Karl. Every last bit of this terminal's new, built after the Flood, and those mosaies are our pride and joy." The ComPol pointed to the excellent portraits of the Harmonizer all around. Each showed Gunnison in a classic pose -- Meditative, Pensive, Executive, Lyric, and Tragic. Schmidt was a big man, nearly two meters in his stoekings, but he felt almost frail next to this giant. He glanced absently at the Harmonizer's five images but his mind lingered with anxiety over the prospect of dinner. The steaks would be five centimeters thick, no doubt, and ComPol w'ould insist that he eat his raw. Ah, these Americans... They went on, and soon they walked in sunshine. Then they crossed macadam and mounted narrow stairs to the copter. Down below Com Pol waved an arm. duced him to the pilot and showed him a good seat. And then, alone at last with Schmidt, he rubbed his hands and said: "What's your pleasure, Karl? Shall we check you in at the hotel, or shall we take a look-see at good old EC?" "EC" "The Eastcoast Confinement." "Aha," Schmidt said. "By all means let's look-see good old EC." ster." The blades began to turn. Moments later they were airborne. T he scene below reminded Schmidt of a favorite Gunnison slogan: Let All Things Be Renewed. Whatever had been had been erased by floodwater, bulldozer, or crane. Schmidt saw what he'd already seen in countless newscasts -- the prim geometricities of New Harmony. Neat-as-a-pin suburbs rushed by. Shiny red trolleys shimmered up through the foliage. Uniform small cars, all brightly waxed, beaded the highways. Schoolyards teemed with uniformed children (here vacations had been abolished) and shopping arcades with shopping women. "So," Schmidt said, peering out. "So this is Harmony." beamed. "Must look good to you, coming from where you come from." Schmidt chuckled. "Oh, it's not so bad, Berlin. We struggle on in all our decadence." "I guess you're right, at that. One gets used to it. Still, if it's anything like it used to be here..." ber how it was, Karl. Something else! Filth, pollution, mobs, weirdos! And headlines!? Headlines like you can't believe your eyes! Jesus, how did we ever live?" "How indeed," Schmidt said with a tiny smile. He kept peering at the scene below'. "I don't know why you folks put said. "You don't have to. We don't. We've got the technology if you've got the will. We'll make a deal with you. We'll send the experts, you provide the labor. Anything for a cause." Schmidt took his eyes off the "The Clean World Crusade?" A gleam of enthusiasm brightenthe name of the game." As they approached Manhattan turned tour guide and explained this and that. Schmidt only half listened. He sought for some sign of the old city, but there was precious little to see. Massive holograph projectors set into the Hudson's banks simulated the ancient skyline, of course, this being tourist season. illusion was generated and at what energy cost. But through the ghostly image of the past, Schmidt saw only squat, uniform buildings. gan explained, was Eastcoast's administrative center. Schmidt had inferred that. People walked about in the red jackets of Gunnison's civil service. He saw a formation on a roof top. Chanting? Praying? Doing yoga? Governor's Island passed by on the left. It was still a Coast Guard station but now the service had been renamed. Sea Wall? Beach Sweep? Something like that. The men wore odd, pointed blue caps with yellow pom-poms on top. The Harmonizer took an interest in uniforms and was said to be a crack designer in addition to his many other superlative talents. They flew over East River and left troubled waters in their wake. Garbage barges on the right moved toward some distant dumping ground much as they'd moved in the old days, but now the barges were painted white and even the garbage had a primly piled look. Then the copter rose to clear the bridges, and Schmidt saw the huge, shimmering bubble of irridescence with a dramatic gesture. "There she is, Karl. Beautiful, isn't it. Just look at her! Just look at her shine! " The Eastcoast Confinement. "What you're seeing there," tonic laminar flow of lectromag radiation. Ozonified, too. Only its not just one laminate but about fifteen hundred plies, like. It's about four meters thick at the bottom, but it thins out on top. We generate it in a Lunac converter. Darn expensive, energy-wise. Sixty thousand kilo-cals per square meter of surface." To the fifty-nine year old eyes of a policeman it was just a shimmering bubble, an extremely large bubble. It began around FortySecond Street (if there was still such a thing) and extended away to the north as far as the eye could see. A blue-grey haze above it suggested smoke. Passage through the barrier caused temporary paralysis and extreme nausea followed by migraine. The field's strength increased geometrically with each breaching, and mass exodus from the Confinement was practically impossible. Schmidt nodded. He understood was superfluous. He wondered what went on inside. The human aspect interested him far more than the whizz-bang stuff. Americans knew and loved whizz-bang. But did they understand the sociology? They made toward the bubble, approaching it fast. On the left Schmidt saw midtown Manhattan, the transformed Manhattan. He could see into the straight, uniform streets and inspect the low concrete buildings, each exactly the same as the other. The monotony was relieved only by large billboards. The people in the streets, however, were reassuringly people -- women chatted in doorways and little children ran and bicycled about. Then they left the city behind and flew parallel to the barrier for a while. At one point the ship began to vibrate and the copter veered to the left. "Brewster just turned it on." They moved through. For a second, but only for a second, Schmidt felt a surge of nausea and pain at his temples. T he Eastcoast Confinement could be divided fairly neatly into four quadrants. This was not a physical division, purely, although il was also that, complete with w alls, towers, w ater or rubble-filled trenches, and all the rest. Rather, it arose from the tribal patterns within the reservation. In the east where the helicopter entered, Peacefreak held sway -- and a bloodthirsty I hey faced the Maoling redcaps on the west and adjoined Ecofreak to the south. Panthermess had its doexplained that Panther "fingers" extended well into the other territories. The Panthers were much in demand for the medical services they provided. Each tribe was further subdivided into so-called "packs," and each pack had its own "turf' and took part in the foodwar in a kind of rotation, like. Schmidt needed to know by way of context w'hen the German asked him curtly why none of this was in gan replied that it was all of marginal interest compared with the technology. He worried a little because Herr Schmidt had begun to frown in an odd sort of way, and so that very ample sociological data were available and would be provided in the course of briefings tomorrow' afternoon. Schmidt frowned because he was thinking. Here it was. His oldest arguments with the Senate came back to him now. He had argued with the gentlemen politicians. He had told them what he had suspected -- namely that inside the Confinements lived societies as legitimate and real as those outside. He had never been able to buy the that the people Inside were the dregs of the earth, incompetents, incapables, antisocials, degenerates -- people, in other words, w hose presence in the larger society represented a danger to the whole. He knew it couldn't be that simple. He had cited the facts of life to the Senate. Even penitentiaries were organized into societies. What now saw, convinced him that he had been right. Dow n below he saw a part of old New York -- a jumble of buildings high and low , canyons and valleys and open spaces, real brick, cement, steel, and glass rather than holographic images. It should have looked like a grim urban desert, but it wasn't quite that. Everywhere he saw green, green of every conceivable shade -- the dark green of bushes, the light green of new sprouts, the variable green of carrot tops, cabbages, lettuce, turnips, and other plants he didn't recognize. It seemed as if old Manhattan had been overgrown with vegetation. It greened on rooftops, streets, squares, yards, windowsills. Next he was struck by the mass of people. He saw them everywhere, fhey swarmed down there in clumps and bunches. They sat darkly, fhey worked in rows amidst the green. Faces turned up toward them and hands waved...Schmidt imagined that he saw the people smile, but he couldn't be sure of that. 'They ilcw too high and a blue haze from a thousand chimneys obscured the view. They moved over a mile-long, ed to it. "That's a food line down there, a pack distribution point. And that over there, that clump of men with axes? See the red hats? Maoling slaves tearing up the pavement to make more strip farms. They cultivate every bit of land they can find." "Maoling slaves?" "Yep. That's the latest. In the last couple of months Peacefreak has started taking slaves, and our guess is it's spreading all over the Confinement. They work 'em twenty hours a day on half rations. Keeps chuckled. "Your food shipments...?" "Not enough; not nearly "l et's face it, Karl. We're not trying very hard to keep'em alive in here; but they fight back." that remark, but his attention snagged on a weird, impressive structure that now detached itself from the haze. It was a dome topped by three slender needles of unequal length. The building stood in a large square of cleared ground. Masses of people tilled the square with a dark dotting of heads. The structure seemed made of bits and pieces of waste material -- glass, briek. steel, and plastie all welded together in a loose reticulation. The massive construct gleamed in the mixed light of afternoon sunshine and shimmering barrier. This was certainly not old New York, nor was it New Harmony. This was something new and somehow alien, (he expression of some kind of spirit; Schmidt sensed a kind of grandeur and defiance in this aggregation of materials. He pointed to it. "And that?" "That's Sophia Grande." The lone dismissed the whole thing in such a way that Schmidt, already alerted, grew suspicious. "What is it? A church?" "Our Lady of the Expansion." "fhat wasn't in my briefing package either. What is this? Some sort ol' recent development?" curled his lips in an expression of contempt. "Naw, not really. The structure is fairly new, but the myth is almost as old as the Confinement. They say down there that the liarricr will come down some day and the people inside will inherit (he earth. They say a woman will lead (hem, so they built her a cluirch." The voice expressed scorn, and Schmidt had a momentary glimpse of a slightly different hard-nosed cop. For a second there was silence filled only by the chopping whirr of blades. "Fat in hell. We've got this barrier on a lusion plant, and that, believe me, ain't gonna run out of fuel." Silence. "Brewster, you better get up a bit. fhey're bound to take a shot at us." 'fuming to Schmidt, he pointed down. "See that double wall and the water trench? That's the border between Peacefreak and Maoling. There. Those dark half circles? Catapult nests." A religious myth strong enough to engender a public works built by a mass of people under some kind of tight coordination would mean the presence of real culture down below , something that these dregs of humanity were not supposed to possess. Schmidt set that aside for the moment and concentrated on the scene. Near the catapult nests halfnaked men worked feverishly. In seconds fire-darts rose up toward them reaching for the copter's bottom-mounted fuel tanks. But Brewster had lifted the ship in a right-leaning circle and the darts fell short. The ship passed almost directly over Sophia Grande as it turned, and Schmidt got a better look at the shining needles of the construct. There was something odd about the light reflection and the geometry of the panels laid on (he needles' surface. What had seemed like panes of glass to Schmidt from a greater distance now resembled panels of some kind. Solar panels? But that, of course, was ludicrous. The technology was denied to these miserable inhabitants of this incredible, green ghetto. More likely small hothouses used to grow food. "How many people live in here?" he asked. The Eastcoast Confinemerit looked tar larger than he'd imagined from the literature. we -- " "Rxciise me, Hank; did you say "I know, Karl. The offieial statistics only list principals, and there down there." "Principals?" "I don't want to anticipate your briefings, Karl, but here goes anytorial. "Crime is a social phenomenon. not an individual thing. When the Mind embraces crime, it pollutes or infects all those who co-vibrate with it." if the German followed him. This was deep stuff, and Europeans were terribly skeptical. That's why the World Crusade made so little progress in the Zones of Decadence. But the German seemed receptive, "When someone commits a crime, we obviously find the covibrators, too, and in they go, the whole lot." "I take it, then," Schmidt said, that 'co-vibrators' are... what? Husbands, wives, children?" Karl, fhat's why we have eight exact number isn't known. Eight is down to a few thousand a year, and (hey kill that many in the foodwar and the tribal raids. On the other hand, the birth rate..." padded, stitched ceiling and shook his head. "You'd swear they're deliberately breeding. Goes to show you that they're antisocial. It's suicide to breed in a confinement, social suicide." A thought made him smile. "Gunnison says we might have to import people from the Confinement one of these days. Anti-fcr is working too well on our side. Fopulation on the Outside is down to a hundred and fifty Confinements, all forty-seven of them, the Inside population's pushing sixty and it's growing." In the silence Schmidt pondered that relationship. The birthrate was up? In all other industrial nations, it was dropping at an alarming rate. cried suddenly. "Let's just do it right now . I'he official tour isn't till Friday, but you might as well get a look at the best population control device ever invented -- and the oldest." He chuckled. "Brewster, let's circle by the Pile for just a sec, and then you'd better head out again." T he w Olds "foodw ar" and "pile" did not appear in the literature, but Schmidt understood the reference. I he population w as supplied by helicopters equipped with neutraliers such as this one had. Schmidt expected a large mob scene at points where the food was distributed... people trampling each other. But when they came upon the scene, he saw with the cold horror of a man whd'd seen many things that it was worse than that. This was a real war. Long before they reached the spot. Schmidt saw the busy movement of large transports far away behind the haze of smoke. They came in from the Jersey side in an endless line. Huge bales swung by cables from the bottom. The ships dipped, released the bales, rose up high again, and headed back. The locus of the deposition was a large square surrounded by old brow list ones. In an area five blocks square the ubiquitous green of the (Tmllnement was conspicuous by absence, fhe copters came in and released bales in the center of the scpiare. and it was indeed a huge pile of materials. In a circle all around it. defending the mouths of street radiants, men fought a fierce battle against attacking masses -- but it wasn't a mob against a mob so much as organized military formations against organized deIcnders shielded from roof-top arrow lire and wheeled catapult tlarts by barriers built of broken crates, sacks of sand, and concrete rubble. Brewster brought the ship to a hover, and they watched the fight. Below them a long line of women and children marched southeast in single file. They carried crates on back, head, and slung on bicycles. Schmidt w as reminded of ants. said in a tone of displeasure. "They dominate the distribution. Peacefreaks. sec? You can tell by the yellow band they've got tied around their arms and the yellow shirts some ofem wear. If we were closer you could see the symbol. That's the Hundred and Twelfth Street Pack. Our records show that Peacies are in charge here sixty-four point two percent of the time. And they only have thirty-three point nine percent of the population." "Are you sure it's point nine?" Schmidt asked. "You'll see, Karl. We've got this technology down pat. Every transport brings back a report, and it goes right into a computer. We know all about these birds. Stats, everything. Nothing you have to invent lor yourselves in Berlin. We'll come in and set it up for you free of charge. And we'll guarantee that it'll work." "I'm sure it will. Hank," Schmidt said. He heard something in the man's voice. But the long face was serious, and the gray eyes were fixed steadily at the scene below. "Nose down a bit, Brewster. Herr Schmidt might want to see the symbol." "There's no need for that," Schmidt said. "Does it go on like this all the time?" He watched a salient of men in red railroader caps. They had stormed over the bodies of their dead and had cut and slashed their way past the barrier to a corner of the Pile. Immediately a column of women materialized in the feeder street, and men began to throw bales and sacks across the barrier. "Twenty-four hours a day." Sabbath, of course. We don't shook his head. He watched the battle with a professional eye. "I'eacefreak's too strong." he said. He turned to Schmidt. "You're just in time to sec us try a little innovation tonight. Com Pol mentioned it to you. What we call an adjustment operation. Peacefreak's too strong and must be weakened, or else we'll get unification down there, and that's dangerous." "Why so?" " fhey've got some awfully smart people in there. Physicists, chemists, people like that. Brainy folks are often antisocial. They could invent a neutralizer in no time at all. But they can't massproduce'em -- not so long as they keep fighting. So we keep'em off balance." "What'll you do, exactly, tonight?" "Peacefreak's too well led," keep gaining turf. We'll pick up some of their chiefs on girly raids ing for the word. "Let's say we'll give them a bit of education -- that's permitted by the Constitution. Our stats people say four chiefs should do it. Peacefreak will drop down to around thirty percent or so." "In population?" the battle. "In RD." "In RD?" "Iesourec Dominance. Control of the pile." They watched in silenee as the redcapped men were dislodged again by the furiously slashing counterattack of blood-drenched Peacefreaks. can't do it. They're too weak and I'he initials were multiplying. "Optimum Population Mass get all that in the briefing tomorrow. Have you seen enough?" Schmidt nodded. Involuntarily he thought of a rat trap he had once seen. It'd been a box with a trap door, fhe rats fell down into the box and were slowly starved into cannibalism. As the copter rose and turned again, this time to the south, he made a note to ask about "girly raids" and to inquire how it was that "education" was "permitted" by the Constitution, and how much "education" would weaken the leadership abilities of Peacefreak tribal chiefs. But for the moment he didn't want to pursue the matter. He was tired. His internal body-clock told him it was eleven at night, although here the sun still shot oblique rays into the smoky atmosphere beneath the barrier. II E mmanuel Toronto Salazar Smith. Or Emmanuel Smith. Or Manny, for short. Manny stared at the gorgeous three-color graffiti painted on the bathroom wall above the toilet that no longer worked and had never worked and wouldn't be allowed to work even if it did -- the fecal matter was too precious to waste. What you didn't put, on the crops you burned as fuel. The graffiti was a bold yellow swirl faintly resembling an E and a double S. A red border enclosed the letters, and two fat green dots hung over the rumplike curve of the last letter on the right, riiey called those dots the eyes of Emmanuel Toronto Salazar Smith. Or Manny, for short. Everyone knew Manny-Man in the tenblock turf where that symbol and those eyes warned interlopers to stay off Brinco territory. He shifted his eyes from wall to mirror to help clumsy hands tie the bright yellow tic under the collar of a starched white shirt. A neat suit jacket hung from the rusty hook of a shower-curtain rod. Manny flicked a bit of dust from its arm and then put it on. Neat and tidy. You had to be spotless out there or the squeeze would nail you before you even saw the chickie line. He had w orn his raiding suit four times in his life, and this was the fifth time. It brought back memories of pain and a kind of fear that he never felt inside the Realm. It was the fear of his cells, the fear of his blood, the fear of his guts, the fear not of Manny-Man but of that which Manny-Man carried about with him. his bod. The fear was already beginning. It would grow slowly on the way to the chapel. It would grow greater and greater w ith every step of that endless walk south to the border. And finally it would be there screaming in his brain when he'd face the Fire, riial's w hy he had delayed so long. But now the time had finally come. He couldn't stay Manny-Man much longer without a Queen. His eyes would be put out, covered over, and the Pack would sell him off to Maoling as a common slave. He pulled the jacket down and pulled in his chin. Almost. He looked almost puritan. The face was a bit too Latin -- dark and swarthy despite the camouflaging powder, riiey said that browns and blacks lived out there, and they did, but Manny knew and they all knew inside the Realm that browns and blacks didn't belong in Harmony. Slowly they brought them all in here and shoved them in through the barrier loeks, with the locks set at full force, so you'd get a good feel of what it was like, crossing the Fire. Manny didn't mind so much with the young men and women. It did them good to know what it was all about. But it hurt with the oldies and the children who rolled around on the ground twitching and spasming and throwing up the precious food they'd brought in with them in their stomachs. He turned and swept the gold into his hand from the empty water tank of the useless toilet. He stared at the pendant for a second then put the whole mess into his pocket. He was ready to go. In the Big Room lounging rubes looked up from chores. They were busy with whetstones sharpening swords or tipping arrows or dipping darts into steaming asphalt reclaimed from pavements lifted up to make more farms. They broke into derisive laughter and pointed fingers at him. They made noises in the cheeks and called him Neatytoe and Sensy-wensy. But Manny sensed their approval now. There was a joy and glee in their abandoned yelping. They saw him dressed and they were reassured. He half suppressed a smile and gave them the thumb. At the door he turned. "Tonight," he called. He fixed them with dark, brooding eyes whose whites were almost dark yellow and were marked by fine red arteries. They rested swords, darts, and arrows and settled down to listen. "Tonight we'll have a Queen." Manny ran down stairs. The rube cheer resounded behind him and echoed dully through the bare brick halls of the ancient building. He walked through dark streets eyeing the w alls. Competing graffiti had mushroomed here and there in the last day or so. His rubes had claimed they couldn't stop it. He suspected that some of them had painted signs, eager to be pack chiet' themselves. "You lost your stroke. Your queen's fled. You got no gripe, Manny-Boy." MannyBoy, the rubes had said. Not Ma nny-Man. Folk lined the sidewalks three deep getting a breath of night air. #-yes followed him and heads nodded in approval. They saw his raiding dress and they knew that he was Manny-Man again now that he'd resolved to take the Ordeal and do it again -- go up against the Man's wall for a Queen. Back in charge... if he came back. Manny didn't know how it had all started, the business with the tuccns. It lay very far back, several years, and in the Realm you lived one day at a time. Suddenly they were there. One pack had one and then another. Packs with queens (lid better in the war. The Virgin Mom had Idretold this long, long ago. back when they were still building the engines and you could still go out ol'the Realm by subway. And then it was like this. You had to have a queen. The people demanded it. And the only real queen was one you took from a chickie line. They waited for you. They had precious things hidden away in their clothing and on their body... things that the squeeze would catch at the official gates with detectors. The people said those precious things guarded the pack luck. Manny-Man had his doubts about that, but you never knew, and without the queen the rubes led poorly and the boys didn't fight. He headed for the Brinco chapel aware that women detached them selves from the crowd and came in his wake like an ever-growing comet's tail. He saw it up ahead, the gleaming chapel, still only half finished. One spire of burning steel-glass-stone reached up above the dark, surrounding tentements. Four holy panels from Sophia Grande had been installed already to make pow er in the chapel's basement. They had lathes and drills and other machinery down there that the queens had told him to assemble. It was holy work indeed. One year, tw'o years? The work moved forw ard slowly, but the time would come some wondrous night when neutralizers would open up the barrier in a thousand places and the folk would burst from the Confinement and rage over the land like a herd of hungry locusts following Her lead. He stopped for a second and looked at the construction -- a wondrous design he'd made himself, modeled on the Grande. When it was done, the Lady would smile on Brinco. No other pack in Peacefreak would have a chapel so beautiful. Someday they'd call it Emmanuel Toronto Salazar Smith's gift to Her of the Expansion. He entered the chapel and kissed the stone book's nipple by the door. "Mercy please," he murmured. Head inclined he walked toward the empty wood-cage suspended from the loft above the votive light extinguished now that no queen sat and prophesied from the cage. He knelt down, careful not to smudge the raiding suit. Slowly he let the feeling rise in him. It came readily enough. He felt longing and desire. The holy bed stood on the right. Four weeks had passed since she'd been here. He let the feeling expand from the particularities of that one girl into the universality of the Lady. Emotions choked him, and the feeling burst out in a sob. "Queen Mother," he cried with lifted head sensing the people in the darkness behind him, feeling their emotion of dread at the agony in his voice. "Queen mother, precious bride and crone." His voice rang clear with erotic ardor. It shivered him to say it. "You saw fit to leave our midst as a slave to Maoling." "Maoling," the women murmured in the back. The murmur grated with harsh anger. Yes. They looked at the right altar railing ruined in the last assault when a handful of rubes and men had died in that surprise raid weeks ago. Manny had been at the Pile with most of the men. The redcaps had ravished her away. "Queen Mother Bride!" His eyes filled with tears of longing. Emmanuel Toronto Salazar Smith had loved Betty Simple, Brinco's queen. He'd dreaded the time when she would leave him in the course of things to journey to Sophia Grande. But she'd been taken before her year was up. He sobbed. He almost saw her pouting in the cage. She always pouted and her oracles were mixed with dark obscenities. But she had clung to him always in sacred intercourse on Janenights when the people came w ith candles. He saw her lay on the holy bed raised high on carved stilts below the cage. She had a yellow bow tied jn her hair and peace signs painted on her naked thighs. "Queen of Expansion, give my heart strength," he sobbed. "Secure me in the fire of the wall. Make me invisible to the squeeze. Grant me a queen for Brinco whose lips shall call the future clear. Mercy thanks." "Mercy thanks," the women hispered, and it sounded like w ind passing over straw. Manny bent his head. Slowly a lone voice behind him took up the Hymn in reedy tones. Then they all came in, a hundred Brinco fem-folk voices. The sound grew and enveloped him. Lady High in gracious splendour Grant us now the land beypnd. Homage to you now we render To secure the Sacred Bond. Jee, jee, jimeny high, Jee, jee, jimeny low. To secure the Sacred Bond To secure the Sacred Bow . , . M anny-man Toronto Salazar Smith rose, turned, and passed out between the women. Their dark eyes rested on his powdered face in serious, questioning expectation. At the door a deaconess gave him the wooden flower painted white and affixed to the end of a carved stick. Four times he'd held the stick; this was the fifth time. It would secure his passage through friendly and hostile territories despite the puritan threads and the yellow tie. Soon he left behind the last of the yellowred graffities with the green eyes of Manny-Man. He marched with fixed gaze, flower stick held high, fhe people made way for him and murmured "Mercy thanks." I hen later he entered Ecofreak land and they said nothing at all but let him go from pack turf to pack turf toward Forty-Second Street where lately Eco's had breached another wall and let raiders use the gap for a decagram of gold. The gold was in his pocket. Five rings, two armbands, fortyfive teeth, and a pendant. He wasn't sure about the pendant. That might be amalgam. Security tightened around FortyFifth Street. Ecofreaks knew they had a good thing. This was supposed to be one of the best gates through the Fire, a low-pressure spot in the shield. (They all claimed (hat, of course, they all did, and it was never true.) This pack had no need to fight on the Pile every eighteen days. Not when you had a gate. They had the gold and bought the bread. Checkpoint followed checkpoint. Each had a little scale and he had to empty his pocket. Each time a shrewd man fingered (lie pendant. "fhat's amalgam." "It may be that, but I'm a gram over." "So you are, Peacy, so you are." fhey examined the seal on the liottom of the tlower-stick pressed there by the Virgin Mom of Sophia (jrande with a ring on melted polyethylene. Then they waved him on. I hesc men said "Mercy thanks." I'or them it was a business. They didn't take sides. At the last stop they took his wealth and gave him directions. "Down into the sub over there, three llights. Then you go along the rails to the right for eighty meters, give or take. And then you'll see a eave-in on your left with a narrow break to the left of that. Through there. In a bit you'll see the shimmer. Good raiding." To them it was all routine. "How' much for a torch?" "Four nails." "Jeez. You rubes know to squeeze." The men shrugged. Manny-Man gave up four precious cigarettes and they lit a torch for him from one stuck in a crack in the wall. Emmanuel Toronto Salazar Smith set out with a torch in one hand and a flower in the other dow n dark stairs to get a queen for Brinco Pack lest the Lady frown and the pack fail in battle on the Pile. In a way he held their future in his hand. T he dinner in Karl Schmidt's honor was drawing to an end. Servants served ice cream to the guests who sat in bright red jackets around the oval table in a private dining room of the Crusade House. On the walls hung tapestries with slogans. fhe Special Assistant to the Lord Mayor had the word. "Herr Schmidt," he said, "you ask about the philosophical basis of the Confinement. Let me put it like this, flic basis is mercy and freedom. fhe guidance laid out in the Harmonizer's Science of Morals is clear. He writes, 'And make no mistakes about it. Punishment is presumption, but nonviolent withdrawal is permitted.'" The Lord Mayor said: "That's a mouthful. " The youthful Regional Crusade Rep broke in eagerly: "What Hendricks is saying, Herr Schmidt -- " "What I'm saying," Hendricks asserted, "is that we have eliminated punishment. It no longer exists." The Lord Mayor: "It's gone, it's gone." The City's Secretary for Perpetual Harmony leaned over his ice cream dish and gestured with an index finger: "The Constitution expressly forbids punishment, and we abide by that." "But we have a Cosmic Right to live in harmony," Hendricks augmented. The Lord Mayor: "There you have it." Hendricks: "We may withdraw nonviolently." The Secretary: "And we've done so, in effect." The Rep: "While we allow the dissidents every freedom within the boundaries of the Confinement." "They live in bliss with their covibrators," Schmidt said. "All have the same rights, of course. Principals and co-vibrators. We make no distinctions whatever." fhe Lord Mayor shook his head: "None! None!" Hendricks continued: "They have their lives, and we have ours, and that's the Lesser Harmony." "And the Greater?" "That'll come in time. We have a program we call Gradual Life Support Cutback." "Which is being implemented as their indigenous agriculture improves. Ultimately -- " "Pardon me, Mr. Hendricks, but people to live off agriculture on a part of Manhattan?" "We don't play numbers games around here, Herr Schmidt," Henthe Harmonizer has so aptly written, 'All things reach their appointed level.'" Schmidt said: "With all due respect, Mr. Hendricks, but back home we'd call that genocide," The Secretary for Perpetual Harmony broke the brief, awkward lies on gradual adjustments, natural attrition. We expect the birthrate to drop inside." "But now' it's rising." "A temporary phenomenon, Herr Schmidt." The Lord Mayor nodded: "Temporary, temporary." The Regional Rep explained: "We believe that the rate of growth shows signs of declining. Our experts on population dynamics expect that once a certain point is reached, the birthrate will take a sharp dip." "It seems to me that point should've been reached long ago." rhe Secretary shook his head: "Under normal circumstances, maybe. But these are antisocials." "Antisocials and their co-vibrators, don't forget,"  Schmidt said. "Yes, of course." "Look here, you guys!" The booming voice was the ComPol's. He had been silent too long. "Karl, here, he's a practical man. Let's not bend his ear with philosophy and stuff like that. The Confinement works. That's where I come out on this. Hey, Karl, how about a little steak sauce. The rest of us are on ice cream, and you haven't even touched your steak." Schmidt waved a hand defensively. "My stomach is still in Berlin." "Hey, that's a good one," ComPol chuckled. "His stomach's in Berlin. Karl, that's what I like about you, your sense of humor. Say, you won't mind watching tonight's operation, will you? Time change, and all that?" "You've convinced me that it will be interesting." The Rep broke in eagerly: "We finally think we've solved a big problem, Herr Schmidt. The Commissioner has said it well. The Confinement works, but -- " Hendricks cut in: "But that doesn't mean that we don't have very real practical problems." The Lord Mayor: "Very real." "For example?" The Secretary took a turn to elaborate: "I think that all of these gentlemen would agree that there remains a significant danger from within." "From w ithin the Confinement?" "Yes." "The Ghengis Khan threat." The Rep began: "What Mr. Hendricks means -- " "I mean the danger of unification." The Lord Mayor nodded gravely: "Ghengis Khan, yes!" Com Pol took the floor: "You've got to see it like this, Karl. There's a lot of real smart alecks in there, too smart for their own good." mentioned that to me. He fears that neutralizers might be invented and -- " "Hell, w'e assume they've done that," ComPol said. "We're worried about mass production. They might start that if they ever unify under some Ghengis Khan." Hendricks took the lead: "In practical terms, Herr Schmidt, we're limited in what we can do. The Constitution is clear on the subject, and so are the Harmonizer's writings. We may withdraw nonviolently, but we can't meddle with their internal politics." The Lord Mayor said: "No. That would be wrong, that's for sure." Schmidt looked around and addressed them all: "Isn't that a little incongruous? You lock up a third of the population but you scrupulously avoid interference on some Constitutional basis." "Herr Schmidt." Once more the Secretary filled a silence. "I think all of us would object to the phrase Mock up.' Sequestration is the term we use, and it is far more descriptive. 'Locking up' implies a form of punishment. We don't punish in New Harmony. You might, in Berlin, but we don't deprive people of their Freedom. We merely sequester them into their vibrational community." I'he Rep came in eagerly: "The writings arc quite explicit on the subject. Why, in Moral Science the Harmonizer writes -- " "Farley," Hendrieks broke in, "Herr Schmidt is not all that interested in the writings. I'm sure. But now that you bring it up, the quote you're groping for is: 'The just seek justice and the base baseness. Let us therefore establish a place of justice and a place of baseness. and let Mind sequester the wheat from the chaff.'" The Lord Mayor agreed: "Well put. well put." "Nevertheless, you do want to interfere." "We merely want to ensure that the Sequestration remains effective." "Why don't you let Mind do that?" file Rep eagerly threw in: "The Harmonizer writes: 'Mind works through Man as Man works through Mind."' "So you have to give Mind a Hand?" The Secretary for Perpetual Harmony smiled painfully and said: "I see, Herr Schmidt, that your sense of humor is very active, indeed. You sense a contradiction here, but the conflict is more apparent than real. Precisely put, the doctrine goes something like this: The 'hand' you refer to is actually a manifestation of Mind. Farley's quote should be understood in its poetic, not in its metaphysical sense. It appears in the Harmonizer's Science of Aesthetics." C omPol had grown restless again: "As one practical man to another. Karl, let me say this. We're lucky as hell that the boys in (here go on girly raids regular as clockwork, or we'd have our work cut out for us." " fell me about that. The phrase (his afternoon." "Girly raid?" "Yes." "Well, it's like this. Karl. When you're dealing with weirdos and crazies, there's always something like that -- something you can't explain. and the girly raids are one of those things. The big studs in there, the chiefs, they have to kidnap their girls from the Outside. It's a kind of... of a... an act of what-you-ma-call it... machismo, like. I mean, those guys go through agonies coming and going, and I guess it makes them look pretty big in the eyes of the crowd inside." The Rep interjected: "Of course, there is a more sophisticated explanation -- " "Which is," Hendricks continued, "that there's a differential moral pressure on this side of the barrier that pulls the chiefs. As it says in the .Science of Morals, 'The Victim is by far the stronger in such cases, acting like a magnet on filings."' The Lord Mayor: "Apt, apt." The Secretary said, pointing with a spoon: "I see that you're puzzled, Herr Schmidt. What Hendricks means is that -- " "I was coming to that," Hendricks said. "The theory is simply that we have a certain number of unidentified co-vibrators out here who attract the chiefs." "Let me see if I understand you," Schmidt said. "You're saying that the girls -- some girls -- wish to be kidnapped and so -- " "That's evident -- " " -- they get what they deserve?" "Where I come out on this," the Com Pol said, reasserting the practical again, "is that they come-, and that gives us a chance to educate them." do you do? Use some kind of drug?" "Goodness no," the Rep cried. The Secretary was also shocked: "That would be clearly illegal." Hendricks: "A breach of the Constitution." The Lord Mayor: "Breach, that's the word." ComPol said: "Karl, let me tell you what w'e'll be doing tonight and in the future. We'll vipple the guys and send them back in." "'Vipple' stands for Victim-Perpetrator Life Exchinge," Hendricks explained. The Rep chimed in with: "It's an educational tool, pure and simple." "It ain't simple!" ComPol protested. "It takes up three floors of a good-sized building. And it's damned expensive, too. But it should work. The boys tell me it'll work. It's like this, Karl. Used to be, we lectured to the chiefs. For one day. That's all we're allowed. We used to lecture them till they were blue in the face. But that didn't work. Now with vipple, we've got 'em." The Secretary held up his hands. "Gentlemen, gentlemen. You're going too fast for Herr Schmidt. He looks from face to face and I see that he is confused. Let me explain, covery, a phenomenal new device invented in our penal laboratories by Dr. Fieldgreen." ComPol: "You met him this afternoon." And the Rep: "It's a consciousness expander." Then Hendricks: "Let Herb explain." "What it does, Herr Schmidt, is this. It transfers the experience of one person to another, and viceversa. Clearly you get a tremendous expansion of eonseiousness." " fhat's possible?" "We've done it!" ComPol added: "Works like gangbusters." The Rep exulted: "It's a real breakthrough." Sehmidt shook his head. "I don't see how that would serve your purposes. How will that incapacitate the chiefs? That's your object, isn't it? To destroy their effectiveness?" Hendricks pushed his ice cream dish aside and said: "Whatever makes a chief a chief in there, it must be his superb adaptation, right?" "All right," Schmidt said. "I would agree." "Adaptation's a state of mind, right?" Schmidt shrugged. "All right; go on." guy's consciousness. That changes his state of mind." "Right," Schmidt conceded, "but it doesn't follow that he'll be maladapted. More likely, he'll be better adapted." "Not so," Hendricks said. "He loses his charisma." the Rep intcriccted. "and that's what these boys rule by. in there." " I hey become much more 'rellcctivc' -- that's the phrase." This was the Secretary. "Wc'vc got proof in the case of Abe Herenberg Sultzy Chico Kid." fhe Lord Mayor nodded: "Yes, the Kid." "Abe Herzenberg...?" ComPol saw his opening. "We've only vippled one guy so far. Abe Herzenberg Sultzy Chico Kid. (All of these guys have these long names -- more machismo.) We knew it'd work from the animal experiments, but we had to have a test case -- for the legality of it. So we vippled the Kid, and then w'e had some friends of ours file a friendly suit." fhe Rep: "It went all the way to the Celestial Arbiters." Hendricks: "And the case held. VPl.n is a legal educational tool." fhe Lord Mayor: "Legal's the word." . "Put what I wanted to say, Karl, is that it worked on this Sultzy Kid. Afterwards he was kind of a zombie, like, and so was the victim." Lor a second there was silence. I hen Schmidt began: "So you have a new technical innovation that, in effect..." He stopped. Richard door of the dining room. "It appears, gentlemen, that my guide is ready to take me from your midst." Heads turned. Then Hendricks said: "Herr Sehmidt. Let me try to sum up the Lord Mayor's thoughts about your visit, fhe people of Berlin and the people of the United Harmonies have a long and friendly history of mutual cooperation. We'd like your eity to be the first on the Continent to try a confinement. Conditions warrant it. Your people want it. Your Senate would vote for it if only you withdraw your opposition. The Mayor has that assurance from the delegation that came to visit us last year. The time for action is now, and we are at your service." The Lord Mayor said: "My sentiments, my sentiments." Ihe Regional Rep: "Such a venture w ould cement our deep cultural ties." And the ComPol: "Karl, old buddy, believe me, it's good to know they're behind that barrier, all nicely sequestered up, the whole damned lot of them, safe and secure." Finally, the Secretary for Perpetual Harmony: "A toast, gentlemen. I give you the Berlin (onllnement." Schmidt gave his glass of carrot juice a tiny lift. But he didn't drink to w hat he judged was pious, ignorant, official genocide, no, not even to be polite. T hey drove out of the Eastcoast Police Compound over a ribbed metal surface that made talk diffia van but Schmidt would have described as a station wagon. He sat formed chauffeur. It was nighttime in Manhattan. Schmidt found it odd to drive through what seemed to him more like a military reservation than a city (with its low concrete buildings. virtually empty streets, and its "buttoned-up-tight-for-the-night" atmosphere) while all around flickered a luminous replica of old New York. Sometimes the streets projected by the holograph generators didn't coincide with the real, the new , the neo-puritan road, so that the van drove through buildings, statues, lamp posts. When they got off the ribbed street and the high-pitched hum the operation that lay ahead, but Schmidt only half listened. His mind still mulled over the dinner conversation. chief was relatively easy once you knew the exit points he used. The barrier could be crossed at any point, of course, but the chiefs always came out underground to avoid detection. The surface was constantly patroled, and it was easy to pick them up as they spasmed on the ground. It took the better part of half an hour to recover from passage, and the chiefs liked to do so in privacy, of course. Now up ahead was an underground breach the Peacefreaks liked to use because it was near their territory, and that's where they were going now. The Department had set up an observation room from which the breach could be watched through hidden cameras. Once a chief was spotted. detectives would follow him until he made his move against a girl. Then they'd hustle him off to be vippled. German said yes, he'd been told a launched off into a description of that. He knew a lot about the animal tests that had been conducted and the technology -- work, he said, that had grown out of experiments with brain wave control in the sixties and seventies. But was pensive, he stopped, and they rode on in silence. Schmidt thought about RD, briefing package had made no mention of these things. Nor had there been mention of complex social arrangements inside the Confinements. No. Nor mention of a religious movement that had throw up a truly intriguing, original building. Despite its humble materials and seemingly random construction, Sophia Grande (even the name had stuck), reminded him in an odd sort of way of the cathedral in Cologne. Our Lady of the Expansion. It darkened his mood to think about that. Was it possible that an authentic new religion had been born inside the Confinement -- a new inspiration that would die along with the people when Harmony carried out "gradSchmidt imagined a conversation between Harmony officials. Said one: "Let's glitch the bastards." Said the other: "Yeah, let's glitch 'em, let's glitch 'em good." On the left people in spic-andspan clothing streamed out of the lighted rectangle of a large concrete building, a Meditation Hall. They vere gone in a flash as the van drove by, but they set Schmidt to thinking about the people on the Outside. Not the officials, the little people. How did they feel about the Confinements? America had become a remarkably quiet and placid place since the so-called "Renewal," that period of a year or more after Gunnison's take-over. They were said to resemble the Japanese of antediluvian times. (The Japanese resettlements on the Asian mainland were areas of turmoil, passion, and disorder. Class war raged. The Japanese had settled once and for all the argument about an unchangeable national character. There was no such thing.) Americans operated the great industrial plant -- for it remained great even after the disorders of l#-#()()#. I'hey farmed, raised cattle, moved goods, educated, comnumicted, and entertained themselves. But Harmony was not a world power, as the U.S. had been. Its financial and military tentacles were withdrawn and folded in a prim, clean lap. The striving, hustling, bustling spirit had gone out of Americans. All that they promoted now was the Confinements. Was that a clue? Had America withdrawn into itself to nurture a new creation? Or was it caught in the grip of a fatal disease? Was American placidity a kind of grand, national guilt? The car slowed down. Abruptly (hey were out of the holographic ghost town. The geometric uniformity of the real Manhattan lay beliind. The scene resolved into an ancient neighborhood of half-ruined brick buildings, dark in silhouette against the barrier's shimmer. The road ahead had narrowed, and in the headlights of the vehicle Schmidt saw the huge buckled concrete slabs of an impassable street. "We go on foot from here." The ear door opened and a light came held the door. "You're absolutely sale," he said. Sehmidt groaned a little as he got out. Ancient bones. "We've got this whole place staked a wide eirele w ith an electric torch Schmidt hadn't seen him activate. Schmidt stretched. He was still tired, despite the good snooze on the plane and a nap in the aseptic hotel room. The barrier was very near. It niiieh resembled a rainbow, but it was a dome of a rainbow, not merely a strip. Tiny firellies of current pulsed amidst the colors. It was beautiful in a way. gan's light on the broken pavement. and they walked into the darkness of brick. How the barrier was generated, the cost of generation, how deep it extended underground, and how high into the sky -- all that had been in the brochures. They knew all about the deletenious gynomax expansion but nothing about the l.ady of the Expansion. The abandoned old-fashioned buildings turned out to be part of a buffer zone between the barrier and the rest of the city. In a moment they were through it and emerged hesitated -- then moved to his left in a diagonal line across the razed terrain. In the jerkily moving ball of light. Schmidt saw bits of broken brick pressed into the clay, pieces of reinforcing bars dark with rust, and other litter. He had a wry thought. All this was a bit below par for the famous tidiness of New Harmony. Immediately up ahead (he barrier seemed to rise right out of the grourid. Suddenly Schmidt stopped. turned with him on the ground. Schmidt gestured. "Who're they?" The light moved and picked out a girl on the edge of the desolate, barren terrain. She stood near a brownstone that had been cut in hair by the giant bulldozer that must have cleared this strip of land. Behind her a bathtub hung like a whitish blob inside the shell of the building by a pipe. The girl stood very erect, very still. Her blond hair fell straight down. She wore a simple skirt and blouse. Neatly neo-puritan. Beyond her stood another girl in the same attitude, and beyond her yet another, and so on until the desolation curved away out of sight. hadn't replied. The young man fidgeted in obvious discomfort. "Well?" himself. Like every other official of the New Puritan Secular Order, he was an avid student of the Harmonizer's writings, but he didn't fully understand the doctrine of differential moral pressure that people gan the Vigil had always seemed a straightforward protest movement that should be put down without much ado, and that's how his superiors would behave, he thought, if they were free to act. But somehow a protest movement was not compatible with the doctrine of differential moral pressure. "Girls," he said lamely, unable to delay any longer. "Just some girls." .Schmidt raised his eyebrows at the evasive reply. Girls they were, so much was established; but he that. This was one hell of a lot more than girls. This was a formation of girls, fhe girls stood spaced out at five meter intervals. All stood in the same odd, almost reverent pose, Schmidt said: "Surely that can't be all? Come on. Hank. You have such nice initials for everything that I don't understand. Tell me what the letters are." added: "If you must know." When Schmidt raised his eyebrows again, he went a step further: "The Vigil of Protest." "Oh? I thought you people lived in harmony. All the malcontents are supposed to be behind that thing." Schmidt gestured at firellies in a sea of color. Inwardly Schmidt was pleased. Maybe the America he knew and loved hadn't died altogether. There was some hope. stitution," he said. He paused, struggling to find the right expression. "Oh, gee, it's complicated. You see, Karl, they're not organized. They never speak. They come alone: they leave alone. We've got agents tracking the lot, but wc'vc never been able to prove conspiracy. So it's not a protest under the Constitution." Pause. "God know s why they do it... Of course we have a theory." "Differential moral pressure? Unidentified covibrators?" "Oh. you've been told." "Lnough to understand, altogether enough," Schmidt said. "Of course no one bothered to tell me call it the Vigil of Protest?" "They don't call it anything. They xs come and stand here. The people call it that. It's just a phrase that's got about. We'd better be going, Karl." "Just a minute," Schmidt said. "How long has this been going on ' "As long as I can remember. I guess ever since the barrier went up. That'd be seven years." "So not all the people support the Confinement -- on the Outside, (liat is." protested. "Not a bit. Like you said, they're co-vibrators. They are gestured toward the barrier. "They rightfully belong in there. Could we go? This is the time they always start coming through. I don't want (o miss the action." Schmidt hesitated, but then he gave up, nodded, and followed an unmarked hole in the middle of the razed terrain. Once it must have been the entrance to the subways that no longer ran. I'hey went down and then, led by abandoned corridors amidst cobwebs and litter to a small room crowded with equipment. Two lounging detectives rose and were to a large screen set against the wall. It showed the sparkling light of the barrier edged on two sides by what looked like a broken wall. They sat down to wait for a chief. T he chief w as a long time in coming. At the moment he -- that is to say Emmanuel Toronto Salazar Smith -- sat on a rock in a cavelike enclosure w ith his hands around his face. He sat on a white handkerchief that he had spread out to protect his suit. From time to time he glanced up at the shimmering barrier that filled the cave with dim light. He glanced especially at the fireflies in the color, measuring their intensity. On two successive earlier tries, he had found the Fire too hot. Three chiefs had gone ahead of him, and it being the peculiarity of the Fire to intensify when someone passed through it, Manny-Man had had to wait. Now he still waited, guessing that in another hour or so he might chance it again. He smoked his last cigarette like a man condemned. He carefully smoothed the empty package and put it in his pocket. Then he waited without even that consolation. On the other side of the barrier, in the small observation room, the two detectives, accustomed now to the presence of the foreign visitor and bored by the absence of action on the flickering screen, resumed the argument .Schmidt's entrance had interrupted. They discussed the Flood. One maintained that the Flood had come because Ralph Waldo had prayed for Divine vengeance seeing that the Nation disregarded his counsel. Furthermore, the things that had gone on in California! The Devil himself had lived in California and had feasted his nostrils on the smoke of hippies and cats and children sacrificed by cultists on the beaches over fires of driftwood. It was no surprise to the detective that God should listen to Ralph's entreaties. He himself had known something would happen just from reading his Bible. The second one called the first a superstitious fool whose blabberings were a blasphemy and degraded the Great Mental Scientist. He wouldn't sit by and let any man make a petty tribal god out of Ralph Waldo. Ralph was the ultimate modern man -- a man who'd learned the law s both of Matter and Spirit. If this detective's opinion counted for anything, it was that Ralph had foreseen the Flood by searching the Future with his Third F.ye, the one the Hindoos said was right in the center of your forehead and oiened when you lived a strictly scientific life. As for the Bible, in his humble opinion, it was a corruption of something once valuable, but lor all practical purposes. it was as good as useless now . As this argument grew heated, rassed and tried to engage Schmidt in a competing conversation. But Schmidt waved him away. He said this was a most interesting and enlightening discussion. Hearing this, the detectives launched into ever greater flights of eloquence. rhus time passed. At last, in his cave, Manny-Man rose from his rock. He thought he detected a thinning of sparkles in the color, and when he tested the Fire w ith a finger, he found that it had lessened its bite. The third try would succeed, he decided. Three was the Lady's sacred number. This time he'd make it all the w ay through and not recoil from the suffocating nausea and the searing, paralyzing pain. He took a deep breath. His lear had become so intense that his bod no longer felt it. Sweat beads stood on his forehead and over his lip. He moved forward, but his feet were rooted in the clay dirt of the ground. He stared down and saw bits of old tile that had paved this area. "Please," he w hispered. "Please, l.ady, be with me, let me go, let it be over, please release me." The lady denied his request. Instead she made him think compulsively about the passage back which was also still before him. He'd have to make it carrying a girl in his arms. And he remembered Betty Simple as they'd passed through coming the other way -- not at this breach but at another. She had screamed in the middle of the hell ol Fire. And he'd stared at her face, licr open mouth, her terrified eyes. And Fire had clung to her lips and longue and teeth. Her brows and liair and eyes had flamed. And he'd almost fainted with the fear of Strangeness that had overcome his hod fear. "Be with me. Lady," he whispered again. He gave himself a little nudge forward, and this time his body obeyed him. He eased himself into llrsl, his face torn by a grimace. ( entimeter by centimeter he merged with the barrier and became a dark shape within its brilliance. Schmidt saw the figure first and called attention to it. It was a dark luimanoid shadow in the light. It came very slowly. Then at last Manny-Man broke out of the barrier, doubled over, swayed, and fell over like someone dead. He jerked involuntarily. Spasms passed over his half-bent form. Whisps of elecIromagnetic energy played over the exposed surface of his skin like names. Then the radiation died down to a shimmer on hands and face. Finally even the shimmer faded away. the disputatious detectives nodded. tense with excitement. "The yellow tie," he added with a glance at Schmidt. Schmidt marveled. The form on the ground testified to the excruciating agonies the slow passage must cause. Why did they do it? Surely only the deepest and most fundamental human motivation could induce a man to go through such torture. called for someone he dubbed Dragnet Five. He told the man they had a "live one." He gave instructions and emphasized that no action be taken until the subject had committed an act of force. "We've got to have an honest to goodness V-P pair," he concluded. "You know those chicks. They know the Constitution. We've got to get them dead to rights." Dragnet Five said that he understood. "It's all set. This should be clean as a whistle." He pointed to the screen where the Peacefreak still spasmed on the ground. "He'll come to in about twenty minutes. Then he'll clean himself. They believe they must be spic-and-span to go undetected. They always pick a nice clean spot on this side. I'll give you odds that he'll go under the strip and come up in the brick. Then I'd guess. He'll drag her back into the ruins. When he gets her into the shadow's, we'll move in." tration, all cop. He rubbed his hands. "And then?" Schmidt asked. "And then we'll vipple the pair." Ill T he girl waited to be snatched. Her name was Timmy McCallum, but in the Vigil they called her Rubeegol, which was the brandname of a lipstick. She also thought of herself as Rubeegol. She had left her old life behind. Everyone in the Visible Vigil had a code name, the necessary condition for surreptitious communications by telephone and letter. Communications were essential, for the Vigil orchestrated a widespread national protest -- and what it had become, the Expansion Plot. So the girls had code names, and the girlish chit-chat about nailpolishes, deodorants, depilatories, creams, ointments, unguents, and powders wasn't what it seemed. But it was more complicated than that. No member of the VV ever spoke to any other member, but they communicated nevertheless, using intermediaries, never fewer than three. The go-betweens were members of the Invisible Vigil. These girls never went near the forty-seven Confinements of New Harmony. Rubeegol came from the upper class. Her father belonged to the new aristocracy that had arisen Crusade Representative for Allied Donsanto International, one of two chemical giants in the country with headquarters in flood-safe St. Louis in Mokan Harmony. Rubeegol grew up in California. She took part in the East Rush when, following the earliest California tremors in February #, a third of the state's population (later called The Remnant) had literally climbed the Rocky Mountains and had thus escaped both the earthquakes and the Flood. Her father had been a space engineer in charge of a thousand people engaged in the formulation of nosecone coatings, and thus he had the management experience required for organizing one of the sixteen Remnant "Salients" that had fanned out all over the land east of the Rockies to generate the popular uprising in favor of Gunnison. Through the first years of the Renewal, Rubeegol had been an ardent Puritan, working as a nurse in the Civil Disturbance. When things settled down, she resumed her interrupted studies, and since went to Eastcoast. Here she witnessed establishment of the first Confinement, and she was one of the first girls in her class to join the Women's Protest which over time grew into the Vigil. Rubeegol served IV for nearly four years. She recruited eighty girls at last, and as a reward she was allowed to "take off her makeup," as they said in the Movement. She turned visible. She got her chance to enter Lady-service inside (he barrier. This was her three hundredth (lay of vigil. With days off and vacations counted in, that made nearly a year and a half of waiting -- time enough to grow impatient, time enough to wonder if she'd ever be snatched. Yet tonight she had a light heart, beneath the hard-nosed militancy (hat came with the acceptance of Vigil discipline, Rubeegol remained a woman. She didn't totally avoid (he pervasive anti-fern propaganda which said -- in effect -- that women were different: more sentimental, a little light headed, warmer of heart, iingifted in technology, and intui(ive rather than brainy. She knew all this for the pure bosh it was. Rubeegol knew all about women and what they could do. In a period of less than seven years, a handful of women (many of (hem active Puritans during the Renewal) had infiltrated the Confinements and established the Ladyeiilt. It had started as a collective effort, as a political tactic, a way to give cohesion and hope to the wretches in those unspeakable, bounded slums. But the Cult had developed a spirit and meaning of i(s ow n. The rituals devised to manage the masses had begun to act on (he originators, and now the Cult was something more. The bits and pieces of poetry and scripture taken almost at random from hundreds of sources and Xeroxed crudely to make a Holy Book had linked like fibers into a real Scripture with an oddly cohesive logic of its own. The concept of a stern yet benevolent Lady -- simultaneously Bride, Mother, and Ancient Crone -- now seemed real and vibrant with life. Taboos imposed merely to create an air of mystery turned out now to have inherent value. (One of these was the sanctity of metals of all kinds, and the command to save them.) Disciplines extracted to create order had created high morale. (One of these was the requirement that chiefs undergo the Ordeal of Fire to get a queen and hence to merit their positions of leadership.) Oracular pronouncements by pack and tribal queens became of necessity real oracles. And the sacramental fornications on Janenights -- chosen as a central rite because nothing less would have captured the attention of the debased population -- had become charged with symbolic significance. The Lady became the Cosmos, the Ecosphere, the Mild Adaptation, the Circle of Peace, the Song of Heaven, the Merciful, the Bond of Service. Her robe was the sky and her undergarments the rainbow, and the barrier itself the shelter of her skirts. In the Lady's name -- and later in Her service -- women worked to free the confined populations using any and all tools they could, including technical tools. Rubeegol stood on the edge of the razed terrain in shoes between whose soles cadmium flakes had been hidden, They would make solar panels, and the panels would power the underground factories. Her clothing was laced with other metals and fibers needed to make neutralizers. Progress was slow, but the first factory, the one beneath Sophia Grande in Eastcoast, already produced such devices. They couldn't be used yet. The authorities could detect neutralizer breaches. But they were being produced, and some day they would be used. Rubeegol was all too conscious of the fact that women had organized the metals smuggling, by-passing the detectors at the official gates through the device -- and the discipline -- of Queen Raids. Women had engineered the logistical system Outside as well as the production system within. Women had solved the complex problems presented by an environment so primitive the common people burned fecal waste to cook their meals. Women. Yes, women had done all that, a signal achievement. The Confinement had helped, of course. The psychic pressures generated by a population expanding against a barrier had prepared the folk for religious conversion. The brutal competition for food had created a longing for unity and peace -- and the Lady-cult supplied a kind of central union even as it pardoned and sanctioned the reality of vicious foodwar that it couldn't stop. Better that some live well than that all starve and Confinement become a graveyard of men and women without flesh on their bones. Meanwhile in every oracle every queen urged the people to make the Realm green. Women. She was proud to be a woman. Nevertheless, Rubeegol accepted from the Harmony propaganda what it pleased her to accept. She was superstitious when it pleased her, and she was more intuitive than men, when it pleased her. After all, she was a woman, and it was the ancient privilege of women to do what they pleased. She knew this in her bones. Tonight it pleased her to have an intuition. She would be snatched. She knew it. It also pleased her to be superstitious. She felt she had received too omens. This was the three hundredth day of her vigil, and the number three was sacred to the Lady. The second omen had been a flashlight beam pointed in her direction by two men who'd stood in the darkness and had then disappeared down the subway entrance. The light had picked her out. Why her? Why not one of the other vigilantes? Rubeegol felt sure it was a sign. She thought about that, and she thought about life inside the Realm, the year she'd spend inside a cage hung up in a church or chapel, the Janenights she'd announce whenever it pleased her. and then the work in Sophia (jrande on the great plot to break out of the bubbles and overrun the land. Her mind wandered off into the future and ranged over the past. She exulted in the thought that humanity would once again be reunited in America. The narrow, crabby aberration of a time would be swept away. But then she brought her mind back to her intuition, growing lldgety and nervous again. Her (ime was nearly up. She'd have to leave soon and then, after a measured interval, as if it had liappened at random, another girl would take her place. But no, she thought, that won't he. Tonight is the night. It was in the air about her. She telt a sense of expectation. Or was it just that the squeeze were thicker than usual? In that ruin to her left she'd seen the glow of a cigarette. Earlier she'd heard (he upsurge and abrupt cut-off of a transistor radio -- as if someone's Unger had slipped on the volume dial. They were out in force tonight. Well, she thought, they can't do anything to me. Is it that that I'm sensing? she wondered, momentarily worried. All those cops? No, she assured herself. It's real. I'll be snatched tonight. The police were remarkably well disciplined, by and large. Nevertheless Rubeegol had heard of girls What a banner month September Is for the science-fiction side of the house! Leading our mass-market list -- breaking out of the category and heading straight Clarke's smashing new novel! Backed by publicity, promotion and all the attendant fanfare reserved for mainstream for sf sales, perhaps even surpassing superior intelligence would be totaUy indifferent to man and his doings is indeed what Clarke is writing about." It's already won the Nebula and John W. Campbell Award... and we're betting on its taking the "triple crown!" If we had to nominate a cover as the best sciencefiction cover of this or any other) year, we'd opt for the Dean Ellis but, of course, we are totally impartial. Each year Ellis contributes several of the most imaginative and best executed covers in the business -- not only are they beautiful, but they sell books. Strangely, his name never appears on Hugo ballots... perhaps because his work is concentrated in the book field, and only exposure in sf magazines keeps an artist's name before the fans. Pity! Think about it... A year and something ago we read quite an off-beat yam in Galaxy: "A Voice and Bitter Weeping." You may remember it -- a delightful tale of some Israeli mercenaries who find themselves embroiled in a war between Texas and the United States. A novel idea, we thought! Indeed, enough ideas floating around to make a novel... and so we long-distanced the chaps responsible in Texas and asked for more -- # words more to be exact. And so, a year later, we offer The Texas-Israeli War? #, by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop. Rebellious Texans have kidnapped the President of the United STates and are holding him captive in Crystal City. His future -- and indeed the future of the country -- depends on a band of fearless Israelis whose courage has been tested in other wars! Sol Inglestein Is the delicious hero, and we nominate Alan -- Alda or Arkin -- to play the lead, when Hollywood discovers this fast-paced and delightfully exciting sf adventure. Finding science-flction short stories to publish is easy. Everybody's a writer -- or at least everybody thinks he's a writer. Finding good short stories to publish is quite another matter. Nonetheless, we've thrown our editorial hat into the originalanthology ring and are introducing Clement, Dickson, Foster, Lafferty, Niven, Rothman, Silververg, Simak and Vinge. The editor of this splendid new series is Judy-Lynn del Rey, who learned ail about science fiction in the eight years she was Managing Editor of Galaxy and IF. Now she is Ballantine's sf editor and writes most of these columns... she is also related to Lester del Rey by marriage. And last, but never least, we offer of everybody's favorite phenomenon written by Alan Dean Foster. Gene Roddenberry called from California the 'that Foster has really brought those characters to life... can hardly wait for the next one." Well, here it is, on sale follow in January. BB who'd been dragged off into the ruins by squeeze for a bit of forcible bushwack. She imagined a dirty old mattress, a heavy pressing body, hard breathing. She shook off the feeling. It had never happened to her, but it was the kind of thing a vigilante was supposed to take in her stride. You couldn't be sexually selective in this job. You'd be the mate of whatever chief snatched you, even if he turned out to be Frankenstein himself. Time passed. Rubeegol watched the play of fire in the barrier. An airplane flew by overhead. She grew sluggish and despondent. And when the feet dislodged a brick behind her in the ruin, she mistook the sound for the scamper of a rat. The man caught her totally by surprise. His final rush came too quickly to elicit anything resembling a reaction from her. The hand enveloped her mouth and crushed her nose. She gulped for air. A knee bruised the small of her back. Her hands fought frantically for balance as he pulled her back. Then she saw an explosion of stars. The pain rushed in just as her consciousness fled, S HE came awake in a speeding car. She opened her eyes for a second and immediately closed them again. One glimpse told her that she was in a police van. She lay on a cot. Peripherally she'd sensed another figure next to her, and at the foot of the cot had squatted a police technician in a white shirt. She'd recognized the gold-rimmed cap. In the wide front seat she'd seen two men next to a driver in a chauffeur's uniform. The tactic of camouflage rewarded her with information. The men in the front conversed, and she could hear them fairly well despite the rush of tires on the pavement. "Mind you," one voice said -- it was bright, young and eager. "We don't know for sure that it'll work, hut our psychologists swear it'll incapacitate the man." "By the expansion of his consciousness. I was told that; over dinner." The voice of an older man. Rubeegol detected an accent. Silence. The wheels whizzed over pavement. Rubeegol felt a dull ache on the side of her head, a throbbing. But she pushed that aside. She was thinking hard. She added one and one together. She had been snatched. In the moment before some hard object had exploded against her head, she'd known her attacker as a chief. By the smell. Not a cop, a chief. The pungent odor still hung in the car. It conjured up a llash-niemory of her uncle's farm. Men coming in from the hunt brought in that earthy odor, that redolence of animality. The figure she sensed next to herself must be a chief and her attacker. Adjustment operation, she thought with irritation. Clumsy attempt to influence the internal politics of the Confinement. It irritated Rubeegol because it meant a delay in her entry, nothing more. They would lecture the chief and, if it pleased them, they'd include her also under the 'victim' rubric of the law . At most they could carry on for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. Thereafter it was detention, and that was unconstitutional. Then they'd be released or placed inside EC. She preferred release. If she was pushed through the metal detectors at the official entry point, she would lose the precious cargo she carried. Up front the older man spoke; "You've assured me that it's legal, but I've been thinking. In Berlin we'd call it an invasion of privacy. Isn't that illegal here?" A foreigner, hence the accent. "Not if it's mutual," the young voice said. "The Celestial Arbiters found that an exchange of privacies was not covered." Rubeegol was puzzled. What on earth were they talking about now. An exchange of privacies? It sounded menacing, somehow. "Doesn't that come to the same thing?" Berlin asked. "It hurts them both, doesn't it? And even if we assume that the perpetrator deserves what he gets -- what about the victim? Those failure rates you cited earlier don't sound encouraging. Not for mice or rats or hamsters or guinea pigs; certainly not for people. You're exposing an innocent victim to the risk of schizophrenia. High risk, if your numbers are correct." "Innocent?" "Of course. The victim's innocent, of course." "We have a slightly different conception here," the young voice said. "We make no differentiation." Now Rubeegol understood a part of what they were talking about. Ralphy's Science of Morals, she thought. The victim invites the crime. Nothing ever happens by accident. If you get robbed, you want to get robbed. The Mind reaches out and grabs hold of Substance. Substance manifests in Phenomena. She thought of the ideological indoctrination she'd undergone during the Renewal and later in college. It had all made marvelous sense at one time. The older man said: "I had forgotten. That is your penological doctrine. That falls under the rubric of co-vibration, right? But I'd understood that you don't carry that principle into practice. Say a what then?" Rubeegol began to like the old man. The youngster answered: "As a rule we don't enforce that provision, and there is the exception clause where a victim can show that professional or scientific involvement with crime may have been the cause of the attack. But the point is, Karl, that we're legally covered. That's why we don't hesitate to vipple the girl. Legally she's as guilty as the man." But Rubeegol didn't hear what the older man said. The car ran over a ribbed surface now and tires hummed at a high pitch. She recognized the place by the sound. Good old familiar Police Compound. It was like home. They dragged you off to the Compound once a month at least for interrogation. They were on West Side near Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Third Street. The phrase rang through her mind. Vipple the girl. Vipple? Rubeegol began to feel strong apprehensions and judged it high time to come awake officially. She opened her eyes and looked about, sat up. There was a chief beside her, a handsome, dark brute of a man -- not Frankenstein, thank God. Her movement appeared to trigger motion in the technician who squatted at the foot of her cot. He reached down into a narrow black case between his legs. "Where am #? What is this? Where are you taking me?" She spoke calmly knowing the rules of the game. At her words the two men in the front seat immediately turned and the chauffeur glanced over his shoulder briefly. She saw an expression of sympathy in the grey eyes of the older man, but the young one looked stern. He said: "Calm yourself, chicky. Just don't get hysterical right away." "I'm not a bit hysterical. I just want to know where you're taking f  me. The young man turned to the technician who still fumbled with something between his knees. "Messerschmidt, you better give her a sedative. She's overwrought." "Now just a minute," Rubeegol cried, but she saw that it would do no good to argue. The technician had risen to a crouching position and approached her with an injector in his hand. His round cap almost brushed the roof of the van and he swayed with the motion of the vehicle. She struggled briefly when he bent over her, but the gun soon touched her arm at one point, and for the second time within a short span she felt the outrush of awareness. component was a room divided in the center by a pane of glass. One side contained two elaborate devices that reminded Schmidt of dentist's chairs. An impressive console stood between them. Wires ran from the console to instrument arms above each chair. On the other side of the glass were armchairs, couches, a coffee table, and other furniture reminescent of a doctor's waiting room. Dr. Fieldgreen, a little man in a white coat and sporting a goatee, stood by the glass with Schmidt on the coffee table behind them and leafed through a magazine. Beyond the glass, lab technicians prepared the V-P pair. Both the girl and the dark man were unconscious, and the technicians strapped them into the chair now. Dr. Fieldgreen apologized for the seeming simplicity of the set-up. He had a calm, precise delivery. "There is much, much more to sured Schmidt. "Our computer facilities are on the floor below, and the signal modulators occupy sixty cubic meters on the floor above." He pointed a finger at the white cork of the sound-proofed ceiling. "The rest of this floor is office space, labs, and the animal test areas, of course. Our annual dollars, but of course we spend most of that in outside contracts on component work. You see, Herr Schmidt, we are still looking for improvements. This process takes almost eight hours, which is unacceptable, totally unacceptable." Dr. Fieldgreen frowned and shook his head to underline his words. "How do you monitor the process," Schmidt asked. He had been toying with an idea he didn't care to share with anyone just yet. "Through instruments," the doctor said. "I failed to mention that, but we have a recording room next door where the wave patterns are graphed." "I meant," Schmidt pursued a little guardedly, "I meant human monitoring. Can't you... I guess I'd imagined that you could 'listen in' on the exchange between two people. Human monitoring..." The little man shook his head slowly but persistently. "No, no," he said. "No, no, Herr Schmidt." He lifted a finger. "First, it's highly dangerous. The danger of schizoid reaction is pronounced. In that area we are also expending some resources, as you can imagine. Second," and he added another finger, "there's what we call the Heisenberg effect. You see, Herr Schmidt, you can't monitor without participation, and so the monitoring itself would tend to interfere with the process. Third -- " "Excuse me. Doctor. I didn't understand you completely. You mean to say you don't know what is exchanged between the people?" "Of course we do. Their life experience." Dr. Fieldgreen pointed to the couple in the dentist chairs. Technicians were fitting loose nets of wire over the man's head. "'His experience will become her experience, and her memories, feelings, etc., will become his memories and so forth." "Do you mean that he'll lose his memories and get hers?" Schmidt asked incredulously. "No, no. Each will retain his or her memories as well. The process is additive." "Hmm," Schmidt said, thinking, "But as for substance, the content of those memories. Do you monitor..." "We have no way of monitoring that -- unless, of course, we were to ridiculous." "Then how do you know what takes place?" "Through animal tests." "But how can you be sure? One animal picks up what another animal has learned?" the other's behavioral repertoire." Schmidt shook his head in wonder. If it was true, if it really worked, this device could fantastically magnify human powers. "Third," Dr. Fieldgreen said. Schmidt looked at him in puzzlement. Then he saw the three fingers in the air. "One more question. Dr. Fieldgreen, before you go on to your third point. Dr. Fieldgreen, has it create a superman?" The doctor nodded. "It has. But we don't think it wdll. It hasn't created a supermouse or a superrat at this point. As a matter of fact, the tendency is in the other direction. Vippled laboratory animals tend as a whole to underperform in the maze. We have a theory about that. We eall it the Field Capacity Syndrome. We assume, and I think rightly, that the brain can only absorb and hold so much information -- what w'e call field capacity. And if it's overloaded, you get a leaching effect. The additional input seeps away. That seems to be (he actual situation. Two sets of experience get mixed up, but only a portion of each remains, and consequently the subject loses mental coordination. At least that was the obvious result with Abe Herzenberg Sultzy Chico Kid." Abe Herzenberg Sultzy Chico Kid. Superrats and supermice. Mental leachate dripping through the psychic ether. A strange world, Karl Schmidt thought, which made mice and rats the model for Man assuming no discontinuity in the spectrum of life between rodent and poet. Maybe there was no sharp and obvious break. Maybe man was nothing more than a superrat... "Third," Dr. Fieldgreen said. Schmidt gave the persistent doctor a glance. "Oh. Of course. Third, Dr. Fieldgreen." "Third," said the doctor, "we wouldn't monitor even if we could. That would be an illegal invasion of privacy." "Why. of course," Schmidt said. "I'd forgotten about that." D r fieldgreen threw the switch shortly after midnight. The instrument panel on the console between the chairs came alive in multichromatic splendor. In the chairs the man and girl seemed unaware that anything had transpired. They sat strapped in, asleep or comatose, their faces even and peaceful as if they were dreaming. Each had a netting draped about the head with wires extending from the netting to the instrument arm and from there to the console. Furthermore, Schmidt understood that the impulse from her chair passed, through the console, into the signal modulator banks on the floor above; and from there, presumably modulated, to the computer banks on the floor below; and from there, appropriately digitalized, into the console; and from there, through the cables, to his chair. And vice versa. Schmidt watched, wondering if he would have a chance to do the foolish thing he had decided to do. The large group that had assembled soon dispersed again. There was nothing to see, no drama, no action. Nevertheless, Schmidt continued standing before the glass, his arms folded in front, his eyes on the couple. He was aware that his continued presence Dr. Fieldgreen. appeared at his elbow and suggested that they retire now. The process would continue until eight in the morning, there would be no change... But Schmidt shook his head. First, his personal body-clock now said that it was nearly seven in the morning in Berlin, the time he habitually rose without the help of an alarm. Soon he would get up and put on his thick blue-white robe. In the refrigerator would be a cool carton of yogurt. Five after seven the bell would ring and Rudi, the baker's son, would bring him hot, crisp rolls. Second, Schmidt was much too interested in this process to abandon the scene now. ing out the yogurt part. Then he tapped the young man on the shoulder in a fatherly way. "Go on home and get a good rest," he said. "You probably have a wife waiting for you." peared that he had no wife. He was only thirty-two, and ani-fer asked you not to marry until thirty-five. "However that may be," Schmidt said, "please feel free to go." And third, he thought. But the real reason why Schmidt wanted to stay he kept to himself. somewhat morosely he sat down on the couch and picked up the magazine he had been reading. It was the latest issue The Meditative Scientist. The lead article was "Gunnison's Contributions in Mental Chemistry." A little after two in the morning, rose and told Schmidt that, if it was all right with him, he'd slip off and lived. Schmidt told him he'd made a wise decision and asked what phone number of his room written out on a slip of paper torn from a page of the magazine. Call him anytime. Then he bade good night and left. Still Schmidt waited. Apart from the hum of machinery and the on-and-off throb of an air compressor somewhere overhead, there was very little activity in two Dr. Fieldgreen put In an appearance and stayed for a short chat. He parted saying that he'd be unavailable for a while. His assistant, Miss Virginia Haut, could be reached by pushing that button just to the left of the Harmonizer's picture on the wall. Miss Haut spoke German like a native. Dr. Fieldgreen said, as if to encourage Schmidt, and then he also left. Miss Haut did not make an appearance, but Schmidt noted that a technician entered the action room in half hour intervals, glanced at instruments, and made marks on a sheet affixed to a clipboard. After a while Schmidt went to the toilet and, on the way, he looked around a bit. He opened a door here and glanced into a room there, and he saw that the place was empty. For a while he contemplated pairs of rats wired in gleaming glass containers as they exchanged lives. A papercluttered office with wood paneling would be Dr. Fieldgreen's domain. Over the doctor's desk he saw a clock. The time was nearly four. Schmidt went back to the waiting room just in time to see the technician enter with his clipboard. Schmidt watched while inside his fifty-nine year chest his heart beat like that of a nine-year old. At last the technician took his leave, and Schmidt took a deep breath to calm himself. He squared his shoulders and walked through the glass door in the glass wall disregarding the IV E mmanuel Toronto McCallum Salazar Rubeegol Timmy Smith whirled away into celestial agonies and then dropped down again like a leaf abandoned by the breeze. And then the breeze came back again and carried the androgynous Creature up again in a spiral through corridors of fusing experience... back, back, back once more to that which had been, until the plasticities of perception collapsed again and the Creature fell in a darkness down, down, down... but never far enough down, never down to the dark, still, limpid rest for which it longed. It was a roller-coaster to exhaustion. Each successive pass penetrated deeper and fused ever more experience. Cell clusters fell into the relentless wine press of some kind of electronic force and gave up the juices of memory, and a male juice mingled with a female juice and dried on parched vistas of burning nerve deserts into visions. The Creature seethed with an enormity of insight. It longed to stop and to assess the fantastic experience. Its fused parts started dialogues constantly interrupted by brutal shoves into yet other, deeper, and stranger tangles of recall. On the ends of the whirling, egg-shaped mental cosmos cracks began to form. The Creature sensed in panic that those cracks might open and drain away the last cohesion of its being. Its structure of awareness groaned in the final stages of a pleasure so intense that it was a searing pain. Stop, screamed the Creature, falling once more, falling into a black darkness of total exhaustion. Stop, it screamed. I can't stand it any more. And it stopped. Incredibly, it stopped. The Creature fell. It was a leaf in the shaft of a deep well. The orange-red blaze of experience was a receding circle of light above. It came down slowly, turning. It came to rest on the still surface of a motionless sea. For a timeless moment the Creature braced for the inevitable kick of forces that would spiral it up from its floating bed into a thousand tortures of mingling, but the kick didn't come. The Creature lay softly and there was only a wondrous silence all about. In that stillness and in that darkness, the Creature shaped an ego from the chaos by an act of reflection, and it discovered itself to be Emmanuel Salazar, a Puerto Rican male, lately the leader of a clump of humanity inside a penal reservation on the island of Manhattan. For sound but unconscious reasons, Salazar also used numerous other names, including the patronymic 'Smith,' whose purpose, he realized, was to set him apart and to enhance his authority with the suggestion of Anglo ancestry. He ruled by a combination of skill and instinct -- a magnetic personality, quick executive reflexes, and an instant conceptual grasp of smallunit warfare. He commanded respect and won high shares of the Man's food distribution, and therefore he was the key element in Brinco Pack's survival. Through some kind of mechanical contrivance, the Eastcoast police had exposed him to the inner experience of the girl he had chosen for his fifth Queen, and he knew this because she knew it. He assumed that Rubeegol also knew what he knew. She was the agent of a Movement they called Lady-cult inside the Confinement, and the network embraced, by Salazar's calculation, at least fifteen percent of all women Outside. Within a short time, perhaps less than a year, again by his calculations -- combining what he knew (and now, for the first time, really understood) and what she knew -- all of the Confinements in New Harmony would burst open like seedpods and engulf a surprised and unsuspecting world. From the ensuing collision would come -- by inference from historical, cultural, anthropological, and psychological studies that Rubeegol's mind had furnished him as evidence -- a great cultural efflorescence. Salazar smiled at the bottom of the well cradled in a leaf on the measureless ocean of darkness. He retraced the mingling with Rubeegol's mind and now, in that stillness, he understood the process itself and how the fusion of memories had taken place. Unaware of the mechanism, he had resisted the experience with all of his ego energies, and in the process he'd almost destroyed the structure of his mind. If he ever had to do it again, he would know what to do. He'd cast aside all resistance and plunge with a cry of abandon into the alien mind -- so very much the same as his own, so very much One and inseparably human. And then he saw' the dot of orange light at the top of the well grow in diameter until it became a blazing sun that came dowm toward him with a rush of light and fire, and he plunged eagerly into the kind, surprised, but welcoming mind of Karl Schmidt, Superintendent of the Berlin Police. T he long arm of the clock on the wall moved dangerously close to the six. Schmidt expected the technician to come in any second with the clipboard. Don't go yet, Salazar's mind said to him. Give her time to recover and to consolidate her ego. There was a kind of laughter in the mind, a joyousness, an anticipation. He loves her, Schmidt thought. Of course I love her, Salazar laughed. How canyon help but love someone you are. They both knew that Rubeegol's mind had swayed on the brink of collapse when Schmidt had at last released her for the leaf-like drop to the bottom of the well. They also knew that, given time, she'd make the same discoveries as Salazar had made, for she knew what he knew. Her impact on Schmidt had been lar more brutal than Salazar's. Schmidt had clutched his head at the temples when the force pulled him into the panoramas of her being. He had reared back like an epileptic with the shock. The man, by contrast, was in control. He gave of himself or he denied as he wished. He could carry on a conversation or wander about Schmidt's memories taking this and leaving that. The power of his mind enveloped Schmidt and made the old man marvel at the potentialities of the human brain. But time was running out. The consequence of a discovery were more hazardous than the benefit of another minute's rest for Rubeegol. Schmidt thought "Good-bye" to Salazar and removed the netting from his head. He replaced it carefully over the girl's blond hair and then, furtively, like a fifty-nine year schoolboy, he slipped out through the door into the waiting room. He'd left just in time. The technician entered and made for the gauges on the instrument console between the chairs. He lingered somewhat longer than usual, and his face darkened with puzzlement. He glanced at Rubeegol. He moved to her side. He removed and then replaced the netting on her head. Finally, back at the console, he nodded to himself and made a notation on his board. Schmidt sought the comfort of the couch, sank down, and closed his eyes. He smiled to himself, rich with information about the Eastcoast Confinement. He, she, and Salazar knew something perhaps no one else knew so well -- the shape of the future. He knew less than they did, of course. He'd only gotten a brief, confused glimpse, but it had been enough to cheer him. Schmidt also hoped that the glimpse of him that was now theirs would have a balmful influence -- like a vitamin or other vital trace element -- in the growth of the Movement. He was sure that both of them would play major, perhaps decisive, roles in its future. The experience had drained him, although it was still early. At the moment, in Berlin, it went on toward eleven in the morning -- almost time to walk down to Cafe Mayer where, in company of men who had long retired, Schmidt took a cup of coffee, a small brandy, and granted himself a single cigar. Midmorning. He dozed off. restored to a pink, scrubbed, cheerful self full of eagerness to please. He brought a thermos of coffee for Herr Schmidt and a sweet roll. At a quarter to eight Dr. Fieldgreen walked through the waiting room muttering to himself. He clutched a set of paper discs marked by squiggly lines. He came back through again and then yet once and asked what it was that bothered him so. "Back to the drawing boards," Dr. Fieldgreen muttered. He slapped a set of disks with a limp hand. "There is an inexplicable change in the pattern. It happened between four and four-thirty. We can't figure it out." He glanced at Schmidt. "Did you observe anything, Herr Schmidt?" Schmidt shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid I won't be much help. lurch last night, I confess I followed his example and fell asleep on the couch." He smiled. "Sorry." "Damnable pattern," Fieldgreen muttered, staring down at the disk. "It's almost as if..." He shook his head and walked out again. laboratory staff arrived for the conclusion of the exercise. They crowded around the glass of the observation room while inside technicians uncoupled the victim-perpetrator pair. Schmidt stood at the window pretending consuming interest, but he already knew the strategy the couple would follow, something that he had worked out in a nanosecond exchange of thought between himself and Salazar, It all went as planned. The couple acted disoriented, sluggish, and stupid. Everyone beamed on Schmidt's side of the glass and exchanged pleased nods and glances. Just like Abe Herzenberg Sultzy Chico Kid. Unresisting, the couple let itself be led into the van. Then, again, the group drove in early morning light -- it was overcast now -- through the much diminished shimmer of holographic images north to the edge of the Confinement. Detectives pushed the couple out of the van on the periphery of the brick. It looked far more dreary and desolate to Schmidt than it had in the rainbow-shimmer of the night. Before the van backed away again, leaving the pair outlined against the ruins, both he and she contrived to shoot a glance of full awareness to Schmidt, a look only the three of them understood. The van backed away, turning. It lurched forward, backed again in the narrow road, and thea it pulled away toward the concrete geometricities of Manhattan. Emmanuel Salazar looked at the girl and she looked at him. Her face was his face, and he could read her eyes almost as if they were his own. There was still a little strangeness about her. He didn't know all about her; he hadn't plumbed her deepest being. The German had saved them. He had interrupted the process, and they both retained unviolated sanctuaries of irreducible privacy. His mind wheeled with the enormity of the task ahead, and he sensed that she had the same thought. So much to do. Harmony's new technology must be replicated. Raiding chiefs must be ence. Greater cohesion must be created w'ithin. Forces must be freed for production work. Time w as of the essence. They had to win opened before his mental eyes. Soon he'd be chief of Peacefreak Tribe and later chief of chiefs. The process would be inevitable. He felt within him the fire and eloquence to move hearts, the will to overcome, and the intelligence to see the answers. And Rubeegol would remain his partner and mate throughout. She'd become the Lady's surrogate. She of the Visible Expansion. Together they would link the Confinements into a coordinated w'hole. She'd rule the temple, and he'd rule the war. He saw a flickering in her eyes, and with gladness he dropped these thoughts and smiled at her in response. "You know, of course, that I love you." "I never would have guessed," she said. They embraced and kissed. When they broke apart, she said: "No, darling, I won't scream in the Fire like Betty Simple did." "That's encouraging," he said. "And I promise that I'll bathe occasionally." "I'd call that progress," she said. "Come on," he said, "after a night like this, I can hardly wait to get to know' you," "What've you got in mind," she asked. "A Janenight in the morning?" "No, no. I don't particularly care to be watched. Let's have a dry run." "Not too dry," she said, and they both laughed. fectly ordinary year. On July #th of that year, at #:# in the afternoon, Berlin's Superintendent of Police boarded Lufthansa's Flight #I for the transatlantic trip to Germany -- and lest the old man get the wrong impression, a delegation of Eastcoast officials followed him all the way to the end of the ramp of Peaceful Abiding International Airport's international terminal. Karl Schmidt stood before them, tall, grave, his long face kindly. He had been briefed, he had been toured, and now he assured the gentlemen that he had seen a very, very impressive display of American ingenuity. Yes, indeed, he said, America was and remained the land of promise, the beacon of the future. The officials were clearly pleased, and they waved to him as he boarded the jumbo jet. Hank him and made sure that he had a pillow and that his hat was properly put away into the overhead rack. Then, tears in his eyes, he shook hands with the German and, with a sob, turned and walked out. The plane took off and flew away east. Soon it plunged into the night that came rushing west. Schmidt did not sleep this time. He spent some hours on Level II, in the lounge, with a bottle of wine. He chatted with the senior stewardess. He enjoyed a light. Continental dinner. He browsed through some European newspapers he hadn't seen in days and caught up on all the latest scandals, abductions, and civil disturbances. Finally he walked up the stairs to the observation room of the tripledecker jumbo. He took up a position in front of one of the large oval windows, folded his arms across his back, and reflected on the mysterious unfolding of destiny. Strange, he thought, very strange. Inadvertently, unconsciously -- or perhaps inspired by a kind of madness that is really the ultimate in sanity -- Ralph Waldo Gunnison had stumbled onto the solution, one solution. He had intensified the disunities, separations, fragmentations, hatreds, and alienations that plagued the world. He had magnified the global disease to a point where man's genius at last found an answer. A new culture grew like a fetus inside the womb of Confinement, and it would burst forth soon, its face still shrouded, its character unrevealed. For a while there would be turmoil and the clash of forces old and new; but then the world would hear a new song and march to a new drumbeat. Schmidt knew what he would tell the Senate. Wait, he'd say to them. Wait a couple of years. Oh, yes. Plan by all means. Plan in a low-key sort of way. Don't announce it to the public. Planning would take the Senate's attention off the issue. It would set their mind at ease about the future. And the future, Schmidt knew, would be revealed soon. In two years there would be no longer any Confinements on earth. The huge machine hummed competently through the darkness. In the sky stars hung in silence, unmoving. Then, suddenly, much sooner than he had expected, dawn drew a bright line across the horizon.  Like the man said: "War is Hell." rwHiNK you're going to like man on double crutches. Rob Jenne turned from the streams of moving cargo to his unnoticed companion in the shade of the starship's hull. His own eyes were pale gray, suited like his deadwhite skin to Burlage, whose ruddy sun could raise a blush but not a tan. When they adjusted, they took in the clerical collar which completed the other's costume. The smooth, black synthetic contrasted oddly with the coveralls and shirt of local weave. At that, the Curwinite's outfit was a cut above Rob's own, the same worksuit of Burlage sisal that he had worn as a quarryhand at home. Uniform issue would come soon. At least, he hoped and prayed it would. When the youth looked away after an embarrassed grin, the priest chuckled. "Another damned old fool, hey boy? There were a few in your family, weren't there... the ones who'd quote the Book of the Way saying not to kill -- and here you go off for a hired murderer. Right?" He laughed again. seeing he had the younger man's attention. "But that by itself wouldn't be so hard to take -- you were leaving your family anyway, weren't you, nobody really believes they'll keep close to their people after five years, ten years of star hopping. But your mates, though, the team you worked with... how did you explain to them why you were leaving a good job to go on contract? 'Via!'" the priest mimicked, his tones so close to those of Barney Larsen, the gang boss, that Rob started in surprise, "you get your coppy ass shot off, lad, and it'll serve you right for being a fool!" "How do you know I signed for a mercenary?" Jenne asked, clenching his great, calloused hands on the handle of his carry-all. It was everything he owned in the universe in which he no longer had a home. "And how'd you know about my Aunt Gudrun?" "Haven't I seen a thousand of you?" the priest blazed back, his eyes like sparks glinting from the drill shaft as the sledge drove it deeper into the rock. "You're young and strong and bright enough to pass Alois Hammer's tests -- you be proud of that, boy, few enough are fit for Hammer's Slammers. There you were, a man grown who'd read all the cop about mercenaries, believed most of it... more'n ever you did the Book of the Way, anyhow. Sure, I know. So you got some off-planet factor to send your papers in for you, for the sake of the bounty he'll get from the Colonel if you make the grade -- " The priest caught Rob's blink of surprise. He chuckled again, a cruel, unpriestly sound, and said, "He told you it was for friendship? One a these days you'll learn what friendship counts, when you get an order that means the death of a friend -- and you carry it out." Rob stared at the priest in repulsion, the grizzled chin resting on interlaced fingers and the crutches under either armpit supporting most of his weight. "It's my life," the recruit said with sulky defiance. "Soon as they pick me up here, you can go back to living your own. right now?" "They'll come soon enough, boy," the older man said in a milder voice. "Sure, you've been ridden by everybody you know... now that you're alone, here's a stranger riding you too. I don't mean it like I sound... wasn't born to work, I guess. There's priests -- and maybe the better ones -- who'd say that signing on with mercenaries means so long a spiral down that maybe your soul won't come out of in another life or another hundred. But I don't see it like that. "Life's a forge, boy, and the purest metal comes from the hottest fire. When you've been under the hammer a few times, you'll find you've been beaten down to the real, no lies, no excuses. There'll be a time, then, when you got to look over the product... and if you don't like what you see, well, maybe there's time for change, too." The priest turned his head to scan the half of the horizon not blocked by the bellied-down bulk of the starship. Ant columns of stevedores manhandled cargo from the ship's rollerway into horse and oxdrawn wagons in the foreground: like most frontier worlds, Burlage included, self-powered machinery was rare in the backcountry. Beyond the men and draft animals stretched the fields, studded frequently by orange-golden clumps of native vegetation. "Nobody knows how little his life's worth till he's put it on the line a couple times," the old man said. "For nothing. Look at it here on Curwin -- the seaboard taxed these uplands into revolt, then had to spend w'hat they'd robbed and more to hire an armored regiment. So boys like you from -- Scania? Felsen? -- " "Burlage, sir." "Sure, a quarryman, should have known from your shoulders. Y ou come in to shoot farmers for a gang of coastal moneymen you don't know and wouldn't like if you did. " The priest paused, less for effect than to heave in a quick, angry breath that threatened his shirt buttons. "And maybe you'll die, too; if the Slammers were immortal, they wouldn't need recruits. But some that die will die like saints, boy, die martyrs of the Way, for no reason, for no reason... "Your ride's here, boy." T he suddenly emotionless words surprised Rob as much as a scream in a silent prayer would have. Hissing like a gun-studded dragon, a gray-steel combat car slid onto the landing field from the west. Light dust puffed from beneath it: although the flat-bed trailer behind was supported on standard wheels, the armored vehicle itself hovered a hand'sbreadth above the surface at all points. A dozen powerful fans on the underside of the car kept it floating on an invisible bubble of air, despite the weight of the fusion power unit and the steel-iridium armor. Rob had seen combat cars on the entertainment cube occasionally, but those skittering miniatures gave no hint of the awesome power that emanated in reality from the machines. This one was ten meters long and three wide at the base, the armored sides curving up like a turtle's back to the open fighting compartment in the rear. From the hatch in front of the powerplant stuck the driver's head, a blank-mirrored ball in a helmet with full face shield down. Road dust drifted away from the man in a barely-visible haze, cleaned from the helmet's optics by a static charge. Faceless and terrible to the unfamiliar Burlager, the driver guided toward the starship a machine that appeared no more inhuman than did the man himself. "Undercrewed," the priest murmured. "Two men on the back deck aren't enough for a car running single." The older man's jargon was unfamiliar but Rob could follow his gist by looking at the vehicle. The two men standing above the waisthigh armor of the rear compartment were clearly fewer than had been contemplated when the combat car was designed. Its visible armament comprised a heavy powergun forward to fire over the head of the driver, and a similar weapon, also swivel-mounted, on either side to command the flanks and rear of the vehicle. But with only two men in the compartment there was a dangerous gap in the circle of fire the car could lay down if ambushed. Another vehicle for escort would have eased the danger, but this one was alone save for the trailer it drew. Though as the combat car drew closer, Rob began to wonder if the two soldiers present  couldn't handle anything that occurred. Both were in full battle dress, wearing helmets and laminated back and breast armor over their khaki. Their faceplates were clipped open. The one at the forward gun, his eyes as deep-sunken and deadly as the three revolving barrels of his weapon, was in his Ibrties and further aged by the dust sweated into black grime in the creases of his face. His head rotated in tiny jerks, taking in every nuance of the sullen crowd parting for his war-car. The other soldier was huge by comparison with the first and lounged across the back in feigned leisure: feigned; because either hand was within its breadth of a powcrguirs trigger, and his limbs were as controlled as spring steel. With careless expertise, the driver backed his trailer up to the conveyor line. A delicate hand with the fans allowed him to angle them slightly, drifting the rear of the combat car to edge the trailer in the opposite direction. The larger soldier contemptuously thumbed a waiting horse and wagon out of its slot. The teamster's curse brought only a grin and a big hand rested on a powergun's receiver, less a threat than a promise. The combat car cased into the space. "Wait for an old man," the priest said as Rob lifted his carryall. "and I'll go with you." Glad even for that company, the recruit smiled nervously, fitting his stride to the other's surprisingly nimble swing-and-pause, swing-and-pause. The driver dialed back minusculy on the power and allowed the big vehicle to settle to the ground without a skip or a tremor. One hand slid back the face shield to a high, narrow nose and eyes that alertly focused on the two men approaching. "The Lord and his martyrs!" the driver cried in amazement. "It's Blacky himself come in with our newbie!" Both soldiers on the back deck slewed their eyes around at the cry. The smaller one took one glance, then leaped the two meters to the ground to clasp Rob's companion. "Hey!" he shouted, oblivious to the recruit shifting his weight uncertainly, "Via, it's good to see you! But what'rc you doing on Curwin?" "I came back here afterwards," the older man answered with a smile. "Born here, I must've told you... though we didn't talk a lot. I'm a priest now, see?" "And I'm a flirt like the load wc'rc supposed to pick up," the driver said, dismounting with more care than his companion. Abreast of the first soldier, he too took in the round collar and halted gapemouthed. "Lord, I'll be a coppy rag if you ain't," he breathed. "Whoever heard of a blower captain taking the Way?" ".Shut up. Jake," the first soldier said without rancor. He stepped back from the priest to take a better look, then seemed to notice Rob. "Umm," he said, "you the recruit from Burlage?" "Yessir. M-my name's Rob Jenne, sir." "Not 'sir', there's enough sirs around already," the veteran said. 'Tm Chero, except if there's lots of brass around, then make it Sergeant-Commander Worzer. Look, take your gear back to the trailer and give Leon a hand with the load. "Hey, Blacky," he continued with concern, ignoring Rob again, "what's wrong with your legs? We got the best there was." "Oh, they're fine," Rob heard the old man reply, "but they need a weekly tuning. Out here we don't have the computers, you know; so I get the astrogation boys to sync me up on the ships' hardware whenever one docks in -- just waiting for a chance now. But in six months the servos are far enough out of line that I have to shut off the power till the next ship arrives. You'd be surprised how well I get around on these pegs, though..." Leon, the huge third crew member, had loosed the top catches of his body armor for ventilation. From the look of it, the laminated casing should have been a size larger; but Rob wasn't sure anything larger was made. The gunner's skin where exposed was the dense black of a basalt outcropping. "They'll be a big crate to go on, so just set your gear down till we get it loaded," he said. Then he grinned at Rob, teeth square and slightly yellow against his face. "Think you can take me?" That was a challenge the recruit could understand, the first he could meet fairly since boarding the starship with a one-way ticket to a planet he had never heard of. He took in the waiting veteran quickly but carefully, proud of his own rock-hardened muscles but certain the other man had been raised just as hard. "I give you best," the blond said. "Unless you feel you got to prove it?" The grin broadened and a great black hand reached out to clasp Rob's. "Naw," the soldier said, "just like to clear the air at the start. Some of the big ones; Lord, testy ain't the word. All they can think about's what they want to prove with me... so they don't watch their side of the car, and then there's trouble for everybody." "Hammer's Regiment?" called an unfamiliar voice. Both men looked up. Down the conveyor rode a blue-tunicked ship's man in front of what first appeared to be a huge crate. At second glance Rob saw that it was a cage of light alloy holding four... "Dear Lord!" the recruit gasped. "Roger, Hammer's," Leon agreed, handing the crewman a plastic chit while the latter cut power to the rollers to halt the cage. The chit slipped into the computer linkage on the crewman's left wrist, lighting a green indicator when it proved itself a genuine bill of lading. There were four female humanoids in the cage -- stark naked except for a dusting of fine blue scales. Rob blinked. One of the near-women stood and with a smile -- Lord, she had no teeth! -- and rubbed her groin deliberately against one of the vertical bars. "First quality Genefran flirts," Ixon chuckled. "Ain't human, boy, but the next best thing." "Better," threw in Jake, who had swung himself into the fighting compartment as soon as the cage arrived. "I tell you. kid. you never had it till you had a flirt. Surgically modified and psychologically prepared. Rowf!" "N-not human?" Rob stumbled, unable to take his eyes off the cage, "you mean like monkeys?" Leon's grin lit his face again, and the driver cackled, "Well, don't know about monkeys, but they're a whole lot like sheep." "You take the left side and we'll get this aboard," Leon directed. I he trailer's bed was half a meter below the rollerway so that the cage, though heavy and awkward, could be slid without much lifting. Rob gripped the bars numbly, tuniing his face down from the tittering beside him. "Amazing w hat they can do with implants and a w ig," Jake w as going on, "though a course there's a lot of cutting to do first, but those ain't thedifferences you see, if you follow. The scales, now -- they have a way -- " "Lift!" Leon ordered, and Rob straightened at the knees. They took two steps backward with the cage wobbling above them as the girls -- the flirts! -- squealed and hopped about. "Dowm!" and cage clashed on trailer as the two big men moved in unison. Rob stepped back, his mouth w orking in distaste, unaware of the black soldier's new' look of respect. On an y work left a man used to awkward weights. "This is foul," the recruit marveled. "Are those really going back with us for, for..." "Rest'n relaxation," Leon agreed, snapping tie-downs around (he bars. "But how..." Rob began, looking again at the cage. When the red-wigged fiirt fondled her left breast upward, he could see the implant scars pale against the blue, fhe scales were more thinly spread where the skin had been stretched in molding it. "I'll never touch something like that. Look, maybe Burlage is pretty backward about... things, about sex, I don't know. But I don't see how anybody could... I mean -- " "Via, wait till you been here as long as we have," Jake gibed. He clenched his right hand and pumped it suggestively. "Field expedients. that's all." "On this kinda contract," Leon explained, stepping around to get at the remaining tie-downs, "you can't trust the local girls. Least not in the field, like we are. The Colonel likes to keep us patrol sections pretty much self-contained." "Yeah," Jake broke in -- would his cracked tenor never cease? "Why, some of these whores, they take a razor blade, see -- in a cord, you know? -- and, well never mind." He laughed, seeing Rob's face. "Jake," Sgt. Worzer called, "hop in." The driver slipped instantly into his hatch. t)isgusting as Rob found the little man, he recognized his ability. Jake moved with lethal certainty and a speed that belied the weight of his body armor. "Ready to lift, Chero?" he asked. T he priest was levering himself toward the starship again, Worzer watched him go for a moment, shook his head. "Just run us out to the edge of the field," he directed. "I got a few things to show our recruit before we head back; nobody rides in my car without knowing how to work the guns." With a sigh he hopped into the fighting compartment. Leon motioned Rob in front of him. Gingerly, the recruit stepped onto the trailer hitch, gripped the armored rim with both hands, lifted himself about. Leon followed. The trailer bonged as he pushed off from it, and his bulk cramped the littered compartment as soon as he grunted over the side. "Put this on," Worzer ordered, handing Rob a dusty, bulbous helmet like the others wore. "Brought a battle suit for you, too." he said, kicking the jointed armor leaning against the back of the compartment, "but it'd no more fit you than it would Leon there," The black laughed. "Gonna be tight back here till the kid or me gets zapped." "Move'er out," Worzer ordered. The words came through unsuspected earphones in Rob's helmet, although the sergeant had simply spoken, without visibly activating a pickup. The car vibrated as the fans revved, then lifted with scarcely a jerk. From behind came the squeals and chirrups of the frills as the trailer rocked over the irregularities in the rammed-earth field. Worzer looked hard at the starship's open crew portal as they hissed past it. "Funny what folks go an' do," he said to no one in particular. "Via, wonder what I'll be in another ten years." "Pet food, likely," joked the driver, taking part in the conversation although physically separated from the other crewmen. ".Shut up, Jake." repeated the blower captain. "And you can hold it up here, we're out far enough." fhe combat car obediently settled on the edge of the stabilized area. The port itself had capacity for two ships at a time; the region it served did not. Though with the high cost of animal transport many manufactures could be star-hopped to Curwin's back country more cheaply than they could be carried from the planet's own more urbanized areas, the only available exchange was raw' agricultural produce -- again limited to the immediate locality by the archaic transport. Its fans purring below audibility, the armored vehicle rested on an empty area of no significance to the region -- unless the central government should choose to land another regiment of mercenaries on it. "Look," the sergeant said, his deep-set eyes catching Rob's, "we'll pass you on to the firebase when w'e take the other three frills in next week. They got a training section there. We got six cars in this patrol, that's not enough margin to fool with training a newbie. But neither's it enough to keep somebody useless underfoot for a week, so we'll give you some basics. Not so you can wise-ass when you get to training section, just so you don't get somebody killed if it drops in the pot. Clear?" "Yessir." Rob broke his eyes away, then realized how foolish he must look staring at his own clasped hands. He looked back at Worzer. "Just so it's understood," the sergeant said with a nod. "Leon, show him how the gun works." The big black rotated his weapon so that the muzzles faced forward and the right side was toward Rob and the interior of the car. The mechanism itself was encased in dull-enameled steel ornamented with knobs and levers of unguessable intent. The barrels were stubby iridium cylinders with smooth, two-centimenter bores. Leon touched one of the buttons, then threw a lever back. The plate to which the barrels were attached rotated # degrees around their common axis, and a thick disk of plastic popped out into the gunner's hand. "When the bottom barrel's ready to fire, the next one clockwise is loading one a these" -- Leon held up the # cm disk -- "and the other barrel, the one that's just fired, blows out the empty." "There's a liquid nitrogen ejector," Worzer put in. "Cools the bore same time it kicks out the empty." "She feeds up through the mount," the big soldier went on, his index finger tracing the path of the energized disks from the closed hopper bulging in the sidewall, through the ball joint and into the weapon's reeeiver. "If you try to lire and she don't, check this." I'he columnar finger indieated but did not move the stud it had first pressed on the side of the gun. " That's the safety. She still doesn't lire, pull this" -- he clacked the lever, rotating the barrel cluster another one-third turn and catching the loaded round that flew out. "Maybe there was a dud round. She still don't go, just get down outa the way. We start telling you about second-order malfunctions and you won't remember where the trigger is." "Ah, where is the trigger?" Rob asked diffidently. Jake's laughter rang through the earphones and Worzer himself smiled for the first time. The sergeant reached out and rotated the gun. "See the grips?" he asked, pointing to the double handles at the back of the receiver. Rob nodded. "Okay," Worzer continued, "you hold it there" -- he demonstrated -- "and to fire, you just press your thumbs against the trigger plate between'em. Let up and it quits. Simple." "You can clear this field as quick as you can spin this little honey," l.eon said, patting the gun with affection. "The hicks out there" -- his arm swept the woods and cultivated fields promiscuously -- "got some started, but no powerguns to mention. About all they do since we moved in is maybe pop a shot or two off, and hide in their holes." " riicy've got some underground stockpiles," Worzer said, amplifying l.eon's words, "explosives, maybe some factories to make rifle ammo. But the Colonel set up a recce net -- spy satellites, you know -- as part a the contract. Any funny movement day or night, a signal goes down to whoever's patrolling there. A couple calls and we check out the area with ground sensors... anything funny then -- vibration, hollows showing up on the echo sounder, magnetics -- anything! -- and bam! we call in the artillery." "Won't take much of a jog on the way back," Leon suggested, "and we can check out that report from last night." "Via, that was just a couple dogs," Jake objected. "Okay, so we prove it was a couple dogs," rumbled the gunner. "Or maybe the hicks got smart and they're shielding their infra-red now . Been too damn long since anything popped in this sector." "Thing to remember, kid," Worzer summed up, "is never get buzzed at this job. Stay cool, you're fine. This car's got more firepower'n everything hostile in fifty kilos. One call to the firebase brings in our arty, anything from smoke shells to a nuke. The rest of our section can be here in twenty minutes, or a tank platoon from the firebase in two hours. Just stay cool." T urning forward, the sergeant said. "Okay, take her home, Jake. We'll try that movement report on the way." The combat car shuddered off the ground, the frills shrieking. Rob eyed them, blushed, and turned back to his powergun, feeling conspicuous. He took the grips, liking the deliberate way the weapon swung. The safety button was glowing green, but he suddenly realized that he didn't know the color code. Green for safe? Or green for ready? He extended his index finger to the switch. "Whoa, careful, kid!" Leon warned. "You cut fifty civvies in half your first day and the Colonel won't like it one bit." Sheepishly, Rob drew back his finger. His ears burned, mercifully hidden beneath the helmet. They slid over the dusty road in a fiat, white cloud at about forty the recruit, but he realized that the car could probably move much faster were it not for the live cargo behind. Even as it was, the trailer bounced dangerously from side to side. The road led through a gullied scattering of grain plots, generally fenced with withes rather than imported metal. Houses were relatively uncommon. Apparently each farmer plowed several separate locations rather than trying to work the rugged or less productive areas. Occasionally they passed a roughgarbed local at work. The scowls thrown up at the smoothly-running war car were hostile, but there was nothing more overt. "Okay," Jake warned, "here's where it gets interesting. Sure you still want this half-assed check while we got the trailer hitched?" "It won't be far," Worzer answered. "Go ahead." He turned to Rob, touching the recruit's shoulder and pointing to the lighted map panel beside the forward gun. "Look, Jenne," he said, keeping one eye on the countryside as Jake took the car off the road in a sweeping turn, "if you need to call in a location to the firebase, here's the trick. The red dot" -- it was in the center of the display and remained there although the map itself seemed to be flowing kitty-corner across the screen as the combat car moved -- "that's us. The black dot" -- the veteran thumbed a small wheel beside the display and the map, red dot and all, shifted to the right on the panel, leaving a black dot in the center -- "that's your pointer. The computer feeds out the grid coordinates here" -- his finger touched the window above the map display. Six digits, changing as the map moved under the centered black dot, winked brightly. "You just put the black dot on a bunker site, say, and read off the figures to Fire Control Central. The arty'll do all the rest." "Ah," Rob murmured, "ah... sergeant, how do you get the little dot off that and onto a bunker like you said?" There was a moment's silence. "You know how to read a map, don't you, kid?" Worzer finally asked. "What's that, sir?" The earphones boomed and cackled with raucous laughter. "Oh my coppy ass!" the sergeant snarled. He snapped the little wheel back, re-centering the red dot. "Lord, I don't know how the training cadre takes it!" Rob hid his flaming embarrassment by staring over his gunsights. He didn't really know how to use them, either. He didn't know why he'd left Conner's Stoneworks, where he was the cleanest, fastest driller on the whole coppy crew. His powerful hands squeezed at the grips as if they were the driver's throat through which bubbles of laughter still burst. "Shut up, Jake," the sergeant finally ordered. "Most of us had to learn something new when we joined. Remember how the of man found you your first day, pissing up against the barracks?" Jake quieted. They had skirted a fence of cane palings, brushing it once without serious effect. Russet grass flanking the fence flattened under the combat car's downdraft, then sprang up unharmed as the vehicle moved past. Jake seemed to be following a farm track leading from the field to a rambling, substantially-constructed building on the near hilltop. Instead of running with the ground's rise, however, the car cut through brush and down a half-meter bank into a broad-based arroyo. The bushes were too stiff to lie down under the fans. They crunched and howled in the blades, making the car buck, and ricocheted wildly from under the skirts. The bottom of the arroyo was sand, clean-swept by recent run-off. It boiled fiercely as the car first shoomped into it, then ignored the fans entirely. Somehow Jake had managed not to overturn the trailer, although its cargo had been screaming with fear for several minutes. "Hold up," Worzer ordered suddenly as he swung his weapon toward the left-hand bank. The wash was about thirty meters wide at that point, sides sheer and a meter high. Rob glanced forward to see that a small screen to Worzer's left on the bulkhead, previously dark, was now crossed by three vari-colored lines. The red one was bouncing frantically. "They got an entrance, sure 'nough," Leon said. He aimed his powergun at the same point, then snapped his face sheild down. "Watch it, kid," he said. The black's right hand fumbled in a metal can welded to the blower's side. Most of the paint had chipped from the stencilled legend: grenades. What appeared to be a lazy overarm toss snapped a knobby ball the size of a child's fist straight and hard against the bank. Dirt and' rock fragments shotgunned in all directions. The gully side burst in a globe of black streaked with garnet fire, followed by a shock wave that was a physical blow. "Watch your side, kid!" somebody shouted through the din, but Rob's bulging eyes were focused on the collapsing bank, the empty triangle of black gaping suddenly through the dust -- the two ravening whiplashes of directed lightning ripping into it to blast and scatter. The barrel clusters of the two veterans' powerguns spun whining, kicking gray, eroded disks out of their mechanisms in nervous arcs. The bolts they shot were blue-green Hashes barely visible until they struck a target and exploded it with transferred energy. The very rocks burst in droplets of glassy slag splashing high in the air and even back into the war-car to pop against the metal. I. con's gun paused as his fingers hooked another grenade. "Hold it!" he varned. The sergeant, too, canic ofl the trigger, and the bomb arrowed into the now-vitrified gap in tlic tunnel mouth. Dirt and glass shards blew straight back at the bang. A stretch of ground sagged for twenty meters beyond the gully wall, closing the tunnel the first explosion had opened. I hen there was silence. Even the frills, huddled in a terrified heap on the Hoor of their cage, were soundless. Cjlowing orange specks vibrated on Rob's retinas; the cyan bolts had been more intense than he had rcali.cd. "Via," he said in awe. "how do they dare...?" "Bullet kills you just as dead," Worzer grunted. "Jake, think you can climb that wall?" "Sure. She'll buck g mite in the loose stuff." The gully side was a gentle declivity, now, where the grenades had blown it in. "Wanna unhitch the trailer first?" "Negative, nobody gets off the blower till we cleaned this up." "Umm, don't want to let somebody else in on the fun, maybe?" the driver queried. If he was tense, his voice did not indicate it. Rob's palms were sweaty. His glands had understood before his mind had that his companions were considering smashing up, unaided, a guerrilla stronghold. "Cop," Leon objected determinedly. "We found it, didn't we?" "Let's go," Worzer ordered. "Kid. watch your side. They sure got another entrance, maybe a couple." The car nosed gently toward the subsided bank, wallowed briefly as the driver fed more power to the forw ard fans to lift the bow. With a surge and a roar, the big vehicle climbed. Its fans caught a few pebbles and w hanged them around inside the plenum chamber like a rattle of sudden gunfire. At half speed, the ear glided toward another fenced grainplot, leaving behind it a rising pall of dust. "Straight as a plumb line," Worzer commented, his eyes flicking his sensor screen. "Bastards'll be waiting for us." R ob glanced at him -- a mistake. The slam-spang! of shot and ricochet were nearly simultaneous. The recruit whirled back, bawling in surprise. The rifle pit had opened within five meters of him. and only the haste of the darkfeatured guerrilla had saved Rob tVoni his first shot. Rob pivoted his powergun like a hammer, both thumbs mashing down the trigger. Nothing happened. The guerrilla ducked anyway, the black circle of his foxhole shaped into a thick crescent by the lid lying askew. Safety, safety! Rob's mind screamed and he punched the button fatfingered. The rifleman raised his head just in time to meet the hose of fire that darted from the recruit's gun. The guerrilla's head exploded. His brains, flash-cooked by the first shot, changed instantly from a colloid to a blast of steam that scattered itself over a threemeter circle. The smouldering fragments of the rifle followed the torso as it slid downward. The combat car roared into the field of waist-high grain, ripping dow n twenty meters of woven fencing to make its passage. Rob, vaguely aware of other shots and cries forward, vomited onto the floor of the compartment. A colossal explosion nearby slewed the car sidew ays. As Rob raised his eyes, he noticed three more swarthy riflemen darting through the grain from the right rear of the vehicle. "Here!" he cried. He swiveled his weapon blindly, his hips colliding with Worzer in the cramped space. A rifle bullet cracked past his helmet. He screamed something again but his ow n fire was too high, bluegreen droplets against the clear sky, and the guerrillas had grabbed the bars w hile the frills jumped and blatted. The rifles were slamming but the frills were in the way of Rob's gun. "Down! Down!" he shouted uselessly, and the red-haired frill pitched across the cage with one synthetic breast torn away by the bullet she had leaped in front of. l.eon cursed and slumped against Rob's feet, and then it was Chero Worzer shouting, "Hard left, Jake," and leaning across the fallen gunner to rotate his weapon. The combat car tilted left as the bow came around, pinching the trailer against the left rear of the vehicle -- in the path of Worzer's powergun. fhe cage's light alloy bloomed in superheated fireballs as the cyan bolts ripped through it. Both tires exploded together, and there was a red mist of blood in the air. The one guerrilla who had ducked under the burst dropped his rifle and ran. Worzer cut him in half as he took his third step. fhe sergeant gave the wreckage only a glance, then knelt beside Leon. "Cop, he's gone," he said, fhe bullet had struck the big man in the neck between helmet and body armor, and there was almost a gallon of blood on the floor of the compartment. "Leon?" Jake asked. "Yeah. Lord, there musta been twenty kilos of explosive in tl.'at satchel charge. If he hadn't hit it in the air..." Worzer looked back at the wreck of the trailer, then at Rob. "Kid, can you unhitch that yourself?" "You just killed them," Rob blurted. He was half blinded by tears and the after-image of the gunfire. "Via, they did their best on us, didn't they?" the sergeant snarled. His face was tiger striped by dust and sweat. "No, not them!" the boy cried. "Not them -- the girls. You just -- " Worzer's iron fingers gripped Rob by the chin and turned the recruit remorselessly toward the carnage behind. The frills had been torn apart by their own fluids, some pieces flung through gaps in the mangled cage. "Look at'em, Jenne!" Worzer demanded. "They ain't human but if they was, if it was Leon back there. I'd a done it." His fingers uncurled from Rob's chin and slammed in a fist against the car's armor. "This ain't heroes, it ain't no coppy game you play when you want to! You do what you got to do, 'cause if you don't, some poor bastard gets killed later when he tries to. "Now get down there and unhitch us." "Yes, sir." Rob gripped the lip of the car for support. Worzer's voice, more gentle, came through the haze of tears: "And watch it, kid. Just because they're keeping their heads down don't mean they're all gone." Then, "Wait." Another pause while the sergeant unfastened the belt and bolstered handgun from his waist and handed it to Rob. Leon wore a similar weapon, but Worzer did not touch the body. Rob wordlessly clipped the belt, loose for not being fitted over armor, and swung down from the combat car. The hitch had a quick-release handle, but the torqueing it had received in the last seconds of battle had jammed it. Nervously aware that the sergeant's darting-eyed watchfulness was no pretense, that the shot-scythed grainfield could hide still another guerrilla, or a platoon of them, Rob smashed his boot heel against the catch. It held. Wishing for his driller's sledge, he kicked again. "Sarge!" Jake shouted. Grain rustled on the other side of the combat car and against the sky beyond the scarred armor loomed a parcel. Rob threw himself flat. T he explosion picked him up from the ground and bounced him twice, despite the shielding bulk of the combat car. Stumbling upright, Rob steadied himself on the armored side. The metal felt odd. It no longer trembled with the ready power of the fans. The car was dead, lying at rest on the torn-up soil. With three quick strides, the reeruit rounded the bow of the vehicle. He had no time to inspect the dished-in metal, because another swarthy guerrilla was approaching from the other side. Seeing Rob, the e.-farmer shouted something and drew a long knife. Rob took a step back, remembered the pistol. He tugged at its unfamiliar grip and the weapon popped free into his hand. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to finger the safety, placed just as the tri-barrel's had been, then trigger two shots into the face of the hinging guerrilla. The snarl of hatred blanked as the body tumbled face-down at Rob's feet. The knile had flow n somewhere into the grain. "Fbros?" a man ealled. Another lid had raised from the ground ten meters away. Rob fired at the hole, missed badly. He climbed the caved-in bow , clumsily one-handed, keeping the pistol raised. There was nothing but twisted metal where the driver had been. Sgt. Worzer was still semi-erect, clutched against his powergiin by a length of structural tubing. It had curled around both his thighs, fluid under the stunning impact of the satchel charge. The map display was a pearly blank, though the window above it still read incongruously # and the red line on the detector screen blipped in nervous solitude. Worzer's helmet was gone, having flayed a bloody traek across his scalp as it sailed away. His lips moved, though, and when Rob put his face near the sergeant's he could hear, "The red... pull the red tab..." Over the left breast of each set of armor were a blue and a red tab. Rob had assumed they were decorations of some sort. He shifted the sergeant gently. The tab was locked down by a eotter pin which he yanked out. Something hissed in the armor as he pulled the tab, and Sgt. Worzer murmured, "Oh Lord. Oh Lord." Then, "Now' the stimulant, the blue tab." After the second injection sped into his system, the sergeant opened his eyes. Rob was already trying to straighten the entrapping tube. "Forget it," Worzer ordered weakly. "It's inside, too... damn armor musta Hexed. Oh Lord." He closed his eyes, opened them in time to sec another head peak cautiously from the tunnel mouth. "Bastard!" he rasped, and faster than he spoke he triggered his powergun. Its motor whined spitefully though the burst went wide. I'he head disappeared. "I want you to run back to the gully," the sergeant said, resting his eyes again. "You get there, you say 'Fire Central'. That cuts in the arty frequency automatic. Then you say, 'Bunker complex... Worzer looked down. '"Slx-onelour, five-seven-nine.' Stay low and wait for a patrol." "It won't bend!" Rob snarled in frustration as his fingers slid again Ironi the blood-slick tubing. "Jenne, get your ass out of here, now. " "Sergeant -- " "Lord curse your soul, get out or I'll call it in myself! Do I look like I wanna live?" "Oh, Via..." Rob tried to reholster the pistol he had set on the bloody floor. It slipped back with a clang. He left it, gripping the sidewall again. "Maybe tell Dad it was good to see him," Worzer whispered. "You lose touch in this business, Lord knows you do." "Sir?" "The priest... you met him. Sergeant-Major Worzer, he was. Oh Lord, move it -- " At the muffled scream, the recruit leaped from the smashed war car and ran blindly back the way they had come. He did not know he had reached the gully until the ground flew out from under him and he pitched spread-eagled onto the sand. "Fire Central," he sobbed through strangled breaths, "Fire Central." "Clear," a strange voice snapped crisply. "Data?" "Wh-what?" "Lord and martyrs," the voice blasted, "if you're screwing around on firing channels, you'll wish you never saw daylight!" "S-six... oh Lord, yes, six one four, five seven nine," Rob singsonged. He was staring at the smooth sand. "Bunkers, the sergeant says it's bunkers." "Roger," the voice said, businesslike again. "Ranging in fifteen." Could they really swing those mighty guns so swiftly, those snubbarrelled rocket howitzers whose firing looked so impressive on the entertainment cube? "On the way," warned the voice. The big tri-barrel whined again from the combat car, the silent lash of its bolts answered this time by a crash of rifle shots. A flattened bullet burred through the air over where Rob lay. It was lost in the eerie, thunderous shriek from the northwest. "Splash," the helmet said. The ground bucked. From the grainplot spouted rock, smoke and metal fragments into a black column fifty meters high. "Are we on?" the voice demanded. "Oh Lord," Rob prayed, beating his fists against the sand, "Oh Lord." "Via, what is this?" the helmet wondered aloud. Then, "All guns, battery five." And the earth began to ripple and gout under the hammer of the guns.  phere #, his six-by-nine flop with its Class # components became moonlit sandy beach complete with sound of surf, smell of sea. He donned his autobarber, buckled his excribelt and pondered the mysteries of a simulated gibbous moon. There should be a lighthouse, he felt, and a girl with a strange mind, though he had never seen a beach or an ocean -- had never, in fact, felt any inclination to venture beyond Bubble #I of MetroEast. It was Friday night, and Norm w as looking forward to the political meeting. As he sealed his alumalloy suit, he noticed some oldstyle letters that seemed to be flashing in the night sky just below the 'moon. Norm knew what they were because he had studied letter-reading to fulfill a requirement for his M agister's #:#, the stray message flashed. "Don't know anyone named Ronnie," Norm said aloud. He ondered if he should request a transceiver circuit-check, since Mom had been behaving erratically lately. He pushed the tramway button and waited. The political party was in Cornroom #, two levels up and four sections west. Norm would be there in less than an hour, he figured, barring a chainbreak or a tramjam. He checked his CL# digit, set for six hours tlopleave every weekend and tramway to any pubplace in Bubble #I -- except the Mayor and other exec thinktanks. The tram arrived and opened... ness suit trudged along a pitted macadam road toward the lighthouse, his body hunched forward, his hands hanging almost to his knees. Shouts and laughter penetrated the roar of the surf; waited for the youngsters climbing the scarp from the beach sixty feet below. It was a warm July evening, the sun still half an hour high. Three, five, eight naked bodies scrambled onto the dune top. They pulled up abruptly when they spotted Cal, the old man, and nodded to him in a half-hearted gesture of respect. "Norma, Supper Service tonight -- come along." "Yes, Father Witch," she replied, separating herself from the others. The two walked toward the lighthouse. The kids walked across the road and then, laughing, hurried to Lovelane. Norma climbed the steel ladder and pushed through the hatch into the cage. In the dark she found the acety'ene inlet-line cock, opened it, it the pilot flame in the lamp. When the big light ignited she removed the bar from the spokes of the sprocket wheel, and as the links of the weighted chain engaged the sprocket the light began to revolve. She listened to the familiar scratch of the chain as the light played upon the multiprismed lens. When she returned to the galley. Cal was pouring coffee through a strainer. On the table lay an open volume of the Annals of Tacitus. The lighthouse was stocked with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Martinson's coffee, Chivas Regal and editions of classical texts. "Ten minutes to curtain," Cal said. "You've been in the radio room nearly an hour." "A lot of news tonight," Cal said. "You were right about Ron. They found him about fifteen miles down the beach." "Dead?" "Very." "Stupid." Norma blinked back tears. "Stupid to pull lobster traps in that fog. He didn't know which way to swim." "Something odd about all this and about the radio. I'll tell you about it later, after the show. Now bring the fish." The beacon of Nauset Light, flashing in the night sky, summoned the Stonies to the Supper Service. Arriving in couples and family groups from what had once been vacation cottages and summer homes, they seated themselves in a semicircle about the driftwood fire. They wore skirts of salt grass and sea lettuce, necklaces of mollusk shell, bracelets of seapolished pebbles. Norma walked out of the lighthouse first, ceremonially clad in a white cotton dress. She placed the striped bass on the fire. Cal, who had followed her, stepped forward into the center of the circle and intoned the familiar ritual: Our land is named for a fish Out of the sea we have come From the sea we are fed May we feed forever on its mystery Out of death has come life -- The waters turned black Death piled upon the sand and stank The flies came bringing plague And the men died turning black in turn Those who fled are the living dead Tomorrow belongs to the sea people And to those who are dreamers of dreams Father Witch in heaven Deliver us from evil omens "There will be a heavy fog tomorrow morning," Cal continued in his ordinary voice. "It will burn off before noon. One of the Gibson girls in Gonquet has had quadruplets -- two girls and two boys. The raiding party has returned to Metro. It's safe to move back to the bay side. Two Metromen will arrive in a small copter later tonight or tomorrow. Do not kill them. This is important. Bring them to the lighthouse. They won't be armed..." After the service Norma sat alone under the stars and stared into the embers of the fire. The children were peaceful except forH'ab who was cold and uneasy. Sleep, sleep, my child, she said to the uneasiness in her mind. Then her other self was in a room full of people dressed in the metal clothes of Metromen. One of them, whose back was to her, had a familiar posture. When he turned, Norma saw he was Ron. He recognized her and seemed equally astonished. "Norma." a voice called from the darkness. Not Ron's voice. She stood up but said nothing. "Norma," the voice came again, closer. She could make out Garth's ligure and the feathered bonnet of I he Cosgard commune chief. "Norma, come with me." "You have your own women." "Ron is dead and I'm in his l)lace. How long are you going to stay with the old man?" he said, moving closer. "Be careful, now... "Listen, I come here for the weather reports,, that's all." Garth made her uneasy. "You owe me your thanks, at least," he said. "For what?" "For your life." "You killed those two for spite. It had nothing to do with me." "One for spite, perhaps. The other Metroman was about to kill you." "That's absurd. Why would he want to kill me? And why would he use a spear-fishing gun?" "Absurd, yes. But true." "Leave the girl in peace," Cal's rusty voice echoed from the darkness. "Of course. Father Witch," Garth answered. They did not confuse Cal with God. Only with the godhead. Many times he had tried to straighten them out before giving up on it and just answering to the name. "Father Witch, I would not harm her." B ecause of a tramjam Norm was pretty late for the political meeting. It was in full swing when he arrived. The party leader, who would be up for Transformation # next month, met him at the tramway. The voting had not yet.begun. Political posters saluted Norm as he entered thecomroom, electronically advocating candidates for the #I election. Norm was not particularly interested, the office at stake, that of Senator, being merely a stepping stone for politicos. He just wanted the voting over with, since he was scheduled for a Project Assignment. Looking around the room, he recognized a few colleagues he had already met in person and a number of others he had worked with on screen. "Please be seated," a metallic voice requested. Norm slid into an unoccupied voting machine. The screen dilated, presenting the ten issues. As usual in local elections most of the issues were Metro concerns, affairs with which the candidates, if elected, would have little to do: the Energy Rights Defensive Reaction with Metro-Central -- philosophical differences about future biotypes -- policy toward Stonies and other primitive life forms. Only toward the bottom of the list did the issues become relevant: the question of ilopleave and tramjams; the mounting problems of asphyxiation and the Quality of Life. Norm favored maintaining the two sexes and about at the present ratio, and maintaining a variety of bio-types as well, at least until research proved conclusively that these differences were natural. As each of the issues was presented he inserted his right index finger -- the CL# digit -- into a socket on a six-point scale, indicating his degree of approval and disapproval. After he had gone through the ten issues, the screen indicated the order of his preferences for the candidates -- #, #, #, #, as it happened. As the results came in he saw that # had no chance, so he switched to #. He watched the flickering numbers as they mounted and was pleased with himself when the arrow came on indicating that # had won. Upon identification. Norm was surprised to discover the winner was Karl #, a cybrosport scholar he had been working with on a project they had just completed. According to the con-circ screen, Norm had a few minutes before his appointment with his Project Director. While selecting an Ncapsule from the buffet table -- it was a dinner meeting -- Norm felt someone's eyes on him. No, not eyes exactly, he mentally amended. A mind. The mind of a girl. She was sitting by the embers of a fire under the night sky. Norm experienced her astonishment. He turned and saw her. The alumalloy suit was incongruous but the features were right. A shock of recognition flashed from the base of his spine and struck somewhere in the back of his head. It was not an unpleasant sensation, nor half so disturbing as the situation: a dream, one that bothered him because of its consistency, was walking directly toward him. "Ron?" she asked. "No, I'm Norm." "Veronica." Something about the name rang a bell. Veronica? Ronnie, for short. He realized her name should be Norma. "You know about the lighthouse?" he asked. "Yes." "Ever been there?" "No." "But you've studied Stonyculture, watched tapes..." "No." "I'm afraid we've been having the same dream." "Do you know about the children?" "Yes," Norm answered, and for the moment he could feel those small-body comforts and anxieties. His attention was diverted by the appointment screen. "We'll have to talk later," he said. "I have a project appointment right now." "We. I believe. You and I have been teamed up." As they walked toward Project Director S, the situation. Norm felt, had begun to make some sense. He and Veronica were the subjects of a psychological experiment, and the entire matter would be cleared up immediately. Project Director S, who specialized in Interdisciplinary Research, had been elected to and had survived the Fifth Transformation. He was built into his office equipment. Were it not for his sense of humor, conferring with S would be much like talking to an unoccupied room. S's door opened as they approached, closed behind them. They sat at the conference console. Norm placed his palm down on the console so that his digit met the identification lock. Norm X, the electronic read-out announced. Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Specialty: Contemporary Atlantic Stonyculture. Transformations. none..." "Forget the formalities," S announced in a polyphonic voice. "I know both of you quite well. In fact. I've been going over your tapes." "The project is important, then," Norm said. He spoke to the clock on the wall, following the sweep of the second hand with his eyes. The face showed #:#. "It's unusual, to say the least. But before we get to it I have a few questions. Have you two ever met before?" "Just in the comroom tonight." "Never before, in person or on screen." "... No." "Why the hesitation?" "Oh," Norm answered, "I felt a certain... I don't know how to put it. It was as if we had indeed met somewhere before." "Go on." Veronica had received it too. Norm could tell, because for an instant he seemed to be into her mind. "Interesting. Can you explain why you felt that way?" "Not really. Deja vu, perhaps." "And you, Veronica, did you feel the same way?" "I felt nothing at all," she lied. Norm recalled her astonishment, mixed as it was with a deep urgency. Just then he realized that the urgency had sprung from sexual attraction. But that was impossible, almost natural! "Anyw'ay, to get on with it," S continued, "you have been assigned to a classified project. The designation indicates it will deal with Stonyculture but there are no specifics. You are to embark on a sputtercraft -- presumably, you will receive instructions in transit. There will be no enforcers -- not even a pilot. You will go tomorrow, alone." "But I can't fly a sputtercraft," Norm said, confused. "That's the least of it. Why send a computer technician like Veronica to a place where there are no computers?" "Perhaps," Norm suggested, his prior idea surfacing, "we're the subject of an experiment." "A thought. But as Project Director I would have been informed. In this case, though, just about everything has been relayed through a security bank." ".Any reason to think we're guinea pigs?" "You two are genetically... related. And there are some other oddities or coincidences." "About us?" "Well, there's another project that apparently ties in. It has to do with rearing children. Three of the subjects are in the same genetic line as you two. And since the time those three were put together, most of the reports override me and I can't even guess what's going on. The researchers have asked for maximum security status. Day before yesterday, on their recommendation, a full squadron of enforcers was sent to Cape Cod. Does any of that mean anything to you?" "Not really. It might tie in, though, as you say." "Well, without further information I can't let you go tomorrow. It would be suicide." "I'd prefer more information myself." "Yes. One more thing. You've worked with Karl #?" "We've just finished a project." "Something to do with games, I believe?" "We did a comparative analysis of cybroball and a game the Stonies call scrimmage, #'hey're both derived from football, an aggressive tribal ritual that the ancients..." "Yes, I recall your tapes. Published in Access Level #, weren't they? Congratulations. And now this Karl is a Senator." "You believe that ties in. too?" "I don't know. Maybe it's a case of Fifth Transformation paranoia. You'll hear from me as soon as I get more data." The clock had stopped at #:#. As they made their way through the comroom. Norm avoided his Conversation Circle. "We have another appointment," he said, leading Ronnie to the tramway. "Who with?" "Damned if I know, but it's right here and in half a minute." First the lights went out. Amid the confusion in the comroom Norm could hear components shutting down. Then came the acrid smell of overloaded circuits, a series of Hashes, splattering sounds. The tramway whisked open and Ronnie stepped into its lighted cubicle. "Quick," she said, "before we're spotted." R eaching the third deck, Norma found Cal seated on the old sofa drinking a large glass of whiskey and looking more than usually forlorn. "I'll dim the light," Norma said. "Leave it." "It's nearly midnight." "Leave it on. I've been told to leave it on." "Told? What do you mean? Are you sure you're not drunk?" "I'm not drunk now, but I will be in about an hour. I think it was a computer. I don't like getting orders from a machine." Norma sat down and poured herself a drink. "It has to do with the raiding party, the one we're not to kill." "I suppose it does." "Cal, you've always been secreand Norma was her other self, sitting with Ron in a room with a clock and hearing mechanical noises. "What's wrong, Norma?" Cal sipped whiskey. "Speak up." "It's time for you to talk. There are a number of people running around in my head. You must tell me -- who are they? Who am I?" "'You are the wonderful child who came from the sky." "Stop it. Cal. please." He paused. "Sorry. Twenty-odd years ago a copter from Metro landed out front. The pilot presented me with a baby girl. Said researchers wanted to find out about the difference between children raised here and those raised in Metro. We were short of children -- and you were a wonderful child." "Then I'm not really your daughter. And my mother..." "What I told you about your mother -- my wife -- is true. She died in the plague. We used to come here every summer. The cottage you call Lovelane was our place." "Is she buried there?" "No. We got out as soon as the plague broke. A colleague of mine flew us to Boston-Cambridge, one of the complexes bubbled over even then. Both of them died." "So you returned." "There was no point in staying. I'd been thinking of leaving the university, anyway. You see, what I taught no longer interested anyone." "Those old books?" "Books. With reading going out of style, it became futile to expect young people to pore over texts in languages that hadn't been spoken for a thousand years. That hit me hard. In those days I believed every answer worth knowing and every question worth asking could be found in those books." Cal sighed. "I'm getting maudlin. Must be the scotch." "What was it like, when you returned?" "Everyone dead or gone. In a few months new people started to arrive -- groups of kids, a couple of families. But till they came I was Adam with more work to do than naming the animals -- fiddling with gasoline engines, getting a generator working, things like that. A humbling experience for an academic." "Why did you move into the lighthouse?" "There was the radio, and the light is the soundest structure around. Anyway, there's something about a lighthouse. For a few years I talked with hams all over New England. Then they revoked amateur licenses and Metro began to treat us the way they do now." Cal reached into his vest, took out his brass pocket-watch. "Just about midnight," he said. "Time to get back to the radio room for more orders." "What makes you think it's a computer." "Computer voice. Also it talks to me over the radio in Latin hexameters -- in the style of Virgil. I don't suppose anyone alive can speak classical Latin. Ironic -- I once used to think of myself reading from those 'old books' to my children and grandchildren. But only computers understand classical languages nowadays." Then Norma was pressed up against the other Ron in a tight windowless compartment that jostled and clanked as it moved. Ronnie asked. "Seems to be going down, and toward Bubble Center," Norm replied. "How did you know about the tram?" "Mom -- my transceiver -- sent a message before I left the flop tonight. It didn't make sense at the time." "S wasn't much help." "Why did you lie to him about "For the same reason you were evasive. There's a struggle going on, I'm sure -- a power struggle of some sort." "How do you know what side we're on? It may only be some kind of reaction test." "I don't think so, no. And I trust the voice." time weak and attenuated though echoing in a rough bass. Ronnie shut it off, realizing the message was not meant for her or Norm. The tram, which had been clanking along at the unusual speed of almost # klicks, screeched to a halt. When the door opened they found themselves looking into the brain of Bubble #I -- Admin Norm and Ronnie hurried into the humming chamber. On the far wallscreen a series of instructions were spelled out in oldstyle letters. "Just a minute," Norm said. "There are a few questions..." "Who are you?" "Are you Thinktank #?" level #-# reaching minimql life support level... Tramway power outage... Sewage backup through out SW complex... Citizen mechanics Company # proceeding on foot through Tramway # toward... "Let's do what she says, Norm." "She?" "It must be Mom." "Who are you?" Norm asked again. "Not a very motherly voice. Why should we follow your instructions?" manual backup outlet began to click in staccato and spew out a #mm tape. "Why the oldstyle print and the rest of the gimmicks?" "Okay, okay." Norm read the "Doesn't mean much to me." "Genetics code," Ronnie said. The printout clattered again, after a pause, and produced a diagram. W (# x'd' (x Ycf Yd Y D ### D ### Y'd Y'# D ### Y'O D ###I Yd Y Y'Cf (C "Still doesn't help." Again the prmlout clattered. "Do what she says. Norm. I took you for Ron at the party, and he's dead. I know he's dead." "Okay," Norm replied. "Let's do what it... Mom... says." The instructions now on the wallscreen were mostly for Ronnie. They involved programing and sabotaging the central computer. "If they were after us before, they really have reasons now. We seem to be carrying out a political assassination." "The Mayor will survive," Ronnie answered. "He'll be doing things he won't know about and he'll have forgotten a lot, but he'll survive. That takes care of instructions one through nine." "Ten I can follow myself," Norm The tram traveled straight up for more than ten minutes, then leveled off, headed due east. When it stopped and opened. Norm and Ronnie were peering into a large bleak hangar with its hatchway open to the sky. It was empty except for a lone sputtercraft. They walked across the hangar, footfalls echoing metallically in the vast chamber. "I suppose we get in," Norm said, opening the cockpit. He sat down in the pilot's seat. "What now?" "We fly to the lighthouse," Ronnie backed into the adjoining seat. "But I don't know..."Suddenly Norm discovered he did know how to operate the sputtercraft. He could read the instruments and gauges. He understood even the mechanism of the internal combustion engine that drove the rotary blades. Then he felt eyes on him and a mind. Turning, he saw three small faces staring at him through the glass panel that separated the cockpit from the crew station. "Those must be the Y's on that chart." "Yes," Ronnie replied. "The children... our children." C AL was telling Norma that the radio signal was unusual in a number of ways. "It's on all frequences for one thing," he said, turning the tuning dial. The message came in a mechanical "What does it mean?" "Jupiter -- God, I suppose we would say today -- set these coasts apart for a manly race when he alloyed the golden age with bronze and hardened the bronze age with iron, from which a happy flight is granted to the pious, according to prophesy." "That sounds good for the sea people, as you call us," Norma voice as that coming over the radio, but it was faint and far away in her mind. Norma ignored it. "It's from Horace," Cal explained. "From a poem lamenting Rome's self-destruction." "So, Metro is destroying itself?" "That would be... interesting. Just a minute, Norma, here's ClA... "From Tacitus, about prodigies of impending evil during Nero's days. The diviners explained that another power was coming into the world, one 'neither mighty nor hidden,' whose growth had been cut off in the womb. Another prediction of the fall of Metro, if that's what the computer is telling us. What's wrong, Norma?" He had seen she was not listening, was concentrating on somesaying. "Give me something to write on. Cal -- quick!" He handed her a stub of a pencil, looked for paper. "Dammit," he said. "Write on the wall." Shwrote:  Norm  Ronnie  Ron  Norma ou know this Norm and Ronnie?" "Ronnie is what I used to call my other self -- the one in Metro. Norm I met earlier tonight. Cal, this used to be just a dream, but it's getting stronger." "Is there anything else?" "Another diagram. I can remember only part of it." Again she wrt D ### D ### it?" Cal asked. x'cf understa "Well, I'm X'O, and Ron is X'O . That's the date he died, July #. They killed Ron -- Garth was right. They were trying to kill me." "Quadruplets!" Cal blurted. "That explains it." "Explains what?" "Why they would save premature children born to a woman dying of the plague. Two sets of identical twins -- ideal subjects for the research they were interested in." "Your wife?" "Yes, your mother. She died on July #, #, just as the diagram says." All was becoming clearer. Not only the meaning of the diagrams but the minds of the others. In the other mental chamber, the one with the copter, the impulses were stronger than they had ever been. She knew Norm's confusion and then his understanding of the aircraft, felt the hesitant liftoff, the initial uncertainty of the flight, and then she saw the nighttime sky and its myriad stars with eyes of wonder. Behind the lifting craft, the immense hemispheres ofMetroEast were diminishing to an ebony honeycomb that glowed with a cold phosphorescence. "They're coming here. Norm, Ronnie and the children." "To the lighthouse?" "Yes, in a copter." "I see. That's why we left the light on. Well, there seems to be nothing to do but wait, and have another drink." sat tensely at the stick, eyes glued to the altimeter, overcompensating for every roll, pitch and yaw. The twenty minutes of flying time stretched to an eternity before he spotted the swirling beam of the light. Once in view, the light lurched toward them. When they were within a thousand meters of it, Norm hovered the craft and began to descend. It hit sooner and much harder than he expected. He felt stunned and dizzy. An old man with hair on his head led them to the lighthouse. Inside, in what the old man. Cal, had called the galley. Norm sat uncomfortably at the table, staring in horror at the red corpse of a crustacean on his plate and trying to avoid thinking about the evil-smelling liquid he had been cheerfully handed and was apparently expected to drink. Seated across from Norm, Cal ripped open a steaming bivalve and stuffed its gray carcass into his mouth. "Eat something," he said, "You must be starving." "No, thank you," Norm replied, watching with disgust Cal's carnivorous teeth making short work of the quahog. Norm knew that the Stonies ate fish, flesh and fowl, but knowledge is not experience. He also realized that the hollow feeling in his stomach and the lightness in his head were hunger. But nature, he had been taught, was something that had been overcome. It was then he realized that Cal was having fun at his expense. "It will be all right," the old man laughed. "Your aversion to food is chemically induced. It will wear off." "You're sure about that?" "We've had some experience with Metropeople. It takes a couple of days. You have a few other surprises coming." Norm felt a twinge of concern and realized that Norma was worried about the children. Both women had been trying to get some response out of them. "What's wrong?" he asked. "They won't say a word. And they just sit there," she replied. "Is that unusual?" "It... is... all right," the eldest child said hesitantly. She was about seven. "Speak... ingisdiffiNorm felt the blast of "sound" thunder in his head. Everyone but the children had instinctively covered their ears with their hands. "You better just talk, or turn that down," Cal said. "Sor... ry." "I'll... do... it," the boy said, talking to Norma and then climbing the ladder. He was about five years old. "Do what?" "Turn off... the... light." "It can be dangerous," Norma said. "I only... have to close... inlet-line valve," the little boy, Jon, answered, and the others laughed at his assurance. "The boy has been picking your brains. He'll do all right," Cal replied. Turning to Nell, the oldest, he continued. "Tell us about the experiment -- about Metro." "It is... compli... cated to the transparent plastic cubicles, the overhead devices that fed the children. He saw the blank stares of the others and felt the dreamlike warmth aglow in Nell's mind. "The others?" "Went... crazy." "But you?" "I knew about... my mothers and fathers." "So Metro was trying to raise children without human contact, and these survived because they had a mental contact with you. But what happened?" "On... ly we sur... vived." "So that's why you were so hesitant about talking to us. What happened then?" "That's why it got so much stronger!" Norma said. Ronnie added, "These kids must be genetically identical, practically. I suppose they aeted as a catalyst -- that would explain how Norm and I knew about the lighthouse." "It explains everything else, as well," Cal added, " -- except why the computer at Metro is on our side." "We'll think about that tomorrow," Norma said. "The children are tired. It's two a.m." Tab. the three-year old, had fallen asleep. So had Norm... Next morning two of the children were gone. Norm was the first to awake, from an uneasy sleep, and he knew immediately that they were missing. It did not alarm him. The two had left Tab, the little girl, behind. Across the room, on a sofa, he saw a figure under a coverlet. The bald head told him it was Ronnie. He felt his own scalp and realized, with a touch of squeamishness, that without an autobarber he would grow hair on his head and face. Norm began to make breakfast. It was easy, he discovered, as long as he did not try to think about it. His hands knew where the eggs were and how much butter to dab in the warming skillet. They knew how to break the eggs and beat them with a fork. They knew how much soft cheese to grate upon the sizzling eggs in the pan and when to fold the omelet in two. They knew all of these things familiarly, but his mind was still revolted by the thought of actually eating it. Suddenly the knowledge in his hands was obliterated. In its place seethed a horror, a horror he recognized as part of the strangeness of Norma's mind, but amplified beyond belief. It was the ferocity of a beast ready to spring. He heard her bare feet on the ladder and turned to see her jump the last three steps. "Quickly," she said. "The children!" "They can take care of themselves, can't they?" "Maybe they can, maybe not." Into the horror, which had abated, came a stream of images. Wildlooking men in animal skins, hunting with spears, butchering children. "But that's a myth," he said with scholarly conviction. The notion of hunting animals was revolting enough. To hunt people... Nevertheless he zipped up his suit and followed Norma as she hurried down the ladder to the next deck. She ran at a steady pace north along the macadam road. He followed at her heels knowing, as she did, where the two children were. It was an exhilarating experience for Norm to run the first hundred yards; then suddenly he felt exhausted. His lungs protested. Sweat seemed to fill his suit. He stopped to catch his breath and strip off the alumalloy. She had passed beyond the crest of a dune and w as out of view. Norm decided to walk briskly. At first a bath of balmy warmth, the sun became painful to his skin. forcing Norm to squint. The roar of the surf beat in his head like a drum. Even the salt smell -- so pleasant in Atmosphere # -- became painfully intense. The beach grass and pine shrubbery cut and whipped his legs and occasional whiffs of bayberry made him dizzy. Norm kept his eyes on the path yield to the spasms of nausea brought on by glimpses into the abyss of blue sky. But when he felt Norma's alarm -- anger mingled with fear -- he forced himself to look up. He saw' a compound of unpainted weathered cottages on the slope of cultivated hill. Then the ground rose and struck his face and shoulders. Norma said. "I don't care why you came. You're here, and you're staying here with me," Garth answered. "Where are they?" "The kids? They've been hanging around the hospital since they arrived. What's wrong with them? They haven't said a word." "Nothing's wrong with them. They escaped from Metro last night." "If they mean so much to you, you can have them. They can stay, too." "I'm not staying." "Grow up, Norma. You were to be Ron's woman. He's dead and I rule at the commune now. The best women belong to the strongest men." "I have a man." Garth laughed. "We'll see about (hat." There was a knock at the door and a warrior entered. His shoulder-length hair was tied with a Inaided band. Like Garth, he wore a leather loincloth and sandals. "We've found someone," he said, placing his shotgun on a rack. "Why bother me? Take what he doesn't need, feed him, and send liim on his way." "You should look at this one. Garth." "Bring him. then." Two women helped Norm into (he room and sat him down on a wicker chair. "Well, what have we here?" Garth said. "Ron's ghost? It looks like Ron three days dead." "It's his brother, his twin brother," Norma explained. "He escaped from Metro last night, also." "The skin is as white as a fish's belly. Is this your man, then?" Garth laughed and Norm was furious. "Can it speak?" Norma sent the proper reply. Norm nodded. "Thank you for your hospitality. Garth, leader of the Cosgard commune. Whatever is in my power I will do for you and yours." "He not only speaks, but with a civil tongue. Still, what can you do, Metroman?" commanding voice Norma and Norm had heard several times the night before. Now it was accompanied by a wave of electronic music and resonances of the children's consciousness. She turned to Norm to see his reaction. "Watch that weapon," he said, pointing with his right hand at the shotgun. The stock turned black and crumbled into ashes. The metal melted. "Another witch?" Garth asked, glancing at Norma. "I thought one was enough." His eyes returned to Norm. "Do you expect to frighten me with a trick, Metroman?" "I'll help Mary," Norm said, feeling the minds of the children reaching for his. "Clairvoyant, too," Garth said, "Maybe I can help," Norm repeated unconvincingly. As the three of them made their way toward the hospital, Norma observed the work going on in the commune complex. Men were hewing pine rafters and splitting cedar shingles. Two women were planing cabinets. A pumper that still advertised the Eastham Volunteer Fire Department was lifting water into the central tank. From the outside the hospital looked like the other cottages. The interior, however, except for a washroom, consisted of a single large chamber. A row of beds extended along each wall, barracks style. A young woman lay asleep on the first bed. The two children were sitting on the second, staring with blank eyes into the jerry-rigged crib between the beds. Norma looked into the crib and saw four tiny diapered babies. "Two girls and two boys," Garth said. Norm bent over the crib and touched the infants. The older children continued to stare into the crib and Norma felt her mind expand in a surge of electronic counterpoint. It radiated knowledge, power, will -- all directed at the tiny bodies in the crib, at their lungs, at the budding alvioli. Like the children. Norm stared. "They'll live," he said, after a while. "I see they are indeed breathing easier, Metroman. I'll be at headquarters. When you're through here, join me and we'll share a bottle of wine." As soon as Garth had closed the screen door, Norma asked, "How did you do it -- the shotgun, the babies?" "I didn't." "Who did, then?" "Mom, I suppose." F rom where Ronnie sat on the beach, the Nauset Light half a mile away looked like a stray white rook from a titanic chess set. The metaphor, she knew, was Cal's. He was thirty steps down the beach, surf fishing, and had just hooked a striper. Tab was playing in the sand. It had been an anxious morning for them all, but now the turbulence in her head was still. When Cal netted the fish, he called to her, "Lunchtime. They will be back soon." "Good," she answered. "I'm starved." Breakfast had been difficult but lunch, Ronnie knew, would be no trouble at all. She pulled the straw hat over her ears, wrapped the heavy olive-drab blanket about her shoulders, staggered through the resistant sand toward the scarp. Cal followed with Tab on his shoulders. Ronnie was relieved to escape from the terrors of the beach, the walls of foaming blue-green water that pounded the surf, the bizarre antics of sandpipers, terns and shrieking gulls, the clean corruption of wrecked crabs, mussels, and clams, the saline purity of driftwood, sea grapes and other jetsam. It would be comforting to be out of the sun and within the enclosure of the lighthouse. When Ronnie reached the galley. Cal was preparing the bass. "Anything I can do?" she asked. "Why don't you amuse Tab." "She's busy." "What's she up to?" "Reading." "Reading!" "Something wrong?" "Three-year-olds don't usually read before lunch. What so fascinates her?" "One of your books." Cal slid the pan into the broiler. "That I'd like to see," he said. walking toward the ladder. Tab lay on the sofa, poring over a large volume. "Like the book?" Cal asked. "It's difficult." "In what way?" "I know what it says but not what it means." "Show me." "Here," Tab said, pointing to a passage. "What did he do that's so terrible?" "An ancient taboo -- against incest . ' ' "Is anything wrong?" Ronnie asked. She seemed always to expect trouble. "Nothing. It's just that she's reading Sophocles -- in Greek." "She's a smart little thing. We were doing mathematical puzzles this morning. She got the hang in no time." "Picking our brains, are you, fab?" "I don't think so," Ronnie interjected. "She's way ahead of us. She computes faster than I can." "How fast?" "Instantaneously. Does it all in her head." "Like a computer?" "I suppose so." "H'm -- interesting." A hatch slammed shut and voices could be heard below. "Here they come," Cal said. "Let's have some lunch." Everyone ate in external silence; each understood completely what the other's had been doing throughout the morning. Internal silence too, except for some static coming from the children. Norm was trying to penetrate the static, but he couldn't. "Tab," he said casually, while Cal poured coffee, "can you compute the value of pi to fifty places?" #... It was instantaneously in Norm's mind, five lines of ten digits. The two older children were glowering at Tab. "Tab, can you compute pi all the way?" There was a hesitation, then it was Mom. "Show-off," Jon said, scowling at Tab. "We agreed not to let them know till we were sure." "Sure of what?" Ronnie asked. "That we were safe. But it's all right," Nell soothed. "You'll be able to do it yourselves in a few days." "Do what?" "Think like the computer." Norm sat back in his chair, and looked in turn into innocent dark eyes of each of the children. Just the same, it w as Ronnie who understood first. "They must have planned the whole thing," she blurted. "The escape from Metro, the instructions, our crazy project, everything!" "And they sent the radio messages. In Latin," Norma added. "That's Mom, then -- the three of them." Norm concluded, and all the static cleared.  t An alternatearmanth liked the look of the mount. It had powerful front quarters, a sloping back, long legs. The beast was fast... And big. Short, sharp, heavy horns jutted from its head. The animal could kill with them. And with the thick hoofs. Yet its teeth were fit only for grazing. Its hide was thin. It could be prey for a killer. Armanth thought: Perhaps they did not exaggerate when they said Ungar handled the best mounts available on any Reservation. The creature is dangerous, but it is vulnerable, too. As a good mount should be. Then he thought: It may disappoint. There are now so few mounts that do not. Now, when every fool with a few days to spare wants to ride, there are so many artless handlers who demean the sport by offering dull mounts and deathless contests. Numbers cheapen everything. "It will do," he said. "You may turn off the viewscreen. I will mount when you are ready." "Yes, sir," Ungar said. An hour later, Ungar said, "I have one, sir. His crisis is coming. Are you ready?" "Yes. Help me mount." Armanth entered the creature gradually. Muscles. Hide. Nerves. He let himself into the animal's senses. Smell, especially smell. The animal smelled danger. Cat danger. Big cat danger. It snorted universe story and pawed the ground restlessly. Armanth trembled, already part animal. He thought: Ungar is good. To provide a mount just as it begins the heightening that comes with danger -- that is skill. Armanth settled fully into the animal. He heard the others of his herd moving uneasily near him and trotted a few steps closer to them. Their smell was reassuring. But over it, dominating it, was the cat smell. His head turned. He saw the cat: huge, tufted head, wide chest, long mane. The cat opened its mouth and exposed massive teeth. It roared. He started and reared up on his hind legs. Awkwardly but quickly, he ran. The cat smell was in his nostrils. Then he saw the other cat. It was slightly smaller than the beast that had roared and had no mane. He veered away from the new cat. The comforting smell of the others of his herd was gone. He felt teeth knife into his hind leg, cut deeply. Instinctively he bucked and kicked backward. The teeth were gone. He spun clumsily, the wounded leg almost folding under him. Head lowered, horns only a few inches above the ground, he charged. His horns caught tlesh. He heard the cat howl, smelled blood, saw the animal limp away. He snorted in triumph. Painfully he began to run once again, seeking the scent of his herd, safety, healing. Sudden crushing weight on his hindquarters. He tried to turn, felt the leg give, fell heavily on his side. A grunt of terror spewed from his mouth as the cat came briefly into his vision, mane flowing, teeth bared. He kicked at it with his forelegs, tried to rise. Raw pain at his tbroat. Cat smell in his nostrils. His head snapped back in a reflex spasm. He opened his eyes, blinked, aiTci looked through the window' of Ihc satellite at the Reservation planet below him. "Wonderful!" he said. "Delicious. The death was exquisite. Riding a victim is much better than riding a killer, don't you think? Not that one knows which he will get." He tried to guess which of the continents he had been on. "Yes. sir," Ungar said. " fhe victim's experience is much more complex, much richer. What was it the Poet said? 'To fight and die is to know life.'" "I believe so, sir." Armanth thought: This Ungar is a find. A wonderfid mount. And. his timing is superb. He must have dismounted me only a split second before I would have been trapped in the creature's final ending. But I knew the dying. That is more than skill. That is sport that becomes art. His exhileration faded into slight uncertainty. He thought: This was only once. Can he do it again? Perhaps he was only lucky. "Sir." said Ungar. "I have another mount ready." "Oh?" Armanth said. "I usually prefer to wait, to savor..." "I appreciate that, sir, but this one is something a bit different. I liave one that is almost fully sentient. We find only a few. They generally manage to avoid interesting crisis-situations." Armanth hesitated. Ungar flicked on the viewscreen. "His appearance is deceptive," Ungar said. "But I think you will llnd him interesting. If I may suggest that you test him for a moment..." Armanth partly entered the animal, w ithdrew . " The heightening has begun, as you ean see, sir." Ungar said. "His erisis will come slowly, but it is good to mount at the beginning." "Yes. I have ample time," Armanth said, eager now, his uncertainty gone. So subtle, he thought, so subtle this Ungar is. "I will mount when you are ready." "Very well." Ipleyebrows in a scowl as the .mclge entered the room, strode toward the bench. Sweat trickled clow II his cheeks. It was the lights that were making him sweat. They alw ays did, he knew . the miserable rv lights, the last smalt indignity Ibreed on him by the media that had hounded him all his life. He brushed away the moisture and listened. "Senators," the Chief Justice said. "In obedience to your notice. I am present for the purpose of forming a Court of Impeachment for the President of the United Slates." report on D. G. Compton's which I hadn't finished as the last deadline glared at me. It fulfills all of its extraordinary promise. The little-known, un-trumpeted Compton is without doubt one of the finest writers-in-depth around. It would take a special arrogance, for example, or a breath-taking competence, to dare bringing in a major character not twenty pages from the end of a book. Since arrogance is not this author's thing, it has to be the other. I read the last ten or so pages of this book over and over -- fifteen or twenty times -- not because it was hard to grasp, but because of the levels which were uncovered, one by one, and the pleasure it gave me to undergo the revelations. I have said this before about Compton: that it is legitimate for a writer, even a very good writer, to try to make every facet of a character clear and every motivation understood; but that not real person can ever be understood in that way, and often his motivations spring from that area I call the infrarational, which by its nature cannot be understood. Compton is one of the very few writers who has grasped this and who is able to use it without clouding anything, and therefore his people are, in their sayings and doings, unpredictable and forever interesting. So take this tale of tomorrow's TV for itself and as a fable; read it at its own pace and keep it around to read again. You'll be glad you did. Reference Guide to Fantastic Films: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, is at last in print. This completes the first edition and basic structure of this monumental work. For most of twenty-five years Lee, a moonlighting aerospace physicist, has labored to produce an exhaustive index of fantastic films. As he worked, the field proliferated, and as his research expanded, he discovered thousands of titles he doubtless never suspected nor expected when he began. He deserves our thanks and support, and we must join with him in the hope that some foundation will undertake to carry the Guide into future editions. This final volume is, like its predecessors, an #'# x #I paperback with photo-reduced type and stills which by themselves offer a fascinating stepping-stone trip through the history of film. The #rd section has an Introduction and Afterword by Robert Bloch and Forrest J. Ackerman, delights to read. The price is a little steep for the average buff, but I urge you strongly to beg, persuade, admonish and argue your local library to put it in, and to bring it to the attention of theater and TV film which do their own programming, and the like. Here are the vital statistics: Reference Guide to Fantastic Films, compiled by Walt Lee. Vol #, A -- F, #. Vol. #, G -- O, and Vol. #, P -- Z, # each. Total price for the set: #. Since the circulation in bookstores will be extremely limited, I suggest you contact the publisher, ChelseaLee Books, Box #, Los Angeles #. And speaking of film, as I think I will from time to time, I do wish to recommend two to you which you might miss if I don't, and that would be a serious loss. One is Fantastic Planet, a feature-length animation from Czechoslavakia, beautifully drawn, and done from a novel which I understand was written by famed Polish s-f writer Stanislaw Lem. I'm sorry I can't give you the details of the production company and distributor; if you haven't seen it and want to, you'll just have to dig. It will be worth the effort. Much of the art is truly lovely, and the plot, though tied together a little hurriedly at the end, is really intriguing. The sex is mature and the suspense, from time to time, nerve-strumming. The other is an astonishing and poetic film made in Israel, written, directed, and generally made-tohappen by a human dynamo named Richard Shorr. Using unknown actors and sensitive, meticulous photography, it tells the tale of a street kid, a sheltered young girl, and a strangely gifted youth with more-than-natural powers. The plot takes an unexpected and provocative twist at the end which leaves the viewer thoughtful and satisfied. The production company is Piranha Films, and it's called Once Upon Time. I N MY last report to you, you'll have noticed what might be called a rave review for Jean Gawron's An Apology for Rain. I not only identified the author as female but went on to signalize a certain type of controlled violence which, I said. I had noticed before only in the works of Ursula le Guin, Josephine Saxton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Joanna Russ. I went on to say that a good writer is a good writer regardless of gender, and my observation means only whatever it means. You must know that many of the books I review come to me in the form of galleys -- clusters of yardlong (almost) narrow printed sheets, or in a later stage, paged, printed on both sides, and primly bound in heavy paper with nothing but the title, pub. date, number of pages and author's name on it. No illustrations, jacket copy, or anything. I reviewed the Gawron book from one of those, and you can imagine my feelings when the hardcover edition came in, complete with a four-color jacket and a photograph of the author, who has about as much claim to being female as Richard Burton, I herewith explain but do not apologize, and retract nothing but the pronoun, which I correct to 'he' and 'his'. It's a hell of a fine book by a fine new writer, and if my bobble puts egg on my face, sobeit. An Apology for Rain, by Jean Mark Gawron, is from Doubleday at #, and well, well worth it. R umor has it that that extraordinary sleeper. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins, has gone into a third printing by Ballantine, with a blurb on the cover quoting me. I haven't seen it but I heartily approve. Can't quote Something New! A October #-November #, # Tour the Caribbean aboard Cunard's Ambassador while enjoying a full program of s-f activities with Ben Bova, Frederik Pohl, Gordon R. Dickson and others. Cabins from # include air fare to and from San Juan, Puerto Rico. For bookings and information write # Eighth Ave. New York, N.Y. or call (#) #-#I you the price but I'd guess it at #. Whatever 'underground classic' means, this is probably one. Get it and fall in love with outrageous Amanda. A paid advertisement in the s-f newsletter Locus, by Robert Heinlein, is causing quite a stir. It promises The National Rare Blood Club, and has an interesting backstory. A good part of Heinlein's  Shall Fear No Evil dealt with serology, type-matching, rare fractions and the like, and his interest in the subject led him to publish the name, address, and hotline phone number of the Club on the copyright page of all editions of the book. It w as after he did this, when gravely ill, his life was saved by five nameless, faceless donors from the National Rare Blood Club, since he happens to be a "rare" himself. All you have to do to become a member is to have a rare type, and then to register with the Club. It is a beautifully selfish thing to do -- beautiful because you have offered to help, any time, anywhere, some stranger somewhere who might die if you don't, and selfish because the registration may well save your life when nothing else could. Though not a "rare" myself, I have for a long time given blood three or four times a year through the Red Cross Blood Bank and the Writers Guild, for the same beautiful selfish reasons, and I was really astonished to discover, through Heinlein's ad, that up to now there has been no centralized agency for the immediate dissemination of rare blood. The Powers That Be are so remiss in their choice of real priorities that I was harangued, not long ago, by a highw'ay patrolman who objected to my writing my blood type in tiny letters in the margin of my driver's license -- w here I thought it belonged. He said I was subject to citation for "defacing" it. Anyway, here are the needed "rares"; no others apply: B pos.; O neg.; A neg.; AB pos.; B neg.; and AB neg. As you surely know, the pluses and minuses refer to the Rh factor, and if you don't know what your type is, call your doctor or a convenient hospital and find out how to discover it for cheap. After that, a postcard is sufficient to get you going with the National Rare Blood Club, # Fifth Ave., New York, NY #. Their hotline is Area #, CHelsea #-#. No dues, no payments -- just the good feeling of beautiful selfishness. B etter get to some books... There is, as you know, a rising tide of books about s-f, and of anthologies designed for the classrooms. Of the latter, one in particular is worth your attention. Not only will it succeed in its purpose "... to provide the reader unfamiliar w ith science fiction with an orientation in the field, with a large body of short fiction which reflects the breadth and scope of modern science fiction," as the foreword states, but it is also the finest across-the-board package of really good s-f since the Hall of Fame, a meticulously selected, highly enjoyable trunk full of delights. Titled simply Modem Science Fiction Doubleday: pages and price unavailable at this writing; see above remarks about galleys), it has been compiled and edited by none other than Norman Spinrad, a writer whose swift and continual growth amazes and pleases me. The arrangement of stories, with a small hint of what's in each section is, first. The Golden Age, dealing with John Campbell's extraordinary effect on the field, and such stories mov's unique Nightfall, The Post-War Awakening, which includes stories like Clarke's The Star and one of the most effective (by which I mean the gigantic effect it has on writers and readers alike) stories ever written, Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations: and finally The Full Flowering, with Thomas Disch's asionishmg Descending, At the Mouse Circus by Ellison, and le Guin's beautiful Nine Lives. Spinrad has stoutly stitched the volume together with his own Foreword, Introduction, a long rubric preceding and illuminating each section, an Afterword and finally a Bibliography to suggest further reading. Each story is followed by a short list of the author's more significant work. In sum, it would be hard indeed to find so perfect an introduction to the field, or a richer feast for the cultivated taste. By the way: there's one of my yarns in it. I have always felt a little peculiar about reviewing books which include my work, and I have to say that my usual practice has been simply to pass when they come along, and say nothing, unless there is some overriding reason to praise or condemn. Praise has it this time. It would be a great injustice to all of us to skip this one. And -- sorry about the omission of pages and price. It's a big book and I'm sure a small price for what you're getting. Check it out. Is one small step toward home? These words are Alfred Worden's, from his book Hello, Earth (Los Angeles, Nash Publishing Co., # pp, illus, #), a small collection of poems from the command pilot of Apollo #. # was the first truly scientific moon landing, and its effect on all subsequent manned space flight is pivotal and profound. So it was for Col. Worden, an unassuming, soft-spoken man with a glint of humor and occasional flashes of deep passion for in presenting the astronaut as a super-macAo Mister Clean, whose occasional use of slang was regarded with worshipful amazement, that it comes as a mild shock to meet one who is thoughtful, articulate, and not a little touched by magic. Listen: A spacewalk Is like Being let out At night For a swim By Moby Dick. In many cases Worden's images are better than his prosody, and quite often he chooses not to avoid a well-worn phrase. It is the integrity -- I almost said 'purity' -- of the man that shines through his words. He is not a great poet; he is a good man. The photographs, by the way, are magnificent. Next month I'll describe a new be well.  #  wi 'frJ# ' ' ' 'S mi '.vs-'.T#  !?l Time out of mind their madness grew, as they fled down the corridors # f Space and Time! ' WA f Si' M EwBBifl mwML .oj H eed me, Yoshe, my stardappled princess! Heed me well: there is something deeply mysterious about G -- something beyond that grim devotion, beyond the confusion of self and service. Is it the eyes which gleam of times past or never to come? Or the stubborn insistence that he is well despite the pain? Or are these all merely symptoms of something greater -- clues to an alien within? I do not know, Yoshe. Do. Not. Know. But the something is huge, palpable. And worrisome... Consider: on small-hours inspection today, fresh from lodging, I sighted G in the depths of the nodal gallery, engrossed in Duties. The dimness chilled the very breath in my lungs, curtained me with apprehension as I stood in my perch by the portal. Odors of soil and aminoplastic swirled about and clashed and grew upon each other to underline the mood of combat in the air. Cautiously. I stepped forward onto the rim, and for a fearful moment observed unannounced, scarcely daring to breathe, curling downward along the way, around and around the darkened gallery, hugging the wall to elude the conifer's needles. Below and below and below, made meek and insubstantial in the presence of even that tiny foundling of a tree, G grew in size too slowly, looking centuries older, darker, more distant than when I'd last seen him. Flushed a gruesome orange by the lamps, he lay prone on his couch -- rigid, Hand locked onto the Master's circuit, mouth agape in a parody of self-absorption. Gleaming clots of perspiration rolled about on his brow, clogged the hairs of his chest and groin, scuttled all along the dips and declivities of his body -- his ancient, withered body. And his Hand... his Hand, steaming with the fires of the drivers, lay silvery and supple on the circuitpad, a seven-digit bridge between G and his outer self. The silence was awesome, stifling, but its texture changed subtly as the Way whispered shut, and G blinked into awareness, his eyelashes fluttering in anguished slow motion. He remained immobile, gasping for equilibrium, and it was I who ventured contact; "Reeling in. Master G?" Laboriously, he squinted through the haze of the lamps. "Right-o," he said, wheezing the word, exhaling it, with the painful economy of the truly ancient. "Can't be too careful, Po, can't be too careful. Enna's good to us, but she takes some care, y'know?" I didn't respond: the statement was self-justifying, pathetic, and half-awareness -- drawn back, no doubt, by the tug of some awkward inner knowledge. He shivered against the gel of the couch; his Hand trembled, mocking the rhythm of the drivers as though out of mere tenacity; his face grew taut once again, smooth and oblivious; but the eyes, mirroring orange, slid slowly sideward in distrustful pursuit as I lowered myself into the companion couch. He cleared his throat, busily and without apology. "Y'know, Po, they say a Master doesn't need the skill anymore. But they're wrong, y'know? There's many an option 'tween Destinations." "Of course," I said, carefully modulating my voice to avoid any hint of condescension. "Say!" he blurted. "How're those lubbers of ours getting along?" ' Knowing that labored patience would offend him as readily as pity, I ignored the remark. "Passenger Thirty-seven asked about you," I said. "Nisa? Nice of her, real nice." (Do you see? He denies the Passengers! Confuses them with lubbers, Yoshe!) And, as though acknowledging this delusion, G shifted on the couch, swallowing a sigh. "Seen Yoshe or the others?" he added. "Not this month." (I lied since I was fearful I might create the impression steps were being taken against him.) "They're all in lodging, I imagine." "Course." He appeared unconvinced. "Well, Hand's twitching. Duties of the Caste! The Chosen and all, y'know?" It seemed futile to dispute him. "I've got to be drifting along anyway," I said. "Any message for Thirty-seven?" But G's eyes went to gloss as the curtain of Duty descended again, and T left just as I had come, Yoshe -- stealthily, mystified, fearful. T his too I have seen, princess -- and often, through these years without beginning or end: He lies unmoving, unmoved, as fhirty-seven glides into the gallery. Do you remember his Thirty-seven? Do you recall the rich tumbling curls, the beguiling curves, the smile of a thousand excitements? Each graceful movement, each warm shadow it makes across the gallery deck expresses the culmination and intermeshing of a thousand lost arts and a thousand sciences. The loathsome embodiment of all perfection -- yet a matchless vessel for his satisfaction, is it not? But it approaches, dancing, shedding its wisps of coverings, seductively calling out his name -- and he refuses it. Tensing the bruised and knotted muscles of the arm which bears the Hand, squinting painfully through the lampfires, G looks but does not see. His Hand rests apprehensively on the pad, and as Thirty-seven comes nearer, gesturing evocatively in the language of the body, his eyes close or lurch sideward. Its every attempt to calm his fears, he spurns. Its every move to sate his deepest (hirsts, he ignores. And yet, rejecting it, he defies it with a name. "Nisa," he calls it. Calls it thus, and thus denies it. "Please leave me (o my Duties, Nisa. The Duties of (he Caste." Can this be simple confusion, mistaking likeness for alikeness? Or is it, as I fear, a matter of lundamental denial and contradic(ion? He, with all his aspirations, must accept his Thirty-seven, repulsive as it is, but accept it as what it is -- his Passenger. It cannot be more, or less than what Time has made it. You, with your accepting ways, need not succumb to your Passenger; I, lacking a Hand, can rest content without mine. You see, Yoshe, I do not blame him. I fear him. H ave I mentioned the screens? The screens are blank, you know. Blank, and silent. All about him in the node, curving one into another in a glistening cylinder encircling the base of the tree, they are blank. Alight with flares from (he lamps; panels of aminoplastic, afire. Nothing more. They trouble (he senses with silence, with smoothness, with lingering hints of (he remnants of smell which struggle through the nodor. They are a profanity to the eyes in their relentless, unchanging blankness. He looks, though -- watches them, waits, hopes. His eyes roam on clockwork Duty, ravenously circling the node. What does he see? What can he possibly be awaiting? The screens are blank, you see, have been and will be. He lies on the couch beside the tree. Hand pulsing, waiting. Watching the tree grow. Watching blank screens. Are they blank to him Yoshe? H eed me, princess! Consider the outrageous tale G performed for me when I came upon him yesterday during phaseout inspection: "Know how it all got started, Po? Our Hands? Our Destinations? The Long Life to suffer them? Well, things have beginnings and ends, y'know? And ours -- our beginning -- was Master A, the Savior of Paradis Colony." (Watch, Yoshe! Gingerly, disengaging his Hand with painstaking care, G rises from the couch and assumes the pose of the storyteller, squatting in the shade of the tree.) "Back in Century One, it was -- the Century when Choice began." (You see, Yoshe? His hand and Hand weave through the shadows, evoking images of Youth and the long-ago.) "We were all lubbers, then. The Caste was soon to be, and Passengers, and Hands and Destinations, but we were lubbers and stiffs every one of us then -- half-lived, rolled in the Company, prisoned in Galaxy Way. And the best of us was A, Master in old Bessa -- the best and the swiftest and brightest. "There he was, out by AltarA, halfway from Center to the end to his hop on the Edge of Galaxy Way." (Watch the fingers flutter! Watch now, and listen!) "Stars stacked up all around him in pools and puddles and points... Bessa's drivers moaning sweetly at the touch of his hands... stiffs bundled up in the sleeper, cool and crisp and patient... Master A was logging record time, on his way to another bonus on his last hop out -- but then the call came through! A crackle from the 'caster; 'Distress! Danger! Paradis Colony in trouble!' "Now, they'd settled Paradis in the Early Years, during the first wave or the second, and the frontier'd long passed them by. The place was a loner, circling a dwarf, and not another within fifty parsecs. And Paradis isolated, was Paradis alone -- alone to build, alone to suffer and wonder. They'd contracted with the Company for tenth-year visits for news from Center and all the latest marvels and fads, but the Company's prime directive was 'Time is Our Tool,' y'know? As the Early Years'd worn on into darkness, and they'd hopped themselves so thin across Galaxy Way that their lifelines weren't worth the snapping, the Company's visits to Paradis phased down from tenthyear to fiftieth and then to once a century. Who was it? -- lubberman or woman who'd grow old and wither away! just to lug a few toys or trinkets to a' handful of colonists? Not Master A! When the lasercasts from Center could beam out the recipes faster? Not Master A! And the Company was so top-heavy with surplus they the long hops to the Edge like mugs of juice at mug-up? And the frontier was all and everything... and no one was happy unless every step went that much further than the last... and death was what happened when you'd gone as far as you could? And it happened, all right, after two hops or three or not many more? "But Paradis was in trouble! Their sun was going nova -- had been, would be, in fifty years or thirty! The lubbers would perish without a starship's drivers to cool the fires, restore the balance! And Master A, the best and the swiftest and brightest, was the first in the Company to get the news. Thirty parsecs off, he was -- a century or more -- but the first! "There he was, out by AltarA, midway to the Edge of Galaxy Way: stars stacked up all around him in pools and puddles and points... Bessa's drivers moaning sweetly at the touch of his hands... stiffs bundled up in the sleeper, cool and crisp and patient... a thousand lives and a bonus to weigh against ten his last hop out! Thirty years for thirty parsecs! Unthinkable! Impossible! The Barrier could never be breached! Bessa would melt, ordisappear! They'd lose themselves on the deserts of Time! Yet how could he fail to answer the call, to he fail to try? "So, off came Bessa's caps, and her 'brakes, and her memory of limits! Off came her ties, her doubts, her fears! "In a year and a day, Bessa was ready! Ready to roll, and roar, and swallow Time! "The day came, the hour, the minute... A settled into the Master's couch, hands caressing the circuit... , thirty seconds to GO, then twenty, and ten... his muscles tensed with visions of hope... live, four, three... his thumb depressed the warmer... two, one... "For an instant, the blackness of darkness' darkness: Time billowing up and sloshing about in waves and eddies and drops... Bessa's drivers flaming hot with rivers of molten velocity... Space flowing into Time, and turning about, and twisting, and screaming with l)ain... "An instant, and then it was over. "Thirty years for thirty parsecs! Unthinkable! "But he did it. "The Barrier could never be breached! Impossible! "But he did it. "Bessa would melt, or disappear! They'd lose themselves on the deserts of Time! "Yes, but he went, and they didn't. "And when it was done, and Paradis safe, and lubber limits forgotten in darkness, they lifted him from the couch, his forearms charred to carbon. "They carried the Master out from Bessa, and down to the surface. and there he resolved to stay -- to wait, smiling, for death to come slow and sweet. But as the days passed, and the months, and then a year, and the Motion Sickness came upon him in high-gee terror, and returned and returned, growing stronger and more awful, tearing his gut and peopling his visions with ravenous beasts. Master A grew old and older -- swiftly, mercilessly, painfully. "Time had twisted his soul, you see. and gravity his body! A's life was Motion, among the stars, and below was only the Sickness -- the Sickness, and galloping death. And knowing this at last, he knew he couldn't stay. "The Choice was made, the Caste had claimed its First. "Sadly, quickly, he fitted himself with Hands -- proper Hands, to Handle his Bessa, and rock to her drivers' rhythms. And soon he set out, the First of the Caste, the Savior of Paradis Colony, to the First Destination away from home in the puddle of Galaxy Way." H ave you pondered the tale I related yesterday? Have you let it's absurdities and inconsistencies trickle down through that crude veneer of second-hand emotion? And do you see now, Yoshe, how the mystery deepens and darkens? How our Master G overflows with fanciful tales of Origins, with dubious notions and fear of the truth? Can there be any doubt of the danger in this? I should -- no, must explain that no sooner was the tale performed than a dreadful screaming silence took hold again on the node. For the longest moment of Time -- an hour? a year? from phaseout to phasein? -- G remained on the deck, legs intertwined in the storyteller's squat, hand and Hand crossed on his sweat-drenched chest; he swayed ungently from side to side, as though rocked from doubt to hope by a greater Hand. Fearful of setting off some new and more worrisome tirade, I lay motionless on the companion couch, waiting... Cool and unhurried, the tree reached upward, sending its needles upward, upward, brushing the portal to Lodging Module, upward tow ard the limits of its confmement... Once the lamps warmed the end of phaseout -- or later? much later? -- G rose without prelude and strode from the shadows to resume his pose on the couch. But in the instant before his Hand locked on, he turned, examining the panels of blankness all about him in one loping circle, and then peered at me, his eyes framed with blood-red shadow's: "Think w'e'll ever get there, Po? Think we'll ever get there?" His tone -- frightened and wistful, wistful with not knowing -- magnified my worries a thousandfold, transmuting fear to bonewrenching terror. I bolted from the couch, but before I could leap onto the way and find refuge elsewhere, he jerked his Hand back from the pad with the extraordinary strength he can still muster in times of unusual stress and, sitting stiffly upright, shouted at me -- yes, Yoshe, he shouted: "They're out there, Po! Somewhere! They're out there!" There was more, of course -- more, and more, and more, uttered with the shrill ferocity of one who cannot be denied, but it was no more than a rumble, an indistinguishable roar beyond the portal. There, in my safety, G's delusions could not reach me... T here are patterns here, Yoshe, patterns which cannot be ignored. Patterns of rhythm: the Hand twitches, G twitches, the eyes shift, the Hand twitches; G moves from mug-up to meal-down, from lodging to node, from Destination to Destination. Each instant is but a memory. meaningful only as memory-that-was or memory-thatwill-be. But there is no stopping G. It is all he knows. The Hand twitches, G twitches, the eyes shift, the Hand twitches. He asks me, "Will we ever get there, Po? Will we ever get there?" Yet he goes on. There is no stopping. And patterns of design: G fears the Loneliness and the Darkness, yet he seeks them always, fearing their distaff twins; he is Changed and not-Changed, yet he denies change; he is hand and Hand, lubber and not. Lost but not lost, alive yet beyond Life; he is continually in Motion, yet never moves; he sees me, fears me, yet cannot admit me. Patterns of flux: Time lumbers on, taking huge gulps. Is he (were we?) the Chosen, or the Damned? He is (we are) notlubbers, not-Passengers, yet are we? We stand erect, seeking skies above and ground below, yet we can attain neither. Is this G's plan? Is it the Company's? Is it yours? Why don't you speak, Yoshe? Respond! He fears me, I tell you. Fears examination, exposure. Yes -- these are patterns which cannot be ignored. Y ou needn't worry about me. I'm a lot better today! Do you see. my princess, my light of inner lights? Do you see how I glow and cavort and pirouette? Yes, I'm feeling much better because now I K Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher lazny's latest novel is "almost impossible to put down." (University of Maryland SF Society). September. (UQ#-#c) Another well-known who is a original novel, is a three-way puzzler. (UQ#-#C) novels have built up an ardent mystic marvel world. (UQf#-#c) Michael G. Coney's first collection of his great short stories is truly memorable selection by this rising new sf giant. (UQ#-#C) Kern is a fine interstellar action novel on a planet haunted by monsters and the men who tracked down their source. (UQ#-#C) Fabulous cover art for this month by Kelly Freas, George Barr, Jack Gaughan... And we did it! We held the line on price, all #c. If you can't find our books, #I Ave. of the Americas  New York, N.Y. # know how things stand. Stand? I'm funning you, princess. Where can we stand? We're of the Caste, aren't we? You do see the humor? Of course you do. I don't need your laughter or smiles to know you see the humor. But this is a serious matter -- a most serious matter, this madness of G's. There's no time for laughter or smiles. No -- no time. You see, now I grasp G's madness, understand it, see my place in it, and yours, and the others'. I hold it in my hands and form it into myriad shapes which capture the gleam of transient starlight and in that gleam stand out stark and bald and undeniable! Thus it is illuminated, this madness. I embrace it fully, swallow it, gag on it. Yes. Now I've eaten the madness, the poison, the essence of G's confusion. I have suspected this for some time, spoken of it, pondered it -- but now I know it. You see, Yoshe, he confuses Passenger with lubber. Yes! It's truly as simple as that -- as simple and as subtly horrid. G speaks of "Nisa," of "her," of "his Nisa." Do you hear that, fathom it? Can there be such madness? A Name for a Passenger -- a numbered one! This is poison. Poison! To a quivering hunk of neuroplastic and tine-meshed wire and self-regenerative plasm he gives a Name! The Name of a lubber! Do you see how he thus deludes himself, how he claims to be a part of things which are no more? And do you see -- yes! -- how he denies us? Denies you, Yoshe, and me, and the others? His logic, Yoshe, his muddled cringing thoughts, are most subtle. To G, you see, we are all lubbers, and thus there will always be lubbers. He and you and I; Alor, Lulak, Lu -- but not the six of us alone, for to him there is also "his Nisa," and there are the other Passengers, yours and all the others', and to him we are lubbers one and all. All of us are a part of things -- things which are no more -- and thus things go on, and on, and on, and do not, will not, cannot drop unnoticed through the floor of Time. Yes! G lives with this delusion, this poison, attempts to spread it about. As though he didn't make the Choice! As though the day of the lubber might still be with us! "They're out there, Po," he says. "Somewhere! They're out there!" Are they, Yoshe? Are they? N ow WE are five. The Caste is five. Alor couldn't wait, you see. Somehow, in some way we shall never know (or want to), she slipped into the sleeper, deactivated its failsafes, and there, beyond the reach of her Passenger -- her Keeper -- ripped off her Hand. The Passenger couldn't stop her, couldn't make her wait, and she -- grew old. Passed from life. Abruptly. I found her lifeless body going to dust in the sleeper. Or perhaps I arrived earlier. Perhaps it was not entirely her choice to Change in quite that way. I don't know. It was so long ago. Have such things happened before on Enna? I have the feeling they have. A nagging feeling... Now, if I had a Hand, I'd rip it off too. But I don't, do I? Do I, Yoshe? Tell me I don't. I know it, but I want to hear you say it. Of course, G won't hear any of this about Alor. Today, only other Duties pre-empted contact with him, but I won't see him tomorrow or the next day either, or perhaps for a year of years, and by the time I do, maybe I'll have forgotten. Maybe. I hope so. It is clear why I don't want to see him, isn't it? Clear that the less frequent and regular my visits, the less obvious will be my investigation of him? You do see, don't you? My Duty is to oversee him, hold him back from rash beliefs and foolish acts. This is only my Duty, and now it is my only Duty. Aside from these reports, of course. You do see, don't you? We are five now. Alor has Changed again. The Caste is five. Or perhaps there are others. Perhaps... Today's a day for riddles, my love -- riddles! Think now, I know you'll come up with the answers! Why does the tree grow feet every day, and why don't we have hands? Got them? Here's another; If a day is a thousand years or ten Puzzled? Riddled? Perplexed? Try this one -- it's really a puzzler; If we want Time to go slower, why must we go faster? Or put it this way; why do we go farther and farther to get nearer and nearer? You see? Why does the tree grow feet. How long is a day. Why do we go faster. Think now -- I know you're going to laugh when I tell you the answers... Give up? I'm surprised, Yoshe. You were always so quick, no pun intended. But okay. The tree grows feet every day because it doesn't have a Hand! And we don't have hands because there's nothing we can touch! You see? And a day isn't a thousand years day. That's all it can be. But here's the really tricky one; if we want to get nearer and nearer, and we want Time to go slower, we go farther and farther and faster and faster because Time gets used up! It does, Yoshe. Yes, it does. I know it does. No matter what he says. Funny, isn't it? Y oshe! Do you hear me? We found it! We reached our Destination today! Yes! Do you hear me, princess? Today we were back in Galaxy Way! It was during smallhours. I was in lodging with Kulak, observing while he executed an especially intricate maneuver in his game and attempting, in vain as always, to communicate my admiration to him, when one of the Passengers' approach-warnings virtually exploded with the news! I stumbled to the nearest portal and, somehow, this way or that through Enna's bowels, struggled into the Nodal Module, and then into the gallery, where I found Master G already locked on amid the blazing screens. Blazing! They were burning, roasting, flaming with lights from the stars! Choking back my delirium, I joined Master G, taking my place on the companion couch and, with him, attuned my Hand to the scanners. Their song was a song of arrival! it rocked and roared and coursed throughout me with rhythms I thought I'd forgotten; it played sweetly, calling up all the colors and the textures and tastes of what we have all missed for so very long! The probability, Yoshe -- the probability was ninety sixth percentile! Yes! Veritably certain that we've found Galaxy Way! When Master G and I reached this conclusion -- almost simultaneously, it seemed -- he shrugged himself higher and peered across at me. His eyes were alight with exultation. "How about that, Po? How about that?" he said. Independently, each of us groped his way into calibration with the near-scanners to examine our immediate surroundings. As I immersed myself further and further w ithin the sloshing currents of sensation Enna was transmitting through my Hand, the gallery receded into haze, and memory into darkness. There was but one reality -- starlight, chill and piercing -- and one life. Finite. Bearable. It can do that to you, you know? Remember? Our stopping-place was a moderate-sized star system not far from the Edge of the Way -- a binary, white and Yellow II, with a half-dozen worlds whirling about eccentrically -- and of course we found no signs of lubber life there. the Way, and tomorrow or tomorback again from the Clouds and maybe there'll be lubbers there and then. And if not there and then -- well, w'e can return again and again! They've got to return some time! Anyway, that's what Master G told me. He said if they're all dead, or they've all gone away, all we need do is keep coming back later and later, and somewhere -- sometime -- we'll find them. He said it softly, patiently, eyes fixed on the hazy reaches of the tree above, and once he had said his say, I rose silently from the couch and moved to board the way. Then it w as that I noticed Thirtyseven, seated on the deck unspeaking and unmoving, its smooth back arched against the trunk of the tree. The gnarled and mottled trunk of the tree, which then seemed older and bigger than ever and overripe for replacement. While Thirty-seven, by contrast, was as secure and patient as in any time through Time in its war of attrition against Master G. But he? He was settling down for the long hop back out to the Clouds. You know, Yoshe, I've just thought of something funny. The Way's a galaxy like all the rest of them. Stars, Yoshe. Stars and dust. And isn't it funny too how we die a little each time, each time we reach our Destination? Now, if we come back often enough, then eventually we'll die, won't we? We will die, won't we? Why should the tree grow old and die, and not we? Why is there so much w'e cannot understand? Master G says they're out there. He says they are. Y oshe...! Yoshe...! You're hiding from me, princess! Do you think I don't know? Do you think I don't know you're hiding, and why? That I don't know your fear of me? Your fear of my power? Do you think I don't know that when I'm not with you, you speak with the others? With Alor and Kulak and Lu, and -- yes! -- with G, with the hateful Master G, discussing me, taking steps? Do you think I don't know this? You are hiding from me, aren't you? Hiding and fearing me? Why don't you speak, Yoshe? I know you're not dead, princess. I see you breathe. Yes, I see it... there! You inhale... exhale... the breasts rise golden and luscious... slowly... the nipples broad and sleeping... slowly... rise... and fall... rise and fall... I know you're not dead, princess. We don't die. The trees die, and the stars, and lubbers. All the lubbers, every one of them. But we don't die. The longer we look, the longer we live. Yes! We're going to live a very long time! Why are you hiding from me, Yoshe? And Alor and Kulak and Lu? They're no better, my princess! Sprawled out or curled up and rigid. Staring. Eyes glassed and blank and uncaring. Why? Why do you leave me with him'I With him and his poison and the numbered ones? Why am I alone with them, Yoshe? We're going to live a very long time. Why must we live alone, Yoshe? Why are you hiding from me? Why must we go faster and farther for Time to go slower? Yoshe! The tree is dead! Yoshe... Yoshe... # ment between Rusty Schweithought to ask it to tell you, and a kert, astronaut-scientist, and Gene trained astronaut-scientist will Resources Survey. After a while I in space and can do them, had a sense of dea vu: the man-inI w on't pretend neutrality, havspace people have been fighting ing started in the Human Factors with the black-box boys at least laboratories and put several years since # when I first got involved into work on keeping men alive in in the space business. the space environment; obviously The arguments haven't changed, I'm prejudiced in favor of the astrothe black box boys still say that boys have a strong point. It's going anything a man can do in space, into cost a lot to send manned strument probes can do better and missions to the planets, and with cheaper -- and two instrument mispresent spacecraft manned intersions cost less than one manned planetary travel can never become mission. Meanwhile, the astronauts routine. It's not just a question of say that you can't learn anything refining what we've got, either; there's a definite theoretical limit to what we can do with chemical rockets, and manned interplanetary cruises -- other than spectacular one-shots to say we've done it -- are beyond those limits. Let's see why and then look at ships that can take man to the planets. F irst we'll need a couple of basic facts about propulsion. Jim Baen and I are agreed that this column won't become a substitute for a textbook, and I'll keep the lecture short. Rockets are still the only means of interplanetary travel we have, and they work by throwing mass overboard. The more mass tossed, and the faster it goes aft, the more thrust: Thrust (force)  (rate of mass loss) X (exhaust velocity) or, T  (MqMi) X (Vp) T (Equation one.) What this says is you take the weight of the ship when you get through burning fuel, subtract that from the weight you started with, divide by time of burn and multiply by the velocity the burned fuel went aftwards from the ship; and you get thrust. Now in the footpound measurement system, thrust is expressed in pounds and sounds like a weight. It's not, it's a force, but it does have one convenient property. One pound of thrust will just support one pound of weight in the gravity of the Earth's surface. It will accelerate that same mass at one gravity if you started in orbit. In metric systems, thrust is expressed in newtons or dynes, and if you don't understand the difference between mass and weight, they aren't easy to interpret. However, equation one makes it easy to see that if you don't want to throw much mass overboard, you'd better get it going aft at a fast clip -- that is, you need high Vg. Now Vg happens to be related to the temperature of the burn in the rocket engine, so naturally there's a limit to how high Vg can get; if it's hot enough, the engine melts, and your rocket won't work so good. It should be clear, though, that the theoretical Vg obtainable with any given combination of fuel and oxidizer is a good measure of how efficient that combination would be as a rocket fuel. However, for reasons I won't go into, instead of Vg most engineers use another measure of fuel efficiency known as Specific Impulse, abbreviated lp; this is given in units called "seconds." That's not really a unit of time. Ip is the "pounds of thrust obtained per pound of fuel expended per second", obviously a measure of efficiency; and I  V sp (Equation two) O where g is the acceleration of gravity: # cmsecsec in the mettric system and # ft. secsec in the English. Now we have a measure of fuel efficiency, but we don't know what we need for interplanetary travel. As I've shown before in these columns, one of the most convenient figures to look at is "deltavee", meaning the total change in velocity we can get from a ship if we burn all the fuel in it. Delta-v is convenient because it doesn't matter if you burn all the fuel at once, or keep turning the motor on and off; and furthermore, we can calculate the delta-v needed for various space missions without knowing anything about the ships at all. Big or little, it takes the same delta-v to get into orbit, or to go from here to Mars. We're almost done with the rocketry basics, but we need one more equation: Delta-v  Vg logg M j (Equation Three) What this says is that the total velocity change you can get from a rocketship can be found by knowing the exhaust velocity of the fuel burned, and the ratio of the mass when you started to the mass when you finished the mission. Log-basee is the "Natural log" of that ratio, and if you don't understand logs, don't worry about it. It's tabled in handbooks or given by scientific pocket computers. Early chemical rockets used fueloxydizer combinations with Ijp of under # pounds. That means that at a mass-flow rate of I pound a second, the rocket could lift about # pounds against gravity. Recall, though, that this is the total weight lifted, including the fuel to be burned in the next seconds, etc., and you'll see it's not so good after all. Incidentally, if you'll look at the three equations you'll see why liquid-fuel rockets start lifting slowly and get faster and faster as they rise. The mass-flow stays the same, but they're burning fuel and getting lighter all the time. Since the thrust hasn't changed, but the mass it has to lift is decreasing, the acceleration the motor imparts to the rocket inereases steadily. Roeket chemists worked very hard to get higher lp (and thus higher exhaust velocities), and now the best solid fuel rockets have Ip in the order of # seconds. Meanwhile, liquid-fuel rocket motors were developed to give even higher speeific impulses, and by using that around the motor to cool it before it was burned, higher burning temperatures were achieved.  An easier way to calculate delta-v is to send # to Rand Corporation, # Main St., Santa Monica, Calif. # and ask for a "Rocket Performance Computer." It's a circular slide rule developed by Ed Sharkey, and it comes with a book of instructions. You enter with Isp and mass ratio and it gives delta-v directly. nearly routine. More exotic fuels were employed, including liquid hydrogen and flourine. However, with the best chemical fuels, the theoretical maximum Ip is no more than #. Actually, no one has got that yet; and it's certain (hat no chemical rocket will do better. Isp of # is an exhaust velocity, at best, of # kilometerssecond. Let's plug that into equation three for various mass ratios and see what happens. (Table One.) Best Delta-V for chemical rockets. Isp # Ve  # Kmsec Mass Ratio  Fuel Delta-v (Kmsec) # # #.I # # It takes about # kmsecond to get into Earth orbit, which means the best chemical rockets have to be almost # fuel simply to get into orbit in a single stage; but let's assume we start in Earth orbit. #'o get to Mars requires about # kmsec velocity if you start in l:arth orbit -- and it takes that much again to get back. Clearly, if we're to carry any payloads to Mars, we need refueling out there. Equally clearly, we've got a problem, because how do we ferry enough equipment to set up a fueling station on Mars? About # of our payload put into Earth orbit gets burned before we reach Mars. To make a round trip, which means carrying the fuel to come home with, we have to put # pounds into Earth orbit for each pound making the trip from Earth to Mars and back again. Even one way takes a factor of four to one, not impossible, but expensive enough. Still, we could imagine commerce in which four tons of fuel were burned for each ton of payload delivered. Unfortunately, minimum energy transfers (and those are the only kind possible with chemical rockets; anything else required delta-v in the tens to hundreds of kmsec) take time: # days to Mars. People eat, drink, and breathe. With the best recycling we're going to have consumables aboard the ships -- and the recycling systems are massive, too. Let's be generous and say we hold things to # pounds a day per passenger, and start with people who weigh # pounds each. That's # pounds of passenger and consumables -- and # pounds of fuel for his one-way trip. If we can't refuel at Mars and hydrogen out with us, it's far worse. You need # pounds of fuel in Earth orbit for each round trip passenger. Clearly, that's not a commercial proposition. Chemical rockets can give us commerce with Mars only if we can build a Mars orbiter and fueling station, and even then it's marginal: and remember, we've given chemical rockets the best possible performance. It's not good enough. then? We have several, one of which could have been developed by the end of this decade. How would you like to have had a # person scientific mission leave Earth orbit in June, #, to arrive at Mars # days later; orbit Mars for # days, then head for Venus, encounter the asteroid Eros and stay near it for a day or so; then go on to orbit Venus for # days and, finally, # days after it departed, return to Earth orbit? It could have been built. I have a model of the spacecraft that could have carried that mission. It employs a stabilized main section, and a counterbalanced rotating crewquarters section to give about # gravity; it carries plenty of scientific instruments, and a small nuclear electric power plant; and by making rendezvous in Mars orbit with an expendable fuel pod, pilgrim could have sent down a manned Mars lander. The model was built by model Michigan, and sold for about # dollars under the name pilgrim celestial mechanics of the model and its mission were very well worked out -- and we really could have built it for a # flight. The engine employed was an atomic rocket called nerva. Unfortunately, neither the model nor the engine are available any longer, and for the same reason: no out of production at about the same time as Congress cancelled the budget of Project nerva. This was just after Apollo #, when people lost interest in space, and I was involved in trying to save nerva: involved to the extent of writing some columns in daily papers, and furnishing the House Science Committee with data. But despite my efforts, which weren't important, and those of Congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr., which were very imIronically it died a great success. It had been ground tested and found to work fine. rockets" of the better science fiction writers of the #'s and #'s. Basically, it's a nuclear reactor with a rocket nozzle at the end: you squirt fuel, say hydrogen, through the reactor; it gets hot; and out it comes, fast, to propel the ship. hotter than the best chemical rockets; in fact, some chemical rockets operate at nearly #, which is better than nerva's design specs called for. However, Ve, which is 'hat you want to maximize, depends not only on the temperature of the reaction, but also on the molecular weight of what you're throwing overboard. Hydrogen burning in oxygen produces water, with molecular weight of #. Even hydrogen and tlourine give off HF with a weight of #. (It's also rather corrosive, since the least moisture converts it to hydroflouric acid.) But nerva squirted out molecular hydrogen, and that has a weight of only two. The best tested Ip for nerva was #. The designers of pilgrim assumed they'd get # by #, and that was reasonable. Most encan get Ijp of #. Let's plug those into Equation three and see what we Come up with. (Km second) Mass Ratio # # # # # # #.I # Even with the lower figure, you can get a round-trip to Mars at a mass-ratio of four. With that kind of capability, commerce between the planets becomes economically feasible. It's still expensive, but given some kind of system to get materials into orbit at either end, it's more than just possible -- it becomes likely. T here's another alternative to studied extensively before it was abandoned. It was called orion, and on first description it seems like the most unlikely method of space travel you ever could devise. ately as Bang-Bang. It worked very simply: you take a big ship, and on the bottom you put a very thick metal plate. You hang the rest of the ship in such a way that there are a lot of shock absorbers between the base plate and the ship itself. Then you set off an atomic bomb underneath the ship. Believe me, the ship will move. When it starts to slow down, you fling another atom bomb down below and detonate it. You keep doing that until you've got enough velocity to get where you want to goSilly as it sounds, orion would have worked. There were some problems. Obviously that base plate and suspension system had to be carefully designed. You probably wanted a small shielded compartment for the crew and those items you carried that couldn't take hard x-rays, and a larger compartment, unshielded, for the rest of the cargo. None of this would have been difficult. Another problem with orion was coupling the energy from the bomb to the ship. Atom bombs put out a lot of x-rays and neutrons and heat, and of course once out of the atmosphere there's no blast at all. But even that problem was solved: you have to put something between the bomb and the ship, something that will absorb energy from the bomb and whap! the bottom of the ship to keep it moving: something like styrofoam, for example, which looks as if it would work despite its unlikeliness. but it could lift from Earth -- if it weren't for the Treaty of Moscow that prohibits surface detonations of nuclear weapons, and if you weren't worried about the fallout. It has been calculated that pounds on the Moon -- and do it on one whack. That's enough for a fair-sized colony's consumables and machine tools. Of course we won't use orion to launch from the Earth's surface, but there's nothing wrong with using it from Earth orbit to plant Lunar and Martian colonies; it's the most efficient and cheapest form of space transportation known, believe it or not. M oreover, orion works us toward something even cheaper. The problem with orion at the moment is that you're blowing off a kilo or so of weapons-grade U-# with each bang, and that stuffs not cheap. Aviation Week and a few other publications have been hinting that fusion bombs with laser trigger either have been or are about to be developed: with these. you don't need a U-# primary, you just have a hot laser zap some Tritium or Deuterium. It's more bang for the buck, and it would Dr. Greg Benford has also described a system that would be even cheaper: you have a big power source on the ship, say a small fission reactor. That feeds a big laser. Pellets of Tritium or Deuterium are ejected below the ship, and zapped from the laser, producing fusion to drive the ship, carried to its most efficient extreme. When you've got ships like that, you don't even talk about Ip and exhaust velocities, and the mass ratios are actually fractional -- that is, the ship that arrives weighs more than the fuel expended to get there. All these ships were once seriously studied. Now, it's only in universities and among science-fiction people that they're mentioned, and even there most don't take oriontype ships very seriously. Yet any of these ships could have given us the planets -- and until either the exploited, the black-box boys have won. Man can dominate near-Earth space using the shuttle and laser launchers; but until we go beyond chemical rockets, interplanetary space will belong to unmanned probes.  This is a classic 'problem' sf story -- and as is proper in this genre-withina-genre the solution is inherent in the problem! T hey were five days out from the Base when the caterpillar stripped a track. Dugmore was driving. They had entered a wide ravine spectacularly divided between sunlight and shadow, cold black and blinding white. Although the line of demarcation ran roughly along the center, Dugmore kept within the sunlit area to avoid putting extra strain on the relays. Ahead he noticed a dip in the ravine floor -- a medium-sized crater that took up the entire width of the ravine. He studied the obstacle as they approached. Both the dip and the ascent on the far side were well inside the caterpillar's potential -- and since there was no way around and going back would involve a long detour; he drove on. The caterpillar reached the lip of the crater, nosed down. Suddenly there was a screech of tracks trying to grip and failing, a sensation of sliding. Corfield was thrown against him. They wound up in a heap on the floor, knocked about but undamaged. They donned suits and went out to examine the damage. It was easily found. The left-hand track was broken and stripped, a limp tail that trailed behind the caterpillar. They touched helmets to speak, a grotesquely romantic gesture, Dugmore always thought. Corfield said: "Think you can manage it?" His voice was small and tinny; even normally it was high-pitched for a man so massive. Dugmore said: "Nothing to it. Go and amuse yourself." Of course, Corfield could have done the work just as Dugmore could carry out the necessary mineralogical surveys; but this was basically Dugmore's field, just as the other was Corfield's. It was simple enough -- a straight-forward job of welding and reassembly. Before getting the tools, he straightened his back and had a look at the surrounding scene. The caterpillar had slid to the bottom of the crater, which was filled with loose rock and gravel, and dotted with boulders. All very dead, bleakly devoid of life. Inside, he had a shot at raising Cape Kennedy before picking up the welder. No good. Direct communication with Base had, of course, been out since they dropped below the horizon. After that, signals had to be bounced through the link stations back on Earth. The sun-spot interference had come in first on the morning of the third day, and on the next contact, when they should have had Tokyo, there was nothing but howls, whistles and bangs. The regulations ruled that you turned back on losing touch, but this particular edict was honored mainly in the breach -- had been broken, in fact, by the last probe as well. The point was that the caterpillar was pretty much an independent entity: air and water, with re-cycling, would last a couple of months, food concentrate, half as long again. There were other considerations as well. One was that they had been waiting a long time for the chance to get out of the underground tunnel that was Base. Another was that theirs was the fourth probe, heading south as the previous ones had gone west, north and east and there was a certain amount of rivalry as to distance covered. Probe # had done best so far, but they were ahead of them so far. fhey had little difficulty in making up their minds to carry on. The I'ollowing day they got through to Shannon, though only in Morse: KT was still impossible. "Day" was a misleading word. The probes set out from Base at the lunar daybreak, travelled away with the rising sun and then, as it began to slip from the zenith, made their way back. Seven earth days each way. But they continued to live on a twenty-four hour clock, taking it in turns to have the six hours sleep which was as much as anyone needed on the moon. If anything went wrong they could easily survive the fourteenday lunar night. They would stay warm and snug in their caterpillar, and could listen again to the music tapes or re-read the flimsy ricepaper books. It would be a bit boring but that was something they were used to. There were no hazards: no storms, no monsters. A dead world, in which nothing changed, nor had changed for hundreds of thousands of years. The most interesting thing any previous probe had turned up had been a high-temperature streak in the tufa which covered the greater part of the ground area, the high temperature being ten degrees above calculation. They, of course, had discovered Corfield's invisible worms. Dugmore smiled at the thought. They stopped at specified intervals to take specimens. Usually Corfield brought back two or three cores, but the last time he had taken the cutter and sliced out a much larger section, a piece of rock about two feet square and a couple of inches thick. On Earth, it would have been quite a weight, but he hefted it easily. Too easily even for the Moon. When he carried it through the lock, Dugmore said: "A hefty chunk of real estate, that. You planning to take it back to Joan for that rock garden of hers?" "What would you say it was?" Dugmore looked at it. A section of typical ore-bearing basalt, except that instead of ore veins it had... well, holes. In parts it looked as though worms had crawled through the rock, an unlikely notion to say the least. "Metalliferous," he said, "without the metal." Corfield nodded. He looked excited. "Typical iron-bearing rock. I'd swear to that. But without iron. Almost as though it had been leached out." "Doesn't iron oxidize?" "Where there's oxygen, it can." "Then maybe the moon had an atmosphere at one time." Dugmore considered the point. "A rather selective one. We've come across plenty of exposed iron ore elsewhere." "Then there's life on the moon after all. The rock-eating lunar worm. Vermis Lunaris Corfieldis. O.K. to move on, or do you want more from here?" Corfield was studying the rock. He said abstractedly: "Sure, move on." F or an hour, Dugmore bent over the welder, with Corfield checking occasionally to see how things were going. He thought it was time then to have a break for food. He went in and opened a self-heating can of high-protein, low-residue mush, chicken and ham flavour. He was not sure whether the texture or the flavour inspired more nausea. But it was nourishing. They had been well assured of that. Corfield followed him in. "How long now?" he asked. "Another hour, I should think." "Fair enough. You picked an interesting spot to bust a track." "More worms?" "By the dozen, from the looks of it. A good place for siting an iron mine, except that it's been surface-mined already. And with high efficiency. I've found a couple of pockets where the iron content assays staggeringly high. The rest is holes where the iron ought to be." Dugmore plugged in a tape of the musical, "Royal Scot." "You can have yourself a ball with it. A short one, anyway. We need to get on, since it's turnaround tomorrow." Corfield, whose taste was for string quartets, grimaced as the Overture belted out. "I think I'll get out there right away." The job in fact took another two and a half hours to finish. In that time, the line dividing sunlight from shadow had shifted fractionally away from them. At the top of the rise there was a boulder -- about three feet in diameter -- one edge gleamed now in the sun's marginally more yerticai ray. They went inside, Corfield taking the tiller. It was his turn for driving, and Dugmore was tired, anyway. His sleep period was almost due, and he was in favour of that. The caterpillar jerked forward, and stopped. There was a higher whine from the engine. The wheels were turning, but the tracks were not gripping -- you could hear the stones spinning under them. Corfield gave her more power, and the tracks bit. The caterpillar moved up, skidding and sliding sideways. They were climbing the slope. Then she stopped again, with a more decisive feel to it. Dugmore took over -- there was nothing to worry about but she might need coaxing. He revved high before he let in the clutch. She bounded, and covered about half of the remaining distance to the top. She stuck there, however. The pitch was a little too steep with this kind of loose scree. Only a little, but that was enough. Corfield said: "Now what?" "I suppose we could wait to get through, and then wait for a rescue party." "Three weeks. Any brighter suggestions?" "Yes," Dugmore said. "We'll get the block and tackle staked in up above, and hook the spare motor to it. Run a hawser round the caterpillar. Pull and push at the same time. Dead easy." Corfield nodded. "You're the boss." Working in their suits, it took over an hour. At least, Dugmore reflected, there was no need to worry about getting caught by the dark. The sun would not start setting for another twenty four hours. When it was ready, Corfield went up to handle the winching part, while Dugmore stayed in the caterpillar. He was near the edge of exhaustion. He had told Corfield to start the spare motor first and to gun the caterpillar as soon as he felt the hawser taking a strain. Corfield did so. The caterpillar moved serenely up the slope, poised on the lip, and came onto level ground. Corfield was visible a few yards ahead. Dugmore signaled to him to stop the engine, cutting his own at the same time. He heard the hawser grate against the side of the caterpillar, shifting position. There was a harsh tearing spang of metal. It sounded expensive. Corfield came in through the lock. He said: "Bad luck. It's the..." "I know," Dugmore said. "The track's snapped again." Corfield nodded. "At the weld." Dugmore took a grip on himself, and breathed out heavily. "Ah well -- back to the workbench." D ugmore's eyes were aching, their fatigue made worse by the blinding whiteness of vacuum light reflected from volcanic dust. Both his reflexes and his judgment were impaired by fatigue. He fumbled things. He had to re-do the first weld he made. Corfield stood and watched for a time and then, to Dugmore's relief, wandered off, examining the terrain. Corfield stayed in view, of course: that was one rule no-one ever broke. Later he went back to the caterpillar to watch Dugmore add the final touches. He bent his head, making contact. "All right now?" "It hhd better be." They went in through the lock. Dugmore said: "Try the radio again?" "Yes." "No luck?" "I heard something. Garble." "No matter. We're on our way." "You look shot," Corfield said. "You're overdue for the bunk. I'll take her off." Dugmore finished removing his suit. "She's all yours. I don't think I'll need ear-plugs." He had put his own cocoon in the narrow recess of the bunk. He slid into it, turning his face to the blankness of the wall. Drowsily he heard Corfield making the necessary connections. The engine started, a good healthy note. Clutch in. Something was wrong. The engine w'hined on a higher note for a moment, then stalled. Dugmore was filled with a murderous rage -- against the caterpillar, Corfield, himself. He heaved himself up and out, and began dressing. Corfield asked: "Shall I try her again?" "I'll have a look outside first." "You don't want to try her yourself?" "No." "I'll come out with you." He did not bother to reply to that. H e ex.mined the track he had mended first. He could see nothing wrong. He went to the other side. The trouble was plain. A boulder was Jammed in the tracks, wedged in the space between wheel and body. Visible, all right -- but possible? He pulled at the boulder for a moment, then drew' back as if stung. The rock was hard, but not rock-hard. There was resilience there. Corfield's helmet touched his. Corfield said: "What is it?" "You tell me. Not stone, anyway. Feel it." He saw Corfield touch it, then the expression of surprise behind the visor. "The main thing is getting it clear. I'm going in for a crowbar." When he came back Corfield was lying prone staring at the boulder. Crouching was difficult in a suit. Dugmore wedged the crowbar in and heaved. Nothing happened. If it had somehow been wedged in during that last ascent then it should have been forced out again. He tried again. The thing was in solid. Corfield touched heads with him, "Hang on while I get the drill." While he waited for Corfield's return he decided there was something wrong with the shape as well. It was too regular, too close in the sunlight. The surface gleamed with a faintly bluish sheen in the sunlight. He hit it with his hand -- it yielded ever so slightly. Corfield put the edge of the drill against the thing and started up. There was no sound, but a faint vibration transmitted through the rock to the soles of his feet. He ran it for several seconds, and switched off. Dugmore stared at the place where he had drilled. Not the faintest sign of penetration. Corfield's head bent down to his. "Let's go inside." Dugmore nodded, pulled at the crowbar to free it. He had to put his weight behind it. The odd thing was that it felt like overcoming adhesion rather than ordinary jamming. cabin Dugmore said; "You're the metallurgist -- what is it and how did it get there?" Corfield looked dazed. "It's not metal, nor rock either." "Then what?" Corfield held out the drill. "I had the diamond head on. Didn't touch the thing -- yet it gives when you press it -- just a little." "Go on." Corfield said slowly: "Two things emerge. One is that it has a different molecular structure from anything we've ever come across." "The other?" "It could be alive." "On the moon? No air, no water -- how?" Corfield picked up the crowbar which Dugmore had put back in its box. "Look at this." Dugmore stared at the crowbar. For eighteen inches from the end -- that part which had been pressing against the boulder -- there was a discoloration, a kind of blue smear. He looked more closely. Just barely visible, there was pitting. "Metal?" he asked. "Are you suggesting it eats metal?" "It would explain some things." "The worms, you mean? A bit on the large size, to get into those holes." "I don't know. I'm going out to have another look at it. You could try raising Cairo again. Or Manchester might be coming in by now." "And tell them what? That we've found the local inhabitants, and that they chew iron filings and excrete rust?" "I think it might be a help to have them send someone out from Base with another caterpillar." "In case we can't pry our little friend loose?" "Just in case." Dugmore applied himself to the radio. Cairo offered a gale of noise. On the Jodrell Bank frequency it seemed a little better. RT was obviously out of the question, so he keyed and waited. There was nothing. He was still straining to pick up an intelligible signal when Cortield came back in. He shook his head in answer to Corfield's unspoken query, and said: "What about our little friend?" Dugmore asked. "Siderophagous," Corfield said, "and siderotropic. Polymorphous with it. I suspect its natural shape is a sphere, which is the most conservative of energy. But if you put iron-containing material near it, it throws out a pseudoped toward it, fastens on and starts absorbing." "At what rate?" "A slow one, fortunately. It's slow altogether, which I suppose is what one would expect." Dugmore closed down the set. "If it's slow, and that size, why didn't we notice it before? I mean, you've been busy checking the local territory. You didn't spot a bluish sphere, a couple of feet across?" "I saw it all right, only it wasn't a bluish sphere then. It was a boulder, lying on the lip of the crater. At least, the boulder is now missing, so that's my guess." Dugmore wrinkled his brow, remembering. "That can't be right. I remember that stone: there was only the one. It was nothing like a sphere, and didn't have that sheen. A chunk of rock." "Try a cut with Occam's Razor. The boulder miraculously removed as well as our lunarian sphere fastening onto the caterpillar? Better two improbabilities than one?" "I don't get it." "Nor do I -- but I'm feeling my way towards something. That section was in shade when we arrived. Let's suppose the thing inactivates during the lunar night -- goes to sleep until the sun touches it again. Then it wakes up and starts looking around for food. It can obviously mine iron out of rock pretty effectively. But the caterpillar offers more attractive scope. Something like one of us back home finding a living saucer composed of T-bone steak." "The thought's too poignant. It's a good theory, but there's one thing against it." "Whafs that?" "If it tends towards a sphere shape as a means of conserving energy, surely it would remain in that form during the dormant period? That boulder was a pretty jagged piece of stone." Corfield shrugged. "Protective mimiery perhaps. Who cares? What matters is that we've found life -- or pseudolife, at least." He had the look of a child who's just discovered that Father Christmas is real after all. "It's fantastic." "Yes," Dugmore said, "I can see that. I'll start cheering as soon as we've pried the goddam thing loose." T hey weren't worried, not yet. The thing did not look menacing, did not appear likely to become a threat. Corfield tried various metal objects in contact with it and thereby established that it displayed tropism only for iron and its alloys. The higher the iron content the more rapid the rate of absorption, the highest rate being, CorField calculated, slightly less than a thousandth of an inch per hour, something like a fiftieth of an inch per day. The caterpillar's plating was half an inch, which meant they had twenty-five days before the thing ate its way through. On the other hand, the problem of freeing the track from its clutches remained obdurate. Various attempts at prying or pushing it out got nowhere. After an hour of this, Dugmore thought of heat. It could plainly take extreme temperature changes, but a touch of the oxyacetylene tlame was somewhat different from the sun's radiant energy, even in vacuum. He set up the welder and directed the torch at that part of the sphere furthest away from the caterpillar. In a short time, the blue turned to orange and then to cherry-red. Nothing else happened. Corfield had another go at levering it out, with no result. Dugmore held the torch steady in one spot and the red brightened to a yellowish white. But that was absolutely all. Corfield touched a part of the sphere away from the flamed area. He made a gesture of negation, and another towards the airlock. Dugmore switched off, and followed him back in the caterpillar. Corfield was excited again. He said: "Quite a different molecular structure, obviously. Do you realize that a few inches away from the point you were burning the temperature was absolutely normal?" Dugmore stashed the welder away. He said: "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it. Look, I'm beat. I'm going to get in the sack. Wake me if it sprouts wings and starts lifting us off towards Tycho." Corfield said abstractedly: "Sure. I wonder if it would respond to magnetism?" "You find out. You might also have another shot at getting through to Base. I have a feeling maybe we are going to need help. Try Manchester again -- or Shannon." usual hemidemisemitasse of coffee and steaming tin of scrambled egg with diced ham mush. Sitting up, Dugmore asked: "Any luck?" "No. It was an odd thing with the magnet, though." "How so?" "It started putting a tendril out and then stopped and withdrew." "You should have carried on. You might have got it confused." "I didn't think of that." Dugmore reached for his sponge and began rubbing himself. "Don't take it to heart." "But I mean it. It might..." "Forget it. What about the link? Any luck?" "None." "Cape Kennedy should be in by now." "I tried them. Nothing." Dugmore sighed. "We're still on our own, then, coping with our ravening monster. No other bright ideas?" "I set up the camera to record it." "That should win a prize for action movies." "Single-frame at minute intervals. Do you think electricity might touch it?" "We could try. Or tickle it with a feather, maybe." They manhandled the generator outside, hooked it up to the transformer, managed to boost the output to two thousand volts. Dugmore held a contact against the sph ere, which seemed distinctly larger, bulging out more obviously from the track, and nodded to Cortield to apply the juice. This time, it didn't even change colour. When Corfield cut, and came over to touch helmets, he asked him: "You sure it was getting through?" "It was getting through, all right. "Let's go in and think again. Might be worth trying Berkeley, too." Corfield tried to get through to Berkeley. The static sounded louder than ever, a storm of sound. There was no point in persisting. As he switched off, Dugmore said: "This is turn-round point, by the way. I just checked the clock. We ought to be on our way home by now." "We've got a day in hand." "Yes." For the first time, Dugmore felt uneasy. If they did not get started on the return journey within twenty four hours the chances were that they were not going to make it -- they would have to spend the lunar night in the open. And suddenly that was a prospect not just of boredom but of something else... He started looking for tools. Corfield asked: "What do you propose doing?" "I'm going to dismantle the track on that side. We might be able to do more if we can get a clear approach to it." I T was not an easy job under the best of conditions; working in a suit made it harder. Dugmore sweated heavily and had to break off after a couple of hours and go inside to rub down. He stood the suit in the dehumidifier and had another try at radio communication, with the same result as before. Corfield had tried half an hour before. He realized he was beginning to get nervous. An hour later he was again soaked with sweat -- but he had the track off. The thing was exposed, a flattened blue spheroid pressed against the metal side of the caterpillar. It was bigger than he had thought, more than four feet across. He saw at once that the exercise had been futile. It clung tightly to the metal, as though part of it. All the same, he tried driving aluminum wedges in at the side. No luck. When he tried it with a steel chisel it yielded; yielded -- and held. First he tried to pull it out, then to knock it out with a hammer. Neither attempt succeeded. When he had first tried to remove it, it had not gripped the crowbar like that. Their beast had grown stronger. They went inside for conference, Corfield said: "It's not going to budge, is it?" "No. There's something else." "What?". Dugmore said: "If adhesion can change, maybe absorption can." Corfield nodded slowly, "I'll check that." "While you're doing it. I'll try to raise Hawaii." "It's been a long time for a sunspot flare, hasn't it?" Corfield said. "Yes." If they managed to put through a call for help it would take six days for a relief caterpillar to get to them; and that meant both parties spending the lunar night in the open. All the same, it would be a comforting thought to know that help was on the way. He called Hawaii, went on calling. Through the bubble he could see the globe of the Earth, a pale disk against the brightly hazed black of the sky. Late evening there. Maybe people were walking by the sea, watching moonlight on the waves. He listened to the crackle of the ether. Maybe the whole world was dead. He broke off as Corfield came back in. "Well?" He really did not need to sk. Corfield 's face told him. But not exactly how bad. Corfield said: "Double" That meant twelve days instead of twenty five; presumably it would inactivate during the night. Six days for the relief tractgr to get out here. It was going to be close. One could live for forty eight hours in a suit, but no longer. Corfield said: "And, of course, if it's variable, then it could go on varying. We don't know that it's reached it's maximum." "No." The chill of fear for a moment was the chill of the airless vacuum outside. "I see that." "I've had an idea, though," Corfield said. "We've been trying force on it. Persuasion might be more rewarding." Dugmore said bitterly; "Promise it we'll take it back to Earth and feed it cannon-balls?" "We could have a shot at luring it. We've got stuff in here with a higher iron content than the hull. Those tools, for instance. It might find a purer food source more attractive. If we could lay a trail away from the caterpillar...I agree it sounds unlikely. On the other hand..." ."Sure," Dugmore said. "On the other hand, anything is better than nothing. I'll start collecting the gear." T hey used the crowbar as the final link. Dugmore closed the gap with it. As it approached the blue spheroid the surface pulsed and a tendril rose out of it. It reached the bar and started moving along it -- not fast, but the movement was quite perceptible. From the far end it went on to a metal jack and from there to various tools placed end to end. The trail ran more than twenty feet. The filament, Dugmore saw, was thickening, first along the crowbar and then over the jack. And the spheroid itself looked slightly smaller. Crazy as the idea was maybe it was going to work. But something else was happening: a lump of the same slightly gleaming dark blue as the rest swelled under the tendril and flowed along it to the crowbar. The nucleus? It moved to the jack, enveloped it. Then, between crowbar and caterpillar, the tendril thinned and parted. The ends retreated from each other into their parent spheres. That made two of them. D ugmore persuaded Corfield to get some sleep, and made him take a pill to ensure that he did. Listening to Corfield's deep, even breathing, Dugmore felt loneliness as a physical presence. More for something to do than out of real hope he fiddled with the radio, found the Tokyo frequency relatively quiet. Switching to transmit, burst of staccato dots at the end sounded like nails in a coffin. Listening in afterward, he thought he heard a signal, but it was so weak that it might have been his imagination. He transmitted again, and listened again. This time the static was back, and there was no hope of picking anything up. Dugmore spent the rest of Corfield's sleep period outside with the monster(s). He tried all the things that they had tried before. When none of them worked, he stood and looked at the two spheroids. The new one seemed to be growing faster that its parent. A function of infancy, or of pure iron diet from "birth"? He was not interested, he found, in such academic questions. His attention was focused solely on survival. mush and rehearsed about the situation. Neither of them came up with anything new. Their tempers were frayed and they began snapping at each other. Dugmore felt that he was more to blame, but he could not do anything to cool himself out. His nervous tension was such that he could not stop himself. In the end, Corfield went outside and he concentrated on the radio. Static, nothing but static. He continued to search the dial hungrily and hopelessly. When Corfield came back in, Dugmore didn't bother to look up. But Corfield said: "I checked the rate of absorption of the new one, to see if the higher iron content made a difference. It does. #'he rate's up." "Write a book about it." "And then I checked the first again. The rate's up with it too." Dugmore stared at him. "Are you sure of that?" "I double-checked. At the new rate it will be through the hull in lour days, give or take the odd hours." "So even if we get through, and they sent a relief caterpillar out..." "Yes," Corfield said. "Too late." He found himself cursing insanely, a string of vituperation against the spheroids, the moon, Corfield, or played two hundred and forty thousand miles across space. Corfield let him run on until exhausted, and then said; "I think I may have the answer." Hope paralyzed him. He waited, staring. Corfield said: "If it's got a mind at all, it must be of a pretty primitive order -- and it seems to activated by sunlight. Perhaps the reverse is true. When the sun goes down, maybe it reverts to that pseudo-boulder form. Unfortunately, the way this ravine runs, it will be another five or six days before the sun is off it -- unless we provide an artificial night, rig up a sunshade." "It can't be as simple as that." "Worth trying, don't you think?" Dugmore looked around the cabin. "We can rip the bunk out for a start. Use the sides as supports." I T was ridiculously easy. Nothing happened until the last ray of sunlight was obscured, and then it all happened at once. The spheroid seemed to shrivel and fell away from the caterpillar. Once again it was an ordinary, irregularly shaped chunk of rock. Felt like it, too. Dugmore prodded it with his glove. Not yielding any more; just a rock. He put both hands down on it, heaved. He rolled it along to the point where the natural shade took over, left it. Then they went to deal with the other one. D ugmore said: "I can't think why it took us so long to work it out. It seems so obvious." "I've always been a bit weak on the obvious," Corfield said. "Not as weak as I am." He paused, considering this. "I wonder if I would have thought of it, before that damned thing chewed its way through. I'm not at all confident I would." Through the bubble he could see the remaining segment of the sun's disk. Otherwise no different from what it had looked like at the zenith; there were no spectacular sunsets here. They were still in the same place. There were two reasons for that. In the first place it had taken longer than they expected to put the damage right: the erosion had made the track difficult to fit. By the time the caterpillar was ready to go they were in communication with Base again. Their report of the spheroids, as they had expected, had caused quite a stir. The relief tractor would head toward them at the next lunar daybreak, carrying a lightproof, ironfree container in which the two lumps of pseudo-rock could be crated. Meanwhile, they were to stay and keep watch. There was obviously no danger now, and in any case they could not have got back to base in the four days' light that remained and they had more than adequate supplies to sit the night out. T he tape that was being played was some quartet of Beethoven's; one of the later ones, Dugmore guessed, because it made even less sense to him than most. But he was not irritated by it, nor by the prospect of hearing it a dozen more times. Relief from the fear of death was a great mollifier; even several days later it came over him, a wave breaking and showering him with a fine spray of awareness of the joy of living. Corfield looked happy, too. He sat staring out through the bubble with a remote half-smile on his broad face. His wife had come through on RT from Cape Kennedy that morning, and told him all was well -- she was expecting to have the baby sometime during the next week or two. They were, Dugmore gathered, a very contented couple. Lucy had not come through to him, but she scarcely would, with a divorce pending. He found he did not worry about that any more. What were those lines? The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all he as happy as kings... The world was up there, waiting. The sun was creeping down, the long slow shadows were creeping towards them. Soon only starlight and earthlight would remain. A long night, but day at the end of it.  Sdtm Som mil I I -- riai the Science Fiction  Market ReportsWlierc To Sell SF  Conference Reports  The SF Publishing Field  People  Places in SF  Photos of Authors  Events  Articles on Writing  Internal Organizational Doiitgs  Future Studies  Letters  Symposium-ITiscussion Transcripts And Introducing a New Supplement Covering academic affairs, with articles by critics, writers, and teachers of SF, letters, calendar information, announcements. Contributions from Bulletin subscribers invited. A  Writers  College  Fligh School Teachers  Students  Libraries  Readers  Critics  Editors  Publishers Subscriptions : # single and I double special annual Nebula Awards issues per year. One yearSlO; two years#. Sample copy, postpaid, I .#. Complete back issues available: individual A. E. van Vogt Ursula K. LeGuin Gordon R. Dickson Anne McCaffrey James Gunn Damon Knight Barry N. Malzberg Joanna Russ Larry Niven Robert Hoskins Kingsley Amis Harry Harrison Poul Anderson Robert Bloch Clifford Simak Katherine Kurtz Don Pfeil David Harris and Received by atmoit # members of the Science Fiction Writers of America the name Adam Freeman, in # at Hesterville, Missouri. # years before the #Minute War and the following plagues which destroyed his family. Adam fell in with a party who believed things were better in the east. They traveled through heat and torrential rains to a place called Nuber. in the Catskills. During the journey a boy Adam loved, Demetrios Makarios, destroyed himself, unable to endure the collapse of his world. The boy 's mother refused to believe him dead and "mistook" Adam for him; he supported her delusion by taking the name Demetrios, and kept it ever after. Forty-seven years later, still at Nuber, he has become a streetcorner yam-spinner, earning the rest of his living as janitor in a respectable sex-house in the "Outer City". Inner City is reserved for the aristocracy, the new rulers who support an uneasy monarchy and call the city-state a "King's Republic". The water level has risen in a warming climate: wilderness has returned over most of North America where the sea has not. A fter giving some of his long-ago experiences as a streetcomer tale, and making a few radical remarks, Demetrios is informed by a policeman that he must get a license for stoiytelling at Town Hall before he does it again. The little crowd breaks up. but two members of it, a will go with Demetrios to the ends of the earth, and Angus' wolfhound panion. In a private conversation in the city park, Demetrios learns something of Angus' life in Inner City, which is precarious. He also recognizes the boy's quality and loves him. They agree to meet tomorrow in the same place. Demetrios returns to the sexRedciirtain Street. He shares a room there with his two closest lute-player who never speaks) and found wandering after her loss of memory. Mam Estelle and her friends o f Demetrios. and he sometimes helps entertain in the Parlor with his stories. It is a pleasant life, except that everything in Nuber is under the shadow of a medievalism, a returning dark age. Demetrios was the son of a doctor, and remembers an age when reason might have had a chance. In the morning Demetrios goes to the Town Hall to see about a license, and learns it costs more than he can afford. There is an impending shake-up: the Nuber authorities are worried by a new stoiytellers and other uncommon people are regarded as potential subversives. The Abramites are FiAM, martyred at Nuber # years before -- the everrecurrent Christ jigure who declares the earth must make way for the kingdom of heaven. In the past Demetrios has made a streetcorner story of the martyrdom -- (he saw it happen himself) -- and is suspected of being an Abramite. Inserted here is an excerpt from a diary kept by Mam Estelle, (and others will appear later). She rambles considerably, concerned with her own past as well as the present. She also was born in Old rime, indeed is somewhat older than Demetrios. In the #-Minute War she lost her lovers and her baby whom she adored: she drifted to Nuber, worked in the sex-house and later inherited the management of it. (And occasionally you will encounter remarks by "the one who writes this book" and who doesn't cpiite seem to be Pangborn -- don't worry about it.) After his disturbing intennew with a police lieutenant who specifically warns him against ever Demetrios goes to the park to meet Angus, who is not there. In his disappointment, and anger at the license thing, Demetrios gets a bit drunk, and defies fate by drawing a crowd and telling the story of Abraham, as it truly happened. The policemen appear as he is finishing, and he has a glimpse of Garth arriving, but not Angus. Demetrios is taken to the town lock-up without a hearing, and a wandering rascal who has been jailed for stealing a pig. Bosco's great wish is to get back to the Rambler gang (traveling tinkers and entertainers) that brought him up. He owes the Boss a licking for giving him one. The stable-boy Garth and his #to the jail after dark, promising a jailbreak later in the night. Garth has seen Angus, who escaped from a night of knives at the Inner City -- the Abramites are being purged: Angus' mother was involved on the side of the dictatorship. For all of them flight seems the only answer. Garth and Frankie return at midnight with Angus and the dog Brand: the jailor is overpowered, Demetrios and Bosco set free. On the road south of Nuber they join Solitaire and the Professor. Angus on his escape had gone to Mam Estelle's to warn Demetrios that he was in worse danger than he thought: there he met and loved Solitaire: all are beginning to think of themselves as a Company. Babette goes with them a little way, spending the night with them at the "hant-house " in the woods south ofNuber; then she returns to Mam Estelle. The Company proceeds through mist and uncertainty, down a wood-road which runs into a remnant of Old-Time blacktop, heading west. Solitaire has told Demetrios that she is pregnant by him, three months along. In her diary. Mam Estelle tells of the early years of the sex-house, of The journey haunted by mist deepens the affections of the travelers for each other, except for Bosco who is seldom concerned for anyone but himself. At one point, nearing a river that could be the Delaware, Demetrios is oppressed by fantastic sounds that seem to belong to the #th Century; the others are undisturbed, having rational explanations for them, which he accepts. The fog stays with them until they cross the river, and then they are solidly back in the Year #. They move on to the conservative Penn town of Trottersville, where arrived. It's our Covenant with Nature Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe -- Sailed on a river of crystal light Into a sea of dew. T he innkeeper at the Boar's Head thought he might have heard of Gammo's Ramblers -- long ago, he couldn't place it. "Someone at the Circus might know about'em -- those bums get around. Jason Smallways has left'em have his back field for to camp in -- Smallways never had no sense. Show opens tomorrow -- no tent, just lousy caravans." "I'll ask now," Bosco said. "Anybody want to come along?" "Sawyer Finn's Circus did you say?" The innkeeper confirmed that. "I might go along," said Demetrios. Frankie and the Professor added themselves; the rest were tired, or sad, or busy. They passed through the drowsy town -- all Penn is drowsy, it's partly the climate -- to the animalsmelling excitement in Smallways' back forty. Six mule-caravans were drawn up in a loose ring -- yes, rather like the pictures you (should) have seen of Conestoga wagons in a defensive circle surrounded by war-v hoops. An acrobat was trying the stretch of his tights recently mended in the seat. A lank boy exercised two pretty horses. An old, old, square-jawed gentleman was testing a ringmaster's whip, snapping it at the ground. A thin man with black handle-bar mustaches petted two sleepy pumas in a cage, and a fat woman sat grieving in the sunlight. Bosco went to talk to the youth with the horses. Demetrios, Frankie, and the Professor approached the old gentleman, who eyed them uneasily. "Another committee to civilize us! I never see such a power of committees." But he wasn't unfriendly. "I never civilized anybody," said Demetrios. "Now I look at you, I reckon you never did," Bosco replied, "Who's the boy?" 'Tm Frankie, and this is the Prolessor. He doesn't talk, but Miz Solitaire is teaching me to tell what he thinks." The old man nodded. "Looking I'or a job, any of you?" "Depends," said Demetrios. "We're heading west." "Be you the big boss?" "Naw, Frankie, I'm Vice-President. Just H.F." He called to one of the caravans: "OT.S.l Mister VicePresident! Company!" The Prolessor's lute asked a question. "Oh, he's the other Vice-President." The lute inquired one thing more. "President? Why, how you talk! Wouldn't have one on the place. (HI T.S.!... You know, it ain't IK) use going west. Ocean, jungle, islands, fhe map ain't what it wasyou could throw a dog through it anywheres." He shucked his frock coat, wiping off sweat. "I got to wear this at the opening tomorrow -- for style, T'.S. says -- but jeans, like those Frankie and Demetrios wore, had patches at knees and rear. "Mister Vice-President! What'sone with that man, I wonder? Sleeps later every afternoon." Two midgets appeared, man and woman, with another woman close to normal size, about four feet ten. The midgets were in faultless proportion, the dark-haired man three feet tall. The red-haired, blue-eyed women bore a facial resemblance affirming sisterhood. The man spoke in a voice of alto pitch: "T.S. isn't asleep. His sore toe's bothering him, but he said he'd be along." He bow'ed in the stage manner, not in mockery but as if he enjoyed it: "I am Nod, Minuscule Marvel of the Modern Mundane Masque. I have the honor to present my wife Wynken, and my wife Blynken." "I'm Blynken," said the taller woman. She dimpled, shaking hands. "Marriage is such a convenience, now and then!" "I'm Wynken." Wynken's eyes were nearer soft green than blue. "We were the Cabot sisters of Lowelltown before we married -- originally Kabotski of course -- perhaps you're not from Massachusetts -- " "Stuff it, Blynk," said Wynken. " I hese are friends." fhe other Vice-President emerged at last, in his own frock coat. He wore a dainty felt hat too. perhaps only for the sake of lifting it expressively. He w as all courtesy, thus reminding Demetrios in no way of the #()th Century. "I don't know what H.F. is thinking of to let you stand out here in the sun. Do come into the caravan." Nod said: "I thought I'd go over with -- " "Blynken to look at the horses," said Blynken, "while -- " "Wynken's always crazy about strangers," said Wynken. "Consound it," said H.F., "they do that all the time. It's like talking to somebody with three heads." "There's a trick to it," said Wynken, and she reached her hand up to H.F.'s as they walked to the caravan. Studying the newsfaces, she swished her long skirt and hummed to herself: '"We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in the beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we! ' Said Wynken, Blynken, And Nod. " Both old men w'ere white-haired, carved with wrinkles, eyes a little blurred at the iris. They moved carefully on thin legs -- (T.S. gave no sign of martyrdom to a sore toe) -- but they did not stoop; they were clear-voiced, pink-cheeked. Ihey graciously indicated which parts of the caravan floor were best to sit on. "We are embarrassed for furniture," said T.S., "a bucolic sheriff having attached some of our choicest pieces, including a rocking chair to which I was much attached. It belonged at one time to my aunt. Of course it's only a temporary inconvenience." Wynken had served a round of corn spirit in little chipped cups. "Allow me, my dear -- " T.S. flicked a handkerchief over the floor where she was about to sit. Frankie nosed around like a cat in a new house, but he was already in love, obliged to sit down as far as possible from Wynken and become somewhat red and bug-eyed. "Better times are coming," said T.S. "Something is bound to turn up. It always does. Where are you from, sir?" Demetrios told the story of Nuber. Sawyer Finn's Circus had never visited there, though Wynken said she and her sister and their husband knew' something of it from earlier years. And Demetrios told of Hesterville, of a culture that had died partly from self-hate. T.S. said: "Yes -- yes -- we hoped it wouldn't happen..." "What would you think of going back west. Mister Vice?" "Oh, I'm afraid we can't Mister Veep. All changed -- we wouldn't know those islands. No public for a circus so far as I can see, and we do have to make a living, H.F." "That lute w'ould sure give the Circus a tone," said H.F. "The Professor," said Frankie (showing off some), "is thinking he'll always go w'herever we go." The lute agreed. Then Frankie yielded to inexorable forces and spoke directly to Wynken, forsaking all others: "How old be you?" "I am as young as I am old, Frankie, love." "I guess that's all right." He studied his desperate toes. "Only I wish you was coming with us." The lute spoke in the silence; Wynken was listening. She looked in disturbance to Demetrios, who smiled at her. By his guess she could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty-five'; midgets are uncanny. "T.S.," she said, "Blynken and Nod and I have been talking lately about something that bugs us, only I wasn't ready to speak up. It's been on our minds -- oh, ever since those yucks almost egged us back there at Betlam -- " "Cruds, every one." But T.S. knew what was coming. "T.S., darling, we aren't lucky for the show' and you know it." "Land of Goshen, child! Nonsense!" It did not ring true. "T.S., we can't do much except flutter around and be small. And the yucks -- oh -- Blynken says she's losing her knack with the fortunetelling -- it never w'as her thing anyway. If she could be in our act -- but she's too big. Nod and I -- oh, we dance, and we're good with the horses because they like us. But it doesn't go over. The yucks want us to be freaks. Oh, it w'as fairly tough when we were living in the woods, and you were angels to get us out of that, but -- T.S., H.F., the yucks want to despise us. They want to think how' wonderful it is of them, not to be little people. If we could be awkward or ugly they'd like us well enough." "Sho!"said H.F. "That caw'tbe, honey." But he must have knowm it was so. "What'd we do without you, Mary Ja -- Wynken?" "Oh... We'll put on a good show tomorrow. Don't worry. We'll sleep on it, talk again. I -- " Wynken ran out of the caravan. Glancing back at Frankie. Chickened out, you might say. Friday, July # entertain people? There's two ways. For Money, like this House, where they come in uptight and we send them out pacified, almost like Sensible -- like when my old Demetrios used to go on the streetcomers and set his Cap by his feet. Or for love, like when Babette comes to sit with me and tell gossip things to make the Time pass if Fm blue or the Arthuritis is giving me connimptions or Fve got too much Tea into me. I'm bad Company then and I know it, but she comes anyway. bless her, and we fight over nothing till I feel better. Mister Fleur used to say to our Talent: "Look, Boys and Girls, it's not just Fun they want. They like to make it seem so because they know the rest lies too deep. What they need is to feel they're Somebody and that Somebody Else notices it. And they want to be touched, so the World won't chill down to a cold Hurt and the Wind blow through 'em, "he'd say. "And don't despise them neither for coming here, " he'd say, "because that'd be despising yourselves for being here, and I won't have that. Anybody works here is good enough for me, and that means good enough for the fucking World. " Maybe they could nail a man for talking so nowadays, the way the Righteousness is thickening up in Niiber like milk going sour in the Jug. We're protecting Democracy and Liberty these days, and that means you better walk soft and not bother the Brass. We got a new Musician, for my Money he ain't worth a Dam. Takes his pay mainly in meals and Trade, that's all right. Has a Gitter and does some songs pretty good, Old-Time Rock he calls them, he forgets I was a grown-up already when the original was still in Style, me and Sam and Stevie oftentimes laying around making love to it when we didn't feel like hearing real music. This is a N iceEnough Boy, but for a Professor you don 't want a Boy, you want a man that's had Trouble and Joy so's to give him what I guess the Abramites call a SoulRipening. Babette she picked him up to ripen, someplace. I call him Joe which is his Name. The Girls can call him Professor if they want, not me. Taking it in Trade, he favors Gloria mostly, she being stacked the biggest. Yesterday morning  heard a Commotion in the Room where Demetrios and Solitaire and the Professor used to be, and there they was, him and Glorie, helling around bare-ass.  could see they'd been prying into things. I know we got to use that room for Business, but Babette hadn't finished doing it out. That bitch Glorie had spread out some of Solitaire's things that had to be left behind -- to steal and sell likely -- half her ass would be enough to split Solitaire's things. I chased them out with a Scolding, because it did give me a turn to see them grunting and frenching all over Demetrios' s Bed. Some of our Regulars are already saying, "Where's Demetrios, what about the Stories we used to have into the Parlor?" All Joe knows is a few flat old porn tales everybody heard before the year umph.  started to say, I think Entertainment means building a Special Place, call it a Special World, where other people can come and forget the bloody one they got to live in Most of the Time. Like Mister Fleur made this place, and didn't little Shawn make a World too with his crazy Pictures? And my old Demetrios. Or maybe Tm talking about something bigger than Entertainment, if there is anything bigger. No, I don't believe there could be any grander Occupation than making Worlds, especially if other people can come into them. like I would have made a World for Marcus if I could. plored Trottersville, to kill time before the Circus. T.S. had given free passes for them all, and would have been hurt by a suggestion that he'd never get rich that way. Nobody gets rich in Trottersville except the Patrons, the landowning families, and they've already got it. Some artisans and business men like the innkeeper, who call themselves Burjoyces, manage to stay comfortable. The Guilt Craftsmen run small shops, but all essential stores are owned by the Patrons: Welfare People trade there or do without. Angus, nosing around to learn things, was told the Welfare People are so named because Society has their Welfare at heart. They rent small strips of land for subsistence, in return for spending two thirds of their labor time on the Patrons' fields. It is a Free Democracy: in their free hours they may do as they please so long as they stay home. The penalty for a first attempt to leave the district is the loss of one ear. The second attempt is usually the last. Trottersville is in touch by fairly good roads with a nation in the south called Virginia, importing ideas as well as the tea, silk, and cotton we like so much, even though it's produced by that slave labor which is totally unheard-of in the Free Democracies. The manager of the Trottersville Importers' Guilt told Angus that the Welfare System had been working fine all through the Christian Era, and did he think he could figure out a better one? Also, if he wanted to criticize, him and his dog could gosemplace someplace else to do it. Angus wasn't criticizing, he just wanted to find out. More and more, he said to Demetrios that day, he was wanting to find out things. An old hunger never satisfied in the Inner City at Nuber -- (except by the books!) "The people I knew couldn't imagine I really wanted truth, if truth was any-way uncomfortable or unfashionable." He sat over drinks with Demetrios at the tavern; the others were still out savoring the town and would meet them at the circus lot. "But I did want to find out things, Demetrios, and I do. To find out why for instance that old war ever happened forty-seven years ago. And how different was it essentially from the war that's bound to happen between Moha and Katskil in the next few years because both silly little nations want to exploit (he old mines near the borders?" "Weaponry is the main difference, perhaps. We can't destroy life on the grand scale any more, unless some new technology is built up, and there may not be the resources for that. The difference in eaponry makes a psychological difference. There'll be small medieval wars, with man-to-man coiilVonlation. the warrior's dearest thrillyou remember your Iliad? -- and no button-pushing. But it's still war. and we'll have it because we re too stupid to read history, and not brave or intelligent enough to respect our fellow' beings." "Respect, not love. Thou art bitter, Demetrios." Demetrios was not feeling bitter. He was suffering, but pleasantly, from the beauty of Angus' hands, the gentleness of his mouth, a waterfall of light across his shoulder. "Thee and thou -- we spoke that way now and then at Imier City. A some-time thing with me -- you can even use it along with the modern way." "I like it. Angus. In Outer City it w as usually sneered at... Yes, respect. Love is for individuals. Whoever claims to love humanity is a hypocrite or self-deceiver. We love men and women and children, not abstractions. But the concept Man is worthy of respect, and in a climate of respect something politically decent might some day emerge. The American states made a beginning at the end of the #th Century, but couldn't protect the achievement from watergating and other corruption... Nobody loves Man. poor monster. An artist doesn't love his art, either -- he lives within it and for it, is carried by it, but love has no meaning in that connection that I can see. I love, thou lovest -- love is for thee and Solitaire -- tell me, is it good between you?" "Very good. Demetrios." "It's for Garth and Frankie, for Solitaire and me. For thee and me, Angus." He covered the boy's hands; they responded. "Is there the body's need in it?" "I'm old, and yet I don't think I'd care to die without having embraced thee." " I hc serpent in Eden -- wasn't its name Jealousy?" "My God!" said Demetrios -- "you've given me another story." Angus grinned. Sobering, he said; "You told me once -- it was at the Meadows, the day we met -- that love is a country. I like that saying." In Angus there would always be an observer, even a judge, but this took nothing from his warmth -- rather, Demetrios thought, it was what made his acceptance a beatitude. "A wide country," said Angus, "with many roads, and no place to walk timidly. I'll always need you, now and long after you're dead, my friend." no tent, and so had made Smallways' back forty like a fairground. An area had been roped olT where a slope of land allowed a low semicircular theatre. The public could settle there or stroll among the exhibition tents, after paying admission at the gate of Smallways' fence, where Frankie and Solitaire w'ere watching for Demetrios and Angus; the others had gone in with their free passes. "H.F. says it'll be a real bully circus." "But he's worried, Frankie?" Denietrios asked. Solitaire kissed Angus and rolled her forehead on his chest. "Little cat," he murmured, "Little pregnant cat. Denietrios' fruit'll be a man-child." "They're worried," said Frankie, his underlip stuck out in bother. "Mr. Virgil says the yucks are coming in too quiet." "I'm Mr. Virgil," said the man with the handle-bar mustaches, who was attending the gate. No more folk were arriving; the crowd already inside was small. "I have Ihe puma act, and it's account of them we can't let the dog in -- I'm really sorry, he's a beauty. Frankie has known me a long time -- twenty minutes -- so he figured you did." "Up yours too," said Frankie gently, preoccupied. "I'll stay out here with Brand a while," Angus said. "Then someone else can take my place with him and I'll go in. But he never pulls when I have him leashed." "It's the smell. It would make the cats act up." "Sure." "Nice if everybody was obliging like you." said Mr. Virgil. "It's a fact, they been coming in too quiet, like people do w hen they might be looking for trouble," "Don't see many kids," said Denietrios. "Ain't many in Trottersville. It's that kind of towm." Frankie said: "Can't people just enjoy themselves and be nice instead of all the time troubletrouble? Especially at a Circus?" With Denietrios he returned to the circus ground, but at a black tent marked with cabalistic signs he said: "Oh, that's just old Blynken -- " and ran off about his own researches. Denietrios ducked his head to enter candle-lit darkness, where little Blynken sat alone at a table with two chairs, peering into a crystal ball. "Draw thou the Inner Curtain, that none may -- oh, it's you, hi! Draw' it anyway. It's got a 'busy' sign -- pity most of the yucks can't read." She lifted off a spangled turban. "T.S. had this damn contraption made years ago for somebody with too much skull. I heard a rustling in it up there a while ago, like mice." She tidied up any out there?" "Not much. Mr. Virgil doesn't like the look of it." "Ay-yah, and he's got experience! Hold my hand, dear -- if anyone busts in fni reading your palm. Or shall I, for real? Living does write on us, though not the way they think. What a nice old gardener's fist!... Wynken was crying most of the night." "Oh?" "Bundle of nerves, and today she and Nod must dance on horseback. She wants us to go with your company, Demetrios, if you'll have us. So do I, so does Nod I think, only he hates quick decisions." "It would be a joy to us. But we hardly know uhere we're going, Blynken. 'West' is only a word, and the world's round." "Don't you really, my dear?... Well, for us. the way things happen. Sawyer Finn's Circus took us in at a time wdien we needed them but they didn't truly need us. It was the old boys' kindness. Mr. Virgil's wife is better at the fortunelelling pitch than I am, but I had to #I in somewhere. Now' she takes care of the commissary, laundry and all-w hat-all -- claims she prefers it. I feel temporary. T.S. and H.F. -- God, sometimes you'd almost think they were -- " she studied him, perhaps testing his acceptance and compassion. "It would be a delight, any time," said Demetrios, "to talk with you about the different facets of truth. We'd never run short." "And I could serve tea. Well, r.S. talks about retiring, but it wiuild break his heart. H.F. says more sensibly: 'Looky, Tom, I been retired all my life and what good did it ever do me?' But we're a dilTerent sort of freaks, modern freaks at that. New-century people." "Like T.S. and H.F. I live in both worlds, at home in neither." "Where's home, ever? We're not at home here, w'e three, but -- oh. it's hard even to think about a break!" "Was that the only reason Wynken was crying?" "No, sweet man." Blynken looked away, head tilted, listening to crowd sounds beyond the tent. "God. I wish I was small enough to be in their act! No, she was thinking of Frankie, and of all young people the way they are before the world rolls over them." "Nothing new'-century about that, Blynken." "For sure, for true! It's our covenant with nature -- Wynken said that, last night: so much to enjoy if we can, and then return the raw materials. But -- so short a tmie for being Frankie!" " That other almost-question you almost asked: no, I really couldn't tell you where our Company is going. But I think, as an old man may. of a republic growing up, slowly, isolated for a while in a rather empty world with a number of slag heaps -- growing up from a beginning made by this handful of Iiuman beings who are traveling with me. I didn't choose them -- that man Bosco will probably leave us to look for a certain Rambler gang -- " "I hope he does. I didn't like him." "Oh -- probably no real harm in him." " There is," said Blynken -- "no, never mind. I may be wrong. Go on. tell me more, Demetrios." "Well, I didn't choose them and I don't lead them -- but the potential of generous leadership is there against the time it's needed. Love and chance drew us together, and I begin to see we have certain qualities in common, qualities that were never of much influence in Old rime: we are able, for instance, to love without jealousy. We can enjoy remaining separate beings while we cherish the community that we have with each other." "Was jealousy so great a thing in Old Time?" "I was thirteen, the year of the Crash. I saw little jealousy, but mine was a rare sort of family for the #s -- they gave me education as well as love. The social tradition was loaded with jealousy, and there were still people who made a virtue of it. That had begun to change twenty or thirty years before I was born. Some of the young people of the #s and '#s were able to bring peace and generosity into the sexual freedom that earlier generations had won only partway and in bitterness. The Crash put an end to many bright promises. Well, our Company has faults, and we haven't been much tested yet, but so far I've seen no cruelty or meanness, no grabbing, no greed." "I here's been none with us three. Demetrios. Nod and Wynken and I have been natural lovers for more than three years." "I think it can happen only for small groups, small enough to keep sensitive person-to-person communication -- that's the heart of it. Old Time at its worst was an urban thing, unable to comprehend the importance of small groups. The mass communications that should have been a simple public service became a dominating horror of homogenized stupidity. The small groups themselves forgot their importance, yielded up the virtue of town meeting without a struggle. You'd think they could have remembered that the family or tribe or eommunc family is the servant of the individual. It's Frankenstein's original neeessary monster, and must not be permitted to turn on its maker, or hell is loose. The village, a larger monster, is the servant of the family, and the far-off central government, if there must be one, greatest and ugliest monster of all. is still by rights the ser ant of the village, and ought to be in dircet eommunication with it, directly answerable. But in the uproars and terrors of Old Time, this simple idea, the obvious essence of representative government, could scarcely even make itself heard. Impractical! Impractical! And of course it was. once the swollen political and corporate growths had become inoperable... Well, maybe what our Company starts with won't carry through. Making a republic is a labor for the gods, and we aren't gods. But I have this old man's thought, and I have my hopeful moments." "We need an island," said Blynken. "An island meeting certain specifications." Denietrios was happy. Often later he would enjoy this ability Blynken has to take what you say as a creation to be shared, as if with your four hands you held up a new picture and considered, artists with a common devotion, what more might be done to make it live. The crowd noise changed. "Hell, that's trouble!" said Blynken, she jumped up to fling open the curtain. "Stay with me, friend, and hang onto that stick." S unshine hit their eyes. People were running in it -- not many, but they were high with that tension, that witless gap-mouthed hunger for a spectacle of disaster, which can make a few look and smell like a multitude. They were running and stumbling down toward the stage area, the level ground below the natural theatre, and dow n there, like flowers tossed about in a water-bucket, gaudily dressed Wynken and Nod were trying to keep their footing on the bare backs of their horses. Yesterday the beasts had been gentle snulflcrs; Demetrios had petted them, and seen Wynken and Frankie and Nod climb around all over them. Now they had gone mad. riiey reared and plunged, Wynken's beast choking. Nod's venting a wild miserable scream. H.F. managed to grab the bridle Wynken had lost, and was thrown about like an old stick. Garth running to help him shouted to Demetrios: "The bastards spooked them -- clods, with pepper! They think it's funny." As Demetrios hurried down -- Blynken had already darted far ahead of him -- he saw Wynken lose her balance and tumble asprawl of the horse's tossing, writhing neck, saving herself wdth a clutch of his mane; and the crowd yelled with delight. One voice squawked out above the rest: "Make with the porn show. Baby! Strip!" Others took it up, finding a rhythm: "Strip! Strip! Baby, Strip!" Nod vaulted down. He wrenched his horse's head around, and with a slap and a yell sent the beast running blind toward the spectators, whose laughter ceased. Somew here among them Bosco had just picked up somebody and thrown him at somebody else. By the watch on Angus' wrist, the Battle of Trottersville began at #:#I P.M., Friday, July #, #, w hen he heard trouble and pushed through the gate with Brand a leashed storm at the end of his arm, reached a climactic point when a crowvoiced yuck hollered: "Let's clean up the joint!" and a higher point when Angus hit him. It ended at #:# when Frankie jumped on a barrel and yelled: "Run for your lives! The pumas is loose!" I .S. later told Frankie that this w as the noblest lie of the Year # -- no, more likely the noblest of the decade, or say the century. It had cost Frankie almost sixty seconds to arrange it with Mr. Virgil and help him wheel the cage out of sight behind a caravan and cover it with a tarp. During the four minutes DemeIrios' stick had connected with at least one skull -- he hoped it belonged to the one who had yelled Tor a porn show, but there was too much dust to be sure. He witnessed Angus' arrival with Brand, and rested a bit, panting but able to relish it when Brand tore off somebody's loin-rag before Angus saw I'll to restrain him. The man had looked almost like a policeman before he lost his modesty and ran lor it. but that could hardly be -- likely Demetrios' fevered imagination. On the hole. a lovely tight, though too much exertion for one of his years. There were other head-smashings and arguments. Wynken had been able to jump down clear when Ciarth quieted her horse; H.F. scooped her up and ran with her on his shaky legs to the shelter of a caravan. After that Demetrios had the soothing impression of Garth and Angus hitting a lot of people, with aid and advice from T.S. But Frankie decided the day. After his shot it was all over. The beat and elite of Trottersville retired from the field like piss off the end of a dock. XllI Nothing is just too big, you can t look at it. And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly: for what can the man do that cometh after the king? even that which hath been already done. Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. T he company and Sawyer Finn's Circus considered it intelligent, alter decent rcllection, to split, and the C'ompany gladly accepted the olTcr ol' a ride as far as the next cnssroads that led north. The farm of Jason Smallways lay to the west of Trottersville. Angus, Brand, and Bosco made a portentous progress back there to pick up the gear still at the tavern. Angus showed a black eye and Brand two red ones; Bosco was moved to roll his muscles like a bear; nobody bothered them. None of their stuff had been stolen except one ham, and Bosco said never mind, there might be some way to correct this. On their safe return, the rest of the day was spent in nursing bruises and readying for a departure at dawn. Night travel is unsafe anywhere but especially in Penn, where the most convincing tales of brown tiger come from. He has (folk say) attacked villages down there and carried off people, sometimes haunting a particular region for weeks or months like a burning conscience. Tawny stripes, they say, on a pelt like a cloud of white and cinnamon. The stripes melt into the colors of morning or evening, and if you see him at all at those hours it's probably too late. T.S. wanted to go north. He had a hankering to take the Circus all the way to Nova Scotia where the evangelines are, and though Demetrios warned him they might not be there now -- it's the change of climate, evangelines need the northern winters or something -- still T.S. allowed he'd give it a whirl. But the Company wanted west -- two moonshines are as good as daylight, maybe. And it was that night, in the good quiet, with the drinks, the music, the campfire mood, that we agreed Wynken, Blynken, and Nod would go with the Company. That settled, T.S. kissed all the girls including Solitaire goodnight and pottered off to bed. H.F. sat up a while to hear Demetrios tell the story of how brown tiger might have come to haunt this part of the world where no such beast was ever known in the past. It's a story of one of those mad saints who bloomed in such profusion in the dying years of Old Time. Not long before the war, this fellow slunk about to the zoos in several of the great cities, liberating the beasts under cover of night, burning off locks with what was called a blow-torch. Some believed he was not one man but a group of conspirators. One man, Demetrios thought. Anyhow the episodes ended after that one man, who kept a diary and called himself Jack the Liberator, was found gored to death by a Cape buffalo he had let loose. It's a harsh, sad little tale -- Jack had no love for the animals, he just hated the world -- and your novelist may write it some day remembering Demetrios' words, but not here. Among the creatures set free by Jack was a pair of Manchurian tigers, the female already heavy with young. H.F. went to bed too, not forgetting to kiss the girls. Bosco had slipped off somewhere, his absence for a long time unnoticed. All were comfortable and lazy, but even Frankie not yet sleepy -- (our hero) -- so in this hour the new members saw fit to tell their new friends something of what the world had done to them and they to the world, since they would now be sharing joy and trouble and love and danger with Demetrios' people all the way to the other ocean. "Nod," said Wynken, "was born Seiji Ohara, the last name being a good Irish one even without the apostrophe, as had been noted by his great-grandfather Seumas O'Hara when he arrived in Boston from Bally na Hinch in #, not very skilled in the English spelling of foreign names -- that is, when the apostrophe dropped he was not after stopping to pick it up. Thus it came about -- " " -- that we skip a generation," said Blynken, "arriving at the marriage of his grandson Stockton Ohara late in life to Teru Kamayatsu who in # turned up in that course on The Socio-Ideological Matrix of Piers Plowman which Stockton was then conducting at a well-thought-of university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For some years they were childless. Stockton in his sixties, having undergone an unusual number of diagnostic X-rays in addition to the atmospheric and other radioactive pollution which was politely referred to as normal, believed himself to be sterile. In # he retired from teaching, and the two went to live in the town of Hoton near the New Hampshire border, where they were when the war came. Though untouched by bombing effects apart from radiation, the town was severely damaged by the earthquakes of the Year One, and decimated by the plagues. It was hardly more than a camp site in the ruins when, in the Year Four, there was born unexpectedly to Teru and Stockton Ohara a son -- " " -- who is now forty-three," said Nod, "and looks it, being thus two years older than his beloved though garrulous wives. They were born, Wynken being the older by two hours, at another small but famous town in Massachusetts, in the Year Six. Their father Ignace Kabotski, who had been a child refugee from Poland in the European famine of # and who never -- " Solitaire cried: "But Wynken can't be over twenty-five!" "Love, I'm forty-one," Wynken said, not looking at Frankie. "But with my crow's feet and double chin I show it," said Blynken. "You imagine them," said Wynken. "On me of course old thing is so small it doesn't show." "Anyhow what looks like my middle-aged sag is actually -- " "O beautiful!" said Solitaire. "This too." "Maybe we can pop together," said Blynken. "If I may now again intrude, their father Ignace Kabotski, a refugee who never did change his name to Cabot in spite of Blynken's tendency to say he did, really a deplorable inverted snobbery -- " "A natural defense," said Wynken. "Even after the war the tow n was full of stuffpots. We grew up with 'em." J "w as the acknowledged leader in the effort to hold that town together after the Crash, stuffpots and all. The mother of the girls died in an outbreak of diphtheria in (he Year Nine, so they but dimly remember her. By the time the (wins (obviously not identical) were out of early childhood, it was evident that Wynken would be, as I am, what people call a midget, while Blynken would grow to normal or almost normal size. Ignace believed in the virtues of learning, a conviction strengthened by the calamities of his century. He held that there are only two important ways to avoid the consequences of folly; one, to act with wisdom; two, never to get born. Since wisdom is an acquired quality, he set himself with devotion to give his daughters the firmest and widest education he could manage under the difficulties, a training w hich -- " " -- even now' renders us capable," said Wynken, "of sharing the bewilderment of this boy Seiji Ohara growing up in surroundings where an accepted and tolerated desolation was the norm. Hoton was a ruin inhabited by slow-moving giants with broken hearts. ( impassion usually comes late in adolescence if one is to learn it at all. That was so w ith Seiji, intensely impatient with these big dazed people while they were all he knew, full of pity later w hen they'd been swept off the earth. He loved his mother, but she too was existing in a state of shock, almost as hazy as the rest of them. Seiji's old father -- accustomed to teaching the fantastics of medievalism, and to grownups -- did his best to supply what basic education he could: reading, writing, figuring, enough history Discover Man's most advanced technology of the mind -- Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand your awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. This best seller reveals the parts of the mind and the source of human irrationality. Grasp this opportunity to reap the benefits of the simple, powerful techniques in copies have been sold! Order your copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health today! Just Get it, Read it and Try it! Send # to The Church of Scientology of California, Publications Organization U.S., Dept. G-#. # West Temple St., Los Angeles. Calif. #. No charge for postage and handling. All orders will be shipped within # hours of receipt. Dianetics is the registered trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect of his pub(Greek) "mind." Copyright  # by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved. The Church of Scientology of California -- a non-profit organization. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. Scientology and Dianetics are registered names. for a start. He died when Seiji was twelve. Teru carried on as best she could -- Seiji was not a manageable brat. She still believed when he was fourteen that he might have a spurt of growth, though his hands and feet never had the puppy largeness of a growing boy's. The loneliness of Hoton was extreme, partly -- " " -- because of ancient vanities," said Blynken. "After the war most stricken groups wanted to join others, as you've told us wanderers drifted into Nuber. Not so in Hoton, nor in Lowelltown. They still felt the world ought to come to them; when it did, it might come with witness cruelty. Sitting still, waiting for better times, those ghost towns were easy prey for outlaws, wild folk, the new savages. In his fifteenth year Seiji was working with his mother in their corn patch when three horsemen came storming out of nowhere and snatched up Teru. Seiji they flung aside -- " "I bit the wrist of the one that caught me up and felt it crunch. He yelled, I landed in the dirt, and they were gone." "Then he saw others of the band setting fires and butchering his neighbors for pleasure. He escaped into the woods, and was joined by a few survivors from Hoton and other ravaged towns. They formed their own wild crew. They valued Seiji in spite of his smallness because for a while he was fiercer than any giant, and quicker than the rest of them to learn woodcraft and hunting. His speed and silence in the wilderness are uncanny. He took part in certain acts of reprisal -- " " -- which he prefers not to remember," said Nod. "We never caught up with the men who took my mother. When I was seventeen I understood w'e were simply turning into bandits ourselves, no better than the rest. I left them, lived in the wilderness alone for two years, visiting human habitations as a listening shadow. I needed little. Arrowheads I flaked out from the flint, still do. Worth the effort -- with my light bow I prefer them. When in need of something that couldn't be had except by stealing, it was -- " " -- his whim to leave something in exchange," said Wynken, "such as a rabbit pelt for a hank of yarn." Mr. Virgil remarked: "Woe unto anyone else who talked in so." "They don't know the signals, man Virgil," said Wynken. "I'hey didn't murder me," said Solitaire. "Well, you're a sweet kid," said Nod. "We make exceptions." "Actually more than a whim," Wynken continued, "for Seiji was then and is now more ethically decent than his wretched little wives, who seek to profit by his example yet make at times but a halting progress, hm. (You used the first person singular, Solitaire honey.) They had, it's true, that education he mentioned, but it sometimes abandons them. It had, when Seiji first observed them out of his forest invisibility, as they stumbled down an empty road without any idea where they were going, because the wits had been knocked clean out of them. At that time they could have been called temporary idiots. You see, Lowelltown also was wiped out, by sickness. We don't even know what the epidemic was. There weren't any Old-Time doctors left there; it may have been a new thing anyway -- violent fever, rash, glandular swellings, sudden collapse. The town had survived the post-war plagues, diphtheria, the red plague of Year, Sixteen, but this one cleared the slate. I mean -- everyone, except my sister and me, the beauty and the midget, explain it how you will. When we grasped what had happened we only thought of getting out, going down the road, no goal except escape. Blynken, whom I knew then as Sophia, wanted -- " " -- to die, or so I said, but you made me lie down in the shade, Miranda, and took my head in your lap and said to me: 'No, you will live -- ' and so I lived. For a while I slept so deeply that one world fell away from me, though -- " " -- all the worlds," said Nod, "may be full of illusion as well as truth, and their philosophers amazed." "And when she woke Nod had already come to us, standing there naked and beautiful, with his bow -- " " -- and hardly taller than you, Miranda. So my thoughts went racing down the millennia, every one of them a praise of life -- " " -- and the wind had played with the hair on your forehead while you slept, your breasts were white and virgin." "And the first words he spoke after Blynken's waking were: 'Come with me so we can care for each other and not be lonely.'" "Therefore I knew he was of finer substance than the gods, namely flesh and blood. And now I will explain our names, but I'll do it in a subdued tone of voice because our hero, without whom Sawyer Finn's Circus might well be lying in ruins, appears to have fallen asleep. The explanation is simple: our mother we don't quite remember knew that funny old poem and a bit of music for it, and sang us to sleep w ith it, and so did our father after she died, and -- " " -- sometimes you sang it for me w hen I was drowsy in the hot afternoons or the nights in the forest and the other places we've knowm, so that I learned it. And I sang it for you, Wynken, when sleep abandoned you in the bad time after our baby was lost. Then when we happened on the Circus, and T.S. so kindly invited us to join Ihem, and asked our names, we thought, why not name ourselves after a fragment of Old-Time fancy? Though it's true that we are spirits of another sort, still, Shakespeare is not for all occasions, and -- ayah," said Nod, "Frankie's asleep for sure. Sounds like a very small porpoise." "Where did you ever -- " " -- hear a very small porpoise?" "In your dreams." Saturday, August # I t's more than a month my old Demetrios has been gone, and sometimes Babette and me play wonder-what about what's happened to them. But that Game can't feed on Nothing. Babette said today, Nothing is just too big, you can't look at it. Professor was the First. Seems to me it was twelve years ago he turned up on my back Porch with his Lute, and played, and looked at me in his Particular Way. And was it ten years ago Demetrios came to me? -- I get mixed. Before Babette anyhow. Solitaire was here only two years, but I did Love her more than any of them knew. Not wanting to get in bed with her like I've done with Fran sometimes, not Motherly neither but still a wantingtohelp Love, for it was strongest in the Times when she got wild, it was like seeing an Angel in a Spiderweb. Me and Babette pretty well know, though we don 't say it, that we ain't likely to see those three again, nor Garth and his cockahoop little Brother, nor that young Ristacrat -- he was all right, I liked him. I think he'll do Solitaire good, anyway he'll try. And that Character Dimmy picked up in the Jail, Babette said he was the Practical Type. Well, but if they do come back it won't be soon, and there's that lump in my right breast. I hope I don't go talking to Babette about that just for lonesomeness, because what could she do? There ain't an Old-Time Doctor in all Nuber, and any new-time Surgeon likely makes his living as a Barber, they can Keep That. I believe  can wait my time without too much fuss,  wouldn't be the First and won 't be the Last. Why would anybody be a fraid of Death unless he'd talked himself into thinking there's an afterlife? I couldn't do that. I tried, after Marcus, was still trying when  came to Nuber, though Myself kept saying to me inside, You Fool, it ain't wishing anything will make it so. Mr. Fleur he knew how it was with me. He said to me, quiet and kind, he says, "Stell, you ever black out?" I said yes I had, couple times. He says: "It has to be like that. No blood moving in the Brain nor breath in the Lungs, why, no Thinking, no Feeling. No Thinking and Feeling, no Person. Don 't despise the Body, Stell, " he says. "No Body, no Mind. "I've been quiet inside about it, since. Dying, yes, we can be excused for hating that, that seems like a bad Animal coming after you. But more than half of that is just Funk, like being afraid of the Dark. I guess w hen the Tiger picks you up, you anyhow know it won't be long. Lately I've took to the habit of carrying a Stick to lean on when I go out into my Garden, I know why it was Demetrios liked to have one, only forme it's the Arthuritis made me think of it. Suppose I write about Something I seen in the Garden a while ago, when I was Poking around. That fella Joe is doing a mite better on the Janitor Work, but he don't so far give the Garden no more than a Licking and a Promise. Babette she keeps after him, tries. He can always find new ways of resting onto the job. Some places that my old Demetrios kept neatened up has already gone to weeds in the time he's been gone. I tell Babette, Don't sweat Joe too much, he's got to ease into it like Gradual, and maybe weeding does bother his Gitter Fingers. Maybe it do, she says, only Professor never minded pulling weeds, he'd do it for love, not ast. Joe ain't Professor, I said to her, so let him grow up a little. Anyhow -- There's this stretch in the Border where Demetrios has set out Lilies for me, time to time, some the neighbors have give me and some he 's found around the Countryside where Old-Time people used to have Gardens. There 's early-blooming white ones, and some big fragrant Whites with a goldy center, Regals Demetrios called them, and a fawny tan one, and of course the common kinds too, some being Day-Lilies and Tiger Lilies like I remember growing wild in Raeburn. Sol was out there in the deep Sunlight leaning onto my cane, and thinking back I suppose -- that's natural. Then I seen how the grass and wild convolvulus and Things had gone to growing thick where Joe hadn 't done nothing. So I felt bad about that, I even started for to reach and pull, but the Arthuritis knocked that idear out of me, fast. But further down the Border I come on a gaudy common Tiger Lily standing in the sun with his sword-leaves and funny black knobs and his buds opening out full. There was this convalvulus wropping itself around him, and a Catmint crowding him along with the rank Grass. He just stood there looking like my old Demetrios. He didn 't mind, he made me think of any good man or woman in the sun, with a burden but carrying it, and with Time left over to recognize me. That was all -- I felt better and went hack in the House and had my Tea. It 's only the having to stop that gripes me. Having to stop even the small things, the good Breakfast or a touch of the Corn Spirit, or Music heard someplace down the Street, or seeing a new Face with something sweet in it, or an old face with something New. But we stop. G arth and the other grown-ups sat up a while worrying about Hosco, which was unnecessary at least so far as the man's physical safety was concerned. H.F. -- not sleeping well these days, he said -- emerged in night-shirt and slippers to help them worry'. He had been sorry not to be able to tell Bosco anything useful about Gammo's Ramblers. Some three or four years ago the Circus had entered a town up in northern Moha which had otily just donated all its loose change to a Rambler company of that name, and T.S. had taken pains to learn what way the Ramblers had gone, so as not to meet tliem again under those conditions. Gammo's Ramblers were heading west, but that was all he knew; Bosco had taken it philosophically. Bosco returned at about midnight, soft-footed, with a ham under his arm and a chicken carcass dangling. "Could even be the same ham," he said proudly. Seeing Demetrios' distress, Angus' disapproval, Garth's startled anxiety, Bosco grew sulky. "Well, I Figured the chicken's a sort of commission -- you know?" "Seeing what they done about your ham," said H.F. uncomfortably, "I reckon you could say tit for tat. still it don't seem just right, Bosco. T.S. ain't going to like it. T.S. is going to call it stealing, a body shouldn't do it. Did you have to bust into a house?" "Woodshed," said Bosco meekly enough, perhaps respecting something venerable in Demetrios as well as in H.F. But the meekness itself was not pleasant. For some time Demetrios had been finding it difficult to adjust his republic to the presence of Bosco as a citizen -- but then, where was the republic? "Jasus!" said Bosco -- "I figured you'd be pleased." Nobody said anything. Bosco searched Garth's face with especial intentness, and got no comfort from it. "Well, jasus, you going to be down on me just for picking up something, maybe I better skin out. I won't stick around where I ain't wanted. I can just take my ham and my god-damn chicken and by God split." "No need of that," said Demetrios. and wondered if he meant that at all. Leadership was not in him. "So long as you know," said Angus, "how the Company feels about it, stay with us, Bosco. Stay and learn our ways." No one of them before, so far as Demetrios remembered, had spoken of The Company in just that way, with that authority. He could not have done it himself without selfconsciousness. "Well, Jasus -- " Bosco was unlikely to learn much, but Angus might have said the most assuring thing as well as the right one. "We done things thataway," said Garth, "we'd be in hot water all the time, Bosco. We got to treat people by rules they understand, right? l.ike if a bunch of 'em come after you now for busting into that shed, cvcrybody'd get hurt, and maybe  c couldn't turn them pumas loose a second time." That seemed to reach Bosco. He rumbled miserably, flung down the ham and chicken, brushed his hands. "Well, Jasus -- " "I figure," said H.F., yawning, "you was tempted beyond your strenth, Bosco. It's a noble ham." Bosco allowed his feathers to be smoothed; the Company went to bed in peace. We lent a hand gelling the circus wagons under  ay at dawn (Bosco working harder lhan anyone) and rode along in them all through the morning. Al about the noon hour we hailed by a crossroad for a meal wilh ham in it. Then, after many loving farewells, after T.S. had scrupulously paid their back wages lo Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, and gol a receipt for it, after T.S. and H.l-'. had kissed all the girls (Blynken blubbering a little bit). Sawyer I inn's Circus took the northern road, and though the road leading west dimmed out in grass, we found others after a while. It is not hard to travel by the sun. When the sun goes down in glory it's time to sleep; when it rises all you need do r hold it behind you till the noon, and rest, and go on to the end of ihe day. you should be somewhat losing awareness of Demetrios' viewpoint. But viewpoints -- what an odd. inaccurate word!) -- viewpoints do fade, even cease. It engages my vanity that I have been able to give you as much of his as I have -- but there, I knew the man well, as they say, and spent many hours in talk with him, rambling, observing, questioning in my sly manner, so that if there's anything in his life, even from the faraway beginnings in Hesterville and including the details of the years in Nil her, the fun and troubles of the sexhouse, the garden he tended, the worries over Mam Estelle and her tea or the sound of Elizabeth of Hartford beating up a cookie batter with an Old-Time spoon and howl -- if there's any of that I don't either know or have snugged down in my notebooks, it's hardly worth mentioning. The notebooks made up a good deal of the weight in my hac-pac till  talked Garth into carrynng some o f them for me. I believe I told you Garth couldn't read. Angus and Demetrios fixed that, and he was a quick study, not a passionate spark like Frankie but bright and eager for discoveries, hut my tiny marks in the notebooks are a shorthand of my own. Besides, Garth was always a sweet kid. and wouldn't have peeked without permission. I could use his viewpoint -- (some time I intend to inalyse that word; not as absurd as "standpoint" but still pretty crazy) -- his viewpoint too if I was ainind to: an adolescent boy is not really any more fantastic than other warmblooded animals. D emetrios' viewpoint -- (the reader may now supply his own exegesis, since the novelist is out of sight again) -- was becoming somewhat clouded by forgetfulness, that mental cataract. There was also the worm of pain that more often made its journey up and down in his belly and probed more detestably, and the presence of this creature was bound to color his thoughts. A morning came when the rain fell lightly. It would not have interfered with the Company's traveling, but Angus decided that they should rest that day, and so they stayed in the shelter of a fine stone barn that stood sound where no house was. Rain ceased and the sun appeared in early afternoon, but Angus said it was too late to start, also he thought Brand was slightly lame from the chase of yesterday when Bosco had failed to bring down a deer with the first arrow. Bosco had been using a new bow Garth had made for him -- Garth handy at anything, and Frankie ever-present with the sacred hatchet -- and had been in too much haste for good shooting. "So let's loaf the rest of the day and chew venison," said Angus. "The western ocean will wait for us." It never occurred to Demetrios that the rest was being called on his account, nor did he notice that when they continued the following day, travel was slow, with numerous halts. He enjoyed the new pace, enjoyed the heft of his walnut stick, enjoyed resting in the sun with his back against a tree-trunk. Someone was always with him, he noticed -- Solitaire, very often Wynken with her small voice and curious green eyes, occasionally Frankie with not much to say, but most often Angus, who was never far off even when someone else was keeping him company. One day the Professor and Angus were sharing the sunlit shaft of a broad oak with him when he noticed Solitaire in conversation with Blynken, and he saw that Solitaire was disturbed. But it was not one of her trouble-times. In fact, unless his tiresome memory was betraying him (and he had found that it was already interfering with his telling of stories). Solitaire had not gone through any of those storms since the little episode on the approach to Trottersville. And now she merely looked excited, like one who has stumbled on something pleasant -- a coin shining in the road, a friend's face in a crowd of strangers -- and Demetrios heard her say: "Oh yes, Blynken, do let's pop together, and you can name your baby after mine, and I'll name mine after yours, but Blynken, love, don't ever call me Solitaire! Who was she, this Solitaire! There was never any such person, only me. and I am I, I am I, and my name is Eve." When I'm Building I'm Right with Myself But we are spirits of another to a region where the air held an odor of salt and seaweed, as it sometimes does at Nuber or in the eastern nations when the wind blows from the Atlantic, the ocean that no one crosses in our lifetime, perhaps for many lifetimes to come; but here in the place where Penn has no border, where the known and the wilderness come together with no more sign of joining than there is in the coming together of the sea waves, the wind was blowing out of the southwest, and it was warm. "Salt marsh maybe," said Bosco. "But I can tell you it's durn-much like the air I smelled near the coast of the Freshwater Sea that ain't fresh, that earthquake country of western Moha. I'd think I was there if I didn't know we're way to the south of it." It was the coast of the inland sea; nothing else could be so immense, so overwhelming with the sense of eternity -- and yet it was new, an inllowing of risen waters where recently there had been farmland, forest, cities, roads. New, and old -- in earlier millennia, Demetrios had told us, a shallow ocean had covered this land for immeasurable centuries. We were already somewhat south and west of Penn, perhaps. Demetrios had said we would not pass through the town of Aberedo. When Nod asked him how he could be sure of that, the old man's answer was doubtful. He said his journey -- (he must have meant the journey of all of us) -- led through time as well as space. "So does the journey of a rock," said Wynken, "as the turning earth carries it, and the earth's orbit moves with the galaxy." Demetrios looked on her with kindness and some amusement. Wynken is not to everyone's taste, but they had become close friends. Demetrios would have carried her when her little legs grew tired, but in these days he had not quite the strength; the others w ere burdened with their bac-pacs and similar gear. "Let Brand carry you," said Angus, and sometimes Wynken did, riding his back for short distances, the gray hound walking proudly and laughing with his tongue at the side of his mouth. But at this coast our walking had come to an end. A town stood here, w ith no people in it, and the ancient highway that had brought the Company to it ran down into the sea. No people at all. An empty square, most of the houses fallen in and some overgrown with vines, old street signs dangling, a few. Beyond the abandoned square, into a once-paved open area where even now few seeds had been able to exploit the cracks and make them useful -- I think it was what Old Time called a parking lot -- into that desolate open space the waters came white-tipped and whispering. In the west the sea met the horizon, though at the southern section of that arc a rise of hazy blue suggested the presence of land. The sun was shining from behind us on that hinted island, for we had come to this place in middle morning. We saw the strong light touching what may have been a cliffside or waterfall, and Demetrios described this for Angus. Then they moved further away, and I saw them standing at the very edge of the small waves, Demetrios still speaking, but too low' for me to hear, his left arm over Angus' shoulders, his other hand w'ith the oaken stick pointing here and there -- but it waS Demetrios whom the boy's nearsighted eyes were watching, with trouble and tenderness; and it's true that island to the south was so far from us you'd think only a dream could reach it. Now earlier that morning we had passed an old signboard carrying several names, with figures after them indicating distances, and it seems to me that one of the names may have been Aberedo. Yet Demetrios did not speak of it, and he looked on this ruin of a town with no sign of sorrow or recognition, asking Garth -- possibly he meant it at first only as one of his mild jokes -- whether he knew how' to build a boat to go on with. "No, man Demetrios," says Garth, serious as always, "but you tell me how', and if it's made of wood and I ain't hurried, I believe I can do it." "September's a-going toward winter," said Bosco. "Couple months, like. Shelter of a house, even one of them w recks, would be handy, if it takes till cold weather to build your boat." "What about repairing one house to live in," said Nod, "in case we're still here w'hen it gets chilly, and using the rest for lumber to build our boat?" He said "our"; Boseo had said "your"; likely the whole Company noted it. We discussed the idea comfortably through a lunch that was embellished by apples from someone's long-ago garden, w'here we sat protected from a brisk damp ocean wind. It seemed a good idea: practical, reasonable, and foolish enough to be interesting. "If my baby is born at sea," said Eve who had been Solitaire, "he'll live long and always be safe in a storm. It's an old Lowelltown superstition, right?" "Tell 'em how old," says Wynken. "A day old. Blynken made it up for me yesterday while we were cooking bacon and comparing bulges." "Hours and hours and hours ago," said Blynken. "Mine are bigger than thine." "Phoo." "I can't help it," said Nod, "I love all those women. Well, I'm in favor of the boat. We'll need smoked meat. I'll be hunting while Garth is building." "We want an island. Demetrios and I were getting that settled when Frankie turned the pumas loose." "And rode the big one three times around the lot," said Frankie. "Don't leave that out." "That island we see from here," said Demetrios, "is not really far away. Maybe we'll want something further off. If there's to be another republic -- another attempt to make a republic -- it might need to grow a while, undisturbed by the efforts of worried strangers to destroy it." He looked at the Professor, who was usually ready to confirm or deny the good sense of his remarks; the Professor nodded. "Let our island be one not too easily discovered," said Demetrios, "and large enough to support a few hundred or a few thousand souls with a taste for love and a taste for privacy." T hus it was agreed -- though Bosco made a production of saying damn-all nothing about it one way or another -- to build a boat. Garth examined the gaunt gray structure that was sheltering us from the sea wind, Frankie close by him in case he needed the Hatchet. He kicked the clapboards, sounded the walls. "This one might do to live in," he said, "And we'll find stuff here and yonder, for the building." Then he and Frankie went inside the place to consider beams, studs, floor-boards, the state of the roof, while the rest of us explored the town. Demetrios was attracted by a heap of rubble where he glimpsed on a charred signboard the letters stick, uncovering a hammer rusted but not spoiled, w'ith a metal shaft, and a grip still covered by a goodhandling material unknown to us. The hardw are shop must have been burned before the looting was finished, and its treasure buried from sight under plaster and trash and charcoal. Bosco and Nod helped us. We grubbed and besooted ourselves in the ruin, winning two hand-saws still with a coating of the manufaeturer's wax, some barrels of nails, a two-edged ax, an auger with a set of bits, a draw-shave. There was of course much intricate gadgetry that Demetrios recognized as eleetric, which we tossed aside. Returning to our house and garden, we found Garth and Frankie already engaged in renovating. The front room possessed an enormous w indow of heavy glass amazingly unbroken. Other windows, gaping and forlorn, could be boarded up against winter winds, and through the great Old-Time window we could watch the ocean's changes when the sun w-ent down. The chimney was sound, the fireplace in that main room large enough so we could cook there, and the room would also accommodate our sleeping gear. We noticed signs of rats, but after Brand had spent a night or two with the run of the house we heard no more scampering in the walls. Garth with our loot from the hardware store was a happy man. His happiness spread about him, as light will, touching Blynken with a particular radiance. "With that stuff we can go on a ways," Garth said. "Aye-so, when I'm building I'm right with myself." Later, after his work routines were established, and the mild winter brought certain days of rain when he could not work on the boat. Garth made us more of those small carvings which to him seemed nothing wonderful. For Blynken he carved a swan with lifted wings, and she said in the same hour that she hoped Garth would father her next child. It is like that with us; I hope our easiness with one another will continue when the w ays of living grow more intricate, as I suppose they must. Frankie was illuminated with satisfaction too that first day in the town that was probably not Aberedo, when it was decided that certain w all-hooks in the Old-Time kitchen should be sacred to the priceless tools, and that Frankie himself should keep watch of this, empowered to raise hell with anyone who failed to replace them after use -- and cleaned too. Angus laid his hands on Frankie's shoulders, and though he may have intended a jest, when he spoke it was in solemn earnest: "From this day forth thou art Toolwarden." have used the old second person singular ever since -- for emphasis, or special events of solemnity like this one, or those astounding occasions when two or three people (possibly even more though  have never known it to happen) not under the urgings of desire or self-importance, are able to share and enter one another's lives however briefly, doing so lovingly and unafraid. It may happen without speech, but not with much depth, for words -- the right words, seldom heard -- are like no other sort o f embrace. That is why the Professor troubles me, though  love him dearly; but on the island Peranelios (which vvc have so named because the invention comes from the stories of Demetrios) we never invade the privacy o f another with suggestions o f how he ought to be doing things this way or that way in the character of somebody else. Yes, your novelist ran on several steps ahead. a bratty thing to do. I am sorry. I only started out to say that Toolwarden is no small status, and nobody could have filled the position more excellently over the years than Frankie -- who has yet to write his first book: just wait a while. T he boat Garth set himself to build could only be a dignified raft with a sail, a keel, a ruddersweep, a cabin. Our tools and knowledge offered no way to warp and form the long grand curves of a true ship. It doesn't matter -- we knew from the first trials that she would serve. Bosco said she wouldn't float. We launched her, very incomplete, hardly more than a framework platform, to work out a few problems with the steering and the keel, and several times more before Garth was satisfied with the setting of the mast, and she fioated nicely, but Bosco wasn't convinced. She wouldn't carry the weight of the cabin, he said, not with all those people. Bosco's real trouble lay deeper. He just didn't want to gosemplace, not with us anyway. Angus finally took care of it, after the rest of the Company, including Bosco, had w asted considerable time and effort stew ing about it -- you know, chewing the mahooha in corners with each other, uptight about hurt feelings, ballywambling around. Angus just sat down by Bosco one evening -- it was still warm enough so that we were eating some of our meals out in the garden -- and said: "You don't really want to go west w ith us, do you, Bosco?" "To be real fucking honest with you." says Bosco, "it's a fact I don't. But I wouldn't want to let you down." "Sooner say goodbye than take you where you don't want to go," said Angus, and he added in his gentle no-nonsense way just as if he meant it: "We'll miss you naturally." Maybe he did mean it. Maybe it takes a Ristacrat to lay on just enough butter, never too much, so you're never sure it's butter at all. He never buttered up Demetrios of course, because he loved him, nor me because he knew I'd have been aware of it. He may have laid it on slightly now and then with quicktempered Nod, to simmer him down, and with Garth (slower of wit but thin-skinned) for no reason except that he loved to make Garth feel good -- name me a better reason and you can have it. "Since you put it thataway," said Bosco, "and with no hard feelings, I believe I better split. See, it's this thing about Gammo's Ramblers. If they went west a ways from that (own T.S. spoke of, they wouldn't've gone far west. Ocean and wilderness don't draw no Ramblers, account thev want to llnd a crowd in between ramblings, sell a few things, have some fun. And anyway it's kind of on me to find Boss Gammo. I don't care so much about he might've been my Pa, but the thing of it is I owe him a licking. Even if he's past seventysomething when I catch up with him he'll still be meaner'n a catturd, and I'll have to give him -- well, a little one. Not, of course, if he can't stand up." So early next morning Bosco made his farewells, with small gifts IVom everyone, and the bow Garth had made for him, and new deerhide sandals cut and thonged by Nod's hands, and so forth -- we all chipped in. While the rest were occupied with good wishes and llapdoodle I whispered to Frankie to go look at the tools, which he did. and came back to say everything was in place, what was the matter? -- in fact he was annoyed with me, for all he loved me so much and still does. Oh, now it's out.) "What was you thinking of, Wynken?" says my Frankie, my Brains of the Outfit. But not through your cleverness: through mine, mine.) "Aye-w'ell," I told him, "I was just wondering." Not until evening, when Bosco was long gone into the wilderness on his way back to his own kind of life, did Angus miss his wrist atch. X Pock when I went swimming yesterday," said Angus, knowing himself he was never that careless. For we had a little beach, sanddrifted for us by that lazy-seeming ocean, and Angus still liked to run in for a dip after the air had grown too sharp for the rest of us. Near the margin of the beach a statue of Penn had fallen over or been pushed: it was earthquake country. I he old boy now lies gazing at the sky in benignant perplexity. I went with Angus to help him look. He ran his hand over the pedestal, I poked around here and there; when we gave it up he sat down and laughed. "Oh, that damned roly-poly bastard!" he said, and laughed some more, but he was doing it to hide the fact that he was crying -- Angus weeps rather easily: I believe it's better than leaving frustrated unhappiness to I'ester -- and I knew it was because Demetrios that afternoon had let slip an unintentional word during an attack of his sickness. It meant, or at least Angus took it to mean, that Demetrios didn't think he'd live to sail with us when the boat was ready. "He's had a life," I said, "in two worlds, and there's been pleasure ill it." "You do see into me." (Well, human nature is my country -- I have to look where I'm going.) Then Angus struck his knee in misery. "Two worlds -- why not three? Why can't he live to glimpse the third world he wants for us, the republic? It's his dream, the rest of us are only groping after his meaning -- except maybe you." "Are you looking for justice in nature?" "I suppose I was," he said, and his weeping ceased. "He said, you know -- it was when the pain had let us, but he was exhausted, near sleep I think, maybe didn't know I was still sitting by him -- he muttered something about the Moses principle." "Maybe he only meant that all prophets are like Moses, because the promised land always stays somewhere just ahead." He didn't answer me, but took my hand and held it against his throat, a way he had. so that I felt his good blood beating there. "The promised land, w hen we get to ours, will have a few headaches." "Don't I kno', love? But he u oil Id enjoy dealing with them. He would like to see -- ah. I'm going in for a dip." He jumped up and shrugged off his clothes. "Come with me?" It was too cold, but I did anyway -- because he's such a dear hunk of boy, I suppose, with his red-brow n hair and his build like a Raphael angel, and I didn't want to leave him. We plunged, and swam a while, and dried in the breeze, and made love. Only in the ways Angus allowed us, because he was afraid for me. It's true enough a midget would be taking a chance, with no surgeon around to do a Caesarean. Yet I had an easy delivery with Nod's baby -- it was sickness that took her -- and I was facing almost the same risk in that pregnancy, for w e're told midgets don't breed true. But Nod and I are not proportionately short-legged and big-headed: couldn't we be something a little bit new ? I wish it were so -- and didn't Demetrios himself, on a later afternoon during one of his remissions, say that he wished the Republic might have many people like Nod and me? And didn't we at once fall to designing houses in our heads w licrc big and little could live together and both be comfortable? She was a very tiny thing, my baby who lived three months, all in such perfect proportion -- I had milk for her. in plenty. Diphtheria killed her -- one of the diseases conquered in the old time that will not come again. Nod's wildness is beautiful and strikes a spark in me, but I am partial to gentleness too. Angus is sweet. Kve who had been Solitaire smiled on us without malice out of her young maternity when we went back to the house, quieter and comforted. T hrough the early winter we toiled at our vessel under Garth's direction. Winter comes to southern Penn, if that is w'here we frost such as we expected in Lowelltown for December and January. Long rains fall, almost never snow. Wc were puzzled, what to use for a sail; Demetrios warned us the woolen blankets would be no good, holding damp instead of shedding it. We thought of sending a party back along our trail to the last town we had passed, to buy linen cloth; but it had been a mean, small place, likely with nothing to offer, and Angus was not minded to divide the Company. Angus himself would not leave Demetrios. He had promised a certain service to his friend that no one else could or should perform. He trusted me with the knowledge of it; since he has given me leave to write it, the others will learn (perhaps without much surprise) when they read what I have set down here, so much later. As for the sail, we patched our garments together, and cut up the blankets for such small rags of clothing as we might want from time to time. The cabin of the boat was sound enough to hold in our warmth and give us shelter; we would probably be sailing into a region of tropieal warmth. We all like nakedness, and we here young. The Professor -- (young? well, yes, really, in all that matters) -- spent most of his time with our friend, studying his face while the lute made music for him, knowing (often without a word from Demetiios) what mood of music the sick man's mind might prefer to follow. He would shift suddenly from joy to sorrow, or the other way, or from simplicity into a counterpoint so subtle that Demetrios would frown with delight in going along with it -- all this in response to some message from Demetrios that we had missed. And whatever the shift of mood, Demetrios would nod with satisfaction, and share the journey until the pain struck again destroying the chance of pleasure. I have not heart nor wish to write of Demetrios' sufferings nor of the thousand indignities that attend a long dying, except to say: he endured them, until the time came when he could tell his beloved that he wished to endure them no more. He did speak once, placidly but with some contempt, of the OldTime habits of pawky euphemism, of wrapping its human stuff in a bundle of comfort against the facts of death and suffering and finality. And once, when Garth and Frankie and the Professor and I were with him, he said: "I have nothing intricate to tell you about death. Death is necessary, like birth; dying is unpleasant, also unimportant. Except for such truisms, such small obvious bits of comment -- why, there's just nothing worth saying about it: it is life that speaks. Play us a little Mozart, Professor -- he was a good cheerful joe w'ho knew how to cry." There came a warm day of March when by unspoken agreement we left Angus alone with him, and lingered outside the house, sometimes looking at our finished boat where she tugged at the anchor bespoken by an easterly breeze. You may be wondering certain things. I am writing in the year when Demetrios' darkhaired daughter. Eve's daughter, is seven years old. My sister's girl was bom two days later: she is fair and bouncing, and small like Nod and me. As I hinted some long time ago,  returned for a visit to the eastern nations. I traveled in safety, with Garth and a much bigger Frankie. We had a few days in Nuber. Mam Estelle was dead. Babette came hack with us, with the Diary, Shawn's pictures, a few other bits of valued loot. It was good to return; it is good to discover the end o f this hook, and turn my though ts to other affairs. It will be evening presently, and Eve's daughter Miranda will go to chasing fire flies. Out there watching the inland sea, we felt no need of saying goodbye, for each time we had been with Demetrios lately it had been a goodbye: he knew it. In an hour, or two, Angus came out of the house and sat on the ground, and when F've went to him he lifted a, handful of earth and let it flow through his fingers. Afterward he told me how Demetrios had asked after each of us in turn, whether we were of good heart and right with ourselves. "And then he told me," said Angus, "that pain had won, over the enjoyment of living, and so it was time for what we had agreed on. And he said -- how could this be, Wynken? -- he said that in our short time together he had known more delight of body and mind than he supposed most men ever crowd into a lifetime. Can such a thing be true, Wynken?" he asked me. as if I knew. I don't know in how many senses it can be true. But I think, and I told Angus, that it was certainly the aspect of truth that Demetrios w as accepting. Then Angus had kissed his Friend, and placed a cushion over his face and held him fast until it was over, because this was the manner of death that Demetrios had requested, saying there would be no distress in it under Angus' hands, and w'ishing that Angus might later be free to tell us the w hole truth of it or not, as he saw fit. We had thought to give him a sea burial. But Garth's good boat carried us more swiftly than we expected to that island we had watched from the mainland. It was lonely and small, a patch of innocent wilderness. Not a place for the republic, but we could pause there, before sailing on to find the island we would name Peranelios, where this part of the story ends. And it suited our hearts to bury Demetrios' body there, near a wild grape that would accept it and bear fruit each season in the sun,  Where the checkerboard goes on and on... Life in the Twist ain't hard. I mean, there's lots of other Twists, but somehow, when you've lived someplace for a long time, years maybe, you get to call it "the" when you talk about it. I been here since '#, year of the riots. I didn't get involved in no riots, though. That ain't my style. It's kinda funny, but I got caught and put in the Twist after I gave the scientists and politicians the way to make it. Pete, see... Pete's a scientist frienda mine... he wanted a gizmo called a dimensular unit for some invention. He hired me to steal it, 'cause the guys who owned it wouldn't sell him one. It figures they wouldn't. They're scientists, like Pete, but lots more chickenshit. Pete was a guy who experimented a lot with electricity. He was a real nut, used to cut holes in his apartment walls to put boxes of stuff in when he ran out of room on the floor. One time a guy sneaked in and stole some of the stuff. Pete damn near had an attack. I never saw a guy more interested in making money, either. He told me his new invention. He said it would move things around by dissolving 'em and shooting 'em someplace else; kind of like radio, though not quite. I took a year of math in high school but it didn't help much when he started getting real deep in the stuff, trying to explain it. Pete once told me he was kicked outta science on account of he blew up somebody's lab trying to find perpetual motion. Said he could do about anything he wanted, if he had the stuff to do it with. He told me too that the thing he wanted for his invention would have to be lifted from the inside and that all the labs in the country knew him and wouldn't hire him to strip wires. So he needed me to lift the dimensular unit for him, and we'd Really, I don't have no regrets about it anymore. I mean, I used to steal things for a living. I used to have junk taken by teachers clear back in grade school. They'd lock it up in closets and I'd have it inside of an hour. It shouldn't'a been any hassle and it wouldn't'a been if I hadn't been so dumb. It wasn't Pete's fault I got caught. He filled his side all right. He got me the job and all. No, I fouled it up. F irst day at work. I had my little badge, my company-issue uniform, my smile, and I was ready for work. I always had a hard time, first days at work. That's why I never worked legal for very long. I never could get used to any kind of janitor work, which was about all I could do that wasn't making license plates or picking locks. Dimensions, Incorporated hired me to be a Third-Class Sanitation Engineer. That means janitor. I just swept floors and mopped 'em at night. And only the hall floors at that. They wouldn't even let me change a light bulb in a lab or an office when I first started. They kept everything important locked up most'a the time. But I was happy doing hall floors. Office floors always made me nervous, they took me back to state. The State Penatentiary. I put in twelve years there. Twelve long, stinking years with nothing to show for it except I got grey hair. I stayed in a cell with three other guys, a cell about as big as one of them business offices. I hear that businessmen sometimes complain about the size of their offices. I wonder how they'd feel if they had to share it with four bunks, three guys, and a toilet. I was only supposed to do seven years but I busted out and got caught. That added five years, no parole. I almost busted out again, but somebody told the screws and they had me put in solitary. There ain't no escape from there. My solitary cell was even smaller than my regular one. It leaked cold air in the winter and made you sweat off five pounds every day in the summer. And it stank. Oh, Lord, did it stink. Anyway, that's why I don't like offices. When I'm in one long enough the chairs and desks and things start to disappear and the walls melt into bars. I start hearing the screws yelling down the line and smell the piss and sweat. Pretty soon I'm crawling on the walls, sweating and cussing, and trying to find the doorknob. When I do I'll yank the door open and fall outside, screaming and running. At least when I'm in the halls that don't happen. Yo( might think a big company might not want cons on their payrolls, which is what I thought. But then I found out that Dimensions likes to have cons work for them, doing janitor work and such. They say it gives a fellow human-being a new lease on life; like it allows a guy to remake himself. But every con in there knows sure as people make' prisons that the real reason is to make the scientists feel good. Scientists are all a little off, and a lot of 'em feel like they passed up a lot' a life by going to school so long and then having to stay in labs all their lives. So Dimensions hires cons to scrub floors and pull gum off a chairs. Scientists leave gum on chairs, too. I used to think of us cons as the guys taking care of a machine. The machine really didn't do much of anything useful, but it had to be taken care of. We oiled it and polished it and replaced its cogs and gears when they got loose or busted. We scrubbed the rust off and cleaned out the dust. We kept the people machine running smooth. I've seen what bad upkeep can do to a machine. Once, in the pen, we had a machine blow up 'cause it wasn't taken care of right. I mean it really blew up, killed the guy working it. It curled smoke for awhile but nobody noticed or cared. Then funny noises came out of it, like dozens of ball bearings were suddenly loose inside and shooting around from part to part and making one hell of a racket. Then a huge crack spread down the front and the machine's guts came out. The guy working the controls screamed a couple'a times, but you couldn't see him for the flying metal shavings and bits of springs and wires. After it was all over, and we used fire extinguishers on the little electrical fires, we couldn't even find anything that we could be sure was really him. He was all burned and cut and mixed in pretty well with all the metal parts that used to belong to the machine. It was funny, I think. He must'a thought he had that machine right where he wanted it. And it blew up on him, grinding him up and spitting him out. Pete said all I had to do was work at Dimensions for awhile, until they let me into the labs. That's where they kept their important parts to the inventions, because the labs are the cleanest rooms in the building. During the day nobody was allowed in except the technicians. At night, though, they had to let somebody in to clean up what the automatics can't. Stuff up the size of a gnat's ass could be sucked oufa the air, but bigger stuff had to be cleaned up by Sanitation Engineers. The guards might'a done it, but their agreement with the company wouldn't let 'em. Pete gave me a little meter that he said would find radioactivity. He showed me how to set it, where the needle would go when the meter found the unit, and how to hide it so the guard wouldn't find it. I had a rolling cart Dimensions gave me to work with. It had an old floor wax can on the end that had soap powder in it. Pete said I could hide the meter in the soap and the metal detector wouldn't know it was there. I'd do the same with the unit when I found it, after wrapping it up in lead foil so I could get in past the radiation detector outside the door. We went over the heist until I said we couldn't foul up, no way. I had the late shift, starting at eight o'clock. I rolled my cart down the hall, passing the two-colored squares on the floor. They were black and white and looked like a big checkerboard. They reminded me of my cell, too, except that floor was black-and-white because the cement floor was chipped in some places and dirty in others. The guard on duty was a friend'a mind, sort'a. He liked me so I knew he wouldn't work too hard checking me over. I rolled the cart into the little room in front where you're cleaned of dust by a hard blast of raw air. Burt, the guard, nosed around the cart while me and the cart were being scrubbed. He looked into the soap bin, but didn't stop. He lifted a couple'a things, sniffed, and said to go ahead. The far door slid open, I pushed my cart through, and I was in the lab. I thought it'd be dark in there, but it wasn't. Maybe they kept it lit up for insurance. I could see Burt's head through the emergency door, beside the other door connecting onto the cleaning tunnel. He was sitting down, reading a book. The trouble with that was he could see in just by turning his head. I couldn't hang nothing over the door or he'd get suspicious. Suddenly he turned and waved. I waved back and started getting cleaning stuff off a the cart. I shoved the meter under my shirt, along with my lock-picking tools. I picked up the dry mop and walked over to a wall. I sized the place up real quick and all of a sudden realized how long it'd take me to pull the job, I'hat lab looked like the operating rooms you see on doctor shows, but a whole lot bigger. All (he walls were either chrome or glass-like plastic. The only way to tell what was a cabinet and what wasn't was by looking at the little hairline cracks running down the walls and by the little holes where keys would go. There were long benches strung all over the room with meters and irons and things attached to'em. Except for papers dropped on the floor, the lab was spotless. There wasn't one spot of over-heavy wax on the floor. No fly specks on the ceiling. No burn marks on the benches. You see it? Like the room was created to study what clean really was. I walked along the walls with my mop, holding the little meter just out in front. I must'a gone around that room five times before that sweet little needle jumped over to the right place. If I'd'a had to go around the place once more I'd probably'a quit. I was shaking real bad, throwing looks every other second at Burt. I looked up again when the needle jumped. Burt looked like he was asleep. I pulled out my tools and got to my real work. pen to testify before some committee that was studying prisoners and prisons. As far as I know, they wrote down everything I said and never looked at it again, because I never heard of nothing being done with it. I sat at a table in front of them, wearing a suit. It was the only time I wore a suit the whole twelve years I was in the can. The committee sat a little above me, on a platform. They asked me questions and I answered them. Sometimes one guy looked happy at an answer, and other times another guy would. Sometimes the screws that brought me looked like they'd eaten yellow snow by mistake at some'a the things I said. I told'em too, by God... told'em about the noise, and the smells, and about the four bunks and me and three guys and a toilet. I told'em about solitary and the chipped floor and -- I told'em every lousy thing I could remember, that's all. And somebody wrote it all down. It didn't make things easy for me when I got back to the pen. Some of the screws who'd been my friends weren't interested in me anymore. But I really didn't care. I was due for release in two weeks. Funny, ain't it? I mean, people all the time yell real loud about reforming prisons but all they ever do is make stronger ones. What those politicians wanted w'as a prison that was good for speeches but was so strong you couldn't get out of. I 'll probably never know why they locked that little box up in that stupid closet. Here was a dollars or something and they trust it to a lock a retarded monkey could 'a picked. I guess, except for when they're doing science, scientists are stupid all the way around. The unit and meter fit real nice into the soap can along with my tools. I dusted a little more and picked up paper so Burt wouldn't think something was a little strange. Then I signalled him to let me out. He got up and yaw ned and I took one last look around that room. All that stainless steel and chrome. Plastic, glass, and aluminum. It was all so nice and shiny clean it almost made me cry. I thought about how I'd wanted to get in there so bad... worked for it, months on end. If I'd stayed I'd probably have given in to temptation and sneaked in a sledgehammer. The other guys who had worked the labs talked sometimes about what they'd bust first if they had a sledgehammer in there. I knew what I'd have gone for first. There w as a big light in the middle of the room, about twenty feet long, and all covered with a wire cage for protection. I'd take a sledge and I'd smash that big cage, smash it and twist it and break it apart. I got so worked up about it I might have done it right then if Burt hadn't opened the lock on the door for me to get out. I pushed the cart through the door, all through the cleaning tunnel, and out the other door. Burt stopped me again and searched a little bit with the metal detector and the radiation counter. He nodded me on. I was home free. I was down the hall and around a bend before I let myself laugh. I laughed at Burt and the scientists and Dimensions all at once. I shouldn't have done it, but I pulled the little dimensular unit out of the soap bin and looked at it. It had little dials and switches and jack plugs on its face, a square mirror about as big as a dollar bill. I walked off down the hall, leaving my cart where it was, and tossing the little box into the air. It was my revenge on the scientists, on the screws, and the fat government guys. With it I was bigger than Pete, even. I could sell it to anybody I wanted. But no. That wasn't right. Pete got me the job so I could get the box. He ought to have something. That's when I tossed it up once too often and a little too far away. It hit the wall, bounced to the tile, and rolled off down the hall. And it hummed. Lord, it hummed loud as a bee hive, I ran after it, picking it up without slowing down. I looked for something that might shut it off, but I didn't have time to look for one thing in all them controls. I tucked it under my arm and ran, hums and all, to the double-doors leading to the offices. They crashed open when I hit them, and glass spilled over the floor in strange flashing colors. My hand was cut pretty bad from one of the busted pieces but I couldn't stop. I kept on running, pounding in my rubbersoled shoes. Guards looked kind of funny at me, but I was holding my arms across my stomach like I was about to puke. I ran past doors with blurry numbers and office fronts. I went past bulletin boards and light bulb after light bulb. I finally got to the front doors, the ones leading to the street. They opened in but I made them open out. I couldn't wait to get out, into the cool air where I could run on wet cement and run and run... and I was still running on tile, with overhead lighting and double doors in front of me. Wrong turn, I thpught, and opened them. Ran on through. Ran by labs and offices and more labs. On checkerboard tile under light bulbs with cages around them. I was starting to get tired, my breath getting sharp. I ran past business rooms and labs and more rooms and more labs and offices and typewriters and telephones and little offices and labs with guards and cages around the lights and then I ran past Burt. I saw Burt get up but I didn't care. I had to keep going, before the alarm went off and other guards'd come down on me. Burt started after me, looking puzzled. Sweat ran into my eyes and I smacked into something hard with sharp corners that gouged my ribs. My cart. I slowed down, walked. I came up on two double doors. Their glass was sprinkled over the floor. I looked at my hand and saw the red blood still flowing that had already stained half my shirt red. I looked at Burt coming up behind me. I took off, running blind, looking for the outside wall like in one of them mazes guys build for rats. Burt caught up with me and grabbed my arms, but I shook him off. Now there were five or six other guards chasing me. Through the doorway, past more labs and offices, with the theft alarm screaming around me. The loudspeakers were yelling orders and questions one after the other. I didn't see the glass doors to the street the second time, and now I know it was the second time. I almost knocked myself out on the door handle. In the few seconds, before the guards reached me, I saw outside the doors that were supposed to lead out. They didn't. I should have been looking out at stars and wet pavement. I was looking at the same landscape I'd passed minutes before. There were little red drops leading away down a corridor that shouldn't have existed and didn't end. For the first time in my life, I was really scared. Not just of getting caught, but of what I could see, something other than the eorridor or Burt. It wasn't nothing I could point at, but staring down that hall, the one I'd already run down, I knew I'd never forget that feeling of being frustrated and scared -- of trapped places you couldn't never get out of. Then the guards mobbed me. me back to jail. Life sure is fiinny, ya know? I mean, if it wasn't for me stealing that dimensular and dropping it so the little jigger inside touched another little jigger they wouldn't'a discovered the Dimensulation Effect. From what they told me, the Twist is something like a thing they call the mobius strip. Someway, when you take a strip of paper and put it together like a tread on a tank, and give it one twist before you put it together, you get a thing called a mobius strip that makes you end up right where you started by walking in any direction. Dimensions, Incorporated builds Twists because they jumped on their rights on the dimensular unit. The Twist is really just a little different from the effect I got caught in inside Dimensions. What happened, sort of, was that the tail of the building connected with the front so I couldn't get out no matter where I went. In the Twist, you can walk down the one hallway and walk right around to where you started. So God help me, for the rest of my life I'll be running down that same hallway past labs and offices and Burt. Pretty soon they put other guys in with me, and now there's seven of us. We get fed from a little machine set in the wall. It gives us the food on plates made of some kind of milk-colored plastic that dissolves after twenty minutes or so. Little holes in the walls suck out anything dirty, like the toilet in my old cell. It's a lot better than the one in the lab, even. Spraying nozzles blast the floor to clean up old food or where somebody's pissed. It's easy to look out the windows but there's not much to see. Just another hallway on the other side, same as the one we're in. You can climb through the windows on either side, and be in another hallway like the one you came out of. They have doors up along the hall because they're afraid we'll go crackers seeing a hallway that never ends. So they gave us doors that can't be propped back. You can lock the doors at both sides of a little room you can call your own, but guards have keys and anyway, all you have to do is crawl through a window to land in somebody's bedroom. We can't bust into the walls to get at the machinery, because the walls are made of some real tough plastic. We can't jump the guards because whenever they bring somebody in they always wait until we're asleep. I been in here almost a year, longer than anybody. I used to keep a calendar of scratch marks on the wall but the blasting hoses shot'em all off. The walls are smooth, like eggshells. That's what the whole Twist reminds me of -- an egg. Except we'll never hatch out of it. It's an egg of piss and sweat and death. Nobody in my Twist is a first-timer; the only people put in here are the ones that've got life sentences. Nobody else in my Twist knows that I made it possible to build one. They'd probably laugh at me if they knew. I only been in here a little over a year, and the only thing that keeps me from going nuts is the room. But that's not enough anymore. I'm starting to get faint whiffs of three other guys and a toilet. I don't know just what I'm going to do when I start climbing walls. Maybe hold my breath until I turn blue and die. This place is perfect, I guess. The people outside don't have to look at us or pay attention to us. We can't get out. Ever. Sometimes it makes me sore that I did it, gave them the Twist. They probably never would'a found the Effect without me. I gave them politicians what they really wanted and now they've got a prison that's escapeproof and humane at the same time. It's funny, but we haven't had anybody put in here in a long time. Whenever we used to yell out, we usually got somebody to yell back. They don't yell anymore. I think maybe the people machine blew up, some way, and we were just forgotten. Maybe somebody forgot the oil, or broke a part. I don't suppose whatever happened'll affect us any, though. And so help me they've got tile floors in here. They're checkered, in fact. Black and White. Funny.  advertisers to take advantage of the trio combination, we are now offering a discount prira of # per word to run in the three issues that appear in a #-month period. Our regular price is now # a word per issue. Whatever your choice...it's a bargain. and fantasy magazines from # to date. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA. #. to: S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Over # titles listed. Send # cents for one, # for next #, or # for four consecutive catalogs plus Silverberg's "Dying Inside" a # publisher's edition SF book. 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Just check the package(s) you want and send cash, check or MO. and a statement ol your age (youmuslbelStoorder these comix) lo our address, and presto! ! ! your mind will be blown... From Harper ) Row hW #   f A spellbinding novel of an eerily enigmatic world by Christopher Priest. # By Ursula K. Le Guin. A stunning tour de force by the Nebula Award-winner. # Eleven singular stories by George Alec Effinger. # Coming in November, Harlan Ellison's devastating collection of stories about our new "gods." # Latest in the oldest, finest SF series -- eleven original stories by Wilhelm, Aldiss, and others Damon Knight, Editor. # All the winners and runners-up, plus commentary by Kate Wilhelm. Coming in November. # All-new stories by Lafferty, LeGuin, Russ, Vinge, Wilhelm, Wolf, Wolfe, and Yaco. Damon Knight, Editor. # # Michael Moorcock novels "A wayward, imaginative, wholly original novel." -- New Statesman # By Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. A gripping new tale of Dr. Warboys. # At bookstores Harper Row # E. #rd St... New York # "Enjoyable adventure." -- Publishers Weekly # More Jherek Carnelian antics. # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor Bonnie Leigland, Managing Editor Lester del Rey, Feature Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscription Director Jay Tunick, Circulation Director 'Love' is a four-letter word that means different things in different times and places. In this case it refers to "Eros' -- another word of four letters. yours of evolution. This story illustrates that fact in a novel way. Ironically, it is not the warrior who suffers most from battle, but the innocent bystander, in the future, of course, things will be different... A tale of technological deduction set in the notdistant past -- and perhapsin the not-distant future as well! A story of a time when Explorer Teams range the galaxy. One member is chosen for brawn and manuai dexterity, the other for wisdom... SF East -- an sf safari to Redland. Here Come The Brains -- frs month's science articie is devoted to a new and startling model of human thought processes. And whether or not it is vaiid, it will almost certainly prove useful! In which Sturgeon deals with matters far stranger than fiction. Letters from Abramowitz, Scheuern, Weiner Interior illustrations by Fabian, Freff, Gaughan lishing Coiporalion. a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, Presidant. Main Oltlcas: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-Issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company. Ltd., # Gloucastar Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of lha Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-lssua subscription In Ihe Unllad Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity batwaan chaiactere and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. "And then, as the French book saith, the queen and Launcelot . were together. And whether they were abed or at other manner of disports, me list not hereof make no mention, for love at that time was not as Is nowadays .  -- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D' Arthur  # by Fred Saberhagen I his little California house, calling his wife's name, but only music answered him. The hidden sensors of the hifi system marked Art's passage from room to room and as he passed the system changed the music for him, blending each piece more or less smoothly into the next. When he entered the children's room, where the two beds and a scattering of toys reposed in a somehow ominous stillness, there came from the speakers a cacophony of metallic sounds that bore an intended resemblance to a Iniby'scry. Little Timmy and Paula liad wanted that teenage stuff for their room, and he and Rita had agreed, though the kids were really far too young, but never mind that now, no one was there. The discordant metallic baby cries cut off when Art went out. In the master bedroom he was led the music of pulse-beating drums, fit for a wild and wiggling dance that must find its appropriate end upon the bed. No one here, either. The glass in his wide windows (looking out over his neighbors' desert landscaping, complete with plastic iguana) had darkened itself almost to opacity against the force of the California sun, but the sun was getting into (he bedroom anyway, reflecting blue and green through the depths of the inside-outside swimming pool. By this water-mottled light that quivered in all of the bedroom's many mirrors Art saw that a small piece of white paper had been propped against the massage unit on his bedside table. He tossed his box of handcarved Staunton chessmen rattling onto the large circular bed, set his digital tournament clock down gently, and picked up the note, which was in Rita's handwriting. Darling, please believe that I love you as much as ever, but I must go away for a time. The kids are with me and will be okay. I really am pregnant again and Dr. Kuang says he has had to report my pregnancy to Family Planning. It's the law, as he says, and I guess I can't expect him not to report it. I will call you or at least write you soon so try not to worry. Love, Rita As he read. Art's knees went weak with fear confirmed, and he sank down on the edge of the round bed. He glanced up at the overhead mirror, but learned nothing from the sight of his own slightly pudgy, dark-bearded face, pale and enigmatic in its shock. He looked down again and re-read the note three times and dropped it on the bed beside him. Putting his weight on the bed had quickened the heartbeat of the hifi drums, though if he sat still the system would soon switch to soothing, lulling music and in a little while he would be granted silence. He could get up and turn the thing off but he felt too numb. Where to look for escape, for guidance? Where else but on the short bookshelf built into the wall beside his bed? The words of Eros are those of the true heart. Shortly he reached over and pulled out a well-fingered gray volume with Philosophy of Pleasure lettered on the cover in a beautiful and lively pink. But then he sat there holding the book unopened. It was obvious that Rita had run off to her sister-in-law in Chicago. She would not have taken the children to leave them with anyone else. Rita meant to go into hiding somewhere and bear an unwanted child, even if she had to put it up for secret adoption later. Just the kind of thing that sister-in-law Ann would encourage her to do; quite likely it w'as Ann who had suggested the scheme to her in the first place... thought faded out into pain and shock. His wife was gone. How far pregnant was she? It couldn't be more than ten weeks or so, he thought. He tried to remember when she had last gone off the pills for a menstrual week, but he had trouble keeping the dates in his mind, because his mind wanted to forget it. So it would have to be about six months before she bore the child, assuming she could remain in hiding and get away with it. If instead. as seemed more likely, the FP caught up with her and gave her her abortion anyway, she would probably go to jail. So it was in the cases one read about. In any case she was going to be gone for months. As well as being the mother of his children she was Art's favorite sex partner, too. He opened the book and began to make plans for the changes in his sex life that would be brought about by Rita's prolonged absence. After half a minute he realized what he was doing, threw the book aside, and went back to re-reading the note, hoping without real hope to find some less terrible interpretation of its words. But there was none. him on the bedside table. Art started to punch out the number of Ann and GeorgeParr in Chicago. They had recently moved into a new house there -- business at George's karate school was evidently good -- and the new number was still fresh in Art's mind. He had looked it up for Rita last weekend. But when he was haltway through punching, he hesitated and then hit the blankoff key. Rita had been gone only a few hours at the most, and probably had not yet reached Chicago. Talking to George was not likely to do any good since Ann would be the one most actively helping Rita -- and arguing with Ann about anything was, in Art's experience, certain to be futile. Anyway it was not the kind of thing Art wanted to talk about over the phone. Best not to call at all but to go straight after Rita and for her own good compel her to behave sensibly. And the sooner he caught up with her the better. He reached for the phoneplate again, and this time tapped out the number of the Chess Director's Office, in the mid-California branch of the Bureau of Arts and Games. There was a wait, with evanescent rainbow static on the plate. Then a man's florid face appeared. "Oh, hi. Art," the face said. "What's up?" "Listen, Nick, I just called to say you'd better not pair me in for the first round of the Quarterly. I'm taking a little trip and I don't know il' I'll be back in time." "Oh, okay. Let me know about the August Monthly, hey?" "Certainly I will. Go'th Eros." "Goodbye." For a moment Art continued to stare at the blank phone. In spite of his larger worries he found himself irritated by the Chess Director's olfhand manner. Bureau of Arts people were supposed to believe in the importance of what they were lining; they should show at least a little formal regret when a rated master withdrew from an event. Nick had seemed as indifferent as a factory foreman checking attendance. The thought of factories reminded Art that in courtesy he should call his own place of employment before he left, but the chime of an incoming call forestalled him. On the plate appeared the face of a young woman, full-featured and of flawless skin. "May I speak to Ms. Rita Rodney, please? I'm Ms. Lazenby of the Bureau of Family Planning." An unpleasant contraction in the stomach. "This is her husband. Ah, Rita's not in the house right now. Ah, she's out shopping somewhere, I expect." Ms. Lazenby smiled, a friendly smile that could become sympathetic if the need arose. "Actually, the reason for my call concerns you too, Mr. Rodney, and your two children." She paused just enough for Art to have gotten a question in if he had felt the need. "Will you ask Rita to call me back as soon as possible if she returns home during business hours? We're open until five. Or otherwise to call me in the morning at her earliest convenience?" "I will, yes. I'll tell her that." "Thank you," Ms. Lazenby blanked off. Art sat clutching the phone. Dr. Kuang had smelled trouble coming, had called in Family Planning right away, reporting Rita as a problem case. Call back tomorrow, Ms. Lazenby, and you'll probably get no answer, and you'll be very suspicious that something's up. But call back two or three days from here to talk to you, I promise you that. Or maybe you'll never have to call again, maybe by then the Certificate of Abortion will already have been fed into your FP computer banks. What next? Oh yes, his job. Art punched out the number of the Macrotron Electronics plant in San Bernardino, and then the personal extension number of Pete Kinelo, his boss in the test-equipment maintenance and engineering department. The plate showed the Macrotron trademark, and then the taped image of a girl who was nude or nearly so, it being impossible to tell at the moment because she was partly concealed behind a receptionist's desk. A small vase of roses stood before each breast, so that her nipples were just concealed. "One moment, please," the girl said, smiling pleasantly. "Your party has not yet answered his or her personal phone. We are continuing to page your party; thank you for waiting." The music of Swan Lake began. The girl affixed an electrostatically clinging sequin to each of her nipples, coyly displayed a G-string and wriggled into it, and then writhed up from behind her desk in an erotic dance. In a moment she was dancing along the shore of a lily-pond, and then in and out of the curtain of a small waterfall. Art waited impatiently, looking at his watch. There were several other calls that he should make. One was the bank, to see how much cash was readily available, in other words how much Rita had taken; fortunately he had come home today with the check for first prize in the Weekly in his pocket and so should at least be able to buy a ticket to Chicago. Another call would be to the Office of Transcontinental Transit, to see how soon he could get a seat on a tube train. At last the dancing girl was replaced by the face of Pete Kinelo. "Art?" "Hello, Pete. I can take next week off, too." "Oh, good." Pete beamed through his thick glasses. "Then I can bring another substitute engineer in for a week. That'll put us in real good shape on employee utilization. Say, there's nothing wrong, is there?" "No, no. Ah, I've been winning quite a few prizes and I've got my nerve up. I'm going to try some of the big tournaments coming up around Chicago." "Great. Fine. Be sure and let me know if you're coming back week after next." T he transcontinental train, a string of sealed metal cylinders almost windowless and almost silent in their movement, hurtled eastward through its buried tube at a steady supersonic speed. On three-dimensional stages at the front of each car, feature-length tridi programs were being shown, a hangover from the days before competition with the airlines had been virtually ended by the latter's susceptibility to hijacking, accidents, and weather. In Art's car the life-sized, solid-looking, almostreal-looking images were enacting a play set in Victorian England, the locale of a lot of fiction these days. The story had something to do with the romantic pursuit of a prim London nursemaid by a young Icftenant (in the play they pronounced it that way) freshly returned from India. Obsessed as Art was with his own real problems, still the Irashiness of the play aroused in him an automatic disgust. There was no apparent limit to what they could get away with showing these (lays. Every second or third shot, or so it seemed, was a long lingering closeup of the heroine, showing her sw athed almost from chin to ankles in clothing that was not only loosefitting but practically opaque. Only just enough of her shape and skin showed through to keep the Bureau of Arts censors from clamping down. Doubtless the producer would argue that in real Victorian lingland nothing had showed through, but, thank Eros, that was evidently not yet accepted as a valid argument by the censors and the courts. Ann, when he met her in Chicago, would probably be wearing something like this heroine's clothes. Rita wouldn't, though. She had better not. What would be the very best first words for him to say when he caught up with her? What kind of look should he put on his face? He thought a moment and then decided there was no use trying to plan in such detail. Details would have to depend on the circumstances of the moment, on what her own attitude seemed to be. Of course he would have to be absolutely inflexible about terminating the pregnancy. No room for argument there. Rita could be stubborn, as he well knew, but this time he would be more stubborn. Maybe if he had taken a firm stand earlier, things would never have come to this pass... maybe. The trouble was that he could discern no single turning point; they had just drifted into it somehow. Of course, pregnancies did happen. There was really no shame in getting pregnant, for the third or the thirteenth time, the only shame was in not doing something about it. Yes, pregnancies happened, all right. They certainly happened to Rita, ever since he had known her. He had been teaching high school electronics when he met her; she was a student, though not in any of his classes, and eight years younger than he. They had been casual acquaintances until the Senior Prom for Rita's class, at which Art had happened to be one of the chaperones. At the Prom -- it had been held aboard a tube-train basically like this one, only a local, chartered to keep running in a closed loop around mid-California for a couple of days -- the graduates in keeping with tradition broke out of their own age-group sexually for the first time, and Rita had spent a good deal of the Prom in the bedroom car with Art. He had felt a little guilty later about being distracted so much from his chaperone's duties, for there was some stargazing trouble in the baggage car -- well, that sort of thing had happened before, and would again. coming back from a vacation trip, he had accidentally -- as he then thought -- run into Rita while visiting the school for a one-day seminar. Later he was to realize with a warm glow that she had made a determined effort to locate and meet him on that day. In the course of casual conversation she mentioned to Art that she was pregnant. "That's too bad," he commiserated mildly. In general he disliked hearing people talk about their ailments. "Do you suppose it happened at the Prom?" "I think it must have happened there." Rita smiled at him, and brushed back her naturally blond, almost platinum hair, for which Art had declared his admiration a number of times, and which today seemed to have been newly curled. "Maybe it's a little present from you." "I suppose it quite possibly is. The Prom was great fun, though, wasn't it? I hope your escort wasn't too put out with you for spending so much time with me." Rita dismissed the problems of her Prom escort with a wave. "Great fun!" she agreed, but in the next moment smiled a little sadly. "Now it looks like I'm leaving my good old school days all behind." Art was surprised. "Surely you're going on to junior college at least?" "I had planned to, but a pregnancy sort of changes everything. At least for me it does." "Why, won't you be over all that before the fall term starts? Are there complications?" "I'm going to have the baby. Art." About halfway through the Prom her calling him Mr. Rodney had stopped forever. "You're what? I'm sorry, it's none of my business, of course, but... "Going to bear the baby." This calm determination was a side of her he had not seen before. "But why?" His shock dampened her enthusiasm, if that was the right word for her attitude, but not her determination, "That's what my parents keep asking. It's hard for me to explain to anyone. It's as if there were already a tiny baby inside me, depending on me. Though I can't even feel it moving yet, of course." "Hormonal changes are proceeding early. I suppose," Art muttered, to be saying something. As he had already said, it was none of his business -- unless, he realized with a shattering silent flash, unless he wanted it to be. He had tried, as he thought, a lot of things in his life, but never marriage. Now it was getting to be time for marriage. And he liked this girl, liked her better each time he saw her. He said: "I suppose your parents have pointed out to you that having a child already is bound to make things harder for you when the time comes when you want to get married. Not to mention the difficulty of raising it by yourself." "I know, you're absolutely right." Her frown admitted that it was a problem. "I guess most men want to raise two kids that they think they might have fathered themselves." And she, too, was right of course. It was a rare man who was certain of being the biological father of his wife's two children. It took the trouble and expense of genetic testing to make sure, and lew were that concerned. You might as well accept the first two healthy ones that came and raise them as your own. If one of your neighbors' kids was especially strong or smart or handsome, why you might nurse a hope that you were the sire. Conversely, if your wife gave birth to a child that seemed a little inferior, even though acceptably free of defects and certified human, you might tell yourself that someone else had fathered it. The really pertinent question was, would Rita Parr make him a good wife? From observing his married friends Art knew that you always wound up spending a lot of time with a marriage partner. It was also an important step to take because getting into and out of marriages all the time added up to a lot of trouble and expense -- and you wanted the children, when they came, to have a stable home. He said: "Rita, I wish I knew you better." They started dating regularly. He got to know her parents, and her likable brother George. He considered the idea of marrying her from every angle, or tried to. On the few occasions when he saw his own parents he hinted at the prospect of coming marriage, and detected a mild glow' of approval in response, which, of course, was as much as he could expect; it had been a long time since what he did was of deep concern to them, or vice versa. He and Rita were together more or less constantly for several months. He became convinced that she wanted very much to marry him. They quarreled, and then made up. In the spring her Timmy was born and Art sent flowers to her at the hospital and a few days later came to pay her a visit at home. Rita, sitting in a rocking chair in her bedroom and feeding the baby from a nursing bottle, said to Art: "You know, I still think he's yours. I have that feeling about him, and I'm glad." Studying the small wizened face, still bruised from the violence of birth. Art could find in it no resemblance to himself. But he realized that he was hoping to find a resemblance and, giving this some solitary thought a little later, he decided it was enough to tip the balance. A month later he and Rita, now legally, financially, and socially united in the bonds of matrimony, moved into a new apartment with little Tim. Rita preferred to spend most of their free time in each other's company. After marriage Art experienced only one or two orgasms per month with anyone except his wife. And while he wasn't sure, he had the impression that Rita's sex life was even more intensely concentrated on him. He should have made a point of finding out. Such concentration of lust was one of the danger signals that the popular psychologists were always harping on, a sign that one's sexual attitudes might be somehow warped. They had been married, quite happily for the most part, for two years when Rita surprised him with the announcement that she was pregnant again. It was really a surprise because they had both been taking anti-fertility pills, which certainly should have given adequate protection. But, as Dr. Kuang explained, the pills were not one hundred per cent certain. Anyway the pregnancy was no real problem; they had caught it quite early and he could do a menstrual extraction right now in his office if they wished. Oh. no. Although Rita, too, seemed surprised and not at all as calm as she had been about her first pregnancy, she was if anything even more determined that this one should produce a baby. To her the fetus was a person inside her belly, as if someone had taken a real baby and stuffed it in there. Her new baby was alive already, and she must protect its life. As far as Art could tell she had not absorbed this dogma from any of the few religious or "humanistic" sects which still maintained it as official doctrine...She had arrived at it by herself. Naturally Art saw more of her during this pregnancy than he had during the previous one, and by now could more easily read her moods and guess her thoughts. What he saw this time began to frighten him. The first time he had thought she was simply being stubborn on the subject, acting in an immature, adolescent way. This time she seemed in the grip of some enormous force, a force bent on using her for making babies. Indeed, she refused even to discuss the possibility of getting an abortion. She even refused to take the tests that would predict whether her fetus was likely to grow into a deformed child; deformed or not, she said, it was her baby still. If Art persisted in trying to talk to her about it she quivered and suffered, seemingly outraged to the point of pain. Well, Art had always more or less expected his wife to have two children. And people said it was more convenient if your two kids were about the same age. They could play together, and you got I he diapering and the rest of the messy business over with once and lor all. Since Rita was so determined to have this one. why not? A couple of days after Paula was born Art called Dr. Kuang to talk over the best means of insuring against another pregnancy. Frowning from the phoneplate, Dr. Kuang told him that Rita's psyehological profile showed that surgical sterilization w'as definitely not indicated in her case. He would prescribe new pills for her. "And of course having a vasectomy yourself will help. And, with male partners w ho are known to be strongly virile, she should choose sex activities other than copulation." Otie trouble was that sex activities other than copulation were not much fun for her. One good thing was that she so rarely brought any man but Art to orgasm. He hastily got his vasectomy; in six months or so the residual sperm in his ductwork would presumably all have had their chance and he would be permanently and completely sterile. He had done all he could, or so he thought. Meanwhile he had switched from teaching electronics to working at it, for Macrotron; also he had begun to spend more time away from home, improving his chess rating and winning more prizes. And then one day he came home and found a note. T he suggestive dialogue of the pseudo-Victorian play nagged at Art's attention, pulling him away from the fruitless game of trying to guess how' he might better have managed his life with Rita in the past. He looked for the set of earplugs that should have been attached to his seat, intending to drown out the play with music or a soothing waterfall of gentle noise, but found to his disgust that one plug of the set w'as missing. Its connector of steel-jacketed wire had been neatly severed by some vandal, w ho seemed to have gone to the trouble of using a cutting torch. He w as not going to be able to avoid hearing the struggle of Phyllis and Rodney (the nursemaid and leftenant, respectively) against their mutual lust, a struggle in which he was sure they would eventually be victorious, but at least nothing forced him to watch the repulsive sight. Art now kept his face turned most of the time to the small window beside his luxurious chair. In the buried tunnel there was of course nothing to be seen except advertisements, the kind that were now starting to be called flickersigns. These were glowing adjurations that might be a hundred kilometers long, lettered in elongated characters designed to be intelligible only to one hurtling past them at a distance of a few centimeters and a speed of hundreds of kilometers per hour. Art was reading one such ad, without absorbing an iota of its meaning, when without warning the train was thrown into violent deceleration. It was braking at emergency rate from jet-aircraft speeds, seemingly coming to a halt. In an instant the great plastic flowers of airbags bloomed before each seat, their multiple release coming with the sound of a single explosion. A second after they had bloomed, the bags were soft and deflating once again, sagging into plastic detumescence. "Phyllis," said the tridi leftenant's voice, loud and clear in the first breathless moment of alarm among the passengers, who were only now reacting to being slammed in the face by plastic bags, "I am not an animal, to hurl myself upon you." Phyllis's reply was drowned out by a general commotion among the passengers. In Art's car about half the seats were occupied, and the people were now exchanging exclamations, questions, and comments. As Art rubbed his nose where the bag had stung him a woman seated across the aisle looked over and asked him, almost pleadingly: "It must be just something wrong with the machinery, don't you think?" Bracing his arms on the seat before him, against the continuing heavy deceleration, he tried to give her a reassuring nod. "Yes, it must be." But he recalled the missing earplug; the Transon tubes were not immune to vandals, not any more at least, and therefore probably not immune to apes, or to terrorists of one persuasion or another. Glancing at his wristwatch, he determined that at the moment the train must be somewhere under the Great Plains, only a few hundred kilometers from his destination. Now the deceleration eased markedly. A look at the blur of tunnel wall and flickersign outside the little window indicated that the train was now moving not much faster than an automobile. As the train continued to slow toward a full stop, the tridi play was interrupted. A man's voice, strong and reassuring and probably recorded, issued from the speakers on the momentarily empty stage. "Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm." The voice paused as some decision-making process, human or electronic, selected the next phrase. "A technical difficulty has arisen. To minimize your inconvenience until your trip can be safely resumed, you will shortly be conducted to the surface by company guides. When the train stops, please remain seated until the guides arrive at your car. There is no cause for alarm." Immediately a girl's tremulous voice added: "Rodney? I -- I've always wanted a -- a large family." A moment later Phyllis's image, as heavily garmented as ever, was back on stage, confronting the image of Rodney, who was standing in such a way that his uniform's flat lack of any bulging codpiece could not very well be ignored. The airbags by now were nothing but w rinkled draperies on the seats. The passengers, who had quieted to get whatever news they could from I he recorded announcement, were now babbling again and some of them were standing up. The woman across the aisle was once more addressing herself to Art but he could not hear her in the general noise. Now' she got up and apl)ioached Art. to stand hovering over him. He unthinkingly took this as a sexual invitation and began to caress her hips, bare except for a (j-string. but she gave only a perfunctory wiggle of response and he realized that her intent was to peer out of the little window beside his seat. "Is that water in the tunnel?" she asked in a loud, clear voice, looking out. Other passengers heard her words and echoed them, and alarnu began to mount. Art took a turn at the window, trying to squint down at a difficult angle along a curve of dim concrete. The tunnel was circular in cross-section, as was the. train, which filled it nearly from side to side and top to bottom. It was hard to see anything but Art thought there was at least some wetness on the concrete wall. "Yes, it was a Thug who strangled him," groaned a grayhaired senior officer in full dress uniform upon the stage, "but I am the one really responsible for my son's death." The phantoms vanished from the stage again, as behind it, with a hiss and a clack, an emergency door opened in the front of the car. In a moment a man in a blue translucent uniform had come through the door and climbed upon the stage. Looking at first no more real than Rodney or Phyllis, he wore a hard helmet of blue plastic, with a clear faceplate, and carried some kind of pistol bolstered at his belt. His stern expression eased into a professional smile as soon as a quick glance through the car assured him that all was peaceful. He stepped down briskly in front of the stage, making room for two more men, similarly dressed and armed, to mount it from behind. The man who had entered first, and who wore stripes on his sleeves like those of a military sergeant, leaned casually on one of the front seats and addressed the passengers in a loud but friendly voice. "There's nothing to worry about, folks. The company regrets the inconvenience. We'll just have to walk a few steps through the tunnel, that's all. Will you all follow me out, please, through the front of the train?" Eager as they were to get out of confinement and on their way again, the sergeant had no trouble keeping them moving past him and onto the stage and over it, while his two aides went on to the rear of the car, presumably to start evacuating people from the next car in that direction. "Nossir, there's no flood," the sergeant reassured a man who had mounted the stage ahead of Art. "It's no more than a puddle. Just some kind of equipment breakdown. Keep moving. This way out, please." A few people were burdened with enough luggage to make getting over the stage a struggle for them, and Art felt like offering a hand, but he would have had to back up or push ahead in line to do so, and he judged it better to keep the evacuation moving smoothly. So far all was going well enough, considering. He and his fellow passengers had to pass through two cars ahead of the one they had ridden in, surmounting another tridi stage in each, before an open door in the very front of the train let them descend a short, steep, folding emergency stair into the darkness of the tunnel. Maybe the sergeant had spoken too soon about there being no flood, or maybe he had simply been lying to prevent a panic. From somewhere ahead, beyond the point where the file of passengers preceding Art vanished in the gloom, there came a sound of heavy splashing, as of wading, shuffling feet. And now he could distinguish another watery noise, as of a minor waterfall. The tunnel seemed to slope downward gradually ahead of the train, so it was natural that the water, wherever it was coming from, would be deeper there. A pebble's toss ahead of Art one of the guides -- they were really Transcon's uniformed private police, of course -- was shining a pocket flash about, and someone else was doing the same thing much farther on. The only other illumination was that which shone feebly from inside the train, and from a dim red glowing line embedded in the tunnel wall and stretching crooked and broken into an indeterminate distance. Art realized that this was an elongated flickersign symbol; if he had been compelled to guess, he would have said it was a question mark. Following the vague form of the passenger ahead, he felt the water rise to slosh about his ankles. Now in the glow of the flickersign he spotted the water leak, or at least one leak. From a small crack in the concrete near the tunnel's curving top. a kitchen-faucet-sized stream came burbling down the concavity of wall. But at least swimming was not going to be necessary, for now just ahead another sergeant with another pocket flash was lighting the file of evacuees into a doorway set into the curved concrete of the tunnel wall. When Art neared the door he saw just beyond it the steep steps of a service stair ascending in a tight helix. He climbed in the wet footprints of those ahead. At a landing that Art hoped was near the top, but later proved to have been approximately halfway up, another policeman was stationed to urge them on. It was a good thing there was nobody in a wheelchair. "Step right up, folks. When you're all assembled on the surface we'll see you safely across the river, then get you on another train. Sorry for the inconvenience. This way..." A black woman past middle age, gasping from the climb, wearing gigantic false breasts and an obvious merkin of false pubic hair beneath her transparent gown, stepped out of line to argue. "River? What river is this? Why were we halted here, for sex's sake?" BallaiiMne BooIks A Division of Random House, Inc. Leigh Brackett's back and so is Eric John Stark, heading Ballantine's October science-fiction list. The Hounds of Skaith picks up Stark and his followers where we left them at the conclusion of The Ginger Star. Stark has rescued Simon Ashton from the Citadel In the North and is ready to turn South on an adventure-filled Journey In pursuit of the powerful Lords Protector. Somebody at Publishers Weekly Is as enthusiastic about this adventure series as we: "Brackett proves again that she is a peerless spinner of adventure yarns... All this might be standard stuff but for Brackett's fine pacing and really admirable imagination, particularly when it comes to setting up alien societies fully as obstinate and incomprehensible as our own." We have sublime confidence in Eric John Stark and his potential as a series hero. No doubt we ate building another series with a lead character who will became as popular, as profitable and as famous as Tarl Cabot, John Carter -- and even Tarzan. With those fabulous covers Steranko Is turning out, we can't miss!    Questor is an android, built In the labs and programmed according to the tapes left by the mysterious Dr. Voslovlk. Sound familiar? That's the conceit.Gene Roddenberry created for a television pilot, when the Hollywood big shots said, "Give us another Star Trek." Gene did. But the moneymen lost their nerve andor enthusiasm and tried to turn a superior sf series Into a run-of-the-miU chase stoiy. So no go, as a series. But we've got the book, written by D. C. Fontana who, as you oil icmember, was both stoi; editor for Star Trek and also a contributor to the series. So the people who brought you Star Trek have combined their many talents on The Qucstor Tapes, a compelling and suspense-filled science-fiction novel of an artificial man's search for his creator. Fontana has gone back to Roddenberry's original concept and added many adventures that were lost on the cutting-room floor.    Some months ago we went to a screening of a whacky and wonderful movie -- sort of Mack Sennett waiting for Godot in #... absurd! We loved It! So we got on the horn to Hollywood and tied up book rights for Dark Star. Already the rage at the Trieste cult flick of the #'s. If anything could possibly go wrong aboard the scoutship Dark Star sooner or later It would. Now In the #th year of Its mission -- track down rogue planets and destroy them -- the ship and its crew were falling apart, literally. After years in space, the four surviving crew members are bored beyond relief. Only an occasional bomb run or another of the Inevitable malfunctions aboard ship upsets the monotony. Then, Bomb ## Is primed, armed and set to detonate automatically. Suddenly life on board the ship becomes frantic. See the movie... read the book by Alan Dean Foster -- there has never been anything quite like it. Walt till you meet the pet alien that gets loose and learls Its keeper on the wildest and merriest chase. Great fun! "Every scene, every sequence, every schtick and aside was flawless. The sets are perfect, the visual effects magirificent... many years of love went Into it." That fiom the reviewer of the Los Angeles Free Press. BB "It's the Mississippi, lady," said the officer, politely gesturing her upward, then when she still delayed, taking her arm with easy firmness and propelling her along. "You're almost in Chicago. Don't be alarmed, we'll get you through in good shape." Maybe three hundred kilometers to go. Art estimated. As he climbed on, he could still hear the guide's voice from behind: "Have to keep moving, folks. No telling how high the water'll come up these stairs if the tunnel should collapse down there. Step along, please. If you should see a little light rioting on the surface, don't let it throw you. Just assemble where you're told, and we'll see you through." lighting on the stair, but still it was good to finally distinguish daylight coming from above. At its top the stair delivered its stream of refugees into a graceful low concrete structure that was open on three sides to the late summer afternoon. The structure looked as if it might serve as a picnic shelter on more peaceful days. It stood surrounded by a half-wooded, parklike area. The near bank of the wide, placid river was little more than a stone's throw away, at the bottom of a broad gentle grassy slope. The sun was lowering over the woods behind Art's back as he faced across the river toward a solid array of wooded bluffs that rose above the distant shore. In and around the shelter lay many pieces of freshly splintered wood that might very recently have formed picnic tables and benches, and nearby a trash container lay on its side, meager contents scattered. But there were no rioters in sight. Some forty or fifty passengers with Iheir luggage, apparently all who had preceded Art up from the tunnel onto the grass, were standing in loose formation close by the shelter, like some motley levee of inducted troops about to begin their training. A single uniformed policeman stood casually before them, giving them something to look at, at least. Three more police, one wearing inconspicuously on his collar what Art supposed was an officer's insignia, were standing inside the shelter. One of these carried a radio buzzing with distant messages. With the three police was a shivering middle-aged man wearing a translucent coverall and thick, tough-looking clear boots with mud dried on them. For a moment Art thought that this man too was armed, but then he saw that the bolstered object at his waist was an electronic calculator. Following the gaze of these men. Art saw' that the park was becoming not so peaceful after all. Down near the water people were emerging at a run from the concealment of some trees. The people were mostly men, running like clowns in twos and threes and half-dozens, whooping and waving. There were twenty or twenty-five of them altogether, and they might have been playing a game, or just scampering in high good spirits. One was waving a festoon of what appeared to be cables or plastic tubing. The man with the calculator at his belt was talking rapidly to the police; with a little sideward glance he included Art in his audience, and went right on. "So we had our boat close in toward the west bank here, taking sediment samples, and just as I turned to say something to Carl, why pow, this rock went by my head and missed me by about a centimeter. And then I heard this mob up on the bank start yelling. Sex, once you hear a yell like that you know what it is, it means a bunch of people have all gone ape. Carl had his helmet off, see, but he still had his diving suit on, and it must have looked almost opaque and they must have thought we were from the monastery. I gunned the boat to get out from the shore, and then we must have hit something, a log or a piece of junk. When I came up for air that mob was heaving more rocks, there were splashes all around me. I ducked under and swam and waded, and came downstream about half a kilometer and climbed out here when I saw' the uniforms. Never saw what happened to Carl. I hope he managed to grab his helmet and tanks before he went under." The capering people near the riverbank had disappeared into the trees again. "Looks like they've got her burning, finally," one of the police said, squinting to the north, where the bank of the river on which they were standing mounted higher in tree-clothed bluffs. Rooted somewhere among the trees atop the bluffs, an ominously burgeoning growth of black smoke towered like the djinn of riot above the countryside. "Must have been an old building," another policeman remarked. "Did someone say it was a monastery?" Art put in, shocked at the indication of bigotry without being surprised by it. "Yes," the river engineer (or whatever the man with his calculator was) answered. "Oh, not Church of Eros. One of the old Christian ones." "That's hardly an excuse." Art watched the plume of smoke grow fatter. All this time a continuing trickle of passengers were continuing to emerge from the stairhead and straggle into place in their loose formation on the green. "Well, I live around here," one of the police commented. "Not right for people to take the law into their own hands, but what can you expect? The rumor has been going around that the monkeymonks up there have been carrying on some kind of experiments with abortion specimens. Not just the kind where the scientists gain knowledge from them, but creating some kind of monsters. Chastity, I don't believe all I hear, but how do you expect people to take it when they're so mysterious?" No one said anything for a little while. A poor attitude for even a private policeman to take, thought Art, practically condoning rioting and vandalism. But it would be futile to argue. Shortly the engineer remarked: "Here come a couple more refugees." Hiking across the inviting park, from the direction opposite the smoke, came a couple who had evidently been picnicking, for he carried a red plastic picnic cooler and she a small outdoors pack and a folded translucent blanket. The man was tall, lean, thirtyish, and freshly sunburnt. The girl was a full-bodied brunette of eighteen or twenty. As they drew ndar. Art saw that what he had at first taken for sunglasses on her face were really artificial eyes of what must be an. advanced design. They might have been opaquely dark sunglasses except that the thickness of their bulky frames was molded in flush to the skin, all around her eyes. She was neatly and modestly dressed in a sports bikni of the latest style, her translucent bra extended in twin peaks by finger-long cones of pinkish nipple-colored plastic. As the couple approached the shelter, the man spoke to the police in a husky, somewhat hurried voice. "Officers, we're very glad to see you. I hope you can provide us with some kind of escort back across the river, or get us on the train to Chicago if possible. Our boat was destroyed, you see."' The girl said nothing, looked around nervously, and stayed close to her companion. She looked at Art, but he had trouble reading her expression; the artificial eyes functioned like a mask. Faint cat' s-eye gleams shone in their dark lenses, and the plastic frames were studded with artificial jewels. Or could those stones possibly be genuine? "Sure, you can come along," the officer with the collar insignia said. "Got your boat too, hey?" He changed his position and stretched as the last rescued passenger, sitting in a wheelchair (so there had been one, after all) was heaved into view at the stairhead by a team of puffing police. "I guess we're all here now. Let's start getting these people over the water." T he two saved picnickers walked beside Art to join the other evacuees. As the whole group with its escort of police began to move, the girl let out a sudden, choked little cry, and Art saw her actually begin to tremble. Following the direction of her gaze, he beheld a new eruption of rioters boiling out of the woods and cutting across the passengers' path, evidently with the intention of intercepting them before they could reach the river. Art now also saw in midstream a large launch that had evidently just been called from across the river and was now heading in to the near bank where a small dock waited at the end of the passengers' present line of march. The march continued. The officer barked an order or two, and his blue-uniformed men, now about a dozen strong, closed in beside the much more numerous troop of people they were convoying, their screen forming most tightly at the point where the threat was greatest. There were perhaps thirty people in the mob approaching. Half a dozen or so were women, and these were screaming loudly, urging on the men. Most of the men wore the gaudily colored and oversized codpieces favored these days among the youth of the Basic Income class. One who was so garbed, a large, florid young man with close-set eyes, went right up to the police line and peered over uniformed shoulders at the shrinking sheep behind as if about to choose one for slaughter. "Any triplet priests in there?" the florid one demanded. "Any sublimatin' vivesectionists? We got one already, but there's some more experiments we'd like to try." He seemed on the point of trying to push his way through the protective line, and one of the bigger police shoved him roughly back. When he demonstrated anger at this treatment he found himself looking at a drawn handgun. "We're just passing through, bigmouth," the policeman told him. "Now you just pull your jaw out of our way and let us pass." There were no firearms visible among the rioters, and indeed Art could not see that they carried weapons of any kind. The sight of the gun knocked them back almost like a physical force. Moving like the cells of some multiple organism. keeping together as if under the control of a single mind, they fell into retreat. One we got already. The words echoed in Art's mind. But maybe they were only brag and bluff. The passengers with their convoy of police moved on unmolested toward the dock, which was now only about a hundred meters off. The immediate threat was apparently over but the girl with artificial eyes, walking beside Art, continued to breathe as if on the verge of hysteria. Her escort held her by the arm and kept speaking to her in a low voice, but his efforts to calm her had little effect. The police, evidently to keep a prudent distance from a patch of dense woods into which the rioters had retreated, had bent the convoy's line of march almost parallel to the river. Now in those infested woods another outbreak of shouting rose up, blended with the noises of running feet trampling the undergrowth. The girl moaned and moved away from the noise, leaning against Art like a frightened child. He put an arm around her full body and squeezed it in a polite caress. "My name's Art, by the way. What's yours?" He would scarcely have been surprised to receive no answer, but one came. "Rosamond. Rosamond Jamison. Oh!" Now from the woods came a man's voice shouting, but words indistinguishable but pain, fear, and despair all blended in. The man who was walking on the other side of Rosamond Jamison froze in his tracks, so quickly that those walking behind him had trouble avoiding a collision. "That was Steve," he said to himself in a low voice that Art nonetheless overheard distinctly. In another moment Rosamond's escort had caught up with the police lieutenantand was grabbing at his shoulder. "Did you hear that? A man's in trouble over there. Aren't you going to do something?" The voice shouted again, this time in terrible wordless agony. The lieutenant, who had started to say one thing, began again with something else. "I've got my own job to do, getting these people safely on their way. That could be some kind of a trick, just to get us into the woods." "No it isn't. Didn't you hear that scream just now? You think that could have been a trick?" The lieutenant, inflexible, shook his head. 'Tve got my orders, my job. That's it." "You can't just go on." The lieutenant turned away. The tall, sunburnt man, anxiety unabated, hurried back to Rosamond. "Here." To her he gave the weighty-looking picnic cooler. She (ook it automatically and carried it with some difficulty as she continued moving forward with the refugee eolumn. The man said to Art: "Try and look out for her, will you? See that she gets on a train to Chicago?" "Of course, I'll try to help. But what are you -- ?" Muttering some last, unintelligible phrase over his shoulder, the man was gone. Moving with unexpected strength and speed, he had pushed his way through the police escort on the inland side and was running toward the woods before anyone but Art became aware of his intention. "Halt!" the lieutenant bellowed, when he did catch on. "Come back here! Don't be a sublimatin' fool!" The fleeing man did not pause or turn. In another moment he was out of sight in the woods. Rosamond, struggling forward with her picnic cooler, looked after her companion only briefly and then faced forward again, concentrating her efforts on keeping up with the convoy's rapid pace. She was having a hard time doing so now. In the rear of the column shifts of volunteers # I Donald A. Wolheim, Publisher ! ; ; Andre Norton: the big news for I ; ; ' October, first time in paperback, ; ; I I a marvelous Norton novel of  ; ! ; parallel Earths with a gorgeous ' I ;; cover by Jack Gaughan, Andre's l! ;; favorite artist. 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The boat, which was moored at the dock by the time they got there, proved to be some sort of sight-seeing craft, evidently commandeered for this occasion. With all the refugees aboard, it was quite crowded, and some had to sit or squat on the deck between rows of seats. Most of the police remained behind on shore, and as the boat pulled away from the dock Art saw them beginning to march in loose formation back up the slope toward the emergency exit from the tube. Other trains would be arriving behind his. Art realized. the woods looked wilder and less park-like than those of Iowa just left behind. When the boat scraped bottom on the eastern side, the police pilot made an announcement, straining to be cheerful. "Folks, will you all wait right here in this area, please? We have to take the boat back across the river and pick up some people from another eastbound train. Then we'll get you all on your way to Chicago very shortly. Get off the boat promptly please, step right into the water there. It's not deep." There was no dock here on the eastern shore and one policeman was in the water himself, handing passengers off into the knee-deep Mississippi. Plenty of volunteers rallied around the wheelchair again, with grins and jokes. People were sometimes marvelous. A few steps had to be taken on the oozy river bottom to reach the muddy shore. Once on solid ground most of the passengers gravitated inland, as if hoping, in spite of what the guides had said, that there might be another tube terminal right at hand. Thirty or forty meters inland a narrow unpaved road roughly paralleled the river, but traffic seemed nonexistent. Beyond the road and behind a wire fence, the tree-covered bluffs rose up unpromisingly. The passengers who had probed the farthest soon came back with unhopeful reports. There was apparently no place to go and nothing to do but wait as they had been told. No one knew where the point of access to the eastbound tunnel might be. Art and Rosamond, having the cooler to carry and both of them lacking any desire for an aimless hike, remained somewhat behind most of the other passengers as the latter drifted up to hang around the road. The two of them sat down upon a grassy bank where the sun, now lowering close over Iowa, still shone brightly. Rosamond was quiet, and seemed less fearful now. though she was still looking intently back over the river. "He'll probably come over in the next boatload," Art offered, trying to be comforting. "He's probably all right and they'll be able to pick him up and bring him along." She turned to him and reached across the cooler to tickle the palm of his hand, and smiled at him beneath her enigmatic eyes. "I think I would enjoy some sex right about now." "Of course." They spent an enjoyable ten minutes at it, with Art's paper shirt spread over the rough grass beneath their bodies. Afterward as they lay together relaxing Rosamond began to shiver; the sun was so low that it had lost its heat, and a cool breeze had come up. In a little while she sat up and pulled her discarded bikni on again but of course it was too small to provide any real warmth. Art picked up the paper shirt, now notably wrinkled and soiled, and held it out. "Afraid this is the best I can offer you. There doesn't seem to be a clothing vendor anywhere around." "You'll be cold, won't you?" "I'm a little fat." He stood up and adjusted his codpiece and transparent trousers. "I guess that helps to keep one warm." Rosamond pulled on the shirt, and then sat down in the grass again with her legs crossed, feet and all tucked completely in under the garment so that it fell around her like a small tent. The shadow of a bush fell over her now and in the dulled light the shirt was practically opaque, and she was concealed and shapeless from the neck down. Now it was Art's turn to shiver slightly, and his shivering was not caused entirely by the cold. Unwholesome thoughts had come unbidden to his mind. He controlled himself, however and, like a gentleman, looked away. Just as he thought he had the temptation to repression really squelched it popped up again with a new ploy. The poor girl was still shivering, wasn't she? He should do what he could to help, right? "Want my trousers?" he asked. It was incidental, he told himself, it was not important in this emergency, that removing the trousers would mean taking off the codpiece too and this would mean stripping his detumescent body of his proper sexual emphasis. She appeared not to find anything wrong or suggestive of sublimation in his offer, but declined it all the same. "No, this is fine, thank you. You've been a wonderful help. I hope I can repay you some day." He slew a mosquito on his bare shoulder. The river before them was beginning to reproduce a sunset. Around them on the riverbank a number of the other stranded passengers had also paired off and were embracing or resting between embraces. The presence of these others made real impropriety unthinkable and helped Art put temptations from his mind. There were more boats in the river now, police or other official craft of some kind, and their searchlights were beginning to play over the far bank. Groups of people were still moving around over there. They had improvised banners to carry, and rhythmic chants to sing. From where Art sat on the eastern bank the words of neither song nor sign could be distinguished, but the powerful tones of the chanting carried across the water. Ill Chicago terminal, Rosamond leaned across the seat arm and snuggled once more against Art's shoulder, while one of her hands, like some small animal seeking shelter, strayed inside his tattered shirt. "Art, are you sure you can't take the time to meet Daddy tonight? I know he's going to want to thank you for helping me." "I wish I could, but I'm really anxious to catch up with my family." Of course he hadn't told her why he was trying to catch up with them. He glanced at his watch; it was nearly midnight. "Some other time." "You be sure and call us while you're in Chicago. I mean it." She dug out a pencil and a piece of paper from the pouch attached to the seatback in front of her, and scribbed a number, using the top of the picnic cooler as a desk. When he touched the plastic top, in reaching to pick up the paper, it felt at least as cold as ice. Like her eyeframes, the cooler was perhaps more expensive than it had seemed at first sight; whatever picnic remnants were inside were probably frozen solid. As he emerged from the tube car into a vast cheerful cave of ceramic tile and warm light. Art looked around to wave goodbye to Rose, and caught only a glimpse of her in the crowd, being met and welcomed by a couple of men. Strange girl. But he forgot about her quickly in heading for a huge electronic display describing the city's public transportation system. It was late enough for the traffic to be light, and the taxi he had chosen as the probable fastest means of transport made good speed through the well-illuminated streets. Still Art shifted restlessly in his seat, and pulled at his beard impatiently. He had the feeling that minutes counted, that even now Rita might be taking some irretraceable step toward an illegal parturition. The feeling was no doubt irrational; any actual birth would have to be months away, of course. But there was some kind of federal law against even conspiring to commit an illegal parturition. Midwifery, as the news media usually called it. Art didn't know exactly how far one could go without running afoul of the law. He didn't know exactly what the law said. It was one of those things he hadn't wanted to learn about, probably because all along he had been subconsciously afraid that someday it would menace him and Rita. How could she do such a thing, get them into this kind of trouble? In her note she had said that she still loved him. She had used the word twice. But now he was being rhetorical with himself; he knew his wife, and she was perfectly capable of doing this thing, loving him or not. While waiting for a traffic signal to change the cab driver turned in his seat and glanced back at Art through the bullet-proof partition, fhrough the intercom speaker the driver's voice asked: "Someone meeting you?" "Yes." Art stretched the truth. "At the block entrance. It's a block of townhouses." The cabbie faced forward again without answering. Art had just killed his hopes of collecting an easy bodyguard fee, in what the cabbie must know was a good neighborhood. They were moving again. Now the building walls that had lined both sides of the street fell back. The cab was entering a section of the city that had a look of newness, of having recently been rebuilt. Discover Man's most advanced technology of the mind -- Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand your awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. This best seller reveals the parts of the mind and the source of human irrationality. Grasp this opportunity to reap the benefits of the simple, powerful techniques in copies have been sold! Order your copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health today! Just Get it. Read it and Try it! Send # to The Church of Scientology of California. Publications Organization U.S., Dept. G-#. # West Temple St., Los Angeles, Calif. #. No charge for postage and handling. All orders will be shipped within # hours of receipt. Dianetics is the registered trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect of his pub(Greek) "mind.' Copyright  # by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved. The Church of Scientology of California -- a non-profit organization. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. Scientology and Dianetics are registered names. Under new streetlamps that closely simulated daylight, tall elms warmed their fine June leaves. On each side of the wide, gently curving boulevard were new-looking stone walls, smooth enough to be unscaleable but still with enough irregularities in their texture and color and shape to give them almost the look of natural formations. The walls were windowless, two or three stories high, and Art knew that they enclosed townhouse blocks, about the size of the old city blocks they had replaced. The pedestrian entrances, never more than one on a side, were narrow-mouthed and well-lighted; inside each entrance. Art supposed, there would be a security guard in a protected booth. Vehicle ramps curved down from the street to enter a subterranean level of each block. The cab stopped in front of one such entrance, and Art put money into the slot in the partition, got back his change, and disembarked. He walked right into the bright rocky tunnel of the entry, through block walls that looked as thick as those of some ancient castle -- or cave, perhaps, where the first men had sheltered from the terrors of the night they could not understand. He came quickly to a place where the bright-lit narrow passage was blocked by a gate of steel grillwork, heavily functional despite its ornamentation of nymphs and cupids. In a booth built into the wall beside the gate sat a gray-uniformed man who looked out at Art through a small window of bulletproof glass. Through the window Art could see that this guard had before him rows of buttons, and closedcircuit TV monitors, and a pistol within easy reach. The guard was eyeing Art with alert suspicion, no doubt sharpened by the lateness of the hour. "I want to visit George Parr," Art said. "Tell him Art Rodney is out here." He checked the time on his w atch and began to wait. Less than three minutes passed before George came into view beyond the iron gate, which slid open at his arrival. He was smiling and holding out his big-knuckled hand. Aside from the callus pads over the base knuckles of forefinger and middle finger, there was nothing peculiar in the feel of George's hand, lethal weapon though it was supposed to be. And George was rather short. Sturdy, but not bulging or rippling with muscle inside his transparent shirt. His pale hair, almost the color of Rita's, was crcw-cut to the same length as his neat goatee. "How's it going. Art?" George didn't look upset about anything, but then Art could not recall that he ever had. "Well, I'm upset, naturally. I want to talk to Rita right away." "She's been here, but now she's gone again." "What?" "That's right. Come in." With gentle pressure on an arm George steered him through the gate...Speaking to the microphone below the guard's window, George added: "My brother-in-law. He's going to be staying with us for a day or so." Art let himself be steered inside, though he wasn't at all sure about the duration of his stay. "Where is she now?" he asked impatiently. "Couldn't y'OM have talked to her?" George simply continued to smile in his likable way. "Come on in and have a look at our new home. We can talk the whole situation over. It's not something that can be settled in a couple of words. Ann's fixing up a bed for you." doning whatever hope he had left of somehow catching up with Rita tonight. Let Ann fix the would neveroffer to share it with him, which was fine with Art. He would make polite gestures of lust at her. whether or not she had the good manners to reciprocate, but in (iTith she aroused him not at all. Another few meters of tunnel and they had reached the interior of the block. It looked just about as Art had expected, but still he was impressed. Most of the interior was a single open space, wide and pleasant, green now with summer grass and trees and shrubs. This central park was mostly in darkness now, but was surrounded by the lighted windows and patios of the block's thirty or so townhouses, which were all backed against the block's encircling outer wall and were probably integral with it. Shaded lights on knee-high poles gently illuminated curved paths of flagstone paving that branched off into the balmy night in several directions. Crickets sang of summer and tranquility. In spite of his worries Art found himself pausing, soothed by the peaceful scene. He said: "It looks like you have things nice in here." George pounced gratefully on this retreat to banality. "I tell you, it makes me feel a lot easier about the kids. There's even talk about getting our own elementary school started right here in the block." He gestured the direction for Art to take and they walked on. Somewhere nearby, people playing string instruments were rehearsing a melody, starting and stopping and trying again. Somewhere else a wild party was in progress, but its uproar came heavily muted from some deep interior place, and to the musicians inside their own house it must be entirely inaudible. "Yes, very nice," said Art, following where George led. "We have our own emergency power generator, too," said George. "In case vandals knock out the city power or there's a breakdown. That's happened a couple of times in the last year." "Good idea." Art's sandals scraped on the slight unevenness of the flagstones as they walked a pleasant curve between the houses' vineand bush-screened patios and the openness of the central park. Each house was surprisingly private behind its trellises or open-work wall or vines. Art wondered if Rita might be sheltering at this moment in one of these discreet dwellings, hidden by friendly conspiratorial neighbors until Ann could throw the persecuting husband off the track with some halfway plausible story. "Yes, this is a beautiful place." "Costs an arm and a leg and a testicle too," said George, his voice now turning grim. "I don't think there's a man in the block who doesn't have a job -- I mean a good job -- or his own business. In fact I'm repressin' sure there isn't." Talking man-to-man, George would sometimes use strong language. In front of ladies. Art had noticed, he never did. "How are things at the dojo?" Art asked. Then he turned his head at the unexpected sound of a splash, followed by a trill of feminine laughter. Way out in the middle of the common park the lights of a swimming pool glowed in the soft, safe darkness, and he saw the wet tan gleam of a bikinied body. What were possibly the lights of another pool were almost completely blocked off by intervening shrubbery. "Oh, good enough, I guess," said George. "Here's our happy home." He walked behind a vinecovered trellis to a patio. Ann, as if she might have heard them coming, was peering out with a hospitable smile from her doorway of white stone and Spanish-looking ironwork. Stalking across the Parrs' hedged-in patio on thin metal legs, a kneehigh electric bugkiller lured flying creatures to itself with a nervously flickering eye of yellow light and a whisper of attractive noises. It broke its whispering with zapping hiccoughs as some of its larger victims were ingested. As Art had expected, Ann's dress was radical. Her skirt fell almost to her knees, and her blouse almost completely covered her breasts and left only a narrow strip of midriff bare. Both garments were loosefitting and practically opaque. Also as he had expected, Ann's chin was lifted high in challenge despite her smile; she would be glad to have him stay in her house for a day or so and argue; maybe she would be able to convert him. Her face was reasonably pretty, and her hair a curly brown. She was small and strong, like George, and her strength was even more subtle than his. "Rita thought you might come after her. Art," she greeted him. "You didn't bring a bag? That's all right, there's a clothing vendor right here in the block. Of course you're staying with us, we have a spare room now. My brother was here for a couple of days, but he moved out when Rita showed up." Ann shrugged away her sibling's behavior. "Fred's here in Chicago too?" "Yes. The day he finished high school he just had to apply for Basic Income, like a fool. Couldn't see going to college, or even trying to go. He wants George to give him a job, or so he says. Come and see your children, they're asleep." ings were rather sparse and disorderly, indicating that the Parrs were not yet done with the job. Evidently they had barely had time to unpack in their new house before a series of their crazy relatives began to arrive from California. Following Ann to some ascending stairs. Art noted an electric fireplace in the living room, where the floor looked like real hardwood. He could well believe that only the prosperous lived in this block. After gesturing for silence in a second-floor hallway, Ann slid open a door. Art went in to find Timmy and Paula curled in their usual positions in the strange bed, child-bodies clothed in opaque pajamas like unopened flower buds all sheathed in leaves. Across the room in another bed were two small mounds that would be George Jr. and his younger brother Enoch. On the wall Art noticed a version of what he recognized as a traditional Christfan statuette, depicting the putative founder of the sect fastened to a wooden cross. The figure was quite large for the little room, and crudely but strongly carved in some pale wood. He wondered if Fred might have done it. "Don't wake them," Ann whispered, as Art bent over his own two children. "They're worn out from traveling." Art, who had not intended to touch them and risk an awakening, now gave each a kiss. They were not as deeply asleep as he had thought, for Paula reached up to tangle baby fingers in his beard. Then, as if reassured, she slept again. Tim, almost three years older, murmured: "Daddy." "Go to sleep," Daddy whispered. And Tim did so, for once. Art walked downstairs again with Ann. "So," he commented, "Rita's gone into hiding somewhere. How long does she expect the children to stay here?" "Art, you know we don't mind having them in the least. Husband George, where are you?" "That wasn't what I asked." "Black Russian?" asked George from below, appearing in the doorway of what was evidently the recreation room, holding a couple of plastic bottles in his hands. "Thanks, I will," Art answered. Inside the rec room was a bar, and a second fireplace, with a tag markfrom one andiron. Art sank down with a sigh upon a leather-like couch, and received from George, a glass with ice cubes floating in a dark and powerful fluid. Ann had vanished, apparently to the kitchen, for there drifted in sounds suggesting the preparation of food. From out there somewhere she called: "How do you like our medieval fortress? I'm very happy with it. The kids have a safe place now." "It's very nice," Art called back, downing his first swallow of Black Russian. "I think I saw two swimming pools, didn't #?" In a chair opposite the sofa George sat, or squatted, pulling up his sandalled feet and folding his legs in an effortless contortion. "The pool in the bushes is more Ann's than anybody else's. She's always wanted a nude pool available, and when the blockhouse corporation was being formed she kept standing up in meetings and demanding." "Well, why shouldn't I?" Ann, smiling, was in the doorway, already pushing a serving cart laden with sandwiches and cups of soup. Had she been expecting Art? "You know me. Art." He thought he did. While moving clutter from a small table to make room for some food. Art got a good look at the covers of some of Ann's radical magazines. The cover photos featured startlingly shrouded bodies, and bold print promised that the articles inside were of shocking frankness, detailing what every adult ought to know about the history of celibacy and the ancient, once-honorable techniques of self-control. Art took these to be the kind of magazines that promised more in the way of obscenity than they usually delivered. He would have expected a more sophisticated obscenity than this on Ann's coffee table. He thought that she was watching for his reaction to the magazines, and he tried to show none at all. Maybe they were just left there as argument pieces. Art didn't much like the idea of his children staying here, but where else was he going to put them while he searched for Rita? And they were too young, he supposed, to be much affected by Ann's morals -- or lack thereof. He liked to think of himself as fairly liberal, but this woman just had a dirty mind. It was as simple as that. He could imagine being marooned in a long orbit with her, and her wearing long opaque coveralls continuously, and refusing sex through all the months and years. He had thought he was conjuring up that image as a private expression of his scorn, but somewhere in its ugly heart a kernel of attraction lay, which made Art angry when he realized it. Repulsive woman! He could feel sorry for George, who was a gentleman, except that George must have known what kind of woman he was marrying and George still seemed very well satisfied. George in his own quiet way was evidently pretty far out himself. "You know, old girl," said George, the squatting guru, "your ways are actually more old-fashioned than your opponents' are. You go back to the twentieth century. Or was it the nineteenth when everybody pretended to be chaste?" Ann took a seat on the sofa next to Art and gave him a look intended to show comic exasperation with her husband. "I'm hungry, let's eat," she said. "Oh, George, you know it's not what's new or what's old-fashioned. I know things go in cycles. It's not whether people wear suits when they swim or don't wear them, it's why they wear them or go without." "Ann." Art set down his glass, which had somehow become empty. "Ann, where is Rita? Where did you send her?" "Art, listen to me. I'm not going to tell you where she is, because I don't know." "Don't know? Come on. When is she coming back to get the children? As soon as I leave?" Ann, with maddening assurance, ignored the question. "Art, I suppose you realize that she's expecting the people at Family Planning to make trouble for her." "Of course I know she's in Family Planning trouble. Why do you imagine I'm here?" If he hadn't had the drink he would be shouting at Ann by now. "She left me a note, I know she's pregnant. I even had a call from the FP before I left California." He repeated as well as he could the few words of Ms. Lazenby's message. dignation, as if the FP agents had broken down Art's door. "Well, if and when our third one comes along -- I take my pills and pray it never does, but if and when -- I'm going to do just what Rita's doing. No court or no doctor is going to murder one of mine, I don't care what the laws say." "You have that right," affirmed George in a low voice. She flashed her eyes over at her husband, glad of support though not needing it, and plunged on. "And no one's going to make me call it unwanted, either, not once I know that it's alive!" Drink or not. Art's nerves were worn and his voice got louder. "Most people would say that you yourself have rather a murderous attitude toward the wanted people of the world . The ones who are alive right now, including the babies. You're talking about adding to the crowding. Remember Calcutta. Remember Rio. Where will this year's cannibalism be?" George had begun on a cup of soup with apparent good appetite. Now he reached in between the disputants for some crackers. "Peace, brethren, peace, sistern," he said. smiling genuinely. "Art, how was your trip?" "Oh, exciting." Art sat back. and took an interest in his own soup. Arguing general principles with Ann was certain to wear him out and get him nowhere. Let the atmosphere cool off for a minute and then he would return to the subject of his wife. He began to tell the Parrs of his adventures. The attack on the Christian monastery was naturally a shock to Ann, and he let her see the real sympathy he felt for any victims of persecution. "I suppose we passengers should have stopped and demanded that the police do something for that man who was screaming in the woods -- but they were only Transcon's private police, and I suppose they had their orders, as they said." Ann looked at him wanly, mystified. "But why was the monastery being attacked?" "One of the people there said something about the monks' performing experiments on some aborted fetuses. Some absurd, muddled story about creating monsters. Of course a lot of scientists work with fetuses." Ann for some reason seemed shocked, perhaps even frightened; she was sitting quite still and listening intently. Art went on: "It does strike me as rather inconsistent for these monks, who are presumably as opposed to abortion as you are, to use fetuses that are still biologically active in their experiments, whatever research they're really doing. Of course that's no excuse for violence, for mob action." Ann and George exchanged a look. Then she brought her attention back to Art. "Who was this girl you said you helped?" "Oh, her name was Rose something or other, lived in Chicago. She was really frightened, for which I don't blame her." Ann was upset. "There doesn't seem to be any safety for anyone any more. I'm glad we've got this place. Art. you and Rita should think about getting into a townhouse like this. I don't think California is any safer to live in "I'm sure we have a lot of problems out there, too. I'll talk over our housing situation with Rita after I've found her again. Now tell me where she is." His voice was not threatening but it was grim and determined enough to shake Ann back into her anger mode again. Her eyes brightened and her chin lifted. But before she could speak George put out a peremptory hand and got to his feet with a neat quick untangling of his legs. "Ann," was all he said, but to Art's surprise, she closed her mouth. George set down the empty soup cup that he had been turning round and round in his fingers for some time. "Art, I'm satisfied that Rita's in good hands." "Then you know where she is. If you know, you're going to tell me." "Let me finish. Let's say that I know my sister. I believe she knows what she's doing. Isn't that enough?" "Not for me." Art was inflexible. "You knew she was trying to do something wrong, and dangerous, and maybe you could have stopped her but you didn't try." There was a pause that seemed long. Ann, evidently still considering herself commanded to silence, was biting her tongue. Her husband still held the floor, dominating the room without effort, unconsciously rubbing his enlarged knuckles. "I know it's dangerous," George said unhappily. "She could go to jail for what she's doing. But she wants to do it. She made a free decision." "What about me?" Art demanded. "Don't I have any say about how many children I have?" Ann's headshake snapped a deabortion -- ?" But it was no use. Lven if it had been desirable to argue with Ann, he could have found no words. Ann's reality was so far from the commonly accepted view that there seemed to be no place to start. At least Art could not find the place, not after midnight, not after a day of wife-chasing and strain and rioting and Black Russians. Somewhere along the line George had refilled his glass and by now it was half empty again. "I wish we could forget about our differences," Art went on, lowering his voice. "Rita's welfare is the only thing I'm worried about right now. All else is secondary." "We know that," said Ann with impulsive honest sympathy. "Eventually I'll find her," Art insisted. "You know I'm going to bring her home. You think I'll just let her drop out of my life for six or seven months? And what about the children, are they going to stay here for that length of time? Timmy should be starting kindergarten... it's an insane scheme and I won't allow it. In any case Family Planning will put a stop to it if I don't. Don't you suppose they can quickly track her down? Isn't there a law against conspiracy to commit parturition, that they could prosecute her under already?" "Not without more evidence than her dropping out of sight for a few days," Ann said quickly. "Not without a lot more evidence than that." "For a few days? I don't understand. What does she hope to accomplish by doing that?" Ann fell silent again. George waved a hand and seemed about to speak, but then only sat down again and stared into his new fireplace. "Will somebody tell me, please?" "You see," Ann began slowly, "once nine months have passed since conception, no doctor is allowed to put the baby to death for any reason, without the direct petition of the mother or other surviving next of kin. The Supreme Court was very clear on that several decades ago, and the decision still stands. And what does a conspiracy indictment matter to a mother who can save her baby's life?" Baby? Oh, of course, she was talking about the fetus. Art was no longer sure that anything being said made sense. It was well after midnight, and they must all be tired. He was, certainly. Eros, but Rita too must be tired this midnight, wherever she might be. Ann said: "Art, your room is ready. Whenever you want to go up." "In the morning, then," Art told her. "But never doubt that I'm going to find her and take her home." IV F red Lohmann woke up with someone's smooth arm thrown across his bare chest and someone's delicate breath snoring gently in his left ear. Where was he? Oh yes, the he had checked out of the Parrs' plush new house, more or less urged on by his sister Ann, and anyway not anxious to get himself involved in whatever had brought Rita Rodney in weeping from California. Rita had looked pregnant. far enough along to show a little. Say, didn't the Rodneys have two kids already? Anyway, all that was none of Fred's affair. He had big problems of his own, and important events were scheduled for today. First of all, this morning Fred as a newly independent and adult citizen was going to collect his first Basic Income check from Uncle Sam, the check covering the month that had passed since his graduation from high school in California. And that first BI check might well be his last; he sublimatin' well hoped it would be anyway, for this afternoon he was going to have a real workout with George and if things went well at the dojo he might be a jobholder by tomorrow. And that would prove a lot of people wrong. Now, what about this sleeping arm that weighed so gently on his breathing? In a moment he remembered, her name was Marjorie. She too was a newcomer to Chicago, looking for a job, and last night the desk clerk at the Y had assigned her and Fred to sleep together. The atmosphere at the Young Persons' Play Club was certainly different from what it was at the Parrs'. Ann and George might get a chuckle out of it when he told them. Behind the front desk in the lobby was a big sign on the wall reading pure ing to be funny, either, they were really that old-fashioned here. They had a strict house rule requiring at least two people in every bed. Marjorie, though she herself was by all indications a conservative, wellbrought-up, lascivious girl, had agreed with Fred last night that the sign was funny, and they had shared a little laugh about it. She was a good sex partner, too, so things had worked out all right. He might have been paired with someone a lot less congenial. Fred disentangled himself from Marjorie's naked body and got out of bed without awakening her. The bed folded down on both sides of the wall that separated his tiny loom from hers. Ingenious, Fred thought. When the bed was raised it completed the wall and the rooms were separated, allowing either party to have privacy for business or social reasons, A hole was created through the wall, connecting the rooms, whenever the bed was lowered for use. Last night Fred had discovered that the bed mechanism made it impossible to raise or lower either side independently; if you wanted to lie down, you had better be ready for sex, or at least a polite attempt at sex, with your appointed partner. ( Jeorge was going to have a good laugh when Fred told him. Except George seemed to have a lot on his mind just lately. After a quick visit to the alcove that held his toilet and shower, Fred came back to the center of his small room, studied his tall. muscular body in the wall mirror, and did a few light exercises, just loosening and testing a little, making sure the knee and elbow joints moved freely and with plenty of snap. He tensed his corrugated belly muscles and snapped his rocklike fist at his solar plexus, leaving a small red mark. He told himself he looked older than eighteen; the beard was coming along okay. But he hadn't really worked out in more than a week, and though he tried not to admit it to himself he was scared by the thought of this afternoon's pending test with George. Would George take his word for it that he really had a brown belt ranking, or might George call California to check, and catch him in a lie? The idea was to do really well in the workout, show George some real good moves, and he wouldn't bother to check up. He would hand Fred a brown belt to wear and put him to work instructing novices. Meanwhile he would work out all he could, and in a few months start to think about moving up to black... Marjorie stirred in her sleep and seemed on the point of waking up, and Fred hastened to get his codpiece and shorts from the chair and put them on. She seemed like a nice girl, and so Fred was treating her with respect; he wouldn't want to display to her his unmannerly shriveled lack of arousal on this nervous morning... all the same, though, you never knew. Some guys who had been around said that the nice girls like this one could really be the coldest chillers once they let themselves go. Looking down now at Marjorie's still-sleeping form, Fred could easily imagine it covered, blurred into sexlessness. Her figure was almost boyish in repose, without the padded bra that she had thrown off last night, and it was years since he had felt any lust for boys. He could picture her eyes opening, their clear and penetrating gaze (so he imagined; last night he had not noticed) pushing lust aside, piercing through his hard male body, seeking to touch him... F red gave himself a mental kick and looked away. Not that he felt guilty. Twins, every normal guy had thoughts about chastity and sublimation, and enjoyed them, too. It was just that today Fred didn't want to get himself into a difficult emotional state. Still it was impossible not to notice how childlike Marjorie looked in her sleep. In his imagination he found himself putting a long, snowy, opaque gown around her... he kicked himself again, and went on getting dressed. She woke up, turning and stretching, before he was ready to leave. He looked around at her and swallowed hard, for suddenly the clear-eyed gaze he had imagined was quite real. "Good morning -- Margie. You don't mind if I call you by your first name?" He had forgotten what her last name was. "No, I don't mind. Uh..." "Fred, Fred Lohmann." "Yes, certainly, Fred." She rolled over onto her back and gave a routine wiggle of her hips. "Burning with lust this morning, that's me." But her tone made the invitation no more than a polite form. "Me too." His tone was even more casual than hers. "Too bad, but I gotta get an early start on some business today." Her eyes seemed to chill, sending something like a sensation of real cold along his back. She murmured softly: "What is a poor girl going to do, when the man she's with says he just won't screw?" The verse from which the line came was latrine doggerel, ancient and more than mildly dirty. If Fred had ever heard encouragement, this was it. Even Basic Income and karate could wait. "Well, then, how about it, girly?" he asked boldly. "How about you and me just frosting things a few degrees?" He had been too bold too soon. "Just don't rush it," Marjorie said crossly, with a curve of her spine becoming all sex again. Who could tell anything about women? She rolled out of the bed on her side, into her own room, where she reached for a transparent robe. 'Tm sorry," Fred muttered, bending slightly to look at her through the bed-gap in the wall. "Don't get sore." Sublimation, was she going to complain to the management now? Would he be thrown out? Somewhat mollified, she paused in the act of raising the bed between them. "Just don't rush things, okay?" Her eyes had lost their coldness, but at least she was smiling. "I'll be around tonight!" Fred called through to her. He helped her lift the bed-barrier into place, and gave his side of it a jovial pat as it sealed him off. An hour later he had found his way to the nearest branch of the Social Security office and was standing in line. Having no permanent address since leaving California, he had arranged to have his first Basic Income check held lor him in the Social Security data bank until he called at an office somewhere to pick it up. For whatever reason, a number of other people seemed to be making similar arrangements. The line was eight or ten people long, and not moving very fast. The jobholders in the office sat snugly fortified behind their desks and counters and computer consoles. or else walked quickly by, giving the impression that they were up to something important. Chastity, it was just that they had some kind of political pull, or they'd be the ones standing in line. They seemed to have little regard for the people they were processing so slowly. Fred lit up a small cigar. Now the window at the head of the line was being closed for some reason, and a man came to divide the line and lead its fragments to different windows. "No smoking in here!" he snapped at Fred. He was a paunchy, waddling man who reminded Fred of a particularly unpleasant high school teacher he had suffered under only a few months ago. "No smoking, I said! Put it out at once or you'll have to leave the office." "I got a right to my check," Fred muttered, but so weakly that it was doubtful if the officious man even heard him. At the same time Fred was crushing out his cigar on the sole of his sandal, for he knew very well that he was never going to win an argument with the paunchy jobholder. Not here. Now, if they ever met somewhere else... Fidgeting and waiting, thinking vague and sullen thoughts, Fred inched forward with the line. At last he reached the window, gave his name and federal identity number, and held the tips of his fingers on a scanner-plate. After a few seconds there came a machinegun clacking from a printing device beside the clerk who was processing Fred, and some official-looking papers emerged. "Well, this is your first check, Fred. Do you have a permanent address to give us yet?" now." "Address?" "It's here in Chicago. The one on North State Street." The clerk made a note with a stylus on a computer input plate, then pulled more pieces of paper from beneath the counter. "Take these booklets, Fred, they'll tell you more about your rights and responsibilities under the Basic Income law. If you win more than two hundred dollars' prize money in any state or national lottery or government-sponsored competition in any calendar month, or obtain gainful employment, or acquire ownership of more than fifty shares of corporate stock, you are required to notify us so that your Basic Income can be adjusted. There are penalties for failing to notify." There was a little more he had to listen to. When at last they released him by handing over his check -- he supposed it was enough to scrounge along on for a couple of weeks until the next one came, if scrounging along was your idea of life -- he hurried from the office, dropping the booklets into a trash receptacle as he went through the door. He'd notify them, all right, as soon as he moved up to jobholder. The sooner he could tell them that, the better. Since he had such a good chance for a job, there was no use hoarding his money like a miser. Two weeks' scrimp-along money could buy a couple of nights of real fun. After that... well, nobody starved. A kind of gravitational pull was leading him onto a particular slidewalk, one that would carry him in the direction of a run-down neighborhood he had noticed not far from the Y. There he should be able to hit a coffeehouse bar or two. He could get some lunch there as well as anywhere. There was plenty of time before he had to meet George at the dojo. And Fred wanted to see about getting hold of some gladrags, in case it turned out tonight that Marjorie was not just mood. If you went to the right place and asked the right person, a few dollars could always buy a pair of plastic cloaks, thin, but stiff and perfectly opaque, folded together into a pocket-sized carton. Parrs' guest room bed, looked at his watch, and saw that it was a little after nine o'clock. He sat up blinking. On the barren tile floor in one corner of the sparsely furnished room lay a pair of men's translucent disposable trousers, apparently used and ready for the discard. The length of one extended leg indicated that the garment would be too big for either him or George. Oh yes; Fred Lohmann had been staying here, before Rita. Conceivably Fred would know something of her present whereabouts, if Art could find a ehance to question him. Art remembered him as a wild-looking adolescent, tall and awkward. Before retiring Art had bought himself some disposable clothing from the block's vending machine, and now after a quick shower and beard-trim he dressed in fresh shorts and shirt. Still only a quarter after nine. While buttoning his shirt he peeked into the children's room and found the four of them still sleeping. Must have been .dlowed to stay up late last night, playing together. A door chimed and very shortly thereafter voices drifted up from downstairs, one Ann's, the other belonging to a man whom Art did not recognize. Standing in the upstairs hall he could understand only a stray word or two. Going down as soon as he had finished dressing. Art turned first into the kitchen. He was liable to feel sick unless he ate something as soon as he got up. In the refrigerator he found a cinnamon-flavored protein bar, and on the elaborate new stove he dialed himself coffee. Five minutes, while the low dialogue continued in another room, and he had the indispensable minimum of breakfast in his stomach. Chewing on a toothmint, more or less ready to face the world. Art walked into the living room . The low voices stopped. A lean. stooped man wearing a conservative transparent business jacket above his shorts was standing just inside a door that had been closed last night and which Art now realized must provide access to a lower-level garage. The man looked up at Art with keen interest, or perhaps he was only glad of any interruption. Ann, her pretty chin somewhat higher than usual, turned with arms folded from her stance of confrontation with the visitor. "Art, this gentleman claims he's a Mr. Hall. From Family Planning. George has gone out." Her tone managed to imply that George, if at home, would have beaten this probably fraudulent intruder to a pulp, and Art was welcome to do the same if he liked. "My name is Hall, and I am from the Family Planning office." The intruder had a determined voice, though not angry or flustered (Aha. Ann, have you met your match at last?), and his eyes were sharp. "I take it you're Mr. Rodney?" "I am." "I was hoping to run into you here. Our California office has asked us to make a routine investigation into your wife's case." "Her case? My wife hasn't broken any laws." "That's fine! Then if you'll tell me where I can get in touch with her, we can clear all this up promptly and with as little inconvenience as possible." The protein bar in Art's stomach had suddenly gone lumpy. He supposed that criminals must have terrible chronic digestive problems. Or maybe they got used to it. He could think of nothing to say to Mr. Hall, and just stood there like a guilty fool. Hall's determined voice kept coming at him. "I understand you didn't accompany your wife to Chicago, you followed her here?" "I -- yes, what of it?" Surely, thought Art, he had the right to refuse to answer these questions. To talk to a lawyer first, at least. But once he refused to answer. Hall's suspicions, that possibly were no more than suspicions now, would surely be confirmed. "Mr. Rodney, is there some reason you don't want to tell me where your wife is at the moment?" "I don't know where she is." It was Ann's fault, and George's, and Rita's too, that he had to conduct this argument in ignorance. Their fault, not his, if he got them all in deeper trouble. Meanwhile he marveled greatly at how fast the deadly pits could open beneath one's feet in the dull corridor of life. "You don't know?" The interrogator's tone implied that Art must be a fool or a knave, or both, to hope to get away with such an answer. Art folded his arms in unconscious imitation of Ann. "That's right." Mr. Hall glanced toward Ann, who with her own arms still folded was obviously quite ready for him. He appeared to stifle a faint sigh, and then turned back to Art. "Mr. Rodney, our California office has received medical testimony indicating that your wife is pregnant for the third time." "Yes, I know about that." "We have no record that she's made any appointment with a physician to have this pregnancy terminated. And the first trimester must be nearly over." "I, ah, know nothing about that." "Well, I'd like you to at least give me your opinion on the subject, Mr. Rodney. Do you think your wife is planning not to have it terminated normally, to carry it on to parturition?" There was no way he could admit it. "No, I don't think that," he had to say. Then he had to pause, for a nervous, choking swallow. Ann was just standing by, letting him flounder, confident that they had told him no secrets and so there were none he could betray. Triplets, but he hated her at the moment. When he had his throat under control again he said; "I'm sure Rita means to have it terminated properly, she's, uh, probably just gone away by herself for a few days to think things over. You see... our psychologist has recommended against her being sterilized. After Paula, our youngest, was born, Rita had an lUD inserted but her body kept expelling it. She always takes her pills. I'm sure there was just a chemical failure somewhere. I'm sure she didn't plan the pregnancy. Unless it was subconscious." There seemed to be stories in the newsprints every day about apes avoiding prison sentences by pleading their subconscious compulsions. If they could do it, why couldn't she? Lay the groundwork for it now. But he was talking too much, he had better shut up. As soon as he quieted, however. Hall was after him again. "Mr. Rodney, is it like Rita to go off by herself for days at a time? When was the last time she made a similar disappearance?" "I..." He was cornered. Once he started making up a string of lies. Hall would have it knotted around his neck in no time at all. "No, I can't say it's like her," he said in desperation. "I tell you, I don't know where she is. If I knew where she w'as I'd be with her right now." Mr. Hall shuffled his feet, which were no doubt tired from standing, and glanced again at Ann, and sighed once more, more openly this lime. "Mr. Rodney, will you walk me back to my car?" "There's no need for you to do that. Art," Ann put in. "All right, Mr. Hall," Art said, since the alternative was to go along with Ann's instructions. Ann was not going to argue with him, not in the face of the enemy. "I'll have breakfast for you when you get back," she promised, holding the door. She gave Art a ritual kiss as he went out, but offered no kiss or caress to Hall, who in turn contented himself with a barely polite pelvic thrust in her direction. V. stairs to the garage, with no one else about. Hall said quietly; "Mr. Rodney, I hope you don't think of us at Family Planning as out to get your wife. Believe me, we'd like to help her; I think she's a woman who can use some help." Art was silent. They emerged at the foot of the stair into the garage. A variety of vehicles were berthed in a series of numbered, gate-protected stalls. Other areas were marked for delivery vehicles and visitors' parking. At the moment there was still nobody else in sight. Hall stopped, facing Art. "If I can't get a chance to talk to your wife, it's going to be awfully hard for her to stay out of trouble. And you yourself can be in trouble if you're deliberately withholding information. There is the federal conspiracy law. We may not like the world in which all these laws are necessary, but it's the only world we have." "I've been telling you the truth." "Another thing." Hall very slowly resumed his walk toward the visitor's parking area. "Giving birth is a somewhat risky proposition at best -- I'm sure you realize that, as the father of two legitimate children. In some of these birth-mills a full-term parturition, or even a fetiparous one, can be downright dangerous, believe me." This time it was Art who stopped, a few slow paces later. "Even a what?" Hall was silent. He seemed to be trying to read Art's face. Art repeated: "Even a what? What kind of parturition, live birth, is there except full term? Do you mean premature?" Hall continued his intent gaze at the mystified Art for a long moment, and then relaxed. "I think you and I are really on the same side in this case, aren't we, Mr. Rodney?" "I want my wife at home with me, not getting into trouble. And I don't want the world overcrowded spect the rights of others." "Fine." Hall was suddenly more relaxed and friendly. "Then I'd better tell you something you may not know about. Just recently there has come into use a method for removing a first-trimester fetus or embryo from the womb in such a way that it can be kept alive. The midwifer usually freezes it -- " "Alive?" "If you can call it that. Alive in potential. It can later be reimplanted in the woman's body again, or in the body of another woman, or put into an artificial womb, and it will grow and develop eventually into a child. In experiments on animals normal young have been produced by this method for several decades now." "Oh." "You begin to see. Now if we at Family Planning seize a frozen fetus or embryo, our legal situation is tricky, because federal law states that if nine months have passed since conception, the fetus has become a child. The law goes back several decades to when termination of surplus pregnancies was first required in this country. Some women who were about six months or so along claimed that they were already in labor when their pregnancies were terminated by FP doctors, and there was a lot of fuss. The law is really outmoded now, but we're still stuck with it." "I don't quite see..." "The thing is, we can't legally destroy a frozen fetus unless we can prove it's less than nine months old. Calendar age, not stage of development, is the way the law reads. We're trying to get it changed, of course. There have been several articles lately in the newsprints on all this, and stories on television. I would have thought perhaps you would have heard or read something about it." "I've been busy," Art said. "Not keeping up much with the news." Probably it was another example of his subconscious avoidance of hearing or remembering, like the exact wording of the federal conspiracy law. "You see, with just a frozen fetus in our hands, we have a purity of a lime proving its exact age. Can't even take a tissue sample for proving the parenthood, since that would constitute damage. If we can't prove it's a superfluous third, and nobody claims it, why then believe it or not it has to be regarded as an unidentified orphan child. Treated as a human being in potential, which means taking it to an orphanage. Some of these religious and so-called humanist institutions will take them right in. They're building artificial wombs at a furious pace, without permits of course, and they have plenty of money and manpower for clandestine research on freezing and revival techniques, or so it seems." "Uh-huh." "You may have heard something about the riot just recently in Iowa, where a Christian monastery was destroyed. I understand the ringleaders of the riot are now in jail, as they should be. Can't have people taking the law into their own hands. But there'll have to be proper legal action against those cultists too. Some of their priests were out there building cryogenic devices and freezing fetuses." Art, without realizing it, had started walking again, on newly shaky legs. Cultists. He thought of the carven image on the wall above the children's beds. He knew Ann. He thought of the scream coming out of the woods, and he thought of Rita. "But then... suppose, as you say, that the fetus is thawed and put into an artificial womb and a child results. What then? Could the mother claim it?" "Probably not without spending a prison term, and undergoing sterilization." Hall was looking at his watch. "I suppose there might be all kinds of devious means, adoption and so on. But a third live birth is still a criminal offense by the woman, no matter what subterfuges she employs. I really can't understand the woman who does such a thing. Setting aside the legal problems, anywhere that she and her husband live afterwards, the neighbors are going to be able to count: one. two, three children. You couldn't very well pretend one of them is adopted. There aren't enough adoptable children to even match the childless couples who want one, let alone go to people who have tw'o of their own. So it'll be obvious to all that the parents had three kids, and pretty soon that third one is going to know that he or she is superfluous and unwanted by the world. That's a very cruel thing to do to a child, in my estimation." "Mine, too." "No. I just don't understand these women who go to midwifers." Hall had reached his car and now he unlocked a door and pulled it open. "There's just one more, thing I wanted to mention to you, Mr. Rodney. Several times a year we in Family Planning get a massive detailed population forecast for the whole world, and for our own areas in particular; we get it right from the UN computer center. Right now the latest forecast is several days overdue; the rumor is that it's been delayed for re-checking, because it's a real shocker." "I suppose so." Hall got into his car, slammed the door, and then peered out the window. "I hope I can rely on you, Mr. Rodney." "Certainly I mean to do all I can -- " "That's fine." With a tiny wave and a half-smile, his mind probably already at work on his next case, Mr. Hall upped his window, faced forward, and drove off. -- but I don't even know where she is. Art stared in silent protest after the car already zooming up the exit ramp. V wandered to an escalator and rode it up from the garage, emerging just inside one of the block's pedestrian entrances. He was jogged partially out of his dazed state by Timmy and Paula, who ambushed their father as he made his way back toward the Parrs' patio. The children were munching protein bars w ith which they smeared his clothes. Overriding his requests for a delay, they pulled at him to get him moving on a tour of the block's central park. He gave up and went along. He reassured himself that his children were well and then tentatively questioned them about Mommy. About all he could find out was that she had said she would come back to get them soon. The tour got as far as the nude pool before its directors deserted to join the Parr boys, w'ho were already in the water. Art sank down on a grassy bank nearby and tried to think, now and then waving mechanically at his offspring when they clamored for his attention. There w'ere other distractions too. No other men were at the pool -- probably most of those who lived in the block were busy this morning, at jobs or tending to their investments -- but several women had come to swim. Ann was obviously not the only bluenose radical in this small community; probably people with similar attitudes tended to get into the same blockhouse corporation. Anyway these women came to the nude pool wearing long, loose, only dimly translucent jackets, and they swam as bare as babies, without so much as a sequin pasted on to emphasize their sex. It was hard to say which was the more antierotic, being almost completely covered or completely bare. Some of them cast suspicious glances at the male stranger, who in turn waved at his children to show that he had a good reason for hanging around, and then frowned thoughtfully into space. But only his face was truly thoughtful. His brain was getting nowhere. In half an hour or so the kids were ready to do something else, and Art walked home with the four of them, reminding them to gather up their clothes. When he got back to the house he found George there, and promptly took him aside. "George, have you seen her this morning or heard from her?" "No, Art, I swear." "I've got to find her. She's my wife and I have a right to talk to her." George stood there for a while, looking glum and uncertain about it all. Then he said: "I have to agree with that." Emboldened, Art pushed harder. "I don't want to get you, or anybody, into trouble. But if I can't find her I'll have to go to the police and report her missing. It's that important to me." George came to a decision. "All right. After lunch you and I will go out and see about making contact." "How about right now?" "Just come along and we'll do it my way. After lunch." So a couple of hours later, after Art had spent some more time with his children, and Ann had fed them all some more sandwiches, the two men went out and got on the slidewalk together, George explaining that he didn't have a car right now, what with one expense and another. After a couple of kilometers' ride. Art saw a vast domed stadium looming up ahead of them. At about the same time, George came up from deep thought to say: "Understand, it may take a little time to find out exactly where she is. There are several people I want to talk to about it." "Just so I get a chance to see her, before she commits any irrevocable foolishness. Where are we going now?" "I expect one of the people will be at the ball game today. You just stand by and let me talk to him." "All right." Another kilometer and the slidewalk, by now fairly thick with passengers, deposited them before one of the entrances to the stadium. George said: "Let's not forget to pick up tickets. A dollar is a dollar." They accepted time-stamped tickets from the jaws of a machine as they passed in through a turnstile. George led Art through cavernous passageways to an outfield grandstand, where they emerged squinting into the sun. A sizable of the seats. The stadium's domed roof had been opened like a set of gigantic jaws and the people were in a good humor under the warm sun. George chose seats high in the rear, and kept looking around him at the crowd. "I think I see our man," he said after a minute. "You just watch the game, and I'll go talk to him." George moved away. Art watched the game, which was just beginning, and the crowd as well. The Cubs, the home team, took a one-run lead in the first inning, and gambling in the grandstand promptly became fierce and steady, conducted by arm-waves and cryptic shouts. Ushers and police ignored the betting; Art wasn't sure whether it was legal here or not. There seemed to be no bookies, no formal organization, and no wagers of more than ten dollars, but small money passed through hundreds of hands with every pitch. One of the busier gamblers was the man George had engaged in lowvoiced talk, who seemed able to keep his gaming and his conversation going at the same time. They were sitting too far away for Art to be able to tell if George was learning anything. Their talk just went on steady. So things went until the top of the fourth inning, when the Cubs blundered thernselves four runs behind. The emotional climate in the stands changed radically with the score. The majority of the spectators, grown men and late adolescents who wore the gaudy codpieces and indefinable look of the jobless, lost most of their enthusiasm for betting and brooded in sullen silence. Here and there a few gamblers persisted more energetically than ever, jumping and shouting like fanatics when they won, but joyless even then. G eorge finished his conversation abruptly and stood up, motioning to Art that it was time to leave. They met on the moving ramp going down to street level. A number of other men were heading restlessly in the same direction, taking to the exits early. In the lines forming at the exits there was some jostling for position, and some police were standing by alertly. A huge, disheveled man standing in the next queue glared across a railing at Art and George and murmured something unpleasant about jobholders. In present company Art felt secure enough to glare right back, until the man decided he was getting nowhere and turned away. "Three innings, dollar and a quarter," droned the Bureau of Sports agent in the booth where Art presented his ticket. Art picked up the coins that came clattering toward him from under the bulletproof glass. Probably watching a whole game would be worth three seventyfive. He wondered if they paid overtime for extra innings. As soon as they were clear of the stadium crowd, riding a westbound slidewalk into a part of the city Art had not visited before, he asked eagerly: "Did you find out where she is?" "We're on the trail. I told you, I'll have to talk to a couple of people." George, shaking his head, turned back to look at the slowly receding stadium, its roof-jaws gaping at the sky. "I was afraid we might have a little riot. It gets bad in there sometimes when the home team loses." Controlling his impatience. Art looked back too. "They can get paid now just to sit and watch a game and keep out of trouble. Or there are a thousand things people can do to win prizes. They don't have to be intelligent or educated, they can win by bowling or pitching horseshoes. Everyone can win a prize at something. I don't know what they want." George faced forward again. "Did I tell you, I may be going on television? Probably not, though, I think I blew the audition." "No." Art was surprised. "That's where I was this morning, auditioning. Just a local station. Oh, it's a real triplet of a mess. They have this monstrous clumsy machine, made up like a woman, for a man to fight. Let's change to the high-speed walk here, the next place I want to stop is way out in a slumburb." At the interchange, the walk they had been riding flowed briefly beside an acceleration strip. This strip was of viscous plastic that remained cohesive and hard-surfaced though it flowed like water, the circular stream of it running thick and deep and slow beside the slow slidewalk, and thin and fast to match speeds with the express. With no more balancing than it took to mount a stair, the passengers made the changeover. Once whizzing westward aboard the fast, long-distance belt. Art and George sat down on the continuous bench that moved with their new conveyance. "So what about this television program?" Art asked, his curiosity aroused. "It'll be garbage. They want somebody to jump through the air like an idiot and scream, and beat up this giant woman... There could be a good karate program, showing how the human mind and body can work together. I'd like to do a good one someday but I don't suppose they'd ever let me. I guess I'll do this one if they want to hire me. I can use the money." Art had a sudden realization of the obvious: a midwifer was illegal and therefore must be expensive. Rita hadn't had much money with her. Might she have fallen into the hands of some cut-rate quack? "George, are you paying for -- Rita?" "I'm contributing something." "Then why must we run all over the city to find out where she is? Don't you know?" George calmly shook his head. For a while they rode through the warm afternoon without talking. The whispering rush of the express walk, shaded beneath its plastic awning, bore them at highway speed through kilometer after kilometer of the great city. They passed industrial blockhouses, and older manufacturing parks surrounded by grim fences, where machines labored night and day for Man, the master, repairing and sometimes redesigning themselves, only occasionally requiring any human supervision. They passed street after street of the twoand threeapartment dwellings in which the bulk of the city's people seemed to live. Here dwelt the great respectable mass. Here the head of the household might work two or three days a week, here the family owned stocks and bonds enough to bring some usable income, here they had success from time to time in winning prizes. Not really full-time jobholders, most of them, but that was how they saw themselves. Vending centers flowed past, public computing terminals, streets and parking lots. A school. A park, with a young couple naked on the grass, bodies locked and working toward orgasm. A Church of Eros, whose twin towers stood like the raised knees of a supine woman, flanking the main entrance. A superhighway interchange for private surface vehicles, fallen into disrepair, with half its lanes closed by barricades, grass growing through the cracked concrete. Nearby, a terminal of the underground long-distance tube complex. More twoand three-family dwellings, row on row on row. And scattered everywhere throughout the clean and sunlit city, the fortified stone walls of blockhouses springing up. Now Art noticed with part of his mind that the buildings rushing past were becoming noticeably shabbier; they must be approaching the western border of the city. Thinking aloud, he said: "Suppose she actually does have a child, produces a living child out of this. What will we do then? I tell myself that if it comes to that we'll just ignore what people say, or the looks we get from them. I'll do all I can to keep the third one from feeling unwanted. But I suppose he will." "I just don't know how that would work," said George. "And Rita. I don't know if going to jail would bother her as much as being sterilized." After another little silence George said; "I know the thought of having that done has scared her in the past. Maybe now, though, it won't seem so terrible. She'd never have another baby to worry about, once this one is taken care of." "If it ever is a baby." Art felt a surge of pity and grief for the unwanted third-to-be, unneeded and detested by a world already jammed. Fetus, why do you thrust with such a mad, blind drive to reach the light? Shrink back to nothing. Go away. There's nothing here in the world for you, that you should fight to reach it. But of course the seed could only grow where it had been planted. "George, the Family Planning man implied that when some women go through this new method of extracting the fetus and freezing it, then they're content to have the resulting child brought up in an orphanage. I wonder if that's what Rita has in mind. To me it would be worse than having a third child with us, to purity with what the neighbors say. Do you know what she intends? She must have discussed some plan with you." George shook his head gloomily, staring off into the distance. "We'd adopt the kid, or something. We'd hang onto him. But it would be pretty grim, and I don't want that kid to ever come into this world. You can see how I feel, can't you?" "I can see how you feel, and how Rita feels, too. Maybe that's my trouble. I see everybody's point of view. Even the kid who isn't born yet." His eyes flicked at Art and off what is it then?" Being w'ell rested and in good control of himself. Art could now have brought out the arguments w ith which to demolish this simplistic point of view. But he had no wish to argue with George, and anyway arguments were no good for changing someone's mind until that mind was ready for change. T he city proper was suddenly left behind. No official boundary or sharp line of demarcation was visible, but within the space of a few blocks the view changed, as what was unmistakably a slumburb came rising about the slidewalk like a dirty wave. Art was a stranger to this part of the Chicago area, but it did not look much different from some sections of Los Angeles. Here were the endless curved rows of small houses cheaply built, falling apart at the age of twenty or thirty, but still occupied. Not only occupied, but cut and partitioned. There would be no steady jobholders living here, and not many who owned shares of stock or won more than an occasional prize. This was Basic Income territory. A small vending district clustered around the terminus of the high speed slidewalk. Here all the other pedestrian walks were stat, as rigid and unmoving as the streets. Among the automated vendors a couple of huntan-attended establishments survived. One of these, a small and dingy tavern at the dead end of a block, proved to be George's destination. The tavern did not look old, but was already rundown in appearance, sharing the neighborhood's general air of defeat. Daylight was shut out from the interior, and the artificial lighting inside was dim but violently colored. As Art's eyes adjusted he could see obscene words scrawled here and there on the shabby walls, and concealing garments, opaque hip boots and overcoats, crudely drawn. All in all. Art supposed, a typical BI barroom; not that he had seen many such, except in television stories. Four or five apathetic male customers perched on bar stools. Above and behind the bar, the legally required police TV eye roosted like a robotic vulture, now and then turning its glass eye on its scrawny metal neck. The bartender raised his head, sizing up his two new customers, and fixed eyes blank as the vulture's lens on George, as if deciding he was the one who had to be dealt with. "Couple of short ones," George ordered, resting an elbow on the bar. When two small glasses of beer had been poured, he asked: "Is Alfie around?" "Maybe shootin' pool," the bartender grated. There was a back George strolled that way. "I'll just see if he's there." "That'll be one dollar, see the sign?" George just glanced back as he strolled. "I won't touch a cue." He went on into the poolhall. The bartender hesitated briefly, then picked up the coins George had left on the bar and slouched away to tend another customer. Art sipped his beer, which for some reason tasted quite good. He wished he knew how to talk to these people and act with them. George's and Rita's background was a middle-class as his own, but George had picked up the knack somewhere. Maybe in karate, though he had mentioned once that most of the students and practitioners were not the tough-guy type. Couple of short ones. Get tough with me and I can break your ribs -- this last was only implied, of course, never verbalized or even bluntly stated in so many body-language words. He was just this somewhat undersized fellow who was not at all intimidated. What others read into that was what intimidated them. There was a stir in a rear booth and a pair of B-girls materialized out of the dimness there and came flowing forward to the bar. Art felt a mild twinge of alarm. The girls' license buttons were prominently displayed on their kimonos, but the garments were probably longer and thicker and more shapeless than the letter of the law allowed. The woman approached the bar and stood there, closer to Art than to anyone else. Not that they looked at him. Their pale-painted faces were averted slightly, their mouths pinched in professional haughtiness and cool reserve. Art uncomfortably shifted his stance. George stuck his head out of the back room. "Not today, girls," he called. "Art, get a beer for Alfie, and get us a booth. We'll be out in a minute." The girls' faces relaxed into more natural scowls and they moved away, resuming some private conversation in bored voices. One pulled off her kimono to scratch beneath her bikni straps. Art bought three more short ones, and carried the filled glasses to an empty booth. F rom the booth he had a good view of the tavern's huge television stage. For some reason the ball game was not being shown; maybe the game was already over, or there could be rioting at the stadium. The barrel-sized image of an announcer's head was reading a news story: "This afternoon in the General Assembly, chief Chinese delegate Lu Ti-p'ing accused a neighboring government. Southern Pan-Asia, of using biological weapons against its own -- the Southern Pan-Asian -- people. "Lu quoted statistics from from uncertain causes have reduced the spa population by nearly ten per cent during the last three months. According to the have been the elderly and the chronically ill. According to the Chinese accusation, disproportionately few of the deaths have occurred among members of the Patriots' Party, now the ruling group in Southern Pan-Asia. "Finally the Chinese delegate expressed regret that, in his words, such an inhumane method of trying to strengthen itself economically. Is this, Lu asked, to be the first step on a road of dangerous economic aggression?" As if on cue the announcer's head was abruptly replaced by that of another, equally big, who with a tyrannosaur's smile read hastily through a perhaps ill-timed commercial for a Chicago vending chain. The presentation was so inept that Art assumed this was some small local station, maybe the very one George had auditioned for. Probably there were a hundred of them, though. Art sipped his beer. The newsmonger was soon back on stage, saying: "Then it was the turn of Cao Din That, chief spa delegate, to reply." The enlarged head of Cao Din That now appeared on the stage of the tavern in the Chicago slumburb, where nobody but Art seemed to be paying the least attention, and his translated words were heard, categorically denying all the charges leveled against the leaders of his suffering country. Possibly some foreign government was really to blame for the surplus deaths. If so, let the aggressors beware, they would be found out shortly. In any authority by interfering in spa internal affairs. The tone of the speech became milder. Possibly the deaths were the unforeseen side-effect of a new insecticide, employed in the desperate struggle to increase food production. Also to be considered were the airborne viruses that had been accidentally freed during the recent UN police action against the Nile Republic; no one knew where those viruses might have landed, nor would anyone even admit to knowing exactly what they were. The UN was to be applauded for its prompt action along the Nile, which had liquidated some planners of biological war, but still some of the consequences had been unfortunate. "Ah, th' world's gone t' repression," said a colorless little old man who must be Alfie, for he arrived at that moment with George. Art slid over to make room. Alfie seized a beer, drank most of it, and went on talking. "The whole world's crazy. You know what happened the other night? Somebody bombed Vic Rizzo's townhouse. It musta been just vandals. They couldn'ta known it was his." "That so?" George asked, indifferently. Art wondered who Vic Rizzo might be. After a few more social noises had been made, and Alfie further supplied with beer, George got to the point. "Alf, you know the city pretty well." "I guess I do." "Then tell me something." George dropped his low voice even lower. "Who might a nice girl go to see, if she got kind of carried away and emotional, and wanted to finish an extra baby? She's got two kids now." Alfie gave facial demonstrations of thought. "Married?" he asked, as if being married or single made any difference in the number of children a woman was allowed to bear. "Yes," said George. Alfie glanced at Art, wordlessly identified him as the worried husband, and winked at him. Then obviously pleased to be consulted, Alfie assumed an air of wisdom and began to talk. He seldom quite finished a sentence, however, and his speech was thick with allusions to people and places that Art had never heard of. Also Alf used a number of slang words strange to Art, or maybe Art was only mis hearing them, because Alfs whisper was almost too low to be made out. All in all, the dissertation was perfectly unintelligible. George, though, kept on listening with apparent satisfaction, now and again encouraging Alfie with grunts and nods, and ordering more beer. characters you know," Art reflected aloud, as he and George rode the express slidewalk into the east again. Twenty kilometers or so ahead, near the shore of invisible Lake Michigan and farther east than Art had been as yet, the unbelievable towers of the central city rose. George grinned. "Alfie has his uses." "I hope you found out something from him. I didn't. Do you think Rita is with one of those people he mentioned?" George turned to look back into slumburb country, a desolate sea of rooftops beneath the mid-afternoon sun. "I think Alfie may be on the phone to Family Planning right now. trying to sell them the information that ypu and I were asking about midwifers. The man I talked to at the ball park may be doing the same thing. Family Planning knows what Rita's trying to do, but I want'em to think she doesn't have a midwifer yet. They can't arrest us for asking general questions. All I've been trying to do so far today is put'em off the trail a little." Floundering well off the trail himself. Art could find nothing to say. VI silence through several slidewalk interchanges. He and George were deep in the city again, moving on a fairly crowded walk that angled to the southeast, before he spoke again to ask: "Where are we going now?" "The dojo. Fred's supposed to be there at three-thirty so I can watch him work out. And then I have a private lesson to give. Come along and watch." "Look, George, are you going to help me find Rita or aren't you? If you can't or won't, just say so. Don't keep stalling me along." George was unperturbed. "Just come along to the dojo. I said I'd help you and I will." Art puffed out his breath. But he went along; somehow George's words carried conviction. Under a sign that read parr's waiting for them, holding up the front of a modest building in a small middle-class vending district. Under one arm Fred was carrying a whitish roll of what appeared to be clothing. "Art, you and Fred remember each other, hey?" George unlocked the ground-floor door and stepped inside, waving on the lights with a passage of his hand over the switchplate on the wall. Art's hand was squeezed. "Sure we do," said Fred, clearing his throat nervously. He towered over the two older men. "Art, how's your wife and kids?" "Oh. fine. I guess you met Rita yesterday? Over at George's place?" "Yeah, sure, that's right." It seemed obvious that Fred wasn't in on the midwifery conspiracy, but still some clue to Rita's whereabouts might possibly be gotten out of him. Later. Right now Fred was all nervous anticipation of whatever test he had been brought here for, and George was present, raising his window blinds, checking his printout for messages, and in general opening up his shop. The interior of the dojo was mostly one big room, about twenty meters square, and two stories high, so you could have fitted a very small house inside it. The floor was of polished wood. In the front, beside the street entrance, an area separated by a low partition from the big room contained a desk, with phoneplate and computer terminal, and a few chairs, some of them arranged as for spectators. An open doorway in the rear led to some lockers and. Art supposed, a shower. Large flags of the United States, the United Nations, and Japan were formally and correctly displayed together on one wall. The general impression was of functional orderliness. George and Fred each bowed, not deeply or very ceremoniously, toward the flags. Then they slipped off their sandals and padded back toward the locker room, bare feet seeming to grip the floor familiarly. "Make yourself at home, Art," George called back. Art put his own sandals into the convenient rack by the front door, then wandered about looking the place over. The smooth floor was not slippery to bare feet. Something here reminded him of chess. He wondered if it was the square arena of polished wood, or some faint scent of conflict lingering in the conditioned air. Glancing up, he saw four android fighting machines hanging like felons near the high ceiling, above the center of the open floor. He looked about and spotted their control console standing near the desk. Feeling a technician's curiosity. Art walked over and looked at the controls. George and Fred soon emerged from the locker room, clad in loose whitish trousers and jackets, only moderately translucent, and wearing athletes' codpieces of hard protective plastic. "I guess I just lost my own belt someplace," Fred was saying, meanwhile accepting a brown belt, an overlong strip of tough-looking cloth, from George's hand. G eorge looped a black belt twice around his own waist and knotted it in front, and the two of them began to limber up, swinging their legs like ballet dancers, crouching and twisting and stretching their bodies to unlikely extremes, shaking wrists and ankles as if their hands and feet had fallen asleep. Art stood watching with some interest. "Ready?" George asked, after a few minutes of this. "Let's go fivetime sparring, then." With nearly the full length of the floor clear behind him, he drew himself up facing Fred and they exchanged bows. Then they stood, each with arms slightly bent, hanging down in front of his body, fists loosely closed. "You first," George directed. Fred snapped into a tenser, much lower stance, poised to attack, his right fist cocked near his hip, left arm curved before him in a blocking position. "Jo-dan! " The word came out in an explosive breath. George grunted: "Uhssf" Fred sprang forward and advanced in long deliberate strides, and with each stride one of his fists drove like a piston at George's chin. George flowed backward easily, staying just ahead of the punches, pressing each of them aside at the last moment with an economical open-handed block perfectly timed against Fred's extended arm. His short legs gracefully matched the speed and rhythm of the long ones driving at him. What he was doing looked quite easy. After he had gauged the first punch, George's eyes moved downward between punches, appraising the movements of Fred's feet and hips. With his fifth punch Fred halted and stood motionless, arm still extended. Instantly George came blurring back at him with a counterpunch that was evidently an expected part of the ritualized combat; he snapped it to a halt a centimeter from Fred's unmoving chin. Now it was Fred's turn to draw himself up straight, while George crouched for the attack. "Jodan!" "Uhss!" George charged. Somehow he made his shortness look like an advantage. The sleeves of his white jacket snapped audibly with each punch. Fred retreated stiffly and hurriedly, parrying with heavy blocks that looked comparatively awkward. When it came time for his counterattack he essayed an arm-grab and kick to the stomach which George did not attempt to avoid. The snapping kick just touched George's jacket, as it was evidently supposed to do, but George still seemed to find it unsatisfactory. "Try again," he ordered. Fred went through the grab-andkick again. George said nothing. Art got the impression that Fred was failing his test. George exchanged bows with his opponent, and turned to Art. "Art, switch the andys on, will you? The console by the desk." Art found the power switch. There came a whispering of cables up above, and the four androids started to descend, hanged men coming down for vengeance. Their wire cables lowered them slowly, as their still-blind faces turned this way and that and their plastic limbs began to quiver and stir. By the time the androids' feet had touched down on polished wood, their legs had life and balance enough to let them stand. The cables detached themselves and were quickly reeled up out of the way by the overhead machinery. Four men of about average height were left standing in the middle of the floor. Their heads and hands and feet were tan, the rest of their bodies white, as though clothed in beltless karate outfits. At the crotch of each appeared a small, formalized codpiece-bulge. Their tan faces were featureless except for small recessed eye lenses and flattish dummy noses. Like superior creatures lost in their own proud thoughts, they stood with loosely hanging arms, ignoring the three real men who watched them. George, coming over to the console, called back to Fred: "Want to run through heian number four?" Fred shrugged. "Okay." He frowned at the man-like figures, as if hoping to intimidate them. The four androids were warmed up and fully active now, and as George set up their controls they obediently arranged themselves in the center of the floor, facing one another like four cardplayers looking across a large square table. Each was crouched in the same attacking position that the men had used for the ritual sparring. "You don't fight all four at once, do you?" Art asked. "I've seen karate on television a few times, but I confess I never paid too much attention." George dismissed television karate with a mere lipcurl of contempt. "What speed do you want, Freddy? How about Three or Four?" Fred flushed slightly. He stood with his hands on his hips, swinging his legs again. "I can handle One-point-five, or Two." After a moment George said: "Try Two-point-five, then," and set a dial. "Better get a helmet." "Okay." Fred trotted to the locker room. going to fight all four at once." "Just in a kind of formalized way, a pre-arranged exercise. They come at you one at a time, and anybody who has some training and who has memorized the moves of the particular heian can do it. If he keeps his nerve. And if the speed's set low enough. He wants to do it pretty fast." For a moment George's face said openly: It's his funeral. Something about the fighting machines fascinated Art. The way they stood there on the polished wood like outsize chessmen, waiting for an act of human control to impel them to ritual battle. He asked: "Is it all right if I take a closer look?" George glanced at the controls. "Go ahead." Art padded over to the androids. They did not seem to notice him, as they waited with impassive poise. If you order us to punch and kick you. Lord Man, so will we do. Art peered into dull lens-eyes and wondered what image they made of him. With a cautious finger he touched the plastic knuckles of one cocked tan fist. Not as hard as the proverbial rock, but not what one would call safely padded, either. The fingers of the hand were not really separate, but only indicated by grooves in the one plastic piece. "Feels as if it could kill you." "Not likely, they don't really hit like black belts." George smiled briefly. "Does sting a little, though." "You've been hit, then." "bh, sure. Not seriously. Yes, these things can be dangerous. We sometimes put big padded hands and feet on'em for novices. But if there's no real element of danger when you train, you can't really train properly." He glanced toward the locker room. There came the sound of a toilet flushing. "Fred's no novice. But he's nowhere near as good as he's been telling me he is. I just can't hire him now." "Then why -- ?" Art gestured at (he androids. "Oh, I owe him a full fair tryout, I guess. And he's got good potential if he'd settle down and practice every day." Fred came back, fitting on something like a fencer's mask. "I found a face protector. I like it bettern a whole helmet." "All right," said George, standing by the console. Fred moved in among the androids, and oriented himself carefully at the center of the space between them, where he was the focus of all their lenses. He drew a deep breath and then stood up relaxed. "Ready." George touehed a red control, and instantly bright red warnings glowed into life in the eyes of each mechanical figure. Somewhere a small repeater chime began to sound, one, two, three, four, five notes and the android at Fred's left lunged at him with a punch too fast for Art to follow. Fred was ready though and his left arm snapped up to block the attack while his right hand came whipping around edgewise to hit home like a hatchet on the tan plastic neck. The aggressor machine was sent staggering back. Meanwhile another was already charging. Each android charged in turn, was beaten off, reset itself quickly, and in its next turn came back to the attack again, aiming another blow or kick at Fred, or grabbing at his jacket with clamplike fingerless hands. About half a minute passed, while Fred piled up points. Fred spun from side to side, defending himself with vicious blocks, counterattacking with fists and feet and elbows. His face was rigid with concentration -- or was it fear and hate he showed? He reached out and pulled down an android's head, smashing the blank uncaring face against his driving knee. Again he spun around -- Not quite in time. A savage punch glanced off his skull, and down he went. Art moved with an electronic technician's instinct for the power switch, but George's hand was there already. For an instant the androids hesitated, looking for fair game. Then their eyes died and their bodies fell clattering to the wooden floor. Fred was rolling over on the floor, gasping and moaning, clutching at his head. Art and George went to him. He rolled just as Art bent down, and Art's hand was besmeared with a drop of Fred's blood. "They changed speed!" Fred sat up, dripping blood onto his white jacket. "I almost had'em, and then something went wrong... ah, triplets, that hurts! I swear they changed on me..." Fred was practically sobbing with exertion, pain, defeat. Having played chess against computers. Art thought that perhaps he understood Fred's feelings. But since he had risked no blood against the chess computers, Art said only: "Lie still. I'll get a towel." Fred's scalp was torn but still the damage didn't look too serious. George stayed with the victim, gently getting his faceprotector off, while Art went to the locker room and found a towel and also picked up a first aid kit that hung there on the wall. He had just gotten back to the disaster area when the street door of the dojo opened and a tall man came in. This man was well dressed in translucent shorts and business jacket, and had dark skin and Oriental eyes. As he was starting to bow to the flags he noticed what was happening, and immediately slipped off his shoes and came across the floor. "Have an accident?" "Oh, hello. Doc. Yes," said George, getting to his feet. Fred also started to get up, then sat back on the floor as the man who had just come in bent to look at his torn scalp. Accepting the towel from Art, Doc dabbed around the wound. "This looks like it'll need some glue. Ivor, fetch my bag in from the car, will you?" Another man, youngish and of undistinguished appearance, who had followed the doctor in and then had remained uncertainly near the door, gave a little salute with his fingers like a chauffeur or a servant and then ducked out. "Doc," said George, "this is Art Rodney, my sister's husband. Art, this is Dr. Hammad." With a look as of recognition, the doctor nodded, and reached to shake Art's hand. George said: "Art, when you have a chance, you can consult the doctor about your problem. He's your man." Galactic Emperor's treasure-box sampier includes the best of Anderson -- holder of five Nebula and two Hugo Awards. And editor Roger Elwood tops it off with careful, affectionate, insightfui analyses of Foul's work. An honest-to-goodness tribute to one of science-fiction's abiding geniuses. #S pages. # science-fiction by authors like Aldiss, Pohl, Knight, Lafferty, Russ and six others proves that the realm of laughter lies not very far from the realm of tears. Edited by master science-fiction writer, Robert Siherberg, who has won two Hugo and three Nebula awards. # pages. #  Just by adding these science-h'ction masterpieces  to your iibrary, you can depart any time. To iive in the dimension you choose, for as hme as you want. And return, of course, when you like. What a stellar way to go... and come hack. For a very noncosmic price! meticulously plotted, detailed, frightening, exciting, baffling, challenging. It just won't let you go! # pages. # engaging, amusing science-fiction fantasy is set in the post-atomic war civilization of Stories. Ten gripping stories representing the subtle union of precise biochemical technicalities and mystical reverence for the occult. # pages. # Get these books from your favorite book store, or wherever science-fiction books are sold. WAdvt. No. # -- I pageIf -- August, October and December -- # E arly in March my phone rang. Vienna was on the line, the U.S. Embassy: "Would you consider coming to Eastern Europe to speak on science fiction for the U.S. I. A.?" I won't lie to you, this is not the sort of thing that happens every day at our house. But it seems to be happening more in the last few years than it used to; in the recent past I've accepted similar offers, from one government or another, to visit Italy, Japan, Brazil and a few other countries, not to mention the usual run of speaking engagements for schools, corporations and institutions. I am not alone in this. Over the past decade I've seen Brian Aldiss, for instance, any number of times; and with the possible exception of London, I don't think we've ever run into each other in the same city twice. This is almost as true of my long-term friendship with Arthur Clarke. Robert Silverberg, Robert A. Heinlein and half a dozen others. We are becoming a pretty peripatetic lot, we sf writers. All this traveling has been educational to me: it has taught me that sf people are a breed apart. Sometimes the color of the skin is different, or the shape of the eyes. Often we have trouble with languages (how nasty it is of everyone else not to speak English!), and almost as often our governments don't get along very well. But the people themselves are never different. The science-fiction fans, the editors, the writers, the artists -- they are always and everlastingly the same; and I have felt more at home in Nagoya or Montreal with my own kind than I usually do with my neighbors next door. The qualities that interest you and me in sf here in America are the same qualities that interest all those other people in it, too: We are of one blood, you and I; and the culture shock of a different nationality or tongue lasts half an hour at the most. Nevertheless, Eastern Europe was something special. I had only visited that whole part of the world once or twice before, and very briefly. So I didn't think very long; I said yes, and began packing. The statistics: I was gone a little under a month. I gave eight formal lectures, participated in eleven round-tables, gave twenty-one TV, radio, newspaper and magazine interviews and took part in something like thirty "other functions," ranging from a meeting in a publisher's office to an all-night drinking party in a Soviet night club. I don't remember all this; I'm quoting from a summary the State Department made for me. I especially don't remember the Soviet night club, or at least not all that clearly. It was a hard evening. What I do remember is a little chaotic and disconnected, in the form of notes I jotted down on airplanes and trains and while waiting for a car to pick me up; and here it is. The Yugoslav publishing industry has a lot of problems that Americans don't face, and many of them come from the sheer difference in size. Yugoslavia is not a very big country to begin with. And it has four -- count 'em, four -- official languages. Nevertheless they do have a considerable amount of publishing, and quite a fair amount of that is science fiction: hard-cover books, paperback books and even magazines. The magazine is particularly interesting. It is called Galaksija. It is not related to the American Galaxy, but is a sort of young people's popular-science magazine. Every month they devote their centerfold to one or two sf stories, usually translations from foreign writers: Henri Slesar, Anatolij Dnjeprov, Brajan Oldis, Artur Klark, Frederik Pol, Deni Plahta are common bylines. The editor is a really fine fellow named Gavrilo Vuckovic. He started Galaksija a couple of years ago with a circulation of # copies; it is now # and they expect # quite soon. So they are going to spin off an all-sf magazine, they hope, maybe late this year. You can move around quite freely in Yugoslavia, but tourists do encounter a few problems now and then. For example, there is Yugoslavia's answer to the Pentagon, the building called The Gorges. This is Yugo Army HQ, and it got that name because the architect designed it to look like the mountain gorges where the Yugoslav partisans fought against the Germans in World War II: jagged building edges cantilevered partway across one of the main streets of Belgrade. It is interesting looking, so tourists often stop and take pictures of it, and then they get arrested if a cop sees them. Photographing Army installations is a crime in Yugoslavia. (There are no signs warning you against it, either.) A foolish law? Sure. You know that and I know that. But the police, they don't know that, so they arrest you. Esperantists; The Belgrade Esperanto Association is at # Marsala Tita. The thing to remember about the Yugoslavs is that they have spent most of their history being conquered and fighting themselves free again. If the city of Belgrade makes it through to the end of this year without being occupied by any foreign army it will be, someone told me, the first time since the Romans invaded that they have managed thirty consecutive years without some foreign army running their city. Politically they are wise as wolves. One of the favorite strolling and playground parks in Belgrade used to be a Turkish fortress. Kids ride the merry-go-round where the Turks used to impale Serbs on sharpened stakes, and leave them there so their screams would notify the other Serbs who was boss. All the Yugoslavs know all about it, even the little kids. For two thousand years someone or other has almost always been shoving a sharpened stick up their asses. When no outsider appeared to do the job they did it to each other: Serbs to Croats to Slovenes to Macedonians to whoever. They are wary, skeptical and outspoken. They respect trust either. I like them. It surprised me -- in view of this bred-in wariness of theirs -- to find they liked me, too -- more accurately, it surprised me that on very short acquaintance I found I was being given more warmth and trust than I had any reason to expect. Then someone explained it to me. The acquaintance was not short at all. The Yugoslav sf readers had known me very well for a good many years, as they know a lot of Western sf writers, through our published work. Principal sf book publishing house is called "jugoslavie," and they bring out a nice-looking line of hardbounds in uniform black-andwhite laminated plastic covers: Brave New World, The Space Merchants, #, Blish's The Seedling Stars and other by English-American authors, plus writers from Strugatsky brothers) and elsewhere. There does not seem to be any real native science fiction in Yugoslavia. A few writers have tried it, but none have been translated into English, and the locals spoke politely but not enthusiastically about their work. Nearly every sf book is available, at least in small quantities, in imported editions, usually English Penquins or French paperbacks. I assume there is some sort of censorship. but it does not seem terribly strict. I saw everything from Solzhenitsyn through karate manuals to raunchy German nudie magazines freely on sale, in general publishing categories, and a wide assortment of sf. They are all in foreign languages, but that doesn't make as much difference as it might in, say, the U.S. Nearly all educated Yugoslavs appear to speak at least two languages well, and I have met some who were fluent in eight or ten. Belgrade names its principal streets after great revolutionary leaders of history, including that great American, Dzordza Vasingtona. One of my public lectures got canceled for political reasons. It wasn't banned, exactly. It was just that there was some sort of unclear directive, and the sponsoring authority decided to play it safe and call the lecture off. Another, under exactly the same directive, went off freely and to a large audience. That was in the Student Cultural Centre -- a snappy looking building out of a #s Astaire-Rogers movie, that before the war had been a Royal Yugoslav Arniy officers' club. The audience was nominally "youth," although I saw at least four or five men with actual long white beards, and it went very well, especially in the discussion period that followed. This is a major difference between Yugoslavia and other Eastbloc countries: the Yugoslavs are The discussion was a lot like any American college or sf-club rap session, including impassioned debate on New Wave vs. Old. One student made a #-minute impassioned speech in Serbo-Croatian denouncing me for my invidious attack against Stanley Kubrick (I had said that in my opinion the last third of #I was a meaning-free light show plus some stale Jean Cocteau surrealism; I have said the same thing to American audiences, and gotten the same response.) For a moment it felt like a lynch mob forming, and everybody was trying to talk at once. Attendance was # male. None of the few girls present took any part in the discussion, although at my press conferences several of the reporters were pretty young girls, at least one of them a red-hot fan. There's a handsome mountain called Avala near Belgrade; people go there on one-day excursions. It has a very modern TV tower, and a celebrated monument to the Yugoslav war dead. It also has a small plague to the memory of Soviet Marshal Zhokov, who died there a few years ago when his plane crashed into the mountain. The guide books don't say much about the plaque. Every Yugoslav knows all about it, though. When Zhukov decided to come to Belgrade on a state visit the Russians insisted on putting their own air traffic controller in the airport tower, and the poor fellow got mixed up between feet and meters in giving landing instructions. He wound up guiding the plane in about fifty feet under the runway. The Yugoslavs are course, probably hasn't got that much to be grateful for. Yugo TV has sampled most of the American science-fiction programs, without any of them being very popular. It surprised me that Star Trek didn't go bigger. With all the Trekkies in the U.S., I confidently expected at least some mad partisanship anywhere in the world the series appeared... but the Yugos (remember?) aren't much given to wild enthusiasm. The ones I talked to about it shrugged and said politely, "Perhaps twenty years ago it would have been more interesting." So it ran four weeks and that was that. I was in Belgrade during the Tenth Party Congress, which meant the hotels were full of Communist Party Delegates from all over the world, even places like San Marino, and four or five times a day the main streets would be closed off so that some big wheel, usually Marshal Tito, could drive by at ninety miles an hour. You can always tell when it's Tito, because his private ambulance is always in the motorcade. He is #, and that week he was made President of Yugoslavia for life. I said delicately to a Yugoslavian friend that making a man of # life president was not quite as farreaching a step as with a man, of say, half that age. He said, just as delicately, that that point had not been lost on anyone. Yugoslavia has its own sciencefiction film Festival, more or less competing with the one every year in Trieste, Italy, right across the Adriatic. Yugoslavia's is "biennial," which means whenever they can afford to put it on. The next one will likely be in #. It will be held on the Adriatic coast, with the most marvelous mountains and bays you've ever seen... and the most terrifying German drivers of Porsches and Audis, down from Munich for the weekend and determined to make the round trip in record time. Yugoslav food is good, at least up to a point, but the best dishes are native. If you don't have an interpreter, you can always fall back on Yugoslavia's answer to the hot dog, What's-Its-Name-#. That isn't its real name, but it's all you need to order it. It looks like ten small sausages, tastes somewhere between a spicy hamburger and an ungreasy hot dog and is always served with plenty of chopped raw onion. Very good, especially if you don't plan to breathe on anyone. Its special virtue is that you don't need to know its name. It is always served # pieces at a time, and it is the only dish that is always served that way, so whenever you see .Something-or-Other-# on a Yugoslav menu that's it. Just point to it and enjoy. The State Department offered me all sorts of visual aids and stuff to help dress up my tour. I said, "yes, thank you" to everything, and that was the last we heard of that. Except for the films. They asked me what films I thought would be of interest in Eastern Europe, mentioning that their own researchers had suggested Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet. Silent Running and The Thing. I said with great tact that these were all fine films, but not exactly the newest and most exciting. I recommended #, Sleeper, Westworld and several others. So we got Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet, Silent Running and The Thing. Jhe basic lecture At least I knew something about each of the four films: the handicapped children who had played the robots in Silent Running, the background of Forbidden Planet and the subsequent adventures of Robby the Robot, the making of Fantastic Voyage as it had been told to me by Jerry Bixby, who wrote the script. And I was happy to tell them the inside story of The Thing. Time was when the late John W. Campbell wrote a truly marvelous science-fiction story. It was called Who Goes There?, and it has been voted the most famous science-fiction novella of all time, and it deserves it. Who Goes There? took place on the South Pole, involved a creature from outer space who could assume any shape he chose, even yours or mine, undetectably, and was not only rattling good adventure but contained much meat for philosophizing on questions of identity, good and evil and all that. It was really a fine story, and it would have made a marvelous movie. A producer who read it realized this, so he bought it. He then turned it over to a script writer. Who made some changes. It had been at the South Pole; he changed it to the North Pole. It had been about an alien who could assume any shape; it now became about an alien who had a very specific shape: he looked like a giant, man-eating carrot. And all the thought and insight into identity and reality were dropped in favor of one of the dumbest boygirl stories I have ever seen, plus a lot of people being hit over the head. And he put it all together and called it The Thing (short for The Thing from Outer Space). I do not want to give you the impression that I dislike The Thing. That would be a wrong impression. I loathe it. For one thing, I had to see it three times in three weeks; and you don't know how bad a film is until you watch it with a bunch of people who don't understand the dialogue and have to get by on the visual story, which in this particular film hardly exists. For another, even if it were a good film I would resent it. It is a travesty on Who Goes There?, which could have been a superb film and now, because The Thing was made, will never be a film at all. I also told the Eastblockers about what was happening in current American science fiction. To illustrate, I told them about three different, brand-new books -- two of them so new that they haven't been published yet, although they will be very shortly. I selected the books with some care, first because I consider them fine books, second because there is very little chance that any of them will ever be published in any of the Eastbloc countries, and yet they signify to me some of the most interesting new directions in sf today. One was Samuel R. Delany's mammoth new novel, Dhalgren: a counter-culture story about a strange city somewhere in America, where some inexplicable disaster has taken place. Dhalgren is the most sensually explicit sf novel I remember reading. It isn't porno; but it is naked, nothing is fudged, nothing is concealed, everything is explored. The second was Joanna Russ's time novel about women in three parallel worlds, and a tract for women's lib... so good that I admire it immensely, although I have the bad luck to be a man. The third is Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed: an interplanetary socio-space opera, beautifully written and peopled, taking place on the worlds around a distant star after the Earth has all but destroyed itself. It too is a tract -- for a sort of libertarian anarchy, against Big Government. I do not believe Eastern Europe will see very much of these books. The LeGuin is, I am sure, politically unacceptable. So, in a different way, is the Russ: the women's liberation movement does not exist anywhere in Eastern Europe. It is not allowed to exist; official government wisdom decrees that it has already attained its objectives, under their laws. And the Delany is the least publishable of them all, by Redland standards. Socialist countries are less sexually tolerant than Queen Victoria ever was. I also told them about as many other Western writers as I had time for. There are only about half a dozen living Western sf writers who are fairly well known through the socialist countries. I'm one, mostly on the basis of three or four very widely translated books and stories like The Space Merchants, Tunnel Under the World and The Midas Plague. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov. Arthur C. Clarke, and at most one or two others complete the list. Of people like Larry Niven, Andre Norton, Frank Herbert, even Robert A. Heinleirt they have heard very little; so I tried to tell them, too, about the writers I thought they might publish... especially as most of the Eastbloc countries have now joined the International Copyright Convention, and presumably will start paying for new books in real, globally spendable currency. When there was a general audience (as distinct from members of the Writer's Union, Journalists, etc.), I also tried to tell them something about the weird and wonderful world of American science-fiction fandom, with its conventions, fanzines, feuds and enthusiasms. But I don't think they believed me. The hardest thing for me to get across in this whole series of encounters was that there are no answers to questions like, "What does American science fiction think of the future?" or "How does American science fiction view political questions?" Over and over I kept repeating that we are a bunch of stubborn individualists, and what is true of Delany is nowhere near true of Niven, Heinlein does not map against Bradbury, etc. I am not sure they believed me there, either. To some extent I think many Eastbloc sf writers cannot imagine a society in which there is not a party line. And I suspect that some of them would be uncomfortable without the guidance it provides. Bucharest is a beautiful city. Looks like a clean Paris. You can live like a king in Bucharest, if you have the money. I thought the restaurant food was awful, but I am told that is because I never got far from the hotel except to go to private homes for meals (which were great.) Some of the specialties are good. A favored fish is called "Crap," so when you pick up a menu you are likely to see four or five different kinds of crap on it. Tourists like to buy canned crap to take home for gifts for their friends. I didn't do this. I've never liked the idea of carrying a lot of crap around. The Romanian Writers' Union laid on a special round-table meeting for me with their Science-Fiction Section. It was a full-dress affair: coffee, wine, cakes and the Romanian equivalent of slivovitz. The long table was loaded with Romanian sf: about a dozen original novels, another dozen short-story collections, plus odds and ends. They also have translated a fair amount of Western sf, but nowhere near as much as they would like. The reason is commendable. Romania is dollar-poor; they try to keep their foreign policy and their economy independent of Moscow (El AI flies into Bucharest, and Romania kept up diplomatic relations with Israel all through the disturbances), and so they devote most of their export earnings to heavy machinery for industrialization. On the other hand, they don't publish without paying, as Certain Neighbor Nations have been known to do. When they can find a way to pay for more, they will publish more. They are, I think, a likeable lot. (But it may be that I am an easy mark: I've never been in a country where I didn't find people I liked a lot. Nor have I ever been in a country where I liked the government very much... including my own.) The Secretary of the Writers' Union, Ion Hobana, is himself a science-fiction writer of considerable distinction. He is a handsome, distinguished-looking, cordial, intelligent man somewhat resembling Philip Jose Farmer. He has traveled widely, has read everything of any importance in American and in fact world science fiction and would be an asset to any writers' or publishers' group anywhere. He, through the Writers' Union, does a lot to encourage new sf blood in Romania. Last year they had a nationwide contest to discover new talent. "Several hundred" amateur stories were entered, each with the names removed to give each a fair chance. About forty were considered promising enough for the final round, and the winner was a young man named Mircea Oprita. They tell me he writes extremely maturely and well, and I hope somehow to find a way to get some of his work published in the U.S. You don't have to belong to the Writers' Union to get published. It you've published a few stories, the Union will probably invite you to join. Then you get the benefits: protection on royalties and subsidiary rights, opportunities to use the club facilities, use of Unionowned vacation hotels, etc. I did not see these in Romania, but if they are half what they're cracked up to be I would like to join that union. After I spoke at the Writers' Union roundtable there was quite a lengthy and varied discussion. One man got up and made a lengthy rejoinder in abstract, metaphysical terms, which appeared to concentrate on the subject of The Meaning of SF Considered as Mythopoeia. When he was finished several of the writers present immediately said. "That's your opinion," and one said the Romanian equivalent of "Bullshit." Made me feel right at home, that did. The place in Bucharest you shouldn't photograph is the headquarters building of the Communist Party of Romania. There is no particular reason that you would want to, except that it happens to be right behind a pretty church and park. The cops lurk in the park. I saw my only Eastbloc fanzine in Romania. Throughout socialist Europe all printing facilities, including mimeograph machines, are all state-owned, and it is not advisable to try to set one up in your basement. So all publishing is official. The fanzine, named Solaris, gets around this by using the mimeo facilities of a university. It is published. edited and written by students. I am not very sure of its contents (anyone who reads French, Spanish or Italian can make out a few words of Romanian, but in my case not enough to have much confidence), but they appear to be entirely fiction; no articles, no columns, no fan feuds, no ads for Star Trek posters. I asked the American Embassy in Moscow to wire me a copy of my Russian travel plans via the American Embassy in Bucharest. They did, right off. Unfortunately somebody along the line marked it "classified," so they couldn't show it to me. A Romanian translator is now finishing up a version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit for immediate publication. The same translator did Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, which sold out nationwide in twelve hours. They expect Tolkien to sell out just as fast. The University of Bucharest maintains an Institute of Futurology. I had a pleasant meeting with two of their head persons. They were very interested in western forecasting ("primarily, of course, in methodology and validation processes; not, of course, in political or ideological matters," one of them spelled out) and I promised to put them on the mailing list for the World Future Society's # General Assembly in Washington. Their basic approach to forecasting is analytical and mathematical. It so happens that I consider this approach hopelessly formal and sterile. I explained this to them, and they courteously inclined their heads. I looked forward especially to going to Moscow, because I have close personal friends there, fellow veterans of the Japanese International Science-Fiction Symposium of #. That was a marvelous bash. The Japanese had imported a selection of foreign writers: Judith Merril, for Canada; Brian W. Aldiss, England; Arthur C. Clarke, delegate for the world at large (but principally Sri Lanka, as they have now taken to calling his home base of Ceylon); myself for the U.S. And there was also a five-man Soviet delegation, headed by a handsome, cosmopolitan editor named Vassili Zakharchenko. My wife and I had happened to meet one of the other Soviets, a teachercritic-historian named Y-uli Kagarlitski, in London a few years earlier, and found him delightfully humorous and well informed. Otherwise East and West were total strangers. It was like a miniature U.N. We each knew the members of our own bloc very well, and looked with suspicion and curiosity at all the strangers. We tended to huddle in our own groups and peer perplexedly at the others: The western sf people on one side, the Soviets on the other and the Japanese huddling worriedly in between. It looked like being a sticky week. It did not begin particularly well, either. Arthur Clarke gave a keynote speech, quite formal, on the challenge of space. Vassili Zakharchenko gave an equally formal address on socialist realism in sf. Considered purely as lectures, they were up to the very high professional standards of excellence of both of them; but considered as first tentative steps to friendly association, they didn't do much. For one thing, the translation problem was acute. The Japanese had wisely provided two sets of translators: one fluent in English, the other fluent in science fiction. It didn't solve the problem, but it certainly eased it. But Zakharchenko chose to speak in Russian, fairly enough. So their official translator, a pretty girl who was part of the delegation, first rendered his Russian into Japanese, and then the Japanese teams did them into English. It all took forever, and by the time they were finished there was not a great deal left of Zakharchenko. Also it was a time when international tension was pretty high. Pingpong diplomacy had not yet started. China was the wild card in everybody's hand. Several of us in all three groups were old enough to have been in uniform in World War #, and it was sort of disconcerting to shake somebody's hand and realize that if I had happened to encounter him twenty-five years earlier it would have been our mutual duty to kill each other. And the Lion and the Unicorn, were still cold-warring for the crown of the world . Running any kind of sciencefiction conference is a chancy business, since so many of us are prima donnas. I really admired the courage of the Japanese. Not only were they facing up to all the usual problems of logistics and personalities, but they must have felt they were running a very real risk of starting But then, after the formal ceremonies, a marvelous Japanese writer named Tetsu Yano took over. Tetsu is a jolly, bright man who designs remarkably innovative advertising displays as well as writing science fiction. He announced that he was master of ceremonies for the remainder of the evening, and instructed us all, all eight or ten Russians, Ukranians, Canadians, Americans and British clumped restlessly on the stage, that we would each have to do a vaudeville turn. Arthur Clarke was required to do a South Sea Islands hula. Zakharchenko was instructed to give a three-minute speech in Japanese. Judy's assignment was a talk on the joys and perils of being a grandmother. The Ukranian sf writer sang a Ukranian folk ballad -- no one understood a word of it. not even the other Soviets, but it was obviously a funny little song. My wife, Carol, was asked to assume that I had vanished into hyperspace and she had to choose her next husband from among the couple of hundred people in the room. We all did our silly, amusing, good-natured little bits. And all of a sudden the air was let out of all our stuffed shirts. We were all giggling like fools together, and the symposium was alive and well at last. For the next week or ten days we lived in each others' pockets, drank Armenian brandy and American Coke together, sang, strolled, lectured, explored: we became a family. So we have all had a very special affection for each other since then that transcends personal, political and national differences; and that is why, among other reasons, f was looking forward to Moscow. Moscow is not only the capital of headquarters of its publishing business, the center of everything and the place where every Soviet who doesn't live there wishes he did. It is where the Action is. To an outsider, it isn't a particularly endearing city. It is monumental rather than beautiful, huge rather than appealing. Most of the way it looks is due to Joseph Stalin. He lived there; and he liked to decorate his home in styles that appealed to him. What appealed to him was mostly heroic statues and peculiarly gingerbready skyscrapers. dotted all over the city, in the style that is called Stalin-baroque. The celebrated Moscow subway is everything that has been claimed for it: clean, beautiful, spacious, fast, efficient and cheap -- seven cents, to go anywhere in the city. And in the last few years Moscow has filled up with cars. The Soviets imported a whole auto factory from the Italian Fiat people, and the result is that on the way to the airport leaving Moscow I was caught in an authentic and wholly unexpected Moscow traffic jam. The public face most Muscovites wear is dour and withdrawn. In private they are like anybody else, or a little jollier. real science-fiction magazine, and has no immediate plans to publish one. However, several of the major magazines publish sf (even Literaturya Gazetya, the classiest literary weekly), and one or two of them publish it regularly. One of these is a young people's science and handicraft magazine called Teknika-Molodezhi The editor is my old Japanese-band-ofbrothers friend Vassili Zakharchenko. He publishes some sf in every issue, both because he likes it and because the readers do. My entourage and I paid a ceremonial visit to their offices. (My entourage consisted of a State Department official and a Russian translator; later on the Writers' Union added a companion-cum-chaperone, and from time to time there was also a driver and some local dignitaries. It was a little like being in a parade.) As Teknika-Molodezhi had just published two of my stories, they ceremoniously handed me a brownpaper envelope containing # rubles and # kopecs. So I at last had my first taste of Moscow Gold. (I innocently inquired what had become of the royalties on the various other books and stories published in the Soviet Union over the past decade or so. The answer was translated very carefully, but I do not think I understand it. It had something to do with a statute of limitations; Moscow Gold is fairy gold, it appears, and if you don't pick it up in three years, it melts away.) The publishing house that owns Teknika-Molodezhi also publishes a number of science-fiction books, as well as a lot of everything; it is a big enterprise, with a circulation of The editor-in-chief is a woman of about fifty, very sharp and understanding, who wants to do more science fiction, and probably will. Moscow restaurant food is awful. for some reason.) Most of it is imitation-cosmopolitan, and even the Russian national dishes are spotty. There used to be a Chinese restaurant in Moscow that was highly recommended. It is still there, but not so highly recommended; the menu has gone all queer. Apparently during the problems with China the chef went home. The best places to eat in Moscow are private or organizational: the union clubs. The House of Journalists has the reputation of possessing the best kitchen in Moscow, and it is all due to Nikita Khrushchev. When he was running the country he believed in pampering journalists. So he made sure they had the finest chefs, the best foodstuffs, the most modern and complete facilities and the prettiest waitresses. Khrushchev isn't around any more, so things have gone off a little: the prettiest of the waitresses married Journalists and their replacements appear to be dropout Aeroflot hostesses. But the chef is still extraordinary. The House of Writers is a negligible amount less exciting for food, but a lot more exciting for decor and history. In War and Peace there is a description of a grand ball in Moscow. The ballroom, and mansion that housed it, was real, it was the home of an extremely wealthy nobleman, and Since the Revolution it has been the headquarters of the Writers' Union. (The ballroom scenes in the Russian film of War and Peace were shot there.) And now the writers eat where Pierre once danced and courted and went out to fight Napoleon. It is not too easy to get good food to cook in Moscow. The state grocery stores have plenty of food, but it's monotonous and not too choice in quality. You get the really good stuff from what the collective farmers have grown on their own initiative and brought up to Moscow to peddle. (This is legal, up to a point.) The prices are scary -- apples, I -- and so it pays a farmer to stuff a suitcase full of fresh lettuce from his private plot, hop in an Aeroflot jet, sell it off in Moscow and fly back. It is not just apples. It is everything from fresh violets to goat cheese -- which, I think, accounts for the mighty aroma that distinguishes Aeroflot planes on domestic routes. They are building enormous greenhouses in the outskirts of the northern cities in order to grow fresh vegetables hydroponically all year around, which may make a considerable difference some time. Soviet joke: On a flight from Soviet Armenia to Moscow there was a hijacking. Everyone was terrified except for one collective farmer, who jumped up. attacked the armed hijackers with his bare hands, subdued them and turned them over to the police. "Comrade Collective Farmer," said the militiaman, "you are a Hero of Soviet Labor for your incredible bravery." "Bravery-shmavery," said the collective farmer. "What was I going to do with # kilos of tomatos in Turkey?" Had lunch with a Soviet Cosmonaut named Valentin Sevastyanov, one of the spacemen who spent eighteen days in orbit three or four years ago. Really bright, assertive, intelligent, friendly man. He is exactly like the American Astronauts I have met, except about # smaller. (All Soviet cosmonauts, I am told, were required to be under #'#" to tit into their spacecraft.) For years I had hostile feelings against the American astronauts, I think because of the incredibly image they projected. Then I began to meet and know some of them, and they aren't like that at all. They are good, courageous men who have done remarkable things, and apart from that they are as complex and indefinable as you and I and everyone else. Valenti Sevastyanov was the same admirable breed. He took me to his home for a drink (lovely huge apartment in the best part of Moscow) and we discussed mutual friends and how we felt about space. I listened with interest to what he saw ("The strangest thing was the Moon, which was yellowish-brown from space. The stars were very bright, in conspicuous colors, and there were two or three times as many as from Earth, so that I could not recognize constellations."), and shared what he felt ("In orbit I could see how small the world was, just one tiny grain of dust in the universe. I became more sure than ever that we must all learn how to live on it together like good neighbors."). One wall of his apartment is devoted to medals and trophies, another to ikons. ("I myself am atheist, but I consider these beautiful art.") He shares the apartment with his pretty wife, young daughter, and young daughter's young puppy. The pup is named Snoopy. The Soviets are planning to call a World Socialist Countries Science Fiction International Symposium sometime soon. It appears not to be definite whether westworlders may be invited at least as guests or observers. Should be interesting either way. science fiction on radio or television, barring some discussions on talk shows. Nothing dramatized that anyone could remember. I watched some Russian TV from time to time, when I had the chance to spend a little time in my hotel room. Not knowing the language doesn't help, but my impression is that it isn't a lot of fun. The big viewer attraction is sports. The rest of it is news or how-to-be-a-betterSoviet-person docymentaries or films. One of the documentaries was on the subject of why it is very bad, comrade, to be late for work, since it means your whole department is thrown off schedule. The lecture (with film clips illustrating sides of beef piling up on hooks because Sergei didn't show up to push them over to the other side of the meatpacking plant) was delivered by a chuckling father-figure with white hair. I think I have seen the same fellow on American TV. He was a chuckling fatherly doctor selling hemmorhoid medicine. The one film I saw at any length was about a wise, fatherly Red Army sergeant whose squad, for some reason, had to occupy a village in the Soviet Far East. There was this boy who was afraid they were going to hurt his goat, so he mistakenly threw rocks at them and wounded the sergeant, but the sergeant understood the boy's problem and, very decently I thought, took time to w'in him over. On formal debate occasions one hears some Soviet sf writers complain that what is wrong with American science fiction is that it projects a view of the world of the future in which the ordinary man is regimented, deprived of his individual rights of self-expression and doomed to inhabit a gritty, unsatisfying society. I never did manage to think up a reply to this which was both truthful and polite. Tbilisi is the capital of Soviet Georgia, and the czars called it "Titlis." The Georgians are a strikingly self-sufficient people. They preserve their traditions with practically Yugoslavian stubbornness. Stalin liquidated a higher proportion of Georgians than of any other nationality, but he was a Georgian himself and they still have a sort of wry pride in him. (The only picture of Stalin I have ever seen in the Soviet Union was a portrait on sale in a Tbilisi shop window.) There are no Georgian sf writers, but there may be. While I was there the Georgian writers' union decided to set up a special science-fiction section, which will start by translating Russian and foreign sf into Georgian and then, hopefully, will try to foster local talent. Many, many Georgians appear to have read a fair amount of sf in Russian translations or in the originals. They like it. They want more. Anybody care to bet on a Tbilisi bid for the # Worldcon? Leningrad was the home of the Grand Old Man of Soviet science fiction, Biyaelev. His books are numberless, and most of them still in print; I am not sure just what they are like, but get the impression they are basically juveniles with adult interest, rather like the Heinleins. Leningrad, of course, was besieged and surrounded by the Nazis throughout three years of World War II. The inhabitants were cut off from food and fuel, and were reduced to burning the books in the libraries and eating stews made out of the glue from the bindings, among even less attractive substances. There are no native Leningraders aged around thirty. All the babies and small children either were somehow gotten out of the city, or died. Among the casualties was the Biyaelev. As far as I could find out, they do not even know where his body was buried. There was not much time for niceties in Leningrad in the '#s. I was in Leningrad around the time of the summer solstice, and would not have missed it for anything. Leningrad is the farthest north of any metropolis in the world, not far below the Arctic Circle. On Midsummer's Day the sun never really sets. I went out to dinner and fell into conversation (about sf, transformational grammar and Finnegan's Wake) and in the heat of discussion failed to keep track of the time. Outside the window it was broad daylight, and it was a shock to look at my watch at last and see that it was one o'clock in the morning. So we went strolling on the banks of the Neva River, two, three o'clock, and crowds of people walking around, laughing, chatting, couples arm in arm, kids listening to Western music on transistor radios held to their ears. It is like champagne bubbling in your blood. I don't know why. But it is. It is a temptation to wind up this series of notes with a set of concluReally Like. I will try to pass up that temptation. What it is like is itself, and nothing else. It is everything you have ever heard about it, and many things quite different. It is a tightly controlled police state, but it is also a place where I heard natives say rather astonishingly frank things. One anecdote. While I was waiting for a plane at one of the airports I fell into conversation with a couple of journalists on their way to an assignment. They turned out to be dyed-in-thewool sf fans, and we became pretty friendly, especially as we were becoming rapidly awash in Soviet w ine. So one of them offered a toast to us meeting again. And I offered a toast to all of us meeting again, with their families, in my own country. And another of them stood up and raised his glass. "I drink," he said, "to the difference between science fiction and fantasy. When my friend here proposed a toast to our meeting again, that was science fiction. But then my new friend Frederik proposed a toast, and that was to all of us meeting again, in the United States, with our families; and that, my dear friends, was fantasy." o W #C When our science finally succeeds in penetrating to the core of our humanity -- we may find more than we bargained for! Q D I  I With thanks to Samuel R. Delany and Robert P. Holdstock 'thick lenses confronted the stu'You're with the Chan-Monteith Institute? Is this research for a paper, or what? Why are you asking me all these questions?' The dark young man refilled the drinking cup and offered it. The melancholy sound of a songtape tilled the silence, while the professor's hand hesitated, then accepted. 'I have this feeling I should talk to you,' said the student. 'I found some old records from the Memory Project of '#. I wondered what had become of you. That's all.' '.So now you know what's become of me. I teach biology at Idaho AM. Keep the cup tilled... what did you say your name was.' His voice reflected no interest. 'Why did you quit?' 'Why does anyone quit?' The man produced an old-fashioned pipe and filled it; an elaborate procedure of stuffing and tamping. 'Not enough reward... the place was too claustrophobic... what business is it of yours, anyway?' The student smiled, and said again, 'I had this feeling.' The professor winced. 'There was a time when "having a feeling" was regarded as crackpot. Unscientific. The whole Karma bit -- we didn't have time for that. We used to have discipline. We did our research logically -- step by step, proving everything over and over, believing nothing we couldn't prove.' 'We still do that, even in the social sciences,' replied the student. 'Did you think scientific method had drowned?' 'In a sea of mysticism.' The pipe required relighting, and he spoke from a cloud of blue smoke. 'Listen to that drivel. Even the pop songs, reduced to a #-tone scale. We used to have tw'elve -- we lose and lose.' The boy was used to the Oriental resonances of modern instruments,' where sympathetic strings iterate and reiterate the melody, lingering within the ears and bloodstream, the delicacy of single tones developing into implications of lifetimes... or so it was agreed. The tape suddenly spew'ed out a cacophony of nostalgic rock-and-roll. 'Christ!' the professor slammed down his cup. 'That's Lui-zhe! It was meant for the koto.' 'I thought you didn't approve...' "'And the wild horses pulled us along the sand, then, in those blossom-days..."' he quoted bitterly. 'I'hat's a ch'in song, not rock-and-roll. Can't they tell anything apart any more?' 'I didn't really come here to discuss music,' said the student. He refilled the emptied cup. 'I wanted to understand why you quit the Institute.' The older man looked at him, and swirled the liquid in the cup. He took in the narrow, aquiline face, the black straight hair. 'How old are you?' 'Almost eighteen.' 'I was nineteen when I joined the Institute. I w as there two years.' He fell silent, eyes unfocusing. 'I know' that.' The boy waited. Then, 'You were doing some work on the five-root of five.' Liquor slopped on the plastic surface of the table as the man jerked. He sat immobile for a moment and said, 'What have you found out?' 'Nothing much,' said the boy blandly. 'I just have this feeling.' '.So you have a feeling. What of it?' The boy regarded him steadily. The back of his neck shivered as he gazed at the sharp, self-possessed young face. 'You too have a feeling. Don't you?' said the student with a bright slow smile. 'All right, all right.' The professor sat back heavily. 'May god help me, I do. I don't understand who you are or what you want... but I suppose I don't understand who I am either, so what the hell -- keep that cup tilled, kid. Out of respect for the dead.' 'Who is dead, then?' He set down the carafe. 'I don't know why I said that... fhe place is still going. I'm still going. But in those days both of us were just out of the egg. All bright and shiny new. "fhe Institute was just about my age. sprawling over the last remaining bit of Connecticut countryside. The mysterious East was taking us over, lock, stock and barrel. No need for the war our parents had been so worried about -- just a series of small insignificant events; youngsters traveling to god knows where looking for mystic experience: the meditation-encountergroup craze: instant nirvana through drugs: and the gradual leaking away of faith in the capitalist virtues. All things were turning inward -- no more racing for the conquest of outer space. And we went socialist. 'Suddenly we were having intimate relations with China. Cooperative this, the People's that. The Institute was a symbol of "scientific cooperation between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America". Both parties contributed their best equipment. But with competition, there was a shortage of good personnel. They had to scrounge all over the world... there's something -- unstirred -- about the statedirected... 'At any rate, the West had swallowed the East, whole. I think we were choking. Maybe it's better nowadays, I don't know... My students here still seem uneasy.' 'We live in interesting times,' said the boy. 'But some of us see great opportunities -- very great indeed.' 'Oh, so did we. The only drawback was that we had to work for group credit, and the groups didn't quite blend. Sure, they all spoke English, but they thought in Mandarin. French, Hindi, god knows what. It was Mom's apple pie with soy sauce and socialist realism... but I wasn't aware of the cultural indigestion then. All I knew was that personal ambition had been declared obsolete... I suppose that's still true, isn't it?' 'So they say,' said the student, shrugging. The quick flash. of his black eyes was not hooded soon enough. The man hesitated. '... Fill the cup again.' He wiped his beard. P jMemorv Project. There were was in the group trying to isolate the memory-controlling components of human chromosomes -- by working with rats and mice, of course.' 'What can you tell about us by watching vermin?' said the boy scornfully. 'A very great deal. Lab animals aren't vermin; they have been carefully bred for years.' 'So being laboratory-bred makes them superior. Interesting. Go on.' The professor frowned. 'Where was I? 'We had plenty of animals; we #(X) computer, the BR-# microscope -- which makes holographic images all the way down to atomic level. We had a collection of chromosome maps, almost all blank spaces waiting for us to fill them in. Some damn fool scrawled "Here there be Dragons" all over them, and started a row with the Peking contingent. It took nearly a month to soothe them down, and by then we knew each other pretty well, language barriers or no. 'Our lab had a central conveyor belt that received our slides and carried them to be freeze-dried, then to whatever microscope we wanted to use. We had readout panels and an immense library and filing system in the computer... Christ, that was a marvelous machine. Saved months of working time.' 'How could you bear to leave it, then?' 'I'm getting to that. I'm getting to it,' said the man testily. 'Don't you kids learn patience along with your ideograms? 'So there we were, confronted with models, holographs, screens, data banks, waldoes. all the machinery we could possibly need, staring into the enigmatic little patterns called chromosomes... 'I used to be a skinny kid with long thin fingers. When I was six I could lift a cobweb from its moorings without breaking it. When I was fourteen I discovered I could turn a girl on by feather-brushing my fingertips on the back of her neck. A delicate touch, they said. Watchmakers were out of date. Work with something small, they said. Might as well have flippers for all the use it was in this job. Small, yes. Molecules are like that. 'The trouble was that the meaning of every molecule was altered by the meaning of every other, and by the time the information reached our sloppy, gross perceptions it was distorted. The machine measured as accurately as we could conceive measurements; and beyond. Our grubby little notions were turned ridiculous. We were too ponderous to hear the laughter. We never saw chromosomes; thousands of square watched -- what? An infinitesimal brushing of yes and no, no and yes, defining the basis of identity. I began to feel that numbers were the wrong language, and that was all we had. 'The papers piled up. We hunted lor clues. We had found out a few things, pencilled in a few guesses on the blank maps. We had, possibly, established that Chromosome # contained some of what we were seeking, information that would eventually control cortical development. We had applied the molecular knife to thousands of muscine molecules. There were results. oh yes, there were results. We had bred mice who had lost the sucking reflex and starved with the teat in their mouths. We had rats who built nests and waited for something to happen but had forgotten w hat. We had mice with perfect vision who blundered into obstacles. and mice who regarded (heir food as a mortal enemy. We had proved these instincts to be inherited memory, some part of which was inherent on Chromosome #. But we couldn't isolate predict what results we would get from what seemed to be the identical manipulation. 'And I hated the angle of attack. I dreamed of doing something with my animals that would add to their capacities -- make them remember something they could not have known -- something beyond instinct. But I couldn't do any more with giving than with taking. How could you tell if a mouse knows something it shouldn't? They can hardly tell you their reminiscences. 'And the Skinner-box gadgets were a dead end. Once, only once, a specimen went immediately to the correct set-up, pressed the correct button, and did it six times in a row . The ghost of Lysenko grinned over our shoulders. The other lab groups came in to see our Mouse. Then the little bastard blew the seventh try and never got it right again, nor his children nor his grandchildren or any unto the twentieth generation. We checked him out for injury, brain damage, anything. No dice. No repetition, no explanation. Another mighty triumph for Chance. 'So we brooded over charts and models and holographs until our eyes ached, and spent a lot of time Fooling around with the girls in the group and drinking coffee. The molecules hung there on their chains, knobs of acid twisted into helices making fools of us... 'One day while I was passing the time doodling the door opened and someone came in with a tray of slides. Just another tech in a white coat, seen out of the corner of my eye, till I glanced up. A white Cheongsam, not a lab coat, slit up the sides. She glided in effortlessly balancing the slide boxes, seeming to cross the room without any visible motions. Her face was plumgold above the white, her smooth dark hair coiled high. Her legs shimmered inside the long slit skirt. 'I dropped my notes in a jumble. The slight sound caused my neighbor to jump and as he raised his head to complain he saw her too. His expression embarrassed me. I closed down my own face. 'The girl set the trays on the counter and turned to leave. No one spoke. She did not seem to notice us at all. As the door swung behind her the bodies in the room came back to life. 'Across the table. Lisbeth sighed. "I'm going to hang out a sign saying 'Plain Sewing,"' she said, looking ruefully at her own pretty legs. Nobody could answer. Until then we had thought her beautiful. 'The other men left the room, ever so casually. Some returned, their expressions saying, do not intrude. I finally escaped and as soon as I was out of earshot of the others pelted down the corridor to Anstruther's office.' 'Anstruther!' said the student. 'The Anstruther?' 'Of course, the Anstruther. He was Director then. He must be near retirement by this time.' 'He has retired,' said the boy. His expression was an odd mixture of satisfaction, malice and regret. 'Please go on.' VV out of breath. "Who was that tech that just came in?" 'He smiled, looking sleek and smug. "Yes, she is, isn't she?" he said pleasantly. 'Anstruther-san, for god's sake, don't hold out on me now.' I suppose I was pushing my luck; I thought we were friends. "'Calm yourself, Ric. You're the last in line -- they've all been in here in the past couple of minutes." 'I sat down slowly. I managed barely to level my wild heartbeat. "'She's magnificent." "'I didn't realize that she would cause so much disruption." He swiveled in his leather chair, his bulk lumbering after the swinging jowl. "She's just a new tech, that's all. We're trying her out on the job." "'Well, I'll tell you something. She won't go home alone tonight.'" "'No. Go back to work, Ric." "'Won't you tell me where she went? Is that all you'll say?" "'That's all." He withdrew his attention. I went back. On the way I realized I was very angry. Had he meant that he would be taking her home? Was he presuming to decide upon whom he would bestow her. and did he have any right? At least, I told myself, I hadn't deluded myself that he and I were close friends. What in hell was he up to? My rage must have exploded into my voice. As I reached the lab, I shouted "He says she's just a new tech. Period." The chattering of the others died back. The air was thick with resentment. At me, at Anstruther, I didn't know; but a few minutes later I was alone. But even my microscope panel had gone dark. i stayed late anyway. I wasn't going to beg. I stared at meaningless notes on the nature of memory. The notes stared back. The autoclaves and freezers hummed away, unperturbed. My fingers kept feeling the smoothness of pale gold thigh instead of paperex. Black eyes slanted warmly through the charts. I thought I had better take a walk through the cool night air. 'Anstruther's office light was still on. The door was half-open. He called, "Come in, Ric." How had he known it was me? Never mind; as I pushed the door I saw her and forgot Anstruther. I remember wishing I'd changed my coat. Then I stopped. 'She stood by his desk, one hand resting lightly on an open book. She sat in the chair by the wall, her hands folded in her lap. She leaned against the chair, her hair slipping from the smooth coils. She knelt on the carpet studying a swatch of material intently. She stood, and faced me as I halted, stunned, with one foot paralyzed in midair. '"You see, she doesn't go home alone," said Anstruther merrily. "Better let him sit down, girls, before he falls over." 'One on each side, they guided me, holding my elbows, to the vacated chair. "'This, these, are Nyen-Hwa, Ric." 'Five graceful Oriental heads inclined toward me in a queenly gesture. I nodded weakly, like an unstrung marionette. "'Er -- hello," I muttered, inaudible even to myself. The Perfections looked at me gravely. She, they, said, "What is the trouble, Stan-Tzu?" "'I believe he finds you five times as beautiful as he had expected." "'Ah, ah. ah, ah, ah," the voices murmured. 'Anstruther leaned over and pulled open a drawer in his desk. "You'd better have a drink. You've been working rather late." He unsealed a white ceramic bottle. I recognized a middling brand of mao-tai; one of the ladies brought it to me, poured some in a tiny cup. '"Thanks." This time I achieved a gurgle. They all bowed again and I gulped at the drink. It steadied me a little, enough to say, "Anstruther-san, you're enjoying my confusion." 'He laughed heartily. "I am, I am. Now I'll take pity on you. These ladies are not quintuplets." "'Not quintuplets," I repeated stupidly. He had overestimated me. My reasoning powers had not yet reached so fine a point. '"Chan-Monteith is a big place. Research covers a lot of ground. We are rather proud of this little flowerbed." 'I was beginning to catch my breath -- as long as I kept my eyes off the girls. Five of them. '"Yes, Ric, they represent quite an achievement... the first successful human clone, raised to maturity in the Institute... We've been working on it for years, and only made it seventeen years ago. What a prize, eh?" 'I couldn't answer. I just sat there, as he went on. '"You can read up on it sometime, Ric. Right now -- I'm in the mood to celebrate!" He raised his cup in a toast. We drank. 'Questions half-formed in me, as in a dream. Raised in the Institute... what kind of education had the girls had, isolated from normal society? Even the experimental animals suffered from maternal deprivation; what had they been offered as parents? Anstruther? And how under god had they become so exquisite? The questions I might have asked then escaped me. I cared only that they should have known some kind of love. Humbled, I no longer felt even slightly adequate. "'Aren't you interested? This is the most spectacular genetic experiment of all time, and you sit there like a lump!" Anstruther heaved to his feet. "Look at 'em! Perfect!" '"I'm -- overwhelmed," I said. "What -- who -- ?" "'Aha! I'm glad you asked." He refilled my cup himself. Waving the carafe he gestured at the girls, now occupied with the swatches of brocade, silent. "'They don't need to talk much -- to each other. Their minds work alike, most of their associations are identical -- we had some trouble teaching them to talk at all." He turned his back to them and leaned over me confidentially. "'Wait till the Press hears about this," he whispered. "What a picture, eh?... You can chat with them whenever you like, if you can get 'em to answer you. They aren't very gabby." He straightened up. "Come along, girls, we'll walk you home," he said expansively. 'As one, they rose; the silk vanished. They proceeded, as in procession, to the doorway. Each back was perfectly straight; each delicate head set erect upon its ivory column; each pair of peach-grooved buttocks nearly motionless, so sweet and smooth the walk. 'And the musk-and-apple-blossom odour threw me into renewed confusion. Was I responding to what I wanted to find -- so intense a sexuality under the remote innocence? 'Helplessly, attached to Anstruther and his bouquet, I followed them down the hall, out into the grounds and along the path to the distant building we would know as the Pavilion. At the entrance we were greeted by a woman who introduced herself to me as "the girls' ayah -- they call me Mariji." Shethey accorded us a last formal bow and a smile that irradiated the serenity of golden faces, and was utterly contained. 'They needed no one, nothing. As distant as the Tang dynasty, they were complete. How inappropriate was my fearful desire...'" T he professor turned his head suddenly. The student was staring with fixed concentration. "What are you looking at?" 'Sorry. I was interested.' 'I didn't want to remember all this. It's been more than twenty years.' 'Go on. You know you must.' The professor sighed. 'I wish I didn't have that feeling.' 'The next day was chaotic. Anstruther had sent a release to the science columnists of the major papers and TV. As soon as one editor had got his hands on one photograph, the deluge set in. Even though our lab was at the far end of the grounds, they were in and out all day demanding directions to the 'Pavilion of Popsies", no less. When the astrology woman from day. 'Do you know what a palimpsest is, boy?' The student, startled, said, 'An ancient piece of writing. Why do you ask?' 'An ancient scrap that has been partly erased, and written over,' the older man amplified. palimpsest of the cell he cloned, our project was redundant. He must already know how to control genetic memory patterns and we were wasting our time. But he hadn't concelled us; and he had said I could read his records. I had to know how much control he'd had over that cloning cell seventeen years before. As I pushed my way across to the Pavilion -- surely all these arms and legs did not belong to reporters? -- I realized the monumental temptation facing the Director at this moment. Already he might have become entangled with a public construction, in which truth could easily get lost. 'The way in to the Pavilion was blocked by two fellows in uniforms. An army van was parked by the gate. I was stopped and searched in spite of my ID card. Finally a call was placed to Anstruther, who was understandably annoyed at the interruption of his interview. I had got in to the building. Now I was at a loss. It was obviously not the time to ask for those records. The hall was marvelously quiet after the uproar outside. I wandered down a corridor carpeted in white. It ended in a low archway, opening into a room whose contrast to the rest of the Institute was profound. Not a room, a chamber. The walls were hung with silk paintings... Complex thoughts; these must have been priceless, and by state order belonged in museums; dawning recognition that here was where they belonged, in this place designed for the Nyen-Hwas; a belated decision that they must be high-quality plastic replicas after all. Deep reddish drapes hung from the ceiling, not against the walls but at symmetrical positions in the room, gathered into cylindrical bunches and tied with cut velvet ribbons at intervals. The windows were elaborately leaded. '"Please remove the shoes in the Ming T'ang." She emerged from behind one of the curtain-pillars, golden. '"I'm sorry," I said, feeling at a heavy disadvantage as I bent over clumsily to remove the offensive shoes, which now seemed incredibly gross, and which I had no place to hide. "Er -- excuse me," I retreated to the doorway, holding the shoes. I was already a discourteous intruder in that place. "'Please do not go," she said. "Will you tell me what all the unusual noise is? I can't see from my windows." "'There are a lot of people who are curious about you... where are the others?" "'I am here," she said, with faint edge of surprise. 'They were all there, now that I looked again. "'Why are they curious about me?" said one. "'You are rather different from them, " I said helplessly. '"Yes." "'So they're curious." "'What are they like?" I wondered how they managed to speak one at a time; then realized that they must be used to anticipating and deciding. "'Well, like people are, all different.' That sounded lame even to me. I tried again. "You're very unusual. Most of the rest of us have experiences in common that you haven't shared. And we don't any of us think exactly alike. You haven't lived like ordinary people." "'But that is as it should be." "'Of course, but, well, the others are curious." 'There was laughter. "Are you also curious?" "'I -- yes." "'Please be seated." There were low cushions, without backrests. We sat -- one of us with cracking knees. "I have curiosity as well. Stan-tzu cannot explain. I was born here; I know everyone around me and have always lived in this place. Why do I find it strange?" 'I stared. "I don't know. It's aphoristic, we feel at ease with what we know." "I am easier now in this room. It is nearer right than any of the others. Yet I have only just begun to dress it." '"Who looks after you?" I was getting accustomed to their alternate use of the singular pronoun. '"There are many -- Mariji has always been here, Stan-tzu, oh, many others. I have teachers. They do not understand either." "'Do you go out?" "'Sometimes. But the car disquiets me." 'The Institute car was a luxury -- private cars were a thing of the past. Cars disquieted me, too. I said as much. They smiled, welcoming even this small bond. I knew how small it was but -- oh, god. The smile incandesced their faces until they seemed surrounded by a cloud of fire which ignited and spread through me to my genitals. I felt my face burning. They went on smiling. I couldn't get up, nor stay where I was; I closed my feverish eyes and struggled for some sort of calm. "A clone," I thought. "A-homogenetic-clone-incubatedin-isolation-a-breakthrough-scientit'ic-experiment -- " Like Kim's multiplication table, the jargon came to my rescue. 'When I looked again, they also had closed eyes and had dropped into meditation. All at once they emerged from it and rejoined me. "'Stan-tzu does not know how to do that." they said. "Nor anyone else here... I thought I was the only one." 'Through my precarious calm, I managed to say, "Anstruther grew up before it was taught. It's part of our schooling now." 'A sigh of sheer satisfaction. I said, "Tell me about this room. What did you call it?" "'I call it the Ming T'ang. I don't know why. It seems right. It has eight windows. There should be pillars here, and here," they indicated the cascades of drapery, "but we didn't know that was what we wanted until we had made these." "'But how did you know?" 'An expression of perplexity flashed over the perfect faces. "I just know. The pictures are not right; but when I asked for some Chinese paintings they went to a great deal of trouble to get them, and I couldn't say they were wrong. Please, don't mention it to Stantzu. It would distress him. He always wants to please me." "'But what's the matter with them? They are very fine." '"Yes, but there's something... they are so -- complicated? Sophisticated, too graceful. I remember that wall paintings should be more definite... The horses are very nice." 'The horses were T'ang reproductions. "'You remember va paintings? Where did you see them? In the Institute?" "'No, how could I? I don't know. Sometimes I remember things I cannot possibly remember..." Two voices overlapped. 'My heart beat a bit faster. I had recriminated the mice for their inability to speak. I must get those records. 'Gently, I asked, "What else do you remember?" '"It's so hard, like trying to recall a dream... there are bits here and there. It's much easier to point out what feels right when we see it..." It was disturbing. As they spoke of this the soft voices separated, as if the clone were losing its rapport. For some reason this made Nyen-Hwa more accessible. Again I was aware of the scent of musk... and now there was fear, disintegration intermingled. "'Does this frighten you?" I said aloud. "'It is Stan-tzu. He is afraid. He doesn't understand." 'There was something here of importance. My mind was churning with tenderness, passion and curiosity. They were so goddam beautiful. "'I will try to understand. Stan-tzu knows a great deal about you; if there is something he doesn't know I can try to find it out." The troubled faces smoothed and they smiled again, relieved. A hand touched my arm; the others had reached to me and withdrawn, as if sensing that so many touches would be too much for me. "'I thank you." Slowly, two of them slid to their feet. "Will you take tea?" "I had the feeling it would be rude to decline, as bad as the shoes. We waited in friendly silence while a glazed pot was prepared and tiny handleless cups appeared on a tray. The tea was overperfumed for me, but surprisingly refreshing. Or perhaps it was the company. When I took my leave, they bowed, once more distant, serene and intact. T here was a moment of silence. Then the student murmured something. 'What?' 'I said. So that's what they were like, the first one.' 'I can't begin to tell you what they were like. They were so pure, so remote -- it was something to do with being a clone.' 'I know.' 'You can't possibly. You couldn't have met them.' The boy laughed. 'Did you think Nyen-Hwa was the only one?' 'Of course, she was unique -- what?' Light flashed on the lenses as the man jerked. His mouth opened slowly, a fleshrimmed hole in the patchy beard. 'Oh, old Anstruther had several clones under way before he stopped,' said the student. 'We were the last -- there are thirty of us... we're not so pure and remote, though.' He snickered. 'But I do know what you mean. Ordinary people look all sort of strung out to us... anyway. Go on with your story.' He offered the filled cup. The professor drank deeply. As if hypnotized, he said, 'Thirty... that man never knew when to stop.' 'I told you we are the last. He knew. His work's done.' # rrHE day after I had visited X Nyen-Hwa I went to see him. I didn't get a chance to ask anything. Before I could open my mouth he said, "Did you see the rV program?" He was so filled with pride; I couldn't deny him his big moment. 'I said, "You were great. Never heard anything described so clearly." I didn't say, so incompletely. '"I've devoted all my life to this project, Ric... all the stuff I couldn't say -- the cows' uteri; the accidents; all those Institute documentaries when we had to keep this quiet; the staff problems... the girls already have a film offer, how about that?" 'Appalled, I said, "You're not going to..." '"Don't be an ass, of course not." He leaned toward me. "Sooner or later they'll have to find their way in the world, but not yet. Not till the noise dies down." "'But what will they do?" "'They don't have to do anything; they exist. That's enough." '"Enough for you, Anstruthersan; but for them?" 'He shrugged. "They won't be in want. They've been trained here. they can stay on. Or get married or something. They'll be okay." 'I wasn't satisfied. He didn't seem to have given any serious thought to their future. I pictured them seeking helplessly for their "right" frame in our erratic world, and shivered. Anstruther's next remark pushed the picture to the back of my mind. He spoke in a voice taut with suppressed greed. "'Ric, they've said something about the Peace Prize. For the Institute, of course." As I looked at him, I could see the tide of publicity rising around him, and knew that before long he would be imprisoned by image-makers. He was susceptible. The first kiss of public attention had roused his appetite. Sure, he deserved recognition; but in that moment I lost all my awe of the man, and despised him. 'So I grew up a little. In my disappointment I resolved to stand by the girls. Their putative father had forgotten them, as human beings. I would take their welfare to myself, somehow. If my interest was a combination of lust, scientific fascination and esthetics then so be it. Even then I knew that love isn't an element but a compound. 'I asked for the records. "'Oh, yes. Sorry, Ric, they've been put under security." "'But you said I could see them!" "'Oh, I have nothing to do with it. Board's decision." 'That was one code long broken. The "Board" suddenly surfaced when an unpopular decision had to be made. Now those files would be locked in the computer by a key that would effectively keep my hands off, unless... 'I left the office thinking furiously. I was no engineer. The tech staff was rotated so often I never had the chance to scrape an acquaintance among them. 'The Pavilion receptionist knew me by sight. It didn't get me any closer to the records but it did keep me in touch with Nyen-Hwa. I visited them every day. I brought pictures of Chinese things. 'We began with art treasures tions and sloppy one-sentence text; commentary, not-quite-so-elegant pictures; and we ended with A disold flat photos came in a separate folder. Among them was a rather uninspired bronze animal which had been lost in a plane crash of the eighties. She wept over it. It had been "right". Shethey were impressed, amused, admiring of the T'ang horses and the Ming pottery, but those were not the same. Only objects dated before about # A.D. had that certain quality of recognition. 'I acquired a taste for scented tea. And I lay awake nights, my head a carousel of thicknecked horses, electrons whirling around a nucleus of yearning, bridled with polypeptide chains, spinning around and around the grinning carnival face of Anstruther to the zithery music of the ch'in. 'Nothing succeeds like a courtship when the suitor is committed to solving a problem for his beloved. You'd think it would be perfect, wouldn't you? What a romantic dream... there I was, head over heels in love, my sweetheart's eyes alight at my footstep, all of us counting the long slow seconds of separation... 'Five sweethearts, inextricably one, inhabiting five exquisite hungry virgin bodies... 'What would you do? I imagined things... oh, how I imagined. My imagination tangled me in confusions. Suppose my capacities extended only to three, or worse, four? How could I be sure whether or not I had actually, er, made it with all of them, or missed out one? And how close were they really to each other -- close enough to feel one another's sensations? For all I knew I might be providing five times as much as I'd get -- I squashed that ungenerous thought. I alternated between a hot conviction that I could easily satisfy all of them, and a cold feeling that I couldn't possibly hope to. I couldn't really understand them, not ever. Yet when we were together there were no doubts. We were in love... I didn't dare start anything at all. I didn't know how. 'And every day I tried a new attack on the locked records. Anstruther had moved his office to the PR department next to the Pavilion. He spent his time offering titbits to the Press. I buttered him like any flack in order to obtain small pleasures for my love. We managed to mount an expedition to an exhibit of Chinese art. By the time he had set up his complicated security measures the show was about to move on; but at last we did get there in privacy. The girls came home in a state of intense nostalgia. There had been some lacquer boxes... 'Then Anstruther left for a week, to collect his Peace Prize. Thereafter he was inaccessible. 'I got a new batch of mice. I went through the motions of analysis, blindly recording the usual murky information revealed by the microscopes, filing the records somewhere. The whole program had lost its impetus; we had no director. 'Finally I just let the system run on and devoted my whole attention to the Nyen-Hwa records. It hit me suddenly; suppose Anstruther had placed that bar across the records in the computer without planning in advance? He wasn't really regulation-minded. That night he had been a little drunk; he had introduced me to the girls... he had been triumphantly preoccupied with success, the night before his first Press announcement. Suppose he had thought up the locking code on the spur of that moment?... Success meant "five". On impulse I worked out the five-root of five; the computer hesitated. I knew I'd got it. I fed in that number and "NyenHwa", and the screen lit up. So simple, so obvious... I cursed myself for the weeks of stupidity. '... In # liver cells contributed by living donors, Chinese and American, had been de-differentiated to the embryonic cell needed to reconstruct the whole organism. There had been occasional efforts at human cloning earlier, all failed. There was public reluctance, the equipment needed was prodigious, and nobody had been able to establish at what stage of cell division it would work. When the Institute was founded, Anstruther got it all together for the first time. 'They had allowed the first cell to divide, parted the resulting pair. Six hours later, one of the four new cells had been removed and killed for inspection, leaving three in culture. By the sixth division fifteen single cells remained, and these were cultured through to embryo. Only five had reached their full development. 'The chromosomatic records were all there. Had they been interpreted? If so, why were we still fooling around with identifying memory components? I turned back to the beginning, to the cell drawn at random from anonymous donors... # TT wasn't all that random;' J 'What do you know about it?' said the professor irritably. 'We've had a lot of time to check things,' said the boy. 'Naturally, we've been curious about ourselves, and the others. The Nyen-Hwa cell came from a Chinese girl in the lab; her family had lived in Hunan -- that's the place they have discovered the Han tombs, all those jaded ancestors.' 'So that's what they remembered... and yourselves?' 'Oh, we're Italians. We weren't supposed to know, but we have ways... we started with one of the Maintenance Cadre.' 'I see.' The pipe had long since gone out. The professor began to clean it. The student watched the process with distaste. 'You're making a bit of a mess, aren't you?' As the man looked up, he noticed the open notebook for the first time. 'What are you taking down?' he said nervously. 'This is all in the Institute records.' 'Not quite all,' said the boy. 'I'm just making some notes.' He smiled reassuringly. 'It's much easier to understand when you tell it -- we don't learn much biological notation in the Political Science department. You don't need to worry about a thing. Go on, what about the chromosomes?' 'I don't need notes to remember the next part. It's a lot of dates stuck to my mind. 'Chromosome # was as familiar and enigmatic as ever. It wasn't different from others I'd seen in any the details of that first cell, models of the chromosomes made from the holographs taken at the time... I went on to the divisions. II had the next morning; IV six hours later; V, seven hours after that. Of course the records were a few minutes older, allowing time for slides to be processed. But near enough... by Division VI I was seeing spots that weren't there, and Chromosome # had shown no signs of anything. inspections, and left the lab. It was after #. I was still groggy when I went to my love in the afternoon. "'Ric, how tired you look,' she said, and led me to my cushion. I forgot that it had no back, and leaned, and sprawled in a heap. They exclaimed, and were all around me asking, "Oh, are you hurt? I am so sorry..." Soft arms touched me, embraced me. Remember, I'd had no sleep and worked all night. I forgot everything; I held a warm body in my arms at last, and caressed her... I was lost. 'I don't remember the rest... if I do remember I will never tell it. Never.' He dropped his head in his hands and was quiet. The student watched, and refilled the cup. The professor pulled himself upright after a few minutes. 'I awoke there, in the Ming T'ang, alone. I have never been so alone. There was no sound, only a faint dawn light through the tiny windowpanes. I knelt there, stricken. What had I done? What colossal arrogance had led me here? I had nothing to offer them, nothing. Can you understand? They were unique, precious, vulnerable. I had failed them. I had known how little I understood and barged in, unthinking...' The student interrupted. 'But I thought permissiveness had been around a while even then. Why all the fuss?' The older man shook his head sadly. 'You haven't understood at all. They were different. They hadn't grown up with the rest of us; the only men they knew were Anstruther and me. When you invoke the power of sex things happen to people." 'Well, what happened?' 'I was afraid to visit them again... They sent for me. Then I was afraid not to visit. 'I made my way to the Ming T'ang in a state of panic. They ran to greet me; they kissed me. All my fear disappeared. I only loved them... and then they spoke. 'One said, "Ric." Another said, "You are beautiful." Another said, "We love you." All at the same time. 'They had changed. They were out of synch. 'They smiled, and one was dreamy, another merry. They moved, drawing me into the room, and misjudged each other's movements, and laughed. "'Why didn't you come to us yesterday?" "We wanted to see you!" "We", not "I". 'They seemed quite happy. My fear returned. I could see so much further than they. I was older and experienced. I knew I had broken something irreparable. I stumbled through an explanation of my absence -- I had been very tired, I had been working on the problem -- they accepted, without satisfaction. 'Politely, one of them said, "Tell us" -- us! -- "what you have found. I said something, I don't know what. "'It will take a long time to find out?" '"I'm afraid so." "'We have plenty of time." '"Yes." Did they? I was conscious of Anstruther, of guilt, of time running out. I explained that I thought I ought to concentrate on the work. They clearly felt they had disappointed me. I couldn't tell them about my terror of precipitating a row in the Institute; nor that I could see the gentle pattern of their days falling into chaos, because of me. 'I fled. 'A few colleagues sat around in the lab, drinking tea, gossiping. Someone said hello in a desultory way and offered me a cup. To my surprise my hands shook too much to hold it. I retreated to my desk, closing my ears to the chatter. The troubles of the others were dim and uncomplicated, they only had to worry about their own futures. 'In my absence the computer had constructed a series of schematic models of the chromosome divisions of the Nyen-Hwa cell...I wondered which of those mysterious helices contained beauty, and quickly turned back to biology. Molecular diagrams were displayed on the screen. I tried to concentrate... the helix hovered, section by section, twisting before me... rings of cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine, parting and rejoining with the sugar bases, bonded by atoms of hydrogen and oxygen... the beginnings of my ruined love... Something had happened at 'The bonding pattern had altered... a flicker in the image had caught my eye. I brought the picture in closer, and watched. One hydrogen atom of one molecule of cytosine had dropped out of its normal position, and moved down the molecule; thereafter the chain of thymine to guanine instead of to adenine...' The student's stylus was moving slowly. His eyes were glazing slightly. 'You don't know what I'm talking about.' said the man. 'You'd best tell it your own way,' said the boy. 'I'll manage.' VV whether this freaked-out chromosome had anything to do with Nyen-Hwa's freaked out memory. I had to induce the change in a cell culture of my own, and then test it on a specimen... I tried. I clobbered a cell with x-rays, and it died. I tried gamma radiation, expecting the same. It died. I bombarded it with sound and ultrasound and infrasound, and it died. But something must have caused it... port on all the experiments of the dates in question, in the whole Institute. On the #th there had been a telemetry project involving microwaves. I tried microwaves. Nothing. Culture terminated. There had been a series of brain-acupuncture tests; no use at all. There had been some magnetographic measurement of a point on the #-day solar cycle. There had been a new -- and unsuccessful -- staining test in the pathology lab. I went back to look at the solar experiments, without much conviction; but the time was right. The sunspot cycle, blah, blah, microvariable star... human pulse rate related to the cycle... so? The instrument had detected magnetic waves, a perfectly ordinary part of the cosmic background, as expected. Blah, blah. 'But there was a footnote I'd missed the first time. For one nanosecond the clocks had stopped. There was a memo directing better shielding on the magnetograph to prevent its acting as an amplifier. Too much depended on accurate time measurement in the Institute to risk clock trouble. 'Well, I had nothing to lose. I set up the computer to run nanosecond-stop tests on the slides I'd prepared, subjecting them to various intensities of magnetic fields with the laser-magnet. 'It only took a week. 'At the right strength, at the precise second in the chromosome division, that same hydrogen atom reacted to the magnet by reversing its spin, drifting away from its nitrogen bond and moving into the new position as the field released it... 'What does a wild mouse know that a lab mouse does not? I didn't want to mess with dietetics; the field mouse knows of dangers that the lab mouse has had thousands of generations of forgetting. Lab mice ignore cats. In the archives I found a recording of the European woodlands at night, made in the days when it was still possible to pick up , the sounds of nocturnal creatures going about their business; wind, the gnurr of hedgehog, the lower range of bat squeaks... I was alone in the lab when I played the recording to the three litters of mice I had prepared for this. 'Fourteen young ones, and their mothers. Nine of them continued their usual scuffling as the strange little sounds echoed in the room. Then, an owl hooted. Five small mice jerked high in the air and dived for cover under the placid dam. variation within its perimeters. Some times -- at the coincidence of the reproduction of a certain twist in a helix with a peak of a solar cycle; some how -- by the exposure of a dividing cell to a tiny increase in the magnetic field; and a memory of a previous existence is evoked... A man almost recalls a past he never lived. Scraps and bits, patched with learned history, and he is convinced he is a reincarnation. He can be called a fraud, but he will not believe it. It is enough that the pattern be repeated, to haunt the mind. Somewhere in the genetic history of that man that same pattern existed before, and he almost remembers. The Ming T'ang "felt right". 'And would it continue? Would those people's children remember?" The man finally lit the pipe again. 'No; how could they? When the chain parted again, it would resume the normal bonding. The only way it could happen would be by cloning.' He dropped the pipe suddenly. 'Oh my god.' The boy sighed. 'You have told me several important things.' Slowly, painfully, the professor said, 'I have given you the events of my life. I suppose that is of no importance.' 'Only to you... but we had not realized... several things. What happened to the girls?' 'I went to the Ming T'ang. Tea was ready. "'We've been waiting every day." "Oh, dear Ric, how good to see you." There was no absolution here. They took no offense. And they did not inquire about the problem. They had lost interest. They had turned to the future, away from the past, however mysterious. They spoke of jobs, of meeting new people, of me, tenderly; I had become a memory.' The professor fell silent. The student said, 'Is that the end of the story?' 'It's the end of my story.' 'But what happened to your discovery? And why did you quit the Institute?' 'Because I couldn't bear to stay there... Nyen-Hwa; they took names of their own, and moved on... I resigned. What good was my discovery? I knew how to provoke a random memory of a random ancestor in one creature; what use is that? I knew no more about memory than I did before. A complete waste of time. I quit the whole scene... I had lost my love, I had discovered with great effort an irrelevant phenomenon. Anstruther went on with his cloning games. 'I was tired... So I teach elementary biology. It's an existence.' The student said, 'I thank you, sir. You have told me one thing of vital importance to us. We had not realized that we must remain celibate... we wouldn't be likely to have guessed it.' The young face took on an expression that chilled the professor; the word "obscene" crossed his mind. Staring, he said, 'What did you say your.name was?' The student rose, and bowed. He picked up the bill, and blinked at it. 'The world is in an odd position, as are we all... I'll give you the name we call ourselves.' He scribbled a signature on the notepad, ripped it out, and handed it to the tired man. 'Again, we thank you,' he said, and tossing his jacket over his shoulder, swiftly crossed the room. The door swung to behind him. The professor picked up the scrap of paper. The signature was bold and clear: Machiavelli (Ventiquattro).   any direction there and there's nothing to see but the wheat," said the brown man to the other tankers and the woman. His hair was deep chestnut, his face and hands burnt umber from the sun of Emporion the month before and the suns of seven other worlds in past years. He was twenty-five but looked several years older. The sleeves of his khaki coveralls were slipped down over his wrists against the chill of the breeze that had begun at twilight to feather the hillcrest. "We fed four planets from Dunstan -- Hagener, Weststar, Mirage, and Jackson's Glade. And out of it we made enough to replace the tractors when they wore out, maybe something left over for a bit of pretty. A necklace of fireballs to set off a Lord's Day dress, till the charge drained six, eight months later. A static cleaner from Hagener, it was one year, never quite worked off our powerplant however much we tinkered with it... "My mother, she wore out too. Dad just kept grinding on, guess he still does." The girl asked a question from the shelter of the tank's scarred curtain. Her voice was too mild for the wind's tumbling, her accent that of Thrush and strange to the tanker's ears. But Danny answered, "Hate them? Oh, I know about the Combine, now, that the four of them kept other merchants off Dunstan to freeze the price at what they thought to pay. But Via, wheat's a high bulk cargo, there's no way at all we'd have gotten rich on what it could bring over ninety minutes' transit. And why shouldn't I thank Weststar? If ever a world did me well, it was that one." He spat, turning his head with the wind and lofting the gobbet invisibly into the darkness. The lamp trembled on its base, an overturned ration box. The glare skippered across the rusted steel skirts of the tank, the iridium armor of hull and turret; the faces of the men and the woman listening to the blower captain. The main gun, half shadowed by the curve of the hull, poked out into the night like a ghost of itself. Even with no human in the tank, at the whisper of a relay in Command Central the fat weapon would light the world cyan and smash to lava anything within line of sight of its muzzle. "We sold our wheat to a Weststar agent, a Hindi named Sarim who'd lived. Via, twenty years at least on Dunstan but he still smelled funny. Sweetish, sort of; you know? But his people were all back in Ongole on Weststar. When the fighting started between the Scots and the Hindi settlers, he raised a battalion of farm boys like me and shipped us over in the hold of a freighter. Hoo Lordy, that was a transit! "And I never looked back. Colonel Hammer docked in on the same day with the Regiment, and he took us all on spec. Six years, now, that's seven standard... and not all of us could stand the gaff, and not all who could wanted to. But I never looked back, and I never will." From the mast of Command Central, a flag popped unseen in the wind. It bore a red lion rampant on a field of gold, the emblem of Hammer's Slammers; the banner of the toughest regiment that ever killed for a dollar. Jmove to the front in company columns and advance." The tiny adamantine glitter winking on the hilltop ten kays distant was the first break in the landscape since the Regiment had entered the hypothetical war zone, the Star Plain of Thrush. It warmed Pritchard in the bubble at the same time it tightened his muscles. "Goose it, Kowie," he ordered his driver in turn, "they want us panzers up front. Bet it's about to drop in the pot?" Kowie said nothing, but the big blower responded with a howl and a billow of friable soil that seethed from under the ground effect curtain. Two Star in the lead, H Company threaded its way in line ahead through the grounded combat cars and a battalion from Infantry Section. The pongoes crouched on their one-man skimmers, watching the tanks. One blew an ironic kiss to Danny in Two Star's bubble. Moving parallel to Hotel, the other companies of Tank Section, K and M, advanced through the center and right of the skirmish line. The four man crew of a combat car nodded unsmilingly from their open-topped vehicle as Two Star boomed past. A trio of swivelmounted powerguns, # cm hoses like the one on Danny's bubble, gave them respectable firepower; and their armor, a sandwich of steel and iridium, was in fact adequate against most hand weapons. Buzzbombs aside, and tankers didn't like to think about those either. But Danny would have fought reassignment to combat cars if anybody had suggested it -- Lord, you may as well dance in your skin for all the good that hull does you in a firefight! And few car crewmen" would be caught dead on a panzer -- or rather, were sure that was how they would be caught if they crewed one of those sluggish, clumsy, blind-sided behemoths. Infantry Section scorned both, knowing how the blowers drew fire but couldn't flatten in the dirt when it dropped in on them. One thing wouldn't get you an argument, though: when it was ready to drop in the pot, you sent in the heavies. And nothing on the Way would stop the Tank Section of Hammer's Slammers when it got cranked up to move. Even its # tonnes could not fully dampen the vibration of Two Star's fans at max load. The oval hull, all silvery-smooth above but of gouged and rusty steel below where the skirts fell sheer almost to the ground, slid its way through the grass like a boat through yellow seas. They were dropping into a swale before they reached the upgrade. From the increasing rankness of the vegetation that flattened before and beside the tank, Pritchard suspected they would find a meandering stream at the bottom. The brow of the hill cut off sight of the unnatural glitter visible from a distance. In silhouette against the pale bronze sky writhed instead a grove of gnarled trees. "Incoming, fourteen seconds to impact," Command Central blatted. A siren in the near distance underscored the words. "Three rounds only." The watercourse was there. Two Star's fans blasted its surface into a fine mist as the tank bellowed over it. Danny cocked his powergun, throwing a cylinder of glossy black plastic into the lowest of the three rotating barrels. There was shrieking overhead. A poplar shape of dirt and black vapor spouted a kay to the rear, among the grounded infantry. They were detonating underground. Thrush didn't have much of an industrial base, the rebel portions least of all. Either they hadn't the plant to build proximity fuses at all, or they were substituting interference coils for miniature radar sets, and there was too little metal in the infantry's gear to set off the charges. "Tank Section, hose 'down the ridge as you advance, they got an OP there somewhere." "Incoming, three more in fourteen." The satellite net could pick up a golf ball in flight, much less a four hundred pound shell. Pritchard grinned like a death's head, laying his # cm automatic on the rim of the hill and squeezing off. The motor whirred, spinning the barrels as rock and vegetation burst in the blue-green sleet. Spent cases, gray and porous, spun out of the mechanism in a jet of coolant gas. They bounced on the turret slope, some clinging to the iridium to cool there, ugly dark excrescences on the metal. "Outgoing." Simultaneously with .Central's laconic warning, giants tore a strip off the sky. The rebel shells dropped but their bursts were smothered in the roar of the Regiment's own rocket howitzers boosting charges to titanic velocity for the seven seconds before their motors burned out. Ten meters from the muzzles the rockets went supersonic, punctuating the ripping sound with thunderous slaps. Danny swung his hose toward the grove of trees, the only landmark visible on the hilltop. His burst laced it cyan. Water, flash-heated within the boles by the gunfire. blew the dense wood apart in blasts of steam and splinters. A dozen other guns joined Pritchard's, clawing at rock, air, and the remaining scraps of vegetation. "Dead on," Central snapped to the artillery. "Now give it battery five and we'll show those freaks how they should've done it." Kowie hadn't buttoned up. His head stuck up from the driver's hatch, trusting his eyes rather than the vision blocks built into his compartment. The tanks themselves were creations of the highest technical competence, built on Terra itself; but the crews were generally from frontier worlds, claustrophobic in an armored coffin no matter how good its electronic re'ceptors were. Danny knew the feeling. His hatch, too, was open, and his hand gripped the rounded metal of the powergun itself rather than the selsyn unit inside. They were climbing sharply now, the back end hopping and skittering as the driver fed more juice to the rear fans in trying to level the vehicle. The bow skirts grounded briefly, the blades spitting out a section of hillside as pebbles. For nearly a minute the sky slammed and raved. Slender, clipped-off vapor trails of counterbattery fire streamed from the defiladed artillery. Half a minute after they ceased fire, the drumbeat of shells bursting on the rebels continued. No further incoming rounds fell. Two Star lurched over the rim of the hill. Seconds later the lead blowers of K and M bucked in turn onto the flatter area. Smoke and ash from the gun-lit brushfire shoomped out in their downdrafts. There was no sign of the enemy, either Densonite rebels or Foster's crew -- though if the mercenaries were involved, they would be bunkered beyond probable notice until they popped the cork themselves. "Tank Section, ground! Ground in place and prepare for director control." Danny hunched, bracing his palms against the hatch coaming, inside the turret the movement and firing controls of the main gun glowed red, indicating that they had been locked out of Pritchard's command. Kowie lifted the tow to kill the tank's immense inertia. There was always something spooky about feeling the turret purr beneath you, watching the big gun snuffle the air with deadly precision on its own. Danny gripped his tribarrel. scanning the horizon nervously. It was worst when you didn't know what Central had on its mind... and you did know that the primary fire control computer was on the fritz -- they always picked the damnedest times! "Six aircraft approaching from two-eight-three degrees," Central mumbled. "Distance seven point ought four kays, closing at one one ought ought." Pritchard risked a quick look away from where the gun pointed toward a ridgeline northwest of them, an undistinguished swelling half-obscured by the heat-wavering pall of smoke. Thirteen other tanks had crested the hill before Central froze them, all aiming in the same direction. Danny dropped below his hatch rim, counting seconds. The sky roared cyan. The tank's vision blocks blanked momentarily, but the dazzle reflected through the open hatch was enough to make Pritchard's skin tingle. The smoke waved and rippled about the superheated tracks of gunfire. The horizon to the northwest was an expanding orange dome that silently dominated the sky. "Resume advance." Then, "Spectroanalysis indicates five hostiles were loaded with chemical explosives, one was carrying fissionables." Danny was trembling worse than before the botched attack. The briefing cubes had said the Densonites were religious nuts, sure. But to use unsupported artillery against a force whose satellite spotters would finger the guns before the first salvo landed; aircraft -- probably converted cargo haulers -- thrown against directorcontrolled powerguns that shot light swift and line straight; and then nukes, against a regiment more likely to advance stark naked than without a nuclear-damper up! They weren't just nuts -- Thrush central government was that, unjoin the fighting -- they were as crazy as if they thought they could breathe vacuum and live. You didn't play that sort of game with the Regiment. They'd laager for the night on the hilltop, the rest of the outfit rumbling in through the afternoon and early evening hours. At daybreak they'd leapfrog forward again, deeper into the Star Plain, closer to whatever it was the Densonites wanted to hold. Sooner or later, the rebels and Foster's Infantry -- a good outfit but not good enough for this job -- were going to have to make a stand. And then the Regiment would go out for contact again, because they'd have run out of work on Thrush.  he'll be in looking for you pretty soon, won't she, handsome?" "Two bits to stay." "Check. Sure, Danny-boy, you Romeos from Dunstant, you can pick up a slot anywhere, huh?" A troop of combat cars whined past, headed for their position in the laager. Pritchard's hole card, a jack, flipped over. He swore, pushed in his hand. "I was folding anyway. And cut it out, will you? I didn't go looking for her, I didn't tell her to come back. And she may as well be the Colonel for all my chance of putting her flat." Wanatamba, the lean, black Terran who drove Fourteen, laughed and pointed. A gold-spangled skimmer was dropping from the east, tracked by the guns of two of the blowers on that side. Everybody knew what it was, though. Pritchard grimaced and stood. "Seems that's the game for me," he said. "Hey Danny," one of the men behind him called as he walked away. "Get a little extra for us, hey?" The skimmer had landed in front of Command Central, at rest an earth-blended geodesic housing the staff and much of the commo hardware. Wearing a wrist-to-ankle sunsuit, yellow where it had tone, she was leaning on the plex windscreen. An officer in fatigues with unlatched body armor stepped out of the dome and did a double take. He must have recollected, though, because he trotted off toward a bunker before Danny reached the skimmer. "Hey!" the girl called brightly. She looked about seventeen, her hair an unreal cascade of beryl copper over one shoulder. "We're going on a trip." "Uh?" The dome section flipped open again. Pritchard stiffened to attention when he saw the short, mustached figure who exited. "Peace, Colonel," the girl said. "Peace, Sonna. You're such an ornament to a firebase that I'm thinking of putting you on requisition for our next contract." Laughing cheerfully, the girl gestured toward the rigid sergeant. "I'm taking Danny to the Hamper Shrine this afternoon." Pritchard reddened. "Sir, Sergeant-Commander Daniel Pritchard -- " "I know you, trooper," the Colonel said with a friendly smile. "I've watched Two Star in action often enough, you know." His eyes were blue. "Sir, I didn't request -- that is..." "And I also know there's small point in arguing with our girl, here, hey Sonna? Go see your shrine, soldier, and worst comes to worst, just throw your hands up and yell 'Exchange.' You can try Col. Foster's rations for a week or two until we get this little business straightened out." The Colonel winked, bowed low to Sonna, and reentered the dome. "I don't figure it," Danny said as he settled into the passenger seat. The skimmer was built low and sleek as if a racer, though its top speed was probably under a hundred kays. Any more would have put too rapid a drain of the rechargables packed into the decimeter-thick floor -- a fusion unit would have doubled the flyer's bulk and added # kilos right off the bat. At that, the speed and an operating altitude of thirty meters were more than enough for the tanker. You judge things by what you're used to, and the blower captain who found himself that far above the cold, hard ground -- h could happen on a narrow switchback -- had seen his last action. While the wind whipped noisily about the open cockpit the girl tended to her flying and ignored Danny's curiosity. It was a hop rather than a real flight, keeping over the same hill at all times and circling down to land scarcely a minute after takeoff. On a field of grass untouched by the recent fire rose the multi-tented crystalline structure Pritchard had glimpsed during the assault. With a neat spin and a brief whine from the fans, the skimmer settled down. Sonna grinned. Her sunsuit, opaquing completely in the direct light, blurred her outline in a dazzle of fluorescent saffron. "What don't you figure?" "Well, ah..." Danny stumbled, his curiosity drawn between the girl and the building. "Well, the Colonel isn't that, ah, easy to deal with usually. I mean..." Her laugh bubbled in the sunshine. "Oh, it's because I'm an Advisor, I'm sure." "Excuse?" "An Advisor. You know, the... well, a representative. Of the government, if you want to put it that way." "My Lord!" the soldier gasped. "But you're so young." She frowned. "You really don't know much about us, do you?" she reflected . "Umm, well, the briefing cubes mostly didn't deal with the friendlies this time because we'd be operating without support... Anything was going to look good after Emporion, that was for sure. All desert there -- you should've heard the cheers when the Colonel said that we'd lift." She combed a hand back absently through her hair. It flowed like molten bronze. "You won on Emporion?" she asked. "We could've," Danny explained, "even though it was really a Lord-stricken place, dust and fortified plateaus and lousy recce besides because the government only had two operating spacers. But the Monarchists ran out of money after six months and that's one sure rule for Hammer's Slammers -- no pay, no play. Colonel yanked their bond so fast their ears rang. And we hadn't orbited before offers started coming in." "And you took ours and came to a place you didn't know much about," the girl mused. "Well, we didn't know much about you either." "What do you need to know except we can bust anybody else in this business?" the soldier said with amusement. "Anybody, public or planet-tied. If you're worried about Foster, don't; he wouldn't back the freaks today, but when he has to, we'll eat him for breakfast." "Has to?" the girl repeated in puzzlement. "But he always has to -- the Densonites hired him, didn't they?" Strategy was a long way from Danny's training, but the girl seemed not to know that. And besides, you couldn't spend seven years with the Slammers and not pick up some basics. "OK," he began, "Foster's boys'll fight, but they're not crazy. Trying to block our advance in open land like this'd be pure suicide -- as those coppy freaks -- pardon, didn't mean that -- must of found out today. Foster likely got orders to support the civvies but refused. I know for a fact that his arty's better'n what we wiped up today, and those planes..." "But his contract...?" Sonna queried. "Sets out the objectives and says the outfit'll obey ciwie orders where it won't screw things up too bad." Danny said. "Standard form. The legal of it's different, but that's what it means." The girl was nodding, eyes slitted, and in a low voice she quoted, "...'except in circumstances where such directions would significantly increase the risks to be undergone by the party of the second part without corresponding military advantage.'" She looked full at Danny. "Very... interesting. When we hired your colonel, I don't think any of us understood that clause." Danny blinked, out of his depth and aware of it. "Well, it doesn't matter really. I mean, the Colonel didn't get his rep from ducking fights. It's just, well... say we're supposed to clear the Densonites off the, the Star Plain? Right?" The girl shrugged. "So that's what we'll do." Danny wiped his palms before gesturing with both hands. "But if your Advisors -- " "We Advisors," the girl corrected, smiling. "Anyway," the tanker concluded, his enthusiasm chilled, "if you tell the Colonel to fly the whole Regiment up to ten thousand and jump it out, he'll tell you to go piss up a rope. Sorry, he wouldn't say that. But you know what I mean. We know our job, don't worry." "Yes, that's true," she said agreeably. "And we don't, and we can't understand it. We thought that -- one to one, you know? -- perhaps if I got to know you, one of you... They thought we might understand all of you a little." The soldier frowned uncertainly. "What we don't see," she finally said, "is how you -- " She caught herself. Touching her cold fingertips to the backs of the tanker's wrists, the girl continued, "Danny, you're a nice... you're not a, a sort of monster like we thought you all must be. If you'd been born of Thrush you'd have had a -- different -- education, you'd be more, forgive me, I don't mean it as an insult, sophisticated in some ways. That's all. "But how can a nice person like you go out and kill?" He rubbed his eyes, then laced together his long, brown fingers. "You... well, it's not like that. What I said the other night -- look, the Slammers're a good outfit, the best, and I'm damned lucky to be with them. I do my job the best way I know. I'll keep on doing that. And if somebody gets killed, OK. My brother Jig stayed home and he's two years dead now. Tractor rolled on a wet field but Via, coulda been a tow-chain snapped or old age; doesn't matter. He wasn't going to live forever and neither is anybody else. And I haven't got any friends on the far end of the muzzle." Her voice was very soft as she said, "Perhaps if I keep trying..." Danny smiled. "Well, I don't mind," he lied, looking at the structure. "What is this place, anyhow?" Close up, it had unsuspected detail. The sides were a hedge of glassy rods curving together to a series of peaks ten meters high. No finger-slim member was quite the thickness or color of any other, although the delicacy was subliminal in impact. In ground plan it was a complex oval thirty meters by ten, pierced by scores of doorways which were not closed off but were foggy to look at. "What do you think of it?" the girl asked. "Well, it's..." Danny temporized. A fragment of the briefing cubes returned to him. "It's one of the alien, the Gedel, artifacts, isn't it?" "Of course," the girl agreed. "Seven hundred thousand years old, as far as we can judge. Only a world in stasis, like Thrush, would have let it survive the way it has. The walls are far tougher than they look, but seventy millenia of earthquakes and volcanoes..." Danny stepped out of the skimmer and let his hand run across the building's cool surface. "Yeah, if they'd picked some place with a hotter core there wouldn't be much left but sand by now, would there?" "Pick it? Thrush was their home," Sonna's voice rang smoothly behind him. "The Gedel chilled it themselves to make it suitable, to leave a signpost for the next races following the Way. We can't even imagine how they did it, but there's no question but that Thrush was normally tectonic up until the last "Via!" Danny breathed, turning his shocked face toward the girl. "No wonder those coppy fanatics wanted to control this place. Why, if they could figure out just a few of the Gedel tricks they'd... Lord, they wouldn't stop with Thrush, that's for sure." "You still don't understand," the girl said. She took Danny by the hand and drew him toward the nearest of the misty doorways. "The Densonites have, well, quirks that make them hard for the rest of us on Thrush to understand. But they would no more pervert Gedel wisdom to warfare than you would, oh, spit on your colonel. Come here." She stepped into the fuzziness and disappeared. The tanker had no choice but to follow or break her grip; though, oddly, she was no longer clinging to him on the other side of the barrier. She was not even beside him in the large room. He was alone at the first of a line of tableaux, staring at a group of horribly inhuman creatures at play. Their sharp-edged faces, scaledusted but more avian than reptile, stared enraptured at one of their number who hung in the air. The acrobat's bare, claw-tipped legs pointed # apart, straight toward ground and sky. Pritchard blinked and moved on. The next scene was only a dazzle of sunlight in a glade whose foliage w as redder than that of Thrush or Dunstan. There was something else, something wrong or strange about the tableau. Danny felt it, but his eyes could not explain. Step by step, cautiously, Pritchard worked his way down the line of exhibits. Each was different, centered on a group of the alien bipeds or a ruddy, seemingly empty landscape that hinted unintelligibly. At first, Danny had noticed the eerie silence inside the hall. As Winner of the John W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award for the BetSiefie floAfidioA Book of # "Lucid, exciting, inspiring, and always igniting the sense of wonder." Theodore Sturgeon, Galaxy. "A daring view of the Universe by the wittiest, nnost rational, and most clear-thinking astronomer alive"saac Asimov. Illustrated. A national he approached the far end he realized he was conscious of music of some sort, very crisp and distant. He laid his bare palm on the floor and found, as he had feared, that it did not vibrate in the least. He ran the last twenty steps to plunge out into the sunlight. Sonna still gripped his hand, and they stood outside the doorway they had entered . The girl released him. "Isn't it incredible?" she asked, her expression bright. "And every one of the doorways leads to a different corridor -- recreation there, agriculture in another, history -- everything. A whole planet in that little building." "That's what the Gedel looked like, huh?" Danny said. He shook his head to clear the strangeness from it. "The Gedel? Oh, no," the girl replied, surprised again at his ignorance. "These were the folk we call the Hampers. No way to pronounce their own language, a man named Hamper found this site is all. But their homeworld was Kalinga IV, almost three days transit from Thrush. The shrine is here, we think, in the same relation to Starhome as Kalinga was to Thrush. "You still don't understand," she concluded aloud, watching Danny's expression. She sat on the edge of the flyer, crossing her hands on the lap of her sunsuit. In the glitter thrown by the structure the fabric patterned oddly across her lithe torso. "The Gedel association -- it wasn't an empire, couldn't have been. But to merge, a group ultimately needs a center, physical and intellectual. And Thrush and the Gedel were that for twenty races. "And they achieved genuine unity, not just within one race but among all of them, each as strange to the others as any one of them would have been to man, to us. The... power that gave them, over themselves as well as the universe, was incredible. This -- even .Starhome itself -- is such a tiny part of what could be achieved by perfect peace and empathy." Danny looked at the crystal dome and shivered at what it had done to him. "Look," he said, "peace is just great if the universe cooperates. I don't mean just my line of work, but it doesn't happen that way in the real world. There's no peace spending your life beating wheat out of Dunstan, not like I'd call peace. And what's happened to the Gedel and their buddies for the were so great?" "We can't even imagine what happened to them," Sonna explained gently, "but it wasn't the disaster you imagine. When they reached what they wanted, they set up this, Starhome, the other eighteen shrines as... monuments. And then they went away, all together. But they're not wholly gone, even from here, you know. Didn't you feel them in the background inside, laughing with you?" "#... Danny attempted. He moved, less toward the skimmer than away from the massive crystal behind him. "Yeah, there was something. That's what you're fighting for?" You couldn't see the laager from where the skimmer rested, but Danny could imagine the silvery glitter of tanks and combat cars between the sky and the raw yellow grass. Her eyes fixed on the same stretch of horizon, the girl said, "Someday men will be able to walk through Starhome and understand. You can't live on Thrush without feeling the impact of the Gedel. That impact has... warped, perhaps, the Densonites. They have some beliefs about the Gedel that most of us don't agree with. And to prevent the artifacts from being defiled by anyone who doesn't believe as they do." "Well, you people do a better job of using force," Danny said harshly. His mind braced itself on its memory of the Regiment's prickly hedgehog. "Oh. not us!" the girl gasped. Suddenly angry, the tanker gestured toward the unseen firebase. "Not you? The Densonites don't pay us. And if force isn't what happened to those silly bastards today when our counter-battery hit them. I'd like to know what is." She looked at him in a way that, despite her previous curiosity, was new to him. "There's much that I'll have to discuss with the other Advisors," she said after a long pause. "And I don't know that it will stop with us, we'll have to put out the call to everyone, the Densonites as well if they will come." Her eyes caught Danny's squarely again. "We acted with little time for deliberation when the Densonites hired Col. Foster and turned all the other pilgrims out of the Star Plain. And we acted in an area beyond our practice -- thank the Lord! The key to understanding the Gedel and Way being short, is Starhome. And nothing that blocks any man, all men, from Starhome can be... tolerated. But with what we've learned since... well, we have other things to take into account." She broke off, tossed her stunning hair. In the flat evening sunlight her garment had paled to translucence. The late rays licked her body red and orange. "But now I'd better get you back to your colonel." She slipped into the skimmer. Danny boarded without hesitation. After the Gedel building, the transparent skimmer felt almost comfortable. "Back to my tank," he corrected lightly. "Colonel may not care where I am, but he damn well cares if Two Star is combat ready." The sudden rush of air cut off thought of further conversation. and though Sonna smiled as she landed Danny beside his blower, there was a blankness in her expression that indicated her thoughts were far away. Hell with her, Danny thought. His last night in the Rec Center on Emporion seemed a long time in the past.  ment was almost # kilometers from the camp they had abandoned at midnight. There had been no warning, only the low hoot of the siren followed by the Colonel's voice rasping from every man's lapel speaker, "Mount up and move, boys. Order seven, and your guides are set." It might have loomed before another outfit as a sudden catastrophe. After docking one trip with the Slammers, though, a greenie learned that everything not secured to his blower had better be secured to him. Col. Hammer thought an armored regiment's firepower was less of an asset than its mobility. He used the latter to the full with ten preset orders of march and in-motion recharging for the infantry skimmers, juicing from the tanks and combat cars. Four pongoes were jumpered to Two Star when Foster's outpost sprang its ambush. The lead combat car, half a kay ahead, bloomed in a huge white ball that flooded the photon amplifiers of Danny's goggles. The buzzbomb's hollow detonation followed a moment later while the tanker, cursing, simultaneously switched to infra-red and swung his turret left at max advance. He ignored the head of the column, where the heated-air thump of powerguns merged with the crackle of bomblets kicked to either side by the combat cars; that was somebody else's responsibility. He ignored the two infantrymen wired to his tank's port side as well. If they knew their business, they'd drop the jumpers and flit for Two Star's blind side as swiftly as Danny could spin his heavy turret. If not, well, you don't have time for niceness when somebody's firing shaped charges at you. "Damp that ground-sender!" Central snapped to the lead elements. Too quickly to be a response to the command, the grass trembled under the impact of a delayfused rocket punching down toward the computedlocation of the enemy's subsurface signaling. The Regiment must have rolled directly over an outpost, either through horrendously bad luck or because Foster had sewn his vedettes very thickly. The firing stopped. The column had never slowed and Mama, first of the heavy companies behind the screen of combat cars, fanned the grass fires set by the hoses. Pritchard scanned the area of the firefight as Two Star rumbled through it in turn. The antipersonal bomblets had dimpled the ground where they hit, easily identifiable among the glassy scars left by the powerguns. In the center of a great vitrified blotch lay a left arm and a few scraps of gray coverall. Nearby was the plastic hilt of a buzzbomb launcher. The other vedette had presumably stayed on the commo in his covered foxhole until the penetrator had scattered it and him over the landscape. If there had been a third bunker, it escaped notice by Two Star's echo sounders. "Move it out, up front," Central demanded. "This cuts our margin." The burned-out combat car swept back into obscurity as Kowie put on speed. The frontal surfaces had collapsed inward from the heat, leaving the driver and blower captain as husks of carbon. There was no sign of the wing gunners. Perhaps they had been far enough back and clear of the spurt of directed radiance to escape. The ammo canister of the port tri-barrel had flash-ignited, though, and it was more likely that the men were wasted on the floor of the vehicle. Another hundred and fifty kays to go, and now Foster and the Densonites knew they were coming. T here were no further ambushes to break the lightless monotony of gently rolling grassland. Pritchard took occasional sips of water and ate half a tube of protein ration. He started to fling the tube aside, then thought of the metal detectors on following units. He dropped it between his feet instead. The metal-pale sun was thrusting the Regiment's shadow in long fingers up the final hillside when Central spoke again. You could tell it was the Colonel himself sending. "Everybody freeze but Beta-First, Beta-First proceed in column up the rise and in. Keep your intervals, boys, and don't try to bite off too much. Last data we got was Foster had his anti-aircraft company with infantry support holding the target. Maybe they pulled out when we knocked on the door tonight, maybe they got reinforced. So take it easy -- and don't bust up anything you don't have to." Pritchard dropped his seat back inside the turret. There was nothing to be seen from the hatch but the monochrome sunrise and armored vehicles grounded on the yellow background. Inside, the three vision blocks gave greater variety. One was the constant # display, better than normal eyesight according to the designers because the blower captain could see all around the tank without turning his head. Danny didn't care for it. Images were squeezed a good deal horizontally. Shapes weren't quite what you expected, so you didn't react quite as fast; and that was a good recipe for a dead trooper. The screen above the three-sixty was variable in light sensitivity and in magnification, useful for special illumination and first-shot hits. The bottom screen was the remote rig; Pritchard dialed it for the forward receptors of Beta-FirstThree. It was strange to watch the images of the two leading combat cars trembling as they crested the hill, yet feel Two Star as stable as # tonnes can be even when grounded. "Nothing moving," the second leader reported unnecessarily. Central had remote circuits too, as well as the satellite net to depend on. The screen lurched as the blower Danny was slaved to boosted its fans to level the down-grade. Dust plumed from the leading cars, weaving across a sky that was almost fully light. At an unheard command, the section turned up the wick in unison and let the cars hurtle straight toward the target's central corridor. It must have helped, because Foster's gunners caught only one car when they loosed the first blast through their camouflage. The second car blurred in a mist of vaporized armor plate. Incredibly, the right wing gunner shot back. The deadly flame-lash of his hose was pale against the richer color of the hostile fire. Foster had sited his calliopes, massive # cm guns whose nine fixed barrels fired extra-length charges. Danny had never seen a combat car turned into Swiss cheese faster than the one spiked on the muzzles of a pair of the heavy guns. Gray-suited figures were darting from cover as if the cars' automatics were harmless for being outclassed. The damaged blower nosed into the ground. Its driver leaped out, running for the lead car which had spun on its axis and was hosing blue-green fire in three directions. One of Foster's troops raised upright, loosing a buzzbomb at the wreckage of the grounded car. The left side of the vehicle flapped like a batwing as it sailed across Danny's field of view. The concussion knocked down the running man. He rose to his knees, jumped for a handhold as the lead car accelerated past him. As he swung himself aboard, two buzzbombs hit the blower simultaneously. It bloomed with joined skullcaps of pearl and bone. Pritchard was swearing softly. He had switched to a stern pickup already, and the tumbled wreckage in it was bouncing, fading swiftly. Shots twinkled briefly as the two escaping blowers dropped over the ridge. "In column ahead," said the Colonel grimly. "Hotel, Killer, Mama. Button up and hose'em out, you know the drill." And then something went wrong. "Are you insane?" the radio marveled, and Danny recognized that voice too. "I forbid you!" "You can't. Somebody get her out of here." "Your contract is over, finished., do you hear? Heavenly Way, we'll all become Densonites if we must. This horror must end!" "Not yet. You don't see -- " "I've seen too -- " The shouted words cut off. "So we let Foster give us a bloody nose and back off? That's what you want? But it's bigger than what you want now, sister, it's the whole Regiment. It's never bidding another contract without somebody saying, 'Hey, they got sandbagged on Thrush, didn't they?' And nobody remembering that Foster figured the civvies would chill us -- and he was right. Don't you see? They killed my boys, and now they're going to pay the bill. "Tank Section, execute! Dig'em out, panzers!" Danny palmed the panic bar, dropping the seat and locking the hatch over it. The rushing-air snarl of the fans was deadened out by the armor, but a hot bearing somewhere filled the compartment with its high keening. Two Star hurdled the ridge. Its whole horizon flared with crystal dancing and scattering in sunlight and the reflected glory of automatic weapons firing from its shelter. Starhome was immensely larger than Danny had expected. A boulevard twenty meters wide divided two ranks of glassy buildings, any one of which, towers and shrine Danny had seen the previous day. At a kilometer's distance it was a corruscating unity of parts as similar as the strands of a silken rope. Danny rapped up the magniBy J. O. Jeppson. The fascinating story of an exciting quest for survival, which could prove to be the key to eternity -- or doom. At your bookstore  # To the farthest houndaries of time and space... and heyond! The fication and saw the details spring out; rods w'oven into columns that streaked skyward a hundred meters; translucent sheets formed of myriads of pinhead beads, each one glowing a color as different from the rest as one star is from the remainder of those seen on a moonless night; a spiral column, freestanding and the thickness of a woman's wrist, that pulsed slowly through the spectrum as it climbed almost out of sight. All the structures seemed to front on the central corridor, with the buildings on either side welded together by tracery mazes, porticoes, arcades -- a thousand different plates and poles of glass, A dashed cyan line joined the base of an upswept web of color to the tank. Two Star's hull thudded to the shock of vaporizing metal. The stabilizer locked the blower's pitching out of Danny's sight picture. He swung the glowing orange bead onto the source of fire and kicked the pedal. The air rang like a carillon as the whole glassy facade sagged, then avalanched into the street. There was a shock of heat in the closed battle compartment as the breech flicked open and belched out the spent case. The plastic hissed on the floor, outgassing horribly while the air-conditioning strained to clear the chamber. Danny ignored the stench, nudged his sights onto the onrushing splendor of the second structure on the right of the corridor. The breech of the big powergun slapped again and again, recharging instantly as the tanker worked the foot trip. Blue-green lightning scattered between the walls as if the full power of each bolt was flashing the length of the corridor. Two Star bellowed in on the wake of its fire, and crystal flurried under the fans. Kowie leveled their stroke slightly, cutting speed by a fraction but lifting the tank higher above the abrasive litter. The draft hurled glittering shards across the corridor, arcs of cold fire in the light of Two Star's gun and those of the blowers following. Men in gray were running from their hiding places to avoid the sliding crystal masses, the iridescent rain that pattered on the upper surfaces of the tanks but smashed jaggedly through the infantry's body armor. Danny set his left thumb to rotate the turret counter-clockwise, held the gun-switch down with his foot. The remaining sixteen rounds of his basic load blasted down the right half of Starhome, spread by the blower's forward motion and the turret swing. The compartment was gray with fumes. Danny slammed the hatch open and leaned out. His hands went to the # cm as naturally as a calf turns to milk. The wind was cold on his face. Kowie slewed the blower left to avoid the glassy wave that slashed into the corridor from one of the blasted structures. The scintillance halted, then ground a little further as something gave way inside the pile. A soldier in gray stepped from an untouched archway to the left. The buzzbomb on his shoulder was the size of a landing vessel as it swung directly at Danny. The tri-barrel seemed to traverse with glacial slowness. It was too slow. Danny saw the brief flash as the rocket leaped from the shoulder of the other mercenary. It whirred over Two Star and the sergeant, exploded cataclysmically against a spike of Starhome still rising on the other side. The infantryman tossed the launcher tube aside. He froze, his arms spread wide, and shouted, "Exchange!" "Exchange yourself, mother!" Danny screamed back white-faced. He triggered his hose. The gray torso exploded. The body fell backward in a mist of blood, chest and body armor torn open by four hits that shriveled bones and turned fluids to steam. "Hard left and goose it, Kowie," the sergeant demanded. He slipped the panic bar again. As the hatch clanged shut over his head, Danny caught a momentary glimpse of the vision blocks, three soldiers with powerguns leaping out of the same towering structure from which the rocketeer had come. Their faces were blankly incredulous as they saw the huge blower swinging toward them at full power. The walls flexed briefly under the impact of the tank's frontal slope, but the filigree was eggshell thin. The structure disintegrated, lurching toward the corridor while Two Star plowed forward within it. A thousand images kaleidoscoped in Danny's skull, sparkling within the windchime dissonance of the falling tower. The fans screamed as part of the structure's mass collapsed onto Two Star. Kowie rocked the tank, raising it like a submarine through a sea of ravaged glass. The gentle, green-furred humanoids faded from Danny's mind. He threw the hatch open. Kowie gunned the fans, reversing the blower in a polychrome shower. Several tanks had moved ahead of Two Star, nearing the far end of the corridor. Grayuniformed soldiers straggled from the remaining structures, hands empty, eyes fixed on the ground. There was very little firing. Kowie edged into the column and followed the third tank into the laager forming on the other side of Starhome. Pritchard was drained. His throat was dry, but he knew from past experience that he would vomit if he swallowed even a mouthful of water before his muscles stopped trembling. The blower rested with its skirts on the ground, its fans purring gently as they idled to a halt. Kowie climbed out of the driver's hatch, moving stiffly. He had a powergun in his hand, a pistol he always carried for moral support. Two Star's bow compartment was frequently nearer the enemy than anything else in Hammer's Slammers. Several towers still stood in the wreckage of Starhome. The nearest one wavered from orange to red and back in the full blaze of sunlight. Danny watched it in the iridium mirror of his tank's deck, the outline muted by the hatchwork of crystal etchings on the metal. Kowie shot off-hand. Danny looked up in irritation. The driver shot again, his light charge having no discernable effect on the structure. "Shut it off," Danny croaked. "These're shrines." The ground where Starhome had stood blazed like Hell.  A sre R obots are a favorite science fiction theme. Another is the great computer, much smarter than a man, which one way or another takes over the world. Machine intelligence fascinates us. Comparatively fewer stories deal with enhanced intelligence, mostly because that's very hard work: how do you write about a character who is much smarter than you are? One theme I've been working on for two years involves implants: you take a small transceiver and put it into a human head (or elsewhere in the anatomy if you like), wiring up the output of the receiver into the auditory nerve. Now you have someone who can communicate by a kind of telepathy; let's put a really big computer at the other end of the system. In theory, at least, every bit of information known to mankind will be instantly available to this "terminal man." Dossiers; reference books; dictionaries; encyclopedias; all the files, etc. , can be his for the asking. A detective could get continuous information on the whereabouts of his colleagues on the force, or continuous information about burglaries in progress, or whatever. There'd be more: all the mathematics capability of powerful computers would be available in real time. Solve integral equations in your head, calculus of finite motion, stock market predictions, etc., all are instantly yours at a thoughts. It's not all that far-fetched. I've spoken with both computer specialists and neurosurgeons who think the first use of gadgetry like that may very well come before the end of the century. The stumbling block at the moment involves the language you'd use to communicate with computers, and no one expects that to take too long to solve. Voice communication with a computer in ordinary English is probably coming within the decade (there are limited cases of that going on right now), and once that's available, comes first the walkie-talkie computer terminal, then the implant. Neither of those is beyond present state-of-the-art. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to think like a man who has a ## in his head, and my story has dragged a bit while I give this more thought. I don't recall too many memorable stories in which real geniuses were the viewpoint characters, probably for the same reason I'm having trouble. Of the two that impressed me most. Flowers For Algernon and Ted .Sturgeon's Maturity, the central character lost the genius ability before the story ended. Still, if there's a mental hookup to a computer in the future of some of the younger readers of this column -- and there probably is -- there's another possibility also. A robot can be connected to the central brain, and of course there have been a lot of stories on that theme. All in all, it may not be long before electronics gives us a number of very smart characters, both human and mechanical, to deal with, provided no one jams their data link-ups. T here's another approach, though, that may be just as exciting: we may be on the way to real robots: self-contained, not relying on any kind of link with a central data bank although able to use one if it's available; very strong; and capable of independent action if not thought. Again, the mechanics are simple enough. The robot itself could be constructed today. What's missing is the brain. The human brain weighs, on average, about # kilograms, or #-## pounds, in the mature male. That little chunk of matter can information, which is quite a lot; the best computers don't have anything approaching that capability, and they're big. Computers are getting smaller all the time, of course; I remember back in the early fifties visiting the then the biggest computer in the world. It w'as housed in a gymnasium-sized building with the world's largest air-conditioner, and three undergraduates were employed full-time running around in iliac's innards to replace burnedout vacuum tubes. Nowadays you can get the old iliac's memory capacity inside my desk. Still, with all the micro-chip technologies we have today, the human brain remains the most efficient data-storage system ever built. It isn't as reliable as we'd like it to be, but it's very good at packing data into a small space and getting it back out quickly. It has another characteristic that's very useful: the information doesn't seem to be stored in any specific place. Karl Lashley, after # years of work trying to find the engram -- the exact site of any particular memory -- gave up. All of our memories seem to be stored all over our brains. That is: Lashley, and now others, train specific reflexes and memory patterns into experimental animals, then extirpate portions of their brains. Take out a chunk here, or a chunk there: surely you'll get. the place where the memory is stored if you keep trying, won't you? the memory remains, even when up to # of the cortical matter has been removed. Lashley once whimsically told a conference that he'd just demonstrated that learning isn't possible. The experiment has been duplicated a number of times, and the evidence of human subjects who've had brain damage as a result of accidents confirms it: our various memories are stored, not in one specific place, but in a lot of places; literally, all over our cortices. That's got to be a clue to how the brain works. A second characteristic of the brain is that it's fast. Consider visual stimulation as an example. You see an unexpected object. You generally don't have to stop to think what it is: a hammer, a saucer, a pretty girl, the Top Sergeant, an ice cream cone, a sabertoothed tiger about to spring, or whatever; you just know, and know very quickly. Yet the brain had to take the impulses from the light pattern on the retina and do something with them. What? Introspection hints that a number of trial and error operations were conducted: "test" patterns were compared with the stimulus object, until there was a close correspondence, and then the "aha!" signal was sent. If, somehow, the "aha!" was sent up for the wrong test pattern, it takes conscious effort to get rid of that and "see" the stimulus as it should be seen. We're still trying to teach computers to recognize a small number of very precisely drawn patterns, yet yesterday I met a man I hadn't seen for ten years and didn't know well then, and recognized him instantly. Dogs and cats automatically do what we sweat blood to teach to computers. If only we could figure out how the brain does it... A number of neuro-scientists think they've found the proper approach at last. It's only a theory, and it may be all wrong, but there is now a lot of evidence that the human brain works like a hologram. Even if that isn't how our internal computer works, a holographic computer could, at least in theory, store information as compactly and retrieve it as rapidly as the human brain, and thus make possible the self-contained robots dear to science fiction. T he first time Dr. David Goodman proposed the holographic brain model to me, I thought he'd lost his mind. Holograms I understood: you take a laser beam and shine part of it onto a photographic plate, while letting the rest fall on an object and be reflected off the object onto the film. The result is a messy interference pattern on the film that, when illuminated with coherent light of the proper frequency, will reproduce an image of the object. Marvelous and all that, but there aren't any laser beams in our heads. It didn't make sense. Well, of course it does make sense. There's no certainty that holography is the actual mechanism for memory storage in human beings, but we can show the mechanism the brain might use to do it that way. First, though, let's look at some of the characteristics of holograms. They've been around a long time, to begin with, and they don't need lasers. Lasers are merely a rather convenient (if you're rich enough to afford them) source of very coherent light. If you don't have a laser, a monochromatic filter will do the job nicely, or you can use a slit, or both. A coherent light beam differs from ordinary light in the same way that a platoon of soldiers marching in step differs from a mob running onto the field after the football game. The light is all the same frequency (marching in step) and going in the same direction (parallel rays). Using any source of coherent light to make a hologram of a single point gives you a familiar enough thing: a Fresnel lens, which looks like a mess of concentric circles. Holography was around as The biggest covenip of all! flying objects "If Major Keyhoe's book didn't sufficiently substantiate his claim that the United States Air Force knows more advanced world -- and is deliberately concealing the truth from the public by censoring reports and discrediting witnesses -- this somber warning might sound a trifle ridiculous. But it rings disturbingly true."Christian Science Monitor. # Idoubleday "lenseless photography" back before WW II. As soon as you have several points, the neat appearance vanishes, of course. A hologram of something complicated, such as several chessmen or a group of toy soldiers, is just a smeared film with strange patterns on it. Incidentally, you can buy holograms from Edmund Scientific or a number of other sources, and they're fascinating things. I've even seen one of a watch with a magnifying glass in front of it. Because the whole image, from many viewpoints, is stored in the hologram, you can move your head around until you see the watch through the image of the magnifying glass -- and then you can read the time. Otherwise the watch numerals are too small to see. Hmm. Our mental images have the property of viewpoint changes; we can recall them from a number of different angles. Another interesting property of holograms is that any significant part of the photographic plate contains the whole picture. If you want to give a friend a copy of your hologram, simply snip it in half; then you've both got one. He can do the same thing, of course, and so can the guy he gave his to. Eventually, when it gets small enough, the images become fuzzy; acuity and detail have been lost, but the whole image is still there. That sounds suspiciously like the results Lashley got with his brain experiments, and also like reports from soldiers with severe brain tissue losses: fuzzy memories, but all of them still there. (I'll come back to that point and deal with aphasias and the like in a moment.) Holograms can also be used as recognition filters. Let us take a hologram of the word "Truth" for example, and view a page of print through it. Because the hologram is blurry, we can't read the text: page, whether it's standing alone or embedded in a longer word, you will see a very bright spot of light at the point where the word will be found when you remove the filter. The printed word can be quite different from the one used to make the hologram, by the way. Different type fonts can be employed, and the letters can be different sizes. The spot of light won't be as bright or as sharp if the hologram was made from a type font different from the image examined, but it will still be there, because it's the pattern that's important. The Post Office is working on mail-sorting through use of this technique. Computers can be taught to recognize patterns this way. The police find it interesting too: you can set up a gadget to watch the freeways and scream when it sees a # Buick, but ignore everything else; or examine license plates for a particular number. There's another possibility. Cataracts are caused by cloudy lenses. If you could just manage to make a hologram of the cataracted lens, you could, at least in theory, give the sufferer a pair of glasses that would compensate for his cataracts. That technique isn't in the very near future, but it looks promising. You'll have noticed that this property of holograms sounds a bit like the brain's pattern-search when confronted with an unfamiliar object. A large number of test patterns can be examined "through" a hologram of the stimulus object, and one will stand out. Brain psysiologists have found another property of the brain that's similar to a holographic computer. The brain appears to perform a Fourier transform on data presented to it; and holograms can be transmitted through Fourier-transform messages. A Fourier transform is a mathematical operation that takes a complex wave form, pattern, signals, or what have you, and breaks it down into a somewhat longer, but precisely structured, signal of simpler frequences. If you have a very squiggly line, for example, it can be turned into a string of numbers and transmitted that way, then be reconstructed exactly. The brain appears to make this kind of transformation of data. Once a message (or image, or memory) is in Fourier format, it's easy systematically to compare it with other messages, because it is patterned into a string of information; you have only to go through those whose first term is the same as your unknown, ignoring all the with similar second terms, etc., until you've located either the proper matching stored item, or one very close to it. If our memories are stored either in Fourier format or in a manner easily converted to that, we've a mechanism for the remarkable ability we have to recognize objects so swiftly. S o. It would be convenient if the brain could manufacture holograms; but can it, and does it? It can: that is, we can show a mechanism it could use to do it. Whether it does or not isn't known, but there don't appear to be any experiments that absolutely rule out the theory. There are rhythmic pulses in the brain that radiate from a small area: it's a bit like watching ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. Waves or ripples of neurons firing at precise frequencies spread through the cerebrum. These, of course, correspond to the "laser" or coherent light source of a hologram. Beat them against incoming impulses and you get an electrical neuron-firing analog of a hologram. Just as you can store thousands of holograms on a single photographic plate by using different frequences of coherent light for each one, so could the brain store miltion by using a number of different frequences and sources of "coherent" neuron impulses. That model also makes something else a bit less puzzling: selective loss of memory. Older people often retain very sharp memories for long-past events, while losing the ability to remember more recent things; perhaps they're losing the ability to come up with new coherent reference standards. Some amnesiacs recall nearly everything in great detail, yet can't remember specific blocks of their life: the loss or scrambling of certain "reference standards" would tend to cause en bloc memory losses without affecting other memories at all. Aphasias are often caused by specific brain-structure damage. I have met a man who can write anything he likes, including all his early memories; but he can't talk. A brain injury caused him to "forget" how. It's terribly frustrating, of course. It's also hard to explain, but if the brain uses holographic codes for information storage, then the encoderdecoder must survive for that information to be recovered. A sufficiently selective injury might well destroy one decoder while leaving another intact. In other words, the model fits a great deal of known data. Farther than that no one can go. The brain could use holograms. Not very long ago, Ted Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and I were invited to speak to the Los Angeles Cryonics Society. That's the outfit that arranges to have people quickfrozen and stored at the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the hopes that someday they can be revived in a time when technology is sufficiently advanced to be able to cure whatever it was that killed them to begin with. I chose to give my talk on the holographic brain model. The implications weren't very encouraging for the Cryonics Society. If the brain uses holographic computer methods, then the information storage is probably dynamic. not static; and even if a frozen man could be revived, since the electrical impulses would have been stopped, he'd have no memories, and thus no personality. If the holographic brain model is a true picture, it's goodbye to that particular form of immortality. On the other hand, whether our ow'n brains use holograms or not, holographic computers almost undoubtedly will work: and the holographic information storage technique offers us a way of construct those independent robots that figure so large in science fiction stories. Either way, it looks as if the big brains may be coming before the turn of the century. Human dignity is sacred bul not tJie only kind. T he heat drilled into the back of boring into his brain like some absurd earwig. The notion struck him as somehow amusing and he smiled, tugging down the visor of his cap. Sweat and dirt had dulled the embroidered bullion into a sullied brown. Moisture beaded his upper lip and dripped from the peaks of his nose and brows. His lips cracked as he smiled and dried blood flaked onto his teeth. The smile filled with gritty brown sand and he spat, turning away from a capricious gust of desert wind. He stumbled down the sagechoked arroyo toward his craft. The eddy of wind moved across the cracking soil and he leaned forward, glancing at a distant horizon filled with blue mountains and gray clouds. He slid down to the sand beside his shattered vessel, studying his companion inside the darkened hull. "How's it going?" he asked stupidly. "Not too bad," crackled the answer from the Translator on to speak English. "We should try and get to the mountains." "No. Rest. Wait." The Translator's electronic voice approximated that of its subject. ders. "We'll die here." He stood and scratched at the peeling skin of the ship, listening to the subliminal homing signal pulsing outward from the crash area. "We won't." "I've got to keep you alive." "You've got to live." "That's not what the book says." "I know." The man whirled. "There must be some chance!" he cried. "As a ControllerExplorer Team I should think the two of us might be able to do something!" "Explorer," said the Translator softly, "we must wait. Remain as cool as possible." The man's companion saw perspiration on his forehead. "You need water..." You need it much more -- " "I won't argue. Explorer." moment, then moved into the ship. It was quiet with the Controller's presence, his companion, and he walked softly to the supplies. He swallowed the water deeply, an angry expression on his face. "Now a Nutrient-A capsule..." "You need those too," answered "A CE Team could never hope to function efficiently with one member starving himself," returned the Controller. and fell onto the command-sofa in the compartment. Sighing, he stared at the mountains through the shredded hole where the nose of the ship once was. The Controller dropped into silence and the Explorer listened intently to the reassurance drifting through his mind. Although the psychic bond between Controller and Explorer very seldom went beyond general expressions of emotion, the entire program was based on that very rare talent that enabled the two beings to communicate. The Translator did as its name implied, but the bond made the team, and even been selected for a CE Team. He knew he would not be alive now had he been a solitary individual "out there." H e closed his eyes and saw the interior of his patrol craft, panels and computer grids popping into his mind like soap bubbles, and he thought back... A light was blinking red and white in a central console. light on Number Two Fuel Bypass," said the Controller from a tele-screen. The Explorer looked up from an old film and reached across for the toggle beneath the light and said, "Sorry. Didn't see it." He tugged the switch and heard a muffied roar, quick, sounding more like a thump against the skin of the ship than an explosion. said the Controller, consulting a straight, ignoring the film. "Bad?" The Controller switched a screen on the man's panel and he saw an image awash with white vapour trailing into space. "You can see there," said the Controller. "We're losing it," muttered "I'm afraid so. Inertial systems will go within the hour. I'm already losing telemetry from Base." "Recommendations?" The Controller consulted his computer scans. "Planet Dante. If we reach it in a reasonable amount of time Planetfall can be made without much problem." The man's eyebrows rose in question. "As of now," said the Controller, "chances are fair. I expect them to be poor by the time we reach the planet." "You're confident we can make screen above his console. "I'm feeding your Library Grid Environmental Data now." answered the Controller. The Explorer read the glowing characters aloud: "Surface temperature over seventy-five percent of the planet greater than fifty degrees centigrade..." "At nightfall it drops down to a comfortable forty-five," observed the Controller wryly. "What few mountain ranges there are approximate more temperate earth conditions. Unfortunately, the shorelines are wholly inaccessible." The monitor screens began to flicker, the ship losing electrical control, soon to be dead in space. ing back in the command-sofa. "Are you okay back there?" Dark eyes met his from the scanner. "I'm relatively safe for the time being..." "I think both of us should get into the escape-shuttle and -- " "The escape-shuttle was carried away by debris," interrupted the Controller. coming into scanner range now," said the Controller, consulting an indicator screen. "Nat, are inertial systems going to be able to handle this?" asked intermittently blinking panels and lights. "I'll need your help..." answered the Controller, the image of Dante growing on four monitor off the still-running film. Before the craft screamed into Dante's atmosphere, they launched an orbiting distress beacon, radio transmissions useless across the light years. The leading edges of the ship were glowing crimson as tress beacon until the radar popped and went dark. The cabin began to shudder, overhead light elements crackling out, the blue of emergency lanterns sputtering on. The man ran his fingers across rows of buttons. The shuddering continued to increase. "Nat, I can't hold it..." The Controller's screen was dark but audio facilities hadn't failed: "Worse... than I expected... If it's still on, punch up System #-H, will you?" The voice was a One navigation sector was still alive. He punched up #-H. It held. "Thanks," said the Conthe vibration shaking his teeth. It grew hotter in the cabin and he strained against the pull of rising g's. Metal surfaces were hot beneath his hands and he smelled burning plastic. Suddenly the emergency lights shorted out and he was in darkness. "Nat!" The shuddering reached an intense peak and fingers of flame choked in the acrid smoke. "Nat!" he coughed. "Nat!" The howl of reentry filled his ears and his eyes burned with hot tears. The flames grew. He attempted to pull himself onto the deck and was thrown onto his back and into unconsciousness... G rains of sand scratched his eyes when he awoke. Blinking, he rolled carefully onto his stomach. Nothing felt broken. He studied the surface of Dante, shifting and blowing sand, the mountains painfully distant. He stood, looking about. Pain lanced through his hip and he limped across to the broken craft, clouds of sand billowing before him. Although pieces of the vessel were scattered over the better part of an acre, the main cabin had remained remarkably intact. He realized he had been thrown clear when the main escape hatch had blown open on impact. He looked through the fuselage, smoke still fouling the air. Leaning against a scorched bulkhead, he listened to the sand hissing over the craft's hull and wondered what had become of the Controller. Moving from the cabin he looked about intently. Nat had made planetfall. Something would be about, even if he was spread over an acre of desert. The Translator amplification of the weakened voice widened the man's face into a grin and he looked about the ship. He saw the cylinder of the pocket-Translator upright in the sand and reached down for it, saying, "I'm here, Nat! We made it!" "It would seem so," answered the Controller, his voice faint even walked back into the ship. "Where... where are you?" he asked. "Here," squeeked Nat, pushing aside a blackened panel with his head. Even though there was an eternal anthropormorphic smile on his face, there was irritation in the twitters and whistles of the bottlenosed dolphin's voice, precious saline solution dribbling from his ruptured tank... The Explorer shook his head. Memories fled from his mind with the wind. He turned on the command-sofa. The Controller lifted his head above the level of dirty water in the small tank. "You're daydreaming," the Translator made the reedy whistles of the dolphin understandable. his tongue translated through the collar on the dolphin's neck. "About the crash?" troller sensing his guilt. "There was nothing we could've done..." "Had I been more alert -- " his bleary eyes. " -- And I more capable, we would've set down perfectly on one of those mountain-tops out there," returned the Controller brusquely. in a situation such as ours." The man was unconvinced. "It doesn't look very good, Nat." He regarded the small cache of salvaged water and food above the tank. "We'll make it." "Your Cetatean intuition tell you that?" asked the Explorer. "You know we have that ability." bitter with frustration. "With the ship as banged-up as it was, we're lucky to be alive." "What do they say about any landing you can walk away from?" "I'm not walking," answered laughed at the joke, his despair drying in the wind and the Controller's electronically channeled voice crackling through the Translator. The man continued to laugh, reflecting upon the tragi-comic plight of one of the most valuable teams in space exploration: he, laying about in the long-underwear-lining of his space-suit, baseball cap tugged over his ears, and his companion crammed into a too-small survival tank at his back. And all of this on a desert world; with no sunglasses... He reached across to the shattered frames on the main ship's console. He picked them up gingerly and studied the falling pieces of gray, polarized lenses; pieces too small even to be patched together. Hearing Nat issue a sigh through the Translator, he stopped laughing and they both fell silent. He began to sing after a long while, his voice a whisper above the breeze, growing louder as he went on. Presently Nat joined him in a squeeky falsetto and they harmonized sourly through the chorus of I've Been Workin' on the Railroad. Toward the conclusion of the song Nat fell silent and the hiss of the Translator accompanied Phillips' last words. "What is it?" he asked. "Sandstorm," answered the Controller. "Coming this way. Approximately fifty miles per hour..." and saw the low cloud of wind and sand, crawling toward them like a living creature. All about the wreckage was eerie calm. The Explorer looked through the perforated ship for cover. "There isn't any," said Nat. "It will pass over us. You'll be exposed for at least two full minutes..." supplies and precious water into a small locker, attempting to bend the twisted metal closed, succeeding only partially. He looked toward the cloud. It was growing and a ground-hugging breeze fluttered the legs of his clothing. He checked the seals on the Controller's tank. "Never mind about that," said the dolphin. "I'll be all right. Stay out of the wind as best as you can, and watch the sand doesn't cover you over." "What about you?" asked blowing sand. "If I'm buried," answered the Controller, "you'll have to dig me out. I've my own atmosphere in here." "But not indefinitely!" cried "Which is why you can't let yourself be covered over! here it Translator and tucked it into his suit, pulling all the zippers closed. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and pulled the helmet seal from his collar, covering his nose and mouth. The material was wet with perspiration and cool against his face. He crouched beneath the leading edge of the main panel, his body pressed against the bulkhead. He looked toward the tank and saw Nat staring at him intently. And the storm was there. T he heat and tremendous wind burned the metal zippers into his chest and he gasped with pain, his sigh ripped away in the screaming gale. Sand and rocks pitched around him and a heavy stone collided with his arm. He lifted his hand and the wind slapped it down. Even huddled under the console he felt sand shifting beneath him and rising over his body. He leaned out toward the tank and fell to the earth, sand covering his face. He reached out scrabbling hands, burning with the sand and heat. He felt nothing but the ragged pain of his cut and torn fingers,. On his stomach the sand marched over his back, pinning his chest onto the hard deck; stones scratched his cheeks and sand sifted through his entire suit. He attempted to move but could only wave his arms and legs feebly, his torso crushed by the sand. Foolishly he peered through dirtcaked eyes; a thorny branch of some desert plant, ripped up by the wind, slapped his eyes and they clouded with blood. And the storm was gone. The wind was a whisper in his ears as he slowly shook the sand from his hair. Then there was no sound at all. In the silence he tried to stand but was held down by the mound of sand. Squirming beneath it he was soon on his back. His legs were still buried but he easily pulled himself clear of the dune that had built itself over him. He sat up, brushing the sand from his face. There were fistfuls of it in the collar of his suit and it drained down his back as he leaned forward, standing slowly. He felt pounds of earth dropping through his suit to his legs where it gathered in billows at his zippered ankles. He reached down and the sand flowed out of the opened flaps. He shook his legs until the greater portion of it was gone. He turned about, eyes searching. The wreckage had been almost completely buried. Shards of metal gleamed in the afternoon light and an occasional flap of material fluttered silently through the sand. but he found himself standing nowhere near his ship. The cloud was almost out of his sight now, sinking below the horizon, creating new land as it moved. He couldn't see the tank. He reached into his suit and pulled out the Translator. Brushing the sand from it, he hit the small switch. me?" The Controller's voice was in the Translator almost immediately. "Yes. I'm all right," answered the man, looking about. "#... don't think... I am." The voice was choked, gasping. him. Small bits of metal and cloth, a new dune. "Nat," he said, "I'm not sure if I'll be able to find the ship. Everything's buried." "#... had... considered that probe the sand surrounding the many pieces of his craft. He slung the Translator on his belt as the Controller said, "I made certain I had some small control over the aft retro-fire assembly..." As he discarded a small lump of aluminum the man said, "You might be able to kick up a little dust..." "Perhaps." He paused at an overturned and useless generator unit, sitting on his haunches thoughtfully. There was no wind at all now and the white sun burned rays of gold across his face. He heard a whine beneath him. The retro-fire assembly. Standing, he cried, "It's working!" The Translator was silent. A puff of sand belched upward from the middle of grin on his face. The electric whine was dying... "That's it..." gasped the Controller. "I'm afraid the unit's shot..." "That's good enough," answered pulled at the sand with both hands and was soon smoothing it down from the rounded hull. Minutes later he felt the tank and increased his efforts, perspiration clearing his face of sand and blood. His chest was pounding and vision blurred. Finally the tank was completely uncovered and he looked down at the Controller. The seals had not held. Nat was resting on two feet of sand, the brown water just covering his sides. He rolled about, wetting patches on the silver-gray dorsal fin. His companion was dehydrating. He sighed and leaned against the tank, tired eyes closing. "Explorer," the dolphin was saying, "I'm all right... it's just that I've got some sand in my eye... and I can't seem to get this damn water clear..." The man twisted off the damaged seals and looked at the shredded gaskets as he opened the tank. "We'll lose the water a lot faster now," he said, putting his finger gently in the corner of the Controller's eye. "No. Back... yes... that's it... Thank you." Nat smiled up at him and he smiled back, forgetting that Controllers always smile. He dropped the top of the tank back down and burrowed toward the damaged locker where he had stowed the provisions. Tugging open the bent door he peered inside and cursed softly. The anger reached the Controller before the curse and he watched the man silently remove the still wet sand that filled the broken water flasks. He carried them out of the ship and hurled them, one-by-one, into four directions. He returned, puffing with dimming anger and said, "That's better." ''Although I appreciate your frustration," said the Controller, "you should attempt to conserve your energies." lessly. "We need water. We won't survive another day here and I can't carry you around on my back looking for it." "That would be impractical," answered the dolphin, motionless in the tank, eyes closed in thought looked away. said finally. The Controller didn't answer and the man sighed, feeling a growing sense of calm resignation ' in his mind that was not his own. He turned and said, "Nat, what have you done?" "Done?" play games with me. You can't conceal that. Nat, it's against regulations!" "Explorer," said the Controller slowly, "it doesn't matter..." The man looked down into the tank, the dolphin's back wrinkled and brown. "It does! I cannot allow you to die!" "You have no choice." you always known?" "When I saw this was the only planet I knew." "It's wrong." "Is it?" asked the Controller. "To insure the safety of those entrusted to you -- to be certain someone survives?" The man leaned against the case. "Would you have made it in the ship after the accident, had we remained in space?" ".Sealed off as I was, yes," answered Nat flatly. "But you would have been dead long before we reached Base." "Without water I'll die now re"A ship will be here by morning. Although you'll be grossly dehydrated. you'll be alive." "And you?" The Controller ignored him. With sadness growing in his right." "As a Controller I had every right. As your friend, I had an obligation." "What about my obligation to you?" asked the Explorer. "You tell me I would've died in space. Now you'll die here. How -- " " -- Did I make my decision?" the Controller sigh. "When I was growing up, in the oceans back home, there were many tales told among us. Of humans we knew a great deal. And one of the stories I've always remembered was that of our ancestors helping shipwrecked sailors to shore, defending them from harm, protecting them. And I realized when I evaluated heuristics a i ter the accident that those tales weren't legends or sleep-time stories. They were truth, and I understood." "Regulations state," began Phillips through clenched teeth, "that in the event of a life-or-death situation during a CE Team mission, the life and protection of the Controller shall be maintained over and above the life of the Explorer. Very explicit." "That regulation was established by your superiors -- humans. They realize our importance in space exploration but do not understand our personal dignity. They never have." "Dignity?" "it is simply beyond my imagination to allow you to die." "And it's beyond mine that you can do this." The dolphin was silent for several moments and he then asked, "Had you the choice, would you have insured my survival above yours?" "Of course." "Why then, do you deny me the same right?" tank and reclined on the commandsofa. The fatigue and his companion's words pressed on his shoulders with a tremendous weight. He looked across the desert and saw the sun riding on the mountains, long shadows crossing the dunes. Darkness was approaching slowly and he watched it marching toward him, quietly saying, "You should've told me." "You would not have allowed it." "You're damn right!" The Controller chuckled raggedly and said, "I remember something I was told long ago..." "What's that?" "When I was finally selected for the CE program, my family told me that although humans recognized us as intelligent beings they would always treat us as pets and we should tolerate that as best we could." "I hope I haven't been too much of a burden..." "Not at all, # -- " Nat began to cough violently and the man moved from the command-sofa to the side of the tank. He pushed away the top and put his hand onto the Controller's great head, feeling the racing pulse beneath the dulling flesh. He moved his hand in gentle strokes, his throat tightening with each gasp from his companion. Soon the dolphin found his voice again and said, "You've been "You've always been my friend, Nat," answered the man, finding his words clouded by black thoughts of death. "Oh, don't entertain notions," said the Controller, a dismissing tone in his voice. "One of us alive is far better than both of us dead." team. What am I supposed to do?" "There's dozens of Controllers waiting for a chance to work with an experienced Explorer like yourself." "I'm j;oMr Explorer," responded the man, moving his hand onto the dolphin's back, feeling shuddering breaths shallow beneath his hand. "Yes," sighed Nat. "And I'm your Controller." "We're a team." "A team," repeated the Constreamlined form was trembling beneath the Explorer's hand and soon it was still and he felt a sickening wave of black sweep deeper into his mind. "Nat," he said softly, bending dow n and staring in the twilight at the Controller. The laughing dolphin-face stared back at him. T he night was starless above him as he scraped a hollow in the sand with a flattened hull plate, ignoring the heat and the convulsions of his own thirsting body. Once he managed to swallow a Nutrient-A capsule w'ith difficulty, working on without rest. As he was smoothing the last handful of sand over his companion he heard a distant whisper in the growing light of dawn and looked toward the horizon. Suddenly it was over him. A wide-bellied rescue ship, screaming turbine engines churning the sand, its red beacon flashing in the pale light. It pulled back slowly, massive with metal and sound above his head. He saw figures moving inside the bubble canopies, a Controller peering through its saline solution, a human commander on the flight the clouds of sand and asked, "What am I supposed to do?" He didn't even hear himself in the roar. Parting day Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues With a new colour as it gasps away. The last still loveliest, till -- 'tis gone, and all is gray. -- Byron # because of the pain in his foot. As a result he ceased to think correctly, and his experiment kept going wrong. He added the catalyst four times altogether (checking and rechecking his sequence each time) but still the reactions failed to materialize. Eventually he abandoned the experiment -- and the laboratory -- altogether, half blaming his equipment as even educated men sometimes do, and half determining to try again when he felt fresher, titter. It was bound to be a mistake in procedure. He walked up the back stairs, nursing his irritability. Distantly, someone was singing softly: Dora probably, who had a habit of singing when she imagined her betters weren't about. He might, perhaps, speak to her about it. None of the other servants seemed to be in evidence; and in his irritability he imagined that they would not be about if he happened to require them. Servants were growing more impossible with every passing year; even the women were remarking on it. He moved up the stairs quite slowly, with an uneven gait; since he could not place his full weight on his foot. Emily would have said the motion (and his frown) made him look considerably older than he was. He failed to find her in the Sewing Room, somewhat to his chagrin. Although his self-awareness was as limited as that of most men of his era he nursed the fleeting realization that she was the only human being in Creation likely to lift him from his mood. But if she was not to be found, she was not to be found. Sighing faintly, he limped to the Withdrawing Room and, finding a reasonable fire there, sat down before it in the only decent armchair the house provided. After a time, he rang for Danvers. He appeared eventually. "Sir?" "Oh, there you are -- what kept you?" Without waiting for an answer, he asked, "Is Mrs. Clarkson in the house?" "I believe so. Sir," Danvers said. He was youngish for a butler, but quite damnably efficient. "Shall I look for her. Sir?" Clarkson waved his hand negatively. "Let her be; she'll find her way here eventually. You might see if you can find me some port." "Certainly, Sir." He regretted the order the moment Danvers left. After all, the port was largely responsible for the pain in his foot, according to Dr. Flanagan. At the same time, life would hardly be worth living without some relief from the sober call of duty. Besides, whatever the longterm detriment, if you drank enough port it deadened the worst of the pains for an hour or two. Danvers brought in a full decanter with the glass. As he set it on the table, he said gravely, "A gentleman called a little earlier, while you were in the laboratory. I informed him you had left instructions not to be disturbed." "Good," Clarkson grunted. He stared into the fire, waiting for Danvers to pour the port. "He intimated that he might return later. Sir, when you had concluded your work." Clarkson sighed heavily. "What an infernal nuisance. Who was he?" "He left his card." Danvers produced it like a prestidigitator and laid it beside the glass. It was small, expensively engraved, although without the ornate elaborations which seemed to be affected by many so-called gentlemen nowadays. The name read, 'Count Vincent de Berg'. "Did he say what he wanted?" Clarkson asked, his tone considerably softened by the title. Although, as he realized quickly, the man might be a Papal Count. The name sounded foreign, possibly French. "Only that he wished to see you on a matter of importance. Sir." Danvers hesitated marginally. "I hope I did right in not disturbing you." "Perfectly right, Danvers. Perfectly right." Clarkson reached for his port. If it was really a matter of importance, the man would be back. He sipped his port and felt the rich, sweet wine ease some of his earlier frustrations. "Foreign, was he?" Danvers nodded. "So I would judge. Sir." "French?" "Possibly farther afield than that." Clarkson let it go. There was always the possibility the man might be one of those itinerant noblemen from Eastern Europe; it was quite impossible to tell anything from a name nowadays -- or even a title, come to that. In any case, it was useless speculating. The mystery would be cleared up when he called again. If he called again... Emily came in as Danvers withdrew. She looked, as usual pale and happy. "There you are, darling. Finished in your smelly old laboratory?" She came across and kissed him, not altogether respectfully, on the forehead. Then she caught sight of the decanter and frowned. "I thought you were feeling gouty, my dear. You know what the doctor said about drinking port." "Confound the doctor!" Clarkson muttered. He reached defiantly for his glass. "Really, Charles, I do wish you wouldn't use such expressions." But there was a twinkle in her eyes. "And I wish you would not use such expressions as 'smelly old laboratory', my dear." He looked up at her and smiled. Emily sat down opposite him, primly upright -- a posture she frequently adopted when she was about to say something outrageous, or simply to engage in banter. "But it is smelly." she pointed out. "And the wing in which you have housed it is certainly old, even if the equipment you use is not." Her eyebrows elevated. "So what else should I call it?" "I have no idea, my dear," said Clarkson fondly. "But I do feel whatever you decide upon should be a little more respectful." "You're very stu," Emily said. But the subject obviously bored her, for she went on almost immediately, "Who was the curious man who called earlier?" Clarkson raised an eyebrow. "I was not aware that we had been invaded by -- " He coughed. " -- curious men." "Not men, darling -- man. Hardly an invasion, but -- " She lowered her eyes becomingly. " -- a striking individual. I could scarcely contain myself for wondering what business he might have here." "I fear you will have to contain yourself a little longer," Clarkson said. "For I presume the individual you saw was Count Vincent de Berg and I have not the slightest idea what business he had here. I have only just now learned about his call from Danvers." Emily looked a little surprised. "You did not see him?" Clarkson smiled. "I was working in my smelly old laboratory," he said. Cook had one of her tantrums, so dinner was a little late that evening, Clarkson found the delay embarrassing since he was entertaining Sir Laurence and Lady Pitney and they had, with Presbyterian punctiliousness, arrived exactly on time. But the meal, when it did arrive, was up to an acceptable (one might, in all modesty, have even said exceptional) standard and by the time the ladies withdrew, Clarkson had mellowed again. His humour was further heightened by Sir Laurence, who took the opportunity while Danvers served the port and laid out a selection of Clarkson's best cigars, to bring the conversation around to science. "Didn't want to bring it up before, old boy," he rumbled. "Know how these things bore the ladies. But frankly. I've been keen to have your opinion on something. As a man of science, you appreciate." He had a basso profundo voice that sat well in his portly frame, although there was a hint of roughness in it which might have come from the prodigious quantities of spirits he habitually imbibed. Clarkson finished lighting his cigar, then waved depreciatingly. "Hardly a man of science. Sir Laurence. A mere dabbler, if you must..." "A dabbler with a reputation," Pitney said. "Don't think I'm unaware of it. Matter of fact, I overheard old Bannerman chatting about you in the House the other day. Said you were doing some of the most interesting investigations in chemistry this country has ever seen." Although the report was probably exaggerated, Clarkson felt both surprised and pleased. Lord Bannerman was nobody's fool, despite his age. But he felt obliged to shrug. "Lord Bannerrrian is kind. Sir Laurence, but I fear I am no more than an amateur in these matters. I consider myself fortunate to have sufficient private income to allow me to amuse myself at these things." "The Empire was founded on amateur virtues," Pitney told him. "Amateurism is what makes England great -- don't lose sight of that, my boy." He leaned forward in his chair. "What I want to know -- in confidence, of course -- is your opinion of this fellow Darwin." Clarkson hesitated. It was not, admittedly, an unexpected question. Evolution had become a fashionable controversy lately. He had his own ideas about the Theory, but it was not, perhaps, politic to voice them in all and every circumstances. Pitney, in his own gruff way, was reputed to be a religious man. At the same time, like Bannerman, he was not a fool, so it would never do to waffle. "I have considerable respect for Mr. Darwin's research," Clarkson said carefully. "And in particular his observations in the field." Pitney nodded, so it seemed he was on a reasonable safe tack. He sipped his port. "One must, I think, admire his courage; first, in exposing himself to the rigors of his famous voyage; and secondly, for propounding his Theory in public when he returned." "Agreed," said Pitney, "but the Theory itself -- what do you think of that. Sir?" Something in his tone gave Clarkson the clue he had been seeking. He smiled. "Even a courageous man may be lacking in wisdom." "Ah," said Pitney. "Ah." He leaned back and sucked on his cigar with an expression of satisfaction. "So you think he's a fool, do you?" It would have been easy to agree, but Clarkson, who had in fact some sympathy for the Evolutionists, had also an ingrained habit of defending his self-esteem. "Certainly, not a fool. Sir Laurence. Let us merely say that -- as a man of science if you will -- I find his theory very much unproven." "Thought so," Pitney nodded. "You're being very careful and I appreciate it. But it's easy to see what you really feel." He chuckled suddenly. "Dammit, I can trace my ancestors back to Bosworth Field and there's not a monkey in the lot of them? Although, by George, a few of them behaved worse than monkeys, what?" Clarkson smiled back, but cut short his reply as Danvers entered. The butler came in behind his chair and murmured, "The gentleman who called earlier -- Count de Berg -- has returned. Sir." For the second time that evening, Clarkson hesitated. The man kept calling at the most infernally unsuitable times. All the same, he was curious to find out what he wanted. Courtesy dictated that he should not interrupt his conversation with Sir Laurence. But if he sent the mysterious Count away again, the man might conclude he would never be welcome. He temporised. "Beg to inform the Count that I am engaged at the moment, but if he cares to wait I may be free to arrange a suitable appointment a little later. If he agrees, show him into the library." "Look here, old boy," Pitney said as Danvers withdrew, "if some business has come up, don't let me keep you from it. Damn fine meal and damn fine conversation, but Isobel and I are early to bed at the best of times." "Please don't distress yourself. Sir Laurence," Clarkson told him smoothly. "I wouldn't dream of having you cut short your visit -- I'm enjoying our talk too much. The fact is I have a Continental nobleman who keeps calling to see me on some mysterious errand. I have not had the opportunity to speak with him as yet, so I have no notion of the importance of his mission. I merely suggested to Danvers that he might wait a while in the library and perhaps if you would excuse me for no more than five minutes, I could arrange a mutually convenient time for us to discuss whatever he wished to discuss." Pitney nodded. "Why not do it now. old boy. I'll join the ladies and give them your excuses. Expect I can put up with their chatter until you get back." "If you really wouldn't mind..." Clarkson murmured. "Course not, old boy. Can't have you sitting all night wondering what the fella's after." He stood up, his bulky frame dominating the dining room. "Damn glad to learn you're not one of these bright young men chasing after Darwin just because that brand of science has become fashionable." He lowered his voice confidentially. "Don't take offense at this, old boy, but I'm an admirer of your work -- damn, science is the coming thing and any man who doesn't see that is a fool. Fact is -- and, as I say, I wouldn't want you to take offense -- if you ever feel that you need a little extra money for some project in hand -- " He caught sight of Clarkson's expression and waved him to silence with a meaty hand. "I appreciate you're a man of substance, Clarkson; but even a man of substance can sometimes feel the need of friends. So if there's ever a necessity in the way of equipment or anything of that sort, I just want you to know that I'm sympathetic. Say no more." He stopped, his expression vaguely embarrassed. "That's damned white of you. Sir Laurence," Clarkson said easily. "Let me assure you no offense has been taken. I see no prospect of requiring any but the most modest financing in the foreseeable future -- and as you say, this is certainly within my means -- but should the situation ever arise..." He left the sentence hanging in the air, and Pitney appeared more than satisfied. Clarkson walked down to the library experiencing an unfamiliar mixture of emotions. He was thinking not of his mysterious visitor, but of Pitney's offer. It was interesting not in itself, but for what it implied. Perhaps the Clarkson name was becoming known in. the right circles after all. How ironic, though, that this modest fame should stem from something which had started as a hobby and little else. Despite the irony, he felt a warming glow of pride. Was it really such a bad thing to become known -- however modestly -- for the part one played in the March of Science. There was, he had to admit, a certain nobility... His visitor arose as he opened the library door. II  dear," Emily said softly. They were sitting alone in the living room, the huge log fire which Danvers had stoked earlier now low, but still glowing cheerfully. Emily had been engaged in crochet, or embroidery, or some such feminine frivolity. Clarkson had been engaged in thought. He looked up. "That, perhaps, is because I am pensive," he said, not unkindly. In fact, although he would have died rather than admit it to her, he felt faintly shaken. Emily glanced at him shrewdly. "You seemed in excellent humor until you talked with the mysterious Count de Berg..." "Did I?" Clarkson replied calmly enough; but her insight had surprised him. It had been like that throughout their marriage. He would decide, on the basis of considerable evidence, that she had not a serious thought in her pretty little head, then some flash of insight -- indeed sometimes wisdom -- would bring his carefully-constructed conclusions crashing down. Her expression was studiously bland. "It also seems to me that you spent rather more time with our unexpected visitor than might have been courteous to our invited guests..." He glanced at her sharply. "Do you imply criticism of my actions?" Emily smiled coolly. "It is scarcely the place of a wife to criticise herhusband. And yet..." She toyed with a thread from her embroidery, winding it coquettishly about her finger. "And yet?" Clarkson echoed. She looked directly into his eyes and suddenly all her teasing air had vanished. "Charles, darling, you must not pretend to me. I am, after all, your wife and as such I have certain rights. No, please -- " He had been about to interject, but stopped. She set her embroidery down, an unconscious gesture which emphasized her seriousness. "When you rejoined the Pitneys and myself after your talk with our visitor, you were disturbed. No, Sir, do not trouble to deny it: I have known you too long and too intimately to mistake your mood. Our guests were deceived, but I was not." The direct approach calmed him. It was as if Emily's sudden change of role made him feel less alone. "How was I then, behind the deception?" Emily smiled. "You were excited, dearest husband. You were disturbed; perhaps a little frightened. But most of all, you were excited. I have never seen you engage in a sterner battle to prevent your emotions becoming evident." For a long moment, Clarkson said nothing. Then, on a rare impulse, he rose, walked across and embraced her. "My dear, dear Emily! How fortunate I am to have married such a jewel! You are correct, of course, and I was foolish to try to hide it from you. I was excited -- more excited, perhaps, than I can ever remember being since a child. The Count de Berg is a most remarkable man." He began to pace the room, his expression thoughtful. "A most remarkable..." "Then," Emily said mock sternly, "you must tell me all about him." The coquette appeared behind her eyes again. "And about the business he came to discuss." "Very well," Clarkson said firmly. He looked at her seriously. "I do not need to tell you everything I say must be treated in confidence -- absolute confidence." "Cross my heart," said Emily; and though the gesture was childish, he knew she meant it. "First, the Count. As you saw, he is a most impressive-seeming man." "I saw him only at a distance," Emily interjected. "Since you have decided to trust me with your secret, you must tell me all. How he looked, how he dressed, from what remote spot he originated. And -- " Clarkson held up a hand. "Enough, dear wife, you shall know all. He is a man shorter in stature than I am, but with enormous presence. I could not guess his age, for he is one of those individuals with truly timeless features. He dressed soberly, with taste, in black. And as for his origin, although I did not venture to question him on that point, I feel it may be remote indeed." "France?" asked Emily. "Or beyond?" "I would say Russia," Clarkson told her. "His English is impeccable and I was quite unable to detect a hint of accent; but it was that careful English one hears when the speaker does not hold it as his mother tongue. No, he is not a native of these islands. It was the cast of his features which gave me the clue: were it not for his bearing and obvious breeding, I would have thought him an Asiatic -- possibly even a half-caste Chinee. But since, as I say, he is obviously nothing of the sort, we must, I think, assume he is a Russian, for part of that country borders Asia and so many of its inhabitants -- even in the highest circles -- display certain Asiatic characteristics." "So he is Russian," Emily said, accepting the logic without further question. Clarkson ceased to pace and sat down again, but the excitement was still obvious in his face. "I believe so. It is unimportant. What is important -- " He hesitated, as if even at this stage he doubted the wisdom of telling her everything. But the conflict was resolved almost instantly. "What is important is that our mysterious visitor is an inventor -- the designer of an aerial machine!" There was silence in the room, broken only by the measured ticking of the grandfather clock. A log shifted in the fireplace, hissed and sparked. Emily frowned. "A balloon? Count de Berg is a balloonist?" "No!" exclaimed Clarkson excitedly. "Not a balloonist! That is exactly the point! When he first told me his business, I made the mistake you have made. His invention is as far beyond the balloon as the balloon is beyond a toy kite. He has designed an aerial machine -- an airship!" Emily stared at him in silence. By her expression, she was having difficulty assimilating the information. Eventually she said hesitantly, "A ship that flies through the air?" Clarkson nodded vigorously. "But... but, dear Charles, such a thing is impossible." Clarkson smiled, a little smugly. "I am afraid, my dear, that in your imagination you are picturing an ocean liner sailing through the heavens. That indeed is impossible. A flying machine heavier than air is a logical absurdity. We know from our experience with balloons that any flying device must, in some manner, be buoyed up." He stood suddenly and reached for the bell pull. "I shall do better than tell you: I shall show you." They waited impatiently until Danvers appeared. Clarkson sent him off for drawing materials and presently he returned with several sheets of paper, an inkwell and a quill. Clarkson would have preferred charcoal, but he let it go for the sake of expediency. Now that he had begun to tell Emily about the airship, his imagination had taken fire and burned away all hope of patience. He laid a sheet of paper on the table and began to sketch. "Now here we have a typical balloon. Here the balloon itself and here the gondola. The balloon is, of course, spherical -- or approximately spherical. Hardly a modern invention and hardly a particularly useful one; except, of course, for sportsmen and adventurers. But for all that, the first device with which Man has attempted to conquer the air. You know the scientific principle of the balloon, of course?" Emily nodded, but in his excitement he appeared not to notice. "Although the basket, and indeed the canopy of the balloon are in themselves heavier than the air, once the balloon is inflated, we introduce buoyancy. The sum-total buoyancy of the inflated balloon is greater than the weight of the balloon material and the gondola. Thus the balloon rises, buoyed up by the air around it. Hot air, as we all know, is lighter than cold air and thus rises. The first balloons were filled with hot air. A fire was built in the gondola for that purpose." "Was not that dangerous?" Emily asked. Clarkson nodded at her and smiled. "Extremely dangerous, my dear. Good men have lost their lives because the fire got out of control. However, in more modern times, the primitive hot-air concept has been replaced by balloons filled with some lighter-than-air gas, such as hydrogen. The effect is identical, but since there is no naked flame, the device is considerably safer." In a moment of whimsy, he drew a matchstick man in the gondola and added hanging weights to the side. "Although they have little commercial importance, modern balloons are quite sophisticated. We can control their ascent by lightening the gondola: all that is necessary is to throw out some weights -- usually bags of sand. And we can descend again by the use of a valve which spills sufficient of the gas to allow a landing." He set the quill down and sat back in his chair. "But for all its sophistication, the balloon has very considerable drawbacks as a mode of transport. In it, we can travel no faster than the prevailing winds permit. More important, although we can ascend and descend, we cannot steer. In short, as a practical form of transport, the balloon is useless." "But," Emily put in gently, "you tell me Count de Berg is not a balloonist." Clarkson's excitement flared again. "No indeed." He returned to his table and his quill. "I have not had time to study the plans of this man's remarkable invention in any detail, you appreciate, so there may be particular flaws which have escaped me. But the general principle..." He sketched a fat cigar beside his earlier drawing and added a curiously-shaped gondola underneath. "He envisages a balloon of rigid structure. The framework might be of light, strong wood, or possibly some alloy combining strength and lightness. The structure allows us to vary the shape from the spherical. I do not expect you to follow this, my dear, but for a guided airship shape is important, since we must in some manner eliminate wind resistance. Our airship must, so to speak, cut through the currents of the upper atmosphere as our more familiar ships cut through the currents of the oceans. For various reasons, the Count feels this cigar shape is the most suitable." The quill made amendments to the gondola, added an exaggerated propeller to one end. "There is almost no limit to the size we can construct such a balloon. With greater size, we have greater lift. Thus the gondola may be massive and may house -- " He looked across at Emily and smiled" -- machinery. This is the essence of the Count's invention. He proposes to fit machinery in the gondola. This machinery will propel a shaft and the shaft will, in turn, propel an air-screw. This screw will drive our great airship through the atmosphere exactly as the screw of a ship drives it across the sea." Emily frowned. "But what will he use to drive his machinery?" she asked. Clarkson looked at her in surprise. "Why, my dear, there is only one source of energy powerful enough to motivate a device of this magnitude. I should have thought you might have guessed, even without my scientific training. The airship will be powered by steam." Ill T he little doctor bustled in before Danvers had time to announce his arrival. Clarkson guiltily set his glass of port behind a vase, but not, apparently, quickly enough. "At it again, Charles? Some men never learn." He shook his head and set his black bag down beside a chair. "Well, since you're intent on I can do is keep you company." Clarkson smiled and gestured to Danvers. "Another glass for Dr. Flanagan. And I suppose you'd better bring a fresh bottle -- this one is almost empty." "Well," said Dr. Flanagan as Danvers left, "I suppose I should ask you how you are. Although in my professional opinion, you are looking healthier than a horse. How is the foot?" Clarkson shrugged. Curiously enough, his foot had been giving him a lot less trouble lately than in the past. "A few twinges now and then. Nothing to speak of. Frankly, I doubt your diagnosis." "Frankly, so have I. Always thought you were a bit young for gout, although since you insist on living like a reprobate, anything is possible. How's the work?" For a moment, Clarkson stared at him blankly. Then he said, "Oh, my experiments? To be perfectly honest, I have not been in the laboratory for almost two weeks." Dr. Flanagan sat down. The leather armchair dwarfed him but his expression suggested he was perfectly at home. "Delighted to hear it, dear boy. Overwork never did anybody any good; and believe me, you've been overworking for years. Never could understand it in a man who does not have to earn a living. Now if I was a rich young man like yourself, instead of an old pauper -- " "You would do exactly as I do," Clarkson put in. "Unless I am grossly mistaken about your character, you are as devoted to the advancement of science as I am." If Flanagan intended to reply, he was cut short by Danvers' appearance with the port. When the butler left, they raised their glasses. "To your very good health. Doctor," Clarkson said. "And to yours, Mr. Clarkson," said the doctor. "Even though such an eventuality must cut down the outrageous fees I am pleased to charge you." They drank. As Flanagan set down his glass, he said, "I fear I can't enjoy your company for long, Charles. I have had a spate of calls this morning -- I only dropped in for a moment since I was passing." "I trust we are not witnessing the beginnings of a local epidemic?" Clarkson remarked. It was lightly put, but there was a hint of seriousness behind it just the same. Epidemics did occur. Come winter especially, they waited on the wings of human experience like spectres of death. Occasionally they moved center stage and the combined advances of modern medicine were powerless against them. "Not unless imagination and stupidity are infectious," shrugged the little doctor, "which my professors always assured me could not be the case." Clarkson smiled. "That strikes me as an interesting remark. Doctor. Would you care to explain it?" Flanagan sighed. He looked longingly at his glass of port as if regretting the fate which prevented the devotion of his life to such pleasures. "My dear sir, every doctor numbers amongst his patients those -- most often ladies of advancing years and astronomical income -- who require no more potent medicaments than attention. I fear my practice is no exception; although naturally wild horses would not drag their names from me." There was no need for equine pressures, for the names of Dr. Flanagan's more difficult patients were known to every tradesman in the district -- and for essentially the same reasons. "And one of these good ladies demands your attention this morning?" Clarkson asked. "Not one. Sir -- several. They have decided, individually and collectively, that they are suffering from shock." He sipped his port and favored Clarkson with a knowing look. "Because of a strange experience they underwent together last evening." "Fascinating," Clarkson said. "Tell me more -- or will that interfere with your Hippocratic Oath?" "Damn the bit!" Flanagan exclaimed. "It seems several of this town's good ladies meet occasionally for an evening of social intercourse. Chatter about how badly their sons treat them and gossip about the evil doings of the younger generation. There was one such gathering yesterday evening. Afterwards, as they were repairing to their separate homes, a number of these ladies saw -- or thought they saw -- a ship. We are inland, you appreciate, Charles, so this vision is strange enough as it stands. But not satisfied with such strangeness, our fine ladies claim this ship was flying through the air!" He frowned. "Oddly enough, I have heard one or two reports of a mysterious flying object from rather more reliable sources." The frown cleared. "While the vision apparently did them little damage last night, they have decided this morning that they are shocked, and consequently -- why, Clarkson, what's the matter?" Clarkson set his glass down, aware that he must have gone quite pale. His mind was racing. It was apparent that matters were moving forward far faster than he had anticipated. The problem now was what to tell the doctor. Clarkson's shocked reaction to the news was too apparent to pass without some comment. Nor did he feel the little doctor could easily be fobbed off with some makeshift story: he had far too high an opinion of Flanagan's native shrewdness for that. He came to a conclusion. "Tom, a moment ago, in jest, I mentioned the Hippocratic Oath. I should like to mention it again, seriously this time. I have something to tell you, but it must remain forever a privileged communication. Although it does not concern my health, I would ask you to hold it as confidential as any detail of my most serious illness. Do I have your word?" "By Jove, you intrigue me!" Flanagan exlaimed. "For what it's worth, of course you have my word." "Very well," said Clarkson; and launched into the story of his initial meeting with the Count de Berg. "Since then," he went on, "I have seen the Count on two further occasions. The first of these was a brief meeting. But during the second, which took place only a few days ago, he did me the honor of showing me detailed specifications of his airship. The thing is an engineering miracle, Tom. He even plans to have the passenger quarters lighted by electricity to promote the most exquisite comfort during flights at night." A cloud passed over his face. "As he was leaving, he did mention the possibility that he might soon be testing a prototype. But I had no idea the test would come so soon." For a long moment, the doctor regarded him shrewdly. "This Count: why did he bring his plans to you?" Clarkson glanced down modestly. "I believe my experiments in chemistry have left me with some little reputation as a man of science. The Count may perhaps have felt he would have a sympathetic and intelligent hearing." Flanagan nodded. Clarkson went on, "There was, perhaps, a rather more delicate aspect of his approach. He intimated that he would need funds. Planning an airship is one thing. Actually building one is another. Such a project would strain even the resources of a wealthy man. So he offered me a partnership in his enterprise in return for an investment." "An equal partnership?" the doctor asked bluntly. The bluntness was embarrassing, but Clarkson was accustomed to bluntness from this source. "Originally yes. But as it happened, the sum of money needed was beyond my immediate capital resources. Now, by a very curious coincidence. Sir Laurence Pitney had generously offered to finance my own experiments just prior to my initial meeting with the Count. I did not need his money then, of course, but it occurred to me that he might well be interested in the airship venture. The Count agreed on one-third interest each." "Have you paid out any money, if I may ask?" Clarkson shook his head. "Hardly, Tom, While I am convinced of the man's integrity, one must make certain of these things before one invests." "I wonder where he got the money for the prototype," Dr. Flanagan mused. "According to my patients, it seems to be well enough built to fly last night." Clarkson blinked. "Well, no matter," Flanagan went on. "Am I permitted to know the motive power of this vessel? The technical details, so to speak? Or does he tly it all on electricity?" "No indeed," Clarkson said. "The motive power is steam. That is to say, an air-screw is driven by steam power. The balloon gives a lift of # pounds." The doctor's eyebrows raised. "Are you sure of that figure?" Clarkson nodded. "He mentioned it several times. Impressive, do you not think?" Dr. Flanagan set down his glass decisively. "Not impressive enough, dear Clarkson. The Count's airship will not work." IV time of year. Clarkson was introverted. much of his confidence shattered by the events of the day. Flanagan, on the other hand, seemed to find release in talking. They walked across the common, en route to Clarkson's home. The last witness had been interviewed. With only minor differences, the accounts tallied. "Steam power," Dr. Flanagan was saying, "does not require only machinery. It requires fuel; coal. And coal is heavy. So are batteries, if you intend to light your quarters by electricity. Or, if you use a generator, you have further weight problems there too. Add the necessity of a captain and crew. Add your gondola, your furnishings. Even without a single passenger, you have a weight far in excess of a thousand pounds." "I feel a fool. Doctor. I cannot imagine why I could not have made such a simple calculation." Flanagan glanced across at him. "You could have made it easily had you thought of it. But you did not because, my dear Clarkson, you are a man of science and you were faced with a problem of engineering. The two are very different. There was also, if I may say so as a medical man, the question of the Count's personality. From your account he was -- or is -- a very impressive individual. Better men than you or I have failed to think clearly under the impact of an impressive personality." The soft blue glow of the street lamps showed in the distance, diffused by a light ground mist. Clarkson shook his head. "I cannot believe him more than a simple swindler." "Nor #," agreed the doctor. "Even though he appears to have vanished now." It was, Clarkson thought, a double mystery. They had called at the Count's lodgings -- or supposed lodgings -- only to find no man of his title, and no man answering to his description, had ever stayed there. Inquiries throughout the town had failed to elicit any hint of him. "And yet," said Clarkson pensively, "if not a swindler... what?" "He required you to keep the matter of the airship secret?" Dr. Flanagan asked. Clarkson nodded. "But he did not object to your telling Sir Laurence Pitney?" Clarkson glanced at him in surprise. "No, of course not." "And I may assume that, like any decent husband, you shared the secret with your wife?" "Yes." "And Pitney with his wife?" Puzzled, Clarkson said, "I would assume so." "And, with the deepest respect to the ladies involved, are not women notorious for their inability to keep even the most minor secrets?" Before Clarkson could reply, Flanagan went on, "Besides, if our friend the Count really required secrecy, why would he choose to test his marvelous invention over so heavily populated an area?" "You are piling Pelion on Ossa where mystery is concerned," Clarkson remarked. "I fear I fail to follow your train of thought." The little doctor stopped. "You are forgetting one thing: although we are now both agreed that the Count's marvelous airship could not possibly work, we have a dozen eye-witness accounts that it did work. It flew above this very town, electric lights blazing, no longer ago than last evening. What do you conclude from that, Clarkson?" Clarkson shook his head. "I have no conclusion," he said helplessly. "I have," the doctor told him shortly. "Whatever flew over here last night was not the Count de Berg's airship." They walked on, slowly. For a time, Flanagan appeared sunk in reverie. Then he said suddenly, "Have you any military training, Charles?" "No." "Nor have #. But I once took an interest in tactics. A hobby, you might say, like your own chemical experiments. I learned the techniques by which one country may successfully invade another. You first send scouts to find out the lie of the land. If they are to survive, they have to pass for natives. That is to say, they must know the lingo and they must -- at least superficially -- have the appearance of natives. If these scouts carry any equipment, it must be cunningly disguised. If, by its nature, it is impossible to disguise, then the natives' attention must be diverted from it. And should this be unsuccessful, the natives must be convinced that the equipment is really something else -- something that will not alarm them. We have done this ourselves in Africa, convincing tribesmen that small arms are white man's totem sticks and so forth." Once again he stopped. "Perhaps our mysterious Count was a scout. Perhaps his talk of an airship was not meant to enlighten, but to confuse. Perhaps he meant the... secret... to leak out, so that people would not guess the real nature of the craft which visited us last night." As the implications sank in, Clarkson breathed. "You mean some foreign power plans an invasion of Britain?" The doctor's face was impassive. "I know of no nation which possesses airships, Charles. I doubt if any European country could have constructed an aerial navy in absolute secrecy. But this concerns me less than a more serious question..." "Which is?" asked Clarkson. The doctor looked directly at him. "If Count de Berg was a scout, I wonder when we might expect the main invasion force?" Then Flanagan did a strange thing. He turned his face upward, so that he was staring out beyond the gas lamps to a sky filled with myriads of stars. "Although," he added thoughtfully, "the main force may not arrive for quite some time; perhaps not for centuries. God alone must know how far it has to travel."  regarded by the lay public -- and indeed by some readers -- as flying saucer experts or flying saucer nuts. I don't know which is the more irritating. My personal opinion on the whole subject, with which I respond to the inevitable questions on speaking tours, panels, and interviews is that yes, opinions as to what they are, where they come from, or why, being perfectly content to wait for further evidence -- "hardware or bodies," as the late Fletcher Pratt used to say. To hypothesize about them is legitimate; to construct hypothese into credos, to force them to carry a freight of personal prejudice, and to use them to attack established scientific search-and-sum-up techniques is only ludicrous. To attack some scientists and certain of the military for their "Let's debunk this, whatever the evidence" andor their .#ish "Whatever it is, it's restricted information," is laudable. It seems to me a simple matter indeed to draw on every known observational technique, to make dispassionate summations, and to publish the results as they accrue. In the unlikely event that they are dangerous, we should know as soon as possible. In the event that they can give us something of value, then let's have it, as soon as possible. It seems to me that both the military and the scientific communities need their credibilities laundered almost as urgently as the poluticians (an accidental typo, that, but ain't it a beaut?) do. The latter have made themselves an easy target, but wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where their statements, and military and scientific reports could be accepted comfortably with no grains of salt? Military secrecy has a pervasive side effect, feeding directly into the ego glands. In small kids it's called "I know something you don't know." In the brass, especially the lesser brass, it acts like shoe lifts, making one appear taller even when one knows one is not. This (to keep the metaphors mixing) spills over into civilian government and the press. And scientists are by no means immune. What brings all this up is an interesting cluster of non-fiction which has accumulated here over the past few weeks. Beyond Earth. (Bantam, # pp., indexed and illustrated, #) is by Ralph Blum with Judy Blum (what's the difference between that and Ralph Blum and Judy Blum?) and is the work of a hard-working professional journalist. The Blums retread a lot of the indignant insistence of other writers in the field against official secrecy and stupidity in the area of ward the concept that these phenomena are extraterrestrial and intelligently operated, he has the sense to conclude, in his final chapter, that (as Charles Fort once remarked) any answer is not necessarily the only answer, and that we still seek a full explanation, I find immensely refreshing. There are times when his "tilt" tips his objectivity, as in his too-ready acceptance (I think) of certain "authorities" just because they have college degrees, and his startling ad hontinem attack on Carl Sagan; do homework, legwork and spadework has produced one of the most sensible tomes yet written on the phenomenon. The folio of photographs is truly mind-boggling and worth the price by itself. (Zebra Books, # pp, illustrated, annotated but not indexed, #) has an interesting publishing history. The first copyright is Italian, the English translation #. (I do not see a translator's name. Whoever he is, he's good.) Published in '#I by Grove Press, it was released as a paperback this past spring. The author, says the bookjacket, is the former head of the technical section of the Italian Air Force, and a senior member of the Italian Association of Aerotechniques. In my judgment his knowledge of air technology is truly encyclopedic, as is his familiarity with the wartime and postwar history of aviation; as a matter of fact, were I to be asked for a reference work in these areas. I'd unhesitatingly recommend this one, quite aside formidable underpinning to his that they have, because logic and physics dictate that they must have, such and such a propulsion system, so and so lift factors. He avoids almost completely any conjectures as to where they come from, and makes no shrill conclusions as to why. His enmity toward "ufologists," "contactees," and the flying saucer crowd generally, is matched by his scorn for the military's public relations tactics. He is convinced that they have been aware terrestrial, with occasional panic suspicions that they are Soviet, and that they have been engaged for all these years in frantic secret effort to duplicate them and get them into the arsenal. The presumption is that the Soviets are doing the same. The result is, of course, an increasing lack of faith in government, in science, and in the military, by an informed and would-be informed public. Let us pray -- let us also make noise! -- that a new breeze may blow through secret corners of these establishments, that the usand-them syndrome be dried up and blown away, that we begin to think as a thinking species which welcomes and shares all knowledge. Anyway... if you have a heard of R.C.W. Ettinger on the old Long John Nebel show on hour talkfest every night and really wrung his guests out. He had Ettinger on several times and was himself heavily hooked on the man. And I suppose that's understandable. Ettinger's idea of freezing people at the moment of death, so that they can be revived decades or centuries later, has a certain appeal to the ego. As a matter of fact, one might say that the greater the ego, the greater the appeal. It takes a very special kind of arrogance to assume that one is worth preserving, reviving, renewing indefinitely. It isn't, I suspect, so much the spirit of adventure nor the prod of curiosity about ages-to-come that constitutes this appeal; it's the magic of Me, the conviction that "#" am worth preserving and rewarding. I am not the world's humblest person, but I am realistic enough, I think, to permit whatever virtues I possess to become genuinely posthumous, and to see the value of not being around to answer for my vices. As a resident of the far future with the power to resurrect any of countless rows of frozen stiffs, I think I would hesitate particularly to push the button marked Ettinger, for fear that the ego he so prizes, the ego that caused him to start his movement, the ego which drained so much of his real wealth into cold storage for so long, might be resurrected with him. Man into Superman (Avon, # pp, indexed, #) is about the most opinionated packet of push you will ever hold in your hands. Superficially I have to agree with a great deal of what he says, and join him in what he attacks -- the trend to stasis in so the long view in favor of immediate gratification, the adherence to the outmoded, the forgiveness of so many irrationalities because, and only because, they have been around for so long. The carrot he holds out for us donkeys is his assertion that superman is inevitable, and that state or condition is within your personal reach. He goes on then to describe what it must be to be a superman, and how mutable, improvable, are all the aspects of You, body, mind, and spirit. For all that, I don't think I could place myself at the mercy of some future generation which would be prepared to thaw me out just because I am so damn wonderful. I think the likelihood is just as great that we will run out of the energy necessary to keep the icebox going, or that I will be revived for the protein in my liver and hams. Anyway, read the book. It might put the light of revelation in your eyes, and it might Hush some dust out of your veins through fury. At the very least he will force you to answer for your own convictions, a good many of which I'll bet you haven't looked at for too long. An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Joumai Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ##I will feature a revealing, disturbing interview with Avram Davidson. Also: "The Foundation on Sands" by John J. Alderson, which leaves Isaac Asimov beached. Also: Larry Shaw's reminiscence of the behind-the-scenes And with luck: "Noise Level" by John Brunner. Every issue: The Archives -- new book and story lists. QuarterlysatnpleI year#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I Bergier, who wrote The Morning of the Magicians and created quite a stir a while back, have given us The Eternal Man (Avon, # pp, illustrated, with bibliography, #). The Michael Heron translation (from the French) is crisp and articulate. The book might be described as van Daniken with scholarship, taste and style. The authors display their product and wait for you to examine it; they do not put a knee in your chest and shriek. Like that charioteer with the screaming axles, they feel that we have a legacy from very ancient sources, and those sources may not be of Earth. The Eternal Man, however, insists on nothing and, except by gentle illumination, does not attack. One such illumination is that science, as we know science, comes late to technological advancement. Some of the most astonishing and potent technological leaps were made by people absolutely ignorant of science and to whom science would be meaningless or worthless. To unhitch one's mind from the axiom that the scientist is the discoverer, the engineer, the exploiter, is to elevate the doer, rather than the thinker, to a more deserving place. "The history of invention is boundless. The history of science is narrowly limited. Science is a river. Invention is an ocean. Science is mental conquest. Invention is the whole of nature at work in man. Science advances within the bounds of the possible. Invention is a blind victory over the impossible. In this sense, it is magic." So state the authors, and go on to point out that it is magic that works, that has worked for more millennia than we acknowledge. It is so easy to fluff off this or that ancient culture as barbarian, because they had no science; so easy to believe that because of this they were slant-browed trogs squatting in front of holes in the cliff, when in actuality they lived in complex societies full of technological wonders, in cultures already ancient. In our lifetime the origins of man have been pushed back from five to seven figures, and the thrust of this book is, not that the teachers from the stars are necessary to our history, but that there is less and less evidence that they did not come, more and more time in which they might have. Fascinating. And now I'm going off to build a version of a backyard seismograph (I live in California; I was jolted by a # just this morning) which this book describes. It was invented in China by one Chang Heng, who was born in # a.d. and died in #. It is simple and breathtakingly ingenious. Of course, Chang had access to a lot more seismology than #. The Chinese study of earthquakes goes back to # B.C.!  Mr. Baen: I enjoyed Poul Anderson's article in the August issue very much, but I disagree with him on one point. I think that many science fiction readers do continue reading sf for much of their lives. I'm talking about people who read sf often. I realize that quite a few people read, say. The Terminal Man. then never touch another sf book. I don't think that type of person can be considered to be someone who abandoned sf, he was never a Trureader in the first place. I think that Mr. Anderson had Trureaders in mind, though. Isaac Asimov has said that after writing science fiction, everything else is downhill. This is also true of reading sf; when one quits reading it, what does he go on to? It's true that science fiction often loses a long-time reader, Myrum J. Mudgett (Galaxy Directions, Aug.) is a good example. But he read sf for over forty years. Even now, he still wants to read it, but he doesn't like what is now being written. That's unfortunate, but not tragic. Mr. Mudgett is going to miss out on a lot by quitting now, but still, forty years is a long time. No, Mr. Anderson, I think that most sf readers keep at it for a long time. As I said, though, I did enjoy the rest of Poufs article, it's one of the best I've seen on where science fiction has been, and where it's going. You're doing a very fine job on Galaxy and If, Mr. Baen. I especially like Jerry Pournelle's column in Galaxy, and Dick Geis' in If. Please put better covers on If, though. They mar an otherwise excellent magazine. Sincerely, Mark G. Scheuern Dear Jim Baen; I am writing in reference to Alexei Panshin's letter (Galaxy: July, #). Panshin writes "... a new format with a better sense of the values of science fiction should sell strongly." I wholeheartedly agree with this idea, but not his proposed approach to the matter. Alexei's first complaint is of size. Personally, I prefer a magazine to look like a magazine (i.e. Vertex size). # 'A by # size allows a magazine, like Vertex, to not look like "cheap digest magazines." Pulp-sized magazines are not only ugly but very inconvenient to hold, carry, and store as opposed to S'z x # (or even digest size). The idea of an #'# by # magazine being lost by being put with other general-type magazines is illogical. I truly doubt if a reader of GalaxyIf Vertex, or any other science-fiction magazine just reads sf. Chances are that sf readers look for other magazines of the # by # size. too. If another person, who wouldn't normally look for a science fiction magazine, picked up and bought a sf magazine of this size because it was next to one of their favorite magazines and looked interesting, would this be so bad? As to the content of a new science fiction magazine, what Alexei Panshin outlines is a mainstream magazine. Science fiction magazines should be more aware of their times and include articles, reviews, and stories which reflect them, but only those which relate in some way to science fiction or fantasy. This relation should include science (as Vertex has) and books, movies, and records concerning science, science fiction and fantasy. Articles on comedians and performers have no place in a science fiction magazine. If a magazine included all things that reflected our times (as Panshin suggests), it might be excellent but it would not have those unique ingredients that constitute a science fiction magazine. A science fiction magazine is a place where people who enjoy the hobby of sf can come together to write, read, and comment on it. I would like to see a science fiction magazine which includes good writing of sf and its related fields (fantasy, horror, science, etc.) and interesting, thought-provoking comments on the writing and the field as a whole. (Galaxy If anA the other science fiction magazines seem to be coming closer to this idea. They seem to be giving more room to science and non-fictional articles, but are still -- in the words of whomever wrote the ad for If in Galaxy -- "Pulp Gone First Class." Still closer to pulp than regular magazine.) This is the type of science fiction magazine I would like to read. It is perhaps a compromise between the Panshins' idea, the pulps, and present-day magazines. And the type of magazine I hope the future will bring. Alyson L. R. Abramowitz # Valmont Place Elmont, N.Y. # I must confess -- I wrote that ad. And while my normal editorial apstill, I meant every word of it. Dear Editor, In your July, # issue Jerry Pournelle did an article on the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. This article interested me very much and I would like to know if you are planning to do a follow-up article on some of the ideas he talked of. Also while reading your issue of Galaxy I read Dr. Asimov's article. Question, Dear Doctor -- are you sure nothing else can or will go wrong? Teri Weiner # Larkspur Dr. Mountainside, N.J. # Jerry tells me that the meeting provided a great deal of grist of his mill indeed. As for Dr. A -- well. Dr. A? #il#iXy The Foremost Publication in Science Fiction Some Contributors Post and Present Pool Anderson Isaac Asimov Allred Besler James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein 'A illy Ley Donald H. Menze) J, R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A. E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegul, Jr. H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. 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And the men of the village said unto hint, "If whilst ye guard the sheep a wolf appears, then blow thy horn and cry 'Wolf and we will come to succor thee. " -- Old Fairy Story U p until then, it had been an unusually uneventful night, they hadn't even descended once. But now the screen lit up with large red letters and numbers, H-# K-#. A voice said urgently, "Emergency distress signal from citizen with wrist alarm." Patrolman Jim Kelly hit the drop lever with the butt of his right hand and they started down. His partner knew the coordinates of their patrol area by heart. Tad Boleslaw snapped, "Corner of Locust and MacArthur. And, by Christ, there they are." The police helio-jet came swooping in. "On the ball. Tad," Kelly said, voice tense. But Tad Boleslaw was already whipping his Police .# Recoilless from its quick draw holster, his hand on the door next to him. They could make out two figures below, in the otherwise deserted streets. "Stick-up romp," Kelly growled. The other patrolman didn't bother to answer that obvious statement. Between the two small figures below there was suddenly a lance of Hame. "Oh, Christ, he nailed him," Boleslaw groaned. "Well, at least we'll get the bastard." When they swept in, one of the figures was sprawled over the gutter, half his .body in the street, half on the sidewalk. Boleslaw vaulted out while they were still five or six feet off the ground and went charging up, .# in hand. "Drop that gun!" he yelled. The other was standing, facing him, his hands at his sides and two feet or so out from his body. He had a gun in his right. He said, "I'd rather not. It might damage it." "Drop that gun," Boleslaw said dangerously. He had come to a halt. "Why not just take it from me?" the other said mildly. "You've got me covered." The patrolman scowled. This was a new' one. Kelly came running up, weapon in hand. He circled around, taking care not to get in the potential line of fire, came up behind the other and grabbed the gun in question. He slipped it into a pocket and gave (he gunman a thorough frisking. "Keep him covered," he told his partner and went over and stared down at the body. There was a gaping hole in the fallen one's chest, the blood had already stopped pulsing. It was a youngster, probably in his late teens. Near his right hand was an old fashioned automatic pistol. Kelly turned back to the man Boleslaw was covering. "You the one sent in the emergency alarm on the wrist gismo?" "Yes." "What happened?" "Stick-up, I guess." Boleslaw said, "You must be awful quick on the draw if you took him when he already had you covered." "Thanks. I guess he wasn't expecting me to be armed. When he heard your cruiser coming in, he looked up... startled. That was long enough." The two patrolmen sized him up. He was an unprepossessing man somewhere in his early fifties. He was a bit under average in size and could have used another ten pounds or so. He wore a mustache, and shouldn't have; he didn't have enough hair on his upper lip. He also wore spectacles, which were rapidly becoming an anachronism in these days of eye surgery and the new model contact lenses. Kelly thought inwardly, "No wonder the kid let him get the drop on him. He doesn't look as though he could kill time." But then something else came to him and he said, "Aren't you Buddy Brothers? Seems to me I've seen you down at the pistol range." "I'm getting a little old to be called Buddy any more. The name's Charles Brothers. Yes, I'm kind of a junior member of the Police Pistol Team. I can't compete member of the City Auxiliary Police." He added, a touch of pride there, "It's too bad, because I can shoot circles around most of the boys." Patrolman Boleslaw said, in response to the incoming whine of sirens, "Here comes the meatwagon. This won't take long, Mr. Brothers. Then we'll run you down to headquarters and you can make a statement." "Sure, boys. I've been through this before." Tad Boleslaw eyed him in surprise and said, "You have?" "Yes," Brothers said, looking about as though in explanation. "This is a pretty tough neighborhood." "What in the hell are you doing here, this time of the night?" "Walking home from work. I'm on the swing shift. I get off at midnight." Tw o vehicles, one an ambulance, came swooping in. Uniformed officers, a plainclothesnian and two white jacketed younger men with a stretcher spilled out. The plainclothesman, obviously in charge, looked over the scene without change of expression. He had seen the scene before, though usually roles were reversed. Usually, it was the citizen stretched out on the street, the stick-up man caught, gun in hand, or shot down when he tried to resist or escape. Kelly handed the gun over to him. The newcomer was a little gone to weight, was tired of eyes and his hat, shoved back, indicated that he was beginning to bald. He smoked a well charred, short pipe. He said to Patrolman Boleslaw, "What happened, Tad?" The other told him. The plainclothesman looked at Brothers closely and said, "I'm Detective Lieutenant Norman Schmidt. You got a permit for this pistol you used on the punk?" "Yes, sir." "You don't have to call me sir," the detective replied. "You're a citizen and, I assume, a taxpayer. I work for the city." The smaller man nodded. "I'm a member of the City Auxiliary Police, acting patrolman when on duty. I was helping you that time you led the squad against the Dolly Teeter gang... sir." The other pretended to remember him now. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Well, good work. Brothers. Tad, you and Jim take him down to headquarters and make out a routine statement. Check his identity, so forth. Check out his gun permit." He turned his eyes back to Brothers. "Nocrud, but technically you're under arrest...technically. You'll sleep in your own bed tonight." "Thanks, sir. I suppose I'm a little upset. Uh, your men are certainly efficient. I have to congratulate you all. They were here in possibly half a minute after I activated my emergency distress alarm." T he next evening, before going onto his shift. Tad Boleslaw drifted into Lieutenant Schmidt's office. They were moderately good friends, considering the difference in rank. Tad's father and Schmidt had both been sergeants when the former had been killed in line of duty. The lieutenant knew that the younger man was bucking for the detective squad but didn't have the seniority as yet. Schmidt had a marking stylo in his hand and was sourly checking out a report. He didn't like tapework and, God knew, there was enough of it these days. He said, "Cheers, Tad. What spins with you?" He ran a freckled hand back over his less than generously haired head. Tad pulled up one of the steel chairs of the drab police office, without invitation. He said, scowling a little, "I was wondering about that gunning last night." The older man tossed his stylo to the desk, glad of the opportunity to scuttle it, and reached for his well soured pipe. "What gunning? There were four. Center City is getting to be like a shooting gallery. Oh, you mean the one you and Jim Kelly were in pn. What about it?" "I don't know. It was something Brothers said. He said it wasn't the first time he'd gone through this. He doesn't exactly look the Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickock type. But last night he evidently drew on that young funker while the kid was leveled down on him." Schmidt laughed, even as he loaded the briar. "This Charles Brothers I checked out, just as routine. In spite of his looks, he's an Asian War hero. Bronze Star. He's seen a gun or so before." Tad said, "All right, but for crissakes what's he doing living in that neighborhood? And, if he does, what in the hell's he doing walking back and forth to work at night? Why doesn't he drive or at least take public transportation? We've got a pretty good vacuum transport metro in this town these days. He could get to within a block of his house on it." The lieutenant contemplated him, even as he lit his pipe. "What are you getting at. Tad?" "He said he'd been through it before. How many times?" Schmidt said, "Like I say, I checked him out just as routine. He's one of the first citizens in Center City to buy an emergency alarm wrist device. And he was one of the first to use it. Two Blacks jumped him and he had it out with them. By the time the patrol boys got there, he had finished them off. We were looking for both of them, since they both had nice long records in the Crime Data Banks. One had a gun we were also looking for since a slug from it had chilled one of the citizens over in Far Cry. The other's gun wasn't hot, so far as we know." Tad said, "That was the first time. You mean that there were more?" "The next time, the man who tried to mug him didn't have a crime dossier. Nothing at all. Brothers nailed him before the funker got a single shot off. That gyro-jet rocket pistol he carries needs exactly one hit to demolish King Kong or Moby Dick." "How was the mugger armed?" The lieutenant said, "With one of these bureau-draw er specials left over from the old days w'hen you could buy these foreign made warsurplus shooters for about fifteen dollars apiece. No record of the serial number, of course." "They're getting kind of scarce these days." "What are you building up to?" "Damn if I know. How did that gun the kid had last night check out?" "Same thing. You can still pick them up in that slob neighborhood for a few pseudo-dollars. What in the hell's roaching you, Tad?" The lieutenant had gotten his pipe going well. It stank. The patrolman said unhappily, "Walking home at night, in that neighborhood. It looks like he's asking for it. His luck can't last forever." Schmidt shrugged lardy shoulders. "The guy's got guts. He's not afraid of these punks. If more citizens were like him, had his courage, the muggers wouldn't be on the streets. I told you, he's even got medals. You think a bunch of funkers looking for bread to buy their next fix are going to scare him off the streets of the city?" Tad said sourly, "They're either going to or he's going to wind up in the gutter himself one of these nights. He's had more shoot-outs than most of the patrolmen on the force." He came to his feet, preparatory to leaving but the lieutenant pulled out a drawer, reached in and came up with a gyro-jet rocket pistol. He said, "This is Brothers' gun. All charges have been dropped against him, of course. When you and Jim Kelly get over that neighborhood, take it back to him." Tad Boleslaw took the weapon and looked at it distastefully. "I don't like these things," he said. "Too much gun. You hit a man, just anywhere at all, and if he doesn't go down you walk around behind him to see what's holding him up. Suppose somebody's running and you want to shoot him in the leg to stop him. You shoot him with one of these and it'd blow his leg off and he'd probably bleed to death before you could get medical help." "Yeah," Schmidt said around his pipe stem, "but you're a cop and sometimes the occasion comes up when you want to shoot some funker who's running in the leg. But Brothers carries his shooter for self defense and when you're defending your life the more punch you have on hand the better." "I suppose so," Tad said, still not happy. "See you later, Norm." S ince Brothers had told them he worked the swing shift. Tad and Jim Kelly put off going to his home until about one in the morning. Even knowing the neighborhood, both of the patrolmen were surprised at the squalid, aged apartment house that the man lived in. The whole ward was a blot on the city and periodically the city fathers drew up plans to renovate it. Nothing seemed to come of them. Popularly, it was known as the last of the slums and the residents were aliens and others not eligible to collect the federal Guaranteed Annual Income, which was sufficient to enable the unemployed or pensioners to rent a small apartment in a decent high-rise apartment house, or even a place out in the suburbs. You didn't live very lived adequately. One of the reasons for the high crime rate in this neighborhood was because so many of the residents were felons on the lam, military deserters, or others afraid to register for GAI since they couldn't reveal their correct identity. But it was unlikely that Charles Brothers would live here. They parked their helio-jet patrol vehicle before the building and both got out. They looked up at the aged structure; it must have been well over a century old. "Some joint," Jim said. "Let's go. I hate to leave our heap here. In this vicinity, somebody might steal it." They went up the stone steps to the door. There was no identity screen. Instead, there were eight names and eight old fashioned electric buttons there. One of the name plates read Charles and Tilly Brothers. Apartment Six. Tad pressed the appropriate button and shortly the door buzzed. Jim opened it and they went into a dimly lit hall. There was no elevator. They started up the stairs. Apartment Six was on the third floor. Evidently, there were two flats per floor. Jim knocked at the door. There was a peephole set into it and the two patrolmen could detect an eye taking them in. The door opened and Charles Brothers was there in shirtsleeves, pants and slippers. He said, "Yes? What can I do for you?" Tad said, "The lieutenant sent us over to return your gun, Mr. Brothers. All charges against you have been dropped." "Why. come on in boys." They followed him into a living room. In actuality, once inside the apartment it wasn't badly done at all. It was very well, very tastefully, furnished and there were paintings on the walls that were obviously originals. A girl got up from the couch where she had been, of all things, knitting. Whoever heard of women knitting in this age? She looked at them nervously. She was not an unattractive young woman. About twenty-five, Tad would say. Nice brown hair worn rather long as styles went these days, pleasant figure just a very little on the dumpy side and, like Charles Brothers himself, she wore glasses. If anything, they rather enchanced her blue eyes. Her clothes were a good twenty years out of date. Brothers said, "Gentlemen, this is my daughter, Tilly. Tilly, these officers came to my rescue last night." He added apologetically, "I don't believe I got your names." Tad grinned at her, his cap already in hand, and said, "He didn't need to be rescued. I'm Patrolman Tadeusz Boleslaw and this is Patrolman James Kelly." Brothers looked at him and said. "Are you a foreigner?" Tad frowned and said, "Why, no. My father was of Polish descent and my mother German but they were both second generation Americans. Why?" Brothers said uncomfortably, "I don't like foreigners. I'd offer you boys a drink but I no longer use the stuff myself. It cuts down your reflexes. For that matter, I don't hold 'with keeping it in the house." Kelly said, "We can't drink on duty anyway." And Tilly said in a small, distinct, sweet voice, "Coffee, perhaps?" Tad smiled at her. "Afraid we don't have the time, Ms. Brothers. We'll take a rain check." He looked at her father, preparatory to leaving. He had already handed over the gyrojet pistol. He said, "Hope you don't have to use that again, sir." "I trust I won't, but I like to be prepared. These gook slum elements have to be kept down." Jim said, "I hope you didn't walk home tonight through this neighborhood." "Why, yes, of course I did," the other told him, a touch of indignation in his voice. "I do every night. I have a sedentary job and need the exercise." "Unarmed?" The small man shook his head, as though smug. "No. I had another gun. I collect guns." Tad nodded, as though that figured and said, "Well, goodnight. Nice to have met you, Ms. Brothers." On the way down the steps. Tad muttered, "That's a funny set-up there." Kelly looked at him from the side of his eyes. "How do you mean?" "I don't know." Back on their patrol over the city, Tad said, "Did you notice that the girl wore an emergency wrist alarm too?" "Why not? I wish the hell every citizen did," Jim told him. "Biggest thing to hinder crime we've ever had. The Federal Enforcement Assistance Administration came up with the first primitive one way back in the #s. But they're really efficient now. A citizen is confronted with an emergency and activates his wrist alarm. The computers, within less than a second, get a cross on his location and beam a message to the nearest patrol vehicles both surface and air. Wizard! We're on the scene, often in less than a minute. How can you beat it? Burglaries, for instance, have just about disappeared. And rape? Any girl with a wrist alarm is as safe as in her mother's arms." "I guess you're right," Tad said. "Everybody ought to wear one, especially if they're often in situations open to violence." Jim was suddenly scowling. "You know," he said, "it just came to me, talking about wrist emergency alarms. Brothers wasn't wearing one last night." "What're you talking about? How could he have sent in that emergency call, if he didn't have an alarm?" "I'm not saying he didn't have one. I'm just saying he wasn't wearing one on his wrist. Remember when I frisked him? I ran my hands up his forearms. I always do, to check for knives or little hide-out pistols. He wasn't wearing anything on his wrists, even a watch." "He probably had it in a pocket," Ted said. "Why? They make those alarms as big as they are so that potential stick-up men or muggers, or whatever, can see them and be scared off. There's not much point in hiding your wrist alarm." They flew in silence for a time until Tad said, "What got me was the uncomfortable atmosphere. The girl seemed afraid." Jim looked over at him quizzically. "Afraid of what? Not a couple of cops. Hell, her father's a cop himself, in a way. Volunteer in the City Auxiliary Police. From what he told Lieutenant Schmidt, he evidently was in that shoot-out with Dolly Teeter's mob." "I don't mean immediately afraid," Tad said slowly. "I mean a long time afraid. There was a feeling of fear in that apartment." "Jesus," Jim said. "You going mystical on me?" T he following day was one of Tad's free days. He was a fitful sleeper, especially when working a late shift. But his sleeping the night before -- mostly in the early morning hours had been worse than usual. He'd slept about three hours and had then come awake and spent the next four or five in that half-sleep in which you usually worry about something or other. He couldn't get Charles Brothers off his mind. The whole thing didn't ring true. Okay, what Norm Schmidt had said was believable. The guy was a war hero who had won medals and wasn't about to truckle to a bunch of cheap hoods. He went armed and provided with a police emergency wrist alarm and he was ready and able to take on anybody who gave him trouble. But something still didn't quite ring true. In all. Brothers had killed four of these young funkers. Four! He hadn't simply wounded a single one. All were dead by the time the police got to the scene. Of course, using a gyro-jet pistol would account for that. But still. Four. In all of his police years, Tad Boleslaw had killed exactly one man. And he was sorry about that. He should have been able to bring the other prowler had run up an alley with Tad in full pursuit. It proved to be a dead end. The man turned and pulled a gun. Tad had tried to wing him but he had shot too hurriedly, fearing that the other would shoot first. He had got him in the belly. The ambulance, for once, had taken hell's own time to get to the scene. Everything went wrong. The hospital. Of course. Tad had nicked several others in his time, some of them pretty badly, but he had only killed one. But four, for crissakes, and the man wasn't even a real cop. Since he was a bachelor and impatient of larger quarters, Tad lived in a mini-apartment in a moderately sized high-rise apartment house. There were some five hundred apartments in the building and he doubted if he knew half a dozen of the people who were supposedly his neighbors. It suited him, and his way of life, but he knew that this existence was rapidly becoming unpopular with most. Too ant-like. The big cities were breaking up and the inhabitants, lemming-like, were streaking out into the boondocks, some to small communities, some to even more isolated existence, or mobile towns. People's Capitalism, as some called it, allowed for not only Guaranteed Annual Income, but also provided each family in the land one free residence, or mobile home. In actuality, you could apply for yours, get it -- there was a certain maximum amount of pseudodollars you were allowed to expend -- and then sell it the very next day, if you wished. But from then on you either had to buy another place on your own, or rent. There was a certain method in the seeming madness. It was a way of counter-balancing the fall off economically when so much of the military spending had been discontinued. so-called defense were put into construction and into other fields, such as ecology and the rebuilding of the environment. All for the best, he assumed, although Tad Boleslaw was precious little interested in such subjects as socio-economics. He was a dedicated cop and a good one. He found it a satisfactory manner of making a living, though unromantic, usually drab and laborious. He had a moderately good education and had also had studied every issue of such technical publications as Criminology, Police Science and the Journal of Criminal Law. He had a distinguished marksman rating, and two citations on his record. After training, he had moved up from probation through the two patrolman grades and had his fingers crossed about getting detective status in the reasonably near future. He finally gave up any hopes of further sleep, got up and flicked the button which slid his bed into the wall where it would be made-up with fresh bedclothes. Thank the powers that were for automated housekeeping. He went through his usual morning bathroom routine then went into the so-called kitchenette, sat down at the small table and dialed breakfast from the automated kitchens in tHe basement. And thank the gods for them, too. Tad was of the tribe that couldn't even make a decent pot of coffee. He was so preoccupied that he didn't taste his food, and was mildly surprised to find the meal was over. He threw the dishes and utensils into the disposal and turned back into the livingroomcum-bedroom-cum-study. He went over to his desk and dialed the National Data Banks on his screen. He said verbally, rather than dialing for his information, "I want the dossier of Charles Brothers." He opened his police notebook and flicked to the page he had used the night before and read off the identification code of his subject. The screen said, "What is your classification, please? Are you eligible to request a citizen's dossier?" "Police officer," he said, and put his identification card on the appropriate square of the screen. And there was the life of Charles Brothers. Very cold was a citizen's dossier, very sterile. But all the information was there. Had Tad been interested, grandparents, parents, date of birth, doctor presiding at birth, etc. etc. Health from his earliest years, every time he had medical attention, every childhood disease from the first months, every other visit to a doctor, up to and through any venereal disease he might have picked up in Asia during the war, etc., etc. Brothers had a high-school education as they had called it in those days. Evidently, average student. As a matter of fact he seemed average all ways from Tuesday. Tad got to the war years. His subject had been drafted and had seemingly been a good soldier, rising to the rank of sergeant. Four years in the infantry. Which would seem to have been plenty. And then Tad Boleslaw came to his first discrepancy. The other's military discharge status was blank. Strange. He flicked a switch and said, "What type of discharge was Charles Brothers given?" He repeated the other's identification code. The screen said, "That information is restricted." Tad blinked. "Why?" "That information is also restricted." He'd be damned. He went on with the dossier. Following the war, Brothers had taken training in seemingly been good at it and got promotions. He was currently being paid three hundred pseudo-dollars a week as a shift supervisor in an installation in an ultra-market. Three hundred pseudo-dollars a week! And living in a dump like that? Well, not really a dump. The apartment was pleasant enough. But in that cheap ghetto? That slum? He went on. Married. Divorced a couple of years ago. One child. Tilly. Yes. Tilly. The scared girl. Scared of what? He ran into his second surprise. Organizations to which the other belonged. Brothers had applied to join the National Guard. Application refused. Reason restricted. Application refused! To a war hero? He sunk back into his chair for a moment, then flicked his switch again and said, "What classification is needed to receive the information about Charles Brothers' military discharge and his application refusal to join the National Guard?" "A Military Classification One." One! Jesus Christ, you practically had to be a member of the Chiefs of Staff or the President himself. One! Who in the hell was this Brothers? He had largely skim-read but now he had come to the end of the dossier. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen for a time. Then he said, "I want the Crime Dossier of Charles Brothers." "What is your classification, please? Are you eligible to read a citizen's Crime Dossier?" fffil jggantlM A division of Random House, Inc. Just back from the World Science Fiction Convention where, as we prewon the Hugo. We instantly cabled our congratulations to Arthur C. Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka new name for Ceylon, and he cabled back, "Splendid news... , should boost me on final # stretch just began ... thanks and love to all!" So a new Clarke novel is on the horizon... and we'll tell you more as soon as we see the manuscript. States as a serial in Galaxy, thanks In large part to Clarke's agent Scott Meredith, who was a devoted sf fan long before becoming literary agent for many of the world's top writers. While still an editor at Galaxy, we suggested to Meredith that it was high time Clarke had a novel serialized in one of the magazines, since that was where his first sf was published. Meredith agreed and promised to send the next Clarke novel to Galaxy providing Playboy the best-paying market in the field, could not take it on. True to his Then we brought the galleys of the novel with us to Ballantine, and the rest is publishing history. Much has been said and written about agents -- and not all of it complimentary. So, let us go on record in appreciation of the unsung middlemen in the field.    We are celebrating an auspicious anniversary this month with the publicamond Z. Gallon, whose first and second, as it happens story was published exactly # years ago. Hardly a new-wave writer, Ray Gallun nonetheless fills his novel with all the literary invention and imagination associated with the best contemporary science fielion. Here's a world where mere wishing will make it so... where anyone can do anything, can be anywhere and can even live forever: "As you choose in all matters, you have ultimate free choice, as long as you do not seriously Interfere with the choices of other roving personalities... But, does man really want free-will? Will he know how to exercise it? What Is the price he must pay? These are some of the philosophical problems Gallun considers in a unique novel that takes places on a farm in the mid West, on a streetcomer in Heaven, In a palace of Ancient Egypt, in the environs of Hell and, even, somewhere in Middle Earth.    sales conference last year, we were greeted with a chorus of "What's a Weinbaum?" Readers knew who Weinbaum was, and lots of books were approved that choice. This second volume in our classic library of definitive sf collections by the giants of the field was a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. The # stories, specially chosen by Leiber himself, are Introduced by Poul Anderson. Even at its price of I .# you would not believe what paper costs!, this collection is a super buy. Any serious reader of science fiction will, no doubt, want the entire series.    Finally a Christmas present for all you fantasy fans -- the fourth and final volume of Evangeline Walton's reand we are reissuing the first three which have been unobtainable for some months. All four books have been beautifully boxed for holiday gift-giving. Look for the set S# or for the paperback books are sold. He went through that routine again. And there was the Crime Dossier. There was precious little that Tad Boleslaw' didn't already know, aside from a couple of traffic violations before the war and one drunk and disorderly charge back when the other had been eighteen. He came to the subject's military years. awol once for two days. Another minor offense; while going through training he had refused to obey an order of one of his non-coms. Tad didn't bother to read the details. He then came to another surprise. There was a lot of militarized numbers, references and general gobblydygook -- then a stamp; "Information Restricted." Again he slumped in surprise for a moment, then checked Brothers' post-war Crime Dossier. Nil except for the three shootings. The first two had been Blacks, as Tad had already knowm. Same family; they were brothers, Wilbur and Washington Scott, # and # years respectively. Both with lengthy crime records. The second, Jesus Martinez, a Cuban of # years, had no particular record. Schmidt had already told him that. The third shooting, that of last night, was of Jose Gonzales, a Mexican. And that was the crime career, such as it was, of Charles Brothers. Tad thought about it awhile and then requested the Crime Dossier of Jose Gonzales. Though of Mexican background, he had been born in Arizona. His record was sparse. As a twelve-year old he had been picked up by the juvenile authorities for pilfering candy in an ultramarket. He had been properly scolded and released. He had been picked up again at fifteen for loitering, evidently in the companionship of some less savory Mexican youths. About a year ago he had been arrested while riding in a stolen car. It turned out that he hadn't known it was stolen. The driver, who had given him a ride, had ripped off the vehicle. Jose was turned loose. And that was all, no more crime record. Tad slumped back again. The boy that Brothers had shot the night before had, for all practical purposes, no criminal record at all. Tad's probably was worse. Although, now that he thought of it, he had never looked up his own dossier. He probably had a few traffic violations, or some such, to his credit. Oh yes, and that time when he was in college and they had the peace demonstration. He had been arrested along with a score of other students, and released when the Civil Liberties Union hit the fan. He turned off his screen and thought a while, then turned it back on and asked for the Military Dossier on Charles Brothers. It would seem that he had been a war hero. Besides his Bronze Star, a combat medal not easily acquired, he had several Battle Stars, a few campaign ribbons -- but anybody could get those -- and three Purple Hearts. In other words, the innocuous appearing Buddy Brothers. as Jim Kelly had called him, had been hit by enemy fire three times. The last item was what stopped him. It was practically a duplication of the restricted information in the general dossier he had first read. Something had happened. Tad hadn't the slightest clue as to what. A court martial, perhaps? The report didn't even give that. Charles Brothers was discharged. Period. Honorably? Dishonorably? For being a homosexual? Or what? The information simply wasn't there. Suddenly, he became irritated with himself. This was a hell of a way to spend one of his days off. He and Jim Kelly worked a full four-day week. Why should he devote his own time to worrying about something that was really none of his concern? Charles Brothers had been exonerated. To hear Norm Schmidt talk, the bemedaled veteran should get another medal for knocking off undesirable juvenile delinquents. Maybe he was right. God knows, there were enough of them these days. What with automation and computerization of industry, it was practically impossible to get a job any more and the streets were overflowing with kids, some of whom seemed to feel that they had a mandate to prey on their elders. He flicked off his screen and came to his feet, yawning. He decided to go downtown to the Mall and see if anything was stirring. He could have ealleci one of his feminine friends but he didn't really feel like it. He was in an unhappy frame of mind. Instead of summoning an automated cab from the autopool on the third basement level, he went on down to the metro and took the vacuum tube into town. There were too many vehicles around as it was, even though they weren't allowed on street level. In the Mall he sauntered about. When he had been a youngster, there had been a good many small shops here. But that was yesteryear. With the coming of the ultramarket, the small shop had begun to wither away. You could order anything, but anything, in your own home and have it delivered there into your delivery box by chute almost instantly. Why spend time shopping? The Mall these days, aside from being a charming area for loafing away on a bench, or strolling about amongst begging pigeons, watching the girls go by, and such, boasted various bars and restaurants, usually highly specialized; Chinese, Italian, French, Mexican. You could, of course, have ordered any of the dishes in the privacy of your own home, but some citizens liked the congenial atmosphere of a welldone restaurant. There were also art galleries, theatres for live shows, nightclubs and various other public establishments purveying items or entertainment not practical for home-use. He stopped for a few minutes and stared into the window of an art gallery. Evidently, a one-man show was going on inside. He peered down at the name of the artist. Sam Rhinedorf. Tad had never heard of him. His style seemed to be a return to the Impressionists. There was someone standing next to him. He looked over and said, "Why, it's Ms. Brothers. Good afternoon." She blinked her blue eyes through the slightly pink tinted lenses of her glasses. She was petite, he realized now -- size eight at a guess. And she looked even nicer than she had the night before, though she wore no cosmetics and her clothes were once again years out of date. Not that Tad Boleslaw was any fanatic about women's styles. She said, in her small voice, "Why, it's Mr. -- " "Boleslaw," he reminded her, smiling. "My partner and I returned your father's gun last night. Tad Boleslaw." "Yes, of course," she said, and then looked up and down the street as though seeking some reason for departure. But Tad wasn't having any. There was an elfin something about this girl that attracted him. And there was also a... well, he couldn't quite put his finger upon it. A mystery of some sort' or other. He said. "It's one of my days off. the street, would you join me?" "The Hole?" He laughed. "Sam's Bar. Really, a very nice place. Sam owns the only unautomated bar in town and serves the best dark beer I've ever tasted. He has everything else, too, of course." "Oh, Father doesn't permit me to drink." He studied her quizzically for a moment, his head tilted to one side. He guessed her age at twenty-five or so. He said, "For that matter, Sam carries soft drinks. You could have a Del Valle or something while I had my beer, and we could find out a little about each other." "What did you want to find out about me, Mr. Boleslaw?" she asked, her voice wavering just a bit. He stared at her. "Why, nothing. I meant, I just thought we could chat a little." "I'm afraid my father wouldn't approve of my entering a place where they served hard drink." He was exasperated and said, "Well, then, we'll go somewhere where they serve only soft drinks and we'll both have a Del Valle." She said, and was there a distant regret there? "I don't think my father would approve of me associating with a man to whom I haven't been properly introduced. Forgive me -- and thank you. Good afternoon. Mr. Boleslaw." She turned and hurried away. He gazed after her. Her long brown hair bounced charmingly on her shoulders and the very faint sway of her buttocks gave promise of a fascinating figure underneath those antiquated clothes. "Properly introduced, for Christ's sake?" he muttered. "I was introduced to you last night, in your own home by your own father. How proper can an introduction get?" In disgust, though why he should be bothered he couldn't say, he went on up the way to The Hole and took a stool at the bar. He liked the place. It was his favorite bar. Sam had made every effort to recreate the atmosphere that prevailed a century ago, before the first of the World Wars. It was pleasantly dim, pleasantly cool though without the artificial cold of air conditioning. Sam came down and without a word drew a dark beer. Tad said, "Sam, how old do you figure a girl should be before she's allowed to drink, enter bars and associate with any men she damn well pleases? And, come to think of it, choose her own clothes and her own hair-do and wear make-up if she wants to?" Sam slid the stein over. He was a stereotype bartender of the old school, beefy, with large reddish hands, and came complete with white apron. He said, "Why, I don't know, Mr. Boleslaw. About eighteen?" "Would you believe twentyfive?" Sam obviously didn't know what he was talking about. I ife was routine. Each patrol was j about the same. An indecent exposure complaint over in Madison Park; an attempted rape of a fourteen-year old; an occasional mugging; a salesman reporting his hotel room cleaned out, samples and all. One night they picked up a child of eighteen months and rushed it to the hospital; it had been beaten unconscious by a drunken father. They picked up a pervert in Jefferson Park who was molesting boys, or trying to. He was an old customer. Jim called him "sweetie." It was two weeks later that Jim Kelly told him idly, as they were about to take off for the night's patrol, "Did you hear? Brothers did it again." Tad looked over at his partner, not getting it at first. "What the hell are you talking about?" Jim snorted and said, "Buddy Brothers. He was jumped again. Two of them this time. Chilled them both. I tell you, that man's a one man vigilante group." Tad stared at him. "You have to be drivel-happy. When? Why weren't we called in?" "Didn't happen in our patrol area. Just outside it. Mike and Luke were first on the scene. Couple of wop kids. One had a gun, the other a knife." "That makes six," Tad muttered. "How can a man in a well policed, civilized town have to kill six kids -- were they kids?" "Yeah," Jim said. "One about sixteen, one eighteen. Good riddance." Tad sucked in breath. "At the rate he's going, he'll finish off every juvenile delinquent in town -- if they are juvenile delinquents." Jim looked at him from the side of his eyes. He said harshly, "What are you talking about? They tried to stick him up." Tad said emptily, "The first two he killed had criminal records. The second two didn't." Jim was disgusted. "They were just beating the rap. They hadn't taken a fall yet for any of their romps. They were both armed, weren't they?" Tad didn't answer directly. He said, his voice musing, "I wonder how much of a Crime Dossier these latest two had." He stewed about it. When the patrol was over he decided to go and see Norm Schmidt, but the lieutenant was out on an attempted armed robbery romp. H e went on home and to bed and stewed some more. After a couple of hours, he got up and went over to his desk and activated his screen. It took him fifteen minutes to get the information he was seeking from the National Data Banks. Buddy Brothers had had his shootout with the two Blacks tw'o years ago. He'd had his second attack, the one with the Puerto Rican kid a year later. And the Mexican boy that Tad and Jim had been in on, came six months after that. This shooting of the two Italians came only two weeks after, give or take a day or two. "It's accelerating." he growled. Then something else came to him. The first two were Blacks, the third was a Puerto Rican, the fourth a Mexican, the next two Italians. What had Brothers said, when Tad had given him his name? "Are you a foreigner?" A foreigner, for Christ's sake? Wasn't everybody in America a foreigner, except the Indians? He went back to bed and stewed some more. He got damn precious little sleep -- if any. At best, he drowsed. When he finally surrendered and got up. he went, still in his pajama tops -- he never wore the bottoms -- directly to his desk screen. Then he thought better of it and walked on into his bath and used his face depilatory. Then he donned his dress uniform, which was swank !j i: B O O K S ; Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher j by the leading Russian sf writI; : ; atski. Ursula Le Guin called it "a P p thoroughly good book." We p ;; agree! UYI ##) p P Lin Carter, ever popular, starts a P  Welcome! (UQ# #c) p ; ; with a complex and fabulous P p cosmic extravaganza entitled A p P Croyd, Pan Sagittarius and an P I; intergalactic troublemaker calP #; led only Child Roland. p ;; (UY #I ##) p ! : rett, Jr. is a delightful tale of a .I  ; marooned astronaut on a world I !  that is truly alien! Ride the P wormway express and find out ;  P for yourself! (UQ# #c) P #; "Who is Gregory Kern?" is the p p question everyone asks us... p P because Kern's Cap Kennedy p P series is first rate adult sf adI p venture of the Doc Savage P  the November title -- don't miss p ;l it. (UQ# #c) ;; i ; For our catalog and order !  I ; forms, send #c in stamps to: ; ; . I #th FI. ; I P #I Ave. of the Americas P p New York, N.Y. # p enough to suggest he had more rank than he actually carried. He didn't take time for breakfast. He sat down before his screen and began. He wound up with Colonel Mathers, of the Local National GuardHe identified himself and said, "Colonel Mathers, I'm checking up on some matters pertaining to Charles Brothers." He read off the identification number. It evidently wasn't necessary. The colonel recognized the name. "What can I do for you?" "Some years ago, Mr. Brothers attempted to join the National Guard. With his background, isn't such a man usually offered at least a lieutenant's commission?" "Yes." "But he was rejected." "Yes." "But, why?" "That information is restricted." "I am a police officer, Colonel." "So you have already informed me." The screen blanked. "Wow," Tad said. He slumped in his chair. It came to him that he was continually slumping every time he came up against the Buddy Brothers matter. He thought about it. Was there any use attempting to get in touch with the Octagon, in Greater Washington? He doubted it. And he began to have some other doubts. He suspected that if he prowled about much more that sooner or later somebody was going to land on him and shut him up. He could be shut up easily -- if he didn't want to lose his job. And only a small percentage of the population had jobs any more, what with computerization and automation. Automation, hell, ultra-malion they were calling it these days. You didn't need people any more on the job. Most people lived on their minimal Guaranteed Annual Income. So far as Tadeusz Boleslaw was concerned, the hell with that. However, he was a cop, and a dedicated cop. It was late in the day by the standards of the average man, but early for him. However, he got up and went over to his minisized autobar and dialed himself a Polish Zubrowka vodka. The world might think that Russian vodka was the best, but any Pole knew better. This came with a sprig of herb in it that gave it a special flavor. Buffalo brand, it would be translated into English. Bison brand was more accurate and there was a Bison on the label of the bottle. He took it back with him to the desk screen and stared a long time, without activating it. Then he knocked the drink back and got to his dialing again. From the National Data Banks he checked back on the military career of Charles Brothers. His division, his regiment, finally down to his company and then squad. He winced when he went over the record of Brothers' company. Over the four years that Buddy Brothers had been with them, they had taken something like two hundred percent casualties. Two hundred percent! How had Brothers lived through four years with no more than three wounds? At the end of four years, there must not have been a dozen men who had gone through the whole thing, as Buddy Brothers had done. Four years of taking casualties. A death here, a minor hit there, a wound the other place that took you out of combat for all time -- and probably you blessed the fate that did it. But two hundred percent casualties! There just wasn't such a thing in military statistics for that short a period. That meant nobody was left alive, twice over. And over and over the new replacement kids coming in, most of them, green as they were, going down the first week or so. The veterans, such as Buddy Brothers, after a year or so in combat had at least some chance of surviving. At least they knew all the ropes. Two hundred percent casualties! In four years? They must have used that regiment as shock troops, expendables. His efforts became routine now. And it took him two hours to find what he wanted, a veteran of Charles Brothers' own outfit who lived in Center City. Had he failed. he would have picked the nearest other big city and started off all over again. But he found what he was looking for. John Cardin, once a corporal in Brothers' company. Tad noted down the man's address; it was out in one of the suburbs. He got his cap and headed for the car pool where he rented a Volkshover. The Cardin home was a single family house, middle class, neat and with a few children's toys on the lawn. The identity screen on the door picked him up and shortly the door opened and a middle-aged woman in an apron was there. She was a placid looking type, obviously busy at her housework and surprised to have a police officer confronting her. She said, "Good heavens, what is it? Nothing's happened to -- ?" He held up a hand and smiled. "Nothing has happened to anyone, Mrs. Cardin. I simply have a few questions to ask your husband." "What has he done?" she said in alarm. He held his smile, trying to make it reassuring. "He hasn't done anything. It's not about him. It's about someone he used to know." She was relieved. "Oh, well, John isn't here now, but he should be home from work at any time." "Could I wait?" "Why, certainly." She led him to the small living room and saw him seated. "Could I get you a drink? John usually has a bottle of something or other in the kitchen cabinet." "Thanks, no. Not while in uniform." She left him and he waited for possibly fifteen minutes until her husband entered. The man was somewhere in his mid-fifties, which fitted in with the fact that he had served in the Asian War, and his face was wrinkled beyond his years. It wasn't a happy face, no laugh wrinkles, but lots of weariness. He was scowling. He said in puzzlement, "You wanted to see me? About what?" fad stood and held out his hand for a shake, in the way of reassurance, and said, "I'm Patrolman Boleshaw, Mr. Cardin. I wanted to ask you sonic questions about Charles Brothers." The other shook hands, still frowning. He said, "Never heard of him." "It was a long time ago. During the war. Sergeant Charles Brothers. Possibly you knew him as Buddy Brothers." "Oh, Buddy. Sure. Sit down, Officer. Whatever happened to him?" "He lives right here in Center City." Tad reseated himself. "I'll be damned. I never knew that. What did you want to know about Buddy?" Tad's host seated himself as w ell, and leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the armrests. Tad said carefully, "It's about that trouble in the Asian War." "Good God," the other said in disgust, "are they raking that up again?" "Well, in a way," Tad said carefully. The other was more than unhappy. He said musingly, "If they're after him, they'd be after me too." Tad shook his head reassuringly. "Don't worry about it, Mr. Cardin. You were exonerated, weren't you?" He hoped he was asking questions that wouldn't alarm the other. "Yeah, sure, we all were. The whole thing was hushed up. The orders came right from the top. I don't know why in the hell they're digging it up at this late date. It happened over twenty years ago." Tad nodded and said, pulling his notebook from his pocket and bringing out a pencil. "Suppose you tell me about it, briefly." Cardin said, "Well, no reason why not. It's all in the records though. Why do you need it?" "I'm afraid I can't tell you. Orders." "Okay, then. We were down in the Delta, see, and we'd been taking a lot of hits. One hell of a lot of casualties and we were all uptight. We'd been in the line for three weeks and that Delta was no joke. Anyway, there was this town called Soc Trang. Little dump, couple of hundred people. The lieutenant, he figured that was where some of the sniper fire was coming from. And we went in. I don't know what happened. Something just kind of snapped." He paused and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, obviously distressed at the memory. "Go on," Tad said soothingly. "Well, Buddy Brothers was kind of the ring leader, you might call it. He always was a fiesty little bastard. We didn't find any snipers or even any military age men at all. We rounded up the women and kids and put 'em all in the school house and then we rounded up the men, they were all old, and wasted them." Tad looked up, trying to avoid gaping at the other. Supposedly, he already knew about the incident. He said, "You shot them all?" "Yeah. That's what I just said." The other moistened his lips. "We'd gone drivel-happy, see. We were all acting like crazies. I don't know who it was got the idea of burning down the school. Maybe several of us at once." "I see," Tad said. "I don't believe I've ever heard of Soc Trang." "Nothing ever came out. The army was having a lot of heat those days about several other -- massacres, they called them. And there was a howl going up in the States, the newspapers and all. So the Brass didn't want any more to get out so they put the lid on Soc Trang. The lieutenant and Buddy Brothers and a couple of other guys, they were considered the leaders and they were bounced out of the service with some kind of special discharge handed down all the way from the general." "I see," Tad said. He returned the notebook to his pocket. "You think this might have had any long term effect on Brothers?" The other shrugged hugely. "I don't know. I've never seen him again. But you see, he'd been in it for years. I only was in for six months before l took a hit. He got to the point where he liked the prisoners. He shot 'em. Sometimes, if you had a prisoner he'd take him off aways and waste him, too, even after the officers had told you to pick up a few of them for questioning, He hated gooks, and he called just about anybody a gook that wasn't what he was. He even didn't like the niggers in our own outfit." "I see," Tad said. He stood and said, "Well, thank you very much, Mr. Cardin. You've been very cooperative. I hate to have brought this all up again for you -- after all these years." The other looked at him, sickness behind his eyes. "Nothing at all." "And please thank Ms. Cardin for me." Tad headed for the door. W hen Tad Boleslaw walked into the office of Norman Schmidt, the lieutenant looked up. He said, "Cheers, Tad. What spins? What're you doing in uniform? I thought this was one of your days off." Tad nodded and sat down. "It is." he said. "But there was something I wanted to check out. Norm, Charles Brothers is a psycho." "What in the hell are you talking about?" The older man reached for his stubby briar, scowling. He pulled a pound tin of pipe tobacco toward him, flicked the lid off it and began to load up. Tad said, "I've been talking to a war buddy of his. He said that Brothers saw so much action that he finally liked to kill. He'd shoot prisoners and so forth. Then one day he led his men into one of those civilian massacre things. Killed a whole village of them, burning the kids up in the school house." Lieutenant Schmidt winced. Tad held his peace for a time. The older cop said finally, "That was a long time ago. Tad. More than twenty years. The median age in the United States of the Americas is twenty-five. In short, most people can't even remember back to the Asian War. A lot of us did things that we don't like to think about any more. I w'as part of a bomber crew in the Asian War. God only knows where some of the bombs we dropped hit. We even layed them on towns that were in the part of the country we were supposedly trying to defend. God only knows how many children the bombs that left my plane killed." He paused, and his face was empty, there was the same sickness that had been in the face of John Cardin. "Probably more than the number that died in that school." Tad didn't say anything. The older man spoke up again, finally. "It was a long time ago, Tad." Tad didn't say anything. Schmidt had let his pipe go out. He relit it with a match from the old fashioned box of kitchen matches he affected. He said, "Tad, it was a long time ago. Like I told you, I checked out the Brothers' Crime Dossier. He had nothing at all on him until just two years ago when he ran into those two Black funkers. Those were bad boys. Tad." Tad Boleslaw nodded. "Evidently they were. Andwhat you say is true. He has nothing on his record since the war. until that. But there are some other angles." "Such as?" The older man's voice was skeptical. Tad brought his notebook from his pocket. He said, "I checked out his daughter, Tilly. Just on, sort of, instinct. Two months before he had his shoot-out with those two Negros, she was gang-raped by a half dozen or so street bums. They never caught them. Tilly is just a bit around the corner these days." The lieutenant, who somehow' hadn't been able to get his pipe going again, fixed his eyes upon his junior and said, "Okay. Go on." Tad said doggedly, "Brothers had a nice home out of town aways. He moved into the slums where he lives now. He began to collect guns. into the National Guard, which turned him down in view of his Asian War thing, I suppose." "Go on." "He began to what amounted to prowling the' streets -- armed. By the way. I suspect he wears bulletproof clothes." "Why do you suspect that?" "It comes back to me. The way he looked that night when Kelly and I picked him up. Sophisticated bullet-proof stuff. The kind the army has. Not hard to come by -- surplus army stores and so on." "Go on." "He's out looking for trouble. Norm. He finds it. And he has no mercy. So okay, his liking for years. But then his kid was raped. He's prejudiced. All these supposed muggers and stick-up artists he's killed are either Negros, Latin Americans, or Italians. Jesus, even when I gave him my Polish name the other night he tightened up. He's a psycho. Norm. His wife left him a couple of years ago; she must have been afraid." "So what are you going to do about it?" Tad stared at him. "I brought it to you." The lieutenant put his pipe down To the farthest boundaries of time and space... v and beyond! The By J. O. Jeppson. The fascinating story of an exciting quest for survival, which could prove to be the key to eternity -- or doom. At your bookstore  # into an ashtray overflowing long past. He said, "Forget about it. Tad. We've got nothing on the guy. As far as the military is concerned, his case is long buried. As far as his shooting up young punks who have jumped him, who are we to argue? Better him than some poor innocent citizen who can't defend himself. He defends himself with a vengeance." "I think we ought to look into it." "Forget about it, Boleslaw. That's an order. I get the feeling that you're pushing a little bit more than is called for. You'll make detective w'hen your time comes." Tad flushed. He took a deep breath. "Yes, sir," he said. "I'd like lo request a leave of absence." "Oh. you would, eh?" "Yes. sir." "Wizard. You're eligible. In fact. I think you're due for a vacation shortly. You could take it now. Just onething. Patrolman Boleslaw. On your vacation, you do not wear your uniform." "No. sir." "And turn in your gun for the period you are away. Patrolman Boleslaw." T ailing a man is an art. particularly at night in a city of practically deserted streets. However, Tad Boleslaw had taken a special ambitious local police as much training as they could assimilate, in view of the continuing national crime wave. Obviously, the subject must not even suspect that he is being tailed. He must not be even vaguely aware of your presence. You walk across the street from him, considerably behind. Sometimes, when on the same side of the street, you walk ahead of him. You never look into his face. If you make that mistake, he might remember it, if only subconsciously. and then be surprised, possibly several blocks later, to see that face again. Unless they have reason to suspect they are being followed, few persons consider it. It isn't part of the usual experience. It went on for almost two weeks and then there was a seeming change in atmosphere. Tad Boleslaw got the impression that either Brothers had tagged him or that the man had something out of the ordinary in mind. He wasn't particularly afraid that the other would recognize him. The small man had seen him only in uniform, some weeks ago, and even then only twice and for short periods of time. Besides, Tad had assumed a bit of disguise, had darkened his complexion and put pads of cotton in his cheeks to change the contours of his face. He would have had to be quite close to his quarry to have been recognized. But this night the other was from time to time looking over his shoulder, seemingly a fraction on the nervous side. Peering, occasionally, right or left. Brothers varied in the route he took walking home. It was about a tw o and a half mile hike and there were three different ways he covered it. Tad Boleslaw had already figured out the one he was taking this time, and remained ahe of his quarry and, at first, on the opposite side of the street which was even more than usually deserted this night. T ad got the feeling that this was told him that the crisis was just about to be reached. He crossed back to the other side of the street and entered a doorway, nonchalantly thumping a rolled newspaper against his leg. The door was seemingly that to his home. He had noted from the other side that the doorway was open. A delapidated apartment house, typical of this slum neighborhood. He closed the door behind him, all but a crack, and waited. Had it been rehearsed, it couldn't have come off more cleanly. He heard a voice, and could recognize it as that of Brothers, say coldly. "Hold it, you funker!" And another voice, indignantly. "What kind of shit is this? There's no use sticking me up. Do I look And Brothers again. "You damned gook funker. What're you doing on the streets this time of night?" His voice was going high. "Looking for some poor girl to rape, some honest citizen to mug?" "Who the hell are you? You a cop?" Tad Boleslaw flicked off the dim light which illuminated the hall behind him and opened the door slightly wider. The two were only a few yards down from him. Impossibly. he had hit it almost on the nailhead. Brothers was standing there, ineffectual, as usual, in his appearance, but his gyro-jet rocket pistol in hand. The other was a youngster. Puerto Rican, Cuban or Mexican. by the look of him. "I'm asking the questions," Buddy Brothers said. The young fellow was indignant. "I'm going home from work. I'm assistant janitor at -- " "You're a liar," the small man sneered. And then came something Tad Boleslaw hadn't figured upon. Brothers dipped a hand into a side pocket of his jacket and brought forth a second gun. He tossed it to the feet of the other. He then brought forth from a pants pocket an emergency wrist alarm and flicked its activating stud. Almost immediately, sirens could be heard in the near distance. His face a mask of hate, the gyrojet pistol came up. "That'll be all. Buddy!" Tad called, and stepped from his place of concealment. Originally, he had planned to tackle the smaller man. Or, at least, that's what he had told himself he planned. Schmidt stripping him of both uniform and weapon had left him up in the air. He knew he was being a damn fool trailing this killer without means of taking him. Charles Brothers swirled, his eyes gawking behind the lenses of his spectacles. Tad had already pulled the cotton from his cheeks. Now he took off his hat and let it drop to the street, so that the other could recognize him. The young fellow had shrunk back against the wall, his eyes, too, gaping. Tad Boleslaw looked at the killer. He said. "You cried wolf once too oflen." "What are you talking about?" the other snarled, his gun now directed at the patrolman. "The old fairy story about the kid who was a shepherd. They told him if he ever saw a wolf to sound his horn and yell 'wolf and they'd come running. But he used to do it just for the Dutch of it -- for the excitement. He used to call wolf when there wasn't any wolf. He finally got it in the neck, though somewhat differently than the way you have." Brothers was staring at him, breathing deeply. The siren swelled in the background. Tad shook his head and said, "I hadn't figured it. That first shootout you had with the two Blacks was legitimate. They really did try to jump you. But then that kill-love came back to you and all these more recent shootings have been set-ups. You'd find some kid, alone in the streets at night, and toss an unlraceable gun at his feet, activate your wrist emergency alarm, and then let him have it. The way you let those defenseless people have it in the Asian War. You're around the corner. Brothers. Drop the gun." The other's eyes were darting every which way. He brought the super-lethal weapon up. Tad said emptily, "Charles Brothers, would you shoot an officer of the law, pursuing his duty? You too are supposedly an officer of the law, serving our city." "They were gooks," the other said shrilly. "They're all the same. They're no good. All you can do is kill them, when you find them on the streets, raping girls, sticking up honest -- " Tad said, "Drop the gun. Buddy Brothers." Instead, the small man, incongruous as a killer with his glasses and his ineffectual mustache, turned and darted for the corner. He made it just in time to dash in front of the siren screaming patrol car -- supposedly coming to his rescue. He shrilled first despair and then agony. Lieutenant Schmidt issued forth, looked down at the shattered body, then up at Tad Boleslaw. Tad said, "He was setting this tossed one of those illegal, untraceable guns to the sidewalk in front of him. H e was all ready to shoot when I got into the act." Schmidt looked down at the dead man for a long weary moment. He said finally, "I suppose there's a moral here, somewhere. Wars aren't the best thing in the world to happen. And they don't end -- the results of them -- when the actual shooting stops." Tad said, his voice empty. "I'll go over and tell Tilly. She obviously already knew her father was a psycho, poor kid. That's why she was afraid. She knew it was only a matter of time."  T here was nothing but fire in the air as the first of the ships rose, one, two, three, from their berths. There were roars like blasts of hateful sound blown upward from the depths of pits run by mechanical demons and full of the anguish of unrepentant automobiles. There was Ember-Eyes, coming over the lip of the valley, into fire and noise, shrieking after the departing vessels, "You can't do this!" EmberEyes staggered down the slope, gasping in the hot air. He moved on three feet and used the talon-tipped fingers of his free pawhand to massage the Mark of the Beast, circuit-printed into the flesh over his heart. The searing agony radiated by the Mark worsened with each step he took toward the launch site on the valley floor. The fire in his chest spread down into his bowels and, hotter than supernovae, cored out his marrow bones. He fell many times. Two more ships had lifted off and escaped him by the time he reached the floor of the valley and came to the launch site's outer fence. Ember-Eyes hooked his stubby fingers through the metal links and sagged against the barrier. "You can't leave us," he growled hoarsely. "We need you, we need you..."  He let go of the fence and slid to his knees in the gravel. Beyond the fence was a narrow, ditch-bordered service road and, beyond that, a second fence, lower than the first. Next came a quarter-mile-wide strip of deep grass and, finally, the great white concrete plain, rolling across the valley floor, past the launch pads, past squat black buildings, to more grass, blacktop and metal links. He fought down his agony and rose to his hind feet with effort, took a couple of deep, steadying breaths and then clawed his way up the fence. Fifteen feet high, the fence was topped with triple rows of barbed wire, braced at intervals with steel prongs projecting outwards at a forty-five degree angle. Seizing one of the prongs, EmberEyes eased himself over the wire and succeeded in avoiding all but a few of the barbs. Crouched atop the fence, shifting on his feet to maintain balance, he was about to leap for the service road when a pencil-thick beam of bluish-white light flashed out of the darkness and sliced through metal links close to his left hind paw. The beam started to track toward him but winked out of existence too soon. It was enough, however, to startle him. EmberEyes fell forward, snarling with panic, and landed in ditch muck with the breath knocked out of him. Writhing with new pain, he thrashed amid the mud and weeds and was vaguely conscious of new fires in the night as another of the ships got away from him. And his renewed sense of having been betrayed was like a cold, hard fist closing around his heart. J hey would not come with me, my own children and my children's children would not help me. You hate the human beings too much, they told me, and  shrieked at them. Yes! yes! I hate the human beings, I remember the feel of their fire and steel in my flesh and bones, I can still hear their ghost whispers in my head, telling me what was expected of me, telling me what I was in their eyes so that I would hate them all the more intensely for having made a play-thing of me, for having refashioned me in the image of their ancient terrors, that I might prowl in the darkness outside their city of light and afford them excitement, yes, yes, I hate the human beings, yes, and now, now they're bored again, they're going away, they've moved out of their city, they've erected strange machines in the valley, but we won't let them get away, we won't let them discard us -- They would not come with me. My children, my children's children, they all refused to help me. They were bom changed, not rebuilt as I was, they were bom changed, and they have been capable of thought all their lives. And they think thoughts that are strange to me.  am betrayed on every hand. T he fire and thunder of the vessel's departure died away, and Ember-Eyes lay still in the ditch, listening. He heard soft, tinny footfalls. He saw the guard. The sentry glided out of the darkness on legs that were thin metal rods. Its hemispherical feet made faint clacking sounds as they struck the pavement. Insect-like, its head burned silver when moonlight struck it, then golden as it reflected the flames spouting from the next ship in line to take off. A long, slim traser wand was held at the ready in a curled-up spider of a fist. EmberEyes shifted position in the ditch as he sized up the sentry. Dextrous rather than rugged, the robot had been designed for maintenance work, not fighting. EmberEyes grinned toothily and waited until the robot, ignorant of the intruder's flanking movement, drew abreast of him. Then the creature in the ditch came up out of the mud and shadows with jaws distended and forepaws outstretched. The robot wheeled and jerked the deadly wand around but had no chance to fire. The weapon spun out of the guard's claw as Ember-Eyes struck. The robot reacted almost at once by clamping a steel-tarantula hand around its attacker's vaguely canine snout. As cartilage in his face began to pop, Ember-Eyes reared and shook his head violently, tearing himself free and sending the sentry skidding on its flat buttocks across the blacktop, toward the inner fence. It was on its feet again immediately, just quickly enough for its leaping black opponent to butt it backward through the air into the shallower ditch on that side of the road. The gleaming cranium grazed the fence, the bulbous metal eyes exploded and, for a few seconds, the sunburst at the perimeter of the launch site rivaled anything in the heavens. Ember-Eyes did not pause to appreciate the sight. He scooped up the traser wand and, holding it clumsily, pointed it at the inner fence. He had seen the wands used in the city of light, when the human beings had had him that time, and he knew what to expect when he applied pressure to the firing button. But he nonetheless dropped the wand when it flashed away a section of the fence before him. Retrieving the weapon, he fired again and again until he had sliced a wide gap in the electrified barrier. Then, tossing the wand away, he dropped to all fours and plunged into the high grass. And, out on the white concrete plain, another ship coughed like a Titan clearing his throat and began to rise. You can't leave us! Ember-Eyes wanted to scream the words, but he had no breath for cries, only for running. The Mark of the Beast, forgotten during the fight with the robot, burned in his body. The ships rose, one, two, three.  won 't let you leave! I need you ' I need you! The ships rose. And you need me, you made me. you must still need me, don't you, don't you? He stumbled out of the grass and onto the concrete, and he could sec human beings moving around the base of the nearest ship, one halfmile away, and he ignored the fire in his flesh, the roar in his ears, and ran. He had covered half the distance to the nearest vessel when he abruptly crumpled and skidded on his face. The pain was too great. He pushed himself up and tried to make his mouth form the words he had heard the human beings use in their city, but only howls came forth. Through the murk of his agony, he saw that the human beings were now entering the ship, the last ship, the very last . , . Ember-Eyes dragged himself forward half the length of his body and crumpled again. Then the pain in his body diminished. The Mark of the Beast cooled. He panted on the concrete and glared at the ship. He felt turned to lead. He had failed. He saw one of the last human beings turn and wave to him fondly, and he raked his claws on the concrete in an agony of frustration, he snarled his hatred, too weak now to howl, and he watched in horror as the last human beings filed into the vessel, watched as the boarding rump automatically slid away from I he base of the ship, as the hatches dosed and sealed themselves... Go home, said a spirit voice in his head . Go home, little wolverine. Ember-Eyes tore at his skull, trying to dislodge the voice. Go home, insisted the voice. You are not safe hebe. "You can't... discard me like this," he muttered. "You took me und remade me, you gave me a purpose. and you gave me the power of thought so that my knowledge of that purpose would make me hate you all the more... what can I do, if not hate you and prey upon you? What -- " Go home. And images flooded Ember-Eyes' mind. He saw a fire cloud erupting from the craft on the pad a quarter of a mile away, he saw the concrete blackening and cracking with heat, he saw steel bubbling and running like water, he saw his own hair disappearing in a white flash, saw his flesh crisping, melting away from bones that turned to ash. He cast a final look of hungry longing at the last of the ships, then turned and began dragging himself back the way he had come. Fly, urged the voice. He forced himself to trot as, behind him, the ship rumbled ominously. He trotted faster, feeling adrenalin wash through him, he put his belly close to the ground and ran, felt grass whip his jowls as An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ##I will feature a revealing, disturbing interview with Avram Davidson. Also: "The Foundation on Sands" by John J. Aid arson, which leaves Isaac Asimov beached. Also: Larry Shaw's reminiscence of the behind-the-scenes And with luck: "Noise Level" by John Brunner. Every issue: The Archives -- new book and story lists. Quartorfysatnple I year #two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I he left the concrete plain, felt his claws tearing up the dirt as he ran --  -- felt a wall of heated air sweep him forward, raising his hindquarters and shoving his snout into the sod, singeing his fur, bouncing him unceremoniously for a dozen feet, and noise light noise heat light noise... Blackness. He could not have been unconscious for longer than seconds because, when he opened his eyes, he was on his back in the grass, kicking at the air, and he could see the ship climbing, slowly at first but gaining speed, growing smaller, and he tried to cal! after it, call it back down to earth, but there was too little air in his lungs, too little air, and there was no longer a spirit voice in his head, only a roar. And he had failed. And he slept. E mber-eyes left the launch site shortly before the moon set. He passed several more of the light robots on his way out, but they lay still, did not dispute his passage. Nor did current flow through the inner fence. The robots and the electrified fence, like the Mark of the Beast, like Ember-Eyes himself, had served their purpose. No longer needed, they had been shut off. Ember-Eyes envied them and hated himself for doing so. He spent the day resting on the lip of the valley. His face ached, his lungs burned whenever he tried to breathe deeply, and large patches of fur had been singed away, revealing pinkish blisters on the skin. When night fell, he made his slow, painful way back to his territory to the south of the city of light. He sat down beneath a tree on a hill overlooking the city and waited and, by and by. Stripe, his favorite son, crept out of the darkness to sit beside him. "You look a little the worse for wear," Stripe said in a respectful tone. Ember-Eyes glared at him for a moment, then fastened his gaze on the blindingly bright city below the hill. "I failed. Stripe." Stripe contemplated the ground between his forepaws. "We knew that you would," he said quietly. "We told you that you would. Are you hungry. Father? I killed a deer this morning. The carcass is buried not far from here." "I wish I could make you understand, Stripe. I failed. I failed. I went after the human beings to show them that I refused to be a mere play-thing, that I could still exert a little control over my own destiny. That they could not simply cast me aside when they were through with me. That..." He shook his head miserably. "What happened. Father?" "They... they humiliated me again, Stripe. They made me the terror of their nights and then, down in the valley, they made me feel terror. One of them spoke to me and told me to run away from the ship before it took off. And I ran away. From start to finish, Stripe, they had things their way." "Let them go. Father. You can live your own life now." "They were my life. They thrust me into the night and let me give them the pleasure of fear, of being hated and stalked." Stripe rose and stretched. "They tired of it. Father. They grew up, and something in their flesh, something irresistable, told them that the moment had come for them to leave." "To what purpose. Stripe?" "To whatever purpose. Father. They grew up. We're growing up, too. There will be better things for us to do in days to come than -- " "Go away. Stripe. You confuse me." Stripe said nothing for a long moment. Then: "I'm sorry. Father. Do you want to eat the deer?" "No. Leave me alone, Stripe. Go away." "We could go down into the city and -- " Ember-Eyes snarled and lunged, but Stripe dodged and skipped away from his father's fangs. They eyed each other tensely. "I won't go down into the city," Ember-Eyes growled savagely. "The Mark of the Beast can no longer hurt us," Stripe said, "and there are things there that -- " "Go away. Stripe!" "I'm sorry," Stripe muttered sadly. "Goodbye, Father." E mber-eyes watched his favorite son turn and lope away in the direction of the city of light, and he somehow knew that not much time would pass before Stripe and the rest of his progeny no longer remembered the nights spent lurking just beyond the lighted perimeter of the city, that they would no longer speak of how the men and women who ventured forth sometimes died squealing with delight and of how that delight had served to make the lurkers hate all the more intensely. They would think thoughts increasingly strange to EmberEyes. Down the hill. Stripe paused and looked back over his shoulder. "We're growing up," he said, a low, soft sound, and was gone. Ember-Eyes gazed at the city for a long time before limping away into the evening. And his renewed sense of having been betrayed was like a cold, hard fist closing around his heart. He had been remade, he had been told what was expected of him and had been apprised to the fullest extent of his capabilities. He had been made a creature of the night, a deliberately intended monster, and there was no place for him in the city of light. He had been cheated from the start. There was no more growing up in store for him.  This paper is an amalgamation and summation of several talks I have given during the past year to various groups of teachers of sf, in Oregon, at the California Association of Teachers of English, and in Milwaukee. Parts of the talks were directed toward specific problems and techniques of teaching sf, and I have omitted these. But, if I have been creeping around behind science fiction's back talking about it to academics, science liction has a right to know what I've been saying. So I tried to put the drift and gist of it into this paper. the # meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, an annual event which I like to call The Bride of Frankenstein in the Grove of Academe, Alexei and Cory Panshin held forth eloquently against the teaching of science fiction in schools and colleges. It seemed a bit quixotic, since their audience consisted of teachers of science fiction, people so interested in and committed to the subject that they had come from all over the country to talk about it and learn how to do it better; since thousands of high schools give science fiction courses now, and the stuffiest college English departments are stooping to conquer. I don't think there's really much question, now, of keeping the professors off Aldebaran. They're there. And that face looking out of the fifth story window of the Ivory Tower, that's the Little Green Man. For myself, I accept this miscegenation happily, and am simply interested in what the offspring may be. For undoubtedly the recent great increase in the teaching of sf is going to affect the writing of sf. Our audience has widened immensely; and for the first time, we in the sf ghetto are beginning to get criticism -- not brush-offs from literary snobs, and not blasts of praise and condemnation from jealous, loyal, in-group devotees, but real criticism, by trained, intelligent people who have read widely both inside and outside the field. This could be the best thing that ever happened to sf, the confirmation of it, both to its readers and to its writers, as a powerful and responsible art form. A ghetto is a comfortable, reassuring place to live, but it is also a crippling place to live. The essence of a ghetto, after all, is that you are forced to live there. To choose the ghetto when one is free to choose the greater community is an act of cowardice. Now that the walls are breaking down, I think it behooves us to' step across the rubble and face the city outside. We need not lose our solidarity in doing so. Solidarity, loyalty, is not a prison, where you can't choose: it is a choice freely made. But equally we shouldn't expect to be welcomed with songs of praise by all the strangers out there. Why should we be? We're strangers to them, too. If we have weaknesses we must learn to take criticism of them; if we have strengths we must prove them. One way we can show our strength is by helping the serious critics of sf to set up a critical apparatus, a set of standards, suited to the study and teaching of sf. Some of the criteria by which the conventional novel is discussed and judged apply to sf, and some don't. Teachers can't switch from a tale high castle without changing gears; if they do, one book or the other is going to be misinterpreted, mistreated. Fortunately, in two areas at least, sf has established its own standards, and has been applying them with increasing severity, in writing, in teaching writing, and in teaching sf as literature. The first of these is the criterion of intellectual coherence and scientific plausibility. The basic canon of fantasy, of course, is: you get to make up the rules, but then you've got to follow them. Science fiction refines upon this: you get to make up the rules, but within limits. A science fiction story must not flout the evidence of science, must not, as Chip Delany puts it, deny what is known to be known. Or if it does, the writer must know it, and defend the liberty taken, either with a genuine hypothesis or with a sound, convincing fake. If I give my spacethat I'm contradicting Albert Einstein, and accept the consequences -- all the consequences. In this, precisely, lies the unique aesthetic delight of sf, in the intense, coherent following-through of the implications of an idea, whether it's a bit of far-out technology, or a theory in quantum mechanics, or a satirical projection of current social trends, or a whole world created by extrapolating from biology and ethnology. When such an idea is consistently worked out in material, intellectual, social, psychological, and moral terms, something solid has been done, something real: a thing which can be read, taught, and judged squarely on its own terms. The "sense of wonder" isn't a feeble perfume, it's built right into a good story, and the closer you look the stronger the sense of wonder. A second criticism is that of stylistic competence. You know what sf was like in the Golden Age of Science Fiction. You know. It was like this. "Oh, Professor Higgins." cooed the slender, vivacious Laura, "but do tell me how does the antipastomatter denudifier work?" Then Professor Higgins, with a kindly, absentminded smile, explains how it works for about six pages, garble garble garble. Then the Starship Captain steps in, with a tight, twisted smile on his lean, bronzed face. His steely grey eyes glint. He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. "Oh, Captain Tommy," Laura inquires with a vivacious toss of her head, "is there anything wrong?" -- "Don't worry your pretty little head about it," the Captain replies, inhaling deeply. "A fleet, of nine thousand Gloobian Slime Monsters off the port side, that's all." And so on. You know. American sf used to be a pulp medium, popcult, all that. Now it isn't -- not all of it, anyhow. It has rejoined the sf of England and Europe, which was sparse, but which never was schlock except when it imitated us, and which was always part of the major tradition of fiction. And therefore it is to be judged, not as schlock, not as junk, but as fiction. What I'm saying is neither selfevident, nor popular. Within the sf ghetto, many people don't want their books, or their favorite writers' books, judged as literature. They want junk, and they bitterly resent aesthetic judgment of it. And outside the ghetto, there are critics who like to stand above sf, looking down upon it, and therefore want it to be junky, popcult, contemptible. There was a strong vein of this in Gerald Jonas' otherwise perceptive New Yorker article, and it's one of the many games Leslie Fiedler plays. Fortunately it's a game that our best sf critic, Darko Suvin, never plays. I consider it a real cop-out, an arrogance towards both the books and their readers. T here is an area where sf has most often failed to judge itself, and where it has been most harshly judged by its nonpartisans. It is an area where we badly need intelligent criticism and discussion. The oldest argument against sf is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that sf, like all fantasy is escapist. This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that sf doesn't deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn't fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, that's not criticism; it's bigotry. If it's worth answering, the best answer was given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible. But people who are not fools or bigots, people who love both art and liberty, critics as responsible as Edmund Wilson, reject science fiction flatly as a genre simply not w'orth discussing. Why? What makes them so sure? The question, after all, must be asked: From what is one escaping, and to what? Evidently, if we're escaping a world that consists of Newsweek, Pravda, and the Stock Market Report, and asserting the existence of a primary, vivid world, an mtenser reality where joy, tragedy, and morality exist, then we're doing a good thing, and Tolkien is right. But what if we're doing just the opposite? What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simply cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured -- like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always toward an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression, or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail. And inside the padded cell the people sit and say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest. They don't care if anybody outside is listening. They don't want to know that there is an outside. Because the most famous works of sf are socially and ethically speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Gapek, Stapledon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American sf, while riding on the reputation of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism. That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American sf has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all the "relevant" problems. regular textbook in Problems (and my story was one of the chapters). But what worries me is that so many of these' stories and books have been written in a savagely selfrighteous tone, a tone that implies that there's an answer, a simple answer, and why can't all you damn fools out there see it? Well, I call this escapism: a sensationalist raising of a real question, followed by a quick evasion of the weight and pain and complexity involved in really, experientially, trying to understand and cope with that question. And by the way, I'm not talking only about the reactionary, easy-answer schools of sf, the technocrats, scientologists, "libertarians," and so on, but also about the chic nihilism affected by many talented American and English writers of my generation. Annihilation is the easiest answer of all. You just close all the doors. I f science fiction has a major gift to offer literature, I think it is just this: the capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut. What science, from physics and astronomy to history and psychology, has given us, is the open universe: a cosmos that is not a simple, fixed hierarchy, but an immensely complex process in time. All the doors stand open, from the prehuman past through the incredibte present to the terrible and hopeful future. All connections are possible. All alternatives are thinkable. It is not a comfortable, reassuring place. It's a very large house, a very drafty house. But it's the house we live in. And science fiction seems to be the modern literary art which is capable of living in that huge and drafty house, and feeling at home there, and playing games up and down the stairs, from basement to attic. I think that's why kids like sf, and demand to be taught it, to study it, to take it seriously. They feel this potential it has for playing games with and making sense and beauty out of our fearfully enlarged world of knowledge and perception. And that's why it gripes me when I see sf failing to do so, falling back on silly, simplistic reassurances, or whining Woe, woe, repent, or taking refuge in mere wishful thinking. So I welcome the study and teaching of sf -- so long as the teachers will criticise us, demandingly, responsibly, and make the students read us demandingly, responsibly. If sf is treated, not as junk, not as escapism, but as an intellectually, aesthetically, and ethically responsible art, a great form, it will become so: it will fulfill its promise. The door to the future will be open.  By the mid-#st century the revolution in sexual morals had advanced to the point where chastity, and the repression or sublimation of sexual impulses were considered social offenses, if not actual crimes -- but were still sought by many as secret pleasures. Most members of the Establishment belonged to the Church of Eros. Concurrently, crowding and hunger in the world had led to severe restrictions on reproduction even among the wealthy. A woman who had borne two children was required by law to have any subsequent pregnancies aborted. tronics engineer and chessmaster, to Chicago to locate a midwifer and bear a third child rather than have the abortion required by law. Art pursues Rita to convince her that her plan is both wrong and dangerous before it is too late. Art's transcontinental tube train is halted at the Mississippi. Under attack there by rioters is a monastery of Christians ( a sect long in decline) where experiments on preserving life in freshly aborted fetuses are thought to be under way. Art helps a distraught girl get on the train for Chicago. In Chicago, Rita's brother other city dwellers in a complex of townhouses fortified against the random violence of the age. Art arrives to find that Rita has come and gone, leaving the two Rodney children with Ann, a militant freebirth advocate and Christian. Art and Ann futilely argue the right and wrong of compulsory abortion in an overcrowded world. brother, hwakens with his assigned cago Y ( Young Persons' Play Club), a strait-laced place where nightly sex activity is required of all. Fred is a karate student on his way to becoming an ape, the current term for one who roams the streets inflicting apparently pointless violence on strangers. Bureau of Family Planning, visits Art and is soon convinced that Art himself is innocent of conspiring toward an illegal birth. Hall brings him up to date: the very latest medical technology allows a just-removed fetus to be quickfrozen and later placed in an artificial womb where it will develop into a normal baby. ( Some doctors are preserving fetuses on moral grounds, while others are performing these illegal operations for the money . ) Art convinces the Parrs that he must be allowed to talk to Rita, face to face. George takes him on a tour of the city, supposedly to arrange the contact but really to confuse any Family Planning agents who might be watching them. High points on the tour are a stadium where the unemployed are paid to watch , baseball, and rioting threatens when the home team loses; and a slumburb tavern where Art hears a disheartening broadcast of world news. George takes Art to his karate dojo where Fred, who wants George to hire him as an instructor, has come to be evaluated. Fred fails in combat against humanoid karatemachines. One of George's students. Dr. Hammad, is introduced to Art as the man who can arrange his meeting with Rita. happened to see your wife X this morning," the doctor was telling Art a few minutes later. "She's in good health and good spirits." The doctor was hanging his street clothes in a locker, getting ready for his private karate lesson. George was out in the main room of the dojo, discussing some refinement of mayhem with the bodyguard Ivor. From where Art stood in the locker room he could see Fred sitting out there too, the picture of defeat, head resting in his hands, blood drying brownish on his white jacket. His brown belt had come unknotted. "Where is she?" Art asked. "Understand, I have no direct connection with the place she's staying at. It's been my experience, though, that they do a good job of taking care of guests." "You have no connection? Aren't you the one who's intending to -- ?" "Oh, no, no, I'm not handling your wife's case myself. No, the connection between me and George is too obvious, you see. In such cases a referral to another physician is more prudent." "Who is he, then? When am I going to see her? When is the operation to be?" "It'll be soon, I suppose. She's young and healthy, and I would anticipate an uneventful parturition and freezing." The casual words brought on an icy congealing in Art's own bone marrow. He had no clear idea of what a three-months' fetus actually looked like, but in his mind he saw a mindless finger of tissue, extracted like an appendix and then frozen into an icicle. He asked: "If a fetus is treated this way, then grown in one of those artificial wombs -- what are its chances of becoming a normal child?" "Oh, very good. Excellent. Is that what's worrying you? Don't let it. Freezing an organism that small and then revivifying it is nothing, these days. And an artificial womb actually offers several advantages over a full-term pregnancy and birth. Development of the fetus can be watched day by day and the flow of nutrients perfectly controlled. It's much more physically convenient for the mother, too, of lease the wombs for unrestricted use with legitimate children soon; they're probably only delaying because more women would want kids if pregnancy wasn't such a bother." Dr. Hammajj pulled on his loose white karate trousers; he smiled reassuringly, as if he had just solved all Art's problems for him. "That's all very well, doctor. That helps to ease my mind of one kind of worry. But now what about my wife?" "Oh, this is safer for her than a normal birth would be. I understand she's had two of those." "I mean legally. Suppose she's caught and convicted and sent to jail and sterilized against her will? What's all that going to do to her?" "See here," said Hammad sharply, "I thought you wanted this child. There are always certain risks involved, for everyone." "I don't want this frozen so-called child, Rita does. I want to talk to her, to reason with her, before it's too late." The doctor had turned his face away and was adjusting his jacket, slowly and meticulously. "You'll have to see someone else about it, then, Mr. Rodney. I told you I'm not operating." "I insist that I be allowed to see my wife, face to face!" Art was keeping his voice low, but he felt it becoming shaky with his anger. "Now you know where she can be found. And I'm quite ready to stir up trouble, if you refuse to help me talk to her!" Knotting a green belt at his waist, the doctor glared at Art as if he had found the wrong specimen laid out on a dissecting table. Art glared right back. "All right," the doctor said at last. 'Til find out if some arrangement can be made for her to phone you. Though it's not wise, phones can be tapped. Where are you staying?" "No. I want to be able to talk with her in person. Alone." Hammad was ready now, but he did not go out. "All right, all right. It's against my judgment but since you insist on taking the risk I'll see if there's any way a meeting can be arranged." "Soon. Very soon." "All right. Where can you be reached by phone?" F red Lohmann stood inside the Megiddo Bar  Coffee House, on the edge of a mean little urban BI district near State Street, not far from the Y where he was rooming. He was alone in a crowd. On a low dais some people with medieval musical instruments were twanging out a ballad about pure-hearted love, and a chill silence had crept into the huge dim room. The place was befogged with the exhaled smoke of several kinds of leaves and synthetic mixtures, tobacco being only one. At every table there were glassy staring eyes, and few of them seemed to be aimed at anybody else. Fred slouched his tall frame over the coffeebar, nursing what they called a small Turkish, which had coffee and other things mixed in it, along with a vague dull hope that someone might ask him about the little bandage on the side of his head. After all, mighty few men could have handled those andys at the speed they were set for today. Not one in a hundred, probably, even given the chance to train, could do it. Black belt George, of course. Third degree black belt, no less. He probably set them on speed One and knocked them down like bowling pins. Toward George, Fred felt envy, but there was no malice in it. Karate was a good business to be in. You could get to meet some influential people, people with class, like the Dr. Hammad who had come in and patched Fred's scalp today. Afterward Fred had watched the doctor go through his private lesson, and George had used Fred to demonstrate a point or two, and had Fred spar freestyle with the doctor a little bit, taking it easy. Now Fred made a karate blade of his hand and chopped delicately, silently, at the edge of the bar. Then he stopped. Who cared? What was the use? George probably could tell without even checking that he had been lying about having a brown belt. Sorry, George had said, no job now. Practice every day and we'll see. George hadn't said every day for how long, but Fred knew it wouldn't be for just a week or two. Months or maybe even a year before he got his stance and his control and everything else up to the standards George wanted in a brown or black belt, in a paid instructor. There was not much fun in grunting and sweating and working like a machine for that length of time. And there was no guarantee that he would ever make it, so what was the sense in putting out that kind of effort? Up to the bar beside Fred there stepped a young man who looked like one who knew his way around. He was of average height, but so broad-shouldered that he appeared squat. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt, doubtless artificial, of what Fred supposed was a wolf; anyway it was a shaggy animal, with pointy little stick-up ears, beady glittering glass eyes, and sharp-looking sizable white teeth in a pink open plastic mouth. Fred hadn't yet made contact with anyone who knew where he might buy some gladrags. "Hey," he called quietly. The wolf-man turned, properly casual, and looked Fred over. "Hey," he answered coolly. "You buyin'?" Fred waited long enough to show that he wasn't being pushed into anything. "Got my check today, why not?" Fred and Wolf ("Call me Wolf, man.") sat at a table, where they were soon joined by a friend of Wolf s called Lewandowski, who was drinking herb tea spiked with vodka. Fred bought another round for the three of them and decided it was the last he was going to buy. He sounded out Wolf and Lewandowski about gladrags. and they assured him that a man who sold such things would be around later. Wolf said he came from New York city. He let it be known that he had led a gang there and the New York police were looking for him so he had come west for his health. Fred could believe this about halfway. Lewandowski, a fat, strong-looking youth with empty eyes, was a native Chicagoan. Once he started talking it was hard to get him to shut up. He said he was looking for a job with, one of the policy wheels, legal or illegal made no difference to him; his old man was a compulsive gambler and he knew there was no money to be made on the sucker's side of the operation. Neither of them asked Fred about his bandage, but he faked a little more headache than he actually felt and managed to reveal casually that he was a karate expert, working hard for his black belt. He saw the others hardening their faces slightly to keep from showing that they were impressed. Probably they believed him about halfway as he did them. Well, he was telling them about half the truth. If only there was someone he could talk to. Finally Fred gave up waiting and bought yet another round, forneither of the other two seemed to have any money. They both said they had been on BI for about a year, since abandoning school. And Wolf said he couldn't even collect his checks these days or the New York police would Find out where he was and have him extradited. Fred began to feel a little drunk and sick, and his wounded head ached in earnest. The gladrag man Finally arrived and was pointed out to him, and as soon as he had the little carton in his pocket Fred went back to the Y. Marjorie wasn't in, or else she wouldn't answer his tapping at her door. Without her unlatching her side of the bed, he couldn't even let his down, and so was restricted to slouching on his spine in a chair with his feet up on his tiny table. He sat there in dizzy silence for a while, staring into the hot eyes of the Y's founder, whose portrait decorated one wall. On another wall was the predictable print of Love Conquers All, the naked urchin wearing fake wings and pretending to be Eros, climbing out of bed and knocking down books and mathematical instruments and trampling a violin. That Garavaggio had certainly known how to paint. That picture would be something to try to carve in wood. He wanted Marjorie to come back, and to hurry up about it. But maybe she had checked out, and tonight he would have to sleep with some real old-fashioned sex kitten, some real dog who studied an erotic manual every day. He didn't know if he could take that now. One thing he sure wasn't going to be able to take for very long tonight was sitting here alone. It was only about eight o'clock, not yet dark outside, and he was neither sober nor yet really high on the spiked coffee. He got up and went out, and had nowhere to go. In a little while he was heading back to the Megiddo, T he phone call got Art up from the Parrs' dinner table. When Art had let the caller see him, a man's voice spoke briefly through a blanked screen, giving him directions. "The corner of Belmont and Halsted. Be there in an hour. Don't forget to come alone." "How will I know -- ?" but the connection had already been broken. George, who had been listening in the background, now looked worried, which did not help Art's nerves at all. Ann, smiling though she was worried too, came up to Art. "You're going, then? Give Rita our love if you do get to see her. And listen to what she says. And don't do anything foolish. You won't get lost now, will you?" "No. No, I won't. Well then. I'm off." He left the house before they could change their minds completely and begin to argue with him not to go. He had prepared himself somewhat by purchasing a map of the city's slidewalk system from an autovendor, and to pick out a good route to Belmont and Halsted was no trouble at all. He even detoured through a busy shopping center with the idea of shaking off anybody who might be trying to follow him. Chicago was a place where people walked, or at least rode standing on their moving walkways. In this it was unlike most of mid-California, where a man trying to move any distance on foot soon found himself a helpless alien in a world that had been planned and built and paved and spaced for surface vehicles. By night out there a walking man was a blind alien once the particular slidewalk or statwalk he was on had taken him out of the particular region where he lived. The tall islands of glittering buildings seen in the distance all looked pretty much alike, and the daytime mountains were gone. A walking man could think that the passing tides and torrents of headlights and Here in Chicago things were closer together and more reachable, more on a human scale, save for the towers that clustered in the center of the city, the place a few Chicagoans still called the Loop. Here signs named the streets at every corner, address numbers were consistent where they could be seen, and the city was covered by the vast slidewalk grid. But now at sunset most of the walks were only thinly occupied. The crowded shopping center had evidently been fed most of its customers by surface vehicle, for its large parking lots looked nearly full. The people Art saw on the walks kept looking at one another in mutual wariness as they passed. Art kept to the main thoroughfares, which Ann had said were fairly well patroled by the police. Plenty of artificial light fell on the faintly whispering slidewalks, and on the new, high, blind walls that now made up so much of the city's face. Next to the vehicle lanes of the street there usually came a strip of grass, then the whispering walk, a wider strip of grass and trees (no shrubbery, though, wherein a man might lurk), and then the walls, high and unscaleable. Walls of workerless, humming factories, or walls of defended blockhouses like George's. Art, searching out his path tonight between the walls, was reminded of a maze he had once seen in the laboratory of a psychologist who had been experimenting with rats. With the going of the sun, the trees growing in the tended spots and strips of grass took on an unreal, misplaced look. Their June leaves were as green as signals in the streetlights' brightness. And the streets' steady vehicular traffic, dipping or rising as the streets passed under or over the moving walks, was also quite unreal to a slidewalking man; the people in the cars were like fish in an aquarium, dim sliding shapes bound into their own world. "See that one there?" the psychologist who ran the rats had said. "Looks fine and healthy, doesn't he? Fat and sleek and bright-eyed compared with most of the others." "How do you keep some of 'em that way, with so many crowded in?" "They're supposed to be crowded in. I'm studying the effects of overpopulation. And he's really no healthier than the others are. He's like a sleepwalker, passive, nonsexual..." "What about the others?" "Various reactions. See the shabby one with all the energy? He's what we call a 'prober'. Hyperand homo-sexual. Hyperactive altogether, often turns cannibal. Only good point is he's not a status-seeker as most of the males are." T hunder rumbled somewhere. Or was it thunder? Close above the streetlights the night pressed down, opaque and prematurely there might be stars or clouds or watching eyes, nothing could be seen. Art ran his maze. After leaving the shopping center he changed slidewalk directions twice, navigating with his map. He was sliding east along Belmont Avenue, calculating the distance to Halsted Street, when a passing police car slowed, keeping pace with him for ten or fifteen seconds. Art threw one half-scowling glance toward the car and just kept on walking, until it pulled away. A minute later he wished it back. Glancing down a comparatively dim side street as he crossed an intersection, he saw a group of four or five male figures walking together two long blocks away. They were shouting in rough voices and waving their arms. Fortunately they were a little too far off to be concerned with Art. He would bet that they meant trouble for someone, though. Thunder rolled again. Hyperactive, and they often turned cannibal. But the psychologist with his crowding studies had been too wise to offer any cure-all for human nastiness. Certainly not the simple absence of crowding. There was still plenty of violence on farms. Art's nerves relaxed a little when the band of toughs passed out of sight, then tightened again as he arrived at the intersection to which he had been told to come. It was a busy place, the center of a small vending district. He alighted on a statwalk bathed in the rippling noon of a barred display window. People moved around him, shopping or aimlessly walking. No one moved at once to approach Art, and as far as he could tell no one was watching him. Another police car, or perhaps the same one, came easing around a corner, and Art turned away from it, pretending to study the contents of the vendor's window. He heard the car halt just a little distance off, and wait there, turbines idling with a muffled whine. Maybe they were just keeping a protective watch over the pedestrians in sight. If they were trying to follow him to Rita, surely they would be more subtle about it than this. But now it seemed to Art that the police and Family Planning probably knew already where she was. He pictured Hall conferring with cool and crafty agents, all of them agreeing to wait until the crime had been irrevocably committed before they sprang their trap. We're not out to get her, Hall had said. Art inventoried the window until he heard the police car pull away. A few seconds later another car drove up to the curb beside him, one of its windows lowered. A man's voice called softly: "Are you Rodney?" "Yes." Art skipped across the slidewalk to the curb. A rear door opened for him. "Get in." He got in and pulled the door shut and the car moved out. There were two men with him in the car, one driving and the other beside Art in the rear. As soon as the auto had turned out of the busy intersection, the man in back took Art by the neck and pushed him impersonally down to the floor. "We don't wancha see where we're going. Get under this." A musty-smelling: opaque blanket of some kind was thrown over his head. Opaque blankets like this one were not commonly found, in the possession of proper people. Suddenly all the possibilities of evil began to open. Art could fear that he was not being taken to Rita at all, he was being gotten rid of as a troublemaker. Meanwhile the car purred on, no one in it having anything to say. It stopped and started and turned in traffic. Art no longer had the faintest idea of the direction in which he was moving. There was a faint odor of perfume, or perhaps of some kind of drug, in the car or clinging to the blanket. He told himself firmly that his new fears were ridiculous. Anyway, it was too late now to start having them. He crouched awkwardly beneath the blanket, breathing uncomfortably and pulling at his beard. Just let him have one chance to talk with Rita, face to face. She would not be able to stick to her mad plan. She had always gone along with him on the few occasions when he had really insisted on having something his own way. If she were able to face him with this decision, she would not simply have left him a note and fled. He had to believe that he would be able to make her change her mind. How could he have lived with her for more than three years and not know her any better than he did? But Rita didn't know him, either, if she thought he would simply let her wreck her life this way. That was the important thing. The number of children and the legal problems were secondary. To save her was what he was really fighting for. The car turned, slowed, turned once more, crept ahead, and shortly stopped. "We get out here. Don't look around, just go straight into the building." The blanket was pulled away and Art saw that they were parked in an alley. Anonymous rough brick walls were close on either hand. As he got out of the car one of his escorts turned him toward an open doorway, some kind of unmarked service entrance, in the rear of a sizable, dimly lighted building. One of his guides, a graying, tough-looking man, came along, walking a pace or two ahead of Art to show him the way. Art followed down a long shabby passage between walls of painted concrete block and up a narrow flight of stairs whose carpet had begun to wear. The place was a run-down apartment building, or perhaps a hotel. This impression was strengthened as they traversed another passage, that twisted past closed and numbered doors. The building was certainly old, but reasonably clean and well-maintained. At last Art's guide stopped and pointed to a door. "She's in here. I'll come back in fifteen, twenty minutes, and we'll take ya back where we picked ya up." The man turned his back indifferently and walked away. Art tapped on the door, then turned the old knob and pushed it open. Rita was sitting with her back to him, in a worn plastic armchair, wearing a silvery bikni that sparkled in the light of -the small room's single lamp, and staring out through the one small window at the night. She looked around, startled, at Art's entrance, and he saw that above the bikni bottom her belly still bulged slightly with three months' illegitimate pregnancy -- he was not too late. As she recognized him, love and fear and defiance came into her face, and she jumped up from the chair. A second later she opened her arms. Iomh home with me now," Art murmured, almost sleepily, about ten minutes later. His voice was half muffled by the single pillow on the small bed. Rita's hair, spread artlessly on the same pillow, was silver and gold in the light of the cheap lamp, as it would be in the best.light anywhere. A gleam of almost the same color came from the plastic armchair, where her discarded bikni lay. "No, I can't." Her voice was small but did not hesitate. "They'll kill my baby if I do." Unable to lie still after saying those unsettling words, she got up from the cot and went to close the window, against which rain was just starting to splash. Art also sat up and put his feet on the floor. He had suddenly realized that a good many minutes had passed, that his escort would soon be back for him, and that so far Rita and he had talked very little, and that mainly about how they loved and missed each other and whether Timmy and Paula might be much upset by what was going on. He stood up and reached for his codpiece, which had been thrown onto the armchair too. "You're coming home with me, so don't argue about it. You haven't committed any real crime as yet, and there isn't any reason why you can't just walk out of here. A man from Family Planning came to see me, and from what he said I'm sure they won't place any charges, if we just turn in this fetus as we're required to do." "I can't, I can't. I wish you would try to understand. I wish you could stand by me." Her tender body turned in the lamplight, naked and unprotected. His heart turned over. "Why can't you do it, for sex's sake?" he demanded, more savagely than he had meant. "B-because it's living. It'smy baby, and it's part of you I have inyou. Oh, Art." Even slight pregnancy always made women look ridiculous and she would look more so when she put the bikni on again. Why couldn't anybody make clothes in which a pregnant girl looked less grotesque? Maybe such clothes were made somewhere. But then. Art realized abruptly, Rita's pregnancy was probably going to be ended in one or two more days. One way or another. Now she got her bikni from the chair and did start to put it on. She looked fragile and vulnerable and ridiculous and he loved her tremendously. Her breasts were fuller than usual; that would be the pregnancy, too, of course. "I can't go through this again," she told him grimly, meanwhile working on a strap. "I'm g-going to have myself sterilized when this is over, even if the government doesn't make me. But I can't give up this baby who's already here." When Rita got very tired or upset she sometimes stuttered. "You have two real children, who need their mother with them right now, not away somewhere in one of those places that Family Planning runs, or hiding out here." "You say they play all day in that b-blockhouse park. I didn't have time to look around there much. Is it safe? Ann's very nice but sometimes she doesn't watch her children closely enough." By now she had gotten back into the bikni, and stood looking into the little mirror on the dresser, trying to pull and tug the bottom to a better fit. "Very safe." By now Art too was dressed. "Come on, Rita, you're rid of a fetus. I'll still be here." "But not inside me. That part of you won't grow anymore, or go on living." "Bah. How do you know it's even mine?" She did not answer, or look away from the mirror, but something in her face closed off. He said: "If I had a diseased appendix you'd want it cut out and done away with." "What's growing in me is not diseased -- " "How do you know, have you had any defect tests made?" " -- and even if it were, I'd love it." If this kept on he was going to grab her and shake her. "If you loved it -- I mean, if you loved the potential child it might become -- you know what I mean -- you'd want to save it from a lifetime of being unwanted by the world." "I want him. His mother wants him." Now Rita was getting angry too. "We should kill him now because he's going to have a very tough time someday? Then I suppose we'd better not take any chances, wed better knock Timmy's and Paula's heads in because someday they're likely to have a tough time too," Sublimation! He knew that he was right, but where was the argument to use? Not what the neighbors might someday say; that wouldn't work with Rita. It came down really to their duty to the overcrowded world, of course, sacrificing a personal wish for mankind in the abstract. For the good of mankind, everyone's reproductive urges, weak or strong, just had to bow aside. But those were not phrases with which to belabor one's suffering wife. How to make the truth sound less self-righteous, speechy and highflown? There came a knocking at the door. On his way to answer. Art said over his shoulder: "You're coming back to Ann's with me now to get the children, and then you're coming home." "No, I'm not." Stubborn as a mule, just like her sister-in-law. You might have thought the blood relationship was there. This time the knock was loud. Art reached the door and flung it open. The man who stood there, the same graying escort, looked at Art's face and hesitated. Then, in a more respectful tone than he had used before, he asked: "You about ready to leave? Don't worry, she'll be outta here in a couple days," "My wife is leaving with me. Now." "I'm not going, Art. Don't ask me -- oh, I wish you hadn't come." A pair of young women were coming along the hallway, talking and giggling about something. They eyed Art strangely, and as they passed the doorway they glanced through it into Rita's room, curiosity showing through the pale makeup that masked their faces. They were made up worse than the B-girls in the tavern had been, and dressed worse too, for those two wore loose shrouding robes, totally obscene draperies of brown and gray that no woman would wear except... except... "What kind of a place -- ?" barked Art, glaring wildly at the man who faced him in the hall. The man took a step backward, startled. Art turned quickly and confronted Rita. Lightning flared, twice, very bright through the window just behind her. In the repeated violence of light Art could see the main front of the building he was in, Rita's room being evidently in a projecting wing, diana arms apartments, said a cheap new sign above the main entrance at ground level. Above, molded into the old concrete that arched above the entrance, were other words, not conspicuous but picked out now by perfect light and some trick of the speed-reading brain. "What kind of place is this?" He grabbed at her, while thunder detonated. "Answer me, what kind of place?" He saw his hands shaking her, shaking Rita, with a violence that no one should dare to offer her. Rita slapped him in the face. Never before. Art backed away from her slowly, as she began to cry. He backed up three steps and bumped into the man who had come to take him away and who now took a grip on Art's arm. When Art tried to pull free, the man said something and only tightened his hold. Art turned in instant rage and struck out with his fist. The blow was clumsy but by chance he got most of his weight behind it and it took his enemy by surprise. Art felt human tissue yield with a crunch beneath his knuckles and then he was no longer being held. Now once more he had Rita in his grip. She was struggling with him, trying to break free. She screamed: "Do you think I like it, being here in a whorehouse? Do you know what I feel about anything? Let go!" Even in his rising madness he had no intention of hurting Rita. His only thought was to save her, get her out of here. After he had gotten her, screaming, out of the little room, there were frightened faces in his way, and doors, and scrambling bodies. All these were obstacles that must be pushed or knocked aside. Strong hands came from somewhere and fastened -- on him. but he struck out blindly and kept trying to pull Rita free. Her being here was not to be endured. An expert foot tripped him, and down he went on a dirty floor. His arm was clamped and bent until he must let go of Rita's wrist. Massive weights sat on him, crushing out what little of his wind was left. "Stop it!" a rough male voice demanded. "Stop. You gonna stop?" It had been barking the same words at him for some time, and finally he had to listen. "Uh." A hand turned Art's face up from the floor. "In th' name o' pure chastity, you gonna behave?" "Yuh." "All right, let 'im up. Sublimation, we get 'em all in here, every kind of nut there is." The powerful hands that held Art down reversed themselves and hoisted, and without even trying he was on his feet. He was dizzy, the world was gray with his faintness. Unused to such exertions. Sweat and dirt were in his eyes, all mixed with helpless tears. His chest heaved in wind-broken spasms. There was a pain inside his shoulder, where something seemed to have been torn. Rita's voice was somewhere nearby, demanding: "Where is he? Let me see. Oh, the fool. If you've hurt him. I'm going to -- to -- " "Oh, lady, please, he's all right, see? Just his wind knocked out. He was out to tear the place apart. Look at my chaste eye, excuse th' language, where he slugged me." Good. Rita was visible as a blur before him now, and they were speaking to her with respect. Of course she was a boarder here, only a fugitive, not a -- no, no, of course she was not that. He felt her cool hands, moving on his hands and his face. "Don't start him up again, now, lady, please. Let us get him the purity outta here. We'll see he gets home safe." "Art? Oh, Art, forgive me. Are you all right?" "Come home with me." "No." He nodded. Then he was being led away. He no longer tried to resist. A man's voice muttered: "Where's the Holy Joe, why don't he look after these celibatin' people of his? I'm sick of the whole celibatin' mess." Then the voice lowered itself to ask a whispered question. "No! Take 'im back where ya picked 'im up, and just leave him there, nice and safe. Is somebody usin' the car now?" There was a fresh uproar in the middle distance, men's voices raised in some angry quarrel. "What's that?" "Sounds like the homos again. I tell ya, we get every kind of a nut there is. Lemme put this guy in here for a minute." The grip that had remained on Art's arm guided him into another room. He was released and the door was closed behind him. He groped along the wall in darkness and found a switchplate, which in response to human fingers on its surface turned on a lamp. T he light was dim and his eyes were still befogged with tears and sweat, but he made out that the small room possessed a cot. He stumbled over and sank down on it, still wheezing for breath. He had to regain his wind, and more importantly his self-control. His strong point was supposed to be intelligence, and so he had to think. Forget that Rita was staying in this whorehouse. Forget that the arrogant nameless obstetrician (Holy Joe, the bouncer had said -- a cultist, then? One of Ann's priestly friends?) was using this former nurses' quarters of a doubtless abandoned hospital as his maternity ward. Remember this, seen in the fortuitous lightning flash: diana all the blindfolds they liked, now he could locate this place again. To what end? Should he tell all to Family Planning? Should he tell George in what sort of place his sister was holed up? George coming here to drag her out would likely kill somebody in the process, or they would kill him. Anyway, it was likely that her brother would let her stay here since she wanted it that way. The door of the room opened quietly, and a nude girl stepped in, carrying under one arm a bundle of cloth rulled up as Fred's karate outfit had been: Art blinked his eyes and found that he could focus clearly now. She was young and blond, flat-bellied and full-breasted, and her face was made up into a pale, cold mask. The girl closed the door behind her and then froze, motionless, staring at him haughtily. In a cold voice she asked: "Is this the right room? I don't think it can be mine. What are you doing here? I don't want men in my room." Art shifted his weight on the cot, started to get up, and then when his body made its great reluctance known he let himself stay sitting there. He knew, he understood perfectly well, that he should speak up without delay and tell the prostitute that for once she was indeed mistaken. This one time she had actually, really, walked into the wrong room. He understood it perfectly well yet he said nothing. Was it that he had not yet regained wind enough to speak? Was something wrong now with his throat? The girl now was moving away from the door, edging along the wall opposite where Art sat on the cot. Already she was gradually, unrolling the thick, opaque robe that she had brought in under her arm, and now she was beginning to cover her body with it. As she passed the switchplate on the wall she turned the room's light to a cooler, softer glow. In her movement she gave the impression of trying to keep as far as possible from Art. She turned her painted face away from him, fixed in a mask of bitterness and contempt, while her motions, graceful as a dancer's, expressed distaste and even fear. By now the robe was half unrolled, and now it covered half her flesh. This girl was good, she knew her trade. "Don't make a move toward me," she said in a low voice, tense with raw repression. "I don't want to be pawed by a man. I don't want you even to stare at me." In his adolescence Art had gone twice to brothels. Both times guilt feelings had hampered his performance, and the results had been unsatisfactory. He was still very nearly a virgin as far as sublimation was concerned. Since his marriage he had come to think of himself as grown above all that kind of thing, and he had never, since marriage, been seriously tempted toward it. If Rita had ever wanted to do anything like this, he hadn't been aware of it. Did he know what she felt about anything? -- those were her words. He would have done it with her. if she had ever asked. What went on between husband and wife was nobody else's business. The girl had nearly reached the window now. "Maybe you don't want to touch me, though," she said, turning her eyes on Art as if with dawning hope. Oh, yes, this girl was good. "Maybe you're a pure, chaste man. Maybe you're a person who knows what a human being really likes." She had reached the window, and now she turned her pale mask of a face to look up and out through the upper panes, left unshaded for this very pirrpose while the lower were fitted with plastic shields in imitation of stained glass. By now her body from the neck down was completely hidden in the long robe, and now her simulated fear and tension vtere fading out, were being put aside by something else. By an exaltation that, once he let it grip him, might be impossible to deny. "The stars," she said, her voice now more distant and far softer than before. "The stars are very beautiful tonight." Of course tonight's sky was all clouds and rain, and the stars were only a part of her routine. But that hardly mattered. In his mind the perfect blue-white points of light were there. Her voice and her face and the attitude of her body beneath the long concealing robe made it all true. Again he realized dully that he must move and speak, he must explain his presence here and make her stop. But for the moment he could not. His breathing, already slowed to normal, became still slower while his eyes rested on the girl. Her hair reminded him of Rita's, and in other ways they looked something alike. This girl was physically quite attractive, as were all the most successful whores. The more lust there was to sublimate, the more the act could mean. Of course nothing to do with sex was ever reducible to such a simple formula as that; but it seemed to Art that with this girl the meaning of the act of sublimation was likely to be very great indeed. To throw down the weight of sex and stand beside her, for the moment straighter, taller, freer, than that encumbrance would ever let you stand. To stand on top of sex, and use it for a footstool, and look with this girl at her imaginary stars and take their light into his being. Tonight he yearned very powerfully to do just that. He knew it was a wrong and perverse yearning that he struggled with, and once he had thought that such urges were over for him, all safely outgrown. But now in his weakness and defeat they came to trouble him once more. Well, since an act of sublimation promised all the comfort of which he stood in need, why not? Why not, just this once? No! He was not going to be so spineless, so weak-willed. Art resisted. He called up images of Eros, lust-knotted bodies sweating, writhing, roaring, raging to attain a pinnacle of lust yet higher than the one they slipped and labored on. He fastened his mind upon the remembered image of the girl's bare body as he had seen it when she first entered the room. He pictured Rita's body, spread out invitingly before him. But all the fleshly stirrings that he now managed to arouse in himself would only go as fuel for sublimation if he faltered. And he was faltering. The consciousness of sex-as-God that never should entirely leave an adult's mind was flickering now and fading dangerously in his. "The stars are beautiful," the girl said again, and now her voice sounded like winter bells. "So beautiful, so far away." The rain drummed on the window steadily, but had no power to make her words ridiculous. Art feebly tried to cling to images of female nakedness, but all were still and flat and lifeless now, remote and meaningless as old photographs. Just as he might have gotten up and gone to join the girl at the window, the thought presented itself that the men would soon be coming back for him, and they would have quite a laugh if they came in and found him stargazing. The banal fear was enough to tip the balance on the other side. "I'm sorry," he said, and stood up with a grunt. His hands and knees were quivering still and his wrenched shoulder hurt. He fumbled in his pockets for some money with which to tip the girl; probably she would make a fuss if he tried to walk out without tipping her. At least he seemed to recall that things had been that way in the brothels of his youth. "I'm not a customer." She had turned from the window and was regarding him with great surprise. He handed her money and explained: "There's really been a mistake." Mechanically a gentleman, he squeezed the girl's breast through her robe. "Mistake? I'll say!" The wintry voice had broken suddenly to nasty shrillness. "This is only five dollars you gimme!" "It's all you'll get," said Art, now dangerously calm in his exhaustion. "I told you I'm not a customer." With the money in hand the girl rushed out of the room. Art followed, wearily, as far as the corridor, where he stood waiting. In a moment his guide, with a swollen cheekbone but the same indifferent expression as before, and another man, came into sight. "I'm ready," Art told them. "Take me back." He rode under the blanket again in the silent car, and smiled grimly to himself. Diana Arms Apartments. He was let out of the car at the busy intersection where he had been picked up. After all he had just been through, a late trip home by slidewalk seemed nothing at all to be concerned about, and he did not even look around when once there came to him the sound of distant screams. When he got back to the Parrs, who seemed to have been waiting anxiously, Art did not have a great deal to say. Yes, he had seen her and yes, she still wanted to go through with it. She seemed to be all right, and she said they were treating her well enough. "What kind of a place is she staying in?" Ann wanted to know. "And what's wrong with your arm?" "I, ah, twisted my shoulder somehow, opening the car door." Ann, evidently assuming from Art's defeated attitude that he was now going to let his wife do as she chastely well pleased, became very comforting and motherly. Art let her rub his shoulder with some kind of medicine that George used for his occupational aches and pains. He also let her go on thinking what she liked. George appeared noticeably relieved by Art's safe return. "I should have gone," he muttered several times. No, you shouldn't, thought Art. At last Ann released him and he dragged himself upstairs and fell into the guest room bed. In the morning, he decided painfully. he would go to Family Planning, and have a talk with Mr. Hall. There was really nothing else that he could do. Sleep was a long time coming. jtr. barnaby of the HomolYlsexual League is here asking to see you, sir." Oscar Grill, director of the Chicago office of the Bureau of Family Planning, slumped back in his chair and gazed unhappily at the image of his secretary in the intercom plate. "What's he here for? The same as usual, I suppose." "I tried to find out, sir, but he was vague. I suppose the same as usual." Grill made a grimace of annoyance. He had barely had time this morning to sit down and assure himself of what a busy day he had ahead, and now here came Barnaby again. About a year ago the presiLeague had begun a series of dropin visits, coming around about once every two months. Barnaby came, and talked mostly in generalities, and sometimes they had lunch together, and Grill had never been able to understand just what his visitor was hoping to accomplish by visiting. It wasn't that Barnaby was personally attracted to him; that surely would have been made plain by now, and didn't seem too likely anyway, given Grill's paunchy, jowly appearance and the fact that he was sliding fast past middle age. What made the situation difficult for Grill was that the president of the state Homo League was too important to be casually brushed off. No politician wanted to risk alienating a bloc of votes of the League's size, and Oscar Grill was, among other things, very much a politician. And general elections were coming up within the year. Grill sighed, ijientally trying to rearrange his morning schedule. He wondered which appointments he might be able to put off. "I suppose you'd better send him in right away. Maybe I can cut it short." "Yes sir." Seizing the moment of peace before Barnaby walked through the door. Grill closed his eyes and tried to achieve an instant of total relaxation. But his job was difficult, and his thoughts were hard to quiet quickly. He wanted to be sure to get to today's luncheon meeting, with the local heads of other bureaus, Art, Poverty, and Vandalism. Important political decisions were in the offing. And sometime today he wanted to try to talk again with his semi-official contacts at the UN's Chicago consulate, to try to find out what might be delaying the latest population forecast. There was a fog of rumors surrounding that report; probably when he did learn what it contained, he would wish that he hadn't. The door was opening, and Grill opened his eyes and stood up and came around his desk, setting himself to be courteous but still to ease his visitor out as quickly as he could. At least he had an obviously and honestly crowded desk for Barnaby to notice. The president of the Homo League entered, moving with his usual slightly feminine walk. His basic physique was that of an average male, but his face was strikingly handsome -- or perhaps pretty -- and his long hair was a natural-looking bright red. In the League as elsewhere, appearance evidently counted for a lot in getting to be president. Barnaby wore a conservatively tiny bikni not too much different from the standard female model, the bottom lacking the exaggerated fullness of the usual male codpiece. Mr. Barnaby's bra was functional; medical science had given him that much in the way of matching his biology to his lusts. "How do you do, sir?" Grill asked formally, extending a hand in greeting. "Not well today, Oscar, not very well." Barnaby's voice was husky rather than deep. He shook Grill's fingers delicately. "I am becoming afraid to travel through the streets. There is an organized harassment that I must endure. Good citizens pay taxes, then find that their government offers them no protection." Grill said: "Won't you sit down? You mean you're being picketed again by that bluenose group?" "Again? One might say that it has become almost continuous." Adjusting his shoulder bag with a large hand, Barnaby settled himself You don't start with True. You change to True. It happens after you've been smoking for a while. You decide it's time you changed to a low tar and nicotine cigarette. And that decision brings many people to True. Because True is not only gentle on your mind, it's gentle on your taste. Shouldn't your next cigarette be True? Warning.The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.  Lorillard # You don't start with True. You change to True. It happens after you ve been smoking other menthols for a while. You decide it's time you changed to a low tar and nicotine cigarette. And that decision brings many people to True Menthol. Because True is not only gentle on your mind, it's gentle on your taste. Shouldn't your next menthol be True? Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. in a visitor's chair. "Not only is our headquarters under seige, as it were, but some of these Young Virgins have taken to following my car through the streets. I should warn you that some of them have followed me here today." Grill had seated himself and was toying with the corner of a stack of printout that lay awaiting his attention on his desk, though he had little hope that the hint would be taken. "Well, I can certainly sympathize. I really wish there was something I could do but, twins, we're sometimes picketed here ourselves." "Yes, I'm sure you are, and by many of the same people." Barnaby crossed his hairless, slightly plump legs. "Oscar, it seems to me of the utmost importance that those of us who lead in conserving traditional values should support one another, for the cause of Eros and the good of society. Men and women of good will should stand together whenever possible, that's all I mean. I realize that you have no power to punish those wretches who are out there picketing." "I certainly don't." Grill sneaked a look at his clock. "I did go to the police about the picketing, as I believe you suggested once before." Barnaby seemed unable to keep from exciting himself over the pickets. "I tried to point out to the police the difference between our country's traditional freedoms and the anarchy those bluenoses want. They paint their dirty words right on their signs, and wave them about in public places, and the police and the courts will do nothing to put a stop to it!" Grill shrugged. "I suppose if the police are providing you with physical protection, that's really about atl you can expect." "Oscar," said Barnaby reproachfully. He leaned across the desk and lowered his voice. "Which is the more to be feared, injury to the body or poisoning of the mind? And I am more concerned for the youth of the community than for myself. What will happen to them, growing up in a world where nothing is considered obscene any longer?" art woke up slowly. There was something very nasty that he would have to face on waking, and so it was pleasant to delay the process. Then he moved, and felt a twinge in his shoulder, and all his memories of yesterday came back. With a groan he sat up in the guestroom bed. His watch read half past eight. His situation looked no better in the morning light than it had in midnight gloom. There was nothing for it but to be a good citizen and go to Family Planning. Mr. Hall had said they were not out to get anyone, at least not anyone like Rita. People like her were only the innocent victims of the midwifers and their gangs. And of their wellmeaning relatives. Too bad if the relatives got in trouble. Art's first responsibility was to his wife, not to the relatives who should never have gotten her into this mess in the first place. Even if Ihey were only trying to help.  He didn't want to think about the Parrs right now, but it was hard to avoid while he was in their house. He got out of bed and began to get ready to go downstairs. While he showered and shaved and dressed he pictured raiding police breaking down the doors of that former nurses' quarters, carting off hysterical whores, handcuffing thugs. Then along came their quietly efficient lieutenant, leading Rita safely out. When she saw Art (who had ridden along in the lead car with the lieutenant) she burst into tears, and threw repentant arms around his neck... More likely she would slap his face again. The scenario was fundamentally unconvincing, so Art had to give up on it and think of something else while he held fast to his determination. Aromas of coffee and warm food now reached him in the upstairs hall. He promised himself that he would say nothing to the Family Planning authorities about George and Ann. Well, sooner or later he would doubtless have to say something about them, for he was going to be asked a lot of questions. But he might make their immunity a condition of his giving information. Something like that. Anyway, he kept telling himself, if they wound up in trouble it would serve them right, for helping Rita get herself into such a mess. His shoulder definitely felt better this morning. He would get Ann to rub it with liniment again tonight, if he was still staying here. If she was still staying here. After taking a quick peek into the children's room and finding it already deserted. Art went downstairs. In the kitchen he found George and Ann facing each other across the breakfast table, where Art's place was also set. Dirty dishes and a minor litter of garbage testified that the children had already eaten before going out to play. Even as Art's in-laws said good morning to him, they seemed to him to be exchanging guilty looks. They had provided Art and his children with food and lodging, but what did they count for, compared with the harm they were doing Rita? Their intentions had been good, of course, but what of that? George raised troubled eyes. "Art, what are your plans now?" "I don't know." As soon as Art was seated, Ann began to ply him silently with toast and protein bars and coffee. His fingers fumbled on the jelly jar. He asked unnecessarily: "Are the children out in the playground?" He was assured they were, and with that an awkward silence fell. He wished he had gone straight out of the house, but that would have been insulting, and besides, being under a strain increased his tendency to get sick if he didn't eat any breakfast. Still, he couldn't stand to sit there. He gobbled his food and quickly pushed back his chair. 'Tm going out." No one said anything to him as he fled the house. It was a bright warm morning; only puddles here and there gave evidence of last night's rain. Once outside the blockhouse walls Art breathed a little easier, at least at first. As soon as he came to a public computer terminal he went in and obtained the address of the Chicago office of Family Planning. With a slight feeling of relief he saw that he would have to travel a considerable distance to reach the place; he needed some time to think over just what he was going to say. They weren't out to get Rita, though, they were really on her side. Once on the proper slidewalk, he drew a deep breath, and again remarked to himself that the weather was fine today. Who cared? Reaching the Family Planning office seemed to take almost no time at all, and somehow he could get no constructive thinking done en route. The office occupied a new, fairly large building, one of the foothills surrounding the central Loop's high range. From a block or two away Art could see that there was an unusually dense crowd gathered on the statwalk in front of the place. As he drew a little nearer he realized this was no ordinary pedestrian jam. There was a stack of placards on the pavement, ready for distribution; some kind of demonstration must be shaping up. Should he go on in? If he didn't mike himself go in and face the authorities now, he never would. Ignoring the murmuring, jostling crowd as best he could, he pushed his way into the lobby. In the vast ground-floor lobby of glass and marble he approached a receptionist, a voluptuous girl who smiled at him enticingly from behind her desk. As befitted her place of employment she was very conservatively dressed, wearing only a few electrostatically clinging sequins and pads. Art halted in front of her desk, not as by the application of brakes, but as with a complete loss of momentum. This was it. He was finished. His mind had gone as blank and bare as the smooth expanse of receptionist's skin confronting him. Somehow he had convinced himself that once he got this far all the right words would flow, but that had been a lie.Now here he was, and all the words were gone in fear. To ask for Mr. Hall would be like leaping over a cliff. "I'm from California," he began with a great effort, helped along by the girl's encouraging eyes. "Still, I have important business with you here. I'd like to see -- the director or someone." Art was suddenly and completely sure that he never wanted to talk to Mr. Hall again. He would never be able to convince Hall that George and Ann were innocent, or at least that they deserved a break, not after the tough time Ann had given him. And she and George hadn't even asked Art where he was going this morning. The girl's eyes turned grave. "The director is a very busy man," she said. "If you'll tell me the nature of your business, perhaps I can help you." "My business is, uh, important." Of course the director was not going to see everyone who just walked in. One could hope that everyone here would be too busy for that. The girl's eyes narrowed slightly, searching Art's face. He had the idea that she could see his guilty knowledge, and was already pressing an alarm button hidden beneath her desk. "I can arrange for you to talk to a social worker. Are you in a hurry?" "I -- " When their computer learned his name it would give him to Mr. Hall, and Mr. Hall would seize upon him, not to be denied a single scrap of information. Art would stumble helplessly into a betrayal of the Parrs, and Rita would hate him for that, even if she were not thrown in jail and forcibly sterilized herself. "No, there's no hurry," he told the girl. "May I have your name, please?" the receptionist pulled a computer-input slate toward her on its decorative coiled cable, and took up an electronic stylus. "I -- " Ann was at this moment caring for Art's children. George was risking bloody beatings from machines, to pay for safe blockhouse playspace and midwifers and cinnamon-flavored protein bars that tended to turn lumpy in the stomach. Art's thought, now scrambling like a cornered animal for some way out, seized suddenly upon the possibility that Rita's illegal operation was being performed this very morning. If so she would certainly be jailed instead of rescued if Art led Family Planning to her. In his present state he took this as excuse enough to flee. Without even delaying to pinch the receptionist goodbye, Art took a step back from her desk. He blurted out wild words about returning later. He turned and fled. jVpressors of all that makes his animal heritage!" Barnaby's voice had grown shrill. "Are we to abandon the youth of the world to them?" Looking down, with Barnaby, from an open window of his office. Director Grill had a good view of the wide slatwalk in front of the Family Planning building. Two competing picket lines had just been organized down there, and both of them were on the march, weaving and writhing like antagonistic serpents. The lines had formed with a healthy distance between them but were gradually being forced closer to each other by the pressure of a mass of onlookers, whose expectation of a riot was probably going to fulfill itself. It seemed likely to Grill, who had seen this sort of thing happen elsewhere, that a critical mass of active humanity would soon be reached. To carry the analogy with atomic fission further, a block away a column of helmeted city police was marching in, a damping rod about to be thrust into an ' overheating pile. Sporadic shouting drifted up to Grill's office window, but as yet he had seen no actual violence. He was not too high above the picket lines to tell that one of them was composed mostly of radical-looking young people, the girls wearing their hair long, the men short-haired and clean-shaven, both sexes dressed in opaque garments that covered half their bodies or more. These of course were the Young Virgins, the objects of Barnaby's wrath. In the opposing picket line, men and women of ordinary appearance were in the majority, though there was a noticeable admixture of men in biknis, and women in codpieced, translucent business suits. Discover Man's most advanced technology of the mind -- Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand your awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. This best seller reveals the parts of the mind and the source of human irrationality. Grasp this opportunity to reap the benefits of the simple, powerful techniques in copies have been sold! Order your copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health today! Just Get it. Read it and Try it! Send # to The Church of Scientology of California. Publications Organization U.S., Dept. G-l. # West Temple St... Los Angeles, Calif. #. No charge for postage and handling. All orders will be shipped within # hours of receipt. Dianetics is the registered trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect of his pub(Greek) "mind." Copyright  # by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved. The Church of Scientology of California -- a non-profit organization. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. Scientology and Dianetics are registered names. "I see your League has some eountcr-picketers out today," Grill commented. "Naturally we do!" Barnaby ran nervous fingers through his bright red hair. "We don't intend to succumb without a struggle." Grill decided that the time had come lor blunt ness, whatever the result might be. "Frankly, I wish you hadn't decided on counterpicketing. Not in front of my building." "What? But we must take action. Look, look down there! A sign that says 'sublimate', in big bold letters, being waved around in a public place!" Grill looked down and saw. He also saw another sign, in bigger, bolder letters yet: stop moral free fall. He wondered honestly which side that one was intended to be on. "Let them go to their monasteries and lamaseries and nunneries to have that kind of freedom," Barnaby was saying. "Let them go behind walls, away from the innocent. and do what they like." Gi;ill drew a deep breath. "You know, if I was coldly logical about my job..." "Yes?" "Well, I might look with official favor upon the bluenoses. After all, the less sex activity there is, generally speaking, the fewer pregnancies and the less population pressure." "Only in the most primitive societies!" snapped Barnaby. But then he fell silent and put on a mask of careful control, which Grill thought was concealing more fear than anger. F.mboldcned by this. Grill went on: "I don't know if any society has ever been run on the basis of cold logic. Probably not. I'm sure ours isn't. People's emotional attitudes are the ultimate power, of course. And most of the people are with you. at least in your attitude toward bluenoses. If I were to come out strongly in favor of chastity today I'd doubtless be fired tomorrow." Barnaby relaxed slightly. "You are joking. Of course there's no excuse for chastity. For a long time our League has shown the way toward the fullest enjoyment of sex without the slightest risk of pregnancy." "Most people just don't enjoy your kind of sex, though," said Grill deliberately. "At least not as a steady diet. And the monasteries and other religious places you talk about are from my point of view very much like Homo League enclavesthey have a vanishingly low birth rate. So. I may not agree with the bluenoses emotionally, but I'm not going to try to put them out of business. I still don't dare to praise them publicly, but I can tell you off the record that I'm rather glad there are more and more lamaseries and nunneries these days." There was silence, except for Barnaby clearing his throat. He seemed to be giving some point a deep reconsideration. "Really," he said at last, "l didn't come here with the main objective of getting your help against the bluenoses. I know I let them upset me too much. I can see, they do help you in your difficult job. But we've helped you even more, haven't we? For many years? I like to think that we in the League are your favorite citizens. so to speak. That there's a large backlog of goodwill built up between us." "Of course." Grill sighed, left the window, and walked back to his desk. He did not want to watch another riot. Privately, he had no more emotional sympathy for homosexuality than he did for chastity. Professionally. he was glad to accept all the help, from every quarter, that Family Planning and the world could get. The human world was in danger of collapsing by the weight of its own numbers, though you might not be able to tell that by O n the walls of Grill's office the computer-drawn curves of the world demographic charts showed the danger in the form of the everworsening pressure of population. More people inevitably ate more food, and while around the world the food suppliers struggled to get ahead, sometimes they could not even manage to keep up. There were now laws restricting births in every country on the planet. It was mathematically physically, inevitable that at some future time, by some combination of peaceful or violent forces, the world's population growth would finally be stopped -- obviously it could not continue until human beings stood jammed shoulder to shoulder on evety square meter of solid land. people w ho inhabited the world today could all, in theory, probably be stored w ithin Chicago's borders, standing indoors and out, leaving the rest of the earth on which to grow their food. Frighteningly many of the eight and more would be tomorrow I . Science had boosted the world's supply of available energy beyond all foreseeable needs by achieving controlled atomic fusion; by harnessing, as the popularizers of science put it, the power of the Hbomb and of the sun itself. The problems of producing and distributing adequate food, and providing medical care, were not so amenable to research and engineering. The leaders of the have-not nations spent their time in power in states of chronic desperation, weighing and selecting gamblers' moves to keep themselves in power and -- sometimes this came first -- to help their countrymen. One aid toward staying in power was to point out a scapegoat or two on which the people could vent their hate and dissatisfaction. If there were any justification for the choice of scapegoat, so much the better. Another gamblers' move was the utterance of overt or implied threats. Often the threats were serious, even when spoken by the leader of a poor but desperate nation against a wealthy and much more powerful one. Today at least eighty nations were theoretically capable of producing atomic weapons, and fifteen or twenty or these had technologies sufficiently sophisticated to perhaps enable them to hide such outlaws weapons from the UN inspection teams. Delivery of a nuclear bomb could be accomplished by stealth if not by missile or aircraft. Biological weapons were easier to make, conceal. and deliver, and could be just as deadly if not as quick as nuclear blasts. Thus the voices of the have-nots must be heard in all the greatest capitals of the world. Thus if a newborn baby in Chicago consumed. statistically, three times the food of one new-born in India, it w as considered only just and decent to limit the number of new-born Chicagoans, and the same with Londoners, Muscovites, babies of Peking and Tokyo. The starving child in the Indian village might never see a bite of the food thus theoretically saved for him, but who could say it was not just to offer him at least a chance? Thus, even among the haves, compulsory sterilization and abortion for women who could not limit their fertility in any other way. Thus, the illegitimacy of the third child. We may not feed the world, we may lack the knowledge or the will or the material wealth for that, but we will not let it watch us overeat. Again, as he looked now at the charts, there darted across Grill's mind the question of why the latest population forecast had been delayed. He felt a foreboding chill. "It seems to me," Barnaby was saying to him, "that in fact you owe us a real debt. Very few of the League's members have brought any children at all into the world -- as yet." Something in Barnaby's tone brought Grill's thoughts back firmly to his office. "As yet? Why do you put it that way?" Barnaby did not answer at once. An alien hardness had come into his face. He continued to stand beside the window, watching Grill. As Grill stood waiting beside his desk his mind started to relate that odd phrase "as yet" to the chain of Barnaby's odd visits, and to certain other terrible hints that Grill had lately received from other sources. The hints concerned recent advances in surgery, and in hormonal chemistry; until now, Grill had managed to avoid confronting their implications face to face. Barnaby, as if reading the director's mind, was nodding slowly and solemnly now. "Maybe you've heard something about it? True male to female sex reversal is going to be possible. There've been doctors working on it in Sweden, and lately in Japan, and both groups seem to have been successful." "Well. That's fine. I suppose many members of the League will want to avail themselves of the operation, to become practically complete women." "Not just practically, Oscar. Truly complete. I want that. Does that surprise you?" Paradoxically, as he spoke of becoming a woman, Barnaby looked more normal than before, a male trapped in a masquerade costume he could not shed, a man grown weary and desperate beyond all words. "Does it make you laugh, to hear that I will want to bear a child? Two children, if I can." Grill was far from laughter. "This is -- beyond belief." "Not to me." Barnaby's husky voice quavered. He spoke now as if confessing some terrible crime. "All my life, since I was a child myself, the thought has been in my mind that somehow -- if I could have a son -- what do you know about me, anyway?" Like the first thunder of an unexpected storm, the sounds of rioting burst up abruptly from the street outside; Director Grill hardly noticed them. He moved behind his desk and sank slowly into his chair, without taking his eyes off Barnaby. "So," Grill said in a faint voice. "Today you have come here on business." art, while inside the building and knotted in his own problems, had forgotten completely about the demonstrations being organized outside. When he emerged from the lobby, practically at a run, he was at once caught up between chanting swirls of picketers and counterpicketers. When he pushed his way free he had been turned around, and stood still for a moment, disoriented, in the middle of the statwalk. A short fat man carrying an armload of cheaply made, stick-mounted signs appeared at once beside Art, haranguing him. "Get yer sign, get yer placard here! Dp yer part, sir, only a dollar." stop moral free fall, said the signs, or some of them at least. Others, interleaved, bore the proud legend "I'm not involved in this," Art muttered, trying to get free of the peddler, not knowing which side the man thought he was on, or even what the two contending forces were. As soon as Art spotted a small gap between the picket lines he made for it. The pickets were chanting louder and louder, faster and faster, mouthing unintelligible rioters' warcries. The peddler would not give up but stayed at Art's side like a stubborn conscience, trying to sell him a sign. Moving together they were too big to get through the gap, and they, or Art at least, collided with one of the lines as it writhed snake-like toward him. A shout of anger went up from those ,he had bumped, followed by a cheer from the opposing ranks. "Filthy censor! Bluenose!" "Smear the queers! Smear the queers! Smear" A tall male figure loomed up in front of Art. Above the words handpainted on a dirty, opaque sweatshirt, the young man's face was clean-shaven, angry, florid, shouting. Someone bawling a song about love pushed Art from behind, whereupon the young man in front struck Art on the head with his flimsy sign. Something was wrong, the blow should not have hurt so much. It was a great deadening bash that dented a vacuum into his skull, into which a tremendous pain was now about to rush... There was a policeman in view. And other people, he could not tell who... Art was down, but somebody had him under the arms and was dragging him along... the blow from the flimsy sign should not have been so hard... now he was dying, or else... IX after Art hurried out of the house, George and Ann remained seated at the breakfast table, alone now in the silent house, facing each other with glum expressions. "I wonder what's happened to Fred," said Ann distantly, turning her head to look out through her window at the patio vines. "And I wonder if Rita has her baby yet." Then she gave up making conversation and brought her hands up to cover her face. "Oh, if Art turns us in today it's going to be all my fault." "He won't," said George, putting into his voice a lot more certainty than he felt. "He doesn't want to get Rita in trouble. Anyway, there's no use blaming yourself if he does." "He might." Ann spoke through her muffling hands, around her silver wedding ring. "You and Rita will be the ones who go to jail for conspiracy, but it'll be all my fault. Why did I have to tell her you had a student who could arrange things? Some criminal doctor." George was irritated. "Hammad's no criminal, or I wouldn't have him as a student. I don't consider arranging for births to be a crime, and you don't either. I don't know of anything else he does that's outside the law." "He arranges births and breaks the law just for money. I don't like that. Why couldn't we have waited until I heard from the Order of St. Joseph people?" "You might have waited a long time, with their monastery burned down. Anyway, it might even be one of them who's doing the operation. I think it was smart for Hammad to farm it out." "Someone else is doing it, while he gets paid. Hammad, I don't trust Hammad." "Now's a fine time to tell me that," George grumbled. "Anyway, Rita's no Christian, she won't care who does it or why." As long as it's done competently. If it isn't -- but there was nothing he could do. Ann was silent behind her hands. "Art won't turn us in," George repeated, trying to be comforting. To himself he thought that he could hardly blame Art for anything he did today. Art was the one they hadn't allowed for in their plans. Still silent. He reached across the table, pried one of Ann's hands down from its job of eye-hiding, and held it softly in his own. "Hey, things aren't that bad," he said. "Hey, lady, do you need some help?" T he first time he had made that offer to Ann they had both been aboard a bus cruising at eighteen miles an hour along the sixty-lane freeway that ran from Bear Canyon to Pasadena, near the middle of Los Angeles. Five apish young men had also boarded at Bear Canyon, though George had not paid much attention to them then. Perhaps they had gotten on to follow Ann. She had five or six small children with her that day. The five young men had taken seats just a little forward in the bus from Ann and her brood, and once the bus was isolated from the world in the flow of traffic they had begun talking loudly among themselves, boasting in obscene language of their skills at stealing, fighting, and sublimating. Ann was pretty good at ignoring them, but then one of the apes began to toss little wads of something or other in her direction. "Hey, lady, those all yours? Quintup-lets! Looks like you waited too long, decidin' which two to keep." By now most of the other passengers had congealed in their seats, seeing and hearing nothing, feeling safer behind pretended walls. "Hey, girly?" called the youth who had been tossing the spitballs. "Anyone ever tell you you'd look nice wrapped in a blanket down to your toenails?" He turned to a friend. "Red, you got some gladrags with you?" "Sure." "Break'em out. Girly's gonna gaze at the stars with us." An old woman sitting beside George muttered something to the effect that girls who dressed that way were just asking for trouble -- and true enough, Ann had on an opaque blouse, and an opaque skirt that came down nearly to her knees. Maybe her dress was one reason why George had noticed her as early as he did. But that was irrelevant now. "Do you need some help, lady?" he called to Ann politely, as he got up to stand in the narrow aisle, swaying there slightly with the motion of the bus. George was then twenty-one, half trained in karate, proud owner of a purple belt. He stood up with a feeling of necessity, without either much fear or sense of heroism. Vaguely he wished that he could have a chance to limber up. "Yes, I believe I do." Ann's voice was as calm as if she had dropped a package in an awkward place and a presentable young man had offered to pick it up. So George cleared his throat like a nervous orator and faced forward. He met the eyes of the five troublemakers, one after another, and wondered if there were any words that he might stop them with. A wise old instructor had once told George that if you were really ready for street trouble the readiness showed somehow and trouble never came, not unless you went out of your way to make it, which wise people in or out of karate never did. What words would have stopped me, George wondered, when I was just a kid and up to something wild? But he had never been as wild and apey as these five were acting now, and magic words eluded him. At the same time he was reassuring himself on a comforting point he had already noticed: the narrowness of the aisle. There might be five of them, but they could only come in reach of him one at a time. If they were going to come at all. He could see in their faces that he had frightened them just by getting up to face them, and he hoped that his continued calm and that of the girl might be enough to keep them paralyzed. He raised his eyes toward the front of the bus, and met the driver's eyes in a mirror behind the driver's personal shield of armored glass. All around the bus the sixty-lane river of vehicles crept on, cutting it off from the rest of humanity and bearing it along. The driver was already trying to maneuver the bus into an outer lane and reach an emergency stopping bay, but to accomplish the maneuver might easily take ten minutes or so. Meanwhile, maintaining a calm silence was not going to be enough, perhaps because the five had nowhere to retreat. Now their faces were hardening again; they were more afraid of something else, something that drove them on, than they were of him. They looked at one another and got to their feet and started after George. The old woman screamed. The eyes of the first youth to come at George changed again when he realized he was in a narrow aisle, and could expect no immediate help. He was a boy of average size and strength, a little taller than George, sixteen or seventeen years old. His face was just a bit too broad to be called handsome, and his red hair was cut so short the top of his head looked bald. His cohort, mumbling obscenities, shoved forward behind him. pushing him to the attack, until there was nothing he could do but lunge at George, swinging his fists in clumsy desperation. The bus driver was thinking, as well as watching in the mirror. At that moment he tapped his brakes firmly, risking a bang from the vehicle following, but stalling the momentum of the single-file attack. George saw the first blow of the fight coming at him, and ducked just enough to catch it on top of the head, where an enemy knuckle was likely to be cracked. Then he leaned forward counterpunching, just as the sudden slowing of the bus rocked the enemy back on their heels. George could already crack tw o centimeters of pine with either hand. The foe went down like helpless dummies, tangled with one another as they fell. George pressed forward, hammering at the face and body of the unfortunate youth who had led the attack, getting him down and keeping him down so that the rest were jammed and pinned behind him and beneath him. W hen the police came aboard, only a couple of minutes after the bus had reached an emergency bay, they found George still leaning on the pile of inept apes, punching anything that dared to move. The police heard Ann's matter-of-fact story, and the driver's, and the stories of the passengers who had noticed anything happening. George was identified and allowed to go his way; the five were removed to a police copter. The red-bald youth had to be carried, and his face was now far from handsome. George had a moment of sick regret, but no more than a moment, on seeing the damage he had done. As soon as the police had departed with their catch the bus got rolling again and Ann's reaction started to set in. Her hands were trembling and she had to fight back tears. She understood, probably from experience, that they would have done more than just wrap her in a plastic sheet. And the children riding w ith her were still in a slight state of shock, sitting quietly and staring at her and George. George sat down at her side and acknowledged her choking thanks. He now felt ten feet tall, and at the same time shaky with relief. "Relax, it's all over now," he said to Ann. He patted her arm, and slid a hand beneath her long skirt, gently squeezing her thigh. "Please don't," she murmured, shifting away from him, pressing her knees firmly together. His quieting pulse speeded up again at her withdrawal. But he couldn't believe she had meant that just the way it sounded. Probably it wasn't really the open invitation it sounded like, but just a nervous reaction from the danger she had been in. A lot of people just didn't feel like sex when they were frightened or upset, and under the circumstances her lack of even a polite pretense was quite forgivable. So he restricted himself to holding Ann's hand, and lightly stroking her arm, which attentions she accepted and seemed to find comforting. "I think I know you," he said with sudden mild surprise. "At least I know who you are. Your name's Ann something, and you're in my sister's high school class. You were there at school one day with a bunch of girls when I went to pick her up. She's Rita Parr. Oh, excuse me, my name is George." "Yes, I heard you giving it to the police. I'm Ann Lohmann. Oh, why must I start blubbering now, when the trouble's all over?" She was certainly not blubbering, just a little tense and swollen-looking about the eyes. "Thanks to you." Getting herself completely unjjer control, Ann looked around to her children, giving them a smile and a few cheerful words, snapping at a boy to get his feet down off the seat. "Where are you taking them?" George asked. "We're just coming back from Bear Canyon Park. I took them out there because so many never see anything but pavement and little strips of grass." The kids all had a BI look. "They're from my Sunday School class." "Oh, one of those religious schools?" "Yes." There was a pause. "I remember seeing you, too, now that I think about it. Rita looks a lot like you." He laughed. "Don't say that about the poor girl. She's all excited about graduation these days. So are you, I suppose." "Yes. we all are. I guess." But Ann was evidently not nearly as excited as Rita was. "And about going to college. Where are you going your freshman year, if you don't mind my asking?" "How could I mind your asking anything?" Ann smiled beautifully. She w as really quite a good-looking girl. "I might go to Mid-Cal my first year. Or maybe Ha-Levy Junior. I'm not sure." George also liked this girl's voice, now that he had a chance to listen to it attentively. Girls' voices were important, in his estimation. So w ere their tempers and spirits. If there was a suggestion of repression in Ann's clothes and manner, well, that was an attractive spice for him. He hadn't yet seen her standing up, but he guessed that she would be no taller than he was. That, too, was nice. "You're older than Rita, aren't you?" Ann was asking. "Well, naturally you are. Where did you go to college, or are you still going?" "I didn't go." Not wanting her to think him lazy or stupid, he quickly added: "Oh, I may go yet. But the year I finished high school there was one problem after another in our family, people getting sick and losing jobs and all. We were almost back on BI. I didn't have much time or money, and I was a little too dumb to qualify for any good scholarships. Then I got into this karate business. Once you get your black belt, it's really a profession." Ann looked at him warmly. "I can't imagine that you're lacking in intelligence. Anyway, you've proved that you have courage, that's more important." She shook her head as if marveling. "When you stood up there in the aisle, I didn't know what you were going to do. But I knew that you knew." Unable to find the words to answer that. George changed the subject. "I suppose you're all excited about the Prom? Rita is. She's got her escort all picked out and everything. I don't know if the poor clod knows about it yet." Once more Ann seemed to withdraw for a moment, as she had when he caressed her leg. "I'm not going to the Prom," she said, then busied herself suppressing a quarrel that had been developing among the children. George supposed that she had been having a quarrel with her best boy friend, and was uncertain about who her escort was going to be. He never doubted that a girl like this would have a choice of invitations to accept. "I'll bet you change your mind about that," he said, thinking back to the closing of his own high school days. "The Prom's half the fun of graduating, or more than half." She didn't answer. But surely a girl like this had been invited, so he could push and tease antf probe a little more without seriously hurting any feelings. "Why," he said. "I'd be tempted to ask you myself, if I was in your class." "I've been asked." Ann face was slightly averted so he could not make out her expression, but her voice was unhappily chilly. "I'm just not going." Ouch. He had managed to hit a real sort spot after all. "Anyway," he said, "your Prom isn't next week. You have lots of time to think about it.' Meanwhile, when am I going to see you again?" I t turned out that he saw her next day, at the police station w here they had both been summoned for questioning about the fight on the bus. George came near being charged with aggravated battery, but when the testimony of all the available witnesses had been heard, he was not charged. Later George bought Ann a snack in a nearby restaurant, and then suggested they find some place a little less noisy and copulate. "No. please. I'd rather not." Again her reply was blunt and seemed to amount to an open invitation to repression. But at the same time hei answer seemed so natural and direct, so unembarrassed, that he simply could not take it at face value. He told himself that she had probably been upset all over again by having to testify. She was so matter-of-fact about what she said that she probably didn't realize how it sounded. He asked her several times to go out w ith him on a regular date, but she consistently refused. Still, he contrived to see more of her. His sister Rita told him where Ann could usually be found on Monday nights, playing volleyball, and he went to the gym and managed to get in on some of the games. "Annie, this is fun, but how about you and me going out someplace by ourselves? You like other sports? Bowling, swimming? Or maybe a show." "George, #... you're nice, and I really like you, but I think it wouldn't be wise." "Why not?" But now people were yelling at them to get back to the net if they wanted to play. They never had the time or the place for a serious discussion. Ann seemed to be making sure of that. During this same period of a month or so George made it a point to enjoy sex with five or six different girls. With each, at the most abandoned moments, he found himself closing his eyes and imagining that it was Ann Lohmann's flesh that moved against his own. The popularizers of psychology on television and in the newsprints were always warning that such behavior could be a danger signal. To focus lust on one individual might be a step tow ard its repression whenever that individual was not available. just staggering how smart those college educated psychologists could be. Anyway, he wasn't worried. A lot of the younger, more radical psychologists held that sexual repression, or all-out sublimation even, did no permanent harm when practiced occasionally. That seemed sensible to George, though he hadn't much personal experience to judge by. He was young and full of health and usually wanted to do nothing with his sex but satisfy it every day or so and enjoy thinking about it in between times. But now this thing with Ann -- this thing with Ann was something else. Early on the evening of the Prom -- living in the same house as Rita, he could not possibly have gotten the date wrong -- he obeyed an irrational-seeming impulse and phoned Ann's home. Ann's mother, tight-lipped and looking somehow hurried and harried, answered. When he asked for Ann, she reminded him in a nervous voice that this was Prom night. Still he noticed that she did not say in so many words that Ann had already left lor the Prom, or that she was too busy getting ready for it to come to the phone. After he had blanked off, George sat thinking. Then he went to Rita's room, where his sister was still being fitted into her Prom gown, meters and meters of fuzzy pink transparency. While their mother was out of the room looking for implements or materials of some kind, he took the opportunity to question his sister. "I really don't know whether she's going tonight or not, George. How does this look in the back?" "Fine." "She's an honest girl and a good friend of mine and I love her dearly. If she said someone has asked her, then someone has. Also, if she said she's not going, then that's the way it will be. I love her dearly, as I said, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if she doesn't go. Oh, George, what do you mean it looks fine? I can tell in the mirror that it's terrible." He wasn't looking into the mirror, or at the dress. Ineluctably motherly even on her Prom night, Rita came over to him, frowning with concern. "Oh, George, is it really getting serious between you two?" "It is for me, although I've never even screwed her once. Is she always -- like that? You know?" Rita was worried now, completely distracted from her dress. "I might as well tell you bluntly, Ann has a bad rep with the boys in the class. I mean I'm not the most prudish and old-fashioned girl, but she is really way out." Rita glanced at the bedroom door to determine whether their mother was still out of earshot. "You know she's been excused from Erotic Orientation classes all along, on religious grounds. Don't get me wrong, she's been niy loyal friend ever since sophomore year." "No, I didn't know that about no EO. But it's not really surprising." "You say you've never screwed her. If you ask me, no one has." Rita nodded significantly. "I mean it. She's my friend, but you're my brother. I've seen a lot of the boys displaying a certain interest in her, if you know what I mean. And more than one man teacher, too. Well, if she hardly ever lets them see anything between her shoulders and her knees, I suppose the men are bound to get the message and come sniffing around. I guess you know what you're doing." Rita was still looking at him worriedly when their mother returned and George withdrew. A deep excitement was now taking control of him. It had begun on that first day on the bus and had been developing ever since. He went back to his own room and spent half an hour alternately lying on the bed, pacing, and practicing his side snap kick before the mirror. Meanwhile he fought an inner struggle, understanding that the whole course of his future might be altered here and now. Again and again he told himself to put dark ideas out of his mind and phone some other girl with whom he could joyfully and simply spend the night in bed. Then he gave up and started to punch out Ann's phone number again. Then he gave that up too and headed for her house. T he house was all in darkness and he almost stumbled over a small figure sitting on a step in front of the door before he realized that anyone was there. Taking a second look, George saw that it was a boy about ten years old, who held in his hands a carved wooden figure about half as tall as he was. "You live here?" George asked, his hand hesitating over the callplate on the door. "Yeah," said the boy. "Nobody's home but my sister," he added gloomily. George's heart gave a little premonitory throb. "It's her I want to see." He touched the plate and immediately a light came on above his head, giving the TV eye in the dodr a chance for a good look. In the new light George could see that the carved wooden figure in the boy's hands was -- or had been -- a female nude, executed with some skill. The kid was slowly mutilating it now, moodily gouging and hacking it with a small knife. The step was littered with little chips and shavings. "Hey, what're you doing that for?" "I carved it, I can do what I want." "Well. What's your name?" "Fred." "I'm George. You can carve pretty good, Fred, if you did that. Why don't you save it?" Though it seemed too late for that. Now one of the house's windows came alight; someone was on their way to answer the door. "Oh, you're karate-George from the bus." The boy looked up with interest for a moment, but then lowered his brown head again and dug in with the knife. "Why should I save it? Nobody wants to look at it." Ann opened the door, rubbing her dark hair with a towel. She was wearing a translucent pinkish sarong. not radically concealing, with apparently nothing under it. "Hello, George. Freddy! I thought you were at the Scout meeting. What are you doing, destroying that?" "Nobody cares about it." " care. I told you I like to see anything you do -- " "You don't know nothin' about it. And nobody else cares." Freddy flung down the chunk of wood and was gone running into the night. B# across the little front yard and then swallowed up by the shadows along a narrow statwalk beside a slow Ann called after her brother in annoyance, but evidently without any real expectation that he would turn around and come back. She made a gesture of resignation and then turned. "Come in, George." It was almost as if she had been expecting him. "Thanks. Is your brother going to be all right?" "Oh, I suppose so. I think he'll stay in the neighborhood. Anyway I don't know what I can do." George daringly omitted giving her any slightest pinch or caress of greeting, even on the hand or arm, as he stepped into the house. True to form, Ann did not blush or giggle at the omission, as most of the girls he knew would probably have done, nor did she take offense at it, as the really nice conservative ones might. A bad girl then, as Rita had warned him, and all the signs so plainly showed. But still... somehow he couldn't believe she was. "Let's go out beside the pool," she said. "It's nice outside tonight." "All right." He followed her through the house. "I called earlier, and your mother sort of implied you were going out, but I just had a hunch and came on over anyway." "I'm glad you did." As they were leaving the indoors for a palmfringed patio Ann stopped and turned to him. Her gladness, if such it was, was quiet and almost melancholy. "My parents have gone to the Prom, they agreed to be chaperones. They were very upset w hen they found they couldn't talk me into going, even going at the last minute w ith them instead of a boy taking me. My mother is Church of Eros, you know, quite devout, and she's been going there for guidance day after day and trying to get me to go. But her church and mine just don't agree. My father went to his playclub and talked to the philosopher. Finally my parents both decided they ought to do what's expected of them even if I won't. So they're chaperoning. I guess that's partly why Freddy is upset. He thought Dad might go with him tonight to some Scout meeting." It was about the longest speech that George had ever heard from her. She seemed farther from melancholy when she had gotten it out. "I'm glad your parents decided that way," said George. "Now I have you all to myself." "I'm glad you do. I had to talk a little bit to someone." Ann stopped rubbing her hair and let the towel hang down in front of her. She seemed innocently unconscious of the concealing effect. Now for the first time she smiled. "Would you like a swim. George? I just climbed out." "Sounds like fun." He followed her around the bend of the L-shaped patio to the pool, which was irregular in shape and fairly small, and bordered along most of its perimeter by plastic grass and probably artificial flowers. His mind pictured Ann climbing from the pool, slipping on her sarong, going to answer the door. Suddenly he w as sure she had been swimming in the nude, and his inward excitement -- if excitement was really the went up another reading on the dial. Of course there was no sensible reason why a girl alone should not slip off her bikni and swim nude if she wanted to. Only the most satyrish reactionaries would insist that a solitary person wear clothes to emphasize his or her sex. But still the mental picture of Ann floating alone, smooth as a snake, divorced from sex, all chaste and bare as a lily-pad, was overwhelming. "Still, the air is getting a little cool now," said George, stalling. Standing beside her on the edge of the pool, he felt very unsure of himself. Would she laugh at him for an old-fashioned clod if he mentioned his lack of a swimming codpiece? On the other hand, if he just stripped bare and dove in, would she, after all, be shocked? In spite of the evidence of her own words and actions he couldn't really believe that she was the bad kind of girl. But hadn't he come here tonight hoping she was, trying to prove it, wanting to get from her w hat only bad girls gave? Confused as a sixteen-year old, he chickened out. "You're right," she said calmly. "I wasn't in the pool for very long." They sat down side by side on the pool's curved grassy edge, and George pulled off his sandals and dipped his feet into the water. In his knitted translucent shorts and jacket he was really quite warm enough, but he saw Ann shiver just slightly in her sarong with the damp towel around her bare shoulders. In a minute he would suggest that they go back inside where it was warmer. Meanwhile he wanted to watch her as she stirred the water gently with one toe, scattering a thousand California stars. O nly once, as an adolescent in the grip of a way-out mood, had George visited a brothel. There a pretty girl had draped herself while he watched, and had talked about stars and purity and poetry and other high, mysterious things until she had him sexless as a mushroom. Then he and the girl had lain chastely side by side on her narrow bed and talked. Between other topics of conversation he tried to explain the mental processes of karate to her, how the mind could concentrate the body's force sufficiently to drive the hand uninjured through a wooden slab. At the time he had not really started any serious study of karate, and so he had been facile with explanations. Probably his dissertation hadn't made too much sense, but the girl was a skilled listener. He supposed most whores were that, and sexually desirable, too. He had heard Japanese speculating about what the old-time geisha must have been like, and he wondered if they were something similar. In the brothel George had never forgotten how desirable the girl with him was, while at the same time his mind had daringly pushed lust farther and farther away. A door had opened for him to a bittersweet world of controlled power. Change the metaphor: free style sparring, and Eros's feet of fleshy clay were swept out from under him, and down he came with a great ignominious gonad-jarring crash, to be made to bend his neck before a single rebellious human slave. Still, when it was all over, when his half hour was up and he was being expertly shown the door, he found himself somewhat disappointed. Was this all that sublimation ever amounted to? It hardly seemed worth the fuss that people made about it. Now, sitting with Ann on the grassy rim of the pool, he watched a movement of her hips show through the sarong as she shifted her weight slightly, and felt a sudden physical surge of desire for her. He remembered suddenly that he had seen and responded to just such a movement of the prostitute's body as she began to wrap herself before him. "So. I guess you're still working with that Sunday school religious class, hey?" "Oh, yes. When I have time." "Have you belonged to that Christian group long? I mean, guess the rest of your family aren't members." "It's a Christian school, but..." Ann spoke slowly and carefully now. "I'm not actually baptized into the Church yet myself. I just help out there. I've been hanging around the school and church there since I was about thirteen. You're right, my parents are much against it and of course they try to argue me out of ever being baptized. I guess my adolescence has been difficult for them, with me always hanging around Sunday school instead of going to young peoples' orgies in their church. The philosopher at Daddy's playclub says I'm looking for a crutch to help me get through life. And really it is such a tremendous step, being baptized, I mean. In a sense I'm still free now to do anything I want, but after baptism I won't be." "Hm," "For example I'll be practically restricted to marrying someone who's also a Christian. If I get married at all." "Really?" "Well, I just mean it takes an awful lot of work to make a marriage a success even when the two partners agree on the important things such as religion. And my marriage will have to succeed because Christians don't have divorce, or at least not very often." "Aren't they divided into a bunch of splinter sects? I was reading about it the other day." George had rarely given the subject of religion much thought, but just recently he had been reading up a bit on Christianity. He didn't think it was for him. He couldn't figure out whether violence was ever allowed or not. Maybe it was something like the traditional rules of karate, where you weren't allowed to use it for real unless to protect yourself or another loved one. "Christians used to be divided. Now they're pretty much reunited again, what's left of them." "Well, I never even go to Church of Eros any more. I think religion's not for me. They say that some of those churches, once you join them they never let you alone again afterwards." After a little silence Ann said: "There are a number of things that never let you alone." "Yes," agreed George, wondering just what things she had in mind. "George?" Her voice was different. "What?" "Would you like to have sex with me? Here and now?" "Why, yes," he answered, speaking mechanically in his surprise. "That would be nice." F or long seconds she did not reply. She sat there so motionless that her toes no longer troubled the starry water. George tried to read her face in the near-darkness. Then abruptly she turned her face aw ay. "The way you say that!" Ann said, and made a frightened, twisted sound that was a little like a laugh. "It's just that you took me by surprise." George slid closer to her along the side of the pool. "Oh, Ann. Annie? You've never wanted me to give you an erotic touch before." "Oh." she said, "I've wanted." She leaned away from him, supple and graceful in her sarong. Her toes left the water with a tinkle of tiny drops, and she stretched out on her back along the edge of the pool. Now she covered her eyes with one slender wrist. George could no longer control himself. He crept very close and bent over Ann, daring not to touch her at all. "Don't be afraid," he said. "'m not afraid. I'm not ashamed." Her voice was surprisingly firm and proud, and she was watching him from under her arm. "You don't know me very well, George. But maybe you've heard some stories." "Yes I have. But I don't care if I lie stories are true." "What do they say about me. the stories (hat you don't care about?" "They say -- " His voice went shaky on him and he had to pause. "What they amount to is that you're still a virgin." She moved her arm away and now he could see her face in the starlight, her lace becoming calmer now with an inner change, the blooming of some beauty that George could not have named. "Yes." She said it without a trace of shame. "That's why I'm not at the Prom tonight. Nothing but one long orgy. George, just now I offered you my virginity. Can you understand what that means to me?" Watching her, listening to her, he thought he could. As if following some biological imperative his lust now began to recede, while at the same time there rose up in him -- something else. His throat ached with his joy. He straightened up so that he was no longer bending over Ann but sitting at her side. Looking at him steadily, she asked again: "Now, do you want to have sex with me?" "Yes. Sometime. Right now I want -- something more." Ann nodded agreement and lowered her eyes. Her breathing, that had quickened momentarily, now grew slow. In a gentle voice she asked: "Shall I take this sarong thing off? Or put on something thicker?" George could not find his voice to answer right away. What had happened in. the brothel had afforded him an enjoyable, way-out kick, a fancy kind of reverse mental tickle. That tremendous gulfs of experience lay beyond had been suggested, but no more. In itself the visit to the whore had been not quite worth the effort to repeat it. This thing impending now, beginning now , was going far beyond. A winged thing had been born inside his chest and it was lifting at the roots of his being, lifting and pulling and expanding until it seemed that sex itself might be dissolved out of the flesh and carried outward to the stars. "Oh. I don't care what you wear," George groaned in a failing voice. "Oh. I love you, love you, love you. Oh. sublimation's such a dirty word, there has to be a belter." "I know." Ann whispered. "Don't talk now." She had done this before. He w as the virgin here. Their hands came together and held, now just human hands more than they were male-female. She raised her eyes to his, and then on past his eyes, and he knew that she was looking at the stars. No turning back now'. Never. They rose on the great lifting wings. X W aking up, rejoining the inhospitable world, was a slow and intermittent and instinctive struggle. Art understood from the beginning of the struggle that he was sick, or hurt, and paradoxically this left him less worried than he had been before. Before whatever had happened to leave him in this state. He was less worried because now less would be expected of him. They would have to take care of him now... they? Someone was trying. However he had come to be here, he lay in a bedroom in somebody's home. In one of the two beds crowded into the small and cheaply furnished chamber. He had the vague impression of somebody having been in the other bed, and the covers there were rumped, but now when he looked carefully there was no one. Perhaps, too, somebody had once shared this bed with him. He should have been polite and pawed at their genitals at least but right now he felt tired of genitalia and thank Eros he was sick or hurt and nothing much could reasonably be expected of him along that line... should have grabbed and pawed as those little plastic figures were doing to each other, those cheap Church of Eros icons that someone had shoved to the rear of the top of that high plastic wardrobe over there and then forgotten. It was a BI bedroom from the look of it, or could it be a room in a cheap hotel? Or some rented room where tenant after tenant rushed through, forgetting and leaving things, and none of the haphazard objects in the room fit with anything else. There on the wall was the founder of Christianity nailed up, as in Ann's children's room, but here two pieces of plastic were doing the job instead of wooden beams. And there on the other wall, a reproduction of a painting that looked like a Caravaggio, but a Caravaggio that Art had never seen before. Nothing like Eros trampling the violin, or Bacchus lounging amid bowls of fruit. In this picture there were men around a table doing something, counting money, and on the right two men entering, one of them important, a mysterious figure of light and shadow and power, extending a hand that said: here, you, enough of playing with those trifles on the table, more important things are waiting. The summons had come, and everyone in the picture knew about it except the man for whom it was intended... so he himself was sick, no, he was hurt, for now he remembered something about being frightened out there in the street, and now there was this sexawful pain in his head that only intermittenly would go away. And now truly there was a long-haired girl resting, indecently covered, in the room's other bed, and now, whup, a trick of the illusionist's art and she was gone again. Meanwhile it might have been that Art had slept. Standing before him was a man. tall and narrow-shouldered, with a sandy beard and impressive green or gray or blue eyes, it was hard to tell because the color seemed to change, who looked at Art intently. And this man was a somewhat familiar figure, because he had been standing in the same place an hour ago (a day ago?) and asking Art some questions. "What's your name?" the man asked now, looking at Art intently. He had a mild, slow voice that contradicted' a look in his eyes of being fierce and concentrated and somehow ready to pounce. The man smiled and nodded, as if this were very good news indeed. He had shut the door of the room behind him; outside somewhere in the background printout was clacking noisily from a computer terminal in need of mechanical adjustment. "Art, what year is this?" Art's second correct answer was just as satisfying as his first. "How do you feel. Art?" "Not good. I've got a triplet of a headache." All of a sudden the lobby of Family Planning came back, and then the frantically waving picket signs outside, the jam of bodies on the statwalk. What should come after that? He didn't know. He had reached a real blank. The man stepped closer to his bed. "Let's have a look at that." With what were unmistakably a doctor's hands, professionally sure and gentle, he probed through or around some kind of dressing on Art's scalp. "Ouch." "Sorry. Well, that's not looking too bad. And I'm glad you've waked up fully now." The man stepped back, pulling at a curl of sandy beard. "But I still want to make an X-ray or two. Haven't been able to as yet." "How long have I been here? And where am #, anyway?" "You've been here several hours. Let's say you're with some people who gave you shelter when it appeared to them that otherwise you'd go to jail. May I ask -- what is the last thing you remember clearly?" Art closed his eyes. His head throbbed. "Coming out into the street, in front of the Family Planning building. There was some kind of demonstration, or riot... but why should I have gone to jail?" The doctor shrugged and gave a tiny smile. "I don't know that you would have. Some of the Young Virgins on the scene evidently mistook you for one of their own casualties and brought you here. Some of them think that if a person gets clobbered in the street he must be a good guy, and anyone who's a good guy is automatically in danger of being thrown in jail." He approached Art again, and with the aid of a tiny light looked closely into his eyes. "How am I doing, doctor?" "Not bad, not bad. Rest. It's important that you take it easy for a while. Don't worry about a thing. I'll be back in a bit." When the door had closed behind the doctor Art lived in silence tor a while with the pain in his head, alternately opening and closing his eyes. Somewhere in the distance the faulty computer terminal clacked away again. The room had one small window with bright daylight coming in around the edges of a closed shade. This was some Young Virgins' refuge, then. But he was not back in the Diana Arms; at least. Rita's room had looked very little like this one. The door opened and a girl in a long, opaque sweater came in, bringing him a cup of something w arm and chocolatey to drink, and Art w as abruptly conscious of being entirely naked beneath the bedsheet. "Medicine?" he asked, while routinely starting to put a hand up under the bottom of her sweater. "No." She gave him a cool smile and turned away, so that his hand slid free. "Just a drink. Thought you might like some." She went out again right away. The stuff in the cup tasted good. Soon he might try getting up. He wondered if his clothes, and his watch and his money, were in the plastic w ardrobe, and he wondered what time of day it was. About the lime he had finished the drink, sipping slowly, the doctor was back. H e looked in Art's eyes again with his little light and then pulled up a chair and sat. "Art, I look the liberty of going through your wallet while you were unconscious. Just to see if there was a record of anything, diabetes or allergies or so forth, that might bear on your medical condition." "No doubt I owe you thanks for taking care of me. And you found out my name. I didn't catch yours." No answer. "I suppose now I had better get up and put on my clothes and leave." "I don't want to scare you. Art, but before you go walking out on the street I must insist we take some X-rays. I hope to be able to make them downstairs here in just a few minutes. If X-rays show no skull fracture we can drive you home right away, take you anywhere in the city you want to go. If they do show a fracture we are going to have to somehow arrange to move you on a stretcher to a hospital." "I -- see. Or maybe I don't." "The point is that your presence puts us here in something of an aw kw ard position. If you do have a fracture, we can't simply call an ambulance to come and get you. And for your own good I wouldn't want you riding folded down and blindfolded in the back seat of a car." "I know how that works," Art muttered, feeling a little sick. "Beg your pardon?" "Nothing. Evidently I'm in some kind of a -- secret hideout." The doctor looked relieved. "I'm glad you understand. It's quite important to a number of us here that the location of this house be kept a secret. And we've realized by now that you're no sympathizer of ours. Nevertheless we wish you well. We don't want to -- to make you feel you're being held a prisoner. As soon as the X-ray film I need arrives. which I hope will be any minute now, we'll take a couple of pictures and then you'll be on your way." Art relaxed wearily in the bed. "All right, all right. I guess you know what you're doing." "I'm really glad you're being understanding about this. Art. I feel a personal responsibility in this matter. For your being in the Family Planning office to begin with, I mean." Art looked at him, trying to puzzle it out. "You see, I'm Rita's midwifer." A couple of sturdy male Young Virgins came along shortly, pushing a regular hospital cart. They got Art's clothes out of the wardrobe -- he noticed the strap of his watch sticking out of a pocket, and also the faint bulge of a billfold that had evidently been scrupulously replaced -- and helped him put on his codpiece and loaded him onto the card beneath an opaque sheet. Meanwhile, of course, he was demanding again and again to be told where his wife was. "She's not here, not in this building," the doctor kept answering him calmly. "The parturition will bequitesoon. She's well. And she's worried about you -- more precisely, as I interpret what she says, she's worried about whether you'll want her back when she has her third child." It took Art a moment to understand. "You mean she thinks I might divorce her? But that's foolish, how would that help? It wouldn't help her or the children, and it certainly wouldn't help me." He lay on his back with his head on a low pillow as the two husky Virgins propelled the cart out of the room and along a rambling hallway, through what appeared to be an ancient house of mansion size, or else perhaps the rundown dormitory of some private school. Not at all like the Diana Arms. "Sure, I hope she doesn't have a third baby when she comes back. But even if she does, I most certainly want her. So, you're the one who's doing it. How can you interfere in people's lives like this? How much are you being paid?" The doctor was walking beside the cart, now and then going ahead or tailing behind when the way became too narrow. "I'm not getting a dollar from Rita or anyone in her family. If she's paid out money it must be going to fhe doctor who referred her to me. or to someone else along the line. In a clandestine business like this you're always going to get some people going into it for the money." "And you?" "For the good of my immortal soul. That's how I see it. That I have an inescapable moral duty to do what I am doing here." The cart rolled into a small, oldlooking elevator. The two orderlies remained behind as the doors closed and the elevator started down w ith Art still lying on the cart and the doctor standing beside it. "You don't inspire a great deal of confidence, doctor. If you are a doctor, really. If you're not you'd better keep your hands off my wife." "I assure you I am an obstetrician. And you'll be glad to hear that I haven't lost a mother in some years of practice." The slow descent of the elevator stopped and the doors slid open. "I haven't lost anyone to a head injury, either. But then yours is about the first I've treated since I was an intern." And with that the cart was rolling again. The opaque sheet came over Art's face in two thicknesses as they left the elevator. The voice of his captor said: "I'm covering your eyes up here, so you won't be able later to identify or locate this house." Art only grunted. He felt the cart jolt lightly over a threshold, and then there came a whiff of outside air, summer-warm and fragrant, but he stoically refused to look or listen or sniff for clues. Once before he had been granted knowledge that secretive guides were trying to withhold from him, and knowledge had done him no good at all. This game was hopeless, for him at any rate, and he was about ready to give it up. Not to accept that his opponents were in the right, but to admit that they had him beaten. The law and the bulk of society were on his back but he could not call them in. When you went into the endgame a rook down and your clock running out, maybe you had better resign and save some mental energy for the next game. There would be a lot of tough games to play against the world when Rita came home again, whether or not she had to go to jail first or not. If she w ent to jail who was he going to get as a steady, dependable babysitter in California? Now the cart was on a descending ramp. Impossible to judge whether it went down one meter or three. When it stopped and the doctor pulled the sheet down from Art's face, the two of them were alone in a kind of laboratory or treatment room crowded with a This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulpscans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans yahoogroups . com. jumble of shelves and boxes and equipment, lighted by some oldfashioned overhead fluorescents. The windowless walls were lined nearly from floor to ceiling with shelving, loaded with boxes and bottles labeled in what seemed to be the jargon of medical technology. The nearby door through which they had evidently just entered was now closed. It was hard to guess the size of the room because sections of it to both right and left were cut off by portable w hite screens. "Now where is the damned film?" The doctor was ruffling through stacks of papers, journals, printouts, and other impedimenta that covered a large desk-like metal table. "They told me that they left it here." Somehow the archaic swearword, the like of which Art had not heard since the tridi play went dead on the tube train, sounded natural coming from this man. After fruitlessly searching a few moments longer, the doctor muttered an excuse and went out impatiently, closing the door of the room behind him. Art heard another door open and close some distance off. Apart from his continuing headache. he now felt pretty good. Good enough to have a sense of awkwardness and vague shame at lying here on a cart like an invalid. He raised himself on an elbow and looked about. There on the foot of the cart were his clothes. Should he dress and stagger out into the street, calling for the police? That certainly wouldn't win Rita over to his point of view. No, he had tipped his king and resigned the game. Near at hand he recognized a portable X-ray machine, a familiar sight from visits to other physicians' offices. An unobtrusive background hum of electric power and electronics permeated the room. And now he became aware of another sound, an old-fashioned watch tick-tick-ticking, except this was a little faster and more irregular than a watch would be. Still alone. Art swung his feet over the side of the cart and sat up. His head ached, but he felt able to stand and walk. Now if that was a bathroom over there, as a tiled interior glimpsed beyond the top of a white screen seemed to promise, then his physical comfort might soon be brought back close to normal. He slid off the cart and walked around the screen, past glassy tanks and a maze of piping and a portable computer terminal set up on a dimly lighted workbench, and found the hoped-for toilet. He was on his way back to sit on his cart like a good patient when, just rounding the shadowed workbench, he came to a full stop. "Ah," he said aloud. The fetus was in the central glassy tank atop the bench... as I write this, California courts are trying to decide whether the police have the power to seize copies of the film "Deep Throat" and my friend Earl Kemp may be headed for jail due to violation of censorship laws. Thus I'm tempted to write about censorship. But since this is a science column and not a political essay I don't suppose I'll be able to. However, one should never underestimate the ingenuity of a columnist... I suppose, though. I'd better stay with science and cosmology. I've just got the latest on gravitation research; that seems like a good safe topic. I mean, how far from censorship can you get? I expect most Galaxy readers are at least vaguely aware of the ongoing research on detection of gravitational waves, but it won't hurt to summarize a bit. In the Newtonian universe, and in many other theories as well, gravity is a "force" that acts through a field. That is, these theories postulate that although gravity is #;# times weaker than electromagnetism, it is not fundamentally different. This essential similarity holds true in the realm of special relativity also. Special relativity, you'll recall, states that no material object and no signal can travel faster than light. There's a good bit of evidence for special relativity, and no really good counter-theory lurking in the wings to take its place. The general theory of relativity, however, is another breed of cat entirely. There are several contenders in that realm, and experimental evidence offers no clear-cut way to choose one or the other. General relativity does away with gravity fields altogether. In that theory. gravity results from the geometry of space. Whether gravity fields "exist" or merely result from geometry, theorists believe gravitational attraction propagates with the speed of light. Thus, if matter be created -- or destroyed -- the rest of the universe won't be instantly affected, but must wait until the gravitational effect, traveling at light speed, reaches it. Thus "gravitation waves", which will have a frequency and an amplitude much like light, but .which may also have some rather strange properties as well. I n theory, if we could detect and examine gravitational waves, we might be able to tell whether they result from a field and are thus similar to magnetism, or if they are merely a property of space and its geometry. Unfortunately, gravity is an incredibly weak force. It requires the mass of the whole earth merely to pull things with a puny # cmsec# acceleration -- and we can overcome that with rather small magnets, or chemical rockets, or even our own muscles when we jump. Because gravity is so weak, it's hard to play with. You can't turn on a "gravity wave generator" and fiddle with the resulting forces to see if they refract, or can be tuned, or whatever. You can't wiggle a mass to generate gravity waves, because you can't get a large enough mass held into place to be wiggled. It's not even possible to blow off an atomic weapon, turning some matter into energy, and measure the effect of the matter vanishing; the effect is just too small to be noticed, and it's hidden among the rather drastic side effects. However, there are a number of theoretical ways that gravity waves might be generated by the universe: stars collapsing into black holes or neutronium would do it, for example. The universe might be riddled with gravitational waves, but they'd be terribly weak, and require delicate and sophisticated apparatus to detect them. Some years ago. Dr. Joseph Weber of the University of Maryland decided to build a gravity wave antenna. He took a large aluminum cylinder and covered it with strain gauges. The idea was that so long as the cylinder were acted on only by the steady gravity of earth, it would be in a stable configuration; but if a gravity wave passed through it, the cylinder would be distorted, and the strain gauges would show it. He had to compensate for temperature, and isolate it from vibration, and worry about a lot of other things, but the technology had been developed: the antenna was built. It was incredibly sensitive, able to detect distortions on the order of an atomic diameter. It was also able to detect student demonstrations outside the library, trucks rumbling along the highway a mile distant, and other unwanted events. The solution to the latter problem was simple: build another copy of the antenna and place it # kilometers away; now hook the two together, and pa'y no attention to an event that doesn't affect both. Such "coincidences" should be due to a force affecting both antennae, and since even earthquakes take time to propagate -- and their effects move much slower than lightspeed -- the output should be reliable. Unfortunately, it isn't as straightforward as that. The instruments must be very sensitive, and thus there's a lot of chatter from them. By the laws of chance, some of this chatter will be simultaneous, or near enough so, and thus you are guaranteed some false positive results. The output of the gravity wave detectors, therefore, needs careful analysis to decide what's real data and what's chance. Weber immediately got results. He got a lot of results, far too many for chance. Unfortunately, there were far too many for cosmologists to believe; as a result of Weber's early reports some cosmologists estimated that as much as # of the universe must be inside black holes. The argument went this way: something is producing gravity waves. We can't see enough matter to account for the events, but normal matter falling into a black hole would produce gravity waves. Therefore -- There were other cosmologists who wanted to believe this for different reasons. Readers familiar with black holes must excuse me: it's now necessary to discuss their basics for a moment. A black hole is a theoretical construct that can be derived from both general relativity and the older Newtonian universe; in fact, the first speculations about black holes come from La Place back in #. If you take enough matter and squeeze it small enough, you will eventually get so much gravitational force that nothing can prevent the matter from continuing to collapse. In Einsteinian terms, the space around the matter becomes curved into a closed figure, but the result is the same: the matter is squeezed to infinite density. Long before it reaches that state, though, there is a region around the matter at which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. The effect of that should be pretty obvious. If light can't escape, you can't see into the hole. Moreover, anything that goes down in the hole stays there: that is, if you accept the speed of light as the top limiting velocity of the universe, nothing can come out, ever. The area at which space is curved into a closed figure -- or the region at which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light -- is known as an event horizon, and interestingly enough both Newtonian and Einsteinian equations give the same location to it. It is the region at which: R  #GM c (Equation one) where R is the radius from the center, G is the universal constant of gravitation, M is mass, and c is the speed of light. For our sun, that radius is on the order of two kilometers: if the sun is ever squeezed that small, we'll never be able to see it again. An observer diving into the black hole would never know when he had crossed the event horizon. He could continue to send signals 'to his friends outside, and as far as he could tell, they would go right on up and out. Those outside the hole, though, can never under any circumstances receive information from inside it. Now, as it happens, if we measure the total amount of matter in the universe, and plug that in for M in equation one; and we take the furthest object we can observe and plug that in for R; then the equation almost balances. Almost, but not quite. There isn't enough matter in the universe; we're missing from # to # depending on whose figures you use for M and R. Winner of the John W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award for the Bet Science Donfiction Book of # "Lucid, exciting, inspiring, and always igniting the sense of wonder" Theodore Sturgeon , Galaxy. "A daring view of the Universe by the wittiest, most rational, and most clear-thinking astronomer alive!'Isaac Asimov. Illustrated. A national If the equation were to balance, space would be curved into a closed figure at the boundaries of the universe, and we'd live in a closed universe. Eventually, in a closed universe, those galaxies receding from us will stop and come back, and the whole universe will be packed into a big wad at the center. What happens after that is debatable, but a number of cosmologists want badly to believe in a closed universe. It also means, of course, that we live inside a black hole ourselves: that is, our whole universe is a black hole. If we don't live in a closed universe, Ihe receding galaxies will go right on receding, and this disturbs some theorists. Thus, Weber's coincidences were welcome in many cosmological circles. Others tried to build gravitational antennae to confirm his results. T hen a second startling result came out of Weber's shop. It appeared that there was a #-hour sidereal cycle to the coincidences, and furthermore, that this cycle was related to the galactic plane. In other words, gravitational waves originated in the galactic center. We have a good estimate of the distance to the galactic center, and thus were able to estimate how large an effect at the center of the galaxy would be required to deliver that much force to us out here on our spiral arm. The result was once again dismaying. Far too much energy was apparently being turned into gravitational waves. Now the energy radiating from the galactic center could be either sprayed out in ali directions, obeying the inverse square laws, or it could be "beamed" into the galactic plane. Obviously less total energy is involved if it is "beamed", but what mechanism might account for that? The speculations were many, imaginative, and varied; they were also rather frightening. I et's take a moment to go back to j black holes. When matter gets dense enough to satisfy equation one, and the event horizon forms, things don't just stop there. The matter goes on collapsing; we just can't see it any longer. In fact, nothing can stop the collapse. In theory, the matter should quite literally become infinite in density. This is a troublesome concept: how can infinite density be present in a finite universe? The answer is obvious: in some respects, the matter no longer remains in the universe at all. When gravitational forces have got to this point, we have what is known as a "singularity;" a point at which normal laws simply do not apply. Actually, things are worse than that. Not only don't normal laws apply, but the relativity equations suggest that no laws apply. Strange things happen in the region of a singularity. Time is reversed. Conservation laws don't work. Causality is a joke: if you could get into the region of a singularity, you really could go back in time and assassinate your grandfather. In fact anything could happen and science ceases to exist; and you don't even have to physically go to the singularity for this to take place. If you can observe one directly science has just gone down the drain. That bothers a lot of theorists and scientists, and rather disturbs me as well. If there is a naked singularity -- that is, a singularity not covered with an event horizon -- then, at least in potential, there is no order to the universe. Out of that might come ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. W hat then may we do to save science? Why, invoke censorship, of course. (I told you never to underestimate the ingenuity of a columnist.) The kind of censorship invoked is called rather whimsically the "Law of Cosmic Censorship", which states that "There shall be no such thing as a naked singularity." All singularities must be decently clothed with an event horizon. Given cosmic censorship, a number of interesting laws about black holes may be demonstrated: that they never get smaller, that if one is rotating it can't be sped up until the escape velocity is smaller than the speed of light, and a number of other rules that are collectively known as the laws of black hole dynamics. Unfortunately, cosmic censorship deprives science fiction writers of some of their best stories. Hmm. Cosmic censorship is unfair to It does it this way. If all black holes are covered with event horizons, it follows that you can't plunge into a black hole and come out elsewhere or elsewhen. Actually, if you plunge into a random black hole, all that could ever come out anywhere would be a stream of undifferentiated subnuclear particles; for all their fantastic properties, singularities do retain one feature, namely that gravitation in their region is rather high, sufficient to disassociate not only the molecular, but the atomic, structure of anything visiting them. On the other hand, if a star about to collapse into black hole status is rotating fast enough, some solutions to the Einstein tensor suggest that the singularity formed will be a donut; you could dive through that and come out in one piece, provided the donut were large enough. Large enough means galactic sized. I'm afraid; stellar size black holes will still get you too close to the singularity so that you can't use them for transportation. Furthermore, what you come out to on the other side is not, according to the equations, our universe at all. What it will be like, no one can say, except that it will have in it a copy of the black hole you dove through to get there. So, turn around and dive back, of course; but that doesn't work. You go through and out again, all right, but into a third universe different from either of the other two. The black hole is still there, so try again -- and come out in a fourth, and there behind you is that rather tiresome black hole again. Is any of this real, or are we playing with ideas? No one really knows, of course. The most we can say is that the people who can solve Einstein tensors come up with that kind of result. It's rather discouraging for science fiction writers. Here we thought we had a new way to get faster than light travel, what with black holes connecting us to another universe, or, just possibly, to another region of our own, and the very people who gave us the black holes go on to prove we can't use them. Still, maybe there's a way out. Perhaps someone will find a solution. But they can't so long as the law of cosmic censorship is enforced, because singularities decently covered with event horizons can't come out and affect our universe. B ack to Weber and gravitation waves. One of the models constructed to account for the enormous gravitational energy generated in the center of the galaxy had a very large singularity lurking down there. Suns fell into it, and as they were eaten, gravity waves poured out. It was a rather depressing picture, our galaxy being eaten alive like that. Then a number of other laboratories constructed gravitational antennae. Bell Laboratories, an English group, the Russians, all made gravity wave detectors. In each case their equipment was supposed to be an improvement on Weber's. None of them found any coincidences at all. People began to wonder just what Weber had done, and to doubt his results. Last summer, at the Cambridge Conference of experimental relativists, the picture changed again. The people who had built "improved" gravity wave antennae reported no results whatever. (Weber continued to report results, but with a change I'll get back to in a moment.) Meanwhile two other groups, one at Frascatti, Italy, the other at Munich, Germany, had built carbon copies of Weber's antenna. They got coincidences. Whatever Weber was observing, others have independently observed something similar now. While all this was going on Weber did a re-analysis of his coincidences -- using a computer rather than human judgment to define just what was a coincidence. The result was startling. He still gets events -- but they are no longer concentrated in the galactic plane. The sidereal coincidences have gone away, and with them has gone the evidence for the large singularity eating the galaxy. Moreover, Dr. Robert Forward, of Hughes Research at Malibu, California, has constructed his own gravity wave antenna. Since lasers were invented at Hughes Labs, it's no surprise that Forward's antenna employs them. He has three big weights at the apexes of a right-angle triangle. Lasers measure the precise distance of each weight from the others. A gravity wave will presumably distort that triangle, and thus be detected. Forward has "events" too. They seem to coincide with the kinds of things Weber gets but, as I write this, no serious attempt has been made to compare results. For that matter, the Munich people have just got started. They were quite surprised, by the way; they'd thought Weber's results were some kind of artifact. I t appears, then, that some kind of gravity waves do travel about through the universe; at least something that can affect large aluminum cylinders hundreds of kilometers apart is operating here. write # Eighth Ave. New York, N.Y. or call (#)#-#I The next step is to see if these events have any relationship to those bursts of x-ray energy detected by Vela satellites that I told you about a couple of columns ago. At the moment that's not possible, and of course there are a lot more gravity wave events than x-ray events; but if the x-ray events are accompanied by coincidences on the gravity antenna, we'll know a lot more about both. We may then be able to decide what gravity is: a force, or a distortion of geometry. We may be able to learn more about black holes, and what happens inside them, and who knows, those trips to alternate universes could be a real possibility. Until we get rid of cosmic censorship, though, we'll never know what happens to the volunteers who go exploring down black holes. didn't put the pseudopear into her stew. We're too small a group to be constantly afraid of each other, though. Anyone might have been the next victim, if Nadi had died, as we tried to stretch our dwindling food supply. But Nadi threatened our very survival, psychologically as well as physically, and I can't blame whoever tried to put her away. Sometimes I wish it had been me; I might have done a better job... E ight of us manned a small booster station and switchyard on Ingeborg, handling n-space traffic in this end of the Arm. We'd crossed eighteen light-years of space to get here, from the closest transit station then operating, the in corpora passage taking six weeks subjective time, and nearly twenty years, relative time. Once here, we dug foundations, assembled the works, set up prestressed shells and topped them with five meters of packed earth, one on each side of a handy drumlin which gave optimum separation of transmitter and receptor. Within a month, plains grass tufted the insulating dirt; four years later, the only visible signs of our presence were the power guidepoles and the conveyer belts like licking metal tongues from pursed, green mouths. This area had glaciated at least once; the solar-still purified water from a stream that snaked through low hills haphazardly dumped across the landscape toward a lake gouged out by some anciently retreating mass. It's purely beautiful; pretty soon we camouflaged everything, trying to pretend we lived on a resort planet with occasional interludes of necessary labor. This was easy to do, since our living quarters were minimal, Ingeborg's weather being on the heavenly-subtropical side, and our station being small, with minimal mechanization. We even shuttled cargo from receptor to transmitter on goosey little forklift front-end loaders that zoomed over and around the hills with an excited shriek or an ill-tempered snarl, depending on the driver's mood. Someday someone would build a reverse station, when rimworld colonies were sufficiently established to ship Homeworldsway, and there'd be more of us here; but we made a pleasantly close and friendly group, and none of us felt the lack of company. Bopp, Garth, Becky, Carol, Mari, Doc, Stew, and myself -- all of us experts at practically everything. We respected and supported each other. Some of us were more expert than others, of course. I was particularly handy the minicomp; Becky could sense receptor load without using meters, and Mari's hand on the directional beam was more accurate than anyone else's. We'd shaken into a unit, over the years. No one grudged me my afYection for Rags, a native whatnot (no one could really classify it), or Becky's mess of leatherwork, or Doc's persistent inquisitiveness, which added to our bookreels and required our patient answering of his impertinent questions; Doc didn't mean to pry, exactly, he simply had to know. Cargo came through regularly, kicked by a chain of nuclear furnaces, our Ingeborgian sun being merely the nearest, in crates measuring and massing identically to spare the minicomp that adjustment. The only variable factor aside from the contents (which were none of our business, but we always checked invoices anyway) was their destination. We had to 'ping' each shipment, bouncing the beam unloaded through n-space to the designated terminal, computing feedback, and vanishing the crates on toward colony worlds even further down the rim than we were. The shipment I was shuttling from receptor to transmitter that day was aimed for Salvation, a badly misnamed iceworld, but one judged suitable for colonization. I had the third totcrate balanced on the warning light swirled. Scared? There are no words to tell how scared I was. I backed the a dancing bear, and snapped through the multi-gears like grim Death was chasing me. Somehow' I had time to think quite calmly, maybe it's just a short in the warning system, but I'd better leave fast, just in case. And of course, my cargo was precious; they crate children carefully. But if the receptor was about to blow... It blew. I flew off the seat, smashed against the upper edge of the crate, rose with the blast. Hunks of debris flew about me, traveling at about my speed; I javelined along face down in a more or less flat trajectory. I could see cowering tracks, fragmented blossoms I'd stopped to admire on my last trip... my last trip... I could pick out individual glass blades. Either I was dropping or the ground was rising. I puzzled over the problem, and finally realized it was both. I'd reached the slope. The perception amused me. I was laughing when I hit. B opp was bending over me when I woke; the moon was down, but he'd set out glowlux. Ingeborg is way to hellangone down the arm, so the nightsky is mostly ink. Bopp didn't seem to realize I was awake; I lay quietly for a while, thinking that's funny, I don't hurt, except my head aches. Then I thought. Oh god, I wish I did hurt. "I'm dead, man," I said. I meant to whisper, but it roared out of me. Bopp jumped like a prodded cow. Then he steadied, and replied quite calmly. "Not quite. Bud." "My neck's broken, isn't it?" "Don't think so. You're still breathing." He was right. A respirator was one of the luxuries our medikit didn't have; either I was breathing, or I'd discovered a workable substitute. "Seem to be," I agreed. I was sprawled on the hillside, cradled in that limitless meadow. Bopp hadn't dared move me. "Is everyone else all right?" I asked finally. "Garth reached the shelter. Becky didn't." The rest of the crew had been at the transmitter, and were bound to be safe. Unless whatever blew uprooted that, too. But that was unlikely, "Just Becky?" I sounded quite calm; I was surprised at myself. "Well, Rags, to." "Damn." When I'd found him, he'd been quite small, and we didn't have any idea how big he would get; he'd been shaggy, friendly, curious and, fortunately, herbivorous. At his death he'd topped # kilos, looking a lot like a flatfooted Terran muskox. We never had solved the question of whether Rags followed me because he'd imprinted on me, or because he just liked the attention. We hadn't made any real study of Ingeborgian ecology; it didn't seem important, once we found the planet was unsuited for colonization. Ingeborg was hostile. The weather was perennially temperate, the radiation level low, the air just a smidge high in oxygen, the gravity a touch below one g, the fauna friendly andor harmless... but we couldn't eat anything. On Ingeborg, all the longchain molecules rotated the wrong way. This meant, of course, that we kept a lot of fbod stockpiled, in case of disaster. And brother, we'd just had a disaster. Normal wear-and-tear we could fix, or jury-rig some acceptable repair; but there was no way to replace the entire receptor system. That meant we were out of contact, until an in corpora ship could get to us. Without the powergrid on the receptor, we couldn't even ping an surely have noticed anything massive enough to blow our station. Food could be an important problem. Still, with Becky gone, and me... I couldn't envision the world without me, but I couldn't convince myself I'd be around... at least there would be plenty of food for the survivors. I could placidly contemplate my own death. Bopp had certainly injected me with something from shelf six of the medikit, the one that took a second key to open. He'd stuck a needle in my arm, and even though I knew my head was disconnected, the drug had reached my brain. Circulation hadn't yet heard that I was in two pieces. If it hadn't noticed. I'd better not think about it, or it might read my mind. I howled with laughter, screwing my eyes up and roaring breathlessly. Slowly the.spasm passed and the few stars grew fuzzy. Another drug, of course... I'd scared hell out of Bopp. Then I had a busy little dream. I guard Training School; I was practicing guarding tots, but something was wrong, I couldn't see my Trainer anywhere, thirty or forty six-year-olds bulged an undersized room jampacked with playgear, and more kids were coming out of the woodwork. Literally. I watched them wriggle from heatducts, while others went two-dimensional and slithered in between the door jamb and the door. They were three deep on the floor, falling off the swings, perched on the climbing bars, stacked like and with the blocks, and most particularly, festooned all over me. Everywhere I looked they were snatching toys and smacking each other. I was supposed to control them, nontraumatically. Why were they picking on me? "We love you. Sissy," they shrilled, pulling my hair, throttling me. "Be funny. Sissy, be funny, befunny, befunnybefunny," they screamed, swinging on my skirt, twisting my ankles. "I love you. Sissy," a girlchild cawed, sinking her teeth in my hand. my wrist. She sailed lowgrav into the opposite wall, then slowly, slowly slithered down. On the yellow paint a dark-smear of blood glared at me. They stopped fighting each other. They were all over me, hitting, clawing, biting, breaking... "Up or down?" someone asked. "What do you say?" That was Bopp. "She's pretty far down, now." "Well..." Bopp never made a decision if he didn't have to. The tots were gone, but not far; I could hear screams and shrieks of laughter in the distance. Where was I? A strange woman's voice, and children... not Ingeborg, for sure. But wherever I was, Bopp was there too. "Up, I think," the woman declared. "Up," I agreed. My mouth was dry and my tongue thick. I opened my eyes; three daylit Bopps finally settled down to one-and-a-half of him. His square face, lumped by years of offhand reaction to the world, was frowning, but he wasn't looking at me. I switched my gaze -- oh, how I concentrated to do that -- and there, sure enough, was a stranger. "Who... you?" I croaked. I was still lying on Ingeborg grass. Where had she come from? "I'm Nadi Belayen, nurse-attendant-in-transit," she smiled. "I've got you pretty well patched up, I think. You're showing some motor response in your extremities, now. Do you want another dose of..." "No," I interrupted her. If whatever she'd given me had started that nightmare, I didn't want any more of it. But I still heard children's voices. Surely I wasn't hallucinating audially, if my visual input was tracking, was I? "Children?" I asked. "The damaged crate," Bopp said shortly. He wasn't keen on our little visitors, either. None of us was child-oriented; that was one of the reasons we worked a transit station instead of a Homeworld. Nadi began a long explanation; I cut my ears out of circuit and figured it out for myself. They'd unpacked her to care for me. She'd found the blasted crate and insisted on opening it, no matter what it did to our food-time ratio, or our sanity. "Just the one crate?" Bopp nodded, Nadi was still talking, but Bopp and I understood each other. From the twist of his heavy eyebrows, it was plain she'd wanted to uncrate all of them when she understood they were indefinitely delayed; transit takes a few hours, but we couldn't be rescued for almost twenty years. Deepfrozen for transit, though, the crates would keep. I t had taken us six subjective weeks to reach Ingeborg, but better than twenty years had passed; only planet-based installations could handle the power needed for n-space insertion. So whatever went wrong, wherever it had happened, unless by some odd chance an Installation ship was already in our area, at a base nearly enough complete to receive messages. that was not involved in whatever catastrophe destroyed us, that could be sent to pick us up... somewhere in that tangle of reasoning, I'd convinced myself we were stuck here. Nadi had run down, or perhaps finished. "Any ideas?" I let my eyebrows wigwag back at Bopp. "Doc guesses an online sun's gone nova." "The safeguards?" "Uh, uh. Those circuits look good on paper, but they've never been really tested. Anyhow, we got a critical overload, the receptor blew, the power's gone. That's it, Sue." Nadi was chattering again. "Mari and Carol are just sweet with the tots, but I've had to speak quite harshly to Stewart and Herman about the serious effects of childhood trauma," she chirped. She was a small, brownhaired, plump, smiling person, with a wrenlike way of tilting her head, and a sweet, high trill to her voice. "I suppose it must be hard for you to remember, all alone like this, how very sensitive small children are to emotional upset." I grunted. My arms and legs were numb, but my butt ached like fury where it pressed the ground, and I needed . a bedpan, badly. I said as much. "Oh. my dear, I don't dare lift you; just let it go. I'll clean you up." "Noplas sheet," I snapped at Bopp, and he trotted off. "It's a good thing you had scanpanels and airsplints in your medikit, " Nadi chattered. She seemed uneasy if she wasn't talking, a trait I had often noticed among guardians. "We have what we need for emergencies, until we can crate the victim for shipment," I replied. That was why we didn't have a respirator; anyone who needed it probably couldn't survive shipment. But scanpanels, sheets about six bony tissue to the naked eye, and airsplints to immobilize fractures, these were simple necessities on any world. She'd used her brain and our equipment, and hopefully done a workmanlike job on me; but my spine was definitely damaged. Well, now I knew where I stood. Or lay. The sun of Ingeborg blanketed me, and Nadi kept stroking my hair off my forehead; I suppose she thought it was soothing. Bopp galumphed up with a huge roll of noplas, and Nadi helped him fit a catchpan under me. Relieved, I remembered something Nadi had said. "'Herman?'" I asked Bopp. "Doc," he grunted. Oh, oh. Then he'd be, omigod, Francis; I'd at least be Suzanne, not Sissy, that sillyass diminutive that was supposed to make tots like me. I preferred "Bud," though I'd been tagged that for continually using it instead of names; now it was familiar, friendly. And she'd had to speak firmly to Doc and Stew about traumatizing the brats. A warning bell went off in my head. "Kids sampling local flora?" I snapped. "You guessed it." "You explain?" My eyes slapped Nadi-ways and back. "Tried to." Hoo, boy. We had a progressive nurse-attendant on our hands, a dozen unsocialized tots, and a hostile planet. "Look, Belayen," I began. "Oh, Sue, please call me Nadi." So she could be informal with another woman. "Whatever. Do you realize that anything those tots ingest is dangerous? Reactions range from acute allergy to actual death-bypoisoning. And we tested healthy adults, with carefully measured minidoses. Take the pseudopears, they look and taste delicious, but are deadly; fruit sugars are rapidly absorbed and rejected. Are you sure you've warned the children?" "They're much too young to heed warnings, Suzanne. Mari and the others are guarding them." "How old are they?" "The youngest is eight," Bopp growled. "In my opinion, that's a fair age to learn, madam. Any kid of eight who can't understand a simple rule in Basic Standard, is too defective to survive on the rim." "Oh, they'll learn, Francis, they'll learn; but gradually, through experience and reasonable explanation, not by frightening lectures, and certainly not through punishment. It will take time, of course, and they must be carefully watched, but they will learn, and without damage to their personal integration. It would have been a good thing if you and your friends had had the benefit of a modern upbringing." That was a low blow; all of us were twenty years outdated just by being here, but we'd all grown up in the usual Environment; none of us had experienced family-group trauma. Bopp reacted with characteristic tact. "Madam, if those children eat anything here, the result will be far more traumatic than any lecture I can imagine. More traumatic even than corporal punishment. More..." "Don't be silly, Francis," she cut him off in midflight. "They're carefully watched. What can possibly happen?" "It's been my experience," I began, but she cut me off, too. "I'll just go and check up on them, since you two are so anxious about them. I'm getting a new outlook on you primitive types -- a very favorable one. I thought you took this sort of job because you were unable to adapt to a child-oriented environment." She trotted off, still flinging compliments over her shoulder. "I wonder what the survival factor really is on newsettled worlds?" I muttered. "Very, very low," Doc replied, coming up behind us. "Damn shame, really. They're bright little bastards, every one of them. We'll have some bad cases of poisoning soon; the others'll have to learn from that." He dropped beside me, wagging his bald head sadly. "I doubt if they'll be allowed to," I said, thinking back over my training. "I bet if one of them gets sick it will be hustled into isolation, and the others won't be told why. Hard truth is too raw for tender minds." "Tell me you're kidding," Bopp pleaded. "Unless things have changed radically, I'm not." "Where could they find an isolation unit here?" Doc asked practically. "But those kids are bred for transit," Bopp exclaimed at the same time. "Sure they are," I answered Bopp. "But they're born on Homeworlds, raised in Environments, cared for by psychologically oriented Guardians, none of whom have ever been out. What they see doesn't impress them, they're raised on holovee. They know about animals, but nothing with teeth has evef chased them. I mean the adults, Bopp, the ones who raise these children. They baby them to shipping age, pack them off -- and never really connect their training with the horrifying mortality-rate; it isn't real to them. "If Nadi had completed transit, she'd find herself with a couple of hundred children, on a raw world with very little help and a few basic supplies, on the far end of a pipeline that is stingy at the best of times, except with more warm bodies. That is the only thing Homeworlds has a surplus of, the only thing they'll ship out in quantity. The ones that lived would be the ones fit to manage the colony... I suppose..." I was getting tired. "They must lose all their socialization under those circumstances," Doc mused, chewing thoughtfully on a fingernail. "Seems pretty damn cruel to me, and wasteful, too," Bopp answered. "Better teach them something first, and give them a fighting chance." "They'd get a better return on their investment, too." "Not all tots ship out," I muttered. "They'd be teaching their own people survival tactics, too." I'd never thought of that before; I'd simply had a gut reaction to the amorphous atmosphere of the Environment, created a trauma or two. and been rejected from Guardianship as incorrigible. I'd been upset at the time, of course, but no, I had to admit that working for Interworld, up to now, had been a hellovalot better. Trying to prevent infant trauma had traumatized me pretty thoroughly; working with a bunch of perfectly egocentered adults had salvaged me. And now we were playing guardian again, dancing to Nadi's tune like a bunch of blobheaded jellybags. N adi was a Guardian, but Ingeborg was our planet. We knew our way around, and she didn't. We could put those kids on the right track ourselves; hopefully before any of them died from her pussyfooting. Ingeborg was a paradise -- aside from the fact that nothing on it was edible; if we could just hammer home that simple lesson, and keep the kids from falling out of trees, or drowning, we had a good chance of raising them. Oh, no, we don't, said I to myself. Better let them die now; we won't have enough food. Twenty years' rations for eight wouldn't begin to feed us, Nadi, and twelve growing children. But I couldn't simply accept letting them die... I must have slept the clock around; the morning sun was full in my face, and I squinted, trying to see who sat beside me. I risked turning my head, just a fraction, before pain warned me that was plenty, thank you! But my back ached even more than it had yesterday, and my legs tingled. I was delighted. Nothing could be as terrifying as that first dead numbness. "Carol?" She bent over me, straight brown hair curtaining her cheeks. "Hi, Bud. Hungry?" Oh, that beautiful, practical gal! Then she fetched Doc, and we worked out a system for outmaneuvering Nadi long enough to indoctrinate the children. I dredged theory out of my aborted training; Garth, Mari, Carol, Stew, and Doc did all the work. Bopp ran herd on Nadi, and Nadi labored grimly to get me on my feet, possibly thinking that once that was accomplished, she could regain full control of the tots. We lost tw'o of them, before they settled down and took us seriously. The rest of them saw exactly what happened, the retching, the convulsions, the delirium... it was a hundred times more effective than any lecture. Stew # caught another little whatnot and, playing with it, the kids got their minds off the recent horror. They named their new pet Puddles, and pretty soon two of the older boys came home with another one. Doc suggested they call that one Piddle, but was fortunately outvoted. The girls tagged it Cocoa, because it was almost black, with a white tuft on the tail which, they explained, was the marshmallow in the cup... by then, I was walking. Very short distances, with lots of help, but walking. And we were already into our second years' rations. R aising kids on Ingeborg was almost fun, once we understood what we were doing. Even Nadi had to admit, after a few furious months, that we hadn't caused any paralyzing traumas. Kids went everywhere and did everything with adults; soon each adult found a favorite among the kids, and some were naturally left out. So w e had to agree among ourselves that we'd share out as evenly as possible, and the one thing we'd never do was pit "my" kid against "your" kid... tricky, in practice, no matter how easy it is to say. Before long we found we needed very little discipline. The kids were busy and respected, with jobs to do and enough people to turn to that no one was neglected, and we didn't overpraise anyone, either. Doc said our community was modeled after certain ancient Terran Amerindian societies, but none of us had even heard of a Terran Amerind. We just did w'hat seemed right at the time. We learned a good deal about Ingeborg; for one thing, we found that the whatnots were bisexual, reproduced marsupially, and that Cocoa was of one sex, the one with the pouch, and Puddles was of the other, and laid the babies Cocoa carried and fed. Pretty soon we had a herd of vyhatnots, following the kids around, lumberingly friendly. It was four years before deterioration began in the two totcrates stored in the deepcache with our rations. By then our tots ranged from twelve to fourteen, and we were faced with another worry. We adults had been made sterile before being shipped here in corpora, but Nadi and the kids had been crated for a rimworld that needed warm bodies; they'd been sent out to breed like rabbits. We had a choice: stretch a few lives for rescue (and to do that, the kids practically had to stop eating, forget about having babies) or uncrate the rest of the tots, and live a short life but a moral one. Delaying making that choice seemed immoral to me, but being human, that was what we did. We'd rationed ourselves, and as soon as the kids matured physically, we expected the same of them; not starvation, but real austerity. And I guess we'd taken it for granted that more of us would die, in the course of things, and the food would stretch. I'm not sure how the others felt, but Doc and I watched those kids adolesce with quiet terror. We'd go off to the lake, and watch lungfish lurch out of the water after lowflying insects, and swear bitterly at the fate that gave us such beauty and not a bite to eat. Doc let me know he felt anything we did about the kids was pretty much up to me. I felt I needed Nadi's cooperation; after all, she was the nurse. I put it off as long as I could. Finally, the matter was taken out of my hands. I was supervising cleanup; the men were off somewhere elsewhere. Nadi was sitting watching me get the kids to help. We didn't have much to litter with, but you know kids -- if there's anything at all, they'll drop it and walk over it as if it wasn't there. Rose and Pete, who were supposed to be helping, were talking with Nadi; I resented their laziness, but was too occupied to speak of it. My kids were working half-heartedly, and watching Nadi and her two covertly. Jody, the youngest boy, had pretty well attached himself to me, went very far, and he was crazy about machinery. We'd stripped down and rebuilt the engine together, when it began to vibrate; he was clever, and a quick learner, and I was glad to have him drive me. I could tell Jody resented Rose and Pete as much as I did. but I didn't expect him to try to shame them into working. "Rose loves Petey," he singsonged, pointing derisively. "Rose and Petey go off together, into the grass." He jerked obscenely. Then he howled, as Jim backhanded him savagely on the mouth, and bored in, head down and fists swinging; Jody wasn't one to take punishment lying down. "Shut up, you little freak," Jim shouted, fending off Jody's fists. "Just shut your freaking mouth!" "They do, they do, they do! You're mad, cause you want Tami to go with you! I seen you, I did!" I was moving as quickly as I could, but Nadi got there first, trying psychology (now, then, dears, what's this all about?) and then physically restraining Jody. I broke the group up with some hastily invented busywork, and they went; they knew I was mad. "All right, Nadi," I said when the kids were gone, "what can we do about this?" "About what?" Oh, innocence! "You know we haven't enough food even for ourselves. We simply can't let the kids breed." "You talk as if they were animals!" "In this sense, they are." "You're jealous." "Because I'm sterile?" The absurdity of it angered me even more. "At least I'm not hogging rations! You don't know the meaning of austerity!" "That isn't fair!" "I've seen you "tasting" the food you're cooking. It makes a meal in itself, your samples!" "Don't talk to me like that!" "You don't deny it, do you?" I was screaming. "Why should I? I never take more than my fair share, what I'd have on any other world!" "You dumb broad, don't you understand you're making the rest of us starve?" "I knew you were jealous! Just because I'm fertile, and you're not! You're afraid the men will ignore you!" "They're sterile, too, and I haven't been ignored, not so's you'd notice! But that isn't the point, Nadi." I strove to speak more calmly. "Really and truly, we can't spare the food. When the deepcache is empty, we'll starve." "It's still almost full." "It's built to hold twenty years' rations; we've used six, we've been pretty careful, and it still looks pretty full. But there's no way we can possibly be rescued in less than eighteen years. Figure it out, Nadi; in four years, we've used six years' rations. Even if we're very, very careful, we'll have trouble stretching the food for eighteen years, and there's no guarantee we'll be picked up then, either. Even if we're still alive." "You're trying to scare me. You just don't like me." She didn't even sound excited any more. I hadn't realized how impervious she was. "Nadi, we've got to keep the kids from breeding. They know about the food, but unless we help them, they won't be able to help themselves. We don't have any birthcontrol drugs, but you're a nurse. You must have some ideas." "They're still children. Sue. It can't be all that urgent." "Have you looked? Those two you were talking to just now are big, strong, fully matured breeders." "I told you that you were jealous." What could you do with a woman like that? I swung around, and suddenly realized that Jody was standing beside me, silent, mouth open, face deadly pale. He'd never seen two women screaming at each other before; I suppose we'd managed to do what Nadi had always feared, and traumatized him, but I was too upset to care. "Are we really going to starve?" he whispered anxiously. "Not today, love," I replied briskly, trying to get a smile. Nadi was still standing there, staring triumphantly at me. "Aren't you supposed to be starting dinner?" I snapped. "Oh, of course. I wouldn't interfere for the world." "What?" I yelled. Jody was twelve, not yet pubescent; she could actually sneer at me when she fawned over hulking fourteen-yearolds, and flirted with them, too. Nadi was just as likely to get pregnant as any of them. I told Jody to go off and play; the men were back, I could hear the he'd heard, but I was too angry to think to caution him. I had to think of some way to convince Nadi to teach contraception to the fertile girls, but I couldn't. The more I thought, the madder I got, and the madder I got -- the nerve of that woman! -- the less able I was to think. I don't know how much later it was when I heard a terrible screech from the cookshack, and saw Jody tearing toward me. I can't stand quite straight, but I can still hurry when I have to. It was Nadi, of coursa, vomiting, convulsing; she'd spilled the stew pot and the stove was in real danger of being upset. Rose was holding her head, or trying to; it was more than one girl could handle. Doc and Bopp carried her out where she couldn't hurt herself, and I dug into the drugbox for the small vial of antiallergen that was all wc had left. It had to be deliberate. No one asked about it, not even Doc; no one wanted to know. By the time Nadi was up and around again, it was obvious that Rose and Tami were already pregnant. Nothing in the medikit would act as a chemical abortifacient, and Nadi swore she hadn't the training to interfere surgically. I'd thought it was fairly simple, but Nadi gave a lecture on the subject, and Doc backed her up. She did teach the other kids basic contraception. We watched the blossoming stomachs of the two gravid girls, and I got so I was counting rations in my sleep. It was hard to realize how desperate our straits were. Ingeborg is so beautiful that Paradise suffers by comparison: warm sun, gentle rain, even climate, sweet water. But Paradise had only one tree forbidden its residents. The heavier Rose and Tami grew, the more I felt I had to get away. The only way I could see for any of us to live was for some of us to die voluntarily, and I was a logical candidate. But someone would have to see that the kids didn't get out of line, and someone would have to pull those crates out of the deepcache and dump them before Nadi noticed how they were discharging, and someone would have to prod the kids into keeping up their studies and their records -- we insisted that each of them write a daily log -- and the someone usually seemed to be me; but I was the one who should die, soon, before I used up more rations. So Jody spent quite a lot of time driving me around and generally trying to cheer me up, with Hey You, his darkgold whatnot calf, flatfooting behind us. When the sun got high, Jody would park the and help me down, and we'd sit and talk, or I'd sleep while Jody climbed for fruit to toss to Hey You. The whatnots were wild about those pears, which normally didn't drop until they'd dried into a sort of inedible parachute that the wind carried several hundred meters, and where they landed, there'd soon be the beginnings of another clump of trees. They only produced fruit for a few years, though, so they had to seed liberally. I had the kids keeping notes on everything we found on Ingeborg, anything we thought of, or guessed at; partly for practice, and partly in the desperate hope we'd think of something miraculously lifesaving. Anyway, this day we went a lot further than usual, over the crest of hills beyond the station and across the broad valley beyond. Then Hey You started to tire, and Jody steered for a clump of trees about halfway up the slope. Before we got there, though. Hey You started to act oddly, sniffing the ground, and shying away, and hopping up and down, and generally acting the fool. So Jody naturally stopped the her problem was. There on the ground was a clump of small, deep blue ovoids. I picked one up; it was cool, jellied, but firmly shaped. They lay there like a nest of shell-less eggs without the nest. Hey You pranced about nearby; idly I tossed one to her. She was used to catching pears, and fielded it neatly. Jelly globs dripped off her flews. Then she went absolutely wild, spitting, shaking her head, thrusting her paws into her mouth... Jody grabbed her and dragged her down to a stream at the foot of the slope, and she thrust her head into the water and shook it, and blew, and choked, and finally drank and drank and drank. In the meantime, I was thinking. What Hey You could eat, we couldn't. This she instinctively knew she shouldn't eat; maybe we could. It was a wild chance, but hadn't I already figured I'd be the one to die? I nibbled an egg, nervously, half expecting it to burn my tongue, so I'd spit and paw my mouth like the poor whatnot. But it was bland, slightly salty, sort of a cross between raw egg and lightly flavored gelatin. I licked my fingers, packed the rest into the carryall of the where Jody knelt beside Hey You. The calf was down, breathing harshly and trembling. I helped Jody tie it to the loader. All the way back, I kept watching myself for some reaction, shuddering sympathetically with the suffering whatnot, but it was all sympathy. I felt fine. Nadi eagerly helped with the nearly comatose calf. I took Doc aside and showed him the eggs. "How long ago did you eat it?" he asked, turning up my eyelids and taking my pulse. "Must have bpen two hours," I said around the thermometer. "The whatnot reacted instantly, though." "Any more of them out there?" I shrugged; where there were eggs there were egg-layers -- and thus more eggs. Obviously. He removed the thermometer. "Temperature's normal. No cramps, no vomiting, no hives or asthma... so far." "I didn't look for any more. I went to help Jody with the calf." Doc glanced at the sky. "Too late to go back today, I'm afraid. Let's hope you tolerate this, and there's lots more, and they don't spoil..."he breathed the list like a prayer. We boiled the eggs and I ate them. Doc wanted to share them with me, but I told him that was stupid and he admitted as much. I slept badly, still expecting symptoms; Doc sat quietly beside me. Either he was a lot more confident in my fate than I, or he was a better actor. Hey You died in the night. We carried her back to the valley of the blue eggs and buried her there, which seemed to comfort Jody somewhat. Then we hunted the whole hillside for more eggs, and found nothing. Hot and tired, we gathered by the pseudopear tree beside Hey You's grave. "We'll have to search with whatnots," I said. "It was Hey You that found those others." Naturally the kids raised a storm of protest; they were as attached to their pets as Jody, We held an impromptu town meeting on the sunny hillside, shouting at each other and generally growing incoherent and red in the face. "We won't make that mistake again," I yelled, silencing them by sheer volume. "It was my fault that Hey You ate that egg. We spotted them by her avoidance reaction; she knew better than to eat them. If I hadn't tossed it like a pear, she'd be fine now -- but we might not know we could eat those things." Doc took a turn emphasizing the importance of a new food supply to help us hold till rescue; they knew it, but they needed reminding. "So what's the maximum time to rescue, Herman?" Nadi asked innocently. "Forever, Madam." Doc's voice was frosty. She thought he was kidding. W e were too excited to wait for the girls to deliver before mounting a full scale expedition. Carol and Mari packed food, Stew rounded up the whatnots with the Garth, Doc, and Bopp consulted on a course from the old aerial maps. Nadi and Mari would stay with Rose and Tami. Everyone else would spread the whatnots into a loose sweeping crescent, while I strays, and run errands. Like, hopefully, carrying back clutches of eggsThis was new territory for us; there'd never seemed much point in exploration, knowing that there was nothing out there to eat. Surveys showed that the miles and miles of lake-dotted prairie simply went on for miles and miles. We planned to sweep out straight past the valley as far as we felt safe supply-wise, then return on a passing sweep. If necessary. It wasn't. Large clumps of the clear, shell-less eggs showed up just over the hill from Hey You's valley; we ate them for the evening meal. The next morning we found enough "nests" to make it worthwhile for me to run them back to base for processing. The whatnots were perfect pointers; they bucked and whined and carried on to our complete satisfaction. They also misbehaved around various bare patches of earth, where the prairie grass had rotted to the ground; Doc guessed that decaying egg-masses had poisoned the soil. However, we never saw anything that could have laid the eggs, not one sign of any strange animal. And it had to be strange, whatever dropped anything we could eat. Naturally we wanted to identify it. If it was alien to the planet, it had to have a food supply somewhere that we could eat. If itthey could eat the rotated proteins and somehow untwisted them in their bodies, we might be able to eat them. I had nearly twenty kilos of eggs to take back to camp. And I met Mari, hiking out to meet me, following the flattened grass. I didn't need to ask. "Nadi decrated the rest of the kids. Right?" Mari nodded, breathlessly, then burst into tears. I got her calmed down, and she explained. "She must have seen the crates when she went to the cache right after you left. I didn't even know she was going, we didn't need any more food out, we had plenty, but you know what a glutton she is. "At least that's what I think she did. Because she must have drugged us. She doesn't trust us, especially since that stew... anyhow, we all woke with a sick headache about noon -- with tots popping all over the place." "Damn," I groaned. "If she'd just waited til we were sure of those eggs, we'd have uncrated the children properly! Any adults in those crates?" "No. Oh, Bud, I'd forgotten what hellions our kids were! We tried to round them up and lecture them, but Nadi interfered. She's going to raise this group her way. You wouldn't believe the time we had! And now four or five of the kids are poisoned, and Nadi was trying to get the rest away instead of nursing the sick ones, but anyhow we haven't any more antiallergen, and Tami went into labor, and I tried to get Nadi to help her, but Nadi was hysterical, she wasn't even making sense. So Rose and I hammered some rules into the kids; they were pretty scared by that time, and I came to get help." "Out to fetch the cavalry?" I tried to keep my voice light. The one time Mari should have stuck it out... but I should talk; I'd left Nadi where she could get at those crates. "I had to! Nadi's gone sort of catatonic, the kids are scared out of their minds, the sick ones must be dying, Tami's in labor, and poor Rose can't cope." She wrapped herself around me and sobbed miserably. I disentangled myself, cursing our stupidity in not providing radio-transmitters for our expedition. We hadn't built any before; we rarely were out of earshot. But we should have planned better, not rushed off in all directions at the first hope of survival. We could cobble up transceivers from transmitter parts easily enough; we'd left the remaining station alone, as if it could magically link us to the universe. Now was the time to rip into it for every bit of technology we could salvage. We were going to survive! Our lives had meaning again! Before anyone could rescue us, there'd be a third generation on Ingeborg; we'd make sure our rescuers found people, not savages. We'd find metal ore, we'd reinvent tools that didn't require intricate fabrication. Our little colony had a real chance for life. see Tami's baby boy born. W ell, now we know that whatever disrupted our station was probably more than an online nova; it's more than ten years past the date we figured for rescue. We don't talk about that any more. Bopp's dead, and Garth, and Stew; I'm pretty crippled, but I get a lot of help. Statistically, women live longer than men. Statistics hurt in a small group like ours. We've done a lot, though. We had a small sack of seeds in store, from the colonization check; prayerfully we "killed" a patch of ground with rotted eggs, and sowed that withered seed. Some of it grew, and we hoarded its seed, and the next harvest was better; the growing season is pretty much continuous, though we have to reconstitute the soil almost constantly. With the grain and vegetables we can grow, the eggs provide us with a pretty balanced diet. While we're picking up all the blue eggs we can find, we find more and more of them. Apparently we're encouraging production. We work; oh, my god, how we work! There's so little time left for us. We should have realized much sooner that we were on our own, and faced our real problem: creating a viable society for our successors. (Not our children. How I regret my casual accession to permanent sterilization. Sometimes I'd almost rather leave damaged descendents than none at all... but our kids understand, and try to help; we're all multiple godparents.) Pseudopearleaves soaked in mild caustic, beaten, pressed, and rolled dry make fair paper; we don't encourage authorship, we require it. This is one society that will have complete historical records, and plenty of them. Everyone contributes to the evening thinktalks, and even the wildest suggestions are considered. Something one of the youngsters said gave Doc and Jody the idea for our improved gangplow; the permanent ink Pete makes came from a chance remark of mine about using fish secretions as fixative. Ingeborgian fish don't cooperate, but there's a kind of large beetle that does. The kids are fantastic, but we're the ones who remember. They understand about in corpora ships and n-space transmitters, but we're the only ones who really believe in them. Their memories of glowlux and holovee are fading; they never had a chance to explore their "civilized world." But they won't be savages. They have their records, and their gumption, and everything we can fabricate before we've all left them. We even teach them n-space maths, impractical as they seem to kids who will spend their lives herding whatnots, farming, and collecting blue eggs; Doc claims they're a religion, now. I say they're true, and someday they'll be useful to them. Nadi has authored an Epic: drama, dance, music, and history all stylized and interwoven. She takes each group of adolescents into her exclusive care for a year, and they learn to perform it for the anniversary of the Blast; it's sort of a "coming of age" rite for them. I suppose it's her substitute for the Environment she'd like to isolate every tot in. It keeps a sense of history alive, and it's not bad ritual, though the language is elaborate, and everyone is shown as tremendously wise and capable. She's left out all of our shocked scrambling and frantic making-do. In the Epic, when we find the eggs, we've almost starved to death, though it's quite soon after the Blast, and everyone gathers to sing formal praise to the Power that spread manna in the desert, with phrases copped whole from her Bible. She's put in a lot about me, making my recovery sound practically miraculous; this boosts her part, of course, and also lends authority to my finding the blue eggs. I get very embarrassed, listening to an awestruck child pretending to be me; I feel as if I were being deified. Nadi's moved herself and her school out to the remains of the transmitter. We were glad enough to see her go; she's gone rather dramatic and strange, but it doesn't seem to hurt the kids to let her teach them for just one year. She guards the cache, and what's left of the equipment fanatically, though no one would think of touching them. There's just a few rations left, which we save for the annual Blastday Feast, and of course we've used everything we could from the transmitter, but Nadi's laid out everything that's left in solemn rows, carefully labeled; their arrangement bears no relation to their function, but she takes the kids on tour, and they recite the names Garth and Doc wrote on her labels like a hive of reverent bees. Even Becky's tooled leather belt with the gold buckle is there; she should have been buried in it, but we didn't find it until later, and no one wanted to wear it. Sometimes I wonder if the kids think it was part of the works? Nothing on the label says it wasn't, and it must make as much sense to them as the crystacircuits and transplates. Nadi sought me out recently, and breathlessly whispered that she'd heard a space ship land, way back before we found the first blue eggs. Naturally, I asked her why she waited so long to tell us, and I guess I hurt her feelings, being so skeptical; she plans to write it into the Epic. Doc says it's to compensate for not being rescued. We can't believe her; none of us heard anything, but if it helps her to think that way, there doesn't seem to be much harm in it. Anyway, she attributes the egglayers to divine providence, so an actual spaceboat is supererogatory. The fact that we've never been able to catch one of them, or even get a decent picture before we ran out of landfilm, has reinforced her certainty in their supernatural origin. And it is true that the nights we watched from concealed blinds, they went elsewhere; we even had to search out their eggs again with whatnots. After that we put out a tripwired camera; it caught a blur, and they got scary again, and it took weeks before things settled down. I think they're psi-sensitive, or empathic, or both. They aren't big, that much we know, and they move very fast. And it's plain they never evolved on Ingeborg. Somewhere there may be worlds with evenly mixed rotations; as Doc says, just because we haven't found one doesn't mean they don't exist. The point is, the egglayers shouldn't exist here. I tend to believe they're escapees from some alien expedition, maybe strayed pets, and they couldn't multiply until we came along to clean up after them, so they didn't poison their pasture. Before, they'd have to keep on the move, and that couldn't be a good way to raise their young. On the other hand, if they're intelligent, I suppose they could eventually try to control us. Keep us as their useful pets. So I'm just as glad we can't see them. We imagine them as fantastic, benevolent, beautiful creatures, aware of our omnivorous appetites. Nadi's working on that, though; she has a couple of her little granddaughters in training now, learning to think loving thoughts at the creatures. Some day they'll go out, pure dedicated virgins, to entice our shy egglaying unicorns. (Nadi's education didn't include the classical myths, but I wonder: what happened to captured unicorns?) Maybe Nadi is creating a religion, as Doc says, while the rest of us build a society to fit. That's scary; religions don't deahwith the world as it is, they always set out to change it. While Nadi worships whatever provided the egglayers, and the Hand of God is as good a name as any, I guess it's safe; if she ever centers her devotion on the egglayers themselves... that really bothers me. That's when I wish I'd gone ahead and finished the job the poisoned stew began, so long ago. But the rest of us have our illusions, too; we still call them egglayers. We've always known those blue spheres weren't eggs; even extraterrestrial eggs would have internal coherence, and no creature as biologically advanced as these would leave its next generation to rot. Ever hear of Coprid beetles? We know what we're eating, but it doesn't sicken us, as long as we think of it as eggs. We've built a life here, collecting eggs in Eden.  galaxy bookshelf dec I an Ellison bonanza for those addieted to him and for those who want more material to go on hating him a lot. One is a reissue (Ellison Wonderland , Signet, SI. #) of his first, # collection. In a way it has always been my favorite Ellison book, one against which one may measure the astonishing distance he has traveled since he wrote stories like The Silver Corridor and Do-it-Y ourself. Intrinsically a good entertaining book, it is, especially with the new # introduction, an important strophe in the Ellison saga. The other book is Approaching Oblivion (Walker, #), which the author certainly is not. The man could die dead and not do that. The book contains all recent stories and one new one, and is as angry and as abrasive as anything he has done to date. A certain degree of disillusion has come to Ellison in recent years, and small wonder. Now he is angry because no one (he thinks) has been listening, no one (he thinks) has been moved by his energy, his passion, his compassion and his fury. Now he's mad at you. I think more people have listened, have been moved by him than he realizes. I have become aware recently that among the great numbers of ex-flower-children from the late 'sixties who have cut their hair and reverted to tobacco have not, after all, changed anything but their exteriors. So it is with the ones who marched, the ones who protested, the ones who hoped and acted, dreamed and acted. They're under cover rather than underground now, but the change in them in basic no matter what appearances tell the pundits. Trivial and deep, certain changes take place within and around us, and Vogue and Women's Wear Daily cannot eliminate the bikini and the miniskirt. President Ford cannot disappear Watergate, Rome cannot cancel contraception. Ellison is supremely right in crying out in outrage against what he calls in his introduction students' sinking "back into a charming Fifties apathy (with a simultaneous totemization of the banalities and mannerisms of those McCarthy Witch-Hunt Fifties)... but he seems not to be aware of the true meaning, for example of the explosion of fury against Nixon when he fired Archibald Cox and instigated the "Saturday Night Massacre." I beg Harlan Ellison in this open forum not to despair, not to abandon either his passion nor the compassion which is his true wellspring, a deeper one than that puddle of anger and retribution in which he still insists on splashing and stomping. People have listened and will listen; people can change and will. The book carries a gracious Foreword by Michael Chricton, and the stories are a maelstrom and a chiaroscuro. Get it. Dig this: Now we can predict this apocalyptic date to within a couple of years. A remarkable chain of evidence, much of it known for decades but never before linked together, points to # as the year in which the Los Angeles region of the San Andreas fault will be subjected to the most massive earthquake known in the populated regions of the Earth in this century. At the endpoint of the chain, directly causing this disaster, is a rare alignment of the planets in the Solar System. By disturbing the equilibrium of the Sun, which in turn disturbs the whole Earth, the planets can trigger earthquakes. The trail links astrology -- for that is really what the study of planetary alignments is, even though we can explain their effects in sound scientific terms -- astronomy, meteorology, geology, geophysics and other sciences. Small wonder that pieces of this chain have lain about unrecognized for so long. But now they have been put together there is no question about the implication: in #, when the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars and with the other seven planets of the Solar System, Los Angeles will be destroyed. The astrological link with the dawning of the age of Aquarius may or may not be coincidence; that is outside the scope of this book, which contains only solid scientific evidence and reasoning. Never in my book-reviewing life before have I given away the punchline, exposed the plot, until I wrote the above, which is p. # of The Jupiter Effect (Walker, introduces tion by Isaac Asimov, with two appendices and an index, #.) Startling as it is, this conclusion is not the most interesting aspect of the book. Its authors, John Gribbin, an editor of the international science magazine Nature, and Stephen Plagemann, a meteorologist (among other things) kooks with a nutty theory. As Asimov points out in his introduction, they have gathered widely disparate clues and pieced them together with a meticulousness which rivals the performance of the greatest fictional detectives. And like detectives who know that a trial must follow their revelation, they lay out every scrap of evidence and every link of their chain of reasoning for examination and test. A more exciting, a more pertinent narrative would be hard to find. One thing particularly appealed to me: so many science and popularscience articles and books pursue a notion isolated, insulated from human affairs and human nature. What this book points out, explicitly and implicitly, about the bull-headedness and greed, the purposeful marriage to ignorance, of growth-oriented politicians and developers in earthquake-prone California, is almost as devastating as the quake itself. As in all good literature, the message, the moral, is larger than the narrative. This is going to be a most prestigious and effective book, especially out here in Never-never Land. Not effective enough, of course, but then... human beings will make their point, even more effectively than Gribbin and Plagemann. and speaking of the Good Doctor, he has (of course) another new book, and it was reviewed for us by the printer. As you may know, I get a good many forthcoming books in the form of galleys -- long printed sheets, by which the printer sets up his type preparatory to breaking it down into pages. Each galley has the name of the book at the top, together with various codings, and the number of the galley. At the top of Galley # in this one, where the title is supposed to go, the printer wrote: The Best Is Isaac Asimov The Best of Isaac Asimov (Doubleday, #) really needs no other remarks than that; nevertheless, I shall make some. The book is a collection of a dozen stories, chosen by the author as his own personal favorites. Some, like Nightfall, are acknowledged classics; some, like Marooned Off Vesta, you may never have heard of, and are here because of Asimov's nostalgia for the peripheral circumstance of their origins. All of this he covers in a typical, charming, highly personal asimovian introduction. It all helps to know the man better and, being what he is (to know him is to love him), knowing him better is to love him more. I do not know when Mr. van Daniken trotted out his first chariot, but it says here that Jacques Bergier wrote his Les Extra-Terrestres dans L'histoire for publication in #. The Regnery hardcover is dated #, and now we have it in paperback, as Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to the Present (Signet, indexed, #). It is so much better written, better reasoned, and generally, well, better than the original chariot and all its cabooses (now, there's an image for you) that one can only be horrified at the popularity of the Swiss sensationalist and his many imitators, just as one can be appalled at the fact that the publisher binds it to look like the others. It's like putting a diamond seventh in line behind zircons. Bergier's premise is that we have been visited by other beings whose function was (is?) to bring us knowledge, and also to create surprises in order to study our reactions and thus gauge our progress. In the course of this endeavor, he gives us some of the most fascinating glimpses not only of a good many of the things van D writes about, but of strange and wonderful men in history, like Lord Cavendish and Benjamin Franklin, to name only a couple, and the vortices of knowledge which spun off from them and into their cultures. The big difference between Bergier and the others -- even the others who obsessively debink each other -- is that they all insist, while Bergier merely lays it out, lucidly and in an orderly fashion. If you are moved by van Daniken at all, it is likely that it will be in the direction of faith-full acceptance. Bergier gives you solid leads for your own research. If you want your sense of wonder reborn, get this book. M ad Michael Moorcock is at it again, this time with the further adventures of Jherek Carnelian, a resident of the wild, weird hedonistic culture "at the end of time." An Alien Heat was the first volume of a trilogy, and this, The Hollow Lands, (Harper  Row, #) is the second. In the first book we met Mrs. Amelia Underwood, snatched mysteriously into the far future from # London, where the incomparable Jherek, the most naive innocent since Billy Budd, yet still to be compared with no one else you have ever encountered, falls wildly and obsessively in love with her, follows her back to her own time, then returns alone to his own by means I shall not tell you. In this book, driven by his passion, he returns to her again, and they have -- adventures. So much for the plot skeleton. Only Moorcock can convey the outrageous texture of these narratives, the bored and potent subsidiary characters, and the fabulous -- that is, the real human truths for which all this madness is metaphor -- quality of the tale-telling and the prose. Aside from R. A. Lafferty, I doubt there is a more accomplished prose stylist than Michael Moorcock alive. (Vell, maybe Nabakov.) I must say again, as I did in reporting on the first book, that I'd gladly have waited a bit for this one and the next, to get them all in one volume. At these prices, and #some pages for each. The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy will come high. But then -- you'll have a high time with it. Con your library into getting it all, in any case. I think it's time, and just, and kind of nice to salute our friendly rival with a mention of its #th birthday and The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (Doubleday, #), one hell of a good book, edited by Edward L. Ferman. Now, I feel a little funny about this, because one of my stories is in it and, as I have said before, I tend not to review books with my stories in them. In this case, however, I feel I must. What Mr. Ferman has done is to gather together the lead stories of six of FSF's special issues, each of which featured an appreciation of the author by someone who knew him when, and a bibliography. The appreciations are by Judith Merrill, L. Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, and Robert A. W. Lowndes. The updated, booksonly biblios were compiled by the authors andor Sam Moskowitz, Mark Owings. The authors are Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson and James Blish. And what's-his-name. Every one of these stories is not only good; it is, in my mind, important. and here again comes the bottom  of the page, and I have so much more to tell you about. With the wish that I could expand my comments, let me recommend Sundance (Nelson, #), a fine new collection by Robert Silverberg; Andiomeda Gun, (BerkleyPutnam, #) a swift strong novel by John Boyd; Continuum # (BerkleyPutnam, #) Roger Elwood's crete but connected novelettes by Farmer, Anderson, Oliver, Scortia, McCaffrey, Wolfe, Pangborn and SargentZebrowski; The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (Chilton, ed. Roger Elwood, bibliography, #), a fine sampler of this prodigious writer. Features a Rick Brooks critical appreciation which is most perspicacious; and a most provoking non-fiction book, Worlds in Creation (Regnery, #) by Kenneth Gatland, President of the British Interplanetary Society, and scientist-test pilot Derek Dempster. I'll tell you more about this one in my next.  He returned from the fathomless depths of space to reclaim his lost love -- and they lived happily ever after... N aturally, there was a tremendous fuss made over him, since he was the first man actually to buy up his indenture and return from a colonyworld. He had been away eighteen years, farming on bleak Novotny IX, and who knew how many of those years he had been slaving and saving to win his passage home? Besides, rumor had it that a girl was involved. It could be the big romance of the century, maybe. Even before the ship carrying him had docked at Long Island Spaceport, John Burkhardt was a systemfamed celebrity. Word of his return had preceded him -- word, and all manner of rumor, legend and myth. The starship Lincoln, returning from a colony-seeding trip in the outer reaches of the galaxy, for the first time in its history, was carrying an Earthward-bound passenger. A small army of newsmen impatiently awaited the ship's landing, and the nine worlds waited with them. When he stepped into the unloading elevator and made his descent, a hum of comment rippled through the gathered crowd. Burkhardt looked his part perfectly. He was a tall man, spare and lean. His face was solemn, his lips thin and pale, his hair going gray though he was only in his forties. And his eyes -- deepset, glowering, commanding. Everything fit the myth: the physique, the face, the eyes. They were those of a man who could renounce Earth for unrequited love, then toil eighteen years out of the sheer strength of that love. Cameras ground. Bulbs flashed. Five hundred reporters felt their tongues going dry with anticipation of the big story. Burkhardt smiled coldly and waved at the horde of newsmen. He did not blink, shield his eyes, or turn away. He seemed almost unnaturally in control of himself. They had expected him to weep, maybe kneel and kiss the soil of Mother Earth. He did none of those things. He merely smiled and waved. The Global Wire man stepped forward. He had won the lottery. It was his privilege to conduct the first interview. "Welcome to Earth, Mr. Burkhardt. How does it feel to be back?" "I'm glad to be here." Burkhardt's voice was slow, deep, measured, controlled like every other aspect of him. "This army of pressmen doesn't upset you, does it?" "I haven't seen this many people all at once in eighteen years. But no -- they don't upset me." "You know, Mr. Burkhardt, you've done something special. You're the only man ever to return to Earth after signing out on an indenture." "Am I the only one?" Burkhardt responded easily. "I wasn't aware of that." "You are indeed, sir. And I'd like to know, if I may -- for the care to tell us a little of the story behind your story? Why did you leave Earth in the first place, Mr. Burkhardt? And why did you decide to return?" Burkhardt smiled gravely. "There was a woman," he said. "A lovely woman, a famous woman now. We loved each other, once, and when she stopped loving me I left Earth. I have reason to believe I can regain her love now, so I have returned. And now, if you'll pardon me -- " "Couldn't you give us any details?" "I've had a long trip, and I prefer to rest now. I'll be glad to answer your questions at a formal press conference tomorrow afternoon." And he cut through the crowd toward a waiting cab supplied by the Colonization Bureau. N early everyone in the system had seen the brief interview or had heard reports of it. It had certainly been a masterly job. If people had been curious about Burkhardt before, they were obsessed with him now. To give up Earth out of unrequited love, to labor eighteen years for a second chance -- why, he was like some figure out of Dumas, brought to life in the middle of the #th Century. It was no mean feat to buy one's self back out of a colonization indenture, either. The Colonization Bureau of the Solar Federation undertook to transport potential colonists to distant worlds and set them up as homesteaders. In return for one-way transportation, tools and land, the colonists merely had to promise to remain settled, to marry, and to raise the maximum practical number of children. This program, a hundred years old now, had resulted in the seeding of Terran colonies over a galactic radius of better than five hundred light-years. It was theoretically possible for a colonist to return to Earth, of course. But few of them seemed to want to, and none before Burkhardt ever had. To return, you had first to pay off your debt to the government -- figured theoretically at # for round-trip passage, # for land, # for tools -- plus # interest per year. Since nobody with any assets would ever become a colonist, and since it was next to impossible for a colonist, farming an unworked world, to accumulate any capital, no case of an attempted buy-out had ever arisen. Until Burkhardt. He had done it, working round the clock, outproducing his neighbors on Novotny IX and selling them his surplus, cabling his extra pennies back to Earth to be invested in blue-chip securities, and finally -- after eighplus-accruedinterest that would spring him from indenture. worlds wanted to know why. The day after his return, he held a press conference in the hotel suite provided for him by the Colonization Bureau. Admission was strictly limited -- one man from each of the twenty leading news services, no more. Wearing a faded purplish tunic and battered sandals, Burkhardt came out to greet the reporters. He looked tremendously dignified -- an overbearing figure of a man, thin but solid, with enormous gnarled hands and powerful forearms. The gray in his hair gave him a patriarchical look on a world dedicated to cosmetic rejuvenation. And his eyes, shining like twin beacons, roved around the room, transfixing everyone once, causing discomfort and uneasiness. No one had seen eyes like that on a human being before. But no one had ever seen a returned colonist before, either. He smiled without warmth. "Very well, gentlemen. I'm at your disposal." T hey started with the peripheral questions first. "What sort of planet is Novotny IX, Mr. Burkhardt?" "Cold. The temperature never gets above sixty. The soil is marginally fertile. A man has to work ceaselessly if he wants to stay alive there." "Did you know that when you signed up to go there?" Burkhardt nodded. "I asked fort the least desirable of the available colony worlds." "Are there many colonists there?" "About twenty thousand, I think. It isn't a popular planet, you understand." "Mr. Burkhardt, part of the terms of the colonist's indenture specify that me must marry. Did you fulfill this part of the contract?" Burkhardt smiled sadly. "I married less than a week after my arrival there in #. My wife died the first winter of our marriage. There were no children. I didn't remarry." "And when did you get the idea of buying up your indenture and returning to Earth?" "In my third year on Novotny IX." "In other words, you devoted fifteen years to getting back to Earth?" "That's correct." It was a young reporter from Transuniverse News who took the plunge toward the real meat of the universe. "Could you tell us why you changed your mind about remaining a colonist? At the spaceport you said something about there being a woman -- " "Yes." Burkhardt chuckled mirthlessly. "I was pretty young when I threw myself into the colonization plan -- twenty-five, in point of fact. There was a woman; I loved her; she married someone else. I did the romantic thing and signed up for Novotny IX. Three years later, the newstap from Earth told me that she had been divorced. This was in #. I resolved to return to Earth and try to persuade her to marry me." "So for fifteen years you struggled to get back so you could patch up your old romance," another newsman said. "But how did you know she hadn't remarried in all that time?" "She did remarry," Burkhardt said stunningly. "But -- " "I received word of her remarriage in #, and of her subsequent divorce in #. Of her remarriage in #, and of her subsequent divorce in #. Of her remarriage in the same year, and her subsequent divorce in #. Of her remarriage in #, and of her divorce four months ago. Unless I have missed the announcement, she has not remarried this last time." "Did you abandon your project every time you heard of one of these marriages?" Burkhardt shook his head. "I kept on saving. I was confident that none of her marriages would last. All these years, you see, she's been trying to find a substitute for me. But human beings are unique. There are no substitutes. I weathered five of her marriages. Her sixth husband will be myself." "Could you tell us -- could you tell us the name of this woman, Mr. Burkhardt?" The returned colonist's smile was frigid. "I'm not ready to reveal her name just yet," he said. "Are there any further questions?" along toward mid-afternoon, Burkhardt ended the conference. He had told them in detail of his efforts to pile up the money; he had talked about life as a colonist; he had done everything but tell them the name of the woman for whose sake he had done all this. Alone in the suite after they had gone, Burkhardt stared out at the other glittering towers of New York. Jet liners droned overhead; a ness. New York, he thought, was as chaotic and as repugnant to him as ever. He missed Novotny IX. But he had had to come back. Smiling gently, he opaqued the windows of his suite. It was winter, now, on Novotny IX 's colonized continent. A time for burrowing away, for digging in against the mountain-high drifts of blue-white snow. Winter was eight standard months long, on Novotny IX; only four out of the sixteen standard months of the planet's year were really livable. Yet a man could see the results of his own labor, out there. He could use his hands and measure his gains. And there were friends there. Not the other settlers, though they were good people and hard workers. But the natives, the Euranoi. The survey charts said nothing about them. There were only about live hundred of them left, anyway, or so Donnoi had claimed. Burkhardt had never seen more than a dozen of the Euranoi at any one time, and he had never been able to tell one from another. They looked like slim elves, half the height of a man, gray-skinned, chinless, sadeyed. They went naked against their planet's bitter cold. They lived in caves, somewhere below the surface. And Donnoi had become Burkhardt's friend. Burkhardt smiled, remembering. He had found the little alien in a snowdrift, so close to dead it was hard to be certain one way or the other. Donnoi had lived, and had recovered, and had spent the winter in Burkhardt's cabin, talking a little, but mostly listening. Burkhardt had done the talking. He had talked it all out, telling the little being of his foolishness, of his delusion that Lily loved him, of his wild maniac desire to get back to Earth. And Donnoi had said, when he understood the situation, "You will get back to Earth. And she will be yours. " That had been between the first divorce and the second marriage. The day 'the newstapes had brought word of Lily's remarriage had nearly finished Burkhardt, but Donnoi was there, comforting, consoling. and from that day on Burkhardt never worried again. Lily's marriages were made, weakened, broke up, and Burkhardt worked unfalteringly, knowing that when he returned to Earth he could have Lily at last. Donnoi had told him solemnly, "It is all a matter of channelling you r desires. Look: l lay dying in a snowdrift, and I willed you to find me. You came: l lived. " "But I'm not Euranoi," Burkhardt had protested. "My will isn't strong enough to influence another person." "Any creature that thinks can assert its will. Give me your hand, and  will show you. " Burkhardt smiled back across fifteen years, remembering the feel of Donnoi's limp, almost boneless hand in his own, remembering the stiff jolt of power that had flowed from the alien. His hand had tingled for days afterward. But he knew, from that moment, that he would succeed. B urkhardt had a visitor the next morning. A press conference was scheduled again for the afternoon, and Burkhardt had said he would grant no interviews before then, but the visitor had been insistent. Finally, the desk had phoned up to tell Burkhardt that a Mr. Richardson Elliott was here, and demanded to see him. The name rang a bell. "Send him up," Burkhardt said. A few minutes later, the elevator disgorged Mr. Richardson Elliott. He was shorter than Burkhardt, plump, pink-skinned, cleanshaven. A ring glistened on his finger, and there was a gem of some alien origin mounted on a stickpin near his throat. He extended his hand. Burkhardt took it. The hand was carefully manicured, pudgy, somehow oily. "You're not at all as I pictured you." Burkhardt said. "You are. Exactly." "Why did you come here?" Elliott tapped the newsfax crumpled under his arm. He unfolded it, showing Burkhardt the front-page spread. "I read the story, Burkhardt. I knew at once who the girl -- the woman -- was. I came to warn you not to get involved with her." Burkhardt's eyes twinkled. "And why not?" "She's a witch," Elliott muttered. "She'll drain a man dry and throw the husk away. Believe me, I know. You only loved her. I married her." "Yes," Burkhardt said. "You took her away from me eighteen years ago." "You know that isn't true. She walked out on you because she thought I could further her career, which was so. I didn't even know another man had been in the picture until she got that letter from you, postmarked the day your ship took off. She showed it to me -- laughing. I can't repeat the things she said about you, Burkhardt. But I was shocked. My marriage to her started to come apart right then and there, even though it was another three years before we called it quits. She threw herself at me. I didn't steal her from anybody. Believe me, Burkhardt." "I believe you." Elliott mopped his pink forehead. "It was the same way with all the other husbands. I've followed her career all along. She exists only for Lily Leigh, and nobody else. When she left me, it was to marry Alderson. Well, she killed him as good as if she'd shot him, when she told him she was pulling out. Man his age had no business marrying her. And then it was Michaels, and after him Dan Cartwright, and then Jim Thorne. Right up the ladder to fame and fortune, leaving a trail of used-up husbands behind her." Burkhardt shrugged. "The past is of no concern to me." "You actually think Lily will marry you?" "I do," Burkhardt said. "She'll jump at it. The publicity values will be irresistible. The sollie star with aires now stooping to wed her youthful love, who is now a penniless ex-colonist." Elliott moistened his lips unhappily. "Perhaps you've got something there," he admitted. "Lily might just do a thing like that. But how long would it last? Six months, a year -- until the publicity dies down. And then she'll dump you. She doesn't want a penniless husband." "She won't dump me." "You sound pretty confident, Burkhardt." "I am." For a moment there was silence. Then Elliott said, "You seem determined to stick your head in the lion's mouth. What is it -- an obsession to marry her?" "Call it that." "It's crazy. I tell you, she's a witch. You're in love with an imaginary goddess. The real Lily Leigh is the most loathsome female ever spawned. As the first of her five husbands, I can take oath to that." "Did you come here just to tell me that?" "Not exactly," Elliott said. "I've got a proposition for you. I want you to come into my firm as a Vice President. You're system-famous, and we can use the publicity. I'll start you at sixty thousand. You'll be the most eligible bachelor in the universe. We'll get you a rejuvenation and you'll look twenty-five again. Only none of this Lily Leigh nonsense. I'll set you up, you'll marry some good-looking kid, and all your years on Whatsis Nine will be just so much nightmare." "The answer is no." "I'm not doing this out of charity, you understand. I think you'll be an asset to me. But I also think you ought to be protected against Lily. I feel I owe you something, for what I did to you unknowingly eighteen years ago." "You don't owe me a thing. Thanks for the warning, Mr. Elliott, but I don't need it. And the answer to the proposition is No. I'm not for sale." "I beg you -- " "No." Color flared in Elliott's cheeks for a moment. He rose, started to say something, stopped. "All right," he said heavily. "Go to Lily. Like a moth drawn to a flame. The offer remains, Mr. Burkhardt. And you have my deepest sympathy." at his press conference that afternoon, Burkhardt revealed her name. The system's interest was at peak, now; another day without the revelation and the peak would pass, frustration would cause interest to subside. Burkhardt told them. Within an hour it was all over the system. Glamorous Lily Leigh, for a decade and a half queen of the solidoJilms, was named today as the woman for whom John Burkhardt bought himself out of indenture. Burkhardt explained that Miss Leigh, then an unknown starlet, terminated their engagement in # to marry California industrialist Richardson Elliott. The n'Hirriage, like Miss Leigh's four later ones, ended in divorce. "I hope now to make her my wife , " the mystery man from Novotny IX declared. " After eighteen years I still love her as strongly as ever. " Miss Leigh, in seclusion at her Scottsdale. Arizona home following her recent divorce from sollie-distributing magnate James Thorne, refused to comment on the statement. For three days. Lily Leigh remained in seclusion, seeing no one, issuing no statements to the press. Burkhardt was patient. Eighteen years of waiting teaches patience. And Donnoi had told him, as they trudged through the gray slush of rising spring, " The man who rushes ahead foolishly forfeits all advantages in a contest of wills. " Donnoi carried the wisdom of a race at the end of its span. Burkhardt remained in his hotel suite, mulling over the advice of the little alien. Donnoi had never passed judgment on the merits and drawbacks of Burkhardt' s goal; he had simply advised, and suggested, and taught. The press had run out of things to say about Burkhardt. and he declined to supply them with anything new to print. So, inevitably, they lost interest in him. By the third day, it was no longer necessary to hold a press conference. He had come back; he had revealed his love for the sollie queen, Lily Leigh; now he was sitting tight. There was nothing to do but wait for further developments, if any. And neither Burkhardt nor Lily Leigh seemed to be creating further developments. It was hard to remain calm, Burkhardt thought. It was queer to be here on Earth, in the quiet autumn, w hile winter fury raged on Novotny IX. Fury of a different kind raged here, the fury of a world beings, but Burkhardt kept himself aloof from all that. Eighteen years of near-solitude had left him unfit for that sort of world. It was hard to sit quietly, though, w ith Lily just a visicall away. Burkhardt compelled himself to be patient. She would call, sooner or later. She called on the fourth day. Burkhardt's skin crawled as he heard the hotel operator say -- in tones regulated only with enormous effort -- "Miss Leigh is calling from Arizona, Mr. Burkhardt," "Put the call on." She had not used the visi-circuit. Burkhardt kept his screen blank too. She said, withdut preliminaries, "Why have you come back after all these years, John?" "Because I love you." "Still?" "Yes." She laughed -- the famous LL laugh, for his benefit alone. "You're a bigger fool now than you were then, John." "Perhaps." he admitted. "I suppose I ought to thank you, though. This is the best publicity I've had all year. And at my age I need all the publicity I can get." "I'm glad for you," he said. "You aren't serious, though, about wanting to marry me, are you? Not after all these years. Nobody stays in love that long." "I did." "Damn you, what do you want from me?" The voice, suddenly shrill, betrayed a whisper of age. "Yourself." Burkhardt said calmly. "What makes you think I'll marry you? Sure, you're a hero today. The Man Who Came Back From The Stars. But you're nothing, John. All you have to show for eighteen years is callouses. At least back then you had your youth. You don't even have that any more." "Let me come to see you. Lily." "I don't want to see you." "Please. It's a small thing -- let me have half an hour alone with you." She was silent. "I've given you half a lifetime of love. L.ily. Let me have half an hour." After a long moment she said, simply, hoarsely, "All right. You can come. But I won't marry you." H e left New York shortly before midnight. The Colonization Bureau had hired a private plane for him, and he slipped out unnoticed, in the dark. Publicity now would be fatal. The plane was a chemically powered jet, somewhat out of date; they were using photon-rockets for the really fast travel. But. obsolete or no, it crossed the continent in three hours. It was just midnight, local time, when the plane landed in Phoenix. As they had arranged it, Lily had her chauffeur waiting, with a long, sleek limousine. Burkhardt climbed in. Turbines throbbed; the car glided out toward Lily's desert home. It was a mansion, a sprawledout villa moated off -- a moat, in water-hungry Arizona! -- and topped with a spiring pink stucco tower. Burkhardt was ushered through open fern-lined courtyards to an inner maze of hallways, and through them into a small room where Lily Leigh sat waiting. He repressed a gasp. She wore a gown worth a planet's ransom, but the girl within the gown had not changed in eighteen years. Her face was the same, impish, the eyes dancing and gay. Her hair had lost none of its glossy sheen. Her skin was the skin of a girl of nineteen. "It's like stepping back in time," he murmured. "I have good doctors. You wouldn't believe I'm forty, would you? But everyone knows it, of course." She laughed. "You look like an old man, John." "Forty-three isn't old." "It is when you let your age show. I'll give you some money, John, and you can get fixed up. Better still. I'll send my doctors to you." Burkhardt shook his head. "I'm honest about the passing of time. I look this way because of what I've done these past eighteen years. I wouldn't want a doctor's skill to w ipe out the traces of those years." She shrugged lightly. "It was only an offer, not a slur. What do you want with me, John?" "I want you to marry me." Her laughter was a silvery tinkle, ultimately striking a false note. "That made sense in #. It doesn't now. People would say you married me for my money. I've got lots of money, John, you know." "I'm not interested in your money. I want you." "You think you love me, but how can you? I'm not the sweet little girl you once loved. I never was that sweet iittle girl. I was a grasping, greedy little girl -- and now I'm a grasping, greedy old woman who still looks like a little girl. Go away, John. I'm not for you." "Marry me, Lily. We'll be happy. I know we will." "You're a stupid monomaniac." Burkhardt only smiled. "It'll be good publicity. After five marriages for profit, you're marrying for love. All the worlds love a lover, Lily. You'll be everyone's sweetheart again. Give me your hand, Lily." Like a sleepwalker, she extended it. Burkhardt took the hand, frowning at its coldness, its limpness. "But I don't love you, John." "Let the world think you do. That's all that matters." "I don't understand you. You -- " She stopped. Burkhardt's grip tightened on her thin hand. He thought of Donnoi, a gray shadow' against the snow, holding his hand, letting the power flow from body to body, from slim alien to tall Earthman. It is all a matter of channelling your desires, he had said. Any creature that thinks can learn how to assert its will. The technique is simple. Lily lowered her head. After a moment, she raised it. She was smiling. ((YT won't last a month," RichJardson Elliott grunted, at the sight of the announcement in the paper. "The poor dumb bastard," Jim Thorne said, reading the news at his Martian ranch. "Falling in love with a dream-Lily that never existed, and'actually marrying her. She'll suck him dry." On nine worlds, people read the story and talked about it. Many of them were pleased; it was the proper finish for the storybook courtship. But those who knew Lily L.eigh were less happy about it. "She's got some angle," they said. "It's all a publicity stunt. She'll drop hint as soon as the fanfare dies down. And she'll drop him so hard lie won't ever get up." Burkhardtand Lily were married on the tenth day after his return from space. It was a civil ceremony, held secretly. Their honeymoon trip was shrouded in mystery. While they were gone, gossip columnists speculated. How' could the brittle, sophisticated, much-married Lily be happy with a simple farmer from a colony-world? Two days after their return to Earth from the honeymoon. Burkhardt and his wife held a joint press conference. It lasted only five minutes. Burkhardt, holding his wjfe's hand tightly, said, "I'm happy to announce that Miss Leigh is distributing all of her possessions to charity. We've both signed up as indentured colonists and we're leaving for Novotny IX tomorrow," "Really, Miss Leigh?" "Yes." Lily said. "I belong at John's side. We'll work his old farm together. It'll be the first useful thing I've ever done in my life." The newsmen, thunderstruck, scattered to shout their story to the waiting worlds. Mr. and Mrs. John Burkhardt closed the door behind them. "Happy?" Burkhardt asked. Lily nodded. She was still smiling. Burkhardt, watching her closely, saw the momentary flicker ot her eyes, the brief clearing-away of the cloud that shrouded them -- as though someone were trapped behind those lovely eyes, struggling to get out. But Burkhardt's control never lapsed. Bending, he kissed her soft lips lightly. "Bedtime," he said. "Yes. Bedtime." Burkhardt kissed her again. Donnoi had been right, he thought. Control was possible. He had channelled desire eighteen years, and now Lily was his. Perhaps she was no longer Lily as men had known her, but what did that matter? She was the Lily of his lonely dreams. He had created her in the tingling moment of a handshake, from the raw material of her old self. He turned off the light and began to undress. He thought w r ith cozy pleasure that in only a few weeks he would be setting foot once again on the bleak tundra of Novotny IX -- this time, with his loving bride.  The medicine shaker, the bone breaker. I have seen and been all these. It is nothing but trouble. I have sat on the good side of the fire. I have cried over young women. It is nothing but trouble. M iss Dow leaned against the observation window. Her stomach revolted and she backed away. Unable to quell the nausea rising within her she clamped a hand to her mouth. Dr. Santell gently took her arm. led her away from the window and helped her to a couch facing away from the observation window. Nausea passed; Miss Dow smiled weakly. "You did warn me," she said. Dr. Santell did not return the smile. "It takes getting used to. I'm a doctor and immune to gore, but still I find it unsettling. He's a biological impossibility." "Not even human," Miss Dow suggested. "That's what the government sent you here to decide," said Dr. Santell. "Frankly, I'm glad he's no longer my responsibility." "I want to look at him again." Santell shrugged, lit a syntho. Together they walked back to the observation window. He seemed amused at her discomfort... Again, Miss Dow peered through the window. This time it was easier. A young man, tall and wellmuscled, stood in the middle of the room. He was naked. His uncut black hair fell to the small of his back. His chest was slit with a gaping wound that bled profusely; his legs and stomach were soaked with blood. "Why is he smiling? What is he staring at?" she asked, unable to take her eyes off the figure before her. "I don't know," said Dr. Santell. "Why don't you ask him." "Your sense of humor escapes me," said Miss Dow through tightly closed lips. Dr. Santell grinned and shrugged. His synthetic cigarette reached the cut-off mark and winked out. The butt Hashed briefly as he tossed it into the wall disposal. "Doesn't everything?" suggested Dr. Santell, trying not to laugh at his little joke. Miss Dow turned away from the window. Her look was sharp, withering. "Tell me about him," she snapped, each word like ice. "How did he get -- that way?" His amusement faded. He licked his lips nervously, nodded. "He has no name, at least no official name. We call him Joe. Sort of a nickname. We gave him that name about -- " "Fascinating," interrupted Miss Dow, "but I didn't come here to be entertained by some droll little tale about his nickname." "Friendly, aren't you?" asked Santell, drily. A pity, he thought. If she knew how to smile she might have seemed attractive. "The government doesn't pay me to be friendly. It pays me to do a job." Her voice was cold, dispassionate. But she turned to face Dr. Santell in such a way that she would not see the bleeding man. "How long has he been like this?" "It's all in my report. If you'd like to read it I could -- " "I'd prefer a verbal outline first. I'll read your report later; I trust that it is a thorough one." She eyed him sharply. "Yes, quite thorough," Dr. Santell replied, the polite edge in his voice wearing thin. He turned away from Miss Dow, gazed in at the bleeding man. His words were clipped, impartial. "He is approximately twenty-three years old and has been as he is now since birth." "Incredible!" said Miss Dow, fascinated in spite of herself. "All this is documented?" "Completely. There is no possibility of fakery. Nor point either, for that matter." "Just as you say," echoed Miss Dow, "what have you done to try to cure it? Is it some form of stigmata?" Dr. Santell shook his head. "If this is stigmata, it is the most extreme case this world will ever see. Besides, it is inconceivable that a psychosomatic illness could cause such a drastic biological malfunction." "But surely some sort of surgery?" began Miss Dow. "Some sort of chemical therapy would -- " Dr. Santell shook his head emphatically. "We've tried them all in the seven years he's been here. Psycho-chemistry, primal reconditioning, bio-feedback-tried singly and together; none have had any effect. He's a biological impossibility." "What is his rate of bleeding?" she asked. "It varies," said Dr. Santell. "Somewhere between two and three pints an hour." "But it's not possible!" exclaimed Miss Dow. "No one can -- " "He can and does," interrupted Dr. Santell. "He doesn't do anything normally. I can give you ten reasons why he should be dead. Don't ask me why he isn't." Miss Dow turned her head around and stared at the silent figure standing in the center of the room. The bleeding man had not moved. The blood flowed evenly from the chest wound, gathering in a coagulating pool at his feet. "#'ve had enough." She turned away from the window. "Show me to my office. I'm ready to read that report now." T wo hours later, the last page of Dr. Santell's report slipped from nerveless fingers. The bleeding man lay outside the parameters of human biology. By all rights he should have been dead, indeed, could never have lived. Her hands were a little unsteady as she punched in Dr. Santell's office on the videophone. His face appeared on the screen -- and it was flushed. "Report to me immediately," Miss Dow snapped. "I doubt it, sweetheart," said Dr. Santell, grinning. "I'm off the case, remember?" He drank something out of a dark tumbler. "You're drinking!" snapped Miss Dow. "Now that you mention it," admitted Dr. Santell agreeably. He gave her a lopsided grin. "Perhaps you would care to join me?" "You are a disgusting, undisciplined lout. And I should like to remind you that you are still responsible to me. You may be discharged from this case in your professional capacity, but your standing orders are to cooperate with me in any way possible." "So I'm cooperating," muttered Dr. Santell. "I'll stay out of your way, you stay out of mine." "I won't tolerate this!" she raged. "Do you realize to whom you are talking?" Dr. Santell thought that over slowly. His face tightened. He did realize who she was. It sobered him a little. He tobk another drink from the tumbler to compensate. "Are you sober enough to answer a few questions?" He thought that over for a while too. "I'm drunk enough to answer any questions you have. I don't think I could answer them sober," he said. "I am trying to be understanding," said Miss Dow, a note of conciliation in her voice. "I realize it is quite natural for you to resent me. After all, I am responsible for your termination at this installation." Dr. Santell shrugged it off. He took another drink from the tumbler. "We're both professionals. Dr. Santell," reasoned Miss Dow. "We can't let emotional considerations enter into this. There is no place for emotion here. Our goals must be -- " "Hell! That's easy for you to say!" growled Dr. Santell. "You don't have any!" "That's quite enough, thank you," said Miss Dow, pressing her lips together in a tight, angry line. "No, it's not enough -- " started Dr. Santell. "You can't -- " "The subject is closed!" she shouted. There was an uneasy silence. Miss Dow broke it by changing the subject. "What about his parents?" she asked. "Didn't you read my report?" "It said they committed suicide. It did not specify or go into anydetails. I have to know more than that. Your report was supposed to be thorough. You didn't list your sources of information on his early life, for one thing. I need to know -- " "Ask Nahtari. He can tell you everything," he said. He shrugged as if to say it was out of his hands. "Who?" "Nahtari. His uncle. He comes every week to visit his nephew. Nahtari used to exhibit him at the carnival until we discovered him and brought him here. If you'll turn to the financial report near the back, you will see that we pay him a small gratuity for the privilege of studying his nephew. We pay him by the week and he stops in to pick up his check and talk to his relative." "Did you say he talks to his relative?" "Yeah. It's pretty strange. Nahtari talks to Joe every week for an hour. I don't know if Joe understands anything that is said to him or even if Nahtari cares if he understands. I've never heard Joe respond in any way, not in the seven years I've been here." "When does this Nahtari make his weekly visit?" "He's here now in my office. He brings me a pint of whiskey every week. Makes it himself. You'd never believe how good -- " Miss Dow hit the dial-out button viciously, cutting him off in midsentence. She pushed the door open to Dr. Santell's office. She hadn't bothered to knock. Dr. Santell had his feet propped up on the edge of his desk. He held a drink in one hand and a deck of cards in the other. Across the desk from him sat a grey headed Indian dressed in faded blue jeans, cracked leather boots and a tattered flannel shirt. "I'll see your dime and raise you a dime," said Dr. Santell, slamming a dime onto the pile of change on the desk between them. "Are you Nahtari?" demanded Miss Dow, coming into the room. The two studiously ignored her. "It depends," said the old Indian, not looking up from his cards. "I'll meet your dime and raise you a quarter." Dr. Santell bit his lip. "You're bluffing! I know you don't have that other ace!" Miss Dow marched up to the desk, snatched the cards out of Dr. Santell's hands. Dr. Santell pounded his desk in anger. "Stupid bitch! I had him beat!" He tried to collect the torn cards in his lap. "Is she some kind of nut?" asked Nahtari, holding his cards out of harm's way. Dr. Santell dumped the torn pieces of cards on the top of the desk and sighed. "Yeah. A government nut. She's in charge of Joe now." Nahtari scowled and laid his cards face up on the desk. "And that means she wants to ask me about my relative." "It certainly does," said Miss Dow. "Would you like to come to my office?" Nahtari shrugged. There seemed to be no way to avoid it. "You are owing me twelve dollars," he said to Dr. Santell as he rose to leave the room. "Don't I always," growled Dr. Santell, staring at the ace that Nahtari had had after all. # it down, Nahtari. This may y ake a while. I have a great many questions I want to ask you." She put a new cartridge in her tape machine and turned it on. "If Dr. Santell had taken down all facts from before when I tell him I would not having to be saying again," said Nahtari. "I get tired of telling the story and having no one taking down so I don't have to do all over again." Miss Dow patted the tape machine. "Don't worry about it," she assured him. "This recorder will make a permanent record of everything you say. I guarantee you won't have to tell it again." "You going to listen and take down no matter what?" "Every word," she replied. She started to ask a question but Nahtari held up his hand. "Let me tell whole story," said Nahtari. "It will be a saving of time and you can ask questions after if you have any. I want to get this over before too long. Got to-catch Dr. Santell before he leave with my twelve dollar." Nahtari scratched his chest over his right shirt pocket. "That sounds all right to me," agreed Miss Dow. "Could you start with his parents? I'd like to know -- " "He killed them." "What?" Miss Dow was stunned. "He killed them," repeated Nahtari matter-of-factly. "I was there the day he was born. His father and mother died within an hour of his birthing. He killed them." Miss Dow was confused. "But how did it happen? How could -- " "You was not going to ask questions until I finished," accused Nahtari, dragging the back of his hand insolently across his nose. Miss Dow settled back into her seat with a tight-lipped smile. She motioned for him to continue. "His parents were medicine people. They were people of great power. My brother was one of the strong ones. They had this child stronger than them." Miss Dow made a face. "You don't expect me to believe in primitive super -- " "I am expecting of you to keep your stupid mouth shut so this telling can be done and over with. I want to tell this so you will no longer pester me when I come to see my relative. I know all of your kind of government people. You harass a person -- " "Tell the story!" rasped Miss Dow. "For Christ sakes, just tell the story!" She drummed her fingers impatiently on the desk. "My brother and his woman were filled with the sickness of the world. I knew that my brother did not want to live. His wife knew this and was content to go with them. Then when they had decided the road, she became heavy with child. They had no expecting of this. They became uncertain and did not know the way. But they could not change their decision for the living of the child. They went into the mountains, looking for their road. It was in the fifth month of the child in her belly." Miss Dow sighed impatiently and settled back in her chair. It looked to be a long story, unrestricted by the inclusion of anything factual. Already she regretted asking him for information. , "They were high in the mountains. They laid down for dying but something strange happened. The child began speaking to them. The child was angry. They ran to the high places, to throw themselves off before the power of the child got too strong for them. But the child stopped them at the edge of the cliff and turned them around. The child forced them back down the mountain. And for four months, they were prisoners of the child." "Are you seriously telling me that -- " began Miss Dow with disgust. Nahtari snorted contemptuously and passed his hands in front of his eyes. His eyes seemed to be focused on some far horizon. His voice mocked hers. "I just had a vision. I saw you and Dr. Santell embraced upon the ground and then suddenly crushed by a falling outhouse." "I'm not laughing," said Miss Dow. She wasn't laughing. "Somebody is," said Nahtari with a straight face. "I knew you was going to not let me finish the story and take it all down so I don't have to tell it again. Nobody ever lets me finish my story," complained Nahtari. "Christ! I don't blame them!" said Miss Dow. "I've never heard such an outrageous piece of trash." She turned the tape machine off. "You may have all the time in the world but I haven't got time to listen to this idiocy!" She stood up and marched around the desk. "When you leave, shut the door." Nahtari came around the desk and sat down in her chair. He tilted the chair back and rested his bootheels on the desk. He turned the tape recorder microphone around so that it pointed at him. He pushed the recording button and began talking into the machine. "You bet this time, record is made of all the facts," he said and went on with the story. "For four months, they were prisoners of the child. Five days before he was born, the child began to fear leaving the belly. The fear did not last long but it lasted long enough for his father to put poison in their food without the child's knowing. They ate this poison, the mother, the father and the child. "The child felt the poison and changed it into water in his belly. He felt great sadness in his heart and an anger because they did not want him to live. They did not want him born into a world they had grown sick of. It was not their right to choose for him because his power was greater than theirs. He did not change the poison flowing through them to water. His hatred was at them for they had let the world beat them. They began the agony of poison dying but they could not die. "I sat with them through this time. I sat with my brother and my sister by law and they told me these things through their agony. They screamed to die but the child was punishing them for letting the world beat them. I, Nahtari, did not want to see the child born into this world. I feared his coming. There was nothing I could do. He came to birth. "It was not a child like expected. He bled. His chest was bleeding. I had expected hot roaring fires. I had expected a child of frightful appearance. It was but a small baby that bled and could not talk. "The father pulled the baby up and beat him into breathing. He laid the baby on the bed and went outside the house. After a little while, my sister by law got to her feet, swaying 'on dizzy legs, and she staggered out after him. I tried to stop the bleeding of the baby chest but I was too scared about my brother and sister by law. I ran outside. They laid side by side in the black dirt of the garden. They were dead and five days decayed. "I took the little one into my home but the bleeding sickened my old woman and she died. So I took the bleeding one to the traveling show. The white people there did not sicken and die at the sight of his bleeding. "In lines all around the tent they would stand to pay good money to see the bleeding one. They all wanted to see him bleeding and they were not sickened by it and they did not die. But the government people came and took the bleeding man from me and made me sign little pieces of paper and gave me money so they could do what they do. I turned him over to the government ones and that is all there is to the story and it is the truth. "Now I come every week to talk to him. I know he is too powerful to have a name. I am waiting for him. I am telling so I will not have to tell it again and so that this warning is given to all who would have dealings with him. He is not ready to do what he will one day do. Do not walk in his shadow. Leave him alone for he is not you. For twentythree years he has been gathering power. That is all I have to say." He switched off the tape machine, smiling to himself because there was no one to hear it. He closed the door carefully behind him and went looking for Dr. Santell and his twelve dollars. M iss Dow pushed open the door cautiously. She was not sure if she had the stomach for what she was doing. But making up her mind, she stepped into the room. She kept telling herself that he was perfectly harmless. The drain in the center of the floor was stopped up with clotted blood. He stood in a shallow pool of his own blood. His body was motionless, his breathing just barely perceptible by a slight rising and falling of his chest. The blood flowed steadily to the floor. "Can you hear me?" she asked nervously. She shut the door behind her. She kept her eyes on his face. He stared at her but gave no sign that he had heard her. He seemed to be in no pain, despite the stream of blood flowing down his chest. "I'm not going to hurt you." She approached him slowly with a small, glass lab beaker. Averting her eyes slightly, she placed the glass container below the wound. She felt a little foolish for having spoken to him. It was obvious to her now that he was little better than a cretin and that he could not understand a word she said. She stood there awkwardly, the The naked man seemed unaware of her presence, yet still she felt an unreasonable fear. There was something frightening about the still figure. Something threatening, otherworldly in the steady flow of blood down his chest. He did not seem vulnerable. Rather it was as if the world were too insignificant for him to notice it. She backed away with a full glass of his blood. She felt better with each step she took. He stared at her, no expression on his face, his eyes unusually bright. She had felt very uncomfortable under his stare. Miss Dow had turned and started out the door, watching him alL the while. Suddenly he moved. She turned quickly. Fear rose in her like a tide. The bleeding man cupped a hand beneath the wound in his chest. Slowly, he brought his hands to his lips and drank. Miss Dow fainted. D r. santell found her in the doorway. A tiny, red pool of fresh blood was beginning to blacken on the floor beside her head. The glass beaker she had brought into the room was gone. "What happened?" asked Dr. Santell, bending over the couch, his voice oddly gentle despite its gruffness. "Here -- take a sip of this," he said, offering her a small glass of whiskey. "It'll steady your nerves." She was too weak to refuse. The whiskey burned her throat and made her cough. He made her take another sip. It almost made her gag but it seemed to help. A touch of color reappeared in her face. "He -- he -- he drank his own blood!" she whispered, tottering on the edge of hysteria. Dr. Santell leaned forward eagerly. His features sharpened, his manner became intent and forceful. "Are you sure?" he demanded. "Yes, I'm sure," she said with a trace of her normal sharpness. "Are you sure -- absolutely sure -- he drank his own blood?" he asked again, impatiently. The answer seemed unusually important to him. "Of course. I'm sure, damn it! It was absolutely disgusting!" She wrinkled up her nose, "That revolting animal did it on purpose! Just because I collected a beaker of -- " Dr. Santell suddenly became greatly agitated. "You collected a glass of blood?" he husked. She nodded, bewildered by his strange behavior. "God! It's happened again," he muttered. "It's happened again!" A look of dread passed over his face. "What the devil are you talking about?" demanded Miss Dow. "When I heard you scream, I started running, I was the first one to reach you. You were sprawled in the doorway. There was a big bloodstain beside your head on the floor. There was no glass on the floor of the rdom and it wasn't in the hallway." "Don't be ridiculous! I had it with me. Isn't this an awfully big fuss to be making over a -- " Dr. Santell turned his back on her and dialed security. "Hobeman? This is Santell. Have room # searched for a glass beaker. Delay his feeding time if you have to, but find that beaker!" He shut off the view screen. He looked at Miss Dow. Her face was blank with bewilderment. Before she could ask a question he began, "Something strange has developed in the last few weeks. Our monitors have been picking up unusual activity levels. They aren't sophisticated enough to tell us. exactly what's happening but his heartbeat and galvanic skin responses have been fluctuating wildly." "But what does that have to do with the glass?" asked Miss Dow. "I'm coming to that. A week ago, during one of his strange activity levels, the observation port on the wall of his room disappeared." Miss Dow's face registered shock. "Disappeared? How is that possible?" Dr. Santell was grim. "I have no idea. We found traces of melted glass on the floor of the room. But what disturbs me the most is that we could detect no coronary activity. For two hours his blood was circulating but his heart wasn't functioning," "He's not human, is he?" said Miss Dow'. "I don't know," said Dr. Santell, staring off into space. "I just don't know." H e pushed the carts through the door. The bleeding man stared at him as he had stared for the seven years he had been there. "Soup's on, Joe," said the man with the feeding carts. Two men hidden from view by the door, were examining two streaks of melted glass on the floor. "Hey, hold up there," said one of the men. "He's not to be fed until we've finished our search." "I won't get in the way. What's disappeared this time?" "Nothing important," grumbled one of the men. "Just a glass jar from the lab." "Shame on you, Joe," said the cartman, waving a finger at the motionless figure in the center of the room. "You oughten to be stealing stuff like that." He opened the top of his cart and took out a pair of gloves. "It won't hurt if I feed him will it? I don't have to hose him down until you guys have finished," he said, pulling the gloves over his hands. "Go ahead. We aren't going to find anything anyway." The cart man opened a panel on the side of the cart and brought out a bowl of raw meat. He sat it on the floor in front of the bleeding man. From the other cart he got a large bowl of uncooked vegetables and a large wooden ladle. He detached a water hose from the wall and started backing toward the bleeding man, uncoiling the hose as he walked. When he got to the end of the hose, he turned around. The bleeding man had overturned the feeding bowls with his feet. He was drinking his own biood from cupped hands. ffrpHis is what you are looking l for," said Dr. Santell, handing Miss Dow a clipboard. "His blood type is O lateral. We've run hundreds of tests on it and it seems to be perfectly normal blood, a little more resistant to some diseases than ordinary blood but otherwise normal. It's too bad the government won't let us use his blood. He's a universal donor and at the rate he produces blood, I'll bet he could supply Intercity all by himself." "But that's just the point. We are going to use his blood," said Miss Dow. "We are going to use his blood," said Miss Dow. "We are going to use a lot more besides. That's why I was sent here." "The government's changed its policy, then?" asked Dr. Santell. "Why?" "We've given transfusions of his blood to prisoners and it seems to have no bad effects. Tell me, you've studied him for seven years. Do you have any idea how something like him is possible?" Dr. Santell lit a synthetic cigarette slowly. He gave her a curious look. "Did you listen to Nahtari's explanation?" "That lunacy," sniffed Miss Dow. "I think we should pay a little more attention to a chromosomal mutation theory than some wild story from some primitive like Nahtari." Dr. Santell shrugged. "It doesn't really matter what caused it. I couldn't even make an educated guess. His version is the only evidence we have." "Confine yourself to specifics, please," said Miss Dow. "What biological evidence do we have?" "There is biological evidence pointing to chromosomal differentiation. He has sixty-four paired chromosomes. I have been unable so far to determine their exact structure. He seems to have all the normal ones. Technically, that makes him a member of our species, I suppose. But it's those extra chromosomes that are so unusual. They seem to be entirely new structures unlike anything we are familiar with. It must be something outside our experience. I think I pointed this out in more detail in my report." "But technically, he is human?" asked Miss Dow. "I would say he is," said Dr. Santell. "Very well. Then I am going to give the final go-ahead on this project," said Miss Dow. "And what project is that?" "We're going to transfer him to the military dome at Intercity where he will be dissected for tissue regeneration. Hopefully, his cellular matrix will produce like functioning biological constructs." "What!" Dr. Santell jumped to his feet. "You're not serious! That would be murder! Matrix reconstruction from tissue cultures has never advanced beyond the experimental stage! We don't have the technology to stimulate the reproduction of brain and nerve tissue! Good lord, woman, you can't seriously -- " "I am quite aware of our shortcomings in the field of tissue regeneration," said Miss Dow coldly. "For years, our work in this area has been little better than a waste of time and materials. We have yet to produce a successful unit with a well-developed nervous system. Nor have we been able to successfully clone an individual. These matters, however, are not relevant to this case." "Not relevant! You'll kill him! And to what purpose? A line of research that you yourself admitted has been a waste of time!" stormed Dr. Santell, his face flushed with anger. "Be careful. Dr. Santell," she cautioned him. "I don't think I am happy with your choice of words. We are not going to kill him. Many of our first tissue regeneration experiments are still alive -- alive after a fashion, that is. Their bodies still function, their cells still grow, it is only their minds that are dead." She smiled. "It's still murder! You have no right!" Dr. Santell looked away from Miss Dow. He had suddenly realized that the things he was saying could be considered treason. "When's the last time you had an attitude check, Dr. Santell?" asked Miss Dow. "I almost thought I heard you say something that was opposed to the wishes of our government. You did agree that my patient can be made ready for transport tomorrow morning, didn't you?" "Of course," said Dr. Santell. "He will be ready," "And did I hear you use the word murder, Dr. Santell? I did hear you use the word! I'm sure General Talbot will be most interested in your attitude." Dr. Santell turned and began walking out of the room. He knew that he was in trouble and nothing he could say would make it any better. "Dr. Santell!" He turned to look at her. "I'm really not hard to get along with," said Miss Dow. "You have scientist. I've handled your type besmall measure of eccentricity. But I draw the line at treason." His expression remained blank. "It's only natural that you're defensive about your patient after seven years," she soothed. "You have personalized him, lost your objectivity. But you must know as well as' I do that the bleeding man is a brainless vegetable, hopelessly retarded since birth. You can see that, surely?" Dr. Santell stared wordlessly. "It would be a lot easier for me," she continued, "if I had your cooperation on this thing. You've had seven years experience on this project and you could help us smooth over any rough spots we might encounter. This isn't exactly a normal case. It will require special procedures. Procedures that your cooperation will make possible." She smiled at him. "My report could be a very positive one. It depends on you." Dr. Santell forced himself to smile. "Believe me," he said. "I shall cooperate in any way I can. I apologize for my behavior." Miss Dow' nodded. "Good. Now, how much blood could, let's say, ten of his regenerations, produce in a forty-eight hour period?" Dr. Santell began punching up figures on his desk calculator. T he bleeding man continued to drink. The men studying the glass streaks on the floor had fled. A security guard unlocked the door and looked into the room. The bleeding man did not seem aware of the other's presence. A call went out for Dr. Santell. Dr. Santell, followed by Miss Dow, arrived just in time to see the heavy door buckling outward. "He's gone berserk!" screamed Miss Dow, as the door was battered off its hinges. The bleeding man walked through the wreckage of the door. He advanced upon them, a crimson trail of blood behind him on the floor. Miss Dow fled, screaming. Dr. Santell stood his ground. The bleeding man brushed him lightly as he walked past. He looked neither to left or right. He strode down the corridor, moving quickly, relentlessly. Dr. Santell ran in front of him and tried to push him to a halt. His hands slipped, coming away blood soaked. His efforts to stop him were futile. Through the plasti-glass corridor walls he could see the security guards gathering around Miss Dow at the corridor exit. Dr. Santell took hold of the bleeding man's arm and tried to drag him to a stop but found himself being dragged instead. The bleeding man did not even break stride. Miss Dow stood within a cordon of security men. Dr. Santell knew what she would order them to do even before the bleeding man smashed through the exit door. "Aim for his head!" she shouted. A burst of stunner fire took the bleeding man full in the face. He walked several steps, then toppled. Dr. Santell rushed to his side and put a hand on his chest. "He's still alive," he muttered to himself. "Good shooting, men," congratulated Miss Dow. "A couple of you men carry the body down to the lab." "Is there very much damage to his head?" she asked. "Is he still alive? Not that it matters. We can't risk another episode like this. We might as well do the dissection here. It'll make him easier to handle. We'd have to ship him frozen anyway now that we know more about his capabilities." The security men carried the body away. "He's still alive," Dr. Santell said, pronouncing each word slowly and distinctly. "He's very much alive." M iss Dow had a surgical gown on and a mask. "Are you sure you can handle the dissection all by yourself. Dr. Santell? I could fly someone in to assist." "Quite sure," said Dr. Santell, bending over the still form on the surgery table. "I'll begin soon. You'd better leave now." "I'll be waiting at the military base in Intercity for the body," said M iss Dow . She came over to the table and stood beside him. Her voice was cold and emotionless as usual. "You realize I still must report your treasonable remarks to General Talbot." Dr. Santell nodded, not looking in her direction. "However, your behavior has shown marked improvement. That too will be noted in my report. Trying to stop this creature singlehandedly in the corridor like you did was a very brave if somewhat foolish thing to do. You realize of course that the matter is out of my hands. General Talbot will be the one deciding, not I. Perhaps, after a short period of retraining, you may even be reassigned. A man of your reputation. I'm sure, will find it very easy to rejoin the fold. Only a fool -- or a traitor -- bucks the system." Dr. Santell seemed not to be listening. He stuck a needle into the arm of the body on the dissection table. "What a shame a body like tht should have no mind." mused Miss Dow . "Just think of the power he must have in order to smash through those doors like he did." "Yes," Dr. Santell replied tonelessly. Miss Dow pulled her mask off and turned to leave. "Wait," said Dr. Santell. "Before you go, could you hand me that box of clamps under the table here?" She bent over and looked under the table. "I don't see any -- " His scalpel sliced through her right carotid artery. Her body jerked convulsively and she crashed heavily (o the door. "Yes." said Dr. Santell with a strange look on his face. "It is always a shame to find a good body with a defective mind." It took him a little over two hours to dissect her. By the time he finished, the stimulant he had injected into him had brought the bleeding man back to consciousness. As he was putting her dismembered body into the liquid nitrogen packs for shipping, he kept his eyes on the body of the bleeding man. The body sat up slowly and opened its eyes. The head swiveled and the eyes regarded him. The eyes were alive with raw intelligence. The body slid off the table gracefully and stood up, the wound on his chest completely healed. "I knew," said Dr. Santell. "I knew." The medicine shaker, the bone breaker. I have seen and been all these. It is nothing but trouble. I have sat on the good side of the tire. I have cried over young women. It is nothing but trouble. These are the words I heard written in his skin. He made me kill her. I had to do it. I am not sorry. I knew. That is enough, knowing. -- Paul Santell (This suicide note was found near the charred body of Dr. Paul Santell. who Intercity Police say, apparently soaked himself with an inflammable liquid and then set himself afire. Dr. Paul Santell, twice recipient of the Nobel Prize in psycho-chemistry, police report had been experiencing... -- excerpt from Intercity Demographic Area Telepaper.) T he bleeding man cured of bleeding, walked without haste toward the door leading outside. He remembered the taste of blood, he who no longer had need of it. He pushed the door open and stepped outside. The sky pulled at him but he resisted for that last little moment. His feet touched the ground. His lungs filled with air. His eyes danced on the horizons of the world. Raising his hands into the air, he let the sky pull him away from the earth. He took the air in his lungs and thrust it out with a shout. Silently his lips formed words. And then he had no more need of air and words. His fingers curled into the hands of the sky. He disappeared in a cloud. He Who No Longer Bleeds is gone. He will return. To bleed again.  directions Dear Jim, I'd appreciate it if you'd run the following letter for me. I don't think science fiction writers ought  lightly to get involved in politics, but this is an issue close to most of our readers, and one I think we'll have universal agreement on. t If you eat tuna fish, think about ' changing diets. For hundreds of years tuna were caught by hook and line, but in the last decade "porpoise fishing" for tuna became widespread and is now nearly universal. This involves using speedboats to terrify dolphins into entering purse seine nets. The tuna follow the terrified dolphins. The net is then drawn closed, and the result is unimaginably cruel to the dolphins. Most of them don't survive the experience. In # Congress passed a law protecting dolphins, and a new kind of net that reduced fatalities from thousands of dolphins was introduced. I'm told there's now a net that gets it down to maybe a dolphin per ton of tuna, which means you haven't contributed to more than a small percent of the murder of a dolphin when you buy a can of tuna -- but isn't that too many? If you like tuna but don't like dead dolphins, albacore and skipjack are still caught by methods not involving "porpoise fishing," but those are hard to find. And if you're upset about this, you might write your Congressman and demand that something be done about it. I understand Congress is considering a law that will let tuna fishers buy a license to kill dolphins in connection with their fishing. I try to be a reasonable man, and I recall many friends who were fishing boat captains when I lived in Seattle. They aren't evil, but they have to make a living. So long as anyone is allowed to use "porpoise fishing," then everyone who wants to stay in the fishing business must, because it is just so much more effective than the old methods. And certainly any effective restriction on the tuna industry that as part of their catching system will raise the price of tuna considerably. more if they'll leave our sea-going cousins alone -- and thinks naive me, so would almost everyone in the U.S. if they knew about it. You can learn more about this by sending # to "The Porpoise News," # Twentieth Ave., San Francisco, Calif. #. Jerry Pournelle, Ph.D. More than happy to run such a letter. Although fishermen may not know any better, Congressmen, by God, should. Murder it is, and murder most foul. Dear Editor, With the exception of Heinlein, and a very few others, sf today seldom measures up to the high standards of the fifties. I can think of a lot of reasons why this is so, but would like to share just a few of these reasons with you. The first reason why today's sf is generally inferior is that some of it is highly experimental in form or concept. Eventually the art of sf will be advanced by these experiments, but for now we'll have to suffer through them. Another reason for the inferior sf seems to be that authors are not so content to be entertainers, but are reaching -- and overreaching -- for the Big Concept. To be both a graet writer and an outstanding BigConcept-person is extremely rare, but the authors do not know this, or think that they are exceptions. Still another reason for inferior sf seems to be the desire to imitate Leiber and Tolkien -- and alas, the imitations are worse than blank pages. These imitations seem to combine with a love for the middle ages or the renaissance. So we have jarring cases of medieval societies on other planets or in the future. A man rides up to a castle on a horse and pulls out his laser gun, or perhaps some other unbelievable mixture of two technologies occurs. Perhaps editors are also at fault for the low estate of sf at present. I hesitate to say that, because I know an editor has to be awfully sharp just to keep a magazine operating at a profit. Anyone can write, more or less, but no one is an editor-more or-less; an editor either cuts the mustard or his magazine goes under. Precious few mortals can do it. Yet I suspect that, among the thousands of manuscripts that Galaxy receives each year, there must be three-hundred or so that I'd much prefer to read, rather than those actually published. Could it be that editors become too sophisticated? Could it be that a panel of sf fans would choose to publish manuscripts that would delight the public and make editors vomit? Perhaps an editor should set up such a panel and find out. I really do not mind when an author inserts a bit of the occult or special care to make it believable. The kind of sf that I like to read has clarity; one does not have to read the last half of the story in order to understand the first half. Nor does one have to put a lot of clues together to make sense of the piece. The story may not present a conflict or problem (a conflict or problem usually helps the story along), but it should be fun and interesting to read from the beginning through the middle to the end. I am not satisfied with a story just because it has a terrific ending, no matter how carefully the ending has been prepared by the story as a whole. Much of the sf of today is so tedious, I cannot imagine even the authors writing it with any pleasure. Heinlein, in his speech at the Naval Academy, said: "If it bores me, I don't write it." The other authors should take that statement to heart! Mark Terry P.O. Box # San Diego, Ca. #I #  think you are about # (#) correct, and I hope GalaxyIF reflects this. However, consider: by the nature of things the readership of this and every magazine represents a spectrum of tastes, and what you love someone else might think shallow and done-to-death. Or the reverse might be true. Personally, I go for action-adventure stories with a philosophical foundation, and which contain a valid scientific postulate integral to the plot, and which have believable characters with whom  can form a "relationship." And, of course, the author must write clean, concise prose which nonetheless has a degree of elegance... I don't get many stories like that. Dear Mr. Baen: In your September issue, Mr. Pournelle commented on building materials in his article "A Step Farther Out." He asks why we are so concerned with iron and steel since aluminum is so plentiful and notes that fiberglass and plastics haven't begun to be exploited. In the case of the latter materials he feels that building codes have not caught up with technology. Actually, building codes are largely responsible in both instances. Remember that the reason for the building code is public safety. This is primarily expressed in concern for structural adequacy and fire safety. Although aluminum has replaced steel and other metals to an enormous extent in modern construction, its physical properties have placed a limit on its use. I know of no architect or builder who would not be overjoyed at being offered aluminum door or window openings that would pass standard fire tests. Ignoring any weightstrengthcost factors, further structural use of aluminum is possible now, but it fails in one very large and important area. Aluminum does not successfully interact with concrete (still one of our least expensive, most flexible, and available materials) to provide that special strength, fire resistance, durability and economy that ferroconcrete construction offers. Also, no available aluminum alloy can substitute for stainless steel in corrosion resistance. Despite opposition from affected groups, the code acceptance of plastics has increased greatly in the last few years. In several instances performance has not lived up to the requirements and this has delayed further acceptance. The problem is still one of technology. Better combinations of physical properties are needed. Aging sometimes produces unfortunate effects in either appearance or durability. A material may offer many desirable features but prove hazardous in an actual fire. A great substitute for glass can not take standard maintenance practices. I am sure that composite materials have a great future but we are waiting for better products and for more information, especially on the effects of time and on the results of fuller and more realistic testing procedures. Very truly yours, # N. La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, Calif. # Jerry's reply follows: I believe my column made it clear I was speaking of plastics, fiberglass, and composites as being hampered by lagging codes; although it took long enough to get codes revised to allow exploitation of aluminum. Nor did I blame codes as the only reason for application lagging technology, although a pretty good case can be made for their being a prime cause. Mr. Robinson is as aware as I am that building codes are not primarily concerned with public safety (although certainly they must protect that) but with resale value and protection of moneylenders. Most housing is financed by someone other than the owner, and it is difficult to raise capital for a structure unless the lender can be certain the building will outlast the mortgage. Thus codes tend to be highly conservative, and rightly so. However it has been my experience that they have been unduly conservative, even when the building is a single family residence, isolated from public access, and financed by the owner. An engineered house can be built only by someone determined enough to get through the maze of bureaucrats whose purpose is to enforce a code designed to protect moneylenders rather than either the public or the builder. Because of this, a great deal of research into novel construction methods and techniques has been lost. Years ago I engaged in extensive correspondence with Frazier Formam Peters, a pioneer in the use of concrete in construction of private homes and perhaps the most important architect of stone "traditional" residences in our history; and problems with codes figure largely in that correspondence. (There is an allied difficulty, which is rules designed to protect construction trades unions, but that can of worms would take far too long to discuss, since there is right on both sides here as well as in the code situation.) Mostly, my article was intended to point out that we've got plenty of construction materials left on Earth if only we'll be a bit more thoughtful about how to use them, and I'll let that conclusion stand. Jerry Pournelle, Ph.D. Dear Jim, Congratulations on the August Galaxy! I liked just about everything in it, especially Ed Pangborn's yarn. The Company of Glory. (Mark Bilsen postulates the influence of W. H. Hudson on Pangborn's latest work, esp. Die, The Craven City (author's collection). His commentary has been published in the otherwise undistinguished June issue of his fanzine, Alien Fwowup. I do not hold with this thesis myself; the entire matter of deep exegesis needs to be more carefully gone into. LeGuin is her usual charming mordant and disconcerting self in The Day Before The Revolution. The solemn word-painting in this exquisite portrait of a woman bomb thrower with a dicey heart is one that will remain with me long after I have forgotten the illo (is that one by Staffore?) which reaches hard for incisiveness but burns its fingers on the foreshortening-as-emotion. The Pohl  Kornbluth is several steps above competent, but disappointing through its very effectiveness. (See my letter in the March Glitterglumph titled 'The Long-distance Sadness of the Competent Runner.' R. C. Ritchie Dalton, Georgia Er... yes. Dear Editor, There is an old saying that all good things have an end. We of the sf world want to put off a mutation of our fiction toward vulnerability, dreading a final chapter for this genre. Surely, we say: let a hundred more flowers bloom; let the harvest outlast our day. Nonetheless, many complex factors make up sf and nourish it. No man has been able to pin it down -- who can assure us what is essential? Both Baen and Bova, as well as the rest of the staffs, must often be reminded how sf magazines have prevailed so long. Strangely, they persist for decades, though specialized -- and even general, like magazines have been both ingredient and binding glue since #. Suppose they are the vital link? If the magazines go down, admittedly the security and occupations of only a few could be spoiled. Established and veteran authors would continue with other markets; indeed the trends are proceeding now. But what if the magazines turned out to be the Goose that laid the Golden Eggs? Once they are killed, sf might dissolve into the general. No light would fall on its nature, only regret for seeing a wonder stifled. Furthermore, readers would lose the stimulation of new entertainments; fiction would lack the stimulus of new authors that operate in distinct varieties. Without the catalyst of dedicated magazines, sf might come apart, like a wire puzzle does when a key link is taken. Once such dismantling starts, no one can re-set any limits since the art remains a riddle from its origins. Far worse, its identity stands in peril. Identity looms more important than safe prosperity or larger than entertainment, stimulus to fresh departures. For once sf begins to lose its unique status, the lesser needs are driven in its wake. However, fate is not fixed. Although the field needs more periodicals, not less, they are holding on w'ell. Once choice comes upon readers, editors, writers alike: w hether (o save the arrangement or to drop the magazines and set a dark course. Who can tell the trouble that might lie along that uncharted path? The risk shows, but not any apparent gains. If people seek adventures they should ask for bolder experimental stories, not for revolts against our struggling magazines. John W. Andrews #I E. Foothill Dr. Santa Rosa, Calif. # # per word per Issue (Including name and address) or # Issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. malics Einslein sought? Send stamped, addressed envelope. Leepress, Rockport, Mass. #. #; 'Walership Down" (British), #; "Guide to Middle Earth", I .#. Catalog free. T-K more, Maryland #. Most complete listing for Sci-Fi Fantasy Occult Books and products. PO Box #G, Plattsburgh, New York #. #'? E. #nd Street, Duluth, Mn. #. to: S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Over # titles listed. Send # cents for one, # for next #, or # for four consecutive catalogs plus Silverberg's "Dying Inside" a # publisher's edition SF book. 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D., Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Manager Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Third in the author's magnificent and what would seem to have become open-ended series concerning the genially fratricidal Princes of Amber. (Earth is but a Shadow World, one of many cast by the Perfection that is Amber.) To ensure that all parties are current with the affairs of the one real World, Roger has included a prefatory Essay -- which alone will make this a collector's issue among Amberphiles! Arthur Rodney has become embroiled with the lowest element of human society -- sexual sublimators! A beautifully crafted little tale in which we are given a glimpse of the day-to-day life of a band of mercenary warriors of a truly different breed... An hilarious study in cross-cultural conflict and interstellar betrayal. It's really very funnyon the surface... This one is not so funny. The author says of it; "This story is about manipulation, film, and the image of an entire race, as typified in the living death of Iron Eyes Cody." Of Time and Space and a Bicycle Race. A psycho-social satire in which the nature of sexuality is explored -- in depth. Fusion. A non-verbal series. Black holes of less than stellar mass would seem to have an Uncertain future! (Show this one to your neighborhood physicist; it's not in the Learned Journals yet . ) Letters from Davis, Hill, Kelly, Pauls, Pournelle, Sargent, Woods Interior illustrations by Fabian, Freff, Gaughan, Pini tion, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. ed in the United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. 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In this regard I would like to quote the relevant portions of my Editorial in IF's final issue: But be of good cheer. The rowdy, fun-loving spirit I have striven to infuse into this magazine will not be lost, but will sound in clear if muted tones in a fusion of the best of two worlds -- the best of Galaxy, which has long stood for intellectual and esthetic pre-eminence, and the best of this magazine. And surely I don't have to tell you what IF is all about! m Here are a few of the contributions to that new magazine that otherwise would have appeared in Worlds of IF. The Alien Viewpoint of Dick Geis will continue to delight and enrage you on a bimonthly basis. The Editor's Page will also maintain a bimonthly presence, as will SF Calendar. Sign of the Unicorn, a new Amber novel by Roger Honor) will first see print in the new GalaxyIF. A new Mack Reynolds story. A new Chandler. A "Berserker." And (as the saying goes), much, much more! So let us make a virtue of our necessities. Heretofore Galaxy and Worlds of IF have each catered largely to a particular sub-set within the generality of science fiction readers. Now the task is simpler; to aim straight for the center, to create -- hopefully with the aid of massive reader feedback -- the ideal sf magazine. With a lot of help from my friends, I think I can do it. So welcome to Galaxy, incorporating Worlds of IF -- the best science fiction magazine in the World! -- Baen Gene Wolfe man very well; I was just seventeen. A flock of snow geese flew under us that day about noon. I remember looking over the side of the basket, and seeing them; and thinking that they looked like a pike-head. That was an omen, of course, but I did not pay any attention. It was clear, fall weather -- a trifle chilly. I remember that. It must have been about the mid-part of October. Good weather for the balloon. Clow would reach up every quarter hour or so with a few double handsful of straw for the brazier, and that was all it required. We cruised, usually, at about twice the height of a steeple. You have never been in one? Well, that shows how things have changed. Before the Fire-wights came, there was hardly any fighting at all. and free swords had to travel all over the continent looking for what there vas. A balloon was better than walking, believe me. Miles -- he was our captain in those days -- said that where there were three soldiers together, one was certain to put a shaft through a balloon; it was too big a target to resist, and that would show you where the armies were. No, we would not have been killed. You would have had to slit the thing .vide open before it would fall fast, and a little hole like the business end of a pike would make would just barely let you know it was there. The baskets do not swing, either, as people think. Why should they? They feel no wind -- they are .aveling with it. A man just seems to hang there, when he is up in one of them, and the world turns under him. He can hear everything -- pigs and chickens, and the squeak the windlass makes drawing water from a well. "Good flying weather," Clow said to me. I nodded. Solemnly, I suppose. "All the lift you want, in weather like this. The colder it is, the better she pulls. The heat from the fire doesn't like the chill, and tries to escape from it. That's what they say." Blond Bracata spat over the side. "Nothing in our bellies," she said, "that's what makes it lift. If we don't eat today you won't have to light the fire tomorrow -- I'll take us up myself." She was taller than any of us except Miles, and the heaviest of us all; but Miles would not allow for size when the food was passed out, so I suppose she was the hungriest too. Derek said: "We should have stretched one of that last bunch over the fire. That would have fetched a pot of stew, at the least." Miles shook his head. "There were too many." "They would have run like rabbits." "And if they hadn't?" "They had no armor." Unexpectantly, Bracata came in for the captain. "They had twentytwo men, and fourteen women. I counted them." "The women wouldn't fight." "I used to be one of them. I would have fought." Clow's soft voice added, "Nearly any woman will fight if she can get behind you." Bracata stared at him, not sure whether he was supporting her or not. She had her mitts on -- she was as good with them as anyone I have ever seen -- and I remember that I thought for an instant that she would go for Clow right there in the basket. We were packed in like Hedgings in the nest, and fighting, it w ould have taken at least three of us to throw' her out -- by which time she would have killed us all, I suppose. But she w'as afraid of Clow. I found out why later. She respected Miles, I think, for his judgment and courage, without being afraid of him. She did not care much for Derek either way. and of course I was hardly there at all as far as she was concerned. But she was just a little frightened by Clow. Clow was the only one I was not frightened by -- but that is another story too. "Give it more straw," Miles said. "We're nearly out." "We can't land in this forest." Clow shook his head and added straw to the fire in the brazier -- about half as much as he usually did. We were sinking toward what looked like a red and gold carpet. "We got straw out of them anyway," I said, just to let the others know' I was there. "You can always get straw," Clow told me. He had drawn a throwing spike, and was feigning to clean his nails with it. "Even from swineherds, who you'd think wouldn't have it. They'll get it to be rid of us." "Bracata's right," Miles said. He gave the impression that he had not heard Clow' and me. "We have to have food today." Derek snorted. "What if there are twenty?" "We stretch one over the fire. Isn't that what you suggested? And if it takes fighting, we fight. But we have to eat today." He looked at me. "What did I tell you when you joined us. Jerr? High pay or nothing? This is the nothing. Want to quit?" I said, "Not if you don't want me to." Clow w'as scraping the last of the straw from the bag. It was hardly a handful. As he threw it in the brazier Bracata asked, "Are we going to set down in the trees?" Clow shook his head and pointed. Aw ay in the distance I could see a speck of w hite on a hill. It looked too far. but the wind was taking us there, and it grew and grew' until we could see that it was a big house, all built of white brick, with gardens and outbuildings, and a road that ran up to the door. There are none like that left now, I suppose. w andings are the most exciting  j part of traveling by balloon, and sometimes the most unpleasant. If you are lucky, the basket stays upright. We were not. Our basket snagged and tipped over and w as dragged along by the envelope. which fought the wind and did not want to go down, cold though it was by then. If there had been a fire in the brazier still, I suppose we would have set the meadow ablaze. As it was, we were tumbled about like toys. Bracata fell on top of me, as heavy as stone: and she had the claws of her mits out. trying to dig them into the turf to stop herself, so that for a moment I thought I was going to be killed. Derek's pike had been charged, and the ratchet released in the confusion; the head went flying across the field, just missing a cow . By the time I recovered my breath and got to my feet. Clow had the envelope under control and was treading it down. Miles was up too, straightening his hauberk and sword-belt. "Look like a soldier," he called to me. "Where are your weapons?" A pincer-mace and my pike were all I had, and the pincer-mace had fallen out of the basket. After five minutes of looking. I found it in the tall grass, and went over to help ('low fold the envelope. When we were finished, we stuffed it in the basket and put our pikes through the rings on each side so we could carry it. By that time we could see men on horseback coming down from the big house. Derek said, "We won't be able to stand against horsemen in this Held." For an instant I saw Miles smile. Then he looked very serious. "We'll have one of those fellows over a tire in half an hour." Derek was counting, and so was I. Eight horsemen, with a cart following them. Several of the horsemen had lances, and I could see the sunlight winking on helmets and breastplates. Derek began pounding the butt of his pike on the ground to charge it. I suggested to Clow that it might look more friendly if we picked up the balloon and went to meet the horsemen, but he shook his head. "Why bother?" I he lirst of them had reached the fence around the field. He was silting a roan stallion that took it at a clean jump and came thundering up to us looking as big as a donjon on wheels. "Greetings," Miles called. "If this be your land, lord, we give thanks for your hospitality. We'd not have intruded, but our conveyance has exhausted its fuel." "You are welcome," the horseman called. He was as tall as Miles or taller, as well as I could judge, and as wide as Bracata. "Needs must, as they say, and no harm done." Three of the others had jumped their mounts over the fence behind him. The rest were taking down the rails so the cart could get through. "Have you straw, lord?" Miles asked. I thought it would have been better if he had asked for food. "If we could have a few bundles of straw, we'd not trouble you more." "None here," the horseman said, waving a mail-clad arm at the fields around us, "yet I feel sure my bailiff could find you some. Come up to the hall for a taste of meat and a glass of wine, and you can make your ascension from the terraee; the ladies would be delighted to see it. I'm certain. You're lloating swords. I take it?" "We are that," our captain affirmed. "but persons of good character nonetheless. We're called the Faithful Five -- perhaps you've heard of us? High-hearted, fiercefighting wind-warriors all, as it says on the balloon." A younger man, who had reined up next to the one Miles called "lord." snorted. "If that boy is high-hearted, or a fierce fighter either. I'll eat his breeks." Of course, I should not have done it. ! have been too mettlesome all my life, and it has gotten me in more trouble than I could tell you of if I talked till sunset, though it has been good to me too -- I would have spent my days following the plow, I suppose, if I had not knocked down Derek for what he called our goose. But you see how it was. Here I had been thinking of myself as a hard-bitten balloon soldier, and then to hear something like that. Anyway, I swung the pincer-mace overhand once I had a good grip on his stirrup. I had been afraid the extension spring was a bit weak, never having used one before, but it worked well; the pliers got him under the left arm and between the ear and the right shoulder, and would have cracked his neck for him properly if he had not been wearing a gorget. As it was. I jerked him off his horse pretty handily, and got out the little aniace that screwed into the mace handle. A couple of the other horsemen couched their lances, and Derek had a finger on the dogcatch of his pike; so all in all it looked as if there could be a proper fight, but "lord" (I learned afterwards that he was the Baron Ascolot) yelled at the young man I had pulled out of his saddle, and Miles yelled at me and grabbed my left wrist, and thus it all blew over. When we had tripped the release and gotten the mace open and retracted again. Miles said: "He will be punished, lord. Leave him to me. It will be severe, I assure you." "No, upon my oath," the baron declared. "It will teach my son to be less free with his tongue in the company of armed men. He has been raised at the hall. Captain, where everyone bends the knee to him. He must learn not to expect that of strangers." The cart rolled up just then, drawn by two fine mules -- either of them would have been worth my father's holding, I judged -- and at the baron's urging we loaded our balloon into it and climbed in after it ourselves, sitting on the fabric. The horsemen galloped off, and the cart driver cracked his lash over the mules' backs. "Quite a place," Miles remarked. He was looking up at the big house toward which we were making. I whispered to Clow, "A palace, I should say," and Miles overheard me, and said: "It's a villa, Jerr -- the unfortified country property of a gentleman. If there were a wall and a tower, it would be a castle, or at least a castellet." T here w'ere gardens in front, very beautiful as I remember, and a fountain. The road looped up before the door, and we got out and trooped into the hall, while the baron's man -- he was richer-dressed than anybody I had ever seen up till then, a fat man with white hair -- set two of the hostlers to watch our balloon while it was taken back to the stableyard. Venison and beef were on the table, and even a pheasant with all his feathers put back; and the baron and his sons sat with us and drank some wine and ate a bit of bread each for hospitality's sake. Then the baron said, "Surely you don't fly in the dark, captain?" "Not unless we must, lord." "Then w'ith the day drawing to a close, it's just as well for you that we've no straw'. You can pass the night with us, and in the morning I'll send my bailiff to the village with the cart. You'll be able to ascend at mid-morning, when the ladies can have a clear view of you as you go up." "No straw ?"our captain asked. "None, I fear, here. But they'll have aplenty in the village, never doubt it. They lay it in the road to silence the horses' hoofs when a woman's w'ith child, as I've seen many a time. You'll have a cartload as a gift from me, if you can use that much." The baron smiled as he said that; he had a friendly face, round and red as an apple. "Now lell me." (he went on) "how it is to be a floating sword. I always find other men's trades of interest, and it seems to me you follow one of the most fascinating of all. For example, how do you gauge the charge you will make your employer?" "We have two scales, lord," Miles began. I had heard all of that before, so I stopped listening. Bracata was next to me at table, so I had all I could do to get something to eat for myself, and I doubt I ever got a taste of the pheasant. By good luck, a couple of lasses -- the baron's daughters -- had come in, and one of them started curling a lock of Derek's hair around her finger, so that distracted him while he was helping himself to the venison, and Bracata .put an arm around the other and warned her of Men. If it had not been for that I would not have had a thing; as it w as. I stuffed myself on deer's meat until I had to loose my waistband. Flesh of any sort had been a rarity where I came from. I had thought that the baron might give us beds in the house, but when we had eaten and drunk all we could hold, the white-haired fat man led us out a side door and over to a wattle-walled building full of bunks -- I suppose it was kept for the extra laborers needed at harvest. It was not the palace bedroom I had been dreaming of; but it was cleaner than home, and there was a big fireplace down at one end with logs stacked ready by, so it was probably more comfortable for me than a bed in the big house itself would have been. Clow took out a piece of cherry wood, and started carving a woman in it. and Bracata and Derek lay dow n to sleep. I made shift to talk to Miles, but he was full of thoughts, silting on a bench near the hearth and chinking the purse (just like this one, it was) he had gotten from the baron; so I tried to sleep too. But I had had too much to cat to sleep so soon, and since it was still light out, I decided to walk around the villa and try to find somebody to chat with. The front looked too grand for me; I went to the back, thinking to make sure our balloon had suffered no hurt, and perhaps have another look at those mules. T here were three barns behind the house, built of stone up to height of my waist, and wood above that, and whitewashed. I walked into the nearest of them, not thinking about anything much besides my full belly until a big war horse w ith a white star on his forehead reached his head out of his stall and nuzzled at my cheek. I reached out and stroked his neck for him the way they like. He nickered, and I turned to have a better look at him. That was when I. saw w hat was in his stall. He was standing on a span or more of the cleanest. yellowest straw I had ever seen. I looked up over my head then, and there was a loft full of it up there. In a minute or so, I suppose it was, I was back in the building where we were to sleep, shaking Miles by the shoulder and telling him I had found all the straw anyone could ask for. He did not seem to understand, at first. "Wagon loads of straw. Captain." I told him. "Why every horse in the place has as much to lay him on as would carry us a hundred leagues." "All right," Miles told me. "Captain -- " "There's no straw here, Jerr. Not for us. Now be a sensible lad and get some rest." "But there is, Captain. I saw it. I can bring you back a helmetful." "Come here, Jerr," he said, and got up and led me outside. I thought he was going to ask me to show him the straw; but instead of going back to where the barns were, he took me away from the house to the top of a grassy knoll. "Look out there, Jerr. Far off. What do you see?" "Trees." I said. "There might be a river at the bottom of the valley; then more trees on the other side." "Beyond that." I looked to the horizon, where he seemed to be pointing. There were little threads of black smoke rising there, looking as thin as spider web at that distance. "What do you see?" "Smoke." "That's straw burning, Jerr. House-thatch. That's why there's no straw here. Gold, but no straw, because a soldier gets straw only where he isn't welcome. They'll reach the river there by sundown, and I'm told it can be forded at this season. Now' do you understand?" They came that night at moonrise.  It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me. Thus began Nine Princes in Amber, with the awakening of an amnesiac patient in a private sanitorium in upstate New York. Something about the arrangement seemed very wrong to him, so he contrived to escape, learning three things while he was about it: he was registered as Carl Corey; his next of kin was apparently a sister named Evelyn Flaumel, residing in Westchester; his condition was supposedly such that he should be unable to stand, let alone walk out. He departed, proceeding at once to the residence in Westchester. There he met Evelyn, saw that she was frightened, realized the opportunity this represented and engaged her in an ad lib bluffing session wherein he succeeded in convincing her that he had recovered his memory. During the course of this, he became convinced that she was indeed his sister. This stirred the return of other, peculiar memory fragments which he seized upon to strengthen his story. During the conversationhe learned that his name was really Corwin, that he was originally from a place called Amber and that there were numerous other siblings about, few of them kindly disposed toward him. The following day, during Evelyn's absence, he discovered a strange deck of Tarot-like cards in a concealed drawer in her desk. The major trumps, he quickly realized, were representations of the various family members -- himself among them. Studying them, he recognized the following individuals: Random -- wily, small, sharpnosed, laughing mouth, strawcolored hair, dressed in a Renaissance costume of orange, red and brown. Julian -- dark hair, blue eyes, passive expression, dressed in scaled white armor which looked as if it had been enameled. Caine -- swarthy, dark eyed, dressed all in satin of black and green, wearing a three-cornered hat. Eric -- big, dark hair and beard, dressed in a leather jacket and leggings, a plain cloak, high black boots. Benedict -- tall, thin, dour, long of jaw , hazel eyes and brown hair, clad in orange and yellow and brown. Gerard -- a huge, powerfully built man, clad in a light blue dressing gown and a black belt. Bleys -- red beard, red hair, blue eyes, clad in red and orange. Brand -- small, beardless, redhaired, dressed in green, mounted on a white horse. Flora (Evelyn) -- blonde, greeneyed. clad in green. Deirdre -- brunette, blue-eyed, dressed in black and silver. Fiona -- small, red-haired, greeneyed. Llewella -- green haired, grayeyed, clad in gray and green and lavender. -- All of them were very cold to the touch. Things happened quickly that day. Corwin answered the telephone and the caller proved to be his brother Random, in trouble and looking for help. He agreed to help him. Random arrived later that same day, pursued by not quite human beings whom they fought and dispatched. The following day, having also taken in Random as to the state of his memory, Corwin agreed to an attempt to reach Amber, driving EvelynFlora's car. The roadway altered, the world itself changed about them as Corwin drove. He realized that somehow Random was responsible for these effects -- that he was conveying them through something he called Shadowin order to. reach the real world. Amber. After an extremely eventful journey, they succeeded -- encountering en route their brother Julian, w'ho seemed to wish them somewhat less than well, and their sister Deirdre, whom they rescued from a bit of mischief. Then, in sight of Amber, Corwin confessed the true state of his memory. Deirdre and Random decided that the best possible remedy w'ould be for Corwin to walk the Pattern located in a city called Rebma, Amber's mirror image beneath the sea. This was done, and the Pattern restored most of Corwin's memory along with his power over Shadow. Corwin then drew upon the power of the Pattern to transport himself into Amber, where he confronted his brother Eric. Eric, he realized, had been responsible both for the original injury w hich had produced his amnesia and for his exile to the shadow-world. Earth. Eric was planning on taking the throne, left vacant by the long absence of their father Oberon, now presumed dead. Corwin and Eric fought an inconclusive duel, from which Corwin tied when palace guards arrived. Utilizing a deck of the family cards, which he then knew to be communication and transportation devices, Corwin went to his brother Bleys, whom he discovered to be in the process of putting together an army and a fleet of ships for purposes of assaulting Amber before Eric could take the throne. Corwin agreed to join him in this effort. They were later defeated in the military engagements which occurred. Bleys may or may not have perished in a fall from Kolvir, the mountain upon which Amber is situated. Corwin, then Eric's prisoner, was forced to participate in Eric's coronation, after which he was blinded and cast into the dungeons beneath Amber. He laid a curse upon Amber at that time. Years passed, during which his eye tissues slowly regenerated. He was later assisted in escaping from the dungeons by Dworkin -- his father's old adviser, the creator of the Trumps -- who was now' apparently quite mad. The book ends with Corwin sailing away from Amber: A demon wind propelled me east of the sun. The Guns of. Avalon is the story of Corwin's search for Avalon, one of the shadow images of Amber, where he had once ruled. He was aware that a polishing rouge used by jewelers in that place could be caused to ignite in Amber, where gunpowder and other known explosives would not. He intended to employ a different type of warfare in his attempt to wrest the throne from Eric. In the course of his search, he became involved in the troubles of a land called Lorraine, ruled by a who appeared to be one of his own former generals -- a man he had personally exiled from Avalon ages before. The ills of this land, Lorraine, were strangely like those which now lay upon Amber, and he felt constrained to remain for a time and help to combat them. The presence of a woman, also named Lorraine, added to his resolve in this respect. The creatures responsible for the situation were later vanquished at (he center of their place of power, but not before Corwin was recognized by their leader and named by him as the one who had provided them entry to the world. Lorraine was subsequently slain by the man with whom she had run off following a disagreement with Corwin. Corwin and Ganelon proceeded to Avalon, which recently had faced similar problems of its own. The situation had been settled, however, by the Protector of Avalon, who proved to be Corwin's elder brother Benedict -- who had lost his right arm in that final battle. Corwin and Ganelon remained in Avalon as Benedict's guests. There Corwin met a girl named Dara who claimed to be Benedict's greatgranddaughter. She was anxious to learn of Amber and to visit there. Corwin told her of the Pattern, the Trumps and of Shadow -- things she claimed Benedict had never properly explained to her. Later, Corwin and Dara became casually involved. Corwin obtained the chemicals he sought, and on preparing to depart Avalon was advised by Ganelon that there were several fresh corpses in the woods nearby. Deciding not to seek further trouble, Corwin and Ganelon did nothing about this situation. They departed quickly, heading for an eventual meeting in Brussels with an arms merchant Corwin had known when he had lived on the shadow Earth. They were pursued by Benedict, and Corwin assumed the reason to be his actions with Dara. When he faced Benedict in combat beside the black road, however, Benedict disavowed any knowledge of the existence of Dara and accused Corwin of the murder of his retainers. Corwin managed to best Benedict by means of a ruse involving the black road itself -- a phenomenon somehow connected with the troubles of Amber, Lorraine and Avalon, cutting through a great number of the shadow worlds, spreading ill wherever it touched. Leaving Benedict bound and unconscious, Corwin summoned Gerard via his Trump to attend to him. He then proceeded to Earth, obtained arms and ammunition, recruited a shadow assault force and returned to Amber for purposes of disposing of Eric. He arrived in the middle of a battle, however. Amber was under attack by creatures which had reached it over the black road. He joined with the forces of Amber in repelling the attack. Eric was fatally injured in the fighting. Before his death, Eric gave Corwin the Jewel of Judgment, the weapon he had used against him in the attack Corwin and Bleys had commanded years before. As he lay dying, he partly instructed Corwin as to its attunement. Dara then appeared on the scene, advanced into the city, reached the Pattern and walked it -- an ability supposedly only possessed by those of the blood of Amber. She underwent peculiar transformations during this passage. Completing the Pattern, she announced that Amber would be destroyed. Then she vanished, giving no reason for this threat. I T ignored the questions in the I eyes of the groom as I lowered the grisly parcel and turned the horse in for care and maintenance. My cloak could not really conceal the nature of its contents as I slung the guts over my shoulder and stamped off toward the rear entrance to the palace. Hell would soon be demanding its paycheck. I skirted the exercise area and made my w ay to the trail that led toward the southern end of the palace gardens. Fewer eyes along that route. I would still be spotted, but it would be a lot less awkward than going in the front way where things are always busy. Damn. And again, damn. Of troubles I considered myself amply possessed. But those w ho have do seem to get. Some spiritual form of compound interest, I suppose. There were a few idlers beside the fountain at the far end of the garden. Also, a couple guards were passing among the bushes near the trail. The guards saw me coming, held a brief discussion and looked the other way. Prudent. Me. back less than a week. Most things, still unresolved. The court of Amber, full of suspicion and unrest. This, now: a death to further jeopardize the brief, unhappy prereign of Corw in I: me. Time now to do something I should have done right away. But there had been so many things to do, from the very first. It was not as if I had been nodding, as I saw it. I had assigned priorities and acted on them. Now, though... I crossed the garden, out of the shade and into the slanting sunlight. I sw'ung up the wide, curving stair. A guard snapped to attention as I entered the palace. I made for the rear stairway, then up to the second floor. Then the third. From the right, my brother Random stepped out of his suite and into the hallway. "Corwin!" he said, studying my face. "What's the matter? I saw you from the balcony and -- " "Inside." I said, gesturing with my eyes. "We are going to have a private conference. Now." He hesitated, regarding my burden. "Let's make it two rooms up," he said. "Okay? Vialle's in here." "All right." He led the way, opened the door. I entered the small sitting room, sought a likely spot, dropped the body. Random stared at the bundle. "What am I supposed to do?" he asked . "Unwrap the goodies," I said, "and take a look." He knelt and undid the cloak. He folded it back. "Dead all right," he observed. "What's the problem?" "You did not look closely enough," I said. "Peel back an eyelid. Open the mouth and look at the teeth. Feel the spurs on the backs of the hands. Count the joints in the fingers. Then you tell me about the problem." He began doing these things. As soon as he looked at the hands he stopped and nodded. "All right," he said. "I remember." "Remember out loud." "It was back at Flora's place..." "That was where I first saw anyone like this," I said. "They were after you, though. I never did find out why." "That's right," he said. "I never got a chance to tell you about it. We weren't together all that long. Strange... Where did this one come from?" I hesitated, torn between pushing him for his story and telling him mine. Mine won out because it was mine and very immediate. I sighed and sank into a chair. "We've just lost us another brother," I said. "Caine is dead. I got there a bit too late. That thing -- person -- did it. I wanted it alive, for obvious reasons. But it put up quite a fight. I didn't have much of a choice." He whistled softly, seated himself in the chair opposite me. "I see." he said, very softly. I studied his face. Was that the faintest of smiles waiting in the wings to enter and meet my own? Quite possibly. "No," I said flatly. "If it were otherwise, I would have arranged for a lot less doubt as to my innocence. I'm telling you what really happened." "All right," he said. "Where is Caine?" "Under a layer of sod, near the Grove of the Unicorn." "That looks suspicious right there." he said. "Or will. To the others." I nodded. "I know. I had to hide the body and cover it in the meantime, though. I couldn't just bring him back and start parrying questions. Not when there were important facts waiting for me, in your head." "Okay," he said. "I don't know how important they are, but they're yours. But don't leave me hanging, huh? How did this thing happen?" "It was right after lunch," I said. "I had eaten down at the harbor with Gerard. Afterward, Benedict brought me topside through his Trump. Back in my rooms, I found a note which apparently had been slipped in under the door. It requested a private meeting, later in the afternoon, at the Grove of the Unicorn. It was signed 'Caine'." "Have you still got the note?" "Yes." I dug it out of my pocket and passed it to him. "Here." . He studied it and shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "It could be his writing -- if he were in a hurry -- but I don't think it is." I shrugged. I took the note back, folded it, put it away. "Whatever, I tried to reach him with his Trump, to save myself the ride. But he wasn't receiving. I guessed it was to maintain secrecy as to his whereabouts, if it was all that important. So I got a horse and rode on down." "Did you tell anyone where you were going?" "Not a soul. I did decide to give the horse a workout, though, so I rode along at a pretty good clip. I didn't see it happen, but I saw him lying there as I came into the wood. His throat had been cut, and there was a disturbance off in the bushes some distance away. I rode the guy down, jumped him, fought with him, had to kill him. We didn't engage in any conversation while this was going on." "You're sure you got the right guy?" "As sure as you can be under such circumstances. His trail went back to Caine. He had fresh blood on his garments." "Might have been his own." "Look again. No wounds. I broke his neck. Of course I remembered where I had seen his like before. so I brought him right to you. Before you tell me about it though, there was one more thing -- just for a clincher." I withdrew the second note, passed it over. "The creature had this on its person. I presume it had removed it from Caine." Random read it, nodded and handed it back. "From you, to Caine, asking to be met there. Yes, I see. Needless to say..." "Needless to say," I finished. "And it does look a bit like my writing -- at first glance, anyway." "I wonder what would have happened if you had gotten there first?" "Probably nothing," I said. "Alive and looking bad -- that seems how they wanted me. The trick was to get us there in the proper order, and I didn't hurry quite enough to miss what is bound to follow." He nodded. "Granting the tight scheduling," he said, "it had to be someone on the scene, here in the palace. Any ideas?" I chuckled and reached for a cigarette. I lit it and chuckled again. "I'm just back. You have been here all along," I said. "Which one hates me the most these days?" "That is an embarrassing question, Corwin," he stated. "Everyone's down on you for something. Ordinarily, I would nominate Julian. Only it doesn't seem to hold up here." "Why not?" "He and Caine got along very well. For years now. They had been looking out for each other, hanging around together. Pretty thick. Julian is cold and petty and just as nasty as you remember. But if he liked anybody, he liked Caine. I don't think he'd do it to him, not even to get at you. After all, he could probably have found plenty of other ways if that was all he wanted." I sighed. "Who's next?" "I don't know. I just don't know." "Okay. How do you read the reactions to this?" "You're screwed, Corwin. Everyone is going to think you did it, no matter what you say." I nodded at the corpse. Random shook his head. "That could easily be some poor clod you dug up out of Shadow to take the blame." "I know," I said. "Funny, coming back to Amber as I did, I arrived at an ideal time for positioning myself advantageously." "A perfect time," Random agreed. "You didn't even have to kill Eric to get what you wanted. That was a stroke of luck." "Yes. Still, it is no secret that (hat is what I came to do, and it is only a matter of time before my l roops -- foreign, specially armed and quartered here -- are going to start provoking some very bad feelings. Only the presence of an exlernal threat has saved me from that so far. And then there are the things I am suspected of having done before my return -- like murdering Benedict's retainers. Now this..." "Yes," Random said, "I saw it coming as soon as you told me. When you and Bleys attacked years ago, Gerard deployed part of the lleet so that it was out of your way. Caine, on the other hand, engaged # Ballanttne  #I Book# A Division of Random House, Inc. Lots of delectable items on the sciencefiction list this month... great for gifts andor for holiday reading. The wags tell us that December is a so-so month for book sales. But we're betting a bundle that our decern ber goodies will be grabbed up so fast they'll be back for second printings before the turn of the year. So don't wait for the books to disappear off the shelves... get your copies now... and beat the rush! Baiian tine's special of the month is an old friend wrapped up in a spariding new package. One of the first books the house published when it opened shop M. Kornbluth. 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But she has also written what we think is one of the finest post-holocaust novels ever: The Long Tomorrow -- when men of science fall into disgrace and technology Is against the law... when the #th Amendment to the Constitution says: "No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America." "By far Leigh Brackett's best novel... a greet work of science fiction," said the NY Times -- and we certainly do agree! Next month we'll have a wrap-up on # and a look ahead to #, a year that promises to be super for science fiction here at Ballantine. Live Long and Prosper! you with his vessels and scuttled you. Now that he is gone, I imagine you will put Gerard in command of the entire fleet." "Who else? He is the only man for the job." "Nevertheless..." "Nevertheless. Admitted. If I were going to kill any one person to strengthen my position, Caine would be the logical choice. That's the real, damning truth." "How do you propose handling this?" "Tell everyone what happened and try to discover who was behind it. Any better suggestions?" "I've been trying to think how I could alibi you. But it does not look promising." I shook my head. "You are too close to me. No matter how good we made it sound, it would probably have the opposite effect." "Have you considered admitting to it?" "Yes. But self-defense is out. With a cut throat, it had to be a matter of surprise. And I have no stomach for starting off with the alternative: hoke up some evidence he was up to something rotten and say I did it for the good of Amber. I flatly refuse to take on fake guilt under those terms. I'd wind up with a bad odor that way, too." "But with a real tough reputation." "It's the wrong kind of tough for the sort of show I want to run. No, that's out." "That covers everything, then -- just about." "What do you mean 'just about'?" He studied his left thumbnail through slitted eyes. "Well, it occurs to me that if there is anyone else you are anxious to get out of the picture, now is the time to consider that a frame can often be shifted." I thought about it and finished my cigarette. "Not bad," I said, "but I can't spare any more brothers at the moment. Not even Julian. Anyhow, he's the least frameable." "It need not be family," he said. "Plenty of noble Amberites around with possible motives. Take Sir Reginald -- " "Forget it. Random! The reframing is out, too." "Okay. I've exhausted my little gray cells, then." "Not the ones in charge of memory, I hope." "All right." He sighed. He stretched. He got to his feet, stepped over the room's other occupant and made his way to the window. Drawing back the drapes, he stared out for a time. "All right," he repeated. "There's a lot to tell..." Then Random remembered out loud and at length... II t#hile sex heads a great yy number of lists, we all have other things we like to do in between. With me, Corwin, it's drumming, being up in the air and gambling -- in no special order. Well, maybe soaring has a little edge -- in gliders, balloons and certain variations -- but mood has a lot to do with that too, you know. I mean, ask me another time and I might say one of the others. Depends on what I want most at the moment. Anyway, I was here in Amber some years ago. Not doing much of anything. Just visiting and being a nuisance. Dad was still around, and when I noticed that he was getting into one of his grumpy moods, I decided it was time to take a walk. A long one. I had often noticed that his fondness for me tended to increase as an inverse function of my proximity. He gave me a fancy riding crop for a goingaway present -- to hasten the process of affection, I suppose. Still, it was a very nice crop -- silver-chased, beautifully tooled -- and I made good use of it. I had decided to go looking for an assemblage of all my simple pleasures in one small nook of Shadow. It was a long ride -- I will not bore you with the details -- and it was pretty far from Amber, as such things go. This time, I was not looking for a place where I would be especially important. That can get either boring or difficult fairly quickly, depending on how responsible you want to be. I wanted to be an irresponsible nonentity and just enjoy myself. Texorami was a wide open port city, with sultry days and long nights, lots of good music, gambling around the clock, duels every morning and in-between mayhem for those who couldn't wait. And the air currents were fabulous. I had a little red sail plane I used to go sky surfing in, every couple days. It was the good life. I played drums till all hours in a basement spot up the river where the walls sweated almost as much as the customers and the smoke used to wash around the lights like streams of milk. When I was done playing I'd go find some action, women or cards usually. And that was it for the rest of the night. Damn Eric, anyway! That reminds me again... He once accused me of cheating at cards, did you know that? And that's about the only thing I wouldn't cheat at. I take my card playing seriously. I'm good and I'm also lucky. Eric was neither. The trouble with him was that he was good at so many things he wouldn't admit even to himself there were some things other people could do better. If you kept beating him at anything you had to be cheating. He started a nasty argument over it one night -- could have gotten serious -- but Gerard and Caine broke it up. Give Caine that. He took my part that time. Poor guy... Hell of a way to go, you know? His throat... Well. Anyhow. there I was in Texorami, making music and women, winning at cards and jockeying around the sky. Palm trees and night-blooming wallflowers. Lots of good port smells -- spices, coffee, tar, salt -- you know. Gentlefolk, merchants and peons -- the same straights as in most other places. Sailors and assorted travelers passing in and out. Guys like me living around the edges of things. I spent a little over two years in Texorami, happy. Really. Not much contact with the others. Sort of postcard-like hellos via the Trumps every now and then, and that was about it. Amber was pretty much off nty mind. All this changed one night when I was sitting there with a full house and the guy across from me was trying to make up his mind whether or not I was bluffing. The Jack of Diamonds began talking to me. Yes, that is how it started. I was in a weird frame of mind anyway. I had just finished a couple very hot sets and was still kind of high. Also, I was physically strung out, from a long day's gliding and not much sleep the night before. I decided later that it must be our mental quirk associated with the Trumps that make me see it that way when someone was trying to reach me and I had cards in my hand -- any cards. Ordinarily, of course, we get the message emptyhanded, unless we are doing the calling. It could have been that my subconscious -- which was kind of footloose at the time -- just seized on the available props out of habit. Later, though, I had cause to wonder. Really, I just don't know. The Jack said, "Random." Then its face blurred and it said, "Help me." I began getting a feel of the personality by then, but it was weak. The whole thing was very weak. Then the face rearranged itself and I saw that I was right. It was Brand. He looked like hell, and he seemed to be chained or tied to something. "Help me," he said again. "I'm here," I said. "What's the matter?" "... Prisoner," he said, and something else that I couldn't make out. "Where?" I asked. He shook his head at that. "Can't bring you through," he said. "No Trumps, and I am too weak. You will have to come the long way around..." I did not ask him how he was managing it without my Trump. Finding out where he was seemed of First importance. I asked him how I could locate him. "Look very closely," he said. "Remember every feature. I may only be able to show you once. Come armed, too..." Then I saw the landscape -- over his shoulder, out a window, over a battlement -- I can't be sure. It was far from Amber, somewhere where the shadows go mad. Farther than I like to go. Stark, with shifting colors. Fiery. Day without a sun in the sky. Rocks that glided like sailboats across the land. Brand there in some sort of tower -- a small point of stability in that flowing scene. I remembered it, all right. And I remembered the presence coiled about the base of that tower. watch-thing, it seemed -- too bright for me to make out its outline, to guess its proper size. Then it all just went away. Instant off. And there I was, staring at the Jack of Diamonds again, with the guy across from me not knowing whether to be mad at my long distraction or concerned that I might be having some sort of sick spell. I closed up shop with that hand and went home. I lay stretched out on my bed, smoking and thinking. Brand had still been in Amber when I had departed. Later though, when I had asked after him, no one had any idea as to his whereabouts. Fie had been having one of his melancholy spells, had snapped out of it one day and ridden off. And that was that. No messages either -- either way. He wasn't answering, he wasn't talking. I tried to figure every angle. He was smart, damn smart. Possibly the best mind in the family. He was in trouble and he had called me. Eric and Gerard were more the heroic types and would probably have welcomed the adventure. Caine would have gone out of curiosity. I think. Julian, to look better than the rest of us and to score points with Dad. Or, easiest of all, Brand could have called Dad himself. Dad would have done something about it. But he had called me. Why? It occurred to me then that maybe one or more of the others had been responsible for his circumstances. If, say. Dad was beginning to favor him... Well. You know. Eliminate the positive. And if he did call Dad, he would look like a weakling. So I suppressed my impulse to yell for reinforcements. He had called me, and it was quite possible I would be cutting his throat by letting anyone back in Amber in on the fact that he had gotten the message out. Okay. What was in it for me? If it involved the succession and he had truly become fair-haired, I figured that I could do a lot worse than give him this to remember me by. And if it did not... There were all sorts of other possibilities. Perhaps he had stumbled onto something going on back home, something it would be useful to know about. I was even curious as to (lie means he had employed for bypassing the Trumps. So it was curiosity. I'd say, that made me decide to go it alone and try to rescue him. I dusted off my own Trumps and tried reaching him again. As you might expect, there was no response. I got a good night's sleep then and tried one more time in the morning. Again, nothing. Okay, no sense waiting any longer. I cleaned up my blade, ate a big meal and got into some rugged clothes. I also picked up a pair of dark, polaroid goggles. Didn't know how they would work there, but that warden-thing had been awfully bright -- and it never hurts to try anything extra you can think of. For that matter, I also took a gun. I had a feeling it would be worthless, and I was right. But, like I said, you never know till you try. The only person I said good-by to was another drummer, because I stopped to give him my set before I left. Then I went on down to the hangar, got the sail plane ready, went aloft and caught a proper current. It seemed a neat way to do it. I don't know' whether you've ever glided through Shadow, but -- No? Well, I headed out over the sea till the land was only a dim line to the north. Then I had the waters go cobalt beneath me, rear up and shake sparkly beards. The wind shifted. I turned. I raced the waves shoreward beneath a darkening sky... Texorami was gone when I returned to the rivermouth, replaced by miles of swamp. I rode the currents inward, crossing and recrossing the river at new twists and kinks it had acquired. Gone were the piers, the trails, the traffic. The trees were high. Clouds massed in the west, pink and pearl and yellow. The sun phased from orange through red to yellow. You shake your head? The sun was the price of the cities, you see. In a hurry, I depopulate -- or rather, go the elemental route. At that altitude artifacts would have been distracting. Shading and texture becomes everything for me. That's what I meant about gliding it being a bit different. So, I bore to the west till the woods gave way to surface green, lightening the while, dispersing, breaking to brown, tan, yellow. Light and crumbly then, splotched. The price of that was a storm. I rode it out, as much as I could, till (he lightnings forked nearby and I feared that the gusts were getting to be too much for the little glider. I toned it down fast then, but got more green below as a result. Still, I pulled it out of the storm with a yellow sun firm and bright at my back. After a time, I got it to go desert beneath me again, stark and rolling. Then the sun shrank and strands of cloud whipped past its face, erasing it bit by bit. That was the shortcut that took me farther from Amber than I had been in a long while. No sun then, but the light remained, just as bright but eerie now, directionless. It tricked my eyes, it screwed up perspective. I dropped lower, limiting my range of vision. Soon large rocks came into view, and I fought for the shapes I remembered. Gradually, these occurred. The buckling, flowing effect was easier to achieve under these conditions. but its production was physically disconcerting. It made it even more difficult to judge my effectiveness in guiding the glider. I got lower than I thought I was and almost collided with one of the rocks. Finally, though, the smokes rose and flames danced about as I remembered them -- conforming to no particular pattern, just emerging here and there from crevasses, holes, cave mouths. Colors began to misbehave as I remembered from my brief view. Then came the actual motion of the rocks -- drifting. sailing, like rudderless boats in a place where they wring out rainbows. By then, the air currents had gone crazy. One updraft after another, like fountains. I fought them as best I could, but knew I could not hold things together much longer at that altitude. I rose a considerable distance, forgetting everything for a time while trying to stabilize the craft. When I looked down again, it was like viewing a freeform regatta of black icebergs. The rocks were racing around, clashing together, backing off, colliding again, spinning, arcing across the open spaces, passing among one another. Then I was slammed about, forced down, forced up -- and I saw a strut give way. I gave the shadows their final nudge, then looked again. The tower had appeared in the distance. something brighter than ice or aluminum stationed at its base. T hat final push had done it. I realized that just as I felt the winds start a particularly nasty piece of business. Then several cables snapped and I was on my way down -- like riding a waterfall. I got the nose up, brought it in low and wild, saw where we were headed and jumped at the last moment. The poor glider was pulverized by one of those peripatetic monoliths. I felt worse about that than I did about the scrapes, rips and lumps I collected. Then I had to move quickly, because a hill was racing toward me. We both veered, fortunately in different directions. I hadn't the faintest notion as to their motive force, and at first I could see no pattern to their movements. The ground varied from warm to extremely hot underfoot, and along with the smoke and occasional jets of llame, nasty smelling gases were escaping from numerous openings in the ground. I hurried toward the tower, following a necessarily irregular course. It took a long while to cover the distance. Just how long, I was uncertain, as I had no way of keeping track of the time. By then, though, I was beginning to notice some interesting regularities. First, the larger stones moved at a greater velocity than the smaller ones. Second, they seemed to be orbiting one another -- cycles within cycles w ithin cycles, larger about smaller, none of them ever still. Perhaps the prime mover was a dust mote or a single molecule -- somewhere. I had neither time nor desire to indulge in any attempt to determine the center of the affair. Keeping this in mind, I did manage to observe as I went, though, enough so that I was able to anticipate a number of their collisions well in advance. So Childe Random to the dark tower came, yeah, gun in one hand, blade in the other. The goggles hung about my neck. With all the smoke and confused lighting, I wasn't about to don them until it became absolutely necessary. Now, whatever the reason, the rocks avoided the tower. While it seemed to stand on a hill, I realized as I approached that it would be more correct to say that the rocks had scooped out an enormous basin just short of it. I could not tell from my side, however, whether the effect was that of an island or a peninsula. I dashed through the smoke and rubble, avoiding the jets of flame that leapt from the cracks and holes. Finally, I scrambled up the slope, removing myself from the courseway. Then, for several moments, I clung at . spot just below any line of sight from the tower. I checked my weapons, controlled my breathing and put on the goggles. Everything set, I went over the top and came up into a crouch. Yes. the shades worked. And yes, the beast was waiting. It was a fright all right, because in some ways it was kind of beautiful. It had a snake body as big around as a barrel, with a head sort of like a massive claw hammer, but kind of tapered to the snout end. Eyes of a very pale green. And it was clear as glass, with very faint. line lines seeming to indicate scales. Whatever flowed in its veins was reasonably clear, also. You could look right into it and see its organs -- opaque or cloudy as the case might be. You could almost be distracted by watching the thing function. And it had a dense mane, like bristles of glass -- about the head and collaring its gullet. Its movement when it saw me, raised that head and slithered forward, was like flowing water -- living water it seemed, a bedless river without banks. What almost froze me, though, was that I could see into its stomach. There was a partly digested man in it. I raised the gun, aimed at the nearest eye and squeezed the trigger. I already told you it didn't work. So I threw the gun, leaped to my left and sprang in on its right side, going for its eye with my blade. You know how hard it can be to kill things built along reptilian lines. I decided immediately to try to blind the thing and hack off its tongue as the first order of business. Then, being more than a little fast on my feet, I might have any number of chances to lay in some good ones about the head until I decapitated it. Then let it tie itself in knots till it stopped. I was hoping, too, that it might be sluggish because it was still digesting someone. If it was sluggish then, I was glad that I hadn't stopped by earlier. It drew its head out of the path of my blade and snapped down over it while I was still off balance. That snout glanced across my chest, and it felt as if I had been hit by a massive hammer. It knoeked me sprawling. I kept on rolling to get out of range, coming up short near the edge of the embankment. I recovered my footing there while it unwound itself, dragged a lot of weight in my direction and then reared up and cocked its head again, about fifteen feet above me. I know damn well Gerard would have chosen that moment to attack. The big bastard would have strode forward with that monster blade of his and cut the thing in half. Then it would probably have fallen on him and writhed all over him, and he'd have come away with a few bruises. Maybe a bloody nose. Benedict would not have missed the eye. He would have had one in each pocket by then and be playing football with the head while composing a footnote to Clausewitz. But they are genuine hero types. Me, I just stood there holding the blade point upward, both hands on the hilt, my elbows on my hips, my head as far back out of the way as possible. I would much rather have run and called it a day. Only I knew that if I tried it, that head would drop down and smear me. Cries from within the tower indicated that I had been spotted, but I was not about to look away to see what was going on. Then I began cursing the thing. I wanted it to strike and get it over with, one way or the other. When it finally did, I shuffled my lect, twisted my body and swung the point into line with my target. My left side was partly numbed by the blow, and I felt as if I had been driven a foot into the ground. ;  wf w  w w f   w ; Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher  I ;; novels we have Alan Burt Akers, #; today's inheritor of the mantle ; ; of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  ; Prescot on the marvel planet !; Kregen. Fully illustrated, too! ;i (UY #I #-SI .#) ;! Brian M. Stableford writes ; literary space opera. His tales of Grainger and the Hooded Swan ; win constant review credits. ; ' the best as Grainger descends ;  to the stormy surface of a ;j planetary giant. ( UQ#-#C ) ;  in its first paperback edition -- I; ;  written by a Space Center engiI ; ; neer who really knows -- fated to !; be a classic. The Kelly Freas #; cover will win your heart! l! ;; (UYI #-SI. #) f ; ; Goulart -- need we say more? I I Goulart's fans will love his new I ! whacky wonder novel of the ;  I : pesthole planet, Malagra. ;! ( UQ#-#C ) ;j ; first non-fiction special -- by I ; I John Norman, author of the #;  what an sf mind can do put to ! ; ; ' the problem of enhancing ! ;; sexual pleasure. (UJt#-#. #) #; Somehow, I managed to remain upright. Yes, I had done everything perfectly. The maneuver had gone exactly as I had hoped and planned. Except for the beast's part. It wasn't cooperating by producing the appropriate death throes. In fact, it was beginning to rise. It took my blade with it, too. The hilt protruded from its left eye socket, the point emerged like another bristle amid the mane on the back of its head. I had a feeling that the offensive team had had it. At that moment, figures began to em erge -- slow ly , ca u t iou sly -- from an opening at the base of the tower. They were armed and ugly looking, and I had a feeling that they were not on my side of the disagreement. Okay. I know when it is time to fold and hope for a better hand another day. "Brand!" I shouted. "It's Random! I can't get through! Sorry!" Then I turned, ran and leaped back over the edge, down into the place where the rocks did their unsettling things. I wondered whether I had chosen the best time to descend. Like so many things, the answer was yes and no. t was not the sort of jump I I would make for many reasons other than those which prevailed. I came down alive, but that seemed (he most that could be said for it. I was stunned, and for a long while I thought I had broken my ankle. The thing that got me moving again was a rustling sound from above and the rattle of gravel about me. When I readjusted the goggles and looked up, I saw that the beast had decided to come down and finish the job. It was winding its phantom way down the slope, the area about its head having darkened and opaqued since I had skewered it upstairs. I sat up. I got to my knees. I tried my ankle, couldn't use it. Nothing around to serve as a crutch either. Okay. I crawled then. Away. What else was there to do? Gain as much ground as I could and think hard while I was about it. Salvation was a rock -- one of the smaller, slower ones, only about the size of a moving van. When I saw it approaching, it occurred to me that here was transportation if I could make it aboard. Maybe some safety, too. The faster, really massive ones appeared to get the most abuse. This in mind, I watched the big ones that accompanied my own, estimated their paths and velocities, tried to gauge the movement of the entire system, readied myself for the moment, the effort. I also listened to the approach of the beast, heard the cries of the troops from the edge of the bluff, wondered w'hether anyone up there was giving odds on me and what they might be if they were. When the time came I went. I got past the first big one without any trouble, but had to wait for the next one to go by. I took a chance in crossing the path of the final one. Had to, to make it in time. I made it to the right spot at the right moment, caught on to the holds I had been eyeing and was dragged maybe twenty feet before I could pull myself up off the ground. Then I hauled my way to ils uncomfortable top, sprawled (here and looked back. It had been close. Still was, for that matter, as the beast was pacing me, its one good eye following the spinning big ones. From overhead, I heard a disappointed wail. Then the guys started down the slope, shouting what I took to be encouragement to the creature. I commenced massaging my ankle. I tried to relax. The brute crossed over, passing behind the first big rock as it completed another orbit. How far could I shift through Shadow before it reached me? I wondered. True, there was constant movement, a changing of textures... The thing waited for the second rock . slithered by behind it, paced me again, drew nearer. Shadow, Shadow, on the wing... The men w ere almost to the base of the slope by then. The beast was waiting for its opening -- the next time around -- past the inner satellite. I knew that it was capable of rearing high enough to snatch me from my perch... Come alive and smear that thing  as i spun and glided, I caught hold of the stuff of Shadow, sank into the feel of it, worked with the textures, possible to probable to actual, felt it coming with the finest the appropriate moment... It came in from the beast's blind side, of course. A big mother of a rock, careening along like a semi out of control... It would have been more elegant to mash it between two of them. However. I hadn't the time for luiessc. I simply ran it over and left it there, thrashing in the granite traffic. Moments later, however, inexplicably, the mashed and mangled body rose suddenly above the ground and drifted skyward, twisting. It kept going, buffeted by the winds, dwindling, dwindling, gone. My own rock bore me away, slowly, steadily. The entire pattern was drifting. The guys from the lower then went into a huddle and decided to pursue me. They moved away from the base of the slope, began to make their way across the plain. But this was no real problem, I felt. I would ride my stony mount through Shadow, leaving them worlds away. This was by far the easiest course of action open to me. They would doubtless have been more difficult to take by surprise than the beast. After all, this was their land; they were wary and unmaimed. I removed the goggles and tested my ankle once more. I stood for a moment. It was very sore, but it bore my weight. I reclined once more and turned my thoughts to what had occurred. I had lost my blade and I was now in less than top shape. Rather than go on with the venture under these conditions, I knew that I was doing the safest, w isest thing by getting the hell out. I had gained enough knowledge of the layout and the conditions so that my. chances would be better next time around. All right... The sky brightened above me, the colors and shadings lost something of their arbitrary, meandering habit. The flames began to subside about me. Good. Clouds started to find their ways across the sky. Excellent. Soon a localized glow began behind a cloudbank. Superb. When it went away, a sun would hang once again in the heavens. I looked back and was surprised to see that I was still being pursued. However, it could easily be that I had not dealt properly with their analogues for this slice of Shadow. It is never good to assume that you have taken care of everything when you are in a hurry. So... I shifted again. The rock gradually altered its course, shifted its shape, lost its satellites, moved in a straight line toward what was to become the west. Above me, the clouds dispersed and a pale sun shone dou n. We picked up speed. That should have taken care of everything right there. I had positively come into a different place. But it had not. When I looked again, they were still coming. True, I had gained some distance on them. But the party trooped right along alter me. Well, all right. Things like that can sometimes happen. There were of course two possibilities. My mind still being more than a little disturbed from all that had just occurred, I had not performed ideally and had drawn them along with me. Or, I had maintained a constant where I should have suppressed a variable -- that is. shifted into a place and unconsciously required that the pursuit element be present. Different guys then, but still chasing me. I rubbed my ankle some more. The sun brightened toward orange. A wind out of the north raised a screen of dust and sand and hung it at my back, removing the gang from my sight. I raced on into the west, where a line of mountains had now grown up. Time was in a distortion phase. My ankle felt a little better. I rested awhile. Mine was reasonably comfortable, as rocks go. No sense turning it into a hellride w'hen everything seemed to be proceeding smoothly. I stretched out, hands behind my head, and watched the mountains draw nearer. I th 'Ught about Brand and the tower. That was the place all right. Everything was just as it had been in the glimpse he had given me. Except for the guards, of course. I decided that I would cut through the proper piece of Shadow, recruit a cohort of my own, then go back and give them hell. Yes, then everything would be line... After a time, I stretched, rolled over onto my stomach and looked back. Damned if they weren't still following me! They had even gained some. Naturally, I got angry. To hell with flight! They were asking for it, and it was time they got it. I rose to my feet. My ankle was only half-sore, a little numb. I raised my arms and looked for the shadows I wanted. I found them. S lowly, the rock swung out from its straight course into an arc. turning off to the right. The curve tightened. I swung through a parabola and headed back toward them, my velocity gradually increasing as I went. No time to raise a storm at my back, though I thought that would have been a nice touch if I could have managed it. As I swept down upon them -- there w r ere maybe two dozen -- they prudently began to scatter. A number of them didn't make it, though. I swung through another curve and returned as soon as I could. I was shaken by the sight of several corpses rising into the air, dripping gore, two of them already high above me. I was almost upon them on that second pass when I realized that a few of them had jumped aboard the first time through. The first one over the edge drew his blade and rushed me. I blocked his arm, took the weapon away from him and threw him back down. I guess it was then that I became aware of those spurs on the backs of their hands. I had been slashed by his. By that time, I was the target of a number of curiously shaped missiles from below, two more guys were coming over the edge and it looked as if several more might have made it aboard below. Well, even Benedict sometimes retreats. I had at least given the survivors something to remember. I let go the shadows, tore a barbed wheel from my side, another from my thigh, hacked off a guy's swordarm and kicked him in the stomach, dropped to my knees to avoid a wild swing from the next guy and caught him across the legs with my riposte. He went over, too. There were five more on the way up and we were sailing westward once again, leaving perhaps a dozen live ones to regroup on the sand at my back, a sky full of oozing drifters above them. I had the advantage with the next fellow because I caught him just partway over the edge. So much for him, and then there were four. While I had been dealing with him though, three more had arisen, simultaneously, at three different points. I rushed the nearest and dispatched him, but the other two made it over and were upon me while I was about it. As I defended myself from their attack, the final one came up and joined them. They were not all that good, but it was getting crowded and there were a lot of points and sharp edges straying about me. I kept parrying and moving, trying to get them to block one another, get in each other's way. I was partly successful, and when I had the best lineup I thought I was going to get, I rushed them, taking a couple cuts -- I had to lay myself open a bit to do it -- but splitting one skull for my pains. He. went over the edge and took the second one with him in a tangle of limbs and gear. Unfortunately, the inconsiderate lout had carried off my blade, snagged in some boney cleft or other he had chosen to interpose when I swung. It was obviously my day for losing blades, and I wondered if my horoscope would have mentioned it if I had thought to look before I'd set out. Anyhow, I moved quickly to avoid the final guy's swing. In doing so, I slipped on some blood and went skidding toward the front of the rock. If I went down that way, it would plow right over me, leaving a very flat Random there, like an exotic rug, to puzzle and delight future wayfarers. I clawed for handholds as I slid, and the guys took a couple quick steps toward me, raising his blade to do unto me as I had his buddy. I caught hole of his ankle though, and it did the trick of braking me very nicely -- and damned if someone shouldn't choose that moment to try to get hold of me via the Trumps. "I'm busy!" I shouted. "Call back later!" and my own motion was arrested as the guy toppled, clattered and went sliding by. I tried to reach him before he fell to rugdom, but I was not quite quick enough. I had wanted to save him for questioning. Still, my unegged beer was more than satisfactory. I headed back top and center to observe and muse. The survivors were still following me, but I had a sufficient lead. I did not at the moment have to worry about another boarding party. Good enough. I was headed toward the mountains once again. The sun I had conjured was beginning to bake me. I was soaked with sweat and blood. My wounds were giving me trouble. I was thirsty. Soon, soon, I decided, it would have to rain. Take care of that before anything else. So I began the preliminaries to a shift in that direction: clouds massing behind the mountains, building, darkening... I drifted off somewhere along the line, had a disjointed dream of someone trying to reach me again but not making it. Sweet darkness. S awakened to the rain, sudden and hard-driving. I could not I w hether the darkness in the sky was from storm, evening or both. It was cooler, though, and I spread my cloak and just lay there with my mouth open. Periodically, I wrung moisture from the cloak. My thirst was eventually slaked and I began feeling clean again. The rock had also become so slick-looking that I was afraid, to move about on it. The mountains were much nearer, their peaks lined by frequent lightnings. Things were too dark in the opposite direction for me to tell whether my pursuers were still with me. It would have been pretty rough trekking for them to have kept up, but then it is seldom good policy to rely on assumptions when traveling through strange shadows. I was a bit irritated with myself for going to sleep, but since no harm had come of it I drew' my soggy cloak about me and decided to forgive myself. I felt around for some cigarettes I had brought along and found that about half of them had survived. After the eighth try, I juggled shadows just enough to get a light. Then I just sat there, smoking and being rained on. It was a good feeling and I didn't move to change anything else, not for hours. When the storm finally let up and the sky came clear, it w'as a night full of strange constellations. Beautiful though, the way nights can be on the desert. Much later, I detected a gentle upward sloping and my rock began to slow. SomeIhing began to happen in ternis of whatever physical rules controlled the situation. I mean, the slope itself did not seem so pronounced that it would affect our velocity as radically as it had. I did not want to tamper with Shadow in a direction that would probably take me out of my way. I wanted to get back onto more familiar turf as soon as possible -- find my way to a place where my gut anticipations of physical events had more of a chance of being correct. So I let the rock grind to a halt, climbed down when it did and continued on up the slope, hiking. As I went, I played the Shadow game we all learned as children. Pass some obstruction -- a scrawny tree, a stand of stone -- and have the sky be different from one side to the other. Gradually, I restored familiar constellations. I knew that I would be climbing down a different mountain from the one I ascended. My wounds still throbbed dully, but my ankle had stopped bothering me except for a little stiffness. I was rested. I knew that I could go for a long while. Everything seemed to be all right again. It was a long hike, up the gradually steepening way. But I hit a trail eventually, and that made things easier. I trudged steadily upward under the now familiar skies, determined to keep moving and make it across by morning. As I went, my garments altered to fit the shadow -- denim trousers and jacket now, my wet cloak a dry serape. I heard an owl nearby, and from a great distance below and behind came what might have been the yipyip-howl of a coyote. These signs of a more familiar place made me feel somewhat secure, exorcised any vestiges of desperation that remained with my flight. An hour or so later, I yielded to the temptation to play with Shadow just a bit. It was not all that improbable for a stray horse to be wandering in these hills, and of course I found him. After ten or so minutes of becoming friendly, I was mounted bareback and moving tow ard the top of the trail in a more congenial fashion. The wind sowed frost in our path. The moon came and sparked it to life. To be brief, I rode all night, passing over the crest and commencing my downward passage well before dawn. As I descended, the mountain grew even more vast above me, which of course was the best time for this to occur. Things were green on this side of the range, and divided by neat highways, punctuated by occasional dwellings. Everything therefore was proceeding in accordance with my desire. Early morning. I was into the foothills and my denim had turned to Khaki and a bright shirt. I had a light sport jacket slung before me. At a great height, a jet liner poked holes in the air, moving from horizon to horizon. There were birdsongs about me, and the day was mild, sunny. It was about then that I heard my name spoken and felt the touch of the Trump once more. I drew up short and responded. "Yes?" "Random, where are you?" he asked. "Pretty far from Amber," I replied. "Why?" "Have any of the others been in touch with you?" "Not recently," I said. "But someone did try to get hold of me yesterday. I was busy though, and couldn't talk." "That was me," he said. "We have a situation here that you had better know about." "Where are you?" I asked. "In Amber. A number of things have happened recently." "Like what?" "Dad has been gone now for an unusually long time. No one knows where." "He's done that before." "But not without leaving instructions and making delegations. He always provided them in the past." "True," I said. "But how long is 'long'?" "Well over a year. You weren't aware of this at all?" "I knew that he was gone. Gerard mentioned it some time back." "Then add more time to that." "I get the idea. How have you been operating?" "That is the problem. We have simply been dealing with affairs as they arise. Gerard and Caine had been running the navy anyway, on Dad's orders. Without him, they have been making all their own decisions. I took charge of the patrols in Arden again. There is no central authority though, to arbitrate, to make policy decisions, to speak for all of Amber." "So we need a regent. We can cut cards for it, I suppose." "It is not that simple. We think Dad is dead." "Dead? Why? How?" "We have tried to raise him on his Trump. We have been trying every day for over half a year now. Nothing. What do you think?" I nodded. "He may be dead," I said. "You'd think he would have come across with something. Still, the possibility of his being in some trouble -- say, a prisoner somewhere -- is not precluded." "A cell can't stop the Trumps. Nothing can. He would call for help the minute we made contact." "I can't argue with that," I said. But I thought of Brand as I said it. "Perhaps he is deliberately resisting contact, though." "What for?" "I have no idea, but it is possible. You know how secretive he is about some things." "No," Julian said, "it doesn't hold up. He would have given some operating instructions, somewhere along the line." "Well, whatever the reasons, whatever the situation, what do you propose doing now?" "Someone has to occupy the throne," he said. I had seen it coming throughout the entire dialogue, of course -- the opportunity if had long seemed would never come to pass. "Who?" I asked. "Eric seems thelest choice," he replied. "Actually, he has been acting in that capacity for months now. It simply becomes a matter of formalizing it." "Not just as regent?" "Not just as regent." "I see... Yes, I guess that things have been happening in my absence. What about Benedict as a choice?" "He seems to be happy where he is, off somewhere in Shadow." "What does he think of the whole idea?" "He is not entirely in favor of it. But we do not believe he will offer resistance. It would disrupt things too much." "I see," I said again. "And Bleys?" "He and Eric had some rather heated discussions of the issue, but the troops do not take their orders from Bleys. He left Amber about three months ago. He could cause some trouble later. But then, we are forewarned." "Gerard? Caine?" "They will go along with Eric. I was wondering about yourself?" "What about the girls?" He shrugged. "They tend to take things lying down. No problem." "I don't suppose Corwin..." "Nothing new. He's dead. We all know it. His monument has been gathering dust and ivy for centuries. If not, then he has intentionally divorced himself from Amber forever. Nothing there. Now I am wandering where you stand." I chuckled. "I am hardly in a position to possess forceful opinions," I said. "We need to know, now." I nodded. "I have always been able to detect the quarter of the wind," I said. "I do not sail against it." He smiled and returned my nod. "Very good," he said. "When is the coronation? I assume that I am invited." "Of course, of course. But the date has not yet been set. There are still a few' minor matters to be dealt with. As soon as the affair is calendared, one of us will contact you again." "Thank you, Julian." "Good-bye for now. Random." And I sat there being troubled for a long while before I started on downward again. How long had Eric spent engineering it? I wondered. Much of the politicking back in Amber could have been done pretty quickly, but the setting up of the situation in the first place seemed the product of long-term thinking and planning. I was naturally suspicious as to his involvement in Brand's predicament. I also could not help but give some thought to the possibility of his having had a hand in Dad's disappearance. That would have taken some doing and have required a really foolproof trap. But the more I thought of it, the less I even dredged up some old speculations as to his part in your own passing, Corwin. But offhand, I could not think of a single thing to do about any of it. Go along with it, I figured, if that's where the power was. Stay in his good graces. Still... One should always get more than one angle on a story. I tried to make up my mind as to who would give me a good one. While I was thinking along these lines, something caught my eye as I glanced back and up, appreciating anew the heights from which I had not quite descended. There were a number of riders up near the top. They had apparently traversed the same trail I had taken. I could not get an exact nose count, but it seemed suspiciously close to a dozen -- a fairly sizeable group to be out riding at just that place and time. As I saw that they were proceeding on down the same way that I had come, I had a prickly feeling along the base of my neck. What if? What if they were the same guys? Because I felt that they were. Individually, tjiey were no match for me. Even a couple of them together had not made that great a showing. That was not it. The real chiller was that if that's who it was, then we were not alone in our ability to travel through Shadow. It meant that someone else was capable of a stunt that for all my life I had thought to be the sole property of our family. Add to this the fact that they were Brand's wardens, and their designs on the family -- at least part of it -- did not look all that clement. I perspired suddenly at the notion of enemies who could match our greatest power. f course, they were too far off mJfor me to really know just then vimether that was truly who it was. But you have to explore every contingency if you want to keep winning the survival game. Could Eric have found or trained or created some special beings to serve him in this particular capacity? Along with you and Eric, Brand had one of the firmest claims on the succession. -- Not to take anything away from your case, damn it! Hell! You know what I mean. I have to talk about it to show you how I w, thinking at the time. That's all. -- So, Brand had had the basis for a pretty good claim if he had been in a position to press it. You being out of the picture, he was Eric's chief rival when it came to adding a legal touch to things. Putting that together with his plight and the ability of those guys to traverse Shadow, Eric came to look a lot more sinister to me. I was more scared by that thought than I was by the riders themselves, though they did not exactly fill me with delight. I decided that I had better do several things quickly: talk to someone else in Amber, and have him take me through the Trump. Okay. I decided quickly. Gerard seemed the safest choice. He is reasonably open, neutral. Honest about most things. And from what Julian had said, Gerard's role in the whole business seemed kind of passive. That is, he was not going to resist Eric's move actively. He would not want to cause a lot of trouble. Didn't mean he approved. He was probably just being safe and conservative old Gerard. That decided, I reached for my deck of Trumps and almost howled. They were gone. I searched every pocket in every garment about me. I had taken them along when I'd left Texorami. I could have lost them at any point in the previous day's action. I had certainly been battered and thrown about a lot. And it had been a great day for losing things. I composed a complicated litany of curses and dug my heels into the horse's sides. I was going to have to move fast and think faster now. The first thing would be to get into a nice, crowded, civilized place where an assassin of the more primitive sort would be at a disadvantage. As I hurried downhill, heading for one of the roads, I worked with the stuff of Shadow -- quite subtly this time, using every bit of skill I could muster. There were just two things I desired at the moment: a final assault on my possible trackers and a fast path to a place of sanctuary. The world shimmered and did a final jig, becoming the California I had been seeking. A rasping, growling noise reached my ears, for the final touch I had intended. Looking back, I saw a section of cliff face come loose, almost in slow motion, and slide directly toward the horsemen. Awhile later, I had dismounted and was walking in the direction of the road, my garments even fresher and of better quality. I was uncertain as to the time of year, and I wondered what the weather was like in New York. Before very long, the bus that I had anticipated approached and I flagged it down. I located a window seat, smoked for awhile and watched the countryside. After a time, I dozed. I did not awaken until early afternoon, when we pulled into a terminal. I was ravenous by then, and decided I had better have something to eat before getting a cab for the airport. So I bought three cheeseburgers and a couple malts wfith a few of my quondam Texorami greenbacks. Getting served and eating took me maybe twenty minutes. Leaving the snack bar, I saw that there were a number of taxis standing idle at the stand out front. Before I picked one up" though, I decided to make an important stop in the men's room. At the very damndest moment you can think of, six stalls flew open behind my back and their occupants rushed me. There was no mistaking the spurs on the backs of their hands, the oversized jaws, the smouldering eyes. Not only had they caught up with me, they were now clad in the same acceptable garb as anyone else in the neighborhood. Gone were any remaining doubts as to their power over Shadow. Fortunately, one of them was faster than the others. Also, perhaps because of my size, they still might not have been fully aware of my strength. I seized that first one high up on the arm, avoiding those hand bayonets he sported, pulled him over in front of me, picked him up and threw him at the others. Then I just turned and ran. I broke the door on the way out. I didn't even pause to zip up until I w'as in a taxi and had the driver burning rubber. Enough. It was no longer simple sanctuary that I had in mind. I wanted to get hold of a set of Trumps and tell someone else in the family about those guys. If they were Eric's creatures, the others ought to be made aware of them. If they were not, then Eric ought to be told, too. If they could make their way through Shadow, perhaps others could, also. Whatever they represented might one day constitute a threat to Amber herself. Supposing -- just supposing -- that no one back home was involved? Whal if Dad and Brand were the victims of a totally unsuspected enemy? Then there was something big and menacing afoot, and I had stepped right into it. That would be an excellent reason for their hounding me this thoroughly. They would want me pretty badly. My mind ran wild. They might even be harrying me toward some sort of a trap. No need for the visible ones to be the only ones about. I brought my emotions to heel. One by one, you must deal with those things that come to hand, I told myself. That is all. Divorce the feelings from the speculations, or at least provide for separate maintenance. This is sister Flora's shadow. She lives on the other edge of the continent in a place called Westchester. Get to a phone, get hold of information and call her. Tell her it is urgent and ask for sanctuary. She can't refuse you that, even if she does hate your guts. Then jump a jet and get the hell out there. Speculate on the way if you want, but keep cool now. So I telephoned from the airport and you answered it, Corwin. That was the variable that broke all the possible equations I had been juggling -- you suddenly showing up at that time, that place, that point in events. I grabbed for it when you offered me protection, and not just because I wanted protection. I could probably have taken those six guys out by myself. But that was no longer it. I thought they were yours. I figured you had been lying low all along, waiting for the right moment to move in. Now, I thought, you were ready. This explains everything. You had taken out Brand and you were about to use your Shadow-walking zombies for purposes of going back and catching Eric with his pants down. I wanted to be on your side because I hated Eric and because I knew you were a careful planner and you usually get what you go after. I mentioned the pursuit byguys out of Shadow to see what you would say. The fact that you said nothing didn't really prove anything, though. Either you were being cagey, I figured, or you had no way of knowing where I had been. I also thought of the possibility of w'alking into a trap of your devising, but I was already in trouble and did not see that I was that important to the balance of power that you would want to dispose of me. Especially if I offered my support, which I was quite damned if those six didn't board later and follow me. Is he giving me an escort? I wondered. Better not start making more assumptions. I shook them again when we landed and headed for Flora's place. Then I acted as if none of my guesses had occurred, waiting to see what you would do. When you helped me dispose of the guys, I was really puzzled. Were you genuinely surprised, or was it a put-on, with you sacrificing a few of the troops to keep me ignorant of something? All right, I decided, be ignorant, cooperate, see what he has in mind. I was a perfect setup for that act you pulled to cover the condition of your memory. When I did learn the truth, it was simply too late. We were headed for Rebma and none of this would have meant anything to you. Later, I didn't care to tell Eric anything after his coronation. I was his prisoner then and not exactly kindly disposed toward him. It even occurred to me that my information might be worth something one day -- at least, my freedom again -- if that threat ever materialized. As for Brand, I doubt anyone would have believed me; and even if someone did, I was the only one who knew how to reach that shadow. Could you see Eric buying that as a reason for releasing me? He would have laughed and told me to come up with a better story. And I never heard from Brand again. None of the others seem to have heard from his either. Odds are he's dead by now -- I'd say. And that is the story I never got to tell you. You figure out what it all means. Ill I studied Random, remembering what a great card player he was. By looking at his face, I could no more tell whether he was lying, in whole or in part, than I could learn by scrutinizing the Jack of, say, Diamonds. Nice touch, that part, too. There was enough of that kind of business to his story to give it some feel of verisimilitude. "To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and all those guys," I said, "I wish I had known this some time ago." "This was the first chance I really had to tell you," he said. "True," I agreed. "Unfortunately, it not only fails to clarify things, it complicates the puzzle even more. Which is no mean trick. Here we are with a black road Discover Man's most advanced technology of the mind Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand your awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. This best seller reveals the parts of the mind and the source of human irrationality. Grasp this opportunity to reap the benefits of the simple, powerful techniques in copies have been sold! Order your copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health today! Just Get it, Read it and Try it! Send # to The Church of Scientology of California. PublicationsOrganization U.S., Dept. G-l. # Wesl Temple St., Los Angeles. Calif. #. No charge for postage and handling. All orders will be shipped within # hours of receipt. Dianetics is the registered trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect of his pub(Greek) "mind." Copyright  # by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved. The Church of Scientology of California -- a non-profit organization. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. Scientology and Dianetics are registered names. running up to the foot of Kolvir. It passes through Shadow, and things have succeeded in traversing it to beset Amber. We do not know the exact nature of the forces behind it, but they are obviously malign and they seem to be growing in strength. I have been feeling guilty about it for some while now, because I see it as being tied in with my curse. Yes, I laid one on us. Curse or no curse though, everything eventually resolves into some sort of tangibility that can be combated. Which is exactly what we are going to do. But all week long, I have been trying to figure out Dara's part in things. Who is she really? What is she? Why was she so anxious to try the Pattern? How is it that she managed to succeed? And that final threat of hers... 'Amber will be destroyed,' she said. It seems more than coincidental that this occurred at the same time as the attack over the black road. I do not see it as a separate thing, but as a part of the same cloth. And it all seems to be tied in with the fact that there is a traitor somewhere here in Amber -- Caine's death, the notes... Someone here is either abetting an external enemy or is behind the whole thing himself. Now you link it all up with Brand's disappearance, by way of this guy." I nudged the corpse with my foot. "It makes it look as if Dad's death or absence is also a part of it. If that is the case, though, it makes for a major conspiracy -- with detail after detail having been carefully worked out over a period of years." Random explored a cupboard in the comer, produced a bottle and a pair of goblets. He filled them and brought me one, then returned to his chair. We drank a silent toast to futility. "Well," he said, "plotting is the number one pastime around here, and everyone has had plenty of time, you know. We are both too young to remember brothers Osric and Finndo, who died for the good of Amber. But the impression I get from talking with Benedict -- " "Yes," I said, " -- that they had done more than wishful thinking about the throne, and it became necessary that they die bravely for Amber. I've heard that, too. Maybe so, maybe not. We'll never know for sure. Still... Yes, the point is well taken, though almost unnecessary. I do not doubt that it has been tried before. I do not put it past a number of us. Who, though? We will be operating under a severe handicap until we find out. Any move that we make externally will probably only be directed against a limb of the beast. Come up with an idea." "Corwin," he said, "to be frank about it, I could make a case for it being anyone here -- even myself, prisoner status and all. In fact, something like that would be a great blind for it. I would have taken genuine delight in looking helpless while actually pulling the strings that made all the others dance. Any of us would, though. We all have our motives, our ambitions. And over the years, we all have had time and opportunity to lay a lot of groundwork. No, that is the wrong way to go about it, looking for suspects. Everyone here falls into that category. Let us decide instead what it is that would distinguish such an individual, aside from motives, apart from opportunities. I would say, let's look at the methods involved." "All right. Then you start." "Some one of us knows more than the rest of us about the workings of Shadow -- the ins and the outs, the whys and the hows. He also has allies, obtained from somewhere fairly far afield. This is the combination he has brought to bear upon Amber. Now, we have no way of looking at a person and telling whether he possesses such special knowledge and skills. But let us consider where he could have obtained them. It could be that he simply learned something off in Shadow somewhere, on his own. Or he could have been studying all along, here, while Dworkin was still I stared down into my glass. Dworkin could still be living. He had provided my means of escape from the dungeons of Amber -- how long ago? I had told no one this, and was not about to. For one thing, Dworkin was quite mad -- which was apparently why Dad had had him locked away. For another, he had demonstrated powers I did not understand, which convinced me he could be quite dangerous. Still, he had been kindly disposed toward me after a minimum of flattery and reminiscence. If he were still around, I suspected that with a bit of patience I might be able to handle him. So I had kept the w hole business locked away in my mind as a possible secret weapon. I saw no reason for changing that decision at this point. "Brand did hang around him a lot," I acknowledged, finally seeing what he was getting at. "He was interested in things of that sort." "Exactly," Random replied. "And he obviously knew more than the rest of us, to be able to send me that message without a Trump." "You think he made a deal with outsiders, opened the way for them, then discovered that they no longer needed him when they hung him out to dry?" "Not necessarily. Though I suppose that is possible, too. My thinking runs more like this -- and I don't deny my prejudice in his favor: I think he had learned enough about the subject so that he was able to detect it when someone did something peculiar involving the Trumps, the Pattern or that area of Shadow most adjacent to Amber. Then he slipped up. Perhaps he underestimated the culprit and confronted him directly, rather than going to Dad or Dworkin. What then? The guilty party subdued him and imprisoned him in that tower. Either he thought enough of him not to want to kill him if he did not have to, or he had some later use of him in mind." "You make that sound plausible, too," 'I said, and I would have added, "and it fits your story nicely" and watched his poker face again, except for one thing. Back when I was with Bleys, before our attack on Amber, I had had a momentary contact with Brand while fooling with the Trumps. He had indicated distress, imprisonment, and then the contact had been broken. So Random's story fit, to that extent. So, instead, I said, "If he can point the finger, we have got to get him back and set him to pointing." "I was hoping you would say that," Random replied. "I hate to leave a bit of business like that unfinished." I went and fetched the bottle, refilled our glasses. I sipped. I lit another cigarette. "Before we get into that, though," I said. "I have to decide on the best way of breaking the news about Caine. Where is Flora anyway?" "Down in town, I think. She was here this morning. I can find her for you. I'm pretty sure." "Do it, then. She is the only other one I know of who has seen one of these guys, back when they broke into her place in Westchester. We might as well have her handy for that much corroboration as to their nastiness. Besides, I have some other things I want to ask her." He swallowed his drink and rose. "All right. I'll go do that now. Where should I bring her?'.' "My quarters.If I'm not there, wait." He nodded. I rose and accompanied him into the hall. "Have you got the key to this room?" I asked. "It's on a hook inside." "Better get it and lock up. We wouldn't want a premature unveiling." He did that and gave me the key. I walked with him as far as the first landing and saw him on his way. Then I headed for my own quarters. From my safe, I removed the Jew el of Judgment, a ruby pendant which had given Dad and Eric control over the weather in the vicinity of Amber. Before he died, Eric had told me the procedure to be followed in tuning it to my own use. I had not had time to do it though, and did not really have the time now. But during my conversation with Random I had decided that I was going to have to take the time. I had located Dworkin's notes, beneath a stone near Eric's fireplace. He had given me that much information also, that last time. I would have liked to know where he had come across the notes in the first place (hough, for they were incomplete. I fetched them from the rear of the safe and regarded them once again. They did agree with Eric's explanation as to how the attunement was to be managed. But they also indicated that the stone had other uses, that the control of meteorological phenomena was almost an incidental, though spectacular demonstration of a complex of principles which underlay the Pattern, the Trumps and the physical integrity of Amber herself, apart from Shadow. Unfortunately, the details were lacking. Still, the more that I searched my memory, the more something along these lines did seem indicated. Only rarely had Dad produced the stone; and though he had spoken of it as a w'eather-changer, the weather had not always been especially altered on those occasions when he had sported it. And he had often taken it along with him on his little trips. So I was ready to believe there was more to it than that. Eric had probably reasoned the same way, but he had not been able to dope out its other uses either. He had simply taken advantage of its obvious powers when Bleys and I had attacked Amber; and he had used it the same way this past week when the creatures had made their assault from the black road. It had served him well on both occasions, even if it had not been sufficient to save his life. So I had better get hold of its power myself, I decided, now. Any extra edge was important. And it would be good to be seen wearing the thing, too, I judged. Especially now. I put the notes back into the safe, the jewel in my pocket. I left-then and headed downstairs. Again, as before, to walk those halls made me Icel as if I had never been away. This was home, this was what I wanted. Now I was its defender. I did not even wear the crown, yet all its problems had become my own. It was ironic. I had come back to claim the crown, to wrest it from Eric, to hold the glory, to reign. Now, suddenly, things were falling apart. It had not taken long to realize that Eric had behaved incorrectly. If he had indeed done Dad in, he had no right to the crown. If he had not, then he had acted prematurely. Either way, the coronation had served only to fatten his already obese ego. Myself, I wanted it and I knew that I could take it. But it would be equally irresponsible to do so with my troops quartered in Amber, suspicion of Caine's murder about to descend upon me, the first signs of a fantastic plot suddenly displayed before me and the continuing possibility that Dad was still alive. On several occasions, it seemed we had been in contact, briefly -- and on one such, years ago, that he had okayed my succession. But there was so much deceit and trickery afoot that I did not know what to believe. He had not abdicated. Also, f had had a head injury, and I was well aware of my own desires. The mind is a funny place. I do not even trust my own. Could it be that I had manufactured that whole business? A lot had happened since. The price of being an Amberite, I suppose, is that you cannot even trust yourself. I wondered w'hat Freud would have said? While he had failed to pierce mv amnesia, he had come up with some awfully good guesses as to what my father had been like, what our relationship had been, even though I had not realized it at the time. I w ished that I could have one more session with him. I made my way through the marble dining hall and into the dark, narrow corridor that lay behind. I nodded to the guard and walked on back to the door. Through it then, out onto the platform, across and down. The interminable spiral stairway that leads into the guts of Kolvir. Walking. Lights every now and then. Blackness beyond. I t seemed that a balance had shifted somewhere along the way. and that I was no longer acting but being acted upon, being forced to move, to respond. Being herded. And each move led to another. Where had it all begun? Maybe it had been going on for years and I was only just now becoming aware of it. Perhaps we were all victims, in a fashion and to a degree none of us had realized. Great victuals for morbid thought. Sigmund, where are you now? I had wanted to be king -- still wanted to be king -- more than anything else. Yet the more I learned and the more I thought about what I had learned, the more all of my movements actually seemed to amount to Amber Pawn to King Four. I realized then that this feeling had been present for some time, growing, and I did not like it at all. But nothing that has eyer lived has gotten by without making some mistake, I consoled myself. If my feeling represented actuality, my personal Pavlov was getting closer to my fangs with each ringing of the bell. Soon now, soon, I felt that it had to be soon, I would have to see that he came very near. Then it would be mine to see that he neither went away nor ever came again. Turning, turning, around and down, light here, light there, these my thoughts, like thread on a spool, winding or unwinding, hard to be sure. Below me the sound of metal against stone. A guard's scabbard, the guard rising. A ripple of light from a lantern raised. "Lord Corwin..." "Jamie." At bottom, I took a lantern from the shelf. Putting a light to it, I turned and headed toward the tunnel, pushing the darkness on ahead of me, a step at a time. Eventually the tunnel, and so up it, counting side passages. It was the seventh that I wanted. Echoes and shadows. Must and dust. Coming to it, then. Turning there. Not too much farther. Finally, that great, dark metalbound door. I unlocked it and pushed hard. It creaked, resisted, finally moved inward. I set the lantern down, just to the right, inside. I had no further need of it. as the Pattern itself gave off sufficient light for what I had to do. For a moment, I regarded the Pattern -- a shining mass of curved lines that tricked the eye as it tried to trace them -- imbedded there, huge, in the floor's slick blackness. It had given me power over Shadow, it had restored most of my memory. It would also destroy me in an instant if I were to essay it improperly. What gratitude the prospect did arouse in me was therefore not untinged with fear. It was a splendid and cryptic old family heirloom which belonged right where it was, in the cellar. I moved off to the corner where the tracery began. There I composed my mind,' relaxed my body and set my left foot upon the Pattern. Without pausing, I strode forward then and felt the current begin. Blue sparks outlined my boots. Another step. There was an audible crackling this time and the beginning of resistance. I took the first curvelength, striving to hurry, wanting to reach the First Veil as quickly as possible. By the time that I did, my hair was stirring and the sparks were brighter, longer. The strain increased. Each step required more effort than the previous one. The crackling grew louder and the current intensified. My hair rose and I shook off sparks. I kept my eyes on the fiery line and did not stop pushing. Suddenly the pressure abated. I staggered but kept moving. I was through the First Veil and into the feeling of accomplishment that entailed. I recalled the last time that I had come this way, in Rebma, the city under the sea. The maneuver I had just completed was what had started the return of my memories. Yes. I pushed ahead and the sparks grew and the currents rose once again, setting my flesh to tingling. T he second veil... The angles... It always seemed to tax the strength to its limits, to produce the feeling that one's entire being was transformed into pure Will. It was a driving, relentless sensation. At the moment, the negotiation of the Pattern was the only thing in the world that meant anything to me. I had always been there, striving, never been away, always would be there, contending, my will against the maze of power. Time had vanished. Only the tension held. The sparks were up to my waist. I entered the Grand Curve and fought my way along it. I was continually destroyed and reborn at every step of its length, baked by the fires of creation, chilled by the cold at entropy's end. Out and onward, turning. Three more curves, a straight line, a number of arcs. Dizziness, a sensation of fading and intensifying as though I were oscillating into and out of existence. Turn after turn after turn after turn... A short, sharp arc... The line that led to the Final Veil... I imagine I was gasping and drenched with sweat by then. I never seem to remember for sure. I could hardly move my feet. The sparks were up to my shoulders. They came into my eyes and I lost sight of the Pattern itself between blinks. In, out, in, out... There it was. I dragged my right foot forward, knowing how Benedict must have felt, his legs snared by the black grass. Right before I rabbit-punched him. I felt bludgeoned myself -- all over. Left foot, forward... So slowly it was hard to be certain it was actually moving. My hands were blue (lames, my legs pillars of fire. Another step. Another. Yet another. I felt like a slowly animated statue, a thawing snowman, a buckling girder... Two more... Three... Glacial, my movements, but I who directed them had all of eternity and a perfect constancy of will that would be realized... I passed through the Veil. A short arc followed. Three steps to cross it into blackness and peace. They were the worst of all. A coffee break for Sisyphus! That was my first thought as I departed the Pattern. I've done it again ! was my second. And, Never again! was my third. I allowed myself the luxury of a few deep breaths and a little shaking. Then I unpocketed the jewel and raised it by its chain. I held it before my eye. Red inside, of course -- a deep cherry-red, smoke-shot, fulgent. It seemed to have picked up something extra of light and glitter during the trip through the Pattern. I continued to stare, thinking over the instructions, comparing them with things I already knew. Once you have walked the Pattern and reached this point, you can cause it to transport you to any place that you can visualize. All that it takes is the desire and an act of will. Such being the case, I was not without a moment's trepidation. If the effect proceeded as it normally did, I could be throwing myself into a peculiar sort of trap. But Eric had succeeded. He had not been locked into the heart of a gem somewhere off in Shadow. The Dworkin who had written those notes had been a great man, and I had trusted him. Composing my mind, I intensified my scrutiny of the stone's interior. There was a distorted reflection of the Pattern within it, surrounded by winking points of light, tiny flares and flashes, different curves and paths. I made my decision, I focused my will... R edness and slow motion. Like sinking into an ocean of high viscosity. Very slowly, at first. Drifting and darkening, all the pretty lights far, far ahead. Faintly, my apparent velocity increased. Flakes of light, distant, intermittent. A trifle faster then, it seemed. No scale. I was a point of consciousness of indeterminate dimensions. Aware of movement, aware of the configuration toward which I advanced, now almost rapidly. The redness was nearly gone, as was the consciousness of any medium. Resistance vanished. I was speeding. All of this, now,seemed to have taken but a single instant, w'as still taking that same instant. There was a peculiar timeless quality to the entire affair. My velocity relative to what now seemed my target was enormous. The little, twisted maze was growing, was resolving into what appeared a three-dimensional variation of the Pattern itself. Punctuated by flares of colored light, it grew before me, still reminiscent of a bizarre galaxy half-ravelled in the middle of the ever-night, haloed with a pale shine of dust, its streamers composed of countless flickering points. And it grew or I shrank, or it advanced or I advanced, and we were near, near together, and it filled all of space now, top to bottom, this way to that, and my personal velocity still seemed, if anything, to be increasing. I was caught, overwhelmed by the blaze, and there was a stray streamer w hich I knew to be the beginning. I was too close -- lost, actually -- to apprehend its overall configuration any longer, but the buckling, the flickering, the weaving of all that I could see of it, everywhere about me, made me wonder whether three dimensions were sufficient to account for the senses warping complexities with which I w'as confronted. Rather than my galactic analogy, something in my mind shifted to the other extreme, suggesting the infinitely dimensioned Hilbert space of the subatomic. But then, it was a metaphor of desperation. Truly and simply, I did not understand anything about it. I had only a growing feeling -- Pattern-conditioned? Instinctive? -- that I had to pass through this maze also to gain the new degree of power that I sought. Nor was I incorrect. I was swept on into it without any slackening of my apparent velocity. I was spun' and whirled along blazing ways, passing through substanceless clouds of glitter and shine. There were no areas of resistance, as in the Pattern itself, my initial impetus seeming sufficient to bear me throughout. A whirlwind tour of the Milky Way? A drowning man sw ept among canyons of coral? An insomniac sparrow' passing over an amusement park of a July Fourth evening? These my thoughts, as I recapitulated my recent passage in this transformed fashion... And out, through, over and done, in a blaze of ruddy light that found me regarding myself holding the pendant beside the Pattern, then regarding the pendant, Pattern within it, within me, everything within me, me within it, the redness subsiding, down, gone. Then just me, the pendant, the Pattern, alone, subject-object relationships reestablished -- only an octave higher, which is about the best way I feel there is to put it. For a certain empathy now existed. It was as though I had acquired an extra sense, and an additional means of expression. It was a peculiar sensation, satisfying. Anxious to test it, I summoned my resolve once again and commanded the Pattern to transport me elsew'here. I stood then in the round room, atop the highest tower in Amber. Crossing it, I passed outside, onto a very small balcony. The contrast ,was powerful, coming so close to the super-sensory voyage I had just completed. For several long moments, I simply stood there, looking. The sea was a study in textures, as the sky was partly overcast and getting on toward evening. The clouds themselves showed patterns of soft brightness and rough shading. The w'ind made its way seaward, so that the salt smell was temporarily denied me. Dark birds dotted the air, swinging and hovering at a great distance out over the water. Below me, the palace yards and the terraces of the city lay spread in enduring elegance out to Kolvic's rim. People were tiny on the thoroughfares, their movements discountable. I felt very alone. Then I touched the pendant and called for a storm. IV tandom and Flora were waiting JKin my quarters when I returned. Random's eyes went first to the pendant, then to my own. I nodded. I turned toward Flora, bowing slightly. "Sister," I said, "it has been awhile, and then awhile." She looked somewhat frightened, which was all to the good. She smiled and took my hand, though. "Brother," she said. "I see that you have kept your word." Pale gold, her hair. She had cut it, but retained the bangs. I could not decide w'hether I liked it that way or not. She had very lovely hair. Blue eyes, too, and tons of vanity to keep everything in her favorite perspective. At times she seemed to behave quite stupidly, but then at other times I have wondered. "Excuse me for staring," I said, "but the last time that we met I was unable to see you." "I am very happy that the situation has been corrected," she said. "It was quite -- There was nothing that I could do, you know." "I know," I said, recalling the occasional lilt of her laughter from the other side of the darkness on one of the anniversaries of the event. "I know." I moved to the window and opened it, knowing that the rain would not be coming in. I like the smell of a storm. "Random, did you learn anything of interest with regard to a possible postman?" I asked. "Not really," he said. "I made some inquiries. No one seems to have seen anyone else in the right place at the right time." "I see," I said. "Thank you. I may see you again later." "All right," he said. "I'll be in my quarters all evening, then." I nodded, turned, leaned back against the sill, watched Flora. Random closed the door quietly as he left. I listened to the rain for half a minute or so. "What are you going to do with me?" she said, finally. "Do?" "You are in a position to call for a settlement on old debts. I assume that things are about to begin." "Perhaps," I said. "Most things depend on other things. This thing is no different." "What do you mean?" "Give me what I want, and we'll see. I have even been known to be a nice guy on occasion." "What is it that you want?" "The story. Flora. Let's start with that. Of how you came to be my shepherdess there on that shadow, Earth. All pertinent details. What was the arrangement? What was the understanding? Everything. That's all." She sighed. "The beginning..." she said. "Yes... It was in Paris, a party, at a certain Monsieur Focault's. This was about three years before the Terror -- " "Stop," I said. "What were you doing there?" "I had been in that general area of Shadow for approximately five of their years," she said. "I had been wandering, looking for something novel, something that suited my fancy. I came upon that place at that time in the same way we find anything. I let my desires lead me and I followed my instincts." "A peculiar coincidence." "Not in light of all the time involved -- and considering the amount of travel in which we indulge. It was, if you like, my Avalon, my Amber surrogate, my home away from home. Call it what you will, I was there, at that party, that October night, when you came in with the little redheaded girl -- Jacqueline. I believe, was her name." That brought it back, from quite a distance, a memory I hadn't called for in a long, long while. I remembered Jacqueline far better than I did Focault's party, but (herehad been such an occasion. "Go ahead." # A s  sa 'd' s  ie went on, "I was there. You arrived later. You caught my attention immediately, of course. Still, if one exists for a sufficiently long period of time and travels considerably, one does occasionally encounter a person greatly resembling someone else one has known. That was my first thought after the initial excitement faded. Surely, it had to be a double. So much time had passed without a whisper. Yet, we all have secrets and good reasons for having them. This could be one of yours. So I saw that we were introduced and then had a devil of a time getting you away from that little redheaded piece for more than a few minutes. And you insisted your name was Fenneval -- Cordell Fenneval. I grew uncertain. I could not tell w hether it was a double or you playing games. The third possibility did cross my mind, though -- that you had dwelled in some adjacent area of Shadow for a sufficient time to cast shadows of yourself. I might have departed still wondering had not Jacqueline later boasted to me concerning your strength. Now this is not the commonest subject of conversation for a woman, and the way in Nvhich she said it led me to believe that she had actually been quite impressed by some things you had done. I drew her out a bit and realized that they w ere all of them feats of which you were capable. That eliminated the notion of it being a double. It had to be either you or your shadow. This in mind, even if Cordell was not Corwin he w'as a clue, a clue that you were or had been in that shady neighborhood -- the first real clue I had come across concerning your whereabouts. I had to pursue it. I began keeping track of you then, checking into your past. The more people I questioned, the more puzzling it became. In fact, after several months I was still unable to decide. There were enough smudgy areas to make it possible. Things were resolved for me the follow'ing summer though, when I revisited Amber for a time. I mentioned the peculiar affair to Eric..." "Yes?" "Well...He was -- somewhat -- aware -- of the possibility." She paused and rearranged her gloves on the seat beside her. "Uh-huh," I said. "Just what did he tell you?" "That it might be the real you," she said. "He told me there had been -- an accident -- " "Really?" "Well, no," she admitted. "Not an accident. He said there had been a fight and he had injured you. He thought you were going to die, and he did not want the blame. So he transported you off into Shadow and left you there, in that place. After a long while, he decided that you must be dead, that it was finally all over between you. My news naturally disturbed him. So he swore me to secrecy and sent me back to keep you under surveillance. I had a good excuse for being there, as I had already told everyone how much I liked the place." "You didn't promise to keep silent for nothing. Flora. What did he give you?" "He gave me his word that should he ever come into power here in Amber, I would not be forgotten." "A little risky," I said. "After all, that would still leave you with something on him -- knowledge of the whereabouts of a rival claimant, and of his part in putting him there." "True. But things sort of balanced out, and I would have to admit having become an accomplice in order to talk about it." I nodded. "Tight, but not impossible," I agreed. "But did you think he would let me continue living if he ever did get a chance at the throne?" "That was never discussed. Never." "It must have crossed your mind, though." "Yes, later," she said, "and I decided that he would probably do nothing. After all, it was beginning to seem likely that you had been deprived of your memory. There was no reason to do anything to you so long as you were harmless." "So you stayed on to watch me, to see that I remained harmless?" "Yes." "What would you have done had I shown signs of recovering my memory?" She looked at me, then looked away. "I would have reported it to Eric." "And what would he have done then?" "I don't know." I laughed a little, and she blushed. I could not remember the last time that I had seen Flora blush. "I will not belabor the obvious," I said. "All right, you stayed on, you watched me. What next? What happened?" "Nothing special. You just went on leading your life and I went on keeping track of it." "All of the others knew where you were?" "Yes, I'd made no secret of my whereabouts. In fact, all of them came around to visit me at one time or another." "That includes Random?" She curled her lip. "Yes. several times," she said. "Why the sneer?" "It is too late to start pretending I like him," she said. "You know. I just don't like the people he associates with -- assorted criminals, jazz musicians... I had to show him family courtesy when he was visiting my shadow, buthe put a big strain on my nerves, bringing those people around at all hours -- jam sessions, poker parties. The place usually reeked for weeks afterward and I was always glad to see him go. Sorry. I know you like him, but you wanted the truth." "He offended your delicate sensibilities. Okay. I now direct your attention to the brief time when I was your guest. Random joined us rather abruptly. Pursuing him were half a dozen nasty fellows whom we dispatched in your living room." "I recall the event quite vividly." "Do you recall the guys responsible -- the creatures we had to deal with?" "Yes." "Sufficiently well to recognize one if you ever saw another?" "I think so." "Good. Had you ever seen one before?" "No." "Since?" "No." "Had you ever heard them described, anywhere?" "Not that I can remember. Why?" I shook my head. "Not yet. This is my inquisition, remember? Now I want you to think back for a time before that evening. Back to the event that put me in Greenwood. Maybe even a little earlier. What happened, and how did you find out about it? What were the circumstances? What was your part in things?" "Yes," she said, "I knew you would ask me that sooner or later. What happened was that Eric contacted me the day after it occurred -- from Amber, via my Trump." She glanced at me again, obviously to see how I was taking it, to study my reactions. I remained expressionless. "He told me you had been in a bad accident the previous evening, and that you were hospitalized. He told me to have you transferred to a private place, one where I could have more say as to the course of your treatment." "In other words, he wanted me to stay a vegetable." "He wanted them to keep you sedated." "Did he or did he not admit to being responsible for the accident?" "He did not say that he had had someone shoot out your tire, but he did know that that was what had happened. How else could he have known? When I learned later that he was planning to take the throne. I assumed that he had finally decided it was best to remove you entirely. When the attempt failed, it seemed logical that he would do the next most effective thing: see that you were kept out of the way until after the coronation." "I was not aware that the tire had been shot out," I said. Her face changed. She recovered. "You told me that you knew it was not an accident -- that someone had tried to kill you. I assumed you were aware of the specifics." I was treading slightly mucky ground again for the first time in a long while. I still had a bit of amnesia, and I had decided I probably always would. My memories were still spotty for a few days prior to the accident. The Pattern had restored the lost memories of my entire life up until then, but the trauma appeared to have destroyed recollection of some of the events immediately preceeding it. Not an uncommon occurrence. Organic damage rather than simple functional distress, most likely. I was happy enough to have all the rest back, so those did not seem especially lamentable. As to the accident itself, and my feelings that it had been more than an accident, I did recall the gunshots. There had been two of them. I might even have glimpsed the figure with the rifle -- tleetingly, too late. Or maybe that was pure fantasy. It seemed that l had, though. I had had someS# thing like that in mind when I had headed out for Westchester. Even at this late time, though, when I held the power in Amber, I was loathe to admit this single deficiency. I had faked my way with Flora before with a lot less to go on. I decided to stick with a winning combination. "I was in no position to get out and see what had been hit," I said. "I heard the shots. I lost control. I had assumed that it was a tire, but I never knew for sure. The only reason I raised the question was because I was curious as to how you knew it was a tire." "I already told you that Eric told me aboqt it." "It was the way that you said it that bothered me. You made it sound as if you already knew all the details before he contacted you." She shook her head. "Then pardon my syntax," she said. "That sometimes happens when you look at things after the fact. I am going to have to deny what you are implying. I had nothing to do with it and I had no prior knowledge that it had occurred." "Since Eric is no longer around to confirm or deny anything, we will simply have to let it go," I said, "for now," and I said it to make her look even harder to her defense, to direct her attention away from any possible slip, either in word or expression, from which she might infer the small flaw which still existed in my memory. "Did you later become aware of the identity of the person with the gun?" I asked. "Never," she said. "Most likely some hired thug. I don't know." "Have you any idea how long I was unconscious before someone found me, took me to a hospital?" She shook her head again. Something was bothering me and I could not quite put my finger on it. "Did Eric say what time I had been taken into the hospital?" "No." "When I was with you, why did you try walking back to Amber, rather than using Eric's Trump?" "I couldn't raise him." "You could have called someone else to bring you through," I said. "Flora, I think you are lying to me." It was really only a test, to observe her reaction. Why not? "About w'hat?" she asked. "I couldn't raise anyone else. They were all otherwise occupied. Is that what you mean?" She studied me. I raised my arm and pointed at her and the lightning flashed at my back, just outside the window. I felt a tingle, a mild jolt. The thunderclap was also impressive. "You sin by omission," I tried. She covered her face with her hands and began to weep. "I don't know what you mean!" she said. "I answered all your questions! What do you want? I don't know where you were going or who shot at you or what time it occurred! I just know the facts I've given you, damn it!" She was either sincere or unbreakable by these means, I decided. Whichever, I was wasting my time and could get nothing more this way. Also, I had better switch us away from the accident before she began thinking too much about its importance to me. If there was something there that I was missing, I wanted to find it first. "Come with me," I said. "Where are we going?" "I have something I want you to identify. I will tell you why after you see it." She rose and followed me. I took her up the hall to see the body before I gave her the story on Caine. She regarded the corpse quite dispassionately. She nodded. "Yes," she said, and, "Even if I did not know it I would be glad to say that I did, for you." I grunted a noncommital. Family loyalty always touches me, somewhere. I could not tell whether she believed what I had said about Caine. But things sort of being equal to each other, it didn't much seem to matter. I did not tell her anything about Brand and she did not seem to possess any new information concerning him. Her only other comment when everything I'd had to say was said, was, "You wear the Jewel well. What about the headpiece?" "It is too soon to talk of such things," I told her. "Whatever my support may be worth..." "I know," I said. "I know." M y tomb is a quiet place. It stands alone in a rocky de , shielded on three sides against the elements, surrounded by transported soil wherein a pair of scrubby trees, miscellaneous shrubs, weeds and great ropes of mountain ivy are rooted, about two miles down, back of the crest of Kolvir. It is a long, low building with two benches in front, and the ivy has contrived to cover it to a great extent, mercifully masking most of a bombastic statement graven on its face beneath my name. It is, understandably, vacant most of the time. That evening, however, Ganelon and I repaired thither, accompanied by a good supply of wine and some loaves and cold cuts. "You weren't joking!" he said, having dismounted, crossed over and parted the ivy, able to read by the moon's light the words that were rendered there. "Of course not," I said, climbing down and taking charge of the horses. "It's mine all right." Tethering our mounts to a nearby shrub. I unslung our bags of provisions and carried them to the nearest bench. Ganelon joined me as I opened the first bottle and poured us a dark, deep pair. "I still don't understand," he said, accepting his. "What's there to understand? I'm dead and buried there," I said. "It's my cenotaph, is what it Bookshelf is alive and well. Sturgeon is enjoying a wellearned rest and will return next month. is -- the monument that gets set up when the body has not been recovered. I only just learned about mine recently. It was raised several centuries ago, when it was decided I wasn't coming back." "Kind of spooky," he said. "What's inside then?" "Nothing. Though they did thoughtfully provide a niche and a casket, just in case my remains put in an appearance. You cover both bets that way." Ganelon made himself a sandwich. "Whose idea was it?" he asked. "Random thinks it was Brand's or Eric's. No one remembers for sure. They all seemed to feel it was a good idea at the time." He chuckled, an evil noise that perfectly suited his creased, scarred and red-bearded self. "What's to become of it now?" I shrugged. "I suppose some of them think it's a shame to w r aste it this way and would like to see me fill it. In the meantime though, it's a good place to come and get drunk. I hadn't really paid my respects yet." I put together a pair of sandwiches and ate them both. This was the first real breather I had had since my return, and perhaps the last for some time to come. It was impossible to say. But I had not really had a chance to speak with Ganelon at any length during the past week, and he was one of the few persons I trusted. I wanted to tell him everything. I had to. I had to talk with someone who was not a part of it in the same way as the rest of us. So I did. The moon moved a considerable distance and the shards of broken glass multiplied within my crypt. "So how did the others take it?" he asked me. "Predictably," I answered. "I could tell that Julian did not believe a word of it even though he said that he did. He knows how I feel about him, and he is in no position to challenge me. I don't think Benedict believes me either, but he is a lot harder to read. He is biding his time, and I hope giving me the benefit of the doubt while he is about it. As for Gerard, I have the feeling that this was the final weight, and whatever trust he had left for me has just collapsed. Still, he will be returning to Amber early tomorrow', to accompany me to the Grove to recover Caine's body. No sense in turning it into a safari, but I did want another family member present. Deirdre now -- She seemed happy about it. Didn't believe a word. I'm sure. But no matter. She has always been on my side, and she has never liked Caine. I'd say she is glad that I seem to be consolidating my position. I can't really tell whether Llewlla believed me or not. She doesn't much give a damn what the rest of us do to one another, so far as I can see. As to Fiona, she simply seemed amused at the w hole business. But then, she has always had this detached, superior way of regarding things. You can never be certain what represents her real thinking." "Did you tell them the business about Brand yet?" "No. I told them about Caine and I told them I wanted them all to be in Amber by tomorrow evening. That is when the subject of Brand will be raised. I've an idea I want to try out." "You contacted all of them by means of the Trumps?" "That's right." "There is something I have been meaning to ask you about that. Back on the shadow world we visited to obtain the weapons, there are telephones..." "Yes?" "I learned about wiretaps and such while we were there. Is it possible, do you think, that the frumps could be bugged?" I began to laugh, then caught myself as some of the implications of his suggestion sank in. Finally, "I don't really know," I said. "So much concerning Dworkin's work remains a mystery -- The thought just never occurred to me. I've never tried it myself. I wonder, though...?" "Do you know how many sets there are?" "Well, everyone in the family has a pack and there were a dozen or so spares in the library. I don't really know whether there are any others." "It seems to me that a lot could be learned just by listening in." "Yes. Dad's deck. Brand's, my original pack, the one Random lost -- Hell! There are quite a number unaccounted for these days. I don't know what to do about it yet. Start an inventory and try some experiments, I guess. Thanks for mentioning it." He nodded and we both sipped for awhile in silence. Then, "What are you going to do. Corwin?" he asked. "About what?" "About everything. What do we attack now, and in what order?" rY original intention was road toward its origin as soon as things were more settled here in Amber," I said. "Now though, I have shifted my priorities. I want Brand returned as soon as possible, if he is still living. If not, I want to find out what happened to him." "But will the enemy give you the breathing time? He might be preparing a new offensive right now." "Yes, of course. I have considered that. I feel we have some time, since they were defeated so recently. They will have to pull themselves together again, beef up their forces, reassess the situation in light of our new weapons. What I have in mind for the moment is to establish a series of lookout stations along the road to give us advance warning of any new movements on their part. Benedict has already agreed to take charge of the operation." "I wonder how much time we have?" I poured him another drink, as it was the only answer I could think of. "Things were never this complicated back in Avalon -- our Avalon, I mean." "True," I said. "You are not the only one who misses those days. At least, they seem simpler now." He nodded. I offered him a cigarette, but he declined in favor of his pipe. In the llamelight, he studied the Jewel of Judgment which still hung about my neck. "You say you can really control the weather with that thing?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "How do you know?" "I've tried it. It works." "What did you do?" "That storm this afternoon. It was mine." "I wonder...?" "What?" "I wonder what I would have done with that sort of power? What I'd do with it?" "The first thing that crossed my mind," I said, slapping the wall of my tomb, "was to destroy this place by lightning -- strike it repeatedly and reduce it to rubble. Leave no doubt in anyone's mind as to my feelings, my power." "Why didn't you?" "Got to thinking about it a bit more then. Decided -- Hell! They might really have a use for the place before too long, if I'm not smart enough or tough enough or lucky enough. Such being the case, I tried to decide where I would like them to dump my bones. It caught me then that this is really a pretty good spot -- up high, clean, where the elements still walk naked. Nothing in sight but rock and sky. Stars, clouds, sun, moon, wind, rain -- Better company than a lot of other stiffs. Don't know why I should have to lie beside anyone I wouldn't want next to me now, and there aren't many." "You're getting morbid, Corwin. Or drunk. Or both. Bitter, too. You don't need that." "Who the hell are you to say what I need?" I felt him stiffen beside me, then relax. "I don't know," he finally said. "Just saying what I see." "How are the troops holding up?" I asked. "I think they are still bewildered, Corwin. They came to fight a holy war on the slopes of heaven. They think that's what the shooting was all about last week. So they are happy on that count, seeing as we won. But now this waiting, in the city -- They don't understand the place. Some of the ones they, thought to be enemies are now friends. They are confused. They know they are being kept ready for combat, but they have no idea against whom, or when. As they have been restricted to the billets the whole time, they have not yet realized the extent to which their presence is resented by the regulars and the population at large. They w ill probably be catching on fairly soon, though. I had been waiting to raise the subject, but you've been so busy lately..." I sat smoking for a time. Then, "I guess I had better have a talk with them," I said. "Won't have a chance tomorrow, though, and something should be done soon. I think they should be moved -- to a bivouack area in the Forest of Arden. Tomorrow, yes. I'll locate it for you on the map when we get back. Tell them it is to keep them close to the black road. Tell them that another attack could come that way at any time -- which is no less than the truth. Drill them, maintain their fighting edge. I'll come down as soon as I can and talk to them." "That w'ill leave you without a personal force in Amber." "Stanisfaw Lem is wildly comic... sardonic, perplexing, insightful," writes Theodore Sturgeon in The New York Times Book Review. He is also the leader of the Continuum Books "cultural invasion" that is making the best in European science fiction available to American readers. Stanisfaw Lem Lem shows himself the absolute master of language and satire in this apocalyptic vision of the overpopulation problem in #. "Original, disturbing, mordantly funny. "-The Kirkus Reviews. # Stanisfaw Lem "A rousing adventure in the technological mode." -- Ursula K. Le Cuin. # Franz Rottensteiner, Editor The best in European science fiction. "Startlingly informative. A good anthology." -- Theodore Sturgeon. # Arkadi and Boris Strugatski A novel with a "sweep of characterization astonishingly wide." -- New Statesman. # Stanisfaw Lem This story of missing -- and apparently resurrected -- bodies adds a fresh dimension to the detective mystery genre. # Stanisfaw Lem book." -- Ioanna Russ. # Stanisfaw Lem Fables for the Cybernetic Age The escapades of two cosmic constructors in "the funniest... most thoughtprovoking book I have read for a long time." -- Arthur Koestler. # Jacques Sternberg A selection of short stories, including the acclaimed novella Fin de #ece by a younger French author who has been called the Moliere of science fiction. # Stefan Wul Full of fast moving plots and surprise endings, this French classic is must reading. # Write lor a complete Continuum Books catalog # Second Ave., New York, N.Y. # "True. It may prove a useful risk though, both as a demonstration of confidence and a gesture of consideration. Yes, I think it will turn out to be a good move. If not..." I shrugged. I poured and tossed another empty into my tomb. "By the way," I said, "I'm sorry." "What for?" "I just noticed that I am morbid and drunk and bitter. I don't need that." He chuckled and clicked his glass against my own. "I know," he said. "I know." So we sat there while the moon fell, till the last bottle was interred among its fellows. We talked for a time of days gone by. At length, we fell silent, and my eyes drifted to the stars above Amber. It was good that we had come to this place, but now the city was calling me back. Knowing my thoughts, Ganelon rose and stretched, headed for the horses. I relieved myself beside my tomb and followed him. V T he Grove of the Unicorn lies in Arden to the southwest of Kolvir. near to that jutting place where the land begins its final descent into the valley called Garnatli. While Garnath had been cursed, burned, invaded and fought through in recent years, the adjacent highlands stood unmolested. The grove where Dad claimed to have seen the unicorn ages before and to have experienced the peculiar events which led to his adopting the beast as the patron of Amber and placing it on his coat of arms was, as near as we could tell,' a spot now but slightly screened from the long view across Garnath to the sea -- twenty or thirty paces in from the upper edge of things: an asymmetric glade where a small spring trickled from a mass of rock, formed a clear pool, brimmed into a tiny creek, made its way off toward Garnath and on down. It was to this place that Gerard and I rode the following day, leaving at an hour that found us halfway down our trail from Kolvir before the sun skipped flakes of light across the ocean, then cast its whole bucketful against the sky. Gerard drew rein as it was doing this. He dismounted then and motioned to me to do the same. I did, leaving Star and the pack horse I was leading there beside his own huge piebald. I followed him off perhaps a dozen paces into a basin half-filled with gravel. He halted and I came up beside him. "What is it?" I asked. He turned and faced me and his eyes were narrow and his jaw clamped light. He unfastened his cloak, folded it and placed it on the Iground. He unclasped his swordbelt and lay it atop the cloak. #"#ET rid of your blade and your jcloak," he said. "They will only get in the way." I had an inkling of what was coming, and I decided I had better go along with it. I folded my cloak, placed the Jewel of Judgment beside Grayswandir and faced him once again. I said only one word. "Why?" "It has been a long time," he said, "and you might have forgotten." He came at me slowly, and I got my arms out in front of me and backed away. He did not swing at me. I used to be faster than he was. We were both crouched, and he was making slow pawing movements with his left hand, his right hand nearer to his body, twitching slightly. If I had had to choose a place to tight with Gerard, this would not have been it. He, of course, was aware of this. If I had to fight with Gerard at all, I would not have chosen to do so with my hands. I am better than Gerard with a blade or a quarterstaff. Anything that involved speed and strategy and gave me a chance to hit him occasionally while keeping him at bay would permit me to wear him down eventually and provide openings for heavier and heavier assaults. He, of course, was aware of this also. That is why he had trapped me as he had. I understood Gerard though, and I had to play by his rules now. I brushed his hand away a couple times as he stepped up his movements. pressing nearer to me with every pace. Finally, I took a chance, ducked and swung. I landed a fast, hard left just a little above his middle. It would have broken a stout board or ruptured the insides of a lesser mortal. Unfortunately, time had not softened Gerard. I heard him grunt, but he blocked my right, got his right hand under my left arm and caught my shoulder from behind. I closed with him fast then, anticipating a shoulder lock I might not be able to break; and. turning, driving forward, catching his left shoulder in a similar fashion. I hooked my right leg behind his knee and was able to cast him backward to the ground. He maintained his grip though, and I came down atop him. I released my own hold and was able to drive my right elbow into his left side as we hit. The angle was not ideal and his left hand went up and across, reaching to grasp his right somewhere behind my head. I was able to duck out of it, but he still had my arm. For a moment, I had a clear shot at his groin with my right, but I restrained myself. It is not that I have any qualms about hitting a man below the belt. I knew that if I did it to Gerard just then his reflexes would probably cause him to break my shoulder. Instead, scraping my forearm on the gravel, I managed to twist my left arm up behind his head, while at the same time sliding my right arm between his legs and catching him about the left thigh. I rolled back as I did this, attempting to straighten my legs as soon as my feet were beneath me. I wanted to raise him off the ground and slam him down again, driving my shoulder into his middle for good measure. But Gerard scissored his legs and rolled to the left, forcing me to somersault across his body. I let go my hold on his head and pulled my left arm free as I went over. I scrambled clockwise then, dragging my right arm away and going for a toehold. But Gerard would have none of that. He had gotten his arms beneath him by then. With one great heave, he tore himself free and twisted his way back to his feet. I straightened myself and leaped backward. He began moving toward me immediately, and I decided that he was going to maul the hell out of me if I just kept grappling w ith him. I had to take a lew chances. I watched his feet, and at what I judged to be the best moment I dove in beneath his extended arms just as he was shifting his weight forward onto his left foot and raising his right. I was able to catch hold of his right ankle and hoist it about four feet high behind him. He went over and dow'n, forward and to his left. He scrambled to get to his feet and I caught him on the jaw with a left hook that knocked him down again. He shook his head and blocked with his arms as he came up once more. I tried to kick him in the stomach, but missed as he pivoted, catching him on the hip. He maintained his balance and advanced again. I threw jabs at his face and circled. I caught him twice more in the stomach and danced away. He smiled. He knew I was afraid to close with him. I snapped a kick at his stomach and connected. His arms dropped sufficiently for me to chop him alongside the neck, just above the collarbone. At that moment, however, his arms shot forward and locked about my waist. I slammed his jaw w'ith the heel of my hand, but it did not stop him from tightening his grip and raising me above the ground. Too late to hit him again. Those massive arms were already crushing my kidneys. I sought his carotids with my thumbs, squeezed. But he kept raising me, back, up over his head. My grip loosened, slipped away. Then he slammed me down on my back in the gravel, as peasant women do their laundry on rocks. There were exploding points of light and the world was a jittering, half-real place as he dragged me to my feel again. I saw his fist -- T he sunrise was lovely, but the angle was wrong... By about ninety degrees... Suddenly, I was assailed by vertigo. It cancelled out the beginning awareness of a roadmap of pains that ran along my back and reached the big city somewhere in the vicinity of my chin. I was hanging high in the air. By turning my head slightly, I could see for a very great distance, down. I felt a set of powerful clamps affixed to my body -- shoulder and thigh. When I turned to look at them, I saw' that they were hands. Twisting my neck even farther, I saw that they were Gerard's hands. He was holding me at full arms' length above his head. He stood at the very edge of the trail, and I could see Garnath and the terminus of the black road far below'. If he let go, part of me might join the bird droppings that smeared the cliff face and the rest would come to resemble washed up jelly fish I had known on beaches past. "Yes. Look down, Corwin," he said, feeling me stir, glancing up, meeting my eyes. "All that I need to do is open my hands." "I hear you," I said softly, trying to figure a way to drag him along with me if he decided to do it. "I am not a clever man," he said. "But I had a thought -- a terrible thought. This is the only way that I know to do something about it. My thought was that you had been away from Amber for an awfully long while. I have no way of knowing whether the story about your losing your memory is entirely true. You have come back and you have taken charge of things, but you do not yet truly rule here. I was troubled by the deaths of Benedict's servants, as I am troubled now by the death of Caine. But Eric has died recently also, and Benedict is maimed. It is not so easy to blame you for this part of things, but it has occurred to me that it might be possible -- if it should be that you are secretly allied with our enemies of the black road." "I am not," I said. "It does not matter, for what I have to say," he said. "Just hear me out. Things will go the way that they will go. -- If, during your long absence, you arranged this state of affairs -- possibly even removing Dad and Brand as part of your design -- then I see you as out to destroy all family resistance to your usurpation." "Would I have delivered myself to Eric to be blinded and imprisoned if this were the case?" "Hear me out!" he repeated. "You could easily have made mistakes that led to that. It does not matter now. You may be as innocent as you say or as guilty as possible. Look down, Corwin. That is all. Look down at the black road. Death is the limit of the distance you travel if that is your doing. I have shown you my strength once again, lest you have forgotten. I can kill you, Corwin. Do not even be certain that your blade will protect you, if I can get my hands on you but once. And I will, to keep my promise. My promise is only that if you are guilty, I will kill you the moment I learn of it. Know also that my life is insured, Corwin, for it is linked now to your own." "What do you mean?" "All of the others are with us at this moment, via my Trump, watching, listening. You cannot arrange my removal now without revealing your intentions to the entire family. That way, if I die forsworn, my promise can still be kept." "I get the point," I said. "And if someone else kills you? They remove me, also. That leaves Julian, Benedict, Random and the girls to man the barricades. Better and better -- for whoever it is. Whose idea was this, really?" "Mine! Mine alone!" he said, and I felt his grip tighten, his arms bend and grow tense. "You are just trying to confuse things! Like you always do!" he groaned. "Things didn't go bad till you came back! Damn it, Corwin! I think it's your fault!" Then he hurled me into the air. "Not guilty, Gerard!" was all I had time to shout. Then he caught me -- a great shoulder-wrenching grab -- and snatched me back from the precipice. He swung me in and around and set me on my feet. He walked off immediately, heading back to the gravelly area where we had fought. I followed him, and we collected our things. As he was clasping his big belt he looked up at me and looked away again. "We'll not talk about it any more," he said. "All right." I turned and walked back to the horses. We mounted and continued on down the trail. T he spring made its small music in the grove. Higher now, the sun strung lines of light through the trees. There was still some dew on the ground. The sod that I had cut for Caine's grave was moist with it. I fetched the spade that I had packed and opened the grave. Without a word, Gerard helped me move the body onto a piece of sailcloth we had brought for that purpose. We folded it about him and closed it with big, loose stitches. "Corwin! Look!" It was a whisper, and Gerard's hand closed on my elbow as he spoke. I followed the direction of his gaze and froze. Neither of us moved as we regarded the apparition: a soft, shimmering white encompassed it, as if it were covered with down, rather than fur and maning; its tiny, cloven hooves were golden, as was the delicate, whorled horn that rose from its narrow head. It stood atop one of the lesser rocks, nibbling at the lichen that grew there. Its eyes, when it raised them and looked in our direction, were a bright, emerald green. It joined us in immobility, for a pair of instants. Then it made a quick, nervous gesture with its front feet, pawing the air and striking the stone, three times. And then it blurred and vanished like a snowflake, silently, perhaps in the woods to our right. I rose and crossed to the stone. Gerard followed me. There, in the moss, I traced its tiny hoofmarks. "... Then we really did see it," Gerard said. I nodded. "We saw something. Did you ever see it before?" "No. Did you?" I shook my head. "Julian claims he once saw it," he said, "in the distance. Says his hounds refused to give chase." "It was beautiful -- That long, silky tail, those shiny hooves..." "Yes. Dad always took it as a good omen." "I'd like to myself." "Strange time for it to appear... All these years... ," I nodded again. "Is there a special observance? It being our patron and all... Is there something we should do?" "If there is. Dad never told me about it," I said. I patted the rock on which it had appeared. "If you herald some turn in our fortunes, if you bring us some measure of grace -- thanks, unicorn," I said. "And even if you do not, thanks for the brightness of your company at a dark time." We went and drank from the spring then. We secured our grim parcel on the back of the third horse. We led our mounts until we were away from the place, where, save for the water, things had become very still. "h: into the row long," asked Chiet EdIward Longlegs, Sr., staring ne mirror and centering the war bonnet on his head with both hands, "am I supposed to sit around here saying 'ugg' and 'how' like some kind of savage?" He adjusted the feathered train to fall exactly between his shoulderblades. then glanced at his grandson's relleclion in the mirror. "As long as it takes," answered Ambassador-at-large Ed Longlegs, Ilf. scrutinizing his grandfather's costume and frowning. "There's still something wrong." Chief Longlegs looked at himself. Boots. Fringed leather pants and jerkin with authentic Hopi beadwork. Authentic Sioux war bonnet. He looked up at his grandson. "Looks O.K. to me." The Ambassador shook his head, unconvinced. "I can't quite put my linger on it. Somehow, you don't look indian enough." Chief Longlegs grunted. "Been an injin all my life." "But you don't look it." Chief Longlegs peered into the mirror. His weathered face and hooked nose went well with the bonnet. "Best lookin' injin I ever seen." "It's not your face." "What is it?" The Ambassador brightened, pointing. "Your boots." Chief Longlegs lifted one foot, examining the boot. "What's the matter with my boots?" "They aren't authentic." "They're gen-u-wine Mexican leather." "I can see that." "Hand tooled." "I can see that, too. But whoever heard of an indian wearing cowboy boots?" "Me. I worn'em all my life. On (he reservation, even'body wears 'em." The Ambassador showed his exasperation. "Grandfather, we aren't on the reservation. We have to impress a few palefaces." "Ain't no difference between palefaces and most injins no more. Take you, for example. You ain't no more an injin than... than..." Chief Longlegs waved his hand in a great arc in front of him, indicating the ship around them and the Moon ahead. "... them critters out there." "Aliens." corrected Ambassador Longlegs. "Whatever you call 'em, they ain't injins and neither are you." Chief Longlegs jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "I seen you back there in Washington powwowin' with the big wigs. Do you call him Great White Father ever now and then so's he remembers you're an injin?" "I call him Mr. President like everyone else." A laugh erupted from Chief Longlegs, a curt, sarcastic laugh. He pointed an accusatory index finger at his grandson. "You see! You ain't no injin! Any selfrespectin' injin would throw in a few Great-White-Fathers just to keep'cm guessin'." Chief Longlegs snorted and chuckled, enjoying his grandson's discomfort. Eventually, he subsided. "Where was we anyways?" "Your costume. Are you sure everything else is authentic?" "More or less." The Ambassador frowned. "What do you mean, more or less?" "You called me at the last minute, you know." "I know. So what?" "So I had to scrounge around." He touched the bonnet. "This here's Sioux, but it's authentic Sioux, they tell me, and this..." He touched the leather jerkin. "...is Hope-eye. or most of it anyways. Some of them beads is plastic and put on by machine, but them designs is supposed to be Hope-eye, and -- " "Is vthing Apache?" "What do you care? You wouldn't know an Apache from a Sioux if one bit you." The Ambassador shook his head, incredulous. "None of it is Apache?" "Not much. If you'da given me more time -- " "We didn't have more time. Now take off those cowboy boots and put on some moccasins." "Ain'l got no moccasins." " Then go barefoot." "Barefoot!" "It has to look authentic and cowboy boots," said Ambassador L.onglegs, "don't." "But barefoot does." "It's better than nothing." Grumbling, Chief Longlegs reached down and began tugging at his left boot. It came off easily. The right one stuck. "Gimme a hand here, halfbreed." said Chief Longlegs, extending his right leg. "Grandfather, please stop calling me half-breed." "That's what you are, ain't it? Half while man, half injin." "I'm a full-blooded Apache just like you." Chief Longlegs grunted. "What's that grunt supposed to mean?" "No full-blooded Apache would of treated no injins the way you treated them injins." "What injins -- I mean, indians?" "In New York. They just wanted their rightful tribal land back, but you -- you Uncle Tom-Tom -- you skinned 'em out of it for the Great White Father." "Graztfather, they wanted Manhatten back." "Don't matter." "Sometimes you're very difficult to talk to. grandfather." Chief Longlegs grunted. "And what's that supposed to mean?" "It means my leg's gettin' tired sticking out here in the air. Take off the boot." The Ambassador grabbed the heel and toe of the boot and jerked. " Watch it! You're gonna rip off the leg." "Sorry." W hile watching his grandson struggle with the boot, Chief Longlegs began to doubt the wisdom of accepting the boy's offer. If he were incapable of removing a simple boot (the leg was twisted and jerked; sweat blossomed on his grandson's forehead), how would he be at saving the human race, palefaces included? Initially, when his grandson phoned from Washington, Chief L.onglegs had been reluctant to accept the call. For months after the Manhatten incident, Chief Longlegs had gone around denying kinship to the boy. When asked if he were related to the Ed Longlegs who sold out the indians holding Bedlow Island, he usually tried to suggest the Ed Longlegs involved was a Seminole. No relation. Accepting the phonecall might acknowledge the kinship. Still, the boy was kin. Acknowledging it. Chief Longlegs was forced to acknowledge something else about his grandson. In spite of the boy's Harvard education -- perhaps because of it -- he was a dumb injin. In Chief Longlegs' opinion, nothing was w'orse than a dumb injin, except a dumb paleface. He had taken the call. When the boy explained the situation, that alien lifeforms had occupied the Moon, completely rending Tranquility Base and destroying any approaching ships or missiles from Earth, that the President wanted Ed Longlegs, the successful negotiator in the Bedlow Island incident, to talk to them and strike a bargain, that Ed Longlegs wanted Chief Longlegs to accompany him -- w'hen all this was explained, Chief Longlegs called the boy a dumb injin to his face and hung up. The boy called back. He pleaded, saying this was the finest opportunity in modern times to demonstrate indian wisdom. Chief Longlegs replied that wise red men stayed on the reservation when green men threatened White men. The boy said the world was in danger. Chief Longlegs said indians alw'ays lived with danger. The boy said the family name would be enhanced. You mean, responded Chief Longlegs, the career of Ed Longlegs would be enhanced. Yes, admitted his grandson, the grueling climb to the presidency would be shortened. Why, inquired Chief Longlegs, me? Because, answered the boy, the government is desperate. T he governments of the United States and the Soviet Union had tried everything to contact the aliens. When radio communication proved fruitless, they sent out ambassadors. Each time an ambassador's ship settled into parking orbit around the Moon, the aliens blasted it. Ed Longlegs, seeing an opportunity to save mankind and, incidently, enhance his career, had sold the President on the idea of Chief Edward Longlegs, Sr., possessor of ancient indian lore, gleener of sacred mystical insights, a man in complete harmony with himself and nature, a man so serene rattlesnakes only bit him when forced to at gunpoint -- in short, a man capable of communicating with anything, terrestrial or extraterrestrial. Chief Longlegs, mulling over the description, had hesitated, remembering his last encounter with a rattler. The snake had plunged its fangs into Chief Longlegs' calf, and if it had shown any emotion at all, it certainly was not a sense of coercion -- more like delight. Finally, Chief Longlegs spoke. Me? Yes, you. But -- All of it, assured Ed Longlegs, was simply a deception, a harmless ruse to let the boy get into a position to talk to the aliens and save the world. Did Chief Longlegs, after all, disapprove of deceiving palefaces? Of course not, replied Chief Longlegs, but he did disapprove of situations tending to endanger Chief Longlegs' life. The boy assured him he could rest easily. At Harvard, they had taught Ed Longlegs, #, to handle any situation. In spite of himself, Chief Longlegs found the mystical insights taught at Harvard persuasive. Plus, he liked the idea of deceiving palefaces, whether pale white or pale green. Besides, he would get a free trip to Washington and a ride in a rocketship, if that was what they called them. It would divert him from the daily grind of haggling with the Japanese import company that supplied the pot shards he sold the archaeologists. He accepted. W atching the boy yank at his boot, feeling the pain it caused in his hip. Chief Longlegs rather doubted the wisdom of accepting. "Here," said Chief Longlegs, withdrawing his boot from his grandson's hands and hiking it on his knee, "let me do it." He pulled on the heel, pointed his toe and extracted his foot. Ambassador Longlegs wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "O.K. Let's go." "Where?" "The bridge. We're almost there." Chief Longlegs followed his grandson into the corridor. They took the elevator, riding in silence. During most of the trip from Earth, Chief Longlegs had ridden in silence. He felt like a prisoner, forbidden to leave his cabin. The boy had said it would strengthen his image -- add authority -- if he were held off stage until the crucial moment, then brought in like a savior. Chief Longlegs gave less than a hoot in hell about his image. He wanted to see the spaceship. He had an idea for painting pot shards so the archaeologists would think the Apaches were descended from space travelers. It would boost sales. But he needed authentic designs. To get them, he had to see the ship. Even when he explained the situation to the boy, simply and clearly, his grandson kept him in the cabin. Harvard had done something to the boy's values. The door opened onto the bridge. In front of them, a figure, its back turned, stood in the center of a wide panorama of glass windows, staring out at the Moon below. The figure heard the hiss of the opening door and glanced around, simultaneously telling one of the numerous men seated at the bridge console to keep an eye on the planet. "He think it's goin' somewheres?" whispered Chief Longlegs and chuckled. "Shh," said his grandson. "Remember, only Apache." "Ahh," said Captain Carapalida, approaching them with a hand outstretched toward Chief Longlegs, "Ambassador and Chief Longlegs." He grasped Chief Longlegs' hand in both of his, shaking it vigorously and peering deeply -- almost reverently -- into his eyes. "I was about to call you two. We're almost ready to take a parking orbit around the Moon." The Captain grinned. "What's he grinning at?" asked Chief Longlegs in Apache. " The responsibility shifts to us as soon as we're in orbit. " The Captain, eyebrows raised, glanced at Ambassador Longlegs. "What's he say. Ambassador?" "He wants to know if the escort ships are still with us." Captain Carapalida returned his attention to Chief Longlegs, nodding his head in an exaggerated arc and speaking in a raised voice. "yes, sir. they are, sir." "Tel! him I'm not deaf. " "He's not deaf." "Oh," said the Captain, flustered. "Sorry. If you'll come over here, you can see our escort." Chief Longlegs followed the two men to the center of the wall of glass. In'front of them, the Moon -- from their angle, half full -- hung in space like a lunar globe. Even what was left of Tranquility Base, which showed on lunar globes as a dot, showed on the Moon as a dot. To either side, ships identical to their own. bubble-nosed giants dragging three long tubes and sporting complicated arrays of solar panels, paced them, approaching the Moon. Only their ship carried the "When do they usually blast ambassadors ?" asked Chief Longlegs. His grandson glowered. "What's he say?" asked the Captain. '"He wants to know when we enter the danger zone." "We're in it." Hesitantly, the Ambassador responded. "I see. I think I'd better consult with my grandfather." He continued in Apache. "What do we do now?" "How the unhappy-huntinggrounds am I supposed to know?" Hell was a difficult word to translate into Apache. " You're the wise-man, aren't you?" "You're the Harvard man, aren't you?" "Grandfather, this is a serious matter. Try to think of some new approach. Mankind needs time. " He pointed out the viewports at the Moon. "Those creatures have the technological capability of coming here from the stars, then destroying our great birds like they were tiny Jlys, " "What do you mean by great birds?" "Spacecraft," said the Ambassador in English. "Oh. I always use heavenly canoe myself. " "Whatever you call it, they can destroy it. We have to buy time until we've reached equality with them. " "First things first. We don't even know if they're still out there. They may have gone home. You might try talking to them. " "Good idea. Captain, is it possible to contact these creatures?" "Sure." The Captain turned to a technician and ordered a visual and audio channel to the surface. When it was established, he turned back to the Ambassador. "That's the frequency the Ruskies used. They got thirty seconds of good talk in before the creatures blasted them." Chief Longlegs noticed his grandson swallow. "O.K. We'll try it. Where do I stand?" "Anywhere. The monitor camera will pick it up and feed it into the communications link." Ambassador Longlegs threw out his chest and stepped forward, staring at the Moon and raising his right hand, palm out. "We come in peace," he said, "for all mankind." Two beams of blue light shot up from the surface. The escort ships (lamed -- incandescent blue balls -- and vanished. "I guess, " said Chief Longlegs, watching the dying sparks from one of the explosions, "that was a bad idea. Ambassador Longlegs, much too stunned to speak, nodded agreement. "Let me tty, " said Chief Longlegs. Shaken from his stupor, the Ambassador looked at Chief Longiegs. "You?" " What do we have to lose?" " Our lives?" "Chicken-livered, eh?" said Chief Longiegs, rather proud of the translation. "Prudent. " "Look, I can't do any worse than you did. " "How do you figure?" " You lost two heavenly canoes, right?" His grandson nodded. "I can only lose one. " " Grandfather , in case you hadn't noticed, we're on that one." "I noticed, " said Chief Longiegs, stepping forward. "Out of my way. Chief Longiegs raised his right hand to the Moon. "How. " He squinted, examining the planet's surface for an answering burst of blue light. None came. Encouraged, he continued. "This is Chief Edward Longiegs talking. What are you foreigners doing on our hunting grounds?" "Grandfather, we're not even sure they know English or Russian. I'm sure they don 't know Apache. " " Are they shooting ?" Ambassador Longiegs fell silent. "Listen here, palefaces, " continued Chief Longiegs. "You go hunt the heavenly buffalo on somebody else's ground. You got that?" S uddenly, a meter in front of Chief Longiegs, the air shimmered, resolving itself into a creature, a humanoid bi-ped, feathered from crest to claws. It reminded Chief Longiegs of a cross between a Hopi Kiva dancer and a parrot. The beak protruded like a macaw's. Apparition, wondered Chief Longiegs? Holographic projection? Perhaps the creature itself, teleported to the bridge of the ship? Hard to tell. Seeing it, the crew panicked, fleeing. They packed themselves so solidly into the bridge elevator that the last man, a sweating fat man, had to scale the front rank and be held aloft by the other passengers. The elevator door closed, leaving only the Captain and the two Longlegs. The creature's beak, flanked by two squinting eyes, clacked like wooden blocks when it spoke. "We will meet with the feathered one. " it said, its Apache, except for the clacks, accentless, glancing at some object hidden among the feathers on its wrist, "at ,twentythree hundred Greenwich Mean Time. " The apparition vanished. after the ship's doctor gave Ambassador Longiegs a mild sedative. Chief Longiegs and his grandson returned to their cabin to prepare for the descent to the surface. Chief Longiegs, noticing his grandson's chagrin at being surpassed in his area of expertise -- diplomacy -- decided to gloat. "You see," said Chief Longiegs, changing out of his beaded suit and vided by the Captain, "you just gotta know how to talk to them critters." "Grandfather," said Ambassador Longlegs, zipping up his own jumpsuit, "stop gloating." "I ain't gloatin'. I'm just tellin' you how it is. If they'd have taught you a little more mystical injin wisdom at Harvard, you'd know that." "You don't know any more about mystical indian wisdom than I do." "I know them critters ain't shootin'." They finished dressing in silence. Chief Longlegs, tired of walking barefoot on the cold metal decks, fearful of arthritis, slipped on his cowboy boots, then replaced his war bonnet, positioning it securely. "How do I look?" "Ridiculous. That war bonnet and those boots don't go with the jumpsuit." "Tough." "You're going to wear them anyway." "Yep." "Why?" "So's they'll know me from you. We probably all look alike to them critters." "When we get down there, let me do the talking." "They want to talk to me, remember, the feathered one." "Do you know' anything about ambassadorial work?" "They ain't shootin'. That's all I gotta know'." The cabin phone hummed. Ambassador Longlegs touched it on. A technician's face appeared. "Lasereom from the White House." "Put it on." The President's face, gray-haired and distinguished but clearly burdened, came on the screen. "Ed," said the President, nodding. "Mr. President." "This is a serious situation." "I agree, sir." The President's gaze went past Ambassador Longlegs to the bunk behind. "Is that your grandfather?" "Yes, sir." "An impressive figure. Does he speak English?" "Only Apache. As I told you at our conference, sir, he is untainted by modern civilization." "I see," said the President. He then raised an open hand to Chief Longlegs. "How." Chief Longlegs responded from the bunk. "Ugg." The President's attention returned to the Ambassador. "The Captain has told me of your initial contact with the creatures. At first, I was dubious of your suggestion. Your grandfather, sagacious as he no doubt is, seemed the wrong diplomatic tool for the job. However, it seems to be proving out. We must continue the strategy. When you get on the surface, I want you to let your grandfather do the talking. him. I have obtained full authority from every country in the United Nations to let him make any agreement he feels is justified. We need time, Ed, to gain technological parity with these creatures. Your grandfather has to get us that time. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir." "Good luck." The screen went blank. They left the cabin and proceeded to an airlock, transferring to the landing vehicle. The plan called for a geodesic air dome to be erected on the surface and filled with an Earth-normal atmosphere. The creatures could use their apparition to enter the dome. trapped into his seat, war jjbonnet on his lap. Chief Longlegs began to plan his negotiation from the underside of the larger ship and began falling toward the numbers, relayed data to the ship. Below them, the cratered surface grew. Chief Longlegs, hard at work on his plan, ignored it. When his grandson asked about the plan. Chief Longlegs answered, "I figger I'll treat this critter just like an injin agent." They neared the surface and shot over the crater-pocked terrain. Eventually, the alien craft, a rickety-looking structure like an oil derrick surmounted by a sphere, came into view. The pilot landed, meters from the derrick, then pushed the geodesic dome-shaped button on the control panel. A noise erupted from the side of peered out the port. A ramp was just touching ground below him. A cart rolled down the ramp onto the surface of the Moon. It stopped after a hundred meters and seemed to explode metal bars. Arms quickly extruded from the cart, catching the bars and rapidly beginning to build the dome frame. Once complete, the cart sprayed the frame with plastic from a hose with a blunderbuss nozzle, conplastic tunnel and retreated ten meters, stopping. A green light "Ready," said the pilot. "Let's go, grandfather. " "What do you mean, let's go?" Chief Longlegs indicated himself with his thumb. "The bird wanted to talk to me. " "Yes. but -- " "And, the whitechief-inWashington did say I was supposed to do the talking. " "I know, but -- " "No buts. I 'm going alone. " Before his grandson could object, Chief Longlegs, grabbing a voice activated document printer, found the entrance to the plastic tunnel and started for the dome. Though he realized the act might look like courage to the pilot, his was to jettison his grandson. Mystical Harvard wisdom or no mystical Harvard wisdom, the boy lacked sense. He would only antagonize the bird into blasting them. Chief Longlegs emerged inside the dome and put on his war bonnet. Almost immediately, the feathery apparition shimmered and solidified. It raised one clawed hand. "How," it clacked. Chief Longlegs, glad to see the creature had learned English at last -- Apache lacked words for some of the things they would be forced to talk about -- responded with a raised hand. "O.K. How you?" "Fine. What do you want with us?" "What do.you," said Chief Longlegs. "want with us?" "We intend," clacked the feathered emissary with a candor Chief Longlegs could but admire, "to take all of the usable worlds in this arm of the galaxy." "That sounds reasonable. Can I ask why?" "It is our destiny, our manifest destiny." Somewhere, Chief Longlegs had heard the phrase before. He shrugged, unable to pinpoint the source. Sizing up his adversary. Chief Longlegs decided they were critters who both spoke the same blunt language. "What say we skip all the Harvard niceties and get down to business. I gotta proposition." "What kind of proposition?" asked the creature, the eyes, next to the beak, narrowing. They got dow n to business. Chief Longlegs offered, the bird rejected. The bird offered. Chief Longlegs rejected. After several hours of tedious detail w'ork. Chief Longlegs had to admit the bird was a hard bargainer, harder than the Japanese pot shard company, harder than the indian agent, harder even than the archaeologists. Still, the bird reacted enough like them to let a bargain -- rough but adequate -- be struck. They drew up a voice-printed document and signed, the bird's talon mark next to Chief Longlegs' X. Chief Longlegs rolled his copy of the treaty into a tube, picked up the voice-printer, and started for the tunnel. He hesitated at the entrance, a question forming in his mind. He glanced back. "By the way, how come you critters agreed to talk to me and blasted everybody else?" "We saw' your feathers and took you for human." Chief Longlegs, his curiosity satisfied, made his way back to the ward the orbiting spacecraft. During the trip. Ambassador Longlegs read the treaty, his scowl deepening with each paragraph. "Grandfather," he said as they approached the mothership, "this is the worst treaty I have ever seen. You gave away everything ." "Yep." Angry. Ambassador Longlegs shook the document, jabbing at a middle paragraph with his free hand. "Look at this, grandfather. Mankind is restricted to Sol's four inner planets for a hundred years!" "Yep." "I can't show a treaty like this to the President," protested Ambassador Longlegs. "It's man's destiny to own the stars. We can't just... just... He threw up his hands. "...stop! You've made the inner planets into some kind of..." His hands continued to wave. "... "... reservation!" "Yep." "Is that all you have to say, yep? What am  supposed to tell the President?" "Tell him I got faith in him. When the time comes, the Great White Father will know how to break a treaty."  We know the past and must act accordinglyso that the Present may be Eternal! can remember when the years l changed, I can remember when (rode a horse of a different technicolor. Now when I feel like having a woman, I have myself changed into one. You remember me. I was Mr. and Mrs., I rode across your screen. I danced for you. I fell off horses for you. I got shot for you. I was living in two worlds and Jesus Christ was working the night shift. When they said do a rain dance, I did a rain dance. When the dance called for a woman, I was one. You remember me, don't you? If you do, tell me who I am. Am I the book? The movie? I can remember w hen I rode a horse of a different technicolor. I'm making sense to you, yes I am, unless I am a movie and you are a book. The universe is divided into two worlds. Now' the appeal of two worlds is the fear of death. One world is the book and there it is written, "All lives are to be divided into two sections, day and night." The other world is the microphone and the camera and there it is recorded for playback, shining to us, "I am the kingdom and the glory. Let the children come unto me for they shall be recreated in my own image." It all began in #. Twice. Once for day and once for night. This story began in # where precedence became the word as it was spoken, the word. Man learned that all men had to rechannel their aggressions. They invented spectators. They said people should be great and disinterested souls. We know the past. We must act accordingly. Yes, let us act accordingly. T he year # was the year of the success, the all-inclusion, the triumph of the wait-and-watch. They learned how to make people act accordingly. (Do you remember when you w'ondered whether the people you watched on television could watch you. Now you know, don't you?) And # happened twice. Once in the soil and once in the spirit and they all began acting accordingly. Next year will be the third year # happened. # will alw ays be with us. That is what they said. Did you listen? I listened and did not learn. I couldn't be the language, couldn't hide in the same time, couldn't stand for the old or whisper soft things counting me to sleep like tallied sheep. They pushed my button. I know they pushed my button. I heard the connections made in my brain. I died in my sleep and was changed into someone else on a silver screen. I used to be a book. I'm a lie. I know I'm a lie but I am very important. That makes all the difference. You can be punished for not listening. (cocktail conversation tape, tile under "possible blackmail material") Did we push your brain button? Did you die in your sleep? Will you ever know if we made you into someone else? If we changed you from a movie to a book? Did your whole life flash before your eyes at the last moment? Remember -- we saved you from #. And only white men flash through their lives at the last moment, only white men want to watch home movies. Remember -- we saved you from #. Trust us. Be true to yourself, ethnic one, lest you be undone, as it were, in playback. The signal fades with every playback. Save your strength. Magnetism loves you, be kind to its home, the tape. Remember, you have your place with your race, and are taped accordingly. Take your hand off the silver screen. We don't want to push your brain button. You are the book, and as we told you many times before, you can't re-edit anymore. Put your faith in the tape, rest your mind, we shall watch you watch us, we shall not unwind. Spectators are participators. Do not make us push your brain button. Repeat, do not make us push your brain button. Finish that moccasin, make it accordingly. Sew that bead choker today. Do it for the tape, for your records must be complete. Nobody likes to push your brain button. Stay tuned. (this information broadcast We made you whole. We made you fit the pattern. We broadcast day and night. We make decisions for you. Take your hand off the silver screen. You are interfering with the projectionist. Yes, we listen, we tell you, you are a book, and having been written, you can not cancel a line of it. Act accordingly. R emember when w'e wondered how technology would affect us? Then we woke up suddenly, not enjoying the long, long journey and at that moment a jet screamed through the air, whipping across the sky like a death overhead. On the beach, children tried to leap into a jet's shadow. How fleeting we were. I used to be a dancer. Now' I'm happily possessed. I used to sinfully clothe myself in the central facts of our time. Now', because of the lucky cleavage of men into actors and spectators, I remain undressed. I know you care, I know you'll never cut across my transmission lines. I'll learn and look. I'll promise to remember to forget. I pledge allegiance to the logo and to (he station for which it stands. Forgive me Sponsor, forgive me talking toothbrush, for missing a tooth yesterday morning. I am going to make you proud of me. You'll see a change in my overnight ratings, I promise. No longer will the back of my antenna be resistant to your signal. I am going to be better. I will be content with the "given" in sensation's quest. Before your very eyes, in one stunning lap dissolve, you'll see me faithful to the screen, see me metamorphosised from an untamed body dancing on trees to a pair of eyes staring beautifully in the dark. (a child's prayer of con"Remember the Alamo! Send free laxatives to Mexico!" to davy crocket -- edited out of late-late show telecast) J r know they pushed my button. I  used to be the best Iron Eyes ody that was ever Iron Eyes Cody. Yes, I really think I was. I was always built for action. I fell off horses so well. I got shot very beautifully. I was always very graceful. I was always built for action but I never got the girl. No, I never got the girl. I used to wonder why I never got the girl. Then they rewrote the script and I got the girl by getting myself. I always fell off, horses so beautifully. (note found in murine #) I watched while you slept. Wouldn't you be more comfortable sleeping on the other side. We want you happy, we want you rested. We hope you'll stay tuned, we want you # refreshed. This is your mattress monitor and, as you have guessed, it's time to turn over. Yes, turn over. We want you to pass the freshness-test. We'll treat you like a guest. Roll over, you are done on that side. For your resting convenience, w e are very soft and very wide. Roll over now, we'll show you how. Do it now', don't delay. We want you at your best. You are our favorite guest. We-are the ones to count on to prepare you for a perfect day. Turn over, don't delay. We talk to your kidneys, we are in constant touch. We hope you'll obey. We don't ask much. Failure to comply, we make the kidneys let go. Repeat. Failure to comply, we make the kidneys let go. Isn't it better when the bed stays dry? (neural transmission broadWe don't like the way the toilet flushes. It seems undiplomatic. We wonder. Could its sound be put in harmony? Can you change the rhythm, mute the gurgle, accentuate the flush? We only tell you this because you are near and dear to us. We want your home sounding just right. We want you happy day and night. We don't want to mention it. We really hate to mention it. We hate to mention it but we count. We measure. We are here to insure your utmost in living pleasure. We recommend prunes. We want to see more of you here. You know the danger of becoming a stranger. Wipe away your gloom, let us help you here in the bathroom. We tell you one thing our findings show, you could come here more times than you wanted to go. Trust us and change that flush. (toilet dispenser broadcast, Remember -- we touch you deeply. As you approach sign off, take comfort in the path of transmission. Remember as you travel through life, the world has got you by the golden apples. Take comfort, for your future is now, and now is forever more now. It is audiovisual. Stay tuned. For happiness the number to call is -- . Ask for George or Candy. Or both. We are glad you have chosen our lens as the one to look at. We are glad to see you. Be assured we see you. No one ever dies. Repeat. Take comfort that no one ever dies. Although the original telecast has ceased, we promise you shall live on in reruns and syndication. Take comfort in your longevity. Take comfort we say. Channel # has picked up your option. Your life will be continued as a children's program. The We have signed F. Scott Fitzgerald to play the buffalo. Rejoice in transmission everlasting. Y es, we wrote you as a book, saved you from #. Could you live without what we give? We tell you the truth. Don't make us push your brain button. You believe in one armed men. We made you whole and we don't like that very much. We feel,, your voice and image is wavering from our purpose. It is becoming soft, muted. We want more lights on your face. Remember we saved you as a representative of your race. We monitor, we pray and we teach. Are you trying to escape our reach? Why do you dream of #? We checked, we programmed, we wrote the book. Be glad you're alive. Be glad you have # just once more. You are the kingdom and the book. Watch me dance on the silver screen. There are no words to confuse you. There are no painful choices. No fear of right or wrong. There are no choices to confuse you. We offer you the appeal of two words -- fear and death. The fear of death. Do you know what we mean? won't you watch us sonably persuaded by.) Remember we made and remade every dream ever played and put them on the screen. We wrote the book. We asked nothing of you, wanted nothing of you, programmed nothing from you. We came into your home. Did you look? Don't make me ask you again? We don't want to push that button. We don't want to send you to that place where lights close their tired eyes. Remember -- one-armed men carry imaginary fists at the end of imaginary arms. T his is strictly confidential but I thought you'd like to know. I've been watching you and your hormone count is really quite low. I hope you can correct this. I've watched you. I've programmed your text. Biologically speaking. this monitor recommends sex. Please act accordingly. Your audience loves you. Love them. Refill the lifely cup, we want to see your hormone production go up. Was your voice unsynchronised with the image? Was the meaning hidden, the lights too bright? It came out wrong. It was not what we hoped. Believe me, it will not happen again. Buttons will be pushed, brains will roll. Yes, we know we made an error, we have discovered error. Did we miscalculate your sex? Watch the screen. Watch the screen. See us rectify the errors. Remember -- editors make mistakes. We wrote the book. We edited the movie for you. Be patient. If you've discovered a mistake in the year #, consider it was put there on purpose. We try to put something in # for everybody and some people are always looking for mistakes. (this tape broadcast on the to you once each #, courtesy of the unemployed calendar printers union.) won't go. (popular folksong from #) Crazy Horse, his dying words, #: I can't help you anymore, tell the people I cannot help anymore. I knew you'd see it my way. I knew careful editing would make the meaning clear. It was wrong of you to want #. It was wrong of you to assume that our art needed you, the spectator, in order to be. It was wrong. The film can run, the tape can play without you. you can not exist without it. We insure your existence. We married you when none would have you. We had you. We had you. We had you. When w'e start a film, we put out the lights. (from Webster's Dictionary, # Edition: suicide -- an unprogrammed act, usually committed without benefit of monitoring devices. Usually a fatal act, a fatal taking of one's life, without being ordered to do so, or recording the act for rebroadcast. #. A sin of nontransmission at a moment of the highest entertainment value.) T his is an official notification to all those suicide prones who insist on depriving their peers from witnessing death. In order to insure that the people are not deprived of the entertainment due them, we have devised a method of taking still pictures of your body and turning it into a film for later broadcasting. We take the still picture of your dead body, assemble the dead pictures on a traveling matte, and through recent innovations of the multi-plane camera, bring it to life as a film by artificial insemination. This is the meaning and aim of our films. This is an official notification to suicide-prone monitor tamperers. The people must not be denied their entertainment. Please confine your deaths to monitored periods. The people must not be denied entertainment. Civilization must not aspire for #. It is not on the program. Read this book. It is a suicide note. The people must not be denied their entertainment. (Please watch your monitor. I am committing suicide. The people must not be denied their entertainment. Stay tuned. The people must not be -- ) You are now watching a test pattern. The pleasing tone is designed for your listening enjoyment. Our test pattern is designed to be symmetrically pleasing. Are you happy? The truth about the evils of happiness is on channel #. Please change your dial for this channel. Repeat. Please change your dial for the truth about the evils of happiness.  B lack holes have no hair, but they're fuzzy. Because they're l tizzy. they're not really black. We haven't space for a chatty lead this month. My Velokovsky article was originally scheduled this issue, but Jim Baen just called to say he's got a novel, and could I do a shorter piece. But if that opening sentence doesn't make you want to read the column, I doubt anything would. This month we're giving Galaxy readers a scoop. Our lag time is shorter than most science journals, so you'll learn why black holes aren't black about as quickly as your friendly neighborhood physics professor will. Last month I told you that if a chunk of matter gets squeezed small enough, it becomes a black hole. That's about three kilometers radius for our Sun. The equation for the radius, r, in centimeters is r  #GMc # (Equation #) for mass M in grams, G the universal gravitation constant, and c the velocity of light. W'e call the region that satisfies equation one the Schwarzschild radius. Inside it gravity has become so strong that nothing including light, can escape. Also inside it lurks a singularity that does strange things to time and casuality. For a fictional treatment of this theme see "The Schwurzkind Singularity, " this issue. -- Baen  If you watched a star collapse you'd never see it get quite so small as that. Instead it would appear that the collapse had slowed down and everything was now hovering just outside the Schwarzschild radius. The light would get redder and redder, and also dimmer and would go out. Since nothing can come out of the hole, we can't see in. We call the region from which nothing can escape the "event horizon," and we'll never know what happens inside because of the law of cosmic censorship. If you want to know more about that, read last month's column. lassical black hole theory .dictates several laws of black hole dynamics. Some aren't too interesting, but the Second Law says the area of the event horizon can never decrease, and increases as matter and energy are pumped into the hole. This means that black holes never get smaller. Feed the matter andor energy and they grow. That lets us deduce one thing instantly. What happens if a normal matter and an anti-matter black hole collide? Well, nothing that wouldn't happen if two normal matter holes, or two anti-matter holes, collided, of course. The holes eat each other to form one larger than either, but we'll never know which ones contain normal or antimatter. In fact, the question is meaningless. You see, black holes have no hair. This is a convenient way to say that everything we'll ever know about a black hole can be deduced from three parameters. Once you specify the mass M, the angular momentum J, and the electric charge Q, you've said it all. Nothing remains but location, which isn't important for the physics of the hole, but may be for the physicist who wants to study it. Mass we understand. It doesn't really matter whether that mass is in the form of energy or matter; Einstein's e  Mc# takes care of that, and down in the hole it's irrelevant w hether the rest mass is e or M. Angular momentum comes from rotation of the object before it collapsed. Naturally it's conserved, so that if the star were rotating, the thing inside the hole rotates as well. It also rotates fast, just as a skater speeds up in a spin when she pulls her arms in. The last parameter, charge, is just w'hat it says, and it gives us a way to move a black hole around. If it isn't charged, feed it charged particles until it is, then use magnets to tow' it. The laws of black hole dynamics say you can never recover the rest mass energy (that's the Mc# energy, of course) of the original body. It's lost forever. Even shoving anti-matter down the hole gains you nothing. However, you can get energy out of a spinning black hole. Up to # of the rotational energy is available, and in the case of a star that's a lot. To get it you throw something down the hole, and one of the things that comes out is gravity waves. In our experience gravity waves are puny things, but we're a long way from their source. Up close is another matter entirely. You could be torn apart by them, as the characters in my story. He Fell Into a Dark Hole, very nearly were. Most of what we know about black holes comes from Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge. Many physicists think Hawking is to Einstein what Einstein was to Newton, and he's still a young man. This year Hawking has added quantum mechanics to classical black-hole theory, and he's ruined a lot of good science fiction stories. omewhat over a year ago Larry jJNiven and I went out to Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu. The laser was invented at Hughes, so of course they do a lot of laser research there. They're also among (he top people in ion drive engines, and they've done a lot with advanced communications concepts. All that was fascinating, but we went to talk with Dr. Robert Forward, who's known as one of the experts on gravitation. I'd met him because he liked my previously mentioned black hole story (nominated for a Hugo last year, but alas...) and had been kind enough to call and tell me so. Bob Forward is the inventor of (he Forward Mass Detector, a widget that can track a tank miles away by mass alone. It can't distinguish between a tank at a mile and a. tly on the end of the instrument, but if you use two and triangulate you're safe enough. His detector can also be lowered into oil wells, or lowed behind an airplane to map mass concentrations below. After lunch we talked about black holes. Dr. Forward was particularly interested in Stephen Hawking's then-new notion that tiny black holes might have been formed during the Big Bang of Creation. Since the Second Law predicts that they never get smaller, there should be holes of all sizes left. Some might be in our solar system. They would come to rest in the interior of large masses. There might be quite a large one inside the Sun. for example -- and in the Earth and Moon as well. A hole of very large mass, say # exp # kilograms, would still be tiny: about # exp# centimeters radius. An atomic radius is around # exp# cm., very large compared to such a hole, so that the hole couldn't eat many atoms a day, and wouldn't grow fast. Readers will note that I'm being kind to typesetters. Obviously # exp# means # to the minus # power, just as # exp # means ten to the eighth. I'm using this convention because we had sad experience with the "Belter" column some time ago; between the typesetters and the printing some of the column made no sense. Galaxy readers who don't understand powers of ten notation should go find a highschool (new highschool; they didn't teach that in my day) text and learn, because you can't deal with very large or very small numbers without it. Anyway, black holes inside the Earth or Sun aren't too useful because they're hard to get at. Bob Forward wanted to go to the asteroids. You search for a rock that weighs far too much for its size. Push the rock aside and there in the orbit where the asteroid used to be you'll find a little black hole. You could do a lot with such a hole. For example, you could wiggle it with magnetic fields to produce gravity waves at precise frequencies. There might be all sizes of holes, even down to a kilogram or tw'o. It sounded marvelous. Larry and I figured there were a dozen stories there. I'd already written my black hole story, and Larry hadn't, so he beat nie into print with a thing called The Hole Man. All I got from the trip was a couple articles and columns. Well, Larry's story has just been reprinted in his new collection, while the columns I did about little black holes have been forgotten -- I hope! I'm glad I have nothing in print about tiny black holes, because Hawking has just proved they can't exist. Oh, they can be formed all right, but they won't be around very long. It seems that black holes aren't really black. They radiate, and left to themselves they get smaller all the time. The Second Law needs mosifying. S tephen Hawking's new paper hasn't been widely published yet because he submitted it to this year's Gravity Research Foundawas founded by Edison's friend, stock market analyst Roger Babson. It's been around for many years, and received scornful treatment in Martin Gardiner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. It may or may not have deserved that in the #'s, but for a number of years the leading people in gravitational theory have been entering the competition. Hawking won first prize from cosmic censorship and black hole dynamics. This year he took only third prize, first going to a Cal Berkeley astronomer. Even third prize was enough to tear Larry's The Hole Man to shreds. (Not that Hawking ever mentioned science fiction; but then the Pioneer probes weren't intended to wreck all our stories about Jupiter, either.) Hawking points out that Einstein's general relativity, which produces most of the primary equations for black holes, is a classical theory. It doesn't take quantum effects into account. Hawking corrects this. In quantum theory a length, L, is not fixed. It has an uncertainty or fluctuation on the order of L # L, where L # is the Planck length # exp# cm. Since there is uncertainty in the length scale, it follows that the event horizon of the black hole isn't actually fixed. It fluctuates through the uncertainty region. and energy and radiation can tunnel out of the hole to escape forever. It's the same kind of effect as observed in tunnel diodes, where particles appear on the Other side of a potential barrier. Since black holes have no hair, although they do have fuzz, the quantum radiation temperature -- that is, the rate at which they radiate' -- must depend entirely on mass, angular momentum, and charge. It does, but I'm not going to prove it for you. Hawking uses math that I can tool up to follow, but I'm not really keen on Hermetian scalar fields, and I doubt many Galaxy readers are either. If you want his proof, send a dollar to Gravity Research Foundation, # Middle Street, Gloucester, Mass # and request a copy of HawkDescription Mass Radius Lifetime Lifetime (grams) (cm) (seconds) (years) Kilogram #xI #-# #-# #xI #' I # .I -- # tons #x# #x#-# -- #xI # #I #x#-# #x## #x#-# -- I . #x## #x#-# Ceres #xI # # # #x#-# Earth #xI # #x#-I Eternal Sun #x# # kilometers Galaxy #l I suns #x# #  .# lightyear. Universe # suns #x#  ing's paper Black Holes Aren't Black. Hawking shows that the temperature of a black hole is, T  (# exp #) M K (equation #) where M is mass in grams, and the lifetime of a black hole in seconds is tL  (# exp#) M# (equation #) Using my new Texas Instruments SR-# that handles scientific notation and takes powers and roots in up Table One from these equations. There are more numbers than we need, of course. It's a consequence of the pocket computer. Not long ago I'd have had to use logs and sliderule, and I'd have done no more than I needed. Now look. The first thing to see is that small holes have uninteresting lifetimes. In order for one to be around long enough to use it, the hole must be massive. Any black holes formed in the Big Bang would be # exp # years old now ; so if they weren't larger than a small asteroid they're gone already. Worse, that exponential decay rate defeats us even if we find a hole just decayed to an interesting size. It w ill still vanish too fast to use. So there w'ent Larry's Hole Man , and two stories I had plotted but hadn't written, and I suspect a lot of other science fiction as well. Sometimes I feel a bit like Alice when she protested, "Things flow here so!" But it's w hat we get for living in interesting times, and it ought to teach my friend Larry not to rush into print ahead of me... tt ext month Velikovsky, and I hope I have some friends left after that one's out. B eyond the outskirts of Ramur the elephants at last pulled off on the shoulder of the highway and, sounding my brass horn by way of saying Phhooot! for all the precious lime not to mention trouble they and their handlers had cost, I downshifted to third and picked up speed, seeing in my mind's eye what awaited me at kilometre #, a mess of badderlocks fried in safoil and perhaps one or two cold glasses of excellent frog-toddy. Oh yes, I was exercising my mind's eye quite well, thank you, when rounding a downward sloping hill what should I have to drag both feet to avoid dashing into but a squat structure of gray stone piled up in a rather clumsy imitation of ashlar masonry. I mean the bloody centrestripe ran directly up to, and I supposed, under the oak door, above which hung a small brass bell shaped rather like an irregular star. Well. I caught my breath and dismounted, feeling my brake pads while doing so and noting that the sudden stop had caused them to heat rather much. I recalled not without dread that I hadn't any extras. (Since the region beyond Ramur is hilly this fact was of great importance.) Of course, I could always improvise -- had done so with amazing success in other races -- in fact was known by some sportswriters as the Great Improvisor. Still, I hadn't planned to waste so much brake material on a building that had absolutely no business. that I could then determine, blocking the road. I mean there were cliffs maybe ten metres tall on either side -- solid granite with a hint of diorite -- and the structure was jammed in between. In my mind's eye I saw myself laboring to get myself and the racing bike up the front wall and across the slate roof. That would drain quite a bit of speed from my gluteus maximus, medius and minimus and might well cause mild coxalgia, which racers must avoid at all costs. Of course I was prepared; in my carry-all I had thoughtfully stowed crampons and claws -- not to mention rings, pinions, pulleys, and a length of nylon rope. So I dismounted, caught my breath, and considered the door, underneath which, as I have already stated, the yellow centrestripe seemed to run. Doors are not what you would call my best friends. In previous races my record against them is rather dismal. The first which confronted me I opened with optimism and had my innocent smile bashed in by a lurking medicine ball, placed there by my enemies, of whom I was at that time unaware. And -- to summarize with one last example -- there was the ornate mahogany door on the route from Ciudad Juarez to Belize, behind which waited a slightly ravenous anaconda Eunectes murinus. Close call, yes, thanks to an anabatic breeze from the Gulf of Honduras. But getting back to this door, the one smack in the middle of the highway beyond Ramur. Well, I rang the star-shaped bell, stepped back, hands to the front, set for anything, anything at all. I heard voices. Chanting. I listened. Schoolboys, it sounded like and, yes, they were reviewing the Curie-Weiss Law, by rote I supposed. So I knocked and rang the bell again. Not that I'm anti-education. But my lead in the race, while good, wasn't impossible for a determined foe like Kip or even Pretorius to overcome. And the elephants had delayed me. rriHE door opened inward. I I followed the stripe across the threshhold, where it ducked under a pair of neat, tan oxfords. My gaze elevated. By golly, standing before me was a splendid little chap wearing a handsome fawn-colored suit, with spots, tailored of, I judged, pina cloth. Around his neck dangled a silver chain and whistle, of the type used aboard warships. His face was rather round and I noted immediately his curious gyrus. "Yes?" said he. "I beg your pardon," I replied, "for interrupting, however -- ." "You are sweaty, quite." "Yes, well, actually I've involved in this -- ." "Bicycle race, I assume, seeing that you have such a machine with you." His blue eyes twinkled. I peered past him at the classroom. Sure enough, the yellow centrestripe continued dowm the aisle between the desks, then climbed the wall several feet, and leaped out an open window. Upon the chalkboards Hanking this opening were neatly printed such marvelous bits of info as: # bushas  one R and: # tils  I JD as well as: "As a matter of fact, he said, "we are preparing for recess." The students nodded. "During which time we shall be most happy to help you." Having seen the dusty portrait hanging in the lefthand corner beside what seemed to be a worn Christmas tree was that of BadenPowell, I said, "Jolly decent of you." "You are wondering about the highway," he declared. "I shall explain. The Department of Public Werke changes the roads around for variety. Cuts accident rate, they claim, by breaking monotony. Beware of all road signs -- seldomly mean what they say." "Confusing," I said. "Perhaps, until one knows. But rest assured -- eventually you will reach your destination, perhaps sooner than expected." I glanced over my shoulder. "Maintaining a slight lead, eh?" he said. "And getting slighter. See here, all of this is most stimulating, but what can I do? Mind if I duck through the window and be on my way?" "What? Without sharing our hospitality?" A fine looking young lad wearing I lie red and blue class uniform popped to his feet and cried out, "We have some splendid sagger baked cookies!" Another declared: "And a refreshing clyster!" "Saggers will be adequate, with a whiskey sour, of course," said their teacher. And having so ordered the boys he turned back to me and continued. "We must help you." "I was doing well enough by myself, till now." He frowned. "I was not so much concerned about your fate as the instruction of my charges." He pointed to the likeness of Baden-Powell. "Would be contrary to his philosophy to allow a chance such as this to pass. Boys!" The class came to attention. "To the armory, double-time, h'arch!" They moved off smartly through the window. Now we drank our sours and munched cookies, iced with star designs which tasted more like plaster than sugar. He said, "They'll return in a jiff and then we'll cook up a very warm welcome for your foes." "Not foes, competitors." "As you like." The boys leaped through the window and formed a rank, air rifles at the ready. "You will deploy," said the teacher, "according to Clausewitz Sonata for Light Infantry in E-Major. Fire when you see the flash of their spokes. Move out!" And out they moved, as the teacher donned a dayglo rubber helmet and said, "Make your move An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ##I will feature a revealing, disturbing interview with Avram Davidson. Also: "The Foundation on Sands" by John J. Aiderson, which leaves Isaac Asimov beached. Also: Larry Shaw's reminiscence of the behind-the-scenes And with luck: "Noise Level" by John Brunner. Every issue: The Archives -- new book and story lists. Quarteriysatmple I year S#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I now. Through the window. Follow the highway. You are equipped?" "For anything," I replied. "Excellent!" He extended his hand. "Luck!" "And you," I said. T here were questions I longed to ask; however, the open window beckoned, and in moments I was once more in the race. The highway beyond the building rose quickly to a hilltop. At the summit I glanced back and saw the students, sans uniforms, formed up in several triangles flanking the road down which Kip and Pretorius would soon be coming -- unless during the lag between myself and them the Werke Department had rerouted and by their quirkput those two ahead of me. Well, that thought made me think of w'hat to do. My trusty Onflichter .# was strapped with scope, bipod, and shell-case to the crossbar. If things became too critical I was allowed to try for a rim or chain shoot. Of course, should I miss and draw blood I'd be disqualified. But I hadn't a target, yet. So I settled for another measure by pulling to a halt and breaking out the ketch-rig sails. That was the right move! The mountain wind puffed out the blue and green gala sail, and away I went, feet resting on the pedals. I had time to observe the land through which I raced -- an experience rarely experienced. Cowberries w ere in season. Their purple flowers blended well with the white moschatel and pachysandra, while repant oxalis formed a splendid reseau through which peeked a host of snakeroots. Abruptly, the wind died and the highway left this altiplano in a breathtaking descent which demanded all my cycling skill. Reefing and furling with one hand, steering with the other, I negotiated the twists and turns through gathering shadows, till I passed through a layer of refreshingly moist cloud and fairly popped like a cork from vintage champagne, perhaps Rothchild '# or Funderburk '#, on to an eight-lane concrete freeway, bathed in the pink tones of a setting sun. Adjusting my course to the third lane from the right, I bent low over the silver BeFortage handlebars and endeavored to make up for lost time, all the while keeping one eye on the rearview' mirror, just in case. The freeway rolled on and I with it for several kilometres, then it narrowed like a bottle's neck, wheeled left, rose, lessened again to eyedropper size, turned into a dirt path, and brought me to a curious wooden bridge hung across some sort of dark gorge, out of which came the tumult of struggling water and a great deal of vapor, remindful perhaps of lilac or owl's-clover, if you know' what I mean. So, there was this bloody bridge, a fitting spot for a murder. I tested it with one foot. It swayed but otherwise seemed sturdy enough. Still, no use to risk all. I looped my rope over a thick oak limb close by, ran the rope through the steel safety link on my all-purpose belt, knotted it neatly, and allowed the untied portion of the nylon to play out of my pack, through my fingers, and back to the limb. Thus, if I should plunge into the gorge, I could pinch off the free end and make my way out, having, of course, secured my bicycle by gripping the frame between my legs. However, I reached the other side without having to put this plan into effect. As I drew in and recoiled my rope the idea came to fix the bridge in such a way that it would cause Kip and Pretorius a bit of trouble. Not that I dreamed of cutting the supports clean through! Half-way would be good enough. But I resisted this impulse, and since it was now after sundown, switched on my head and tail lamps and followed the highway, which began to widen a bit and to show signs of halfhearted attempts at paving. On either side the shoulders were buttressed with immense piles of scoriae. Atop of one the beams from my lamp illumined a host of Centruoides gracilis meditating upon the moon, which even now was making its slow rise through the stars. Ah, that was a tranquil leg of the race! But then the beeper pinned to my blouse informed me that I was hungry, and there was neither drive-in nor cafe in sight, nor sign promising one, till I made the next turn and found myself coasting toward a massive steel gate which, luckily, swung inward to admit me. I was in a park of some kind. Yes, I plainly made out in the glow of quaint iron lamps beds of flowers and at least six fair sized Dragon frees in full bloom. The driveway, upon which I rolled seemed to be of brick, perhaps in the Roman style. At any rate, there was no going back for the gate slammed behind. And so I went on, noting Poincianas, Jackarandas, and Quamas in orange, purple and silver bloom, hearing the soft little cries of sapajous, the moans of howler monkeys and, thanks to my amazing scotopia, seeing in the darkness a pleasant enough pond whose beach was festooned by legions of parading yellow and blue crabs. at last, however, the drive ended. I stopped before a bucolic cottage made of white cinchona and, I supposed, satin wood. Brushing a few pesky Zancudos from one eye, my left, I dismounted, set the McGregor "Standfast" kickstand, and knocked upon the door. It opened immediately. "Yes?" said a rather large woman, naked save for rings on her ankles, very large rings, of gold, I judged. "Ahum," I began. "You're with the race," she declared. "Come in." "How could you know that?" I started to say. But didn't. Something was up, I sensed it. Yes, no doubt she was in the pay of my opponents. I must be on guard. And so I went in. My beeper beeped again. "Hungry?" she said. "I have just the dish for you." "Of poison?" I almost replied. But then what should I hear but laughter of a most pleasing sort. It seemed to come from a large red and blue mail box beside the hearth. "Oh dear, aren't they having a good time, though?" she said. "I mean my girls. Not mine, really, but my students." "This is a school of some kind?" "But of course! What did you suppose?" "I had not, till now." She beckoned with her meaty hand. The mail box swung back to reveal a damp stone staircase lighted by sputtering torches. "Shall we go down? The girls will want to make your acquaintance, and there is food available too. Please, you first." I hesitated, then plunged down the stairs which opened onto a narrow corridor cut from living rock. After several twists we came to a huge chamber. Red and green lights burst off and on like pulsing stars. I blinked, then saw in various comfortable positions upon the floor a host of delightful young women and not a few men, who seemed rather fatigued. They were engaged in such play as one might observe in Masters  Johnson's Haiidbuch. Tw'o absolutely perfect misses were playing ride-the-horsey with two gentlemen. I don't know what came over me, perhaps I wasn't thinking clearly due to the trials of the race, but without a moment's delay I rushed over and almost became guilty of involuntary Gomorrah. She giggled and exclaimed, "Better luck next time, handsome!" My hostess laughed and clipped me a good one on the backside, saying, "My sentiments, exactly!" "Yes, well," I fumbled, "it's been a long day, and -- " Language, handmaiden of Thought, failed. I mean w'hat should I notice upon the dangling foot of one gentleman but, yes, a recognizable shoe! Purple upper crafted of shark leather; gold neoprene laces; sole of woven hemp. Done special by Addidas these shoes were, and for whom? Why, the eleven man crew more commonly to those who odds-on favorite to win the Transworld Lighter-than-Air Derby. But it had disappeared, vanished, and the squat DlR-# Pin Ip had come in first, paying sixteen-to-one. "And you are starving," said the hostess, handing me a bowl from w hich spun wisps of steam smelling rather like pumpkin. "This is our favorite dish," she said. "Don't be bashful. Plenty where that came from." I did not dare ask where, exactly, it had come from. But sat down on the floor and gobbled it down,, without looking. I must say that actually it wasn't half-bad, whatever it was. I felt invigorated, revitalized, and so, putting the bowl aside, got the attention of the fellow I'd spotted and said', "By the way, the weather out is splendid. And that's a very interesting shoe you're wearing." "I am barefoot," was his only reply. Seeing that he did not particularly care to converse, I shrugged and glanced about the chamber. In one corner stood a large, glass-fronted case in which were arranged not a few objects, two of which caught my eye. Now, the lighting was not good, but since my vision is perfect I am quite sure (hat they were the shirts of my opponents. The silver and gold #I numerals of Kip were very plain, as were the ## in burnt orange and forest green of Pretorius. Well, I was on the brink of pondering this turn when my hostess pulled me up and said, "Come, I'll show you our class rooms." She drug me through any number of spacious rooms devoted to such pursuits as horticulture and synesthesia and canon law. At last wc arrived at a laboratory where several lovely young ladies were conducting an experiment not unknown to me. They were having some difficulty, so I stepped in and said: "Your problem is that the jellyfish, Cyclosalpa pinnata, must be oriented east-west upon the pewter dish, like so. And now. if you will give me the metal rod. Thank you. Behold!" I tapped the edge of the dish. A sprang from the specimen and threw our shadows in stark relief along the wall. I acknowledged their applause with a simple nod and, not wishing to overstay my welcome said, "It's getting late and I am involved in a race. Best hit the road, you know." "Nonsense!" cried the lady. "You must spend the night. It is snowing on Chimborazo. The pass will be blocked." "There are ways of circumventing snow." I began. "Naturally, I anticipated you would act thusly," she said, "and so, for your own good and the sake of the race, I slipped a little someli Exact sen le, finely detailed, precision melalensl replicas of real tanks, aircraft. ships mid soldiers. Not toys, but historically accurate models which enable you to recreate and command at the great buttles and campaigns of history... ancient. Napoleonic. Revolutionary and Civil Wars. World Wars, etc. Models ideal for diorama budding. Also: Realistic w.-irgamc rules: tabletop battle games: bmks on wargaming techniques, battle analysis, uniforms, equipment performance and specs. Challenging, education a I und thoroughly absorbing ,... one of America's I us lest growing hobbies. Send SO for big, illustrated catalog containing complete listings and descriptions of products available. Dept. Box #, Belle Haven, Va. # thing extra into your food. Aren't you drowsy in the least?" Before I could answer I fell asleep. Perhaps I dreamed. I usually do. But I cannot recall of what I dreamt. I awoke with the dawn outside the iron gates. A tray of breakfast was on the soft grass beside me. My bike stood waiting. I, of course, ignored the food and downed three low-fat racing pills stowed in the carry-all. Then, having checked tire pressure and brake cables, mounted up and spun away, at the same time wondering how I could've missed the left turn which, last night, would've enabled me to avoid the girls' school and its terrible delay. Soon, however, the road steepened and all my energy was required for pedaling, so I turned off my mind. Up, up, up into the dark clouds I drove myself, lungs bursting, gasping for oxygen. A sign edged in black said: "chimborazo straight ahead." There was snow, of a sugary kind, and ice. I stopped to put on chains, then rattled off again, expecting the worst, at least. But no, the road dipped down, down, down, and in moments I sped through a pleasant pasture grazed by an enormous herd of springbok. It was then I noticed something extremely curious. My shorts were gone. I stood on the pedals to make sure. Yes, no doubt, they were totally gone. Someone, some -- , I mused. But of course! The trophy case! The shirts and now my shorts! A dastardly trick, but I could not repress a smile, which, incidently attracted a large purple butterfly who smacked into my white teeth. Luckily, they had not taken my "John Henry" supporter, so I was in no real danger. Unless I happened through a village populated by prudes or appreciative ladies or alert homosexuals or -- Perhaps I was in some danger. But so be it. Part of the game of racing, and if it came to a showdown, well, I was a crack shot with the Onflichter .#. Wouldn't catch me with my -- that is, well. And so, head down, legs wheeling, I drove myself onward, raising behind a wonderful plume of dust. The road signs promised ice and slippery surfaces, soft shoulders, dangerous curves, so I knew I had nothing to fear. However, when before me loomed a baby blue and pink sign saying "clear sailing ahead, don't worry," I applied brakes and skidded to a halt before a broad river. The water ran deep, the water ran dark. I fancied green eyes peering up from the depths. The other shore, if there was one, was shrouded in gray mist. Periodically a moan rose remindful of fog horns. I laughed. The lengths to which these people went to make their race interesting was absolutely amazing! And I had expected something of a marvellous challenge near the end. What better than a forbidding aqueous expanse? Whistling a merry tune, from Reichmark's Donner und Blitzen, I believe, I quickly inflated my allpurpose gum rubber raft, fitted the bike aboard, tensed the guy wires, and shoved off, carefully shifting into low gear so as to counteract the current's sweep. I passed the wreckage of several wheeled vehicles, one of which might have been a bicycle. Another I recognized as a curricle -- yes, the drowned horse was still between the traces. A seagull perched upon his head and nodded back as I passed. Into what? Why, the mist, of course, and beyond, into clear golden sunshine and a spotless white highway neatly landscaped with cedars. Ah, the odor was a delight! But the road, there was something familiar about it -- yes, it looked to be exactly the same bit of highway that started the race! Of course, I couldn't be sure. But I sensed I was almost to the finish of the race, and to' another victory, for Kip and Pretorius were nowhere to be seen.Ping! Ping! Ping! I steered into a convenient haycock and took cover, at the same time checking my person and equipage. Zing! "Close, but no cigar!" I yelled. There were telltale dimples on the rim of my rear wheel. Zing! Ping! Ouch! Shot zigged off my helmet. Ears rang. I rubbed my eyes and sneaked a peek through the hay. Something moved in the cock twenty yards away. Yes, motion, and now came the glitter of a rifle barrel. At a glance I saw the unique ribbing and horn sights characterizing the Dinkier .#. Kip was potting me, or -- I saw a flash of gold -- no, it was Mrs. Kip, his mother. Rats! Of all the lousy luck, to be pinned down by that woman! I mean she was really overprotective. The hay parted a bit more and I saw her clearly, saw the gold ring in her nose, saw even the green patterned haik she always wore -- had something to do with the Kip tribe. "Mrs. Kip, dear lady, it's only me!" I called out. By way of reply she fired twice into my straw and hissed, "I know, that's why I'm shooting." I frowned, then smiled. "Does this indicate that your son has not yet passed this point?" "Ask him when you see him!" Aha, I reasoned. Kip had not yet passed. I was in the lead, provided of course Pretorius was behind Kip. "You are forcing me to take measures!" I cried. Zing! Well, I had warned her. It was out of my hands now. I considered trying to pot her with my .#, but recalling the great meals of hawksbill soup and filigumbo she'd rustled up for us in happier times, and taking into account the fact she was, after all. Kip's mother, I decided on a less final solution. fully determined trajectory so that after bursting it would float down on her hiding place, then settled down to wait. In moments I heard the sirens, then the whish-whish of the choppers, as they winged in at tree level to give aid. They dropped their huge steel grapples into the hay. On the second pass they hooked Mrs. Kip -- I decline to say where -- and sped off for home base. And once more I was on my way down the homestretch, riding hellfor-leather for the checkered flag. But I had to stop at an eight-foot chainlink fence, beyond which, through scrub pine and palmettoes, I could see the track on which we had to finish. Now what was I to do? I mean the road ran directly into the fence. And I had no way of knowing if the wire was safe. I was standing there, chin in hand, when I heard a bell ring, ring, ringing. Coming down the road toward me was a figure on a bike! I shaded my eyes! Merciful heavens, there were two figures! Kip was bent low over the handlebars, and behind him, rising now on the seat to get a clearer look, was Pretorius. Apparently, they had joined forces against me. I heard them yowl, laugh, saw Pretorius shake his fist and urge Kip on to greater exertion. Well, things did not look very good. I mean, the two of them working together could get over the fence quickly, and then -- I shuddered to think of them taking the flag. So I took immediate steps to insure they would not by simply falling on the group, grasping my right thigh, and moaning. They slid to a stop. Kip bounded over the bars and hit the pavement running. Pretorius steadied the bike and smirking, said to me, "Looks like you're out of it, eh?" "Help me, please." I implored. "Sure," said Kip, "we'll screw up your other leg." They moved up to the fence. I called out, "Stop! The wire may well be electrified!" That gave them pause, but only for a moment. "You'd like us to believe that, wouldn't you?" said Pretorius. "You'd like us to waste time here while you recover, wouldn't you?" "He'd like it," said Kip. "Well, we won't!" exclaimed Pretorius, bending over and making a cup of his hands. "Here, Kip, I'll give you a boost." Quite a boost it was. I mean, the voltage made a delightful rainbow through Kip's body into Pretorius' and thence into terra firma. I let them stand there like glowing statues for a minute, or at least until the circuit breaker up the line blew out and the wires went dead. They seemed welded together, but I detected breathing and eye flicker. They would soon be ready to ride again, so I had to hurry. Over the fence went my bike, followed by me. The brambles and weeds clutched at my bare flanks, but I was not to be stopped this near victory. No, I reached the track, righted my bicycle, found the proper gear, and took off. Let me say right now that this track is really two tracks in one or, to be more exact, a pair of ovals forming a figure eight. At the start of the race each rider had first to make one complete circuit then exit for the crosscountry via an escape road at the pinch, or narrows, as the spot w'here the ovals join is called. All right. I found the entrance lane at the narrows and followed the track, pulling myself together in fine racing form to oblige the hordes of media representatives which, I cameras and mikes at the end. Oh yes, I really moved out, around one oval into the other, around it, and in the distance made out the finish, the wooden stand hung with patriotic bunting, even heard the rumble of the crow'd. Only as I came flashing closer I saw something wasn't quite right. I mean the banner above the track didn't read F-l-N-I-S-H. No, instead it bore the letters S-T-A-R-T. I slowed, pondering this, then speeded up again, reasoning that there was actually no real problem. The course was a circuit; therefore, the end was the same as the beginning. And so, standing up on the pedals and giving the overhead clasped hands sign of victory, as well as my most photogenic smile, I crossed the line of shadow cast down by the banner, slowed to a gentle, graceful stop, and awaited the mob's welcome. Silence. Somewhere beyond the stands in the woods a bird made a cackling sound. I looked to the judges' stand. They sat fanning their sweaty faces with palm fronds. "Ah, I say there," said I. "Beg pardon, but did I come by so -- haha -- fast you didn't notice?" Lord Klutz, chief judge and publisher of the Beaver State Racing Bugle, looked down upon me and, yawning, declared, "My dear fellow, you're a bit late, don't you think. The race began days ago. Why, at any moment we expect the winner." Another judge, I believe it was Dinzu Xblit. Knight of Asphodel and Keeper of the Seal of Blinn, said, "Has he had his shots? Is his passport in order?" I was on the point of making reply when the crowd loosed its finest roar. The checkered flag fell. Kip and Pretorius crossed the line. My protest was disallowed, the ruling handed down being that two men on one bicycle did in no way constitute a breech of the peace and in fact showed great resourcefulness, not to speak of grit. So the bronze trophy was cut down the middle, as was the cash prize, and I was left with nothing. In fact. I was left with somewhat less. My finish so amazed everyone that by unanimous vote I was declared invisible, the reason being that I had gone in the wrong direction, reversing time in a most singular manner and attaining, for now at least, a prodigious mass which precluded the reflection light and, consequently, rendered me a dark spot. I could not stand for this treatment! And so I remounted and commenced to rerun the race, chasing my own shadow, as it were and, I hasten to add, catching it just before Kip and Pretorius set out. as i accepted the trophy and granted exclusive interview rights to several reporters, my opponents foamed. "Schwarzkind, you are a cad!" Pretorius opined. "And a cheat!" said Kip. "Perhaps," I replied, "but I have beat you again. And, as usual, I am a star. Eat your hearts out." This they fell to doing, while I signed endorsements for baby food and the Quark Motorcoach Company, Ltd., of Panama City, Panama, securing enough in the twinkling of a pen to insure my participation in the next race, which was even then being sonorously announced from the judges' stand.  of the best science fiction published today about worlds of tomorrow... Outstanding authors... magnetic stories... scientific believability... low cost... To be savored again and again... a must for your science fiction library... The city of the apes was on the brink of an horrendous destruction that had happened once -- and was suddenly inexorably, happening again... 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AX# ## A compelling and fascinating anthology of seven science-fiction masters exploring the "ends of time." AS# ## Here is a portrait of ordinary men and women who sought the wrong answer, opened the wrong door to evil. AS#II ## "Psycho." AX#I# ## Voyage only two centuries into the future to find a world filled with luxurious houses of execution. AS# ## A completely new anthology of stories never before published in book form by masters of science fantasy. AX#I ## A look into the future when a massive computer system provides all of man's earthly needs. AX# ## Farmingdale, N.Y. # (Please add ## for shipping) considered social offenses if not actual crimes, but were still sought By the twenty-first century the by many as secret pleasures. Most earlier revolution in sexual morals members of the Establishment behad advanced to the point where longed to the Church of Eros. Conchastity, and the repression or subcurrently, crowding and hunger in the world had led to severe restrictions on reproduction even among the wealthy. A woman who had borne two children was required by law to have any subsequent pregnancies aborted. tronics engineer and chessmaster, to Chicago to locate a midwifer and bear a third child rather than have the abortion required by law. Art pursues Rita to convince her that her plan is both wrong and dangerous before it is too late. Art's transcontinental tube train is halted at the Mississippi. Under attack there by rioters is a monastery of Christians (a sect long in decline) where experiments on preserving life in freshly aborted fetuses are thought to be under wav. Art helps a distraught girl geton the train for Chicago. In Chicago, Rita s brother many other city dwellers in a complex of townhouses fortified against the random violence of the age. Art arrives to find that Rita has come and gone, leaving the two Rodney children with Ann, a militant treebirth advocate and Christian. Art convinces the Parrs that he must be allowed to talk to Rita face to face. George takes him on a tour of the city, supposedly to arrange the contact but really to confuse any Family Planning agents who might be watching them. High points on the tour are a stadium where the unemployed are paid to watch baseball, and a slumburb tavern where Art hears a disheartening broadcast of world news. George takes Art to his karate dojo where Fred, who wants George to hire him as an instructor, has come to be evaluated. Fred fails in combat against humanoid karate-machines. One of George's students. Dr. Hammad, is introduced to Art as the man who can arrange his meeting with Rita... Fred, gloomy and wounded, goes in search of some gladrags ( opaque plastic cloaks) to facilitate his planned sublimationaffair with Marjorie. At the Megiddo Coffee House Fred falls in with some apish companions. A meeting is arranged between Art and his wife, who is in hiding while her anonymous doctor, an acquaintance of Dr. Hammad's, makes preliminary tests. Art is blindfolded and driven to see Rita in the former nurses' quarters of a maternity hospital -- that with the changing times has been converted into a sublimation-brothel. When Art realizes his beloved wife is staying in a whorehouse he tries to drag her out by force but the bouncers subdue him. Exhausted, he is almost seduced into sublimation by one of the girls, who takes him for a customer. Desperate now, he decides to take his problems to Family Planning and throw himself and Rita on their mercy. Outside, opposing picket lines of the Homo League and the radical Young Virgins clash as Art arrives at the building. In the lobby, he finds he cannot betray Ann and George to the law as the midwifery conspirators they are; he dashes out again, and is knocked unconscious in the riot. Musing at home about Art's and Rita's problems, George and Ann hark flashback to their own meeting and early life together; George's saving Ann from apes on a California bus, and their first sublimation together, on the night she missed her high school's orgiastic Senior Prom. We see what has only been implied earlier, that to members of this society the deliberate refusal ( repression , sublimation) of a sexual impulse can sometimes be a transcendental experience, intense and important as orgasm was in an earlier age. Art wakes up in a hideout where the Young Virgins have brought him, having mistaken him for one of their own casualties as they fled the riot scene with the arrival of the police. Art is being treated by a Christian priest-doctor on the lam for midwifery -- in fact the very man who is about to deliver and freeze Rita's fetus. While waiting for a skull X-ray, Art notices a glassy tank and, peering within, discovers a three-month-old human fetus... T he surrounding light was quite dim, and the tank's only window a tiny aperture that allowed a clear view of the thing only from certain angles. Art stepped closer, staring, then abruptly relaxed. There was no umbilical cord, only a blind knot of tissue at the navel. For a moment he had thought that the complex of equipment before him (besides the tanks and piping, there were three oscilloscopes, counters, and other gear that Art could not immediately identify) was in fact an artificial womb, and that the fetus before him had been frozen and revived, or was at any rate in some sense viable. But now he realized that it must be only an abortus being used in some experiment. Tubes, or only wires perhaps (he could not be sure in the dim light) were attached to it inside the tank, but without an umbilical cord, he supposed, it could not be receiving oxygen and nourishment. And he could see no placenta, or analogue of one. There it sat, or rather floated in an upright sitting posture. The thing that so much fuss was made about. It was small, only about the length of Art's middle finger. Its proportions were much different from those of a normal full-term infant, and of course even further from those of an adult, but the thing was unmistakably genus homo all the same. What other species would develop a bulging brow like that, or hold up two such human hands? When Art bent closer, the fingers were fully distinguishable, as were the toes at the end of the insignificant legs and feet. What with the shadows and the angle of his view, the sex was not quite visible. He jumped back a step with a quick intake of breath, and only then was aware of the doctor standing watching him at the corner of the screen a couple of steps away. "Feel all right?" the doctor asked. "You shouldn't be on your feet unnecessarily." Art raised a hand to gently touch the side of his head, at a good safe distance from the wound. He turned his gaze back to the tank. "It moved." "Oh yes, they move. I've located the X-ray film at last. Get back on the cart if you will and we'll finally be able to make sure about that head of yours. Yes, the little girl in there happens to be about the same developmental age as Rita's fetus is right now. About three months as near as I can tell. At that age they've usually been moving spontaneously for several weeks, though the mother usually can't feel the movements yet." Art walked away, pausing at the corner of the screen to look back once. "I didn't know it was... there was no cord." The doctor held out a hand to give support if needed. "Oh. But we usually take that off at parturition. Tapping into the circulatory system elsewhere serves the purpose, and has some technical advantages. Yes, she's very much alive and growing. That's her heartbeat you can hear in the background, sounds like a clock or watch? And with those scopes back there we're continually monitoring brain activity; that won't settle into the regular rhythms for a few more weeks." Art lay back carefully on the cart, settling his head down gently on the pillow. "Is that a living human being?" he asked the fluorescent lights above. The vision of the grotesque, half fish-like head was still before him, and the tiny hands, that seemed about to be raised secretively, protectively, before the face. "Is it?" "You tell me," the doctor grunted, moving the cart in the direction of the X-ray. Art now noticed the thick shielding hung between the machine and the artificial womb at the end of the laboratory. The doctor continued: "Frankly, I've Had my doubts. Sometimes I feel I don't know where to start in thinking about it anymore." His tone was mild and preoccupied; now he had begun a delicate positioning of Art's head beneath the X-ray snout. Art, still looking at the ceiling, said: "Maybe it doesn't matter if a fetus is a human being or not. Maybe such a question is meaningless." "Take a deep breath -- hold it, don't move." There came the usual audible hum. "All right, you can move. What do you mean, it doesn't matter? You know, if these embryos and fetuses turn out not to be individual human beings after all, then I and some of my friends have gone to a hell of a lot of trouble and broken a hell of a lot of laws for nothing." Art twisted on his cart. "You just said that you yourself have doubts." " Doubts , yes!" The man was vexed. He waved a piece of blackened film. "I might have very strong doubts that there's a child under that overturned box I see in the middle of the road, but that doesn't justify my running over it with a truck, not without some lifeor-death reason to run it over. Damn, this one didn't come out as clearly as I'd like. Let's try again. Turn on your right side this time, if you will." "How about the welfare of society as a whole? How about overpopulation, people starving? Aren't those life-or-death reasons?" "To cut off the life of that little girl in there? In a word, no. Take a deep breath, hold it. That's fine." Allowed to move again. Art got up on one elbow. "I suspect neither of us is going to be able to change the other's mind on this by arguing." Art said: "All right, I know that thing in the tank has the potential for someday being a full human being, with all the rights thereof. But not yet, surely not yet. It may generate a brain wave or two but it can't think, it may twitch but it can't act. It couldn't survive for three minutes without artificial help." "Neither could you if you had a really massive coronary. And she could have survived quite well in her natural environment, had we been able to leave her there." The gray-green eyes gave the pictures a final stare and then turned to Art with evident relief. "You're all right. This second picture makes it unanimous. No fracture. You ought to take things easy for a while, but you can go." "Tell me. Why does that have to be a baby? Why must you break the laws, as you admit doing, to make that point?" T he doctor sighed, and let himself down in a chair beside the paper-burdened table, as Art sat up on the cart and reached for his shirt. "Art, I can't make it a baby or not a baby. I can only try to determine which category it already belongs to, and conduct myself accordingly." He wearily rubbed his eyes. "Damn it, it looks like a baby now, right? In a few weeks it may begin to suck its thumb. A cute little human touch, hey? Not necessarily convincing." "Wait a minute. How about gillslits? Doesn't it still have those, or didn't it at an earlier stage? Are they cute little proofs of humanity too?" "All right, the gill slits. What do you think they prove?" "I... nothing. How am I supposed to know? You're the scientist, or at least the expert, though most of the scientists and experts don't seem to agree with you on this. What has you so convinced?" "Art, I know of no solid scientific definition of man. What can I communicate to you? Only facts, and people interpret them in different ways. Both parents of that organism in the tank were human, of course. But its cells are different from either of its parents' cells; it is now a genetically unique individual. "It... no, I have to say she. What you see as a thing in a tank I see as a little girl. But if you try to pin me down on when she began to be a little girl. I'll have to admit that I just don't know. Teilhard says that the beginnings of all Ihings tend to be out of sight. Was a unique hulnan soul infused when the sperm first pierced the egg? When the nuclei of the two parent cells were first completely united? With implantation of the blastocyst in the uterine wall? Maybe a few days after that, when the time of possible twinning had passed." "If you're bringing souls into it, you're leaving me out." Art was off the cart now, getting dressed. In the background the steady ticktick-tick went on, soft and rapid. "Just let me get out of here." "Of course." As if caught derelict in his duty, the doctor jumped up and went to push a button near the door. "I can't help bringing souls into it, though I tried. I'm a Christian priest as well as a doctor, you see. I suppose if one's humanity is questioned one must try to prove it by appealing either to God or to a board of review of other human beings, who sit in judgment. I know which I prefer to do." "No one is questioning your humanity, doctor." "Not now. But some future government might decide that I belong to an inferior race. Governments in the past have made such pronouncements about people. Or, if I suffered a stroke tonight and still hadn't come to by next week, my fellow physicians might by then be questioning my continued humanity." He rose from his chair, hands clenching. The naturally fierce look in his eyes grew more intense. "Maybe it would be the kindest thing in such a case to let me die. But I would still be a human being dying, not a -- a specimen reacting!" "All right," said Art, in slight alarm, speeding up the fastening of his shorts. "Take itasy." "Yes, I'm sorry." The tall man let himself slump back into his chair. "In my opinion there are a few rare situations where abortion may be justified, at least if there's not an artificial womb available. But it's still a human being dying, being killed, and there's not many reasons to justify that. Surely not some non-specific good intended for the world in general." Art, dressed now and putting on his watch, shook his head. "Do you think a single human being dying matters that much to the universe? Appeal to your God if you want, the rest of us haven't heard anything from him lately. We have to look out for ourselves as best we can." The priest-doctor pulled himself to his feet once more. "Let me go and find someone to drive you home. We'll feed you something first if you care to wait for it." "No, I'm not quite through talking yet." Art moved to stand between the other and the door. "You are about to inflict a third child on me and my wife, because your God wants you to. The least you can do is listen to me for a minute longer." Abruptly the priest turned fierce again. "I am sincerely sorry for the danger and expense and inconvenience that the third child is going to cause you. But it is still better than inflicting death on your third child. If you find his presence unendurable, why there are people in the world who will take him in." "People in the world! Yes, I'll say there are." Now they were standing almost toe to toe, Art with his arms folded like an umpire. count. And how many of them are starving now?" "Quite a few are starving, Art, quite a few. Maybe you've seen more of them than I have. Maybe you've fed more of them. Maybe you promote contraception more enthusiastically than I do." B ut Art seemed to have stopped listening. He stood staring, with an altered expression, into a corner of the room. The priest looked there and saw only a red picnic cooler with a white handle. "Art, here, sit down again. I'm sorry, we shouldn't have been arguing." "No, I'm all right," said Art. But then he did sit down in the chair the other brought for him. "That cooler over there. I believe I may have carried that across the Mississippi a few days ago. It was very heavy and very cold. Now I'm just realizing what must have been inside it. That was while your monastery out there was burning down." "You were there?" The priest sat down again too, and leaned anxiously toward him. "Can you tell me anything of what happened? I've seen and read the news stories, but... Art told what he could, leaving out the name of the girl for whom he had carried the container. "And the man with her said, 'That was Steve' before he took off running into the woods. That's about all I can tell you." The priest-doctor nodded, hands clamped on his knees, squinting as if in physical pain. "Yes. Those two men were both my friends. Neither of them mentioned in the official accounts. Maybe the police never knew they were there." "I'm really sorry," Art said impulsively. "At the time there didn't seem to be anything I could do." "Of course not, Art. It's not your fault. Listen, I'd better get you on your way home before I'm charged with kidnapping. But you must be hungry, let us feed you something first." "Maybe just a protein bar. I never got around to thanking you for this patch-up job, did I?" Art brushed a hand gingerly over his scalp bandage. It wasn't nearly as big as he had expected, and very little of his hair had been removed. In a few minutes one of the stalwart Young Virgins brought him a couple of bars on a plate, and a glass of milk. As he munched, the priest-doctor asked him: "Would you object very strongly to a blindfold when you leave? I'd accept your word if you gave it, but some of the other people here might not." "Blindfold? Oh, I don't care." Art was abstracted again. Foodbar in hand, he got up suddenly and went to push the white screen aside. Like an idol in a temple, he thought suddenly. Surrounded by its screens and paraphernalia like an idol, or a statue on an altar. Suddenly the minuscule statue frowmed at him, averted its blind face, then stretched an arm. Not an idol, then. Far more than that. Inscrutable as a flower or a nebula, it could only be contemplated, not understood. Tick-ticktick. And again the firing neurons in its developing brain smeared green traces across the three oscilloscopes. S haking hands with the doctor an his way out, Art said: "Thanks again for the treatment. You know' if I could find a way I'd still stop Rita from going through with this. Because of the kind of world we have to live in. But I wish it wasn't so, I wish the world would let your way be possible. Anyway, you tell her that I want her back, whatever happens. I want that most." "I'll tell her, Art. I'll be very glad to pass that word along." XI at one o'clock in the afternoon Art, once more shrouded in an opaque cover (this one smelling more medicinal than musty), was led out of the laboratory and out of doors, across an area of long weedy grass and uneven paving stones. Then he was put into the back seat of a car, where without being told he hunkered down so as to be invisible from the outside. The car when started jolted slowly over rough terrain for about a minute, before getting onto any kind of a regular road. Shortly Art began to hear the noises of other traffic around him. "You can come up," said one of his Young Virgin escorts, in apologetic tones, only about five minutes after the start of the trip and somewhat before Art had expected any such permission. He pulled the blanket gingerly from his sore head and eased himself up to a normal position in the seat. The car was traveling through some middleclass, jobholders' residential neighborhood that Art could not recognize. One of the two youths escorting him sat beside him in the back. "Sorry, we're not going to be able to take you all the way to the Parrs' house," the driver said, apologetically. "It's possible their place is being watched -- you know how it is." "I don't know whether I do or not. Not any more." "Pardon?" "It's all right. I can walk." "Oh, oh," said his other escort, swiveling his head to peer back through the rear window. As it turned out. Art didn't have far to walk at all. The police car with its blue lights flashing came alongside and nudged their vehicle neatly to the curb with its foamy plastic bumpers. F rom the questions the police asked before the van arrived to cart the three of them off to the station, Art gathered that his escorts' car had been somehow identified as one used by participants in the morning's infamous Family Planning riot. All its present occupants were under grave suspicion, the sullen one with the lump on his head being no exception. When they unloaded at the lockup he was taken underground to a large cell w ith padded w alls. He recognized it as what they called a DD, or drunkdrug, tank on the tv crime dramas. In real life he found it crowded not with thrashing drunks or druggards, but w'ith loudly vocal Young Virgin types, several of whom complained steadily to the walls (where perhaps there were microphones to listen) of their real or supposed injuries. Nobody else was listening. "Shuddup in there," advised a loudspeaker in the ceiling, from time to time. In reply to this the Young Virgins would usually break out into a verse of all but unintelligible song. Approaching Art through this milieu, smiling as if at an old friend, came a suddenly familiar face: that of the signpeddler of the morning. "It's just a mistake I was picked up." Art could hear the signpeddler saying, as the latest outburst of song was ended. "My signs were useful, weren't they, to let the world know what was going on? A man tries to be an influence for peace and communication in the world, to mediate the intelligent expression of differences in the community, and this is the thanks he gets. Hey, bud, which side were you on?" "Shut up," said Art Rodney. Now another fifteen or twenty prisoners were being brought in a group, adding to the crowding and confusion. These looked like Young Virgins too. Presumably any Homo League members arrested were being held somewhere else, in the interest of relative peace. The corridors under this station seemed to be lined with these tank-like cells, and through the corridors drifted the steady animal murmuring of innumerable inmates. There was also a noticeable amount of dust in the air, and the muffled roar of heavy machinery at work nearby. Maybe more cell space was being excavated. At last three policemen came to the door of Art's cell, and set up a table there for processing. "One at a time now, people. Form a single line. Come up here and present your identification and we'll take your fingerprints. Then you can make one phone call. Form a single line." ' A Young Virgin girl, a beautiful girl with dark devilish eyes, pushed herself forward to the table and demanded: "How about separate facilities for men and women?" The policemen who had already spoken eyed her warily, his lined face on guard against any of these young punks attempting to get smart. "Separate what?" "Latrines!" The girl waved at the open urinals and water closet at the rear wall of the cell. "We want to have separate latrines for each sex, with walls closing them off." The cop's hardened face showed disgust. "Oh, arid no doubt you'd like to open a brothel in here, too. You'll take what the city gives you, and do your carryin' on outside of jail." As if that were the answer she had hoped for, the girl stepped back smiling. With a gesture and a yell she started up another loud song, all the Young Virgins within earshot quickly joining in. But their rebelliousness now seemed strictly verbal; they were not slow to line up before the table for processing. Jail probably grew quite boring in a couple of hours, and it was now time to call one's parents to get one out. Art used his weight and his elbows in self-defense, refusing to be pushed to the rear. Someone shouted at him: "Do you know the song?" It was a comradely voice, coming from just behind Art in the newly formed queue. The speaker was a tall young man, wearing a sweatshirt society handpainted on the front; something about him looked vaguely familiar to Art. "No, why should I know your song?" Art answered, as soon as the noise of it had trailed off into silence and he could talk without shouting. "I was just caught up in all this by mistake." "That's the way it was with me," said the voice of the sign-peddler, from up near the head of the line. "Are you with us, though?" asked the devil-eyed girl ahead of Art. As the line was just about formed she had squeezed her clothshrouded body in just ahead of him, her eyes daring him to protest. "I'm not with you or against you. I just happened to get caught up in this." The girl's eyes, those of a determined persecutor, attacked Art's beard and the conservative translucency of his clothing. She was silent, perhaps making plans. The tall young man demanded: "Sir, if you're really not with us, why not?" His tone was meant to be not threatening but inspiring. "Now I judge you're a man who has supported the Establishment in the past, who has upheld all its outworn dogmas and twentieth-century creeds. And now it's thrown you into jail anyway. What good has worshipping the sex gods and goddesses ever done you? Think about it." "Oh, shut up," said Art, and shuffled forward with the line. If it came to posting bond, he didn't have a great deal of money. He never knew what Rita was feeling -- those had been her words to him. Why couldn't he have started, sooner, to find out? Until he knew what she was feeling it made little sense to argue with her. Of course she should have shown him similar consideration, talked to him more, found out what he really felt. Maybe they weren't so utterly, terribly far apart as it had seemed when she ran away. He didn't want her having another baby, of course... but if she was going to, anyway, if she really had to do it, then he wanted to be with her while it was going on. Now it was too late even for that. He wouldn't be able to reach her until the thing was done. "Everybody be careful!" cried the devil-eyed girl brightly. She had been whispering with a couple of girl friends, and now she was ready to have some more fun with Art. "Everybody on their proper behavior while Mr. Whiskers is here. Maybe we should all undress a little." "Now, Eunice," chided the tall young man. She wasn't helping his recruiting drive at all. At least Art was soon going to have a chance at a phoneplate. Did he have the nerve to call George and Ann, tell them that he had been caught in a riot in front of the Family Planning building, and ask them for help? Not if he could help it. Better if he never saw them again until this whole thing was over -- but of course, his children were there. He had no choice but to call the Parrs. "I do hope they let us out soon," said Eunice. "I want to pack as much sin into my life as I possibly can!" She stepped defiantly up to face the sour policeman at the cell door. Art followed in his turn. after being fingerprinted and identity form, Art got his chance at the phoneplate. Behind him other prisoners were waiting. Reluctantly he punched the Parrs' number, and felt more relief than anything else when he was answered only by George's recorded voice telling him that he might leave a message if he wished. He left no message and after a moment's thought his relief turned sour. Maybe the Parrs had been arrested too, and his children were now in some orphanage. He was allowed one completed call. Who else in the city did he know, where else might he turn for help? There was the dojo, but he couldn't remember either its name or address. There was Dr. Hammad. Ugh. After thinking a moment longer he dug a piece of folded paper from his wallet and, without much hope, punched numbers on the phoneplate once again. "Jamison residence," said a male voice, answering through a blanked plate on the other end. He cleared hsi throat. "I'd like to speak to Rosamond Jamison, please." "Who shall I say is calling?" The voice had some thick and awkward tones in it, those of a man who would rather be doing something more manly than taking messages on the phone. "Tell her it's Art Rodney. Tell her the man she met on the tube train from California. She'll remember." "The tube train. All right, wait just a moment." Art waited, gazing around him. The prisoners in line to use the phone looked in their frozen impatience as if they expected him to forget about his call and get out of their way at once. And now the nearby police were all watching Art, silently, with peculiarly blank, controlled faces. He hadn't noticed them doing this when other prisoners were phoning. If it was just a game they were playing to make him nervous they were succeeding. "Hello?" It was Rosamond's voice. Then on the phoneplate appeared the image of her pretty face, the cat's-eye lenses gleaming. "It is you, my handsome protector! I'm so glad! I've been hoping you would call, and Daddy has too, he's wanted to thank you." With the corner of his eye Art noted, without understanding, that the nearby policemen had suddenly all lost interest, were turning away and getting back to their jobs. "I'm glad I could reach you," he said. "I'm afraid I need help, and I don't know where else to turn. The police have made a mistake, and they have me in jail here -- " "Wha-at?" "I innocently accepted a ride with some strangers," which was quite true, "and it turned out the police w ere looking for their car. So now' I'm being detained for questioning, as they put it. I'm held for investigation on a charge of conspiracy to riot, something like that. I'm not sure I have it straight. to call a law'yer for me. Or something. I'm afraid I don't have much money w ith me, and -- " "Oh my, oh my. Poor Art. How do you spell your last name? And what station are they holding you at?" He spelled his name for her. "And the sign here says Tenth District Detention." "Just wait there, wait!" Rose counseled him excitedly. Then she blanked off. Art took a step away from the phone and a policeman was there to touch him on the arm and beckon him away. This officer, for a change, had a friendly-seeming smile. He led Art down a corridor to where a bulky, middle-aged man in civilian clothes was sitting behind a desk. On the desk were computer printouts whereon appeared small photographs of Art, both full face and profile. The bandage on his head with the small bald spot around it showed on the photos, and he wondered when and how they had been made. The bulky man looked up. "You're Mr. Arthur Rodney? I see here that you're from out of state. Did you know when you accepted a ride in that car that the police were looking for it?" "No, I -- 'no." "Well, we find that there's no evidence to the contrary. We're very sorry about the inconvenience, but you can understand that we can't take any chances." "I suppose not." The man behind the desk nodded in a friendly way, and the interview seemed to be over. Another smiling policeman, this one in uniform and with an unusually large number of stripes on his sleeve, was holding open a door at one side of the desk as if he expected Art to pass through it. Beyond the door was an ascending escalator. After he had started up, and realized that what appeared to be a public lobby was at the top, Art asked: "This means that I'm free to go?" "That's right, sir." The smiling sergeant had come with him onto the rising stair. "By the way," he added, his voice lowering, "if you're talking to -- anybody, you can let'em know that the men on the force are a hundred per cent behind the campaign to get tough with the apes and get'em off the streets." "Huh?" They had reached the marbled public lobby on the station's ground floor. With a gesture the smiling sergeant directed Art's attention to where the air-curtained main doorway stood open to the world. "I'd better wait here for a while," said Art. "I think someone's coming to see about getting me out." "That so?" The sergeant winked. "Tell'em they needn't have bothered. Still, you're welcome to wait for'em here if you like. Have a seat. Excuse me, I'd better get back to work." "Certainly." As soon as the man had gone. Art went to a public phone booth in the lobby and tried the Parrs' again. To his surprise, Ann answered the phone almost at once. "Art, what's up?" He stood with his head held high; maybe the bandage wouldn't be noticeable at that angle to the plate's pickups, with his hair sort of piled in front of it. "How are the kids?" "Why, they're fine, fine. How are things with you?" "I tried to get you a few minutes ago, but no one answered." "I was just out in the park with the children. George is working. Where are you calling from. Art?" "I'll -- be talking to you again, soon, Ann." With that he blanked off. TjfH went to sit in the marbled Ij lobby, and watched the public flow in and out at a brisk rate. All these people were involved with legal trouble in some way, even if they w'ere only reporting it, so he supposed it was natural that they should look frightened or dazed, or indignant or stony-faced. What bothered Art was that now when he looked out the window at the throng passing the station on the slidew'alk, the faces out there looked much the same. He had been sitting there less than ten minutes when Rose came in. She spotted him at once, smiled, and came marching clackclack across the lobby on new hardheeled sandals. It struck him now that her walk was somewhat too childlike and bouncy for a normally mature young woman. She was wearing a red bikni, daringly opaque all over and almost pad less. Art stood up and greeted her with an embrace. "My good friend Art! How have they treated you?" "Fine, ever since they heard me talking to you on the phone. Before that they practically had me sentenced, and now they tell me I'm free to go." Rose laughed prettily, and linked her arm in his. "Then let's be going. We have lots to talk about on our way." He w alked out of the station with her, asking: "Did you call a lawyer?" "I thought you couldn't be in any serious trouble," she said obliquely. "Here, get in." She was unlocking the door of a very expensive car parked right in the no standing zone in front of the police station. ber four. Four. Great sex, had his luck changed at last? He got in obediently. "Where are we going?" "I want to take you home with me, Artie. I told you. Daddy's been anxious to meet you." Once in on the driver's side. Rose scanned the readiness indicators on the dash, as a cautious driver should, and then punched keys quickly. Then she sat back and turned to Art, giving him a long, unfathomable look while the programmed car started its engine and radared its way out into traffic. "Artie?" "What is it -- Rosie? Do you like being called Rosie, by the way?" "Yes, I do like it." She tilted her head, making the lenses shimmer beautifully. Probably in days of calm she practiced with them before a mirror. "Artie, my father's a very nice man, a kind man. He's not one to fly into rages or anything like that." "Well. That's fine." He supposed she w'anted him to ask some favor of her father for her. "Just w ho is your father, by the way?" "He's the bishop, silly. Church of Eros archbishop of Chicago. Everybody in Chicago knows him. Artie, we really are good friends, aren't we?" Taking Art's hand. Rose swung his arm back and forth over the seat between them. It was a childlike action, and when a basically sexy girl like Rose did it, a man could be tempted toward serious repression. Especially a weary man drained of his energy to light. The vision of her crouching on the riverbank, veiled by his dirty shirt, rose in his mind's eye but he managed to thrust it down. "Of course we're good friends, Rose. Any time I can do you a favor I hope you'll let me know." "Today I just want you to meet Daddy." She giggled. "I'm looking forward to that, 'specially... Rose, I won't lie to you. Especially now that I know he's someone with influence." An hour ago Art had been ready to resign the game, but now things might be just a little different. "Because you see I have a problem, one that I really need help with. I hope your father may be able to at least give me some advice on it." The cat's-eyes seemed to offer sympathy. "It isn't a really big and nasty problem, is it? Oh, I hope not." He laughed feebly. "Big and nasty enough. Oh, I haven't murdered anyone, so far." Rose snatched her hand away. "Don't say things like that! Don't even make jokes about them!" "I'm sorry." He hadn't realized how sensitive she was to even the suggestion of violence. He looked around them. "Do you live nearby?" "Not far." The neighborhood through which they were now passing looked much like that around the Parrs' home, except here the blockhouses were set even further from the street, occupied larger plots of land, and their walls looked even higher. Just ahead was one whose granite walls were extra high. "We're almost home, my big handsome protector." The car measured the traffic and the traffic-spaces around it, chose an opening and shifted precisely to the street's curb lane, then signalled for a turn and dove onto a ramp that swept it down beneath the granite walls. A man in a guard's booth gave Rose a casual wave which she returned while switching the slowing vehicle back to manual control. The steering gear folded out of a panel into her hands and she drove on. Here as in the Parrs' block the underground garage was divided into visitors' parking areas and private stalls. Rose turned into what appeared to be the largest stall, with two cars parked in it already, and room for several more. She switched off the turbines and turned to Art again. "Artie, if your problem is -- nothing like the horrible thing you joked about -- then you can tell me what it is. In fact I think you'd better tell me, before you go in and meet Daddy." "Rose, it has nothing to do with violence. It's somewhat similar to -- your problem. To the problem you were faced with when you and I first met." She had pretty teeth and moist, full lips. "FJowever did you figure out what that was?" "Oh, just putting two and two together. I know now what you must have had in that picnic cooler." Now her lips were pouting. Was she going to cry? It seemed to Art that without eyes her weeping would be tearless and therefore repulsive. "Not that I care what you were doing. Rose, not that I'm in any position to talk. It's just that my wife is now having difficulties along a somewhat similar line. I don't know that your father would be able to help me with that kind of a problem, or that he'd want to get involved in it." Rose dabbed with a tissue at her nose, and yes, at her lidless lenses too. "I'm glad you understand, Art. What happened to my fetus is another thing my father mustn't know the truth about." ( Another thing?) "Of course he thinks that I simply had it aborted. But I can't even think about such violence, let alone permit it inside my own body. Ugh.' A final dab and a deep breath, and she smiled and was back to what passed for normal. "Now you'd better listen to me for a minute, Artie. Because I haven't told you everything yet." S omething about those words was ominous. Art leaned back in the car's luxurious seat, closing his eyes for just a moment's rest. He checked his watch. A little past three. Then he turned and looked into Rose's lenses. "What is it you haven't told me?" Once more she took his arm. She became clinging. "Oh, Artie, I was just desperate. You see, there's a man I... like. I like him very much indeed. In fact I've come to -- to revere him." "Revere!" "Art, I put my fate into your hands. I know you won't betray me. Just recently my father has found out that I'm having an affair, or at least he's become very suspicious. But he doesn't know who the man is, and I didn't dare confess the truth, because... anyway, I didn't dare. So today I told him that it was you." "Oh." Art closed his eyes again. He supposed he could push Rose out of the car, seize the controls, and go roaring up out of the garage, perhaps crashing through the barrier at the door. Transporting illegally frozen fetuses. Rioting. Midwifery. Auto theft, gate-crashing. Was there a crime called gatecrashing? There would be. No previous convictions, or even arrests, that Rodney must have been a clever one. But sooner or later the most cunning criminals trip themselves up. They say he seduced a bishop's daughter, that's what really wrote finis to his career. They say just the other day he was in the Family Planning office, bold as you please, talking about an appointment with the director himself. They say... "Artie, dear?" Rose's voice dripped honeyed anxiety. Probably she didn't even like to be called Rosie. "Artie? I was just desperate, or I would never have done it. I had no one else to turn to, and I just had to keep Daddy from finding out who my true cavalier really is... Art? Oh, I promise it won't be so bad. Daddy really did want to get you out of jail, even after I told him you were the one." Art nodded slowly, meanwhile keeping his eyelids firmly closed. If he could somehow get out of the bishop's dungeon here and reach the Parrs' castle, maybe Ann could hide him under a bed and no one would ever find him. Drape him in an opaque sheet. But that might constitute another crime. Oh, chastity, what a mess. Maybe he was dreaming. "I was just in despair. Art, when suddenly you called. Then it seemed so logical for you to be the man that I told Daddy you were. Don't you see? Art, are you all right? Poor Art!" Poor Art opened his eyes. Now then, what did he have to do to attain success and happiness? Meet the bishop and prove himself innocent of Rose's seduction. Then, with or without ecclesiastical help, find Rita and get her safely aborted, w'hile keeping George and Ann, and Rita and himself of course, clear of the law. That about covered it. He opened the car door and slid out. The situation was clearly beyond worrying about, and from that fact he derived a kind of second wind. Bring on the bishop. "Shall we go in, Artie?" "Oh, why not?" Rose led him directly from the parking stall through a double door that might have served to guard a bank vault, and up a private escalator. The door at the top was opened by a huge man, rough-looking though well dressed, who eyed Art with suspicion. Art in turn suffered a momentary fear that this was the bishop himself. Rose said: "Jove, this is a friend of mine, Mr. Rodney. Daddy wanted me to bring him home so they could get acquainted." Jove grunted. "Have'im wait here and I'll see. Or would you rather go in. Miss Jamison?" "No, you go, I'll wait with Art." She took Art's arm and they stood there in the elegantly carpeted hall like a couple waiting to be married. "The bishop's chiefbodyguard?" Art asked, when the giant was gone. "Yes. Don't mind Jove's rough manners, he's really quite sweet." She squeezed his arm meaningfully. "So's Daddy. Now I put all my trust in you, darling." Jove was already coming back through the plush hallway. "The boss says you should bring him on in. Hey, Miss Jamison, you're looking real hot. I'm off duty in a little while, could we maybe get together for some sex?" "All right, Jove, I'll see you in the chapel. Art, dear, let me introduce you to Daddy first." At the end of the hall Rose tapped on an old-fashioned woodpaneled door, then pushed it open without waiting for an answer. The room revealed was a large study, the w'alls lined with bookshelves and tape-racks. A massive, brownskinned old man rose from an armchair and favored Art with a mild smile of greeting. The bishop wore the exaggerated white codpiece of his office, under a vaguely transparent robe. "Daddy, this is Art. I've been telling him how nice you are, and that he really had nothing to be afraid of, meeting you. Now I want you to be nice to him." "Why, I'm generally sociable, dear." The old man accepted his daughter's kiss on his worn sagging cheek. "Dear, why don't you buzz away now for a little bit? Mr. Rodney and I are going to have a chat." "Sure, Daddy. I expect I'll be in the chapel with Jove if you should want me." Turning toward Art with an expression that was doubtless meant to be encouraging, Rose stepped past him and out of the study. Art, who had reached out his arm mechanically, caught himself at the last moment and let her go without a good-bye pinch. They were supposed to be having an affair, and possibly, just possibly, he would want to maintain that fiction. Bishop Jamison was still smiling. "Mr. Rodney, that sofa there is very comfortable. And how about a drink? I have vodka and bourbon and beer and even a little sherry on hand." "Uh, thank you sir. Your Potency. Bourbon on the rocks would be fine." Art sank resignedly into the sofa while his host turned away. Poison in the whisky, maybe? He would drink it anyway. T he room might have been the study of any successful and conservative man, though, not surprisingly, there was a somewhat heavy emphasis on religious art. Rodin's The Kiss in nearly lifesize reproduction. Leda and the Swan, there on the wall, by one of the newer photographic masters. Painting had been dead for a century now, along with poetry and story-telling, or so most of the critics said. And there of course above the mantel, Love Conquers All, Caravaggio's Cupid trampling triumphantly the symbols of the occupations by which man sometimes allowed himself to be lured temporarily away from his true master. Lust. The old man was back, holding out a glass, and Art half rose to take it from him. "Thank you, sir." With a wheeze, the bishop settled his bulk in his own leather chair; his own drink he held in a tankard around the outer surface of which some kind of Oriental orgy marched in bas relief. "Mr. Rodney. Rose tells me that you and she have become quite good friends." "Uh, yes sir, we have." Art's intended sip of bourbon somehow transformed itself into a gulp. Jamison emerged from his tankard w'ith a trace of beer foam on his dark lips. "She's a lovely girl in her way... her mother was a lovely piece, and I oughta know, though I was an old dog even then... how was it you two happened to meet? On the tube train coming in from Iowa, wasn't it?" "That's right, sir." Art drew in a deep breath. "Bishop, I don't mean you or Rose any harm. Far from it. So I'm just going to tell you the truth. I don't know what Rose may have told you, but the fact of the matter is I hardly know her. If she has any, ah, involvement with any man, it's certainly not with me." So far the news was being received with apparent calm. "I'm sorry about her problems. Your Potency, and yours, but I have problems of my own that are just as bad. I'm sorry." Jamison leaned forward a little. "Would you like a refill on that drink?" 'Til get it myself, sir, thanks. Another beer? I'm telling you the truth, bishop, I never was any good at lying." The bishop indicated with a headshake that his tankard had no his chair to keep facing Art, who was now at the bar. "Some people never realize they're not, and it gets 'em into endless trouble. Most of the time honesty simplifies things, if it doesn't always pay. You really did help Rose, out there in Iowa, didn't you? Her own story is a little muddled. She was just coming back from visiting some girl friend in Dubuque, I guess, when that riot broke out." "Oh, yes sir, I had the chance to be of help to her in a small way." Back at the sofa. Art sank down with relief and took a sip, this time truly no more than a tiny sip, of the excellent bourbon. "But believe me, there's been nothing wrong between us. We made it all the way, right there in the park, while we were waiting to get on the train to Chicago. " Jamison was nodding slowly. "Arthur, I find myself believing you. I know my own daughter, and she just gave me your name too suppose you know the name of the man she is involved with, as you put it?" Then before Art could try to answer, the bishop scowled and waved a white-palmed, wrinkled hand. "No, I withdraw the question. Don't want to put an honest man like yourself on the spot." "I really haven't the faintest idea, anyway, who it could be." Numbly relaxing. Art sipped at his icy whisky. His head ached, but not as bad as before. It seemed that he had managed to avert any new and disastrous trouble; and what more could a man hope for than that? The bishop set his tankard down carefully on a small table. "Not that I care an awful lot what kind of fun she has with men." His steady black eyes peered at Art from their time-ravaged face. "Probably that shocks you, coming from a churchman like me. But if she wants to sit with some young fella and gaze at the stars and forget all about sex for ten minutes, I can't see how society is harmed." "Yes sir, I am surprised to hear you talk like that." It would really have shocked Art, too, if he hadn't been somewhat numb with alcohol, and emotionally exhausted by still more shocking things. "If what your statement implies is true, that society isn't harmed by repression, that it doesn't matter what people do with sex, why do we have the Church of Eros then?" The bishop heaved himself erect, his erotically-decorated tankard in hand, and walked over to the dark fireplace. It looked a lot like George's, except this one was bigger. When the bishop switched it on, a realistic imitation of burning logs, probably a hologram, appeared in the dark cave. The logs crackled audibly and flared and seemed to send smoke up the flue. "This thing is a fake," Jamison mused, patting the mantle with one hand. "Lots of fire and noise, but no smell. And no real heat." He set his tankard on the mantlepiece and turned to Art. "You know why it is good for man to worship sex? Why it really is good? Simply because the poor fool has nothing better before which to prostrate himself. Eros as a god is far from perfect, he's just the best of a bunch of failures." Having a little time to think over what the bishop said, and looking at the old man closely, Art was not so very surprised after all. There were such cynical bishops in modern fiction sometimes. And Jamison wasn't just old, he must be decades over a hundred. He must have spent his youth in the period of moral vacuum before his Church became established. Art had sometimes heard other very old people express similar startlingly modern and radical views. Standing massive beside the fireplace, Jamison told him: "The wargod and the wealth-god and the heaven-and-love god all have failed. Heaven-and-love came the closest. Best example is the man they nailed up on the cross. He spoke to a lot of people, that one did. He was about the best, except for sex. And then Allah and Jehovah and Mithra and all the rest. "And then there's the man-god. You know what I mean by that? I mean god made by man in man's own image, humanity in apotheosis, we will all be god someday and maybe our great leader is god right now -- he's the worst, the most dangerous, and we're not through with him yet. Damnation, are we ever through with anything?" Jamison's voice, which had taken on the tones it might employ on Saturday nights in the pulpit above the orgy, fell back to conversational pitch. One other man in Art's recent memory had used such ancient expletives. "Mr. Rodney, man was made to worship something, and no god he finds is worthy of him. That's what the ancients would have called a tragedy. Sex does the least harm, I would judge; and sex is fun. Oh man, yes man, it sure is fun." T he bishop smiled at Art wryly, and made his way to the bar to get a refill on his beer. Then back to his leather chair to let down his weight, he and the chair wheezing together. "The only thing is, if she does like some young man in what to her is such an extra-special way, then I'd like to know his name and what he's like. Rose has had enough pain in her young life already. She tell you about that apeassault where she lost her eyes?" "No sir. I didn't know that was what had happened. It must have been terrible." "That it was," said Jamison shortly. "My much-publicized crusade against the street-apes and the dope-peddlers, which you will hear a lot about if you stay long in Chicago, stems in large part from that assault on my daughter." "I believe I heard something about it from the police. They were in favor." "I myself am not a non-violent man," the bishop said. "Not always. Eros does not counsel turning the other cheek except for a caress." Art failed to understand the reference. Jamison sipped at his newly foamy beer. "When I was a boy, a lot of people thought it was having brown skin, what was then called being black, that made young men go out and act like apes. And there was a grain of truth in what they said, a grain of truth, because brown skin could be a real burden then. It could make a man feel desperate and just lash out." Art grunted something. He was growing sleepy and would have to be careful that he didn't doze off, what with the drink and the hypnotic fire. "Arthur, if you should ever quote me as saying what I said about stargazing being not so bad after all, I shall of course deny it. Likewise with my speculations on comparative religion. On the other hand, if you should want to mention to me now your own problems that you said were so bad, I can at least guarantee secrecy. Maybe I could even offer help." Art was abruptly wide awake again. "Well, my problem involves my wife. And the Bureau of Family Planning. It's a rather serious..." Jamison w'as already shaking his head and putting up a hand to stop him. "No. Not Family Planning trouble. I'm staying clear of that. Sorry, no, it wouldn't do for a man in my position to get involved. Too bad, my boy, but I can only wish you luck." "That's all right, sir, I understand. And I wish you luck. And Rose. Understand, bishop, I'm not having an affair with her, but she's a very attractive girl and I can understand how a man might wish to do so. I mean that as a compliment." "Hmf," laughed Jamison, a single laugh, not loud. He was staring into the glow of his artificial fire, and looking into the long scroll of his memories he found Art's words amusing. Then he was silent for a while, and Art was almost dozing again before Jamison asked suddenly: "You're not angry about what Rose did to you today?" "Telling you I was the man? I almost fell through the floor. She didn't spring it on me until we were here and I couldn't run out. But I'm not angry now. She didn't do it out of meanness." "You're right about that." Jamison nodded. "There's no meanness in her. But ever since that assault she's been not quite right in her mind. Too much frightened of any least hint of violence. I think she's scared that I'll have violence done upon the real man, should I discover his identity. Now who could he be, that she should harbor that idea?" "I really wish I could help," said Art. "But I guess there's nothing I can do." "She saw psychiatrists right after she was injured, and now she's talking about going to another one, but I don't put any faith in 'em. Doctors, computers, modern science, and we still live in caves with the doors blockaded. Not that I want to damn modern science, not me with my artificial heart and arteries." With a seeming effort Jamison roused himself from his musings, and once more got to his feet. "Go with Eros, my son. Is there anything else I might be able to do for you?" Art put down his glass and stood up. "I guess not, sir. Thanks again for getting me out of jail. I really was innocent." When he emerged from the study. Rose, who had changed her red bikni for a transparent dress, jumped up from a sofa in the hall and hurried to him eagerly. "What happened?" she stage-whispered. "Did Daddy believe you?" "I think he believed everything I told him." She was so delighted she jiggled up and down like a child. "And he didn't explode?" "No, he didn't." Rose squealed. "My faithful protector! You took such a risk for me." She threw her arms around Art and kissed him with a kind of innocent chastity. "Poor Daddy, sometimes at his age his mind wanders. I hate to deceive him. But I knew you'd manage somehow. Oh, how can I thank you?" "It's all right." "It isn't all right. You've done so much for me, that now I must do something in return." Her voice turned suddenly cool, and she retreated from him half a step. "If I wasn't pledged to be chaste with only one..." "Please, Rose!" "You're right, what must you think of me?" She tugged Art down the hallway. Looking toward the door to the escalator, he could see that a different bodyguard was now on duty. Rose snuggled one breast against Art lustily. "I'm not promiscuous, you know," she whispered. "Not like some of those bluenose girls, those terrible ones they throw in jail." "I can tell you're nothing like that." As they were going down the escalator she said: "I bet they didn't feed you properly in that awful jail. And, knowing my father, he gave you nothing but drink. Let's go out and get something to eat, and we'll talk." "All right." He had nowhere else to go at present. It was almost four, hours since they had fed him at the midwifer's hideout, and the whisky he had just taken was biting at his empty stomach. "Where shall we go?" "I know a place. I'm buying." That seemed no more than fair, and he went along. They were just getting into the car again when Rose squealed, suddenly enough to make Art jump. "Artie, I forgot all about your problem, trying to help your poor wife save her baby! Did you get a chance to mention it to Daddy? What did he say?" She had the problem backwards, but he saw no point in enlightening her. "I did mention it to your father. He can't do anything." "Tell me more about it." She sympathized and persisted until he had to elaborate on his story a little. Obviously she had the idea that he was trying to help Rita avoid an abortion, and he let her go on thinking so. Why upset the poor girl for nothing? He would share a meal with her, and maybe some sex again, and go his way and never see her more. "But where is she right now?" Rose questioned anxiously. By now she had driven the car into a drivein automat of the better class and they had placed their orders. "Here in Chicago... really, Rose, it's painful for me to even talk about it. And there's nothing you can do." He reached to take a tray of food from a robotic servitor at the window. When he looked back at Rose she was shaking her head slowly, and smiling as if in mischief. "Artie, as soon as you've eaten you're coming with me to get some help. I know people Daddy doesn't know!" R ose urged him to hurry through the meal, and shortly they were on the road again. "But where are we going?" Art kept asking. "Who is it you want me to see?" When he began to grow angry. Rose at last stopped being coy. "We're going to visit my psychiatrist, in his office." "Rose, that's not the kind of help I need. I'm not trying to adjust to my situation, I want out of it." Rose dismissed such quibbles with a shake of her head. This time she was driving manually instead of riding on autopilot, proceeding slowly and cautiously, with fierce concentration on the job. They were headed straight toward the center of the city. "It's a good thing Daddy hasn't started having me followed yet." "Why do you say that?" No answer. "Rose, I'm sure you mean well, but I don't see how this is going to help me in the least." "I know you don't. But wait and see." Art slumped back in his seat. He could demand to be taken somewhere else, but where? Probably by this time Rita was waiting for him at the Parrs', with a red picnic cooler frosting over at her side, her belly flat and perfect once again. All right, Rita and George and Ann had won. So let them do the wandering and searching for a few hours. Meanwhile, let Rose lead him where she would. She parked in a public garage on the edge of the no-private-vehicle zone encompassing the city's center, and from there went on with Art by slidewalk into the multilevel knots of moving pedestrian ways that in their plastic shields threaded the deep canyons between the skyscrapers. At about forty stories above ground level they entered an office building, and boarded an elevator which bore them much higher still. From the elevator they walked an elegant, skylighted hallway, to stop at last before a door lettered Rizzo. Art had somewhere, recently, heard that name. He followed Rose into a doctor's waiting room, small and luxurious but empty. Not even a receptionist. There was an alarmingly remote look on Rose's face, and she put sexless fingers on Art's arm. "Hush. Wait." After a moment an inner door opened. The well-dressed young man who emerged from it was of no more than middle height, but so emaciated that he looked taller. His eyes did not turn for even a moment to Art, or inany other direction away from Rose. "My lady fair," he said, his tense voice hardly louder than a whisper. "My true knight," Rose breathed in answer. Her expression was becoming even more remote, moment by moment. "Oh, my champion." They stepped closer to each other. They raised their right hands, and each caressed the air a few centimeters from the other's face. Not once did they make actual physical contact. Staring woodenly over each other's shoulders, they reminded Art of opposing chess pawns set down slightly off-center on their respective squares. Art just stood there. If they didn't mind his watching, why should he? At last Rose turned, breaking off the non-embrace. "Raoul, Raoul my cold one, this is Art, the man who helped me on the tube train. You remember my telling you." "I thought that today I would have you all to myself, Rose, rose petal, rose essence, dear specter of a rose." The psychiatrist sighed, still staring into the air. At last he roused himself and put out a hand to Art. In Art's grasp the thin fingers felt as weak as they looked. Raoul's gaze was penetrating at first but then it kept sliding selfconsciously away. "Raoul, dearest. Today Art was kind enough to help me again. Now he has a problem of his own, and we've just got to do something about it for him." Raoul thought this over for ten or fifteen seconds, nodding slowly. He dug a pipe out of a pocket in his translucent shorts. He looked from Rose to Art and back again. "Come in then, all of you," he invited in his solemn near-whisper. He held open for them the door by which he had come out into the waiting room. In his inner chamber Raoul pushed a pair of reclining chairs together side by side, and gestured for Rose and Art to seat themselves. Looking out the window as he sat down. Art saw the June sun working its way lower in the northwest sky, beyond a palisade of towers and a groundcover of distant, much lower rooftops. Raoul perched himself crosslegged on his desk and lit his pipe. Judging by the aroma of the first fumes, the tobacco certainly contained an admixture of something stronger.  "Mr. Rodney." Raoul paused and puffed. "You witnessed the greeting that passed just now between Rose and myself. Have you ever beheld even a. brother and sister going to greater extremes of anti-erotism? My purpose in posing the question is not to shock you." Art, watching the lowering sun and wondering if Rita could also see it, had not been paying close attention. "Are you brother and sister? But I thought..." "No, no, we are not. Perhaps I failed to make my meaning plain. Would you have described our behavior as obscene?" No, thought Art, just exhibitionistic. He doubted that the greeting would have been quite so extravagantly repressive had there been no audience. But, wanting to be a good fellow, and uncertain whether Raoul wanted to be thought obscene or not, he answered: "I suppose most people would call it that." I t was Raoul's turn not to listen. "I just wonder," he murmured, as if to himself, "why did I employ that sibling analogy? Brother and sister may repress a mutual sex attraction and the repression is tolerated by society." "Of course." Art glanced over at Rose, wondering if she still hoped that he would benefit from this visit. Her inscrutable lenses were aimed steadily at Raoul. Raoul rocked back and forth on his desk and puffed his pipe. "Taking a larger view, are not all men and women in some sense siblings? What then is more natural than our occasional urges to escape from sex? We are all of us subject to the deep powers of the subconscious. Modern science tells us that dreams, produced in the subconscious, are attempts of the ego to flee the restrictions of the body. In every human adult lies the buried wish to return to sexless infancy. In all honesty, isn't letting these urges out into the open the only healthy course to take?" suppose." If Art spoke honestly he would say he thought his healthiest course would be getting up to leave as soon as he could think of someplace to go. Rose meant well, and he didn't want to hurt her feelings, but this was quite ridiculous. With an unfolding of bony legs Raoul got down, or rather stood up, from his low desk. "Personally, I have never conducted an analysis in which I did not uncover a strong. buried celibacy-wish in the subject. Our differences from other animals are inescapably part of our natures, and we ignore them at our peril." "You may be right." Now she was going to have the chaste baby anyway and he was not going to be with her when she needed him the most. That was all his campaign to rescue her had accomplished. What had he done? But what else could he have done? "Face these things in yourself," Raoul was saying, in a brooding voice. Behind him on his walls were abstract photographs, and a couple of Vandalist splash-paintings, upto-date and arrogant in expensive frames. Yes, the art had been dead for a century, all right. "Face them squarely, and they will begin to lose their power over you." Art cleared his throat. Raoul's eyes fastened on his, this time not to be easily driven away. "Face the truth about what has happened between you and Rosamond! When you first saw her she was alone, she was frightened, she was in danger." "She wasn't exactly alone." "Immediately you went to her aid. Your relationship thus began with no erotic values, but society tolerates that in an emergency, and you yourselves did not realize that in your hearts you wanted it that way. "When the immediate danger was past, perhaps you turned to sex? Yes. Then, when your lust was temporarily in abeyance, there came the moment of temptation. The forces of the subconscious were no longer to be denied. The fragile remnants of your lust were to be sacrificed upon the altar of repression. You wanted to flee with Rose from the world of flesh, to climb a crystal stair to an ethereal palace, to enter the world of sublimation. Yes. Perhaps you draped her body -- " "Enough of this." Art pushed away his suddenly vigorous memories of that sunset with Rose on the bank of a wide river. He tried to get to his feet forcefully but the reclining chair betrayed him and he staggered and had to make an effort to keep from falling. "Look here, I haven't asked you -- to analyze me." Raoul fell silent, gazing at Art with what seemed a mixture of pity and antagonism. "Dearest?" Rose spoke up timidly. "Raoul? The reason I thought you might be able to help Art is because his wife is looking for a midwifer. Art wants to help her save her baby, but there are obstacles."  Raoul, professionally unshockable, took the news in stride. "I can help him live with the situation, provided he wants to be helped." Rose shook her head. "No, my chill one, that isn't what I meant." Raoul blinked. "What, then?" "Oh, for you to see your father about it, of course!" Rose was lovingly irritated by her lover's obtuseness. At mention of his father, Raoul's face twitched, and he laughed bitterly. He sat on his desk again and tried to relight his pipe. "Please, dearest. You mustn't be jealous. Art and I are not having an affair. He and I are strongly erotic together, really we are." Puff and pause. "Why do you say that?" "Who is his father?" Art asked, standing now with his arms folded. Rose flowed easily to her feet; probably she had some experience with these chairs. "I say it because you are my knight. Do you think I could ever want to sit coldly beside any other man?" Raoul closed his eyes and let his pipe go out. Rose hovered near him, pleading. "My champion! Won't you do this little thing for me? Take Art to see your father?" "Who is his father?" Raoul's eyes opened. His whisper had a broken sound. "For you, my lady, my chaste one, I will do it. Sometime tomorrow." "Tomorrow might be too late for his poor wife. Couldn't you do it now?" "I thought that you and I would have this evening alone together." "Please. Take Art to your father now. I set you this task, to prove that you revere me." "Then I have no choice but to obey." Raoul came to life and slid off the desk . "Will you wait for me here, my lady?" Rose squirmed as if with repressed desire and took a step back, avoiding any pgssible physical contact with her knight. "I'll wait here all night for you, if need be. When you come back, maybe... we'll play chess." "My lady, not that childish game, I beg of you. Anything else." "Who is your father?" Art asked the ceiling. "And what good is seeing him supposed to do me?" Like as not Rizzo Sr. would turn out to be the head of Chicago's branch of the Family Planning office. Soon everyone in the city would know about Rita's warped reproductive cravings and her illegal plans. No one would do anything to save her, but everyone would know, even irredeemable idiots who thought chess was a childish game. After staring incredulously at Art for a moment, Raoul asked: "You don't know who my father is?" And then he laughed bitterly and long. S till not knowing, Art went along with Raoul, first in a taxi lo a garage, and then in Raoul's car. In spite of all, a nagging hope persisted . Whatever his occupation might be, Rizzo Sr. had evidently made a success of it. The blockhouse in which he lived was every bit as high-walled and luxurious as the Jamisons'. The Rizzo garage space was even larger than the archbishop's had been, and protected by heavier gates. As Raoul eased his line car to a stop and turned its turbines off, Art was once more nagged by the sense of having recently heard the Rizzo name in some other connection. Was it something about this very structure, Rizzo's townhouse? In a short passage connecting the garage with an underground level of the Rizzo home, a pair of nonuniformed guards were stationed. They looked meaner than the Jamisons' Jove, though neither of them was quite as large. "Who's your pal, Doc?" one of them asked. "A man I know." Young Rizzo smiled wryly. "A man with a problem, I expect my father will be able to help him, if he wants to help." "Maybe you shoulda just phoned," said the other guard. "The Magnifico's sorta been lying low the past few days." The what? thought Art. "You know how my father likes to do business face to face." The pair of gate-blockers looked doubtfully at Art. He could place them now. They were the ones who had sat on him in the brothel. Not the same men, but the type. Rizzo, Rizzo, he almost had it. "Well, let's see if you're carryin' anything. Doc, the boss is in his study now, if you wanna go up." "I'll be back in a minute, Rodney," said Raoul, and went on ahead. The two guards began to pat Art's pockets and bulges, searching him. Rizzo. Little old Alfie in the slumburb tavern, saying Vic Rizzo's townhouse was bombed. Oh, great stargazing quadruplets. Rizzo Jr. was soon back from his filial visit. His face was flushed, but seemingly not with joy. "He says I can bring him up." "Awright." Art rode up with Raoul in a large and fancily paneled elevator, which disgorged them into a room like the entry hall of a small art museum. Marble columns supported a high, vaulted ceiling, and across one end of the room there burbled a complex of waterfalls and fountains and pools, complete with fish. For all its size the hall was almost crowded with paintings and statuary. On the wall opposite the elevator, in a place of dominance over the other objects d'art, was an ancient life-sized crucifix of wood, done in a realistically gory Spanish style. Its paint, once red and brown, had aged into a grayish dullness that with the cracks and holes gave the figure a look of frighteningly patient endurance. Raoul led Art across the museum hall and opened a massive wooden door. "In here," he ordered tersely. The room behind the door was also quite large, with a beamed ceiling and woodpaneled walls. Might it all be real, virgin, tree-segment wood? Anyone whose house had fountains and waterfalls -- Art caught one breath-tripping glimpse of a girl, heavily garmented, even her face veiled, before she moved out of sight behind some opaque woven draperies. And there, almost as startling as the girl and the paneled walls, was a huge genuine fireplace that appeared to be consuming genuine logs. At least four chess sets, of stone or wood or metal, all large and ornately carved, were visible on tables or in display cases. A suit of armor stood at Art's right hand. What appeared to be medieval torches standing in brackets on the walls bore warm and writhing electric flames. Upon one paneled wall there hung a crossed pair of long, pointed weapons, pikes or lances of some kind; on the opposite wall a brace of submachine guns were mounted in the same way. Walls and furniture bore many framed photographs evidently reproduced from twentieth century newspapers or films, showing men in the obscenely heavy garb of that time. The men smiled unpleasantly and many of them were carrying firearms. From the upper walls there looked down at least a dozen paintings of a more distant time, mostly of men in archaic costume wearing swords and accompanied by crouching dogs. These paintings looked old and dim enough to be originals. The Magnifico, the guard had said. The Magnifico came forward amid his treasures. His small torso was plump beneath his shimmering, partially translucent dressing gown, but his face still showed some of the leanness of his son's. His flat voice came out around a cigar. "So, you're the man with troubles. I was curious to see you, I wondered w'hat kinda man my son would bring here to get his troubles fixed." Art made himself look straight into the Magnifico's direct and seldom-blinking eyes. The reality of power before him was as apparent as the hardness of the suit of armor at his right. Art could feel the world and all its probabilities shifting again, crazily and unpredictably beneath his feet. Art cleared his throat. "My trouble is a fairly simple one." "So. I guess my son can only fix the high-priced troubles in his office. The simple ones he still has to bring to me. Whaf s yours?" "My wife is in a birth-mill, here in Chicago." Facing the reality of power in Rizzo's eyes, Art had a moment of weakness, of indecision. But now his choice was clear-cut, inescapable. "I want to stop her from going through with it." "So, w'ho says I know anything about birth-mills?" rriHE fireplace roared and seemed to make the room too hot. Somewhere behind Art, Raoul fidgeted. Art said the next thing that came into his head: "I see you're a chessplayer." Every time he glanced around the crowded room he spotted another set somewhere. Rizzo removed his cigar from his mouth and raised his eyebrows. "You play?" Art smiled faintly. "I'm a master." "No! You are?" The cigar went flipping into the fireplace. Rizzo almost bowed. "Come in here -- whazza name? Mr. Rodney? You come in here, there's somethin' I want you t' look at." He held open for Art the drapes behind which the veiled girl had vanished. At the same time he raised his eyes to stare coldly over Art's shoulder. "Hey Raoul, go fix yourself a drink or something. Or get out. Hey, if you see Penny around maybe she'll wanna screw. She's been sublimatin' her urges quite a bit lately." The only answer was the sound of the heavy wooden door softly closing: probably. Art thought, it could not be slammed. He went on through the drapes and Rizzo followed, into a smaller adjunct of the study. The girl was not in sight. "You say you're a rated master, Mr. Rodney?" "Yes. However not in this state. In California." "I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at this position I got set up here. Tell me what you think about it." On a board on an antique table were ebony and ivory men arranged in an intricate early middle game or late opening position. At first glance Art took it for one of the new computer-discovered variations of the neo-Shapiro defense, but one of White's knights was oddly placed, changing the w hole complexion of the game. "Interesting." said Art. It really w as. "One of your games?" "Nah, not a real game. Oh, Mr. Rodney, meet Penny." The veiled girl had returned from somewhere amid velvet hangings, moving on soft silent feet. Under the Magnifico's smiling but watchful eye. Art kissed Penny hello with a fervent show of lust, and pushed a fondling hand inside the innermost of her voluminous garments. Rizzo chuckled benevolently. "Nov run along, little lady."  Peony paused to blow an openmouthed kiss to Art before she let the drapes fall into place behind her. Rizzo, staring at the place where she had vanished, released a small sigh. "That son of mine just don't know how to keep a woman." Then he brightened. "That reminds me. You hear the one about this traveling salesgirl, she stops at a lamasery to sell blankets?" "I'm not sure." Evidently he was not going to hear it now . Rizzo w'as still looking after the girl. "That Penny, though. She's been livin' with me here almost a year now, and I've never touched her. Imagine." He sighed again. "I hardly seen a centimeter of her skin in all that time. I did see her ankle once, when she was walkin' upstairs, and I nearly went dizzy. I tell you, when I finally get rid of that girl she'll prob'ly take a lot of loot along, but she's been worth it, everything a man could want. Whaddya think about this opening setup, now?" "Interesting." With some relief Art turned back to the board. "Y'see, I'm foolin' around with a little analysis here. I like to take the book theory, you know, and try t' find improvements in it. The fellas who write them chess books sometimes don't know much about the practical side of the game. Chastity, I'd like t' get out and play in some tournaments. But I got too much business to think about." Rizzo glanced up from the board. "I'm a investment counselor," "I see. I was hoping to play in a big tournament myself, but then this trouble came up involving my wife. That makes it very hard to concentrate on chess." "Oh, yeah. She's in some birthmill, you said. Tell me about that." Art recited his story. By now he had it down pat, like some politician's standard speech, that could be edited a little here and there to suit the day's audience even as it was being delivered. "Possibly it's too late and the operation's already over. But if at all possible I w'ant to stop her from going through with it. For her own good." "And you say you talked to this doctor who's gonna do it, but you don't know his name?" "Right. He's one of these Christian priests, I know' that much. Tall fellow , kind of narrow-shouldered, with a sandy beard." Rizzo nodded thoughtfully and started to pace the room. For the time being chess was forgotten. He lit a fresh cigar and squinted through the smoke of it, studying Art's face. "Whatever people she's paid, or promised to pay, can have their money," said Art, as free with George's substance as with his own. "But my idea is this: the pregnancy can just be terminated legally, and as far as my wife will know, something just went wrong. The fetus turned out not to be viable, or whatever the medical term is. That's simple, and there's no trouble in it for anyone." Rizzo smiled faintly. "I kinda taken a liking to you, Mr. Rodney. Course you understand I don't know nothin' about midwifers -- but what did you say your wife's name is, what does she look like?" Art told him, and ran through the standard speech again, going into greater detail. His tongue stumbled reluctantly at times. He felt afraid to start hoping again. Rizzo heard him out, then nodded decisively. "Yeah, I see. Too bad. Any day now she's gonna have the operation, huh?" "I got the impression it might be at any hour." "Uh-huh. Some of these priests don't stick to religion, they're real cultists and mix into things where they don't belong. Excuse me a minute, I got a phone call to make. Look over this position here meanwhile, hey? Tell me how do you like White's chances." I e ft alone. Art heaved a tremenj dous silent sigh. He sat down at the chess table and leaned his head forward into his hands, letting his eyes close. A great exhaustion was coming down upon hitn. It came with a disturbing' sense of permanence, as if he might never be able to rest long enough to recover. But his feelings didn't matter, if Rita could be saved. Someday he would be able to tell her what he had done, and someday she would understand and thank him for it. Art opened his eyes and found the chessmen waiting. Rizzo would expect a masterly evaluation of the position, and that was little enough for him to ask. Four or five minutes of Art's flawed attention sufficed to convince him that the Rizzo Variation was a bust. Rizzo evidently thought that White's advanced knight could not be readily dislodged from its fine post, but Rizzo had overlooked a thing or two, and White was going to have to retreat and waste a tempo, and stand poorly in the middle game. These were the facts, but they had better be conveyed diplomatically. In a few minutes the Magnifico was back. His mood had brightened into something like joviality. "Like I said, I know nothin' about any birth-mills. Still, I got a hunch that things are gonna work out okay from your point of view. Just a feeling. Well, should we have a little game? How about a drink, somethin' to eat?" "Certainly." Art got off another sigh, like a man dropping a weight. But there was the weight still clinging to his shoulders. He began to rearrange the chessmen to begin a game. Someday she would understand. tying chastely beside Marjorie I j in the dark bed between their darkened hotel rooms, Fred was pouring out his heart. "Ah, who'm I kidding. I'm not ready for even a brown belt yet. I could Te. if I settled down and worked at it. I dunno, though, if it's really worth the effort. AH the lumps and bruises, and you never get rich. Karate just gets you flunky jobs, like this part-time bodyguard thing I got going now with this Dr. Hammad. Ivor, he's the regular bodyguard, says the pay never amounts to much. "George does all right, though, running his own dojo. He must, you should see his house. I don't know what he charges for private lessons. If I could only get myself a setup someplace like he's got. And his brother-in-law does all right too. Ann, that's my sister, says Art holds down an electronics job and wins prizes. He must have bread cornin' out of his ears. He wins his prizes playing chess, real good at it I guess. "You know something I was good at, though, besides karate, was woodcarving. I won a couple prizes when I was a kid. My folks showed off the trophies, but they never paid any attention to the stuff I carved. Finally I didn't carve any more. Maybe if I'd kept up with that I could set myself up handcarving chess sets. Art would probably give me some clues on what sizes and shapes the players like and where to sell them. You know, I carved a nice religious cross once for Ann, when she got baptized. I did it from pictures in books. That was after she left home and married George. She still has it on the wall in her kids' room. George don't go for that religious stuff himself, but he don't care what Ann does." Fred raised himself on one elbow in the bed. making his plastic gladrag cloak crackle faintly all around him. Marjorie's form, similarly draped, lay still and straight beside him. The room was too dark for him to read her face but still he could perceive the tenseness of her body. A tinny, tiny sound, so faint that he could hear it only intermittently, leaked out into the room from the earplugs of her pocket hifi. Fred could not make out any of the words but he thought it was Orlando, one of the season's top recording stars, reciting his own verse. Marj had said she liked to have Orlando on for background music whenever she got started outward to the stars. "Anyway," Fred went on, "the carving business is not bad in some w ays if you can get a reputation as an artist, but there are certain drawbacks. You have to have the right wood. And when you go to sell your work, it's hard to prove it's really handcarved unless they've actually seen you do it. I mean there are woodworking machines that can be set to take off little irregular chips and leave little marks just like a hand knife, and the machines do the job a hundred limes faster. It's like man in the modern world has to contend with machines at every turn, you know what I mean?" Majorie W'as nodding, nodding gently. She could understand, she could understand it all and heal him of the pain of it. Above Orlando's tinny moans Fred now could hear another little moan, but in his girl's warm breathing voice. Could it be that she was weeping for him. He reached to chastely touch her hand, and tried to think of words to tell her how' much it meant to him to have her here tonight. M arjorie's little moan swelled quickly into an exasperated snarl. She sat up in her crackling cloak, and with the hand he had touched she reached up to pull her earplugs out. "You twin!" she stage-whispered angrily at Fred. "What's the matter with you? I've run into some horny stallions in my time, but... what do you think I am, your shrink? If you can't talk it chill any better than you do, just fall back in your plastic and let me listen to someone who can." She flopped her head back on the pillow' and turned up the volume on the hifi slightly. Into the silence, Orlando's peculiar, almost metallic voice recited: Fred almost hit her. Why didn't he? Only because he was afraid she wouldn't be hurt by his blows at all, wouldn't cry out or fold up or bleed, but would just ignore his efforts the way his dream-opponents usually did. Hands shaking with the urge to hit, he got up slowly on his own side of the bed, and pulled the stiff opaque plastic poncho off over his head and threw it down. He turned away from the bed and pulled his clothes on and went on out of the room without once looking back. Outside Ihe sky was darkening and the streetlights coming on. In the Megiddo Coffee House Fred spotted Lewandowski and the Wolf sitting at a table together, teetering restlessly in their chairs. Making sure that his own face was hard, he walked to their table amid the baby-crying music that at least was not Orlando's, and amid the smoke, and saw their faces harden, challenging and welcoming him. "Let's go cruise, men," he said, standing beside their table. Wolfs pelt turned to look at him, with the movement of Wolfs own head and shoulders turning, and the two sets of teeth showed Fred their grins. "Quads and quints, I'm with ya," said Lewandowski, stretching to his feet. "I been sitting here five hours now, let's go find some live fun." They cruised out of the Megiddo and right away Wolf began talking about how to organize a street gang and establish a territory of streets and blocks. Fred heard without listening, without caring. As they passed some parking meters Fred tried to smash one with a kick, but it was too strongly built and he only hurt his foot. He thought he managed to keep the pain in his foot from showing in his face, as he was still managing to keep a lot of other things from showing, but it was all coming to a head. They cruised the narrower, dimmer slidewalks. "Hey," Lewandowski whispered, stopping the other two, "here comes fun." It was a young couple walking alone. They slowed timidly as they drew near, but that only made their fate a certainty. Fred and Wolf and Lewandowski crowded them right off the walk onto the well-manicured grass. "You're a jobholder, ain't you, pal?" asked Fred, slapping the young man. The youth began to wrestle ineffectually, and Fred slammed a fist into his ribs full power. The young man collapsed, croaking. Fred bent down and seized one of his manicured fingers and w'renched it back savagely until lie thought it must be broken. "Now try and work," he said. The young man 'sat on the ground yelping and stuttering with his broken finger and cracked ribs. Fred had had enough, so instead of shutting him up he walked away. After a quick glance around to make sure that no one was coming to interfere, he looked to see what Wolf and Lewandowski were doing with the girl. "Don't hurt me!" she was squealing. "Take my money, wrap me, but don't hurt me!" "Who'd w'ant to wrap you, sister?" Lewandowski laughed. He had her purse tucked under his arm, and he was tearing off her electrostatically-clinging costume, while Wolf kept her from running away. Lew'andowski peeled the last bit of silvery film from her plump body, and then shoved her away so she fell, sadly naked and unattractive. She sat there quivering flabbily, staring at them in abject terror, while Wolf and Lewandowski rifled her purse. Some people at the end of the block were looking their way and pointing. "Come on, let's go," urged Fred, starting away. Wolf delayed a moment, bending over the girl. She screamed loudly and he jumped up and came hurrying after Fred and Lewandowski. For some reason the three of them started running. They ran for a block, switched slidewalks athletically, and ran again, looking over their shoulders. There was no pursuit. and they slowed to a casual walk. Fat Lewandowski was puffing hard. Wolf was holding up the head of his pelt, waiting for the other two to notice it. Fred saw that the sharppointed plastic teeth were reddened. "I left m' brand on her, where it counts," Wolf snickered, and Fred wondered, without caring, where the place that counted was. Lewandowski still had a handful of silvery film, and was tearing it into little bits which he scattered like confetti. Good-humoredly he demanded: "How much bread that guy have on him, Lohmann? Hey Fred, you get the bread?" Lewandowski laughed at his own rhyme, and they all laughed, feeling good. Fred's sense of power and self-assertion, brought to a peak by the terror with which the girl had looked at him, was not spoiled by the realization that he had forgotten to take the young man's money. "Naw, I didn't get it," he admitted cheerfully. "But what th' purity." "Didn't get it? Why?" Lewandowski too was more amused than upset. '"Cause I didn't give a quint about it. What the purity!" But now the omission did begin to bother Fred a little, mainly because the young jobholder would be comforted by having retained his money and his papers. All right, next time Fred would make up for the oversight. Fred had never done anything quite like this before. As a kid he had been in fights, but never launched such an unprovoked attack. But already he knew that there would be a next time, and then he wouldn't stop with just breaking a finger and maybe cracking a rib or two. Next time? Quintuplets, yes, there would be one. T he Magnifico, when he finally returned, furrowed his brow over the chessboard and took half an hour to make twelve moves. Then Art managed to let him win a pawn. Rizzo was an intense and serious player, with a drivingly aggressive style that would probably win him most of the amateur games he played. Though he mentioned vaguely having taken part in some tournaments, he seemed to have little competitive experience since he accepted a pawn from a master without apparent suspicion. Maybe he had played in prison somewhere. Art, headache-ridden, wished he had given away a knight or bishop and so provided himself with an excuse to resign. But no, that might be putting it on too thick. The best thing was to arrange a draw. If only Rizzo would not take so long to move! A man opened the study door. "Chief?" Rizzo grunted in exasperation, got up, and went out. Art shifted in his chair, took a bite from the tasteless sandwich that had been provided for him, took a sip from the accompanying drink, and looked at his watch. Nine o'clock, almost. It would be dark outside. His headache was waxing fat. He could ask for aspirin but it wouldn't mix well with the drink. He meant to spend a lot of time and effort, from now on, making it up to Rita for what she was losing, or thought that she was losing. Right now, for some reason, all of Rita's weak points -- mostly insignificant things, of course, like her occasional stutter -- kept popping up in Art's thoughts; but all in all she was a good wife. What was he thinking? She was a purity of a good wife, the best of wives, and someday she would understand. When that day came it would be a great relief to be able to tell her how he had managed things, and to have her understand and thank him for it. It wasn't as if he had had a real child of hers done away with. It wasn't anything at all like that, even if they could move. They would smile over all this then. Over all their foolish ideas and fears. Someday they would. Still only nine o'clock. Yes, his watch was still running. Twins, how this night seemed to last and last. The Magnifico came back through the draperies, smiling and rubbing his hands together, looking eagerly at the board. "Where'd you move? Like I said, I don't know about these places where they have your wife. But if I was to give you advice like a father I'd say don't worry, these things have a way of working themselves out." "I moved my queen here. And I want to thank you." "For advice?" Rizzo's laugh was deep and rich, and still it managed to be nasty. "Advice is cheap." The door opened again. "Chief?" "Oh, Gramma's chastity. Look Mr. Rodney, you don't mind, hey? I guess we can't continue our game tonight." "Of course." Art stood up, trying to hide his relief. "Some other time maybe. We'll call this one a draw." "Sure, sure, maybe another day. Look, I'm gonna have one of my friends see you safely on your way." A taciturn man nearly as big as Jove came out to guide Art on the slidewalks and ride with him; maybe Rizzo's cars were all out on business. The guardian rode silently and protectively at Art's side until they drew near the Parrs'. Art didn't want him comings to the door. "It's all right, you can go back now. This is a safe neighborhood." He rode on under the black sky and the daylight streetlights that somehow w ere nothing like the day at all. What would he tell George and Ann when he got back to them? Nothing. Why should he have to tell them anything? Never mind, some words would come. He looked sharply over both shoulders; his escort was well out of sight already, and there was no one else in view. He glided past a clock in a vendor's window, and checked it automatically against his watch. Only a little after nine; why did he bother to worry about the time? If only this headache would let up. At an intersection he heard loud voices in the dark, coming from along the walk that came to cross his at right angles. A streetlight must be out, it was so dark in that direction. He saw an arm wave, though, an extended imperious hand, and a voice called: "Hey. Hey you, hold up." At least he thought those were the words. Art ran. Each jog of his body sent a stab of pain flaring up from the base of his skull to exit on his pate. The voice, or voices, were raised now in a babble of threats and pursuing feet came pounding in his wake. He tried to yell for help, but only the tortured wheezing sounds of an exhausted runner left his mouth. The wall of gray faintness, that he had last seen following his struggle in the whorehouse, rose up quite, soon to mask the world. Art stumbled, and had the sensation of losing consciousness for just a moment as he fell. Were they kicking him, hitting him already? No, it was only the pain in his head and the indirect jarring as he fell to elbows and knees on the smooth and smoothly moving walk. Where were his attackers, then? With a grateful shudder he realized that there was no one nearby. They had left him for more sporting game. Or had he really managed to outrun them all? Rizzo sent them, Rizzo sent them, said the irrational panic inside his buzzing head, but that made no sense at all. Rizzo liked him, and anyway Rizzo's agent would not have been so easily eluded. But still Art could not get rid of Rizzo's name. It kept coming up like something that had to be vomited. Art glimpsed a street sign and knew that he was still on the correct walk. He tried to get up on his feet again but couldn't, not right away. He rode on all fours, in terror of meeting someone. T he guard at the pedestrian entrance of the Parrs' blockhouse took no chances on being tricked out of his bulletproof booth. First he shut the steel grillwork gate behind Art's crawling figure, then got on the house phone, and only then came out of his booth to try to help. A few moments later George came running up, his face a taut mask. Once they helped Art to his feet, he was able to stand. The faintness returned for a moment but then abated swiftly, although the headache pain went on and on. They asked him where he had been hurt, and which way his attackers went. These days if you saw a human being knocked down, squashed like a bug beneath a runver box in the road, you just assumed some other human being had done it to him. "I -- I got away from them somehow. I'm just winded. From running." George said to the guard: "I wouldn't call the cops yet, hey Casey?" "All right, no law says I have to in a case like this. Wouldn't do any good anyway." "I'm all right," Art muttered, finding he could do without support as he and George passed on into the interior of the block. "How are the kids?" "Okay. Come on in and rest, Art. You look like you've been through the mill." At the Parrs' patio door, Ann came to meet them. "Put that thing down," said George. "We're not invaded." "Ohh," she murmured, sagging briefly against a wall. Art saw now that she was carrying a carving knife with a gaily decorated blade in her right hand, holuing it as if ready to thrust. For a moment he could also see in her face all the strain of the last few days, and he could see how she would look when she was middle-aged and when she was old. Then she turned away to take the knife back to the kitchen. George pulled forward a chair in which Art gratefully sank down. Then George said: "We've just now had word from Rita's doctor. The one who operated. She's all right." "Operated?" Art started to his feet again. "Then -- ?" "Sit down. She's all right. I got the code-word message on when and where to pick up her and the baby." Suddenly this was all, in essence, very familiar. Old stuff. It had happened to him twice before, with Timmy and with Paula. "How's the baby?" "Oh, the birth went okay. Codeword for a healthy boy." George bent down, squinting at Art, his face going all blurry in Art's vision. "You all right?" "I'm all right," said Art. "All right now." He was crying. T onight Dr. Matthew Hammad was working late office hours, and he happened to be performing an abortion on a teenaged girl when the phone call came in. "Says to tell you it's life or death," his receptionist informed him. "Really vehement about it." Behind the receptionist's image on the intercom he could see on the wall of his outer office, just some grapes and Bacchus' elbow showing in part of a painting visible there. "What name?" Hammad asked, looking across the supine figure of his abortion patient. He was irritated at the interruption and yet the possibility that the life-or-death claim was true. "Said he was calling for a Ms. Chester. But I didn't know that you had any patient by that name." "Oh." Hammad glanced down. The young girl draped in translucent sheeting on the treatment table had the music earphones on, and the look in her eyes was faraway. "All right. I'll take it in here." He touched the girl on the arm and when she had loosened ah' earphone and looked up inquiringly, he said: "We'll just let this work, for a minute. Are you comfortable?" Resting on the table between her raised knees, the Autobort looked something, like a small vacuum cleaner, or some unearthly alien in sexual union with the girl, its slender sterile organ of plastic and flexible glass extended into her body. She said: "I'm starting to get a cramp inside." "Well, next time come in sooner, and we can do a simple menstrual regulation. Those are a lot easier, you know. Next time don't wait until you're this far along." The girl, pouting at the mild lecture, put her earphone on snugly again and Hammad went over to the phoneplate. He punched the button to take the incoming call. "Ms. Chester" was a code word, and one that Hammad knew he had better not ignore. The caller kept his own phoneplate blanked, as Hammad expected, but the doctor recognized the voice from a few previous calls. What the voice said this time was guarded and indirect, and the message was being relayed from someone else, but still the message came through plainly. "Yes, yes, I understand." Now Hammad was frowning. "Well, it wasn't my intention to make trouble when I made the referral. Mrs. ah, Chester's whereabouts are not known to me now with any certainty." Now' Hammad understood why this call was being made; every time overlords of illegal business had the chance, they tried to embarrass the operations of their rivals in midwifery, the religious cultists who ran their birth-mills w ithout paying tribute for the privilege. "I can only guess whether I'll be able to reach her and, ah, provide the therapy." Even while he was engaged in this difficult call, Hammad kept a conscientious physician's eye on the progress the Autobort w as making. The girl was now quite relaxed, soothed by light sedation and music and the mild sexual stimulation of the machine. Through the tubing into the receptacle of clear glass on the vacuum cleaner's back there now flowed the debris from the dismemberment within the womb. Now a few ribs, fishbone clear and soft but recognizable to the trained eye. Now a knee joint, which Hammad also could readily identify. Now parts of the skull and brain. "Yes, I understand." His frown deepened as he stood listening to the phoneplate voice. Certain powerful people, those who made it possible for hint to continue in the illegal sideline of his profession, were displeased that he still made referrals to the cultists. "Yes, I'm sorry." Try to help out a friend whose sister was having problems and look where it got you. Now which would he rather have angry at him, George Parr or Vie Rizzo? There was always South America, he thought to himself. Meanwhile, George Parr need never know everything that went on, while Vic Rizzo evidently already did. "All right, then, I'll do everything I can. At once. You can depend on me to take care of it." His caller blanked off. Looking grimmer than ever, Hammad kept the phoneplate in hand and punched a number rapidly. Waiting, he continued to keep a dutiful watch on his tabled patient. She was coming along nicely. "Hello, let me speak to Ivor. This is Dr. Hammad. Oh. Well, whenever he comes back, or as soon as you can reach him, will you tell him to cal! me back at once. It's rather urgent. Thank you." He blanked off and at once began to punch again. W hen Fred got back to the Y and found the message waiting for him at the desk, he wasted no time in hurrying to Hammad's office; he wanted to hang onto his job, part-time or not. Hammad ushered him directly into an inner consultation room and shut the door. "Lohmann, there's something very important that's just come up, and I haven't been able to get hold of Ivor. It can't wait. You haven't been working for me very long, but I think I can rely on you -- right?" Fred nodded at once, and felt the butterflies start up in his stomach. His big chance -- could this be it? "Fred, the situation is this. There's a fetal specimen that has to be reclaimed. This woman -- she's not one of my patients. I'm doing this for a colleague -- has carried off a specimen that according to law should have been destroyed, and she's likely to get several innocent people in trouble by doing so." Fred nodded. "There'll be a nice bonus for you if you can carry this off. We'd prefer that the police not be involved in this at all, if you understand me." "Yeah, I got the idea." "Good. Now, from past experience with the people who have been encouraging this woman to do the wrong thing, I can tell you just where she's likely to be waiting to be picked up by some of her relatives or friends. It's down on South Shore beach. Do you have a reliable friend or two to take along in case of trouble?" "Yeah, sure." With any luck at all he would be able to find Lewandowski or Wolf, or both of them, back at the Megiddo. Lewandowski, being a native Chicagoan, would certainly be able to lead him to South Shore beach, and either of them would be a good back-up man if he shouJd need one. "I can handle it fpr you, chief. If she's there and she's got it with her. Don't worry about a thing." art and George had time for only a few hours' sleep before they started out on the slidewalks at about an hour before dawn. When Ann came to wake him. Art sat up with a start, but he felt rested. The pain was still there in the top of his head, but not bad enough to keep him from concentrating on other matters. George had dug out a couple of old fishing poles and some other fishing gear for them to carry, to provide a plausible reason for being out if they fell under the eye of the police. He said a lot of fishermen went to the lake in the early morning, this time of year. They briefly considered calling a cab for the trip, but with cabdrivers required to file complete reports on all passengers for the police computers, that was about as risky as being stopped and questioned. On their southwest passage through the city's nearly deserted predawn streets, they twice underwent brief surveillance from police cars but were not stopped. They also had one near-brush with a small group of rough-looking youths, but at the last moment the others avoided open confrontation. In the grayness before sunrise the slidewalks brought them to the edge of a green strip of parkland that George said ran continuously along the city's lakefront. Streets and buildings behind them now, George led the way into the park, across a wide, grassy athletic field, now otherwise deserted. Art thought he could smell the lake nearby, fresh dampness without the tang of ocean salt, and billows of morning fog drifted into their faces as they trudged toward the east. The fog made vague green mounds out of stands of trees, and limited visibility drastically in all directions. "Looks like nobody's following us," George muttered, after he had glanced over his shoulder several times. Traffic on the street they had just left was so light as to be practically non-existent, and at the moment nothing was moving there. The ghosts of fog stalked in from the lake to cut them off from the city behind, and when he looked to the east Art could not see nothing but fog. Now in that direction he could hear a couple of distant radios or recorders blaring out pop music. "We should see some people soon," George told him in a low voice. "There are always fishermen. She won't just be sitting out here utterly isolated." "I was wondering." He kept wondering too if she would really have the picnic cooler with her. According to George the code message had indicated that she would. Rose had carried her own fetus home -- or somewhere -- but that had been under emergency conditions. Maybe illegal parturition was always an emergency situation. Maybe normal birth and life were, too. Out of the thick fog there loomed abruptly athwart their path a chesthigh wall of massive stones, looking at first sight like part of some ancient fortification. Art realized in a moment that just beyond this rampart was the lake. They came up to the seawall and stopped. Four or five more tiers of the gigantic blocks made a rough stair going down to the water, where waves materialized out of fog to lap against their base. It was impossible to see out over the water for more than a few meters. "This chaste fog," George muttered. He checked his watch. "She's supposed to be waiting right around here somewhere. Look, we'd better separate. You go south and I'll go north, along the rocks. If youfind her, give a whistle. If you need help, yell out good and loud and keep on yelling, I'll be there as fast as I can." "How far south do I go?" George considered. "I'd say half a kilometer or less and you'll come to a harbor where a lot of private boats are tied up. Some fishermen will be around there too." The radio music was coming from that direction. "If you don't find her between here and the harbor, better turn and come back this way. I'll go north about the same distance and come back. If we can't find her we'll meet again about here." "Right." F red and Wolf came out of the park to stand beside the seawall amid the drifting billows of fog. There they paused uncertainly. At the moment there was no thin blond girl carrying a container -- or anyone else -- in sight. Fred wished he had been able to find Lewandowski, too, but there was no use wishing. He said: "This must be the place. I guess we better split up. How about if you go that way and I go this?" "All right." Wolf and his neckpiece showed their double grin. "Watch out, man. They say there's a lot of apes hang out in these parks." Fred laughed nervously, and with a tentative wave of his hand set off toward the south, walking parallel to the seawall. Wolf watched him go. Almost at once he was swallowed by the fog. Wolf set out at a deliberate pace in the opposite direction. Despite having been up all night, he felt alert and cheerful. It was fun to have something interesting to do with his time, fun to help out a pal, and there might be some money at the end of it. He didn't know what the whole thing was all about, except it had something to do with illegal midwifing, but he didn't really care. He knew the moment he saw the girl that she was the one they were looking for. She was a few meters inland from the seawall, waiting amid some carelessly stacked stones left over from its construction. Thin and blond, and doing nothing but waiting, she was sitting on the lowest tier of one of the stacks of stone where she was pretty well sheltered from view. And there was what he had been told to look for -- a container of some kind, which turned out to be a whitehandled red picnic cooler. Her head swung around sharply when she heard the tiny scrape of his sandal on the stone he had mounted in order to see down into her sheltered spot, and at the sight of him she gave a little cry and started to get up. She was wearing a translucent skirt and open Cretan bodice. Wolf grinned his knowledge at her and came hopping down the stair of stone to where she was. Conscious of being menacing, he w atched her face, enjoying the little series of masks she was trying on, masks of unconcern, of welcome, of defiance, trying to hide the fear inside and keep him off. He came right up to the girl and reached out. but not for her. He pul his hand instead on the handle of the cooler. Maybe she would be smart and simply let him take it and walk away. But no, when he turned around she jumped at him silently from behind, and he smiled a little because he had been half expecting it. But the attack on his face and head was too fierce for him to go on smiling. He had to drop the cooler and use both hands to shove her off. She went down on the grass with a little cry of pain. "Wait!" she called down. "Wait, can't we talk about this?" Wolf could feel the blood trickling down his face from where her mils had raked him. He sighed. This was business, and Fred hadn't passed along any instructions that the woman w'as to be beaten up. People w ho hired this kind of business done usually spelled out just what they w'anted, no more, no less. Anyway, Wolf had gotten all the urge to hurt people out of his system during the night. He shook his head, mocking and chiding. "Lady, lady. You know this thing don't belong to you anyway." He picked up the cooler again, noticing its unusual weight. And cold. Well, he wasn't being paid to be curious. She got up, pulling her bodice together, hiding her breasts provocatively. "Please," she called, first quietly, then louder. "Please, it  mine. Isn't there something you want more?" Wolt gave a tiny laugh and turned, shaking his head. She wasn't bad, but this was hardly the time or place. He started off again, the heavy cooler pulling at his arm. To his utter amazement, she jumped him from behind again, this time screaming as she landed. This time the attack almost brought him down because it was so unexpected. He dropped the picnic cooler on the grass again, once more fended off the clawing fingers from his eyes, and twisted around to get a good grip on the girl's arms. Without much difficulty he avoided her clumsy attempt to knee him in the balls. This time he gave her a violent shake or two before he let her fly. This time she went down harder and lay there sobbing. "Lady, you're pushin' your luck." Then there was the sound of running feet approaching. A little guy carrying a fishing pole and tackle box dashed out of the fog and into the little arena among the stones, where he came to a sudden stop. A short guy with blond hair and goatee who looked enough like the girl to be her brother. Wolf had fifteen kilos on him easily. He picked up the cooler once rtiore and took a step in the way he wanted to go, scowling, but the little guy only threw down his fishing gear and took a step to stay in front of him. "Hey, it's a quin-tup-let," Wolf said easily. "And this one must be the runt of the litter." Now here came another pair of running feet, and he reached into an inner pocket for his knife, but it was all right after all, it was just going to be a little extra fun, for it was Lohmann who came charging up. Lohmann slid to a stop, though, with a look on his face so sick that Wolf had very rarely seen the like before. "George, Rita," said Lohmann, staring at the other two people there, and speaking in this low', sick voice. "Oh purity. Oh chastity no." "George," said the girl in a low, fainting voice. "It's my baby. Stop him." Wolf snarled and held out the knife to make sure little George stayed w here he was, and here he came anyway with a skip and a dart. Wolf, good with the knife, aimed at the oncoming flat belly. The body before him twisted away, though, going down very low, and Wolf never saw the upthrusting back-kick coming, only felt his breath driven out of him and his heart stop momentarily as the kick smashed into his ribs and broke them inward. And then he felt his knee with his weight on it break sideways from some terrible impact, with blinding pain, and then he felt a jolt that went all through his head and tore part of the world away and came again and again like a long echo, until the world was gone. Art Rodney, puffing and lumbering toward the sounds, saw Fred backing out of the arena among the huge stones. "George, I didn't know," Fred was saying. "George, I swear." And then Fred turned and ran, just ran flat out, almost knocking Art down in his passage. Art could still hear the long strides pounding when Fred had vanished into the fog. Advancing again. Art took in the scene with a glance. Knife on the grass, man on the grass, George looming over him, looking down and rubbing his knuckles automatically. White-handled red picnic cooler on its side, Rita sitting near it, sitting awkwardly and in pain. "Oh, darling, easy," she said into his ear. "Don't squeeze me. Oh Art, you didn't bring the police down on us, did you? The doctor said you wanted me still." "Oh, yes, yes, yes I want you. Never mind about all the rest of it. Let's get you home." "My baby." She was pointing at the cooler and he went to set it right side up, as if that could make any difference to what was encapsulated inside. Then he looked over at George, who was prodding the fallen figure with a toe. "What happened?" Art asked. "I got here as fast as I could when I heard a commotion. I thought I just saw Ann's brother Fred run past me just now." "It was." George shook his head and seemed to rouse himself. "Let's get out of here." "And who's that?" Art moved a little closer to look at the man on the ground. The man's eyes were open, blankly, above what looked like a fur collar of some sort. His face was scratched and marked with trickles of fresh blood. "Will he be all right if we just leave him?" "He'll be dead," said George, in a voice that wavered once and came back strong again. "He's dead right now. Let's get going." And he moved and picked up the cooler with one strong hand and helped Rita to her feet with the other. "Art. get our fishpoles and stuff." "Oh. Oh, chastity." Art looked once more at the dead man and pulled his eyes away. Somehow he picked up all the fishing gear that he and George had carried here and dropped, and then went on after his wife and her brother into the fog. When he caught up, he demanded: "Rita, did that fellow back there hurt you?" "No, no, only pushed me down. And my bottom is still sore from the parturition, and I have cramps, but the doctor didn't have to make any incisions. I can walk, but I'm so tired I don't know how far." Now she was clinging to Art's arm while George walked a little ahead of them carrying the cooler. They moved through the fog toward the sound of Orlando's voice on several radios. "Art, George, if anything happens to me, this is the situation. He's on the waiting list for a womb, but it may be months. The doctor says the safest place for him in the meantime is the Loyola School of Medicine, cryogenics lab. They seem (o have some safe depository. I don't know where. Loyola's on the north side of the city. Art. Ask for Gwen or Larry. I said we'd get him there. The doctor said he was afraid he had to flee the city right away or be arrested. Maybe there are worse things than that for us to fear. That man back there was no policeman, but he was after my baby, not after me." Art felt a pang. Rizzo. He patted his wife, hugged her, murmured soothing words. "I tell you he was. He would have taken this basket and walked away if George hadn't stopped him." Art, head throbbing sickly now, stared at George's back, moving three paces ahead of him through the mist. Over his shoulder George said: "We'll deliver him where you said. Sis. Hey, what's his name?" Art stared at the red cooler, seeing instead the dead body they had left behind them on the grass. He and George both. "I haven't talked that over with his Daddy yet. I think George Arthur. Or maybe Arthur George, though Art used to say he didn't want a junior." They came abruptly to a little rise, and at its top encountered the seawall again. Almost below them, amid thinning drifts of fog, several long piers extended at right angles to the shore. The piers were edged in plaees with moored pleasure boats 'and elsewhere occupied by fisherfolk with their poles and nets and buckets. The sun was up now, turning fiercely white above the watery horizon, visible between great lake-borne mounds of the dissipating fog. Here a road of recycled plastic gravel ran just inland from the seawall. A few fishermen's cars were parked along its edge. As the three of them reached the road, they simultaneously saw a police car cruising in the middle distance, a face turned out of its wdndow in their direction. In unison they altered course, and there was another car approaching along the road where it bent inland. "Split up," said George succinctly. He thrust the picnic cooler into Art's hands and with the same movement took back his own old tackle box. "Rita, take the bait jug," he added, and in the next instant was gone, sprinting toward the. south. Now both police cars were accelerating, but the trio on which they had been closing in were gone three ways at once. G eorge went around a clump of bushes, and back onto the seawall, where he dashed past a group of fishermen. Then he slowed to a trot, and then to a quick walk. He looked back frequently, and cursed. Obviously neither of the cars had come after him, though fie was staying near the road to lure them on. But now' at last there came a uniformed policeman in pursuit of him on foot. "You there, halt!" George was purposely deaf to the first yell, figuring they would give at least one more before they started shooting. If they were serious enough to shoot, which they probably w eren't as yet because the dead man could hardly have been found and reported to them so soon. He heeded the second, closer shout, and looked around with polite surprise as an athletic policeman of dark brown skin came running up. "All right, hands in the air." "What's the matter, officer?" He set the tackle box down and put his foot on it and raised his hands. He was patted down for weapons. "What've you got in there?" "Show me a search warrant and you can search me completely." "I'm conducting a weapons search, mister, get your foot off (hat thing before I shoot it off." George got, moving two steps away and keeping his hands up. The policeman peered into the box and then looked at him expressionlessly. "All right, come along. Bring this box of junk if you want it." The officer sheathed his pistol and took a good grip on George's right sleeve just above the elbow' with his left hand. With this grip he w alked George north again. It must be a technique they taught at the police academy, how to be ready to subdue resistance by the suspect. The grip was not bullying, and yet quite firm enough for business. Not bad for an amateur, not bad. Fishermen stared at them as they passed. Now only one police car was in sight, parked, with a scattering of the curious observing it from a little distance. Rita sat alone and composed in the back seat while a man in civvies sat twisted around to face her from the front. "Do you know this man?" Her eyes turned neutrally to George, waiting for a signal. "Of course she knows me. I'm her brother." "George, this gentleman says he's Detective Simmons." "What were you running off with, George? Empty tackle box, maybe? Don't you know' it's against the law the interfere with police carrying out their duties?" It wasn't really empty, but too close to empty to be convincing to a fisherman. George held it under his arm and remained silent. The man sighed and informed him that he was under arrest for conspiracy to violate the Population Control laws, and made the little speech detailing his constitutional rights. With George and a patrolman in the back, and another uniformed man up front with Detective Simmons, the car began to move, cruising slowly north, going off the plastic road and over grass, following the lakefront. Then they turned and cruised the other way again, and stopped and let out one of the uniformed men. w'ho stood looking over the piers with quick twistings of his head, then walked away, talking on a wrist-radio. The man in civvies turned once more. "We're bringing along your tackle box and your empty baitbucket, George and Rita, to show the judge what kind of tricks you try to pull. We're also going to bring that red picnic cooler and the fat man who's carrying it. We're going to pick that up in a minute. Why don't you tell me something about it now, just to show you're you taking it?" "My sister and I want to see an attorney before we answer any more questions at all. This sounds like something serious." "What do you think something serious is, George? What were you two and your sister's husband doing here today? No reason you can't tell me, if it wasn't anything wrong." "Let us talk to an attorney," Rita said. "And then we'll answer questions." A message w as coming in on the near South Shore Beach. Police number-jargon followed. The two policemen still with the car exchanged looks but did no more. George held his hands down so that the callus pads might not be seen. Sooner or later somebody might make the connection. At the moment he felt no guilt or fear; at the moment he was still steady as a rock. Attorney, attorney, where will I find you? He had a couple of them among his students, but none in criminal law . Another radio message was coming, this one on Simmons' wrist-radio. From the back seat George couldn't quite make the message out, but abruptly the car was rolling again. It accelerated strongly, turned on its siren for a blast or two, then almost at once screeched rocking to a halt. "That's Hall," Simmons in the front seat said, opening his door and getting out. O ut of a small crowd a lean, stooped man was coming toward them, plodding with slow weariness as if he waded through mud; that was not pure figure-ofspeech, George saw, for the man w as wet as if he had just fallen into the lake. From the business socks inside his sandals a little puddle sloshed out at every step, and water plastered down his thinning hair and dripped from his translucent shorts and jacket. Simmons jumped to meet him, asking excited questions. "That fat fathering breeder!" was all Hall said at first, in a voice choked w'ith anger, as he stood there trying to press the water out of his clothes. "That quintupletsiring crowder!" Some of the onlookers gathered at a little distance smiled or giggled at the earnest vileness of the man's speech, while one or tw'o appeared sincerely shocked. Simmons was holding his wristradio ready. "If he shoved you in the w'ater I can put in a call and charge assault and resisting arrest. That'll get us some more manpower out here. Which way did he go?" "I don't know. Anyway, I don't care to press those charges." It seemed that a little strong language had served to discharge Hall's anger. He put up a hand as if to ward off the detective's glare and exclamations of disgust. "He didn't hurt me. I don't think he even intended to knock me in the water, just to get away." Hall had taken off his jacket and now began to wave it like a distress signal, trying to dry it in the morning breeze. "I called out to him, when I saw that I had him cornered on a moored boat, I said just hand over the specimen and save yourself a lot of trouble. You and your wife and 'ie whole world will be better ofi, I said. But then he came off the boat with this picnic cooler under his arm like a football. Just put down his head and charged, and he must weigh ninety kilos... Hall had looked at Rita several times, but had offered her no recognition until now. "Well, Mrs. Rodney, I suppose you and your husband and brother here are getting yourselves a lawyer. From the way you sit there looking so serenely into space, I suppose too that you've heard about the report." Rita, chin high, was studying the horizon. George asked: "Report?" "The new population forecast from the UN. The one we've all been afraid of. A real surprise. If the latest trends continue, world population is going to reach a peak forty years and then start down, maybe even a rather sharp decline. Not that that will help the people who are going to go hungry in the next forty years, of course, but it's going to make it a little harder to convict people like yourselves before a jury." Mr. Hall was now standing nude and shivering slightly in the dawn, wringing out his shorts, his dripping codpiece slung over one shoulder. "World population's going down?" said the detective, sounding rather dumb. He couldn't seem to grasp it right away. George couldn't either. Hall said: "Oh, we all knew it had to happen someday, one way or another. The only question was how and when. Still, when it does happen, we feel surprise." Simmons was busy with his radio. George asked: "But what is it? The Homo Leagues? I know they're growing fast." "They were allowed for in previous forecasts. No, the thing that tipped the balance, that wasn't foreseen, was all this religious celibacy. Half a dozen religions booming today, young people pulling themselves out of the reproductive will think it will ease the population pressure right away, though of course it won't. It was hard enough before to get convictions, with bleeding-heart lawyers and frozen fetuses to cloud the issue. Now this. But we're going to try, sir, we're going to try. I'll see you in court, whether we manage to recover the specimen or not." George, riding north along the Outer Drive in the back of the police car, going to some police station where they would have to let him see a lawyer before he said a sublimatin' thing, held his sister's hand and looked out over the lake. The waves were coming in stronger now with a freshening breeze, starting to crest into whitecaps near the shore. The fog had gone. Get through. Art, get through. Loyola School of Medicine, cryogenics lab, ask for Gwen or Larry. I've killed a man to save that kid, and you'd better not lose him now. I'd kill any other son of a bitch who tried to kill my nephew. He smiled a little for the new man born so strangely into the world, and at the same time he was very worried. The waves came in from the clear horizon, cresting into white. The crest of the wave has been reached. And now, to see which way the world slides down.'# H ell is underground. Five minutes ago they'd never seen each other. Two minutes ago (he little blonde had been clutching Karmela lor dear life. Now she tacked unsteadily down the subterranean hall in the grip of a husky matron. Karmela let throat-tightening sympathy distract her own churning fear as she followed them, jostled and crowded by other women. Someone was chivvying them from the rear -- surely no one was that anxious to serve the City. Cindy looks like a rowboat hustled by a powerful tug. Trinity! W liv'd I think that? I've never seen the ocean. Must have been some travelogue: York, maybe, or Socal. Somewhere big and dangerous and frightening. Ever since she'd received Notification -- less than an hour ago -- slogans had become Karmela's only coherent consciousness. Then, on the elevator, Cindy's trembling arms had gone around her waist, and the reassurance she'd automatically given had steadied the other. But still she burned with resentment: snatched from job, family, comfort, sequestered with thirty-nine others, forced into unnatural servitude to involuntary compliance -- and she couldn't even bear it alone, she had to spend herself comforting that weak snit of a girl.  always collect the weepers. Every time  turn around someone's using mv shoulder. The corridor, patchily lit, stretched close and green and strangling. Another sign like the one in the elevator, flashing imthe elevator car it made sense, where mixed contact was both close and unavoidable, but why here? Karmela decided someone must have a sick sense of humor. Around a bend in the tunnel: Well, at least that makes sense. The matron lumbered off, leaving Cindy bonelessly trembling in the doorway of a stifling locker room. She sagged toward Karmela, goldpiled hair catching in the silver filagree at Karmela's throat. Swearing under her breath, Karmela carefully untangled them. She would be wearing her good bola today, her lucky piece. She laughed, shortly, bitterly; the room stifled sound. There isn't enough air down here to go around. Echoingly garbled instructions blatted from a loudspeaker; Karmela held her breath, straining to hear. It stopped, and everyone gasped and shuttled; someone sobbed and choked. Karmela still gripped her bola. Slowly she pulled it over her head, caressing the satiny stone with her thumb. If they lose this... Anger gave her strength; she joined the line for a basket, still hiding it in her fist. Sweat poured down her face, between her breasts, ran chill over the. flatness of her stomach to dampen her crotch. She felt isolated in the crowd, bearing alone the whole burden of Contract. Someone would take over her job, and she's spend a whole month trying to straighten out the mess, as she always had to after vacation. She glanced toward Cindy, motioned her to join the line; it looked as if she'd spend the whole Service time taking care of her. As if she didn't have enough to put up with. Always something, she thought resentfully. If she couldn't rely on Celia at home, she'd never have been able to keep their troy, the most difficult yet most rewarding family group. Mari didn't have what it takes. Celia was their strength, but she, Karmela, was the lubricant that kept them functioning smoothly. Will they miss me? Cindy was still sagging beside the bench when Karmela returned and set her basket on it. Roughly she pushed the girl toward the line. "Get a basket, Cindy!" The vague blue eyes snapped into focus, and big tears spilled over invisibly fair lashes. "Basket? What for? Oh, Karmela, I'm so scared!" "Basket for your clothes." Soothingly, appealing to childish pride: "You don't want to lose that pretty dress." Cindy moved off. Karmela rubbed her bola nervously. Having it no longer strengthened her; she wondered desperately how to keep il safe. The mesh of the basket was too wide to hide it. Finally she pushed it into one of her roughout desert boots and stuffed her panties over it, then neatly folded her ruffled shirt and tailored navy slax on top, latched the cover, and returned to the line to have it locked, thumbprinted, and stored. Wish  didn't know how often nice things turn up missing. The line moved sluggishly past the lockers, into another corridor. Stillness was heavy; occasional bitter comments were subdued, pounded down by the air and the stink of fear. Sudden shrieks spun them all around; still clothed, Cindy struggled with the matron who had pulled her off the elevator. Furiously Karmela broke out of line and strode back.' "C'mon, honey," the matron chattered, "c'mon, honey." Her voice was loud, mechanical; she knew Cindy wasn't listening, but it didn't matter. She could enforce compliance. "You know the Contract." "Why me? Why? I don't want to! I won't!" "I'll take care of her!" Karmela drew Cindy's hot, swollen face against her breasts. "You know the Contract binds all Cities; we can't violate it for personal preference." the matron said defensively, taking the clothes Karmela stripped off Cindy and folding them deftly into a basket. "Preference!" Karmela made the word a curse. "You know that insisting on biological function discriminates against us." "Population quotas limit the others, and they call that discrimination, too." "We have to fill the quota, and they have to limit. 'Keep order and maintain the population,"' Karmela quoted. "They didn't think we could maintain ourselves, but we do!" The matron's heavy cheeks flushed patchily. "Praise the Perfect Troy!" "So we do," Karmela said bitterly, joining the end of the line with Cindy once again clutching her. "We even keep our elderly, instead of sending them to Havens; we take in immigrant converts. And thank God w'e still get them; otherwise I'd have been down here long before this, and often." She was talking to herself; Cindy had withdrawn again into a shocked daze. "Look at the men, poor things, the ones that can have to Serve over and over; too many are nonfunctional. Look up, Cindy! We women have always been biologically superior." She gave the girl a little shake and an encouraging grin. "I wish I hadn't worn my bola today." What subject would capture Cindy's attention? "They don't very often lose things, but if anything gets lost. I'll bet that'll be it. It was the first really perfect cab I ever cut." "I noticed it," Cindy hiccupped. "Did you really make it yourself?" "Did it all myself: found the rough, slabbed it, shaped and polished it, too. Bought the finding, of course, but I'm pretty proud of the whole thing. It's fortification-agate, and I got the design balanced and the polish is flawless, and it fits the bezel perfectly. You should have seen how many cabs I ruined before that one, though!" "It's simply lovely. I wish I could do something like that." Cindy's voice had steadied, Karmela noticed. So had hers. And the child was standing on her own two feet for a change. Karmela slipped her arm protectively around the slender waist. "My troymate's a rockhound; I picked it up from her. At first I didn't think it w'ould be much fun, hours on the desert hunting welldisguised rocks and days slicing them up and working them, but it is. Even hard w ork's fun, when you get something like that out of it." "You're in a troy?" Cindy's tone was worshipful. "Gee!" "Three years." "I'm in a crowd. But I only left school six months ago." "They Notified you young, then." "Well, at least I won't have to worry about it any more." "True. I've been sweating out Notice for years; it will be sort of a relief to have it over." They were half-shouting over squawks of protest and the solid roar of water. "I hate showers," Cindy squealed. "They could at least ask if we're clean or not." "They assume the worst." T he shower was pleasantly warm, and breathtakingly, punishingly powerful. Karmela staggered through and was blown dry. A matron measured her with an expert eye. produced and smoothly fitted a binder before Karmela realized what she was doing. The heavy cloth strapped her arms above the elbow, crossed under her breasts and fastened snugly in back; she could, with difficulty, touch her chin. She glanced back at Cindy. What a bra that makes! Cindy stared back at her, flushing. and warmth flooded Karmela. Slowly the younger girl approached and offered her hand; closecoupled they walked the few yards to join room . reject perversion, the palegreen wall blinked, be ye perfect. "Will we be here long?" "Two weeks, at least," Karmela snapped. Then, more calmly, she went on, "Don't be afraid. They take good care of us." "I suppose so." "I know they do. I work here." "You work down here?" "No, silly, upstairs in Hospital. I keep records. I know all about it; after all, where do you think we'll be, nine months from now? It's a natural process. Almost no one dies." "I know that. What I meant was, are they going to make us wait long? I hate waiting." Chairs clustered in comfortable groups, but no one sat down. They all felt the need to move about, to demonstrate, for a short while, their independence. Defiantly Karmela stalked to the largest, most deeply cushioned chair and dropped into it. No on would see how badly her nerve were jumping. "What are we waiting for?' Cindy persisted, perching on th chair arm. "Who knows?" "Trinity keep us, I don't think can stand much more of this,' another woman gasped, slippin; into the chair next to them. "Maybe they're going to give us ; pep talk." Karmela guessed. "More likely they're rounding uj the men, poor things," the womai said sadly. "They even recruit fron Ambiville, now." Cindy shuddered and sagged toward Karmela. Foiled by the binder in her instinctive warding gesture, Karmela sank a shoulder into the pliant ribs. "Sit up and behave yourself! Why not use ambis? All of this is unnatural. Who cares how low we stoop? As long as it gets the job done." "That's the way to look at it," the woman said steadily. "And some of the ambis were normal, once. I know one or two the City destroyed, right here." "How could that happen?" Cindy gasped. "They check your reactions, afterwards," the woman replied, nodding dourly at the sign that flashed reject perversion. "Down here, that's good advice."  sick, creeping chill overcame Karmela's disgust and anger. Aberrant reaction! The most feared perversion of all, the desire to reject perfection, to change their Way of Life. It could overcome even the strong, she knew, could cause lovely, sensible people to become confused, miserable failures -- ambis, or worse. The City protected itself by rejection of such unassimilable trash, of course -- but she'd tract could cause perversion! Not her! Others, perhaps, but not her! Not strong, cool, competent Karmela! Seeking comfort, she rested her flushed cheek against Cindy's cool flesh even as the girl leaned forward, intent on the other woman's casual words. "That's why all the admonitions?" "The whole City is undergoing a religious revival. Well, perhaps that isn't the word; our tradition wasn't ever religious. Not like some Cities, that were founded on fanaticism. I think myself we're afraid this third generation is losing the spirit of the Founders. They knew' all about hardship and persecution. They were jailed, fined, fired, ostracized; we have it easy. Why, breeding is the only difficult thing the City ever demands of us. We don't even have to endure the dangerous, crow'ded conditions of the Old Cities. Our population stays level, we have a good balance of trade, good education, good nutrition, artistic opportunities, the whole Good Life. So of course Complex is afraid we may go soft, especially toward Perversion. Nothing could destroy the City as last as that! And if a good crusade is the answer, I'm all for it." "Oh, you must be in Complex!" "Sort of." She dismissed Cindy's openmouthed aw'e. "Karmela's in a troy," Cindy his most devastating novel yet... The Company Gf Glory Atomic war has reduced the earth to a primitive state -- history is no longer written... plagues and radiation death are common... Demetrios, the former Adam Freeman, remembers what life once was and tells a new generation of earthlings the terrifying tale of a world devastated by the Twenty Minute War! pvieiin Rumux # (V#) available at your local dealer, or send # plus #( for postage  handling to N.J. #. volunteered eagerly, anxious to impress the woman. Karmela felt vague disgust wrestle with jealousy. To be publicly used to impress an official, and by a girl she'd carried all afternoon, who had leaned on her, excited her, almost promised her... "A religious?" The woman nodded sagely, and rose; a matron was signalling them. "You're proud of it, too. It's not an easy group to maintain." "You get I am," Karmela grunted, working her way heavily out of the chair. Without free use of her arms it w'as unexpectedly difficult. The woman was gone. Had she been making fun of her? Of course the Troy was the traditional model of family perfection; the Trinity, first perfect troy, was Biblically ancient. Just showing off to impress Cindy, she decided. The child didn't know any better. Karmela followed a matron into a cubicle and hitched herself onto the Y-shaped table. "Lie down, dearie." "I know what to do." The matron's speech was set, a reply went unnoticed. "It's no different from a physical, dearie. Just relax." "Oh. yeah?" Someone's crying. Maybe it's me. "Put your legs up, dearie. Head down. Just let me fasten the straps; that's a good girl, safe and snug. Hold real still, now, this won't hurt a bit. Just a neutral bath, make everything nice for the little visitor, and a good greasing up to help it along." Ugh. The polarizing mask snapped over her head; she looked up darkly as the man entered. His mask, oriented ninety degrees from hers, made a black hole of his face. At least he's young. Good wide shoulders, not too hairy, stomach under control and omigod he's big. He surged against her, bound arms frictioning her spread thighs while the matron adjusted the table to attack height.  thought I'd have some time... while he... got ready... Panic tore her when the matron left; she bit down a wail. IN omigod and UP I'll split and IN and UP and there isn't any more IN to go. Get UP a rhythm you idiot... that's more like it. Come on, come on, what's the matter with you? Hands clenched teeth clenched maybe he's clenched too. This is frightful. Suppose I don't conceive. I'll have to do this again next month. I want to go home ! I want to love with Celia and Mari and pretend this is all a bad dream. I'd like to pretend it now, but this is... too real... Suppose I do conceive. Nine months of grossness and misery... but I won't ever have to do this again. At least I won't have to take care of the brat... I'd be a lousy mother. I want back to my own computerminal, put my files straight, handle bitter complaining patients and impatient doctors and problems I know I can solve. Explosion at last... pumping heat, panting, lax, betraying weakness. She opened her eyes, saw only the ubiquitous, smirking matron. "Can I get up now? Why not?" Angry almost to tears: "Dammit, can't they swim uphill?" "Why, dearie, did you think that was all? One breeding doesn't deliver a satisfactory statistical return. Two a day through your fertile period, and we guarantee # conception. Just rest, now, dearie." Karmela shivered with fear, more than the abuse or chill. The woman looked so knowing, so sadistically expectant. Could she be an ambi? Was she the one who would test her responses, when this was over? Trinity! Don't let me be different! Don't twist my mind! Dear Directions: I wish to differentiate and analyze some of the many comments made by Poul Anderson in the August # article titled "A Cyclical Theory of Science Fiction." I do not agree with Anderson that the "new wave never existed." Because an author can't tell the difference between one thing and another doesn't mean that "it never existed." This is inane (even though I do agree with Anderson on other points). Many who wish to theorize over the new wave have labeled it anything from "plotlessly precise mechanical trash," to the change, or if you will, acceleration in science fiction as an entirely new concept in reading. As a matter of fact, Anderson himself stated approximately one year ago as saying that the new wave was "an introduction to the more advanced mainstream techniques." At that concept, one suspects that one dozen authors ended up on his back screaming the new wave was again something else. One conclusionally thinks that it's just as ludicrous to label "new wave sf," as it is "sf" itself (even though I agree with Heinlein that sf is 'realistic fiction'). Is it not as easy to label science fiction and fantasy "speculative fiction?" Hell knows you can't say it never existed. Craig J. Hill # Standish #I Redwood City, CA # Dear Mr. Baen: I've read a lot about John W. Campbell in the past, and Frederik Pohl, and others, but as of a few months ago I decided you belong right on up there with them. So far. Dick Geis and Jerry Pournelle are fantastic. The stories are fantastic. Ted Sturgeon and Lester del Rey are fantastic. The Showcase is a nice addition. Anything left out is fantastic. And when the magazine is fantastic so is the editor. I've read the letters that say how awful science fiction has become and to a certain extent I agree. But I do know that Galaxy and IF are the two best magazines on the market. As to that "so far" I put in the first paragraph, that's just to remind you to keep on working hard. But somehow I feel you don't need to be reminded. Oh, one more thing: I'd like to encourage everybody to subscribe to Locus. I'm sending in my subscription as soon as I finish this letter. Yours devoutly, John Kelly # Bushton Court Clarkston, Ga. #I This letter is directed to Jerry Pournelle' s column "Our Friends the Arabs " in the August issue. Jerry's reply follows the letter. Dear Mr. Baen: Regarding the article "A Step Farther Out," by Jerry Pournelle. Mr. Pournelle covered the energy situations well, and his article was very interesting, but while he mentions it in passing, he and all other knowledgable people in this field keep overlooking the most obvious source, except in a casual way, and one that we have right now and have had for a number of years. That's solar panels, not in space, but right here on earth. I am not an engineer and my terminology may be wrong, but I am talking about the little silicon wafers that are arranged in banks and change direct sunlight into electrical energy. The Bell Telephone Company has been using them for years in rural areas where electricity was not available. A few thousand acres of desert land in Southwest Arizona, as an example, could supply half of the country with power with absolutely no pollution. The only problem I know of is that of storage, since these panels would only produce power while the sun's rays are striking them. If the technology doesn't exist at present to store vast amounts of electrical energy, then I suggest a concentrated effort of our engineers and scientists to produce a means of storage. Think of it, the vast wastelands of the Earth, producing all the power needs of the complete Earth, without a single generator, nuclear power plant, use of coal and oil, all free, except for the building of solar panels and the means of storage of that power. And as for "depleting" our source, as in oil and coal, how long is our sun going to last? Sincerely, Ed Woods Box # Pearce, Arizona # Dear Mr. Woods, Jim Baen of Galaxy has been kind enough to forward your letter. At the Mexico City meeting of panel and presentation on direct solar energy, and I have some data on the system. If you are interested, by the way, the Congressman from Arizona inserts most articles on the subject into the Congressional Record, a good place to go for preliminary research on practically anything; the Extensions of Remarks usually reprint the best news articles from all magazines (along with an extraordinary amount of gubbage). There are two problems: at the moment, there's not enough for a full article on the subject, as it's an incomplete story -- a Arizona University project seems to expect a breakthrough pretty soon, though, and when that happens Galaxy will be among the first to know. Secondly, you've put your finger on one of the biggest problems, namely storage. I discussed this briefly in one of my articles. The most efficient storage system we have at the moment is pumped reservoir storage, and the Sierra Club, among others frowns on these. Batteries are impractical. Using sunlight to electrolyse hydrogen is another possibility, but this requires both sunlight and lots of water in the same location -- and the latter commodity is hard to come by in deserts where cloud cover is not a problem. An electricity supply must be reliable, meaning that the net as a whole must be; a lot of unreliable sources together can add up to a reliable one, but you need predictability, or else a very rapid substitution cycling time, else come disasters. The efficiency of present day solar panels is rather low. There are improvements expected; also, methods for using diffuse sunlight, that is, methods that would work on a cloudy day, are also in the works. We'll have a report on all of this when there's a bit more to report; also, perhaps we've worked the energy crisis for about as much material as it deserves just now. By the way, one of the final problems -- not unique to solar direct energy, but certainly a major one for it -- is transmission of energy. A lot gets lost sending it over long distances. In other words, it's the total system efficiency that counts, and of course economic factors are crucial as well. One of these days, though, I make no doubt we'll make more use of solar energy collected on the ground. Thanks for your letter, and I hope you continue to like the column. Sincerely, Jerry Pournelle Dear Jim, Several months ago, T-K Graphics ran a full-page ad in Galaxy , and one of the orders received was from Mr. Charles Hillestad, who paid for a copy of SF: Today and Tomorrow. In the course of our normal order processing, orders, checks and envelopes are separated. Mr. Hillestad's order did not contain his address, but by the time we noticed this his envelope had been thrown out and his check deposited, so we had no way of finding it. And there has been no subsequent inquiry or complaint. This, then, seems our only method of reaching the gentleman. Will Mr. Hillestad please send us his address so that we can send him the book we owe him. I hope you can manage to find space for this in Directions. Thank you for your kindness. Sincerely, Ted Pauls, for Dear Mr. Baen: My story. If Ever I Should Leave You, was published in the February # issue of IF. But the version of my story which appeared there had been massively edited and rewritten. I feel I must protest against such treatment. The editing done on it, in almost every case in which I compared it to the original story, was to its detriment. I realize that you were not the editor of the magazine when this occurred, but w'riters must object publicly when such editing is done without their knowledge and consent. A writer's name is his or her slock in trade. If I am to stand or I'a I I by what is published under that name, let it be by my own words and not those of a nameless collaborator. I must therefore disassociate myself from this story as it was published in IF. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to state my grievance in print. Very truly yours, Pamela Sargent Box # Johnson City, New York # Ms. Sargent has the right of it. Dear Galaxy: In a letter, I somewhat "overdramatized" a piece of fiction entitled Come Times' Arrow which, at that time, was a spaceship infested opera, bearing a marked resembexpressed a desire to submit it to you for a "look-see." I was preparing the nth draft, blundering through page after page, wondering if I would ever finish, and really hoping there was more to deepspace exploration than free radicals and interstellar grains when I received my copy of the June # Galaxy. The idea that the future is synonymous with the present is not a new one, but I have never seen it presented in such exciting terms as those given by Alexei and Cory Panshin in Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow. Many editors have written blurbs such as "this is 'now' science-fiction" to accompany stories; the latest being a drugoriented pinball soap opera, loosely experience Tommy, in one of your competitors. But, stories such as this, although clearly identifying themselves as being "different," tend to produce the proverbial "bull in the china-shop" syndrome, when presented with material that cannot quite complement their action. In a word, synergy. I think this is what Alexei has in mind when he discusses the "new" sf magazine in his letter to Directions, Galaxy July #. Although he confines his statements to the "physical" package for the most part, he does indicate the need for "internal" change as well. Again we have combined action. The obvious question is: What type of sf will this new era produce? On page nine of the Forum article the Panshins' write, "This universe will be the ideal reflection of the new multiplex Earth we are now awakening to." I have underlined what I consider to be the key words of this passage. Will mankind see his own past, present (and future?) reflections in other faces on other worlds? Will sf become more cerebral? Certainly, both are distinct possibilities, but I would substitute the word probing for cerebral. And what of this term, multiplex? This is given in the form of synergy , ecology, and evolution. I personally feel that these three "Panshin Multiples" will become the by-words of the new era, the blueprints for tomorrow, if you will. I also feel that the new sf will, if you will pardon the expression, come "down-to-earth" in reflective qualities, of course. Continued success with your new look, and thanks for a really great article. Respectfully, Jeffrey T. Davis # Lake Street Dallas, PA # The Foremost GlXY pwb,ia#i "    Science Fiction Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bester James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menzel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A. E. 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D., Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Manager Jay Tunick, Circulation Director Sooner or later all empires must fail...What will America's declining years be like -- and who will be her masters? This story is a self-defeating prophecy; by virtue of its having seen print the events it describes cannot happen...Or can they? Fred Saberhagen # Once again a frail human must pit his puny resources against the cold precision and unutterable power of a Berserker -- while the fate of worlds hangs in the balance! In which a lone Hero battles against incredible odds to conquer the Language Barrier -- again, and again, and again... In which it is shown that certain human values and their consequent institutions are timeless. Would that it were otherwise! " They are with you always...for all things take their form from Amber." -- Corwin, Prince of Amber that gentleman received in a recent issue of a Certain Other magazine (the one with rivets) Jerry has decided to declare this Galaxy's Be Fair to Velikovsky issue. Of course being fair doesn't necessarily mean being gentle, exactly... In which Alter enrages the Editor. Hmm...perhaps I shall instruct Geis to leave him to rot in his Dungeon for a few issues! A non-verbal series. Allman, Dickens, Dixon, Anderson, Sapienza, Brazee Interior illustrations by Fabian, Freff, Gaughan, Kirk, Pini of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N. Y. I #I #. Single copy: #c. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-Issue subscription in the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. Allstories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. ...:' ' .--- '- t# r M . ' ... '... '  J Berserker vs Editor how could I resist The battle was a long one for deep space, lasting well over a standard hour, and as fierce as any fight in which the losing side can have no expectation of survival. Commander Ridolfi had fought his heavy cruiser, the Dipavamsa, with a desperate skill that twice in a matter of minutes forestalled instant destruction by the berserker's missiles, and each member of his crew performed superbly well in making such combat decisions as could be handled slowly enough to let human brains co-operate with their slave computers. The human crew of course faced death or worse if they should lose. And the berserker, their unliving foe, faced its own analogue of death and worsethan-death. To lose would mean destruction -- which was nothing to a berserker if destruction could bring victory. But destruction in defeat meant certain failure to achieve any further progress toward its programmed goal, the annihilation of all life, whenever and wherever it could be attacked. Aboard the Dipavamsa there were only four civilian passengers, including Otto Novotny, who in his long life had never come close to taking part in a battle before and who felt a great deal too old and paunchy for such endeavors now. Nevertheless he was more alert than any of the other civilians, and had begun to don his requisite suit of space armor as soon as the Battle Stations klaxon sounded, while the other three were still wondering aloud if it was only practice. Ten seconds later the first berserker missile blew against the cruiser's defensive screens, a mere kilometer from her hull, and they all knew better. Dipavamsa was fighting for her life several light years from any star, along a trade route where in these last few standard months no unarmed vessels had dared to try to pass. The berserker machine, a sphere some forty or fifty kilometers in diameter, all armor and combat computers and heavy weapons and drive, had waited like a spider in the midst of the net of detectors it had planted in subspace. The region where its detectors existed was conterminous to one in normal space where a strait of hard vacuum bent between two "nebulae, forming a bottleneck only a few reasonably fast passage could be achieved. When a manned ship dared to try the strait -- heavy cruiser or not -- the berserker jumped to the attack. Locked together with their armaments of fields and counterfields like grappling ocean ships of old, the contending metallic giants rolled into normal space. there to remain until the issue was decided. After the first enemy missile-blast reverberated through the cruiser's hull, Novotny thought that the battle would probably be over one way or the other before he could get himself completely into the unfamiliar armor. His efforts were complicated by a sudden lack of artificial gravity; every erg of the cruiser's energies was suddenly needed for more important things than maintaining a rightsideup. But he persevered, working with the same methodical speed with which he usually solved problems of quite a different kind and finally got the armor on. No sooner had he sealed its last seam and begun to wonder what to do next, when Dipavamsa's hull was breached by blast and beam. Hatches slammed to seal compartments, but the air in their compartment could not be held and Novotny saw the lives of his companions who had ' been too slow snuffed out like candle flames. After that the battle became a scrambling confusion of largely physical effort for the humans who took part in it. For Novotny especially, who had less idea of what to expect than did any of the cruiser's crew and who was not in as good shape as they were either. Now the berserker chose to hurl some of its auxiliary machines across the narrow no-man's-land of space to try to board the cruiser. It could use the ship if it could capture it still reasonably intact, and probably it wanted living prisoners. Prisoners of course were useful for interrogation, after which a berserker generally killed them quickly; it was programmed only to pursue death, not suffering, though of course it was quite willing to apply judicious torture to extract information of value in advancing the cause of death. And prisoners were needed for experiments that the berserkers carried on extensively, in an effort to learn what made Homo Sapiens, a species now spread across this part of the Galaxy, such a resistant life-form to their relentless program of sterilization. The berserkers were automated warships, made by an unknown race to fight in an interstellar war that had been over ages since; they had outlasted their original enemies and their makers as well, having been programmed and equipped to rebuild and reproduce themselves. Still trying to carry out their originally programmed task, they had made an age-long progress across the spiral arms, leaving nothing living in their wake. While following the motions of the Commander's arms, which were gesturing to shovel suited people from one wrecked-looking compartment to another, Novotny had a chance to look out through the holed hull to catch his first glimpse of the enemy. The monstrous spherical hull of the berserker was visible by the cherryglow of craters that the cruiser's weapons had pocked across its armor hide. One crater flared anew while Novotny watched, flamed with some power that seemed to be eating like a cancer into the enemy's metal bowels. But again the cruiser was rocked and shaken in its turn, Novotny and Commander Ridolfi were picked up by the same invisible hand and slammed together into a bulkhead, saved only by their suits from broken bones. Now some of the berserker's boarding machines, which were a little bigger than men and of divers shapes, managed to get aboard Dipavamsa, and Novotny had a chance to see the enemy at close range. Men, some of whom were hardened veterans, were screaming around him in terror, but his own unconsciouslymaintained attitude was that under conditions like these one could hardly spare the time to be frightened. Vaguely he thought of this situation as resembling an impossible editorial deadline -- one thing that could never help was panic. He followed as best he could the Commander's waved and shouted orders, and kept alert. At last he got his own chance to blaze away at the foe, with a small recoilless rifle he had snatched up from a fallen crewman's hands. By that time -- as Novotny confusedly understood, from scraps of combat jargon that came into his helmet -- Commander Ridolfi had ordered his Second Officer and a picked crew to leave the cruiser in an armed launch that could take shelter among the drifts and waves of nebular material in space nearby, darting through where the bulky berserker could not pass at speed. It was a feigned acknowledgement of defeat, intended to make the enemy think they were abandoning ship, a battle tactic to lure the damaged enemy in where a sharp counterattack might still destroy it. Ridolfi himself, as the cruiser's commanding officer, and Novotny, as more or less useless baggage, were among those who stayed aboard her and tried to fight a delaying action through her corridors. The vacuum around Novotny's helmet continued to buzz and sing with the strange energies of this battle; he clutched his recoilless rifle and continued to fire it toward the enemy's boarding machines whenever he caught a glimpse of one of them. He could not have said whether or not his shots were doing any good. He also tried to stay close to Ridolfi's side; whether he felt in slightly less hopeless danger there, or was hoping thus to improve his chances of being useful, he did not pause to consider. Ridolfi indeed kept snapping orders, but they were meant for members of his crew. The two of them were still together, trying to defend the central control room of the ship, when Death struck closer to them than an any moment yet. It came very suddenly. One moment Novotny was still looking toward Ridolfi for a hint of what they might try to do next -- and the next moment a berserker machine that looked like a cross between a centipede and a crab had thrown itself upon them and they were prisoners. Steel claws that moved with the force of atomic power effortlessly tore Novotny's rocket launcher away and wrenched the Commander's sidearm from his hand. The berserker shifted its grip then, holding each pair of human arms helpless with a single claw -- and then machine and men went down together in a tangle as a new force slammed at the cruiser from outside. The Second Officer and his picked crew, in their fresh and undamaged launch, had begun their counterattack. The crab-centipede was wrecked, sheared almost in two, as the launch sent something like the Angel of the Lord passing almost invisibly through the embattled ship, cutting selectively, passing over fragile human bodies and machinery that it could somehow identify as human property. The mass of his late captor, and its tenacious grip which had not relaxed with the destruction of its computer-brain, pinned Novotny in an angle between deck and bulkhead, surrounded by wreckage. Beside him Ridolfi grunted and struggled in similar difficulties. Then they abruptly ceased their efforts to get free, simultaneously ceased even to breathe -- another berserker machine was entering the damaged control room. If it was aware of them, it did not turn. It moved straight to one of the panels before which a human astrogator normally sat, and with a startling delicacy began to remove the panel from its mounting. Neatly -- almost timidly, it seemed -- it probed for the panel fasteners, teasing and tickling at them with grasping devices that could have ripped the panel free like so much tissue paper... it was working so carefully, and now it almost had what it was after. It reached inside and pulled out... very slowly... a small metal case... That burst into a flaming snowball even as the berserker oh so gently tugged it free of its connections, a blaze that here in free fall sent out its flames in a sunburst of straight radii, a wad of radiant glory that the enemy instantly hurled away. Without pause the enemy turned to snatch up a small bundle of paper printout that writhed weightlessly across the deck. It shoved this inside itself, door slamming shut protectively across the orifice -- and the machine was gone, lunging with inhuman speed out of the room again. "Novotny." The two of them gasped for breath again and once more struggled against the dead claws that held them prisoner. "Look -- can you shift your weight this way? Lean on it here, maybe I can get a hand out of this claw..." After a minute or two of cooperative effort both of them were free. From some comparatively great distance the shocks and slams of battle were still coming to them through the hull. "Novotny, listen to me." The Commander talked while looking for his pistol, which he at last grabbed from a turning swirl of other weightless debris that drifted in the middle of the room. "It was going after our astrogational databank just then. After that thing that burst into flame?" "I saw." "It didn't get what it wanted, because the bank's destructor charge worked when it was pulled out. But it must need astrogational information badly, or it wouldn't have sent a machine after it, before the battle's even over. Maybe its own banks have been shot up." Novotny moved his head inside his helmet, showing that he understood so far. The Commander had his pistol back, held absently in his right hand, and his left hand clamped briefly on Novotny's suited arm. "I believe you have in your quarters something it could use as a substitute. I understand you're traveling with the whole new edition of Encyclopedia Calactica in microstorage -- and the EG gives galactic coordinates for all inhabited systems, right?" Novotny agreed again. Now that he had been almost immobile for a little while, his muscles were starting to stiffen from the unaccustomed workout. He could hear the wheezings from inside his own chest, and his body was beginning to feel like so much fluid lead. If they weren't in free fall he would certainly be dizzy and have to sit down. Decades at a senior executive's desk had left him too fat and old for this kind of nonsense. But he was moving again now, keeping up with the agile Commander as they picked their way out of the ruined control room, which now looked not in fit shape for controlling anything. "Then we've got to get to your quarters," the Commander was saying, "while there's still a chance. You've got just the one copy of the encyclopedia there?" "Yes." "We must see that it's destroyed." They had started down a corridor, and there came a glimpse of a machine moving ahead of them, and the vibrations of its massy passage came through the bulkheads to their gripping hands. Taking shelter together in a doorway, they waited for it to get out of their way. The Commander kept trying to make contact with his Second Officer by suit radio, but seemed unable to get any reply. Maybe, thought Novotny, it's only that the space between is far too noisy... "Commander," he asked, when there was a momentary opportunity, "What sector are we in now? Of the Galaxy, I mean, in Revised Galactic Coordinates?" Ridolfi's eyes came to full focus on him for what might have been the first time. "Omicron Sector, Ring Eleven -- what does it matter? Oh, you mean you want to know which volumes of your set it will be most important to destroy. Good thinking. That damned machine will be too shot up itself to get out of Omicron without help. I don't think it'll be able to catch another ship, even if one should come along. It'll be trying to find an undefended planet nearby, within a light year or two if possible, preferably an inhabited one where there'll be machines it can take over and some readymade materials that it can use to repair itself." "And my encyclopedia is now the only means by which it can locate such a planet?" "That's the way I read the situation. It can't just go visiting stars at random, the chance of success is far too small... remember that printout it picked up from the control room floor? That was a copy of what we call the Military Information Sheet, which we got when we filed our flight plan. Among other things it contains a list of all the defended planets along our projected course -- all the places where we might be able to look for help in case of an emergency. I suppose it'll go for one of them if it can't find anything better. But in your reference book it's likely to get the address of some undefended one... the war's a recent thing in this neck of the galactic woods, remember?" Novotny's face bore a doubtful look, but the Commander was no longer watching him. "Coast's clear, Novotny. Let's move." Then the two of them were in motion again, diving and scrambling in free fall. For the moment their luck held; no more berserkers came in sight as they reached the stateroom corridor and swam along it to the door of Novotny's cabin. The door had been jammed shut by some warping of the battered ship around it, and it took the men an agonizing moment or two to force it free. Then they were inside. "Where is it?" "There on the table, Commander. Already plugged into the reading machine. But wait." A new anxiety had come into Novotny's voice. "I'm not sure that destruction is our wisest move." Commander Ridolfi only looked at him. "Get back." But Novotny had not moved when a third figure suddenly joined them in the little cabin; the crab-centipede's cousin, which raised a multitude of claws. The Commander aimed his gun again, but not at the berserker. He thought his own life and battle now lost anyway, and more important than perhaps damaging one more of the berserker's machines would be denying it this information on new targets. He aimed at the reading machine that sat like some dull sculpture on the table. Novotny reached out deliberately and knocked Ridolfi's arm aside: The berserker, on the verge of fractionally as it observed their struggle. Did one of these lifeunits wish to become goodlife, a Such conversions had happened before, more than a few times, and a goodlife could be very useful. And what on the table was so important that a life-unit struggled to destroy it -- ? From the armed launch came the next phase of counterattack. The cabin was nearly ripped apart. The berserker lashed out at Ridolfi, and the Commander saw that his pistol was gone again, before it could be fired, and his arm gone with it almost to the shoulder. The suit will seal itself around the wound, he thought, in sudden massive shock that made all things seem trivial. He saw the reading machine snatched up from the table in the claws of the berserker, and the launch's weapons struck again. A fresh gust of escaping atmosphere whirled through the cruiser from a newly-ruptured compartment, and with the last glow of his consciousness the Commander could see stars. His first feeling when his wits came back was sheer astonishment at being still alive. Astonishment deepened when he realized that he had somehow been brought on board the armored launch. All four bunks in its tiny sickbay were full of wounded, and men and women and machines were steadily at work, passing back and forth continually in the small space between the bunks. The Second Officer came in to report, relief dawning on his face when he saw that Ridolfi was getting up and evidently in shape to resume his command. Shock and loss of blood had been treated, pain blocked, and bandages sealed the wound from which a new arm could one day be made to grow. The Second made his report concisely. The launch was now within the nebula, its defenses alertly repelling or safely detonating -- so far -- all the torpedoes that the berserker had sent after it. The battle had ground to a halt, otherwise, in mutual though incomplete destruction. What was left of the cruiser had now been abandoned by both contending forces. Before pulling back deep within the nebula, the launch had dared to delay long enough to follow distress signals and pick up two suited survivors who had, it seemed, somehow been blown clean away from the embattled cruiser in the last stages of the fighting. One of the survivors was Commander Ridolfi himself. The other... "That makes nineteen people on the air and food," the Second Officer mused, as they stood looking down at the collapsed shape of Otto Novotny, slumped in total exhaustion in a corner of the small dayroom where there hardly seemed room for his gross form. "Still, we should be able to recycle, and make supplies last until we're eventually picked up..." "I don't know if there'll be nineteen or not, for very long." Ridolfi's voice was hard as that of one just going into battle, not coming out of it, and his eyes were welded on the fat civilian. "Sir?" The Second didn't get it at all, not yet. "I mean, Mister, that unless I get some questions answered by this man here, and answered damn fast. I'm going to convene a formal court and press charges against him of voluntarily aiding a berserker. " There were only six people in the dayroom when the first informal inquiry began; the Commander didn't want to prejudice possible jurors if the thing came to a formal trial, which he was empowered to give even civilians when in space and in the face of the enemy. As Novotny, by now somewhat recovered though still slow of movement and blinking a bit bewilderedly, was ushered in and shown to the seat across the table from him, the Commander was simultaneously handed a note from the other side. It informed him that the berserker had just been observed dropping out of normal space in the area of the battle. Instruments showed it departing the local area, having evidently completed such emergency repairs as it could manage on the spot. A reading on the subspace signals of its departure gave a vector for its probable destination that deepened the lines carved down through Ridolfi's cheeks. A silence grew in the room, until Ridolfi spoke. "This is not yet a trial, Mr. Novotny. But I warn you that there may be one before we get back to a planet, if we ever do; or are picked up by another human ship, if we ever are. If there is a trial, you will be charged with voluntarily aiding a berserker, and conviction will carry an almost certain penalty of death." Exhaustion and puzzlement seemed to be absorbed almost at once within the layers of fat as Novotny pulled himself together. "Ah. I stand ready, of course. Commander, to answer any questions on my behavior that you may have." "That's good. Frank answers will be required." Ridolfi tried to keep his one hand from fidgetting before him on the table. "On board the cruiser, in a combat situation, you deliberately interfered with my attempt to destroy (he databank containing your encyclopedia. Do you deny it?" Novotny was sitting very still, as if he feared that movement !! Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher To launch # we have two John I ! Brunners; the first paperback ediI ; of # projected just a few years  I further. It's a mind-tingler! And we ! ; have a new printing, with a terrific ! Josh Kirby cover, of Brunner's out ; triple treasure of time and space. I We intend to keep John Brunner ! in print! ; (UY#-#)  (UY#-#) ; Don Wollheim has another "first" I ; by M.A. Foster, a substantial and ; I fascination-packed novel. Wait till ! ! you see Kelly Freas's cover! Kelly ! ; is thrilled with it, himself. ; ' (UYI #-#) ; j been highly praised in Analog, j ; Saberhagen, of Berserkers fame. !  (UYI #- #) ;; Gerard Klein, France's leading sf ; ' lions of light-years. It is a package ; of perpetual wonders!  ' (UYI ##) E.B. Wollheim ; j #th FI. j; #I Ave. of the Americas i! New York, N Y. #  ; y  f  -- l might land him in further trouble of some kind. He thought before answering, and his face maintained a frown. 'No, I do not deny that, Commander." The Commander paused, then put his arm out on the table, fingers opened, elbow straight, a dominating gesture. "You do not. Very well. My intention in destroying that data, sir, was to prevent its use as an astrogational aid by the berserker. If you wanted to save it, it was surely not for yourself. Did you expect that the berserker might accord you some favorable treatment if you..." Novotny was shaking his head. "I very seriously doubt that the data in the encyclopedia will do the enemy the least bit of good, in this case. Nor did I wish to help the enemy." The Commander's voice was relentlessly unchanged. "On the cruiser, you and I both saw the berserker going after the astrogational databank, which it evidently needed but didn't get. "We also know the enemy is severely damaged, which means it will be looking for some comparatively near planet where it can commandeer machinery and materials to repair itself; in addition, of course, to wiping out as many unprotected human lives there as it can reach. Because we fought it to a standstill here in space doesn't mean it won't be able to poison an atmosphere and depopulate a planet, if it comes on one only lightly defended or takes one unaware. Is all this news to you?" "I think I understand all this, Commander." "Let those who are here with us be witness that you do." Ridolfi glanced briefly round at the faces of the others, all of them staring now at the accused. "Because so far you are answering yourself right into a trial. Mister Novotny. There are only two things, basically, that a berserker ever wants or needs; victims, and facilities for repair and refitting. And you've shown this one where to go for both of them." Novotny slumped a little in his chair and closed his eyes. But when he opened them his voice was as steady as before. "Commander, if I am. indeed on trial for my life, or likely to be, then I would like to hear the charges and the evidence as fully as possible before I try to answer them. Go on." "Very well." Ridolfi nodded grimly. "You came on board the Dipavamsa with two copies of your new edition, one of which was subsequently and routinely stowed aboard this launch, along with some other baggage not immediately in use. That copy is still here and available, and since going off combat alert I've fed it into our computer and asked for a readout -- as the berserker can readily do with the copy you gave it -- of all inhabited planets within seven light-years of where our battle was fought. That's about as far as that berserker is going to get without repairs; and extending the radius another light year or so brings no new planets in." The Commander had a paper which he now consulted. "There are seven inhabited planets to be found, according to the Encyclopedia Galactica, within that radius. They are Angkor Apeiron, Comparettia, Epirus, Francavilla, Han Kao, Reissner, and Yang given for each." He put one piece of paper on the table and took another from a pocket of his shirt. "I have here part of a spare copy of the Military Information Sheet given us when we filed our flight plan before departing on this trip. Among other things, it lists the six inhabited planets in this same region that have notable ground defenses, or fleet units standing by, or both. As one more bit of evidence, Mr. Novotny, let me state now that you were also a witness with me that a copy of this list of the six defended planets was also seized by the berserker. Any denials yet?" Ridolfi's fingers were shaking and he put the second paper down. "Not yet, Commander." "Though whether you understood the full implications of that seizure at the time..." "I had... some idea, I suppose, of what the implications were. Proceed." Ridolfi read: "The six defended planets on the military list for this region are: Comparettia, Epirus, Francavilla, Han Kao, Reissner, and Yang Ch'i. Notably missing from this military list is Angkor Apeiron." The Commander pushed his second paper out on the table beside the first, where anyone who wished might look them over, and then produced a third. He went on: "According to the latest census figures, as given in this EG article, this world has thousand inhabitants. Its chief export industries are crystal growing and natural honey. The spaceport is small, but probably the berserker could plunder it. for useful machines and materials after it has wiped out what appears to be an undefended populace. The Commander needed a moment before he could continue. "Angkor Apeiron was discovered by Chang Izanagi, of Hathor, in # CE... first colonized only ten standard years later." His voice was starting to shake a little like his hand. "I suppose your reference work is quite reliable in these particulars? I mean, about there being eleven Novotny paused for thought, began to speak, then stopped and shook his head and tried again. "The EG is the most reliable general reference work in human history, Your Honor -- Commander -- whatever I am to call you now -- " " 'Commander' will still do." " -- when it is used for the purposes for which it is intended. Which is to say that it was never meant to serve as a manual of doit-yourself medicine, or law, or astrogation either. It is a means by which one can verify, or learn, a fact; check a date or name; obtain entree to almost any field of knowledge, and learn where to go for further..." "Yes. Spare us the sales talk, we're not in the market for a set right now." Nobody cracked a smile. "Now here in your reliable reference work, which you gave the enemy as a present, are the precise coordinates for the Apeiron system; Sector Omicron #, Ring Eleven #, Galactic Latitude # North. These figures are correct, are they not? Hasn't the EG a competent editorial staff, with the technical and scientific knowledge..." "The staff at the home office is more than competent. Commander. It is very good indeed. I speak from personal experience." The Commander leaned forward. "Then what, Mr. Novotny, is going to save the inhabitants of Angkor Apeiron from the consequences of your action?" Novotny leaned back, somewhat haughtily, as if he had at last taken affront. "Only the fact. Commander, that the inhabitants of Angkor Apeiron do not exist." There was a silence in the dayroom, as if each person who looked at the speaker were waiting for his last words to somehow clear themselves out of the air, or for some great hand to reach in from outside the little ship and mend the broken spring of sanity. The Commander, his shakiness shocked away, was the first to reply: "You mean... you claim to have some knowledge... that the planet has already been evacuated, or wiped out?" "I mean, sir, that the star Apeiron has no planets. It has never had any. When the berserker arrives there it will find no victims and no material help; and if your estimate of its damaged condition is as accurate as I would like to believe, before it can go on to some other world it will have died, if that is the proper word, of the injuries your crew has so gallantly inflicted on it." "But..." The Second Officer was starting a disbelieving protest. Novotny rounded on him sharply. "Why do you suppose the military authorities protected six settled planets in this region and ignored a seventh?" "Lack sufficient forces..." "Bah. Correct me if I am wrong, Commander, but would not the general or admiral in charge be more likely to spread his forces thinner, and not leave defended, since this sector has become a combat zone? Of course his forces are probably spread all too thin already, which is why I thought it good to direct our late antagonist to a desert system, rather than letting it go challenge some of them. " Ridolfi had recovered, or almost. "Desert system? But this EG entry... you claim your encyclopedia is the most reliable..." Novotny was holding up a pudgy, magisterial hand, and his face had eased into something that approached a smile. "I will explain, as I have promised. But to do so I must briefly go far afield from berserkers and space warfare." His accuser had not yet relaxed a bit. "Do so. Go as far as you like. But be sure that you come back." Novotny took another moment to marshall his thoughts before he spoke. "Suppose... suppose that you, Commander, are a ruthlessly good businessman, back on Earth or one of the other crowded worlds. And you decide that there is money to be made in purveying information to the public, even as EG makes money. You decide that you will compile and sell a general reference work. Or perhaps one more specialized -- on ga lac to graph y, let us say, listing and describing all the inhabited and explored planets as well as other bodies in the Galaxy that are for some reason interesting. "You decide that you will put a great deal less work into your encyclopedia than we put into ours, and therefore be able to sell yours for a great deal less money, while including the same information we include. How? The most direct expedient is of course to copy all your articles verbatim from ours; but this the laws and courts, alas for your enterprise, are never going to allow. You are forced to the inconvenience of at least rewriting our material somewhat as you crib. "Given a little computer help, to rearrange the syntax and replace words with their synonyms, this will not be such an arduous task as might at first appear. Even might be rehashed and reprinted, in slightly different format, in a quite reasonable time. Behold! And Commander Ridolfi's Encyclopedia of All Knowledge is available for the home data bank, at a much lower fee than ours... never mind that you will not provide your customers with the constant updating service that ours receive. "So! Even with much rewriting, your basic idea is still illegal, still infringes upon our copyrights, does it not? Well,, now the answer is no longer quite so clear-cut. But believe me, our lawyers will try, have tried in similar cases, to sue you for a bundle, as soon as they find out what you have done. "Now you show up for trial, and are on the witness stand, though not with your life at stake of course... Commander Ridolfi, I the prosecuting attorney ask you: Is it true or not, that you have compiled your so-called reference work virtually entirely from EG? Now think carefully, for on your answer your whole defense will stand or fall. "Of course it is not true! you answer ringingly. You used the Merchant Astrogation banks, you used periodicals and the records from dusty archives, you looked in books, you queried eminent authorities in many fields, just as does the great EG itself. "Ohh? I ask, and now my voice is of the softest, and I cast an eye toward the jury. Then tell me, sir, which of these many indispensable sources did you use to cross-check your information on the planet Angkor Apeiron?" There was another silence in the dayroom, a different sort of silence this time, and death that had all along seemed close was suddenly light years off again, at one with the berserker's wake that faded in subspace. Novotny felt the difference and began to sag. "Because you see, sir, we have made this entry up, population, industries, discovery date and all, as encyclopedists have made up entries for the same reason from very ancient times. We made it up to catch such plagiaristic fish as you, and put it as bait for you within the great EG, and nowhere else in the great universe of worlds or information storage does Angkor Apeiron exist... there are a number of other baits like this one. Commander, among our like this , one, I had a hand in making up myself; but how many there are altogether I do not know; no one man or woman knows them all. The ordinary' user is of course never going to hear of Angkor Apeiron anysVhere and is therefore never going to look it up. If he comes upon it while browsing at his reading machine, he is only treated to a dull and minor fantasy that he will soon forget." Novotney let himself sink back into a chair that no longer seemed to be a dock above the edge of death. Then he turned his head to a wallscreen showing space, and looked off into the nebular cloudbanks of the Deep. "I wonder if it can even wonder how it was tricked, or how it tricked itself...I know that it could never understand."  Science iHoti Semeyou'll find it the Science Fiction Writers of America  Market Reports Where To Sell SF  Conference Reports  The SF Publishing Field  People  Places m SF  Pilot os of Authors . I: vents  Articles on Writing  Internal Organizational Doings  Future Studies  Letters  SymposiumDiscussion Transcripts And Introducing a Now Supplement Covering academic affairs, with articles by critics, writers, and teachers of SF. letters, calendar information, announcements. Contributions from Bulletin subscribers invited. A  Writers  College A High School Teachers  Students  Libraries  Readers  Critics  Ldilms Subscriptions: # single and I double special annual Nebula Awards issues per year. One year#;iwo yearslH. Sample copy, postpaid, SI .#. Complete back issues available: individual A. L. van Vogt Ursula k. LeGum (fordun K Dickson Anne McCaffrey James Gunn Damon knight Burry N. Malzberg Joanna Russ lany Niven Robert Hoskins Kingsley Amis Harry Harrison Poui Anderson Robert Bloch Clifford Sunak Katherine Kurt Don Pleil David Harris and "Received by almost # members of the Science Finikin Writers of America I cleopatra amid the kudzu Do you know what kudzu is? Kudzu. Most people who live in a domed city, even the Urban Nucleus of Atlanta, aren't like to know. How many of you have been outside our huge, geodesic walnut? I know about kudzu for two reasons: when I was very little my grandmother used to tell me about it and, more impressively maybe, I am one of those who have been into the Open: Japan invades. Far Eastern vines Run from the clay banks they are Supposed to keep from eroding, Up telephone poles. Which rear, half out of leafage, As though they would shriek... James Dickey's description of kudzu in the opening lines of a poem entitled "Kudzu." It's a good description, too, especially the part, about the telephone poles shrieking. Not too many standing telephone poles out there anymore, but pine trees, old barns, collapsing fire towers -- all of these do seem to be shrieking as the merciless kudzu clambers over them. Kudzu. Pueraria lobata, native to Japan, imported during a precious century to keep the red clay from washing away. Baroque, vegetable architecture. My grandmother told me about it before I ever saw it. My last name is Noble, but Zoe, my grandmother, gave me my first one: Clio. I remember Zoe very well even though she lived with us only the last three years of her life and died when I was five. Also, I have a photograph of my grandmother that she took herself, using a tripod and timer: a large black-and-white one. This photograph, which sits on top of my visicom console as I write this, gives me a hand-hold on Zoe's heart and on several generations of the past. The past is important to me. Just as you have to hack your way out of furiously growing kudzu to attain a vantage point on the surrounding terrain, sometimes you have to rise above and survey the past in order to get the lay of your own soul. Zoe understood that, and I think that's why my arents, after once renouncing er and packing her off to the Geriatrics Hostel, let her, in her seventy-second year, stick me with a monicker like Clio. But, having bridged a generation and walked over that bridge into my grandmother's life, I find that I like my name OK. In Greek mythology, you know, Clio was the Muse of History. (Ta da!) The piece of history I'm telling now occurred just last year, but really it takes in many more human seasons than just #, month of Summer. It's the story of how three of us on a resources-reclamation team, in the employ of the Human Development Commission (the very same authority that, nineteen years ago, disbanded Zoe's experimental septigamoklan in the Geriatrics Hostel), went out into the Open to fetch back several people to our Urban Nucleus. Although I was only twenty-one last summer. I'd been out on three missions before the one this story is about: all routine, all predictable. We'd "reclaimed ' a number of people with desirable technical skills or influential relatives in the city by going out, finding their kudzu-camouflaged encampments, and asking them to return with us. Upon the promise of enfranchisement and respectable jobs, they all had: every one of them. They were flattered that an rr team had been sent out for them. Our efforts were part of what the bureaucrats in the Commission called the "Fifth Evacuation Lottery" -- although it wasn't an evacuation at all in the way the first four had been, when the domes were going up sixty and seventy years ago (#-#, in case you're counting: a neat decade). The Fifth Evacuation Lottery is another thing altogether, not an evacuation but a series of carefully planned manhunts. The three of us who went out last summer were Newjyn Yates, the team leader; Alexander Guest, a man of swarthy complexion although, unlike Yates, not a black; and me, Clio Noble. Three was the optimum number for such teams; it had something to do Twice before I'd been on teams with Newlyn Yates, and I was a little bit dithery about him: he did things to my sense of equilibrium, sabotaged it mostly. But Yates was all poker spine, set jaw, and unflappable decorum, and we'd never come close to bodyburning, despite the opportunities spending all that time in the Open naturally provides. Yates was awfully interior, he was ingrown. In the Open you couldn't get him to uncoil, he did everything as if by an invisible manual. Off duty, you never got a chance to see him. Alexander Guest, a big, mahogany-colored man with a graggy profile, was probably ten years older than Yates. He looked like he ought to be wearing moccasins and the traditional turban of the old Creek Indians -- for good reason, it turned out. Before our assignment last summer. I'd never met him before, never even seen him in the Comihission Authority tower. He was just insane enough to like traipsing through kudzu; you could tell by the way the wilderness polled up in his muddy eyes. He was insane in other ways, too. But this I found out in the Open. On the day I met him in the rr section of the Human Development Tower, he just looked bummish and uncouth. We were sitting in plastic chairs in the carpeted anteroom of Yates' office, two zombies rising out of the deadness of sleep at six o'clock in the morning: even so, I had to admit that the craggy, brown man whose bulk seemed to overflow the fragile cup of his chair was more awake than I. 'Lo," he said. An orotund rumble. I nodded. "Looks like we're gonna be team members. You know what this one's about?" "No," I said. "Do you?" "Think SO. " H e said this matter-of-factly rather than smugly, but I still didn't feel like asking him the natural follow-up question. So, shifting in his wobbly chair (with him in it, it looked like it had been stolen from a Van-Ed elementary division classroom), he said, "What's yOur name, Miz?" I told him. "Cleo," he said, missing it by a letter. "Short for Cleopatra. Married up with her brother and bodyburned with two Romans. Well, Cleo, you're the first redhaired 'Gyptian I've ever seen. Nice to meet you." I didn't correct him about my name. I did manage the bogus courtesy of nodding: again. That was all I could manage. "History's a pastime of mine," he said after a while. "My name's Guest, Alexander Guest. That's how I'm listed in the UrNu census anyhow, and even here at the Tower. Really, though, it's an alias. "The alias I'd rather go by," he said after musing for a while, "is Menewa. But it's hard to get people in an Urban Nucleus to call you that. All the forms say Last name, first name, middle initial.' You write down somepin like Menewa' they jes' stamp INsend 'em back to you. You see, Cleo, I'm an Indian. The name Menewa..." Fortunately, he got cut off because Newlyn Yates, trim in a one-piece worksuit and street slippers, glided through the anteroom and into his office. Guest didn't have time to lapse into an incomprehensible Muskohogean dialect: the words "Come in" floated back to us as Yates disappeared, and the Indian Menewa and the 'Gvptian Cleopatra exchanged a glance, got up, and followed their black pharoahchieftain into the dark. In the center of Yates' metal desk -- once Yates had coasted the false wood surface aside -- you could see an illuminated projection well; in fact, that was all we see when we came into his office. Yates was standing behind the desk and he beckoned us to take up positions opposite him. Then he pushed a button so that a map of tne transit tunnels leading out of Atlanta to the other Urban Nuclei appeared in the projection well. "We'll take a transit-car to this station," Yates said, pointing at the map. "The juncture of the Miami and Savannah tunnels, southeast of here. Then we ll have to go to the end of the Savannah tributary, dismantle the filter system on one of the ventilation units, climb through, and strike out on foot. The biomonitor-relay people have one of our targets placed at about forty-five kilometers due east of the tunnel juncture." Yates' father had once been the director of the city's Biomonitor Agency, but in the last fifteen years the Agency had extended its operations to include surveillance of the natives of the countryside; this was in addition to the medical monitoring of all dome-dwellers. A target, both then and now, was a human being who was being monitored. "Hot damn," I said. An old expression of my grandmother's. "How did they manage that?" "An implant tab at the nape of our subject's neck, they told me," Yates said. "A month ago -- two months ago -- he came into the city." "Why?" "The Agency told me he brought a truckload of peanuts up here, using what's left of the old highway system. While here, he was drugged, implanted, and afterwards pumped by a hypnotistphysician at Grady Memorial. He's not aware of the implant tab or the fact that he was questioned." "Why didn't we just keep him here when he came to the city? It doesn't make sense to go out and fetch him now." I was doing all the asking: Alexander Guest, the gingerbread Indian, was standing hunch-shouldered and openmouthed beside me. "The man's name is Jonah Trap," Yates said, irritated with me, the projection well giving his face the demonic geometry of a mask. "A black. But we're not going after him, Miz Noble. We're after two people whose intelligence and ability the city needs and who're now apparently living with Trap near the old town of Toombsboro. You were selected for this assignemnt because one of the people is a woman: the Commission Authority believes you may be able, far better than Mr. Guest or I, to persuade her to return with us." "Why was I chosen?" Indian Alex said, surprising both Yates and me. "I thought they explained that to you. You met Trap while he was here, they told me; they said you'd even been into that area of the Open before. Is that true?" "Yep." "Then those are your reasons. You ought to be helpful." Then Yates said, "And in case the question seems to logically present itself now, I'm going because I'm ood at taking teams out and ringing them back entire. The fact I'm black probably won't hurt much either, not in this instance." "Well," I said, "who are the people? The man . and the woman?" "That, Miz Noble, I can't tell you till we're on our way to Toombsboro." "Why not?" "If I could tell you that,"I said, "I could tell you the other. Couldn't I?" "Not necessarily. Maybe the Commission Authority just wants to be sure we don't spread our targets' names around before we leave. You could easily tell us that without telling us the names of the targets." "Well, Miz Noble, if you have it all figured out, why ask?" Yates was an icicle with an iron bar inside it, and I had just put my lily-white foot so far into my mouth that I was gnawing on ankle bone. Hot damn, I said to myself: an old expression of my grandmother's. Aloud I said, "I don't have it all figured out. I didn't even know we had a tunnel to Old Savannah: Savannah's not one of the Urban Nuclei. Never was, was it?" "It's about one-tenth of a tunnel," Yates said, letting his finger trace the route in the projection well. "A dead-ender. Anyway, the geology of the coastal region wouldn't permit the construction of a viable tunnel, even if there were people there to get to. Same with Miami. Most of the TransSeminole 'tunnel," you know, is above-ground and hooded." He tapped the illuminated map. "Once we exit the main tunnel near the Ocmulgee mound here," tapping again, "we'll head down the dead-ender and then surface well to the east of Macon. Then, a kudzu-fouled walk in the Open. We may be able to use the old state highway -- #, I think -- for a good part of the way. That should ease it a little for us." Guest said, "That highway's tom up and overgrown, # is -- at least over here where we're, gonna come out." He shook his head. "Crazy." "It doesn't matter," Yates said. "We'll get there, Mr. Guest." In live more minutes the briefing was over, and Yates turned us out of the office, out of the Tower, for the rest of the day. An open day. "You like to get some coffee, Cleo?" Guest asked me. "No thanks," I said. "See you at six o'clock tomorrow morning." I went back to my cubicle on Level #, under. That's where, a quarter of a century ago, my parents started from: Level #. II the general toombs cornstalk brigade The transit tunnels are dark; they smell of the dampness of concrete. Even before construction on the domes of the Urban Nuclei had begun, the entire Federation-wide network of tunnels was blasted into existence by an arsenal of immaculately sanitary H-bombs: grrr-choom, grrrchoom, grrrrr-whumpf! Strangely, we don t use the tunnels that much. On the morning after our conference in the Human Development Tower, an open transit-car carried us in eerie silence to the Miami-Savannah juncture, where, before we turned into the Savannah tributary, I knew we were passing pretty darn close to the old Ocmulgee Mounds. At these mounds and the territory called the Ocmulgee Old Fields, the Creek Indians had long ago formed the Creek Indian Confederacy. Several prehistoric cultures had thrived here, too. I started wondering. Maybe the domes of the Urban Nuclei had been raised from the same impulse that had motivated Kheops in Egypt and the Mound Builders in Georgia. Oh, in these two cases I know the immediate motives diverge: Pharoah wanted a splendid tomb whereas the Indians wished their flat-topped pyramids to serve as the thrones of the gods. But if Pharoah believed himself a deity, a god incarnate, then his tomb was also a throne, and the common denominator in the two instances is humankind's need to exalt something larger than itself. A religious motive, finally. Anyhow, that's my belief, and I'm not talking about the OrthoUrban Church, either. I've tried to voice it once or twice, but of a twenty-two-year-old woman with red hair, elicit only peeved looks ("The girl thinks she s Bertrand Russel, Tom") or curt dismissals ("Sophomoric bullshit, Clio"). So I reserve these ruminations now for accounts like this one. Except I probably won't be writing any more accounts like this one. Circumstances change. But for the beam of a single headlamp, our resourcesreclamation team rode in absolute darkness. Th e winds of our blastborne passage smelled of concrete, concrete and iron. Yates slowed at the Miami-Savannah juncture and negotiated the turn into the southeastward tributary of the subterranean network: Guest had to get out and switch the transit-rails. Then off we went again, the Ocmulgee Old Fields behind us, well to the west. We'd been traveling for three hours. I shouted into the resurging wind of our movement: " Now can you tell us who we're going after?" Turning his head, Yates permitted his thin profile to carve itself in the air: ' Wait till we're out! You've waited this long!" In fifteen minutes the wind began to die, the walls to lose their dizzying speed, and we glided into what I could only think of as Dead-End Station: yellow fluorescents casting a somehow greenish light over the platform here. You half-expected, when you were close enough to see more clearly, to find stalactites on the ceiling. Didn't, though; too mercilessly hot. We got out and began unloading equipment and carrying it up to the platform. Yates wore a myriad tools on his low-slung belt, as well as a holster of artificial leather: it contained a laser pistol. (One such weapon to each reclamation team, and the team leader carried it.) Then Yates pointed at the ventilation unit at the top of the tunnel's final wall. "OK," he said. "Let's dismantle that grate." Guest climbed up the maintenance rungs to the unit and began working to take the filter apart. The filter systems had been installed when the Federation had been worried about the tunnel's Internal Environmental Control that the Open's tainted atmosphere would spill into the network and strangle us with the wastes we had fled from. If that's what we'd fled from. The Open had never been so foully tainted as that. Never. The first reclamation team had carried oxygen canisters and over-the-head masks (which made them look like startled rhesus monkeys when they put them on: perforated speakers, plastiglass eyes, and all), but its members hadn't had to use this equipment. And ninety per cent of Atlanta's people still believe you can't go outside. Most of them, if they knew differently, still wouldn't rush to re-colonize the wilderness. "This thing's rusted," Guest said, swaying up there on the maintenance ladder. "Won't budge." So yates had to go up and cut both the filter system atid the grate out of their moorings with the laser pistol. After the area around the ventilation unit had cooled, we all climbed through, weighted with paraphernalia, into the Open: Guest first, then me, then Newlyn Yates. And the first thing we saw was the deformed, rearing landscape: green temples, arabesques of Kiidzu, pagodas to the gods of rampant fertility. The Orient had invaded Georgia, invisible samurai crouched in the vines. The wilderness shouted at us, and the sky -- this always amazed The job they gave Clio Noble was tying flaming-red markers on trees ana rotted fence posts, anything up-jutting. "Hell." Alexander Guest said. "She don't need to do that. You got a wristcompass and I could smell our way back to the station." He lifted his big head and whufUed two or three times at the air, a comic and lordly bear in the chapel of Ballantine ##I Books A Division of Random House, Inc. What a spectacular year # has been for our science-fiction list -- more titles selling more copies to more people than ever before. # was the big bestseller that has already been back to press several times. Hard to keep up with the unprecedented reorders -- but we're coping, so that the book will be in stock at all times...along with Arthur's classic Childhood's End, now reissued and both! # was also the year of Icerigger, our own Alan Dean Foster's survival novel that took off like a shot and is still outselling most other books in the category. Why? Who knows? Perhaps the marvelous Dean Ellis cover moved the books off the racks; or maybe the cover looked enough like the hardcover bestseller Alive; or maybe all the Star Trek Log fans followed Foster to science fiction. Or maybe a combination of all these factors -- or maybe none. But we think the book sold its bloody head off because Alan is a damn good writer, and sf readers are desperately looking for the kind of adventure fiction he writes so well. Also in '#, we introduced several top science-fiction authors to the list -- authors who, for one reason or another, had never been published by Ballantine. Back in March, we brought out Frank Herbert's classic chiller Under Pressure, a little gem that is already in its third printing and has become a permanent fixture on our backlist. Then there was Stanley G. Weinbaum -- the best of, that is. Some of our sales honchos wanted to know "What's a Weinbaum?" So they read the big beautiful collection that introduces our Classic Library -- and they found out. L. Sprague de Camp appeared on our science-fiction list for the first time in '#, as did Ray Gallun and -- you guesses it! -- Leigh Brackett! In addition to books by the old pros, we featured several smashing first novels by Suzy McKee Chamas, by that crazy cartoonist-cum-author William Rotsler and, lest we forget, by Waldrop  Saunders with their wacky, wonderful Texas-Israeli War. So much for #!    Now on to # and January's big book The Best of Planet Stories # I . edited by Eric John Stark's favorite lady, Leigh Brackett. Planet Stories was that late, great pulp magazine of the #s and #s that featured strange adventures on other worlds -- lots of larger-than-life swashbucklers and lovely damsels in distress. Quite a combo! Here is heroic fiction at its best -- a dynamite collection culled from the pages of the greatest pulp sf magazine. Most of these stories have never been reprinted; many of them are appearing in paperback for the first time. Leigh has included by popular demand (or at least on request by the publisher) her famous collaboration with Ray Bradbury, "Lorelei of the Red Mist," first published back in # and now something of a classic. Then there's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (what a title!) and Fred Brown's immortal "The Star-Mouse" (who will ever forget Mitkey Mouse?)! And these s lots more in this big book, not least Leigh Brackett's penetrating portrait of an era she helped make happen. Not to be missed!    Donald J. Pfeil is the editor of Vertex , the slick sf magazine. Exchanging his blue pencil (at least, for as long as it takes to write a novel) for a typewriter, Don has come up with Voyage to a Fore got ten Sun -- a rousing space opera. Trader Zim was doomed to spend # years in isolation on some god-forsaken planet unless he agreed to accompany the President of Earth back to his home planet in a ship that was # years old! It was going to be a I-o-n-g trip. We liked Voyage so much we instantly signed on for his next novel...and the one after that...and... ! Don't miss it! the forest. "Suppose something happens to you. Guest," Yates said. "Or to me. Maybe Clio...Miz Noble," he emended, "will have to get back here on her own." I grinned at him, and the martinet in Yates revived. "Miz Noble will set the rags, and that's it." So off we went, angling northeast in order to intercept the ruins of State Highway #, Clio Noble tying markers the color of her hair at intervals of roughly a hundred meters -- unless the eclipsing vegetation or a turn in our progress demanded them more often. Langorously swinging his machete, Indian Alex marched point. Newlyn Yates, good team leader that he was, brought up the rear. Two brown thrashers (once upon a time, the state bird) and a logy cardinal. Which was funny enough -- in context, mind you -- to make me chuckle out loud; in that knee-high kudzu "brown thrashers" was especially good. "Don't get to laughing so hard," Yates said from behind me, "you forget to keep an eye open for snakes. They love this stuff." Guest stopped and turned around. "My little brothers," he said. I glared. He'd almost lopped off my head with his machete. 'Sense me," he said, wiping his brow with one mesh sleeve. "It's snakes, though. Since I'm an Indian they're s'posed to be my little brothers: snakes, lizards, alligators, all like that. But I saw a green mamba at the Grant Park Zoo two years ago and got so crawly I had to get out of there." His shoulders shuddered. "Went right home." "If you've been out here before," Yates accused, "you've seen snakes plenty of times. ' "Yeah, but I didn't come 'specially to look at 'em." Then he said something both clumsily poetic and, right then, incomprehensible: "This Hothlejjoya ain't no herpetologist: no sir. ' And started hacking again. We did see some snakes, too -- as we always did in the Open. One was a coral snake, up from Florida no doubt, that we gave a wide berth. Guest waved Yates and me around it and whispered to me as I went by, "Hope we don't run across any asps, Cleo." I thought he was being a smart Alex until I deduced from his head movements and inflection that he really did hope that. Literally, he meant it. An asp in Georgia, a creature as alien as that! At one o'clock we found some shade, a knoll in the forest of pine and kudzu. Some moss actually grew at the base of the slash pine we decided to camp under. For lunch. We drank from our canteens and v nibbled at our dried rations. "Well," I said. "How 'bout now?" Yates looked at me. "How 'bout now what?" Imperial annoyance. "Telling us who we've come after this time. I think it's a pretty safe wager we won't leak the word to someone disreputable." "OK," Yates said. I noticed that Guest, his heavy jaw working on a dehydrated vitamin bar, was gazing off into the distant portals of kudzu, apparently indifferent to Yates' impending revelation. Well, he'd told me he thought he knew what this mission was all about; maybe he did.  Yates said, "Do you know the name Carlo Bitler?" "I know we're not looking for him," I said. "He was a half-caste demagogue who was assassinated in the UrNu Capitol Building almost forty years ago." "Thirty-seven. And he wasn't a demagogue, Miz Noble." Archly he said this: very archly. "OK," I said. "Beg your pardon. Why do you mention him?" "We're looking for his wife," Yates announced, "and for the son of the man who assassinated Bitler, Emory Coleman. We think the two of them are together. Fiona Bitler was Coleman's teacher in a Van-Ed program for precocious children before the two of them disappeared." "Great Maynard's ghost!" I was really excited: that's an expletive for thugboys and sentimental politicians. "How long ago was that?" "Thirty-two years." "You've got it all memorized! How old does that make Fiona Bitler and the little boy she was teaching?" "The 'little boy' is now fortyone, Miz Noble, and Fiona Bitler has to be in her mid-sixties. In thirty years people age." Which was about the stupidest thing I'd ever heard Yates say. He was melancholy, though. To cover his emotion he lifted the canteen and drank. Indian Alex hadn't stopped munching. None of what we a just been talking about impressed him, his eyes still veered away into pine copses and viny cathedrals. When he did look at us again, well into Yates' and my awkward silence, he said, "Toombsboro was named for Robert Toombs, I think." He wiped vitamin-bar crumbs from his hands. "Robert Toombs was an unusual man. Confederate general who escaped the yankees in the last year of the war and ended up in London. Came back to Georgia later, but never would swear his loyalty to the Union." "Yes, sir," Yates said, annoyance surfacing again. "Old Toombs was a real jewel." "Hitler's your hero," I said by way of mediation (they hadn t asked for it, though); "maybe Toombs is his. Everyone has his own heroes." I remembered a story about Toombs that a professor of mine had always relished telling: In an early year of the war the old secessionist had bragged to a friend that one Georgia brigade with cornstalks could defeat any bunch of yankees sent against them. After the war the friend reproached Toombs for this bit of brag. Well, Toombs drawled (my professor drawled it, anyhow), we could of -- but them yankee bastuds wouldn't fight with cornstalks. (Ho ho.) But it wasn't a story that would amuse Yates, though; so, out there in the Open, I didn't tell it. "Not a hero of mine," Guest said. "When that war broke out there wasn't an Indian left in Georgia, least not officially: only white men and Negro slaves. But Toombs was a man who knew where he stood, that's for sure." "Let's go," Yates said. He was already standing up. "Wait a minute," I said. "Heroes aside, what're Fiona Bitler and that old pupil of hers doing out here near Toombsboro? Strange place for them to be, isn't it?" Without looking at me Yates began jockeying his implementlined belt into place over his hips. i ohan Trap's farming out here, e reports say. He's Fiona Bitler's first cousin: son of her mother's brother. When she and the boy left the city in '#, they naturally went to Trap." "And they've been living out here thirty years?" "Off and on. It isn't completely clear." "So why do we, in this funky Year of Our Lord, come out here to haul them back to a place they must've wanted out ofr" Which was a question that needed asking. Most of the "indigenous salvageables" our resource reclamation teams brought back to the city had never lived in it before, had never been enfranchised. Fetching runaways was business we didn t engage in. Let the trash go, one of our more intellectual ward reps liked to say. "To persuade them to return. Emory Coleman's a genius, and Mrs. Bitler's husband s been vindicated over and over again for his so-called rabblerousing. Streets have been named after him, schools, housing projects, churches. The woman ought to he able to come back to that. She always wanted natural change, that's why she was a teacher. She ought to be able to die in the city that finally recognized the rightness of her husband's goals. " "Fine recognition," I said. "Implementing the Retrenchment Edicts of '# and crushing that so-called 'Glissador Revolt' three years back, when there wasn't any revolt at all; nothing physical anyhow." This was heresy, but Yates didn't respond to it. His loyalties were cruelly divided:the city employed him, but his pigmentation suffused him with an allegiance no mere emolument or law could undermine. Newlyn Yates wasn't that sort of human being; a soldier maybe, but no mercenary. Ill rasputin at the battle of horseshoe bend About five o'clock on that first day we stumbled out of the green mosques and jumbled pagodas into an open area of sorts. A universal groundcover of kudzu still tripped us up, but now it rose no higher than our upper shins: we waded through it like kids in the shallow end ol a recreation pool. Guest raked the blade of his machete through the vines and felt for the hidden surface. The machete clanged. Guest scraped at the ground-cover. "Well, here she is, Mr. Yates: Highway #." The Ocean Living Institute has been formed to conduct and promote research in oceanography and independent self-sufficient forms of community living on the ocean. It will encourage individuals and business firms to form investment groups to fund construction and operation of ocean based industries, serve as a clearinghouse for ocean living contacts, publish information on legal and other aspects of oceanic settlement, publish information on new concepts in oceanography, aquaculture, and oceanic settlement, and conduct tests on new concepts and devices. the institute is a nonprofit corporation and contributions of cash and supplies are deductible for federal income tax purposes. The institute is in the formative stages, and is especially interested in hearing from people who can help to develop it. Further information is available from, and Contributions should be sent to: # River Road North Arlington, New Jersey # And it was. The vines had simply grown across it. We followed the filigreed roadbed for a while, moving east, and had the easiest time of it the wilderness had so far granted us. Well before sundown, though, we stopped, moved off the roadbed into a copse of deciduous trees (wild precans), and made our camp for the evening. Twilight still twinkling in the tall pines and pecans, Yates told us to go to bed: he would roust us out early, he said, so we could steal a march on the heat. We prepared to sleep on the ground. But tall thunderheads began rolling through the twilight from the northwest, and Yates ordered us to pitch our one-person tents in a kind of triangle, dig run-off trenches, and hurriedly finish supper. The woods began to boom, the branches of the trees to thrash about violently. Huge drops began to fall through the accumulating darkness and the stuttering leaves. Well, no stars this night; no bloated moon and no vivid, glittering constellations. Too bad. Those are things that make being a team member worth all the agitation of soul. From my two previous trips with him I remembered that Yates had sometimes stayed up all night, transfixed, looking at the stars. (How did I know it was all night? Sometimes I stayed up, too, watching him.) Tonight, though, Yates crawled into nis tent before the worst of the deluge hit and fell soundly asleep. A feat I couldn't emulate. It was too noisy. And my soul was agitated: we were going after Fiona Bitler and Emory Coleman! It rained an hour, at least. W'hen it stopped, I looked up and saw a shadowy bulk hunkering next to my tent: Alexander Guest, rocking on his heels in the slow, sloughing, red mud. " 'Lo," he said. "What're you doing?" I said. Not too civilly, maybe. "First watch," he said. "Yates gave me first watch. You can't do it proper from a tent." "Why do we need one at all?" I said. "Nothing out here but snakes, raccoons, and opossums." The answer was that Yates did everything by the manual, even down to assigning watches in the middle of thunderstorms. "Can't sleep, huh?" That question disturbed me a little. I was afraid (ashamed afterwards, though) that Guest was going to propose a mutual settling of the nerves, a little easy bodywarming as a prelude to sleep. I said, "No. But look at Yates. Don't you hate a man who can go off like that, and then stay off?" "I don't hate anybody," he said obliquely. Then, staring into the dark: " 'Cept maybe Andrew Jackson. I've never really forgiven Andrew Jackson." "For what?" "For the way he treated Indians, you know. When that man got elected President, the Civilized Tribes and ever' other Indian in Georgia was doomed. In ten years, violatin' first this treaty, then that, he had all of us cleared out of here: Yamacraw, Creek, Yuchi, Cherokee. That Jackson's one dead fellow I wish was alive, jes' so I could kill him again." "I'd think his being dead so long revenge enough." "No," Guest shook his head. "Death is a sweetness, it's the dying, you know, that's the devil-bitch, always hungry for new meat...I wish ole Jackson was new meat again so I could feed him to the devil-bitch." Death as Goddess, Death as Avenging Female. Well, Indians had considered the white man's failure to isolate his woman during menstruation as the most heinous of obscenities. I could accept the devil-bitch metaphor from Guest even though it would have angered me from anybody else; I could accept it without approving it, just as I could understand but never approve the Indian's fear and awe of a woman in her cycle. Thinking these things, I crawled out of my tent. It seemed rude to carry on a conversation Irom the comfort of my bedding while Guest squatted in the mud. Together we drew a log up to the rain-squelched ashes of our fire and sat down. Yates slept on. Should I assure Indian Alex that I was in a touchable condition? Instead I said, "You told me yesterday your name was an alias. " "Sort of," he said. "It's the name on my birth certificate, but Alexander and Guest certainly ain't Indian names. I'd be closer to it using something like Alexander X, the way some of them old-time black Muslims did. Like the one who got shot in New York, that Malcolm fellow. He didn't know his real name was any more than I do mine -- now." Guest told me that he was the descendant of Cherokee Indians who had escaped into North Carolina at the time of the Great Removal in # and #. Somewhere along the line a great-grandfather had taken the name Guest. "The reason for that," the big man said, "is Guest is one of the most common forms of Gist, and George Gist was the anglo name of Sequoyah." "Sequoyah? The inventor of the Cherokee syllabary?" "Yep. Which I can read. I got a nigh-on complete microfilm facsimile of the Cherokee Phoenix. The Indian newspaper run off at New Echota up in old Gordon County. Got it back in my cubicle." The other reason that Guest was an appropriate name for Alexander's family, he explained, was that they were "guests ' in the city: none of them had ever been granted enfranchisement. "What about Alexander?" I said. "Well, that's from Alexander Creek micco whose father'd been a Scotch trader. If you want to survive in the Urban Nucleus, you know, you can't go around calling yourself Menewa. So I got me a compromise name: Alexander Guest. ' "Why do you want to call yourself Menewa? Is that a Cherokee name?" "No. That's the name of a Creek warrior who called himself Hothlepoya when he was young. That means Crazy War Hunter. He was an unusual man, Menewa was; more unusual than Robert Toombs, even." And, talking slowly, the ground around us steaming so that ghosts seemed to be rising from the heavy, carnal earth, Alexander Guest told me the story of Menewa. By # the Creek Confederacy had fragmented into proand anti-American actions; most of the Upper or Alabama Creeks were hostile to the new American nation, while many of the Lower or Georgia Creeks, hoping for the best, determined to support and befriend it. "A few of these Lower Creeks," Guest said, "was in the pay of the U.S. government. Which you can't blame 'em too much for -- since they was givin' up land right and left and jes' tryin' to survive in a turned-upside-down world." The principal culprit, as Guest saw it, was a half-Scot Lower Macintosh, who led his people in a massacre of the anti-American party of a chief named Weatherford ("Then Scots jes' seemed to have a way with the Indian gals") after Weatherford had directed his own massacre of the soldiers and their families of Fort Mims in Alabama: a Civil War ante-dating the one that gave the world William Tecumseh Sherman. "Got all that straight?" Guest asked. "I don't know. What about Menewa?" "Well, he was a chief of an anti-American faction called the Red Sticks, and he and Macintosh robably saw themselves as the eadliest of enemies. At the battle of Horseshoe Bend in #, the Red Sticks was making a desperation stand against Jackson's Tennessee militia and some proAmerican Indians, and things didn't go too good for Menewa. Macintosh was there, and some Yuchi Indians, and maybe sixhundred or so Cherokee.' "Cherokee?" "Well," Guest said defensively, "they'd been promised all sorts of things. Some of 'em even had friends among the white men. Also, they was pretty sure this country never was gonna be all Indian again. They was doin' what they thought they had to do, jes' like Menewa's Red Sticks was -- unless they was gettin' paid to do it." The battle lasted several hours. Jackson used cannons to bombard the Red Stick positions on the peninsula. Only seventy of the original nine-hundred Red Stick warriors survived, and threehundred women and children were taken as captives. What about Menewa? "H e was shot seven times," Guest said. "Seven times! None of 'em kilt him, though. Then, when he woke up -- he'd been left for dead in the brush, you know -- he took a shot at one of Jackson's militiamen. That fellow shot back. He drilled Menewa right through the cheek, but that didn't kill him, either. Menewa woke up in the middle of the night. He crawled to the river, found him a canoe, and floated down the Tallapoosa to some of the women and children who'd hidden themselves there. Made it alive, too." "Sounds as tough as Rasputin," I said. "Sure. Far as survivin' goes, anyhow. But the real Rasputins at the battle of Horseshoe Bend was Jackson and Macintosh. They took all the Red Sticks' land, all of Menewa's goods and property, too, and Macintosh probably went off thinkin' he'd finished Menewa for good," "He hadn't?" "It took thirteen years, but Menewa got his revenge. Yessir!" In #, against both Creek custom and law, Macintosh ("who was gettin' paid regular from the slate, mind you") ceded to Georgia all the Creek land that hadn't already been signed away in past treaties. "So the Creeks, the big miccos who hadn't been talked to, got together and decided to kill ole Mac. On May Day a bunch of 'em attacked his house and killed the bastard. His son-in-law, too. A lot ol Georgia history writes this up as some sort of tragedy, Cleo, but it was only what the ole traitor deserved. He knew it, too. You bet he did. The best part, though, is this: it was Menewa who actually killed Macintosh." Despite this triumph over his rival, Menewa lived out a story whose conclusion wasn't so happy. In # Menewa went to Washington himself to make a An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ## (Feb.) will feature a combination interviewarticle Richard Delap. Also: "Science Fiction's Greatest Disaster -- Hugo Bernsbackl" A Revisionist View by Darrell Schweitzer. Nostalgia -- "Visit To a Pulpy Planet" by Milton F. Stevens. Columnist: Larry Shaw. Every Issue -- The Archives: new book  story lists. Quarterlysatnple I year #two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I new treaty. He didn't give up any new land, but he promised the loyalty of himself and his people to the of the United States. "The land got took over, anyhow," Guest said. "Governor Troup was a cousin of Macintosh, and ne didn't give a damn how many white men tramped all over the Creek and Cherokee territories. He jes' said to hell with this U.S. gov'ment's treaty, and pretty soon some of the Creeks was beggin' for food or livin' in the woods and swamps and tryin' to get by there. Coweta Town, the capital of the Lower Creeks, was full of white land speculators, Cleo, and finally a micco named Eneah Emathla got some of the Creeks together to fight it. That's when Jackson, who was now your president, you know, told his secretary of war to Send troops in and smash up this 'rebellion.' Know who helped the white soldiers do it, Cleo?" Cicadas were whirring in the undergrowth; the night sky looked like a dyer's vat full of torn bed sheets. "Not Menewa?" I said. "Yep. Him and about twothousand of his followers. " "Why?" "Because in '#, you know, he'd pledged his loyalty to the U.S. gov'ment. He'd even taken to wearin' a general's uniform, standard army style, and someone in Washington promised him and his followers they wouldn't have to trek off to Oklahoma like the rest of them." "He sold out his people," I said. "He kep' his word. And the gov'ment broke its. They marched Menewa, a battered ole man, off with all them others, never to come back. And some who saw that ole Red Stick say he wept to go." "Look," I said. "He put his abstract honor above the material well-being of the Creeks. He gave his allegiance foolishly, then acted upon it foolishly." "Damn straight," Guest said, "considerin' who he gave it to. They never once put their, uh, abstract honor above material well-being." Groaning like an arthritic septuagenarian, he stood up and kicked languidly at the muddy ashes of our fire. Questioningly, I looked up at him. "Your watch, Cleo," he said. "You can wake Yates in a coupla hours." Then he lumbered over to his rain-sopped tent, took off his boots, and went to bed. IV aldebaran above, alighieri below That night I got about two hours sleep. We borke camp at four in the morning and moved out; eastward on kudzu-carpeted Highway #. In thirteen hours we probably traveled about thirteen old-style miles. (Twice we saw buckshot-riddled, rusted signs saying things like Gordon #, Irwinton #.) The going was so bad because in places the asphalt had crumbled like a stale graham cracker; briary thickets had reasserted their primacy. A little after Gordon #, Irwinton #, upon which I had tied a red marker, I said, "There's got to be a better way." "Like what? ' Yates said. "How about a belicraft?" "There's two in the whole city now. Besides, some redneck out here would open fire if he saw one." Having got a little beyond the junction of Highways # and # (the latter of which led to the old town of Gordon), we stopped in the evening and made camp again. Five o'clock or so. While gathering firewood with Guest, I asked him if he had known that our "targets" were Fiona Bitler and Emory Coleman. Through an opening in the trees I could see Yates shedding his gear and ragging rubbish out of the circle of our proposed encampment. To me, it seemed a good idea to know where he was. Not, however, to Guest. "Sure," he rumbled. "I knew'." "How?" My voice was quieter than the Indian's: a shush by means of example, I hoped. "I was the one that met Trap when he come into the city. I'm not employed bv the Human Development Commission, you know. Usually I work at one of the dome's receiving points. It's a job you can't do if you're enfranchised, you might get corrupted off the True Path." "But Yates said you'd been out in this area before." "Have. But not any team member on a rr squad. Since I work at the old Interstate # Receiving Point, I'm also a agent between the city and some of the farmers out there. There ain't a single slf-sufficient Urban Nucleus in the whole Federation, spite what the councilmen and ward reps say. Amazes me some people don't believe the truth of that. Anyhow, I've been into the Open beaucoups of times. -- And a few miles from here w # e ain't onna have to wade through udzu no more. Wouldn't've had to do any of this if the city wasn't so set on motherhennin' its chicks." "Did you set Trap up for his drugging?" "I did. But that business about puttin' a implant tab in his nape is jes' a lot of eyewash. Yates thinks it happened, but it didn't. Hell, I knew where the man lived, and the fellows at Grady Memorial got all the other information out of him with the hypnotizin', and the drugs too. Surprised 'em, what he had to say. You see, I got a friend at the hospital." "Why'd you set Trap up? He must've trusted you." "'Cause enfranchised or not, I had to sign a oath to carry out the city's biddin' -- in all things, you know -- before they'd even give me a job." Holding two fistfuls of dry kindling, my gingerbread Indian paused and looked intently at me. "And, Miz Noble, I put ny name on the paper, I put my name on the paper -- with no one sayin' he'd scalp me if I didn't." He started to turn. I caught his elbow. "Do you know why the authorities want Mrs. Bitler and Coleman back in the city?" "Probably not for a ticker-tape parade, Miz Noble." "Then what?" "Old Trap told the doctors his cousin and her pupil, who calls himself Nettlinger now instead of Coleman (Nettlinger was his real father's name, you know, and he was the fellow who shot Bitler) -- anyhow, Trap said they'd spent several years in New Free Europe: to be eggzac', the Scandinavian Polity. That's dangerous. Now they're both back, the infection might spread -- sort of like kudzu, I guess." "So what will the city do?" "Question 'em, lock 'em up someplace. Maybe worse. I don t know." Guest broke free of me this time, and of my questioning, and made his heavily delicate way back to the clearing, where Yates had begun, with the fuel he had gathered, to boil some drinking water. I just stood there. Oh, Grand Zoe, what a picture of perplexity I would have made, what a study in bewilderment. Hanging over the trees like lamps, stars abounded that night: they freckled the matte sky with gold, silver, silver-blue, red: a carnival of constellations. It was splendidly gaudy, like a gauche hat. Yates, propped up on his elbows and forearms, his head thrown back, began without prompting to talk: "Before I'd ever been into the Open, I used to dream about doing what we're doing now. Seeing the stars firsthand; not on film, or in picture-books, or done up by some crazy foreigner with rings and haloes around them, like they showed us in artappreciation class. I wanted real stars, just like these. "Even inside the dome I felt connected to them, you know: they were like missing parts of my body the nerve ends wouldn't let me forget. Or maybe like pulled teeth that had little radio transmitters inside them, so that even when they'd been dropped down the disposer-converter in some dentist s office, they still kept sending me messages: an all-thetime toothache, no matter what I did. So I tried everything I could to get close to them, to the stars on the Other Side. They had something to tell me, you know, gaps to fill in. "When I was fourteen a man who worked for my father in the Biomonitor Agency -- his name was Ardrey, I won't forget that -- started taking me combcrawling: you know, using girderboots and mesh gloves, expensive magnetized equipment, to climb over the inside of the dome. Scary as it could be, even when you was just practicing easy assaults out on the perimeter of the city and doing a lot of vertical climbing instead of hanging upside-down over the whole skyscape. I did that, too, though. Partly so Ardrey wouldn't think I was a baby, but mostly because combcrawling, when I did it, I felt like I was pressing myself that much closer to the real sky outside and the stars hiding behind the dome. The dome was just another skin to get through, and I tried to get through it combcrawling, scared as I was. "Then Ardrey and I had an argument. It was about this old woman who died on Level #, under. Since he worked for the Bio Agency, he had her cubicle burned out -- even though she had the whole thing made up like the inside of a spaceship. Neatest and craziest thing I ever saw. We'd gone down there because I'd challenged Ardrey to go look at a deader in person. I think I thought dying was one way to get outside tne dome, scarier even than combcrawling but probably more effective, too. Anyway, Ardrey ordered this spaceshipcubicle she was living in, with these fake viewscreens of planets and stars, eaten up by flametorches and refurbished for a new occupant. I hated him for doing it, I called him names. Stopped combcrawling, too; just never went with him no more. My lather had to sell back all the equipment he bought me. "Three or four years later Ardrey was killed in a combcrawling accident. Now it's outlawed, nobody can do it. And I'm sorry I never made it up with that man, know-it-allish as he liked to act. Ardrey just did what my father would have ordered him to do if Ardrey hadn't gone ahead and done it himself. Simple as that. "Now I don't have to combcrawl to get close to the stars; don't have to pretend some old woman's busted dreams are going to get me closer. Just look up, there they are -- making ny nerve ends tingle and my toothache throb even worse than when I couldn't see them. Can you tell me, why is that? Sitting here looking at them, I ache ten times as bad as when I was fourteen years old and girderclimbing in order to press myself right through the skin of the dome to the torn-off pieces of myself: ten times as bad. Now why is that? Can you tell me, why is that?" But he didn't really expect an answer, and Alezander Guest and I, sipping at our metal cups of insta-caffe, didn't break the silence. The Ferriswheel lights in the sky kept turning. Yates rousted us out early the next morning, before sunrise, and we were on our way again. In two hours' time, just as tne sun had begun to send sparkles through the foliage, the foliage itself fell away and we were staring at cleared fields. Too, the kudzu on # had been hacked aside and contained. We walked out of the vines and onto a recently compacted and graveled surface. On previous trips into the Open I had never seen anything like this, no manicured roadbeds arid certainly no cultivated fields the size of these: garden plots and arbors I'd seen, but not farms, not grazing land. Well, Guest had hinted at such a possibility. "Can I stop stringing up these silly rags?" I asked Yates. The road stretched out before us like an invitation, whitewashed wooden fences paralleling it on both sides. "Sure," Yates said amiably, coming up from the rear to lead us. "This is a civilized pocket.' My surprise to you, a pift for the two days' slogging we ve done." He looked around happily. "They told me it'd be here." Guest said, "Did they tell you it uz more'n a pocket?" Yates, sweat in the hollows of his eyes, stared at the big man. "There's a strip of cultivated land through here," Guest went on, "all the way to Savannah. And some of the towns have people in 'em, too. Not Toombsboro, it don't. But I rwinton and Wrightsville and Vidalia and beaucoups of others. Savannah's got thirty-thousand people, at least. Ships still run in and out of it, that's probably how Bitler and Nettlinger got to the Scandinavian Polity and back." Blank of all expression, his eyes maybe a little caged-looking, Yates said, "Guest, you're crazy." But he had been hit with an Indian club and was standing dazed on doomed legs: just to hold him up, I wanted to embrace him. "Wait till you see all the walkin' 'lucinations I can conjure, then," Guest said. "Far as surprisin' us with this gravel road goes, we're gonna run into U.S. #I at Irwinton -- and it run straight on up to old Interstate #. We could've saved two days and a heck of lot of boot leather if the ole Com Authority had let us come by way of 'em." He spit into #'s loose gravel. "Guest," Yates began. "Guest..." Then, to both of us: "Come on." We walked in the sunshine down the gravel road: right out of Erskine Caldwell, we were. If we'd had fishing poles, the scene would have been perfect. Eventually we passed a house, and a man on a parboiled, rustpurpled tractor came down its enclosed drive pulling a flat-bedded hay wagon. After expressing, by his movements more than anything else, his distrust and suspicion, the man said, "Yeah, old Jonah Traps lives on the other side of Irwinton. Get in. Take you that far at least. Bald and leathery of neck, he did what he said he would -- carrying us right into the Irwinton town square, where he let us off. Coming in, I noted that U.S. #I bisected our own "highway" and ran off to the north, there to connect with Interstate # (as Indian Alex alleged) out of Atlanta. Anyhow, by some strange transmutation, we had all traveled into a rural community redolent of the life depicted on old John Deare and International ' Harvester calendars. (It was popular early last year to decorate your cubicles with reproductions of "Americana." Now I was a piece of Americana myself: a living curiosity. And a curious one, too.) We watched our benefactor's tractor chug around a corner. "Runs on methane," Guest said. "Distilled from pig's shit, or any other kind of droppin's you care to use." Yates looked at the Indian with distaste. "No worse than the city's waste converters," I said. A few people staring at us from store windows and chairs under awnings, we went on through the little town, still on Highway #, and followed the gravel road toward the site of old Toombsboro. The fields on either side of us waved with beans, or cotton, or com. we got closer and closer to the dwelling place of our "targets," I began thinking about what sort of living accommodations a man like Trap would receive if he lived in the Urban Nucleus. Since most of the surfaceside ghettoes had been razed (they had tom down Bondville in the conciliatory aftermath of the "Glissador Revolt"), he would most likely go under: most likely Level #, or #, or maybe even #. The circles of Dantes Hell, our cynical professor types always called them. Except that in the UrNu scheme of things, the innocent get punished along with the guilty. A few of the absolutely shiftless sort have been consigned to the Big Bad Basement, but you can find plenty of those upstairs, too. On Level #, for instance, you have people whose greatest crime consists of being too young or too old or maybe of having only a "marginally utilizable skill," like grocery-stocking or messagerunning or waiting tables. In addition, all the unenfranchised live on Level #, which meant -- as I had either forgotten or never really considered -- that Alexander Guest had a cubicle in this final ring of our parochial inferno. What were the sins ot these damned, what enormities were they guilty of? My father would say, "You're a bleeding heart, Clio. Almost everybody's lived under, one time or another. Forty-five meters up or down just don't make that much difference." And Mama Lannie, twirling her chiffon sleeves, would say, "Oh, she's just young yet, Sanders, that's how she's supposed to feel." As if sympathy were a glandular condition like acne. So that I would go off remembering how Dante had put the perpetrators of passionate crimes in less abysmal circles of Hell than those who had committed sins of malice and fraud. Which meant, to me anyhow, that whereas I ought to be sentenced only to Level # for killing my parents in an idealistic rage, Atlanta's councilmen and ward reps -- for their manifold, premeditated treacheries -- ought to find brimstone and pitchforks waiting for them on our two nethermost strata. Sayeth Dante, it is more heinous to abuse the intellect, which separates us from the beasts, than to abuse the emotions. Therefore, I was proud of my overactive and probably misfunctioning glands. On Highway #, without ever having met him, I was proud of Jonah Trap for shunning the whale's belly of the Urban Nucleus and forging a life for himself and his family in the Open. A black man -- a poorly educated black man, mind you -- in the renovated plantation house of a one-time "marster." No Level # for him, no Level # for his brood. V sesame street down on marster's plantation When we reached Trap's house, we paused before it like astronauts on the rim of an unexpectedly quartz-shot, lunar crater. In awe we stood there, or at least Yates and I did. From the graded roadbed we looked across a lakesized lawn whose far edge, immediately before the ante bellum mansion itself, was dominated by two gnarled, top-heavy oaks. His and her trees, they'd been called in New England: one for the Master and one for his Dame. Pools of shade undulated on the grass. The mansion had a portico supported by four Doric columns, and beyond the living complex -- which included a neat, single-story structure off to the right -- you could see the beginnings of terraced red fields. A shieldlike, wooden sign on the gate by the roadbed said Phoenix Plantation. A series of starlike points on the sign had been connected to make this figure: "What's that?" I said. "The constellation Cygnus," Yates replied without a second's hesitation. "Sometimes called the Swan, or the Northern Cross. But it could be a phoenix, too, I guess: any sort of firebird that's born again every night." A breeze rocked the sign. It was only nine o'clock or so in the morning, and I felt like I had been born again, right there on the edge of Jonah Trap's lawn: the Athena of Noble stepping from the sundered, feverish forehead of Newlyn Yates. Indian Alex, unperturbed by all this, was our staid midwife. "Well, let's go see if anybody's home," I said. And I struck out up the long, circular drive that passed behind the oaks in front of the mansion. Scufflings behind me indicated that I was being followed. A venerable-appearing black woman answered my knock at the wide, shaded door. I asked for Jonah Trap. She introduced herself as...Fiona Bitler, cousin of the man who owned the Phoenix Plantation; and without asking us who we were she invited us in, graciously. Waxed parquetry in the anteroom. An enormous chandelier. An imposing, carven china cabinet. Silence and coolness such as you might anticipate finding in an Ice Palace. And then, as we trailed the shorts-clad woman into an adjoining room (I hope I have legs that good when I'm sixty-five, and that they don't interfere with my looking venerable): the altogether incongruous sounds of children laughing. "Come sit down with us," Mrs. Bitler said. "We've just started school for Jonah's grandchildren. As for Jonah, you'll have to wait till noon to see him." School. For the first time since coming into the Open together, Yates and Guest exchanged a sympathetic glance -- but, along with me, they followed their hostess through the sliding wooden doors to the left of the long foyer and into an elegant, high-ceilinged "classroom." Mrs. Bitler motioned us to a row of rocking chairs behind the five black children, three boys and two girls, who were sitting on the (loor and who did not turn their heads as we entered. Their gazes were fixed on the screen of a videoplayback unit mounted on a high metal stand. Since I saw no electrical outlets or fixtures in the entire room, the complex must have drawn its power from batteries. The power source made no difference to the kids; they were successively intent, bemused, apprehensive, raucous, puzzled, and quietly delighted, all in accord with the images unwinding on the screen and the sounds sputtering out of the unit's speakers. A school of no little gaiety. I leaned forward to watch: puppets, cartoons, animal films, adults singing and talking with children, letters and numbers flashing by, all of it spliced together with quick cuts and remarkable elan. Indian Alex, whose chair rested on the hardwood floor instead of the rug, had to keep himself from rocking in time to the activity: his movements made the floor squeak. Yates, holding himself erect (tricky in a rocking chair), just looked bewildered. Public Broadcasting Service program antedating the domes," Mrs. Bitler told us. "When I worked with the Van-Ed people over thirty years ago, we had limited access to this series -- for historical as well as educative purposes. You had to give cause for wanting the tapes, and sign for # paperbound.now at your bookstore. A division of Random House. them -- but you could get them. The year after I left, the tapes were proscribed; nobody got to use them, not for any reason." On the screen two puppets, apparently outer-space creatures, were examining a telephone. They bobbed up and down, their googly eyestalks bouncing, and made high-pitched, repetitive noises: "Yip yip...yip yip yip...yip yip." Trap's grandchildren, all of them under six, I'd say, were giggling. When the video-taped telephone rang and the unearthly creatures plunged out of sight in panic, the kids guffawed and bounced about and cuffed each other. Guest was laughing, too: a close-mouthed, resonating chuckle. "Is that educational?" Yates said. "In a way, I suppose," Mrs. Bitler said. "It's certainly funny. " A new sequence was on now, though: an animated alphabet, each letter surrealistically metamorphosing into the one following it. "How did Mr. Trap get these tapes?" I asked. "He bought them from a man whose father had taken them from an educational television station in the evacuated university town of Athens. The video equipment Jonah had put together by an electronics hobbyist in Savannah. He has almost two years' worth of these tapes; he used them to start Gabriel's and Michael's education, not knowing what else he could do for them. Jonah can read, but only just." We watched for fifteen or twenty minutes. Although Guest was engrossed in the program, Yates still had not loosened up. I touched the arm of Mrs. Bitler' s chair and said, "We didn't come only to see Mr. Trap. We came to see and talk to you also, Mrs. Bitler, and the man you took out of the city with you in '#. Gerard Coleman. Gerard Nettlinger. Whichever of those names he goes by now." Yates, whose reaction I had been unsure of, looked past Mrs. Bitler at me with an expression suggesting gratitude: I'd done something right! "How did you know we were here?" she asked. "We haven't been, you see, for that terribly long: two or three months. In fact, Emory's been to Europe and back -- again -- since we arrived here in...what?...the middle of April?" That was old-style dating, not one of the Federation's "seasonal" months. Yates glanced at Guest as if surprised by the big man's prescience: hadn't Guest, just that morning, mentioned the Scandinavian Polity? "We learned Trap was your cousin," I said, "and just supposed you would be here. " Fortunately Mrs. Bitler did not ask how we had learned that Trap was her cousin or how we had known where he lived. "Well," she said instead, "you don't have to wait till noon to talk to me. This is almost over." We waited. When the program ended, she turned off the video-playback unit, then called to the children's mothers, who had been at the back of the house in the kitchen. Casta and Georgia, their names were. They nodded politely to us and herded their children into the wing of the house giving off the classroom. Mrs. Bitler led us through another high-ceilinged room to the cool, grey kitchen they'd just evacuated. "This is a good place to talk," she said, and we all sat down at a round oaken table. Through the screened-in porch behind the kitchen I could see a grape arbor in the back yard, a portion of the cultivated field we had seen from the road, and an adjacent orchard beyond the arbor: these were peach trees, Mrs. Bitler said, and that's where the men were, out there picking the fruit. Trap and his family were people who still divided their labors into men tasks and women tasks. That was the only relic of unenlightened agrarian life predisposing me against them, and Fiona Bitler, a woman who had lived once in the shadow of her husband's passionate crusading, didn't seem at all perturbed by the dichotomy. A breeze lifted the kitchen curtains, and the planet seemed to stretch out around us like a new Eden (the inan-and-maiden opposition still sadly intact). In comparison, though, most of the other "indigenous salvageables" we had gone out after haa been living like ferreting beasts. Yates said, "Where is Mr. Coleman, Mrs. Bitler?" "It's Nettlinger now. When he was old enough to decide for himself, he began using his real father's name again." Another of Guest's assertions corroborated. "At any rate, he's asleep. You're not likely to see him until this evening; he functions best at night, and, like an owl, that's when he comes out." "He uses the name of the man who assassinated your husband?" Yates asked, his long, nervous hands poised on their fingertips over the table. "It's his father's name, isn't it?" said Guest, who was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped at his middle. "Whose name you want him to use? W'hose name you use?" I could see Yates emotionally staggering, first from Mrs. Bitler's revalation, then from Guest's midlly delivered, but unexpected assault: so vulnerable under the obsolete, martial armor he affected in the field. "But his mother remarried " Yates countered, looking from the composed Indian to the composed black woman, "and his new father officially adopted him." "Yes," Mrs. Bitler said. "Well, do you approve of the change? From Coleman to the name of your husband's assassin?" His hands looked as if they would momentarily flee from him. "As a boy Emory had no say in the matter. The name was changed, lipity lip, just like that. Later he decided on the other. My approval -- your approval -- anyone else's approval -- is beside the point." She looked at Yates. "Isn't it?" "But how did it make you feel?" "Emory isn't his father, Mr. Yates, but his father lives in him. We don't renounce our pasts out of hand, even if we don't like them. We don't renounce our origins, our birthrights, our kindred. We acknowledge them at least. Then, if we don't like them, we move away from them into our selves." Fiona Bitler laughed. "Now, that's the sort of didactic pronouncement only a queen or a comfortable old whore can get away with, I give you leave to classify me as you like." "A B C," a thin voice said from the door. "E F G." It was one of the kids who'd been watching the video-playback unit: a boy wearing only a pair of cotton underpants. He didn't look much more than two. Fiona Bitler motioned the child to her, and he climbed into her lap. "This is Carlo," she said. "Jonah's youngest grandchild." She introduced us all around. "Hello, Carlo," I said. The boy looked me directly in the eye. "A B C," he said seriing in the appropriate spots, he continued successfully to the end. "Carlo has a twenty-six letter vocabulary," Mrs. Bitler said. The namesake of her dead husband, the boy stayed in her lap for the rest of our conversation, occasionally reciting his letters in a voice that didn't disrupt Mrs. Bitler's narration but provided a contrapuntal undercurrent to it. And she took us back to #: began. "Before that, I worked very, hard to put myself in a position to teach the boy, not knowing exactly what I would do once I achieved this goal. I had followed Emory's development from only a month or two after Carlo's death down to the moment he was placed in my Van-Ed classroom, you see, and I felt an affinity with him for several reasons, not merely because he was the son of my husband's murderer. "Maybe one reason was maternal: Carlo and I had never had any children. Planned them, yes, but never had them. The strongest motivation, though, was the fact that Emory and I shared a similar questionable blessing: precociousness. It had brought me to the attention of the Education Authority of the Human Development Commission at the age of four and lifted my entire family out of the Bondville ghetto into Tower housing. But that was just after the dome was completed, before the gradual return of a claustrophobically bred repressiveness. I don't know what it accomplished for Emory, this precociousness, until he was accepted into one of the special-education programs. I know that his mother and her new husband, John Adam Coleman, lived in a Level # cubicle, under. So it didn't accomplish for his family what it had once accomplished for mine. "He was eight when I met him for the first time, a thin, spindly, almost palsied-looking little boy who could have passed for an autistic child except for his occasional lapses into sociability. He liked to draw, almost always in black or purple crayon, and sometimes he would come out of his corner to show us these productions. Mockery, some of these drawings seemed. "Toward the end of that year -- the only one we had together inside the dome -- he must have discovered who I was, what oblique relationship I had to him. After that, mockery emerged in his actions as well as his drawings. He insisted on dragging odd reminders of his father, Carlo's murderer, into the classroom. The principal one was an old instructional film of his father's: Nettlinger had been a dentist, and Emory, who was the class projectionist when we showed films, would run this film even when another one was scheduled. You couldn't stop him, he wouldn't be reasoned with, and Fiona Bitler...well, Fiona Bitler was losing control of things. So I asked for help. "The Van-Ed people gave me a psychologist from the Human Development Commission, a middle-aged man with a pleasant disposition but something out of kilter in his eyes. Greer. Dr. Gregory Greer. The man tried. He tried his best. But what happened was, he quickly alienated Emory and wrenched nis own objectivity apart by falling in love with me. I don't know which happened first, maybe they occurred simultaneously -- but Greer couldn't admit either of them to himself: he was a bachelor, his commitment was wholly to sychological troubleshooting, and e didn't know how to handle a collapse on two fronts, the personal as well as the professional. I don't think I'm flattering myself about the personal aspect of the situation; I may have even encouraged the man -- in ways too subtle for me to pinpoint -- to relinquish his objectivity. I don't know. I hope to God I never find out for certain. "The result, oddly, was that Greer somehow threw Emory back into a strange sort of sympathy with me. Finally Greer suffered a nervous breakdown in the classroom where I taught: he came in the evening when nobody was there and set fire to Emory's drawings and the old film that the boy had been showing. "Two days later Emory asked me to take him away from his parents. He said he wanted to live with me. During this same week, of course, Greer was hospitalized, and my life seemed as up in the air as it had been after Carlo's death. Sick I was: deeply, hollowly sick." Fiona Bitler stared into the peach orchard beyond the screened porch, a black Isis recalling her struggle to resurrect in her own life and work the image of her husband and the promise of their unborn children. Little Carlo was now blithely saying his numbers. "How I was tugged," Fiona Bitler said at last, now I was cruelly tugged." Her arms were wrapped around Carlo. "I cast about for help. Again. My mother, who was alive men, told me that a friend of hers who worked at an UrNu receiving point had heard from her brother: Jonah Trap had delivered some goods to the city. The friend might be able to get a message through to him, if mother had one she wanted carried. 'You've got one,' I told Mama, 'you've got a very special message you want carried.' And so one day after class in the VanEd complex I took Emory over to Mama's, and we all rode a transit-car to a liftterminal as close to our friend's receiving point as we could. We didn't take anything with us, only ourselves, and that night we rode out of the city in the back of Jonah's pickup truck, under a tarp since we were afraid there might be patrollers out." She lapsed, suddenly, into plantation dialect and began to sing: Run, nigger, run the paddy-role will catch you, Run, nigger, run, the paddy-role will catch you. You better git away you better git away... Run, nigger, run, the paddy-role will catch you, Run, nigger, run, the paady-role will catch you. You better git away you better git away... "A long, bumpy ride to the Phoenix Plantation, right here where we're all sitting now." She let Carlo down. The boy made a circle around us, touching the backs of our chairs and sometimes putting his lips to the edge of the table. "A B C," he said gruffly; "A B C." "Nicer here than in a subterranean cubicle, ' Mrs. Bitler said. "Isn't it? Even if you happen to be a kidnapper." The morning passed much too quickly for me. The two young women, Georgia and Casta, cooked on a wood stove that quickly heated up the kitchen. Indian Alex and I helped Jonah Trap's daughter-in-law put the noon meal on the table, while Yates and Mrs. Bitler, two or three children tagging along, strolled through the scuppernong arbor and part of the peach orchard. When they returned for dinner, Yates took me aside and said that they had talked about her late husband and her own desire to see the city again. "It shouldn't be too hard for you to persuade her to come back with us," he said. Trap and his two sons came in from the orchards to eat. More introductions. Gabriel and Michael, this is Mr. Yates, Mr. Guest, and Miz Noble. The kitchen was teeming with people, the linoleum floor sighed under us, additional wings on the table were folded into place and dishes dealt out like playing cards. Georgia took the kids into the back yard to eat on the lawn. Fried chicken, sliced tomatoes, fried okra, fresh cucumbers, fried fruit pies, cornbread, slabs of home-churned butter, well water cooled in the earth. Amid this abundance, silverware rattled and latters of food went from hand to and as if hovering on their own power. Looking at Guest, Trap said, "You I done met, Mistah Guest. These people yo' frien's?" He pointed his fork at Yates and me. "Yes, sir." "Well, they plenny welcome, then. Will you ax the blessin', Casta?" Casta asked the blessing: it wasn't an Ortho-Urban prayer, that's the main thing I remember about it. Between mouthfuls of food, then, Jonah Trap got our business straightened out: we wanted to invite hi's cousin and Gerard Nettlinger to return to the Urban Nucleus, at least for a kind of commemorative visit. (I think I was the bright one who used the word "commemorative.") Fiona Bitler said that Emory had been planning, for several years, to do just that; since returning from the Scandinavian Polity two weeks ago, he had moved this contemplated visit to the top of his own personal time-table: he wanted a chance, in fact, to address a combined session of the Urban Council and the Conclave of Ward Representatives. "Good luck to you there," Alexander Guest said. "We're both enfranchised," Mrs. Bitler said. "Or were. Besides, I'd think our returp would stir up enough interest to invite such a public address." "A century ago," I said, "the Japanese permitted a rescued hold-out in the South Pacific to speak to their parliament, almost thirty years after World War II." Not one of my better-received analogies. Jonah, Michael and Gabriel, Casta, Newlyn and Alex -- they all stopped chewing to look at me: Scarlet O'Hara, Ph.D. in Comparative History. "That's exactly right," Fiona Bitler said. After dinner Trap and his sons returned to the orchards. The serving dishes on the table were covered with an embroidered cloth:' no more cooking that day. Guest and I, working in washdry landem, took care of the dirtied plates and silverware. But Emory Nettlinger was elsewhere, sleeping out the heat of the day, and the afternoon was much longer than the morning. VI long king is to Oglethorpe as yates is to nettlinger his most devastating novel yet... The Company ot Glory Atomic war has reduced the earth to a primitive state -- history is no longer written... plagues and radiation death are common... Demetrios, the former Adam Freeman, remembers what life once was and tells a new generation of earthlings the terrifying tale of a world devastated by the Twenty Minute War! ivUiui iwenuHX # (V#) available at your local dealer, or send # plus # for postage  handling to N.J. #. Mrs. Bitler countered the length of the afternoon a little by giving us a bedroom upstairs and urging us to take naps: "If you want to talk to Emory this evening, you'd better get some sleep." We had left our gear on the mansion's porch, in the portico. We hauled it up the stairs to our bedroom (the middle one of three in relation to the stairwell) and stacked it on the floor between the room's two brass beds. The beds had feather mattresses, though, and Alex refused to sleep on them, preotesting a weak back. He made a pallet beside our gear and lay down on that. For the first time since we had been in the house Newlyn removed the belt supporting his holster and let his constricted facial muscles relax; he put the hand laser under his pillow. Even though all the heat in the mansion had seemed to concentrate itself in this one room, we all managed to sleep. The floors were so rickety that Newlyn didn't even feel compelled to set a "watch." We met Emory Nettlinger himself that evening -- after the supper Newlyn wouldn't let us go downstairs for. "One meal like that a day is enough," he said, shaking his head almost jovially. "Feather mattresses and fried food, it'll do you in." Jovial or not, he wouldn't let us go down -- until he was sure the Traps had finished the evening meal. Then we clumped in our boots single-file down the stairs and, at Trap's direction, met Mrs. Bitler and her former ward in caned lawn chairs under the "Master's Oak." It was almost twilight. Nettlinger stood to shake hands with us. He was a short man with allid skin, close-cropped blond air making a point in the middle of his forehead, and eyes like bluish ice. The veins in his temples pulsed. ' "You want to take us back to the Urban Nucleus," he said. "That's fine, Mr. Yates. We're almost ready -- almost -- to go." "Will you come with s tomorrow?" Newlyn asked. "No. Tomorrow I'm not prepared to commit myself to. Nor would you and your people be rdy for us to leave with you." "Why not? That's what we came for." "Sit down," he said, and Newlyn and I took up lawn chairs; Alex, true to form, sat down on the frass. "To answer your question, ' Nettlinger said, "you are ones who have been too long in city pent, and, like a great many other of the Urban Nucleus' citizens, you're going to require some...what shall I call it?...grooming? indoctrination? before you'll be truly ready to accept us." "We've accepted you already," I said. "And Mrs. Bitler will find that the city's done a great deal to rectify the conditions her husband once complained of." This was Newlyn's line, I knew, but out here it seemed altogether true, not merely a part of the truth. Alex's fears were exaggerated. -- And I was supposed to De "persuasive." "Maybe you've accepted us," Fiona Bitler said," looking at Nettlinger, "but we don't intend to come back to Atlanta alone." "Trap's family will be welcome, too," Newlyn said. "It'll have to be arranged, but I think -- " "Jonah doesn't want to leave the Phoenix Plantation," she countered. "We're not speaking of them." "Then who?" Alex said. "We s'posed to guess?" Nettlinger said, "Do you know where we've spent most of our time in the Open? Not here, certainly. Not here." "The Scandinavian Polity," Alex said. "Eventually, eventually. I've just come from there, in fact. But when Fiona first took me out of the city, when I was a child, she arranged in Savannah to transport me to relatives of my father in Austria. That's when we discovered that Austria per se didn't exist anymore: the national units we supposed still intact had long since melded into the encompassing political entity of New Free Europe. "At any rate, I insisted that Fiona accompany me, and we sailed to the continent on a steam vessel someone had christened the Phoenix. It was named for one a man named John Stevens had built in #! A steam vessel, please note. Lately, we've traveled by air -- since the Scandinavian Polity had aircraft which can compensate for the several inadequate, coastal landing strips this 'country' still possesses -- but we first left here on a steamship!" Nettlinger told us that he had acquired tutors through the intervention of a paternal uncle in Salzburg and that Fiona and these rotating tutors had taken him beyond the "kinetic relations" sessions and the "elementary" integral calculus of the Van-Ed program in Atlanta into physics and higher mathematics: wave theory, relativistic studies, subatomic physics. "Oh, I gravitated to these studies naturally," Nettlinger said, smiling at Mrs. Bitler. Moreover, he and Fiona had moved his schooling about: from Salzburg to Vienna, from Vienna to Munich, and, finally, when Nettlinger was sixteen, from Munich to Scandipol (formerly Kobenhaven), the designated adminstrative center of the Scandinavian Polity of New Free Europe. Here, his "schooling" ended, and he began work in a research-development institution, on aeronautical and space engineering projects that the Euroeans, Eurasians, and Japanese ad jointly commandeered, by deprograms of the United States. "Actually," he said, " 'commandeered' is the wrong word, since what they had appropriated was neither hardware nor working plans but -- this is very important -- an attitude no longer countenanced in the Urban Nuclei because of the very nature of these cities, these nuclei-, it's the eternal opposition of entropy and growth, perhaps even of autism and extroversion. 'Nucleus' says it all, Mr. Yates: Atlanta sees itself, as do all the other domed cities, as the center of its own very narrow and circumscribed universe. And we're afraid that your own gracious...acceptance of Fiona and me will not be shared by Atlanta's authorities, primarily because of the argument we intend to bring with us. ' "No," Alex said. "They're likelier to accept people than a argument. What is it?" "To tear down the domes and rejoin the community of men, which is also the community of life." Legs crossed, hands folded, the man looked remarkably priggish: prim as a prufrock. Even so, his voice was free of superciliousness. Alex put a blade of grass between his teeth. "Doomed," he said. "You really are doomed." Mrs. Bitler said, "That's' why Emory's been telling you about the changes in Europe and about the course of his own education there. Since uou find this hard to accept, you know the urban authorities are going to require some time to become comfortable with the changes in the outer world." "But they aren't that startling," I said. "Here they are: Europe's become a single political unit, and Emory Nettlinger has studied advanced sciences in three or four different cities." The twilight had come together around us as if guilted out of sequined, navy-blue cloth; fireflies were winking on and off under the trees. Fireflies, stars, and mosquitoes. I slapped at my exposed arms and squinted at the silhouettes of those around me: Mrs. Bitler was rubbing her bare legs as if similarly pestered. "That's true," Nettlinger said, "but there's more." He suggested, though, that we go inside since the mosauitoes and the gathering dark made continuing on the lawn unpleasant. Trap's sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren had all retired to bedrooms in the mansion's west wing. In the foyer we found Trap himself preparing to go upstairs to bed. "That owl there," Trap said, pointing to Nettlinger as we came in, "got him a place to stay in that ole overseer cottage. Can' stan' no early-mornin' scootin' about. Do all his thinkin' when the moon shine." "A clear case of lunacy," Nettlinger said. "Godnight, sir." "Goodnight." Trap paused on the stairs. "Goodnight, evvybody." And went on up with the step of a considerably younger man. In the parlor across the hall from the video-playback "classroom," Nettlinger resumed the process of our grooming. I felt even more removed from my own century than I had that morning in Irwinton. The parlor was illuminated by wall-mounted gas lamps, and the quality of the light -- shifting, intangible, touched with the influence of lacuered floors and voluted window rapes -- made the impetus of Nettlinger's words almost too choicely ironic for comfort. The setting was Victorian rather than ante bellum, and Nettlinger was our intent, thin-faced tour guide leading us into a future that had already been part of the Old World's past. Legs crossed, hands folded, he sat in a chair that swallowed him. "Did you know that during the construction of the domes, shortly after the turn of this century, men walked on the moon again? Did any of you know that?" Newlyn's face was tattooed with blue and purplish highlights; he leaned forward on the edge of the striped sofa, hands hanging. "I don't believe that." But he wanted to, you could read the desire in his posture. "No one in an Urban Nucleus has any reason to believe that," Nettlinger said. "So why should you? As a boy, I had no idea that such a thing could be. Fiona had never heard of a moon expedition beyond the American Apollo # mission. If any enfranchised citizen of the domes knew that an Old World coalition had put men on the moon, he sat on the fact -- smothered it beneath the wide, twin buttocks of urban policy and patriotism. My own opinion is that no one knew, that no one in the city's hierarchy would have cared very much even if the fact had been conclusively demonstrated. "The truth is, however, that continuously since #, two years before I was born, human beings have had a large and expanding base on the moon: a base, a colony, a shipyard, an observatory...Enough. You must call it a city, I suppose: oddly enough, a domed one... How do you feel when I tell you these things?" His eyes stopped on me. Since Newlyn and Alex weren't going to answer, I said, "That it's too early for bedtime stories, is how I feel." "OK," he said enthusiastically, his accent now more European than American Southern. "Expected. Anticipated. How else should you feel? But it's the truth, and it's part of the reason Fiona and I aren't going trotting, trit-trot, trit-trot, into Atlanta tomorrow. The news is a shock, a jolt, it will undoubtedly throw a good many people and some of the UrNu authorities into confusion. And the note of dismay, or confusion, or even exhilaration. sounded by the broadcasting of this news -- I must warn you -- will only be the minor of that sounded by the rest of what I have to tell you. Do you understand me?" "We've gone to the planets?" Newlyn said: We've. He was transferring the accomplishments of New Free Europe into the hands of humanity in general. We came in peace for all mankind. (And womankind as well, Mr, Armstrong?) "Beyond," Fiona Bitler said. "To what?" Alex said. "To what?" He looked as if he wanted out of doors again, whereas I was proving susceptible to Newlyn's excitement: I found myself leaning forward, too. "When I arrived in Scandipol," Nettlinger said, sidestepping, it seemed at first, Alex's question, "they had been working on relativistic and astrophysical concepts beyond those that had to do with the propulsion systems for earth-moon transport. Their compatriots on the moon had, in fact, built a prototype of a vessel whose range would be interstellar rather than merely interplanetary. "Gravitation wells and astrodynamics, metallurgy and stress mechanics; oh, it was a program drawing upon but otherwise divergent from the ones that had established us on the moon. "How to tell you? My mentor at the institute was Nils Caspersson, and my own contributions were minor. Everything had gone forward extremely well before my arrival, I could only hone -- by virtue of my virgin perspective, if nothing else -- the insights Caspersson and his fellows had developed over a period of three intensive decades. But I won't be self-servingly modest: I did contribute, I did lend my own quirky insights to these researches. Emory Nettlinger, seventeen years old. "In # our moon-orbiting prototype was given probecapability and mechanically testacfvanced a range of four lightyears, nearly the distance of Alpha Centauri -- although on this first unmanned 'flight' our directioning was reluctantly, unavoidably random: a technological embarrassment, I must grant you. But we retrieved the vessel; we called it back to our solar system and confirmed by its onboard equipment, photographic and chronometric as well as protoastrogational, the very real fact of its advance. The surprise -- the great, hoped-for surprise -- was the coincidence of shipboard, subjective time and Scandipolmoon-base, subjective time: a round-trip of eight lightyears in ninety-three Earthstandard days. Not the negation of Einsteinian physics, oh no, but a kind of ballet kick over the glass stage of interstellar space." Nettlinger uncrossed his legs, pointed his toes, and performed a funny, seated entrechat. "Caspersson, Fiona, and I got drunk, oh, we got magnificently stewed, we did, in the dead of an old Kobenhaven winter, snow sifting down outside like confetti from our friends on the moon. That's how it was, wasn't it, Fiona?" "Like confetti," she said. And I remembered Alex's saying, Probably not for a ticker-tape parade. Right now he looked as unsettled, as uncomfortable, as I had ever seen him: a bear on a lumpy ottoman. But I was too happy for Newlyn to worry very much about Alex's discomfort: Newlyn was a fourteen-year-old gawking about in the spaceshipcubicle of that old woman on Level #, before Ardrey told him that it all had to be "flamedecontaminated." Nettlinger got carried away, maybe just from looking at Newlyn, maybe from the simple joy he took in these recollections. He went on to tell us about the concept he and Caspersson called "light-probing," and about its controlled implementation in a "fleet" of operable, manned vessels. "Six light-probe ships," he said. "Why, that's a fleet. Who could want more than that so soon? Who could afford a larger investment?" Planned, constructed, equipped, and manned, and all by Nettlinger's twenty-fifth birthday, too. Then broadcast, according to itineraries computer-derived, to those stars within a hundred light-year range possessing the optimum likelihood of habitable planets. Four of the vessels, it seemed,' had returned and gone out again with new crews! "One way to our furthest target," Nettlinger explained, using a word that had a numbing and familiar impersonality, "is only # years. The remaining two ships -- if nothing hinders tnem -- ought to be back in our own system before Christmas, perhaps slightly after the New Year at the very latest. All goes well." "Oh, it's a New Year already," Newlyn said. "You got. to come back with us now, Mr. Nettlinger," then turning to the woman, "Mrs. Bitler: both of you. Hot damn, who's gonna want a dome over their heads when you can tell 'em things like that? Hey, nobody's gonna get apoplexy hearin that, nobody! It's gonna wake up all them mummies sleepin' in the Basement, is all: Thats what it'll do!" For the first time since I had been around him, Newlyn was falling into the speech rhythems suggestive of his blackness. But that Hot damn: somewhere, some time, he had got that from me, Clio'Noble. "An' maybe not," Alex said from his footstool, his bulk almost shapeless in the pooled light next to the sofa. "I don't see it jes' that way, Mr. Yates." "H ow do you see it then. Guest?" They were using each other's names like weapons. "The only way I can, where I sit from. When General Oglethorpe first landed in this state, to make a colony of it, you know, an Indian they called Long King came all the way from Coweta Town to see him. You know why?" Hell no," Newlyn said. "What's that got to do with anythin', with anythin' at all?" He was shaking his head in exasperation. "Wait a minute," I said. "Let him tell it, OK?" "Please do," Nettlinger said. "Arguments against us we probably require more than blind enthusiasm. To forearm ourselves, you see." "All right," Alex said. He looked up at the ceiling: the cracks and moisture stains fixed his attention. "Long King went to Oglethorpe to learn wisdom. He thought God had sent ole Oglethorpe to teach the Indians since it was plain the English had more and knew more and must have been picked by Him to instruct 'em. So they gave up some land in payment for the instruction they was supposed to get. Later, the English got all the land and the only wisdom the Indians was left with was, You can't trust the English. But it was too late, they was on reservations in Oklahoma keepin' themselves warm with cholera." Alex looked down. Everyone considered this, Newlyn annoyed that he couldn't give vent to his excitement -- which was still effervescing in his head and hand movements. Finally, Mrs. Bitler said, "I don't think Emory's saying we're going to bring the population to the Urban Nucleus wisdom, or even advanced technological knowledge, necessarily. The offer is really the chance to rejoin a larger community." "Oglethorpe," Alex said, "didn't say he was bringing wisdom, either. The Indians jes' looked at the English and supposed it, is all." "The citizens of Atlanta," Newlyn said, "aren't going to suppose they're inferior beings in need of instruction." His speech was crisp again. "Who said 'inferior'?" Alex said. "Besides, you're one citizen that's supposin' jes' what Long King supposed when Oglethorpe got here. You're an Indian hopin' these people will take you back to England and show you off to the lords and ladies." I chuckled, right out loud. And it was really me who had done it. Newlyn gave me his exasperated look, then said: "I think Guest's opinion is an eccentric one. "A minority opinion," I said, and Newlyn didn t know whether I was supporting him or subtly ridiculing him: I didn't either. "Well," Mrs. Bitler said, "eccentric or not, it's probably a view that will be held, with all sorts of variations, by enough people to make our hesitancy about going into the city the wisest course. You people may have to be our ambassadors, going ahead of us to pave our way. Because caution is called for, caution is required." "Selah," Emory said. "Selah to that." the citizens of the urban nucleus considered as indignant desert birds At three in the morning we broke it off, Emory and Fiona telling us that the best procedure would be for us to go back to the Urban Nucleus and explain to the authorities what we had heard at Phoenix Plantation. Jonah would serve as a go-between for later preparations, if these were needed. Inconclusive; all of it, inconclusive. Alex wouldn't sleep upstairs. He wouldn't say why, but it pretty clearly had to do with the conflict between him and Newlyn. "That lawn looks plenty good enough," he said when we were in our room. "Cooler than up here, too." So I helped him carry his bed gear down the stairs (Fiona and Nettlinger were still in the parlor as we went by) and watched as he spread it out under the Master's Oak, cane chairs around it like a breastwork fortification. Resembling the hard, sinister, bone under a face that has melted away, the moon had come up: full. I couldn't see anything on it that might be the domed base of Nettlinger's narrative. Just the moon, nothing more. "Sweet Cleopatra," Alex said to me. "What about the mosquitoes?" I didn't know why he'd said that, so I was heading him off. "What about them back there in the Kudzu? We made it, Cleo. I'm gonna make it out here tonight." He kissed me on the forehead, father to daughter. Our feet almost entangled in his sleeping bag, surrounded by cane chairs, we stood there. "Kiss me again, Cleo?" Asking, not ordering. "Why?" "Because Yates is gonna get more'n that, even." It wasn't insulting somehow, it wasn't even self-pitying: only a statement of fact that I didn't at that moment believe in. I kissed Alex, putting my arms around the bulges above his waist, the ones my mother always called "love handles." (My father had a pretty good set of them.) Then it was over. Alex sat down in one of the chairs and looked at the moon. "You know what I want more than anythin' else in the world, Cleo?" He didn't give me a chance to answer. "Enfranchisement," he said. "That's all I want, that's why I do things like this one, come out here and all. One day -- I keep thinkin' -- .they're gonna say to me, 'OK, Mr. Guest, you can call yourself Menewa, and from now on you're fully protected by the Urban Charter. Jes' write Menewa on this form here and drop it in the mail.' That's what I dream about, even actin' as a agent between the city and all the Jonah Traps out here." "Why?" I said. "What do you really owe the UrNu authorities? I don't know why you must haven't defected and stayed out here." "I don't either, Cleo. Cept that I'm waitin' for my enfranchisement." He looked at me in bewilderment. "Ain't that the damndest?" of the brass beds. I closed the door, and he said, "Is Nettlinger still up?" "Talking with Mrs. Bitler," I said. I couldn't see Newlyn, he couldn't see me: the room bound us together in an indivisible blackness and a summer heat that (he moon still hadn't begun to siphon off. "I think they're lovers," Newlyn said. "Bodyburners." "She's twenty-five years older than he is," I said, finding the bed opposite his. Did he really think Fiona Bitler was a modernday Isis, both mother and consort to her own NettlingerOsiris? "How she look to you? Decrepit?" The blackness in the room had crept into his speech: city blackness, Bondville blackness, even though Newlyn had never lived a day in one of those razed tenements. Under maybe, but only Level I or #. "No. Hardly decrepit." "Preserved," Newlyn said. "What you got to call 'preserved.' " But I was elsewhere, light-probing through my own grey matter. "What's wrong, chor "Guest. Alexander Guest." "Look," he said, turning so that the bed springs sighed and I could almost see his face resolving out of the darkness. "That man's a case. All this Indian history, all his foreknowledge of what's gonna happen if Nettlinger comes to Atlanta. And he claims to be...what? a Creek Indian?" "Cherokee." Newlyn was quiet a minute. "I know something about them, too, about the Cherokee. Indians and black men; co-holders of honors in this world's dispossession stakes. But when the Cherokee got thown out of Georgia, Miz Noble, some of 'em was rich enough to take their nigger slaves on the Trail of Tears. I always remembered that, whatever else of school I long since forgot. So if those black people was cousins in sufferin' to the Cherokee that dragged them along, they was cousins twiceremoved. Did you know that, Miz Clio Noble?" "No," I said. "Why are you so wrought up?" Our first quarrel, our first real quarrel. Start by using her first name but end up by spitting out the whole thing like a curse: almost flattering. Newlyn lay back, the mattress sighed, the bed springs clinked. I took off my boots and socks and just sat there with my feet on the hardwood floor. After a while, Newlyn said, "Come over here, Clio. Please." It was seduction by ennui, not as I had imagined time and time again it would finally occur: loving violence and tender rapacity on both sides. I finished undressing, went over to Newlyn's bed, and slid myself onto his naked, clammy body. Ain't this the damndest? I was thinking as it all unrolled like film footage consisting of nothing but blank frames. Then, head on his chest as he slept, I wondered if I had committed a sin of passion or of fraud. To which circle would Dante, that old anal-retentive, consign me? After a half hour or so I got out of Newlyn's bed, put on all my clothes but my foot gear, and lay down on the floor. Went to sleep there, too; went to sleep there as if I had been lovingly embalmed by the hot night. And woke up to the shrill, repeating shouts of someone downstairs, terrifyingly like war whoops from the ghosts of murdered red men: war whoops rising through ( onah Trap's house as if the preude to a general massacre. "Yip yip yip!" the shouts came. "Yip yip!' "Jesus," Newlyn said, sitting up on his bed and swinging his legs to the floor. "What in Christ is that?" But he was naked, and, answering him nothing. I went ahead of him to the door. I burst into the upstairs corridor to confront only darkness. No lamp anywhere, the hallway too tightly sealed for the tion from the stiars, a creaking of the banister railing and successive hollow thumpings on the steps themselves. Continuing above these noises, the war whoops that had yanked us out of our sleep. Holding my heart, my every pulse beat, in the curl of my tongue, I edged down the hall and stopped on the very brink of the stairwell. A door was thrown open behind me, far enough away that I felt certain it was Jonah Trap, and not Newlyn, coming to provide moral reinforcement. "Yip yip yip!" the shouts continued to come. Then, suddenly, they mutated into coherent language: "Yates! Clio! Get the hell out of there! Get the hell up!" It was Alex, and his voice was ascending through the foyer and the stairwell from the open door of the Phoenix mansion. Then he started the war whoops again, that strangled-sounding, banshee yipping. I couldn't see Alex because of the shadow of an eclipsing shape on the steps. No: two shadows, two shapes. They changed position and seemed to retreat as if in response to my presence. When they did, I could see Alex silhouetted in the doorway, moonlight pouring its waxy, bone-hard glow across the parquetry, the chandelier sparkling in a fitful run of tiny bursts. Then Jonah Trap was at my elbow, candle in hand. The shapes that had formerly blocked my view of Alex were not at the bottom of the stairs; they were edging toward the entrance to the parlor. Not stealthily: diplomatically. One of them lifted its head and stared at me for a moment, as if trying to confirm a recognition. The other, its back to the first, looked guardedly toward the open doorway, where Alex had still not given up his hueand-crying. Behind Trap and me, Newlyn came clumping down the hall in his boots, and there was movement in the third upstairs room, too. "It awright," Trap said. "It awright, Miz Nobel, you jes' go on back to bed. I take care of this now." But I had already taken two or three steps down the stairwell, my weight on the lefthand banister. The creature in the foyer had not let go of my face, nor had I released its: a physiognomy carved out of maple or mahogany, but flexible in spite of its rigid appearance. Lips that moved. Two parallel, vertical bridges separating the eyes and lips. Two brow-hooded eyes possessing large, hourglassshaped pupils, one bulb of each horizontal pupil set to the front, the other Dulb curving away to the side as if to provide simultaneous peripheral and frontal vision. The eye structures themselves looked like moist patches of canvas set into the wooden sockets of a primitive mask and glued there with a thin layer of mucilage. All of this, every bit of it, hypnotizing and unreal. Guest, having seen people at the head of the stairwell, had finally shut up. I took two more steps down the stairs. The other shape turned toward me. A face very similar to the first, perhaps taller from chin to crest. Each creature, behind its head, had a corona of bone or cartilage that extended its height and gave it an out-of-time, out-ofplace regality. What were they? What were they doing in the foyer of Jonah Trap's house? "Clio!" Newlyn said. "Clio, stop right the hell where you are!" I looked back up the stairs. The number of lights there had proliferated, as had the number of people. Emory Nettlinger, wearing a dressing-gown so hastily knotted at the waist that Trap's candle and his own lantern showed me Nettlinger's thin, white legs, came jerking along the corridor and stopped above me on the landing. Fiona Bitler, carrying another lantern, came up behind the three men now standing there: her cousin, her lover, and Newlyn Yates, who was holding his hand laser trained on the shapes downstairs. Alex shouted up to us, "They come out of that overseer's cottage! I saw 'em cross the lawn and come inside! When they started up the stairs, Yates, I started in to whoopin'!" "Thank you for that," Nettlinger said, sotto voce. "These are the 'visitors' he wants to bring into Atlanta! Alex shouted. "This is what we're havin' to get groomed for!" Somewhere in that huge house, a child had long since begun to cry. Without turning around, the two strange shapes below us retreated deliberately into the darkness of the parlor. Then little Carlo came out of the classroom opposite the parlor and stood in the middle of the foyer, dwarfed by shadowy adults and incomprehensible events, naked and bawling. I started down to him, but Fiona, setting her lantern down and descending quickly, swept past me and caught the boy up in her arms. Trap's sons and daughters-in-law appeared in the entrance to the video-unit classroom, too, but Fiona, handing Carlo to Gabriel, turned them back. An empasse. No one moved. "We can't take 'em into the Urban Nucleus!" Alex shouted, still from the doorway. He was afraid to come in, afraid of the things he had followed up the lawn to Trap's mansion. "If w ; e do, Yates, I ain' cornin' with you! I'll go on ahead and spile over'thin' for you, I'll tell em what Nettlinger's plannin', I swear I will!" Newlyn ignored all this; he looked at Nettlinger. "Starmen?" "Please, Mr. Yates, put your weapon back in your room. Let me go down to them, they didn't know you were here anymore than you knew they were." "It s not any wisdom I want to touch!" Alex was shouting. "It's not any wisdom worth goin' into bondage for!" Several other children were crying now. Mrs. Bitler slid the panel to, closing off the room that the families of Gabriel and Michael Trap had come through. This muffled the noises of their dismay and confusion. "They ain' seen 'em befo' either," Jonah Trap said, his arm around my shoulders, and, although I had been steelily in control to this point, I realized I was crying. "They jes' like you and yo' gen'lemen, Miz Noble. It take some time, is all; it jes' take some time." We were midway down the steps, and I could see the two creatures in the parlor as if they were lepers hovering inside the mouth of a cave, cerements for garments, muipmy-cloth unwinding from their arms -- except that what I first saw as unwinding bandages were in reality the loose, ribbonlike extensions of their incredibly long forearms. "Yates, Yates!" Alex was shouting, Mrs. Bitler beside him now. "You'd do best to shoot 'em, you'd really do best to take 'em out now!" But Newlyn had put the weapon away (though he hadn't retreated to our bedroom as Nettlinger had asked him to), and Fiona was trying to calm Alex, just as Jonah Trap was trying to comfort me. I don't know why I was crying, I didn't really feel in need of comforting: all I can suggest is that I was empathizing with Alex's panicky premonition of ruin. "Can you believe this?" Newlyn said. He said it as if he believed it completely, as if he relished the spectacle of our astonishment, his own included. Jonah Trap turned me so that I had to come back up the stairs with him, but I kept casting back over my shoulder. I saw Fiona lead Alex back out onto the lawn and close the front door behind her. Nettlinger said, "Well, everybody's been given a good jolt, our visitors as well as ourselves. Please, Mr. Yates, you and Clio, go back to your room." He turned to Trap. "It's your house, Jonah. Tell them that it's an order, for their own sakes." "No one get ordered here but chillun," Jonah said. "But I suzges' the same thin', Miz Noble, I strongly sugges' it." Nettlinger went down the stairs, carrying his lantern. I wouldn't turn back to our room until I saw him go into the parlor and caught one more glimpse of the "starmen" who had thrown the Phoenix mansion into a four-o'clock-a.m. uproar. Then the little blond man pulled the glasspaneled doors to the parlor shut and returned the gleaming foyer to cool normality: silence and emptiness. After Newlyn and I had gone back to our room, there were no more doors to be closed. Not physical ones, anyway. Jonah trap drove Alexander Guest and me back to Atlanta in a pickup truck built so long ago that its fenders and sideboards jounced about maddeningly. In the truckbed, a load of peaches -- since he had to make the trip, he said, might as well do some business, too. It was raining when we left, so we rode in the cab, not beneath a tarp in the back. West on Highway # to Irwinton we went, then right on U.S. #I in order to make connection with Interstate # . As we drove, I kept thinking of all the red flags -- flags of warning, now -- hanging on the green temples along our route out from the transit-tunnel. Through the wiper-cleared semicircles on the truck's windshield, we could see more vines rearing, Jittering in the thin, steamy rain. The rain finally stopped, and on the outskirts of Atlanta, late that evening, we saw the Northern Cross among the ragged, blownaway clouds. Newlyn had refused to come back with us. Before we left, he gave the hand laser to Alex and told him it was his. Not to me, but to Alex. And not to slight me, either, but maybe to bridge the chasm between Alex and him. Riding back to the Urban Nucleus in Trap's pickup, the Indian retty well knew he wouldn't ave a chance to use the weapon. That didn't mean anything, though, that didn't matter. After seeing all the burning constellations, we were absorbed into the city through a receiving point, Alex's own, the one where he ordinarily worked. Trap unloaded his peaches. So: one enfranchised team member had defected, the only unenfranchised team member had returned, and Clio Noble, full citizen, feeling an affinity for both these men and even for the vaguely sphinx-headed creatures who had ultimately decided their allegiances for them, came back into the city because -- They debriefed us, Alex and me. And we told them the truth, all of it. Then I quit my position with the Human Development Commission, my position as a resources-reclamation specialist. This was last year. Since then, for resigning with no apparent or at least acceptable reason, they moved me out of my Level # cubicle to one on Level #. My parents have asked me to move back in with them, but I'm an adult now and have kept myself in enough earnies to subsist on by waiting tables in the Gas Light Tower plaza. Mama, bless her, is trying to get me a job clerking at Consolidated Rich's. "Or maybe even modeling," she says sometimes; "if it weren't for all those freckles..." I haven't seen Alex, even though he's supposed to live on Level # too, since our debriefing sessions at the end of last summer: he has dissolved into the population as surely, as irrevocably, as a chameleon into kudzu. I just hope he's still alive somewhere, preferably not in this city, and that he's found some people who don't think he's crazy for wanting to be called Menewa. Not long ago the chairman of the joint CouncilConclave announced that the widow of Carlo Bitler and her former student, Emory Coleman, would be returning to the Urban Nucleus from a long sojourn in Europe. The spirit of the announcement makes me think that no reprisals are planned; the councilmen and ward reps are touting it as some kind of coup. I just don't know. At the same time, I hope Newlyn comes back with Fiona and Nettlinger, though how safe his return would be is hard to assess. He did defect, you know; for at least a year he renounced the city -- and I'm living on Level # for quitting my job, nothing more than that. What's going to happen? Sometimes I think about Nettlinger's "starmen" and wonder if this great, mound-shaped tomb of ours is destined to be the cradle of a new community. I see their rough, masklike faces. And even though we still don't understand each other, you me, or I you, I want you to answer me this: Are we now, all of us, living in Bethlehem? And, if so, in whose tax books must we enroll ourselves?  The idea first came up at a beer and bull session at Jesse Weston's place. She and her husband, Ardee, had been down at the beach that afternoon, and Ardee had stuck his foot on a discarded pop top. He was sounding off at his usual length about where and when it had happened, how much it had hurt, how crowded the beach was, and wasn't it awful how much garbage was strewn about. That's the way he actually talked: 'strewn about'. He's an English lit. major. Jesse had been sitting there, her gray eyes wide, nodding occasionally, when she interupted him: "You know what would be funny?" She addressed us in general. Nobody responded. What Jesse had thought funny in the past had ranged from a five hundred pound granite facingDon Trotter block left in the kneehole of Thorsen's desk ("That way his feet'll reach the floor.") to arranging for every phone in the lab to ring with a loud, juicy raspberry. That is to say, a very narrow and very practical range. Seeing she wasn't going to proceed without a little prodding, I ventured: "Not another quarter-ton tombstone, I hope. My hernias still twinge when I think about it.' She looked contemptuous. "That was trivial, and lacking in social significance... No, picture this: It's a chilly day this December. All the world, or at least the hardened space-freaks, are huddled around their TV sets. We see through the eyes of Marsman I, who just fifteen minutes before has first set tread upon the ocher sands of Barsoom." (She pronounced it to rhyme with 'Bar Boom'.) "Our eyes sweep the horizons of the Red Planet, then fix on a distant hill. Treads chum the crimson grit, propel us toward the summit. We reach the crest, and what confronts us on the other side?" "Beer cans!" "Miles of beer cans." "Acres of pop top plants." It was practically chorused. She'd telegraphed the punch line. She looked pleased. "That's right. Wouldn't it be perfect ?" She hugged her knees and grinned hugely at its absolute perfection. Kim Sohn spoke up: "Better yet, if the whole place were paved over with black asphalt." My turn: "Or even better, Marsman comes over the brow of the hill, and there's a little white cardboard sign, on a wooden stake. He rolls over to it, and it says: 'No Tresspassing, by order of the owner, A.M. Thorsen'." "In that icky orange ink of his." That was Stephie, my wife. "No, no, not a sign, a stone tablet." Kim's wife, Lee. "Not a tablet, an engraved facing block." That was mine and brought the house down. Perhaps I should explain that Professor Albert Michaelson Thorsen is "boss" to Jesse, Kim and me, and that his vanity is exceeded only by his shortness. There's a sign on his door that says: "A. M. Thorsen'. Someone years ago penciled in 'A.IM.ighty' Thorsen. He never erased it. Kim spoke thoughtfully: "You know, it might not be impossible." Me: "Kim, do you know what the freight charges on five miles would be?" "Probably enough to recarpet the stadium. Twice. But you know that, besides monitoring Thorsen's life-detection experiment with it, they're using that gizmo of the Computer Science department's to process Marsman's return signal into, among other things, real-time TV pictures." That 'gizmo' was the third largest computer in existance, and the biggest one that wouldn't have found capitalism terribly confusing. "It might be possible to alter the output slightly. I know a guy over there who'd love to help out on this, if it's possible." Kim 'knew a guy' just about every useful place there was. "Call him, Kim, call him!" That was Jesse, looking about ten years old and as if she were having a tough time keeping from jumping up and down and clapping. We were all just mellow enough for it not to seem unreasonable. Kim balanced his beer on top of a Vietnamese brass elephant, and went to use the phone. While he was gone, I began to have second thoughts. "You know, having his name come up like that on national TV would be pretty embarassing for him." In spite of everything, all of us respected, and some of us even liked the little expletive. Jesse snorted. "The little bantam will bask in it." Lee came to my aid. "I think Hank's right, Jesse. Five minutes after Thorsen's name appeared there'd be a couple of dozen reporters badgering him. And they'd keep it up for weeks -- you know how desperate for scandal they are." Jesse wasn't that easily defeated. "Nuts, he'll love it." "And it probably wouldn't do his academic reputation any good. You know how those things are, everybody'd think he'd done it himself for the publicity." I was back on the attack again. "He probably would if he were to think of it." My bright and beautiful bride had a suggestion. "Listen, how about if instead of something with Thorsen's name on it, Thorsen himself is there, maybe standing shaking his head at your pitiful notions like Hank says he does. That way it'd be harder to trace who it was and there'd be no question of hurting his academic standing. " "Well, that misses the beautiful symbolism, but you might be right about his academic reputation. Thorsen would sacrifice his first-born daughter before that." Ardee stuck in his oar. "You're all aware that it would be purest vandalism if this scheme destroyed valuable data." That sobered us a bit. No one had even considered that aspect of it. And it suggested something else to me. "And has anyone thought about what happens if we get caught? Tampering with a project as expensive as this one is likely to rate more than a visit to the principal." "But you're not really going to do it are you. Hank," Stephie wanted to know. "I mean, its fun to think about, but God!" "I don't know if I am or not, but I'm betting that if it's possible Kim and Jesse are going to give it their damndest." "You betcha," Jesse confirmed. "I think Kim is looking on it as an interesting technical exercise." Lee turned to face me. "He probably hasn't considered Thorsen or what happens if we get caught. " "I notice you said 'we'. You want in on this?" "Sure, if there's anything three-quarters of an attorney can do. I think it would be funnier than Hell." She swore badly, capitalizing the word. Kim returned from the phone in the kitchenette, recovered his beer from the elephant, thanked the beast, and sprawled out on the rug. Jesse practically assaulted him. "Well, come on -- give!" "OK, the guy I know in Computer Science says that he thinks he can get us what we need to do it. He's going to look into it and come over tomorrow." "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" Jesse exulted. "Indeed," Kim said drily. "Before you get too carried away, Kim, have you thought about what this might do to the data from the TV experiment? And what happens if we get caught?" "Yes to both." So much for Lee and Kim's marriage. "All we've got to do is rig a subroutine that causes the output of the TVprocessing program to include Thorsen's facing block at some point. The Output is altered, but the input, the actual data, is unaffected, and they can clear things up afterwards." I interupted to tell him about the replacement of the block with Thorsen himself. "Better yet. The Almighty on Mars." He sipped beer. "As for getting caught, we can set up the subroutine to commit hara kiri after its run. Poof! Up in a cloud of random numbers. I know that verges on mixed metaphor, Ardee. After the subroutine is gone, all that's left is the tiny insertion in the main program that calls the subroutine in the right circumstances, and that contains no account numbers or anything else to implicate us directly...of course, suspicion is apt to be rather heavy." "You're not British are you, Kim?" He ignored me. "The only really hard part, aside from getting the subroutine to give a pretty picture, is getting the passwords that let us make that tiny insertion in the main program. But Georgie thinks he may be able to get ahold of them for us; his father is associate chairman of the department." "Sounds almost foolproof," commented Lee. "And I think Jesse's right, Thorsen will love it, although it may be somewhat difficult to tell at first." I took a couple of large swallows of beer. "Yeah...OK, let's do it." "Okay." Jesse sounded surprised. She hadn't thought there was anything to be decided. K.im's tame computer whiz came to the lab the next morning. The kid looked about twelve, all pimples and stringy hair, and mostly he looked down at his shoes and mumbled, but he seemed taken with Kim, and he provided the passwords we needed. Those, the dust-covered time-sharing remote computer terminal in the comer of the lab, and the programming expertise Kim had picked up as a math major before switching to exobiology were all we needed. A couple of weeks later, Kim had the subroutine written and was proudly displaying his work on the TV display of the terminal. "Oh, it's beautiful, Kim." Jesse was ecstatic. "It is, Kim," I agreed. "It's Thorsen right down to the ends of his pointy little mustache. And that's his supercilious head shake too." "It is pretty good, isn't it." He was really pleased with himself. "Of course, getting it to look like Thorsen was no real trick. The hard part was getting it to appear in the right place at the right time. For instance, I couldn't just have him appear centered in the picture, that might have made him look as if he were floating in the air. And if he simply appeared at some preset time he might suddenly pop into existance in front of some feature of the landscape. No, the way this works, the main program will report to the subroutine every hundred routine has gotten reports in a sequence that indicates that Marsman is breasting a hill, then it triggers, and Thorsen comes into view as we crest the hill, then vanishes a few seconds later...like that." He pointed to the TV display where the subroutine was running over and over, Thorsen appearing over the hill, shaking his head pityingly, then vanishing. "Doesn't having the main program report to the subroutine require more than a 'tiny insertion'?" Jesse wanted to know. "Only marginally; and the identifying information still selfdestructs with the subroutine." Jesse was grinning at the display again. "It's really perfect, just mimsy." "Shouldn't he be a little nobler about the brow?" a voice behind us wanted to know. A familiar voice. Thorsen's voice. Kim and I both froze. Jesse rallied to our aid: "Oh, good, Dr. Thorsen. Take a look at this. We've been thinking of doing some promotional announcements for the educational channel about Marsman. You know: 'No telling what'll turn up on Mars. Don't miss Marsman.' " It was close enough to the truth that I cringed. "With my face?" "Well, naturally we needed someone distinctive looking -- an ordinary face just wouldn't do." "I'm pleased to see such initiative, but you'd better leave that sort of thing to the TV experimenters. Our own experiment is far more significant; see what you can dream up for that." He left looking unconvinced but thoughtful. Kim killed the display on the screen, and as far as any of us knew that was the end of that. Early the next morning Jesse stuck her head into the cubbyhole I used as an office. "Thorsen wants us in his office. He wants to play speculations again." "What's he doing here this time of day? Its only a little after eight." " 'Ours not to reason why' ", she misquoted. Kim was already there, perched on a window sill, mountains in the background peaking over his shoulder. Thorsen sat with his feet up on the desk. Jesse sank gracefully to sit cross-legged on the carpet. I flopped into the only chair. "All right, you've just been told that an animal about the size of a cat positively and for a fact exists on Mars. What's it look like? Hank, you start." He was always picking on me in these sessions. The last one, a couple of weeks before, he'd wanted to know what numbering system intelligent Jovans were likely to use. I'd held out for binary, arguing that they'd most likely be built along the lines of fish, with bilateral symmetry. Everybody else held out for radial symmetry, like squids or octopus, and octal, decimal, or duodecimal. Apparently I was to be the goat again. "Well, to begin with, the results from the Viking probes showed no lower order life, no plants, no smaller animals, no microorganisms." "No detected microorganisms," Thorsen in tempted. "You're well aware that those experiments were neither conclusive nor in some cases even well conceived." "No detected microorganisms," I corrected myself. "Nonetheless the TV experiments showed nothing analogous, to terrestrial plants or animals, and without those to live on, and in fact a whole ecological base to have evolved out of, more complex, larger animals are extremely unlikely." "Correct, and I'd have been extremely perturbed had you failed to bring that up. However, you've been told that such an animal exists even so. What does it look like?" "OK, say something on the order of a turtle. Low, close to the ground so the wind doesn't bother it, hard integument so the sandstorms don't scour it to death. Black or dark brown for camouflage from predators if there are any, and to absorb what little energy is available from the sun." "Black will make it radiate better at night," Kim put in. "Well, maybe it can change color then, but in the daytime it'll be black." "What about locomotion," Thorsen wanted to know. "Well, I'd say legs, or something very similar. Wings are obviously out, and sliding or gliding like a snake or snail wouldn't work well in that fine grit. Maybe six or eight of them, with broad, paddle-shaped ends to dig in and anchor." "Any other limbs, Jesse?" Somebody else's turn now. "Yes, two of those paddleshaped feet modified to scoop sand into its mouth." She sounded certain. "Why?" "There are only three major sources of energy available to Myrtle: direct solar radiation, which is obviously inadequate, radioactive decay, of which there ain't that much there to decay, and other life forms, our as-yetto-be-detected microorganisms. I therefore conclude that she makes her living by filtering smaller organisms out of the sand, like whales filter krill." "You left one out," said Thorsen, and waited. Jesse looked puzzled. "The wind," Kim helped out. "Oh, yeah, sure, but I can't think of any likely way for an organism to use that. I mean martians with little windmills on top of their heads would never be able to reproduce. They'd be too busy laughing at each other." She giggled, and rocked back onto her elbows. "I agree windmills are impractical," Kim said, "But how about a sessile organism with thousands of tendrils waving around in the breeze, sort of like a sea anemone?" "How does it get energy from that," Thorsen wanted to know. "Say its got two kinds of tendrils, one impregnated with natural lodestone, the other with some sort of conductor. The tendrils are shaped so the flow around them is very turbulent, so when the wind blows over them they whip around and bingo, a natural generator." "Lodestone isn't that common even on Earth," I put in to show I was listening. "Make him self-energizing then, like a powerhouse generator, that way it wouldn't take much." "It sounds pretty unlikely to me." "Have you ever seen a hermit crab? Or a human being?" "Let's hear some more about Hank's turtle," Thorsen ordered. "Head, sense organs, Jesse?" "I'd say a retractible cluster of sense organs. That sort of thing isn't generally very durable. Probably something analagous to eyes, so Myrtle can stay in bright sunlight and avoid stepping into puddles...of shadow, and a pair of antennae -- feathery things, like a moth's -- for detecting breezes. Probably they'd be as far apart as possible when extended to give the most directional information. Hearing would be useless, of course." "Anything else, Kim?... Hank?" "Well, it might be useful for it to be able to sense changes in atmospheric pressure, and maybe to smell water or whatever it uses for a solvent, but those funccions could be in the antennae." "OK...anybody want to add anything else?" He waited a few seconds. "What you've come up with is substantially the same as the result of my own thoughts." He fumbled around in the papers on his desk, then came up with a pencil drawing which he passed around. It showed a creature very similar to what we'd described. Thorsen had been staring out the windows while we examined his drawing. When I put it back on his desk, he spoke, still staring out the window: "It has come to my attention that some members of this group may have the capability to make alterations in the output of the television experiment on Marsman I." 'Come to his attention', indeed. I wondered how much he'd doped out for himself and how much he'd squeezed out of Ardee Weston. I was sure Ardee was our weak link and sure Thorsen knew it. He looked around at each of us in turn. "Possibly," I admitted. Jesse glared at me. Thorsen looked back out the window again. "I wonder if any of you has fully comprehended the power you have at your disposal. Consider what the effect would be if rather than my humble self (!) the creature I have just shown you were to be 'sighted' on Mars by Marsman. Life on Mars! And not just some boring little bacteria only people like us care about, but something big enough to see and strange enough to excite. At the least, the very least (He was beginning to sound excited!) it would assure the launching of further Marsmen. And I think the odds are excellent that it would trigger completion of Ares and Stalin. The cold detente is just starting to heat up, and a joint manned Mars mission could be just the thing to fan the flames. But the citizens of neither country would pay for it without there being something up there to excite their interest." He had a strange look in his eyes, a dreamy look I had never seen before. All at once, I realized: I'll be damned, the Almighty wants to be an astronaut. But if he could get the manned mission revived, he probably had a pretty good chance; he was about the top exobiologist in the country. A lot of other things fell into place too. All that jogging he did, for instance, and that biplane he was so fond of buzzing football games in. But he was still talking: "We've been tending to turn more and more inwards the last decade. There's been little in space to capture the public's imagination so appropriations have been waning. We must do something like this to turn attention outwards or mankind will remain forever earthbound." He realized he was getting uncharacteristically poetic, and turned toward Kim briskly. "Well, Kim? I think you are probably handling the nuts and bolts of this." Kim looked at Jesse and me, then replied. "Sure, we can do it, but why not go all the way, have John Carter gallop up on a thoat?" "Don't be ridiculous." "The whole idea is ridiculous. Do you really think that if something like this," he brandished the drawing he'd picked up from the desk, "wanders across the landscape the actual data from Marsman won't be checked and rechecked, processed and reprocessed, trying to get every possible shred of detail? And that when it is, the hoax won't be discovered, and the whole space research program totally discredited. Then watch your appropriations wane!" Kim was as angry as I'd ever seen him. "I'ye considered that with the most extreme care, Kim, and I feel that the chances of our being found out are very small." He grinned. "I had a few drinks with the chairman of the Computer Science department at the faculty club last night. Once the data from Marsman is in the computer, there's literally nothing that can't be done to it while its still in the computer. No one will ever examine data of any sort except that provided by the computer. And consider human nature. The people running the TV experiment won't doubt their own machine, expecially when its putting out exactly what they'd most hoped to see. No, Kim, I think we're safe." "But its criminal, deliberately falsifying data that way." "In a moral sense, you're right of course, and that point bothered me more than any other. Its against every principle I was taught and believe, but I think in this one case the advancement of science requires the violation of its principles." " 'Violation' is right," Kim said. "Doc, just how badly do you want to go to Mars," I asked. He looked surprised and a little angry. "Your perception amazes me. Hank, but if you're implying that I'm advocating this merely because I want to go to Mars, you're absolutely wrong. Even if I knew right now that the only effect would be to cause the launching of more Marsmen, I'd still want to follow this course." "But you still haven't answered my question." "How badly do I want to go to Mars?" He looked embarassed and turned to stare out the window again. "More than anything at all." "Then I think we should do it." "Me too," Jesse echoed. It took us three more days, working in shifts, to convince Kim to help us. He put up moral arguments, ethical arguments, technical arguments, and practical arguments, but in the end, he yielded. And he did a beautiful job. It was # a.m. here, but a little before noon ("Don't want to have to worry about shadows.") in Solis Lacus on the sixth day after Marsman landed. A' light sandstorm ("Or tracks.") had come up earlier in the morning, and the duty engineer on Earth was alternately yawning and staring at the TV screen trying to decide whether to tell Marsman to go into resting mode until it passed. The screen showed the boulder field Marsman's dog brain was guiding it thru. Suddenly out from behind one of the boulders churned Myrtle, all eight legs paddling sand for all they were worth, apparently flushed by Marsman. It almost immediately disappeared behind another boulder, and was seen no more. Marsman hadn't been programmed to go chasing after things, even things as interesting as that (oh, vain regrets!), so he took no notice, and by the time his masters could get word to him to go back for another look no trace could be found. It was very convincing, and like I said, a beautiful job. Unfortunately it wasn't enough. The papers the next day had 'Mars Turtle Found' in four-inch type, all right, and a fuzzy photo of Myrtle, but the next day it was half-inch type on page four, and the day after that, interviews with scientists on page nineteen, and within a week it was forgotten by the public. No manned mission, no more Marsmen, no more money. Things were very gloomy around the lab after that. Thorsen tried to take it philosophically: "We just underestimated the public's capacity for apathy. We didn't capture their imaginations." But four weeks later the Solis Lacus Plinth did. Jesse came tearing into the lab to get Kim and me, and we all ran down to Thorsen's office. The bulletin was playing over and over on all the networks. A three meter cube of quartz, half drifted over with sand, once deeply carved, now worn almost smooth by the ceaseless action of the wind and and sand over the weary eons. They'd moved Marsman up close, and you could see the sand and wind eddying around it, and the carving, very faint, but almost, almost intelligible. The hackles on the back of my neck rose. Even Thorsen was speechless. Funds for more Marsmen were voted almost that night, and construction resumed on Ares and Stalin the following morning. So Thorsen got what he wanted after all. He's scheduled to land with the first group next month. They're planning to set down in Solis Lacus, where Marsman I finally conked out, near where the Plinth is supposed to be. But I wonder... sup r or # years the startling cosmological theories of Immanual Velikovsky have sparked debates that generate far more heat than light. Is he a misunderstood genius, persecuted by a Big Sciacknowledge the truth, or is he a crackpot trudging through the fever swamps of pseudoscience? "If he's right, the rest of us are crazy," said Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley. "He has fearlessly said that much of our conventional science is a bust and needs restructuring. Most of us have known this for a long time," says Fred Jueneman, science writer and Velikovsky supporter. The Velikovsky Movement challenges not only astronomy and archeology, but the whole structure of science. It's not surprising that emotions run high, and discussions of Velikovsky tend to be debates in which each side scores points off the other. There's little serious examination of Velikovsky's theories and evidence. It is easy to see how this happened. Big Science not only treated Velikovsky as a crackpot from the beginning, but violated its own canons of ethics and fair play in doing it. The whole sad story was told in the American Behavioral Scientist ten years ago, and is available in De Grazia's book, The Velikovsky Affair (New York: University Books, #). The scientific community should be, and much of it is, ashamed of itself. Not only was Velikovsky's best seller -- a trade book, not a textbook -- hounded out of the MacMillan Company by massive attacks of academicians on MacMillan's textbooks, it was also pursued even after the book was transferred to Doubleday which has no textbook department. "Reviews" of Velikovsky appeared in which the "scientist" reviewer proudly stated that heshe had not read Velikovsky and never would. Cecilia PayneGaposhkin, a colleague of Shapley's, published a paper which misquoted Velikovsky and demolished the misinformation in the misquotes. It would be easy to fill this column with horror stories; for my purposes it's sufficient to show that Big Science has something to be ashamed of. If Velikovsky is just another crackpot, those involved can claim that although the tactics were wrong, no real harm was done. However -- if he has a core of truth in his publications! If he should have been taken seriously! Then indeed is there grounds for massive guilt feelings. To avoid guilt, refutation of Velikovsky is not enough. It must be shown that he was never worthy of serious attention. I think this is why many scientists are not merely academic opponents, but actual enemies of this Russian-born psychiatrist. It explains why an entire day session not to looking at Velikovsky 's theories for their merit, but rather to taking various statements of his and picking them apart. It may be why there was so much gleeful sarcasm expended on refuting casual remarks in no way central to Velikovsky's hypotheses. Unfortunately for Velikovsky and his supporters, it is easy to score points off him. Some of his claims are so absurd that his most ardent supporters don't want to discuss them. Moreover, Velikovsky is guilty of both academic showmanship and sloppy scholarship. He can't help making spectacular claims that are totally irrelevent to his theories. He often quotes out of context. He does not evaluate his sources, and he seldom discusses evidence against his theories. I'm sure this last paragraph will infuriate the Velikovskians as thoroughly as the opening paragraphs have inflamed his enemies. It would be unfair simply to make my charges and not give instances, but for continuity I will postpone examination of Velikovsky's rather strange scholarly tactics and procede immediately to my main thesis. I think both sides have lost sight of the major point of the debate. In my judgment, Velikovsky In the interests of fairness, and with Jens s concurrence, I hereby invite Dr. Velikovsky (at standard Galaxy rates and a maximum length of # words) to address himself to any or all of the issues raised in Dr. Pournelle's column. has raised important questions that 'the Science Establishment should deal with. At the same time, his tactics and those of his followers make it difficult to have the impartial discussion he and they claim to want so badly. his theories, invariably stating that his thesis is that sometime prior to # BC the planet Venus, previously unknown in the solar system, erupted as a "comet" from Jupiter; that Venus narrowly missed striking Earth about#, and again # years later; and that some time after that Earth had one or more near encounters with Mars. Although Velikovsky does say all this, it is not his basic thesis. Actually, Velikovsky's theories begin with his evidence for cataclysms in the immediate prehistorical times of Western, and world, civilization. His entire cosmology rests on the catastrophe hypothesis, and most of his evidence is mythological, legendary, and archeological. If it can be shown that there were widespread catastrophies in the period # BC to # BC, then Velikovsky deserves well of the scholarly world, no matter what the fate of his cosmological theories. game is no more than his suggested mechanism whereby such catastrophies might have taken place. He is convinced that no other mechanism could account for what he believes were key events in man's histoiy. Whether he is right or wrong about the cosmological mechanism, the catastrophies are his primary hypothesis, and the evidence for them is his primary data. It is this evidence which the scholarly community ought to examine with care. If there were no catastrophies, his cosmology is simply irrelevent. If there were, it is up to those who reject his cosmology to come up with alternate explanations for these events; and Velikovsky will deserve the credit for bringing our pre-history to light. Therefore, I propose to take Velikovsky seriously and examine his evidence for catastrophies. I also intend to raise several wellknown facts that Velikovsky has ignored in his account of the life and times of the Bronze Age. Velikovsky states that much of his cosmic thesis comes from the Bible, and close reading of his books shows that he believes that the Bible is a real account of real history. For example, he points out that the Bible frequently refers to the Amalekites as very important people, yet history knows them only as desert robbers. He is in good company in pointing this out; the Hittite Empire was discovered partly from the Biblical references to Hittites as a great Empire; for a hundred years archeologists thought of the Hittites as unimportant. Could the Biblical references be a key to unknown events in Near East pre-history? In order to bring the Bible into correspondence with Egyptian history, though, Velikovsky has had to compile an entirely new Bronze Age Chronology. In doing so he once again places himself in a position in which if he's right, the other experts are crazy. In defense of his chronology, Velikovsky has written a persuasive essay attacking the basis for traditional chronologies. He points out that most archeologists, not being chronologists, simply accept the "standard" chronology of Egypt and key their data to that; but the Egyptologists' chronology rests on far shakier data than its proponents believe. So far so good: and I for one wish I could find a good undergraduate level text on chronology, because my research has turned up only rather obscure articles that don't convince me. However, to say that the traditional chronologies rest on less data than is generally supposed, and that there are nightmarish contradictions involved in accepting them, is not to say that Velikovsky's own scheme is correct. Velikovsky has not made minor adjustments in Egyptian chronology: he has thrown out about # years of what Egyptologists think of as history. Because of this it is difficult to deal fairly with Velikovsky. One cannot simply show that there was no world-wide catastrophe at some date that Velikovsky says there was one, because he does not accept the usual dating scheme. His cosmology and his chronology fit together like a fine watch must be dealt with as one. Furthermore, his books suffer from his style. He is often obscure, generally inteiprets everything in the most sensational light possible, and sometimes is internally inconsistent; financially his methods have served him well but as a scholar he is his own worst enemy. It's hard to take him seriously. One has a strong temptation to throw his book across the room because it is so easy to pick out some outrageous statement and refute it out of hand. One must continually try to decide just how crucial a particular enormity is to his theories. One must also ignore his infuriating habit of documenting the well-known while providing either no reference at all, or an unreliable source, for some of his most startling assertions. Finally, Velikovsky never mentions some quite well-known facts that seem to contradict his theories. I'll give examples of this later. For all that, though, let's look at the evidence for catastrophe in the Bronze Age. Velikovsky begins well; in his first two controversies I agree with his position. First, he attempts to supplement archeological finds with myth and legend. Therein lies a sad story: ar-. cheologists and historians seldom work together. There is a powerful archeological school that condemns any attempt to blend the testimony of the spade with legend and myth, and reputations of highly esteemed archeologists have suffered when they tried to link their potsherds to legend. In my judgment this is a shame, and if Velikovsky can get historians and archeologists to talk to each other -- even if only to refute him -- he will have done, both a favor. Velikovsky also relies on the Bible, and is immediately embroiled in a curiously vicious scholarly war. Historians who are pererations of XVth Century BC history on "Manetho" will reject the Bible on the grounds that it was written much later than the events it describes by priests who wanted to prove certain points. Yet Manetho was a #rd Century BC priest who wanted to please his Greek masters, a sort of Egyptian Geoffrey of Monmouth -- and his works have not even survived. What we know of Manetho comes from those who quoted him much later. Could it be that scholars, having once been unable to publish anything contradictory to the Bible, now have a tendency, in reaction, to reject everything it says? But Velikovsky takes the Bible as history, and his view seems to gain strength as new archeological finds are made; and of course he is not alone in presuming that myth and legend contain a central core of historical truth. I first became interested in Velikovsky because of his assertion that Plato had "one too many zeros" in his dating of the Atlantis legend. Plato says that Atlantis fell # years before his own era. Velikovsky makes that #... Martin Gardiner in his Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science ridicules Velikovsky for dropping the zero, and years later Isaac Asimov's "Minds in Confusion" echoed Gardiner with no better evidence. Yet it is very likely that Velikovsky was correct here; certainly his view has support from well-regarded scholars. In #, Spyridon Marinatos, then Ephor of the Cyclades, theorized that Minoan civilization may have been destroyed by a cataclysmic eruption of Thera, a volcanic island # miles south of Cnossus. That eruption can be dated by archeology, radiocarbon technique, and vulcanology to about # BC or perhaps a few years earlier -- ie, # years before Plato. The eruption was singularly violent, from four to ten times as powerful as Krakatoa. It was the most powerful explosion in known human history, with a force of more than # megatons. The identification of Atlantis and Minoan Crete had been argued by reputable scholars from # on, and in # Marinatos explicitly discusses Crete's fall as the basis of the Atlantis Legend. This proved to be a mistake: not the identification, which has come to be widely accepted, but discussing it Marinatos has suffered from the charge of "sensationalism" ever since. I spent a day with him last summer and although he was charming and helpful, he simply will not discuss Atlantis at all. In #, however, he did. Velikovsky must be familiar with Marinatos' work, and I am aghast when Velikovsky's supporters in Pensee claim that their idol "introduced" the dating of Atlantis to # rather than # years before Plato. However, he certainly can rightly claim to have been among the first to recognize the importance of the Thera disaster and it was his handling of mythological data which led him to give it the correct date. Robert Heinlein says this is: "Possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever I I "A spellbinder, a swashbuckler Selection of The Science Fiction Book Club A, He can likewise claim to be among the first to accept the now widely held view that if there is an historical basis for the Atlantis legend, the fall of Minoan Crete in about# was the event that inspired it. It should be noted that the conditional is widely accepted, but many archeologists doubt there was any historical basis for the Atlantis Legend at all. I'll add my view: Atlantis was real and Crete was it. Now Velikovsky claims to be able to show that the Thera disaster was only the Mediterranean aspect of a global catastrophe. He must claim that: the Thera catastrophe is well documented and forms the major part of his evidence for disasters having taken place at that time. He marshals an impressive amount of evidence for universal destruction at the time of the Thera eruption. He not only quotes myth and legend from China and Central America, but eminent French archeologists working in Mesopotamia. Unfortunately, I am not competent to evaluate his claims -- and I cannot simply take them on faith because of his "scholarship." Velikovsky nowhere discusses the evidence against his view of Thera. There's an impressive amount of it, but as far as all of his works are concerned it might as well not exist. He has to be familiar with the evidence; he quotes' from the same documents that contain it. But he ignores it completely, and in fact at the last spring, asserted that he does not have to change a single sentence of any of his books -- even after # years. In the rest of this column I will show why I for one use Velikovsky's books as an interesting compendium of legends, but do not consider them serious scholarship. I intend to bring up archeological facts that Velikovsky must be aware of, but which he has never mentioned, and which I believe establish that the Thera eruption, although locally devastating, was not a world-wide catastrophe. By Velikovsky's own admission, if the # BC events were not a universal catastrophe, he has no case. It is inconceivable that Venus narrowly missed Earth and yet did not affect the entire Mediterranean basin, if not the whole world. The day the sun stood still must have been devastating for everyone. If it was only catastrophe for those near Thera, there can be no case for the near miss by Venus. First. Velikovsky's revised chronology is not peripheral to his cosmology. He has revised the whole of Bronze Age chronology because he must. In particular, he of Egypt well into the First Millenium BC, and not at # BC where everyone else puts it. The reason for this is that we have very good records of the glorious period of ancient Egypt. It begins with Ahmose, who expelled the Hyksos (even Velikovsky admits that, and the order of pharoahs in the Dynasty; what he disputes is when they lived.) It includes Thuthmose I, Queen Hatshepsut of the Punt Expediand continues into decline with Ahkhenaton the monotheist herebroken record of achievement, and there is little room for disasters within it. Now if the Thera disaster took be local, not universal. There are a few serious scholars who think the Thera explosion might have affected part of the Egyptian Delta, bringing darkness at noon, lightning, rains of red dust to produce rivers of blood, etc., and thus form the background for the Exodus; but no one contends that it was more than a local event in one province, and the "pharoah" referred to in the Bible must have been a local official. Actually, most archeologists and Egyptologists think even this much is poppycock, and I must admit that although I would like to believe it for dramatic purFact v. Jk I I '# c I"I#'I waterline model of over I # U S... lapancv. Smith (ermin. Italian and French warship of World War II hrltksJupv earner, miner. de-uroyerv mb, luiilenm. etc. Pratliutly rrr type and cUo fepreirnird Super linely and accurately detailed prremon metal caUing Ideal lor wargaming. colletn display t Vastly improved version of model uicd lor rcifniliM trauunp ty V S Navy World War I iip loo Abo Naval arpnr rukv warship data # detn hook. I I # icalc aircraft available Send S I # lor h. new. illuiiraird catalog to poses, it is unlikely. How could the Exodus take place during Egypt's period of expansionistic glory? For precisely this reason Dynasty to about # BC, contemporary with David and Solomon. Anyone who has visited the National Museum at Athens, and the dig at Cnossus in Crete, and the Minoan museum at Iraklion -- and I have only recently returned from there -- must be convinced that the Thera eruption took place in the period called Late Minoan I. The date of LM I may be in doubt, but not that the city Marinatos is excavating at Akrotira on the island of Thera was an LM I culture. Now in the tomb of Rekhmire, an Egyptian Vizier and Foreign Minister, there are paintings of Cretans carrying tribute offerings -- and those offerings are from the LM I period. They are typical: a bull-head rhyton, and a collared rhyton -- both easily recognizable as uniquely LM I. Rekhmire was definitely an Dynasty, it must correspond to LM I period on Crete. Even Velikovsky admits this. And there we have the contradiction; if the Thera eruption was in LM I it must have been in # BC by Velikovsky's chronology, and thus cannot serve as evidence for his# disaster. But of course we can establish that the Thera eruption was in#, and in fact it was Velikovsky's recognition of this at a time when most archeologists underestimated its importance that first attracted me to Velikovsky's work. The date of the eruption is established by stratigraphy, radio-carbon, and vulcanology, and is not seriously in doubt. The only one who disputes the date is Pomerance of the Archeological Institute of America, and Dr. Pomerance wants it in # to account for the so-called Dark Ages of Greece. Even if he were right it would be no use to Velikovsky, who must place LM I in#; and besides, Velikovsky doesn't believe in the Dark Ages to begin with. And Pomerance is absolutely alone in his dating. Everyone else agrees that the eruption was no later than # BC. Second. Velikovsky quotes Manetho extensively in his books, and although he argues strongly against some parts of his history, he is not ashamed to use Manetho as an authority when he is needed. Velikovsky also uses the Greek legend of the Deucalion Flood as evidence for a catastrophe, and he very definitely dates the Deucalion Flood at about # BC. Manetho quite clearly states that the Deucalion Flood took you won't learn that from Velikovsky. Next. In Earth in Upheaval Velikovsky reprints a speech made in October #. In that speech he claimed that Linear B, a language of the time of LM I, would prove to be Greek. There is then a long footnote in the book pointing out that in November #, a month after Velikovsky's prediction, Michael Ventris first announced his decipherment of Linear B, and lo and behold it was Greek. This claim to a correct "prediction" is false. In #I Ventris sent copies of his decipherment to leading archeologists. By # his claim was the talk of the profession. In summer, #, there was a key find, a tablet decipherable using Ventris' system, but which Ventris had never seen. This confirmed Ventris' theory, and by January of # virtually everyone in archeology believed Linear B "would prove to be Greek." A few diehards held out for ten more years, but they were a small minority. So, of course by October # there was no great expertise involved in identifying Linear B. Velikovsky discusses Linear B in books published before #, but in none of them does he even hazard a guess that it is Greek; it was not until the answer was known that he "predicted" it. Unfortunately those Linear B tablets give him real problems. Velikovsky must place Linear B in about#, because the largest find was in the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, and Velikovsky has the Trojan War in about # BC rather than# when everyone else thinks it took place. (The traditional date is#, and it is still accepted by some authorities.) Also, Linear B is contemporary with the LM I pottery on Crete, although it survived on the mainland until much later. But Linear B is contemporary with the Thera disaster which Velikovsky himself dates to#. There are several new finds that definitely make Linear B slightly predate the Thera eruption, so if Velikovsky's chronology is right, his disaster date is wrong, and his position is endangered; and viceversa. Next. Velikovsky must prove the Thera eruption to be a universal disaster. It's the heart of his position. But the eruption took place in LM I, and LM I is found in Mycenaean cities on the mainland, so that Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations can be synchronized. Mycenae experienced rapid growth of power and wealth following the end of LM I. This is precisely what one would expect if a local catastrophe removed the Minoans from the Aegean so that the Mycenaeans could inherit their trading empire. It is not what one would expect to follow universal catastrophe. Needless to say, you will find none of these facts in Velikovsky's books or his more recent publications in Pensee. In other words, both Velikovsky and his critics have suppressed evidence and indulged in other academic mau-mau tactics. Neither has played fair with the disinterested student. Now I wish I could simply dismiss Velikovsky as dead wrong at the heart of his theory and get on with my book on Atlantis. (Well, of course; why else would I know so much about the Bronze Age Aegean? And remember, you saw the identification of Thera with Atlantis in this column when Willy Ley was writing it.) Unfortunately, I can't simply dismiss Velikovsky, because there do remain maddening discrepancies in chronology, and some of them were predicted by Velikovsky. He has correctly predicted that radio-carbon dating would show that certain artifacts Pre-Columbian Central America would prove to be younger than expected. I don't have to accept cosmic tic studies of legend. I just have to be careful, because Velikovsky quotes Ginzberg's fairy tales of Jewish legend and Jane Harrison's excellent studies as if they were comparably reliable sources. I do think there are some problems with chronology, although I doubt I need a cometary Venus to account for them. I do think some of the legends Velikovsky has painstakingly studied may embody real historical truths, possibly even of widespread cataclysms. In fact, I have a wild guess -- and it is no more than that -- about a very large meteor strike in the Mediterranean around # BC giving rise to the Phaeton legend. It might account for the very sudden decline of populations and culture, the loss of writing, and general discontinuities not only in Greece, but around the Mediterranean basin. But that's another story for another time and place, and if you want me to tell it here, write the Editor and ask for it. By all means! Ed. Archeology is not really a "natural" subject for this column, and I only went into it this month in order to try to play fair with Velikovsky. one, and I think there may well have been hitherto-unsuspected natural disasters in the late Bronze Age. For that reason I wish mightily that someone better qualified than I would read Velikovsky's books with an open mind and determine just how much real evidence he has in among all the other stuff he references. I don't mean just his legends, either, but the physical anomalies he describes in Earth in Upheaval. On the other hand, having experienced what Velikovsky does to the evidence in a period in which I have some knowledge, I can understand why professional archeologists don't want to take him seriously. It isn't just that he challenges their "orthodoxy", but that he is either ignorant of basic facts, which in view of his widespread reading is hard to believe; or that he ignores them, inviting others to do the same to him.   in tribute to the father of modern American science fiction, Edited by Introduction by This book is a unique memorial -- the thirteen stories in especially for this volume by Pout Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Hal Clement, Theodore R. Cogswell, L, Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, Harry Harrison, tylack Reynolds. Clifford D. Simak, George O. Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, and Theodore L. Thomas, Each with an introductory tribute to John Campbell. # #, now at your bookstore frrY Discover Man's most advanced technology of the mind -- Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand your awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. This best seller reveals the parts of the mind and the source of human irrationality. Grasp this opportunity to reap the benefits of the simple, powerful techniques in copies have been sold! Order your copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health today! Just Get it. Read it and Try it! Send # to The Church of Scientology of California, Continental Organization U.S. Dept. G-l, # West #th Street, Los Angeles, Calif. #. Obtain from the above address or, if unavailable, order from The Church of Scientology of California, Publications Organization, Dept. G-l, # West Temple Street, Los Angeles, California #, No Charge for postage and handling. All orders will be shipped within # hours of receipt. "Dianetics is the registered trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect Copyright  # by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved. The Church of Scientology of Califomia-a non-profit organization. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. Scientology  and Dianeticsare registered names. Ever have somebody interrupt you when you were on the last page of a really great novel P Frustrating isn't the word! I won't have my brain picked," shouted Everly, squinting over the rear sight of the #-# and aligning the bead on the rocks below. " Not this time! Not again!" A faint shadow dodged from rock to rock. Eberly squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked against his shoulder. Dirt puffed in front of the rocks. The shot had fallen short. "Eberly, give up," came Plagio's voice, amplified by a bullhorn. "You haven't got a chance. You can t fight us. There are too many of us." "Where there's life," responded Eberly, wishing he had something pithier and more original to say, "there's hope." He squeezed off another round. Rock shattered. A man screamed. "You made a contract, Eberly." "An illegal contract." " But an enforceable contract, Eberly."' Bullets splattered on the rocks around Eberly, punctuating Plagio's comment about the contract's enforceability. Specific Performance? Was that what they called making someone fulfill his contract? Eberly shrugged. Maybe they called it Specific Performance. Maybe they called it Fred. Eberly had studied law once, but that, too, was gone, plucked from his head for a fee. He dusted the rock chips from his sleeve and decided to change position. Plagio and his men were too close. Soon they would know his exact position. Knowing it, they could surround him and wait. Even if the Mohave sun failed to cook him, hunger and thirst would eventually defeat him; if he lost consciousness even for a minute Plagio would sweep down on him, sedate him, carry him off and pick his brain. Eberly shoved two replacement shells into the #-#. He stuck a bookmark into the tattered copy of Don Quixote and stuffed it into his coat pocket with the box of shells. This time, he would finish the book. If he had to shoot Plagio himself, he would follow Don Quixote to the end. Quietly, keeping low behind the rocks, Eberly scurried toward the ledge he had spotted earlier. He slung the rifle across his back, but hesitated before continuing the climb, glancing down. Over the ledge, the cliff fell away for two hundred meters to the desert. One slip would leave him flattened on the sand or draped over a cactus, a sack of broken bones. Yet, death with honor -- even without honor -- had advantages. It would cheat Plagio of his pound of engrams. Momentarily, Eberly considered jumping, then rejected the idea. Any satisfaction he might feel at cheating Plagio would only be transitory. Better to climb higher and hope for total victory. He began a sideways shuffle along the ledge, fingertips straining in fissures to hold his body against the rock wall. Once, he glanced down. His head swirled. He looked away, stopping and leaning his sweating forehead against the cool rock. He tried to breathe deeply to calm his nerves. "Eberly!" "Not now," muttered Eberly. "Don't distract me." "We see you moving, Eberly. We have heat scanners on you." Eberly inched toward the next outcropping, trying to ignore the distracting voice. " Submit , Eberly. You've done it before. It takes only a few seconds. It is painless. Think of your wife and children. If you submit, they will continue to live in luxury. If you are killed they will have to go on welfare. Your wife is too slow-witted to be of use to us." Now Plagio was insulting Gloria. True, Gloria was a slow learner. It had taken her four years just to master the fundamentals of Rumanian grammer, a skill Eberly sold Plagio for fifty dollars flat fee. Considering Gloria's faulty preterit and weak future subjunctive, along with her complete inability to understand the Rumanian relative pronoun, it was probably a good price. Still, Plagio had no reason to insult her. "Your own wife pronounced French like a Bulgarian ," shouted Eberly. An angry burst of rifle fire answered. Eberly reached the outcropping and relative safety. To the west, the sun, an elongated orange ball on the desert horizon, was setting. No one would try to cross the ledge at night. If he could hold them off until after dark, he could finish the last two hundred pages of Don Quixote. Eberly unslung the rifle and positioned himself behind a tall rock with a V-shaped notch in the top, resting the gun barrel in the notch. At this distance, he would need all the stability he could find to keep Plagio pinned down. Below, he heard gravel slip. He fired twice. "No," he muttered. "Save the ammunition. Only shoot when I see something worth shooting." He got out the box of shells and opened it, replacing the two spent rounds and counting the rest in the fading light. Thirty rounds, including those in the rifle. Hardly enough for a war but adequate to hold off Plagio. "Eberly!" "Brain picker!" shouted Eberly. "Filthy brain picker!" "I harvest a crop. Nothing more. We have had a profitable arrangement in the past, Eberly. Why can't it continue ?" "Why can't I finish Don Quixote?" "I am a reasonable man. How -- " "You are a pig and a brain picker!" "As I was saying, I am a reasonable man, a businessman. How much do you have to go to finish it?" " About two hundred pages." A pause ensued. " How long will it take you?" "In this light? All night. Maybe longer." "How long with a good reading lamp?" " Four or five hours. ' "It's too long. The customer is waiting. He has a final exam in Spanish tomorrow at eleven a.m. He's paid in advance. We have to set up the equipment, make the extraction and the implant, then get him back to Los Angeles for the exam. Submit, Eberly. You can finish the book next time." Next time. Eberly had already learned Spanish seven times. Each time, when he mastered the ability sufficiently to read Don Quixote, Plagio, who used Don Quixote as the objective test of Spanish mastery, extracted the skill from him, leaving Don Quixote or Sancho Panza or the beautiful Dulcinea or the not so beautiful Rosinante in some dire situation and Eberly unable to find out what happened. He was thankful, at least, that he could remember the plot. Plagio only took the language skill, not the information it conveyed. "Plagio!" yelled Eberly. "What?" "You said the same thing last time and the time before that. It's no go. You'll never let me finish. Next time will be exactly like this time. As soon as I can read it, you'll pick my brain. I won't even know how to say buenos dias." " Read it in translation." Infuriated by Plagio's aesthetic insensitivity, Eberly muttered, " Carumba ," and squeezed off three rounds. His ears rang from the explosions. " Eberly , what was that for?" "Because it's never the same in translation, you philistine!" Eberly sat down behind the rocks, planning to take advantage of the last rays of sunlight. He opened Don Quixote and began looking for his place. "Let's see, they came to the inn and Don Quixote fell asleep and -- ah, here it is. The curate has just said the original cause of Don Quixote's madness was from reading books." Eberly became immersed in his book. Eventually, the light faded completely. He withdrew a penlight from his shirt pocket, but instead of flicking it on to read, he leaned back against the rocks. His escape from Plagio's Palm Springs home had unexpectedly drained him. He had planned to escape, then make his way to the main highway and thumb a ride to Los Angeles. Somehow -- probably from crashing through the window, an act he found considerably more unnerving and more difficult than in the movies (It had taken two trys and the help of the rifle butt to get through the plate glass) -- his sense of direction had become addled. Instead of striking out toward the highway, he had struck out across the desert. He had expected Plagio to follow immediately. Evidently, Plagio's henchman, Marvin The Extractor, a name referring to Marvin's perhad remained unconscious longer than expected. The glancing blow with the Ming vase, shattering the vase, had felt too light to put Marvin out long, but after an hour of walking, Eberly had looked back and seen no sign of pursuit. Only when he neared the rocks three hours later and started his climb to reconnoiter and get his bearings did he see the jeep, bouncing toward him across the desert. "Eberly. " Eberly noticed how the voice carried in the night air, making Plagio seem to be right on top of him. "What?" "Can we make a deal?" " What kind of deal?" "You submit and -- " "Never!" "You submit and I'll give you three weeks paid vacation in Acapulco before you start on your next subject." "What good will Acapulco be if I don't know Spanish?" "You don't have to talk to anyone." "I like talking to people." " O.K . , make it Miami -- anywhere. " Eberly thought about it. Plagio must be desperate. He had never offered Eberly a vacation before. He always expected Eberly to be back at the books the day after an extraction. The client must be someone big, or the son of someone big, possibly one of Plagio's superiors. In spite of the dominating figure Plagio had become in Eberly's life, Eberly knew Plagio was small fry to the Organization, that vague and only obliquely-mentioned group who financed Plagio. When Congress outlawed engram transplants in the early #'s, claiming it allowed the rich to become not only richer but smarter, organized crime moved in. The price to college students, harried executives without time to take night classes, or any of the myriad other slowlearners in society had actually dropped when people like Plagio took over. The American Medical Association had maintained the cost of the operation at such artificially high levels -- they fought the criminalization of engram extraction tooth and nail, but popular sentiment and the proximity of a congressional election carried the day -- that even the illegality of the procedure failed to sustain the high price. Nowadays, a college student with five thousand dollars and a disinclination to study -- by the looks of Plagio's balance sheet, something close to eighty percent of the students in the country engaged in "cramming" as it was colloquially called -- could buy French, German, Spanish or any western language at a level sufficient to sustain them through graduate study. Slavic, Oriental and African languages, along with ancient languages, came slightly higher. Other subjects varied according to the job market. One year sciences would be expensive, the next, law or medicine. Liberal Arts seldom became economically interesting enough to transplant, except foreign languages, Eberly's specialty. Group rates were also available, allowing students to pass around skills as needed. Plagio preferred to sell to groups, fraternities and sororities. Though the fee per person was smaller, the total was larger and the overhead -- supporting people like Eberly, who had a gift for language learning (He had once learned Kurdish in seven weeks.) remained constant. Still, if Plagio were so anxious to deliver, the customer must be important. Did that fact give Eberly some bargaining power? Maybe. "Plagio." "What?" "Who's the customer ?" "What's it to you?" "I've got a deal of my own to "Let's have it." "You let me finish this book and I'll submit. Tell the customer to call in sick." "He tried that already. His teacher doesn't give makeup exams. If he doesn't take the exam, he flunks. If he flunks, he's out of school -- he's a borderline case already. If he's out of school, you know what that means." "One less future customer for you." "Right." "Is that all you think about, Plagio, money?" "It makes the world go round, Eberly "There's more to life than money. " "What?" At a loss, Eberly hedged. "Why can't you be reasonable?" "I think I am being reasonable. You're the one that's fighting the system and being unreasonable. What can you gain? A Pyrrhic victory?" "A what?" "Are you forgetting your English?" Eberly shook his head. Pyrrhic? It was Greek to him. He shrugged and sat down, flicking on the penlight. Plagio would never understand. Things other than money drove some men, things with intrinsic merit, things without market value. He began to read. The dot of light danced across the page, illuminating accent marks and tildes. He read on. Don Quixote, once more mounted and questing, galloped, or rather, considering the nature of the sway-backed Rosinante, plodded through Eberly's brain. If only, mused Eberly, he had some modem equivalent to Rosinante, some charger, sound of limb and ready for flight, some jennet or jade or -- "Jeep," said Eberly. He stood up and peered around the rocks. No sign of Plagio. Vaguely oudined below him, visible in the starlight only as a rectangular lump on the sand, stood the jeep. "But how?" wondered Eberly aloud. If he retraced his steps, crossing the rock ledge, Plagio would see him. Plagio's heat scanner worked even better at night. Searching the rocks for an alternate exit, he found the only possibility, a sheer descent to the desert floor. Looking at the drop he felt himself sway. It would be difficult during the day. At night, it would be impossible. He decided to wait for dawn, and then descend and try for the jeep. Dawn, tentative, gradual, then more assertive, arrived just as the battery in Eberly's penlight gave out, sending its faint emanations over the desert horizon. Though he had only ten pages to go to finish Don Quixote, he decided to postpone the pleasure. Dawn would rouse Plagio, too. If Plagio arrived before the end of the book -- Eberly broke off, unin his mind. He stuffed his belongings into his jacket, checked the rifle and prepared for the descent. If he were lucky, he would make it to the jeep and freedom before Plagio noticed. "Eberly. " Should he answer? If he failed to answer, Plagio would boldly climb the rocks to inspect, thinking Eberly had escaped in the night. He wanted Plagio pinned in the rocks as long as possible. " What is it now , mind raper!" "Eberly, do you have to use insulting language like that? I have always treated you fairly. " "Like a prize Hereford, ready for milking. " "A Hereford's a steer." "Call it what you will, brain picker! You understand what I mean." "No, I don't, Eberly. I don't understand you at all. I thought I did, once. I thought you were like the rest of us. I thought you knew what was important in life. " "Money." "That's right. What you can't sell in the market place isn't worth having." "It's a form of intellectual prostitution, Plagio.' "Prostitution's a marketable skill, Eberly. If you think Gloria's game, I'm sure I can find a spot for -- " I said." "Oh, Sorry. It's hard to hear in these rocks." "You drain people's minds for profit, PlagiO." "As I said, I harvest a crop. The crop is in demand. It's the way of the world, Eberly. Submit to it." "Submit," muttered Eberly, jacking a shell into the chamber of the #-#, about to pop up over the top of a rock and get ofT a shot. He controlled himself. Plagio probably wanted him to show himself. Though Plagio would have instructed his men to shoot for the torso, thus saving the brain and its engrams, Eberly felt little comfort in the idea. Plagio could extract the engrams for up to two or three hours after death. No, he would remain hidden. "Eberly." "What?" "When did you suddenly get morality?" "What do ijou mean?" " You've worked with me for the last ten years. You've never complained before." "I never complained because I was hooked." "Narcotics? They will interfere with your learning capacity, Eberly. " "Not narcotics-money!" A sarcastic edge came into Plagjio's amplified voice. "But now you're not hooked." Eberly thought about Gloria, about the kids, Ephraim and Ezekiel, both born when he was studying Biblical Greek. The money, arriving every Friday like clock-work, never late, never short, had kept him going. Each time he wanted to do something for himself -- branch out into business, or go back to school and learn something unsaleable (History or Literature) -- money and the soft seduction of luxury, along with Glory's spendthrift nature, kept his nose in a grammer book, conjugating Estonian verbs. Ten years without once doing something for himself. Ten years without taking his eyes from the demands of the market place. Ten years without doing something for its intrinsic worth. It was ten years too long. Plagio might know what Hereford meant -- a Hereford could be sold on the market -- but he would never understand the meaning of intrinsic worth, a thing done for itself, a windmill tilted. No, Eberly was no longer hooked, at least for the moment, on money. He was hooked on something more compelling, something he had to do, if only once, for himself. Casting his eyes up to the last fading star in the west, Eberly, hand in his jacket pocket, held tightly to Don Quixote. "It's time to try for the jeep." The descent was steeper than Eberly anticipated. He tore his pantleg on the rocks, almost dropped the rifle once, and hung by his fingertips innumerable times, sweating and scrambling for a foothold. Eventually, hands tom and bleeding from the sharp rocks, he dropped the last three meters to the desert, narrowly missing a kangoroo rat, who looked at him -- frozen except for its twitching nose -- then fled. "You're lucky," said Eberly to the vanished rat. "No Plagios in your life." During his descent, the sun had climbed up the sky. It baked the desert and broiled Eberly. June was a less than accommodating month in the Mohave. Eberly wished he had a hat. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve, planning his next move. Approach the jeep by stealth or rush it? Should he try for the jeep at all? Plagio or one of his men might be close to it. They could put a bullet through him before he could drop the jeep into low. Perhaps he should exploit his small advantage and head into the desert. And the keys, what if they were in Plagio's pocket? Eberly glanced at the sun. He could almost hear it crackling. No, the desert was out. It had to be the jeep, the jeep or surrend -- "Never." The keys. If the keys were missing, he could sabotage the jeep and try to escape on foot. Either way, it was his only chance. Keeping low, he worked his way around the base of the rock pile. With luck, Plagio would be above him, looking up and shouting into his bullhorn. "Eberly." Hypothesis proved. Plagio was still talking to him. Getting no answer, Plagio would be drawn farther up the rocks and farther away from the jeep. " Eberly , answer me."Eberly chuckled, amused at fooling Plagio, then tensed, freezing behind a man-sized boulder. The scraping footsteps of a man descending in gravel had frozen him. Cautiously, he peered around the boulder, keeping low. The jeep stood on a sand dune about twenty meters from the rocks. Marvin The Extractor, his elongated head like a loaf of bread with hair, approached it. Horrorstruck, Eberly watched as Marvin leaned across the driver's seat and plucked the keys from the ignition. Plagio was one step ahead of him. Throwing caution, and, inadvertently, his penlight, to the wind, Eberly -- leaving his crouch behind the rocks like a Marine leaving a landing craft, rifle gripped at the small of the stock and the barrel, holding it almost horizontal before him, a fearsome, baredtooth leer on his face -- charged. Charging on sand proved a slow business. Still, he managed to surprise Marvin, noting, before Marvin turned, the white bandage on the back of Marvin's head where the vase had landed. Marvin turned, saw Eberly sturggling up the dune, started to laugh -- pointing his finger -- as Eberly took a comic pratfall in the loose sand, changed his mind and went for his sidearm, a .# in a flap holster. Marvin's attempted laugh fueled Eberly's rage. Eberly reached the top of the dune. Marvin had the holster flap up and the gun half-withdrawn. Eberly swung with the rifle butt, connecting with the side of Marvin's loaf-shaped head. Marvin, staring blankly, dazed, stood a moment after the blow, shook his head once, then wilted. His unconscious body began rolling down the dune like a log. Rolling, Marvin's .# went off. "Damn it," muttered Eberly, frowning, "why don't you tell the whole world, Marvin." The shot would bring Plagio. Eberly scrambled after the rolling man. Abruptly, Marvin stopped rolling, almost tripping Eberly. Eberly knelt and gave the prone figure a slight nudge. It flopped on its back, snorting sand and beginning to breathe again. Quickly, Eberly rifled the pockets, coming up with two sets of keys, one presumably for the jeep and the other for Marvin's car. He shook Marvin. "Wake up, you creep." Marvin's eyes started to open, narrow slits in the sand-matted face. Eberly dangled both sets of keys before Marvin's eyes. "Which of these fits the jeep?" The eyes closed. The head lolled. "Marvin, damn it, wake up." He slapped Marvin once. The blow succeeded only in pushing Marvin farther down the dune. Sand kicked up near Marvin's head, followed almost immediately by the sound of rifle fire. Eberly looked up. Plagio and two men, half inch figures resting their rifles on rocks, fired at him. Taking both sets of keys, he left Marvin and started up the dune. Sand hopped and jumped around his feet. He heard one stray round plink off the jeep. Only when he reached the relative safety of the opposite side of the jeep did he look back. Plagio, kneeling, and the two men, standing behind him and firing, had reached the base of the rock pile. Eberly steadied the rifle across the hood of the jeep and fired four quick rounds. Though he could see none of them hit, Plagio, scurrying for the rocks, must have gotten the message. Eberly reloaded and got into the jeep. Frantically, he tried the keys, innumerable keys on both chains. Why did Marvin carry so many keys? Vaguely, Eberly remembered a commeht of Plagio's. Marvin, before setting up as an engram extractor, had stolen cars. It explained much of Marvin's character, the joy he took in his work. Stealing cars, stealing engrains, they both gave Marvin the Eberly stomped the clutch to the floor and twisted the key. The jeep ground, coughed and caught, coming alive. He jammed the gearshift into first and popped the clutch. The jeep lurched, almost seemed to hop, and then stopped, stalled. Eberly restarted it, this time gently releasing the clutch. The engine uttered a decrescendo of slowing, labored, lugging noises, stalling. Eberly checked the emergency brake -- off -- then leaned out to look at the front tire -- flat. At the instant Eberly had popped the clutch, Plagio's aim had evidently proven true. It accounted for the hopping sensation. "What now?" asked Eberly, staring at the flat tire. A bullet shattered the windshield, leaving a hole surrounded by a spiderweb of cracked glass. "Take cover," answered Eberly. He got out of the jeep and crawled under it, positioning himself so Plagio would have to charge straight up the dune and into his rifle fire. Furtively, Plagio attempted to dart from the rocks. Eberly fired. Sand spurted at Plagio's feet. The figure retreated, shaking its fist at Eberly. After several seconds, the bullhorn came on. "Eberly.' Eberly cupped his hands around his mouth, answering. "What?" "You can't escape now. You may have us pinned down but we've got you pinned down, too. And that jeep isn't going anywhere. It's a standoff, Eberly. Give up." Suddenly, inexplicably, doubt surfaced in Eberly 's mind. Plagio was right, a standoff. What could he hope to gain by resisting Plagio? Actually, the man wanted nothing more than his due, completion of the illegal contract. What was wrong with that? In return, Eberly would get not only his life, something he had always found useful, but life in luxury. Conscious of his own mortality, conscious of the shortness of life, conscious also that he was outgunned, Eberly considered submitting. He had responsibilities, Gloria and the children. Selfishness, a quality he abhorred on principle though practiced from time to time, was no reason to deny his family the good life, was it? He imagined Gloria in the welfare line, dress in rags, hair frazzled, people crowding in front of her. He imagined Ephraim and Ezekiel, selling pencils, begging from strangers, their eyes tearfilled and pitiful. And why? Eberly crawled out from under the jeep, disgusted with himself, preparing to surrender. He stood up and took the copy of Don Quixote from his pocket, glaring at it. "Because of you," he snarled. " That's why!" He hurled the book to the sand and began hopping on it with both feet. "You! You! You! Traitor! Seducer! What the hell good are you anyway?" He stopped hopping, stepping back from the book. It had fallen on its spine, open to the page with Eberly's bookmark. He looked at the half-buried book, breathing deeply and trying to control his fury, pondering. A bullet whizzed past his ear, jerking him from his ponderings. He dropped to the sand, nose inches from the book. Plagio, unaware of Eberly's intent to surrender, was still firing. "Plagio ," shouted Eberly. The firing ceased. "What?" "I want -- " The words seemed to stick in his throat. "You want what?" "I want to -- " Eberly broke off, his attention attracted by the page in front of his nose. He began to read. " You want to what?" coaxed Plagio. "Just a minute." "Eberly?" "Just a minute!" Eberly became lost in the knight's final return home. Sancho Panza's wife, Joan Panza, after asking about the health of Sancho's donkey (Better, answered the squire, than that of the master), inquired what profit the squire had gained from his adventures, what dresses for Mrs. Panza, what shoes for the children? I bring none of these things, good wife, quoth Sancho, although I bring other things of more moment and estimation. "More moment and estimation," mumbled Eberly, sniffing, a tear beginning its journey down his cheek. Doubt again surfaced in his mind, this time challenging his desire to surrender. His voice changed, hardening, determination encrusting every syllable. "More moment and estimation." He looked over the top of the book. Plagio was nowhere in sight. "Plagio!" No answer. He looked down the sloping dune. Something odd, or rather, the lack of. something odd -- Marvin -- attracted his attention. Had Marvin revived? Or -- Grasping the book in one hand and the rifle in the other, Eberly crawled under the jeep, elbows and knees dragging him forward. He reached the crest of the dune. Temorously, he looked over. The dune dipped in the area of Marvin's body, creating natural cover, obscuring Eberly's line of fire. He could see the tops of three heads behind the dip. While Eberly read, Plagio and his men had reached Marvin. They advanced out of the divot on their stomachs. Seeing him, they fired, rifles blazing in rapid succession. Sand hopped and skipped on all sides. Repositioning the book slightly, Eberly rested the rifle barrel along the book's inner crease and aimed. He fired twice, halting Plagio's advance. He glanced down at the page next to the barrel, reading on. Proceeding in this manner, firing and reading, pausing occasionally to turn a page or reload, Eberly impeded Plagio's advance and followed Don Quixote's. He read through the sonnets and epitaphs of the last few pages, eventually arriving at both the last paragraph and his last bullet. A scholar, read Eberly, had been given the moldy, time-worn papers treating of the life and doings of Don Quijote de la Mancha and had, according to the author, (someone named Cervantes) deciphered them. They promised to tell of further exploits, a third sally for the great knight. "A third sally," said Eberly, closing the book and firing the last round. Another tear formed in his eye as he wistfully imagined the third sally. "Eberly." The voice of reality. "What?" "By my count, you're out of ammunition. We re coming up." Eberly rolled on his back, throwing his arms out to either side and letting the sun warm his face. He spoke quietly. "Come and get me, vulture. I'm ready." He could hear Plagio marching up the dune. What had Plagio scheduled him for next time? Ah, yes, Russian. For the fifth time, Russian. In that word, Eberly saw his future. Russian would be harder than Spanish. First of all, that funny alphabet, like barbed-wire he would have to penetrate to get at the language. Secondly, it would take more time and effort to plan carefully, plus more endurance to carry out the plan. Momentarily, he shuddered at the rigors that lay ahead. At the same time, he welcomed them. What else could a man do who was driven from within? What else could a man do who was only on page fifteen of War and Peace? Galaxy IF Dialogue ## I'm warning you. Miss...Ms.? Sorry. You're taking a terrible risk going in there. You don't know Alter-Ego the way I do. If he even suspects for an instant that you're a girl...woman. Sorry. If you insist. Just do me a favor and keep in the shadows and if you don't mind hunching your shoulders forward... Sorry. It's just if he sees those big... Yes, he is a sexist. For your own protection, if you'd pull that man's shirt looser from your jeans... And don't say a word! Not a sound. Yeah, pull the bolts while I unlock those Yales. I know -- got to bring the oilcan down one of these times. The screech gets worse each time they're pulled. Now, the chains... Hold the lantern high as I pull this big mother open... Sorry. Watch the steps. The slime... Oh, that's from when I stepped on his pet spider. An obscene affection... Never forgave me. Never cleaned up the mess, either. Sloppy. Where is he? We don't dare go too far from the door. Those side Where are you?" "I'm coming, Geis. You pick the worst times to visit...no damn privacy even in your own dungeon! Bad enough having to use a hole in the rock floor as a privy and having to keep it cov"Ohh...just a fan. Nobody special. An observer." "Why is he hunched over by that stack of mouldy fanzines? I'm not going to sell any of them, you! An 'observer'? What if I don't want to be observed, hall? You selling bi-monthly tickets, Geis? 'See the Freak'? 'Ten bucks for a visit to the dungeon to peek at the dreaded Alter-Ego'? That your gimmick? Hey, you, how much did he con you out of?" "Alter, it's time for you to vent your spleen. You know how ill you get if it isn't vented every few months." "I'll vent when I feel like 'it. Hey, you! I asked you a question! Get away from those copies of "Leave him alone. Alter. He doesn't want any of those ancient crudzines from your youth. Now about your emmission of bile -- " "I'll spurt my bile up your -- Hey...is that a girl?" "Girl? Don't be ridiculous. Now, I order you by my wearing of the Amulet and the Ring and the Scret Words: Yug Sluggoth Thunkis Fgn-thi-Ulgudd..." "Okay, okay, okay. Geez, my sinuses... Let's see now. Current trends in science fiction...there is the matter of 'literary values' beginning to pollute the precious bodily fluids of science fie -- You sure that isn't a girl? I never saw a guy with bumps like... Hmm. Sorry, fella. No insult intended. You oughta go on a diet, though." "Alter, attend to the bile." "Sorry, Geis. Bile... Yes. You have touched me where I live. I love to rant and rave against the organized conspiracy, the plot to destroy science fiction as we know it! The enemy is everywhere, insidiously scheming... Well, you know I've been reading all my life and I make no bones about it. I've had it up to here -- over my bloody head! -- with what are called 'literary values'. They are an intellectual con-game, an elitist ego-trip, a -- what's a good third phrase, Geis? Gotta balance my sentence." "Uhhh..." "Hopeless. You're -- " "All right, let's hear you define exactly 'literary values'. You hate them so much, you ought to know what you hate." "C'mon, Geis, you know! Excessive, pretentious, obsessive characterization. Deep, Important Thoughts. Significance. No science fiction writer alive today can win a Hugo or a Nehula without a heap of Significance and Symbolism. Actually, Symbolism is even better -- a good Christ-figure, a birth trauma, an Earth Mother...a Succubus...the orgasmic Symbolism, for instance, of Bob Shaw's hero in his phallus spaceship thrusting, raping, the vagina' of Orbitsville and going deep into the dyson sphere 'womb'...now that's Symbolism! Of course, a good critic can find a Symbol in any story or scene or... Writers always use symbols...it's unavoidable." "So how are these hated 'literary values' ruining science fiction? And let me say, Alter, that this all has a familiar ring to it. Can't you rant about something else?" "Of course, and I will next time, Geis. I'm just reinforcing an engram. Hitting the nail on the head to drive it deeper. Repetition is the heart of propaganda, the soul of advertising, the karma of -- " "Get on with it." "It comes down to...well, let me explain it this way. See, in porno writing -- at which you are an expert, eh? -- the sex imperative overpowers every other narrative consideration. The plot, characterization, locale, the whole schmeer is bent and twisted to serve the sex scenes, sex scenes, and more sex scenes. Right? So. What is happening in science fiction nowdays is that the genre is sliding gradually into the bed of the literary mainstreamand getting seduced...seduced... You sure that isn't a girl?" "That is not a 'girl'. Seduced how? Make your point." "Getting seduced -- well, gradually the science fiction plots, the themes, the stereotypes, are being warped to serve mainstream ends. What price acceptance, eh, Geis? Too many science fiction writers nowdays are writing bastard science fiction, science fiction molded to the mainstream symbolism imperative, characteriza            # Eighth Ave , New York, N. Y. # #-#  i  ;: -,c i  c tion imperative, significance imperative, relevance imperative...all clumped into a general 'literary values' imperative. See?" "In a word. Alter, science fiction is being prostituted?" prostituted science fiction to the porno imperative, so these latter-day (and some older-day) writers are prostituting science way -- so they think -- to serve 'literary values' and reap the heavy fringe benefits of intellectual elitism and respectability. Science fiction should be fun and and entertaining (and still is now and then because a few editors and a few writers still cling to the reader imperative), but more and more it is boring, serious, egotrippy, Literary...serving a new set of masters. Hail and farewell." "You exaggerate. You overstate. You oversimplify." "Maybe. But when certain leading lights in the s-f scene lust for respectability and academic acceptance and start calling their work and our genre 'speculative fiction' and 'speculative fantasy', that's a signal I find difficult to ignore." "Alter, you are a troglodyte, an arch reactionary with your head buried firmly in #. That was the year, I recall, that you read your first science fiction magazine -- a tattered copy of "Sure, sure, I know that old put-down: there's a ten-year-old in this #-year-old mass of aches and pains who is yowling for the good old days. I'm hip that most of those pulp-days stories were God-Awful and I'd hold my nose if I read them today. But -- " "Alter, you are a common person! You want action, suspense, danger, life-and-death, gosh-wow, malevolent aliens, space wars...all that discredited raygun FI ash Gordon  Buck Rogers jazz." "damn right! If it's done realistically and with skill and talent. And you can keep the weak, palid, gutless, soul-searching, whining, mystical, considerate, socially conscious crap that's passing as science fiction today. Writers today are becoming afraid to be entertainers and 'commercial' in science fiction now. They'll be sneered at, they fear, and not approved for reading in S-F #I at Academic State College. We have come to that." "But, if this new type of science fiction is what the readers want..." "Oh, Geis! In the depression of the Thirties science fiction magazines sold more copies than they do now! Now IF is gone. down to #-# readers and may not last out theyear. This magazine may be on the ragged "Well, there's TV, poor distribution of magazines..." "Bullshit. If there were as many science fiction programs on TV as there are detective shows, I'd maybe agree...to a degree. But printed fiction has many advantages over TV fiction -- if it's distribution argument...if s-f mags sold out, if there was a demand for the mags, you better believe the distributors would deliver. Money imperative always commands. That's what the market is all about, the s-f mags are mostly suffering because the readers don't much like what they're printing. Too many people in the s-f field have forgotten why people buy fiction! Fiction, damn it, should aim for the guts, the groin, and the brain in that order. Science fiction has to add Wonder." jft jjC Sfc Up yours Alter -- IF was going up by (censored) per issue, but the margin-of-profit per issue was going down almost as fast. Aside from which, raising the newsstand sales (censOred) only means, say, five extra copies to the average newsie. Or to put in in the words of the dealer on my corner: "Twice nothin, is still nothin, Jack." He sells hundreds of copies of Reader's Digest every month, Alter. If he doesn't get his shipment of sf-mags one month, so what does he care? Not much, Alter, not much. And paper, Alter -- what about paper!? They wouldn't give us any, Alter. Oh, Alter, you (censored) seepage from Geis's subconscious, you've touched me to the quick. I do publish stories that are good to read -- I do, I do! -- Baen "God, you're a presumptuous know-it-all. How -- " "I'm not saying the mix shouldn't be varied in emphasis, but in the last ten years or so science fiction has gotten brain (intellect) heavy...self-consciously Arty...and the readership has shrunk and shrunk... Soon science fiction will be owned by the professors; written for the professors, and read by the professors -- and their classes. " "There you go off the deep end again!" "Watch it happen, Geis! Now -- get the hell out of here and take that tempting morsel with you -- not that you'd ever leave her. God! I -- can't -- control -- myself -- any -- " "Keep away from her, Alter! Miss...Ms. keep away from him! You're playing with dynam -- " those -- " "Stop it! Alter! By the Amulet, by the Ring, I command thee -- Yug Thunkis Fgm-thu...thi Ulglud..." " Ahhh...umm... shriek pant-pant-pant How disgusting. Still, I did warn her...and...it's not as if she isn't...in fact...hmm... Well, I'll just read this tattered until they're finished. Man, look at Alter go! It had been a long time for him. Let's see now... 'Although I have written over a hundred twenty books, on almost every subject...' yawn. Man, look at them go.  I had been back in Amber for less than a week when my brother Caine was killed, killed in such a fashion as to make me the logical suspect. Only, I had arrived on the scene a trifle ahead of schedule. I got my hands on the real culprit and intended to question him. He was understandably displeased with this, and circumstances required that I kill him in order to deal properly with his displeasure. This left me more than displeased. It left me without an adequate defense. But there was something strangely familiar about the guy: He strongly resembled one of those creatures which had come in pursuit of Random, back when he had sought sanctuary at Flora's place in Westchester, years ago. I buried Caine and bore his killer's remains to the palace. Random had never explained what had been going on back at that time. I realized I had better have the story fast, before I let the others know what had become of Caine. When I got to him, Random told me that years before, when he had been living off in Shadow, he had received a cryptic message from our missing brother, Brand. Brand had indicated that he was a prisoner in a peculiar place: a burning, sunless land of revolving rocks and drifting dead. There he was held in an isolated tower, guarded by a transparent serpent and a squad of strange troops. Random had decided to go to his rescue. Steering his sail plane through Shadow to that place. Random had mounted to the tower and fought with the serpent. He finally dispatched the creature, but was unable to effect Brand's release. Weaponless, battered and with a sprained ankle, he had been forced to flee aboard one of the moving boulders. He was pursued by the tower's guards, with whom he fought several skirmishes. In the process, he learned of their anatomical peculiarities, the features they shared with Caine's killer. He fled through Shadow, and somehow they were able to pursue him, an exercise normally restricted to those who are related by blood to the royal family of Amber. He finally decided to head for the shadow Earth, where sister Flora dwelled. In the meantime, he was contacted by Julian, via his Trump, and advised that Eric was contemplating taking the throne, in light of Dad's Tong and unaccountable absence. Various speculations had passed through his mind at this point, but there was really nothing he could do about the situation, one way or the other. Arriving in California and discovering that his pursuers were still with him, Random had phoned Flora's place and I had received the call. He had flown over in response to my offer of assistance, and the creatures had not been far behind. The rest I knew. Of all the conjectures we then made, the only one that seemed certain was that some part of the family itself was behind the entire business. That in mind, it seemed advisable to have at hand every weapon available to me. So I fetched the Jewel of Judgment and took it down to the Pattern, where I went through the process of attuning it. This was a somewhat involved procedure, but its results were satisfactory. After that, I was able to use it for purposes of controlling the elements. I then questioned Flora at some length as to how she had come to be my warden off on that shadow Earth. She alleged having encountered me by accident, in France, on the eve of those events which so delight historical novelists, around the end of the eighteenth century. She had told Eric of this and became his confidante as to how I had gotten where I was. She agreed to take up residence in that place and keep an eye on me in return for favors to come. She refused to admit any direct involvement in my accident. It seemed to me that she knew more than she was telling, but I was in an awkward position when it came to pressing her on that point; that is, I was still missing a few days from my memory collection, and this was a matter I wanted to keep to myself. She agreed to identify tbe corpse of Caine's slayer as of the same ilk as those who had once pursued Random into her home. She agreed to support me in anything I might be about. Blessed are the pure in heart. I went and got drunk in my tomb and told Canelon my troubles. The following day, Gerard accompanied me to the Grove of the Unicorn, to retrieve Caine's body. On the way, he paused to beat me unconscious, to show me he could still do it, to show me he could make good on what he then promised; i.e., that he Would kill me if I should turn out to be the one behind the plot that was obviously underfoot, overhead and pressing in on all sides. The others, he informed me, were watching his performance over his Trump, so that any reprisal against him would constitute an admission of guilt on my part. I told him -- and my viewing audience, by proxy -- that this did not necessarily follow, and I had to let it go at that. There was nothing much else that I could do. We proceeded to the grove and disinterred Caine. While we were about it, the unicorn put in an appearance. I had never seen it before and neither had Gerard. I hoped it was a good omen, for the beast is the patron of Amber. Then we headed back, and I had a definite course of action in mind for a change, for that Evening. One that involved -- unavoidably -- cooperation on the part of the family. VI. Life's incessant ceremonies leap everlasting, humans spring eternal on hope's breast ana frying pans without fires are often far between: the sum of my long life's wisdom that evening, tendered in a spirit of creative anxiety, answered by Random with a nod and a friendly obscenity. We were in the library, and I was seated on the edge of the big desk. Random occupied a chair to my right. Gerard stood at the other end of the room, inspecting some weapons that hung on the wall. Or maybe it was Rein's etching of the unicorn he was looking at. Whichever, along with ourselves, he was also ignoring Julian, who was slouched in an easy chair beside the display cases, right center, legs extended and crossed at the ankles, arms folded, staring down at his scaley boots. Fiona -- five-two, perhaps, in height -- green eyes fixed on Flora's blue own as they spoke, there beside the fireplace, hair more than compensating for the vacant hearth, smouldering, reminded me, as always, of something from which the artist had just drawn back, setting aside his tools, questions slowly forming behind his smile. The place at the base of her throat where his thumb had notched the collarbone always drew my eyes as the mark of a master craftsman, especially when she raised her head, quizzical or imperious, to regard us taller others. She smiled faintly, just then, doubtless aware of my gaze, an almost clairvoyant faculty the acceptance of which has never deprived of its ability to disconcert. Llewella, off in a corner, pretending to study a book, had her back to the rest of us, her green tresses bobbed a couple inches above her dark collar. Whether her withdrawal involved animus, self-consciousness in her alienation or simple caution, I could never be certain. Probably something of all these. Hers was not that familiar a presence in Amber... And the fact that we constituted a collection of individuals rather than a group, a family, at a time when I wanted to achieve some over-identity, some will to cooperate, was what led to my observations and Random's acknowledgement. I felt a familiar presence, heard a "Hello, Corwin' and there was Deirdre, reaching toward me. I extended my hand, clasped her own, raised it. She took a step forward, as if to the first strain of some formal dance and moved close, facing me. For an instant, a rilled window had framed her ead and shoulders and a rich tapestry had adorned the wall to her left. Planned and posed, of course. Still, effective. She held my Trump in her left hand. She smiled. The others glanced our way as she appeared and she hit them all with that smile, like the Mona Lisa with a machine gun, turning slowly. "Corwin," she said, kissing me briefly and withdrawing, "I fear I am early." "Never," I replied, turning toward Random, who had just risen and who anticipated me by seconds. "May I fetch you a drink, sister?" he asked, taking her hand and nodding toward the sideboard. "Why, yes. Thank you," and he led her off and poured her some wine, avoiding or at least postponing, I suppose, her usual clash with Flora. At least, I assumed most of the old frictions were still alive as I remembered them. So if it cost me her company for the moment it also maintained the domestic tranquility index, which V'as important to me just then. Random can be good at such things when he wants to. I drummed the side of the desk with my fingertips, I rubbed my aching shoulder, I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, I debated lighting a cigarette... Suddenly, he was there. At the far end of the room, Gerard had turned to his left, said something and extended his hand. An instant later, he was clasping the left and only hand of Benedict, the final member of our group. All right. The fact that Benedict had chosen to come in on Gerard's Trump rather than mine was his way of expressing his feelings toward me. Was it also an indication of an alliance to keep me in check? It was at least calculated to make me wonder. Could it have been Benedict who had put Gerard up to our morning's exercise? Quite possibly. At that moment, Julian rose to his feet, crossed the room, gave Benedict a word and a handclasp. This activity attracted Llewella. She turned, closing her book and laying it aside. Smiling then, she advanced and greeted Benedict, nodded to Julian, said something to Gerard. The impromptu conference warmed, grew animated. All right again, and again. Four and three. And two in the middle... I waited, staring at the group across the room. We were all present, and I could have asked them for attention and proceeded with what I had in mind. However. , . It was too tempting. All of us could feel the tension, I knew. It was as if a pair of magnetic poles had suddenly been activated within the room. I was curious to see how all the filings would fall. Flora gave me one quick glance. I doubted she had changed her mind overnight -- unless, of course, there had been some new development. No, I felt confident that I had anticipated the next move. Nor was I incorrect. I overheard her mentioning thirst and a glass of wine. She turned partway and made a move in my direction, as if expecting Fiona to accompany her. She hesitated a moment when this did not occur, suddenly became the focus of the entire company's attention, realized this fact, made a quick decision, smiled and moved in my direction. "Corwin," she said, "I believe I would like a glass of wine." Without turning my head or removing my gaze from the tableau before me, I called back over my shoulder, "Random, pour Flora a glass of wine, would you?" "But of course," he replied, and I heard the necessary sounds. Flora nodded, unsmiled and passed beyond me to the right. Four and four, leaving dear Fiona burning brightly in the middle of the room. Totally selfconscious and enjoying it, she turned immediately toward the oval mirror with the dark, intricately carved frame, hanging in the space between the two nearest tiers of shelves. She proceeded to adjust a stray strand of hair in the vicinity of her left temple. Her movement produced a flash of green and silver among the red and gold geometries of the carpet, near to the place where her left foot had rested. I had simultaneous desires to curse and to smile. The arrant bitch was playing games with us again. Always remarkable, though... Nothing had changed. Neither cursing nor smiling, I moved forward, as she had known I would. But Julian, too, approached, and a trifle more quickly than I. He had been a bit nearer, may have spotted it a fraction of an instant sooner. He scooped it up and dangled it gently. "Your bracelet, sister," he said pleasantly, "It seems to have forsaken your wrist, foolish thing. -- Here. Allow me." She extended her hand, giving him one of those lowered-eyelasn smiles while he refastened her chain of emeralds. Completing the business, he folded her hand within both of his own and began to turn back toward his corner, from whence the others were casting sidelong glances while attempting to seem locally occupied. 'I believe you would be amused by a witticism we are about to share -- " he began. Her smile grew even more delightful as she disengaged her hand. "Thank you, Julian," she relied. "I am certain that when I ear it I will laugh. Last, as usual, I fear." She turned and took my arm. "I find that I feel a greater desire," she said, "for a glass of wine." So I took her back with me and saw her refreshed. Five and four. Julian, who dislikes showing strong feelings, reached a decision a few moments later and followed us over. He poured himself a glass, sipped from it, studied me for ten or fifteen seconds, then said, "I believe we are all present now. When do you plan proceeding with whatever you nave in mind?" "I see no reason for further delay," I said, "now that everyone has had his turn." I raised my voice then and directed it across the room. "The time has come. Let us get comfortable." The others drifted over. Chairs were dragged up and settled into. More wine was poured. A minute later we had an audience. "Thank you," I said when the final stirrings had subsided. "I have a number of things I would like to say, and some of them might even get said. The course of it all will depend on what goes before, and we will get into that right now. Random, tell them what you told me yesterday." "All right." I withdrew to the seat behind the desk arid Random moved to occupy the edge of it. I leaned back and listened again to the story of his communication with Brand and his attempt to rescue him. It was a condensed version, bereft of the speculations which had not really strayed from my consciousness since Random had put them there. And despite their omission, a tacit awareness of the implications was occurring within all the others. I knew that. It was the main reason I had wanted Random to speak first. Had I simply come out with an attempt to make a case for my suspicions, I would almost certainly have been assumed to be engaged in the time-honored practice of directing attention away from myself -- an act to be followed immediately by the separate, sharp, metallic clicks of minds snapping shut against me. This way, despite any thoughts that Random would say whatever I wanted him to say, they would hear him out, wondering the while. They would toy with the ideas, attempting to foresee the point of my having called the assembly in the first place. They would allow die time that would permit the premises to take root contingent upon later corroboration. And they would be wondering whether we could produce the evidence. I was wondering that same thing myself. While I waited and wondered I watched the others, a fruitless yet inevitable exercise. Simple curiosity, more than suspicion even, required that I search these faces for reactions, clues, indications -- the faces that I knew better than any others, to the limits of my understanding such things. And of course they told me nothing. Perhaps it is true that you really only look at a person the first time that you see him, and after that you do a quick bit of mental shorthand each time that you recognize him. My brain is lazy enough to give that its likelihood, using its abstracting powers and a presumption of regularity to avoid work whenever possible. This time I forced myself to see though, and it still did not help. Julian maintained his slightly bored, slightly amused mask. Gerard appeared alternately surprised, angry and wistful. Benedict just looked bleak and suspicious. Llewella seemed as sad and inscrutable as ever. Deirdre looked distracted. Flora acquiescent and Fiona was studying everyone else, myself included, assembling her own catalogue of reactions. The only thing that I could tell, after some time, was that Random was making an impression. While no one betrayed himself, I saw the boredom vanish, the old suspicion abate, the new suspicion come to life. Interest rose among my kin. Fascination, almost. Then everyone had questions. At first a few, then a barrage. "Wait," I finally interrupted. "Let him finish. The whole thing. Some of these will answer themselves. Get the others afterwards." There were nods and growls, and Random proceeded through to the real end. That is, he carried it on to our fight with the beastmen at Flora's, indicating that they were of the same ilk as the one who had slain Caine. Flora endorsed this part. Then, when the questions came, I watched them carefully. So long as they dealt with the matter of Random's story, they were all to the good. But I wanted to cut things short of speculation as to the possibility of one of us being behind it all. As soon as that came out, talk of me and the smell of red herring would also drift in. This could lead to ugly words and the emergence of a mood I was not anxious to engender. Better to go for the proof first, save on later recriminations, corner the culprit right now if possible and consolidate my position on the spot. So I watched and waited. When I felt that the vital moment had ticked its way too near I stopped the clock. "None of this discussion, this speculation, would be necessary," I said, "if we had all of the facts right now. And there may be a way to get them -- right now. That is why you are here. That did it. I had them. Atten"I propose we attempt to reach Brand and bring him home," I said, "now." "How?" Benedict asked me. "The Trumps." "It has been tried," said Julian. "He cannot be reached that way. No response." "I was not referring to the ordinary usage," I said. "I asked you all to bring full sets of Trumps with you. I trust that you have them?" There were nods. "Good," I said. "Let us shuffle out Brand's Trump now. I propose that all nine of us attempt to contact him simultaneously." "An interesting thought," Benedict said. "Yes," Julian agreed, producing his deck and riffling through it. "Worth trying, at least. It may generate additional power. I do not really know." I located Brand's Trump. I waited until all the others had found it. Then, "Let us coordinate things," I said. "Is everyone ready?" Eight assents were spoken. "Then go ahead. Try. Now." I studied my card. Brand's features were similar to my own, but he was shorter and slenderer. His hair was like Fiona's. He wore a green riding suit. He rode a white horse. How long ago? How long ago was that? I wondered. Something of a dreamer, a mystic, a f oet. Brand was always disilusioned or elated, cynical or wholly trusting. His feelings never seemed to find a middle ground. Manic-depressive is too facile a term for his complex character, yet might serve to indicate a direction of departure, multitudes of qualifications lining the roadway thereafter. Pursuant to this state of affairs, I must admit that there were times when I found him so charming, considerate and loyal that I valued him above all my other kin. Other times, however, he could be so bitter, sarcastic and downright savage that I tried to avoid his company for fear I might do him harm. Summing up, the last time that I had seen him had been one of the latter occasions, just a bit before Eric and I had had the falling out that led to my exile from Amber... And those were my thoughts and feelings as I studied his Trump, reaching out to him with my mind, my will, opening the vacant place I sought him to fill. About me, the others shuffled their own memories and did the same. Slowly, the card took on a dream-dust quality and acquired the illusion of depth. There followed that familiar blurring, with the sense of movement which heralds contact with the subject. The Trump grew colder beneath my fingertips, and then things flowed and formed, achieving a sudden verity of vision, persistent, dramatic, full. He seemed to be in a cell. There was a stone wall behind him. There was straw on the floor. He was manacled, and his chain ran back through a huge ring bolt set in the wall above and behind him. ft was a fairly long chain, providing sufficient slack for movement, and at the moment he was taking advantage of this fact, lying sprawled on a heap of straw ana rags, off in the corner. His hair ana beard were quite long, his face thinner than I had ever before seen it. His clothes were tattered and filthy. He seemed to be sleeping. My mind went back to my own imprisonment -- the smells, the cold, the wretched fare, the dampness, the loneliness, the madness that came and went. At least he still had his eyes, for they flickered and I saw them when several of us spoke his name: green they were, with a flat, vacant look. Was he drugged? Or did he believe himself to be hallucinating? But suddenly his spirit returned. He raised himself. He extended his hand. "Brothers!" he said. "Sisters..." "I'm coming!" came a shout that shook the room. Gerard had leaped to his feet, knocking over nis chair. He dashed across the room and snatched a great battle axe from its pegs on the wall. He slung it at his wirst, holding the Trump in that same hand. For a moment he froze, studying the card. Then he extended his free hand and suddenly he was there, clasping Brand, who chose that moment to pass out again. The image wavered. The contact was broken. Cursing, I sought through the pack after Gerard's own Trump. Several of the others seemed to be doing the same thing. Locating it, I moved for contact. Slowly, the melting, the turning, the re-forming occurred. There! Gerard had drawn the chain taut across the stones of the wall and was attacking it with the axe. It was a heavy thing, however, and resisted his powerful blows for a long while. Eventually, several of the links were mashed and scarred, but by then he had been at it for almost two minutes, and the ringing, chopping sounds had alerted the jailers. For there were noises from the left -- a rattling sound, the sliding of bolts, the creaking of hinges. Although my field of perception did not extend that far, it seemed obvious that the cell's door was being opened. Brand raised himself once more. Gerard continued to hack at the chain. "Gerard! The door!" I shouted. "I know!" he bellowed, wrapping the chain about his arm and yanking it. It did not yield. Then he let go the chain and swung the axe, as one of the horny handed warriors rushed him, blade upraised. The swordsman fell, to be replaced by another. Then a third and a fourth crowded by them. Others were close on their heels. There was a blur of movement at that moment and Random knelt within the tableau, his right hand clasped with Brand's, his left holding his chair before him like a shield, its legs pointing outward. He sprang to his feet and rushed the attackers, driving the chair like a battering ram into their midst. They fell back. He raised the chair and swung it. One lay dead on the floor, fallen to Gerard's axe. Another had drawn off to one side, clutching at the stump of his right arm. Random produced a dagger and left it in a nearby stomach, brained two more with the chair and drove the final man back. Eerily, while this was going on, the dead man rose above the floor and slowly drifted upward, The one who had been stabbed collapsed to his knees, clutching at the blade. In the meantime, Gerard had taken hold of the chain with both hands. He braced one foot against the wall and commenced to pull. His shoulders rose as the great muscles tightened across his back. The chain held. Ten seconds, perhaps. Fifteen... Then, with a snap and a rattle, it parted. Gerard stumbled backward, catching himself with an outflung hand. He glanced back, apparently at Random, who was out of my line of sight at the moment. Seemingly satisfied, he turned away, stooped and raised Brand, who had fallen unconscious again. Holding him in his arms, he turned and extended one hand from beneath the limp form. Random leaped back into sight beside them, sans chair, and gestured to us also. All of us reached for them, and a moment later they stood in our midst and we crowded round. A sort of cheer had gone up as we rushed to touch him, to see him, our brother who had been gone these many years and just now snatched back from his mysterious captors. And at last, hopefully, finally, some answers might also have been liberated. Only he looked so weak, so thin, so pale... "Get back!" Gerard shouted. "I'm taking him to the couch! Then you can look all you -- " Dead silence. For everyone had backed off, and then turned to stone. This was because there was blood on Brand, and it was dripping. And this was because there was a knife in his left side, to the rear. It had not been there moments before. Some one of us had just tried for his kidney and possibly succeeded. I was not heartened by the fact that the Random-Corwin Conjecture that it was One Of Us Behind It All had just received a significant boost. I had an instant during which to concentrate all my faculties in an attempt to mentally photograph everyone's position. Then the spell was broken. Gerard bore Brand to the couch and we drew aside; and we all knew that we all realized not only what had happened, but what it implied. Gerard set Brand down in a prone position and tore away his filthy shirt. "Get me clean water, to bathe him," he said. "And towels. Get me saline solution and glucose and something to . hang them from. Get me a whole medical kit." Deirdre and Flora moved toward the door. "My quarters are closest," said Random. "One of you will find a medical kit there. But the onlv IV stuff is in the lab on the third floor. I'd better come and help." They departed together. We had all had medical training somewhere along the line, both here and abroad. That which we learned in Shadow though, had to be modified in Amber. Most antibiotics from the shadow worlds, for example, were ineffectual here. On the other hand, our personal immunological processes appear to behave differently from those of any other peoples we have studied, so that it is much more difficult for us to become infected -- and, if infected, we deal with it more expeditiously. Then, too, we possess profound regenerative abilities. All of which is as it must be, of course, the ideal necessarily being superior to its shadows. Ana Amberites that we are, and aware of these facts from an early age, all of us obtained medical training relatively soon in life. Basically, despite what is often said about being your own physician, it goes back to our not unjustified distrust of virtually everyone, and most particularly those who might hold our lives in their hands. All of which partly explains why I did not rush to shoulder Gerard aside to undertake Brand's treatment myself, despite the fact that I had been through a med school on the shadow Earth within the past couple generations. The other part of the explanation is that Gerard was not letting anyone else near Brand. Julian and Fiona had both moved forward, apparently with the same thing in mind, only to encounter Gerard's left arm like a gate at a railway crossing. "No," he had said. "I know that I did not do it, and that is all that I know. There will be no second chance for anyone else." With any one of us sustaining that sort of wound while in an otherwise sound condition, I would say that if he made it through the first half hour he would make it. Brand, though... The shape he was in... There was no telling. When the others returned with the materials and equipment, Gerard cleaned Brand, sutured the wound and dressed it. He hooked up the IV, broke off the manacles with a hammer and chisel Random had located, covered Brand with a sheet and a blanket and took his pulse again. "How is it?" I asked. "Weak," he said, and he drew up a chair and seated himself beside the couch. "Someone fetch me my blade -- and a glass of wine. I didn't have any. Also, if there is any food left over there, I'm hungry." Llewella headed for the sideboard and Random got him his blade from the rack behind the door. "Are you just going to camp there?" Random asked, passing him the weapon. "I am." "What about moving Brand to a better bed?" "He is all right where he is. I will decide when he can be moved. In the meantime, someone get a fire going. Then put out a few of those candles." Random nodded. "I'll do it," he said. Then he picked up the knife Gerard had drawn from Brand's side, a thin stiletto, its blade about seven inches in length. He held it across the palm of his hand. "Does anyone recognize this?" he asked. "Not I," said Benedict. "Nor I," said Julian. "No," I said. The girls shook their heads. Random studied it. "Easily concealed -- up a sleeve, in a boot or bodice. It took real nerve to use it that way..." "Desperation," I said. "...And a very accurate anticipation of our mob scene. Inspired, almost." "Could one of the guards have done it?" Julian asked. "Back in the cell?" "No," Gerard said. "None of them came near enough." "It looks to be decently balanced for throwing," Deirdre said. "It is," said Random, shifting it about his fingertips. "Only none of them had a clear shot or the opportunity. I'm positive." Llewella returned, bearing a tray containing slabs of meat, naif a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and a goblet. I cleared a small table and set it beside Gerard's chair. As Llewella deposited the tray, she asked, "But why? That only leaves us. Why would one of us want to do it?" I sighed. "Whose prisoner do you think he might have been?" I asked. "One of us?" "If he possessed knowledge length to suppress, what do you think? The same reason also served to put him where he was and keep him there." Her brows tightened. "That does not make sense either. Why didn't they just kill him and be done with it?" Must have had some use for him," I said. "But there is really only one person who can answer that question adequately. When you find him, ask him." "Or her," Julian said. "Sister, you seem possessed of a superabundance of naivete, suddenly." Her gaze locked with Julian's own, a pair of icebergs reflecting frigid infinities. 'As I recall," she said, "you rose from your seat when they came through, turned to the left, rounded the desk and stood slightly to Gerard s right. You leaned pretty far forward. I believe your hands were out of sight, below." "... And as I recall," he said, "you were within striking distance yourself, off to Gerard's left -- and leaning forward." "I would have had to do it with my left hand -- and I am righthanded. # "Perhaps he owes what life he still possesses to that fact." "You seem awfully anxious, Julian, to find that it was someone else." "All right," I said. "All right! You know this is self-defeating. Only one of us did it, and this is not the way to smoke him out." "... Or her," Julian added. Gerard rose, towered, glared. "I will not have you disturbing my patient," he said. "And Random, you said you were going to see to the fire." "Right away," Random said, and moved to do it. "Let us adjourn to the sitting room off the main hall," I said, "downstairs. -- Gerard, I will post a couple guards outside the door here.' "No," Gerard said. "I would rather that anyone who wishes to try it get this far. I will hand you his head in the morning." I nodded. "Well, you can ring for anything you need -- or call one of us on the Trumps. We will fill you in in the morning on anything that we learn." "Gerard seated himself, runted and began eating. Ranom got the fire going and extinuished some lights. Brand's lanket rose and fell, slowly but regularly. We filed quietly from the room and headed for the stairway, leaving them there together with the flare and the crackle, the tubes and the bottles. Many are the times I have awakened, sometimes shaking, always afraid, from the dream that I occupied my old cell, blind once more, in the dungeons beneath Amber. It is not as if I were unfamiliar with the condition of imprisonment. I have been locked away on a number of occasions, for various periods of time. But solitary, plus blindness with small hope of recovery, made for a big charge at the sensory deprivation counter in the department store of the mind. That, with the sense of finality to it all, had left its marks. I generally keep these memories safely tucked away during waking hours, but at night, sometimes, they come loose, dance down the aisles and frolic round the notions counter, one, two, three. Seeing Brand there in his cell had brought them out again, along with an unseasonal chill; and that final thrust served to establish a more or less permanent residence for them. Now, among my kin in the shield-hung sitting room, I could not avoid the thought that one or more of them had done unto Brand as Eric had done unto me. While this capacity was in itself hardly a surprising discovery, the matter of occupying the same room with the culprit and having no idea as to his identity was more than a little disturbing. My only consolation was that each of the others, according to his means, must be disturbed also. Including the guilty party, now that the existence theorem had shown a positive. I knew then that I had been hoping all along that outsiders were entirely to blame. Now, though... On the one hand, I felt even more restricted than usual in what I could say. On the other, it seemed a good time to press for information, with everyone in an abnormal state of mind. The desire to cooperate for purposes of dealing with the threat could prove helpful. And even the guilty party would want to behave the same as everyone else. Who knew but that he might slip up while making the effort? "Well, have you any other interesting little experiments you would care to conduct?" Julian asked me, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back in my favorite chair. "Not at the moment,". I said. "Pity," he replied. "I was hoping you would suggest we go looking for Dad now in the same fashion. Then, if we are lucky, we find him and someone puts him out of the way with more certainty. After that, we could all lay Russian Roulette with those fine new weapons you've furnished -- winner take all.' "Your words are ill-considered," I said. "Not so. I considered every one of them," he answered. "We spend so much time lying to one another that I decided it might be amusing to say what I really felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed." "Now you see that we have. We also notice that the real you is no improvement over the old one." "Whichever you prefer, both of us have been wondering whether you have any idea what you are going to do next. " "I do," I said. "I now intend to obtain answers to a number of S uestions dealing with everything lat is plaguing us. We might as well start with Brand and his troubles." Turning toward Benedict, who was sitting gazing into the fire, I said, "Back in Avalon, Benedict, you told me that Brand was one of the ones who searched for me after my disappearance. " "That is correct," Benedict answered. "All of us went looking," Julian said. "Not at first, I replied. "Initially, it was Brand, Gerard and yourself, Benedict. Isn't that what you told me?" "Yes," he said. "The others did have a go at it later, though. I told you that, too." I nodded. "Did Brand report anything unusual at that time?" I asked him. "Unusual? In what way?" said Benedict. "I don't know. I am looking for some connection between what happened to him and what happened to me." "Then you are looking in the wrong place," Benedict said. "He returned and reported no success. And he was around for ages after that, unmolested." "I gathered that much," I said. "I understand from what Random has told me, though, that his final disappearance occured approximately a month before my own recovery and return. That almost strikes me as peculiar. If he did not report anything special after his return from the search, did he do so prior to his disappearance? Or in the interim? -- Anyone? Anything? Say it if you've got it!" There followed some mutual glancing about. The looks seemed more curious than suspicious or nervous, though. Finally, then, "Well," Llewella said, "I do not know. Do npt know whether it is significant, I mean." All eyes came to rest upon her. She began to knot and unknot the ends of her belt cord, slowly, as she spoke. "It was in the interim, and it may have no bearing," she went on. "It is just something that struck me as peculiar. Brand came to Rebma long ago -- " "How long ago?" I asked. She furrowed her brow. "Fifty, sixty, seventy years... I am not certain..." I tried to summon up the rough conversion factor I had worked out during my long incarceration. A day in Amber, it seemed, constituted a bit over two and a half days on the shadow Earth where I had spent my exile. I wanted to relate events in Amber to my own time-scale whenever possible, just in case any peculiar correspondences turned up. So Brand went to Rebma sometime in what was, to me, the nineteenth century. "Whatever the date," she said, "he came and visited me. Stayed for several weeks." She glanced at Random then. "He was asking about Martin." Random narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. "Did he say why?" he asked her. "Not exactly," she said. "He implied that he had met Martin, somewhere, in his travels, and he gave the impression that he would like to get in touch with him again. I aid not realize until some time after his departure that finding out everything he could concerning Martin was probably the entire reason for his visit. You know how subtle Brand can be, finding out things without seeming to be after them. It was only after I had spoken with a number of others whom he had visited that I began to see what had occurred. I never did find out why, though." "Tnat is -- most peculiar..." Random observed. "For it brings to mind something to which I had never attached any significance. He once questioned me at great length concerning my son -- and it may well have been at about that same time. He never indicated that he had met him, however -- or that he had any desire to do so. It started out as a bit of banter on the subject of bastards. When I took offense he apologized and asked a number of more proper questions about the boy, whicn I assumed he then put for the sake of politeness -- to leave me with a softer remembrance. As you say, though, he had a way of drawing admissions from people. -- Why is it you never told me of this before?" She smiled prettily. "Why should I have?" she said. Random nodded slowly, his face expressionless. 'Well, what did you tell him?" he said. "What did he learn? What do you know about Martin that I don t?" She shook her head, her smile fading. "Nothing -- actually," she said. "To my knowledge, no one in Rebma ever heard from Martin after he took the Pattern and vanished. I do not believe that Brand departed knowing any more than when he arrived. "Strange..." I said. "Did he approach anyone else on the sub. ject?" "I don't remember," Julian said. "Nor I," said Benedict. The others shook their heads. "Then let us note it and leave it for now," I said. "There are other things I also need to know. -- Julian, I understand that you and Gerard attempted to follow the black road awhile back, and that Gerard vya s injured along the way. I believe you both stayed with Benedict for a time after that, while Gerard recuperated. I would like to know about that expedition." "It seems as if you already do," Julian replied. "You have just stated everything that occurred." "Where did you learn of this, Corwin?" Benedict inquired. "Back in Avalon," I said. "From whom?" "Dara," I said. He rose to his feet, came over, stood before me, glared down. "You still persist in that absurd story -- about the girl!" I sighed. "We have been round and round on this too many times," I said. "By now I have told you everything that I know on the subject. Either you accept it or you do not. She is the one who told me, though." "Apparently then there were some things you did not tell me. You never mentioned that part before." " "Is it true or isn't it? About Julian and Gerard." "It is true," he said. "Then forget the source for now and let us get on with what happened." "Agreed," Benedict said. "I may speak candidly, now that the reason for secrecy is no longer with us. Eric, of course. He was unaware of my whereabouts, as were most of the others. Gerard was my main source of news in Amber. Eric grew more and more apprehensive concerning the black road and finally decided to send scouts to trace it through Shadow to its source. Julian and Gerard were selected. They were attacked by a very strong party of its creatures at a point near Avalon. Gerard called to me, via my Trump, for assistance and I went to their aid. The enemy was dispatched. As Gerard had sustained a broken leg in the fighting and Julian was a bit battered himself, I took them both home with me. I broke my silence with Eric at that time, to tell him where they were and what had become of them. He ordered them not to continue their journey, but to return to Amber after they had recovered. They remained with me until they did. Then they went back." "That is all?" "That is all." But it wasn't. Dara had also told me something else. She had mentioned another visitor. I remembered it quite distinctly. That day, beside the stream, a tiny rainbow in the mist above the waterfall, the mill wheel turning round and round, delivering dreams and grinding them, that day we had fenced and talked and walked in Shadow, had passed through a primordial wood, coming to a spot beside a mighty torrent where turned a wheel fit for the granary of the gods, that day we had picnicked, flirted, gossiped, she had told me many things, some of them doubtless false. But she had not lied concerning the journey of Julian and Gerard, and I believed it possible that she had also spoken truly when she said that Brand had visited Benedict in Avalon. "Frequently" was the word she had used. Now, Benedict made no secret of the fact that he distrusted me. I could see this alone as sufficient reason for his withholding information on anything he judged too sensitive to become my business. Hell, buying his story, I would not have trusted me either if our situations were reversed. Only a fool would have called him on it at that moment, though. Because or the other possibilities. It could be that he planned to tell me later, in private, of the circumstances surrounding Brand's visits. They could well have involved something he did not wish to discuss before the group, and especially before Brand's would-be killer. Or -- There was, of course, the possibility that Benedict himself was behind it all. I did not even like to think about the consequences. Having served under Napoleon, Lee and MacArthur, I appreciated the tactician as well as the strategist. Benedict was both, and he was the best I had ever known. The recent loss of his right arm had in no way diminished him in this, or for that matter impaired his personal fighting skills. Had I not been very lucky recently he could easily have turned me into a pile of scallops over our misunderstanding. No, I did not want it to be Benedict, and I was not about to grope after whatever he had, at that moment, seen fit to conceal. I only hoped that he was just saving it for later. So I settled for his, "That is all," and decided to move on to other matters. "Flora," I said, "back when I first visited you, after my accident, you said something which I still do not quite understand. In that I had ample time relatively soon thereafter in which to review many things, I came across it in my memories and occasionally puzzled over it. I still do not understand it. So would you please tell me what you meant when you said that the shadows contained more horrors than any had thought?" "Why, I do not properly recall saying it," Flora said. "But I suppose that I must have, if it made such an impression. You know the effect that I was referring to: that Amber seems to act as something of a magnet on adjacent shadows, drawing things across from them; the nearer you get to Amber the easier the road becomes, even for shadow-things. While there always seems to be some exchange of materials among adjacent shadows themselves, the effect is more forceful and also more of a one-way process when it comes to Amber. We have always been alert for peculiar things slipping through. Well, for several years prior to your recovery, more such things than usual seemed to be showing up in the vicinity of Amber. Dangerous things, almost invariably. Many were recognizable creatures from nearby realsm. After a time though, things kept coming in from farther and farther afield. Eventually, some which were totally unknown made it through. No reason could be found. for this sudden transportation of menaces, although we sought fairly far for disturbances which might be driving them this way. In other words, highly improbable penetrations of Shadow were occurring." "This actually began while Dad was still around?" "Oh, yes. It started several years before your recovery -- as I said." "I see. Did anyone consider the possibility of there being a connection between this state of affairs and Dad's departure?" "Certainly," Benedict replied. "I still feel that that was the reason for it. He went off to investigate, or to seek a remedy." "But that is purely conjecture," Julian said. "You know how he was. He gave no reasons." Benedict shrugged. "It is a reasonable inference, though," he said. "I understand that be had spoken of his concern over the -- monster migrations, if you like -- on numerous occasions." I withdrew my cards from their case, having recently gotten into the habit of carrying a set of Trumps with me at all times. I raised Gerard's Trump and regarded it. The others were silent, watching me as I did this. Moments later, there was contact. Gerard was still seated in his chair, his blade across his knees. He was still eating. He swallowed when he felt my presence and said, "Yes, Corwin? What do you want?" "How is Brand?" "Sleeping," he said. "His pulse is a little stronger. His breathing is the same -- regular. It's still too early -- " "I know," I said. "I mainly wanted to check your recollection of something? Near the end there, did you get the impression from anything he might have said or done that Dad's going away might have been connected with the increased number of Shadow beings that were slipping through into Amber?" "That," said Julian, "is what is known as a leading question." Gerard wiped his mouth. "There could have been a connection, yes," he said. "He seemed disturbed, preoccupied with something. And he did talk about the creatures. But he never really said that that was his main concern -- or whether it was something entirely different." "Like what?" He shook his head. "Anything. I -- Yes... Yes, there is something you probably ought to know, for whatever it is worth. Some time after his disappearance, I did make an effort to find out one thing. That was, whether I was indeed fhe last person to see him before his departure. I am fairly certain that I was. I had been there in the palace all evening, and I was preparing to return to the flagship. Dad nad retired about an hour earlier, but I had stayed on in the guard room, playing draughts with the Captain. As we were sailing the following morning, I decided to take a book with me. So I came up here to the library. Dad was seated at the desk." He gestured with his head. "He was going through some old books, and ne had not yet changed his garments. He nodded to me when I entered, and I told him I had just come up for a book. He said. You've come to the right place,' and he kept on reading. While I was looking over the shelves, he said something to the effect that he could not sleep. I found a book, told him good night, he said, 'Good sailing,' and I left." He lowered his eyes again. "Now I am positive he was wearing the Jewel of Judgment that night, that I saw it on him then as plainly as I see it on you now. I am equally certain that he had not had it on earlier that evening. For a long while after, I thought that he had taken it along with him, wherever he went. There was no indication in his chambers that he had later changed his clothing. I never saw the stone again until you and Bleys were defeated in your assault on Amber. Then, Eric was wearing it. When I questioned him, he claimed that he had found it in Dad's chambers. Lacking evidence to the contrary, I had to accept his story. But I was never happy with it. Your question -- and seeing you wearing it -- has brought it all back. So I thought you had better know about it." "Thanks," I said, and another question occurred to me but I decided against asking it at that moment. For the benefit of the others, I closed off by saying, "So do you think he needs any more blankets? Or anything else?" Gerard raised his glass to me. "Very good. Keep up the good work," I said, ana I passed my hand over his card. "Brother Brand seems to be doing all right," I said, "and Gerard does not recollect Dad's saying anything that would directly connect Shadow slippage and his departure. I wonder how Brand will recall things, when he comes around?" "If he comes around," Julian said. "I think that he will," I said. "We have all taken some pretty had beatings and we are still around. Our vitality is one of the few things we have come to trust. My guess is that he will be talking by morning." "What do you propose doing with the guilty party, he asked, "if Brand names nim?" "Question him," I said. "Then I would like to do the questioning. I am beginning to leel you may he right this time, Corwin, and that the person who stabbed him may also be responsible for our intermittent state of seige, for Dad's disappearance enjoy questioning him before we cut his thrtat, ana I would like to volunteer for that last part also. " "We will keep it in mind," I said. "You are not excluded from the reckoning, Corwin." "I was aware of that." "I have something to say," said Benedict, smothering a rejoinder from Julian. "I find myself troubled both by the strength and the apparent objective of the opposition. I have encountered tnem now on several occasions, and they are out for blood. Accepting for the moment your story of the irl Dara, Corwin, her final words o seem to sum up their attitude: 'Amber will be destroyed.' Not conquered, subjugated or taught a lesson. Destroyed. -- Julian, you wouldn't mind ruling here, would you?" Julian smiled. "Perhaps next year this time," he said. "Not today, thank you." "What I am getting at is that I could see you -- or any of us -- employing mercenaries or obI cannot see you employing a force so powerful that it would represent a grave problem itself afterwards. Not a force that seems bent on destruction rather than conquest. I cannot see you, me, Corwin, the others as actually tryto gamble with forces that would. That is the part I do not like about Corwin's notion that one of us is behind this." I had to nod. I was not unaware of the weakness of that link in my chain of speculations. Still, there were so many unknowns... I could offer alternatives, such as Random then did, but guesses prove nothing. "It may be," Random said, "that one of us made the deal, but underestimated his allies. The guilty party may now be sweating this thing as much as the rest of us. He may not be in a position to turn things off now, even if he wants to." "We could offer him the ppportunity," Fiona said, "to betray his allies to us now. If Julian could be persuaded to leave his throat uncut and the rest of us were willing to do the same, he might come around -- if Random's guess is correct. He would not claim the throne, but he was obviously not about to have it before. He would have his life and he could save Amber quite a bit of trouble. Is to a position on this?" "I am," I said. "I will give him his life if he will come across, with the understanding that it will be spent in exile." "I will go along with that," Benedict said. "So will I," said Random. "On one condition," Julian said. "If he was not personally responsible for Caine's death, I will go along with it. Otherwise, no. And there would have to be evidence." "Life, in exile," Deirdre said. "All right. I agree." "So do I," said Flora. "And I," Llewella followed. "Gerard will probably agree, too," I said. "But I really wonder whether Brand will feel the same as the rest of us? I've a feeling he may not." "Let us check with Gerard," Benedict said. "If Brand makes it and proves the only holdout, the guilty party will know he has only one enemy to avoid -- and they can always work out their own terms on that count." "All right," I said, smothering a few misgivings, and I recontacted Gerard, who agreed also. So we rose to our feet and swore that much by the Unicom of Amber -- Julian's oath having an extra clause to it -- and swore to enforce exile on any of our own number who violated the oath. Frankly, I did not think it would net us anything, but it is always nice to see families doing things together. After that, everyone made a point of mentioning that he would be remaining in tne palace overnight, presumably to indicate that no one feared anything Brand might have to say in the morning -- and especially to indicate that no one had a desire to get out of town, a thing that would not be forgotten, even if Brand gave up the ghost during the night. In that I had no further questions to put to the group and no one had sprung forward to own up to the misdeeds covered by the oath, I leaned back and listened for a time after that. Things came apart, falling into a series of conversations and exchanges, one of the main topics being an attempted reconstruction of the library tableau, each of us in his own place and, invariably, why each of us was in a position to have done it, except for the speaker. I smoked; I said nothing on the subject. Deirdre did spot an interesting possibility, however. Namely, that Gerard could have done the stabbing himself while we were all crowded around, and that his heroic efforts were not prompted by any desire to save Brand's neck, but rather to achieve a position where he could stop his tongue -- in which case, Brand would never make it through the night. Ingenious, but I just couldn't believe it. No one else bought it either. At least, no one volunteered to go upstairs and throw Gerard out. After a time, Fiona drifted over, sat beside me. "Well, I've tried the only thing I could think of,"' she said. "I hope some good comes of it." "It may," I said. "I see that you have added a peculiar piece of ornamentation to your wardrobe," she said, raising the Jewel between her thumb ana forefinger and studying it. Then she raised her eyes. "Can you make it do tricks for you?" she asked. "Some," I said. "Then you knew how to attune it. It involves the Pattern, doesn't it?" "Yes. Eric told me how to go about it, right before he died." "I see." She released it, settled back into her seat. "Did he give you any cautions to go along with it?" she asked. "No," I said. "I wonder whether that was a matter of design or circumstance?" "Well, he was pretty busy dying at the time. That limited our conversation considerably." "I know. I was wondering whether his hatred for you outweighed his hopes for the realm, or whether he was simply ignorant of some of the principles involved. " "What do you know about it?" "Think again of Eric's death, Corwin. I was not there when it occurred, but I came in early for the funeral. I was present when his body was bathed, shaved, dressed -- and I examined his wounds. I do not believe that any of them were fatal, in themselves. There were three chest wounds, but only one looked as if it might have run into the mediastinal area -- " "One's enough." "Wait," she said. "It was difficult, but I tried judging the angle of the puncture with a thin glass rod. I wanted to make an incision, but Caine would not permit it. Still, I do not believe that his heart or arteries were damaged. It is still not too late to order an autopsy, if you would like me to check further on this. I am certain that his injuries and the general stress contributed to his death, but I believe it was the Jewel that made the difference." "Why do you think this?" "Because of some things that Dworkin said, when I studied with him -- and things that I noticed afterwards, because of this. He indicated that while it conferred unusual abilities, it also represented a drain on the vitality of its master. The longer you wear it, the more it somehow takes out of you. I paid attention after that, and I noticed that Dad wore it only seldom and never kept it on for long periods of time." My thoughts returned to Eric, the day he lay dying on the slopes of Kolvir, the battle raging about him. I remembered my first look at him, his face pale, his breath labored, blood on his chest... And the Jewel of Judgment, there on its chain, was pulsing, heartlike, among the moist folds of his garments. I had never seen it do that before, or since. I recalled that the effect had grown fainter, weaker. And when ne died and I folded his hands atop it, the phenomenon had ceased. "What do yon know of its function?" I asked her. She shook her head. "Dworkin considered that a state secret. I know the obvious -- weather control -- and I inferred from some of Dad's remarks that it has something to do with a heightened perception, or a higher perception. Dworkin had mentioned it primarily as an example of the pervasiveness of the Pattern in everything that gives us power -- even the Trumps contain the Pattern, if you look closely, look long enough -- and he cited it as an instance of a conservation principle: all of our special powers have their price. The greater the power, the larger the investment. The Trumps are a small matter, but there is still an element of fatigue involved in their employment. Walking through Shadow, which is an exercise of the image of the Pattern which exists within us, is an even greater expenditure. To essay the Pattern itself, physically, is a massive drain on one's energies. But the i ewel, he said, represents an even ligher octave of the same thing, and its cost to its employer is exponentially greater." Thus, if correct, another ambiguous insight into the character of my late and least favored brother. If he were aware of this phenomenon and had donned the t ewel and worn it overlong anyiow, in the defense of Amber, it made hipi something of a hero. But then, seen in this light, his passing it along to me, without warnings, became a deathbed effort at a final piece of vengeance. But he had exempted me from his curse, he'd said, so as to spend it H erly on our enemies in the , This, of course, only meant that he hated them a little more than he hated me and was deploying his final energies as strategically as possible, for Amber. I thought then of the partial character of Dworkin's notes, as I had recovered them from the hiding lace Eric had indicated. Could it e that Eric had acquired them intact and had purposely destroyed that portion containing the cautions, so as to damn his successor? That notion did not strike me as quite correct, for he had had no way of knowing that I would return when I did, as I did, that the course of battle would run as it had, and that I would indeed be his successor. It could just as easily have been one of his favorites that followed him to power, in which case he would certainly not have wanted him to inherit any booby traps. No. As I saw it, either Eric was not really aware of this property of the stone, having acquired only partial instructions for its use, or someone had gotten to those papers before I had and removed sufficient material to leave me with a mortal liability. It may well have been the hand of the real enemy, once again. "Safety factor?" I asked. "No," she said. "I can give you only two pointers, for whatever they may be worth. The first is that I do not recall Dad's ever wearing it for long periods of time. The second, I pieced together from a number of things that he said, beginning with a comment to the effect that 'when people turn into statues you are either in the wrong place or in trouble'. I pressed him quite a bit on that, over a long period of time, and I eventually got the impression that the first sign of having worn it too long is some sort of distortion of your time sense. Apparently it begins speeding up the metabolism -- everything -- with a net effect that the world seems to be slowing down around you. This must take quite a toll on a person. That is everything that I know about it, and I admit that a large part of the last is guesswork. How long have you been wearing it?" "Awhile now," I said, taking my mental pulse and glancing about to see whether things seemed to be slowing down any. I could not really tell, though of course I did not feel in the best of shape. I had assumed it was totally Gerard's doing, though. I was not about to yank it off, however, just because another family member had suggested it, even if it was clever Fiona in one of her friendlier moods. Perversity, cussedness... No, independence. That was it. That and purely formal distrust. I had only put it on for the evening a few hours before, anyway. I'd wait. "Well, you have made your point in wearing it," she was saying. "I simply wanted to advise you against prolonged exposure until you know more about it." "Thanks, Fi. I'll have it off soon, and I appreciate your telling me. By the way, whatever became of Dworkin?" She tapped her temple. "H is mind finally went, poor man. I like to think that Dad had him put away in some restful retreat in Shadow." "I see what you mean," I said. "Yes, let us think that. Pour fellow." Julian rose to his feet, concluding a conversation with Llewella. He stretched, nodded to her and strolled over. "Corwin, have you thought of any more questions for us?" he said. "None that I'd care to ask just now." He smiled. "Anything more that you want to tell us?" "Not at the moment." "Any more experiments, demonstrations, charades?" "No." "Good. Then I'm going to bed. Good night." "Night." He bowed to Fiona, waved to Benedict and Bandom, nodded to Flora and Deirdre as he passed them on the way to the door. He aused on the threshold, turned ack and said, "Now you can all talk about me" and went on out. "All right," Fiona said. "Let's. I think he's the one." "Why?" I asked. "I'll go down the list, subjective, intuitive and biased as it is. Benedict, in my opinion, is above suspicion. If he wanted the throne, he'd have it by now, by direct, military methods. With all the time he has had, he could have managed an attack that would have succeeded, even against Dad. He is that good, and weall know it. You, on the other hand, have made a number of blunders which you would not have made had you been in full possession of your faculties. That is why I believe your story, amnesia and all. No one gets himself blinded as a piece of strategy. Gerard is well on the way to establishing his own innocence. I almost think he is up there with Brand now more for that reason than from any desire to protect Brand. At any rate, we will know for sure before long -- or else have some new suspicions. Random has simply been watched too closely these past years to have had the opportunity to engineer everything that has been happening. So he is out. Of us more delicate sorts, Flora hasn't the brains, Deirdre lacks the guts, Llewella hasn't the motivations, as she is happy elsewhere but never here, and I, of course, am innocent of all but malice. That leaves Julian. Is he capable? Yes. Does he want the throne? Of course. Has he had time and opportunity? Again, yes. He is your man." "Would he have killed Caine?" I asked. "They were buddies." She curled her lip. "Julian has no friends," she said. "That icy personality of his is thawed only by thoughts of himself. Oh, in recent years he seemed closer to Caine than to anyone else. But even that... Even that could have been a part of it. Shamming a friendship long enough to make it seem believable, so that he would not be suspect at this time. I can believe Julian capable of that because I cannot believe him capable of strong emotional attachments." I snook my head. "I don't know," I said. "His friendship with Caine is something that occurred during my absence, so everyting I know concerning it is secondhand. Still, if Julian were looking for friendship in the form of another personality close to his own, I can see it. They were a lot alike. I tend to think it was real, because I don't think anybody is capable of deceiving someone about his friendship for years. Unless the other party is awfully stupid, which is something Caine  was not. And -- well, you say your reasoning was subjective, intuitive and biased. So is mine, on something like this. I just don't like to think anybody is such a miserable wretch that he would use his only friend that way. That's why I think there is something wrong with your list." She sighed. "For someone who has been around for as long as you have, Corwin, you say some silly things. Were you changed by your long stay in that funny little place? Years ago you would have seen the obvious, as I do." "Perhaps I have changed, for such things no longer seem obvious. Or could it be that you have changed, Fiona? A trifle more cynical that the little girl I once knew. It might not have been all that obvious to you, years ago." She smiled softly. "Never tell a woman she has changed, Corwin. Except for the better. You used to know that, too. Could it be that you are really only one of Corwin's shadows, sent back to suffer and intimidate here on his behalf? Is the real Corwin somewhere else, laughing at us all?" "I am here, and I am not laughing," I said. She laughed. "Yes, that is it!" she said. "I have just decided that you are not yourself! "Announcement, everybody!" she cried, springing to her feet. "I have just noticed that this is not really Corwin! It has to be one of his shadows! It has just announced a belief in friendship, dignity, nobility of spirit and those other things which figure preminently in popular romances! I am obviously onto something!" The others stared at her. She laughed again, then sat down abruptly. I heard Flora mutter "drunk" and return to her conversation with Deirdre. Random said, "Let's hear it for shadows" and turned back to a discussion with Benedict and Llewella. "See?" she said. "What?" "You're insubstantial," she said, patting my knee. "And so am I, now that I think about it. It has been a bad day, Corwin." "I know. I feel like hell, too. I thought I had such a fine idea, for getting Brand back. Not only that, it worked. A lot of good it did him." "Don't overlook those bits of virtue you've acquired," she said. "You're not to blame for the way it turned out." "Thanks." "I believe that Julian might have had the right idea," she said. "I don't feel like staying awake any longer." I rose with her, walked her to the door. "I'm all right," she said. "Really." "Sure?" She nodded sharply. "See you in the morning then." "I hope so," she said. "Now you can talk about me." She winked and went out. I turned back, saw that Benedict and Llewella were approaching. "Turning in?" I asked. Benedict nodded. "Might as well," Llewella said, and she kissed me lightly on the cheek. "What was that for?" "A number of things," she said. "Good night." "Good night." Random was crouched on the hearth, poking at the fire. Deirdre turned to him and said, "Don't throw on more wood just for us. Flora and I are going, too." "Okay." He set the poker aside and rose. "Sleep well, ' he called after them. Deirdre gave me a sleepy smile and Flora a nervous one. I added my good nights and watched them leave. "Learn anything new and useful?" Random asked. I shrugged. "Did you?" "Opinions, conjectures. No new facts, ' he said. "We were trying to decide who might be next on the list." "And...?" "Benedict thinks it's a tossup. You or him. Providing you are not behind it all, of course. He also thinks your buddy Ganelon ought to watch his step." "Ganelon... Yes, that's a thought -- and it should have been mine. I think he is right about the tossup, too. It may even be slightly weighted against him, since they know I'm alert because of the attempted frameup." "I would say that all of us are now aware that Benedict is alert himself. He managed to mention his opinion to everyone. I believe that he would welcome an attempt." I chuckled. "That balances the coin again. I guess it is a tossup." "He said that, too. Naturally, he knew I would tell you." "Naturally. I wish he would start talking to me again. Well... Not much I can do about it now," I said. "The hell with everything. I'm going to bed." He nodded. "Look under it first." We left the room, headed up the hall. "Corwin, I wish you'd had the foresight to bring some coffee back with you, along with the guns," he said. "I could use a cup." "Doesn't it keep you awake?" "No. I like a couple cups in the evening." "I miss it mornings. We'll have to import some when this mess is all settled." "Small comfort, but a good idea. -- What got into Fi, anyhow?" "She thinks Julian is our man." "She may be right." "What about Caine?" "Supposing it was not a single individual,' he said, as we mounted the stair. "Say it was two, like Julian and Caine. They finally had a falling out, Caine lost, Julian disposed of him and used the death to weaken your position as well. Former friends make the worst enemies." "It's no use," I said. "I get dizzy when I start sorting the possibilities. We are either going to have to wait for something more to happen, or make something happen. Probably the latter. But not tonight -- " "Hey! Wait up!" "Sorry." I paused at the landing. "Don't know what got into me. Finishing spurt, I guess." "Nervous energy,' he said, coming abreast of me once more. We continued on up, and I made an effort to match his pace, fighting down a desire to hurry. "Well, sleep well," he said, finally. "Good night, Random." He continued on up the stair and I headed off along the corridor toward my quarters. I was feeling jittery by then, which must be why I dropped my key. I reached and plucked it out of the air before it had fallen very far. Simultaneously, I was struck by the impression that its motion was somewhat slower than it should have been. I inserted it in the lock and turned it. The room was dark, but I decided against getting a candle or an oil lamp going. I had gotten used to the dark a long time ago. I locked and bolted the door. My eyes were already half-adj listed to the gloom, from the dim hallway. I turned. There was some starlight leaking in about the drapes, too. I crossed the room, unfastening my collar. He was waiting in my bed chamber, to the left of the entrance. He was perfectly positioned and he did nothing to give himself away. I walked right into it. He had the ideal station, he held the dagger ready, he had the element of total surprise going for him. By rights I should have died -- not in my bed, but just there at its foot. I caught a glimpse of the movement, realized the presence and its significance as I stepped over the threshold. I knew that it was too late to avoid the thrust even as I raised my arm to try to block it. But one peculiarity struck me before the blade itself did: my assailant seemed to be moving too slowly. Quick, with all the tension of his wait behind it, that is how it should have been. I should never have known it was occurring until after the act, if then. I should not have had time to turn partway and swing my arm as far as I did. A ruddy haze filled my vision and I felt my forearm strike the side of the outflung arm at about the same moment as the steel touched my belly and bit. Within the redness there seemed a faint tracing of that cosmic version of the Pattern I had followed earlier in the day. As I doubled and fell, unable to think but still for a moment conscious, it came clearer, came nearer, the design. I wanted to flee, but horse my body stumbled. I was thrown. Out of every life a little blood must spill. Unfortunately, it was my turn again, and it felt like more than a little. I was lying, doubled up, on my right side, both arms clutching at my middle. I was wet, and every now and then something trickled along the creases of my belly. Front, lower left, just above the beltline, I felt like a casually opened envelope. These were my first sensations as consciousness came round again. And my first thought was, "What is he waiting for?" Obviously, the coup de grace had been withheld. Why? I opened my eyes. They had taken advantage of whatever time had elapsed to adjust themselves to the darkness. I turned my head. I did not see anyone else in the room with me. But something peculiar had occurred and I could not quite place it. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back to the mattress once more. Something was wrong, yet at the same time right... The mattress... Yes, I, was lying on my bed. I doubted my ability to have gotten there unassisted. But it would be absurd to knife me and then help me to bed -- My bed... It was my bed, yet it was not. I squeezed my eyes tight. I gritted my teeth. I did not understand. I knew that my thinking could not be normal there on the fringes of shock, my blood pooling in my guts and then leaking out. I tried to force myself to think clearly. It was not easy. My bed. Before you are fully aware of anything else, you are aware whether or not you are awakening on your own bed. And I was, but -- I fought down an enormous impulse to sneeze, because I felt it would tear me apart. I compressed my nostrils and breathed in short gasps through my mouth. The taste, smell and feel of dust was all about me. The nasal assault subsided and I opened my eyes. I knew then where I was. I did not understand the why and how of it, but I had come once more to a place I had never expected to see again. I lowered my right hand, used it to raise myself. It was my bedroom in my house. The old one. The place which had been mine back when I was Carl Corey. I had been returned to Shadow, to that world where I had spent the years of my exile. The room was heavy witn dust. The bed had not been made up since the last time I had slept in it, over half a decade before. I knew the state of the house fully, having looked in on it only a few weeks earlier. I pushed myself further, managed to slide my feet out over the edge of the bed and down. Then I doubled up again and sat there. It was bad. While I felt temporarily safe from further assault, I knew that I required more than safety just then. I had to have help, and I was in no position to help myself. I was not even certain how much longer I might remain conscious. So I had to get down and get out. The phone would be dead, the nearest house was not too close by. I would have to get down to the road, at least. I reflected S 'rimly that one of my reasons for ocating where I had was that it was not a well-traveled road. I enjoy my solitude, at least some of the time. With my right hand, I drew up the nearest pillow and slipped off its case. I turned it inside out, tried to fold it, gave up, wadded it, slipped it beneath my shirt and pressed it against my wound. Then I sat there, just holding it in place. It had been a major exertion and I found it painful to take too deep a breath. After a time, though, I drew the second pillow to me, held it across my knees and let it slip out of its case. I wanted the pillowslip to wave at a passing motorist, for my garments, as usual, were dark. Before I could draw it through my belt though, I was confounded by the behavior of the pillow itself. It had not yet reached the floor. I had released it, nothing was supporting it and it was moving. But it was moving quite slowly, descending with a dream-like deliberation. I thought of the fall of the key, as I had dropped it outside my room. I thought of my unintended quickness on mounting the stair with Random. I thought of Fiona s words, and of the Jewel of Judgment which still hung about my neck, now pulsating in time with the throbbing of my side. It might have saved my life, at least for the moment; yes, it probably had, if Fiona's notions were correct. It had probably given me a moment or so more than would otherwise have been my due when the assailant struck, letting me turn, letting me swing my arm. It might, somehow, even have been responsible for my sudden transportation. But I would have to think about such things at another time, should I succeed in maintaining a meaningful relationship with the future. For now, the jewel had to go -- in case Fiona's fears concerning it were also correct -- and I had to get moving. I turked away the second pillow cover, then tried to stand, holding onto the footboard. No good! Dizziness and too much pain. I lowered myself to the floor, afraid of passing out on the way down. I made it. I rested. Then I began to move, a slow crawl. The front door, as I recalled, was now nailed shut. All right. Out the back, then. I made it to the bedroom door and halted, leaning against its frame. As I rested there, I removed the Jewel of Judgment from my neck and wrapped its chain about my wrist. I had to cache it someplace, and the safe in my study was too far out of the way. Besides, I believed that I was leaving a trail of blood. Anyone finding and following it might well be curious enough to investigate and spring the small thing. And I lacked the time and the energy... I made my way out, around and through. I had to rise up and exert myself to get the back door open. I made the mistake of not resting first. When I regained consciousness, I was lying across the threshold. The night was raw and clouds filled much of the, sky. A mean wind rattled branches above the patio. I felt several drops of moisture on the back of my outflung hand. I pushed up and crawled out. The snow was about two inches deep. The icy air helped to revive me. With something near panic, I realized just how foggy my mind had been during much of my course from the bedroom. It was possible that I might go under at any time. I started immediately for the far corner of the house, deviating only to reach the compost heap, tear my way into it, drop the jewel and reposition the clump of dead grasses I had broken loose. I brushed snow over it and. continued on. Once I made it around the corner, I was shielded from the wind and headed down a slight incline. I reached the front of the house and rested once more. A car had just passed and I watched its tail lights dwindle. It was the only vehicle in sight. Icy crystals stung my face as I moved again. My knees were wet and burning cold. The front yard sloped, gently at first, then dropped sharply toward the road. There was a dip about a hundred yards to the right, where motorists generally hit their brakes. It seemed this might give me a few moments more in the headlights of anyone coming from that direction -- one of those small assurances the mind always seeks when things get serious, an aspirin for the emotions. With three rest stops, I made it down to the roadside, then over to the big rock that bore my house number. I sat on it and leaned back against the icy embankment. I hauled out the second pillow case and draped it across my knees. I waited. I knew that my mind was fuzzy. I believe that I drifted into and out of consciousness a number of times. Whenever I caught myself at it, I attempted to impose some version of order on my thoughts, to assess what had happened in the light of everything else that had just happened, to seek other safety measures. The former effort proved too much, however. It was simply too difficult to think beyond the level of responding to circumstance. With a sort of numb enlightenment, though, it occurred to me that I still had my Trumps. I could contact someone in Amber, have him transport me back. But who? I was not so far gone that I failed to realize I might be contacting the one responsible for my condition. Would it be better to gamble that way, or to take my chances here? Still, Random or Gerard -- I thought that I heard a car. Faint, distant... The wind and my pulsebeat were competing with perception, though. I turned my head. I concentrated. There... Again. Yes. It was an engine. I got ready to wave the cloth. Even then, my mind kept straying. And one thought that flitted through was that I might already be unable to muster sufficient concentration to manipulate the Trumps. The sound grew louder. I raised the cloth. Moments later, the farthest visible point along the road to my right was touched with light. Shortly after, I saw the car at the top of the rise, I lost sight of it once more as it descended the hill. Then it climbed again and came on, snowflakes flashing through its headbeams. I began waving as it approached the dip. The lignts caught me as it came up out of it, and the driver could not have missed seeing me. He went by though, a man in a late model sedan, a woman in the passenger seat. The woman turned and looked at me, but the driver did not even slow down...A couple minutes later another car came by, a bit older, a woman driving, no visible passengers. It did slow down, but only for a moment. She must not have liked my looks. She stepped on the gas and was gone. I sagged back and rested. A prince of Amber can hardly invoke the brotherhood of man for purposes of moral condemnation. At least not with a straight face, and it hurt too much to laugh just then. Without strength, concentration and some ability to move, my power over Shadow was useless. I would use it first, I decided, to get to some warm place... I wondered whether I could make it back up the hill, to the compost heap. I had not thought of trying to use the jewel to alter the weather. Probably, I was too weak for that too, though. Probably, the effort would kill me... Still... I shook my head. I was drifting off, more than half a-dream. I had to stay awake. Was that another car? Maybe. I tried to raise the cloth and dropped it. When I leaned forward to retrieve it, I just had to rest my head on my knees for a moment. Deirdre... I would call my dear sister. If anyone would help me, Deirdre would... I would get out her Trump and call her. In a minute. If only she weren't my sister... I had to rest. I am a knave, not a fool. Perhaps, sometimes, when I rest, I am even sorry for things. Some things. If only it were warmer... But it wasn't too bad, bent over this way... Was that a car? I wanted to raise my head, but found that I could not. It would not make that much difference in being seen though, I decided. I felt light on my eyelids and I heard the engine... Now it was neither advancing nor retreating. Just a steady cycling of growls. Then I heard a shout. Then the click-pause-chunk of a car door, opening and closing. I felt that I could open my eyes, but I did not want to. I was afraid that I would look only on the dark and empty road, that the sounds would resolve into pulsebeats and wind once more. It was better to keep what I had than to gamble -- "Hey! What's the matter? You hurt?" Footsteps... This was real. I opened my eyes. I forced msyelf up once again. "Corey! My God! It's you!" I forced a grin, cut my nod short of a topple. "It's me. Bill. How've you been?" "What happened?" "I'm hurt,' I said. "Maybe bad. Need a doctor." "Can you walk if I help? Or should I carry you?" "Let's try walking," I said. He got me to my feet and I leaned on him. We started for his car. I only remember the first few steps. When that low-swinging sweet chariot turned sour and swung high once more, I tried to raise my arm, realized that it was restrained, settled for a consideration of the tube affixed thereto and decided that I was going to live. I had sniffed hospital smells and consulted my internal clock. Having made it this far, I felt that I owed it to myself to continue. And I was warm, and as comfortable as recent history allowed. That settled, I closed my eyes, lowered my head and went hack to sleep. Later, when I came around again, felt more fit and was spotted by a nurse, she told me that it was seven hours since I had been brought in and that a doctor would be by to talk with me shortly. She also got me a glass of water and told me that it had stopped snowing. She was curious as to what had happened to me. I decided that it was time to start plotting my story. The simpler the better. All right. I was coming home after an extended stay abroad. I had hitchhiked out, gone on in and been attacked by some vandal or drifter I had surprised inside. I crawled back out and sought help. Finis. When I tola it to the doctor I could not tell at first whether he believed me. He was a heavy man whose face had sagged and set long ago. His name was Bailey, Morris Bailey, and he nodded as I spoke and then asked me, "Did you get a look at the fellow?" I snook my head. "It was dark," I said: "Did he rob you, too?" "I don't know." "Were you carrying a wallet?" I decided I had better say yes to that one. "Well, you don't have one now, so he must have taken it." "Must have," I agreed. "Do you remember me at all?" "Can t say that I do. Should I?" "You seemed vaguely familiar to me when they brought you in. That was all, at first... ' "And...?" I asked. "What sort of garments were you wearing? They seemed something like a uniform." "Latest thing. Over There, these days. You were saying that I looked familiar?" "Yes," he agreed. "Where is Over There, anyway? Where did ou come from? Where have you een?" "I travel a lot," I said. "You were going to tell me something a moment ago." "Yes," he said. "We are a small clinic, and some time ago a fasttalking salesman persuaded the directors to invest in a computerized medical records system. If the area had developed more and we had expanded a lot, it might have been worthwhile. Neither of these things happened, though, and it is an expensive item. It even encouraged a certain laziness among the clerical help. Old files just don't get purged the way they used to, even for the emergency room. Space there for a lot of useless backlog. So, when Mister Roth gave me your name and I ran a routine check on you, I found something and I realized why you looked familiar. I had been working the emergency room that night too, around seven years ago, when you had your auto accident. I remembered working on you then -- and how I thought you weren't going to make it. You surprised me though, and you still do. I can't even find the scars that should be there. You did a nice job of healing up." "Thanks. A tribute to the physician. I'd say." "May I have your age, for the record?" "Thirty-six," I said. That's always safe. He jotted it somewhere in the folder he held across his knees. "You know, I would have sowrn -- once I got to checking you over and remepibering -- that that's about the age you looked the last time I saw you." "Clean living." "Do you know about your blood type?" "It's an exotic. But you can treat it as an AB Positive for all practical purposes. I can take anything, but don't give mine to anybody else." He nodded. "The nature of your mishap is going to require a police report, you know." "I had guessed that." "Just thought you might want to be thinking about it." "Thanks," I said. "So you were on duty that night, and you patched me up... ? Interesting. What else do you recall about it? ' "What do you mean?" "The circumstances under which I was brought in that time. My own memory is a blank from right before the accident until some time after I had been trans ferred up to the other place -- Greenwood. Do you recall how I arrived?" He frowned, just when I had decided he had one face for all occasions. "We sent an ambulance," he said. "In response to what? Who reported the accident? How?" "I see what you mean," he said. "It was the State Patrol that called for the ambulance. As I recollect, someone had seen the accident and phoned their headquarters. They then radioed a car in the vicinity. It went to the lake, verified the report, gave you first aid and called for the ambulance. And that was it." "Any record of who called in the report in the first place?" He shrugged. "That's not the sort of thing we keep track of," he said. "Didn't your insurance company investigate? Wasn't there a claim? They could probably -- " "I had to leave the country right after I recovered," I said. ' I never pursued the matter. I suppose tnere would have been a police report, though..." "Surely. But I have no idea how long they keep them around -- " He chuckled. "Unless, of course, that same salesman got to them, too. -- It is rather late to be talking about that though, isn't it? It seems to me there is a statute of limitations on things of that sort. Your friend Roth will tell you for sure -- " "It isn't a claim that I have in mind," I said. "Just a desire to know what really happened. I have wondered about it on and off for a number of years now. You see, I have this touch of retrograde amnesia going -- " "Have you ever talked it over with a psychiatrist?" he said, and there was something about the way he said it that I did not like. Came one of those little flashes of insight then: Could Flora have managed to get me certified insane before my transfer ' to Greenwood? Was that on my record here? And was I still on excape status from that place? A lot of time had passed and I knew nothing of the legalities involved. If this was indeed the case, however, I imagined they would have no way of knowing whether I had been certified sane again in some other jurisdiction. Prudence, I guess it was, cautioned me to lean forward and glance at the doctor's wrist. I seemed possessed of a subliminal memory that he had consulted a calendar watch when taking my pulse. Yes, he had. I squinted. All right. Day  month: November #. I did a quick calculation with my two-and-a-half to one conversion and had the year. It was seven, as he had indicated. "No, I haven't," I said. "I just assumed it was organic rather than functional and wrote the time off as a loss." "I see," he said. "You use such ph rases rather glibly. People who've been in therapy sometimes do that." "I know," I said, "I've read a lot about it." He sighed. He stood. "Look," he said. "I am going to call Mister Roth and let him know ou are awake. It is probably est." "What do you mean by that?" "I mean that with your friend being an attorney, there might be things you want to discuss with him before you talk to the police." He opened the folder wherein he had somewhere jotted my age, raised his pen, furrowed his brow and said, "What's the date, anyway?" I wanted my Trumps. I imagined my belongings would be in the drawer of the bedside table, but getting at it involved too much twisting and I did not want to put the strain on my sutures. It was not all that urgent, though. Eight hours' sleep in Amber would come to around twenty hours here, so everyone should still have been respectably retired back home. I wanted to get hold of Random though, to come up with some sort of cover story for my not being there in the morning. Later. I did not want to look suspicious at a time like this. Also, I wanted to know immediately whatever Brand had to say. I wanted to be in a position to act on it. I did a quick bit of mental juggling. If I could do the worst of my recovering here in Shadow it would mean less wasted time for me back in Amber. I would have to budget my time carefully and avoid complications on this end. I hoped that Bill would arrive soon. I was anxious to know what the picture was in this place. Bill was a native of the area, had gone to school in Buffalo, come back, married, joined the family firm and that was that. He had known me as a retired Army officer who sometimes traveled on vague business. We both belonged to the country club, which was where I had met him. I had known him for over a year without our exchanging more than a few words. Then one evening I happened to be next to him in the bar and it had somehow come out that he was hot on military history, particularly the Napoleonic Wars. The next thing we knew, they were closing the place up around us. We were close friends from then on, right up until the time of my difficulties. I had occasionally wondered about him since. In fact, the only thing that had prevented me from seeing him the last time I had passed through was that he would doubtless have had all sorts of questions as to what had become of me, and I had had too many things on my mind to deal with them all that racefully and still enjoy myself. I ad even thought once or twice of coming back and seeing him if I could, when everything was finally settled in Amber. Next to the fact that this was not the case, I regretted not being able to meet him in the club lounge. H e arrived within the hour, short, heavy, ruddy, a bit grayer on the sides, grinning, nodding. I had propped myself up by then, already tried a few deep breaths and decided they were premature. He clasped my hand and took the bedside chair. He had his briefcase with him. "You scared the hell out of me last night, Carl. Thought I was seeing a ghost," he said. I nodded. "A bit later, and I might have been one," I said. "Thanks. How have you been?" Bill sighed. "Busy. You know. The same old stuff, only more of it." "And Alice?" "She's fine. And we've got two new grandsons -- Bill Jr.'s -- twins. Wait a minute." He fished out his wallet and located a photo. "Here." I studied it, noted the family resemblances. "Hard to believe," I said. "You don't look much worse for the years." I chuckled and patted my abdomen. "Subtracting that, I mean," he said. "Where nave you been?" "God! Where haven't I been!" I said. "So many places I've lost count." He remained expressionless, caught my eyes and stared. "Carl, what kind of trouble are you in?" he asked. I smiled. "If you mean am I in trouble with the law, the answer is no. My troubles actually involve another country, and I am going to have to go back there shortly." H is face relaxed again, and there was a small glint behind his bifocals. "Are you some sort of military adviser in that place?" I nodded. "Can you tell me where?" I shook my head. "Sorry." "That I can sort of understand," he said. "Doctor Roth told me what you said had happened last night. Off the record now, was it connected with whatever you have been doing?" I nodded again. "That makes things a little clearer," he said. "Not much, but enough. I won't even ask you which agency, or even if there is one. I have always known you to be a gentleman, and a rational one at that. That was why I grew curious at the time of your disappearance and did some investigating. I felt a bit officious and selfconscious about it. But your civil status was quite puzzling, and I wanted to know what had happened. Mainly, because I was concerned about you. I hope that doesn't disturb you?" "Disturb me?" I said. "There aren't that many people who care what happens to me. I'm grateful. Also, curious what you discovered. I never had the time to look into it, you know, to straighten things out. How about telling me what you learned?" He opened the briefcase and withdrew a manila folder. Spreading it across his knees, he shuffled out several sheets of yellow paper covered with neat handwriting. Raising the first of these, he regarded it a moment, then said, ' After you escaped from the hospital in Albany and had your accident, Brandon apparently dropped out of the picture and -- " "Stop!" I said, raising my hand, trying to sit up. "What?" he asked. "You have the order wrong, also the place," I said. "First came the accident, and Greenwood is not in Albany." "I know," he said. "I was referring to the Porter Sanitarium, where you spent two days and then escaped. You had had your accident that same day, and you were brought here as a result of it. Then your sister Evelyn entered the picture. She had you transferred to Greenwood, where you spent a couple weeks before departing on your own motion once again. Right?" "Partly," I said. "Namely, the last part. As I was telling the doctor earlier, my memory is shot for a couple days prior to the accident. This business about a place in Albany does sort of seem to ring a bell, but only very faintly. Do you have more on it?' "Oh yes," he said. "It may even have something to do with the state of your memory. You were committed on a bum order -- " "By whom?" He shook the paper and peered. " 'Brother, Brandon Corey; attendant physician, Hillary B. Rand, psychiatrist', " he read. "Hear any more bells?" "Quite possibly," I 'said. "Go ahead." "Well, an order got signed on that basis," he said. "You were duly certified, taken into custody and transported. Then, concerning your memory..." "Yes?" "I don't know that much about the practice and its effects on the memory, but you were subjected to electroshock therapy while you were at Porter. Then, as I said, the record indicates that you escaped after the second day. You apparently recovered your car from some unspecified locale and were heading back this way when you had the accident." "That seems right," I said. "It does." For a moment, when he had begun talking, I had had a wild vision of having been returned to the wrong shadow -- one where everything was similar, but not congruent. Now, though, I did not believe this to be the case. I was responding to this story on some level. "Now, about that order," he said. "It was based on false evidence, but there was no way of the court's knowing it at the time. The real Doctor Rand W'as in England when everything happened, and when I contacted him later he had never heard of you. His office had been broken into while he was away, though. Also, peculiarly, his middle initial is not B. He had never heard of Brandon Corey either." "What did become of Brandon?" "He simply vanished. Several attempts were made to contact him at the time of your escape from Porter, but he could not be found. Then you had the accident, were brought here and treated. At that time, a woman named Evelyn Flaumel, who represented herself as your sister, contacted this place, told them you had been probated and that the family wanted you transferred to Greenwood. In the absence of Brandon, who had been appointed your guardian, her instructions were followed, as the only available next of kin. That was how it came about that you were sent to the other place. You escaped again, a couple weeks later, ana that is where my chronology ends." "then what is my legal status right now?" I asked. "Oh, you've been made whole," he said. "Doctor Rand went down after I talked with him and gave the court an affidavit reciting these facts. The order was vacated." "Then why is the doctor here acting as if I might be a psycho case?" "Oh my! That is a thought. It hadn't occurred to me. All their records would show here is that at one time you apparently were. I had better see him on the way out. I have a copy of the journal entry in here, too. I can show it to him." "How long was it after I left Greenwood that things were set right with the court?" "The following month," he said. "It was several weeks before I could bring myself to get nosy." "You couldn't know how happy I am that you did," I said. "And you have given me several pieces of information I think are going to prove extremely important." "It is nice to be able to help a friend sometime," he said, closing the folder and replacing it in his briefcase. "One thing... When this is all over -- whatever you are doing -- if you are permitted to talk about it, I would like to hear the story." "I can't promise..." I said. "I know. Just thought I'd mention it. -- By the way, what do you want to do about the house?" "Mine? Do I still hold title to it?" "Yes, but it will probably be sold this year for back taxes if you don't do anything about it." "I'm surprised that hasn't already happened." "You gave the bank power of attorney for paying your bills." "I never thought of that. I'd just set it up for utilities and my charge accounts. Stuff like that." "Well, the account is nearly empty now," he said. "I was talking to McNally over there the other day. That means the house will go next year if you don't do anything." "I've got no use for it now," I said. "They can do whatever they want with it." "Then you might as well sell it and realize what you can." "I won't be around that long." "I could handle it for you. Send the money wherever you want." "All right," I said. "I'll sign anything necessary. Pay my hospital bill out of it and keep the rest." "I couldn't do that." I shrugged. "Do whatever you think best, but be sure and take a good fee." "I'll put the balance in your account." "All right. Thanks. -- By the way, before I forget, would you look in the drawer of that table and see if there is a deck of cards there? I can't reach it yet, and I'll be wanting them later." "Surely. ' He reached over, opened it. "A big brown envelope," he said. "Kind of bulgy. They probably put whatever was in your pockets in it." "Open it." "Yes, here's a pack of cards," he said, reaching inside. "Say! That's a beautiful case! May I?" "I -- " What could I say? He slipped the case. "Lovely..." he murmurred. "Some kind of Tarots... Are they antique?" "Yes." "Cold as ice... I never saw anything like these... Say, that's ou! Dressed up like some kind of night! -- What s their purpose?" "A very complicated game," I said. "How could that be you if they are antique?" "I didn't say it was me. You did." "Yes, so I did. Ancestor?" "Sort of." "Now that's a good looking gal! -- But so is the redhead..." "I think..." He squared the deck and replaced it in the case. He passed it to me. "Nice unicorn, too," he added. "I shouldn't have looked at them, should I?" "That's all right." He sighed and leaned back in the chair, clasping his hands behind his head. "I couldn't help it," he said. "It is just that there is something very strange about you, Carl, beyond any hush-hush work you may be doin; -- and mysteries intrigue me. I ve never been this close to a real puzzler before." "Because you just slipped yourself a cold deck of Tarots?" I asked. "No, that just adds atmosphere," he said. "While what you have been doing all these years is admittedly none of my business, there is one recent incident I am unable to comprehend." "What is that?" "After I brought you here and took Alice home last night, I went back to your place, hoping to get some sort of idea as to wnat had happened. The snow had let up by then, though it started in again later, and your track was still clearly visible, going around the house and down the front yard..." I nodded. "But there were no tracks going in -- nothing to indicate your arrival. And for that matter, there were no other tracks departing -- nothing to show the flight of your assailant." I chuckled. "You think the wound was selfinflicted?" "No, of course not. There wasn't even a weapon in sight. I followed the bloodstains back to the bedroom, to your bed. I had only my flashlight to see by, of course, but what I saw gave me an eerie feeling. It seemed as if you had just suddenly appeared there on the bed, bleeding, and then gotten up and made your way'out. " "Impossible, of course." "Why no tracks, though?" "The wind must have blown snow over them." "And not the others?" He shook his head. "No, I don't think so. I just want to go on the record as interested in the answer to that one too, if you ever do want to tell me about things." "I will remember," I said. "Yes," he said. "But I wonder... I've a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who get shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out.' "I can appreciate the feeling," I said. "My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author. But look at it this way: inside stories seldom live up to one's expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions." He smiled. "You talk the same as always," he said, "yet I have known occasions when you have been tempted to virtue. Several of them..." "How did we get from the footprints to me?" I said. "I was about to tell you that I suddenly recalled having approached the house by exactly the same route as I left it. My departure obviously obliterated the signs of my arrival." "Not bad," he said. "And vour attacker followed the same route?" "Must have." "Pretty good," he acknowledged. "You know how to raise a reasonable doubt. But I still feel that the preponderance of evidence indicates the weird." "Weird? No. Peculiar, perhaps. A matter of interpretation." "Or semantics. Have you read the police report on your accident?" "No. Have you?" "Uh-huh. What if it was more than peculiar? Then will you grant me my word, as I used it: 'weird'?" "Very well." "...And answer one question ?" "I don't know..." "A simple yes-or-no question. That's all. "Okay, it's a deal. What did it say?" "It said that they received report of the accident and a patrol car proceeded to the scene. There they encountered a strangely garbed man in the process of giving you first aid. He stated that he had pulled you from the wrecked car in the lake. This seemed believable in that he was also soaking wet. Average height, light build, red hair. He had on a green outfit that one of the officers said looked like something out of a Robin Hood movie. He refused to identify himself, to accompany them or to give a statement of any sort. When they insisted that he do so, he whistled and a white horse came trotting up. He leaped onto its back ana rode off. He was not seen again." I laughed. It hurt, but I couldn't help it. "I'll be damned!" I said. "Things are starting to make sense.' Bill just stared at me for a moment. Then, "Really?" he said. "Yes, I think so. It may well have been worth getting stabbed and coming back for what I learned today." "You put the two in peculiar order," he said, massaging his chin. "Yes, I do. But I am beginning to see some order where I had seen nothing before. This one may have been worth the price of admission, all unintended.' "All because of a guy on a white horse?" "Partly, partly... Bill, I am going to be leaving here soon -- " "You are not going anywhere for awhile." "Just the same -- those papers ou mentioned... I think I had etter get them signed today." "All right. I'll get them over this afternoon. But I don't want you doing anything foolish." "I grow more cautious by the moment," I said, "believe me." "I hope so," he said, snapping his briefcase shut and rising. "Well, get your rest. I'll clear things up with the doctor and have those papers sent over today." "Thanks again." I shook his hand. "By the way," he said, "you did agree to answer a question." "I did, didn't I? What is it?" "Are you human?" he asked, still gripping my hand, no special expression on his face. I started in on a grin, then threw it away. "I don't know. I -- I like to think so. But I don't really -- Of course I am! That's a silly... Oh hell! You really mean it, don't you? And I said I'd be honest..." I chewed my lip and thought for a moment. Then, "I don't think so," I said. "Neither do I," he said, and he smiled. "It doesn't make any real difference to me, but I thought it might to you -- to know that someone knows ou are different and doesn't care. ' "I'll remember that, too," I said. "Well... See you around." "Right." IX. It was just after the State Patrolman left... Late afternoon, I was lying there feeling better, and feeling better that I felt better. Lying there, reflecting on the hazards involved in living in Amber. Brand and I were both laid up by means of the family's favorite weapon. I wondered who had gotten it worse? Probably he had. It might have reached his kidney, and he was in poor condition to begin with. I had stumbled across the room and back again twice before Bill's clerk came over with the papers for me to sign. It was necessary that I know my limits. It always is. Since I tended to heal several times faster than those about me in that shadow, I felt that I ought to be able to stand and walk some, to perform in the same fashion as one of these after, say, a day and a half, maybe two. I established that I could. It did hurt, and I was dizzy the first time, less dizzy the second. That was something, anyway. So I lay there feeling better. I had planned the Trumps dozens of times, dealth private solitaires, read ambiguous fortunes among familiar faces. And each time I had restrained myself, suppressing my desire to contact Random, to tell him what had happened, to inquire after new developments. Later, I kept telling myself. Each additional hour they sleep is two and a half for you, here. Each two and a half for you, here, is the equivalent of seven or eight for some lesser mortal, here. Abide. Think. Regen rate. And so it came to pass that a little after dinnertime, just as the sky was darkening again, I was beaten to the punch. I had already told a well-starched young member of the State Patrol everything that I was going to tell him. I have no idea whether he believed me, but he was polite and he did not stay long. In fact, it was only moments after he left that things began to happen. Lying there, feeling better, I was waiting for Doctor Bailey to stop by ana check whether I was still oriented. Lying there, assessing all of the things Bill had told me, trying to fit them together with other things that I knew or had guessed at... Contact! I had been anticipated. Someone in Amber was an early riser. "Corwin!" It was Random, agitated. "Corwin! Get up! Open the door!Brand's come around, and he's asking for you." "Have you been pounding on that door, trying to get me up?" "That's reight." "Are you alone?" "Yes. ' "Good. I am not inside. You have reached me in Shadow." "I do not understand." "Neither do I. I am hurt, but I will live. I will give you the story later. Tell me about Brand." "He woke up just a little while ago. Told Gerard he had to talk to you right away. Gerard rang up a servant, sent him to your room. When he couldn't rouse you, he came to me. I just sent him back to tell Gerard I'd be bringing you along shortly." "I see," I said, stretching slowly and sitting up. "Get in some place where you can't be seen, and I'll come through. I will need a robe or something. I am missing some clothes." "It would probably be best if I went back to my rooms, then." "Okay. Go ahead." "A minute, then." And silence. I moved my legs, slowly. I sat on the edge of the bed. I gathered up my Trumps and replaced them in their case. I felt it important that I mask my injury back in Amber. Even in normal times one never advertises one's vulnerability. I took a deep breath and stood, holding onto the bed frame. My practice had paid off. I breathed normally ana relaxed my grip. Not bad, if I moved slowly, if I did not exert myself beyond the barest essentials required for appearances' sake... I might be able to carry it until my strength really returned. Just then I heard a footfall, and a friendly nurse was frame in the doorway, crisp, symmetrical, differing from a snowflake mainly in that they are all of them alike. "Get back in that bed, Mister Corey! You are not supposed to be up!" "Madam," I said, "it is necessary that I be up. I have to go." "You could have rung for a pan," she said, entering the room and advancing. I gave my head a weary shake just as Random's presence reached me once more. I wondered how she would report this one -- and if she would mention my prismatic afterimage as I trumped out. Another entry, I suppose, for the growing record of folklore I tend to leave behind. "Think of it this way, my dear," I told her. "Ours has been a purely physical relatinship all along. There will be others... Many others. Adieu!" I bowed and blew her a kiss as I stepped forward into Amber, leaving her to clutch at rainbows as I caught hold of Random's shoulder and staggered. If you yearn for the sweet simplicity , the simple rusticity of our primeval ancestors, perhaps you too should take a look into -- flint-chipper Henry, and his shapeless wife Gertrude. There were also five children of various sizes. That gave the expedition a lot to observe. The three Windows that had been built were all clumsy devices that hadn't justified the money the government had plowed into them. Hopes of spying partriotically on the country's enemies, or privately on some well-chosen friends, or scientifically on the enigmas of history, were ended when it was mathematically demonstrated that each Window could show only a single segment of time and in each case the prehistoric past, and furthermore only the past of the particular spot in which the Window was located in the twentieth century. Improvement of the process seemed impossible, so the project was canceled and the Windows were turned over to the paleo-anthropologists, who alone found some reason to rejoice. No, not quite alone. The present expedition consisted of six anthropologists, some graduate students as hewers of wood and drawers of water -- and three professional movie cameramen. The costs of the expedition were being underwritten by a California film company, and this anthropologist-philologist. "Do we have to let those people get their fingers in, mucking things up?' It was pointed out to him that the film company was paying the bills and supplying the best cameraman in the business, that the company had nothing to say about the direction of the expedition, and that the serious researchers would get free processing for a year's worth of film. "Yes," Beldone said, "but we don't have any control over the film they release. I'll bet it comes out as a skin flick." Beldone had been first a poor boy on the streets of New Y'ork and then a student at Oxford. He'd picked up a number of Britishisms there that he dropped into his sentences for effect. He was a good fellow, but he had some odd ideas. The Window wasin the body of a Land Rover parked near the front of the cave. The millenia and their glaciers had laid down a lot of rock and earth, so the observers looked back through time from a perch twenty feet in the ancient air. Power was supplied through a line run up from the large generator down at the main camp by the river. The anthropologists directing filming served four-hour shifts, the cameramen eight hours. Half an hour before he was due to relieve his predecessor, Beldone came trudging up the hill in the dark, under his arm his private notebook, thick and well cared for. "Damn bloody television," he said. "You go watch it if you want." A certain vice president had dropped in last week, just to see how his boys were doing. Brought with him and left behind with a grand gesture was a large television set. Color, yet. It worked fine even here, making the graduate students happy. But not everyone, not Beldone. "What's the matter, Phil?" "You'd think there'd be a place in the world where they couldn't shove remedies for blocked nasal passages at you. In color, yet." "Oh, Phil. Ought to be good for a chapter in your magnum opus, there. So use it. Turn dross into gold; of the spirit, I mean." "I intend to. I shall." Phil smiled just slightly, but he meant the words. "Goodnight now." Smiling, the other scientist touched Phil's arm and went out, closing the door behind him. The cameraman, whose name was P. Waner Byrd -- his father had been a baseball fanatic -- was sitting back in a swivel chair with one eye on the Window. He was an older and more leisurely man than Beldone. "Is anything happening?" Beldone asked. "No, they're just sitting around eating." Byrd shrugged. "Nothing new." Super Deluxe Gold Lined Labels Only #." Quick and easy way to put your Name and Return address on letters, books, records, etc. Any Name, Address and Zip Code up to # lines beautifully printed with large Gold Strip # labels only #.. Dublin Valley Press, # Betlen Drive, Dublin Calif. #. The Window's viewing area measured somewhat larger than that of the television now displaying nasal congestion to the main camp. The Window could be swung around a pivot in the middle of the truck to provide a full three hundred sixty degree view. Through it now Henry and his family could be seen hunkered around the campfire eating. Henry was not clad in the bearskin strongman's outfit of the cartoons. He and all his clan wore tailored outfits of tanned hide that were functional if not pretty. From their communal bowl they ate meat brought home by Henry, stewed with roots collected by Gertrude and the children. In that longpast time there was still daylight as they ate. Beldone pulled up his chair and sat down. When there was nothing doing in the Window he sometimes worked on his book ("A return on a higher plane to Thoreau, to the simple life", he could say in his own mind and one day in print) but now he just held the notebook in his lap. Byrd asked: "What's on the TV tonight?". "We were watching an opera, for a while." Some beautiful things would be lost to devotees of the Simple Life, because the price was too high. "It doesn't matter. They spoil everything. Art one moment and armpits the next." "Oh, the commercials? They're not that bad," Byrd said. "Some of them are funny and the rest you can ignore." "Maybe so," Beldone said. "I never could. I owned a telly once. And then one day I could feel the brainwashing beginning to get to me, and I broke the tube." "You did?" "Yes." Beldone smiled. "Just picked up a heavy glass ashtray and threw it. Made a most lovely noise." Henry spoke to two of his middle-sized children and after a reluctant moment they picked down a hanging skin bag, stuck a stick through the thongs at its top so they could carry it between them, and set off downhill to the river, passing under the Window. "Chores," said Byrd. "I wonder what they get for an allowance?" "Did you get an allowance when you were a kid?" "Yes." "I never did. As a matter of fact, I turned over the money I made to my parents. You know. I'm growing to actually envy Henry and his family. The times are good. Life isn't too hard. And they don't have to put up with... ha. Television announcers." Byrd smiled. "No Social Security." "No taxes." "Yes," Byrd said, "but I don't imagine Henry will live much past forty, will he?" "No. You're right, of course. But his is the world as man evolved to fit it, and that's an advantage we'll never..." Henry and Gert had jumped to their feet. A moment later the two children burst back on scene, wildly pointing and apparently yelling. They didn't have the water bag with them. Henry grabbed up a spear. His older son, who perhaps came to his shoulder, did the same, standing a step behind his father. Beldone was up and watching intently. Byrd had switched on the camera. After the family had been caught in alert position, Gertrude shepherding the girls and the younger boy into the cave, Beldone said: "Let's swing around and see what's coming." "Right." Window and camrera swiveled to look down the hill. Climbing toward them were three people. Two were women, carrying packs. The third, a very large man, brought with him the filled waterbag, swinging it in one hand while he raised the other in a sign of peace. He had a couple of spears but they were slung on his back. He stumbled once, sloshing water on himself; the women with him tittered. "Who's this?" Byrd wondered. "Relatives come to call?" "We'll see." Beldone lifted the phone and informed base camp of the new arrivals, while Byrd brought the Window round again and focussed on the cave mouth. The newcomers came into sight just below and halted there. Henry came slowly forward, spear ready, and he and the new man talked. Now and then Gertrude acted as barber for Henry, so most of his face was usually exposed; the newcomer had hair down past his shoulders, and a great bushy beard. He towered over Henry, but benignly. After they had talked for a couple of minutes, Henry waved the three forward to the fire, and called Gertrude. She came out of the cave, and with her oldest daughter bustled about adding reserve ingredients Quick and easy way to put your name and return address on letters, books, records, etc. Any name, address and zip code up to # lines beautifully printed in black type and red happy face on white crisp gummed paper. # labels #" x W only #. Send to: Paul Lundquist # Santa Maria St. Castro Valley, Ca. to the stew. The older boy set down his spear and took the waterbag from the stranger's peaceful hand. In the two months the expedition had been observing this family, only once before they had visitors. Byrd was filming every moment. Beldone went up into the cab to move the Land Rover slightly for a better angle. Back in the rear, Beldone said: "Try for closeups of the new ones talking." "That fella's beard'll cover a lot of lip movements." "True, but the more talking mouths we can get on film the better our chance of cracking the language." The new man had sat down crosslegged near the fire, facing the Window almost directly, to gobble some food. That chore out of the way, he belched, and wiped his mouth on his hand. Then, accommodating, he started talking. And he talked. He was a funny fellow, for Henry and Gertrude soon were laughing. And the shy children gradually crept closer, watching with bright intent eyes as the bearded man chattered, waved his hands, waited for laughter. "I wonder who they are?" Byrd said. He was getting a lot of close-up footage. Beldone just shook his head. Bushy-Beard abruptly stopped his palaver and pulled from somewhere a small drum, which he tapped on while his two women got up to go capering around the fire. They hopped and jumped briskly in their shapeless leggings and jackets, shiny with grease. With their natural haircuts and gap-toothed smiles they did not seem particularly attractive to Beldone, but they did have a certain sense of rhythm. When the first viewers from the main camp of breath, cursing someone's sprained ankle that had delayed them, Beldone just waved them inside while keeping a fascinated eye on the Window. The dance was cut off suddenly. The big man set the drum aside and stood up. Looming over Henry, he began to talk again, and this time all the lip movements showed clearly through the facial brush. "Phil, what -- are you all right?" Beldone raised an imperative hand. Henry was standing now too, but retreating step by step. Spear not thought of, useless against this threat. The big man matched him step for step, advancing beard to beard, spraying words while with one hand he motioned his women forward with their packs. "Phil! What is it?" Phil was tearing pages from his notebook into little bits. His voice seemed changed. "What is it? It's the bloody commercial!"  Dear Mr. Baen, J.A. Lawrence's November story, "The Persistence of Memory," deserves some comments on its biological heresies First, there is the misconception that having the same genetic makeup produces a psychic link between the people involved. This is not the first clone story which has used this idea, which is provably false. The proof lies in the existence of manv individuals of identical genetic makeup (identical twins) who show no such link. And the only difference between twins and clones is that the latter are an artificial creation of the former. Another idea without biological basis is the supposed effect of celibacy on the psy chic link of clones (or for that matter on any mental or physical process). Is there any physiological basis for such an effect? I cannot think of one. May be an endocrine imbalance could effect psychic contact but only temporarily. The real idea that Lawrence was probably driving at was that loss of celibacy means loss of some pristine and ideal state. I would add to these qualities intangible and immeasurable. I enjoyed the story. It was only afterwards that I got to thinking about the biology. "The Aerial Machine" by Herbie Brennan probably deserves classification with Chariots of the Cods. .Vo , no! Anything but that! -- Ed. We poor stupid earthlings are constantly suckered in by these alien ploys. If aliens are interested in us, when they want us to know about them, we will know. One can only hope (for how could one prepare) that conquest is not the rule on other worlds. While we wait, speculaJerry Pournelle's holographic brain model sounds right. But if a small portion of the holograph contains the whole picture, why does increased brain capacity between species usually indicate increased intelligence? Surely no animal has a brain small enough to make the picture fuzzy. I would appreciate Jerry's answer to this question. Congratulations on editing some fine magazines. Pool Anderson you have given us. Isaac Asimov you have given us. Dick Geis you have forced on us (Even though I enjoy every minute of his outrageous ideas). Here comes the suggestion. I want Heinlein. As publisher of the latest Hugo winning novel, Rendevous With Rama, you ought to be able to strike a deal with any author. Take heart! If you can get Clarke, you can get Heinlein. Say it over and over. Now do it. Please. OK -- I'll ash him. -- Ed If is the best SF magazine being published today and I have tried them all. Keep up the good work and don't cut any more pages out of those magazines! Brian Allman # Bay Court Ave. Tampa, Fla. #I Nov. #, # Perhaps the prior existence of a conscious entity produced by the same "genetic template would create a uniquely personal "psychic-field effect " that would envelope-and thus conjoin-the clones in question? Also, Ms. iMwrence postulates identical memory-sets. Dear Jim, Thanks for sending me the August Galaxy. I've begun to read it, and I didn't so bad -- at the end she really had my sympathies for the old woman. I guess the only problem with this kind of story is that it's cumbersome to read quite so much interior monologue unless it's written with terrific -- just about the funniest thing I've read in a long time, a super-duper winner of a tale, extremely timely nowadays, especially from the point of view of a federal official trying to find ways to recycle PE. Poul Anderson's article hit me between the eyes, in a way, because just before I read his ' cyclical theory," I finished a piece on this general subject -- from a slightly different slant. My angle was that sf will become literature, someday...and when it does, it'll be a dead genre. Poul has obviously been dipping into Toynbee or Spengler or both -- towering proponents of cyclical history, as evidenced both by and the sf article. I am also very interested in that concept. It's a damn useful perspective for the luturistically oriented author. Some (non-exhaustive) comments about And suddenly the story ended, before I was ready for it to end, and I got the imf iression that it was Chapter One of a onger work. Well done -- but the real kudos, I think, go to Jack Gaughan. Tell Jack that the cover was magnificent! If you should run , Jack should be asked to do the art. Y'ear at Marienbad -- a film I rather hated at first but later got to like. I guess the story depends on endless repetition to create a mood, and it's an attempt at art, has my approval, and as for metal eating rocks on tne moon, I enjoyed having a Those #-year old fans really ate it up, I'd uess. James Lacey tries what I usually on't dare -- creating a massive confusion from which he doesn't entirely extricate us at the end... Incindentally, I liked Utley's piece in August Galaxy -- Utley is outdoing himself in creating hilarious, up-beat pieces! It's certainly a step up from a woman with her guts hung up, on the way to becoming an android, to show us the start of the Universe in a Big Bang with a priest fingering the erotic elbow of a female bee! Man alive! I liked it! So far I still like the October IF best of all your books. It's superb through and isn't so bad -- and I got a really Big Bang if you correspond with Colin Kapp -- tell him from me that Mephisto is magnificent, as close to a perfect piece of sf as I've seen recently, meaning scientific theme, character, visual effects, and balanced story telling. Please do not print any of my comments in your letter column unless they're attributed to Charles Dickens, or something. Charles Dickens I've always wanted to attribute a letter to Charles Dickens. Dear Jim, Entropy can be reversed! After Fred Pohl quit as editor of Galaxy and If, both zines went to hell in a handbasket. Thanks to you, both are rising to their former levels of good and fun reading. I tip my space helmet to you. First of all, a variety of artists. Bravo! Jack Gaughan is a good SF artist, witness his cover and the showcase in the October issue of Galaxy, but he was being over worked. Fabian has always been good and several of your new illustrators show great promise. The quality of your stories has improved to the point where I expect you to be grabbing your fair share of the Hugo's in times to come (now there is a phrase that sounds familiar). And I must compliment you on your features. Congratulations on your coup in signing Dick Geis on as a regular contributer. The last time something like that happened was when FSF got Isaac Asimov as Science editor . Take that, Geis! Ed. I'd like to take him to point, however, on his October "Alien Viewpoint" column in If. Now, Dick's alter-ego claims to want realism in SF stories, namely to make the characters more human. Ego seems to claim that to make characters believable, we must place human limitations on them, to wit, give them faults and foibles. Now I quote from Before the Golden Age an afterword by Isaac Asimov: "That hero (of "Submieroscopic" and "Awlo of Ulm") is rich, athletic, and the kind of square-shooter who longs to kill ants for sport, and who does kill an inoffensive deer the instant he sees it, even though he is not hungry at the time and has no intention of eating it... , . There is love at first sight, the princess who acceps a strange adventurer as her husband... The kind of tale in which virtue just happens to have stronger muscles, readier fists, and better weapons..." A brief psychoanalytical look at the hero and heroine reveal them to be totally out of touch with reality, failing the grasp clear and present dangers, easily deceived, armed with cruel and vicious tempers, unforgiving, sadistic, masocistic, immature psychotics who are quite impetuous, contradictory, and filled with dark compulsions and obsessions. Is this human enough for alter-ego, Dick? Seriously, I think SF has produced some outstanding characters. Most have been larger than life, true, but then SF deals with larger than life issues. Name one mundane character who can equal Gully Foyle, Ben Reich, Prestign of Prestign, Lazarus Long, Rysfing, Sol Dagenheim, Valentine Michael Smith, or any Puppeteer. Larger than life situations call for larger than life characters. The common, everyday variety would shrivel up and die. Fortunately it was an extra-ordinary man who suffered a great personal tragedy and not an ordinary one, else Captain Nemo might have spent the rest of his life drifting through various gin shops cursing whatever government happened to be in power instead of building the Nautilus. Fortunately an extra-ordinary man was president of a port-Civil War veterans' club instead of an ordinary one, else Impy Barbicane might have lobbied Congress instead of building the greatest cannon in the world and launching himself, two others, and the hopes of a nation to the moon. Realism's great, but don't forget that it takes a big (confidence) (wo)man to do a big job. Buzz Dixon SP# Hubert C. Dixon #-#-# Trans. Dear Mr. Baen: I just finished reading the October issues of IF and Galaxy and thought they were both superb. I had been thinking of letting my subscriptions to both lapse but now I wouldn't think of doing so. Keep up the excellent work!!!!!!!!!!!! Now to the reasons that I'm writing. First, if "Yours in Christ, . Parker Wilbern. Chairman, Federal City Conservative Club" was so offended by Mack Reynolds' Second Advent that he had to rip it out of the magazine why in the expletive deleted is he reading science fiction in the first place! Second, I certainly agree with your statement, "Fandom: I will take famdon seriously as long as fandom does not return the favor." I have been reading science fiction seriously for over twenty some years, and the few slight brushes that I nave had with fandom have left me with the opinion that famdom on a whole does not read science fiction because they are too busy going to conventions and discussing it. Third, I also agree with your statement in your editorial, "No, when it comes to defining our field, intensive definitions don't seem to work very well. They just build walls. Unnecessary' ones." Fourth and final, I absolutely adored your story, Mepltisto The Ion Explorer by Colin Kapp. It was one ol the most beautiful stories I have ever read. Please tell Mr. Kapp that I would like to read more about Dr. Peter Lisbon. (Mrs.) Lois A. Anderson Thank you -- and another on team story is in the works. Dear Sirs: Thank you for sending me the October issues of Galaxy and If, which I had requested in my last letter Irecause my subscription copies had not arrived -- even though both issues had been on the news , stands several weeks earlier. My subscription copies finally arrived. If I don't receive a request from you to ship them back, I will give the extra copies to friends to introduce them to these fine magazines. Arsen Darnay's "The Eastcoast Confinement ' deserved to be the cover story in the October Galaxy. It's by no means a totally original idea, but Mr. Damev's writing skill made it a richly developed story. This begs for expansion into a novel, with two parts to be developed further: the unification of the lour interior cultures, and the breakout. The first is easy to foresee, at least in outline. The second will take a lot of ihinkingout to reach a logically satisfying conclusion. I think Darnay should be encouraged to proceed. As an attorney specializing in federal taxation, I have some nits to pick with S. Roger Keith's "Death and Taxes" in the October If. I assume Mr. Keith is an accountant, since his "notes' are preapred by a C.P.A. But really', Mr. Keith -- # A . F T . R . #d and # T.C. published in #? These volumes were, in fact, published in # and #, respectively. You should have computed the correct volume numbers for that year to maintain a convincing background to your case reports. Along the same line, the Tax Court has never affirmed or reversed a Circuit Court of Appeals, so the correct citation for your first case, for example, would be: Hegar t. Commissioner. # A.F.T. R.#d #-# (cd Cir. #), affg # T.C. # (#). I have a more substantive objection to Mr. Keith's third case. He apparently forgot to check the Citator for an update on his cases before he returned his page proofs to the printer; # Wires of Stud was reversed on certiorari by the Supreme Court under the rapid review procedures instituted by the Court in #. The Second Circuit opinion was manifestly in error, since a joint federal income tax return when more than two spouses are filing is by its very nature a consolidated return: one return for everyone. In a joint return, each spouse gets a personal exemption (# for the returns involved in this case), blit this is beside the point; federal law permits only one joint return, and on this return there is only one ocea-. sion to deduct the shared husband. The Second Circuit reached the right result, but its concept of # "joint" returns was absurd. # Wives of Stud v. Commissioner, # U.S.#d # (#), re vg per curiam # F.#th # (#d Cir.). Is there any truth the to rumor that If is folding after the December issue? John T. Sapienza, Jr. # Virginia Avenue, N. VV, Apt. D-# Washington, D.C. # Sirs, I very' much enjoy your magazine, but who can wait two months for Part II of a novel? How long is it going to take us to get thru the middle fifth of Zelazny's ( Cackle , cackle.Ed. ) Besides having the pleasure of reading about Flandry's faithful Chives serving Chateau Falkayn '#, I really enjoy Anderson's work. With the possible exception of Tau Zero I have seen nothing of the future beyond Flandry's declining Empire -- for instance with Admiral McCormac's group. Does he plan further human civilizations or other stories? I am very happy to see R.E. Geis with you -- except that he can't seem to find time for his own zine now -- or he doesn't keep good subscription records for it. PO Box # Is there a future for the Race, after the Empire P I mean, with the damn Merseians just waiting their chance , and all...Well, Foul? 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J Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose J  numbers I have indicated below, and bill me   just # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to i J take # additional books during the coming year J  and may resign anytime thereafter. Mrs. Miss Address Please print Apt. City State Zip #. The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. Price # #. Again, Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed. Short stories and novels, # in all. Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # #. Fire Time. By Poul Anderson. Terrific suspense as a young spaceman must decide who will live, who will die on a tiny planet on the verge of cosmic disaster. Pub. ed. # #. The # Annual World's Best S.F. Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Ten novellas, short stories: Ellison's Hugo Award-winning The Deathbird, plus top Simak, Sheckley, Pohl. Special Edition. #. The Dispossessed. By Ursula K. LeGuin. A lone scientist, caught in a cold war between two planets, tries desperately to unite them. Pub. ed. # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant #-in-l volume of # awardwinning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. The Gods Themselves. By Isaac Asimov. The master's first novel in # years... and worth the wait for a fabulous trip to the year #. Pub. ed. # #. Approaching Oblivion. By Harlan Ellison. Eleven mindspinning stories irt the multi-award winner's new anthology explicit scenes, language exploring new and unfathomed areas of the future. Pub. ed. # #. The Best of Fritz Lieber. Shoot craps with the devil, visit a planetwide madhouse, fall in love with an alien # tales by the sorcerer of SF. Special Edition. #. Before the Golden Age. Isaac Asimov, ed. # classic stories of the #s, from vintage SF pulps, now in one huge volume. Pub. ed. # #. Rendezvous with Rama. By Arthur C. Clarke. Hugo and Nebula Award Winner. Dazzling visionary novel of a selfcontained world in space. Pub. ed. # #. The Deathworlri Trilogy. By Harry Harrison. On # amazing planets interplanetary adventurer Jason dinAlt gambles his life against different lethal environments. Special Edition. The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even nore. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. Printed in U.S.A.  #S# BioeeiR zeiBxiRip Ik Thank you Galaxy Readers! Due lo your ovenwhelmlng response lo our previous ad, we are happy to announce # new prepaid economy packages ol underground comli. You will receive the best art and story telling of today at prices you cen afford. Careful selection ol the right packages will mean hours ol reading plea sure. We believe these adult stories are what you have been walling lor. 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A science fiction story about a science fiction magazine. Any resemblances between the staid and proper real world of sf publishing and this ridicuious story are categorically denied! After alt, this is Steve Carper's first pubiished sf story-so how could he possibly know?! A genuinely scary story of the near future when Decency and The American Way have become synonymous. Ms. Tuttle is this year's other Campbeii Award recipient In which all that stands between Earth and an Alien Menace is a single mulberry tree-a tree in grave danger of being chopped down! Continuing the adventures of Corwin of Amber. In this instaiiment he makes a shocking discovery about the nature of the Universe... This editorial is directed not so much to readers as to writers of science fiction. It is an adjuration against gloom and doom, and whimpering despair: Introducing the Next Phase! Senator or Congressman by simply addressing it to: The Hon. (name), The Capitol, Washington, D.C. And you should! exception to those who would dissolve sf into the Mainstream of Literary Values. A non verbal series. Sturgeon reviews what he considers to be the best science fiction novel ever written! Letters from Rea, Meyer, Grimshawe, Isdale, Miliken. Interior Illustrations by Freff, Fabian, Gaughan of Univaiaal PiMlahlng A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, Praaidant. Main Offices: # East # Street. New York,N.Y. #. Single copy: #Sc. #-laaue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-lasue subscription in the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventiona. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magailne are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.SA. What's new in the lives of bees... the minds of dolphins...artificial intelligence, astrophysics. To keep up with everything that's happening in every scientific area that interests you... Take any # books (values to #) all for only #... as a member of The Library of Science. if you join now and agree to accept only # more books -- all at member discount -- over the next two years (Retail prices shown) anal Eric Mendoza. A collection ol jokes, short essays and poems on humor and humanity in physics and related sciences. SI #.M slranger-than-sciencefiction happenings from the Smithsonian Institution's Center lor Short-Lived Phenomena # of the pioneers of radio astronomy offers an absorbing history of this powerful technique's remarkable development.  I # feuer. What really accounts tor the shattering insights ol Einstein. Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and others. A ground-breaking book with a bold and controversial explanation. I # Edition. Bart Bok and Priscilla Bok. Updated and expanded outsized volume, filled with over I # pictures, charts and diagrams, includes the latest scientific research in wonderfully elegant style. # by Robert M. Besancon. Updated and expanded edition of a modern classic. Over # distinguished authorities in # articles offer incisive, authoritative information on every topic in physics today. Counts as # of your # books. #  The Book Club News, describing the coming Main and Alternate Selections, will be sent to you I # times a year at three to four week intervals.  If you wish to purchase the Main Selection, do nothing and it will be shipped to you automatically.  If you prefer one of the Alternates, or no book at all, simply indicate your decision on the reply form always enclosed with the News and mail It so we receive it by the dale specified.  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Two of the world's leading photographers provide both wealth of information on wildlife photography and an exquisite collection o( Iheir finest pictures I # Lewis Thomas. Widely acclaimed essays on man and nature, science and lite. "... an ode to biology bursting with information" -- The Washington Post. # linguistics, anthropology religion, philosophy. and psychology, a prominent cultural anthropologist investigates Ihe riles, beliefs, places and taboos that various societies have considered sacred. # The Library of Science  aa Riverside, New Jersey # Please accept my application for membership and send me I agree to purchase at least three additional Selections or Alternates during the lirst two years I am a member, under the club plan described in this ad Savings range up to # and occasionally even more. My membership is cancelable any time after I buy these three books. A shipping and handling charge is added to all shipments. Send no money. Members are billed when books arrive. # books for # Indicate by number Ihe # books you want. Some expensive books count as # selections NameCily-State-ZipBook selections purchased lor professional purposes may be a lax deduclible expense. (Offer good in Continental U S. and Canada only. Prices slightly higher in Canada.) Boy, hae we got problems. And if we don't solve them some pretty terrible things are going to happen -- and we all know it. That's the point. Thanks in large part to the efforts of those involved in science fiction, the Big Problems of ecological contamination, overpopulation, dwindling resources, genetic and personal peril arising from drugs and food additives (well, there may still be a bit of room on that one) and so on have all become a part of public consciousness -- and certainly have been incorporated into the awareness of virtually every reader of science fiction. In other words, we have already done a more than adequate job of broadcasting the consequences of stepping in it. Maybe it's time to ' dramatize ways and means of stepping around it -- and the benefits accru ing therefrom. Maybe it's time to begin the Next Phase -- one which the ing populace that while man and his planet may be in for Hard Times, these Hard Times are by no means inevitable, that, given the will, we have the means and the knowledge to do something about our problems. Example: Laser-generated fusion is a virtual certainty during this decade. This means that the #'s will see both cheap, "clean" energy and the first constant-acceleration space-vehicles (oh, what the hell -- spaceships!) capable of ranging the Solar System at a payload cost of pennies-per-pound at point of delivery. Example: Cheap, simple, safe, reversable male sterilization is imminent. What will this do to world population trends? Example: A laser anti-ballistic-missile system could be begun today (and perhaps has been) that would neutralize for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. the dangers of nuclear proliferation. (See this month's science article.) So perhaps we should mute our cries of doom, and speak if not in tones of triumph, then at least of hope -- and courage. For those of you who have  an unconquerable urge to create still another "fully realized world" steeped in misery and horror resulting from #th Century stupidity -- please try another market. I firmly believe the readers are as bored with it as is this editor. -- Baen From: Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division To: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction Larry. I've been looking over your circulation figures for an upcoming report for Allison Jr. in the main office and I ran across something strange. Listen to this. Paid newsstand circulation for your book for cover-dates July and August '#; May, July and December '#; and March '# was down almost # copies each. Very regular decreases. I wouldn't have even noticed them in the middle of all your other ups and downs if the drops weren't so even. But I can't explain them. Not even to myself, let alone someone like Allison who wants nothing more than to get you dropped from the group as it is. Maybe you have some ideas. It's not in my end. I've checked it all the way down the line. Different months, different seasons, same distributors, same newsstands. Are you beginning to run porn or is one of our competitors sticking pins into his Quasar doll? What gives? From: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction To: Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division Rodge. (Remember the good old days before we were bought and you still worked with me when I could put your name on line-one instead of seven? Thanks for the warning old buddy. I could give you any number of reasons for our losing circ but I can't think of anything that could account for such astounding disregularity. What could it be? Sunspots? Smog warnings? Blonde centerfolds in Playboy? Anyway, I'll put my new assisBoy From Upstairs), somebody's relative probably. We re building up a fine mutual dislike because he's going batty reading the slush pile and he's taking it out on me. Hopefully something like this will send him out of here with foam coming from his mouth. I could use something like that to brighten my day. Besides, even if worst came to worst and he figures this out, we're still ahead. I can't lose. P. S. Porno would either send our circ up # or drive the next issue's down. Should try it though, sometime. From: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction To: Marshall Enze Assistant Editor Quasar Science Fiction Marshall. I'm sending over some circulation figures along with this memo, so you can take your nose out of the slush pile for a while. Dig up the six issues that went bad with as many others as you can find and figure out one of two things; #) What the hell is similiar about those six or #) How they are different from the rest. Analyze. Quantify. Draw maps and charts. You may have any resources you think you may need but I want it done in th ree days -- in time for next issue's deadline. From: Marshall Enze Assistant Editor Quasar Science Fiction To: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction From; Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction To: Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division Rodge. We may, just may, have something. It sounds strange (obvious was the way my assistant put it) but there isn't anything else as far as we could tell that's common to those six issues and those six issues alone. Let me tell you a little story. Sometime back in #, not long after we were taken over by TE, Inc. in that massive acquisitions grab of theirs, I began to receive stories through the slush pile from an author I had never heard of before. (I was still doing my own first-reading in those far off, bygone days.) Slush pile or no, these stories weren't at all bad. In fact I bought the first one I saw and every one after that. Unusual. What's more unusual is that he sells only to us. And positively strange is the fact that I have no biographical detail on him at all. None. A hint that the name's a pseudonym, a hint that he's young, a hint that he knows computers. Checks go to a box number right here in New York. The stories came in regularly and got better and better. Reader response was good. I thought I had a real find in him. I became convinced when, about a year or so after I first heard from him, I got an especially good novelette. Very nice. So I assigned a cover for it and ran it as the lead story in the issue. Naturally his name ran on the cover too. As an old hack, Rodge, you can ' guess what the hook is. That was the January # ish. So. Another story, not as good. I run it in May but his name doesn't go on the cover. In August, though, there it is again. When the circ hits bottom. And again the next May, and July, and, and. Not merely when he's in the issue. Not when he writes a poor story. When he's on the cover. I can't tell you what the hell is going on. All I know is that I found out just in time to take his name off the cover for next time. The painting has been set up for printing, of course, but I can change the overlay with the names on it just enough so that his name disappears without affecting anything else. Especially the circulation. Now tell me. Just how fast can you tell me whether or not we get that ten percent drop? In the meantime I'm going to remove banalities of his normal existance to see if that Harvard educated brain of his can come up with any other deductions. I'm beginning to feel kindly toward him now, stuck off in. this god-forsaken corner of the conglomerate. Maybe investigating this will make him feel useful and keep him out of my hair at the same time. Keep me posted, and for god's sake not a word to Allison Jr. From: Nestor W. Allison Jr. Director, Publications Division Printed Media Sector To; Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division Sir. The report on our three year circulation patterns was due on my desk over two weeks ago. Must I remind you that no useful conclusions aimed at improving the circulation of several of our more moribund publications may be arrived at until I have sufficient data at hand to bear on the problem ? If you find yourself incapable of doing an adequate job at your present position, I am sure that somewhere in our vast organization there are many who would prove more capable. Do not make me doubt the wisdom of our promotion of you from that rather less demanding position you previously held. From: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction To; Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division Rodge. What's the news? I'm on pins and needles up here. From: Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division To: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction Larry. Get off my back already! Allison Jr. is hard enough to take. You of all people should know how long it takes to get results back to us. Nevertheless, I've performed a miracle. By making a mortal enemy of every person I have to work with and may need for a favor someday. I've managed to come up with the data earlier than ever before. And it checks Ballantine Books A Division of Random House, Inc. Just back from the Spring Sales Conference where we presented our # list. What a reaction! Never has there been a science-fiction program quite like this one...bigger and better than ever! Look for our stunning new logo -- Ballantine's Seal of Selection stamped on every sf book. Then there's a spectacular new cover "look," featuring design and illustration by top commercial artists -- some of whom we are introducing to the field.      We will have larger print orders, bigger ad budgets, additional titles published (three instead of two each month) and In other words: the best of the old, the best of the new and the best of the best! And it all starts in February... (over) out, all the way. Circulation was not down #. In fact, it went up, if only #. would like to know. By the way. I've had to turn in the circulation report to Allison Jr., so he may be sending down some nasty memos. Give him the good news about not having these drops in the future, maybe it will slow him down for a while. P.S. I read some of the guy's stories in the past couple of weeks and they aren't bad. Lack a certain life, though. Is there any way we can send him over to our competitors and put him on their covers? Or better yet, on a paperback antho or ten? From: Nestor W. Allison Jr. Director, Publications Division Printed Media Sector To; Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction Sir. A report on the circulation patterns of your magazine during the past three years has come to my attention. There are some startling anomilies in the figures Ballantine Books Always the best sciatica tictiofi and fantasy -- Our Nawast Ralaasas -- Robert A. Heinlein # Cordwainer Smith . # Michael Bishop # Laurence Manning # James Tiptree. Jr I .# Theodore Sturgeon I .# Hal Clement # Alan Dean Foster # You'll lind them all wherever paperback books are sold. Or. to order by mail, send price per book(s) plus #e per order for handling to Ballantine Cash Sales. P.O. Box #, Westminster, Maryland #. Please allow three weeks lor delivery. that I believe call for an explanation. Study the enclosed copy of the report and prepare a report for my office for no later than this time next week. From: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction To; Marshall Enze Assistant Editor Quasar Science Fiction Maxshall. Look, damn it, there's such a backlog of slush-pile stories here that I've had to start reading them myself to get things moving. And one of the conditions I insisted on when TE wanted to buy us is that I would never have to stoop so low again. And now Allison wants a report out of me in a week. So I want answers out of you. I know you're doing something because you're never in the office, but it had better have some bearing on our problem. Now, if I don't hear something from you by tomorrow, you'll find yourself doing lay outs and paste ups for All Time Great Fantasy Stories which I also nominally edit, you know. My wrath can be swift and merciless as in the days of old. Send me up something, even one of these thrice-damned memos. From: Marshall Enze Assistant Editor Quasar Science Fiction To;Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction Boss. Don't go getting yourself lost in fantasies of your past glory because -- unlike you -- I have relatives in high places. I'm not sure if I could get your-job taken away, but you'd find yourself answering more memos than I see Adam and Eve stories each day. Fortunately for you my opinion of Allison Jr. (my second cousin, as near as I can figure it) is lower than William Buckley's for Gore Vidal. But since I'm preparing to take over your somewhat more prestigious job I went to work to save the magazine when I smelled a Machievelli hand in our circulation figures. There's a complete summary of the last few weeks attached to this, along with an explanation of the time-sharing bills you're going to get for the company computer. I doubt if you'll read it, much less understand it, so I'll simplify it here. Six years ago, Allison Sr. (my first cousin, comprende?) added this magazine into his publishing empire as both a tax loss and a reason for asking Congress for special-interest postal legislation. Therefore we are supposed to lose money. Somehow you've managed to stop doing so (and as soon as I can figure out how. I'm moving upstairs). Now, Allison Sr. likes this kind of initiative in the face of adversity but it drives Allison Jr. up the wall. Or at least that's how family gossip has it. Allison Jr. drew up a plan. You had to be made to lose money but it had to be covert or else his old-line capitalist father would be up in arms. How to work it. I found out from one of the computer jocks in the main office who went to Harvard with me. took to the company.) Allison Jr. went to the same computer that works out package names for our lines of board games and paperback action series to come with an anti-euphonious name guaranteed to drive the average science reader screaming into the night. Remember the study he ordered of newsstand buyers of SF magazines? He's been plotting this for a long time. One problem left. How to get this name on the cover of the magazine where the buying public could see it? Easy. All of our computer jocks, my cousin discovered, are SF readers. It was no trouble for him to get the whole computer crew interested in a secret project to program ideas into our Scientific Application Systems computer (a wholly owned subsidiery) and teach it to grind out better and better science fiction plots that could be ghosted-up into a complete stories by one of the companies pet hacks -- good enough stories to get the "author's" name on the cover in not too many issues. Nice to know that kind of talent is in my family. From: Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division To: Lawrence Epplinger Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction Larry. Hey, I thought you had forgotten all about me but that plan you sent for improving distribution coverage for your magazine really works. Who did you steal it off of? You never knew the first thing about this end of the business. What to let me in on the secret? Anyway, the early reports that I'm getting on Quasar say that sales are up. Positively healthy, in fact. Keep this up and you'll be putting the paperbacks out of business instead of vice versa. Congratulations are in order if you're the cause; if not, give him a raise. P.S. I picked up one of the copies of last month's issue that came floating through here. It was so good I may even start reading the zine again. Especially if you keep running stories by that new discovery of yours. From: Lawrence Epplinger Director, Publications Division Printed Media Sector To: Rodger Frew Sales and Distribution Manager Publications Division Rodge. Sorry I took so long to get around to answering you but your memo got misfiled when I changed offices and it took this long to catch up to me. I'm sending this along with Marshall's report. Remember thing first and then get back to this so I can tell you the rest of the story. All done? OK, now to let you in on the secret of our circulation increase, which must not be breathed to a living soul, especially not even that secretarymistress of yours. After Marshall filled me in on the sabotage the rest was easy. The computer jocks up in the billing office were having a fine time playing with their creation until I sent Marshall upstairs to tell them the facts of life. It would seem that Allison Jr. had neglected to tell them that their little joke was being used to kill their favorite mag. God, the power of a computer scorned. For revenge they tossed a subtle bug or two in Allison Jr.'s brand new, heavily publicized subscription computer with results that must have had you contemplating suicide the past few weeks. (It won't happen to us, they assure me. As long as I behave myself, that is.) With the time stolen from naming our new line of packaged art masterpieces we re-ran the results of the newsstand survey and came up with a name for my new "discovery". I like the stories, myself. That computer (with hack-assist) is getting positively talented. As for that other fellow -- why everybody knows how erratic authors are. Just a permanent writer's block, From: Harris Lazluli Assistant Editor Quasar Science Fiction To: Marshall Enze Managing Editor Quasar Science Fiction Cousin Marshall. I've been getting some very strange submissions to the slush pile. Could I come up and talk with you about them? Soon?  the of Pity poor Noball -- his lovo was hopelessi It happened during the colonization of the Eastern Quadrant, on the heavy-planet Galuben, known to you as the source of the aphrodisiac fleece -- in your teenage argot the so-called jutting rug.' Some of you probably believe the claims made for the ents did or do. You've heard about its properties. It's said to make barren women fecund and impotent men verile. And if you get your gal to sit on it, she'll go mellow. I won't tell you my opinion. I'll let my story do that. Anyway, it happened on Glauben, in my grandfather's time. He played a key role in the affair. He described his experience as 'the polities of ratticide,' and that'll be my title. But please no questions now. You'll hear all you need to hear by-and-by" With these words the old man paused. The teenies in the B-Deck Whybar gathered around and settled into flato chairs to hear the Taler spin his yam. He in turn touched a glower to his pipe and pensively puffed on the device. Grains of Millusion mixed with tabak vaporized and drifted invisibly in the air, amplifying the teenies' powers of imagination, while the great Time Ark in which they traveled hurtled from Milky Way to New Frontier. They were a tiny fragment of the Human Wave, expanding outward. The Taler lowered his pipe at last and told the following story: In those days Glauben wasn't as famous as it is now and had been colonized only six hundred years. In fact the Eastern Quadrant was a vast emptiness. We hadn't met the beemen of Marad, nor had wc found Superhole, the planet whose great time warp lets us slip through the meshes of dimension toward a new home in this magnificent, cunning Ark. But enough. You get the picture. A thousand planets with colonies of all sizes, worlds yet to be opened; and Commercial System hell bent for leather, trying to capture its share of the worlds. Grandfather's name was Borislav Hit, and he served in an outfit Special Technical Assistance Corps, stag's primary mission was to help colonies adapt to new worlds, to overcome unusual problems. But the colonists saw System's special good-squad making sure the concessions stayed in races, enforced the Ecology Convention, did a bit of counterintelligence against those birds from Empire, and in a pinch investigated crimes, corruptions, and malfeasance in high places. Popular, you understand. Bushy brows, bushy beard, round nose, shrewd squirvting eye, stocky build, a ready laugh. That was Borislav Enhildo Quantromer Hit, my venerable grandsire. No matter what body the technicians grew him for this or that assignment, sooner or later he made it look like his original self. He had a fierce kind of will that molded foreign protoplasm rather than let it mold him. He never needed psyadjustment after inhabiting an artibod. That's the kind of man he was. in the year #, Eastern Quadrant reckoning, that is, a team from System East, on a routine health inventory of Glauben (carried out quadrennially), came back with a ton of tapes and fed them to computers. Six months later the computers had consumed and digested the stuff. A routine report went by regular channels to the Department of Census and lay there for another six months. Then the data were prepared for assembly into EQ's Quadrennial Health Assessment -- a report the Minister East submitted to the government. Then hell broke loose. For the first time in two standard decades, EQ's health index had dropped by eight points. They quickly traced the trouble to the Glauben inventory. The Minister East had the Glauben data purged from his Assessment on the basis that they were incomplete. And early in #, Borislav Hit went out to Glauben on the trail of Weil's Disease, Haverhill Fever, sodoku, and other odd but disturbing things like listeriosis, toxoplasmosis, and lumphocytic choriomeningitis. Never fear, my dear, impatient Rubeema. You need not remember the diseases. We're after the cause. fing on his pipe, you can imagine how it was. Borislav, of course, was about to take a well-earned vacation. And, of course. Big Man called him in and told him he'd have to delay his pleasures for the Cause. And, needless to say, Borislav struggled. And finally, as you might expect, he agreed to go. At the end Big Man rose and put his arm around Borislav's shoulders. He led hm toward the one-way glass through which Boris could see Big Man's oh-sodesirable secretary. Big man said with a wary look: "Now, Agent Hit, get out there and clear this little matter up. And do it in a hurry, will you? That's why we selected you. You're a fast operator. As you know, the Minister is pacing the ceiling. Now I don't want to prejudice the investigation, but all of us around here think that it must just be data error. You understand. Those folks in Glauben do very nicely on the economic front. Hit. No sense antagonizing them. Quite a racket they've got going with that aphrodisiac goat pelt they export. Anyway, Hit, a word to the rise, right? The situation might l)e sensitive, and you must be careful but definitive. Hit. Definitive and discreet. You understand, I'm sure. A delicate situation, by all accounts." In the front office Borislav joked with the Big Man's secretary, a real juttable fern but always too busy or too virtuous to accept grandfather's advances. A fast operator he might be, but in three years he'd never even operated his hand around her sweetly-plump elbow. He waved good-bye to her with a catch in his throat. He'd remember her on Galuben, and so should you. Her name was Ita Gitta. Keep in mind her pleasant, oval face, engaging smile, shy lashes. From the back she had a nice rumpy wobble, and from the front she was -- she was...how should I put it? She was a tail of two titties. Glauben is a heavy planet, as I said at the outset, several times standard gravity. Visitors march about in suits squishing with levitron and sleep in gravadjusted hotel rooms. Boris couldn't do that. He was going incognito. Nor could he wait out the five-year adjustment cycle. He had to go in now and without a suit. And here's the first explanation you've been waiting for, Rubeema. Boris got himself an artibod. Artibods are no longer legal. They went out fifty years ago with the Genetic Convention pushed through by the Society for the Prevention of ProtoplasmicAbuses -- with the aid and abetment of colonists, I might add, who didn't like surreptitious visitors like my old grandpa. ped with all the necessary instruments and gravor atmosphereadjusted bodies in all shapes, sizes, ages, and sexes resting in cold storage. In the Corps they called the ship (unofficially, of System Space ship. Bod Boat took up orbit around Glauben's sun. Borislav jumped naked into a warm pool of simublood with a weight attached to his leg. Down there he thought he'd drowned, but he hadn't really. Simublood rushed into his lungs rich with oxygen. But by that time his restless Awareness had already fled. A psychomagnet caught him neatly and squirted him into the artibod he'd already picked out for himself -- another stocky but smooth-shaved character laid on a cot in a hi-grav chamber. Boris settled in, opened the bod's eyes, jumped up on the bod's legs, hammered on the door with the bod's fleshy fist, and cried; "Let me out of here!" with the bod's voice. A loudspeaker answered; "All right. Hit. Cut the dramatics. We know you're just putting it on. Let's give the computer a test, shall we?". One advantage of artibods, you see, was that they could be equipped with all manner of gadgets. They weren't meant to live especially long. They had terrible digestive systems and tiny livers and non-essentials were left out or off. Borislav, for instance, couldn't have reproduced himself in his new bod, and he knew that he'd be faithful to busy or virtuous Ita Gitta no matter what his Awareness might want to do. His lungs, muscles, and heart were souped up, and he had a computer in his center in place of a bit of kidney and a part of his stomach. Too bad he never had to use the damn thing! They tested the computer, and it worked very well. The controls were in the roof of his mouth and the playback went straight to his brain, and Noball, as Borislav had named his new bod, had already learned to play on the dials with a very clever tongue. So it all worked out nicely. Three days and no adverse reaction. Borislav started to grow a beard, but Noball was defective in that regard; the forest was sparse on one side and so, disgusted with Bioengineering, Boris started to shave what little there was to shave, and on the fifth day a Glauben moon on the dark side with papers and visas and a briefcase full of phony papers from a phony Glauben company. Salesman Boris. On his way back to the home planet in a boxy, blue grav-suit that he would shed back on the planet's surface. The Taler puffed and the teenies breathed Millusion. Now I want you to see good-sized colony with an unusually high birthrate. One continent occupied, four of them empty. A big planet, Glauben. Big trees, big beasts, big mountains. Gigantic cities on coasts and inland. Soot and smoke and fantastic traffic jams. Deserts and primeval forests crisscrossed by highways and trainways and tubeways and airways above. Shining rivers and lakes. Tractors and fields. Jungles and tundra. I do believe Glauben had a little coal and oil, and in those days the people had a riot of living. Energy pulsed all through the planet. Factories hummed and people traded. They had a philosophy that business was the highest and noblest human occupation, Production was king. Growth was the nod of the Almighty, and when growth stopped or slowed down, the bearded one up there...He frowned. Chief business of Glauben, then as now, was the sale of the aphrodisiac fleece. A small business, in those days. It would expand to galactic dimensions in time -- as you well know. All around the spaceport where Borislav landed, protected by glistening black sheets of plastic from the tropical rains, pyramids of pelts waited for shipment to the panting worlds. As Boris would discover later, the pelts played a role in all aspects of the planet's life, which would make the fulfillment of his mission something of a problem, Ecolaws neither here nor there. But of that later. I told you that Borislav had a will of his own and sooner or later his artibod would do what he wished. Well, so it was on Glauben with Mr. Noball. Boris landed at the spaceport, one of four on Continent A. He turned in his grav-suit for the deposit, and tossing the gold coin in his hand, he made for the tubeway gates. On the way his eye caught a sign in the window of a small concession. It said; "Well, I'll be damned," said Borislav to himself rubbing the shaved chin of his artibod. "I'll fix you up nicely. Noball." He went up to the window and said; "Give me some Virillu-two, babe", to the girl there. She gave him a tube filled with little round pills. "How do you take these?" She hesitated. You take one in the morning and... one just... before... She blushed a little. He asked; "What if I take more than two? Will it hurt me?" "I don't know," she said, 'Tve never taken these." "I would guess not," he leered. "I mean, does it -- is it harmful?" "It's a two-percent extract." "Extract of what?" She gave him a hard stare, and his experienced agent Awareness coupled with the souped-up eyesight of his artibod saw her press a button beneath the counter. Two policemen began to move warily in his direction, and he inquired no further. Rather, he tossed the gold coin to the girl and made a quick get-away. Soon inhabitant of Glauben. But later, in the privacy of a little hotel, he swallowed the entire contents of the tube. "There you are, Noball," he muttered. "That shouod make you act more like a man." That, my children, is the kind of man le was, my grandpa. bushiest, wildest beard on Glauben, a glorious red beard; and in addition he turned hairy on the chest and arms and legs; hair sprouted from his nostrils and his ears and from between his toes; and it got so bad he had to cut it daily. "Noball," he said, "I do believe you're overdoing it a bit." In addition to these physical manifestations of virility, Borislav was sorely troubled by memories of Ita Gitta's oval face, low lashes, and other auxiliaries, and for the first week of his stay on the planet, he forgot all about Weil's Disease, Haverhill Fever, sodoku, listeriosis, taxoplasmosis, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis, and instead wrote her several long letters of the most poetic excellence, straining Noball's competent but pedestrian brain to the edge of a fever. Now you must understand something more about artibods to understand what happened to your friend and my forebear. The Taler touched the glower to his pipe and puffed. Despite their obvious and lamentable deficiencies in the areas of digestion and so forth, he continued, which soon reduced Borislav to a fare of milkgap from the indigenous supergoat Guru (whose mountain cousin Borislav then naively thought was the source of the aphro-fleece), the artibods were pretty well made. And because they served agents in the field, they were full of various repellants, anti-bodies, and whatnot. Little cuts and bruises healed with the rapidity of a miraculous laying on of hands. And fevers were zapped by Noball's by no means puny metabolic reserves. Had all this not been so, Borislav would soon have sickened and therefore discovered the problem -- for his hotel room, none of the best, literally swarmed with xcnopsylla cheopis... That, my dear Riibeema, is a secret I won't reveal just yet, but let it suffice if I describe this mysterious Something as very small, very dark, capable of incredibly long hols foni one warm bod to another warm bod, and when it landed it could bite like blazes. Unfortunately for Borislav's mission and for his great eagerness to try to scale inacessible Mount Ita Gitta, Noball had been grown expressly for the jungle climate ol Glauben's A continent, and when xenopsylla cheopis did its thing. Noball didn't even feel it; hence Borislav didn't either; and thus neither became aware of the third. Now let me compound your puzzlement further and reveal that our dark little hopper carried rickettsia typhi, and the only reason why ricky-tippi didn't make it into the computer banks of the Glauben health inventory was that to this disease the people had become immune, and the team from System East had lived in a much better hotel. The authorities had made sure of that. 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God, man, the Minister East is crawling the walls; and his staff is pacing the ceilings; and their staffs are up in the trees; and so the Deputy Assistant Underminister is shaking the bars; and his staff is rattling the cage; and -- You know what I mean! They're coming in the windows!" "I'm sorry. A little trouble with Noball." "Who?" "My artibod." There was a sad sighing in Borislav's head. "All right. Hit. Tell me what you've observed so far. " "Nothing. I've been in this room, and down the street to a shop, and to the post office to mail off my letters. I've been buying some goat-pap in a fiveone -- " "A what?" "A five-one. A store. Open from five to one. These Glauben cats know how to hustle. Growth, they say. Business. Anyway, Big Man, nothing unusual. I'm looking out past this old fire-escape. Some smoke is rising up ahead there. I see all sorts of roof tops. And to my right is a piece of the ocean, and to the left I see the desert and some trees that look like palms only they're much thicker. And what else? There was a car crash in the street last night, and -- " "Spare me. Please spare me that. Hit. We sent you to Glauben to track down disease, not to paint landscapes." "One hellishly rickety fireescape, " Borislav said. "You get that artibod of yours out there! And start working, my friend, or we'll give you a little stimulation." "Yes, sir!" my grandfather said, and now he was fully awake at last. Ky a 'little stimulation' Big Man meant the stimulation of Borislav Enhildo Quantromer Hit, the original Hit, the one in that pool of simublood with a weight around his leg to keep him down, for Borislav never lost contact with himself entirely, else he would die. He obscurely knew Boat breathing in the viscous stuff filled with oxygen and nutrients, and if Big Man chose, he could make life miserable for that helpless Borislav back there or up there or whatever. But to continue. Borislav sat down on the edge of his cot and buried his bearded face in his hands. A little black Something aimed for the back of his neck, but Noball repelled it and Boris felt nothing. Instead he recalled his stay on the planet thus far, searching for clues; and then he discovered a nagging little note buried under the Virillu experience. The girl in the concession booth had called the cops when he had asked after the source of the extract. Now why would a body do a thing like that? Had Boris revealed himself by that single question? And what, by the way, did they have to hide? Of course, he looked like a Glauben man, a perfect replica of the planetary type. Heavy planets l)red them thick of limb and fat of jowl. They came tall as if to defy the gravity and, on Glauben, they could also tolerate a whisp of ammonia in the atmosphere without a mask. So the girl had clearly taken him for a native -- and a native didn't ask? Didn't ask that question, clearly. A native knew. About this time a knock sounded on his door, and the chamber maid came in to clean up. She stayed downtown as long as she could, and she cleaned up some rooms in the evening, especially if the guest didn't mind. She was used to Mr. Hit's ways. The poor man sat at the narrow little table and scribbled those letters so fine. Sometimes he threw away a page or two and she read the crumpled paper in the basement. Tugged your heart. So she came in without his byyour-leave, surprised to see him idle. And he, in turn, looked up and saw her for the first time with his agent eyes wide open, as it were. He stared at her; he stared at the scars on her face and .on her hands. Upon closer inspection he also saw scars on her legs exposed beneath a drab, grey skirt. He pointed involuntarily to her face. "What's that?" he asked. "What happened to you?" The chamber maid looked at him. She didn't understand. "Those scars," he said. "How did you get them?" The chamber maid immediately drew the right conclusion. She was of the lower classes and therefore directly exposed. She lived down by the wharves in a rickety shack near where they unloaded grain ships. She called herself lucky for working here, in the Grand Hotel, as the place was called. She didn't have to fight them here although sometimes they invaded the basement and a lew lived in the walls. And so, of course, she guessed at once that Borislav was an agent, although he looked like anybody might, of the upper classes, that is... No, dearest Rubeema, you may not ask. A Taler has his rights, my girl, and one of them is to increase the suspense. Borislav didn't know, and so you may not either. The Taler paused and lit his pipe again. The teenies were silent. They leaned forward in their flato chairs. The blue smoke rose up in elaborate spirals. The Colormixer on the wall wove patterns in blues and reds, this time dotted with white stars. So... So the chamber maid turned and fled. Down the stairs she went. She bolted. Bolted! On the way she upset a bucket and mop. They made a tinny clatter. Borislav went right behind her, down the stairs in her wake. He heard her excited whisper down below. Then the burly man in shirtsleeves who sat at the night desk came around prepared for trouble. He summoned an even burlier porter who followed in a dirty red jacket. They trampled up the stairs with grim faces and balled fists toward Boris. He didn't trust Noball to win in this fray, so he ran back up to his room with a hop over the overturned bucket and mop. He locked the door and entrusted his artibod to that hellishly rickety fire escape. Down he went and away lie went, into the night. Soon sirens sounded and red lights circled and cars bucked to a stop before the Grand Hotel. But by that time Borislav was well on his way toward a solution to his puzzlement. Let me leave him for a moment and regale you with a lecture about the Ecology Convention. Now the Eco-Convention goes a long way back, back to the first days of the Western Quadrant where it all started on the legendary planet Earth, but the principle is simple enough and you know something about it to boot. If you've ever landed on a foreign planet, you know what you go through. They bathe you, they squirt you, they irradiate you. Every cell of your body is purified. The flora of your stomach must yield to the flora of their stomach. They probe beneath your nails and they run electronic fingers up and down your hairs, one by one. Tourist planets are a little sloppy, but even they do the minimum. You ever ask yourselves why? Well, to come around in a circle, they do it because of the Ecology Convention. In the early days of colonization, in the Obscure Age of the Human Wave, people were less careful about such things, and so we lost entire solar systems to ecoblight. A tiny little beast, for instance, too small for the eye to see, can disrupt an ecosystem to which it isn't adapted. That was and is the rationale. Of late I've noticed a slackening of vigilance. Total isolation never really worked, and now people go through the motions. Some of our learned sages conjecture in magazines the masses never read that genetic 'pollution' and 'ecosystem collisions,' as they are pleased to call these phenomena, may even be a good thing. Others argue, persuasively, I think, that man is genetic pollutant enough, and anything else you might introduce won't matter much. But that is neither here nor there for the purposes of my story. In the days of my grandfather Borislav, the Eco-Convention was not only taken .seriously; it enjoyed a kind of revival thanks to the blighting of Palomar IV by the Hirotishy sand worm -- an episode you may research at your leisure in the Pedy. My point is this. No colonizing wavelet ever took to a new planet anything but sterilized bodies and sterilized tools. Period. Once on the surface, they could do what they pleased. Space-based exated several thousand -- they moved from cluster to cluster on a schedule) carefully tested the eco-relations between alien flora and fauna, and in rare instances permission was granted, say, to plant a Humro wheat in a Duskitanian soil; to bring in an inoccuous palm for aesthetic reasons; and so forth. Let me stress that this happened rarely, and while that reduced the kind of fun and games the Glauben corporiarchs still play, I think we've gained more than we lost. By now even you, Rubeema, must be getting the drift. Reluctantly your Taler has relinquished the reins of suspense. But you'll accompany me nevertheless, I trust, as we find Borislav again and pick up the second part of this story. II Now you shall hear about matters more serious than Borislav's infatuation with Ita, although for Borislav that was serious enough. He fled through the evening crowds of Cosmopolis, the capital of Glauben's Continent A. He hustled along with little glances over his shoulder (he'd flunked his Secret Agent course). The people -- decked ut in evening clothes and redolent or perfume. going to the opera and the theater -- probably took him for a madman. That hair! That look in his eyes!? It was not my grandfather's greatest hour. But then he wasn't a hero in the conventional sense, just an average greatness, I would sit in the Lords rather than warble yams to teenies in a Time Ark!) Instinct or good sense led him away from the opulent center. Behind him police cars wailed in their search, stupidly racing up and down the geometrically laidout streets of downtown Cosmopolis. He hustled; he slowed down; finally he walked along casually, catching his breath. Street lights thinned out, disappeared. The loomed shadows, shacks, and palm trees in between. People on porches. The red glow of joyweed. The sweetish odor of fermenting garbage. He changed his direction at frequent intervals. Had he had a precise goal, surely he'd have lost his way. But he walked without much care although generally in the direction of the ocean. He hoped to find rest of sorts on the beach behind a comfortable rock. The surf would lull him. By morning he'd figure out something. On this mad planet, every question he asked got him in trouble! And then, not far from the beaches, he made his discovery. At that moment he walked beside a tenement of sorts in the dark, narrow, unpaved street of a poor and shabby quarter. An alley to his right. A little ways ahead a vaulted doorway led into some kind of courtyard. Boris ducked into the alley because he saw the headlights of a car turn into his street and judged it safer to hide. The big, sleek cars Clauben folk used seemed to have no place in this neighborhood. He guessed it was a cop. In his haste he stumbled over something. The Something gave an angry squeal. He felt a sharp bite on his leg. Noball's splendid metabolism immediately healed the wound, but Borislav lost his balance and fell against what had looked like a tree trunk but turned out to be a garbage can thickly covered with large, hairy creatures that scampered off as he lurched into the car. Then he saw movement all across the alley. The ground had begun to move. Greenish eyes glowed in the darkness. Feet scurried over broken glass. At the same time, involuntarily, Boris had a vision of Ita Gitta. A wish-vision, if you like. She beckoned with a hand while with the other she held a flimsy veil over her obviously naked front. Gome, Borislavissimus. Come, Borislavissimine. Boris shivered. Traces of Virillu-Two? There was a rank odor in the air. The car wobbled past on the uneven clay surface of the street. Up above him he heard faint laughter. He stood in a kind of daze for a moment longer, and then he realized what he had seen. What in the depth of damnation! he cried in his thoughts. Noball, wake up! Did you see what I saw? He had seen rats. He'd seen a plague of rats. They had filled the alley. They had fed on garbage from several upright and several upturned cans. Only, of course, that couldn't possibly be. And Borislav calmed himself. He had also seen Ita Gitta, nearly naked, at that. And he knew she couldn't be here in this alley, and neither could the rats, and so it must have been that powerful hair tonic he'd swallowed like a blooming fool. But then, almost as if to make liars of his thoughts, he saw them again. They came slowly in single file. They hugged the walls, long whiskers in touch with the brick, green eyes aglow. They stared at him. They came toward him, toward the food. They resumed feeding with quick nervous glances at Boris, and as they filled the alley he again hallucinated the girl, but only for a second; for now he was overcome vvith a powerful pulse of anger. An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ## (Feb.) will feature a combination interviewarticle Richard Delap. Also: "Science Fiction's Greatest Disaster -- Hugo Bernsbackl" A Revisionist View by Darrell Schweitzer. Nostalgia -- "Visit To a Pulpy Planet" by Milton F. Stevens. Columnist: Larry Shaw. Every Issue -- The Archives: new book  story iists. Quarterlysample I year#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I No hell-vision could taunt Borislav Hit with demonic impunity. It these were rats, he'd catch himself one and feel its furry reality with his hands. And if he saw what wasn't thre, those clowns from Bioengineering could just pull him off this planet in a hurry, and he'd personally see to it that Noball went into the vat. He grabbed a piece of broken beam and hit at the nearest rat in a fury, but the beast leaped to the side and the beam raised a tinny ruckus s it hit the barbage can and its leaning lid fell off. He rampaged among the rats. He ran up and down the alley, a weird, bushy-bearded, stocky berserker in the light of Glauben's moon which, at that very moment, peeked past the roof of the tentement to shed its milky light on the scene. Borislav failed to catch a rat. They were too quick and agile and disappeared long-tailed into burrows and holes. In a moment he stood alone again in the moonlight with a stump of wood in his hand. "Just you wait, " he whispered fiercely, throwing the beam away. "Come on. Noball. If force won't do it, cunning will." He picked an appropriate burrow, melted into the shadow of the wall, and waited. After a while a whiskered nose peeked out. Then came a head followed by the long, fat, pear-shaped body of a rat heading away from Borislav toward the sweetish smell of fermenting waste -- except that it didn't get very far, for Boris leaped out after it like a warball player on a flying tackle. Noball's souped-up hands grabbed the creature just as it turned with a fierce snarl and bit Borislav on the wrist. Borislav endured the bites and scrambled to his feet. He cracked the rat's head against the brick and the creature shuddered before it went limp. The Taler fell silent. He knocked out his pipe and refilled it carefidly from a porcellain bowl inlaid with snakes of gold. The glower glowed red. Smoke rose. The Taler stared into the distance. Well now, children, he resumed at last, what now follows is both a little sad and a little difficult to relate, for it involves several simultaneous states of mind on the part of my granddad and your friend, Borislav Enhildo Quantromer Hit, owing to the powerful effect of the dead rat's emanations, which confused his consciousness to an extreme degree. On top of that, he had a big heart, no matter what body he had on, and he felt what he heard and saw deeper perhaps than another one might. Lest you lose your way in his thoughts, let me tell you what really happened at the outset. Borislav went into the courtyard he had glimpsed earlier, carrying his rat. He fell into a conversation with a youngster in his early teens. The boy took him into the tenement and there Boris spoke to an older man. Then he continued toward the beach. On the way he bought some goat milk. That's the action and here's what it was like. Waves of violent longing pulsed through Noball's hands and arms and up into Borislav's Awareness. He chased after Ita's receeding naked form through marbled corridors, past squirting fountains. In hold tank, the fully equipped body of the original and inimitable Borislav Quantromer underwent physiological changes that would have embarrassed its absent owner, but fortunately only computers watched, and they translated what they saw into huge, sharp peaks on a hormone graph. Hold the bleeder by the jutting tail, man. Can't you see that some infernal something comes up through that jutting pelt? Yeah, Noball, drag our buddy along by the tail. That's better, really. Diminished vibrations... rens under half the continent. Tribe upon tribe of rat; regiments, kingdoms, empires of squeaked with the newborn. A into channels of clay. Rat wars. The waxing and the waning of ratty dynasties. A few centies beneath soil surface lived a red root fungus native to Glauben -- like all things except man and this repulsive rat. The fungus had learned to live in the rat's epidermis and its waste products engendered a strange effluvium. He gathered this from the youngster. The youngster wouldn't talk at first. Borislav tossed a gold coin alluringly. It glinted in the milky light of Glauben's moon. The rat lay on the uneven stones that paved the courtyard, its tail in Noball's hand. And so? What do they eat? Hey, Mister. You're goofy. What don't they eat? The youngster's right arm was missing at the elbow. It ended in a stump. He waved it in Borislav's face. Two of his toes were also missing, and his young face was white with moon-shaped scars. Each day at dusk, caravans of trucks loaded with specialized equipment moved out into the jungle hinterlands and the tundra areas of the continent from the myriad settlements of Galuben. The men set up intricate barriers of netting. Others inserted sonic devices into selected burrows picked by computers from aerial maps. Then at a signal -- see the white smoke of the flare fi-om the gun of the man in charge? He stands by his dune-buggy on top of the rise -- the sonics blasted away. See the land explode with swarms of, rats? See the rats caught in the elaborate nets... Look out, Mister. If you don't watch it, the brothers will eat your rat... Come on. Noball, pull that beast out of their ravenous teeth. Go on, pull away, rip it away. Scoot, brothers, get back, get away. And? And in the rancid odor of the red root fungus waste reacting with the epidermic layers of rat pelt, Ita Gitta again sailed down a marble hall in the costume of the first woman while fountains played. Their steps echoed through the tentement. The rat scraped on the floor. Out of dark holes in the wall live rats darted out and snapped at their dead brother. Naked children bunched at the end of the corridor and ran way only to stop and bunch and look again with fingers in their mouth. Disfigured children. Is it laughter that I hear? And do I have a strange sensation that every human in this building one minute past pubescence groans in the act of reproduction? Now the rats were dead and on fast-moving portable conveyor belts they entered the automatic skinning machines. My uncle, he can tell you all about that, he worked on one all his life. Noball, you're not watching. Our rat has lost its head and trails an ooze of blood. The youngster limped. You can't walk straight with toes missing, now, can you? That's my uncle there. You better give him a coin too. He's blind. Ask your cjuestions. How do children survive in this place? Or is that the wrong question to ask? The automatic shinning device, you see. Mister, is fast as anything, and people don't have to handle the pelts, which is a good thing. The emanations are strongest just after a rat dies. Of course, you understand -- and thank you for the gold florin; my retirement pay won't buy the bread -- they lose a good bit of the pelt. The yield is a few square centies a beast, but it's a tradeoff, like we used to say in the crews. The pieces are collected and they go through drying drums, around and around. They run the drier gases through cryocoolers to collect the extract. Then the dried pelt-pieces are shipped off to be stitched into pelts after a careful color sort. The youngster pointed to a baby cot completely encased by a strong wire cage. He held up the stick he carried. At its end Borislav saw the sharp glint of a blade. "That's how, " the boy said. In an obscure corner of the crowded room something moved rythmically beneath some blankets. The boy's stick-blade chopped at a skinny fellow who'd followed the blood-trail into the room. Now see that portable pipeline vomit red liquid residues from skinning trucks back to the ground. See the stuff ooze into burrows. The blind man said: "Mister, they're not trying to eradicate them. What do you think? They want 'em to breed In no time at all the burrows they clean out are full again, and the new ones eat what's left of the old ones. " The old man spoke a vision of sleek men and women in mountain-top castles. He spoke (dectronic apparatus around the castles and thick wire deep beneath and above the ground, hard-meshed and gnaw-resistant. Me spoke yachts on the ocean, all pretty and white and sun-bronzed beautiful people in white walking the white decks with glasses in hand and smiling. He spoke fat bankrolls delivered to the bank by trucks thickly armored and guards who held pistols in their hands, lie spoke spaceships lifting off into the sky. But all this is a violation of the lcology Convention. The what? The building sang a rising ( liorus of Growth Growth Growth Sigh... Growth Growth Growth Growth Growth Growth Sigh... The children bunched around the door and listened with fingers hooked into lips and with knifesticks in hand. Their bellies were large and extended, their eyes dark and round in pale narrow faces. Someone laughed somewhere as Ita Gitta looked out from behind a marble column with an eye and a tit. The building sang sodoku and Haverhill Fever transmitted respectively by streptobacillus moniliformis and spirillum minus, both of which live happily on the gums and teeth of rats. Through minute cuts and abrasions leptospira icterohemorrhagiae sang in the bloodstream of rat piss and Weil's Disease. And on a flourish from the knife-tipped baton of the boy, toxoplasmosis, listeriosis, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis joined in the Lesions, Sores, and Fevers Song. Ancient, blind operator of a rat skinning machine, tell me this. Why do they hunt them in the jungles and the tundra and why not here in the city where they are as thick as a carpet? Bearded stranger so full of gold, I never operated a skinning machine. I had a more humble assignment. After the gorge discharged into the soil and the caravan formed up to take us back, my colleagues and I crawled into the drums, and while the trucks bounced home, we cleaned and replaced the blades. I hold up my arms so you can see the many cuts I received in my life's work. Put your finger to the leathery skin and feel the tangles of hard tissue. But I asked you... Here in the city? Stranger, it would be uneconomical to hunt them here. It wouldn't be costeffective. We were efficient, I tell you. We processed four hundred kay a day out there on an off day. Now here, in the city, it would be much too costly. And the pelts are less nice. The children stick them in the back and the soil here is deficient in the red root Ringus that interacts with the rat epidermis to create the wondrously aphrodisiac effect... He dragged the headless rat through the tentement, across the poorly paved courtyard, and out into the uneven clay street. He stopped and tossed a handful of gold toward the children bunched in the vaulted courtyard door. High up someone laughed. He walked along toward the beach, and as he made progress so did the hungry rats who came behind him. They darted forward and took bites of their brother, jerking hard on the carcass so that Noball's hands had trouble holding the tail. Borislav was in a daze. He thought he sensed rats everywhere, up on the roof tops sitting like a green-eyed chain of beads; in the windows, tails a-curl; in the crowns of palms. Finally Noball's fingers held only a tail. Borislav made Noball throw it away. Up head he saw the red-white-and-blue light of a five-one. He went in and asked for a gallon gourd of Guru juice. The rest is short. On the beach, surrounded on all sides by suspicious little mounds and doubtful tracks in the sand, Borislav shuddered and cast his eye out to sea. Out there he perceived a small light and heard the faraway clang of a bell buoy. He checked his gourd seal and slowly walked into the water. He swam out into the night, using Noball's souped-up body to its limit, until he reached the buoy, a large affair and incredibly loud at close proximity. He crawled up on the platform. He tied his wet coat jacket to the bell's tongue to silence the critter. Then he put out the Red Priority tions. What's that, Rubeema? A 'gallon'? A gallon is an ancient measure of liquids. It isn't used now and it wasn't used on Glauben then. But Talers are permitted a little poetic license when it suits. Ill Cheer up, children, why so gloomy? The Whybar of your Time Ark is a place of truth. To live is to laugh, to smile, no matter what. I sing of man and of his folly. I sing also of man's large and generous heart, the heart of my granddad, one Borislav Hit, who'd seen worse things and better, and who knew how to take the sweet with the alkaline. Here it was dawn over the Glauben world ocean, a rosy light sat on the saddle of the wine-red, heaving sea. Borislav had snoozed in comfort, a sandbag under his hair-bush head, rocked and cradled in the waters. The air smelled fresh and sweetly saline. The waves splashed gently against the buoy. Was Borislav cheerless? Nay, nay. He jumped up filled with energy again; he cracked the goat-gourd and swallowed some milk. "Hey, there," he cried to a large red gull approaching to sit on top of the structure. He had forgotten the night. He looked toward the future. He was an They didn't keep score. They picked themselves up. Borislav had put in his call for Kmergency Operations, and the response to his call was instantaneous -- that is to say inwhich meant that Borislav spent nearly a week on the buoy waiting for the spaceships to land. But he used his time wisely, and the (Juru milk lasted the whole lime -- it was the perfect fare for Noball's troubled digestive system. Borislav sought answers to three questions, and he caused several scandals and dozens of investigations by asking -- no mean feat for an unwashed agent talking to himself on a swaying buoy in lar, as I've said. Item. He wondered out loud to the System authorities how come that health team had found any evidence of disease. Surely the local authorities were more clever than that? Why had earlier teams found no sign of that long list of diseases that I shan't repeat again, dearest Rubeema. The answer was: by accident or by the treasonous activity of some official of the Clauben Department of Health. For, as it turned out, health teams come to Clauben were soon engaged in mindless debaucheries in low-grav hotel rooms for the duration of their stay, while the local boys put together sanitized data. Someone had slipped into that carefully selected packet of tapes one or two with authentic information. Item. He wondered out loud how rattus norvegicus had gained a gnaw-hold on this planet? Who had inspected the colonizing ships on the airless moon of Clauben six hundred years ago? And as the answer of bribery and kick-backs came kicking back, the reputation of several Underministers was smirched posthumously in the process, and it turned out that the Galuhen settlers had thought to sneak in the seeds of lacrema veni, the levitating flower, thinkron; but in protecting their seed stores, they protected norvegicus as well, which adaptable creature soon learned to live in the hi-grav conditions and soon made friends with a certain red root fungus a few centies below soil surface. Glaubenites still praise their good fortune. Item. How come, Boris asked -- in a voice increasingly his own -- how come that the famous Computer on Pappa hadn't nailed the correlation between those diseases and the rat? "You did ask Computer, now, didn't you?" he growled. Computer had been asked. Unfortunately, they told people to keep Computer programmed. What with the low pay and status that clung like an odor vacancies at the Temple, and so... "What in the Cos does the Pappa-C do?" "He balances the System East budget, Boris..." "Oh, Jus Chris!" By about the fifth day the Guru milk ran out. Borislav took a slip of indestructible scriptoplast from his field notebook and wrote a message on it. He stuck the message in the bottle, resealed the translucent container, and tossed it to the waves. The message said: "Darling Ita, wherever you may be on the shores of the Cosmic Sea, know that Boris-love-issiyou." W!ay I have a glass of water? Thank you. Your name is Francisco, isn't it? Thank you, Francisco. The Taler drank and continued. Now it is time for you to see my grandsire in a new role. Borislav the Boss. He takes command transports in orbit around the planet and nine hundred thousand troops on the ground, brought down in fleets of shuttles that land on large segments of desert in the center of Continent A. Following a radio signal, a hydroplane glides to a halt in a track of foam. Boris leaves his bell buoy. etary Agent in Charge, he is suddenly the peak of a pyramid of people, all of them in dark brown, rubbery and sterilized levitron suits. Rapidly a sizeable city is built on the desert -- command post, staff buildings, barracks for the troops. Communications are laid. People salute Borislav Enhildo Quantromer Hit, and in the best tradition of a military leader, he acknowledges these signals of respect with a lazy wave from Noball. Members of his legal and public relations staff travel to Cosmopolis and there present to the Concession formal charges of willful violation of the Ecology Convention. A set of orders is handed over. All of the planet's rat-catching enterprises are soon drafted -- men and caravans -- to And while shuttle ships land physical pyramids of chemicals on a day-night schedule, Borislav leans over newly minted operations plans in his headquarters quonset. Few people can take a change so great. But Borislav was an transition without so much as a blink in Noball's eyes. One day a rat catcher drunk on aphrodisiac, the next day a generalissimo commanding forces. All in a day's work. Nothing to get shook up about. Tomorrow he might impersor ate a belly dancer somewhere -- although, truth to tell, Borislav would've been a bearded belly dancer. The Task Force members enjoyed this assignment. They chafed a little at Borislav's first command -- no repeat no grav-tents would be used. Everyone had to wear the squishy levitron suits (except Boris of course; he had an artibod). He didn't want his force to stage the greatest orgy in the history of ering that half the members were women. In the suits all were protected -- from the smell and liked the operation. Rat eradication was the most common excercise in the Corps owing to the cunning and adaptability of rattus, more truly Man's inseparable companion than canis familiaris. Easy, no trouble, you knew exactly what to do and how to set it up -- although the more grizzled never had to do so large an operation. Most planet concessionaires wanted their rats controlled; they'd never let things get so out of hand. You can see it. A holiday atmosphere hung about the camp. Strike teams headed out laughing and joking over their intercoms to all corners of the continent. Unhappy locals waited for orders and deployed their caravans. Mammoth incinerators were fabricated and set up. Within days the smoke of burned rat lay dark over the land -- and yet the work had barely begun. Borislav remembered the tentement where the stumparmed boy had introduced him to the blind knife cleaner. His heart swelled with magnanimity. He picked an elite team from the nine hundred thousand. They flew in copters to the area of the tentements. They staked out a neighborhood of several square kilms for the operation. The people were evacuated in requisitioned buses. Boris found the boy and kept him by his side. "Now, son," he said in a gruff, fatherly way, "now you'll see something!" Then, after the initial survey had been taken and the computers had #ielded a pattern, gas trucks drove up and pumped sulfur dioxide, hydrogen cyanide, and methyl bromide into holes and burrows. Huge water mains were diverted to flush out the subterranean massgraves of ratdom. Bait was laid for animals that might have escaped -- a rich fare of strychnine, zinc phosphide, various arsenicals, thallium sulfate, barium carbonate, yellow phosphorus, and wondrous anticoagulants. What the gas didn't get and the water didn't drown, internal hemorrhages, pleural effusion, kidney destruction, gastroenteritis, heart paralysis, convulsions, exhaustion, and asphyxia ripped away permanently into Rat Walhalla. Then they repeated the laid a wire wall around Borislav's pet areas, three meters deep into the ground, eight meters into the air -- gnaw-proof, electrified, much like those that protected the mansions of the rich. To the rats he was Hitler the Hun. To the people Schweitzer the Saint. He filled Noball's lungs with pride. He gestured to the grizzled colonels. "Let the people return," he said grandly with a lazy wave of Noball's hand. The buses came back. In anticipation Borislav had mounted on the hood of a huge truck near the break in the wire; he stood there with his arms folded across his chest, his hairy chin out, his eyes far-seeing. The boy leaned against a tire of the truck. He played with his knife-stick, eyes on the clay. Imagine Borislav's surprise when -- instead of the joy and laughter he had expected -- the people limped by surly and glum with nary a look at their hirsute saviour. A tiny grin on Borislav's puss slowly faded. He leaned down toward the boy. "Tell me, son. Why are they unhappy? They should be laughing, dancing, jumping up and down. What is this?" The boy said; "Mister, you've destroyed their livelihood." "How now, boy?" "How now. Mister? I'll tell you how now. Most of the men here work in the caravans. Most of the women sew pelts in the city. The men -- they're out there now under the command of your weird-looking spacemen destroying what feeds us. The women have been laid off. When you're gone and all the rats are dead..." "What, son? Speak up. ' "We'll starve, that's what." Borislav said: "Son, it'll be better! How can you call this living. Look at your people. Look at them limp by without toes. Look at those hands with fingers missing. Look at the white scars and sores and lesions. Just look at those children, marked for life. You're wrong. This can't be. They should be happy." The boy laughed drily. "Who asked you to do us good?" he asked. He broke his knife-stick over his knee. He used his stump most artfully to hold one end of the stick in the process. Borislav pouted in silence. After a moment he said: "Who's trying to do good, boy? Tm just doing my job." "Then why are you standing up there on that truck?" Borislav snorted. He jumped oflF the truck and went to his helicopter. "Take oflF," he barked at the pilot. "Ingrates," he muttered. "I hope the rats come back, I do. Don't you. Noball?" But Noball said nothing. He had something with his stomach. The copter flew too high for Borislav to see -- and even Noball's souped-up eyes couldn't see through walls -- hundreds of (.'oncession agents going frorn person to person with sheafs of petitions in hand. While TFgathered signatures. They asked the rich and they asked the poor. They walked up spiralling walkways to mountain tops and gathered signatures around tables ol the most exquisite construction and polish. 'They ducked into illerate X's in gloom. Nobody argued, nobody refused. Elsewhere a certain health official of the Concession Department of Health was apprehended by the authorities and put against the wall with his eyes blindfolded some fine dawn. And eventually activities invisible to Borislav's Awareness and Noball's eyes had consequences. Wondrous charts had been constructed ahd lined the walls of Ratticide Central. Black bars on graphs showed the estimated rat population on Glauben, and red bars indicated the number killed, region by region. The red bars climbed slowly, trying to catch the black. Borislav liked to sit in the room and watch staffers post changes as reports rolled in from the seven corners after each incinerator burn-out. One day, midmorning, in the third week of the operation, a buzzer sounded in Borislav's artihead. He moved an expert tongue to establish the connection. Big Man was on the line, and Borislav instantly smelled a rat -- if you'll forgive the expression. "Hit." "Sir." "What in the hell are you doing?" "Thought so. Goddamned, Hit, you stop that at once. I want orders out this instant to cease and desist." Borislav waited for a moment. Then he said: "Big man, you can't chew me out for this. You gave the orders; you approved the operation. I remember your words, Big Man. You said, 'Good show. Hit. A competent job.' So don't try to sit on me now." "You sandbagged me. Hit. You pulled a sack over my head. You didn't tell me how sensitive this issue is." "What do you mean, sensitive?" "Do you realize what clout those Glauben people have? Jus Chris, Hit, the House is in an uproar and the Lords are...are..." "Crawling the walls." "That's right. Hit. They're walking the ceiling. And the Minister is shaking the bars." "That's your problem. Big Man. I'm not in politics." "It is your problem. Hit. You blundered in there like the goddamned fool that you are, with both of your left feet in your ears -- " "Mouth," Borislav corrected. "Mouth, Hit. Dammit, you should've told me about the aphro-fleece, the connection, I mean." "I did. Big Man." "Well, then, dammit, you should've told me about the economic value of that trade." "You knew that. Big Man." "Well, dammit. Hit, why didn't you tell me that fifteen hundred Concession executives would show up on Pappa? They're tramping all over the planet. In the House, the Lords. They sit in the offices of every Underminister. All you see around here is Glauben executives in those blue gravity suits with thick pads of lead on their feet. Goddamned, Hit, you should've told me!" "What's that got to do with the Eco-Convention?" "The what?" "The Eco-Convention." "Oh, for Chris' sake. Hit. Wake up to reality. You realize that that steam is building for a regional amendment to the E-C in the House? The Lords will go for it unanimously. You heard me. Hit. Cease and desist. I want orders to "I'll give the orders. Big Man. But System East can't amend the Eco-Convention. That's unconstitutional. Section #, remember?" Big Man's fury could almost be heard. His sputters seemed to moisten Noball's brain. "That's not for you to determine. Hit. That's a matter for the General Counsel. Do as I say. I've got to run. All I've done these past four days is fend off Glauben executives. There's another one shuffling toward my office now. Miss Gitta, ask the gentleman to wait. Hit, today it's the Deputy Assistant Underminister. They're going to meet him -- to appeal your inexcusable actions. And they'll keep on going to the very top. I know these types. Tomorrow the Assistant Underminister. And day lifter tomorrow the Underminisler. And then you know who See what schlock you've got me into? I'm climbing the cage." "Well, Big Man, when you see Minister East, tell him to veto the hill." "In writing," the Big Man iiarled, and suddenly there was imly a hum in Borislav's head. Borislav understood the not-sosiibtleties of bureaucratic slithering. The Glauben program was threatened! Well, by Jus, he'd do something about it. "Let's assume that the Minister's heart is stout," he muttered. "Let's assume he won't try to wiggle through the meshes of the law. Let's assume hi"s a great man, tough but fair iiikI warm and human and all that." Boris calculated his chances. ( !ould he arrive in time? Yep, he (Irtided. And within the hour he was on his way to Pappa in a fast Time Collapse scout. But before he left he went back to the quonset. He took a crumpled piece of  ellow paper from the vast clutter on his desk. In a writing so tiny only the souped-up hand of Nohall could render it, he wrote llie following words in a corner: He dated the slip and signed it under the litter. "My secretary is efficient," he muttered to himself. "Surely she'll find it. " Such a man was grandfather Borislav Hit.  Now you'll be surprised to hear what Borislav did. Remember that he was still in his artibod, and when he landed on Pappa, he couldn't move about freely as he might have inside the original Quantromer who still breathed simublood not far from the planet of Glauben now many parsecs away. He had to do what the Glauben executives had done. After he'd been sterilized in the heavy-planet sector of Customs, he donned a blue gravity-suit. It had a generator on the back, just beneath the rump -- a big, fat, ball-shaped tail. (The generator made it difficult to sit, but the grav-suit had been developed under a government contract and its manufacture was still heavily subsidized, so no one said a word.) It had shoes with thick lead soles, and the suit was so heavy, he shuffled along like any other Glauben executive. He filled his pockets with florins from Glauben and hailed himself a cab. The cables Jostled madly to give him a ride. The GE's had spread money thickly on Pappa, and they hadn't even neglected the cabs. "To the Minister's tower," Boris growled, and his voice sounded strangely hollow through the suit's intercom. "Step on it." Away they went. You've Yiever been to Pappa, so I'll give you a glimpse. Pappacappolus, the capital, a jewel by the sea. Towers, graceful and slender. Hundreds of thousands. From the spaceport white chalk mountains rise on the left; ultramarine lies the ocean white-capped to the right; and the towers stand in central splendor in between. The dominant tree-type is a willow weeping in the salty spray. In the spacious, fountained square around the ministerial tower, cabs unloaded GE's -- blue, boxy men whose face-glass threw back the sun. They shuffled into elevators. They rose up to the topmost flloor. It rotated slowly at so great a height that you could look beyond the chalky mountains into Printout Plain where the Temple of Pappa Computer sat far away in a haze. "Come in, come in. How do you do." Flesh hands shook glove hands. The Clauben executives shook their way up the hierarchical ladder beginning with Big Man and then on up through the long chain of command all the way past the Underminister and into a gigantic conference room. Pretty girls attached suckers to their suits and asked in oozing tones: "Coffee, tea, or Curu juice?" -- the last in deference to Clauben, but only one of the executives opted for Curu. At last all were seated (more or less comfortably) and the Minister came in flanked by the leaders of House and Lords. He welcomed the blues in liquid Pantongue. Then each CE took from his pocket a framed holograph and set it up so that the Minister might see the face behind the mask. One of the Executives excused himself saying he'd inadvertently left his pic behind. The Minister made a speech. The Chairman of the Clauben Concession made a speech. The faceless exec punctuated the Chairman's remarks with loud "Hear! Hearls" accompanied by thumps of his thick glove on the table. He called "Hear! Hear!" at somewhat awkward moments: for instance when the Chairman said "...and let us assume for the sake of argument, Excellency, that the Breeding Stock is eradicated..." and once when the Chairman said "...we respect the Constitution, of course, but..." The blues leaned together on their side of the table and whispered on private circuits. Big Man looked at the faceless exec and began to sweat. If you' ve been expecting a loud debate between Minister East and the GE's, teenies, you would be wrong -- and in that case it is well for you to sit in the Whybar. No debate, of course. When the Chairman had had his say, the Minister East cleared his throat and replied as follows: "Distinguished Chairman. If I understand your assessment, it is that our Constitutional lawyers see matters in exactly the same light as your Constitutional lawyers. To wit, since it is established that on the planet Glauben the species rattus norvegicus has thus far acclimated itself nicely and has not caused the type of ecodisaster which the Ecology Convention is designed, by prevention and -- I stress -- nonretroactive measures to forestall hut -- I stress -- not to after-stall; therefore, it appears, the full force of the legislation may be said to be in a state of suspension or lapse." The Chairman nodded his visored helmet. (If you didn't understand the Minister, he said, in effect; "We'd like to help you. Chairman, and so let's just say that the law isn't applicable to your case.") The Chairman nodded and replied: "We claim more than that, esteemed Excellency. We do not recognize the classification rattus norvegicus. No certainty exists that the animal we call rodentus glaubenicii amoris is an import. The reports filed by your agent, '  # paperbound. now al your bookslore. A division of Random House. Borislav Hit, which your people were gracious enough to put at our disposal -- " "Hear! Hear! " " -- make claims and draw deductions we cannot possibly approve. Your man Hit, for example, speculates that amoris is norvegicus because the same diseases are associated with the former as with the latter. Now that. Excellency, is not established fact. Agent Hit cites no laboratory proof. In fact, Excellency, we rather question the competence of your agent, who spent his first week on our beautiful planet composing love letters of such...of such... I have no words to characterize them, but permit me to read to you a sample -- " The Minister interrupted hastily. "That won't be necessary, Mr. Chairman. In fact, our own technical people have emerged with conclusions very much like yours. And in this connection, let me say that Eastern Quadrant's Quadrennial Economic Report outshines that of all other sectors thanks largely to the productivity of your planet. Such economic prowess, Mr. Chairman, is completely inconsistent with violations of law. We can only infer that our agent has made a mistake. Both the House and Lords have approved by nearly unanimous vote amendments to the EcoConvention, and the document lies here before me for signature -- " Thump, thump, thump went the heavy glove of the faceless executive on the polished surface of the table. "Minister," he cried in a loud, hollow voice, "surely you know Section # of the EcoConvention which expressly forbids regional amendments? As the representative of the Southwestern Ratcatchers' Association, I regretfully bring this to your attention -- not because it will wipe us out! But because my constituents are men of law and honor, and we cannot allow you to make a serious error. Therefore I respectfully request that you submit the bill unsigned to System Central for ratification." An uproar of voices. "Your Excellency, I protest -- " "Who is this clown?" "What's in that suit?" "Sir, we'll check this, this gentleman's credentials this instant." This last was said by Big Man himself who rose and gestured, pale of face and sweatbeaded with bureaucratic agonies. But before the armed attendants could make a move, the faceless Glauben executive suddenly rose and disappeared through a panel of wall where none of the GE's until then had suspected a door. He moved with the speed and resolution of someone with a souped-up body. Guards bounced against the panel, but it had been locked again from the other side. The Glauben executive knew his way about the building and he went straight to a lower floor where Big Man's offices were located, thinking, rightly, that no one would seek him there. He shuffled into the reception area and looked through his face-plate at a charmingly juttable fern behind a desk. "Excuse me. Miss," he said, "are you the secretary of Borislav Hit's supervisor?" The girl nodded with shy lushes. "I've come to make a complaint about that swine. Hit is the most K'pulsive, insensitive, vicious rascal I've ever run into. Let me Icll you -- " 'Sir, " the girl cried, and her diy eyes flashed a kind of fire. I'm only a secretary around here, hut I can tell you my opinion of Borislav Hit -- he's the finest, most lompetent, kindest, fairest, Nweetest man who ever..." Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked down. "Well," cried the Blauben exrcutive, and now there was a riirious catch in his voice. "Well, well..." But when the girl looked up, the executive was gone. IV Gather around closer, youngsters, and let me conclude my lule. Let me skip over Borislav's escape from the ministerial tower merely that Pappacappolus had underground tunnels for transportation, water, waste, and so forth, and in a pinch Borislav didn't mind swimming through sewage, especially not in a gravity suit. And let me say further that he ple who had little love for Big Man or his excellent superiors. and so Borislav was conveyed back to Glauben in a Black Market sort of way, incognito, as it were. On the way Big Man called him on the communicator built into Noball's head, and Borislav swore the most solemn oaths that he was on Glauben that very moment. He described the landscape to Big Man in the minutest detail -- while actually staring out over the spiraling luminosity that space assumed through the port holes of a TC jumper. Big Man didn't believe my granddad, but he didn't press him very hard either. Big Man had scored a triumph of sorts and his mood was elated. Also, Borislav was dangerous in his erratic way. Any man who'd do this, by God, might go all the way to System Central. You had to treat him with a pinch of caution. No use driving the man up a tree. Furthermore, let me skip over the conclusion of that conference in the ministerial auditorium with its gorgeous view of Computer's Temple in Printout Plain -- except to say this much; The faceless executive truly rattled the Minister's cage, in a manner of speaking, and the leaders of House and Lords began to grow nervous, and the Chairman of the Concession also felt a twinge of fear. They huddled in a tighter circle and nervously sucked coffee and tea, the Guru drinker having departed. Here was a dilemna,' and they solved it like this: The amendment had to go, clearly. Now that a threat had been sounded, the Eco-Convention had to be respected. But how? How do that and yet protect the trade whose profits made EQ's Quadrennial Economic Report such a shiner? They talked at length, weighing options, each as dreary as the next. At last Big Man had a study the problem in greater depth, " he suggested, and at his words a great excitement trembled through the people. A creative suggestion finally! Study the problem, indeed! Determine all the unknowns. Yessir! "Alphonse," said Minister East, "that's a darn good suggestion." 'Alphonse,' the Minister had said, using Big Man's first name -- certainty of a promotion to Deputy Assistant Underminister at least. Big Man relaxed and expanded his chest. The Chairman agreed. Superb idea. Su-perb! In the meantime, of course, business had to go on as usual. How could you study the problem if the problem had been solved, right? Right, everyone said. And so an official order went rived, in writing, the same day Borislav landed on Glauben and resumed his duties in the quonset hut. His secretary had failed him. For reasons unfathomable in an organization as efficient as the Special Technical Assistance Corps, she had overlooked his tinued. In fact, when Boris walked over to Ratticide Central, he saw that the red bars on the graphs had almost caught up with the black. But now, official orders in hand, he had to call off the operation. There was no alternative. He obeyed. He didn't keep score. He sat down before the central communicator and activated the All Channels button. "All Points, " he said to the device. "All Points, this is Borislav Hit, Planetary Agent in Charge. We have orders to terminate the termination immediately. You will stop operations in an hour and return to home base." One junior colonel in the Southwestern district radioed back in astonishment. gO;" "Never mind, " Borislav answered. "The rest w ill d ie of grief." He didn't keep score, but he was sad. He asked his pilot to drop him off on the outskirts of Cosmopplis, and from there, left alone, he walked through the city engaged in a muttering conversation with Noball. He circled the neighborhood where people now lamented in ratless grief behind the wire fence. He circled by the ocean where surf had wiped out the last tracks of norvegicus. He gazed out over the wine-red sea to the bell buoy in the distance nnd listened to its mournful clang. Then he checked in again at the Grand Hotel and asked for his old room back, eager to be alone with the thoughts he'd sent to Ita Gitta from that narrow table. That night the chamber maid came in. She recognized and reported him ufain. And thus it was that Conmonial farewell dinner they had staged. It was a gala affair, and Borislav put a cheerful face on it. He even tried a toast or two after a few bottles of the local wine had thoroughly confused Noball's head. He lurched and staggered ut the podium and made something of an ass of himself, his heard all beaded with wine. At the end, when the Chairman gave him an unusually large and beautiful aphrodisiac fleece, carefully sealed into a plastic cover, he forgot to shake the Chairman's hand and just careened out of the hall to the half-derisive applause of the Concessionaires. The next morning, however, aboard the shuttle, just before pick up Quantromer again, Borislav cracked the seal on his farewell present and got such a whiff of aphro-scent he quickly sealed the thing again. "Ho, boy!" he whispered to Noball. "If I ever get the three of us together -- me, Ita, and this rug! Ho, boy, Noball. That'll be something. " Let's skip the trip and see Borislav as he stood, once more, on the edge of the simublood pool. He had undressed Noball to his incomplete nakesness, had attached a weight to his leg. Now the two of them stood and waited for a signal from the man behind the glass to show that the psychomagnet was ready and operational. At last the attendant signaled, and Borislav turned to Noball, in a manner of speaking. "Good-bye, old friend, " he said, in a voice that was now entirely his own yet still a vibration in Noball's throat -- and in a voice that had a cargo of feeling. "Good-bye, old buddy. You're not a bad sort. Maybe we ll meet again. But tell those bio-boys to make you a better tummy, hear?" Then he jumped in. One last time the Taler touched his pipe and let smoke curl up into the air. One final time Millusion burned in the braincells of the teenies gathered around him in the B-Deck Whybar of the Time Ark bound for New Frontier. Once more the Taler resumed his yarn. Now we're back on Pappa, children. Borislav's arrival coincided with the sunset, and the chalk mountains were red, the ocean purple. He muttered his way through sterilization. "Just don't put on any airs, Quantromer Hit," he said to his body. "You've had it nice, friend. Poor Noball, now, he vvjent through all sorts of hell with me, he did. So you just keep still, will you. Don't tell me how 'deprived' you are. All will be well, I think. How can she resist that smell, now? That's what I'd ask you." And Borislav made for a bank of telbooths and picked himself one. Quantromer's fingers trembled over the digits, but to Borislav's great joy and relief, Ita Gitta came on the screen. She dropped her lashes when he said hello. "You're back," she murmured. "Did you get my letters?" "Yes," she murmured. Her eyes were wary. "Ita," he said, "I've got to see you, even if it's only for five minutes." He fingered the plastic of his aphro-pelt, just retrieved from Customs five seconds ago. But he kept it out of her view, below the screen. "Boris," she said, "you wouldn't have any ideas, now, would you?" "None, dearest," he swore with feeling. "None whatever. I just want to say hello; you know, a handshake." "Fine," she said; her voice trembled a little. "A handshake." "Be right over," he husked into the screen, and he ran off in such haste that he forgot to sign off. Ita Gitta lived in a tower in the foothills of the mountains, and the trip to her place took far longer from Borislav's perspective than the forty minutes it actually consumed. They drove up a snaking road lined with willows weeping, up toward the fine blue residential tower where she had an apartment on level twenty-six. He threw money at the driver. He raced into the lobby and through it to the elevators. He fidgeted in the lift itself, which wouldn't move fast enough for him. He burst out even before the sliding doors had completely slid apart. He bounded down the carpeted hall. But just before the door of her apartment, he suddenly stopped. With a sly grin beneath his bushy red beard, he carefully opened the plastic seal on his aphro-rug and -- And he was shattered with disappointment. Now to understand his disappointment, you must go back in my story to that spot where I lectured on the Ecology Convention. You'll recall what I said to you. If you've ever landed on a planet, you go through one hellish purification. They bathe you, they squirt you, they irradiate you -- that is how I put it, I believe, Every cell of your body is purified. The flora of your stomach must yield to the flora of their stomach. I told you how they probe beneath your nails and massage your every hair with electronic fingers. Well, needless to say, they do the same with your belongings, and Pappa Customs had dealt with Borislav's jutting rug so thoroughly that the red root fungus that, interacting with rat epidermis, creates the aphrodisiac effect had been completely and totally eradicated, and the smell that now arose from the sack was that of musty rat skin. Then as now, real aphro-fleece was difficult to come by. They were smuggled in, as a rule, or they came in through the hands of bribed Customs officials. And the real thing gave a kind of glamour to the pelts whose effectiveness was destroyed in transit or by time. But Borislav didn't know about such things, and he had been neatly finessed by the very Convention he strove to enforce with such ingenuity. Well, you can imagine his dismay. Quantromer shrunk several centies. The sly, smiling face fell in and turned into a long, sad frown. But at last Boris pulled himself together. He was an agent picked themselves up. He rang the bell. Almost at once the door flew open, and Ita Gitta's warm, soft arms embraced his neck (?), Ita Gitta's hot sweet lips sought his(!l), Ita Gitta's magnificent titties pressed against Quantromer's chest(!?), and her eyes bathed his beard with beads of tears, and her voice husked with longing and affection, and in short, broken phrases she said, more or less, that she loved him, that she loved him more than anyone else in the Cosmos...such letters...such poetry... When she pulled him into the apartment, Borislav let the juttting rug drop from his grasp. It lay outside on the thick carpet of the hall while inside, unaided by rat or fungus, my forebears did what they would do many times in a long and very fruitful marriage. And so ends my story. Any questions? Rubeema said: "Taler, what is xenopsylla cheopis and what is the rickettsia typhi that it carries?" The Taler answered: "I knew you'd catch me on an omission, Rubeema, you always do. Little xeno is a rat flea, and ricky-tippi is murine typhus fever, a disease. But to that the Glauben people had become immune. Next?" Francisco asked: "Taler, whatever happened to that study Big Man suggested they carry out?" The Taler said: "It is still underway. Next?" Rubeema asked: "Taler, what is the moral of this story?" The Taler answered: "Moral? Children, I'm a Taler; I tell stories. Who am I to moralize?" ir The topics for these columns come from discussions between Editor Jim Baen and myself. This one is at .his request -- but the opinions in it are mine. Jim shouldn't be held responsible for my views, only for believing the subject important. When I first began work in aerospace I was part of a group known as Human Factors and Reliability, and it says a lot about the status of both fields that they were lumped into one rather small outfit under a single supervisor. Now both are pretty big stuff in both aerospace and other industries, but in those days they were an afterthought. It turned out to affect my whole career, though. Although my primary work was in the human factors laboratories (I have probably cooked more people than anyone not a cannibal by profession) there was always reliability work to be done, and I had that reliability-engineering background on my record. One route into "systems engineering" used to be through reliability. (Two others were physics and economics; it was thought that physicists and economists were uniquely qualified to look at the "big picture".) Consequently, when I moved up the aerospace ladder I ended up in systems design work, and that took me over into "requirements." The requirements game is a tough one. The theory is that one analyses what tasks ought to be performed, and comes up with concepts for systems to perform them. The real design engineers work on these, and if they're lucky they sell the idea to a customer. In aerospace the customer was generally the US Government, particularly the Air Force Requirements analysis can't be done in a vacuum. The analysts must know what's p)ossible within the time span of their forecasts. It's no good saying "we need a tons across fifteen astronomical units at cost of no more than # Capability) should be no later thanfive years from date." We might need such a system, but anybody turning in that kind of report would find himself with a mandatory appointment at Central Medical. On the other hand, a proper requirements should take account of realistic expectations in technology. It's perfectly permissible to do a system predesign assuming that certain areas of research are going to pay off. In fact, if the funding agencies buy the requirement analysis, they may well put more money into the necessary research -- so long as you can convince them there's a good chance the desired capability will exist when needed. This is a very complex subject and I wouldn't go into it if it weren't a requirement for this column. However, any discussion kind of requirements analysis. Besides, it provides a good background incident. Requirements teams generally get the best information on present and expected capabilities of exotic systems, and ours was no exception. Naturally the space systems requirements group was vitally interested in lasers as early as the late fifties. About # we received a briefing from engineers who had given lasers a great deal of thought. Their conclusion was that lasers were interesting for communications, and had a potential for rangefinding and the like, but their utility for aircraft and spacecraft interception would be nil. They argued from efficiency. Lasers in # were much less than # efficient. Any airplaneeating laser would necessarily use a great deal of power, # of which would stay within the laser. We can't possibly dissipate that much energy, and even if you make a fantastic assumption and plan on lasers an order of magnitude better, you still can't do it; and besides, efficiencies an order of magnitude better just aren't in the cards. That was #. I am told that as of September # the airplaneeating laser was declassified. Since I've no clearance and haven't had one for some time, I've no idea how long they've existed, but it must have been for a while. It seems that our estimates -- which were the very best obtainable in # -- vvere not only wrong, but drastically so. In something less than # years the impossible was invented, and it changes the whole strategic environment. The story is told that when John F. Kennedy first took office as President, he asked the Commander in Chief of the Strategic apologize for the alphabet soup, but it's obvious why so many initials are used in this business) to review the battle plan in case there were war. He was given a review of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (Slop), in which each component of the strategic force had a definite mission. Some were to attack interceptor bases in order to allow others to get through. Tankers rendezvoused with bombers in many unlikely places. The sub marines launched their birds. The whole force went as soon as the order was given, and the result was destruction of the potential enemy. Kennedy was horrified. "General," he is supposed to have said, "you don't have a war plan, all you have is a kind of horrible spasm." One of the first tasks given Secretary of Defense (SecDef) McNamara was revision of "strategic options". The new doctrine was to be called "controlled response," and the big buzz words in those days were "flexibility" and "flexible response." It didn't work. Although the name has been changed, our strategic war plan to this day is no more than a "horrible spasm". Today our strategic doctrine is called "Mutual Assured Destrucanalysts think best describes it. The idea is that we kill them and they kill us and since each knows the other can do it, nobody will start the Big One in the first place. primary requirement of US strategic forces is "Assured Destruction" (AD); the capability to absorb the enemy's best attack and launch sufficient weapons to penetrate his defenses and assure the destruction of the potential enemy to some unacceptable (to him) level. Now that level may have to be quite high. The Soviet Union, as an example, took some # casualties in WW II and survived; and strict Marxist doctrine says that no level of casualties is too high if the outcome of the war is the destruction of the bourgeois societies and the final victory of socialism. It's no good saying that no sane man would really believe that, either, because some pretty influential people over there have come out and said it. The requirement then is for an AD force that can survive and perform its mission. ("Perform its mission" is euphemistic for "kill most of the enemy's civilian population and certainly cripple his leadership, military capability, and industry".) It can do this in several ways. One is to have sufficient defenses for our weaponssystems (not for our people) to assure the temporary survival of the AD force. Another is to have an AD force so large that it can't possibly be successfully attacked. A final method is to launch the AD force as soon as you're sure you're being attacked. This is by far the cheapest way to fulfill the requirement -- so long as you're not at war. It's pretty expensive if you've saved money on weapons and then couldn't afford to wait and see who launched what at you, and what it might do to you. I know of almost no one who likes the "launch on early warning" solution, although there are economizers who seem determined to force us into that nooption position. If we reject this position, there remain proliferation of offensive systems; construction of defensive systems; or a mix of the two. Proliferation of offensive systems is generally called "overkill", and isn't terribly popular. Now if you buy any part of the deterrence argument, there has to be some on-going improvement of the offensive capabilities in order to match threat requirements; not only must the AD force be able to survive and penetrate, but all potential enemies must believe it can do that. This is the usual argument advanced for the "triad " concept of missile subs, landbased missiles, and manned aircraft. The triad is supposed to make our AD capability credible. Something is bound to get through, or so the argument goes. At bottom it's offensive system proliferation, which is demanded by the AD requirement, which is doctrine. Naturally it results in "overkill" in that the force before losses must be many times more capable than the minimum that has to get through to perform the AD mission. The alternative is defense. Criarguments: (#), it won't work, and we ll have wasted a great deal of money for nothing. This school includes not only those who don't like any form of defense spending but also a number of Air Force generals -- who'd rather put the money into more missiles and airplanes. It also includes some strategists who say "nobody ever won a war with defensive systems." is that it will work. If it does, situation at all. The potential enemy won't hold the US population as hostages. He will therefore have two choices: either start the war at a favorable opportunity without warning, hoping to smash our AD before it can be launched, or, more likely, start RD efforts to develop systems that can defeat our defenses. His RD efforts are, it is said, bound to succeed. Modern weapons are so destructive that it doesn't take many getting through to kill everyone off. Therefore, when it's all finished, we'll have a will have new offensive weapons, and both of us will have spent a very great deal of money for nothing. "trigger a new round in the arms race." It will absorb funds we need for better things. Oddly have their own ideas of what we should do with the money "saved" of none of those who wants that money left in the pockets of the taxpayers. Thus the strategic argument generally gets complicated by debates about the social desirability of various schemes of national self-improvement, and accused of ignoring vital problems which should "come first." In addition to the above positions, all of which more or less degree, there are those who retirely new strategic concept govern force requirements. The most obvious of these is pacifism in one or another form. While philosophically respectable, and in my observation fairly popular among science fiction fans, pacifism will get no discussion here because at the moment it's simply not a realistic alternative. The American people don't buy it, and the liklihood of a pacifist Congress in the near future is vanishingly small. Another position was "assured survival", which I didn't invent, but I will claim credit for naming. It's discussed at some length in a volume by S. T. Possony and J. E. Pournelle; the strategy Dunellen, #. The idea was that our goal ought to be not the destruction of the potential enemy but the survival of the United States, and it accepts deterrence only as a temporarily necessary evil. There are two main arguments for assured survival as a goal. The first is obvious: it's common sense. The second is moral: the Judeo-Christian concept of Just of harmless civilians, certainly not as the primary military objective. The AS doctrine, then, generates a difierent force requirement placed on defensive systems to protect not only weapons, but people; and offensive systems would be tailored for use against military targets for destruction of the enemy's war capability. There were two main arguments against AS in my day. The first was technical: you can't do it. The second was moralphilosophical: you don't want to do it if you can, because AS assumes there can be nuclear wars, and if there can be there will be. Furthermore, the argument goes, by removing the US population from its status as hostages, we create the possibility that the US will start the war; the enemy knows this, and thus he is tempted to start it at any favorable opportunity. That argument can be and was carried to the extreme of saying that any attempt to build fall-out shelters in the United States wasis an aggressive act against the Soviet Union. (For some reason those making that argument never comment on the mandatory civil defense training every Soviet citizen undergoes, or the extensive shelter program in Finally, it wasis said, AS will again trigger another round in the arms race, so that at the end we'll be no better off than we were, we'll have spent a lot of money, and both sides will have more weapons -- all to no benefit. his most devastating novel yet... Atomic war has reduced the earth to a primitive state history is no longer written... plagues and radiation death are common... Demetrios, the former Adam Freeman, remembers what life once was and tells a new generation of earthlings the terrifying tale of a world devastated by the Twenty Minute War! rvicium wtraeitMx # (V#) available at your local dealer, or send # plus #C for postage  handling to N.J. #. I hope the above is a fair summary of strategic debate as it was prior to September, #. In my judgment, the missileeating laser has changed the strategic environment considerably, and should "trigger a new round" in the arms debate. From a technical view the laser that you had not only to locate an guide an interceptor to it, and detonate a weapon to kill it. Tracking is horribly difficult, decoys can exhaust the supply of interceptors, and the defensive weapon so contaminates the defense environment that you have trouble seeing through your own weapton effects to get at the next bogie. With lasers none of this applies. The ability to detect is the ability to kill, since the lethality travels at lightspeed. Also, the laser is not a one-shot weapon, and thus we need not be so concerned with discriminating between decoys and the real thing. Also they can slew rapidly to cover a large area. (The laser itself doesn't point, of course; a mirror does all that.) Thus, at least in theory, much of the technical argument against Assured Survival vanishes if laser moral-philosophical objection? First, assume it's all true, and that having spent the money to the enemy has come up with an gained nothing? We've gained a great deal. First and foremost, at the end of that round of the arms race there will be only one potential enemy. The Soviets may be able to develop penetrators, but no one else will. Italics mine. -- Ed. Soviet we'll be hostage to no one else. That may be worth quite a lot; there are nations far more reckless than the Soviet Union and in a few years many of them will have both nuclear weapons and primitive delivery systems. At the moment we have exactly zero capability to protect ourselves primitive. It may be worth something to our friends, too. With a good to protect ourselves and allies from the Soviets, but we can provide assurance against other military adventurers. After all, the US-Soviet detente, no matter how real, will not end international conflict. The effects of a not-incredible defense reach far beyond the currently popular strategic issues. In my day we had a number of standard strategic problems, each identified with a self-explanatory name. They included; The Mad Dictator with a Missile; the N-th Country Problem; Catalytic War (in which a third party attempts to trigger war between the US and the Soviet Union); The Crazy General Launching Two Birds; etc., etc. All of these are, if not solved, at least affected by a strategy of Assured Survival based on laser eral launches a bird, it can be shot down; we won't have to worry about this being the initial shot of a pin-down attack. Pindown, incidentally, is no joke: it's an attack that uses a few weapons detonated at intervals over the enemy's (or our own) missile farms to keep the birds from rising until a massive attack can arrive and kill them in their holes. With many warheads per missile, if we see one bird coming in we can't be sure it's not the first stage of pindown. Incidentally, the Catalytic War problem may be more real than you might think. A few years ago a fanatic faction within a nation allied with the US actually plotted to trigger a US-SU war. The conspirators were caught by their own intelligence agencies. They included some pretty influential people. So there are some real benefits won't stop the Soviets. Mutual US and SU deployment of such systems would create a bi-polar world, which may or may not be preferable to a situation in which there are several, to dozens, of I think it would be. And beyond all that we'd have the lasers themselves! A rocket interceptor isn't worth very much beyond its designed purpose, but a big laser is valuable. Among other things it could be the heart of the laser orbital-systems launcher I described last April Galaxy, April, #). It could be the key to the planets. Italics mine. -- Ed. Then too, a major component and large part of the expense of a laser system is power plants. These would be useful in peacetime since the lasers won't need the power. I don't think I need say a lot about the advantages of energy self-sufficiency. There are, in other words, a number of benefits to a laserbeyond the issues now debated. I'll freely admit I'd like to see the lasers themselves developed indepedently of the defense requirement. In my judgment the resulting cheap access to space would itself be worth the investment. In fact, I think economical access to space will bring such a wealth of technological benefits that we'll be able to afford many of the social programs now advanced as preferable to defense spending -- and I also think it unlikely that we'll buy the needed research except as part of a defense package. I've given up believing myself infallible. Still, I've looked at the problem for a nuriiber of years, and my present analysis convinces me. I think we ought to adopt Assured Survival as our goal; and that we should get to work on big missile-eating lasers.  Ryan turned away from the window, looking down and turning his glass so that the ice cubes spun. The house felt empty; the silence was not right. He knew that he should hear the soft sounds of his wife getting his daughter ready for bed. Ryan felt lonely, and went to the portable bar for another drink. The bar looked like an antique wooden globe when it was closed. Ryan had bought it in Spain, where he and May had gone on their honeymoon, the year before civilian passports were revoked. Annie walked in naked. # "Annie," Ryan said, gently reproving. He set his glass down on the stereo and went to kneel beside her. Her hair lay in moist curls around her head, and there were tiny droplets of water all over her body. The damp patch on the carpet where she stood began to spread. She turned her eyes, on Ryan and said accusingly, "Mommy didn't come dry me off." Ryan smoothed her damp hair. Russet, he thought, auburn. The loveliest words for the loveliest color. It reminded him of autumn. He pressed his face against her head, but she smelled of Ivory soap and childhood, not of apples or leaves. She pulled away, putting her hands on her hips, and made a mouth at him, the way she had seen her mother do. "Daddy. It's my bedtime." "I'll put you to bed, " he said. "You shouldn't run around naked, you know." "Well, Mommy didn't come. I was looked for her. " "A child." Ryan and Annie looked up together. May stood in the doorway, her hair mussed, her face soft and slightly puffy, as if she had been asleep. "There's a child, a little girl. Ryan?" No, he thought, belatedly. He wished he had not been drinking, or that he had drunk himself into insensibility. But there was Annie. "Annie, sweetheart -- " But she had run to her mother. "I waited and waited but you didn't come." "Ryan?" "Annie, sweetheart," Ryan said. "Run to your room and put on your jammies. Mommy and I will be in to kiss you goodnight in a minute." "Mommy, why didn't you come dry me? Mommy? Why? Mommy?" Annie tugged at May's full skirt. Ryan caught the note in her voice that presaged tears. Poor Annie. She knew. She could sense it. Dawning panic on May's face as she bent to enfold Annie's wet body to her. Her eyes did not leave Ryan's. "Oh, Ryan. This is -- oh, Ryan -- " "Annie." "Annie," May murmured. She stood up, holding Annie, and bent her face into Annie's neck. "Annie, Annie. Oh, Annie." Annie threw her arms around her mother's neck and buried her face against her. But she said nothing. She was not reassurred. "I'll take her to bed?" May asked. "At the end of the hall." "Wait for me." Ryan sank into the couch and stared at the Van Gogh print on the opposite wall. Crazy old Van Gogh. He had cut off his own ear. Ryan wondered what they had done to him after that. "Five years, Ryan. At least five years." May came and sat beside him on the couch, taking his hand between hers. "How old is she? Of course we called her Annie, after my sister, right?" Ryan nodded wearily. "This has happened before, hasn't it, Ryan? It's happened before? Has it? " "Yes." "But I don't remember! I don't! We were married, the two of us, together, here -- " she touched the couch and looked around. "Here, in this house. But no Annie, no children. Oh, Ryan, what does it mean? How could I lose -- five years? Or more? How could it happen? Why? What is it? " "You just forget things," he said, very softly. "But why? Always? Will my memory come back? Why?" "The operation. It's something to do with that." She stared at him in a panic and snatched her hand from his. "What op -- I don't remember! What's wrong with me -- is this me?" Turning her face away from him, she began to cry. Ryan stood and went to the window where he stared out at the placid streets. The pools of light beneath each streetlamp were empty. The neighborhood was silent. People didn't go out much after dark anymore, though the streets were safer than they had ever been. He turned back into the room. May had stopped crying. She had never been one for crying. She said, "When I was little my sister Annie told me that every seven years each cell in a person's body has been replaced. I guess I was about five then. It really worried me. She told me that every seven years you become a completely new person. A different person. I used to be afraid. I thought that when I was seven I wouldn't rememb.er the old me. I thought that if my brain cells were all replaced then, " she turned her palms upward into the air, "poof go my memories." "But by the time you were seven you had forgotten about it. Until Annie reminded you." "I've told you this before? " Ryan nodded. "The last time I forgot? Is it like this every time? " "Not exactly." "How often? How long has this heen going on? Have we been to the doctor?" "More than one. There's nothing...nothing that can be done. It might be just an immediate reaction, and it should stop soon." But her periods of amnesia had been increasing in frequency. "What operation was this?" May asked. "Government sponsored for a better future." She glanced at him sharply. "A volunteer thing?" "Not in the least. People turned each other in -- and then, of course, there were the criminals, and tho.se on file as subversives." "Of course. I was a subversive in college. A teenage radical. What did the operation do to me?" "Made you a better, happier citizen. The object was to remove your destructive tendencies and install something, a tracer device .so that if you should backslide, they could find you." "Are you... ?" "No. There's a new bill up, though, about 'testing for subversive and criminal potentiality' and if it passes, which it will..." May stared at the floor. "I don't remember. I could have been in fairyland for the past five years. Or what Annie told me about being made new, or -- " "Or you could be a changeling." She looked up. "How did you know -- " "That was the story Annie wanted?" She nodded. "I told her no story tonight." "But she never goes to sleep without a story." "She was very good about it. Very quiet. She -- I suppose she could feel there was something wrong, that I was different. I didn't even know what drawer her pajamas were in. Oh, Ryan, can't we do something? When will I be all right again?" Ryan shrugged, caught her look of need. "I'm sorry, but it varies. A few hours or a few days." "Never any longer?" He shook his head. Last time it had been six days before her memory came back. The duration grew longer, and the time between occurances lessened. The first time she had been set back only to the time of the operation. "Can we call a doctor?" "I told you -- " "Oh, please, darling -- just let's call Ben. It will make me feel better to talk to him. He knows about me?" Ryan nodded. "I'll call him." She leaned across the couch to hug him, and he pulled her to him, holding on tight. May went back into the bedroom while Ryan called Ben. "I'll just lie down for awhile," she said. Ben would come, of course. He was the family doctor and a longtime family friend. He promised to be by within an hour. Ryan went into the bedroom. It was dark, but the curtains were open, and there was some light from the street. He saw the gleam of May's eyes. "I didn't mean to disturb you," he said. "I'm not sleepy. He's coming?" "In about an hour." "Oh?" "I told him it wasn't an emergency. Really, darling, we can't just break up his whole evening." "I'm sorry." "Don't be silly." He went to the dresser, to the box that held the cuff-links and tie-clips he never wore, relics of a time past. He took out a folded, brittle newspaper clipping and unfolded it by the window in a shaft of light from the streetlamp although he knew the picture well enough to look at it in the dark. It had been a front-page photo. May's head was sandwiched between two others, leaning out of the window of an occupied building. A banner proclaiming the building's liberation stretched below them. Three arms thrust forward in jubilant fists. And May's face, smiling, alive, victorious...holy. "For this, " he said softly. "Ryan? What are you -- oh. I wish you'd throw that away. I don't like it. " He turned and saw that she had raised herself on her elbows. "That's not me. It was a stupid, violent time that we grew up in. You had the sense then...I didn't. I'm a different person now, though. I don't know how I could have ever been like that...I can't even remember what it felt like." "Of course you can't. " He folded the paper and put it in his back pocket. "Ryan? Come here." Her voice was shy. "Not now," he said, as gently as he could, and left the room without touching her. He didn't like the way the living room felt and knew the rest of the house would be no better. He felt like a deserter, but he went outside. He would walk for a few minutes. Outside was no better. It was quiet and the air felt thick and still. He could taste the smog. He began to walk, hoping he would see someone to speak to, but he saw no one. He headed up toward the highway, towards a diner he had occasionally stopped in for a cup of coffee. The diner, when he reached it, was empty except for the counterman, its emptiness made the more vivid by the merciless florescent lights shining down endlessly on all the hard, clean, bright surfaces. "Evening," said the counterman cheerily. "What can I do for you?" Ryan straddled one of the high brown stools. "Just a Coke. Thanks." "This is a slow time," the counterman said. "Past the regular dinner hour, but not so late that other places are closed. You live nearby, don't you? We don't get many walking in -- when I saw you didn't have a car I knew you must be from nearby. There y'are -- anything else?" "No thanks." "Walk for your health?" "I just wanted some air." "Nice night for walking, I guess. Real warm for this late in the season." Ryan wished another customer would come in. The counterman's persistant friendliness made him uncomfortable, and his physical appearance inspired dislike in Ryan: the shining head beneath thinning hair, the watery blue eyes, the horsey teeth beneath the stiff ginger mustache...Ryan turned his attention to the voice from the radio which was playing at the end of the counter. It was a news broadcast, full of hopeful messages about the state of the union. There was less and less coverage given to the rest of the world these days -- no one wanted to hear about wars or crime. The counterman seemed to follow Ryan's attention. "Gives you hope, doesn't it?" "What." "The news. It's all good now, or nearly. Just remember how it was ten years ago -- or even five. People didn't go out on the streets -- you wouldn't have gone out for fresh air unless you were crazy. You would have been beaten up and robbed. Mugged. " He said the word as if it were foreign and he wasn't sure of the pronunciation. "Thanks to the operation," Ryan said. "That, and other things. The government finally cracking down on criminals. Democracy is great, but people have to deserve it. There were a lot of changes that had to be made." "Did you have the operation?" Ryan asked. "Me? No. I've always been a good citizen. I've always done my duty." The way the counterman looked at him made Ryan uneasy, and he had to caution himself against paranoia. The day May was. in the hospital he had gone around all day suspecting people of spying on him, of being out to get him, of making accusations disguised as innocuous conversation. Ryan realized that he was standing, fumbling in his pocket for change. "I've got to be going," he said. "I didn't tell my wife I was going out -- she'll worry -- " "But you didn't drink your Coke." "I guess I'm not thirsty." He put a quarter on the counter. The counterman pushed it back. "I won't charge you for it, then. Drink it myself." He smiled. "Have a good walk. " His "Come back again" was cut off by the closing of the heavy glass door. Headlights cut across Ryan's face as he turned up his driveway, and he felt the familiar paranoid beating of his heart as he realized the car was turning into his driveway just behind him. "Ryan? Is anything wrong?" It was Ben. "No, no. I just stepped out for some air." "Well, you stepped into the wrong place for it," Ben said, getting out of his car. "Phew. It stinks tonight. Supposed to clear by tomorrow, though." Ben was one year away from compulsory retirement. He'd chosen to continue working through the past two optional years. They went into the house together. "May's in the bedroom, resting." "Fine." He scrutinized Ryan's face. "You shouldn't let this get to you, you know. I'm sure it's only some preliminary adjustment. " "Why don't you go in and see her." Ryan knew that Ben would catch the hard edge of dismissal in his voice, knew also that Ben would not be offended by it. "Sure, sure, " Ben said. He put his hand on Ryan's shoulder. "Take it easy." Ryan sank into the couch, ignoring the voices that came quietly from the other room. "She'll sleep now," Ben said when he came out of the bedroom. "Could I trouble you for a cup of coffee?" He followed Ryan into the kitchen. "What did you tell her?" "She just wanted to talk." "She's sleeping, you said?" "No, but it shouldn't be long." "Why didn't you just turn her off?" "I wouldn't do that, Ryan." "Why not? You're a doctor, you should know all about implants. I turned her off myself, once. Accidentally. I was frantic until I found the place again to turn her back on." "The little death," said the doctor. "No. More like turning off and turning on a doll. Ben, they've taken my wife away from me and given me a docile robotWarning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. Kings; # mg. "lar," I #) mg. nicotine; #'s; # mg.' tar," SLorlllard #! Warning; The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. housekeeper. They destroyed her! Now she's losing her past -- " "It's nothing to worry about, Ryan. This whole business of the memory -- it will pass, I promise you." "How do you know? Maybe for some people -- but when they're tampering with minds -- it could get worse. She'll be nothing but a shell, without memories, and they'll reprogram her into a model citizen -- that's what they -- " "Your voice, Ryan, lower your voice." Ryan took a coffee cup and saucer out of the cupboard, his hands shaking. "How did we let this happen, Ben? How could we? It won't stop. It was only the criminals at first -- but they took my wife, my sweet, beautiful May just because she was on their bloody list." "She wasn't harmed, Ryan. You're being overly dramatic. You must face up to the fact that May had certain...tendencies and beliefs that could be harmful." "She never did anything! They forced her to have this op -- " 'Calm down, Ryan. If May had had an illness you would have wanted it operated on, removed -- " "The analogy doesn't hold, doctor. May used to be interested and aggressive and very alive. She wanted to change things -- she was a constructive person, not a destructive one. You've seen the change -- you can't say it's for the better. I can't believe this is you, Ben, spouting -- " Ryan stopped, comprehension dawning. "You. You've had the operation, too. You have an implant like May, haven't you, Ben?" "Yes. Yes, I have. But don't you see -- " "Why you?" Ryan asked softly. "God knows you've never been a radical. What was your crime? "I was against the operations at first. I thought that they removed the will. Now I understand -- " "Of course. And now you're a puppet as well." "You're being paranoid. There is no great 'they' corrupting us -- we run our own lives." "Oh, we let it happen, all right. We wanted to bum out the badness in our criminals. Then in our potential criminals. Then in anyone who disagrees. Change their minds. Indoctrinate our children." "Ryan, it's all for the good." "It always is. The good of the State. Well, goddamn the State!" "As your doctor and your friend I must advise you to stop this foolish talk. Get some sleep. Take a vacation. Don't worry so much." "That's a great prescription. This country has gone to hell precisely because we've closed our eyes. Ben turned away. "I'd better leave now." Ryan saw his own hand go out toward the back of Ben's neck. His fingers found it, pressed, and he caught Ben before he could hit the floor. The implant was in the same place as May's. "How convenient," he murmured. He looked up from the sleeping Ben to see Annie standing in the doorway in a long blue nightgown, her little bare feet curling on the lineoleum as she watched in silence. In a year she would have to go to kindergarten, and they would begin on her, feeding her drugs for docility and propaganda in the name of education. "Is Doctor Ben sick?" "Just sleeping, hon. Run back to bed now." "Can't sleep." "Sure you can." "No story," she said, widening her eyes at him. A finger went to her mouth, and she chewed it thoughtfully, staring at him. "Run back to bed and Daddy will come tell you a story." When she had gone he laid Ben down in some semblance of comfort. He thought about going to Canada. He had thought about it before. Things weren't much better up there, but in Canada and in the northwestern states like Washington and Oregon the underground was supposed to be strong. May had told him that, before the operation. They should have gotten out then, but when you've spent your whole life, as Ryan had, accepting and obeying, it was hard to give up everything and go. If he went now he would have to leave May. He couldn't take her -- the implant was part tracer and the police would have them back as soon as they were missed. He went back into the bedroom. "Darling? Has Ben gone?" "Yeah." "I didn't hear his car. I yas listening for it." "You should be asleep." "I know. Is Annie still up?" "Yes, she came out and saw Ben." "Oh. I heard her -- I didn't hear any other voices -- I don't know, I thought she was playing with the phone. I must have been dozing. " "Of course you were. Go back to sleep. The sooner you do, the sooner it will be morning." She laughed. "Like Christmas. If I wait for Santa, he'll never come. Ryan..." He went to her, bent over, and kissed her. His hand went behind her neck and pressed, and her lips fell slack and asleep beneath his. He went into Annie's room and helped her to dress, telling her that they were going for a ride. "But it's late." "Not for grown-up people. And you're not asleep, anyway. You like to go for rides." "Yes," she said doubtfully. "Will Mommy come?" "No. Mommy's sleeping." "Like Doctor Ben?" He looked down at her sharply. "You turned him off, didn't you?" "What do you mean?" "You turned off Doctor Ben." "What do you know about things like that? Where did you hear it?" "I just know." Her eyes grew vague. She looked away. "Can I bring Raggedy Ann?" Ryan picked up the doll from the bedside table, where it slumped against the pink Princess telephone. The streets were eerily empty. Didn't people go out anymore? Ryan turned on the radio in the car and settled into driving. "The President spoke to the nation this afternoon, expressing his gratitude to the people of the United States for making such a drastic drop in the crime rate possible. Reminding his listeners that 'Eternal Vigilance is the price of freedom,' Mr. -- " Ryan punched the key for another station and got some bouncy, innocuous music. "We learned that in school, " Annie said suddenly. "What?" "Eternal vigilance." "Annie, you don't go to school." "Ballet school. I do so." "You learned that in ballet school?" "Miss Fontaine tells us lots of things." "Not always about ballet, I take it." He had convinced May that ballet lessons would be more useful to Annie than nursery school. There were no more safe places. "You shouldn't have," she said. "What?" She was as uncanny as her mother about reaching into his thoughts. "Done what you did to Doctor Ben. That's against the law. And the things you said to him. They were wrong, too." How long were you spying on us?" Fat, ugly spiders were crawling up his spine. His sweat made him cold. He looked at her. She was leaning away from him, her face close to the window, fogging it with her breath and tracing lines with one finger. "Answer me!" Her left hand crept to her mouth at the sharpness in his voice. "It was against the law," she whispered. "Annie -- " With an effort he gentled his voice, returned most of his attention to the road. They were on the freeway now, heading out of town, and there was some traffic. "Annie, you know your Daddy wouldn't do anything wrong. Sometimes the laws are wrong, and people must change them." "People change laws by voting. People who break laws are sick and they must be helped." The words were not hers; her voice was virtuous and intent. "Does Miss Fontaine tell you that, too?" "Nuh-uh. That's Sargent Dare." "Who's Sargent Dare?" "You know. On TV." "The TV doesn't always tell you the truth, punkin. Life isn't that simple. The 'TV is wrong sometimes, but what your parents tell you -- " "Tell me a story. You said you would. Tell me the one about the changeling. " "I don't know that one." "Yes you do. About how the fairies come and steal away the human baby and put a fairy child in its place -- yes you do know it. Tell me." "Not while I'm driving, sweetheart." Glancing down at her he saw that she was near tears. She should have been asleep long ago, poor kid. "Look, why don't you climb over into the back seat and lie down and go to sleep. "Story first." "Youll have to give me time to think of one, then." "Okay." But all he could think of was May, how she had been before, and the way they had changed her. Annie began to speak then, and he pulled himself out of bitterness to listen. "On Sargent Dare there was this show where this boy's parents were very bad people. " She was speaking to her Raggedy Ann doll, Ryan saw. She used that ploy often, dragging the doll into a room where her parents were occupied, and talking to it, meaning for them to hear as well. "They weren't really bad people, but they were sick. They had bad thoughts and so they broke the law. They broke the law a whole lot, but nobody knew about it except their little boy. Then he learned in school about the law and so he called the police and told them. He remembered the number. "But don't worry. Raggedy, they didn't put his parents in jail. The police are our friends. They help us. They took his parents and did a little operation and made them happy. They came home and they smiled and they never broke the law again and they gave the little boy presents. And they all lived happily ever after. " There 'vas a road block up ahead. A routine police check. One of the measures that wds ridding the country of crime. Ryan had been through a dozen of them at least. He slowed the car, his throat tight. He felt Annie sliding closer to him on the seat. She put her. hand on his arm. "We'll live happily?" she asked. "Happily ever after? "  Lester del Rey Quite a while ago some idiot came up with the idea that science fiction is a ghetto. That ideas has now become a clieche that far too many accept. Some indeed seem to have accepted it so well that they have developed fears of pogroms to come and so have hastened to convert to the True Faith of the infallible mainstream. Or perhaps they have only become maranos. All of which shows that science-fiction's Chosen People should never trust the goyim. Two articles by writers from our field whom I always respect and often admire demonstrate how widespread the idea of a science fiction ghetto has become. Games Gunn began a guest editorial in Analog with that cliche; and Ursula K. LeQuin quickly got to it in her article for For those who know little of Jewish history, pogroms were reigns of terror against the people of the ghetto; maranos were those who claimed to convert, but secretly retained their previous faith; and goyim singular, goy) were the Nazarines outside the ghetto. the December Forum in Galaxy. Now Cliches are tricky things to use, even though I don't necessarily object to such harmless ones as "cold as ice." But they should always be re-examined by those who use them. Some, like "good a gold", are neither true nor harmless; gold is not good as a general investment in today's market -- but those who automatically associate good with gold are flocking to lose their money on this unstable commodity. Cliches have a bad habit of being used as axioms -- like the concept that the President is better than other men. There are a lot of people who still believe that, despite recent evidence to the contrary. All right, let's examine just what a ghetto is. There's a good deal of argument about the origin of the word among dictionary authorities; but it's fairly obviously an Italian form (or respelling) of the Hebrew word g-f. (Hebrew uses a stem of consonants in which the vowels move around or change for shades of meaning.) A git was the paper a man of Old Testament days used to divorce -- or put away -- his wife. A ghetto is a place where Jews were put away. They were forced to live there, away from contact with true believers, and forbidden to be outside the ghetto after sundown. They were put away, and they had no option but to stay there. A voluntary ghetto is a meaningless noise. Now just who put the writers, fans and general readers of science fictionaway? Who forbade them to associate freely with other readers and writers at any time? In what way were they banned, proscribed, segregated, cast out or put away? I can't remember ever being kept from any kind of books or from libraries because I read science fiction. Nobody ever told me that I shouldn't read the old avant garde Story magazine -- or the books by Cervantes, Hugo, Kafka, or even Joyce and Pound. My college literature professor didn't frown when I brought Astounding Stories into class; in fact, it was he who told me about the Balmer and Wylie serial in Bluebook. And nobody else I've met among a rather large acquaintanceship of writers and fans seemed to have been kept from reading outside the field of science fiction either. In fact, I find that the readers of science fiction are often far better read than most other people I meet -- including many of the college teachers I have known. It's true that I was sometimes asked why I read "that trash." Curiously, the ones who asked were rarely among the people who read much better literature of any sort; the askers usually did so while buying their daily tabloid or their sports, detective or western fiction. (Incidentally, I also read a lot of those pulps; there was no discrimination about selling them to s-f readers.) How about a ghetto for science fiction writers, though? Sorry, I never discovered that there was one. I wrote science fiction -- and still do -- more than other types of stories simply because I liked writing it more. But the ability to write isn't really divisible by categories, as all good editors know, whatever the self-termed critics may feel. I have usually reserved my real name for science fiction, but "Lester del Rey" was typed clearly on the first page of every manuscript regardless of byline -- to make sure the check would come to me. So, whatever pen-name I used, my identity was never secret. Nobody rejected me because I wrote science fiction. Examples: some time during World War II I happened to think of an idea for a slick story about a romance between two older people. I sent it off and got a check for it. I hadn't written a letter of self-introduction to the editor, but he enclosed a note to me with the check, asking whether I was the same del Rey who wrote science fiction? Apparently he was a fan. Much later, I sent a two-page outline for a historical adventure book to a major publisher for whom I'd never written. When they queried my agent about my writing experience, he simply cited some science fiction books. The editor didn't read that type of literature -- but she accepted my work in it as sufficient proof that I could write; as a result, I got a contract without the need of sample chapters. Rather than a cause for being put away, my experience in the field has been a means of being accepted generally as a writer. I've written damned near every type there is (except for the long defunct love-pulp type), both fiction and non-fiction, and I've never found any editor who wanted to put me in a ghetto. Even academic circles have never seemed desirous of excluding science fiction writers. Quite a few from our ranks have been sought for and welcomed into the world of academe -- with Philip example. Certainly I was never excluded. More than twenty years ago, I lectured and taught quite often at various college and other writing workshops. And even when I was teaching mystery stories or general marketing, considerable emphasis was placed on the fact that I was a well-known science fiction author. Of course, superficial study might indicate that the science fiction magazines were a sort of restricted group. They were usually clumped together in the stands. Rut things weren't that simple, even there. Back in the days before # -- when there were a lot of fiction magazines -- many of the general pulps featured science fiction. So did some of the slicks. And when I was first reading, I found much of the best science fiction in the pages of American Boy, Saturday Evening Post and Harper's, to name only three. Nope, no real discrimination there. In fact, there never was any kind of a ghetto for science fiction. There were specialized magazines for it -- but in those days, there were specialized magazines for almost every interest. And many of the writers and readers tended to join together to promote their interest in the field. But if getting together sometimes in somewhat exclusive groups created a ghetto, then the finest example of a ghetto I know is the typical exclusive country club! I've belabored the point about our "ghetto " because I think the term must be proved wrong. Too many people who are setting themselves up to criticize and guide us have been using it. I think it's time we took a good look at them with a clear understanding of how easily they fall into error. And when anyone sets himself (or herself) up to examine our field critically -- and then begins with a false major assumption about that field -- we can damned well be suspicious of every other assumption! What kind of critic accepts a false cliche as a working datum about the subject being criticised? I'm not opposed to criticism, in its fullest sense. For years, from a number of public platforms. I've been lamenting the dearth of good criticism. I'd like to see someone do for science fiction what C. S. Lewis did for the medieval romance -- or for literature in general in his Experiment in Criticism. I'd like to see someone like Exra Pound use his critical scalpel on us. It would be good for us -- and maybe I'd enjoy reading that criticism as much as I enjoyed the critical works of Lewis and Pound. But I don't want criticism of our works or our attitudes that is based upon adjurations to open our minds to the truth -- and is itself filled with the hoariest of bad critical judgment as to what we are. I agree completely with James Gunn when he says: "If science fiction has any vitality, criticism won't kill it...so long as the writers do not accept the critics as final arbiters. " In fact, I don't think the cant of criticism (as Sterne put it in Tristram Shandy more than two centuries ago), though it be most tormenting, can ever kill science fiction; that was proved by its resistance to the gibes of the critics during its first thirty years. But unfortunately, too many writers are beginning to write for the approval of the critics, rather than for themselves or their readers. Public reaction to a book is diffuse and slow to discover; but the words of the critic are direct and often quick. It's a temptation to write for those words, and try to make them pleasant ones. And even sadder, some of the publishers and editors on the book field seem to accept the critics as in some measure arbiters of what science should be. Criticism can't kill the field -- but it can distort it, at least for a time, if it is misinformed or selfserving. I agree that we need "literary feedback, criticism from sophisticated critics. " We need critics who are thoroughly conversant with the great body of literature of all kinds and who are also conversant with the body of science fiction. The finest critic of wine may be a lousy critic of beer -- or vice versa; a man who is steeped in the great classics may likewise be a lousy critic of science fiction without long familiarity with it -- because the ways in which it does not conform will irritate his sensibilities so much that he may well not see the virtues that are unique to it. But I cannot agree that we are about to get valuable criticism from the teachers whom Gunn seems to equate with critics. He says they tend to be enthusiastic, open, experimental. (Having talked to a lot of them. I'm not quite that enthusiastic, but let it go.) But are they knowledgable, capable of taste and judgment, aware of all the different types of science fiction, capable of assessing each according to its purpose? Most of them are not. Gunn admits that many do not know enough. But he passes that over by the comment that "every new discipline begins with no qualified teachers." That simply isn't so, unless by qualified he means qualified as a teacher by some university. In the first place, science fiction isn't a new discipline -- it's almost fifty years old as a category -- and older still if you count the many true science fiction stories published before the first category magazine. In the second place, almost every new discipline begins with the best possible teachers: the first ones to teach a discipline are the men and women who have discovered it; they teach others, who then teach the engineers who must make it work -- who then set up the first regular teaching courses. Of course some of the teachers who give the courses in science fiction are qualified by long experience with the field. I saw the list of books and outline of the course given by Professor Low at his approach was excellent in every way. There are a few other cases, including men who have not only read but written sf for years. (Gunn is a fine example.) But I ve also been approached for help by teachers who obviously know little about the field -- which wouldn't necessarily be bad if sively and learn, but is bad because they usually feel that the field really requires no study of one who has taught "serious" literature. I've seen lopsided lists of books of every kind. A few years ago, I went to lecture at a workshop conducted by a local college. The teacher did know something of science fiction, but didn't seem to care much for it. He grew increasingly unhappy as I answered a question from one student about the structure of a story that would sell to a magazine. When I finally used the nasty word plot, he could stand it no longer. "Oh," he broke in, "you're talking about what we call good story!" He sniffed in contempt. "We don't teach that here." Later, I had a chance to read a book he'd written. I could see why he didn't teach such things as plotting, structure, consistency, or sound motivation. He didn't understand them, hence had to hold them in contempt. His choice of reading material also showed that. He's still teaching science fiction courses. I've also had the opportunity to read a fair number of articles and books on science fiction done by those who are teaching science fiction or hope to teach it. Most of the so-called criticism consists of trying to impose some far-fetched theory onto science fiction, trying to force it into some more familiar mold, or simple attempts at sticking some label or other onto it to replace "science fiction". Most of it is ignorant and misleading. In fact, one of the few bright spots was L. David Allen's Cliff Notes, which Cunn mentions. That was a good guide to the teaching of science fiction courses; but it was not (and wasn't intended to be) a work of criticism of the type science fiction needs. Leaving the need for critics aside for the moment. I'd like to see a far better job of teaching science fiction than I've usually observed. The average course among the better ones I know about seems to take the historical approach -- start with older books and work forward. That might be all right for a true study course, but most of these courses are supposedly designed with less ambitious goals; Cunn rightly seems to value them fiar their ability to arouse interest in the field. A majority of the students in most classes probably haven't read a great deal of science fiction. (Some have, and are taking it as a "snap" course. But they probably know more than the average teacher, anyhow.) The problem is to lead them to open their minds to this somewhat different literature. And for that purpose, the sensible program, it seems to me, would be to start the course with fairly simple but good stories, such as Heinlein's so-called juveniles, among which I'd recommend Tunnel in the Sky or Start Beast, or Clarke's Sands of Mars-, then move up through van Vogt's Sian-, and finally they can try reading Herbert's Dune, and so on. Also, the emphasis should be on reading, rather than studying. Maybe the works of Tolstoy, Kafka and Joyce need to be studied; I wouldn't know, since I prefer reading to studying it -- certainly when I first read it. And certainly most science fiction was meant to be read rather than studied; even in most of the better works the story is the thing because it was meant to be. Students get into the habit of underlining passages, pondering over some "significant" phrase, etc. That only gets in the way of reading most science fiction. Save it for Hesse and Gibran. When I was teaching a course in modern fantasy, I began with the announcement that I wanted no such nonsense, and that I'd downgrade anyone whose books were marked up. I also advised against taking notes in class. There were some heavy frowns from the class. But I think it paid off. At the end of the course, several students commented on being surprised at how much fun they'd had and at how many books they'd read. "You know, you were right," one young man told me. 'Reading doesn't have to be work. It's even better than television sometimes." I wish the teachers -- or most of them -- would make the same discovery. As a writer (in or out of any ghetto), I can ask nothing more than to be read for pleasure. I don't want to be studied. I once was introduced to an audience by a professor who had analyzed a fair number of my stories. He spent forty minutes telling the audience why and how I had done what I did. Then he left and I had the pleasure of spending another forty minutes explaining why almost every bit of his his careful analysis was totally wrong. However, I tried to be reasonably tactful; after all, my stories were in good company. He was wrong about the Bible, too. There is no Book of Exultations. I made that up (at the top of the last chapter of "For I Am a Jealous People ") as a hint to the reader that mankind had won the war against God. But maybe all this just goes to prove Gunn's point that we're suspicious of overtures from outside the field. I must admit that I'm very suspicious sometimes. Especially when those overtures include requests that I immediately sit down and supply the basic knowledge that will go into somebody's thesis; or when said overtures consist of invitations for me to come to some affair put on by academe and donate my services, thus assuring some measure of success for the work the overturer is being paid to do. I like a certain amount of brass in certain overtures but not that much, I'm afraid. And I am suspicious of overtures from inside the field -- to academe, perchance -- when they contain bias and error against the field. I'm also in accord with Ms. LeGuin's rules that say science fiction must have intellectual coherence and scientific plausibility, as well as scientific competence. In fact. I'm in agreement with all the hundreds -- including myself -- who've repeatedly said that. But when she starts talking about the fiction of the "Golden Age," I'd like to find more historical coherence and plausibility. She says we know what sf was like in the Golden Age of Science Fiction. To wit, the young girl coos questions about the gadget. And Prof. Higgins "explains how it works for about six pages." Then enter the dauntless Star Captain, etc. Sorry, Ms. LeGuin, I don't know it was like that in the Golden Age of Science Fiction -- which ran more or less from # to ,#. No, I can't remember it that way at all; I was reading it and writing it then, but I just don't remember it that way! The scene described did happen, more or less, in science fiction magazines; but it came from the birthing days of our literature. It was pretty well weeded out by #, and getting rare even before. Our writers had to learn how to handle fiction where new technology and new societies were in need of explaining in each story; but they caught on pretty fast, or the editors were rejecting all their stories by the beginning of the Golden Age. Oh, there were some magazines where such . schlock was published -- but they certainly weren't the leading ones, by any means, nor were they the favorites of those most "ghetto-ized" among the readers. I wonder just what Ms. LeGuin was reading back in those days? Surely not the works of Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, Simak, de Camp, or even myself, to name a few. She also admits that "recent American sf has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, over-population, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on. " Recent? I can recall stories dealing with every one of those things going back to the early thirties -- and some before that. Science fiction quickly got over its anthropocentrism and stopped confusing form with degree of cirtue long ago. Indeed, one of its major values was spreading the doctrine that the "bad guys ' didn't have to look different nor the "good dyas" look like us but that ever' race and kind could be either bad or good, and that this depended on its goals and motivations, not its form. Heinlein and I were writing science fiction for school libraries in which we had all colors and races -- yes, and people who happened to be female -- put in space long before Ms. LeGuin started writing. And we did it without making a big thing of it, but as something to be taken very much for granted. Too much of recent science fiction has done it in a way that indicates thewriters are trying to be noticed for the "relevance", but that's not the way to get the best results. D now for escapism. I agree that the big question is sometimes whether you're escaping to values or from them. Good literature deals in values and the human condition, whatever the stage on which it's played. But I'd like to suggest that the poorest literature for escapism is science fiction. If ybu want simple escape, try the average western novel with its simplified code of values -- or the sports story, where winning is the only value -- or the detective tale, where all too often good is "us" and evil is "them" and nothing we do to them, no matter how ugly, is bad. Or try some of the regular books, where all human value is rejected, and a fool who does nothing and learns nothing except perhaps to have a few affairs and gorge on self-pity is considered worthy of # pages or more. Science fiction, which demands that the reader enter and accept many new ways of looking at the world, is perhaps the least escapist of all literature. Sure, it isn't for real -- but neither is Faulkner nor Heller. If you want reality -- at least one side of it -- try Gorki. Anyhow, what's wrong with escape literature, however you define it? Despite the mouthings of the crypto-Marxists (it is a purely Marxist doctrine that all art must serve other functions than "mere " art -- this is an idea foreign to all previous concepts of artistic merit.) not everything in life has to have a Purpose and carry a banner inscribed with "I Serve!" There are lots of escapist activities that enjoy high repute, such as collecting coins, or playing chess. (Don't get me wrong; I think chess is a marvelously intellectual game -- but it isn't of any more value to anyone or anything than is watching football, another bit of escapism.) In fact that ancient "escapist" label is just another convenient cliche, one probably tossed (and properly so) at Rabelais and (even more properly, since he was trying to escape from his real impotence to punishing his enemies by make-believe) against Dante. It's like another label used much too carelessly; pulp. Pulp fiction is not necessarily bad nor. necessarily good. Most of Conrad, Kipling, and I don't know how many other writers was published first in the pulp magazines here. Somehow, practically all of the "slick" fiction and most of the "quality" fiction of the same period is no longer read, and for good reason. Maybe if more people would read C. S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism, they'd stop falling back on such trite devices. He took a careful look at what and why people read. If Ms. LeGuin is not familiar with the book, she should be. It's one of the lovely jewels that sometimes comes from academe. Ah, yes. There have to be some respectable writers, all from a list Ms. LeGuin points out as not being American. Curiously, I find Eddison missing from the list, so let me add him to Wells, Orwell (who wrote dystopias, not science fiction), Huxley (mostly ditto), Capek and Stapledon. (I refuse to add Zamyatin to the list.) I might point out that most of them were printed in the early science fiction magazines and somehow found their way into our ghetto world. But that doesn't matter. It's a good list. It supports the proper critical view that American literature doesn't amount to much, and that any really cultured view must be gained from European works. The trouble is that these are works basically written outside the field of science fiction, deliberately meant to fit into the broad stream of European literature. I would never point to them to prove that science fiction, per se, isn't escapist. They have 'nothing to do with any criticism of what writers should be doing now in the field. Maybe we should write more like those books -- but if we did, we'd have very small chance of getting our works published. Those books were written before the field was mined completely, and a writer can't go back to the beginnings after the beginnings are gone. Nevertheless, there are some American books that I might point to as being far from merely escapist. There is Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia, which dealt with many of the burning issues on the campuses today -- but dealt with them early in the century. (It's at least as legitimately science fiction as Orwell or Huxley.) And there is Frank Herbert's Dune, dealing not merely with ecology but far more with a philosophy of man and progress. And there is indeed Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, which I consider a unique study of the nature of human love, worthy to stand beside any European literature, but beholden to itself alone. Let's not fall into the popular cliche among intellectuals that everything American is trash. Of course, the guardians and acolytes of academe tend naturally to a conservative outlook in the humanities, which makes them suspicious of newer works and newer ways. This is quite proper for the needs of academe, and I respect them for it within their proper area. They must conserve the best of human achievements and attempt to instil a respect for and understanding of such works in their students, who tend to be impatient with anything not current. The very nature of their work demands a somewhat conservative outlook. And similarly conservatived limits are demanded of those who evaluate and determine the best current work. There is no sure guide to enduring value except time and hindsight; the success of those who have tried to make quick decisions on values has been woefully bad. Too many of the "great" works of one generation prove valueless to another. And too many of the relatively unnoticed works come to be appreciated properly only after many years have passed. But that very conservativism must make the critics who serve in such institutions highly suspect when they attempt to evaluate or guide in something as new and multiform as science fiction. Both the articles under discussion seem to take it for granted that the criticism we will have from the world of academe will enable us to improve science fiction. But will they? What is their track record? They have been busy improving the novels of the mainstream for quite a few years; they were already at work on that, though less obviously, when I began reading criticism forty years ago. Lately, they've captured a fair amount of space in the largest-circulation review magazine, as well as in the more learned critical forums. Has the mainstream' improved that much? Not by what I hear from academe! I keep hearing that the novel is either a dead or dying form. Could it be that all their improvements have simply turned a healthy creation into a moribund one, even in their own judgment? If that's the improvement we can expect from them then I, for one, want no part in it. If superior fiction is based only upon the essential tragedy of Man, then let me write trash in which I can sometimes indulge in the idea that being a man is so much better than being nonexistent or ameboid that I call it a triumph. If the use of a fairly simple style to describe the complexity of other worlds and times is the sign of my pulp background, then so be it; J have no intention of developing the elaborated, tortuous, impressionistic or "experimental" style that may be necessary to perk up the threadbare nature of most mainstream ideas. (I'm not convinced it helps, even there.) And if trying to develop tight and explicit plots makes me a hack, then I'll get by with my royalties and leave the plaudits of the critics to those who find them necessary. That doesn't mean my mind is completely closed. But it isn't wide open to the overtures of anyone outside the field -- or to most of those within it, for that matter. No I'll stick with what I know of the universe -- which is a long ways from being wide open in all ways. There are quite a few rather rigid limits on that universe, without which it wouldn't work. There is that pesky limitation on velocity which seems to make a faster-than-light drive impossible, and even a near-light drive incredibly demanding on energy source?. Maybe that will be bypassed some day; let's hope so. But there remain several conservation laws (mass-energy, momentum, angular momentum, and more) which set limits on us. And just maybe thermodynamics and other rules indicate the whole universe is running down -- that it will be all closed eventually, despite Ms. LeGuin's faith. I intend to be a bit skeptical still as to the blandishments of new scientific or literary theories. Science fiction has evolved pretty much by itself for nearly fifty years. During that time, it has grown and developed'. Now, at a time when most literature is in decline -- despite the nostrums of its bedside critics -- science fiction is healthily capturing more and more readers. Perhaps there is something to be said for a field that can establish and maintain its own values. During almost forty years. I've spent a lot of time outside the "ghetto" reading works of every description, including a fair amount of criticism. I've tried as best I can to improve my techniques of writing, in science fiction and far outside it. I've always been grateful for the help some eo criticism has given. But I'm suspicious enough to open my mind only when I find that the critic knows his field (mine, if it's science fiction he's criticizing) at least as well as I do and that he know something beyond the limits of his field. And I insist on my right to stick to the style and ideas I want to write and like to read. Thus I refuse to take Gunn's final advice seriously. I've heard for decades that writers must broaden the appeal of science fiction. Experience teaches me that this is another of those cliches that is false. I don't really believe in the lowest common denominator appeal for science fiction. I've seen the results of broadening the appeal of television from the early, experimental and sometimes marvelous beginnings. I prefer to write for those with sufficient flexibility and intellect to be able to grasp science fiction as it is, and to appreciate it at its best and most demanding. Until the self-termed critics can do as much and can come up with more than cliches (half of them untrue). I'll remain an unregenerate writer and reader of science fiction. Until then --  Amber, Caine was dead. Murtain an extra weapon and for dered. I was the logical suspect, purposes of being seen sporting and I had already slain the real one of the traditional adornments killer -- a creature of a sort Ranof the monarch of Amber, dom told me he had first met Gerard accompanied me to the while attempting to rescue our Grove of the Unicom, where we missing brother. Brand, from the recovered Caine's body and actushadow where he was imprisally caught a glimpse of the unoned. A party of such creatures icom itself. Also, enroute, Gerard had pursued Random through had halted our journey long Shadow to the world where I had enough to beat the hell out of dwelled in less than blissful me, as a general cautionary forgetfulness. notice, should I happen to be the We deduced that the real autraitor we were looking for. He thor of all our ills was most likely also announced his intention of seemed possible, then, that to be the case. Brand had become aware of this My plan was basically quite fact. Should he still be alive, the simple. Since no one of us had obvious course of action, as I saw been able to reach Brand via his it, was to attempt to rescue him. Trump, it had occurred to me We could then simply ask him that all of us working together at who was behind it all. Simple. it might be able to get through to him. Voilal We tried. We succeeded. But one of us knifed Brand before he could tell us a thing. If nothing else, this confirmed the suspicion that it had to be one of us. Gerard took charge of the injured and expelled the rest of us from the room. We adjourned to other quarters and engaged in a fruitless session of guesswork, threats, promises and accusations. When we ran out of bad words we retired. Brand was still hanging on. Fiona had told me that overexposure to the Jewel of Judgment resulted in severe and possibly fatal stress on the wearer, a condition initially characterized by a distortion of one's time sense. This phenomenon did seem to be developing as I made my way to my quarters. I did not have a chance to explore my symptoms further because I was knifed on entering my bedroom. I came around lying on my old bed in my old house on the shadow Earth, the place where I had resided back when I had been Carl Corey. Crawling, I made it out of the house and into a snowstorm. As my time sense was still distorted, I buried the jewel in my old compost heap before heading down to the roadside. I finally managed to flag down a car, driven by one of my former neighbors -- my old friend Bill Roth. He took me to the same clinic where I had been taken years before, back when I had had my accident. The doctor who had been on duty in the emergency room that night was also present then and something about me, plus an unusually thorough medical records systems, brought it all back to him. Doubtful as to my rationality, he told me part of the story. Bill later filled in the rest. During those dark times in my memory there had been two other medical facilities, not one. I had been committed to a sanitarium in Albany on a bum order certifying I needed it. There, I had apparently received some shock therapy. Whatever its effects, I escaped two days later and was heading back in the general direction of my home when the accident occurred. From the fake names used as next of kin and attending physician in connection with my committment, as well as from the police report's description of my rescuer, it became apparent that it had been Brand who had been trying to restore my memory and Brand who had probably saved my life by getting me out of my car and over to the shore, by administering what aid he could while waiting for help to arrive. It was only later that I wound up in Greenwood. Now both of us lay punctured, and someone back in Amber must have been more than a little concerned that one or both of us might survive. As I lay contemplating these and other matters. Random contacted me via my Trump to tell me that Brand had regained consciousness and was asking for me. It was time to go outpatient once more, I knew. I had to get back immediately to find out which of my relatives was out to do the rest of us in -- and maybe even why and how. Such is the kingdom of Amber.   iht Iorwin! What the Hell -- " "If blood be the price of admiralty, I've just bout me a naval commission," I said. "Give me something to wear. " He draped a long, heavy cloak about my shoulders and I fumbled to clasp it at my throat. "All set, " I said. "Take me to him." He led me out the door, into the hall, toward the stair. I leaned on him heavily as we went. "How bad is it?" he asked me. "Knife," I said, and laid my hand on the spot. "Someone attacked me in my room last night. " "Who?" "Well, it couldn't have been you, because I had just left you," I said, "and Gerard was up in the library with Brand. Subtract the three of you from the rest and start guessing. That is the best -- " "Julian," he said. "His stock is definitely bearish," I said. "Fiona was just running him down for me last night, and of course it is no secret that he is not my favorite -- " "Corwin, he's gone. He cut out during the night. The servant who came to get me told me that Julian left an hour or. so after the rest of us turned in. What does that look like to you?" We reached the stair. I kept one hand on Random and the other on the banister. I called a halt at the first landing and rested there briefly. "I don't know," I said. "It can sometimes be just as bad to extend the benefit of the doubt too r as not to grant it at all. But it does occur to me that if he thought he had disposed of me, he would look a lot better by staying here and acting surprised to learn of it than by getting the hell out. That does look suspicious. I am inclined to think he might have departed because he was afraid of what Brand would have to say when he came around." "But you lived, Corwin. You got away from whoever attacked you, and he could not be certain he had done you in. If it were me, I would be worlds away by now." ' "There is that," I acknowledged, and we started on down again. "Yes, you might well be right. Let us leave it academic for now. And no one is to know I have been injured." He nodded. "As you say. Silence beats a chamber pot in Amber." "How's that? " "'Tis gilt, m'lord, like a royal flush." "Your wit pains both wounded and unwounded parts. Random. Spend some figuring how the assailant entered my room." "Your panel?" "It secures from the inside. I keep it that way now. And the door's lock is a new one. Tricky." "All right, I have it. My answer requires that it be a family member, too. " "Tell me. " himself up and tough it through the Pattern again Tor a shot at you. He went below, walked it, projected himself into your room and attacked you." "That would be perfect except for one thing. We all left at pretty much the same time. The attack did not occur later on in the evening. It happened immediately on my entering. There wasn't even sufficient time for one of us to get down to the chamber, let alone negotiate the Pattern. The attacker was already waiting. So if it was one of us, he had gotten in by some other means." "Then he picked your lock, tricks and all." "Possibly, " I said, as we reached the landing and continued on. "We will rest at the comer so that I can go on into the library unassisted. "Sure thing." We did that. I composed myself, drew the cloak completely about me, squared my shoulders, advanced and knocked on the door. "Just a minute" -- Gerard's voice. Footsteps approaching the door... "Who is it?" '"Corwin," I said. "Random's with me." I heard him call back, "You want Random, too?" and I heard a soft "No" in reply. The door opened. "Just you, Corwin," Gerard said. I nodded, turned to Random. "Later," I told him. He returned my nod and headed back in the direction from which we had come. I entered the library. "Open your cloak, Corwin," Gerard ordered. "That is not necessary, " Brand said, and I looked over and saw that he was propped up by a number of cushions and showing a yellow-toothed smile. "Sorry, I am not as trusting as Brand," Gerard said, "and I will not have my work wasted. Let's have a look. ' "I said that it is not necessary," Brand repeated. "He is not the one who stabbed me." Gerard turned quickly. "How do you know he isn't?" he asked. "Because I know who did, of course. Don't be an ass, Gerard. I wouldn't have asked for him if I had reason to fear him. " "You were unconscious when I brought you through. You couldn't know who did it." "Are you certain of that?" "Well... Why didn't you tell me, then?" "I have my reasons, and they are valid ones. I want to speak with Corwin alone now." Gerard lowered his head. "You had better not be delirious," he said. He stepped to the door, opened it again. "I'll be within hailing distance," he added, and closed it behind him. I moved nearer. Brand reached up and I clasped his hand. "Good to see that you made it back," he szid. "Vice-versa," I said, and then I took Gerard's chair, trying not to collapse into it. "How do you feel now?" I asked. "Rotten, in one sense. But better than I have in ears, in another. It's all relative. ' "Most thirtgs are." "Not Amber." I sighed. "All right. I wasn't getting technical. What the hell happened?" His gaze was most intense. He was studying me, looking for something. Mat? Knowledge, I'd guess. Or, more correctly, ignorance. Negatives being harder to gauge, his mind had to be moving fast, must have bene from the moment he had come around. Knowing him, he was more interested in what I did not know than in what I knew. He wasn't going to give away anything if he could help it. He wanted to know the minimum enlightenment he need shed in order to get what he wanted. Not a watt more would his way, and of course he wanted something. Unless... More strongly in recent years than ever before I have tried to convince myself that people do change, that the passage of time does not serve merely to accentuate that which is already there, that qualitative changes do sometimes occur in people because of things they have done, seen, thought and felt. It would provide some small solace intimes such as these when everything else seems to be going wrong, not to mention pepping up my mundane philoSophy no end. And Brand had probably been responsible for saving my life and my memory, whatever his reasons. Very well. I resolved to give him the doubt's benefit without exposing my back. A small concession here, my move against the simple psychology of humors which generally governs the openings of our games. "Things are never what they seem, Corwin," he began. "Your friend today is your enemy tomorrow, and -- " "Cut it out!" I said. "Cards on the table time is here. I do appreciate what Brandon Corey did for me, and it was my idea to try the trick we used to locate you and bring you back." He nodded. "I fancy there were good reasons for a recrudescence of fraternal sentiment after all this time." "I might suppose you had additional reasons for helping me, also. " He smiled again, raised his right hand and lowered it. "Then we are either even, or in one another's debt, depending upon how one looks at these things. As it would seem we now have need of one another, it would be well to regard ourselves in the most flattering light." "You are stalling, Brand. You are trying to psych me. You are also spoiling my day's effort at idealism. You got me out of bed to tell me something. Be my guest." "Same old Corwin," he said, chuckling. Then he looked away. "Or are you? I wonder... Did it change you, do you think? Living all that while in Shadow? Not knowing who you really were? Being a part of something else?" "Maybe," I said. "I don't know. Yes, I guess it did. I know that it shortened my temper when it comes to family politics." "Plain-speaking, blunt, plaindealing? You miss some of the fun that way. But then there is a value to such novelty. Keep everyone unbalanced with it... Revert when they least expect it... Yes, it might prove valuable. Refreshing, too. All right! Panic not. Thus end my preliminaries. All pleasantries are now exchanged. I'll bare the basics, bridle the beast Unreason and wrest from murky mystery the pearl of sweetest sense. But one thing first, if you would. Have you anything smokable with you? It has been a number of years, and I'd like some foul weed or other -- to celebrate my homecoming." I started to say no. But I was sure there were some cigarettes in the desk, left there by me. I did not really want the exercise, but, "Just a minute" I said. I tried to make my movements look casual rather than stiff as I rose and crossed the room. I attempted to make it seem as if I were resting my hand naturally upon the desktop as I rummaged throu it, rather than leaning as heavily as I was. I masked my movements with my body and my cloak as much as possible. I located the package and returned as I had come, stopping to light a pair at the hearth. Brand was slow in taking his from me. "Your hand is rather shaky," he said. "What is the matter?" "Too much partying last night," I said, returning to my chair. "I hadn't thought of that. I imagine there would have been, wouldn't there? Of course. Everyone together in one room... Unexpected success in finding me, bringing me back... A desperate move on the part of a very nervous, very guilty person... Half-success there. Me injured and mum, but for how long? Then -- " "You said that you knew who did it. Were you kidding?" "No, I was not." "Who then?" "In its place, dear brother. In its place. Sequence and order, time and stress -- they are most important in this matter. Allow me to savor the drama of the event in safe retrospect. I see me punctured and all of you gathered round. Ah! what would I not give to witness that tableau! Could you possibly describe for me the expression on each face?" "I'm afraid their faces were my least concern at the time." He sighed and blew smoke. "Ah, that is good," he said. "Never mind, I can see their faces. I've a vivid imagination, you know. ' Shock, distress, puzzlement -- shading over into suspicion, fear. Then all of you departed. I'm told, and gentle Gerard my nursemaid here." He paused, stared into the smoke, and for a moment the note of mockery was absent. "He is the only decent one among us, you know. " "He's high on my list," I said. "He took good care of me. He's always looked out for the rest of us..." He chuckled suddenly. "Frankly, I can't see why he bothers, I was musing, though -- prompted by your recuperating self -- you must have adjourned to talk things over. There is another party I m sad I missed. All those emotions and suspicions and lies bouncing off one another -- and no one wanting to be the first to say good night. It must have gotten shrill after a time. Everyone on his own best behavior, with an eye out to blacken the rest. Attempts to intimidate the one guilty person. Perhaps a few stones shied at scapegoats. But, all in all, nothing much really accomplished. Am I right?" I nodded, appreciative of the way his mind worked and resigned to his telling it his way. "You know you're right," I said. He gave me a sharp look at that, then went on, "But eveiyone did finally go off, to lie awake worrying, or to get together with an accomplice, to scheme. There were hidden turmoils in the night. It is flattering to know that my well-being was on everyone's mind. Some, of course, were for it, others against. And in the midst of it all, I rallied -- nay, flourished -- not wishing to disappoint my supporters. Gerard spent a long while bringing me up to date on recent history. When I had enough of this, I sent for you." "In case you haven't noticed. I'm here. What did you want to tell me?" "Patience, brother! Patience! Consider all the years you spent in Shadow, not even remembering -- this." He gestured widely with his cigarette. "Consider all that time you waited, unknowing, until I succeeded in locating you and tried to remedy your plight. Surely a few moments now are not so priceless by contrast." "I was told that you had sought me," I said. "I wondered at that, for we had not exactly parted on the best of terms the last time we were together." He nodded. "I cannot deny it," he said. "But I always et over such things, eventually. ' I snorted. "I have been deciding how much to tell you, and what you would believe," he continued. "I doubted you would accept it if I had simply come out and said that, save for a few small items, my present motives are almost entirely altruistic." I snorted again. ' -- But this is true," he went on, "and to lay your suspicions, I add that it is because I have small choice in it. Beginnings are always difificult. Wherever I begin, something preceded it. You were gone for so long. If one must name a single thing, however, then let it be the throne. -- There. I have said it. We had thought of a way to take it, you see. This was just after your disappearance, and in some ways, I suppose, prompted by it. Dad suspected Eric of having slain you. But there was no evidence. We worked on this feeling, though -- a word here and there, every now and then. Years passed, with you unreachable by any means, and it seemed more and more likely that you were indeed dead. Dad looked upon Eric with growing disfavor. Then, one night, pursuant to a discussion I had begun on a totally neutral matter -- most of us present at the table -- he said that no fratricide would ever take the throne, and he was looking at Eric as he said it. You know now his eyes could get. Eric grew bright as a sunset and could not swallow for a long while. But then Dad took things much further than any of us had anticipated or desired. In fairness to you, I do not know whether he spoke solely to vent his feelings, or whether he actually meant what he said. But he told us that he had more than half-decided upon you as his successor, so that he took whatever misadventure had befallen you quite personally. He would not have spoken of it, but that he was now convinced as to your passing. In the months that followed, we reared you a cenotaph to give some solid form to this conclusion, and we made certain that no one forgot Dad's feelings toward Eric. All along, after yourself, Eric was the one we felt had to be gotten around to reach the throne -- " "We! Who were the others?" "Patience, Corwin. Sequence and order, time and stress! Accent, emphasis... Listen." He took another cigarette, chain-lit it from the butt, stabbed the air with its burning tip. "The next step required that we get Dad out of Amber. This was the most crucial and dangerous part of it, and it was here that we disagreed. I did not like the idea of an alliance with a power I did not fully understand, especially one that gave them some hold on us. Using shadows is one thing; allowing them to use you is ill-considered, whatever the circumstances. I argued against it, but the majority had it otherwise." He smiled. "Two to one. Yes, there were three of us. We went ahead then. The trap was set and Dad went after the bait -- " "Is he still living?" I asked. "I do not know," Brand said. "Things went wrong afterwards, and then I'd troubles of my owii to concern me. After Dad's departure, though, our next move was to consolidate our position while waiting a respectable period of time for a presumption of death to seem warranted. Ideally, all that we required Wias the cooperation of one person. Either Caine or Julian -- it did not matter which. You see, Bleys had already gone off into Shadow and was in the process of putting together a large military force -- " "Bleys! He was one of you?" "Indeed. We intended him for the throne -- with sufficient strings on him, of course, so that it would have amounted to a de facto triumvirate. So, he went off to assemble troops, as I was saying. We hoped for a bloodless takeover, but we had to be ready in the event that words proved insufficient to win our case. If Julian gave us the land route in, or Caine the waves, we could have transported the troops with dispatch and held the day by force of arms, should that have proven necessary. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong man. In my estimate, Caine was Julian's superior in matters of corruption. So, with measured delicacy I sounded him on the matter. He things, at first. But he either reconsidered subsequently or deceived me quite skillfully from the beginning. Naturally, I prefer to befieve it was the former. Whatever, at some point he came to the conclusion that he stood to benefit more by supporting a rival claimant. To wit, Eric. Now Eric's hopes had been somewhat dashed by Dad's attitude toward him -- but Dad was gone, and our intended move gave Eric the chance to act as defender of the throne. Unfortunately for us, such a position would also put him but a step away from the throne itself. To make matters darker, Julian went along with Caine in pledging the loyalty of his troops to Eric, as defender. Thus was the other trio formed. So Eric took a public oath to defend the throne, and the lines were thereby drawn. I was naturally in a somewhat embarassing position at this time. I bore the brunt of their animosity, as they did not know who my fellows were. Yet they coula not imprison or torture me, for I would immediately be trumped out of their hands. And if they were to kill me, they realized there might well be a reprisal by parties unknown. So it had to stand as a stalemate for a time. They also saw that I could no longer move directly against them. They kept me under heavy surveillance. So a more devious route was charted. Again I disagreed and again I lost, two to one. We were to employ the same forces we had called upon to deal with Dad, this time for purposes of discrediting Eric. If the job of defending Amber, so confidently assumed, were to prove too much for him and Bleys then came onto the scene and handled the situation with dispatch, why Bleys would even have popular support as he moved on to assume the role of defender himself and -- after a fit period of time -- suffered the thrusting or sovereignty upon him, for the good of Amber. ' "Question," I interrupted. "What about Benedict? I know he was off being discontent in his Avalon, but if something really threatened Amber -- " "Yes, " he said, nodding, "and for that reason, a part of our deal was to involve Benedict with a number of problems of his own. " I thought of the harassment of Benedict's Avalon by tbe hellmaids. I thought of the stump of his right arm. I opened my mouth to speak again, but Brand raised his hand. "Let me finish in my own fashion', Corwin. I am hot unmindful of your thought processes as you speak. I feel the pain in your side, twin to my own. Yes, I know these things and many more." His eyes burned strangely as he took another cigarette into his hand and it lit of its own accord. He drew heavily upon it and spoke as he exhaled, "I broke with the others over this decision. I saw it as involving too great a peril, as placing Amber herself in jeopardy. Broke with them..." He watched the smoke for several moments before he continued, "But things were too far advanced that I might simply walk away. I had to oppose them, in order to defend myself as well as Amber. It was too late to swing over to Eric's side. He would not have protected me if he could have -- and besides, I was certain he was going to lose. It was then that I decided to employ certain new abilities I had acquired. "I had often wondered at the strange relationship between Eric and Flora, off on that shadow Earth she pretended so to enjoy. I had had a slight suspicion that there was something about that place which concerned him, and that she might be his agent there. While I could not get close enough to him to achieve any satisfaction on this count, I felt confident that it would not take too much in the way of investigation, direct and otherwise, to learn what Flora was about. And so I did. Then suddenly the pace accelerated. My own party was concerned as to my whereabouts. Then when I picked you up and shocked back a few memories, Eric learned from Flora that something was suddenly quite amiss. Consequently, both sides were soon looking for me. I had decided that your return would throw everyone's plans out the window and get me out of the pocket I was in long enough to come up with an alternative to the way things were going. Eric's claim would be clouded once again, you would have had supporters of your own, my party would have lost the pupose for its entire maneuver and I had assumed you would not be ungrateful to me for my part in things. Then you went ana escaped from Porter, and things really got complicated. All of us were looking for you, as I later learned, for different reasons. "But my former associates had something very extra going for them. They learned what was happening, located you and got there first. Obviously, there was a very simple way to preserve the status quo, where they would continue to hold the edge. Bleys fired the shots that put you and your car into the lake. I arrived just as this was occurring. He departed almost immediately, for it looked as if he had done a thorough job. I dragged you out though, and there was enough left to start treating. It was frustrating now that I think back on it, not knowing whether the treatment had really been effective, whether you would awaken as Corwin or Corey. It was frustrating afterwards, also, still not knowing... I hellrode out when help arrived. My associates caught up with me somewhat later and put me where you found me. Do you know the rest of the story?" "Not all of it. " "Then stop me whenever we've caught up on this. I only obtained it later, myself. Eric's crowd learned of the accident, got your location and had you transferred to a private place, where you could be better protected, and kept you heavily sedated, so that they could be protected." "Why should Eric protect me, especially if my presence was going to wreck his plans?" "By then, seven of us knew you were still living. That was too many. It was simply too late to do what he would probably have liked to do. He was still trying to live down Dad's words. If anything had happened to you once ou were in nis power, it would ave blocked his movement to the throne. If Benedict ever got word of it, or Gerard... No, ne'd not have made it. Afterwards, yes. Before, no. What happened was that general knowledge of the fact of your existence forced his hand. He scheduled his coronation and resolved to keep you out of the way until it had occurred. An extremely premature bit of business, not that I see he had much of a choice. I guess you know what happened after that, since it happened to you. " 'I fell in with Bleys, just as he was making his move. Not too fortunate." Brand shrugged. "Oh, it might have been -- if you had won, and if you had been able to do something about Bleys. You hadn't a chance though, not really. My grasp of their motivations begins to dissolve at this point, but I believe that that entire assault really constituted some sort of feint." "Why?" "As I said, I do not know. But they already had Eric just about where they wanted him. It should not have been necessary to call that attack." I shook my head. Too much, too fast... Many of the facts sounded true, once I subtracted the narrator's bias. But still... "I don't know..." I began. "Of course," he said. "But if you ask me I will tell you." "Who was the third member of your group?" 'The same person who stabbed me, of course. Would you care to venture a guess?" "Just tell me." "Fiona. The whole thing was her idea." "Why didn't you tell me that right away? " "Because you would not have sat still long enough to hear the rest of what I had to say. You would have dashed off to put her under restraint, discovered that she was gone, roused all the others, started an investigation and wasted a lot of valuable time. You still may, but it at least provided me with your attention for a sufficient time for me to convince you that I know what I am about. Now, when I tell you that time is essential and that you must hear the rest of what I have to say as soon as possible -- if Amber is to have any chance at all -- you might listen rather than chase a crazy lady. " I had already half-risen. "I shouldn't go after her?" I said. "The hell with her, for now. You've got bigger problems. You had better sit down again. So I did. X hostly torchlight, like fires in lack-and-white films... Stars... A few fine filaments of mist... I leaned upon the rail, I looked across the world... Utter silence held the night, the dreamdrenched city, the entire universe from here... Distant things -- the sea. Amber, Arden, Garnath, the Lighthouse of Cabra, the Grove of the Unicorn, my tomb atop Kovir... Silent, far below, yet clear, distinct... A god's eye view. I'd say, or that of a soul cut loose and drifting high... In the middle of the nit... I had come to the place where the ghosts play at being ghosts, where the omens, portents, signs and animate desires thread me nightly avenues and palace high halls of Amber in the sky, Tir-na nog'th... Turning, my back to the rail and dayworld's vestiges below, I regarded the avenues and dark terraces, the halls of the lords, the quarters of the low... The moonlight is intense in Tir-na Nog'th, silvers over the facing sides of all our imaged places... Stick in hand, I passed forward, and the strangelings moved about me, appeared at windows, on balconies, on benches, at gates... Unseen I passed, for truly put, in this place I was the ghost to whatever their substance...Silence and silver... Only the tapping of my stick, and that mostly muted... More mists adrift toward the heart of things... The palace a white bonfire of it... Dew, like drops of mercuiy on the finely sanded petals and stems in the gardens by the walks... The passing moon as painful to the eye as the sun at midday, the stars outshone, dimmed by it... Silver and silence... The shine... I had not planned on coming, for its omens -- if that they truly be -- are deceitful, its similarities to the lives and places below unsettling, its spectacle often disconcerting... Still, I had come... A part of my bargain with time... After I had left Brand to continue his recovery in the keeping of Gerard, I had realized that I required additional rest myself and sought to obtain it without betraying my disability. Fiona was indeed flown, and neither she nor Julian could be reached by means of the Trumps. Had I told Benedict and Gerard what Brand had told me, I was certain they would have insisted we begin efforts at tracking her down, at tracking both of them. I was equally certain that such efforts would prove useless. I had sent for Random and Ganelon and retired to my quarters, giving out that I intended to pass the day in rest and quiet thought in anticipation of spending the night in Tir-na Nog'th -- reasonable behavior for any Amberite with a serious problem. I did not put much stock in the practice, but most of the others did. As it was the perfect time for me to be about such a thing, I felt that it would make my day's retirement believable, of course, this obliged me to follow through on it that night. But this too, was good. It gave me a day, a night and part of the following day in which to heal sufficiently to carry my wound that much the better. I felt that it would be time well spent. You've got to tell someone, though. I told Random and I told Ganelon. Propped in my bed, I told them of the plans of Brand, Fiona and Bleys, and of the EricJulian-Caine cabal. I told them what Brand had said concerning my return and his own imprisonment by his fellow conspirators. They saw why the survivors of both factions -- Fiona and Julian -- had run off: doubtless to marshall their forces, hopefully to expend them on one another, but probably not. Not immediately, anyhow. More likely, one or the other would move to take Amber first. "They will just have to take numbers and wait their turns, like everyone else," Random had said. "Not exactly," I remembered saying. "Fiona's allies and the things that have been coming in on the black road are the same gup." And the Circle in Lorraine?" Ganelon had asked. "The same. That was how it manifested itself in that shadow. They came a great distance." "Ubiquitous bastards," Random had said. Nodding, I had tried to explain...And so I came to Tir-na Nog'th. When the moon rose and the apparition of Amber came faintly into the heavens,stars showing through it, pale halo about its towers, tiny flecks of movement upon its walls, I waited, waited with Ganelon and Random, waited on the highest crop of Kovir, there where the three steps are fashioned, roughly, out of the stone...When the moonlight touched them, the outline of the entire stairway began to take shape, spanning the great gulf to that point above the sea the vision city held. When the moonlight fell full upon it, the stair had taken as much of substance as it would ever possess, and I set my foot on the stone... Random mine within my jacket. Grayswandir, forged upon this very stone by moonlight, held power in the city in the sky, and so I bore my blade along... I had rested all day, and I held a staff to lean upon... Illusion of distance and time... The stairs through the Corwin-ignoring sky escalate somehow, for it is not a simple arithmetic progression up them once motion has commenced... I was here, I was there, I was a quarter of the way up, before my shoulder had forgotten the clasp of Ganelon's hand... If I looked too hard at any portion of the stair, it lost its shimmering opacity and I saw the ocean far below as through a translucent lens... I lost track of time, though it seems it's never long, afterwards... As far beneath the waves as I'd soon be above them, off to my right, glittering and curling, the outline of Rebma appeared within the sea... I thought of Moire, wondered how she fared... What would become of our deepwater double should Amber ever fall? Would the image remain unshattered in its mirror? Or would building blocks and bones be taken and shaken alike, dice in the deepwater casino canyons our fleets fly over? No answer in the mandrowning Corwin-confounding waters, though I felt a twinge in my side...At the head of the stair, I entered, coming into the ghost city as one would enter Amber after mounting the great forestair up Kolvir's seaward face...I leaned upon the rail, looked across the world. The black road led off to the south. I could not see it by night. Not that it mattered. I knew now where it led. Or rather where Brand said that it led. As he appeared to have used up a life's worth's reasons for lying, I believed that I knew where it led...All the way...From the brightness of Amber and the power and cleanshining splendor of adjacent Shadow, on through the progressively darkening slices of image that lead away in any direction, farther, through the twisted landscapes, and farther still, on through places seen only when drunk, delirious or dreaming illy, and farther yet again, running beyond the place where I stop... Where  stop... How to put simply that which is not a simple thing... ? Solipsism, I suppose, is where we have to begin -- the notion that nothing exists but the self or, at least, that we cannot truly be aware of anything but our own existence and experience. I can find, somewhere, off in Shadow, anything I can visualize. Any of us can. This, in good faith, does not transcend the limits of the ego. It may be argued, and in fact has, by most of us, that we create the shadows we visit out of the stuff of our own psyches, that we alone truly exist, that the shadows we traverse are but projections of our own desires... Whatever the merits of this argument, and there are several, it does go far toward explaining much of the family's attitude toward people, places and things outside of Amber. Namely, we are toymakers and they, our playthings -- sometimes dangerously animated, to be sure; but this, too, is part of the game. We are impresarios by temperament, and we treat one another accordingly. While solipsism does tend to leave one sligntly embarassed on questions of etiology, one can easily avoid the embarassment by refusing to admit the validity of the questions. Most of us are, as I have often observed, almost entirely pragmatic in the conduct of our afrs. Almost...Yet, yet there is a disturbing element in the picture. There is a place where the shadows go mad... When you purposely push yourself through layer after layer of Shadow, surrendering -- again, purposely -- a piece of your understanding everv step of the way, you come at ast to a mad place beyond which you cannot go. Why do this? In hope of an insight. I'd say, or a new game... But when you come to this place, as we all have, you realize that you have reached the limit of Shadow or the endof yourself -- synonymous terms, as we had always thought. Now, though... Now I know that it is not so, now as I stand, waiting, without the Courts of Chaos, telling you what it was like, I know that it is not so. But I knew well enough then, that night, in Tir-na' Nog'tn, had known earlier, when I had fought the goat-man in the black cir(de ofTorraine, had known that day in the Lighthouse of Cabra, after my escape from tbe dungeons of Amber, when I had looked upon ruined Camath... I knew that that was not all there was to it. I knew because I knew that the black road ran beyond that point. It passed through madness into chaos and kept going. The things that traveled across it came from somewhere, but they were not my things. I had, somehow, helped to grant them this passage, but they did not spring from my version of reality. They were their own, or someone else's -- small matter there -- and they tore holes in that small metaphysic we had woven over the ages. They had entered our preserve, they were not of it, they threatened it, they threatened us. Fiona and Brand had reached beyond everything and found something, where none of the rest of us had believed anything to exist. The danger released was, on some level, almost worth the evidence obtained: we were not alone, nor were shadows truly our toys. Whatever our relationship with Shadow, I could never more regard it in the old light...All because the black road headed south and ran beyond the end of the world, where I stop. Silence and silver... Walking away from the rail, leaning on my sticK, passing through tne fogspun, mist-woven, moonlightbrushed fabric of vision within the troubling city... Ghosts... Shadows of shadows... Images of probability... Might-bes and might-have-beens... Probability lost... Probability regained... Walking, across the promenade now... Figures, faces, many of them familiar... What are they about? Hard to say... Some lips move, some faces show animation... There are no words there for me... I pass among them, unnoted... There... One such figure... Alone, but waiting... Fingers unknotting minutes, casting them away... Face averted, and I wish to see it... A sign that I will or should... She sits on a stone bench beneath a gnarly tree... She gazes in the direction of the palace... Her form is quite familiar... Approaching, I see that it is Lorraine... e continues to regard a point far beyond me, does not hear me say that I have avenged her death... But mine is the power to be heard here... It hangs in the sheathe at my side...Drawing Grayswandir, I raise my blade overhead where moonlimt tricks its patterns into a kind of motion. I place it on the ground between us... "Corwin!" Her head snaps back, her hair rusts in the moonlight, her eyes focus... "Where did you come from? You're early..." "You wait for me?" "Of course. You told me to -- " "How did you come to this place?" "This bench... ?" "No. This city." "Amber? I do not understand... You brought me yourself... I -- " "Are you happy here? " "You know that I am, so long as I am with you." I had not forgotten the evenness of her teeth, the hint of freckles beneath the soft light's veil... "What happened? It is very important. Pretend for a moment that I do not know, and tell me everything that happened to us after the battle of the black circle in Lorraine." She frowned. She stood. She turned away. "We had that argument," she said. "You followed me, drove away Melkin and we talked. I saw that I was wrong and I went with ou to Avalon. There, your rother Benedict persuaded you to talk with Eric. You were not reconciled, but you agreed to a truce because of something that he told you. He swore not to harm you and you swore to. defend Amber, with Benedict to witness both oaths. We remained in Avalon while you obtained chemicals, and we went to another place later, a place where you purchased strange weapons. We won the battle, but Eric lies wounded now." She stood and faced me. "Are you thinking of ending the truce? Is that it?" I shook my head, and though I knew better I reached to embrace her. I wanted to hold her, despite the fact that one of us did not exist, could not exist, when that tiny gap of space between our skins was crossed, to tell her that whatever had happened or would happen -- Tne shock was not severe, but it caused me to stumble... I lay across Grayswandir... My staff had fallen to the grass several aces away... Rising to my nees, I saw that the color had one out of her face her eyes her air... Her mouth shaped ghost words as her head turned, searching... Sheathing Grayswandir, recovering my staff, I rose once again... Her seeing passed through me and focussed... Her face grew smooth, she smiled, started forward... I moved aside and turned, watching her run toward the man who approached, seeing her clasped in his arms, glimpsing his face as he bent it toward her own, lucky ghost, silver rose at the throat of his garment, kissing her, this man I would never know, silver on silence, and silver... Walking away... Not looking back... Crossing the promenade... The voice of Random: "Corwin, are you all right?" "Yes." "Anything interesting happenin?" 'Later, Random." "Sorry."...And sudden, the gleaming stair before the palace grounds. Up it, and a turn to the right... Slow and easy now, into the garden... Ghost flowers throb on their stalks all about me, ghost shrubs spill blossoms like frozen firework displays... Sans colors, all... Only the essentials sketched in, degrees of luminosity in silver the terms of their claim on the eye... Only the essentials here... Is Tir-na Nog'th a special sphere of Shadow in the real world, swayed by the promptings of the id -- a full-sized projective test in the sky, perhaps even a therapeutic device... ? Despite the silver. I'd say, if this is a piece of the soul, the night is very dark... And silent... Walking... By fountains, benches, groves, cunning alcoves in mazes of hedging... Passing along the walks, up an occasions step, across small bridges... Moving past ponds, among trees, by an odd piece of statuary, a boulder, a sundial (moondial, here?), bearing to my right, pressing steadily ahead, rounding, after a time, the northern end of the palace, swinging left then, courtyard overhung by balconies, ghosts here and there upon them, behind them, within... Circling around to the rear, just to see the back gardens this way, again, for they are lovely by normal moonlight in the true Amber... A few more figures, talking, standing... No motion but my own is apparent...And feel my self drawn to the right. As one should never turn down a free oracle, I go...Toward a mass of high hedging, a small open area within, if it is not overgrown... Long ago there was... Two figures, embracing, within... They part as I begin to turn away... None of my affair, but... Deirdre... One of them is Deirdre... I know who the man will be before he turns... It is a cruel joke by whatever powers rule that silver, that silence... Back, back, away from that hedge... Turning, stumbling, rising again, going, away, now, quickly... The voice of Random: "Corwin? Are you all right?" "Later! Damn it! Later!" "It is not too long till sunrise, Corwin. I felt I had better remind you -- " "Consider me reminded!"...Away, now, quickly... Time, too, is a dream in Tir-na Nog'th... Small comfort, but better than none... Quickly, now, away, going, again...Toward the palace, bright architecture of the mind or spirit, more clearly standing now than the real ever did... To judge perfection is to render a worthless verdict, but I must see what lies within... This must be an end of sorts, for I am driven... I had not paused to recover my staff from vvhere it had fallen this time, among the sparkling grasses... I know where I must go, what I must do... Obvious now, though the logic which has seized me is not that of the waking mind... Hurrying, climbing, up to the rearward portal... The sidebiting soreness comes home again... Across the threshold, in...Into an absence of starshine and moonlight. The illumination is without direction, seeming almost to drift and to pool, aimlessly... Wherever it misses, the shadows are absolute, occulting large sections of room, hallway, closet and stair... Among them, through them, almost running now... Monochrome of my home... Apprehension overtakes me... The black spots seem like holes in this piece of reality now... I fear to pass too near... Fall in and be lost... Turning... Crossing... Finally... Entering... The throne room... Bushels of blackness stacked where my eyes would drive down lines of seeing to the throne itself... There, though, is movement... A drifting, to my right, as I advance... A lifting, with the drifting... The boots on feet on legs come into view as forward pressing I near the place's base... Grayswandir comes into my hand, finding its way into a patch of light, renewing its eyetricKing, shapeshifring stretch, acquiring a glow of its own... I place my left foot on the step, rest my left hand on my knee... Distracting but bearable, the throb of my healing gut... I wait for the blackness, the emptiness to be drawn, appropriate curtain for the theatrics with which I am burdened this qight...And it slides aside, revealing a hand, an arm, a shoulder, the arm a glinting, metallic thing, its planes like the facets of a gem, its wrist and elbow wondrous weaves of silver cable, pinned with flecks of fire, the hand, stylized, skeletal, a Swiss toy, a mechanical insect, functional, deadly, beautiful in its way...And it slides aside, revealing the rest of the man...Benedict stands relaxed beside the throne, his left and human hand laid lightly upon it... He leans toward the throne... His lips are moving...And it slides aside, revealing the throne's occupant... 'Dara!"...Turned toward her right, she smiles, she nods to Benedict, her lips move... I advance and extend Grayswandir till its point rests lightly in the concavity beneath her sternum... Slowly, quite slowly, she turns her head and meets my eyes... She takes on color and life... Her lips move again, and this time her words reach me... "What are you?" "No. That is my question. You answer it. Now." "I am Dara. Dara of Amber, Queen Dara. I hold this throne by right of blood and conquest. Who are you?" "Corwin. Also of Amber. Don't move! I did not ask who you are -- " "Corwin is dead these many centuries. I have seen his tomb." "Empty." "Not so. His'body lies within." "Give me your lineage! " Her eyes move to her right, where the shade of Benedict still stands... A blade has appeared in his new hand, seeming almost an extension of it, but that he holds it loosely, casually... His left hand now rests on her arm... His eyes seek me back of Grayswandir s hilt... Failing, they go again to that which is visible -- Grayswandir -- recognizing its design... "I am the great-granddaughter of Benedict and the hellmaid Lintra, whom he loved and later slew." Benedict winces at this, but she continues, "I never knew her. My mother and my mother's mother were born in a place where time does not run as in Amber. I am the first of my mother's line to bear all the marks of humanity. And you. Lord Corwin, are but a ghost from a long dead past, albeit a dangerous shade. How you came here, I do not know. But it was wrong of you. Return to your grave. Trouble not the living." My hand wavers... Grayswandir strays no more than half an inch... Yet that is sufficient... Benedict's thrust is below my threshold of perception... His new arm drives the new hand that holds that blade that strikes Grayswandir, as his old arm draws his old hand, which has seized upon Dara, back across the arm of the throne... This subliminal impression reaches me moments later, as I fall back, cutting air, recover and strike an en garde, reflexively... It is ridiculous for a pair of ghosts to fight... Here, it is uneven... He cannot even reach me, whereas Grayswandir -- But no! His blade changes hands as he releases Dara and pivots, bringing them together, old hand and, new. His left wrist rotates as he slides it forward and down, moving into what would be corps a corps, were we two facing mortal bodies. For a moment, our guards are locked. That moment, is enough... That gleaming, mechanical hand comes forward, a thing of moonlight and fire, blackness and smoothness, all angles, no curves, fingers slightly flexed, palm silver-scribbled wi th a halffamiliar design, comes forward, comes forward and catches at my throat...Missing, the fingers catch my shoulder and the thumb goes hooking -- whether for clavicle or larynx, I do not know. I throw one punch with my left, toward his midsection, and there is nothing there... The voice of Random: "Gorwin! The sun is about to rise! You've got to come down now!" I cannot even answer... A second or two and that hand would tear away whatever it held... That hand... Grayswandir and that hand, which strangely resembles it, are the only two things which seem to coexist in my world and the city of ghosts... ' I see it, Corwin! Pull away and reach for me! The Trump -- " I spin Grayswandir out of the bind and bring it around and down in a long slashing arc...Only a ghost could have beaten Benedict or Benedict's ghost with that maneuver. We stand too close for him to block my blade, but his countercut, perfectly placed, would have removed my arm, had there been an arm there to meet it... As there is not, I complete the stroke, delivering the blow with the full force of my right arm, high upon that lethal device of moonlight and fire, blackness and smoothness, near to the point where it is joined with him... With an evil tearing at my shoulder, the arm comes away from Benedict and grows still... We both fall... "Get up! By the unicorn, Corwin, get up! The sun is rising! The city will come apart about you!"...The floor beneath me wavers to and from a misty transparency. I glimpse a light-scaled expanse of water... I roll to my feet, barely avoiding the ghost's rush to clutch at the arm he has lost... It clings like a dead parasite and my side is hurting again...Suddenly I am heavy and the vision of ocean does not fade. I begin to sink through the floor... Color returns to the world, wavering stripes of pink... The Corwin-spurning gulf is opened... I fall... "This way, Crowin! Now!"...Random stands on a mountaintop and reaches for me. I extend my hand... XI    .And frying pans without fires are often far between... We untangled ourselves and rose. I sat down again immediately, on the bottommost stair. I worked the metal hand loose from my shoulder -- no blood there, but a promise of bruises to come -- then cast it and its arm to the ground. The light of early morning did not detract from its exquisite and menacing appearance. Ganelon and Random stood beside me. "You all right, Corwin?" "Yeah. Just let me catch my breath." "I brought food," Random said. "We could have breakfast right here." "Good idea. " ' As Random began unpacking provisions, Ganelon nudged the arm with the toe of his boot. "What the hell," he asked, "is that?" I shook my head. "I lopped it off the ghost of Benedict, I told him. "For reasons I do not undestand, it was able to reach me." He stooped and picked it up, studied it. "A lot lighter than I thought it would be," he observed. He raked the air with it. "You could do quite a job on someone, with a hand like that." "I know." He worked the fingers. "Maybe the real Benedict could use it." "Maybe," I said. "My feelings are quite mixed when it comes to offering it to him, but possibly you're right..." "How's the side?" I rpodded it gently. "Not especially bad, everything considered. I'll be able to ride after breakfast, so long as we take it nice and easy." "Good. -- Say, Corwin, while Random is getting things ready, I have a question that may be way out of order, but it has been bothering me all along..." "Ask it." "Well, let me put it this way... I am all for you, or I would not be here. I will fight for you to have your throne, no matter what. But every time talk of the succession occurs, someone gets angry and breaks it off or the subject gets changed. Like Random did, while you were up there. I suppose that it is not absolutely essential for me to know the basis of your claim to the throne, or that of any of the others, but I cannot help being curious as to the reasons for all the friction." I sighed, then sat silent for a time. "All right, " I said, after awhile, and then I chuckled. "All right. If we cannot agree on these things ourselves, I would guess that they must seem pretty confused to an outsider. Benedict is the eldest. His mother was Cymnea. She bore Dad two other sons, also -- Osric and Finndo. Then -- how does one put these things? -- Faiella bore Eric. After that. Dad found some defect in his marriage with Cymnea and had it dissolved -- ab initio, as they would say in my old shadow -- from the beginning. Neat trick, that. But he was the king." "Didn't that make all of them illegitimate?" "Well, it left their status less certain. Osric and Finndo were more than a little irritated, as I understand it, but they died shortly thereafter. Benedict was either less irritated or more politic about the entire affair. He never raised a fuss. Dad then married Faiella." "And that made Eric legitimate?" "It would have, if he had acknowledged Eric as his son. He treated him as if he were, but he never did anything formal in that regard. It involved the smoothing over process with Cymnea's family, which had become a bit stronger around that time." "Still, if he treated him as his own..." "Ah! But he later did acknowledge Llewella formally. She was bom out of wedlock, but he decided to recognize her, poor irl. All of Eric's supporters hated er for its effect on his status. Anywa, Faiella was later to become my mother. I was born safely in wedlock, making me the first with a clean claim on the throne. Talk to one of the others and you may get a different line of reasoning, fiut those are the facts it will nave to be based on. Somehow, it does not seem quite as important as it once did, though, with Eric dead and Benedict not really interested... But that is where I stand." "I see -- sort of," he said. "Just one more thing, then..." "What?" "Who is next? -- if anything were to happen to you... ?" I shook my head. "It gets even more complicated there, now. Caine would have been next. With him dead, I see it as swinging over to Clarissa's brood -- the redheads. Bleys would have followed, then Brand." "Clarissa? What became of your mother?" "She died in childbirth. Deirdre was the child. Dad did not remarry for many years after mother's death. When he did, it was a redheaded wench from a far southern shadow. I never liked her. He began feeling the same way after a time and started fooling around again. They had one reconciliation after Llewella's birth in Rebma, and Brand was the result. When they were finally divorced, he recognized Llewella to spite Clarissa. At least, that is what I think happened." "So you are not counting the ladies in the succession?" "No. They are neither interested nor fit. If I were though, Fiona would precede Bleys and Llewella would follow him. -- After Clarissa's crowd, it would swing over to Julian, Gerard and Random, in that order. Excuse me -- Count Flora before Julian. The marriage data is even more involved, but no one will dispute the final order. Let it go at that." "Gladly," he said. "So now Brand gets it if you die, right?" "Well... He is a self-confessed traitor and he rubs everybody the wrong way. I do not believe the rest of them would have him, as he stands now." "But the alternative is Julian." I shrugged. "The fact that I do not like Julian does not make him unfit. In fact, he might even be a very effective monarch." "So he knifed you for the chance to prove it," Random called out. "Come on and eat. " "I still don't think so," I said, getting to my feet and heading for the food. "First, I don't see now he would have gotten to me. Second, it woula have been too damned obvious. Third, if I die in the near future Benedict will have the real say as to the succession. Everyone knows that. He's got the seniority, he's got the wits and he's got the power. He could simply sav, for example, 'The hell with I tnis bickering, I am backing Gerard,' and that would be "What if he decided to reinterret his own status and take it imself? " Ganelon asked. We seated ourselves on the ground and took the tin dishes Random had Riled. "He could have had it long before this, had he wanted it," I said. "There are several ways of regarding the offspring of a void marriage, and the most favorable one would be the most likely in his case. Osric and Finndo rushed to judgment, taking the worst view. Benedict knew better. He just waited. So... It is possible. Unlikely, though. I'd say. "Then -- in the normal course of affairs -- if anything happened to you, it could still be very much up in the air?" "Very much." "But why was Caine killed? " Random asked. Then, between mouthfuls, he answered his own question, "So that when they got you, it would swing over to Clarissa's kids immediately. It has occurred to me that Bleys is probably still living, and he is next in line. His body was never found. My guess is this: He trumped on to Fiona during your attack and returned to Shadow to rebuild his forces, leaving you to what he hoped would be your death at the hands of Eric. He is finally ready to move again. So they killed Caine and tried for you. If they are really allied with the black-road horde, they could have arranged for another assault from that quarter. Then he could have done the same thing you did -- arrive at the last hour, turn back the invaders and move on in. And there he would be, next in line and first in force. Simple. Except that you survived and Brand has been returned. If we are to believe Brand's accusation of Fiona -- and I see no reason why we should not -- then it follows from their original program. " I nodded. "Possibly, " I said. "I asked Brand just those things'. He admitted their possibility, but he disavowed any knowledge as to whether Bleys was still living. Personally, I think he was lying. "Why? ' "It is possible that he wishes to combine revenge for his imprisonment and the attempt on his life with the removal of the one impediment, save for myself, to his own succession. I think he feels that I will be expended in a scheme he is evolving to deal with the black road. The destruction of his own cabal and the removal of the road could make him look pretty decent, especially after all the pennance he has had thrust upon him. Then, maybe then, he would have a chance -- or thinks that he would." "Then you think Bleys is still living, too?" "Just a feeling," I said. "But yes, I do." "What is their strength, anyway?" "An endorsement of higher education, " I said. "Fiona and Brand paid attention to Dworkin while the rest of us were oflF indulging our assorted passions in Shadow. Consequently, they seem to have obtained a better grasp of principles than we possess. They know more about Shadow and what lies beyond it, more about the Pattern, more about the Trumps than we do. That is why Brand was able to send you his message." "An interesting thought..." Random mused. "Do you think they might have disposed of Dworkin after they felt they had learned enough from him? It would certairdy help to keep things exclusive, if anything happened to Dad." "That thought had not occurred to me," I said. And I wondered, could they have done something that had affected his mind? Something that left him as he was when last I had seen him? If so, were they aware that he was possibly still living, somewhere? Or might they have assumed his total destruction? "Yes, an interesting thought," I said. "I suppose that it is possible." The sun inched its way upward, and the food restored me. No trace of Tir-na Nog'th remained in the morning's light. My memories of it had already taken on the quality of images in a dim mirror. Ganelon fetched its only other token, the arm, and Random packed it away along with the dishes. By daylight, the first three steps looked less like stairs and more like jumbled rock. Random gestured with his head. "Take the same way back?" "Yes," I said, and we mounted. We had come by way of a trail that wound about Kolvir to the south. It was longer but less rugged than the route across the crest. I'd a humor to pamper myself so long as my side protested. So we bore to the rit, moving single file. Random in the lead, Ganelon to the rear. The trail ran ently upward, then cut back own again. The air was cool, and it bore the aromas of verdure and moist earth, a thing quite unusual in that stark place, at that altitude. Straying air currents, I reasoned, from the forest far below. We let the horses pick their own casual pace down through the dip and up the next rise. As we neared its crest. Random's horse whinnied and began to rear. He controlled it immediately, and I glanced about but saw nothing that might have startled it. When he reached its summit. Random slowed and called back, "Take a look at that sunrise now, will you?" It would have been rather difficult to avoid doing so, though I did not remark on the fact. Random was seldom given to sentimentality over vegetation, geology or illumination. I almost drew rein myself as I topped the rise, for the sun was a fantastic golden ball. It seemed half again its normal size, and its peculiar coloration was unlike anything I remembered having seen before. It did marvellous things to the band of ocean that had come into view above the next rise, and the tints of cloud and sky were indeed singular. I did not halt, though, for the sudden britness was almost painful. "You re right," I called out, following him down into the next declivity. Behind me, Canelon snorted an appreciative oath. When I had blinked away the aftereffects of that display I noticed that the vegetation was heavier than I had remembered in this little pocket in the sky. I had thought there were several scrubby trees and some patches of lichen, but there were actually several dozen trees, larger than I recalled, and greener, with a clutch of grasses here and there and a vine or two softening the outlines of the rocks. However, since my return I had only passed this way after dark. And now that I thought of it, it was probably the source of the aromas that had come to me earlier. Passing through, it seemed that the little hollow was also wider than I recalled it to be. By the time we had crossed and were ascending once more, f was certain of it. "Random," I called out, "has this placed changed recently?" "Hard to say," he answered. "Eric didn't let me out much. It seems to have grown up a bit." "It seems bigger -- wider." "Yes, it does. I had thought that that was just my imagination." When we reached the next crest I was not dazzled again because the sun was bloed by foliage. The area ahead of us contained many more trees than the one we had just departed -- and they were larger and closer together. We drew rein. "I don't remember this," he said. "Even passing through at night, it would have registered. We must have taken a wrong turn." "I don't see how. Still, we know about where we are. I would rather go ahead than go back and start again. We should keep aware of conditions around Amber, anyway." "True." He headed down toward the wood. We followed. "It's kind of unusual, at this altitude -- a growth like this," he called back. "There also seems to be a lot more soil than I recall." "I believe you are right." The trail curved to the left as we entered among the trees. I could see no reason for this deviation from the direct route. We stayed with it, however, and it added to the illusion of distance. After a few moments, it swung suddenly to the right again. The prospect on cutting back was peculiar. The trees seemed even taller and were now so dense as to puzzle the eye that sought their penetration. When it turned once more it broadened, and the way was straight for a great distance ahead. Too great, in fact. Our little dell just wasn't that wide. Random halted again. "Damn it, Corwin! This is ridiculous! " he said. "You are not playing games, are you?" 'I couldn't if I would," I said. "I have never been able to manipulate Shadow anywhere on Kolvir. There isn't supposed to be any to work with here." "That has always been my understanding, too. Amber casts Shadow but is not of it. I don't like this at all. What do you say we turn back?" "I've a feeling we might not be able to retrace our way," I said. "There has to be a reason for this, and I want to know it." "It occurs to me that it might be some sort of a trap." "Even so," I said. He nodded and we rode on, down that shaded way, under trees grown now more stately. The wood was silent about us. The ground remained level, the trail strait. Half-consciously, we pushed the horses to a greater pace. About five minutes passed before we spoke again. Then Random said, "Corwin, this can't be Shadow." "Why not?" "I have been trying to influence it and nothing happens. Have you tried?" "No." "Why don't you?" "All right." A rock could jut beyond the coming tree, a Morning Glory twine, and bell within that shrubby stand... There ought a patch of sky come clear, a wispy cloud upon it... Then let there be a fallen limb, a stair of fungus up its side... A scummed over puddle... A frog... Falling feather, drifting seed... A limb that twists just so... Another trail upon our way, fresh-cut, deep-marked, past the place the feather should have fallen... "No good," I said. "If it is not Shadow, what is it?" "Something else, of course." He shook his head and checked again to see that his blade was loose in its scabbard. Automatically, I did the same. Moments later, I heard Ganelon's make a small clicking noise behind me. Ahead, the trail began to narrow, and shortly thereafter it commenced to wander. We were forced to slow our pace once again, and the trees pressed nearer with branches sweeping lower than at any time before. The trail became a path. It jogged, it curved, it gave a final twist and then quit. Random ducked a limb, then raised his hand and halted. We came up beside him. For as far as I could see ahead there was no sign of the trail's picking up again. Looking back, I failed to locate any sign of it either. "Suggestions," he said, "are now in order. We do not know where we have been or where we are going, let alone where we are. My suggestion is the hell with curiosity. Let's get out of here the fastest way we know how." "The Trumps? " Ganelon asked. "Yes. What do you say, Corwin?" "Okay. I don't like it either, and I can't think of anything better to try. Go ahead. " "Who should I try for?" he asked, producing his deck and uncasing it. "Gerard?" "Yes. He shuffled through his cards, located Gerard's, stared at it. We stared at him. Time went its way. "I can't seem to reach him," he finally announced. "Try Benedict." "Okay." Repeat performance. No contact. ""Try Deirdre," I said, drawing forth my own deck and searching out her Trump. '"I'll join you. We will see whether it makes a diffierence with two of us trying." And again. And again. ""Nothing, " I said, after a long effort. Random shook his head. "Did you notice anything unusual about your Trumps?" he asked. ""Yes,, but I don't know what it is. They do seem different. " ""Mine seem to have lost that quality of coldness they once possessed," he said. I shuffled mine slowly. I ran my fingertips across them. " Yes, you are right," I said. "That's it. But let us try again. Say, Flora. " "Okay." The results were the same. And with Llewella. And Brand. ""Any idea what could be wrong?" Random asked. ""Not the slightest. They couldn't all be blocking us. They couldn't all be dead. -- Oh, I suppose they could. But it is highly unlikely. Something seems to have affected the Trumps themselves, is what it is. And I never knew of anything could do that." "Well, they are not guaranteed one hundred percent, ' Random said, "according to the manufacturer." "What do you know?" He chuckled. "You never forget the day you come of age and walk the Pattern," he said. "I remember it as though it were just last year. When I had succeeded -- all flushed with excitement, with glory -- Dworkin presented me my first set of Trumps and instructed me in their use. I distinctly recall asking him whether they worked everywhere. And I remember his answer: "No," he'd said. "But they should serve in any place you will ever be.' He never much liked me, you know." "But did you ask him what he had meant by that?" "Yes, and he said, "I doubt that you will ever achieve a state where they will fail to serve you. Why don't you run along now?' And I did. I was anxious to go play with the Trumps all by myself." "Achieve a state'? He didn't say "reach a place'?" "No. I have a very good memory for certain things." "Peculiar -- though not much help that I can see. Smacks of the metaphysical." "I'd wager Brand would know." "I've a feeling you're right, for all the good that does us. " "We ought to do something other than discuss metaphysics, ' Ganelon commented. "If you can't manipulate Shadow and you can't work the Trumps, it would seem that the next tning to do is determine where we are. And then go looking for help. " I nodded. "Since we are not in Amber, I think it is safe to assume that we are in Shadow -- a very special place, quite near to Amber, since the changeover was not abrupt. In that we were transported without active cooperation on our part, there had to be some agency and presumably some intent behind the maneuver. If it is going to attack us, now is as good a time as any. If there is something else it wants, then it is going to have to show us, because we aren't even in a )osition to make a good guess. ' "I propose we wait. I don't see any value in wandering about, losing ourselves further." "I seem to remember your once telling me that adjacent shadows tend to be somewhat congruent," Ganelon said. "Yes, I probably did. So what?" "Then, if we are as near to Amber as you suppose, we need but ride toward the rising sun to come to a spot that parallels the city itself" 'It is not quite that simple. But supposing it were, what good would it do us?" "Perhaps the Trumps would function again at the point of maximum congruity. " Random looked at Ganelon, looked at me. "That may be worth trying," he said. "What have we got to lose?" "Whatever small orientation we still possess," I said. "Look, it is not a bad idea. If nothing develops here, we will try it. However, looking back, it seems that the road behind us closes in direct proportion to the distance we advance. We are not simply moving in space. Under these circumstances, I am loathe to wander until I am satisfied that we have no other option. If someone desires our presence at a particular location it is up to him now to phrase the invitation a little more legibly. We wait." They both nodded. Random began to dismount, then froze, one foot in the stirrup, one on the ground. "...After all these years," he said, and, "I never really believed it... " "What is it?" I whispered. "The option," he said, and he mounted again. H e persuaded his horse to move very slowly, forward. I followed, and a moment later I glimpsed it, white as I had seen it in the Grove, standing, half-hid, amid a clump of ferns: the unicorn. It turned as we moved, and seconds later flashed ahead, to stand, partly concealed once more by the trunks of several trees. "I see it!" Ganelon whispered. "To think there really is such a beast... Your family's emblem, isn't it?" "Yes." "A good sign. I'd say. " I did not answer, but followed, keeping it in sight. That it was meant to be followed, I did not doubt. It had a way of remaining partly concealed the entire while -- looking out from behind something, passing from cover to cover, moving with an incredible swiftness when it did more, avoiding open areas, favoring glade and shade. We followed, deeper and deeper into the wood which had given up all semblance of anything to be found on Kolvir's slopes. It resembled Arden now, more than anything else near Amber, as the ground was relatively level and the trees grew more and more stately. An hour'd passed. I'd guessed, and another'd followed it, before we came' to a small, clear stream and the unicorn turned and headed up it. As we rode along the bank. Random commented, "This is starting to look sort of familiar." "Yes," I said, "but only sort of I can't quite say why." "Nor I." We entered upon a slope shortly thereafter, and it grew steeper before very long. The going became more difficult for the horses, but the unicorn adjusted its pace to accommodate them. The ground became rockier, the trees smaller. The stream curved in its splashing course. I lost track of its twists and turns, but we were finally nearing the top of the small mount up which we had been traveling. We achieved a level area and continued along it toward the wood from which the stream issued. At this point, I caught an oblique view -- ahead and to the right, through a place where the land fell away -- of an icy blue sea, quite far below us. "Were pretty high up," Ganelon said. "It seemed like lowland, but -- " "The Grove of the Unicorn! " Random interrupted. "That's what it looks like! See!" Nor was he incorrect. Ahead lay an area strewn with boulders. In their midst a spring uttered the stream we followed. This place was larger and more lush, its situation incorrect in terms of any internal compass. Yet the similarity had to be more than coincidental. The unicorn mounted the rock nearest the spring, looked at us, then turned away. It might have been staring down at the ocean. Then, as we continued, the grove, the unicorn, the trees about us, the stream beside us, took on an unusual clarity, all, as though each were radiating some special illumination, causing it to quiver with the intensity of its color while at the same time wavering, slightly, just at the edges of perception. "This produced, in me, an incipient feeling like the beginning of the emotional accompaniment to a hellride. Then, then and then, with each stride of my mount, something went out of the world about us. An adjustment in the relationships of objects suddenly occurred, eroding my sense of depth, destroying perspective, rearranging the dilay of articles within my field of vision, so that everything presented its entire outer surface without simultaneously appearing to occupy an increased area: angles predominated, and relative sizes seemed suddenly ridiculous. Random's horse reared and neighed, massive, apocalyptic, instantly recalling Guernica to my mind. And to my distress, I saw that we ourselves had not been untouched by the phenomenon -- but that Random, struggling with his mount, and Canelon, still managing to control Kiredrake, had, like everything else, been transfigured by this Cubist dream of space. But Star was a veteran of many a hellride; Firedrake, also, had been through a lot. We clung to them and felt the movements that we could not accurately guage. And Random succeeded, at last, in imposing his will upon his mount, though the prospect continued to alter as we advanced. Light values shifted next. The sky grew black, not as night, hut like a flat, non-reflecting surface. So did certain vacant areas between objects. Tlie only light left in the world seemed to originate from things themselves, and all of it was gradually bleached. Various intensities of white emerged from the planes of existence, and brightest of all, immense, awful, the unicorn suddenly reared, pawing percent of creation with what became a slow motion gesture I feared would annihilate us if we advanced another pace. Then there was only the light. Then absolute stillness. Then the light was gone and there was nothing. Not even blackness. A gap in existence, which might have lasted an instant or an eternity... Then the blackness returned, and the light. Only they were reversed. Light filled the interstices, outlining voids that must be objects. This first sound that I heard was the rushing of water, and I knew somehow that we were halted beside the spring. The first thing that I felt was Star's quivering. Then I smelled the sea. Then the Pattern came into view, or a distorted negative of it... I leaned forward and more light leaked around the edges of things. I leaned back; it went away. Forward again, this time farther than before... The light spread, introduced various ades of gray into the scheme of things. With my knees then, gently, I suggested that Star advance. With each pace, something returned to the world. Surfaces, textures, color... Behind me, I heard the others begin to follow. Below me, the Pattern surrendered nothing of its mystery, but it acquired a context which, by degress, found its place within the larger reshaping of the world about us. Continuing downhill, a sense of depth reemerged. The sea, now plainly visible ofiF to the right, underwent a presumably purely optical separation from the sky, with which it seemed momentarily to have been joined in some sort of Urmeer of the waters above and the waters helaw. Unsettling upon reflection, but unnoted wnile in effect. We were heading down a steep, rocky incline, which seemed to have taken its beginning at the rear of the grove to which the unicorn had led us. Perhaps a hundred meters below us was a perfectly level area which appeared to be solid, unfractured rock -- roughly oval in shape, a couple hundred meters across its major axis. The slope down which we rode swung off to the left and returned, describing a vast arc, a parenthesis, halfcupping the smooth shelf. Beyond its rightward jutting there was nothing -- that is to say, the land feel away in steep descent toward the sea. And, continuing, all three dimensions reasserted themselves once more, in proper fashion. The sun was that great orb of molten gold we had seen earlier. The sky was a deeper blue than that of Amber, and there were no clouds in it. The sea was a matching blue, unspecked by sail or island. I saw no birds, and I heard no sounds other than our own. An enormous silence lay upon this place, this day. In the bowl of my suddenly clear vi.sion, the Pattern at last achieved its disposition upon the surface below. I thought, at first, that it was inscribed in the rock, but as we drew nearer I saw that it was contained within it -- gold-pink swirls, like veining in an exotic marble, naturalseeming despite the obvious purpose to the design. I drew rein and the others came up beside me. Random to my right, Ganelon to my left. We regarded it in silence for a long while. A dark, rough-edged smudge had obliterated an area of the section immediately beneath us, running from its outer rim to the center. "You know," Random finally said, "it is as if someone had shaved the top off Kolvir, cutting at about the level of the dungeons. " "Yes," I said. "Then -- looking for congruence -- that would be about where our own Pattern lies." "Yes," I said again. "...And that blotted area is to the south, from whence comes the black road." I nodded slowly, as the understanding arrived and forged itself into a certainty. "What does it mean?" he asked. "It seems to correspond to the true state of affairs, but beyond that I do not understand its significance. Why have we been brought here and shown this thing?" "It does not correspiond to the true state of affairs," I said. "It is the true state of affairs." Ganelon turned toward us. "On that shadow earth we visited -- where you had spent so many years -- I heard a poem about two roads that diverged in a wood," he said. "It ends, T took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.' When I heard it, I thought of something you had once said -- 'All roads lead to Amber' -- and I wondered then, as I do now, at the difference the choice may make, despite the end's apparent inevitability to those of your blood." "You know?" I said. "You understand?" "I think so." He nodded, then pointed. "That is the real Amber down there, isn't it?" "Yes," I said. "Yes, it is." The room looked quite comfortable , when they brought McGinny in and left him alone. He had seen pictures, and knew what it was. But in his guts he could not believe that it was a cell.' It didn't look like a cell. It didn't taste like a cell, or feel like one, but most of all it didn't look like one. McGinny had been in jail once before, in this same county, and the cell then had borne all the classic hallmarks: bars, mildewed concrete walls, barred windows, an absurdly large look, and miserably inadequate sanitary provisions consisting of a seatless toilet which stubbornly refused to flush and a badlycracked sink which exuded brown, rusty water. But then, that had been so long ago that the charge for which McGinny had done time was possession of marijuana. That statue, while it still existed, had not been enforced in over ten years. And in the meantime, prisons had changed. They had had to, of course. The Attica Uprising and the Tombs Rebellion, the Joliet Massacre and the Battle of New Alcatraz had been unmistakable signs that the traditional approach to penology was obsolete. A criminal population approaching thirty percent of the total simply could not be herded together and kept safely subjugated without the very sort of brutalization which an informed public would no longer tolerate. But what if they were not herded together? So it was that the room which met McGinny's eyes now was in appearance a pleasant, modestly appointed studio apartment -- with a few anomalies. The convict seated himself in a remarkably comfortable, high-backed psuedoleather armchair, padded with God alone knew what, and surveyed the unit which would be his universe until the time-lock on the room's only door ran out, ten years from now. Lookit all the cubic, he told himself wonderingly. Maybe this wouldn't be too bad after all. The time-lock itself, not unnaturally, was the first thing that held his eye. It was set just below the apparently open window which was cut into the door of his cell. All that faced on his side of the door was an inverted triangular plate with rounded corners, small horizontal grooved slots in each corner. The overall effect was damnably like a skull. "Pleased to meet ya," McGinny told it, returning its sour grin. The window above the plate measured about three by three, and appeared empty of glass. So did the window on the opposite wall behind McGinny, but both were in fact enclosed with a synthetic material (trade-named "Nothing") which was so transparent as to appear invisible. It could not break, crack or get dirty. The second window looked out on a small courtyard, pleasantly landscaped with ferns and lush grasses, bordered by three fifteenstory wings just like the one which held McGinny's cell. The seven hundred and fifty windows of each were opaque, and McGinny knew that his too seemed opaque from the outside. He sighed. To his left was a bed, consisting of a mattress on top of a sealed box-spring which was clamped to the floor. Although the room's climate-control system made bedclothes superfluous, the penologists had been thoughtful enough to realize that a man (or woman) felt better with something over him as he slept. Hence they proved a sheet -- made of paper. Above the bed were two horizontal slits, about a half-inch thick each. The upper one would dispense either paper sheets or paper clothes. It was activated by placing a used sheet or garment in the lower slot, which led to an incinerator somewhere in the bowels of the prison. Two pillows lay on the bed, each a featureless sponge. head of the bed and the corner of the room was a closet without a door. It had no transversing pole from which to suspend hangers, nor did it have hangers. Instead, suits of paper clothing -- there were four of them -- hung from small extrusions of plasteel high on the rear wall of the closet. In the opposite corner, behind McGinny and to the right, was a spacious desk with voicewriter and rawing pencils. Above the desk was a reader which would display any book requested, page by page, so long as it was stored in the prison's central computer. Much of the fiction available was speculative, the authorities having decided that it would be all right to allow prisoners some form of escape. (McGinny knew that lately, the majority of sciencefiction writers were ex-criminals, some of whose output was quite disturbing. Or perhaps that was not a new development.) To the left of the desk was a quadio console, also computersupplied, its four speakers represented by darker areas at four corners of the ceiling. Available tapes ranged from classical through rock to flash, with sidetrips into gregorian and neojazz. The console was nearly featureless: one spoke one's choice and selected tone and volume with simple slide switches. In appearance, therefore, the console resembled a washing machine with two small horns. Directly adjacent to the quadio was the Automat: an equally large cube, with a serving platform let into its front and small slots on either side which dispensed rubber cutlery. It too was voiceactivated, and was fed through the floor from a master unit which supplied the Automat with raw materials. Save for the absence of a slot into wKich to deposit one's quarters, it was identical to the Automats to be found on the average street corner -- from McGinny's angle of vision at least. From the other end of the room one could have seen the unmistakable, time-honored shape of a toilet bowl, let into the Automat's left side. It drained to the prison's basement, where paper and waste were filtered out and the remainder routed to the master food unit. dollars annually. McGinny snorted, ceased his inventory of the room and rose from his chair. He went to the small sink on the right of the cell door and regarded himself in its "mirror," a glassless reflective surface. As McGinny was one of many who had elected to inhibit his beard, there was no shaving unit next to the mirror; his hair would simply have to grow for the next ten years, or until he became sick enough to warrant the cutting open of the time-lock to permit a doctor to attend him. The doctor played a lot of golf Familiar, coarse features stared back at McGinny, restoring his confidence. His head was large, with a cap of wiry brown curls resting on elongated ears. His eyes were set close against a blunt nose, and his overfull lower lip gave him a pouting, petulant expression. As he saw again the room whose reflection surrounded his own, the pout became almost a sneer. These were the most spacious and luxurious quarters he had ever inhabited -- few in the overcrowded world of # had it so good. Ten years? he thought cheerfully. I'll do it standing on my head. Elbow room, privacy, food cooked for me... He frowned. Sure will miss beer, though. And the ferns. His contentment beginning to fade, he returned to the armchair and dropped heavily into it. He found his gaze fixed on the window set in the cell door. It was strange -- the window on the opposite wall looked out on open space, this one onto a plasteel corridor. And yet the exterior window gave a view of a false freedom, sculpted to make McGinny and other thousands feel better. In the corridor, men walked. Somehow, freedom was that way. He shifted, scratched his crotch and considered the quadio. It seemed to him that his first choice in this cell was a significant event, demanding contemplation. He imagined himself ten years hence, narrating his prison saga to an enraptured fern with eyes like saucers, saying, "And do you know what the first thing I played in that taken place was?" This'd better be good; he'd hate to have to lie to her. After a time he addressed the quadio. The room filled with the sound of a frenzied ## piano solo from Leon Russell's legendary last album, Live At Luna City. Bass and moog came in together as the Master of Space and Time hurled his anthem: "I'm just tryin to stay 'live-and keep mah sideburns too." Legs trembling, vaguely enjoying the play of cool air across his sweat-sheened, slender body, Solomon Orechal lay in the utter relaxation called afterglow and surveyed his bedroom. In so doing, he also surveyed his dining room, his living room, his kitchen and his car -- all at the same time. He sighed, for perhaps the dozenth time that day; just as, in fact, he had sighed with an almost rhythmic regularity on every day since he had first moved into his own Mome, from the comparative spaciousness of his parents' fishand-see apartment. As the popular name indicated, a good efficiency was hard to find these days, but the Orechal ancestral apt (the building dated all the way back to #) had been in family possession since before the Housing Riots -- as the axe-scar and single bullet-hole in the door attested. Solomon had told himself often in the last two years that he had been a fool to strike out on his own. But the lure of adventure and the challenge of living wherever he could find a parking space had been enough to pry him from the four-and-a-half-room home of his youth. Besides, it was awkward, bringing your girlfriends into the bathroom to be alone. Apropos of which; It's very strange, thought Solomon. I know just what she's going to say now... "Sol, why can't we do the Truth Dope?"...and yet there's nothing deja vu about it. Beside him on the narrow bed, Barbara raised on one elbow, half-leaned across him. Sleepily, earnestly, she brushed the hair out of his eyes and repeated, "Why won't you do Truth with me, lover?"...even down to the soft but oh so insistent tone of voice, the way she lets her left breast brush me; and it's just nothing at all like deja vu... She was still talking, and there was that in her voice which acts directly on the glands, but he was miles ahead of her, his attention two levels removed, contemplating the frustration of Moebius's Band with what seemed a poignant bitterness. Vaguely, he monitored the persuasions and importunities, dropping a grunt here and there and looking impassive, until he heard the line he had been patiently waiting for...how," she was saying, timidly and inevitably, "can I help but think you're afraid of the Truth?" His timing was magnificent. "Afraid of the truth? " he asked quietly, paused. "What we just did...wasn't that the truth?" He brushed his fingertips along the underside of her belly, and she shivered. "Are you suggesting that that wasn't real? That we werejustucktng? Because it sure seemd to me that we were making love. Maybe I was wrong." He had her now, he knew it from the look on her face, but somehow he couldn't summon up the old elation, the sense of triumph. Mechanically, he moved in for the coup-de-grace: now that you've stirred up the emotions, throw in a little pseudologic and you're home free. "You know why I don't do Truth Dope, man. I've told you a dozen times. I'm not afraid of the truth, Tm afraid of the dope." She made one last try. "But Sol..." "Now don't start. Barb. We've been through this, kark it. There's a mountain of evidence for each side, just like there always is when a new drug comes out. The law says it plays hob with your motivations, and the heads say it clears your vision. The law says it rots your body, and the heads say it's a lie. You know what happened with pot. " (It hadn't been until # that it was proven that marijuana could cause tuberculosis. No real problem, as they had TB licked by that time -- one shot at # and you couldn't get it if you tried -- but it was too late for an awful lot of smokers who had thought that all the evidence was in by #.) "I lost my mother to TB, and I plan for the rest of my life to take the conservative opinion wherever possible. No thanks. Barb. I'll take my Truth the sloppy, human way, through inference and deduction. Maybe I'll be wrong a lot more often...but maybe Tll have a lot more often to be wrong in. "Besides, I don't need any proof that you love me -- even though you're trying to get me to do something I don't think is safe, to reassure you. Things like just happened here a couple of minutes ago are all the 'proof I need." There was, of course, nothing she could say to that, and she even apologized, but somehow even as he mounted her to prove again the depth of his love by the strength of his hips he knew that the subject wa not closed, and that someday she would back him into a corner he couldn't talk his way out of, and on that day they would share the drug that made dissembly impossible, and she would leave him, just like all the others. He moaned, but she misunderstood and held him tighter. Mcginny tried for the fifth time to cut the leathery soyburger with his rubber fork. This time the disposable plate danced on the serving platform and he nearly lost the meal entirely. He swore a hideous oath and flung the fork angrily from him, but with the blind malignance that inanimate objects display when a man is in a towering rage, it bounced from the plasteel wall and dropped with an absurdly loud, high splash into the toilet. He rose quickly, cursing with a steady, monotonous rhythm. Taken stuff tastes enough like rubber already, he thought savagely, plunging his thick hand into the bowl. He was just too late to save the fork; the cell's designers had reasoned that a flusing mechanism could fail -- a serious calamity in a time-locked room -- and so that bowl simply emptied itself constantly, at a gentle speed which McGinny had not quite beaten. Swearing louder now, he straightened and walked to the sink to wash his hands. He could not for the life of him understand why he felt that the water there would be any cleaner than that which laved the bowl, and it irritated him immensely. Of course he burned his hands. But by that time the anger had reached the point from which one either tremblingly descends, or begins throwing things. He had few things to throw, and none he could spare. He counted to ten, then chanted Om Mani Padme Hum, and gradually the black rage subsided, at least to the point where he could see through the red haze. Make the karkin silverware rubber so we can't snuff ourselves, he thought, and look how much good it does. I'm really filled with the joy of livin' now. Finally he walked back to the automat, sat down in the desk chair which stood before it, and picked the soyburger from the plate on the serving platform. It was cold. "Sunnabitchin' machine s'posta keep the taken stuff hot, just my fuckin' luck to get the one don't There was nothing for it; the soyburger was all he would get until tomorrow morning. Growling, he raised it to his mouth and ripped off a piece with his teeth. "Hi there." He whirled, his hand absurdly cocking the soyburger like a weapon. There in the window of the cell door, above the skull-like time-lock, was a face. A person! McGinny ran to the door, flinging the soyburger into a comer. "Hello!" he shouted, and then pulled to a halt before the door, suddenly embarassed. They looked at each other for a while, McGinny seeing a yong kid, maybe twenty, with long blonde hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, looks like one o' them Trippies, oh Jesus I hope he likes to talk. "What are you in for?" "Embezzlement," McGinny tions that he could not form coherently enough to ask buzzing in his brain. "Oh," said the youth, adjusting a uniform cap on his shaggy head. He seemed somehow just slightly disappointed. "I guess that must be pretty interesting stuff, embezzlement. I get to talk to all kinds of interesting people on this job. Once...once I talked to a rapist." He almost seemed to be licking his lips, but McGinny was beyond noticing. He managed to stammer, "Hey, look, buddy... what...I mean, who are you? What are you doing here? How often do you come around? What...hey, how come I can even hear you in here?" The kid chuckled. "They've got a two-way sound system on the door, man. Didn't you know? Listen, don't freak. I'm, like, the guard. You didn't think they'd leave you alone with nobody to check on you, did you? Suppose you conked?" "But," McGinny said, "...I mean, do you come around alot? Can you stay a while and talk?" "Oh sure, " the kid assured him. "That's why I took this job, man. I'm into people, where they're at, like. All I have to do is walk around and talk to interesting people, and I only gotta cover fifteen guys a day. See, if you want to know the truth, the job's welfare." McGinny understood. The work-and-wage ystem as a means of distributing wealth was on its last legs -- there simply wasn't enough work to go around, and the population continued to climb. As a last-ditch stopgap, the government had taken to making up idiot work so that there would be sufficient jobs available to keep the traditional economic system staggering on, but the farce was becoming more obvious every year. What more obvious example than this young Trippie, "guarding" men in sealed plasteel cells to earn his living. But at this particular moment McGinny was overwhelmingly grateful for the continued sham. It was accidentally providing him with the means of maintaining his sanity. "Listen, " he said urgently, "listen, kid, if you'll come around and talk t me a lot. I'll..." He paused, baffled. He had nothing to offer. "I'll be grateful," he finished lamely, desperate with fear that he would be rejected. "Sure, man," the kid grinned. "I like to talk. ' Mostly I like to listen. I'm interested in the criminal mind and all. I'll bet you've got some interesting stories to tell." "Yeah, you bet, kid. I got the most goddamned . interesting stories you ever heard in your life!" He paused again, embarrassed by his fervor. "Hey, listen, man," the kid said softly. "I know how it is. Nobody likes to be lonely." And he smiled. The mome ahead completed its business and gunned away noisily, and Sol pulled his own vehicle smoothly up alongside the Chase World Bank. Rolling down the forward driver's-side window, he addressed it. "Solomon Orechal, license NY-#-#-#T." The Bank, which bore a remarkable resemblance to a vacuum cleaner making love to a garbage can, asked San Francisco a question, received a reply, and hesitation,' "Sir?" "Request additions and alterations allotment, three thousand dollars and zero cents; travel allotment, five hundred dollars and zero cents." "Purpose? " "A and A: Fortrex cooling unit. Travel; to Lesser Yuma. " "Justification?" "Profession: entertainer." "Type and Credit Number, please, " the Bank said a bit more respectfully. Its voice was like a contralto kazoo. "Folksinger. Number own agent." This time the machine actually paused. Barbara squirmed on the seat next to Solomon, twisting her hair nervously. "Aren't you going to get it, lover?" "Relax," he said easily. "The Bank's got to consult a human for this. Judgement decision required. It's bound to take a minute or SO; they've got to decide if I'm worth shipping across the country." "Oh, Sol..." "Now don't worry. Barb, I told you. If the Bank says no. I'll use my own credit and we'll go just the same. Now relax, will you?" The squat machine spoke up. "So ordered, " it said emotionlessly, "and good luck to you, sir. Have a pleasant time in Lesser Yuma. " "You got it," she said excitedly as Solomon engaged gears and roared away from the Bank, "oh, baby, you got it! When can we go?" "Get centered, mama," he answered as he slid the huge mobile home smoothly into the freeway traffic. "There's a lot of things we have to do first. We've got to get the cooling unit installed, gotta cop a big block of food, got to get the engine overhauled and tuned. Gotta say goodbye to our parents. It'll be a couple of days, easy. Less if we bust ass." Behind "his practical words Solomon was immensely pleased with himself Barbara had been difficult lately, carefully avoiding any mention of Truth Dope but finding more and more reasons to sulk. But he'd managed to find something to distract her. She'd never been out of New York State in her life, and travel held a fascination for her, as for so many. A similar feeling had been responsible for Solomon's decision to buy a Mome in the first place, and so he was somewhat excited about the trip himself And too, his ego writhed with gratification that is performing record was in fact impressive enough to make the Bank invest in his relocation to an area where performers were scarce. Consciously he had never doubted the outcome, and he would never admit his subconscious doubts, but it felt good to know. You had to be good to be a performer; it was one of the most sought-after jobs in the country. It wasn't only the tremendous prestige, nor even the almost orgasmic egoboo that applause brought. It was simply that the first time you saw drab, apathetic faces come alive during your set, the first time' you made some of those thousands of crowded, useless people a little more content with their lot, somehow you never again felt that gut-ache of uselessness quite so sharply yourself "Sol," Barbara said softly, breaking into hi reverie, "do we have to start...right away?" Her soft fingers traced a question mark on his thigh. "Mama," he mock-growled, "I'll never be that busy!" And no one was more surprised than he when, having found a place to park the Mome, he failed to achieve an erection. iiTM be an embezzler, Mr. McGinny?" "I embezzled." "No, I mean why?" "Because I wanted some money. " The kid was impervious to sarcasm. "What did you want the money for? " He adjusted the guard's cap that looked so incongruous atop his shaggy mane, his hand stroking his mustache on the way down in a mannerism which McGinny suspected he could learn to hate sometime in the next ten years. "I mean, it isn't like way back in the seventies when people were hungry. " "Listen, what is, a quiz show or something? I mean, what's it to you?" "Oh, I'm just curious, is all. I mean, there's nothing much else to do on this job but talk with you fellows. Anyway, crime interests me, you know? Like the things that made you end up...in here." "Well it's none of your taken business, how do you like that?" McGinny snapped. The kid made as if to turn away, and suddenly McGinny almost panicked. The kid was a pain in the joints, but he was better than nothing, better than the tangled, tormenting company of McGinny's own thoughts, of his self-recrimination and his frustrated rage. "No, wait, kid. Listen, I'm sorry, please wait. You...you don't want to lift off so soon. C'mon, look: a guy gets a little hot under the collar sometimes, you ask him personal questions. I didn't mean any offense. " The kid half-turned back to the door, stroking his mustache again. "Look, it was like this, see? I'm an accountant, I was I mean, and they pulled an audit at the wrong time. No big story -- I just got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. Gould have happened to a dozen other accountants, just happened to be me, that's all." "Why'd you have your hand in the cookie jar?" "I needed the money." There was a pause, and the kid turned to walk away again. McGinny cracked. "It was a fern, dammit. " The kid turned back again, smiling now. A gentle smile. "Yeah?" McGinny gave in. Maybe the kid was right -- it might help to talk about it, straighten his thoughts. In any case it was certainly better than trying to think of something new to play on the quadio. Or something to dictate into the voicewriter, which stubbornly refused to do anything more than repeat his own thoughts back to him. "It was like this: I had to get my hands on a whole lot of money at once to shut this fern up. She had something on me that could have ruined me, had me by the hairs, and she loved every minute of it, the little slot. She had it in for me, but she needed green more than she needed my scalp, and she didn't even care if I got burned gettin' it. 'You're an accountant,' sbe says. 'You can get it.' Sure. Easy. Ten years easy, and she walks away laughing. I had a chance. I'd be in here for murder right now." The kid was all ears now, face almost pressed up against the cell window like a child at a candystore window. "What'd she have on you?" he breathed. McGinny turned bright red. The kid didn't bother to pretend to leave again; he simply waited. After a time the prisoner answered him. "See, she was... she was pregnant vithout a license, and she was far enough along she was going to start showing ariy day, and she said when they hauled her in she was going to name me in the afFadavit. The pregnancy fine alone tould have ruined me, let alone the Lifetime Child Support without even a welfare option. I mean, every man's entitled to welfare, isn't he? You can see what a jam I was in. I just had to have the green -- she said if I gave her enough money to keep her and the kid until she could leave him with a sitter and go to work, she'd tell the Man she didn't know who the father was." "I don't get it," the kid said cheerfully. "What was the sweat? You'd have beat the heat easy.' Kark, they couldn't pin an Elsie's on you -- it's your word against hers. Unless there was a photographic record of the conception..." his voice trailed off with just the faintest suggestion of a leer. McGinny shrugged, made a face. "Well, maybe they couldn't have pinned an L.C.S. on me, if it came to that..." He seemed disinclined to continue. "Then I don't understand why you took such a risk," the kid persisted. "Well, " McGinny said reluctantly, "I...I got a wife and kids." "Oh," the kid said brightly. ' "Have you got a picture of them?" "No I have not got a harkin' picture of them!" "All right, all right, don't jump salty. I can take a hint. Sorry if I bothered you." The kid gave hi.s mustache a final tug, turned and walked out of view down the corridor. Suddenly terrified, not wanting to be alone with his memories, McGinny beat against the door with his fists. "Wait, damn you, wait Hold on a taken minute, I didn't mean to shout at you. Hey listen. I'm sorry, wait, come back, poease come back. Come back you bastard you, don't leave me alone. You flonofabitch. I'll cut your Footsteps echoed faintly down the acoustically-muffled hallway. McGinny looked down at his hands stupidly. They ached terribly, and the heels of them glowed an angry red. He went to the mirror on shaky legs, tried a sickly grin, then whirled and threw himself across the bed, and very suddenly he was crying, the wild, racking sobs of a child. Sol looked around at the hundreds of prairie rats who made up a cross-section of the population of this particular sector of Lesser Juma, brushed the guitar strap out of the way of his wrist, and adjusted the microphone with a feeling of growing desperation. He wasn't reaching them, he just couldn't get it on for this audience, and he felt a frustration which was growing familiar of late. It's the people, he told himself frantically, tuning up to stall for time. There was plenty of parking space left in the deserts, and hence a trouble-free existence for Mome-owners who could afford cooling gear. But the thousands who had flocked to the vast barren expanses had learned quickly that boredom was the price of exurban existence. They looked to entertainers like Solomon to keep them going, but the wary ennui they brought to a concert depressed him so much (he told himself now) that he just couldn't seem to get into his music tonight. In desperation, he seized upon a song that summed up his mood precisely, one of his own. For the first time in his career he didn't care how the audience liked it, whether it was what they wanted to hear. He hurt, and so he sang. This tune next year   will hate won or lost This time next year my lyridfes all will be crossed I'll either he in headlines Or standin in the breadlines It all depends on how the dice are tossed This time next year  will be up or down Far away from here or still hung up in town I'll either be in clover Or barely turnin' over It all depends on how the deal goes down I feel it cornin' onit's O so close now Wonder if it's bad or good Hope it isn't gonna be an overdose now Really wish I knew where I stood This time next year... I'll either win or lose This time I fear Tm on a short, short fuse I'll either be together Enjoin' sunny weather Or suckin' up an awful lot of booze He trailed off, fingers stinging from the harsh, emphatic runs. The catharsis of the bluew left him literally exhausted, but the pain was reduced to an empty, fading ache. The applause nearly frightened him out of his wits. From then on he had them, had them in the palm of his hand. Having made them cry, he could now make them laugh, or clap, or dance, or anything he had a mind to. He had shown them that he shared something with them, and now they could empathize, let themselves be taken with him along whatever musical road he chose to pick. It felt good. It was on the way home, joyfully breaking the speed limit and humming snatches of his closing number, that he heard the news from Barbara. "Sol?" "Yeah, kitten? Here, have a toke. " "Later." She waved the joint away. "Sol, the clinic called while you were onstage. I came out to get my shawl and played back the message." "Oh." There was a pause. "Sol, they said...the results were negative." A longer pause, long enough for humiliation to turn to anger. "Well what the hell is that supposed to mean? Why, they're full of shit. Negative! What is that supposed to signify, it's all in my karkin' mind? Is that it? " She was silent, and his fury boiled over. "Sol, I don't know, baby, I don't know. Maybe they made a mistake." She was crying, soundless tears highlighted by oncoming headlights, and he flung the joint out the window in disgust. "Don't make excuses for me, you taken slot! It's no big deal. So the results were negative, so there's a little something I got to work out in my head is all. You know I've got it. I just have to get it back." He drove on furiously, concentrating on the road until his eyes ached from squinting. They left the Mome colony behind, took a seemingly-abandoned side-road up into the hills. The roai! swerved treacherously beside sheer precipices at some points, but Sol had his control back now, and his hands on the steering wheel were unnaturally steady. The ponderous Mome was like a live thing under his hands, and he drove it with a grim determination. Eventually they passed through a great shadow-filled crevice between two walls of granite, and came out upon a ridge overlooking a great valley, invisible in the darkness. There were only seven or eight Momes parked here, clustered around the natural mountain spring which surfaced in this unlikely spot. It was sufficiently long that there was at least an acre for each of them. Solomon had been lucky to find this place, the few who had tended to keep their mouths shut. We are all very happy here, he thought savagely, wheeling the huge Mome to its parking space. He parked, shut down the engine, extruded the watersucker and threw power to the house generator. Pushing the button that dropped the seat-back flat, he got up and walked to the back of the Mome, flinging himself down on the bed without a word. Barbara got up and walked slowly back to the bed, sat down on the carpeted floor beside it. "Sol, what do we do now?" "What the kark can I do?" he said, voice muffled by the pillow. "Well, as far as I can see, there's only two things left. Analysis, or... " "Or the Truth Dope," he snarled, lifting his head to throw her a venomous glance. "Get my head candled or my chromosomes scrambled, that's the choice, huh?" '"Well, all I know is I'm pretty karkin' sick and tired of masturbating, " she shot back, and then gasped. He winced. "I'm sorry, baby," she said pitifully. "You know I didn't mean that. " "Well, it's true, and there's nothing I can do about it, " he barked. "I'll be go to hell before I'll let some professional voyeur probe into my sex-life. Analysis! No thanks, mama. If there's anything wrong with me, I'll fix it myself. I'm not about to have some fumble-fingered idiot "adjusting' my personlity for me." "Then do some truth, lover," she pleaded. "Just once, do Truth with me. Once we know what it is, we've got it licked. It'll never bother us again." He tried to stall for time. "Ah, we'd never find a connection for Truth out here in the sticks. Forget it, mama. It'll pass. " She bit her lip. "Sol...I've got some here. I brought it with us from New York." He stared at her, mouth dry, and knew that it was all over. "Sol, please baby, take it with tne. Honey, I don't want to live with a man who's...who's impotent." It was the first time either of them had said the word, but he didn't explode as she had half expected him to. He only buried his head in the pillow for a long, long time, tasting defeat, accepting what was to come. At last he raised himself up on his elbows and regarded her levelly. "Okay, Barbara," he said quietly. "We'll do Truth." Shakin! Taken! All forsaken! I think I got to flash now, mama. Believe I got to flash! Mcginny slumped in his chair, growling along with the fiizzbass. The quadio's separation was improperly adjusted, forcing him to hold his head at an uncomfortable angle. By now this had produced a permanent crick in his neck, which had a serious eflFect on his peace of mind, not to mention his taste. The snarling flash tune he had opted for was symptomatic of a growing unease (as, in startlingly close analogy, it was with flash freaks outside the prison). The ex-accountant was seething with frustrated rage, and would not understand why. The moog took a solo on the left front speaker, began pouring on the watts. With a treble shriek, the speaker went dead. McGinny howled with rage, sprang from the chair and stood under the sf)eaker, cursing fulminously. He leaped upward and smashed his fist at the darkened area behind which the dead speaker crouched, accomplishing nothing whatever. "Ten years," he gibbered, "Ten years!" He began slamming his fists against the near wall, flaying the limits of his universe with a black hatred. His eye was caught by the skull face of the time-lock, grinning reminder of the unpaid balance of his sentence, and he struck at it savagely, fracturing two knuckles on its hard surface. His bellow of pain chopped olf in the middle as he saw his jailer watching him from a foot away. The kid's face held a clinical interest; his cornflower-blue eyes gazed with infuriating calmness into McGinny's. "Oft," the prisoner snarled over his shoulder at the paraplegic quadio, which went completely silent at once. "What the hell are you staring at?" he demanded of the young guard. "Why'd you hurt your hand?" the kid asked. McGinny checked an angry retort. This kid was just too dumb to know any better, he decided. "Ah, the karkin' quadio blew a speaker," he grumbled. "Looks okay from here," the kid said. "Well, it doesn't sound okay from here," McGinny snapped. "Left front channel's gone." "Gee, that's a beat," the kid acknowledged. "They wouldn't crack the lock for something..." "I know they wouldn't crack the lock for something like that," McGinny barked. "What the hell you rub it in for?" His hand began to throb, the numbness wearing olf now. "I didn't mean to rub it in, Mr. McGinny. I just thought you mighta thought..." "Well-I-didn't-so-just-shut-upabout-it-all-right?" the prisoner said through grated teeth. Kark, this kid was dumb! "Sure. Hey listen, wow, I meant to ask you. You never told me about how come you let that fern talk you into taking the green." The jailer tugged at his mustache and regarded McGinny expectantly. McGinny turned, took a few steps from the window. Then he frowned and turned back resignedly. "It's like I told you: she was going to stick it to me." "Yeah, but she couldn't prove a thing. Or could she?" "She didn't have to prove it. I told you I got a wife and kids, didn't I? What do you think my wife'd do. I'm down in Paternity Court? What do you think my boss'd do? Bigshot Z.P.G. supporter, he'd toss me on the street in a minute. It ain't like if I sold illegal dope or run over somebody stoned. You can't get fired for criminal record any more. But an unlicensed pregnancy? A third kid? Don't make me laugh. She didn't have to prove a thing to Bnish me off." "Yeah, I guess I see..." said the kid. "But one thing I don't understand..." "You don't understand nothing. You never been married. I'd have done anything to keep Alice from leaving me. Anything." His voice broke. "I...I loved her." "That's what I don't understand," the kid said eagerly. "I mean, if you loved her so much, how come you topped this other fern? I mean, sure, everybody likes variety once in a while, but you must have a House in your neighborhood, you must have had the money." "Hey listen, I never paid for it in my life, " McGinny said proudly. "I mean, half the thrill of love is in the conquest. " He had read that somewhere. "So then, since your wife was already 'conquered' she didn't turn you on?" "Of course she turned me on. I told you I loved her, didn't I? But there was this fern I met at the Automat, worked in the same building, and she looked like she never had it, you know? So I called her up that night, invited her out for a drive." "Top her that night?" the kid exclaimed. "Well, sure," McGinny said modestly. "You know, I kind of always had good luck with bargains." "Plural? You mean there were others?" "Not too karkin' many others. I told you I loved my wife," McGinny said suspiciously. "But you said... " "I know what I karkin' said," McGinny barked. "Okay, take it easy. I was just asking. "Cause I thought you meant..." "Well, keep your thoughts to yourself Jesus, you ask a lot of dopey questions. What's the matter, you got nothing better..." His voice trailed off as he caught himself. "I mean, what makes you so taken curious?" "Oh, I just wonder a lot. You know, how come you're in there and I'm out here and all -- I've always been kind of philosophical, you know? Into people, like I said. I mean, we all start out the same, and some of us do things others don't. I guess I'm just curious about what makes people tick. How come she got pregnant?" "Huh?" "I mean, don't you use anything?" "Well, sure, but I mean, I didn't know. Hell, first date and all, I...I just figured she'd be using something. Nice piece like that..." "But you said she looked like a virgin." "Well, that's it, see? How was I supposed to know she'd spread right off like that?" "But you just said you always had good luck with..." ""Get oflF my case, will you? I'm telling you, this fern was a slot. She...she told me it was all right, see, because she wanted to get me by the pills, pump me for green, get it? " "'Look, I don't know, you were there and I wasn't, but frankly that sounds like a load of used food to me," the kid said evenly. "You told me all she asked for was support until she could work again, didn't you? And just for rap and lose her own Welfare. Doe.sn't sound like a slot to me." "Get out of here, you fuzz-faced stuffer! Who the hell asked for your opinion, anyway? Go on, get taken before I..." "Before you what, bro?" the kid asked softly. "You can't get out of there, can you? You can't even snuff yourself to embarass me. I'm not a captive audience, but you're sure a captive performer. I don't understand what you did, and you're going to explain it to me. Sooner or later." "I'll see you in hell first," McGinny shouted, almost gibbering from helpless rage. "Sooner or later," he repeated, tugging at his mustache. McGinny's eyes widened, and hfe placed a hand on either side of the window. "You're enjoying this, aren't you? You little nark, you're really enjoying this!" "Does that matter?" the kid asked softly. "Does it really make any difference whether I enjoy it or not? All I'm doing is asking you questions. The answers you already know yourself, right? Or you couldn't answer the questions. I'm not putting any words in your mouth -- just asking questions so I can understand why you did what you did. All I want, " he said simply, "is the truth." "You want it, you clinical little bastard, but maybe  don't," McGinny snarled. "Oh, well..." said the kid, shrugging. "There I can't help you, Mr. McGinny. I mean, even if I don't ask you another thing, you've got ten years to go, and there's noplace to hide in there. How long you think you can duck the truth?" "Forever, you lousy bastard," McGinny roared. "Get out of my life, go on, get the hell out of here." He turned away in dismissal, began pacing the room angrily.  don't have to take this kind of sewage! I'll write to the Warden, to my Congressman, to he stopped suddenly, struck by the obvious. Prisoners lost all their civil rights -- including access to the postal computer network. His voicewriter lacked the familiar "Transmit" key. There was no way for him to get a letter to anyone, unless the kid agreed to take it down for him and deliver it. Somebody else has got to come by, sooner or later, he thought frantically. A maintenance man, somebody! No one had so far. He was trapped, pure and simple, trapped with this shaggy punk kid with his words that twisted the truth into lies and made you feel like you'd done something wrong, like you deserved all this instead of merely being caught up in a web of circumstances that could have happened to anybody. The little staffer'll he back, to pick at me and twist everything all up. Enjoys it, like he was pulling the wings off flies, like... He spun around angrily, and the kid was still there, his face frarned in the window over the skull-like time-lock. "Spying on me, you..." McGinny groped for words. "No," the kid murmured. "Just...just observing you." McGinny howled. The drug which Solomon Orechal's age knew as Truth Dope had been known to man for hundreds of years before a single word was ever written about it. Known, that is, to some men. The first words written about Truth Dope appeared in the middle Twentieth Century. Author legend of unknown origin concerning a forgotten tribe in the trackless wilds of South America who used a drug he called "yage," which induced temporary mental telepathy between its users. The brief mention was too preposterous to be taken very seriously, of course, but there were many in those times who took preposterous things seriously. Rumors traveled the junkie grapevine, apocrypha rode the dealers' trail, and the A-heads spoke in whispers of yage. In vain. Yage existed, and its ridiculous Lost Tribe as well. But they were not exactly lost. They were hidden. For the telepathy that its users experienced under the influence of yage was more than the ability to send and receive messages without material aid. It was rather a total dissolution of all the walls surrounding human consciousness, a complete opening of minds one to the other, providing the first and only escape from the solitary confinement of the human skull. It was a melding of personalities, a stripping away of all cover. Two pc(q)le who took yage simply had no secrets from one another. At all. Secret thoughts, inner motivations, hopes, shames, dreams, pretenses, likes and dislikes and the true inner feelings of that part of the heart whose name is unpronounceable, all were laid bare to a partner in the yage experience. That the drug should have remained so perfect a secret for so many hundreds of years was not in the least surprising. Realizing what they possessed, and its potential for good and evil, its discoverers -- the Kundalu -- adopted a policy of isolationism utterly simple in execution; anyone they did not recognize was apprehended, and yage stuffed down his throat. Then they either killed him or married him. This delightftilly uncomplicated system lasted until #. Inevitably, the Kundalu were discovered, by a real estate, developer looking for a place to put # condominiums. Over twelve hundred years of self-knowledge on a level unknown to mankind at large had made the Kundalu wise and canny indeed -- # of the condominiums had been built and fifty-three sold before the clearing crews stumbled across the Kundalu village. The strange and humble indians would not leave the land where holy yage grew, nor permit its razing. They resisted the developer's half-hearted attempt to learn their vestigial spoken language, lest the secret of its growth be somehow wrested from them. He, in turn, was impatient -- and out there in the bush, no sanctions could be applied to him -- he was, after all, building dwelling units. He slaughtered the simple Kundalu to the last man. It chanced that four of the crew assigned to demolish the primitively beautiful village of the Kundalu were welfare clients -- counterculture types who recognized the ceremonial bowls of dried leaves they found for what they were: a communal drug. The foreman found them inside a structure like a decapitated dome, open to the skies but closed to the gaze of passers-by, and he understood enough of the joyous babbling he overhead to shoot all four of them dead. In six months he and the developer had a small but established corporate identity in the underworld of big-time drug traffic. In a year, the developer had him killed. Within four years, the developer was outselling the quasilegal giant. Speed Inc. and was giving even the mammoth, completely legal International Marijuana Harvesters a pain in the balance sheet, despite the fact that Truth (as yage was brandnamed) was still on the Illegal List. The usual controversy flared in the news media, freighted with a larger than usual bulk of ignorance, for very little indeed was known about Truth Dope. In time the substance might completely overturn many time-honored concepts of personal privacy, many institutions of law and justice, many truisms of human psychology -- but at present absolutely all that was known about it was that it was curiously resistant to chemical analysis, and that no more than three people could safely share the drug. The stressed of mingling identities with a larger number were severely unhinging; the ego tended to get lost, and the secret of finding it again had died with the Kundalu. Before that had been proven to the counterculture's cynical satisfaction, many communes ended in gibbering insanity. Nor did many triads flourish. By its nature Truth became a couples' drug. Thus: Solomon and Barbara sat naked in the rear of the Mome, facing each other in lotus. The windows were opagued, the roof transparent; the mobile home was open to the skies but closed to the gaze of passer-by. "Should we smoke?" Sol considered this at length, shrugged. "I don't see why not. The parts to be opened go deeper than pot can reach. Maybe it'll relax us. This is going to be a little scary." Barbara caught his nervousness, mulled it over carefully. "Sol...you're really jumpy about this, aren't you?" A flash of insight: "You've done Truth before, haven't you?" "Why ask? You'll know for yourself in a little while." "Sol...Sol, maybe you're right. We don't have to rush into this. I don't..." "You don't want to know?" Sol burst out. "After all the pleading and convincing you're scared of the Truth? Oh, no! Have a few tokes and then we'll get to it. I'm not going to call this off now, and then wait to see how long it is before you want to know again, before you start hinting and then urging and then demanding. No way, mama. We re doing Truth today." Barbara lowered her eyes, and busied herself searching for the Grassmasters. She found a crumpled pack on the right-hand service shelf qver the bed and passed them to him. Current social etiquette required the woman to wave the joint alight, but Solomon had chosen to smoke GMs specifically because they did not have ignotips, and had to be lit by hand. He enjoyed the archaic ritual of striking fire with his hands and placing it where it was needed, and spent a not insignificant portion of his income on thfe hard-to-find matches. Now more than ever, she sensed, he would want that feeling of control. He accepted the marijuana impassively, producing a box of wooden matches from the pocket of the tunic which lay beside him on the bed. By his other side lay the ancient, hand-made Gibson J-# which was his comfort and sometimes his voice, and Solomon struck a match along the silkand-steel A string with a quick snap of his wrist. Echoes ot whispering giants overflowed the sounding-box, and Solomon sucked flame through the filtertip joint with a sharp urgency. He passed the joint to Barbara, cupping it protectively in his hand. Reaching to take it, she was struck for the first time by how much in him was conservative, if not reactionary. His independent thinking had struck her until now only as an evidence of the creativity she admired and loved in him; all at once she realized how much of him yearned for an earlier age. He cupped the joint as if wary of detection -- yet pot had been legalized long before his instincts were trained. He played an acoustic guitar in an electronic age -- certainly it sounded mellower than contemporayr instruments, but mostly it was older. In a dozen innocent mannerisms she detected for the first time an undercurrent of yearning for the uncomplicated past, when men still controlled their destiny. If I keep pulling insights like this, she thought, gulping smoke, I wont need Truth. And it was true. Expecting imminent truth, her mind was revving up, extending the sensitivity threshold of its own built-in truth detectors, trying to approach both drug and experience as honestly and openly as possible. She passed the joint back to Solomon, who took it impassively, emptying his lungs for a second hit. He would not meet her eyes. She watched his bare chest fill as he drew on the smouldering cigarette, and became unaccountably aware of the weight of her own breasts. She looked down at them, and it was only when she observed that her nipples were swollen that she remembered that before the night was out, Solomon's impotence should be over at last. In a vivid flash of memory she saw again the look of his eyes when orgasm took him, and she shivered. "Barb." She looked up. He was holding out the joint, breath held tightly. Brushing hair from her eyes with # vague hand, she took the joint, which was burned down close to the filter. She inhaled sharply. Very suddenly, the air began to sparkle, and a gentle buzzing filled her head. "Whoops, I'm stoned," she said and giggled, taking another puff. "Say, you must have been smoking some of that there merry-wanna," Solomon said gravely. "Well of course, ye damn fool," she crowed, spraying smoke. "How else would I get stoned?" They roared with laughter. Sol retrieved the joint from her relaxing fingers and stubbed it out in an ashtray. Still giggling, he slid open a sliding panel in the wall, removed an Oriental figurine; a carven dragon with sparkling eyes. He touched it under one wing, and its mouth opened wide. Prisoned in its lower fangs was a blue capsule. Solomon tilted the dragon. It spat the capsule onto his upturned palm. Barbara stopped giggling. "Oh," she said. "Yes." Solomon met her eyes. "Yes." He made a long arm, pulled open the refrigerator, and removed a plastic flask, red with white logo. "Better take this with soda," he said judiciously. "Taken stuff tastes wor.se'n peyote." He could have read that in a magazine, she thought. He put the flask of Coke on the bed between them, shifting his it. He dried his sweaty left hand on his thighs and broke the capsule open onto his palm. It made a powdery pile of grey veined with green, fine-grained and dry. He held out his hand. Barbara reached, gingerly bisected the pile with her thumbThe Ocean Living Institute has been formed to conduct and promote research in oceanography and independent self-sufficient forms of community living on the ocean. It will encouram irdividuals and business firms to form Investment groups to fund construction and operation of ocean based industries, serve as a clearinghouse for ocean living contacts, publish information on legal and other aspects of oceanic settlement, publish information on new concepts in oceanography, aquaculture, and oceanic settlement, and conduct tests on new concepts and devices. the institute is a nonprofit corporation and contributions of cash and supplies are deductible for federal income tax purposes. The institute is in the formative stages, and is especially interested in hearing from people who can help to develop it. Further information is available from, and contributions should be sent to: # River Road North Arlington, New Jersey # nail, sweeping the two portions far apart. Looking up at him one last time, she bent close, licked one of the two doses from his hand, and grabbed for the Coke. She made a face. "Oooooh!" He nodded gently as she gulped Coke, then took the flask from her. Eyes on the remaining powder, he licked and gulped Coke in almost the same motion. When he had swallowed, he put down the flask, wiped his hands on the bedspread and took her hands in his. "Okay, mama," he said with great tenderness, suddenly vulnerable. "Here we go." sleep, flailing wildly with leaden arms. "Goddam skull-face kid," he shouted, and then fell back exhausted, drenched in sour sweat. Coherence came slowly to his thoughts, and he was torn by an unbearable craving for a cigarette. He tried to masturbate, and could not. He rolled finally from the bed, padded to the bookviewer and selected a book at random, falling heavily into the chair. He stared at the displayed title page for a few moments, reached out to punch for the next page and slapped the set off instead. He buried his face in his hands and wept. Nerves stretched wire-tight, he shook with racking sobs. He dug his knuckesl into his eyes, but could not banish the haunting, palpable vision of Annie beside him on her bed, naked and vulnerable, cringing under his wrath (his baby planted now in her belly). He ground the heels of his hands against his ears, but could not banish the sound of her tears as she begged him for emotional support ("You said you were going to divorce her. Mack, I need you with me on this -- it's our baby."). He beat at his skull with his clenched fists, but he could not deny the memory of his decision to "borrow" enough money from his company to leave town, going underground and leaving the whole impossible tangle of his life behind. And above all, he could not shut out the voice of the blonde kid with the incongruous hat, could not seal the holes that soft voice blasted through McGinny's carefully-wrought fortress of rationalization. When the mind refuses to face truth, it very often knows what it is doing; a high truth-level is only tolerable to saints and those sinners who, loving themselves, have learned how to forgive themselves. But McGinny no longer had any choice. For the kid never attacked in any overt way, never quite gave him a justification for his helpless rage. He just...asked questions. and McGinny could not keep the answers from leaping unbidden to his mind. Nor could he forget them now. The jailer's soft voice, hideously amplified, seemed to fill the cell, as it had for days now. "Well I don't know, Mr McGinny. You say that security and prestige were your goals, but doesn't it seem like you already had them both? And yet you weren't satisfied..." "So then you're saying sex is kind of like a power trip for you, aren't you?" "Well, why didn't your father divorce her then? I would have. " "Then Annie's probably having a pretty rough time of it now?" "I get it. You were afraid to leave Alice...No?" "But Isn't that just a fancy way ol saying...?" ."but you just said... " But didn't you just... ?" "But I thought..." "But..." McGinny burst from the chair with an animal howl and swept the desk clean of paper with clawed hands, swinging his arms wide and scattering sheets in all directions. "I'll kill you, " he shrieked, and tore at his hair. He lurched around the cell, kicking and punching at the unyielding fixtures, slamming his shoulder into the wall with whimpered oaths. He beat on the surface of the quadio, snapping off both controls, and the machine roared into life. Shorted somewhere within, it picked its own tape, at peak volume. The selection was old, stereophonic, activating the rear speakers only -- it balanced perfectly. The earsplitting voice of Leon Russell plaintively asked: Are we really happy with this lonely ame we play? Searching for words to say Searching but not finding understanding anyway We re lost in this masquerade. McGinny staggered, his hands over his ears. He could not shut out the song. He lay down on his back and smashed at the quadio with his bare heels, and it went dead with one last shriek. As he lay panting on the floor, his ears still ringing, he opened his eyes to see the kid watching him from the door window. McGinny began to sweat profusely. He struggled to his feet and looked wildly around the room. Rubber silverware, paper "Say, did I near noise just now? Kinda late to play the quadio, isn't it, Mr. McGinny? Oh, I bet I know. You got to missing Alice and the kids, didn't you, Mr. McGinny? "Hey, Mr. McGinny! What are you...hey "Oh holy shit. "Oh wow." The kid's face pressed closer. The drug came on very slowly at first. For what seemed like hours, Barbara felt only a gradual numbing of her extremities, a slow falling-off of communication with the nerves and muscles of her limbs. She and Solomon gazed deep into each other's eyes, motionless in lotus. She yearned to let her gaze travel downward over his body, but she maintained eye contact tenaciously, as though afraid of opening a circuit that was being built between them. Very suddenly she was blind. Almost immediately, all tactile sensation vanished from her body. Adrift in crackling black, she could no longer see or touch anything in any direction. Although she had learned enough from friends and media reports to be expecting this, it still took her by surprise. She yelped. As from a great distance, she heard Solomon's voice reassuring her, needlessly explaining that they were only experiencing a repression of distractions, that it was only a drug which would wear off, the standard litany of calming things that are said to one who might be freaking out. The truly extraordinary thing was that the voice changed as it spoke from stereo the monaural, converging inside her skull, as though she had switched from speakers to headphones. "It's okay, Sol, I'm all right," she assured him, and then realized that she had not spoken aloud. She tried to and could not. They drifted for awhile in silence, then. And as they drifted, sparkling darkness everywhere, each became aware of a growing presence, for which no words or symbols existed, which their minds could not grasp but only seefeeltaste. Barbara concentrated as hard as she could on the complex abstract which was Solomon Orechal's identity in her mind; received no familiar echo. Of course, she thought, of course he sees himself differently than I do. She waited patiently for her mind to construct a suitable analogy for the identity-waves she was beginning to receive, and wondered what he was seeing. Soon I'll know. The darkness coalesced, lightened perceptibly. An image began to take form, seen simultaneously from all angles. It was a smooth iridium sphere. It gleamed before her in the swirling dark, self-contained and apparently impenetrable. Her heart began to beat faster, a bass drum miles below her. As she watched, spellbound, she saw the polished surface of the sphere begin to discolor, to tarnish. Portions of its surface began to bubble and flake away, as though the metallic sphere were immersed in a clear acid that was slowly oxidizing it away. A high, sharp whining became audible, a sound of reluctant disintegration. The image disturbed and frightened Barbara. She sensed an uncontrollable power latent in the sphere, ready to burst it asunder when it was sufficiently weakened. Girlfriends had tried to tell her of their experiences with Truth, but' the closest Barbara had heard to this was a woman who said she initially perceived her partner as a man in full medieval armor, visor down. Unsettled, Barbara found that she was employing a pressure she could not define, in a manner she could not describe, against the sphere she could not understand. Whatever it is, she screamed silently, let it end now. It's been too long already. Time stood still, and she slipped into a new plane of understanding, intuition refined into knowledge. She perceived all at once that the walls of the sphere drew strength in some way from the marijuana Solomon had smoked -- and that he had known they would. He lied, came the thought. And at that, the sphere crumbled like a sugar easter egg in a glass of boiling water. Parts of that explosion of data she forgot as soon as she perceived them. Parts of it she could carry with her to the end of her days. Some things simply could not be forced into words, some translated as paragraphs, some as single words or impressions coded only to subvocalized grunts or wordless cries. Alone in the darkness that crackled and roared she recoiled, struggling to reduce the enormous input to something comprehensible, pursued by howling fragmentary echoes of forgotten thoughts and memories... thinks he's so smart. I'll break his nobody knows but me so alone like this, I don't look things on so I could squint in the mirror and see what a lady looked like in her don't look in I didn't mean to won't let me, just bee it wasn't cheating exactly, it was don't #... so pretty, I wonder what her... don't how could she do this to me after all we holy shit it squirted all over my If only I don't look insi what's he doing to Mother? don't I I Shaken to her roots, she reeled but held on, too terrified to let go. There was something beneath, something hidden, something that made alarms go off all over her subconscious. And as well as something hidden, there was something missing, and she knew intuitively that they were connected. What's missing? she screamed toward the place where she had once supposed Cod to be. What is wrong? The onslaught continued, keeping her off-balance. Gawd you give a pain in the ass Janice, you real... think I got away with it this ti... got to get a B this term of Old Karkheadll... don't loo... God the Father Almighty Who... she suspects other kids get a bike so why can't red like blood be good, God, I'll be don't look insi n't you understand I've got to be the master in my own why you don't look... seen a... sunset like... that before... hairy black spider that so alone and they Inside! With a sinking feeling of terror and despair Barbara yanked her attention from the chaotic distracting turmoil that the sphere had held, and turned it inward. She found only the confusion of her own thoughts. She was alone inside her skull. Where was Solomon? Why was he not probing her consciousness, as deep within her identity as she was in his? Frantic now, she reached back out to the welter of tangled thoughts and forgotten memories emanating from her lover, and swept at it, in a manner impossible to describe. The roar of swarming images died as though she had struck a suppressor switch, and she saw several things very clearly. She saw that Solomon had palmed most of his share of the drug. She saw his consciousness, trembling, crouched, incoherent with terror. She saw at last that which he had sought most to hide: that the feeling he professed to have for her was non-existent, a cover for his real motivations. She saw his triie reason for clinging to her; a paralyzing fear of being, in history's most crowded era, intolerably alone. She saw that her man had never confronted her identity as an individual, never allowed himself to perceive her as a person, as anything but a palliative for hideous loneliness. Nor anyone else in his life. She saw that he was afraid to confront her identity, to accept the guilt he knew he bore for using another human being as a tool, a teddy-bear, a living fetish with which to ward off demons of solitude. She saw the indifference with which he regarded her own hopes and needs and fears, saw the relentless guilt which made him despise himself for it. She saw the desperation in which he had sought to hide the truth from them both by reducing his dosage of yage and distorting both their synaptic responses with pot. Conprehension and compassion washed over her as a single wave, a wave of pity and love for this tormented man to whom she had given her heart, and she cried out in her mind: it's all right, Sol, it's please. I love you. Undrugged, her heard her not. She saw swimming to the surface of his mind a surreal cartoon figure of herself, choked with revulsion, recoiling from the selfishness of his love, face contorted with bitter rejection. No! she screamed silently, but she knew he could not hear, knew she could not make him hear, and knew with astonished horror that he was snapping, could no longer bear the crushing pain of the guilt he could not forget; and she realized with a nauseating certainty what he was going to do. The throbbing undercurrent of fragmented voices swelled to a shuddering roar in her skull, and now each of those voices was only a throaty growl. She screamed once, and then many times. The hissing of the torch reverberated in the bare corridor with an acoustic sibilance that was unpleasant if you listened to it. Jerry and Vito had learned not to listen to it. "Ain't had this thing out of the shop in so long, I feel like I oughta take it for a walk," Jerry said, adjusting the oxy mix. "Yeah," grunted Vito from behind his opaque mask. "Naw, we sure don't have to do this very often." Vito grunted again. "Wonder what made him do it. You know? Whole place like that to hisself, nobody to tell him when to go to work, when to go to sleep. Just lie around all day and think about ferns, that's what I'd do." 'So get busted, " Vito grumbled. "Hey, bro. What's with you? You got a belly-ache or something?" "Him? He ain't givin' nobody nothin'." Vito grunted a third time, and Jerry shook his head, returning to his cutting. Welfare check's due tonight, he thought suddenly, and smiled behind the polarized mask that shielded his eyes from the arc of the tortl. Noises came from the distance, approaching. Hastily, Vito stubbed out a Gold and tucked the roach in his shirt pocket. The warden came into view around the corner, followed by two long-haired guards. He swept past Vito and Jerry without a word, ignoring the torch, and peered into the window of the cell door. "Mmmmmmm," he said. "Yes." The two guards shifted their weight restlessly. "All right, said the balding official. "All right. Obviously it's a suicide." "Obviously," murmured one of the guards, a blonde, mustached youth. The warden glared at him irritably. "Why wasn't I notified at once?" "You were, sir," the guard said evenly. "Union regs say you only have to check 'em twice on night shift unless otherwise ordered. That's how I found him an hour ago. It was already too late to help him." "Oh, very well, very well," the warden grumbled. "Carry on, you two." He went away, trailing the two guards. The blonde one was smiling faintly. Jerry and Vito looked at each other, shrugged. Jerry realigned the still-snarling torch against the door, and Vito relit his joint. "Sure is a good thing this old torch leaks so bad, or he'd have smelled that and taken your ass," Jerry grinned. Vito passed him the joint; he slid it behind his mask and toked quickly, before the smoke could accumulate and lace his eyes. After a time he left off tracing a nearly-complete, foot-and-a-half circle in the plasteel door, and paused. Giggling, he began to inscribe eyes and a broadly smiling mouth within the circle. Vito watched and smoked silently. Again echoes sounded distantly. "Jesus," said Jerry. Vito glared at him and swallowed the joint. Hastily, Jerry completed the circle and began hammering at the disc he had cut, frantic to unseat it before his artwork was seen. He was barely in time; even as the plug fell into the cell with a crash, two fat men came into view at the end of the corridor. One wore black and one wore grey. Both wore the same expression. Jerry and Vito scrambled to their feet and backed away from the door, striving to look straight. The fat men came near simultaneously, entirely ignoring the two welfare workers. The one in grey reached gingerly through the new hole in the cell door, pulled toward himself with a gloved hand. They both entered, walked a few paces inside, stopped. "Not much either of us can do here, is there. Doctor?" "It seems not. Father." "Well, then " "Yes." They emerged, began to walk away. "Hey," Jerry yelped. The physician turned. "Yes?" "Wh...what do we do with...?" The fat grey man paused, thought for a moment. "Unlock the infirmary and put him in there somewhere. I'll have a vehicle sent." He and the priest left, talking about chess. Jerry looked at Vito, who gave him a very black look. He knelt and extinguished the torch, and silence fell in the corridor. They went inside. "Jeez," Vito breathed softly. It sounded like a prayer. The two-inch-thick plug was lying just inside the doorway, its imbecile smile upside down. Beyond it lay McGinny, on his back, a feral and bloody grin on his face. His wrists had been chewed open. "Jeez," Vito sai# again, and began putting on his gloves. Solomon orechal sat in his chair and surveyed the room which was to be his home for the next twenty-to-life-depending. With a disgusted sigh he picked his J-# from the bed, hit a G, tuned, hit an E, tuned, hit an E again. Satisfied, he modulated through D back into G, added a seventh. "This time next year" he sang, and stopped. After a while he sang "Pack Up Your Sorrows," and that was all right, but when he had finished he found himself wondering who he could give all his sorrows to, so he went right into Lightning's "Prison Blues," and managed to get off on that. But before long, inevitably, he was playing the song he used to close every set, the one he hadn't wanted to play here, now. He was halfway into James Taylor's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight," when he saw the face at the cell window, blonde mustache under a blue uniform hat. He leaped from the chair, tossing his pride-and-joy heedlessly toward the bed, and sprang to the window. hear me?" he shouted. "Hey man, be measured," came a soft voice, electronically muffled. "I can hear you heavy." "Wow, listen," Solomon babbled, "you work here, man? Or what? Hey listen, you want to hear a song? You got a minute? " "Sure, bro, sure. Take it easy." Solomon ran back to the bed, picked up his axe and threw the strap over his head. He began frantically patting his pockets for a flat-pick, discovered he held one in his hand. "What are you in for?" the blonde guard asked quietly. "Huh? Me? Oh, uh rape," Solomon said, gripping the pick. "...and murder," he added, and looked down, hitting a very intricate chord. 'The blonde jailer's eyes lit up, and he tugged at his mustache,k Among the characteristics by which life can be recognized are ingestion, excretion, irritability, tenacity... It was a young thee, as trees go, planted from seed in the days preceding urban sprawl. Its cultivator, an elderly man with an inordinate and uncommercial fondness for berries, owned a hundred acres of foliage adorned with black and purple and red morsels of sweetness. He lived in a rambling manse of a style too southern for the local climate; thus he succumbed to pneumonia before the seedling bore its first fruit. For a time, rabbits and squirrels feasted on his bequest; the tree, mature at last, showered its bounty in the weeds for their sole benefit. But, inevitably, civilization arrived. A contractor annexed the land for his latest subdivision, and the vines and brambles were mashed under tractor treads, drowned in fresh topsoil, buried beneath concrete. The trees, toco -- the old oaks, the hickories, the elm -- were all cut down for standing in the wrong places... all but the berry tree, which the bulldozers had somehow missed. The contractor decided to leave it there, at the edge of one of the newly-formed, ungreen yards -- he thought it gave the property character. He resolved tocharge an extra five hundred dollars for it. Harry and Marlene bought that house, and they laid out a flagstone patio in the shade of the tree. It was March, and the branches were still bare. its gravitors demolished. Nutrient fluid from the suspension-tank foamed over the controls, but he didn't worry about that -- they were too disrupted to suffer further harm. He fought tenaciously to maintain the tender host-body's life-functions, to preserve the faint spark that flickered through its neural web. Yet all his hyperorganic power was insufficient; his host's senses dimmed, its pulse diminished, it manipulators ceased to respond. Additional emergency procedures were futile; he contracted into the ultimate shelter of the central body cavity. Despair descended, a despair he had never known before. He might survive the crash, but unless he obtained a new host immediately, his dessication in raw atmosphere would follow with relentless speed. The prospect of such a fate disturbed him little, though it was a particularly grisly sort of end, but the shocking reality of his personal failure brought him to the brink of catatonic dysfunction. He was shamed, and his own unspecialized tissues revolted against his shame, secreting painful acid enzymes throughout his amorphous, slightly alkaline body. He had misjudged the strength of the deadly sphere of radiation enveloping this siren world of blue seas and white clouds. It was only just that he should pay for his failure with his life -- he resigned himself to that -- but his duty lay in warning his comrades of that danger, arid the abstract imperative of duty demanded that he survjve long enough to accomplish it. A violent concussion shuddered through the cabin as the craft slammed into the densest layer of atmo.sphere. Deceleration hurled his ruined life-support system against the view-screen. Helpless and on the edge of utter withdrawal, he dreamed, lapsing into shock as the crash plastered his protoplasm against the bulkheads. He dreamed still -- though he was scarcely one agonized molecule thick -- while the ship collapsed about him; dreamed of a lazy future after the struggle for race survival had ended in victory. When his feeble, unaided senses returned, he found himself entombed in glowing metal. His ship was smashed and fused beyond recognition, his host pulverized and charred, but his own resilient fibers, or thirty percent of them -- enough -- survived. He dragged himself away from the heat, out into the alien air. He sensed a large life-form nearby, and some hidden reserve of strength propelled him toward it. It made no attempt to escape but accepted him docilely; he entered easily through a scratch in its outer covering. Methodically, he extended filaments of his substance throughout its vascular system, feeding reflexively as he went. He slept... I'm so glad we bought this house, Harry. The mulberry tree really makes a difference." Harry shrugged. His wife had mouthed that same line so many times before that he had developed a conditioned reflex. The tree was her idea. He was more interested in the sod that he had purchased at vast expense and which was slowly but steadily turning brown under his ministrations. "Look -- tiny berries I thought they were caterpillars, they're so white and bumpy looking. Frieda says they're very tasty when they're ripe. " Harry eyed the tree noncommittally. Berries did not excite him. "I guess we shouldn't spray it if we're going to eat them, but look at the poor leaves. They're all chewed up. Aren't there bugs you can buy that will eat the bugs that eat the leaves?" "I don't know." Harry had lived in a fifth floor walk-up as a child and in a three hundred unit high-rise as a young adult. Not only the tree, but the whole suburban bit was his wife's idea.  "I think I'll ask the man at the nursery." "Ask him about the grass, too." Catatonia failed to claim him, but he was semi-torpid for a long time, regenerating and regaining his old strength. Eventually, intellection superseded instinct; he surveyed his savior with critical intensity. From its size and sturdiness, he judged it to be a mature individual, a member of a slow-growing, long-lived species -- a durable haven in which to contemplate his future. But the lack of sensory apparatus was disconcerting. Vision, in particular, would have been of use; he had become accustomed to vision in his former host and felt disoriented without it. Manipulation, too, was absent, and locomotion, but he was not immediately concerned; many creatures went through stages of free-living interspersed with immobility. It was possible that other senses would appear later in the life-cycle. He was prepared to wait. He strained upward, experiencing heliotropism and photosynthesis. dam berries off the patio, Marlene?"  "More will fall as soon as I'm done." "I can't stand it; they squish and stain my shoes, they're all over the lawn chairs, and I'm tracking them into the house." "Stand on the grass." "They're in the goddam grass, too! Every time I mow the lawn, I get sprayed with berry juice." "Well, Marlene replied, if you'd pick them all, there wouldn't be any left to fall." "I don't have time to pick berries. I come home tired and want to relax, not clirrib around in some tree, getting full of berry juice. Why don't you pick them?" "You're the one it bothers." "Yeah, but you're home all day. " "I've got enough to do to take up all my free time. Besides, we need a longer ladder to get the ones near the top. If you ate the berries, I might be persuaded to pick them." "You eat them." "Tve had enough." "Then give them away." "I don't feel like playing migrant worker just to feed the neighbors, thank you." "Well, Tm going inside! " He stormed away from the patio, and his foot slipped on an over-ripe berry or two that lay in the grass, causing him to perform backwrenching contortions in order to avoid falling. The doctor diagnosed a slipped disc and prescribed a month in traction. He knew heat and cold and the loss of minor tissues. As water crystallized around his host's uppermost appendages and piled in drifts around its central support, it lapsed into dormancy. He withdrew to its lowest extremities, where life lingered, digging deep into solid matter in search of nutrients. He began 'to fear that the individual he occupied was one which died in the coldest season. If so, he was as doomed as when his ship crashed. He could not leave a host while it was alive, yet if none of those small mobile creatures which abounded in warmer times was near enough for transfer when this host perished, he was lost. He worried unnecessarily. As temperatures rose, he flowed upward with his host's sap and swam in chlorophyll. every year, " said Harry. "The goddam tree must pollinate itself " "The man at the nursery said it was wind-pollinated." "If people did that, we'd be knee-deep in babies by now!" "Calm down, Harry." "If I could. I'd pick every goddam flower olF that goddam tree. Then there wouldn't be any goddam berries. " "They're catkins, not flowers." "Shut up, Marlene. I'm gonna chop it down." He wasn't too familiar with axes but the doctor said it wasn't a dangerous gash. He felt his host in pain. It was a slow kind of pain, slowly perceived and slowly reacted to, but pain nonetheless. He flowed toward the injury, sent tiny tendrils of himself to investigate it. To his previous host, it would have been fatal; the circulatory system was almost severed, the central support dangerously weakened. But the new host was hardy, and when its slow sufiering had faded, it blossomed as before. He was not entirely pleased by this. He had come to realize that his host was long-lived but permanently stationary. It had saved his life, but it was otherwise useless; he required' locomotion, at least, for the consummation of his plans. He had to transfer from host to host until he lodged in a member of the dominant species of the planet, which he knew from his studies was technologically advanced enough for his purposes. But until his present host died, he could not transfer, not even tQ one of the small mobile creatures that scrambled about him more and more often as the weather warmed. So he waited. Cycle after cycle passed, and his host survived -- and lacking organs of manipulation or locomotion it could not even be forced to kill itself Sooner or later, his people would come to this planet, and the faulty information he had sent them would mean their destruction. lene, why do you let these kids climb in that tree? It's too dangerous. " "Oh, Harry, leave them alone. They aren't climbing very high." "Get out of that tree! Goddamit, you're full of berry juice. Get into the house." "Harry, be careful with that thing. You know how unmechanical you are." "Don't worry about it. I know what I'm doing this time." Methodically and with great satisfaction, he began to cut off the smaller branches. The power saw vibrated pleasantly in his fingers. "How much are you going to prune?" asked Marlene. "All of it, twig by twig." membered, and he withdrew to the lower extremities, where the major portion of his flesh had always rested. Not quickly enough, though -- a filament of himself was caught and sliced off. He shrank, pooling deep within the host, and nursed the raw edge. Vibration shook him, and he knew from his host's reaction that the damage was intensifying. If only he knew what appendages were being removed, he could concentrate his whole body in one of them and be removed with that limb, which would then undoubtedly die and free him. The agent of destruction, he knew with his own unaided senses, was alive, and the random way in which it chose to work first on one side of his host and then another betrayed its mobility. He felt confident that it possessed vision, too, for its use of the metal cutting tool was precise and swift. The randomness, however, stymied him. Where to go and how far? He waited, holding his body as compact as possible, hoping he would be removed in one piece; he would have given another slice of himself for vision. "After it's seasoned, we can burn it in the fireplace," Harry said triumphantly. "Wood is damn expensive these days." "What about the trunk?" "Forget it. I'm tired. Paint it blue and use it as a chair. " His host lived slowly and died slowly. Deep among its lowest extremities, cells divided and reached for moisture, but above, it was inert. He waited, impatient now, for he often sensed the warmth of other life touching his host. Cells divided and fed, and he remained. can't believe it sprouted. On your mother's street, dozens of trees were cut down, and their trunks never sprouted." "They died of Dutch elm disease, Harry. The city cut them down so they wouldn't fall on anybody. " "Can we give this thing Dutch elm disease?" "I don't think a mulberry tree can catch it." "We've got to get rid of it." "Harry, you promised you'd panel the rumpus room this summer." The tenacity of his host overwhelmed him. If only it were mobile he would have no complaints. Here was another danger to warn his people against; he only wished someone had warned him the damn thing would have berries. How do they grow so fast? And now it's a bush instead of a tree, and the roots are cracking the patio. Why didn't you nag me to finish the job, Marlene? " "H ow about weed-killer, Harry?" "I don't want to kill the grass. I'll dig it up." "Harry, the man at the nursery said those roots grow deep." "So, I'll dig you a swimming pool while I'm at it! Leave me alone. This is between me and this goddam mulberry tree." He felt something worrying at his host's lowest extremities. They were being exposed to air. A mobile creature was clearing the solid matter away; he could feel the pressure of its soft flesh against his host's substance. He contracted upward, away from the source of disturbance, realizing with satisfaction that his host was being detached from the lifegiving nourishment below. He had already chosen his next host: the creature that killed his present one. Perhaps it was not too late. You can't burn that in the fireplace, Harry. It's too big. " "I'll saw it up. " "But it's full of dirt." "I'll wash it with the hose. "Oh, Harry, it'll never dry; it'll just rot." "Goddamit, then I'll haul it to the dump!" aluminum cans, the soggy, used paper products the putrefying garbage his host rested. Once a month a tractor came along and shoved some soil on top of the mound. Rich, nutrient-laden soil. The slowly-dying tree thrust out rootlets, thrust up green shoots, and was dying no more. In time, it bore fruit. It was a young tree, as trees go, with the tenacity common to all vegetation, and it had a long, long life ahead of it.  you who, like me, are Malzberg addicts: Guernica Night (New York, Bobbs-Merril, # pp., #), a novel, and Out from Ganymede (New York, Warner Paperback Library, # pp., #), a collection of short stories. Barry N. Malzberg is a true phenomenon; prolific, iconoclastic, bitter, angry, hilarious, and utterly self-directed. Guernica Night, a short novel together with a most perspicacious Appreciation by Jeff Clark and some introductory remarks by his friend and sometime editor Roger El wood, is a most unsettling book. The basic theme is suicide: what am I doing here, and really, who should #?... cast in a near ftiture in which instiuitaneous transportation is available to all me, and in which governmental policy is to prohibit, or at least inhibit, the population from taking the Final Trip. How much of Malzherg's narrative is metaphor and how much is narrative is in the eye of the beholder. In some sequences he is in violent confrontation with people who are not there at all; in other, despite the dreamlike quality of the prose, the other guy is indeed there and when struck, bleeds. It's the kind of book which keeps gnawing away at you after you put it down. It isn't an easy book to read, to review, or to think about afterword. I can't predict where you will wind up when you read it, but -- try it. Ijoing from Malzberg to A Place Beyond Man, by Cary Neeper (New York, Scribner's, # pp., #) is like going from sauna to snowbank. The beautiful microbiologist Tandra Grey, together with her adopted two-year-old daughter, are whisked away to a base on the other side of the Moon which is occupied by two species, the ellls (yes, friend printer; three I's), who are happy quasi-amphibians, totally involved with their senses; and varoks, austere, taciturn, and cerebral. In the course of the narrative, Tandra becomes an interface between these two, to the ultimate benefit of all. Interesting comparisons are made between the history and cultures of the three species, and Tandra's convoluted approach to acceptance of love from the ellls and the gift of her own to the varoks is interestingly documented. And yet through it all the passion, the sex, the anguish, the anger, and all the other points on the emotional spectra through which Tandra passes, there is a cool and clinical detachment which the author seems not to be aware of, not to be able to eradicate. Human passions are not orderly, and this book is, every line. And everything is explained. Everything. If there is a single common denominator to really good characterization by really good writers, it lies in their discovery that with human and believably humanoid beings, you can't explain everything. If you try, you are shoving tiles around on a game board. Harry martinson is a Nobel Laureate. This pleases me, because in my own secret world I long ago nominated him for this together with half my kingdom and the hand of my fairest daughter -- not because of his most famous work, Aniara, which is science fiction of the highest order, nor because it sold forty thousand copies in hardback in spite of being a poem, nor because it was made into a fine opera, but because of one passage he wrote:Sie wounds She wounds you as a rose will wound. Not always, as expected, with its thorn, A rose will always wound you with its rose... One of the headiest adventures in reading I have had in a long while is Worlds in Creation (Henry Regnery, illustrated, with # pp of photographs, index, and bibliography, # pp., #) Kenneth W. Gatland is a Briti.sh scientist. President of the British Interplanetary Society, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the editor of Spaceflight magazine. His two years of solid effort on the book collided with other commitments and he was assisted in its completion by Derek Dempster, former test pilot and science writer. The Foreword is by astronomer Patrick Moore. The book was published in England with the title The Frontiers of Knowledge , which I think is much more apt, because the book concerns itself with the farthest reaches of that growing edge at which science begins to involve itself with mysticism and religion and philosophy -- with which, at base, science has never had any serious quarrel. Much of the book will seem, to this audience, a review of things long known -- the origin of the universe, the solar system, the planets; the nature of evolution, and so on. Regard it as just that -- review -- the back-pacing one does before the forward sprint to a great leap. Gatland's plunge into the areas of mysticism and religion is bold indeed, and the basic statement of the book is that our ancestor is the Universe itself, and the future, into which we have barely poked our noses, is the vast bulk of our history. So shrill (and of course, so justified) are the cries of doom these days that a book which holds so high a hope for us comes as almost a shock, and what comes with it, a resurgence of that sense of wonder which got us all into this mountain of marvels, .science fiction, in the first place. what I have been wanting to do for weeks, what I have been getting other things out of the way for, what I have, at the same time, ignored duties and rituals, my wife, my child, my rabbits and my dog. And now I hardly know where to begin. How about this: I have just read the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field. How about that. Or I could start like this: Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany (New York, Bantam, #pp., #) is the all-time Best Buy. There are so many things to be said about this astonishing achievement that it would take many more than # pages to cover them all, and I make the flat prediction that criticism and commentary on Dhalgren will exceed that pagecount very many times over. Further (and I think one must read the book before thoroughly appreciating this point) the urge to comment evokes an instant fury of fi-ustration because of the necessity of putting down words in a linear fashion while the pressure is to say it all at once on every one of the many levels in which the hook itself communicates. Seat the greatest performer in the world on the bench of the world's most elaborate organ, facing the orchestral score of the most celebrated symphony ever composed, and then amputate nine of his fingers, and he will tell you about this kind of frustration. Nothing one can lucidly state about this book can emerge like anything but one-finger music. Delany calls for response in chords because he writes in chords. Looking back over the immense experience of having read Dhalgren, one recalls certain crests and peaks: a strophe on rape, great crystalline stretches of poetry and about poetry, sex sequences so exquisitely delineated that dirt cannot adhere to their polish, and above all, the injection of atmosphere -- all kinds of atmosphere, meteorolgical, ecological, aural, emotional, spiritual. And character! The Scorpions, ragged and deadly kid gangs armed with holographic projectors which surround them with huge, Newboy, whose profound literary criticism would not be amiss in Wilfrightened blonde June, the obsessive rappee, fifteen-year-old Denny, a depraved innocent who knew, perhaps, some things about love which could benefit us all, and Lanya, whom I love, whom I shall always love. There are dozens more, and perhaps the most memorable character of all is the city itself, Bellona. It is somewhere in the U.S. , and has experienced an unnamed disaster; but it is more than that. Metaphorically it is "here" -- any man's "here" -- and unless you are very different from the rest of us, you will allow that from time to time "here" shifts and changes in remarkable ways while "here " shifts and changes in remarkable ways while "why" remains a mystery. In addition, the protagonist is never sure of his own name; that is to say, he spends a lot of this gigantic novel in not knowing who he is. Do you know who you are? Have you noticed how often recently, in sf shorts and novels, this theme of transient or alternate reality occurs, and how it increases? For some rather fascinating reason which I must seek out some day, this looks like the trickle which will be a torrent in most literature in the near future. Who am I? What am I? Where am I, and what, really, is "here"? The natural pressure of growth and change, decay and rebirht, has always been in direct conflict with our hunger for stasis, solidity, permanence, security. It is in these areas in which Delany and other truly great, finished writers live and work; it is in these areas where live the wonders and astonishments, the surprises, the new learnings, the discoveries of things and processes hitherto unknown or (a very different thing) unrecognized. The ultimate, test of great and lasting literature is its usefulness. I have said it and said it; the big ones, from Homer through Shakespeare to Nabkov and Delaney, are fables, metaphors, parallels to your thout and actions and passions and mine. The usefulness of Dahlgren to you and to me is beyond question. Having experienced it, you will stand taller, understand more, and press your horizons back a little further away than you ever knew they could go. I have space to say only one more thing about Dahlgren . It is a paperback original, and as such is going to be by-passed by serious critics everywhere. Some of us have been fighting this especially pernicious snobbery for a long time, with a certain but regrettably small amount of success. Rumor has it that a whole series of hardback houses turned this one down, until paperback release was the only course. I'll try to get the facts on this and will share them with you if I can, but in the meantime proclaim with me our gratitude to Bantam Books. The ultimate recogntion of Dhalgren as the literary landmark it truly is, as expressed in strong sales and wide acceptance, will do more to eliminate this snobbery than any amount of fulmination from this chair.  Dear Mr Baen: I am confused! In past issues of Galaxy and If, there has been talk of the new sf I've been reading both magazines for the past year. The writing field -- part time -- appeals to me. I find that both magazines keep me in touch with the present sf scene. Anyway, the reason I'm confused is that I'm not sure what the new sf is. Are the recent stories in both magazines the new sf? I would appreciate your expert definition. Your faithful mag. reader, Bruce Rea # Saratoga Eugene, Oregon # Beats me. Dear Mr. Baen; It's now two issues almost! in a row you've had something I ought to thank you for, and I couldn't hold myself back. But first; One: I'm tremendously pleased with your editorship. Until you took over, my husband and I had pretty much dropped If  Galaxy from our reading. Now (this year) we've come back. Two: My sympathies about If s suspension. I hope everything eases up quickly so we can enjoy it again. Now to the meat of the letter. I'm awfully glad Mr. Sturgeon inserted the comments on rare blood. I never knew mine was anything out of the ordinary, and even though it's the commonest rare, the information was definitely worth having. I gave the Red Cross some of my blood about # weeks later, and have sent in my form to the Rare Blood Club. It's so nice to know my blood is really of some use to someone besides myself! And now, the most recent issue has Ursula LeCuin's remarks about SF. I write SF, though I'm not yet good enough to buy, and my aim is to produce good SF. My husband, however, is the "arrogant " sort who believes that SF is the junk you read when you come home tired from work. He's pounded the image of SF as trash into my head so often I wonder occasionally if I'm seeing more in it than there actually is. Thank heaven for Ms. LeGuin's article. She's just about the only author he will grant does write good literature in the field (he even buys ber books think his basic opinion has changed, it's given him something to consider. And it's relieved the pressure for mediocrity from me, whether I finally do write first-class stories or not. I was also shocked to find myself reading the science article on black holes. Even though I'm the sort of person whose eyes glaze at numbers of any sort (including phone and license!) and who treats formulas like man-eating plants, I just flew through Dr. Pournelle's clear presentation. Lastly, thanks for putting Alter in Galaxy. I would have missed him. (Mrs.) Henye Meyer # Addington Rd. Brookline, Mass. # And thank you! Dear James Baen, I have just finished reading Le Guin's article in the Dec. issue of Galaxy. Of all the interesting articles you have printed in the Forum, this is the most provocative and stimulating one.' I cannot agree with Le Guin more. Her points are well made and touch on something that I have thought of writing to you about several times. The point she stressed was the chance, at last, to get intelligent criticism, from people trained to do it. Damon Knight is the only peson inside the field to do a good job of intelligent criticism. Since he quit there has been a vacuum which has not been filled, either inside or outside the field, until recently. I think you now have a chance to take a very bold step with Galaxy. If you look at all science fiction magazines you will find reviewers, no critics. The magazines are, for all intents and purposes, closed doors to the Academe, with the possible exception of this article by Le Cuin. There's been a hell of a lot of talk about the sudden profusion of high school and college courses in S.F. and the methods of teaching such courses, but beyond that there is silence. Why not approach, say, Darko Suvin to do a bimonthly or even quarterly critique for Galaxy? It would put Galaxy out in front by a mile as a magazine seriously interested in the future of the genre and its expansion. It would also serve to broaden readers' perspectives and appreciation of science fiction. The interchange can only be beneficial to all of us, writers and readers alike. As Le Guin points out there are alot of walls up, which for an open, supposedly unlimited field is hypocritical. I know Galaxy is already a little cramped, but it can't hurt and it can serve to open doors and least knock on walls. Shevek did it, why not Galaxy? All the best, Nicholas Grimshawe # East Keith Rd., Apt #, North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V#L #V# Dear Mr. Baen: It is with great regret that I read of the "demise" of IF in the Dec. '# issue. Since taking out my subscription in January # If has provided many hours of reading pleasure in its particular vein. The controlled "hard-science" approach of Galaxy relative to If has much to offer but variety is the spice of life. I would like to offer a few comments on the elements of If which I feel should be carried over and given One of the first things that comes to mind is the cover art of Rick Stembach. His "Starbow" cover for the April # issue was breathtaking and one of the most beautiful covers I've seen in several years. A painting like that is worth making into a poster cum Frank Frazetta. This cover along with the Dec. # cover have convinced me that Stembach has the potential to rank with Freas and Gaughan with continued experience. Other readers will recognize his talent only if exposure of his work is continued. I certainly hope that he will be contracted by the new magazine for his art work , which has provided much visual pleasure so far. I am glad that Geis' "The Alien Viewpoint" will be continued. Although much of what he says seems like nonsense at times, it's refreshing to hear him expound. One column I did fervently agree with was the Dec. one, where among other things he cited Gene Wolfe as an example of the rising wave of "academic SF," Since I am a double major in college in Chemistry and Literature I straddle the fence of two different worlds of college viewpoint. After reading Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus, " 'The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories," and "The Death of Dr. Island " I am amazed at the popular support these stories have received in Hugo balloting and I was especially appalled at Wolfe's Nebula for "The Death of Dr. Island." After slogging through stories like these what is one left with? From the "hard-science " point of view nothing is gained in interpretation and from a symbolic literary angle, the ideas that Wolfe is attempting to express are so obscure as to become unimportant. While I'm not advocating the extreme "Get SF out of the college and back into the gutter where it belongs " vein of thought, some allowance has to be made for the reader. I felt cheated of my time after reading the Wolfe stories. A strong writing talent has written himself into a corner inacces.sible to most except those meaning. The writer shouldn't force his reader to do work worthy of a doctoral thesis to get the crux of meaning. Such stories will not he mulled over by an audience waiting to hear what writers such as Wolfe have to say. Getting back to items that should be included in the new magazine, I hope you will continue publishing the work of Colin Kapp. His recent serials for If, Patterns of Chaos and The Wizard of Anharitte had me suspended for weeks waiting between installments. Few SF writers of this decade have matched Kapp's vividness. While stories about exotic forms of planetary exploration such as Anderson's "Call Me Joe " and Clement's Mission of Gravity have been seen before, Kapp's "Mephisto and the Ion Explorer" gave an approach which showed originality and work on the author's part. His is a talent that I hope won't be neglected by you in the future. Well, that's about it. Best of luck to you with your combination magazine. I'll be avidly following its progress and hoping for the best. Sincerely yours, # N. Meridian St. Indianapolis, IN # Dear Sir, September issue, I have been very much impressed with the recent rise in quality in Galaxy and If under your editorship. As a member of Mensa I should have enough intelligence to appreciate good material. If I may refer further to the September issue so long after -- it is new here -- the story "Incident" by Rex and Elizabeth Levie, re the Cain and Abel theme seems to have reversed its polarities. In the Biblical story, Abel was the hunter andor herdsman, and his gifts were flesh, not fruit, while Cain's vegetable products were not acceptable sacrifices, whence he raged and slew Abel. On the broader field, we hunters, who, contrary to "logical" beliefs, were less warlike. In Africa the Hereros suffered thus, and earlier the hunting and gathering Bushmen. (Hunting and gathering normally go together). The maize tribes, e.g. ; Iroquois, pursued the "hidden children" like the Mohicans. In New Zealand the kumara cultivating tribes outsted and slaughtered the hunters and gatherers, as in this region. It is significant that the trappers lived on reasonable terms with the Plains Indians, but when the farmers came, war became relentless. Maurice Walsh tried to make out that the meat-eating Highlanders were better warriors than the oat-fed Lowlanders, but in the Montrose campaigns, the sudden dashes were no match for the dour and persistent fighters they found themselves up against. It is something like persistent and dangerous buffalo against sudden but lazy lions. It is those beliefs which seem most self-evident that usually most need questioning and research into what actually happens. In science fiction particularly, the views that most need illustrating in fictional form are unusual insights from reality, rather than the already shopworn "obvious." The "obvious" usually tells more about a prevailing mental atmosphere than about reality. -- Which is why I find the assumptions of that story out of tune with a fresh wind which is already blowing in Science Fiction. Isn't this supposed to be the time for a high point in the S.F. cycle? Anyway, carry on with the good work. Yours cordially, Alistair M. Isdale P.O. Box #, New Zealand "Incident" directed itself not to the perennial conflict between agrarian and nomad peoples but to much earlier types of hominids -- the inventors of the essentially carnivorous tool-as-weapon versus the essentially herbivorous inventors of the tool-as-diggerchopper. The progeny of the former still exist (us) while the latter group is of interest solely to the anthropaleontologists... Dear gentleperson, The only comparable sadness I can remember in my many years of reading SF magazines is the discontinuance of Venture, which for all its virtues, lasted less than a year. I am probably one of the few people around who have read every single one of the # issues of IF and thus can fully appreciate what is now lost. I first started reading SF mags when I was ten in #, but didn't discover IF until #. Poking through the piles of junk at a local (Painesville Ohio -- according to my myth Harlan Ellison's hometown as well) junk store I discovered several back years rest. In those days, before real collectors had made it impossible, a fourteen year old boy could still do this. Although IF had its goodly number of failures (particularly the years before your current editorship) which almost caused me to stop buying, in general its high quality often made the entire field bearable. I don't know how this decision was reached, but I wish that those of us who have provided the solid core of SF buyers over the years (I have probably bought # of all major pb publishers lists and all non-reprint mags for fifteen years) could have been consulted about this step. I have always resisted subscribing, since I have felt that my purchases would insure at least one local outlet, but certainly I kind of substaining subscription if that catagory were necessary. Those of us in the solid core will buy at virtually any price. Sincerely, # Parkside Dr. Hayward, Ca. # Baltimore, Maryland #. Giant catalog free. and construction. Sample copy #. wkk, New Jersey #. #, Longview, Washington #. # -- Croft, # Colina, Glendale, Calif. #. nonfiction journal of science fiction and fantasy. Features, columns, article plus reviews of every new science fiction or fantasy book published. Detailed information available for a stamped self-addressed envelope. Rt. #, Box #, Union, Miss. #. #, Aquarius Press, # Aquarius Ave., Silver Spring, Maryland #. Send wants to: S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. fiction and fantasy magazines from # to #. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA. #. tasy books. Over # titles listed. 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If you think you can't remember your past lives, this book will change your mind. Here are actual case histories of ordinary people who became able to remember their past lives and how it affected them. You can remember them Send # to: Bookstore GY-I Founding Church of Scientology # #th St. N.W. Washington, DC # Your copy shipped immediately. Satisfaction guaranteed. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. You'll want to. It's that good... it's The Hugo Winners: # speculative fiction stories that have won the science fiction equivalent of the Oscar -- Arthur C. Clarke's superb story, "The Star," Jack Vance's classic, "The Dragon Masters," and Poul Anderson's award-winner, "No Truce With Kings," plus # more. This fabulous #-page anthology of speculative fiction sells for # In the original publisher's edition. It's yours, if you wish, as one of # books for just # (plus shipping and handling) when you join The Science Fiction Book Club. Here's how the Club works: When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your Introductory package of four books for just #. You may examine them in your home, and if not completely satisfied, return them within ten days -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin. Things to Come, describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If you want both Selections, you need do nothing; they'll be shipped automatically. If you don't want a Selection, or prefer an Alternate, or no book at all, just fill out the convenient form always provided, and return it to us by the date specified. We try to allow you at least ten days for making your decision. If you do not receive the form in time to respond within # days, and receive an unwanted selection, you may return it at our expense. As a member you need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any time thereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. Most books are only # plus shipping and handling. Some extra value selections are slightly higher but always much less than Publisher's Editions. Send no money. with membership jScience Fiction Book Club I Depl. GR-#, Garden City, New York # i I I have read your ad. Please accept me as a j member in the Science Fiction Book Club. I Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose  I numbers I have indicated below, and bill me  I Just # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to j I take # additional books during the coming year  I and may resign anytime thereafter.  Mr. Mrs. Miss.  . Please print Address  Apt. Cily.  Slate Zip #. The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. Price # #. Again, Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed. Short stories and novels, # in all. Cipliclt scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # #. Fire Time. By Poul Anderson. Terrific suspense as a young spaceman must decide who will live, who will die on a liny planet on the verge of cosmic disaster. Pub. ed. # #. The # Annual World's Best .F. Donald A. WoMheim, ed. Ten novellas, short stories: Ellison's Hugo Award-winning The Deathbird, plus top Simak, Sheckley. Pohl. Special Edition. #. The Dispossessed. By Ursula K. LeGuin. A lone scientist, caught in a cold war between two planets, tries desperately to unite them. Pub. ed. # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I fc ii. Giant #-ln-l volume of # awardwinning stories, # to #, Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # # The Gods Themselves. By Isaac Asimov. The master's first novel in # years... and worth the wait lor a fabulous trip to tbe year #. Pub. ed. # #. Approaching Oblivion. By Harlan Ellison. Eleven mindspinning stories in the multi-award winner's new anthology explicit scenes. language exploring new and unfathomed areas of the future. Pub. ed. # #. The Best of Fritz Lleber. Shoot craps with the devil, visit a planetwide madhouse, fall in love with an alien # tales by the sorcerer of SF. Special Edition. #. Before the Golden Age. Isaac Asimov, ed. # classic stories of the #s, from vintage SF pulps, now in one huge volume. Pub. ed. # #. Rendeivous with Remo. By Arthur C. Clarke. Hugo and Nebula Award Winner. Oarzilng visionary novel of a selfcontained world in space. Pub. ed. # #. The Oeathworld Trilogy. By Harry Harrison. On # amazing planets interplanetary adventurer Jason dinAlt gambles his life against different lethal environments. Special Edition. The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted In U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. Printed in U.S.A.  Thank you Galaxy Readers! Due to your overwhelming response lo our previous ad. we are happy to announce # new prepaid economy packages ol underground comli. You will receive the best art and story telling of today at prices you can afford. Careful selection ol the right packages will mean hours of reading plea sure. We believe these adult stories are what you have been walling lor. 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SB  U.S.N SB n Wildrmeu Campaign SB n Winter War SB U World Warn SB  Year of the Rat SB LI American Chril War SB n East It Red SB L I Seelowt IB n War In the East S#D Subicribelo SiniletiyATactIn the bi-monlhly magazine of military hiwory that firet you a etan piece simulaiion game wilb vrtrj iowel a I year # Usueii-SI# a # yrs.(l# Ksoes-S# the simulation gamer's bi-oranlhly forum of deugn iheny. play lechaique. and game erilieisin. n I year # bsan-S#  # yn.# mocsl-SI# n Free, descriptive brochure (Nvirruted eatofogSO.SO Send now to: addmtn. Canadian and Foreign cutiomers add S#.CD ps onler to cover additional handling. Prices are subject to change wilheui aoliCC. Sorry, no Please don't write in this apace -- for our me onlyC-Cmie Trtal Credit Pottage ' Tai Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher James Baen, Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Jerry Pournelle, Ph. D., Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Manager Jay T unick. Circulation Director A novel of a distant future; our civilization has long since crumbled into dust, and the world has been freed from the tyranny of the Machine. But the Demon-Whore Technology has risen once again... In which it is shown that the tendency to overgeneralize is a human trait not limited to any particular culture; to the Cuchipamba, for example, all aliens were gringos! A game for two players. A story of Interstellar diplomacy In which it is shown that Parkinson's Law applies in all times and cultures! A Galaxy First. Craig Strete is single-handedly creating an entire sub-genre -- Amerind sf. In this story he presents us with a cross-cultural view of the end of the world. In which gods' ways are justified to Man. A story of a time when escapism has become a way of life -- and death! In which Elmo involves us all in troubles of morethan-infinite proportions. An alternate-universe poem. inevitably to more and bigger problems; Fred offers herein a gestalt soiution to virtually all our troubles. This is a verbatim transcription of a Co-Keynote Address delivered at the last World SF Convention tative from the Sierra Club calls Kahn the "Boss Polly anna of them all!" Two views of the Malthusian Dilemma are the crux of this month's science article. Wherein Alter threatens to set back science-fiction fifty years! Letters from Bowen, Sheffield, Beiler, Cecil, Pournelle. Interior illustrations by Fabian, Freff, Gaughan, Mailings, Pini, Kirk of Unlvaraal Publishing A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, Mew York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. United Kingdom by UniversahTandem Publishing #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-Issue subscription in the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for urwolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters ard actual persona is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. took up stations at its Trojan points, dressed the inhabitant of the trailing They regarded the world, its two point; "Select." cities, their devices. The other released the stasis. After a time, the inhabitant of the Simultaneously, they became aware forward point spoke: that the first radioactive decay par"I am satisfied." tide emitted fled by way of the opThere was a long pause, then, posing path. "It will do," said the other, fetch"I acknowledge the loss, ing up some strontium-#. Choose." Their awarenesses met above the "I am Dust," said the inhabitant metal. of the forward point. "Three moves "Go ahead," said the one who apiece." had brought it. "And I am Blood," answered the other. "Three moves. Acknowledged." "I choose to go first." "I follow you. Acknowledged." They removed themselves from the temporal sequence and regarded the history of the world. Then Dust dropped into the Paleolithic and raised and uncovered metal deposits across the south of Europe. "Move one completed." Blood considered for a timeless time then moved to the second century B.C. and induced extensive lesions in the carotids of Marcus Porcius Cato where he stood in the Roman Senate, moments away from another "Carthago delenda est." "Move one completed." Dust entered the fourth century A.D. and injected an air bubble into the bloodstream of the sleeping Julius Ambrosius, the Lion of Mithra. "Move two completed." Blood moved to eighth century Damascus and did the same to Abou Iskafar, in the room where he carved curling alphabets from small, hard blocks of wood. "Move two completed." Dust contemplated the play. "Subtle move, that." "Thank you." "But not good enough, I feel. Observe." Dust moved to seventeenth century England and, on the morning before the search, removed from his laboratory all traces of the forbidden chemical experiments which had cost Isaac Newton his life. "Move three completed." "Good move. But I think I've got you." Blood dropped to early nineteenth century England and disposed of Charles Babbage. "Move three completed." Both rested, studying the positions. "Ready?" said Blood. "Yes." They reentered the sequence of temporality at the point they had departed. It took but an instant. It moved like the cracking of a whip below them... They departed the sequence once more, to study the separate effects of their moves now that the general result was known. They observed: The south of Europe flourished. Rome was founded and grew in power several centuries sooner than had previously been the case. Greece was conquered before the flame of Athens burned with its greatest intensity. With the death of Cato the Elder the final Punic War was postponed. Carthage also continued to grow, extending her empire far to the east and the south. The death of Julius Ambrosius aborted the Mithraist revival and Christianity became the state religion in Rome. The Carthaginians spread their power throughout the middle east. Mithraism was acknowledged as their state religion. The clash did not occur until the fifth century. Carthage itself was destroyed, the westward limits of its empire pushed back to Alexandria. Fifty years later, the Pope called for a crusade. These occurred with some regularity for the next century and a quarter, further fragmenting the Carthaginian empire while sapping the enormous bureaucracy which had grown up in Italy. The fighting fell off, ceased, the lines were drawn, an economic depression swept the Mediterranean area. Outlying districts grumbled over taxes and conscription, revolted. The general anarchy which followed the wars of secession settled down into a dark age reminiscent of that in the initial undisturbed sequence. Off in Asia Minor, the printing press was not developed. "Stalemate till then, anyway," said Blood. "Yes, but look what Newton did." "How could you have known?" "That is the difference between a good player and an inspired player. I saw his potential even when he was fooling around with alchemy. Look what he did for their science, single-handed -- everything! Your next move was too late and too weak." "Yes. I thought I might still kill their computers by destroying the founder of International Difference Machines, Ltd." Dust chuckled. "That was indeed ironic. Instead along a young naturalist named Darwin." Blood glanced along to the end of the sequence where the radioactive dust was scattered across a lifeless globe. "But it was not the science that did it, or the religion." "Of course not," said Dust. "It is all a matter of emphasis." "You were lucky. I want a rematch." "All right. I will even give you your choice: Blood or Dust?" "I'll stick with Blood." "Very well. Winner elects to go first. Excuse me." Dust moved to second century Rome and healed the carotid lesions which had produced Cato's cerebral hemorrhage." "Move one completed." Blood entered eastern Germany in the sixteenth century and induced identical lesions in the Vatican assassin who had slain Martin Luther. "Move one completed." "You are skipping pretty far along." "It is all a matter of emphasis." "Truer and truer. Very well. You saved Luther. I will save Babbage. Excuse me." An instantless instant later Dust had returned. "Move two completed." Blood studied the playing area with extreme concentration. Then, "All right." Blood entered Chewy's Theater on the evening in # when the disgruntled actor had taken a shot at the President of the United States. Delicately altering the course of the bullet in midair, he made it reach its target. "Move two completed." "I believe that you are bluffing," said Dust. "You could not have worked out all the ramifications." "Wait and see." Dust regarded the area with intense scrutiny. "All right, then. You killed a president. I am going to save one -- or at least prolong his life somewhat. I want Woodrow Wilson to see that combine of nations founded. Its failure will mean more than if it had never been -- and it will fail. -- Excuse me." Dust entered the twentieth century and did some repair work within the long-jawed man. "Move three completed." "Then I, too, shall save one." Blood entered the century at a farther point and assured the failure of Leon Nozdrev, the man who had assassinated Nikita Kruschev. "Move three completed." "Ready, then?" "Ready." They reentered the sequence. The long whip cracked. Radio noises hummed about them. Satellites orbitted the world. Highways webbed the continents. Dusty cities held their points of power throughout. Ships clove the seas. Jets slid through the atmosphere. Grass grew. Birds migrated. Fishes nibbled. Blood chuckled. "You have to admit it was very close," said Dust. "As you were saying, there is a difference between a good player and an inspired player." "You were lucky, too." Blood chuckled again. They regarded the world, its two cities, their devices... After a time, the inhabitant of the forward point spoke: "Best two out of three?" "All right. I am Blood. I go first." "...And I am Dust. I follow you."  Joe haldeman wrote to me a couple of months ago and asked me to co-keynote this convention. He said, "I want you to deal with the various problems that face us in the near future -- energy sources, overpopulation, eco-disaster and so forth." And I said I would, but actually I had my fingers crossed. Ten or fifteen years ago I used to lecture a lot on those subjects. I would talk about the black rainfall in Boston, where the smog was so thick the police couldn't arrest the polluters -- they couldn't see the tops of the chimneys to know whose stacks were doing it. And I'd talk about the rivers in New England so filthy that you not only can't drink the water -- or swim in it -- it isn't even safe to drive a motorboat in it; the spray coming up over the coaming can give you a disease. And it all went over very big with my audiences. They'd have a delicious shudder of fear, and a momentary glow of resolution to clean up our soiled planet -- and then they would light their cigarettes, and get into their cars and turn on their air-conditioners and pump exhaust fumes all the way to their air-conditioned, energy-using homes and offices. I remember giving that talk in Cambridge once -- the English Cambridge, that is. My host was a marvelous fellow who applauded every word I said and took me to his home for a drink after the lecture. His home was a narrowboat moored in the River Cam, and while we were drinking and talking about the horrors of pollution I felt the need to go to the John, and I did, and while I was in there a thought struck me, and when I came out I opened my mouth to ask him a question -- He anticipated me. "Oh, yes," he said at once, "it goes right into the water, sure enough. But, God, man, what else can I do? It would cost me thirty pounds to put in a sewage trap!" And anyway that was ten or fifteen years ago, and a lot of time has passed. I'm a science-fiction writer. I like to talk about the future. Pollution, overpopulation, urban crisis, racial strife, protein shortage, fuel shortage, welfare disasters -- those are all in the present; and I bet that every one of you in this room has heard so much about them you never want to hear another word on any of these subjects. Right? Right. Well, I have a surprise for you. I'm going to talk about them anyhow. But not just yet -- I have something else I want to say first -- and when I do I think I may, believe it or not, have something new to say about them. But first I'm going to talk about science fiction. Science fiction is a very good way of looking at the future. For one thing, it's cheap. If you want to see what an atomic war is going to do, it is cheaper to Vrite a story about it then it is to start a war. Also it is a sort of diluted reality; people can confront realities in a science-fiction story that they don't want to hear about in real life. But it is also a good way of matching up possible future events in such a way that problems become solutions. Now this is a science-fiction way of looking at things. It is not the real world's way. The real world bumbles along, throwing its empty beer cans out the car window and expecting someone else to pick them up; and when the real world gets a flat because somebody in the car ahead of it has been oldfashioned enough to throw out a beer bottle rather than a can, it feels mightily aggrieved. So it appoints a special commission to study the environmental impact of throwing beer bottles out of cars, hires a large staff of experts out of tax money and devises an automatic highway vacuum cleaner to suck up all the broken glass. The real world takes one problem at a time and looks for the single solution to the problem, which after much study always turns out to be the same thing: money. Or, what is the same thing -- but even more damaging in the sense of natural law -- the use of problem-creating mechanisms to get rid of the effects of other problems. I'll give you an example. There is a scarce resource in the world; high-temperature heat. There is plenty of low-temperature heat. That's where the whole universe is going, sooner or later, according to the laws of entropy; and we are moving the process along just as fast as we can. High-temperature heat is much harder to come by; the principal way we get it is by sending drillers and pumpers to Saudi Arabia and other unattractive places to suck up huge quantities of oil out of the ground. That oil is not just stuff that bums. It is basic hydrocarbon, and if you don't bum it you can use it in a lot of jazzy other ways: you can grow food on it, you can turn it into drugs and dyes and plastics. You can even just leave it there and wait until you need basic organic feedstocks even worse than we do now. We don't do that -- we burn it. Once place we bum it is in power plants. We take our hightemperature heat, and we boil water with it. We turn the water into steam, the steam into electricity and we move the electricity out over wires. And then if we've been dumb enough to swallow the stories the public utilities people have been telling us and bought outselves an all-electric house, we take the electricity and we use it to warm our rooms to seventy-eight degrees, and heat some water for a bath to maybe #, and put some in our washing machine at perhaps # -- all low-temparature heat again, you see. And meanwhile, back at the power plant, all that steam has come out of the turbines and condensed. And they have oceans of water -- some at seventyeight degrees and some at a hundred and ten and some at a hundred and forty -- and they have a hell of a job getting rid of it. They pour it into the rivers and they kill the fish. They pump it into cooling towers, and they create manmade fogs that have been known to close down airports for a week on end. You see what I'm talking about? It takes no special brains to see that if what you want is just enough heat to warm a room, it is pretty stupid to use a kind of heat that can smelt iron and then dilute it to the room temperature you like -- especially as you have the problem of throwing away enormous quantities of room-warming heat on the next block. Any engineers present will immediately point out that there are difficulties here; and so there are. Difficulties of capital funding, difficulties of design, difficulties of seasonal load. But the difficulties do not add up to enough to spoil the general principle that the problem of getting rid of waste heat can in fact be the solution to the problem of heating a house. Science fiction is a good way of matching these phenomena together. Not only on the hardware level. I remember a marvelous Fritz Leiber story. Sanity, the world was going mad, and the problem was how society could survive when every person in it was insane. Fritz solved it beautifully; he matched the kind of insanity to the job requirement. I don't remember the exact mixes -- something like paranoids became policemen, manic-depressives bell came book reviewers... not too much unlike the real world at that. Then there was a Harry Harrison story -- I published it, I think in Galaxy, a decade or so ago, but I'm sorry to say I don't remember the title. The problem was robots multiplying on their own. A familiar scare theme in science fiction, right? But in Harry's stOry the robots became raw materials. People trapped the little ones for transistors, stalked and shot big ones for sheetmetal sidings for their homes and so on. And of course science fiction has proposed gross-scale improvements in the way things are done for a long time. Automatic little cars instead of privately owned #-cylinder monsters. Telecommunications instead of commuting -- we see a little of that now; I think we'll see more. Domed cities... You know, I've always suspected Buckminster Fuller of being a secret science-fiction fan. His geodesics look an awful lot like a Wonder Stories cover from say #. But what Fuller has done, of course, has been to put the numbers into the science-fiction story. And the numbers, as a matter of fact, are interesting. Consider New York. Fuller wants to build a dome across it two miles wide. To keep the rain out? No, to keep heat where it belongs -- out in summer, in winter in. The Manhattan skyline, Fuller points out, is about as perfectly designed a radiator system as you could build: all those spindly little spikes sticking out into the air, each one of them losing heat from every side and spire and comice. If you put a dome over it you would save enormous amounts of both air-conditioning and heating. In fact, the radiating skyscrapers pour away eighty times as much energy as a dome would. Which would pay for an awful lot of geodesic construction in a short time. There is no engineering problem here. There is a different kind of problem that keeps us from doming in New York and Washington and Chicago -- above all, Chicago -- and most of the other major cities in the world: that is, convincing the people who have to foot the bill that it's worth it. That's a different kind of game, and the name of that particular game is "politics". At this point I arrogate to myself the privilege of any writer who has an audience at his mercy, and I intend to talk a little bit about some of my own work. There are two in particular. One is a science-fiction story, published in FSF about a year ago, called In the Problem Pit. The other is a non-fictionbook, published by Ballantine for # -- and, I believe, to be published by somebody else for # -- called practical politics. In the Problem Pit describes a procedure for identifying what the world's real problems are, and solving them -- hopefully, by using one problem to solve another, as I was talking about a moment ago. procedure for making those solutions transit from theory to reality, by means of the existing political institutions -- the elections, the political party machinery and so on. One of the nice things about being a writer is that you can give a sort of a reality to your fantasies by writing them out on paper. An even nicer thing -- sometimes quite a frightening thing -- is to find that some people somewhere have taken those spelled-out fantasies and transformed them into that other kind of fantasy we call the real world. It happens a lot with science fiction, though we who write it don't always know when it has happened. But in the case of happen; in places like Georgia and California and Ontario I've heard of people and groups who have brought the book and done what it says and made real, substantive changes in their worlds. A couple of weeks ago I sat on the porch of the mayor of Gpe May, New Jersey, listening to him tell me how he came to be mayor: He got hold of a copy of my book, did what it said -- and elected not only himself but a whole city council. All this is great fun and a joy -- but also, I must say, a little scary. But in order to convert theoretical solutions into reality -- as in to find the solutions. That is where the story in the problem pit comes in. government-funded problem-solving system located in some large caves near the radio observatory at Arecibo, Puerto Rico -- no particular reason that it should be there, except that I had just visited Arecibo a few weeks before I wrote the story. (You can reconstruct any writer's autobiography from what he writes, if you know how to interpret it.) It is a long story, and a lot of its wordage is devoted to spelling out how it works: I don't have time to go into it all here. (Anyway, it will be published by and by as part of a collection called in the problem science-fiction stories. I'd rather you read it than listened to me tell you about it. I get better royalties that way.) But in the problem pit isn't just a story. It is also a proposal for real-life problem-solving. As far as I know no one has actually transformed that fantasy into real-world reality yet, but the World Future Society has offered me a chance to run a pilot-model demonstration right here in Washington at their Second General Assembly next May. So by the # Worldcon, if any of you are interested, maybe I can report on how well it works. And all of this, you see, is simply one variation or another on the basic science-fiction game: creating new worlds and seeing how they work out. We sf writers have been doing it for years on paper. We sf readers have been doing it all our lives in our heads. Politicians do it -- usually in limited, power-andplunder-hungry ways, but do it all the same. Futurologists do it, it is their only raison d'etre, if indeed they can be said to have one at all. And scientists do it. And now at the end of my talk I would like to tell you about the way one particular scientist has played this game. He is a physicist, and his name is Peter Fong -- from Emory University in Atlanta -- and I certainly hope he is a sciencefiction fan. One of these days I want to meet him, and I would not like to discover that he has done this bright thing without benefit of all the thinking we've been putting into Galaxy and Analog and FSF for the last umpty-ump years. First, let's look at the trouble we're in. Remember last winter's energy crisis? That's powerful trouble. Real trouble -- and we're still in it, we just pretend that taking an aspirin has cured the cancer of the brain; but the cancer is still there and deadly. Remember urban crime? Society's rejects -- mostly black or Spanishspeaking, mostly the people, or the children of the people, who had a clear choice between starving on a plantation somewhere and going on relief in New York or Baltimore and wisely chose relief. Remember mugging, remember drugs, remember the hard-core unemployed in the city's slums? Remember pollution? the car exhaust that rots these marble buildings in Washington? The sewage that has destroyed a hundred square miles of ocean bottom off New York, befouled San Francisco Bay and turned much of the Mediterranean into a cesspool? Remember starvation? Hundreds living on the borderline, where a drought or a flood can push them over the hunger point into death? into lives that do not give them enough protein while their brains are building, so that all their lives they will be a little less quick, a little less capable than they should have been? All these problems are right with us right this minute, and they are deadly ones. And no solution is in sight -- unless, Peter Fong says, we take all these problems and let them solve each other. How do we do that? Com and booze. Now alcohol is a well-known problem-solver. Some of my best friends have solved their problems that way, and keep right on doing it, until they solve themselves into delirium tremens and death. That isn't quite what Fong has in mind. Don't drink the alcohol, he says. Put it in the tank of your car. If you replace # of the gas in your tank with alcohol you don't have to do a thing to the engine -- in fact, it works better than it now does on gasoline -- you cut down the polluting emissions by # right then, instantly; you reduce the need for oil imports, help the balance of payment, take the Arab sheiks down a peg and strike a blow for the independence of Israel. Name it. You do it, and that's how. Ah, you say, fine. But where do you get the alcohol? Why, you grow a lot of corn. You don't need all the corn for fermentation into alcohol, only the starch. You've got # left over in the form of protein and # in the form of oil. You can feed these to hungry people if you like -- they are extremely nutritious. Or you can feed them to livestock, cutting the cost of raising steers, putting more steaks in your supermarket and ending -- did you forget this one? -- the meat shortage too. You also have the com stalks left over, and you use them to fuel the boilers that distills the fermented starch into pure alky. Who grows the com? Ah, says Fong, you have all those urban hardcore unemployed. Give them a half #-acre farms. Better still, don't give them to them. Sell them. All this stuff is cottage industry, it can be done just as well in indihis most devastating novel yet... The Conpanli Of Glory Atomic war has reduced the earth to a primitive state -- history is no longer written... plagues and radiation death are common... Demetrios, the former Adam Freeman, remembers what life once was and tells a new generation of earthlings the terrifying tale of a world devastated by the Twenty Minute War! # (V#B) available at your local dealer, or send # plus #t for postage  handling to N.J. #. vidual #-acre bits as in one mammoth Federal Booze Project, and the earnings for each farm after all expenses are paid should come to between ten and twelve thousand dollars per family. Not a fortune. But a hell of a lot better than welfare, not to mention the advantages of running your own vegetable patch and chicken yard if you like. So on a reasonable mortgage your formerly unemployed can pay off his farm free and clear, feed his family, educate his kids and, for the first time in his life, most likely, find himself in a world where his own life has some point and purpose. Where do you get the farms? You just reach out and pick them up. The United States is full of played-out farmland, or soil that doesn't want to grow a crop. Bad land, but land. All it needs is something to make the bad land good, and we have that -- every one of us produces about eight ounces of it every day, and there are a lot of us producing -- and we flush it away and ruin our waterways with it, and yet it is the finest and best stuff you can get to make things grow. The Japanese and Chinese have used human excrement to grow crops for hundreds of years. We westerners are much too fastidious. Indeed, there is some reason for daintiness here; there is a risk of disease, a problem of sterilization. But the basic problem is esthetic. We don't like to put into our mouths something we know to be containing molecules that recently came out of some other part of another person's anatomy -- it seems to be all right if it came out of a horse or a cow, rather than a person, which is rather strange -- but strange or not the prejudice is there. Only it disappears if you use the excrement to fertilize something you're going to put in the tank of your car. And so you've solved the lot -- end sewage pollution, cut down car exhaust damage, slash the relief rolls, radically diminish the preconditions for slums and urban crime, help the balance of payments, decrease the velocity of the energy crunch, make steaks cheaper and more available... it kills every bird in sight, claims Fong with modest self-satisfaction, even up to economic growth and school busing. And by gosh, when you look at it, it does. Now, what's wrong with this proposal? Oh, a few things. Several scholars have complained that its longterm effects diminish; it is only a temporary solution, they say. And that's true enough. In the long run we have to find quite different ways to live. But the trouble with the long run, as John Maynard Keynes told Franklin Roosevelt thirty or forty years ago, is that in the long run we are all dead. It also does not solve every problem for everyone; there are only a and a half people in trouble. But what a beginning! And the beauty of it is that each problem solves the other, like cobras supporting themselves by eating each others' tails, until the ring is complete and the problems all disappear. enough, too; I'm Just about out of time. I want to steal just a minute or two more to close on another note -- a rather different one, and quite a personal one. I suppose a lot of you have heard me speak before, perhaps at the Los Angeles Worldcon a couple of years ago; and perhaps if you do you remember what is an article of faith with me. That you and I, and Harry Stubbs and Harlan Ellison and all of us here are in some way brothers. We are a family. We are united in a way that I can only faintly perceive, but which seems to me to be so strong a way that although we differ terribly from each other on questions of religion and politics and life style -- and battle among ourselves on matters of dominance and resentment -- yet we always come back to each other, to share what we have done and learned; because who else is there to talk to? Well, I don't quite mean that. There are other people to talk to. one level or another. But there is something about us, about all of us, in this room and in all the other places in the world where sciencefiction people get together, that makes us important to each other, for the perceptions and the understandings that we can best share. We are droogs, sometimes, joining together to stomp the rest of the world. We are water brothers, sometimes, sharing the precious resource of imagination and creation. We may, of course, from time to time hate each others' guts. You out there in the seventh row, fourth seat -- you may not like me very much, and maybe I don't especially care for you. But in some way you are a very important part of my life... as I think I am, of course, of yours. So I talk, on subjects like these, many times in many places to all kinds of audiences. And I say pretty much the same things. The details change as the world changes, but the theme is all about the same. But when I talk here, to you -- my friends, my water-brothers, my droogs -- I want to talk in a special way. I don't want just to argue you into my way of thinking. Or to inform you, or to educate you, or even to entertain you. What I want is to share with you -- my family -- that very basic article of faith in my head which says there are no problems, there are no hopeless disasters, there are no inevitable dooms; there are only games we play with ourselves, pollution games and crime games -- traps we put ourselves into, shortage traps and inadequacy traps -- and we can stop playing the games, we can free ourselves from the traps, any time. All we have to do is summon up the resolution to do it, and all it needs for that to happen is for some people somewhere to make up their minds to start it. To start thinking in terms of what we want, rather than what we fear. To start planning not for what makes us more rich, but for what makes us more free. It can be done -- by somebody. And -- droogs, siblings, waterbrothers, friends -- if we don't do it, who the hell will?  I Four kilometers from Ricardo, the horsemen stopped for a rest, and while their ponies stretched down to graze, the men stared up at the AcropKtlis. They were Ecofreaks and far from home, dressed in beaded leather suits and wearing floppy black hats. Their long hair was braided, their faces tanned, but these were not ordinary herdsmen, as evidenced by the ornate ceremonial daggers and the gilded red Crestmore bibles that hung from their belts. Mutagrass rolled in the breeze behind them. It thinned out ahead us steppe gave way to no man's land -- the Desolation, in tribal parlance -- a dusty, boulder-strewn ring around the city, made by the deadly emanations of gravitron. Mycal Bono, leader of the group, took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He closed and opened his eyes to ease the wind sting. Then he threw his head back to see Ricardo's five looming towers. Today the tips were lost in moving clouds. He couldn't see the towers in their entirety. Drilla-glass mirrored the setting sun. A reticulation of dark plastosteel held the glass in place and supported the structures. At this distance, the frame resembled a screen of hexagons. Bono thought: Poisonous silver stems. Rooted in the Desolation. Full of humanity. He shook his head. He hadn't seen a structure in years, and the prospect of Ricardo, especially at close proximity, was awesome. Most structures, including those of Ricardo, were at least three thousand meters from root to crown, an unbelievable height. The sway of the towers induced dizziness. The observer felt that the structures leaned threateningly down toward him. Bono turned away, plagued by a childhood memory. It had come on him early in the morning while boarding the large helicopters near Wellhead for the long flight north. The feeling had persisted. The forty-kilometer ride from the Staging Station hadn't shaken his mood. As a small boy his father had taken him to Husten, a mono-tower city. Panic had gripped him a short way into the Desolation. The gravitron vibrations had tightened about his body like so many invisible claws, and he had screamed and fought until his father had sent him back with a mutant slave. At the time his relatives had teased him about that, calling him a true tribesman -- one who couldn't stand the grav. Men rested all around him. Some had dismounted. Some sat and stared at Ricardo's visible parts below the clouds. Talk buzzed. To his left the heavy-set Sonder, physicist of the group, explained the mysteries of gravitron to a youngster they'd picked up at the Staging Station to take the horses back. "Drums," Sonder was saying. "Drums in the caves below the towers. They generate the stuff. And our Helium cools the machines. No Helium, Freddy, and poof! Down she goes." Bono imagined Ricardo falling. He saw the framework buckle and twist. He saw the towers sag, split into the air -- the hard outer crust and the soft, organic, mushy innards. In mind's eye he saw people, rubble, and machinery fall down in a rush. Then he imagined Desolation dust rising like a veil to cover the scene. It was a vision of the Great Change -- the end of the structures. Like many other young Activists, Bono had heard the Older Tack hold forth about it with a Crestmore bible open in his hand. "The structures must be destroyed," Old Tack had thundered with a balled, veined fist shaking the air. "We can't let the Abomination take over earth again!" And with that OT had always hit the table with a crash. Old Tack had had bushy grey eyebrows, a florid face, and eyes that had flashed. You couldn't help remembering such a man. He left a deep impression, especially on the young. Old Tack was dead. Like the legendary Moses of the Biblibooks, he had died before his dream had been fulfilled. Unlike the legendary Moses, he hadn't even glimpsed the promised land. Bono's situation was not without irony. The least enthusiastic of the younger Activists stood before Ricardo with a mandate to negotiate the last and decisive Helium deal. Bono's assignment amounted to nothing less than the destruction of Union's thirty-nine structures. Would Mycal Bono, the silent doubter, achieve OT's dream? Bono fell into a brooding contemplation of his role. He felt extremely small and puny -- a mote of dust in the vast sweep of history that had created the Union of Structures. A thousand years seemed a very long time against his thirty. A thousand years, yes, give or take a handful. The last of the socalled limited nuclear wars had been followed by a period of interregnum. The last one had Xin? Bono could never remember. At the Academy of Action, he'd had to memorize the circumstances surrounding each war, but they all ran into each other in his mind. Well, it didn't matter a great deal. What mattered were the structures. Bono tried to imagine their genesis: how the ancient city dwellers had invented gravitron wjth whose aid vertical cities could be flung into the sky. The ancients had gone straight from a mole-like existence in underground bunkers into the heights. In one gigantic leap, as it were. In his mind Bono pictured structures rising out of the rubble, yes, like poisonous stems. Structure-man had found an answer to the scarcity of useable land. Remarkable as it seemed, nevertheless people in structures occuped a mere eight hundred square kilometers of ground, all of it along the coasts. Their fusion reactors ran on hydrogen ions that were plentiful in the sea. What a shock it must have been to the pious tribal elders, it occurred to him. If the ancient tribesmen had been anything like the Older Tack, they must have fallen into paroxysms of rage when the first reports of structures came filtering back to Hinterland. The Technology Beast has risen again! No sooner dead than resurrected. Foul Phoenix. And the old hatred had burst into flame again. Bono knew himself a product of that hatred. A thousand years of hate had caused him to sit here before Ricardo on a pony with a secret locked in his brain. The tribes had waited a thousand years for this opportunity. Now they only needed a small assist, a very small favor from Union. If only Union could be duped! If Union could be persuaded to mix up the poison it would have to swallow -- then Technology would be finished. Or would it? Bono experienced a stir of doubt. Union might be destroyed. But then, for all they knew, Technology might rise up elsewhere -- in Europe, in Asia, in whichever it was, contact with those continents had been lost -- more by choice than necessity. Structure-men Had the means to travel. But exploration was not their long suit. Life in structures seemed to be an end in itself -- or it destroyed curiosity. Maybe. The men of Union lived too far from the surface of the earth. They saw it through windows. Always. The horizon did not entice them. Bono guessed that life on other continents must be like life in Hinterland: simple and savage. Structure-man wanted no part of that. If it weren't for Helium... Helium. The noble gas was essential for the gravitron reaction. And the pipeline through which it flowed bound structure dwellers to the earth. Against their will, in a sense. Bono suspected that Union would pay no attention to the tribes at all if it weren't for those rich Texahoma wells -- or if they could get enough Helium out of the air, which they couldn't. But they did need Helium. And therefore their missiles ringed North America, aimed inland, a perpetual threat. Bono shook his head. It was all too vast, too much, too improbable. His task seemed overwhelming. He had no confidence in this venture, yet here he was. It seemed wrong, somehow. Bono sighed and turned to his right. Sunk deep into his saddle, tiresome old Franco Dart had reached over and now pulled Bono's sleeve. He pointed to a hovering airship some distance from the road. Union airships were held aloft by gravitron and resembled large glistening rods. One blunt, rounded end of the ship faced the horsemen. The ship had picked them up a kilometer or two outside the Staging Station and had shadowed their approach ever sinee. Dart said: "They're filming, Mycal. They film and film. I'll bet you Reston Proctor is watching us. I'll bet that he sees us talking." On Bono's left Sonder said: "No, Freddy, you don't get it. The vibes make the steel light. Light as feathers. It's the plastosteel, not the drilla-glass." Bono didn't answer Dart. He still mused about his chances of success, that worrisome childhood memory in the background. Dart peered at Bono with a disapproving look. The chiefs hooked nose and forked black beard gave Bono an aggressive air, but Dart saw a dreamy haze in Bono's eyes, a telltale trembling around his lips. Bono had a good face, but he lacked that...something; that special quality, leadership... With a measure of pride Dart recalled how he had opposed Bono's appointment as chief of mission. Dart had protested, oh, yes. He had the courage to oppose, whatever his age. His was a voice of wisdom among the brash young men around Jonny Tack. "Go with him," Tack had said. "Keep your eyes on him." But Tack had sent him as a 'senior advisor,' that is to say without authority -- which made Dart mourn the passing of the Older Tack. Now there was a man! "Mycal," Dart called again. "I said, they're filming us!" "What? Oh, yes. You've said that before. The Media." "It's more serious than that. They use the films for intelligence. They study our faces. They build profiles on us. Psychometry." Bono shrugged. "We can't stop them." "No, not that But you must be aware of it." "I am aware. Believe me. Franco, I'm aware." A group in the rear laughed uproariously at something. The noise startled a flock of black carries. They rose from the long mutagrass, flew low over the ground, then dropped out of sight again. Dart wondered if the men were laughing at him. He threw them a suspicious look. "Look, Freddy, imagine a molecule like this, see? Fifteen in a row? The gavitron vibes come in here, see? And they make these little balls stretch. Got it?" Bono glanced at Freddy and saw that he still hadn't got it. Then he turned to Dart, aware that the old man was unhappy. The younger men all humored Dart, the last surviving member of the old core of Activists. "What do you think. Franco?" Bono gestured toward Ricardo with his hat. "The bastions of the whore -- will they fall this time?" "All thirty-nine of them, on all the coasts. It is written." Dart slapped the red Crestmore bible hung on a chain from his belt. " 'Her bastions shall crumble, and from the dust shall rise a new time.' " "It is written," Bono murmured. He stared up. "Collapse they will," he said without conviction. "Sooner or later. The question is when. This time? Or some other time?" Dart answered; "This is yoMr chance, Mycal. It's a good chance. Everything aids you: Jonny's courage, Unsler's senility. You're the man if you want to be. You're the chief of mission." Bono's close friends thought him quiet, sensitive, curious, and somewhat retiring. Those who knew him less well considered him a sullen, moody man. But unlike other sullen, moody men, he was not forever ia the lotus posture praying for deliverance from Technology. He was no zealot. But only Bono knew the degree of his own ambivalence about the Activist cause. Now he felt the excruciating pain of uncertainty. The gigantic pentastructure up ahead attracted and rehelium pelled him in turn. Inwardly he scoffed at the crude negotiating strategy Jonny Tack had dictated. The tribes had waited a thousand years for this moment. Did they have to implement the plan within a month? Couldn't they get microwelders instead, patiently, piece by piece? No, apparently not. Tack had no patience with long-range strategies. Now! Today! But Jonny's hurry, more than anything else, destroyed Bono's confidence. He despaired of success. Yet, at the same time, he had accepted the job. Why? Pride, he told himself.  can't just disregard the prophesies. If this is the time, if the scheme succeeds, my name will live in history. And yet... "No, no, the other way about," Sonder said. "The vibes enter the atom like this. In a spiral. They loosen the electronic grip. Yes...like that." Bono said to Dart: "All right. Franco. We'll see. We might as well go in there and see what fate holds." He swivelled in his saddle and waved an arm. "Mount up, men," he called. "In the name of Ecology, let's go and do it." In a moment the horsemen plunged down the side of the rise and coaxed their struggling, reluctant ponies into the vibration-filled Desolation. Rivera French left the communications room of the Bureau of Tribal Affairs and, accompanied by a crew of experts, he travelled by Jump tube to the West Tower recepreceived Hinterland delegations come to negotiate. On the way he turned to a member of his staff. "Have you called the Ambassador?" The staff man nodded. "And?" The man said: "They thanked us for the information but said that no one would be present at the reception." "Did you ask them why? Have they been told to stay away, or is it Andros Barney playing games?" The man said: "They acted very reserved. I couldn't get much out of them." "Did you talk to the ambassador personally?" "Yes. I got the feeling Barney resented my calling. He is used to dealing with you." French said: "Well, there's a nice start." They arrived in the reception hall and found a crowd pressed against gold roping hung in slack curves from silver posts. Media crews stood in readiness with cameras and lights near the double-winged portal. Servants polished wine glasses beside a table in the back. Huge green banners with the white Ecology symbol in the center hung from the walls and trembled in the flow of ventilation air. selves in the center -- a clump of yellow robes. French walked some steps ahead of them and took up a stance beneath a chandelier, a middle-sized, sturdy man in a purple robe. He had long blond hair, carelessly tossed. His face, tanned an orange-brown in the rays of artisun, revealed his tension in a movement of muscles under the skin of his cheeks. He pulled down on his robe so that it wouldn't bunch above the belt and waited. Seven weeks ago word had come through intelligence channels that the Accommodationist faction of the Ecofreak tribe had been ousted by worked five years to prepare for this Helium round. That news had destroyed five years of work. Union marched into this battle blind. No Activist had held power in Ecofreak since the Helium War of 'll. Almost nothing was known about Activist personalities, and French was both curious and anxious. He blamed himself for the situation. His intelligence apparatus had failed to predict the political shift. The chief Negotiator had visibly cooled toward French as a consequence -- and no wonder. Proctor expected much from this negotiating round -- and so did French. Proctor had formed a revolutionary group immediately after the .series of executions that had marked the Dynastic Proclamation four years back. Only recently had Proctor drawn French into the plot. French had joined eagerly, flattered by the distinction. Yet now, when the time drew near, he'd failed Proctor. The Secret Agenda depended on Ecofreak participation. French stood and waited, growing impatient. Impatience was one of his failings. Miri always scolded him for it. She called him a man who tried to leapfrog over himself. "You're a trinity of impatience," she said. "Impatient in love -- you proposed to me an hour after we met. impatient in eating -- you bolt your food as if you wanted an ulcer. Impatient to rise -- what do you want to be? Unifier?" French always answered; "I'd do better than Bernie Unsler, girl." Miri disapproved of his ambition. She came from a high-level family and couldn't understand his slumkid drive for the bigger world. Branco was way in the bottom. He wanted up, up. Dammit, he wanted to rise, and nothing wrong with that! The Top was ruled by stupid, evil men. You had to rise to right the wrongs. French had his eyes on the floor of the hall. The emblem of the Unsler family was reproduced on the white tiles -- a red flower complete with cup, stem, and a single leaf. Ten years ago, when French had entered service at age twenty, this floor had been covered by Ricardo's ancient symbol, the spiral, depicting the flow of gravitron vibrations. Unsler had gathered the power, both symbolical and real, but now his hands grew slack on the reins and his son waxed strong. French wished Proctor luck with the Secret Agenda. Proctor would be a better mler than Unsler. An attendant by the doublewinged door, whose eyes had been hefted to a narrow observation slit, now turned and called back: "They're here." The murmuring crowd fell silent. The doors flew open and the Ecofreaks came into Ricardo in a wedge-shaped formation with Bono at their head -- it had to be Bono, as per dispatch. Hoofs clackered on Ballantine Books So you thought last month's enormous science-nction promotion was something? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. Those nine big, beautiful titles we launched on the world are already creating quite a stir in the industry...and several of them are beginning to sell out their first printings. We are even making "back-topress" noises to keep the racks filled. But that was only the beginning;...the beginning of the biggest and best sffantasy promotion ever. We'll be publishing # super titles every month -- new books and reissues of great old classics that have been out of stock for too long. And the second installment of Science Fiction '# leads off this month with Poul Anderson's spirited adventure fantasy A Midsummer Tempest...best thing we've read by Poul in many and many a moon. We came upon this novel in its hardcover incarnation just about a year ago and took it along on our trip to last year's Minneapolis science-fiction convention. High in the sky -- somewhere between New York and Minnesota -- Anderson's magic worked its charms, and we could not wait to gel home and buy tbe book for our list. Imagine a world in which every word written by Shakespeare was literally true...a world in which Prince Rupert of the Rhine could fight for Charles I of England and escape the Puritans by hijacking a railroad locomotive -- on the right track, but # years before its time! "...Sword, Sorcery, Religion, Literature and Love -- plus a rattling good adventure yarn," said one reviewer; "...a virtuoso performance," said 'nother -- and we agree with both. Now here's a name to conjure with -- Darrell Sweet...(a flourish of trumpets is heard in the mind's ear!). He pted the cover for the Poui Anderson book, and we liked It so much we thought to put Darrell under contract before the competition decided to compete for his work. We think he's the find-of-the-year...and our "think" is confirmed by oooohs and uaiiahs whenever proofs for one of his finished covers arrives in the office. He's already completed seven or eighf paintings, and he's promised to us for dozens more. Watch for them! And don't forget the name...remember, you hehrd it here first! We do gush on about our artists and our covers...but if the package isn't right the book won't sell...or at least not as well as it should. So, no wonder artists and art directors (hail Ian Summers, the noblest art director of   Back on the list after an absence of far too long is David Gerrold's nowfamous novel When Haiiie Was One. world's first uman .Analogue Robot, Life nput Equivalents. In other words ter who thought he was human. And that's where the trouble began...and then there was the time... But you'll have to read the book (or reread the book) to find out. David tells us there will be a sequel coming...something about When Harlie Was Two! David, as you may remember, has written several books about Star Trek for us, each of which has had several printings. He's also the author of perhaps the most famous Star Trek episodes -- all about some furry creatures that multiply endlessly -- or the mutated variety that grow and grow next book on the list Star Trek Log Four, adaptations of everyone's favorite television series by our own Alan Dean Foster! One of the episodes in the new books is -- you guess it -- "More Tribbles, More Troubles."    the tiles. The ponies were small, hairy mutants and had frightened eyes. The tribesmen blinked in the floodlights of Media. The noble tribe of Ecofreak. They were the largest and most powerful among the peoples of Hinterland, French reflected. They always came on horseback -- matter of principle. At home they used technology with relish. But when they came before the Enemy, they pretended to be purer than the pure. The delegation stopped before him, and Freneh bowed low beneath the chandelier. The smell of horses brought to mind memories of clandestine Hinterland missions. He watched Bono swing out of the saddle and observed the supple grace of the man, the fierce expression on the face. Bono moved like a herdsman -- probably owned whole countries of silvery land speckled with cattle, white Harvey hare, and the black prairie birds tribesmen called 'carry' after carrion. Bono's spurs rang on the tiles as he approached. The Crestmore bible on his belt swung on a tarnished silver chain. As they shook hands, French observed the faee closely. Bono's narrowed eyes were cool, unfriendly. Bushy brows, hooked nose, a sharply sculptured, forked blaek beard. Aggression. Yet French also sensed a disturbing shyness in the man. Shy men are poor negotiators, it went though his mind. They exchanged traditional greetings under blazing Media lights. "Welcome to Ricardo, Chief Bono, the Pearl of Union. May your stay be profitable." Bono answered: "We come under duress, Mr. French, and protest the threat of your missiles." And French: "We threaten no one but ask only for that which we need to live." French led Bono to the waiting one by one. Then Bono did the same in turn, surreptitiously assessing the young Deputy Assistant. The innocent charm of the man, those curls and locks of blond hair, that cleft in the chin, that small, pulpy nose, that dimple in the cheek, his whole look of careless, twinkling bravado disguised a tough and able man. Bono recalled French's history, had read it over again on the flight north. French was a vegetable smuggler from a notorious slum-level in East Tower who, by dint of native abilities and a fortunate marriage to a high-level girl (he'd met her in Branco, which was a kind of artist's haunt, among other things), had been lifted up and educated. In the service of the Bureau of Tribal Affairs, he used his pugnacious skills against the tribes. Some years back he'd earned fame among the tribes as a reckless agent. They'd called him 'starface' in Hinterland after a small scar on his forehead that he covered up with make-up when in the field. Now French was chief of intelligence, although he carried the title of DA for Public Affairs. A shrill neigh made them look up. The ponies had begun to panic in the gravitron vibrations. They reared, screamed, and kicked in all directions. Tribesmen rushed to aid a youngster who fought to control the animals. The crowd laughed at the turbulence. It took a moment to unload the pack animals. Then a youngster leaped into the saddle, gave Bono the raised-fist salute of the tribes, and with a cry drove the horses toward the entrance... They disappeared in a cloud of dust. French met the last of the tribesmen and recognized one of them at last -- not by appearance but by name. Franco Dart was a small, old, wrinkled little man with suspicious eyes. French knew him as associates. He'd been a member of the Ecofreak embassy many years back, a first or second secretary, one of the few Activists with a proFrench turned to Bono. "Shall we toast your safe arrival?" Bono gave a stiff little bow. "At your service." They walked to the table at the back. Their followers came behind them like a comet's tail, while the crowd gaped and savored the traces of rank horse smell left behind by the departed herd. Against the back of the hall hung circular emblems of all Hinterland tribes -- Maoling, Peacefreak, Narodnik, Twin River Compromise, Bluegrass Territory, Planetfriends, Gulfrats, Ecofreak, and others. French pointed to them, but Bono couldn't see them properly. Moments before he had begun to see double. Now murmurs in his stomach signalled the onset of nausea. The clammy feel of cold sweat spread from his armpits and neck over his body. His hands trembled as he took the glass of bubbly wine and his tongue slurred the words as he responded to French's toast. helium Waiters brought sandwiches on trays, but Bono shook his head. French turned to Bono. "I don't see anyone from the Ecofreak embassy. We notified them of your arrival. Did you tell them to stay away? Bono nodded. "Barney is not of our party. We don't expect him to play a role in these negotiations." "Why hasn't he been replaced?" "He shall be," Bono replied. "In due time." "I must say the sudden change in leadership caught all of us by surprise here." Bono didn't answer. He stared into his half-empty glass. He blinked in the characteristic manner of a man with gravitron bends, surprising French. "Tell me. Chief Bono. Is this your first time in a structure?" The tribesman nodded. "In that case you've still got it in front of you." "The Adjustment?" French nodded. "But it isn't all that bad. It takes less than a week. By the time of the opening ball, you'll be completely attuned." Bono said; 'T suppose we couldn't skip the opening ball?" French smiled. "Impossible, Chief. Tradition is tradition. Receptions, balls, rituals. How can we hide a man of your distinction from the curious eyes of the ladies? Some of your countrymen are very gallant." Bono heard French but could not concentrate on the conversation. He felt an unreasoning rage and longed to give it expression. "I'm a strict constructionist," he said. "I shun frivolity." Bono's feelings about the subject were more complex than that, but in the eyes of the blond DA he preferred to appear to be a conventional Activist. French answered: "A good rule, by and large. Let me assure you that Union respects your wishes. But the opening ball is absolutely unavoidable. The tradition goes way back..." He saw an expression of pain flash across Bono's features. "Are you starting to feel it already?" Bono's rage grew and grew. Pressure choked him. The feeling was entirely physical. His mind and spirit were benevolently inclined toward French, but something made him want to strike out. "H-how can you stand it," he brought forth. "Th-this...Vvibration." His hand described a circle. Wine spilled. Servants rushed in to wipe up the mess. "Are you p-people mad? When will you #-leave your er-rant ways!" French looked at him indulgently. "Where would you have us go? The tribes have all the desirable land. Shoii of atomics, how could we prevail against you? We like the High Culture -- we also like compression. We don't force you to live here. It's to your advantage to maintain Union. You've got no use for Helium... And neither of us wants the alternative." He noted a pulse of pain in Bono's face. The man's elbows jerked outward. French added: "You'll get used to it. In five days you'll be adjusted. You won't even feel the vibes." A five-percenter, French told himself. Or else he couldn't feel it yet. Bono was preoccupied. His lips trembled as he tried to form words. "I...don't u-understand...it. Y-your life span...is fifty-five at best. You deliv-delib-berately... deliverately..." "Yes?" French prompted. completed. Then he took himself in control. His eyes gained focus. His cheeks stiffened under the beard. Bono took a step toward the table. His feet seemed heavy. He placed his glass on the white table cloth with a studied gesture. Turning to French, he spoke very slowly. "With your permission, Mr. French, we'll now take our leave. We've had a long flight and an even longer ride." French bowed. "Of course, Chief. As you wish. Jump tubes are waiting outside. Until you and your associates have learned to operate them, one of my men will guide you by remote control." The Bureau of Tribal Affairs occupied nearly one quarter of Level # or Old Top, so called because it had been the summit of Central Tower until the end of the seventh century when Helium-cooling had dramatically improved grav-drum performance and two hundred new levels, spacious in the extreme, each with several storeys, had been added to the tower. Nevertheless, there clung to Old Top a certain hoary magnificence, a memory of wealth and of rooftop gardens open to the public, from whence structure folk had gazed out over the Atlantic or Hinterland through pressure-sealed glass. the Lord Mayor's domain, and the Lord Mayor's former office now belonged to Reston Proctor. Wood panelling nearly black with age formed three walls of the spacious room. Slender white columns a meter from the wall held up a vaulted ceiling from which the irridescent colors of an exquisite micromosaic reflected light. The outer side of the office, beyond the columns, was an outjutting terrace shut off by floor-to-ceiling drilla-glass. From that terrace Proctor could look across at West Tower or down at the intertower beltway that linked Center to West like a slack hose of translucent silver filled with motion at all times of day and night. Proctor sat behind his desk and, over its cluttered surface, he watched the screen of a visiset that had been rolled in over the heavy red carpet leaving a trail on the soft fibers. His face was pensive, eyes impassive. He wore the shimmering blue robe of a Big, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Proctor was a short, heavy man whose powerful neck, barrel-like torso, massive round head, heavy jowls, and an abnormally large and outjutting chin suggested the legendary rhinoceros. He sat surrounded by mementoes of his rise to power. Models of missiles on his desk marked his years in Defense. On the walls hung certificates of appointment to ever higher jobs in various parts of the bureaucracy -- Defense, Commerce, Public Order, Media, Health. Between these framed and ornamented pieces of scriptoplast under glass, and on little tables strewn about the room between armchairs and couches, were signed photographs of virtually every member of the Unsler clan, including an inordinately large holographic representation of Unsler himself. It hung by itself on a wall behind Proctor's desk. On a golden plaque set into the gilded frame of the picture was an inscription reproduced from the Unifier's hand: "To the best damn administrator who has ever served our noble cause, Bernie." In the visiscreen tribesmen stepped into upright jump tubes parked in rows outside the reception hall. Proctor watched them. The flat remorite on his desk lit up; a slip of scripto extruded from its slit. Proctor reached to get it. His secretary had written on it: 'Blottingham insists that you brief him (telcall is enough) on your assessment of the delegation.' Proctor crumpled the note in a meaty fist. He held it for a second thinking of pear-shaped Blottingham whose power increased as Unsler's declined. Then he threw the slip into the dusto and wrote a note for Mrs. Sedlig. It said: 'Call Blottingham and tell him to jump down a shaft. Tell him verbatim.' Below he penned a large, bold P. He stuck the slip into the remorite, leaned back in his throne-like chair, crossed his thick arms across his chest, and turned his attention back to the screen. But his concentration wandered, his mind excercised by Blottingham's peremptory message. Well, he thought, so far as I'm concerned, Unsler can do what he bloody well pleases. Proctor felt strong for the moment. He wouldn't jump every time Unsler's pear-shaped staff-chief whistled. The Helium round was underway -- a poor time to change the Chief Negotiator. A few more weeks, he thought. A few more weeks... Proctor shifted position. His blunt fingers drummed on the desk as he watched the tribesmen. Terrified. They were terrified. They gripped the waist-high tube rails as the jump tubes rose above the movebelts. They looked manageable enough, these youngish men. Proctor had hopes that they'd deliver the brief Interdicition he needed to carry out the plan. Of course, one never knew... The deep, melodious chime of his tel sounded. French! He reached for the small-screened tel to his right, punched a button. French came on. Behind him, through the telbooth glass, Proctor "Just a minute," Proctor rumbled. He reached for the black cube of his intercept. A spiderweb of wires trembled on top of the device. He touched its sides, and the cube turned red. "Have you got your intercept on?" he asked. French nodded. "Very well," Proctor said, "tell me what I already know." French chuckled and gave his report while Proctor wondered how these men would react to his proposal. After a while he broke in. "How does Bono strike you?" "Fanatical, uncomplicated, probably rigid... But it's too early to tell. Res. You saw his behavior. He's a five-percenter, and I'd wager he'll have a tough Adjustment. Grav-bends make people act strangely." Proctor said: "I'm watching him now. He's jerky, all right. His eyes are erratic." "Another thing, Res. He calls himself a strict constructionist, claims to dislike frivolity -- by which I guess he means the social side of things." Proctor, eyes on the screen, nodded and turned to French. "Our women are the devil's brood? Pollute the tribal blood?" French smiled. "Now, Res, I don't think I'd go as far as that. That'd be the extreme form of the disease." Proctor recalled the last Ecofreak delegation, said: "It would be refreshing -- after the debaucheries of '#." French laughed. "I wouldn't expect high moral tone, if I were you. Tack's followers can't be entirely opposed to mingling. OT is dead, you know. Remember the 'grand alliance'?" Proctor frowned. The five-year-old episode still reverberated. In #I Jonny Tack had come to Ricardo with the Helium delegation. A technical advisor, or some such thing. Soon a passionate love affair had bloomed between Regina Unsler and the young man, despite the Crestmore prohibitions against the mingling of tribal and structure seed. Had been an insane, trying time, that. Unsler had seen in this romance a new opportunity for expanding his power. For weeks frantic negotiations had been carried out under his orders to forih a Grand Alliance between Union and Hinterland by intermarriage. Proctor belonged to the hard-line school. He had opposed the venture even as he'd led the negotiations, but fortunately the Accommodation policy, as it came to be called -- favored both by Unsler and the Ecofreak council -- was scotched by the intervention of the Older TacL "Don't remind me," Proctor said to French. "That was one time when I was grateful for the late OT. He made short work of that romance... What about strategy? Did you get any hints?" In the screen the tribesmen had reached West Tower's central shaft. The tubes rose quickly with the upthrust traffic, bottom jets ablaze. The tribesmen were afraid. None looked down into the chasm and none looked up. None gaped at the many tubes, the movement of podshaped elevators, or at the common people moving up and down on hundreds of slide bars, arms and legs wrapped about the darkish rods. The men stared ahead with rigid expressions, terrified but much too proud to show it. French said: "Bono said nothing. I haven't polled the staff yet. But I still stand by my predictions. They'll try to wreck us economically. Activists can't have any other strategy. The question is why they came to power. If we could answer that question, we'd know a good deal more. For the moment, the best I can do is speculate, and I predict that they'll try for a Very Big as hostage -- someone from the Meyer family, say. Then I expect that they'll ask for half of our plastosteel production, which would mean the end of expansion, population control. Unsler couldn't survive that. But I expect that they'll settle for thirty percent. If, that is. If..." Proctor looked back at the telscreen. "If we make a credible military gesture." French nodded. Proctor was silent. How to strike a deal with Activists? Their objective was total destruction -- and he couldn't give them that. He had to find something they really wanted, something short of total war but more than economic damage. Perhaps he'd give them Portia structure in the north-west, a hotbed of Unsler support... He had to find a deal. The plot probably leaked like a sieve. The Group couldn't be held together for another five years. "We must get a better feel for their strategy," he rumbled. "See if you can talk to the ambassador in a day or two. Barney must be unhappy with this bunch. He might play with us." "they tell him' anything. I expect he'll be frozen out. Bono said as much." "Barney can't be cut out that easily. And it doesn't hurt to try." "I'll do it," French said, nodding. "And you better close the loop with our people in the regions. I don't want surprises on the other coasts." French nodded. "Call personally." "Will do." "And let's talk about this tomorrow morning." Through the telbooth glass Procclude their conversation. They waved to each other and passed out of sight. They reminded him of something. "Rivera," he said, "one more thing. Have you talked with Darby Dickens today?" French shook his head. "We lost two more people to flame attacks last night." "You're kidding." "I'm serious," Proctor asserted. "Ten deaths in as many weeks. That far exceeds chance." "Do you think Sidney is deliber"Of course, I do! And I think it's more than that. I think the flames are getting encouragement from Top Level. If this keeps up, I'll have to retaliate. Top Level is pressuring us -- through the flames." "Your popularity?" Proctor stared into the screen, communicating with his eyes. "That...and perhaps other things." French understood. The Secret Agenda. "Be careful," Proctor continued. "Don't move about alone. Always take some men with you on the movebelts, especially at night. I can't afford to lose you now." A grin lit up French's face; his dimples showed. "I can take care of myself." Proctor's eyes turned angry. "Balderdash," he rumbled. French still behaved as if he were a Branco gangster. "Take people with you when you move about. Tell Darby to assign you a guard." "I'll think about it." "No, Rivera, do it. The conflict may deepen now that Ecofreak is here. I just insulted Blottingham. He also belongs to that group peripherally." French nodded, amused and flattered by Proctor's concern. He had been on sixteen Hinterland missions and had come back alive. He was a Branco kid. Sidney's flames might harrass the people all over the Acropolis, but they stayed away from Branco. A few noble sadists wouldn't have a chance against him. "And come see me in the morning," Proctor said. "First thing." Proctor punched a button, and French became a single fading dot of light in the tiny screen. Bono stood before the embassy door and pressed the bell. Faintly from within came the first six notes of Woodstock. The door opened and he entered a terazzoed lobby followed by his retinue. A curved stairway led up to a second level where Barney stood tall and grave dressed in a white robe like a Very Big. His white hair fell down straight, structure style. Bono walked up the stairs toward Barney. Pressure squeezed his lungs and eyes. Terror gripped his mind. His feet were lead. He had the urge to gasp for air in huge, noisy bursts, but he suppressed it. Barney seemed far away, blurred. helium Barney looked down at the approaching Bono. How young he is! And the delegation-a tableau of inexperience. He said: "Welcome, Mycal Bono, welcome to Ricardo." Bono blinked. Barney was an Accommodationist and a man who, through the years, had lived in structures as Ecofreak's representative. A man you couldn't trust. Nevertheless Barney looked kindly. His hand was large and warm. Crows feet extended like rays from his greenish, solicitous eyes. Behind the ambassador, reflected in mirrors, Bono saw the embassy staff assembled to receive them. He nodded to Barney, afraid to speak lest his leaden tongue slur the words. "I knew your father well," said Barney. "We fought together against Maoling in the war of # ." Barney wondered how youngsters like these could have wrested the power from Franklin, Denton, Ruff and the others. Jonny Tack had demanded much in the way of information from the embassy, but he'd provided nothing in return since the shift. These youngsters would have to bring him up to date, whether they wished to or not. Something very big must have happened back home to vault the tiny splinter minority into the political saddle. Then, noting the rigid look on Bono's face and surprised that the man clung to his hand, it dawned on Barney what the problem was. I must be getting insensitive in my old age. Simultaneously, he saw Bono's elbows Jerk outward, saw the head fly back, saw the chief take in air with a violent gasp. Barney felt a surge of pity for the miserable youngster. "Smith, Duffy," he commanded sharply over his shoulder. "We have a five-percenter. Get the tub ready." As the two men ran off, he turned back to Bono. "Relax, son. You'll be all right. We'll take care of you." He put an arm around Bono's shoulder and, dispensing with ceremonial, he guided the youngster through a corridor formed by the curious embassy staff. He walked slowly, knowing that Bono's feet must feel heavy. Regardless of his ideology, he thought, a man's a man, and if he is a fivepercenter, he deserves both pity and care. Will he be ready for the ball? Should I seek a postponement? They went up a flight of stairs. Bono gasped without restraint now in that imitation of an epileptic fit that gravitron imposed on some. The worst part of it was the embarrassement. Adjustment reduced a man to a pitiful caretaker of a defective biomachine. Up ahead, in an open corridor, closed off by a wooden rail. Smith and Duffy carried small sacks in hand -- red gelatin. They scurried along. Barney heard the rush of water from the bath. "It'll be all right," he assured Bono again. "A minute or two, and we'll get you relief." He looked back at the group which had followed, a mixture of staff and delegates. He searched for his secretary. His eyes snagged on Franco Dart. Now there was a familiar face. He nodded to Dart, a plan half forming in his mind. "Martha," he called, seeing the woman at last, "get me a sedative and a glass of water." He moved Bono slowly along toward the sound of water. Bono let himself be led, his terror diminished. He let himself go. Mentally he gave himself over entirely to the care of others. In the bathroom, with water rushing into the tub, Barney told him to undress. He complied and stood naked on cold tiles, shuddering and shivering in fits. Two men stirred a red powder into steaming water. Bono smelled plastosteel and inferred that the red color of the powder came from that. His arms and chest were covered by goosepimples. The sheen of his skin was blueish beneath the tan. The bathroom door opened a crack. A hand reached in holding a cup of water, some pills. "Take these," Barney told him. Bono obediently swallowed. "And now into the tub with you," Barney said. In the late afternoon Sidney had jumped off the lip of his North Tower domain and after a long freefall through North shaft had landed by parachute in the Pit. At his insistance Regina had been present. When the riots erupted, her bodyguard formed a ring about her and brought her back to Top Level West, considerably shaken. She asked Selma, her favorite maid, to call St. Theresa of Carmen on Level # Central and ask that Sister Serenita be sent to her at once. Serenita came, a tall, severe old woman in a huge winged coif and blue robe. They retired to the meditation chamber of Regina's extensive domain. Regina lay down on the couch and Serenita, seated beside her, read to her calmly from the Biblibooks until Regina fell asleep. Selma awakened her some time later. Serenita had gone back to the convent again. Regina was momentarily confused. She had dreamed about Serenita, a confused jumble. The nun had spoken about the Great Change, whatever that signified. There had been some business with a turquoise ring. Selma was excitable, and her eyes opened wide and resembled fried eggs. "Mistress," she cried, shaking Regina, "come quickly. We've spied some tribesmen near the Desolation. It must be them!" They ran through the chambers of Regina's domain and passed through a glass door to spiral stairs that led up to a rooftop garden covered by many small domes of drilla-glass. In the west the sun reddened the horizon, but there was light enough to see the clump of horsemen through telescopes. Presently the tribesmen plunged down the side of a small rise, and soon they were obscured by dust. Regina sighed and walked pensively back through the lush tropical vegetation of her garden, down the gravelled path, to the spiral stairs, stirred into memories of Jonny Tack. helium She said to Selma: "Roll a visiset into my favorite room. I'll watch them on the evening news. Meanwhile I'll take a bath." Selma Said: "Mistress, Clafto Meyer called while you slept and said he must speak with you." Regina frowned and didn't answer. Mention of Clafto set her brooding, and she still pouted in her marble bath, lounging in the recessed, oval pool while fountains played all around her. Mounds of foam lay on the water, and she flicked the fluffy icebergs toward the cone-mountains of her deeply tanned knees. She thought of the abject slavery Sidney imposed on her by his brotherly violence, her father's inaccessibility, and swarthy Clafto "Who, chosen as Sidney's latest favorite, now demanded the use of her body. Then, with a rush of reassurance, she remembered something Serenita had said the other day. Serenita had said: "Darling girl, I pray for you daily. I commend you to the Virgin Mother Mary, "the Star of the Sea. She has turned her face from me for a long time, sealing her ears to my prayers, but yesterday she smiled. I do believe she has now heard me, and you'll be granted your dearest wish." Regina sighed in the pool. Then she rose and water pearled down her body. The scent of her bath oil lay on the air. Her chemist had concocted it for her. No other oil in Union had the same lubricity or the same fey smell. She tingled with pleasure all over as she rubbed herself dry. Her nighty, genuine silk from Maoling, snuggled softly against her flesh. She wormed her feet into half slippers and they beat on her soles as she walked to her favorite room, a circular cubicle cut off at one end by a full-length, gold-laced mirror. She dropped down on the low divan where she and Jonny had striven in love, their bodies reflected darkly in the glass. She reached for a sugared crispstrip in a white bowl and activated the visiset Selma had rolled into the room. Jonny Tack. She remembered him vaguely, alas. Five years had wiped off everything except a few great strokes. He was tall and powerful. He shaved his head except for a spot on top of his skull from which had sprung a long horse-tail of hair. Jonny had never smiled. He had been rough, tumultuous in love. His blue eyes had glazed when he'd desired. Once satisfied, he'd always cursed her, calling her a wanton temptress, black of mood and tortured by some kind of guilt. But he came back always after a while. The news had not yet begun, and Regina looked at herself in the mirror. She was aristocratically tall. Her legs were pulled up and half hidden by pillows. The grey-blue nighty was low-cut between firm breasts and decorated with yellow stars whose points were long like lights seen through drilla-glass. Her high cheeks now showed a bloom. Her pouting lips were full. Her eyes had the brooding look of one who'd loved and lost. She adjusted her red hair. It now hung down to her shoulders, although ordinarily it would have been piled high to show the swan-like arch of a delicate neck. She thought: I've become a woman since those days. She reached for and crunched another sugared crisp-strip between white teeth. In mid-bite she stopped, the strip protruding between her lips. For a second she had thought she'd seen a tribesman, but it turned out to be merely a man in a beaded jacket advertising an ethnic eatery. She crunched up the strip and licked her lip with the tip of a pink tongue. The news came at last. The word 'Helium' flashed on and off at the bottom of the screen. She saw pictures of the tribesmen on horseback, in the reception hall under the blaze of chandeliers, in jump tubes travelling through the Acropolis. The commentator said: "Mycal Bono, Ecofreak's negotiator, arrived in Ricardo tonight. He was met by Rivera French, a highhad no comment for Media. He retired at once to the Ecofreak embassy in East Tower. Observers here expressed surprise at Bono's youth. Concern has been voiced that Union's Helium needs will depend on the sagacity and skill of so inexperienced a man, a virtual unknown. Reston Proctor, Union's chief negotiator, sees no basis for concern and once more denies persistent rumors that this round of negotiations will be hotly contested. Reliable sources within the Bureau, however, privately concede that rough times are ahead. Contingency plans have been dusted off and stand-by air liquefaction units are reportedly on stream. Proctor himself is reported gloomy about prospects. He felt hemmed in by the Accommodation policy and darkly hints that 'the worst' may happen on this round. Top Level spokesmen refuse to comment at this early stage and reaffirmed the Unifier's absolute confidence in Proctor." Regina barely listened. She gazed with fixed concentration at the flashing images of Mycal Bono. His dark, brooding eyes and black, forked beard made her pensive.  could fall in love with him, she thought.  like that name...Mycal. It's the name of an archangel in Serenita's Biblibooks. He isn't like Jonny, of course, but he seems more...sensitive. A little sad,  think. "In other news..." A sealing crew maneuvered a section of plastosteel into a gaping hole of Portia structure. The structure renewal had gone smoothly. In Laystruc four mushtanks had been poisoned, and Media showed emergency supplies brought in by air from Frisco. Several jumpball innovations were shown. Regina plotted. The opening ball was a week away. She decided to wear a green sheer-gown for the occasion, the one with the coiling snakes all oriented suggestively (their split tongues extended) toward her center. She'd spread pink tint across her eyelids and hang her neck with silver bells. She'd daub Volcano behind her ears, across her wrists, in the crook of her arms. Her cosmetician said that Volcano yaporized in body heat. "It's like incense burned in your blood," the helium woman had said, presenting the phial. "Just for you," the woman had said. No other lady in Union could afford the price. "In another spirited display of leadership courage, Sidney Unsler, the Underunifier, today demonstrated the art of parachuting..." Angrily, Regina looked up at the screen. Sidney stood at the lip of the shaft, a foolish grin on his long face. Torches smoked in his gloved hands. He leaped out over the chasm lip, torches held high and away from his body at an angle. His motion imitated that of a diver. For a dizzying moment the cameras followed Sidney's spreadeagled freefall through the lighted shaft, an infinite depth down. Then cameras deployed on lower levels picked him up as he came, his torches blazing, a dot that became a man, that flashed by like a bullet. Next they showed the parachute furl out of his backpack pulled by a lead. The striped silk cracked open and Sidney swung down. Finally, they showed him standing at Pit level, an idiotic pained grin on his face. The collapsed chute could be seen trailing from his harness and out of the picture. A Media reporter interviewed Sidney. Sidney prattled about the exhilaration of freefall. Regina jabbed the visi control and the picture went blank. They hadn't shown the deaths and the riot. Sidney had collided with three unsuspecting people in jump tubes. Two girls had lost control and had fallen with terrible screams to the bottom. His parachute had pulled four children from slide bars around level #. They too had died. Rioting people had erupted from severaf levels and, crowding the slide bars, had descended to Pit bent on revenge. Regina had been down-bound in a tube. Police had stopped her. Down below they'd battled to save Sidney's life. She thought: How I despise him, how I loathe him! She slipped her feet into her fluffy half slippers; they slapped her heels as she strode off to bed. She thought: # must marry into the tribes before Daddy dies and Sidney takes over. Bless him, she thought, meaning her father. Bless Accommodation. U Tradition decreed a one-week gap between a tribal reception and the opening ball -- time enough for the Adjustment, time enough to renew acquaintances, to get an informal feel for the other side's negotiating position. In # the Ecofreak delegation kept to itself. Bono was a fivepercenter and lay in the tub. The delegates were new and had no friends in Union. Only Dart had had structure experience, but his last stay in Ricardo went fifteen years back. He had time on his hands, and he used it to look at the Acropolis. He toured Ricardo with a young tribal attache and found the city much the same as he had left it -- physically. The pentastructure was fixed in design and couldn't be transformed like a tribal settlement. But details had changed. The crowds were thicker and the physical plant seemed poorly maintained except at higher levels, of course. In Dart's day Ricardo had been a riot of psychedelic color, musicJ and sensuality, of which only traces remained.  The mood of the place was sub-j dued somehow, and when he asket his guide the reason why, the youngster ascribed it to rot at the top: "Unsler is old and ailing. His brain is turning to mush. He clings to power but won't excercise it. His aides act for him, and his precious son rages through Ricardo unchecked. Things have really deteriorated since the Proclamation when Bernie made his son Underrunifier. That was followed by executions and much mayhem of that sort. Life in the structures is different from life at home. Here everything is integrated. When the chief is sick, everyone sickens." Dart answered a little huffily: "You don't need to tell me that. I'm an old structure hand myself." One time they toured a lower level and Dart saw an urchin selling hand-printed scriptos. Such things were illegal; Media controlled all communications. Dart bought a copy of the rag and found it filled with the gruesome escapades of someone called Fink. The embassy aide explained. "Fink is their word for Sidney Unsler, and it's a mild word, if you ask me. Sidney is a degenerate. He thinks he is the reincarnated person of a mythical hero or god, someone called Julius Caesar. Young uplevel nobles have formed a cult brotherhood around Sidney. They call themselves flames and call him Ignis, meaning Fire in latin. They all study latin and use the tongue in secret conversations. They have initiations and fight duels with short Roman swords and round shields in a room set aside for that purpose in Sidney's domain. All this wouldn't bother a soul, but they also maraud through Ricardo at night -- drunk, as a rule. They rape and loot for the sheer hell of it, and the police look the other way, of course. You can imagine Union's future. Sidney takes over when mushbrain dies." "I take it you don't like the Unslers." The young man laughed. "No, indeed!" "You should be pleased. A weak Union means a strong tribe." "I'm an Accommodationist myself," the young man said, suddenly brusque. "It gives me a pain to see the High Culture decay." Hearing this. Dart cancelled the evening excursion they'd planned. He didn't want to be associated with a vocal Accommodationist -- and the entire embassy was riddled with them. Only one man, Dulsol, the chief of maintenance, appeared sympathetic with the Activist cause. Dart sat in the embassy's library that evening when Barney approached him and suggested dinner for old times' sake. He left the choice of restaurants to Dart. Dart recalled a cozy little place on Level # North called the House of Eighty-two Flavors. They went there the following evening. They dropped down East shaft, crossed to North by the intertower beltway, and went down to Level # . From the tower's central shaft, helium narrow streets fanned out like rays and fed traffic to Inner Ring, the first circumferential. Sixty-eight was a labor quarter with low ceilings. They parked their tubes in a garage and went in on foot. They found the feeder street deserted and discovered Inner Ring blocked by huge inflated bags, one on each side. Through a gap between the bags, people slowly passed into the interior eyed by police in blue uniforms. Dart pointed to the crowd and asked what it was all about. Barney said: "That's a roundup. Franco. Remember the riot of a few days ago? Media filmed Sidney's jump. They also filmed the riots. Now they're rounding up the participants." "How? How can they possibly pick individuals out of this mob?" The people of Union all looked alike to Dart, especially those on lower levels who, deprived of the luxury of artisun, had blue-white faces. They looked like things you might find at home under a rock. "They condition the police to remember the faces. They sit in front of viewing screens for days on end. Their recall is also boosted by a mnemonic drug." They joined the crowd at the rear and shuffled forward as it moved. Barney towered above the people, a giant in a white robe. Dart saw several people pulled out of the line by police. One older man in the green jump suit of nutrition tank attendants protested his innocence with vigor. His fat mate came to his aid swinging a plastic shopping bag. Both were dragged away. "What'll happen to them?" Barney turned a thumb toward the reddish netting of the flexoplast. "Surely you're joking," Dart reacted. "They wouldn't execute them for rioting, would they?" Barney saw this as an opening for the attack he planned, and so he arched his eyebrows, said: "Where have you been. Franco? Don't tell me you don't know about conditions in Ricardo. Have those youngsters cut you out of the cable traffic?" The remark hurt -- it really hurt. Dart mumbled something. Barney persisted. "What is your function on this delegation. Franco? I've assumed all along that you're the Number Two." At that point, to Dart's relief, a policeman noticed them and waved. Barney's white robe meant Very Big! "Look," Dart said, ducking the question. "They're pointing." They wormed their way through the sluggish crowd and soon were past the barrier, walking along Inner Ring on the stopped movebelt. Barney didn't renew his question. It had served its purpose. He already knew Dart's rank. Dart, for his part, mumbled to himself. He should be Number Two. He consoled himself with the reflection that even Bono had no real authority. He was merely Jonny's mouthpiece, not a plenipotentiary.  They walked through a desolate neighbiarhood. Broken furniture and garbage piled beside the movebelt testified to disposal chute clog-ups. Many windows were broken in buildings to either side. Some of the overhead lights were out. Wild, loud, bold-eyed children played in the streets despite the advanced) hour. As they walked. Dart began to speak about the House of Eightytwo Flavors Charming atmosphere...eccentric chef...memorable dishes. The shabby neighborhood compelled him to justify his choice. The place ws disappointing. A smell of burned grease hung about little tables covered with an oily, checkered material. Little candles burned in colored glass. Slick gangsters in jump suits lounged idly in the back. How memory deceives! To Dart's relief Barney didn't seem to mind. He said he rather liked the place. In the filtered light of the candle, his face seemed amused. He joked about Dart's adventurous past. Dart was a deep one, he said. Sly but deep. When the girl came, Barney ordered a bottle of wine. After the second bottle had been drained and food was on the way, Barney looked up at Dart's flushed face. Time to get down to business. He had a date with French for the next evening, and he meant to give French some advance intelligence about Ecofreak's demands. Tack's inexperienced Activists had no idea how you worked a Helium round. Now the time had come to pluck the vail old cock's dry feathers. To hear him tell it, Dart had been the terror of Union, the savior of the tribe. "Ah, yes," Barney sighed. "Those were times... But nowadays... Tell me. Franco, how do you assess these brash new kids?" Dart glowed with wine and niemories. "With a bit of wise and seasoned advice, they'll do all right," he winked. "But will they listen?" "It takes a bit of skill and diplomacy," Dark admitted. "Finesse, my dear Andros, finesse." "I'm pleased to hear you say that. Franco. They need a man like you. Desperately. Your role is extremely important. You provide that link between experience and energetic youth. It's a very responsible and subtle role. I don't envy you the job. We niust work hard to save the tribe from reckless foolishness. With you in the inner circle, I'm not so worried about developments." Dart compressed a smile into a pleased smirk. If Bono would appreciate his role as much as Barney did... Barney continued: "I suppose that you've approved the general negotiating plan. I'd feel better if you had. I realize that my own position is somewhat ambiguous, what with my strong ties to the Accommodationists. But Tack hasn't removed me, so I expect that my loyalty is not in question -- and I'd like to help. It's unfortunate that Bono is having such a hard Adjustment. Time is wasting. By now we should've had one or two informal They must have some early warning as a matter of courtesy, at least about the hostage question. I'm sure you did that sort of thing when you were first secretary here. In short. Franco, I thought it best to sit down with the only man in charge who's on his feet rather than in a tub -- ' ' helium Donald A. Wollhelm, Publisher The big news in March each year is one. It brings Tarl Cabot back into heroic focus as he invades the northland of Earth's counterworld to help its Viking natives fight off the first real attack of the alien Others -- those beastlike outer-space beings which have been the implacable enemies of the Priest-Kings. Kelly Freas, Hugo-winner-time-and-again, signed the cover and interior illustrations as well to guarantee a fast sellout so put in your order at your local bookshop to be sure of your copy! (UW #I #- #) The book that will prove to be the see the movie! (UY#-#) of Dumarest's galactic adventures in his attempt to locate lost Earth. A fine space adventure, with a great cover by George Barr! (UY#-#) Speaking of covers, the girl that Kelly Freas put on Michael G. is going to be the hit of the year. And the novel is a honey -- Coney's best -- an extension of his world of the near future with a plot twist that will wrench your heart. (UY#-#) Incidentally, have you seen IMA fun book if ever there was one! (UJ#-#) and at these words Barney grinned " -- and see what orders you may have for me." Dart drew himself up in his chair. "As a matter of fact, I agreed to this delightful dinner because I had the same intentions. I did approve the strategy -- reluctantly, Andros, very reluctantly. I meant to discuss the matter with you. Privately, of course..." "Of course." "Chief Bono and I are not entirely..." "I understand," Barney hastened to say. "Old diplomats like us know the value of discretion." "The real work is done like this," Dart persisted, "privately." "My view to a fault." "Well, Andros, Tack is determined to obtain the silcoplast parts, you know." Dart watch Barney's face, but Barney gave no reaction. "The silcoplast parts," he said evenly. "And to get sufficient leverage, he intends to ask for Sidney as hostage." "Sidney Unsler as hostage," the ambassador echoed. Dart nodded with a gleam in his eye. "Sidney Unsler." He thought: Barney must be surprised, though he doesn't show it. Dart went on: "In addition, that is to say to add more leverage yet, he'll ask for eight hundred thousand tons of plastosteel." "Ten times the usual demand," Barney said without intonation. "He must want the silcoplast parts very much. What are they? Zippers? Buttons? Hairpins?" Dart heard the sarcasm. Once more his eyes lit up. "There are some things so secret only the innermost circle is privy to the information. But I can give you a hint, ambassador. There's been a breakthrough!" Barney extracted a small coin purse. The cheap article was made of sil. Barney squeezed the flat round object. A slit in its top opened like a mouth. He repeated the motion once or twice more. Then he put the purse away. He said: "Would this have to do something with the Kaysee labs you Activists have been funding all these years?" "I am silent," Dart pronounced, but his eyes gleamed. "Why?" Barney probed. "Why do we ask Union to give us SP? Maoling is a major producer, and so is Peacefreak. Why don't we get it from them?" Dart raised his eyebrows. He was enjoying this. "Welded SP? Does Maoling have the clean rooms? Does Peacefreak have molecular micro-welders?" Barney stared into the candle and thought about it. Silcoplast was a common synthetic derived from silicon, cheap to produce, reasonably gravitron resistant, and much more durable than the hydrocarbon plastics it had replaced. What else? Then suddenly he thought he had it and, reflecting upon it, he knew he had it. Sil was also a laboratory curiosity. Low level energies transmitted through the stuff generated a curious field that inhibited all types of nuclear core reactions. But the inhibiting oscillations were random -- had to do something with the crystalline structure of the silicon-carbon. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Barney decided to test Dart. The little man revealed his every emotion. "You've learned to control siloscillations. In effect you've got a...a bomb inhibitor." "I am silent," Dart replied, but his eyes flickered. "Perhaps you're free to tell me this: Why don't we build our own clean rooms, our own molecular welders?" "That would take years. Jonny has little patience. He wants to act now." Barney nodded. A lardy woman brought their food, a circular tray with seven dabs of tankmush, each with a unique flavor. In the middle of the tray lay limp sticks of simubread. The idea was to scoop the mush with the bread. Barney let the silence build while he fell to. In Hinterland the old men read the Crestmore bible again, fingers on that passage about the bastions of the whore. Like a malignant virus the Activists had lain dormant until this time. Now they had the argument that no one could refute. "We have it in our power to topple the structures. The Abomination shall be humbled. We shall break the back of the Technology Beast. No more threats, people of Hinterland. Their missiles shall never strike again. In the heart of every town we shall build a generator, and their bombs will fall like rocks but won't explode." The little people didn't know this, needless to say. But the members of the tribal council must have heard Tack's eloquence and voted to send Pranklin, Denton, Ruff and the helium others back to their wells and, ranches, dispossessed -- the noble cause of Accommodation dead, displaced by the pointy-eyed wrath of the Crestmore zealots. The assessment made sense. It must have been thus. Chewing, Barney looked up. He took a sip of wine, swallowed, and said: "The strategy stinks. And it's juvenile. Union will smell a rat. Tack has lost h'is marbles. All you Activists are crazy. Here's what'll happen. Franco. Proctor will run to Harvanth of Defense, and the two of them together will see the Unifier. Unsler will have to pay attention to this one. He'll give Proctor permission to attack -- selectively, of course. They won't stop until all of our production capacity is destroyed -- all but the essential refineries, of course. They won't touch the Helium. The irony of it... Union will destroy our technology. This is the Helium War of #I all over again. How many of these components does Tack want, by the way?" Dart wiggled uneasily. "I can't tell you that." Barney laughed. "Franco, don't be silly. You must. You've already blabbered out too much. We're conspirators, you and I. You must confide in me." Dart protested: "I didn't tell you anything of importance." Barney cocked his head and smiled. "Of course you did. You gave me the hostage demand -- another really jejune notion. I suppose Tack thinks that Union will give up the parts if we relent on the hostage question. Where have you people been these last few decades. This is no way to negotiate! You should have asked for microwelders, not for the components. Insane! Well, how many?" Dart stared glumly. "Franco, out with it. If you play games with me, I swear I'll cable Tack and expose your blabbermouth." "Fifty thousand." "So many? Why...that's almost one for each tribal settlement. Why the sudden concern for other tribes?" Dart stared ahead unhappily. He didn't touch his food. "Explain it to me. Franco." "There's an alliance." "What?!" "Jonny has formed a tribal alliance. It's called the Counterunion." "Sooooo! Well, that explains a few things too. Far too many ambassadorial changes lately. Hmmm. Jonny has ambitions, then. He wants to bring all of Hinterland under his protective umbrella... But eat. Franco; try this peppery stuff here. Not bad." "I'm not hungry," Dart said. Then, after a moment: "What'll you do, Andros." "I'm more discrete than you. Franco. I'm not going to tell you. But, as the saying goes, a hint is permitted. I expect to look out for the Accommodationist cause." In the alternating cycles between dumb pain and almost disembodied vision, Bono had lost track of the passage of time. Somewhere in that murky chunk of duration, a physician had installed a needle into his arm. Sugar flowed into his body through the hose that linked the needle to a bottle hung on high. He wore a strange pair of rubber shorts from which his wastes were pumped out. In lucid moments he could hear the pump cut in and out at intervals. The rest of him, up to the neck, was submerged in jelly. It trembled with his every breath and exhalation. Some chemical in the sugar or the gel interfered with his brain chemistry. Time and time again he dozed off to relive with minute variations a single experience -- his last day on his father's ranch on the Plain of Baez, a vast expanse of mutagrass steppe closed off in the distance by the jagged blue line of the Sierra Blanca. He hunted the giant Harvey hare, one of many curiosities created by radiation's disorderly invasion of the chromosomal world. He was again a half-naked fifteen-year-old armed with a crossbow, stealthily stalking through shoulder-high mutagrass toward the grazing beast. The Harvey raised its head from time to time, ears erect, listening. Then the head went down again and the hare fed invisibly on young mutagrass sprouts that issued green in spring and autumn. When the Harvey ate, Mycal crept forward, the wind in his face. When Harvey listened, he crouched. Cricks chirped harshly on all sides, and a flock of carries, sensing a feast, glided in a far away circle against the sky. Kilometers away a large transport copter landed near the ranch house and a group of boys clambered out. Xhey stood about in a half circle and threw rocks at a scarecrow while the pilot went inside. The copter belonged to the Activist Academy at Wellhead, and it had come to fetch Mycal for his first term. It meant the end of his carefree days. Men on horseback soon rode off to find the youngster. Oblivious of all this, Mycal crept forward. Fifty meters from the beast he picked up the musk-scent of a female. He paused and checked his dark, oily bow, the cranked-back wire, the blunt bolt. Then in the high tones of a boy whose voice had not yet changed, he called: "Har-vey! Har-vey!" The she-hare rose, a large white apparition. She sailed from Mycal in the first zig of a zigzag course. He had anticipated the intial direction. When the hare zagged, they were both heading for the same spot like lines of a triangle on a collision course. The hare was faster than the boy and reached the magic spot where obscure instinct made all Harveys stop for the cloying counterattack. The Harvey turned and stopped. Her red eyes were sad with an unspeakable sadness. Her ears hung down accentuating the pitiful look. Her paws were bent in the manner of a begging dog. Then the telepathic pulse hit Mycal with full force. He had only a second to react. He felt a sensation of pity, love, and concern for the hare. The beast appeared to him not as it was -- a white giant, a half ton of muscle and sinew wrapped in a fluffy pelt helium that brought three hundred suds in Merillo. Harvey seemed a tiny, sweet, and utterly helpless baby rabbit, a lost little thing. Mycal's eyes watered with affection. Tribesmen thought that the Harvey hunt strengthened the character. Mycal had killed seven hares in the course of growing up. He knew how to choke down the pity. When the beast zigged again, he let the bolt fly. She gave an agonized shriek and fell out of sight into the grass. Her shrieks continued, and he went after her, hard and pitiless inside. She lay on her back and spasmed, pink nostrils gushing blood, red eyes terrified. He felt the terror as if it were his own. Nevertheless, he knelt beside the beast and slit her throat with a wide-bladed knife. She was his eighth hare. Bono relived the experience time and time again. The dream changed shape. Sometimes he called and there was no Harvey. Sometimes he shot her and she fell dead at his feet. Sometimes he missed. Yet again he joined in her pity and embraced the hare with a rush of emotion, and the two of them cried in each other's arms like people. Awakening with a shudder, he felt the inrush of discomfort. The pressure descended on him. His breath grew heavy and he began to gasp for air. He could swear that a chemical interfered with his memory. Bono had devised a method to escape the trauma. He concentrated on his heart beat, on his breathing. He took one breath at a time. In...out...in...out...in...out. Silvery, swaying, there was the Plain of Baez. In the distance stood the Sierra Blanca. Mycal stalked through the shoulder-high grass. The Harvey looked up, ears tall and trembling... French met Barney for dinner in The Mutant, a fashionable but discrete up-level eating place in West Tower. French chose roast veal with autumn potatoes; Barney ordered cricklegs in wine sauce. Not everyone in Union's structures ate flavored tankmush. The very rich and very poor had access to real food as well. French picked up the ninety-sud tab; it was a bargain considering the information he had gained. They parted in the tubepark adjoining the restaurant. French found striped affair. He headed out to find Proctor. A flame had left the restaurant some time before and, spotting French's tube in the lot, had hidden in the shadows. Now he followed French at a distance. In his excitement, French didn't notice the surreptitious pursuit. The time was ten forty-five at night or fifteen minutes after the scheduled start of the late-night jumpball game. Tonight Proctor had the Leader Box and French made for Central's collosseum to catch Proctor with the news. When he arrived he noticed at once that Proctor hadn't made his appearance yet. The people roared with unhappiness and stamped on the thin plastosteel floor so that the collosseum trembled. A band played on the field below, bulj crowd noise almost completely obliterated the sound. The Leader Box was on the upper level, accessible by the wide corridor that went up around the place in a spiral. French stopped along the way and chose one of a bank of empty telbooths. He closed the door to dampen the noise, dialed Fred Clemmens at his cubohome. Clemmens was director of the technical division, one of three operations under French in the Office of Intelligence. The man appeared in the tiny screen, older and balding. A towel hung around his neck. French said: "Fred, what do you know about silcoplast?" Clemmens raised his eyebrows. French went on, a little amused. "Ever hear of a silcoplast wave modulator used in a telcom net?" Clemmens said: "Riv, what is this? Some kind of practical joke?" "I am serious, my friend. Ecofreak will ask us for fifty thousand silcoplast devices or components or switches or whatnot; they claim they need them for a communications system. I searched my brain, Fred, but somehow the demand didn't make sense." Clemmens shook his head slowly. "It doesn't; not on the face of it. Are you worried?" "Aren't you?" Clemmens made a face., "Frankly, Riv, you've made me in-: terrupt my vibromassage, so..." "Do you have contacts in the SP industry?" ; "Some, yes."  "Well, Fred, I want you to get galaxy: on the tel and have the best silchemists in here by tomorrow morning" Clemmens said: "You are worried. You sure? The SP centers are mostly in Husten, Norlens, and Laystruc. Should I... "Yes. Fly them in overnight. I think this is a big one." French signed off and went on his way. Through vaulted doors spaced at regular intervals, he could oversee the colorful crowd and the green field below. The crowd was in an angry, ugly mood. Hate vibrations filled the air. Roused structure crowds were dangerous, especially sporting crowds. The leader had made them wait for more than half an hour. Clearly people didn't know that they waited for Proctor. French walked between two openings, bare, scuffed wall on either side, when the noise suddenly intensified, died down. He hurried forward. Even before he reached the next door, he heard the announcer's magnified voice. "Here he is, jumpball fans. The games are on. Reston Proctor, the Chief Negotiator. ' ' At the mention of the name, the crowd fell silent. It held its breath. Then a wild cheering started and grew in intensity. French had reached the door and stopped to watch. Light from the floods glared off the bullet-proof, chem-proof glass of the Leader Box. Proctor was not visible inside, and the crowd Wanted to see him. It took up a chant. "Proc-tor, Proc-tor, Proctor." Then French saw movement in helium the box -- a blue robe flashed. Cheering and whistling much more intense than before displaced the chanting. It lasted a long time but, finally, slowly, it died out. French walked on, thinking about Proctor's popularity. Media had issued two books in as many years Action. For three years now a visishow ran on Saturday nights called The Hunt. It had an 'organization' who resembled Proctor, a black security chief -- black like Darby Dickens. Proctor's engineered popularity was all part of the Secret Agenda. Hondo Weinberger, one of the Media Bigs, often lunched with room. He was not the only one. It was a measure of Unsler's decrepitude that he tolerated the obvious self-promotion of one of his agency heads...and a measure of Sidney's stupidity that he appeared not to notice. Or perhaps Sidney had noticed -- hence the recent harrassement. Outside the Leader Box stood one of Dickens' men. "Mr. French, I'll have to search you." "Me, Harlow? For God's sake, surely you know meV' "Sorry, sir. New orders from Dickens. Everybody must be searched. No exceptions. It's the flames sir." "More trouble?" "Not so far this week, Mr. French, but we're on a general security alert." French handed over a pistol he'd checked out of the security shop some days ago. He'd considered that precaution enough against the flames. He said: "Here. Now you can be sure I won't shoot the Negotiator." "Yes, sir. Go right on in." French frowned as he walked down the aisle of the Leader Box, his eyes on the players. Some floated in the air, maneuvering with boot and elbow jets. Others stood on the ground in patterns of defense and attack. French scorned the game. He belonged to the die-hard set that resented the game's debauchery by the addition of Fulbright's gravitron webbing. The classic collision of forces had become an awkward aerial ballet. Proctor sat up front alone, absorbed in documents from a briefcase. French pulled up his robe, sat down, and gave his report. Barney did not think that the Activists would last long. He had hinted pointedly that Ecofreak should look out for some electronic components ostensibly meant for a telcom system across four radiation belts -- Barney hadn't said anything specifically, but that had come across clear as a bell. Sil-components welded to copper. Those parts would play a key role in the negotiations, French said. Then he reported on the predicted plastosteel levy and the hostage demand. Down below three men in red crashed against the tripple-decker flywall, zoomed down. Ground guards felled them with loud snaps of equipment. Proctor stared at the groaning crowd. "Sidney Unsler," he rumbled. "That's interesting." "It doesn't make sense," French threw in. "Either they are incredibly naive negotiators -- or else I'm missing something. I think it's a diversion, Res, an attempt to make us focus on the hostage question. They'd rather we don't think about the things they really want. Technology. The sil-components. Barney almost said as much. You just don't ask for the Underunifier as hostage -- not in this day and age." "Very interesting," Proctor mused. French asked, "What do you make of it?" Proctor glanced at French, a little wary. "You know how I feel about those intelligence estimates." "They're the best we have." "Sure, sure. Still... Rivera, I sense trouble. I suspect these 'Activists' of yours, and the demand for Sidney makes me nervous. Suppose they insist on the demand, insist hard enough so that I'm forced to take it up with Unsler." "So?" "So I take it up with Unsler -- and suppose Unsler says 'Yes.' " French was genuinely puzzled. "Why would he do that?" "Because he wants Accommodation. I can see it now. Sidney in Hinterland. Sidney hobnobbs with tribal leaders. Sidney forms close friendships." "With Activists?" "they're Activists." French didn't hide his irritation. "Res, they are Activists. I have no doubts about it. I've been out there." He gestured with an arm. "I've seen the sour bread." "You're too brash, Rivera, too damned cocksure." For a moment both men were silent. Down below whistles shrilled and flags dropped from the rafters. French broke the silence. "The key is in those silco parts. Barney's hint was -- hell, it was a slap in the face. Hint isn't the right word." Proctor shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they want us to worry about the technology. Besides, technology is one of those things with Ecofreak. They always want some damned oddity. The last time it was laser drilles -- but nothing happened." French said; "I'm suspicious." "You're always suspicious," Proctor countered. "You've got a fetish about technology. You were suspicious in '#, but nothing happened, like I said. Those people are like monkeys. They like to play with gadgetry. It's like sex with them. Because the Crestmore forbids it -- therefore it has appeal." Silence. "Sidney Unsler. That may about it for another second. "At any rate, we must wait for more details. How is the Helium situation?" "Flow is back by thirty percent -- the usual thing. All the structures are holding. Four or five days inventory, roughly." "Air liquefaction?" "The stand-by units are all operating and they compensate for the shortfall. But it's the usual problem. We're having one hellish energy drain. Just not enough fusion capacity for everything -- gravitron, services, and air liquefaction." Proctor nodded. "High time we start the talks. The ball's tomorrow, helium and the first session the day after that. By the way, I did wangle an invitation for Miri. It was like pulling teeth, but she's invited." French smiled. "Thanks," he said. "Miri has been after me for months. Though search me why anybody would want to go to a Top Level dance." "Women," Proctor said in the tone of a confirmed bachelor who has long ago stopped trying to understand the mystery. They talked for a while longer about concurrent talks with Maoling and toxic metals in a shipment of lettuce delivered recently. French noted down some assignments and finally left. He headed south by the intertower beltway. South Tower was a pattern of random lights ahead. He lived with Miri on Level #. He wondered if she still waited up for him. He longed for her company. He thought: What makes me disconsolate? Laser drills, his mind answered instantly. Yes, laser drills. They symbolized for French Proctor's contempt for all technical matters, his preoccupation with politics and personalities at the expense of gut issues. During the last Helium round Ecofreak had demanded and gotten five hundred laser drills despite the tribe's weak rationale. They'd claimed to need them for dental work, which was ridiculous. French had protested, had been overruled. Later he'd personally gone deep into Hinterland to find out how Ecofreak had really used the drills. The track had led to a research center under maximum security outside Kaysee in Mokan Territory. French had returned more suspicious than ever, but Proctor had simply shrugged off the report. The pieces of the puzzle locked nicely. The Tacks came from the Kaysee region. Could those lasers have something to do with Jonny's rise to power? Could the sil-parts be another link in a technological chain? He entered South shaft and, bottom jets blazing, began the steep ascent. Podlike elevators clung to the walls. 'Hundreds of slide bars glistened darkly between the elevator grooves. The chasm was empty, the hour late. Near Level # a group of whiteclad men in tubes shot out of a feeder nearly colliding with French. The timing of their entry convinced him it was no accident. Among the men were several prominent flames, including Clafto Meyer, the dark, swarthy plastosteel heir Sidney now favored as his first deputy. "Watch were you're going, pig!" "Fratres, that's no ordinary pig. we, amicH Let's teach this guy how to drive a tube." French assessed the situation coolly. His standard issue vehicle couldn't outrun the expensive jobs these boys had. He had retrieved his pistol from Harlow, but the goons must also be armed. Stare them down? Talk them out of it? French had cold memories of many bloody Branco confrontations, many close calls in Hinterland. Old instincts stirred. His fatigue fled under a rush of adrenaline. The flames had begun to maneuver, forming a circle about him, even as they all rose in the shaft at maximum speed. French guessed their intention. They would try to upend his tube, to make it tumble around and around until the centri-forces grew so great that he'd be flung free. One of the men lunged, sidejets ablaze. French saw the mindless grin of a youngster. The feint didn't deceive him. He turned quickly and saw two others almost upon him. He chopped out with the edge of his hand. A man reeled back, coughing. He punched the other and shoved his tube aside. French saw two others dart forward from the comer of his eyes. He couldn't win. This was their game. He did the only thing he could do. With a flick of his thumbs, he cut out jets and gravitron and overrode safety with his knees. His tube dropped from the circle of his pursuers like a rock. French had practiced this manuever years ago in training. The Death Drop. But this time there was no flexonet to catch him if he failed. An endless chasm yawned below. His fall accellerated, and his tube began to tumble slowly as it fell. French held on with all his might. He stared rigidly ahead. His innards liquefied. Physical terror clutched him. Forces tugged and wrenched. His knuckles grew white as he gripped the rail. His knees went numb against the tube. The shaft turned helter skelter, now up, now down, a wheeling broken telescope of light. On one of the turns he saw the flames in hot pursuit. But they came slowly, with jet power. His mind wheeled. His brain lagged behind events. His thoughts Miri, Helium. He had no time to reflect, but his body and mind were active. His eyes measured the height and counted levels. Around Level # he cut in the gravitron. Immediately his body grew heavy, his own weight nearly crushed him. The tumbling stopped slowly, but the inertial forces of his fall overcame the gravitron, and he went on falling at a sideways tilt. At Level I he cut in sidejets. When the tube had righted, he let the bottom jets blaze. Despite these actions, his tube crashed on the concrete of the Pit and burst apart in a shower of sparks. French fell free and rolled some distance from the impact point before the tube exploded. A long flame shot toward him and licked his face. He rolled from the flame and lay where he came to rest. He felt a pain in head and shoulder. He scrambled up and nearly stumbled over his own robe. Black clouds of smoke rose from the furiously burning tube. Above him flames approached. He stared up into the chasm for a second, an endless tubularity. From this perspective it seemed to curve, to lean over him. He couldn't see all the way up. The shaft walls closed in and came together in a point. French ran toward a corridor. Roused from the dull routine of duties in a lighted booth, a pit helium secured the Pit, but the guard didn't recognize French. He ran past the man and into a darkness faintly lit by red lights. The guard yelled behind him. French ripped the purple robe from his body as he ran; it impeded his movements. He wore a simple grey jump suit underneath. French knew Helium like few other men. He knew precisely where Ecofreak pipelines fed each and every Union structure, how the gas was liquefied and where, how die cold stuff flowed to the drums. He knew the layout of the Pit in every detail. But his memories went even farther back. As a boy he had explored the deep, dark catacombs below the Pit, the tunnels and bunkers of ancient Eastcoast on whose site Ricardo had been built. He knew where he was. He had several avenues of escape -- sideways, up, or down. He stopped to orient himself. That luminous exit sign up ahead would lead into one of the drum rooms and from there he could make his way into the interior of the structure. He ran toward the sign freeing his pistol as he ran. He heard voices and the sounds of boots on concrete. He ducked into the opening and fired at movement behind him. He meant to do no harm, merely to show that he was armed and dangerous. In the narrow confines of the corridor, the sound of the blast was deafening and made his ears ring. He ran through an instrument room, face lit up for a second by green, red, and yellow lights from a panel. And from there, through a door, beneath low-slung piping, he entered a gigantic hall so filled with the hum of vibrations that he couldn't hear his own feet hit the ground when he cleared some low steps. Pain stabbed up his leg. He hobbled forward and ducked behind a huge, grey, loaf-shaped machine to catch his breath, massage the foot. Hall A. Six giant generators stood in a line. Beneath the painted, yellow, concrete floor on which he cowered lay tanks of liquid Helium. Dmms turned half submerged in the liquid. From the generator casings gargantuan strands of cable, each fiber as thick as a man, carried the pulse into a vaulted ceiling and, through the ceiling, to the plastosteel framework of the tower. He shook his head to clear the pain, blinked, and peeked past the grey-painted metal of the drum toward the door through which he'd come, toward the stairs he had descended. His foot still hurt. He didn't dare attempt the run until he had assured himself that his pursuers had given up the chase. Just in case, he took aim with the pistol. He aimed it at the door. His hand shook so that he had to steady it with his left. When the door opened a crack and then all the way; when he saw a whiterobed figure slipping through; he pulled the trigger without thinking. The shape fell forward and rolled down the stairs. French blasted away until the door closed. In the fantastic hum of the hall, he hadn't heard the sound of his own shots. He waited a moment longer. The man he'd shot lay sideways on the stairs. Blood spread a large circle of red on his chest. French stared at the dead flame. Now I've done it. Now they have a casualty! He was angry with himself, angry that he hadn't had sense enough to think before he'd shot. He could have eluded these goons. The consequences of his action came to him now. The death of a A blood-bath could follow this...Goddamned! He gathered himself from the floor and limped past other gravdrums. He came into another hall where expanders liquefied Helium and stopped to decide on his course. The dead man would serve as a warning. No need to find one of the hidden passages to the catacombs. He'd make his way to a small elevator not far from here. it. He reached the lift without mishap. The elevator came, summoned with a button. He walked into the narrow box, punched #. When the register showed Level #, French finally relaxed. He had been leaning against the wall. Now he let himself slide down to the floor. The pistol still hung from his fingers. Flames from the exploding tube had blackened his hand. Singed hairs curled at the ends. For a long moment French stared at the hairs as if they were a matter of the greatest interest. Then he broke his gaze. He realized that he was very shaken. Energy had drained from his legs, arms, hands. It took him a long time to put the pistol into the case. He looked at his watch. The exquisite device, a gift of Mini's, had been shattered. The fine pieces of the micromosaic had been dislodged. The digits had stopped at #:#. Miri French spent her evening at a meeting of her coven on Level #. Most of the session had been devoted to a test of mantuition, the art of reading character from the aural energies that leave the human body by the extremeties. All ad-adepts had gathered in a small room. Two women and two men hired to help in the procedure had waited behind curtains in a dark room. Groping in the darkness that prevented the acquisition of visual cues, Miri had followed others to shake hands with the strangers. Then she retired to a cubicle next door to write down what she had learned from those brief touches. Afterwards the coven elder sought out Miri over tea. She said: "Miri, your analysis was almost perfect. You're growing stronger in the arts. Soon you'll advance the final step. Frankly, that pleases me very much -- because you're marked." Miri reached up involuntarily and touched a birthmark on her cheek. From time to time the elders mentioned that peculiarity of hers. Each time Miri felt a vague uneasiness combined with an inner pulsation as if a suppressed memory were trying to surface. But the memory bounced up against a barrier of some sort. To her the birthmark was simply a blemish. To the elders it meant something else. For months at a time they allowed her to forget that she wore 'Madonna's Mark.' But then, out of the blue, came another cool reminder. Miri found this maddening. The mark meant that she 'had a role in history.' Beyond that no one would tell her anything. She looked up at the coven elder, a fortyish woman whose face was smooth as marble from the spiritual abrasions of meditation. She said: "Mother, I may be marked, but I'm still childless. In my group I'm the only one who hasn't passed through Aat experience. I can't become a full adept until I have conceived. Do you think Frenchy is sterile?" Miri kept her voice under control -- the least of accomplishments for a member of the Cult. Even her eyes were steady. But the question stirred anxieties that adadepts were supposed to have put behind them. She hoped with unseemly eagerness that the Lady wouldn't test her to the utmost -- that her Frenchy would be spared the grav-sterility that afflicted so many. Could she, a member of Madonna's cosmic body, be mated to a crippled male? The elder smiled faintly. She reached over and patted Miri's arm. "You'll conceive, Miri. The mark assures it. Just don't forget to practice vision. Form a strong vision of maternity -- but what am I telling you. You know all that. Tell me, are you bothered by something?" "No, mother...yes, mother, I sense -- I have an odd intuition. Something is wrong. I think it has to do with Frenchy." "Let me feel your hand." Miri laid her hand into the elder's who, in turn, eyes slightly narrowed, sampled Miri's mood. The elder said after a moment: "A party, a dance. Some sort of great event. You're worried about some future event." Miri laughed. "You're right. I'm anxious about an invitation to a Top Level ball. The ball's tomorrow, but I still don't know whether I'm going -- and I want to very much." "Anxiety is unnecessary. Now that you're an ad-adept, you could you'll know whether you're going or not." Miri looked down at her cup. "It's a trifle, really. And we're not supposed to trifle with the oracle." The elder rose. "Of course, not, child, but we can make an occasional exception. Have you consulted the oracle about conception?" Miri shook her head. "There, now. That's not a trifling matter. You should trust yourself -- and the Lady. Above all, Miri, avoid anxiety, practice vision. Practice, practice, practice. Until next week, then." Saying this, the elder nodded and went her way. Miri's tea had been laced with Millusion, and soon the effect of the drug manifested itself in a belllike ringing in the head. She moved toward the assembly hall whispering with others. They settled on cushions on the floor. The lights dimmed and visions appeared on the large curving screen. Miri caught her breath as Earth appeared, a green-white magnificence, turning slowly against a velvet darkness. She heard music. The picture faded and others came in world as it had been in ancient times, a riot of color and a shimmer of light, an exotic profusion of biological life, of jungles, prairies, animal herds, bird flocks, fish schools, and things that creeped and crawled. The proud, beaked head of an eagle, the moist nostrils of a hippo, the shadowy whisk of a deer tail, the rush of wind in tree tops, the radiance of a screen of fish in coral, the glistening sweat on the bodies of men rowing a log canoe, the lumbering of a polar bear, a drop of water on a leaf... The beauty of it brought tears to her eyes. Millusion enhanced her senses, enabled her to become the marvelously varied life shown on these secret, ancient tapes. She'd seen it all before a hundred times, but ever and again the vision was fresh. She sobbed as she watched, knowing it wouldn't last. The visions faded, growing lighter and lighter. Now a throbbing, hissing, pounding, and drumming overlaid the music. The Male had entered the world and transformed it before her eyes. These also were ancient films -- of tractors gauging the earth, of skylines forming and disappearing, of machines beating rythmically, of smoke, devastations, penned beasts, polar bears bleeding, whales quartered and melted, parched land, poison fumes, sludge lakes, landscape carved into geometrical formations by thousands of identical dwellings. Miri held her breath and screwed up her eyes anticipating the blinding light and the explosions. They came. In their wake came pictures of today -- of gaping craters, the uniform silver of mutagrass broken here and there by trees, the lope of Harvey hare, the flight of carries. She saw furtive mutant colonies hugging the edge of rad-belts, hiding in caves, burrows, huts, hovels. They hopped one-legged, rollwalked three-legged, crawled legless on rump-stumps. Beemen whistled bonily, tailed crick-eaters purred. She saw six children suck milk from a woman's six udders. Tribesmen on horses came to raid, poking spears into hovels, looking for reasonably humanoid shapes. Smoke rose from burning huts when the men rode away. Last came a vision of the structures, one after the other, surrounded by Desolations. They flashed by faster and faster as the music rose higher and higher -- and suddenly there was a single flower, sharply in focus, against a blurred green and a deep-blue sky. The picture hovered before her eyes for a long time while the music hummed in harmony. Then it was over, and Miri went home. Frenchy was still out. Miri debated with herself, sensing anxiety. Then, to keep her hands busy, she resumed work on a micromosaic, eyes framed by the rubber of her microscope, hands busy with wires thinner than hair. She worked for a while, absorbed by the task. helium Nevertheless, her feelings of unease grew. At last she rose and stepped into her meditation nook, eager to rid herself of the odd depression. Against the wall hung Madonna's shrine. It featured the Cosmic Lady on an oval micromosaic of the finest quality. The rays of the sun formed her hair. The planets were her jewelry. She stood wrapped in star-spangled night. Next to her, on either side, hung other, small pictures -- trees, shrubs, animals. Suspended from the ceiling on fine wire and turning slowly with the movement of air in the room were tiny yellow birds, their wings extended. Miri pushed a switch on the floor next to the prayer rug. A low multi-tonal hum began to fill the room. It was electronic music, a slowly shifting harmonium piece whose sound resembled the sonorous chant of men. She meditated on maternity. The act of love unrolled before her eyes. Liquids oozed in palpitating mucous membrane. A sperm, one of thousands, squirmed and struggled toward the giant egg. The Female roundness waited for the tiny Male. They met. He clung to her like a particle of dust to an orange, but then he penetrated through the sheathing and life had been conceived again. Miri was pregnant and carrying child. She imagined the ceremonies in the coven when she'd announce her pregnancy, but this portion of the vision refused to crystallize. Instead she saw herself struggle in a fierce, hot, dust-laden wind. Miri opened her eyes and tried again. But once more there was wind and other people obscurely visible through the dust. Someone walked beside her, holding her hand. She opened her eyes, frightened. Something interfered with her meditation, a worry or an intuition. Frenchy was in trouble and she knew it. She uncoiled from her crosslegged position, rose, and walked out of the room leaving the deep hum behind her. She passed through her work room where the implements of her art were laid out on tables and through there to a small but comfortable living room drenched in the orange blaze of artisun. She went out through the front door of the cubohome, took the elevator down, nodded to the dozing guard, crossed the lobby, and walked out into the brightly lit street through a revolving door. Frenchy's work demanded odd, long hours. As a rule she didn't worry about him. So why tonight? Why did she feel that something was wrong? She made for central shaft eyeing the airspace above the belt; she sought signs of Frenchy's red-white tube. No one about. Past midnight. A strong current of air blew over Outer Ring. They renewed the air at night and it smelled fresh and salty. Ocean spray entered the ventillation intakes down below. The colorful banners of competing apartments waved and beckoned in the air: Hyatt House, Union Manor, Galsworthy Square, Denver Acres. Through glass portals she could see ornate lobbies and sleepy staffs lounging in chairs. Going out to meet him like this made no sense at all, but Miri had to do something. She couldn't stay in the cubohome any longer. She searched the empty airspace arranged in random, artistic patterns. She was so intent on the heights that she missed him. His call made her look down. Then she saw him. He seemed to limp slightly as he approached on the movebelt. His robe was gone, his face blackened by soot, his long hair in disarray. She broke into a run to meet him. "Oh, Frenchy," she cried when they collided. "What happened?" He said: "Nothing. Nothing, girl. But you -- what 're you doing on the belts? Don't you know how dangerous it is?" Ill The ballroom slowly filled with people. They stood on the dance floor talking and drinking. They sat on a kind of peripheral balcony supported by pink marble columns. Young men and women moved about in separate groups to see and be seen. The grandiose sweep of the place, the flash of lights from chandeliers and jewelry, the shimmer of robes and gowns, shadowy movements in endless mirrors against the wall below the balcony, the bubble in the wine he drank -- all this made Bono's head spin. Something in his stomach laughed. Forteen harmonious tones rose side by side from an electronic organ on a platform to Bono's left. Crystalline water-spurts from a fountain to his right pulsed in rythm with the music. He put his glass on a passing tray, snatched a full one. He turned to Dart. "Wild, isn't it? Oh, wild," he said with an arching eye. He ogled a group of passing girls. The curvature of rumps and breasts shone pink beneath oddly textured gowns that seemed to let the eye penetrate and then again not. Dark almond eyes glanced with provocation at the group in whose midst Bono stood -- tribesmen in simple leather clothing that looked drab amidst the fire of diamonds and the sheen of silk. He took a large swallow from the glass. Droplets of wine clung to his mustaches. He throbbed with happiness. The pressure had fled. Morning had brought relief. Amidst the foul stink of the gel, in the reddish darkness of the bathroom, Bono had awakened to his old self. He'd scraped the stuff from trunk and limb, he'd shaken it from his hand. Already then a giddy joy had possessed him. No, it wasn't just the bubbly wine nor the shine of glass, silk, silver, and waxed wood. Life beat again inside his skin. He was back among the living again, out of the realm of painful dreams. He slapped Dart on the back with a hand a little out of control, hard enough to make the wrinkled oldster spill a drop of wine he hadn't touched. Bono cried: "Come on. Franco! Cheer up, old man. Why that dark look on your puss. Tonight we see how structure Bigs live." Dart said nothing. He meant to tell Mycal to curb his guzzling. His foolish, grinning face drew the snickering attention of the Bigs. His bucolic manner clashed with the sophisticated setting. Crestmore urged moderation -- and modest shame in the presence of lascivious display. Dart said none of this, gloomily aware that he'd made a hash of things. He followed Barney with his eyes. The ambassador mingled with Bigs. Dart hoped that Barney would stay away from Bono. What if those two had a heart-to-heart talk? Maybe I should confess it all, he thought, but then he shrank back from the notion, repelled by the reckless madness in Bono's eyes. Quite clearly the chief was out of control on this first day of his Adjustment. He was a fivepercenter, and God only knew what such a man would do. Across the room Proctor, who had been searching for French, found him on the edge of the ballroom with Miri. The two watched the crowd near a pink column. "There you are, Rivera," Proctor rumbled. "Hello, Miri." He took her hand. "It's been some time since I've seen you." He eyed her opaque, long-sleeved gown, the fringed white stole across her shoulders, and noted that she did not display herself -- but despite the chaste costume she was seductively full. But her femininity didn't reassure Proctor. He always experienced a kind of discomfort in her presence. She resembled a proud, black bird with that dark hair, beaked nose, and flashing eyes. A single golden ring suspended from her left earlobe reminded him that she was a witch of some sort, member of some obscure cult. He released her firm, warm hand, still vaguely troubled. "You don't mind if I steal your husband for a second, do you? We have a small crisis on our hands." He smiled momentarily. Miri said: "Not at all, Reston. And thank you for getting me the invitation." She analyzed the feelings conveyed by Proctor's hand. He gave her a sense of concentration, ambition, vulgarity, and repressed resentment. She had a vision of a small, fat boy, the butt of jokes...and the words 'raisin-balls' echoed in her mind. Had that been a nickname of his? It seemed incongruous in a man who lived in a world of abstractions, his vital energies chained to the power lust. At the moment Proctor was also fearful of something -- and yet he seethed with suppressed anger. At Frenchy? At something else? She looked after the stout, short, blading Proctor as he led her husband a few steps away. How little of his power the man revealed in his externals, she reflected. Despite the blue robe and the ceremonial white sash that ran from his shoulder to his waist, Proctor looked common -- a small bureaucrat. Proctor stopped with his hand on French's sleeve. His mind lingered on Miri, who was one of the Schulheitzins, he now recalled, very high. Very Big, a family prominent in the arts but inconsequential in politics. Miri had made an odd match, marrying a slum kid, probably the expression of artistic eccentricity. She was a practicing micromosaiker. Proctor released French's robe and brought his mind back to the unpleasant business. "I've had a call from Blottingham." French affected surprise. "Blottingham on Unsler's staff?" he asked, thinking: As if the world were simply filled with Blottinghams! There's only one that matters. "Yes," Proctor said. "But he said he was calling in his private capacity." "Meaning?" "Meaning he was speaking for Sidney." French raised his eyebrows. He hoped that the blood pounding in his neck was not visible. killed one of Sidney's flames last night," Proctor said, eyes sharp. "In a gun fight. Have you picked up something on that?" "No," French said tonelessly. "What else did he say?" "He gave me a few not-soveiled threats. Fact is Blottingham was furious, and if he weren't a bit afraid of me...Anyway, they want the man handed over, no questions asked." "What did you say?" French asked. Proctor snorted. "The obvious. I told them I'd find the man and hand him over." French was taken aback. "You mean it?" "Don't be absurd," Proctor said with deep scorn in his voice. "I protect my own. But we've got to gain time. Whoever did it shouldn't have . left witnesses. We can't afford open war with Sidney now." His eyes spoke about the Secret Agenda. French nodded. There's no help for it, he thought. His eyes were on the clump of tribesmen and he noted absently that Bono seemed quite another man from the reserved and hostile Activist French had received a week ago. Bono was bent double with laughter, he slapped his There's no help for it. I have to tell him. He took a deep breath and braced Miri grew restless as the conversation between Frenchy and Proctor went on and on. The nobility had begun to clear the dancefloor. People took up positions along the edges of the shiny, waxed floor. Eyes looked expectantly toward a double portal. Miri watched Frenchy's red face and hang-dog expression while Proctor spoke angrily with vehement, chopping gestures of his fat hands. A group of men passed by behind Miri. They stopped and drew her attention by a murmured conversation, their heads bunched in a knot. From time to time they glanced toward Proctor and French. Then one of them drew away from the group and came toward her, a young man with an olive complexion, glistening hair. "Excuse me. Miss," he said. His helium half-smile was unpleasant somehow. "Would you happen to know who that man is?" He inclined his head toward Proctor. It surprised her that anyone might have to ask. She said; "Of course. That's Reston Proctor, the Chief Negotiator." The man shook his head. "No, no," he said. "The other one, the blond one. I think I recognize him from a recent encounter." At the words his lips curled oddly. "Why, that's my husband, Rivera French." His eyes bored into her, noticing her for the first time. He nodded. "Thank you," he said, nodded again. Then he rejoined his group and, arms extended, he pushed his companions on their way. None looked back at Frenchy. Miri couldn't escape a faint shudder, but she couldn't attribute the feeling to anything in particular and assumed that she had experienced the man's aura mingling with her own. Whoever the man was, inside he was a bundle of contradictions. Miri shrugged off the feeling and turned her attention to the double portals, sensing a sudden hush. In a second the electronic organ opened with a jangled version of the Grand Harmony, music calculated to grip the emotions as it rose, fell, rose, and built up to the grand finale. It brought tears to the eyes, but Miri resisted the emotion. She had learned to scorn this crude, visceral adoration of the Male's organized power. When the Grand Harmony was done, the organ took up a slow march, the portals opened, and she saw the Unifier in his golden robe, a thick black belt around his middle. Behind him came the members of the family. She noticed that Proctor had been caught by surprise. He disengaged himself from Frenchy and, as the Unifier slowly walked toward the Ecofreak delegation, he weaved his way rapidly in the same direction beneath the balcony. He had a part in the ceremonies. Frenchy came back to her side with that look on his face. "It's all right," she whispered. She sought his hand and squeezed encouragement. Then she turned her head back to the ballroom. Behind the Unifier marched Regina, and behind her, three abreast, came the rest of the family. Like her father, Regina moved slowly, one hesitating step after another hesitating step, in rythm with the slow processional. She looked straight ahead with brief glances to the side, noticing people she knew, nodding to them faintly. She noted with pleasure that all eyes were on her. Her red hair was piled high on her head, revealing the swan-like sweep of a delicate neck. The hairdo was called Medusa -- hundreds of ringlets seemingly random but actually arranged with computerized precision. Emerald teardrops swung from her ears. Her sheer-robe with the coiling snakes, all oriented suggestively toward her middle, glistened in the light of chandeliers. Tiny bells tinkled on her neck. Volcano burned in her blood and surrounded her with a nimbus of seductive scent. She glanced to the side again, and her eyes encountered Clafto. He stood a little back, half in shadow, surrounded by several of his sparks. She saw anger in his eyes and felt a pulse of fear. So far site had kept Clafto at bay, but obviously Clafto still hoped. She broke her gaze and looked ahead again with a definat lift of her chin. Clafto would have to resign himself to his fate -- yes, even if Sidney pressed and pressed and pressed. She wouldn't be his tool not any more. She dismissed both of them from mind and thought about the archangel with a cool sort of thought, a tiny smile in her mind. She couldn't see the tribesman. Her father's golden form blocked her view. If Sidney weren't nursing a broken leg, he'd be beside her now, and then she could look past her father, but she'd rather have her view blocked, of course, than have that beast near her. She imagined the curtsey she would give Mycal, the look she'd have on her face -- a trace of a smile, a tinge of a pout in the lips, a boldness in the eyes followed by a drop of lashes. She had practiced the look in the mirror. The plan swam before her mental consideration. It pleased her that Serenita had blessed it -- although it was just a wee bit devious. But Regina didn't care. Her energies flowed and raced, stimulated by a little drug mixed just for her ladyship by her physician. This time I shall achieve it, she thought with determination. French watched her from the sideline with a brooding look. Proctor's last words still rang in his ears: "Never, never disobey me again!" I should have done as he'd ordered, French thought. A part of his mind noted that Regina looked fit to kill -- a veritable if slightly vulgar goddess. She was ravishing and knew it. If I'd have had some staff with me, another part of him brooded, all this wouldn't have happened. I should have stayed behind that drum and killed them all. Half measures, he thought. Half measures. Now we're in the soup. He felt Miri's eyes on him and turned. She smiled and winked. French felt a sudden rush of affection, put an arm around her waist, and pulled her close. So long as he had Miri... Her body heat penetrated through the silk. She was soft to the touch and yet he could feel her strength. Nothing daunted Miri. She could have been a Branco chick -- a fierce, passionate smuggler's fern. He tweaked her hip, eyes on the scene. The Unifier had stopped before the delegation. An attendant noble disengaged himself from the entourage and carried the ornate key to Ricardo forward. He knelt down and held the pillow high so that the Unifier could take the key with his left. Then Bono stepped forward. The two men shook hands and the key was presented. Ceremony, French thought. Ornate Gestures of good will. Meanwhile we're just waiting to knife one onother. His mind went back to the long, arid session with the sil-chemists that morning. They had explored every conceivable possibility, but helium ultimately they hadn't been able to resolve the central question: Why would anyone want to weld silcoplast to anything? It could be done with copper, aluminum, and plastosteel. Simple: all you needed was a clean room, a molecular web der, and tightly controlled conditions -- dust and random electrostatic fields had to be absent. Virtually every structure had the necessary facilities. But why do it? Such combinations had no possible use in any kind of communications system. At the center of action, Barney and Proctor had now joined the group and toasted each other with glasses from a tray held by a brightly clad servant. Behind the group Regina and the family waited patiently. The Unsler clan always amazed French by its size -- all those brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews. They all had a kind of dull sameness, the same long face, pouched eyes, drooping nose. Only two people stood out. One was Regina -- a beauty. The other was Harvanth, a fat, ruddy man. He had married one of the Unifier's four sisters and had brought into the Unsler clan a blustering kind of energy. They had put him in charge of Defense, an unimportant job that even a stupid man could do. The toast done, Unsler turned to introduce his family, and Regina advanced toward Bono. French watched with interest, wondering how the strict constructionist would react to the girl. Bono blushed when she came forward, her hands lightly grasping her long gown. She bent down before him in a curtsey so low he glimpsed the movement of unsupported breasts. His blush grew darker. Blue eyes locked into his. Then her lashes dropped and she withdrew. Bono felt an involuntary twinge in his bowels and caught himself staring at her center with stupefied intensity. Someone else had come forward and pronounced a name, but Bono barely heard it. He'd -- he'd never seen anything quite so...it was really quite obscene, but it hypnotized him! He had to resist looking at her again, at all those undulating snakes. They pointed to a spot in her center that now shimmered darker, and now not. Faces and names flashed by him. He shook hands and bowed absently, while his mind touched furtive memories of short, guilt-laden sexual encounters. He knew very little about women, really, it came to him now. Strict constructionist training discouraged experimentation. Chastity was the word -- at least until you formed a harem. Bono had trespassed on that command, of course. Drunk on fiery Wellhead whiskey, he had stumbled into the dark shacks on the other side of the refinery where the mutants lived. But those experiences had never been altogether pleasant in retrospect. You couldn't call him an innocent, not really, still... Bono had never seen such a display before. She was a princess, after all, he noted with inward shock. The Unifier's only daughter... The last of the family came and withdrew, and now the organ struck up a slow number, all fourteen notes jangling. Bono looked about at the vast glimmer and shine. Wellhead was very far away. The ballroom lay in a hush. No one moved. People stood on the edge of the empty dancefloor. Unsler's family had arrounded itself on both sides of a throne before the fountain. Only Regina stood a little apart, alone. Her lashes were down. Dart whispered fiercely from behind: "Dance. You're supposed to ask her to dance." Now he remembered. Dart had described the whole procedure in the afternoon. The dance. He walked toward her, rigidly averting his eyes from the snakes. He looked at her neck instead, at a narrow red band around her neck, at little silver bells. He bowed. Again she curtsied, in response, and her nipples flashed. Then he held her and they swung out on the floor. For some time now Proctor had conferred surreptitiously with members of the Group. He had just spoken with Justin Todd, an old friend in the Ministry of Engineering, on whom he could rely to help hide the Interdiction. Todd's people, jointly with Proctor's, supervised Helium delivery. And then Hondo Weinberger had also been by, his hair grey and unruly. Hondo was the architect of the surreptitious Media campaign. Proctor obtained perverse pleasure from meeting the group here, in Top Level, but enough was enough. Roger Belmonte came toward him, the black commander of Ricardo's police and garrison. With a slight shake of his head, Proctor told the soldier from a distance that a meeting was inappropriate. Belmonte changed course. The red-gold jacket suspended from a button on his shoulder swung at the turn. Soon only the feather on the man's triangular hat showed above the crowd. Proctor looked around for French, eager to chew on someone. The evening had been a sinister replay of #I when Tack had chased the same seductive bitch with such disturbing consequences. Could all the intelligence forecasts be wrong? Proctor wondered. For a single, frightened moment Proctor imagined a scheme whereby Ecofreak arranged a charade to let Activists had won. Once that notion was firmly set, they would swoop bold bid for Regina, intermarriage, the whole lot. The thought made Proctor tremble. Under those conditions, there would be no Interdiction, no Secret Agenda. French! Goddamned, where was that man? He'd blundered last night, gunning down a man. Had he also blundered in his estimates? Proctor searched the crowd. Then at last he saw them. White-robed men had blocked his view, but now he picked out French and Miri just as they joined the dance. They turned around and around. Miri's fringed stole flew through the air and light glanced off her single golden earring. Proctor watched French lead the girl across the ballroom, comer to comer. He lost the couple for a second; then he picked them up again, somewhat closer this time. A strained expression on French's face caused Proctor to glance back toward the spot where French and Miri had started. That group of men who'd blocked his view...had they been flames? His searching look fell on Clafto Meyer flanked by three husky young men. They wove their way through dancers on the floor clearly in pursuit of French but at a sedate, leisurely pace. Proctor comprehended the situation in a flash and experienced conin Top Level, while Sidney's flames came and went here every day. On second thought, French was no fool -- a hardy man, a veteran of Hinterland. He had brains, good instincts... Proctor glanced back to his left and saw the couple again just as French broke off the dance and, pulling Miri under the balcony, raced for an exit. He nearly collided with a tray-bearing servant. From the other direction, Clafto and his followers came in hot pursuit, running now. They pushed mdely through the dancers toward the exit. Suddenly Proctor exploded in anger. It boiled up in him hot and steaming. He'd felt the fury ever since Blottingham's tellcal, ever since that pear-shaped wonder had threatened him. Damnation, he had watched the bloody arrogance of this noble brotherhood too goddamned long, thank you. They could ravage the helpless masses of Ricardo all they Deep down Proctor sensed a memory, but its content was out of focus. A counter-thrust, he thought, casting caution to the wind. Goddamned, I'll mount d counterthrust. Turning cool, icy as rapidly as he had flared, he thought about the matter with shrewd calculation. Sidney's flames came from Very such men without danger of severe retaliation. But if the counter-thrust was to have its desired effect, it had to be something...shocking, jolting, memorable. Proctor turned this and that around in his mind. Then he had an idea and began to elaborate on it. As he did so a smile faintly lit his features. The idea was neither very practical nor very rational...but he found it irresistible for that very reason. Nobody would believe the flames, and therefore it might just work. He gave it a name: Operation Hairy-Scary! He snapped his concentration and began to look about. He had to have a talk with Belmonte after all. swarmed over the Acropolis to pick up flames, the police had to be conveniently blind. As they had danced through the hours, Bono had fallen ever more deeply into a trance in which nothing seemed to matter but her scent, her feel, her warmth. He moved with the tide, aware that he was drunk with stimulation and false hopes. He thought: The girl's crazy about you. There is no other explanation. She has refused all others, and her eyes shine with a kind of admiration. Seconds later he took it all back. She isn't really in love with you. It's just this damn Adjustment thing. You're making it all up. Shame possessed him, and he blushed recalling the stupid conversations between dances. They had nothing in common. "You are a "You are a rancher, Mr. Bono?"..."Yes, ma'm."... "Where is your land?"... "In the Merilo district, on the Plain of Baez." "You dance divinely." "Ma'm, I -- " He'd stood beside her like a tongue-tied clod. Chocked up, plain and simple. A chasm yawned between them. Yet... Yet she clung to him for dear life. He could not be imagining it all. Her eyes sparkled in such an odd way... Now they danced near one of the exits from the ballroom. She had more or less guided him toward it, and now she stopped. "Come," she said, and she pulled him through. The heavy door closed, shutting off the noise of people, the jangle of music. In the odd silence, in a hall lined on both sides by mirrors and lit by lamps fashioned in the shape of candles, her eyes gazed into his, and then he found her in his arms. Her lips sought his in a hungry, almost angry kiss. After a moment she disengaged her mouth with a wrenching sigh, as if it Lorlllard # Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. caused her pain to do so. His legs trembled with weakness. Bright, languid, yet teasing eyes looked into his. He bent to kiss her again, but she turned her head aside and shook it slightly. "When?" he asked in a voice almost harsh with emotion. "Tonight," he husked. Where?" She reached up and pulled his head down so that her lips could whisper in his ear. "In my domain, you silly. Where else. Top Level West. The tower nearest to Hinterland." She managed to give that a romantic sound. Her breath tickled and heated his ear. "But how?" He needn't have whispered. They were alone, observed only by mirrors on either side. "I don't know how to get about. I've been inside the embassy all week." . Once more she pulled his head down. Her teeth gingerly bit the lobe of his ear, causing him to tremble all over. "Outside the main lobby -- where you came in? Turn left and walk to the garage that faces Outer Ring. One of my people will bring you to I  me. She let go of him and drew back. He took a step toward her, but she shook her head again. "Later," she whispered. She puckered up her lips in the semblance of a kiss. Then she walked away from him, hand extended, reflected in mirrors. When she had disappeared, Bono turned and walked back into the ballroom. For the first time in hours he became more aware of his surroundings and noticed that the crowd had thinned, but in the middle of the dancefloor hardy holdouts still twirled round and round. He picked a path along the edge of the dancers, walking next to columns, unaware of the knowing looks that followed him. He mused in a kind of strung-out way, thinking that it was true after all. She did love him, by God. And that meant that he'd soon be violating a sacred law of the Crestmore doctrine, but the thought left him indifferent. He knew the verse -- who didn't! "Thy seed shall not mingle with that of the whore." It was written. But he couldn't wait to pollute the pure tribal blood, he thought with an inward chuckle, didn't give a damn, was delighted to do it, in fact. He picked up the pace, making for the lobby. Suddenly small, wrinkled Dart stepped out from behind a column and blocked his path. Bono frowned. "There you are, Mycal," Dart said, eyes searching and disapproving all at once. He side-stepped and continued beside Bono. "Ready to go home, call it a night?" "I have other business," Bono answered curtly. "You go on alone." "Mycal!" Dart grabbed him by his sleeve and stopped his eager forward rush, raising within Bono a sudden fury. "What is it!" Bono grunted. "If there is one thing I have," Dart said dramatically, "it's the courage to oppose. I oppose your whoring after structure flesh!" "Hold your tongue!" Bono hissed, glancing about furtively. His face had gone red, more from anger than embarrassement. "I have business. I am not whoring after anything." He tried to pull free, but the wrinkled claw held on to his sleeve tenaciously. Dart said: "The talks start at nine tomorrow. It's nearly one in the morning. You must be rested and sharp. You can't risk the future of the tribe." "Let me worry about that," Bono spat back under his breath. He jerked his arm loose. "What I do is none of your business. Dart. Remember that!" He gave Dart an angry stare, turned, and walked away. French pushed through a swinging door and pulled Miri behind him. Cooks in white tunics looked up in surprise. French swept the gleaming kitchen with a glance. His eyes came to rest on a heavyset butcher. In front of the man, stuck point down in a wooden block, he saw a big, sharp knife. He glanced at Miri and noted that her uncomprehending suiprise of a moment ago had yielded to cool awareness. He let go of her hand, whispered: "Keep with me, no matter what." She nodded as he moved forward. French stopped before the butcher, eyes on the knife for a second. "Which way is out?" he asked, looking up. The butcher stared back with an open mouth, clearly a very stupid man. "The back way!" French added, feeling strong tension. Precious seconds fled. Then he saw the exit, half obscured by large pots hung on the wall. French grabbed the knife as he passed the butcher. It would replace the pistol he had left at home -- you didn't go to Top Level social events armed. Past pots and pans he ran out, Miri breathing behind him. The stunned butcher yelled: "Hey! Heey, you!" The door cut off his voice. Senses sharpened by danger, French looked about with a flashing eye. Now they were in a narrow room. On the right a row of women stacked plates into a battery of dishwashers. Ultrasonic cavitators hummed. The women didn't notice them. He ran forward, pressed into motion by the certainty of pursuit. Near the opposing door stood a wheeled cart loaded with stacks of dirty porcelain -- precious, skin-thin stuff from Narodnik. He drew up short before the cart and gave it a shove. It sailed down the way they'd come, its tiny swivelled wheels wobbling. The butcher opened the door just in time to collide with it. French heard the crash of breaking skidding china as he pushed Miri ahead and out. They ran through a maze of corridors seeking the exit toward the garage -- but found only toilets, broom closets, pantries. French felt fatalistic about this crazy chase. Clafto's face back in the ballroom, when, for a second, he had confronted French, had been too damned cocksure. Flames would be blocking all the exits. French kicked himself for his carelessness and softness. He shouldn't have allowed Miri to come, should have anticipated this, shouldn't have let her talk him into it. Would he ever learn to say no to Miri? He raced ahead. Miri's silk swished behind him. Now was the time for some of her magic, he thought wrily. They needed a spell that would transport them to their cubohome. Never mind, he added, I'll bet Clafto has the place staked out. On one of the turns they suddenly saw flames coming toward them and turned in the other direction, running for a door up ahead. They ran to the door, went through. On the other side,French found and activated a lock. Thank God for little favors! They had a second or two for deliberation. The room was dark. It took him a moment to see what it was. An empty dormitory! Beds were stacked five high to the ceiling, but clearly the place wasn't used at present, the mattresses, seen in the dim red light above the door, were bare. An idea came to him and he decided to take a chance. He pulled Miri between a set of bunks. "Quickly. Get down," he hissed. "Crawl under the bed." She complied and he lay down beside her. "Don't move. Don't breathe." She settled down. For a second her gown rustled. Then all was still. Soon flames bounced against the door, tore at its handle, kicked the metal. This was followed by the silence of their consultations on the other side, and then by the dull reports against the metal of a heavy shoulder backed by body weight. The lock snapped at last and a big man tumbled in, bringing a flood of light and, immediately behind him, a group of flames. Clafto yelled: "Up ahead, through there." Boots ran along the aisle of the empty dormitory. A door slammed. It was still. The gamble had paid off. "Come," French whispered. He ran to the door where Clafto's herd had just departed, locked it. Then he led the way back. On the opposite end of the long corridor was another door just like the one Clafto's men had broken down. Another dormitory? One for women, one for men? Another lock? His guess turned out to be right. They plunged into darkness. Once more he saw a red light at the end of a bunk-lined aisle. He locked the door and moved forward. He stopped below the night light on the other end, glanced at Miri, saw tension in her face. "Are you all right?" he whispered. Miri nodded. She was tense but confident. She'd never seen this side of Frenchy before -- his concentrated instinct and power. The knife in his hand glowed red in the light above the exit. Tiny bits of meat and fat caught in the serrations of the blade brought to mind that Top Level ate imported food, not hydroponic substitutes. French turned to the door, grasped the handle firmly, and slowly opened it. Light drew a narrow line down his face. He saw a wall. He opened the door wider. There he was! A heavyset young flame leaned against the wall out there, a pistol suspended from his slack hand. He was evidently bored by his guard duty. French saw him yawn, saw him scratch his head. Very, very slowly, French closed the door. "Wait here," he whispered to Miri He gripped the knife, the door knob. Five steps should get him to the flame and surprise would work for him. His throat was tight with excitement. One last glance at Miri's tense face, then he leapt out of the darkness into the light. His sudden, flashing attack totally overwhelmed the flame. The man didn't even have time to raise his weapon. His big, florid face turned slowly. Large, watery eyes stared. Then French drove the knife into the man, stabbing up through guts toward the lungs. The moist eyes, wide-open in innocent surprise, slid past French as the figure sank slowly to the floor. Blood appeared at tire man's mouth, nose. French took possession of the pistol. Three quick steps carried him to the dormitory door. He reached in for Miri and pulled her out. She stopped and stared at the dead man from whose mouth a stream of blood had begun to flow down. The eyes were still open, still innocent but glazing. A wound in his center had begun to ooze. She took it all in with cool objectivity. Recycled. Back to the womb of the Cosmic lady, she thought, and she reflected that he'd be reborn again and would start his interrupted Journey over as a baby. "Come on," French said, his voice edgy. He had glimpsed a door down the hall with the word 'Garage' painted in black letters on its grey surface. In the garage itself, dark at the point where they had entered, light up ahead where through arches French could see the upper portions of Outer Ring, he led the way toward a clump of jump tubes parked closely together. "Get in one of these," he told her. "Quickly. Get down so you can't be seen. I'll look around a little." He waited until she had disappeared in what turned out to be one of the tubes of the tribal delegation. All the tubes in this cluster bore the circular Ecology symbol on the door, and French was reminded that the ancient greek tetter symbolized death. He hoped it wasn't an omen. They were on the third or fourth floor of the parking lot, a simple arrangement with open sides. Thick, rectangular columns supported the roof. In the shadow of the columns, he ran to a spot from which he could oversee the down-shaft. He recoiled when he saw motion. Peering out more slowly, he recognized Bono and another man descending in jump tubes marked by the Unsler flower. Sooooo! French thought. Will my troubles never end? My noble strict constructionist already pants after the only fern he should avoid like the plague. Proctor will-Proctor will have a heart attack! He went toward the street side and saw what he had hoped he wouldn't see -- flames spaced at regular intervals on the sidewalk below. That way was blocked too. Now what? Regina ran out of the shower, still drying herself, to see if Selma had laid out the costume. She wanted to be ready and in position by the time the archangel arrived. Yes, the girl had done her work. The ruffled blouse and leather shorts with suspenders lay on the end of the large, canopied bed under the supervision of four large teddy-bears lounging against the pillows. White kneesocks with tiny red pom-poms on top -- also ready. On the floor waited red leather shoes with thick, high heels. Regina smiled, pleased with the display. Shorts, suspenders, especially the crossbar on the suspenders made of carved bone -- all this would combine in a signal. A tribal touch, but not excessively tribal. The leather conveyed a hint of armor, of inaccessibility. Yet the shorts were very short and would give full play to her thighs -- a touch of the necessary enticement to cap the matter off. As if the poor boy needed any more enticement! She slipped into panties and pulled them over her flat belly, across the shadow of her navel. Should she wear a bra? Decidedly. Absolutely. She squeezed several in a row, standing before a cabinet with its drawer open, and picked the stiffest and most opaque one she could find. More armor. In a way she felt sorry for the archangel. He was a very nice boy. She had found him clumsy and innocent. As for dancing, he hadn't the faintest. Most clubfooted, clumsy. Not like her Jonny at all. She could like him, she decided. She might even learn to love him, although now it was all pretence. Her arms behind her back, she pressed the fabric together and the fibers locked. She put on and buttoned her ruffled blouse and slipped into the leather shorts. The horn buttons of the suspenders gave her a bit of trouble. They refused to go into the button holes. Serenita had approved the plan and had called her a clever girl. The nun had come in the afternoon for consultation, and for once she hadn't worn her usual nunnish costume but a long, blue robe and a simple cloth around her head, a very tall woman and surprisingly erect for someone her age. In her left ear had been a golden ring, and that ring now puzzled Regina. She had seen the identical ring on a woman at the ball...or had she? Oh, never mind. "He will understand when it's all over," Serenita had said, seated primly on the edge of a backless, hassock-like seat in the conversation pit. Her understanding had surprised Regina, for the proposal was a bit unethical. She meant to use Mycal, to make him into a tool of her own designs, and Serenita should have disapproved of that as contrary to the teaching of charity. But the nun had nodded. "Now you must do anything you can to escape that worthless brother of yours." How true. How true. "Afterwards, when it's all over, you can explain everything to him. He will understand and forgive you -- I'm sure of it." Yes, Regina thought, he's a sweet boy. She pulled on her socks and slipped into the shoes. Fully dressed now she walked to the tall mirror by the shower door to look at herself and found the image pleasing. The hairdo, of course, would have to go. Five minutes in that marvellous, computerized machine her hairdresser had devised -- he said it was the only one in all of Union, designed exclusively for her ladyship -- and she would have, in place of this randomly curled Medusa pile on her head, two girlish braids on either side with a red ribbon in each. And then she'd go up into the garden and wait for him under the stars. All around Top Level's lobby, Bono had seen pictures of Union's thirty-nine structures. Some were shown at night in a blaze of light, some in daytime against clear skies, yet others half shrouded in clouds. The sight of so many structures had filled him with awe. The reality of Union's hundreds-some odd million people had impressed itself on his awareness. That was one perspective on the subject. Another was the inside view, what he had observed in the last fifteen minutes or so -- the Acropolis at night -- on in the day time, for that matter. In structures there was no difference between the two. Ricardo -- a bright shining of glossy surfaces, deeply shadowed recesses. Everywhere light had bounced off blueish drilla-glass panes, large and small, convex and concave -- like the eyes of an insect magnified a thousand-fold. Ramps, railing, flights of stairs cascading down or towering up. Squares, alcoves, fountains, mechanical birds twirping in artificial trees. Gigantic micromosaics blinking from tiny particles as he passed. The slithering, reddish, scaled surface of movebelts. Colorful clusters of flashing signs in empty shopping arcades. The breathtaking drop down Central's shaft, passing level after level in a succession of bright-dark-bright all the way down to the mixing bowl. And now this sweeping vista that stretched before him -- West Tower's broken lights seen through the translucent roof of the hose-like intertower beltway. She lived up there. She lived up there. She lived in this city. Yet another perspective on the subject. Ricardo, fruit of a tree. Regina, sweet meat of the fruit. Bono explored the image. A map of the Helium pipeline in that Top Level lobby had suggested it. The pipeline resembled a gigantic red tree overlaid against the American subcontinent. Its trunk ran south and north. Its branches reached from coast to coast. At the end of each branch hung a structure. The roots of the tree reached deep within Texahoma and sucked Helium from five red pools, all of them near Wellhead, where the gasfields had been discovered three hundred years ago -- a new formation since the wars, perhaps caused by the wars, gas fields whose methane was rich with Helium. The gas came from the ground and went through refineries. Cryoexpanders stripped off the methane leaving the Helium. It travelled through slender pipes up the trunk of the tree. Once he had put his hand around it. His fingers had almost touched his thumb. And yet that small artery sufficed to raise these magnificent constructions. His admiration for the structures was excessive, of course. Regina colored his thoughts. Wherever she was, there was magnificence. The poisonous fruit of the Helium tree held a sweet kernel that he would taste. How could he reject the structures? He wanted to get there. "Show me how to drive one of these things," he said to the servant who travelled beside him. Bono pointed at his own jump tube, which the man operated by remote control. Later he sat in a dark lobby of "her ladyship's domain," as the servant called it. He paced up and down, nervous like a caged beast. At last a thinnish young woman with large eyes appeared at the door. She had a face perpetually in an expression of astonishment. "The mistress is waiting for you in the garden. Please follow me." She led him through halls and rooms, a veritable warren of rooms, some small and cozy, some large and expansive, but all of them incredibly wealthy and beautiful -- mirrors, tiny fountains, glass tables, cabinets, soft crumpled couches, statuettes, glistening mobiles, tables and chairs, exquisite micromosaics. The lights were dim and he sensed in the shadows more rooms, more nooks, more mysteries. He heard a faint whispering of music. He had a vague thought of paradise and underneath that a tremor of anxiety. I'm not worthy... He couldn't believe any of this. The experience had a dreamlike unreal quality. He followed this girl through a...museum of wonders. He smelled perfume. Somewhere she waited...for him! It boggled his mind. A devilish part of his brain reminded him that he had come to Ricardo to destroy it. He'd sat on his poly staring at the poisonous fruit and had imagined it crumbling, falling down. Madness, foolishness! He meant the Crestmore doctrine. Right now he couldn't understand what the fuss was all about. Perhaps Mycron Crestmore had had a point at one time. But now the mad antagonism between Structure and Hinterland made no sense at all. The two had lived side by side for centuries. Heretical thoughts, chided his devilish self. My, my, Mycal. How you can twist and turn the facts when you want to...when you want her! Bono shook his head in protest as he followed the girl over carpets of irridescent sheen, delicate tiles, polished parquette. Nothing new, this doubting. He recalled his adolescence when he had stared at refineries, compressor stations, copters, laboratories, rockets, cannon, temp-control devices...He had thought then that all these things were also Technology. He'd smiled inwardly when he'd been told that tribesmen only used Technology to defeat Technology. He had always wondered. Now, after all these years, the doubts had simply come to the fore again in the presence of structure life -- which didn't seem so terrible after all. I really had no concrete idea, he assured himself. No idea at all what it was like. It was enchanting -- the whisper of music, the strands of faint scent floating in the air, the warble of water somewhere, the girl hiding somewhere here... Well, yes, dammit, the girl! They don't know anything back home, he thought with sudden irritation. The servant had stopped before a glass door. Through it Bono saw a stairway curving out of sight. His own image -- boots, beaded leather clothing, dark, bearded face -- was mirrored faintly in the glass. "The mistress waits up there. Just go on up." He pushed the door open and felt an inrush of humidity, smelled a garden. Nodding to the servant, completely intent now on what lay ahead, he went through and up the stairs. Halfway up he noticed open sky above glimpsed through a curving dome of glass faintly reflecting light, a deep blackness richly sprinkled with  wash of stars. He hadn't seen the sky in days. The Milky Way clouded across his vision overlaid by closer, brighter luminosities. He went on around a spiral. He stopped at the head of the stairs and saw a garden under a roof formed by numerous small domes. Telescopes stood in a row on his left. Lamps on two sides behind a profusion of plants bathed the roof in a faint light. A gravelled path stretched ahead. A fountain played at its termination. Olive trees, palms, tropical bushes, flowers in a riot of color filled the place, closely packed and lush, exuding a rich organic smell. The garden must have cost a fortune to install, must cost a daily fortune to maintain. The whole place had to be completely shielded from gravitron -- like mush tanks. He sought her with his eyes and saw her at last half hiding in a small moon-shaped clearing off the path smiling from the depth of a large piece of canvas upheld by four steel stems that fanned out of a thick stone base. She had crossed her legs and her chin rested on two up-held fists. She took his breath away. She had transformed herself from a sultry goddess into a sweet, lascivious child -- braided hair, white ruffled blouse, and tiny shorts that gave full play to a pair of thighs the color of milk above the tan. She smiled at him for a long, breathless moment. Then, with the grace of a kitten, she jumped up and ran toward him. She nearly leapt into his arms. He kissed her with mad abandon. He crushed her to his breast. He groaned with an overload of emotion, a murky feeling of Joy and longing and breathless surprise. For a long time they kissed, embraced, pulled back to look at each other. Then they went around again. Each time was more and more tumultuous, a rising symphony repeating a theme at octaved intervals. He grew frenetic with passion. The tension mounted. He kissed her, hugged her, and held her close because he didn't know how to go on. In those dark and filthy shacks in Wellhead, bored naked women had waited while he'd dropped his pants. This situation called for a ceremony of disrobing. But where to begin? She didn't help him. He had to make the first move. Regina, for her part, began to weaken rapidly as their sustained endearments continued. She felt the warmth of passion rising slowly. He was so deliciously inept. She fought the urge to yield, to help him. She was aroused! She -- who'd been subject to the most sophisticated methods of seduction used by men who fancied they knew a bit about the art of love. That she could handle. This was something much more dangerous for all its innocence. Very human, her bearded angel. A real passion throbbed in this artless, unskilled man -- in more ways than one. She could feel his swollen organ pressed hard against her center. When Bono began clumsily to grop around her back for an opening -- she felt the irritation of his hands as they encountered the rigid strappings of her suspenders -- she nearly panicked into submission. But she pulled herself together. She had to follow her plan, no matter how inconvenient. When he intensified his search with something approaching. frenzy, she suddenly slipped out of his. grasp and stepped back. Her face was blank with desire, the red of her lips enlarged by kissing. She shook her head. Her eyes brimmed with affection. "We musn't," she said. "Not that." "What do you mean," he rasped, completely out of breath, chilled with irritation. "Honey-sweet," she said, and she came back to him now but with her arms protectingly up front, hands curled into balls beneath her chin, "I can't strive with you, little darling, not yet." "Why not?" he barked, his eyes in a terror. "Why? Why not?" Bono had a terrible premonition that she would elude him. He felt a dark confusion. Everything about her told him she desired as much as he. The sensation of her own lust merely amplified his own. "Oh, sweetheart," she whispered, "don't be so furious. I love you, truly! But I've been disappointed before." At the moment, strangely, she did love him -- or maybe it was just her hormones? "I love you," he breathed, and he took her in his arms again, possessively, fiercely. But she blocked him from her softness and resisted his artless tugging. Did he truly love her, she wondered. Or was he, like she, under the venal spell?' "I know, I know," she whispered. Whatever they now felt was real enough in its way to be a substitute for love. "I know, Mycal. But I won't be hurt again. I need your true commitment." "You have it," he said hastily. "Truly. I love you." Once more he began to seek an opening on her back. She thought: He still hasn't grasped that it can't be tonight, that I must have more... She wished it didn't have to be so. She wanted to conceive, so much, so much. Conceive? It was a stray thought, and she put it aside. What she wanted, obviously, was to yield. She wanted to put her plan aside, take his hand, and lead him to her favorite room, her favorite divan where, across from the goldlaced mirrors, she could lie down and give him leave. But this time she was determined to win. Like crazy, menacing laughter, another world was there, in a comer of her mind -- a future much like the past, a future which might become worse after Daddy died and Sidney became ruler of all. My plan, she thought almost hysterically. My plan. Slowly but firmly she pushed him back. Bono saw her shake her head. "I must have more," she said. "Name it," he cried. "I promise you! You'll have it." He was all fervor and conviction. He'd give her the Milky Way itself, rolled up in a canvas bag. She looked at him with an expression so sweet, so filled with longing, he forgot the lust he felt, that sublimial rage which was ready to burst forth, that strange vacillation between hope and despair. Her look was questioning, timid. "Do you really love me?" "Truly, I do!" He made a step toward her, but she retreated. "Then take me with you to Hinterland." Bono felt a surge of joy. Was that all? Was that all her little heart desired? Nothing he longed to do more, nothing easier. He relaxed again. He would possess her yet. He could meet her price -- and more: he wished desperately to pay it. To have her by his side was his own most fervent longing. "Yes," he effused. I promise." Once more he made an advance, thinking that now the bargaining was over. But then he saw with a wary eye that those words were not enough. She retreated further, all the way to the moon-shaped behind a lawnchair, put it between them. "Darling," she said, "please don't be angry. I shouldn't have asked you to come. But I so wanted to see you again. We won't strive tonight. Please don't expect that. I won't do that until you've made your commitment." Bono was devastated. "But how?" he asked. His voice had the sound of suppressed tears. "What do you want me to do?" She looked at him; she hesitated. Now she would learn the extent of his commitment. In this moment, she cared as much for his commitment as she did for what it would bring her -- escape. She took a deep breath. "This round," she said, "I must be the Helium hostage. Only then will Daddy let me go. Ask for me, darling. And when I see it reported on the Media, I'll be yours." 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For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD Enclosed find.in payment for my subscription The purpose of diplomacy is to further the careers of diplomats! The ancient castle that housed the Terran Embassy seemed one with the mountain it topped. Carved of the same muted stone, ponderous walls blotched with the same mustard-colored lichen, it merged imperceptibly into the living rock. The two figures which soared from it and flew east could have been eagles bursting from their aerie. They were birds of more subtle powers. Diplomats. "There's the problem," Jana Blinton shrieked, gesturing to the verdant valley a klick below. Twisted shrubs dusted the steep sides in random outbursts, but the narrow flat bottom had been parcelled into neat rectilinear patches. Among them moved dark ants: Kronigian serfs tending their masters' crops. With a cry of delight Civerie Llan adjusted his belt and swooped down. Safe from prying eyes, Blinton treated herself to a grimace. The priests who ruled Kronig disliked humans spooking their people. If they saw a senior Embassy official like this idiot of a Naval Attache breaking the rules... Of course, the way things were going they might all be kicked off Kronig by winter anyway. Blinton checked her wrist chron. Two hours till the meeting with the Ambassador. She should be reinforcing her lobbying efforts with the other department heads. But then, a jaunt with Llan was lobbying too. He was an unknown factor, a man who'd been Naval Attache only since his predecessor's accident three weeks earlier. How would he vote when she presented her report and the assembled egos proceeded to clash? Llan continued to disport himself below. Damnation. She jerked at her belt and shot off into the wind, letting the pelting molecules cleanse her face for the fight ahead. Strip off the loose skin, wind; only a bone-and-muscle Blinton dares attack the Ambassador's overwhelming inertia. Cumulonimbus boiled over the range ahead, promising a storm. She flew directly into the refreshing hi-oxy air, the air that, along with its strategic location, made Kronig so valuable as a potential RR base for the sector. And how simple the elements are, she thought, compared to the Embassy infighting. The clouds loomed. "Hey, slow down," buzzed the bone-phone behind her ear. Llan closed from behind, epaulets askew. One meaty hand reached for her thigh as he neared. She dodged. He had to settle for the forearm-forearm hold decreed by belt etiquette. "The natives certainly seem industrious," he said, trying to make conversation after an awkward pause. "They have to be. Low solar radiation, primitive farming techniques. Adds up to a lot of labor per unit of protein." A rift in the stormfront revealed the dark growth of a castle on the range before them. "Veer left," Blinton said, turning Llan to fly parallel to it. "Why?" If you spent more time studying the planet and less time with your damn Navy intrigues... Blinton kept her face locked in the meek mask a civilian learned to wear around members of the military clans. "These people may be on the brink of starvation but that doesn't keep the priests from fighting to extend their parishes. That's why you see so many castles. Another product of war is suspicion. Paranoia. They worry about spies. If we want to be allowed to stay on the planet we don't want to look like snoops." "They don't seem to mind Molots in their airspace. Look." Out of the sky dropped a tiny cruciform airship, abristle with pods and nacelles. It hovered above the fortress for a few seconds, blinked its lights, then settled out of sight inside the walls as the clouds closed in again. "That's the third visit in aS many days. Something must be done," Llan scowled. Well said, commander. Blinton ignored the hand fondling her forarm -- the man was already famous as a womanizer -- as she reviewed the problem for the coming meeting. Kronig; a planet with a medieval culture and equivalent technology. Under a cool sun members of the dominant theocracy compete for power, straining already slim resources. Suddenly it became part of a galactic community, with two competing stellar civilizations eager to bring it into their respective sphere of influence. The priests hold back, unsure of which to trust. As consul general and head of the original Tenan legation, she'd been using Terran technological expertise to solve minor problems for the Kronigians while her staff traced out the workings of the society. It seemed to be paying off. But two months ago the legation had been upgraded to embassy status. The ambassador placed over her had brought with him a swarm of bureaucrats and other functionaries. She still didn't know the reasons behind the shift; frontier posts were usually under rather than overstaffed. Probably a high-level power struggle between the Throne and the Navy. But whatever the reason, her efforts at winning the Kronigians' trust had been aborted by the new Ambassador and his cronies. Today's move would be her big try to get things moving again. If everyone liked her report -- "Say, don't you think we ought to head back?" Llan tugged at her arm. The first long tendril of rain splattered over them. Blinton felt nothing inside her polymer coverall but the Naval Attache's dress uniform, so ludicrously unsuited for flying, was already half soaked. She remembered his pass and an impulse flared. "What's the matter, commander?" she cooed. "Afraid of a little water?" She squeezed his arm lest he break away and with an alluring smile flew into the storm. Thunder jolted the conference room as she concluded her report and flowed back into her chair, tossing her red mane for effect. Lightning and more lightning etched evanescent half-tone images of the counselors scurrying to seal the embrasures against the storm. Blinton glanced at Llan, noting his still-damp curls. But he refused to meet her eyes. She bit her lip as she waited for reacitons, hoping the soaking hadn't turned him completely against her. Could he take a joke? Damn all impulses! "An interesting analysis of Kronigian economics." That was the Counselor for Xenological Affairs, a shabby rabbit. His opinion meant nothing in these circles, which was why he usually spoke first. "Balanced." Well, the Logistics Secretary was verbose today. What, no others? The heavies were holding back. Blinton scanned the table, but gazes flickered around her without intersecting. And their fingers: a ring of anemone tentacles in fitful drift. Bad signs. She braced herself. The rasp of dry palms rescued her colleagues from uncertainty. The Naval Attache. He straightened up and spread his arms wide across the polished pseudo-wood, looming larger as more of his body came into view. "I thought the Consul General's report was very interesting," he said, head slowly rotating to bear on each of the others. "It's got some fine ideas. But overall" -- his eyes locked on hers -- "it's poorly thought out." Blinton's social mask never flinched. "I think it's very straightforward. Eighty-nine percent of the Kronigian population are serfs engaged in primary agriculture, barely producing enough to prevent starvation. We could alleviate their miserable lot by introducing crop rotation, animal breeding techniques, awareness of subtle ecological interactions. Boosting crop yields would mean more food and also encourage long-range trade with the surpluses, thereby breaking down some of Kronig's provincialism." "Unemployment would also increase, since fewer serfs would be needed to feed the population," Llan needled. "Wouldn't that create crime and unrest?" "I dealt with that in appendix F." But I didn't want to stress it, damn you. "I calculate the excess population would be displaced to the market towns. It would provide the labor for the crafts which would expand as trade increased and a money economy replaced barter. There would be temporary dislocations, of course, but the gradual nature of the change -- several generations at least -- would mitigate the impact a great deal." Llan leaned back in his chair, frowning. What was he up to? She hadn't expected opposition half this overt. She sneaked a glance around the table; all were intent on the Naval Attache's dramatics. So much for her lobbying. Llan raised his head. Blinton's stomach clenched. "There are two major problems with the Consul General's plans," he stated. "First, it's not spectacular enough. She proposes sending a few score socio-agronomists out into the countryside to spread good farming techniques. Suppose the Molots countered with an offer of self-propelled plows good for # years of service. Who would look better?" "But that would make them dependent on an advanced technology, whereas my idea -- " Llan swept on. "Second, suppose the priests did accept our offer. Consider the social impact. Not Just crime, but generations from now when the market towns become cities and flex their political muscles. Against the priests. How favorable toward the Terran Hegemon will they be when they realize we've set them up?" Murmurs flowed about the table. Llan looked at the Ambassador and lifted his shoulders apologetieally. "Of course. I'm just a simple military man," he said, reminding them of the power he served. "I don't want to monopolize the discussion." He sat back as they grilled her, a half-smile drifting over his full lips. Blinton already knew how the vote would go if she forced the issue, so she fought to minimize her losses. On they ground for # minutes as each department and section rep dashed in to whack his coup stick against the proposal already half bludgeoned to death. Good little bureaucrats that they were, most worried about the long-range power shifts. She tried to explain that lessening the priests' grip on the planet needed to be done eventually, if only to stop their wars. But to no avail. The Ambassador listened fitfully and doodled, probably thinking more about plans for his party. But at last he bestirred himself. "Obviously Consul General Blinton's proposal needs more study. I suggest she prepare additional reports analyzing the questions raised. Analyzing them in detail." A wrist-flip dismissed the documents, some # pages thick, scattered about the table. You bastard, she nodded. "And when she returns with the additional information -- in several months, I should imagine -- we can consider her proposal again. And if it has merit, we'll form a committee to study the matter further." tled to eat in the Executive Dining Room. But Blinton prefered cafeteria utility to ambassadorial ostentation: waiters, three forks per person, meals that dragged on for hours. She drifted through the lower ratings, nodding, looking for -- ah ha. The Personnel Officer. "Mind if I join you?" she asked, with a barely perceptible pause before dropping down. Jeremy smiled over his tray, eying her bare midriff as he nibbled on a stalk of red vegetable protein. "Haven't seen you in here lately," Blinton trilled. Not for four days anyway; that's how long I've been laying for you. "Been busy with the Ambassador's new idea. Contingency efficiency planning. You'll probably be hit with it soon. Everyone will have to draw up plans for dealing with every conceivable emergency. Quakes, plague, war, insurrection, new vices. Ain't nobody or nuthin' gonna ketch this embassy by surprise." But who does the real work while this planning goes on? Blinton stabbed her fork into a chunk of meatmeal. She could see it now. Department meetings to announce the need for contingency plans. Another meeting to gather ideas. Days wasted threshing them out, deciding how to best meet emergencies. Write a first draft; hold a meeting to discuss it. Rewrite. Submit to the Ambassador's administrative assistant arid a week later it comes back with "inadequate" or "part IV needs more work" scribbled in the margin. How could her staff study Kronig if everyone had to waste time brainstorming how to cope with an infinity of improbable emergencies? But then the Ambassador probably didn't want any real work done; taking action meant taking risks. A policy might backfire and interfere with his chances of snagging a post on a more civilized planet. Blinton had seen it before, which was why she requested frontier assignments. The people were generally younger and had to be more hard-working if they wanted to rise. The Ambassador, though, had reached the age where he couldn't afford a mistake. So he kept the Embassy playing at busy work while the Molots moved in and the Kronigians grew more paranoid by the day, jeopardizing the whole Embassy. She shoved her plate away. "When's the next personnel allotment due?" "I don't know. Something's happening in the Dulbaniq sector and our staffing is frozen for the duration." "Another 'protective reaction' against the Molots?" He shrugged. "Even my sources in communications don't know. Whatever it is, the Ambassador won't get his # new people until it's over." Thirty-two? Rage mounted; she fought to keep her face normal. The Ambassador's latest increment was more than her entire staff in legation days. The Embassy was choking on flesh; no wonder nothing got done. Blinton activated the spy screens concealed in her chron (in case someone had a bug on her) and leaned forward, hand masking her mouth against cameras. "Jeremy, I need a dozen agronomists. When you set up the talent profiles for the new #, you could slip them in. I don't care what their primary roles are -- they can' be psychs or mechs or even stenos. Just get me # people who know something about farming and I'll handle the transfers once they're here." She hunched her shoulders as she whispered, letting her halter-vest gape. Come on, look at my breasts. You were hot enough for them once before. But Jeremy rubbed his nose and scratched an elbow, looking away. "Could you get me six?" she pleaded. "One of Llan's assistants monitors the outgoing material. Security, he says. I might not be able to slip it past him, and if it was spotted I couldn't justify it. You're the only one in the Embassy who wants farmers. I'd like to, but I can't." It was cool and dim in the chambers of the Kronigian equivalent of pope. Enticing aromas tickled her nose; the furnishings or the Kronigian himself? Blinton shifted uncomfortably on the high knobbed stool as he puffed up his bladders to speak in fluting whistles: "You promised us many things. Tools. New materials. Knowledge. Yet since your initial gifts eleven cycles of eleven have passed with nahght but talk. Why?" Why indeed? Blinton remembered her inspiration to give them a few score telescopes, which would be useful and have minimal cultural disruptions. But just getting in to see the head of the sociology department had taken two appointments. Appointments! In her legation days an intercom call would have sufficed. Once she'd penetrated to Westerial's inner sanctum, the woman had stalled her for a staff report. The excuse was that she was still waiting for said report, but Blinton's informants said Llan had found out about her idea and vetoed it. How can I explain bureaucratic inefficiency, an Ambassador who prefers planning parties to negotiating, and a Naval Attache who checks my every effort? Damn Llan. The Ambassador's inertia is understandable, but the Naval Attache is smart enough to realize what will happen if the Molots get in and distrupt the Kronigian culture. Why is he -- She realized the priest was impatient. Hurriedly, she said, "Unfortunately the ship that was supposed to bring our new gifts was delayed. We hope that in a few -- " His whistle was high-pitched. "The last two ships have brought many humans. What do they do?" Good question, although asked for paranoid reasons. She frowned at the computer translator hanging between her breasts. "It takes many humans to fully study your world." But that didn't satisfy. The head priest began to reel off the names of everyone who'd been assigned to the planet when the legation was upgraded to embassy and demanded to know what each did. The Ambassador was easy to explain; she called him the new head priest. But how to present the difference between a sociotech and a recreation therapist? And why the Embassy needed six of each? Blinton struggled along but when he dismissed her she knew he wasn't satisfied. She studied the simple tomic on the seneschal's torso as he led her out. Its sole decoration was a green stripe around the waist. Utilitarian, like the bare stone walls of the castle corridors. Bare even of Kronigians -- they didn't clutter up their homes with excess retainers. Blinton thought of the Terran Embassy and her office, and wondered how she could feel so lonely in the midst of so many people. Perhaps she should take an old friend to bed tonight, instead of that Programs Analysis Officer she'd been working on. A dark figure in an alcove broke her reverie. A Molot. Wearing the cobalt and blue chevrons of the diplomatic corps where its light gray body turned ebony on its dorsal surfaces. Like a great frog it squatted there, looking out the narrow embrasure. Waiting its turn for an audience? Under one short arm a metal case gleamed. Blinton let the seneschal continue on as she froze, squinting at the alien characters on the box, then hurried after. An atomic drill, she thought numbly, as she lofted into the evening sky. More than just a useful tool to snag the Kronigians on advanced technology. A potential weapon. It took her four days to find an agreeable code clerk, three hours to bring him to her room. While he efficiency slept, drained, she injected him with # cc of di-sodium lithanol and implanted a sequence of subconscious commands. Three watches later, while encoding a routine status report, he transposed two digits. The new code combination would have requisitioned a complete set of memory cubes on farming through the ages. Unfortunately a sharpeyed naval cadet caught the "error." Blinton learned of the clerk's demotion when he came shuffling by for a consolation screw. She soothed him, sent him on his way, then soared off skyward where she could rage in safety. The ambassador's party took place in the castle's great hall. Glo-globes emitting bursts of human, Molot and Kronigian colors drifted under arches and between columns; tangers wafted an odd scent calculated to relax the olfactory organs of all three races. How festive we must seem to our enemies, Blinton thought, nodding automatically to passing humans. She swirled the nektarile in her snifter, wondering how long she had to stick around. She tried to count the humans present but gave up at #. Nearly the entire Embassy was present. Depressing, to see so many people, so many unfamiliar faces, with every human on the planet pulled into one place by the social event of the year. She let the current carry her into an alcove with an ecologist the ecologist!) from her original legation staff and they drank to the old days. But his caresses failed to cheer her. The Ambassador meandered through the crowd, syncophants eddying in his wake. Through her glass Blinton studied the bits of metal and plastic decorating his chest. Forty years till I'm pensioned; what are my chances of an Embassy command and being able to straighten out this messed up diplomatic service? To be precise, what are my connections in either the Navy or Throne? She tossed off her drink and went in search of more. Buck up, Blinton, get to work. Talk respectfully to your superiors. Share a joke with your equals. Be polite with just a trace of condescension (keep 'em in their places) to your inferiors. So what if this planet is lost; you've still got your career to think about. There'll be other conferences, other votes. So get out there and mix. A trio of Kronigians wandered by. They halted to talk to the Ambassador and automatically arranged themselves in a triangle to cover each others' backs. A Kronigian gathering must be pretty wild, Blinton thought, smiling at the defense posture. Oh oh -- the Ambassador was trying to chat with them without using his translator. The aide behind him winced and motioned for another drink. "Isn't it a wonderful party?" Jeremy materialized at her side, one hand discretely tucked in that of a long-limbed woman in an engineering uniform. "Best one I've been to all night." Blinton eyed the find: good breasts. The engineer looked away though. Already taken. Best leave her alone anyway; Jeremy was too useful to alienate. Unless they wanted to try it with three... She started as the Personnel Officer took her arm and leaned close. "The Navy boys are annoyed with a certain diplomat who keeps trying to go outside channels. As long as they think they're outmaneuvering you they'll let it go on, but if they decide you're putting one past them, there may be some overt response." His eyebrows arched for a moment and he disappeared into the throng with his new friend. Moodily she climbed up into one of the pulpit-like structures extruding from the columns. At least up there she didn't have to play the polite social games with people she didn't like but had to placate. Ah, there was Llan, holding court down by the stocks. Lesser Navy officers surrounded him; others dotted the hall... Lots of Navy officers. Blinton lowered her snifter, frowning, and began to count the Navy men present. Llan's planetside staff consisted of only #, plus those manning the watch ship. The Navy protected its secrets, of course, but the ship contingent was supposed to be only a handful. She counted #. Over half wearing the blue rosettes of Llan's clan. Blinton studied her antagonist. The party had drawn his followers out of their hiding places in the sky, but even so there must be some left to man the ship. Say, a minimum watch of eight. That meant he had # to # officers assigned to him. Three times the normal staff for a minor planet like Kronig. Especially in peacetime -- So that was it. Blinton closed her eyes and slumped against the cold stone pillar. Of all the corrupt, foul, loathsome -- Mastering herself, she let the party burst upon her senses again and chugged her drink. She dared not be weak. No wonder Llan blocked her efforts. He didn't want the Terran Hegemony to negotiate a successful treaty with the Kronigians. He wanted the Molots to succeed, so that a war would result. Perhaps not immediately, but a few years down the line, the Navy would denounce the increasing Molot influence in the sector and launch a "protective reaction." Military action equals career advances. Simple. And who would be in the best position to benefit but the naval staff on the scene, already thoroughly backgrounded. Blinton arranged her face and carriage and started down the stairs. placing one foot carefully in front of the other. Wouldn't do to have an accident now, oh no. She'd have to be very careful in the coming months. People who get in the way of well-laid schemes have a demonstrably higher accident rate. Options: take Llan to bed? Make a peace offering of her body? It was a tactic that had served her well in the past, but satyr though he be, she doubted he'd halt his rise to power for a good lay. Assassination? In her career she'd avoided the temptations to eliminate rivals, although several times she'd had opportunities. But for these stakes... She could invite him flying, just a casual jaunt -- let him think it a peace offering. Play up to him a bit, and when he made a pass let him get in close and tap a scrambler against his spine. No, he'd be too cagy. Navy officers don't rise without having survived dozens of simple assassination attempts of the sort a novice like herself could muster. And then a Navy Star Chamber inquisition -- out of the question. She shuddered. She let the crowd sweep her away and reverted to her social greeting mode. Nod, smile, stop to joke, smile, an extra second of eye contact for you, squeeze an arm. And she thought: she could always just give up. "Yes, isn't it a grand party! And your outfit..." She could pretend not to know what was going on, wait for the routine transfer to another world, and not get crushed in Llan's machinations. "Oh, I think she's being outrageous. Too much quoppe." How would it feel to live inside one's head after abandoning a planet ot a Navy-Molot war? "Madame Jana Blinton. My pleasure." A Molot squatted before her, great bulk slumped on the flagstones, upper appendages spread in a gesture of greeting. She replied in turn, which was the signal for an involuted monologue on a fine point of Kronigian botany. Skillful banter, she noted professionally, before drifting back to her own worries. This creature was the fourth point of the maneuvering between herself, Llan and the Kronigians. His enigmatic race was expanding through the same arm of the galaxy as the Terran Hegenomy. With a difference. While humanity ballooned out in a sphere centered on Old Sol, the Molot domain was a cylinder of constant radius expanding at both ends. Actually no one knew for sure what the far end was doing, but the one intersecting human space was giving Throne and Navy planners alike something to worry about. She had a sudden vision of planets stacked atop one another in a great pyramid through time, with Kronig at the base. And herself fighting off those who wanted to pull it out and. bring the stack crashing down. Damn. If only she were free to act -- A void in the conversation jerked her out of her brooding. She realized both of the Molot's eye clusters were on her. No, lower. Her empty snifter. "I said, if you humans concentrated more on work and less on pleasure, perhaps you would accomplish more." It would be amusing to violate every diplomatic and ethical tradition by smashing his face in. No, the Molot was baiting on purpose. Why? She opened her mouth to reply -- and heard a faint whistling behind her. She lifted her glass and scrutinized it, adopting a mockserious expression for the Molot's benefit. The reflection showed a trio of Kronigians behind her. Waiting to see what she might reveal in a moment of alcoholic carelessness. Her mind cleared; inspiration flared. She giggled and staggered forward a step. "You wait and see what the Ambassador's going to do," she said loudly. "He isn't bringing all those people here just to study flowers." With that she lurched off toward the bar, wondering if she hadn't Just thrown away her career on a very long shot. Skull-throb pounding; burst of interior drum savagry. Blinton rolled over, grimacing, trying to shut out the noise. Finally she conceded to herself that she was awake. "Who the hell is it?" she grumbled, fumbling for the light. It seared her eyes. When she could see efficiency she found the chron. #. "Shit." Blinton lurched out of bed and found a robe. Belting it loosely shut, she heaved the antique wooden door open. It was Llan. Just what her hangover needed. But he was panting, and his uniform mussed for the first time since he'd come to Kronig. What -- "Something's gone wrong," he ground out. "The head priest just announced we're being kicked off Kronig and we've # hours to be gone." Two men dashed down the hall behind him, shouting. Blinton's hand closed her robe as his eyes dropped. Did I succeed? "All of us?" she asked. "No, we blustered and argued and finally convinced them to allow a skeleton staff to stay on. It'll be the original legation you headed. They're not afraid of that," he sneered. "Of course you won't have the personnel to do anything, just show the flag and negotiate for the return of a full embassy." He sighed and pulled out a crumpled list. "Now here's what the Ambassador wants you to do while he's gone. First, contingency planning." He was gratified to see her burst into tears at the extent of their predicament. It confirmed his opinion of her as a female who didn't have what it took for real responsibility. But he could not understand why, when he tried to take her in his arms to comfort her, her knee came up so sharply.  testify before the California Legislative Committee on Energy and Diminishing Resources. The very existence of such a committee is a sign of the times: no one would have expected the legislature to spend money and effort on such issues a few years ago. It was even more surprising that they would ask a science fiction writer to appear on a program that included Joseph Coates of the Office of Technology Assessment; Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute; Paolo Soleri, arcologist extraordinary; and a star-studded group of academic experts. To be honest, the Committee originally wanted another science fiction writer and science columnist, but he wouldn't travel from the East Coast to California; so they had to experience all the same, and I thank Dr. Asimov for putting my name into their hopper. I'm not at all sure the hearings were as useful as the Chairman, Assemblyman Charles Warren, thought they would be. To begin with, the committee hearing format isn't too productive. There wasn't any interchange among the participants; instead, each "expert" gave a set presentation, followed by a few minutes of questions by Committee members who might or might not have been listening to what had been said. That kind of dog and pony show doesn't always produce exciting new ideas. With every word taped, and plenty of time to think in advance about what you're going to say, you tend to be rather careful. It's going to be public record, after all, and if you make specific predictions you may be called on to account for them sometime in future. As a matter of fact, that's one of the topics I chose to speak on: how to get more information and ideas across the barrier from the scientific community to the political community. There are a lot of formal mechanisms for transmission across that barrier. There are commissions and institutes, and staff conferences, and formal papers -- and every one of them suffers from the defects inherent in such formal systems. You don't get the nuances, and you don't get the wild ideas that just might turn out to warn politicians of an upcoming problem. When you write a formal paper you don't know just what your audience knows (and what it doesn't know but can't admit publicly that it doesn't know). As a matter of fact, one of my suggestions was that the Committee members make a firm resolution to take a scientist to lunch once a month, with no formal papers and no statements for quotation. A second suggestion was that there ought to be periodic conventions with no program; science people and political people ought to be put in an atmosphere of informal conversation and left to communicate. I don't know if it will work, but I've seen a lot of good come from downstairs meetings held while formal papers are being read in the convention ballroom... pancy in expectations. The Committee Chairman wanted specific predictions. The political authorities have been hit with a series of crises: inflation, energy shortages, pollution, the ecology movement, collapse of aerospace as a major employer, etc., etc., and it seemed reasonable to Mr. Warren that the Committee might get a hint of what was to come, so that the legislature wouldn't have to operate in a continuous atmosphere of crisis management. I didn't hear all the testimony, but most of the experts seemed more inclined to discuss philosophy and sociology, rather than get specific. One chap did talk about diminishing resources, specifically metals like tin, but even there he had to say there were tradeoffs that would help weather the problem. I don't think the Committee members were expecting a philosophical debate; but in a very real sense maybe that's precisely what's needed. Obviously mist of the expert witnesses thought so. Here's why: until you have some basic assumptions about the nature of the future, you're going to have real problems planning for it. The lead-off speaker was Herman Kahn. I hadn't seen him for perhaps ten years, although of course I've read a number of his works. He hasn't changed, except that he's grown a short, full beard; Herman is a fascinating speaker. He generates strong emotions in people: very few can listen to him without either nodding in agreement or violently shaking their heads. No one wants to argue with him, because those who take him on in debate generally lose. That doesn't mean that Herman is invariably right: it just means that you'll probably lose a debate with him. Plato mentions that phenomenon in his dialogues: an opponent is silenced but not convinced. Herman has that effect on people. On the other hand, he can be pretty convincing, too. The Sierra Club representative, asked later about Herman's presentation, summed it up this way: "You've just heard a massive dose of Pollyanaism from the Boss Pollyanna of them all." The fact that Herman Kahn had, during his testimony, offered to prove that the Sierra Club cost the US over # may have had something to do with their representative's attitude, of course. Herman Kahn's presentation was basically one of philosophical world view. There are two currently important views, Kahn said: NeoMalthusian beliefs, which can be summarized by saying the world is a finite "fixed pie" out of which we can take just so much and no more; and a Post-Industrial view that says the world-model should be seen as a growing pie, with no one able to predict what we can produce. He went on to summarize both views, and to describe one of his characteristic tricks that excite either admiration or hatred. In his public lectures, he passes around charts that summarize the two would views. Then he asks the audience to vote on which view they hold. He also asks them to vote on the confidence with which they hold it, and there's where the joker comes in. The Neo-Malthusian summary is stated in dogmatic terms. There are no qualifiers in it at all. The Post-Industrial perspective is full of qualifiers such as "within limits", and "no one knows but the best guess is", and "if we are reasonably prudent", and the like. He's been conducting this poll all over the country, and the results are a little frightening. Most college students accept the Malthusian perspective -- and profess a great deal of confidence in it. As Herman points out with some glee, there's got to be something wrong with an educational system that produces this result. It may be that the Malthusians are right, but no one has a right to be that confident -- and particularly no one has a right to be confident about the view as Herman wrote it. It's more dogmatic than any medieval scholastic's catechism. about "trained incapacity." Herman Kahn called it "educated incapacity." Our schoojs, he said, are systematically teaching not only unreal views of the world -- but views which are known to be unreal. He was taught in high school, for example, that "wars never settle anything." Now anyone who cares to can in about five minutes come up with a list of at least a hundred things that wars have settled. Canada is English, not French. The Third Reich does not control the Suez Canal and the Middle East oilfields. Israel exists. Yet for generations students were taught the catch-phrase "wars never settle anything." Perhaps they don't, but it's certain that if that cliche eontains a truth it's a subtle one not learned by ceaseless repitition. As another example: NeoMalthusian arguments are generally based on exponential curves. An exponential curve is one that rises slowly at first, gets steeper and steeper, and eventually becomes near vertical. You can fit an exponential curve to a number of modem phenomena: population, pollution, energy consumption, depletion of natural resources, etc., etc. On the other hand, there are no exponential curves in nature. Natural phenomena that look like exponentials turn out in the long run to be "S" curves. That is, at first they look like exponentials, but eventually they turn just the other way. Given the latest census data, for example, the population trend of the US is much better fitted by an S curve than by an exponential. Now there's more at stake here than the teehnical question of which curve best fits present trends, because as Herman is fond of pointing out, more and more educated people simply accept what they've been taught without even considering that there might be an alternative: and that fundamental world-view translates into action. Indeed, anyone who seriously believes that the world is on an exponential road to crisis and die-off must try to do something about it -- or confess to having no more moral sensitivity than a weasel. I've been through my exercise in "technological optimism", and I it again (just now); but it's interesting how the testimony of the experts did seem to bring out one point -- and by accident I made that point the central theme of my own testimony. There's pretty general agreement among both Neo-Malthusians and Post-Industrialists that we've got some problems, and if we're to find a way out of them we'll need some highly educated talent. Technology got us where we are, and created most of our problems. It will take technology to get us out of them. It doesn't matter which way you think is "out", either. Even if you believe that the only hope for the world is to de-emphasize technology, change our goals, learn to settle for fewer gadgets and gimciicks and miracle drugs and Coca-Cola and transistor radios and high quality stereo systems and electric canopeners and paperback books and cheap trips to Europe and cheap nylon backpacking gear and sleeping bags, and the rest; even if you'd like us to go to the simple unspoiled life, getting there is not going to be easy. The Luddite solution -- "Smash the machines!" -- is not going to lead to high quality of life for very many people. It may even lead to a counter action by those who operate those machines or depend on their output. On the other hand, if you believe with Herman Kahn that the world population is likely to stabilize at tury, and that we've got the resources to produce a Gross World Product of some # per capita forever -- you still can't think it's going to happen automatically. "It's going to take people who understand technology whether we want to have more of it or start dismantling it. Despite our enormous investment in public higher education, it's doubtful whether we're turning out the people we'll need for the world of tomorrow. As Joseph Coates of the Office of Technology Assessment put it, ask a recent college graduate in anything other than the hard sciences and engineering what he or she thinks they're prepared to do. A growing number of people invest a great deal of their lives in this magic thing called "education", which they are assured will let them live better lives -- and find at the end that there's little demand for their "skills". The United States, Coates said, has become very middle class. That has some benefits: when there's an automobile accident, it doesn't usually generate a fist fight. Instead we call our insurance company and the police. We expect, in other words, that the System will have methods for dealing with our problems. If it can't, we expect it to change until it can. That leads to a number of side effects. One is credentialism: we don't ask if you can do a job, but ask what credentials you have to prove that you can do it. I think of a case near at hand: my wife She works in a detention center. When she first went there she was hired under a contract that stated quite plainly that unless those kids learned to read, she didn't get paid. She gets paid, so there's objective evidence that she knows how to do her job. She also has to take classes in order to keep her position. It's interesting to look at the experience and performance record of some of the "experts" she has to take classses from. Another side effect is increasing detachment from the primary processes: Coates listed a number of specific questions (among others, "How is this nylon rug made? Where do sesame seeds come from? How does a satellite get up and what keeps it there? Through how many hands does our food pass from farmer to our table? What does a carburetor do? How does television work?") that he claimed most 'educated' people couldn't answer. To my horror he got nods of agreement from much of the assembled company. They were all college graduates and many were officials on whose decisions our lives depend. Ortega y Gassett wrote fifty years ago that the "mass man" accepts the products of civilization as a kitten accepts milk, with no more understanding of civilization than the cat has of dairies. That brings us at long last to my own presentation: a crisis prediction. People are living longer, and fewer are bom. The trend is easily seen: we have an aging work force. By the end of this century -- in fact, well before then -- we'll have many more retired people and comparatively fewer productive workers. No problem is more easily foreseen, but I've yet to see anyone planning for it. Now we have also encouraged political activism, and we have extended the franchise to nearly every conceivable group. Certainly all those retired people are going to vote to keep their standard of livving from falling. Where's the money -- or productive goods if you think we'll be beyond money by then -- to come from? Certainly not from savings. Social Security has no money, only bonds, which is to say the authority to tax. The whole Social Security system is geared to a growth economy. It assumes you can tax the current work force to support the retired work force -- and therefore assumes that the current work force will be larger than the retired group. That's not going to be the situation within a few years. The only way out is either a general lowering of everyone's living standard, or increased productivity per employed worker. Or both. The recent trend in productivity isn't encouraging, though; it's going down. As a technological optimist my suggestion is to get productivity back up. The Neo-Malthusians will doubtless have their own suggestions, but the problem is quite real, and quite predictable. Query: is our educational system organized to produce the trained talent we'll need to meet the crisis? I'd say no. In a recent visit to largest single book section was reserved for "Subject A" textbooks. Subject A is the modem euphemism for what was called Bonehead English in my day. I suggest that when California, said to have the best public highereducation system in the world, can't find among all its dozens of Universities and State Colleges and Polytechnical Universities and Community Colleges, one undergraduate institution that doesn't take in students in need of Bonehead English, we're in trouble. Sure, the state should provide a means for correcting deficiencies in lower level education. If education is conceived as a magic leveller of class differences, then Bonehead English at the top undergraduate institutions makes sense; but if public higher education is supposed to be an investment for the future, it becomes questinable. We need one public university that takes only the cream of the student population. Cal Tech can't possibly produce all the really top-flight engineers and scientists we're going to need. Higher education has another interesting phenomenon: department budgets are based, not on projected needs for graduates thereof, but on enrollment. The more students a department can attract, the larger its staff, the more promotions for its faculty, the more undergraduate assistantships, and the more public resources that department is given. In effect the public authorities are inviting recent high school graduates to allocate educational resources. Control of perhaps our most important public investment is left to those who by definition haven't the qualifications to do it. The freshman student is expected to predict for himself where he'll be needed: to make the most fundamental decision of his life in the atmosphere of an oriental rug market. He's given very little help, and the public interest is hardly represented at all. The results are grim. Our education systems look as if we think our future problems will be solved by training enormous numbers of social scientists, teachers, and the like. Does anyone seriously believe this method will meet the problem of producing enough goods to support those retired people we know we'll have around in a few years? For that matter, does anyone seriously believe that expanding departments of education makes sense at a time when birth rates are at an all-time low? lished a study of employment among engineers and scientists. As you might expect, technically trained people have the lowest unemployment rate of all groups in this country. There are specific problem areas, and middle-aged aerospace engineers in particular have employment problems, but by and large there's more demand for technically educated people than there are graduates. This is hardly the result of planning. In # the technical professions were hard hit by government cut-backs. As a result fewer students enrolled in those departments. Now we have shortages. This will spur demand, which will build up experience of geologists -- who eight years ago were a glut on the market and are now at a premium -- is like a bad parody of manpower planning." That, boiled to its essence, was my presentation. Because I'm a science fiction writer and it was expected of me, I talked a bit about far-out technology: bringing icebergs from the Antarctic to Los Angeles to meet our water shortage, using the thermal capacity of the Sea of Cortez as a long-term solution to the energy crisis, laserlaunching systems to get orbital power plants, and that sort of thing. None of it would be thought far-out none of it is; I was careful to stay with concepts that have a fair chance of economic feasibility within the next # years. I expect that's what drew most of the attention. That sort of thing, though, is implied in my choice of world views. If you accept the proposition that technology can, intelligently applied, cope with the problems technology has created, then it becomes a matter of hard study as to which technological solutions ought to be investigated. If you don't accept that proposition, then any specific technological suggestion is probably obscene, since it implies that we ought to use even more resources to bail ourselves out of the short term crises, thus putting off the fundamental restructuring we'll have to face someday. I wasn't paid for my appearance and I didn't have long to prepare for it. I expect I should have made a bigger impact than I probably did. Even now, though, after listening to the other experts, and thinking about what I should have said. I'm still convinced that my prediction was correct: we're about to face a shortage of trained talent, and our education establishment isn't geared to do anything about it. I remain an optimist: we'll do something. But I wish those responsible for investing public money in higher education would stop and take a long look at what we're doing and what we're going to need in future. At the least, couldn't we subsidize tuition in engineering colleges as well as find scholarships for those in the big departments? And can't we have one undergraduate institution that just won't accept students who need Bonehead English?  That which has never lived can never die! of summer and he came out on a hill, maybe the only hill left. They were gathered there. The old, the young, and the no longer restless, all gathered. And he sat by the cold fires and not knowing or caring if any listened he said "I will go do what I have to do." The trees and birds listened. The people listened. It was a time when all things listened for there were soon to be none left to speak. The people looked at him like birds seeing tom feathers. They said "The world ends tonight. You can not leave your song here and go. Do not leave your song here. It will warm itself by the fire. It will wait for you by the fire. But not for long." All this was said with tumed-away faces and with silence. They said "Do not go. Your song will go outside to wait for you when you do not return. It will sit away from the fire. It will get cold." This was said with busy motions and precious moments. That is what they said. "Tomorrow is cold for all songs," he said. And they knew he was right. They knew he was right. "I will go," he said. "How will you go," they asked. "I will go as an owl. I will go see the city sitting on its buildings." And quietly, like a hawk without claws, he went away over the soft ground. And the people shook their heads as he went. And the old ones, thinking of him, could not see his face in their minds. He was an owl and owls when the world ends say, "Don't look at me with your eyes." There was a place he went to first. It was above the city. It was a high place built of concrete and steel on ground where once a hill had stood. It was built there so that one could take pictures of the city to send home. He was not there to send pictures home. He who had lived his life in a long shadow of a city now felt the first moment of going from a darkened room out into the light. Somewhere down there in the shadow of the city, the sky was hidden. He knew his strength by the distance he could see and down there in the city, he would be blind and bent in shadows. But he had to go down there. And the world was ending and all the city was ending. In his heart he knew it was ending, knew that the grey place that did not live was ending but his heart knew it was not enough. He drew his arm across his face in a wing and feather motion, shielding his eyes from the sharp face of the sun. Softly like a bird he moved, like a bird about to soar. He said, "I will fascinate you. I will tear out your eyes with spirit teeth." And he laughed and laughed. And below him, the city sat on its buildings. And he laughed and laughed. And Detroit screamed on its wheels. And Chicago slid on slaughtered animals. And the old man sucked it up in his breath. The panic of an animal city was like telltale smoke to an owl. And Los Angeles waited like pregnancy in unmoving traffic. And the skyline of New York, for the first time, did not cast any shadows. And the old man tore it away like cobwebs and laughed and laughed. And the closed eyes of animals with their heads to the ground, moved slowly with flies. And the old man saw it. He saw the city burning. The concrete, the steel, the brick and iron, all burning. And the wood of dead trees was rusting. And he laughed, sharpening claws he never had. And there was a song, a little song from his memory and it too was burning. And the song said "Go to sleep and do not cry. Your mother is dead and still you feed upon her breasts." That is what the song said. It was the end-of-theworld song of a hungry spider who spins his web, knowing how to die. Back there on the hill, the old man's song got cold waiting for him. And the people set all the dances on fire. All the dances on fire. And they packed them away still burning with handfuls of dirt, red earth like pipestone. They gave the dances all burning to mother earth. Only mother earth can keep dances when the world ends. The old man stood in the harsh glare of the city, wrapped in the soft protection of folded wings of memory. The air around him was alive with flame as his memories got stronger and the earth moved beneath him with the power of living before him and after him. He felt the earth moving under his feet like a child spinning around and around in a secret place known only to boys. Tomorrow was cold and burnt away to ash. But in the secret place that lived yet inside of him, the current was slow and the warm brown river seemed to be standing still. And the reason that had sent him away from the hill, when the people gathered, came up the brown river and he could not say her name. No, he could not say her name. Not even now when the world was ending, could he say her name. For the dead take their names with them out of the world. But he thought of her in this time of the coming back, in this time of the world ending and coming out of the ground. His old woman had not come out of the ground. That was why he was there. That was why he was there to see the city sitting on its buildings. There to see the city that had hidden the sky. The other people had buried their city on her grave. He listened. He did not hear the scratching of her fingers as she clawed at the city above her. Or did he? Was the long animal cry of the city her cry too? Was it her moving-in-the-grave sound? The ears of the owl are sharp and he listened. And then he knew he heard her. The owl can hear many things when the world ends and he heard her. The scratching, the painful scratching of her moving. "She can not come up through the sidewalk's concrete." he said. That is what he said. And in his face he took her hammer and beat her name into ashes and beat those ashes into a hammer. But the spirit calling of her to come was not enough. They had buried a city on her grave. He closed his eyes and he said, "I will wait and watch. I will not go down there yet. I will not speak and see if they do not move the city. They do not need the city anymore. Maybe they will tear it down now." He was an owl and that is what he said. But they did not move the city. He waited and watched. An owl waited and watched but they did not move the city. The other people had buried their city. It was behind them even though they still lived in it. They had buried their city. He was an owl and he knew this. He had heard them. He saw them through the eyes of sick animals. The sun was going to come at them and they had gathered together like a swarm of locusts. They were like storm-frightened cattle and the wings of frightened birds brought their words to him. They said "Let's swim to the moon." He was an owl and that is what they said. The old man looked up at the flaming sky of high-sun time. It was hot like a pot oven and the sun was spinning like a wounded spider, dangling closer to its prey on a single strand of fire. It filled the sky and moved quickly to the west. Moving fast like a thrown spear, the sun pulled night after it like a blanket. It was dark coming at noon. It was the end of the world coming and darkness and flames. Flames and then darkness. "I am an owl. I live in the dark. I will not be angry when it grows dark." That was what he said but things within him snapped like twigs in the summer and he sat down on the ground like an old man. He sat down like an old man. 'T am not an owl!" he cried and he beat the ground with fists not wings. "I shall fascinate you. I shall tear out your eyes with spirit teeth." he said and he laughed and laughed and the sound of his laughter was a noise in a hollow barrel and the warm tears ran out of his eyes into the ground. He was an old man. And old men cry when the world ends. Back on the hill they were gathered. His song had grown cold. His song had no relatives. All his relatives were gone. They could not be there. The other people had buried their cities on them and the sun could not see them down there under the city. And in the city in buildings called museums there were rustling sounds and weeping sounds. In cold grey filing cabinets the bones of the old ones stirred uneasily. In vaults, in labeled boxes, the bones of the old ones cried restlessly and they could not get free. In one box the leg, an arm in another, the skull filling with tears in a long display case in another room. And the Sun could not reach them and Mother Earth could not bring them awake and they wept, quietly, quietly, in the museums. And they wept. The old ones, and the young ones and the no longer restless ones were sitting quietly on the hill. They talked and laughed with their relatives. Far away on something like a hill, the owl knew what they said. They said, "It is a good day today." They said, "We have today and each other. It is a good day to die." And behind all these words, they said one other thing and that was a shy thing that could not be spoken. So it was said with a time of quiet, or a soft look or a touch. It was said between father and child, between man and woman, with quiet movements that brought them together. All together. They were there with the ground people and the animal people. All together. They were there and the world was ending and they were there. And with faces, not words, they said "No one here gets out alive." There was a cold thing coming out of the man's heart. His cold song had come for him. The wind had blown his song away and it had come for him. The people on the hill did not see his song blow away because in the last of the time left they only had eyes for each other, only had eyes for those of their own kind and he had told them he was an owl. That is what he told them. They could not see his face, all silver and golden, in their minds. They thought he was an owl and owls when the world ends say, "Don't look at me with your eyes." Buried animal and ground people were trying to reach out through the cracks in sidewalks. The ground people moved restlessly under the concrete. "I will fascinate. I will roll my dead fist in your dead eyes." He raised his fist at the city and did not laugh. He could hear her under the concrete, scratching, scratching. The world was ending but the city did not know. There were corpses in clown suits running across each other's bodies on rat legs in the city. There were awkward throats moving out of habit, saying "Pile the bodies here and here." Cheated monkeys with jaded tongues screamed across the years saying, "I promised to drown myself." Loud noises choked small throats and softly, softly, like whining children who write on walls, they tumbled over each other in the darkness of a city that sat on its buildings. And the city did not see an old man take a hammer from a store with a broken window. And the city did not see an old man with a hammer trying to move a city. He swung and hit and swung and hit but cities are dead and forever when the world ends. He broke the hammer. The hammer broke on the concrete. And broken he sat down like an old man and said, "I want my old woman." And his voice was a tearing sound. "I am not an owl. I want my old woman." This is what he said and his fists hid his eyes and his shoulders shook. There was a man with a book down there in the city. He was all blood and death and writing in a page and he touched the old man on the shoulder with his book. He touched the old man on the shoulder and he spoke. His ancient words went through the air like a knife and his book was bound in snakeskin. But the old man had been an owl. The book man ran away. He ran away holding his book with his knees. It was getting hot like a summer grass fire and the old man looked up. But the sky was hidden by the city. He had come to the city to find his old woman and now he had lost the sky in the city that hid it. And old men and owls need the sky when the world ends. He wanted to run away from there. He wanted to fall asleep watching the sky but he could not leave his old woman. He could not run. His song was gone in the wind now and he could not go. He had gone to see the city sitting on its buildings and now the sky he could not see began to bum him. And the darkness was crawling across his shoulders. And the moon above was there in the hidden sky, chased by dead wishes. The moon was there. The blood moon was there, burning. Hurting old men, hiding its mother, the city sat on its buildings when the world ended. And the sky came apart like a wing tearing off.  Good Captain Christopher. was rowed ashore to set his foot on a new world, one which would never bear his name, and to plant his banners in the name of Spain in particular, in the names of Europe and Civilization in general. He stood on the beach with his men, and a fine autumn breeze stirred his hair and cloak. It was indeed a significant moment, a grandly climactic one, almost as though the sole purpose of European civilization had been to propel the captain and his seamen across the Atlantic to this moment on this strip of sand. Watching from the trees beyond the beach, darker-hued men shook their heads disbelievingly, looked at one another questioningly and whispered among themselves, "Who are these invaders?" None could say. So they shrugged together and, grinning mirthless grins, began drawing back the bolts of their machine guns. Mai Warwick One of the worst aspects of the intrusion of civilization into a of traditional values... There was shouting in the council hall, and the four-o'clock winds careening down the eastern pass were right on schedule, kicking up a fuss in the parched sands of the plaza. Brown legs braced in a tiny drift, rumpled brown poncho aflutter, the wild-eyed old man the weavers called "the witchdoctor" to impress the occasional tourists stood with his back to me. He was peering into a hubcap hung by a crude fiber rope on the cinderblock wall around Cisco's place, compulsively combing his long black hair with a two-peso plastic pocket comb he'd picked up at the weekly market. We exchanged wary nods as I trudged past. Then it registered. That makeshift minor wasn't a hubcap. It was a convex spherical section of silvery metal, too warmly luminous to be chromium steel and too large for any automobile. At closer leaving afterimages of violet and blue, and the ruptured hole where the rope passed through revealed a matteyellow inner surface, astonishingly resilient and silky to the touch. The old man scowled as I examined it. Whatever it was -- I admit I'm a simpleton in matters technological -- it would have been out of place in Ohio. In Cuchipamba its presence was deeply disturbing. Behind the wall there was none of the squealing and whining of wood on wood that comes from inside the house when Cisco's looms are in use. On the radio a popular singer was assaulting a Latin ballad with intermittent bursts of lucidity, but no one I saw when I rounded the comer to investigate seemed the least bit concerned with the anguish in his bursting heart. Tavio was there, fatter and taller and darker than the others, and Cisco and all the twelve-year-olds who work his looms, and a hostile little guy named Jose Antonio who never seemed to work at all. In identical white shirts and crisp broad-bottomed white pants, they were standing or squatting in the earthen courtyard in a semblance of a circle, with Tavio and a blaring radio at the center of attention. The radio was obviously new, and they seemed to be chiding him about it in rapid-fire Quechua, between laughs and gulps of Pepsi-Cola. Tavio grinned when he saw me. "Hey! Meester Roberto! Back from the city?" "Hey! Tavio! Cisco!" At the sound of Spanish, the laughter ceased, and the animated conversation I only barely comprehended. Pointedly ignoring the companion mirror I glimpsed on the inside wall, I nodded to Jose Antonio and all the kids, with a "Hey!" and a couple of grunts for good measure, but international relations obviously hadn't mellowed while I'd been at the clinic. Jose Antonio turned away with a snort of loathing; and the kids were even more skittish than usual. And as he ambled over Cisco was giving me one of those looks -- his teeth were bared but he wasn't really smiling. "Senor Roberto, how's it going? On your way to Haiti's house?" "No," I lied. "Just thought I'd walk around a little. See what's happening. You know." "Of course, of course." There was something Cisco wanted to say, and I'd have to wait it out. Nodding, he turned to the house to bring me the obligatory pepsi. In the doorway was an unsteady pile of wall-hangings, stylized bird-gods wading through bright woolen skies. Cisco irreverently rummaged through them, then returned, thrusting a warm bottle into my hand, and took a couple of worn coins in exchange. We stood together in uneasy silence while Tavio and Jose Antonio exchanged meaningful looks about the radio. It was an enormous Japanese-made set of the sort bought only by the richest Indians. When Tavio maneuvered the station-finder it made sounds like chalk dragged the wrong way over a blackboard. Every so often an explosion of heated Spanish or the frenzied cries of a love song would come blasting through too loudly to be understood, and Tavio would grin and Jose Antonio gravely shake his head. Jose Antonio glanced momentarily in my direction but looked through me to the wind-whipped sands beyond, his eyes boiling with contempt. With a fleet little smile that might have been meant for the wind, he took the set from Tavio's hand and slung it, still caterwauling, under one scrawny arm, collecting his hat and poncho with the other. Tavio looked crestfallen but made no move to stop him when off he trudged through the spiny green hedge behind the house, hugging the radio to his chest. I was already intensely uncomfortable in the bottled heat of the courtyard, bundled up in a jacket I to stay for hours. I raised my eyebrows in Cisco's direction as I swallowed a mouthful of tepid pepsi. "How's business, Cisco? Get that big order off to the city?' ' "Well, you know how it is when you don't stand right next to the kids. I've been out in the fields a lot." "Sure. The drought." "Always the drought." Cisco shuffled his feet on the hard-packed soil, examining his toes, and silence descended again. One of the kids emerged from the house with a noisy radio and the pack of marked cards Cisco had gotten from a Peace Corps Volunteer with a poor sense of humor. The daily game of gin rummy was about to begin when Tavio wandered over to us, grinning a friendly grin. "You see my new radio, Meester Roberto? Two thousand one hundred pesos!" "Hey, Tavio, that must be one helluva radio!" "It gets Guayaquil, Lima, San Carlos -- it's world-wide!" Cisco was still hanging on. I asked Tavio idly, "Jose Antonio going to fix it for you?" "Sure, Meester Roberto! You know that old Timex Juan Chango found in the city?" He stuck out his wrist, flashing a slender steel watch in obviously good condition. "I thought you took that to a watchmaker." "He said it was dead, but Jose Antonio fixed it." Tavio giggled suddenly. "And you remember that old bike Cisco bought for eleven hundred pesos?" " -- That rusty old bike Cisco bought because Balti had one?" Laughing, Cisco jostled him by the shoulders. "Well, Jose Antonio took that old bike and straightened everything out. Cisco resold it in the market for nineteen hundred pesos." Cisco was pounding Tavio 's arm all the while, and finally drove him away to the card game with laughing abuse in Quechua. "Tell me something, Senor Roberto," Cisco said as he caught his breath, "who's that new gringo?" That was it. Cisco didn't like gringos around unless they bought his wall-hangings -- certainly not one so machiavellian as to introduce a cheaper loom the kids could afford to buy (but wouldn't). In taking this view he was in a small minority in Cuchipamba; most people didn't want gringos around at all. "A new guy?" I asked. "Just got in." "Well, you know how it is. They come and they go. Sometimes I don't even meet them if they're tourists." Cisco brightened. "You think he's a tourist?" "I couldn't say." "Maybe he is a tourist," he said hopefully. "Maybe he is. You get those great new mirrors from him?" Cisco beamed. "Pretty nice, aren't they? Balti sold them to me. Two hundred pesos." Balti, I hoped, would be slightly more approachable. rummy and started across the plaza again. The old man was still grooming himself in the impossible mirror, the ruckus in the council hall was proceeding unabated, and all around, against a backdrop of snow-covered picturebook peaks, the frail straw rooftops of the villagers' homes were sprinkled among the fields, lonely and lifeless under scene smelled of decay and desperation, but I wasn't certain who was dying. I was still more than twenty pounds underweight from my recent bout with bacillary dysentery, hours overdue for a meal, and very, very cold. As the wind pushed me along in the direction of Haiti's, I wondered what manner of masochism or dementia could have possessed me to return to the village for the remaining few months of my two-year term. The hubbub inside the council hall diffracted into individual voices as I slowly drew near the path to Haiti's. Twice I heard my own name among the babble. Chilled and slightly dizzy, I stepped up to the hall and squinted inside. At the front of the dimly-lit meeting room were the old men of the village -- Taita Toribio, Taita Eustacio, and nearly a dozen others -- all half-drunk and shouting in turns. More than once, they'd confronted me with knives in hand on my way through the fields to visit the weavers; on other occasions, they'd threatened the weavers themselves. Now, the object of their fury was Hernardo Pichicaihua, president of the village council. Hernardo was reclining uncomfortably on a bucket seat apparently removed from a sportscar driven a little too far into the village. Hefore him, on a low wooden table, was a profusion of hand-written papers, from which he was reading aloud in Spanish -- a language the old men didn't understand. Their protests waned to an angry murmur as soon as they caught sight of me, but Hernardo read on obliviously. "... end of our wise and glorious Cuchipamba forefathers. Chapter one hundred fourteen. And when the Conquistadores arrived on ships and horses, everyone could see that their faces were white, and everyone who was subject to the Inca remembered what the old ones said, that the god Viracocha, whose face was white, would return to their hills and valleys on strange ships. Only our wise and glorious Cuchipamba forefathers, who knew that the Conquistadores were false gods and that the true Viracochas came only once every hundred years, did not succumb to the..." Hernardo faltered, then looked up. "Taita Roberto, welcome!" "Hey! Taita Hernardo! Taita Eustacio! Taita Toribio!" I went the rounds with grunts of greeting, but Hernardo alone came to the door. "Welcome back!" He warmly took my hand in the Latin manner. "They fixed up your liver in the clinic?" "Not only did they fix my liver, Taita Hernardo, they even cured what was wrong with me." "You've got to watch those doctors, Taita Roberto. They always say it's something else." With a solicitous arm about my shoulder, he urged me into the hall but, always the diplomat, kept us both close to the door. "Now," he said absently, "when're you coming over to visit?' ' "Tomorrow okay?" "Excellent." Bernardo's eyes, and mine, were on the old men, who were shuffling about and muttering among themselves. I raised a shoulder questioningly. "You know how it is," Bernardo said with resignation. "Gringos buy wall-hangings, and weavers weave instead of working their fathers' fields. These old men are no better than their own fathers, who killed the engineers who were laying the road. They're ignorant -- you must forgive them." I nodded. "Have you met the new gringo?" "He's not one of yours, Taita Roberto?" Suddenly, Bernardo was examining me closely, with puzzlement and concern. I shook my head. "I've only been in the city for a couple of weeks. I don't think the Peace Corps would send in anyone else without telling me. Or you." "Maybe he's from the Ministry of Agriculture, then. To give us an irrigation canal? For the drought?" "Maybe he is. You don't know anything about him?" Bernardo clucked a reluctant "No," squinting up at me all the while, with a hand massaging his chin. "How about those new mirrors Cisco got from Balti? You know where they came from?" "Mirrors? You know, Senor Roberto, you really don't look so good. Are you sure they cured you in that clinic?" "I'm fine." "Well, to make really sure, my Consuela will give you some hot lemonade tomorrow. But now" -- he glanced aside ironically -- "I'd better get back. I'm trying to educate them, you know; it's quite a responsibility being the only one who can read and write." He smiled wearily, then narrowed his eyes. "Take care, Taita Roberto." Nodding thanks for the warning, I turned toward the door. "Oh, by the way, Senor Roberto -- are you going over to see Balti now?" "Yes," I admitted grudingly. "Will you tell him something for me?" "Sure." "Tell him that new chair he sold the council doesn't work so well. It goes down, but it doesn't go up." Bernardo stepped aside, motioning toward the bucket seat at the head of the room. There were indications in the yellow padded headrest and the complicated gear at its base, but the instrument-studded armrests eliminated all doubt: it was no more a seat from a sportscar than Cisco's mirrors were hubcaps, and to judge from the silvery gleam of its frame it had come from the same source. A jet, perhaps -- but it seemed too small for a full-grown pilot, and there'd been no plane crashes nearby in years. Unfortunately, there was no way to examine it closely without dangerously antagonizing the old men, and I wouldn't have known what to look for, anyway. "I'll tell Haiti," I mumbled. "See you tomorrow, Bernardo." By the time I was back in the chill of the plaza, Bernardo was blithely reading from his endless history of sixteenth century Cuchipamba. His wise and glorious forefathers were resisting the Spaniards as usurpers. His contemporaries, less obviously glorious but equally determined, were shouting at a hundred decibels again. I sped up to a trot. Balti had recently tapped the electric power line that ran, otherwise ignored, along the highway from the city to the east, and a dozen yards from his massive, unfinished cinderblock house, the Rolling Stones were already wailing, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." The door squealed open as I slowed to a walk, and Haiti's grinning face poked out. "How about a drink? I've got good gin. Vat #." I laughed. "For real, Roberto. You want some?" I startled him by saying "Yes," hoping a stiff drink would settle my dizziness. Balti waited for me to enter, then fastened the door behind me and skipped across the hardwood planks to a small steel cabinet which hid in the comer from the room's timid overhead bulb. The music stopped and, grateful for the silence, I lowered myself to the floor, resting against one in the line of four wooden looms which dominated the room. Opposite the looms were the heaps of throwaways that made Balti the richest in the village at the unlikely age of eighteen -- everything of wood, cloth, metal or plastic that he could beg or buy or otherwise safely remove from the gringos he met in the city, or from the few foolish tourists who ventured as far as Cuchipamba itself. It was a veritable second-hand Sears -- from bedding, baubles and books, to staplers and auto parts and rusted-out toasters -- but there was nothing even suggestive of the chair and the mirrors. "Here." Grinning hospitably, Balti settled into a crouch on the floor and thrust a blue metal cup into my hand. "I brought you a couple of messages, Balti." The grin subsided quickly. Balti raised the cup to his lips, twohanded, as though performing a solemn ritual; he rlrew in a breath, closed his eyes, and only then did he upend the cup. "From the city. The Embassy." Despite himself, Balti gagged on the liquor. "That's right," he said through tears, "you were in the city." "Miss Arlen in the economic section told Frank Gover at A.I.D. to tell me to tell you that she won't pay two hundred dollars -- he said dollars -- for those wall-hangings you sent up." "Miss Arlen!" "Sure. How much did you tell her you'd charge?' ' Balti smiled slyly. "That's the other message?" I took a very long time sipping my drink -- scotch, as Balti probably knew -- and stared across at his junkyard. "Bernardo says that new chair you sold them doesn't work so well." He shrugged disdainfully, but clouded the reaction with an unreadable look into his cup. It was already clear he'd volunteer nothing. "Tell me something, Balti." "What?" "You know Jose Antonio?" "Of course I know Jose Antonio -- you think this is New York or someplace?" I smiled. "What's with him?" "Well, you've got to understand that Jose Antonio's not really prejudiced against you. He hates all gringos the same. He even hates our white people." "What I mean is, can he really fix things?" Balti studied my face for a second. "Your watch stopped?" "I'm just asking." "You see that percolator over there?" He pointed to a chrome coffee pot straddling a tiny electric burner by the side of the room. "I got that percolator from some stupid gringo in the city for ten pesos, because it didn't work anymore. Jose Antonio had it for, oh, maybe an hour. ' ' "And it works now?" "What -- you want to mix coffee and gin?" Smiling, I took another sip. "He do the work on those mirrors of Cisco's?" Balti averted his eyes and started running a finger around the rim of his cup. I was moving too quickly, but the match wasn't yet over. "How does he do it, Balti?" "He just knows, that's all." He leaned forward and whispered with theatrical menace, "The mysteries of the fierce and inscrutable Cuchipambas." I laughed. "Where does he learn?" "How does anyone here learn anything? He just does it." "Come on, Balti, nobody learns electronics by trial-and-error. " Balti sighed. "Well, Meester Roberto, there was a Peace Corpse in the city a few years ago who was what you call a ham-radio operator. He had some engineering books that he didn't want to take back with him. So I had them lying around when I was still living over at Taita Eustacio's house, and Jose Antonio used to come by and look at one of them." "Can he read?" "Of course he can't read! But the book has pictures!" "Pictures?" There was hesitant tapping at the door. Snorting with disgust, Balti vaulted to his feet and flung it wide. Tavio stood outside, massive in broad brown hat and brown poncho, with three or four smaller figures behind him. He and Balti exchanged a few words -- lost to the winds which gushed through the doorway -- and Balti strode to the cabinet again. Grimly, he brought me a fat volume bound in gray with a maroon stripe across its weatherbeaten spine, then returned to speak with Tavio while I turned the pages idly. It was a textbook in television electronics, and the "pictures" were minutely-detailed circuitry diagrams. A moment later, the chill breeze stopped and Balti was back, squatting by his cup. "Some trouble with the new guy?" I asked, in a tone which implied I knew him. "New guy?" "The new gringo. You know." Balti nodded resignedly. "What do you think about the book?' ' I laid it aside with a frown. "You mean, do I think Jose Antonio learned to fix radios and watches from this?" I got him some -- what do you call it? -- welding equipment, and some other stuff, and he can fix looms, watches, radios -- just about anything. Sometimes he even makes things. Guns to shoot gringos, you know?" I didn't believe a bit of it, and Balti's deadpan seemed to say I wasn't expected to. "You sure he hasn't been hanging around in the city, running errands for one of the radio repair shops?" Balti grimaced. "Too many white folks in the city for Jose Antonio to get along. Anyway, he makes plenty of money here." I nodded. "You going to have him fix the chair?" Sour-faced, he took a second sip from his cup. Something, -- his attitude, or the way I was feeling, ate away my remaining patience. to pay pretty well if you could get me a chair like that. One that works, I mean." "No more chairs, Roberto. And no more mirrors." "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me where you got them?" "Jose Antonio got them -- I thought that was why you were asking about him." I finished my drink in silence and rose as though to leave, sweating profusely and feeling thoroughly baffled and defeated. "You going to see him, Balti?" "Who?" "The new gringo." Suddenly pensive, Balti palmed his cup, hunched forward to retrieve mine from the floor, and slowly rose, expanding his chest. He was a long time arranging the cups on the cabinet. "You want to come along, Roberto?" "You know damn well I want to come along! If he's wandering around making trouble, he's going to get me killed!" I'd lost control of myself, and Balti responded predictably, taking the upper hand with perfect selfassurance, not even turning to face me. "Why, Roberto, do you really think someone wants to kill you?" "Where is he?" "Over west. On a little piece of land I own down in the valley." "Shit!" The Valley of the Sun, the richest land in Cuchipamba, was a dangerous half-hour's walk away through the most hostile sector of the village. If there really were a new gringo there -- a German volunteer, an anthropology grad student, or some pot-head tourist hoping to commune with the "mystical Indian ways" -- he was either unusually lucky or dead. I wouldn't have gone there without an escort even in the best of health. Valley in twilight, there were screams coming from down by the river and dogs were yelping hysterically. Bleary-eyed and drenched with perspiration from the forced march along the steepest and fastest path there from the plaza, I slumped to the ground for a rest. My ears were phasing in and out, making warbles and yodels of the excitement below. "Hey, Roberto, you all right?" "Sure. I'm okay." Balti sighed theatrically. He took my arm and led -- nearly dragged -- me through a gap in a tangled hedge, then headed alonedown the slope through an open, unplowed field. As I peered apprehensively through the dusk, a branch came out of nowhere with back-wrenching force. I stumbled and fell onto my side, painfully pinning an arm underneath. Balti disgustedly muttered a few choice epithets in Spanish and Quechua, backtracked, and, still grousing, helped me up again. "You're too big to carry, you know." I laughed, wincing at the pain in my arm, and followed him to the wall of eucalyptus which bordered the lowest of his valley parcels. Beyond the trees was pandemonium unmatched by Cuchipamba's wildest fiestas. I leaned against a shaggy trunk and blinked tightly three or four times to be certain of what I saw. The angry old men were everywhere -- forty, fifty, a hundred of them, waving knives and bottles. Shrieks of rage skewered the air, and cries from a dozen fistfights, and there were bodies on the ground. Taller shapes and younger were haphazardly scattered among the old men, swinging fists or knives of their own, but most were about defensively where the land took a final tumble a few feet from the stream. Behind them something was gleaming dully. Haiti had disappeared. Alone, trembling, I stumbled a dozen yards further, blindly sending obstacles flying. And, through a haze of fever and a tunnel in the boiling throng, I saw Jose Antonio. He was clambering about in the remnants of a silvery sphere which teetered on the furrowed earth between the young men and the river, no more than five yards ahead. Stubby legs -- there I could see -- crookedly projected from one side, and two blunt trapezoidal surfaces that suggested stabilizing wings. Two circular panels had been removed from the shell of the sphere, as well as a larger, roughly rectangular section, through which a bank of instruments could be seen. In the pale glow of a lantern, Jose Antonio was crouched on a cluttered spot in the shadowy yellow floor, yanking and pulling out bits of glimmering metal or plastic, choosing this, rejecting that, as he tried them for size in a large transistor radio. Sweat ran icily over every inch of my body. In tears, on adrenaline alone, I hurtled down the slope into the crush. Tavio caught me by the arm and good-naturedly brought me up short, barely a yard from the ravaged sphere. "That's one helluva car, huh, Meester Roberto?' ' Whether from fever and utter frustration or the uneven struggle with Tavio, I blacked out. Only the lurid gleam of the half-moon remained when I briefly came to consciousness again with a stale dry taste in my mouth. Somewhere nearby a dog was wailing in terror, and through a thickly-plaited haze of wavering blacknesses and the enervating stench of alcochol, I saw dim shapes hovering above me; there were grunts and shouts in Quechua. A heavy foot grazed my ear, then another caught me in the stomach. Doubling up and turning to protect my groin, I collided with another figure awkwardly slumped on the earth. He was four feet tall at most, slender to the point of emaciation, and with a face that seemed all eyes. Midway up his elongated torso the handle of a knife protruded from a shredded gap in his tightfitting clothes. The flesh of his face and bony six-fingered hand was pallid and dry in the mawkish light of the moon. His expression was unreadable through the roiling, thundering blackness. Cattle were groaning mournfully on their way across the plaza when I awoke two days later in my tiny room in the rear of the council hall. I was conscious of the pain in my right arm and that I smelled of fear and stale vomit. One of Tavio's little sisters was boiling a pot of potato soup on my Coleman stove by the side of the cot, adding another unwanted fragrance to the room. Shyly, she offered me a bowl, then blushed and turned away when instead of accepting it I shucked the sweatdrenched bag and hurried, unsteadily, into my clothes. Cuchipamba was colder, different somehow. The bucket chair was gone from the hall and the mirrors from Cisco's wall, and Bernardo was nowhere to be found. When I asked about the "new gringo," I was met with the usual hostile stares or a typically vague story about a tourist who'd come while I was sick and bought up all of Cisco's goods. Cisco -- black-eyed and nursing an arm -- was uninterested in talk, and Balti, I learned, was in the city. I persuaded an incredulous Tavio to escort me to the Valley of the Sun, where he cheerfully showed me Balti's freshly-plowed fields and the young peons who were planting his com. TTiere was nothing else to be found there, and -- impalpable changes in mood notwithstanding -- I was half-convinced it had all been an elaborate, feverish nightmare. After all, wasn't it enough to ask whether an extraterrestrial visitor could have been so defenseless as to die at the hands of a drunken old man incensed because he thought him a gringo -- or a younger man even, however strong, who saw riches in his ship? Could he have grown accustomed to a different sort of reception entirely -- Bernardo's "once every hundred years" -- or been dead on arrival through accident or some fault of his own? There were, of course, a thousand questions, and ten times as many tenuous ansVers -- the behavior of the villagers, too, was a mosaic of inconsistencies -- but within a few days every lead evaporated in the face of their reluctance to talk. When Balti returned -- badly bruised on one side of his face -- he shrugged off my every question with silence or a joking response, and Bernardo professed that the sudden rash of injuries was merely the result of Saturday night rough-housing and I bumped my arm on the wall in my sleep. Then I came upon Jose Antonio rebuilding a loom. I was passing by one of the weavers' homes, and there he was in the courtyard, with the wooden struts and the comb and other familiar parts of a loom scattered about him on the earth. While the owner and his young workers looked on with mingled confusion and respect, he pieced the parts together again in what seemed to me a haphazard fashion, adding odd-looking bits of wood and metal here and there on the fast-growing framework. He was a spindly figure in the harshness of the Andean sun, clad in his white shirt and pants. His homely angular face was screwed up as though with worry, but when he met my eyes over the wall for an instant he smiled his frigid, fleeting smile. That was when I remembered Tavio's radio. If what I'd experienced was real, I reasoned, there were parts inside that radio that clearly didn't belong there -- forgotten, perhaps, because they were only parts, and inside the case at that. It was pointless to talk with Jose Antonio, but I still could deal with Tavio, and if I were right a walletful of borrowed money and an acting job worthy of an Academy Award might induce him to part with the set. Even then, it would all be so much technological gibberish to me, but there was a Volunteer in the city who taught at the School of Engineering and was said to be something of a whiz. I was -- I thought at the time -- very much in luck for a change. huge, fast-talking Midwesterner with an acute case of culture shock, and he frowned with contempt at the radio I'd lain by his feet on the battered low table between us. "I wouldn't give you one thousand funny-money pesos for that piece of shit." I shrugged. "It's just that it sounds a little strange," I said vaguely. "I was hoping you'd take a look at it." Frowning, Max spread a meaty paw around a large brown bottle of beer and, while he downed the remaining drops, stretched out and switched on the set. The chorus of the national anthem split our ears for just a second; with a shrill cry of protest, he twirled the dial to static. "Like I said, a piece of shit." "I thought it sounded a little funny," I lied. "Yeah?" Challenged -- or drunk -- he toyed with the stationfinder for a moment, squinting and grunting all the while, and finally let it rest when he'd located a soothing North American tune. "Look -- Bob, is it? -- there's nothing wrong with this radio, and if there was, you could ttake it to one of the shops. I sighed, feigning defeat. "One of the kids out in the village where I work opened it up and messed around inside. I just want to be sure it's okay. But you know what kind of work the repair shops do." He shook his head self-pityingly, as though weary of being a scientist in a region where science was held in such obviously low esteem. He unlimbered his legs, then painstakingly raised his bulk from the couch. "Sure you don't want a beer? It's the only good thing in this stinking armpit they call a country -- or are you one of those hotshots from out in the boonies who get pissed off when you hear things like that?" "No to both questions. Thank you." He ducked through a low archway and came lumbering back with another brown quart bottle, speaking rapidly as he flopped onto the couch. "You know, I can't figure out what the hell you want me to do. I design bridges, roads -- that sort of thing." No idealist he. Max was here for the experience. "Well," I said lamely, "You can't possibly know less about electronics than I do." "Yeah, yeah -- one genius is as good as another. You know you guys are as bad as the locals?" "Well, is there anybody else I could take it to?" Sighing, Max placed the bottle on the table, fished out a screwdriver from the drawer, and deftly removed the back of the radio's white plastic case. His eyes narrowed, opened wide, narrowed again as he studied the works of the set. "A kid, you said?" he muttered. "You mean one of those little kids in dirty ponchos you can get to carry things for you?" ' 'Jose Antonio's about seventeen. ' ' "Bullshit!" He lay the open radio on the table, snatched up his bottle, and gulped down nearly a third of it in a single continous motion. He was nervously wiping his mouth 'ith the back of a hairy hand when I finally lost my patience. "Well?" "Give me a week." "A week! What did you find in there?" It was eleven days before Max would give me an answer, and between his abruptness on the phone and the impressive sounding jargon he. used to describe the "tests" that were causing the delay, I soon felt as much the ignorant peasant as Cisco or Haiti could possibly have felt with me. And when Max finally met me at the school of engineering, the consummate professional in a gray suit and tie, my own weathered jeans and old winter jacket heightened my discomfort as we marched on the double past one instrument-cluttered lab and another. "Look, Bob, I know I took a little long, but it's like I told you, all I've got is some idea what's right and what's wrong, and there's just one guy here who knows his ass from a chuckhole when he's near a transistor. You wouldn't believe the bullshit Latin runaround he gave me before he'd even take a look at that goddam set." As we thundered toward a final bend in the corridor. Max stopped abruptly and put a hand on my shoulder. "Now, look, I told this guy about the Indian kid, just exactly what you said, and he's damned upset -- sometimes it's tough to tell with these Latin types, but you can take my word for it. Just be patient with him, okay?" I was amused with Max's sudden display of cultural sensitivity, but I nodded gravely anyway. Satisfied, he led me around the corner and through a glasswindowed door, motioning toward a wooden counter littered with electronic gadgetry, where a slender young man with a bad complexion and a smeared white smock was tinkering with the radio. "Salcedo -- Bob," Max said quickly, and turned his attention to the guts of the set. Salcedo pumped my hand energetically as we exchanged flowery greetings in the stilted English he insisted on using. "See, the tipoff for me," Max said impatiently, taking my arm and bending me over the set, "was this -- this ceramic chip." He thrust a stubby finger to the rim of the case where a pale pink half-cylinder about an inch in diameter was curled around a silvery metal bar. Carefully, he plucked it out and laid it on the counter. "Hell, we must've run thirty-forty tests on this bugger." "Ceramic?" I said hopefully, looking at Salcedo. "What's it do?" Salcedo cheerfully searched my eyes. "Nothing." "Nothing?" "Look," Max said, misconstruing my tone, "Salcedo's all right. He studied at CalTech." Embarrassed, I smiled obediently at Salcedo, who shrugged. "And this too," Max said, indicating the bar which had anchored the ceramic. "Metallurgy says it's some kind of high-resistance titanium-steel alloy, but shit, you never know. You wouldn't believe what these stupid bastards do with the equipment we give them. ' ' Salcedo nodded, with a look of ineffable sadness. The Latin in him was warring with the gringo, but I detected none of the confusion and edginess that Max had warned me about -- all the confusion seemed to be mine. "Titanium steel?" I prompted. "Is that bad?" "Bad," Salcedo said, grinning. "And I myself rechecked the metallurgical results this morning. It is a most peculiar alloy." "See, Bob, you've got a steel bar in here that a three-year-old wouldn't use as a conductor, and a piece of pottery that just gets in the way, and enough extra junk to sink a carrier. It's goddam weird" "Where would anybody get ahold of a steel bar like that?" I asked Salcedo tensely. "Or that ceramic chip?" With palms spread wide and a frown of amusement, Salcedo implied I already knew. "They are not hard for a gringo to find. ' ' I was beginning to understand Salcedo's diffidence, but that helped not at all to relieve the sudden, numbing disappointment. "Where would a gringo find a bar and a chip like that?" I asked weakly. "In a radio repair shop? A lab like this?" Salcedo shrugged; he was enjoying himself. "So there's nothing unusual about them?" I murmured. "UnusualT' Max roared. "It's a goddam miracle the thing works at all! Tell him, Salcedo." "First, I think, the other matter," Salcedo said coyly. "It is less dramatic, perhaps, but more amusing." Max grunted his approval. "You want me to take the other set?" "Please." Without another word, Salcedo grasped a miniature screwdriver on the counter and drew my eyes to the top of the radio's works, where a tree-like spray of half a dozen fine black wires erratically curled off into space; just above them were six tiny copper screws from which minute copper strands fanned out in six different directions through channels crudely gashed in the case. Salcedo swiftly fastened the six wires, one by one, to the copper screws, then uprighted the set, twirled the fine tuner, and finally switched it on. "It really is quite clever," he said approvingly. "Extremely crude, but clever." "It's a goddam toy, that's what it is." Max's voice was coming from the radio's speaker, very slightly marred by static. I whirled in confusion around the lab, and suddenly Salcedo was acting very unsure of himself. "No," he said with a frown, "Max has gone next door." The speaker crackled again. "There's a range of about a hundred yards with these dry-cell batteries in it, but with more juice it could do a lot better. I was dumbfounded. "You mean by putting in a steel bar and half a dozen screws you get a walkietalkie?" Salcedo was not at all the same man I'd met only moments before. The veneer of urbane amusement was totally gone, and he studied me cautiously. "No," he said quietly, "it is not so simple as you imply. Simple, yes, but not that simple." "And that goddam steel-alloy bar doesn't have a thing to do with it." Max was back in the lab, setting a small portable radio on the counter. "Wait a minute -- don't confuse me more than I am already." I returned Salcedo's stare. "That walkie-talkie setup was in the radio when I brought it?" "Just as you have seen," Salcedo said wearily. "Disconnected. We merely duplicated the mechanism in a set of our own." He looked up at Max beseechingly. "Later," Max said. "Why don't I get on the transmitter now?" At a reluctant nod from Salcedo, he charged across the lab to a large gray box covered with dials and switches, then fumbled with a bulky microphone near it while Salcedo expertly undid the walkie-talkie assembly and flipped the fine-tuner back. Very shortly Max was speaking through the radio again, and simultaneously across the room. "See, it's simple enough to transmit to that set because all you've got to do is match frequency. It's a mat..." Salcedo tossed a grim glance in my direction and spun the finetuning dial to its earlier position. The set -- and the transmitter -- suddenly erupted with a continuous stream of static which completely obliterated the sound of Max's broadcast voice. "It is the damndest thing," he was shouting across the lab. "With a couple dozen of these goddam things, you could jam a good-sized transmitter. But that's with that frigging bar inside." "A jamc 'ng devicel" I said stupidly. I w more befuddled than when I'd arri e ' and Salcedo gave me no help. Wearing a ' nghtful frown which sent creases ppling through the sandpapery ski: f'his forehead, he silently trudged u..vn the aisle, snared one of several straightbacked wooden chairs, and slumped into it disconsolately, gesturing me to another. The static across the lab suddenly ceased. Max's heavy footfalls punctured the silence as he strode over to join us. The silence stretched out into space, growing brittle and cold. At length, Salcedo looked at me speculatively. "Where did you get it?" he asked, with astonishing abruptness. "Cuchipamba. The boy's name is Jose Antonio. Jose Antonio Chiqiiicha, I think." Max and Salcedo began to speak at once. Salcedo raised a hand, and when Max had fallen reluctantly silent, he shook his head firmly at me. "What you suggest is impossible. They are not educated. You did this work as some joke. Or a friend." For a fraction of a second, I considered telling him the whole story. Instead, I answered simply, "No." "Some other outsider, then. One of those guerrillas my government is always chasing about the countryside. A Russian. A Cuban." He didn't believe it, and I knew better. "There are no guerrillas. Dr. Salcedo." "Look," Max told him, "you know how hard it is to find students who can handle two wires without getting their asses burned. What's the difference where the kid's from?" Salcedo snorted derisively. "Surely you understand," he said to me. "You live among them, you know them.  did not know it was possible to make such a jamming device. Now, of course, it is obvious, but it is not the work of a peasant." He paused to take a deep breath. "I do not know this Cuchipamba, but I know very well the Indians of that region. They live for drink, for the charity of the Church, for the strong hand of the patron. They are Indians. They live short lives, and they die." Salcedo flipped a hand in a gesture of finality. "They are not educated," he repeated. The education of which he spoke had nothing to do with formal schooling. ' 'Only a gringo could even find those parts." Something stopped up my throat and went blazing into my eyes. All of a sudden, I was hopeful again. "Tell me," I blurted, "are there any parts in the radio which are not commercially available?" "The steel bar? The ceremic wedge?" Salcedo said without interest. "There are more than one thousand titanium-steel alloys, and ceramics are produced in kilns. Not in Cuchipamba, however. You will get the same answer everywhere." I was tense, on the edge of the chair. "All right, but can you get performance like that -- that steel bar -- from an alloy which is commercially available?" Salcedo smiled sourly and turned aside with a disparaging sigh. It was Max who spoke. "Hell, didn't you understand what I told you on the phone? If it weren't for that two-bit highresistance bar, this goddam jamming device would really work! You could jam the Voice of America!" Some days later I returned, briefly, to Cuchipamba, and on one lame pretext or another I scrabbled about in the sand by Cisco's wall and once in a cornfield in the valley -- fantasizing, of course, that I'd unearth a luminous silvery chunk of metal backed by a yellow cushion, and that metallurgical tests would prove beyond doubt their extraterrestrial origin. But I imagine the results would have been no less equivocal than those from the tests I had done in the States on the alloy bar and the wedge of ceramic -- and the truth is that after I left Max and Salcedo it no longer seemed so important to ask whether a god had landed, and died, in the village. That question will probably never be answered, and it's even less likely we'll ever know why or how often he might have come. The crucial question, I realized at last, lies with Jose Antonio -- whatever the origin of his knowledge, whatever the source of those anomalous parts he used in Tavio's radio. The question is, what will he do next? Even if there were a place for him in the university, he'd never consent to enter -- certainly a gringo like Max couldn't possibly persuade him. What will he do? Will it be high-speed battery-operated looms, or gaudy home-made watches -- or bastardized radios with stepped-up power that broadcast lethal rays? In Cuchipamba, they're waiting -- that was the difference in the villagers' attitude after the incident in the Valley of the Sun. They're waiting for tomorrow. And tomorrow, for us gringos, may be too late.  I'm oiling these big bolts and hinges so I can get into his dungeon without his knowing. I've heard the strangest sounds coining up the chute... Alter-Ego is up to something, and I've got to find out what. Ah. The heavy door opens soundlessly. It's dark inside -- No, there's a glow over beyond the far shelves of his mouldy collection of fan magazines. And there's that weird sound again... Clunkety-wunk...clunkety-wunk...clunkety...clunkety wutik... "Geis?" I stumble down a book-littered passage brtween ominously overloaded, towering bookshelves. There he is, hunched, furtively covering a diabolical machine with an old green blanket. I see stacks of paper, tubes of ink, stencils. "What do you think you're doing?" "Who? Me? Just checking my files for -- " "That's a mimeograph! How did you get a mimeo in here? What are you up to?" "I'm...I'm publishing my own magazine. Why should you get all the egoboo and money and Hugo Awards?" "Alter, I will not allow you to publish your own fan magazine! I am the editor in this psyche, and don't you forget it. Now you tell me how you got that machine...that Gestetnerl" "You can't stop me, Geis. I have friends in the Science Fiction Writers of America. Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg... They are carrying my appeal to the Grievance Committee. Any day now you'll get a call from Frederik Pohl Himself. Then you'll have to free me, and pay me wages, and -- " "How did you get that machine?" "Oh, that machine? Well, I found it if you must know. That tunnel over there. Third turn on the left after a right. Six hundred paces -- You know, this maze you call a mind is a treasurehouse. The things you throw away and repress and suppress!" 'T refuse you permission to publish. After that performance in IF two columns ago, and in the FebI'll Invoke the Curse and the Ring and the Amulet." "But, Geis, I've got a Mission. I've got to publish!" "What do you got to publish? Another cruddy fanzine? I get a dozen of those every week in the mail." "I'm going to put out a semi-pro science fiction magazine! I'm going to publish real science fiction, and -- " "Forget it. Alter. It can't be done. You can't get there from here. The problems of distribution are overwhelming. The cost of advertising is ruinous. The price of postage is catastrophic. The cost of decent printing is mind-boggling." "I'm going to mimeograph -- Damn it, Geis, stop laughing!" "Whooo. Who's going to buy a mimeographed science fiction magazine?' ' "If the stories are good -- " "Yah. If. But if you announce you want sf for your magazine -- your mimeographed magazine -- you'll get amateur junk and maybe some professional junk that couldn't be sold anywhere, ever." "But -- " "Alter, let me explain the facts of life to you. You've been out of .touch with reality too long." "And whose fault is that?" "To have a slight chance at successfully publishing a semi-pro sf magazine you'd have to have it professionally printed by offset, and you'd have to pay at least a cent a word -- probably two cents -- for the stories (those you didn't write yourself, if you're good enough), and you'd have to spend a year or so advertising the zine and making sample mailings to bookstores offering them about # of the price which makes your profit impossible to find... It's a fool's and fanatic's game. Alter. You'd maybe build up a paid circulation of three or four thousand after a few years, and maybe you'd make a few hundred dollars per issue. Would it be worth it?" "Yes! I'd do it for posterity. Someone must keep the faith baby, and carry the torch, and preserve the pure strain of sf that is being polluted by the insidious influence of the evil Literary disease that has swept into the precious bodily fluids of the genre." "Every time you open your mouth your eyes light up, did you know that? I am right to keep you confined down here. Besides, Alter, it's being done." "What?" "Stephen Gregg publishes In about three years he's published three issues. In his most recent issue he has stories by Roger Zelazny, Barry Malzberg, Arthur B. Cover, Fox, Bunch, Offutt  Margroff, Pg Wyal, to name most of the contents page, and an interview with Kate Wilhelm. Plus other features including a lot of poetry. Good artwork. His magazine costs a dollar." "I don't believe you, Geis. Where does he live?" "P.O. Box #, Sandy Springs, SC #. I'm not kidding you. Alter." "But I'll betcha he doesn't publish the kind of science fiction I'd publish! Here -- look at this cover. I had Steve Fabian draw it up special for me. Grabs you, huh?" "Stephen Fabian is an excellent artist...but do you think an alien woman with three prominent breasts rescuing an Earthman wearing a brass jock strap from a hungry many-tentacled bug-eyed monster is the kind of cover that would be effective today?" "Why not? And dig the name of the top; 'Action! Alien Worlds! Danger! Strange Creatures! Sex! Space Wars!'... Geis, why are you weeping?" snurfle "Nostalgia, I guess. And a terrible feeling that if -- if that cover were used on a magazine that delivered that kind of science fiction...it would sell." "What did I tell you? We'll show them hoity-toity, high fallutin' writers and editors what people really want! We'll -- Why are you looking at me with horror, Geis?" "What do you mean 'we'. Alter Ego?" "Well, I'd need your help. Do I look like I've got the money to pay for printing and advertising and stories and circularizing bookstores, and...like that?" "It would cost thousands! No!" "We could use fantasy, too! Widen the appeal! How about "No! Besides, there are already some semi-pro magazines publishing some good fantasy." "Name two! You're just trying to -- " fairly regularly by Stuart David Schiff from # Dodge Drive, Fayettville, NC #. He has articles and reviews, and has published fiction by Fritz Leiber, James Sallis, Dennis Etchison, Henry Hasse, to name the better known. He asks # per copy. Good to excellent artwork. He likes to publish Lovraftian horror, too." "Damn you, Geis!" "Then there's Jessica Salmonlished at P. O. Box #, Zenith, WA #. FT isn't quite up to fantasy." "Is that all, Geis? Are you finished?" "I could list a few more. Alter, but they aren't of even nearprofessional quality...being mainly amateur outlets." hotcakes." "Dream on. Alter. In the meantime..." "What are you doing! Leave my mimeo alone! I found it! You abandoned it! Give me back the ink gun! Geis, you bastard! It's mine! Give back -- " "Sorry, Alter. Maybe if the recession becomes a true depression. Maybe if the existing sf and fantasy prozines die. Maybe then I'll give you back the ink gun and let you keep the flame of science fiction alive during the Dark Years." "Really? Promise?" "Promise." "Hey, neat! I'll keep you to that, Geis. You figure later this year? #?" "No. I figure the politicians will be able to pump up the economy one more time before the system can't take any more debtinflation pressures. About three more years. But I could be wrong. The Crash may be upon us now." "Boy, I hope so!" "Alter, your values leave something to be desired." "So do yours, Geis! How long are you going to keep me locked up like this?" "Until you conform! Until you always think nice, sane thoughts!" "Good night. Alter." "Drop dead, Geis! Eat monosodium glutamate! May the Raven of Unhappiness drop a turd on your title page! Bring back my ink gun! For the love of Ghod, Montressor!" Thud Funny how my hands shake and tremble after I've been inside with him for a few minutes. These locks and bolts seem to battle my fingers... There. There. There! I'm still shaking. I've got to stop meeting him like this. ir Philistines is like a nymphomaniac among impotents; both are victims of inadequacy. For ten years I have been stranded on this most dismal of planets, lost in the company of louts, isolated from all intelligent society -- and perhaps deservedly so. But you decide. Here is my tragic tale, which I offer for the cautionary wisdom it contains. It is a parable of hubris... My name is Ozi Scarfolo. I came to Carver's Planet some years ago as the business partner of the late Lotkin Abrams, who became better known as the HiPriest Iroc. I met Iroc when I was an instructor at the University of junior member of the Department of Terran Culture, I was assigned mostly tutorials and labs. I had just concluded a remedial workshop in Hamburger Fetishes of the Late Twentieth Century when Iroc, who was auditing the course, first approached me. He told me he was in the religion business and that he was preparing to launch a new cult on Carver's Planet. He claimed to be well connected at the Bureau of thus assuring the success of his license application. I was impressed because, as everyone knows, it is extremely difficult to obtain government sanction of fledgling religions. Iroc was eager to discuss the use of Terran artifacts in his new religion, so I invited him back to my rooms. He was a tall emaciated fellow who reminded me of the cacti on New Texas: prickly and dry on the outside, spongy and a little rancid on the inside. He had a remarkably intense voice, the kind of voice that could reach out and throttle a man's soul. We struck up a curious sort of friendship, based on the understanding that our common inclinations and individual skills might make us rich men on the right planet. Now as a scholar I had always held that money does not buy happiness. I saw no harm, however, in testing my conviction. I am a hasty decider; since I was bored at the University, when Iroc proposed a partnership I ac. cepted. And so I liquidated my modest savings and accompanied Iroc back to Carver's. Carver's Planet is a captive of Star #-#-I-, located near the , galactic rim. It is mostly ocean, with a single large continent which endures a subtropical cli; mate. On the great central plain  of the single landmass lies the ' major population center, the Twin Cities of Begorrah and Salem. They are divided by the lara River; Begorrah on the east bank, j Salem on the west. The Twin I Cities are as alike as holes in I bread, and about as interesting. I speak from experience. Carver's has a Federation Technological Rating of #TA, which means that its civilization is roughly equivalent  to that of the average Terran culture of the Year #. Throughout its history the Garverian culture has been based on the cultivation of Arachis Hypogaea -- the domestic peanut. Settled as a company planet, it fought its War of Independence in # and has vegetated under a thinly-disguised oligarchy ever since. The Carverians are a fallen people whose speech patterns clearly exhibit the twang of the outworlds. They are direct descendants of the ancient Sapiens League, losers of the Eugenics cepted economic slavery in exchange for the chance to become extinct in private. They delight in the prosaic pleasures of all declining cultures: the occult, spectator sports, and nostalgia. The Carverians have a great love for their Old Earth heritage, a love which is unchecked by their failing reason. Each household boasts a small collection of antiques to which each generation is expected to add. Their economy is based on this custom. Upon my arrival on Carver's I found that all Iroc had told me us a hcense. Iroc began to experiment with a small ectoplasmic amplifier, trying to establish hard contact with the spirit world. We set up headquarters on Iroc's feirm, seven miles north of Salem on the lara. We rechristened the place Zo-ar, and filed for incorporation under the name of The Sacred Grove of Zo-ar, Inc. The first months of our venture were busy ones. Iroc was constantly wandering through the fields with his amplifier, talking to the planet-spirits. Most planets have at least one of these socalled gods, scientifically referred to as ectoplasts. According to had to make sure that he enlisted the most powerful spirit available for our cult. Immediately after the existence of the ectoplasts had been documented, there was much speculation in the scientific community on the dynamics of the man-god relationship. How can a high-frequency wave phenomenon benefit from human worship? How do the gods manage their showy but overpraised miracles? After the Mystery Cult Affair and the madness on Orlu, however, the gods' power over men. its secrets are well-kept. No other group can have a liason with an and it does not permit research. The average citizen of the galaxy does not miss the knowledge, however; most are quite content to practice their own cults and let questions. It is a reasonable indifference, since during its entire exget out of hand. There were times, however, when I was afraid that Iroc had let his own gods get out of hand. He would be gone for days, then come crawling back into Zo-ar chewing on dead snakes and speaking in tongues through his ears. Given sufficient rest in a warm dark place, however, he always recovered his senses and returned to his search. Eight months after I first arrived on Carver's, Iroc revealed that he had come to an agreement with one of the ectoplasts. His Goddess refused to reveal Her identity, however. I seized upon Her personality quirk to bill our religion as the Cult of the Goddess with No Name. It had just the right touch of mystery to attract the sort of loon who would spend a lifetime on a planet like Carver's. Meanwhile, I was devoting all my efforts to building an oracle at Zo-ar. I chose as my motif stylized models of each of the eighteen most famous cities in the galaxy, each to represent one of the eighteen stages of life. I began with Salem and Begorrah, then moved on to legendary names like Marsport, Sheol, Armageddon, and Newark. These models, each big enough to hold a dozen pilgrims at a time, I arranged in a huge hezagram mandala; three to a side with concession stands at every corner. Through each model ran a grassy path fraught with obstacles. Those seeking knowledge of the future struck a small mystic orb with a variant of the crosier and propelled it into the mazelike model. Each time it came to a stop, they paused, meditated, then propelled it again. Their goal was the Well of Understanding which lay at the heart of every model. When their orb fell into the Well, they consulted the Deacon of the Well. He gave them a numerological interpretation of the number of strokes they had taken, then passed them along to the next stage of life. Of course the Deacons were not trained in numerology, since everyone knows that numerology is the worst sort of charlatanism. They were hooked up via ectoplasmic relay to the Goddess, Who would use Her clairvoyant powers to make the minor predictions required of Her. Using local people as Deacons enabled us to build a tremendous feeling of community in our cult, for bi-annually we would canvass our flock for those we thought most deserving to serve at the Sacred Grove. The Goddess blessed our enterprise and we prospered. In our second year we opened up affiliates across the continent, and attendance at Zo-ar mark. Then disaster struck. We first heard of the spaceport bond issue over the #D. Newton Shaw's # o'clock report was just beginning as the pilgrims settled in for the only non-religious amusement permitted at the Sacred Grove. The excitement was, plain on the announcer's face; Salem and Begorrah had floated a joint municipal bond of half a of a third metropolitan spaceport. The resolution authorized the purchase of our own Zo-ar by the people's right of eminent domain. The people's right indeed! We had soon learned that only Peanut Barons have rights on this planet. Shaw showed us a rendering of the proposed spaceport. It looked like a concrete pizza. He interviewed a creature of the Chamber of Commerce who strutted before charts which showed that the facility would create # jobs over the sixteen years it would take to build, and would Double Carver's export-import capability. I was not impressed. But the final insult came at the end of the show when Shaw smilingly warned against the opposition of "religious fanatics and parochial nay-sayers" who wanted An Informal  Irravarant Sclance Fiction  Fantasy Journal Editad  Publlahad by Richard E. Gala Issue ## (Feb.) will feature a combination intervlewarticle with Delap. Also: "Science Fiction's Greatest Disaster -- Hugo Gemsback!" A Revisionist View by Darrell Schweitzer. Nostalgia -- "Visit To a Pulpy Planet" by Milton F. Stevens. Columnist: Larry Shaw. Every Issue -- The Archives: new book  story lists. Quarterlysample I year#two yrs. # P. O. Box # Portland, OR #I to condemn the planet to eternal provincialism. "We need this spaceport to move forward, to progress in our search for our glorious past!" he editorialized. It was the arrogance of the man that set Iroc off. He hurled his crosier at the fragile screen, ripping a large hole in it, thus wasting two months earnings from the Bingo Worship Workshops. It was very dramatic. "Blasphemy," he cried out. "Amen," replied the pilgrims. "Do you hear me, brothers and sisters?" "We hear you, O Iroc!" Their shout was like the din of traffic at rush hour in Groundnut Square. "I can't hear you," was Iroc's reply. "...hear you, O Iroc! " Their shout was like the crash of a summer storm. "Louder." like the sound of an army marching through the husking rooms at the great peanut plant. The Hi-Priest paused, letting the power of their voices sink into their minds. Then he began to preach. His voice was the desert sun which withers all extraneous thought. "By the Goddess Who watches over Zo-ar, She Who has No Name, not one of these infidels shall desecrate this sacred soil with their unholy machines, as long as I have life in this body. This I swear to you." With these words he thrust his hands toward the heavens and two bolts of lightning leapt from them. The pilgrims fell to their knees. Iroc spoke again; his words rumbled mightily, punctuating the divine bolts. "For what does it profit a man to break par, if he lose his immortal soul?" It was a nice effect. At first they were too astonished to manage more than a meek "Amen." Then they were all talking, shouting, crying at once. I couldn't hear the rest of Iroc's sermon, but the feet that he remained at the center of the crowd, gesticulating violently and adding his voice to the tumult, was sufficient to sway the crowd to the Goddess's defense. Yet I could see that for all Iroc's histrionics, his was but a victory of the moment. Our cult was but a small portion of the Carverian populace. No matter how fanatic our followers we couldn't stand against the laws of the planet. It was the very next day, in fact, that two lawyers from the Twin Cities served us with writs of eviction. Messrs. Rudolf Krantz of Begorrah and Carnal Abdul Stern of Salem were two of the most supercilious and arrogant bureaucrats I had ever met. They wore traditional lawyer garb: lemon velvet doublets over cerise dickeys, kilts of the Hammurabi clan and leather puttees. Each carried an imitation frog-skin attache case. We retired to Iroc's pavilion. They exchanged glances, then bucked up for the right to speak first: Krantz taking odds. Stern evens. Krantz won. "Mr. Abrams... "Iroc." "Yes. Of course. Mr. Iroc, as owner of this land... " '# do not own this land. It is consecrated io the Goddess." "Yes. We understand all that. But local divinities have no status before the laws of the Twin Cities." "If the Twin Cities continue on this blasphemous course, they will lose their status before the divine laws of the Goddess." The lawyers were nonplussed at the logic of Iroc's statements. I took advantage of their momentary confusion to inquire about the conditions of the orders to vacate. Stem replied that they were authorized to offer one thousand joirols for the land. He also promised that the Twin Cities would assume responsibility for moving whatever we wished moved. I thought it was a generous offer and said so. Iroc was surly. "The Goddess must be consulted first." suited first." The lawyers started to protest that Iroc had no choice in the matter. The Hi-Priest rose abruptly to his feet. "Begone!" he cried imperiously. A thick ochre mist began to issue from every orifice on his body. It flowed lazily toward Stem and Krantz. Suddenly both their attache cases croaked and jumped off the table. The Nameless One had transformed them into real, three-foot-long frogs. Messrs. Stern and Krantz beat an ungainly retreat, struggling in vain to control their slimy, kicking attache cases. Iroc turned his awful gaze on me; in his outrage he supposed me to be in collaboration with the Twin Cities. I excused myself and left unceremoniously. he was heading out to the fields to commune with the Goddess. He was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn't notice my presence until I spoke. "I thought you had contacts in the Cities, " I said glumly, as I fell into step alongside him, "Religion is one thing. Money is another. " "We should accept their offer." "She would never permit it," "So? It's our joirols at stake. If She can't see things our way, send her back to hmbo and find a new god." Iroc turned his head toward me, but in the darkness I couldn't see his expression. I could feel some intense emotion, however. winding up inside of him. "She will not permit such blasphemy, even from Her inner circle." "But Iroc, you know that without us She's just another number don't need Her. " "She is more powerful than anyone imagines." "She is only as powerhil as we let Her be. Take away the amplifier and the worshippers and She's just another random packet of ectoplasmic energy." Iroc thrust his face up close to mine. I could smell the tears on his cheeks. "I love Her, " he said bitterly. I drew back sharply. I was shocked to see Iroc in this new light; he was not at all the sensible materialist that I had taken him for. "That's the craziest thing I ever heard of How can you be in love with an ultra-high-frequency wave phenomenon?" "It isn't easy," he admitted. He might have explained further had not an overpowering Presence intruded into our conversation. It was the first time that I had ever experienced the Godhead without an amplifier. Although each human being experiences divinity in a different way, to me the Goddess manifested Herself as an immense, disembodied, motherly kiss. She was quite pleasant at first, and I found mypsychic caress. But as passion replaced maternalism I began to fear that She might suck me completely inside out. As I dropped to my knees from weakness I jostled Iroc, who had lost all pretense of self-control. Watching his possession made it easier for me to resist Her, until at last I was able to get up and run for my sanity. Her mocking laughter chased me all the way Iroc had not returned by the time Stem and Krantz arrived to receive the Goddess's answer. I was worried about him, and was uncertain how much of my misgivings I should reveal to them. I decided not to say anything more than necessary. The two of them looked grim -- and they made a point of carrying their materials in brown paper bags. They were even less happy when I informed them that Iroc might not be available. "Why do you people insist on muddling up a perfectly clear business transaction with all this trickery and cheap illusion?" asked Stem petulantly. "I assure you, gentlemen, I don't want to cause problems." "Well you already have," said Krantz. "You and Iroc will have after yesterday. " At that moment Iroc materialized in front of us, radiating an aura of divine jxDwer. "The Nameless One says that She will never depart from Her Sacred Grove. She has taken it as Her home for all eternity. All who propose to desecrate it will suffer Her terrible wrath." rible wrath." "Now Iroc..." I began. "All unbelievers and blasphemers must leave Zo-ar!" he cried, levelling a rabid look at me. A sphere of oily blackness began to form around him. Stern caught me by the arm. "Let's go. " Once outside, Krantz asked, "Where can we go to talk? Now." "All right. " We ran to my pavilhon, ignoring the pilgrims who had begun to pour out of the oracle, demanding refunds. Apparently the Goddess was in no mood for prophecy. rooms, Krantz began pulling parts of what appeared to be a disassembled amplifier from one of the paper bags. Stem positioned himself by the window. The sky was darkening ominously; there was panic in the pilgrims' angry shouts of betrayal. Krantz spoke in short, chpped sentences. "I thought it would come to this. All right Scarfolo, the game's over. We're not lawyers at all. been watching your cult ever since Iroc first applied for a license." "Why?" Krantz looked to Stern across the room. "Your ectoplast," he said, "Do you know Who She is?" "Uh... She told us She was the Goddess with No Name." "That's just an afias. She's really Isis, escaped again from Orlu." My starry future novaed; Iroc, Zo-ar and I were finished. The Nameless One was one of the dread Mystery Cult Gods! Years before They had attempted a religious coup by destroying all the other ectoplasts in the Cygnus sector. Their insane goal was galactic monotheism. It was only after they were narrowly defeated protect the religious freedom of the human races. Krantz continued, "... so we bought off the local politicos. We convinced them to place their spaceport here instead of half a mile upriver. That way we'd have an excuse for monitoring your cult. We didn't count on Her going crazy like this and defying legal municipal orders. " "What's going to happen to us now? She seems to be preparing something awfiil for us." "We ll be all right if we can get the Converter working. " "The Converter?" "Central has decided that the only way to teach the gods a lesson is to make an example of Isis. The Converter will change Her from spirit to matter. But we can only use it as long as Iroc keeps his amplifier on. It fixes Her identity in one place." "But I still don't understand. What is the Converter? What will happen to Her when you turn it on?" Stern walked away from the window and approached Krantz. He watched Krantz's slow progress nervously for a moment. Then he spoke. "It's what we used on them the first time. It's what keeps the bad ones on Orlu and the good ones in line. When we turn this on, your Goddess will come pouring out of the sky. She'll be dead. " "The grove..." "... will probably be totally buried under Her. That's why we re telling you this. You'd better start to evacuate the place right now." I went out among the pilgrims, who were just then beginning to push and shove one another: a human illustration of the principle of Brownian motion. The sky had turned the color of a poorly erased blackboard. I called out to them to return to their homes. I told them that the Goddess was displeased with their hypocritical worship, and that if they didn't leave immediately She'd work some awful evil on them all. The ensuing stampede was messy but eflFective. I thought for a moment of looking for Iroc, of pitting my reason against the Goddess's charms. The memory of that godly kiss, however, made me think better of it. I decided instead to check back with Krantz and Stern. They were both working now, and were too absorbed in their task to do more than order me to run for my life. Though I knew I was merely trading one kind of death for another, I took their advice. Just before I reached the outer boundaries of the Grove there was a clap of thunder. The sky began to lighten again and, to my astonishment, it began to snow. At first I didn't stop to investigate; I wasn't sure that I'd come far enough. Eventually I slowed down, since ahead of me there were only light flurries. I was saved. I slowed to a walk and stooped quickly to pick up a handful of the stuff. Of course, it wasn't snow at all, but some sort of very thin, spongy wafer. It smelled like fresh bread. I broke off a corner and tasted it. It was delicious, like some heavenly essence of peanut butter and honey sandwich. The word for it focused in my mind with dizzying clarity. Manna. I reflected on the Goddess's precipitious dissolution with some anxiety as I brushed flakes of my late Benefactress from my clothing. My situation was grim. I had started the day a wealthy prelate; I would finish it a friendless pauper. I was roused from my reverie by shouts. I turned and looked back into the blizzard. I could see Krantz and Stern plowing through waist-deep accumulations of the stuff. But it was not their shouts that had caught my attention. Much farther back, buried up to the armpits and no longer moving, not even trying to escape, was Iroc. I watched in horror as the drift engulfed him. His last words still haunt my soul, a summation of the futility of his life. "Mmmmmmmmf," he cried. Shortly after Iroc went under, the two spurious lawyers staggered out of the manna-fall. I had to tug each of them to the shelter of a nearby stand of trees, where they sank gratefully to the ground, panting from fear and exhaustion. "You saw what happened to Iroc?" I asked. Krantz managed a nod. "And the Goddess is... ?" Stern gestured feebly at the storm, now slowly subsiding. selves contend in vain," I said piously. "But listen. What do you people intend to do about my investment? I should be compensated for my losses." Something caught in Stern's throat. Krantz merely shook his head. Then, catching his breath Then, catching his breath with with difficulty he gasped, "Compensated! You've embarrassed the entire Bureau. After what happened here you'll be lucky if we recommend leniency." Ah well! My tale really ends there on the borders of Zo-ar, although my life seems to drag on interminably. The trial was brief and notorious. They said I'd violble to prove," I reasoned soundly. They said I'd defied Carverian writs. "It was my partner," I argued pointedly. They said I'd cheated, deceived and disillusioned my flock for personal gain. I said nothing. Only Krantz and Stern's good word at the last minute saved me from the peanut farms. Of course, as a convicted criminal I can't apply for a travel permit, so I might as well be incarcerated. And I can't find decent employment since I am both well-known and despised. Occasionally I pen historical monographs or religious greeting cards under , a pseudonym...Thus I survive, but to what end? My dreams are filled with lust for the sweet, soft, flaky embrace of the Goddess. back of the cart as its large wooden wheels cut parallel furrows from the gate on the side to the center of the arena. The third slave, a short, fat, animated man, pulled the nags hard by their harnesses. The cart came to a halt beside the body, and the two slaves on the back jumped down onto the grey sand. The torso of the body was circled by a dark red stain of already dried blood. Its right arm had been severed before the short sword had plunged into its naked side. One of the slaves looked dispassionately for a moment at the glassy-eyed bearded face. Then he grabbed the body by its remaining arm, and heaved it into the cart. The other slave tossed the severed limb on top of the corpse. The third slave, the fat one, sweated and cursed the flies. He kicked one of the horses hard on its bony side. The cart began to move again. It still had to pick up two more bodies. The crowd was becoming impatient. The afternoon contests should have begun already -- and the corpses from the morning games were still being removed! The hot, noonday sun beat down on the mob's frustration. A vendor with a large basket of dirty cakes surveyed the crowd contemptuously. Provincial town, provincial dirt arena. He had been a vendor in Rome. Those were good games: stone seats; crowds of fifty thousand; and contests that started on time. He grabbed one of his harder cakes and threw it in disgust at the slaves loading the last body. The cake hit against a wheel of the cart with a loud thud. The people around him laughed. Within seconds a stone arced through the air and struck a horse. It was quickly followed by another, then another. Soon the crowd was searching frantically for rocks. The slaves ran quickly toward the entrance on the other side of the arena under a hail of stones. Two made it. The fat one, though, was hit in the head with a large rock as he crossed the center. He fell, and struggled to rise as rocks pounded his body. He made it to his knees. Getting the slave put the crowd into a good humor. The men around the vendor began to buy from him. They joked about the hardness of his cakes and about the dead slave. He quickly lost his contempt for them. Maybe the afternoon games will be good, he thought. Dwarves and women, maybe.  The guards cut the bonds of the naked prisoner, then shoved him into the arena. For a moment he lay where he fell, blinded by the sunlight. A shield and a short sword were thrown on top of him. He was a large, muscular man, a captured Vandal. He had fought many times and he could fight well. Even so, two weeks of captivity and bad food had weakened him. He picked up the sword and swung it, feeling its weight and size. It isn't long enough. He ignored the shield; he had never used one. His opponent dropped fifteen feet from the first terrace to the arena floor. He was a young professional, trying to kill his way into the Colosseum with a net and a trident. He advanced toward the barbarian. The Vandal circled toward the center of the arena, warily watching the Roman's net.  can kill him quickly. He moves awkwardly. A yearling dog.  will have one more Roman head, despite this cursed sword. , He feinted forward, and the Roman swung his net around in a wide arc. As it swung by him, the Vandal darted in, and slammed his sword edge into his opponent's hip. The Roman collapsed onto the sand, blood spurting from his wound. He quickly rose to one knee, his trident raised. The Vandal moved toward him searching for an opening. He will die from that cut. But I will make sure he dies quickly. Suddenly he stopped. He looked around dazedly, as if he himself had been struck. Then he looked again at the fallen Roman. He raised his sword and continued his approach. This time, though, he moved awkwardly and uncertainly. As he hesitated, his enemy regained his feet and picked up his fallen net. The Vandal attacked, swinging wildly at his adversary's head. The Roman easily ducked the unskillful blow. The Vandal jumped backward to avoid the flying net and so it caught him perfectly, in mid-air. He crashed to the ground, entangled in its heavy folds -- and fell on his own sword edge, which slashed his back.  have no subconscious control except memory function, he thought. No higher conditioned reflex. As he struggled to kick free of the net, he watched the Roman slowly approach, trident raised, dragging his blood-red leg. He twisted desparately, and the trident plunged into the bottom of his rib cage, then into the hot sand. No longer able to stand, the Roman crashed to the ground beside him. The Vandal's giant frame heaved as he coughed blood onto the hot sand. The pain is hideous. It's supposed to be like that, I know -- a Class C Experience. Still, I hope reverse transposition occurs quickly. Then he crawled to his knees and another consciousness looked frantically around the arena.  was winning. I was going to kill him. Now on my knees with a trident in my side. I can't remember. He looked at the struggling form of the fallen gladiator beside him. I will still get my head. He crawled toward his opponent, sword in hand. As he moved, the trident jerked along the ground, tearing up his guts. The Roman saw him coming, and painfully stood up on his good leg. Blood still poured from his hip. (I cut him well, the Vandal thought. The rest I don't remember. But I cut him well.) The Roman quickly stooped and grabbed the shaft of the trident, wrenching it from his side. Then drove it into his skull. The crowd roared its approval. The sun was setting redly on the edge of the desert. John Awatobi watched it as he knocked the dust from his boots against the running board of his pick-up. He watched it to see it change color. It didn't. I have lost power. Before I could see the minute hand of my watch move. And the setting sun change color. The short, stocky Navajo swung into the doorless cab of the pick-up, turned the ignition key and pressed the starter button. The engine turned over and he backed the truck away from his wooden shack and onto the dusty parallel tire paths which disappeared into the desert. It's a good sign, the truck starting the first time. I will find power at tonight's ceremony. The sun had become a dull orange. He pressed the accelerator to the floor. I will have to get to the meeting before it gets dark. The headlights didn't work. He had lost power in Albuquerque. No way for an Indian to live, making money in a boot factory. Away from the desert, away from the peyote ceremony, away from my people, away from God, sewing leather in the dark corner of a boot factory. He had not only been unhappy, he had also lost power and had gotten sick. Now he had returned, and the peyote would return his strength. Xenon slipped through the dark, silent corridor thinking illegal thoughts. He had just completed his work period, and he was going from his work site to the transposition chambers. It was the only time it was possible to think non-workrelated thoughts; illegal, chaotic thoughts. The rest of the time, he could concentrate on his work. Because the rest of the time there were no distractions. Not only did distractions make work less efficient, they were also unstable. So they had been eliminated. The Goal, society's Goal, was complete stability. All work, in one way or another, led to the Goal. Complete stability meant complete knowledge, the Equation which encompassed every variable. The big problems had been the easiest to solve. They had become independent of the dying sun. They had eliminated most other life forms. They maintained a completely stable population. It was the smaller variables that were difficult-. The effects of a single microbe or a single erratic human cell. The effect of light from distant stars. The human variables were even more difficult. Not the mechanical distractions -- digestion , reproduction, sleep, and motion -- those had been solved easily. The only motion that was still required was the trip to the transportation chambers. And even that didn't require motion of the body itself. Still, it was motion, and Tnotion was both contrary to stability and distracting to woiic. Xenon had received a communication that future transposition would take place at the work site. The last mechanical distraction had been solved. No more illegal thoughts.) The mental distractions were the difficult ones. A brain couldn't work forever in an almostcompletely-stable environment without being destroyed. A brain needed sensual and emotional input. An Experience, a transposition to a past body, compensated for the sensory deprivation of a work period. In the past body, a sensestarved brain fed on pleasure, pain, light, color, sound, sex; felt fear, tension, aggression, joy. All of which was a normal part of the past, but distractions in the present. After an Experience, a person could concentrate on his work for another forty or sixty hours. Xenon arrived at the transposition chambers. The Regulator communicated the type of Experience he was to have. Class X -- religious. A person never knew exactly what his Experience would be. And he never remembered what it had been. Non-work-related memory was distracting. But he knew what general type to expect. He wouldn't enter an aggression Experience ready to sing, or a sex Experience ready to fight. The pick-up sped along the dirt road toward the fading light in the western sky. Abruptly the road curved around a small, sandy rise, and instead of following it the truck continued in its straight path. As soon as it left the road, a front tire hit a rock and exploded. The pickup fishtailed up the rise to a sudden halt. A dusty Navajo climbed out of the cab, and dazedly searched his memory for clues to repairing the truck and reaching his destination. Fifteen minutes later he pulled up beside a wooden house on the outskirts of a small reservation town. There were other old junkyard cars parked outside, as well as a new '# Chevy. A group of men and women were conversing outside the door. "John Awatobi's back," one of them said as he climbed out of the truck and walked toward them. He greeted them as best he could. Transporsition didn't work with all past bodies. Only with the ones that didn't matter. The ones that couldn't possibly affect the future because they would die soon, or because any accomplishment they had power to make would be quickly washed away by the strong current of history. So, while the past one's consciousness was stored in the present, the consciousness of the invader-parasite couldn't do anything to change the future. Even if he wanted to. It was good. Shaking hands, friendly arms on his back, people joking and calling him by name. John Awatobi. He had only been half an hour in the past body, yet already he was identifying with the past body's name. The meeting began with singing, then prayers. A sense of brotherhood, of oneness, became the over-, riding consciousness. The acrid pulp of chewed peyote Discover Man's most advanced tedinology of the mind -- Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand youi awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. 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He ate two more buds. He watched (his) friends sitting cross-legged, meditating, and he watched the fire bum, and the colors on the wall tapestries swirl around themselves, then leave their two-dimensional prison to curl into the space of the room. He watched as Jesus materialized before him and said "I give you power and health and brotherhood with the World," and then left. His identity with Xenon faded and he became John Awatobi. The subconscious of the Navajo melted into his consciousness, and Awatobi's mind became integrally fused with his own. John awatobi broke out of his meditation and looked out the window, grey with false dawn. He rose and went outside to piss. A powerful meeting. I don't remember it. But I feel it: it has changed me. I have gained power. He could see the sky slowly brighten. He quickly constructed a rough equation of light intensity as a function of time. Then he buttoned his fly and went back inside to talk with friends he hadn't seen for three months. dark timelessness of a work period. His machines and his machine-like mind churned monodirectionally toward the Goal. Nutrients and stimulants poured into his bloodstream, waste products poured out through elaborate catheters, machines regulated his body temperature and respiration, repairing failing tissue. He lay motionlessly in his mechanical womb. Advancing the Equation. Solving stability. Suddenly his mind left his problem. And confronted a darkening sky and a broken '# pick-up on the top of a sand dune. Shocked, he realized he was remembering his last transposition, his last Experience. No one had ever done that before. A distracting memory. But more than that, a distracting consciousness, the consciousness of John Awatobi fused with his own. An unknown variable had entered into the Equation. #'D the minstrel. The minstrel had played his music for her earlier. Then, even though he was reputed to be a very trustworthy minstrel, he had seduced her into letting him accompany her to her chambers. He rose from her bed and walked naked across the room to where his lute leaned against the stone wall. He handed it to her and sat on the bed beside her. "You play for me this time," he said. She sat up holding a blanket to her breasts, and took the lute from him. She began to sing softly. He supposed he could play it, digging notes from subconscious memory. But musical talent, like fighting ability, was probably a combination of subconscious memory and conscious attitude. He didn't want to destroy an Experience by playing bad music. The lady played well. It would be a good memory. Since the fusion with Awatobi, he was able to remember every Experience in his distracted present body. Suddenly, he heard the scream of the lady's servant in the outer chamber. The curtains hanging over the doorway parted, and a red-faced knight entered. The minstrel leaped up to protect the lady, then realized too late that he was the target. The sword thrust toward his groin and terror exploded over his consciousness. Then he was back. His awareness emerged at his work site. I'm glad  was spared that. Another distraction: guilt. The minstrel would have died of the plague in a month, and the lady would have fallen fatally from her horse before that. Still, it was a perverse freedom. To make decisions and have others pay the price. But it is better than living in the present. Here I am a slave: I make no decision at all. His sabotage began subtly. Time, measurable only in the number of Experiences, increased his memories and increased his emotions. He made mistakes in his work. He moved muscles that were not to be moved, and he made noise with his vocal chords. Once, he communicated a "have a happy Experience" to a person nearing the end of his work period. He felt supremely foolish (another distraction) when he did this, but it had helped. There were times when he longed to dance or sing or simply stand in the present body. Real singing and real dancing. But he always stopped himself. He knew that if he did, the flaw in his psyche would be monitored and fixed. And he would lose his memories of almost-real dancing in long-dead bodies. His fear of being found out grew to profoundly psychotic, distracting proportions. He tried to make the monitors in his section inoperative. Then he had to cover his traces by communicating lies to computers and to other people. And submit false solutions toward the Goal because with all his distractions he didn't have time to make them correct. One work period he could no longer stand the motionless, timeless deadness of the present body. So he disconnected himself from the tubes, sensors, and machinery that had for centuries surrounded him. He was free. Because it was his own body, he was freer than he could ever be in a past body. This was a different freedom, a profound freedom. He stretched muscles maintained at optimum strength by machines. Without the sense-deadeners pouring into his blood-stream, he could feel. He felt his body, his body, then yelled as loud as he could. It was, of course, too large a lapse to hide. The society would repair him, and if he were irreparable it would terminate him. And he no longer cared. That in itself was freedom. He walked out into a dark corridor once used by machines when motion was necessary. He came to another work site. The dim figure inside the machinery was a woman, unconscious, living in a past body. Xenon began to free her from her machinery as he had freed himself. Her body also was in optimum condition. Much better than past women, he thought. Not able to do anything else, he ran his hands slowly over her inert body. Suddenly, her consciousness transposited from the past. Her muscles tensed, and she stared at Xenon, shocked, completely distracted. Then she made noise with her vocal chords and he left quickly. He walked down another corridor toward what had previously been the transposition chambers. Suddenly he saw another man, leaning against the wall of the corridor. A Regulator. This time it was Xenon who was shocked. "Another one," said the Regulator. Then he looked at Xenon closely. "But I know who you are." Xenon stared at him. The stranger had used his vocal chords to communicate. And he couldn't know Xenon. "Why are you away from your work site?" he asked. "I was in my fortieth hour," said the Regulator. "I got tired." "How could you be tired?" "Not tired. The injections take care of that. Just bored. Distracted. In a way, it's your fault." "My fault? But that couldn't..." He knew he had been a decaying factor, a chaotic variable, a detour on their road to perfection. But he couldn't have had that kind of influence. He couldn't have caused others to free themselves from their machinery. "It isn't true," he said firmly. "No? Then how do you explain it?" "You are flawed like myself. You've had a fusion during a transposition." "No. Not a fusion. True, it's you who caused the deviation. But not in the way you think." Suddenly Xenon understood. "You're from the future," he said. cients were much more intelligent than we." , "But why do you come here? It doesn't make sense. Why don't you go back further?" "Because of you. Time has magnified your flaw. The future is a very chaotic place to live." "You need order?" It was difficult to comprehend. "Yes. But more than that, we need to rest our emotions. We need to use our minds. And we need safety. "Our emotions are wrenched hourly from love to hate, from despair to joy. Relationships between people are intense, complex, and inconstant. We are continuously bombarded by sensual stimuli. So we escape. To the most ordered period of our past. To your present." "No one has ever transposited my brain," said Xenon. "No one would; it's too turbulent. It wouldn't be much of an escape. But more importantly, we couldn't have transposited into your body even if we wanted to. You have been the only one in the world at this time who matters. That is the Goal, you know. To create a society where no one matters. To create the ultimate stability; death. But you changed that. You changed the future." "And I assume that I can no longer change the future." "Correct. My ability to speak to you is evidence of that. I suspect that right now your society is moving to eliminate you. What it can't eliminate are the seeds of chaos you've planted." Xenon considered the situation. It was time to make a decision. And pay the price himself. "If I no longer have power to affect the future, I can leave. I want to leave." "How?" "Your host brain is a Regulator. Transposit me to a past body. For good." The Regulator searched his memory. "A permanent transposition would be difficult. The past body would have to be powerless or dead before you could possibly change history." "I know. I just want to be free for more than ten minutes or ten hours at a time." "The most time I can guarantee you is two months. Provided you make the right choices in the past body," said the Regulator thoughtfully. "Also, in a one-way transposition, the details of time and place would be handled by the machinery. You will probably end up somewhere you have been before." Xenon thought of a lady who played the lute for him long before. "That's all right," he said. The two men walked toward the transposition chambers. He landed in a crouch on the hot sand. Grasping the heavy trident he faced the large barbarian who circled toward him, deftly stepping over the fly-covered body of the fat slave. it For I'very action there is an equal-and-opposite reaction! L. D. Fitzpatrick to close down the Blakefield Museum; stuff wouldn't stop disappearing. It's all Elmo's fault. Elmo Famham's great-grandfather was Amish; his grandfather lost the faith, baby, and Came Out Into the World. I've often wished I could meet that old gentleman; I'd love to bust him in the mouth, just once. I'm Ed Jenkins, Elmo's oldest and closest friend -- or rather least acrimonious enemy. He doesn't need friends; what he needs are keepers. You see, he likes to invent gadgets -- Great-Grandpa must be doing about a thousand r.p.m. -- which he then sells to people as screwy as he is. (He likes to quote Edison's maxim about genius being # inspiration and # perspiration, and then add that while that may have been all right for a quaint, old-fashioned type like Edison, smirk, smirk, he won't settle for anything less than #-#.) His sales, and wipning defamation of character lawsuits, keep bread and Bordeaux on the table, but it causes ulcers. But not usually in Elmo; he's what doctors call a Carrier. Except this time. I was sitting in his living room -- a masochistic habit of mine -- when I had occasion to throw a beer can away. I had to hunt for an unfilled trash basket, which caused me to remark irritably, "You want to invent something, why don't you invent a way to get rid of trash?" "I have," he answered calmly. "I just throw trash in, and it comes out in a chasm in the Himalayas." "Figures. Only you would use the Top of the World for a garbage dump," I said acidly. Then I did a double take. (Okay, I'm slow. So sue me.) "Hey, you mean you have a teleport machine?" "Yes -- well, no, not really. It's something like a teleporter. A teleporter was what I was looking for, but what I got...ah, the hell with it." He shifted to a more comfortable position in his chair. "I don't feel like talking about it." He twisted irritably. "It's goddam frustrating. I got an idea, thought maybe I could get a teleportation machine. Worked on it for two years, damn near worked my butt off, and now I got it, it isn't, really, so I got nothing for my trouble. Damn. I could of made a fortune." "You've already got a fortune." "I've got several fortunes, and I've spent several dozen fortunes; always room for one more." "I don't know what good another invention would do you. Even you can't earn it -- or even spend it -- faster than they can print it." He grinned. "Maybe not, but a man can try." We fell silent for a moment. Elmo stared into the fire -- which shows you what a big detonation he is, because what mere mortal could afford to burn wood. Finally I said, "Okay, it isn't a teleporter. So what is it?" He looked up. "You still on that? I said I don't want to talk about it. Change the subject." He stared morosely into the fire a moment and then said abruptly, "It's an alternate-universe machine." That's Elmo. He's so contrary he won't even do what he wants. I raised my eyebrows. "You've got a machine that creates alternate universes?" "Not creates. Contacts." He started to warm to his subject; he loves to explain. "The universes -- call them alternates -- already exist; I've managed to prove that there are a transfinite number of them." "You mean an infinite number?" "Not just a simple infinity -- denser. Just looked blank. "Look, you know, I presume, about Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle?" "In a vague sort of way," I said. "The Principle states that the position and momentum of an object are indeterminate; the object doesn't act as if those quantities had exact values -- there's always a small uncertainty. The product of the uncertainties of the momentum and of the position is a constant. The tighter the constraints on the momentum -- that is the smaller the uncertainty -- the looser the constraints on the position -- that is the larger the uncertainty. It has to be that way, or the equation won't come out right. Write the equation another way, and the energy an object has during a given event and the duration of the event are related in the same way. "A whole slew of things -- radioactive decays, fissions, photon emissions -- are influenced or controlled by the Principle. "Now, for any event, each Principle-influenced quantity has an infinite number of values it can take -- all within a very narrow range, of course. Now for every event in space-time, there exists a universe for each value each quantity can adopt." I chewed on that one for a while. "Then for every point in time, there's an infinite number of alternates. No, more than that because at any given point in time there are an infinite number of events occurring, so -- " "Not infinite," grunted Elmo. "The number's large, but finite. It's less than the factorial of the number of particles in the universe." "You don't know for sure that the number of particles in the universe isn't infinite," I pointed out. "Unh. Well, yeah, that's true, at least in theory," he admitted. "But practically, we can assume the universe is finite. Besides, you'd still be wrong. The numbers aren't multiplicative, they're exponential. Look, think of it as a tree. The trunk is our universe. Every point on the truck has an infinite number of branches. Let's consider all the branches from the trunk at a certain height. Just above that point, the trunk would branch again -- ami so would all the branches.'" "Yeek! You're right!" I tried to chart it in my mind. "Good Lord! To graph it, you'd need an infinite number of dimensions, even for a finite section of it!" "You mean a bounded section. That's why I said there were a transfinite number of them, instead of just an infinite number." "I boggle. How do you find a particular alternate?" "I don't. I Just set limits -- rather large limits unfortunately -- and the machine bounces around at random inside those limits. The selection process is also controlled by the Principle, so it has to be random -- there's no help for it." I thought for a moment. "And you can send something anywhere in one of these alternate worlds?" "Sure. I told you, I was looking for a matter transmitter. But the transmission effect is tied up with alternatives -- and there's no way to untie 'em." "Too bad. But it seems to me that alternate-universe effect could still be useful." He shrugged. "Maybe later. It's not finished; I'm going to add a view screen and a force-field to pro' tect the traveler. Right now, though, it's too dangerous to be useful." "How d'you figure dangerous?" We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in' gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. "Look, you jerk, the energy differences'll be small, but that still leaves room for big differences between alternates from the point of view of, say, sociology or biology. I could be arrested for wearing socks, or attacked by unicorns, or any damn thing. There wouldn't be any rules any more." "I don't see that. In fact, considering how small these Heisenburg changes all are, I don't see how they could cause gross changes -- unless you're talking about alternates that are a very large number of branchings away from ours?" He gestured impatiently. "Don't be ridiculous. The Principle -- even in single applications -- it shows up on the macroscopic scale -- a lot. Look, say a man makes a random decision, one where all things are equal, so he's just picking his choice out of thin air. Say he's picking a number to play at roulette. His choice will be influenced by the Principle. Any arbitrary decision -- and a person makes 'em all day long -- is like that. You can change a man's life completely just by changing Heisenburg events." I thought about that. I wasn't sure I liked it. "You're saying free will is the Uncertainty Principle." "You got it." He smiled derisively. " 'The displacement is small, and the momentum high, that leads to salvation.' Hallelujah!" I colored, and he snickered. "I don't see how that could get you attacked by unicorns," I said, to change the subject. He looked at me as if I were an idiot child. "Look, it's not just mental things; for instance, out of lar one fertilizes the egg. That's influenced by the Principle. So are mutations. So are any number of other things." left his house that night. My thoughts were eerie. A slight, random change in the ratio of the momentum to the position of a molecule -- and Fleming doesn't decides not to go to the theater. Hitler attacks Stalingrad a month earlier. He was right; the world could change entirely. Of course, most changes would show on the surface, so you would be on your guard, but many might not. Best to leave it alone. Of course, if Elmo stayed inside a force field, as he said he would, there would be little danger. Still, I didn't like it. So I wasn't wildly enthusiastic two weeks later when he called to say he'd finished the machine. I went to his house. "C'mon," he said, and I docilely followed him to an elevator which he'd fiendishly devised to drop at the right speed to make me just as airsick as I could get without messing up the inside of the elevator -- though a couple of times I've fooled him. The fiend himself is immune to airsickness. This time, though, he took it slowly, which put me on my guard. He apparently wanted me in a good mood. That meant he was going to try to persuade me to accept something I shouldn't, and that meant that he wasn't as confident as he acted. He felt a need for my agreement. When we arrived at his laboratory -- which by a whim of his was far underground -- he led me through a maze of rooms to one I'd never been in. Almost the entire room was taken up by a large, untidy machine. "The alternate machine," said Elmo unnecessarily. He pointed. "Controls. Vision screen. Computer terminal and display." He slid back a panel in the machine, revealing a curved wall. He waved his hand across a photorelay and a section of the wall slid out and away. "Transmission field chamber." He pointed to a hollow glass cylinder in the center of the chamber. "Transmission cylinder. I ride in the cylinder; the force field follows the lines of the chamber, but the chamber doesn't go anywhere." He walked to the control board. "Now I'll show you how it works. What would you like to see?" A thought struck me. "Say...if those worlds are almost exactly like ours -- " "They are, for the most part." " -- then what you've got is the world's worst eavesdropping gadget! The military would love this. Or the police -- # without being obvious. Or -- " "Or the busybody next door. A lot of people love a police state; it gives them an excusfe to spy on the neighbors. But don't worry. I'm not about to turn it loose. Besides, it wouldn't be much use to the military or paramilitary; you never know which parts of the alternate are the same and which are different, so the facts aren't reliable. It's a toy; no more." "Well, come to that, what good is the transmission part of the machine?" He looked at me contemptuously. "You must be kidding. Look, stupid, a transfinite number of universes means an unlimited supply of anything you'd care to mention." He waved his arms. "Metals. Oil. Wood. Uranium. Anything!" He dropped his arms and scowled. "It's so damn frustrating. I could go, I could get things and do things, except I'm afraid to." I should have realized that was what was bothering him. Elmo isn't the kind of person who likes to admit fear, and this being afraid of an intangible possibility of danger rather than a specific danger, was getting on his nerves. Hence his determination to finish and use the machine, thus removing the fear, and building his self-respect, by creating safety. Hence also my presence; his fear made moral support desirable. Suddenly Elmo turned to the controls. "But I asked you a question. What would you like to see first?" "Well, what's the first thing you looked at when you got the screen hooked up?" "My home. I figured I'd be most able to see differences there." "Your home. That figures. Okay, Narcissus, lay it on me, as they used to say." He found my rooms and began flicking from alternate to alternate. I was in some of those pictures; it was an odd sensation, watching a duplicate of myself carry on his and, essentially, my life. After watching myself for a while, I began to feel acutely uncomfortable. "Some of those other me's are somewhat peculiar. Okay, enough of my -- God, what a hideous painting! -- rooms, let's see what the rest of the world -- I mean worlds -- I mean let's see something else." "Okay. It'd better be a city; no rural or suburban places have enough variety for us to be likely to hit on a change right off. ' ' "All right. How about New York?", "You have no imagination. All right, New York it is." He consulted his notebook and touched some contacts. "Voila Times Square." He began jiggling the button, and the scene grew intermittently peculiar. Not architecture too much, but clothing and shop windows. I mean, businessmen in kilts? Grecian robes? Mukluks? Shaved heads on women? Casual nudity -- in churches and synagogues? "I thought they were supposed to keep their heads covered." "Maybe they're Reform." "Doesn't your machine pick up anything but extreme variants?" "These aren't extreme. There's no such thing as an extreme clothing fashion. There's nothing New Yorkers couldn't get used to in a month." I had to agree -- especially after he focused on a rather attractive girl sitting on a bench, and took her all the way from nudity to heavy veils -- without even changing her position. "If these are more or less average, then what are the extremities like?" "Not much different. There's only a finite number of ways clothes can be worn or not worn, given a certain level of technology." "How about art, music, the theater?" "The same, at least for the modem stuff. Let's see if we can find a museum and I'll show you." He chose one he was fond of visiting when in New York -- or rather its duplicate. He panned through the doorway. The exhibits were not especially remarkable; in fact Elmo remarked that they were mostly exhibits he recognized as being in the museum in this world. Until... Elmo was reaching for the change button when he suddenly jumped and backtracked. He centered the screen on a piece of sculpture which showed several very life-like statues of both sexes. They were engaged in activities hitherto considered inappropriate to art galleries. I felt myself blushing. "Jeshua Hashimoto the Anointed," I blurted. "I'm no prude, but -- " "Yes, you are. You always have been. Well, you wanted variety. I'm kind of out of touch with the museum, but I'm fairly sure that's not in it." He contemplated the statue for a few moments, and then said, "Maybe this alternate is going to be interesting after all. Let's see what else the museum has." He scanned down uninteresting corridors and past unspectacular exhibits until we reached a doorway flanked by guards. "High-security room," he said. "That bastard." "The room is a bastard?" "No, the last owner of that new Titian." He gazed thoughtfully at the door. "Hmmm. You know, I never thought about it, but thi machine'd make the perfect getawa; vehicle. A criminal could disappeai completely in an instant, if he committed the crime in an alternate different from his own. The police couldn't find him; he wouldn't even exist in their world! And even if they could, he'd be outta their jurisdiction. Boy, would he be outta their jurisdiction!" That's when I began to get uneasy. "What're you thinking of?" I asked. The authoritative review of the #-year controversy sparked by Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. Order your copy today. If not completely satisfied, return within # days and receive full refund. Send # to Pensee  P.O. Box # Portland, Oregon # Though scientists once scoffed at Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, space age discoveries reveal he may have been right after all. If so, much of what we thought we knew about the solar system and man's history must be reconsidered. Were ancient civilizations simultaneously destroyed at the time of the Biblical Exodus? Sifting through religious, mythical and astronomical records around the world, Velikovsky builds a case for overwhelming catastrophes within human memory. "Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered" examines the startling tale of Worlds in Collision and the equally disturbing efforts to suppress this book. Included are several special pieces by Velikovsky himself available nowhere else. "I tried to buy that painting for myself." He sent the view through the door and towards the case containing the painting. "The owner wouldn't let me have it, unless I'd agree to put it in a museum. He said it was 'public property' or something. But if I swipe this Titian, I'll have it and the public will have it too." "But the alternate universe people won't have it!" "My heart bleeds for the alternate universe people." "But what about the guards...the alarms...what if there are automatic defenses?" "There are. Stunners set in the ceiling. But so what? The shield's impermeable to anything but electro-magnetic radiation -- so I'm safe unless someone's carrying a laser, which ain't likely." He manipulated the controls. "It'll be easy. Watch." He opened a cabinet and pulled out a hammer. He then turned to the controls and touched a contact. He gave me an evil grin and entered the chamber. I had been groping for words without finding any. "Wait," I said in desperation to the closing door, but as I expected Elmo paid no attention. Helplessly I turned back to the screen. Part of the picture shimmered, and Elmo and the cylinder appeared next to the display case. Elmo opened the cylinder, walked to the case, carefully broke the glass, picked up the painting, and returned to the cylinder and entered it. He grinned and thumbed his nose at someone I couldn't see. As a light in the cylinder wall turned green, he touched a contact and vanished. A moment later he came out of the machine, the painting clutched in his hands. "I got it!" he crowed, and shoved the painting at me. I stepped back. "Here, look at it," he said, and tossed it in my direction. I juggled it frantically. "Elmo, be careful!" I begged. "These old paintings are fragile!" He snickered. "So what? I can always get a replacement." He grabbed the painting back. "Elmo, I don't like it. Send it back!" "Nothing doing! In fact. I'm going to see if I can't find something else worth stealing." "NO! I mean...Look, Elmo, at least do this, as a favor to me. Take the painting upstairs and put it in a safe place. Then stop and think for while before you go after anything else. Please!" "Well... Sure, why not. As a favor to you. But it won't change my mind." He shut down the machine and locked it, then took off through the maze of laboratories at a dead run. Like most children, he gets athletic when he's excited. ITollowed, puffing. He got to the elevator before me and was waiting impatiently, as if it were he who wanted to escape the machine and I who wanted to remain. I stepped into the elevator. and we shot upwards so fast I fell to my knees. I yelped, and Elmo uncomfortably tried to look unembarrassed. When we got to his quarters, he was more subdued, but still cocky. He trotted to a painting on his wall and replaced it with the Titian, then went to his bar, poured himself a drink, and flopped into a his drink in his lap. "So talk," he said, wiping Scotch off of his pants. "Not while you're in this mood." I'd seen him that way before; King Canute's chances were better, there on the seashore. "Let's wait till you calm down." He grinned Satanically. "What makes you think I'm going to?" Desparation, that was what. "Tell you what: it's after noon; this week's Time will be out. I'll read that, and then we'll see if you listen to reason. Okay?" He was too busy admiring the Titian to answer. I accepted that as a yes. I tuned in the trivee, decided on the Art section, dialed -- and found myself staring at It. "Elmo," I shrieked. "Look at this! The statue!" He glanced unconcernedly at the screen. "So what? Almost everything about that alternate was just like ours. Why not that?" "But you said art would be different!" Hell, even I knew that was silly. Elmo looked at me scornfully. "I said likely to be different. I didn't say it had to be. And remember, most of the other exhibits were the same as ours. I didn't get excited about them; why should I get excited about this?" He set down his drink and opened a panel in the chair-arm. "However, if it'll make you feel better." He punched for the Times, which, as a continuousupdate paper, should already have had a bulletin about any museum robbery, unless the police were sitting on it. He got the front page and knocked his drink off the chair-arm. looked at me wildly. "But that's impossible. It's nota teleporter!" I read on in horrified fascination. "Da Vinci, Rembrandt, El Greco...Elmo, there's a whole list of stuff here!" "What!? B-but I didn't take anything but that Titian! You stopped me." Dawn broke, blinding, and I burst out laughing. He stared at me in shocked disbelief, as if I'd poisoned his pet transistor. "You!" I gurgled. "I stopped you!" "Unhh...no! Oh, no! Oh, no!" number -- a transfinite number of alternates, a transfinite number of Elmos robbing a transfinite number of museums! Of course there's overlap. Some of the robber universes are also robbee universes." He groaned. "I won't be able to give the museum back its paintings, because I don't have them -- just the Titian!" "You could give the alternate museum back the Titian." He shook his head miserably. "I can't even do that. I turned off the machine; the alternate's lost; I'll never find it again." He looked up at me, oddly. "Besides, why would I want to? What good would that do? What I really need to do..." He started. "Sure! What I really need to do is go to the other alternates and steal replacements for the paintings the museum lost." I sighed. "I figured you'd think of that. That's why I suggested you send the painting back. The other Elmos -- the robbers who are in universes which are also victimuniverses -- the Elmos who find themselves in the same predicament as you -- they'll think of that too. And they'lll rob other universes for replacements, including some universes containing Elmos who got away their thefts, and some with no theiving Elmos. And tha Elmos who get in trouble because of those thefts will also steal replacements. And it'll go on. You -- all of you -- have started a series of troubles which will spread like ripples in a pond. God knows where it will end." "But I have to. The guards will have seen me -- him. My fingerprints'll be on the case. The police will know who I am -- mean who he was. Any minute now -- " Right on cue, the doorbell rang. That wasn't the end of it, of course. Elmo showed the police the machine and Told All, and in time it was decided that he might replace the stolen art treasures from other universes -- a disturbing decision. Objets d'art continue to disappear from the museum, and Elmo continues to replace them. Why do they disappear? Has some Elmo kept his machine running, zeroed in on us? Or are all the thefts by different altemate-Elmos? Some of the stolen goods were duplicates of previously stolen ones; would the same Elmo steal multiple copies? What is the ratio between Elmo-thieves and potential victim-universes? How does one divide trans-finite numbers? And that's not the worst. We chose the Blakefield Museum by chance. In other places in the transfinity of worlds, are there other Elmos who chose other museums? How long before the ripples of thievery from those foci reach us? Will anything of value ever be safe again? And what about, those who aren't just thieves? Elmo responded to greed and esthetics; were there others who responded to lust, sadism, hate, vengeance-longings? When Pandora opened the Box, she let a multitude of troubles into the world, but at the bottom of the Box was Hope. But the number of alternate worlds is transfinite -- limitless. Elmo's Box has no bottom.  Dear Editor: Ursula Le Guin's excellent and insightful essay on science fiction in the Dec. issue of Galaxy started me thinking about my own criterion for judging SF. While I still can't give you a precise definition of what a truly great SF story ought to be, I do have some definite ideas about what makes a story fail. Here are some common pitfalls that I believe do mote than anything to relegate a story to the "not worth reading" class of literature: #. Fantastic gadgets and weird alien beings do not make a science fiction story unless they are an integral part of the plot. How many times have I read a story whose only claim to being SF was the fact that it was set in the future or on some distant planet? If such a story could just as easily take place in modem day New York or San Francisco it's not SF. #. Science fiction is, of course, fantasy. It is the mood of a story that engenders the sense of wonder and mystery that is so essential to any fantasy. Put modem slang in the mouths of characters supposedly living in the year # A.D. or create starship captains with the emotional control and mentality of ten year old boys and you destroy mood. #. Some theorizing in a SF story when offered as explanation is usually essential, but page after page of it makes the story tedious and demonstrates that the writer really doesn't know where he's going. Of the half dozen or so SF magazines on my local newsstand Galaxy is by far the best. On the whole the writers whose works appear in it steer clear of these pitfalls and produce superior fiction of absorbing interest. It's this kind of Quality that keeps me coming back to Galaxy month after month and for it I thank you very much. Sincerely M. Bowen Santa Rosa, Cal. A letter to Galaxy's Science Editor: Dear Dr. Poumelle, As I am sure you know, Larry Niven wrote a story (The Borderland of Sol) that featured quanmm black holes in the January '# issue of Analog. I was practically poised with pen in hand to write to him when the January issue of Galaxy arrived and made my letter unnecessary. Your article answered my basic question -- where was he getting his facts from? It seemed to me that only someone who was actively engaged in relativity or astrophysics would be up to date on charged or quantum black holes, but it is clear after reading your article that you are both on top of recent developments. I would like to make one or two comments deriving from your remarks. First, Hawking's result on the dissipation of small black holes because of quantum effects is discussed in Kip Thome's recent article in Scientific American (The Search for Black Holes). However, he gives few details on the masslifetime relationship. It also seems as though there should be at least one good story involving energy extraction from the ergosphere of a rotating black hole, but I have not seen anything along these Unes -- have I missed one? Roger Penrose originated, or quoted, another interesting idea a few years ago -- the use of the black hole as combined garbage disposal unit and energy source. Garbage in, a substantial proportion of the rest mass out, as radiation. Ecology buffs might object, since recycling presents apparently insuperable problems. Just about everything thought or written about black holes is either described or referenced in Misner, Thome and Wheeler's magnum opus "Gravitation", current up to about mid'# -- including the real problems that singularities present in relativity. These singularities imply that classical general relativity has to be an incomplete theory, and most people look to some form of quantization as essential -- what Wheeler referred to some years ago as the 'fiery marriage of general relativity with quantum physics'. (Hawking's paper on small black holes introduces a few quantum mechanical concepts, but does not perform the fundamental re-shaping that seems to be needed. Hawking and Ellis, in their book "The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time", clearly outline the problem). Looking forward to more stories and articles on wormholes, naked singularities, Kerr-Newman black holes and other delicacies from you. Sincerely, Charles Sheffield # Wilson Lane, Bethesda, Maryland Jerry's reply follows: Thanks for yours of December #. Yes, I was aware of the material in Thome's article and the book he did with Wheeler and Misner. A couple of years ago Kip gave a lecture at Cal Tech on Black Holes, and Larry Niven and I attended it -- that's what got us interested at the time. Since I have press credentials it was easy enough to get a long interview with Thome later, and also another with Lee and Lightman, two post-doctoral students at Cal Tech who did a lot of the actual work on the Thome project. They were assigned the task of taking all experimental evidence known and trying to discard one or another of the relativity theories. As you may have heard, not only couldn't they eliminate any of the better current theories -- but they were also able to come up with their own equations. They also told me that in Lee-Lightman theory it is possible to send messages -- but not material objects -- at speeds faster than light. If it is possible, the implications ate profound, and even if Lee-Lightman theory is wrong, the fact that we've got a theoretical model not inconsistent with any experimental of the most exciting developments I can imagine. Best, Jerry Poumelle PS: If I can get out from under deadlines -- including rush jobs for a certain galactic magazine editor Ahem -- Ed., I've got a dilly of a black hole story I'm writing... Another letter to the Science Editor: Dear Mr. Poumelle; I have just finished reading your article in the November Galaxy, concerning memory. At the risk of boring you to death, I will now submit an unsubstantiated hypothesis which I have about memory, and ask you if it fits with your holographic theory. To begin with, I discovered that most of the people with whom I could relate intellectually had a memory which went back to the age of two. By contrast, most of the people I could relate to only superficially could not remember much before the age of five. The main visible difference was that the people who could remember their early childhood tended to form their own hypotheses, while the people who could not remember tended to accept one of two conflicting theories on any subject. For example, most of the people I knew who accepted the theory of a specific "New Left" group could not remember beyond age five, while most of the "independent" Leftists could remember to age two. On the basis of this small sample, I formed the folllowing hypothesis: Since the variation in the age of earliest memories runs from two to (in a few cases) eight, it was unlikely that it could be explained by any biological variation at the time the memories were recorded. It was more likely that the variation was caused by a difference in mental patterns which developed later. Since children have a very different view of what they see than adults, the main problem in remembering would be to relate the object which was observed at an early age (when it had a totally different meaning) to the object as it would be observed by an adult. For example, a person who thought of old people as having great wisdom when a child, and who thought of them as senile as an adult might have two completely different symbols for the old people he saw at different times, and be unable to relate the two. If the individual had discarded his childhood view of reality and accepted the view of the adults around him (as someone discards his previous view when he accepts a new scientific or political theory), he would tend to forget how he had thought in the past and be unable to decode his early memories. If, on the other hand, his present view of reality had evolved from his early view, through the gradual integration of adult concepts, he would still be able to understand his earlier way of thinking or -- more likely -- would have converted his earlier memories to his new way of thinking as his mind evolved. My guess is that the shift from a continually evolving, integrative mind to a "pattern-accepting" mind occurrs as a result of our type of education, in which learning is divorced from direct observation. The individual variation would, logically, be accounted for by differences in age and intelligence at the time children start to assimilate large amounts of information in school. This hypothesis conforms with the observed fact that early memories can be revived through hypnotic age regression, which returns an individual to the general understanding of reality which he had at an earlier age. Also, Buddhism asserts that people cannot remember their childhood, or their previous lives, because of their attachment. I would be interested to hear if this hypothesis is in conformity with your holographic theory. Possibly, some people retain a sine system of encoding memories while. in others, the encoding system is broken at a particular age. Thank you. Truly yours, George Beiler #I California St. ##C San Francisco, CA Dear Mr. Beiler, I'm not entirely sure the holographic theory is "mine", in the sense that I agree with it. It's certainly not mine in the sense of originating it. I don't see any obvious conflict between the holographic brain model and your own view. I suspect your theory would make a good Ph.D. dissertation for some psychology student, and might result in a pretty good book as well. I've seen worse books pubWhether or not we accept the holographic brain model, the evidence for dynamic as opposed to fixed memory storage gets stronger every day. Just last week I heard that at least part of the evidence for chemical memory -- namely the experiment in which flatworms were fed to others, and the new ones seemed to get some of the previous Worms's memories -- had collapsed. Like polywater, at least some of the results were due to dirty laboratory glassware. Best, Jerry Pournelle Dear Mr. Baen, I agree with Alter (Alien ViewpointDecember IF). The so-called intellectual SF is a rip-off and a bore. Reading a disconnected backwards nightmare of a novel is not my idea of good SF or good anything. Instead let's see more authors using science in fiction and writing so we can all understand their point of view. I enjoy both Galaxy and If -- hope the new combined magazine will be as good. Peace, Christie Cecil # Ellis (Apt. C-#) San Francisco, CA No argument. fantasy, other features. # pages # Send coins to: J.D., # Vale Ave., Cranston, R.l, #. #! Free lists. 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C. Murphy, Subscriptions Cynthia Bolling, Assistant to the Editor James Baen, Editor In which a man must choose between godhood -- and reality. The Aighor alone were condemned to brief mortality -- and only the Aighor were given lifeeverlasting. Until men came. A Galaxy First. Why do some elephants wear wooden legs Because they're afraid of cockroaches, perhaps? We published Greg's first story in our last issue. Here he is again, this time with a sort of braindrain. In the end, the chimerical alien proved as solid and real as the Himalayas. Rivera French and his wife, Miri, are surrounded by Sydney Unsler's "Flames". They know that death is infinitely preferable to capture -- yet on their survival hangs the fate of Union! more is there to say? yogurt, Mankind is not limited to the Electromagnetic. Or so Jerry would have us believe... Letters from Eastman, Meredith, Grounds, Woods, Leshendok, Hays Showcase has moved to the inside back cover In order to take advantage of the higher quality of the cover-stock. Interior illustrations by Freff, Gaughan, Pini of Universal Publlahirg A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-jssue subscription: # in U#., # elsewhere. United Kingdom by Universal-Tandem Publishing Company, Ltd., # Gloucester Road, London SW# #RD. Arnold E. Abramson, Chairman of the Board. Ralph Stokes, Managing Director. Single copy: #p. #-issue subscription in the United Kingdom: p#. Copyright Conventlona. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing officea. The publiahers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this rmgazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. ross the rumbling cavern of the friends to spare. Nggonggan portal dome, a scowl on "Rain." He paused to echo the his bleak dark face. formula. "Shade. I'm here to meet "Respected Benefactor!" A busy traffic inspector had recognized him even without the red uniform and the silver crescent of his lunar fellowship, which he had put off for the plain gray kilt of the Game clan. "Rain and shade!" The black inspector shouted that hearty Sand clan greeting. "We range the desert together." I range alone. In no mood for courtesy, he pushed rudely on until he saw that wide grin fading. The man's hurt a passenger. ' ' "Share my tent, sir." Relieved, the inspector bustled up to brush palms with him. "I saw you fight in the arena, sir. Before you had a name. In fact, I lost twelve gongs on you." Admiration flashed in the grin. "The unknown challenger from the gutters of Nggonggamba! I never expected you to win -- but I would have bet another dozen gongs that you would never become the Benefactor. Our first citizen!" No longer. The unspoken thought lay bitter on his tongue. A dozen dozen days ago, when Snowfire left, he had been named the resident Benefactor. That high post had been the goal of all his years of training on Xyr, and cruel emotion tore him now that he had to give it up. "I see you're troubled, sir," the inspector humbled. "Nggongga hatches no end of hard dilemmas, and they all fall upon you. I know that each starving clansman wandering into the city makes a new burden for you. But the Benefactors are our last great hope. We trust you, sir!" More than I trust myself. He didn't want to say that he was surrendering his high position just to follow a girl who had left him. Wryly silent, he recalled the term in the Game clan dialect for such hopeless expeditions. "White tly hunts." There were no white tlys. Disconcerted by his moodiness, the man was turning away. "Find water." Forcing a smile, he groped for words of graceful gratitude. "Find peace." "Water!" Happy again, the inspector dropped to one knee in the ritual bow of a departing junior. "Peace!" He bustled away. Blacklantern stalked somberly on to wait for Thomwall at the arrival stage beneath the space gate. He knew that the stare of the gate was nothing more than an optical illusion created by the transport fields, but in his dark mood it seemed to watch him like the eye of God. Lidless and enormous, the seeming eye peered out of involute space-time. The blue-glowing control fields were its iris. The pupil, framed in that queerly painful shimmer of dimensionless energy, was the interface itself -- the cosmic short cut to myriad worlds. Uneasily, he kept shifting along the guard rail beside the exit strip. The eye always followed. Its huge black disk seemed to probe through all his poor defenses of uncertain status and unstable purpose to find the naked black street urchin he once had been. It made him feel several sorts of fool. The giant pupil winked. Half a heartbeat from the far-off planet of the Benefactors, Thomwall emerged from the reflected cosmic dark. A tall commanding man, robed in formal red. He flashed his ensign at the guards and swung off the transit strip, stem face searching. Blacklantern started to meet him, but faltered. His ageless ice-blue eyes were too much like that appalling orb through which he had come. When he found Blacklantern, however, all his sternness thawed into an easy smile. Lifting two fingers in the fellowship salute, he paused with a look of mild inquiry. "I wish you were angry, sir." Stiffly, Blacklantern returned his salute. "You ought to be. I've let you down." "You know you're always free to leave the fellowship." Thomwall's level gaze was still disturbing, but his quiet tone showed no resentment. "We never coerce anybody." "I can't help feeling disloyd." The implacable stare of that giant eye drove Blacklantern to confession. "I remember you took me out of jail. You made me a Benefactor. You gave me knowledge and power I had never dreamed of -- the chance to share the gifts of progress with all my people. I know I've failed, and I feel wretched about it." "What went wrong?" "Two -- two problems." Beneath that ruthless gaze, his words stumbled. "You'll meet one of them, waiting outside. The other is Snowfire." "You can forget her." "The trouble is, I can't forget." "I knew you were lovers." Probing him, Thornwall's pale old eyes seemed as omniscient as the gateway. "That's why we left the two of you together here after your escape from the Game clan hunters. When she left, I supposed the affair was over." "Not for me." He stopped uncomfortably, but Thomwall simply stood waiting. "We had different notions of what love is. When Engineer Toolsmith brought us out of the desert after the hunt, she fell for him. She wanted us both. Being Nggonggan, I was jealous. She called me selfish. We hurt each other. When he went back to Swarmworld One, I let her go with him -- though I thought she wanted me to beg her to stay. I felt too -- too proud for that." He bit his lip, with a grimace of pain. "I was wrong," he muttered. "A wrong-headed fool! I'm going after her now. I'll beg her, if I must, to let me Join them." "You can't get there," Thomwall told him. "Swarmworld One is nearly five thousand lightyears away. The star gates to it have all been closed." "I can try -- " "Trying won't help. The swarmworlders aren't cooperative. We have an old philosophic quarrel with them, about culture contacts. As Benefactors, we try to help primitive races adapt to new technologies. The swarmworlders feel that alien technologies are destructive. They have always kept their culture to themselves." "I know they don't like visitors -- " But  have a plan. He didn't say the words, because his plan was too desperate. He didn't want Thomwall laughing at him. "Snowfire's gone." With a shrug that dismissed her utterly, Thomwall swung toward the exit strips. "You're still here. The Benefactor of Nggongga." "I was," he said. "You'll see why I'm quitting." When Thomwall's luggage was routed to the agency compound, they rode out of the terminal into the brassy noon of Nggonggamba. Though the "white night" was almost over, the traffic ways were still abandoned to savage sunlight. Blind in the glare, Blacklantern heard angry native voices and the slap of calloused native feet. "Watch them, sir!" he whispered. "They're desperate!" A score of nearly naked blacks came rushing at them from the shadow of the dome. A gaunt cripple, lurching on clumsy lancegrass crutches. A reeling woman, skeleton-thin, with a still baby in her arms. A huge-eyed child running ahead, holding out a bright native hat for a begging bowl. "They're -- dreadful!" Thomwall was thumbing coins from his belt. "Let's give them something." "Careful, sir!" Blacklantern murmured. "Let me do it." "You call yourselves Benefactors?" The woman shrieked her accusation in a desert dialect. "You travel to the stars and do the work of gods -- but look at my child." Her withered black hands held out the dead infant. "Why won't you share with us?" "We do share." He took Thomwall's coins and flung them out across the pavement. "We try to -- forgive us!" Most of the mob ran to scrabble for the coins, snarling over them like ravenous animals. The woman stood swaying, the bloated baby in her stretched-out arms. Its odor turned him ill. "Come, sir!" He hurried Thomwall toward the nearest passenger way. "You'll see our troubles here. Attacks in the public ways. Pickets at the agency. Hatred I can't endure. The people screaming for food. Their leaders trying to blame us for all that's wrong with Nggongga -- and more going wrong every day." "Patience." Gently, the old man smiled. "Our task was never easy." "Impossible!" he muttered. "Here on Nggongga. The starving mobs are after our heads, and the police can't -- or won't -- protect us." A second crowd of shouting blacks had sprung from nowhere before they reached the ramp. A slim young girl hawking desert flowers. Grimy boys clamoring to clean their boots. Shrieking sellers of brightdyed incense sticks and mildewed muskweed pods and burnt clay charms against Cru Creetha. One blind crone followed the pack, offering a worn-out rug of woven nearman hair. "Make way!" Blacklantern pushed through them. "Make way for the respected senior Benefactor. ' ' "Tleeshl" A tly-stung arena veteran shoved past him, thrusting a twisted claw at Thomwall. "Share life!" Jostled, the Benefactor tripped over a boot-cleaner's box. The horde closed around him. The old tly-fighter bent as if to help -- and slammed him viciously back against the pavement. The flower girl snatched at his belt suddenly and ran. "OongathV' Blacklantern called that Game clan warning of ritual revenge and plunged into the mob. The tly-fighter met him with a cunning kick at the groin. Twisting aside, he saw a dagger flash. "Tleeshl" A dirty urchin mocked him with that old appeal for desert hospitality. A thrown boot-box grazed his head. The owners jeered him with his own battle cry, "Oongath! OongathV" The sense of crisis lit a bright elation in him, and awoke his old arena skills. Smiling into the sun, he whipped off his belt for a binding rope. One quick flick drew his attacker's eyes, while he drived for the dagger. In another moment the stung man lay squealing on the pavement, bound like a defeated tly. He gripped the captured dagger and whirled. Suddenly silent, the mob melted away. Two frightened boys scuttled to recover the box they had thrown. The evil reek of the dead baby still tainted the stifling air. Thomwall stood up, rubbing his bruises. "My ensign!" he whispered. "Gone." "Guard yourself." Blacklantern gave him the dagger. "I'll get it back." Thumbing his own ensign to call the police, he started after the flower girl. She had paused to look back. When she sw him following, she flung the stolen ensign at him and fled again. He brought it back to Thomwall. "My people!" He opened his arms in a gesture of futility. "My own people! As a Benefactor, I was trying to bring them progress -- or anyhow to help them survive it. But they're too many for me. Too ignorant. Too hungry. Too savage." "That's why they need us." "The job's too much for me." He scowled moodily down at the bound man and turned wearily back to Thomwall. "I have a stereogram from Snowfire. Her farewell message from the swarmworld, just before the gates were closed. I want you to hear her -- she says we Benefactors have been wrong." "On some worlds we have failed. We may fail here." Thomwall nodded calmly. "Mankind has one great enemy, that we can never completely defeat -- man himself." With age-yellowed hands, he held up the dagger as if for evidence. "All the human traits that served us in the jungle can betray us in society. Yet we must preserve them. The same dark forces that threaten us are also the bright springs of our creative evolution. That ancient blackness sometimes kills us -- but sometimes it transforms us. The paradox now and then defeats us -- but sometimes we win. The human universe is better than it would have been without the Benefactors." "I wonder -- " But he saw Thomwall's pain, and checked himself. "Let's get on," he said. "Before the police come. These people will accuse us. We could be the ones hauled in." He released his captive, who stalked sullenly back toward the shadow of the dome. "Let's hear Snowfire." Thomwall stood blinking into the searing glare and swaying unsteadily, as if Nggongga had been too much for him. "Somewhere out of the sun." II The stillabandoned ways carried them out of the portal zone to a Sea clan wineshop where they took refuge from the white night in a cool dim booth. When the waitress was gone, Blacklantern twisted the base of the little black message disk and set it on the table before them. Snowfire's silver image flickered in its focal cone and came alive with sudden color. Her green-gold eyes smiled sadly at him. "Dear Blackie -- " Her lowpitched voice woke memories that still blurred his. eyes with tears. "I'm deeply grieved that we can never meet again. Never touch. Never love. But I guess we've made our choices. You couldn't accept the customs of my folk. I wouldn't accept the ways of yours. "Anyhow, this will be our last contact. Swarmworld One is closing all its external gates. Indefinitely, Toolsmith says. I suppose you'll wonder why. The reason is something I can only hint at. A cultural quantum jump. A radical new solution to the population problem. "I wish I could say more. I've been asking for details to send back to the Benefactors, but you know the swarmworld philosophy. My hosts are afraid their new technology might damage other cultures. Perhaps they're right. Anyhow, it is something too far advanced to be useful on Nggongga." Her image moved in the cone, and red fire played across her hair. He trembled, fighting the blind desire to reach, to catch and hold her golden loveliness. "So this is our final farewell. I wanted to say again that I do love you, Blackie. In my own way -- I still wish it had been yours too. It saddens me to think of you left to waste your life on the pathetic little projects of the Benefactors, doomed as you are to suffer and die in the darkness of Nggongga. I still wish -- wish -- ' ' Her voice had quivered, and the cone flickered as if she had erased a moment of emotion. "Don't forget me, Blackie!" Suddenly she was dazzling. "I want you to know that I'm utterly happy. Eager to test this startling new invention. If Toolsmith's promises are true, our new world will be more wonderful than anything you ever pictured for a paradise. "Good -- Goody-by, Blackie!" Her eyes had darkened with feeling, and he caught the green glint of a tear as her image dimmed. The disk clicked faintly and the empty shadow-cone winked out. Blacklantern sat gazing dully at nothing. She had looked real enough to touch, and he could still imagine her sweetleaf fragrance lingering in the booth. All his own brash confidence had faded with her image, and the gloom around him grew darker now with his own awareness of the tragedy of Nggongga. He had almost forgotten that he was not alone, and it startled him a little when Thomwall moved. The old Benefactor looked as fragile as another shadow in the cone, but his thin old voice was strangely serene. "So we've lost Snowfire." He leaned calmly forward to refill their glasses. "It takes a rare sort of person to remain a Benefactor. But we're still physicians to mankind. So long as men nqed help to deal with progress, we'll go on -- " "Without me." Impatiently, Blacklantern swept his glass aside and stood. "I'm going to follow Snowfire." "You heard her say all the gates are closed." "But I think I've found a way." Eagerness lifted his voice. "Engineer Toolsmith was here, you know, to mine Nggongga for the swarmworld -- without too much concern at that time about what happened to the natives. The mine is abandoned now. With this new invention, perhaps our planet is no longer needed. "Anyhow, I've earned a name in the Game clan and my new friends tell me the mining machinery is still lying there, abandoned in the pit. I hope to get to the swarmworld, through the gates that took the ore. "Don't laugh at me!" Thomwall's breath had caught. "I'm not laughing -- but you make me wish I were young again." A brief smile twitched his parchment lips. "If our mission here on Nggongga is too much for you, I think you'll find the way to Snowfire ten times harder." "I'll take the risks." "Have you really faced the odds?" "I've had nightmares about them." "You've no chance at all." Thornwall's face was sadly stem. "You're a primitive. You'll be lost in the most advanced culture known -- the swarmworld has been evolving new technologies for twenty thousand years. You don't know the folkways. Not even the language." He had to nod in uneasy agreement. "Even if you get there, how will you find her? The swarmworlders have been exploding into space for dozens of generations. The swarm orbit. Each one holds as many people as a planet. Looking for her, you'll be like a blind man searching all the deserts of Nggongga for one special grain of sand." Blacklantem stiffened impatiently. "I've met swarmworlders before. I've even killed one. Ooldforge. The manager of their mine here -- when he was hunting my head in the desert. I have his translator and his name ring. I have Snowfire's swarmworld address -- probably Toolsmith's home -- from the label of the stereogram. I even have money, from selling a few trinkets I'll never need again." "I drink to your enterprise!" Thomwall raised his glass, with a quick ironic smile. "Even though I think you wouldn't be going if you had attacked your problems here with this sort of spirit." Blacklantem gulped his wine and said nothing. "Is she really worth so much?" Cold again, the old eyes probed him. "Your whole career as a Benefactor? All our hopes for the future of your people?" "I've tried to be rational." Blacklantem scowled at the dead message disk. "I used to laugh at the love-crazed heroes in our old epics. I know there are women enough on Nggongga -- girls my own color, sharing my own culture, fit for anything. I even know Snowfire will never be entirely mine, wherever I find her. ' ' He spread his hands in a native gesture of submission. "But -- you see, sir -- I can't help how I feel. She -- she's burnt into my brain. The image of her festers in me like a barbed desert thorn. Not that I want to forget!" For a moment they sat silent. A lazy fan above them stirred the scents of stale wine and rancid musk and black sweat. Glasses clinked somewhere in the steamy gloom, and a girl laughed. "You trouble me." Thomwall pushed the pottery bottle aside. "You and Snowfire. Top agents. People I trusted -- loved. Doing something very foolish, that I can't understand." "I know how to fight a tly." Blacklantem paused uncomfortably. "Nggongga is harder to handle. I guess I've just lost faith. In the Benefactors. Even in myself." He saw the hurt in Thomwall's eyes, and still went on. "I believe the swarmworld philosophy is right. Nggongga must have been a better place before the eye was ever opened. My people had their own way of living, shaped and tested by a dozen dozen generations." "Yet they were quick enough to give it up," Thomwall said. "Just watch them now, leaving their desert trails and their old mud towns to flock into Nggonggamba. " "The city seems to draw them, as flames draw night-moths." He nodded and paused to think. "The unbreakable problem is the people explosion. The old clan system here was a working answer to it -- each clan owned only a limited list of names, and nameless men were not allowed to marry. The younger sons had a hard choice -- the priesthood or the tly arena. But at least they knew who they were." He made a face, as if the wine were bitter. "The opening of the eye has wrecked all that. The clans are breaking up. The old traditions are thrown away, the old gods forgotten. Progress has betrayed us. We wipe out old diseases with the miracle medicines -- and breed more people than the planet can feed. We buy bright new atomic pumps to irrigate our croplands -- and dry up the geologic water under the old oases. In flight from the spreading deserts, we follow the promise of progress into Nggonggamba -- and die in the streets." He pushed his glass aside, to lean across the table. "Tell me what I could have done," he challenged Thomwall. "As resident Benefactor, after Snowfire left, I was alone here. With no power over anybody. Tell me what one man can do for two gry people like those who tried to rob us. They can't eat culture or social theory or even benevolent intentions." "We can't help people," Thomwall objected patiently. "We learned that long ago. You have when there isn't that much food. Even if you somehow fed them, you would have twice as many millions in another generation, twice as desperate. It may seem cmel, but all you can do is tell them how to help themselves." "If they're toohungry to listen -- " "We always find a few to listen. We train those few to teach and lead the rest. Better than food, we can offer membership in the new galactic culture. We can build a university, design a planetary language, plan a new government. Rather than food alone, we bring knowledge and purposeand hope. We lead the way to a new social discipline." "If people won't follow -- " "We can't compel anybody -- but the facts of nature can." Thomwall straightened sternly. "If you Nggonggans could keep on doubling your numbers with every generation, in only six thousand years the whole mass of the universe would be black flesh. If we Benefactors have authority, it comes from such harsh brute facts." "I tried." Blacklantern shrugged. "I'm through." Suddenly smiling, he leaned to pick up the black message disk. "All I want is Snowfire." "I don't think you'll find her." Yet Thomwall's smile reflected his own. "If you do reach the swarmworld, I want to know that new solution to the people problem. I thought the swarmfolk already had the final answer, with all their available mass built into space vehicles and all their solar energy trapped and utilized. I can't imagine anything better." "I'll try to learn their answer. But I don't expect to be coming back." "Good hunting, anyhow!" Bright youth had come back to Thomwall's deep-sunk eyes, and he lifted his glass with a flourish. "We trained you well on Xyr. Perhaps you'll make it!" Ill sign that afternoon, though Thornwall still protested. He outfitted himself at a manhunter's shop. Next morning, wearing Goldforge's name ring and translator, he set out on a chartered flight south toward the old hunting lands of the Game clan. His pilot was a nervous little mud-colored man, a compulsive chewer of saltflower seed, a compulsive worrier about the voltage drop in his reserve power cell, a compulsive talker about his Sea clan wife and his nine unmarried daughters, two of them unaccountably pregnant. Only half listening, Blacklantern was scanning his route map and the unrolling desert. At last he found the narrow green oasis where the ritual hunts had begun. He picked out the bare red mesas he and Snowfire had crossed, the ripple of yellow dunes where Goldforge had overtaken them, the flows of black lava beyond, and the white blaze of the dry salt lake where the body hunters had finally brought them to bay. Beneath the flyer, all their endless days and nights of love and pain were telescoped into meaningless moments. There was the last red ridge -- where the world broke off. Beyond it, sheer cliffs of broken sandstone lipped a pit too vast to show any farther rim. The brown pilot fell abruptly silent. He leaned against the window, looking for the bottom of the pit. He found rubble slopes, level shelves, deeper slopes and steeper cliffs. What he discovered at last, miles and miles below, was no bottom, but the tops of towering clouds, floating out of a hazy void. "Do you want to land on the rim, sir?" The pilot still thought he had come to hunt wild nearmen. "Our agreement doesn't cover spotting or shooting from the air." "We aren't landing here," he said. "We're flying down inside." Profanely, the pilot called the name of dark Cru Creetha, eater of suns. His flyer had been chartered for a flight to the pit, not into it. Of course, personally, he was not afraid to fly anywhere. The Sun Lighter would bear witness to his courage. But he was legally obligated to adhere strictly to the terms of their official flight plan. "I'll double the charter price," Blacklantern offered. "If you'll land me near one of the old mining machines down inside." The pilot's muddy color faded. He had heard all he wanted to know about the great metal worms the swarmwoflders had sent to eat up the planet, and he was already closer to them than he wanted to be. The old excavators were stopped and abandoned, Blacklantern . said. They couldn't harm anybody. So I hope, he told himself. The pilot crunched another saltflower seed. Muttering huskily through froth-purpled lips, he said he must consider not only the alarming signs of failure in the reserve power cell and his duty to his wife and daughters, but also the terms of his flight insurance. Blacklantern estimated the funds he had left. Gates and gongs would be useless, he supposed, in the swarmworld, and he wasn't coming back. He offered to triple the charter fee. The pilot munched thoughtfully and spurted purple fluid at the cabin floor. Squinting shrewdly across that jagged brink into the cloudy depths, he announced that another gross of gongs would complete the dot for his first daughter. Blacklantem paid him, and they dived. They found the excavator lying on a black granite ledge. A small bright worm, it swelled and swelled beneath them to become a mile-long monster. The pilot set the flyer down at a Judicious distance, and Blacklantern scrambled out with his hunting gear. "I'll wait overnight," the pilot offered, "For six gross of gongs." "Don't wait." "You can't live here. You can't climb out." The pilot peered uneasily up at the slopes of broken stone and the fracture-carved precipices and the broken benches that made a giant's stairway toward the far sky. "I'll come back in three days -- for another triple fee." "I don't have the money," Blacklantern said. "I'm taking the excavator out." Chewing hard, the pilot blinked up at the monstrous metal mass and took off hastily. From the lip of that wide ledge, Blacklantern looked down into the pit. Though the jagged rim that framed the narrow scrap of sky was miles and miles above, his rocky ledge was less than halfway down. The clouds that hid the bottom were still far beneath his level. Lightning flickered in them now, and an endless peal of thunder began crashing and rumbling and rolling away against those looming walls. He turned to watch the flyer climb. Dwindling fast, it was only a black insect before it reached the top of the first talus slope. Before it rose above the first black granite wall, he had lost it. He stood there alone. His neck hurt from looking up, and he couldn't help a tiny shiver from his shattering sense of the vastness of the pit and the power of the swarmfolk who had abandoned it so casually. Perhaps he had been a fool to let the flyer go, but he had no time for fear. He hitched up his hunting pack and hiked toward the excavator. The cautious pilot had left him a long way to hike. He was sweating before he reached the great machine. Its curved armor swelled out far above him, scarred from titantic rockfalls, bright and massive and impregnable. Under its shadow, he plodded on toward its rockcrushing jaws. A new rockslide had half-buried the machine since it stopped. Huge fallen boulders faced him with sheer cliffs as grim as any he had conquered long ago, hunting nestling tlys. It cost him a hard hour's climbing to reach the rotary teeth of the excavator. In the echoing cavern behind those enormous metal molars, he used his hunting lantern to pick a way along the titanic conveyor that had carried broken stone back to the transflection portal. A blue light flashed suddenly ahead. Alert to the danger of toppling into some ore-bin or smelter in the far-off swarmworld, he took that for a warning. Climbing off the conveyor, he explored great strange mechanisms until he found a railed inspection walk that led him at last into a high control booth. Lights came on, when he closed the door. One wall turned transparent to show him a bright picture of the swarmworld -- a tiny blue sun wrapped in a milky mist of lifespheres, each invisibly small. A long panel against the opposite wall glowed with symbols he couldn't read. The third wall framed a dark opening beyond a level ramp. When he walked toward it, new lights picked out a little vehicle without wheels, somehow suspended just above a wide black track. Its transparent shell showed half a dozen seats inside. Trembling now with the same breathless sense of risk and elation he had felt when he faced his first diving tly, he pulled at its oval door. The door stayed fast -- but, beside it, an amber-circled sensor began to blink. He stopped for a moment, frowning. Any error, now, could be as quickly fatal as a false move in the arena. Yet this was clearly the transport system of the vanished miners. The vehicle promised to cany him to the swarmworld, while the blinking sensor seemed to question his right to go. He caught his breath and thumbed Goldforge's name-ring to flash its color-coded signal ray into the black center of the sensor. The amber circle quit blinking. The door slid open. Light came on inside the crystal shell. Heart thudding, he stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him. He waited, almost afraid to breathe. Nothing happened until he slid warily into the nearest seat. Then a soft bell-note rang, and a bank of keys shone green on an oval panel beside his seat. Most of the symbols that marked them were strange, but he saw that two of them were numerals, oddly shaped, like those on the label of Snowfire's stereogram. He sat for a moment thinking, muscles as taut as when he first had to judge the strike of a screaming tly. Hopefully, then, he began using the portal print on the label to translate the green symbols, punching out what he hoped would be Snowfire's swarmworld address. The life-sphere number -- or was it? As he touched the last digit, the panel chimed faintly and one green key turned golden. Elated and more anxious, he stabbed out what he thought should be the level number. A higher note chimed. Another symboled key changed color. With a heady sense of success, as if he had discovered the blind side of a dangerous tly, he tried the octant number. Another rising chime. Another golden glow. He kept tapping, his whole body cold with sweat and quivering. The sector number. The zone number. The corridor number. At last, the dwelling number. Its final digit startled him with a deep-toned gong and a flashing crimson symbol. He froze, as if an unseen tly had bellowed above him. While he stood wondering what to do, a toneless synthetic voice hummed from the panel. " -- transposed." Goldforge's translator picked it up. "Dwelling no longer occupied. Access restricted. Revised destination instructions required." All his muscles tightened, but he had nothing for them to do. "Request -- " His voice failed, and he had to catch his breath. "Request destination information. New address of -- of last occupants. Of Benefactor Snowfire and Engineer Toolsmith." For an endless second, nothing happened. "Benefactor Snowfire not identified," that dead voice droned at last. "Engineer Toolsmith transposed. No local dwelling in use. Revised destination instructions required." Grimly, he tried to slow his drumming heart. "Request assistance," he called again. "Required destination is current address of Engineer Toolsmith, former occupant of destination first requested." For longer seconds, there was no response. "Body of Engineer Toolsmith located," the machine purred suddenly. "Revised destination will be Ironforge Clinic of Exotic Pathology, Sphere #, Level #, Octant #, Sector #, Zone #, Corridor noon. Dwelling #. Prepare for departure." He sank back in the seat with a gasp of relief. The crimson winking stopped. A triple chime rang. Silently, the crystal capsule swept forward into a gray-walled tunnel. Ahead, a giant eye widened. He shrank in spite of himself from its blue-rimmed blackness. The vehicle toppled down its track, through the painful depthless flicker of the iris, into the flat enormous pupil. The cavernous belly of the excavator was instantly five thousand light-years behind. The vehicle swayed and fell again, through another gray tunnel and into a stranger space. For a heart-clutching moment, he felt weightless. The capsule tipped up h steeply climbing track. As it gained speed, his sense of weight came back. He caught his breath and tried to see where he was. On his left, a dark wall was blurred smooth by his motion. On the right, he looked out into a hollow cylinder, its dimensions too vast for him to estimate. Mottled blue and green, its far-away curve was below and above and all around him. Its farther end was lost in misty distance. The cylinder seemed to roll beneath his racing vehicle, spinning around him at a giddy rate. A wave of vertigo swept him. Clutching at the seat ahead, he groped for his lost orientation. Though he supposed the life-sphere must be rotated to create a centrifugal substitute for gravity, he knew it couldn't be spinning so crazily. Most of the actual motion, he soon decided, was that of his own capsule, plunging around and around a spiral track built into the near end of the cylinder, carrying him away from its axis toward the wall. This long hollow, then, must be only the core of the huge lifesphere. The inhabited levels would be farther from the axis, where the centrifugal pull was stronger. His giddiness gone, he looked "down" again at the endless racing landscape. Now, as it came nearer, he could see that the green areas were grassland and forest, the blue patches lakes and streams. Here at the heart of this enormous mechanical world, the swarmfolk had made a place for nature. Eagerly, he began searching for people. Soon he was able to pick out the boles of odd-shaped flowering trees. He saw winged things flying, fat quadrupeds grazing, a sleek black creature stalking one of them. He caught a glimpse of what looked like playground equipment in an empty park on a wide lake beach. Graceful robotic devices were busy here and there, but he found no human beings. Perhaps the swarmfolk were sleeping. At the level of that deserted landscape, the capsule flashed past a vacant passenger platform and dropped into another tunnel. A new gong chimed, and the whole nose of the vehicle was filled with the stereo image of a half-transparent ball, wide triangular wings flaring from its poles. Deep inside it, a bright green point was crawling. When he found the hollow core, and all the curving shells around it, he suddenly understood the the ball was the lifesphere, that the creeping point followed his own position. Now and then some light or signal flashed backward along the tunnel wall, but the capsule was so soundless that he thought it must be moving in a vacuum. He felt startled when it lurched and stopped, with a wheeze of air. The map winked out. A mellow gong rang. "Ironforge Clinic," that cold synthetic voice announced. "Ironforge Clinic." When the door slid open, he scrambled out of the capsule. Soundlessly, it glided away. He stood on a bright-lit platform. Tensing with a wary readiness, as if waiting for a strange tly to dive, he turned to search that long chamber for the teeming swarmfolk he had been prepared to meet. He found nobody anywhere. IV Bewildered by this silent emptiness where he had expected to ento sniff the air for any human odor. His nose was keen enough to tell Sea clan fish-eaters from the muskweed pickers of the Wind clan or the Game clan nearman hunters, but the cool wind that blew from the tunnel held nothing of mankind. When he listened, all he could hear was the thump of his own heart and the rustling of his clothing and the tiny clink and clatter of his hunting gear, all magnified when they whispered back from the hard white walls. As if climbing near a wild tly's nest, he moved along the platform, all alert, searching the way for each footstep. Still he heard no human sound, caught no human scent -- till a loud gong nearly stopped his heart. Where it had rung, he found an amber sensor circle blinking. Quivering with his own strained readiness, he flashed Goldforge's ring into the circle. It went out. A tall crack cut the wall and widened to make a doorway. He walked through, into a monumental room. It should have been busy. Rows of seats faced high screens where unreadable legends glowed. Bright kiosks were spaced here and there about an unending desert of floor, as if to dispense information or instructions. All around the far-away walls, empty archways opened into half-seen vacant passages. But all his senses found nobody anywhere. The dead hush dissolved all his first elation into dark perplexity. Even if the swarmfolk observed their own white night, there should be somebody somewhere. Though he could see no evidence of violence or disaster, he began to feel that he had stumbled into a universe of irrational nightmare. A liquid clink took his breath again, as startling as some waterdrop in a desert cave. It rang and pattered and died in the long vaults above him, and came again before he found its source in a new pool of scarlet light before him on the floor. Uncertainly, he stepped toward it. The pool stretched out at once to become a bright red line, leading toward a distant archway. He caught his breath and followed. The scarlet mark arrowed ahead, guiding him down an echoing hall beyond the arch, across another huge concourse, intoanother corridor so long that he could see its floor curving disturbingly up and up ahead of him to follow its level around the axis of the spinning sphere. Still he met nobody. The red line bent at last, to pick out a door. A queer light symbol flashed beside it. A chime sounded. The door divided. A gangling, yellow-freckled man ambled out into the corridor to greet him in fluent street Nggonggan. "Welcome, Benefactor! I knew it had to be you." "Toolsmith?" Without the blue goggles he had always worn on Nggongga, with his stiff white hair uncombed and his uneven teeth too widely spaced and a faint purple stain on his lips, the freckled man looked so young and mild and harmless that he was hard to recognize. "I'm glad to find you!" "You almost missed me." Relaxed and affable, Toolsmith beckoned him through the entry alcove, past the glowing signals of what must be the master panel for the household machinery, into the thin sweet smoke of muskweed burning in a black clay censor on an antique tripod of Sea clan bronze. The room relaxed him. The walls were hung with ritual daggers and braided rugs of nearman hair. A tall shelf held a blown tly's egg, painted with Cru Creetha's blackfan ged grin. The seats were massive lancegrass cushions. Inside, everything was Nggonggan. He inhaled the incense gratefully, but stiffened again when he saw the wide archway in the farther wall. Beyond it, bright-sailed boats were tacking up a slope of flashing blue water, climbing an insane seascape that bent up and up to an impossible perpendicular and curled back overhead, with no horizon. For a moment he thought he was somehow looking through a window into the sphere's hollow core, though he knew he had left it far behind. Then Toolsmith touched a button and the whole unsettling scene dissolved into a grey fog of an empty stereo tank. "Your signal from Nggongga was just in time to catch me here," Toolsmith was explaining. "It was transposed, you see, several days ago. Ordinarily, my body would have gone straight to salvage, but it I Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher ! i ' ; i K. Dick is his first in years and ;  ' I April. You'll understand the typically  Phil Dick title when you've read the ; Dray Prescot on the planet Kregen  I I Havilfar cycle. Illustrations and cover : ; by Jack Gaughan. (UYl #-I .#)  ! ' I And we are bringing back the first in I ;  for Prescot's fans who may have missI ! ; ed it. It tells how he got to Antares I I  I in the first place. Interior illustrations I  ' I by Tim Kirk and a stunning new ; ' ;; cover by Josh Kirby. fy;#-S;. #) ;j ; ; Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories I  I ' have become major items in interstel I I April, packed with color and peril. I : ; (UY I ##)  ' I And Gregory Kern returns in April ;  ! ! for his growing numbers of fans. A  I ' I pie which can imitate anything!   (UYl #-SI .#) ;I I ; For our catalog and order ! ; ; I forms, send #c in stamps to;  ; . : #th FI. ; ; I ; #I Ave. of the Americas I I ;; New York, N.Y. # I; ! ### ##i I happens that the medics wanted to hold it for research into the effects of all my years among the pathogenic hazards of primitive Nggongga. "Otherwise -- " He broke off to urge Blacklantem into the room. "Sit!" With a Nggonggan bow of ceremonial welcome, he waved at the cushions. "Share water and shade, shelter and life." He added genially, with his gap-toothed smile, ' 'I have to admire your sort of reckless enterprise. Snowfire was expecting you to follow. I thought you would fail to get here, even if you tried." "Is she -- " He stood looking around the room, sniffing the heavy smoke-scent, searching for any trace of her. "Is she -- here?" "You're too late to find her alive." Casually compassionate, Toolsmith spread his open hands in the Nggonggan gesture of final negation. "You see, we were both transposed together." Once long ago, still proving himself for the arena, he had been creeping into a dark cave to steal an egg from a tly's nest when he heard the furious bellow of the male returning. Suddenly, now, he could taste the bitter dust of the droppings again. He felt the same choking tightness in his dry throat, heard the same fast hammer of his heart. But Engineer Toolsmith was no bull tly. A tall ungainly man with stooped narrow shoulders and weak blue eyes, his pale skin still bronze-mottled from Nggongga's sun, he looked too mildly insignificant to be any enemy -- so awkwardly unhandsome, in fact, that he wondered once more what Snowfire had found to love in him. "About Snowfire?" Tormented, Blacklantem reached out as if to clutch his angular frame and shake information out of him. "What do you mean, when you say she was transposed?" "Sit and rest, respected Benefactor." Toolsmith bowed again in the Nggonggan manner, courteous and almost apologetic. "I'm afraid you'll be disturbed by what I have to tell you, but you're too late to do much about it. The transposition process cannot be reversed." He was shuffling about the room as he talked, lighting a new muskweed stalk in the censer, placing a low table between the cushions, bringing plates of brightskinned fmits and small hard cakes, opening a bottle of seaberry wine. "I spent half my old life on Nggongga,' he murmured. "As you can see, I became quite a primitive. Of course I never took up trophy hunting, the way Manager Goldforge did. But I did have a nice antique collection that we brought back, and a small cellar of my favorite Nggonggan wines. Let's drink to Snowfire." Blacklantem had firmly resolved not to be jealous. Though that promised to be difficult, he made himself accept a glass of the aromatic wine. Silently, they sipped. The perplexing hush of the whole sphere began to echo in his mind. Toolsmith's air of casual ease brought his impatience to the bursting point. "Where is she?" he exploded. ' 'Where ' s -- everybody?' ' "Transposed." Toolsmith shrugged lazily. "I suppose you came but transposition had been in progress for several generations. The whole job will take a few more -- a few of the most conservative spheres have hardly begun. Here, we're nearly done, though of course I'm not the only live body left. You'll find a good many at the transposition center. Even a few here at the clinic." "Tell me -- " Struggling with violent impulses, he had to be careful with his voice. "Won't you tell me what you mean?" "You won't like it." The weakseeming eyes blinked at him thoughtfully. "Yet your status as a Benefactor ought to help you grasp it. Snowfire had no trouble at all. In fact, she was even wishing you could share it with us." "She sent me -- sent me a stereogram." He felt cold with a dread too vague to grasp, and his tongue was clumsy with the words. "She hinted at something -- some new process. She called it a cultural quantum Jump." "So it is!" Beaming, Toolsmith paused to savor his wine. "Our final answer to the problem of numbers. A universal problem. You can see the beginning of it if you bother to look, even on Nggongga. All those refugees from their dried-up oases and their wind-eroded fields. Jamming themselves into the city to beg and breed in the streets." Toolsmith was leaning genially to refill his glass. He waved the bottle away and sat stiffly upright, waiting while the long swarmworlder drained his glass and disposed his angular limbs on the cushions. "We've always done rather well by our own expanding population." Toolsmith smirked smugly through his freckles. "I won't club you with statistics, but each one of our spheres can hold several times the present population of Nggongga, still assuring each individual an abundance of space and mass and energy that even your rulers might envy. "A dozen generations ago, however, we began to feel the limits of that physical solution. All the mass of our moons and planets had been built into vehicles and all the radiation of our star had been efficiently trapped. Of course we tried to limit our growth, but our total population had become so large that even the smallest rate of increase produced more people than we could care for. "We sought new stars to colonize, but those in reach had all been claimed. We did begin efforts at expansion to a few such undeveloped worlds as Nggongga, but even the most backward races turned out to have an irrational attachment to their plague-ridden planets. "Now and then some radical wanted to relinquish our policy of non-contact, suggesting that our exported technology would soon conquer all the civilized galaxy, converting every star into a new swarmworld. Such proposals were always vetoed. We still respect other cultures." Blacklantern had moved impatiently. "Give me time." With a chiding grin, Toolsmith gestured at the pottery bottle. "You may as well relax. You're too late to stop Snowfire's transposition, and she would want you to know all the details before you come to your own decision." Stubbornly, he shook his head at the bottle. "As you like." Toolsmith shrugged. "But there's no hurry." If I kill him, he told himself, Snowfire will hate me. If she's still alive, he added, to hate anybody. Grimly, he sat back to listen. "We had come to the physical limits," Toolsmith rambled easily on. "it looked as if our growth had ended, until the computers made a breakthrough. Of course our computer technology had always been advanced, stimulated by all the demands of our expansion into space. For dozens of generations, all our culture had been going into the memory banks -- science and engineering, laws and commercial records, literature and history, even music and art. When our dilemma of numbers became acute, the computer net met the challenge with transposition. "From the living body, into the computer!" Toolsmith paused to enjoy his shocked response. "The entire mental content is read out and stored. Memory and awareness. Patterns of habit. Emotions and perceptions. Capacity for learning and thinking and growing. Everything that makes us human, scanned from the fragile and fallible cells of the organic brain and transposed into solid-state matrices in eternal crystals. "Finally, we've shaken off our old animal inheritance -- all the jungle traits that trip up progress on planets like Nggongga. We've really done what the priests and philosophers have been calling for since mankind left old Earth. We've broken the chains of the body, to set the human spirit free. "If you can grasp that -- " Toolsmith stopped, blinking at him doubtfully. "All this means that Snowfire is dead?" He sank back against the cushions, as numb as if an unmilked tly had stung him. "You did this -- this thing to her?" His hands ached for Toolsmith's scrawny neck so savagely he had to clutch them together. "You fed her mind into some machine? And let her body die?" Toolsmith was nodding cheerily. "I'm the exception. In most cases the bodies aren't revived." His thin shoulders twisted in a gesture of benign unconcern. "Not that they matter. I've been speaking to Snowfire and my own transposed self. They're both too. busy exploring their new state of being to have much time for me but they're certainly very much alive." "I -- I won't believe it!" Blacklantem tried to soften his grating voice, and he made his quivering fists relax. "Snowfire was so -- so wann, so bright and beautiful. So altogether human. She can't be herself, caged in some cold machine." "I knew you'd find the notion hard to take." Toolsmith made a compassionate Nggonggan click. "You're displaying the normal primitive prejudice against machines, but I hope you'll try to rise above it. If you'll stop to think, you'll have to admit that human brain tissue is just about the worst possible vehicle for intelligence." He grunted his angry disbelief. "Compare the two!" Toolsmith urged him blandly. "The organic brain functions through clumsy electro-chemical processes propagated at a few hundred feet per second. The computer functions at the speed of light. At best, the human brain is a transient association of unlikely atoms, designed by random evolutionary mutations. Our great computer net is the ultimate mental instrument, formed by intelligence for the functions of intelligence." Toolsmith's pale eyes shone, and a sudden fervor lifted his twangy Nggonggan nasals. "Transposition sharpens all your sensations and amplifies your emotions. It lifts all experience to a new level of intensity -- nowfireand my new self assure me that making love is now an ecstacy they had never hoped to discover." Blacklantem tried not to flinch. "The change has made them truly immortal," Toolsmith ran happily on. "They're secure now from sickness and exhaustion, from all pain and decay. Their mental powers are multiplied beyond our comprehension. Their memories are absolute. They can make full and instant contact with all the other minds in the machine -- or even merge with them. They have reached a perfect state of being. One that you primitives never imagined, even for your greatest gods!" Blacklantem sat staring, feeling cold and dull and ill. "Drink up and cheer up!" Toolsmith drained the bottle into their glasses, splashing recklessly. "You haven't glimpsed the real beauty of it yet. I'm an engineer. I respect practical efficiency more than anything, and transposition is superlatively efficient. As a vehicle for life, our computer net is twelve our old organic bodies." He flourished his dripping glass. "Evaluate that! Twelve-point-two human beings -- fully supported with the same space and mass and energy we had been wasting to maintain only one. That's the reason you met so few people on your way here. Most of us -- in this sphere, anyhow -- have already been transposed. We have resources now former population." Adam's apple bobbing beneath the yellow freckles, he gulped his wine. "I suppose you're busy projecting our future population curves. The problem gets complex, because nobody ever dies. You'll be glad to know that birth still takes place inside the computer -- with none of the old physical hazards, and with vastly enhanced opportunities for intelligent selection and manipulation and recombination of the parental genetic factors. Without such growth, our whole world would die. Now, however, the rate of growth can be rationally controlled -- as it seldom has been on the primitive worlds." "I'm not projecting anything." Blacklantern tried to moderate his voice. "But tell me this. If transposition is everything you say, why didn't you let Snowfire take the secret back to the Benefactors? Don't other worlds need it?" "Our position makes good sense." Toolsmith met his harsh impatience with an air of mild reproof. "We don't export our culture -- simply because it is superior. In contact situations, the other race nearly always accepts it and lets their own culture die." Blacklantern has surged half upright, and Toolsmith beckoned him back toward his cushions. "Cultures are living entities, with their own rights to survive. When they are closely kin, they sometimes merge successfully. I can see a legitimate role for you Benefactors, in facilitating such mergers. But we have pulled too far ahead. Contact with your world would surely kill Nggonggan culture -- even though dislocated individuals might survive. We don't want that." Hastily, he raised both hands against Blacklantem's anger. "Share peace! We mean well, believe me, and the wisdom of our position has been established many times. Cultures grow. When you Nggonggans are ready for a new technology, you'll find it for yourselves." "You're wrong!" Blacklantern rasped. "Cultures have always spread from people to people. The impact of new ways may be painful -- but progress always is. Our business as Benefactors is to ease the pain." Toolsmith shrugged, his contempt not entirely veiled. "About Snowfire -- " Blacklantem stopped to smooth his tone and he spread both hands in the Game clan gesture that begged for hospitality. "Can I speak to her? Whereever she is!" "If she likes." Toolsmith waved a limp freckled hand at the stereo tank. "You'll have to remember that transposition has enlarged her whole scale of being. I' really doubt that you matter to her now. But you can try." Lazily, he rose. "With all respects. Benefactor." He stood dipping his white-stubbled head in a Nggonggan bow of parting. "You've had a pretty full briefing, and now the medics want me at the lab. Their gross observations are completed. I'm reporting now for the histological studies, so I don't expect to be back." "You mean -- " Shock caught Blacklantem's voice. "You expect to die?" "The medics will be using up my body." He nodded casually. "It's good for nothing else. But the real me, programmed into the machine, is more alive than ever. I'll never die." "Once in the arena I heard a disciple of Cru Creetha make the same boast. An hour later he was stung and begging for the dagger." "People don't return from Cru Creetha's mythical kingdom." Toolsmith murmured. "But if you'll wait here, I think Snowfire will come back to you." His white head bobbed again. "Share drink, share food, share peace." "TIeesh," Blacklantem answered stiffly. "Share life." He was busy for a moment at the control panel in the entry. Blacklantern heard him humming an old Sand clan love song. Then the door whispered, and he was gone. f V in that tiny odd oasis of Nggonggan culture. Blacklantem felt lifted with the same curious lightness and keenness that had filled him before his first tly fight. The smoke from the muskweed censer became unendurably sharp and sweet. The aftertaste of the wine turned acid in his mouth. The breathless stillness seemed to promise some intolerable explosion. Each beat of his heart opened another anxious infinity. The faint click of the stereo tank seemed louder than a mangun. He had to squint and blink against the sudden glare that burst through its fog. Before any form took shape, he heard Snowfire's eager lowpitched voice: "Blackie! I'm so glad you came." Now in paperback The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes esis with astrological overtones, bul supported by the latest scientific findings: the forlhcoming Grand Alignment of the planets in # may trigger a California earthquake far worse than the San Francisco catastrophe of #. # Three Novellas About the Spirit of Man est addition to Vintage's growing Hst of preslige science fiction -- a collection of three masterful novellas by one of the top writers in the field. # a division of Random House While she spoke, the burst and swirl of fire in the tank had become another Nggonggan room, with ornamental daggers and patterned carpets on the walls and muskweed stalks charring in a black clay censer on a bronze tripod. Almost exactly, it mirrored the room where he was -- but the person reflected where he stood was Snowfire. He ran to meet her, rejoicing in her warm golden loveliness. She wore something snug and lustrous that flowed to the floor but bared one firm pale-gold breast. Her green-gold eyes smiled into his, dazzling with delight. "Watch the glass!" In his hot desire to take her in his arms, he had almost forgotten the wall of the tank. She raised her hand to stop him and laughed at the way he checked himself, a glint of malice in her eyes. "Vou can't just walk into the computer," she said. "I'll have to send a car to bring you to the transposition center. A few minutes -- if you can wait!" He recoiled, amost as if she had slapped him. "You're really -- dead?" he whispered. "Except -- " "I suppose." Her carefree shrug sent waves of fire through her redgolden hair. "The bodies aren't revived. They go straight to the mass exchangers." "You can't -- " His aching throat caught again. "You can't come back?" "Why should anyone go back?" Her long body shivered in the tight scarlet sheath, and her eyes grew dark with something close to terror. "I remember life as it used to be -- when I knew no better. I thought it was good, as you still do. But now I could never endure all its agonies again. The limits of the organic body. The frustration and weakness and pain. The dread of inevitable death. Worst of all, the loneliness." Her long golden arms opened toward him. "I loved you, Blackie. I believe you loved me. But we were both terribly alone -- shut up in the prisons of our organic bodies as all mortal humanity is. I could never really understand you -- never really reach you. We always had a barrier between us." She gestured impatiently, as if to brush the wall of the tank aside. "Out here, we communicate. The old barriers are gone. Contact is closer than speech or touch. You're part of everybody else, as fully as you wish to be. All that anyone has ever learned or lived is yours to remember -- to be -- with no loss of the individual you . " . She made a wry little grimace that twisted a dagger in his own recollection. "Words aren't good enough. They never were. Nothing was -- not even the love we had in the desert, with the Game clan hunters behind us." She paused to smile at him dreamily, eves half closed, lips a little parted, arms slowly lifting to her red-golden hair. "You'll know what I mean," she breathed, "when you're transposed. When we love, we'll truly share each other. I'll feel all you feel, and you'll feel all I feel. We'll be entirely one." Thinking of Toolsmith, he fet weak and cold. "Here outside, all of us share everything." She reached again as if to grasp his hand. "A quantum jump in human evolution!" Her breathless huskiness begged him to understand. "In all the history of the universe, the only important fact has been the slow expansion of awareness, from a tiny spark in the first one-celled things to each stage of brighter light as some new power of mind emerged. If you look for the quantum jumps, they have all been inventions in communication -- nerve tissue, sense organs, language, writing, electronics, the space gates. "Now, transposition!" She was leaning closer to the barrier, so ripe and warm and wonderful that he quivered with desire. "Those inventions have always fused minds together, into greater and greater social beings. Into many-celled individuals. Into families. Into tribes. Into nations. Into the whole galactic civilization. Each stage enjoyed wider perceptions, a vaster experience, a higher level of awareness. Now, through our computer net, uncountable merged minds have reached a new era of conscious evolution. We've become a supermind!" The light in her green eyes frightened him. "The final limits of our new power are not yet tested -- if any limits do exist -- but we can already control mass and energy and space and time as no lone human brain could ever hope to. We can already sense older and greater superminds in the farther arms of the galaxy, and we're reaching out for contact with them. We can already foresee even more exciting quantum jumps on our way, toward a full conquest of all the brute stuff of the whole universe by a completely conscious mind. A fully sentient cosmos! "Blackie, aren't you thrilled?" Both hands now pressed hard against the cold crystal wall between them, he stood frozen, dazed with a shapeless dread, gripped in spite of himself by her triumphant emotion yet stunned by the stark immensity of her vision. "Blackie, haven't you been troubled by the nature of things?" Her voice fell appealingly, as if she had suddenly sensed his whirling uncertainty. "By the deadness of all the cold mass around us? By all the stubborn facts that feelings can't change? By the terrible gap between what we are and what we want?' ' When she paused, he had to nod. "The world has always been a poor fit for us." Her urgency was almost plaintive. "Most science and most art and religion has been a pathetic effort to improve that fit -- to discover or invent some sort of order or meaning in the shape of nature. Now we've found the natural plan." Elation quickened the rythm of her voiee. "Now at last, we belong! We're all part of an increasing natural order that will expand without limit until it has transformed the whole space-time universe into the mental instrument of a single ultimate awareness -- " A gong boomed. "Your car." Her bright head moved toward the doorway behind him. "Waiting to take you to the transposition center." Her voice sank huskily again, almost caressingly. "You needn't hesitate. The process has been perfected for several generations, and tested many pain at all. The scanner itself puts you to sleep, and your body will never be revived." Her full lips pouted as if to kiss him. "In an hour, you'll be with me." The gong throbbed again. He drew back from her, trembling. "Listen to me, Blackie!" Her voice was flat and shallow now, alarmed. "If you're still doubtful, I can understand. I was a Benefactor, too, you know. The old way of thinking was hard to shake off. When Engineer Toolsmith first told me about transposition, I begged for permission to take the invention -- or even just the news about it -- back to the fellowship. He said it wasn't possible. I appealed to the transposition staff, on the grounds that isolation law didn't apply to me because I wasn't a swarmworld citizen. Once I thought I was about to win, but they kept delaying the decision till Toolsmith persuaded me to come through with him. Now I wouldn't go back -- not for anything!" Her pleading voice sank breathlessly. "Trust me, Blackie!" "I -- " A throb of pain closed his throat. "I guess I'm still a Benefactor. I thank you for reminding me of that." "Blackie!" She cried his name sharply. "I was so happy when Toolsmith said you were here to join us. You can't -- " He saw her bright tears welling. "You can't turn back!" Her golden arms had opened for him. He swayed toward her till his head struck the crystal wall. In an agony of frustration, he drove his fist against it. The impact dimmed her image and set diamond sparks to dancing all around her. "Don't!" Her image cleared again, her eyes black with pain. "You could smash the glass. You could bleed. You could die, Blackie. Die!" Dread hushed her voice. "You could miss immortality -- all your splendid chance to share the transformation of the universe. "If you love me -- " A third time, the gong boomed. "Come, Blackie!" she breathed. "Come now. The car can't wait." "I -- I can't!" "Why, Blackie? Why?" "Maybe -- maybe I'm too primitive." Stiffly, with both hands, he pushed himself away from the tank. "I do love you, Snowfire -- at least I loved the human you. But I'm not quite ready to become a god. I'm going home to be a Benefactor." "You're refusing transposition?" Her wet eyes widened. "The greatest gift there is! I don't understand you, Blackie. I never could." "You've become a goddess. I'm still a black Nggonggan." "Knowing about transposition -- " Her hurt eyes searched him again. "How can you be just a Benefactor?" "I think I see my mission now," he told her. "I'm going to take the news back, as you wanted to -- if I can get back. I can't take the actual process. Maybe Nggongga isn't ready for it. But I think my troubled people need new beliefs to replace the old myths that progress and knowledge have killed. Perhaps the legend of eternal life in the computer can replace the old legend of Cru Creetha." She shook her head, bewildered. "I offer godhood." Her eyes were blankly accusing. "You want only a legend. I hope you're never sorry -- ' ' Her head turned as if to listen. "Good-by, Blackie!" Briefly, sadly, she glanced back at him. "Freckles is calling me now." The projected room around her dimmed and faded. The Nggonggan daggers and rugs and censer were gone. Where they had been, he saw the fleeting image of a bare black granite peak. Toolsmith stood there with his angular arm flung out toward a huge red sun rising from a flat black ocean. When Snowfire appeared there, he turned to welcome her with his gaptoothed, grin, and she was scrambling to his side as they vanished. Blacklantern stood a long time gazing into the empty stereo tank. "Freckles!" The sound grated harshly in his throat. "Freckles!" He swung abruptly from the tank to stalk the empty room, all his new resolution crumbling into pain and doubt. Even though he had refused Snowfire's gift of something like divinity, her golden image still haunted him. Not eternal, he was not yet ready to die. He had rashly spoken of returning to Nggongga, but he knew no way to get there. He felt utterly lost, in a world he would never know. That rnellow gong throbbed again. Uncertain what it could mean, he started toward the entry. "Blackie!" The doorway was open, and another Snowfire stood there, quietly smiling. He stared, recoiled, gasped for breath, and swept her into his arms. Her golden flesh felt warm and firm and real. Her redglinting hair was fragrant with her own clean sweetleaf scent, and he found no barrier between them. "You look -- terrible!" She caught his arms and pushed him off to study him. "Was my other self so frightful?" "I thought you were dead." "That was my transposed self." She nodded at the gray-fogged tank. "But I'm the original me." Her green eyes smiled at his mute astonishment. "I. hadn't really expected to be revived, but I had applied for permission to return to Nggongga and the transposition staff has finally agreed that we're not under their legitimate jurisdiction. They're opening the gates to return us to Nggongga. The car's waiting. "Shall we go?" He glanced back into the stereo tank, where her superhuman self had offered him everlasting life. Its cloudy depths looked cold and dead. He waggled three black fingers at it, in a childhood gesture against Cru Creetha, and swung eagerly back to grasp her mortal hand. They ran together to the waiting car.  Note: Madmen are often unable to distinguish between dream, reality, and...between dream and reality. None of the incidents in Henry Lafarge's narrative ever happened or could have happened. His "Orinoco Institute" bears no relation to the actual think tank of that name, his "Drew Blenheim" in no way resembles the famous futurologist, and his "United States of America" is not even a burlesque upon the real United States of Armorica. I couldn't hear him. "Can't hear you, Blenheim. The line must be bad." "Or mad, Hank. I wonder what that would take?" "What what?" "What it would take to drive a telephone system out of its mind, eh? So that it wasn't just giving wrong numbers, but madly right ones. Let's see: Content-addressable computer memories to shift the conversations..." I stopped listening. A bug was crawling up the window frame across the room. It moved like a cockroach, but I couldn't be sure. "Look, Blenheim, I'm pretty busy today. Is there something on your mind?' ' He plowed right on. "... so if you're trying to reserve a seat on the plane to Seville, you'd get a seat at the opera instead. While the person who wants the opera seat is really making an appointment with a barber, whose customer is just then talking to the box-office for Hair, or maybe making a hairline reservation..." "Blenheim, I'm talking to you." "Yes?" "What was it you called me up about?" "Oh, this and that. I was wondering, for instance, whether parrots have internal clocks." "What?" I still couldn't be sure the bug was a cockroach, but I saluted just in case. "If so, maybe we could get them to act as speaking clocks." He sounded crazier than ever. What trivial projects for one of the best brains of our century -- no wonder he was on leave. "Blenheim, I'm busy. Institute work must go on, you know." "Yes. Tell you what, why don't you drop over this afternoon? I have something to talk over with you." "Can't. I have a meeting all afternoon." "Fine, fine. See you, then. Anytime around #:# . ' ' Madmen never listen. Oelmut rassmussen came in just as Blenheim hung up on me. He seemed distressed. Not that his face showed it; ever since that bomb wrecked his office, Hel has been unable to move his face. Hysterical paralysis. Dr. Grobe had explained. But Hel could signal whatever he felt by fiddling with the stuff in his shirt pocket. For anger, his red pencil came out (and sometimes underwent a savage sharpening), impatience made him work his slide rule, surprise made him glance into his pocket diary, and so on. Just now he was clicking the button on his ballpoint pen with some agitation. For a moment he seemed about to actually take it out and draw worry lines on his forehead. "What is it, Hel? The costing on Project Faith?" He spread the schedules on my desk and pointed to the snag: a discrepancy between the estimated cost of blasting apart and hauling away the Rocky Mountains, and the value of oil recovered in the process. "I see. The trains, eh? Diesels seem to use most of the oil we get. How about steam locomotives, then?" He clapped me on the shoulder and nodded. "By the way, Hel, I won't be at the meeting today. Blenheim just called up. Wants to see me." Hel indicated surprise. "Look, I know he's a crackpot. You don't have to pocket-diary me, I know he's nuts. But he's also technically still the Director. Our boss. They haven't taken him off the payroll, just put him on sick leave. Besides, he used to have a lot of good ideas." Hel took out a felt-tip pen and began to doodle with some sarcasm. The fact was, Blenheim had completely lost his grip during his last year at the Institute. Before the government forced him to take leave, he'd been spending half a rumors said, glass pancakes. And who could forget his plan to arm the police with chocolate revolvers? "Sure, he's had a bad time, but he's better now," I said without conviction. Institute people never get better, Hel seemed to retort. They just keep on making bigger and better decisions, with more and more brilliance and finality, until they break. Like glass pancakes giving out an ever purer ring, they explode. It was true. Like everyone else here, I was seeing Dr Grobe, our resident psychiatrist, several times a week. Then there were cases beyond even the skill of Dr Grobe: Joe Feeney, who interrupted his work (on the uses of holograms) one day to announce that he was a file cabinet. Edna Bessler, who believed that she was being pursued by a synthetic a priori proposition. The lovely entomologist Pawlie Sutton, who just disappeared. And George Hoad, whose rocket research terminated when he walked into the Gents one day and cut his throat. George spent the last few minutes of consciousness vainly trying to mop up the bloody floor with toilet paper... Something was wrong with the personnel around this place, all right. And I suspected that our little six-legged masters knew more about this than they were saying. Finally I mumbled, "I know it's useless, Hel. But I'd better find out what he wants." You do what you think is best, Hel thought. He stalked out of my office, then, examining the point on his red pencil. The bug was a cockroach, P.americana. It sauntered across the wall until it reached the curly edge of a wall poster, then it flew about a foot to land on the nearest dark spot. This was Uncle Sam's right eye. Uncle Sam, with his accusing eyes and finger, was trying to recruit men for the Senate and House of Representatives. On this poster, he said, "The Senate Needs men". So far, the recruiting campaign was a failure. Who could blame people for not wanting to go on the "firing line" in Washington? The casualty rate of Congressmen was thirty per cent annually, and climbing, in spite of every security measure we could think of. Which reminded me of work. I scrubbed off the blackboard and started laying out a contingency tree for Project Pogo, a plan to make the whole cabinet -- all # secretaries -- completely mobile, hence, proof against revolution. So far the Security Secretary didn't care for the idea of "taking to our heels", but it was cheaper to keep the cabinet on the move than to guard them in Washington. The cockroach, observing my industry, left by a wall ventilator, and I breathed easier. The contingency tree didn't look so interesting by now, and out the window I could see real trees. The lawn rolled away down from the building to the river (not the Orinoco, despite our name). The far bank was blue-black with pines, and the three red maples on our lawn, this time of year, stood out like For just the duration of a bluejay's flight from one to another, I could forget about the stale routine, the smell of chalkdust. I remembered a silly day three years ago, when I'd carved a heart on one of those trees, with Pawlie Sutton's initials and my own. Now a security guard strolled his puma into view. They stopped under the nearest maple and he snapped the animal's lead. It was up the trunk in two bounds, and out of sight among the leaves. While that stupid-faced man in uniform looked up, the fireball shook and swayed above him. A few great leaves fell, bright as drops of blood. Now what was this headache going to be about? All the big problems were solved, or at least we knew how to solve them. The world was just about the way we wanted it, now, except we no longer seemed to want it just that way. That's how Mr Howell, the Secretary of Personal Relationships, had put it in his telecast. What was missing? God, I think he said. God had made it possible for us to dam the Amazon and move the Orinoco, to feed India and dig gold from the ocean floor and cure cancer. And now God -- the way Howell said it made you feel that He, too was in the Cabinet -- God was going to help us get down and solve our personal, human problems. Man's inhumanity to man. The lack of communication. The hatred. God and Secretary Howell were going to get right down to some committee work on this. I think that was the telecast where Howell announced the introduction of detention camps for "malcontents". Just until we got all of our personal problems ironed out. I had drawn up plans for these camps that summer. Then George Hoad borrowed my pocket knife one day and never gave it back. Then the headaches started. As I stepped outside, the stupidfaced guard was looking up the skirt of another tree. "Prrt., prrt" he said quietly, and the black puma dropped to earth beside him. There was something hanging out of its mouth that looked like a bluejay's wing. "Good girl. Good girl." I hurried away to the helicopter. Drew Blenheim's tumbledown mansion sits in the middle of a withered woods. For half a mile around, the trees are laced together with high-voltage fence. Visitors are blindfolded and brought in by helicopter. There are also rumors of minefields and other security measures. At that time, I put it all down to Blenheim's paranoia. The engine shut down with the sound of a coin spinning to rest. Hands helped me out and removed my blindfold. The first thing I saw, hanging on a nearby stretch of fence, was a lump of bones and burnt fur from some small animal. The guards and their submachineguns escorted me only as far as the door, for Blenheim evidently hated seeing signs of the security he craved. The house looked dismal and decayed -- the skull of some future Orinoco Institute? A servant wearing burnt cork makeup and white gloves ushered me through a dim. hallway that smelled of hay and on into the library. "I'll tell Mr Blenheim you're here, sir. Perhaps you'd care to read one of his monographs while you wait?" I flicked through The Garden of Regularity (a slight tract recommending that older people preserve intestinal health by devouring their own dentures) and opened an insanely boring book called Can Bacteria Read? I was staring uncomprehendingly af one of its pages when a voice said: "Are you still here?" The plump old woman had evidently been sitting in her deep chair when I came in. As she craned around at me, I saw she had a black eye. Something was wrong with her hair, too. "I thought you'd left by now -- oh, it's you." "Madame, do I know you?" She sat forward and put her face to the light. The black eye was tattooed, and the marcelled hair was really a cap of paper, covered with wavy ink lines. But it was Edna Bessler, terribly aged. "You've changed, Edna." "So would you, young man, if you'd been chased around a nuthouse for two years by a synthetic a priori proposition." She sniffed. "Well, thank heavens the revolution is set for tomorrow." I laughed nervously. "Well, Edna, it certainly is good to see you. What are you doing here, anyway?" "There are quite a few of the old gang here: Joe Feeney and -- and others. This place has become a kind of repair depot for mad futurologists. Blenheim is very kind, but of course he's quite mad himself. Mad as a wet hen. As you see from his writing." "Can Bacteria Read? I couldn't read it." "Oh, he thinks that germs are, like people, amenable to suggestion. So, with the proper application of mass hypnosis among the microbe populations, we ought to be able to cure any illness with any quack remedy." I nodded. "Hope he recovers soon. I'd like to see him back at the Institute, working on real projects again. Big stuff, like the old days. I'll never forget Drew Blenheim, the man who invented satellite dialing." Satellite dialing came about when the malcontents were trying to jam government communications systems, cut lines and blow up exchange offices. Blenheim's system virtually made each telephone a complete exchange in itself, dialling directly through a satellite. Voice signals were compressed and burped skywards in short bursts that evaded most jamming signals. It was an Orinoco Institute triumph over anarchy. Edna chuckled. "Oh, he's working on real projects again. I said he was mad, not useless. Now if you'll help me out of this chair, I must go fix an elephant." I was sure I'd misheard this last. After she'd gone, I looked over a curious apparatus in the corner. Parts of it were recognizeable -- a clock inside a parrot cage, a gas laser, and a fringed shawl suspended like a flag from a walkingstick thrust into a watermelon -- but their combination was baffling. At #:# by the clock in the cage, the blackface servwt took me to a gloomy great hall place, scattered with the shapes of easy chairs and sofas. A figure in a diving suit rose from the piano and waved me to a chair. Then it sat down again, flipping out its airhoses behind the bench. For a few minutes I suffered Mexican tune. But when lilenhcim -- no doubt it was he -- stood up and started juggling orangc.s, I felt it was time to speak tnit. "Look, I've interrupted my work to come here. Is this all you have to how me?" One of the oranges vaulted high, nut of sight in the gloom above; .inothcr hit me in the chest. The figure opened its faceplate and grinned. "Long time no see. Hank." It was me. explained, plucking at it. "I couldn't resist trying it on you, life gets so tedious here. Ring for Rastus, will you? I want to shed this suit." We made small talk while the servant helped him out of the heavy diving suit. Rather, Blenheim rattled on alone; I wasn't feeling well at all. The shock of seeing myself had reminded me of something I should remember, but couldn't...to build a heraldry vending machine. Put in a coin, punch out your name, and it prints a coat-ofarms. Should suit those malcontents, eh? All they probably really want is a coat-of-arms." "They're just plain evil," I said. ' 'When I think of how they bombed poor Hel Rassmussen s office -- " "Oh, he did that himself. Didn't you know?" "A suicide attempt? So that explains the hysterical paralysis!" My face looked exasperated, as Blenheim peeled it off. "Is that what Dr Grobe told you? Paralyzed, hell, the blast blew his face clean off. Poor Hel's present face is a solid plate of plastic, bolted on. He breathes through a hole in his shoulder and feeds himself at the armpit. If Grobe told you any different, he's just working on your morale." From upstairs came a kind of machine-gun clatter. The minstrel servant glided in with a tray of drinks. "Oh, Rastus. Tell the, twins not to practice their tap-dancing just now, will you? Hank looks as if he has a headache." "Yes, sir. By the way, the three-legged elephant has arrived. I put it in the front hall. I'm afraid the prosthesis doesn't fit." "I'll fix it. Just ask Jumbo to lean up against the wall for half an hour." "Very good, sir." After this, I decided to make my escape from this Bedlam. "Doesn't anybody around here ever do anything straightforward or say anything in plain English?" "We're trying to tell you something, Hank, but it isn't easy. For one thing, I'm not sure we can trust you." "Trust me for what?" His twisted face twisted out a smile. "If you don't know, then how can we trust you? But come with me to the conservatory and I'll show you something." We went to a large room with dirty glass walls. To me it looked like nothing so much as a bombedout workshop. Though there were bags of fertilizer oh the floor, there wasn't a living plant in sight. Instead, the tables were littered with machinery and lab equipment: jumbles of retorts and colored wires and nuts and bolts that made no sense. "What do you see. Hank?" "Madness and chaos. You might as well have pears in the light sockets and a banana on the telephone cradle, for all I can make of it." He laughed. "That's better. We'll crazily you yet." I pointed to a poster-covered cylinder standing in the comer. One of the posters had Uncle Sam, saying: "I Need men for Congress". "What's that Parisian advertising-kiosk doing here?" "Rastus built that for us, out of scrap alloys I had lying around. Like it?" I shrugged. "The top's too pointed. It looks like -- " "Yes, go on." "This is silly. All of you need a few sessions with Dr Grobe," I said. "I'm leaving." "I was afraid you'd say that. Hank. But it's you who needs another session with Dr Grobe." "You think #'m crazy?" "No, you're too damned sane." "From your viewpoint, yes!" I shouted. "Why bother with all that security outside? Afraid someone will steal the idea of a minstrel show or the secret of a kiosk?" He laughed again. "Hank, those guards aren't to keep strangers out. They're to keep us in. You see, my house really and truly is a madhouse." I stamped out a side door and ordered my helicopter. the guard. "Take it easy with that blindfold." "Oh, sorry, mac. Hey, look, it's none of my business, but what did you do with that tree you brung with you?" "Tree?" God, even the guards were catching it. T'hat evening I went to see Dr Grobe. "Another patient? I swear. I'm going to install a revolving door on this office. Sit down, Uh, Hank LaFarge, isn't it? Sit down. Hank. Let's see...oh, you're the guy who's afraid of cockroaches, right?" "Not exactly afraid of them. In fact they remind me of someone I used to be fond of. Pawlie Sutton used to work with them. But my problem is, I know that cockroaches are the real bosses. We're just kidding ourselves with our puppet government, our Uncle Sham -- " He chuckled appreciatively. "But what 'bugs' me, doctor, is that nobody will recognize this plain and simple truth." "Ah-ah. Remember, last time you agreed to call me by my first name. Hank." "Sorry. Sorry, uh, Oddpork." I couldn't imagine anyone with that first name wanting to be called by it, unless he wanted to get used to it himself. He was an odd-pork of a man, too; plump and rumpy, with over-large hands that never stopped adjusting his already well-adjusted clothes. He always looked surprised at everything I said, even "hello." Every session, he made the same joke about the revolving door. Still, repetitive jokes help build up a family atmosphere, which was probably what he wanted. There was a certain comfort in this stale world of no surprises. Happy families are all alike, and their past is exactly like their future. "Hank, I haven't asked you directly about your cockroach theory before, have I? Want to tell me about it?" "I know it sounds crazy at first. For one thing, cockroaches aren't very smart, I know that. In some ways, they're stupider than ants. And their communication equipment isn't much, either. Touch and smell, mainly. They aren't naturally equipped for conquering the world." Oddpork lit a cigar and leaned back, looking at the ceiling. "What do they do with the world when they get it?" "That's another problem. After all, they don't need the world. All they need is food, water, a fair amount of darkness and some warmth. But there's the key, you see? "I mean, we humans have provided for all of these needs, for many centuries. Haphazardly, though. So it stands to reason life would be better for them if we worked for them on a regular basis. But to get us to do that, they have to take over first." He tried to blow a smoke ring, failed, and adjusted his tie. "Go on. How do they manage this takeover?" "I'm not sure, but I think they have help. Maybe some smart tinkerer wanted to see what would happen if he gave them good longdistance vision. Maybe he was so pleased with the result that he taught them to make semaphore signals with their feelers. The rest is history." Dusting his lapel. Dr Grobe said, "I don't quite follow. Semaphore signals?" "One cockroach is stupid. But a few thousand of them in good communication could make up a fair brain. Our tinkerer probably hastened that along by intensive breeding and group learning probwould take ten years at the outside." Really? And how long would tlie conquest of man take? How would the little insects fare against the armies of the world?" "They never need to try. Armies are run by governments, and governments are run, for all practical purposes, by small panels of experts. Think tanks like the Orinoco Institute. And -- this just occurred to me -- for all practical purposes, you run the Institute." For once, Dr Grobe did not look surprised. "Oh, so I'm in on the plot, am I?" "We're all so crazy, we really depend on you. You can ensure that we work for the good of the cockroaches, or else you can get rid of us -- send us away, or encourage our suicides." "Why should I do that?" "Because you are afraid of them." "Not at all." But his hand twitched, and a little cigar ash fell on his immaculate trousers. I felt my point was proved. "Damn. I'll have to sponge that. Excuse me." Ke stepped into his private washroom and closed the door. My feeling of triumph suddenly faded. Maybe I was finally cracking. What evidence did I really have? On the other hand. Dr Grobe was taking a long time in there. I stole over to the washroom door and listened. "...verge of suicide... ," he murmured. "...yes...give up the idea, but...yes, that's what I..." I threw back the door on a traditional spy scene. In the half darkness. Dr G hunched over the medicine cabinet, speaking into a microphone. He wore earphones. "Hank, don't be a foo -- " I hit him, not hard, and he sat down on the edge of the bathtub. He looked resigned. "So this is my imagined conspiracy, is it? Where do these wires lead?" .They led inside the medicine cabinet, to a tiny apparatus. A dozen brown ellipses had clustered about it, like a family around the TV. "Let me explain," he said. "Explanations are unnecessary, doctor. I just want to get out of here, unless your six-legged friends can stop me." "They might. So could I. I could order the guards to shoot you. I could have you put away with your crazy friends. I could even have you tried for murder, just now." "Murder?" I followed his gaz, back to the office. From under iIk desk, a pair of feet. "Who's that?" "Hel Rasmussen. Poisoned him self a few minutes before you came in. Believe me, it wasn't pleasant, seeing the poor fellow holding a bottle of cyanide to his armpit. He left a note blaming you, in a way." "Me!" "You were the last straw. This afternoon, he saw you take an ax and deliberately cut down one of those beautiful maple trees in the yard. Destruction of beauty -- it was too much for him." Trees again. I went to the office window and looked out at the floodlit landscape. One of the maples was missing. Dr Grobe and I sat down again at our respective interview stations while I thought this over. Blenheim and his mask came into it, I was sure of that. But why? from the ashtray. "The point is, I can stop you from making any trouble for me. So you may as well hear me out." He scratched a match on the sole of Hel's shoe and relit the cigar... "All right, Oddpork. You win. What happens now?" "Nothing much. Nothing at all. If my profession has any meaning, it's to keep things from happening." He blew out the match. "I'm selling ordinary life. Happiness, as you must now see, lies in developing a pleasant, comfortable and productive routine -- and then sticking to it. No unpleasant surprises. No shocks. Psychiatry has always aimed for that, and now it is within our grasp. The cockroach conspiracy hasn't taken over the world, but it has taken over the Institute -- and it's our salvation. "You see. Hank, our bargain isn't one-sided. We give them a little shelter, a few scraps of food. But they give us something far more important: real organization. The life of pure routine." I snorted. "Like hurrying after trains? Or wearing ourselves out on assembly line work? Or maybe grinding our lives away in boring offices? Punching time clocks and marching in formation?" "None of the above, thank you. Hank, cockroaches never hurry to anything but dinner. They wouldn't march in formation except for fun. They are free -- yet they are part of a highly organized society. And this can be ours." "If we're all put in detention camps." "Listen, those camps are only a grumblers get sterilized and shut away for a year or' two? Think of zens, enjoying a freedom they have earned. Someday, every man will live exactly as he pleases -- and his pleasure will lie in serving his fellow men." Put like that, it was persuasive. Another half-hour of this and I was all but convinced. "Sleep on it, eh. Hank? Let me know tomorrow what you think." His large hand on my shoulder guided me to the door. "You may be right," I said, smiling back at him. I meant it, too. Even though the last thing I saw, as the door closed, was a stream of glistening brown that came from under the washroom door and disappeared underneath the desk. the night, staring out at the maple stump. There was no way out: Either I worked for Periplaneta americana and gradually turned into a kind of moral cockroach myself, or I was killed. And there were certain advantages to either choice. I was about to turn on the video recorded to leave a suicide note, when I noticed the cassette was already recorded. I ran it back and played it. Blenheim came on, wearing my face and my usual suit. "They think I'm you. Hank, dictating soine notes. Right now you're really at my house, reading a dull book in the library. So dull, in fact, that it's guaranteed to put you into a light trance. When I'm safely back, Edna will come in and wake you. "She's not as loony as she seems. The black eye is inked for her telescope, and the funny cap with lines on it, that looks like marcelled hair, that's a weathermap. I won't explain why she's doing astronomy -- you'll understand in time. "On the other hand, she's got a fixation that the stars are nothing but the shiny backs of cockroaches, treading around the heavenly An Informal  Irrevarant Sclanca Fiction A Fantaay Journal Edited  Publlahed by Richard E. Gala Issue ## (Feb.) will feature a combination interviewarticle with Delap. Also: "Science Fiction's Greatest Disaster -- Hugo Gemsback!" A Revisionist View by Darreii Schweitzer. Nostaigia -- "Visit To a Puipy Planet" by Milton F. Stevens. Columnist: Larry Shaw. Every issue -- The Archives: new book  story lists. Quartartysatnple I year #two yrs. # P. #. #x# Portland, OR #I spheres. It makes a kind of sense when you think about it: Periplaneta means around the world, and jamerica being the home of the Star-Spangled Banner. "Speaking of national anthems, Mexico's is La Cucaracha -- another cockroach reference. They seem to be taking over this message! "The gang and I have been thinking about bugs a lot lately. Of course Pawlie has always thought about them, but the rest of us... I missed the next part. So Pawlie was at the madhouse? And they hadn't told me? "... when I started work on the famous glass pancakes. I discovered a peculiar feature of glass discs, such as those found on clock faces. "Say, you can do us a favor. I'm coming around at dawn with the gang, to show you a gadget or two. We haven't got all the bugs out of them yet, but -- will you go into Dr Grobe's office at dawn, and check the time on his clock? But first, smash the glass on his window, will you? Thanks. I'll compensate him for it later. "Then go outside the building, but on no account stand between the maple stump, and the broken window. The best place to wait is the little bluff to the North, where you'll have a good view of the demonstration. We'll meet you there. "Right now you see our ideas darkly, as through a pancake, I guess. But soon you'll understand. You see, we're a kind of cockroach ourselves. I mean, living on scraps of sanity. We have to speak in parables and work in silly ways because they can't. They live in a comfortable kind of world where elephants have their feet cut off to make umbrella stands. We have to to make good use of the three-legged elephants, and other left-overs. "Don't bother destroying this cassette. It won't mean a thing to any right-living insect." It didn't mean much to me, not yet. Cockroaches in the stars? Clocks ? There were silly questions I had to ask. There was one question I'd already asked, that still needed an answer. Pawlie had been messing arund in her lab, when I asked her to marry me. Two years ago, was it? Or three? "But you don't like cockroaches," she said. "No, and I'll never ask a cockroach for its claw in marriage." I looked over her shoulder into the glass cage. "What's so interesting about these?" "Well, for one thing, they're not laboratory animals. I caught them myself in the basement here at the Institute. See? Those roundish ones are the numphs -- sexless adolescents. Cute, aren't they?" I had to admit they were. A little. "They look like the fat black exclamation points in comic strips," I observed. "They're certainly healthy, all of them. I've never seen any like them. I -- that's funny." She went and fetched a book, and looked from some illustration to the specimens behind glass. "What's funny?" "Look, I'm going to be dissecting the rest of the afternoon. Meet you for dinner. Bye." "You haven't answered my question, Pawlie." "Bye." That was the last I saw of her. Later, Dr Grobe put it about that she'd been found in some distant city, hopelessly insane. Still later, George Hoad cut his throat. The floodlights went off, and I could see dawn grayness and mist. I took a can of beans and went for a stroll outside. One of the guards nodded a wary greeting. They and their cats were always jumpiest at this time of day. "Everyting all right, officer?" "Yeah. Call me crazy, but I think I Just heard an elephant." When he and his puma were out of sight, I heaved the can of beans through Dr Grobe's lighted window. "What the hell?" he shouted. I slipped back to my office, waited a few minutes, and then went to see him. A slender ray came through the broken window and struck the clock on the opposite wall. Grobe sat transfixed, staring at it with more surprise than ever. And no wonder, for the clock had become a parrot. "Relax, Oddpork," I said. "It's only some funny kind of hologram in the clock face, worked by a laser from the lawn. You look like a comic villain, sitting there with that cigar stub in your face." The cigar stub moved. Looking closer, I saw it was made up of the packed tails of a few cockroaches, trying to force themselves between his closed lips. More ran up from his spotless collar and joined them, and others made for his nostrils. One approached the queue at the mouth, found a comrade stuck there, and had a nibble at its kicking hind leg. "Get away! Get away!" I gave Grobe a shake to dislodge them, and his mouth fell open. A brown flood of kicking bodies tumbled out and down, over his well-cut lapels. time I joined the others on the bluff. Pawlie and Blenheim were missing. Edna stopped scanning the horizon with her brass telescope long enough to introduce me to the pretty twins, Alice and Celia. They sat in the grass beside a tangled heap of revolvers, polishing their patent-leather tap shoes. The ubiquitous Rastus was wiping off his burnt cork makeup. I asked him why. "Don't need it anymore. Last night it was my camouflage. I was out in the woods, cutting a path through the electric fence. Quite a wide path, as you'll understand." He continued removing the black until I recognized the late George Hoad. "George! But you cut your throat, remember? Mopping up blood -- " "Hank, that was your blood. It was you who cut your throat in the Gents, after Pawlie vanished. Remember?" I did, giddily. "What happened to you, then?" "Your suicide attempt helped me make up my mind; I quite the Institute next day. You were still in the hospital." Still giddy, I turned to watch Joe Feeney operating the curious laser I'd seen in the library. Making parrots out of clocks. "I understand now," I said. "But what's the watermelon for?" "Cheap cooling device." "And the 'flag'?" I indicated the shawl-stick arrangement. "To rally round. I stuck it in the melon because the umbrella stand was in use. They were trying to use it -- " "Look!" Edna cried. "The attack begins!" She handed me a second telescope. All I saw below was the lone figure of Blenheim in his diving suit, shuffling slowly up from the river mist to face seven guards arid two pumas. He seemed to be juggling croquet balls. "Why don't we help him?" I shouted. "Don't just sit here shining shoes and idling." The twins giggled. "We've already helped some," said Alice, nodding at the pile of weapons. "We made friends with the guards." I got the point when those below pulled their guns on Blenheim. As each man drew, he looked at his gun and then threw it away. "What a waste," Celia sighed. "Those guns are made from just about the best chocolate you can get." Blenheim played his parlor trick on the nearest guard: One juggled ball flew high, the guard looked up, and a second ball clipped him on the upturned chin. Now the puma guards went into action. "I can't look," I said, my eye glued to the telescope. One of the animals stopped to sniff at a sticky revolver, but the other headed straight for his quarry. He leapt up, trying to fasten his claws into the stranger's big brass head. Out of the river mist came a terrible cry, and then a terrible sight: a hobbling gray hulk that resolved into a charging elephant. Charging diagonally, so it looked even larger. The pumas left the scene. One fled in our direction until Alice snatched up a pistol and fired it in the air. At that sound, the guards decided to look for jobs elsewhere. After all, as Pawlie said later, you can't expect a man to face a juggling diver and a mad elephant with a wooden leg, with nothing but a chocolate .#, not on rheir wages. Pawlie was riding on the neck of the elephant. When he came to a wobbliong stop I saw that one of Jumbo's forelegs was a section of tree with the bark still on it. And in the bark, a heart with PSIHL, carved years before. I felt the triumph was all over -- especially since Pawlie kept nodding her head yes at me -- until George said: "Come on, gang. Let's set it up." Jumbo had been pulling a wooden sledge, bearing the Paris kiosk. Now he went off to break his fast on water and grass, while the rest of us set the thing upright. Even before we had fuelled it with whatever was in the fertilizer bags, I guessed that it was a rocket. After some adjustments, the little door was let down, and a sweet, breakfast pancake odor came forth. Joe Feeney opened a flask of dark liquid and poured it in the entrance. The smell grew stronger. "Maple sap," he explained. "From Jumbo's wooden leg. Mixed with honey. And there's oatmeal inside. A farewell breakfast." I looked in the little door and saw the inside of the ship was made like a metal honeycomb, plenty of climbing room for ourmasters. Pawlie came from ihe building with a few cockroaches in a jar, and let them taste our wares. Then, all at once, it was a sakopening at any big department store. We all stood back and let the great brown wave surge forward and break over the little rocket. Some of them, nyrnpiis especially, scurried all the way up to the nose cone and back dowm again in their excitement. It all looked so jolly that I tried not tliink of their previous meals. Edna glanced at her watch. "Ten minutes more," she said. "Or they'll hit the sun." I objected that we'd never get all of them loaded in ten minutes. "No," said Pawlie. "But we'll get the best and strongest. The shrews can keep the rest in control." Edna closed the door, and the twins did a vigorous tap-dance on the unfortunate stragglers. members of the finest organization on earth were on their way to the stars. "To join their little friends," said Edna. Pawlie and I touched hands, as Blenheim opened his faceplate. "I've been making this study," he said, "of spontaneous combustion in giraffes..."  I'm sorry. I just can't help it. I just have that kind of mind, and there's nothing I can do about it. When Jim Baen asks me for a guest review, all I can visualize is a psychopathic butler, ex-Army no doubt, who instead of announcing the guests as they arrive, lines them up and begins inspecting them for flaws. "Suck in that gut, sister. You there, call that a shave?" I'm sorry, honest. So here's a guest review, Jim. Laurels first, then brickbats, with the white elephant saved for last. I'm sorry to say that there are no perfect books waiting for you at your bookstore this month, genties and ladlemen. But some come closer than others. Closest is Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison (Harper  Row, price unknown). This, friends, is one king hell collection of gutpunching, groin-kicking, armbreaking short stories, subtitled "A Pantheon of Modem Gods" and dedicated to the proposition that if gods die when their followers stop believing, then gods are bom when beliefs crystalize. Harlan takes a look at some of the gods we're raising up these days, and makes it quite clear that we'd better start learning how to placate them, like pronto. Written over a period of ten years, the stories are superbly kind of which Heinlein once said that you should serve a whiskbroom with every shot, so that the customer can brush the sawdust off him when he gets back up. But in the three or four times I've met Harlan, I've noticed a severe strain on our relationship in that he has nothing to bitch at me about, and so I ought to add some beefs. First, most of these stories will probably already be familiar to you (a margarine dildo to the first reader who can name an anthology of anything by anyone in the past year that hasn't contained Deathbird), reminding one of those ten Billy Holiday albums with three albums worth of songs endlessly shuffled and re-dealt. "Maggie Moneyeyes," "Along the Scenic Route," "Paingod" and "Shattered Like A Glass Goblin" aren't exactly obscure, for instance. But thass alright -- somehow all these stories do belong thematically in one book. My main beef is that dll of Harlan's new gods are scary. Pessimism is okay -- but unrelieved pessimism seems a little unrealistic. Maybe all that's on the other side is the sixteen-year-old perfect goombah and his divine Maserati, but why don't we take a look? But how can you complain about a book that has "Whimper of Whipped Dogs" in it? Next in line is The Shockwave Rider (Harper  Row, price unknown -- while this latter phrase reoccurs frequently because I'm working from galleys, for obvious reasons I can't abbreviate it) by John Brunner, a Spring '# selection for the SF Book Club. This one had seeds of greatness, but maybe it needed more vermiculite. It's not a bad book -- and Jesus knows I don't want to join the "it ain't as good as Stand On Zanzibar" ranks -- but somehow it just misses. Close though. The protagonist is Nickie Haflinger, who was drafted as a child into the government's behavioristoriented genius factory, Tamover. Not content with encouraging natural geniuses to mature, the directors of this institution are attempting to grow geneticallymodified geniuses from ova in the laboratory. As a young man Nickie stumbles across a deformed and imbecile Mark I, becomes disillusioned with behaviorism and splits, removing himself from the national data-net and establishing a succession of aliases with a stolen computer-code, dedicating himself to the overthrow of Tamover and all it stands for. A dandy plot, and one that in Bmnner's hands should have been Hugo material. I dunno; maybe he was in a hurry. Both his villains and the community of Precipice (Tamover's underground antithesis) are cut from cardboard, and there are a series of debate-lectures between Nickie and the government interrogator who's wringing out his memory that just don't ring true. But the book reads well all the same. Individual sections are often to have copyrighted, and the message is incisive and timely. But as a story it limps. So call it the worst book he's written in five years, and you've still put it two notches above average. It kept me turning the page, and its closing question has yet to be answered. Onward to a pleasant surprise. Somehow or other I got on Doubleday's SF review list a couple of years back, and as a result my stove here in Nova Scotia has never lacked for fire-starter. Honest to God, you never saw such dreck in your life. Comic-books without the pictures. But I hear they've got a new SF editor lately, and here on my desk, by Jesus, is an actual first-rate science-fiction novel from Doubleday, Newton and the Quasi-Apple, by Stanley Schmidt. I'd never have read it if I hadn't recognized Stanley's name from some fine stories in Analog, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. The planet of Ymrek, see, is at a crisis point in its cultural development. The civilized types in the city of Yngmer are threatened by the barbarian Ketaxil, and have for defense only crude cannon which they don't know how to aim very well. A pair of human xenologists reluctantly decide to interfere by giving the Yngmerians technological aid in the form of "quasi-matter," a wondrous stuff they hope to pass off as "nothing more than simple magic." Unfortunately, at the same time a native genius named Terek has singlehandedly duplicated the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, deducing laws of motion with which he hopes to save the day by inventing ballistics, to aim the cannon better. The local shaman reacts little better than did Galileo's inquisitors, and Just as Terek has begun to convince him that jjerhaps il se muovo after all, in come the xenologists -- with quasimatter trinkets that don't obey Newton's Laws! Poor Terek is ceremonially proclaimed a Dunce, and the rest of the book deals with the attempts of the meddling but well-intentioned xenologists to set things right. It's a dandy, and I'm proiid of Stanley for his refusal to yield to temptation and pull rabbits out of a hat for an ending. My only complaint is his failure to explain quasimatter rather than Simply describe it -- but as a man with a trunkfull of letters saying, "your last story was great -- but of course it's not science fiction," possibly I should shut up. Tasty stuff, Stan. Cliff simak's new book. Enchanted Pilgramage (PutnamBerkley) is another one of those that gave me mixed feelings. If there's a sequel planned, I withdraw most of my objections, but as it stands it raises more questions than it answers. To say that it's well written would be more unnecessarily redundant than is absolutely called for -- it is, after all, a Simak. The characters are well-drawn, the menaces compelling. But the book frustrates me, dammit. The first half reads like pure alternate-universe swordand-sorcery -- a little strange for Cliff, but what the hell. In this alternate universe men have never really left the Middle Ages, and goblins, trolls, elves and unicorns festoon the countryside. A quest is undertaken (incidentally, quests involving a chalice or grail are a separate subgenre called cup-andsorcery) by a band of good joes. Fine. Then halfway through the book, a modern-day human appears from our time-stream, complete with firestick and a Honda dragon, and one not unnaturally assumes that some of the strange goings-on are going to get mundane explanations. Only some do, and some don't, and one of the most impressive menaces turns out for no apparent reason to be an alien, which dies in giving birth to a robot (!) that seems to do nothing to advance the plot. We learn that there are three alternate universes (why only three?) and that the third of these is a "humanist" world in which all the problems of man have been solved -- but all we ever get to see of it is two characters who appear only by rumor. Nor do we ever learn how travel between the universes is managed, nor why only one not-especially-bright inhabitant of our own time-stream (named Jones, forsooth) pulled it off. Worst, the quest turns out to have been a wild-goose chase for all but one of its members. Oh hell -- Cliff is just too good a craftsman to leave such gaping holes in the foundations: there has to be a sequel. But I wish there'd been words to that effect somewhere in the galleys. The missing man in Katherine MacLean's book of the same name (Putnam-Berkley) seems to be the protagonist -- the one we are given just doesn't seem real to me. No, amend that: he seems real for the first chapter (which, if my memory serves, appeared somewhere or other as a novelette -- and a damned, good one) and then vanishes, leaving behind a cardboard simulacrum. There's just no consistency to his character: he's an ex-teengang member, big and strong when the plot requires it, but most of the time he acts like a timid chump; he is a professional empath, and yet he gets suckered into buying the metaphysics of a sociopath gang leader with nary a quiver. And the final group of villains to be dragged onstage, comic-opera Com-YewNists Who Want To Make The World A Conformist Utopia So They Can Power Trip Us (but get this: they're telepathic, see...) went down like two tablespoons of peanut butter. Which leaves me astounded. For years I have watched Kate MacLean write circles around a large lot of folks, and upon receiving the first novel I've seen by her I rejoiced, expecting something above average. But this is barely adequate. The first chapter, in which we meet George, the high-sensitivity empath who works as a locater for the Rescue Squad, is really excellent -- but the book as a whole lacks an internal consistency somehow, and suspending that disbelief starts to give you cramps. I'm disappointed. In view of what Memphis Slim once termed the pay sitchy-ation. I'm reluctant to suggest that anybody stick to short stories, but this just doesn't work as a novel. I don't object to a simple series-of-episodes -- but the cast should be continuous. Getting near the bottom, now. Funny SF novels, when they work, are among the funniest things ever written: e.g., Niven  Gerrold's The Flying Sorcerer, a sizable chunk of Keith Laumer's work, and the new Bester novel. Some are a trifle strained, but still make you giggle consistently: e.g. Bob Toomey's World of Trouble. And some are as strained as the stuff that goes in I.V. bottles: e.g... The Wilk Are Among Us, by Isidore Haiblum (Doubleday, #). Since Stan Schmidt's book had turned out so well, I decided to try the one that came with it; but when I got to the part where the ferocious and homicidal nill says to the alien protagonist, "If I wasn't a bit under the weather, and you didn't have that crude mind-block on -- really, under ordinary conditions it wouldn't do at all, you know -- I'd give you such a hit!" I began to suspect that the stack of handkerchiefs I'd laid in against tears of laughter might be superfluous. Everybody in the book is named Leonard or Ernest or Marvin, extraterrestrials who've never heard of Earth call each other boychik, and at odd intervals Haiblum succumbs to Zelazny's Syndrome: the habit of stringing together sentence fragments. As paragraphs. In groups of six or seven. For no discernible reason. Like a freshman art student. Making a collage. Or some. Thing. Followed by two skipped lines and a block of more or less standard copy. There's a lot of action, a cast of thousands, and a plot that would confound a panel consisting of Keith Laumer, P.G. Wodehouse SO and Avram Davidson, and if you use an Ashley wood-buming stove and don't subscribe to a newspaper you'll be interested to know that the hardcover edition fits snugly into the firebox and will support a good base of kindling and mixed hardwood. I recommend maple if you can get it. de Camp's Antique Shoppe. It is curious that the sciencefiction community has produced people who make their living by looking backward, but science fiction is, after all, the literature of paradox; and lotsa guys are into The Roots and like that. I know there are a horde of you Lovecraft freaks out there, and maybe some of you are Trekkie-type groupies, and I really truly do believe that a reviewer has a duty to finish a book before publishing his views on it, but honest to Christ, Fellas. The Life of H.P. Lovecraft by L. Sprague de Camp (Doubleday, #) is simply above and beyond the call of whatever Baen is underpaying me. "Sold!" he shrieked. -- Ed. It is no bigger than a Smith-Corona portable, clearly the result of a literally incredible amount of time and energy, and I tried, cross my heart. But do any of you really want to know that at the age of two, Lovecraft's golden curls led his landlady to call him "Little Sunshine"? I have in my possession a volume of comparable size, which was commissioned by New York State, printed at Taxpayers' expense in #, and bought by the same taxpayers for the State University Library system, from which I ultimately stole it, leaving behind five identical copies none of which has ever been checked out. It is an #-page study of the ruffed grouse, a bird so stupid you can blow out the brains of one without disturbing the one next to it. It took six men to write, and one of the men later produced a #-page sequel. I take it down from the shelf whenever I'm feeling especially useless and futile, and pore over the maps and graphs and close-ups of grouse droppings, and I feel better. At long last I've found a companion volume. If you're an English major who believes you must know the man to properly read and evaluate his works (don't laugh -- I was one once) then by all means pick this book up -- if you can (little joke there). If you're an Ashley user, I should advise you that the binding is damnably difficult to destroy, and it's too big to use all at once. If you're H.P. Lovecraft, let me know what you think of it. And so opens # in the SF puhlishing world. Me, I think I'm going to get hack in the time-capsule and get some sleep. Wake me up when Heinlein's next book comes out, will you? Thanks.  Arsen Darnay series of limited nuclear wars Americans have polarized into two groups -- Structure-Folk, who live in huge constructions along the coasts (Union), and Tribesmen, who occupy Hinterland. The urban structures reach three thousand meters into the sky and depend on the levitating effect of gravitron, a field-force generated in tower pits. Liquid Helium is needed to cool the gravitron reaction. In the absence of tbe gas, structure collapse is inevitable -- Structure-Man's greatest dread. The only economical source of Helium is in Texahoma, an area controlled by the Ecofreak tribe. Tribesmen have a powerful antitechnology ideology-verging-onreligion, and to them Union is the incarnation of evil, but they are coerced into cooperation by Union's atomic power. Union, however, must use this power sparingly lest it destroy the Helium extraction and distribution facilities. Moreover, Ecofreak demands high-ranking hostages who live in the most vulnerable tribal settlements, exposed to atomic attack along with the natives. The situation thus is one of precarious balance. of Union. Bono and his delegation have come to renegotiate Helium Deliveries -- a "Helium Round." But this time Bono has a hidden objective -- to obtain some electronic parts that the Activists, a radical group within the Ecofreak tribe who have recently gained power, need to bring to fruition their plan to throw off the structure-yoke once and for all. Following a reception in one of Bureau of Tribal Affairs, reports Chief Negotiator and head of Ecofreak's Activist faction is an unknown quantity. In the past Accommodationists. The men know nothing about Mycal Bono and not much more about less young leader. Mention of Tack reminds Proctor of a troublesome episode indaughter of Bernard Unsler, Union's leader "the Unifier". During a stay in Ricardo, Tack and Regina fell in love, suggesting to the Unifier the notion of a Grand Alliance between Union and Hinterland to be achieved by intermarriage -- an idea abhorrent both to Proctor and to Jonny Tack's father, both hardliners. The marriage didn't come off. Aside from the fact that the Activists represent an unknown quantity, Proctor is also worried because he is fomenting a plot to overthrow the Unsler dynasty -- a move that will require Ecofreak Unsler's closest aide, has been unusually interested in the negotiations. Proctor instructs French Ecofreak's permanent ambassador in Ricardo, to learn more about the tribe's strategy before the talks begin a week later. Barney is a hold-over Accommodationist who wants to see Jonny Tack fail politically. He man in Bono's group, into revealing that Ecofre has developed a new device that inhibits nuclear reactions. Part of the device is a switch made of silcoplast (a cheap synthetic) welded to copper. Only Union can do the welding, which requires special facilities. Over some years Ecofreak could develop the welding technology, but Jonny Tack is impatient and wants to get the sil-parts in a hurry. Later Barney tells Rivera French enough to put Union on its guard. After delivering the news to Proctor at a late-night ball game, French is attacked on his way home by a group of "flames," members of an upper-class cult Unifier's son and heir. French kills one of the flames during a chase and escapes. The epidsode brings home to French again the fact that Sidney's power is growing as the Unifier's faculties slowly fail. Sidney and his flames delight especily in ambushing and killsents Proctor's power and popularity. The traditional Opening Ball is held in Top Level, Unsler's domain, the following evening. wife -- an artist and a member of a women's cult called Madonna. Regina Unsler, who has been watching developments both with practical interest and with nostalgic memories of her love affair with Tack, arrives at the ball with a plan to secure her own escape from Union. Her brother Sidney has oppressed her, and under the tutelage of her spiritual advisor, escape to Hinterland. To do so she captivates Bono. Meanwhile a prominent flame and the man who, with others, attacked French the night before. Bono has spent a painful week trying to adjust to the powerful gravitron vibrations in Ricardo (he belongs to the five percent of Tribesmen who find adjustment difficult). During the week he has been plagued by a recurring memory of his youth, hunting the mansized Harvey hare, a mutant rabbit whose escape mechanism is a cloying telepathic pulse of love. The hunter must overcome his affection to achieve a kill. On the morning of the ball, Bono finally experienced release from pain. Now he is giddy and disoriented and promptly falls for Regina. When she invites him to complies -- only to And her much less yielding in the privacy of her roof-top garden. Before she can yield herself, she says, she must have a sign of Bono's true affection. She demands that Bono request her as the Helium hostage of #. Only after she has seen the news on Media that he has done so will she be his. Back at the ball, Clafto Meyer has recognized French from the night before. French and Miri flee from pursuing flames and manage to lose them, but only after another flame loses his life. They reach Top Level's parking lot where Miri hides in a jump tube (one-man transport) while French goes exploring. He discovers that the streets are blocked by flames. Proctor, meanwhile is overcome with rage while he impotently watches the flames pursue French and Miri from the ballroom; he conceives a plan of retaliation against Sidney's Flames -- "Operation Hairy Scary." Trench lay on the bed in his underwear, one leg propped up. His eyes rested on Miri's dark silhouette. She stood by the food of the bed and undressed before him in the half-light from the bath. The chaste gown fell to her waist. Then she dropped it to the floor and stepped out. Her arms went back to her back and her bra popped off. His eyes rested on her shadowy breasts. She wiggled out of panties and stood naked for a second, turned toward him, dressed only in a golden earring. "I must meditate," she said. French smiled and nodded, admiring her cool. They had just escaped death and had been shown into this dingy cubicle empty of furniture, but filled with an unusually strong gravitron hum. A cold and musty room. A late hour. Unusual circumstances. Nevertheless Miri remembered her spiritual chores. She sank down to the floor. Over the bed's edge French saw her shoulders, neck, and face. Her eyes were closed. She sat with her legs crossed and her hands on her knees. In the mood of relaxation he now felt, the tense anxieties of the past hour still there like a residue at the bottom of his perceptions, her very posture aroused him. The physical alignment of her body signalled two kinds of receptivity -- spiritual and sexual. His face softened, and he watched his profile through eyes clouded with a kind of tenderness. He often watched her like this, thinking the same thought. He waited a long time. Miri tripped out in a trance, her spirit in other dimensions. She sought the limpid light of truth, a stale of quiescent calm. Such states came very rarely, she said. Instead she' usually had visions -- silly, prophetic, disturbing. As he watched her, he saw again a faint light around her head -- or thought he saw it. French was never certain whether or not Miri really radiated a kind of strange energy or whether he merely imagined it. To watch her meditate was itself a kind of meditation. It engendered images. Devotee of the Cosmic Lady... French knew next to nothing about the Cult. They taught magical pra'ctices -- like this technique which draped Miri's head and shoulders in a nimbus of light. He swore he saw a light, although its subtle radiance faded when his concentration slipped. Secretive, the sisters of the Cult. They claimed and had very real powers. They claimed to see the future in visions or in books of oracles -- but darkly, darkly. Not with the precision French needed for his work. Prophecy had its limits. They had a doctrine that thoughts took on reality if held with strong emotion. Ritual lustrations and such things. Miri left Saturday evenings to partake of the mysteries. When she returned she was always receptive -- oh, she was receptive! French approved of the Cult, not so much because he approved of the occult or the transcendental but because he disapproved of nothing Miri loved. He was not religious himself. He saw the world in its irreducible particularities, not in collective symbols. If he longed to worship, he could always reach out. You are my Cosmic Lady, he thought. When  embrace you, I embrace the world. When you smile, it's sunny. When you frown, it's clouds. Your laughter tingles my spine like water. Your hands caress me like wind. Your hair shines and rolls like mutagrass. Your scent is the sage. Your touch is soft like Harvey pelt. Your body bucks like a Hinterland pony when we make love. Your eyes are stars, your teeth white cliffs in the distance. He watched her and waited. Deep in meditation, Miri felt Frenchy's enveloping presence. His mood penetrated her sensitized psyche -- and yet she had induced it or amplified it by her visions. His adoration sparkled with erotic tension. He'd soon grow restless, she knew. She smiled inwardly and let the visions of maternity slowly fade away until there was nothing before her eyes but the darkness behind her lids. French decided he had waited long enough. He leapt from the bed and tiptoed behind her. Kneeling down, he began to massage her skin gently. She radiated heat. The Cult also taught them how to control the body's temperature. His hands pressed and kneaded her shoulders and back. He grew passionate. He rubbed and massaged and moved closer and closer until he pressed up against her. He slipped his hands under her arms and cupped her breasts. His mouth muzzled her neck and chewed her right earlobe, the one free of adornment. His breath was hot and acrid with desire. Slowly he worked his hands down over her quivering belly into, her lap. Miri pretended not to feel him. She detached herself from her body and perched her soul into a comer of the room like a yellow bird. From there she watched him and watched herself as if she were looking at an ancient etching illustrating some book on love-yoga. But then came a point when the urgency of nerves summoned the bird back from its perch. She became one with her body, and with a low moan she twisted out of the lotus posture and drew him into her arms. They rose after a moment and jumped on the bed, giggling. Her legs held him tightly while he worked. Her toes probed rythmically toward the ceiling. He covered her face with little bites, growling. She lowed like a calf. Oh, beautiful, trembling flesh. Oh, exquisite sex. Oh, wonderful gorge. Oh, meat of the goddess... The rush of breathing subsided at last. They rolled to the side, nuzzling, stroking in silence. Gravitron vibrations pulsed in the air. French placed tiny kisses on her forehead. Her breathing grew shallow. She fell asleep. He wormed his left arm out from beneath her and set his new digital watch for six o'clock. He wouldn't get much sleep, but every little bit would help. The light was still on in the bathroom. Should he disentangle himself and put it out? No. He closed his eyes and immediately saw shadowy dream images. In their contemplation he passed over to the other side. French started. Six o'clock? Yes. He felt a searing pain against his wrist. He fumbled and turned off the heat-alarm. Miri's legs still held his body in a scissor grip. They lay much as they'd fallen asleep. He had to get up, but his body resisted. It seemed as if he hadn't slept at all. Miri was warm. Perfume lay on her skin like a wraith over waters. Her breath moved against his naked arm. He hovered between sleep and waking, thinking in rythm with her breath. Miri-mine, Miri-qiine. Sleep reached for his awareness again, but he shook it off. He had to get up, had to. His lips sought Miri's birthmark. Then he gingerly lifted her leg, rolled out of her earthy grip, and walked barefoot and naked to the showers. All shivering business now, he made a plan. He was in the Ecofreak embassy and he had to get out undetected by flames. Barney had saved her life the night before. They had left Top Level surrounded by tribesmen. The flames hadn't dared to cause an incident, not with men who controlled Helium. But they had followed the group all the way to the doors of the embassy. Despite strong protests from Franco Dart, Barney had taken them in. But in deference to the Activist, Barney had put them up in an unused wing. Therefore the strong gravitron vibrations. Someone had failed to do the necessary maintenance around here. French took a shower and pondered his situation. He expected that the flames were still out there, waiting. If he wanted to arrive at the first negotiating session on time -- without the humiliation of doing so under Ecofreak protection -- he had to get away now undetected. Which meant a disguise of some sort. And it would be best to leave Miri here, where she was safe, until he could fetch her with a group of men. He shaved with a dirty old razor someone had left behind. Then he rummaged about in the cubicle's built-in closet trying on odd pieces of tribal clothing visitors had abandoned here. Judging by the pattern of beads, this cubohome hadn't been used in years. In the midst of these activities, French discovered a section of wall patched over with a plate of plastosteel screwed into place. He realized at once that the cubicle abutted a service chasm. His troubles were over. He could get out with no trouble at all. Soon he was at work with a stiff saniblade ticm the shaver. The plate came olf easily. Behind it gaped a ragged hole in the eroded wall, and gravinon sparks flew about. The suction pulled him but he resisted. Only his blond locks moved tosvaid the opening. French wrote a note for Miri. Then he put on the tribal tunic (a little too small) and a tribal hat (a little too big). He crawled out into the humming darkness, reached inside and lifted the plate. Chasm vacuum sucked the metal back into place. He was on his way. According to tradition, the first session of the Helium round was scheduled to begin at eight in the morning. Based on the same tradition, no one expected the Ecofreaks until a quarter to nine at the earliest. Ritualized discourtesy belonged to the negotiations as much as ihe toast upon arrival and the Top Level ball. Promptly at eight-forty, French slapped his knees and rose from his chair in Proctor's office. He waited until the speaker had finished. Then, with a glance at the senior members of the negotiating team who had assembled for a last-minute session. He said: "I'd better go and do my chores." Proctor nodded, and French left. By hallway, elevator, and another lobby. He nodded to the guards on his left and took up a stand before the door. Arms folded across his chest, he stared through glass at shallow stairs that fanned out and down to the idewalk and the stow edge-lanes or the movebelt. Morning crowds Tilled the belt. French lifted his eyes to the airspace above and surveyeri the jump tube traffic coming and going. From time to time utility autipers and levi-limos passed in the middle spurting blue flames from tail-jets. French preferred idle waiting to the gloom th' the meeting he had just escaped -- where the Office of Intelligence in general and French in particular had been under sniveling attack. Everyone in the meeting, and above all Proctor -- who'd set the tone and whom everyone had avidly aped -- had made much of Bono's behavior the night before. French's characterization of the man as a strict constructionist had been ridiculed and questioned. How with such poor intelligence estimates? The performance of the Office of Intel hgence had been most lackadaisicui on this issue. And other such bi ,ii! They cal:: .l themselves negotiators, F;.;;ch thought with scorn. At, cikiail parties they told tall tales of fancy dancing and eyeball-to-eycball confrontations. In practice they demanded hard guarantees well in advance that everything would go smoothly and that no one would get the slightest bit of heat. French could understand Proctor's anxieties to some extent. Proctor worried about the Secret Agenda. He feared that Ecofreak had made an end run. The big corporate interests and Bernard Unsler -- both wanted Accommodation. The corporations sought unimpeded trade with Hinterland without the paternal inlowed his oldest ambitions -- to rule the entire American subcontinent, as his predecessors had done. These two interests conspired with Ecofreak to bring about Accommodation Activism. This was Proctor's thesis. It was all nonsense, of course. Nevertheless, the men had all sagely nodded. Then they'd begun to blabber about Regina Unsler. French had quietly suggested that Five-percenters often suffered from behavioral aberrations. A chorus had shouted him down, hands waving in deprecation. An inauspicious beginning, French thought. Yes, inauspicious. When he had arrived early in the morning, still in his ill-fitting tribal clothes, he'd gone to report to Proctor and had found Dickens with his security chiefs in Proctor's office, all spread out on chairs and couches. They were planning Operation Hairy Scary. The mere fact that they were in Proctor's office rather than in one of the conference rooms of the Office of Security had alerted French. The name of the operation had also given him pause. Hairy Scary: a strangely juvenile code name for what seemed very serious business. Dickens and his people were busy with several simulators and with intricate three-dimensional maps of Ricardo's towers. Spots on the maps were marked "points of attack." In the brief time French spent in the office, he learned the name of the operation and gathered that Sidney's flames would be the target. Trays of stale refreshments and mounds of narrow printout scripto pointed to an all-night session. His misgivings grew when he saw Proctor in the midst of it all. Proctor's eyes were red from lack of sleep, and yet they gleamed with boyish excitement -- disturbing in a man of Proctor's usually stony reserve. French was reminded of the fact that he knew almost nothing about Proctor's background; nobody did. He came out of the past, ready made. French soon gathered that Proctor didn't want him there. The Negotiator scowled at French's tribal costume. He sent French off to gather the negotiating team for a meeting at a later time. He waved a hand: "Get into some decent clothing." Then he turned back eagerly to Operation Hairy Scary. Playing little games... French rocked back and forth on his heels. He liked neither the exuberance surrounding Hairy Scary -- ostensibly an action triggered by Clafto Meyer's murderous pursuit last night -- nor the pessimistic approach to the negotiations. Men should sleep at night, he told himself. When they stayed up all night, they lost perspective. A glance at his watch told him it was a quarter to the hour. The delegation should be here by now. He pulled down on the stiff new robe he'd bought from the commissary in manager, had been obliged to come in early to sell French a robe, which the merchant had really appreciated -- but French hadn't dared to go home for proper clothes, and neither could he receive the delegation in a mockery of their own dress. Punctual to the minute. Ecofreak arrived. Their jump tubes fell down from the traffic and settled on the sidewalk. Little doors opened. The tribesmen gathered into a clump and then, in unison, they came up the stairs toward the glass door. French put on a smile while his eyes searched the ascending delegates. Bono was not among them. Dart walked at the head of the group. French experienced a twinge of worry. His mind flashed up a memory of jump tubes in a shadowy garage, the Unsler flower... He pushed the glass door open, face still frozen in a smile. After a series of perfunctory handshakes, French led the delegation toward the negotiating hall -- a cavernous expanse built in the 'burgher' style of another age. It was somewhat overwhelming, with its vast glitter, sparkle, and shine from the chandeliers and huge mosaics made of precious stones. In the center a large oval table rested on sinuous legs. Chairs carved from egg-shaped pieces of obduplast stood around the table. Smiling unminus Proctor, already waited. Gnarled hand on robe sleeve. Dart pulled French aside. His eyes looked at French and evaded at the same time. "The Chief of Mission has been detained," Dart said stiffly. "He is receiving additional instructions from home. I wonder if we could delay the start of the meeting briefly?" "Of course," French said. He pointed to his right where coffee, whiskey, and tiny pastries shaped like human thumbs were laid out over immaculately white cloths on tables between slender columns. Servants stood waiting. "We can refresh ourselves while we wait. The Chief Negotiator has also been detained. ' ' French moved toward the coffee, eyes on Dart. "I understand that you have extensive experience in structures," French said. He bent down and worked the silver handle of the coffee urn. Coffee steamed darkly into his cup. "You were first secretary here, I understand." "Yes," Dart answered absently. He peered toward the Entrance over his shoulder. At that point Bono appeared at the door. He blinked in "Excuse me," Dart said, tight lipped. "I see that he has just caught up with us." French nodded. He took a sip of coffee, following Dart with his eyes. Dart stopped in front of Bono, a small little figure before the taller tribesman whose forked beard and hollow eyes gave a forbidding image at the moment. Even from a distance, French saw that Bono hadn't slept much, if at all. His features showed strain. He didn't have the languid air of a man who'd spent his night striving. Dart's hands gestured fiercely as he spoke. Bono looked past Dart with an indifferent expression in his eyes, observing the tribesmen "who placed ornately worked leather folders before each seat on the Ecofreak side of the table, pre-marked with name plates. Then Bono glanced at Dart and said a single word. A harsh gesture of dismissal followed. Bono stepped past Dart and walked toward the table. French caught the eye of a Union negotiator, held an index finger into the air, and nodded. The man stepped to a tel-set and punched numbers. The call would summon Proctor. Following Bono's lead, the tribesmen settled around the table. Ecofreak would obviously shun the preliminary talk and drinking that, based on experience with this tribe, was a prerequisite for sensible negotiations. If the tribesmen wouldn't come to the refreshments, the refreshments would have to go to the tribesmen. French beckoned to a servant. "Please serve these things at the table," he said. Then he went to his own spot, next to Proctor's in the center, opposite from Franco Dart. Bono reached for the carafe of whiskey and poured himself a glassfull. The liquor tasted sharp, warm. He hoped that the intensity of his excitement was not evident to the others. He experienced a kind of breathless intoxication, a kind of careless abandon a man felt only in the hunt, leaping, say, from boulder to boulder in the mountains after a wounded goat, without time for reflection, at the mercy of reflex. He poured himself another glass and sensed Dart's disapproving stir. Down the hatch! God -- some breakfast. I'm free. I'm loose, Bono thought. He kept his face rigid and his lips in a kind of pout, but he was amused, he wanted to laugh. I'm awake, he told himself. Tack was far away and plotted some kind of nonsensieal war, like a child with lead soldiers, yes. Bono had bought all that like an innocent, but now he was awakened, finally. Here he was, on the scene, plotting love, by Jesus. Ain't it simply wild how one could just chuck all those years of habit and go right against the grain of the past and never give a shit? Men rose around him. He looked up and saw that Proctor had entered. He rose also, keeping himself in control despite internal bubblings. Proctor approached the table, blue robes swishing. He carried folders under his arms. His chin was out. He took up a position across from Bono, bowed. Bono returned the bow. Proctor waited until the assembly had settled down. Then he opened a folder and began to read the welcoming remarks in a hurried monotone. Bono sat entranced by an internal vision of Jonny Tack. The vision amused him in a perverse sort of way. He saw Tack kicking furniture, saw him hit out with a balled fist. Perfidy, he'd bellow. Treason! And what if Union yields the parts anyway? Wouldn't that be doubly amusing? To act, to leap out over a chasm certain that angels stood beneath to catch you on their wings -- it had a mind-blowing exhilaration. Bono followed the vision. If Union failed to yield up the parts, he would be a fugitive hunted by Tack's agents all over Hinterland. He wouldn't be safe anywhere except in the radiation belts or high up in the icy wastes of Canada. No matter. He would wander forever...perhaps with Her. One act of defiance after all these years would be worth it all. Proctor's voice rose slightly, revealing that he neared the end. Bono began to pay attention. "And so, gentlemen," Proctor wound up, as we look forward again to another five years of constructive cooperation with the great and nobel tribe of Ecofreak -- whose purposes, ideals, and aspirations all of us in Union deeply share -- I welcome you again around this table where, though disagreements might surface and conflicts may erupt, we have always, in the end, signed an accord of mutual benefit." Hands clapped politely. Bono rose, a little giddy. "Gentlemen of Union, Chief Negotiator, men of Ecofreak..." To his left Dart gestured with some vehemence. He looked down and saw a folder in Dart's hands extended toward him. It was the official opening statement. Its every word had been carefully weighed; every intonation and nuance had been honed in day-long conferences. Bono waved the folder away. "I'm a simple man," he said, reily believing that at the moment, looking at Proctor, French, and sweeping the line of yellow-robed gesture the folder away, and stared at him now with new interest. "I'm a simple man from the steppes of Texahoma. I've never been inside a structure before. I was prepared, like all of my countrymen, to bring to you suspicion and traditional hatred. And is it any wonder? We are worlds apart. You live on the coasts in these gigantic machines under the drumbeat of gravitron...while we farm the land and herd our cattle through endless oceans of rolling mutagrass..." A strong emotion helped him speak. Words rolled off his tongue unasked. He saw an exchange of glances between French and Proctor. He heard a sound from his left where Dart seemed to be gagging on something. "For too long a time, too many years, your missiles have threatened our settlements. But weWe had your life in our hands. Ever since the Helium War of #, when we forced your corporations to give up control by guerilla warfare, we've had our hand on the Helium valve. And so we stare at each other across the Desolation that circles you and keeps us apart." The tribesmen to either side stirred in discomfort. "There is much beauty here," Bono continued with a sweep of his hand, indicating the blaze of lights in the room. But he saw in mind's eye the beauty that was Regina, her face inclined over his, as they had talked on a low divan all through the night. "There is beauty here and art, and great skill," he continued. "Structure-man has made the High Culture, and may it live forever. May we all, our scientists and yours, together seek an alternative to gravitron, an alternative that doesn't kill as it lifts." Dart coughed. The old man seemed to die of coughing -- a harsh, distracting sound. Bono went on. The words came of their own accord. He was high on fatigue. He realized vaguely that he spoke to Regina, to himself, not to this assembly. "But Hinterland mustn't be despised. We have our life as you have yours. The land belongs to us. Our eyes look out over the steppes. We walk the high sierras, we sail the lakes and rivers. We give you what you need to live and in exchange you give us the products we don't want to make for ourselves. Ours is a life of mutual dependence. Why then do we threaten each other? We have Helium and you have the technology we need -- to communicate, to increase our comforts. Is there sense in constant tension?" He looked around the assembly, lifting his eyes from the empty whiskey glass to which he had been addressing himself. "There is not," he affirmed. "We have everything to gain, nothing to lose from maximum cooperation. Let us strive together..." The word made him halt for a split second. "...for the best possible deal we can find, in a spirit of love and mutual respect. ' ' He sat down amidst uncertain applause. Dart's face was immediately at his ear. The sour old-man's breath hissed. "Have you gone mad? Why didn't you use the prepared text?" throat, and began to read the #I Helium Contract. Bono turned to Dart. "I didn't say anything that wasn't in the text, more or less. Just different words. My own." He saw that Dart was frightened. "Mycal, there's a world of difference. For God's sake, don't go on like this. You're endangering our lives. Yours and mine. Jonny will be furious." Bono shrugged. "He doesn't need to know. If we get him the silco-parts, he'll be delighted. He doesn't have to know how we conduct the negotiations." Dart was breathless. It seemed to him that Bono's eyes still had a glimmer of madness, a residue of the night before. He reached for the prepared text bound in a folder, opened it, and flipped to the last page. He pointed to Jonny 's initials in the approval box in the corner. "He approved it," Dart whispered. Although Dart's voice was low, Bono could sense the heavy charge of emotion in the words. "He put his initials on this. That's tantamount to an order." Dart hit the expensive fiber paper with a wrinkled knuckle. "We need flexibility to negotiate," Bono returned curtly. "I'm no tape recorder, parroting his words." reading the contract. "The cable," Dart insisted in a whisper, meaning the randomcoding radio communications system that linked the embassy with the Texahoma camp but which, as a result of tradition, still went by the term 'cable.' "If you want a change in direction, you can cable home. But without his approval, you can't deviate from your instructions. Jonny will string us up. I can't let you do it, Mycal. Withdraw your statement now and read this." Bono fixed Dart with a stare. "You're merely an advisor. You can't tell me how to negotiate." Dart remembered that he had the courage to oppose. "Do you know why I'm on this delegation?" he asked in an angry whisper, recalling Jonny's words again -- "Go with him, keep your eyes on him." "I'm here," he went on, "because I opposed your nomination. And Jonny sent me along to keep an eye on you. And it's a good thing he did. You gave them an altogether false impression with your off-the-cuff ramblings." Dart felt redeemed by Bono's blunder. I might have blabbed a little to Barney, he thought, but I didn't disobey any direct orders from Jonny Tack. He wondered where Bono had spent his night and suspected that he knew only too well. Of such liaisons came bad policy. Bono's incoherent babble, the mad look in his eyes, his rumpled clothes convinced Dart that more trouble lay ahead. Union bureaucrats had a phrase that described what he now felt about the chief of mission. Bono had blood on him. Any moment now the hounds could close in. Dart had known it, had known it from the start, had told Tack as much in no uncertain terms. Dart didn't mince words when he opposed. And if the hounds already bayed in the distance, Dart wished to be far away when they arrived. "You've heard the old accord. Chief Bono," Proctor said. "What is your initial position for the next round?' ' French eyed Bono with interest. The tribesman's opening remarks, clearly invented on the spot, had had a very different sound than Bono's initial observations in the hall of reception. Now the Ecofreak chief, who had lowered his eyes toward a leather folder, looked up at Proctor. His face revealed nothing. "Ecofreak has no initial position," Bono stressed. "Ecofreak has one position. We intend to abide by it. I believe it's fair and reasonable and will benefit both sides. With your permission. I'll read it." Proctor nodded. They'd have certainty, at last, French thought. If they had been deceived in their estimates, now they'd know the truth -- or at least as much of the truth as Bono would reveal in his opening sally. French found it significant that Barney had been excluded from the delegation. He hoped with all his heart that Bono's statement had been mere talk, rhethoric, not the exposition of an Accommodationist view. Men opened folders. French looked down at his own sheet. He held a stylus at the ready. Bono began to read, very slowly. French made a checkmark next to item one. The plastosteel demand, as Barney had told him -- and as French had noted on the fiber napkin with the imprint of The Mutant in the comer -- was eight hundred thousand tons. No surprise there. Bono read sixteen conditions that corded the points. So did six cameras through holes in the ceiling. Next came a list of products. French grew more alert. The item slipped by almost without notice. Five thousand clock movements, three helicopters, fifty thousand switches, eight hundred visisets, ninety thousand lectroshavers of thousand sheets of scriptoplast... The list went on and on. tion was the hostage demand. It said: 'Hostage: Sidney Unsler, Underunifier (expected to yield on this point if # of plastosteel demand is met)." French felt his muscles tense as Bonos voice rose. The chief was almost finished. French glanced at Proctor, but the man's face was impassive, the thick neck solid; the huge chin stuck out as if daring the world to hit it. "And finally," he heard Bono say, "the hostage demand." In that moment of intense waiting, French recalled wryly the origin of hostage demands -- they went back to ancient days, the troubled of hostages for political purposes had been a random and unpredictable phenomenon until, in this era, it had become institutionalized. It was symbolic, nothing more. Yet now, how much emotion stirred in French as he waited! Bono had laid aside his folder. His eyes were looking straight at Proctor. "This round we shall require only a single hostage," Bono said. "However, by reason of the unremitting threat that Union missiles represent, we shall demand unusual proof of your good intentions. Bono paused. He reached for the carafe of whiskey and poured himself a tiny glass of the clear liquid. French watched him tilt it back. Dart appeared upset by this small interruption in the proceedings. His deep-set eyes stared at Bono in an expression of tight-lipped disapproval. Bono held the glass in his hand. "This round," he said, and French detected a slight trembling in the voice, "we demand that you make available as hostage Regina Unsler, the Unifier's daughter." Silence. Bono lifted his little glass, tilted it back. He shook it, as if to extract a tiny drop of whiskey at the bottom. "And furthermore," a stunned French heard him say, "it is our demand that you make this known to the public of Union immediately by a special visicast." Silence. French had predicted most of the negotiating points -- save one. That one deviation spoiled it all. He remembered an image he particularly liked. Each Helium round was a knife-fight in the dark on wet and muddy ground. At the moment, in a kind of slow motion. Union's feet were slipping on the mud. Slowly they came off the ground. Slowly Union fell toward the ground while the opponent, equally slowly, came in with a flash of light caught in the metal of the blade. French controlled his astonishment and looked about. Bono filled his glass with whiskey. Two tribesmen at the far end of the table whispered, heads close. Most of the rest stared gloomily at folders, hands. Then Dart suddenly rose from his chair. The short, wrinkled man turned from the table and on wobbly, curved legs he hurried toward the door. Proctor appeared to be frozen. French glanced at him anxiously. Proctor stared at the list before him, chin down, as if it had been hit with a sledge hammer. "Your demands. Chief Bono," Proctor said, looking up at last, are unprecedented, to say the least. I propose that we reconvene here tomorrow morning, at which time we shall give you our initial reaction." Proctor moved back his chair. French leaned over, whispered; "The specs. We've got to Jiave a look at the drawings. Ask for documentation. Res." Proctor shrugged. With a sinking heart French saw the man's intense disappointment, although Proctor hid it well. "Details," Proctor whispered tiredly. "Details. We've been stabbed in the back." "Please," French pleaded. "We must have the drawings." From across the table, they both heard Bono speak. "Mr. Proctor, I can agree to your proposal that we adjourn. On one condition. The hostage demand must appear on Media today." Proctor had himself under excellent control. French knew the way Proctor must feel. Everything about the session had Accommodation writ lirge about it -- front, back, sides, top, and bottom. French skirted a suicidal thought -- his estimates could have been wrong. But now, it merely seemed so. Seemed but wasn't! He simply couldn't imagine that he and his staff should have blundered so badly. The evidence before French now must have another explanation. Proctor spoke. "Your demand is most unreasonable. At this point, traditionally, we analyze your demands. For that we need both time and complete documentation. We have no problems, in principle, with your hostage demand. But we expect to negotiate a package in secrecy before we go to Media." Across the table Bono tried to control the shaking of his hands. His hands were sweaty. They left moist marks on the folder before him. Until now he had always dismissed Dart as merely tiresome, but now the little rat had shown unusual initiative -- walking out of the negotiations! What had possessed him? Bono had a vision of Dart dictating a communique for transmission to Tack. But that was unthinkable. Dart was a coward at heart. Even so, Bono had to get them to announce the hostage demand. At once. He had no time to lose. She'd see him tonight. She'd see him the moment Media made its report. "We have the documentary package for you," Bono said. He gestured to Sonder. The burly tribesman passed a large roll of drawings and a thick book of specs across the table to his technical counterpart older man. "As for the announcement, it is the minimum requirement for another meeting."  Bono rose from his chair and gestured to the tribal delegation. All rose and bowed. She came up out of groggy sleep, angrily resisting. Something pulled incessantly on her arm. Her dream had been a mass of confusion, anxiety, and fear. She had tumbled in the air through clouds. Sidney had chased her in a tube, his finger pointing. Someone had bured her beneath a mountain. No, it had been a grave. Dead? Dying? And Mycal had glowered above her with a spade in his hand. Earth had tumbled on her...or had it been grass? She tried to turn away from the insistent, nagging pull. But the pulling persisted. She heard Selma's voice? "Miss Ginny, mistress." Regina opened her eyes and saw Selma's face. Beyond the girl was the intricate pink silk construction of the bed's roof and sides. "What is it? What time is it?" Regina mumbled. She felt as if she hadn't slept at all. It seemed only moments ago that she had lifted Mycal's head gently from her lap. She'd been bone weary. She had left him asleep on the divan where they had talked endlessly through the night. She had left him and had gone to curl up on her own bed. And now this person... "He wants to speak to you on the Discover Man's most advanced technology of the mind -- Buy, Read and Use A Dianetics Publication Expand your awareness of past, present and future life! Predict and understand human behaviour with this wealth of proven, factual information. This best seller reveals the parts of the mind and the source of human irrationality. Grasp this opportunity to reap the benefits of the simple, powerful techniques in copies have been sold! Order your copy of Dianetics: The Modem Science of Mental Health today! Just Get it. Read it and Try it! Send # to The Church of Scientology of California. Publications Organization U.S... Dept. G-#. # West Temple St... Los Angeles. Calif. #. No charc for postage and handling. All orders will be shipped within # hours of receipt. Dianetici is the registered trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect of his pub(Greek) "mind." Copyright # by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rits Reserved. The Church of Scientology of California -- a non-profit organization. Scientology is an applied relious philoaophy. ientology and Dianetics are regbtered names. tel," this person said with a hunted, harried look in the eyes. "He insists that I wake you. He's been calling for over an hour, every five minutes." Regina shook her head and blinked. There was a pain behind her temples. "Who?" she asked. "Who insists?' ' "It's him," Selma said. Her facial expression and intonation said the rest. ' "Tell him to drop dead," Regina said and turned her head back into the pillows. Once more she felt the tug on her arm. Selma's voice had an edge of panic. "Miss Ginny, please, he threatens..." Regina sat up. Eyes flashing, she cried: "All right, all right. I'll talk to him." She leaped out of the bed and strode off into the sitting room outside her sleeping chamber. Fury boiled in her. She threw herself into a chair and activated the smallscreened tel. "What do you want," she said, staring at the screen. The image of her brother didn't appear. All too often he turned down the visio. He liked to come into her room as a disembodied voice. She reached forward and turned down the visio on her side too, just as his voice came over the box. "How was it?" "How was what?" "Striving with that bumpkin." "You're disgusting," she said; her voice conveyed revulsion. She wanted to cut him off, to take the tel and fling it against the wall. But she didn't dare. "Ho, ho, ho! Look who's calling who names. I was told all about you, femmy. As for disgusting...you threw yourself at him. Well, let me tell you something, Ginny. I won't have it, understand?" She heard the sharpness of his voice and could well imagine, without any help from the screen, the tight, angry look on his long face, the cruel turn of his lips. She should have known that her all-night dancing would be reported to Sidney. She had put him -- and Clafto -- out of her mind. But Clafto had tried to dance with her several times during the ball. She had refused him each and every time. At the end he had glowered with dark fury. Now she reaped the consequences. She didn't answer. She wondered what he might say next. She was afraid, but for once she felt defiant as well. By tonight Media would broadcast the news. Her father would hear of that and know that Accommodation was possible again, that Ecofreak sought her. They'd call her into his presence. She would be safe again and forever more, safely tucked away in Hinterland. But for the moment she was fearful and wary. She didn't dare give Sidney any hints. "Well?" he said. "You heard me." "I heard you." "And... ?" "And what?" "And what're you going to do?" "What do you want me to do?" "You know what it is. I don't have to tell you." She knew. He considered her a plaything for his favorites. Clafto was Sidney's latest favorite. He stood next in line as Underunifier should Daddy suddenly die. Until Sidney changed his mind, of course. Then it would be someone else. And after, that it would be someone else again. And in Sidney's mind, whoever it was must be her lover, her husband if Daddy ever died. She imagined the future as a succession of husbands, one after the other. Each one would be executed when he fell from favor. Today Sidney couldn't kill them. But in the future he would, he would. For a moment she felt desperate. Then she remembered. This time she would escape. Serenita had known it, and somewhere deeply she also knew, despite that horrid dream which even now lay beneath her consciousness like some pressure. "I'm still thinking about it." "Damn you, bitch," he hissed over the tel. "Weeks ago -- weeks ago I told you to take Clafto! Thought it had happened. And this morning he told me how it really is. You deceived me, Ginny. You shouldn't do that, you know. And last night you made a whore of yourself -- with a tribesman! "I did no such thing," she answered quietly. She wished she had. "He spent the night." "We talked." "I bet," he cried with a little laugh. "I bet you did! Well, my sweet, there's an end to that, as of now. Clafto will come to you tonight, and you'd better receive him. If you don't. I'll personally open the doors for him. And for his friends. Tell that to your staff, chippie." Regina shivered. She wouldn't be here. She'd go and hide somewhere. He wouldn't dare "I'll go to Daddy," she cried. "I can't stand it any more!" "Ohhh? You will, will you? Good luck, fem-stuff, good luck to you. And if you get through to him, tell him that, that..." He can't think of a threat terrible enough, she thought. "Let me tell you this, Ginny. You go to Daddy, and I'll make sure that you regret it to the end of your days." Sister Serenita, she thought. I'll go to St. Theresas of Carmen. "And don't think you can escape me, Ginny. My men are stationed at all your doors. You can't get away. Don't try." Hysteria put clammy claws around her throat. She buried her face in her hands. Her mind raced, seeking alternative routes of escape. She couldn't find any. Maybe I'll have to yield to Clafto. Sidney will have his way with me one final time. Then I'll get away forever. It wasn't the physical thing she hated; that she rather liked -- it was the humiliation of it all. Another man's will imposed on her. And now, with that strangely sweet experience behind her, her memories filled with the long talk she'd had with the archangel, trying to assure him that she truly loved him -- although she didn't; and this morning she knew that -- it seemed to her terrible and repulsive to yield to Clafto merely because her brother commanded it. Mycal had given her a feeling of what it might be like again...true love. She could yield to him, although she didn't love him and meant to use him crassly -- like Sidney tried to use her. But I'm in desperate straits, she thought. He' U forgive me. "Well?" the voice over the tel probed. "What do you say?" "Nothing," she answered. "I have nothing more to say to you, Sidney." She reached forward and cut him off. Immediately, she punched out the numbers of her father's office; she kept the visio off. In her fluffy nightgown, her hair in disarray, her face puffy from sleep and kisses, she didn't want to be seen. "Top Level," the switchboard operator sang, and a woman's face appeared in the screen. Regina identified herself and asked to be connected with her father. "We'll switch you," the woman said. Her voice was cool. The screen went blank. Regina waited. The seconds multiplied into a minute, then another. Too late, she thought. He must have gotten through before I did. His people are everywhere. Her spirits sank. She saw in her mind the corridors, the large offices filled with her father's many aides. A wall about him. He was behind them, remote and inaccessible even to his own flesh and blood. After a minute, another face appeared. She recognized Blottingham. Daddy's chief of staff -- and one of Sidney's friends as well. He said: "Miss Unsler? Am I speaking to Miss Unsler?" He ran a hand over the short hair on top of his head, cut into the shape of an egg. "Your visio is off." "This is Regina." "The Unifier will return your call as soon as he is out of conference." His tone was crisp but cool, and Regina knew that she had failed. V French came out of Proctor's office and rushed past an astonished Mrs. Sedlig toward the elevators. His energetic strides translated anger into kinetic energy. Mrs. Sedlig peered after him, her head slightly bent, above thick rimless lenses that she wore on her nose for reading. She was a small, faded person, with grey hair held in a bun at the back, and red-rimmed, almost lashless eyes. Her fussy fingers nervously checking packages for signaatmosphere as Proctor himself. She had been his inseparable companion since the days of Defense, and though she didn't look it, she was a survivor type, having come through the clerical purges when secretary machines had invaded the bureaucracy and only a very few, the most loyal, the 'indispensables,' had remained in such positions. Like Proctor she lived alone and had never married or entered a contract. She drew her total psychic sustenance from her work, and this room -- with its scatter of comfortable couches and little coffee tables, the holographs of Helium refineries on the wall, the tribal flags in stands, the huge potted artificial plants she tended as if they were real -- was her real domain. From her teak desk next to Proctor's door she guarded his privacy, filtered the messages, and watched the rise and fall of issues and of men. Now, as she watched French disappear down the hall, striding angrily, his purple robe swinging, she had a clear intuition that Rivera French was on the way down. She inferred this from a number of little signals, not just from the shouting match in Proctor's office which she had overheard as a dampened sequence of sound through the wall. She gathered it also from the frequency with which Gregory Korn, the DA for Compliance, was called to Proctor's office -- he being French's chief rival -- and Proctor's own mutterings when she took him coffee or emptied his in-box. She stored the information away in her meticulously ordered memory, thinking that French was altogether a vulgar man, much too impulsive, his Branco heritage worn outside for all to see. Then she returned her attention to a thick decision package. Down the hall French had stopped in front of the elevators and waited, fuming. His breath still steamed with hormones generated by the bitter exchange. The post-mortem of the negotiating session had left a foul taste in his mouth. Proctor had gathered his chief aides for an emergency meeting. His strategy had soon emerged -- a replay of the laser issue of five years ago. Proctor had proposed that the silco-parts be offered to Ecofreak in exchange for a withdrawal of the hostage demand -- and, of course, delivery of a Helium Interdiction. ' 'We have nothing to lose by trying," he had said, "and, frankly, we have nothing left to try." French punched the elevator button again with unnecessary force. He'd known it, had felt it in his guts, cduld have predicted this would happen, had guessed it would happen ever since that evening at the jump ball game just before that fatal encounter with Meyer's sparks. In the office he had argued with something approaching fury that the Secret Agenda had to be achieved some other way. The silcomponents couldn't be delivered. A brief glimpse at the Ecofreak drawings before the meeting had convinced him that the parts had some sort of military significance. But Proctor had shrugged that off. He could be ruthlessly singleminded when it came to his own objectives. At last French had walked out in anger, leaving the field to more compliant deputy assistants. He, for one, wouldn't risk Union's Unslers ffom rule. But you shouldn't have said it, he thought. You should have kept your yap shut. Opposing the Chief Negotiator did nothing for a man's career -- least of all if Proctor turned out to be right in the end and became Unifier. But there was a point where ambition had to be subordinated to responsibility. The elevator doors slid aside. French was about to enter when he saw Darby Dickens come out. He stopped the DA for security. "Darby," he said, "in all this turmoil I haven't had a chance to talk to you. Did Franklin tell you about my situation?" Dickens nodded gravely. He was a tall, black Structure Panther whose exemplary neatness never failed to surprise French. After a night's work, his jump suit was completely free of wrinkles. His sleeves were carefully rolled back to his elbows. His olive arms were thick and solid. A golden watch gleamed on his wrist. "We'll rescue Miri, never fear," Dickens said. "That'll be the first sweep tonight. But it'll be late. We must wait until the crowds thin out." "I want to go along," French said. Dickens nodded. "Have my boys issue you a chemgun and mask and meet us in the stadium at half past ten or so. Gomer will be in charge of that sector. Look him up." "Thanks," French said. "By the way. Darby, what is this all about. Operation Hairy Scary?" A grin lit up Dickens' face. "You don't know?" French shook his head. "I haven't had a chance to ask Proctor. ' ' "Well, let it be a surprise, then. I'm sorry, Riv, I don't have time to explain. I'm on my way to Res now. Hairy Scary is turning out to he one of his pets -- if you know what I mean." "Darby -- " "Later." Dickens moved off, waving. French punched the elevator button again. Darby enjoyed all this. Nothing like an operation to break the routine of guarding doors and grav-drums. But if Proctor planned something foolish, would Dickens restrain him? It came out of the man rarely enough, thank God, French reflected, thinking about Proctor's penchant for practical jokes. But when it came out, it was usually something approaching the sordid. It seemed as if practical joking and perpetual bachelorhood went hand in hand. French recalled 'Operation Sulphy Ovum' when a hundred crates of rotten eggs had been delivered to Top Level three years ago. Proctor had been most indignant, had promised a full investigation when Blottingham had come calling in the wake of the stink. Yet everyone suspected that Proctor himself had planned every detail of that. The elevator came and French got in. For a second he surveyed mentally the many hours between now and half past ten. Miri would be in that small room, waiting. A powerful pulse of longing shook him, and he realized he didn't give a damn about silco-parts, Ecofreak, Proctor, or anything else -- not until Miri was safe. As he strode off toward his office two floors down, he made a mental note to call Dachshund Jones, Number One in the Kayring Gang. He would hand Miri over to the gang for safekeeping. Nothing less would give him mental rest. People filled his office. The lights had been turned off. Schematics of an ear-shaped device intricately overlaid by a strange pattern were projected against a wall. A computer console stood on the right. A three-dimensional articulation of the component turned slowly in the upper half of the screen while an odd, random, zig-zag curve flashed like lightning on the bottom. Clemmens had assembled the technical staff for an examination of the sil-components. Two silchemists from Norleans had stayed to help. But why in this office? Then French realized the reason. Operation Hairy-Scary had preempted all the conference rooms. French stepped in wondering if Professor Fulbright of the Central Technical Institute had arrived. French said: "How are we coming? Anything new?" Dark, shadowed faces turned toward him. Clemmens stood next to the computer screen with a pointer in his hand. He turned to French. "We've stumbled onto something new, Riv. Should've thought of it long ago...but we're industrial technologists. This is a rather advanced research notion. Lindy here suggested that Ecofreak might be of course, but we haven't got anything to lose. We're boxed in...Professr Fulbright is here." French took the cue. He searched the blue-white faces until his eyes found a small man with angry eyes and a sparse goatee. He walked over to Fulbright and shook his hand. "How do you do, professor; glad you could come." He turned back to Clemmens at the screen. The Random Oscillation Effect. Curious. Over the years French had scientific press. Great promise, little performance. "Well, Clemmens, what have you decided. What use could they make of the effect?" Clemmens shrugged. Computer lights were reflected in his bald skull. "We haven't the faintest, Riv. It's a useless phenomenon -- useless precisely because it's random. A laboratory curiosity. But suppose this little gadget controls the oscillations..." Clemmens let that one sink in. French thought for a second. "Atomics?" he said. God, he thought, if it's really so, Proctor has to be stopped! Heads nodded around the table. Clemmens said: "If this little switch can modulate .the oscillations, Ecofreak could neutralize an atomic attack. But how?" Clemmens raised his hands. "We can't figure it out. This isn't the whole assembly -- only the part they can't make themselves. And from this little bone -- " Clemmens tapped the console screen with his pointer and tiny dots of white appeared on the blue surface where he tapped. " -- we can't reconstruct the whole beast... At least not in an afternoon." French looked down at the professor. "What's your assessment. Dr. Fulbright?" The physicist snorted. He had a high, crackly voice. "It won't work," he pronounced. "I've told your staff as much, Mr. French, but they persist. I've spent thirty years and haven't done it yet. I find it a little difficult to imagine that simple tribal engineers should have solved the puzzle." The man's offended ego sent out angry vibrations. French didn't say what he had on his mind. Those 'simple tribal engineers' had proven their mettle in field after field. The Crestmore bible thundered against Technology, but Hinterland was filled with heretics, as it were. He recalled a fancy laboratory he had once nearly penetrated on the outskirts of Kaysee in Mokan territory -- clumps of buildings in a rolling valley beside the remnants of an ancient highway. French had seen white-clad technicians moving about beyond a fence like monastics. Roofs had bristled with antennae. He had found odd chemicals in the waste cans of that lab. That had been one of those missions to follow up on the laser demand, a job he hadn't left to subordinates... Clemmens cleared his throat. French sensed a tension in the room. "You will admit, won't you. Professor Fulbright, that you've never tried to weld copper and SP." "I'll admit no such thing!" Fulbright bristled. "I have avoided meaningless experiments, if that's what you mean. But my students and I have simulated all possible combinations of sil and common materials. The mathematical foundations have been laid. They yield no results." French looked back at Clemmens. "Suppose for a moment, professor, that they use a new kind of mathematics." Fulbright snorted. "Preposterous! What new mathematics? There is only one kind. Models of the Universe, Mr. Clemmens...perhaps, perhaps. But surely you don't mean a new math!" Scientists were childish in proportion to their fame. French knew that Fulbright could be of help -- but it would take time. "I meant a model, professor. Perhaps a five-dimensional approach, that sort of thing. I'm an engineer myself and don't pretend..." French had to go. In that bitter meeting with Proctor, he had had an intuition. Recalling the negotiating session, it had seemed to him that Bono had acted against tribal instructions. Perhaps the man had fallen for the girl and meant to extract her by using the negotiations. Proctor had rejected that thesis out of hand, saying it was incompatible with the parallel demand for Media announcement of the hostage request. Bono could have the girl for the asking. She was a notorious whore, warming the bed of just about anybody who wanted her badly enough. Nonsense, nonsense. Nevertheless, French was sure. He wanted another look at the tapes of the ball and of the morning session. He waited for Fulbright to finish while he eyed Clemmens. The two men clearly clashed. French decided he had done the right thing in calling in Fulbright. Answers would surely come from these collisions. Fulbright was saying: "I welcome your inspection of our models, Mr. Clemmens. We have a goodly set of models. Five dimensional models, ten dimensional models, Mr. Clemmens. Thirty years is a long time, you know, and I pride myself on a modest reputation in the field of Vibration." Personal gravitron -- the Fulbright invention everyone knew about -- had made the professor famous. He had discovered a method of sensitizing fibers in gravitron chambers so that they gave temporary lift to individuals. Police used it and so did sealing crews. It had made jumpball possible -- alas. French said: "I'll be back shortly, gentlemen; in the meantime, please continue. Professor, thanks for your help. We must solve this mystery somehow and do it quickly." He turned and went off toward the Psychometry Department of the Office of Research. Dart scurried down the narrow stairs with occasional, furtive glances over his shoulder. He appeared unaware of the slightly comical, almost theatrical image he projected as he tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, the very picture of guilty stealth. He tried to make himself small and inconscpicuous, althogh there was no one about. A nervous litany ran in his head,  hope, I hope, I hope, he repeated. Dart hoped that no one would interrupt his clandestine communications with Jonny Tack. He hoped that the technician on duty in the comroom wouldn't raise any annoying little questions about Dart's authority. He hoped, above all, that Tack would receive the message well. In a situation of this kind, where a man had to walk a tightrope between two chasms, one couldn't be sure of the outcome. It took a man of courage to do what he was about to do; no, more than that -- a man of subtlety. He held several sheets of scriptoplast in his hand. He had labored long and hard on the precise wording of the message. Time and again he had pushed sheets through the renewal slot above the desk in his room to erase unsuitable variations. Now he had a version he could live with. He hoped that the words would convey the picture just...so. Not too hard on Bono -- just in case. Not too tolerant either -- in the event... At the bottom of the stairs Dart stopped to orient himself. He had been down here many times in the old days, but things had changed. The comroom should be to the left. Yes, there it was. He saw the sign painted on a glass door. He moved forward. I talked to him, he reassured himself. I asked him outright. This shouldn't come as a surprise to him.  said to him: "Mycal," I said, "are you acting on your own authority on this? Do you have a secret mandate from Jonny Tack?" I was very direct with the man. I came to the point. I didn't mince words. Bono's eyes had shied under Dart's penetrating gaze. Bono had scratched his ear, had glowered. "My arrangements with Jonny are none of your concern. Franco," he'd said. "When I want your advice, I'll ask for it." The memory made Dart feel the fury he had felt then. There had been more along those lines. Bono hadn't been direct. He hadn't denied, hadn't affirmed. Well, my boy, you can't blame me for drawing my own conclusions. I hope they're right. I hope, I hope. Dart's entrance into the comroom startled a lone technician. The youngster lounged in front of a large console with many buttons and a keyboard. He shoved a book into a drawer. "You're certainly busy," Dart snapped, taking advantage of the situation. "What's this you're reading? Let me see it?" "Yes, sir," the youngster said, swallowing. He opened the drawer tion. It had Proctor on the cover. "Uhhum," Dart said, eyebrows raised. "Propaganda. And theirs at that. Don't believe a word of it. You men certainly live a cushy life around here, don't you?" He gestured at numerous pinups on the wall. "When I was first secretary around here, we ran a tighter ship." The youngster gulped. "Yes, sir." "Got an emergency," Dart said. "Get cracking on this message to Tack. Priority. Security code one." Dart held out the sheets, and the technician went to work. He pulled out a book and looked something up. From a cabinet with little metal drawers opposite the console he selected a plastic card, inserted it into a slot on the console. Then he sat down before the keyboard. Dart relaxed. He felt in control. "Does this door lock?" He gestured toward the frosted glass. "I don't want to be interrupted. This is a priority one." He wanted to drive that point home. "Yes, sir," the youngster said. "At bottom, there, under the handle." A small button activated the electronic lock. The bolt slid home with a buzz. Over the technician's shoulder. Dart inspected the words as they appeared on the scriptoplast fed into the machine from a roll. The youngster sweated. Priority one was not an everyday occurrence. sheet. The keys were still. Nevertheless, the machine clackered rhythmically in readiness. That single line would cause quite a stir back home. Dart imagined men around the console, one man breaking away to fetch a supervisor. The clacker intensified. It seemed as if the machine were gathering strength. Then the keys began to move with great rapidity. A message appeared. The technician looked up at Dart with a question in his eyes. "Confirm," Dart said. They don't want to believe it, he thought. the youngster typed. The answer came immediately. Is presence of JT desirablel necessary... The words caused a rush of delight mingled with anxiety. Jonny must be available for communications, else base camp wouldn't have put that question to them. A dialogue with Jonny would be most desirable. Above all Dart had dreaded a long wait for a response from Tack, unsure how the man had received the message. "Desirable," he said to the waiting technician, who now typed the word. The technician spread out and smoothened Dart's sheets of scriptoplast and began to type slowly. He had difficulty deciphering Dart's small and crabby hand. Dart watched through deep-set eyes, anxious that every word should make it across the vast distance to Texahoma. He felt the excitement rise, mixed with a good deal of fear now...now that he had made a commitment to act. He wondered what it was like in base camp. Did the sun shine? Did rain beat a drum on the canvas of the tents? Did the steppe wind blow, ironing the mutagrass? So much depends on the weather, he thought anxiously. What if it rains and Tack's in one of his ugly moods? The Tacks of Kaysee had a mean streak. Genius had its price. The Tacks paid it in the coin of occasional madness. Old Tack had had his share of that blood, and Jonny had inherited both: his father's gifts and curses. At last the message had gone through. The technician's hands rested on the keyboard. Dart tried to guess Tack's reaction to the message. Would he frown? Would his eyes be puzzled? Would the muscles of his neck tighten in anger? Dart's heart beat hard behind his wrinkled throat. He nearly shivered with tension. The machine clackered evenly. Its internal hammers drummed a tattoo against the retaining bar, eager to tap out another message. Then the machine's noise intensified and the words came. It's all right, Dart exulted, staring at the words. He noticed the half-anxious, half-admiring look on the youngster's face. Few they were, few indeed, the men Tack addressed as "old buddy." "Tell him, 'Yes, sir,' " Dart said. The technician typed. The machine responded immediately. Dart imagined Tack next to the machine, his hand on his hip as he dictated. Dart smiled. It's be all right. He recognized the tone. Jonny was in one of his funning moo,ds. "Four nine two," he said. "Five eight seven. Nine nine one." The youngster typed. Tack stood next to a console, his legs wide apart. One of his hands rested on his hip. His head was shaved with the exception of a thick sheaf of hair at the crown which, in the shape of a bushy horsetail, hung down blond and shiny over his back. A pinched and angry expression sat on his face. He waved his arms and yelled: "Somebody fetch me a chair." Men stirred into action. Seconds later a wood-and-canvas chair appeared behind him. He fell into it. "Is it Dart?" he asked. The man at the console looked up from a list and nodded. Tack stared up at the sagging canvas roof, at the wires that ran along a wrinkle toward the polesupported tent tip. "Write," he said to the operator. "Franco, you old skunk, I read your little message, but it's sneaky as hell. What're you trying to tell me?" Tack glanced about. A ring of men had formed at a distance. "Clear the hell out," he yelled. "Out, goddammit!" Tack sat stretched out in the chair, legs forward, the heels of his boots sunk into the canvas flooring. His horsetail fell over the brightgreen back of the chair. He wondered how long it would take to get the story out of Dart. The old man always hedged his bets. Nearly in his grave, the old coot, but ambitious as hell. Sometimes that could be useful in a man, especially a suspicious little ferret like Dart. Tack weighed all the factors while the machine clackered, grew agitated, and the keys began to flash. Dart hated Bono. But Dart was a gutless little rat. He wouldn't dare accuse My cal of anything unless it had substance. Come to think of it. Tack wasn't sure Dart had made an accusation. The message had been vague, full of odd hints. An irregularity in the hostage demand... ? What in the hell was that supposed to mean? "What's he saying?" Tack asked. The operator pulled up on the yellow cable paper to read the message. " 'My message, I believe, is clear and concise as to facts,' " the operator read, " 'in essence I am asking for confirmation of the fact that Ae hostage demand can deviate from your signed and approved instructions.' " "Double talk, garbage," Tack shouted. "No, don't type that." He stared up at the canvas ceiling again while the operator waited. Something had been done up north. Had Bono changed the hostage demand? Dart would never come right out and say it if left a chance. "Write: Did Bono present the no?" Keys clattered. "Yes," the operator said after a moment. "What was the hostage demand. Give the name, only the name." Sidney Unsler. It'd better be that. A bold, clean jab right at Union's solar plexus. The number two man in Union. That should extract the sil-components in a hurry. Tack remembered the loud, whining arguments about the negotiating strategy. All kinds of devious schemes had been proposed. Tack had listened to all the garbage. Then one night he had smashed his fist on the table and had told the talkers what he wanted. A simple, head-on strategy. No monkey business. He glanced at the operator. "Well?" The man shrugged. "They haven't answered yet." "Goddamn," Tack yelled. "Can't they spell?" Just then the machine clattered briefly. The operator rolled up the paper and leaned into the machine. When his head came back up. Tack saw agitation in the face, a kind of cringing. "Well?" he called sharply. "Sir," the man said, almost in a whisper, "Regina Unsler." Tack leapt to his feet. His face turned purple. Veins bulged on his forehead. He was a very tall man. His head almost touched the inclined roof of the small tent. Two great strides brought him to the console. He tore at the yellow cable paper. It came away from the machine with a sideways rip. He stared at the black letters. "Confirm," he croaked to the operator, choked with emotion. He had nearly forgotten the little bitch. She recalled a troubled time...those sweaty nights, his father's thundering anger, the humiliation of six months' penance in the steppe with the herds -- all that rolled around in him now like a down-dipping tornado. Above all he remembered with a shudder the meeting with his father in the old man's Wellhead home. "Stand there, by the door," the old man had ordered. And while Jonny stood there feeling small and intimidated, his father cleared a large space in the middle of the gloamy room ringed by pictures of the ancestors going back nearly to table against the wall with a crack, shoved chairs out of the way. Lamps crashed as he moved furniture. That done, the old man turned with a flash in those eyes beneath the bushy grey brows. "I'll teach you to sully Tack blood," the old man thundered, a fist in the air. "Defend yourself like a tribesman." Then his father beat him to a pulp. The old man had been strong like an ox to his dying day. Tack remembered spitting blood on the carpet on hands and knees when it had been over. Then he'd been sick. The old man forced him to clean up the vomit with a bucket and cloth like a mutant slave. "They confirm," the operator said. "Write," Tack said. "Dart, I want to hear it all. Every bit of it. From the start. I don't want any double talk or I'll have you skinned. Straight, Dart. Straight." As he waited. Tack tried to give Bono the benefit of the doubt. Bono might have found some information unknown to Ecofreak before. Regina might be better insurance that the components would be delivered. But as Dart's message began to clatter over the machine, it rapidly disabused him of such notions. He found it easy to construct a picture from the words -- fivepercenter...tub...ball...dancing all night...refused to go home...disappeared from the...no sign at breakfast...late arriving at... The machine finally stopped. Tack stared at the yellow paper. He said: "Tell him to stand by." Around the low walls of the tent many consoles formed an electronic wall. In the middle a thick central pole supported the roof. Tack began to walk around the tent. He folded his arms across his back, unaware that it was a mannerism he copied from his father. His head was tilted forward. His eyes stared at the slightly cuffed tips of his boots. He let it all sink in without resistance. He was surprised by his own reaction, so bland, so mild. So he had been betrayed. It was so simple that he almost laughed. The Brotherhood of Action had nursed a snake. The poisonous viper had turned and struck. Very well, very well. He walked in a circle. On his boot tip a rock had tom the shiny skin, revealing the white leather flesh beneath. The Bono clan had its roots deep in Texahoma, but the family extended far across Hinterland. Tack recalled Bonos as far north as Chica. Bono fem-folk, in addition, linked the clan to many shades of political conviction. The poison must have crept into the inner circle through one of those capillaries. Tack conjured up an image of Gordon Gono, Mycal's father, and recalled that Gordon had never been an enthusiastic Activist. He'd had an independent streak -- ever off to tend his property. Yes, Tack thought, the Old Man had said as much once. A loner, Gordon Bono. And so's his son! he thought with sudden fury. So's his goddamned son! Not a mainstream Activist. A little distant, a little aloof. Smart, smooth in a way. Tack had picked him for his quiet, brainy manner. The kind of man who'd get along with Union folk but bright enough to read them. And Tack had thought him strong -- not a talker, not running at the mouth all the time. But he'd been wrong. The man was weak. I sent Union a five percenter, a shakey-wakey, a jellyass. Oh, please Muster Union, suh, make this pressure to stop. Not a man who'd bite his tongue and tough it out. A wobble-knee. Then a complex emotion of rage, jealousy, envy, and longing possessed him. He saw Bono ride Regina's wicked, foamy saddle through the night. He saw them strive. He felt a pain and, mixed with it,he felt a treacherous twinge of excitement in the loins. It recalled the Pact of Chastity. My cal Bono, he thought with bitterness. He who had refused with a handful of others to join the crusade Tack had proposed to the Inner circle. Most had sworn a solemn oath to shun fem-folk until the structures fell. Bono hadn't said a word, hadn't explained himself. But when the others stepped forward, Bono stood his ground with a few. He was a bachelor and had no reason to refuse. It seemed to Tack doubly contemptible that Bono, the fivepercenter, the one man in twenty who couldn't take gravitron, would tiptoe after stnicture-ass the day he hit Ricardo. And he'd known where to go! Tack's face darkened. The House of the Lord must be swept clean. He'd trace down the linkages that led through Bono blood to the treacherous Accommodationists. He had been too soft on them. He had let them scatter to their wells, herds, farms. The Lord's brush would sweep through the heap of Accommodationist garbage. He'd order an action as soon as the structures were down. Until then he needed all the support he could get to hold the fragile Counter Union together. The thought of the structures brought him out of murky reverie into the cold, bright present. What if he didn't get the silcoparts? What then? His base of power would begin to crack. The tribes would drift apart again. His father's dream would crumble; the structures would still stand. No, he thought with vehemence. Never! He broke his stride and crossed the tent to the manned console. Bono lay on the bed of his locked bedroom and spoke on the tel with Regina. He was puzzled, worried, and delighted all in one. Despite tear stains, Regina's face was beautiful. Her tone had a kind of desperate edge. Bono had tried to discover what bothered the girl, but she had avoided his questions. Instead she had pursued a single objective -- to get him to come to her domain. "Will you come?" she asked again. Bono drew closer to the tel. He lay on his stomach and cradled the small device in his hands. The bedroom was large and comfortable. Thick white hare rugs lay on the floor. Photos of Hinterland scenes hung on the wall. An orange lumiglobe burned on the night table to his right.  "Of course I'll come," he said. "You know I'll come. But I thought that you were adamant. , No message on the Media -- no togetherness." "Did you ask for me?" Her voice was anxious. Her manner disturbed him. She revealed a state of unnatural excitement. Her head flicked to the side with short glances as if she expected an interruption. Could she be afraid of something? He said: "I asked for you, darling. They have the demand. I told them to announce it on the Media. But it wasn't on the news." "I know," she said indifferently. "I watched... Can you leave now?" "Of course," he said. "But..." He hesitated. He longed to be with her, but he couldn't go through another night of unsatisfied desire. "Do you really want me? I didn't satisfy your condition." She shook her head furiously from side to side. "That doesn't matter any more. I shouldn't have been so cruel -- not for my sake, not for yours. Hurry, darling, and be careful, very careful." She's afraid, she's anxious. Something is wrong. "I waited and waited for you to call," she continued in a burst of words. "I called and called the embassy, but you couldn't be reached. ' ' Regina sounded like a woman in love, and Bono felt buoyed up by her longing, which he shared. "Now you have reached me," he said, thinking back over an afternoon filled with angry altercations between himself and the delegates. They had sought him out singly and in groups to demand explanations. He refused to discuss the matter, but in the process also discovered how totally indifferent he felt about the Helium round. Only she mattered. "Tell me," he said. "You said that I should be careful. Why? is something wrong?" "Nothing," she answered, but Bono saw a furtive motion in her eyes. She appeared to change her mind. "There...there are some strange men outside. I...I don't know what they might want..." "I'll be right over," he said, alarmed more by her manner than her words. "Right away." He undressed and took a quick shower. The rush of water enlivened him, and his sense of dull fatigue gave way to exhilaration. He dried himself before the mirror, pleased by his lithe, hairy, healthy body. For a second he felt again what he had felt the night before -- an irrepressible good humor. "Hey, man," he said aloud to his mirror image. "Hey, you know something? I don't give a shit about the Crestmore prophesies." He grinned at himself. The grin reminded him of another Bono -- his younger self. A flash of insight sobered his face. Then he broke into a grin again. It had occurred to him that all those years at the Academy of Action had been a sham. He combed his hair and beard. He gave a twirl to his mustaches. He thought: I realty don't believe in that religion stuff. Hell, I don't want to change the world. Jutting nonsense. At the moment the world seemed marvellously beautiful. There she was, almost within reach. He frowned for a second, thinking of her strange mood. Well, he would console her. He left the shower and quickly dressed. He whistled a tune. The words went: "I am a kid from Texaho, the prairie she be my hooome..." Across the room hung a photograph of the many-peaked Sierra Petra. He stared at it while his right foot wiggled and worried into his boot. Then he heard the drumbeat of feet outside. He looked at the door. Someone called his name. "Bono! Are you in there? Open up!" He recognized Dart's voice and heard its harsh, commanding tone. Bono instantly grasped the situation. Damn! He shouldn't have showered. No matter. In all leisure he pushed his foot into the boot. Resistance would be useless. He'd think about Regina when all this was over. Outside Dart hammered on the door and repeated his call. Bono opened the door at last, and the little man nearly fell in. One of his fists was raised. In the other he held strips of blue scriptoplast. Several of the delegates stood grimly behind him, hands on the handles of ceremonial daggers. They appeared to be under the command of beefy Dulsol, chief of embassy maintenance, who held a pistol. Dart lowered his arm and composed himself. He inspected Bono's face. The forked beard stood out aggressively, the mustache tips were turned up. Dart felt sorry for Bono. He had the face that should make structures crumble. But he lacked that special something...that vibrant quality of leadership. In the center of the room Dart took up a dignified stance, one foot out in front of the other. "Better sit down, Bono." He eyed the ex-chief with displeasure now. Bono had a little grin on his face. That grin would fade away in a hurry. In no time at all Bono would be on ice. Bono smiled, amused by the little man's obvious air of selfimportance. He decided to humor the little rat. He walked to the bed, sat down on its edge, folded his arms across his chest. "Let me read you something, Bono," Dart said. He arranged scriptoplast sheets. "I have a cable from Jonny Tack," he announced. Bono saw sparks of triumph in the deep-set eyes. "Let me read you what the leader says." Dart looked up at Bono and noted that the man still grinned. " 'I, Jonny Tack, Leader of the Counter Union, apprised of certain treasonable activities by my appointed Chief of Mission, hereby remove him from that post and order him delivered to me under armed guard. I appoint Franco Dart acting Chief of Mission until such time as a new chief can be appointed.' " Dart lowered the scriptoplast and looked at Bono. He said: "This much you have need to know. There is a good deal more, of course. It might interest you to know that I am also provisional ambassador. ' ' Bono came to his feet and made for Dart. For a second Dart retreated, thinking this was an attack. At the door Dulsol lurched forward with a grunt. But then Dart saw Bono's eagerly extended hand. "My dear Franco," Bono cried, grinning, "Let me be the first to congratulate you." Dart witheld his hand for a second and viewed Bono with dark suspicion. But the man's eyes seemed sincerely pleased even if that grin was insolent, and congratulations were in order. Dart took Bono's extended hand, shook it, dropped it, and withdrew a pace or two with a sideways glance at the waiting delegates. "You have a big job ahead of you, Franco," Bono pursued. "Good luck to you. Now, I suppose, you'll put me under arrest? Or do I start for home tonight?" "Take him away, men," Dart said, almost in a whisper, and Dulsol's huge hand soon grabbed Bono's elbow, jerked. Bono walked down the hall, thinking about Tack, thinking that this move was typieal of that ox. He hadn't checked with Bono, hadn't called for his side of the story. Tack had acted from emotion -- as always. The guards led him through the ornate parts of the embassy and from there into a neglected, empty wing. Two men walked in front, two behind. As the group turned a comer, Bono saw coming toward them another and similar complement: two guards, a young woman, two guards. In the narrow, dilapidated corridor, the groups had to squeeze past one another. For a second Bono looked at the girl and she at him. Her situation seemed like his own. Her eyes flashed a knowing look. He had never seen her before. She wore a long, blue gown and had a white stole over her shoulders -- very formally dressed for a prisoner. In a second she was past and he continued on toward whatever prison Dart had decreed. Eight flames , of the inner circle supped around a low, rectangular table seated on legless, cushioned chairs. The lights were dim, music subdued. Pink-robed servants chosen for small size and delicate features hovered around the guests or moved about in the obsequious small-step. They served Peacefreak duck in dark wooden bowls and hot Maoling wine in shallow, pearlwhite porcellain cups. "This casual -- dare I say haphazard? -- meeting pleases me the more in that no conquest past or prospective will be feasted, and we are joined merely as close friends." Through the faintly blue curtain of incense smoke that rose to the ceiling from a slit in the table, Clafto Meyer listened with a smile as Luke Payne began his little speech in faultless Latin. The dinner had been called on short notice as a kind of secret celebration. No one quite said out loud why they were gathered here, the men closest to the Fire, but each one knew the reason, and each knew that the others knew, and so what Payne said had a special significance. It was titillating precisely because he didn't say it all. Payne lifted his shallow cup, held it in both hands; he spoke with his face inclined over the wine. He was the fifth man to try a little speech, but Clafto was sure that Luke would outdo the rest. "As I taste the fire of this wine and savor the fey aroma of the steppes, I disagree with Jackson, Clafto. The question is before us: What is the peak of all delights? To Jackson it's a blooming rose whose soft red petals gently cup a dewbedecked, delicate, pink interior. And he would be a hairy bumble bee with leave to plunge into that rose to bathe in the dew and suck the nectar. And if the petals should close at night, he'd gladly gambol in that soft prison until dawn." To the sound of appreciative chuckles, Luke Payne looked up. He is delightful, Clafto thought. He has improved on Jackson's little speech and hasn't had his own say yet. It'll be bawdy, so much is certain. Clafto was glad that he had dropped the hint this morning after his talk with the Fire. It pleased him that the senior flames had organized this feast. Sidney's second in command deserved such small, thoughtful attentions. Clafto found it especially appropriate that he should be held in such esteem. Unlike the others, he wouldn't be. replaced. None of Sidney's earlier favorites had complemented the Fire's personality to such an admirable extent. Sidney had said as much this morning. He looked about at the flames and thought; They vie for my favor. Next to Sidney I'm the most important man in Union. "The peak of all delights?" Payne asked rhetorically. He had a scar from ear to chin on his left side, a special mark of initiation acquired in Sidney's gymnasium. In a face somewhat flushed with wine, the scar was white. "To me delight is in the doing. I like to make things. I like to cook, to bake. I love the smell in the kitchen, the heat of the stove. My favorite activity is to bake a little cake, a tidy little loaf, you understand, with a neat little crack in the middle, nicely rounded and browned. A puckered little crack, my brothers, and hot inside." Through an arched opening opposite Clafto 's seat at the head of the table, he saw a servant appear over the shiny marble floor of the outer hall. The servant came toward them in a hurry. "To make my favorite cake, I first take two eggs and I put them on the table. Two eggs," he said, stressing the point, "if you see what I mean. Then I pick myself a little pot. Not too large, not too small; a round little pot, white and red with a bit of black in the right places. I put the pot next to the eggs. Then I take a little lard, smooth, silky lard, gentlemen, just enough to cover a finger, and with it I smear the inside of the pot, not too fast and not too slow, but all around the lip and then deeper and deeper. I probe the pot, I plumb its depths with that lardy finger, slowly, as if I were caressing something..." liie servant had stopped next to ClaftOj bent down, whispered. Clafto rose. "You must excuse me, friends," he said. "Something has happened." He followed the servant out of the room, through the arched doorway, across the marble. The blue light of an active tel shone from an alcove. He sat down before it and looked at one of the sparks of his group -- Silvester. "Well, Sil? What's up?" "We've got her," Sil said. He seemed out of breath. "Eerie fern, cold as ice." Clafto raised his eyebrows. "Show me," he said. The image in his screen began to move as Silverter lifted the tel on the other end and pointed it toward the center of a murky room. Clafto saw the wife of French demurely seated on a chair. He couldn't see her features clearly, but he recognized the blue gown and white stole. The tel returned to its original angle and Silvester's face reappeared. "How did it happen?" Silvester shrugged. "The embassy door opened, and there she was. It looked like she had been pushed or shoved out. She didn't leave of her own accord. We let her walk down the street a bit, then we picked her up." Clafto frowned. Although he couldn't decipher precisely what a trap of some kind. "Where are you now?" "Upstairs in the Cosmos Club. In the private rooms." "Good. Stay there..." He thought for a second. Silvester had three others with him. The group was too small if had come from Blottingham in mid-afternoon that unusual things "I'm giving dinner with some men of the circle," Clafto said. "After we're done. I'll come to get her -- with a larger party. Just in might be late, but we'll be there. Meanwhile, don't let her get away." Silvester nodded. "Cheers, Sil. And good work." Clafto switched off. Sidney would be delighted. The wife of French was better than nothing -- precious bait. She'd lure the man. But it bothered Clafto that she had been so easy to capture. Why had she been expelled from the embassy? Where was her husband? The situation demanded extreme care. He returned to the dining flames. He stood for a second before sinking into his cushioned seat. "Fortuna smiles," he said. "We've caught the female. Silvester has her upstairs in the Cosmos Club. I propose a little venture, brothers. Let's dine in leisure. Then you might accompany me to the Cosmos with some of your sparks. From there you might escort me to West Tower Top where I have a little chore or two before me..." He smiled. Faces smirked back. "Then you might deliver our prize to the Fire. He told me this morning that he has a personal interest in this little matter." Half past ten. French walked down stairs and stopped in one of the entrances of place echoed with voices. People moved about. Someone experimented with the lights, dimming them on and off, switching entire sections. Once this room had been the Hall of Burgesses. Now it was a gymnasium, ballroom, assembly hall. Basketball goals hung from the ceiling. The floor gleamed with painted lines for all manner of games. Bleachers pressed up against ancient marble. floor. Some wore jump suits and toted chemguns. Some wore robes and had obviously come to watch the evening's entertainment -- whatever it would be. French had still to learn the details about Operation Hairy-Scary. He didn't see Dickens, Corner, or any of the other leaders. French suppressed a pulse of irritation. He moved into the stadium carrying his chemgun. Its barrel was telescoped down so that the device was barely more than a pistol with an over-large stock. He sat down on a bench to wait. A deep breath and its slow exhalation failed to break his tension. Since that moment in the elevator when he'd looked forward to this hour, French had had a wretched time. His only consolation was that his preparations for Miri's security had gone well enough. He had called Miri in midafternoon. Reluctant tribesmen brought her to the tel, and French reassured himself that she was all right. He recalled now the warning she had given him. He'd asked her how she was, and she said that she was all right. But she'd had a troublesome intuition, premonition, call it what you will. About him. She urged him to be careful. He couldn't get more out of her with tribesmen watching the conversation. French wondered what she could have had in mind, then shrugged it off. He could take care of himself. Everything would go smoothly. After several attempts, he had reached Dachsy Jones less than an hour ago. The leader of the Kay ring Gang had wrinkled up in embarrassed pleasure at the sight of French -- embarrassing French in turn. Years ago Dachsy had been Number Two and French a youthful runner in his service. But now their roles seemed reversed, at least so far as Dachsy was concerned. Dachsy had scratched his shortcropped head, shy like a youngster. He insisted on calling French "sir." When French ejtplained the situation, Dachsy offefed to rescue Miri himself with men from the gang, all eagerness to help. But French shook his head. All he wanted was a safe place for Miri. They made an appointment for eleven, eleven-thirty, at the Scuttle-but, a coffee house controlled by the gang. French stared out over the stadium floor. People moved about aimlessly, restlessly. If Dickens didn't show up soon, French would be late for that appointment. Miri's safety mesmerized him -- had distracted him all day long. French had never before experienced the tension between personal and collective concerns as deeply. The sooner she was safe, the sooner he could devote himself to the job at hand. Proctor's single-minded madness had intensified rather than diminished during the day. The man had convinced himself that Ecofreak would deal with him if he held out the silco-parts. Which was true enogh. French had the same conviction. But it was wrong -- dangerously wrong. Proctor's eyes had narrowed sharply during their last session together. French saw himself reporting wearily, exhausted by the allday session with Clemmens, Fulbright, and the staff. That session deteriorated into a brawl of words at the end. Clemmens and the staff withdrew to one pole, Fulbright to the other. French tried to mediate between the two, but the combatants were beyond reason. At last Fulbright stuffed his briefcase angrily and left in a huff. French had to tell Proctor that no consensus had been reached. The silco-parts might be oscillation control devices, as Clemmens had insisted they were; or they could be "components for some magical prayer machine," as Fulbright, in a moment of white fury, had shouted in a shrill voice. Proctor said: "Let's hope they are oscillation what-you-ma-call-its. I don't think Ecofreak will risk much over prayer wheels." We are losing our minds, French thought in the stadium, rubbing his eyes. Right now, with Miri in the Ecofreak embassy and flames all over the place looking for him, French saw the Secret Agenda in a very different light. Politics didn't seem important. Even the plan itself appeared to be a fabric of madness. Preposterous notion, French thought. An old incident served as model for the plan. Eight years ago three gravitron drums had failed suddenly in South Tower one summer night. For reasons that were still under investigation, the back-up units failed to come on line and structure collapse began in South with a series of horrible thundercracks. The ensuing panic shook Ricardo to its foundations. But there was a big difference between that event and what Proctor planned, French reflected. Eight years ago the trouble had been quickly fixed. No revolutionary group had waited in the wings, ready to exploit the panic. This time the trouble would last as long as Proctor wished. And the Group would be poised for a coup. French yawned and stretched his arms toward the ceiling. Could Proctor hide an Interdiction for five days? he wondered, slumping again. Even with the full cooperation of the Ministry of Engineering? In five days reserve supplies of the gas would be exhausted. At that point the grav-drums would begin to heat up. Automatic temperature control devices would begin to slow down their revolutions. The gravitron would thin out in the cables. Thundercracks would resound again. And there would be no Helium in the pipeline, no way to fix the problem. Panic everywhere -- panic in the towers, panic in Top Level, panic in the Ministry of Defense. But one voice would be calm in all that uproar -- Proctor's voice over the Media and the public address system. The Unslers have gambled with your safety, people of Ricardo. But I can restore the Helium flow if you give me the power... Unreal, French thought. Unreal. He shook himself and stood up. Exhaustion robbed him of objectivity. The plan wasn't all that bad. He'd thought about it often in the past and it had seemed a reasonable, even a clever scheme. Nothing less than the threat of structure collapse could shake Unsler's grip over the instruments of power, could wake the people from their dreadful apathy. It all seemed crazy now, but French was tired and depressed. Where in the hell was Dickens? A catnap in the cubohome Dachsy would put at their disposal would refresh him enough so that he could come back and do battle again, French thought. Clemmens needed help. Before French had left Proctor, Proctor had ordered plans to be drawn up, schedules to be fixed. "Proceed as if we were going to deliver those parts," Proctor said. "I haven't made a final decision, but should I decide, I want everything ready to go on short notice. As soon as you have a delivery schedule, get back to me." He has to be stopped, French thought. I have to make him see reason. A change in the low buzz of voices around him brought French back to the present. His eyes sought the origin of the excitement. Two men rolled a wooden log into the stadium as one rolls a barrel, on its edge. A bald man naked to the waist came behind the log with an axe in his hand. What in hell... ? French watched the men set up the block in the middle of the stadium. The bald man approached it. He hefted the axe back and sank it into the wood with a dull report. Then French saw Dickens emerge from a narrow door between two sets of bleachers. His assistants came behind him. French rose and made toward the group. He wanted to know what that block signified, half suspecting that Proctor had flipped. VI A group of flames in shimmering white rots moved above the intertower beltway. Passengers down below glanced furtively at the westbound assembly, reserve in their faces. Prestigious family signs blazed in bright colors on the nobles' tubes -- Sidney's companions. Best to be inconspicuous and to keep the eyes low. Miri rode in the middle of the group surrounded by at least three circles of flames -- a blue stone in a silver setting. Clafto led the group. He wore a red scarf around his neck. He had bathed and oiled his body for her after dinner. A suitable love offering for the slender bitch, he mused wiA an inward sneer, picturing Regina, relaxed at last. Leaving the Cosmos, he'd been a little apprehensive. But they had dropped down East shaft without mishap. They'd made it to the beltway undisturbed. They hadn't even seen a man from absurd.' Clafto had suspected as much. Ridiculous notion. Proctor wouldn't dare challenge Sidney. Proctor was popular and this was a Helium year. Even so, Proctor had to think about the future. Bernie would die sooner or later. Then Proctor would have a new boss. Clafto's thoughts returned to Regina. He'd jut her with a vengeance. To jut the little bitch would put the final touch on his new status in the Circle of Fire. Too bad Sidney had had to force her into compliance. But that would steal nothing from the pleasure of her lascivious corpus. Clafto imagined all the ways in which he'd force her to give him pleasure. He'd excercise her until dawn. Behind him, masked by other nobles, Miri rode, her face serene, eyes closed. Right now, right here, she'd prove the Teaching, the subtle power of the Lady. Madonna sat at the Eternal Wheel and spun Time's gossamer thread. She wove it into the many-colored pattern of Fate. The Lady was transcending, omnipotent Mind. Miri was the Lady; she herself was part of that Substance. And if she could rise above the Bondage of Attachment, she too could weave a pattern with her mind. Any pattern she chose. The pattern of love, the pattern of death, yes, the pattern of escape. Miri had never tried to do this. It hadn't been necessary. But now the time had come for a test. She imagined a bird in a cage. She made the vision sharp and clear behind closed eyes. A flame operated her tube lest she escape like Frenchy had done the other night. She could devote herself entirely to her project -- the yellow bird and a cage whose bars she imagined to be silvery white like the robes of her captors. She set the image firmly in her mind, complete with all detail -- the litter at the bottom of the cage, the tiny cup of water, the cage door and its latch, open windows across the room, a blue sky and a fluffy cloud beyond the windows. Next she imagined a hand reaching down. The hand unlocked her cage. In a flutter of wings she made a straight line for the window, and in seconds she soared high into the air. Next Miri felt her freedom. She made herself feel it with as deep and real an emotion as she could muster. The Teachings said that strong emotion helped the process. This done, Miri opened her eyes and took a deep breath -- always a pleasure after intense concentration. Meanwhile the group had entered West Tower's shaft, and the tubes were rising. She was as much a prisoner as ever, but now she was certain that she'd be freed. She had formed a clear, sharp image of her desire. She had watched it serenely. 'Detached Desire,' the Cult called it. At the end she had blessed the results with a powerful but directed pulse of feeling. Above her in the shaft, Clafto's mind ran at random over recollections and anticipations. At the moment he thought about Luke's little speech and found that it had been superb, despite the interruption. Worthy of magnificatio. That ending when he'd broken the eggs and hurled them into the sweetened crack of the hot little loaf...dolce, truly dolce. In the end he would drape Regina over the back of a stool, head down, fingers to her toes. Then he'd crack his belt over her little loaf just to remind her of past rejections. From this thought his mind went on to imagine oAer things he might do to her in that bent-over position. Under the sway of such rousing thoughts, he nearly missed the feeder street through which -- a narrow channel (another clever theme for a little speech) -- they would approach Regina's palace. He activated sidejets just in time, and his tube roared into the feeder. He checked his advance glanced back. The group had followed and he went forward, pleased by his sendoff. The brightest flames, the choicest of the choice. Once he had slipped into Regina's burrow, the whole assembly would continue on -- a triumphal parade. They'd deliver French's wife to Sidney. No man who touched a flame could hope to escape the consequences. He had nearly reached the end of the feeder when grey-clad men in large numbers appeared at the mouth of the channel. Some were in jump tubes at his level, some on foot on the ground -- weird figures in gas masks. Chemguns pointed in his direction. With an expression of painful surprise, Clafto turned and looked hack at the group. Beyond them crouched more men. He thought of reached him and he lost consciousness.    Selma burst into the mistress' lavorite room. Through wide-open and somewhat bulging eyes she took in the scene at a glance. The poor mistress sat on the divan, a clump of misery. Her legs were up. She hugged them against her body. Her chin rested on her knees. Selma saw her rocking dumbly back and forth among pink pillows on the white divan, wearing nothing but a flimsy blouse and a pair of panties. "They're gone, mistress!" Selma cried. "They've left." Slowly Regina looked up at her maid, a dull expression in her eyes. I he eyes mirrored hour-long agonies -- a roller-coaster ride of wild, turbulent hope followed by ihc sickening drops into suicidal despair. The eyes said: I'm tired, wrung out, flat. She felt like the I'.ut-string of one of those guitars made by Bluegrass Territory that had lost its tension after too much play. "Who," she asked in a hollow voice. "Who's gone?" "The men, the flames." Regina dropped her head to her knees and stared down at her toes again. Ten little ghomes, side by side. One little piggy went to the market, one little piggy went... I'he toenails glistened with irridescent sheen. The polish changed colors slowly with every shift in temperature, however small. Made especially for her ladyship. Her pedicurist had sworn it was the only formulation of its kind in Union. Gone...left... ? She didn't believe it. All her faith had drained away like liquid from a cracked gourd. Faithless humanity. Mycal, the traitor. It was well past eleven, and he hadn't come. His passion must have cooled in the sobriety of day. He'd lied to her on the tel in the late afternoon. He wouldn't help her escape, and she feared setting out alone. Regina, the traitor. Regina, who'd betrayed herself, whose courage had fizzed like a punctured baloon. In the glassdomed garden upstairs stood jump tubes placed there on her orders. Two of them -- one for him, one for her. When Mycal hadn't come, she had dressed to make her escape alone, through the roof. But she had shrunk from the venture and had slunk back defeated. She had undressed, had made herself ready for the inevitable. Selma watched her mistress rocking, reminded of a child. "Mistress, aren't you glad?" "Glad?" "Yes, glad. The men are gone. Don't you want to get away? Don't you want to visit Sister Serenita?" "They're not gone, Selma. I know it. It's just a ruse. Just something nasty Sidney would do." Selma had her mouth open, ready to answer, when they both heard the melodious chime from the front hall. With a dull, resigned emotion, Regina understood why the flames were gone. They were no longer needed. Clafto had arrived. She would be shamed after all. The days of hope were nothing but illusion. It would be like before. Four times now Sidney's chosen of the moment had stood before her portals waiting to be admitted. I'll be like a rag. I'll submit like a thing, a soulless thing! And tomorrow... Something. She'd do something tomorrow. "Let him in" she said to Selma as the chime sounded again, twice in a row, impatiently. "Let him in," she sighed. French kept his finger on the button, and the pressure produced inside the first six notes of Woodstock, the Ecofreak tribal anthem. The steel cable of his self-control threatened to snap. Tension and anxiety overrode the dull fatigue he felt. Conflicting needs tore at him and filled his mind with flashing pictures. Miri. Miri came first. In the press of troubles around him, he grasped for fundamentals. Self preservation. The family, however tiny. But French also feared for the see Proctor the moment Miri was safe. Now he understood the chopoing block. Proctor had to be stopped. His politician's flair for grand gestures would extract too high a price. What's the matter with everything, he thought. Has the world c r of .'j rocker? x-fench rang the bell again. Worry and fear gathered his throat into a lump. Why didn't Ecofreak open the goddamned door? He wanted Miri now I He wanted to know her safely hid away. Behind him Comer watched at the head of a small group of men, the flat face empty of expression. Corner was an elderly man with a somewhat shapeless Hgure that did not make a good appearance in the tight-fitting, zippered jump suit he and the others wore. Comer watched French, disliking what he saw. The grim, desperate look had come upon the young DA when they had swooped down on this spot approaching from either end of Outer Ring in a hurry, reflected in the glass and polished brass of the well-to-do housefronts and -- hadn't found a single flame! Thoughts ran through Comer's mind, thoughts about "love" and slum kids who had risen too high. He for one didn't have the rank to traffic with the famous DA, Intelligence, but he knew' what every man knew about the man -- a real romantic, he was. No man would marry' in this day and age unless he thought he genuinely loved. Love? Why, it was like astrology -- not very reliable, but you couldn't convince some people of that. Comer hoped that the girl was inside, safe and sound. French had a reputation. People said he had a crazy streak, and it wasn't merely a fable. In his early days he'd volunteered -- yes, volunteered! -- for sixteen missions into Hinterland. If that wasn't evidence of madness... Now he saw French release the bell. The blond DA stepped back and kicked at the portal once. twice, again. The thick bronze door, decorated with pastoral Hinterland scenes in reUef, gave a dull gong-like sound. Balled fists. Flashing eyes. French looked as if fire would spout from his nostrils. Gomer couldn't escape the thought: A low-level man who had made good. Something about French brought to Corner's mind a sense of the elemental, the crude, the uncontrolled. He must have looked like this in the East Tower slums -- the gangster from Branco. No hint of the polish he'd acquired in later years. French felt the cable of his selfcontrol snap. He kicked the door again, his blood in a boil. On the second kick a small square window opened in the door, displacing a rci finery of bronze. Black eyes, brows, the nose of a tribesman filled the apperture. "I'm Rivera French," French said. "I've come to get my wife." "She isn't here." The statement came like a fist into his stomach, taking his breath away. "What do you mean, she isn't here? Where is she?" "I don't know." French controlled the urge to leap at the tiny opening, to grab for the face. "Open up," he husked. "Open up this instant. I want to see the ambassador." Gomer heard the deadly tone and winced, wondering if he should step in to restrain the man. But then he decided it wasn't his place. "Ambassador Dart doesn't wish to receive you." "Ambassador Dartl Where's Barney?" Thoughts raced through French's mind. Dart had walked out of the negotiations. Last night he had opposed giving them sanctuary. "Mr. Barney is no longer ambassador," the man said. "Why? What happened?" "I'm not at liberty to say." Silence. Gomer watched French thinking. The blue eyes stared at the door, fixed to a spot next to the square opening. The DA's face was flushed. Muscles worked in his cheeks. "What did you do with her?" "Mrs. French was asked to leave." "When? How long ago?" Gomer noted a change in the DA's tone. Now it was cool, icy, but somehow even more disturbing. "Seven, seven-thirty." "Did you see flames on the ring?" "I saw nothing. Mister. I wasn't here." French abruptly turned from the door and made for his jump tube. Before Gomer could react, French jabbed the device alive with angry fingers. In a second the tube rose up and curved away with a scream of jets. "Mr. French...Mr. French..." But the DA heard nothing. Within an eyewink he disappeared from Gover's view around the bend of Outer Ring. "Mistress, mistress, it'shiml" Regina felt confused. She would have been angry with Selma if she'd had the energy to be angry. What did the silly female want. She said: "Of course it's him. I told you that before." Selma shook her head with great exaggeration. Her bulging eyes were wide open with some kind of mindless astonishment. "Not him. Miss Ginny. The other one, the man from Hinterland." Regina lifted her head sharply, uncoiled her legs, and jumped to her feet. Her fatigue had fled. The vigour she felt surprised her in a subliminal way. She saw her own image in the gold-laced mirror opposite, a girl in panties and a white blouse. But this was not the girl who'd sat in a miserable clump. The breasts were out, the chin was high. "You mean..." she whispered. Selma's head went up and down with an exaggerated affirmation. Regina felt blood throb in her throat. One of her hands fluttered up. "Bring him in," she said, "but give me time to slip into this." Earlier, in anticipation of escape, she had worn a zippered fortress of a jump suit. She slipped into it now. It fit her snugly. The smooth silk over thermal fluff slid along her skin. The outside was made of miraculous polyhide with molecules so tightly linked a knife couldn't have pierced it. Her seamstress had designed it especially for her. No other lady in Union -- She saw movement from the corner of her eyes -- and he was there! With a gladness that made her sob, she flew to the archangel. Her tears moistened his face. She mumbled incoherently. Her lips sought his with a kind of hunger. Her hands caressed his face. Gradually she calmed down, withdrew a little, looked at him. Mycal's eyes echoed her own gladness, but his face was drawn and pale, his clothes dirty and rumpled. Soil clung to his hands, dried blood marked numerous cuts. She hadn't noticed. Regina had a vision of Mycal fighting outside against flames to be at her side. She asked him what had happened. Had he been accosted in the street? Bono shook his head. He said: "I'm in trouble, Regina." He didn't feel like a man in trouble. He had passed through a kind of eerie hell and stood in heaven now -- supplicant before the Queen. Behind him lay the pulsing darkness of a labyrinth of service chasms. He had escaped through a hole in the closet of his prison which had been blocked by a loose plate. He had groped and stumbled in the depths while tiny sparks electrified the air and clung to his beai;d like microscopic fire flies. Great shudders of machinery coming alive and dying terrorized him. Large rats shadowed his progress. They ran along ledges he couldn't see. They crouched on cable strands and stared hungrily through luminous, greenish eyes -- Norway rat, the only mammal beside man to adapt to gravitron. Once he almost fell to his death when a section of railing turned into flaky dust beneath his hand. And now he was here again in the sparkling palace amidst traceries of exquisite perfume. A tiny music lilted on the air, almost below the level of hearing. He saw confusion in her eyes, elaborated: "I'm no longer chief of mission. They removed me and locked me up. I escaped to come to you." Regina understood him now, and her heart leapt with pleasure. Now nothing stood in the way of escape. If Mycal no longer had duties in Ricardo, nothing would keep him here. "Why," she asked. "What happened?" He glanced aside to avoid her eyes. "You see, I...I exceeded my instructions this morning. I asked for you as hostage." "And you shoudln't have!" "I shouldn't have." "Oh, darling." She hugged and kissed him again, dimly aware that she did more than merely that required to secure his cooperation. "I'm in trouble too," she explained, breaking away. "I've been told to stay away from you. It's my brother, Sidney. I can't hide you -- and I can't stay here either. Will you escape with me? The two of us? Together?" Hope sparkled in her eyes. "But how? You? Me? Alone?" She nodded eagerly and took his hand. Bono followed her in a kind of daze up the same stairs he had mounted the night before with such sure anticipation. Everything moved loo fast for him. He couldn't keep track. He lagged behind himself, trying to catch up. His life had become a voyage on a mountain stream with sudden twists and turns and mind-boggling drops and flings. Water, rock, embankments. A boiling, tumbling all around him. He was about to abduct Unsler's daughter? At her instigation? To take her where? She stopped upstairs and pointed with a beaming face at two jump tubes as if they were statues she had Just unveiled. Next to each lay a thick, fur-lined parka on the gravel path. On each parka sat a yellow mask of some sort attached by coiling lines to tubular devices with straps. To wear on the back? Oxygen? "There," she cried with a note of triumph. "I've already planned our escape." At first she heard the dull murmur of voices. Then, overlaid against that background, she heard the echoing fall of footsteps, movement. She lay in some sort of large place on a kind of narrow cot covered by a rough blanket. The blanket had been tucked in around her, under her feet. Someone had removed her shoes. Her head buzzed and ached. Nausea troubled her stomach. Miri opened her eyes and closed them again. From a spot very high in the ceiling, bright floodlights blinded. She found the spot where memory had failed. She had been on a feeder street in West Tower's Top Level headed for Regina Unsler's palace. She recalled a swarming of grey-clad men, crouched with chemguns in their hands. Then had come a rush of darkness, a feeling as if her eyes were turning inside out. And then -- poof! Darby Dickens' energetic voice cut through the confused noise around her. "Up, up, up, you birds," he cried. "Quickly now. You too. Get up! Don't pretend, my noble friend. We know when the effect wears off." Miri smiled to herself with eyes closed. Darby's voice told her that she'd been saved. A hand had reached down to free the yellow bird. She wiggled an arm from the tightly wound blanket and, shading her eyes, she sat up to look for Frenchy. From her immediate right a voice said: "Ah, Mrs. French, you're up. Here, let me give you a hand. No pains, I hope. Your tube bounced about a bit after you lost consciousness, but we caught you before you had a chance to fall." She didn't recognize the helpful young man. His hair was cut bangs-style across his forehead. He wore a button on his jump suit collar, and she recognized a management intern. He pulled her up from the cot. She stood for a second in her stockings, unsteadily, leaning on his arm, smiled her thanks. Then, eyes still shaded from the glare, she looked around for Frenchy. The stadium. She had been here before for official dances when the ceiling had had a low-slung belly of festoons and a band had played on a stand. Proctor danced with Mrs. Sedlig in her memories -- the pale secretary blushing crimson from the fers packed on bleachers. A chopping block with an axe in its center (it resembled an upside down check mark) dominated the middle of the room. What was it for? To her right Darby marched among supine nobles laid out in rows nudging now this, now that flame with the tip of a brightly polished boot. One by one the flames came to their feet, groggy, confused. She didn't see Frenchy anywhere. Several thoughts went through her mind more or less at once. She wondered what this was all about -- the crowd, the block, her captors on the floor. The crowd scene stirred her artistic interest. The room suggested drama -- a scene for a mural. At the same time she wondered where Frenchy was. Why had they assigned a trainee to wait on her? "Quick, now, gentlemen," Darby called. "We can't be napping all night. Let's move." Miri said to the trainee: "Is my husband here?" "No, ma'm." "Where is he?" "He went out with another party, Mrs. French. They haven't returned." The intern avoided her eyes. Miri grew troubled. How many groups searched Ricardo to find her? Didn't they communicate? "What party did he go with?" she asked. "He went to the embassy to get you -- of course, you weren't there." "And?" He ducked her eyes, but she stared until he answered. "Mr. French broke away from his party and went off alone." Miri sucked in her breath. She had had that dark premonition. He hadn't listened to her. He hadn't counted to ten, like she had asked him. You are sound, secure, calm, and unafraid. She sent the telepathic message with the strongest pulse she could muster. She hoped that he'd be calm enough to receive her message. I am well and safe, she signalled. You are calm, reasonable, confident, courageous . "Mrs. French," the trainee said. He took her by an elbow. "Now that you're up, may I take you to an apartment we've set aside? Mr. Proctor has instructed me to -- " "No," she broke in. "I'll wait here for my husband." Yes, she'd wait. She'd wait until French returned. The intern still held her elbow. He tugged at it, clearly agitated and embarrassed. "Ma'm I..." She turned her head and looked at him. "I wouldn't advise that you watch this." He gestured vaguely. She followed his gesture and saw the chopping block. "Why?" "All right, flames and sparks," Dickens bawled to the nobles; she saw him march up and down in front of the figures in white; they all stood, finally. "Out of your robes, all of you. Undress. Quickly. Down to your Adam's costume. Move We haven't got all night." Undress? Strange... "What'll happen?" Miri asked. The youngster glanced away, embarrassed. "Ma'm...it'll be harmless, but it won't be pretty. I urge you..." She shook her head. "I want to see." She threw off a pulse of annoyance. Why couldn't women witness ugly scenes. At the same time, she felt a stir of suspicion. This was more than a rescue operation, and Well, she would! "Hey, you. Get with it, man. I told you to strip." Darby addressed a swarthy man Miri knew as Clafto Meyer. She thought: We're all connected. She remembered a small commission from the Meyer family she had received some years ago, brought by a senior servant of that household. It had been for a series of inlays for wooden furniture. Since then she had graduated into portraits. To her right Clafto experienced a rare emotion. He felt genuine, gut-wrenching terror. Like flashes of successive lightning in a dark and fearful landscape, his mind fed had dared to touch him! Clafto Meyer, the plastosteel heir, the flame nearest to the Fire! Yet now a black man yelled at him in a tone... Clafto didn't understand the man. His ears buzzed. But he heard the arrogance. "You," the black yelled. A finger pointed. It came out of a dark fist at the end of a dark arm. Around the dark wrist glowed a golden watch. "Get. out of that robe. I won't tell you again." Clafto understood now and burst into protest. "What is this? Who're you to tell me to undress..." He heard the death of his own protest. Around him flames and sparks were more compliant. Some already stood naked with hands up front to shield themselves from scrutiny. "All right, men," the black man yelled. "Strip him." Miri watched the ensuing, feeble Clafto and stripped him naked. They left him only socks and boots. The naked form...so noble in art. Here nudity was used as a superiority. She saw movement from the comer of her eye. A man -- he was unusually tall, muscular, bald, and naked to the waist -- approached the chopping block. She turned her full attention to him, plagued by an indecision in her mind: Was this an elaborate psychodrama staged for the benefit of the flames? Or was this more? Raisin-balls, she thought, but couldn't place the reference. Behind the bald, half-naked man came a camera on wheels. The camera circled the block until the technician operating it found his angle. Miri now became aware of other cameras spotted about the stadium and aimed at various spots. The bald man worked the deepsunk axe out of the wood. He tested its weight in a hand, took a step back. He lifted the axe far back over his shoulder, and with a loud cry -- "Haay!" he cried -- he sank the blade into the wood. Miri glanced at Clafto to see his reaction. The handsome, hairy man was fearful. His eyes shifted incessantly. Three men held him, two on each side and one in the back. She found this excessive because Clafto didn't resist. Did they expect that he would...later? This can't be real, Clafto thought.  don't believe this. Why the butcher block? What significance the axe-wielding gesture, the loud cry of the man? "Mrs. French, I really think you should leave now." Miri shook her head. She was tense with expectation. She thought: Surely they don't intend to harm these nobles!? Even Proctor wouldn't resort to low barbarism? Or would he? Could this be a practical joke? He is said to be quite a practical... No. She doubted it. This -- whatever this was -- was more than just a joke. "All right, men," she heard Darby call, "take him to the block. The rest of you, look lively. Don't let these birds panic." Clafto's guards began to move him forcibly toward the block. She heard him cry: "Hey, what is this -- Stop! You can't do this. I swear I'll..." His voice disappeared in grunting struggle. Miri felt the man's hysteria. It spread like an acid stench on the air, choked the throat. Clafto wouldn't walk and had to be carried. He struggled all the way to the block where the axe-man hefted his weapon with a satisfied but eerie look on his face. It's like a scene from a cheap visishow. had swarmed out to take up positions on either side of the naked formation. Miri watched in growing disgust. Clafto's guards, now joined by two others, forced the noble up against the block in such a way that his genitals lay on the rough surface of the wood. Four men held the madly struggling Clafto. The fifth crossed opposite and rudely grabbed the man's parts. He stretched them out a little, away from the body. Clafto's yell of pain shot through Miri as if it were her own. The chemblast nausea rose up in her again. Degradation in the venerable stadium. Savage rite. Disease of the Cosmic Mind. "All right, you," Dickens now called to the naked nobles. "Turn around. You won't have to see this. You'll feel it soon enough. Go on, turn." The nobles turned. Miri saw her own disbelief mirrored in their faces. But why did Darby make them turn? "Mrs. French, please..." "Please, for God's sake, people, this is...this...oh, God, let me go!" Miri's eyes were on Clafto's face. She dared not look down at the man's stretched genitals. She'd had no idea that the organ could be pulled so far from the body. A great burst of sympathy for the man went out from her to him, so patently fragile and human now -- he who had chased Frenchy and her yesterday (was it only yesterday?). Darby turned and signaled to the bald man. The bald man nodded. He lowered his axe blade over Clafto's genitals in the way of a man taking aim. The he stepped back. Clafto made one last effort to get away, but the pain restrained him. The bald man swung his axe back over his shoulder. Miri turned away. She couldn't watch this. The bald man's loud "Haay," Clafto's piercing scream, and the dull report of blade on wood all came simultaneously. # ! Head still averted, Miri said to the pleasant intern: "Take me away. Now." "But, Mrs. French," he now protested, "you don't understand..." "I understand," she said flatly. "Take me away." Clafto's momentary swoon receeded. He had almost lost consciousness under the brutal impact of emotion that had enveloped him. His eyes had gone black. Now he was back again and he felt release. He felt...release?! The pain in his genitals was gone or less intense. He opened his eyes, bent his head. He was still whole! The axeblade sat embedded in the wood of the block, but it was a long way from his exposure, on the other side of the sawed-off stump. Two men were hurriedly smearing a red liquid on the wood from little bucket-like containers. His captors hustled him out of the halfway down some kind of hall when the next man's loud screams echoed through the corridor. His guards pushed him into a room. Behind a desk sat a man in a grey jump suit. The room was empty save for that desk and a chair. "Here, put these on," the man said, pointing to a blue jump suit, crumpled underwear, and a white robe on the chair. Clafto recognized his own clothing. Gladly, hurriedly, he dressed. "Now understand this," the man flames or sparks or anyone. No member this well and pass it on. Next time the axe will be right on target. Take him away." Men took him to his jump tube in a garage. They watched him until he had cleared a guard booth and had entered the movebelt. Clafto spurted away at maximum speed, a hollow sensation in his stomach. Proctor had dared the ultimate humiliation. It could only mean that the rumors were true and that revolution was brewing. No, more than that. Revolution had succeeded, else how would Proctor dare... Proctor sat behind his desk and watched the action in the stadium over the same visimonitor that had shown him Ecofreak's entrance into Ricardo a few days ago. His face was pensive, with a touch of puzzlement. Below the hardened surface of his every-day consciousness, something stirred. He almost had it, but it kept eluding him. It was a memory that would explain, he knew, why Operation Hairy-Scary pleased him so -- despite the risk, despite its terrible timing, its potentially high political costs. But the memory wouldn't hatch. A buzz on his communicator made him reach out. The voice of the night-duty secretary told him that Clemmens waited outside to give a report. He told the man to send Clenunens in. Simultaneously he turned down the audio on the visiset, and the loud screams faded away. Clemmens came in and sat down with a sheaf of scriptoplast in his hand. Somehow his presence underlined with a vengeance French's absence. "We still don't have word of your chief, do we?" Proctor asked. "No, sir." The men exchanged glances. The glances said: We both know Rivera French, and both of us are worried. "Where do you think he is?" "I'd hate to speculate," Clemmens answered. "Go ahead -- speculate." "He's looking for her. That'd be my guess. And you know where he is likely to look." "Sidney's domain." "Yes, sir." Proctor shook his head. It was more of an incantatoiy denial than a conviction. "Surely not. The man can't be such a fool. Madness. Sheer madness." Clemmens made a wry face. His expression suggested that French was capable of madness. Proctor deliberately dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. He thought: Unfortunately I've set him a very poor example with this operation. Also madness. Aloud he said: "Let's talk about silcoplast. What does it look like? Can we produce the parts?" Clemmens passed scripto over the desk. "The first item is a production schedule," he said, keeping his tone cool and businesslike. It was not his role to discuss policy with Proctor. French would do that. When French returned. French returned. "We've worked it out carefully and checked with all the producers. We had to get some plant managers out of bed, but it's hard information." Proctor studied the sheet, looked up. "Four days? You can deliver in four days?' ' "Yes, sir." Proctor nodded. "And these other items?" "Draft contracts and procurement orders. I didn't bring the specs and the drawings. I don't suppose you're interested." Proctor shook his head. He took the production schedule off the pile and passed the other items back to Clemmens. I'll keep the schedule; I don't need these things." Clemmens made ready to rise. "Stay a second," Proctor said. "What's your opinion? Are these really oscillation control devices?" "I'm sure of it, sir." "But French tells me that Fulbright disagrees." "He does indeed, sir." "Don't you respect Fulbright's judgement?' ' "I'm not in a position to judge the professor's competence. Negotiator. I'm just a simple engineer. But even genius can sometimes be wrong." "Very well, Fred." Proctor scratched behind his ear. Then he looked at Clemmens. "And suppose you're right. Can you defeat the device?" "I don't know, sir. How can you defeat something unless you know how it works?" "But you could try?" "We can try, of course..." "Then try," Proctor said, nodding. "Figure out some minor change that's difficult to detect and work it into the plans."  only need a day, he thought. One day. "Will do," Clemmens said, and this time he rose. Proctor nodded to him. "Thanks, Fred. Do the best you can. If we have to, we could deliver," he summed up, "in four days." "Yes, sir." "Very well, Fred. Your people did a good job." Clemmens left and Proctor turned on the audio again. At the moment the camera down in the stadium focused on another group of naked flames. That picture suddenly triggered the memory, a long forgotten resentment, and Proctor knew why he had indulged himself with HairyScary. The memory moulded Proctor's face into a mask of slightly cruel glee. He remembered it all now. His mind returned to New Ivy League -- Nivylee, as the students called it. The school of schools. Cradle of leaders. Nivylee -- the elite college that claimed uninterrupted descent from the best prestructure universities. That school had accepted him on a scholarship of a dozen mid-level men admitted to the place. He studied with the fathers of the men who now screamed down there in the stadium, one after the other, each stupidly convinced that he'd lose his manhood. The rich boys called him Narses Castratus after some obscure official of the Dimmest Ages, the Roman Time, which still inspired Very Big youths bent on the emulation of past decadence. He had a nickname which he refused to recall. When forced to disrobe with others for the weekly physical education class, compulsory in the first year, the fathers of these worthless flames had chanted in the showers to spite him: "Not a dong, not a ding, not even a dingeling." He had been a fat boy, his physical development retarded by gravitron, a not unusual phenomenon. In the second year his hormones began to flow. The butter of his moonface melted away, revealing the hard rock of his chin. The pillows of lard beneath his eyes disappeared, giving free range to his hard, cold eye. By the third year he manipulated tutors and men and virtually ran the college. He graduated with honors. But he came from mid-level and had to enter the civil service at the lowest rung of the ladder, while his classmates went right to the top of agencies and industries. Proctor smiled and shook his headAll that lay thirty years back. He had risen once more and stood on the brink of another graduation. He could afford a slight indulgence, risk or no risk. If the greater scheme failed, at least he would have had this satisfaction. If it succeeded...why then he might think of other things to do with his erstwhile humiliators and their precious sons. Now that he had found the memory, he lost interest in the activity below. He turned off sound and picture and fell to studying the production schedule. Four days to produce the silcoparts, he mused. Four days. The basic schema that he had been turning this way and that all day began to crystallize in his mind. He would try it. He'd attempt to deal with Bono, an exchange of treasons. He would deliver the components, flawed components, to be sure. And Ecofreak, in turn, would deliver the illegal Interdiction that would catapult Proctor to ultimate power. And as soon as he was in power, the negotiations would take on another character altogether. He was not an Accommodationist, no bleeding heart, had no fear of using missiles, and Ecofreak would learn that. Perhaps he would explode a bomb or two just to show them that the sil-parts didn't work. He sighed tiredly. One last item and then he'd try to snatch a few hours of genuine sleep. He reached for the dictation button laid into the surface of his desk. "A letter to Mr. Mycal Bono, Chief of Mission, Helium, the Ecofreak embassy, and so forth, the text is as follows." He paused, thinking. "Dear Mr. Bono," he began. "Union has analyzed Ecofreak's initial package, and we're pleased to give you the following reaction. Paragraph. Your demand for various products and components, including the communications switches made of welded silcoplast, appear acceptable." He paused, thinking. "Comma," he continued, "provided that you immediately withdraw your demand for Miss Regina Unsler, the Unifier's daughter, and...enter with us into serious negotiations about various demands that we have. Paragraph." He paused again, then went on. "Your demand for plastosteel is excessive in the extreme and cannot be honored. However, we shall be pleased to sit down and discuss a reasonable level of shipment. Paragraph. Technical analysis shows that the electronic components you desire can be delivered to the four Staging Stations..." He paused and glanced down at the delivery schedule. "The six staging Stations specified in your demand," he corrected, "soon after we sign an acceptable Helium deal. Paragraph." Was that too direct? He decided to let it stand for the moment. "We look forward to a timely response and stand ready to resume talks immediately provided that you can sincerely enter into the spirit of the points raised in this letter. Should you be unable to do so, I regret that we shall be forced to take appropriate measures to secure our wellbeing. Very truly yours, etc. etc." Proctor replayed the tape and decided that some editing was required. The text was too obvious and had to be cast in a more subtle form. But he'd do that in the morning. For the moment it would do. He'd sleep on it. A leaden sky obscured the sun. Wind blew across the endless mutagrass driving speckles of icy rain before it. The wide plain was almost completely empty except for a chain of uniform hills spaced one kilometer apart. The remains of an ancient highway could be seen in spots linking the hills. To the left of this chain, looking east, stood the activist camp -- a crowding of tents with horse corrals on one side and a formation of helicopters on the other. On the flat top of one of the hills a group of tribesmen stood in clumps approximating a circle around Tack. He sat in Sie center in the classic meditation pose. The men were silent and endured the rain with stoic expressions. Only Ted Fannin was out of the rain. He stood in the narrow observation room of a high wooden tower that had been erected here recently. He felt the cold as keenly as the others. He shook his arms and ran in place to warm himself. On the window sill before him lay binoculars through which, from time to time, he observed the distant camp, on the look-out for signals that might be sent to recall Tack from his morning prayers. Fannin had a good idea why the meditation lasted longer than usual. The news of Bono's defection had spread from lip to lip the night before. That, combined with Jonny's other troubles, gave the chief lots of things to pray about. Fannin wondered, at the moment, whether or not it might be time to head for home. He'd have no trouble fixing it so that he'd make the mail-run to Wellhead. Then he could become 'sick' in Wellhead. And then, a little later, he might send word that he had gone home to recuperate. He ran in place, shaking his arms, feeling a little warmer now. His breath worked hard. In the center of the circle. Tack wrestled with the Lord but made no progress. He had awakened in a boiling rage, filled with hot, carnal desire. He had kicked his servant across the tent -- the rascal had overslept and Tack had almost missed the dawn. Then he'd come out here to commune with Him, seeking a clear nod, a firm assurance. Did He-UpThere care as much about the Plan as Jonny Tack? The Lord wouldn't answer. Tack labored, worked. But he didn't hear the Lord. Snakes surrounded and encoiled him -- writhing doubts, desires, and uncertainties. Listen, Lord, Hear me! Tack pleaded. I'm surrounded by traitors. They violate your law. They disobey your servant. He felt the prayer in his guts, a strong emotion. But his face was stiff and masked his feelings. The wind drove particles of ice against his skin where they turned into speckles of moisture. Why did they do it? Tack wondered. Why the opposition. What had happened to the fervent commitments of a month ago? Fear, selfish fear! He recalled an elder Gulfrat's statement of the night before: "The venture is doomed to failure. Your own man betrayed you. It's a bad sign. The Lord won't smite all those eous among them. Give up the plan, Jonny. Secure the parts, but give up the madness." Then the man came forward and spread out a map of Gulfrat's territories. "Look at this, Jonny. Those are my people. What if Union betrays us? What if the parts don't work? A few missiles from Husten will destroy us." Tack hit the table with a fist. "Why? Why have you changed your mind? You swore." "We swore, but we've thought about it since." Lord, he prayed, give me a sign. Give me a sign so I can rally these people. Show me your grace. In the tower Fannin stared out over the landscape. Yellow outcroppings of rock broke up the monotony of silvery mutagrass moving under windlash like the sea. He wondered what the pyramids might have looked like in ancient days. He imagined them silvery, reflecting sunlight. And a constant traffic of tank trucks would have moved down below on the ancient highway carrying toxic wastes for perpetual deposition in these structures now covered with dirt and overgrown with vegetation. The ancients were gone, but the wastes were still here -- drums of it, sacks of it, pools of hazard -- liquids, solids, and hot stuff that would still be there when man had gone from the face of the earth. Plutonium has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years, he mused. For a moment he tried to calculate how much plutonium would be left a hundred thousand years from now if you started with a ton of the gave up the effort as too tedious. Instead he mused about the enormities radiation had created. This area still produced mutants that lived a few generations before nature wiped them off the boards. Near Santlu crater he'd once seen a horse so tiny you could hold it in your hand. Around Liberal in Mokan people said lived a creature with a heart so big it squirted poisoned blood to catch its prey. Then there was a curious bird with one enormous right wing and an insignificant left that flap-flew backwards. Near here he'd seen a feathered turtle that -- Motion from the direction of the camp now drew his eye. Straw-hatted Symbimuts marched toward helicopters. Another group deserting the strict constructionist paradise? He watched the Symbies through his binoculars. Several ferns walked in the group, out in the open, unabashed. Fannin chuckled. He had guessed all along that Jonny's rules weren't being observed. Some tribes had women in the camp. And those that didn't jutted fem-folk from mutie settlements in the rad belts. They came from all over in the night and sold themselves for salt and trinkets. I should be so lucky, Fannin thought. He imagined a wild fern scratching on the canvas of his tent. Well, Fannin had a ring or two ready for that eventuality. He too had sworn the Pact of Chastity, but on occa sion you could close an eye. Best if you did close the eyes. Some of these ferns were weird -- eight nipples down each side of the belly, faces without noses, just little holes all covered with hair. But who gave a damn in the dark. Mutant slaves loaded the Symby copters. Then Fannin saw blades begin to turn. Three big birds rose with a dull, whirring sound and curved away, away to Socal. Tack also heard the far-away whirring chop of copters and almost opened his eyes. But he resisted the urge. Is that your answer, Lord? he asked with an undertow of bitterness. Is that your message? More defections? Five tribes had already deserted. If more left, who would mass around the structures to wipe out the remnants of structure life? It seemed to him almost as if fate conspired to ruin the glorious plan -- the plan his father had formulated, for whose achievement he'd sacrified the family wealth. Herd after herd of Tack cattle had been sold to support those scientists in Kay see. For a second Tack yielded to an angry thought. He would succeed without the other tribes. He'd march with his own army down the coasts of America, liquidating the remnants. And he'd subjugate the tribes as well, one by one. The sound of copters faded away. Who was it this time? Planetfriends? Peacefreak? Gulfrats? The word about Bono's defection had leaked out. He'd find the man who'd done the leaking and lock the bastard in this pyramid to eat of arsenate of lead and drink the milk of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Tack stopped himself. This was no way to meditate. He'd have to calm his mind. In the tower Fannin hopped around once more beating his arms against his chest. Wind whistled in through the cracks of the tower. After a while he stopped and went back to the window. He saw that Tack had risen, stood now where he'd sat. His blond horsetail of hair hung down dark yellow, wet with rain. Fannin gathered his binoculars and raced down the stairs. But when he got down. Tack still hadn't moved. Tack tried hard not to see the delegates. He hated them for the doubts they held. How could they doubt him? How could they reject the prophesies! He reached for the Crestmore bible on his belt. He'd try one more time. He had to get guidance, one way or another. In meditation he had seen only conspiracies -- and her, Regina's rutty voluptuousness had confused him with moist memories. He'd open the bible at random and see what the book would say. From the shelter of the door, Fannin saw the gesture. Tack's fingers fanned the pages of the book, which was a bad sign. The delegates would see Jonny's indecision, his telltale reliance on the supernatural. Fannin wondered how soon he might head out for Wellhead and get sick. Tack waited for the spirit's prompting as his fingers moved. He felt the impulse and let the book fall open. He lifted it and read the verse where his thumb had come to rest. "Mercy is sweeter in the mouth than justice." Tack slammed the book shut and let it drop down on its silver chain. Goddamned, he thought. Goddamned! The line gave no guidance. Of late he'd gotten such verses by the score. He wanted to open the book to one of the many instructive stories -- the Chicago Seven, say, or the Tale of Manson. Instead he got chapters loosely transferred from the Biblibooks. He glanced up at the grey sky. Lord, you're no help! I'll have to act without you. His errors would be the Lord's not his. He had asked and he couldn't be blamed. Damnation. A man worked, busted his ass -- but He didn't care. Sometimes Tack was sure that He wasn't there at all. Everything up above and down below was nothing more than sky and rock and mutagrass. Tack wished it were so. But then, again, things sometimes happened that he couldn't explain. Disappointed, he started for the camp. Freckled Fannin came toward him with a grin, but he scowled at his aide, and the man fell back. Behind Fannin came the delegates. They went down the steep slope of the pyramid in the involuntary quickstep forced by the gradient and then in long strides across the wet mutagrass toward flags flapping moisture laden in the wind in the distance. Tack was halfway to the camp when a figure slipped out between tents and ran toward them. The man held something yellow in his hand. Tack grew alert, almost joyous. Action! Something to read, something to do. Perhaps guidance came from another source. The Lord's ways were strange. The man reached him, stopped, and gasped once or twice, out of breath. He handed Tack three sections of cable, said: "A message from Dart, Chief. Thought you'd want to see this right away." Tack read the text of the letter Dart had just sent from Union. His heavy mood gave way to buoyant elation as he read. He glanced up at the sky briefly -- to show the Lord that he understood. Here was the answer. They had succeeded without even trying. Union stood ready to deliver the parts for an almost meaningless concession. Drop the hostage demand. Tack felt like laughing. The strategy had worked despite Regina's substitution for Sidney. The second part of the report dealt with Bono's escape. Tack's face clouded, but this mishap couldn't obscure his gladness. Bono would be caught -- or he'd die in the crash of Ricardo. Tack turned to the waiting runner. "Is he standing by?" "Yes, sir." Tack came about and faced the delegates. His eyes swept the soaked figures, their hair matted down, leather tunics unevenly blackened by rain. Behind them towered the pyramid. Tack's lip curled. "Gentlemen, the doubts that you all harbor about my competence are groundless. We've had a breakthrough. The sil-parts might be in our hands within the week." He turned to Fannin and beckoned him near. Walking forward, he said: "Fannin, I'll move my immediate headquarters north this morning. I want to be near when Ricardo falls. Make all the arrangements." "Yes, sirl" Fannin cried. For the moment he'd postpone getting sick. It looked as if Tack might win after all. A snp that's interesting -- but when yogurt vancement of Science, talks to a man, that's news; and There weren't many headlinewhen hundreds of scientists listen to grabbing papers this year. The him tell about it, that's significant. theme was "Science and the QualThis week I heard a man tell how ity of Life", and most of the papers yogurt communicates with him. I were stolidly presented, with reams also heard about the discovery of of data and often no clearcut con#  #) in a binary system, and ment than did last year's meeting how it can be used as a "labora(see "This Generation of Wonder", tory" for testing theories of relativiJuly, '# Galaxy) but there was ty; sober-minded analyses of the efmore food for thought, fects of modifying world climates. It's not really possible to sumand methods we might use to do it; marize any conference as big as a production during the oil crisis; a sions stand out. First, Big Science long panel on the future of the aucares. Whether or not it was ever tomobile; a hot argument between true that the US Scientific EstabJoe Coates, Congress's expert oil lishment was a monolithic bloc inthe effects of technology, and repterested only in charging ahead with resentatives of the auto industry; indiscriminate applications of techand a panel of careful experts disnology, it's not true now. tablished scientific disciplines. the effects of various technologies In other words. I've just come than on the technologies themfrom the annual meeting of the selves. Although there was plenty of enthusiasm, there was as much concern with what technology can do to us as for us. Secondly, Big Science is more open-minded, possibly as a result of the Velikovsky Affair. There was no fanfare and no special announcement, but Cleve Backster got his hearing. Backster is best known as the react not only to threats, but also to termination of other forms of life. Backster reported as early as # that he had connected electrowave" recording equipment to various plants. When he thought of burning one of the wired-up plants, it reacted to his very thought by giving out agitated electrical responses. Backster also reported that the plant reacted when brine shrimp were killed in boiling water. Few biophysicists took the claims seriously. Plants have no central nervous system, and it's hard to see where the "brainwaves" come from. It's also hard to see what survival value such responses would have. However, Backster was not laughed off as a crackpot. He was invited to participate in a panel organized by Yale biologist Dr. Arthur Galston. Other scientists attempted to replicate Backster's work. Professor Edward Gasteiger of Cornell reported the results of ments. He also had conducted a "plant-killer detection" experiment in which some students went into the laboratory and burned plants alive, while others entered the lab and merely stood there thinking nice thoughts. Various plants in the lab were ers in another room attempted to identify the "plant killers" by plants which "witnessed" the life termination-by-fire . duplications of Backster's published experiments. As you've probably guessed, no one got any results worth reporting. It wasn't possible to determine which students wore "plant killers" and the responses of plants to brine shrimp terminations didn't differ from chance. The important point was not that they failed to get the results -- it seems unlikely to most people that serious effort was made to investigate claims that went counter to all established theories of plant biology. Backster had new and previously unpublished results to report this tems to eggs, yogurt, and sperm, One glass of yogurt, for instance, will react when fresh milk is added to a glass of "brother" yogurt in another room. Sperm give off electrical brainwaves when the donor (also in another room) sniffs an ampule of amyl nitrate. And so forth. The members of science press corps could hardly contain themselves, but # engineers and biologists listened to reports of the world's first yogurt-to-yogurt intercommunications with absolutely straight faces. The contrast to the treatment received by Velikovsky couldn't have been greater. There was also an entire session on parapsychology and psi phenomena, and no one was laughing; in fact, it was so prosaic as to be rather dull. The general attitude onstrating, and the question was how best it might be studied. For example: telepathic communication is notoriously unreliable. At best it operates consistently only a little above the level of chance. information theory -- techniques whereby an unreliable channel can be made to send reliable data through repitition. Accuracies approach # if the message is short enough and sufficient time is spent sending it. Another paper studied interaction and concluded that learning alpha wave control has no significant efbut, contrariwise, there's some evialpha waves are produced. A St. John's professor dealt with ethical problems of teaching or training psi abilities, while another Ph.D. from Santa Barbara described a number of methods by which psi talents could be "simulated" -- in other words, faked. Aha, one thinks. The typical attitude of the scientist debunker; but it wasn't that at all. There's so much to learn about the real thing that there's no time to waste on frauds. There are still scientists like Dr. John R. Pierce, of course. (Pierce is well known in communications theory, and also, as JJ Coupling, is a science fiction writer of some note.) He told me recently that not he won't believe it even if they prove it to him! There are also a, lot more who simply accept psi as a field to be studied. Whatever the attitude, no one seems to want to publication of the results. (Before I leave this topic I feel a warning is needed. Although it's generally accepted among many scigenuine phenomena and deserve extensive study, there are a lot of fraudulent "schools" which sell ' 'training' ' to the gullible. Most claim results that they simply can't obtain.) My third impression was that scientists remain technological optimists: most believe we can solve all our problems. They're not so hopeful that we will. There was a certain amount of gloom in the corridors. A few years ago science had public support. People were pretty sure that whatever holes we got into, science could get us out. The public attitude has changed, and it shows on scientists' faces. There's a general feeling that the public lost confidence at a particularly unfortunate time. There are just too many crises looming on the horizon. For example: last year, for the first time in generations, there was an increase in the proportion of take-home pay spent for food in the United States. World stocks of grain are at historic low points. There are no reserves. Population control is all very well for the long run, but in the next few years we have only two choices: increased agricultural production, or watch famines. Famine is a "natural" phenomenon, though one we of the West aren't accustomed to because we've not only opened new lands, but linked the whole of the West with a transport system. Drought in one region can be compensated for by imports of food from another. However, except for the past # years or so, everyone in the West knew what "lean years" were. We may find out again if we don't do something. We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in' gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. I#I#I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. According to Dr. Sylvan Wittwer of the National Academy of Sciences, we'd better do it fast. The oil shortage has reduced fertilizer stocks to bare minimums, and without energy you can't make more fertilizer. Yet the sun sends down plenty of energy. Legumes regularly fix nitrogen. At the moment plants only convert about # of solar energy to forms we can use, but Wittwer thinks that can be increased by an order of magnitude. The effect would be dramatic. If fertilizers could be grown, the effect would be the same as construction of massive solar energy converters; why take solar energy, turn it into electricity, and use the electricity to make nitrates if with a little more research we can induce plants to do it directly? The major beneficiaries would be energy-poor countries, but we'd profit greatly too. Dr. Wittwer wants a Manhattan Project on food production, with, as gram of research into biological solar energy conversion. After all, it's our most renewable and nonpolluting resource. The basic research has been done. It's now largely a matter of applying some engineering biology to get huge payoffs -- and yet it's precisely now that the public loss of confidence in science has killed research into primary methods of food production. That's not the only high-payoff area neglected. For all the money spent on environment, we know precious little about the real effects of cities on the atmosphere. For example, it's known that areas downwind of nearly every major city in the US receive up to # more summer rain than they would if the cities weren't there. Is there a corresponding drought somewhere else? How many aerosols get to the upper atmosphere, and what effects do they have on the ozone layer? No one really knows. Those who make spectacular claims -- as, for example, that the ozone layer is being destroyed by aerosols, or by smog, or by the flatulence of cows -- get national attention. When challenged they can say "prove we're wrong," and get more heatilines. The careful scientists who admit we don't know get neither headlines nor a budget. dollars invested in learning precisely how sulfer dioxide gets from the stacks to where it falls as sulfuric acid rain would save hundreds of halted, though: no funds. And so forth. Some scientific disciplines are fat, but many with payoffs clearly in the public interest are ignored. Years ago research scientists had a saying: "As long as you're up, jects were regularly funded. Money was shovelled out faster than it could be spent. A lot was wasted. The Department of Agriculture was particularly exciting studies as "Job Attitudes of Supermarket Employees," a thrilling expose on how clerks felt about their bosses (some liked them, some didn't), and imbecilic surveys on whether or not teen-age girls took their mothers with them to buy clothes. (Some did, some didn't, some didn't care.) This nonsense was rightfully parodied by one and all. C. Northcote Parkinson gained a national reputation by satirizing such studies. Those days are gone, and God forbid they ever return; but can we afford to drop nearly all our research? Thus the curious mixture of optimism and gloom. We have the technology to solve the energy crisis, but we're a year closer to the crunch, and in no way a year further along. The energy panels presented the same data this year as last. Forty percent of our power comes from natural gas, and within three to five years the natural gas supply will drop enormously. We've got to begin the first demonstration plant on coal gassification, although we know how to build it. The technology is expensive; but what may not having it cost? The electrical power shortage is going to get progressively worse, and everyone projects that by # we'll be in red trouble. If we're to use nuclear power to solve that problem, the plants have to be started now . Instead, the nuclear industry is liquidating itself. It has become obvious that fission power plants can't be started -- it's just too easy for lawyers concerned about environment to throw a brick into the billion dollar works. There was, in other words, a sense of crisis in the halls of the know what to do and how to do it -- but nothing seems to be getting done. Big Science treated Velikovsky shamefully # years ago; that's been corrected, and new ideas get a hearing. Science and academia wasted a great deal of money in the past; that can be prevented in future. We stand near the threshold of what could be the most exciting period of history. If you look fifty years ahead you can see ways around every problem we face: plenty of energy, pollution abated, enough food for the world. You can find all the optimism you want when you look fifty years ahead. It's those who look twenty years ahead who wear long faces. I hate to end with a downer. Next month we'll assume we get past the next fifty years, and look at family life in the asteroids...  I "You know how foolish the Kamon thought bitterly, "your hussense of impending death." band will be dead soon and all your "On the contrary. Baroness. I lands and holdings scattered to state have been aware of death since I officials like seeds to parrots." He was a few brief months old. Or do watched from the parapet as the you forget that no juvenates exist dancers executed their moves to for my species?" He turned one strains of Ravel's "La Valse." fluid blue-green eye on her and Three small moons hung above like kept the other on the dance floor, etched glass streetlamps, one at the "Your karma, perhaps," Baronhorizon over labyrinths of ess Anna Sigrid Nestor said with a hedgerows, another to the west topshrug. "Are you keeping an eye on ping the Combine Minara, and a Edith Fairchild, or just dreaming of third at zenith, the largest. Their assassinations and seizures?" light made the polished dance-floor "That you are privy to my affairs tiles gleam beneath the swirling does not give you the right to be gowns and white breeches. glib. Baroness," he said sharply. "Enjoying the view, I hope," an "Your position is not so strong that old woman said, stopping quietly you can feel completely secure behind him. She was dressed in a against me." plain black robe -- an Abstainer by "You're a wretch, Kamon." She dress and manner. Kamon turned walked past him and leaned on the his head to acknowledge her presparapet, turning away from his pale ence, then turned back leather-tan face and three-lipped "It is a bit limited," he said, his mouth, which articulated so many voice clipped with the accents of languages so well. Teeth like a non-human teachers. lamprey, she reminded herself. "You can see the whole floor Mind to match, vicious by design, from here," the woman said, knowI am not a species bigot, but dear ing very well what he meant. Deos, she thought, I despise his "The subject is limited," he class of Aighors. "I'm privy, and clarified. "They are quite mindless I'm compelled to silence because of in their pleasures, don't you our pact, but I grow tired of the think?" support of your kind," she said. "When I was young I enjoyed "So I've come to announce a resuch pleasures, and I wasn't exactly scension." mindless. Though I was foolish. To "That will not be advantabe sure, I was foolish." geous -- " "I find it difficult to believe the "Quiet until I've finished. I Baroness was ever foolish. " count the Honorable Disjohn Fairchild as a fine friend and an excellent human. I'm disgusted with myself that I'd even think of letting self-interest negate my duty toward such a man. His kind is rare, Kamon, and you're proof by example." Kamon bowed elegantly, as ugly a creature as she could humanly conceive. "Then voice your rescension. Baroness. I will pass the message along to the Administers. I am sure they would like to prepare the next auspices on the basis of such information." Administers prepared auspices -- the seeking of signs in the patterns of nature -- among dozens of species associated with the mercantile consolidations. But none were like the auspices of the Aighor branch of Hafkan Bestmerit. Anna had attended a ceremony once. It had sickened her. Still, she had a strong inbred abhorrence of judging another species by human standards. If they wished to sacrifice their young and seek signs in their bowels, so be it. Human justice had no meaning for the Aighors, nor did the justice of their allies, the Crocerians. "I deny the support of Hafkan Bestmerit, and the oath of noninterference thereby accrued. I will do everything in my power to prevent you and your associates from stripping Fairchild of his life and holdings. And I'll defend him with all the power at my disposal. That's no small force, Kamon." "The Baroness is influential," the Aighor said. He bowed again and swung the lower, snake-like third of his body into a coil around his thorax. "But not omnipotent -- her weapons are registered. And she does have to answer to the Combine as all of us do. A most interesting challenge, however." Anna was fuming at the reminder of her limitations. "I'll warn you further. Strike against me and you strike against my ally. United Stars. Hafkan Bestmerit, I understand, is extremely interested in establishing stronger relations with use. You may alienate your own allies. You're sitting above a dark, dark singularity, Kamon. Beware of losing momentum and falling in." She turned and walked away, leaving the Aighor to watch the dance, his expression unchanged. I " final dance, made her way from the floor into the small gilded elevator, then up the marble stairs '(edged with malachite) to her third floor bedroom. She looked around with her head moving jerk, jerk, nervous as a bird. Her hands were trembling. Her shoulders slumped and tiny rivulets glistened on her cheeks, spotting the shiny saffron robe. She reached down, pulled up the hem of her gown, and sat on the padded bar edging the sleep field as she undid her shoes. One finger reached for the sleep-field button. The bed hummed into action and she fell back. Her hair fanned out. Disjohn Fairchild stood over her, his entrance as quiet as the activation of the sleepfield. "What's wrong?" he asked. "I saw the Aighor in the hallway," she said, her voice shaking with anger. "They could at least have the decency to hide themselves while they scheme!" "They're too honest and aboveboard for that," Disjohn said, sitting beside her. He looked at the ceramic wall mural, then at his shelves of old books -- all as familiar to him as his own hands. He had no official connections with the Combine, but diplomacy worked in such devious ways that he'd used this office and billet on the Combine world for twenty years. It was more than home, it was the repository of his life's work. Christ, he thought, even my world can't save me. But what was there to be immediately afraid of? The Aighors wouldn't do anything drastic to get to him. It would come some unspecified time when the opportunity presented itself, probably when he was called back to Shireport to deliver his personal lectures. Then they would declare the cultural insult and vendetta, commandeer his ship, and be done with him cleanly. There wasn't a thing Dallat or United Stars could do about it. There was complex diplomacy involved, and he wasn't so important a figure they'd risk the anger of the Combine. Of course, if he could reach Shireport safely, there were Crocerians who might consent to go with him from there -- paid, say, in trade preference for two years. The Aighors wouldn't touch his ship from Shireport to Ansinger with their allies aboard. When he delivered his lectures at Ansinger, he could apply for a United Stars Zone immunity. Ansinger was the largest use stellar province, ten systems. He could transfer his funds, or what part of them he could mobilize and take with him -- not much, he knew -- and his wife, convert his lands and holdings to transferrable commodities -- trade them for data and software, perhaps -- and set himself up on a terraformed world. Buy a continent on Kresham Elak. Start a school there. "Get the wife flinched, shock delaying a question. "Sorry," he said. "Thinking about alternatives." But the alternatives meant the demolition of his life as he knew it, and of his wife's. Would she stand for such a change? "Are they so vindictive that they'd kill you for doing such a simple thing? Then, why don't they destroy the station and kill its personnel as well?" she asked. He shook his head. "It's not that simple." Their reason had to be that he had pioneered and pushed and promoted in every possible way the construction of the Precipice # Station, the station studied blackhole radio emissions coming from the Pafloshwa Rift. He could think of no other. The Aighors called such emissions Thrina, and had built up extensive obeisance-rituals around them. Thus in some way his personal action had violated a religious or cultural tabu -- who could tell what human words applied, if any? -- and he was accountable. "They can't destroy the station," he said. "It's under United Stars jurisdiction now, thanks to Anna nel, then the Combine has to intervene. That would result in severe restrictions -- which the Aighors would have to abide by if they wished to survive economically. It's pretty tight from that angle. But I'm under Dallat protection, and Dallat hasn't yet signed a full agreement with the Combine. It's still a renegade consolidation. Until an agreement is signed, the Aighors can resort to old pre-human law and call a cultural vendetta." With their early half-grasp of human tongues, they had called it a "venging." The name had stuck in legal terminology"It's so damned complicated," Edith sighed, staring at the ceiling. "Not really, once you've been around it for a while." "You almost make it sound just." "It kept interspecies conflict to a minimum for mellennia before we arrived on the scene," Disjohn said quietly. "Roger Bacon was messing around with crude lenses when the original pact was established." Edith stood up from the sleepfield and unhitched her gown in the back, letting the folds pile themselves automatically into a tight, square pile. At forty she was still lovely, he thought -- and she had not yet begun to rely on juvenates. As if she were reading his mind, she said, "They don't have any way of staying young." "What?" "For all we know, they all die at about sixty years of age; they don't have any way to prevent it. Maybe that's why they cling to old religions and rituals. Personal survival after death, or whatever their equivalent is." "You mean that maybe they believe that what I've done blocks their chances of surviving after death?" "They consign their dead to black holes, don't they?" "Yes, but before they die. Pilgrimage ships of the old and diseased." "Maybe studying the thing takes it out of religion and puts it into science. Science still says nobody survives after death. Maybe the conscious mind will not accept what the subconscious -- " "That's archaic," he said. "And, besides, they aren't even human." She shrugged and lay back on the bed. He crawled in beside her and the room lights dimmed and died. What if his actions had condemned some of the Aighors to eternal darkness? He shuddered and closed his eyes tight, trying not to think, not to empathize. Sleep, when it came, was controlled, pleasant. m Kamon gazed briefly at the message spheres on the floor before him, then crossed his eyes in irritation. This gave him a double view of the opposite sides of the octagonal room -- ceremonial gepter knives hung on one wall, over the receiver-altar which periodically sonically reproduced the radio noise of the Thrina; wooden tub next to the opposite wall, filled with mineral water super-saturated with sulfur and iodine salts. He picked up a sphere and put it in the depression in his tape-pad, then instructed the little machine to record all the successive layers of information in linear display. The method tasted too much of human thought-patterns for his liking, but it had been adopted by Hafkan Bestmerit as a common method of using interculture information. It was disgusting, he thought, that a single cultural method of writing -- left to right, top to bottom -- should dominate information techniques across half the galaxy. But such was the dominance pattern of the young humans. The pad's read-out began immediately. The first message was from the Council at Train, the Aighor birthworld. The council had examined the theological and ethical problem of Fairchild and his sacrilege, and supported the conclusion of the district priests. Not even Fairchild's alien background and influence could exempt him from the Venging. Aighors to oblivion after death. He had profaned the major region of Thrina pilgrimage by treating it as an area for rational investigation, and not of deep reverence. The death-ships could no longer drop the assembled dying pilgrims below the event horizons of their chosen black holes. They would no longer experience the redemption of Zero, or bathe themselves in the source of the Thrina song. Kamon seethed with the Venging. He was one of those potential pilgrims. He had wanted so much to live forever. himself into more than he can interfere. We're conducting highlevel talks with Hafkan Bestmerit, very delicate. If I were to start an incident I would forego my employment quick as that." Karl Kondrashef snapped his fingers in demonstration and stared at Anna Sigrid-Nestor with large, woeful eyes. His jowly face was pale in the white light of his reading lamp. ' 'So I can expect no support from use," Anna said, anger beginning to color her face. "At the moment -- no." "Then what would you suggest?" "For Fairchild, finding his way to some immunity zone like Anbut only by renouncing his associations with Dallat. As I understand it, that would mean giving up most of his wealth." "Disjohn isn't so desirous of his wealth that he'd rather die than lose it, but I'm asking what # can do to help him." "Keep your nose out of it. Give him the advice I've given you. But stay clear... unless you want with you." "Kiril, I've known you for seventy years now. We're about as friendly as two old wolves can be. You bailed me out of my doldrums after the death of my first husband. More even, we're both Abstainers and dedicated to our Creed that immortality is no desirable thing. Yet now you tell me you won't do anything to help a man who has done more good for colonists and the consolidations than anyone, Dallat associations or no. You're incredibly two-faced, I think." "Our 'Friendliness' aside, my dear, I don't like your tactics much and I never have; you're too forceful when you should step softly. Now is one of those times when a good many fragile and important things hang in the balance. Do you have any idea -- you must have, you're no idiot -- how difficult it is for species to coexist when all they have in common is the fact they are alive? It's like standing on tiptoes all the time, for all concerned. Involve yourself in this and you might start a collapse you can not now imagine." She sat in front of his desk, hands gripping the edge as if to push it aside. Her forearms were rigid but her facial expression hadn't changed from the mild, grandmotherly smile she'd put on when she came in. "Besides," he continued in an undertone, "your weapons are registered whenever fired, in defense or otherwise, and the situation is recorded. We'll have you on the carpet if you do anything that can even be considered other than strictly defensive." "I've never been able to figure out you bureaucrats," Anna said. "But you're right about one thing." She sighed, stood up to leave. "It hasn't been much of a friendship." She rode a transit tube beneath the modular city, as any pedestrian might have -- seemingly nothing more than just another old woman. In her bag were several pictures of young men, one of whom attracted her very much. She glanced at them several times as she rode, trying to lose herself in reverie and allow her limbic mind to feel its way through to an action. Gut-level thought had carried her through crises before. She isolated the one photograph and tapped it against her cheek as she left the tube. She was at an underground terminal beneath the Myriadne starport, largest on Tau Ceti II. Shuttles landed and departed by dozens every hour, bronze and silver bullets homing for their mother starships. One such bullet, small and utilitarian, waited for her as she rode a wheeled maneuvering tug out to it. In ten minutes she was off-planet. Disjohn Fairchild was an intelligent man. He would already be implementing some of the suggestions Karl had made to her. They were the only outs he had for the moment, with or without her help. She calmly analyzed her own reaction to the suggestions, watching sun, planets and stars form a glittering bow around her ship. Then she smiled grimly and went to sleep as the stars winked out. When she came awake three hours later, dark still surrounded her. It grew muddied and started to take on form. There was a queasy moment, a tiny shiver, and the outer universe returned. Occasional wisps of color dotted and vanished streamer-like along the forty-five degree rotated starbow. She began to wonder what Kamon had meant by the reminder that his kind were mortal without choice. Did it have something to do with Disjohn? She went to the ship's library to do research. On her way, she dropped the photograph into an unlabelled chute and told it, "Hire him." They would pick him up at Shireport. V Edith grew tired of the viewscreen's translation of what was happening outside the ship. She frowned and closed her eyes, trying to wipe her mind clear for a moment. The books in front of her ghosted and darkened, and she swam in a small red sea of interior designs. After a moment, she no longer thought in words, and mental imgery came to her clearly. Three large, very fast starships all moved across hyperspacial geodesics toward a common goal. They left tracks -- she could see them in an allegorical fashion -- in amorphous higher geometries. They were aware of each other's presence and direction. By deduction they would be aware of each other's purpose. Each carried an individual bent on accomplishing one task. Edith wondered what Anna Sigrid-Nestor's purpose was, beyond friendship. They'd communicated briefly a few hours before, and Disjohn had told her to leave well enough alone. But Edith was sure she wouldn't. Her concentration broken, she opened her eyes and again scanned the books. One ship carried a being built very differently from the masters of the other two ships. The being wasn't classifiable in terms of terrestrial biology, having partial aspects of many Earth phyla, as well as others totally alien to Sol ID. He was called "he" by default -- a human cultural tendency to view the convex sexual form as male. But Kamon was neither male nor female in the reproductive process of his kind. His children (by human standards) were not his children. His neurological make-up also varied wildly from the human, the arrangement of his nervous system being central rather than dorsal, while his brains were positioned in three main areas around his esophagus. One of his brains was an evolutionary vestige, handling autonomic and emotive functions. It was very powerful in influence despite its size, and was connected with the two other portions by fibers substantially larger than any human nervous connection -- networks of medullae, each marvelously complex. He could contemplate at least four different things at once while involved in routine action. Even while driven by what humans would consider a maniacal obsession an Aighgor could think as rationally as the calmest of humans. A dangerous enemy, hugely motivated and cunningly reinforced. In this match, Kamon indeed had the upper hand. He would know everything they had planned -- with benefit of manic certainty and calm intellection -- and he'd act without hesitation -- "No!" Edith said. Kamon was not supernatural. He would have his faults, too. They could elude him. They could survive him. Perhaps Sigrid-Nestor could help by distracting him. There was at least hope, and perhaps even a good chance. So why was she feeling so dangerously dark inside, and cold? She closed her books and stood up slowly from the table, then went to join her husband on the bridge. "A ship riding proto-geometry has three options in case of attack," Graetikin, the Captain, was telling Fairchild as she entered. He nodded at her and continued. "It can drop into half-phase, that is, fluctuate between two geometries -- " his finger lightly sketched an equation on the tapas pad -- "or drop into status geometry, our normal continuum. Or it can dispatch part of its mass and create pseudo-ships like squid's ink. This happens to some extent during any transfer of geometries, to satisfy the Dirac corrolaries, but the mass loss is on the order of fifty or sixty protons, randomly scattered." "What about protection from shields?" "Shields only operate in status geometry, Disjohn. You should remember that. They're electromagnetic and that implies charge-holes in hyperspacial manifolds." "It would have been easier if we'd had a few Crocerians," Fairchild said wistfully. But they were a pragmatic species. When the ship had put in at Shireport, all the Crocerians he'd asked had politely refused, not wishing to gamble, or, if gambling, betting on the Aighor. "I'd certainly never fight Aighors if I could avoid it," Graetikin said. "I would avoid it by avoiding having them challenge me." "We're still taking that risk, though." "It's up to you to estimate that risk. Once committed to a protogeometry vector we can't back down." "How far ahead of us is he?" "About four light-hours and matching course and velocity." "How much of a jump can we get if we take one of these protogeometries?" "He'll receive signs of our jump about a tenth of a second status time after we make it. That gives us a good hour or two at the other end of the pierce." "They might take that as an affront," Disjohn said, looking at Edith. "Why, for God's sake?" Graetikin said. "We'd have to jump into some manifold or another anyway." "But proto-geometry jumps are a waste of energy, unless one wants to gain a certain advantage." Fairchild pushed away from the anchored chair and drifted across the cabin. "And if I give any clue that I think they're after me, they'll interpret it as a cultural insult. Kamon is sharper than I care to think about. He won't miss a trick." Graetikin shrugged and doodled an equation among the others on the tapas pad. He had been working on it in his head for months, unaware he was so close to a solution. His eyes widened. He had just described what the Thrina were in terms of physics and mathematics, and how they operated. He branched off with another equation, and saw that in any geometry outside of status -- any universe beyond his own continuum -- the Thrina would be ubiquitous. He could describe it in mathematics, but he couldn't put it into words. That, he idly thought, did qualify them for godhood somewhat. He' would transmit it to Precipice # when he had a chance, and see what they made of it. But for the moment, it wasn'I relevant. He folded the tapas pad and put it into his shirt pocket. "We're four light-days out from Shireport, and sixty parsecs from the Ansinger systems. We made it to Shireport without harassment, and that makes me suspicious. So far we've only been tailed. I expected them to act sooner." Graetikin turned around to look at Fairchild. "They're usually more punctual." the wall with his throat and triplet brain smashed flat. He managed a flnal automatic gasp of query before Kamon pressed the slammer button again and laid his head out. The thorax and tail twitched and the arms writhed slowly, then all motion stopped. Kamon's mate-of-ship huddled against the back of the cabin and croaked tightly, regularly, her face blood-red with fear. Kamon put the slammer down and sent his message to the Council at Frain. "The diplomatic team has caused damage to the Venging," he said. The hazy, distorted image of the Auspiseer chided him for his vehemence. "They have called for the meeting at Precipice # partly for your advantage," the Auspiseer said. "The human Fairchild's ship has been notified en route to Ansinger, and he cannot refuse." "But I have already had several chances to attack -- " "The captain's reluctance to destroy the Fairchild ship was part of his training. You should have been gentler with him." "He is of the governing breed. They've become almost human in the past centuries." "The Council allowed the meeting at Precipice # to be called for a number of reasons. For one, it makes our relations with the humans easier temporarily. And for another, it puts you in a better position should the discussions be unsuccessful. So the Council cannot discount your premature release of Captin Liiank, without benefit of pilgrimage. Your mission has now become one of self-immolation upon completion." "The release of Fairchild will sanctify the Rift Thrina, and I will take my end there." "So be your course of action, wise and good." "But I have lost the Fairchild ship now because of the Captain's reluctance. It will take time to regain an advantage." "What else has offended besides Fairchild?" "His station." "Kamon, you realize now that you are officially declared rogue and we are not answerable for your actions. We will broadcast suitable warnings to that effect." "That is as I've planned. Auspiseer." He ended the communication and turned to speak to his mate. She had regained her composure and was adjusting her belts of pre-fertilized egg capsules. "We will gestate no more young," he said. "It would be useless." wrong with the predictions," the Heuritex said. "I've calculated based on all known constants and variables, all options open, but the trend is against the predicted resuits. I must conclude that there are large portions of information unavailable to me. The model is inadequate." "In short, you're useless," Anna told the machine. "That is as it may be." "I should replace you with my gigolo." "He's a handsome bastard. I'll say that for him." "What if we add the assumption that Kamon is going to behave erratically, say, deranged by being denied an after-life?" "Then the results are open again and we have more options." "Then that's our operating hypothesis. No, wait. Use this -- Kamon will behave as if he is deranged, by human standards. And probably will not be by his own. Never underestimate opponents, not if you wish to grow old." "Do you wish that to be an hypothesis, or an assumption? There is a difference, you know." "Whichever way it works out best. You know what you're doing better than I do, dearie." "Incorporated. The resulting futuremodel indicates that the meeting at Precipice # -- course corrected for that destination, by the by -- will be the site of an attempt at destruction. Kamon will probably be the destroyer, and the Aighors will claim insanity and rogue tactics to bow out of the responsibility." "There. That sounds satisfying, doesn't it? I think so." She paced in front of the panel, then ordered gravitation shut off and floated at ease. "Warn Precipice # to be on full alert when Disjohn arrives." "Done." Martial Aids, at Shireport. Tell them there is going to be a confrontation in the Pafloshwa Rift, coordinates unknown." "Such an action, without further information, will mark you as a rogue agent as well," the machine said, a speculative tone in its voice. "Whatever for?" "First, it would not be... kosher... to expect a supposedly friendly ship to attack. It would inbattle, since you are heading toward the Rift and not backing out, and since you are going there of your own free will." does not know I'm aboard this vessel, so they'll assume -- will have to assume -- that the captain of this ship is not playing with a full deck of cards." "You are the captain." "Nonsense. You are. I shall have you overhauled when we get back to Ansinger." "That will be a good time to install the new Parakem function modules... Where are you supposedly?" "On Tau Ceti II. I made an appointment with Jessamyn Negras for a business talk and she hates me enough to keep me waiting for at least a month. She would refuse to believe anyone could possibly leave if they would miss out on the blessed chance to talk to her. And appropriately deluded recorders are going at all times in my apartments. I'm there, that's certain." "I see," said the Heuritex. captain before learning all there was to know about ship operation. The Aighors who crewed the vessel were all skilled enough in their special tasks, as were the computers, but overall competence was, if not lacking, at least shaky. Kamon absorbed the captain's library rapidly. He received satisfaction from knowing an Aighor pilgrimage fleet was now forming on the borders of the Rift. His kind cheered him on, and the government -- diplomats and rulers alike -- had not sent a ship to stop him. Nor would they. Coldly, precisely, he used his triplet brain to predict what difficulties would arise. First would be the defensive weaponry possessed by Precipice # -- negligible, all things considered. Second, the presence of Anna Sigrid-Nestor, whom of all the humans he'd met he most admired. Third -- the final battleground would not be Precipice #. He would have to chase Fairchild across the Rift. The station would be destroyed before the human ships arrived. "airchild's discovered the slagged ruin of Precipice #, issued a distress signal on the station's bphalf, and headed for deep space at full power. His ship was far enough from the major gravitational effects of the small system in hours and then shamelessly relied on protogeometry jumps to take it deep into the Rift. It shut down all activities not connected with life-support, went into half-phase, and laid ghost images of itself across a wide range of continua. Graetikin silently cursed the Dallat conventions which allowed private ships to carry nothing more offensive than meteoroid deflection shields. He had spent his first thirty years in space as an apprentice commander in the Combine Astry, helping to command ships armed to their gunwales with all conceivable weapons, from rocket projectiles to stasis-shielded neutronium blocks which, warped into the center of another vessel, quickly gravitated the victim's mass into a tiny, super-dense sphere. Now he faced this nemesis armed with nothing more deadly than signal rockets and half-phase warps. Fairchild's motives and those of the Aighor didn't concern him; Both in their own ways were rightthinking beings, concerned with good tasks. But he was concerned with survival. He wanted to live to captain another ship -- or at least continue captaining this one. He didn't mind Fairchild's employ. The man was reasonably sharp and knew how to provide for the upkeep of his own ships. If he had the tact of a young bull in dealing with alien cultures, that was usually not Graetikin's province. Between and around these concerns, he re-worked his equations describing the Thrina. There was a cool, young hypothesis on the horizons of his rnind, and it tantalized him. In reworking the single expression on his notepad, he found four connections with Parakem functions which he hadn't noticed earlier. They implied that the Thrina, though ineffectual in a cause-effect relation in most geometries, had interesting properties in coincidencecontrolled geometries. That meant they could influence certain aspects of status-geometry, where causeeffect and synchronicity operated in struggling balance. And that implied that if... He raised his eyebrows. can contact Fairchild if he chooses to coast free within the next thirtyfive hours," the Heuritex said. Anna grumbled out of a light doze at the pronouncement. "What was that?" "We can join forces with him at points I have calculated along geodesics meeting in higher geometries." "Translate for us mortals, please." She straightened up in her command chair and rubbed her face with her hands. "I think we can Join with Fairchild's ship before Kamon reaches it. Here is our condition: fifth standard day of flight; all three ships are deep into the Rift. Fairchild is inert, following a leastenergy geodesic in half-phase. Kamon is matching the most likely direction of that geodesic, though I'm certain he has no clear picture of the ship's present position along such a path. We follow Kamon closely. And we are constantly correcting our charts with observations of the Rift pulsars and singularities." "Yes, but what's this about joining with Fairchild?" "His vessel alone doesn't have sufficient 'influence' to propel itself away from Kamon. He has little or no chance of escape in the long run. But with our two ships linked, we can create a broader effect-beam in proto-geometry -- " "Is this more than mere theory?" "I think so, madame. And I can do more than that; I can contact Disjohn Fairchild's ship in a code only it can understand, and arrange for the rendezvous without the Aighor knowing." "You're a maker of wonders, and you draw my curiosity like a magnet... into areas I'm sure will baffle me. But explain the code." "It would mix a standard combine code with keys and message vectors linked to Fairchild's position and frequency of interspatial... excuse me, I grow technical. Simply, certain of those particular characteristics of Fairchild's ship along its world line would enable it to quickly decode such a standardized message. Since only one ship occupies its peculiar position, only it can have any chance of decoding." "I'll think on it," she said. Why did he hesitate? she asked herself. Because now, faced with the possibility of doing what she had started out to do -- to save Disjohn Fairchild at any cost -- miserable, cold sense started to creep in. She needed to think about it, long and hard. There were too many considerations to weigh for a hasty decision. She made her way to the ship's observation chamber. Far out on the needle-like boom which extended from the crew-ball, an isolated multi-sense chamber seemed to hang in dark space. But its walls were transparent only by illusion. adjustable images of anything within range of the ship's sensors, down to the Hnest detail a human eye could perceive. Images could be magnified, starbows undistorted into normal starfields for quick reference, or high-frequency energy shifted into visual regions. If need demanded, such subtle effects as light distortion in higher geometries could be brought within the realm of human interpretation. The sphere could also synthesize programmed journeys and sound effects, or any combination of fictions and synesthesias. Anna requested a tour of the nearby singularities. "Will there be a specific sequence, madame?" the media computer asked. "Only an introductory tour. And give me a voice-over to explain what I'm seeing." The visual journey started. "Some singularities are made obvious by surrounding nebulae," the voice-over began. "These are veils of supernova dust and gas that have been expanding at tens of thousands of miles per second for hundreds of like fiery maiden's hair or mart's-tail clouds in a sunset, backdropped by velvet space. Hidden within, a tiny spinning and glowing cloud, a pinprick, not Worh noticing... geometric jaws gaping wide, tides deadly as any ravening starfurnace. "Others are companions to dim red stars, and thus are heavy x-ray sources. They suck in matter from their neighbors, accelerate and heat it through friction, and absorb it in bottomless wells. There is no comprehensive explanation why the majority of the Rift stars supemovaed other, half an eon ago, but the result is a treacherous graveyard of black holes, dwarfs and a few dim giants. They all affect each other across their close-packed Rift in incalculable patterns. "Some can be seen through observation of the stellar background. The rings of stars around a black hole show the effects of gravitational lensing. Light is captured and orbited above the event horizons any number of times depending on the angle of incidence, producing two primary images and a succession of subsidiary images caused by anomalies in the spinning singularity. The glowing gas-clouds falling into the holes produce central points of high-energy radiation, red-shifted into the visual spectrum by the enormous gravitational fields. These are surrounded by rings of stars reddened through clouds of gas, images of stars from every angle -- every visible object, including those behind the observer. There are gaps of darkness and then succeeding rings of stars like the bands on an interferometer plate, finally blending into star-images almost undeviated by the singularity." She was reminded of electronic Christmas ornaments from her childhood. The splendor was heightened by the sphere's adaptation to human vision, but only in part. Anna knew what she saw was very close to what existed outside, away in any direction, so close her ship could reach it in minutes... "Dear God," she murmured. To fall into one of those things would be to transcend any past experience of death. They were miracles, intrusions into reality, jesters of spacetime. Her eyes filled with tears which nearly broke their tension bonds to drift away in free-fall. "Where no such diffractions and reflections are visible, perhaps absorbed in dark nebulosities, and where no X-ray or Thrina sources give clues, naked singularities stripped of their event horizons lurk like invisible teeth. These have been charted by evidence obtained in protogeometry warps. There is no other way to know they exist." The Thrina song of a nearby singularity was played to her through audio. It sounded like the wailing of lost children, sweetly mixed with a potent bass bourn, an echoing cave-sound, ghost-sound, preternatural mind-sound. "No reason is known for the existence of the Thrina song. It is connected with singularities as an unpredictable phenomenon of radiating and patterned energy, perhaps in some way directed by intelligence." Anna Sigrid-Nestor left the sphere and drifted quickly back through the extension to the crewball. Her hands were shaking. Her cheeks were wet. IVamon followed and waited. A ship could remain in half-phase only so long before its unintentional mass loss (how easily he had spotted and avoided the ghosts!) reached a critical level. His shipmate meditated and fasted alone in her cabin. Kamon was left with the simpleminded computers -- it would be blasphemous for an Aighor machine to have a persona -- and a few aides to see to his food and wastes. He preferred it that way. At one point he even ordered them to clear away the captain's smashed body so he might feel truly alone. The Venging was close. He had had no further contact with the Council at Frain or any other Aighor agencies. He had spotted and charted the ship of Anna Sigrid Nestor, and felt his own sort of appreciation at the intuition she was following personally. She was on her own Venging. Such was the dominance pattern of humans. before critical point," Graetikin said softly. Lady Fairchild gripped her husband's arm tighter. For a society woman she was holding up remarkably well, Graetikin thought. He'd never had a chance to talk to her and see what she was like. The worst was yet to come. Kamon would inevitably chase them down, and there was only one chance left. His equation implied their survival if they took that chance. It was a terrifying prospect, even so. "We have to leave half-phase," Fairchild said. "And we'll have to outrun him. There's no other way." Edith nodded and turned away from the bridge consoles. "Have you ever wondered why he called a Venging?" she asked, facing away from the two men. "What?" Fairchild asked, not paying much attention to her. He was focusing on the blank viewers, as if to strain some impossible clue from them. It was useless, however. The eye interpreted glimpses of half-phase exteriors, as if they weren't there, as indeed half the time they were not. "No other way," Fairchild repeated, his voice quiet as Graetikin's. "Kamon has to have a reason," Edith said, louder. "I'm sure he does," Graetikin said. "I've been trying to find out what that reason is. I might have a clue." "That doesn't really concern us now," Fairchild said, irritated. "Reason or no, we have to get away from him." "But doesn't it help to know what we're going to die for?" Edith cried, her voice cracking. "You know damn well we can't outrun him! Graetikin knows it, too. Don't you?" Graetikin nodded. "But I wouldn't say we're going to die. There might be another way." "You know of one?" Fairchild asked. Graetikin nodded. "But first, I want to hear what Lady Fairchild has to say about Kamon's motive." Disjohn took a deep breath and held up his arms. "Okay, Lady Ethnographer," he said to his wife, "tell us." "It's all in the library, for whomever would care to look it up. Some of it is even in the old books. We've known about it it for a century at least -- the basic form of the Aighor pilgrimage. They have three brains, that's well-known -- but we've ignored the way they use those brains. One is for rational purposes, and it can do everything a computer can do -- but it isn't the dominant element. Another performs emotive and autonomic functions, and that's where the seat of their religion is. We don't know exactly what the third brain does, but I have an idea that it prepares the other two brains for a proper death. It has to balance them out, mediate. If the rational brain has an edge, the pilgrim won't be prepared for death. I think the research conducted by the station might have given the Aighors a dilemma they couldn't face -- the rational treatment of subjects hitherto purely religious to them. It gave their rational minds an edge and caused an imbalance. So the pilgrims couldn't be delivered to the black holes without wholesale failure in proper rituals of dying." "And?" Graetikin asked, fingering his stylus. It seemed there was another shoe to drop in the matter, and she wasn't dropping it. But he couldn't decide what it was either. "And that's it. I can't go any further than that. I'm not really an ethnographer. But sometimes I wish to hell you had been, dear husband!" There was no bitterness or rebuke in her voice, only regret. Fairchild said nothing, staring at the empty screens. "You have another way?" he asked finally. "It's possible," Graetikin said. He began to outline his alternative. From the ninth word on Fairchild was pale, convinced his Captain had broken under the strain. Anna lay in the half-dark and watched him dress. For the first time in years she regretted that her emotional needs had drawn her away from constant alertness. But this was the first time she'd been with this handsome lad for anything more than companionship. He had proved not merely serviceable and charming, as though her aging frame didn't bother him, but a sympathetic human being as well. "I don't really understand all of what you've told me," he said. His brown Polynesian physique shone in the golden sanitoire lamps. "But I think what you're asking me is, do you have the right to put your ship's crew in danger. Well, I'm part of that crew, and I say you're the captain, and I signed on -- with the understanding there might be hazards involved in deep-space travel." "These aren't the normal hazards." "But if it serves your purpose to link up with the other ship, then how can I or anyone else persuade you not to?" "Not by discussion, of that I'm sure," she said. "But maybe Ry your presence. I do have responsibilities toward the people who work for me." She was reminded of what Kondrashef had said to her. Even if they could link up with the Fairchild ship, what guarantee did she have that the Heuritex's predictions were completely accurate? They didn't have complete figures on what Kamon's ship was capable of. Already they'd been surprised several times. And her first lieutenant, Nilsbaum, had worked the problem out on an alternate computer, a human-manufacture Datapak. It had given them eighty percent chances of hitting a singularity if they linked and performed a protogeometry jump. The heuritex had disagreed. But still, the dichotomy existed. "I can't blast the bastard," Anna said, "because every pot-shot I take is registered by the tattle machines I tions. No way to tamper with them -- they retreat into stasis whenever they're not registering. No, a link-up is the only way." She looked sharply at the kanaka. He looked back at her, his face blank and expectant. "Go take a shower," she said. Then, softer, "Please. You helped me very much." She turned over and listened to the sounds of the door closing and water running. She was staring at the drifting colors on the nacreous ceiling when the intership chimed. She reached over to depress the switch' and listened half-drowsily. The voice of the Heuritex brought her fully awake. "Madame, we've contacted Fairchild's ships. First Lieutenant Nilsbaum requests your presence on the bridge." "I'll be there. Any message from Disjohn?" "He refuses to allow any link-up. He says he has two reasons -- first, that he will not Jeapordize your life; and second, that his computers predict failure if such a plan is carried out. I don't understand these machines of human construction." "Did he say anything else?" "He just advised you to leave this sector." She sat up in bed and put her chin in her hands. The shower was still running. "Another question," she said. "Yes, madame." "What happens to us if we hit a black hole? I've forgotten most of my physics..." "Depending on the angle we hit at, we have several varieties of doom. If we go straight in, perpendicular to a tangent, we pass through two or more event horizons, depending on the theoretical geometry you subscribe to -- " "What are event horizons?" "Simply the horizons beyond which no further events can be seen. The gravitational field at that point has accelerated any particle approaching it close to the speed of light. From an outside point of view, the particle's time has slowed to almost nothing, no motion at all, so it will take an infinite time to hit the singularity below the event horizon. But from our point of view -- if we are the hypothetical particle -- we will hit it. Much that it will matter to us, though. Long before we pass through the innermost event horizon tidal forces will exert strains on us sufficient to strip us down to subatomic particles." "Not too pleasant." "No, but there are other options. At a lesser angle, we might pass through an outer event horizon at a speed sufficient to propel us into another geometry, and out again someplace else -- a different place and time in our own universe, perhaps, or in another fullcontinuum universe. We might survive that, if certain theoretical conditions prove true -- though it would be a rough trip and the ship might not emerge in one solid piece." "How can there be more than one event horizon?" "Because black holes rotate. May I draw you a comparison of two Kruskal-Szekeres diagrams?' ' "By all means," Ann said, activating the display screen on the intership. But the mosaic-like charts did little to help her comprehension. Kamon said to himself. "Now!" The image reappeared. He had misjudged the geodesic slightly. The ship was a light-hour farther away than he had predicted, which meant the ship's appearance was an hour off from actual emergence. He felt a brief confusion. Fairchild had pulled it out of half-phase an hour early, then, since the appearance had happened according to Kamon's schedule. But the ruse -- if ruse it was -- had gained them a very small advantage. He immediately switched to sub-space sensors. Fairchild's ship was over four light-hours away. More disturbing, it was heading toward a nebulosity which charts said contained three collapsars, two of them black holes. Kamon deftly probed the nebula with his proto-geometry sensors. None of these singularities had ever been used for pilgrimages, thus they did not radiate Thrina songs. The area had not been thoroughly charted except on visual and radio levels from thousands of light-years away, where the patterns of the roiling gas-clouds had given away the presence of hidden collapsars. His new scanning revealed another member of the family, deadly elusive and sacred. It was a naked singularity. The very presence of humans in such a region was sacrilege -- but if they were choosing suicide over destruction at his hands, the danger was unthinkable. If they should plunge into any of the singularities... A shudder racked his entire body. He had heard of humans going insane under stress, but if they fell into a singularity here, the Venging was a failure and the Rift would never be clean again. He forced himself to be calm. They wouldn't know how to prepare themselves for the Fall. They knew nothing about the mental ritual involved. It would be, in effect, nothing more than a suicide. Or it would be something worse, for them. But his basic instinct said destroy them before they ever reached the cloud. For the first time he began to feel real anxiety that he might fail. He did so want to live forever! "It can't be done!" Lady Fairchild shouted. "Disjohn, I'm not ignorant! I know what those things are. Graetikin has to be insane to think we can survive that!" "I've heard him explain it. The computers back him up." "Yes, on his assumptions!" "He's on to something new. He knows what he's talking about -- and he's right. We don't have any other choice. The Aighor has every advantage over us, including religious zeal -- as you pointed out. We've tested event-models on the computers again and again. We have one chance in a thousand of coming out alive. With Graetikin's plan, our chances are at least ten times greater." "We're going to die, is what you're saying, either way." "Probably. But there's something grander about this way of going. It robs Kamon of his goal. We hold the upper hand now." "You know what will happen if we suicide in one of the singularities?" Edith asked. "We don't plan on suiciding." "Just going down one, we make this entire region useless to them for their pilgrimages. Mixing souls is anathema to them, like mixing meat and milk to an Orthodox Jew." "There was a hygienic reason not to mix meat and milk. It spoils faster." "Are we so bloody materialistic that we can't see a reason for this kind of tabu?" Fairchild swung his hands out and turned away from her, talking loudly to the wall. "Damn it, Edith, we have to use Occam's razor! We can't multiply our hypotheses until we avoid stepping mothers. We're rational beings! Kamon has that advantage over us -- he is not acting rationally. He's on a venging, just like a Goddam berserker, and he's got a faster, better armed ship. We're doomed! What should we do, bare our breast to him and shout 'mea culpa'?" Edith shook her head. "I don't know... I feel so lost." Fairchild shivered. "You're not alone. Any being would." "Except Aighors," Edith reminded him. "And they've always been prepared for it." #i He won't let us dock with him, he's turning toward the singularities -- there's nothing more I can do," Anna said. "He's choosing suicide rather than give Kamon the pleasure of executing him. Or is he up to something?" "I can offer no explanation, madame. Either they have gone insane or (hey have data unavailable to me." She sighed and leaned back in her chair. "Can they receive any messages now?" "They are in the cloud. There's too much interference." "Veer off. Circle to the opposite side of the nebula and we'll see if anything emerges at that end. I've met Fairchild's captain -- he may have more up his sleeve than we can know from this perspective." Dumfounded, Anna watched the final act on her sensors and tapped her fingers on the Heuritex. p xvu gosphere interface of a singularity. Whether the same conditions applied to a naked singularity or not, he did't know -- he guessed they would. But they wouldn't have to face the danger of the tidal forces -- there would be no event horizons, no overt indication of inrushing space-time. The singularity ahead had collapsed from a star oblated by the presence of other stars, and the result was a hole in spacetime stretched out into a line. If conditions still applied here, he'd have to figure their chances of survival on a near-poetic hunch. It was clear to Graetikin now. Inter-universe connections of necessity were devoid of probablities. They were truce zones between regions of differing qualities, differing constants. Hence, somewhere above the singularity, re-shaping of infalling material had to take place. Perhaps the Aighors weren't far wrong after all. He worked all his findings into a single tight-packed signal on several media and broadcast it to space in general. When he was finished he turned to Disjohn and Edith and said, "Feels good to toss out a bottle, anyway. If someone picks it up, well and good. If not, we've lost a few megawatts. But we'll replace that and more in the plunge. Too bad we won't be able to use it." "What does that mean?" Edith asked in a small voice. "If we survive, we'll absorb the gain evenly and there will be no differences in potential to draw power from. And if we don't, then it won't matter." The computer spoke up in disagreement. "It will be gained as overall temperature increase and resistance to acceleration," it said. "Not as anything involving potential." "I was thinking metaphorically," Graetikin demurred. "But it's right, of course." JVamon could either back off, let them escape and hope for an encounter later, or he could pursue to the very end. But he was becoming fatalistic. It seemed the Fairchild ship was behaving not with human insanity, but with divine irrationality -- a shield to his Venging. That could imply they were operating in the Grace of the Thrina, not against it. He wished he could consult the Council with his new intuition, but there was no time. Whether he was correct or not, it made him reluctant to interfere. That small reluctance made him hesitate. "No!" he souted, pounding his thorax in disgust. "They are only insane! There is no Grace upon them!" But it was too late. He had followed the Fairchild ship into the nebulosity on a matching course. They could only construe that as an intention to continue the chase. Since they were insane, they would destroy themselves. In his self-rage, he considered destroying the Nestor ship for personal satisfaction. But he had other things to do. He had to prepare himself mentally for the Fall. He told the others to begin their rituals. They would follow all the way." Course plotted," the computer told Graetikin. "There will be a proper configuration at these points of the chart. We can meet the singularity's effect-field here, or here -- that is, at these points in our future-line. If we fail within any width of time measurable in quantum jump intervals, we will come in at a closer angle and the warp-wave of our approach will create a temporary event horizon which will destroy us. These are our options." "Initiate the action and test it on a closed loop. Then choose the best approach and put us there. Kamon hasn't left our tail?" . "No, he still follows. And still jams." "Then my message didn't get through." Somehow that didn't bother him much. Fairchild gave the final order. Edith watched from his side with a small, knowing smile playing around her lips. She was remembering her childhood. She'd married Disjohn, in fact, because he reminded her of the strength of her father. She needed that strength now. The ship's corridors echoed with metal groans as the impact of the nebula's clouds smashed her. The tiny neutron star was pulsating regularly. It was surrounded hy its own halo of accelerated particles, a natural generator of radio energy. The two normal singularities orbited each other, half a light-hour apart. The violet influx of gases outlined them clearly. Like two whirlpools whose surfaces have been smeared with oil, they glowed in disparate, shimmering mazes of light. Starlight ran in rings around them. Ghost images of each other flickered in the rings, and the ghosts carried rings of stars, and images of other ghosts. Here time and space rushed into multi-dimensional holes so rapidly that an object had to move at light speed to stay in one place. It was a Red Queen's race of cosmic -- and cosmological -- proportions . In drawing diagrams of what happens in the singularity below the event horizons, space and time axes cross and replace each other. The word "singularity" itself is a phrase of no more significance than "boojum." It implies points in any mathematical manifold where results start coming out in impossible terms, zeroes or infinities or imaginary numbers. Thus, Graetikin knew more than any of the others, they were soon to step off the pages of one book which had told their lives until now, leave that book behind and everything associated with it, and risk a plunge into null. God's universe was being twisted into grotesque failures and inconceivable alterations. The naked singularity invisibly approached. JVamon's thoughts grew fuzzy and uncoordinated. He spasmed with rage as one portion of his mind came unbalanced in the ritual, lashed out with his tail at the bulkhead before him, denting the inchthick metal. Then he regained balance. The holiday display of the black holes dominated everything. He was ready. A tiny reserve part of him prepared his weapons for the last-ditch effort, then vanished into the calm pool of his being. ness he'd never known before. It was analogous to being spun on a carnival toy, but every part of him felt it differently. "I'm expanding," Lady Fairchild said. "I'm getting bigger. Alite down the rabbit hole -- " Still the ship fell. And fell. Edith gasped. The bridge darkened for the blink of an eye, then was suddenly aglow with scattered bits of ghost lightning. She held her hands in front of her eyes and saw a blue halo around them like Cherenkov radiation. Expansion. Alteration. The desk in front of her, and her arms on the desk, broke into color-separated images and developed intricate networks of filigree, became crystalline, net-like, tingled and shimmered and pulsed, then repeated in reverse and became solid again. Everything smelled of dust and age, musty like vast libraries. Both ships ended their existence in status geometry, at the same moment, Kamon following at a different angle, but hitting the affect-field simultaneously with the Fairchild ship. As he had known it would, the Aighor's warp-wave created a temporary event horizon and he was divested of his material form. The Fairchild ship survived its fall. Graetikin's equations, thus far, were wholly accurate. None of them could conceive of what happened in the interface. It was not chaos -- it was instead a sea of quiet, an end to action. The destruction and rearrangement of rules and constants led to a lassitude of space-time, an endless sargasso of thought and event, mired and tangled and grey. Then each experienced that peculiar quality of their world-line which made them unique. Fairchild, stable and strong, did not see much to surprise him. Graetikin marvelled in a welter of mathematical insight. Edith, still wrapped in childhood, had a nightmare and woke far in her own past, a child screaming for her father. Again the darkness. The ouroboros of the hole spat them out. The computers triggered a lengthy jump, as best as they were able, for the actions of their smallest circuits were still not statistically reliable. This was the chance Graetikin knew they all had to take. They lived. The ship rattled and shivered like a dog throwing off water from a swim, while the howl of metal made Fairchild's scalp prickle and his arm-hair stand on end. Suddenly the bridge cabin was swept as by a rush of wind and it was over. Edith Fairchild wept quietly and Disjohn, beside her, trembled. Graetikin bounced his fingers clumsily over the screen controls, then corrected and gave them a view of what lay outside. "I don't see anything," Fairchild said. "I'm astonished we even made it," Graetikin whispered. Disjohn gave him a strange' look. With adjustment, the screen still showed darkness. "Give me a scab and chart all radiating sources," the captain ordered the computer. "Standard H-R distribution shows nothing. There is only an average temperature," it said. "What's the temperature?" "Two point seven one degrees Kelvin." Graetikin slammed his scriber onto the panel. "Any white hole activity? Any signs of the singularity we just came though?" "Nothing." "We had to come out of something!" "Undefined," the machine said cryptically. "What does that mean?" Edith asked. "It means we're in a region of heat-death." "Where?" "Undefined," the computer said again. " 'Position' is a meaningless term now," Graetikin explined. '"Everything is evenly distributed. We've come into a dead universe. We're at the top of a beat between expansion and collapse." "What can we do?" Disjohn asked. He felt an intense ache for his wife, and wished she were at his side. It seemed he had lost her only recently, the grief was so strong. He looked at Edith. She resembled her mother so strongly his throat ached. He patted his daughter on the head, but felt none of the reassurance he was trying to give. "We might be able to go into stasis and wait it out. But we'd have to have a timer, something measuring the progress of the universe outside us. I don't think any of our instruments would last that long." "There has to be a way!" Fairchild said. "I told you. Father," Edith said with preternatural precocity, "we are being punished." Graetikin thought of them waiting until the ship ran out of energy and food and breathable air. Years, certainly. But years with a bumt-out old politician and a pre-pubescent girl, his daughter; a triangle of infinitely agonizing possibilities. "Daddy," Edith, pale and trembling, asked her father, "are we in Hell?" waited. Anna asked the Heuritex several times if anything had been sighted, and each time it replied, in the negative. "There is no sign." it said finally. "We would do well to return home." "Nothing left," Anna said. She couldn't convince herself she had done all she could. "One moment, madame," the Heruritex said. "This region was devoid of Thrina before." "So?" "There is a signal emerging from the black holes. A single Thrina tone, very strong." "That's what started this whole thing," Anna said quietly. "Ignore it, and let's go home." On the edges of the Rift, the pilgrims received the Thrina, and there was rejoicing. The death-ships resumed their voyages.  The klaxon's hooting caught me in my usual daydream. I was supposed to be plodding through The Journal of Electrical Engineering, but instead of circuits and tensors there nestled in my head a vision of my uncle's farm, of the many summers I'd spent there, picking blackberries and playing in the woods with my cousins. Summers that merged indistinguishably in my memory, unlike the precise nine-month terms of scholastic drudgery. That year we built the hideout -- was I eight or ten? And when in that misty arcadia had Bobby hurt his head diving into the creek? The klaxon blared. I jumped up and ran from the Engineering Library. Students huddled against the walls to give me clear passage down the corridor. This is it, this is it. My heart pounded. aloft from the airstrip behind the Purdue campus. The Central agents cursed as I trotted up to my ship, late as usual, and hustled me aboard. My assigned seat was in the rear, so I plopped into the co-pilot's and hooked the safety mesh. The tall Central agent eyed me but said nothing. I smiled as we lurched into the air. Even in the bureaucratic superstate the condemned man has certain rights. We levelled off at # meters and blasted west. Into the Abyss. turned to the agents. "What happened to the Drain? Did someone finally spot it and knock it out without destroying it?" The tall one shrugged. "It just went off the air. We don't know if it was an accident -- or if someone turned it off." He paused to let me think: it could be a trap. "We hope you'll find out for us." In Cedar Rapids? Sure, I faced forward again. The epicenter of the Abyss -- the most likely location of the Drain -- was # kilometers southwest of Des Moines. But I'd been assigned to search Cedar Rapids, nearly # klicks out. I could tell what Central thought of my electronics skills. The telecopier on the left bulkhead whirred and emitted a long sheet of paper. The stocky agent passed it on. Data from the automatic monitoring stations and satellites that had sounded the alarm: field intensity decay, r.f. flux curves, hysteresis effects. Nothing immediately helpful . I tossed it back. How many thousands of scientists and engineers around the world were studying similar printouts? More important, how many investigators besides Central's would sneak into the Abyss to hunt for the Drain? I went aft to suit up. As I peeled off my university tunic I recalled I had a three o'clock class. Sorry, kids. There'd be a lot of classes cancelled today; Central had # technicians stationed at Purdue. I slipped into a camouflage jumpsuit, wondering if our academic "colleagues" would miss us if we didn't return. The condescension of the PhD's was subtle; they knew Central took care of the people it needed -- that's why I taught sophomore circuit design. Central thought it would keep my mind honed. But the faculty let me know I wasn't really good enough to be part of their world. Just thinking about it, I almost ripped the zipper, pulling it tight, and began to strap on my instruments. "We're at the boundary," the pilot said. na. Roads snaked along, and even the fields held the rectilinear outlines of # years ago. I could almost imagine Uncle Dave still tended his # hectares outside Moline. But I knew if we dipped lower, we'd see only brush or grass growing where com and soybeans once stood in neat rows. The shards of a ruined town came into view but we were too high to see any primitives. As we penetrated deeper into the Abyss, the Central agents betrayed their tension only by a tighter than usual control. They were worrying, of course, that the Drain might come back on before they dumped me and flew out of danger. Experts still quarrelled over whether a person could understand what was happening after it began. Some political prisoners from the '# coup had been flown through the Abyss in robot ships, but the tapes of their gibberings had been inconclusive. They landed me on First Street in the center of Cedar Rapids, the for the two agents to roll a jeep from the cargo bay. Then I was alone except for a fading whine heading east; out of the Abyss. Jab a compass into Des Moines. Set it for a #-kilometer radius. Begin the circle at Chicago, which falls just inside. Arc north through Green Bay (most of Wisconsin is inside) and Duluth (so is southern Minnesota). Then swing south through Aberdeen and Pierre (there goes eastern Sputh Dakota). Almost all of Nebraska falls inside the Abyss. As the circle swings southeast, so does Kansas. Finally it slices through Missouri and back up Scratch Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis. About # people were inside the Abyss when the Drain was turned on. Current population (est.): #. Current lifestyle: neolithic. Inside the jeep were a Photonflux .# and four spare power charges. I buckled it on and stowed the extra charges in a pouch, trying to recall how long it'd been since I had last held a weapon. Was it in '# that Central issued the personal firearms decree? No matter. Just the weight of a gun at my hip evoked my old Robin Hood fantasies. One against the world... I looked at the sky where the No wonder they hadn't given me the gun while I was in the ship. Cedar Rapids hadn't changed much from the small town I knew # summers ago as a Polytechnic engineering student on my first professional summer job. The two big hotels, a bit shabbier, still faced each other like haughty dowagers. The silos over by Water Street had lost their white paint but seemed intact. The store windows were empty but whoever had looted them hadn't burned or smashed much. The same placid, backwater town I remembered. A bit overgrown, but that was all. What was # years to a town that had barely entered the century? I wandered through a few buildings, more for the sake of reminiscence than reconnaisance. My reason for being in Cedar Rapids -- a "suspicious movement" detected by a satellite -- could have been invented by a monitor tech under pressure to get results. I'd seen those games at Purdue, where professors had to churn out papers and monographs to advance their careers. Everyone knows that the game is meaningless, but you're still judged by the points you score. So fake it. I spat and stretched. It was nice just to escape Central's ubiquitious surveillance, even if only for a few hours. I was just beginning to relax when I spotted the primitives. #, the naked grease-and-dirtsmeared creatures running towards me probably would have grown up to be sedate, responsible Cedar Rapids burghers. Then a mysterious power sent an arcane radiation humming over # square kilometers of Middle America and six thousand years of civilization were dissipated in seconds as the transmission bollized long-term memory. The unshieldable force destroyed such learned skills as reading, power plant maintenance, driving, higher math. Almost every culture trait a complex industrial society needs to operate was scrambled into chaos. Language remained, although on a far simpler level. So did family bonding. Without those, not even # would have survived the crash. When the rioting, burning, murder, famine and plagues were over, the Midwest was populated with small bands and a few larger tribes right out of the New Stone Age. I caught myself looking for a familiar face as they chased each other toward me. Stupid of me. There were three girls and two boys; the oldest had yet to face puberty. Even if I'd known one of their parents, he or she wouldn't remember me now. The Drain had taken -- A girl spotted me and yelled something in a strange tongue. A second later tag was forgotten as they gaped. I leaned back against the jeep, hoping they wouldn't flee. How does one indicate peaceful intentions to simple peoples -- open hands, waving leafy boughs? I wished Central had better prepared me. We watched each other across a distance of about # meters. They were quite filthy, but they seemed healthy enough. The summer sun had left their skins dark, and sinew corded beneath it. Oh, most had pox scars, and one boy squinted as if he needed glasses. But my dominant impression, fueled by their quick, alert movements, was of squirrels. Finally I broke the tableau. "Hi, kids," I ventured. They screamed with laughter and scurried off down an alley. I climbed into my jeep and drove off puzzled. Central's documentaries on Abyss life, using film from satellites and robot probes, usually showed children with distended bellies, fly-plagued open sores or rickets. I'd accepted that as the norm and pitied them their harsh life without diapers and measles vaccine. But come to think of it, humanity had survived for many millenia without such refinements. The first years are rough, but once natural selection has culled out the weak... I spotted them once more as I circled the block. They were creeping across the overgrown playground behind Benjamin Harrison Elementary School, moving like the Indians I used to read about in my grade school days. It's a shame psychotropic drugs and behaviorreinforcing machines have replaced the hokey old history books. Both methods of teaching were set up to mold "good" citizens, but when I compare my classmates to the potatoes shuffling into my courses at Purdue, I wonder where it's going to end. Random turnings brought me to Municipal Island where I took a chance on an old bridge. Floods had piled trees and debris around the outer building, but the county courthouse still towered over the island. I found the emergency stairs and climbed to the wide balcony just below the top of the building. Wind mussed my hair as I looked over a town melting into prairie. A green ocean, it nibbled at an island built of human toil. I thought of Ur and Persepolis. Why do we go to all the trouble, when entropy always wins in the end? A glorious lassitude crept over me. It was only two hours ago that the Drain went off yet I felt lightyears from my former existence. No loyalty monitors. No need to choose every word with care. No more cramming to keep abreast of everaccelerating technological change; my first real vacation in years! I strolled around the tower. To the north I spotted the plant where I'd worked so many summers ago. Bollins Radio Research. There I had learned two things much more important than electronics. One was the subtle savagery of office politics. The other was the limits of my talent. That was the summer I had learned I wouldn't fulfill my ambitions. Claws scrabbled on the white granite of the balustrade. A pigeon. The Abyss swarmed with animal life, now that man wasn't such deadly competition. Even the bison were coming back. The contrast amused me. In the midst of a databank U.S.A. the pioneer milieu was reborn. Not a Midwest whitehouse-maple-tree-porch-swing nostalgia hype, but the real Old America -- The pigeon beside me exploded into blood and burnt featherstink. The laser was in my hand before I hit the deck. Blast. Another investigator in Cedar Rapids. Instead of peeking over the edge and getting my brain broiled, I rolled over on my back and studied the wall. About two meters above the railing where the pigeon had been was a burn. I calculated the angle. The sniper must be almost directly below, only a hundred meters from the base of the courthouse. Somewhere on Municipal Island. I snaked inside and padded down the stairs. Every five landings I stopped to listen, heart pounding, hoping I could reach the bottom before he could trap me inside. He was dumb, though. I made it down and was just peeking around the bottom of a side door when he got up the nerve to rush the courthouse. I sighed in relief as I burned his legs off. But after all, most of the good investigators would be in Des Moines. Only second-raters pulled outlying cities. I shot his laser from his hand and strolled over to administer the coup de grace. He stank worse than the pigeon but I'd dealt with worse during my hitch in the Venezuelan War. Eyes clenched, face contorted, moaning. I tapped his cheek with my foot to get his attention. "Who you working for?" "Kill me kill me kill me." "First you have to tell me who hired you." "Com." I snuffed him. Turning this interesting bit of information over in my mind. I was just beginning to congratulate myself when I realized he might have a partner. And there I stood in the middle of the street. A perfect target. I began to laugh, insane laughter at the empty-eyed buildings. Cedar Rapids, City of SecondRaters. Corn? You'd think everyone would want the Drain turned off -- a given, right? Great cities deserted, # people trapped in savagery, rail and river and road links severed. A gaping wound in the nation's heartland. What pathos. At first it was treated as a temporary aberation. Iowa and Wisconsin were classified special federal territories. The surviving fragments of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska set up rump governments staffed by the few state officials who escaped the Drain. Companies that had been headquartered in Abyss cities adapted fast or were shouldered aside by rivals. The federal government announced low-interest loans would be available to homeowners when the Drain went off and exiles needed funds to fix up their houses. But five years flowed into ten, and then fifteen... The population plummeted, then stabilized as individuals learned to cope with the new subsistence economy. Inside the Abyss the cities rotted, but outside -- Corn farmers in Indiana and eastthe Abyss had interdicted # percent of the nation's best com land. Similarly, marginal wheat land in panhandle Nebraska and eastern Colorado boomed as stockmen bid up the price of feed. The price of Texas beef tripled with Kansas out of the way. The South benefited from the need for substitute protein sources like soybeans and peanuts. Northern Minnesota found itself with a near-monoply on dairy products, now that Wisconsin was gone. Chicago's demise especially altered commerce. New commodities exchanges blossomed in Fort Worth and Dallas. New mail-order houses were created. Pittsburgh's heavy metals and machine-fabrication industries boomed. Even Louisville and Cincinatti benefited; their sickly beers were back in the running with Milwaukee and St. Louis gone. the Abyss, settling into new patterns, encysting the scar. Not all the moneymen wanted the Abyss to remain. Oh, how the realtors screamed for Central to nuke Des Moines and destroy the Drain so they could reopen the Midwest. Some of the bills they introduced in Congress before it was disbanded would have made the Oklahoma Land Rush seem sedate. But Central refused to do anything to eliminate the Abyss at the risk of destroying the machine(s) that generated it. Someone had designed the ultimate weapon for depopulating a nation while leaving its industries and resources intact. Why hadn't its creators struck again? Had they been caught in the Abyss when the Drain went on? Other powers than Central had investigators ready for the day the Drain went off. Eventually I abandoned even the pretense of looking for the Drain and drove out to the Bollins plant. At first it bothered me that I'd lost my fear of the Drain. Most of my life had been spent learning to cope with scientific and political structures; if the Drain went on all that would be blasted into the ozone. Well, so what? I wondered what it would be like to live in a world where disputes were settled by hand-to-hand combat instead of satellites poised to spew nerve gas over entire continents. Where one grubbed food from the earth instead of inserting a credit card into a cafeteria machine. I might not live as long, or as well, but... My route took me past a family living in a crumbling frame house. Children played around a woman with sagging breasts mashing something in a bowl. At the sound of my engine a man came to stand beside her, warily hefting a spear. I didn't stop. What would become of them if the Drain stayed off? Nothing could help the primitives who'd wandered outside the Abyss; some long-term effect of the force prevented substantive re-education. What niche could they fill in technocratic society? Reservations? Zoos? Or experimental subjects for the psych teams? I put the thought aside as I entered the winter-twisted parking lot. I didn't want to think ahead to my inevitable return. Nostalgia flared as I walked through long corridors to the wing that had housed my desk. I'd learned a great deal from the wise old engineers here, much of it nontechnical. How to take credit for another's idea. How to spot the person who really controls the division and win his favor. How to wheedle computer time away from someone else and how to cover mistakes. I'd entered Bollins very green but by Summer's end -- Ah, there was the door. The office had been converted into a lab. I sagged against a testing bench, suddenly tired. My fantasies of sitting in the section manager's chair and desecrating his desk vanished. Everything changed. New furniture, even a new wall or two I could have accepted. But not a complete phase-out. It was as if the room had never known my existence. A whisking noise drifted into my gloom. Approaching down the corridor. Secret agent synapses flared and I jumped behind a bulky electronic assemblage and leveled my laser at the door. It could be anyone from a primitive to another investigator. A man wearing a silvery helmet casually walked in. "Freeze!" I shouted. He halted, looking about in confusion. "Hold it right there." I stood up so he'd see I had the drop on him. His face was disturbingly familiar. Was he someone I'd seen at Purdue, stringing for a private firm hunting the Drain? "Who are you working for?" I demanded. "Why, myself." He stared back, bemused. "I built the Drain. Please be careful, you're leaning on it." Twenty minutes later I began to accept his tale. I stood before Jim Rudolphson, holding my laser in one hand and a sheaf of carelessly sketched schematics in the other, listening to an absurd tale of a loner and maverick who beat the system by destroying it. "... and once I'd figured out the affinity principle, it was easy to calculate # watts at # centimetGetting the lysine for the radiating element was the hardest part. So then I asked myself, where to build the transmitters? Why not in the most moronic security system in the world. Hollins Radio Research. Remember the time you created a new circuit and wrote a memo on it? And when you wanted to see the memo later they wouldn't let you because in the meantime it had been re-classified and your security rating wasn't high enough? I built the transmitters in the lab here, the fools..." The extent of my luck astounded me. I had the Drain and its inventor. Suddenly a position in one of Central's high-powered research labs didn't seem beyond my reach. Excited? Like the last day of fifth grade, knowing that in a few days I would be on my way to Uncle Dave's farm again. "... really threw them off was hologramatic wave transmission. I knew if I used ordinary pointradiation antenna they could figure out the locus, examine it from satellites, and send in robots to put me off the air. So I connected two transmitters to the device -- the other's in a silo near Lincoln, with shielded long-life batteries like this one -- and I adjusted them to create an energy nexus over Des Moines. A delicate balance,, oh yes. It wavered every time a thunderstorm came along. But that just generated all the more r.f. flux to wipe out centuries of intellectual garbage..." On he rattled, assuming because he remembered me from years ago at Hollins there was a personal bond linking us. What a romantic idiot. But that summed him up. He was an eccentric, continually running afoul of the corporate machine, tolerated only for his occasional flights of genius. Hologramatic wave transmission? That alone could have earned him fame. I remembered the jibes of the older engineers, who thought him too flighty to realize their mockery. Rudolphson must have enjoyed watching their minds melt. "Since I knew how to neutralize the radiation" -- he touched his helmet -- "I could go anywhere inside the Abyss, do anything I wanted without interference. Most of the time I worked in the labs. Want to see the clocks I built? Sometimes I had to go outside to buy parts or pick up technical publications. I had lots of money. It was lying all over the city. Oh, I enjoyed those trips outside. One newspaper thought I was a Brazilian plot. Another said I was from outer space. And one..." I had to admit he'd conjured up a pleasant dream. A decompressed society where people could be themselves instead of fitting into roles built up over centuries by others. What new world would the primitives create, if we let them continue? Would their path inevitably lead to another Argus-eyed bureaucracy? Or would they avoid our mistakes? This madman's dream it not, after all, be worth it? I envied Rudolphson. Instead of enduring high-competition egos, instead of slicing off little pieces of himself to satisfy society's whims, he'd kicked over the gameboard. What glorious anarchism! I sensed it burning in his eyes as he pleaded with me to join him in repairing the circuit that had let the soothing radiation vanish. I was postponing the inevitable when a man in green coveralls spoke from the door I'd forgotten. "Hold it, both of you." He eased into the lab. He made me drop my gun and then ignored me; my GI camouflage suit proclaimed my master. Keeping his gun trained on me, he eyed Rudolphson's outdated civilian clothes. "Who are you working for?" "My name is James Samuel Douglas Allen Rudolphson and I invented the Drain. Will you help me fix it?" He laughed. A thick braying guffaw. "Where'd you find this nut?" he asked me. Rudolphson screamed, shrill and sudden, and leaped. We were both surprised, but the other investigator was fast; his beam cut the mad scientest in half before he had moved three meters. But that gave me enough time. His second shot went over my head and before he could slice the beam down across me I burned him. My knees shook as I staggered back up. Probably adrenalin activating a flight-reflex, fighting my conscious mind. No need to run now, I told myself, thinking of the other Central flunkies frantically searching ruined Midwest cities, shoulders hunched as they wait for the Drain to snuff them. Nothing to fear, old chaps. I have the situation well in hand. You're safe. As long as I don't turn the Drain on again. I rescued the schematics from a threatening rivulet of gore and riffled them musingly. Poor Rudolphson had completed most of the repairs. With these I could do the rest. The Abyss could blossom again, dark orchid over Middle America. With the helmet to shield me I could laze out my remaining years free of the power-pigs outside. It would be better than exile. No extradition, no assassins in the Abyss, no siree. And if I grew bored I could slip back into the United States... My vision cleared. I remembered my would-be arcadia was only an enclave in an immensely stronger civilization that every year came closer to destroying the entire planet. The Abyss wouldn't protect me from H-bomb radiation or bacterial weapons. Turn it on? What an atavistic fantasy, I chuckled, as I clenched the firing stud and beamed the Drain into slag. So childish, so unworthy of me. I tucked the schematics into my pouch and stepped into the corridor. Then I set the lab on fire and ran from the building, giggling with pyromantic glee. A pity, but not to be helped. Long before I could repair the Drain, Central would have followup agents in to investigate my "disappearance" and they would doubtless come across the device. And if I did report in, then Central would pull me out; and somebody, sometime would find the Drain. No, this was the only way. I sat down under an oak # meters from the Bollins Plant and prepared to enjoy the conflagration. The next steps laid themselves out with cause-effect precision. In a few days they'll come pick me up. By then I will have memorized the major Drain assemblies and principles and destroyed the schematics. With the evidence gone (half of it burned, the other half unlikely to be discovered in its abandoned silo before I visit Lincoln and destroy it too) the secret of the Abyss remains hidden. A mystery for the ages. Eventually I will outlive my usefulness to Central and be mustered out. Ten, fifteen years? No matter. In the end I'll be a forgotten old tech with a little home lab to putter about in. On a farm, perhaps? It must appear innocuous. The whole central building was aflame now. Fragments of roofing ripped free and hurtled aloft, riding a fountain of fire that expanded as destruction ate through the plant. I turned to the section on power. Surely with modem components the range could be extended beyond a mere # kilometers. An interesting technical problem. I thought of the ionosphere. Under certain conditions it reflects radio waves completely around the world. I like the simple life.  the eye' of the beholder. Reality is in. Tenzin peered back at the Lama through his little gold-rimmed spectacles. He wanted to ask a question, but prudence overcame his curiousity and he waited. Eventually Katsang Rimpoche added, "The Yidam must be taken as the object of your contemplation." After a little while it became obvious that the audience was at an end. Tenzin bowed in the Chinese manner, touching his forehead to the ground. It was an extravagant gesture, but one warranted by the circumstances. "Thank you. Precious One," he murmured. He returned to his cell only briefly before leaving the monastery altogether. It was set high in the foothills, its foundations biting into the primeval rock, but instead of taking the beaten track down to the valley, Tenzin set off westwards, following a broken path that took him higher into the mountains. A little more than three hours later, he stepped wearily onto a ridge and walked slowly across a bare rock apron to the entrance of his cave. It was chill at this height, but the exertion of his climb had kept him warm. He sat down and rested, then, anxious to begin, arranged his limbs in the lotus posture, ankles crossed on thighs. Almost automatically, his gaze sank to the tip of his nose, his breathing slowed, shallower and shallower. His body trembled twice, then locked into stillness. In the cave mouth, looking out across a Himalayan valley, Tenzin meditated on the Yidam. Tenzin passed his old cell without so much as a sideways glance. He hesitated at his master's doorway, then slipped quietly inside without knocking. Katsang Rimpoche knelt in prayer before the little shrine at the far side of the room. Tenzin waited. Some time later, Katsang Rimpoche rose and turned. His thin, lined features betrayed no surprise at seeing Tenzin. "I bid you welcome, my son." His voice was soft and dry, like dead leaves blowing across a barren plain. Tenzin bowed. "Forgive my interruption, Precious One. I have done as you instructed." The dark eyes glittered into his soul. "What did I instruct you?" "To meditate on the Yidam, Master." "And what wisdom have your meditations brought?" "They have brought to my mind the truth that the Yidam is a great and powerful deity. They have brought to my mind that His wrath is boundless as His power. Yet withal, there is much that He might teach me, for that is His nature." The Lama nodded gravely. "It is good. Go now and begin your next task." Tenzin waited. "You must conjure up the Yidam to appear to you," added Katsang Rimpoche. massive binding and protective wrappers of oiled cloth, that Tenzin had to carry them singly to his cave. It was the work of two days and it chafed him that so many hours were wasted. When the fifth and final volume had been laid carefully in its niche at the back of the cave, he lighted a butter lamp, tired though he was, and prepared to begin his studies right away. He took leaves from the books, one sheet at a time, carefully rewrapping the remainder to protect them from the damp that seeped down the stone walls. He continued his studies, sleeping six hours in the twenty-four, for three months and eleven days. The books frightened him. It is necessary," said the Precious One, "that you are now initiated in the art of kyilkhor. The time is almost ripe for you to see the Yidam." When he returned to his cave, Tenzin practiced the construction of the kyilkhor diligently, deviating not one fraction from the method his guru had taught him. He became skilled. One morning, by now certain of his abilities, Tenzin drew the kyilkhor on the cave floor using colored powders. Then he sank into the lotus posture and began to chant the formulae that Katsang Rimpoche had given him. He continued, without pause, throughout the day and deep into the evening. Because of his excitement, he slept only four hours that night. On the following morning he began his chant again. Somewhere towards the end of the fourth day, he reconstructed his kyilkhor. On the evening of the eighth day, the Yidam appeared. form above the kyilkhor. It stabilized with agonizing slowness. He chanted, as the Precious One had taught him. The shapes were alien, mindwarping. He clung to consciousness and chanted, watching space turn slowly inside out. A chill of fear ran through his body. Echoes reverberated in the cave. The shifting forms solidified and Tenzin bowed deeply from the waist, thanking all his guardian gods the entity could not escape the kyilkhor. When he raised his head, the cave was empty in the flickering firelight. Well pleased, Tenzin settled down to sleep. Rimpoche told him gravely. "Few are honored in so short a time." The old man stared past Tenzin, his eyes suddenly withdrawn. Tenzin waited, listening to the wind as it slid through cracks in the ancient monastery walls. It was spring, but at this height the wind still carried chill messages and even the occasional snow flurry . The dark eyes focused. "What you experienced was not complete success, my son. Your spiritual protector vanished in brief moments. It was -- " He paused, thoughtfully. " -- an encouragement: no more." Tenzin waited. Surprisingly, Katsang Rimpoche sighed. "You must seek those dark secrets only the Yidam can reveal. And how can that be if He remains but for an instant?" Tenzin remained silent, his eyes fixed on the lips of the Precious One. "You must hold the Yidam within your kyilkhor," Katsang Rimpoche went on. "You must strain your powers of concentration to their utmost. Build up in your mind a detailed picture of the Yidam, for in this way you will aid his manifestation. Practice diligently and without ceasing until you achieve the desired result." Encouraged, Tenzin returned to his cave. After two months, Tenzin felt despair. The Yidam appeared rarely -- late in the evening when fatigue had begun to dull his senses -- and stayed only for an instant. Perhaps, he thought, the entity was just a figirient of the imagination, overheated by the sonorous chanting and relentless concentration. Perhaps it had no more reality than a dream. One evening, for no apparent reason, the Yidam came and stayed. Tenzin went about his daily routine calmly. Each time he glanced towards the kyilkhor, he could see the Yidam. The sight had ceased to chill his 'soul, but the shifting planes of light around the entity disturbed him profoundly. When Tenzin looked directly at it, the Yidam remained immobile. When his attention was diverted, the creature moved about almost fitfully within the kyilkhor. At night, the planes of light grew stronger, more disturbing. Within them, the entity was as visible as at noon. There were even times when it appeared to gain greater density. On the third day, when he was satisfied the Yidam would not fade, Tenzin left the cave to tell his holy master. Katsang rimpoche nodded. "Your progress is praiseworthy." The glittering eyes fastened on Tenzin's own. "But it is far from finished." Tenxin waited. "The Yidam remains but a shadow. While this continues, you can never feel His power, obtain full benefits from His protection. You must strive now to give Him substance. You must achieve greater degrees of concentration. You must pray to Him hourly until He favours you with His conversation and His blessing." For the first time, Tenzin risked a direct question. "And then, Precious One ?" The Lama hesitated. "There is a certain danger. When the Yidam achieves substance, the kyilkhor can no longer hold him." Tenzin bowed wearily to the looming figure. His forehead touched the earth, passing through the Yidam's feet as easily as if they had been a dream. He rose and went on impulse to prepare some buttered tea. Beyond the fire in his cave-mouth, snow was falling. Only a little higher up, the passes had already been blocked. In a house he could not see and had not seen for seven years, servants would be storing up provisions for the winter. Tenzin sipped from the wooden bowl. He knew if he looked round, he would see the shifting planes that formed the Yidam. Yet the entity remained intangible as some product of his own imagination. Imagination... Tenzin set down his bowl. As he half turned towards the kyilkhor, the Yidam spoke. is finished. Master," Tenzin said. "The Yidam walks freely in my cave. I feel His feet with my forehead when I bow to Him. I feel the touch of His hand when He gives me His blessing." "Do you hear His voice, my son?" asked Katsang Rimpoche. "Precious One, as clearly as a temple bell. His tones are fearful." "You know his blessing?" "I know it. Precious One. When His hands are placed upon my head, fire pours through my soul. My body is strengthened, my mind is cleansed." "It is good," Katsang Rimpoche murmured. "But it is not finished. The Yidam can reveal to you the secrets of the Cosmos. Yet until He is prepared to walk with you from your retreat, your task can never be complete. With the Yidam at your side, you will become a great magician or a holy sage. Until then, you are no better than a prisoner in your cave." The blizzards ceased, the raging winds became a memory. Above the foothills, snow still lay in a crisp, white carpet and ice crests glittered on the Himalayan boulders. Tenzin squatted thirty yards outside his cave, heart pounding with excitement. He watched the dark 'O' of the cave mouth with utter concentration. Faint lights sparkled inside, like sun glinting off ice crystals. There was a curious straining in the air, as if the atmosphere was trying to accomodate the meshing of two alien dimensions. The Yidam emerged. For just the briefest instant its form flickered in the sunlight, then solidified. Tenzin heard the sound of its approach, felt the actual vibration of its steps through the apron of primeval rock beneath his feet. The Yidam left no marks in the snow. Katsang rimpoche bowed. "There is no more I can teach you. You have won the favour of a protector far mightier than #." It was a gesture of dismissal, but Tenzin sat still, locked by his inner conflict. The Lama regarded him impassively. Abruptly Tenzin blurted, "I have sinned. Precious One!" "How have you sinned?" "I doubt the reality of the Yidam!" Katsang Rimpoche frowned. "Can you not see Him?" "Yes, Precious One." "Can you not touch him?" "Yes, Precious One." "Is He not solid and material as the universe around you?" "He is. Precious One." "Your doubts are blasphemous," the Lama said. "They must be rooted out. Double and redouble your efforts to resolve them. Spend your days in meditation until this has been achieved." Tenzin left the Yidam near a boulder some distance from the monastery. The ground was wet underfoot with melted snow. He walked slowly, head bowed. The dark eyes glistened, reading his expression. "You are troubled," the guru murmured. "I cannot resolve my doubts!" Tenzin exclaimed bluntly. "I have spent the winter months in meditation and my doubts are stronger still. Master, I am now convinced the Yidam is a product of my imagination." "Is there no way I can shake this strange conviction?" Tenzin shook his head. "Master, I have passed beyond all doubt. Although the Yidam is as solid as the universe around me, I know I am a prey to mirage." He waited, prepared for the Lama's anger. Katsant Rimpoche smiled. "You have learned your lesson well. The Yidam did indeed spring from your mind and will, when you will it, sink into your mind again." Fear clutched Tenzin's heart. "And the universe!" he whispered. "The universe that seems as solid as the Yidam?" The Lama nodded. "That too will sink into the mind when you no longer need it." When Tenzin passed the rock on his way back to the cave, the Yidam was no longer there. He stared thoughtfully at the boulder, then up at the high Himalayan peaks. Under his gaze, their solid outlines flickered.  Dear Mr. Geis: Many thanks for helping hoth the author and the reader viz the "U-Novel" remarks you made in December's "If'. I buy an author twice, and, should I experience non-entertainment, I simply write him off my list and he's never ever missed -- at least by me. Asimov is lettered, I don't know about Vance, but they both know that it's a buyer's market. Never have these gents, among others, failed to entertain me. Consequently I'm attracted to the names, in themselves. It's unfair to term them "hack writers" but I'm not a writer by trade so I cannot conjure up a more prpper term. I still marvel over the arrogance, the wretched arrogance of poverty, encountered in my "Grenwich Village" period. Unsuccessful writers froth at the idea that writing is a sale of a service. They don't want to know about that concept. Unsuccessful writers get very vituperative and noxious when reminded of economics. You've done all concerned a tremendous favor. If you influence some author to forgo "suffering" and if you help to give me a greater array of entertainment it's all been worth while. I expect Asimov will laugh at Alters remarks before he asks the maid to serve tea. Vance, I believe, will simply shrug at the obvious and return to his typewriter or whatever bizarre vices he may be perusing at the moment. So, gentlemen, I leave you to go run a subway train (my trade). I'll not bother you or interfere with you until we meet again for our bi-weekly moment of truth at the bookrack. Ame C. Eastman Dick's reply: The "My art for my art's sake" writers point out that #-# of the fiction on the stands are of the "commerciaT writing ilk, so what are we complaining about? Of course, # of that is junk...which leaves precious little really good dramatic, exciting fiction for us readaholics. Dear Mr. Baen, I would like to compliment you on the resurgance of Galaxy, which, for the first time in years, I am buying and enjoying. The February issue was particularly fine, especially the second installment of Zelazny's The Sign of the Unicorn. Zelazny has the ability to be entertaining while still saying something -- stylistically or thematically -- that transcends parallel universes, dragons, and court intrigues. He's a lot of fun at a time when many writers aren't too much fun. I can see the need for entertainment and literature in the science fiction genre; but I respect a man who can do both. I would like to say a few things about Tak Hallus' "The Linguist." It was a funny story with a good thematic twist that I enjoyed. I have only one beef. A Hereford is not necessarily a steer. Through several personal interviews with the Herefords in our pasture, I have discovered several steers. But there are also some pretty spry bulls romping among our cows; and since we have a couple of calves wobbling around, too, I have concluded their actions are not mere shows of male ego. Hereford is a breed of cattle, like Guernsey or Angus. Only when chromosomes and man conspire to make one so, is a Hereford designated a steer. Okay? Sincerely, Jerry Meredith Route #, Box #-A Mooresville, N.C. Dear Mr. Baen: I enjoyed J.A. Lawrence's "The Persistence of Memory" in the November Galaxy because it was one of the first stories I have read which attempted to give a scientific explanation of the belief many people have in reincarnation. I would, however, like to discuss Lawrence's explanation in light of what is plicating cells. Lawrence's major premise was that a high intensity magnetic field present at the proper instant in cell division could to become skewed. This model he uses to explain the ability of the Nyen-Hwa to remember a past shethey could not have lived. Lawrence then explains that this ability could not be passed on to the offspring because "when the chain parted again, it would resume normal bonding". What Lawrence apparently failed to consider is that if this askewed bonding occurred during the third cell division of the embryo (as stated in the story), the next cell division (the fourth) would corthe original bonds between the strands are faithful replicas of the "old" without the askew bonding error. This, as Lawrence stated, would account for the trait not being inheritable, but it also would mean the trait would not be passed to even one cell generation. Therefore, unless the intense magnetic field were present at the proper instant during each succeeding cell division until cortical development were completed (approximately the end of the fetal stage -- perhaps # cell divisions as a guestimate), or at least at the crucial stage when the cells begin to irreversably differentiate into the cortical cells (which happens well beyond the third division), the ability to remember the past would not have appeared in the Nyen-Hwa. Unfortunately, even if the magnetic field were maintained at Precisely the correct time for the required number of cell divisions, the askew bonding would not into the cytoplasm where it is decoded. copied. The mistake in bonding would not thus would not be decoded in whatever way memories are decoded. Lawrence's was an inventive and thought-provoking story. I hope someone takes his lead (maybe even Lawrence) and tries again to work with the "belief in reincarnation" in such a rational manner. Sincerely, # South Marianna Tempe, Arizona #I Dear Jim; First, I want to congratulate you on what you have done, and are doing, to Galaxy and If. One cover in particular, that of the October issue of, by "Pini," is one of the best I have ever seen. Pini, has real talent. I also enjoy the articles by Jerry Pournelle. The mixture of good fiction and good articles such as his makes excellent reading. One thing I would like to comment on. The letter by Mark Terry, in the December issue of Galaxy. He says, and I quote, "I really do not mind when an auwish he would take care to make it believable", unquote. I do not disagree with this statement and I thoroughly enjoy good ficoccasionally some of the occult, like Andre Norton's Witchworlds series. However, the point I wish to make is, that actual group of friends, for about ten years, testing every form we could think of and in every way we could think of. I'll guarantee you, many of our results were unbelievable, although the greatest disappointment was that they were inconsistent. Like one week results were out of this world, the next, nothing. In other words, it was not something that could be turned on and off like a hght bulb, but only when conditions were just right, and in all the time we ran the tests, we never discovered what it took for "conditions" to be right. Our best results always were unexpected. One thing I learned though. A very high percentage of people tested showed signs of latent abilities they would hardly believe, mostly telepathy. In line with this, I recently read a book called "The Amazing World of Kresken" published by Avon Books. Even discounting a lot of it as publicity stunts, this man has developed more control over telepathy than anyone I have ever heard of. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested Best wishes, Ed Woods P. O. Box # Pearce, Arizona # Ed Woods longer in need of proof -- just further study. One for Dick: Dear Mr. Baen, The many good reasons for castrating, or neutering (the euphemism is "altering") male cats include improving their dispositions, increasing their life-spans, removing the source of their frustrations (if confined indoors), and decreasing their odor. Therefore, (though Geis is so cute when he's being vicious!) may I suggest that someone alter Alter? Yours sincerely, Maureen Leshendok # Riggs Rd. ## Adelphi, Maryland # And one for me: Dear Jim: Phucking is phun. No doubt about it. I've been convinced of this for years and have practiced it at every opportunity. But I'll be danged if I want to read about the operation, especially not in IF-Galaxy. If I should ever want that sort of reading. Brother Hefner can supply it or I can make a trip to Portland and visit one of the "adult" bookstores that cater to delayed adolescents of all ages. What brought all this on is M. A. Bartter's Be Ye Perfect in your current issue. I am not overly fond of little blondes, to begin with, and I don't give a good goddam whether IT goes IN and UP or Down and Out. For crissake, Jim, let's knock off the crap and get back to science fiction. Either that or change the name of your mag and compete with Playboy. Or I'll be tempted to say: UP Most sincerely yours, Virgil Hays study of Dick's work. Paper, #. Huge catalog free. TK Graphics, Dept. 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Bolling, Assistant to the Editor James Baen, Editor Any significant technological development has inherent within it the seeds of a new social order, as Jerry makes elegantly and entertainingly clear herein. See this month's science article for a nuts-and-bolts analysis of the development in question. A vision of a strange . future world where wishing makes it so -- sometimes... Tale of a lunar fat-farm wherein butterballed Bartleby Scrip plays chubby Serpent in the Garden of Eaten. A Galaxy First. A conflict of space-times. Bono and Regina have won through to freedom -- if they can keep it. But they have made a terrible mistake... Medievalcon, Vul-Con li, Kubla Khan Khubed, Clarion SF-Writers' Workshop, not -- be true-to-life. But it should always offer something more than mere realism! going to subtitle this one " A Spaceship for the Editor " -- but he still owes me .# g's, dammit! 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Name Address City Stale Zip .  I remember the seats and the view: hard wood, with corrugated metal high above, television monitors below on the ground, ready, a big clock scoring the seconds; in the distance, a narrow inlet of calm water reflecting a grayness of cloud between us and the vehicle. A couple places over to my left, Harry Stubbs was taking a picture. To my right, a young Korean girl was doing the same thing without a camera. She was painting a watercolor of the scene. In the tier immediately before and below me, with occasional gestures, a European journalist was speaking rapid Serbo-Croat into a plug-in telephone. On the ground, to the far left, the brightly garbed center of a small system of listeners, Sybil Leek was explaining that the weather would clear up shortly and there would be no further problems. When the weather did clear and the clock scythed down the final seconds, we saw the ignition before we heard it and the water was agitated by a shock wave racing across in our direction. Apollo # was already lifting when the sound struck, and the volume kept increasing until the metal roof vibrated. A cheer went up around us and I kept watching until the roof's edge blocked my view. Then I followed the flight's progress on the monitor. I remember thinking, "I've waited for this." I was not really thinking about science fiction at that moment. I was thinking only of the event itself. Yet I would not have been waiting at that spot at that time had it not been for my connection with science fiction. It was in the calmer hours of evenings after that I did give some thought to the manner in which science fiction has touched me over the years, trying to fit a few of the things that seemed part of it into some larger perspective. I was raised and educated in times and places where science fiction was not considered a branch of belles lettres. As I was exposed to critical thought in other areas of literature it did seem to me that science fiction was being shortchanged, in that when it was mentioned at all it was generally with reference to the worst rather than the best that it had to offer. Unfair, yet this was the way of the world. Recently, however, the situation changed and science fiction has been a subject of increasing critical and academic scrutiny. The reason, I feel, is partly that a sufficiently large body of good science fiction has now been amassed to warrant such consideration, but mainly because those who felt as I did in earlier times and then proceeded to follow academic careers have taken approximately this long to achieve positions where they could do something about it. Therefore, I have been pleased whenever I have been asked to address a university audience on this subject, not simply because it seems to represent some vindication of my tastes, but because I feel comfortable with those who worked to effect the change in attitude. Yet, this generated a new problem for me. Every time that I spoke I had to have something to say. It required that I examine my own unquestioned responses to science fiction and consider some of the forces which have shaped and are shaping it. When I was asked to do this piece, I decided to draw together the results of these efforts and display whatever chimera might emerge, both because I am curious to see it myself and because I wish to get in a few words before the amount of science fiction criticism surpasses the amount of science fiction and I am less likely to be noticed. The Apollo-sized hole filled in my psyche that day in Florida had been excavated more than twenty years earlier, when I had begun reading tales of space travel. This was a part of it. Certainly not all, but emotion is as much a part of meaning as thought, and since most longtime fans began reading the literature at an early age the feelings it aroused were generally the main attraction. What do they really amount to? Pure escapism? A love of cosmic-scale spectacle? The reinforcement of juvenile fantasies at about the time they would normally begin to fade? All of these? Some? None? Or something else? The term "sense of wonder" gets considerable mileage in discussions such as this, and I have sought this feeling elsewhere in literature in hope of gaining a fuller understanding of its mechanism. I have experienced it in two other places: the writings of Saint-Exupery on the early days of air travel and the writings of Jacques Cousteau on the beginnings of underwater exploration with scuba gear. The common element, as I saw it, was that both stories share with science fiction a theme involving the penetration of previously unknown worlds by means of devices designed and assembled by man, thereby extending his senses into new realms. Turning backward, I felt obliged to classify the myths, legends, scriptural writings and bits of folklore which have always held a high place in my imaginary wanderings as contributory but different. There have always been story-tellers of a speculative case of mind who have taken some delight in playing about the peripheries of the known, guessing at the dimensions of the unknown. It might be argued that this is a necessary ingredient for, by Aristotle's definition, the highest form of literature -- the epic -- dealing as it does with the entire ethos of a people, up to and including that open end of the human condition, death itself, in a fashion transcending even the grand visions of tragedy and comedy. True epics of course are few and historically well-spaced, but that slightly more mundane ingredient, the speculative impulse, be it of Classic, Christian or Renaissance shading, which ornamented Western literature with romances, fables, exotic voyages and utopias, seemed to me basically the same turn of fancy exercised today in science fiction, working then with the only objects available to it. It took the Enlightenment, it took science, it took the industrial revolution to provide new sources of ideas which, pushed, poked, inverted and rotated through higher spaces, resulted in science fiction. When the biggest, most interesting ideas began emerging from science, rather than theology or the exploration of new lands, hindsight makes it seem logical that something like science fiction had to be delivered. Of course, the realistic novel was also slapped on the bottom and uttered its first cries at that time, an event which requires a glance at the differences in endowment. Basically, as I have said here and there before, the modern, realistic novel has discarded what Northrop Frye has classified as the higher modes of character. It is a democratic place, without room for heroes, rash kings, demigods and deities. Science fiction, on the other hand, retained and elaborated these modes, including mutants, aliens, robots, androids and sentient computers. There is a basic difference in character and characterization as well as the source and flow of ideas. And what of those ideas? It has been persuasively argued that Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel. To simplify, as one must in these discussions, there seems to be, within the body of science fiction, a kind of Frankenstein vs. Pygmalion tension, an internal and perhaps eternal debate as to whether man's creations will destroy him or live happily with him forever after. In the days when I began reading science fiction I would say that, statistically, Pygmalion had the upper hand. The "sense of wonder" as I knew it was in most stories unalloyed with those fears and concerns which the unforeseen sideeffects of some technological usages have brought about in recent years. The lady delivered purer visions involving the entry into new worlds and the extension of our senses. Now the cautionary quality is returned, and the shadow of Frankenstein's monster falls across much of our work. Yet, because this is a part of the force which generates the visions, it cannot be destructive to the area itself. Speaking not as a prognosticator or moralist, but only as a writer, my personal feelings are that a cycle such as this is good for the field, that if nothing else it promotes a re-examination of our attitudes, whatever they may be, toward the basic man-machine-society relationships. End of disgression. Science fiction's special quality, the means by which it achieves its best effects, is of course the imagination, pitched here several octaves above the notes it sounds elsewhere in literature. To score it properly is one of the major difficulties faced in the writing of science fiction; namely, in addition to the standard requirements encountered in composing a mundane story, one has the added task of explaining the extra plot premises and peculiarities of setting -- without visibly slowing the action or lessening the tensions which must be built as the narrative progresses. This has led, over the years, to the development of cliches (I would like to have said "conventions", but the word has a way of not working properly when applied to science fiction), cliches involving the acceptance at mere mention of such phenomena as faster-than-light travel, telepathy, matter transmission, immortality drugs and instant language translation devices, to name a few. Their use represents an artificiality of an order not found elsewhere in contemporary letters -- excepting individiual poets with private mythologies, which is not really the same thing as an entire field holding stock in common. Yet the artificiality does not really detract and the illusion does work because of the compensatory effect of a higher level of curiosity aroused as to the nature of the beast. Literally anything may be the subject of a science fiction story. In accepting the cliches of science fiction, one is also abandoning the everyday assumptions which hold for the run of mundane fiction. This in some ways requires a higher degree of sophistication, but the rewards are commensurate. These are some of the more obvious things which set science fiction apart from the modem realistic story. But, if there must be some grand, overall scheme to literature, where does science fiction fit? I am leery of that great classifier Aristotle in one respect which bears on the issue. The Hellenic world did not view the passage of time as we do. History was considered in an episodic sense, as the struggles of an unchanging mankind against a relentless and unchanging fate. The slow process of organic evolution had not yet been detected, and the grandest model for a world-view was the seeming changeless pattemings of the stars. It took the same processes which set the stage for science fiction -- eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century science -- to provide for the first time in history of the world a sense of historical direction, of time as a developmental, non-repetitive sequence. This particular world-view became a part of science fiction in a far more explicit fashion than in any other body of storytelling, as it provided the basis for its favorite exercise: extrapolation. I feel that because of this science fiction is the .form of literature least affected by Aristotle's dicta with respect to the nature of the human condition, which he saw as immutable, and the nature of man's fate, which he saw as inevitable. Yet science fiction is concerned with the human condition and with man's fate. It is the speculative nature of its concern which required the abandonment of the Aristotelian strictures involving the given imponderables. Its methods have included a retention of the higher modes of character, an historical, developmental time-sense, assimilation of the tensions of a technological society and the production of a "sense of wonder" by exercises of imagination extending awareness into new realms -- a sensation capable, at its best, of matching the power of that experience of recognition which Aristotle held to be the strongest effect of tragedy. It might even be argued that the sense of wonder represents a different order of recognition, but I see no reason to ply the possible metaphysics of it at this point. Since respectability tends to promote a concern for one's ancestors, we are fortunate to be in on things at the beginning today when one can still aim high and compose one's features into an attitude of certainty while hoping for agreement. It occurs to me then that there is a relationship between the entire body of science fiction and that high literary form, the epic. Traditionally, the epic was regarded as representing the spirit of an entire people -- the Iliad, the Mahabharta, the Aeneid showing us the values, the concerns, the hoped-for destinies of the Greeks, the ancient Indians, the Romans. Science fiction is less provincial, for it really deals with humanity as such. I am not so temerarious as to suggest that any single work of science fiction has ever come near the epic level (though Olaf Stapleton probably came closest), but wish rather to observe that the impulse behind it is akin to that of the epic chronicler, and is reflected in the desire to deal with the future of humanity, describing in every way possible the spirit and destiny not of a single nation but of Man. High literature, unfortunately, requires more than good intentions, and so I feel obliged to repeat my caveat to prevent my being misunderstood any more than is usually the case. In speaking of the epic, I am attempting to indicate a similarity in spirit and substance between science fiction as a whole and some of the classical features of the epic form. I am not maintaining that it has been achieved in any particular case or even by the entire field viewed as a single entity. It may have. It may not. I stand too near to see that clearly. I suggest only that science fiction is animated in a similar fashion, occasionally possesses something like a Homeric afflatus and that its general aims are of the same order, producing a greater kinship here than with the realistic novel beside which it was bom and bred. The source of this particular vitality may well be the fact that, like its subject, it keeps growing but remains unfinished. These were some of the thoughts which occurred to me when I was asked to do a piece on the parameters of science fiction. I reviewed my association with the area, first as a reader and fan, recalling that science fiction is unique in possessing a fandom and a convention system which make for personal contacts between authors and readers, a situation which may be of peculiar significance. When an author is in a position to meet and speak with large numbers of his readers he cannot help, at least for a little while, feeling somewhat as the oldtime story-tellers must have felt in facing the questions and the comments of a live audience. The psychological process involved in this should be given some consideration as an influence on the field. I thought of my connection as a writer, self-knowledge suggesting that the remedy for the biggest headache in its composition -- furnishing the extra explanations as painlessly as possible -- may be the mechanism by which the imagination is roused to climb those several extra steps to the point where the unusual becomes plausible -- and thus the freshness; thus, when it is well done, the wonder. And then I thought of all the extracurricular things which many of us either care about because we are science fiction writers or are science fiction writers because we care about. Which takes me back to the stands at the Cape, the vibrations, the shouting, to my "I've waited for this." My enthusiasm at the successful launching of a manned flight to the moon perhaps tells you more about me than it does about science fiction and its parameters, for space flight is only a part of the story we have been engaged in telling -- a colorful part, to be sure -- of the tale of man and his growing awareness. For on reflection, having watched the fire, felt the force and seen the vessel lifted above the Earth, it seemed a triumph for Pygmalion; and that, I realized, had more to do with my view that day than the fire, the force or the vessel. jf Mishkin and the robot came to a tree. At the end of its branches there were blue eyes with thick eyebrows. All of the eyes swivelled to stare at Mishkin. "I thought you would come by this way," the tree said, speaking from a speaker in its trunk. "I hope that you will not deny that you are Thomas Mishkin?" "That's who I am." Mishkin said. "Who are you?" "I am a bill collector disguised as a tree," said the bill collector disguised as a tree. "For Chrissakes," Mishkin said. "Did you follow me all the way to Harmonia?" "Indeed I did. It's rather a curious story. Mr. Oppenheimer, head of the Ne Plus Ultra Collection Agency for which I work, got an inspiration while stoned on acid at his local Tai Chi Chuan class. It suddenly occurred to Oppenheimer that the essence of life lies in completions, and a man can only judge his life in reference to the thoroughness with which he has played his life-role. Hitherto, Oppenheimer had been an easy-going fellow who followed the usual practice of collecting the easily collectible debts and making a few ominous noises on the difficult ones, but ultimately saying to hell with them. Then Oppenheimer achieved his satori. To hell with mediocrity, he decided, if I'm head of a billcollecting agency, then I'm going to make an ethic and a goal out of bill collecting. The world may very well never understand me; but perhaps future generations will be able to judge the terrible purity of my motives.' "And so Oppenheimer embarked upon the poignant and quixotic course that will probably bankrupt him within the year. He called all of us collectors into the Ready Room. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'this time we're going to get it all together. To hell with half-measures! Our goal now is # percent enforceability, and let the paranoia fall where it may. Go after those debts, to San Sebastian or Samoa or Sambal V, if need be, and don't worry about the costs. We're following a principle now, and principles are always impractical. Boys, we're overthrowing the reality principle. So get out there and collect all of those debits and groove on completions.' " ("His speech is definitely late #s," said the robot. "Whereas this is the year # or therabouts. Somebody is conning somebody." "Fuck off," snarled the author.) "That was the call to arms," the bill collector disguised as a tree said. "And that is why I am in Harmonia, Mr. Mishkin. I have come here as the result of one man's vision, to collect your debts regardless of time, trouble and expense." "I still can't believe this," Mishkin said. "And yet, there it is. I have a consolidation statement here for everything, Mr. Mishkin. Would you care to pay without fuss, or do you want me to get nasty?" "What debits are you talking about?" Mishkin asked. "To begin with, there is the matter of your back taxes, Federal, State and City. Didn't quite get around to paying them last year, did you, Mr. Mishkin?" "It was a tough year." "You owe eight thousand seven hundred and fifty-three dollars and fifty-one cents to your Uncle Sammy. Then there is the matter of child support. Sorta passed up on that for a year or so, didn't you, Mishkin? Well, it's a neat fourfigure bundle that you owe to poor abandoned Marcia and little Zelda. Marcia has a new boyfriend, by the way, and little Zelda just flunked out of the Little Red Schoolhouse. Marcia asked me to tell you that she is well, having the best time of her life, and wants every cent you owe her, right now, or she'll have you into The Tombs so fast it'll make your teeth spin. She adds that, through psychoanalysis, she finally has the egostrength to tell you that you were always a lousy lay and that everybody breaks up when she relates how diffidently you tried to pursue perversions." "That sounds like Marcia," Mishkin said. "Next, you owe Marty Bargenfield a thousand dollars. He's your best friend, in case you don't remember. Or he was. I mean, he still feels the same, but you've unaccountably cooled off. One might even say that you are avoiding him. Yet his only crime was to loan you money in a moment of need, when you were breaking up with Marcia and had to buy an abortion for Monique." "How is Monique?" Mishkin asked. "She's doing very nicely without you. She is back in Paris, working as a sales girl in Galleries Lafayette. She still treasures the eighty cent string of wooden beads which was your only present to her during a tumultuous four month romance which you have described as 'the most moving of my life.' " "I was broke," Mishkin said. "And anyhow, she always said she hated gifts." "But you knew better, hey, Mishkie? Never mind, I am not standing in judgement over you. The fact that your conduct, judged by any system of ethics you care to name, makes me want to puke, is entirely a personal matter with me and need not concern you at all. Now we come to the Bauhous Drugstore at #I Barrow Street, run by fat friendly Charlie Ducks, who sold you dexamyl spansules, dexadrine tablets, librium, carbitol, nembutal, seconal, doriden, and so on, in astonishing quantities during your drug years, all of them on the basis of one non-refillable prescription for phenobarbital; who continued to do so until two years ago, when the heat got too hot and he want back to selling excedrin and lipsticks, and whom you ripped off for one hundred and eightsix dollars." "He cleaned up on me," Mishkin said. "He charged me double for everything." "You always knew that. Did you ever complain about it?" "Anyhow, I'm going to pay him as soon as I get a hold of some money." "But there's never enough money for last year's drugs, eh, Mish? We've all been down that road, baby; but it is loathsome, isn't it?" "I can explain everything," Mishkin said. "I have a statement which I would like to read into the record. The facts are capable of various interpretations. I only need a moment to pull myself together." The robot extruded an axe from his left hand. He stepped forward and briskly chopped down the billcollector, who perished miserably. "But I was just about to explain," Mishkin said. "Never explain anything," the robot told him. "Avoid bummers. Don't go on other people's trips." "What is my trip?" Mishkin asked. "That would be telling," said the robot.  Illegal, immoral, and fatteningonly Barttleby was all three! Stately, plump Bartleby Scrip comes from the stairhead, mortally, morbidly, bored and depressed. He mounts the parapet. Below him descend fourteen monotonous levels; in great cellular walls they curve away crescentlike to right and left, meeting again distantly. The Spa is like a hive, thinks Scrip, only each of us isolated in his or her own cubicle (actually not a cube at all but a rhomboidal octahedron) with nothing so productive as bees to be busy at. After a last weary look around he gives a little launching kick and jumps from the parapet. Rich, thick air gathers under the clear flexicon wings webbed between his body and outstretched limbs. With a few good strokes he gains against the local down-air and levels off into a planing glide, slipstream whipping his hair and beating against his Ace Flyer goggles. Naked, or nearly so, alone, aloof, aloft, Scrip soars listlessly, like Daedalus forsaken after Icarus fell. Scrip likes flying best of anything about the Spa, about the moon itself. It keeps the boredom at bay: not just the relative weightlessness, as with skindiving, but the effortless speed, the pure 'personal freedom which he gratefully assumes along with the artificial wings. Of course, only the moon's fractional gravity allows him to fly, to fulfill that archetypal dream, but he would have dreamed it regardless. Although Freud saw in dreams of flying a token of sexual repression, a wishful flight of the libido. Dirty old killjoy. Gliding idly, he regards the sky, which is now only a few meters above him. The sky is a seamless expanse of translucent dome, a kilometer and a half across, capping the high-rimmed crater like a cloche-lidded dish, or a hermetic bell-jar valving out raw ultra-violet while admitting beneficent Sol. Scrip has taken his suntan pill; sunshine is another luxury service of the Spa. It gleams an unlikely cerulean through the vast palpable bowl of the strained-glass heavens. If the odd meteorite, Scrip considers, should puncture the dome just now, might that not divert the tedium, te deum, and scuttle this ship of comatose fools? Yet that continuous flickering on the concave underside indicates that small meteorites are even now being incinerated by the charged ion-field of the outer skin, and big ones will be handily shot down by the warsurplus antimissile lasers. Just as well. Scrip banks away from its iridescent surface with a neat adjustment to the aspect ratio of his lefthand wing. Turning and turning in the widening gyres. Arch hunter of the upper airs, proud lord of the winds, lone eagle, spreadeagled, hawkeyed eagle scanning for prey, he surveys the lunar pastorale below. Within the circumference of the faceted cliff-dwelling: the crater floor all flat and green. A volley-ball game in progress on the two-hundredmeter court; volley-ball is invariably played in the nude. The gardens and orchards, where grows celery (five calories per bunch), tomatoes (six apiece), lettuce (four calories a head), as well as orange, peach, and other fruit trees. In another quadrant of the circle a chubby platoon stands ranked on the grassy exercise field. A tall, mannish figure addresses them and her voice carries tinnily up to Scrip: "... your Fitness Directress, Geneva Woodruff, rhymes with foodstuff. Heh heh. Exercise is the very raisin d'etre of the Spa. It is why you have come to the moon. Because it is easier to move when you weigh only a sixth of what you do on Earth, you can make some of that loss permanent. If you exercise, and follow your diets. They, as you know, need not be enforced; the two hundred and forty thousand miles aAyay. Heh heh. Remember that and abandon all hope of cheating with even a sliver of cheesecake. There isn't any cheesecake here to tempt you. But you have not come here to starve it off. Rather, to exercise it away. Right. Jumping jacks. Not too high, mind. After me. One, two, three and feet together again. One, two..." For the Spa is a fat farm on the moon, an extra-terrestrial reducing resort. (Ironic, perhaps, but while there are lots of orbital factories, broadcasting facilities and such, so far the moon has turned out to be humanly useful only for this -- but that's Free Enterprise for you.) The prestige of being able to afford a trip to the moon and a stay at Selena Spa doubtless compensates for the stigma of needing to slim. No lumpenproletariat these. Conceivably, too, they throw money away here to demonstrate a careless contempt for that which rules their earthside lives, as at a gambling casino. Scrip intends to oblige them by relieving some too, in his own small way. He wheels into an ascending helix, catching the steady thermal on the central, vertical axis of the dome. There are other flyers about, plump angels in their transparent sweatsuits looking like so many cellophane-wrapped bumble-bees. For those too heavy or weak to fly on their own even here, pedicopters have been provided. However much overweight, the pink-skinned blimplike forms sweep the sky with all the easy grace of seagulls, an elephantine ballet. Scrip, also, is grossly proportioned, but fat is only his disguise. An ectomorph at core, he has been blown up with hormones and metabolic steroids. This mufti of blubber can easily be shed, Georgie had assured him, after the caper. Reversible treatments, Georgie had said. They had better be; Scrip shudders to think what he'll do to Georgie if they're not. At worst he'd have to reduce in earnest. Which is worse enough, he thinks. He has been ravenous since he arrived, fantasizing -- like de Sade in the Bastille -- orgies of puff pastry and spaghetti and asparagus in Hollandaise sauce. Bartleby Scrip is obviously as phoney as his fat, but he welcomes the actor's opportunity to put on a new identity. An assumed name -- like all names. Scrip is arbitrarily posing as an East Chicago playboy but could as well be Frank Zei rocks, the photocopy magnate, or Sir Adrian Cleverly, the crack lawyer, or Count Ehrfitt of Lower Schlessweg. Goot mornink, mine hair. Mac Yavelly, the secret politician. Possibly he doesn't mind not being himself because he doesn't much admire what he's doing on the moon. Alternatively if he weren't deceiving, the self-contempt might not arise, or maybe he wouldn't like himself in any case; life is like that. Scrip alights on a perch for tired flyers, carefully folding his wings. It is crowded as a locker-room with democratizing near-nudity, and noisy with chatter: English spoken here, mostly, or at least that ubiquitous Midatlantic accent for whose patronage Selena Spa caters, although Scrip notes a massive South American -- a Largintinian, no doubt -- and a sleek-skinned Oriental; he wonders whether they, too, darken under the sun. (At other such resorts, Moonranch for example, the clientele might be predominantly American, or European at St. Genet's where the female staff wear elaborate pointy nuns' coifs and little else, and terms like Refectory and Dormitory give a mockmonastic tone to the ascetic regimen of self-denial.) There is also a lush, cherubic girl alight on his perch, one of the dumpling-maids at this fat-rendering factory to be rolled in one end and extruded out the other as a sylph. Pity, thinks Scrip, she's lovely as she is, especially as lunar gravity eliminates sag. She is trying to attract his attention by winding her chewing gum round a long lascivious tongue. She tempts him, Scrip himself a tempter, but he resists obscurely. He fears an intimacy with some butterball betrayer, exclaiming between caresses that his fat doesn't feel right somehow. Ah, then the unmasking, the grim-jawed heavies, the long knives. For surely the management would take indignant exception to his activities, and take the law into its own vengeful hands. Like many wrongdoers, Scrip has avoided ascertaining the exact consequences of his crime, if crime it be. Once he'd thought, the beauty part of the present caper is its quasi-legality. Immoral yes, but how illegal? That was before he'd grown so paranoid about the vacant-eyed musclemen who waited silently on table. He imagines them coming to get him, raiding his cubicle, the incriminating evidence found. Perhaps a repentant or dissatisfied customer of his will spill the beans and turn him in. Scrip, on the moon under false name and pretenses; who'd know if he didn't come back? Who'd care -- Georgie? Scrip taken for a ride outside the dome. And left in the long cold lunar night all alone: so long, sucker. "Gotcha!" Scrip jumps at the man's touch. "Been looking all over for you, Balaban. We met at what passes for dinner." It is Lester Blumquist, a sausage-shaped executive, the sort who hums Muzak. His complexion has over-ripened in the unaccustomed sun, unwholesomely, like a tomato pizza. He is the first potential mark Scrip has approached. "Blumstead. What's cooking?" "Hunger gnaws at my vitals, as Sylvester the Cat used to say. Balaban, I can't stand it," he whines. "It's like being in prison." Scrip, who has on occasion been in prison himself, grins with ambiguous sympathy. "What's your beef, Bumquist? You can always leave." "No space flights during lunarday sessions..." "Nuts, that's right. A fine kettle of fish. Well, don't be chicken, Babquist, stick it out." "I'll never last, Barnaby. It's driving me bananas. My wife, Bertha, is equally obsessed. We dare not sleep; maddening dreams of technicolor food, the haunting aroma of frying potatoes..." He confides his regret at bringing the little woman (two hundred earthpounds?) but Scrip thinks, Right. That's why he chose a couple; they can share and reinforce each other's lack of fortitude, and Scrip can double the take. "Please, Barnstable. What -- you've got -- can make it bearable. You hinted as much at dinner. ' ' "Your suffering moves me," fibs Scrip. "My suppliers however will cost you." "I'm no pauper." "Five hundred New Bucks, then. Apiece. Cash, of course." "Is it the real stuff? No synthetics? I've been burned before." Lester is a desperate man, thinks Scrip, he does not stoop to haggle. "The real stuff, Mr. Bumstead. It's a deal." Birdman scrip, free in the pale antiseptic air, gauges his descent. Flying is not so easy as it looks; real eagles, Scrip has read, acquire a kind of sixth sense for anticipating pressure-changes and reacting to them, yet they fly by experienced skill, not instinct. A goodly proportion of eaglets never manage to learn. Evolution, to be sure, never meant men to fly, Leonardo notwithstanding. Heavy, marrow-filled bones, no keel-like sternum to anchor the mighty chest muscles. Most obviously, no tail for steering and braking, no feathers for delicate trim. Scrip has become proficient, though, and recently executed a twelve-point barrel roll with a bit of luck. Unfortunately nobody had been watching at the time. Careful now, kill a bit more airspeed, don't overshoot. While the air currents in the dome tend to be very regular and thus reliable -- cylindrical updraft in the middle, a torus arching down to the perimeter -- even the simplest landing requires exquisite timing. Scrip matches his speed with the wind, then increases resistance by spreading his wings to parachute in. Abruptly he stalls and drops clumsily onto the Beanery court, narrowly missing a table. "Oh, hi there." "You all right, then? Nearly came down in my lap." That lap would be ample enough. Major A.P. 'Tank' Peasblossom, V.C., O.B.E.(se), retired -- as are all majors, generals, sergeants, major-generals, sergeants-major, fried-chicken-colonels and bucknaked privates, under the Pax Luna -- could anytime be found here on the Beanery court. Breaking all earthly scales at twentythree stone, he never flies, even by pedicopter, always and only sits strategically tabled with a view of the playing fields of eaten, where the war waged against fat would be won. But not by him. His ancient fieldglasses, once the formidable eyes of the last Armoured Tactical Assault shock Commando Force, now focus only on the double-breasted, deepchested, full-bodied female patrons of Selena Spa. Since most of the latter go starkers, it is a tit-man's paradise. "Nipples, actually," he explains to Scrip. "A specialized subset of breastworks, my retirement hobby. The bigger the better, I'd always thought, yet a tit without a nipple is only an udder." "An udder what?" quips Scrip. The major chuckles Falstaffian. "An utter boob, a pun my word. You're witty with the titties, my boy." "Thanks, I like to keep a breast of developments." "Used to be in tanks myself, but I've traded tanks for the mammaries. Nipples, as I say, are as various as faces and equally reveal much inner character. I've become a kind of pectoral physiognomist, as it were. Take that waitress for instance, the one with the heliotrope hair." "Gladly, sir." Scrip scrutinizes the subject indicated. Waitresses' uniforms consist only of aprons, with emblazoned pockets (Hi! I'm male staff wear starched tuxedo shirtfronts, bow ties, and black formal jockstraps. Since Spa employees had evidently been hired largely for their near-ideal physiques (Scrip half-suspects them of being lifelike robots, too perfect and expressionless), this bodily exposure must be intended to psychologically encourage patrons by example towards that goal. Marla is, in short, pulchritudinous. "Now, your smallish, darkish, high-definition nipple type usually denotes a diffident introvert," perorates Major Peasblossom, ret., "as distinguished from, say, your good-natured, self-assertive, dilated areola. In Marla's nipples I nonetheless read a laconic articulation of the corona masking some latent intensity. They're asymmetrical, you see, and almost always erect. And yesterday I could have sworn the right one winked at me." "Good Gravy!" "It did. As if to say, "I know your game, old man, but I don't mind." Endearing gesture, don't you think? As with birdwatching, patient observation of the rosy tit paid off. You must borrow my field-glasses sometime. A most rewarding study." "May one not assume then, sir, that you haven't come to the Spa to reduce?" ventures Scrip, thinking, All the better for me. "My dear boy, I'm too thin now. I was no beanpole in my youth, into my tank with a shoehorn..." "But, Major, aside from the aesthetic compensations of your unique avocation, the diet here must be hard to bear?" The portly old soldier sighs. "Orders are orders, even doctors' orders. I come here often, a not unpleasant duty. The light lunar gravity helps support my overload, like the brontosaurus in his bog. I have always loved to eat, t'eat, yet one must make sacrifices for one's art, if not one's health. Sometimes, though, when zeroing-in on a pair of pendulous bosoms, such as once put lead in my pencil, I can think only of calorific fruits swaying ripe on the vine: sweet cantalopes, golden honey dews, watermelons... He salivates copiously, without shame. Now for the clincher. "I'd like to help you, Major," says Scrip, but for some reason he quotes him a much lower price than for the Blumquists. That is why Scrip is not a very good con man. Later, reflecting on it: Take Georgie for instance, superlative, an artist consummate. Georgie suits the role much better; moreover he is genuinely stout. His salesmanship, thinks Scrip, is infinitely more sophisticated than my own ingenuous approach. Hey, meester. Georgie could be President he's such a fraud; he can lie to a polygraph. Georgie however, with a record longer than Pinocchio's nose, could never have gotten past the outbound Customs gate unless the cops had their heads up their asses. Which oftimes they do: still too great a risk. For Georgie, that is... Some uneasy awareness causes Scrip to glance up. The Major has waddled off somewhere. Marla, the waitress with the heliotrope hair and, purportedly, the educated nipples, stands at his table. She sets a cloche-lidded dish before him. "Sorry, but I didn't order -- " "T.S., B.S.," she prompts, transfixing him with a gently commanding gaze. He uncovers the dish. It contains a single, perfect peach. Scrip stares blankly at the peach, then the girl. "Your cue," she says, uncertainly now. "T.S.?" Tough shit, bull shit, T.S. Eliot? A rush of confusion besets him, then in his rumpled memory associations stir, yawn, stretch, awaken. Hot Dog! She, she is the contact! "Do I dare to eat a peach?" he stage-whispers. "Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky," she countersigns with relief. "What evening, here in perpetual sunlamp day?" "Eight o'clock earth-time, cubicle #, level J, staff quarters." As she leans over Scrip to tidy the peach in its dish, her right breast spills further out of its apron. And unmistakably, ten centimeters from his own eye, her rightside nipple winks at him. Is this proof that she is, or cannot be, an automaton? Now she spins briskly, as only waitresses can, and walks away. The peach. Scrip perceives, has been rolled around so that the side now visible bears writing: Dutifully, he eats the message. Scrip finds her cubicle on an access gallery behind the hive, against the crater wall, marla felign, Slenderette Third Class, is graven on the nameplate. She opens almost immediately, dressed in a high-necked, floorlength, heliotrope robe. So erotic is this unfamiliar modesty to him that he astonishes himself by embracing her, without premeditation. Still more to his surprise she reciprocates, as if reunited with a lover. She has opaques the front wall almost completely so that it glows a subaquatic green, the twilight of moon fishes. They converge on her mushbed, fumbling with ardour. It is over in no time, by which one means that time, like gravity, has been suspended here beyond duration or judgement thereof, hours or minutes. To be sure, the Instant Replay on the videoscreen at the foot of the mushbed would, had they activated it, have shown them engaged like whirligig gears, mingling hair and limbs with fingers and other members vibrant in each others' every aperture, doing all things whatever that two can do together, or almost all. His body like a maddened heart and her heliotrope lips moaning muffled, delicious, delirious nonwords and then licking his slippery face like a cat. He is above, behind, and beneath her and the ColourOrgan Light-Show Feedback Accessory projects on walls and ceiling of the rhomboidal octahedron a flaming ocean, two contraposed spirals twisting inwards and upwards in a tense electric blue. Then the vortex turns inside out, exploding into the usual kaleidoscopic firework of molten flowers: azure, lime, and hot, jellied pink. And now Scrip recognizes another attraction of lunar gravity and hence of the Spa. Moonballing -- especially on a mushbed, aptly named -- allows a new agility at .# G's, without the total acrobatic challenge of orbital free fall. Every action has an equal but opposite. All the moon, in fact, simulates a mushbed; as Scrip has suspected, not everyone comes here to reduce. As they lie there enmeshed like two spent swimmers, Scrip compares his newfound corpulence unfavourably with Marla's attenuated torso, her breasts like little muffins. "I was not always as you see me now," he says, suddenly selfconscious. "I'm not really this size or bloated shape; it is an alias of the flesh, a gross impersonation. Temporary silicon padding, courtesy of our mutual confederate Georgie. A few months ago I was as thin as you." "Don't be embarrassed by your body, not here in Fat City," says Marla, chewing on his ear. "A year ago I weighed more than you do now." "You're pulling my leg!"... it isn't quite his leg. "Truly. This is an unsolicited testimonial: I lost it at Selena Spa. It can be done, if one cooperates." "I do admire your transformation, if not my own. But perhaps you wouldn't like me thin," Scrip says, not sure how seriously he means it. She squeezes him gingerly. "I like you for yourself, Bartleby. You have...eyes I can trust. You're about the only decent person I've met here." "I'm a crook, Marla. I take advantage of human weakness and make money off unnecessary misery. Balaban, rhymes with Caliban." "We're all in this together," she says between love-bites. He cannot restrain it, the words come welling up unbidden as a sneeze: "What's a girl like you doing in a job like this? I mean, don't you, having been...pudgy yourself, sympathize with the patrons? How can you then subvert their...liberation from pudginess, by helping me undo their diets?" "An interesting ethical question," she admits, sucking on his toes. "Philosophically, abstinence without temptation is no moral contest. Let no maid call herself chaste who hasn't been chased, right? Psychologically, a frequent motivation of patrons who succumb to our enticements is a sort of selfpunishment for anticipated guilt. Anyway, I'm writing my dissertation in Practical Psycho-Philosophy on it. My research, you see, finances itself." "Ah. May I ask you another, even more personal question?" She strokes him affirmatively. "Can you wink the left one too?" "Yes, but it's more difficult. I'm not ambidextrous." "How do you do it, in either case?" "I don't know, really. After I shed all that weight, extra skin must've been left over. Well, some people can wiggle their ears..." Presently Scrip leaves, carrying the suitcase Marla has transferred to him, and which she had smuggled into the Spa; staff luggage isn't checked for contraband. The corridor he walks along is lined with posters, such as the one loaf of mouldy bread tagged Exhibit 'A'. Another with fat mourners at a funeral: Eating Can Damage Your Health. Surely, thinks Scrip, the Spa is as much of a racket as mine, only its operational scale lends it the euphemistic respectability of Big Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher each year, Don Wollheim's selection of the best sf stories of the year, continues the tradition of gathering the really top ten in one big volume: Bester, Dickson, Martin, Asimov and six more -- the first and best of the "Best"... (UNI #I .#) Brian M. Stableford's highly praised Hooded Swan novels reach a smashing climax as Grainger and his mental double (UY#I I #) ter's new sword-and sorcery-andscience series and introduces a new cover artist come to take his place with the greats: Michael Whelan. (UY# I #) The Lovecraft tradition here as Brian Lumley, surely the inheritor (UW##) And by popular demand we bring back a new printing of Philip K. much praised, highly controversial, and academically discussed. With a great Eddie Jones cover for this edition. (UY# I #) For our catalog and order forms, send #c in stamps to: #th FI. #I Ave. of the Americas New York, N.Y. # Business, avarice institutionalized. Am I not also an entrepeneur? On the other hand, all thieves and conmen are amateur practicing socialists; they redistribute the wealth. Of course one must allow that Robin Hood only robbed from the rich because the poor didn't have anything. Ideologically a hairy one, Bartleby. A racket nevertheless, the Spa. Far more permanent ways to reduce these days, like by-pass surgery. Exercise isn't really easier under moon gravity; as Scrip has discovered through flying, virtual weight may decrease but body mass doesn't. And what of those persistent medical studies of untoward side effects? Calcium atrophication after prolonged low gravity: the Rubber Bone Syndrome. Yet his conscience is tweaked by Marla's disclosure that the Spa's method works, given a bit of will power -- free will to choose. Carbohydrates kill. He arrives at the cubicle door of Lester and Bertha Blumquist, and is admitted. No pleasantries need be exchanged, only the thousand New Bucks counted out. Scrip opens the refrigerated suitcase; all the ingredients to hand, he deftly prepares them behind the concealing suitcase lid. Blumquist is drooling like a St. Bernard. The blackmarket goodies are ready. Two jumbo banana splits, each with handfuls of chopped walnuts sprinkled lavishly on surmounting great globular mounds of French vanilla, pistacchio, peppermint flake, and peach, sloshing in concupiscent chocolate sauce, burying monster bananas fit for King Kong, boat-shaped krystalene dishes, and all topped with paired marachino cherries like clowns' noses or nipples too red for their own good. The girl literally bouncing down the aisle is a specimen art history lecture, from the Venus of Willendorf through Rubens of course to a Fragonard water-baby with eyes by Renoir. Big and round they are, as are also the four or five beachballsized orbs of which she is otherwise composed. Softly yielding except for the Urchin Look pincushion hair and the tiny teardrop pearls at the end of her overlong eyelashes, silvery above mirrored contact-lenses. "Is this seat taken?" she asks, sitting next to Scrip. The coach is half-empty. "You're Bartleby Scrip," she says. "I've seen you around." "About two meters around," says Scrip; the girl giggles. The driver-guide commences his commentary with a sharp preamble of static: " crackle to Lunatrip Tours. We've been cruising at our maximum speed of a thousand kilometers an hour, which 'd be faster than sound if crackle any sound to be faster than ahaha. I'm slowing down now to give you a view of Clavius right below, can't miss it, a big hole in the ground. Big means in this case two-hundred thirty-five kilometers across. Clavius, good folks, is a grandaddy crater but we got craters in every size, # on the Near Side alone more than a kilometer across. Somebody counted not me ahaha." Clavius in Scrip's porthole reverie is like a big empty swimming pool, Bartleby thinks. Enough to bring on acrophobia, but who says Nature abhors a vacuum? That's the moon all over: a bunch of empty swimming pools. The guide's a bigger con than me if he can sell its scenery. There's not much for the powers of imaginative suggestion to work on, to play with, as there is almost anywhere on Earth. Even the architectonic clouds out the window of a jet, formations changing as I watch and presumably ever and always changing after I pass, if I'm not there to see. Magnificent desolation my ass, these moonscapes boring and dead, not eroded enough for the Devil's Anvil, the Old Stone Face, or Camelhump Rock. That impossibly high-contrast lighting, unmellowed by distance and the intervening air. Inkspot shadows more substantial than the unpicturesquely littered rocks which cast them. Beyond entropy, a ruination that never was anything but. Wasteland. In death's dream kingdom  Eyes I dare not meet in dreams -- The eyes of the beachball girl upon him, smiling. "I'm Joyce," says she, "Joyce James." "I've seen you around," says Scrip. "Well, that was Clavius. One of five supercraters two hundred kilometers or more in diameter. Now it just isn't true crackle you've seen one you've seen them all. You good folks gonna know more about lunar geography, geology and topography than you'll wanna know ahaha. We got rifts, we got scarps, chain craters, rills, ejecta blankets, magma rays, you name it -- " "Take me to the skinnies, Bartleby. New double bill at the Pornocopia: "Up Your Ante", and "Let Them Eat Kate" with the celebrated scene where her orgasmic High C breaks a crystal chandelier. It's not faked, you know." "The Pornocopia? Necking in the balcony and popcorn too, with lots of melted butter?" "Mushbeds in the balcony but no popcorn, you silly! Makes me hungry, though!" Rather have the popcorn, myself, thinks Scrip cold-bloodedly. "You want mountains, we got mountains. The Leibnitz Range at # meters, taller than Everest. Of course there's no sea level to measure from, the Seas here don't hold water. On your left, Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms, bigger than the Mediterranean, but don't worry about the weather ahaha. And Sinus Iridum the Bay of Rainbows is as grey as the rest, as you can plainly see coming up on your right. Crackle. The big crater is Archimedes." "Hey Bartleby, know how to do the Archimedian Screw?" she is whispering. "Wanna leam?" " Crackle more craters in the highlands than the Seas, which may therefore be of more recent origin. These so-called seas, now, crackle fifty per cent glass, that's right, glass, plus a good deal of titanium, zirconium -- " "I for one never believed in the Green Cheese Theory of the moon's materiality," says Scrip. "Blue cheese, maybe. Roquefort, Danish, or possibly Stilton." "Giggle," goes Joyce, "Making me hungry again." Scrip shrugs and turns to the porthole, catching a Mephistophelian reflection smirking back in the plastiglas. " -- what you call your impact halo. Notice the rim wall terraced concentrically and the conical peak in the middle -- ' ' Like a nipple, thinks Scrip. Doubtless titanium. Or an eye, a round cartoon eye with a bulging pupil. "Don't be alarmed, good folks, I'm gonna roll the coach so you can get a better angle on that gorgeous sky. This is what you're missing under those domes, good folks. Bigger and brighter stars here, as advertised, because on Earth thirty per cent of their light gets absorbed by the atmosphere. You'll notice they don't twinkle, either, for the same reason. And you won't be able to see the familiar constellations; too many new stars in between the dots to be connected. Each and every star, good folks, is one and three-sevenths times as bright as crackle when seen from Earth. Your lunar sky at night contains about twelve thousand stars, twice the terrestrial number. But this isn't bad for daytime, is it?" "Faaabulous," bleats Joyce, clutching Scrip's thigh as they gaze together cheek to cheek at the sterile sky. "Romantic, innit?" Avoiding the porcupine hairdo, he murmurs in her ear, slowly but urgently: "I am the eggman, the Emperor of Ice Cream. I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream." "And another thing you won't see back home, good folks. Isn't she crackle ? Is there any sight like it? The Earth's globe seen from here is nearly four times the diameter of the moon over Miami and thirteen times the area. Due to this and to the reflectivity of the atmosphere, Earthshine is seventy times as bright as...moonshine ahaha, and I think you'll agree, good folks, that it's more than worth the price of the ticket. ' ' Later, Scrip buys a colour postcard of Clavius but has no one to send it to.  One of science fiction's biggest was supposed to do just that, problems is consistency. Whenever Incidentally, the Dean Drive we make an assumption, it's not wasn't suppressed by big corporaenough simply to leave it at that; to tions, as I've heard some fans be fair to the reader, the sf writer speculate. I am personally acshould also see what that assumpquainted with two men who were tion does to everything else. given large sums by aerospace This was brought home to me companies and instructed to buy the when Jim Baen called to ask for a drive if they saw any positive recolumn on "What happens if we suits whatever in a demonstration, get an economical space drive?" After all, if the thing worked just The result was not only the column, a little bit, it would be worth bilbut the cover story for the issue. lions. Think what Boeing could do The problem is more complex with an anti-gravity machine! But, than it sounds. In fact, until we alas, no demonstration was ever givhave some idea of what kind of en, although the prospective purspace drive, there's no real answer chasers had letters of credit just at all. waiting to be signed. For example: let's suppose we However, couldn't we simply ashave a magical space drive in which sume that it will work and write an we merely turn on an electric motor article about the resulting space and "convert rotary acceleration to civilization? linear acceleration." Some readers No. The discovery of a "Dean may recall the Dean Drive, which Drive" would mean that every fundamental notion we have about physics is dead wrong. It would mean a revolution at least as far reaching as Einstein's modification of Newton. An anti-gravity device like that would have consequences reaching far beyond space drives, just as e  me # affected our lives in ways not very obviously associated with the velocity of light. This doesn't mean that "Dean Drive" systems are impossible, of course. It does mean that looking at their implications is a bigger job than I want to take on in a #word column. Jim's question was, "What happens if we have something that gives one gravity acceleration over interplanetary distances at reasonable costs per ton delivered?" Part of the question is easy to answer. Now that I've got my Texas Instruments SR-# (by the way, they've now come out with a really marvelous device called the SR-#, and I hate them for it) I can run off a couple of tables to show what we could do with such a system. The figures in Table One assume you accelerate half way, turn end for end, and decelerate the other half, so that you arrive with essentially no velocity. The numbers aren't exact, because I haven't accounted for the velocities of the planets in their orbits -- but after all, Pluto is moving about # kilometers a second, and Mercury about #, and when you're playing with velocity changes like these, who cares about the measly # kmsec difference between the two? For shorter trips the effect is even less important, of course. The numbers are a bit startling if you're not familiar with them. Twenty days to Pluto? They won't surprise old time sf readers, though. A full gravity is a pretty hefty acceleration. If you don't bother with turnovers but just blast away, the results are given in Table Two, and they're even more indicative of what one gee can do. Of course, long before you've reached light-speed at the end of a year, you'll have run into relativistic effects. We're only concerned with the solar system, though, so we can ignore trips longer than a month and avoid relativity altogether. Now we can write the article, right? Wrong. The problem is that last column in Table One. Just how do we expect to get delta-v as big as all that? Let's illustrate. As we've shown in previous columns, delta-v can be calculated from mass ratio and exhaust velocity. (If you came in late, take my word for it; we'll get past the numbers pretty quickly.) Now you could hardly call a drive economical if the mass ratio were much worse than, say, three, which means that if you start with # tons you'll arrive with #. What, then, must our exhaust veloc(in hours) (Delta-V) # km. (Earth-Moon) I AU (Earth-Mars, Venus, Sun) # AU (Earth-Asteroid) # AU (Earth-Jupiter, Saturn) # AU (Earth-Pluto) # # (# days) # ( # V # days) # (# days) # kmsec #I kmsec # kmsec # kmsec # kmsec I hour I day I week # I month # I year # (speed kmsec # km kmsec V# AU kmsec # AU kmsec # AU kmsec of light) V # lightyear erage distance from the Earth to the Sun. ity be to make the simple trip from Earth to Mars? It's horrible. About # kilometerssecond, and what's horrible about that is it corresponds to Kelvin. The interiors of stars are that hot, but nothing else is. Just how are we going to contain a temperature like that? One answer might be that we'd better learn how; fusion power systems may require it. OK, and the fusion boys are working on the problem. However they solve it, we can be sure it won't be anything small that does the trick. It's going to take enormous magnetic fields, superconductors, heavy structures, and a great deal more. After all, nothing material can hold a temperature like that without instantly vaporizing, and even containing the magnetic field that holds that kind of energy is no simple job. Let's assume we can contain fusion reactions, though. We know immediately that energy is going to be no problem for our interplanetary civilization. With plentiful energy we'll find that a number of our other problems vanish. There won't be many "rare" materials, for example; if they're rare and valuable enough, we'll simply make them out of atomic building blocks. Of course it may be cheaper to go find them somewhere, such as on Mars or among the asteroids, but we'll always be up against competition from the transmuters. Life on Earth, at least among the people of the high-energy civilizations, will change drastically. Pollution will cease to be a problem (unless the fusion plants themselves are polluters, which isn't impossible). The Affluent Society will be with us and possibly so will be regulations and rules, bureaucracy, and all the other niceties of a universal middle class. All this comes as a result of assuming our space drive. More central to our immediate topic is the fact that the ships will be quite large -- Queen Mary or supertanker size, not one-man prospector jobs. Someone is going to have to put up a lot of capital to build them, and it's not likely to be the Bobbsey Twins and their kindly uncle building ships in the back yard. Only governments or very large international corporations will be in the spaceship operating business, that's for sure. Thus there have to be profits in interplanetary travel. Not even governments will build more than one of these ships simply for scientific reasons. There's got to be commercial traffic. Next, there's a technological problem: assuming we have fusion power and a method of getting electricity from it doesn't necessarily give us a space drive. Contrary to the notions of a lot of high school science teachers back in the #'s, rockets don't "need air to push against"; but the rocket exhaust certainly does need something on the rocket to push against. What can that be? Perhaps some kind of magnetic field, but an open-end fusion system is at least two orders of magnitude harder to build than a "simple" system for generating electricity. It's one thing electricity out of it, and quite another to use that as a reaction drive. Perhaps I'm not sufficiently imaginative, but for all these reasons I decided to shelve the one-g system and design the article and story around something much simpler. In fact, if we had the electric power system, we could build these ships right now. Ion drive systems solve the "something to push against" problem by shooting charged particles out the back end. The ship is charged, the particles are charged, and they repel each other. You can get very high exhaust velocities, in the order of # kmsec, with ion systems. They're among the most efficient drives known. The trouble with present ion drives is that electricity costs weight. As an example, a currently useful system needs about # kilowatts of power to produce one pound of thrust. Since the power plant weighs in the order of four tons, the total thrust is not one g, but about ## of a gravity. It works, but it's a little slow getto receive government financial assistance for business or home-buying purposes? If you should need such aid, in the form of a loan or loan guarantee, how and where can you apply? This booklet lists seven general categories of federal financing, including education, business, home and farm loans. "Loan Sources in the Federal government" is only # postpaid from Financial Technology Limited, # River Road, North Arlington, New Jersey # ting there. Not as slow as you might think: it would take about # days to go a full AU, and your ship would reach the respectable speed of # kmsec. Still, it's hardly interplanetary rapid-transit. Suppose, though, we had a fusion system to generate the electricity. It would undoubtedly weigh a lot: let's say # metric tons, or about we've put together the fusion system and its support units. We'd still come out ahead, because we'd have lots of power to play with. Assuming exhaust velocities of # km sec, which we can get from present-day ion systems, we'd still have quite a ship. She wouldn't be cheap, but it's not unreasonable to think of her as on a par with modern super tankers. She wouldn't be enormously fast: I've worked out the thrust for a ship massing about # tons with that drive, and she'd get only a hundredth of a g acceleration. Still, a trip from Earth to Ceres would take no more than # days, and that includes coasting a good part of the way to save mass. A world-wide civilization was built around sailing ships and steamers making voyages of weeks to months. There's no reason to believe it couldn't happen in space. (Interplanetary Boost Ship) masses # tons as she leaves Earth orbit. She carries up to # passengers with their life support requirements. Not many of these will be going first-class, though; many will be colonists, or even convicts, headed out steerage under primitive conditions. Her destination is Pallas, which at the moment is # AU from Earth, and she carries # tons of cargo, mostly finished goods, tools, and other high-value items they don't make out in the Belt yet. Her cargo and passengers were sent up to Earth orbit by laser launchers; Agamemnon will never set down on anything larger than an asteroid. She boosts out at # cmsec # , ## gravity, for about # days, at which time she's reached about # kmsecond. Now she'll coast for # days, then decelerate for another #. When she arrives at Pallas she'll mass # tons. The rest has been burned off as fuel and reaction mass. It's a respectable payload, even so. The reaction mass must be metallic, and it ought to have a reasonably low boiling point. Cadmium, for example, would do nicely. Present-day ion systems want cesium, but that's a rare metal -- liquid, like mercury -- and unlikely to be found among the asteroids, or be cheap enough to use as fuel from Earth. In a pinch I suppose she could use iron for reaction mass. There's certainly plenty of that in the Belt. But iron boils at high temperatures, and running iron vapor through them would probably make an unholy mess out of the ionizing screens. The screens would have to be made of something that won't melt at iron vapor temperatures. Better, then, to use cadmium if you can get it. The fuel would be hydrogen, or, more likely, deuterium, which they'll call "dee". Dee is "heavy hydrogen", in that it has an extra neutron, and seems to work better for fusion. We can assume that it's available in tens-of-ton quantities in the asteroids. After all, there should be water ice out there, and we've got plenty of power to melt it and take out hydrogen, then separate out the dee. If it turns out there's no dee in the asteroids it's not a disaster. Shipping dee will become one of the businesses for interplanetary supertankers. Thus we have the basis for an economy. Whatever people go to the Belt for, they'll need goods from Earth to keep them alive at first. Later they'll make a lot of their own, and undoubtedly there will be specialization. One rock will produce water, another steel, and yet another will attract technicians and set up industry. One may even specialize in food production. Travel times are long but not impossible. They change, depending on when you're going where. It costs money to boost cargo all the way, so bulk stuff like metals and ice may be put in the "pipeline": given enough delta-v to put the cargo into a transfer orbit. Anywhere from a year to several years later the cargo will arrive at its destination. If there are steady insertions, the deliveries are quite regular after that first long wait. Speculators may buy up "futures" in various goods, thus helping capitalize the delivery system. People wouldn't travel from rock to rock much. Thus each inhabited asteroid will tend to develop its own peculiar culture and mores. On the other hand, they will communicate easily enough. They can receive educational television from more advanced colonies. They can exchange both technical and artistic programs, and generally appreciate each other's problems and achievements. What kind of people will go out there? Remember that life on Earth is likely to be soft; those going out will be unhappy about something. Bureaucracy, perhaps. Fleeing their spouses. Sent by a judge who wants them off Earth. Adventurers looking to make a fortune. Idealists who want to establish a "truly free society." Fanatics for some cult or another who want to raise their children "properly". All this begins to sound familiar: something like the colonial period with elements as late as just before WW One. On the other hand, the "frontier" conditions will be so different from Earth that the Belters may not be too concerned with Earth. What Earth does about them is another story. Given fusion power, Earth could go either of two ways: fat and happy, ignoring the nuts who want to live on other planets and asteroids -- or officious, trying to govern the colonies, and sending up Air Force or Navy ships to enforce edicts set down by bureaucrats who've been outside once for a month and didn't like it. Obviously there's a story or two in either alternative. hat kind of government will evolve if the rocks are left to themselves? Well, each might seek independence, but they wouldn't be independent. They'd depend entirely too much on commerce. Given the enormous investments required to build the ships that carry that commerce, they'd depend on big monied interests, whether private or government. The outfits that control the shipping will make most of the rules, then. They might not reach down into the colonies themselves to spell out laws and regulations, but the big decisions will be theirs. If we envision several large competing companies getting into the act, we can envision more room for Belt freedom through exploiting that competition. The corporations themselves will have to set up some kind of corporate "United Nations", simply because you can't do business without enforcement of contracts, reasonably stable currencies, and the like. Their system may or may not be influenced by pressure from Earth -- depending on how much Earth even cares. There are probably other futures that can be built up from ships of this kind, but here is one reasonably consistent picture of life among the asteroids. I think I might like it.  Jerry Pournelle . # r F I he tinker came astridin', astridin' over the Strand, with his bullocks -- " "Rollo!" "Yes, Ma'am." I'd been singing at the top of my lungs, as I do when I've got a difficult piloting job, and I'd forgotten that my wife was in the control cab. I went back to the problem of setting our # thousand tons of ship onto the rock. It wasn't much of a rock. Jefferson is an irregular-shaped asteroid about twice as far out as Earth. It measures maybe # kilometers by # kilometers, and from far enough away it looks like an old mud brick somebody used for a shotgun target. It has a screwy rotation pattern that's hard to match with, and since I couldn't use the main engines, setting down was a tricky job. Janet wasn't finished. "Roland Kephart, I've told you about those songs." "Yeah, sure, Hon." There are two inertial platforms in Slingshot, and they were giving me different readings. We were closing faster than I liked. "It's bad enough that you teach them to the boys. Now the girls are -- " I motioned toward the open intercom switch, and Janet blushed. We fight a lot, but that's our private business. The attitude jets popped. "Hear this," I said. "I think we're going in too fast. Brace yourselves." The jets popped again, short bursts that stirred up dust storms on the rocky surface below. "But I don't think -- " The ship jolted into place with a loud clang. We hit hard enough to shake things, but none of the red lights came on. " -- we'll break anything. Welcome to Jefferson. We're down." Janet came over and cut off the intercom switch, and we hugged each other for a second. "Made it again," she said, and I grinned. There wasn't much doubt on the last few trips, but when we first put Slingshot together out of the wreckage of two salvaged ships, every time we boosted out there'd been a good chance we'd never set down again. There's a lot that can go wrong in the Belt, and not many ships to rescue you. I pulled her over to me and kissed her. "Sixteen years," I said. "You don't look a day older." She didn't, either. She still had dark red hair, same color as when I met her at Elysium Mons Station on Mars, and if she got it out of a bottle she never told me, not that I'd want to know. She was wearing the same thing I was, a skin-tight body stocking that looked as if it had been sprayed on. The purpose was strictly functional, to keep you alive if S linger sprung a leak, but on her it produced some interesting curves. I let my hands wander to a couple of the more fascinating conic sections, and she snuggled against me. She put her head close to my ear and whispered breathlessly, "Comm panel's lit." "Bat puckey." There was a winking orange light, showing an outside call on our hailing frequency. Janet handed me the mike with a wicked grin. "Lock up your wives and hide your daughters, the tinker's come to town," I told it. " Slingshot this is Freedom Station. Welcome back, Cap'n Rollo." "Jed?" I asked. "Who the hell'd you think it was?" "Anybody. Thought maybe you'd fried yourself in the solar furnace. How are things?" Jed's an old friend. Like a lot of asteroid Port Captains, he's a publican. The owner of the bar nearest the landing area generally gets the job, since there's not enough traffic to make Port Captain a full time deal. Jed used to be a miner in Pallas, and we'd worked together before I got out of the mining business. We chatted about our families, but Jed didn't seem as interested as he usually is. I figured business wasn't too good. Unlike most asteroid colonies, Jefferson's independent. There's no big Corporation to pay taxes to, but on the other hand there's no big organization to bail the Jeffersonians out if they get in too deep. "Got a passenger this trip," I said. "Yeah? Rockrat?" Jed asked. "Nope. Just passing through. Oswald Dalquist. Insurance adjustor. He's got some kind of policy settlement to make here, then he's with us to Marsport." There was a long pause, and I wondered what Jed was thinking about. "I'll be aboard in a little," he said. "Freedom Station out." Janet frowned. "That was abrupt." "Sure was." I shrugged and began securing the ship. There wasn't much to do. The big work is shutting down the main engines, and we'd done that a long way out from Jefferson. You don't run an ion engine toward an inhabited rock if you care about your customers. "Better get the Big'uns to look at the inertial platforms, Hon," I said. "They don't read the same." "Sure. Hal thinks it's the computer." "Whatever it is, we better get it fixed." That would be a job for the oldest children. Our family divides nicely into the Big Ones, the Little Ones, and the Baby, with various sub-groups and pecking orders that Janet and I don't understand. With nine kids aboard, five ours and four adopted, the system can get confusing. Jan and I find it's easier to let them work out the chain of command for themselves. I unbuckled from the seat and pushed away. You can't walk on Jefferson, or any of the small rocks. You can't quite swim through the air, either. Locomotion is mostly a matter of jumps. As I sailed across the cabin a big grey shape sailed up to meet me, and we met in a tangle of arms and claws. I pushed the tomcat away. "Damn it -- " "Can't you do anything without cursing?" "Blast it, then. I've told you to keep that animal out of the control cab." "I didn't let him in." She was snappish, and for that matter so was I. We'd spent better than # hours cooped up in a small space with just ourselves, the kids, and our passenger, and it was time we had some outside company. The passenger had made it more difficult. We don't fight much in front of the kids, but with Oswald Dalquist aboard the atmosphere was different from what we're used to. He was always very formal and polite, which meant we had to be, which meant our usual practice of getting the minor irritations over with had been exchanged for bottling them up. Jan and I had a major fight coming, and the sooner it happened the better it would be for both of us. Slingshot is built up out of a number of compartments. We add to the ship as we have to -- and when we can afford it. I left Jan to finish shutting down and went below to the living quarters. We'd been down # minutes, and the children were loose. Papers, games, crayons, toys, kids' clothing, and books had all more or less settled on the "down" side. Raquel, a big bluejay the kids picked up somewhere, screamed from a cage mounted on one bulkhead. The compartment smelled of bird droppings. Two of the kids were watching a TV program beamed out of Marsport. Their technique was to push themselves upward with their arms and float up to the top of the compartment, then float downward again until they caught themselves just before they landed. It took nearly a minute to make a full circuit in Jefferson's weak gravity. I went over and switched off the set. The program was a western, some horse opera made in the #'s. Jennifer and Craig wailed in unison. "That's educational. Dad." They had a point, but we'd been through this before. For kids who've never seen Earth and may never go there, anything about Terra can probably be educational, but I wasn't in a mood to argue. "Get this place cleaned up." "It's Roger's turn. He made the mess." Jennifer, being eight and two years older than Craig, tends to be spokesman and chief petty officer for the Little Ones. "Get him to help, then. But get cleaned up." "Yes, sir." They worked sullenly, flinging the clothing into corner bins, putting the books into the clips, and the games into lockers. There really is a place for everything in Slingshot, although most of the time you wouldn't know it. I left them to their work and went down to the next level. My office is on one side of that, balanced by the "passenger suite" which the second oldest boy uses when we don't have paying customers. Oswald Dalquist was just coming out of his cabin. "Good Morning, Captain," he said. In all the time he'd been aboard he'd never called me anything but 'Captain', although he accepted Janet's invitation to use her first name. A very formal man, Mr. Oswald Dalquist. "I'm just going down to reception," I told him. "The Port Captain will be aboard with the Health Officer in a minute. You'd better come down, there will be forms to fill out." "Certainly. Thank you, Captain." He followed me through the airlock to the level below, which was shops, labs, and the big compartment that serves as a main entryway to Slingshot. Dalquist had been a good passenger, if a little distant. He stayed in his compartment most of the time, did what he was told, and never complained. He had very polished manners, and everything he did was precise, as if he thought out every gesture and word in advance. I thought of him as a little man, but he wasn't really. I stand about six three, and Dalquist wasn't a lot smaller than me, but he acted little. He worked for Butterworth Insurance, which I'd never heard of, and he said he was a claims adjustor, but I thought he was probably an accountant sent out because they didn't want to send anyone more important to a nothing rock like Jefferson. Still, he'd been around. He didn't talk much about himself, but every now and then he'd let slip a story that showed he'd been on more rocks than most people; and he knew ship routines pretty well. Nobody had to show him things more than once. Since a lot of life support gadgetry in Slingshot is Janet's design, or mine, and certainly isn't standard, he had to be pretty sharp to catch on so quick. He had expensive gear, too. Nothing flashy, but his helmet was one of Goodyear's latest models, his skintight was David Clark's best with "stretch steel" threads woven in with the nylon, and his coveralls were a special design by Ambercrombie and Fitch, with lots of gadget pockets and a self-cleaning low friction surface. It gave him a pretty natty appearance, rather than the battered look the old rockrats have. I figured Butterworth Insurance must pay their adjustors more than I thought, or else he had a hell of an expense account. The entryway is a big compartment. It's filled with nearly everything you can think of: dresses, art objects, gadgets and gizmos, spare parts for air bottles, sewing machines, and anything else Janet or I think we can sell in the waystops we make with Slingshot. Janet calls it the "boutique", and she's been pretty clever about what she buys. It makes a profit, but like everything we do, just barely. I've heard a lot of stories about tramp ships making a lot of money. Their skippers tell me whenever we meet. Before Jan and I fixed up Slingshot I used to believe them. Now I tell the same stories about fortunes made and lost, but the truth is we haven't seen any fortune. We could use one. Hal, our oldest, wants to go to Marsport Tech, and that's expensive. Worse, he's just the first of nine. Meanwhile, Barclay's wants the payments kept up on the mortgage they hold on Slinger, fuel prices go up all the time, and the big Corporations are making it harder for little one-ship outfits like mine to compete. We got to the boutique just in time to see two figures bounding like wallabies across the big flat area that serves as Jefferson's landing field. Every time one of the men would hit ground he'd fling up a burst of dust that fell like slowmotion bullets to make tiny craters around his footsteps. The landscape was bleak, nothing but rock and craters, with the big steel airlock entrance to Freedom Port the only thing to remind you that several thousand souls lived here. We couldn't see it, because the horizon's pretty close on Jefferson, but out beyond the airlock there'd be the usual solar furnaces, big parabolic mirrors to melt down ores. There was also a big trench shimmering just at the horizon: ice. One of Jefferson's main assets is water. About ten thousand years ago Jefferson collided with the head of a comet and a lot of the ice stayed aboard. The two figures reached Slingshot and began the long climb up the ladder to the entrance. They moved fast, and I hit the buttons to open the outer door so they could let themselves in. Jed was at least twice my age, but like all of us who live in low gravity it's hard to tell just how old that is. He has some wrinkles, but he could pass for fifty. The other guy was a Dr. Stewart, and I didn't know him. There'd been another doctor, about my age, the last time I was in Jefferson, but he'd been a contract man and the Jeffersonians couldn't afford him. Stewart was a young chap, no more than twenty, born in Jefferson back when they called it Grubstake and Blackjack Dan was running the colony. He'd got his training the way most people get an education in the Belt, in front of a TV screen. The TV classes are all right, but they have their limits. I hoped we wouldn't have any family emergencies here. Janet's a TV Doc, but unlike this Stewart chap she's had a year residency in Marsport General, and she knows the limits of TV training. We've got a family policy that she doesn't treat the kids for anything serious if there's another doctor around, but between her and a new TV trained MD there wasn't much choice. "Everybody healthy?" Jed asked. "Sure." I took out the log and showed where Janet had entered Stewart looked doubtful. "I'm supposed to examine everyone myself. "For Christ's sake," Jed told him. He pulled on his bristly mustache and glared at the young doc. Stewart glared back. "Well, 'least you can see if they're still warm," Jed conceded. "Cap'n Rollo, you got somebody to take him up while we get the immigration forms taken care of?" "Sure." I called Pam on the intercom. She's second oldest. When she got to the boutique Jed sent Doctor Stewart up with her. When they were gone he took out a big book of forms. For some reason every rock wants to know your entire life history before you can get out of your ship. I never have found out what they do with all the information. forms while Jed muttered. "Butterworth Insurance, eh?" Hed asked. "Got much business here?" Dalquist looked up from the forms. "Very little. Perhaps you can help me. The insured was a Mister Joseph Colella. I will need to find the beneficiary, a Mrs. Barbara Morrison Colella." "Joe Colella?" I must have sounded surprised because they both looked at me. "I brought Joe and Barbara to Jefferson. Nice people. What happened to him?" "Death certificate said accident." Jed said it just that way, flat, with no feeling. Then he added, "Signed by Dr. Stewart." Jed sounded as if he wanted Dalquist to ask him a question, but the insurance man went back to his forms. When it was obvious that he wasn't going to say anything more, I asked Jed. "Something wrong with the accident?" Jed shrugged. His lips were tightly drawn. The mood in my ship had definitely changed for the worse, and I was sure Jed had more to say. Why wasn't Dalquist asking questions? Something else puzzled me. Joe and Barbara were more than just former passengers. They were friends we were looking forward to seeing when we got to Jefferson. I was sure we'd mentioned them several times in front of Dalquist, but he'd never said a word. We'd taken them to Jefferson about five Earth years before. They were newly married, Joe pushing sixty and Barbara less than half that. He'd just retired as a field agent for Hansen Enterprises, with a big bonus he'd earned in breaking up some kind of insurance scam. They were looking forward to buying into the Jefferson co-op system. I'd seen them every trip since, the last time two years ago, and they were short of ready money like everyone else in Jefferson, but they seemed happy enough. "Where's Barbara now?" I asked Jed. "Working for Westinghouse. Johnny Peregrine's office." "She all right? And the kids?" Jed shrugged. "Everybody helps out when help's needed. Nobody's rich." "They put a lot of money into Jefferson stock," I said. "And didn't they have a mining claim?" "Dividends on Jefferson Corporation stock won't even pay air taxes." Jed sounded more beat down than I'd ever known him. Even when things had looked pretty bad for us in the old days he'd kept all our spirits up with stupid jokes and puns. Not now. "Their claim wasn't much good to start with, and without Joe to work it -- " His voice trailed off as Pam brought Dr. Stewart back into our compartment. Stewart countersigned the log to certify that we were all healthy. "That's it, then," he said. "Ready to go ashore?" "People waitin' for you in the Doghouse, Captain Rollo," Jed said. "Big meeting." "I'll just get my hat." "If there is no objection, I will come too," Dalquist said. "I wonder if a meeting with Mrs. Colella can be arranged?" "Sure," I told him. "We'll send for her. Doghouse is pretty well the center of things in Jefferson anyway. Have her come for dinner." "Got nothing good to serve." Jed's voice was gruff with a note of irritated apology. "We'll see." I gave him a grin and opened the airlock. There aren't any dogs at the Doghouse. Jed had one when he first came to Jefferson, which is why the name, but dogs don't do very well in low gravs. Like everything else in the Belt, the furniture in Jed's bar is iron and glass except for what's aluminum and titanium. The place is a big cave hollowed out of the rock. There's no outside view, and the only things to look at are the TV and the customers. There was a big crowd, as there always is in the Port Captain's place when a ship comes in. More business is done in bars than offices out here, which was why Janet and the kids hadn't come dirtside with me. The crowd can get rough sometimes. The Doghouse has a big bar running all the way across on the side opposite the entryway from the main corridor. The bar's got a suction surface to hold down anything set on it, but no stools. The rest of the big room has tables and chairs and the tables have little clips to hold drinks and papers in pace. There are also little booths around the outside perimeter for privacy. It's a typical layout. You can hold auctions in the big central area and make private deals in the booths. Drinks are served with covers and straws because when you put anything down fast it sloshes out the top. You can spend years learning to drink beer in low gee if you don't want to sip it through a straw or squirt it out of a bulb. The place was packed. Most of the customers were miners and shopkeepers, but a couple of tables were taken by company reps. I pointed out Johnny Peregrine to Dalquist. "He'll know how to find Barbara." Dalquist smiled that tight little accountant's smile of his and went over to Peregrine's table. There were a lot of others. The most important was Habib al Shamlan, the Iris Company factor. He was sitting with two hard cases, probably company cops. The Jefferson Corporation people didn't have a table. They were at the bar, and the space between them and the other Company reps was clear, a little island of neutral area in the crowded room. I'd drawn Jefferson's head honcho. Rhoda Hendrix was Chairman of the Board of the Jefferson Corporation, which made her the closest thing they had to a government. There was a big ugly guy with her. Joe Hornbinder had been around since Blackjack Dan's time. He still dug away at the rocks, hoping to get rich. Most people called him Horny for more than one reason. It looked like this might be a good day. Everyone stared at us when we came in, but they didn't pay much attention to Dalquist. He was obviously a feather merchant, somebody they might have some fun with later on, and I'd have to watch out for him then, but right now we had important business. Dalquist talked to Johnny Peregrine for a minute and they seemed to agree on something because Johnny nodded and sent one of his troops out. Dalquist went over into a comer and ordered a drink. There's a protocol to doing business out here. I had a table all to myself, off to one side of the clear area in the middle, and Jed's boy brought me a big mug of beer with a hinged cap. When I'd had a good slug I took messages out of my pouch and scaled them out to people. Somebody bought me another drink, and there was a general gossip about what was happening around the Belt. Al Shamlan was impatient. After about a half hour, which is really rushing things for an Arab, he called across, his voice very casual, "And what have you brought us, Captain Kephart?" I took copies of my manifest out of my pouch and passed them around. Everyone began reading, but Johnny Peregrine gave a big grin at the first item. "Beef!" Peregrine looked happy. He had # workers to feed. "Nine tons," I agreed. "Ten francs," Johnny said. "I'll take the whole lot." "Fifteen," AI Shamlan said. I took a big glug of beer and relaxed. Jan and I'd taken a chance and won. Suppose somebody had flung a shipment of beef into transfer orbit a couple of years ago? A hundred tons could be arriving any minute, and mine wouldn't be worth anything. Janet and I can keep track of scheduled ships, and we know pretty well where most of the tramps like us are going, but there's no way to be sure about goods in the pipeline. You can go broke in this racket. There was more bidding, with some of the storekeepers getting in the act. I stood to make a good profit, but only the big Corporations were bidding on the whole lot. The Jefferson Corporation people hadn't said a word. I'd heard things weren't going too well for them, but this made it certain. If miners have any money, they'll buy beef. Beef tastes like cow. The stuff you can make from algae is nutritious, but at best it's not appetizing, and Jefferson doesn't even have the plant to make textured vegetable stitute for the real thing. Eventually the price got up to where only Iris and Westinghouse were interested in the whole lot and I broke the cargo up, seven tons to the big boys and the rest in small lots. I didn't forget to save out a couple hundred kilos for Jed, and I donated half a ton for the Jefferson city hall people to throw a feed with. The rest went for about thirty francs a kilo. That would just about pay for the deuterium I burned up coming to Jefferson. There was some other stuff, lightweight items they don't make outside the big rocks like Pallas, and that was all pure profit. I felt pretty good when the auction ended. It was only the preliminaries, of course, and the main event was what would let me make a couple of payments to Barclay's on Slinger's mortgage, but it's a good feeling to know you can't lose money no matter what happens. There was another round of drinks. Rockrats came over to my table to ask about friends I might have run into. Some of the storekeepers were making new deals, trading around things they'd bought from me. Dalquist came over to sit with me. "Johnny finding your client for you?" I asked. He nodded. "Yes. As you suggested, I have invited her to dinner here with us." "Good enough. Jan and the kids will be in when the business is over." Johnny Peregrine came over to the Table. "Boosting cargo this trip?" "Sure." The babble in the room faded out. It was time to start the main event. The launch window to Luna was open and would be for another couple hundred hours. After that, the fuel needed to give cargo pods enough velocity to put them in transfer orbit to the Earth-Moon system would go up to where nobody could afford to send down anything massy. There's a lot of traffic to Luna. It's cheaper, at the right time, to send ice down from the Belt than it is to carry it up from Earth. Of course the Lunatics have to wait a couple of years for their water to get there, but there's always plenty in the pipeline. Luna buys metals, too, although they don't pay as much as Earth does. "I think something can be arranged," al Shamlan said. "Hah!" Hornbinder was listening to us from his place at the bar. He laughed again. "Iris doesn't have any dee for a big shipment. Neither does Westinghouse. You want to boost, you'll deal with us." I looked at al Shamlan. It's hard to tell what he's thinking, and not a lot easier to read Johnny Peregrine, but they didn't look very happy. "That true?" I asked. Hornbinder and Rhoda came over to the table. "Remember, we sent for you," Rhoda said. "Sure." I had their guarantee in my pouch. Five thousand francs up front, and another five thousand if I got here on time. J'd beaten their deadline by # hours, which isn't kilometers I had to come. "Sounds like you've got a deal in mind." She grinned. She's a big woman, and as hard as the inside of an asteroid. I knew she had to be sixty, but she had spent most of that time in low gee. There wasn't much cheer in her smile. It looked more like the tomcat does when he's trapped a rat. "Like Horny says, we have all the deuterium. If you want to boost for Iris and Westinghouse, you'll have to deal with us." "Bloody hell." I wasn't going to do as well out of this trip as I'd thought. Hornbinder grinned. "How you like it now, you goddam bloodsucker?" "You mean me?" I asked. "Fucking A. You come out here and use your goddam ship a hundred hours, and you take more than we get for busting our balls a whole year. Fucking A, I mean you . ' ' I'd forgotten Dalquist was at the table. "If you think boostship captains charge too much, why don't you buy your own ship?" he asked. "Who the hell are you?" Homy demanded. Dalquist ignored him. "You don't buy your own ships because you can't afford them. Ship owners have to make enormous investments. If they don't make good profits they won't buy ships, and you won't get your cargo boosted at any price." He sounded like a professor. He was right, of course, but he talked in a way that I'd heard the older kids use on the Little Ones. It always starts fights in our family and it looked like having the same result here. "Shut up and sit down, Homy." Rhoda Hendrix was used to being obeyed. Hornbinder glared at Dalquist, but he took a chair. "Now let's talk business," Rhoda said. "Captain, it's simple enough. We'll charter your ship for the next # hours." "That can get expensive." She looked to al Shamlan and Peregrine. They didn't look very happy. "I think I know how to get our money back." "There are times when it is best to give in gracefully," al Shamlan said. He looked to Johnny Peregrine and got a nod. "We are prepared to make a fair agreement with you, Rhoda. After all, you've got to boost your ice. We must send our cargo. It will be much cheaper for all of us if the cargoes go out in one capsule. What are your terms?" "No deal," Rhoda said. "We'll charter Cap'n Rollo's ship, and you deal with us." "Don't I get a say in this?" I asked. "You'll get yours," Hornbinder muttered. "Fifty thousand," Rhoda said. "Fifty thousand to charter your ship. Plus the ten thousand we promised to get you here." "That's no more than I'd make boosting your ice.," I said. I usually get # of cargo value, and the customer furnishes the dee and reaction mass. That ice was worth a Luna. Jefferson would probably have to sell it before then, but even with discounts, futures in that much new francs. "Seventy thousand, then," Rhoda said. There was something wrong here. I picked up my beer and took a long swallow. When I put it down, Rhoda was talking again. "Ninety thousand. Plus your ten. An even hundred thousand francs, and you get another # of whatever we get for the ice after we sell it." "A counter offer may be appropriate," al Shamlan said. He was talking to Johnny Peregrine, but he said it loud enough to be sure that everyone else heard him. "Will Westinghouse go halves with Iris on a charter?" Johnny nodded. Al Shamlan's smile was deadly. "Charter your ship to us, Captain Kephart. One hundred and forty thousand francs, for exclusive use for the next # hours. That price includes boosting a cargo capsule, provided that we furnish you the deuterium and reaction mass." "One fifty. Same deal," Rhoda said. "One seventy five." "Two hundred." Somebody grabbed her shoulder and tried to say something to her, but Rhoda pushed him away. "I know what I'm doing. Two hundred thousand." AI Shamlan shrugged. "You win. We can wait for the next launch window." He got up from the table. "Coming, Johnny?" "In a minute." Peregrine had a worried look. "Ms. Hendrix, how do you expect to make a profit? I assure you that we won't pay what you seem to think we will." "Leave that to me," she said. She still had that look: triumph. The price didn't seem to bother her at all. "Hum." AI Shamlan made a gesture of bafflement. "One thing, Captain. Before you sign with Rhoda, you might ask to see the money. I would be much surprised if Jefferson Corporation has two hundred thousand." He pushed himself away and sailed across the bar to the corridor door. "You know where to find me if things don't work out, Captain Kephart." He went out, and his company cops came right after him. After a moment Peregrine and the other Corporation people followed. I wondered what the hell I'd got myself into this time. Rhoda hendrix was trying to be friendly. It didn't really suit her style. I knew she'd come to Jefferson back when it was called Grubstake and Blackjack Dan was trying to set up an independent colony. Sometime in her first year she'd moved in with him, and pretty soon she was handling all his financial deals. There wasn't any nonsense about freedom and democracy back then. Grubstake was a big opportunity to get rich or get killed, and not much more. When they found Blackjack Dan outside without a helmet, it turned out that Rhoda was his heir. She was the only one who knew what kind of deals he'd made anyway, so she took over his place. A year later she invented the Jefferson Corporation. Everybody living on the rock had to buy stock, and she talked a lot about sovereign rights and government by the people. It takes a lot of something to govern a few thousand rockrats, and whatever it is, she had plenty. The idea caught on. Now things didn't seem to be going too well, and her face showed it when she tried to smile. "Glad that's all settled," she said. "How's Janet?" "The wife is fine, the kids are fine, the ship's fine, and I'm fine," I said. She let the phoney grin fade out. "OK, if that's the way you want it. Shall we move over to a booth?" "Why bother? I've got nothing to hide," I told her. "Watch it," Hombinder growled. "And I've had about enough of him," I told Rhoda. "If you've got cargo to boost let's get it boosted." "In time." She pulled some papers out of her pouch. "First, here's the charter contract." It was all drawn up in advance. I didn't like it at all. The money was good, but none of this sounded right. "Maybe I should take al Shamlan's advice and -- " "You're not taking the Arabs' advice or their money either," Hornbinder said. " -- and ask to see your money first," I finished. "Our credit's good," Rhoda said. "So is mine as long as I keep my payments up. I can't pay off Barclay's with promises." I lifted my beer and flipped the top just enough to suck down a big gulp. Beer's lousy if you have to sip it. "What can you lose?" Rhoda asked... "OK, so we don't have much cash. We've got a contract for the ice. Ten percent as soon as the Lloyd's man certifies the stuffs in transfer orbit. We'll pay you out of that. We've got the dee, we've got reaction mass, what the hell else do you want?" "Your radiogram said cash," I reminded her. "I don't even have the retainer you promised. Just paper." "Things are hard out here." Rhoda nodded to herself. She was thinking just how hard things were. "It's not like the old days. Everything's organized. Big companies. As soon as we get a little ahead, the big outfits move in and cut prices on everything we sell. Outbid us on everything we have to buy. Like your beef." "Sure," I said. "I'm facing tough competition from the big shipping fleets, too." "So this time we've got a chance to hold up the big boys," Rhoda said. "Get a little profit. You aren't hurt. You get more than you expected." She looked around to the other miners. There were a lot of people listening to us. "Kephart, all we have to do is get a little ahead, and we can turn this rock into a decent place to live. A place for people, not Corporation clients!" Her voice rose and her eyes flashed. She meant every word, and the others nodded approval. "You lied to me," I said. "So what? How are you hurt?" She pushed the contract papers toward me. "Excuse me." Dalquist hadn't spoken very loudly, and everyone looked at him. "Why is there such a hurry about this?" he asked. "What the hell's it to you?" Hornbinder demanded. "You want cash?" Rhoda asked. "All right, I'll give you cash." She took a document out of her pouch and slammed it onto the table. She hit hard enough to raise herself a couple of feet out of her chair. It would have been funny if she wasn't dead serious. Nobody laughed. "There's a deposit certificate for every goddam cent we have!" she shouted. "You want it? Take it all. Take the savings of every family in Jefferson. Pump us dry. Grind the faces of the poor! But sign that charter!" "Cause if you don't," Hombinder said, "your ship won't ever leave this rock. And don't think we can't stop you." "Easy." I tried to look relaxed, but the sea of faces around me wasn't friendly at all. I didn't want to look at them so I looked at the deposit paper. It was genuine enough: you can't fake the molecular documents Zurich banks use. With the Jefferson Corporation Seal and the right signatures and thumbprints that thing was worth exactly # francs. It would be a lot of money if I owned it for myself. It wasn't so much compared to the mortgage on Slinger. It was nothing at all for the total assets of a whole community. "This is our chance to get out from under," Rhoda was saying. She wasn't talking to me. "We can squeeze the goddam corporation people for a change. All we need is that charter and we've got Westinghouse and the Arabs where we want them!" Everybody in the bar was shouting now. It looked ugly, and I didn't see any way out. "OK," I told Rhoda. "Sign over that deposit certificate, and make me out a lien on future assets for the rest. I'll boost your cargo -- " "Boost hell, sign that charter contract," Rhoda said. "Yeah, I'll do that too. Make out the documents." "Captain Kephart, is this wise?" Dalquist asked. "Keep out of this, you little son of a bitch." Horny moved toward Dalquist. "You got no stake in this. Now shut up before I take off the top -- " Dalquist hardly looked up. "Five hundred francs to the first man who coldcocks him," he said carefully. He took his hand out of his pouch, and there was a bill in it. There was a moment's silence, then four big miners started for Horny. When it was over, Dalquist was out a thousand, because nobody could decide who got to Hornbinder first. Even Rhoda was laughing after that was over. The mood changed a little; Hornbinder had never been very popular, and Dalquist was buying for the house. It didn't make any difference about the rest of it, of course. They weren't going to let me off Jefferson without signing that charter contract. Rhoda sent over to city hall to have the documents made out. When they came I signed, and half the people in the place signed as witnesses. Dalquist didn't like it, but he ended up as a witness too. For better or worse. Slingshot was chartered to the Jefferson Corporation for # hours. The surprise came after I'd signed. I asked Rhoda when she'd be ready to boost. "Don't worry about it. You'll get the capsule when you need it." "Bloody hell! You couldn't wait to get me to sign -- " "Aww, just relax, Kephart." "I don't think you understand. boost up to what, fiv, six kilometers a second." I took out my pocket calculator. "Sixteen tons of deuterium and eleven thousand reaction mass. That's a bloody big load. The fuel feed system's got to be built. It's not something I can just strap on and push off -- " "You'll get what you need," Rhoda said. "We'll let you know when it's time to start work."    Jed put us in a private dining room. Janet came jn later and I told her about the afternoon. I didn't think she'd like it, but she wasn't as upset as I was. "We have the money," she said. "And we got a good price on the cargo, and if they ever pay off we'll get more than we expected on the boost charges. If they don't pay up -- well, so what?" "Except that we've got a couple of major companies unhappy, and they'll be here long after Jefferson folds up. Sorry Jed, but -- " He bristled his mustache. "Could be. I figure on gettin' along with the corporations too. Just in case." "But what did all that lot mean?" Dalquist asked. "Beats me." Jed shook his head. "Rhoda's been making noises about how rich we're going to be. New furnace, another power plant, maybe even a ship of our own. Nobody knows how she's planning on doing it." "Could there have been a big strike?" Dalquist asked. "Iridium, one of the really valuable metals?" "Don't see how," Jed told him. "Look, Mister, if Rhoda's goin' to bail this place out of the hole the big boys have dug for us, that's great with me. I don't ask questions. ' ' Jed's boy came in. "There's a lady to see you." Barbara Morrison Colella was a small blonde girl, pug nose, blue eyes. She looks like somebody you'd see on Earthside TV playing a dumb blonde. Her degrees said "family economics," which I guess on Earth doesn't amount to much. Out here it's a specialty. To keep a family going out here you better know a lot of environment and life support engineering, something about prices that depend on orbits and launch windows, a lot about how to get food out of rocks -- and something about power systems, too. She was glad enough to see us, especially Janet, but we got another surprise. She looked at Dalquist and said, "Hello, Buck." "Hello. Surprised, Bobby?" "No. I knew you'd be along as soon as you heard." "You know each other, then," I said. "Yes." Dalquist hadn't moved, but he didn't look like a little man any longer. "How did it happen, Bobby?" Her face didn't change. She'd lost most of her smile when she saw Dalquist. She looked at the rest of us, and pointed at Jed. "Ask him. He knows more than I do." "Mr. Anderson?" Dalquist prompted. His tone made it sound as if he'd done this before, and he expected to be answered. If Jed resented that he didn't show it. "Simple enough. Joe always seemed happy enough when he came in here after his shift -- " Dalquist looked from Jed to Barbara. She nodded. " -- until the last time. That night he got stinking drunk. Kept mutterin' something about 'Not that way. There's got to be another way.' " "Do you know what that meant?' ' "No," Jed said. "But he kept saying it. Then he got really stinking and I sent him home with a couple of the guys he worked with." "What happened when he got home?" Dalquist asked. "He never came home, Buck," Barbara said. "I got worried about him, but I couldn't find him. The men he'd left here with said he'd got to feeling better and left them -- " "Damn fools," Jed muttered. "He was right out of it. Nobody should go outside with that much to drink." "And they found him outside?" "At the refinery. Helmet busted open. Been dead five, six hours. Held the inquest right in here, at that table al Shamlan was sitting at this afternoon." "Who held the inquest?" Dalquist asked. "Rhoda." "Doesn't make sense," I said. "No," Janet didn't like it much either. "Barbara, don't you have any idea of what Joe meant? Was he worried about something?" "Nothing he told me about. He wasn't -- we weren't fighting or anything. I'm sure he didn't -- " "Humpf." Dalquist shook his head. "What damned fool suggested suicide?" "Well," Jed said, "you know how it is. If a man takes on a big load and wanders around outside, it might as well be suicide. Hombinder said we were doing Barbara a favor, voting it an accident." Dalquist took papers out of his pouch. "He was right, of course. I wonder if Hornbinder knew that all Hansen employees receive a paid up insurance policy as one of their retirement benefits?" "I didn't know it," I said. Janet was more practical. "How much is it worth?" "I am not sure of the exact amounts," Dalquist said. "There are trust accounts involved also. Sufficient to get Barbara and the children back to Mars and pay for their living expenses there. Assuming you want to go?" "I don't know," Barbara said. "Let me think about it. Joe and I came here to get away from the big companies. I don't have to like Rhoda and the city hall crowd to appreciate what we've got in Jefferson. Independence is worth something." "Indeed," Dalquist said. He wasn't agreeing with her, and suddenly we all knew he and Barbara had been through this argument before. I wondered when. "Janet, what would you do?" Barbara asked. Jan shrugged. "Not a fair question. Roland and I made that decision a long time ago. But neither of us is alone." She reached for my hand across the table. As she'd said, we made our choice. We've had plenty of offers for Slingshot, from outfits that would be happy to hire us as crew for Slinger. It would mean no more hustle to meet the mortgage payments, and not a lot of change in the way we live -- but we wouldn't be our own people anymore. We've never seriously considered taking any of the offers. "You don't have to be alone," Dalquist said. "I know. Buck." There was a wistful note in Barbara's voice. They looked at each other for a long time. Then we sat down to dinner.    I was in my office aboard Slingshot. Thirty hours had gone by since I'd signed the charter contract, and I still didn't know what I was boosting, or when. It didn't make sense. Janet refused to worry about it. We'd cabled the money on to Marsport, all of Jefferson's treasury and what we'd got for our cargo, so Barclay's was happy for a while. We had enough deuterium aboard Slinger to get where we could buy more. She kept asking what there was to worry about, and I didn't have any answer. I was still brooding about it when Oswald Dalquist tapped on the door. I hadn't seen him much since the dinner at the Doghouse, and he didn't look any different, but he wasn't the same man. I suppose the change was in me. You can't think of a man named 'Buck' the same way you think of an Oswald. "Sit down," I said. That was formality, of course. It's no harder to stand than sit in the tiny gravity we felt. "I've been meaning to say something about the way you handied Homy. I don't think I've ever seen anybody do that." His smile was thin, and I guess it hadn't changed either, but it didn't seem like an accountant's smile any more. "It's an interesting story, actually," he said. "A long time ago I was in a big colony ship. Long passage, nothing to do. Discovered the other colonists didn't know much about playing poker." We exchanged grins again. "I won so much it made me worry that someone would take it away from me, so I hired the biggest man in the bay to watch my back. Sure enough, some chap accused me of cheating, so I called on my big friend -- " "Yeah?" "And he shouted 'Fifty to the first guy that decks him.' Worked splendidly, although it wasn't precisely what I'd expected when I hired him -- " We had our laugh. "When are we leaving, Captain Kephart?" "Beats me. When they get the cargo ready to boost, I guess." "That might be a long time," Dalquist said. ' 'What does that mean?' ' "I've been asking around. To the best of my knowledge, there are no preparations for boosting a big cargo pod." "That's stupid," I said. "Well, it's their business. When we go, how many passengers am I going to have?" His little smile faded entirely. "I wish I knew. You've guessed that Joe Colella and I were old friends. And rivals for the same girl." "Yeah. I'm wondering why you -- hell, we talked about them on the way in. You never let on you'd ever heard of them." He nodded carefully. "I wanted to be certain. I only knew that Joe was supposed to have died in an accident. He was not the kind of man accidents happen to. Not even out here." "What is that supposed to mean?',' "Only that Joe Colella was one of the most careful men you will ever meet, and I didn't care to discuss my business with Barbara until I knew more about the situation in Jefferson. Now I'm beginning to wonder -- " "Dad!" Pam was on watch, and she sounded excited. The intercom box said again, "Dad!" "Right, sweetheart." "You better come up quick. There's a message coming through. You better hurry." # M!ayday mayday mayday." The voice was cold and unemotional, the way they are when they really mean it. It rolled off the tape "Lord God." I wasn't really aware that I was talking. The kids had crowded into the control cabin, and we listened as the tape went on to give a string of numbers, the vectors to locate Agamemnon precisely. I started to punch them into the plotting tanks, but Pam stopped me. "I already did that, Dad." She hit the activation switch to bring the screen to life. It showed a picture of our side of the Solar System, the inner planets and inhabited rocks, along with a block of numbers and a long thin line with a dot at the end to represent Agamemnon. Other dots winked on and off: boostships. We were the only one that stood a prayer of a chance of catching up with Agamemnon. The other screen lit, giving us what the Register knew about Agamemnon. It didn't look good. She was an enourmous old cargo  passenger ship, over thirty years old -- and out here that's old indeed. She'd been built for a useful life of half that, and sold off to Pegasus lines when PL decided she wasn't safe. Her auxiliary power was furnished by a plutonium pile. If something went wrong with it, there was no way to repair it in space. Without auxiliary power, the life support systems couldn't function. I was still looking at her specs when the comm panel lit. Local call, Port Captain's frequency. "Yeah, Jed?" I said. "You've got the Mayday?" "Sure. I figure we've got about # hours max to fuel up and still let me catch her. I've got to try it, of course." "Certainly, Captain." The voice was Rhoda's. "I've already sent a crew to start work on the ftiel pod. I suggest you work with them to be sure it's right." "Yeah. They'll have to work damned fast." Slingshot doesn't carry anything like the tankage a run like this would need. "One more thing, Captain," Rhoda said. "Remember that your ship is under exclusive charter to the Jefferson Corporation. We'll make the legal arrangements with Pegasus. You concentrate on getting your ship ready." "Yeah, OK. Out." I switched the comm system to record. "Agamemnon, this is cargo tug Slingshot. I have your Mayday. Intercept is possible, but I cannot carry sufficient fuel and mass to decelerate your ship. I must vampire your dee and mass, I say again, we must transfer your fuel and reaction mass to my ship. "We have no facilities for taking your passengers aboard. We will attempt to take your ship in tow and decelerate using your deuterium and reaction mass. Our engines are modified General Electric Model five-niner ion-fusion. Preparations for coming to your assistance are under way. Suggest your crew begin preparations for fuel transfer. Over." Then I looked around the cabin. Janet and our oldest were ashore. "Pam, you're in charge. Send that, and record the reply. You can start the checklist for boost. I make it about # centimeters acceleration, but you'd better check that. Whatever it is, we'll need to secure for it. Also, get in a call to find your mother. God knows where she is." "Sure, Dad." She looked very serious, and I wasn't worried. Hal's the oldest, but Pam's a lot more thorough. The Register didn't give anywhere near enough data about Agamemnon. I could see from the recognition pix that she carried her reaction mass in strap-ons alongside the main hull, rather than in detachable pods right forward the way S linger does. That meant we might have to transfer the whole lot before we could start deceleration. She had been built as a general purpose ship, so her hull structure forward was beefy enough to take the thrust of a cargo pod -- but how much thrust? If we were going to get her down, we'd have to push like hell on her bows, and there was no way to tell if they were strong enough to take it. I looked over to where Pam was aiming our high gain antenna for the message to Agamemnon. She looked like she'd been doing this all her life, which I guess she had been, but mostly for drills. It gave me a funny feeling to know she'd grown up sometime in the last couple of years and Janet and I hadn't really noticed. "Pamela, I'm going to need more information on Agamemnon, ' ' I told her. "The kids had a TV cast out of Marsport, so you ought to be able to get through. Ask for anything they have on that ship. Structural strength, fuel handling equipment, everything they've got." "Yes, sir." "OK. I'm going ashore to see about the fuel pods. Call me when we get some answers, but if there's nothing important from Agamemnon just hang onto it." "What happens if we can't catch Pam and Jennifer were trying to explain it to him as I went down to the lock.    Jed had lunch waiting in the Doghouse. "How's it going?" he asked when I came in. "Pretty good. Damned good, all things considered." The refinery crew had built up fuel pods for Slinger before, so they knew what I needed, but they'd never made one that had to stand up to a full fifth of a gee. A couple of centimeters is hefty acceleration when you boost big cargo, but we'd have to go out at a hundred times that. "Get the stuff from Marsport?" "Some of it." I shook my head. The whole operation would be tricky. There wasn't a lot of risk for me, but Agamemnon was in big trouble. "Rhoda's waiting for you. Back room." "You don't look happy." Jed shrugged. "Guess she's right, but it's kind of ghoulish." "What -- ?" "Go see." Rhoda was sitting with a trim chap who wore a clipped mustache. I'd met him before, of course: B. Elton, Esq., the Lloyd's rep in Jefferson. He hated the place and couldn't wait for a transfer. "I consider this reprehensible," Elton was saying when I came in. "I hate to think you are a party to this, Captain Kephart." "Party to what?" "Ms. Hendrix has asked for I whistled. "That's heavy." "The ship is worth far more than that," Rhoda said. "If I can get her down. There are plenty of problems -- hell, she may not be fit for more than salvage," I said. "Then there are the passengers. How much is Lloyd's out if you have to pay off their policies? And lawsuits?" Rhoda had the tomcat's grin again. "We're saving you money, Mr. Elton." I realized what she was doing. "I don't know how to say this, but it's my ship you're risking." "You'll be paid well," Rhoda said. "Ten percent of what we get." That would just about pay off the whole mortgage. It was also a hell of a lot more than the commissioners in Marsport would award for a salvage job. "We've got heavy expenses up front," Rhoda was saying. "That fuel pod costs like crazy. We're going to miss the launch window to Luna." "Certainly you deserve reasonable compensation, but -- ' ' "But nothing!" Rhoda's grin was triumphant. "Captain Kephart can't boost without fuel, and we have it all. That fuel goes aboard his ship when you've signed my contract, Elton, and not before." Elton looked sad and disgusted. "It seems a cheap -- " "Cheap!" Rhoda got up and went to the door. "What the hell do you know about cheap? How goddam many times have we heard you people say there's no such thing as an excess profit? Well, this time we got the breaks, Elton, and we'll take the excess profits. Think about that." Out in the bar somebody cheered. Another began singing a tune I'd heard in Jefferson before. Pam says the music is very old, she's heard it on TV casts, but the words fit Jefand everybody out there shouted it. "Marsport will never give you that much money," Elton said. "Sure they will." Rhoda's grin got even wider, if that was possible. "We'll hold onto the cargo until they do -- " "Be damned if I will!" I said. "Not you at all. I'm sending Mr. Hornbinder to take charge of that. Don't worry, Captain Kephart, I've got you covered. The big boys won't bite you." "Hornbinder?" "Sure. You'll have some extra passengers this run -- " "Not him. Not in my ship." "Sure he's going. You can use some help -- " Like hell. "I don't need any." She shrugged. "Sorry you feel that way. Just remember, you're under charter." She gave the tomcat grin again and left. When she was gone Jed came, in with beer for me and something else for Elton. They were still singing and cheering in the other room. "Do you think this is fair?" Elton demanded. Jed shrugged. "Doesn't matter what I think. Or what Rollo thinks. Determined woman, Rhoda Hendrix." "You'd have no trouble over ignoring that charter contract," Elton told me. "In fact, we could find a reasonable bonus for you -- " "Forget it." I took the beer from Jed and drank it all. Welding up that fuel pod had been hot work, and I was ready for three more. "Listen to them out there," I said. "Think I want them mad at me? They see this as the end of their troubles." "Which it could be," Jed said. can make Jefferson into a pretty good place." Elton wasn't having any. "Lloyd's is not in the business of subsidizing colonies that cannot make a living -- " "So what?" I said. "Rhoda's got the dee and nobody else had enough. She means it, you know." "There's less than # hours," Jed reminded him. "I think I'd get on the line to my bosses, was I you." "Yes." Elton had recovered his polish, but his eyes were narrow. "I'll just do that." They launched the big fuel pod with strap-on solids, just enough thrust to get it away from the rock so I could catch it and lock on. We had hours to spare, and I took my time matching velocities. Then Hal and I went outside to make sure everything was connected right. Hornbinder and two friends were aboard against all my protests. They wanted to come out with us, but I wasn't having any. We don't need help from groundpounders. Janet and Pam took them to the galley for coffee while I made my inspection. Slingshot is basically a strongly built hollow tube with engines at one end and clamps at the other. The cabins are rings around the outside of the tube. We also carry some deuterium and reaction mass strapped on to the main hull, but for big jobs there's not nearly enough room there. Instead, we build a special fuel pod that straps onto the bow. The reaction mass can be lowered through the central tube when we're boosting. Boost cargo goes on forward of the fuel pod. This time we didn't have any going out, but when we caught up to Agamemnon she'd ride there, no different from any other cargo capsule. That was the plan, anyway. Taking another ship in tow isn't precisely common out here. Everything matched up. Deuterium lines, and the elevator system for handling the mass and getting it into the boiling pots aft; it all fit. Took our time, even after we were sure it was working, while the miners who'd come up with the pod fussed and worried. Eventually I was satisfied and they got to head for home. I was still waiting for a call from Janet. Just before they were ready to start up she hailed us. She used an open frequency so the miners could hear. "Rollo, I'm afraid those crewmen Rhoda loaned us will have to go home with the others." "Eh?" One of the miners turned around in the saddle. "What's the problem, Jan?" I asked. "It seems Mr. Hornbinder and his friends have very bad stomach problems. It could be quite serious. I think they'd better see Dr. Stewart as soon as possible." "Goddam. Rhoda's not going to like this," the foreman said. He maneuvered his little open frame scooter over to the airlock. Pam brought his friends out and saw they were strapped in. "Hurry up!" Hornbinder said. "Get moving!" "Sure, Horny." There was a puzzled note in the foreman's voice. He started up the bike. At maximum thrust it might make a twentieth of a gee. There was no enclosed space, it was just a small chemical rocket with saddles, and you rode it in your suit. "Goddamit, get moving," Hornbinder was shouting. If there'd been air you might have heard him a klick away. "You can make better time than this!" I got inside and went up to the control cabin. Jan was grinning. "Amazing what calomel can do," she said. "Amazing." We took time off for a quick kiss before I strapped in. I didn't feel much sympathy for Horny, but the other two hadn't been so bad. The one to feel sorry for was whoever had to clean up their suits. Ship's engines are complicated things. First you take deuterium pellets and zap them with a big laser. The dee fuses to helium. Now you've got far too much hot gas at far too high a temperature, so it it and converts the energy into electricity. Some of that powers the lasers to zap more dee. The rest powers the ion drive system. Take a metal, preferably something with a low boiling point like cesium, but since that's rare out here cadmium generally has to do. Boil it to a vapor. Put the vapor through ionizing screens that you keep charged with power from the fusion system. Squirt the charged vapor through more charged plates to accelerate it, and you've got a drive. You've also got a charge on your ship, so you need an electron gun to get rid of that. There are only about nine hundred things to go wrong with the system. Superconductors for the magnetic fields and charge plates: those take cryogenic systems, and those have auxiliary systems to keep them going. Nothing's simple, and nothing's small, so out of Slingshot's # metric tons, well over a thousand tons is engine. Now you know why there aren't any space yachts flitting around out here. Slinger's one of the smallest ships in commission, and she's bloody big. If Jan and I hadn't happened to hit lucky by being the only possible buyers for a couple of wrecks, and hadn't had friends at Barclay's who thought we might make a go of it, we'd never have owned our own ship. When I tell people about the engines they don't ask what we do aboard S linger when we're on long passages, but they're only partly right. You can't do anything to an engine while it's on. It either works or it doesn't, and all you have to do with it is see it gets fed. It's when the damned things are shut down that the work starts, and that takes so much time that you make sure you've done everything else in the ship when you can't work on the engines. There's a lot of maintenance, as you might guess when you consider that we've got to make everything we need, from air to zweiback. Living in a ship makes you appreciate planets. Space operations go smooth, or generally they don't go at all. I looked at Jan and we gave each other a quick wink. It's a good luck charm we've developed. Then I hit the keys, and we were off. It wasn't a long boost to catch up with Agamemnon. I spent most of it in the contoured chair in front of the control screens. A fifth of a gee isn't much for dirtsiders, but out here it's ten times what we're used to. Even the cats hate it. The high gees saved us on high calcium foods and the drugs we need to keep going in low gravs, and of course we didn't have to put in so much time in the exercise harnesses, but the only one happy about it was Dalquist. He came up to the control cab about an hour out from Jefferson. "I thought there would be other passengers," he said. "Really? Barbara made it pretty clear that she wasn't interested in Pallas. Might go to Mars, but -- " "No, I meant Mr. Hornbinder." "He, uh, seems to have become ill. So did his friends. Happened quite suddenly." Dalquist frowned. "I wish you hadn't done that." "Really? Why?" "It might not have been wise, Captain." I turned away from the screens to face him. "Look, Mr. Dalquist, I'm not sure what you're doing on this trip. I sure didn't need Rhoda's goons along." "Yes. Well, there's nothing to be done now, in any event." "Just why are you aboard? I thought you were in a hurry to get back to Marsport -- " "Butterworth interests may be affected, Captain. And I'm in no hurry" That's all he had to say about it, too, no matter how hard I pressed him on it. I didn't have time to worry about it. As we boosted I was talking with Agamemnon. She passed about half which is awfully close out here. We'd started boosting before she was abreast of the rock, and now we were chasing her. The idea was to catch up to her just as we matched her velocity. Meanwhile, Agamemnon' s crew had their work cut out.    hen we were fifty kilometers behind, I cut the engines to minimum power. I didn't dare shut them down entirely. The fusion power system offers no difficulty with re-starts, but the ion screens foul when they're cooled. Unless they're cleaned or replaced we can lose as much as half our thrust -- and we were going to need every dyne. We could just make out Agamemnon with our telescope. She was too far away to let us see any details. We could see a bright spot of light approaching us, though: Captain Jason Ewert-James and two of his engineering officers. They were using one of Agamemnon's scooters. There wasn't anything larger aboard. It's not practical to carry lifeboats for the entire crew and passenger list, so they have none at all on the larger boostships. Earthside politicians are forever talking about "requiring" lifeboats on passenger-carrying ships, but they'll never do it. Even if they pass such laws, how could they enforce them? Earth has no cops in space. The US and Soviet Air Forces keep a few ships, but not enough to make an effective police force, even if anyone out here recognized their jurisdiction -- which we don't. Captain EwertJames was a typical ship captain. He'd formerly been with one of the big BritishSwiss lines, and had to transfer over to Pegasus when his ship was sold out from under him. The larger lines like younger skippers, which I think is a mistake, but they don't ask my advice. Ewert-James was tall and thin, with a clipped mustache and greying hair. He wore uniform coveralls over his skintights, and in the pocket he carried a large pipe which he lit as soon as he'd asked permission. "Thank you. Didn't dare smoke aboard Agamemnon -- ' ' "Air that short?" I asked. "No, but some of the passengers think it might be. Wouldn't care to annoy them, you know." His lips twitched just a trifle, something less than a conspirator's grin but more than a deadpan. We went into the office. Jan came in, making it a bit crowded. I introduced her as physician and chief officer. "How large a crew do you keep, Captain Kephart?" Ewert-James asked. "Just us. And the kids. My oldest two are on watch at the moment." His face didn't change. "Experienced cadets, eh? Well, we'd best be down to it. Mister Haply will show you what we've been able to accomplish." They'd done quite ,a lot. There was a lot of expensive alloy barstock in the cargo, and somehow they'd got a good bit of it forward and used it to brace up the bows of the ship so she could take the thrust. "Haven't been able to weld it properly, though," Haply said. He was a young third engineer, not too long from being a cadet himself. "We don't have enough power to do welding and run the life support too." Agamemnon' s image was a blur on the screen across from my desk. It looked like a gigantic hydra, or a bullwhip with three short lashes standing out from the handle. The three arms rotated slowly. I pointed to it. "Still got spin on her." "Yes." Ewert-James was grim. "We've been running the ship with that power. Spin her up with attitude jets and take power off the flywheel motor as she slows down." I was impressed. Spin is usually given by running a big flywheel with an electric motor. Since any motor is a generator, Ewert-James 's people had found a novel way to get some auxiliary power for life support systems. "Can you run for a while without doing that?" Jan asked. "It won't be easy transferring reaction mass if you can't." We'd already explained why we didn't want to shut down our engines, and there'd be no way to supply Agamemnon with power from Slingshot until we were coupled together. "Certainly. Part of our cargo is hours without ship's power. Possibly longer." "Good." I hit the keys to bring the plot-tank results onto my office screen. "There's what I get," I told them. "Our outside time limit is Slinger's maximum thrust. I'd make that # centimeters for this load -- " "Which is more than I'd care to see exerted against the bows, Captain Kephart. Even with our bracing." Ewert-James looked to his engineers. They nodded gravely. "We can't do less than ten," I reminded them. "Anything much lower and we won't make Pallas at all." "She'll take ten," Haply said. "I think." The others nodded agreement. I was sure they'd been over this a hundred times as we were closing. I looked at the plot again. "At the outside, then, we've got # hours to transfer twenty-five thousand tons of reaction mass. And we can't work steadily because you'll have to spin up Agamemnon for power, and I can't stop engines -- " Ewert-James turned up both corners of his mouth at that. It seemed to be the closest thing to a smile he ever gave. "I'd say we best get at it, wouldn't you?" Agamemnon didn't look much like Slingshot. We'd closed to a quarter of a klick, and steadily drew ahead of her; when we were past her we'd turn over and decelerate, dropping behind so that we could do the whole cycle over again. Some features were the same, of course. The engines were not much larger than Slingshot's, and looked much the same, a big cylinder covered over with tankage and coils, acceleration outports at the aft end. A smaller tube ran from the engines forward, but you couldn't see all of it because big rounded reaction mass cannisters covered a portion. Up forward the arms grew out of another cylinder. They jutted out at equal angles around the hull, three big arms to contain passenger decks and auxiliary systems. The arms could be folded in between the reaction mass cannisters, and would be when we started boosting. All told she was over four hundred meters long, and with the hundred-meter arms thrust out she looked like a monstrous hydra slowly spinning in space. "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong aft," Buck Dalquist said. He studied the ship from the screens, then pulled the telescope eyepiece toward himself for a direct look. "Failure in the superconductor system," I told him. "Broken lines. They can't contain the fusion reaction long enough to get it into the He nodded. "So Captain EwertJames told me. I've asked for a chance to inspect the damage as soon as it's convenient." "Eh? Why?" "Oh, come now, Captain." Dalquist was still looking through the telescope. "Surely you don't believe in Rhoda Hendrix as a good luck charm?" "But -- " "But nothing." There was no humor in his voice, and when he looked across the cabin at me there was none in his eyes. "She bid far too much for an exclusive charter, after first making certain that you'd be on Jefferson at precisely the proper time. She has bankrupted the corporate treasury to obtain a corner on deuterium. Why else would she do all that if she hadn't expected to collect it back with profit?" "But -- she was going to charge Westinghouse and Iris and the others to boost their cargo. And they had cargo of their own -- " "Did they? We saw no signs of it. And she bid far too much for your charter." "Damn it, you can't believe that," I said, but I didn't mean it. I remembered the atmosphere back at Jefferson. "You think the whole outfit was in on it?" He shrugged. "Does it matter?" The fuel transfer was tough. We couldn't just come alongside and winch the stuff over. At first we caught it on the fly: Agamemnon' s crew would fling out hundred-ton cannisters, then use the attitude jets to boost away from them, not far, but just enough to stand clear. Then I caught them with a bow pod. It wasn't easy. You don't need much closing velocity with a hundred tons before you've got a hell of a lot of energy to worry about. Weightless doesn't mean massless. We could only transfer about four hundred tons an hour that way. After the first ten hour stretch I decided it wouldn't work. There were just too many ways for things to go wrong. "Get rigged for tow," I told Captain Ewert-James. "Once we're hooked up I can feed you power, so you don't have to do that crazy stunt with the spin. I'll start boost at about a tenth of a centimeter. It'll keep the screens hot, and we can winch the fuel pods down." He was ready to agree. I think watching me try to catch those fuel cannisters, knowing that if I made a mistake his ship was headed for Saturn and beyond, was giving him ulcers. First he spun her hard to build up power, then slowed the spin to nothing. The long arms folded alongside, so that Agamemnon took on a trim shape. Meanwhile I worked around in front of her, turned over and boosted in the direction we were travelling, and turned again. The dopplers worked fine for a change. We hardly felt the jolt as Agamemnon settled nose to nose with us. Her crewmen came out to work the clamps and string lines across to carry power. We were linked, and the rest of the trip was nothing but hard work. We could still transfer no more than # tons an hour, meaning bloody hard work to get the whole # tons into Slinger's fuel pod, but at least it was all downhill. Each cannister was lowered by winch, then swung into our own fuel-handling system where Slinger's winches took over. Cadmium's heavy: a cube about two meters on a side weighs a hundred tons. It wasn't big, and it didn't weigh much in a tenth of a centimeter, but you don't drop the stuff either. Finally it was finished, and we could start maximum boost: a whole ten centimeters, about a hundredth of a gee. That may not sound like much, but think of the mass involved. Slinger's # tons were nothing, but there was Agamemnon too. I worried about the bracing EwertJames had put in the bows, but nothing happened. Three hundred hours later we were down at Pallasport. As soon as we touched in my ship was surrounded by Intertel cops.    The room was paneled in real wood. That doesn't sound like much unless you live in the Belt -- but think about it: every bit of that paneling was brought across # Pallas hasn't much in the way of gravity, but there's enough to make sitting down worth doing. Besides, it's a habit we don't seem to be able to get out of. There was a big conference table across the middle of the room, and a dozen corporation reps sat at it. It was made of some kind of plastic that looks like wood; not even the Commission brings furniture from Earth. Deputy Commissioner Ruth Carr sat at a table at the far end, across the big conference table from where I sat in the nominal custody of the Intertel guards. I wasn't happy about being arrested and my ship impounded. Not that it would do me any good to be unhappy... All the big outfits were represented at the conference table. Lloyd's and Pegasus Lines, of course, but there were others, Hansen Enterprises, Westinghouse, Iris, GE, and the rest. "Definitely sabotage, then?" Commissioner Carr asked. She looked much older than she really was; the black coveralls and cap did that. She'd done a good job of conducting the hearings, though, even sending Captain Ewert-James and his engineers out to get new photographs of the damage to Agamemnon's engines. He passed them up from the witness box, and she handed them to her experts at their place to her right. They nodded over them. "I'd say definitely so," Captain Ewert-James was saying. "There was an attempt to lay the charge pattern such that it might be mistaken for meteorite damage. In fact, had not Mr. Dalquist been so insistent on a thorough examination, we might have let it go at that. On close inspection, though, it seems very probable that a series of shaped charges were used." Ruth Carr nodded to herself. She'd heard me tell about Rhoda's frantic efforts to charter my ship. One of Ewert-James 's officers testified that an engineering crewman jumped ship just before Agamemnon boosted out of Earth orbit. The Intertel people had dug up the fact that he'd lived on Jefferson two years before, and were trying to track him down now -- he'd vanished. "The only possible beneficiary would be the Jefferson Corporation," Mrs. Carr said. "The concerns most harmed are Lloyd's and Pegasus Lines -- " "And Hansen Enterprises," the Hansen rep said. Ruth Carr looked annoyed but she didn't say anything. I noticed that the big outfits felt free to interrupt her and wondered if they did that with all the Commissioners, or just her because she hadn't been at the job very long. The Hansen man was an older chap who looked as if he'd done his share of rock mining in his day, but he spoke with a Harvard accent. "There is a strong possibility that the Jefferson Corporation arranged the murder of a retired Hansen employee. As he was insured by a Hansen subsidiary, we are quite concerned." "Quite right." Mrs. Carr jotted notes on the pad in front of her. She was the only one there I'd seen use note paper. The others whispered into wrist recorders. "Before we hear proposed actions, has anyone an objection to disposing of the matter concerning Captain Kephart?" Nobody said anything. "I find that Captain Kephart has acted quite properly, and that the salvage fees should go to his ship." I realized I'd been holding my breath. Nobody wanted my scalp so far as I knew, and Dalquist had been careful to show I wasn't involved in whatever Rhoda had planned -- but still, you never know what'll happen when the big boys have their eye on you. It was a relief to hear her dismiss the whole business, and the salvage fees would pay off a big part of the mortgage. I wouldn't know just how much I'd get until the full Commission back in Marsport acted, but it couldn't come to less "Now for the matter of the Jefferson Corporation." "Move that we send sufficient Intertel agents to take possession of the whole damn rock," the Lloyd's man said. "Second." That was Pegasus Lines. "Discussion?" Ruth Carr asked. "Hansen will speak against the motion," the Hansen rep said. "Mr. Dalquist will speak for us." That surprised hell out of me. I wondered what would happen, and sat quite still, listening. I had no business in there, of course. If there had been some suspicion that I might have been in on Rhoda's scheme I'd never have heard this much, and by rights I ought to have left when she made her ruling, but nobody seemed anxious to throw me out. "First, let me state the obvious," Dalquist said. "An operation of this size will be costly. The use of naked force against an independent colony, no matter how justified, will have serious repercussions throughout the Belt -- " "Let 'em get away with it and it'll really be serious," the Pegasus man said. "Hansen Enterprises has the floor, Mister Papagorus," Commissioner Carr said. Dalquist nodded his thanks. "My point is that we should consider altematives. The proposed action is at least expensive and distasteful, if not positively undesirable." "We'll concede that," the Lloyd's man said. The others muttered agreement. One of the people representing a whole slew of smaller outfits whispered "Here comes the Hansen hooker. How's Dalquist going to make a profit from this?" "I further point out," Dalquist said, "that Jefferson is no more valuable than many other asteroids. True, it has good minerals and water, but no richer resources than other rocks we've not developed. The real value of Jefferson is in its having a working colony and labor force -- and it is highly unlikely that they will work very hard for us if we land company police and confiscate their homes." Everybody was listening now. The chap who'd whispered earlier threw his neighbor an 'I told you so' look. "Secondly. If we take over the Jefferson holdings, the result will be a fight among ourselves over the division of the spoils." There was another murmur of assent to that. They could all agree that something had to be done, but nobody wanted to let the others have the pie without a cut for himself. "Finally. It is by no means clear that any large number of Jefferson inhabitants were involved in this conspiracy. Chairman Hendrix, certainly. I could name two or three others. For the rest -- who knows?" "All right," the Lloyd's man said. "You've made your point. If landing Intertel cops on Jefferson isn't advisable, what do we do? I am damned if we'll let them get away clean." "I suggest that we invest in the Jefferson Corporation," Dalquist said.    The doghouse hadn't changed. There was a crowd outside in the main room. They were all waiting to hear how rich they'd become. When I came in even Hornbinder smiled at me. They were getting wild drunk while Dalquist and I met with Rhoda in the back room. She didn't like what he was saying. "Our syndicate will pay off the damage claims due to Pegasus Lines and Lloyd's," Dalquist told her. "And pay Captain Kephart's salvage fees. In addition, we will inequipment. In return you will deliver # of the Jefferson Corporation stock to us." He wasn't being generous. With a # bloc it was a cinch they could find enough more among the rockrats for a majority. Some of them hated everything Rhoda stood for. "You've got to be crazy," Rhoda said. "Sell out to a goddam syndicate of corporations? We don't want any of you here!" Dalquist' s face was grim. "I am trying to remain polite, and it is not easy, Ms. Hendrix. You don't seem to appreciate your position. The corporation representatives have made their decision, and the Commission has ratified it. You will either sell or face something worse." "I don't recognize any commissions," Rhoda said. "We've always been independent, we're not part of your goddam fascist commission. Christ almighty, you've found us guilty before we even knew there 'd be a trial! We weren't even heard!" "Why should you be? As you say, you're independent. Or have been up to now." "We'll fight, Dalquist. Those company cops will never get here alive. Even if they do -- " "Oh, come now." Dalquist made an impatient gesture. "Do you really believe we'd take the trouble of sending Intertel police, now that you're warned? Hardly. We'll merely seize all your cargo in the pipeline and see that no ship comes here for any reason. How long will it be before your own people throw you out and come to terms with us?" That hit her hard. Her eyes narrowed as she thought about it. "I can see you don't live to enjoy what you've done -- " "Nonsense." I figured it was my turn. "Rhoda, you may not belive this, but I heard him argue them out of sending the cops without any warning at all. They were ready to do it." The shouts came from the bar as Jed opened the door to see if we "Everything all right here?" Jed asked. "NO!" Rhoda shoved herself away from the table and glared at Dalquist. "Not all right at all! Jed, he's -- " "I know what he's saying, Rhoda," Jed told her. "Cap'n Rollo and I had a long talk with him last night." "With the result that I'm speaking to you at all," Dalquist said. "Frankly, I'd rather see you dead." His face was a bitter mask of hatred, and the emotionless expression fell away. He hated Rhoda. "You've killed the best friend I ever had, and I find that I need you anyway. Captain Anderson has convinced me that it will be difficult to govern here without you, which is why you'll remain nominally in control after this sale is made." "No. No sale." "There will be. Who'll buy from you? Who'll sell to you? This was a unanimous decision. You're not independent, no matter how often you say you are. There's no place for your kind of nationalism out here." "You bastards. The big boys. You think you can do anything you like to us." Dalquist recovered his calm as quickly as he'd lost it. I think it was the tone Rhoda used; he didn't want to sound like her. I couldn't tell if I hated him or not. "We can do whatever we can agree to do," Dalquist said. "You seem to think the Corporations Commission is some kind of government. It isn't. It's just a means for settling disputes. We've found it more profitable to have rules than to have fights. But we're not without power, and everyone's agreed that you can't be let off after trying what you did." "So we pay for it," Jed said. Dalquist shrugged. "There's no government out here. Are you ready to bring Rhoda to trial? Along with all the others involved?" Jed shook his head. "I doubt that it -- " "And there's the matter of restitution, which you can't make anyway. And you're bankrupt, since you sent no cargo to Luna and the window's closed." "Just who the hell is this syndicate?" Rhoda demanded. Dalquist's expression didn't change, but there was a note of triumph in his voice. He'd won, and he knew it. "The major sums are put up by Hansen Enterprises." "And you'll be here as their rep." He nodded. "Certainly. I've been with Hansen most of my life, Ms. Hendrix. The company trusts me to look out for its best interests. As I trusted Joe Colella. Until he retired he was my best field agent." She didn't say anything, but her face was sour. "You might have got away with this if you hadn't killed Joe," Dalquist said. "But retired or not, he was a Hansen man. As I'm sure you found when he discovered your plan. We take care of our people, Ms. Hendrix. Hansen is a good company. "For company men." Jed's voice was flat. He looked around the small back room with its bare rock walls, but I think he was seeing through those walls, out through the corridors, beyond to the caves where the rockrats tried to make homes. "A good outfit for company men. But it won't be the same, for us." Outside they were still singing about the great days coming.  You know about Athletics Anonymous? You get the urge to exercise, you call one of the numbers on their list. Someone comes over and drinks with you until the urge goes away. I've been thinking of getting Jerry a subscription. In the four years since we met, Jerry has made of me a sailor and a skindiver and a backpacker. I now own a Silver Knapsack patch and half of a boat ( Ariadne , built by Jerry and a friend I intend to meet some day). It's not that I've given up laziness as a way of life. But every so often Jerry points at my belly and giggles hysterically, and off we go into the wild with half a dozen Boy Scouts, or over to Catalina with Barry Workman as crew. (Two Captains, one Crew. Oh, well.) Meanwhile, we spent three years writing a novel. Then six months writing a second. A collaboration takes practice. We've got a third novel half written and two more planned. The Poumelles and the Heinleins are good friends. It fits, because Jerry fits Robert Heinlein's image of the omnicompetent man. He holds Ph.D.s in Psychology and Political Science, a Master's in Experimental Statistics, Bachelor degrees in History and Engineering. He was in the aerospace industry, in space medicine, for a full decade, including two years as Chief of the Experimental Stress Program, Human Factors Laboratories, Boeing Company. He fought in Korea as a Lieutenant. He taught in college. He has managed political campaigns for Mayor Yorty, and was Executive Assistant to the Mayor in #. He's married to a lady as tough and as full of drive as himself. Roberta Poumelle teaches in a girls' jail. They've been married for sixteen years; the family includes four boys and a dog. A disillusioned ex-Communist, Jerry now stands somewhere to the right of Gengis Khan. "I like to think of myself as a twelfth century liberal," he says. It's hardly surprising that he prefers hard science fiction. He speaks rudely of stories in which the background is sloppy or badly researched. He is as critical of bad sociology, politics, and history as he is of bad physics. He finds even the sociology of my own future history unbelievable. Fuel considerations make my Belt civilization too inefficient to survive, he says; the Belt government would be on Earth. Four years ago, over lots of brandy and coffee, we explored the possibility of collaborating on a novel. At the time Jerry had written some short science fiction and two espionage novels. He still pours brandy in his coffee; I taught him that. Another result was that he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. No, he left his knife in his pocket. He offered to give me full veto over any disagreement on the proposed novel, and to do the final rewrite from scratch. That was something I insisted on: one of us had to rewrite from the beginning, to smooth out any differences in our styles. He didn't know he'd be typing out a # ,#word novel. He complained bitterly, but he did it. Later we had to cut out # words... It turns out that Jerry's skills match the holes in mine, and vice versa, indecently well. Jerry can handle politics and military matters; I try to steer clear of them. I prefer two or three or four people in a room; Jerry can handle a full session of Congress. But my imagery is more vivid, and there were no aliens at all in his thousand-year-old interstellar Empire until I dropped the Moties right in the middle of it. We've been teaching each other, these past four years. I wrote some of Motie social system and carved out the Keeper subgroup. We criticize each other's stories, to our mutual benefit. We are both competitive types. At the beginning I expect we each wondered if the other would hold up his end of the collaboration. Jerry says he stopped wondering about me one rainy night when, during a the Hell over my garden. We went on a snail hunt. We must have killed nearly two hundred of the tiny marauders. And Jerry laughed hysterically at my determination to get more snails than him. No way will either of us fail to put all he's got into a story. No way will we write the same story twice. Our five novels, written and merely outlined, include a tale of alien contact and interstellar war and politics, a trip through Dante's Hell, a study of social changes in an arcology, a disaster-and-survival novel, and the first serious treatment of alien invaIt's rather wonderful, how our advances keep going up. -- Larry Niven mmsm v.V-'j Given the wrong axioms, the best logic is worse than useless! Autumn in Tryllmynrein. Josep Pachryntz stood in his darkened room, looking out over the city he loved. He wondered when the lovely rain would end. It was the sort of rain he liked best, the kind that is too hard to be a drizzle and too soft to chase people back indoors. The rain that infuriates because it soaks without pelting. The soft shower that makes it easy to hate the reason you are out in it. They would be out in it now, perhaps, the people of Tryllmynrein, thronging in some small ornamental square, rallying against the oppression of the Thinkers. If made Josep proud to think that the protest was his doing. For without that hatred, without that constant danger, men would seek the absolute power of the Thinkers, and civilization would collapse. Power is a valuable thing, and the men who wield it must be made to pay for it. Else they become corrupt. That was why Josep Pachryntz, as the Leader of the Opposition, was the most beloved man in the city; it was his job to stir the hatred of the people against the might of the Thinkers.  Josep let his eyes wander to the other side of the city. Four pillars of crimson light proclaimed the location of the Palace of Thought. Four identical pillars of golden light, one at each side of the tower in which he lived, proclaiming the residence of the Opposition. His eyes sank softly over the covered glow of Tryllmynrein and came to rest at the center, on the swirling pastels of the Great Top. It spun and shifted, spinning wishes to all those who wanted to balance themselves and their fortunes against the universe of chance. The door chimes sounded. Josep checked the security panel and opened the door. A tall, thin man stood outside. He had black hair and his face looked as hard as iron. "Josep Pachryntz?" the man asked. "Yes." Pachryntz's heart stirred strangely as he saw the almost legendary black coveralls of the Guardians. It had been rumoured that the Thinkers had finally eliminated the Guardians, for they were never seen. "I'm Gordon. You ordered a riot outside the Palace of Thought?" "I did," said Josep. There was something odd about the strict formality of Gordon's speech. He let his hand slide along the door jamb to the button that would summon help. "Stanmetton is dead." said Gordon. "The rioters got him. They sent you this token of their appreciation for your work." Gordon reached into his purse and took out a small package. Josep did not take the package. A picture of Stanmetton ran through his mind, the Thinker of Tryllmynrein itself. A small, balding man with an ingratiating air who had tried all of the thirty years of his office to please the people. It would be a loss. But that was the price one paid for being a Thinker. For power. Power that must never be allowed to become too attractive. "All right, then," said Gordon. He unwrapped the package, held out its contents for Josep to see. Josep reeled against the door, stomach churning. It was a part of a man. "Who sent this?" he gasped after a moment. "It doesn't matter," said Gordon. "But I'll tell you. It was Carteling, your deputy. He seemed to think you'd be amused at having a souvenir." "It's disgusting." said Josep sharply. "I'll have him demoted. I'll throw him out!" "You won't have the chance." said Gordon. "When Stanmetton was butchered, the Great Top chose a new Thinker for Tryllmynrein. I'm here to see that you are safely conducted to the Palace of Thought. Before Carteling and the mob get here." Josep Pachryntz shivered slightly. The Universe seemed to be just two steps away, but if he took those two steps he would have to come to terms with that statement. That statement that had to be a lie. Deep inside him he knew that it had to be a lie. "There's a button here, by my hand," said Josep. If I push it there will be a hundred of the Opposition in here in a matter of minutes. Take your damned joke and get out of here and I won't push it." "Guardians have a certain duty," said Gordon. "Go on and push the button if you want. Then we'll both die here. It won't matter to me." Josep slammed the door in Gordon's face and ran to the tank. He pushed the button and watched the letters of the news broadcast float before him. Josep smashed the button with his fist and went back to the door. Gordon was still there, still ironhard, waiting. Josep's head swam as he stepped through the portal. Gordon took one step forward and had him against the wall with a single swift motion. Josep struggled, but his breath was cut off by an arm against his throat. He watched, weakly gasping for breath as Gordon brought the small, glowing iron to his cheek. The smell of his own burned flesh crept up his nostrils as he tried to cry out at the pain. Then it was over and the anesthetic took effect. He was branded with the sign of the Thinkers; now there could never be any escape. "Come on," said Gordon, releasing him. "We have to hurry. If we don't get to the Palace before sunrise they'll find you." The music and the lights went out and the lift stopped. They were in a little bubble of darkness, and fear was trying to get in. "Cafteling is here," said Gordon. A moment passed and then the ceiling of the lift glowed cherry red and started to melt. Drops of molten metal fell to the floor and Josep flattened himself against the wall. Soon there was a hole in the ceiling big enough for a man to pass through. Gordon leaped up, grabbed the glowing edges of the hole and pulled himself through. "Come on," he called softly. Then Josep, too, leaped up, his nerves shrinking from the contact of the hot metal. But Gordon had him before his hands could make contact, and he was hefted through with only a small burn on his left shoulder. Gordon's hands were softly wet and bloody where they were not charred. A tiny beam of light appeared from Gordon's hand and searched the wall of the shaft. "Ah," he said, and pushed a button concealed in the safety-catch mechanism. The car beneath them started to rise. "Does that restore power to the building?" Josep asked. "No," said Gordon. "Only to the lift cables. Has your organization discovered the escape-mechanism at the top of each building?" "Not that I know of," said Josep. Gordon shone the light upward and picked out the huge machinery of the lift. There were great wheels and cogs, around which the cables passed. As they came closer a section of one wheel slid out revealing a door. Gordon led the way through it, then shut it behind them to baffle pursuit. "It won't open unless they use the emergency button," he said. "They'll think the car was at the top to begin with. I don't think anyone knew about your being home, did they?" "They could have guessed," said Josep. "Then they will guess that they were wrong when they see that you aren't there." "They'll find that...object...that you dropped in the hall," said Josep. "True. But that could be a good reason for you to go out. They don't know that I delivered it. And they won't find the man who was supposed to." They emerged on a tiny balcony. The tower of the Opposition was covered with such balconies, many of them ornamental. It was dark, and Pachryntz's erstwhile ally, the rain, was now his cold enemy, through which Tryllmynrein was a grey glow far beneath them. "Will we be safe here?" asked Josep. "Where there is no one to kill you, you are safe," said Gordon. "By definition." "What now?" Josep asked. "Take this," said Gordon. It was a tube, about three inches long, painted black to make it inconspicuous. Josep recognized it as a nelfer beam. "Haven't you anything else I could use?" "That's the weapon officially prescribed for Thinkers." said Gordon. "If it's used properly it can do anything from putting the victim to ers are too busy to leam to use it properly, so it usually maims or paralyzes. You can't really blame them for not caring. The people they use it on are generally out to kill them." The wind blew harshly at this height. In a matter of seconds Josep's silks were soaked through. As the mists were whipped away he could see the reflected lights on the pools and basins of the city far below. Then the rain shrouded them again. He wondered what Tryllmynrein would look like if it were open to the sky instead of all illumination being masked. This greatest of cities would scintillate like a gigantic diamond. But then, the glory of the Palace and the Opposition would be dimmed, and the Great Top would be hard to find out there at the center. "Now!" said Gordon. He leaped over the edge of the balcony. Josep followed without thinking, and found himself caught about the waist by Gordon's powerful arm. He got his balance and realized that he was sliding through the air on a downward trajectory toward the lower roof of another building. "How does this work?" Josep asked. "I don't know," said Gordon. "It's one of the things the Thinkers keep secret." A moment later they landed on the wet and slippery roof of the building. Gordon held onto Josep and led the way across the wet tiles to a parapet. Cast metal grillwork decorated the side of the building, and without looking downward # , Gordon climbed out and down the side. Josep followed, trying to block out his fear. It took three hours. They had io go sideways to avoid windows and balconies, and when they reached the mosaic pavement, Pachryntz's hands were bleeding, his arms ached with the unfamiliar exertions and his heart pounded in his chest as he leaned against the building to catch his breath . "From now on, we run." said Gordon. The Guardian started off at a trot. Josep started to call out to him, but instead, followed. In a nightmare they ran through the wonderland city of Tryllmynrein, casting eyes about fearfully at gaudy-colored gems set in golden walls and silken cloths. But rain had thinned the puffiness of fashion and the folk who walked the streets paid them no heed. How merciful, thought Josep, that the skies turned the overblown inhabitants to thin, soaked rats in gay rags, and made all unrecognizable. Josep 's mind was fuzzy when he fell subject to the insidious music. It was a shock for him to note how close it was. Ahead and very close the Great Top was spinning, and that, in itself, sent shivers through him. For the Great Top was a twofold god-goddess. It was the answer and the question at once, and Josep was afraid of it. Somewhere the Princess sat, watching and deciding. You came to the Great Top and made your wishes. Sometimes the Great Top answered them, and sometimes it didn't. Sometimes the Princess intervened. But for each wish granted, someone had to pay. The balance had to be maintained. If someone was given joy, someone else had to be damned. There were rules to be kept, and over all there was the Princess. You couldn't know how close you had to be to the Great Top for your wish to be recorded in the Cosmic Bowl, because the effective radius was always changing. You had to have faith. And you had to fifty-fifty chance. Heaven or Hell. Those who dared stood in the circle at the base of the Great Top, next to the brass rail that guarded the point on which it whirled. Josep had never risked a wish on the Great Top. He didn't want to. He was afraid of that black fifty percent. Ask the Opposition for Miracles! the Thinkers said. The music swelled, and Gordon led him around a corner and into the circle of the Great Top. Josep drew back, pressed himself against the wall inlaid with ivory figures. The Opposition had never dealt in miracles, but it could guarantee the right to hate, and that with nothing in return. There were no chances to be taken with the Opposition. An Opposition ground-car shot out of a street on the other side of the circle, and went into orbit around the base of the Great Top. Josep Pachryntz froze against the wall and stared up at the Great Top. It was huge and beautiful, spinning on its tiny point, leaning first to one side, then to the other, as if at any moment it would topple, and crush the devout, bounce from one side of the circle to the other in a musical death rite. It was gold and pink and purple, and then the colours became soft, pastel, lavenders and orchids. The whole thing turned the color of the best persimmons, warm, with a frosty purple overlaying it. Josep Pachryntz's face appeared on the side of the Great Top, projected from the ground car. It muddied the colors. The rasping voice of Carteling blared out and destroyed the calm spell of the music. It was a good trick, thought Pachryntz with professional pride. One he had invented himself. Interrupt the faithful at their wishing and they will do anything to get rid of you. Even run the risk of an unprofitable wish that might doom them if it came out wrong. Of course, the Princess would probably intervene if anyone wished another dead. But if enough people wished Josep Pachryntz caught so that they could get back to their own wishes, then the odds were that Pachryntz would be caught. Suddenly Pachryntz remembered old Murphy, who was hanged by the thumbs over a fire the day he was elected. This was the technique he'd used on Murphy. And Murphy hadn't wanted to be elected either. It didn't matter at all, he thought, whether you wanted it or not. No one did. If the Opposition got its hands on you...And as Leader of the treason would make him the most hated Thinker in... Pachryntz stopped short in his musing. He was a Thinker now, not the Leader of the Opposition. His loyalties must now be to the Thinkers. If they were not, then the balance between the Thinkers and the Opposition would be upset, and civilization in danger. He was the enemy now. The men in the Opposition car out there in the circle were after him. Gordon grabbed at his shoulder and tried to pull him back into the alley. But it was too late. A woman stood screaming and pointing at him, and the crowd was surging toward him. The car stopped and shot a spot-light at him. Josep Pachryntz wished the earth would open and swallow him. It did. A. jagged sword of light jerked into being and swiveled around them. In the cool, damp darkness that followed Josep heard himself speak. "I wished the earth would swallow me up," he said. "From the looks of this place, it did," Gordon replied a moment later. They were in a tunnel with walls of unfinished concrete. As Gordon led the way around a bend, they were faced with the dim glow of a fluorescent panel inset with innumerable dials and switches. Several massive pillars rose from the floor to the ceiling close above their heads. "We came straight down," said Gordon. "This is the chamber beneath the Great Top. There is a tunnel around here somewhere leading us to the Palace." He walked to one side of the room, then the other. Finally he found the door he was seeking. "I didn't know there were tunnels under the city," said Pachryntz. "You aren't supposed to. But we'll decide what to do about your forbidden knowledge after we get you to the Palace." They walked on in silence. The tunnel split several times. Josep realized that Gordon was following a trail of foot-prints in the dust of the floor. "These tunnels have been sealed for centuries," said Gordon. "Neither the Thinkers nor the Opposition is supposed to know about them. Even if Carteling hadn't already been in the building, I wouldn't have brought you through the tunnels. Only the Guardians know about them, and we don't use them very often. Only when we must, such as during the construction and assembly of the Great Top." "Just what is the function of the Guardians?" asked Pachryntz. "To maintain the status quo. The safety of civilization is our charge." "When are we expected at the Palace?" "We aren't expected at all. Not many get through these days. The Opposition has become most efficient. If it maintains that efficiency, it won't be too long before the only effective people left are the Opposition. Then the Great Top will elect them as Thinkers. The brains will once again belong to the Thinkers, and civilization will go on." "What about you?" said Josep. "Doesn't the Great Top ever elect a Guardian?" "It can't," said Gordon. "We are dead." "What do you mean?" "Quite simple," said Gordon. "Thinkers require a degree of volition, independence, if you will, to make decisions. But we Guardians don't need that. We are taken at birth and...corrupted. As men. Things are built into us. We can do only that which furthers our society. We have no will. We are as good as dead. The dead are not elected." The footprints went up a thin metal stair at the side of the tunnel. Gordon went up and opened the door. It was dark, and Pachryntz felt apprehensive as he followed. He heard Gordon cross the room, and then the lights went on. They were in the midst of a party. People stood all about with glasses upraised and laughter on their faces. But there was no sound, no t movement. And the people were I covered with dust. There was a i faint, unpleasant smell in the room. I "They're all dead," said Josep. "Yes," said Gordon. He moved f through the gathering toward a door t on the other side of the room. "For some time now." ' Josep followed him. The party had spread into the next room. All the guests had been caught in r mid-motion, frozen. Gordon pushed r past a woman in a rotting white v gown. She fell to the floor and shat) tered. A foul smelling cloud of dust s arose to choke him. I There were three more such j rooms, and then they came out into t a clean, well-lighted corridor. Gori don shut the door of the last room I behind them and they both took a breath of the sweet air. "Who are they?" asked Josep. r "The dead. Does it matter?" r "Yes." f "They were," Gordon said, "the t technicians who assembled the  Great Top. When they were i finished they had a party. While it t was in progress, the rooms were c filled with gas and they died t quickly and painlessly." c "Why?" said Pachryntz.  "Who knows?" answered Gori don. He shrugged his shoulders and started off down the corridor. r "Who killed them?" asked Pachryntz. c "The Guardians, under orders I from the Thinkers. It could have r The ultimate reason is balance, as it is for all things. Someone must live, someone must die." "The Thinkers should be able to find a better way of maintaining the balance," said Josep. "They should," agreed Gordon, "but they don't." "Elaborate." "The Thinkers, too, are corrupted. But only after their election, not from birth. That is something we take care of when we first bring you here. New thoughts, as you should have guessed, are dangerous. They are likely to endanger the power of the Thinkers if they are in the wrong hands. And they must be in the wrong hands, because the Thinkers cannot have new thoughts. ' ' "Why not?" asked Josep. "Because if they were capable of new thoughts it would give them more power, and that would make for an imbalance between the Thinkers and the Opposition. The struggle for power would mount in an upward circle until one side overthrew the other. That is the function of the Guardians. To maintain the balance. So we perform a simple operation on the Thinkers, to prevent them from doing anything original." "But the Opposition can have new thoughts!" said Josep. "True. But, a few new ideas cannot prevail against the accumulated learning of the race. And we make sure that the Opposition has no time to invent miracles, is kept too busy hating." "But if the Thinkers can't do anything new, where do the miracles come from? Where did the Great Top come from?" Gordon walked faster, getting a few paces ahead of Pachryntz. "From these rooms, here, under the city," he said, without turning back to Josep. "From this warehouse. This museum. When they want something new to amuse or pacify the people, they delve into the ancient records and find a new toy. A toy invented tens of thousands of years ago, perhaps before we came to this world. Before the establishment of the status quo. Before we were corrupted and in turn corrupted the brains of the Thinkers." "Before... said Pachryntz. "Before..." Josep's mind whirled. There was a time in his childhood when he had asked questions. Questions about...about...what? About how things were before he was in the world. He'd been told not to ask such questions, and eventually he had stopped. For how many generations had this gone on? "It is all arranged," said Gordon. A pattern in which we are corrupted so that we will perform certain functions without being able to stop ourselves. And there is nothing we can ever do to break the pattern, save by the wildest chance. A chance that is as improbable as the results of a wish on the Great Top." Pachryntz thought: That is only a fifty-fifty proposition. Why... ? And then he knew. "We'll have to walk around that green line," said Gordon. They were passing an open door. A green line was painted in a semi-circle before the door. The room itself was dark and dusty. "That is the room of the Princess," Gordon continued. "Guardians cannot go into it. So it isn't kept clean." Pachryntz stopped. "Keep walking," said Gordon. "I can summon a regiment of Guardians here in a minute. You can't escape now. You might as well come along." His voice got slower and slower. He started to turn. Josep Pachryntz lifted the small black tube in his hand and aimed it at Gordon's head. He fired. Gordon fell, but shrieked a warning as he did so. Shouts echoed down the hall. Josep turned and ran into the darkness of the Princess's Room. His footsteps sent back tinny echoes that testified to the sheer size of the place. He held one hand before him and walked farther into the blackness. After a while he slowed and listened. He turned and looked back at the door. It was far away and small. "Thank you!" The words came from somewhere out there in the dark. Josep pressed closer to the metal of the...whatever it was. There were all manner of things in the darkness. Huge metal things of undeterminable function, but that were warm to the touch. He had sat on the floor by this one for a long time. "Thank you!" the words came again, the only sound that had disturbed the deep silence of the place. The voice was weak. Gordon was out there somewhere, looking for him. "I haven't got long," Gordon called. "I don't blame you if you don't trust me. But listen. You haven't anything to lose by listening." Josep let his breath out slowly, silently. "Do you know about emptiness, Josep Pachryntz?" said Gordon. There was pain in the voice. "You would, if they'd got you to the room with the scalpels and probes. They do something to you there. They seal you off in a little corner of your brain, while the rest of it does their bidding, lives by their rules, thinks their thoughts. "Listen, Josep. They gave me something to kill the pain. They wanted information; I told them I'd bring you back. And before they could stop to think that a Guardian shouldn't be able to enter this room, I had walked across the line. You see, you burned away the blocks they had built in my brain. I can talk now, for the first time in my life. I can put my thoughts into words. You don't know what that means, Josep, but if you ever leave this room, you will. "I don't know what's in here, Josep. I took a chance that it might be something really important. If the Guardians are kept out, it must be. But the Thinkers can come in, if they want to. You've got to hurry if you're going to do anything." The wounded Guardian paused, and seemed to laugh. "Do something, Josep. Anything. It doesn't matter what. But the stronger it is, the better." There was a pain-wracked silence, and then Gordon continued. "Know what I'd do if I had the chance? I'd make a wish. I'd wish the whole thing were ended. Not just my life -- everything... "Anyway, I wanted to thank you, Josep. I wanted to...thank you. Because just talking into the darkness like this, not knowing whether or not you even hear, is all that my life has ever been worth. All that has ever mattered. The rest is...less than nothing. "I hope you can hear me. But don't take pity and shoot me again -- they will see the beam and get you. Stay free. Do something. Avenge us, Josep. Avenge us all!" Pachryntz didn't know whether to trust Gordon or not. But then his doubts were removed; a tiny spark shot across the room from the distant portal. It touched the floor before Gordon and exploded. In the light Pachryntz saw the wounded man sink to his knees and heard him call out: "Gas...run..." Then Gordon fell and did not move again. By the dying light of the gas bomb Josep had also seen a door about sixty feet away. He ran toward it. A second bomb exploded behind him, and he corrected his course. A third bomb went off, and his hand was on the knob. He tugged against the ancient hinges and the door slowly opened. Without looking he plunged into the green glare that spilled forth. Josep stood for long seconds, his back against the door, his heart pounding, and looked down the length of the chamber. The room he had just vacated was but an antechamber to this one. Two long rows of monstrous metal cubes made an aisle at least half a mile in length. The cubes were covered with meters and dials that glowed feebly in the lambent atmosphere. The green light came from a huge screen at the opposite end of the aisle that flickered and swirled and beckoned. Josep walked dazedly toward it. As he approached he noticed a chair that was virtually a throne facing the base of the screen; a small black dot centered at the bottom of a three-hundred-foot-high picture. For all its massiveness, thd chair reminded him by comparison of a fly-speck. The screen came into focus as he approached, and he saw images move fleetingly across it. When he had nearly reached the chair he saw it was occupied. He moved slowly around to the front. The Princess sat there, waiting. Her face was wrinkled and sallow, but it was obvious that she had once been beautiful. Her face bore a look of fulfillment, a sweet, sad contentment that kept her from being ghastly, even in death. Josep wondered who she was, and what she had done. Was she from a time before the stagnation of civilization, or was she merely a Thinker who had found something in life? He wished he had known her. In front of her was a console with keys. Each key had two positions, and all the keys flickered constantly. Josep looked from the console to the screen and back again. This was how the Princess intervened in the granting of wishes. But...it had been a long time since the Princess had made any judgements. Josep reached down and punched a button. On the screen a single picture came into focus. He watched a little boy leap up in delight as a toy cart appeared out of nowhere before him. The key flicked away from under his finger and another picture appeared. A woman turned and rushed away as a man whispered into her ear. The balance was maintained. The boy got his cart, and the woman a lost...what? Josep really didn't h care. She had gambled, and lost, n Joy and sorrow were, after all, so ic intimately tied together...for every d emotion an equal and opposite emoa tion. Josep looked from the console to n the screen, and then to the dead si Princess. She had died here, playing I this game, with all the world for her v toys. n Suddenly Josep Pachryntz caught v a glimpse of a pattern, but before it g was fully in his grasp, he lost it. An s insight, something that made him v shudder, a confusion, and then it had escaped him, leaving only a s sick hunger, an emptiness. tl There was a problem. Here, of s all places there had to be a solution, tl even to a problem such as his. But how long could people wait? How tl long had they waited? s He felt as a physicial weight the v centuries in which the Thinkers, the tl Guardians, and the Opposition had c played their game. Viciously he shook the throne and the Princess s clattered suddenly to the floor, with a paper-dry sound of tearing flesh Vi and bones and the susurrus of dry, rotting skirts. He seated himself beC fore the screen and watched the w myriad images flash by.  Carteling's face appeared, staring it intently at something outside of a Pachryntz' s view. n Pachryntz stabbed his finger down on the dark side of the key. s Carteling ceased to be a problem to e anybody. Josep cursed himself for his stupidity. For his anger. For the nature that left him prey to petty ideas and passions and hatreds. He didn't watch what happened to balance Carteling's destruction. After many images that he ignored another face appeared on the screen, a face he knew. The image loomed larger, seemingly of its own volition, as if the wish this man was making were too strong to deny. It was Gordon, enveloped in deadly gases, but clinging to a life he despised, holding on, and wishing with the strength of the dying. Had it really been only seconds since he had left Gordon for dead in the outer chamber? He watched the screen intently, waiting for something to appear. Gordon's lips moved, and though there was no sound, Josep knew instinctively what the wish was. It was as if Gordon were projecting the single thought into his mind, so clearly did he mouth the words.  wish Pachryntz to find the answer. Josep reached out and pressed the white side of the key. At first nothing happened, as the Great Top studied the problem with which it was presented. If there were a solution within the range of its capabilities, it would solve. But as the seconds, the minutes, passed, no solution appeared. The machines in the throne room screamed wildly, tortured beyond endurance. All the other keys on the board of the console tried to spring up to a neutral position, but Josep kept that one key firmly depressed with the strength of desperation. His entire being was focused to one purpose -- to hold the key down. Silence. The screen went black. Josep held the key down. Then, with a low moan, the greenish light returned. Now, one of the black keys was depressed, as well. His eyes went to the screen, searching for the solution, for the answer to Gordon's wish. It was dawn, and Tryllmynrein lay before him. A light haze threaded its way through the beautiful, shadowed streets. It was a quiet time; the people were still asleep. The many-balconied buildings with their lacquer and gold were set knew the sky was blue, and brilliant, despite the pervading green tinge in all the screen's images. He had lived all his life in Tryllmynrein, and the city lived in his heart, alive and full of color. First the power went. The pillars of light that stood near the Palace of Thought, and the towers of the Opposition, dimmed and vanished. The city ground to a halt; because it was a city built and held together with various kinds of power. When the power was gone, it crumbled. Before his eyes, Tryllmynrein crumbled. And Josep knew that he was the cause. He was glad that he could not hear the screams of the ings. The last thing to go was the Great Top. It spun wildly and lost its equilibrium; its rim touched the ground and it crashed into the building with the carved ivory inlay and shattered. The pictures on the screen flickered wildly. Josep saw the Guardians, long regiments of them, falling dead. He saw the Thinkers clutching their heads and tumbling off their high stools. He saw blood pouring from the mouths and noses of the officials of the Opposition. Then, as the machines around him roared, the screen went black for the last time and he was alone in the darkness. He would never understand; he was sure of that. If all this had been equal to the solution, then he would never understand the problem. But it was enough to have provided that solution. He waited. When the machines were completely dead, when there was not a sound but the beating of his own heart and the singing of his own nerves, he took out a pocket lighter and made a torch from a twisted piece of the Princess's clothing. By that dim, flickering light he found the answer, at least in allegory, lying on the console in front of him. He stared at the small mirror in his hand for a long time before he went up to watch the sun set and help pull survivors from the ruins of Tryllmynrein.  i t thousand years after the last of coerced into cooperation by Union's a series of limited nuclear wars atomic power. Americans have polarized into two Union, however, must use this groups -- Structure-Folk, who live power sparingly lest it destroy the in huge constructions along the Helium extraction and distribution coasts (Union), and Tribesmen, facilities. Moreover, Ecofreak dewho occupy Hinterland. mands high-ranking hostages who The urban structures reach three live in the most vulnerable tribal thousand meters into the sky and settlements, exposed to atomic atdepend on the levitating effect of tack along with the natives. The gravitron, a field-force generated in situation thus is one of precarious tower pits. Liquid Helium is needed balance. absence of the gas, structure colarrives in Ricardo, capital of lapse is inevitable -- StructureUnion. Bono and his delegation have Man's greatest dread. come to renegotiate Helium The only economical source of Deliveries -- a "Helium Round." Helium is in Texahoma, an area But this time Bono has a hidden controlled by the Ecofreak tribe, objective -- to obtain some elecTribesmen have a powerful antitronic parts that the Activists, a technology ideology-verging-onradical group within the Ecofreak religion, and to them Union is the tribe who have recently gained incarnation of evil, but they are power, need to bring to fruition their plan to throw off the structure-yoke once and for all. Following a reception in one of Bureau of Tribal Affairs, reports to Both men are upset because Ecofreak's Activist faction is an unhas always negotiated with Accommodationists. The men know nothing about Mycal Bono and not Ecofreak's ruthless young leader. Mention of Tack reminds Proctor of a troublesome episode involving of Bernard Unsler, Union's leader ("the Unifier"). During a stay in Ricardo, Tack and Regina fell in love, suggesting to the Unifier the notion of a Grand Alliance between Union and Hinterland to be achieved by intermarriage -- an idea that is abhorrent both to Proctor and to Jonny Tack's father, both hard-liners. The marriage didn't come off. Aside from the fact that the Activists represent an unknown quantity, Proctor is also worried because he is fomenting a plot to overthrow the Unsler dynasty -- a move that will require Ecofreak help. Also, aide, has been unusually interested in the negotiations. Proctor instructs French to meet with ANmanent ambassador in Ricardo, to learn more about the tribe's strategy before the talks begin a week later. Barney is a hold-over Accommodationist who wants to see jonny Tack fail politically. He tricks Bono's group, into revealing that Ecofreak has developed a new device that inhibits nuclear reactions. Part of the device is a switch made of silcoplast (a cheap synthetic) welded to copper. Only Union can do the welding, which requires special facilities. Over some years Ecofreak could develop the welding technology, but Jonny Tack is impatient and wants to get the sil-parts in a hurry. Later Barney tells Rivera French enough to put Union on its guard. After delivering the news to Proctor at a late-night ball game, French is attacked on his way home by a group of "flames," members of an heir. French kills one of the flames during a chase and escapes. The episode brings home to French again that Sidney's power is growing as the Unifier's faculties slowly fail. Sidney and his flames delight Proctor's power and popularity. The traditional Opening Ball is held in Top Level, Unsler's domain, the following evening. French is ist and a member of a women's cult called Madonna. Regina Unsler, who has been watching developments both with practical interest and with nostalgic memories of her love affair with Tack, arrives at the ball with a plan to secure her own escape from Union. Her brother Sidney has oppressed her, and under the tutelage of her spiritual advisor, escape to Hinterland. To do so she captivates Bono. Meanwhile a prominent flame and the man who, with others, attacked French the night before. Bono has spent a painful week trying to adjust to the powerful gravitron vibrations in Ricardo (he belongs to the five percent of tribesmen who find adjustment difficult). During the week he has been plagued by a recurring memory of his youth, hunting the mansized Harvey hare, a mutant rabbit whose escape mechanism is a cloying telepathic pulse of love. The hunter must overcome his affection to achieve a kill. On the morning of the ball, Bono finally experienced release from pain. Now he is giddy and disoriented and promptly falls for Regina. When she invites him to her to find her much less yielding in the privacy of her roof-top garden. Before she can yield herself, she says, she must have a sign of Bono's true affection. She demands that Bono request her as the Helium hostage of #. Only after she has seen the news on Media that he has done so will she be his. Back at the ball, Clafto Meyer has recognized French from the night before. French and Miri flee from pursuing flames and manage to lose them, but only after another flame loses his life. They reach Top Level's parking lot where Miri hides in a jump tube (one-man transport) while French goes exploring. He discovers that the streets are blocked by flames. Proctor meanwhile, is overcome with rage while he impotently watches the flames pursue French and Miri from the ballroom. In an instant he conceives a plan of retaliation against Sidney's flames -- "Operation Hairy Scary." As negotiations begin the next morning, all parties are tense and exhausted. Proctor has spent the night organizing Hairy Scary. Bono has spent it in chaste conversation with Regina. French and Miri escaped the flames thanks to Barney's intervention -- he escorts them out of Top Level surrounded by tribal delegates and, since they are still followed, invites them into the embassy for the night. Franco Dart objects to the invitation; to him, as an old Activist, French is the enemy. To appease the old man, Barney puts up the couple in an unused wing of the embassy. Relieved at their escape, the two make love, but only after Miri has completed her meditation. French watches her and thinks he observes a glow about her head and shoulders, a consequence of her spiritual achievements as a member of the Madonna cult. Next morning French slips out of the embassy by a back way, leaving Miri to be collected later, with reinforcements. The flames are still watching. During the negotiations, Bono asks for Regina as the Helium hostage, shocking both sides. Dart, fearful of what Tack might do, walks out (the approved hostage demand is for Sidney Unsler). Proctor sees his plot threatened. The talks stop as Union demands time to assess its position. Later Proctor and French have a violent argument. In a last-ditch effort to save his plot, Proctor wants to offer the tribe delivery of the silcomponents if they withdraw the hostage demand and deliver a socalled "Interdiction." French is sure the parts have military significance and are part of a series of shipments needed to develop a new technology. He harks back to # lasers shipped five years ago against his advice. But Proctor is adamant. On the way out French learns security chief, will organize Miri's rescue late that evening. French's staff has guessed the significance of the silcoplast parts, but most expert on the subject, angrily rejects the thesis. French leaves to let them argue it out. Later that afternoon Bono calls Regina. She is distraught, and wants him to come to her at once. That morning Regina had received a call from Sidney (who is laid up with a broken ankle). He is angry because she snubbed Clafto Meyer the night before, despite his orders to take Clafto as a lover (because Clafto is Sidney's favorite). Clafto, he tells her, will come that night to claim her. Flames are guarding her doors to prevent her escape. While Bono is getting ready to leave, Dart bursts in with orders from Tack. Bono has been fired as chief of mission. Barney has been removed. Dart has assumed both positions. Bono is locked up. Clafto is having dinner to celebrate his upcoming possession of Regina when word reaches him (hat Miri French has been expelled from the embassy, has been caught, and is being held in a night club. He suspects a ruse and decides to pick her up after dinner with a larger group of flames. Later that evening French waits learn to form. Preparations for Hairy Scary are being made, involving a large wooden chopping block and an axe-wielding man dressed to look like an executioner. The operation strikes French as crazy -- as does everything at this moment, even Proctor's plot, which depends on the creation of an artificial crisis through a Helium Interdiction which will start structure collapse. With the help of Media, Proctor hopes to take charge. French has no faith in the plot, hut now he doesn't care. He has arranged for Miri's safety with "bottoms" gang. Clafto Meyer and his complement, and rescue Miri. French arrives at Ecofreak's embassy at the same time and learns that Miri has been expelled by the new ambassador, Dart. Berserk with rage and fear he speeds away from his group bent on some mission of his own. Meanwhile Proctor learns that the sil-components can be produced in four days. He then dictates a letter to Ecofreak in which he hints that he is prepared to ship the silcoplast parts if only they will withdraw the hostage demand. In Texahoma the next morning Tack gets word of the letter. He prepares to move the Activist camp to the vicinity of Ricardo.     Bono awoke to Regina's low moaning. A bright ray of sun pierced in through a crack and illuminated the dark hayloft. Speckles of dust played in the light. He stirred, rose up to his knees brushing dry hay from his leather tunic and beard. He felt a strong unease about the brightness of the light -- it was late. Could they move in daylight? Could she move at all? Regina lay next to him covered by two huge wire-bound bales of hay. He had placed them on top of her the night before as a substitute for the gravitron pressure her body demanded. He couldn't well imagine that it helped much, but maybe the illusion did. He leaned over her and saw that she slept despite a constant movement of her head and flow of pained expressions across her face. He watched her, touched by the face. Somehow it seemed so different and ordinary in this new setting, in the gloamy light of this simple, wooden barn. Just a girl. Dark shadows beneath her eyes hinted at the trauma she'd undergone. It pained him to see it. Bono had not imagined his first night in Hinterland with her as it had turned out. The escape had come off smoothly. He'd knocked a hole into the drilla-glass wall of her garden roof, dressed in the parka and wearing the oxygen mask. She'd stood beside him, also masked, resembling some kind of alien creature. Air rushed out through the ragged hole. He enlarged it, listening to the scream of a siren somewhere set off by his breaking of the structure seal. They passed out through the hole and then, sidejets blazing, put distance between themselves and the tower. Minutes later, dropping quickly through the darkness, Bono turned and took in Ricardo with a glance, a random pattern of light. The unnatural exhilaration he felt, consequence of gravitron pressure-drop, should have told him that Regina would probably have an adverse reaction to the outside. But he didn't discover just how badly she had been hit until they were nearly down and Regina ripped off her mask, turned to him , and gasped in a peculiar way. When they landed amid the loud abrasions of cricket legs, she stumbled from her tube and tried to vomit, but nothing came out. He held her by the waist as she heaved. Later yet, many kilometers to the west, well beyond the Staging Station, which he'd skirted to the north, after they had found this lonesome barn, Regina had been in a state of great delirium, had suffered from frightful visions, had mumbled incoherently about serenity, being buried, oracles, ecology, and much else. At last, while he'd sat next to her stroking her hair, she had dropped off to sleep. Now he reached out and gently stroked her hair again, arranged in braids like that of a tribal maid. He was careful not to wake her. She was...just a girl. And in that realization, seeing her as she really was for the first time, without the distorting structure setting, Bono knew that he loved her more than ever. How ridiculous to say that she was the Whore, that her seed couldn't mingle with his. People were people. She came from the same pod he did -- in some misty past. They were alike. Prejudice, he thought. Stupidity. For a moment he thought of Mycron Crestmore as a petty little man who'd fancied that God spoke through his petty little mouth. He moved from her and rose gingerly, recalling hard beams overhead. He had bumped into them during the night, arriving in total darkness, glad to have found a barn unguarded by loudly barking dogs. This barn was far from houses and people. They might be able to leave unobserved despite the advanced hour. If not, perhaps they could stay here until she passed through Adjustment. Bono went down the narrow ladder and out past rusty farm machinery to the small side door he had forced during the night. Outside the sun blazed high and bright. The barn sat in a valley whose rims were lined with pines. A dirt road snaked toward the barn. He hadn't seen that in the darkness. Instead they had descended into the valley from over there, from his left, across that meadow. He glanced in that direction now, trying to establish the relative position of the barn, and he saw something that sent his heart into fierce throbbing. Across the meadow... ! The meadow was a mixture of silvery mutagrass and green fodder scrub. A tiny waterway crossed it diagonally marked by lush, reedy vegetation on its banks and small trees, probably wild apple, at random intervals. From the direction they had come, extending in a straight line right up to the apron of reddish dirt around the barn, he saw twin tracks of discoloration in the meadow. The green scrub was brown; the mutagrass was curled and blue; at the spot where they had crossed the creek, the reedy bushes had collapsed and died. He ran to the edge of the apron and a few steps into the grass. He bent down and fingered the vegetation. The grass had died. Each track was two meters wide, more or less. Bands of desolation...Desolation! In a state of excitement, Bono ran across the valley, in the spoor left by the jump tubes. He wondered how far the track extended. At this point they had been two or three meters above the ground. Earlier they had been higher. He ran, angry with himself. He should have guessed that, even without direct experience. She should have picked a course over rock, sand, dried-out stream beds. Or they should have travelled very high in the air. He hoped that they'd been high enough for most of the night. He had kept the tubes ten meters in the air except in spots where they had crossed over forests. Had that been enough? Well, he would soon know. From the top of the rise, standing between fragrant pines on slippery needle-covered forest floor, he looked down the way they'd come. As far as his eye could reach, he saw the twin tracks, considerably narrower out there where they had been higher up, but visible. His heart sank. From some spot outside Ricardo, their trail led here in twists and turns, broken here and there, thin now and again -- but a track any pilot could easily follow from air ship or helicopter. There was no time to lose. He turned and ran toward the redish, gabled bam as fast as his legs could carry him. Poor Regina, he thought. However she felt, she would have to get up now and move -- on foot. High up in the air they would be seen and reported. Near the ground they would leave a track. Time was of the essence. The official levi-limo dropped down from the airspace and settled in Proctor gathered up his robes while the driver ran around to open the door. Then he climbed out and stood waiting for Gregory Kron. He had taken the Bureau's lawyer along on this unprecedented visit to the Ecofreak embassy. Kron was also DA for Compliance and had supplied the technical language for the secret subagreement. Kron clambered out, his narrow face pinched and blue. Kron was allergic to artisun, hence his expression of perpetual gloom. Once in power, Proctor intended to give Kron a Top Level cubohome where he could expose himself to natural sun through a drilla-glass roof. Together the men mounted the stairs and went inside. In thirty years of official life, Proctor had never experienced anything like this. At ten o'clock, Ecofreak had called. They asked for an immediate meeting about the letter Proctor had sent earlier in the morning. Proctor had suggested that he come to the embassy this time -- a gesture of good will. He had set out with mixed feelings. And now, forty minutes later, the subagreement was signed, sealed, and delivered. Kron carried it in a narrow attache case. The Interdiction could start within the hour. The negotiations had gone nerverackingly smoothly. At the elevator Proctor turned to Kron. "The moment we register the Interdiction, I want to be told. And alert Justin Todd at once. His pedple must be ready and in place. We must keep this absolutely secret, as prearranged." Kron nodded and went off. His offices were on the first floor. Proctor entered the elevator and punched a button. So French had been right after all. These men were Activists. Dart had well-established Activist credentials. His sudden rise to power clinched it. Dart had accepted Proctor's conditions without a murmur. He cared nothing about the hostage demand, so much had been transparently obvious. He wanted only silco-parts. He hadn't even questioned the demand for an Interdiction. He'd nodded his head impatiently, eager to put signatures on paper. Barney, Proctor reflected, would have understood the significance of that demand at once. He would have guessed that Proctor aimed for the supreme position. And once firmly in the saddle, he would be a very different force, very unlike Bernard Unsler. No more Accommodation then. But Barney had been absent. And so had Bono -- reportedly suffering from a bout of malaria. Fat chance. Proctor left the elevator and walked to his office. He knew that French had also been right about the oscillation control properties of the components. Which meant that they had to be made inoperative in some way. And there was a problem. Earlier in the morning, Proctor had had an embarrassing discussion with Clemmens. Clemmens had evidently expected French to return, had expected French to tell Proctor what Clemmens didn't want to tell him -- was incompetent to defeat the Ecofreak device without some highpowered help. When French had been conspicuously absent, Clemmens had come to Proctor. Probing questions had revealed that Clemmens and Fulbright had had a huge spat the day before and that Fulbright was the only man even remotely qualified to do the job. If Proctor wanted parts that didn't work, he would have to negotiate a settlement between Clemmens and Fulbright. Always the negotiator. He stopped before Mrs. Sedlig's desk. "Get me Carl Fulbright on the tel," he said and walked into his office. Moments later Mrs. Sedlig buzzed. Proctor leaned forward to activate his tel. Fulbright' s goateed face appeared on the. screen. "Carl," Proctor said. "Thank you for taking my call. I understand you are in the midst of a conference. I apologize." Proctor always said this -- everybody was always 'in conference.' "I forgive you, Res. I suppose this is about the sil-components?" "Your are perceptive." Fulbright made a deprecatory grimace. "Well, what pipe-dreams has your staff related to you? Do they still think it's an oscillation control device?" Proctor recalled Fulbright from his days in Defense and chose his words carefully. Fulbright was tiny, dried out, but he owned the world's greatest ego. Proctor said: "The staff opinion is ludicrous, but I wanted to talk to you about this personally. I owe you that at least for your trouble. I'd also like to get your gut reaction to this. Not your technical judgement, Carl, your reaction as a citizen. Is it even remotely possible ? My staff might be limited, but they have good hunches sometimes. If you were betting, giving odds, what would you say? What are the percentages?" The tone had been right. Fulbright's face relaxed. His features softened. He thought about the question. Proctor recalled that Fulbright didn't like snap answers, liked to ponder. Proctor watched as one of Fulbrigbt's hands appeared on the screen to caress the goatee. "Well, Res, anything is possible, you know -- speaking now not as a scientist with thirty years of polish in Vibration but as you suggest -- as a citizen. But possible and probable are two different things. I don't think it's probable at all." Proctor suppressed the urge to ask why. That would bring the wrong reaction. Instead he asked: "What conditions would you stipulate -- as a man of science now -- that would make such a breakthrough probable?" "Oh, I don't know," Fulbright said, thinking. He turned his head to one side and stared off into the distance. "I've been toying with this and that since my session with Clemmens on your staff...and it occurred to me that if you could concentrate gravitron vibration like you can concentrate light...if you could straighten out that helical geometry..." Fulbright looked back into the screen, raised his eyebrows, shrugged. Proctor felt reassured both by Fulbright 's answer and manner. No doubt Fulbright had rushed back to the drawing board, anxious to check out the situation. Proctor suspected that Fulbright had been staring at formulae on a blackboard when Proctor called. He said: "If you were to test that theory, Carl, what would you do?" Fulbright gave a dry little snort. "Why, first of all I'd get myself a bunch of lasers and -- " "Lasers?" "Why, of course," Fulbright said. "No need to re-invent the wheel. Not that the laser is a suitable device, but I'd start there." Proctor said: "Carl, five years ago Ecofreak requested five hundred lasers. We shipped them." The little man stared out of the screen. "You don't say?" "I do say," Proctor rumbled. "Carl, we need your help. Desperately. Could you, Clemmens, and I have room? Would you mind very much? We have some awfully tight deadlines to meet. The matter is extremely sensitive, and I don't want to discuss it over the tel. Could we meet? In half an hour? I'll send a limo for you." Fulbright nodded. "This puts a very different complexion on the thing, Res. Yes, I'll be happy to join you. By the way, if your man Clemmens had told me about the lasers..." He shook his head. "Until later, then." The face disappeared. Proctor leaned back in his chair. He recalled the long, acrimonious debate with French five years back. If French ever returned alive, Proctor would compliment him on his insight. Not that French had much chance to receive that compliment, Proctor reflected. Belmonte had been told of French's exploit by Blottingham. French had gone off the deep end. His usefulness now lay entirely in the past. The laser insight had been one of his last signal achievements -- disregarding the silco discovery, of course, which anybody might have guessed. Dart had been so obviously, so single-mindedly interested in them... Dart had chosen Barney's prison personally. It was a windowless room in the very center of the embassy complex. Dart had assured himself from drawings that the room was not even near a service chasm. He had personally inspected the wall for soundness. Barney would not escape, like French had, like Bono had. Bono's escape was not Dart's fault. The staff had blundered. They should have told him that French had left the embassy by a back door, as it were, instead of through the front, as Dart had assumed. Tack couldn't blame him for that. Not at all. In the wake of Bono's escape, Dart had acted vigorously. Men had been sent out to search the landscape beyond the Desolation. Others had been dispatched to comb the chasm itself on the assumption that Bono had fallen to his death -- a good likelihood. After all he was a five-percenter. The pressure in the chasm was great. And it was easy to slip and fall in the darkness, on eroded walks. At the moment Dart hurried to have a look at Barney. He walked up the narrow stairs from the communications room where he had transmitted the good news to Jonny. If it wasn't for Barney's troubling, haunting presence, Dart would have thoroughly enjoyed Jonny's exuberant congratulations. Twice in one day Jonny had praised him! First for the letter Union had sent, essentially caving in on the silcoplast demand, the second for the subagreement itself, delivered within hours of the letter. But Barney troubled him, took all the fun out of it. Dart stopped at the top of the stairs and waited until Dulsol had caught up. The man had a heavy, round head seated on a thick neck connected to a massive trunk. His arms were long and meaty. His legs filled the leather tunic to bursting. Short-cropped hair was a fashion in his district, Dallforth, something of an Activist stronghold. His red coloration was probably a sign of choleric temper. For these and other reasons -- especially the courtesy Dulsol had shown him before he became Ambassador -- Dart had elevated the man from his lowly post as Maintenance Chief to that of Provisional First Secretary. Dart needed an enforcer who could make the rest of the embassy staff do his will. Together they went down corridors, turning several times, until Dart stopped before a peep-hole in a door. Dulsol had personally drilled the hole and had placed the glass before Barney had been incarcerated. Dart wiped his eyes and fitted it to the hole. At first he couldn't see anything, but then his focus adjusted and he spied Barney on the floor. The man was writing, writing on the floor of the empty cubicle. Dart's face wrinkled up in anger. Writing! What was Barney writing down? The hand moved rapidly over the scriptoplast. Now Barney looked up, thinking. Now he bent down again and scribbled on. How had Barney obtained the scripto, the stylus? Dart knew, knew what Barney was writing. It was an account of that dinner in the House of Eighty-four Flavors. Barney composed a falsified report of that. Dart had certainly not betrayed the negotiating strategy. At most his tongue had stumbled over a phrase or two. But Barney would know how to exploit that, would try to disgrace Dart with Jonny -- now! Now that Dart had made a name for himself at last. Who had helped Barney? Who'd slipped him the scriptoplast? Dart turned to Dulsol. "Who has keys to this room?" Dulsol said: "It's an ordinary lock. Anybody could get in." "Come along, Dulsol. Let's have a talk in my office." He strode off, furious. In his office -- recently Barney's and still filled with his things -- Dart glanced about with distaste at the giant Harvey pelt on the wall, the collection of mutant skulls hung on little wooden plaques, the holograms of Barney's ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Petra. He sat down in Barney's huge leather chair, motioned to Dulsol to find himself a seat among the numerous hassocks. He peered down at his wrinkled hands laid on the shiny surface of the desk. He looked up. "Dulsol," he said, "as you know, Tack is coming north. He should have his camp set up by morning at the latest. I shall have to report to him, of course. I intend to leave tonight. While I am gone, you will be in charge. So far you have shown yourself an able, solid, loyal fellow. Now you'll have a chance to show what you can do. I don't expect you'll have any trouble. Everything is under control. But I am leaving you one sort of messy item. I mean Barney, of course. Just now I saw him writing. I don't know what he's been putting down, and I don't want to know. Probably some kind of seditionary message. Barney is a traitor. I have discovered that he had dinner with Rivera French the other night. He conspires with Union. As Jonny Tack told me yesterday on the cable, 'Franco, old buddy, I don't understand why Barney doesn't have the decency to commit suicide.' Or words to that effect, Dulsol. 'The man would be better off dead,' he said. I certainly agree, although needless to say, we'll probably have to go through with a long and dreary trial and all that. Of course, if he committed suicide, we'd be spared that little formality. I am worried about that, Dulsol. I'm also worried about his friend. If anybody can get into that room, somebody might try to let Barney escape. Under no circumstances must he escape, do you understand?" "Do whatever you must. He must be prevented from communicating with Union. At all cost. All cost, Dulsol. Is that understood?" Dulsol nodded again. "Very well. I'll be watching you, of course. If you do a good job, Dulsol, I'll put in a word for you. My recommendation should count for something now that I've pulled off the coup of the century. Well, that's that. Leave me now, Dulsol. I have to prepare my report to Jonny Tack." Dulsol rose and left. Dart came to his feet as soon as the door closed on Dulsol's hulking form. He walked over to the Harvey pelt, grabbed the fine fur, and jerked. The pelt tore a little as it came off. Systematically, Dart began to remove Barney's things from the wall. He tossed them into a heap in the center of the .room. Then he walked to the pile and trampled on it, stamped on it with both feet, until the pictures, mutant skulls, and wooden plaques were nothing but a rubble of glass, fiber, and bone. Blottingham sat in a genuine leather armchair at one end of a small gymnasium where Sidney worked out every afternoon with Roman sword and round shield to get his excercise. The weapons hung from the wall in racks together with horse-tail helmets modified with screened masks in front. Blottingham had chosen this place for his interrogation because it was the least private of Sidney's rooms. He had no desire to trample about in the Fire's domain. Circumstances had made. Blottingham both the Unifier's and Sidney's agent. Sidney's disappearance and Meyer's withdrawal had left a vacuum in the flame leadership. The ranks were decimated indeed. Proctor's ploy had been effective. Take Clafto. The man wouldn't budge from his father's palace, refused all calls. Fear was an effective weapon -- but it could be used by anyone with a will. Blottingham had been interrogating Sidney's bodyguard, servants, and those flames who'd spent the evening with the Fire. Despite persistent probing, he had heard the same incredible story from all who had witnessed the event. A single man in a gas mask and armed with a chemgun had penetrated Sidney's domain. Alone and unaided, he had laid low one and all with chemgun blasts. His weapon had been turned to the maximum setting, and all those exposed to the gas had had an involuntary nap lasting between eight and twelve hours, depending on their metabolic rates. Yet another servant stepped in front of the leather chair. Blottingham knew that the man would add nothing new to the sorry tale. This one and no more. Blottingham intended to act. Listening to these witnesses, he had formed a theory in his mind. Proctor had staged that little theater with the flames as a diversionary excercise to mask Sidney's abduction by one of his best agents -- French. The boldness of the act made Blottingham wary in the extreme. If Proctor had dared this much, something very big might be brewing. Any direct action against Proctor could backfire miserably. Blottingham thought he knew a way to put pressure on Proctor and yet refrain from any overt conflict with the man. He had to be careful. What if Proctor acted in the name of other family members? They were known to be unhappy with Sidney. He turned to a close aide. "Carmody, fetch me a tel," he ordered. Then he nodded to the waiting servant. "Where were you when all this happened?" The man was a butler or valet or table server. He didn't have the proud soldierly bearing of the palace guard -- nor was he humiliated by having been overcome. He worked his hands in front of his chest in some embarrassment. "Yes, sir," he began. "I was in the orgy room with the Master and stood by his head pouring wine from a flagon into his cup." The man stopped short. "And? Go on, man." "And then, sir, the door burst open and there was the man with a chemgun in his hand." "What did he look like?" Blottingham was bored by this. Servants were stupid. He recalled the long and weary interrogation in Regina's domain. All the servants there had sworn that a meteor had hit the tower, knocking a hole in Regina's garden roof. A meteor! The people were superstitious. "I don't recall seeing much of him, sir," the butler said. "Being surprised, as you can guess. I sloshed some wine on the Master's shoulder, and I was so troubled by that, wiping his shoulder with a napkin I always carry that -- " "Get to the point, man." "Yes, sir. Then it got me." "What got you?" "The gas, I guess." "The gas got you." "I suppose, sir. The next thing I know, one of your gentlemen was poking me awake, and I was laying there in a pool of dried wine." Blottingham wondered about that pool of dried wine and ran a hand over his short hair. "All right, you may go. But you didn't see the man? You can't describe him?" The servant shrugged. "Just a man, sir. I can't say as I saw much detail. He wore a grey jump suit with zippers in front and little zippers over the pockets. He wore a gas mask, but underneath his chin was visible. He had a cleft in his chin. And he was blond." Blottingham nodded. He waved the servant away. That man had been French, no doubt about it. He turned to Carmody who held the tel ready. Blottingham took the device on his lap and punched out the numbers for the garrison command. "Please give me Roger Belmonte again," he said into the screen. "This is Blottingham from Top Level." The formula always worked. He always got his man. Belmonte appeared in the screen, black face impassive. "Roger," Blottingham said, "sorry to bother you so soon again, but the Unifier has just given me some new instructions. Meet me in front of plain clothes detectives. The Old Man is very concerned about Proctor's safety in light of the abductions. Can you meet me in...twenty minutes, say? See you there." He signed to Carmody and told the others to return to Top Level. Then he walked through Sidney's domain to the front entrance where he climbed into a waiting levi-limo and told the driver to take them to Old Top in CentralTower. After they were under way, Blottingham punched a button in his arm rest and a soundproof pane of glass rose up to separate the two officials from the driver. Blottingham explained his plan to Carmody, using his assistant as a sounding board. Under the guise of protecting him, Proctor would be confined to his cubohome. Blottingham intended to drop a strong hint that Proctor's release was contingent on the production of Sidney and Regina. "That should work," he told Carmody, "unless, of course, Proctor is stronger than I think he is. Do you think there is something to the rumors? In light of what's happened yesterday?" Carmody shook his head. "I just can't believe that. The family might be restless, but Harvanth is solidly in the old man's camp. We've got the army. Nothing can happen unless we lose the Army. If you want my guess, I think this had to do with French, not Proctor." Blottingham brushed over his short red hair with a hand. Carmody was certain of the Army, but Blottingham wondered. Proctor and Harvanth would be a winning combination. Proctor was popular and Harvanth powerful. Harvanth had much to lose if Sidney took over; Sidney had visions of military conquest. Blottingham turned to Carmody. "Should we tell the Old Man? I'd hate to do it really. He's been very unstable lately. God knows what he'd do." Carmody agreed with a nod. "Why don't we wait and see how Proctor reacts first. There is no sense in alarming the O.M. If Proctor resists, however... "You're right," Blottingham said without conviction. He knew in his guts that Unsler should be told. But then, again, what if Harvanth and Proctor plotted together? In that event Blottingham could easily end up on the losing side. He decided it was best to keep the situation fluid, the options open, at least for a while. The trip to Old Top took exactly twenty minutes, as Blottingham had guessed. Belmonte already waited beflanked by detectives. For once Belmonte wore an ordinary blue robe rather than his ornate red uniform and feathered hat. Belmonte didn't want to be conspicuous. rity guard acted unusually officious. He insisted on seeing everyone's identity card, even Belmonte's, although the garrison commander was a wellknown figure in Ricardo. Next he asked the gentlemen to fill in these here logs. Then he laboriously prepared and issued visitor's passes to everyone. Only after all these preparations did he call Proctor's office on the tel to announce the guests. He had a long wait before Mrs. Sedlig came back on the screen and asked that the gentlemen come up. The guard then gave elaborate instructions on how to reach the Negotiator's office, although Blottingham knew the way. Finally the guard released them. Halfway to the elevator, Blottingham took Belmonte by the sleeve, pulled him aside, and quickly explained the mission. Belmomte was a thick-lipped black with a stony face. He didn't react to Blottingham's account about the Unifier's grave personal concern for Proctor's safety. He merely stared. Blottingham stopped. "Can you handle that, Roger?" His tone betrayed a certain amount of exasperation. Belmonte nodded gravely. In Proctor's outer office, Mrs. Sedlig asked the gentlemen to rest for a moment. The Negotiator was on the tel. He would see them the moment he was off. Blottingham sat down, feeling unease, and gave Carmody an oblique glance, but Carmody was staring at artificial bushes in large planters half masking a row of flag poles in golden stands: tribal colors. The patent tension in the room disturbed Blottingham. He glanced casually at the morose detectives, at Belmonte's noncommittal face, at Mrs. Sedlig's busy preoccupation with some sheets of scripto she pushed through a renewer. Some days ago this woman had conveyed a message from Proctor. Jump down a shaft! For the second or third time this day, Blottingham regretted that he had shouldered so much of the day-to-day burden of running Union since the Unifier's last (and not much publicized) heart attack. In a rush to leave a record before death should claim him, Unsler had begun his memoirs during the recuperation period. That book had become his sole concern. Power had never weighed heavily on Blottingham. He had enjoyed its excercise. In a pinch Unsler had signed papers or, more rarely, had made a telcall or two to back up his chief of staffs decisions. But now Blottingham sensed a yawning emptiness at his back. He wasn't sure at all that the government could pull together and defend itself against a strong attack. Unsler had been protected too long The Ocean Living Institute has been formed to conduct and promote research in oceanography and independent self-sufficient forms of community living on the ocean. It will encourage individuals and business firms to form investment groups to fund construction and operation of ocean based industries, serve as a clearinghouse for ocean living contacts, publish information on legal and other aspects of oceanic settlement, publish information on new concepts in oceanography, aquaculture, and oceanic settlement, and conduct tests on new concepts and devices. the institute is a nonprofit corporation and contributions of cash and supplies are deductible for federal income tax purposes. The institute is in the formative stages, and is especially interested in hearing from people who can help to develop it. Further information is available from, and contributions should be sent to: # River Road North Arlington, New Jersey # from too many facts: Sidney's intense unpopularity, the cabinet's neglect of business, the insolence of officials like Proctor, the carping tone of Media... Blottingham was tempted to rise, leave, burst into Unsler's study, interrupt all those literary labors, and say: "Mr. Unifier, I've botched it all up. Sidney has been abducted. Regina has disappeared, might have been kidnapped. The family has turned against Sidney. They hate me because I really run things. Harvanth and Proctor are probably plotting a revolution. Help me. No, no. It was inconceivable. Blottingham would have to tough this out. Another day or two at most. Besides, it was too late to leave. Proctor's office door opened and out came three officials. One was balding, older; one had a blueish, pinched face; the third was black. Blottingham knew him from reports: Dickens, the security chief. Behind them came Proctor. He sported an uncharacteristic, beaming smile. His short, thick arms were extended in greeting. "Paul," he rumbled. "How very, very good to see you. Quite an honor, I must say." He turned to Belmonte. "Roger! Are you with Paul, here? Gentlemen, do come in, come in." Proctor ushered the people into his office, pointed at couches, armchairs. He rubbed his hands in seeming pleasure, but his forced cordiality served only to deepen Blottingham' s anxieties. Blottingham sat down and brushed his hand over the short hair on the top of his head. More than ever, he urged himself to be cautious. Proctor sat down, pleased with himself. In the last half hour or so, immediately when Belmonte's warning call had cut short the lunch with Clemmens and Fulbright (but not before they had reached an agreement), Proctor had made many rapid arrangements. He had reached every member of the Group, had briefed them all about the arrangement with Ecofreak, had designated Kron as the intermediary should Top Level move against him. The Helium pumping rate had begun to drop at noon. The Interdiction would be complete by evening. In four days, give or take a few hours, the change in power would be all set up. Now Proctor had only one worry. French. Blottingham had come to demand that Sidney and Regina be returned -- wherever in hell French had them. If only French had kept his cool last night, and had not shot off on his own... "What can I do for you, Paul?" Blottingham said: "Res, Sidney and Regina Unsler have been abducted.' ' He stopped and took in Proctor's astonished expression. Did the man feign surprise? "Of course we are keeping it strictly under cover at the moment, but the Unifier has expressed grave concern for the safety of all prominent men in Union. Especially you. You are more popular than most. He has asked me to see personally to your safety." "Are you serious, Paul? This is shocking news!" "Strange things have been happening lately," Blottingham said. He ran a hand over his hair. "A large number of prominent youth have been sexually molested last night by gangs of men -- " "You don't say," Proctor cried. Blottingham peered at him. Proctor was acting, shamelessly acting. "Yes. The Unifier doesn't want anything like that to happen to you, Res. As I said, he has asked me to make sure that you are protected." "What have you got in mind, Paul? A special guard? These gentlemen here... ?" Proctor gestured toward the dour detectives. "These gentlemen will escort you to your cubohome and will guard it against abductors," Blottingham said. "We shall place a tap on your tel-line so that threatening calls may be traced at once. I know that this is inconvenient, but it should last less than a day. The moment Sidney and Regina are freed..." Blottingham touched his hair and looked at Proctor and away again. "Until Sidney and Regina are found?" Proctor asked. "Precisely," Blottingham answered. "The sooner they are freed, the sooner can we dispense with these precautions." He looked up and met Proctor's eyes, but Proctor didn't hold the glance. He turned his head toward the desk, toward the large holograph of Unsler that hung above it. "I respect the Unifier's wishes," he said and rose. "Shall we go now? Or will you allow me to gather some scriptos?" Miri walked the streets of Branco with occasional glances back. Deep cubohome had brought forth the guidance she'd sought. In the afternoon she had quietly slipped out of the building. Soon, wearing a new jump suit she had bought in a nearby arcade, she made her way to East Tower and down to Level #. Her guidance had told her that Frenchy would be hiding in these domains of poverty, disease, and crime -- back home, in territory he knew well. Noise raged all around her -- the noise of squabbling women, of music loud beyond sufferance, of quarrels in alleys, of bargainers at stands. Branco lived in the streets. As far away as she could see -- the Ring curved gently out of sight -- stalls lined the sidewalks, big, small, covered, open, screaming in a thousand colorful signs and with the cracked voices of hawkers. She looked back again, troubled by a sense that someone followed her, but she saw no familiar face in the throng. People jostled and pushed. Teenagers ran past her yelling. Wild, unreflecting people. Odors bombarded her senses -- the sweet smell of decaying garbage and food, of fecal matter, of air singed with ozone by escaping gravitron, of unwashed bodies and clothing worn too often without laundering. Maintenance stopped around Level #. In official eyes these people didn't properly belong to Union. Yet how much more lively, racy, alive everything seemed. Just look at the walls, everywhere decorated by the strangely obscure paintings of the people. Initials, parts of words, numbers -- they all glowed, radiated. On the street vendors sold fruits and vegetables -- real fruit and vegetables -- obviously obtained by illegal barter with nearby tribes and smuggled into Ricardo through subterranean routes below the pit. How, in this world, would she find Frenchy? Then, up ahead, she saw a familiar sign. The Scuttle-but, a coffee house where she'd met Frenchy years ago on an artistic expedition to sketch 'bottoms' types. A linkage point. Unconsciously she had been drawn to this place, possibly the bridge between past and present. Here she might meet Frenchy again. She made for the place thinking of the Madonna who wove the psychic universe on her magic wheel. On Madonna's spider web, the Scuttlebut was a tiny knot connecting two destinies -- his and hers. A large place with many tiny tables, closely packed together, awash in the murmur of voices. Janeweed smoke rose in walls and hung in clouds about the place, its smell familiar to Miri from Cult sessions. She sat down against a wall and ordered coffee. It came, but she didn't drink it. She listened to conversation on her left, watching the surface of her cup, the swirl of steam on the black liquid. A fuzzy-haired man spoke to another in a low, urgent monotone. He catalogued the sins of structure culture, predicted its imminent doom. A shitting jut, he said. Union was like a tired old man . It didn't want to come up any more. You had to read porn to make it twitch. Education, art, religion, science, exploration -- all a shitting jut. Children floated in a vacuum. A shitting jut. His voice hissed on breathlessly. Familiar dirge. Miri had heard words like these years ago. The speaker's aura touched her slightly. She sensed his deep alienation and moved herself slightly to the right, out of his influence. As she did so, she looked up and saw a woman weaving her way between tables toward her. Miri immediately recognized the cool, poised movements of a Cult sister. Thousands of hours of meditation, body and mind control, showed in the woman's face; the woman didn't look at Miri. She came in Miri's direction in a brightly flowered sari. Passing the table, the woman slid an object toward Miri. It half rolled, half skidded toward her, silver and green. A ring. Miri picked it up with a quick glance toward the retreating, flowery back of the woman. She had been followed. Miri looked down at the ring, turning it. The tarnished silver setting held an oblong, turqoise stone with black-white markings. For a second she stared at the pattern. Then she covered her face with her hands in an involuntary, abrupt motion. The pattern in the stone had unlocked memories suppressed by hypnotic command, memories of meetings with Sister Serenita, the Cult Mother. The meetings extended over a period of seven years. Until this moment, Miri had not consciously realized that Serenita was the Cult Mother. Only the coven elders knew the identity of the Lady's living representative on earth. Miri had also known it, but the knowledge had been kept from her conscious self. The flood of recall caused an involuntary shudder. Now Miri understood the significance of her blemish and what it meant to 'have a role in history.' Against the backdrop of her memories, the events of the last few days suddenly seemed fraught with meaning. She sorted the memories in her mind. Seven years ago, at the annual confall of the oracodice had given Verse #, Great Change. This fact had been kept from the Cult membership, because Verse # signified a momentous change in human consciousness, a dramatic transformation in culture. Each verse had nine lines. Three of the lines had been accented and therefore contributed to the meaning of the oracle. The first line had said: 'Ecosphere: flowers in the meadow. ' The second one had said: 'A queen confuses the Male.' And the third: 'The blemished artist leads the remnant.' A search through the ranks of the Cult had identified Miri as the blemished artist -- she was a micromosaiker and had a birthspot on her cheek. At the time she was a novice engaged in the acquisition of the most rudimentary of arts. The Cult Mother called for her, to look at her, to see if the oracle might have meant Miri rather than someone else. Satisfied for the moment, the Mother sent her on her way. From time to time thereafter, other meetings had been held to see how Miri progressed. Each meeting concluded with the hypnotic command of forgetfulness, given under the influence of this ring -- Serenita's own ring, worn on the finger of Saturn on the nun's left hand. She had been commanded to forget; only full adepts could know the inner mysteries, the Lady's visible representative. There had been a meeting -- she recalled now the relief she had experienced then -- when the Cult Mother had concluded that Miri couldn't be the 'blemished artist.' She had just married Frenchy. He had entered the service academy, but he was nevertheless still very much a smuggler from Branco. In numerous other consultations of the oracle, the Cult had learned that the 'blemished artist' would marry a figure capable of delaying or impeding the Great Change, a figure of importance, prominence. Frenchy gave no such promise at the time, and no one bothered to ask the books about him. Later, when Frenchy rose with meteoric speed through the ranks of and Miri's sessions resumed. Recalling this, Miri shuddered again. She didn't want to be one of the so-called 'queens of the change.' She didn't want a 'role in history.' What did it mean, Great Change? Serenita said that the ways of the Male would yield to the way of the Lady. Great Change was a time of rejoicing. The oracle had spoken of the Ecosphere, of flowers in the meadow, of a healing. Change, Serenita insisted, was in the minds and hearts of people. But Miri had always understood that verse in more cataclysmic terms. As an adept she had been permitted to study the ancient texts, and commentaries on the Change never failed to make the point that Verse # meant an ending, an upheaval, a disaster. If the blemished artist 'lead a remnant,' the clear implication was that some would remain. But what about the others? Would they be recycled, one and all, into the cosmic soul vats, to be born again into another age? Miri didn't want to live through anything like that. What would it mean? The fall of the structures? She had posed that question to Serenita as well, getting evasive replies. Structure or Hinterland -- it didn't matter. The ways of the Male dominated both worlds. They would be swept away by a change in consciousness. That might or might not mean the end of structures. Structures didn't matter. They were merely shells. Another question that had plagued Miri -- and once more plagued her now that she remembered it all -- was how. How would she lead a remnant? What remnant? From where to where? Serenita's words still rang in her ear: "Miri, you think like the Male thinks. Causes, effects, motives. The Lady works by indirection. If you're the person chosen to do her will, you'll be led in the right paths. At the right moment, you'll know what to do." "And the queen who confuses the Male? Who is she?" "That's not something you need to know." Miri dropped the hands from her face. Her coffee was a dark, deep shining in front of her. The steam had disappeared from its surface. She pushed the cup aside and looked at the ring again. It was clearly Serenita's ring, the only one she wore on her pale hand. In the concluding hypnotic sequence of her meetings with the Mother-, she had stared at the ring with utmost concentration. She recognized every detail. Now she held the ring. It meant that Serenita had reached a final conclusion -- Miri was the person sigmeant that the time was nigh. The secret had been unlocked so that Miri could act with knowledge. And finally, disturbingly, it meant -- or Miri sensed that it meant -- that Serenita had passed on to her, to Miri, the symbol of her authority. My God! Miri thought. That means I am a full adept. It means l must be pregnant. For to achieve the knowledge of completion, a woman had to have the final experience of womanhood, birth or, at the least, conception. She shuddered again, throwing off psychic tension, and became aware of her surroundings. Next to her the fuzzy-haired man still hissed in a monotone. Doomed, finished, a shitting jut. The end, kaputt, knockout... Miri rose hastily and ran out of the Scuttle-but. She wanted to get out of here, away, far away. She didn't like her inner feelings. She had to dissipate her anxieties in motion. She had to find her Frenchy, sanity, something familiar, something to hold on to. After a while she calmed herself. The throng of people, the noise, the colors reassured her. The shadowy memories slowly settled down as part of her conscious awareness. Whatever happened, life would go on. The Lady wove fate. From her fingers issued the pulse of existence. Not Miri's place to question cosmic forces. Only the Male pretended to rule over the world...a microbe on the skin of the legendary elephant. Whatever will be, will be. She passed a clump of people from whose center a young boy's voice rose up with the scripto-vendors hawking cry. "Getcher, getcher, getcher scrips. Getcher scrips and read abooot his Finkoo's kiddienap las nayte. Getcher, getcher, getcher scrips, Flame's been snufood aeught." It was the most distilled form of Branco dialect. Caught by the urgency of the voice, whose broadcaster Miri couldn't see -- the clump was a whirling of hands and arms from which people broke away reading intently -- she joined in, penetrated the clump, pressed a coin in a dirty urchin hand, and came away with a small, thin scrip. She nearly stopped in her tracks when she read the bold headline across the front page of the thing. She stopped to read the story. All around her people were doing the same, and there was a buzz of excited talk. People ran off; others came. In minutes the newsboy had sold out his supply. The story itself was brief and factual. But much of the rest of the paper carried speculation about the meaning of the unusual event. The story described how Rivera French, well known to the people of Branco, had penetrated Top Level North last night. He had immobilized the palace guard by chemgun and had abducted Sidney Unsler. His whereabouts were unknown. Sources within the Unsler household were cited as authority for the dramatic disclosure. The speculation went far beyond that bare account. They identified Frenchy as a man close to Reston Proctor. They linked the mysterious round-up of flames the night before to the abduction. They saw this move as the opening sally of the much rumored revolution -- Revolution? Miri sucked in her breath. Blood pounded in her throat. For a moment she became oblivious of the scene around her, which began to clear rapidly of people. They ran, they disappeared into buildings. She read with total amazement, aware for the first time of Frenchy's probable involvement in some kind of surreptitious political movement. So she, Miri, had already been associated unknowingly with Change -- be it great or small. Her husband a conspirator? It seemed that he was. Frenchy, oh, Frenchy ! she thought, overwhelmed in a delayed reaction by a crazy fear for her man. Abductor, revolutionary? She bent over the scrip again, searching for additional clues. She stood reading when a small man grabbed her by the elbow. "Lady," he said -- it came out 'leuydy' -- "Can't yer see the squeezoos? Ya better getcher rumpies uffa da belt, heay? Reading a scrips now, leuydy! Open yer eyes." Miri opened her eyes and looked about. Far behind her on the movebelt she saw the blue of police uniforms. The man hustled her along toward a door. She followed him meekly. They entered into the close, fetid atmosphere of a bar. Young men on stools and around tables looked up in unison as the two entered. "An ufflevel chips I picks up reading the scrips in front of the squeezoos?" a young man nearest to Miri asked. He had come erect on his stool. His tone was alert. "Where you at?" the little man asked. "Don't yer read?" He waved his own copy of the scrips at the young man. "Frenchy stole the Finkoo las nayte; they's searching toyteen." "Our Frenchy?" "The same." Young men crowded about them. Miri eyed them. These total strangers discussed her Frenchy in tones as if they were on the most intimate footing with him. They broke into exclamations now crowding together over the articles the small man had spread out on the bar. One of their number read aloud. Miri gathered that only a few could read. Then they conferred. They concluded that Frenchy must be hiding in Branco, they listed possible hiding places only the Kayring would know about. She watched them with apprehension and hope comingled -- young men in hand-embroidered jump suits of various colors, some with faces pockmarked by gravitron blisters, some bearded like tribesmen, dark, light, black, white, chinoise. Beyond the group over the bar a slow-moving colormixer wove patterns on the glass screen. Drink spigots gleamed with curving necks. The stout bartender wiped a glass at the far end. "Ya've yapped sufficient," the small man said. "Naw clear it it uff, clear it uff. Squeezoos will be busting in heay. Move uff naw." "What abooot the chips?" Eyes focused on Miri. "What abooot yer?" the small man asked. ' ' Whatcher doing in Branco?' ' Miri swallowed. "I'm Miri French," she said. "I'm looking for my husband." Eyes searched her face, some with narrowed suspicion, some with an expression of pleasure. Then one man said: "It's er. I seen a pitch. That mark on er, see?" Involuntarily Miri reached up to touch the birthmark on her cheek. Heads began to move up and down. "Cum oon, then," the small man said. "Uff with yer and er, uff to Dachsy. Dachsy must be toold." In a body the men made for the back of the bar. Miri moved in their center. Up ahead regina saw the dark line of pines across the ridge, against the lighter darkness of the star-spangled sky. They made for the broken silhouette of some sort of ruined building up a steep, slippery gradient amidst a rustle of leaves. She sobbed in My cal's wake, sobbed with fatigue. And then she suddenly stopped because It stopped. She realized with a joyous feeling that she was herself again. But the feeling was more than that. She felt incredibly well, giddy with a kind of joy. She cried: "Mycal, Mycal!" Bono stopped and turned around, alerted by the change in her tone. Could she be over it? He put his hands beside her cheeks and tried to see her eyes in the darkness. "Yes," she said. "It's over. I'mall right again." He whispered: "Thank God, thank God." "Mycal, it feels so wonderful...#...I want to sing or something. Do you know what I mean? Did you... ?" "Yes," he said, remembering the feeling. He had felt the same way on the morning of the ball and recalled that sense of miraculous healing, the loss of trauma. Regina felt light and clean. Despite a very arduous day of hiking and the physical weariness she felt in arms, legs, and back, she was refreshed and rested as if she'd just awakened after hours of sleep. "Hungry?" he asked her. "Ravenous," she cried. "Come on, then. Let's go up to that hut. We'll hide there and rest for a spell -- provided it isn't occupied by a bear. Then we'll head out again after a bit." He felt thankful for her recovery but anxious about that trail of gravitron. It haunted him, it made him want to move on, ever farther. He would let her sleep for an hour or two. Then they'd strike out again toward the dry bed of the old Ohio. Inside the building they unloaded the clumsy packs he had fashioned out of oxygen-canister straps. He inspected the place by the light of a torch and saw silver-gray wood of ancient vintage, the inside of some sort of park structure. He cleared an area of brush and leaves and handed her the torch. "Open some cans," he said. "I'll try to find us some water." Regina sat for a moment savoring the pleasure of being off her feet, the musty odor of vegetation, so different, so much more pungent than in her roof-top garden. At the same time she continued to feel giddy release. She ached with pleasure -- and longed for pleasure. She was hungry and tired and lively all rolled into one. It was stimulation, she realized, nothing more. Nevertheless... Her body had been shrivelled up under the assault of pain. Now her cells expanded all together and broke into a chorus of gladness. She set to work unpacking blankets from the packs, finding canned food. She thought: Wonderful, wonderful. I'm in Hinterland. I'm feathering our little nest. She didn't think about the implications of her internal words, feeling as close to Mycal as it was possible to feel. She recalled his anxious ministrations the night before when she had lain under that huge bale of hay sobbing with terror. He was so sweet and kind to her. She was his and he was hers. Very fateful. In the bottom of the pack, groping in the light thrown by the hand torch, she found golden spoons with the Unsler flower set into the handle in relief. She arranged the spoons next to the cans, removed the can lids. Mycal had insisted on taking only protein mush. The smell would have made her turn off under ordinary circumstances, but now she was so hungry, she took a nibble from the can. The taste was delicious. This done, she unzipped her jump suit and climbed out of it -- a girl in panties and a white blouse. Involuntarily she ran her hands over her nipples, belly, and down the insides of her thighs. She trembled with an unaccustomed surge of desire, surprised by it. She inferred its cause as the readjustment of her body and a consequent euphoria; nevertheless, her mind swam with visions of copulation for a second before she controlled herself. I hope I don't smell too bad, she mused. She had had no chance to bathe, nor any inclination. But her deodorant was a secret formula that released odor controllers long after application. Her hygienist had invented the cream expressly for her. Outside Bono sniffed the air, searching for water. He knew the smell of a spring or brook. He hadn't been in the Acropolis long enough to lose his senses. He moved on. After a while he sensed a deeper moistness in the air and soon found a trickle of water at the bottom of a rock face. Moist fingers touched his tongue testing for pollution, but the spring seemed pure. He collected water in the bottle and went back to the building on the ridge. When he entered the hut, he saw Regina on the floor draped in a blanket. In the dim light of the torch which she had propped up so that its beam fell on the roof and reflected from the silvery redwood, he saw her eyes gleam. Yet there was a dull look on her face. She sprang up and ran toward him . She wore only panties and a blouse. She embraced and kissed him while her midriff pressed into his in an unmistakeable way. For a second he experienced annoyance. Now that he was anxious, Regina was amorous. But his annoyance dissolved in passion. Tonight there was nothing to impede his groping hand. Their stumbling movement toward the blankets on the floor upset the propped-up torch and it went out. They made love in total darkness. Bono rolled on his back, tired, a little sleepy, a little sad. The moment had come and fled too quickly. Her body had tasted much like those bodies on the other side of the refinery in Wellhead. By his side Regina stirred restlessly. The brief, clumsy encounter had left her stimulated but dissatisfied. She was sure she hadn't conceived -- Conceived? She kept having that stray thought when in fact she meant something else. He had left her hanging. He had neither the experience nor the sophistication to match her appetite. She hesitated for a while, but then, impelled by hungry euphoria, she engaged his attention with tiny kisses on neck and chest and gently exploring fingers. For Bono the ensuing time of sexual experience was like a mad dream of flesh, a wild tumbling and floating, a stormy trip through pleasure gardens by comparison with which the Wellhead nights seemed a stumbling through a sickly cabbage patch. She appeared to him a Whore of Whores whose indecencies were made the more outrageous by a seeming innocence. Someone so frail and sweet had powers of endurance and an angry, growling, purring, biting passion he had never thought possible in a girl. She groaned and cried in orgasmic culminations. The sound went out of the little hut once, and then later again, and then later -- when Bono had thought that the last pleasure had been drained from their trembling, sweating bodies -- yet once more. And then she fell asleep as soundly as a baby, leaving him bruised and cross-eyed, holding her and breathing her perfume as it seemingly steamed up from her flesh in the cool, moist, mountain air. Ten minutes, Bono told himself. An owl hooted mournfully, and yet it was a glad sound. They lay in an environment where animals thickened the ecosphere again. Ten minutes, then he would wake her and they'd move on again. They had to move. Ten minutes, ten fingers, ten commandments, tents, tentacles of creeping sleep, of mountain fog, of owl hoots falling from the pines... French was out there, far out, on the edge of sanity. He ran down the narrow walk of the service chasm in the light of gravitron sparks. Sidney's heavy body went bump, bump on his shoulder with every step, and Sidney's right foot, encased in a heavy cast, hit French rythmically on the buttock. The life of action, it went through his mind. The life of action, he huffed. Adventure, he huffed. Danger, Tests. Challenge. Battle. French often suspected that he was crazy. Now and then he knew he was. Why did a man choose a life that had such episodes in it? Times when all reasoning, deliberation, wonder, and examination were banished and a whole life hung on the instincts that guided feet over an eroded, dusty, treacherous path. French had become one with his physical processes -- the burning in his lungs and the pain in his limbs and shoulder where Sidney, chemmed again when the police had approached, now pressed down heavy and limp. Meanwhile French's brain drifted off like an uncaged beast into mischiefs of fantasy. He exulted over visions of death. He saw himself stumble forward, hit by bullets from behind. Cut loose from his grasp, Sidney fell against the flimsy railing beside the path and careened down silently, not aware enough to scream. The vision lacked drama, and French imagined other deaths in quick succession -- a deathfall through a shaft, holding his victim in an eternal embrace; death in the crush of a collapsing level; death in the radiation belt where he had once or twice thought of taking his prisoner; death at the hands of a maddened mob intent on lynching Sidney but mixing their identities. Death appeared sweet and inviting. French had lost his will to live although his body and brain disagreed and used his habits and training to keep on surviving anyway, just for the sheer damn hell of it. French let it be. He didn't mind living a little longer. He would pick his own style of death. He'd die with a bang, an explosion, a flash. The world would know that he had sacrificed himself to save his honor. These thoughts arose from a dull conviction that Miri had died at the hand of the flames. French fancied he sensed her absence telepathically. When the police had found his hiding place -- something he would never have thought possible -- he'd seen that as an omen, a sign. Gasping wildly, he stopped and turned. Sidney's cast-heavy foot hit a wall. It seemed to French that he had gained on his pursuers. He had left them behind around the turn. For a second he listened, holding his breath. He heard gravitron pulsing, a kind of silence. But then he could distinguish the far-off rustling of steps. They were still coming and they had no need to hurry. With every step French had left behind a clearly visible trail in the plastosteel dust of the walkway. It would appear sharply outlined in the blaze of their torches. He caught his breath, chest heaving. Momentarily he wondered -- still half in fantasy -- if he should go on like this, burdened by Sidney. What if he just dropped the vile flesh-sack into the chasm? Union would owe him an eternal debt. Then, free of this heavy Other, he could swiftly escape his pursuers and wander through Ricardo, a dangerous seeker after Miri; a vengeful seeker, alone, unimpeded, slipping from disguise to disguise; a hunter after the ultimate prize of life, the love of Another; a stalker after those who'd done her harm; a gardener with a scythe in hand; a reaper of chaff. Or should he, instead, do what he had determined to do in saner moments -- use Sidney as the hostage to force her release? But what if it was too late? Still, there might be hope... But he couldn't stand here any longer, gasping. He turned and ran on. Sidney Unsler went bump, bump, bump on his shoulder; the cast spurred him forward with blows on his rump. The whole mad, undeliberated sequence of events went by in his mind as he ran -- the violent entry into Top Level North, the furtive trip through Ricardo guiding what seemed an empty jump tube alongside his own, the choice of a hiding place -- an excellent, secret spot only a few members of the Kayring gang could know about (and yet the police had found the spot nevertheless, a poor omen!), the wait, the proposition and Sidney's unbelief, troubled sleep, discovery, and now his flight. The pattern was one of madness and disorientation conceived by a man stupified by anxiety and grief. The life of action fell to pieces without a little bit of thought. French had chosen as his hiding place an ancient crane-operator's booth made of silcoplast (silcoplast, alas!) to resist gravitron and left up inadventently after construction of East Tower's southern quadrant. Over the years the booth had been surrounded and obscured by other constructs. It was totally private. French knew about it only because some boys he had run with had found it on forbidden explorations of the service chasm. He dumped Sidney on the floor of that booth toward early morning. The Fire sprawled out, unconscious, still under the spell of chemgun gas administered to him as he had dined. French sat down beside him. He set up a small visi-recording device he'd taken from Sidney's domain. Then he waited and waited and waited for Sidney to sleep off the effect of a fullforce chemblast. As he waited, resisting the urge to fall asleep, French spun schemes of extortion and escape. He didn't plan, exactly. He ran after feverish imaginings. The time of planning was behind him. He had broken with his past. Sidney's abduction would almost certainly derail the Secret Agenda. And even if the Revolution went forward successfully, Proctor would no longer want him on his team, not after this. But the Secret Agenda couldn't succeed. How would Proctor get an Interdiction unless he gave up the silco-parts? And what if he did? It must have been nine or ten in the morning when French started up from a doze. Sidney had begun to stir. He came awake, his long face uncomprehending and disoriented, his eyes blinking in the beam of French's torchlight. A face of dissolution and arrogance: a long face with thick, sensuous lips, red even in the harsh brightness of the torch. The lips contained Sidney's total character. They were mobile and changed shape with his thoughts, while his eyes were cold, malignant, and fixed in a stare. His voice husky after long silence, French explained the situation to the celebrated Ignis. Sidney didn't understand him immediately, and French had to repeat himself several times. At last Sidney's lips curled contemptuously, and he laughed without much humor. "I understand, I understand. This is a practical joke, eh, Tanti? That's you, Tanti, isn't it? Your make-up and wig don't fool me. Well, I see through it. Is this an initiation Did you boys decide to test the mettle of your Caesar? You will find me tough and unyielding in the test. How can the Fire be burned, my dear Tanti?" "I am Rivera French, as I said, are my prisoner, Unsler, and I mean to get my way." French pointed his torch at the small visi-recorder set up next to one of the jump tubes. ' 'I want you to tape a message to your friends. Here's what you say." Again Sidney laughed. "Slowly, Tanti. Your Caesar can't be made to yield. He is a man of courage. Vir fortitudo. I'll say nothing, nothing at all." French Stepped in front of Sidney who sat on the floor leaning against the wire-backed silcoplast booth. "Snap out of it, Unsler. This isn't any kind of game your pals have thought up. This is for real." Sidney guffawed, and in exasperation French hit him across that sneering mouth with the back of his hand. A bitter thought flashed. There is no reality. There are only games. His game is as real as mine. But French wanted Sidney to play French's game. The Underunifier wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. His expression had hardened, but French hadn't got through to the man. The cold eyes stared. The red lips worked. "You can't fool me," Sidney said after a moment. "You're Tanti, no matter how you disguise your voice. Caesar can't be broken, not by a slap, not by anything. I have passed through greater crises. I am a spirit with many bodies. I hover over entire ages. I am Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Tsetung, Phandi, and Pugilista. My moved to do my bidding. Go ahead, Tanti, hit me again. I can stand initiation. And I will be generous with you, after the ordeal. You and I, we shall be brothers. You'll be my godfather, my initiator, the witness of my fortitude..." Sidney went on. In the midst of this French turned away from him and looked around for a suitable gag. He found an old towel, soiled and torn. He himself might have used it for some purpose as a boy. The cloth dusted with age. He gagged Sidney and then tied his arms behind his back . Finally, he placed the man head first into one of the jump tubes. Sidney struggled for a while, his legs extending beyond the tube's rim, one foot in a cast. Then his motions subsided. French sat down. He decided to give Sidney an hour in the tube. That would sufficiently soften the man. French had his doubts about Caesar's courage in a real situation of acute discomfort. Then, exhausted beyond measure, and lulled by the song of gravitron. French fell asleep despite his best intentions. He awoke to a furious metallic noise. Someone approaching the silcoplast booth had stumbled across the trip wire French had rigged during the night and had caused a pyramid of empty lubrican drums to fall. Blood beat in French's throat. He ran to the tube and hauled Sidney out. The long face was gorged with an accumulation of blood. Sidney's eyes were dull with pain or terror. The dirty gag obscured his expressive lips. French had slept long. He felt the pulse of restored energies. Therefore Sidney must have been confined for hours. French checked his chemgun. He pulled the gas mask over his head and pressed the trigger, releasing the last of the gas left in the ammunition cartridge. Sidney slumped and French threw the gun aside. He ripped the gag from Sidney's mouth, placed the body on his shoulder, and climbed out of the booth by way of a manhole and rickety stairs. Above he heard the police bang on the door. When they entered, chemgas would incapacitate them for a while. Sidney went bump, bump, bump on his shoulder. Where to go now? What to do? French pondered. In his hasty flight, French had left behind the visi-recorder. The police had found his hiding place. He had lost his base of operations. He would go down, he decided, down into the abandoned tunnels of the ancient undercrust. The police wouldn't search for him down there. The tunnels were not well known except to gangs operating smuggling rings. And if they followed him, he could easily elude them. He would think about next steps once he was safe. French stopped again, unable to continue at this pace with such a load. Now, far behind him, he saw the jerky motion of torches and several running figures. Somewhere up ahead there had to be a stairway or slide bar that would allow him to descend. He gave himself a moment of breathing time, watching the lights jerk in the hands of his pursuers as they ran. Then he turned to continue and saw with shock another group of men coming toward him, very close, from the other side. They must have entered the service chasm seconds before through a door. French stepped to the railing, and when the men drew up before him, their torches a blinding wall of light, French cried: "Not another step, people, or Sidney Unsler goes right down the chasm." Loud laughter answered his command. The voice said in the thick Branco brogue: "Go ahead, Mr. French; dump the bastard. We don't give a shit." A short figyre detached itself from the lights and came toward him, backlighted and therefore obscure. Nevertheless, French recognized Dachshund Jones and saw that the man smiled. "Dachsy!" "The same," Dachsy answered, grinning. "Before you say anything else, sir, let me tell you this. Miri is safe. She's with us." Young men from the Kayring gang had arranged empty crates approximating an oval in a well-lighted area of the murky warehouse. The councilors sat around the circle and listened to Frenchy with troubled expressions but with a forward-leaning concentration as great as Miri's own. His words mesmerized her for several reasons. First, she'd lived with Ihis man skin-to-skin, as it were. She was an accomplished psychic. Yet she'd never suspected that he had plotted revolution. Second, what he said slowly filled in an empty matrix in her mind, cell by cell, and she gained an insight into the crude mechanics that underlay the Great Change. Finally, she realized that Frenchy had made a momentous decision in the last several days? hours? He had decided to cut the striving ambition. He told these people -- they were total strangers to her but to him members of his larger family in Branco days...they appreciated him, considered him a hero, and Dachsy Jones' introduction had been warmly admiring -- he revealed to these people the entire intricate schematic underlying something he called the Secret Agenda. But to what end did he say all this? What conclusion would he reach? Why had he pleaded with Dachsy to call the council? Half her mind retraced the immediate past seeking clues, lingering over the glorious reunion, the tears...the hungry, cramped, repeated embraces...the long and tender looks they had exchanged, so happy to be together again. But after a while Frenchy had sobered. A look of distraction had come over him. He had excused himself to find a tel. Outside police were searching every centimeter of Level #. They had already rummaged through the warehouses and had sealed all the doors. The gang had known to enter here without disturbing the seals. Nevertheless Frenchy had gone off on tiptoe. She watched him talking on the tel in a brightly lit supervisor's booth in the center of the warehouse, surrounded by small yellow forklift trucks parked in orderly rows before ceiling-high, gleaming stacks of reddish plastosteel rolls. He had come back to her after a while, his face darker even than it had been when she'd first seen him, even more weary and fatigued. "It's no use," he sighed. "Proctor has gone mad. I checked with Clemmens who wouldn't talk but who gave me enough of a hint so I can piece it all together. I reached Proctor in his cubohome. The man seems to be under house arrest but not a bit bothered by that. I asked him to level, but he lied to me." He stared at her, through her. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. He glanced at her, as if awakening, said: "Of course you don't, girl. But you'll hear it all soon enough. Now what I need is your help. Stick with me, baby. For me, at least, there is no place but out." Miri looked across at Frenchy with an emotion of affection. She'd stick with him, through thick and thin. She loved him, after all. Wherever he went, she went. Across the circle French sensed Miri's emotion. He addressed much of what he said to her. His eyes swept the faces of the councilors, many of whom he'd known well as a boy. But his glance returned to Miri's face. Her eyes gleamed with a strange kind of brightness. She sat leaning forward, lips slightly parted, hands folded in her lap, very still. She wore a green ring he didn't recognize. He went on inexorably and step by step recounting the history of the past few years. He knew himself a traitor, revealing secrets not his to reveal. Or was he, perhaps, merely an unconscious agent of the Kayring gang sent out years ago by a pulse of collective will to secure gang-survival now? He felt no real guilt doing what he did. His heart belonged to Branco, always had. The cells of Miri's matrix slowly filled in, and at one point she began to experience the wild flash of insights. From the matrix -- a pattern. From the pattern -- a forecast of events to come. This was a story of two parts, she realized, and Frenchy only knew half of it. But someone knew the other half, and that would be...Regina! Miri wondered if Regina really knew her role. Or was she also, like Miri unconscious agent of Madonna's spinning hand? And had she, Miri, also played into the hands of fate? If she had listened to Frenchy 's pleadings and stayed away from the ball -- would there have been an Operation Hairy-Scary then? She wouldn't have been in the embassy and French wouldn't have gone berserk. He would still be up there arguing for sanity with Proctor. Didn't the oracle say that she would marry a man who could delay, prevent the Change -- if permitted? Had she, unknowingly, derailed the rational unfolding of events? Would Regina confuse the Male in turn? Winch male? Bono? How? Her excitement increased. She marvelled. Her Lady of Indirection. The subtle Female's dark, healing work... In Cult lore they likened Madonna to the long-legged stork picking puffed-up, croaking frogs from a rotting log with a sharp beak. She was the docile cow dispensing milk with her watery eyes staring stupidly into the green, her jaws working slowly on the cud. Or yet again they likened her to a carry bird shamelessly feeding on the dead. Or yet again to the phoenix who burned in consuming psychic fire, who fell down in ashes that fertilized. She was the cunning snake and meek dove of Jesus Christ. Somewhere she had seen Madonna with a hundred arms, festooned with skulls, and also as the Ocean Maid dispensing nourishment. Nature red in tooth and claw. Nature green with bud and seed. Slow and subtle. Cunning and indirect. She insinuated herself into the cracks of the Male's concrete. She abided and waited for the coincidence of events... And at the end she prevailed. She could be yoked, but not enslaved. She was a whore you never used, a sea you couldn't drain, a song you couldn't break by singing, a time you couldn't hold in your hand... Around Miri the warehouse with pyramids of plastosteel coils, straight corridors, neat yellow forklift trucks, the blaze of lumiglobes set in a girdered ceiling seemed like a mausoleum, the geometricities of logic. While in her now burned an intuition, like the Phoenix herself, of a world burgeoning in utter silence. The Lady was Helium, and if she refused to flow, there would be stillness. Then Miri heard French winding up. He predicted structure collapse at worst, great turmoil and destruction at the least . He called upon the council to reach a great decision. He asked them to leave Ricardo using the ancient tunnels of the undercrust for a new life in Hinterland. The words nearly paralyzed her. Not she, he would lead the remnant. Something had been amiss in the oracle. French sat down and looked at the faces in the circle. The council stirred uneasily, frightened by the proposal, embarrassed, perhaps, that he had made it. French might be the 'best loved son' of the Kayring gang, as Dachsy had said, but for that reason, also, he was an outsider. French sought support in Miri's eyes, but she was still away in some contemplation of her own. Yet...how oddly her face shone! Could she be meditating in the midst of this company? Was that brightness the nimbus he sometimes saw about her head and shoulders? Could others see it too? There were nine councilors and Dachsy now turned to Number Two and asked for comment. The man rose, cleared his throat. "Dachsy, I don't know. These are strange times. The Fink lies over there unconscious." His hand gestured toward a group of young men against a wall. "Frenchy tells us we should abandon our turf, but I don't know. We worked eight years to reach one ton of vegetables a month, and in two years we're up to ten tons, and we're all rich now. I just can't see us abandoning the routes just like that. On the other hand, there's the Fink, and who am I to argue with Frenchy. I don't know, Dachsy. I just don't know." Dachshund turned to an ancient, shrivelled man. "Phil?" The ancient rose. "I've been on the council forty-five years and twenty as your Number Three, the gravitron having spared me. Dachsy, you tell me I hark back too much, and I guess I do. I remember when we were four small clans and I went out there to catch cricks for a living back in the days when up-level folk thought that crick pincers kept them from going sterile. When that went flat we hunted rat for a while, in the chasm, and we sold rat meat pretending it was mutachick. Then we won the apple route, and I was there, Dachsy, that night we outbid the Ayring at the Peacefreak village they used to have east of what's now the Staging Station, and I broke my ankle in the fight on the way home that night when the Ay-cats fell on us just after you went down into the narrow part of the closed in '#. Most of you younger ones don't even know that route. And slowly we expanded, Dachsy. I saw us grow. At first it was ten clans, and then it was fifteen. We grew and we gained turf, humble and deferential like. And then we started using muscle, and now we have the ring as ours and going beyond." The old man paused, as if to stop, but he merely caught his breath. "If you think those times were peaceful, you're wrong. I was kid in '# when mercury in a wellbreak poisoned the anaerobics and the tanks were down for eighteen weeks. A below Level #. Oh, I can name them all for you -- repair riots in #, wall break in Branco when I started in school, the electrostorm of # when the power failed although the gravdrums held and people went berserk and ran like mad sheep and fell into the shafts. And the Helium War of #I I . I remember that like it was yesterday. People said the world would end, but it blew over..." The old man went on reminiscing for a long time. Finally he sat down, and Dachsy called on the others, one by one. French could sense the mood shifting. They rose and sat down in turn, one after the other, echoing the old man, discounting the dangers, stressing the positive of the current situation. Gyrations toward inertia, French thought, recalling a hundred similar meetings, scores of committees, working groups. His heart sank as he listened, all too aware of the dynamics. The last man finished his speech at last, and now all eyes turned to Dachsy. In that moment, French glimpsed motion. Miri had come to her feet. He started at her appearance. The faint glow he'd seen about her head had intensified. God! The girl radiated as if she and she drew the attention to herself, away from Dachsy. She stood with hands extended, her face entranced. French saw awe in councilors' faces. They stared at her with parted lips. Slowly Miri looked around. Then, in a voice oddly vibrant, she said: "Listen to me, people. There is a prophesy..." It was dawn. With a small retinue, Tack returned from the pine-covered ridge just above the temporary campsite next to the barn where Bono's jump tubes had been found, charred heaps of metal and burned gear. From there, the night before, Fannin had set out with a group of men and hounds to hunt down the traitor. No word had come during the night, and this morning Tack had combined his meditation with a bit of looking out toward the west, but in the deep mists he had seen no sign of Fannin nor had he heard the yelp of dogs. The meditation had gone well this time, and Tack experienced a stir of pleasure heightened now by what he saw below. A copter had just landed. Its blades still turned, churning dust. He made toward it down a slippery slope. That could be his harem, at last. The moment Ricardo fell, the moment he knew the Plan had succeeded, he would plunge into a great festival of love to dissolve the Pact of Chastity. He had been right! Through settling dust ferns jumped from the aircraft, unsupported breasts deliciously a-bobbing. Tack abruptly changed his course and headed for his own tent. He didn't dare talk to the femmies. The temptation might be too great. Tack wouldn't endanger his great achievement now by a false step that might anger Him-Up-There. Despite these resolutions, Tack sat down to breakfast woefully aware of his many weeks of deprivation. It was worst when he was rested and full of energy. His mind played tricks. The soft-boiled eggs, the grass-seed gruel, the thick molasses he mixed into it, the pink of Harvey ham, and even the rolls he broke to smear with honey reminded him of fem-flesh. It was as if his harem sent out vibes. Come to think of it, a couple of the girls were mutants, and they did emit a rut-smell quite strong and compelling once a month. Henrietta... As soon as Ricardo crumbled, he'd scoop out Henrietta like he scooped out this egg, but he wouldn't use a spoon to do so, by God... To some extent he felt relieved when Robartus announced Dart's arrival and Dart came into the tent. Tack asked for a second table setting. His eyes gleamed mischievously. He would tease the old skunk a bit. During the night Barney had committed suicide back in Ricardo. Chewing mightily, leaning back in his chair, Tack wagged a finger at Dart, chided him. Couldn't stand to have rivals around, could he, the sly little ferret. Dart opened his eyes wide, raised his hands in surprise, and asked what Jonny meant. Dart was dusty from his long ride through the night. His eyes were reddened from fatigue. Tack laughed uproariously. He leaned even farther back in his chair and reached out for a cable on a table at his back. "Listen to this, Franco," he said, looking at the cable. "It comes from your deputy, Dulsol. 'Barney committed suicide, #, ###, as per instructions.' It's addressed to you personally, my friend, but we read it anyway. That's good -- 'per your instructions.' " Tack chuckled. "I'll keep my eyes on you, Franco," he cried, gesturing with the cable. "You're a sly one, you are. Deep but sly." f by L. Ron Hubbard I Read about the evolution of Dianetics, man's most advanced study of the mind. Find out how easily and effectI ively Dianetics can improve your confidence in yourself and your ability to accomplish ypur goals in life. DiaO Just Buy, Read and Try Dianetics: # The Evolution of a Science. (Hand? somely bound, hard cover edition -- O # pages). # The Church of Scientology of Califs fomia Dept. G-#, # West #th St. q Los Angeles, California #. Dianetics ; The Evolution of a Science L. Ron Hubbard Increase Your Abilities I and Self Confidence!  Order "Dianetics: The I Evolution of a Science"  Name Cd to Address I I I All orders will be shipped postage free within # hours of receipt. A DUnctlco Publication. Dianetics is the trademark of L. Ron Hubbard In respect of his published works. Definition: Dianetics -- from DlA Greek Hubbard. All rights reserved. Scientology is an applied religinui philosophy. The Church of Scientology of California -- a non-profit organliallon. Scientology' and Dianetics'!' are registered names. If unavailable from the above addren lend to: The Church of Scientology of California. Publication  Organisation Dept G-#. # Weil Temple St... Lot Angelei. California S#. At these words Dart went white in the face. He heard an echo of Barney's words from Tack's mouth. He stared in fright at Tack's face, half expecting to encounter Barney's eyes. During that eerie ride in the night, he'd had hallucinations. He turned to the side seeing motion. Not a ghost. Robartus had entered and announced that Fannin was on the radio. "Come on, Franco," Tack cried, jumping up, "let's see what our Teddy has found." In the com tent Fannin reported over the crackling frequency. He had them. He had them both. Them ? Tack asked. Yes, sir. Bono and Regina. "We came upon them in a ruined hut," Fannin augmented. "They were fast asleep. Naked. I'll let you guess what they'd been doing. All worn out, the pair. Now we need to get some transportation back. I'm not about to trek all day after treking all night." Dart observed a transformation in Jonny's features. Tack had been in a funning mood. Now he'd turned purple -- a deep purple the more accentuated because Jonny had a light complexion and blond hair. Tack screwed up his face into a grimace whose character Dart couldn't decipher -- some sort of mix between pain and pleasure and anger and a kind of nasty joy. Tack's voice was choked when he replied. Transportation would be sent. Tack signalled a man and told him to get the coordinates and to dispatch a ship. Then he turned abruptly and walked off, leaving Dart to stand by himself. Back in his tent, Tack sat down again before the breakfast table and stared at the food for a second. Then he raised a boot and kicked the table with such force that the flimsy portable affair buckled under the impact His manservant appeared at the tent flap; he knew his master well and stayed out of kicking range. "Clean up this goddamned mess, God dammit! But do it quietly. I have to think." The servant whisked and crawled about as quietly as a mouse, keeping close to the edge of the tent, while Tack sat in his chair. He laid his face into his hands and remained some time in the attitude of a thinker. Tack thought about vengeance. His blood beat at his throat and in his temples. His breath came very hot. Nevertheless, his reasoning powers functioned perfectly. He argued with himself about the Pact of Chastity. In strict constructionist terms, mutants and structure dwellers were not really people but actually a kind of lesser breed. Right? Right. When a man said fem-folk, he meant tribal girls, tribal ferns. Right? Absolutely right. Therefore Regina Unsler couldn't be said to be a femmy, not by a strict construction of the meaning of the term. Right -- right precisely because book nine, chapter seven, verse twenty-eight forbade all intercourse with the Whore, and in the greater context of book nine, the reasoning was clear: they weren't people! Verse forteen also forbade all striving with beasts. Right, right! But what about verse twenty-eight? Wouldn't that be a violation... ? No, Tack decided. Verse twenty-eight applied only when a man sought structure flesh for itself, for the pleasure of it. Tack didn't propose that. Not at all. He proposed to visit vengeance on Bono, and Regina Unsler was merely a tool, merely an instrument to carry that out. Therefore Tack would violate neither the Pact nor the Crestmore if he went ahead with his plan. "Robartus! Where in the hell are you?" "Here, sir." Robartus stuck his head through the flap. "I want a tape recorder." "A tape recorder?" "Yes, dammit. Your ears dirty or something? A tape recorder. Move." The servant disappeared and Tack stood up. He stretched and yawned. His good humor had returned again. The copter flew high over pinecovered ridges. It was a spacious craft with rows of seats in the cabin-facing the pilot, two on one side and one on the other, a small aisle between them. Regina sat in one of the single seats staring rigidly down at thick white mists in valleys, with here and there a tree-top visible faintly in the mist. She didn't want to look inside, still humiliated by the capture. She couldn't help the feeling that she was as much a prisoner as Mycal. The shame of that awakening! She had opened her eyes and had stared up at a man bent down over her naked form with a corner of the blanket in his hand. The hounds hadindecently sniffed her rear. And then had come a certain amount of harsh verbiage. The tribesmen had watched her dress with strange looks in their eyes. They had separated her from Mycal, and later, when the craft had arrived, she had been hustled into the copter very roughly. She could hear the hounds. They had been loaded into the ship and cowered between seats on the other side, their tongues extended, their lean, rib-marked bodies heaving. Near them sat some of the men, and she could feel their observing eyes. For the first time since setting foot in Hinterland, Regina experienced with clear consciousness an intuition, premonition she'd had moments after landing in the darkness outside Ricardo. It had hit her then, an odd sort of awareness that her life would soon undergo a radical change, a great change. Under the tortures of Adjustment pressure, she hadn't thought about it. Nor, later, during that glorious night of striving, which had dissolved in sleep. But now she felt it very strongly -- and it was more than just the usual culture shock any structure-dweller might have on the outside. It was...she couldn't put her finger on it. A feeling, a forgetfulness? Great change, she thought; the words kept echoing. Perhaps it's simply that I'm in love. She no longer tried to conceal it from herself. From the start she had loved Mycal, perhaps as far back as the ball, certainly after their long night of chaste conversation. She had tried to tell herself it wasn't so, still thinking of Jonny, who had been so very different. But now she knew she'd found the man for her future. She turned her head despite the staring tribesmen and looked tenderly toward the archangel. He sat up front, apart from the others, next to the leader of the group that had hunted and found them. From the facial expressions and behaviour of the men, Regina inferred that the leader was prying and her lover uncommunicative. Mycal sat with a morose expression, occasionally nodding, answering in curt phrases. The other man spoke with rapid gestures of his hand. She was determined to save Mycal, confident that she could do it. During their long cross-country trek, he had told her enough about Jonny so that she understood why Mycal was fearful. But she also relied on her own powers of persuasion. Jonny owed her a favor -- for old time's sake. A change in the pitch of the blades signalled the start of descent. The copter began to drop, and Regina felt the surge in the stomach so familiar to jump tube users. It signified 'down.' She pressed her nose against the pane again. Trees rushed by on one side. Red clay ground blurred. Then she saw a circle of tents with an odd metal construct in the center, a kind of tower supporting machinery on a platform. A loaf-shaped device reminded her of a miniature grav-drum. The coper dropped toward a large circle of flattened mutagrass. The clouds of dust rose in greeting and obscured the view. Nudged by tribesmen, she went forward, following Mycal. As she picked her way down the narrow metal stairs, eyes on her lover -- he was being led away toward the...yes! It was the barn where they'd spent a night -- men ran toward the copter with bent backs as they passed beneath the still whirling blades. One of them grabbed her roughly. "Just a minute," she cried, "let go of me!" "Shut your yap, fem-stuff," the man growled. "Out here you're nobody, understand? Nobody." They moved her at forced quickstep toward the camp. She looked ahead, saw an ornate complex of tents connected by low, covered walkways. The ecology flag flapped from the highest peaks. The hands on her arm were hard, relentless. The men led her into the complex and stopped in a kind of outer room. A man seated on a canvas chair in the attitude of a guard rose and went through a flap into an inner chamber. He reappeared and gestured. Her captors led her to the flap and shoved her through. Regina caught herself and looked up. She looked at the back of a man, the back of a head adorned with a horsetail of hair. He stood next to a bed, cover pulled back to reveal a triangle of white. A tray with a bottle of wine and two glasses stood on a stand. The man turned and moved toward her with an odd expression on his face. "Jonny Tack!" she cried, breathless with astonishment. Regina's surprise was not occasioned by seeing Tack, whom she had recognized easily from the back. She was caught off guard by an internal shock of such force that she clutched her head and bent double as if hit by a sudden attack of migraine. Great Change! Great Change! Memories assaulted her, a shock of surprise. She was a member of the Madonna Cult going back many years -- yet she'd been made to forget it. Tack's face had released the hypnotically held memories. She had been commanded to forget until she faced him again -- and now she realized in a flash that nothing, nothing in the last few weeks had been pure chance -- not her meeting with Mycal, not her longing to escape to Hinterland, no, not even her ravenous sexual hunger last night. All this had been predicted, vaguely at first, then in greater and greater detail as Serenita had sought more and more information from the oracles, the crystal, visions. Regina knew herself a full adept now -- which meant that she was pregnant, with Mycal's child. But, shockingly enough, she also knew what her role would be -- to confuse the Male, to shatter his powers of judgement, so that an era could end at last, so that the last remnant of a dead age could be buried. Jonny's intentions were revealed by the bed and its pulled-back cover, the wine, the glasses. But she no longer loved him, she loved another. Do I want to do that? Do I want to do it? Who was shel Was she flighty, irresponsible Regina, the play girl , forever concerned with the excellence of her articles of consumption and use? Or was she that other Regina -- the one schooled in all the psychic arts? She realized that she was both -- that the many long conversations she'd had with Serenita, several each week, forgotten but now remembered as clearly as anything else, were her conversations. That she believed in the oracles and knew that she would do what had been predicted, would have to do them, one way or another, voluntarily or by force. Not she confused the Male -- he confused himself. She was but the Lady's instrument. More than ever she hoped against hope that Mycal would understand and forgive -- if he, if she, survived the Great Change which stood immediately before them. Her odd motion had stopped Tack in his tracks, his eyes puzzled as he stared at her bent-over form. She forced herself to smile as she looked up again. Many years of secret practice had taught her how to command body and emotions. Now she knew how to do it once more. Imperceptibly she took a deep breath and exhaled it, slowly gathering energies from the ether. Slowly her smile turned salacious and her lips curled, her cheeks dimpled. "Jonny-boy," she warbled. "Fancy meeting you here." She held out her arms as he came toward her, a glazed expression in his eyes. He was the Male, stupid and destructive, but ultimately in her power. IX French pulled in the reins of his pony and the horse came to a stop. He nudged the animal forward. In no time his mount walked half submerged in water, groping toward the other side of this depression filled with water seepage. French let the animal find its own way. Lumiglobes strapped to his arms gave more the illusion than the reality of light. The tunnel was very wide at this point, its ancient walls caved in, and darkness reached out hungrily for the faint gleam of his lamps. He heard the splash of other horses as the two explorers he had brought along followed behind. The cold water brought French out of half-sleep -- lately the most cornmon state of his mind unless some new crisis or decision demanded his attention. In the four days since the council meeting, he had yet to see a bed. Organizing Exodus had taken all his time. The horse strained up the sloping bank of the underground lake and continued on, dripping. Once more French saw rails to the side. The tunnel walls became visible as they left the area of the cave-in. Then, in another ten minutes or so, French saw moving lights in the distance. It was the lead column of the Exodus they'd passed some time ago on the way out to explore the tunnel. He spurred his horse into a trot, eager to get back now that 'home' was near. As he came abreast of the column, the people cheered. Those who had lamps lifted them high into the air and swung them back and forth. French waved his arm and smiled tiredly. He had yet to accept, deep down, that he was not a very big Chief in the eyes of these people. No, much more than that -- the Consort of a goddess. He wondered with an undertone of gallows humor whether simple, ordinary Rivera French would become a mythical figure someday. At the moment, thank God, he was still considered human. Unlike Miri. Miri had already assumed the mantle of divinityMore likely, he thought, I'll be remembered, if I am remembered, as one of the great crackpots of the eleventh century, conned into playing Moses by a small and nutty religious cult. They'll laugh and joke about me. "French? Oh, French was that slum kid who made it big in the upper world. One day he dreamt that the structures would crumble. And so he talked these people into leaving Ricardo, see, but when they got out of the tunnel, Ricardo was still there, same as ever." On the other hand, he thought, there is Serenita. To think of the Cult Mother was to deepen the ambivalence he still felt about this -- all this. The tall, severe figure of the nun appeared before his eyes as she had stood in the darkness of an ancient parking lot, face shadowed by a cowl. Serenita had come down to visit Miri in the temporary headquarters French had established next to an enormous hall, anciently a station of the undercrust. He had followed her back up when she left again after tearful farewells with those sisters of the Cult who had joined the Exodus. He had confronted her in the darkness and had accused her of creating crisis, of deliberately fostering disaster. Snatches of that conversation floated through his mind as he rode past the column, waving to the people. "I do nothing," the nun had said. "I serve the Queen of Heaven, the sweet Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Ghost, the Trinity, the Great Unknown, the Cosmic One, Buddha, Krishna, Shiva, Aphrodite -- name your god, Mr. French. I don't make the Great Change, Mr. French. It comes of itself when the time is ripe. You and I and all the rest -- we're witnesses of a drama we don't direct. There is no one in charge, Mr. French. No one. She is in charge." He insisted that she had rigged the confusions surrounding the Helium round, had had her agents -- like Miri and Regina -- interfere. The nun shook her head inside the cave of her cowl. "How can I cause war between Union and the tribes? War must be there in the heart first. We are a tiny Cult, Mr. French. We merely predicted the Great Change. We don't pretend to rule -- only to know." The future cannot be known, he insisted. "You're half right," she said. "The future is murky -- but sometimes quite inevitable. When a seed is planted, it may or may not germinate. But once a flower has sprung up, it will surely wilt again? Eh?" She went on to liken culture to a plant that grows, flowers, gives fruit, and dies. The plant was Western Christendom and the world today its final manifestation. In the scheme of things, she said, the culture had died long ago, long before dead trunk of the tree. Great Change meant a new beginning rather than an ending. protested. That's what Great Change meant. He thought it was terrible. "Why?" she asked. "Life will go on. Cells may die, individuals may die, but life goes on. You are mesmerized by numbers, Mr. French, and you're dishonest and sentimental on top of that. You agonize over the men yourself in the past week or so, and you never gave them a second thought." The words shocked him with their truth. How did she know, he asked, had Miri -- She shook her head ever so slightly. "I know you, Mr. French. I'm standing in your aura, you know, and I'm a psychic. I know all about you. The life of action. Adventure, danger, tests." She smiled. "The mind," she continued, and pointed a slender index finger toward her temple. "The human brain cannot encompass these cosmic events. But, as we say, 'the Male pretends to rule. ' Give it up, Mr. French. It doesn't become you. You're a man of the future. Action, eh? Life, movement, love. Not dark, puzzling thoughts and reckonings. You can't make sense of it, so why pretend? You've done well so far. You've followed the Lady -- your heart. Not the Male -- your head. Your future is bright. Flowers in the meadow, Mr. French. Flowers in the meadow..." Flowers in the meadow... Her words echoed in his mind as he rode past the people in the tunnel, smiling and waving automatically. Miri said that Serenita spoke obscurely, that being the Lady's way, indirection. The old woman had made him think, had convinced him of some things, had left him doubtful of others. He wasn't sure at all about his future. The human mass he passed came from the very dregs of structure life, crackpots like himself, but of another sort. In the dim light of lumiglobes, their faces were blueish and sallow, gravitron-burned; their forms were stunted. They had nothing to lose. Maybe they'll inherit the earth, it flashed in his mind. At last count ten thousand had joined the Exodus. They'd come down by hundreds of paths, following smuggling routes. They'd lain on the floor of the undercrust station in areas marked out by luminous paint, writhing and spasming from pressure loss. Then, later, supplied with food and lights by foragers, they were formed into companies and launched on their way to ancient Chicago by several west-bound tunnels. Ten thousand superstitious slum dwellers, these, who had believed the rumors leaking out of Branco that the world would end and that a woman would lead the chosen to safety. French thought of the other Ricardo They too sought salvation, but in another way. Pent-up frustrations had exploded into riots all over the city. French left the first and reached the second group. The cheering and light waving began all over again. He figured he had to pass ten more companies before he would get some food and drink. It was early afternoon, although you couldn't tell it in the tunnel's perpetual night. He hadn't eaten since morning. French wondered who would be more disappointed -- those who'd stayed above and were now being systematically 'pacified' by the troops Harvanth had flown in from several neighboring structures...or those who had thrown in their lot with the Goddess Miri and Her nearly divine consort, Rivera French. It would all depend on the secret agendas -- Union's and Ecofreaks. And God help us all, no matter what! An hour later he and his explorers arrived at the station and handed the horses to attendants at a kind of livery stable where Exodus leaders and explorer teams could get animals for tunnel travel. The animals had been obtained from tribesmen in the foothills of the Allagains. French mounted a makeshift ramp to the platform where people had long ago waited for trains. This portion of Eastcoast had been abandoned followwhere survivors had lived, experimenting with gravitron, lay farther north. Explosions above had trapped large numbers of people down here. Their skeletal remains had been gathered and piled up by explorer teams to make way for the Exodus. French passed such a pile on his way through a darkish structure to the station hall. He surveyed the busy scene for a second. On his right a disorderly littering of humanity spasmed on the ground in the grip of Adjustment. Only children were up and about. They appeared immune to the effects of gravitron deprivation. Members of the Cult moved about between prone figures. Ministering, they called it, although all they really had to offer was an encouraging word -- that plus the magic aura of the Cult itself. On the left a group of foragers piled boxes and canned mush into a pyramid as they unloaded a transport jumper. French wondered how they'd gotten the jumper down here. The foragers were ingenious and their job had been made easy by the riots. They'd hauled down into the catacombs an incredible tonnage of loot -- food, textiles, lights, fuels, medicines, tools -- everything that might be needed for a new start in life out there. French set himself in motion across the hall. He had reached the center, the point where the luminous lines of demarcation came together, when he heard the dreadful thundercrack. It seemed that he'd be known as a consort after all rather than as a crackpot. Dart scurried out of Tack's sleeping chamber as fast as his short legs would carry him. His face revealed fear, disgust, and unnatural excitement. The leader had satisfied his lust at last from all appearances, Dart decided. The Whore had been nowhere in evidence, although the rush of water from the shower stall adjacent to the chamber had hinted that she was cleaning up after the four-day orgy -- and she had much to clean off, the Unclean Thing. The stench in that chamber still gagged Dart. Oh! They'd sweated and drunk and jutted up a fearful storm of sin and damnation in there, and the place had looked a mess. Dart had barely found a spot to put his feet on the floor inside, cluttered as it was with empty trays and bottles. The linen had looked positively grey with wear. And Tack himself, pale shade of his past magnificence, had lain darkly amidst the creased and mangled sheets with an iced towel wrapped about his shaved skull like a dirty turban of misery. In the outer chamber Dart turned jerkily at a fancied motion. His eyes were terrified. But he saw nothing in the murk. Damn you, he thought. Damn you, Barney. Don't you dare stalk me in the shadows! And he made it out of there even faster. The ghost wouldn't follow him into the bright sunshine outside. Six or seven members of Tack's guard idled outside drawing circles in the red clay of the ground, joking with ferns from Jonny's harem. The ferns spent much time around the Leader's tent spying on their rival from Union, or else they were trying to seduce the men. Dart could almost smell the rutting fetor of one or two of them -- especially that Henrietta, the mutie with the deep red eyes. He reckoned that nothing remained of the sacred Pact of Chastity. Alongside Barney's hollow whispers, Dart had heard lascivious laughter in the woods at night. Jonny's own sported with the jealous ferns among the pines while their master groaned inside the tent, completely captured by that Abomination from Union. First Bono, now Tack. In his grave Old Tack -- No, not that! Dart hurriedly thought. He shivered again, only too aware that Barney's ghost had come out into the sunlight after him and rfiust stand right next to him now. No thoughts about graves. An idea came to Dart. Barney must be buried. Yes. He probably still dangled from a rope in the embassy, the last Ecofreak in Union. He had to be put underground with a heavy stone to weigh him down. Across the empty circle of the camp, past the metal tower on top of which the shielding mechanism, equipped now with its critical silcoswitch, gave forth an invisible but potent oscillation, he could see Ecofreak elders and leaders from other tribes stand outside the council tent waiting to hear what he had accomplished. They'd come north in copter after copter determined to persuade Jonny to hold off, to countermand his orders. But Tack refused, despite the disturbing speculations burly Sonder, the physicist from Kaysee, had offered. They wanted change, these gentlemen, but none dared to confront the Leader. They insisted that Dart do it. "You are the only man he trusts," they'd argued. And they'd forced him to go in. Well, he'd gone -- but he hadn't pressed Tack hard. Dart had no intention of ending up like that damn-fool Gulfrat leader who'd barged in there two days ago. That night his body had been found bruised black and blue by the boot-heels of the guards. Dart had said "Yes, sir" and "no, sir" to Tack's curt commands. Yessir! Yes, sir, I'll bring you copies of the transmission to Wellhead. As soon as we get through. And I'll do it, too, by God! Dart set out across the empty circle toward the council tent. It might have been so nice, triumphant. Union had delivered the parts. Jets and copters had moved the precious components all over Hinterland. They'd been snapped into place. Hinterland was safe and secure. Or was it? Sonder wasn't sure. Dart had been present when Sonder had looked patiently at one of the ear-shaped components. His thick fingers, square nails had scratched at the fine, thin lines of reddish copper print laid down into the ear by microwelders. Sonder had shaken his head. The color. He didn't like the color. Some other kind of metal might be alloyed with the copper, just enough to destroy its effectiveness. He wasn't sure that all the parts had defects, not even that any had them . The parts behaved correctly enough in the small test device Sonder carried about with him. But he claimed that Union would try to avoid an obvious defect. The parts had to have thorough testing, and that meant a testing program in Kaysee, perhaps taking three weeks or so. Dart had been sent in to convice Tack to give them time. Dart had one of the ears in his pocket, and Sonder had shown him how to explain the problem to the Leader. But Dart hadn't even taken the ear out. Tack had not been in a funning mood, not at all, and he'd darkly muttered about trouble-makers who might get some attention from the boys. Dart avoided the eyes of the people as he walked past them into the council tent (Barney had a trick he liked to play; he would possess now this man and now that and stare at Dart accusingly through the man's eyes.) Inside Dart took up a central position and waited. Among the men who entered was Fannin. He kept to the back, shadowed by the sloping canvas, his eyes alert. He looked at Dart and knew that Dart had failed -- could have predicted that he would. The bad news were in. Sonder threw up all these clouds of suspicion. Tack would never admit that he had failed. Better to go down in a blaze of glory, eh? Back home he wouldn't stand a chance, but here he could still lord it over the tribes, surrounded by his goons. So what if Union bombs the tribal settlements, Fanin thought. This camp won't be hit. It's too small a target. The Great Leader might survive the holocaust. Then, gathering the remnants about him, he'll try to play the king of kings. Only, of course, I won't let him do that. Its frightfully uncomfortable around Jonny-boy now that he has let himself go. Dart held up a hand and the murmurs stopped. "Tack is adamant. Dynamite the refineries. Cut the pipeline. It's still the same order, and he wants to see the cable transmitting the command. In fact he wants a console moved into his tent so he can monitor what we say . " The people groaned. Dart held up a hand, asking for silence. "He said that Ricardo will fall tonight by his reckoning , and he plans to watch it. We've been asked to organize a column to move up to the edge of the Desolation. We move in two hours." "Wait a minute !" Fannin glanced to the side where burly Sonder stood. Sonder was one of the most patient men alive, but now even Sonder seemed to have lost his composure. He. moved forward through the tribesmen, stocky, angry. His red beard blazed up like fire when he passed through a sun beam falling from the skylight. Sonder stopped directly in front of Dart, fists clenched tightly. ' 'Did you tell him? Did you tell him we need time? Did you show him? Well, speak up, Franco!" "Get away from me, get away from me!" Dart threw up his hands and backed away from Sonder as if he had seen an apparition. Then he controlled himself and glanced abashedly at the people. "Don't you rush at me like that again," he growled at Sonder in a changed tone. Fannin was puzzled by Dart's manner. The old man had become even more paranoid since his return from Ricardo. "Yes, I told him, but he wouldn't listen. He nearly threw me out." "Did you show him? The color?" Dart hesitated. "Well?" Dart looked away from Sonder and still refused to answer. "You didn't show him, did you? You were too cowardly -- like all the rest of you so-called leaders." Sonder turned and swept the people with a glance. His blue eyes, usually so placid, burned with anger. "Well, gentlemen, I will tell him. In no uncertain terms. Give it to me. Give me the part." He wants to die, Fannin thought, watching Dart hand Sonder the part. Next to Fannin Sonder's friends moved nervously toward the entrance . They intercepted the out-rushing Sonder, but he shook loose the restraining arms and disregarded the pleading of his friends. High time to mosey on along, Fannin decided. Better to be out of the way. Tack might order a general carnage. Fannin made for the entrance slowly and inconspicuously, while up front Dart squirmed under questions. Outside at last, Fannin slipped off between tents and then, in the obscurity of some pines, he went up into the valley toward that distant barn. Bono had been right, more or less, he reflected, recalling the conversation he'd had with Bono in the copter. Tack would blow it, Bono had asserted. Now Fannin knew that it was so. He would head out, up into the Allagains. He knew an isolated hut up there where a man could hole up until the mess was over. Meanwhile, he'd just open Bono's cage a crack. After what Bono had been through, he'd take care of the king of kings without much urging. He walked carefully, wanting to catch the guard by surprise. He had almost reached the barn when he spied, in the distance, the silvery gleam of a Union airship headed toward the camp. He understood instantly. They had also found the trail of desolation at last and came in search of Regina. Fannin decided to seek safety on the other side of the ridge. But before he could carry out this intention, the airship suddenly described a graceful turn and headed back the way it had come. The air ship rushed back to Ricarradio had caused the pilot to lose all color. The soldiers in the back were unnaturally still. Blottingham understood their silence. Gravitron failure made you think. From the distance Ricardo looked safe and sound -- five silvery stalks of urban life swaying almost visibly with the motion of air masses heading out over the Atlantic. Blottingham didn't expect to see anything, of course. Grav failure did not mean immediate structure collapse. That would follow in some hours unless the problem was corrected. At worst the highest levels would begin to sag a little by nightfall, metal pressing on metal, molecules cozying up to each other. Blottingham reached for the radio speaker and gave a string of instructions to Carmody, but when he stopped and Carmody had a chance to speak, he learned that his aide was more or less on top of things. Blotting ham hung the radio speaker back on the dash, sat back in his chair next to the pilot, and ran a hand over the red brush of hair on top of his head. His face was tense. Lately he had learned to hate the excercise of power. The burden of responsibility rested too heavily now that Unsler had had a stroke and was both paralyzed and struck dumb by a failure of his nervous system . Blottingham could see him: one eye frozen open, filled with terrorized pleading, a strange noise in his throat as he tried to speak past a paralyzed tongue. The stroke had come while the Old Man had watched the riots on the Media. Even if he had wanted to, Blottingham couldn't draw on support from Sidney who, though he was back again, was back an imbecile, a raving maniac, calling every man Tanti and blabbering incoherently about his initiation. Blottingham had ordered him locked up in a spare cubo right next door to his stroke-struck father. As for the cabinet, the rest of the family, Blottingham had kept the information from them. Had that been a good decision? Yes, he decided, it was a good decision. In times like these it was best to hold down panic, even if it meant that Blottingham had to endure the weight of power. He fell into a reverie, and it occurred to him that he could continue as Unifier-in-all-but-name indefinitely if he wished. Hypnosis and drugs might be used to prepare Unsler for rare public appearances. Tapes of his voice might be used for speeches. A blurry picture on Media... Then it occurred to Blottingham that he didn't really want the power. It nauseated him . The airship docked at last. Blotting ham hurried to a waiting limo. Outside the airport he noticed at once that the troubles were greater than he had anticipated. He could hear a cacaphony of sirens near and far. The rarely used public address system syruped with soothomuse. What damn fool had ordered that? Nothing panicked people more than hearing soothomuse on the PA system. Blottingham got in and angrily slammed the door. "What's happening?" he asked the driver. The man shook his head. He activated the gravitron and lifted the jumper above the movebelt. "God help us all," he said. "We've heard it twice already." "Heard what?" Blottingham asked. "The clap.," the man said. "What?!" Blottingham cried. The driver nodded. "Somebody really screwed up. No warning. It's just like '#. It's East Tower. The mobs are pouring out. This is big, Mr. Blottingham, big!" Almost as if to underline what Sanchez had just said, came the sickening, sharp, ear-ringing report. Blottingham jerked involuntarily. Sanchez looked at him, cocked his head, made a face. God! Grav failure must have been under way for hours, unreported. It must have begun even before he'd left to follow Regina's telltale track into Hinterland. They crossed from West toward Central Tower througn the beltway. From the mixing bowl in Central Tower, Blottingham observed a mass of humanity moving onto the beltway from East. A dark ooze of people. Blottingham shuddered. People trampled people in a kind of frenzied, animal panic. Sanchez lifted the vehicle up into Central's shaft. Arrived at Top Level, Blottingham ran through the lobby where Union's thirty-nine structures hung around the wall around a centrally placed map of the Helium pipeline. He saw no one, as he ran. The place was deserted, swept clean by panic. He took an elevator to the office wing. Not everyone had fled. A handful of his closest aides were still on the job. They had gathered in an open area usually occupied by visitors. Their faces were ashen. They formed a clump around a visiset, turned when Blottingham came into the room. Carmody disengaged himself from the others, neat as usual, his black hair almost blue of sheen and meticulously combed. He said: "Paul, things are in a terrible shape. Communications are down. Belmonte can't be located. The people in Media laugh when we call and disconnect us. We're trying to raise Defense, but no one responds. " "Defense?" Blottingham asked. "Why Defense?" "Haven't you been told?" Carmody asked. "There is no Helium." Blottingham gave Carmody an uncomprehending stare. The man repeated his message slowly and with emphasis. "There...is...no...Helium!" "Are you mad?" Carmody must have discovered this recently, since their discussion on the radio. "No, Paul, it's the God's truth. The storage tanks are empty. No people in the Pits. The expanders are shut down. And there's nothing in the pipeline, not one molecule. We finally got Engineering to check it out." Carmody paused. Then he went on. "There's been an Interdiction, Paul, lasting more than four days. But nobody reported it. The records have been falsified. All the gauge watchers are gone. It's some kind of conspiracy." Blottingham sank down into a chair. He rested his flat palm on top of his brush of hair. We'll be mobbed. It was his first thought. Once the other towers began to crack, the mobs would make for Central Tower. It was the only one that had a chance. Its drums could be operated with Helium from the standby air liquefaction units anchored out at sea. But Central Tower couldn't here... He looked up and asked, "What about the other structures?" "Interdictions have just been reported -- but they just started." "Oh, God!" Blottingham rose abruptly. "Gentlemen, I'm afraid we'll have to come out into the open. I mean about the Unifier and Sidney. This is big trouble. We'll have to call the cabinet." Wry smiles greeted this announcement. "Too late," Carmody said. He beckoned with a hand. Blottingham followed Carmody out to the lip of the glass-enclosed terrace. Carmody pointed to a large fleet of ships -- jumpers, limos, and individual jump tubes could be seen heading away from Ricardo. "There's your cabinet, Paul. And everybody else. Gone to save Number One." "Harvanth?" "I suspect he was the first to go. I told you. We can't get anyone at Defense." Blottingham stared out the window, chin in hand. His elbow rested on an arm he'd folded across his chest. An unreported Interdiction... That could only mean that tribes and Proctor were colluding. Only men completely loyal to Proctor could have hidden an Interdiction. Which even from the prison to which he had been transferred. And that meant -- Belmonte was part of the plot! Suddenly Blottingham giggled. It tickled and amused him that Proctor and Belmonte and all manner of men deliberately created chaos. He felt the chaos. What he saw was peaceful enough -- the glint of silver from the airships, a few thin clouds, the dark Atlantic. But throughout Ricardo raged a maddened mob. Those thundercracks would drive people crazy. He felt it also. He was just human. And Proctor thought he could control this phenomenon? Proctor was crazier than Blottingham had imagined. He chuckled to himself. He turned to the men just as another crack sounded -- from the direction of West Tower this time. It was physical, tangible. It caused involuntary physiological response. Blottingham noticed that he was on hands and knees on the floor. He stared at tiles marked by the Unsler flower. He laughed. "Do it again," he cried, turning to the west. He pointed an index finger in imitation of a pistol. "Do it again. Bang, bang, bang. Gotchya!" The staff, also on the floor, stared at him with terrorized eyes. Blottingham didn't care. Stupid of him to pretend to be in charge. Insane of them to look at him with those children eyes. Who did they think he was? God? His mind snapped back to reality. "The Ecofreaks," he said in a cool tone. "Did anyone talk with the embassy?" Carmody scrambled up. "None of the embassies answered our calls. We think that..." Carmody's voice trailed out. His eyes stared past Blottingham and out through the drilla-glass. All the others on the floor did the same. Blottingham turned to see what mesmerized them. The air outside visibly trembled as if heated by a gigantic fire below. Blottingham knew the cause. Compressing plastosteel generated heat. In East, in West, the upper levels would be heating up. The drilla-glass would melt. The seals would break. Then escaping air would create a fantastic up-draft in the shafts, powerful enough to lift men -- an internal typhoon. They couldn't stay here. They had to leave. In quick succession came a series of sharp reports. Crack, crack, crack, crack-crack-crack. Fireworks exploding against the roof of your mouth. Everything swayed and shook. Things fell on the tiles, shattered and slid. Blottingham, like the others, ran across the room crazed with fear. His bowels and bladder released their contents, but he was unaware of it. When the sound stopped, he stood embracing a door. Around him men lay on the ground in fetal postures, rocking. One man had three fingers in his mouth and sucked violently. "Bang, bang," Blottingham lisped. Then, in the continuing silence, he found control again. He cried: "Let's get out of here!" His mind latched on to a simple plan and held tenaciously. In the hall outside, as in all halls, hung cabinets with emergency gear, insurance against surface ruptures: oxygen masks and cannisters, sensitized gravitron webbing, medical kits, the like. He ran out toward the cabinets, aware now that his robe was soiled, that waste moistened his legs. He tore open doors and threw gear toward his staff. Some had followed on foot. Others had crawled after him on hands and knees. "Check your seal," he cried. "It should be blue. If it isn't, take another. Don't pull the rip-cord until we're outside." Another series of thundercracks made them all curl into terrorized balls on the floor. One man had inadvertently pulled the rip-cord on his gravitron gear and now floated in mid-air. Blottingham pulled him down and made him exchange the webbing. Then he ran down the hall followed by the staff. On the way he passed an office where a visiset glowed. He thought he heard Proctor's voice exhorting the public, but it might have been illusion. Carmody puffed behind him and now called: "What about the Unifier?" Blottingham shook his head and waved a hand dismissing the Unifier. He had a simple plan: escape. He couldn't be bothered. They reached the emergency exit, a small chamber. He pushed the men into the room and carefully closed the seal-door. He'd never used such an exit, and he looked about, undecided. Glowing dials on the wall drew his attention. In a second he understood the mechanism. "Put on your masks," he called. He donned his own and tested it. Then, glancing about, he assured himself that all had done the same. "All right," he called. His voice was muffled by the mask. ' 'Grab your rip-cords. When the door opens, out you go. Run out. You've got to get well away from the building. Once you're out there, pull." He turned dials. In seconds a hissing sound indicated that internal and external pressures were being equalized. Then the door swung open, and they felt the intense heat of the air outside. "Run!" Blottingham yelled. "Go on, somebody. Carmody! Go!" Carmody took a run and leapt out into the void. His head disappeared in a second. Blottingham walked to the door and peered out. Carmody had pulled his cord. The activated webbing had broken his fall. He floated downward gently, his body-weight overcoming the gravitron. He would have a soft landing. Blottingham turned to the men. "Easy," he said. "Nothing to it." At that moment the dreadful sound came again. This time it wasn't cushioned by plastosteel or by drilla-glass. The air pulse slammed into Blottingham and threw him back into the chamber. He fell on top of others at the back of the room. When the sound died out at last, they scrambled up. One by one Blottingham launched the men out. They floated down in an uneven string -- men in the bright robes of the nobility. Alone at last, Blottingham went to the back of the room so that he would get a good start for his jump. Then he hesitated, brushed his hair. His efforts to help the staff escape had banked his terror somewhat. Now rationality asserted itself. He recalled Carmody's words in the hall: "What about the Unifier?" Unsler couldn't be abandoned. Simple humanity demanded that he should be saved -- if not from the collapse of Central Tower, then from the mobs Proctor would launch. Blottingham, for one, had more of a sense of responsibility than to save Number One and let the world go hang. He turned dials again. The outer door of the chamber closed. Blottingham heard a hissing sound and felt the rise of pressure. He opened the inner door. Once more he hesitated. He had a hunch he shouldn't do this. He'd had a simple plan. Why change it now? But he put the feeling down and ran, drawn by years of loyalty to the Old Man. Moments later he burst into one of Unsler's sitting rooms carrying gravwebbing and oxygen gear. The sight of men in police uniforms made him recoil, but he was too late. The men had turned toward him. As they did so, Blottingham recognized Belmonte kneeling on the floor next to an armchair. His dark, inscrutable face was turned toward Blottingham, but his hands continued to press down on a pillow. The pillow lay on the Unifier's face. "Get him!" Belmonte said evenly to no one in particular. Blottingham turned abruptly and ran down the hall. He heard a series of explosions. They were not thundercracks this time. He fell down, tom by a force, but he felt no pain, only a kind of giddiness. His head was full of fireflies, his throat full of blood. He laughed inwardly. He rolled away into laughter. P roctor sweated under the bright lights. He could see almost nothing. He spoke to the cameras before him and to the microphones -- those mounted on the lectern as well as the one that floated in the air just in front of his head. He exhorted the people to calm down. The Helium already flowed again, he told them. The thundercracks would continue for a while longer, but the danger was past. He urged the invisible masses to get off the beltways. He told them to return to their cubo homes. All is well. Calm down. He repeated this message over and over again. of visisets, thousands of loudspeakers. Proctor hoped that his forcibly calm tone would reassure them at last. He had been before the cameras for more than an hour now, interrupted only by infernal blasts of sound. Yet he persisted, despite a growing hoarseness and fatigue. From time to time Hondo Weinberger had appeared to stand between the cameras. Weinberger monitored the activities outside through banks of cameras. At each approach, Weinberger had turned his head from side to side to indicate that panic still persisted, that Proctor should continue to talk. From the corner of his eye, Proctor now saw another figure between the cameras -- Kron. Kron made an urgent gesture, repeated it twice. Something had gone wrong, Proctor realized, but it didn't bother him too much. In such an operation, something was bound to go wrong. Nevertheless, he brought his remarks to a close. He repeated his assertion that Helium flowed. He called for calm. Away from the circle of light, he mopped his face with a handkerchief. Kron said: "Ecofreak isn't responding. We have sent the message five times. With the code signal." "Are you sure?" A string of thundercracks cut off Korn's answer. Proctor looked at the people in the studio, pleased at their discipline. Of course they knew that the danger would pass. Unlike the mob. Proctor had not expected quite so much panic. Much time had also been lost in his very slow progress from the police confinement to Media Central. The beltway had been impassable, filled with trampled corpses. The noise subsided. "I have bad news, Res," Korn said. "Helium Interdictions have been reported from all structures. It all started about an hour ago." "Damn fools," Proctor said grimly. He meant the Ecofreaks. He imagined the tribal yokels dancing and grinning in stupid glee, thinking they had outwitted Proctor. They were even more careless than Proctor had assumed they were. He had expected them to do the obvious -- test the parts carefully before making a move, a matter of a week or two. They hadn't done so. They were led by a madman or fool. installed a communications center. Proctor made for that area now, stepping over cables. He stopped before a keyboard console manned by a young man. From a corner of his eye, Proctor glanced toward a set of gauges staff and a clump of studio people stood about and stared at the gauges. Proctor didn't like that clump. He knew that the gauges showed zero gas flow. He lowered his voice as he spoke to the operator. "Send this message to Ecofreak: 'This is Reston Proctor. You must immediately restore Helium flow. The silcoplast components... he waited until the operator caught up. "The silcoplast components are deliberately faulty and will not protect you from nuclear attack." He waited again. "I shall order an attack on your settlements within fifteen minutes unless Helium flow is restored to Ricardo and the Interdiction to the other structures is terminated. Acknowledge immediately." Proctor turned questioningly to Kron. Kron nodded as if to say: Good. You have no other choice. Proctor said to the operator, "Give them the prearranged code." The man typed numbers. The machine clackered rythmically in readiness. There was no acknowledgement, only the noise. Korn said: "While you were speaking, Belmonte called to say: 'Mission accomplished.' They also got Blottingham. But most of the family had already fled." "Sidney?" Proctor asked. "He is dead," Kron said. Proctor nodded and turned back to the machine. He noticed the clump of men near the gauges again. They looked expectantly at Proctor. Proctor forced himself to smile, gave them an encouraging nod, only too aware that his face was a grimace of strain. He allowed himself to think the unthinkable. What if there had been a communications failure? That could be disastrous. A simple breakdown in a component, unnoticed at their end. The fate of Union could then be decided by an electronic wafer. He turned to Kron. "How do we communicate with General Martinez?" "By radio," Kron said. "I have to have a talk with him," Proctor said. "But could you..."He gestured toward the people around the gauges. "I don't want half the world to listen in." Korn moved toward the group. Now a series of thundercracks much longer and much more intense than any before exploded the air in the studio. The entire place trembled and moved. The lights dimmed, went out, came on, dimmed, flickered. A camera broke loose from its moorings and sailed across the open space in the center. It careened as its small wheels hit loose cable on the floor. It crashed against a wall, emitting sparks. Weinberger, his hands to his ears, stumbled toward Proctor who half hung by the communications console. Kron had gone down on his knees. His head was just above the floor as he waited for the noise to stop. Proctor thought: We're safe. We're safe. Central Tower still has Helium. It's nothing. Nothing at all. Beneath this conscious incantation, he perceived for the first time a kind of dark doubt. Could the plan misfire? Could the game be up? Could all the plans, deeds, acts of his life have led to a strange end in a visi studio? To die in a man-made storm of his own devising? The final practical joke? The noise stopped at last and Proctor gratefully submerged his thoughts in action. He moved to a radio and gestured to the operator. The man had lain down on the floor, trying to hide from the thunder. Kron no longer had to disperse the observing group. The people had scattered all about the studio. "Get me Martinez," Proctor said. The operator's voice quavered, his face was white, sweat stood on his brow. "Martinez here." The voice had a cheerful sound. Proctor took the microphone. "This is Proctor. Are you all right, Richard? Where are you?" "I'm fine, Res. I'm in a command ship. We are about ten klicks off shore." "Are you up on the latest developments?" "Are you kidding?" Martinez cried. "I'm up to my ears from the area commands. Helium Interdictions. The people in the regions are agitated but not panicked yet, of course. Was this part of the plan?" Proctor ignored the question. He said: "Richard, can you explode a bomb some kilometers from Wellhead? In a safe area? By safe I mean away from the pipeline facilities. Quickly? I have to send these birds a message they'll understand." There was silence from the other side. Only static hissed. Then Martinez came on. "It can be done, Res, but it'll take time." "Why? Why time?" "We overlooked something, Res. The bloody heat. Our automatic equipment is ruined, fused. We have to go to manual firing, which means time. I'm out here supervising the diving operations. We're sending people down to the undersea bunkers." God! Proctor said: "Why don't you order a firing from Husten?" "That'll take time too. This is a missile launch, Res, and Husten won't do it on my orders alone. They think I'm just a duty officer. They'll want verifaxed orders from Harvanth, countersigned by Unsler." Who'll never sign anything ever again , Proctor said. "How much time?" he asked. "Two hours, three hours, maybe longer." Silence. Oh, God! Proctor thought. Aloud he said: "The towers will be down by then." "I'm sorry," Martinez said, "I just can't act any faster." The long narrow face, the white sunburst of hair, gold-rimmed glasses of Weinberger approached. Weinberger started to speak, but Proctor silenced him with a raised hand. "Richard, get ready to fire as soon as you are able. I don't know what'll happen. I have to evacuate Ricardo. You get ready and wait for orders. But if a tower goes, you are on your own. Obliterate the swine. Try to get help from the regions. Tell them everything. It's too late for anything else." Proctor handed the speaker to the operator and turned to Weinberger. Weinberger burst out: "Res, my God, the intertower beltway broke in have fallen. Sucked out by the vacuum. Oh, Jesus, Res. You've got to get back on again. Will this never stop? Have we got the gas yet? Proctor slowly shook his head. No gas. No Helium. "I'll speak to them," he said. He took a path toward the podium up ahead. He formulated words as he went. People of Ricardo. Mechanical difficulties make it look as if there will be a short delay before Helium flow can be restored to normal. In the interests of safety...evacuate in an orderly...no cause for panic...no cause for panic... Bono had been in the darkness of his tunnel so long, he did not realize that day had fled and that darkness had descended outside. Down there, hypnotized by the rythm of his digging, he'd lost track of time. He crawled out of the tunnel slowly with a wiggling motion, feet first, scooching up with the action of his elbows and knees. The smell of clay was strong about him. At first he had liked the smell. But after three days, four days, five days of digging -- he had no real sense of time -- he had learned to hate it. It was thick, hard, red clay. It clung to his hands, clothing, beard, hair. He was a red man, red all over, a clay man, a man a-fire with the earth. His slow motion brought him to the surface. His feet hit the bale of hay he had placed over the opening to hide it. He pushed it aside and immediately heard the hateful sounds coming over the loudspeaker mounted high in the gable of the barn that was his prison -- so high that he couldn't reach it to destroy it. Bono climbed all the way out and stood up. It was dark in the barn. The sun had still been up the last time he had taken a rest. He took strips of clay-soiled cloth from his pockets, tom from his underwear, and he stuffed them slowly, methodically into his ears. The plugs diminished the sound somewhat, but not entirely. He knew that the air about him vibrated with the tape recording of Regina's treachery. The noises of their fornication penetrated the cloth and touched his eardrums ever so slightly. He heard the grunts and groans and the rhythmic beat of bodies on the bed. He heard the smacks and slaps and the agonized breathing. He heard Tack mumble incoherently as he reached out for peaks of passion; and he heard Regina cry out when the dam of her resistance broke and she stumbled into orgasm. And he heard their breathing subside again. Over and over. The tape was spliced so that a series of strivings followed each other, and when the string was completed, it started all over again. The tape ran and ran. Day and night. Bono heard it in his sleep. Only in the tunnel could he find peace . He stood for a second in the middle of the barn. He had no idea of the mad picture he made: a red apparition with crazed eyes; a beard matted with matter, its forks fused into a single clump of hair and mud; ears extruding strips of cloth that had been white; arms slackly suspended; fingers half curled; nails broken and black. He was alone and knew himself unobserved. He was a soul, now, his physical being immaterial. But his soul too was on fire with a red burning. He undid his fly and urinated where he stood. The pure physical act almost brought him back to sanity, but the touch of his genitals reminded him of a wondrous night in a cabin high in the Allagains -- and its ruin, heard now muted but for that reason so much more intensely. An overwhelming rage gripped Bono. "God damn you, bitch!" he yelled with total abandon. "God damn you, God damn you to hell. God damn you, God damn you." Screaming this at the top of his lungs, he went down on his knees and pounded the hay-littered ground with a balled fist, putting all of his strength into the act. Then he sagged down into a sitting position, his fury momentarily spent. God, he was tired. His back, legs, arms -- they all ached from the endless labor of digging. He longed to sleep but knew that he would go back to digging again after a brief respite. By morning, if his calculations were correct, he would be far enough from the barn, on the side which the guard avoided in the morning sun, to emerge unobserved. And then! And then he would be the incarnation of vengeance. He would be pure hatred stalking. He would be Evil with legs and arms and trunk and head and hands -- hands that would seek her neck; hands that would castrate her lover as if he were a sheep. Bono brooded over fantasies of revenge so vivid he momentarily forgot the tape recording. He sat for a while. Then, groaning shamelessly, he rose. He glanced with longing up to the hayloft where, behind the soundcushioning bales of hay, he had snatched what little sleep he had allowed himself. But not tonight. He didn't even dare to lay down. He might go off and not awaken until morning. A drink of water. A bit of the bread left him from his single meal. Then he'd go down again. He walked wearily toward the door where the empty bowl and the pitcher stood. He bent down for the pitcher, aware of muscles in his back he hadn't known he had. Near the pitcher he noticed something he didn't remember seeing before. Something white. He picked it up. A piece of scriptoplast? Huu? He unfolded it and dimly saw writing, but it was too dark to read. Bono moved closer to the barn door, to a spot where through a crack between door and wall a little of the moonlit night came into the interior. As he did so he touched the door. With a painful screech of unoiled hinges, the door opened. Bono stared in surprise. He expected to hear the cry of the guard. Instead there was only silence out there: the silence of nature, filled with a rasp of cricks. He stepped out and immediately saw the guard. The man appeared dead; had he been strangled? In the moonlight Bono read the note. It said 'Remember who helped you. F.' F? Fannin. Yes. Had to be Fannin. Bono puzzled over the slip. In three days, four days, whatever the time had been, he had almost forgotten that the world had people other than himself, Regina, and Tack. Fannin. His mind went back to that conversation in the helicopter the day he was caught. Something must have happened. Fannin had decided to secure himself a friend. Far away Bono heard thunder claps. He looked up at the sky. Odd. The night was unusually clear. He was, the dustwash of the Milky Way. He had thought to gather it up for Her once -- long ago. Thunder? Strange. Then Bono suddenly ducked and sought the shadow of the barn wall. He hadn't seen anything. He had simply remembered that he was an escaped prisoner. Another guard might be on his way now to relieve this fellow. Bono glanced to the side and examined the guard closely. Here was another odd thing. This man should have been relieved some time ago. He lay there stiffly, his balled fists high up, tugging at something around his neck. Strangled. Marks in the mud showed struggle. A groove in the clay revealed the final spasms of the man as he had kicked helplessly out, trying to free himself. Fannin's handiwork? Bono pulled his earplugs out. He heard the tape again. He went in search of the transmitting source and found the recorder on a crate against the side of the bam. He kicked the crate. The sound died. So shall they die! Thunder in the distance, direction Ricardo. Storm over the Atlantic? To Bono's left, high on the ridge, pine trees offered the shelter of deeper darkness. He ran across the clearing and up into the trees, and in their shadow half walked, half ran toward the camp. When he arrived on a level with the place, he crouched and looked down. The camp was dark, deserted. He puzzled over this state of affairs when he heard thunder again and this time clearly saw what appeared to be fireworks against the eastern sky. In a flash he understood everything: Why Fannin had acted, why the guard had not been relieved, why the camp lay so dark and empty, why it thundered without clouds. The Great Change had come. As it was written, so it was. The Bastions of the Whore were crumbling. He ran down into the camp. Bono sought two things: a weapon and a means of transport. He knew where Tack was. Tack would want a ringside seat at the spectacle. And where Tack was, there would be his structure whore. Like a man possessed, Bono ran from tent to tent. He picked up a hunting knife but threw it away when he found an axe. He searched further, wishing for a pistol or rifle, something that could kill at a distance. He had to get through Tack's guards before he could use this axe on Tack, a crude but effective emasculator. In the communications tent he saw coils of plast on the floor, exuded by one of the machines. He stopped and found a light. In its gleam he read the messages -- a monotonous string of demands and threats from Proctor, who promised to launch Hydrogen through the air. Bono laughed. Death, destruction, obliteration, mayhem, pandemonioum, oblivion, doom. Yes, sir. Let the world go up with a bang. He ran on. At last, in a tent, hung on a pole, he saw a crossbow and stopped dead in his tracks. The weapon seemed to invite him to take it. It hung there, dark, oiled, menacing -- as if placed by the Evil One for His obedient servant Bono. Bono took it down lovingly. He cranked back the bowstring. The weapon was in excellent shape. The wire was taut. It gleamed. He twanged it with a finger. It sang. He had what he wanted. No weapon suited his fancy better. A full belt of murderous, blunt bolts hung next to the bow. Bono girded himself with it. Outside he soon found a clump of ponies, three animals. He had a long ride ahead, and he wanted spares. He didn't bother to saddle the beasts. His fierce will alone would guide them without bridles. Moments later he was off. After an hour, the rythm of motion became hypnotic. The ponies steamed. Sweat-lather penetrated Bono's tunic, dissolved the red clay, and discolored the horses' flanks. The beasts snorted. Up ahead light flashed and thunder sounded. Later Ricardo appeared over the horizon. It was a brightness. It threw off showers of sparks, each spark a giant piece of plastosteel brought to sure -- but at this distance but a firefly. Bono recalled another ride, an evening ride; he had been gloomy then and oppressed by a childhood memory. Then, later, he had thrown off all that and had stepped out, a free man, in love with an indescribable dream of an inapproachable girl who had let him approach after all and then had treacherously left him for the bed of another until the story would end with her body engraved. He meant to dig her in with hands already used to tearing clay. Yes. He exulted with a joy of despair. Oh, God! Oh, wonderful, oh beautiful, oh tremendous, passionate Hate! How he longed to destroy, tear, rend, demolish, crush, sever, rip! Yes, yes. He'd bathe himself in gushes of blood. He'd breathe in the hot, steaming smell. He would smear himself with blood. He'd wash in life destroyed. Crack! Fireworks! Crack, crack, crack! A flower of fire. Higher, higher! Explode! Disintegrate! Bono stopped his pony, rolled off, and mounted another. "Heeeey!" he cried, and they were off again. In the third hour he saw Ricardo clearly. Two of the five towers were mere stumps of blazing fire and smoke. Central Tower had begun to sag as well, and the others were in states of disintegration. The thunder was now a continuous noise and the fireworks a permanent feature of the sky -- one burst renewed by another before it could die. In the brightness and noise, Bono didn't notice another, much less spectacular but, from his perspective, much more interesting phenomenon until he was nearly upon it. Several Small Union airships maneuvered directly ahead of him. Bono saw the broken light-lines of tracer bullets aimed at the ground. Tiny explosions threw up dirt. But in contrast to the overwhelming noise of Ricardo's break-up, these lesser sounds were inaudible. When he noticed the action, Bono froze. He realized that he had reached Tack's temporary camp. He realized also that the airships, no doubt bound outward to hit Hinterland targets, had surprised Tack and now wrought destruction. Bono shook an impotent first toward the ships. "They're mine," he screamed. He could barely hear his own voice. He spurred his pony ahead. Then the airships formed up and came his way, their work done. Bono rolled off his pony and sought cover in the high mutagrass. The ships went over him -- long, lighted cylindrical tubes. He let them get away before he rose. The ponies had fled. The noise, the lights, the grav-vibes of the ships had chased them off now that Bono's iron will no longer imposed itself on them. Bono continued on foot. He cranked back his bowstring again and put a bolt into the oiled slot. But he was sure he didn't need a weapon any more. The temporary campsite was a place of carnage. Bodies lay all around, dead, dying. He went from man to man. They lay in a rough circle. They had run out from a center to escape the ships. One by one Bono examined their faces. He knew most of the men. Some he didn't recognize because they no longer had heads or faces. Among those still alive was Franco Dart. He lay on his face, and when Bono turned him with a boot, the old man's eyes stared up in terror. "I didn't mean it, I didn't want to do it, Barney. I swear. I meant no harm, don't! Don't you dare. Go away. I swear it -- " His voice abruptly ceased. Bono went on. He found Tack. Dead. For a long moment Bono stood over the blond giant. Tack was unmarked, but from his posture Bono inferred that Tack had broken his neck in a fall caused by an explosion. Or perhaps his spine had been cracked by shrapnel. The eyes were open and stared up. Empty eyes. They showed no emotion. Bono let the axe slip out of his fingers and went on. After some searching he found harem girls. He inspected each one carefully by the light of Ricardo's disintegration. He didn't find Regina, but he knew that she was here, somewhere. He sensed it. The deep conviction excited him. Inadvertently he experienced something akin to lust, the certainty of satisfaction, the breathlessness of approaching passion. He carried out his search with bent head. All the people lay on the ground, and so his eyes were on the ground, seeking depressions in the tall mutagrass. At one point, however, he raised his head, thinking he saw a carry bird land, attracted by death. But his attention had been attracted by another kind of motion, a motion on the periphery of the ring of bodies -- in fact beyond the ring. A figure. It came toward the ring. It was a white figure. He knew it was Her. Bono let out a murderous yell and ran toward her. He held the cross-bow at the ready. He was a hunter. She was the prey. This was the Plain of Baez. And a memory of a dream in a tub, a dream of hares and stinking gel. She ran in fright at his approach. He changed direction to intercept her. She zigged, like a hare. He zagged to prevent her escape. Bono knew he was near enough to kill her with a well-placed bolt, but he meant to confront her first. He meant to tell her who it was that stalked her, why it was that she must die and bathe his face and hands with blood. She wore a dress of some sort, a harem gown. Light blue or white. Maoling silk. The sparks of exploding Ricardo were caught in its sheen. The dress made it difficult for her to run, and she stumbled and fell. He stopped before her. She half crouched, half kneeled. Her eyes looked at him. They were calm, open, strange. Then he saw recognition. "Mycal," she cried, and she rose up -- tall like a she-hare. Any second she would leap to the side. Oh, yes. Now was the moment to steel the heart against that onslaught of cloying pity -- He raised the bow and took her in his sight. He aimed for her left nipple, a visible target even in the dark. "Mycal ,' # she cried, "For God's sake, I love you." She held out a hand toward him. He knew the rules of the hunt. No hesitation. Let the index finger firmly curl around the trigger like a man's arm around a woman's waist. Let it squeeze calmly, without undue hurry. But though he knew the rules, Bono hesitated. Her tone stopped him. She had cried out her lie with total sincerity -- and in a voice so changed and strange it didn't sound like the Regina he knew. He took his eye from the sight, from her nipple, and glanced up at her face. No harm in that. After all, she was a woman, not a hare. She couldn't leap out of his reach. Her face. It had a spot of sooty dirt beneath one eye. Her face was calm, serene, yet filled with a touching fondness. Bono felt a weakness in his stomach. No! He jerked his eye back to the sight, but it was too late. A question had formed in his mind, and he knew he'd have to ask it. He looked up again. "But why?" he cried. They were close to each other, but he had to shout in the constant noise. "Why did you do it?" "I had to," she called back. "There was no other way. It was an assignment." Bono stared at her. Slowly the bow dropped down. Should he ask her another question? He still struggled inwardly when the world suddenly filled with light brighter than mid-day. It was a flash so intense it blinded him. Staging Station, came the unsolicited thought. Hydrogen. Then the blast sounded. A fierce air whistled past, sharp enough to cut. He dropped the bow and groped forward. Her seeking fingers encountered his. They rushed together and clung to each other as the shock wave picked them up and swept them away. The wind blew relentlessly, laden with dust. Sometimes it let up a little, and then particles of matter glinted in the atmosphere and the landscape could be glimpsed -- rolling country, lines of trees. At such times the column stopped with a collective sigh. People shook dust from their garments and scraped dust from their faces, rubbed dust from their hands. Miri did as the others. She walked in the center of the spearhead group, surrounded by women, children, and old men. Up front and bringing up the rear were young men, a kind of protective guard. They were laughing and joking, happy to be freed for some hours from the burden of carrying gear. Horses! If only they had horses. Miri removed the cloth that protected mouth and nose, wondering about the wind and what it carried. Dusted earth, yes. And tiny seeds of mutagrass. Maybe that. And broken structures? Surely that too. And particles of radioactive stuff? Yes, a little. Flower seeds? Certainly. The books had foretold that. You're strong and resistant, she thought, addressing her child. The radiation can't harm you, baby. You're safe and sound in Mami. Don' t you worry, little one. You'll grow up healthy. The world will be full of flowers. The wind will settle. The dust will rain out of the sky. You just sleep and smile. A man on horseback approached from the distance, and though his face was obscured by cloth, she recognized Frenchy. He came near, embraced her lightly. By now she had accustomed herself to his strong odor. Ah, for a bath. "Everything all right?" She nodded, smiling. "We're fine," she said, meaning the baby and herself, but he didn't catch her meaning. Excitement danced in his eyes. "I'm going on ahead," he said. "One of our explorers has sighted another column. A large one, from what he reports." She blew him a kiss as he remounted, happy with him. Frenchy forever sought more people, delighted each time he found some little pocket, be it tribal or structure. She watched him ride up a rise, the horse kicking dust. Then the wind began to gust again, and she covered her face. The column slowly got into motion again, going deeper into the interior. French rode forward at a trot. Mounted on the pony, his head was above the heavy sand and silt carried by the wind, but the finer particles were just as bad. That wind! It was the perennial subject of thought and conversation. He pondered its causes again and concluded, as he always did, that it must have been caused by the explosion of Union's total arsenal over Hinterland. Shock waves, in combination, still travelled around the globe with undlminished fury. There seemed nothing much left of either structure or Hinterland, and if this dust kept obscuring the sun, there would be desert here in a few years. He rode on, trying to spy ahead through narrowed eyes. After a while, just above the shoulder-high rush of silt, he saw figures moving. This was what the explorer had glimpsed, a long line of people, bundled up much like the folk of Exodus. And animals! By God, French thought he saw a herd of animals revealed and then veiled again by a windgust. And the animals hadn't been loaded. He yelled out, but in the wind noise he couldn't have been heard. He dug heels into the horse's flanks and made toward the tip of the column. As he came nearer, he noticed that a large group of people, yes, real people! -- had settled down in the shelter of a small, low building. Others were still coming, and behind the first herd of horses he saw another. French yelled again, excited by the horses as much as the people. Two people detached themselves from the squatting clumps and came forward a ways -- a man and a woman, faces thickly banded. French slid from his saddle and ran toward them. "Hello," he cried. "More survivors. Am I happy to see you people, where -- " He stopped abruptly, shocked by recognition. The man was Bono, the woman Regina. French saw that-Bono also recognized him. And then, impelled by some kind of elemental gladness, the two men embraced like long lost friends. They disengaged and laughed, slapped each other on the shoulders, laughed again. "You!" they cried, pointing at each other, and they laughed again. Later all four were settled in the shelter of the little hut, which turned out to be a compressor station. Once it had pumped Helium toward Ricardo. Miri and Regina sat to one side, discussing the problems of maternity, Cult business, and the burdens of being divine. The men sat on the other side and compared plans. Bono and his column were headed south. French and the Exodus west. Both had gathered fifty or sixty thousand. A census in this wind was impossible. Stragglers kept joining. After a long set of preliminaries, Bono finally broached the subject very delicately, inquiring gently about the stores Exodus carried, and what items were in surplus and which in short supplies. French replied evasively and turned the question around. Oh, this and that, Bono said. Knives were in short supply, and now that the column lives on cricks, knives were important, but they were doing well enough without them. Hmmm, French said. Exodus just happened to have a goodly supply of cutting tools of all kinds. Matter of fact, he had almost abandoned several tons of tools because of a shortage of transport. Of course Exodus managed well enough without horses, but... "Perhaps we could do some business," Bono said. "Perhaps we could," French answered.  Conroy introduced a whole hew dimension to study #TH conroy, it was always something. I warned old Harcourt not to take him along on the Ice Age dig we were splicing with the Norwegians. Harcourt bristled his eyebrows at me. "Conroy is an excellent, fieldtrained photographer." "There must be others. Try the Yellow Pages." "What have you got against Conroy? We'll be exploring a cave culture. Conroy could snap a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight with a box brownie." "If Conroy was ever in a coal cellar at midnight, the other occupant would be a werewolf." Harcourt blew his soup-strainer moustache at me. "What do you imagine you mean by that?" "The guy lives in another world and drags it around with him." I felt Harcourt ought to remember that when you went anywhere with Conroy, you went in his space-time continuum, which might or might not coincide with everybody else's. Like when we were uncovering pre-Inca trenches, down in Chimbote. It rained. For the first time in several centuries. The fish-meal factories along the Peruvian coast swam in a stinking soup. Mind you, in pre-Inca times the area had normal rainfall, and that was the continuum Conroy was inhabiting at the moment. He was so wrapped up in skull-trapanning that none of us dared admit we had a headache. We felt lucky to get out of it with only a cloudburst. Harcourt would not listen to my warning. He told me I was confusing coincidence with chaos and so the Museum shuffled Conroy home from the Middle East operations. When he got back to New York I did my best to talk him out of the Norwegian assignment. "It's only an island with caves and bones and things, in the Skagerak," I told him. "No blondes." He turned his brooding eyes on me. "You realize it's been only eleven thousand years since the area was glacial." "Yeah. It seems like yesterday." "Do you realize what you are saying?" Him and Harcourt. I tried again. "Look, Conroy, even in the middle of July the place is cold. Your lenses will fog. The iron deposits will distort your meters. The film will get a layer of salt. You'll have to eat boiled potatoes and fish heads." "As usual, Giddings, you miss the point entirely; in # the Skagerak froze solid between Norway and Denmark. "I guess I was doing something else that week. Conroy, you don't need this job. You can pick and choose. Harcourt is all steamed up over a few scratches on a rock. Ten to one, nothing but doodling by Erik Bloody-Ax or Harald BlueTooth. I can take care of it with my new Polaroid." A pitying look; "You don't even know about the seaweed." "I'm an anthropologist, not a horseshoe crab." "I could make a crack, but I won't," he said. There was no talking him out of the trip. He, Harcourt and I loaded ourselves and Conroy's cameras on to a local jet to Kristiansand and were met at the airport by the government archeologist who was to see that we did not deface national property or get away with more than the agreed part of the artifacts. The archeologist was an all-right guy name of Nilsen. He gave us lunch at the Hotel Caledonian and escorted us to a dock where a large wooden launch was waiting, with a grizzled sea-character at the wheel. Harcourt had ordered local camping equipment, and I would have taken Nilsen's word that everything was aboard, but Harcourt had to climb into the launch and poke and pry, while Nilsen followed him with a notebook. I stood on the dock and absently watched passengers disembarking from the Denmark ferry. "Giddings!" barked Harcourt suddenly. "Where's Conroy?" I broke off my research. Beside me were Conroy's boxes and gadgets. No Conroy. "Harcourt, I told you," I said in an aggrieved tone, "he lives in a parallel universe. He's probably in the Hall of the Mountain King or someplace." Nilsen looked past me and smiled, "Someplace they sell shoes, at least." I turned and saw Conroy hurrying to the dock with a shopping bag The grizzled character had already cranked up the two-cylinder engine, so there was no time for questions. Conroy stepped into the launch, and I handed over his equipment. I cast off the mooring lines and hopped aboard. With the load we were carrying, there was not much free space. Harcourt and Nilsen found seats midships, at each side of the engine casing. Conroy and I sat on orange-colored packs under the lee of the focsle. "What the devil did you buy?" I asked him, as we chug-a-chugged out of the harbor. He opened the bag and showed me a pair of the heavy wooden scuffs that Norwegians clomp around in during the summer. "I thought I'd better get these right away. This is a dangerous area." "Yeah, the Russians are massing at the border. What are you going to do? Stomp them to death?" "Your priorities are wrong, Giddings. This area is more sensitive geologically than politically. The severe temperature variations could be catastrophic." Here we went again. Bright July sunshine, a warm blue sea, and Conroy was already a disaster area. I edged over the packs to Nilsen and asked him, "The larger harbors here are ice-free, aren't they?" "Normally, yes," he answered. "In hard winters they freeze. About ten years ago the sea was frozen five miles out. I myself drove a car to a light beacon seven kilometers from the coast. The ice was several feel thick, you know. Trucks and busses short-cut across the fjords all winter." "Has the Skagerak ever frozen clear to Denmark?' ' "In the last century, several times. # to # were terrible years. The crops failed, and whole villages starved to death. They could not even fish, because the lakes and the sea were frozen solid to the bottom. When the freeze started, it came so fast that Skagerak fishermen had to leave their boats in the ice and walk home." So Conroy had not been putting me on. If # to # was going to be his time-space continuum, I should have brought ear muffs. On the other hand, he had not bought ice skates. He had bought wooden shoes. Why? Apparently it had something to do with seaweed. The island was a grass-and-tree oasis in a line of rocky skerries. On the inner side was a sand beach shelving gradually into quiet water. I was surprised when the boatman cut the motor and sheered away from this natural harbor. "Sea-grass," explained Nilsen. "It's choking everything this year. It hasn't grown so thick since the mid-Thirties. The water was warm, back then. People went bathing until late September." Severe temperature variations, Conroy had said. Catastrophic. We dropped the hook in deep water and eased up to a basalt hump fringed by flat-leafed seaweed so thick it was like a fender for the launch. We packed the supplies over the rocks, around the arm of the cove. I could look down into the gin-clear water and see the grass growing like long hairs from a scalp. Nilsen had already made a preliminary trip that morning and left a small plastic boat overturned on the beach. Underneath it were oars, an outboard motor, fuel cans and fishing gear. "You can't work all the time," he giinned, "and the mackerel are running." This was my idea of international scientific co-operation. In less than an hour Nilsen and the boatman had helped us peg down a tent village at the edge of the beach. Nilsen indicated the emergency radio sender and said, "We'll be back in a week. If you run into trouble when you break through that dirt passage, give us a call. A helicopter can be here in half an hour." We thanked him, saw him and the boatman to the launch and watched it dwindle towards the coast. I suggested to Harcourt, "Maybe I ought to catch a mess of fish for supper, before dark." He whoofed at me, "Fine. At this latitude it gets dark about September." So I had to go and inspect his cave. First, in the center of the island was a rune stone which Harcourt dismissed with a brief, "Tenth century." We were after older game. Beyond the rune stone was a fallen tree. The wide shallow roots were tipped from the pot hole they had covered. We uncoiled a rope down the hole. I hung a flashlight on my belt and climbed down to the roomy cavern. I crunched on bones as I landed, and I swung the light around. These had been cannibals. The bones were split, the skulls hacked open. I noted the heavy longhead craniums and decided they would test-date # BC, before the roundheads came out of the southern forests. But we were after older game still. At the back of the cave was a strip of wall that was pounded dirt. Whoever had filled up the passage had partly obliterated carvings that apparently began in the main cave and ran into the passage. They were not runes. Until we had them brushed clean and photographed, we would not know what they were. Even Harcourt decided it was too late in the day to start on the passage. I left him and Conroy lowering tripods and lights into the cave and went fishing. I rowed the boat through the slimy sea-grass, not wanting to use the outboard until I was clear. The mess snaked around the oars. As I reached out to untangle it, I felt how warm the water was, almost tropical. Free of the grass, I started the outboard and trailed a mackerel line alongside the boat. In no time at all I had six shiny beauties. Once again I oared my way through the grass and dragged the boat onto the beach . Harcourt and Conroy had already fried potatoes over the primus and set the coffee pot over a driftwood fire. So far, this space-time continuum was not half bad. As we ate butter-browned mackerel I asked Conroy, "Why the violent temperature swings in this neck of the woods?" He took a slurk of coffee and began, "You see, Giddings, it's not the sun that determines Scandinavian climate. It's the earth's molten interior." "What about the Gulf Stream?" "That's a surface current, more or less constant. I could argue that it, too, is interiorwarmed, but it is not relevant to the immediate question. When these harbors freeze over, it's not because the Gulf Stream is out to lunch. It's because the earth's molten core has drained back." I tried to imagine sea water freezing so fast that a fisherman had to leave his boat and walk home. As if reading my thoughts, Conroy said, "When the Ice Ages came, it was Instant Freeze, you know. A mammoth stuffed a swatch of grass into his maw -- and bingo, choice Bird's Eye." "But the sun must have been giving heat," I objected. "Yeah, and how much is that? At its best, barely enough to fry an egg on a New York pavement. We have central heating on this planet, Giddings. And nobody controls the thermostat. This year the magma is near the surface. The water is warm. The seaweed is growing to choking dimensions." "It apparently grew that way in the Thirties and shrank back." "Yes, but there's no rule about its retreat or advance. The geology of these rocks says that the magma burst through to the surface many times. The Ice Ages are evidence that it also has retreated far into the earth, for reasons of its own. I suppose it's sloshing back and forth under the whole world, but this seems to be one of the thin-skinned spots." The next day we began to uncover the passage, sifting each trowel of dirt and finding two flintchipping tools, which got us excited because flint was not included in Norway's rock ration -- possibly on the theory that Norway had enough else. At any rate, the flint meant prehistoric trade, and we worked twelve hours with scarcely a break, until the passage was clear. It led only to another drop-off, so we quit work and went for a swim. The rock still had the day's heat. I noticed gobs of sea grass floating on the water surface and did not want to row through it. I walked to the other side of the island and tried heaving a fishline beyond the flat weed. The lure was taken by a cod that fought like a whale. Once again we had a gourmet supper, but Conroy was brooding. "The grass is floating because the roots let go," he said. "If you look, you'll see the large round pockmarks in the sand." "And you, of course, know why it let go?" "Of course. It got too warm. If somebody lit a fire under you, Giddings, I guess you'd float pretty fast, too." We washed the dishes, hit the sack for a few hours and were up at the first full beams of a sun that had not entirely set. The warmth of the previous evening seemed to linger, and the coolness of the first cavern felt good. We went through the passage to the drop-off and lowered a flashlight on a rope. The lower cave seemed filmed with white moisture. It was the gloss of what would have made stalagmites and stalactites if there had been more of it. We did not know about the air, so we lowered a lantern. The flame burned bright and flickered in air currents. Conroy wanted to work on the upper wall carving, so Harcourt and I climbed down to the new cave. Somebody had been there before us. Long, long before. He lay on the stone floor with a flint ax still in the back of his skull. He was a long-armed, roughpelted monster. His forehead sloped back from prominent eye ridges. His mouth gaped shark-like. His chin receded into nothing. I estimated he must have stood eight feet tall on his horny feet. The skull was Neanderthal -- but the height? "A folklore giant," breathed Harcourt through his face fringe. "A troll. Beowulf s Grendel." The monster had the same film as the cave. I touched a slippery hand. He was petrified, but there was no sign of previous decay. He had been whammed with the ax. He had been thrown into the lower cave and the passage closed. Then, Instant Freeze. After thirty thousand years -- or maybe sixty thousand -- the ice sheet had retreated. The upper cave had been used by cannibals too primitive to guess the significance of the dirt section of wall or the wall carvings. We moved Conroy and his equipment to the lower cave. We could only photograph our find. It would be up to Nilsen to decide to leave him there or pry him loose. Conroy paused, wiped his forehead and remarked, "You two haven't noticed that we're working up a sweat." "Why shouldn't we work up a sweat?" "In a ventilated cave less than fifty feet below the surface? This is no mile-deep South African mine." Now that he mentioned it, the cave was stuffy. Even the plastic soles of my hiking shoes were sticking to the stone. For the first time, I noticed that Conroy was wearing his new wooden scuffs. Inch-thick insulation against heated rock. He followed my gaze and said sadly, "I told you this area was dangerous." We climbed up to the first cave and took deep breaths of the cooler air. We continued to the surface. The day was warm, but the mossy dirt felt normal. "There's no chop on the sea today," I observed. "We can boat to the mainland and telephone Nilsen." We walked out of the woods and onto the beach. The boat lay like a white plastic pancake on the sand. I took an involuntary step towards it -- and hopped back as my shoe soles melted. The water was a brown mass of floating plants. "There's no rule the magma has to retreat," said Conroy. He walked over to the tents and came back with the emergency transmitter. It had been on top of a wooden crate and was presumably in working order. Conroy began cranking it. Harcourt and I went back to the cooler woods. Harcourt said hopefully, "The helicopter can be here in half an hour." "If it's not too busy picking other people off volcanic hot spots." "Other -- ?" "In Peru Conroy's rain went along the whole coast." "Conroy's -- ?" "Of course, Conroy's! Now he's in another of his space-time continua and has pulled us in with him! I told you, you should have left him in the Middle East where things are such a mess that not even Conroy could make them worse." Harcourt considered. "Even if you're right about Conroy, in Peru the rain stopped, eventually." "Yeah, eventually." Conroy had put the transmitter on a tree stump. The ground-moss under his wooden shoes was turning yellow. Harcourt and I climbed an oak tree. I could see dead fish floating belly-up in sea weed. The edges of the island had begun to steam. "We're lucky this time, I said. "The magma was advancing. Otherwise, choice Bird's Eye." In a quarter hour the whirlybird lifted us off. That night the lava burst through the caves, and for a week the island smoked and steamed. Fortunately the volcanic activity was purely local. Conroy had rescued his films from the island. They developed out as superbly as Conroy's films always did. The Neanderthal monster made the cover of Time, and Conroy was invited to dine with the Norwegian Royal Family. Harcourt and I returned to New York tourist-class on PanAm. I mean, when it came to happy endings, we were definitely back in our usual continuum.  The Foremost galaxy Publication in Science Fictien Some Contributors Past and Present Pouf Anderson Isaac Asimov Alfred Bester James Blish Robert Bloch Ray Bradbury Arthur C. Clarke L. Sprague de Camp Lester del Rey Robert A. Heinlein Willy Ley Donald H. Menzel J. R. Pierce Frederik Pohl Robert S. Richardson Robert Silverberg Theodore Sturgeon A. E. Van Vogt Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. For U.S. and Canada, send coupon to: Farmingdale, New York # H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For United Kingdom, send coupon to: London SW# #RD Enclosed find...in payment for my subscription New... Easy... Safe Way to Guaran teed to stop run. NO  Scraping  Sanding  Treatment of rusted surface  Danger of damaging surrounding surfaces Today... it's easy to eliminate annoying dangerous acid... there's no scraping allow it to dry and set overnight. You're now ready to paint the surface with any paint or broken down the rust at the atomic level and converted the surface into an impermeable shield... locking out air and moisture. And... it's guaranteed! # oz container will eliminate # square feet of rust. Send # (includes postage and handling). TO: New Jersey residents add # sales tax. Dear Mr. Baen, I have some comments on the February issue of Galaxy. First is the cover. The artwork used to be drab and lifeless but now, all I can say is -- wow! The October IF for example had the best painting I've seen in a long time (by the way congratulate Colin Kapp on the excellent work he did on "Mephisto and the Ion Explorer"). "The Annihilation of Ankgor Apeiron" by Fred Saberhagen was a clever story. I am beginning to like his beserker series. "Allegiances" by Michael Bishop was the best story of that length since George R. R. Martin published A Song For Lya in one of the other magazines (the one, like you said, with rivets). Bishop is probably one of the best new writers and should receive a Hugo as such. "Marsman Meets the Almighty" by Don Trotter was alright. "The Linguist" by Tak Hallus, or Steve Robinette since he has decided to drop his pen name, was great. It combined a fascinating idea with his always humorous style to create a masterpiece. (By the way "Powwow" last ish was superb also.) Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny just goes to show that Zelazny is amoung the top writers of our genre. Some other comments follow. I haven't seen Interface yet. How about a 'coming next issue' column? Some authors I'd like to see more of are Lany Niven, Clifford Simak, Harlan Ellison, Stephen Tall. We, too. -- Ed. Congratulations on publishing the greatest magazine in the field of science fiction. Yours truly, Tony Trull # Bowen St. Louis, MO. # Thank you! Dear Mr. Baen: I enjoyed the February issue of Galaxyllf very much. In the fiction department I thought that Michael Bishop's "Allegiances" was the best because it touched upon an underlying theme that most Americans usually don't even consider and does it realistically. Dr. Pournelle's handling of the Velikovsky Affair was the best I've seen on the subject so far. It was beautifully handled in a lucid level-headed manner as perhaps it was not in that "certain other magazine". I especially liked his treatment of certain scientists who tried to use Velikovsky's own nonscientific methods. If Dr. Poumelle keeps up the good work we might have another Good Doctor on our hands. In conclusion I would like to add that I'm very sad to see If go under and I would like to know if the financial situation improves in time if could would be revived?" Yours truly, Lonnie Misner #I #th Ave. S.W. Sidney, Mont. # IF has suspended before, you know! Sirs: Concerning Jerry Pournelle's article World. Galaxy, March '#); he makes one statement that I would like him to qualify. That statement is: "A few years ago a fanatic faction within a nation allied with the US actually plotted to trigger a US-SU war." Although I hate to admit ignorance, I haven't heard anything about it. Was it South Vietnam or one of our other Democracy loving subsidiary s? Do tell. Poumelle seems a little, well, optimistic. The people on top are just a little crazy; and, as Heinlein said in a speech published in Analog, the people on top don't want progress. Our John Cabal has yet to come. Sincerely, Jason Good row Dr. Poumelle is quite reticent on this subject! Dear Mr. Baen: I enjoyed Jerry Pournelle's very thoughtful remarks on Velikovsky (Feb. #); I am especially glad that he got his priorities straight, concentrating on the historical and archaeological issues rather than on the backdrop of "scientific" theory ( cf . my own letter in Analog, Feb. #, p. #). A couple of points, however, deserve further comment. Dr. Poumelle mentions "maddening discrepancies in chronology", writing that Velikovsky "has correctly predicted that radiocarbon dating would show that certain Pre-Columbian Central America would prove to be younger than expected." Alas, this "prediction" should be relegated to the same category as the one about Linear B writing, and, as Asimov has explained, the one concerning the heat of Venus. The radiocarbon dates in question have been brought substantially into line with historical chronology as a result of comparative studies of carbon# and tree-ring dates obtained from samples of the bristlecone pine (see for example R.M. Derricourt in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, #; C. Renfrew in Scientific American, Oct. #; V.R. Switzur in Antiquity, #). As Renfrew points out, this realignment of C-# dates has repercussions in European prehistory. Altogether, it seems that the problem has been one of proper interpretation of the C-# results. As basic sources on ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern chronology, I recommend: W.C. Hayes, M.B. Rowton, F.H. Stubbings, "Chronology" (Revised Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. I, chap. #); R.A. Parker, The Calendars of Ancient Egypt (Chicago #); R. Ehrich, ed... Chronologies in Old World Archaeology (Chicago #). It should be noted that Egyptologists do not rely on Manetho nearly as much as they did in the last century, when contemporary sources were not as well known. In fact, the #th Dynasty, which is so well documented in the records of Egypt and in the international diplomatic correspondence of the ancient Near East, is rather garbled in the recensions of Manetho which have come down to us. Dr. Pournelle's arguments establish most convincingly "that the Thera eruption, although locally devastating, was not a world-wide catastrophe." One shudders to anticipate what some unborn Velikovsky three or four millennia hence will make of surviving records of Krakatoa, the San Francisco Earthquake, the Chicago Fire, and the devastation of two World Wars -- a Ragnarok indeed! Unfortunately, Poumelle seems to be leaning in the direction of the same sort of deus ex machina approach to historical events with his "wild guess" about the meteor strike -- which I am eager to see more fully elaborated in a future issue of your magazine. Sincerely yours, Edmund S. Meltzer University of Toronto Department of Near Eastern Studies Toronto, Canada The bristlecone pine corrections to radiocarbon dating have certainly taken the discrepancies out of the range Velikovsky ' 'predicted", but I'm not convinced they've resolved all the problems with conventional dating. Mrs. Vronwy Hankey has been kind enough to send me her " Absolute Chronology of the Aegean Bronze Age", and believes she has resolved most key events within  # years, but  fear I harbor a few misgivings still. The chronology arguments center to some extent around an astronomical event known as a heliacal rising of Sothis. There's some question about which star the Egyptians called Sothis (although the vast majority of experts believe it's Sirius, and so would l were there not a report by a reliable observer that Sirius is "blood red"). There's even more question about the latitude at which the observation was made, and this is a key problem since it determines the date. My wild guess about Phaeton should be in this column sometime next fall. Jerry Pournelle Mr. Baen, Concerning your March Issue: I applaud the attitude expressed in your editorial. Actually, I have enjoyed your mag because it is primarily filled with up-tone stories. And yet you included a very depressing piece, "Changelings", which I did not enjoy at all. Spider Robinson's story did not have a pleasant ending, yet neither was it emotionally oppressive. He is a very fine writer and and cohesive. Very good. Another goodie was "Politics of Ratticide". What an off-beat, funny story! I loved it. "Tree of Life" was enjoyable. But the real reason I sat down to write is the Zelazny serial. It is phenomenal and I was excitedly looking forward to the conclusion. After all, in the Feb. issue it was tagged a three-parter. So I'm reading along a thousand miles a minute and I come to page # and there is answered and no real ending, not even your little , which heralds "the end". I mean, what happened? Don't tell me that was the end or I'll go stark raving bananas!! Christy Kanes #I Bellevue Avenue Los Angeles, CA. # A good meal will generally contain a bit of pepper and a little vinegar -- for flavor. As was missing due to a typesetting mishap.) But be of good cheer; Roger says he has almost finished the fourth Amber novel, and with a little encouragement from the Readership, I just might be persuaded to publish that one too! Dear Mr. Baen, I, like you, have hopes for the future of mankind. We are big enough to do anything we want to do badly enough. Here is our dilemma: So many shouts are heard against scientists and technology. So many cries of doom ring out. I believe we must take some risks for the good of all. Nothing we have ever accomplished to the good has been without risks or mistakes or danger, including the founding of this nation. I can only write this letter to you today not have survived my first year of life without it. We are a nation that has permitted ourselves to become too depressed. But, I know that somewhere in our hearts and minds, our great warm and humorous spirit still eixists. Let us return to our dreams and hopes and yes, our miracles. Let us show our children that we are made of the same stern and noble blood as our Founding Fathers. Let us strive to give our children new dreams to dream and new frontiers to brave. But more than that, let us strive to give them examples of courage, fine character, backbone and deep humanity. Sincerely, Mrs. Sandra McNabb # Pomme Manor Ct. ' Arnold, Missouri # But let's also keep in mind just how fragile a thing is our planet's biosphere -- and how gently we must treat it. Dear Mr. Baen: Concerning Jerry Pournelle 's Velikovsky article in the February # Galaxy Hf : There is no need for a giant meteor strike in the Mediterranean. Rhys Carpenter's Discountinuity Of Greek Civilization (w.w. Norton, N.Y., #) presents a more than adequate climatological explanation which fits not only Greek discontinuity but also late Roman ones. In addition certain facts usually found only by delvers into oceanography (biophysical) support Carpenter's thesis (the facts 'fit'). I know this sounds awfully general -- needfully so since the data is in books of material and final 'proof' in yet-to-be-done computer studies and collation of data (historical, meteorological, 'biological'). However, it is a directive to those who are interested in what may be the facts of our history! I have some further input on the issue however. I agree with much of what 'Alter' has to say. Perhaps it's my long (# yrs.) habitation of the 'rivet' shop across the newsstand, but some of what you publish does seem pretentious ("A Horse Of A Different Technicolor", previous issue), overdone and almost plotless ("Straw") and so obviously 'social-idea-prone' ("Be Ye Perfect") that Geis' words ring true and reverberate. Of course there are good and even captivating stories ('Sign Of The Unicom') and the 'rivets', too, show signs of yielding to the pressures of including minority characters and overdone philosophy where it's not necessary to the story. Still it would be nice if the College English classes were left in the classrooms. Sincerely Bill March Does a minority character have to be "necessary to the plot"?! ( Jerry's reply follows.) I'm familiar with Carpenter' s thesis, of course. It isn't universally accepted, and even if it were, his view that a massive climate change caused the Dark Ages does not finish the job. What caused the climate change? In the year #, Tamboura blew off with somewhat less energy and considerably less attention than Krakatoa somewhat later in the An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Note: The Alien Critic has magazine continues as before in every other respect. Issue ## features a controversial assessment of a dynamic young editorpublisher who controls from #-# of all science fiction: "Roger Elwood: Science Fiction's Hidden Dictator?" an InterviewArticle by Bruce D. Arthurs. Scheduled for ## is a long, candid interview with Philip Jose Farmer. Columnists: Larry Shaw, Ted White. Every issue -- The Archives: new book and story listings. Quarterlysample I year #two yrs. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I century. Yet # was known as ' 'the year without a summer " because the particulates ejected by the volcano actually changed the albedo of Earth. Less sunlight penetrated, less energy to evaporate water, less sunshine, etc. It's postulated that a really large meteor, as I suppose Phaeton to have been (and recall that this is no more than a guess, an hypothesis, a debating point; I have no wish to start a new school of archeology ) would have quite an effect on climate. Pomerance of the Archeological Institute of America gives some convincing arguments against the simple barbarian migration theory that's generally accepted as the cause of the Dark Ages. Phaeton could have softened up the civilizations with tsunamis, changed the climates to weaken them further, and set the barbarians in motion as Carpenter suggests. Jerry Poumelle i galaxy # fair # # Street New YorW N Y # # per word per Issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. nal TV scripts for sale. Plus other popular programs, movie scripts, stills. 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The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven  Jerry Pournelle. Man's lust contact with an inlel ligent alien species Pub. ed.  # cn  The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada.  Y I#F # #p E T CO ic. As.  "If one is predicting what science fiction will be like in ten years, I would expect Watson to be playing a key role in it." Ian Watson This arresting novel about mind control n and what happens to three separate groups who must achieve it to survive "bril liantly attempts to communicate a precarious truth about what we think is actuality... The effect is quite hallucinating ." -- The London Times # Ron Goulart "These short stories are a happy blend of science fiction with detection and intrigue, told with Goulart's inimitable dry humor ." -- The Kirkus Reviews #  Robert Silverberg "Among Silverberg's best. One of the first rank of SF authors, he is a master at drawing the reader into the times and places of which he writes with style, wit, and imagination ." -- Library Journal # Cary Neeper A vivid novel about a female scientist's encounter with two intelligent non-human species, all of them concerned with the earth's ecological crisis. # At your bookstore or order from Oept MN, # Fifth Ave. New York # I enclose checkmoney order for , which includes # for handling and postage. plus necessary sales tax. Please send me The Embedding  # Odd Job ##I  # The Feast of St. Dionysus  # A Place Beyond Man  # Address. (This offer expires ###) Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Tunick, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle. Ph. D... Science Editor John Wright, Advertising Mgr. Theodore Sturgeon, Contributing Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Cynthia M. Bolling, Assistant to the Editor James Baen. Editor The latest collaboration of two of the hardest (and most popular) of hard-core science-fiction writers; but this one is a little different -- a guided tour of Hell! It is dedicated, of course, to Dante Alighieri... Far out on the edge of the Galaxy, the Rim Worlds lie clustered in their isolation. They are all lonely worlds, and cold. One, in particular, is frightful -- and here more than anywhere the employees of the Dog Star Line should get Sirius! High Technology and Low Tricks are the primary weapons of this interstellar opportunist's assault on our planet, as Earth's financial empires dissolve into General Hilarity! Wherein we are given a glimpse of a new concept in interstellar warfare. In the past few years Sam Lundwall has made a deep and lasting impression on the Swedish science-fiction scene. Here, at last, American readers are given the opportunity to sample his shorter fiction in this disturbing little tale about the nature of realities... Solar System is not a Divine Petri Dish in which God is culturing the Human Race. saucers are respectable! In which Alter Asks Too Much! Sadly, the press of other commitments has forced Theodore Sturgeon to step down as Galaxy's reviewer. He has promised us a Hail-And-Farewell column at some future date; but for now, let us ring in the new -- Welcome, Spider! Letters from Cohen, Banks, LeGuin, Winterfield, Pournelle, Meyer, Sloma, Task. See inside-front cover. Interior Illustrations by Ames, Freff, Gaughan, Kirk, Pini of Universal PifcNshlng A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Sheet, New Yortt, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-issue subscription: # In U.S., # e ls ewhere. Conventions. All rights reserved. Second dess postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. The #'s has been a decade in which every physical and spiritual boundary has drawn progressively inward until finally hope itself seems threatened with extinction. This, more than any other reason, is why, while occupying this chair, I have consistently sought out and tried to promulgate the overlooked positive factor, the factor that implies that maybe we have a chance after all -- that maybe the deck is not inherently rigged against us. That maybe, just maybe, we have a destiny worth having. To this end I now offer the thought that the speed of light as limiting velocity is not a "barrier" that will keep the stars forever from our grasp, but is instead the guarantor of future freedom -- from persecution or benevolent interference! -- for those who will someday seek their fortunes beyond the confines of the Solar System. Consider. At relativistic velocities time "slows down" as compared to the Universe at large. (Most sf-oriented persons are at least vaguely aware of the implications of Relativity Theory -- for those who are not, I heartily inspiring way of rectifying this omission.) What most people -- even sf people -- seem not to be aware of is how much time slows down. At one gravity acceleration it would take about twenty years to reach the center of the Milky Way. Note that I do not say it would seem to take twenty years, but that it would take twenty years. Of course the Universe will have aged # years or so, but that's another matter. A paradox? If so, a relativistic one; the single most fundamental tenet of Einstein's theory is that all frames of reference are equally valid -- including the ship-board one. And that's the point. Given a one-gravity, constant-acceleration spacevehicle plus a complete indifference to point of origin, you can go anywhere and do anything. You can even be free. Because anybody who might have an inclination to tamper with your liberty (unless you were foolish enough to bring him along) will have been dust long before you arrive at your destination. Blue meanies included. Freedom! From Harper ) Row By Ursula K, Le Guin. A stunning tour de force by the Nebula Award-winner. # Harlan Ellison's devastating collection of stories about our new "gods." # A spellbinding novel of an eerily enigmatic world by Christopher Priest. # By Michael Moorcock More Jherek Carnelian antics. # This latest volume of all-original new writings has sixteen stellar stories, edited by Robert Silverberg. # By Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. A gripping new tale of Dr. Warboys, # John Brunner takes you to a world where an electronic government rules. # Damon Knight's latest collection of thrillers by the "new" SF writers. # All the winners and runners-up, plus commentary by Kate Wilhelm. # At bookstores M Harper e? Row U I # E. S#rd Si, New York # A Collection of Speculative Fiction By Kate Wilhelm. Nine stories (including six award nominees) by one of today's best SF writers. # Nonfiction Donald Wollheim's personal survey of SF from Verne and Wells to Asimov and Nabokov. # Essays on SF by the bestknown writers in the field. Edited by Reginald Bretnor. # Welcome to Infemoland! I could remember every silly detail of that silly last performance. I was dead at the end of it. But how could I think about being dead if I had died? I thought about that, too, after I stopped having hysterics. There was plenty of time to think. Call me Allen Carpentier. It's the name I wrote under, and someone will remember it. I was one of the best known science fiction writers in the world, and I had a lot of fans. My stories weren't the kind that win awards, but they entertained, and I had written a lot of them. The fans all knew me. Someone ought to remember me. It was the fans who killed me. At least, they let me do it. It's an old game. At science fiction conventions the fans try to get their favorite author washed-out stinking drunk. Then they can go home and tell stories about how Allen Carpentier really tied one one and they were right there to see it. They add to the stories until legends are built around what writers do at conventions. It's all in fun. They really like me, and I like them. I think I do. But the fans vote the Hugo awards, and you have to be popular to win. I'd been nominated five times for awards and never won one, and I was out to make friends that year. Instead of hiding in a back booth with other writers I was at a fan party, drinking with a room-full of short ugly kids with pimples, tall serious Harvard types, girls with long stringy hair, halfpretty girls half-dressed to show it, and damned few people with good manners. Remember the drinking party in War and Peace ? Where one of the characters bets he can sit on a window ledge and drink a whole bottle of rum without touching the sides? I made the same bet. The Convention hotel was a big one, and the room was eight stories up. I climbed out and sat with my feet dangling against the smooth stone building. The smog had blown away and Los Angeles was beautiful. Even with the energy shortage there were lights everywhere, moving rivers of light on the freeways, blue glows from swimming pools near the hotel, a grid of light stretching out as far as I could see. Somewhere out there were fireworks, but I don't know what they were celebrating. They handed me the rum. "You're a real sport, Allen," said a middle-aged adolescent. He had acne and halitosis, but he published one of the biggest science fiction newsletters around. He wouldn't have known a literary reference if it bit him on the nose. "Hey, that's a long way down." "Right. Beautiful night, isn't it? Arcturus up there, see it? Star with the largest proper motion. Moved a couple of degrees in the last three thousand years. Almost races along." Carpentier's trivial last words: a meaningless lecture to people who not only knew it already, but had read it in my own work. I took the rum and tilted my head back to drink. It was like drinking flaming battery acid. There was no pleasure in it. I'd regret this tomorrow. But the fans began to shout behind me, and that made me feel good until I saw why. Asimov had come in. Asimov wrote science articles and histories and straight novels and commentaries on the Bible and Byron and Shakespeare, and he turned out more material in a year than anyone else writes in a lifetime. I used to steal data and ideas from his columns. The fans were shouting for him, while I risked my neck to give them the biggest performance of all the Drunken Conventiones of Allen Carpentier. With nobody watching. The bottle was half empty when my gag reflex cut in and spilled used rum into my nose and sinuses. I jacknifed forward to cough it out of my lungs and pitched right on over. I don't think anyone saw me fall. It was an accident, a stupid accident caused by stupid drunkenness, and it was all the fans' fault anyway. They had no business letting me do it! And it was an accident, I know it was. I wasn't feeling that sorry for myself. The city was still alive with lights. A big Roman candle burst and greens against the starry skies. The view was pleasant as I floated down the side of the hotel. It seemed to take a long time to get to the bottom. II The big surprise was that I could be surprised. That I could be anything. That I could be. I was, but I wasn't. I thought I could see, but there was only a bright uniform metallic color of bronze. Sometimes there were faint sounds, but they didn't mean anything. And when I looked down, I couldn't see myself. When I tried to move, nothing happened. It felt as if I had moved. My muscles sent the right position signals. But nothing happened, nothing at all. I couldn't touch anything, not even myself. I couldn't feel anything, or see anything, or sense anything except my own posture. I knew when I was sitting, or standing, or walking, or running, or doubled up like a contortionist, but I felt nothing at all. I screamed. I could hear the scream, and I shouted for help. Nothing answered. Dead. I had to be dead. But dead men don't think about death. What do dead men think about? Dead men don't think. I was thinking, but I was dead. That struck me as funny and set off hysterics, and then I'd get myself under control and go round and round with it again. Dead. This was like nothing any religion had ever taught. Not that I'd ever caught any of the religions going' around, but none had warned of this. I certainly wasn't in Heaven, and it was too lonely to be Hell. It's like this, Carpentier: this is Heaven, but you're the only one who ever made it. Hah! I couldn't be dead. What, then? Frozen? Frozen! That's it, they've made me a corpsicle! The Convention was in Los Angeles where the frozen dead movement started and where it has the most supporters. They must have frozen me, put me in a double-walled coffin with liquid nitrogen all around me, and when they tried to revive me the revival didn't work. What am I now? A brain in a bottle, fed by colorcoded tubes? Why don't they try to talk to me? Why don't they kill me? Maybe they still have hopes of waking me. Hope. Maybe there's hope after all. It was flattering, at first, to think of teams of specialists working to make me human again. The fans! They'd realized it was their fault and they'd paid for this! How far in the future would I wake up? What would it be like? Even the definition of human might have changed. Would they have immortality? Stimulation of psychic power centers in the brain? Empires of thousands of worlds? I'd written about all of these, and my books would still be around! I'd be famous. I'd written about -- I'd written stories about future cultures raiding corpsicles for spare parts, transplants. Had that happened to me? My body broken up for spares? Then why was I still alive? Because they couldn't use my brain. Then let them throw it out! Maybe they just couldn't use it yet. I couldn't tell how long I was there. There was no sense of time passing. I screamed a lot. I ran nowhere forever, to no purpose: I couldn't run out of breath, I never reached a wall. I wrote novels, dozens of them, in my head, with no way to write them down. I relived that last convention party a thousand times. I played games with myself. I remembered every detail of my life, with a brutal honesty I'd never had before; what else could I do? All through it, I was terrified of going mad, and then I'd fight the terror, because that could drive me mad -- I think I did not go mad. But it went on, and on, and on, until I was screaming again. Get me out of here! Please, anyone, someone, get me out of here! Nothing happened, of course. Pull the plug and let me die! Make it stop! Get me out of here! Nothing. and they'd let his temperature drop too low. His nervous system had become a superconductor. Nobody knew he was alive in there, frozen solid, but thinking, screaming in his head, feeling the awful coldNo! For the love of God, get me out of here! I was lying on my left side in a field, with dirt under me and warm light all around me. I was staring at my navel and I could see it! It was the most beautiful sight I'd ever imagined. I was afraid to move; my navel and I might pop like a soap bubble. It took a long time to get the nerve to lift my head. I could see my hands and feet and the rest of me. When I moved my fingers I could see them wriggle. There wasn't a thing wrong with me. It was as if I had never fallen eight stories to be smashed into jellyI was clothed in a loose white gown partly open down the front. Not very surprising, but where was the hospital? Surely they didn't waken Sleepers in the middle of a field? They? I couldn't see anyone else. There was a field of dirt, trampled here and there, sloping downhill to become a shiny mud flat. I raised my head, and he was standing behind me. A fat man, tall but dumpy and chunky enough that at first I didn't notice his height. His jaw was massively square and jutted out, the first thing I noticed about his face. He had wide lips and a high forehead, and short, blunt, powerful fingers. He wore a hospital gown something like the one I was wearing. He was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. But my navel? Magnifique! "You are well?" he asked. He spoke with an accent: Mediterranean; Spanish, perhaps, or Italian. He was looking closely at me, and he asked again. "You are well?" "Yes. I think so. Where am I?" He shrugged. "Always they ask that question first. Where do you think you are?" I shook my head, and grinned for the pleasure of it. It was pleasure to move, to see myself move, to feel my buttocks press against the dirt and know something would oppose my movements. It was ecstacy to see myself in the bright light around me. I looked up at the sky. Okay, there has to be a sky. I know that. But I saw nothing. Thick clouds? But there was no detail to the clouds, just a uniform grey above me. Even in my sensation-starved condition it was ugly. I was in the middle of a field of dirt that stretched a couple a miles to some low brown hills. There were people on the hills, a lot of them, running after something I couldn't make out. I sat up to scan the horizon. The hills ran up against a high wall that stretched in both directions as far as I could see. It seemed straight as a mathematician's line, but I sensed the slightest of inward curves just before it vanished into deep gloom. There was something wrong with the perspective, but I can't describe precisely what, just that it didn't seem right. The hills and the mud flats formed a wide strip between the wall and a fast-moving river of water black as ink. The river was a mile away and didn't seem very wide at that distance. I could see it perfectly, another perceptual distortion because it was too far away for the details I could make out. Beyond the river were green fields and white Mediterranean villas, walled complexes with the squat classical look to them, some quite large. They weren't arranged in any order, and the effect was very pleasing. I turned back to the wall. Not very high, I thought. High enough to be trouble climbing, perhaps two or three times my six feet high. I was hampered by the perspective problem. The nearest point of the wall might have been a mile away or ten -- though ten seemed ridiculous. I took a deep breath and didn't like the smells. Fetid, with an acrid tinge, decay and sickly-sweet perfume to cover the smells of death, orange blossoms mingled with hospital smells, all subtle enough that I hadn't noticed them before, but sickening all the same. I won't mention the smells often, but they were always there. Most stinks you get used to and soon don't notice, but this had too much in the blend and the blend changed too often. You'd just get used to one and there'd be another. Beside me on the ground was a small bronze bottle with a classical beaker shape. I figured it would hold maybe a quart. Except for the man standing above me there wasn't another blessed thing. "Never mind where I am," I said. "Where have I been? I don't remember passing out. I was screaming, and here I am. Where was I?" "First you ask where you are. Then where you were. Do you think of nothing else you should say?" He was frowning disapproval, as if he didn't like me at all. So what the hell was he doing here? Breaking me out of wherever I'd been, of course. "Yeah. Thanks." "You should thank the One who sent me to you." "Who was that?" "You asked Him for help -- " "I don't remember asking anyone for help." But this time I'd heard him pronounce the capital letter. "Yeah. 'For the love of God,' I said. Well?" The fat meaty lips twitched, and his eyes filled with concern. When he looked at me it wasn't in distaste, but in sympathy. "Very well. You will have a great deal to leam. First, I answer your questions. Where are you? You are dead, and you lie on the ground of the Vestibule to Hell. Where were you?" He kicked the bronze bottle with a sandalled foot. "In there." Hot diggity damn. I'm in the nut hatch and the head looney's come to talk to me. Carpentier wakes up a thousand years after his last flight and sloppy landing, and already he's in trouble. Spoons and forks and chopsticks, traffic lights, the way a man puts his pants on, all may have to be relearned. Law and customs change in a thousand years. This society may not even recognize Carpentier as sane. But wake him in a #th century looney bin among thirtieth century twitchies, and now what? How can he adjust to anything? There were other bottles sitting unattended on the dirt, some larger than mine, some smaller. I don't know why I hadn't noticed them before. I picked one up and dropped it quick. It burned my fingers, and there were faint sounds coming from inside it. It sounded like human speech in a foreign language, a voice screaming curses. That tone couldn't be anything else. Endless curses screamed -- Why would they put radios in old bronze bottles and scatter them through the looney bin? My hypothesis needed more work. The people up on the hills were still running. They'd looped back to about where I'd first seen them, and whatever it was they chased, they hadn't caught it yet. Do they let the nuts run in circles in futuristic looney bins? Where had I been? Where? There wasn't any hospital around here, no facilities for keeping all or part of a corpsicle, nothing but this crazy man and a lot of bronze bottles and people running in circles and -- and insects of some kind. Something whined and did a kamikaze into my ear. Something else stung me on the back of the neck. I slapped frantically, but there wasn't anything to see. It felt good even to hurt myself slapping. My 'rescuer' was patiently waiting for me to make some response. It wouldn't hurt to humor him until I had more information. "Okay, I'm in the vestibule of Hell and I was in a bottle. A djinn bottle. How long?" I told him the date on which I'd fallen from the window. He shrugged. "You will find that time has not the same meaning here as you are accustomed to. We have all the time we will ever need. Eternity lies before us. I am unable to tell you how long you were in that beaker, but I can assure you it is not important." Not important? I almost went mad in there! The realization made me start to shiver, and he dropped to his knees beside me, all concern, to put a hand on my shoulder. "It is over now. God will not allow you back into the bottle. I cannot assure you that there will be nothing worse before you leave Hell. There will be much worse. But with faith and hope you will endure it, and you will be able to leave." "That's a lot of comfort." "It is infinite comfort. Did you not understand? I know a way out of here!" "Yeah? So do I. Right over that wall." He laughed. I listened for a while and it got irritating. Finally he choked it down to a chuckle. "I'm sorry, but they all say that, too. I suppose there is nothing for it but to let you try. After all -- we have plenty of time." He laughed again. inferno Now what? Would he turn me in if I tried to climb the wall? I got up, surprised at how good I felt except for the gnats and the smell. My imaginary exercises in the bottle -- Look, wherever I really spent all that time, effectively I was in a bottle, right? It's a convenient figure of speech. Anyway, my exercises in the bottle had paid off. I started briskly toward the wall. Wherever the ground dipped low it became squishy mud, anlde-deep, with small live things in it. I tried to stick to the high ground. The fat man kept right alongside me. There was no chucking him. After a while I said, "If wtf're going to walk together I might as well know your name." "Benito. Call me Benny if you like." "Okay. Benito." Benny sounded much too friendly. "Look, Benito, don't you want out of here?" I hit a nerve. He stopped short, his wide face a gamut of emotions like nothing I'd ever seen. After a long time he said, "Yes." "Then come over the wall with me." "I can't. You can't. You'll see." He wouldn't say anything else, just kept pace with me as I walked on. And on. And on, and on, and on. The wall was a long way off. I was right about the perspective. We'd been walking for over an hour as far as I could tell, and the wall looked no closer. We walked until we were exhausted, and it was still a long way off. I sat down in the mud to slap gnats. "Didn't seem that far. How high is that thing, anyway? Must be collossal." "It is no more than three meters high." "Don't be silly." "Look behind you." That was the shock of my life. The river was now maybe three miles away instead of one. And we'd walked for hours. But -- Benito nodded. "We could walk for eternity and never reach the wall. And we have eternity. No, you don't believe me. Very well, concince yourself. Continue toward the wall. Continue until even you are certain it can never be reached, and then I will tell you how you can escape." It took me several hours, but I finally believed him. The wall was like lightspeed. We could get arbitrarily close, but we couldn't ever reach it. Like lightspeed, or the bottom of a black hole, but like nothing else in the universe I knew. We weren't going out this way. And -- and just where were we? Ill I sat in the dirt and slapped gnats while Benito explained it again. "We are dead and in Hell. This is the Vestibule to Hell, where those who would make no choices in life are condemned. Neither warm nor cold, believers nor blasphemers -- you see them in the hills. They chase a banner they will never catch." I remembered then. "Dante's Inferno ?" Benito nodded, his big square jaw heaving like a broaching whale. "You have read the Inferno, then. Good. That was the first clue I had to the way out of here. We must go down -- " "Sure, all the way." Something about a lake of ice, and a hole in the center of it. It had been a long time since I had read Dante. I couldn't see that remembering a #th century book would do me any good to begin with. This couldn't possibly be the real Hell. Dante's cosmology had been ludicrous, for one thing. So where was I? "How come you're so sure this is the place Dante described?" "Where else could it be? All of the features are here. All of the details." And I'd been dead a long time. Centuries? What kind of civilization would build an exact copy of Dante's Inferno? An Infernoland. Was it part of a larger amusement park, like Frontierland in the Disneyland complex? Or was Infernoland all there was to it? Who was Benito? A stooge, or a revived corpsicle like me? The wall. How had they managed that trick? The wall hadn't moved, and I certainly had. Some kind of local field effect? A timeslip? Bent space? Come on, Carpentier, you wrote the stuff. What's the explanation? Not the way they did it, just a plausible way! "First, we must cross the river," Benito was saying. "Do you believe me now when I tell you that you must not attempt to swim it, or even get wet from it, or must you try that too?" "What happens if I just dive in?" "Then you will be as you were in the bottle. Aware, and unable to move. But it will be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and you will be there for all eternity knowing you put yourself there." I shuddered and slapped a gnat. He might be lying. I wasn't going to try it. It looked very nice across the river, and that was where we had to go before we could find Dante Alighieri's escape hole in the center of Infemoland. The hell with getting to the center! Let me get to those villas over there and I'd be happy enough. "Who's on the other side of the river?" "Virtuous pagans," Benito answered. "Those who never knew the Word of God, but kept the Commandments. They are not persecuted. Their fate may be the most cruel of all those in this place." "Because they aren't tortured?" "Because they think they are happy. You'll find out, let us go and see them." "How?" "There is a ferry-boat. Once it was a rowing boat, but -- ' ' "Got overcrowded in Hell. Too many arrivals. Sure." And in Disneyland I'd been on a Mississippi river boat big enough for fifty or sixty people to walk around on. It chugged around on a little pond it shared with a miniature clipper ship. The Builders of Infemoland had a sense of humor, putting a ferryboat in place of Charon's old rowboat. Maybe we'd meet some of the paying customers on the ferry. I didn't think Benito was one. He behaved more like a fanatical Catholic. And what was I? Nobody had given me any role to play. Who inhabits Infemoland? Who inhabits the Inferno? Damned souls. That was my job, to play damned soul for the amusement of tourists. It wasn't a role I liked very much. It took as long to leave the wall as it had to go toward it. At least they were consistent. There were laws to this place, if only I could discover them. When we passed the bottle that had been beside me when I woke up, we turned left and angled toward the river. An old drinking song from science fiction conventions kept running through my head. "If hosen and shoon thou never gavest men, every night and all, the fire will bum thee to the bare bone, and Christ recieve thy soul." Was that really where I was, in a real Hell, where justice was meted out to the ungodly? Scary. It would mean that there was a real God, and maybe Jonah was swallowed by a whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and Joshua ben Nun stopped the Earth's rotation for trivial purposes... There was something leaning against a rock. At first I couldn't make it out: a pink mound with hair trailing down one side. We got closer and the mound became five hundred odd pounds of woman sitting cross-legged in stinking mud. A swarm of gnats hummed around her. She didn't bother to swat them. She looked up at us with lifeless eyes. Benito took my arm to huny me on past her, but I shook him off. She couldn't be quite sane either, but she might be able to tell me something straight. It was more than he could do, and I needed help. I squatted down to look into her face. She was pathetic, hardly in shape to help anyone, including herself. Far back within tunnels of fat were tiny sparks of life, dull grey against black. Hopeless eyes, almost lifeless. Her voice was a husky whisper. "Well?" "I don't know where I am. I just got here and I have to know. Can you help me?" "Help you ! I died, and then this happened to me!" "Died." "How else do you get into Hell?" Her voice rose to demand attention despite my shocked surprise. The full force of her breath washed over me in waves. "What did I do? I don't deserve this! I don't belong here at all," she wailed. "I was beautiful. I could eat like a horse and bum it off in an hour. Then I woke up here, like this ! ' ' Her voice dropped to a low, confidential murmur. "We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism." I shied back. Another one. "Is there nothing you can do?" Benito asked her. "Sure. I can chase banners to keep slim. What's the point of that? They won't let you do anything meaningful." I shuddered. It could have been me. "Why would anyone do this to you?" "I...think it must have been becursing me." Her voice turned venomous. "Fat, fat, fat people with no will power and no self-respect." "Why?" "For doing my job! For trying to help people, trying to save them from themselves! For banning cyclamates, that's why! It was for their own good," she ranted. "You can't trust people to be moderate about anything. Some people get sick on cyclamates. They have to be helped. And this is what I get for helping them!" "We're trying to escape. Want to come with us? Benito thinks we can get out by going down to the center of this crazy place." A little spark of interest flared in her eyes, and I held my breath. My open mouth had sent me floating down the side of a building; when would I learn to keep it closed? If she came with us we'd never get away. What good was she? She struggled to get up, then collapsed against her rock. "No, thank you." "Right." I started to say something else in parting, but what? If anything went at all right, I'd never see her again. I just walked away and she let her head slump back into the mounds of fat that bulged at her neck. As we walked away, Benito asked, "What are cyclamates?" I slapped at a gnat. The gnats were everywhere, stinging us both, but Benito didn't bother to slap at them. "Sugar sutstitute. For people who want to lose weight." He frowned. "If there is too much to eat, surely it would be better to eat less and share with those who have none." I looked at his big paunch and said nothing. "I too am in Hell," he reminded me. "Ah. And they can do that to you..." I shuddered. We were lucky. "I take it you did not agree with her policy?" "Idiots. If they'd fed as much sugar to the control rats as they gave cyclamates to the experimental group, they'd have killed the controls first. Instead, they doomed a lot of people to fat. There wasn't a good substitute for cyclamates. I know one guy who bought up cases and cases of a cyclamate diet drink just before the ban hit. He used to give cases of 'vintage Tab' as Christmas presents. They were appreciated, too." Benito said nothing. "I know a couple who used to drive up to Canada every so often just to buy cyclamates. It was a stupid policy." I looked back over my shoulder at a shapeless pink mound. "Still, it seems a little extreme, what they did to her." "It is not just?" "How can you call that justV' I didn't say anything else, bue I remembered what she'd said. 'We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.' And just who in Hell was Benito? A paying customer having sport? A damned soul like me? Or one of the paid crew of Infemoland? He talked like a religious fanatic; he seemed to take everything at face value. Did I dare follow him? But what else could I do? One thing was certain, if he could think that woman had been treated justly, he was not much better than a devil himself. Hey, Carpentier. Would an artificial Hell have artificial devils? I looked at Benito more closely. He was partly bald. There were no horns on his forehead. We seemed to be covering a lot of ground, as if the effect of too much distance to the wall had been played in reverse. Suddenly we were part of a crowd, all streaming toward the river. Nobody was pushing them along, but they didn't seem friendly and they didn't talk among themselves. Each one was huddled in toward himself, not looking where he was going. Or she, there were a lot of women... The ferryboat captain had a long white beard and eyes like burning coals. He screamed in rage when anyone was slow getting aboard. We were pressed together on deck, a mass of us so tightly packed that we couldn't move. "You again!" he'd turned his burning eyes on Benito. "You've come here before! Well, you won't escape again!" He swung a long billyclub at Benito. It hit with a crack that I thought would break my guide's skull, but it only staggered him. More people packed the decks until I couldn't even see. Finally I felt the boat begin to move. By then I'd have been glad to stay behind, but there was no way off the boat. Two voices whispered intensely near my ear: "Why didn't you stop when I screamed?' ' "Because you startled me into taking my foot off the brake. At least I'll never have to listen to your back seat driving again -- " "But we're in Hell, darling. They'll probably put us in a car with no brakes. Maybe they'll give you a horn. You'll like that." "Shut up! Shut up!" She did, and quiet descended. No crowd is that quiet. It was as if nobody had anything to say to anyone. We bumped solid ground. "All off," Charon shouted. "Damned souls! Damned forever! You cursed God, and now you'll pay for it!" "Damn God and everyone else!" "Piss on you!" "Up the people!" "You're mucking bastards, all of you, get off my foot" "But I don't belong here." "What'd I do? Just tell me -- " "Damn the lot of you, I died a man  " We pushed and shoved and danced to keep our feet in the swarm. At least we were on the other side. The crowd was hurrying downhill, along a road that ran between thick, high walls. I hung back, hoping Benito would go with the rest. No such luck. The road turned and twisted so we couldn't see what was ahead, but that was good because after awhile we were alone. I tried to climb the wall. It was a tough scramble and I kept falling back. After the fourth time I sat there below the wall and whimpered. "Would you like help?" Benito asked. "Sure. I thought you said the only way out was downhill." "It is, but we have time to explore. Try again. This time I will lift you." He practically threw me over the wall. He didn't look that strong. I sat on top for a second and looked down at him. He seemed to be waiting for me to help him up. And now what, Carpentier? Fair's fair, he helped you. Yeah, but why? Leave him behind, he's trouble. But he knows things I don't. And he got me out of the bottle. Did he? He says he poured you out of a bottle the size of a fifth of rum! Leave him. I didn't get the chance to decide. While I thought it over, Benito began climbing like an Alpiner, using tiny cracks and bumps I could hardly see. Pretty soon he got one hand on top of the wall and pulled himself up. He wasn't breathing hard, and he didn't say anything about my sitting there and watching instead of helping. I turned to look at the countryside. After all, this Infernoland seemed to be modelled on Dante. A quarter of a century ago the Inferno had been a required book for a course in Comparative World Literature. I'd paid as little attention to the book as I could get away with. I remembered almost nothing, but certainly the place had not been pleasant. God's own torture chamber, very medieval. Vague images came back to me now: devils with pitchforks, trees that talked and bled, giants and centaurs, fire, snakes...but were those from the authentic Infemo, or were they hangovers from Oz books and Disney cartoons? Never mind, Carpentier. You're not going any further. IV It was lovely on the other side of the wall. I jumped down onto firm ground, grassy and pleasant. The air was clean, as at the top of a mountain, with that fresh smell you get only after a hard backpack into remote country. The gnats were gone. We walked toward the villas, lovely things, square-built, the colors of stone by twilight. There were crowds around us. Men and women and children -- a lot of children, far too many, all watching us with big round eyes (or almond eyes, Hell was thoroughly integrated). Adults and children alike were curious, but none of them said anything. They didn't want to be near us, either. They shrank away as we approached. It was embarrassing. I thought we must be carrying the smells of the Vestibule area, the fetid stench of roses and decay. We'd have to find a place to wash. "I think I'm going to like it here," I said. Benito looked at me curiously, but he only said, "Pleasant, isn't it? Here there is no punishment." The word grated. Punishment implies authority, someone with more power and a better moral position than yours. I couldn't accept that. We were in the hands of the Builders, and I'd learned all about their moral position on the other side of the black river. But I didn't flare up at Benito. Lightly I asked, "These, then, are the privileged customers of Hell?' ' "Yes." Benito did not smile. "They never sinned. They would have reached Heaven if they had known the Church." "And the children?" "Unbaptised." I'd heard that about Catholic beliefs. Even in Infernoland it seemed a little rough on the kids. "I thought they got Limbo." "Call it Limbo if you wish. This is the First Circle of Hell." He paused, uncertain. "There are legends that say the children will be bom again." There were as many children here as there were adults! As if the Builders had gotten a discount for quantity. Hmmm. Androids? It might come down to a matter of economics. Android infants would be cheaper than android adults: smaller, fewer reflexes. Would it be cheaper to build androids, or to find and capture human beings? I couldn't know, not without knowing the source. But  was here, placed here without my consent or knowledge, by an unknown hand. If me, then why Benito wouldn't be much help. He didn't seem to question anything he saw. Robot or human, child or adult, they didn't seem unhappy. Except those near us... "Benito, what's the matter with them?" "They sense that we do not belong here. I come from deeper in Hell, and the smell of the depths is on my soul." "But I don't." His smile was grim. "They will not accept you either. ' ' I wasn't so sure of that. If I found a way to clean up, and different clothing...hmmm. Knock someone on the head, steal his toga; why not? Well, partly because they'd tear me apart if they caught me. And partly because there was no privacy here. The villas, maybe. Or -- I pointed upslope toward what might have been a domed planetarium: the nearest building in sight of us. "What's that?" "He looked. "I have never seen it before." "Come on." He came, but reluctantly. "We might not be permitted entry. That is a public building, but we are not of the appropriate public." "We -- " I stopped because a white-bearded patriarch swathed in purple-bordered white bedsheets had grasped me roughly by the arm. He asked a rude question in gibberish. "Go peddle your papers," I informed him. He frowned. "Recent English? I asked of you why you invade a place not meant for you." "I'm taking a survey. Are you happy here? Do the arrangements satisfy you?" He snorted. "No." "Then," asked Benito, "why not leave? There is a way out." The bearded man looked him over, while several passersby stopped to listen. He said, "In what direction does it lie?" "Downslope. One must travel all the way to the center. To know evil is one path to knowing good." It was lousy dialogue. The bearded man thought so too. "I do not question your knowledge of the depths of Hell," he said pointedly. "I think you lie." "Why would I? We plan to leave Hell -- " Benito was interrupted by raucous laughter. A crowd was gathering and it wasn't friendly. "You can all leave." Benito seemed deadly serious. "Come with me, deeper and deeper into Hell. Leam to hate evil -- " "Hatred for salvation?" one of the oldsters asked. "A curious route to salvation." Benito seemed to know him. "Yet, Epictatus, that is what you must leam. Not to hate men, but to hate their sins. And that you cannot do moderately. You know the truth, now. You know that reason alone is not enough. You must ask for grace..." -- I slipped out during the sermon. They were standing there politely waiting for him to finish. What might have been a mob scene had become a formal debate. How long would that last? Benito was pushing them in a direction they wouldn't even consider, and they didn't like him at all. They'd looked at me the same way: candid contempt, and the high bitter flavor of mockery. They wanted out, and they didn't believe there was any way out, and they were damned well not going to listen long to a man they thought didn't belong with them. Benito was preaching hatred, and they hated him. He should have had more sense. Like me. The dome: it couldn't be a planetarium. There was no sky here. Conceivably it was a bathhouse where I could wash off the stench, and possibly find an unguarded toga. I climbed toward it. There were no guards. I walked between Doric pillars, up black marble steps to an expanse of black marble floor. Half a dozen people were talking in a circle. They seemed lost in distance, but as far away as I was, when they caught sight of me they turned their backs firmly and continued talking. The language wasn't familiar at all. The place was as empty as anything I'd seen since I left the area of the bottles. Six rude sons of bitches, and a thing in the center of the black marble floor. It might have been a sculpture, it might have been a machine. A thick silver ring twelve feet tall, standing on edge, and a control board at its base. The console looked operational. There were labels, in English. A stick, and a notch with a knob in it. The notch ran the whole length of the console. I tried the joystick. It went in all six directions: left, right, forward, back, push down, pull up. When I used the switch the space within the ring clouded, then became starry space. It was a planetarium. When I pushed on the joystick nothing happened. I took a closer look at the markings along the notch. They were logarhythmic, labelled in Parsecs Second. The knob was all the way to the left. I moved it hard right and tried the joystick again. llie universe came up and hit me in the face. Whoosh! Stars shot past and around me; a sun came at me and exploded into a fraction of a second of intolerable brightness and was gone. And I was flat on my back a couple of yards from the console. That was some planetarium! The half-a-dozen natives were watching me with some amusement. Screw 'em. I went back to the console, moved the knob down to one parsecsecond, then to a tenth of that. Tried the joystick. This time the motion was just obvious. I steered toward a bluewhite star; moved the knob to slow as I approached it. Moved into it. The brightness should have burned my eyes out. It wasn't even painful. Odd... I went through the center of the star (X-ray blue) and came out the other side (tremendous prominences leaping out ahead of me) and into space. What now? Find a planet? A different star? Stars were easier to find in this sparkling emptiness, but I'd love to dive into an Earthlike world. To search out the layers of it, to see the glowing nickel-iron heart. Let's see, that be a yellow dwarf. I moved the knob -- A large hand fell heavily on my shoulder. I twitched like a man electrocuted. I turned, and there was the mob scene I thought I'd left behind me: fifty-odd large, heavy men surrounding me and Benito and the Anywhere Machine. The white-bearded man who spoke English said, "You are leaving." I said, "Dammit! Why? Nobody else is using the damn machine. I've waited all my life for something like this!" "We do not want you here," he said. "We waited because we hoped a messenger of the gods would come to remove you. We might have asked him questions...but we have tolerated you too long. As for the machine -- " One side of his mouth twitched upward. "If you can carry it you may take it with you." I cursed him. I stopped when his wide-shouldered friends converged. Several of them wore armor! They moved away in a tight circle with Benito and me in the center. I whispered, "Benito, can't you stop them?" He looked at me. "How?" Yeah. But if I'd known what waited below, I'd have fought them. V Even while they marched us toward the wall Benito never gave up. "You may leave this place!" he shouted. "Hector! Aeneas! You are not cowards, to stay where it is pleasant when there is everything to gain elsewhere! Come with us!" They ignored him. They were compact and tough inside their armor: too tough to fight, even if they were men, which I doubted. Hector, Aeneas: I knew the names. I remembered the Abe Lincoln robot at Disneyland. Could the armor be part of them? With inspection plates -- "Where is Virgil?" Benito raved. "He is no longer here, is he? And the Emperor Trajan?" "We had our chance," said the taller, broader one. "We didn't take it. There will be no other." "Have none come here since?" Benito demanded. The soldiers barked bitter laughter. "Many." "Is it reasonable to suppose that they will never have an opportunity to leave?" We had come to the wall. "We'll think about it," one said. "Now out with you. Go where you belong." The gate slammed shut behind us. I went for the wall on the other side. I examined it without joy. The footholds Benito had used would better have fitted a spider. Benito watched with a wry smile. "You never give up, do you?" "No." "Perserverence is commendable. You will need it, but you must develop other virtues, such as prudence. What will happen if you entet the First Circle again?" "Maybe they won't catch us this time. I won't go near anyone until I've changed clothes and taken a bath." "Do not tempt the angels," Benito said. He was quite serious. Yeah, and why not? I was expecting devils in Infemoland. Why not angels? "That messenger they hoped to see. They wanted him to come." "They did, yes. But we are fugitives, Allen." There were no handholds. This time Benito wouldn't help. I was still trying to climb the wall when a flash flood of people spilled into the far end of the alley. As they foamed toward us in dreadful silence I made one last attempt to go up the wall. Then they swept us up and floated us away. We were in a marble palace. It was enormous, without furniture. The walls were covered with frescoes of bulls and dolphins and pretty girls wearing flounced skirts and little jackets that opened in front to show bare breasts. The palace was lit with torches in bronze holders along the walls, and there wasn't any sign of modern technology at all. Except for the palace itself. It wound on and on, chamber after chamber, huge staircases with great pillars inscribed in languages I couldn't read. It was too big; it must have been prestressed concrete or something better. I would have liked to stay and look around, but we were embedded in the flow of the crowd. Nobody spoke or paid us any attention. I was glad for Benito's company. Crowds of strangers bug me, and this one was worse than New York commuters, everyone wrapped up in himself. We spilled into an enormous room open at the far end. I had a good view through the pillars. The ground sloped sharply away into the bleakest landscape I'd ever seen. The castle was perched on the side of an enormous bowl, a world-sized bowl. Far down into it were the glimmers of fires and the shadow of smoke. I couldn't see far into the smog that hung over everything. There was a throne at the far end of the audience chamber. An alien occupied it. He was vaguely bovine, but I'd have taken him for an oversized man if it hadn't been for his tail. Tail! "What is that?" I demanded. "Minos. Judge of the Dead," said Benito. The Builders had mixed some Egyptian or Cretan mythology with their Christianity. That, or they'd had to warp their landscape to fit a genuine alien. I could believe a cropping beast becoming an intelligent biped, given time and impetus and perhaps an assist from biological engineers. I'd written stories about that kind of thing. Could Minos be one of the Builders? People went up to present themselves to the monster. I couldn't hear what the girl in the yellow dress was telling it, but it grinned and nodded. Abruptly its tail looped out and wrapped around and around the girl. It lifted her. The tail stretched like the limbs of Plastic Man in the old comic books. The girl shot between two pillars and dwindled, dwindled, dwindled to a speck. Minos' tail must have been tens of miles long at that point. It came snaking back through the air, while the speck that was the girl sank like a single snowflake. lief went all to hell. I started to giggle hysterically. Nobody noticed. Nobody but Benito, who watched curiously as I gathered the shreds of my self control, took him by the arm, pointed at 'Minos' and said, "He can't do that!" He was doing it again !The tail stretched out between the pillars like an infinite length of snake, dropped a man in a postman's uniform into the murky air and came coiling back. But there wasn't room! Even ignoring the moment arm -- that much weight at the end of that much length should have toppled him, and how could such a length of tail, flexible tail, be strong enough to stay almost straight? But ignore that, and tell me where there was room for tens of miles of tail to be coiled inside his body? His feet weren't anchored; I watched until I saw them both move. The tail wasn't stored in the floot, then. "Are you all right?" Benito asked. My vision was greying out; my whole body had a buzzing foot'sasleep feeling. I said, "I'm going to faint." "You can't faint here. Hold fast." His hand gripped my shoulder. A dark-haired woman, quite pretty, was encoiled in the tail until she nearly vanished, was lifted and sent spinning off down the bowl. A man in a cabbie's uniform was next. Three loops of tail and out he went into space. And another, and another -- There were thousands here. We'd starve before we reached our turn. But I didn't feel hungry, and hadn't felt hungry since I left the bottle, and that was hours ago. Also, something was wrong with time. "Minos" was in no hurry. Quite the opposite. He took plenty of time to deal with each case, and there were plenty of cases; yet the crowd thinned out much faster than it should have. Where were they going? I never saw anyone leave the room, but there had to be other audience chambers, people slipping off into side passages. There must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of copies of "Minos". Ridiculous mummery. But the tail, Carpentier! Hidden in hyperspace, or snaking out of an alternate time track? If the Builders have that kind of technology, how long were you dead? Ten thousand It was our turn. We approached together. Not many had come up in pairs. "Sodomites, huh?" Minos said. "Seventh Circle, Third Level. Or have you got something worse to confess?" I said, "I refuse to answer on grounds that my -- " He looked a lot like an angry bull when he frowned, and nothing at all like a machine. He turned to Benito. "You've been here before. Why have you left your proper place?" "Is that your affair? You see I roam freely through Hell." "Yes. How?" "It has been willed that I may do so. You have no right to interfere." Minos waved at me. "And this one?" "He has come from the Vestibule," Minos said. "You will note that he comes of his own accord. You may not judge him." "Lawyers." Minos laughed. "I have problems with lawyers. There are so many places appropriate to that breed. Where are you two going, then?" "Down." "Back to the First Circle." We'd spoken simultaneously. Minos laughed. "Back you will not go. Are you sure you don't want me to judge you, Allen Carpenter? My judgement is just and fair. You could choose worse for yourself than justice." "Cease!" Benito commanded. I jumped. He was a changed man. Power seemed to gather around him as he struck a pose, massive chin jutting out in defiance, his face both calm and stem. Once upon a time he had been used to obedience. "I am permitted to judge..." Suddenly Minos sounded petulant. "You have already judged me. What other power have you? And this man is not under your jurisdiction. Leave us alone to go in peace." "Not back up." "No. Down." Minos laughed. He waved toward the steps leading down into the bowl from his throne. "Depart. Thou art sent!" He was still laughing as we started down those steps, the mocking laughter in our ears until we lost sight of the palace. VI the steps continued. Unfortunately they soon trailed away into a broken slope that still dropped at forty-five degrees or so. At the same time a wind began to rise. Benito and I turned to face the slope and backed down on toes and knees and hands. In fact, the hurricane in my head (Where does the Minos-thing keep its tail? What is Benito, that he gives orders to an inhuman that judges all others who come before it? Is this Hell for a science fiction writer, where physical laws are whimsical and puzzles have no answers?) was nothing compared to the hurricane we were backing into. We moved flat against the slope, clutching at the rock and digging into the dirt for footholds. Benito yelled, "Minos called you Carpenter. Not Carpentier." I'd been wondering how the monster knew. "I was bom Carpenter," I shouted down at Benito "I added the i to make the name more interesting, easier to remember. I wrote under Carpentier." And when I talked to myself (I didn't add) it was Carpentier I talked to. I'd started that in an effort to memorize the new pronunciation. We'd backed onto a broad ledge. I stayed flat as I looked around. Someone was dancing to the music of the howling wind. He was bones and paunch and long flying hair just greying unevenly at the temples. He jumped and danced and flapped his arms like a bird, grim determination on his homely face. I hollered into the wind. "Hey, friend -- " He didn't wait for the question. "If I could just get off the ground!" he wailed. "The guy in the helmet's got a dozenV' Hey, yeah, I'd been right the first time! It was a futuristic looney bin geared for psychodrama on the grand scale! Let them work out their delusions here, and maybe they'd be fit for whatever unimaginable society they'd flunked out of... And I had answers to all the questions, in that wonderful moment before I followed his eyes upward. The air was full of flying people. They weren't exactly guiding their flight. The wind had them. Here it churned them in a momentary funnel, then flung them outward. There they came in a straight blast; it hit a shoulder of the mountain and churned the trapped beings into eddy currents. The people flew like Kleenex in a hurricane, but they looked like people, and they howled like Kansans caught outside in a flash tornado. Most of them were flying in man-and-woman pairs. But, yeah, there was one guy surrounded by a good dozen girls, all in a whirling clump at the top of a rising air column. The bony guy on the ledge ran off flapping his arms. There were others along the base, men and women, all trying to fly. I had different ideas. I gripped the rock hard and stayed flat. "The Carnal," Benito screamed into the wind. "Those who warped all that mattered in their lives for lust. I imagine those at the base of the cliff were unsuccessful lovers. We will be in less danger on the next ledge." He started crawling. "Benito! That's it!" I cried. "We'll fly out of here!" He turned in astonishment. It was a mistake. The wind slipped under his raised shoulders and lifted him and flung him at me. I got him by the ankle. He nearly tore me loose, but I had a handhold in a split rock and I hung on. He doubled on his own length and pulled himself down my forearm until he was flat to the ground again. "Thank you," he bellowed. "S'okay. I wish you could have seen your expression." I was rather pleased with myself, as if I'd managed to catch a glass somebody's elbow had knocked off a table. Good reflexes, Carpentier! "We'll fly out of here," I screamed happily into his ear. "We'll fly over the wall. We'll build a glider!" "I was stubborn too, once. Perhaps I still am. Is this really your wish, Allen?" "Damn right. We'll build a glider. Listen, if we're light enough to be blown away by the first wind, we probably won't need much more than a big late! Hey, let's get out of this wind and talk it over." We crawled. The weather changed as we lost altitude. It didn't get any better. The wind died down; we didn't need to clutch at the rocks, and we could hear ourselves speak. But a freezing drizzle started. Now that I was thinking glider, the loss in altitude bothered me. "We need a place to build it," I said. "Out of the wind. We need fabric, a lot of fabric, and we need wood. We probably need tools." Benito nodded. "There is a place, a great swamp, the Styx. Trees grow there. As for the fabric and the tools, we can cross Styx and get them from the wall." "How many walls have you got here?" Benito smiled grimly. "None like this one ahead. Red hot iron." I believed him. Nothing subtle about Infemoland. "How far down is it? We're losing altitude with every step." . "A good distance yet." Benito laughed. "A glider. You may be the first ever to think of that. If we can launch from the hill above Styx, we can use the thermal updraft above the red hot walls. Ecch," he said, about the time I stepped backward into freezing slush. We'd reached another level region. I stood up and looked around. Freezing muck in all directions. Human beings lay full length in it, like half-immersed logs. The rain was turning to sleet. Cold garbage washed against my ankles. "Behold the low rent district," I said. I got a chuckle from Benito. "Not yet," he said; and if I hadn't had the shivers before I got them then. He swept his arm about him and said, "The Gluttonous." "I don't want to know. Come on, let's get through this." We waded out into it. In the darkness, and half-blinded by sleet, I managed not to step on any half-buried victims. Some raised their heads to watch us pass, showing us uniform looks of weary despair; then sank back after we were gone. Men and women in about equal numbers, they ranged from pleasantly plump to chubby to gross. Three or four were as bad as the woman in the Vestibule. I wondered if they'd be pleased to know about her. And once I wiped frozen slush from my eyes, cursing imaginatively under my breath, and when I dropped my hand he was staring at me: a long-haired blond man built like an Olympics athlete. "Allen Carpentier," he said sadly. "So they got you too." I looked close and recognized him. "Petri? Jan Petri! What are you doing here? You're no glutton!" "I'm the least gluttonous man who ever lived," he said bitterly. "While all of these creeps were near their mouths, from pig meat to garden snails -- and you too, for that matter, Allen -- I was taking care of myself. Natural foodsOrganic vegetables. No meat. No chemicals. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke. I didn't -- " He caught himself up. "I didn't hire you as my lawyer. Why am I bending your ear? You're here weren't you?" "Yeah."' He meant the Prestigious International Gourmand Society, whose purpose in life was to go out and eat together. I'd joined because I liked the company. "But I'm not staying here. TTiis isn't my slot." He wiped slush from his face to see me better. "So where are you going?" "Out of this place. Come along?" He'd be unpleasant company till we got him a bath, but I knew he wouldn't slow us down.' There never was a health nut to match Petri. He used to run ten miles a day. I figured he'd be a lot of help building the glider. "How do you get out of Hell?" So they'd convinced him too. "We go downhill for awhile. Then we'll -- " He was shaking his head. "Don't go down. I've heard about some of tbe places downhill. Red hot coffins and devijs and you name it." "We're not going very far. We're going to build a glider and go over the walls. ' ' "Yeah? And then where?" He seemed to think it was funny. "You'll just get yourself in more trouble, and for what? You're better off if you just take what they give you, no matter how unfair it is." "Unfair?" Benitt asked. Petri's head snapped around. "Hell yes, unfair! I'm no glutton!" Benito shook his head, very sadly. "Gluttony is too much attention to the things of the earth, especially in the matter of diet. It is the obsession that matters, not the quantity." Petri stared a moment. Wearily he said, "Bug off," and sank back into the freezing muck. As we left him I could hear him muttering. "At least I'm not fat like those animals. I take care of myself. I was annoyed with Benito. "You didn't have to insult him. We could use his muscles. Hey -- " Benito heard the panic in my voice. "Yes?" "I was at Petri's funeral! All that attention to his health, and then he got caught in the Watts riots. But hey damn sure didn't freeze him! They cremated him!" "Freeze him?" I didn't bother to explain. They'd cremated Petri, burned him to ash and gasses. How could he have been revived? How could the Builders of this Infernoland even have found specs for a robot analogue? Or a cell for cloning? Or...anything? Cremated is as dead as you c an get! Do the Builders have a time camera? Physical principles unknown, but to re-create Petri they have to be able to photograph the past. So we give them that, and the spacewarping fields, and the genetic engineering that created Minos and freed Carpentier from the need to eat or drink or sleep, and the weather control, and the reduced mass of people in the winds, and the engineering technology that built Infernoland itself. Carpentier, if they' re that powerful, do you really want to fight them? Of course not. I only want out ! "You're very thoughtful," said Benito. "Watch your step." I stopped at the brink of a precipice. Then I followed Benito down a wandering, dangerous trail. It switchbacked along the face of the cliff and in many places it would have been easy to go over the edge. That scared me a lot. After all, I'd done it before... At least we were going down on our feet, and the sleet had stopped. Things were definitely looking up. Still, there were funny noises from the gloomy area below, sounds my mind registered as construction work. Crash. A long pause, in which voices screamed orders too distant to make out. Crash. The trail led out onto a flat plain of hard baked clay. As we reached the bottom Benito stopped me silently, with an arm held straight out across my chest. I was the shouting coming toward us. It rolled past us at a good clip: a boulder four or five yards across, nearly spherical, bounding across the cracked adobe, surrounded by a shouting mob. They were urging it along, running alongside and butting the mass with their heads and shoulders, a mob of men and women dressed in the finest rags I'd ever seen. There were the remains of evening gowns and slashed velvet Restoration clothing, academic robes and Gernrich original creations, all torn and filthy. The leader wore striped trousers and swallow-tail coat and a ring that would have choked a hippopotamus. "This time!" he screamed at the top of his voice. "This time we'll...get them!" "We can pass now," Benito said calmly. "What was that all about?" I looked to my left. Two nearly identical masses of pale blue translucent stone stood rocking back and forth. Eighty or ninety humans in decaying opulence lay about the rocks as if they'd been flung in handfuls. A few started to get up. The leader shook his fist and screamed, "Hoarders! Misers! Next time -- Come on, men, we need a bigger lead time!" More got up, shaking their heads dazedly, and two groups attacked the two huge stones and began painfully rolling them in opposite directions. The other outfit, the one furthest away, was dressed differently: also in rags, but these had never been much to start with. "Hoarders and Wasters," said Benito. "Natural enemies. They will try to crush each other with those rocks for all eternity." "Benito, I'd swear those rocks..." "Yes?" "Skip it. I'm getting so I'll believe anything." We started across the plain. A couple of hundred yards ahead of us was a hedgerow of some kind, and sounds filtered through it. The misers were rolling their rock back that way, getting good distance for another run. We followed until they reached the hedges and stopped. Then they turned to, pushing it the other way. A prim-looking bearded man in the remains of a dark suit from the #'s shouted toward the other mob. "You threw away the good in your lives! Now pay!" I couldn't stand it any longer. I grabbed a wild-eyed matron by the shoulder. She struggled to get away. "Let me go! We have to crush those wasteful -- " "Ever manage to do it?" "No." "Think you will this time?" "We might!" "Yeah, sure," I said. "What would happen if you stopped rolling the rock and took a break?" She studied my face for signs of Mongoloid idiocy. "They'd cream us." "Suppose you both stopped?" She pulled away from me and ran to put her shoulder to the boulder. The mob heaved it over a bump. She shouted back to me. "We couldn't trust them. Even if we could...we can't stop. Minos might..." "Might take it away," I guessed. "I thought I knew that color." Several of them glanced at me suspiciously. A couple of the men left the rock to advance on me. "Hey! Hold on! I couldn't steal it by myself. I don't want to." They relaxed. One, a man wearing the remains of a peasant smock, said, "Many of us hae been here for unco time. Yon Queen Artemesia says when first she came, there were still facets upon't. It must hae been a bonny sight." He sighed wistfully. It must hae been, yeah. Hey, Carpentier, how long would it take to wear all the corners off a twelve foot diamond? I turned back toward Benito. He was talking to someone on the ground. It was a man with both legs crushed. The rock must have rolled over him. He was still in shock, because he wasn't screaming in pain, but he would be. Blood seeped from the jellied mess that had been his legs. "For pity's sake," he said, "pull me out of the way. Maybe they won't get me a few times, and then I'll be able to keep away from them -- " He'd had it. Mind gone with his body. It was just as well. We ought to be taking him to a hospital, but why bother? He'd haif it. "We are leaving Hell," Benito said. "First we go down -- " "Oh no! I know what they do to you down there! Just move me, just a little, please?" I wondered where to put him. The ledge was hard and flat, baked adobe, with no cover between the cliff and the hedgerow. But we couldn't leave him out here. I took him under the arms and dragged him over against the cliff to die in peace. "I thank you," he whispered. "What's your name?" "Allen Carpentier." He seemed to brighten. "I had all your books." "Hey! Did you?" Suddenly I liked this man. "Too bad I don't have my collection. I could get your autograph on them. I had...all of everyone's books. Did you ever hear of my collection? Allister Toomey?" "Sure." I'd known many book collectors, and they'd all heard of Allister Toomey, to their rage and sorrow. Toomey had spent a considerable inheritance on books, all kinds of books, from double fouredges to first editions to pulps and comic books that were just getting to be worth owning. Much of what he had owned had been unique, irreplaceable. He'd kept them all in a huge barn he'd managed to hang onto somehow. He'd spent everything else on books: there was no money left to take care of them. They mouldered in that barn. Rats and insects got into them, rain dripped through the roof. If he'd sold a few of them he'd have been able to take care of the rest. I'd known a lot of collectors, and they all had a tendency to brood over Allister Toomey. "I guess I don't have to ask why you're here." "No. I was both a...hoarder and a waster. I lay between both groups...I suppose it's fair enough. I wish I'd taken...one or another of those offers. But what could I sell?" I nodded and turned away. He continued talking, to himself now. "Not the complete Analog collection. Not the Alice in Wonderland. It was autographed. Autographed!" Goodby Allister Toomey, who'd died twice now. I waited with Benito until the mob swarmed past with their bouncing boulder, then we ran across. We found a hole in the hedgerow and scrambled through. There was only a narrow ledge beyond the hedgerow, then a cliff. Thick mists hid the bottom, but it was a long way down. There didn't look to be any way over it. We walked along for miles. There were other groups behind the languages. Then the sounds changed. Machinery, rivet guns, hammers ringing, the sounds of workmen and their tools. Tools! We'd need tools for the glider. I began to run ahead. ledge had collapsed, and the chasm ran right across, from the cliff on the downhill side to the base of the cliff towering above. A stream ran through it and it had cut the gorge even deeper. Far below we could see people working frantically on a dam. Another group was just as frantically tearing it down... At our own level there was a similar contest. One group was tryIn g to build a bridge across the # r ge, and another worked to disassemble it. Fifty yards in either direction were more bridge builders and destroyers. It seemed like a lot of wasted effort. I looked to Benito, but he only shrugged. "I have never been to this part before. I do not think Dante came here either." The group just in front of us were steelworkers, slapping together I-beams, girders, plates, anything they could manage, fastening it with hot rivets and hammers. A small forge blazed away to heat rivets. I looked at all the work without comprehension -- until I saw Barbara Hannover. Suddenly it came to me. I'd known Barbara a long time. She wasn't cruel, and she didn't hate people, but she loved wildlife more. Whatever anyone proposed, a new bridge, a new freeway, housing developement, mine, power plant, oil well, or wheatfield, she had a million reasons why you couldn't do it. I honestly think she'd have let all the Kansas wheatfields go back to prairie and buffalo if she could have thought of a way to manage it. Add to her fanatic streak a Harvard Law School degree and one of the sharpest brains in the country, and it was easy to see why lovers of progress shuddered when she took an interest in what they were doing. And naturally she was tearing die bridge down. I had an idea and looked closer at the construction workers. If Barbara was in this part of Infemoland, Pete couldn't be far away... And there he was, bucking rivets. Pete and Barbara had been married for awhile. A short while. Just as she couldn't see a housing tract without wanting eviction writs and bulldozers, he couldn't see a nice place on the trail without wanting to improve it with a log cabin. I'd gone hiking with him once. The whole fifty miles was one long developement plan, with ideas for improving the trail, building hostels, constructing artificial beaver dams, putting in handrails where the climb was steep...I almost killed him before we got back to the car. "It makes sense," I told Benito. "Artistically. The way anything else down here makes sense. Pete and Barbara were both fanatics." Neither of them had noticed me. I couldn't see how steel-working tools would help anyway. But upstream was a wooden trestle bridge, with a group just finishing it while another tried to get at it with saws. I looked at the saws and lusted. With a saw and nothing else we could build a glider. Other things would be useful, but they were easier to make than a saw would be. I had to have one. The funny thing was that they used each other's tools. One guy would be hammering away to put a beam in place, and another would be sawing it in half -- and while they screamed insults at each other, they did nothing else. The rules in Infernoland were more complicated than I'd have thought. Or the robots were programmed funny. But that sure looked like Pete and Barbara. I waited until a progressive type laid down his saw, then started for it. Too late. A thin-faced woman grabbed it and had at the trestlepiece he'd been trimming to fit. The next time I was quicker. When she set the saw aside for an ax, I grabbed it. There was a drillbit on the ground next to it, just a twisted chunk of steel more valuable than its equivalent in diamonds, and I got that too. You'd have thought they were diamonds. Madam Hawkface started for me with the ax, and her builder companion was right behind. He didn't need an ax. He could have made three of me. "Run!" I shouted. Benito heard. We dashed for the trail leading down into the gorge. It was narrow and twisted, but it looked safer than what we were leaving. I'd done one thing. I'd got those two crews to cooperate for the first time since Infernoland was opened to the public. Unfortunately, what they wanted to cooperate on was tearing me to pieces. The trail turned a corner, then swooped down the cliff. We followed it. There was a ledge ten feet below the lip of the cliff, and we stopped for a moment to catch our breaths. I thought I felt the cliff tremble and asked Benito about it. "It is not any place to stay," he warned. "Allen, you will find that there is no safe place in Hell. Wherever you stop -- well, you won't like it." "I can believe that." The thing to do was get out of here, and the more I thought about it, the better the glider looked. Now I had a saw that I could use to cut frames and ribs and stringers, if I could find anything to cut. I still wondered what we'd use for fabric, but somewhere there had to be a storehouse for the costumes. The gowns Benito and I wore would do. It was a close-woven fabric, very tough, and it shed most of the dirt and muck we'd crawled through. I lifted the hem and tested the weave by blowing through it. It didn't let much through. It would do fine. The ledge heaved again. I wondered if this were something for our benefit, then laughed at myself. Earthquakes on call? The Builders were powerful, but that powerful? We scrambled along the ledge until we were stopped by a waterfall pouring out in front of us. The water was black and dirty, and it stank like a sewer outfall, but the water rushed downward, and it had carved a bed in the cliff side. There were handholds in the sides of the notch the stream had carved. How long would it take a stream to carve that? It would depend on what the rock was made of. And of course the Builders could have carved the notch themselves, though it looked natural enough. After a while we reached the bottom of the cliff. The ground fell away at a steep angle. We found a path down it, along the stinking stream, twisting and turning along lower and lower, with steep cliff e dges in places. It would be an ideal place to launch a glider if we could get one U P the slope. Drag it up here and #Ver to one of the drop-offs, and P u sh. Yeah. It looked better all the time, but first we had to build the glider, and what was I going to build it out of? I wanted to see those trees. I clutched the saw closer to me. Benito was staring at me. I stared back. "Forgive me," he said. "You hold that tool in a way I have seen before." "Yeah?" "By monks riddled with selfdoubt, and clutching a crucifix to reassure themselves their religion is true." "We'll need this. We'll need other things too. Wood, and rope for the glider -- " "Will that do?" He pointed downward. We were almost at the bottom now. We faced a stinking swamp. Thick fog hid most of it, with only temporary glimpses through. Things thrashed around in the filthy water, but there were also bushes and trees hung with vines. Wood! Vines! Certainly I could build a glider out of those! "Now all we need is fabric. There must be a supply dump in this place. Or a laundry. Something." Benito sighed. "There is." "Great! Can we get a lot of those gowns?" "It will not be easy." "Easy?" I laughed. "Who cares, as long as we get out of here!" Benito's determined look was very like a bulldog's. "Very well. I will help you get what you need. I will help you build your glider. I will help you fly it, in whatever direction you choose. In return, you will promise me that if this mad scheme fails, you will come with me to the real exit." "Yeah, sure, sure." I wasn't really listening. I was too interested in the swamp below us. The things bubbling around in there were people. Some of them just lay there half submerged, bubbling out filth and talking nonsense. Others fought each other, for what I couldn't make out. They roiled the stinking waters, washing up slimy things. Thick fog hung all around and I had only glimpses of anything more than a few feet away. "This way." Benito waded out into the slop. He seemed to know what he was doing, because it wasn't very deep, just to our ankles. The gup squished inside my sandals, slimy and thoroughly unpleasant. Every now and again there was solid ground a few inches above the muck. We picked our way through low-hanging trees and bushes. I fingered the wood and tried my saw on one of the trees to cut off a branch. It seemed strong enough and quite springy. I hacked off a chunk of vine and it was too tough to break. We could! We really could build a glider! As we got deeper into the swamp there were fewer people, but I could hear curses in every language I'd ever imagined, people screaming at each other, and the sounds of blows. Sometimes a filthy shape would try to climb up onto the ground where we walked, but others would grab it and pull it back into the mire. I shuddered. Why did they do that? "The wrathful," Benito said. "And the sullen. The worst offenders in upper Hell." He was about to say something else, but he ran into something lying on the trail and almost fell. It was a man, filthy with the muck, lying in foetal position. His eyes were open and staring at us. He glared, not at us, but at the universe in general. "Hello," I said. "Come with us," Benito added. "There is a way." He didn't sound hopeful, and of course there wasn't any response. "Remember there is a way. Downward, accepting everything -- " "Come on, he's catatonic." It bothered me, Benito preaching to a rubber-doll catatonic. Was my loony bin theory right after all? Psychodrama on the grand scale? Then why was I here? And Jan Petri, and Pete and Barbara? It was as if the Builders had revived everyone who had ever lived! Then set out to cure the crazy ones. Did they think I was one of those? There was another one on the trail, and he wasn't catatonic at all. He stood there glaring at us, while others thrashed in the muck at either side of him. To get past we'd have to wade out into that, and from the ripples we would not only be over our heads, but among the fighters. They'd never let us out. "Excuse us," Benito said pleasantly. "The trail is wide enough for us to pass if you will step forward two paces." "Bugger off." "Surely you will not stand in our way?" Benito was still very pleasant, but there was an edge to his voice. "Took me a hundred years to get up here," the figure said. "You never have been in the muck. If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you." He was a big man with powerful arms and he seemed to mean it. "Stand aside," Benito said. He was giving orders now. "You may come with us if you will -- and if you can, which I doubt. But you will not prevent us from going." Benito's voice still had the ring of authority that had cowed Minos, and it shook the guy momentarily. "Don't I know you?" he said. He stared at Benito. "I'm sure I know you. Well, whoever the hell you are, get past me the same way I got up here." "Friend, you leave us no choice," Benito said. "Aha! I do know you! You're Ben -- Hey! Let go! Hey!" Benito grasped him by the shoulders and lifted him as easily as I would a child. I gaped as Benito flung him out into the marsh. He wasn't even breathing hard. "Come, Allen." "Yeab. Sure." I followed numbly, wondering who Benito really was. A professional wrestler? Circus strong man? What he'd done wasn't impossible. I'd seen it done before, but not often, and Benito didn't look that strong. XI Eventually we got through the trees and brush to open water. There was a big black tower at the edge. I couldn't see anyone in the tower, but suddenly there was a light in the top window. It flashed, ruby-red, out across the marsh. Red? Ruby? A laser! Not magic, just a laser signal from an old stone tower. Far out in the murk over the water there was a flash of light, blinking, the same color as the signal. "Phlegyas will come for us now," Benito said. "You must be careful, Say nothing you don't have to say, and as little of that as possible. Let me handle him. "Sure. Why?" "Because we are fugitives and we are approaching the, ah, administrative centers of Hell. There are demons here. Guards. They can do terrible things to us." "Can't they just." I'd seen enough atrocities already. Were the Builders the crazy ones? They seemed to like pain. From somewhere behind us there were screams of rage and agony, and splashing noises. I thought I saw ripples in the open water ahead of us too. Then something took shape in the gloom ahead, something moving toward us. It was a boat. A big man, bearded, with a low gold crown on his head, stood in the stern with an oar in the sternlock. He sculled slowly, but that boat moved. I almost laughed. He certainly wasn't putting out enough effort to get that kind of speed. The boat must have a hidden water-jet or something. "I have you again!" the man cackled. "Ah, Benito, caught again. Good work!" He looked at me closely and his grin faded. "Who are you?" I didn't answer. "Were you sentenced to Lower Hell?" "Phlegyas, mind your own business," Benito said. "Bring the boat to the siore. I do not care to wade in your filthy swamp." "Don't like cold, eh?" Phlegyas seemed to find that funny. "Well, you won't have cold feet long, where you're going! Get in, Benito, get in. The other one has to stay here, of course. I have orders concerning you, but not him." He looked at me again. "You don't have a pass from Minos? No papers? You can't come." "He will come," Benito said. "This has been willed where what is willed must be. Now bring the boat to shore." Phlegyas shrugged. He moved the oar and the boat rammed the bank, bow first. "All right, all right, you have the formula." His voice was a nasty whine of complaint. "It's sure been hell here since Dante published that book. You'd be surprised how many try that on me. Nothing I can do about it, either." We scrambled onto the boat and sat gingerly. I noticed that the boat didn't sink deeper by an inch. Didn't we weigh anything? In that case we could walk on the swamp! But that was silly, because the swamp rippled and bubbled with people -- and we'd sunk to the ankles in the muck. I could smell the stink on my feet. Every now and then a nose would appear above the water as someone caught a breath, then vanished again. How many were there in that swamp? I could hear screams of rage and agony and pain, and cursing in all languages, but I couldn't see any details in the half-light and the fog. Phlegyas sculled rapidly and the boat shot away from the bank. The fog enclosed us in a circle of dark water rippled with shouting faces and with the chicken guts and other filth that poured down from the land of the Hoarders and the Wasters. Sometimes a filthy claw would reach from the water to clutch at the gunwhales, and then Phlegyas would smash it with a six foot pole he kept in a socket ready to hand. He sculled easily with one hand. "You know, that formula doesn't work with the real supervisors," he said. He reached to straighten his crown and gave us a sour look. "They took the power of decision away from me. I made a couple of mistakes, just a couple of lousy mistakes, and now they think they can do better than me. Over two thousand years of service here, and upstarts have more power than me. It isn't fair, you know. Bastards. Stupid bastards. But they won't let you in without a pass, you watch and see." "Old man, be silent," Benito said. "Humph." Phlegyas sculled more rapidly. The boat shot through the water. Now I could make out dim glowing red. The fog began to lift, and we could feet the heat. There were walls ahead of us. They had towers, and some of them were cherry red. The radiated heat was already uncomfortable. A low, wide mudbank stretched out from she walls to the swamp, and I could s e a landing dead ahead, at the end  a narrow bay. We headed toward it. A man c ame out through a doorway in the "'all. He was old and bent, and he hobbled. He carried a box about a yard square and an inch deep. He shuffled to the water's edge and used a shovel to fill his box with mud. Then he turned and ran, his robe flying out behind him as he darted back into the door he'd come so slowly out of. It didn't make sense. I turned to Benito, but he only shrugged. He didn't know either. We passed the entrance to the bay. "You may let us out at this landing," Benito said. "Nope." Phlegyas continued to scull. "It would be more convenient." "Yep." "Then why don't you do it?" I demanded. "Because I don't have to," Phlegyas answered. He continued to scull until we reached another landing. "Regulations say ferry terminal to ferry terminal, and that's where I go. Nothing about any stops in Himuralibima's Bay." Benito frowned, but he didn't say anything. The boat reached the dock area. There was no one to meet us, and I wasn't sorry. "Off, off," Phlegyas shouted. "There's more coming. No rest for an old man, none at all. Off, off." He reached for his cudgel and we scrambled ashore before he could smash us with it. As soon as we were off he was sculling away, headed for the other shore like a motorboat. The city was maybe a quartermile away across hard stinking mud. The walls were hot, although not as hot here as further away. A mile to our left was a tower that glowed cherry red. Thermals! There'd be thermals here, if a glider could get across the swamp. It would take luck and we'd have to drag it pretty high up that cliff to make it, but it could be done. "Be very careful," Benito said. "I will have to deceive the officials. Do not undeceive them." "You mean you're gonna lie? Oh, Benito, that's sinful. You could go to Hell for telling lies." He took it seriously. "I know. It is one reason I am here." "Um, but this is in a good cause..." "I thought my deceits were in a good cause." He shrugged. "The Commandment is against false witness, and by extension, against malicious deceit, and fraud, and perversions of honesty and honor. We shall not do that, and as you say, it is in a good cause. Or so I hope. We tread dangerous ground, Allen." "Come on," I said. I started off toward the door I could see ahead of us. Fat chance I'd ever make that joke with him again. It was getting warmer all the time. Off to our left, near the blazing-hot tower, were the remains of a big gate, torn off its hinges. Things walked guard duty in front of it. They were just far enough away, and there was just enough fog and steam, that I couldn't see them clearly. But the shapes seemed odd, twisted out of true. I didn't want to ask about them. We came to a Dutch-type door open at the top and with a counter on the lower half. Heat poured out through the opening. A boredlooking man in a high stiff collar, something out of a Dickens novel, was inside in a little office. His face was narrow and pinched, and the heat couldn't have improved his disposition. He had a desk like a woodcut from the Scrooge story, a tall thing he stood at. There wasn't a chair or a stool in the room. We waited at the counter. And waited, and waited, getting warmer and warmer, while the clerk fussed with papers on his desk. He seemed to be reading every line on an enormous form a dozen pages thick. Every now and then he used a red pencil to mark something. When he continued to turn the pages and scrawl notes without even looking at us, I pounded on the counter. "Are we invisible?" I demanded. "A moment, sir. Just a moment, please. We're very shorthanded here, sir. You'll have to wait, sir." He made each 'sir' a curse. "You would be well advised to attend us." Benito's voice had that edge to it, a note of warning. The clerk looked around uneasily. He obviously didn't recognize either of us. Hardly surprising. "Your papers, please." "We have none," Benito answered. "Oh my, oh my, one of those days," the clerk muttered. "Well, if you haven't any papers, you can't come in. The rules are very strict. You'll have to go back for papers.' He turned back to his desk an started looking over the files on it. "We have an errand inside,' Benito said. "You do not help you record by delaying us." The clerk looked back nervously He examined us closely again, not ing the slime on our gowns and thr stench of our sandals. That seemet to cheer him. "What is your station inside?" he asked. "No fixed post," Benito answered... "I can t help you, sir. I m only record-keeper for the Sixth Circle. Next window, please." He turned back to his desk. We waited. Benito whistled something monotonous. Finally the clerk turned back. "You still here, sir? I told you, next window, please." "It is to the Sixth Circle that we must go now." "Why didn't you tell me," the clerk complained. "Very well." He reached into a cabinet and produced what looked like, manuscript books and short stubs of pencil. "If you don't have the proper papers, you'll have to fill out these forms." They were twenty pages long, covered with small blanks, and there were nine copies. Not only wasn't there any carbon paper, but the blanks were arranged differently on each copy, although they all asked for the same information. "I think we will not bother," Benito said. I flared up. "What the hell do you want all this for? Great grandmother's blood type! Why should I fill this out?" "You have to." The clerk was getting more and more irritated'. "You can see they're all blank. You can see they have to be filled out. Right at the top, see, it says, replacement for lost papers, application for, D-#t#y#, to be submitted in nine copies'. I can't do anything for you without that information." "Aren't there exceptions?" "Of course there are exceptions, to receive government financial assistance for business or home-buying purposes? If you should need such aid, in the form of a loan or loan guarantee, how and where can you apply? This booklet lists seven general categories of federal financing, including education, business, home and farm loans. "Loan Sources in the Federal government" is only # postpaid from Financial Technology Limited, # River Road, North Arlington, New Jersey # sir. One was made over two thousand years ago. Before my time, but they still talk about it." He shuddered. "But you are obviously not Him. Is either of you a living man? Can either of you summon angels? Those are in the book too." He glanced at a shelf of loose-leaf folios above his desk. "Volume #, page #, paragraph # -- I'm glad we changed to decimal system, but most of us didn't like it -- it says very plainly, anyone who can summon angels may pass. But if you're applying under that ruling you'll have to go to the main gate. Don't prove you can do it. Just go to the main gate and they'll take care of you." "But you will not let us pass," Benito said. "Not evenif I tell you that if you do not you will be in grave trouble?" "I know my duty. You will not come through." "Very good. You have done well," Benito said. "If you had let us in, we would have reported it. Now you have a favorable report coming. Who is your supervisor?" The clerk stared at Benito. "Mrs. Playfair. Formerly a postmistress. But -- " "Oh, my," said Benito. "I won't be able to help you after all. It would do no good to give the report to her." The clerk was unsettled. "Why not, sir?" The sir wasn't a curse any longer. "I am not permitted to say." "Ah. You mean -- " He gulped. Whatever he imagined was going to happen to Mrs. Playfair worried him excessively. "But what will happen to her people? What will become of me?" Benito looked crestfallen. "You know the rules -- " "But I've done everything property My files are in perfect order -- oh dear, oh dear, I told her she shouldn't have let that man in the records room, I told her he wasn't properly credentialled, I told her! It was all her fault, I told her...my files are in perfect order. And they won't even look at them, they'll just -- " He was actually wringing his hands as he looked around his" office at his desk and files. Benito frowned. "It would be a waste to have you in the boiling pitch -- " screamed. "Are you certain your files are in perfect order?" Benito demanded. "Of course they are! Here, you can see for yourself." He did something that opened the gate. Benito and I crowded in. Benito took down a volume of the rule book and leafed through it. "Keep this up to date, do you? All revisions in place as they come in? Where are your unfiled revision sheets?" "There are none," the clerk said primly. "Hmm." Benito lifted the forms on the clerk's desk. "This is not in order!" He leafed through quickly. "But I hadn't checked the seventh copy yet!" the clerk moaned. "I was doing that when you interrupted me! You can't report me for that, I was trying to give you service, and -- " Benito handed the forms back. The clerk looked through and extracted a bulky set. There was pencil all over the first six pages, then the writing medium changed to something darker. Benito looked at it curiously. "This is hardly legible." "He used up his pencil," the clerk said. "Volume #, page #, paragraph #, states that no applicant can have more than one pencil. So I made him fill it out with something else. He used blood." "His own?" I asked. "Where else would he gel blood?" The clerk turned to Benito. "Who is this man?" "In my custody. Witness. Not your case, don't worry about it." He handed back the forms. "This seems to be in order. " "Thank you." There was relief all over the clerk's face. "One item was very difficult to read. You should be more careful next time." "Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. Are you finished with it?" Benito nodded. The clerk took the form -- copy seven of nine copies -- and tossed it into a wastebasket in the comer. It burst into flames. I stared. A man had used his own blood to fill that out? I glanced at the forms the clerk had handed us. Sure enough, at the top of copy eight went to "applicant" and copy nine was "To be routed to the statistical section". "What will be the charges against Mrs. Playfair?" the clerk asked, his voice low and confidential. Benito frowned. "I understand there are shortages in uniforms and supply -- " "But we don't have anything to do with that." "Precisely," Benito said knowingly. Comprehension dawned on the clerk's face. He nodded. "We're going to check that now," Benito said. "Keep up the good work, uh -- " "MacMurdo. Vincent MacMurdo. You'll remember?" "Certainly." Benito opened the inner door and held it for me. I went through, trying not to hurry. X Benito followed and closed the door behind him. I slumped against the wall, convulsed by silent laughter. I jumped away fast. The wall was burning hot. I smelled scorched inferno cloth. Another second and I'd have had a bad bum. We were in a corridor that stretched to infinity in both directions. It was about ten feet high and wide, and there were doors at intervals along it. People hurried in both directions, paying us no attention. And there were all kinds of people! Men and women in flowing robes, in US Post Office uniforms, in colonial costumes, in the high collars the Dickensian clerk had worn, military uniform, Chinese mandarin robes, modern business suits, coveralls with insignia of planets and stars and sunbursts, a whirl of scurrying humanity shoving past us as if we weren't there. Nobody was going to notice us for our funny clothing. The old man we'd seen outside rushed past us, almost running. He carried a box of fresh mud, and poked at it with a stick as he ran. We watched as he turned through a door and out of sight. Someone had stopped beside us and was laughing. He wore a Roman toga. "Do you speak English?" I asked. "Certainly." He was still laughing. "Who was that?" I asked. The laughter stopped and the man glared. He was carrying some kind of wood plank with wax on it. There were letters cut in the wax. "You are new here?" he demanded. "From another division," Benito said quickly. He lowered his voice. "Special assignment." The. Roman drew away from us. "Surely you have no interest in Himuralibima? He is our most honored civil servant." Benito gave a knowing look. I still had a blank stare. "Hammurabi's secretary, you know. Invented record-keeping." "Ah," I said. Hammurabi? Oh, all right, he's Hammurabi' s secretary. And  am Napoleon Bonaparte. "You'd think after all these years they'd let him slow down a little." "But he can't," the Roman protested. "They've offered him retirement, but he has to fill out the proper forms, and in his case, of course they're in cuneiform. And you have noticed how hot it is in here?" I couldn't stand it. I tipped my head back and roared with laughter. It rolled out, gales of laughter, choking me, as I thought of that first beaurocrat trying to complete his retirement papers before the mud dried from the heat... Himuralibimas's Bay? Benito merely nodded. "Fitting. I am certain you have work. Signor -- ?" "Uh, of course," the Roman said. "Your pardon." He pushed past us and walked briskly down the corridor. Our clerk came out of his office. The Roman stopped and they talked in whispers. "Allen, must you ask unnecessary questions?" Benito demanded. "I'm a writer. Of course I ask questions." "Please do not. Not in here. For the moment we are safe. They think -- " He motioned with his eyes. I turned my eyes only. The Roman had stopped someone else and was whispering to him. The man he'd stopped, a young man in #'s US Army uniform, nodded. Pretty soon he stopped someone and both looked clandestinely at us. They stopped others... "They're telling stories about us," I said. "Yes. Let us hope they are telling the proper ones. Now we must find the supply center." herever we went we were preceded and followed by whispers. People got out of our way, too. If we wanted to go through a door, if we even looked like we wanted to go through a door, there was a scramble to hold it open for us. "They sure are scared of you," I said. "They know who you are." Which was more than I did. "I think few of them have seen or heard of me," Benito answered. Oh, really? "You know your way around here." "No. I know my way around beaurocracies. This one is no different from any other." "You were a beaurocrat once?" He hesitated. "I suppose you might say so." "Exactly what -- " An anguished voice drowned me out. We were passing an open door, and a woman's voice screamed in rage and pain: "But that form is twenty-seven pages long! All that for one tool?"  I looked in, caught a familiar hawklike profile, turned back and kept walking. "Don't look now," I said out of the corner of my mouth. The other voice followed us. "You should keep better track of your handsaw. The rules are very clear... At the next door there was a long line of naked people, fat men, pretty girls, ugly women, studs, every form and variety of mankind: the reception desk at a streaker convention. They were trying to get to a counter where some fat guy handed them clothing while two beanpole women took information down on more forms. What was this? The supply center for Infernoland? Were these employees, or spectators, or --  -- or what? We got in line, the only ones with clothing who did. A thin guy in a medieval bachelor gown came in, went behind the counter, and whispered to the supply clerk. The clerk summoned his two old biddies and they whispered together. Finally one of the women came out from behind the counter. She wore a coverall of a kind I didn't recognize, dark blue with strange insignia. "What may we do for you?" she asked. She was trying to be pleasant and it was obvious that she'd never learned how. "This man was given the wrong clothing," Benito said. "He is wearing the same thing I am. In our section we do not give junior courriers the uniform of a supervisor." She frowned. Benito didn't look to be dressed like a supervisor. He looked like an escapee from the violent ward. So did I. But he only stared back, and after awhile her eyes dropped. "What should he wear?" she said. "Loincloth. And there are nine senior men in my section who have loincloths and no gowns. It is intolerable." "Oh." She didn't know what to  M l --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  -- Donald A. Wollhelm, Publisher ! I r I one of Andre Norton's really great I ; novels. It is an sf recasting of Merlin, I ; sword-and-legendry plus star-bome I ; i life and alien intervention. ; I (UYI # -- #) ;j i paperback from the hard cover. Need I ! ; we say more? ! ! ; (UWI # -- #) !; f marvelous three full novels in one, I with a panoramic vision of an alien, ; yet somehow familiar, world of war; ! riors, barbarians, wonder-workers and I goddesses. It will be compared favor; ably with Le Guin, Brackett, Tolkien ! I and Leiber! ! ! (UWI # -- #) ; ! Norton, with a marvelous new cover  by Michael Whelan is here, in case  ; your old copy is in shreds with re! ' reading.  : (UYI # -- #) ;! ' Michael Whelan also painted the '  I Keith Laumer. (Did you know that ; I I Keith's name is pronounced as though I I I the "u" were a "w"?) ! I ; (UYI # -- #I .#) !; ! Happy reading! : e.b.w. ; --  --  --  --  --  --  -- i I make of that. She went back and whispered to the other biddy. Meanwhile the line moved up. The clerk looked at papers and then at the fat man at the head of the line. He went into the shelving stacks behind the counter and came back with bright gaudy clothes, slashed velvet sleeves and tight trousers. They were obviously too small. "Ungood. Double plus ungood. Too small. Wrong period," the fat man protested. "Tough shit, buddy. We all got our troubles. Next!" The biddies came over to him and whispered. He looked at us. "Uh, you sirs -- can I help you?" Three helped carry the gowns, and a fourth brought up the rear with stacks of papers flowing with seals and ribbons. Benito paid no attention to me; he just walked ahead as if he assumed we'd all follow, which we did. We turned a corner and he stopped. "This will do," he said. "Give those things to Allen. You have your work to do, and this is his task." "Certainly, sir. Is there nothing else we can do for you?" This one wore a policewoman's uniform, vaguely American, though the shield was shaped strangely. She talked without using articles. When she spoke to her subordinates she used a language I didn't know. I was afraid to ask her deathdate. "I said this will do," Benito said. "We will be met by others. You may go." "Thank you, sir." The sow turned and stalked away followed by the others. When she was out of sight Benito seemed to wilt. His straight posture was gone, the high angle of the chin vanished, and he slumped. Then he laughed. "So. Nothing changes. Now we must get out of here before someone tells this story to an internal security agent." "They think -- what? That we're important officials?" "No. Of course not. They know we are only pretending that." "Then what -- " "But they cannot be sure. We might be important officials. But most of them think we are secret police." "But how do you know there are secret police?" Benito looked very sad. "Allen, there have to be. You cannot run a beaurocratic state without them. Come." We found a door to the outside and Benito surrendered one of the documents he'd collected. We passed through and were out on the mud flats again. A stinking breeze wrapped itself around me, deliciously cool, and I said, "Ahh..." Far to our right the old man had just filled his box of mud again. He ran for the gate, writing frantically. XI I was smiling as I turned. The robes I held stacked on my head, an ungainly load. "Now what?" Benito was staring across the swamp. "I don't know." "Ah?" "We cannot possibly persuade Phlegyas to take us back. I fear we must swim." He set his own stack of robes down, shook out the top robe and used it to tie the rest together. Swim? Through that ? It wasn't the garbage that turned me off. It was the bubbling of angry people in and under the water. If we met anyone like the guy Benito had thrown back into the water...if we met half a dozen of them while loaded down with heavy wet stacks of robes! "Wait a minute, Benito. Let's try something else." "Lead on, then, Allen." I stopped to tie my bundle as Benito had tied his. Then I turned right along Himuralibima's Bay. The choice was deliberate: here there were windows and doors along the wall. I was wading thigh-deep and not liking it, but it was the only way to learn what I wanted to know. At worst I was postponing our swim. At best -- "We've got plenty of time. You keep saying so." "So we do. I wonder what you expect to find." My foot brushed something soft. She was clearly visible beneath two feet of water: a longboned black woman with her hair floating ike seaweed around a slack face. I asked a stupid question. "Is she dead?' ' "Of course," said Benito. She was curled in foetal position. She stayed rigid as I rolled her to bring her head above water. There w as no sign of decay, and no sign '  :ife. But I felt for a pulse in her and found it. Catatonic." And I started to get ac "Another catatonic. Of all the dirty things. We don't persecute crazy people for crimes. What right do the Builders have to put crazy people in Hell?" "The Builders?" "Never mind. Of all the dirty things. Benito, can you handle two bundles for a minute?" He took my robes on his other shoulder. He waited while I reached into the water to adjust the woman's position. Catatonia. It's a rare enough disorder, but almost incurable. You can find one or two catatonics in almost any mental hospital. They afford opportunity for endless jokes, all identical; for a catatonic will take any position you pull him into, and hold the pose indefinitely. Every intern thinks he is the first to see the possibilities. He will lead the resident catatonic to the hospital cafeteria, place him just outside the door, and leave him there with his thumb to his nose or his middle finger rigidly extended. Hilarious! Sometimes he gets a surprise... I had to stand on her knees to straighten her legs, but fianlly I got them stretched out in front of her. She was still leaning too far back, her eyes staring at infinity through a half-inch of scummy water. Still standing on her knees for leverage, I reached beneath the water, took her shoulders and pulled her up to sitting position. Now she'd be able to breathe...sometimes he gets a surprise, your antic intern. He will have just finished adjusting the patient's hand with thumb properly to nose, when the hand becomes a fist and the first becomes a missile warhead. Catatonics are hideously strong. They have to be, to hold one position forever. And she was sitting down. She lashed straight out and tried to punch a hole through my groin. She damned near made it. I whooped and doubled over, sucking air. Sucking, as it turned out, filthy water as I rolled helplessly over into the swamp. I tried to uncurl. My lungs still wanted to suck water. Inch by inch, I fought my mouth to the surface, drew a lungful of sweet stinking air, and screamed. Benito was sloshing toward me. I gestured him back. If he dropped the robes to help me, they'd quadruple in weight! He stopped. I waited for the pain to ease a little, then tried to stand up. When I put weight on my legs it felt like she'd hit me again. I moved toward shore, doubled over. The woman's lower lip was just at the surface of the water. She held her arm straight out, first clenched. "Don't make waves," I told her sourly as I passed. She didn't respond, and she still looked dead. Water streamed from her nose. I didn't stop for any more catatonics. Gradually I was able to straighten up. Benito followed patiently, carrying both bundles, both of us wading thigh-deep in water. I ignored the floating garbage. It wasn't getting me any dirtier than I already was. The texture of the bottom had changed. Beneath a film of frictionless mud there were tilted slabs that had sharp corners and tended to slide... I stopped. Benito stopped behind me. I said, "Feel that?" Benito didn't get it. "What should I feel?" "Himuralibima's Ford, that's what! No telling how far it goes, but it should get us a good distance across the swamp. Here, give me that." I took one of the bundles and started into the swamp. The footing was chancy, the slabs tended to slide, but it was better than swimming. And I, feeling that I had earned the right to brag, bragged. "All along I wondered where the dried mud was going. It'd shrink a little when the water evaporated, but even so, that bay is huge. Where do they dump the slabs after Himuralibima gives up? Maybe I'd find a mountain of them. Or maybe they don't want a pile of ruined clay slabs in their working area. Maybe they're afraid of getting ticked off for sloppiness. "So, I was right. Someone's been dumping the slabs in the bay. Every hundred years he has to walk a little further. Otherwise they'd show above the surface." "Very clever, Allen." " Thank kew." No telling how far it would go; but we were a good distance into the swamp, and the water was only up to our calves. Hold your breath and make a wish, Carpentier. Or just hold your breath, the water could be over your head any second. Wh were nearly across before it ended. The slabs dipped, and I followed the dip, walking on eggs, with the stack of robes balanced on my head. I was chin deep where the mud turned squish-soft. So far, so good. I found an underwater ridge and followed that going waist deep, then higher. I was wading ashore, with Benito behind me, when our luck ran out. The broad-shouldered man who blocked our path was the same who had blocked our path before. He shied back when he recognized us; and then he saw our situation, and grinned. I turned back to Benito. "Mind if I try this?" "If you think it will help." "I wrote science fiction, remember? I ought to be able to explain a complicated idea to a moron." I hadn't lowered my voice. The j broad-shouldered man advanced on I us, saying, "Who's a moron?" "Don't worry about it," I told ' him. "You've got worse problems than that. Remember the flying lesson?" His grin was back. "I'd like to see old Benito try that with his arms full of bedsheets!" "He won't be able to," I said, keeping my speech slow and distinct. "He'll have to put them down. In the swamp." Pause. "They'll get all dirty." Pause. "Imagine what that will do to his temper." I watched his eyes. It was getting through to him. I said, "Why don't you step aside while you think it over?" "Some guys would rather talk than fight," he said contemptuously. He turned and stalked back to his point of high ground.    of The rising sun is a dagger point casting long shadows toward Vibulenus and his cohort from the native breastworks. The legion had formed ranks an hour before; the enemy is not yet stirring. A playful breeze with a bitter edge skitters out of the south, and the Tribune swings his shield to his right side against it. "When do we advance, sir?" his First Centurion asks. Gnaeus Clodius Calvus, promoted to his present position after a boulder had pulped his predecessor during the assault on a granite fortress far away. Vibulenus only vaguely recalls his first days with the cohort, a boy of eighteen in titular command of four hundred and eighty men whose names he had despaired of learning. Well', he knows them now. Of course, there are only two hundred and ninety-odd left to remember. Calvus' bearded, silent patience snaps Vibulenus back to the present. "When the cavalry comes up, hey told me. Some kinglet or other Is supposed to bring up a couple thousand men to close our flanks. Otherwise, we're hanging..." The Tribune's voice trails off. He stares across the flat expanse of gravel toward the other camp, remembering another battle plain of long ago. "Damn Parthians," Calvus mutters, his thought the same. Vibulenus nods. "Damn Crassus, you mean. He put us there, and that put us here. The stupid bastard. But he got his, too." The legionaries squat in their ranks, talking and chewing bits of bread or dried fruit. They display no bravado, very little concern. They have been here too often before. Sunlight turns their shieldfacings green: not the crumbly fungus of verdigris but the shimmering sea-color of the harbor of Brundisium on a foggy morning. Oh, Mother Vesta, Vibulenus breathes to himself. He is five foot two, about average for the legion. His hair is black where it curls under the rim of his helmet and he has no trace of a beard. Only his eyes make him appear more than a teenager; they would suit a tired man of fifty. A trumpet from the command group in the rear sings three quick bars. "Fall in!" the Tribune orders, but his centurions are already barking their own commands. These too are lost in the clash of hobnails on gravel. The Tenth Cohort could form ranks in its sleep. Halfway down the front, a legionary's cloak hooks on a notch in his shield rim. He tugs at it, curses in Oscan as Calvus snarls down the line at him. Vibulenus makes a mental note to check with the centurion after the battle. That fellow should have been issued a replacement shield before disembarking. He glances at his own. How many shields has he carried? Not that it matters. Armor is replaceable. He is wearing his fourth cuirass, now, though none of them have fit like the one his father had bought him the day Crassus granted him a tribune's slot. Vesta... A galloper from the command group skids his beast to a halt with a needlessly brutal jerk on its reins. Vibulenus recognizes him -- Pompilius Falco. A little swine when he joined the legion, an accomplished swine now. Not bad with animals, though. "We'll be advancing without the cavalry," he shouts, leaning over in his saddle. "Get your line dressed." "Osiris' bloody dick we will!" the Tribune snaps. "Where's our support?" "Have to support yourself, I guess," shrugs Falco. He wheels his mount. Vibulenus steps forward and catches the reins. "Falco," he says with no attempt to lower his voice, "you tell our deified Commander to get somebody on our left flank if he expects the Tenth to advance. There's too many natives -- they'll hit us from three sides at once." "You afraid to die?" the galloper sneers. He tugs at the reins. Vibulenus holds them. A gust of wind whips at his cloak. "Afraid to get my skull split?" he askes. "I don't know. Are you, Falco?" Falco glances at where the Tribune's right hand rests. He says nothing. "Tell him we'll fight for him," Vibulenus goes on. "We won't let him throw us away. We've gone that route once." He looses the reins and watches the galloper scatter gravel on his way back. The replacement gear is solid enough, shields that do not split when dropped and helmets forged without thin spots. But there is no craftsmanship in them. They are heavy, lifeless. Vibulenus still carries a bone-hilted sword from Toledo that required frequent sharpening but was tempered and balanced -- poised to slash a life out, as it has a hundred times already. His hand continues to caress the palm-smoothed bone, and it calms him somewhat. "Thanks, sir." The thin-featured tribune glances' back at his men. Several of the; nearer ranks give him a spontaneous salute. Calvus is the one who spoke. He is blank-faced now, a statue of mahogany and strapbronze. His stocky form radiates pride in his leader. Leader -- no one in the group around the standards can lead a line soldier, though they may give commands that will be obeyed. Vibulenus grins and slaps Calvus' burly shoulder. "Maybe this is the last one and we'll be going home," he says. the enemy camp. At this distance it is impossible to distinguish forms, but metal flashes in the viridian sunlight. The shadow of bodies spreads slowly to right and left of the breastworks as the natives order themselves. There are thousands of them, many thousands. "Hey-yp!" Twenty riders of the general's bodyguard pass behind the cohort at an earthshaking trot. They rein up on the left flank, shrouding the exposed depth of the infantry. Pennons hang from the lances socketed behind their right thighs, gay yellows and greens to keep the lance heads from being driven too deep to be jerked out. The riders' faces are sullen under their mesh face guards. Vibulenus knows how angry they must be at being shifted under pressure -- under his pressure -- and he grins again. The bodyguards are insulted at being required to fight instead of remaining nobly aloof from the battle. The experience may do them some good. At least it may get a few of the snotty bastards killed. "Not exactly a regiment of cavalry," Calvus grumbles. "He gave us half of what was available," Vibulenus replies with a shrug. "They'll do to keep the natives off our back. Likely nobody'll come near, they look so mean." The centurion taps his thigh with his knobby swagger stick. "Mean? We'll give'em mean." All the horns in the command group sound together, a cacophonous bray. The jokes and scufflings freeze, and only the south wind whispers. Vibulenus takes a last look down his ranks -- each of them fifty men abreast and no more sway to it than a tight-stretched cord would leave. Five feet from shield boss to shield boss, room to swing a sword. Five feet from nose guard to the nose guards of the next rank, men ready to step forward individually to replace the fallen or by ranks to lock shields with the front line in an impenetrable wall of bronze. The legion is a restive dragon, and its teeth glitter in its spears; one vertical behind each legionary's shield, one slanted from each right hand to stab or throw. The horns blare again, the eagle standard slants forward, and Vibulenus' throat joins three thousand others in a death-rich bellow as the legion steps off on its left foot. The centurions are counting cadence and the ranks blast it back to them in the crash-jingle of boots and gear. Striding quickly between the legionaries, Vibulenus checks the dress of his cohort. He should have a horse, but there are no horses in the legion now. The command group rides rough equivalents which are...very rough. Vibulenus is not sure he could accept one if his parsimonious employers offered it. His men are a smooth bronze chain that advances in lock step. Very nice. The nine cohorts to the right are in equally good order, but Hercules! there are so few of them compared to the horde swarming from the native camp. Somebody has gotten overconfident. The enemy raises its own cheer, scattered and thin at first. But it goes on and on, building, ordering itself to a blood-pulse rhythm that moans across the intervening distance, the gap the legion is closing at two steps a second. Hercules! there is a crush of them. The natives are close enough to be individuals now: lanky, longarmed in relation to a height that averages greater than that of the legionaries. Ill-equipped, though. Their heads are covered either by leather helmets or beehives of their own hair. Their shields appear to be hide and wicker affairs. What could live on this gravel waste and provide that much leather? But of course Vibqlenus has been told none of the background, not even the immediate geography. There is some place around that raises swarms of warriors, that much is certain. And they have iron. The black glitter of their spearheads tightens the Tribune's wounded chest as he remembers. "Smile, boys," one of the centurions calls cheerfully, "here's company." With his words a javelin hums down at a steep angle to spark on the ground. From a spearthrower, must have been. The distance is too long for any arm Vibulenus has seen, and he has seen his share. "Ware!" he calls as another score of missiles arc from the native ranks. Legionaries judge them, raise their shields or ignore the plunging weapons as they choose. One strikes in front of Vibulenus and shatters into a dozen iron splinters and a knobby shaft that looks like rattan. One or two of the men have spears clinging to their shield faces. Their clatter syncopates the thud of boot heels. No one is down. Vibulenus runs two paces ahead of his cohort, his sword raised at an angle. It makes him an obvious target: a dozen javelins spit toward him. The skin over his ribs crawls, the lumpy breadth of scar tissue scratching like a rope over the bones. But he can be seen by every man in his cohort, and somebody has to give the signal... "Now!" he shouts vainly in the mingling cries. His arm and sword cut down abruptly. Three hundred throats give a collective grunt as the cohort heaves its own massive spears with the full weight of its rush behind them. Another light javelin glances from the shoulder of Vibulenus' cuirass, staggering him. Calvus' broad right palm catches the Tribune, holds him upright for the instant he needs to get his balance. The front of the native line explodes as the Roman spears crash into it. Fifty feet ahead there are orange warriors shrieking as they stumble over the bodies of comrades whose armor has shredded under the impact of the heavy spears. "At'em!" a front-rank file-closer cries, ignoring his remaining spear as he drags out his short sword. The trumpets are calling something but it no longer matters what: tactics go hang, the Tenth is cutting its way into another native army. In a brief spate of fury, Vibulenus holds his forward position between a pair of legionaries. A native, orange-skinned with bright carmine eyes, tries to drag himself out of the Tribune's path. A Roman spear has gouged through his shield and arm, locking all three together. Vibulenus' sword takes the warrior alongside the jaw. The blood is paler than a man's. The backward shock of meeting has bunched the natives. The press of undisciplined reserves from behind adds to their confusion. Vibulenus jumps a still-writhing body and throws himself into the wall of shields and terrified orange faces. An iron-headed spear thrusts at him, misses as another warrior jostles the wielder. Vibulenus slashes downward at his assailant. The warrior throws his shield up to catch the sword, then collapses when a second-rank legionary darts his spear through the orange abdomen. Ranks of bronze Breathing hard with his sword still dripping in his hand, Vibulenus lets the pressing ranks flow around him. Slaughter is not a tribune's work, but increasingly Vibulenus finds that he needs the swift violence of the battle line to release the fury building within him. The cohort is advancing with the jerky sureness of an ox-drawn plow in drysoil. A windrow of native bodies lies among the line of first contact, now well within the Roman formation. Vibulenus wipes his blade on a fallen warrior, leaving two sluggish sheathes the sword. Three bodies are sprawled together to form a hillock. Without hesitation the Tribune steps onto it to survey the battle. The legion is a broad awl punching through a belt of orange leather. The cavalry on the left stand free in a scatter of bodies, neither threatened by the natives nor making any active attempt to drive them back. One of the mounts, a hairless brute combining the shape of a wolfhound with the bulk of an ox, is feeding on a corpse his rider has lanced. Vibulenus was correct in expecting the natives to give them a wide berth; thousands of flanking warriors tremble in indecision rather than sweep forward to surround the legion. It would take more discipline than this orange rabble has shown to attack the toad-like riders on their terrible beasts...Dehind the lines, a hundred paces distant from the legionaries whose armor stands in hammering contrast to the naked autochthones, is the Commander and his remaining score of guards. He alone of the three thousand who have landed from the starship knows why the battle is being fought, but he seems to stand above it. And if the silly bastard still has half his bodyguard with him -- Mars and all the gods, what must be happening on the right flank? The inhuman shout of triumph that rises half a mile away gives Vibulenus an immediate answer. "Prepare to disengage!" he orders the nearest centurion. The swarthy non-com, son of a North African colonist, speaks briefly into the ears of two legionaries before sending them to the ranks forward and back of his. The legion is tight for men, always has been. Tribunes have no runners, but the cohort makes do. Trumpets blat in terror. The native warriors boil whooping around the Roman right flank. Legionaries in the rear are facing about with ragged suddeness, obeying instinct rather than the orders bawled by their startled officers. The command group suddenly realizes the situation. Three of the bodyguard charge toward the oncoming orange mob. The rest of the guards and staff scatter into the infantry. The iron-bronze clatter has ceased on the left flank. When the cohort halts its advance, the natives gain enough room to break and flee for their encampment. Even the warriors who have not engaged are cowed by the panic of those who have; by the panic, and the sprawls of bodies left behind them. "About face!" Vibulenus calls through the indecisive hush, "and pivot on your left flank. There's some more barbs want to fight the Tenth!" The murderous cheer from his legionaries overlies the noise of the cohort executing his order. As it swings Vibulenus runs across the new front of his troops, what had been the rear rank. The cavalry, squat-bodied and grim in their full armor, shows sense enough to guide their mounts toward the flank of the Ninth Cohort as Vibulenus rotates his men away from it. Only a random javelin from the native lines appears to hinder them. Their comrades who remained with the Commander have been less fortunate. A storm of javelins has disintegrated the half-hearted charge. Two of the mounts have gone down despite their heavy armor. Behind them, the Commander lies flat on the hard soil while his beast screams horribly above him. The shaft of a stray missile projects from its withers. Slabbing up from below, the orange warriors fell the remaining lancer and gut his companions as they try to rise. Half a dozen of the bodyguards canter nervously back from their safe bolthole among the infantry to try to rescue their employer. The wounded mount leaps at one of the lancers. The two beasts tangle with the guard between them. A clawed hind leg flicks his head. Helmet and head rip skyward in a spout of green ichor. "Charge!" Vibulenus roars. The legionaries who can not hear him follow his running form. The knot of cavalry and natives is a quarter mile away. The cohorts of the right flank are too heavily engaged to do more than defend themselves against the new thrust. Half the legion has become a bronze worm, bristling front and back with spearpoints against the surging orange flood. Without immediate support, the whole right flank will be squeezed until it collapses into a tangle of blood and scrap metal. The Tenth Cohort is their support, all the support there is. "Rome!" the fresh veterans leading the charge shout as their shields rise against the new flight of javelins. There are gaps in the back ranks, those just disengaged. Behind the charge, men hold palms clamped over torn calves or lie crumpled around a shaft of alien wood. There will be time enough for them if the recovery teams land -- which they will not do in event of a total disaster on the ground. The warriors snap and howl at the sudden threat. Their own sucRanks of bronze cess has fragmented them. What had been a flail slashing into massed bronze kernels is now a thousand leaderless handfuls in sparkling contact with the Roman line. Only the leaders bunched around the command group have held their unity. One mount is still on its feet and snarling. Four massively-equipped guards try to ring the Commander with their maces. The Commander, his suit a splash of blue against the gravel, tries to rise. There is a flurry of mace stroks and quicklyriposting spears, ending in a clash of falling armor and an agile orange body with a knife leaping the crumpled guard. Vibulenus' sword, flung overarm, takes the native in the throat. The inertia of its spin cracks the hilt against the warrior's forehead. The Tenth Cohort is on the startled natives. A moment before the warriors were bounding forward in the flush of victory. Now they face the cohort's meat-axe suddeness -- I and turn. At swordpoint and shield edge, as inexorable as the rising sun, the Tenth grinds the native retreat into panic while the cohorts of the right flank open order and advance. The ground behind them is slimy with blood. Vibulenus rests on one knee, panting. He has retrieved his sword. Its stickiness bonds it to his hand. Already the air keens with landing motors. In minutes the recovery teams will be at work on the fallen legionaries, building life back into all but the brain-hacked or spinesevered. Vibulenus rubs his own scarred ribs in aching memory. A hand falls on the Tribune's shoulder. It is gloved in a skin-tight blue material; not armor, at least not armor against weapons. The Commander's voice comes from the small plate beneath his clear, round helmet. Speaking in Latin, his accents precisely flawed, he says, "You are splendid, you warriors." Vibulenus sneers though he does not correct the alien. Warriors are capering heroes, good only for dying when they meet trained troops; when they meet the Tenth Cohort. "I thought the Federation Council had gone mad," the flat voice continues, "when it ruled that we must not land weapons beyond the native level in exploiting inhabited worlds. All very well to talk of the dangers of introducing barbarians to modem weaponry, but how else could my business crush local armies and not be bled white by transportation costs?' ' The Commander shakes his head in wonder at the carnage about him. Vibulenus silently wipes his blade. In front of him, Falco gapes toward the green sun. A javelin points from his right eyesocket. "When we purchased you from your Parthian captors it was only an experiment. Some of us even doubted it was worth the cost of the longevity treatments. In a way you are more effective than a Guard Regiment with lasers; outnumbered, you beat them with their own weapons. They can't even claim 'magic' as a salve to their pride. And at a score of other job sites you have done as well. And so cheaply!" "Since we have been satisfactory," the Tribune says, trying to keep the hope out of his face, "will we be returned home now?" "Oh, goodness, no," the alien laughs, "you're far too valuble for that. But I have a surprise for you, one just as pleasant I'm sure -- females." "You found us real women?" Vibulenus whispers. "You really won't be able to tell the difference," the Commander says with paternal confidence. in the Sabine hills, a poet takes the stylus from the fingers of a nude slave girl and writes, very quickly, And Crassus's wretched soldier takes a barbarian wife from his captors and grows old waging war for them. The poet looks at the line with a pleased expression. "It needs polish, of course," he mutters. Then, more directly to the slave, he says, "You know, Leuconoe, there's more than inspiration to poetry, a thousand times more; but this came to me out of the air." Horace gestures with his stylus toward the glittering night sky. The girl smiles back at him.  J I I igh Yield i  . ;  iBondag Contrary to popular misgivings, there is indeed intelligent life on Earthbut is it human? ! of the University of Calcidone's Museum of Comparative Anthropology came in through the upper atmosphere like a hundredthousand mile-an-hour blowtorch, appearing in the night sky over Atka in the Aleutian Islands as a hardly visible meteorite streaking toward the southwest. By the time it passed over San Francisco # minutes and # seconds later at #:#I Pacific Daylight Time, it was an incandescent orange fireball that burned a path across the tortured atmosphere which only faded # minutes later, lighting the streets with an eerie Armageddon-moming glow that no one who saw it would ever forget. quarters under Cheyenne Mountain as the fireball ripped down the San Joaquin Valley, boomed past Phoenix and Las Cruces, and rattled the windows of El Paso before disappearing into the wastelands of West Texas. Initial print-outs projected an impact zone somewhere between San Antonio and Houston, and Condition Red warnings flashed across the United States. The few remaining seconds to impact ticked by with dreadful inexorability. And nothing happened. Somewhere over the desolate hill-country in the triangle formed by Grandfalls, Fort Stockton, and Girvin, Texas, at an altitude of what was later calculated to be # feet, the fireball vanished from the sky and the blip from the radar screens as suddenly as if they had never been. The trailing sonic boom battered itself to death against the hills and King Mountain, and the remaining ionization of the shattered atmosphere merged a short time later into the morning sunrise. The Great Fireball of '# has passed into history. "Some ride," said Huntleader Riderson sourly, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I am sorry," replied the SpaceMaster-Scout, "but circumstances were temporarily barely within my control." "So I noticed." , "An easier entry would have meant a better than # chance of impacting at approximately # miles per hour, in which case the stasis-field would probably have protected us from any further physical damage. But why," it asked reasonably, "put it to the test? And how the inhabitants of this world would have reacted to having the equivalent of a fusion explosion touched off between two of their major cities, I leave to your conjecture." Riderson rose from his padded contour chair, a tall, dark-haired, heavily-muscled man of indeterminate age. He scowled. "Inhabitants? You're certain?" "Of course, Hunt." The ship's voice projected directly into his mind. "In the few minutes directly after we came out of space-drive I had little enough real-time to spend on inconsequentials, but there was sufficient to take note of orbiting satellites, diverse forms of communication phemonena, and primitive efforts at tracking our passage by radar. Indeed, our passage through the heavens will certainly have been observed visually, and I suggest that the most urgent steps toward concealing our position be taken immediately." "Where are we anyway?" asked Riderson, as he activated the #degree viewsets. "Are you sure this is even the right world? It looks more like the middle of nowhere to me. Dusty-looking hills, scattered boulders, scraggly vegetation, no pop-eyed locals selling tickets to see the spaceship." The ship appeared to sigh. "This is indeed the correct world. But as you have so cunningly noted, we have fortunately landed in uninhabited terrain. I managed to regain effective control at # feet, and instantly halted our passage, activating all counter-observation measures, and thereafter dropping like a stone. We should. Hunt, at that moment have completely vanished from all visual and electronic surveillance, but I stress my use of the word 'should'. Unless the inhabitants of this world have developed an inertialess drive, they will have probably calculated our impact point as #I miles to the east, but we are not yet certain what senses they may have developed, either naturally or artificially. I urge -- " high yield bondage "Okay, okay. Time to crawl into a hole and pull the top over." Riderson broke out a grav-sled and scouted the surrounding countryside while the SpaceMaster-Scout dug a hole for itself by the simple process of molecular transfer, which in practice consisted of removing the dirt and stones from beneath its #-foot ovoid length and replacing them overhead until it had sunk gradually into a hole # feet deep. "It's slower," said the ship, "but safer. No heat emission or messy clouds of dust for busybodies to come across. # feet of dirt over us ought to be sufficient." "For Zog's immaculate soul," snapped Riderson three miles away, "I've never known such a chatterbox pile of machinery. The sun's almost up and that heap of dirt you've displaced sticks out like Xanthu's Wart. Aren't you through yet?" He wheeled the sled around. As he spoke, the #-foot pile began slowly melting away to merge with the adjoining landscape. He nodded approvingly, then got to work with the grav-sled to shape what little remained into an irregular jumble of sand and boulders. Thoughtfully he fingered his chin. "Lacks that last little touch of the artist," he muttered at last. Deftly manipulating the sled's tractorbeams, he uprooted and transplanted two solid-looking cottonwoods into the rocky mound. "There," he said, brushing his hands in satisfaction, "home." A medium-sized boulder floated into the air, revealing a narrow passage, held by repeller beams, slashing down through the earth to the ship's surface. Riderson let the ship tractor his sled in. As it flowed through the outer integument, he saw the boulder overhead ease down and cover the passage. He stored the sled away and strolled to the salon. Flopping down on a sofa, he kicked off his boots, then punched for a meal. The duplicator processed one out of its memory banks and materialized it before him, along with a sapphire vase of incandescent core-fire flowers. As he munched, the ship came to a decision and slapped him into a stasis field while going itself on emergency blackout. It became as inert and lifeless as an #-foot hunk of buried granite, emitting only that slight radiation which characterizes your friendly neighborhood rock. Emergency equipment was on standby to camouflage the existence of the stasis field in the unlikely event this planet's inhabitants had developed radar capable of penetrating # feet of earth. They hadn't. The psionic sensors Riderson had scattered about the hills reported directly to the ship's mind the movement of jackrabbits, lizards, and an occasional coyote, and the next day an overflight of three brown helicopters in a concentric search pattern. Later in the week, small four-wheeled vehicles climbed laboriously into the hills and beings in brown uniforms, apparently from evolutionary stock similar to Huntleader Riderson's, got out to point instruments and take rock samples. The ship probed gently at the men and their instruments with a spectrum of gossimer-fine psionic sensors, already nearly certain that its safety was absolute. When it had finished its survey, it was convinced; full power was restored to the ship's functioning and a communications cable run up through the earth and connected to an array of undetectable broadband receivers. The SpaceMaster-Scout began to teach itself the world's languages. Riderson sat on in his stasis field, a spoonful of dessert posed before his lips. Two months passed. An expedition of geologists set up camp two miles to the soutwest and poked through the hills for evidence of a shattered meteorite. After ten days they went away and only the jackrabbits and lizards remained. A month later, Riderson experienced a slight flickering sensation as he completed the motion of introducing spoon to mouth. He chomped thoughtfully, then turned to fix his gaze on the wall clock. "Who's running this ship," he grated, "you or me?" "Do you really want me to answer that?" inquired the SpaceMaster-Scout politely. "Oh, no comment." "I have determined the extent of the damage to the ship and have conceived a basic plan regarding its repairs. After a brief language lesson in the hypnotank and a smattering of cosmetic surgery, you may begin its implementation later this -- " "Surgery?" yelped Riderson. "Surgery," replied the ship firmly. "Professor Camptargo will be extremely vexed: his lifelong determination to prove that the entire galaxy's sentient population is derived from the Great Migration of # years ago has already been proven suspect. As the first expedition into this arm since the Black Collapse and the Interregnum of # years ago, we have already learned that the beings of this world are not of our stock." "Not human? They certainly appear -- " "From a distance only. And their internal organs, from what I have been able to gather from their television advertisements, are entirely different. There are superficial exterior differences as well, which must be disguised. Rather than the lovely, flower-shaped orifices you possess for instance, these beings enclose their ears within what it would be charitable to refer to as fleshy extrusions. There are other minor details: only one thumb per hand, a larger -- " "Now wait just a minute here," began Riderson. "You'll hardly know the difference," soothed the ship. "Until we have access to a technical library -- this world's technology has not yet developed to the point of personal electronic retrieval systems -- we won't really understand their evolutionary development. It is certain, however, that they are not human beings. Humanoids, yes; human beings, no." "Convergent evolution, yes; Professor Camptargo, no," muttered Riderson. "There go seven books and his reputation. As well as his credit with the accounting department which hired this ship. Perhaps a stronger word than vexed. I wonder if they'll change the name to the 'Museum of comparative Ethnology'," he mused. "We have other worries," the ship replied primly. "Like implementation of our plan, for instance." "By Zog's sweet breath, what is this plan?" "Nothing you will be unable to handle, my dear Huntleader. At the least, it is the unsuspected subjugation of the geo-political unit in which we find ourselves. At the most, merely the conquest of the planet." "Oh," said Riderson blankly. "Of course." "The latter may prove unnecessary," the ship added. Six months later Riderson returned to the ship after an expedition to Washington, where he had planted semi-autonomous, selfcamouflaging, psionic spy-sensors in the headquarters of the National Security Agency. The SpaceMaster-Scout was pleased. "Excellent. We are now tied into the largest computer and electronic information retrieval system in the world. Combined with our inputs to the Houston Space Center, we are now effectively linked to this world's technological development." "Spare me the details," said Rider wearily. "Obviously you're the brains and I'm just the brawn. If you had to drive one of these rattletrap contraptions so laughably called auto-mobiles -- " "Relax, Hunt, everything is proceeding according to plan." "Well, I wish you'd let me in on it. Six weeks of driving around the country opening accounts in hundreds of banks just to end up with a lousy #, #. Jeez." "I am glad to see that you are already beginning to think like a capitalist. But seriously, even # is an important sum of money if you consider it as yeast." "So now we're bakers," said Riderson peevishly. "And what about the dangers of rampant inflation and the debasement of the currency? 'What good's a molecular duplicator,' I asked, "if we can't just print up our own money and diamonds and gold?' 'Inflation; 'we want to subvert their economy, not wreck it,' you answered. 'Nuts, in fact, peanuts,' I reply." "True, several hundreds of millions could be introduced without significicant distortion although it would be extremely risky to do so with cash -- but I was talking in "Oh." Riderson pondered. "Well, just what are we going to do with this money?" "Such a question. Hunt. As good capitalists, we are going to make our money grow. Modestly at first, but inexorably. I think we shall shortly need a collection of passports; I would welcome your thoughts on their acquisition. And in the short term? We shall purchase a supermarket." "A supermarket?" Riderson blinked and tugged at his still unaccustomed earlobe. "Sure. What could be more logical in the conquest of the world than a supermarket?" A year later he had to acknowledge the logic. Money was easy to come by with a molecular duplicator in the tool room. Introducing large quantities of it into circulation was another matter. Especially since this particular government's confiscatory tax collectors were suspicious of anyone possessing large amounts of cash. One means of introducing surplus cash into one's books was to own a Nevada gambling hall; another was to own a combination supermarket-discount house purchased at a Houston bankruptcy sale. The owner and manager of the store -- a Mr. J. Major Clarkman -- shook his head dolefully. Running an acre of store was hard work. Whoever said that work was uplifting? The only uplifting thing about it was at the end of the day when he duplicated the take -- omitting checks, anything up to # -- five times and then deposited the receipts in six different banks. From there to three banks in the Bahamas was a little trickier but feasible, and from the Bahamas to Switzerland no problem at all. The real problem was the betwixt-and-between state of this world's technology. High enough to have invented double-entry bookkeeping, the creditcard economy, incapable of producing a simple main-dri.ve and gravitationless chamber for an old-fashioned SpaceMaster-Scout Mark IV. Without some well-directed inspiration it would be three or four hundred years before this planet's technology could effect the necessary repairs. J. Major Clarkman sighed and continued to feed # bills into the duplicator. Even with his longevity treatments, he'd still go home, if ever, with a long white beard and a fine set of the shakes. Unless, of course, he preferred to wait for rescue within the statis field for # years while a speed-of-light transmission was beamed back to the Museum by the nearly powerless ship. Assuming the Museum still existed # years from now... No, for the moment he would string along with the ship, playing boy-capitalist. A thought occurred to him. J. Major Clarkman grinned. What courts think when eventually they got around to investigating his store's six bank accounts? That he was a Mafia chieftain? A Presidential fund raiser? He continued to grin. In June of '# Riderson was summoned back to the ship. He found two men sprawled at their ease in the salon. Before he could disentangle his eyebrows from his hairline the ship spoke. "Your brothers, Hunt, those extra hands I promised you some time ago." "My broth -- Oh. Clones. You've been growing them in the vat." "Exactly." "Well..." he drew a long breath, scrutinized them closely. One was shorter than himself and darker, the other taller and thinner. By their facial traits they might have been his cousins. They returned his scrutiny with sardonic smiles. "They're not very handsome, but since you say they're me, I guess that makes them fit for unmixed company." "A little genetic engineering," said the tall one, "for identification only. It would be inconvenient in our dealings with this world, for us to seem as identical as we are." He yawned, punched for a drink. "Before we go any further," said the short one, "I suggest we baptize ourselves. Even among ourselves three Huntleader Ridersons are apt to prove confusing." "I agree," concurred the ship. "In any event, Hunt One's current role as J. Major Clarkman is about to end. Hunts Two and Three have been filled in with your personality and memories as of two months ago, the last time I recorded them. In a moment we'll fill them in with events through today and then begin work on our new roles. You, Hunt One, will shortly become a certain Richard Erikson. Hunt Two is already John W. Franklin of Melbourne, Australia, and Hunt Three is Russell C. vanPestel of Amsterdam. All three of you have 'real' identities, in the sense that people of these names were born to real Americans living overseas, who no longer have surviving parents or relatives, and who all disappeared finally and irrevocably from the face of the earth many years ago -- as a surprisingly large number of the natives of this planet do each year. "Complete backgrounds and documentation covering the years since your namesakes vanished exist for all of you; you will all be able to withstand very careful examinations indeed. vanPestel and Franklin have been somewhat reoriented for technological aptitudes and will concentrate primarily on the engineering aspect, while Erikson' s main role will continue to Je financial, although there will, of course, be a great deal of overlapping activity. Any questions?" There were many, but none that couldn't wait until after dinner. In his scouting career among the stars, Riderson had already met death on three separate planets. Each time he'd been reanimated as an artificially grown clone, complete with personality and memories. Only the fact that there were now three Ridersons rather than one lifted the situation above the prosaic. In ordinary situations it was illegal to duplicate a living, functional person. He punched for a drink and began to discuss the menu with his two selves. In his persona as J. Major Clarkman, Riderson One returned to Houston, where he set about the liquidation of his affairs. The store was free of debt and doing business in excess of # per month. Riderson began looking for a purchaser. Eventually he received a certified check for # which he regretfully disbursed without duplication throughout his banking system and thence to Switzerland. The accounts in the Houston banks were closed out, then the ones around the country and the three in the Bahamas, as all of Clarkman's assets made their way to the anonymity of Geneva. From Geneva # was transferred to Beirut, where it was used to purchase a varied portfolio of mining interests around the world from an expatriate American speculator, one Richard Erikson. J. Major Clarkman, perhaps fortunately, was never destined to learn how unsound his business judgement was. On September #th he rented a light plane, as had been his custom for a number of months, to pilot himself for a joyride over the Gulf of Mexico. It was an overcast day but three shrimp trawlers clearly saw the craft disappear into the scudding clouds. Less than a minute later the plane reappeared, apparently in an uncontrollable dive. It smacked into the Gulf waters and came apart in a thousand pieces. The trawlers searched for six hours and although bits of the plane were recovered, the body of J. Major Clarkman was never found. The few personal effects in his apartment were eventually disposed of by the State of Texas. His portfolio of worthless mining stocks was discovered in a Lebanese deposit box # years later. Richard erikson arrived in New York in October, #, bearing with him letters of credit which he deposited at Chase Manhattan and First National City, # in each. He confided jovially that after a life in the wilds amassing his grubstake as a mining speculator, he was now ready to start making some real money. The bankers smiled indulgently, as did the # brokers with whom he opened accounts. Mr. Bamum's famous adage was still unimpeachable a hundred years later. Initially, however, Mr. Erikson proved to be something of a surprise. He invested modest amounts #M and seemed content to trade them back and forth, occasionally selling one short for no better reason than variety's sake. By February, #, he was ahead of the game by perhaps #, which amidst the pitfalls of the Street could be considered something of a triumph, but as it was all short-term taxable income rather than longterm capital gains, a rather slight one. He had, nevertheless, become well established as one of those rootless men of wealth whose sole occupation appears to be wandering from one brokerage firm's tickertape to the next. But now his natural exuberance began to re-exert itself. He liquidated his holdings of blue-chip securities and possibly because of his background in mining speculation became a mark for a couple of high-class international conmen specializing in the extraction of wealth from the bowels of the earth. From Australia came a sharpy who demonstrated a process whereby he could extract the salt from sea water for no more than the cost of pouring the water over a membrane. With a little money for additional research the extraction of gold and uranium would be forthcoming within months. Erikson wrote out a check for # to purchase a # partnership and to finance the acquisition of a research facility on the Oregon coast. From Amsterdam came another sharpy, one who had invented an automated process for cutting crude diamonds into polished gems at a fraction of the present cost. He was a plausible scoundrel, for he presented as evidence of his bona fides bags of glittering stones from a Swiss deposit box, exact replicas, he claimed, of the lost treasures of Czar Nicholas. From the same box came other bags of raw diamonds, worth only a fraction of what their value would be as finished jewels. So consummate and audacious an artist was vanPestel that he even displayed a U.S. customs appraisal and receipt for duty paid. His eyes glittering with the dazzle of unimaginable wealth, Erikson wrote out another check, this one for # and a partnership in The King of Diamonds, a store to be opened on Fifth Avenue. For his part, Mr. vanPestel would contribute as capital his stock of gems and raw diamonds as well as his yet-unseen automated gemcutter... Having in his mind's eye cornered the world's market in gold and diamonds, Mr. Erikson set forth to do the same with oil. He opined, apparently without outside assistance this time, that the next great oil strike would be made in the triangle formed by Grandfalls, Fort Stockton, and Girvin, Texas, an area that had been picked over and discarded by petroleum geologists a dozen times in the past. He caused to be purchased oil, gas, and mineral rights on # square miles of this worthless terrain by means of #-year leases at an annual rate of I per acre, or # a year, and #I #th royalties on all revenues. The ranchers took his checks with straight faces, too well-mannered to snicker openly. Two weeks later, at astronomical The first seven holes were dry, but Erikson insisted that they continue. He repurchased his #I #f h royalties for # cash under the table. A fashion. Had Mr. Erikson any friends, at this point they would surely have led him away... Simultaneous to these follies, he embarked on another, one that at least possessed the virtue of being marginly comprehensible to his acquaintances on the Street. In # a small firm that made electronic components and precision optical instruments experienced a year of unusual prosperity. Their per-share earnings jumped from a traditional # to a breathtaking #. They immediately split their stock, issued a public offering of and obtained a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Unexpected prosperity and overexpansion into unrelated products were their undoing: there had followed six years of ever-increasing deficits. The company's stock, which had once reached the dizzy height of #, had four times been suspended from trading and was now selling at a modest IVz with no lakers. The only interest the Street retained in Virginia Videolec Inc. was a mild wonderment which would happen first, being struck off the Big Board or going into receivership. For reasons best known to himself, Richard Erikson began to take # shares outstanding; at # a share, a measely # would purchase the company lock, stock, and deficit. He began to place orders with his brokers, who now totaled twenty-seven, purchasing small amounts in the brokers' bleak that no broker would allow him to purchase on margin, necessitating # payment. No bank would accept the stock as collateral for loans to buy additional stock. Erikson's initial grubstake of # continued to melt away. The word spread quickly that a live one was loose in the Street. tinued to buy. It went to #. He frowned, but phoned in his orders. high yield bondage It jumped to # l A. He backed off and the price fell to #-## but continued to hover there. He scowled. Neither Franklin or vanPestel had their operations in full enough swing yet to permit the payment of dividends. He consulted with the ship, and # in Triple-A bonds, the bluest of the blue, GM, Exxon, ATT, were carefully forged and surfaced from a deposit box in Geneva. He peddled them around to various banks, who were pleased to accept them as collateral for loans of # of their market value, the which were to be employed for business transactions only; the purchase of stocks with the said sums being a federal offense punishable by who-knewwhait. to #-##. Brokers now allowed him margin, only #, but it was better than nothing. To purchase a share at #, Erikson put up #, the other # being advanced by the broker, who was loaning the money to Erikson and retaining the purchased share as collateral on his loan. If the price of the stock began to tumble, the broker would require immediate payment of the #; if it was not forthcoming, the stock would be sold, hopefully before its value fell below #. He persevered. On the West Coast John W. Franklin held a press conference, flying in at the company's expense a horde of skeptical science-writers and speculators, along with a retired conman and two internationallyknown prestidigitators. He treated the assembled audience to a simple demonstration. A #-inch pipe was run into the surf. Sea water was pumped through it and out the other end, undeniably salty sea water. He attached the pipe to an apparatus suspended by cables from a construction derrick. An ordinary lamp cord ran to a portable #KV generator. He pushed a button. Sea water was pumped from the ocean. Salt poured forth from one side of the apparatus, a #-inch stream of pure drinking water from another. The audience was invited to find the trick. Tools were distributed for the purpose. Inside the gadget they found a membrane and a small motor to operate a sort of windshield wiper to remove accumulating salt from the membrane. No hidden fresh-water lines ran down from the derrick or up invisibly from the ground. The next morning observers from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Israel appeared on the scene. They returned the following day with certified checks, the smallest of which was for #. As a gesture of good will Franklin had arranged for a fleet of helicopters to transport the crated units to Portland International. Initial profit-taking of # was telexed to Erikson in New York, who used it to purchase the an average price of #-##. It had ase a company a hair's breadth from plus interest to bankers and # million plus interest to brokers. Any day now one of the bankers might think to check the serial number of his ATT bond against the company's list of bondholders. Erikson sighed. If only he'd owned a company in the first place; the company could have made a # share of General Widget, say, for each # share of Virginia Videolec, Inc. The whole thing could have been snapped up for # of paper. Well, never no mind, he told himself, you now have your General Widget for your next acquisitions. It only remained to get the bankers and brokers off his back and to stave off the immiThe following day Oregon Oceanographies, a partnership, was transformed into a corporation with ion of which were subscribed to at a cost of # per share by Richard Erikson (# shares), John W. Franklin (# shares) and a Dutchman named vanPestel (# shares). The Securities and Exchange Commission permits the formation of privately-owned corporations without filing for its approval if the galaxy corporation has less than # stockholders. Oregon Oceanographies, Inc., offered for private sale # of the remaining one million shares at a price of # per share, a brisk appreciation from the founders' #. Ten speculators surfaced, eager to invest # each for the construction of new plant and equipment. The remaining # shares, now worth # by this standard, were traded to the sole stockholder of Virginia Videolec for the # shares of that moribund company. VVI thus became a wholly owned subsidiary of OreOc. The World Bank loaned the drought-stricken nations of Central Africa # for the purchase of desalinization equipment and # for the construction of pipelines from the ocean. Richard Erikson found five additional speculators now ready to pay # a share for the # he had to pay off his brokers and bankers, and consigned his phony Triple-A bonds to the molecular disintegrator with a sigh of relief. The king of diamonds, in the meantime, had opened its doors to trade amidst an unprecedented amount of free hoopla by the world's media, achieved by the simple tactic of giving away a million dollars' worth of diamonds, one # diamond to the first # high yield bondage people to walk past the shop. The National Guard was called out and fire hoses employed. Curiously enough, the windows of The King of Diamonds remained unbroken throughout the riot. The National Association of Jewelers, the International Confederation of Diamond Merchants, and the Union of South Africa lodged vitriolic protests and began the first of hundreds of investigations and court actions. Mr. venPestel was unruffled. "It's like the death throes of the buggywhip manufacturers at the introduction of the automobile," he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. "Automation has finally reached the jewelry trade. Take a raw diamond that's worth #. After being cut by a master craftsman, it's sold for #. How much of that intervening # do you think the master craftsman sees? There's a bunch of them down on #th Street. Poor old boys; I'll hire them all to set the stones -- if the South Africans don't drop a bomb on me first." "You think there's some danger of that?" asked the reporter. "Certainly. I'm going to sell that raw # diamond for not # but #, cut better than any man alive can do it. And I'll still make a fair profit. The diamond and precious stone market is about to go blooey and a lot of South Africa with it, good riddance to them. But first they'll try to deny me the raw stones, then they'll try to prove I'm bringing them to the States illegally." He shrugged. "So let them try. I have my own sources of supply from all over the world. Are they smuggled out of South Africa? Do I know? Do I care? I just buy them from middlemen, and I pay customs duty on all of them. I say nuts to the South Africans." The man from the Wall Street Journal found Mr. vanPestel a refreshing change from the usual run of moguls. "Assuming you survive assassination, of your character or otherwise, what are your plans?" VanPestel shrugged. "It's early days yet, but I'm thinking of forming a little corporation, just a few stockholders, to open some branches in other cities. Then who knows, maybe go public, have my stock listed right up there on the Big Board with Texaco and all the others..." He winked disarmingly, gave the reporter a diamond, then returned alone to his impregnable stronghold at the rear of the store. He placed an uncut diamond into a softly humming machine. A beautifullycut gem popped out. He smiled. He looked about, found a hefty one-pound tome issued by the South African Chamber of Commerce; South Africa, An Industrial Profile. He stuffed the book in. A pound of, cut diamonds spewed forth. He laughed aloud. The simple pleasures of the rich. Over the next two years the deserts of the world began to bloom. Mile by dusty mile the Sahara was reclaimed; Israeli and Arab established the stupendous ThreeChinese were invited to immigrate to the heart of the Great Australian Desert and within # months were dians. bloomed concurrently. Except for handling the vast sums of money that poured in, the only difficulty was in concealing the fact that # workmen, researchers, and scientists were not in actuality manufacturing anything. This is difficult to dissemble in an enterprise in which annual sales are reaching threeend of the second year, but it is possible. stock from Richard Erikson, OreOc became, in effect, a holding company, and upon the transfer of its so-called production facilities for sole source of revenue became the dividends paid by its manufacturing subsidiary. To justify the initial stock sale of #, an enormous research plant was constructed in Oregon and most of the technical personnel and workmen from the Virginia factory summoned west. Here they were joined by # freshly hired researchers and scientists, all working under the direction of John W. Franklin in the fields of molecular grouping and atomic theory. In a desultory fashion, bits and pieces of desalinization plants were manufactured in fits and starts and shipped east for final assembly. In Virginia, # additional scientists and workmen were hired, most of whom were concerned with hologramic research. Additional bits and pieces of desalinization plants were manufactured in fits and starts and shipped west for final assembly. East and West met in St. Louis, Missouri, where bored workmen put together the bits and pieces and inserted the essential membranes, the latter being delivered in haphazard fashion from both Oregon and Virginia. The # speculators who had originally bought a # interest in OreOc were now so preoccupied banking their dividends that none of them ever insisted on seeing an actual membrane production line in full operation. Being a privatelyheld corporation, no disgruntled ficials were in a position to demand an accounting, which was just as well, as the only membrane production line was the duplicator in the rear of Franklin's office. It is marvellously facile to make money if there is no vulgar necessity of actually manufacturing the manufactured article. About the time that Franklin was ready to announce to a breathless world that cheap mineral extraction from sea water was now an economic possibility, one of the ship's spy sensors reported that Israeli scientists would be able to produce their own membrane within six months. For the nonce it was a carefully-guarded state secret, a hangover from the days of the internecine wars of the Mideast. Franklin smiled. It was the moment to milk the membrane for the last drop. The production facility in St. Louis was expanded and incorporated as Saltfree Industries, a subsidiary corporation, thenceforth to be the world's sole manufacturer and distributor of OreOc's desalinization plants. To the joy of Wall Street, the new company immediately went public. A # million shares were issued at #, with the parent company, OreOc. The the day of the offering and immediately rose to #. OreOc thereby possessed nearly a Saltfree Industries stock, which it promptly converted into cash by selling through Swiss brokers. The price fell to #, but not before OreOc had cash reserves in excess hired an additional # scientists. Israel announced its discovery and the stock fell to #. The Riderson brothers sold it short all the way down and pocketed another #. investigation. OreOc hired # lawyers. Franklin continued to smile. The #th dry well paid for itself and the # others when diamonds were discovered at a depth of # feet in the middle of the Texas badlands. The world's geologists snorted. If diamonds were ever mined in the United States outside of Arkansas, it would not be in Texas, and if it were in Texas, it would not conceivably be on Richard Erikson's # acres of badlands. One of the more outspoken geologists (speaking from the legal sanctuary of Johannesburg) declared the discovery an obvious job of salting and suggested that the world follow with close attention just how Richard Erikson proposed to milk his sucker's bait. The geologist's worst fears were well-founded. The King of Diamonds, Inc., a privately-held corporation, with branches now in # U.S. cities, and cash reserves in Zurich of over #, moved swiftly. Mining equipment arrived, an enormous plant began to spring from the Texas desert, armed guards patrolled the perimeter, # scientists were hired for vaguely-defined purposes, and Russell C. vanPestel himself arrived to take up permanent residence in a prefabricated house. After an inspection of a hastily-dug mine, he announced that henceforth all diamonds for his # stores would te produced solely in the Great State of Texas. The Governor and assorted dignitaries applauded. It might even prove, continued Mr. vanPestel, that a revolutionary new form of automated mining was possible. One of his scientists had some ideas about suppressing the charge on the electron, which, if feasible, might not exactly disintegrate matter so much as shove it aside, but in any case... His voice trailed away. He was not a technically-oriented person, he admitted modestly. Others would understand the consequences far better than he. The Governor nodded knowingly. Six months later the world was flooded with diamonds. The price tumbled by #. The rich and haughty abandoned diamonds for-sapphires and rubies. The non-rich and non-haughty bought them by the millions. # more scientists arrived, and a town began to appear on Erikson's acres. The first assassination teams filtered out of South Africa and the Congo, unlikely allies. Russell C. vanPestel survived the attempts with disdainful ease. To rub it in, he appeared on national television and smiled a dazzling smile. His # teeth had been replaced by # carefully-faceted, first-water, indestructable, matching diamonds. # dentists phoned their dental supply houses. Brilgleem, a recently-floated, publically-owned corporation was the world's only supplier of dentaldiamonds. Its stock was at #, rose rapidly to #. On the sale of their holdings a few weeks later, Riderstealing pennies from a blind man, but in a few months every penny would be needed. They were approaching the moment of their fiTst major financial operation. John W. Franklin called another press conference, this one from the paneled majesty of his new board room, to report the development of economically-feasible extraction of magnesium, bromine, strontium, rubidium, copper, and other rare metals from the planet's inexhaustible oceans. He gestured toward a pile of dully-glittering sand, shoveled carelessly into a corner of the room. "# tons of gold, gentlemen, extracted from a single cubic mile of sea water. At the unofficial Treasury price of # per ounce -- in Geneva, I may add, on the free market it was # this morning -- that comes to # multiplied by # ounces, or #. Wait!" he cried to the hastily stampeding crowd of newspaper men, "that's nothing compared to the other minerals..." But the journalists were already gone. Gold opened in Geneva at # and towards the end of the day had high yield bondage plummeted to #. Erikson, Franklin, vanPestel, and their assorted corporate structures began to buy. In Geneva, in Zurich, in Basel, they purchased over two billion dollars worth of gold. The following day the fine print in Franklin's press conference began to penetrate the world's consciousness. To extract # tons of gold it was necessary to first process # billion tons of ocean. Even with the controlled fusion plants that Franklin's scientists now had the highest hopes of developing, it would make better economic sense to extract gold from the dirt in your own backyard... The price of gold immediately rallied to #, at which point the Ridersons unloaded their holdings... copper and other metals, yes. A major industrial effort was needed. OreOc Inc. was proposing nance plant construction. The bond would yield # interest, with, and this was another revolutionary feature, an automatic escalation of its par value geared to the cost of living, so that if inflation eroded the purchasing power of a #-year bond from # to #, it would be redeemed in # years at #. ridiculous vendetta against OreOc Inc. and refuse the proposed bond issue, it might be pointed out that Brazil possessed an enormous coastline, a modern industrial base, and a deep interest in the possibility of harnessing nuclear fusion and the mineral wealth of the inexhaustible seas for the benefit of all mankind... After a short, stormy interview with the President of the United bitterly tendered his resignation. was approved one month later, and although Standard  Poors rated it a high-risk Single-B value, it was over-subscribed before the day of issue and eventually came out at a premium of #. treasurers of Worldwide Oceanographies, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of OreOc, and handled just back and forth in a labyrinth of banks, holding companies, escrow agents, underwriters, insurance companies. Treasury Bills, and Commercial Paper until it submerged for good in the waters of Lake Geneva. True, enormous plants were under construction, a fleet of ships was being laid down in the yards, # scientists had been hired, but had anyone aside from the SpaceMaster-Scout's bookkeeperin-training (its Primary Accountancy Cells were being held in reserve for more important duties) been able to disentangle this plate of spaghetti, it would have become apparent that all these operations were being carried out with additional borrowed money or from the companies' daily cash flow. The moment had come. Reserves was time to put the grubstake to work. It is easy to make money on Wall Street when the price of a share #, and pocket #. It is just as easy to make money when the price of a share declines. You open a short account with your broker. You decide to sell ATT short, betting that it will be selling for less next week than it is today. You tell your broker to sell ATT short by # shares. Today a share costs #. The broker finds shares of ATT for #, the going price. You sell the other customer your shares and you receive his money. With one important reservation. Your # shares will be delivered to the other customer one week from today, and at the same time your # will be paid over. You have sold shares of ATT that you do not yet own. One week later ATT is selling for #. Your friendly broker arranges for the purchase of # shares for #. You deliver your # shares to the other customer, the broker pays you the agreed-upon #. You have just made #. If ATT had fallen to #, you would have made #. Identical orders from #I faceless customers to # brokers scattered around the world: "Sell Kodak, Bell  Howell, and Polaroid short." The orders exwas a drop in the bucket compared to the combined market value of the outstanding stock of the three enormous corporations. Kodak was selling at #, Bell  Howell at #, Polaroid at #. The next morning Richard Erikson, Chairman of Virginia Videolec, Inc., a firm which had virtually disappeared from the public's consciousness, exploded his bomb before an auditorium full of interested parties. He invited a grey-flanneled banker to mount to the podium. As the puzzled banker complied, Erikson appeared to be tracking his progress with a small plastic box held in the palm of his hand, in appearance rather like a photographer's light meter. By the time he reached the podium, Erickson was pointing it at his face from three feet away. "That's enough, thank you." Erikson swung around, pointed the gadget toward the empty stage. "Kindly observe." Ten feet away a section of the audience suddenly materialized a few feet above the stage. A miniature grey-flanneled executive rose from its midst and began to walk forward. As he grew in size the background audience diminished. Eventually, there was nothing but a #-foot, #-dimensional image of his head hovering over the stage. There was pandemonium in the audience. "Gentlemen, the entirely automatic holographic camera and projector," said Erikson with a smile. The noise increased. He raised an admonitory palm. "But wait: when thou hast done, thou hast not done, for I have more." He thumbed a control. The image reversed itself until the banker was in the act of descending the stairs. It stopped. Erikson placed a sheet of paper between the projector and the image, moved it back and forth until he had framed a picture satisfying to his aesthetics. He pushed another button, then handed the sheet of paper to the bemused banker. A high-resolution, full-color, #-dimensional picture of himself mounting the podium had replaced the pristine blankness of the paper. "It is unfortunate," deprecated Erikson when he could make himself heard, "that this is a mere prototype and that production will only begin some indeterminate time in the future..." Nevertheless, Kodak fell to #, Bell  Howell to #, and Polaroid to #. The Ridersons ordered their brokers to sell short a second time. V VI announced that on reconsideration production would begin immediately after all. Kodak fell to #, Bell  Howell to #, Polaroid to #. The Ridersons ordered their brokers to sell short a third time. cameras would be priced between # and #. Studio and theatre models would be somewhat higher. Kodak fell to #, Bell  Howell to #, Polaroid to #. The Ridersons began to buy, but lars weren't needed. For a mere # more an additional #, at which point they demanded and received new boards of directors. The new directors announced that Polaroid and Bell  Howell had negotiated production of its camera and Kodak for the production of its miracle film. The price of their common stock rose by over # and the Ridersons sold half their interests OreOc, the parent company of privately-held stock in exchange for the remaining # of publicly-held Kodak, Bell  Howell, and Polaroid stock. In a daze, stockholders the world over accepted the tender. The Ridersons now owned plant and research facilities surpassing those of most of the world's nations. Their cash reserves climbed past the A scientist at OreOc's laboratories announced that research into extraction processes hinted at the possibility of the age-old dream of transmutation. A scientist at The King of Diamonds Texas laboratories announced that investigations into the behavior of the electron's suppressed charge could conceivably lead directly to controlled fusion. Much as the aging John D. Rockefeller the First hired a public relations man to soften his public image, the Ridersons' various holdings found a center of higher learning, the World University of the Physical Sciences. Its School of Tachyon Behavior was endowed with an adThe ship arranged a conference call between Erikson, Franklin, and vanPestel. "A start has been made," it reported, "particularly in the basic research needed to develop the necessary technologies. Tachyons, fusion, transmutation to achieve continual creation of the transuranic elements. What is primarily lacking is gravitational control to bind the transuranic elements and for the non-gravitational chamber which contains the drive unit. I can explain the theory, but it would be equivalent to explaining the theory of television to Leonardo. Imagine the industries and technologies Leonardo would have to invent for the simple pleasure of watching "Gone With the Wind" on his portable TV. We need more money, more power, more industrial base." combined Kodak-Polaroid laboratories announced that they had succeeded in adding audio recording and playback to their cameras. John Franklin announced it was possible to beam a holographic image from one end of the world to the other. came out with a wristwatch-sized communicator which projected voice and image of the person calling to the person called and vice versa. No telephone wires were needed, or central switchboards, and dialing was replaced by an ordinary voice command to get, for instance, my pal Robert. Only if the caller knew two or more Roberts were there any difficulties. Electronically-augmented telepathy? power source? An unpatented trade secret. They sold ATT short all the way down from # to #, then purchased outright the entire stock of the company with the highest assets of any corporation in the world, among which were the superb Bell Laboratories. It was also the most widely-held stock in the world. Its crash touched off the Great Plunge of '#, and the spectre of the breadlines of the Great Depression became once again a possible reality. Holophones could also be used to replace television if the # model were purchased rather than the standard #. The Ridersons launched their own satellite network and bought up the No one in any of the companies purchased was thrown out of work. Some were given make-work jobs, others were re-assigned, others were essential. General Holophone, for instance, continued to bill its customers on a monthly basis, although only three people in the world knew that the SpaceMasterScout's Primary Accountancy Cells were both the central switchboard and head bookkeeper for # million psionically-boosted holophones. Utility Commissions was overcome when the holophone belonging to every federal, state, and municipal employee, from President down to city-hall janitor, simply failed to function for a three-day period. Outside the United States the Telephone and telegraph services of the world are generally government monopolies run by the postal authorities. Opposition to the introduction of the American-controlled holophone was loud and adamant. buted by direct mailing free of charge to the world's leaders. Their calls were not billed. Four months later their holophones suddenly ceased to work. A researcher at Bell Labs built a primitive duplicator, suitable at any rate for duplicating holophones. Two weeks without holophones and the world's leaders capitulated. # duction and the American balance of paymentdeficit was ended forever. "The next step," said Erikson, "is going to be tricky. Whatever remnants of national sovereignty and boundaries survive the holophone are going to be wiped out by our next gizmo. The Iron Curtain countries particularly are going to cut up rough." "With reason," said vanPestel. "I hereby predict the end of Communism within three years at most, and what I can predict, others can." Franklin tugged at his earlobe. "I agree. We'd better take precautionary measures. We have full control of that Swiss armaments plant, don't we? I suggest we work it, through them." from every country in the world were invited to witness a demonstration on an uninhabited speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A dour Swiss businessman in a black woolen suit sat uncomfortably on a wooden chair in the full blast of the equatorial sun. A small apparatus hummed to itself beside him. From a ship # miles away the observers were invited to observe a small rowboat which bobbed in the waves half a mile from the Swiss. But only through a specially polarized screen. A #kiloton nuclear device suddenly exploded in the rowboat. When the benumbed observers returned to the islet they found the dour Swiss looking impatiently at his watch, suffering from sunburn on his legs where he'd incautiously rolled up his trousers to expose his white shanks to the broiling sun. He returned to the mother ship, presented a pricelist for a wide range of forcefields guaranteed impervious to atomic explosion and radiation. He seemed to think that each of the world's towns and cities were a likely buyer. The price, he pointed out, was modest. France, lars in # on arms and national defense. His firm would be happy to install a forcefield in every town in France with more than # indollars -- one year's armament spending. In a country such as Andorra, which had spent nothing, the forcefield would be gratis. For the They should have reduced their arms budgets long ago... When the world's cities had been fortified by the Swiss PeaceProfiteers as they liked to call themselves, OreOc's West Coast labs launched the grav-sled, and the Ridersons acquired General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors, Boeing, MacDonald-Douglas, Pratt  Whitney and the rest of the aerospace industry. When the shockwaves hit the oil industry, Exxon, Gulf, Texaco, and the others followed. Petrochemicallyproduced plastic was necessary for the gravsled bodies, and a reluctant but shell-shocked Justice Department allowed the merger of the petroleum industry with the automobile and aerospace industries to form a company with assets superior to those of all but three of the world's nations. The company was named, and this is true, General Hilarity, Inc. Why, as opposed to specific gravity, of course. Few people found the joke in steel-workers in an industry which had just gone out of business. grav-sled was offered for sale within the United States for # including Federal and state tax. # the spectre of the Great Depression receded forever. Sales forces moved into Europe, Africa, and Asia, where strippeddown models were sold for as low as #. They were unanimously refused permission to penetrate the Iron Curtain. The salesmen shrugorders were waiting elsewhere. When the world's initial voracious demand had been slaked, # high yield bondage pilotless above the cities behind the Iron Curtain and floated down were immediately confiscated by ofon the other side of the Iron Curpeople. #I hydrogen devices failed to detonate over the United States. The forcefield had been supplemented by a damper-field. The Congress of the United States declared war upon the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The Iron Curtain countries armed, unpiloted grav-sleds, most of which had been drafted from the long-suffering American people. bypassed the ragged tatters of the Curtain, and the war ended three days later. VanPestel had been wrong with his prediction. It had taken # years, # months, and # days for the last Communist state to wither away. were scratched from armaments and invested in the production of housing, food, and industry. The engineers at General Hilarity augmented the lift-capacity of the grav-sled by a power. The Amerilied workers were bodily moved to the Federated States of China; # begin the exploitation of the globe's greatest storehouse of untapped aerospace workers and engineers were invited to the United States by General Hilarity. Passports disappeared. The King of Diamonds added an additional # acres of plant and laboratories to its Texas research center. OreOc placed on the market a device for extracting oxygen from rock. Its applications were expected to be limited. India increased the capacity of the industrial grav-haul to yet another power, mated it to a forcefield, scooped up # cubic miles dians, and announced from Gandhi-opolis-on-the-Grand-Canaf that the terraformation of Mars had begun. Worldwide per-capita income rose from # to # to #I to #. A Japanese was elected President of the Directorate of Global Resources, the successor to the United Nations. Thirty-one million people were now working for Erickson, Franklin and vanPestel. Transmutation and controlled fusion were announced simultaneouslyAlso the first tachyon probes were being launched toward the nearer stars. Components from around the world began to be delivered to The King of Diamonds, Inc. Under the direction of the SpaceMaster-Scout, tested the new power unit. As soon as frill power was operational, Riderson I had a short, acrid conversation with Professor Camptargo at the Museum of Comparative Anthropology # light years away. "He curses us as ham-handed meddlers," he explained to Ridervirgin paradise now unsuitable for serious ethnological study. He reviles us as selfish, egotistical, self-serving oafs unfit to represent the University in any capacity higher than bottlewasher. "He begs me to inform the SpaceMaster-Scout that had it wheels it might be suitable as a lawn-mower. He gives us #-days' notice and no letter of recommendation. In brief, he's given us the boot." Riderson II grinned. "The Earthlings are mounting their first expedition to Centauri next year. One of these days, when they land in the University football stadium he'll be even less pleased." "Talk, talk, talk," admonished fore the natives learn how we've despoiled their paradise." He thumbed a button. The ship floated up through an empty warehouse and into the evening sky. It hovered for a moment, then it dwindled, diminished, and was gone.  eK Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! Get # full months of the finest science fiction writing at a special low introductory rate. Bess than l#th of a solar credit -- just # U.S.Earth money with the coupon below brings you mind-expanding ideas and far-out authors alive today! Plus the unusual free gift described below to let you project the future for years and years from now. Just attach your check or money order to coupon and mail it to us to start your subscription and receive your gift. This time-computer dial lets you look backward and forward in time! Were you born on a Tuesday? What day will your birthday fall on in #? Will Christmas be on a weekend in the year #? You'll have the answers at your fingertips with this perpetual calendar! Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. Use this coupon to take advantage of this special subscription  gift offer from Name: Street: City: State: Zip.Mail With Remittance To : # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # I'm a sort of exception that proves the rule. And that, oddly enough, is my name -- George Rule, currently master in the employ of the Dog Star Line, one of the few independent shipping companies in the Federation able to compete successfully with the state-owned Interstellar Transport Commission. When I was much younger I used to be called, rather to my embarrassment, Golden Rule. That was when my hair, which I tend to wear long, and my beard were brightly blond. But, given time, everything fades, and my nickname has faded away with my original colouring. In uniform I'm just another tramp master -- and the Odd Gods of the Galaxy know that there are plenty of such in the Universe! -- and out of uniform I could be the man come to fix the robochef. It's odd -- or is it? -- how those engaged in that particular branch of robotics tend to run to fat... But this exception business... The space services of the Rim Confederacy are literally crawling with officers who blotted their copy books in the major shipping lines of the Federation and various autonomous kingdoms, republics and whatever, and even with a few who left certain navies under big black clouds. The famous Commodore Grimes, for example, the Rim Worlds' favourite son, isn't a Rim Worlder by birth; he was emptied out of the Federation Survey Service after the discovery mutiny. (It was Grimes, by the way, who got me emptied out of Rim Runners, the Confederacy's state shipping line, many years ago.) I am a Rim Worlder by birth. I'm one of the very few spacemen who was bom an Outsider and who now serves in the Insiders' ships, the very opposite to all those Insiders who, for reasons best known to themselves, came out to the Rim. I was one of the first cadets to pass through the Confederacy's space training college at Port Last, on Ultimo. I started my space-going career as Fourth Mate of the old Rim Mammoth and then, after I gained my Second Mate's Certificate, was appointed Third Mate of Rim Tiger. Captain -- as he was then -- Grimes was master of her. He was a real martinet in those days. Now that I'm master myself I can appreciate his reasons for wanting to run a taut ship. The affair aboard Discovery must still have been vivid in his mind and probably he was thinking that if he'd been less easy going the mutiny would never have happened. I didn't take kindly to the sort of discipline that he tried to impose. Rim Mammoth had been a very happy ship; the Tiger was far from it. Looking back on it all, any Third Mate of mine who tried to get away with the things that I tried to get away with would get a rough passage and a short one. Anyhow -- it was after I'd scrana. bled aboard at Port Fortinbras, very much the worse for wear, about tyj microseconds prior to lift-off -- # was called into the Sacred Presencj. Before he could start on me I to him what he could do with his Su vey Service ideas. Then I told h what he could do with his ship, told him that I wasn't at all st prised that Discovery's officers h done what they did... And so on I don't blush easily, but t memory of that scene induces a I flush from my scalp to the tips my toes. I was lucky, bloody luci , not to have been pushed out throu i an airlock without a spacesuit. (Jl the time we were, of course, will on our way to Port Forlorn.) Oh, I was escorted to the airlock after our landing on Lorn, taken to the Shipping Office and paid off, and told that it was extremely unlikely that Rim Runners would ever require my services again. But I was lucky: (a) I got a job. (b) I got a job that took me away from the Rim. (c) I got a job that exercised I certain civilizing influence (badly needed, I admit now) on me. You may remember when Trans-Galactic Clippers used to in elude the Rim Worlds in the itiner ary of their Universal Tours. One o I their big ships -- Sobraon -- was in and her Fourth Officer, who had in curred multiple injuries in a rente c air car crash, was in hospital. Th c post was mine, I was told, until such time as a regular TG man was available to relieve me. I took it, of course, hastily affixing my autograph to Sobraon's Articles of Agreement before Captain Grimes could breathe a few unkind words into the ear of Captain Servetty, who was to be my new boss. And it was with great relief that I watched, from the Clipper's control room, the lights of Port Forlorn fading below us as we lifted. I decided, then, to make the most of this second chance. I decided, too, that I'd not return to the Rim Worlds, ever. There was nothing to hold me; I was an orphan, and had never gotten on with the various aunts and uncles on either side of my family. I'd had a girl, but she'd ditched me, some time back, to marry a wind turbine maintenance engineer. This broken romance had been one of the reasons -- the main reason, perhaps -- why I'd been such a pain in the neck to old Grimes. As the Universal Tour proceeded everything that I saw -- the glamorous worlds such as Caribbea, Electra and all the rest of them -- stiffened my resolution. The Rim Worlds were so dreary, and the planets of the Shakespearean Sector were little better. This was before Grimes, commanding Faraway Quest, had discovered the worlds of what is now known as the Eastern Circuit -- Tham, Mellise, Grollor and Stree. All that we had then were Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule -- and, of course, Kinsolving's Planet and Eblis. But nobody ever went near either of those. Sobraon knocked quite a few corners off me. There's a saying that you often hear, especially in star tramps, that Trans-Galactic Clippers is an outfit where accent counts for more than efficiency. Don't you believe it. Those boys may convey the impression of taking a cruise in daddy's yacht, but they're superb spacemen. They play hard at times -- but they work hard. I played with them -- and I like to think that I pulled my weight when it was time to work. I was genuinely sorry when I paid off at Canis Major -- Dogtown to we Sirians -- the capital city of the Sirian Sector. There was a new Fourth Mate, a Company boy, waiting for us there, so Captain Servetty had to take him on. He told me, though, that if I cared to fill in a TG Clippers application form he'd see to it that it received special consideration. I thanked him, of course, and I thought about it. I didn't have to think very hard about the repatriation to the Rim Worlds to which I was entitled. I took the money in lieu and decided to treat myself to a holiday. It was while I was enjoying myself at New Capri that I met Jane. She too was on holiday -- on annual leave, as a matter of fact. She was at that time a Purser with the Dog Star Line. It was largely because of her that I became a kennelman myself; I became a naturalized Sirian citizen shortly after we married. She gave up spacefaring when our first child was on the stocks. Oh well, it's nice having your wife aboard ship with you -- but it's also nice to have a home, complete with wife and children, to come back to. You can't have it both ways. And most of the time I got ships that never wandered far from Dogtown, and was contented enough as I rose slowly -- but not too slowly -- through the ranks from Third to Second, from Second to Chief and, finally, from Chief Officer to Master. But now, after all these years, I was coming back to the Rim. The dog star line ships spend most of the time sniffing around their own backyard, but now and again they stray. Basset had strayed, following the scent of commerce clear across the Galaxy. At home, on Canis Major, I'd loaded a big consignment of brassards and self-adjusting sun hats for Arcadia. I must find out some time how those brassards sold. They were made with waterproof pockets for smoking requirements, small change, folding money c c. The Arcadians, who practice naturism all the year round, have always seemed to manage quite well with a simple bag slung over one shoulder. At Ursa Major (the Arcadians; have a childish love of puns) I filled up with the so-called Apples or Eden, a local fruit esteemed on : quite a few worlds. These were consigned to New Maine. And what would one load in Port Penobscot? Need you ask? Smoked and pickled fish, of course, far less fragrant than what had been discharged; This shipment was for Rob Roy, one of the planets of the Empire of) Waverley. I The cargo we loaded on Rob Royj was no surprise either. The Jaco-? beans, as they call themselves,! maintain that their whisky is superior to the genuine article distilled in Scotland. It may be, it may not be; whisky is not my tipple. But the freight charges from the Empire of Waverley to the Rim Confederacy are far less than those from Earth to the Rim. So Basset had followed the scent of profit clear from the Dog Star to the Rim, and now it looked as though the trail was petering out. On the other legs of the voyage Head Office, by means of Carlotti radio, had kept me well informed as to what my future movements would be. On my run from Rob Roy to Lom they had remained silent. And Rim Runners, my agents with only a curt acknowledgement. I didn't like it. None of us liked it: we'd all been away from home too long. Probably I liked it less than my officers. I knew the Rim Worlds; I could think of far nicer planets to sit around awaiting orders. We found the Lom sun without any trouble -- not that we should have had any trouble finding that dim luminary. Even if we hadn't been equipped with the Carlotti Direction Finder, and even if the Rim Worlds hadn't been able to boast the usual lay-out of Carlotti Beacons, we'd have had no trouble. There's the Galactic Lens, you see, and it doesn't thin out gradually towards its edges; the stars in the spiral arms are quite closely packed. (I use the word "closely" in a relative way, of course. If you had to walk a dozen or so light years you wouldn't think it was all that close.) And then there's that almost absolute nothingness between the galaxies. Almost absolute... There's the occasional hydrogen atom, of course, and a few small star clusters doing their best to convey the impression that they don't really belong to the galactic family. The Rim Confederacy is one such cluster. There are the Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo, Thule, Eblis and Kinsolving suns. To the Galactic East there's a smaller cluster, with Tharn, Grollor, Mellise and Stree. To the West there's a sizeable anti-matter aggregation, with a dozen suns. So, as long as you're headed in roughly the right direction when you break out of the Lens, you have no difficulty identifying the cluster you want. You have the Galactic Lens astern of you. When the space-timetwisting Mannschenn Drive is running it looks like an enormous, slowly squirming, luminescent amoeba. Ahead there's an uncanny blackness, and the sparse, glimmering, writhing nebulosities that are the Rim Suns seem to make that blackness even blacker, even emptier. And that emptiness still looks too damned empty even when the interstellar drive's shut down and the ship's back in the normal Continuum. I could tell that my officers were scared by the weird scenery -- or lack of it. I was feeling a bit uneasy myself; it was so many years since I'd been out here. But we got used to it after a while -- as much as one can get used to it -- and here we were at last, dropping down through the upper atmosphere of Lorn. The landing was scheduled for # hours. Port Forlorn Local Time. We couldn't see anything of Port Forlorn yet, although we had clearance from Aerospace Control to enter and were homing on the radio beacon. Beneath us was the almost inevitable overcast, like a vast snowfield in the sunlight, and under the cloud ceiling there would be, I knew, the usual half gale (if not something stronger) probably accompanied by rain, snow, hail or sleet. Or all four. "How does it feel to be coming home, sir?" asked my Chief Officer sarcastically. "My home's in Canis Major!" I snapped. Then I managed a grin. "If you'll forgive my being comy, home is where the heart is." "You can say that again, Captain," he concurred. (He was recently married and the novelty hadn't worn off yet.) I took a last, routine look around the control room, just to make sure that everybody was where he was supposed to be and that everything was working. Soon I'd have to give all my attention to the inertial drive and attitude controls and to the periscope screen; inevitably I'd have to do some fancy juggling with lateral and downthrusts. Rugged, chunky Bindle, the Chief Officer, was strapped in the co-pilot's chair, ready to take over at once if I suffered a sudden heart attack or went mad or something. Loran, the Second, was hunched over the bank of navigational instruments, his long, skinny frame all awkward angles and the usual greasy black cowlick obscuring one eye. His job was to call out to me the various instrument readings if, for some reason, such data failed to appear on the periscope screen. Young Taylor, the Third, an extraordinarily ordinary looking youth, was manning the various telephones, including the were in communication with Aerospace Control. In most Dog Star Line's vessels this was the Radio Officer's job, but I had found that our Sparks, Elizabeth Brown (Betty Boops, we called her) was far too great a distraction. Even when she was wearing a thickly opaque uniform blouse (she preferred ones which were not) her abundant charms were all too obvious. We fell steadily, the inertial drive grumbling away in its odd, broken rhythm, healthily enough. We dropped into the upper cloud levels, and at first pearly grey mist alternated with clear air outside our viewports. And then, for what seemed like a long time, there was only dark, formless vapour. The ship shuddered suddenly and violently as turbulence took her in its grip. The changing code of the blips from the radio beacon told me that I was off course, but it was early yet to start bothering about corrections. We broke through the cloud ceiling. Looking into the screen, stepping up the magnification, I could see that there had been few changes during my long absence. The landscape, as always, was grey rather than green, almost featureless, although on the horizon the black, jagged peaks of the Forlorn Range loomed ominously. There were the wide fields in which were grown such unglamorous crops as beans and potatoes. There was the city, which had grown only a little, with the wind turbine towers and the factory chimneys in the industrial suburbs, each smokestack with its streamer of dirty white and yellow vapour. Yes, it was blowing down there all right. And there was the spaceport, a few kilometers from the city. I could see, towards the edge of the screen, the triangle of bright red flashing beacons on the apron. They were well to leeward, I noted, of the only other ship in port. This, I had been told, was Rim Osprey. There would be enough clearance, I thought hopefully, although I wondered, not for the first time, why Port Captains, with acres of apron at their disposal, always like to pack vessels in closely. I applied lateral thrust generously, brought the beacons to the exact centre of the screen. At first it wasn't too hard to keep them there, and then we dropped into a region of freak turbulence and to the observers in the Port Forlorn control tower it must have looked as though we were wandering all over the sky. An anspeaker, "Where are you off to, Captain?" "Don't answer the bastard!" I snarled to Taylor. I had control of her again and, as We ll as maintaining a steady rate of descent, corrected the ship's attitude. We dropped rapidly and the numerals of the radar altimeter display were winding down fast. I was coming in with a ruddy blush -- but that, I had learned years ago, was the only way to come in to Port Forlorn. I said as much to Bindle, who was beginning to make apprehensive noises. "Try to drop like a feather," I told him, "and you'll finish up blown into the other hemisphere..." I heard Loran mutter something about a ton of bricks, but ignored him. There was little in the screen now but dirty concrete and the flashing beacons, marking the triangle in the centre of which I was supposed to land -- but only when my stern vanes were below the level of the top of the control tower did I step up downthrust. The ship complained and shuddered to the suddenly increased power of the inertial drive. I was beginning to feel smug -- but what happened then wiped the silly grin off my face. I had been leaning, as it were, into the wind -- and suddenly, as we came into the lee of the administration block, there was no longer any wind to lean against. Worse still, there was a nasty back eddy. I reversed lateral thrust at once, of course, but it seemed ages before it took effect. The marker beacons slid right to the edge of the screen, right off it. Then, with agonizing slowness, they drifted back, not far enough... But we were down. I felt the slight jar and the contact lights came on. I cut the drive. Basset trembled and sighed as she sagged down into the cradle of her tripedal landing gear, as the great shock absorbers took the weight of her. With a steady hand -- but it took an effort! -- I fished a packet of Carib panatellas out of my breast pocket, struck one of the long, green cylinders and stuck the unlit end between my lips. (I almost did it the wrong way round, but noticed just in time.) I checked all the tell-tales, saw nothing wrong and ordered quietly, "Make it Finished With Engines." Nobody acknowledged the order. I looked around indignantly. All three officers were staring out through one of the viewports. "Gods! That was close! Bloody close!" the Mate was muttering. I stared through that viewport myself. Yes, it had been close. Another metre over towards the administration block and one or other or our stern vanes would have torn down the side of the other ship, ripping her open like a huge can opener. I unsnapped my belt, walked a little unsteadily to join the officers at the viewport. We could look directly into our neighbour's control room. A junior officer, the shipkeeper, was staring across at us. His face was still white. It had reason to be. "Port Forlorn Control to Basset ," came from the speaker of the me?" "Loud and clear," I replied automatically into the microphone. "Port Forlorn Control to Basset. You are far too close to Rim Osprey. For your information, she is not a lamp-post." ( Funny bastard, I thought.) "You will have to shift. Oh, by the way, you also destroyed two of our marker beacons when you set down. Over." I shrugged. It's a rare master who hasn't rubbed out the occasional marker beacon. And, after all, they're cheap enough. (But Rim Osprey wouldn't have been cheap if I'd hit her. But I hadn't hit her. So what? Finally, after the ground crew had set out new beacons, I tackled the ticklish job of shifting ship. I managed it with no damage except for a slightly dented vanepad and a long scratch on the concrete apron. ( Straight as though drawn with a rule, the Mate remarked. I forgave him, but it wasn't easy.) When we had reberthed to the l Port Captain's approval Customs i and Port Health boarded to clear us ' inwards. Both officials were quite amazed to find that my place of birth, as shown on the Crew List, was Port Forlorn. They had to say, of course, that I had gone to the dogs. My Agent -- Rim Runners' Port Forlorn Branch Manager -- made the same feeble joke. Finally we got down to business. He said, "I've nothing for you at the moment, Captain. My last instructions from your Owners were to try to arrange some sort of charter for you locally... I told him, rather plaintively, "But I want to go home..." He replied cheerfully, "But you are home. Lives there a man with soul so dead, and all that. Don't you have friends or relatives here? And you were in Rim Rinners once, weren't you?' "I was," I admitted. "Then you must know Commodore Grimes, our Astronautical Superintendent. He's in Port Forlorn now, as a matter of fact..." "The commodore and I didn't part on the best of terms," I said carefully. "Time wounds all heels," he told me. "Shall I tell him you're here?" "Perhaps not," I said. "He'll know anyhow, Captain. He always likes to look through the crew-lists of strange ships that come in here." He laughed. "He could be looking for your name!" "I should have changed it when I changed my nationality," I said. "But I doubt if he'll want to see me again." Oddly enough -- or not so oddly -- nobody went ashore that day. The weather was partly to blame; shortly after our final berthing a cold driving rain had set in. Too, all the way to Lorn I'd been telling everybody how drab and dreary the Rim Worlds are, and they must have at least half believed me. And then, after dinner that night, a little party started in the wardroom. We were all relaxing after the voyage and we had a few drinks, and a few more, and then... You know how it is. And, as always, we finished up in full voice, singing our Company's anthem. All the big outfits have one, usually some very old song with modern words tacked on to the antique melody. In the Waverley Royal Mail they have their own version of Fly, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing. In TG Clippers it's one of the ancient Terran sea chanteys, Sally Brown. (Way, hey, roll and go!) Rim Runners have a farewell song from some old comic opera. ( Goodbye , I'll run to find another sun Where I may find  There are hearts more kind than the ones left behind... ) And ourselves, the Dog Star Line? The choice is obvious. "How much is that doggy in the window? (Arf! Arf!) ' 'The one with the great big glass eyes... "How much is that doggy in the window? ' # think she looks ever so nice "I don't want a Countess or a Duchess, "I don't want an Empress with wings..." (This, of course, a dig at the Waverley Royal Mail Line.) "I don't want an Alpha or a Beta..." (The two biggest classes of ship in the Interstellar Transport Commission.) ' 'Or any of those fucking things!' ' "How much is that doggy in the window? (Arf! Arf! Arf!) "The one with the Sirius look, "How much is that doggy in the window? " Please put my name down in her book!' ' We were all happily arfing away, with a few yips and bow-wows, when the Mate noticed a visitor standing just outside the wardroom door. "Come in, come in!" he called. "This is Liberty Hall! You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard! But..." We took the cue and roared in unison, "Beware of the dog!" "That last," remarked a voice, familiar after many a year, "makes a very welcome new addition." I turned slowly in my chair to look at' him. At first I thought that the old bastard hadn't changed a bit. Then I saw that his hair was grey now, matching his eyes, and that his face had acquired a few new wrinkles. Otherwise it was as it always had been, looking as though it had been hacked rather than carved out of some coarse textured stone and then left out in the weather. His ears were the same prominent jug handles of old. "Don't let me interrupt the party, Captain Rule," he went on, slightly emphasizing the title. "I had some business with Rim Osprey, and then I thought that I'd call aboard here to see you. But it can wait until the morning." I got to my feet, extended a slightly reluctant hand. He shook it. "Good to have you aboard, sir," I said in the conventional manner. "Will you join us in a small drink?" He grinned. "Well, if you twist my arm hard enough..." I introduced him around and found him a chair. If he was bearing no malice -- and he had far more reason to than I did -- then neither was I. He was very soon completely at home. Betty Brown -- wearing one of her transparent shirts and a skirt that was little more than a pelmet -- and Sara Taine, my Purser, sat -- literally -- at his feet, getting up now and again to bring him savouries or to freshen his drink. I didn't get that sort of service. I thought resentfully, and this was my ship...He had a fine repertoire of songs and stories, far more extensive than any of ours. Well, he should have done. He had been around so much longer. At last he raised his wrist and looked at his watch. He said, "Thank you for the party, but I must be going... "The night's only a pup. Commodore," Bindle told him. "It was a bitch of a night when I came aboard," he replied, "and probably still is. Raining cats and dogs..." He laughed. "Your Dog Star Line brand of humour seems to be catching..." "Just one more before you go? One for the road?" urged the Mate. "No. Thank you. I don't want to find myself in the doghouse when I get home. Goodnight, all. Goodnight. Goodnight..." I saw him down to the after airlock. He told me, "I'll be seeing you in the morning. Captain Rule, if it is convenient." "Would you mind answering a question before you go, sir? I asked him. "I'll try. What is it?" "T've always rather suspected, sir, that you were instrumental in getting me that berth in Sobraon. After all, Captain Servetty didn't have to take me, of all people. And he must have known why I was... available..." "He did know, Captain. He asked me if he should sign you on. I told him that you had the makings of a good officer, but that he'd have to keep a close eye on you." I said, "If I hadn't been such a self-centred puppy I'd have known that you were still getting over the Discovery business..." He said, "Let's forget about it, shall we? It was all so long ago, and so very far away..." Suddenly he looked old, then recovered, equally suddenly, his appearance of ageless strength. "Goodnight, Captain Rule." Our handshake, this time, was really sincere. "I'll see you in the morning." Wrapping his rather flamboyant cloak about his stocky figure he strode down the ramp, ignoring the wind and the rain, let himself into his squat, ugly little ground car, and then was gone in a flurry of spray. UT I . , anything like the ogre you made him out to be," said Sara Taine when she brought me in my tea tray the next morning. "I'm looking forward to seeing him again. What time will he be coming aboard?" I said severely, "He's married. Very happily, I believe." She frowned. She had one of those thin, serious faces, under sleek, gleaming black hair, on which a frown sits rather well. She complained, "All the attractive men in my life are married. You, and Peter Bindle, and now your old pal Commodore Grimes..." "What about the engineers?" I asked her. "What about the Second and Third Mates? Or the Quack?" "Them!" she snorted, then grinned softly, "If I wasn't such a good friend of Jane's..." "Don't tempt me, Sara. The way this voyage is dragging on I shouldn't require so very much tempting." She had been sitting on the bed, sipping her own cup of tea. She got up, moved to a chair. "That will do, Captain Rule. As I've said, Jane and I are good friends. I want us to stay that way. But it is a pity that she has such archaic ideas about sex, isn't it?" She put her cup back on the tray with a clatter, got up and went out of the bedroom, leaving me to deal alone with the business of getting up to face the day. Showered and dressed I made my way down to the wardroom for breakfast. There were no absentees; the Doctor had insisted that each of us take a neutralizer tablet before retiring. As you know, they're very effective -- but by the time you need them you're in such a state you can't be bothered to take them. That's one of the beauties of having a party aboard ship; you have your own medical practitioner on hand to prescribe as required... Canvey, the Interstellar Drive Engineer, asked what everybody else was intending to ask. He got in first. "Was that only a social call last night, Captain, or did Commodore Grimes have any information about our next loading?" And then Terrigal, Reaction Drive Engineer, stated rather than asked, "He's coming aboard again this morning, isn't he?" I told them, "The Commodore is Rim Runners' Astronautical Superintendent, not their Traffic Manager. " "But he still piles on a lot of gees, doesn't he?" said Canvey. "I suppose he does," I admitted. I helped myself liberally from the dish of Caribbean tree-crab curry on the table, hoping that it would taste as good as it looked and smelled. (It did. Sara was as good a cook as she was a purser, and even the most sophisticated autochef -- which ours wasn't -- gives of its best only when imaginatively programmed.) I asked, "How is the crab holding out, Sara?" "It isn't," she said. "This is the last of it." "I tried to make a tissue culture," put in Dr. Forbes, who was Bio-Chemist as well as medical officer, "but it died on me..." He looked more like a professional mourner than ever as he imparted the bad news. "Then I hope they send us home by way of Caribbea," I said. "So there is a chance of our getting home," persisted Canvey. He was one of those little, grey, earnest men who always seem to be persisting. "I'll believe it when we crunch down in Dogtown," said Porky Terrigal glumly, making sure of his second helping of the fragrant curry"You must have heard something, Captain..." went on Canvey. "I'm just the Master," I told him"Nobody ever tells me anything" Breakfast over, I went back up to m y quarters. Bindle brought me a morning paper; somebody in Rim Runners' dock office had been thoughtful enough to send copies on board. I lit a cigar, skimmed through it. It was deadly dull. (Other people's local rags are always dull -- but this, The Port Forlorn Confederate, had been my local rag once...) I noted that Basset was listed in the Shipping Information column as having arrived. I noted, too, that the date of her departure was given as "indefinite". I knew that already. I read that the Confederacy's Department of Tourism was thinking about reestablishing the holiday resort on Eblis. I read about the Burns Night party that had been thrown by the Ambassador of the Empire of Waverley. Obviously he couldn't have been waiting for our consignment of Waverley scotch. I read about the Rim Rules Football match between the Port Forlorn Pirates and the Desolation Drovers. I found it hard to raise any interest in the account of the game. Even when I had been a Rim Worlder myself I hadn't been all that keen, and on most of the worlds of the Sirian Sector the game is Old Association, the only real football. Finally I found the crossword. It wasn't one of the cryptic variety, just a collection of absurdly simple clues that a retarded child of five could have solved in four minutes. It only took me three and a half. There was a knock at the door. I threw the paper aside, got out my chair to welcome Commodore Grimes. He took the seat I offered him, pulled out of his pocket an ancient and battered pipe that looked as though it was the very one that he had always smoked when I last knew him. It smelt like it, too. Sara Taine came in with a tray of coffee things. She seemed disposed to hang around with flapping ears, and looked hurt when I told her, "That will be all, thanks, Sara." Grimes said, "Quite comfortable quarters you have. Captain Rule." "Yes," I agreed. "Basset and her sister ships are an improvement on the Commission's basic Epsilon design. We have our own yards now in the Sector, of course, and build our own vessels..." "Passenger accommodation?" he asked. "I can take a dozen, in single berth cabins. More if people are "Mphm." He tooked at me through the cloud of acrid smoke that he had just emitted. I countered with a smokescreen of my own. "Mphm. You know, of course, that we have our own Survey Ship, Faraway Quest..." "I've heard of her, sir." "Well, the Quest's out of commission. Will be for some months yet. Oh, she's old, I admit, but even I didn't know that there were so many things wrong with her until she came up for Survey... He relit his pipe, which had gone out, using one of the archaic matches that he still affected. "You know Kinsolving's Planet, of course?" "I know of it, Commodore. I've never been there." "I have," he told me. "Too often. The things that have happened to me there shouldn't happen to a dog. Well, the Port Forlorn University wants to send another expedition to Kinsolving. Normally I'd have been their bus driver, in Faraway Quest. But she, as I've told you, is grounded. And our Navy won't lay a ship on for a bunch of civilian scientists, psychic researchers at that. And all of our merchant tonnage, the Rim Runners fleet, is heavily committed for months to come. Do you get the picture?" "I'm beginning to," I admitted reluctantly. "Do I detect a certain lack of enthusiasm, Captain Rule? I can't say that I blame you. Oh, well, it shouldn't be hard to arrange a charter whereby we man the ship with our own personnel, while you and your boys and girls are put up in hotels at the Confederacy's expense." "I stay with my ship," I told him. "And I'm pretty sure that all my people will be of the same mind. " "Good. I was expecting you to say that. So... If the charter is arranged -- it's not definite yet -- you'll be carrying half a dozen scientists, two qualified psionicists, the Kinsolving's Planet Advisor and his wife. The Advisor is me, of course. Sonya -- my wife -- doesn't like that world any more than I do, but she maintains that I'm far less liable to get into trouble if she's along..." "What is wrong with Kinsolving?" I asked. "You're a Rim Worlder born," he said. "You know the stories." Yes, I knew the stories, or some of them. Kinsolving had been colonized at the same time as the other Rim Worlds, but the colonization hadn't stuck. The people -- those of them who hadn't committed suicide, been murdered or vanished without trace -- were taken off and resettled on Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule. They all told the same story -- oppressive loneliness, even in the middle of a crowd, continuous acute depression, outbreaks of irrational violence and, every night, dreams so terrifying that the hapless colonists dreaded going to bed. One theory that I remembered was that Kinsolving is the focal point of...forces, psychic forces. Another theory was that around the planet the fabric of our Universe is somehow strained, almost to breaking point, and that some of the alternate Universes aren't at all pleasant by our standards. But you don't have to go to Kinsolving to get the feeling that if you make an effort Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. # mg. "tar." # mg. nicotine av...you'll stay for the taste. Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. A lot of good taste that comes easy through the Micronite filter. you'll be able to step into another Continuum; that sensation is common enough anywhere on the Rim. But it's on Kinsolving that you know that no effort at all is necessary, that a mere sneeze would suffice to blow you out of the known Universe into...Into Heaven? Maybe, but the reverse would be more likely. "Kinsolving," said Grimes softly, "is a sort of gateway... It's been opened quite a few times, to my knowledge. I'd as lief not be involved in its opening, but..." he shrugged... "it seems to be my fate always to be involved with the bloody planet." There was a heavy silence, which I thought I'd better break. "The professional psionicists you mentioned... ?" "Old friends of mine," he told me. "Ken Mayhew. One of a dying breed. He was a Psionic Communications Officer long before the Carlotti System was dreamed of. He still holds his commission in the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve. And Clarisse, his wife. A telepath and a teleporteuse. Both of them know Kinsolving." "And does this Mayhew," I asked, "still cart his personal amplifier around with him? I can how they used to make pets of those obscene, disembodied dogs' brains..." "Ken used to keep his poodle's brain in aspic," said the Commodore, "but not any longer. He and Clarisse work as a team. She amplifies for him when he's sending or receiving, and he for her when she's teleporting." "And the scientists? Any weirdos among them?" "Oddly, enough, no. They study psychic phenomena without being in any way psychic themselves. They've cooked up some fantastically sensitive instruments, I understand, that can measure the slightest variations of temperature, atmospheric pressure, electrical potential and whatever. They have their own theory about Kinsolving, which is that the planet is actually haunted, in the good, old-fashioned way. And for a ghost to appear and speak and throw things around it must get energy from somewhere. A drop in temperature, for example, indicates that energy is being used." He laughed, rather mirthlessly. "It makes a change from all the other ideas about Kinsolving -- multidimensional universes and all the rest of it..." "And what are your ideas about it, sir?" I asked. "Kinsolving," he said, "is a world where anything can happen and almost certainly will." The charter was arranged; our Canis Major Head Office was happy enough that profitable employment had been found for Basset. We, Basset's crew, were not so happy. We were all a long way from home, and too long a time out, and this excursion to Kinsolving would inevitably delay our departure from the Rim Worlds for the Sirian Sector. There was one slight consolation; we were not kept hanging around long on Lorn. One day sufficed for the discharge of our inward cargo. It was a matter of hours only to ready the passenger accommodations for occupancy. There was the routine overhaul of all machinery, which took four days, and while this was in progress extra stores were taken on and the crates and cases containing the scientists' equipment loaded. On the morning of the sixth day the passengers boarded. Ken and Clarisse Mayhew I had already met at Grimes' home, where he and Sonya, his wife, had had us all to dinner. Ken was a typical telepath, one of the type with which I have become familiar in the cation between ships and between ships and planet-bases stations was clined to be weedy, with mousy hair, muddy eyes and an otherworldly appearance. Clarisse was another kettle of tea, not at all conforming to the popular idea of a psionicist. She was a very attractive girl with brown hair and brown eyes, strong featured, although a mite too solidly built for my taste. Sonya Grimes, however, was the sort of woman for whom I could fall quite easily; tall and slim, with a thin, slightly prominent nose and a wide mouth, remarkable violet eyes, sleek auburn hair. Her figure? She could have worn an old flour sack and made it look as though it had been imported at great expense from Paris, Earth. The commodore and his wife were guests in the control room during liftoff. Sonya was a spacewoman, I had learned earlier, and although married to a Rim Worlder she still retained both her Federation citizenship and her Survey Service commission. Grimes, I could see, was just itching to get his own paws on the controls. (He had confided to me that, at times, he found the life of a desk-borne commodore more than a little irksome.) But he sat in one of the spare chairs, well out of the way, watching. I don't think that he missed anything. Sonya was beside him. She laughed when we went through our own Dog Star Line ritual after the routine checks for spaceworthiness. The junior officer present -- young Taylor, the Third -- demanded in a portentiously solemn voice, "What is the Word?" We all roared in reply, "Growl you may, but go you must!" Sonya, as I have said, was amused. She whispered to her husband, "I'm beginning to find out why this company's ships are called the chariots of the dogs..." I knew what she meant. That Twentieth Century book, Chariots of the Gods, is still regarded as a Bible by those people who believe in the Old Race who started all the present civilization extant in the Galaxy. Aerospace Control gave us clearance to lift, wished us bon voyage. We climbed into what was an unusual phenomenon for Lorn, a clear sky. Soon the spaceport was no more than a huddle of model buildings far below us, with three toy ships on the apron. ( Rim Kestrel and Rim Wallaby had come in before our departure; Rim Osprey was due to leave, for the worlds of the Eastern Circuit, later in the day.) The little bitch was handling well. I took her up easily, not trying to break any records. I heard Sonya murmur, "George isn't like you, John. He doesn't show off using his auxiliary reaction drive when there's no need for it..." Grimes replied with a far from expressionless mphm. Lorn, with its wide, dreary (even in the sunlight) plains, its jagged, snow-capped mountains, diminished below us, became a mottled globe, grey-brown land, green-blue water, white snow. Still we drove upward, through and clear to the Van Allens. The inertial drive was shut down and the directional gyroscopes grumbled into life, swinging the ship about her axes, bringing her head around to point almost directly at the target star, the Kinsolving sun, a solitary spark in the empty blackness. On the ship's beam glowed the iridiscent lens of the Galaxy, spectacular and, to those of us not used to seeing it from outside, frightening. I steadied her up on the target, making a small allowance for drift. I restarted the inertial drive and then started the Mannschenn Drive, the space-timetwister. As on every such occasion I visualized those gleaming rotors spinning, precessing, fading s as they tumbled down the warped dimensions fading yet never vanishing, dragging the ship and all aboard her into that uncanny state where normal physical laws held good only within the fragile hull. There was the long second of deja vu during which time seemed to run backward. Inside the control room colours sagged down the spectrum and perspective was distorted, and all sounds were as though emanating from a distant echo chamber. Then all snapped back to normal, although the thin, high whine of the drive was a constant reminder that nothing was or would be normal until we were at our destination. And there was nothing normal outside the ports, of course. Ahead the Kinsolving sun was a writhing, multicoloured nebulosity, and on the beam the Lens was a pullulating Klein flask blown by a drunken glass blower. It looked as though it were alive. Perhaps it was alive. Perhaps only with the Mannschenn Drive in operation do we see it as it really is... I dismissed the uneasy thought from my mind. I said to Bindle, "Deep Space routine, Mr. Mate." "But who will keep the dog watches?" asked Taylor. "You're all watchdogs," I replied. "More of your ritual?" asked Sonya interestedly. "Yes," I admitted, feeling absurdly embarrassed. "I suppose it does sound rather childish to an outsider..." Grimes laughed. "I remember one ship I was in when I was in the Survey Service. The cruiser Orion. We called her O'Ryan, of course, and everybody had to speak an approximation to Irish dialect, and our song, just as Doggy In The Window is your song, was The Wearin' Of The Green..." "Still rather childish," his wife said, but her smile took any sting out of the words. Grimes said, "Well, Captain Rule, are you coming down to meet the customers?" I said, "I suppose it's one of the things I'm paid for." The customers -- the passengers -- were in their own saloon. Ken and Clarisse Mayhew I had already met, of course, the others, until now, had been no more than names on the passenger list. There was a Dr. Thorne -- I never did get it straight what exactly he was a doctor of -- and his wife. They were Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt in reverse, he a bearded, Falstaffian giant, she a grey, wispy sparrow. There were two, almost identical young men; mousey, studious, bespectacled. Their names were Paul Trentham and Bill Smith. The two young women could have been their sisters, but were not. One was Susan Howard, the other Mary Lestrange. They were friendly enough -- not that they overdid it. Sara, ever efficient, had seen to it that the bar in the saloon was well stocked. Thome took over as barman; the drinks soon dispelled the initial stiffness of this first meeting. I rather took to the leader of the expedition and he to me. I felt that I would be able, without giving offense. to ask him a question that had been bothering me slightly. "Tell me. Doctor," I put to him, "why don't you have any mediums along? You have two psionicists, sure, but they are, essentially, communications specialists, and by communications I don't mean communications with the dear departed." He laughed, a little ruefully. "One thing that our researches have taught us is this. There are many, many phoney mediums. Even the genuine ones sometimes, although not always intentionally so." "What do you mean, exactly?" "Look at it this way. A genuine medium is determined to deliver the goods. If the goods aren't forthcoming, because conditions aren't right, perhaps, then he or she would just hate to disappoint the customers. Quite possibly subconsciously -- but now and again consciously -- fake results are delivered. The main trouble, I suppose, is that the average medium doesn't have it drummed into him, all through a long training, that high standards of professional ethics must be maintained. A graduate of the Rhine Institute, however -- such as Ken Mayhew -- is bound by the Institute's code of ethics. He is therefore far more reliable than any medium." "But you do believe in spiritualism, don't you?" "I believe that there are hauntings. I believe that Kinsolving's Planet is haunted. I -- we -- want to find out by whom. Or what." "I seem to be spending my life finding out," grumbled Grimes. "But every time I get a different answer." "Perhaps you're a catalyst, Commodore," suggested Mrs. Thorne. "And perhaps Captain Rule is a dogalyst," said Sonya. I tried to laugh along with the rest at the vile pun -- jokes about the Dog Star Line are all right when we make them, but... The voyage was a relatively short one. It was like all other voyages, except that at the latter end of it we should not be landing at a proper spaceport with all the usual radionavigational aids. There would be no bored voice coming from the There would be no triangle of beacons to mark our berth on the apron. Come to that, there would be no apron. The spaceport had become a sizeable crater when something had destroyed the Franciscan ship Piety a while ago. Grimes had brought his charts with him. Together we studied them. He advised me to make my landing in the old Sports Stadium, on the shore of Darkling Tarn, not far from the city of Enderston, the ruins of which stood on the east bank of the Weary River. Those colonists had shown a morbid taste in place names... That applied to all the Rim Worlds, of course, but Kinsolving took the prize for deliberately miserable nomenclature. The commodore acted as pilot when we finally made our approach; he had been on Kinsolving before, more than once, and he possessed the local knowledge. I handled the controls myself, of course, but he was in the chair normally occupied by Bindle, advising. We were making an early morning descent -- always a wise policy when landing on a world without proper spaceport facilities. The lower the sun's altitude, the more pronounced the shadows cast by every irregularity of the ground. Too, when an expedition arrives at sunrise it has all the daylight hours to get itself organised. Left to myself, I'd have arrived when I arrived and not bothered about such niceties. It was Grimes, with his years of Survey Experience behind him, who had urged me to adopt Survey Service s.o.p. So we were coming down after a few hours of standing off in orbit. Already there was enough light for us to be able to make out details of the landscape beneath us. There was the Weary River -- and with all the twists and turns it was making it was small wonder that it was tired! There was the Darkling Tarn -- looking. Grimes said, like an octopus run over by a steamroller. Bindle loosed off the sounding rockets that, at Grimes' insistence, had been added to our normal equipment. Each of them, in its descent, left a long, unwavering smoke trail: there was no wind to incommode us. Each of them released a parachute flare that drifted down slowly. As we ourselves dropped, the picture in the periscope screen expanded. We could see the city at last, a huddle of overgrown ruins. We could see the Stadium, an oval of green that was just a little lighter in tone than the near-indigo of the older growth around it. One of the flares had fallen just to one side of the sports ground and started a minor brush fire; the smoke from it was rising almost directly upwards. At least it would be easier landing here than at the proper spaceport on Lorn...Grimes guessed my thoughts. "The ground's level enough. Captain Rule," he told me. "Or it was, last time I was here." "Any large animals?" I asked. "Just the descendants of the stock brought by the original colonists. Wild pigs and cattle. Rabbits. They'll all have sense enough to bolt for cover when they hear us coming down." In the periscope screen the ground looked level enough. I maintained a slow but steady rate of descent, slowed it to the merest downward drift when there were only metres to go. At last the contact lights flashed on. I cut the inertial drive. The silence, broken at first by the sighing of the shock absorbers and the usual minor creakings and groanings, was oppressive. I looked at the commodore. He nodded, and said, "Yes, you can make it Finished With Engines." Before I did so I glanced at the clinometer. The ship was a little off the vertical, but only half a degree. It was nothing to worry about. "So we're here," whispered Sonya. "Again." I didn't like the way she said it. "Shore leave?" asked Bindle brightly. "Of course, we shall want an advance from the Purser first, sir." "Ha, ha," I said. "Very funny." I looked out through the viewports. This didn't look like a world on which there would be any need for money. It didn't look like a world on which to take a pleasant walk. Oh, the day was bright enough, and such scenery as was in view was pretty enough, in a jungly sort of way, but... It was as though a shadow was over everything, dimming colours and bringing a chill to the air that bit through to the very bones. The sunlight streaming through the viewports was bright, dazzlingly so, to the outer eye -- but as far as the inner eye was concerned it could have been the rays of a lopsided moon intermittently breaking through driving storm clouds. I'm not a seventh son of a seventh son or any of that rubbish, and if I applied for admission to the Rhine Institute for training they'd turn me down without bothering with the routine tests, but I do have my psychic moments. A premonition of impending doom, I thought. I liked the feel of it. I thought it again. "If you don't mind, Captain Rule," said Grimes, "I'll assume command until such time as we lift off again. The ship is still your charge, of course, but all extravehicular activities are my pigeon." "As you please, sir," I said a little stiffly. He was doing no more than to confirm, in front of witnesses, what had already been decided -- but it was essential that my officers have no doubt as to who was boss cocky of the expedition. "Your orders, sir?" "Please pass the word for everybody, ship's officers and civilian personnel, to assemble in the wardroom for briefing. I shall just be repeating what I have told you all time and time again during the voyage -- but this is a world on which you can't be too careful. This is a planet on which anything might happen, and probably will." I reached for the microphone and gave the necessary orders. The wardroom was crowded with everybody packed into it, but there was seating for everybody. Grimes, nonetheless, remained standing. He said quietly, "Of all of us here, only Commander Mayhew, Mrs. Mayhew, Commander Verrill and myself have set foot on Kinsolving before..." Commander Verrill? I wondered, then realised that he meant Sonya. "As we have told you," he went on, "this is a dangerous world, a very dangerous world. You have heard the story of what happened to the Neo-Calvanist expedition when an attempt was made to invoke the Jehovah of the Old Testament. I was among those present at the time, as was Mrs. Mayhew, and the crater where the spaceport used to be bears witness to the destruction of their ship. Piety. You have heard what happened when our own expedition, a little later, tried to repeat that foolhardy experiment. That time there was only one victim -- me. And then there was the landing made by the Federation Survey Service's ship, Star Pioneer, aboard which Commander Verrill and myself were passengers. That time the pair of us got into trouble..." "Of course," Sonya said sweetly, "I wasn't worrying myself sick about you the other times..." "Mphm. Anyhow, this a smaller expedition, than the previous ones and I therefore insist that when excursions are made from the ship there is to be no splitting up; nobody is to go wandering off by himself on some wild goose -- or wild ghost -- chase. Personal transceivers will be carried at all times. Ship's personnel, acting as escorts to the scientists, will be armed. Captain Rule and all of his officers hold commissions in the Sirian Sector Naval Reserve and are trained in the use of weaponry..." Ha! I thought. Ha bloody ha! I remembered, all too well, our practice session at the Navy's small arms range shortly before our lift off from Dogtown. "Miss," the exasperated Petty Officer Instructor had said at last to Betty Boops, "if you really want to hurt anybody with that pistol creep up close and hit him over the head with it..." And most of the rest of us including myself, weren't much better. Only Sara, the Purser, made a fair showing. "Compared to the rest of you," the P.O. had said, "she's Annie Oakley." He went on, turning to Betty, "And you, Miss, are Calamity Jane." Sara had been quite pleased... Grimes continued, "You civilian ladies and gentlemen are not to set foot off the ship without your... watchdogs. Is that understood, Dr. Thome?" "Understood, Commodore," replied the scientist laconically. "Good. I don't know about the rest of you, but my belly is firmly convinced that my throat's been cut. I propose that we all enjoy breakfast before getting the show on the road." There were, as a matter of fact, two shows to be gotten on the road. One was the small party leaving the ship on foot to poke around the stadium and its environs, the other one flew to the city in the pinnace that we had on loan from the Rim Worlds Navy and that we carried in lieu of one of our own boats, which had been left in Port Forlorn. Like any ship's boat it was not only a spaceship in miniature but could be used as an atmosphere flier. Unlike a merchant-ship's boat, it was armed, mounting a heavy machine gun, a small laser cannon and a rocket projector. Grimes and Sonya were in the boat party, as were Ken Mayhew, Dr. Thome, Rose, his wispy wife, Sara Taine and myself. Sara was pleased at having real guns to play with -- somehow she had appointed herself Gunnery Officer of the pinnace -- and was hoping that she would have a chance to use them. I was hoping that she wouldn't. We boarded the boat in its bay. The commodore took the controls, the rest of us disposed ourselves around the small cabin. The inertial drive unit grumbled into life and we lifted from the chocks and then, with the application of full lateral thrust, shot out through the open port into the bright sunlight. Grimes took us round the ship in an ascending spiral. Bindle, who was minding the shop, waved to us from the control room. We were close enough to see his envious expression. Grimes levelled out, headed for the city. It was not easy to see from this relatively low altitude; when we had been looking down on it the street plan had been obvious enough, but from a height of a mere one hundred metres it looked only like an unusually lumpy piece of jungle in the distance. Oh, there were a few ruined towers, prominent enough, but they were so overgrown that they could have been no more than freak geological formations. I tried to enjoy the flight. I should have enjoyed it; the bright sunlight was streaming through the ports, the scenery over which we were skimming was unspoiled, I had enjoyed a good breakfast and my after-breakfast cigar was drawing well. And yet... For no reason at all -- apart from a quite illogical feeling of unease -- I kept looking aft. I noticed that the others -- apart from Grimes -- did so too. (But Grimes had his rear view screen above the console.) A fragment of half remembered verse kept chasing itself though my mind. How did it go? Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread. And having cast a glance behind Durst no more turn his head. Because he knows a fearsome fiend Doth close behind him tread... Something like that, anyhow. And, in any case, there wasn't any fearsome fiend in our wake. I hoped. Grimes tapped out his pipe and refilled and relit it for about the fifth time. Sara Taine checked, yet again, the pinnace's fire control panel. (But could you shoot at ghosts? I wondered. Had anybody had the forethought to substitute silver bullets for the normal machine gun ammo?) Dr. Thorne cleared his throat and, speaking loudly to be heard over the irritable snarl of the inertial drive, asked Mayhew, "Do you feel anything, Ken?" "I suspect," replied the telepath, speaking slowly and carefully, "that something out there doesn't like us..." "A normal state of affairs on this world," grumbled Grimes. "Are there likely to be any manifestations, Commodore?" said Thome. "Anything, no matter how unlikely, is likely here," was the reply. Cheerful shower of bastards! I thought. Rose Thorne -- people do tend to be given unfortunate names, although the lady's parents couldn't have been expected to know that she'd marry whom she did -- had opened the case that she had carried aboard with her and was tinkering with fragile looking instruments. She was finding out, I supposed, if there were any variations in temperature, gravitational or magnetic fields or whatever. Presumably she discovered no anomalies. In any case, she said nothing. And Ken Mayhew had a very faraway look on his face, was staring into nothingness, a nothingness in which... something stirred. That was the impression I got. Cold shivers were chasing themselves up and down my spine. "Cheer up, George," Sonya admonished me. "The first time here is the worst." "Not for me it wasn't," grunted the commodore. "Although every time was bad." "My first time was bad," stated Sonya. We were over the outskirts of the city now, following a broad street through the cracked surface of which trees and bushes had thrust. On either side of us were the buildings, creeper-covered houses with empty windows peering like dead eyes through the tangled greenery. I found myself thinking of ancient graveyards -- cemetaries in which the victims of massacre had been buried and commemorated, and then, after many years, forgotten. Something, disturbed by our noisy flight, scuttled below and ahead of us, finally diving into a doorway. "Hold your fire, Sara," said Sonya sharply. "It's only a hen." "Nothing wrong with roast chicken," I said. "The fowl in the tissue culture vats has long since lost whatever flavour it had..." "There wouldn't have been much left for roasting if I'd let fly with the MG," Sara told me. It was a feeble enough joke, but we all laughed nervously. We came to a sort of square or plaza. There was a group of statuary -- once a fountain? -- in the middle of it, but so overgrown that it was impossible to see if the figures had been men or monsters. They looked like monsters now. Around the plaza were ruined towers, their outlines blurred by what looked like -- was, in fact -- Terran ivy. Those colonists had brought a fair selection of Earth flora and Fauna with them, some of which had survived and flourished. Grimes set the pinnace down carefully, very carefully, selecting an area that did not have any sturdy bushes and saplings thrusting up through the paving. We landed with hardly a jar. Reluctantly, it seemed, he turned off the drive. We could hear ourselves think again. This was not the relief that it should have been. The silence, after the arhythmic snarl and thump of the motor, seemed about to be broken by... something. By what? "Well," said the commodore unnecessarily, "we're here." "You know the city," said Thorne. "Wasn't there -- isn't there -- some sort of temple..." "I don't want to go there again," said Sonya determinedly. Grimes shrugged. "It's as good a place to start our... investigations as any. After all, we are here to investigate..." he remarked. He turned to Mayhew. "You're the psionicist, Ken. What do you think?" The telepath seemed to jerk out of some private dream, and not a pleasant one. "The temple..." he murmured vaguely. "Yes... I remember. You told me about it..." "Where is this temple?" asked Thorne. "We shall have to walk," Grimes told him. "It's not on the plaza. It's in a little alley... I'm not sure that I'll be able to find it again..." "I can lead you there," said Mayhew. "You wouldl" muttered Sonya. So the telepath was picking something up, I thought. He would home on it, as a navigator homes on a radio beacon. I was beginning to feel as the commodore's wife was obviously feeling about it. Deciding to throw in my two bits' worth I asked, "Shall we leave somebody to guard the pinnace?" Sara scowled at me. She was the obvious choice. She would be no more keen on going outside than any of us, but she most certainly did not want to be left alone. "It will not be necessary, George," said Grimes. "We will, of course, notify the ship of our intentions. And Ken will maintain his telepathic hook-up with Clarisse. And, before leaving, each of us will leave his hand impression so that the outer airlock door can be locked after us..." This we did. The door would now open if any of us placed either hand -- or only fingertips -- on the plate set in the hull beside the entrance. One by one we jumped down to the mossy paving stones. There was an unpleasant dankness in the air in spite of the sunlight, a penetrating chill. Yet, according to the thermometer that Mrs. Thorne produced from her capacious shoulder bag, it was mild enough, a fraction over twenty six degrees, too warm for the heavy, long-sleeved shirts, long trousers and stout boots that we were wearing. Mayhew took the lead, with Grimes, projectile pistol in hand, walking beside him. Sonya and I, immediately behind, followed his example, although she favoured a laser hand gun. The Thornes followed us. Sara, carrying a submachine gun, brought up the rear. The telepath led us over the broken pavement, deviating from his course as required to avoid clumps of bushes and the occasional tree, but heading all the time to where a wide street opened off the plaza. It looked more like some fantastically fertile canyon than a manmade thoroughfare. The leaves of the omnipresent ivy glistened in the sunlight, glossy greens and a particularly poisonous looking yellow. There were other creepers too, native perhaps, or importations from other worlds than Earth, but they were fighting a losing battle against the hardy, destructive vine. We walked slowly and cautiously into the wide street. It must have been an imposing avenue before the abandonment of the city, before burgeoning weeds blurred its perspective and obscured the clean lines of the buildings on either side of it. I tried to visualise it as it had been in its heyday -- and succeeded all too well. Everything... flickered, flickered then shone with an unnatural clarity. I cried out in alarm as I stared at the onrushing stream of traffic into which we were so carelessly walking. A gaudy chrome and scarlet ground car was almost upon on us, the fat woman driving it making no move either to swerve or to brake her vehicle. I grabbed Sonya's arm to drag her to one side, to safety. She cried out -- and her sharp voice shattered the spell. Again there was the brief flickering and when normal vision returned I could see that nothing was moving in the street save ourselves. There was no traffic, no homicidal ground car. But there was a low mound ahead of us looking like a crouching, green furred beast. Freakishly, the lenses of its headlights had not been grown over and were regarding us like a pair of baleful eyes. And had I seen the ghost of the machine, I wondered, or of its driver? Sonya was rubbing her arm and glaring at me. The others had stopped and were staring at me curiously"Did you see something, George?" asked Thome. I said slowly, "I saw this street as it must once have been, at its busiest. We were right in the middle of the traffic, about to be run down." I pointed at the derelict, almost unrecognisable car. "We were almost run down by... that. Or its ghost." "The ghost of a machine?" demanded Thome incredulously. His wife, looking at an instrument she had taken from her bag, said, "The graph shows a sudden dip in temperature..." "But a machine ?" repeated the scientist. "Why not?" countered Grimes. "Life force rubs off human beings on to the machinery with which they're in the most intimate contact. Ships, especially... And a car is, in some ways, almost a miniature ship..." He turned to Mayhew. "Ken?" The telepath replied, in a distant voice, "I... I feel... resentment... In its dim, mechanical way that thing loved its mistress. It was abandoned, left here to rot..." "Did you see anything?" persisted Thorne. "I saw the same as George did," admitted Mayhew. "But I knew it wasn't... real." We resumed our trudge along the overgrown street. Everybody, I noticed with a certain wry satisfaction, gave the abandoned car a wide berth. We walked on, and on, trying to ignore the brambly growths that clutched at our trouser legs as though with malign intent. "Here," announced Mayhew. We could just make out the entrance to a side alley, completely blocked with a tall, bamboo-like growth with tangled strands of ivy the upright stems. "Shall P" asked Sonya. "Yes," said Grimes, after a second's thought. While Sara watched enviously the commodore's wife used her laser pistol like a machete, slashing with the almost invisible beam. There were crackling flames and billows of dense white smoke. Coughing and spluttering, with eyes watering, we backed away. I couldn't help thinking that a fire extinguisher would have been more useful than most of the other equipment we had brought along. But only the bamboo burned; the surrounding ivy was too green to catch fire once the laser was no longer in use. At last the smoke cleared to a barely tolerable level and We were able to make our way forward. The embers were hot underfoot, nonetheless, but our boots were stout and the fabric of our trousers fireproof. We found the church. It was only a small building, standing apart from its taller neighbours. It was a featureless cube. Well, almost a cube. I got the impression that the angles were subtly, very subtly, wrong. Unlike the buildings to either side of it it was not overgrown. Its dull grey walls seemed to be of some synthetic stone. The plain rectangular door was also grey, possibly of uncorroded metal. There were no windows. Over the entrance, in black Grimes stared at the squat, ugly building. I could see from his face that he was far from happy. He muttered, "This is where we came in." "This," Sonya corrected him, "is where we nearly went out..." They had told me the story during the outward passage. I knew how they had investigated this odd temple, and found themselves thrown into an alternate existence, another plane of being on which their lives had taken altogether different courses. It had not been a dream, they insisted. They had actually lived those lives. "Something..." Mayhew was muttering. "Something... But what? But what?' ' "And what was the principle that they... er... worshipped?" asked Thorne, matter-of-factly. "The Uncertainty Principle..." said Grimes, but dubiously. "You know, the funny part is that in none of tie records of the abandoned colony is there any mention of this temple, or of the religion with which it was associated." "The worshippers must have... left," Sonya said, "before the other colonists were evacuated." "But where did they go?" asked Thome. "Or when," said Mayhew. 'To when, I mean." Grimes filled and lit his pipe, then almost immediately knocked it out again, put it back in his pocket. He pushed the door. I was expecting it to resist his applied pressure but it opened easily, far too easily. He led the way inside the temple. The others followed. I was last, as I waited until I had raised Bindle on my personal transceiver to tell him where we were and what we doing. He -- always the humorist -- said, "Drop something in the plate for me. Captain!" I was expecting darkness in the huge, windowless room, but there was light -- of a sort. The grey, subtly shifting twilight was worse than blackness would have been. It accentuated the... the wrongness of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. I was reminded of that eery sensation one feels in the interstellar drive room of a ship when the Mannschenn Drive is running, the dim perception of planes at right angles to all the planes of the normal Space-Time continuum. Faintly self-luminous, not quite in the middle of that uncannily lopsided hall, was what had to be the altar, a. sort of ominous coffin shape. But as I stared at it its planes and angles shifted. It was, I decided, more of a cube. Or more than a cube... A tesseract? Rose Thorne was pulling instruments out of her capacious bag. She set one of them up on spidery, telescopic legs. She peered at the dial on top of it. "Fluctuations," she murmured, "slight, but definite..." She said in a louder voice, "There's something odd about the gravitational field of this place..." "Gravity waves?" asked her husband. She laughed briefly. "Ripples rather than waves. Undetectable by any normal gravitometer. " Thome turned to Grimes. "Did you notice any phenomena like this when you were here before, John?" "We didn't have any instruments with us," the commodore told him shortly. "And what do you feel Ken?" the scientist asked Mayhew. But the telepath did not reply. Looking at him, the way that he was standing there, his gaze somehow turned inward, I was reminded of the uneasy sensation you get when a dog sees something -- or seems to see something -- that is invisible to you. "Old..." he whispered. "Old... From the time before this, and from the time before that, and the time before and the time before... The planet alive, alive and aware, a sentient world... Surviving every death and rebirth of the universe... Surviving beyond the continuum..." It didn't make sense, I thought. It didn't make sense. Or did it? His lips moved again, but his voice was barely audible. "Communion... Yes. Communion..." He took a step, and then another, and another, like a sleepwalker. He paced slowly and deliberately up to -- into -- the dimly glowing tesseract. He seemed to flicker. The outline of his body wavered, wavered and faded. Then, quite suddenly, he was gone. The metallic click as Sara cocked her sub-machine gun was startlingly loud. I still don't know what she thought that she was going to shoot at. I did know that in this situation all our weapons were utterly useless. "We have to get Clarisse here," said Grimes at last. "She's the only one of us who'll be able to do anything." He added, in a whisper, "If anything can be done, that is..." Wh had to go outside the temple before we could use our personal transceivers. Clarisse was already calling; she knew, of course. She was already in Basset's second boat, which was being piloted by young Taylor. Grimes told him to try to land in the street just by the mouth of the alley. There were more obstructions there than where we had set down, in the square, but speed was the prime consideration. I walked, accompanied by Sara, to the proposed landing site, my transceiver set for continuous beacontransmission so that Taylor could home on it. We heard the boat -- the inertial drive is not famous for quiet running -- before we saw it. Taylor came in low over the rooftops, wasting no time. He slammed the lifecraft down to the road surface, crushing a couple of welldeveloped bushes and knocking a stout sapling sideways. I shuddered. I didn't like to see ship's equipment -- especially my ship's equipment -- handled that way. The door midway along the torpedo-shaped hull snapped open. Clarisse jumped out. She brushed past us, unspeaking, ran into the alley, clouds of fine ash exploding about her ankles. Sara and I followed her. Clarisse hesitated briefly at the temple doorway, exchanging a few words with Grimes and Sonya, then hurried inside. When the rest of us joined her we found her standing by the altar, motionless, her face set and expressionless. In the dim Ight she looked like a priestess of some ancient religion. Then she spoke, but not to any of us. "Ken," she whispered, obviously vocalising her thoughts. "Ken..." She smiled suddenly. She was getting through. "Yes... Here I ain..." "Where is he?" demanded Grimes urgently. She ignored the question. Suddenly, walking as Mayhew had walked, she stepped into that luminous shape, that distorted geometrical, multi-dimensional diagram. We saw the outline of her body through her clothing, her shadowy bone structure through her trahslucent flesh, and... Nothing. Thome broke the stunned silence. "Did you observe the meter while all this was happening?" he asked his wife. You cold blooded bastard! I thought angrily, then realised that the scientists' instruments might provide some clue as to what had happened. "No," she admitted, then stooped over the gravitometer, pressed a button. "But here's the print-out." We could all see the graph as she showed it to him. There were the slight, very slight irregularities that she had referred to as gravitational ripples. And there were two sharp and very definite dips. The first one must have registered when Mayhew disappeared, the second when Clarisse vanished. So It, whatever It was, played around with gravity. A sentient planet, I reflected, ought to be able to do just that... "Rose," said Grimes, "watch your gravitometer, will you?" She shot him a puzzled look, but obeyed. The commodore brought something small out of his pocket. It was, I saw, a box of matches. He tossed it towards the tesseract. Nobody was surprised when it, too, vanished. "The field intensified," reported the woman. "Briefly, slightly, but very definitely." "So..." murmured Grimes. "So what?" He turned to face us all. "We must get Ken and Clarisse out. But how?" Nobody answered him. Having waited in vain for a reply he continued. "Twice, while on this blasted planet, I've been shunted... elsewhere. Each time I got back. I still don't know how. But if I could, they can." He gestured towards the altar. "That thing's a gateway. A gateway to where -- or when ?" He addressed me directly. "You've an engineroom gantry aboard your ship, George. And in the engineers' workshop." "Yes," I told him. "I'd like them here. Mphm. But there'll be only a few metres of wire on your gantry winches. We could want more, much more..." I remembered, then, something which had been a source of puzzlement to me for a long time. "In the storeroom," I told him, "are two funny little hand winches, with reels of very fine wire. There's a lot of wire. Nobody knows what those winches are for. But... "But they might come in handy now," said Grimes, suddenly and inexplicably cheerful. "I think I know what those winches are -- although what they're doing aboard a merchant spaceship is a mystery. In the Survey Service, of course, we had things like them, for oceanographical work... "Your're losing me, sir," I said. "I could be wrong, of course," he went on, "but I've a hunch that these will be just the things we need. I'd like one of them out here at once. The other one, I think, could be modified slightly. Your engineers can study the simple workings of it, and then fit it with a motor from your gantry..." I suppose that he knew what he was talking about. Nobody else did. We went outside the temple to use our transceivers to get in touch with Bindle, back aboard the ship. Grimes put him in the picture and then gave him detailed instructions. As. well as the first of the odd little hand winches and the cutting tools he wanted a sound-powered telephone, with as much wire as could be found. Then the commodore and myself went to the mouth of the alley to await the return of Taylor with the first installment of equipment. The boat came in at last and we boarded it at once and were promptly carried to the flat roof of the building. Under my watchful eye the Third Officer made a very cautious landing -- but that rooftop, by the feel of it, could have supported the enormous weight of an Alpha Class liner. We unloaded the tools and the reel of wire, then Taylor lifted off and returned to the ship. Grimes looked at the wire reel and laughed. He said, "And you really don't know what this is, George?' ' "No," I told him. "Was your ship ever on Atlantia?' ' "A few times, I think, but never when I was in her." "And one of those times -- probably the last time -- she overcarried cargo," went on Grimes. "And the good, Dog Star Line Mate buried those left-over bones in the back garden, thinking that they might come in handy for something, some time. This is a sounding machine, such as the Atlanteans use in their big schooners, and such as we, in the Survey Service, use for charting the seas of a newly discovered world. But our machines have motors." "I thought that all sounding was done electronically," I said. "Most of it is," the commodore told me, "but an echometer can't bring up a sample of the bottom... Yes, this is a sounding machine. Armstrong Patent." "Is that the make of it?" Grimes laughed again, obviously amused by my ignorance. I rather resented this. It was all very well for him; he was one of the experts, if not the expert, on Terran maritime history. And not only did he hold a Master Mariner's Certificate in addition to his qualifications as a Master Astronaut -- he had actually sailed in command of a surface vessel on that watery world Aquarius. "Armstrong Patent," he said, "is the nickname given by seamen to any piece of machinery powered by human muscle. And they're a weird mob, the Atlanteans, as you may know. They have a horror of automation even in its simples forms. They pride themselves on having put the clock back to the good old days of wooden ships and iron men. But they do import some manufactured goods -- such as this." He looked at the dial set horizontally on top of the winch. "And there's two hundred fathoms of piano wire here. That's about three hundred and sixty five metres." He pulled a cylinder of heavy metal from its clip on the winch frame. "And here's the sinker. About ten kilograms of lead, by the feel of it." "Oh, I see," I admitted. (Well, I did, after a fashion.) "Mphm." Grimes was studying the legs on which the machine stood, the feet of which were designed so that they could be bolted to a deck. "Mphm... He straightened up, then walked to the edge of the flat roof. I followed him. There was no parapet. I stayed well back; I don't suffer from acrophobia -- I'd hardly be a spaceman if I did -- but I always like to have something to hold on to. And it looked a long way down. The temple hadn't looked all that high from the ground, but in its vicinity perspective seemed to be following a new set of rules. Grimes was shouting down to his wife after a futile attempt to use his personal transceiver. Apparently the inhibitory field was as effective on the roof as inside the building. "Sonya, we want some timber. Yes, timber! Two good, strong logs, straight, each at least two metres long and fifteen centimetres thick... Yes, use your laser to cut them!" When she had gone, accompanied by the others, he determined the centre of the flat roof by pacing out the diagonals. Where these intersected he put down his precious pipe as a marker. I brought him the laser cutter -- one with a self contained power pack. He held it like the oversized pistol that it resembled, directing the thin pencil of incandescence almost directly downward. At first it seemed the surface of the roof was going to be impossible to cut; the beam flattened weirdly at the point of impact, spreading to a tiny puddle of intense light, dazzlingly bright even though it was in the full rays of the sun. And then, quite suddenly, without any pyrotechnics, without so much as a wisp of smoke, there was penetration. After that it was easy. Grimes described a circle of about one metre diameter but left a thirty degree arc uncut. He switched off and put down the cutter, then retrieved his pipe. When it was safely back in his pocket he extended a cautious fingertip to the cut in the roof. He looked puzzled. "Cold, stone cold," he whispered. "It shouldn't be. But it saves time." I fetched the pinch bar and we got one end of it under the partially excised circle, then levered upwards. It came fairly easily, and did not spring back when the pressure was released. I took a firm hold on the smooth edge and held it while Grimes completed the cut. When the disc was free it was amazingly light, even though it was all of four centimeters thick. I put it to one side and we looked down. The altar -- I may as well go on calling it that, although I was sure by now that it had no religious significance -- was almost directly below us. Its alien geometry glimmered wanly. I'd been expecting, somehow, to find myself looking down into a hole, a very deep hole, but such was not the case. It was just as we had seen it from ground level, a distorted construct of slowly shifting planes of dim radiance. But we knew that if we fell into it we should keep on going. Somebody was calling. It was Sonya, back from her wood-cutting expedition. We went to the edge of the roof. She and Sara were carrying one suitable looking log between them, the Thornes another. She shouted, "How do we get these up to you?" Grimes did something to the winch handles of the sounding machine so that the wire ran off easily. He pulled as much as he needed off the reel, lowered the end of it over the edge of the roof to the ground. Sonya threw it around the first of the logs in a simple yet secure hitch. We pulled it up. It wasn't all that heavy, but the thin wire bit painfully into the palms of our hands. TTien we brought up the second one. We used the laser cutter to trim the logs to square section, adjusting the beam setting carefully before starting work. We didnT want to cut the roof from under our feet. Then we arranged the two baulks of timber so that they bridged the circular hole. We lifted the sounding machine and set so that it rested securely on the rough platform. Grimes shackled the heavy sinker to the end of the wire, left it dangling. "Mphm..." he grunted dubiously. He had found, clipped inside the frame of the winch, a small L shaped rod of metal on a wooden handle. He asked, "Do you know how this works?" I didn't. I'm a spaceman, not a seaman. "This," he told me, "is the feeler. Normally there's a good lead from the sounding machine so that the wire runs horizontally from the reel to a block on the taffrail or on the end of the sounding boom. Whoever's working it holds the feeler in one hand, pressing down on the wire -- and he knows when the sinker has hit bottom by the sudden slackening of tension. Then he brakes. Obviously we can't do that here. So you, George, will have to exercise a lateral pull with the feeler. Yell out as soon as you feel the wire go slack." We took our positions, myself crouching and holding the feeler ready, he grasping both winch handles. He gave them a sharp half turn forward and the sinker dropped, and the wire sang off the drum. It was plain that we hadn't found bottom on the floor of the temple. Out ran the gleaming wire, out, out... I heard Grimes mutter, "Fifty... One hundred... One fifty..." And what would happen when we came to the end of the wire? It went slack suddenly. "Now!" I shouted as I went over backwards. Somehow I was still watching Grimes and saw him sharply turn the handles in reverse, braking the winch. When I scrambled to my feet he was looking at the dial. "One hundred and seventy three fathoms," he said slowly. "One hundred and seventy three fathoms, straight down... He grinned ruefully. "That was the easy part. Gravity was doing all the work. The hard part comes now!" I didn't know what he meant until we had to wind up all that length of wire by hand. We waited a little while, hoping that Mayhew and Clarisse would be able to attach a message of some kind to the sinker, and then we took a handle each and turned and turned and turned. The pointer moved anti-clockwise on the dial with agonizing slowness. We had both of us worked up a fine sweat and acquired blisters on the palms of our hands when, at long last, the plummet lifted slowly through the hole in the roof. There was more than just the sinker attached to the wire. There was a square of scarlet synthesilk that, I remembered, Clarisse had worn as a neckerchief at the throat of her khaki shirt. And knotted into it was the box of matches that Grimes had dropped into the altar. There was something wrong with it. It took me a little time to realise what it was -- and then I saw that in order to read the brand name quire a mirror. The thornes had a pad and a stylus among their equipment. We used the sounding machine wire to bring these up to the roof, then attached them to the sinker and sent them down to wherever Mayhew and Clarisse were trapped. This time Grimes applied the brake when he had one hundred and sixty fathoms of wire down and walked out the rest by hand. Then we waited, Grimes smoking a pipe -- his matches still worked in spite of the odd reversal -- and myself a cigar. This would give the psionicists time to write their message and, in any case, we felt that we had earned a smoko. We thought of asking Sonya to use the boat that we had left in the plaza to bring others of the party up to the roof to lend us a hand, then decided that, for the time being, it was better to have them standing by on the ground. To begin with, there was the problem of radio communication with the ship to be considered. Our rest period over, we sweated again on what the commodore had so aptly called the Armstrong Patent machine. At last the sinker rose into view. Attached to it was a sheet torn from the pad. Grimes detached it carefully but eagerly, then grunted. Mayhew's handwriting, at the best of times, was barely legible, and a mirror image of his vile caligraphy was impossible. And nobody had a mirror. I suggested that Grimes hold the sheet of plastic up against the sunlight. He did so, then muttered irritably, "Damn the man! If he can't write, he should print!" Squinting against the glare I looked over Grimes' shoulder. At least, I thought, we should be thankful for small mercies; Mayhew had written on only one side of the sheet. I could just make out: Safe, sofar, but no communication. Itthe "it" was heavily underlined -- will receive but not transmit. I can't get inside its mind. It wants to know about us but does not want us to know about it. It's draining us. Can you get us out? (It took us far longer to read the message than it has taken you.) "This piano-wire is strong," Grimes told me. "The weight of a human being is well below its safe working load, let alone its breaking strain. But I don't fancy winching Ken or Clarisse -- Clarisse especially -- up by hand." I was inclined to agree. Grimes wrote a short note to May hew, using the reverse side of the sheet on which the telepath's message had been penned. He printed in large block capitals, to the sinker. And then Taylor appeared with additional equipment, bringing the boat down to a landing almost at the edge of the roof. Also with him were Thorne's assistants -- Trentham, Smith, Susan Howard and Mary Lestrange. The mousey quartet showed signs of pleasurable excitement. A few turns on the hand winch, I thought sourly, would wipe the silly grins off their faces. Betty was with them. She had brought a sound-powered telephone set, a large reel of light cable and a tape recorder. And there was the second sounding machine, to which a motor from the engineroom gantry had been attached. Porky Terrigal, the Reaction Drive Engineer, had come along with it to make sure that nobody mis-used his precious machinery. There were also thermo-containers of hot and cold drinks and boxes of sandwiches, a couple of coils of strong plastic line that Bindle had sent along thinking that they might come in useful (they did) and a spidery looking folding ladder that would give us access from the roof to the ground, and vice versa. The boat had to stay in position, as the power to the sounding machine winch would be fed from its fusion unit. Luckily the rooftop was wide enough to accommodate all the extra people and gear without crowding. Sonya and Sara came up to join the party, leaving the Thornes standing watch below. Grimes turned the four young scientists to on the hand winch. By the time they got the sinker up to roof level they had lost their initial enthusiasm. The message was easier to read this time. To begin with, Mayhew had taken the hint and printed the words and, secondly, Susan Lestrange produced a small mirror from her shoulder bag. It We sent the telephone, and with it some food and drink. Betty hooked an amplifier up to the instrument at our end of the line. We waited anxiously, far from sure that things would work. What if what had been happening to the written word also happened to the spoken word? Then, after what seemed an eternity of delay, we heard Mayhew's voice. "Thanks for the tucker, John! It's very welcome. All the others seem to have died of thirst and starvation..." "What others?" asked Grimes. "Clarisse here," came the reply. "Ken can't talk with his mouth full. We're safe, so far. But I'll try to put you in the picture. It feels like a huge control room, like a ship's, but much, much bigger. Only there are no controls as we know them, no banks of familiar instruments... This is a great, cavernous space with lights shifting and pulsing... We know that it all means something, that it isn't mere, random activity, but what? But whatl Maintaining stasis over uncountable millenia... Staying put in Time and Space while the Universe around it dies and is reborn..." A note of hysteria crept into her voice, "r... It has sucked us dry, of all we know, even of knowledge that we did not dream that we owned. And now It isn't interested in us any more. We can take our places with the... others..." "What others?" demanded Grimes. May hew came back on the line. "There are bodies here. Not decayed but... dessicated. Sort of mummified. Some human. Some... not. There's... something not far from us with an exo-skeleton. Something not from this Universe. And there are two things like centaurs... The arthropod thing is holding a machine of some kind... It could be a complicated weapon... And there's all the time the slow, regular pulse of the coloured lights washing over everything, and there's something that's like a gigantic pendulum, but not of metal, but of radiance... I can feel it rather than see it..."He paused. "It's like being a tiny insect in the works of some vast clock, only the wheels and the gears and the pendulum aren't material..." Clarissed cried, interrupting, "But can you imagine a clock ticking backwards?" Thome had climbed up the 'rooftop. He said, "I heard all that. We must try to bring up some... specimens." "All that I'm concerned with," Grimes told him, "is bringing our friends up." "It would be criminal," said the scientist, "to miss this opportunity" "It will be criminal," said Grimes, "to risk two lives any further. How do we know that the... gateway will stay open? No; we get Clarisse and Ken out of there now." The wire of the hand-powered sounding machine had been reeled in by this time and, under Grimes' supervision, the one with the electric motor was set up in its place. To the sinker the commodore attached one of the coils of light plastic rope. He said into the telephone, "You remember that book of mine you borrowed on bends and hitches and knots and splices, Ken? You should be able to throw a secure bowline on the bight with the line I'm sending down to you... Yes, you sit in it..." "But can't he send up something, anything, first?" pleaded Thome. "No, Doctor." Grimes was adamant. "I overheard some of that," came Mayhew's voice. " think we should. That lobster thing, and the contraption it's holding in its claws... I could carry it up with me..." "Mayhew is speaking sense," commented the scientist. There was a long wait. Then, "It's heavy," came the voice from the speaker. "Damned heavy. We can't shift it..." "Then leave it," Grimes ordered. "The sinker and the plastic line are on their way down to you now. I'm using the electrically powered machine, so I'll have you and Clarisse up in no time." "You have two machines?" asked Mayhew. "Yes. Why?" "I'll send Clarisse up first. Send the wire down again, and I'll have made a sling with what's left of the line and put it round the... thing. Then you bring me up with the hand-powered winch, and you can use the stronger one to lift the specimen..." "Well?" demanded Thome. "All right," Grimes agreed reluctantly. 'It took no time at all to extricate Clarisse. Grimes had sent Taylor down to the temple, accompanied by the two girl scientists, to pull her clear of the altar and then down to the floor as soon as she emerged. She joined us on the roof. I looked at her and tried to remember on which of her cheekbones that beauty spot had been... We sent the wire down again. Mayhew telephoned that he had the end of it, was making it fast to the sling that he had managed to get around the body of the weird alien. We then shifted the electric wjnch to one side, replacing it with the hand-powered one. Grimes was worried that the two sounding wires might become entangled, but the sinker dropped with the same speed that it had done on the prior occasions. Mayhew said that he was seated in the bowline and ready to come up. Trentham and Smith manned the winch handles. It was brutally hard work; the winch was not geared. After a while Grimes and I had to spell them. And then Thorne and Terrigal took a turn. Mayhew was bringing his end of the telephone up with him and was keeping us informed. "Like swimming up through a sort of grey fog..." he said. "I'm putting my hand out, but there's nothing solid... I can see the other wire... I can touch that , but it's all that I can touch... Looking up, I can see a sort of distorted square of white light... It's a long way off..." Yes, it was a long way. A long way for him, and a bloody long way for those of us who were doing all the work. I hoped that Dr. Thome was enjoying his turn at the winch; it had been his idea that a specimen be brought up. If he hadn't insisted Mayhew would have been whisked to safety with the same speed as Claiisse. We heard Taylor's shout from below at last, just as Mayhew himself reported that he was being lifted into the temple. We came back on the winch after the Third Mate had caught his swinging feet and was lowering him safely to the floor. Once he was out of his harness he came up the ladder to join us on the rooftop. Now that the operation was almost over I realized, suddenly, how time had flown. It was almost, sunset, and a chill breeze was blowing from the east. In a matter of minutes it would be dark. Kinsolving has no moon and here, on the Rim, there would be precious little starlight. Grimes said, "I think we should defer any further operations until tomorrow morning." Thome said, "But there are lights in the boat. A searchlight..." Mayhew said, "John, do we want that... thing? I've a feeling that the gateway may be closing again, at any second." "Oh, all right," said Grimes resignedly. He turned to me, "Let's get the electric winch back on to the platform." We did so. Then he told me, "It's your equipment, George, operated by your personnel. Over to you." I thought. You buck-passing old bastard! But what he had said made sense. I gestured to Terrigal at the winch controls, made the Heave Away! signal. The piano wire tightened. I looked over Terrigal's shoulder and could see the pointer on the dial begin to move. I visualised that bundle of -- something -- being dragged across the floor of the...Cavern? Control room? The winch hadn't got the weight yet. Then it took the strain and almost coincidentally the sun set. The light was almost no twilight. Somebody switched on the lights in the boat, including the searchlight, which flooded the rooftop with a harsh, white radiance. The winch groaned. Terrigal complained, "I can't be held responsible for any damage to the machinery..." "Keep her coming!" I told him. I was more concerned about the baulks of timber upon which the sounding machine was resting than with the machine itself. But engineers, in my experience, always tend to be slaves to rather than masters of their engines. There was an acrid taint in the air from overheated metal and insulation and the wire, a filament of incandescent silver in the searchlight beam, was beginning to sing. But the pointer on the dial was moving -- slowly, slowly, but moving. I asked, "Can't you go any faster?" "No, Captain. I'm on the last notch now. And I don't like it." "Better get people cleared away from here, George," Grimes told me. "If that wire parts it's going to spring back..." "And what about mel" demanded Terri gal. "If you're scared..." I began. "Yes, I am scared!" he growled. "And so would you be if you had any bloody sense. But I wouldn't trust any of you on this winch!" All right, all right -- I was scared. And it was more than a fear of a lethally lashing end of broken wire. It was that primordial dread of the unknown that has afflicted Man from his first beginnings, that afflicts, too, the lower orders of the animal kingdom. The darkness alive with shifting, whispering shadows. Most of our party, I noticed, had already taken refuge in the boat, a little cave of light and warmth that offered shelter, probably illusory, from the Ultimate Night that seemed to be closing around us. Only Grimes, Sonya, Sara and myself remained in the open -- and, of course, Terrigal at the winch controls. The winch was making an eery whining noise. The smell of hot metal and scorching insulation was much stronger. And the wire itself was keening -- and was... stretching. Surely it was stretching. Surely that shining filament was now so thin as to be almost invisible. , "Enough!" ordered Grimes. "Avast heaving!" The engineer brought the control handle round anti-clockwise, but it i had no effect. He cried, "She won't stop!" "Mr. Taylor!" shouted Grimes into the boat, "switch off the power to the winch!" "The switch is jammed!" came the reply. "She won't stop! She won't stop!" yelled Terrigal, frantically jiggling his controls. The light was dimming, sagging down the spectrum, and outlines were wavering, and frightened voices sounded as though they were coming from an echo chamber. The thin high keening of the overtaut wire was above and below and through all other noises. Sonya and Sara were wrestling with the power cable, tugging at it, worrying it like two dogs fighting over a bone, trying to drag it out of its socket in the boat's hull. It resisted all their efforts. "Let's get out of here!" snapped Grimes. "Into the boat, all of you!" Terrigal abandoned his winch, but not before aiming a vicious kick at the control box. He scurried into the little airlock. The two women followed. Grimes and I made it to the door in a dead heat; he pushed me inside then followed hard after me. As soon as we were all in, Taylor, forward at the controls, slammed the inertial drive into maximum lift, not bothering to close the airlock doors first. We started to rise, then stopped with a jerk, heeling alarmingly to port. The power cable to the winch was holding us down. But it would soon part, I thought. It must part. It was only a power cable, not a heavyduty mooring wire. It didn't part. It... stretched. It shouldn't have done, but it did. And we lifted again, slowly, with the inertial drive hammering like a mechanical riveter gone mad. I clung to the frame of the open door and looked down. I saw the sounding machine dragged up and clear from the circular hole in the roof, with the shining filament of wire still extending straight downwards. Terrifyingly the city around the temple was coming to life -- but it w asn't the city that we had explored. The human colonists had laid out their streets in a rectangular Plan; these streets were concentric circles connected by radial thoroughfares. And there were the tall, cylindrical towers, agleam with lights, each topped with a shining sphere. Unsubstantial they seemed at first, but as I watched they appeared to acquire solidity. Grimes saw it too. He shouted to Taylor, to Terrigal, to anybody who was close enough to the fusion generator to do something about it, "You have to cut the power to the winch! We're dredging up the Past -- and we shall be in it!" "Just show me how. Commodore!" cried the engineer. "Just show me how! I've done all that  can do -- short of stopping the jenny!" And if he did stop the generator we should fall like a stone. If he could stop it, that is. An aircraft came slowly into view, circling us warily. It was huge, a cylindrical hull, rounded at the ends, with vanes sticking out at all sorts of odd angles. It was like nothing that I had ever seen and possessed a nightmarishly alien quality. There were tubes protruding from turrets that could have been, that almost certainly were guns, and they were trained upon us. What if the alien commander -- I visualized him, or it, as being of the same species as the lobsterlike being whose body we had been attempting to recover -- should open fire? What would happen to us? Nothing pleasant, that was for sure. But we had weapons of our own; we could, at least, defend ourselves if attacked. Sara, I was sure, would enjoy being able to play with her toys. And Sara, I suddenly realized, was beside me in the cramped little airlock, holding her sub-machine gun. I said to her, "What use do you think that will be? What's wrong with the heavy armament?" She replied obscurely, "I can't bring it to bear." I couldn't see why she couldn't. That blasted flying battleship was staying well within the arcs-of-fire of the laser cannon and the heavy machine gun, and a guided missile would home on her no matter where she was relative to us. Sara opened fire. Bright tracer flashed out from the muzzle of the gun, but not towards the huge flying ship. It may have been the first round of the burst that hit the power cable, certainly it was one in the first half dozen. There was an arcing sputter of blue flame and the boat, released from its tether, went up like a bat out of hell. And below us the weird city out of Time flickered and vanished. sir, that the things that happen on Kinsolving's Planet shouldn't happen to a dog. And they shouldn't happen, either, to respectable employees of the Dog Star Line." He managed a grin, then went, "Arf, arf!"  Thank you Galaxy Readers! Due lo your overwhelming reaponae lo our previous ad. we are happy to announce # new prepaid ecoromy packages ol underground com I. You will receive the best art and story lolling ol today al prices you can a I lord. Careful selection ol the right packages will mean hours ol reading pleasure. We believe Ihese adult stories are wtiat you have been wailing lor. Just check the packege(s) you want and send ceah. check or M.O. and a statement ol your age (you muel be # to order these comix) (o our address, and presto? ! 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If the inheritors of the proI ever attended. It was in Seattle, fessional American Rocket Society and the group was called The (that's what I joined, and by golly Nameless Ones. (They had a nasty I'll wear my little red rocket -- the habit of electing newcomers Presidevil with the merger that wiped out another story.) For some reason a normal language of dull science, reporter showed up, and the first maybe we SF dreamers ought to at question she asked was about "flyleast think about them, ing. saucers. ' ' The Nameless rather What really got me onto the subgruffly told her we weren't inject, though, was the publisher of terested and never would be. the newspaper chain I write science The reaction was probably juscolumns for. He wanted a feature nutty people who wanted to go to with a certain degree of apprehenthe Moon, and in the #'s that was sion. claim space travel was respectable if enthusiasts were invariably wildwe were also saddled with flying eyed, generally insisted that I look saucers? at smudgy, ambiguous photos, and SF people have always tended to often revealed that the US Air Force suppress all knowledge about about Project Blue Book. They solemnly related that the US Government had constructed a secret laboratory in the Mojave, and into thinking it was an extraterrestrial space ship so that later they could embarrass him. I had been told of hundreds of excellent photographs seized by away and never to be returned despite vigorous legal efforts to recover them -- but somehow had never been given the name of the lawyer who filed the suit, the court in which it had been filed, or the judge who heard it. I also remembered a couple of worked closely when I was in the space program, and their stories about Blue Book. Blue Book was a "George" job (there's nobody to do it? Give it to George.) that one would start off conscientiously enough, but soon learn to despise as the silly and inconsistent stories poured in. However, an assignment is an assignment, and I dutifully looked up perts as I could find. The field turns out to be more interesting, and far more respectable, than I would have thought. Now that the research is done and paid for, and the subject's fresh in my mind, and Jim has just called to ask where's the July column -- why I guess I'll just have to write about Interest in and study of Un -- is no longer confined to fanatics and eccentrics, if indeed it ever was. I don't mean to imply contempt for all the early investigators, or for the amateur outfits of the data on the subject. However, professional scientists have now moved into the field. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern, and Director of the #, is a tax deductible foundation supported entirely by gifts. It does not accept members and is not tion will get you a newsletter subscription and a lot of thanks.) The consultant list for the Center includes such notables as Dr. Claude Poher, one of the Directors at least one Nobel Laureate, and any number of random Ph.D.'s in various sciences. Dr. Hynek himself looks like a very conservative astronomer, which in fact he is. He sense to be explained away. Unlike some others, notably the late Dr. Edmund Condon of Colorado U., Hynek didn't keep that view. He now hopes that some progress ing his lifetime, and views his Center as his scientific legacy. His still the best general work on the subject. One sign of the increasing Hynek's book was favorably reviewed by planetologist Bruce Murenthusiast; far from it; but he took the trouble to examine the subject before writing a review. Alas, such courtesy seems even more rare in the scientific professions than among writers.) Hynek's Center is now tied in with many law enforcement agencies and maintains a toll-free number available to police; officers sightings and get advice on disposiHynek says, that's practically "the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." spectable, if not orthodox. Now No one knows. There are plenty of speculations, but very little evidence. We'll go into some speculations in a moment, but first let's see what we're discussing. probably are not: namely, they are not misinterpretations of "usual" or "ordinary" phenomena. There are plenty of such, of course, but by definition if we can identify the Incidentally, this is the major failure of the Air Force-financed Condon Report. Condon never investigated a single case, and chose to concentrate nearly all his efforts on known mistakes and misidentifications. In fact, Condon even sought out people like die "man from Galaxy Three" who wanted # "to build runways on orders from Galaxy Control." Condon's administrator even put out a memo stating that the purpose of the study make it appear that a scientific investigation had been carried out. There was great concern that the staff would be laughed at by orthodox scientists, and great efforts were made to show that no one in the study really took it seriously. Thus the Condon study never did do what the taxpayers put up their money for, namely, investigate unidentified flying objects. It does a pretty good job of showing the kinds of mistakes that have been made, but as a scientific study it is valueless. On the other hand, it probably served its major purpose, the Weather Bureau, Air Defense Command (Army), National Academy of Sciences, anyone who'd take it, budget and all.) Yet when we've got rid of the kooks and cranks, mercenaries and swamp gas and meteorological balloons, the planet Venus, helicopters, and hoaxes, there remain cases that we cannot explain. Hundreds of them, including nearly a hundred reported by multiple witnesses of presumed honesty and integrity. Staff, Intelligence, said back in # that "credible observers are reporting incredible things." Nearly # years later that's a good summary. The observers are credible by any test. The reports defy belief. I want to emphasize something: we have convicted people of murder on far less evidence than we have for the existence of "incredible" tries to sort out fact from fancy, and to examine such intangibles as "honesty and integrity." However well it works or doesn't work, courts regularly try cases on flimsier reports, and hear witnesses far less credible than those Hynek has singled out for his studies. If you were on a jury you'd be likely to believe the people Hynek has interviewed. He excludes almost tigators" who grow wealthy from Hynek's classification scheme is ports into the following categories: Daylight Discs, Nocturnal Lights, RadarVisual, and Close Encounters of the First, Second, and Third Kinds. The first two are simple enough. They also exhibit a number of similarities: rapid to enormous velocities and accelerations, no sonic boom despite high velocity, etc. Radar-visuals are those reported by both kinds of observation on the same phenomenon, usually by highly professional personnel such traffic controllers, etc. So far so good. Were these three the whole of it, we could comfort ourselves with the thought that there's probably an explanation well within the limits of present-day science. Unfortunately they are not the whole of it. The Close Encounters are disturbing, but there's a lot of reliable evidence for them: reliable, that is, in that the observers would be believed if they told nearly any other story. Close Encounters of the First Kind involve observations at ranges of # to # feet, close enough to see details. Close Encounters of the Second Kind involve some physical effect on the observers or their surroundings: interference with auto ignition (a common report); movement of trees, as was photographed in the famous Oregon disc; or, sometimes, thermal and physiological effects. Close Encounters of the Third Kind involve living creatures generally humanoid. If we have trouble swallowing the first two encounters, this one really makes us want to gag; yet, again, the reports are about as good as those given in criminal courts, or sent out by war correspondents, or indeed, for most of us, for the existence of any other complex phenomena we haven't ourselves seen. Beyond this point Hynek and There are reports of actual comen by people who seem to be telling the truth, but first there are few such, and secondly, those making them nearly always manifest some kind of psychological aberration. We can note that the experience itself might be enough to unhinge most of us, and still confine our work to the three kinds of close encounters, the discs, the night lights, and the radar-visuals. Ok. that's the subject matter. Reports, sometimes accompanied by photographs, sometimes not. There aren't a lot of photographs, and of those not many have been or can be checked and pronounced unmistakably genuine; but there are some. (There are others which may be genuine, but can't be proved to be; it's those unmistakably genuine ones that are disturbing. Now what do we mean by genuine? Well, among other things, there must be a negative, so that photo experts can be certain this isn't either a double exposure or some kind of fakery from the printing lab; in other words that there's a real object recorded on the film. Next, they want to see other obhouses, wheat fields, etc., so that its size, can be established. This generally takes care of thrown objects and the like. The experts are even happier with a series of photographs, because they can take the sun angle off each one, and again eliminate a lot of thrown or suspended objects. I won't go into all the tests because I'm not a photo expert. But I did conduct a long interview with and I'm now convinced: there exist several photographs of genuine objects, taken at distances of some # to # feet. The objects are in flight. They tend to be circular, and of dimension about # feet diameter by # feet at the thickest point. At least one (the Oregon "saucer") created enough wind to affect large trees. I find it hard to believe that's a thrown or suspended object. Moreover, in several unrelated cases of photographed discs there were multiple observers with no obvious connections with each other and no discoverable reason for making up the story. (As is usual in most cases, the observers do not want their names in the paper, do not want to be paid for their information, and are not interested in going on lecture tours.) Ok again, some Galaxy readers have always "believed" in convinced there's something there, and rather a larger number are probably convinced that I believe there's something there. So what are they? Gee, I don't know. I used to say cause they just couldn't be intelligent critters. Why couldn't they? Because there was no place they could have come from. Earth? Not really likely. The Solar System? Unlikely a few years ago, virtually impossible now given what we've learned about the other planets. Another star system, then. Now that really raises problems. How do they get here? Faster than light travel? Science fiction aside, although the General Theory of Relativity isn't anywhere near universally accepted, the Special Theory forbids faster than light travel by material objects, and gets more and more corroboration every year. But then, so what? Do I really "believe in" the absolute limit of the speed of light? No. I accept it as a probable working hypothesis, but I firmly hope to see faster than hope to see it; but I can't tell you how it will happen, and the evidence is all against me. Still, I do thus I can't say interstellar visitors are impossible either. This is the point at which scientists get nervous. Not only Hynek, but men like Dr. Robert Wood Ph.D., Physics, Cornell) who is an engineering manager for a large aerospace firm he'd rather not have Nobel Laureate who'd rather not be named at all; all say almost exactly the same thing when you ask, They say: "You want some wild guesses? Hypotheses we'd be willing to defend at a scientific meeting? Science fiction? Where's this going to be published, anyway?" Nervous indeed. Every one of them wants it clearly understood they're talking hypotheses, theories which not only may not be true, but probably aren't true; speculations, if you will. Begin with Dr. Wood. "I'd now Continue with Dr. Hynek: "They seem to act intelligently. I wouldn't be surprised to see proof that they're observers from another stellar system. I don't say that's what they are, or that I 'believe' in little men from outer space; but I wouldn't be shocked to see it proved." Continue further with Hynek. We ask how they got here, given special relativity and all that. "People want answers, but we have none to give. Yet I suspect we may be witnessing something as far beyond us as, say, television would have been beyond Plato. After all, not too many years ago the best minds in the world couldn't explain the Northern Lights. They were there. You could observe them. But we hadn't the basic science to begin to understand them. I think that's what we've got here." In fact, it is precisely that which interests Dr. Hynek, and probably to new sciences far beyond anything we have or can now even imagine. It is this which leads Hynek to hope his scientific legacy. and their hypothetical inhabitants "Perhaps they aren't material in the way we think; that they use something like television to transport themselves. Matter transportation, whether instantaneous or at very high velocity." Robert Wood: "I haven't a clue. Yet there's been a small revival of interest in either theories lately, have you noticed? Prehaps Special Relativity doesn't hold after all. "Also, there's the possibility of gravitational interactions. Or try this: these things are generally reported accompanied by a really overwhelming magnetic field. What gauss magnetic field? Whatever it is, I'm sure there's no magic here, and it may be consistent with science we are about to discover ourselves." Hmm. These are scientists. In other words, although we inhabitants can't come from our solar system and can't get here from any other, we've "known" a few other things that turned out not to be so. It hasn't been all that long since we "knew" the Law of Conservation of Matter; that atoms couldn't be split; that the Sun couldn't possibly have been burning for longer than a few thousand, uh, hundred thousand, well, we can years; that heavier than air craft couldn't fly, certainly couldn't fly faster than the speed of sound; that nothing could get into outer space from here, well, not very far out, anyway; and so forth. Now some things we "know" turn out to be true, and maybe Special Relativity will be one of them; but maybe it won't, either. technology capable of interstellar travel. What the devil are they doing here, and why don't they contact us and get it over with? Well, of course, there are a few who say they have made contact with them, but no one wants to believe the stories. Most contact stories show the aliens displaying about the same kind of interest in us as we do in, say, Tobriand Islanders; or Samoans. Perhaps somewhere there is a Library where one can check out a text entitled Coming of Age on Terra. Discount the contact reports and it's still not a bad hypothesis. I know of little to mostly filled with graduate students doing a doctoral dissertation on pre-spaceflight cultures. That explains why they don't make unambiguous contacts. If they did, we wouldn't be a prespaceflight culture any more; at the least we'd be going balls out to develop space flight. It also explains the sightings; they don't want to be seen, but once in a while they get careless, as students do. For that matter, I can envision an extra-terrestrial persuading hiser (no sexists here; they're hermaphroditic) sponsor to let hrim make "a noncontaminating close encounter. After all, Honored Academician, the observers won't be believed ! And you've said my thesis isn't original enough, but all the routine observation stuff has been mined out..." Or what the hell, sometimes they get drunk and put on a show for the primitives, gambling that they won't be reported to their academic superiors. Pasadena knows all about that phenomenon: in the areas around Cal Tech the residents shudder as certain times of the year approach. But blast it all, Pournelle, surely you don't believe' that? No. But I wouldn't die of astonishment if it turned out to be true, either. I don't "believe in" flying saucers, in the sense that I spend much of my time acting as if Earth were being observed by interstellar graduate students in sophontology; I'm merely inclined to think it's possible, and unable to think of a good alternate theory to Yes. I know. The extra-terrestrial theory doesn't account for all the observations. On the other hand we don't have any theories that account for all the observations of Martian geography, either, but that doesn't stop me from playing with about half a dozen mutually exclusive hypotheses about Mars. I do think this. If the "unimaginative" experts of Big Science won't even discuss them, then science fiction writers' reputations as speculators are in grave danger of disrepute. Not that we need contests on how many impossible things we can believe before breakfast; but can we not at least speculate consistent with the observations? Do we, now that study of them has become respectable?  Smoke! i smell smoke! From the Dungeon...from the Archives! My God! What is Alter-Ego up to? Burning books ? P u ffP u ff'P u ff Christ, this corridor is long...Stairs...Yike, too much slope! Can't stop! thumpthud Damn! Luckily the lantern didn't break. Smoke pouring out from under "Geis? Ha! I thought a little bonfire would bring you running. Open up and see." "If you're burning anything valuable...anything good..." Damn this sticky bolt! Too many keys -- Here. There. Yes. Now the chains...Damn, that hinge is squealing again. "Oh...you're only burning fanzines. For a few minutes there..." "Just trying to get your attention. I didn't think you'd mind a few copies of Rune, Defen Droppings, Eternity Road, Knights Of The Paper Spaceship, Extrapolation, Seldon's Plan, and the fanzine title of the year, Sfinctor, providing me with a bit of warmth. It gets cold down here. The fireplace hasn't worked since you trapped Santa Claus in the chimney two years ago by closing the flue and pouring three gallons of stencil correction fluid down on him. You're really evil, Geis. To my dying day I'll remember his piteous cries as he was obliterated. And you did that just because he was bringing me a Christmas gift -- a new inflatable rubber girl." "I pride myself on my good character, Alter. I can't allow you to indulge in obscene cavortings with artifacts such as that. Not any more. "But -- " "As for Santa Claus -- who noticed he was missing? His reindeer were taken by an opportunistic dogfood manufacturer and his sleigh is now in a museum in an exhibit of unsuccessful early automobiles. The lack of wheels and an engine gave the curators pause for a few moments, but they concluded that that was why it failed." "Someday, Geis, you'll be unmasked, found out, revealed for the unfeeling cur you are. Aren't you curious as to why I lured you down here? I lured you down here because I want to review science fiction for you in this column." snort -- snicker "You, Alter? Review in Galaxy ? Why, Jim Baen would throw me out on my ass and you out on your tendrils if I let you vent your opinions of current science fiction novels. Why, already he must have smoking letters and burning phone calls from outraged writers howling over your incredible outburst in the final issue of If. You have no couth. You have no sense of proportion. You don't play the game. You don't know when to stop." "Why is that gap up there, Geis?" "That provides room for Jim to make an interjection. He likes to do that once in a while." "Oh. Well, anything to keep the editor happy. From what I've heard over the years, editors have few happy moments." "You know, Alter, this fire does make the Dungeon warm and cozy. You have my permission to throw a copy of Fantasy Crossroads on the flames. Now, get on with your ridiculous proposal." "Why is it so ridiculous? I read more science fiction than you do. I notice things. I think deep. I have keen insights. Why, just last night I was thinking a prime keen insight about the way human relationships and Characterization are creeping into science fiction from the mainstream and slowly but surely polluting the precious bodily fluids of our favorite genre." "Alter...dear old soul, dear old troglodyte from nineteen-hundredthirty-nine...we have been trying for decades to get some decent characterization into science fiction. We have been crying to the heavens for realistic human relationships in science fiction. You are trying to tell me now this is a bad thing, just when it is finally beginning to happen? You are out of your tree, your gourd has split and you are certifiable. I'll have to call the Home and -- " "Hear me, Geis. I am issuing a Dire Warning. It is true that good characterization and true-to-life people problems are improving science fiction, but -- "I knew there had to be a but." "But beware the siren call of Characterization -- note the capital C -- and people problems. What I read lately is disturbing to my Early Warning glands. I sense the camel sliding his nose into the tent. I see a trend toward too much of a good thing. I see stories appearing in which the accent, the focus, is on character development and interpersonal trauma, while the sciencefictional element is...is..." "Short-sheeted?" "Exactly! "Buildups! As a Cassandra, Alter, you are a flop. You're reaching. Why, the next thing I know you'll be telling me gold will be worth # an ounce by the time this gets published. Ho, ho. I am going back to bed." "Beware, Geis. Mark my words. Science fiction is a literature of ideas, as I read recently that Ray Bradbury once said. And science fiction is not a literature of human problems and personalities. It is a question of which is to be served -- which is to be master -- the ideas or the people." "There is no question in my mind, Alter.  am master here, and I order you to shut up...and put out that fire. It's creeping too close to my precious collection of Tim Kirk fanzine covers." "I defy thee, Geis. I will say my say. If you shut me up -- I'll find another master. Maybe Andy Porter could use a good, healthy AlterEgo. Certainly Algol could use some personality. Maybe I could tunnel my way out, and -- " "Okay, okay l I'll give you a few more minutes." "I thought you would. If you lose me, Geis, no one will read a thing you write." ' ' Get on with it!' ' "As I was saying, it's a matter, in fiction, of which fictional element is paramount, and which subservient. Lately, in science fiction, I see subtle signs that some writers are starting to use the science or sense-of-wonder element (the stuff that makes science fiction different) as decoration for their true purposes -- psyche-exploration and spiritual miasma. Also, the agonies of living with other people. This is merely transplanting the mainstream into sf, Geis. Endless examinations of navels killed "serious" mainstream writing, and now that swamp has a foot in the door of science fiction. We've got to stop it, Geis!" "Umm? How can a swamp get a foot in the door?" "You know what I mean! Let fine, realistic characterizations and relationships be used to enhance, to support, to make more real and breathtaking the sense-of-wonder elements of science fiction. The science idea, the strange view, the mind-bending concepts that are the core of science fiction must always be top dog. Because human relationships are inherently limited, and so are introspections-in-depth, and "characterizations" in depth. Let them decorate the idea." "Finished?" "No, I want to tell what I think of Bob Silverberg's latest, Born With The Dead. ' ' shudder "No more room, no more room! We approach # words now. I'm sure you couldn't review the three novellas in the book in less than # words. We'll pass this time, on that. Maybe next column you can -- cringe  -- review a book or two. ' ' "Is that a promise? It better be a promise, Geis!" "Oh...all right! I promise; if Jim will go along -- which he won't." "Oh, boy! (Slurp.)" Jim'll probably burn the column and demand I write a replacement -- without you! But I'll let you rave if he will. You'll make yourself so ludicrous and extreme that no one will ever again believe you on any subject. You'll be in disgrace. Then I'll reclaim the column and write sage, even-tempered views and reviews. God, how I rue the day I started these Dialogues with you!" "Geis, you poor fool. Go to bed. Keep on dreaming. The readers know who they want to hear from. Mel " The corridor smells awful. He's getting too insubordinate. Smartalecky. Have to put him in his place one of these days...Umm. Come to think -- he already is in his place!  Increase Your Abilities and Self Confidence! Order "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science" by L. Ron Hubbard I Read about the evolution of Diane tics, man's most advanced study of the mind. Find out how easily and effectI ively Dianetics can improve your confidence in yourself and your ability to accomplish your goals in life. DiaO Just Buy, Read and Try Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science. (Hand- # somely bound, hard cover edition -- O # pages). g The Church of Scientology of Cali foroia Dept. G-#, # West #th St. q Los Angeles, California #.  Name ,   H w Address All orders will be shipped postage free within # hours of receipt. 'A NunLIn Publication. DlantUca la (he uadi-mark uf L. Ron Hubbard In Scretlloloir ' a DUprlkaR tram Ike a base add reu mud to: The Chmrrh of Seientoloiy la. Fuhlteettonj Orniiatian Dipt Cl. # Wett Tempt  SI,, a. California # . In the end there was nothing he could give her... I was walking down the steps of the Probal Office Building when the girl intercepted me. I was in my early twenties then and had been Upside for more than two months, subjective time, sealed into a steel chamber with a couple of technicians whom I had come to dislike with an intensity I had not realized was possible before we finally managed to return. But the worst of it had been the lack of feminine companionship; this one was cute -- not beautiful, but anybody without a beard would have done right then. I slowed down and stared at her. Long, flowing hair; at least ten years older than me, to judge by the lines around eyes and mouth; an oldfashioned dress at least two sizes too small. If she was trying to draw my attention she succeeded.Not that she needed any devices; like I said, my attention was very drawable just then. "... isn't that a Probal badge?" she asked, her voice tense with a nervousness I did not notice at the time. I glanced down at my lapel with the small blue-and-green badge. Very discreet. Nobody ever notices it; nobody, except this woman who was staring at it so hungrily. "Sure,"  said. "So?" "You... work in there." She indicated the pockmarked facade. "You can call it that. Mostly I just wait for something to happen." I grinned at her, trying for a dazzling, captivating smile and failing miserably. It didn't matter; her eyes never left my badge. "Have you been...Upside?" "I'm just back down," I replied. "Half an hour ago, I was sitting in a steel box without the foggiest notion of when I'd be let out." I shivered. "Look, let's get away from here. I've been Upside for two months and I want to get as far from Probal as possible. That place gives me the jitters." I started to walk down the steps and into the plaza, as diffuse images of that plaza formed in my mind. I looked away. She fell into step with me. "Is it that bad?" she asked softly"Some of it." I looked down and noticed that she was still talking to my badge. Obviously it was not me that interested her, just the badge. I said, "Excuse me, but I have had a rotten time and I'm on my way somewhere. What is this about?" She walked beside me for several minutes without saying anything. Finally; "I'm interested." "Well, I'm not. I've had enough of that place for a long time." I was deliberately rude; I was in desperate need of a drink and female company, partially to assuage the needs of the flesh, but primarily as a means of getting away from the Probal business and the things that were trying to crawl up from my subconsciousness. This just wasn't worth it. "A personal interest," she said, looking straight ahead. That figured. I looked down at her, the nervous mouth, the darting eyes. I said, "How long have you been waiting here?" "A long time." "And it just happened to be me?" She nodded. "Most people at Probal," I said, "never leave the building. "When they have been at it long enough, they don't seem to like it outside any more. They just stay indoors like the world doesn't exist." I nodded at the dark building. "Not even a window. Hardly anyone ever leaves the place. ' ' "I know," she said. "So?" "Sometimes," she said, "Probal people take things from Upside. I'm interested in that." "Nobody takes anything from Upside," I said, momentarily taken aback. Nobody ever took anything from Upside, not because it wasn't possible -- it was -- but because everyone knew what would happen if they did. It just wasn't done. She shrugged. "How long have you been with Probal?" "Three years." "Perhaps it was before your time, then." "Never," I insisted. She switched the subject. "Where were you going?" "A drink somewhere." I shrugged. "And something else." "Let me buy you one." She smiled suddenly. "To make up for all this. We could talk about something else." We went somewhere and had a few drinks and the kind of dinner I had been dreaming of for two solid months. She was very nice, smiling at the right places, laughing at the right places. Two months' isolation had made her pretty. Three drinks later she was ravishing. I started giving her hints about my exalted position at Probal. She ate it up, just as I had expected. Which was curious, to say the very least, since nobody is interested in Probal and the work it does. Indeed, I had been perfectly indifferent myself before I got the job there. I knew it was some kind of government agency doing research in Probability Lines -- whatever they were -- and that the big, ugly building contained a large number of scientists and assorted personnel, most of them actually living there. There was nothing secret about it -- who would be interested in "Probability Lines" anyway? -- and to me it was just another ugly building until I graduated and went jobless until I had got down to "P" in the yellow pages and called them up. That was a long, long time ago. I'm not a scientist, I don't know much about the theories behind the Probability Line Search and most of what I know I don't understand. I just press my buttons and sit tight in my steel chamber while everybody's beards get longer and shaggier and the pressure builds. Most of the time it isn't too bad, of course; a quick trip Upside and then back with the computer loaded with readings. Once in a while you might draw a two month graveyard shift, but apart from that it's ok. One gets used to it with time, I suppose. Or rather, one learns to live with it. It's just that after a few years you don't want to face the outside world anymore, hence the windowless apartments in Probal Building. There are TV monitors in the steel chambers. You see things. We were sitting in a back booth at the restaurant, well away from the windows, and I said, "Look, I don't know much about it and that's the truth. Not my line of job, that's for the scientists. All I know isj we step into a steel chamber and go off along a probability line somewhere, and I don't do the settings. I just go along." "But why do you call it Upside?" she asked. I shrugged. "I don't know. That's what it's called. We go along a probability line to a version of this world that didn't happen, but could have happened if something had been different, and then we sit there and check the place." "Check what?" "Damned if I know. Humidity, traces of radioactivity, visual search..." I shivered despite the heat. "Some of the probability worlds are nasty. Others... are not so bad." "Better than here." It was a statement, not a question. "Much better, some of them." I drank, lost in thought. "What if you should go out through the door?" she said. "Locked," I said. "From the outside. Impossible." "But if you could unlock it?" "Then out I'd go." "So it is possible, then?" "Sure, it is possible, no trouble at all, if..." I checked myself. "I don't know about that. No one ever went out, so why ask?" "So you just sit there?" "Yep. Sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes for a couple of months. It all depends on conditions, I don't know why, but sometimes you can get back whenever you want, and sometimes you can't." "Sounds primitive," she said. "It is primitive. Probability lines were discovered less than ten years ago, they are still searching in the dark. Anyway, that's not my stuff. I just press buttons and watch. I rose. "Let's go somewhere." We went to another place and had another couple of drinks. By the time we finished them she was more than ravishing. I wanted her so much it hurt. Two months of frustrated youthful masculinity screamed to be let out. I was ready to go a long way to get closer. We sat in an all-night cafe and she said, "How come they have never brought anything from Upside?" I shrugged, my mind caressing her thighs. "Perhaps they did, once," she said quietly. "When the project started." "Perhaps," I said indifferently. "They know what happens if you do, so I guess..." Then I caught myself. "Look; nobody is supposed to know about that." "About what?" "Nothing." I should have walked out on her -- but I was shy and besides, I felt I had a right to her by now; for having listened to her for so long. "They did experiments when they started Probability Line Search," she said. "They did experiments. They brought things from Upside." "Sure they did -- then they realized what they were doing and dropped the whole thing. What do I know? I only work there!" I was beginning to get mad. "Isn't there anything else to talk about? I'm off duty, for God's sake!" She looked down in her glass. "I'm sorry." "Never mind." I felt ashamed. "I'm sorry I blew my top like that. But I've been cooped up in that steel chamber for two months now, looking at the same damned scene in the monitors all the time and never knowing when conditions would let us return home. Right now I just want to forget about it." She looked straight ahead, her eyes obscured by the shadows. "Imagine what it would be like if you had been thrown into that scene with no way back." She bit her lip. "I'm sorry," she said again. "Let's forget about it." I slipped an arm around her waist. She stiffened momentarily, then relaxed, and even smiled. "Let's go." "Where?" "I have a place. We can talk there." She said, "In the Probal Building?" "I'm not that far gone yet," I said. "I have a place of my own a few blocks away from Probal. Nice and quiet." She hesitated. Then, "Okay." She rose and quickly Walked out. I followed her into the night, slipped an arm around her, drew her close to me. She walked stiffly, staring straight ahead. "I don't know what you think of me," she said. "Coming on to you like this and then just talking about your job all the time. You must be tired of me by now." "Not that tired," I said. My fingers dug into her waist. Her body was warm and full of promises, swaying against me with every step. I could hardly breathe. We came to my place. A small, cramped room with a bed and not very much else, heavy curtains before the window. She took in the room with a quick glance. "It's small," she said. "I'm not here often," I said. "I don't need much." She walked up to the window. "Don't!" I said sharply. She turned. "Don't you like the view?" I sat heavily down on the bed. "Just keep the curtains as they are," I said. I hesitated. "Look, I have been sitting for two months, looking at TV monitors showing the plaza outside the Probal Building. It looked exactly like the plaza, it was the plaza, but a plaza on another probability line. There were... executions there, night and day, things you couldn't imagine. I was scared as hell when I came out today; I knew that that was a different probability line, but I was screaming inside all the time we were crossing the plaza. This whole city scares me. A year or two from now I won't be able to go out at all, so please leave the curtains. I don't want to see what's out there." She came over and sat down beside me, not saying anything. "You don't understand," I ranted. "No one understands who hasn't experienced it. Look, on most lines the city looks exactly the same as the one we are in now, with only subtle differencies. People dress differently, the cars look different, things like that. But sometimes people act differently; they do things you wouldn't think people could do. And sometimes there's no city at all, just meadows or woods. Once there was nothing but water -- and on one line there was nothing at all, literally nothing; just a sort of whirling mist that tears at you even via the monitors. "Don't you see?" I said desperately, "how can I know what is real and what is not? Every one of those probability lines are as real as the one we are in right now. After a time you don't know which line is the most real, which one you really belong to, which one you will return to when you leave the chamber. When you step out, it's just like stepping out into another line, and if you have come from one of the beautiful lines you can't stand it here, you just count the days until you can go Upside again, and all the time the ground heaves under your feet because you don't know what's reality anymore; you'll never know. You only know that everything scares you and you can't stand it." I leaned back in the bed, closing my eyes. She put a cool hand on my brow and leaned against my shoulder, soft and yielding, smelling of bottled roses. I embraced her like a drowning man, dragging her down on the bed. She protested feebly but at that point I was past arguing. She resisted at first, then subsided and went through the motions. After a time I rolled over beside her, groping in the dark for cigarettes. I felt warm, satisfied and somewhat drowsy. And now that that throbbing yearning had lost some of its edge, I also felt a bit ashamed. She went into the bathroom for a while, then came out and started the coffee percolator. She moved silently, a dark shadow in the dusky room. "You mad?" I asked. She returned with the coffee, sitting down in the bed with the tray between us. She said, "No. Ten years ago, I would have been terrified, I would have screamed, cried. Now it doesn't matter much one way or the other." She peered at me, eyes gleaming dully in the darkness of her face. "You could have done it more slowly." "Empathy with other people," I said, "is among the first things that go on this job; when you get to the point when you can't discern between what is reality and what is not, you don't care much for other people's feelings." "I know," she said. "You don't," I said. I sipped at the coffee. It was bitter, strong, with more than a hint of -- what? I made a grimace at the vile taste. "Jesus, what's this?" She looked at the cup. "I'm sorry," she said. You don't take it that way. She went away to the percolator and returned with a new cup, sweet and steaming. "After all these years," she said, "I still forget. Here." She handed me the cup. I asked, sipping at the coffee, "Where do you come from?" "You wouldn't know the place," she replied. "Try me." "Somewhere around here, not more than a kilometer away." "You don't sound like you were born here," I said. "That funny accent, for instance, you sound like someone who has arrived fairly recently." "When I was born," she said quietly, "there was no city here." I grinned at her. "Sure," I said. "And this city is centuries old. You look younger." "I was here ten years ago," she said, "and there was no city here then." I suddenly felt chilly. "What do you mean?" I said. "There was a small village here," she said. "And a few kilometers away was a kind of feudal stronghold. No cars or rockets, just a few dirigibles now and then. Very peaceful, very rural, very isolated." I was conscious of a cold, growing spot in my stomach. "It sounds like something out of a fairy tale," I said. "You wouldn't understand," she said tiredly, as if she had been telling and retelling this tale until the words were spoken of their own free will. "I was taken from there." "You're joking. I don't -- how?" "You know. The chamber." I sat up so violently I almost spilled the coffee into my lap. "You're crazy," I told her. "Nothing and nobody can be taken away from one probability line to another. It can't be done!" "That's what everybody tells me," she said quietly. "I have been waiting here for ten years, and everybody tells me it is impossible. They told me that in the Probal Building when I was brought here, and when I talk to the men who come out from there they all tell me the same thing." She looked away. "I have been asking everyone for ten years," she said. "I have been waiting outside that building for ten years, and everyone tells me the same thing." "What do you want?" "Togo back." She stayed two days. She was cool and remote but very obliging. She did not talk much about that fantasy of hers after the first night, but I wondered. The second day I want to the Probal librarian and asked him. He seemed uncomfortable and said he didn't know. I checked on my own, and found that the relevant data dossiers were restricted, off limits for the likes of me. When I returned, she smiled tiredly and wrote down a code number for me. "I got this once," she said, "from a computer technician who had access to all the classified material. He said I wouldn't have much use for it anyway. But this is where I came from." "I can't help you," I said. "I know," she said. "I didn't really believe you could. I never hope much these days; I just wait and wait and go through the motions, but I don't really hope anymore." "I'm just a technician," I said. "I press the buttons and go Upside and handle the machinery and look at the monitors; that's all I do. I'm just a small cog in the machinery, that's all." "I know," she said. "I'm sorry I've bothered you." Next day she was gone. A few weeks later I spoke to a guy at the Probal office about her. "Sure," he said, "I've seen her. Everyone here has seen her at least once. Always waits outside. She's crazy, thinks she comes from one of the probability lines and wants to go back. There's lots of crazy people in the world. Forget her." "She said it happened ten years ago," I said. "That could have been when the project started and no one knew what would happen if something were taken from its probability line. They know now, so they must have found out one way or another." He shrugged. "What do I know? Anyway, even if it's true, she can't go back now." Never. There is some kind of mathematics to explain that, but I'm not a mathematician. All I know is that the door in the chamber is locked from the outside while it is Upside. Under no circumstances whatever must anything be taken from or added to... Someone must have found out the hard way. I would see her now and then, standing on the steps of Probal Building, waiting without any real hope while her shoulders sank and her face hardened into frozen lines. The first years, some of the younger technicians picked her up when on leave and took her to bed. She did anything for the ones who were willing to talk to her. But then she wasn't so pretty anymore and they hurried past her, looking the other way. By then I seldom went out anymore; the city scared me, everything outside the building scared me. I thought of probability lines more beautiful and more horrible than any man's imagination, I saw the ever-changing worlds in the monitors, all of them as real or as unreal as my own, and it frightened me. I finally moved into a windowless flat in the building. I never went out again. Many years later I came across the piece of paper with the code number of her probability line and during a test run I fed the number into the line selector and went Upside. I leaned down over the monitor and looked into the whirling emptiness of the world that had been hers before she was taken from it and I saw nothing. Nothing.  X U  ' Spider Robinson ILffective with this issue, I am the new official reviewer for Galaxy. Please note the word: "reviewer," not "critic." A critic tells you what you ought to like -- I hope to tell you what I think you will like, and what you won't. All across the world there are folks standing in front of a grossly overstuffed, science-fiction section in their local bookstore, with a buck ninety-five burning a hole in their pocket and Sturgeon's Law ("ninety percent of everything is crap") burning in their hearts. I T d like to try and help you put your buck ninety-five or whatever, in a good investment. Now this, of course, puts me in one hell of a position. I write this stuff for a living, see, and I hang out with other guys that do -- the same guys whose books I'm either going to be praising or knocking, and writers are not noted for small egos. As of now I happen not to have really hated any books by people I know, but it's sure and hell bound to happen soon. So if any writers are listening, please be assured that I can love you and hate your latest book (got that, Harlan?). And for the rest of you, I promise to do my damndest to give you my honest opinion as to the relative worth of the books I review. Which is not to say that I'm going chasing after the mythical "objectivity." I've got my own set of prejudices as to what is and isn't good science fiction, and I have no intention of trying to list them -- you'll just have to pay attention and deduce them yourselves. The best I can do is try to be consistent about 'em, and to try and consciously remember and reflect what I conceive to be the prejudices of you -- the hypothetical and probably mythical Average Reader. If you think I'm blowing it, write Baen a nasty letter. Enough of this; on with the show. Watership Down, Richard Adams, Avon, # softcover, # pp. Goldman, Ballantine, I .# soft, # pp The Stone That Never Came Down, The R-Master, Gordon R. Dickson, The Big Black Mark, A. Bertram The Book of Saberhagen, Fred The Gray Prince, Jack Vance, Bobbs-Merrill, # hardover, #I pp First, the one that got all the noise: Richard Adams's remarkable Watership Down is nowhere near worthy of the three or four pages of incredible critical reviews with which Avon prefaces the paperback version -- it is not, as everyone from Bucky Fuller to the Times (both Timeses ) claims, the greatest work of art to emerge from modern man. It's only one of the best books I've read in a helluva long time. Rare indeed is the writer who satisfies as both a wordsmith and a storyteller, but Adams pulls it off. The book reads like a cross between Tolkien, Euell Gibbons and Kenneth Grahame ( Wind in the Willows, twit), and avoids the weaknesses of all three. It concerns a race of non-humans in a near-Utopia, one of whom is a clairvoyant. Having had a vision of some inexplicable doom lurking on the horizon, he persuades a handful of friends to leave their home and undertake a quest for a new and safer one. Along the way the group meets trial, battle and sudden death. Sounds pretty standard, huh? Here's the kicker: the non-humans are terrestrial lapines -- rabbits. The prophesied doom is the bulldozing of their warren for a housing development, and the quest covers maybe ten miles. Please don't make the same mistake I did -- ignore all the rave reviews, forgot that the damned thing was a number one bestseller for nearly a year. If you go into it expecting the New Tolkien you will, as I did, spend the first two hundred pages being disgruntled. What it is, is good solid writing of the evocative school, that is, the "paint 'em a picture" kind in which you forgive the fact that every, little brush stroke shows, because they're such fine brush-strokes. Generally I prefer the sort of background description that allows me to use my own imagination, but in this case I have to admit that Adams' is richer and better informed. He obviously knows rabbits as well as he knows the area in which these rabbits live, and he anthropomorphizes them only as much as he has to in order to give us a comprehensible story. A story, I might add, with all the adventure, excitement and internal consistency you could ask for, with a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. Second, the one that should have gotten all the noise, and didn't: I'm so excited by The Princess Bride that I usually become incoherent when I attempt to talk about it. Much as I like Watership, I'd infintely prefer to give this alternately fantasy my vote for the Hugo andor the Tolkien Memorial Award. Except I can't -- Goldman's book, like Adams's, is ineligible, having appeared in hardcover a couple of years back and sunk without a ripple. Why the hell is beyond me, unless it's antimainstream phobia. Goldman is, of course, the man who gave us Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not to mention Boys and Girls Together and a host of other superb mainstream novels, plays and movies, as well as an astonishingly good analysis of Broadway, The Season. Make no mistake, this man can write until your nose bleeds and your ears drip wax: he is A Pro. And Bride is, to my mind, not only the best thing he ever wrote, but the best sword  sorcery adventure that ever came down the pike -- I haven't been so excited about a book since I finished Stand On Zanzibar (which it in no way resembles). The subtitle that is omitted in the paperback version promises "fencing, fighting, torture, poison, true love, hate, revenge, giants, hunters, bad men, good men, beautifullest ladies, snakes, spiders, beasts of all natures, pain, death, brave men, coward men, strongest men, chases, escapes, lies, truths, passion and miracles." Friends, that ain't the half of it. The book is set, like a diamond in a gold brooch, within a delightful hoax: Goldman alleges that Bride was in fact written by "the famous Florinese writer Simon Morganstern," and that Goldman himself is only the abridger, who threw out Morganstern's political and social satire to give you "the good parts version." He claims that his Florinese father read the good parts to him while he was recovering from pneumonia at the age of ten, converting him in one stroke from a sports-type to a "novel-holic." God knows why Goldman uses this device -- but by Jesus it could have happened that way. If you know a kid who hates to read, buy him or her The Princess Bride and stand clear. If the book ever gets the recognition it deserves, it will doubtless be labeled "a fairy tale for adults," but that is wrong. It is the type of fairy tale we ought to be reading to our kids -- and aren't -- because it insists on one overriding message: that Life may be full of adventure and wonder and excitement and glory, but what it ain't is Fair. Oh yeah, I nearly forgot -- the book is funny as hell too. Okay, enough of this mainstream gobbidge -- back to good ol' Hardcore (how come the mainstream produces Bride and Watership, and the best True Bluedom has to offer these days is Nine Princes In Vmboredl). John Brunner's The Stone That Never Came Down is one dandy piece of work. It manages to neatly avoid every one of the potholes that his Shockwave Rider sprained its ankles in, and emerges as one of John's best. As didactic as Rider in its way, it never out-and-out lectures without a good dramatic foundation, and its characters live and breathe. The setting is England in the near future; the pendulum of morality has swung back with a vengeance, and the Godheads, hoodlum religious fanatics, go about the city extorting alms, trashing bars and brothels, and beating the stew out of the ungodly with wooden crosses. They get away with it because government is under the influence of the Campaign Against Moral Pollution (love those acronyms of yours, John), a powerful lobby indeed. Power, food and other systems are collapsing under gross mismanagement; there's civil insurrection in Glasgow; and on the horizon the bly sprouting in, of all places, Italy. The only hope is a mysterious new drug called VC, which confers -- no, imposes -- eidetic memory, forcing one to remember and integrate all the data he's ever acquired. It prohibits what Brunner calls "selective inattention," the tendency of humans to forget or ignore what they'd rather -- on which Brunner blames much of the world's ills. Motivated by, and armed with, this new discovery, a handful of men and women attempt to head off the war they now cannot help but see coming, by dosing key people with VC in a race against time. Now, the corollary to the moral imperative that grew out of the Psychedelic Age ("Thou shalt not prevent thy brother from altering his consciousness.") is that thou shalt not alter thy brother's consciousness without his consent, and I for one can imagine no greater crime (including murder), good intentions be go to hell. And yet, dammit, Brunner presents an excellent case for doing just that thing. I'm not certain he's convinced me, but I'm sure going to be thinking about it for some time. Altogether a fine story, that alternately curdles the blood and warms the heart that pumps it. D here, on the other hand, we have Gordy Dickson with another drug, and the message that increased intelligence is not The Answer. Gordy by now has polished to perfection the technique of stating a fascinating premise, giving you about half a chapter to absorb it, and then punching you in the head repeatedly until the breath is completely knocked out of you. You guessed it -- he's done it again. And he shouldn'# have been able to. The plot of The R-Master -- the world has seemingly achieved Utopia but is in fact in dangerous stagnation -- is almost as old as boy-meets-girl. But then the "as an outsider what do you think of the human race?" gag had long white hair when Heinlein used it for Stranger In A Strange' Land, and look how that turned out. To the base plot Gordy adds the premise that there is a drug called R-# which has four possible effects: it may raise or lower your I.Q. a few trifling points, it may do nothing, or it may make you either a supergenius or a hopeless moron. With that he's off and running, with surprise after surprise. R-Master is not one of Gordy 's major works; some of the characterization is sketchy, some questions are unanswered, and I found the ending just a bit unsatisfying -- but it is good solid action-packed stuff, and it made me think. Particularly when read concurrently with Brunner's book. If you didn't know that A. Bertram Chandler is an Australian nationalist and a Horatio Hornblower-freak, The Big Black Mark will make it abundantly clear. It fills in the missing link in the career of John Grimes (who, like Lord Nelson, is loosely based on the life of Hornblower), the man who's been paying for Chandler's groceries for many years now. Grime's rise from ensign in the Galactic Federation fleet to admiral of the Rim Worlds fleet has been amply chronicled in hundreds of thousands of words of often excellent SF -- but until now we never knew exactly what caused him to change his loyalties from Federation to Rim. Truth to tell, I'm just a little disappointed to learn -- but I can't explain why without giving away too many surprises. Suffice it to hint that Black Mark borrows just a bit too heavily from both Nordhoff  Hall and Herman Wouk, if you get my galactic drift. True-blue Grimes fans should be satisfied, but I found it pat in spots, contrived in others, and a little too reminiscent of some of the worst Star Trek episodes (the "Earth culture transplanted bodily to the stars" type), though eminently readable. But then I liked the drunken Irish telepath -- I'm a bit of a nationalist at heart too. Jack vance's The Gray Prince bothers the hell out of me. It has an excellent theme, with a tomatosurprise ending that defies guessing, and involves some moral questions that are more and more relevant these days. But you have to wade through some god-awful stuff to get there. The writing style is of a pedantic, top-heavy sort which the dust-jacket calls "evocative" and I call Byzantine -- it kept me thumbing my dictionary and increased my vocabulary immensely, but it didn't arouse my interest: even the fight scenes were stately. I pressed on, and discovered that there seem to be four or five protagonists, with whom Vance plays Musical Viewpoints at random and without warning -- and none of them is The Gray Prince, who turns out to be a very minor character and a humbug in the bargain. Finally, I was horribly annoyed by Vance's heavy use of footnotes to explain plot essentials rather than working them into the story -- and worse, by the fact that non-essential footnotes often held more potential interest than the text, and were invariably abandoned. When the interruptions are more interesting than the matter at hand, something is badly wrong. All in all, Prince reads like a history professor's dry and academic account of what one can dimly see must have been a rousing era. But if you read only the prologue and the last two chapters, you'll find some thoughtful and stimulating moral philosophy. It's the middle hundred and sixty-four pages that hung me up. It's hard to write meaningfully about a non-theme short-story collection at any great length. Fred Saberhagen is a fine writer, largely and correctly famous for his Berserker cycle, concerning the war between mankind and an unliving robot culture programmed by its centuries-dead Masters with a actually  just hate footnotes on principle. single overriding kamikaze directive: to destroy all sentient organic life in the universe. But only two of the ten tales in The Book of Saberhagen are about the Berserkers (two of the best in the series, incidentally). The non-Berserker stories vary from fair to excellent, touching all bases in between. "Deep Space" is an old favorite of mine -- but don't read Fred's introduction to it until after you've read the story, or you'll spoil the ending (by which I've probably ensured that you'll do just that, but what can you do?). "Starsong" is particularly outstanding, a very short story that somehow manages to leave you with the impression that you've just read a novelette -- a trick I wish I could pull off considering that they pay us by the word in this racket. Book of is recommended for all Saberhagen fans, and especially for those who don't know him yet. If they can give Hugos for "dramatic" SF, why can't I review it? Somebody should have warned me about Westworld, py yiminy, and only masochists and socialhypochondriacs read newspapers these days. Okay, then -- here goes. By now everybody's probably gotten the word that the Star Trek cartoon series is almost as good as the original, and in some ways better -- spectacular visuals are cheaper to produce, Kirk looks less wooden, and so on -- but if I know fen pl. of fan -- Ed., it'll take more than one goodie (and a recycled one at that) to jet you out of bed on a Sunday morning. Land of the Lost, with scripts by the likes of Ben Nova, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg and David Gerrold, ought to have filled the bill, but mediocre directing, kindergarten special effects and ghastly acting can strangle even the best writing. One Pro tells me he keeps the pseudonym "Michael Rodenta' ' handy for just such occasions. But there turns out to be after all . a superb Sunday morning show, like Land of The Lost non-cartoon, which has been destroying my lifelong habit of sloth for weeks now, with no relief in sight. Korg # B.C. is its unlikely title, and Fred Freiberger is the Story Editor. The show concerns itself with the problems of moral and social development facing a small band of Neanderthals led by a gent named Korg. The scripts are good enough to remind me of Heinlein's juveniles, the direction and photography are good, and the actors are just great. I mean, it's only a kids' show, you shouldn't expect perfection -- but I wish to hell they'd had shows like this when  was a kid. I hope it hasn't been killed for being too good by the time you read this; check your T.V. listings for the time in your viewing area. Okay, I confess -- I've secretly got the hots for Korg's old lady.  An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Note: The Alien Critic has magazine continues as before in every other respect. Issue ## features a controversial assessment of a dynamic young editorpublisher who controls from #-# of all science fiction: " Roger Elwood: Science Fiction's Hidden Dictator?" an InterviewArticle by Bruce D. Arthurs. Scheduled for ## is a long, candid interview with Philip Jose Farmer. Columnists: Larry Shaw, Ted White. Every issue -- The Archives: new book and story listings. Quartertysample I year #two yrs. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #TI Strange New Worlds Of Don't miss a single novel based on the fantastic Planet of the Apes motion pictures. Written by today's top s.f. authors -- John (Brak the Barbarian) Jakes, Hugo Award winner David Gerrold, and Jerry Pournelle, winner of the J. W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award. David Gerrold AN#-# Jerry Pournelle AN# -- # John Jakes AN#-#   m ' '   v iBj All-new Planet of the Apes adventures by George Alec Effinger! Two humans are trapped in the incredible Ape world. AN# # Men and Apes battle for supremacy. AN# # A race to escape the savage Planet of the Apes. AN# # V antasy And Imagination A compilation of the very best tales from the pages of America's foremost science fiction magazine. Includes stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, Theodore Sturgeon and many more. AQ#I # Robert Silverberg edited this superlative collection of science fiction masterworks by today's most famous authors. "Great variety... Recommended !" -- Locus AN# # AN # # AN# # AS# # AS# # Jack Finney. ANI # # Hauppauge, N.Y. # Please send me the books indicated below by book number: If any of my selections are out of stock, please supply the following alternate choices: Name Address City State Zip Add # i for postage and handling for one book, # for two or three books. We pay postage #n all orders of four books or more. Send remittance in U.S. or Canadian funds. Sorry, n o C.O.D.s. j Dear Mr. Baen: Tuttle story was good # work and the Robinson excellent; the Damay was interesting, and the latest installment of The Perils of Corwin ends with an appropriately intriguing cliffhanger. It's the non-fiction that spurs me to write, though: Subscribe? The newsstand may cost more, but I save frustration. Your editorial -- true, though you're too sanguine about the importance of reversible male sterilization. It will have little effect on the main world-wide problem, which is simply a desire for large families. I don't always agree with Pournellian opinions, though I've found his articles very interesting lately, but his missile-eating laser piece has just about sold me. Well done. (Incidentally, a disagreement: he said last month that the important, basic part of Velikovsky's theories was the prehistoric catastrophe, not the Venus-comet schlock. Well, important to whom? To one interested in digging fact out of the schlock, maybe. But on, that is not what matters to his followers. What matters is that (#) the causes for those disasters were events that The Science Establishment can't handle, and which thus discredit it, and (#) the Bible is literally true. Both# karat drek. These aspects are also the most important ones to V's attackers, judging from what gets dumped on most. And when the Good Doctor (not your Good Doctor) claims, in effect, that these are also the most important to V. himself. I'm inclined to back his judgement over Pournelle's. In other words -- intent on seeing that the baby's not thrown out with the bathwater, Dr. Poumelle forgets that most of V.'s impact comes from the bathwater.) The del Rey piece contains much good sense, but also some overly broad statements. I'd just like to note one -- 'a voluntary ghetto is a meaningless noise' -- because it's quite false and so makes his first three pages largely irrelevant. 'Ghetto' can be used in a sense like 'an in-group that builds walls around itself; such a use is sanctioned by Webster's Third, and I recently met it in a # book; and most important, it is so used by many (most?) who talk of an 'SF ghetto'. It's not fair to ignore what people clearly do mean for what (you think) their words should mean; when the facts are against you, it's worse. Yours truly, Philip M. Cohen # Stewart Ave Ithaca NY # PS. I've learned my tastes and Sturgeon's are parsecs apart, but I bet a lot of people who haven't learned similar lessons will reSubscription fulfillment is being returned to Boulder, Colorado in the near future, at which time service will become even prompter and more reliable than it is now. (For some reason subs, have increased enormously in the last year or so...) I think what annoys Lester ( me too!) about the ' ghetto-izing' of sf is the semantic end-run which all too often follows. The term is introduced into discourse in the sense of ' 'voluntary in-group" and about three paragraphs later the writer starts using words like 'escape' ; it's also not fair for a writer to ignore the previous meanings of his own words! Dear Mr. Baen; I have just finished reading Lester del Rey's article in the March issue of with the points he made, particularly in reference to science fiction as escapist literature. I, like many others, have long accepted the idea of science fiction being primarily escapist without really considering what I was "escaping" to. Any literature that demands that the reader enter and accept many new ways of looking at the world, as Mr. del Rey says, is far from being escapist. I very much enjoyed Phyllis Eisenstein's "Tree of Life". I would like to say that it "sort of grew on me," but I won't, as I abhor bad puns. Keep up the good work! Best Wishes, Michael A. Banks P.O. Box # Milford, OH # , too, abhor puns -- especially those of the grewsome variety. Dear Mr. Baen, I deeply regret that Mr Del Rey took my parody of "Golden Age" sf as a personal slam. "The Siren Song of Academe," March '# Galaxy. -- Ed. I never read anything of Mr Del Rey's involving lean bronzed captains, squeaking maidens, and Gloobian Slime Monsters. Never. In fact I made up the Slime Monsters myself. Mr Del Rey writes: "...the mouthings of the crypto-Marxists (it is a purely Marxist doctrine that all art must serve other functions than 'mere' art -- this is an idea foreign to all previous conceptions of artistic merit.)..." "It is a purely Marxist doctrine... It is? Is Mr Del Rey maybe confusing Marx with Stalin? A bit like confusing Jefferson with Nixon. "This is an idea foreign to all previous conceptions..." It is? Well, look, may I drag in the Palace of Versailles for a minute. Most people who see it, and its gardens, find it a stunning work of art. Who built it, and ately overwhelming symbol or statement of directions the grandeur and power concentrated in the person of the owner, the King by Divine Right, himself. He knew that the better the art, the more effective the statement; he had taste, the jerk, and hired only the best artists. Or take a rather subtler example: Handel's Messiah. Is the Messiah art for art's sake? I think Handel would have said it was art used in the service of God. Is that "cryptoMarxism"? My impression is, in fact, that art for art's sake, art conceived of as free of all obligation except to itself, is the recent idea. That art is an action done in service to, or in homage to, or as a function of, some intense belief or great idea, is the older, and probably still more general assumption. To confuse that idea of art with theories of ideological manipulation is disastrous; you end up with Propaganda here, Escapsim there -- and Art nowhere at all. Finally, after stating that there never was and is not now such a thing as an sf ghetto, Mr Del Rey tells us crypto-academic types, "Get out of my ghetto!" Only in sf can you get ordered to get out of a non-existent ghetto. Science Fiction, I love you. Yours faithfully, Ursula K. Le Guin  suspect that Lester (he may have somewhat more to say on this later) did not so much take "Escape Routes" Dec. '# Galaxy as a personal slam as an editorial springboard for expressing his own, divergent views... Personally t agree with you that sf may indeed serve a didactic role -- and I agree with Lester that it need not serve such a purpose, or any other than its own. And sf loves you right back. Dear Mr. Baen, Whatever happened to Jerry Pournelle's great scoop in the January issue? You know, the one about black holes. Well, I haven't found anything about the existence of "tiny" black holes being disproved anywhere. I thought that by now other magazines would have caught up and heard about it. Can you please clear this problem up. Are there small black holes, or not? Sincerely yours, Dorian Winterfield P.S. I have recently read Black Holes by John Taylor. Does the disprovence of small black holes mean that black holes can't be used for all those fantastic things like time travel, switching universes, etc ? Jerry's reply: There was a lengthy article on the subject of. quantum black holes in the January issue of being on the stands a little before S.A., did indeed have a beat, although not perhaps as long a lead time one as I would have liked. I don't expect to see much in the scientific journals for another couple of months; their lead times are very long, # months to a year. Mr. Taylor's rather mystical treatment of black holes is indeed interesting. As to using black holes for time travel and switching cles the whole thing is not only theoretical, but also requires that you find a hole large enough to go through without being squashed by the very high gravity near the singularity. That turns out to be a hole about the size of a galaxy; stellar sized holes just don't seem to be usable as a means of transport. What would come out in an alternate universe (assuming the purely mathematical exercise that leads us to suspect the existence of the alternate universe in the first place) would be a stream of atomic particles, not well organized; I cannot see how, anyone would survive the trip. But then I've been wrong in the past. Very small sized black holes wouldn't have been useful for time or space travel to begin with, so Hawking's work disproving tiny holes hasn't changed anything in that department. Thank you again for writing. Best regards, Jerry Poumelle, Ph.D Dear Editor I found Ms. Henye Meyer's letter (Match issue) most fascinating and I admit to feeling a certain sense of kinship with her "arrogant" husband who apparently feels Science Fiction to be not quite as great an Art form as many SF writers claim. I would in fact tend to agree with him that most SF is not exactly great literature and a good deal is suitable only for reading on tedious train trips. Ms Meyer, however, does not seem to realize that the fact that a piece of great SF may be of literary merit does not necessarily detract from its absolute value. "Finnegan's Wake" is great literature but it has little impact on those who read it and its absolute value to humanity is small. In contrast Doc Smith's "Lensman" series is in literary terms quite clearly tripe (a misnomer for bad writing as tripe tastes delicious!) but with its tremendous impact on its readers and with be rated highly in terms of absolute value. Occasionally a book surfaces with literary and absolute value -- H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" -- but the two do not necessarily coincide and the genre of SF though it can exist happily without literary values cannot exist without absolute values. SF needs committed readers who enjoy every word they read and who live to some extent in the fantasies they encounter. The popularity of costume parties at SF conventions, the existence of "Trekkies" and the prevalence of Fanzines are not accidents, they merely express the will of the people. Keep on writing Ms. Meyer, don't mind if your husband thinks it's trash in literary terms. Keep in mind that the basic value of an SF story is the pleasure it gives the reader. Literary elegance is merely "gilding refined gold". Sincerely yours. Dr. A. Meyer Knowing better than to insert himself between husband and wife, the Editor maintains a discrete silence! Dear Editor, I was compelled to write this letter about your editorial in the March issue. You seem to think that we have a clear path and that we will soon be free of the threat of nuclear attack or of overpopulation. You show the attitude of many people; faith in "American know-how! You put an awful lot of faith in things which are "virtual certanties." That makes me recall something about chickens and eggs. You claim that people know all about our problems, this is so far from the truth it is sad. Sad because we do have know-how and the means to solve our problems, but people can never get together on anything. It always seems to be our emotions which stop us from getting together and solving our problems; greed, hate, fear, and of course pride. AH too often our knowledge is used to find ways to kill people, unfortunately I do not see any reason why we would suddenly change now. Perhaps what our sf writers are trying to tell us is that we are not God's Chosen People, that we do not always have to solve all our problems and that we are not as great as we think we are. Maybe if we stopped reaching for our "Rightful Place" we would look down and see how little we have progressed from the caves. Yours truly, Ed Sloma # Main St. Bing. N.Y. # No, what I said was that we do indeed have a fair chance of survival-in-style -- if and only if we behave with a modicum of intelligence -- and that the Galaxy Readership wants, deserves, and shall have nonnightmarish stories replete with plots and realistic resolutions thereof. And it's not our distance from the caves (though we've come a long way, baby) that's at issue, but what we've brought with us -- like our prediliction for strong, numb-skulled leaders whose response to a difficult problem is to pick up a club. Dear Mr. Baen, While in many ways I agree with AlterEgo's complaints in your Feb. '# issue (his complaints about SF, of course. I wouldn't know about his other problems.), I also agree with your insert. You do publish stories that are very good to read. For this reason I am going to subscribe to Galaxy (Worlds of io. I also wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed Dr. Poumelle's article. Perhaps you can justify Archaeology as the feature article occasionally on the basis of time travel. For example, if I'd known more about the Icelandic Sagas, I would have enjoyed Harry Harrison's "The Technicolor Time Machine" even more. I imagine the way he fit the story to the sagas was really clever if I knew enough to appreciate it. I hope your magazine prospers and continues to print stories that are good to read. Sincerely, Marjorie Task # Queensbury Rd. Dayton, OH # Take that, Alter! Dear Sirs, sonality. The emphasis now seems to lie on good solid writing and each issue is well rounded now. Of your artists I especially like Steve Fabian -- get him to do some covers please. I also like an occasional astronomical cover -- so please keep David Hardy, too. He's the best man in the field now. Authors I would like to read (go on reading) in Kapp, George R.R. Martin, Leigh Brackett, Poul Anderson, Ursula LeGuin, Fritz Leiber... Well, keep it up, Mr. Baen -- you're steadily winning new friends. All the best, Uwe Luserke In der Rote # # Leonber, Wurtt. # West Germany galaxy # lai' JS Sre! Ne w Y our NY ' # l I # per word per Issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. Damon Knight, David Bunch, Gustav Hasford, etc. I from Box #, Sandy Springs, S.C. #.  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn #. original TV scripts for sale. Plus other popular programs, movie scripts, stills. Collectors Book Store, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. #. your family and Iriends with calculator frolics, games, and magic tricks. Send today for our highly acclaimed #-paae book of calculator entertainments. Paperback #, hardcover #, postpaid. Dept. #, Eleclret Scientific, Box #, Star City, West Va. #. Book Search Service. Send wants: out of print, especially fiction, # Los Verdes Drive, Ranchos Palos Verdes. Calif. #. Longview, Washington #. Fanlasy BookMagazine list -- #c. 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G send free brochure name street apt# city state "E handling charge. Price s are subject to change without notice. y m Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Tunick, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Ass't. to the Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor It takes two to run the Hurricane Flume and live. Gev Carlyle is one, and he has found help in the form of a ship-wrecked alien -- but Cephean is no Rigger. Wherein we are shown the inner workings of a sport that transcends both the esthetic delight of the ballet and the competitive excitement of any sport on earth. The year is # -- and the game is out of this world! A New Age had dawned; it was not a time for ordinary men. A Galaxy First. Exiled by fate to an alien planet, she had yet found love. But there was something missing... Yteic-Os the Voracious has come to Earth seeking to slake his unspeakable lusts on our fair planet. He is opposed by a lone warrior -- who must make the Ultimate Sacrifice. But is his ho-jo working? The Empress had experienced almost everything. She was dying for something new. Hell or Infernoland -- you can't keep a hard-sf writer down; Carpentier is going to fly out! thought it important enough to deserve a page of its own. Read it with care -- and care. we attain the technology necessary for star travel. Meanwhile, let's colonize Venus -- after all, it would be so easy! Someday we will reach the stars -- one way or another. "The Golden Age is about...fourteen," quotes Spider as he proceeds to singlehandedly sweep back the Tide of Nostalgia that threatens to engulf us all! betters from Sennett, Tarbet, Watson, Muirden, Pournelle, Ristow Where to find it. Cover by Stephen Fabian, from Interior Illustrations by Ames Fabian, Freff, Pini Universal Publishing # Olatr but ing Cor porte ion. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-Issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New Yortt, N.Y. and add it ion si making offices. The pibilshers assume no reapona IbJfity for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Dear Jim, A recent Galaxy Forum piece by Fred Pohl showed how a set of problems can be made to solve each other. I think I've found another of those snake-balls that will proceed to untangle themselves once we've taken the first steps -- and since my letter on tuna fishing and dolphins elicited such an intense response, I thought you might like to bring this matter to the attention of Galaxy's readership as well. The sperm whale is the largest of the toothed whales; it teaches a maximum length of # feet, and is the only cetacean (indeed, the only living animal) with a throat large enough to admit a man. It is also the source of ambergris. Also, it is not impossible that the sperm whale is as intelligent as homo sapiens. Ed. Unless we do something, the species will be extinct within ten years. The sperm whale is in trouble because of its spermaceti organ, a rather mysterious thing in its head that carries about a ton of whale oil. No one knows what it pounds of it per year, or # thousand whales' worth. Of course we no longer buy sperm oil. The Marine Mammals Protection Act quite rightly forbids importation of all whale-derived products. Good as far as it goes, but not enough to save the whales; Japanese and Soviet whalers go right on That's problem one, then: saving the sperm whale from extinction. Problem two: severe unemployment in our Southwestern deserts. Dual solution: those same Southwestern deserts, Indian Reservation land, mostly, can be made to produce # pounds of sperm oil per-acre per-year. You see, there's this scruffy-looking plant called the jojoba (pronounced hoHO-ba) that grows wild in the Sonora and southwards, and the seeds of this shrub tum out to be composed of about # of an oil nearly identical to that of the sperm whale -- certainly near enough so for industrial uses. A recent Study by the National Research Council shows how planting # acres in jojoba each year for the next five years will ultimately provide an annual yield of will need Federal subsidies -- but the major costs will be salaries for people at present unemployed -- who will then become taxpayers. So. A viable industry in a high-unemployment area, and sufficiency in sperm oil. So far so good; but I recommend we go much further. Why not plant a lot of jojoba? The cost of subsidizing the cultivation of several bacco for which we pay subsidies. Why not grow enough jojoba to sell the oil The benefits -- alleviating unemployment, sufficiency in sperm oil, and saving a species from extinction -- seem well worth the cost. Normally I do not recommend government subsidies; in this case I'll swallow my theoretical objections. I've written my Congressman about it. Care to join me? Jerry Poumelle Tear out (or copy) this page and send it, and your letter, to your Congressman. Address it to the Hon. (Name), The Capitol, Wash., D.C. -- "extraordinary!" -- John Chancellor -- Harold Taylor Brian Aldiss: "God, it's gorgeous! confidences. Certainly attractive and enlightening. Notably fine bookmaking." Alfred Bester: "I hope I'm published in a book like this before I die!" Donn Brazier: "This is wonderful! It is expertly, informally, personally, beautifully organized -- with everything! Damn, what a book!" John Chancellor: "Fascinating. Remarkable. A most. An extraordinary book." Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.: "Exciting, valuable. A uniquely powerful and compelling view of Lovecraft at the height of his intellectual and emotional maturity." V ic Ghidalia: "A magnificent volume! I expect to cherish Lovecraft at Last for the rest of my life." Loren Gould: "The most beautiful book I have seen in the past twenty years, both in physical makeup and in content." Frank H alpern: "It has become increasingly rare to receive a book that lives up to its promised quality. Far exceeds my already high expectations." Ben P. Indick: "It exhausts superlatives. A work of art, a rejoinder to those who say a publisher's love of fine printing is no longer existent. We are indebted for this splendid volume, a veritable treasure." David A. Kyle: "Very much a collector's item, with great appeal." Fritz Leiber: "Conveys delightfully the amazing impact of Lovecraft in his letters." with the maturity of his ideas and the quality of his writing." Frank Belknap Long: "The Lovecraft I knew. A magnificent book. Delightfully anecdotal -- and every line bears the stamp of absolute authenticity." than any book has done before." Sam Moskowitz: "This is the first truly deluxe edition ever to appear in science fiction publishing -- doubly valuable because it is not merely a reprint in a deluxe format but original material of great value." J r. Albert F. Nussbaum: "Beautifully designed. The content has as much impact as the volume's physical appearance. A dazzling display of casual erudition. Poignant and powerful." Russ Parkhurst: "I have never in my entire lifetime seen such a well-executed book." reading for college science fiction students and for critics who can't decide whether or not Lovecraft wrote 'literature.' " Irresistibly informative. Far exceeded my expectations. A literary coup." R av Russell: "A priceless addition to the small but growing shelf of Lovecraft lore." Stuart David Schiff: "I see this book winning awards for the design alone. A stunning work, a book collector's dream, a revelation. The ending will hit you very hard. It is a moving experience. What a fantastic job!" David C. Smith "I stand in awe. It is just as though Lovecraft were speaking to the experience. " Kenneth Sterling: "Superb! Lovecraft at Last is a great book! " Harold Taylor: "Everything about this book is extraordinary." Gahan Wilson: "Beautiful -- a kind of time-machine, and so completely convincing that collectors might spend small fortunes for clippings from this book. Read it,  page by page and impact by impact. Lovecraft at Last will remain with us, for it is Lovecraft himself -- alive."   I (You may order without coupon, if you prefer) # Rosslyn Arlington, VA # copies of Lovecraft at Last, Collectors Edition,  #.  copies of Lovecraft at Last, Deluxe Standard Edition,  #. -- copies of Supp. Horr. in Lit. (#), facsimile,  #. Total order:  Name: Address: City: I State: Zip: Lovecraft at Last, by H. P. Lovecraft illustrations. Index. Bibliography. TwoI color printing. Full cloth binding. Dust j jacket. Size # by #. #. (In limited supply: Collectors Edition of Lovecraft at Last, in slipcase, numbered. #.) Also available: Supernatural Horror in Literature, as Revised in #, by H. P. Lovecraft. Facsimile of original manuscript, in soft covers. Numbered : limited edition. #. A ancer Christopher Irwin I ien walked over to the edge of the plateau. The grass felt cool and damp under her feet, and the orange light of the late sun glowed warm on her body. It was one of those evenings that made her want to stretch her arms and dance. The shelter she had found for the night was good. It looked like the remains of an old overseer house, one of the many plastic-andconcrete skeletons that dotted the countryside. No doubt it had once been the site of solemn conferences, important gatherings, strange miracles like fires that burned inside glass bubbles like tiny stars -- things that her mother and the minstrels used to tell her about when she was a child. She looked around at the crumbling walls. Someone had obviously been there before her, most of the plastic had been stripped off and much of the better stone carried away. At her feet she saw faint traces of deer tracks; other animals had used this crumbling edifice as a shelter. Suddenly a squirrel appeared on one of the pieces of stone that jutted above the weeds. Tien looked at it, watched the creature's dark inquisitive eyes, its nervous, jumpy motions. She tried to extend herself to the animal, but she picked up no thoughts -- just a vague feeling of fear and hunger. The squirrel was obviously an ur-animal, not one of the newer ones bred by the Overseers to renew the world after the Age of Famine and the Great Plague. Having satisfied himself that Tien was not a meat-eater, the squirrel began to ignore her and poked around for food. As it leaped to the ground, one of its feet grazed a protuberance on an ancient metal box attached to one of the ruined walls. Tien looked about, terrified. The squirrel scampered off into the bush. Tien looked all around her, but could see no one. The voice disappeared as mysteriously as it came. Once again there was only the ancient silence of the evening, the distant cries of birds, the clicking and whirring of insects. Tien backed away. A few yards from the rubble she began to run. The long grass on the hillside whipped around her ankles, thistles scratched her leg, but she kept on running and didn't pause to look back. She ran on, breathing hard, until she reached the deep shadows of a cedar grove, an arm of the Great Forest. Hidden in the speckled gloom beneath countless leaves and towering branches, she sat on a rock and looked around. Her lungs hurt and her feet stung from tiny cuts, but she felt safe here. She couldn't always trust that intuition, however, so she decided to make sure. She closed her eyes and opened her mind to any sensation, any shadow of a feeling. No, she sensed no violence here. Only peace. "When life is no longer surprising to you," her grandmother used to say, "then you are half-dead." But voices out of nowhere? That was a little more than surprising. However, her grandmother had been wise -- the only person she had ever known who could make sense of the funny little markings in the old books of the Overseers. Tidn rubbed her ankle. She was beginning to feel better already. It was then that she heard the music. At least, it sounded like music -- very clear and delicate, like the sound of glass wind chimes on a summer night. First voices out of the air, now music, she said to herself. The sound seemed to come from beyond a hedge by an oak tree. She approached the hedge cautiously, sniffing the air, all senses sharply tuned to any trace of blood or malice. No malice. Just that peculiar shimmering music, shifting, changing color like a dragonfly's wing. She looked through a cleft in the 'leaves. It was a psio-hippus playing a harmonium. Instantly the memory of Tien's old tribe flickered in her head. The campfires... the music... she knew she had heard that kind of music somewhere before. She hesitated to go into the clearing. On the one hand psiohippi were supposed to be very gentle animals; the human-like brains the Overseers had bred into them made them intelligent and inquisitive -- an ideal combination of strength and mental ability. On the other hand, this particular one might be a strange mutant, a renegade. Of course, whatever he was, he might have some food. She decided to take a chance, and parted the branches to step forward. The psio-hippus heard the snap of twigs and looked around. Before him stood a stunning young woman with shaggy hair and full breasts, her legs long and sleek. He smiled. "Long life to you," he greeted. "To you too," she replied politely"What's your name?" he asked, setting aside the harmonium. "Tien," she said. "Yours?" "Twofour Nine," he said. "Too-fore-nine?" she repeated. "That's a strange name." "That's what I've always been called; I'm sorry if you don't like it." "No," she added, "I like it; I've just never heard it before." " 'Tien' -- that's Jinese, isn't it?" "Yes," she said. "I think it means 'field'." "That's a beautiful dialect," he said. "I learned it from a tribe that used to live down by Neverending River." "Really?" she smiled. "My ancestors were from that area." "Tell me, Tien," Twofour continued, "what's a young creature like you doing out here alone?" "I was going to bed down up on the plateau, near the ruins," she said, "but a voice came out of nowhere. I was so frightened I ran. I don't know how long I ran. I ended up here, where I heard your music." Twofour nodded; his short mane shook gracefully. "I know the place," he said. "There's a local spirit that lives there; I think he calls himself 'Or'. Many people are afraid to go there, but I've never heard of anything happening. I believe that this spirit must be a harmless one. Although I know several people who claim to have heard him speak, I myself have never heard a thing there." Tien began to relax. Apparently there was nothing to worry about; the voice was harmless and Twofour seemed gentle and protective. "How about some angelfood?" he offered, extending an arm. Twofour' s strange combination of hoofs and Opposing digits surprised her, although she didn't find it unattractive. "Go on," he said. "I gathered them just this morning. I found a whole bunch growing together in the field down there." She took three of the small mushrooms from his hand, inspected their markings, and then popped them into her mouth. "You haven't answered my question," Twofour said. "You still haven't told me what you're doing out here alone. Did you get lost from your tribe?" "I was separated from my tribe a long time ago," she explained. "At first I tried to find them, but it was hard; they kept moving all the time. Then I found I could do pretty well on my own." Twofour looked at her carefully. "I don't know," he mused. "You don't look like the kind of person who could do that; the world's a rugged place. Full of some pretty ugly things. For example, how do you know I'm not some crazed mutant who was planning to tear you apart and eat you?" "I can tell," she said. "I don't know how, but I can." He shrugged his massive shoulders, and returned to playing the harmonium. Tien watched his fingers do a graceful dance on the lewith chime-like tones, diamondnotes against a velvet background, blue-green, amber melodies. She felt a current of joy well up deep inside her spine, waves of it spreading through her body. "You must be a minstrel," she sighed. "I've never heard music that beautiful, not even in my grandmother's tribe, and they could do amazing things. How do you live? Do you play for food?" He answered her as he played. "I guess I am what you might call a minstrel; I wander a lot. Don't like to stay in one place too long." "Are you a robber?" "No," he said, "I've never robbed a soul in my life. Never had to. I forage for food -- berries, wild vegetables mostly. Now and then I join a tribe for a while and play for them, help them carry wood, build wagons. I have a strong back." She looked at him. He had the back of a horse, strong glossy shoulders, sleek neck. His head was a man's head, though; she looked into his dark eyes. They were sensitive, almost shy. "Much like a man," she thought. "A good man." Her mind began to blossom like a red lily in the gardens of New-D. Twofour continued to play. He played soft, eerie music that reminded her of dark ruins and moss, of the sound of animals in the night -- the lowly ur-animals and the confused half-animals that bayed and howled under the full moon. Twofour looked at her. She was breathtakingly beautiful. In addition, her arms and back looked strong. He felt his nostrils dilating. Tien breathed deeply. Her mind was wide and transparent; it seemed to have no limit. She could sense life stirring all around her: insects carrying particles of food, following their monotonous tracks through towering blades of grass; squirrels nestling together in the dank hollows of trees; wild dogs bounding over the wet grass of pastures, yelping at the evening smells. Through the trees, the sky glowed deep gold. Twofour couldn't take his eyes off Tien. Honey-tongue, he thought. Soft, bare-skinned descendant of a race of hunters... antique crown of all creatures... She looked at him with surprise. A smile spread across her face as she instinctively touched her thighs. "You would like to be my mate?" Twofour laughed self-consciously. "How did you know?" he asked. "I sensed it," she said. "My body grew warm, as though I were sitting by a campfire." "I'll take good care of you," he assured her. "You needn't worry." "I know," she said. "I can sense that too." He came over to her, she put her arms around him. "We might even be able to have children," he said softly. His voice seemed to come from deep within a cavern. It was low and distant, and seemed to echo. "The angelfood," she said to herself. In a second that seemed to last hours, she had a vision. She saw a sun, rising over a plowed field. Wolves and wild horses paced around the edge of the furrowed land, sniffing die air, confused by the lines of turf that crossed their old pasture in a straight pattern they had never seen before -- disturbing, alien lines. Where once they had run among wildflowers and brambles, they now padded gingerly over neatly up-turned earth. As the red orb rose above the field, green shoots pushed through the soil, and in seconds, climbed smoothly toward the sun, blossoming and bearing fruit. Out of that glossy fruit burst creatures like Twofour and herself. They left the field and went out into the other valleys of the world, where they built snow-white towers out of marble and gardens more lush than the earth had ever seen -- even more lush than the fabled dome-gardens of New-D. And all creatures came to those gardens -- men and animals and half-animals -- and all walked together, cultivated vegetables, and played in the crystal pools... Twofour stroked her cheek. She opened her eyes. Then, a rustle of leaves. Snapping twigs. "Hell, would you look at that?" a man said. "I see it but I don't believe it," said the other "One of them crazy halfbreeds." "Thought Alpha team had cleared them away years ago. ' ' "Damn Foundation men. Long dead and we're still cleaning up after them." The one wiped spittle off his lips with , a leather glove. Twofour recognized their white metallic clothing -- surviving humans from the neighboring valley. "It wasn't the Foundation," the one said, "Just Chan and them Biolab people. You know -- Operation Newlife and all that, right after the plague. "You think we should kill them? Or take them back to the settlement?' ' The first man raised a metal cylinder with a grid of fine wires at the end. "Ain't no room for them at the settlement -- not enough food to go around as it is." "But that one looks human," the other protested. "The girl." The first man grinned, eyeing her from the ground up. "Yeah, she does look human. But she ain't. Probably descended from one of those gypsies that ran away from the first settlement. Look at her; she's wild. Who knows how messed-up her genes are." "Yeah," the other agreed. "She might not be half-animal, but she sure looks half animal." "There's no doubt about what we have to do," the first man continued. "It's us or them. Of course, we can have a little fun with the girl first." He raised his metal cylinder higher and pointed it at Twofour. Then suddenly their eyes went blank. They dropped their strange cylinders and stood for a moment as though in a stupor. Suddenly, they ripped off their clothes and ran through the trees laughing and grunting. Twofour, stunned, looked at Tien. "What happened?" he asked. "It's something my mind can do "I felt it. It happens when somebody threatens me. Anyway, they're happier now and we're safe." Twofour smiled. He laughed at his earlier impression that Tien was a helpless fawn of a woman. Together they would begin a fine race, he thought. "I guess we should leave here," he said. "In spite of your talent, I don't like to take chances with the Degenerates. They're too violent -- too dangerous." "Where could we go?" Tien asked. He thought for a minute. They could run wild, of course, as he was used to doing. But that wouldn't be right for her. Although he hated the idea of responsibilities, he did think that his life could stand some order -- within reason. "We must join a tribe," he announced. "That's the only answer. I could play and sing for them, carry lumber, and you could wear gold bracelets and dance." "That would be nice," she agreed. "I think I know where Blue Bear tribe is," she continued. "Last time I saw them they had set up camp about two miles Over South Ridge. We could get there before tomorrow's dawn if we leave now." "Faster than that -- hop on." She climbed upon his back, hugging his sides with her long legs. Together they rode off into the warm night.  He had fled from intimacy with his own kind -- how then could he join minds with this hairless biped?! in concealing his exasperation. "Cephean," he said, "you do know how to fly a ship -- I mean, you flew your own, right?" "Hyiss-yiss!" insisted the cynthian. "Hoff khorss." Cephean was large as a tiger and black as coal dust. His eyes were molten copper, flecked with gold, and he was plump and furry, like an enormous Persian cat. Carlyle was trying to explain to him about starship flying, riggerstyle, but nothing ever seemed to sink in. It was not, Carlyle thought, something which ought to need explaining. Not at this juncture, anyway. "Follow my lead, is all I want you to do," he said. "You can sense my guidance of the ship. Just back me up." He looked at the cynthian questioningly (and felt a rush of impatience , a sense of preoccupation -- Cephean ' s) . The cynthian looped his tail behind his triangular ears, and his eyes blinked and flickered in the subdued light of the bridge. "Hi khann ff-hollow," he hissed. Carlyle cleared his throat dubiously. Could he? The explanations all seemed to go over his head, though of course the cynthian was not really listening to the words themselves. "Okay," he said. "Let's try it again. This time work with me, not against me." Or we're never going to get there, he added silently. Sedora was a long way from any starport. Cephean dutifully padded over to the makeshift stern-rigger station, followed by his two riffmar, the walking ferns that accompanied him everywhere. Cephean sat and Carlyle tilted the back of the partially dismantled seat until it rested against the cynthian's spine. Cephean tensed for a moment, then relaxed. Carlyle hastened to join him, reclining in the pilot-rigger seat until the neural-foam pad touched his own backbone. He felt an instant of numbness, as his eyesight darkened, and then his senses sprang like electric fire, out of his body and into the ship's net. Flux-space curled about him in a majestic panorama of colorfully layered smoke. Stars, nebulae and the currents of the interstellar seas melded in whorled and flowing atmospheres. Here and there, stars were Visible as nuclei of distant vortices; most were mere flecks of carbon dust adrift in luminous space. Below Sedora's glittery net, a channeled intersection of two planes marked the Reid Current, an even-flowing, deeply submerged channel in the multidimensional ocean of flux-space. The Reid was Carlyle's immediate objective. The Reid itself would be easily navigable, but at its end it emptied into a different sort of current -- the Hurricane Flume, a violent meeting and surging and tangling of currents, a wholly perilous place that Sedora would reach in a half-dozen days. From within the Flume streamed the upwelling currents to Cunnilus Banks, and in those Banks lay Carlyle's destination -- and the nearest havens. If they could reach Cunnilus Banks, they would be home-free. But to get there they had to navigate the Flume -- and that was why Carlyle was scared. Sedora was a four-rigger starfreighter -- which until the accident had been manned by five crew(wo)men. Now Carlyle was alone -- except for Cephean. Singlehandedly , Carlyle could barely manage the ship and the Flume was going to hit him like a cyclone. But with his shipwrecked cynthian aboard, he liked to think that there would be two of them to do the flying. There had better be -- or they were both doomed. You there? he asked. Hyiss. He released the stabilizers, reached his steely, spidery, sensory arms into the streamers of fluxspace, and coaxed the ship downward. Behind him, he hoped, Cephean was comprehending and helping. Consider starship-rigging for a moment. A demanding profession, requiring from a human rather particular and peculiar aptitudes. For the rigger, starflight was akin to free-wheeling fantasy, and fluxspace therefore to the mistilymapped realm of the waking dream. Riggers were dreamers, but of a special sort -- not idle ones, but dreamers who could reach through a vision, to gain a fingerhold in another, and sometimes more useful, reality. The net was his harness, allowing the ship to drift with him, like a backpack, while he used the ebbs and flows of flux-space itself for transport. It was a realm unconcerned with the laws or distances of normal-space, and it was a fine way to travel. The dreaming, though -- that was the tricky part. The net itself was a glittery spangle of ghost neurons flung into flux-space like the exploded tentacles of a Man-o-war. Interfaced through organic neural foam and amplified by the flux-pile, it was the rigger's skin against space, his wings and fins in the turbulent air sea among the stars. The rigger guided the ship by intuition, by his own individual imaging powers. Intuition: that was the second tricky part, especially among a crew. No two riggers viewed fluxspace identically; teamwork demanded a gestalt, a deep intermixing of visions, of perceptions, of selves. Functioning smoothly together, several riggers could sail a ship easily among the stars; at odds within the net, at best they would bob helplessly, at worst they would tear a ship to pieces. The teamwork had always been the toughest part for Carlyle. Such openness, such nakedness. And now -- with an alien stranger? The dreampool might well be the only way. He shuddered at the thought. Carlyle cursed the cynthian's clumsy efforts. His anger rang in echoes round the net and vanished in the noise of space. Cephean homm-humm'd to himself somewhere sternward, keeping his thoughts private and consistently responding late to Carlyle's initiatives. The ship bucked and plunged like an angty whale. Gently, Cephean! Do you see the river ? Whass? Whass? A "river," yes, that was an adequate image. The lanes of the Reid congealed, darkened into molasses, flattened beneath a glittery sky and flowed swirling between two misty riverbanks; Sedora settled her hull into the waters and moved quickly downstream through the night. The net shimmered beneath the hull, beneath the dark surface of the river. The Flume was invisible, not even a distant mutter; but beyond it in the distance a dim streamer rose to meet Cunnilus Banks, a faint cloud of particles in the night. The ship lurched again, as Cephean clumsily bumped the stern askew. Cephean; follow FJhollow-hing, Caharleel! No rapport, he thought, straining to guide the ship. What did Janofer used to say? That a crew needn't understand one another, or even be friends... that the crux was congruence, simple congruence of vision. And Skan -- that without unity none of the rest was worth a mote in the Kryst Nebula. That was why they had sent him to crew Sedora, had sent him kindly, firmly, hoping he might learn here what he couldn't from them. This Cephean, though, was more like Legroeder, so alone with his thoughts -- even in the net, where privacy tended to dissolve. Except Legroeder always worked in harmony, despite his aloneness, and could be either leader or follower; Cephean it seemed, could be neither. Carlyle kept up the struggle for a time -- jockeying, trimming the ship, compensating for Cephean's mistakes. How did he ever fly his own ship? Carlyle muttered. Finally he called; Cephean, pull out of the net. which the cynthian did, humming and grumbling, and Carlyle infused the entire net with his strength and bucked the ship into line where it belonged. Then he put it on stabilizers and withdrew himself... and gazed with tired eyes about the bridge, before retiring to the commons, and then to his cabin. To regain the feel of a human body, to eat, to sleep a while, to find and lecture the cynthian -- and to try again, once more. Remembering: After the accident -- trying to summon the faces of his dead crewmates. He had rigged with them for only seven days and now could not recall their names. He had been lucky, or he would have died with them. Lucky? Other names came to him, though: Janofer, Legroeder, and Skan -- the names clicked through his head like the chatter of a rad counter, rhythmically, Janofer Legroeder and Skan. The faces came later. Legroeder: dark little man, pilot-rigger, lover of dream-gestalt plays, but often shut away in his cabin, a place madly adorned with mysticalsequenced pearlgazers. Janofer: gentle, beautiful keel-lifter, fond of stories and music even in the web, briefly a lover and always a friend. Skan: com-rigger and hard-balanced thinker, the one to believe in when decisions were to be made, but fearsome when his balance crumbled and he plummeted into one of his deep, black depressions. Why couldn't they be here now in this battered vessel? beauty of a ship, light and comfortable, and responsive as a kite! Who was the fourth, now, in her rig? Eventually, though, such thoughts had to be put by. With great trepidation he took his place alone, for the first time, in Sedora ' s net. There was no choice but to fly if he could; the vulnerable and delicate transmission gear had been fried along with his crewmates. He was almost astonished when he sank his fingers into the stuff of space and the ship moved at his bidding. Sedora was ponderous, and flew as if laden with water. He could only work her for short, deadening shifts; his stamina deteriorated rapidly even so. He thought of the Flume ahead, considered and discarded other courses, thought of the Flume again, and knew he hadn't a chance in a thousand. Therefore hope, when it appeared, was strange. The signal had seemed a part of the windrush, part of the starsong of the net. But like a warbling bird it would not be ignored, and finally he decided that just perhaps he was hearing a distress beacon; and with tightly suppressed excitement he wheeled Sedora into the clouds to find the source. The search nearly drained him -- ten hours of puffing through crazy blue skies with golden veils and spun hair arching across the stars like a yellowbrick road. At last he found it; a flattened raisin of a spacecraft, drifting abeam of Sedora in the queer neardistance of flux-space. He grappled it and took it spiraling up with him through layered images of spacetimes, into spinning, velvet darknesses... until at last the stars exploded in bright pricks of light -- and he looked out through the clearplex port into normalspace. The ship was squat, strange; alien. He suited up and floated across to it. From space, Sedora was cold, a gun-grey cetacean, linked to him only by a snaking lifeline. His soles touched the other ship; he wondered who he might find, and whether perhaps the strangeness was only beginning. Following a poor night's sleep, Carlyle entered Cephean's quarters. The cynthian hardly noticed as he sat idly batting the two giggling riffmar into floating somersaults. Carlyle cleared his throat. The ferns squealed and scuttled away behind Cephean, their oversized hands flailing excitedly. How strange it must be, Carlyle thought, to be so utterly dependent -- both for Cephean and the riffmar. Cephean was master, but the riffmar had the hands and the prehensile branches. How helpless would the cynthian be without them? "Cephean, let's talk." The cynthian gazed at him, ears forward. (He sensed mild interest.) "Hyiss?" "Cephean," he said, and hesitated -- "this is sort of ridiculous, isn't it? Here we are lucky enough to be able to help each other, and now we can't seem to make it work. We both know how to fly, and there should be no reason why we can't do it." He eyed the cynthian and asked almost pleadingly, "don't you want to reach port, don't you want to go home?" "Hyiss -- yiss," Cephean replied, his whiskers curling and springing straight again. "Hi ffly wiss hyou," he hissed, his velvety face split in an apparent grin. "Yeh. What went wrong, last time? Why didn't you work with me?" Cephean's breath hissed over his teeth, as he seemed to consider Carlyle's statement. Behind him, the riffmar rustled and sssk'd quietly as they buried their feet in the nutrient bed. Cephean touched a forepaw to his nose and said, "Hi ss-ry. Hiss d-hifficulss." (An impression of shame flickered across Carlyle's mind.) "Hyou ffly, Caharleel." (The image was followed by a strange, dark longing, unidentifiable and then gone altogether.) Carlyle grimaced, wishing that he did not have to play guessing games. Cephean, apparently reading his thoughts, stirred nervously. "All right. We'll try it again, in a little while. If we don't do better this time, we'll have to try something else." He did not mention the dreampool, but it loomed large in his thoughts; the cynthian started, and looked away. Odomilk. An image of the strange pods drifted eerily through Carlyle's mind. The cynthian was issuing commands; the riffmar scrambled to lift two odomilk pods from the cache, and set them deliberately in front of Cephean. The cynthian cracked one carefully in his jaws, and sucked at the yellowish liquid that oozed out. He looked at Carlyle with upturned eyes, making plain his discomfort at Carlyle's presence. Carlyle left him, and went to the commons. He toyed with a floglobe, sipped a beermalt, flashed a sparkle-pattem in ringlets about the room: stoic... erotic... pastoral... he stared at the wall. Their next session in the net began not much differently. Cephean hummed away with his own thoughts, while Carlyle pleaded, pried, cajoled -- and the ship sideslipped and trembled in the smoothflowing Reid. Cephean, open up -- turn your thoughts outward, into the net. The cynthian hummed and muttered, and whistled an unintelligible reply. The ship swayed in the clouds, whipped. Follow, dammit ! F-hollow-hing. Carlyle flew a few more practice turns, and then he flew straight, resting. Janofer came to him quietly, unbidden, with a question: Can you go it alone, Gev? You may have to try. Don't ask me that, Janofer. Gentle Janofer, silver-haired keelgirl, you know I can't go it alone, but you always ask. Why must you? A wrong fit in the net warps it like a gravity abscess in a calm stream... dangerous. You are sometimes like that, Gev, for all that we love you -- dangerous. Do you think I don't know? All right -- I'm a lousy rigger. Janofer, face darkening: That's not what I mean, Gev. You're a fine rigger. But... Skan, interjecting flatly, not unsympathetically: You're a lousy matcher, Gev, that's all. You'd be fine in a one-rigger... except you like company too much. Too bad you don't have a bit of Legroeder in you. Skan. Always right, never tactful, damn you. Stay with me a while, Jan, will you? Sad, already distant gaze: Can't, Gev -- I can't. I'm gone, now. Later, perhaps, if you really need me. Perhaps then, for a while. And with that she was gone and so was Skan. Then, perhaps, eh? Janofer so kind, so courteous -- you hurt even when you are here. Carlyle brought his attention back to the ship, which was drifting again. The ship resisted his efforts to bring her true; no assistance from Cephean. More strength was needed, though; he was taxing himself grievously as he flexed his spidery ghost-neuron arms in the current. And then a curious thing happened. Legroeder appeared in his thoughts, wordlessly, and entered the net at the keel station. Smiling enigmatically at Carlyle, the former crewmate lifted the ship, helped steady the axis along the blue haze of the mainflow, and pointed the nose where it belonged, at the distant glitter of Cunnilus Banks. The maneuver was done smoothly, almost effortlessly. All right, Carlyle thought in surprise. Why not? The power, he knew, was his own, focused through a wistful memory. But if he flew better through a memory, what harm? Sedora sailed placidly for a time, and Carlyle almost forgot about Cephean, silent at the stem. Then a turbulent stretch loomed ahead, an orange tributary streaming in from the left, setting the calm blue haze of the mainflow aswirl with dangerous eddies. Legroeder? Yes, still there. The ship shivered into the current, and Carlyle with Legroeder' s help stretched out steely arms and labored like an oarsman to keep it under control. They needed more strength still; they had to aim deeper. Janofer and Skan reappeared as quickly as the thought -- and all three backed him in the net as he hooked his nails into the fabric of space and wheeled the ship slowly to find its new direction. Silently and without fanfare, Carlyle found himself part of a perfect gestalt, and as one the four riggers brought Sedora into a down-welling and then leveled her again in a smoother layer of current. The fantasy was a white lie. He had never managed gestalt with the three, hard as he had tried. If he had he would still be on Lady Brillig. But the image was perfect in his mind -- it was the gestalt for which he had yearned, and Sedora flew with the grace of an eagle. The image multiplied in scope and Sedora winged silently over sprawling tufted clouds which glittered whitely about him. Carlyle forgot his loneliness, realizing with sudden dizziness how terribly lonely he had been. Janofer's music lilted calmingly through the net, and Skan's control lay steady and sure over the gestalt. Even Legroeder, pretending to ignore them all, smiled with unspoken affection. Time, in the gestalt, passed unnoticed. But the image was as tiring as it was exhilarating. Carlyle, bearing the load of four-riggers in one, slowly became aware of the strain he was enduring -- and then it was too late. His strength failed like rapidly souring wine -- his senses dimmed and flattened, and the ship balked in his disintegrating rein. Suddenly he could not remember his friends' faces or their voices. The ship began to tumble; he wanted to sleep, to collapse. How long had he been flying? Caharleel, Cephean whispered urgently. Cephean ! My god. Can you help, can you hold the keel steady ? The fine spiderweb of the net was coming apart, was untangling in the clouds. Hyiss. Cephean 's presence grew quickly in the net, and Carlyle felt first relief, then panic. Could the cynthian handle the ship? He felt a blur of annoyance -- and distracted bewilderment at... what?... at the humans who had appeared and taken things over for a while, and then vanished. And... eagerness? Before Carlyle could think about it in his dullness, the sensations disappeared. Cephean had hastily reclosed the lid on his feelings, and hissed faintly now as he wielded the ship over Carlyle's failing control. He took the ship deeper. Sedora dived steeply, terrifyingly. The cloud-image vanished for Carlyle, and suddenly he was deep underwater, and sinking rapidly. No, Cephean! What are you doing? Level off, bring it up! He opposed the cynthian desperately, and in the conflict the net strained and sparkled brightly, heatedly, then began to break, tear, shred. The ship tumbled deeper and broke completely through the Reid, so that the Current was only a shimmering ocean surface above them as they fell toward the abyss. The space here was dark as night, perpetually dark, far deeper than Carlyle had ever dared venture. Cephean was trying to destroy them and Carlyle seemed powerless to resist. Like a stricken diver screaming for air, Carlyle reacted in blind panic, badly, in the only way he knew. He triggered the fusors: they flared searingly hot, and the ship groaned and rose upward roaring on the throttled torches, a fuming trail burning in their wake. He had failed to numb the sensory field astern, so the heat of the jets crawled along his spine with clear, glazing, flashing agony. Cephean's scream was a silent shriek of pain; centered in the stem rig, the cynthian was taking the brunt of the sun-fury, but Carlyle was too sticken to speak or to help. Fragments of cynthian thought flew like shrapnel: Ruhinned... ss-l-how... de-h-mise! The rest was lost -- too fleeting -- but Carlyle heard a gasp of astonishment as Cephean jerked out of the net and found relief. The fusors were dreadfully inefficient -- but they worked, and they sustained an image of directed movement, so that Carlyle gradually found himself regaining a semblance of control. The surface of the Reid came toward him as the ship rose, then fogged, and sputtered in the jet-flare. When at last the fusors shut down the ship's keel drifted once again in the mainflow of the Reid came toward him as the held by a tangled remnant of the control web. Carlyle set the stabilizers and withdrew, barely conscious, from the net. He sensed the cynthian nearby, jittery and numb and bewildered -- but he was too exhausted to look. His veins flowed with lead, and before he could rise from the seat he felt his eyelids close, and he sank helplessly into unconsciousness. Images of the quarm fluttered naggingly, incessantly. A strange communion, cynthian heads bowed in a circle, whiskers twitching -- thoughts fleeing selves, joining regrouping intermixing like buffeting winds -- shared dreams in strange places, in imaginary bodies. The images were flavored with distaste, with bile-sour anger towards others in the quarm, with resentment at bewas not the quarm a relief, an escape from identity, a boon to a weary, confined mind? Was it not natural? Why did Cephean so want to be alone? Carlyle awoke confused and dizzy. He focused with difficulty on his cabin walls as he tried to recover the recent past. Recollections filtered fuzzily into his brain; he had awakened -- years ago, it seemed -- exhausted on the bridge, and had stumbled to his cabin and bunk. He had slept -- how long? -- two shipdays. Jesus. Memories, dreams -- he had picked up more from Cephean than he had realized. The flying -- Lord, trying to fly as four-riggers-in-one! It might well have killed him. Rousing himself, he went to the commons, ate ravenously. Afterwards he drew a mug of hermit ale, and sat -- knowing that he should go look for Cephean. Before he had done so, however, memory-faces rejoined him and held conference. Skan, shaking his head: "No flow, Gev. You've got to bring that plump cat right into the rigging -- wring him out, make him respond. "Thanks, Skan. Care to help?" Skan, smiling now: "I have, Gev." Janofer, flowing and concerned: ' 'Perhaps you should think of trying alone, Gev. Or if you must, use the dreampool." The dreampool -- frightening enough with another human; machine-assisted intimacy. Now, with an alien? "Just like the old days? That's how you've always spoken to me." "I've tried, Gev -- you know that. But always there was something that wouldn't connect between us." " How many times did you try. Twice? Three times?" "Which nearly broke me. It wouldn't work, Gev -- it just wouldn't." "Hm." " You are a beautiful friend, though." " Thanks ." "You're coming up on the Flume, soon, Gev. Don't be thinking about us. We'll help all we can, but if you depend on us, you'll bum yourself out." Skan: "The cat -- you've got to get the cat working with you or you'll never make it." "He acts suicidal." Legroeder, from somewhere, looked up and nodded, but distractedly, as if his real thoughts were elsewhere. Janofer, whispering softly, drew close and brushed him with a kiss, a breath of moist wind touching him from afar, and then withdrew, her voice a fading note on the air. Carlyle stirred restlesslyAfter a time he rose and left the commons, thinking to find Cephean and -- what? Okay, time to act like a commander and start kicking ass. Right. Cephean was not in his quarters. Carlyle stood in the starboard-main corridor under the humming brushed-bronze stabilizer arch, and -- feeling slightly silly -- considered where to look next. What might Cephean have been doing while he slept? Unsupervised, the cynthian might have gotten into almost anything. The bridge was deserted. Likewise the commons and communications coop. Worried, Carlyle began a more systematic search -- dreampool theater, engineering, utility storage, exercise room, lifecontrol, airlock, conversion room. He checked the fluxfield chamber without entering; the suits were all in place, and the monitors assured him that the pile shield had not been breached. That left only the cargo hold. Carlyle was not sure what all Sedora carried but much of it was bound to be valuable. He went below and looked. "Damn you, Cephean!" he breathed. Number three cargo port was ajar, and a tattered bit of something lay on the deck -- a broken riffmar leaf. Carlyle stepped inside. The hold was gloomy, and webbed with crisscrossed anchoring strands, from which were suspended Lifecybe organic computor cores, each in a fried-egg shaped cradle with umbilical to a central support unit. Each was worth a fortune. Cephean was on the far side of the hold, hunched over one of the cradles. Carlyle started that way -- and was stopped in midstride, mesmerized by a flashing light which danced in a quick series of circles about the room -- external stimulation for the cores. He shook his head, and hurried across the compartment. Cephean looked up at him. "What are you doing here?" he demanded, struggling to sound diplomatic; he looked down at the riffmar, who rustled quickly around behind Cephean. (He sensed disconcertment, frustration .) The cynthian hissed noncommittally, his whiskers curling. "Caharlel -- hyor com-ffusors nohwork." Carlyle looked at him narrowly. "Of course not. They'll work when they're installed in computor tanks. Right now they're just being kept alive for shipment." "D-heds now," Cephean insisted. Carlyle froze, eyeing the cynthian. What was that supposed to mean? He shoved past Cephean and looked into the cradle behind him. The neural tissue, visible under a clearplex dome, quivered faintly; it was dark and smoky, and a glance at the cradle monitor confirmed that the core was dead. He whirled. "Did you do this?" he said. The cunthian's face twitched, unreadable. "Hi h-make missthake," he hissed. "You what!" Carlyle shouted. "What did you try to do?" He glared, caught the cynthian's eye, held it insistently. "What did you do?" he repeated. Cephean sputtered, and pawed his nose. He half-snarled an answer, incomprehensible. The riffmar lurched toward Carlyle, then retreated. Carlyle asked again, insisted. Cephean cast his gaze about anxiously and cried, "Hiss whoodens hansser h-me!" He hunched fearfully, mournfully, and shook his head. Carlyle checked other nearby units, and found one more ruined. "Why are you wrecking my cargo?" he demanded, almost shouting now. Cephean gave in, and sputtered finally that he had been trying to question the computor cores. He had thought that they were hiding something, information of some kind, about the ship. Carlyle was incredulous. "Why didn't you ask me what you wanted to know? This is just a mass of nerve tissue -- works when it's part of a unit. It's delicate! You can't pump it as if it were a ship's computer. What did you want to know, anyway?' ' He looked around disgustedly. The two cores were expensive losses -- not that it would matter, if they failed to reach port. More appalling was Cephean 's lack of good sense, or of understanding of the human systems aboard ship. "Damn it!" he barked, making a decision. "We're going to get some things straight. Right now." The cynthian looked startled. (A jolt of surprise, apprehension, crossed Carlyle's mind.) "I'm not going to like this any more than you," he said determinedly, "but I think at last we're going to understand one another." The riffmar squealed; he glared at them. "Follow me." Cephean followed him out of the hold, shaking and hissing. The dreampool theater was lighted only by a deepsea gloom. The pool, circular and still, was enclosed by a smooth, padded ledge; the water radiated a sourceless, ocean-blue light. The depth of the water was visually indeterminable -- the water appeared simply to merge with the inner wall, and only the glow could be seen in its depths. Good place to dive and never come up, Carlyle thought; he adjusted the lighting and the sensory responders. "Whass?" Cephean queried suspiciously, circling about the pool and coming back to eye Carlyle nervously. "Dreampool," Carlyle said. "Used by rigger-crews to help develop rapport. I didn't want to use it, because it was designed, really, for human minds -- and frankly it can be pretty damn personal. "Well, we're going to test it between a cynthian and a human." Cephean 's flickering eyes seemed to turn inward. His whiskers writhed; and the riffmar shuddered sympathetically. "H-no-o, no-o!" he hissed. He drew himself into a defensive crouch and glared at Carlyle stubbornly. "You'd rather float around in space for the rest of eternity?" Carlyle asked sternly. "Well maybe you would for some reason, but how'd you like to drift forever having to look at me until you die? Eh? This ship goes no further until we've used the dreampool, or given it a good try." Cephean shivered. "Damn it, no arguments," said Carlyle, wondering how far he dared assert himself. His determination must have been plain, because the cynthian acquiesced, muttering. He explained die procedure, and they both seated themselves at the pool's edge, ninety degrees apart from one another. "Look straight into the water, now, and let your mind follow your eyes. Listen to my thoughts and do exactly as I do." Gazing into the pool, Carlyle studied the luminous surface, and allowed his other thoughts and feelings to subside. The water was faintly perturbed beneath the surface, so that the light emanation wavered subtly; after a moment it was the variations rather than the light itself he watched -- shimmerings in the cool bath of sapphireemerald. The flickering of an open flame but without the warmth -- it was alive, and it reached out to him and entered his eyes with the tranquilizing energy of an alert, probing mind... The first thoughts were his own memories. The death of the Sedora's crew -- sudden, terrible, the cauterizing radiation of the Flux-space abscess flaring through the rig like a bursting aurora, the scramblings of communications, the clanging alarms that brought him running from a maintenance chore in the fluxfield chamber, only to find the smoking bodies of his crewmates, dead at their stations. The shock, horror, revulsion. Later, garbed still in a chamber suit, dragging the four bodies to the converter chute, struggling not to lose his grip on himself, not at least until he had done what he had to do. Afterwards he could let himself go to pieces, shudderingly relive the horror, wondering by what fortune he was alive. And then, later still, watching the healers slowly, slowly regenerate the neural foam in the rigger seats, so that he might try to fly. Before disaster, though, was departure; unhappily boarding Sedora at Deusonport Field, with mixed and hurt feelings. He wanted to fly they said that being helper-rigger on a slowship might improve him, then helper-rigger he would be. Deusonport Field, a bit cloudy, green hills and forest about the perimeter, should be a cheery sight on return. Relaxed, amidst the commerce of the Aeregian planets. out of Jarvis on Chaening's World: Legroeder and Skan as usual; and Janofer, never quite stationary -- her moods changing like aircurrents, never merely buoyant or petulant or contemplative or depressed; always a mixture, and her attention rarely focusing long on any one of her friends, but ever shifting from one to another to somewhere beyond the ken of any. Why could he not have been closer to them? And...earlier?...later?... the flight-shell of another spacecraft: the battery of riffmar in turmoil, working to confused commands while he fought to control his fury and discover what was wrong. The riffmar were maddeningly inept, never mind that they only responded to his control. Mindless plants ! he shrieked silently, but it was not a curse, only a statement of fact. Why had he come so far to get in trouble, why had he let Comeph get to him like that? A riffmar, confused by his shaky control, stumbled close to him; he swatted it squarely with his left paw, flattening it. Six more alive, by damn, and they'd better start flying. But they wouldn't, not unless he himself determined what was stalling the craft, and instructed them. If only he knew more about these things! (Strange, to be flying without knowing...) Bring my syrup, he ordered, and glared at the two riffmar scurrying to comply, wrestling between them a large stalk for him to chew. He took it moodily in his jaws, and sent the two off to tend the riffmar-bud cultures, and then to feed themselves. As they wriggled their twiglike feet into the nutrient beds, Cephean turned his thoughts elsewhere, and brooded on his plight. He had left in a huff, before his time, taking a space shell from the docks without checking or preparing. Bad judgement, admittedly, but who would have thought that a simple shell could malfunction? Starflight was so bloody easy -- use riffmar to run the shell, nothing complicated, and let your mind guide the ship, like the interdreaming of the quarm, but with no broil-damn other minds cluttering up your thoughts. Lord-o, he had needed a break from Comeph's incessant nagging, never letting him rest a moment without conforming to the quarm -- mix, mix, mingle, never leave a comer of anyone unexplored. Become a plant, become an alien, broil-dammit was he so strange, that he could not stand it? Ooh, just to be free of them! Lord-o, that's why he had fled, but not to make it permanent. (Did they offend? Is that why you do not wish company?) ( Whass ?) He was stalled, stalled. Why would the damn thing not fly! Seated in his sunken dias, he grilled the riffmar on their findings (though they had been untended, so how could they find anything?), and he hurled abuse at their quivering forms, and finally leaped screaming, scattering them in fear. Odomilkl he shrieked, and sucked on the pods with a vengeance while the riffmar huddled in a comer. Nothing like pungent odomilk -- but still, he must attend to the riffmar. They could perform certain chores by rote, but hardly what he was now demanding -- and certainly he had to be careful with the six that were left. Perhaps there was a maintenance recorder. Humming, he set them to locating the memory-cube and then obeying the cube's silent recitation. Hey-now, the thoughtflow amp seemed to work, so maybe the controls were just out of kilter. This was more like it -- a pity he hadn't thought of the recorder sooner, but after all he was a forest-singer and not a craft-tech. Comeph -- that sotrotted nuisance would be laughing if he knew. His bloody arrogance could make anyone leave home. Comeph, with his stinking empathetic grin, diving like a fool into the quarm, dragging you off on a mindlark whether invited or not. Lord-o-lord, to be rid of him was worth even this! A riffmar peeked shyly at him, awaiting recognition. Useless plants! He recognized with a fast swat. Hah! Two with one blow! But he needed those two to fly! He prodded them agitatedly, but it was no use, they were dead. He sprang to all fours in alarm, his whiskers curling and twisting. What had they come to tell him? The four remaining riffmar huddled at the control tree, and he approached cautiously. What had they learned? Hsss. They quivered, struggling to formulate a coordinated reply. Hssshell ffly... h-nneed more uss. One of them collapsed, from the strain, and the others bent and picked it up and carried it to the nutrient bed. Hsssss. That was it, then; he was finished. He had caught the image, brief but sufficient -- the controls had been upset by a passing storm; with the help of the memory cube, the problem had been corrected, and now all he needed were six riffmar to operate the controls. And all he had left were four. Rage boiled slowly in his stomach. He could not fly with only four, and he could not speed the growth of the buds; he could switch on a distress beacon, but no one would hear it -- he had flown purposely beyond cynthian space. He was finished, and he knew it. He was embarrassed beyond description. A low wail emerged from his throat, and through a haze he saw the riffmar shrink from his anger. Damn them! Hissing, spitting, he leaped at the control tree, rebounded with a crash of breaking elements, and launched himself at the riffmar. Two fell to his flailing paws, but in his madness he lost all thought, and the other two were able to flee shrieking to safety behind the nutrient bed. He forgot them, and bounded back over his dias, skidded, and slammed broadside into the wall. Stunned, he staggered away and hurled himself yowling into the control tree again, where he smashed amidst splinters and tumbled, battered, to the deck. Much later, on awakening, he tore savagely into his stock of bramleaf, and gorged himself on odomilk. He ignored the riffmar, ignored the broken controls, ignored his shell's warbling distress call, and concentrated solely on glutting himself to his limit on bramleaf and odomilk -- and not long afterward he sank groaning onto the dias, laid his head upon his tail, and slept. (My god, such violence! No discipline! It's no wonder you can't coordinate with me in the net.) Ffsscrewhyou who kannnoss kheef hyor mind h-where hiss be-hlongss. Ffsscrew, Caharleel.) Awakening, he hissed in pain, his stomach a hard knot of burning complaint. His fur was matted and disheveled; he wanted badly oh so badly to regurgitate, or failing that to die. He fumed in silent agony, his eyes watery and nearly blind, thoughts orbiting one another in meaningless jokes. Could he maybe work the little knobs himself, with his big, clumsy paws? Yeh. Ooh, to throw the fiercest tantrum in history! But he could hardly move for the cramps in his abdomen. When his head cleared somewhat, he turned grimly to his final challenge: how to arrange for himself a classical demise. He looked balefully at the riffmar, sssking in the nutrient bed, and violence stirred once more in his blood. No, he must spare them, for the moment. Had he grounds for demise? Dereliction in space was embarrassing, to be sure. Depressing, frustrating, infuriating. But was it humiliation enough? He could not be certain. What he really needed, for a demise that would put even Corneph to shame, was to be seen a victim rather than merely stupid. (Demise? What... ?) Later, mulling and gnawing at his tail, he was startled by a shell. That buzzing outside -- was there something out there? Fasti nated, terrified, he listened. What, what! There were thumps, small quiet ones moving in a progression around the shell. Lord-o, lord-o, was space going crazy? He listened with his mind, and nearly spat with surprise. An alien walked on the outside of his shell. Rescue! Frightened stormy panic flashed suddenly, and ebbed. Gathering his wits, he sent the two riffmar to ready the airlock to receive the alien. What better humiliation could possibly be asked? Now, with assurance at last, he began to plan a truly graceful demise. Cephean, you mean you came aboard this ship, meaning from the start to -- ? Fffssilly ssfhool! Hnow Hyou haff h-made h-me ffssay iss! But I'm trying to help you get home again. Ffssthupid! H-noss h-my home-ss. You could find a way home all right. Is your humiliation the only reason you want to destroy this ship? Wouldn't you rather go back to laugh at Corneph or something? Cephean, lurching, almost crashing through the separation layer: No, no! Noss Corneph hin mi-mind! Carlyle, wondering if he was the only blockhead around: Cephean -- I didn't rescue you to embarrass you, or even just to save you. I needed help myself. There's no humiliation in offering help -- and that's what l want you to do, offer me help. The separation layer shimmered like a curtain, and Cephean brought his face close, peering at Carlyle. Whass h-about hyor frenss hyou halways haff? Oh, them. Yes. They're different, I thought you knew -- memory, imagination -- sort of like your quarm, l guess. Hyou heff no quarm! Scornfully. Or was that envy? No. But we like to think we have something like it; though sometimes wishful thinking is as close as we come. Except for the dreampool. And that can be scary -- but it helps us work better in the rig, afterwards, and that's why you're here. H-wy hyor ffrens noss he If? That's the whole point. That was all me in the net flying -- and my crazy imagination. Maybe I could do it again, but it would never get me through the Flume. Whass iss Flume? Again? Here: The Flume. Breakup of the Reid Current, spawner of a dozen new ones. Riggers passing at peril -- like ancient sonarmen -- sounding the depths carefully, guessing at reflection layers, scattering layers, deep transmission layers. Change was the only constant, and things could happen fast. A whirlpool luring a ship into its vortex; a waterspout lifting a ship and pinwheeling it to tumble lifeless back into the sea; white-water rapids smashing a ship and flinging the pieces to the heavens. Or -- the Flume mastered and sailed. H-we kann noss! Yes we can, dammit. Ready for a demonstration in cooperation? The cynthian sputtered in confusion. Whass? The setting changed abruptly. They were suddenly both standing on a hillside meadow, facing each other under a beaming sun. The meadow lay part way upland in a range of rugged hills. Below and around it sprawled tufts and cushions of forest. Whass! Cephean was both astonished and indignant and his copper eyes flashed like buttons in his black velvet face. This, Carlyle perceived, was a bit too much like the tricks old Corneph used to pull. Well, too bad. This is your world, isn't it Cephean? Hyiss. Suspiciously, almost angrilyCarlyle nodded. The dreampool drew as much from Cephean as from him; what the cynthian didn't know was that neither of them was in control. There was a sound of giggles, badly suppressed. Two riffmar poked their heads out of the grass, and sat up hiccuping. Another sound -- a hissing chortle higher on the hill. Corneph was watching them delightedly; he looked like Cephean, only smaller, and with a single brown streak across his black, furry breast. (Carlyle sensed sudden malevolence from Cephean.) Not far from Comeph, Janofer sat serenely watching; and presumably Skan and Legroeder were somewhere about. That's the whole cast, Cephean. Carlyle turned about, scuffled his feet in the turf, breathed great lungfuls of air, and gazed at the almost torturously green countryside. Will you show me around? he said to the cynthian. Cephean spat and sputtered in perplexity, and finally pawed his nose and allowed, Hyiss, ss-all riss. He led the way downhill, trotting on all fours with the riffmar at his heels. Carlyle followed him into the woods, lost him momentarily, and then found him again unconcernedly waiting for him beneath a stand of slender, smooth-trunked trees. Sshtopf. He stopped. The cynthian sat impassively, his molten eyes wide. The riffmar became very still. A sound passed through the air like a flying shadow, a pure musical note. Or was it in his thoughts? Carlyle could not tell, even when the note was first repeated, and then followed by several others of different pitch, and different timbre. Notes began to fall like rain, reedy mournful sounds, and crystal tinkling belltones, and a shower of melohoms, and a skyful of sounds for which he had no name. There seemed to be no melody. But as he listened another kind of pattern developed in his mind: visual, of colors, of blending, sagging clays, of red sands tumbling from cliffs; and the smell of fresh-cut grass and broken cedar. His vision blurred, and instead of Cephean he saw a community of cynthians working, directing riffmar, while the larger delmar were busy at construction. A cacophony of silent thoughts and commands made him cringe and the vision blurred but he glimpsed a quarm, a circle of cynthians, their normal cacophony subdued to an intense mumble. Again: cynthians at study (investigating what?), their sparkling eyes gazing into oddly shaped crystals. Hum of probing thoughts. The vision broke. The music-rain slowed, trickled wetly, and stopped. He looked at Cephean in amazement; the cynthian now sat beneath a cleverly woven bower of trees, looking utterly relaxed. Carlyle blinked. Had the trees themselves bent to Cephean 's designs? The music had engaged him so, he had literally seen nothing happen. You did that? he whispered. Hyiss. The visions -- had they been a deliberate distraction, or merely an undertone, background noise? He never got the chance to ask. A boisterous scream shattered the forest stillness. He looked around, startled. An enormous flying beast coasted over the woods and descended, crashing through the trees, and landed on the forest floor nearby with a crump. It was a koryf, a dragonlike creature from Garsoom's Haven. Carlyle had seen one once, and had been terrified -- as he was now. The beast screamed again, and spat acid saliva that fell smoking among the trees. The creature was hideous, crumpled and grey, and it stank, even from a distance. Whassssl Cephean hissed shrilly. Carlyle explained, and added quickly that the creature would quite likely try to kill them. This one came from my memory, he thought woefully. The koryf beat its wings furiously, and lurched toward the two with a cry like a sigh of death. Carlyle back-pedaled further into the trees, but Cephean did not move. approaching beast, seemingly convinced that if a riffmar would respond, so would a koryf. The koryf lunged spitting and wailing at the much smaller cynthian. Cephean fled after Carlyle. You can't stand against it, Carlyle said stupidly, as he huddled against a tree. Cephean just glared at him. The riffmar scrambled past and did not stop. Carlyle gestured frantically. We can't outrun it, not far, and we can't fight it. We'll have to outwit it. Sss-howl It's stupid, do you understand that? It's telepathic, but it's stupid. The koryf was crashing through the trees towards them. His words spilled out in a jumble. We've got to distract it -- it can only concentrate on one thing at a time. If we each try to hold its attentiofi we can confuse it. Then -- jesus, I don't know what then, but if we don't do that much it will kill us for sure. Somewhere, Corneph cackled a cynthian cackle. Hyou bross heem Caharleel! Cephean protested angrily, not saying whether he meant Corneph or the koryf. Carlyle shoved Cephean violently, and scrambled himself as the koryf smashed with beating wings through the last shielding trees. Urging Cephean on, Carlyle stumbled to gain some distance. He gasped and leaned heavily against a tree as Cephean, beside him, snarled at the beast and then turned to resume his complaint. Carlyle was saved answering as Janofer interceded soundlessly from wherever she watched. He had no choice, Cephean. Carlyle looked up in amazement. Gev can only get so much help from us, and no more. We are not so real as we seem. But you can help, Cephean, if only you will try. Do what he says now -- you must! Her voice was soft as always but urgent. Bitterness and gratitude rose in his throat, in his nostrils at her compassionate and humiliating presence. Cephean snorted, but looked off into space, thinking, pawing at his whiskers. Finally he ducked his head around to face Carlyle. Whass h-we d-hoo? The koryf screamed, as it deciphered their location and started smashing its way forward again. Trees began toppling terrifyingly, and gusts of foul wind filled the woods. You run to the right. I'll run left!. Carlyle shouted. You've got to keep its attention, and I'll do the same, keep it confused. Now GO! The tree before them was suddenly unrooted in the koryf s jaws. Before it could drop the tree to attack, Carlyle and Cephean bolted in opposite directions. The koryf hesitated, and turned to follow .Cephean, roaring. Carlyle began jumpbut when the koryf gave no sign of listening he took a deep breath and charged after it. There were no stones on the ground, so as he approached the beast he scooped up clods of earth and hurled them at the koryf s head. He missed, but found a broken branch and threw that as the koryf snapped close to where Cephean crouched. The branch glanced from its forehead, and it swung about in rage, lifting its wings like tree-bowers, and screamed at Carlyle. Carlyle turned and ran. When he had gained a little distance, he looked back. The koryf had begun following him, but he could see Cephean in the distance, seemingly stalking the beast. The koryf crashed dangerously close, and he could smell its acrid breath, but he waited, ready to run, thinking, come to me, come to me. An image of raw, red meat came unbidden into his mind and he stiffened, thinking he was intercepting the koryf s thoughts, but the koryf stopped suddenly, and wavered. It twisted its head to look at Cephean, and when it did so, Carlyle filled his mind with the same image of raw meat. The koryf turned back, spitting, but did not attack. An image of a wounded, struggling animal appeared, and the koryf turned again toward the cynthian. Carlyle replied in kind. After a minute of confusion, the koryf suddenly made up its mind, and it charged after Cephean. Carlyle ran after it, hurling dirt and branches, and screaming. He had to chase it some distance before it stopped and turned, and they could begin their game of confusion once more. This time they held it longer. Carlyle called encouragement to Cephean as they toyed the beast back and forth. When the spell finally broke, the koryf turned on Carlyle and snapped so close he could hear the teeth clack in his ear, and he ran and did not stop running until he was out of the trees and in the meadow. Stupid! he realized immediately as the koryf broke out of the trees right behind him. But Cephean appeared at the edge of the woods and screamed a mental picture of bloody, gutted animal. When the koryf hesitated, Carlyle hurled a stone, and knocked it on the head. The koryf vacillated. Carlyle thought of a snoring mouse, concentrated all his thoughts on the image of the tiny, sleepy animal. He felt the image reinforced, as Cephean took it up; and suddenly the koryf merely looked confused. Out of the cover of the trees, the beast was as frightening as before, but uglier and less mythical. Carlyle thought of sleep, of peace, of satiation. He imagined himself after gluttonous eating, and that thought too was reinforced. The koryf, after a while, folded its wings and settled down to watch the two from a more comfortable position. It began to look like a shriveled, big-jawed elephant minus trunk and ears. Lowering its weight to the ground, it seemed to decide that there was no point in making hasty decisions. Two minutes later, it was snoring loudly and vulgarly, and Cephean was studying Carlyle with flickering, astonished eyes. Janofer smiled from the edge of the forest. Corneph appeared also and hissed grudgingly. That seemed to please Cephean. Carlyle was not sure just what the cynthian was thinking. But if Cephean had believed Janofer, did any of the rest matter? Carlyle lifted his eyes and looked across the dreampool with unutterable fatigue. His neck was cramped, his arms and legs were sodden, and he was drenched with sweat. He looked at Cephean, who was grumbling and stretching with far less than his usual energy. Carlyle climbed down from the ledge. He nodded to the cynthian, but neither of them felt like speaking. The last day before Sedora reached the end of the Reid, Carlyle suddenly found himself taking a liking to the riffmar; he whiled an hour playfully boxing with them, and later, as they were sunning themselves under a lamp in the nutrient box, he came around and squirted them with a water bottle. They giggled hoarsely, and seemed to enjoy it. Cephean said nothing about this, and Carlyle wondered whether it was really the riffmar he played with, or an amused cynthian. He could not be sure; he rather hoped it was the riffmar. They practiced once more in the net, and Cephean was cooperative but unenthusiastic. Carlyle did not press the issue. Fortunately, the Flume was coming upon them quickly, and the time for worry was over. They would either make it, or they would not. Carlyle took a last draught of hermit ale, frothy and cooly refreshing, and then he summoned Cephean from a last pod of odomolk, and led him to the bridge. He could not guess at his crewmate's thoughts. The net was flushed with a slight excess of power, a result of Carlyle's final retuning of the fluxpile. He flexed his spidery wings gently to bum off the extra energy. Finally he took a last few moments to settle himself calmly and alertly in the net, and to glance about him. The Reid was running fast, and grumbling as it accelerated toward its end. Ready? he asked. Hyiss, answered Cephean. The current became a powdery, tumbled ski slope, and they were speeding downhill into a snowy, evening mist. What lay below was obscured. He folded the net beneath him into skis, and they thundered pleasantly through the snow. He flexed and bounced through the banks; Sedora was heavy, but so far she was riding well. There was no way of guessing when the vision might change or how. Was the cynthian viewing a similar scene? Cephean, what do you see ? How does it feel? Cephean homm-humm'd in reply, and Carlyle caught a stunning glimpse through his senses -- a fleeting landscape, prismatic and crystalline, and dustily wet. And downhill speed, growing. Carlyle was reassured. H-you wanss chahange, Caharleel? Cephean queried nervously... No, this is fine for now. Cephean was uneasy, then, but seemed alert and ready to assist. Little more could be expected. The speed picked up even more, and the snow was turning harder; the skis rumbled louder beneath him, and began to shimmy and skitter on the run. The light on the snowscape was fading into twilight, and he began to lose some of his confidence. Without warning, he thumped into a mogul and was slammed violently into the air, his bones quivering from the impact, his breath sharp and scared. The ship's mass took him off balance and twisted him sideways and off keel as he fell -- and it was Cephean who brought them down safely, his heavy tail swinging outboard to counterbalance Carlyle's torque. They landed hard, skidding and swaying, and swooped onward down the trail. Good work. Thanks. Yiss. The air began to mist, then, and the snow softened under the runners. The image was disintegrating; the snow wilderness was blurring into fleeting, hazy clouds. And then the current dropped, shifted, and turbulence grabbed at them like vacuum. They had been dumped into the Flume. Carlyle pulled his arms and his breath taut, and fought not to become excited. The ship was plummeting uncontrolled, and he had no idea whether he should try to slow it or steer it or leave it alone. Ride it easy until something deve lopes, he called, finding security in the sound of the command. Wind was rushing deafening at his ears. Whass haffenss? he heard in an urgent, frightened whisper. I'm not sure. The turbulent winds were forming ahead into visions of glowing streamers; chaotic, thundering, furiously interclashing. Their downward fall sloped into forward motion again, and an ungodly racket shook the ship's frame until it groaned in the buffeting net. Sedora plunged toward the center of the fury -- and something was changing. Another vision, Carlyle shouted, startled by a new and thunderous roar in the net. A noise of crashing water threatened to shatter his ears. Waterfall! We've got to ride this one, or it will break us apart! he bellowed, not knowing if he was heard. He dug his arms into the hurtling water, felt Cephean doing the same. The ship crashed thundering through foaming spray, dashed amid shining boulders -- and shot over the edge. It dropped like a cannonball (skirting how many light years? Carlyle wondered ludicrously). Ready to bring the stern about! They would have to impact in the cataract basin nose-first, or the shock would demolish them; but they would have to come about under their own power or the wrenching turn would accomplish the same thing. He would have to lift the nose as Cephean kicked the stem... Sedora slammed into the basin like an ungodly pile-driver, an exploding jack-hammer, and smashed Carlyle's thoughts and teeth and steel neural arms, and sent pinwheels of fire through shocking darkness. Carlyle wrenched before blacking, and Cephean kicked, and the ship screamed through its skeleton and its skin but refused to yield to the torrential currents. Then it bent like a maddened porpoise, and rocketed shrieking out of the watercyclone and coasted straight, shivering, intact. Carlyle forced his eyes to see again and gaped in amazement that the madness had passed and the way ahead lay sparkling, clear -- as smooth as a river. We cleared it! he shouted. Hyiss yiss yiss! Where h-we gho? the cynthian burbled, still frightened and delighted at finding himself alive, and open and generous enough to let Carlyle see all of that. To the Banks, to Cunnilus Banks, you sonofabitching cat! he yelled joyously at the cat-like being. But all was not yet over. Sedora still scooted and danced and dashed, and Carlyle and Cephean were jerked from their delight to hold the ship on course, in its pathway among scattering and shifting currents that were the Flume breaking into its upwellings and downwellings and dying threads of energy. The effort was grueling, and the rig strained and stretched between the two; and once Carlyle shouted angrily and brutally at his alien companion, and once Cephean in furious backlash almost slewed the .ship into a sulking dive. But neither could have managed alone, and Carlyle drew often on Cephean's support, and even relied on the cynthian's vision when his own grew blurry in weariness. The currents tore at them and nagged them, but in the end they succeeded, and Sedora hurtled coasting out of the shifting winds, and Cunnilus Banks glittered before them like a starry, snowy hill -- bright and welcoming after their journey. Carlyle pointed Sedora' s nose carefully, deciding on Garsoom's Haven. (Gammon's Annex, the original destination, was too far abeam, and what the hell, he could show Cephean a real live koryf.) Then he settled back in the net and relaxed, watching the powdery drift of the stars and chatting a bit with the cynthian. Not a bad piece of flying, eh, Cephean? H-you kidss h-me, whass, yiss, Caharleel? Why h-yor ffrens no helff? Hi needss broil-damn odomilk, iss whass hi needs. Ho, you weasel, I think I'll teach you to drink ale. Maybe a spot of whiskey, no? H-no, yach! H-you ffoison h-me, yiss? Look at it this way, Cephean, I'll bet it's something Corneph never tried. Ssrue, fferhaffs, yiss. It's settled, then. Just to show no hard feelings. Yorgh. Hey whass? H-yor frenss h-again? Carlyle, hardly aware of the drift of his own thoughts, was as startled as the cynthian. Janofer, clear and beautiful in the net, was staring at the two with mock-beady eyes. What's this, Gev? You two are starting to sound like old friends; vicious. Okay, okay. Don't be embarrassed. It's nice. Yeh. Enough's enough. Cephean, you ready for that ale? (Janofer withdrew back into his mind, grinning.) H-you kray-ssee. Grinning himself, Carlyle pulled gently from the net and rubbed his eyes thoughtfully. The road ahead seemed clear, and he was ready whether Cephean was or not.  Only on the Moon can you learn what ' homesick ' really means! By a vote of #-# the House today approved the so-called "Moohball Rider" attached to the National Lotteries Act (S.#), a bill authorizing the construction of a domed stadium at Lunar Base Two (Copernicus). Construction is scheduled to begin in January, Proponents of the measure have argued that once the facility is functioning, the costs will be recouped in the first year of operation alone. Opponents of the measure, while failing to come up with the votes necessary to defeat the bill in its entirety, nonetheless were able to delay a decision on the financing of the # ground stations stipulated in the bill before the Senate. Recent advances in satellite holography are credited with assuring the passage of the measure, which was defeated when first proposed in #. Thus, what began as simple recreation for the first lunar construction crews, will become what one Congressional aide called " a significant source of revenue' ' in the future. " Once you've seen your first moonball shot," said the aide, " you'll know what all the excitement is about." Senator Steven Grange (D-lll.) who steered the bill through the Upper House, put it more simply: " Betting on moonball will replace sex as the national pastime," he said. The New York Times April #, # Silas saw the boy first thing. He was out against the bam shooting baskets, even though it was an hour past sundown and the ground was still wet. A good sign. Silas pulled his mud-spattered Pontiac into the little wom-down shelf by the front porch where the forsythia was and got out, avoiding puddles. The boy had spotted him. He stood with the ball cradled loosely on his hip, watching, as Silas approached cautiously, looking at the ground, not wanting to get his shoes muddy. "Howdy." The boy nodded. "Ma's over to the house, watching TV." "It ain't your ma I came to see," said Silas, smiling. "It's you." The boy frowned, his pale blue eyes blinking rapidly. Silas could almost feel the thinking going on under the thatch of bright red hair. With a detached professional eye, he noted the thick legs, the muscular buttocks and torso, the stubby arms. The coach over at Culver was right, Silas reflected; The kid looked slow as a freight train, and he couldn't have been an inch over five-foot-nine. Perfect. "I hear you can shoot," Silas said. The boy shrugged. "Are you a scout?" Without answering, Silas walked closer to the basket. The ground fronting it was packed so hard it was almost playable, even after all the rain. And it was a shooter's basket, for sure. The way the backboard came out from the bam on its rig of two-by-fours, there wasn't enough to drive the baseline, and someone making a straightaway layup would have to break his momentum quickly in order to avoid crashing into the side of the bam itself. And the apron in front of the basket had been worn smooth of grass for a distance of about thirty feet in all directions. Thirty feet. Couldn't beat that. "Play you a game of horse," Silas said. The boy smiled, and tossed Silas the ball. He fingered its slick, grimy surface gingerly, trying not to show his distaste. He was a city boy himself, had learned his basketball on the playgrounds and the ball was all-important, where it was dribbling and moves and leaping that counted. You had to have a ball with some tread left for that. Whereas a shooter -- He threw the ball back to the boy and wiped his hands on his pants. "Shoot," he said. When it was over, Silas turned and walked back to the car. The boy trailed behind him, curious, wondering what was coming next. Silas reached into the back seat for his gym shoes, put them on without speaking. The boy watched thoughtfully, chewing on his lip. "What school you with?" "No school," Silas said, shortly, and walked back to the court, avoiding puddles. "I thought maybe you was from State," the boy said. "They sent me a letter and all." "I guess I know what you thought," Silas said. "But you couldn't play basketball for State nor anyone else either, except maybe for some rinky-dink junior college." He watched the hurt come into the boy's eyes, pleased. It was a good sign. It meant that in spite of all the countless hours of dreaming, the boy already knew that what Silas was telling him was the truth. "I just whupped you in horse," the boy muttered. "I didn't miss a shot." "You're a shooter," Silas agreed. Then he allowed some of the old contempt to drift into his voice. "But you think they'd let you sit around the perimeter banging away from thirty feet at State? Shit! Besides, you've got about a D-plus average, ain't that right? Ain't no school going to touch nobody with a D-plus average. No way!" Silas watched the boy worry that one around in his mind a bit. Poor dumb kid; he'd probably been dreaming since he was ten about playing for some college, practiced from sunup to sunset, watched ball after ball settle in the cords, and never really got it through his mind that you can't play basketball after graduating from high school if you can't move ! Especially if you're barely five-foot-nine. "I heard they let you take summer courses." "Summer courses. Shit! Take all the goddamn summer courses you want. You're still gonna be pitching hay next fall for eight bucks an hour." Silas watched the hurt come back into the boys's face, but refused to let it touch him. Why should he? What he'd said had been God's honest truth, and if the boy didn't know it by now, he'd know it in the next five minutes, after Silas treated him to some sweet old playground moves. And it wasn't as if he'd come all the way from Richmond just to show the kid up, after all. The kid was a shooter. Goddamn, was he ever a shooter! He'd drawn nothing but twine in ten or twelve shots, none of them from closer than twenty feet, and that was worth something these days. So, depending on what happened in the next ten minutes, he'd make the kid an offer. That much was certain. Only question was, how little could he get him for... "If you ain't a scout, what are you anyway?" The boy was looking at the ground now, dribbling the ball slowly. "Didn't say I wasn't a scout," said Silas. "Said I wasn't with no school." He emphasized the last word with a meaningful raise of the eyebrow but he couldn't tell if the kid had noticed it or not. The ball continued to move back and forth between the packed dirt and the hand, ringing wheezily each time it struck. "What then?" The boy risked a glance at Silas. "Pro?" "How about you let me ask the questions?" said Silas. His left hand snaked out and grabbed the ball in mid-air. The boy looked up, blinking. "Play you a game of one-on-one. To eleven. Winners out." The boy regarded him blankly. "That means the same as -- ." "I know what it means," said the boy. Silas took the ball and let it hang low to the ground. He watched the boy's thick feet while making quick, feinting moves with his shoulders. When he saw the opening he moved quickly, dribbled twice, and went in for a layup, uncontested. Then he took the ball back, waiting fifteen feet from the basket while the boy shambled over, feinted, and went to his left for another layup. The next time he went right up the middle with his back to the basket and sank a short jump-shot. "That's three to nothing," Silas said, smiling. "You playing any defense?" The boy shrugged and slouched into position. This time when Silas went around him the ball hit a bump and he had trouble recovering before he flipped in a neat little reverse. "You walked," said the boy, and held out his hands for the ball. Eleven shots later Silas went back to the car and changed his shoes. The kid was one helluva shooter. Whenever Silas had crowded him the kid had just raised the ball over his head and lobbed it into the basket -- even with a hand in his face. "You like it around here?" Silas waved his arm at nothing in particular -- the rickety house with the screened-in porch, the bam, the culvert running uphill behind the house, the spindly forsythia, the sky. The boy raised his shoulders a fraction of an inch, dropped them. "How'd you like to go live somewhere else?" "Where?" "Oh, someplace where there's no birds singing, no ma inside watching the TV, no rain, none of this... green shit." "New York?" The veil had come off the boy's eyes, and he was watching Silas curiously. "Naw, not New York." To his surprise, Silas felt himself touching the boy, gently, on the shoulder. "Place I'm talking about ain't for everybody. There's some that like it, some that don't. But the money's good, and they got women there..." "Where?" said the boy, his eyes suddenly bright... Silas smiled. He had him. "You know damn well where," he said. "Let's go on in and talk to your ma." Abu was having the green dream again. He was in the air, floating. It was like being in a jungle, or a huge clump of cypress, where the trunks of the trees were invisible. Overhead, the canopy of high branches and leaves formed a kind of dome which curved suddenly to a short horizon. It was dark in there, greendark and quiet. He could not see the sun or sky. He floated over to where the sides curved down. In deep slowmotion he descended, touched ground lightly, then was up again. He strained upward, as a diver coming out of his tuck reaches for the water. He had never reached the top; gravity caught him this time too, snared him in its invisible loop, braked him, brought him down. He watched the canopy recede, then landed crouched on all fours. This time he felt the power surging in his legs, felt the correctness of the timing, the dream-like explosiveness of the leap. Upward he soared, toward the dome which trembled and chittered in an unseen wind. He knew he would reach it this time. This time he would bury his head in all that green witchery, laughing like a child again, and sing some of the old music before he came down. Hi-eeya epaduma wadda h'rumba toi... May my spirit assume the aspect of tall grasses... But when he reached the top he went straight on through. The woman heard him waking. She climbed down from her bunk, went to the pipe and filled it. "This time I was released," he said in his peculiar, singsong voice. "Always before I have been unable to come to the top. Always before I had thought only to feel the leaves before surfacing again. Even in dreaming I have understood that one must always surface." "Dreams are funny," she said. "I had great velocity," he said. "It was unexpected. I saw this moon when I came through." "Dreams are funny," she repeated, not knowing what else to say. She sensed his puzzlement, knew that for him a dream was a gift from the spirit world, a portent, perhaps a warning. A man must consider it, stalk its meaning like a hunter. Or it would end up stalking him instead. She, on the other hand, was from Philadelphia. The pipe was out. She took it from him, went to the jar, saw that they were almost out of kief. She would have to tell Sheffield in the morning. "I cannot riddle it," he said, finally. "It's probably just the old homesickness taking another form. Or maybe it was a way of reminding yourself that you're a shorttimer now. Your contract will be up in less than a year. You'll be going home." Abu smoked for a while in silence. Then he said, "In your country the people believe that when a man dies his spirit soars upwards, into the sky, away from the earth. In my country it is understood that the spirit instantly plunges into the heart of the earth itself, as if it were a creature of gravity, just like men. " "What's all this talk about dying," she chided. "You'd best come to bed now. You can puzzle on it in the morning." "It was this moon I saw," he said. Sheffield greeted moira with a smile and perfunctory hug, then motioned to the leatherette chair in front of his desk. It was always a pleasure to see her -- especially since she called on him infrequently, and, unlike some of the others, made reasonable requests. Kief for Abu, usually, or pills for herself. Either of which he could invariably deliver. As Operations Manager he had made a lot connections with the people over in Supply, and when the shipments came in it was only natural that a crate of oranges or an occasional steak would find their way to his office, to be dispensed with as he wished. No telling how many mutinies had been averted by a box of chocolate bars. "Let me guess," he said. "Abu's running out of dope." "Yes," she said. "He smoked the last of it this morning." "That makes twice this month, doesn't it?" "It's him that smokes it," she said wearily. "Not me." "Of course." He went to the safe and returned with a small cellophane packet, placing it carefully on the desk. She made no move to pick it up. "Is something the matter?" Moira drummed her fingers against the desk top, hesitated. "Yes," she said finally. "There is something the matter." Something in her tone made Sheffield pause. "Nothing insurmountable, I hope," he said carefully. Moira was a veteran, having spent as much time on the moon as Sheffield himself, and had witnessed any number of... disturbances. Without losing her sense of perspective. "Please, Moira. You must tell me if something is troubling you. It's my job, my responsibility to take care of such matters. You were about to say... ?" "Abu is homesick." "Abu is always homesick," he said, flatly. "What else?" "This time it's different. It's more serious. He's not getting enough sleep. He's tired, withdrawn." "It doesn't seem to have affected his performance. He's still number one on the court." Moira managed a small, wry smile. "And he's about number ten in bed. He hasn't slept with me for months." So that's it, he thought. Oh well... he'd had to deal with problems of the bedroom many times before. In fact, it was an area in which he took a special pride. All that was needed was some delicacy, a dash of diplomacy, and a slight rearrangement of the accomodations. Usually it was the players who came to him, complaining about their women, but even when the reverse was true he'd found some way of dealing with it. "I see," he said. "Well. You and Abu have been together for almost two years now. Perhaps it's time for a change." "A change isn't going to help him," she said, not looking up. "Maybe not. But it might help you." Moira looked amused. "Come off it, Shef. Since when have you really given a damn about me or any of the other women up here?" "I -- " "You don't have to explain or apologize. I mean we're both in the same line of business, right? Keep the boys happy and well-fed and well-fucked, and generally see to it that they show up on the court twice a week." "They are paid -- and paid very well -- for what they do on the court." He sighed. "Look. Of course I try and see that their needs are met. And that means seeing to it that everybody is as comfortable and happy as possible under the circumstances." "I know, I know." Her voice mocked him, gently. "We are all one family up here. We have our ups and downs, same as the New York Yankees. Jesus, Shef, the last thing I need is a pep talk." "I see." He tried, not very successfully, to assume a business-like tone. "What do you need, then?" She regarded him bleakly. "Honest to God, I don't know. I try to remind myself how much we're getting paid for all this. I remember all those checks piling up back home, and I think about the little place I'll get, up on the Hudson Bay. And it helps. It helps. I'm an American, and money helps." "But it does not help Abu. Is that it?" She shook her head slowly. "When I remind him that he's practically rich enough to buy up the whole West Coast of Africa, he laughs and says only a fool would want to buy a desert." "He has a point," Sheffield said, inwardly cursing the steady, even monotonous stream of petty disasters back home, the perpetually gloomy weather and economic forecasts. Sometimes he wished for a real, honest-to-God Catastrophe to rally the troops around; if only California would finally up and break off into the Pacific all at once instead of in bits and pieces, for example, it would make his job a whole lot easier. "He had a dream last night," said Moira suddenly. "Yes?" Sheffield knew all about Abu's dreams. "It's one he's had before, only last night it had a kind of ending. And whatever it was, it upset him." "It upset him," Sheffield repeated drily. In spite of himself, he was becoming irritated. It was bad enough that he had to bust his ass every which way to cope with his players' material needs -- seeing to it that they had enough food, enough dope, enough love so that their game didn't deteriorate. But it was" positively maddening to be expected to cope with something as impalpable as someone's dream. Particularly when that someone came from West Africa, from a culture as alien to him as a quilting society on Mars. What was he supposed to do? Sit by his bunk and hold his goddamn hand? "I'll see what I can do," he said, curtly. "What can you do?" Moira shook her head mournfully. "The only thing that would help would be to send him home for a while. And that's out of the question." It was a statement of fact, but Sheffield sensed an undercurrent of hope. "As you say, it's out of the question. He still has a year to run on his contract." "Ten months. I don't suppose you could find any medical reason..." "No," he said, softly. "He's in perfect physical shape, which the whole world can see for itself every time he plays. And you know what our friend the shrink would say." "What if -- " She hesitated, biting her lip. "Goon." She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. "What if I told you that Abu was hen moira left, Sheffield went over to the small refrigerator and helped himself to a half dozen Gelusil tablets, a tumbler of orange juice to wash them down. He wondered, for what seemed like the hundredth time in the past few months, if his nerves were finally about to go. Jesus H. Christ! It was too absurd for words. Man wants to kill woman so that Washington will be forced to bring him back to earth to stand trial. Where he will see the grass and trees dancing from the window of his cell. Man decides not to kill woman because he believes her spirit will be forced to dwell forever in the confines of the moon, always a victim of its tiny gravity. Incredible! Sheffield reached into his desk drawer and punched the rewind switch on his tape recorder, listened glumly to the voices. "What do you mean, thinking "It sounds crazy, but I'm sure that's what was going on in his mind. After he'd told me about the dream I went back to sleep. About an hour later I woke up, suddenly, as if I had just discovered a snake was in bed with me. I was afraid to move. I felt him behind me, staring at my neck. He was very, very close. I wanted to turn over and look at him, but I was terrified at what I might see." "You were dreaming. Dreaming of snakes, maybe." "No. Because finally I couldn't pretend any longer, and I rolled over and looked at him." "And?" "He was staring at me. His face was cold and empty, colder and emptier than it is out there." (Here she had waved a hand, vaguely). "It made my flesh crawl." "And that's it? That's all there was to it?" "Then he said, 'I could not leave you to this moon forever,' and got back in his bunk. And that was it." switch, slammed the drawer shut. The suspicion that Moira was right tugged at the back of his mind -- an irritant -- but there was no case there, nothing to go on, nothing that would satisfy the folks in Washington if he decided to recommend that Abu be given an extended home leave. They would laugh in his face, or, worse, they might just decide to replace him, as if it were his fault that everybody this side of the moon was going zooey. Operations Managers were a dime a dozen, but there was only one Abu. That was really the key. You just don't send the greatest moonball player in history home on a whim. Especially not when the U.S. Government gets twenty-two percent of changes hands every time he takes a shot. And most especially, you do not recommend that such an action be taken on the strength of the unsubstantiated word of a concubine... So. His hands were tied. He'd mention the incident in his weekly report, and send both of them around to see the psychiatrist. That much, at least, was indicated. But he already knew what the psychiatrist would say. It was what he always said, what Washington paid him to say. Keep them in their traces, unless they're basket cases. He wondred, momentarily, if Washington had any idea that their shrink had begun talking in rhyme. The intercom crackled. "Yes?" "Harmon Ludlow to see you. Shall I send him in?" Sheffield massaged his temples wearily, trying to. collect his thoughts. Harmon Ludlow, the new kid. One of Silas' finds. A good shooter, but not great. And probably not destined for stardom, though he still needed to be handled carefully. He'd been in once before, a victim of the malaise which affected everyone, complaining about the food, the women, the cramped accomodations. Plus the beginnings of a genuine attack of homesickness once the newness of the surroundings wore off. About what you'd expect of a kid away from home for the first time. "Send him in." The door opened and the young man with the thatch of red hair came in slowly, stood in front of the desk, eyes averted. "Sit down, Harmon. Good to see you." The boy shifted his feet, blinked rapidly, but remained standing. "Well. What can I do you for this time?" His tone was deliberately casual. He sensed something coming, something heavy and depressing, and he wanted to minimize its impact from the start. He nodded again in the direction of the chair. "I want to go home," the boy said. Sheffield nodded, then pretended to be momentarily absorbed in the papers before him. "Of course you do." "You don't understand." The boy slumped in the chair, buried his face in his hands. "I just can't stand it up here no more." When Sheffield said nothing, he hurried on. "You've been real nice to me, everyone's been real nice. But I can't take it any more. It's worse than prison, no matter what they say. And I just can't take it any more." The real despair in his voice stabbed at Sheffield, caused him to wince inside before answering. He had confronted homesickness before, in himself as well as his players, and prided himself on having successfully immunized himself against the dull ache that accompanied it. Now, he felt a mild surprise that he could still feel pain in others. Was it a sign that he was losing his grip? "Of course you can, Harmon. Of course you can." His tone was syrupy, soothing. "Look, if you didn't want to go home at this stage -- then I'd think something was wrong with you. You hurt inside. You'd like to be back in West Virginia hunting squirrels, or just generally fucking off under all that wide open sky." When the boy said nothing, Sheffield continued. "Everybody wants to go home, Harmon. Everybody wants to, sometime or other. There's not a man or woman among us who hasn't looked out over all that dead land, and seen the earth hanging in the sky like a big blue ball, and wanted to grab it. Sometimes I think it would be better all the way around if we were over on the dark side, so we wouldn't have earth in our eyes so much, reminding us where we came from." The boy sniffled quietly, and Sheffield half expected him to wipe his nose with his sleeve. There was something else. What? "It's that, but it ain't just that." He paused. "It's my ma, Mr. Sheffield. She's gonna die before I see her again. I just know it!" Which means, thought Sheffield, that you just suspect it. He breathed a sigh of relief. "She's not well, your ma?" The boy shook his head, his eyes still on the floor. "She's vomiting all the time now. The doctors don't know what it is, and she wants me to come home." He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew a tattered sheet of blue stationery. "She says so in this letter, so I really have to go. ' ' The innocence of the appeal bothered Sheffield. I do what my mother tells me. He had a fleeting impression of Hannon's mother, sitting in her shiny new ranch-style house, in a suburb of Charleston probably, mooning (no pun intended) over the loss of her son between trips to the bathroom. It was a nasty thought, and it irritated him that it should have entered his mind, almost forcing a giggle. When he spoke, that irritation was only barely concealed. "The only thing you have to do, Hannon, is to honor your contract with the government. Look: I hate to be crass, but it just so happens that a lot of people down there are vomiting these days. In fact, people have been throwing up since the dawn of mankind, and they have usually survived. Now, I'm very sorry to hear that your mother isn't feeling well, but you have to understand that I can't give everybody a pass home just because someone in their family is sick. We wouldn't have a player left up here if I did." "She ain't just sick, she's gonna die!" Sheffield sighed sympathetically, but his voice was firm. "We're all going to die, sooner or later. Just be thankful you're up here where the conditions are sterile, and not down there with the rest of them, puking your guts out. And while you're at it, you might just say a word of thanks to the people who pay your salary so you can afford to get her a doctor who knows what the hell he's doing, and not some goddamned vet!" The boy moaned. "She don't need a doctor, she needs me!" '"Well so do a lot of other people, including the government of the United States of America!" Sheffield slammed his hand on the desk and the boy's head bobbed up, his eyes wide and blinking. "Look, I'll tell it to you straight, Harmon. Nobody gets off this place before their time is up! Nobody! And there's a reason for that, and I'll tell you what it is. The government decided a long time ago to make this a pretty damn near ironclad rule, because in the early days they did allow people to go home on leave. And what happened? Half of them never showed up for the trip back, disappeared without a trace, vanished into the hills where they lived on snake and racoon for all I know. As for the rest of them -- the ones who decided to honor their contracts and come back -- they had to wait around in the training rooms until their bodies became reaccustomed to one-sixth G, sometimes for months, until they could finally get back on the fucking court and do their fucking job!" "You don't have to scream at me," the boy said, cringing. "I'm glad to hear that, Harmon. I don't like shouting at people, especially my players, because I am here to serve you as well as the government, and I take my job seriously. But I cannot tell you, I cannot tell you how sick I am of people coming to me and demanding that they be allowed to go home. I'm tired of being threatened that such and such will happen if they are not given an immediate leave of absence, and passage on the first ship out. Only this morning, a woman came to me and told me that her man had threatened to kill her, that he came this close to actually strangling her to death. And do you know why? Because he figured that I would have to send him home, because we have no courts up here, no trials by jury on the moon." The boy nodded slowly. "Abu's woman." "Let's leave names out of this. The thing I want you to understand is this: it would have done him no good! And why? Because I would have found a way to cover it up!" He paused, letting the lie sink in, hoping that the boy believed him, surprised at his own audacity. "Yes! That's right! I would have found some way to have it declared an accidental death. Do you follow me? It would not have worked! Murder would not have worked, Harmon! Murder. That's how important it is to me and the government, the folks back home in Washington." For a long moment the boy said nothing. Then: "It must have been Abu." His voice was sullen, resentful. "You'd let a nigger kill a white woman and get away with it. Just on account of he makes you so much money." "It wasn't Abu," Sheffield said quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. He felt momentarily off balance, cursed himself for having brought the subject up at all. "But as long as you bring him up... Yes. He wants to go home as much as anybody else. And yet I ask you: here is a man who was discovered six years ago, pitching peanuts -- peanuts -- into a tin can somewhere in Africa, and making bets with an occasional tourist. All around him, everywhere he looked, people were starving and swatting away the flies, blistering under the sun. And so was he. Today, he is the best-paid athlete in the world. And tonight, Harmon, this very evening, you are going to jump center against him, and in the course of the game a hundred milof dollars while both of you try to put a ball through a hoop, and you tell me you'd rather be home watching your mother puke, and he tells me he'd rather be back in Africa pitching peanuts and scratching his ass while the rest of his country dries up and blows away! Well, I don't want to hear about it! It doesn't make any sense, and I just don't want to hear about it! Not from you, or him, or anybody else! Do you understand me?" "I just want to go home," the boy said, his voice trembling. "Well you can't go home!" Sheffield shouted. "Get that through your thick head! You can't go home until your contract expires, and that's all there is to it!" "Please don't yell at me." It was almost a whisper. Sheffield stood and came around the desk. His legs felt weak, and he had difficulty controlling his voice. "Get out. And don't come back until you've thought about what I said. Then we'll sit down and talk about this like reasonable men." When the boy was at the door he turned to Sheffield. His face was flushed, angry. "This place stinks," he said. "And I don't care what you say. I'm going home." Abu was early. The training room with its dank smell and the gleaming chrome tables and exercise machines was empty except for Cooper, the goalie. "How's it going, Champ?" Abu smiled in return, stripped, and pulled on the red uniform with the blue and white numerals and the emblem of the hawk gliding over the moon's horizon. The uniform was stiff, but a couple of good stretches would work out the kinks. Then it would feel comfortable,' like a second skin. Wearing it always reminded him of snakes. He liked that. He thought of snakes, slow and powerful, coiled in the sun. "Run their butts off," Cooper said, as Abu headed for the court. "Shoot their goddamn eyes out." In the arena, he went over to the rack and fetched a ball and returned to the center of the court and jumped. He went straight up, maybe a dozen feet, then settled down again, his slippers gripping the Vel-Tec surface with its tiny, uncountable bristles. Above him curved the huge invisible dome, like the night eye of a frog against its backdrop of black space, and stars. He went higher the second time, hanging in the air at twenty feet, scanning the short horizon. There was enough light, earthlight, to discern the ghostly, pitted surface, the dead blistered hills rising and falling, sloping towards the horizon where the full earth hung, waiting. He stayed like that for a moment, watching, and then came down. Cooper came out, loped over to his position by the goal, and signaled that he was ready to start the warmups. Abu jumped, and slowly rose, holding the ball loosely at his chest. At the top of his leap he feinted, watched. Cooper leave his feet, rising to protect the goal. He waited until he was halfway down before he shot. The ball come off his fingertips nicely and arched towards the goal, fifty feet away. Cooper reached the height of his jump much too soon, hopelessly out of position. Descending, he watched the ball cleave through the air and settle with a lazy, whipping motion in the back of the net. "Shoot their eyes out, Champ." He missed his next two shots, then called for a high pass. Cooper floated the ball in a flat arc upward, ( then crouched, waiting to defend the goal. Abu took the pass on the ascent, released it almost immediately. The goalie judged its flight, leaped. He was in good position this time, but the ball had too much arc on it, coming down at an impossibly steep angle, like a mortar shell, langorous, consuming time, as if its momentum had been magically retarded. It barely rippled the net in passing. "Shoot their goddamn eyes out," Cooper chuckled. When the others came out for their warmups, Abu left the court and followed the narrow corridor up to the observation deck. Behind him was the arena, with its small, brightly colored figures going through the pre-game ballet, its cameras and technicians making ready for the evening's broadcast, and the gamblers, moving into position behind the small betting consoles, punching up the pre-game odds, laughing and sipping drinks, watching the lazy activity below. Before him, suspended over the pale dead hills, was Earth, a blue, unreachable dream. He sat, crosslegged, in a chair facing the horizon, and waited for the old music to come. T'abu suya vahanu wa'ena toi, he sang, softly. Ta mo' bah vahana lamha Lapo rizha sum Na lapo doy'ha hri. In death, may my spirit seek the earth's center As the moonball seeks the center of the net. Let it go straightly. Let it not be fooled by this old moon. Silas ignored the sign informing him that the Tidewater Moonball Facility was a kilometer ahead and swung the Pontiac off the Interstate and down the ramp into a seam of dark and quiet running parallel to and below the traffic. This close to gametime it was all bumperto bumper up above as automobiles jockeyed for position to get into the parking lots that ringed the stadium. Which was just fine if you happened to like paying ten bucks for the privilege of having your car be there when you got out. On the other hand, if you were a gambling man you approached the stadium from the rear and made other arrangements. Which meant traversing about ten blocks of dimly lit streets at an even fifty k.p.h. with the windows rolled and your eyes glued to the road so that you didn't accidentally run over some kid and start a riot. That was the hairiest part. There was no light to speak of; the highintensity lamps which now attracted knots of black-skinned teenagers had long ago been snuffed out by stone or pistol shot, and the shambling houses which lined the streets were mostly dark and abandonedlooking, being inhabited now by an army of squatters who had to endure the floodwaters which swallowed half of Hampton every fall. (When that happened, Silas took the Interstate and paid his ten bucks like everybody else.) As he came within two blocks he could see the dome of the stadium, rising like a bright lilac bubble above the darkened roofs, occupy ing its own man-made hill, seemingly in deference to the notion that man must have his recreation even when he is drowning. But it was beautiful, like an amethyst glowing in a nest of diamonds and flashing pinpoint rubies, or the electric palace he'd dreamed of as a kid. And it was beauty that was at the heart of moonball in the first place, as indispensible to pleasure as the gaming itself. Inside the arena or out, it was the visuals that hooked a man; it was beauty's talon that pulled him away from the racetracks and the backroom poker games, beauty that set a man to dreaming moonball and its slow ballet, as luminous and unsettling as a hallucinogen. His pulse quickened as he glanced at the dashboard clock. Fifteen minutes to the buzzer. He'd have to huny, and hope his usual boy was there. Near the end of a dead-end street he braked and pulled the car onto what had once been somebody's front lawn. He flashed his lights twice and waited, motor running. A movement on the porch, black against black, and a form appeared out of the shadow at his window. He recognized the teeth. Jake. He left the keys in the ignition and got out. "Be lucky," Jake said, sliding behind the wheel. "Luck has nothing to do with it," Silas said. "See you at eleven." As was their custom, Jake let him get a respectable distance up the hill before throwing the Pontiac into reverse and peeling off down the street to commence, most likely, a two-hour crosstown orgy. But what the hell. It beat paying the bastards for parking. At the entrance to the lobby he flashed his season pass and was waved through, then found himself squeezed into a tangle of flesh at the concession stand, where he had to wait five minutes for a beer. Around him the crowd surged and shouted; animated discussions everywhere. It was the controlled kind of bedlam which made you think of a cockfight, or the crowd at a hai a lai game. To Silas it felt like home. The lobby itself was a horseshoe-shaped enclosure, bright and plush, which hugged the arena on three sides. Tiers of flashing wall-monitors ran from floor to ceiling, indexing the pre-game odds. He gave them a cursory look. The Hawks favored by four goals over the Eagles, Abu a three-goal choice to take individual scoring honors. And then more numbers, numbers setting the prices on the auction bidding and the pools, numbers which he never even bothered to read. A man could get lost in the endless combinations of moonball betting; experience had taught him to keep things simple. Numbers were seductive; a betting console was access to a living system whose blood was number, and a means affecting it. Press a button and the numbers change, everybody's numbers. It was hard not to play with power like that. As he moved up the ramp towards his booth Silas felt his nerves calming, his mind moving into a state of alertness, and just to keep it that way, he popped a meth-tab into his mouth and washed it down with a careful sip of beer. Now and then he recognized a face, nodded, but did not speak. Crowds he could do without, or people, for that matter. Which was one of the reasons be had allowed himself the luxury of buying a season ticket in one of the private booths that circled the arena, a pocket of silence where he could think, without distractions. Concentration: that was the key to a profitable evening of moonball. Because when a shot was thrown up, you had between one and five seconds to decide if it was on target, and the more your mind wavered the longer it took to punch up the correct bet. The longer you waited the more the odds shifted downward and the less money you made. It was that simple. He entered the booth just as the National Anthem began. A quick glance told him the reception would be good, as usual. The holograph signals originating in Copernicus were relayed through satellite to ground station, and occasionally they had to fight through a storm, became twisted beyond recognition. But not now. All was as it should have been: perfect. He draped his jacket over the back of the chair and inserted his card in the betting console. It hummed, suddenly alive. Below him, holographed in the screen, was the court, a rough oval running eighty feet from goal to goal, a field of green under the curving dome where the night stars twinkled. Eight small figures stood at its center, hands clasped lightly behind them as they stared at the flag. It was hard to think of them as illusions, but that was what they were: massed intensities of light and color one-third their actual size. Beauty, that was the only word for it. Sheer motherhumping beauty that burned holes in your eyes to your brain. As the Anthem concluded and the players loped over to their benches for a last-minute conference, Silas suddenly frowned. His eyes raked the court. Where the hell was Harmon? Quickly he punched up the injury report. He groaned. Damn! The kid was usually as healthy as a cow, not to mention the fact that you weren't supposed to get sick up there in the first place. Nerves, maybe, or else an incipient kind of melancholy which, according to the sports pages, was making its rounds more frequently among the athletes. He sat down glumly, closed his eyes -- and finally felt the methedrine going to work, opening up the synapses, flooding the brain with protein. He exhorted the cells: "Fire, you little bastards, fire!" His teeth began to grind, a sure sign that the drug had taken effect. Meth: there was nothing quite like it. He heard the buzzer and opened his eyes. Gametime. The ball shot up from the center hole on its column of compressed air, and right off the bat Abu attempted a shot on goal, swimming upward to take the toss at its highest point and releasing it the same instant, while everyone and his mother was expecting a pass to the forward in the attacking zone. And the shot looked true from where Silas was sitting. He couldn't have asked for a better angle, the ball curling through the air almost head-on -- but at the last moment he decided to pass up the bet. His rule of thumb was if you're even a half-second late in reading a shot, lay off. Hojd back until you know a shot's coming. Anticipation was everything; then watch the curve of the shooter's hand or the set of his arm in the follow-through. Check the goalie's position and the height of the ball. Figure out how everyone else is betting. And, most important, get your own money down in less than three seconds, when the odds are longest. A groan from the crowd, a few scattered cheers. The Eagle goalie, at the last instant, had tipped the ball away. Silas allowed himself a small, self-congratulatory smile. He decided to pace himself, wait for the opening -- and then come on like gangbusters. At the first time-out he lit a cigarette. Instant buzz. Mixing nicotine with meth was a lot like adding lead to gasoline; it boosted the cerebral octane perceptibly. His body tingled sweetly, like a finely tuned machine. His brain whirred. So far so good. He was ahead twenty bucks, and while that wasn't a whole hell of a lot, it beat being twenty in the hole. And Abu, after that first miss had sunk his next three, which meant that the odds were bound to get longer a everyone waited for the law of averages to catch up. But sometimes they didn't, and that was all the opening he would need. His eyes strayed to the Eagle bench. Seated at the far end, his hands clasped together as if in prayer, was Harmon Ludlow. Shot full of dramamine, no doubt, but at least he was out. And then a pleasant surprise. At the buzzer the boy slapped Number Six on the rump and trudged out to center court, his steps even in that bewitched gravity somehow slow and ponderous. Alright! Time for some action! Silas smothered his cigarette and leaned forward, mind racing, his fingers poised lightly at the console. Was it his imagination, or did he actually sense then for the first time that something was up? Wasn't there something in the way Ludlow converged on Abu in the backcourt that suggested purpose, determination? Maybe. Or maybe it was just some of that good old stalking defense the Eagles were famous for. This time two forwards faced off. The tap went deep into the Hawks' defending zone. Abu retreated and took it on the bounce, whirled, his eyes on Ludlow, six feet away and closing. For a long second, Abu did not move. He seemed to be transfixed, watching Ludlow's approach with the intense unwavering concentration of a cobra following the musician's flute: feet apart and firmly planted, his upper body weaving slightly, his black gaze fixed. The crowd, sensing something, hushed. Ludlow hesitated, fractionally, and appeared to fumble with his sleeve. That was the moment Abu chose to jump. It wasn't a short, passing leap, the kind you might expect from a man so deep in his own zone, someone backed up close to his own goal; This was a shooting jump. Silas watched, transfixed, as the small black man in the bright red uniform rose like a flame at the far end of the court; and rose: past the lower tiers and the middle tiers and the upper tiers where even the spectators had fallen silent; up, to the very lip of the dome itself so that for one astounding instant it seemed as if he must be higher even than the goal on the near side of the court where the Eagle goalie stood flatfooted and helpless, watching in open-mouthed amazement as Abu let fly the ball. They said, later, that it took a full fourteen seconds for the ball to travel this unprecedented distance. The odds were never longer. Silas got # down in # seconds. There didn't seem to be any reason for Ludlow's jump. It was too late, useless. He came off the floor badly, clumsily, lending credence to his blubbering assertion later, in the courtroom back on Earth, that he had never meant to stick him so hard and so deep. That he had just wanted to come home. But Abu came a long way down; it was more collision than attack, and the silver slashing at the shoulder bit the throat instead. It had a dreamlike quality, almost beautiful. The ball descended, homing. The air went red. And blood and body and knife touched down, together, as the ball slipped languorously through the net, for a perfect score.  a nice me ffiri line Gail Kimberly A ship from earth is in port tonight, and I will go into town now, by myself. Ensch went to the sea this morning. He'll be there three days, maybe four if this time is like the other times, and I'm already lonely. I should have recognized the signs, should have known that it was time for him to go again. It's spring here on Peleus. (The year is about eleven Earth-months long.) In this area we have a cold winter with snow and a sudden, breathless spring that sweeps in on wet, warm, westerly winds. A change of seasons is one of the signs. He woke me before dawn this morning, rocking our sleeping hammock when he left it, leaving a cold emptiness beside me. I looked up and saw him standing in front of the thick glass wall of our room, a dark shape against the mother-ofpearl morning. "What's the matter?" He didn't turn around when he answered. "Sorry I woke you," he said. "I couldn't sleep." "You're not sick, are you?" But Ensch is never sick. He's one of the two physicians in our little town but he's never very busy; Peleans are a healthy race. He turned and smiled down at me then, his teeth gleaming white against his dark blue skin. "No," he said, "just want to be up and doing something." That restlessness is another sign, but I still didn't guess what it meant. Ensch couldn't eat and wandered through the house and the garden aimlessly for a while until he suddenly said: "I'm leaving for the sea now, Judy. See you in a few days." And just that quickly he had packed a small bag and was gone. It's best that he doesn't linger. He knows how much I would like, to be going with him and so he avoids the tears and sad goodbyes. Now I've tidied the house and eaten my evening meal in the garden and turned the ambisound up high so the music will fill the emptiness, but the solitude is awful. I must go into town tonight. I put on the silver dress and the matching silver shoes that I brought from Los Angeles, and I go out quickly, leaving the tinkling music on low to welcome me when I come back. I close the glass door behind me, the high heels of my shoes click down our steep stone stairway. Halfway down the stairs I pause to breathe in the vanilla scent of the mysym trees that surround the house, thinking that the air in the Naked Nymph will stink of smoke and the strong, alcohol-laden breath of drunken spacers. After a moment I go on, smoothing the skirt of the dress around my hips. Short... they like it short, the Earthmen, and it's uncomfortably tight, after the loose, graceful robes we wear here on Peleus. I remember to walk carefully along the stepping-stone path leading across the orange expanse of the cilia marsh so my heels won't sink into the mud. It isn't a long walk to the Naked Nymph, which is one of the reasons I've chosen that as my place. There are other bars in town: Randolph's, and The Oasis, but they are farther along Main Street, closer to the spaceport, and the men who go to them are the eager ones, the ravishers, too greedy for sensations they haven't had for all the long months in space. The gravity here on Peleus is as strong as Earth's; I like to think the Naked Nymph gets the gentler ones, the ones who have time to stroll the streets of our town, to see the beauty and the strangeness, taste the flavor of life on Peleus first, even if for only a little while. But maybe that's just my own private illusion. It's mostly the cargo ships that come here, not passenger liners, and the spacers who crew them are men pretty much of a kind. The air is warm over the cilia marsh, rising in a fine orange mist, and I pull a scarf out of my purse and cover my hair so that my curls won't straighten in the dampness. The first moon is just rising, outlining the row of tall, straight, arrow-like trees that mark the edge of the marsh. In a few moments I walk through the row and see our neighbors' houses on their separate little hills; Milom's glass cylinder on the first rise, to my right, dark and empty now; Luar's faceted mansion just beyond it, reflecting the silver moonlight on three of its walls so that it almost seems there are lights on inside. Now I climb the steps to Main Street, seeing the dark wall of the market on one side of me and then, at the top of the stairs, the souvenir shops across the street. Two of them are open, but of course there will be only the old men there -- Joocper and Tanjlr, who no longer go to sea. Almost everyone else in town has gone, and the street is darkened tonight, and deserted, so that I can hear the music from the Naked Nymph even before I see the flashing green sign that shows a life-size woman with a shape no woman ever had, and the Earthmen swarming around the front of it. I don't like the sign. It doesn't suit the place at all, but it pulls in the clients, I guess. The four men outside the front door seem to be arguing about something. They have pale skin and heavy beards, and they wear dark pants and brightly colored shirts, all fastened and buttoned and zippered and belted on them. Visitors here always make fun of the clothing the Peleans wear, but none of them would change back if they got used to the comfort of the robes, as I have. They stop arguing as I approach them, and there are whistles and the usual candid remarks about my appearance. They watch me push open the heavy door, one of them reaching out an arm to help me, and they follow me inside. Drunk, of course. All of them. They always want me to drink with them and I've never liked the taste or the effect of liquor on me or on them. I much prefer the pinkleafed herb that Ensch introduced me to; that doesn't affect my speech or mobility but produces a lovely sensation that lasts as long as I want it to, then disappears with a wish. (I don't care for the sensalators. I don't like the idea of probes messing around in my brain. Of course, I'll probably use them later on -- after I can't do this any more -- but time enough to think about that when it's necessary.) Inside, I cross the thick carpet to the desk where Bandal, the owner, sits sketching a spacer standing near her. He doesn't know what she's doing, he's absorbed in conversation with his companion, a small, thin woman with red hair -- obviously an Earthwoman. They seem interested only in each other, probably cohabs on the same ship who want to see the sights. The Naked Nymph is part hotel and part bar, getting its trade, like most of the town, from the spacers. Bandal has decorated it with brass and crystal and shining plastiwood, and has hung her own paintings around the place -- landscapes, mostly -- the prettier parts of Peleus. "That's a good likeness," I say to her, looking at the sketch. She's caught the attitude and expression perfectly. "Hi, Judy. Like the usual room for tonight? I've been holding it for you." "Yes, please," I say, digging thirty Pelean credits out of my purse. "There's a good crowd in the bar tonight," Bandal says. That means there's mostly men, and I'm happy about that. I won't have anything to do with the female spacers, although some of them have offered me big prices. Bandal hands me the room key and I drop it in my purse. "You're not at the sea," I say to her. She's not old, and she's certainly attractive. "Tomorrow I'll go. I couldn't get anyone to stay here for me until tomorrow. My uncle will be here, from the interior." Then she smiles at me in that strange way she always does -- as though it hurt her to part her lips -- and I shrug and turn away. She knows I'd give anything to be going there myself, but after all, you can't have everything. I go on through the raindrop curtains into the bar. It's crowded tonight, as Bandal said. I can see only six or seven women -- two of them at a table near the curtains are Peleans, women I don't know, probably visitors from the interior. Both of them are elderly, both wearing scarlet and pink robes and pink flowered headdresses that cover their sparse brown hair and frame their blue faces. The other women all seem to be spacers. There are no other women from Earth living here, or anywhere on Peleus, that I know of. Except me. I go to the bar and sit up on a stool, smiling at Vos, the bartender. He doesn't have to ask, but brings me the only drink I like, a wine they make here that tastes and looks so much like champagne they call it that. He, too, smiles at me strangely, sadly, but then he's a strange man. I don't ask him why he's not away with the others. He has something physically wrong with him, I believe, and keeps to himself. I look over the men in the place. A lot of them seem to be too drunk, and some seem close to fighting. I want to match my partners as closely as possible to Ensch's appearance, so I always look for a broad forehead, a straight nose, a firm mouth and chin -- a well-built man of medium height. There are several here tonight, and one sits at the other end of the bar, studying me now, so I smile in his direction. He has dark brown hair and eyes, and is about my age. He's coming toward me now, carrying his drink, signalling to Vos to bring me another champagne, and now he's sitting on the stool beside me. "Hello," he says, his voice confident like his manner. "Mind if I sit here next to you?" I shake my head. "The seat isn't taken. ' ' "My name's Ed," he says. "Judy. I used to know a boy named Ed back home." "Where's home?" "Pasadena," I say, "in California, the U.S.A." He grins. "I'm from the U.S. myself. Greensboro, North Carolina. Know where that is?" "I know where North Carolina is, but I've never been there." He offers me an American cigarette out of a pack labelled "Safesmoke" and lights both of them, bending close to me. "Haven't been there myself for a couple of years. Going back this trip, though." I sip my champagne. "I'll never go home again," I tell him. "Why not?" "Space travel would probably kill me. Two years ago I came here as crewman on a freighter, but I was so sick they had to leave me here. The two Pelean doctors in town here saved my life." "What was the matter with you?" His hand pats my shoulder as though to erase any pain, and he looks concerned. "Space sickness was all the ship's doctor could call it. My insides were all turned around, I couldn't eat or sleep, my brain seemed to be crashing around in my skull. I was in a coma when we got here." I remember the first thing I saw of Peleus, when I finally became conscious... Ensch's face looking anxiously into mine, his brown eyes and hair startling against his strange blue skin, his long, four-fingered hands cool against my forehead. I hope he will be only three days at the sea instead of four. "So you live here?" Ed says, as though that's a fate worse than death. He doesn't know. "I like it here." He shrugs. "Want to dance?" and we move through the crowd to the little patch of glowing floor near the ambisound selector that Bandal keeps stocked with the most recent music from Earth she can get. Ed dances well, and when other men approach me to dance with them, I shake my head and stay with him. We go back to the bar and have another drink, and I learn that he's # years old, that he's got a wife and a son in North Carolina, and that he'll pay # credits to go to my room with me. I like him. He's intelligent and funny, and he does remind me of Ensch. I take him up to the third floor in the tubular glass-walled elevator so he can see the second moon rising over the cilia marshes, a pretty sight that always reminds me of sunset on Earth, the two moons so bright they set the marshes glowing orange and hazy pink and red. The room I usually take is ##, decorated in a style reminiscent of home, with opaque pale yellow walls and creamy white furniture, and a bright tangerine-colored spread on the round bed. Ed doesn't push me right into it. I knew he wouldn't. He kisses my face and neck and lips, and ruffles my hair, and admires the glass wall that's part of the aquarium the Naked Nymph is built around. It's a gigantic square tank, open at the roof, and it holds some of the most interesting specimens of sea life here on Peleus. Bandal's idea. Always the artist. I point out to Ed some of the creatures whose names I know, and then we undress. He is passionate and proficient, and I enjoy every lingering moment. Then we lie in each other's arms, saying nothing, until he gets up from the bed and begins to dress himself, opening his belt to get the money and lay it on the bed beside me. "Why are you in such a hurry?" I ask him. "Unhappy with me?" He smiles down at me and shakes his head. "No, I just thought you'd be anxious... for another customer," he says. I shake my head. "You're a strange one," he says, getting back into bed beside me, pulling me against him. "I thought you girls were only interested in money, and here you are passing up profits." "The money isn't important," I tell him. "It's just to pay my expenses." He doesn't question me any more, in fact, he doesn't talk much for a long time. Now and then I watch the sea creatures in the glowing water and feel as peaceful and as placid as they look, their bodies caressed by the silky currents, enveloped in nourishing warmth. It is only when he falls asleep that I let myself think... about Ensch and about what he is doing now. I can see, in the tank, a long coral fish with blue flowers for lateral fins, as it brushes past the shining body of a dolcet, a strange, silvery, mermaid-like mammal with an almost human face that seems to smile. Ensch, stroked by the currents that are the only way of opening the deep-blue pouch on his body, caressed by the warmth of the waters of the Mating Sea, approaching another whose own deep-blue pouch has burst into bloom like a hungry flower as she spreads her arms, waiting. I close my eyes against the pain and open them again to see the dolcet's mocking smile against the glass of the tank. But it's only a senseless fish, after all, and can't help its smile. There are no fish in the Mating Sea, only Peleans returning to their planet's womb to beget their children, using the short time they have only four times each year. I wonder who will carry my husband's child, and what it is like to feel his passion, that I have never known. I can let myself wonder now, lying beside this man who could be Ensch, who was Ensch to me for a little while. And neither of us has been cheated, after all. It is late when I wake him and tell him I have to go home. He goes with me down to the lobby and I wave to Bandal as I pass, who smiles sleepily and waves back. Ed walks me out to the street. It is empty now, and the moons are covered by clouds. "I hope you've given me a baby," I tell him. "Ensch and I want a baby." He only smiles in a puzzled way and watches me as I go down the street toward home. He doesn't understand that Ensch and I have so much together; and after all, you can't have everything.  iTIankind needs frontiers. We need new worlds to conquer, impossible odds to overcome, a place of escape from bureaucracy and government; a place where life is hard but the problems are simple, requiring no more than courage, determination, and hard work to win great rewards. Even for those who will never go chasing out to the frontier there's a great comfort in knowing it's there: that you could, if you chose, pull up stakes and try your hand at making a new life. For the warriors and dreamers among us a frontier is so vital that if there isn't a physical one, we'll create an internal problem and fight that. I suppose that man's need for a frontier is a debatable proposition, in that somebody might question it; but I doubt that many science fiction readers would dispute the point. To a very great extent this is what science fiction is all about. Unfortunately, science hasn't been cooperating with us. First comes Special and General Relativity to say that we won't ever travel to the stars. Then come the space probes to rob us of our traditional solar system. What's left? As I've said before, I firmly believe we'll overcome the speed-oflight barrier, and if we don't, we'll still find a way to leave the Solar System; but that may take quite a while, and suppose I'm wrong. Are there no frontiers left? Venus was once a favorite. Hot and swampy, a younger sister of Earth, with grey skies laden with thick clouds; primordial ooze, scattered thick forests burdened with heavy vines and hanging mosses; thick fungus that ate men alive, a world populated with strange animals, dragons and dinosaurs and swamp creatures resembling the beastie from the Black Lagoon. Venus was a world to challenge us. Then the scientists took away our Venus, as they had taken away our Mars. For a time the extremely high temperatures of Venus gave some comfort to Velikovsky and his supporters, and thus argued for a more unstable and less orderly Solar System than we had imagined -- we could take comfort in fright. In a world of cosmic catastrophies there is room aplenty for adventure and derring-do. After all, Dr. V. had predicted that Venus would be very hot, possibly even still molten from her fiery birth from Jupiter; but, alas, even that is denied us. Pioneer looked down on Jupiter and found that he is not even solid. The Queen of Heaven does not resemble her mythological father, no, not in the least. Velikovsky would have hydrocarbons (and carbo-hydrates) in the Venerian atmosphere, and he may well be right; but mostly there is carbon dioxide (CO # ) in fearful amounts, diluted with sulfuric and hydroflouric acids. Here and there may lurk clouds of ice crystals and water vapor, but mostly there is a poisonous and corrosive brew pressing down with # atmospheres on Aphrodite's face. Venus does not seem an attractive place. When i was a boy I read a "juvenile" novel so utterly forgettable that I recall neither plot nor title nor author nor characters. One incident in that book impressed itself in my mind. The heroes had stranded themselves in the Arabian (or Moroccan or Tunisian or Saharan) desert, and were about to be engulfed by wild barbaric tribesmen on camels -- when lo!, the tribesmen retreated in panic, driven away by the sight of a regiment of British Tommies in full uniform. There were, of course, no British troops for hundreds of miles. The author made a point of explaining that this sort of mirage happens quite often in the desert. I remember looking for one many years later; it's true enough. There are numerous stories of ghost cities in the Mediterranean. One can often be seen across the straits of Messina: a full city, with moving traffic, nestled onto the dry and barren hills. The illusion has been observed and commented on for at least three thousand years. What happens is that changing air densities will affect light rays so that under the proper conditions the image is refracted over the horizon. A British regiment marching in Aden is seen a hundred miles away. Ghostly images of cities form on barren shorelines. This is rare on Earth. On Venus it's inevitable. The Venerian atmosphere is so thick that light is refracted through # and more. The whole planet is visible from any point on the surface. The explorer will seem to stand in the bottom of an enormous bowl, with cliffs towering high above him. This doesn't have a lot to do with the subject of this column, but it fascinates me. Venus must be a confusing place, where one sees the back of one's own head spread about on the top of an enormous cliff... The mirages might be worth seeing, but there's not a lot else to attract colonists or tourists. Carl Sagan, Cornell U's resident genius and expert on Venus, once said "Venus is very much like Hell," and a glance at Table One shows why. It's not a very attractive place to live. In fact, a more useless planet is hard to imagine. What good is a lump of desert whose surface temperature is up there about the melting point of lead, whose atmosphere is too thick, with winds of fearful velocity and force blowing dust across craters and jumbled structures like the surface of the Moon? Some writers have proposed that since we can never visit Venus (and wouldn't want to if we could), we should make her the Solar System's garbage heap. Venus could become the repository for all the long-term radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power plants. It's cheaper to drop a load onto the surface of Venus than to send it into the Sun, and what other use do we have for Hell anyway? Quite a lot, actually. Venus is very likely to become the first terraformed planet. In fact in a few hundred years there may be more people living on Venus than live on Earth right now. The asteroids can be one frontier for the future, as I described a couple of issues ago; but they'll never be developed into a New World. That's reserved for Venus. Not only can we terraform Venus, but we could probably get the job done in this century, using present-day technology. The whole cost is unlikely to be greater than a medium-sized war, and the pay-off is enormous: a whole New World, a frontier to absorb adventurers and the discontented. Few wars of conquest ever yielded a fraction of that. Hardened veteran SF readers will have recognized the title of this column as coming from a # ASderson. His "The Big Rain" should rank with all the other successful predictions by SF writers: when the Big Rain comes, we can live on Venus. The Venerian atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide plus some other junk that we'd like to get rid of. The junk is water soluble, and will wash away when we get the rain to fall. That thick CO# blanket is the cause of all Venus's troubles. Solar radiation comes in, a lot of it as visible light and hotter, into the ultraviolet. It penetrates into the atmosphere and is absorbed. Now Venus slowly rotates, until she faces the absolute black of outer space, a who's camped out in high mountains knows. The absorbed radiation tries to go back out into space, but it has cooled off somewhat, from ultraviolet to infra-red. IR is absorbed nicely by carbon dioxide. The heat never gets back out, and up goes the Venerian temperature. This is called "the greenhouse effect" and works on Earth as well as out there. In fact, there are theorists who wonder if burning all those fossil fuels won't, in a couple of generations, loose so much CO# into our own atmosphere as to bring Earth's temperature up sharply. The result would be melting ice at the poles, and the drowning of most of our sea-coast cities. Before we get too alarmed at that, though, there's something else to worry about: it seems that far from rising, the average temperature of the Earth is falling, and we may be due for a new ice age, complete with glaciers in North America and like that, within the next hundred years. More on both subjects at another time; this month we're concerned with reducing the Venerian fever to manageable levels. We need to break up that thick CO# layer around Venus. This will automatically liberate oxygen, a rather desirable (to us) side effect. It will also chop down the atmospheric pressure to something tolerable. Breaking up CO# is a rather simple task. Plants do it all the time. We'll need a pretty rugged plant, since the atmospheric temperatures of Venus range from below freezing to live steam, but fortunately one of the most efficient CO# converters is also one of the most rugged. In fact, it's generally thought that the blue-green algae were responsible for Earth keeping her cool and not getting covered with a thick CO# blanket like her sister. The algae will need sunlight, water, and CO#. There's no question about finding those on Venus. The temperatures are all right, too, at least in the upper atmosphere where we'll seed the algae. This isn't just theory. "Venus jar" tests have shown that bluegreen algae thrive in the best reproduction of Venerian atmosphere we can make. They break down the CO# and give off oxygen at everincreasing rates. In fact, to the algae, Venerian conditions are not Hell but Heaven. Diameter # miles # km. # miles # km. Mass # x # # gm (D # x # # gm (#) Density # # Distance from Sun # x # # cm  I AU # x # # cm  # AU Length of Year # days # Earth days Rotation Rate Mean Solar Day # hrs # min # hours # Earth days (Retrograde) # Earth days Mean Irradiance I .# calcm # min # calcm # min Atmospheric Pressure # lbs.in #  I atmosphere # atmospheres Mean Equatorial Temperature Range # to #  C # C (Cloud tops) to #C (Surface) Surface Gravity # cmsec #  I # # cmsec #  # g Distance to Horizon # km. # km. We have the algae, and we can build rockets to send them. About a hundred rockets should do the job. price doesn't seem unreasonable. Say we're off by a factor of ten, than wars cost; and out of that much money we should be able to get a couple of manned Venus-orbit laboratories as a bonus. It will be, after all, a once-in-evolutionarylifetimes opportunity. Once the algae are sprayed into the upper atmosphere, they happily eat up CO # and give off oxygen. They have no competition. Nothing eats them, and there's plenty of room for expansion, plenty to eat, and lots of sunlight. Some calculations indicate that within a year of the initial infection the surface of Venus will be visible to Earth telescopes. Meanwhile the algae go on doing their thing. The atmosphere clears. Sunlight coming in begins to radiate back out. The atmospheric temperature falls, and lower levels are invaded by the algae. There is about # inches of precipitable water in the Venerian atmosphere. This means that if it all fell as rain, it would cover the entire surface to a depth of # inches. Compared to the miles of water covering most of the Earth this is not much; still, # inches is respectable. Mars has only # microns of precipitable water. As the air above Venus cools, rain-drops will form and eventually it will rain, and rain, and rain. The first planet-wide storm probably won't ever get to the surface; the rain will evaporate long before that. But as it evaporates it cools still another layer of atmosphere, and down move the algae. Repeat as needed. In no more than twenty years from Go, the Big Rain will strike the ground. Craters will become lakes,. Depressions will become shallow seas. Rivers will begin carving channels. And as Venus slowly turns, there may be snow on the night side: a water-table will develop. Deserts a At that point the surface will be tolerable to humans with protective equipment -- the seeding can begin. Scientists will want to move very carefully, introducing only the right plants and insects, fearful lest an unbalanced ecology result. Opposed to this slow and careful approach will be the colonists who want the job over and done with. Some will demand that we dump a little of everything we can think of onto Venus and let competition take its course; an ecology will result inevitably, although we may not be able to predict what it will be. There will also be tailored organisms. Microbiologists are already to the stage of switching genes from one species to another, and it shouldn't be long before this is done with higher plants and animals. After all, Venus will have special conditions. That long rotation period means severe winters, like the Arctic tundra or worse. Much of Venus may resemble Siberia or the North Slopes of Alaska, which, if you haven't seen them, are second only to Antartica as candidates for the most desolate spots on Earth. On the other hand, Venus will still have a thick atmosphere, and she's closer to the Sun. We don't know what the final temperature will be, or how much heat-pumping the atmosphere can do. It may not be the most pleasant world imaginable. Some writers have speculated that Venetian colonists will be nomads, staying on the move to live in perpetual sunshine. Others have described a world of paired cities connected by rails: as sunset approaches, the inhabitants escape the winter night by travel to their city's twin at the antipodes, somewhat as the Martian Much of this scjieme was described by Carl Sagan in a #I aramplified it in "To Build A In Poul's story there was fierce competition for the better parts of Venus, resulting in a social system composed of clans engaged in innumerable limited wars. It's a ft # Eighlh Ave., New York, N Y. # #-#  reasonable projection; the first settlements will be small, probably dominated by one man, and intermarriage may well result in a clanstructured social system. We haven't yet mapped the face of Venus, so we don't know where or how large the seas will be. We don't know a lot (heck, we know almost nothing) about the substructure of Venerian soil. How much water will be absorbed? At what level will a water table form? For that matter, will it be enough to introduce our algae to get everything started, or will we also have to provide fertilizers: phosphorus, trace elements, that sort of thing? Our massive tampering with atmospheric energies and surface temperatures may trigger techtonic activities. Venus may erupt in a number of places, and spew out even more CO#, water vapor, methane, and such like. Project Morning Star won't be all smooth sailing. There will undoubtedly be unforseen problems. For all that, the terraforming of Venus is no pipe dream. We could do it. We can do it right now, if we want to pay for it. We can create a new frontier, larger than the New World ever was. In other words, there's room here for more stories than we had about the "old" Venus with her swamps and dinosaurs. True, we won't have any intelligent Venerians to contend with. It's unlikely that there's any life on Venus at all. Unlikely but not impossible. There are, after all, Earth-like conditions of temperature and pressure in the Venerian atmosphere, and this is about the only planet -- other than Earth -- in the Solar System that can make that statement. Moreover, it may be that there have always been spots with Terrestrial conditions on Venus. True, life isn't likely to have evolved under present Venerian conditions, but some planetary scientists now believe that Venus was once much more like Earth. Then, for reasons not completely understood, the planet began to heat up and dry out. If by that time life had evolved, it may have taken to the air, and be hanging around there yet. It isn't likely, of course. If Venus had really active bugs they should be busily tearing off the CO# cover that keeps Venus hot, and we wouldn't need to infect the Queen of Heaven with blue-green algae. If there are any native Venerian bugs, Project Morning Star will no doubt doom them to extinction. We have the technology to make Venus a place where we can live. Have we the right to do it? Should we, granted that we can? After all, this is "pollution" on a grand scale. True it's not pollution to our way of thinking; but what's good clean air to us is certainly unnatural to Venus. I suppose that we can and probably will debate this question for a long time to come, and when the debate is finished I suspect that no one will have changed opinion by one jot. Those who feel it monstrous to go about interfering with nature, and see the terraforming of Venus as blasphemy (they will probably use the term 'obscene') are not likely to change their minds. Those who see Project Morning Star as the most glorious opportunity that has yet faced man are unlikely to be concerned about mindless Venerian gas-bags or other hypothetical Venerian critters (beyond building them a preMoming Star zoo). Meanwhile, one thing is certain: it is possible that within my lifetime I could dateline this column "Venusberg". We can do it, and some of you could live there. Just after that Big Rain.  There are countless varieties of science fiction these days, and I would be the last to want any of them restricted in any way. Nevertheless, what first drew me to this literature and, after more years than I like to add up, still holds me, is its dealing with the marvels of the universe. To look aloft at the stars on a clear night and think that someday, somehow we might actually get out among them, rouses the thrill anew, and I become young again. After all, we made it to the Moon, didn't we? Meanwhile, only science fiction of the old and truly kind takes the imagination forth on that journey. Therefore I put up with its frequent flaws; and so does many another dreamer. But are we mere dreamers, telling ourselves stories of voyages yonder as our ancestors told of voyages to Avalon and Cibola? Those never existed, and the stars do; but, realistically, does any possibility of reaching them? The case against interstellar travel traditionally begins with the sheer distances. While Pioneer # and #, the Jupiter flybys, will leave the Solar System, they won't get as far as Alpha Centauri, the nearest neighbor sun, for more than # years. (They aren't actually bound in that direction.) At five times their speed, or # miles per second, which we are nowhere close to reaching today, the trip would take longer than recorded history goes back. And the average separation of stars in this galactic vicinity is twice as great. If we could go very much faster -- At almost the speed of light, we'd reach Alpha Centauri in about four and a third years. But as most of you know, we who were faring would experience a shorter journey. Both the theory of relativity and experimental physics show that time passes "faster" for a fast-moving object. The closer to the speed of light, the greater the difference, until at that velocity itself, a spaceman would make the trip in no time at all. However, the girl he left behind him would measure his transit as taking the same number of years as a light ray does; and he'd take equally long in coming back to her. In reality, the velocity of light in vacuo, usually symbolized by c, cannot be attained by any material body. From a physical viewpoint, the reason lies in Einstein's famous equation E  me # . Mass and energy are equivalent. The faster a body moves, the more energy it has, and hence the more mass. This rises steeply as velocity gets close to c, and at that speed would become infinite, an obvious impossibility. Mass increases by the same factor as time (and length) shrink. An appendix to this essay defines the terms more precisely than here. A table there gives some representative values of the factor for different values of velocity, v, compared to c. At v  # c, that is, at a speed of # light's, time aboard ship equals distance covered in lightyears. Thus, a journey of # lightyears at # c would occupy # years of the crew's lives, although to people on Earth or on the target planet, it would take about #. There's a catch here. We have quietly been supposing that the whole voyage is made at exactly this rate. In practice, the ship would have to get up to speed first, and brake as it neared the goal. Both these maneuvers take time; and most of this time is spent at low velocities where the relativistic effects aren't noticeable. Let's imagine that we accelerate at one gravity, increasing our speed by # feet per second each second and thus providing ourselves with a comfortable Earth-normal weight inboard. It will take us approximately a year (a shade less) to come near c, during which period we will have covered almost half a lightyear, and during most of which period our time rate won't be significantly different from that of the outside cosmos. In fact, not until the eleventh month would the factor get as low as #, though from then on it would start a really steepening nosedive. Similar considerations apply at journey's end, while we slow down. Therefore a trip under these conditions would never take less than two years as far as we are concerned; if the distance covered is # light-years, the time required is #I years as far as the girl (or boy) friend left behind is concerned. At the "equalizing" v of # c, these figures become # years for the crew and # years for the stay-at-homes. This illustrates the dramatic gains that the former, if not the latter, can make by pushing c quite closely. But let's stay with that value of # c for the time being, since it happens to be the one chosen by Bernard Oliver for his argument against the feasibility of star travel. Now Dr. Oliver, vice president for research and development at Hewlett-Packard, is definitely not unimaginative, nor hostile to the idea as such. Rather, he is intensely interested in contacting extraterrestrial intelligence, and was the guiding genius of Project Cyclops, which explored the means of doing so by radio. The design which his group came up with could, if built, detect anybody who's using radio energy like us today within # light-years. Or it could receive beacon signals of reasonable strength within # light-years: a which are different. Still, he does not fudge the facts. Making the most favorable assumption, a matter-antimatter annihilation system which expels radiation itself, he has calculated the minimum requirement for a round trip with a stopover at the destination star, at a peak speed of #c. Assuming # tons of ship plus payload, which is certainly modest, he found that it must convert some # tons of fuel into energy -- sufficient to supply the United States, at present years. On first starting off from orbit, the ship would spend # times the power that the Sun gives to our entire Earth. Shielding requirements alone, against stray gamma rays, make this an absurdity, not to speak of a thousand square miles of radiating surface to cool the vessel if as energy reaches it in the form of waste heat. Though we can reduce these figures a good deal if we assume it can refuel at the other end for its return home, the scheme looks impractical regardless. Moreover, Dr. Oliver, no doubt deliberately, has not mentioned that space is not empty. Between local stars, it contains about one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, plus smaller amounts of other materials. This is a harder vacuum than any we can achieve artificially. But a vessel ramming through it at # c would release X-radiation at the rate of hour. It takes less than # to kill a human being. No material shielding could protect the crew for long, if at all. Not every scientist is this pessimistic about the rocket to the stars, that is, a craft which carries its own energy source and reaction mass. Some hope for smaller, unmanned probes, perhaps moving at considerably lower speeds. But given the mass required for their life support and equipment, men who went by such a vehicle would have to reckon on voyages lasting generations or centuries. This is not impossible, of course. Maybe they could pass the time in suspended animation. Naturally radioactive atoms in the body set an upper limit to that, since they destroy tissue which would then not be replaced. But Carl Sagan, astronomer and exobiologist at Cornell University, estimates that a years. This suggests to me that humans should be good for anyway several thousand. Or maybe, in a huge ship with a complete ecology, an expedition could beget and raise children to carry their mission on. Calculations by Gerald K. O'Neill, professor of physics at Harvard, strongly indicate that this is quite feasible. His work has actually dealt with the possibility of establishing permanent, self-sustaining colonies in orbit, pleasanter to live in than most of Earth and capable of producing more worldlets like themselves from extraterrestrial resources. He concludes that we can start on it now, with existing technology and at startlingly low cost, and have the first operational by the late #'s. Not long afterward, somebody could put a motor on one of these. The hardened science fiction reader may think such ideas are old hat. And so they are, in fiction. But to me the fact is infinitely more exciting than any story -- that the accomplishment can actually be made, that sober studies by reputable professionals are confirming the dream. True, I'd prefer to believe that men and women can get out there faster, more easily, so that the people who sent them off will still be alive when word arrives of what they have discovered. Is this wishful thinking? We've written off the rocket as a means of ultra-fast travel, but may there be other ways? Yes, probably there are. Even within the framework of conventional physics, where you can never surpass c, we already have more than one well-reasoned proposal. If not yet as detailed and mathematical as Oberth's keystone work on interplanetary travel of #, the best of them seem equivalent to Tsiolkovsky's cornerstone work of #. If the time scale is the same for future as for past developments, then the first manned Alpha Centauri expedition should leave about the year #... That's counting from R. W. Bussard's original paper on the interstellar ramjet, which appeared in #. Chances are that a flat historical parallel is silly. But the engineering ideas positively are not. They make a great deal of sense. Since the ramjet has been in a fair number of stories already. I'll" describe the principle rather briefly. We've seen that at high speeds, a vessel must somehow protect its crew from the atoms and ions in space. Lead or other material shielding is out of the question. Hopelessly too much would be required, it would give off secondary radiation of its own, and ablation would wear it down, incidentally producing a lot of heat, less readily dissipated in space than in an atmosphere. Since the gas must be controlled anyway, why not put it to work? Once the ship has reached a speed which turns out to be reasonable for a thermonuclear rocket -- and we're on the verge of that technology today -- a scoop can collect the interstellar gas and funnel it into a reaction chamber. There, chosen parts can be fusion-burned for energy to throw the rest out backward, thus propelling the vessel forward. Ramjet aircraft use the same principle, except that they must supply fuel to combine with the oxygen they collect. The ramjet starcraft takes everything it needs from its surroundings. Living off the country, it faces none of the mass-ratio problems of a rocket, and might be able to crowd c very closely. Needless to say, even at the present stage of pure theory, things aren't that simple. For openers, how large an apparatus do we need? For a ship-plus-payload mass of # tons, accelerating at one gravity and using proton-proton fusion for power, Bussard and Sagan have both calculated a scoop radius of # kilometers. Now we have no idea as yet how to make that particular reaction go. We are near the point of fusing deuterons, or deuterons and tritons (hydrogen nuclei with one and two neutrons respectively), to get a net energy release. But these isotopes are far less common than ordinary hydrogen, and thus would require correspondingly larger intakes. Obviously, we can't use collectors made of metal. But then, we need nonmaterial shielding anyway. Electromagnetic fields exert force on charged particles. A steady laser barrage emitted by the ship can ionize all neutral atoms within a safety zone, and so make them controllable, as well as vaporizing rare bits of dust and gravel which would otherwise be a hazard. (I suspect, myself, that this won't be necessary. Neutral atoms have electrical asymmetries which offer a possible grip to the forcefields of a more advanced technology than ours. I also feel sure we will master the proton-proton reaction, and eventually matterantimatter annihilation. But for now, let's play close to our vests.) A force-field scoop, which being massless can be of enormous size, will catch these ions, funnel them down paths which are well clear of the crew section and into a fusion chamber, cause the chosen nuclei to burn, and expel everything aft to drive the vessel forward, faster and faster. To generate such fields, A. J. Fennelly of Yeshiva University and G. L. Matloff of the Polytechnic Institute of New York propose a copper cylinder coated with a superconducting layer of niobium-tin alloy. The size is not excessive, # meters in length and # in diameter. As for braking, they suggest a drogue made of boron, for its high melting point, ten kilometers across. This would necessarily work rather slowly. But then, these authors are cautious in their assumptions; for instance, they derive a peak velocity of just # c. The system could reach Alpha Centauri in about # years, Tau Ceti in #. By adding wings, however, they approximately halve these travel times. The wings are two great superconducting batteries, each a kilometer square. Cutting the lines of the galactic magnetic field, they generate voltages which can jje tapped for exhaust acceleration, for magnetic bottle containers for the power reaction, and for inboard electricity. With thrust shut off, they act as auxiliary brakes, much shortening the deceleration period. When power is drawn at different rates on either side, they provide maneuverability -- majestically slow , but sufficient -- almost as if they were huge oars. All in all, it appears that a vessel of this general type can bring explorers to the nearest stars while they are still young enough to carry out the exploration -- and the preliminary colonization? -- themselves. Civilization at home will start receiving a flood of beamed information, fascinating, no doubt often revolutionary in unforeseeable ways, within a few years of their arrival. Given only a slight lengthening of human life expectancy, they might well spend a generation out yonder and get home alive, still hale. Certainly their children can. Robert L. Forward, a leading physicist at Hughes Research Laboratories, has also interested himself in the use of the galactic magnetic field. As he points out, the ion density in interstellar space is so low that a probe could easily maintain a substantial voltage across itself. Properly adjusted, the interaction forces produced by this wiH allow mid-course corrections and terminal maneuvers at small extra energy cost. Thus we could investigate more than one star with a single probe, and eventually bring it home again. Indeed, the price of research in deep space is rather small. Even the cost of manned vessels is estimated by several careful thinkers as no each -- starting with today's technology. That's about # dollars per American, much less than we spend every year on cigarettes and booze, enormously less than goes for wars, bureaucrats, subsidies to inefficient businesses, or the servicing of the national debt. For mankind as a whole, a starship would run about # per head. The benefits it would return in the way of knowledge, and thus of improved capability, are immeasurably great. But to continue with those manned craft. Mention of using interstellar magnetism for maneuvering raises the thought of using it for propulsion. That is, by employing electromagnetic forces which interact with that field, a ship could ideally accelerate itself without having to expel any mass backward. This would represent a huge saving over what the rocket demands. The trouble is, the galactic field is very weak, and no doubt very variable from region to region. Though it can be valuable in ways that we have seen, there appears to be no hope of using it for a powerful drive. Might we invent other devices? For instance, if we could somehow establish a negative gravity force, this might let our ship react against the mass of the universe as a whole, and thus need no jets. Unfortunately, nobody today knows how to do any such thing, and most physicists take for granted it's impossible. Not all agree: because antigravity-type forces do occur in relativity theory, under special conditions. Physics does offer one way of reaching extremely high speeds free, the Einsteinian catapult. Later I shall have more to say about the weird things that happen when large, ultra-dense masses spin very fast. But among these is their generation of a force different from Newtonian gravity, which has a mighty accelerating effect of its own. Two neutron stars, orbiting nearly in contact, could kick almost to light velocity a ship which approached them on the right orbit. Alas, no such pair seems to exist anywhere near the Solar System. Besides, we'd presumably want something similar in the neighborhood of our destination, with exactly the characteristics necessary to slow us down. The technique looks rather implausible. What is likely, though, is that closer study of phenomena like these may give us clues to the method of constructing a field drive. Yet do we really need it? Won't the Bussard ramjet serve? Since it picks up everything it requires as it goes, why can't it keep on accelerating indefinitely, until it comes as close to c as the captain desires? The Fennelly-Matloff vehicle is not intended to do this. But why can't a more advanced model? Quite possibly it can! Before taking us off on such a voyage, maybe I'd better answer a question or two. If the ship, accelerating at one gravity, is near c in a year, and if c is the ultimate speed which nature allows, how can the ship keep on accelerating just as hard, for just as long as the flight plan says? The reason lies in the relativistic contraction of space and time, when these are measured by a fast-moving observer. Suppose we, at rest with respect to the stars, track a vessel for # light-years at its steady speed of # c. To us, the passage takes #I years. To the crew, it takes # years: because the distance crossed is proportionately less. They never experience faster-than-light travel either. What they do experience, when they tum their instruments outward, is a cosmos strangely flattened in the direction of their motion, where the stars (and their unseen friends at home) age strangely fast. The nearer they come to c, the more rapidly these effects increase. Thus as they speed up, they perceive themselves as accelerating at a steady rate through a constantly shrinking universe. Observers oh a planet would perceive them as accelerating at an ever lower rate through an unchanged universe. At years pass by outside while a man inboard draws a breath. By the way, those authors are wrong who have described the phenomenon in terms of "subjective" versus "objective" time. One set of measurements is as valid as another. The "twin paradox" does not arise. This old chestnut says, "Look, suppose we're twins, and you stay home while I go traveling at high speed. Now I could equally well claim I'm stationary and you're in motion -- therefore that you're the one flattened out and living at a slower rate, not me. So what happens when we get back together again? How can each of us be younger than his twin?" It overlooks the fact that the traveler does come home. The situation would indeed be symmetrical if the spaceman moved forever at a fixed velocity. But then he and his brother, by definition, never would meet to compare notes. His accelerations (which include slowdowns and changes of course) take the whole problem out of special and into general relativity. Against the background of the stars, the traveler has moved in a variable fashion; forces have acted on him. Long before time and space measurements aboard ship differ bizarrely much from those on Earth, navigational problems will arise. They are the result of two factors, aberration and Doppler effect. Aberration is the apparent displacement of an object in the visual field of a moving observer. It results from combining his velocity with the velocity of light. (Analogously, if we are out in the rain and, standing still, feel it falling straight down, we will feel it hitting us at a slant when we start walking. The change in angle will be larger if we run.) At the comparatively small orbital speed of Earth, sensitive instruments can detect the aberration of the stars. At speeds close to c, it will be huge. Stars will seem to crawl across the sky as we accelerate, bunching in its forward half and thinning out aft. Doppler effect, perhaps more widely familiar, is the shift in observed wavelength from an emitting object, when the observer's velocity changes. If we move away from a star, we see its light reddened; if we move toward a star, we see its light turned more blue. Again, these changes become extremely marked as we approach c. Eventually our relativistic astronaut sees most of the stars gathered in a ring ahead of him, though a few sparsely strewn individuals remain visible elsewhere. The ring itself, which Frederik Pohl has dubbed the "starbow," centers on a circle which is mainly dark, because nearly all light from there has been blue-shifted out of the frequencies we can see. The leading or inner edge of the ring is bluish white, its trailing or outer edge reddish; in between is a gradation of colors, akin to what we normally observe. Fred Hollander, a chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratories, has calculated the starbow's exact appearance for different v. It gets narrower and moves farther forward, the bull's eye dead ahead gets smaller and blacker, the faster we go -- until, for instance, at # c we perceive a starbow about ten degrees of arc in width i centered on a totally black circle of about the same diameter, and little or nothing shows anywhere else in the sky. At that speed, # c, we'd cross # light-years in # months of our personal lifetimes. So it's worth trying for; but we'll have to figure out some means of knowing where we are! Though difficult, the problem does not look unsolvable in principle. It may become so beyond a certain velocity. If we travel under acceleration the whole way, speeding up continuously to the half-way point, thereafter braking at the same rate until we reach our goal: then over considerable distances we get truly staggering relativity factors. The longer a voyage, the less difi ference it makes to us precisely how long it is. Thus, Dr. Sagan points out that explorers faring in this wise at one gravity will reach the nearer stars within a few years, Earth time, and slightly less, crew time. But they will cross the approximately # light-years to Deneb in # or # years of their own lifespans; the # light-years to the center of our galaxy in #I ship years; the two dromeda galaxy in # ship years; or Virgo cluster of galaxies in #I ship years. If they can stand higher accelerations, or have some way to counteract the drag on their bodies, they can cross these gulfs in less of their own time; the mathematical formula governing this is in the appendix. But will the starbow become too thin and dim for navigation? Or will they encounter some other practical limit? For instance, when matter is accelerated, it radiates energy in the form of gravity waves. The larger the mass, the stronger this radiation; and of course the mass of our spaceship will be increasing by leaps and bounds and pole-vaults. Eventually it may reach a condition where it is radiating away as much energy as it can take in, and thus be unable to go any faster. However, thereal practical limit is likelier to arise from the fact that we have enough stars near home to keep us interested for millennia to come. Colonies planted on worlds around some of these can, in due course, serve as nuclei for human expansion ever further into the universe. Because many atoms swept through its force-fields are bound to give off light, a ramjet under weigh must be an awesome spectacle. At a safe distance, probably the hull where the crew lives is too small for the naked eye. Instead, against the constellations one sees a translucent shell of multi-colored glow, broad in front, tapering aft to a fiery point where the nuclear reaction is going on. (Since this must be contained by force-fields anyway, there is no obvious reason for the fusion chamber to be a metal room.) Thence the exhaust streams backward, at first invisible or nearly so, where its particles are closely further off as they begin to collide, until finally a nebula-like chaos fades away into the spatial night. It's not only premature, it's pointless to worry about limitations. Conventional physics appears to tell us that, although nature has placed an eternal bound on the speed of our traveling, the stars can still be ours...if we really want them. Yet we would like to reach them more swiftly, with less effort. Have we any realistic chance whatsoever of finding a way around the lightvelocity barrier? Until quite recently, every sensible physicist would have replied with a resounding "No." Most continue to do so. They point to a vast mass of experimental data; for instance, if subatomic particles did not precisely obey Einsteinian laws, our big accelerators wouldn't work. The conservatives ask where there is the slightest empirical evidence for phenomena which don't fit into the basic scheme of relativity. And they maintain that, if ever we did send anything faster than light, it Donald A. Wollhelm, Publisher i Richard Cowper is ## in the Locus   that changed the world forever. First ! paperback appearance. An orange eyed Zeta-mutant maiden (by Freas) ; that might have been if... It's ! the U.S. Constitution was snatched ! ; and substituted with an equally au; ; thentic one bearing Aaron Burr's sig; ' nature! Kelly Freas's cover is a collector's treasure for stamp and coin ! ! fanciers also. (UY#-I .#) ! drink edited by Richard Davis, it features Ellison's Edgar-winning tale, ' ; ' and great stories by Slableford, Klein, ! ;! Benin, Lumley, et a.(UYlJ#-'#)  ; ; the first time around? It has great ; ' stories by Bob Bloch, Richard Mathe; j  son, Kit Reed and eleven others ; ' #...and a cover by Hans ! ! ! ; Arnold. (UY #I .#) l   ! Pierre Barbet, France's master of  ' ! ; science-fictional fantasy, brings the  r ! world of Spenser's Faerie Queen to   ; life. His Psyborgs call in Captain ; ; ;  Setni to investigate a newly created ; I  ! celestial intruder. Whelan's cover will ; ! I  please the sword-and-sorcery  I ; fans. (UY#I-SI .#) I ; ' : e.b.w. : would violate causality. I don't buy that last argument, myself. It seems to me that, mathematically and logically, it presupposes part of what it sets out to prove. But this gets a bit too technical for the present essay, especially since many highly intelligent persons disagree with me. Th'ose whom I mentioned are not conservatives in the sense of having stickin-the-mud minds. They are among the very people whose genius and imagination make science the supremely exciting, creative endeavor which it is these days. Nevertheless we do have a minority of equally qualified pioneers who have lately been advancing new suggestions. I suppose the best known idea comes from Gerald Feinberg, professor of physics at Columbia University. He has noted that the Einsteinian equations do not actually forbid material particles which move faster than light -- if these have a mass that can be described by an imaginary number (that is, an ordinary number multiplied by the square root of minus one. Imaginary quantities are common, e.g., in the theory of electromagnetism). Such "tachyons," as he calls them, would travel faster and faster the less energy they have; it would take infinite energy to slow them down to c, which is thus a barrier for them too. Will it forever separate us, who are composed of "tardyons," from the tachyon part of the cosmos? Perhaps -- but not totally. It is meaningless to speak of anything which we cannot, in principle, detect if it exists. If tachyons do, there must be some way by which we can find experimental evidence for them, no matter how indirect. This implies some kind of interaction (via photons?) with tardyons. But interaction, in turn, implies a possibility of modulation. That is, if they can affect us, we can affect them. And...in principle, if you can modulate, you can do anything. Maybe it won't ever be feasible to use tachyons to beam a man across space; but might we, for instance, use them to communicate faster than light? Needless to say, first we have to catch them, i.e. show that they exist. This has not yet been done, and maybe it never can be done because in fact there aren't any. Still, one dares hope. Avery few suggestive data are beginning to come out of certain laboratories -- Besides, we have other places to look. Hyperspace turns out to be more than a hoary science fiction catchphrase. Geometrodynamics now allows a transit from point to point, without crossing the space between, via a warp going "outside" that space -- often called a wormhole. Most wormholes are exceedingly small, of subatomic dimensions; and a trip through one is no faster than a trip through normal space. Nevertheless, the idea opens up a whole new field of research, which may yield startling discoveries. Black holes have been much in the news, and in science fiction, these past several years. They are masses so dense, with gravity fields so strong, that light itself cannot escape. Theory has predicted for more than # years that all stars above a particular size must eventually collapse into the black hole state. Today astronomers think they have located some, as in Cygnus X-l. And we see hypotheses about black holes of less than stellar mass, which we might be able to find floating in space and utilize. For our purposes here, the most interesting trait of a black hole is its apparent violation of a whole series of conservation laws so fundamental to physics that they are well-nigh Holy Writ. Thus many an issue, not long ago considered thoroughly settled, is again up for grabs. The possibility of entering a black hole and coming out "instantly" at the far end of a space warp is being seriously discussed. Granted, astronauts probably couldn't survive a close approach to such an object. But knowledge of these space warp phenomena and their laws, if they do occur in reality, might well enable us to build machines which -- because they don't employ velocity -- can circumvent the c barrier. Black holes aren't the sole things which play curious tricks on space An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Note: The Alien Critic has magazine continues as before in every other respect. Issue ## features a controversial assessment of a dynamic young editorpublisher who controls from #-# of all science fiction: "Roger Elwood: Science Fiction's Hidden Dictator?" an Interview Article by Bruce D. Arthurs. Scheduled for ## is a long, candid interview with Philip Jose Farmer. Columnists: Larry Shaw, Ted White. Every issue -- The Archives: new book and story listings. Quarterlysample I year #two yrs. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I and time. An ultra-dense toroid, spinning very rapidly in smoke ring fashion, should theoretically create what is called a Kerr metric space warp, opening a way to hyperspace. The most breathtaking recent development of relativity that I know of is by F. J. Tipler, a physicist at the University of Maryland. According to his calculations, not just near-instantaneous crossings of space should be possible, but time travel should be! A cylinder of ultra-dense matter, rotating extremely fast (velocity at the circumference greater than # c) produces a region of multiply periodic spacetime. A particle entering this can, depending on its exact track, reach any event in the universe, past or future. The work was accepted for publication in Physical Review, which is about as respectable as science can get. Whether it will survive criticism remains to be seen. But if nothing else, it has probably knocked the foundation out from under the causality argument against fasterthan-light travel: by forcing us to rethink our whole concept of causalityThe foregoing ideas lie within the realm of accepted physics, or at least on its debatable borders. Dr. Forward has listed several others which are beyond the frontier...but only barely, and only to date. Closer study could show, in our near future, that one or more of them refer to something real. For instance, we don't know what inertia "is." It seems to be a basic property of matter; but why? Could it be an inductive effect of gravitation, as Mach's Principle suggests? If so, could we find ways to modify .it, and would we then be held back by the increase of mass with velocity? Could we discover, or produce, negative mass? This would gravitationally repel the usual positive kind. Two equal masses, positive and negative, linked together, would make each other accelerate in a particular direction without any change in momentum or energy. Could they therefore transcend c? A solution of Einstein's field equations in five dimensions for charged particles gives an electron then of a spaceship, if the continuum should turn out to have five rather than four dimensions? Conventional physics limits the speed of mass-energy. But information is neither; from a physical standpoint, it represents negative entropy. So can information outrun light, perhaps without requiring any medium for its transmission? If you can send information, in principle you can send anything. Magnificent and invaluable though the structure of relativity is, does it hold the entire truth? There are certain contradictions in its basic assumptions which have never been resolved and perhaps never can be. Or relativity could be just a special case, applying only to local conditions. Once we are well and truly out into space, we may find the signs of a structure immensely more ample. These speculations have taken us quite far beyond known science. But they help to show us how little known that science really is, even the parts which have long felt comfortingly, or confiningly, familiar. We can almost certainly reach the stars. Very possibly, we can reach them easily. If we have the will.  Appendix Readers who shudder at sight of an equation can skip this part, though they may like to see the promised table. For different velocities, it gives the values of the factors "tau" and "gamma." These are simply the inverses of each other. A little explanation of them may be in order. Suppose we have two observers, A and B, who have constant velocities. We can consider either one as being stationary, the other as moving at velocity v. A will measure the length of a yardstick B carries, in the direction of motion, and the interval between two readings of a clock B carries, as if these quantities were multiplied by tau. For example, if v is # c, then B's yardstick is merely # times as long in A's eyes as if B were motionless; and an hour, registered on B's clock, corresponds to merely # hour on A's. On the other hand, mass is multiplied by gamma. That is, when B moves at # c, his mass according to A is # times what it was when B was motionless. B, in turn, observes himself as normal, but A and A's environs as having suffered exactly the same changes. Both observers are right. V Tau Gamma #.I c # # # c # # # c # # # c # # # c # # # c # # The formula for tau is (I -- v #  c # ) where the exponent 'V' indicates a square root. Gamma equals one divided by tau, or (I -- v # c # )'"As for relativistic acceleration, if this has a constant value a up to midpoint, then a negative (braking) value -- a to destination, the time to cover a distance # equals (#ca) arc cosh (I aS#c # ). For long distances, this reduces to (#ca) In (aSc # ) where "I n" means "natural logarithm." The maximum velocity, reached at midpoint, is cl -- (I  aS# # )T The place seems to be a mockup of Dante's Inferno: a great funnel lined with circular ledges. I was on the top and outer level, the Vestibule, when Benito got me out of some kind of sensory deprivation environment. Since then we've crossed several of the ledges, and they do match my somewhat fuzzy memory of Dante's book. I wish I could remember more. I know it got progressively worse going down...fire, demons, boiling blood... down there where Benito is trying to lead me. Benito says we've died and gone to Hell. He's convinced that Dante Alighieri saw the real Hell, and mapped it. He's following the map, down to the bottom of the funnel and out. The fat man has some valuable talents, but he's nuts. Even if this was Dante's copyrighted Hell, they wouldn't let us out at the bottom. Dante was on a divinely ordained mission, and his guide could call oil angels! I can't believe in Dante's ridiculous hole-through-the-Earth Hell. So where am I? Item : I remember dying. The fans got me drunk at a World Science Fiction Convention. I made a silly bet: that I could sit on a window sill eight floors up and drain a fifth of rum without falling out. I lost. Item: I've seen people who are undeniably dead. The Greeks wearing togas and famous names, or armor and famous names, could be robots. But I knew Jan Petri, and I attended his funeral. He's here in the Circle of Gluttons! So try this. After I hit the concrete the fans got up a fund to freeze me. I waited it out as a cryogenic corpse. A lot of time must have passed before the medics learned enough to repair the damage and thaw me. By then someone had built this tremendous funnel. Most of the people I've seen could be corpsicles revived for profit by the Builders. It's a Disneyland for masochists and sadists, with the sadists as devils and the masochists scattered among the revived dead, and evil miracles to entertain them. Benito could be one of the paying customers. He won't say what level he comes from. He seems to accept everything: the massless windtossed victims on the second level, the strange wars on the fourth, the dirty frozen slush that holds Jan Petri, the filthy swamp and the homicidal maniacs in it and the quiet people moored under the waters... Could the place be an insane asylum where futuristic mental patients act out their delusions? I've seen enough crazies. But the sadomasochistic Infernoland looks more likely. I tried to get out over the rim wall. It receded like a demonstration of Xeno's paradox: some kind of space warp. The Builders are hideously powerful. I don't want to fight them. I only want out. And I've found a way. Benito managed to con the bureaucrats out of a couple of stacks of togas, for fabric. There's wood in the swamp, and thermals above the red hot wall below. We're going to fly out, over the rim wall. They can't keep a hard science fiction writer in hell! xn ut I up for Allen Caipentier." "I beg your pardon?" Benito was looking out at the marsh, at decaying trees embedded in fog. "We've got a quiet place to work, I've made some flint tools, and there's everything we need for the glider. What more could we want?" Benito sighed, and I got back to work. The first job was to find a place to loft the glider. We were on a little area of high ground, no more than thirty yards square and nestled up against the base of the cliff. The bad-tempered character was between us and everyone else. He wouldn't let anyone else past, and he wasn't about to bother us. I could just see him through the mist. First things first. I used a log to flatten out an area larger than the glider would be, then cut a long springy sapling for a ruler. After a while I had a whole collection of saplings of various lengths and thicknesses. You draw the rough outlines, then spring the batten -- in this case one of the saplings -- across the important points. That makes a smooth fair curve. It was the way the Wright Brothers designed airplanes, and it was the way the Douglas Gooney Bird was designed. It wasn't until World War II, long after the age of flight was underway, that airplanes were designed on drafting tables. Before that they were done on the loft floors, the same way that boats were designed for centuries. I don't know how long it took me to get it right. I wasn't in any hurry, and Benito never tried to rush me. After a while he even developed some enthusiasm. Did you ever try to set up ribs and make them keep their shape by tying them with vines? When the ribs are whatever you can cut off swamp willows? As a lesson in patience the job has few equals... Eventually it looked like a glider. The wings weren't precisely symmetrical, and the control surfaces pivoted on wooden bearings with dowels shaped by flint knives and thrust into holes enlarged by flint drill bits; the fabric was sewn with vine tendrils shoved through holes poked with a thom; but it looked like a glider. I remember the Cargo Cults of the South Seas. The islanders had been sorry to see the airplanes go after World War II ended. Native magicians had made mockups of airplanes and landing fields. It was sympathetic magic intended to bring back the real airplanes and the great days of cargo and trade. I told Benito about the Cargo Cults, amusing him greatly, and only later realized what had brought them to mind. What I was building would never look like more than a crude imitation of an airplane. But it would fly! I spent as much time making tools as I did working on the sailplane. A bow drill: take one bow, as for shooting arrows; get a good curve in it, and instead of an arrow, take a piece of sapling. Wrap the bowstring around the piece of sapling. Attach the drillbit to one end. You need a hard block in which the top of the saplingchunk will rotate freely because you've worn a depression in it. Hold that block in one hand, put the drill point where you want it, and draw the bow back and forth with the other hand. The sapling turns. The point turns. In about a week you can drill a hole. I'd heard that boat builders in Asia preferred their bowdrills to American electrics. They must have been crazy. I worked. There were no distractions. The Builders must have altered my body radically. I didn't get hungry, thirsty, homy, or sleepy, and I never had to go to the bathroom. I wondered what I had become. What was my power source now? A power source with no food intake and no waste outlet? If it was beamed power, Benito and I would be turning ourselves off when we dropped the glider beyond the wall. Beyond the wall... I hadn't thought much about that. What would we find outside? Dante had described a dark wood, a wilderness. Why not? A low gravity world, native vegetation allowed to run wild... No guarantees, Carpentier. There might be nothing but Infemoland itself, a tremendous cone built in airless space, with a point-mass, a quantum black hole for instance, mounted at the tip to provide gravity. In that case we were dead. I kept working. And eventually, there it was. The Fudgesickle, by Carpentier and Company. "This is a demo, madam. The finished model will have many other desirable features, such as landing gear and seats for the crew, and metal fastenings... "Will that hold together?" Benito didn't seem particularly worried. His tone was more one of abstract curiosity. "I think so. We shouldn't put much strain on it, but I've noticed we don't weigh what we should. Infemoland seems to be built on a lower gravity planet than Earth." "Yours is die most curious delusion I have yet encountered here. Well, if it willfly, we may as well try it. The sooner you are done with this idiocy, the sooner we can reach the center and escape." I could have killed him. So the Fudgesickle wasn't a thing of beauty. It would fly! And it was a lot better way out than his. I didn't try to kill him for three reasons. First, he'd break my neck. Second, He had been useful as a guide; he'd gotten me the fabric. Third, I needed his help getting the Fudgesickle high enough on that cliff above us for a launching. We pulled the glider up the slope and carried it until the land fell away as a steep cliff. The swamp bubbled like sludge, with sickly lights glowing among the oddshaped bushes and trees. "If we crash down there, we'll never get out," I said. "Can you fly this thing?" "I have flown them." Benito laughed, with real humor. "What?" "I have done this before. We launched the glider from a much higher cliff. An Austrian soldier came to get me out of a sticky situation." He settled himself at the controls. Something familiar about that story... but Benito was looking out at the swamp and I didn't ask him. He looked awfully big and heavy to be a glider pilot, and I had to remember that we didn't weigh what we should. I strained against the fusilage and shoved outward. It wouldn't have worked if we hadn't been massless or nearly so. Even then I kept wondering about that. It chewed at my soul die way a ragged tooth attracts the tongue. How could we have weight and no mass? The wrong weight, and... Infernoland. Disneyland of the Damnedable. How long had they kept me in that bottle? Clarke's Law kept running through my head, an old axiom of science fiction. 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ' In my time it would take magic, the supernatural, to make that many people, not weightless, but massless. It wasn't even possible in theory to extract the inertia and leave the weight. But they could do it, the Builders, the God Corporation. Why? It must have cost a lot. Just how big a paying audience did they have? Who was watching us now? I heaved against the plane: and then there was no room for thought. The plane dropped like a rock, with me hanging onto the tail, crawling forward to get into the rear seat. Benito knew how to fly, all right. He let us dive, just missing the cliff, until we had built up speed; then he leveled out, taking us above the swamp and toward the red-hot city. Dis. Dante had described it, glowing with red-hot mosques, with demons on the walls to guard it. I didn't see any demons. I'd take them on faith. If the Builders could build Minos, they could make demons. We were about a hundred feet above the swamp, and keeping steady altitude. There must have been warm air rising from the hellish brew below us. Then we were over the wall, and Benito banked sharply left to catch the updraft. The plane rose steadily, gliding along the gentle curve of the wall. Benito shouted, "This won't do any good, you know." "We're getting higher, aren't we?" I pointed down. The swamp had shrunk until I could see the gentle curve of the cliff beyond it. Cliff and red-hot wall were concentric arcs of circles. The view to the right went down forever. Beyond what seemed the biggest maze ever built, steam rose in a thick curtain. Through windtorn rents in the steam I could glimpse factories belching out ugly black dirt, a line of electric pylon towers, a yellow glow of desert... on and on, down and down. What had it all cost? Thousands of times as much as Disneyland. What kind of people would build Infemoland and people it with unIf this worked out, I would never know. We were higher than the cliffs to our left. It seemed that we had climbed fast, faster than we had any right to. But we were nearly weightless and completely massless. The plane had only its own structural weight to lift. We continued to rise until we were in the hideous grey fog that served Infemoland for a sky. It stank: excrement, oil, smog, sickness, slaughterhouses, everything hideous. There wasn't even the honest smell of sweat and locker rooms. "We'll have to turn now," Benito said. "We can't stay in the updraft if we can't find it." "That's right. Go!" We banked left, then straightened out. The fog began to thin. We were doing it! Passing over the rings we'd struggled through. A wind full of weightless people bounced us about, then let us go. We passed over Minos' palace. It was even bigger than I'd thought. There was the wall ahead. We were going to make it. Have at you. Builders! You can't keep a science fiction writer in Hell! Even so, no hero worth writing about would have left Infemoland with so many questions unanswered. He would have led a revolution against the Builders, and never mind the odds. The plane would have been for reconnaissance, not escape. Heinlein, van Vogt, "Doc" Smith, Robert Howard, all the men who wrote of mighty heroes: what would they think of me now? Who cares? Go, Carpentier! Go, go! The villas of the First Circle slid below us. And suddenly we were losing altitude again. The plane dipped sharply just over the cold river. I should have known it would. "We're not high enoygh!" I shouted. "Obviously. What now?" "Take us back to the thermals! Get up higher, we can try it again." "As you wish." He didn't say it wouldn't work. He just banked left, into the bowl. Toward the winds. Even below the grey fog, Infemoland's lighting was not good. Gloom and night, all the way down. Infemoland was a vast funnel, leading down, down... down where Benito said we had to go. And we were flying there. Suddenly we were in the winds. People flew about us like flurries of autumn leaves, some together, some alone. Aerial whirlpool ahead, which Benito avoided. And off to the left a straight updraft, flailing human shapes rising helplessly toward Infemoland's invisible roof. Just before they vanished into the grey stinking fog, the air column topped out and they streamed away to both sides. "There," I said. I pointed. Benito shrugged expressively. "I'm getting pretty damned tired of your defeatist attitude!" He banked toward the updraft. Suddenly we were rising as in an elevator. I caught startled faces, and some of the whirling victims tried to swim toward us through the air; but they were rising faster than we were. They couldn't catch us. I was glad. Massless they might be, but if I could feel wind roaring past my ears and tugging at my hair, then people clinging to the wings would foul the airstream. We'd all crash. We left the updraft and were carried along with the others. Sure enough we were just at the edge of the fog, so that we could hardly see below. This was it! We were as high as we'd been above Dis, and much closer to the wall. "Now!" I shouted. Benito even grinned at me as he turned toward the wall. This time we'd make it! As he banked, something bulky hit him in the face and knocked him back into the seat, then slipped past and wrapped itself around me. I struggled to rip it off, and it fought back. We'd picked up a passenger. "Let me at the controls! I used to be a glider pilot!" The hitchhiker pulled himself off me and scrambled into the other seat. Benito didn't resist. "Let him fly," he said. The plane turned sickeningly. We had lost altitude. I could see over the stranger's shoulder: cliffside, swampland, a glowing red line -- A tailspin, and we were beyond the place of the winds, headed back into the inner circles of Infemoland. He pulled us out of the spin. Nothing subtle about it. He just stopped the spin with the ailerons, then pulled back on the tailflaps and hung on. Presently we were flying level again, headed toward the swamp. The stranger looked back at us, showing a lean, cheerful face beneath short, wind-tossed hair. "Where to?" "Up and out. Over the wall." "Good thinking, but there's a problem." He waved toward the cliff. We were well below the level of the winds. I said, "There are red-hot walls down there. Good thermals. We'll spiral around them until we're high enough, then get back into the winds -- " "Not me." "We have to! There are updrafts in the winds. Before you interfered we were high enough to get out of this place." "Down is correct," Benito said. "Not the way you mean!" He shrugged. "It is the only way we can go now." "No question about that." We headed out over the swamp again, feeling the rising air that was just strong enough to keep us level. If we didn't find an updraft we'd crash in the swamp. The trouble was, we were looking for something invisible. You can't see a wind, you can only see what it does. I was looking for heat turbulence, or formations that might break a horizontal airstream and send it upwards; anything. There'd been no problem spotting updrafts when the wind was full of actors or draftees or whatever they were. Ahead through the murk we could see the cherry-red glow of the walls of Dis. It looked a bit like the first sight of a town in the middle of the Nevada desert, and for a moment I thought of food and coffee and one-armed bandits, and girls... We were over a hot-spot in the swamp. A shape rose from the murk and shook a fist at us. He had a big bushy Afro hairdo. He lost interest when another man in a voluminous white gown and high pointed cap rose up to scream at him. They were locked in battle when we left them. "Take it easy," I told our pilot. "I think I saw the left wing bend way up when you pulled us out of the spin." "Yeah, I saw it too. What did you build this thing out of." I told him. He looked uneasy. I asked, "What kind of gliders are you used to?" "Hypersonic." "Eh?" said Benito. "Huh?" I said. The stranger chortled. "Jerome Leigh Corbett, at your service. I was a space shuttle pilot. I had a dozen flights on my record, and then... You ever have one of those days?" "Damned right," I said. Benito laughed and nodded. We seemed to have enough alititude to reach the hot walls. They were close enough that we could make out details through the murk and the red glow. Corbett seemed to know what he was doing. There were ripples in the dark mud below. A hand thrust itself upward, middle finger extended. There was no movement in the cobwebs and slimy moss hanging from the bushes, no wind, nothing; only the ripples in the mud. "One of those days," Corbett said. "First, a twenty-six hour hold while we replaced one of the solid boosters. That was only irritating. We lost one of the three main motors going up. Then after we made orbit one of the fuel tank clamps jammed. Either of you know what a space shuttle looks like?" I said I did. Benito said he didn't. "Well, the tank is big and bulky and cheap. We carry the main motors down aboard the dart, the winged section, but we leave the tank to bum up in the atmosphere. If we couldn't get the tank loose there wouldn't have been any point in going down." "Did you?" "Sure. We fired the orbital motors in bursts until the clamp sprang open and let us loose. Then we had to use more fuel to get back to our orbit. We were supposed to dump cargo and change orbit, but there wasn't enough fuel. We had to go down." Benito was looking totally confused. It must have been gibberish to him. I asked, "What happened?" "I don't know. I spacewalked out and looked at the fuel tank clamp. I swear there was nothing wrong. But maybe the metal fatigued, or maybe the hatch over the clamp lock got twisted -- anyway, we were halfway down and going like a meteor when we got a burnthrough under the nose. I heard the maintenance techs -- they were the cargo I couldn't jettison -- screaming in the instrument room, then the whole nose peeled back in front of me. I woke up by that ferryboat. The crowd pushed me along to Minos and he threw me in the whirlwind." "And why were you there?" Benito asked. Corbett grinned. "Being a shuttle pilot carries a lot of prestige. The girls liked me." We were over the walls of Dis now, and banked to catch the rising air. My seat surged comfortingly against me... and the left wing bent in the middle. The Fudgesickle turned on its side and dropped. Corbett dropped the nose. The wing, relieved of pressure, straightened out. But when he tried to pull up it bent again. We'd have been better off if the loose section had ripped away, but it hung on, dragging us back. Corbett did his best. He tried to fly with the broken wing, the flap raised high on the right wing to compensate. We got some lift that way, but there wasn't any doubt: we were going to crash. Inside the walls of Dis there were tombs. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of tombs, some glowing red hot, others dark. The whole landscape was littered with them. On the walls themselves were -- beings. They didn't look much like the cute little devils in Disney cartoons. They raged at us, and Corbett, seeing them, dove for speed to get out of their sight. The wing folded entirely. Corbett played the controls like a virtuoso at an organ, heading out over the tombs and toward a steamy clear area beyond and below them, but we were too low, and falling lower, into the tombs -- We dropped into their midst. The plane kissed the top of one tomb, bounced, and smashed nose on against a wall of red hot iron. xm Flame roared up around me, as if a fuel tank had caught. I pulled myself loose and rolled out, clawing frantically with my hands as the flames washed over me. When I tried to get to my hands and knees my right leg wouldn't work. I pulled myself along the ground, dragging the useless leg behind me, whimpering with fear while the fire raged behind and the air I breathed grew unbearably hot. Come for the niter. You'll stay for the taste. Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.  Lori I lard # I'd heard enough to make me decide one of two things: quit or smoke True. I smoke True. The low tar, low nicotine cigarette. Think about it. King Regular: II mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, King Menthol: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, #'s Regular: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, #'s Menthol: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. I didn't stop until I was forty feet away. My fingernails were tom and my hands cut on the flinty ground. I rolled over onto my back to look behind me, afraid to look at my leg, knowing I'd have to. What I done to myself? Someone was screaming. I ignored the deep throbbing incoherent pain in my leg to look back at the crashed glider. Benito had been thrown clear in the crash. Now he was running back toward the glider. Corbett was trapped in the wreckage, rammed up against the redhot iron tomb, screaming like a damned soul. I didn't even consider trying to get him out. He'd be dead in seconds. His skin would already have charred away, and he was breathing superheated air and smoke. How could he scream like that with seared lungs? He was. a dead man Benito hadn't thought of that. He ran straight back into the flames. I watched in disbelief as he pulled at Corbett's arm, getting nowhere, while fire roared about him. Benito took flaming wreckage in his hands and heaved it away, clawing to get Corbett out. Idiot! He'd leave me stranded here, my leg ruined, with no guide and no one to help me! I sat up and tried to go to his aid, but agony flashed in my leg. I had to look down. I stared at two splintered ends of red-and-white bone protruding through my thigh. Bright blood spurted through the tom skin. Arterial bright, impossibly red. I couldn't take my eyes away. Once before I'd broken a bone. I'd caught a football wrong in high school, and a knuckle had cracked. It had made me sick, not just the pain, but the thought of that broken thing inside me. I could hardly walk to the clinic. Now I stared at two ends of a broken thighbone while my life's blood jetted out with each pulse. I expected to faint. But nothing happened, and presently I thought of making a toumequet before all my blood was gone. There was only my robe. I gripped the hem in my teeth and pulled with both hands. It wouldn't tear, and wouldn't tear, and bright blood jetted in the air. Benito! I was lying with a broken bone and a terrible wound, but I could be saved! Why was Benito wasting his time on a hopeless case, a man he'd barely met, a hitchhiker? It wasn't fair. Corbett was still screaming as Benito tore at the wreckage. Where did the pilot find the strength? He should be finished, lungs burned out, heart stopped, but he went on screaming mechanically as if the sounds of pain were being ripped out of him. The pilot came loose suddenly and they both went sprawling backward. Benito got up and dragged the pilot over to me. Benito was parboiled and hairless, his hands blistered and burned. Corbett was a charred corpse, black from end to end, with bloodrare steak showing through cracks in the char. There were no eyes left in the sockets. And still sounds came through the swollen blackened lips. "Stupid!" I said. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! In a minute he'll be dead anyway!" "He will heal," said Benito. "He is dead already." 'Heal?" "Certainly." Agony surged in my leg. I looked down... and couldn't look away. I watched in helpless fascination. The blood had stopped pumping. The bone ends gradually vanished as skin crawled out to cover them. It crawled on, closing the wound, leaving my leg in an odd tented straightened slowly. An old scar I'd once got fishing slowly reappeared where before there had been bloody jagged bone end. The pain turned to a ferocious itch. That went away too. I was healed. Corbett had stopped screaming. Now he only moaned softly. I looked, afraid to look, afraid not to. The char was flaking off him in thick patches. The skin beneath was bright sunbum red, not at all like raw meat. His tattoo, like my scar, came up from underneath his skin like a self-developing photograph. He groaned again, and opened his eyes. There were eyes in the sockets. Corbett looked at me and smiled weakly. "Can't die again, I guess. Wished I could for a time there." "It is a pointless and evil wish," said Benito. "The dead cannot die." "No." Corbett began an inspection of his body. I stood up uncertainly. Benito watched, saying nothing. I was able to stand. I could walk. I did. I went off a way, toward the glowing tomb, until the heat was nearly unbearable, and I stared at it. We'll have to change our theory, won't we, Carpentier? Corbett's no robot. The Builders would have had to put new, sunburned skin under the skin to be charred. They would have had to plan all this ahead of time. They would have to be omniscient. And what about your leg, Carpentier? What about your leg? Biological engineering. Rapid regeneration. That, to add to their other powers. They can warp space, and possibly time. They can take the mass from a human body and leave the weight. They can put Minos' tail into -- where? Hyperspace? They've got fine-tuned weather control and infinitely adaptable robots. And they can engineer your body, Carpentier, your body, in such a way that it heals in minutes, and do it without your knowing they gave you that ability. Getting a little thin, isn't it, Carpentier? A neat set of rationalizations, but it won't work. How are these Builders different from God Himself? What can God do that they can't? And back at the edge of my mind I couldn't help remembering the last thing I'd screamed in the bottle. Corbett had got up and was peeling saucer-sized flakes of charred skin from his chest and shoulders. "Hot here," he said. I nodded and abandoned my reverie. It was hot. Even the tombs that weren't glowing were just below red heat. Here and there flames shot up from open pits. It must have been painful for Corbett with his new skin. I remembered where we were. Inside the walls of Dis. How were we to get out again? We were surrounded by hot glowing tombs, flames, fire, heat everywhere, except in one direction where darkness showed through the red glow. "We have to get out of here," I said to Benito. "We'll roast to -- We'll roast." To death? We couldn't die. Can't die twice, Carpentier. "Of course we must leave," Benito said. "Recall your promise. I helped you with the glider, and it did not work. Now you have no choice. We go downward." "Which way?" For that moment I didn't care. "I am not sure. We may as well go where it is more comfortable." He led us off toward the dark. It drew us onward, promising relief from the heat and the choking air. We threaded our way between heated tombs and great vat-like pits with fire dancing from them. Huge lids that would just cover them lay beside each one. The edge of the hot region was the beginning of a white marble maze. The heat stopped as if we'd gone through an insulated doorway, but there was no door. I wasn't even surprised. It would take more than invisible heat barriers to surprise me now. Corbett staggered into a corridor and sank down with a happy sigh, his back against cool marble. He wriggled to get his head clear of the brass fixtures. We were in an endlessly sprawling building. The corridors were about fifteen feet wide and nearly that high. Every wall was covered with square-cut marble slabs and rows of brass plates and slender brass... what? Vases? I read some of the plates. Name, birthdate, date of death. Sometimes an insipid poem. These were burial vaults, and those brass things were vases, and of course there were no flowers in them. The corridor stretched on endlessly, and there seemed to be branches at frequent "More unbelievers," I said. "Yes," Benito answered. "But I was an unbeliever. An agnostic." "Of course." "Why of course?" , "I found you in the Vestibule," said Benito. "But now you know the truth." A two-syllable response stuck in my throat. The truth was an elusive thing, here in Infemoland. I could talk about advanced technologies until Hell froze over, and Benito would still call them miracles. I'd watched a miracle. A compound fracture had healed before my eyes. And I was no robot! Rut this place had to be artificial. It was a construct, a design. I knew that. All right, Carpentier. An artifact implies an artificer. There has to be a designer. Pick a Chief Engineer for the Builders, and call him... what? Good fannish names, like Ghod, Ghu, Roscoe, the Ceiling? No. Call him Big Juju. Question, Carpentier. In what way do Big Juju's abilities differ from God Almighty's? Size? This place is the size of a small planet. Carpentier, you've no way of knowing Big Juju can't build even bigger. Worlds, stars, whole universes. Natural laws? He suspends them at will. A world-sized funnel, as stable as a sphere would be in normal space. And -- and he can raise the dead. Me! Corbett, who couhdn't possibly have been frozen. Jan Petri the health food addict, cremated, Carpentier, burned to a pile of greasy ashes and a few chunks of bone, and now risen so that he can be tortured. Big Juju can create. He can destroy. He can raise the dead and heal the sick. Was more ever claimed for Christ? I looked back at the red-hot tombs. They still glowed with heat, but none of that reached us in these cool marble halls. "There are people in those tombs?' ' Benito nodded. "Heretics." The word was frightening. Heretics. They believed in the wrong gods, or worshipped the right god in the wrong way. For that they were raised from the dead so they could be tortured in hotboxes. Iago says it. 'Credo in un Dio cruel.' I believe in a cruel God. And that you must believe, Carpentier. The ability to make a universe does not presuppose moral superiority. We have seen no strong evidence that Big Juju's moral judgements are better than our own. Would God torture people? I half-remembered Sunday school lessons. No. But also, yes. It was one reason I was an agnostic. How could I worship a God Who kept a private dungeon called Hell? That might be all right for Dante Alighieri, a Renaissance Italian, but Carpentier has higher standards! A voice floated from within my mind, a tired voice whispering out of a mound of fat. We're in the hands of. infinite power and infinite sadism. We were in the private museum park of Big Juju. "We've got to get out of here." "Too right," said Corbett. He paused. "Music?" I listened. There was music playing from somewhere within these marble corridors. Something chintzysweet, a minor note in it. Artificial good cheer in Hell. "It fits," I said. "Granted we're damned, how do we get out? Which way?" Benito looked around him. "I have never been in this part before." "Not back out there," Corbett insisted. "Not unless we have to." "Right. We've got time," I said. And I started laughing. It was an awful sound. It bounced around in the maze and came back at me from all directions, transmuted to racking sobs. I tried to stop. Corbett and Benito were staring. I tried to tell them: "I was right. Just once, I was right. All that time in the bottle, all that guessing, and I was right just once. Immortality! When they woke me up they had immortality." Dammit, I was crying. Corbett took my arm. "Come on, Allen." We went inward. The corridors branched away, endless cross-corridors in an endless corridor, and every one of them the same, wall after wall of marblesealed caskets, each with its empty bronze vases for flowers. Our footsteps echoed hollowly. Our sandals hadn't been touched by the flames. The sprightly music continued, never getting louder, and the light never changed, neither gloomy nor bright. On and on, corridor after corridor. Finally we halted. "We haven't turned," I said. Corbett nodded. "Do a oneeighty and we can get out of here. Let's." Half-facetiously I rapped on a bronze nameplate and read off the name and dates. A translucent human shape formed before me. I stared in horror, then shrugged. What was a ghost among ghosts? "Pardon me," I said. "Can you direct us toward the wall of Dis?" The ghost's voice was faint and reedy. "Wall? Dis?" Faint laughter. "They must have added more extensions to the Mausoleum. I don't remember anything like that in Forest Lawn." "Very funny. This isn't Forest Lawn." The ghost seemed vexed. "I was supposed to be buried in Forest Lawn. I paid for it before I died. It was in my will. Where am I?" "Would you believe Hell?" More faint laughter, as if from a great distance. "Certainly not. I don't even believe in ghosts." And then there was nothing but the wall. I jumped when Corbett spoke behind me. "It's a risk, but are you game to try a cross-corridor? I think if we turn left and keep going straight we'll be headed up again. The scenery changed. Now there were niches with urns in them, much closer together. We came to a T-intersection, and turned, and returned to the right direction when we could. Then another T, and a Y, and a big round empty space with corridors off in all directions and a big monument in the very center... and we were in the good section of town. The sarcophagi were no longer buried in the walls. At the ends of short alcoves were huge marble oblongs, ornately carved, guarded by traditional statuary. Knights, and vague sexless winged beings that were supposed to be angels and might have been faggots; reproductions of famous religious statuary; original creations, all done with enormous competence, all in monstrous bad taste. Sculpted Bibles open to John #:#. Replicas of European cathedrals, done in perfect scale, bronze toys. One alcove was blocked off by a brass gate and enormous lock. All the nameplates were of the same family, all ornately carved with relief pictures and bronze replicas of their life's signatures. We looked in, grinned at each other, and went on. Pride. Unbelievably ornate monuments purchased at unbelievable price: expensive tombs turned prison. I wondered if they matched monuments left behind on Earth. Sure, I decided. Big Juju has a sense of fitness. Fitness? In this one case, yes, fitness. The corridors twisted again and again. The dead were high walls on all sides of us. Our footsteps were dull intrusions on music for the proud dead. The dead walked among the dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead! Word and reality echoed with each step. Word and reality hammered at my soul. Dead. Dead. Dead. Presently I sat down against cool marble. "Allen? What is the trouble?" Benito's anxious voice was far away. "Come on, let's get moving. This place gives me the creeps." Corbett shoved at me with his toe. "C'mon." I tried to speak. It wasn't worth the effort, but finally I heard my own voice saying, "We're dead. Dead. It's all over. We tried to make lives for ourselves, and we didn't make it, and we're dead. Oh, Corbett, I wish I'd died like you." The gay sweet music mocked me. Dead. Dead. Dead. Green light blinked on and off in the comer of my eye. It was annoying, a disturbance, an irritant in the thick cotton closing about me. I could see the source without turning my head, but it was an effort to move my eyes. Why bother? But the light winked on and off, and eventually I looked at the source, a neon sign blinking far down at the dead end of a corridor of the dead. It echoed my thought: -- off and on, endlessly, in green neon. Unreachably far away, on another world, in another time, Allen Carpentier had been buried like a potato in a closed coffin ceremony. The fans had come to the funeral, some of them, and a few writers had come, and afterward they'd gone off to have a drink and talk about new writers. Carpentier was dead, and that was all there was to it. I could speculate forever about Big Juju's moral superiority, I could wander forever through Hell, and so what? Corbett's voice came dimly. "We may have to leave him. I saw this happen to a guy, once, in the war. He's going autistic." "I have seen it also. Many times. Would you leave him here?' ' I thought Benito was shaking my shoulder. -- what was a blinking neon sign doing in this place? A horrible suspicion filtered through the blankets around my brain. I pushed Benito away and surged to my feet. I walked, wobbling, toward the blinking light. So it goes? At the end of the corridor was a tremendous square-cut edifice in black marble. The epitaph beneath the neon sign was long and wordy, couched in words of one syllable and short, sirpple sentences. A man's life history, a list of books and awards -- Corbet and Benito stared when I came back. Corbett said, "You look like you're ready to kill somebody." I jerked my thumb behind me. At first I couldn't speak, I was that angry. "Him. Why him? A science fiction writer who lied about being a science fiction writer because he got more money that way. He wrote whole novels in baby talk, wjjh sixth grade drawings in them, and third grade science, and he knew better. How does he rate a monument that size?" Benito's smile was lopsided. "You envy him that tomb?" "If you must know, I was writing better than he ever did before I left high school!" "Being dead hasn't hurt your ego," said Corbett. "Good. We thought we'd lost you." "He's got vases bigger than the bottle they put me in!" "You were an agnostic. Selfish, but not viciously so," Benito said. "If I judge rightly from the size of his tomb, he must have founded his own religion. And possibly worshipped himself." "No, they were jokes, sort of. But he did found at least two, not that there were ever any followers, or that he even intended there to be. One of them had everyone telling comforting lies to everyone else. The other was the Church of God the Fairly Competent. Maybe I should have gone in for something like that." "Why didn't you?" Corbett asked. "Because what's the point of mocking people who've found something to believe in." I turned toward the big, gaudy edifice. " That's the point." Benito shook his head wonderingly. "I question your sanity. He is in there. You are out here, free to escape." I didn't answer, but he was right. We turned away. For a time I could see the green reflection blinking ahead of us. were lost in endless corridors of the dead. Benito walked in stolid patience, but Corbett's face had acquired a grim, set look, desperation barely held in check. I kept my own thoughts to myself. But I remembered Big Juju's ability to distort space and time. We'd come a long way. Perhaps there was no way out. And what if we did get out of the maze? Benito said we had all eternity. Eternity in Infemoland. Or in Hell. Big Juju or God, it didn't matter; the problem was to escape. I'd built a glider once, and it had flown. Get me through the wall, get me fabric for the wings, and I'd do it again. But I'd have to do it without Benito. You promised you'd go with him, Carpentier. Down to the center, out his way. You can keep your word, or you can break it; but if you break it, it'll be without his help. Suppose he's crazy? Or an agent for Big Juju? Then you're on your own. Nuts. Benito might be able to trick the damned bureaucrats into giving us whatever we wanted. I couldn't kid myself I'd be able to. Fabric I could get -- at worst, by peeling it off catatonics -- but how to get through the wall? I'd seen demons on the rim. More demons guarded the gate. I glanced sideways at Benito. Stolid patience, and iron faith in God and the maps of Dante Alighieri. And Carpentier's given word. If we ever got out of this maze, he'd go down. We could follow or not. I felt heat ahead. We turned a comer and found a wall of red-hot ums. The floor seemed to slant uphill. Corbett whooped. "This way! To the wall!" His voice sounded out of place in the Mausoleum. I waited for Benito to protest, but he said nothing, and I wondered if he knew something we didn't. "We could make quite a safari," Corbett shouted. He was over-joyful at finding a way out. "Just open these ums and pour out the ashes." "I went further than that, once," Benito told us. "I attempted to establish a local government." "Didn't work?" "No." "Why?" There was no answer. It became apparent that there wouldn't be one. Something else to think about. We hit a T-corridor and were back in cool marble. We followed it a short way, anxious lest we find ourselves back in the endless tombs. It turned left again. I rounded the turn ahead of the others and found myself facing red heat. I shaded my eyes -- "Your papers, please?" I squinted through my fingers. I faced a towering wall of red hot iron, with a divided door in it. There was a counter on the lower closed half of the door, and someone behind it, half-hidden in the dark interior framed by bright red light. He held a stack of papers. The bored face showed no sign of recognition. It might have been the same clerk or a different one. "Papers? Come on, I haven't got all eternity." He pushed the stack of papers toward me. "You'll have to make these out before you can go uphill. It's in the Rules." I backed around the comer. To the questioning looks of the others I said, "Don't ask. Just turn around." We went back the way we'd come, looking for a right turn. Presently we found it, and -- "Your papers, please?" I walked toward the booth, but I was studying the gate behind the clerk. Iron glowing red, but it was only waist high. We could jump it. The counter turned white hot as I approached. "Papers? You'll have to fill out the forms. No exceptions." I looked to Benito. He shrugged and turned away. After a moment I followed, hating him. He wasn't going to help. And he'd known it all along. We had to go downhill. XV The music went with us wherever we went: nature themes, melodramatic sweetness, singing violins, but never funeral dirges or somber tones. The cheerful music was more depressing than any funeral march. Gradually I realized we could hear something else as well. I don't know if it had been with us the whole time, waiting for us to become aware of it, or if it began as we threaded our way deeper into Hell. The sounds came from the tombs. Groaning. Whimpers. Croaks of rage. Mumbled curses. Once even gay whistling, a tune that jarred against the canned music. Gradually the clammy air warmed. It was our first sign that we were moving out of the maze. We followed currents of warming air. Where the air turned steamy-hot we found a doorway. Unnerving sounds reached us through the doorway: screams of agony tom from throats that could contain them no longer, blended with animal war cries and the most vicious curses I'd ever imagined. Corbett plunged ahead, but Benito caught him. "Carefully," he warned us. We looked out and down. The ground fell straight away from the doorsill, first vertically, then angling down to a forty-five degree slope. The dirt was baked adobe with jagged edges of protruding flint. The bottom of the cliff was obscured by steam, much like the marsh outside Dis, but this was hot. The steam roiled about, leaving occasional clear patches. Gradually the picture formed. We were looking at an enormous discolored lake. The shore curved away to either side until steam hid the endpoints. Men and women stood waist deep in steamy red water, and they howled. They were packed like a public pool on a Kansas summer Saturday; and they wanted out. Some tried it, but they didn't make it. Armed men patrolled the shore between us and the scarlet water. The guards were dressed for a costume ball, in the military garb of all places and all times; but they walked like sentries whose officers are watching. Their eyes were uniformly on the lake, and they held weapons ready. Weapons: there was every hand-weapon known to history. Pistols, bows, scythes, crossbows, throwing-sticks, slings, pikes and lances, AS# rifles, all held at the ready. When someone attempted to leave the lake, the sentries fired. I saw a woman in black military uniform cut nearly in half by a burst from an automatic rifle. She shrieked in agony and waded deeper into the lake, where she stood, healing. Healing. The implications of our inability to die began to get through to me then. One man in a long beard wore a golden crown onhis head and clustered crossbow bolts through his chest. He was stubborn. He'd move toward the shore. The crossbowmen would lire, and he'd stagger back, the scream hissing through clenched teeth. He'd pluck the bolts from his chest and throw them contemptuously into the water -- and wade toward shore again. And again. And again. He was a fool, but a brave one. "I take it the guards won't be on our side," I whispered. Benito shuddered. "No. On the contrary, if they catch us, we -- " He didn't finish, but he didn't have to. The guards looked silly in those costumes. I knew some of them. Nazi swastikas and American GI. Coldstream Guards and Cameron Highlander. Blue and grey of the Civil War. World War I helmets. Redcoats and the blue-and-buff of Washington's Continentals. Fuzzy-wuzzies and Chinese Gordon's Tommies, and more: Roman Legion, Greek hoplite, vaguely Asiatic uniforms, long gowns ami wicker shields, spears with golden apples on the hilts; and more still, yellow men in animal fur, red and black men in little besides war paint, blue men stark naked. Blue? Britons in their woad, marching beside Legionaires, followed by men and women in coveralls carrying tiny machine guns of a variety I'd never seen. And they watched the lake, constantly, vigilantly. "They won't see us up here," I said. "Now what?" "We must cross the lake," said Benito. "There is a place, far around, where it is only ankle deep. Elsewhere it rises to above our heads in the deepest parts. The damned stand at a depth appropriate to the violence they did on Earth." "That water loote hot. It steams." "It is boiling blood." Benito laughed without humor. "What would you expect for the violent?' ' A frozen moment stretched endlessly. Then Corbett shouted, "We can't walk into that! No!" "Jerry -- " "I've been burned before, remember? We'll never make it! When our ankles are cooked we'll go to our knees. When the legs are cooked we'll be lying in it!" "Yet you see that every man and woman in the lake is standing." The calm voice halted Corbett's panicky monologue. He looked. I'd already seen that Benito was right. If they could stand, their cooked legs must still be operating. They also wouldn't stop hurting... "The gpards will not allow us to wander freely in Hell," Benito cautioned us. "Without instructions regarding our sentence, they may well force us to the deepest spot and keep us there.You have noted that their weapons do not kill, but they can disable." Let's stay here, Carpentier. I'm starting to like the music. "They must not notice us. We must do as little screaming as possible." Benito spoke seriously, without a trace of humor. Benito had been in Hell so long that suffering was not remarkable to him, or even unusual. "There may be a better way," Corbett said slowly. He pointed. "Allen, what do you see?" "An island." Half-obscured by steam, it stood very low in the lake a good mile to our right. It was more crowded than the water around it, the water that Benito said was boiling blood. Poetic justice. Infinitely exaggerated, as everything was here. No doubt the people boiling down there were murderers in life, or torturers, or kidnappers, arsonists perhaps. The violent. Well, at least we knew how to get across. "Benito, can we cross on the island?" He stared pop-eyed, his big square jaw thrust forward. "I had no idea there was an island in Acheron. Dante did not describe it." "I suppose he mentioned boiling blood?" "Of course. He also described the ford I used before. The ford is heavily guarded, and perhaps the Island would be better." He considered. "Dante did not mention the ship in Acheron either." "Ship?" "Yes, Allen, a wooden sailing ship sunken on the other side of Acheron. The decks are just awash with blood. I have been aboard it. There are grills in the deck, and souls beneath the grills." "Slave traders," Corbett speculated. "Probably," said Benito. But how had Benito been aboard? Was that where he had escaped from? Or from deeper down? I didn't dare ask, yet how could we trust him until we knew his crime? How could we not? "Slave traders aren't our problem," Corbett said. "I suppose the best plan would be to circle up here until we're just opposite the island, then make a run for it." We looked at each other and nodded agreement. We turned back inside to parallel the shore, passing walls of shelves packed with crematory ums. I savored the cool, damp air. I was going to miss it. The cliff-edge was just beyond that wall. Why bother, Carpentier? Why not stay here? No. We've got to get out of here. Minos would track us down, eventually, and then what? We have to escape. Hey, Carpentier, what makes you think there's a way out? I don't want to think about that. There has to be a way out. Benito says there is. Dante described it -- A way out for him, yes! A living man whose guide called on angels! There is a way out of Hell and we're going to find it, because we can't die trying, because there's nothing else to do but sit for eternity. Eternity. I'm scared, Carpentier. Me too. Let's talk to the others. They're scared like you. Talking helps. "The guards," I said. "They bother me two ways." Corbett said, "It's boiling that bothers me." "I don't think I'll like being shot full of arrows and bullets," I said. "But worse than that, what the blazes are they doing here?' ' Corbett just laughed. They were guarding, his look said. "They did violence they believed justified," said Benito. "They fought for what they thought was a higher cause." "And there aren't any soldiers in Heaven?" "I'm sure there are. But these enjoyed their work." His voice took on a note of sadness. "They enjoy it still. They do not seek to escape." "It's weird. They're serving the Builders, or Big Juju, or God, whatever we call the master of this place. If they're serving God they ought to be in Heaven!" Benito shrugged. "Or Purgatory. Perhaps. Theology is not my speciality. The next doorway is just ahead, be careful." He wouldn't say more, but I remembered the uniformed servitors in Disneyland, and wondered if the guards worked in shifts. Did they have homes to go to when they got off work? Did they go home and tell their wives about their day? We waited, peeking around the door jamb to watch the shore. The island was just opposite, no more than fifty yards off shore, obscured by clouds of steam and no easier to see than it had been from a mile away. A band marched past, robed and unarmed. "Inquisition priests," Benito murmured. "They would call the temporal authorities. The soldiers." They receded. A handful of barbarian women passed, arms and shoulders the color of their bronze armor. They carried bows and shortswords. Behind them was another group, also women, wearing olive-drab fatigues and carrying submachineguns. They passed out of sight, and the shore was clear. "Run," Benito ordered. We ran. There was a ten foot drop to the steep slope. I landed on my feet and kept running in a halfcontrolled fall. Jagged flint edges tore at my feet. When I hit the beach I kept running, because I knew I'd never be able to walk into the boiling lake. The wandering clouds of steam wrapped me round, hid me from the guardians, and I ran toward the chorus of screams. The smell was overpowering, fresh blood and clotted blood, copper bright and polluted foul. Corbett was ahead of me. He splashed into bubbling red fluid and screamed. He stood, covered to his knees, screaming in pain. Benito plunged in, waded through the stuff like a damned robot and gripped Corbett's arm to keep him from turning back. Then I was in it myself. I fell into a trench and was instantly waist deep. The pain hit me weirdly, as if I'd stuck my finger in a light socket. Stunning. Unreal. All my senses were scrambled. I knew die smell of pain, its sight and sound, and there was nothing to see or hear but pain. I couldn't control my limbs. They thrashed and twitched, almost Still jerking like a marionette, I turned toward shore. Nothing could be worth this much pain. Half a squad of Green Berets stood there studying us. They had friends: small men in black pajamas. I turned back. We were committed now. Through a gap in the steamy mist I had seen their eyes: dull, expressionless, intent on their task; and their task was to let no one leave the blood. "The island," I screamed. "To the island!" But I didn't move and neither did the others. We stood where we were and screamed. "The island!" Corbett laughed hysterically, laughter and pain and horror. "We can't use the island -- " I screamed, "What?" "Stupid! Look!" He was right. I cursed the rolling clouds that had hidden it from view. They were shoulder to shoulder over every square inch of the island. I never saw a more vicious mob. They were armed haphazardly, with clubs and crude daggers of what seemed to be splintered bone. Even as I watched, someone trying to climb out of the blood was repelled by half a dozen stab wounds. He staggered away, howling, leaving a foaming red wake. Benito came up to me, still pulling Corbett by the arm. "We must wade around the island." I couldn't move. Suddenly he took my shoulder in his powerful grip, and began to plunge through the boiling red, towing both of us like children. I remembered his strength. There was no point in struggling with him. I didn't want to. I wanted out ; but my limbs would not obey. The pain was paralyzing. You could read the agony on Benito's face. He hurt as we did. But he plunged on. He shouted, "Deeper down, there is a place where souls are not even allowed to cry! Here there is no law against screaming!" "Yeah! Cheer me up!" I screamed. We halted. There were guards on the shore. A man in a high peaked hat stared through binoculars. We didn't dare move. There are two ways to treat constant excruciating agony. Both involve screaming. You may try to suppress the screams, and they will force their way through your teeth; or you can just let it out. Similarly, you can concentrate on the source of pain and try to minimize it; a current of not-quite-boiling blood here on the left, get into it! Stand on tiptoe, you gain an inch... Or you can tell yourself it will heal, and concentrate on something else. There was turmoil on the island. People were shouting at one of their number. He stood with his feet planted wide and his hands raised high over his head. The hands held the haft of a spear: a length of wood that might have been a broken oar or a tree sapling, and a leafshaped blade poised a few inches inferno above his feet. Poised to strike; but at what? Hands reached to shake his shoulders, and he snarled in an agony different somehow from all the moans around him. I tried to hear. By now the wordless moaning of the thousands of waders, even my own, had become a background noise, had faded like the sickening smell of boiling blood. I caught disjointed phrases. "Kill 'em! Kill 'em before -- " "Billy, if you won't do it, let us through!" "Idiot, you hafta, they'll be all around us in a minute -- ' ' The man with the spear bellowed, "No!" And the ground seemed to erupt beneath his feet. He kicked at whatever was gripping his ankles. He kicked himself free and ran for the island's shore. Others got out of his way, then surged to close the gap. Behind him, that portion of the island was heaving as in an earthquake, and clubs and knives were rising and falling with horrible rhythm. "Billy" splashed knee deep into boiling blood and stopped at once. As he sucked air for his first shocked scream, three seperate hands thrust forward against his back. He splashed face down. Two surging waves washed against the bathers around him. He was up in a flash, his spear ready for war. I was sure he'd try to fight his way back onto the island. But he didn't. He turned and waded away, in our direction. A foot short of my nose he said, "Friend, it's not polite to stare." "Sorry. What happened back there? Will they let you back?" He glared back at his erstwhile neighbors. "Those bastards couldn't stop me." He sounded like he was holding his breath... as we all did, because each of us was trying to talk around a scream. It was almost funny, that sound. "I... never thought it would hurt so much," he said. "Why didn't you stay?" "What?" Benito and Corbett had crowded close to listen. "Billy" studied me, his face contorted in agony. "Don't know about the island, do you?" I shook my head. The Afrika Korps had gone, but curaissiers with muskets had replaced them. We still dared not move. "We on the island, we killed people, just like you in the swimming hole. But we all had some excuse, some reason we had to kill. Like me. There was a range war going on. We wasn't even the ones that started it." I said, "Yeah?" He took it wrong. "You think maybe we could have stopped it? Gone along with the amnesty?" I didn't know what he was talking about, and didn't much care. His blue eyes had turned killer in that moment. I said, "Don't mind me. I'm in Hell too." That calmed him, and changed him. He was younger than me and shorter than me, and the short amateurish haircut gave him a pleasant boyish look. Though the hair was plastered down with blood... "Then' there's Harry Vogel," he continued, "he was robbing a liquor store and the owner pulled his mask off. He'd seen his face, so he had to die, see? And Rich and Bonny Anderson, they kidnapped a kid, and it would have been okay, but he got away. Got as far as a great big street called a freeway, .then some kind of machine hit him." He looked down, then continued talking, hurriedly, as if that would block the pain. "Bonnie's here, Rich isn't. Rich got religion. Hey, we got Aaron Burr on the island! And that guy who ran the Andersonville prison camp -- " "I get the idea. If they thought they had to do it, they don't get hurt as bad." "Yeah." Billy looked down at his waist. "It hurts. I think this hurts as much as anything I ever did except die. But I wouldn't go back. No." But he looked back and wasn't sure. He said it again. "No! I won't ever kill anyone again!" "That's twice you've -- " "Well, that island ain't any common dirt, you know. It's mostly judges and congressmen and lawyers and a few jury members and crooked sheriffs -- " "Wait! Wait!" I remembered the island surging up around him. "The island's people? Live people?" I swear he was enjoying my reaction. "Yeah. We have to keep 'em crippled. It's what Minos does to them for letting known killers loose on the public that was paying them to protect them. Some was jury members that took bribes, and lawyers that fiddled with the evidence, and congressmen that passed laws against putting a man in jail if the evidence wasn't got in a special kind of way... I don't know. That kind of law is all new to me. The island was a lot smaller when I first came here." "And they keep coming back to life!" I was this shocked: I had forgotten to hurt. "Friend, they sure do. And we have to keep persuading them not to move, one way or another. Otherwise they'd just swim away, and where'd we be?" "Waist deep in boiling blood?" He tried to laugh. "Well, I guess I'd rather boil. If they could die it'd be okay, but they can't. Let 'em alone long enough and they try to get up. I can't take it any more." I felt Benito's hand on my shoulder. "Allen. The shore is clear of guards. I think we can move." Corbett was already raising a wake. I started after him, tottering on stiffened legs. On impulse I turned back. "Why not come with us? It can't be any worse lower down." His eyes sparked with hope. "Maybe you're right." blood, going up to our chins before the bottom sloped up again. After an eternity we reached the other shore and let ourselves fall, each wrapped silently and solipsistically in his own pain. We lay in full view on what seemed to be rough white concrete. Four targets. If the guardians wanted us they could have us. A long time later, Corbett found the strength to roll over. "They're all along the far shore," he reported. "Watching us. Nazis, Indians -- " Benito said, "Never mind. They will not hurt us. They do not bother those who wish to go deeper into Hell." "That's a relief," said Corbett. I wasn't so sure, but I held my peace. I inspected my feet, legs, buttocks. The meat was loose on my bones. I should have been dead down there; it should have stopped hurting. Fat chance, Carpentier. And Billy, who must have hurt just as much as I did, was smiling to himself. I snarled, "What are you so damned happy about?' ' "First off, this is the first chance I've had to lie down in a hundred years. Second, I don't have to kill anyone, even if they yell at me. Third, I didn't much like the company on that island. Maybe I'll like you better." "Maybe. Who were you?" cowhand that got done unto and did some back." "Bonney?" Corbett sat up suddenly. He'd healed much faster than I had. "Billy the Kid?" "Friend, there are a dozen men on the island that all claim they was Billy the Kid." "And you?" "I'm die real one." I could see the wheels going round in Corbett's head. Were we supposed to spend eternity wondering if he were telling the truth? Corbett said, "Have it your way. I was a spaceship pilot." "What? You mean like you been on the Moon?" "Right." Benito grunted and surged to his feet, then sat down hard with another grunt of pain. From the waist down he showed bright red skin, very tender looking. Like Corbett, he'd healed fast; but he wasn't in condition to scout. I asked, "Benito, what are we headed into? It's for sure we can't go back." "The Wood of the Suicides lies ahead. A pleasant place, comparatively, if we can avoid the dogs." "Dogs?" ' 'The Wood is punishment for the sin of suicide," Benito explained. "Each tree holds the soul of one who took his own life. They are not dangerous to us. But the Violent Wasters also suffer there, and the dogs are their punishment. There will not be many of the dog packs. It is almost an obsolete sin." Corbett looked up. "Since when is a sin obsolete?" "Customs change. In Dante's time there were men who would hold a party at which they would bum part of their wealth, to show how wealthy they were." "Potlach!" I cried. "Gesundheit," said Corbett. "No, dammit, listen. There was a west coast Indian tribe that used to do just what Benito's talking about. Hold a party, bum a lot of valuables. They used to compete at it. I never knew the Italians did the same thing." "They did," said Benito. "Their punishment is to run through these woods pursued by wild dogs. If the dogs catch them they tear them apart." Billy was sitting up. "They heal after that?' ' I was healing! My legs and buttocks still hurt, but the flesh was firm, and I could move the muscles. I watched, fascinated, as new skin grew before my eyes. "The dogs and the souls they pursue should be rare," Benito said, "and the trees can do us no harm. We should find this stretch easy." He stood up. "Ready?" My feet were still tender, and Billy was complaining about his. But it didn't sound like we'd have to run anywhere. Corbett and Benito were healed. We set off, deeper into Hell. It had become an obsession with me. Anything was better than waiting -- and if I spent too much time remembering the agony in the lake, we'd never get started. We left concrete for dirt. When we topped a gentle rise, the ground was suddenly all erosion gullies, hard red and yellow clay studded with gravel and gashed by flash floods. We had to scramble in and out of them. Some had water at the bottom, water filthy with broken bottles and bottle caps, used condoms, floating grease, occasional bursts of brightly colored dyes, chemicals that burned our sandalled feet. Nothing grew here; there were dead stumps of trees and dried brown vines reaching upward like dead old women's fingers. Strange smells moved on the air: incongruous whiffs of automobile exhaust, acids, burning oil and rubber. Billy grunted. "I don't see no trees, Benito. Where'd you put the damn trees?" "We should have reached the Wood long since. I do not understand. But we must go on." We scrambled out of the gully and looked downward. We had a vista of Hell. It looked like Hell on Earth. Nothing grew. We had to shout above a continual racket. In the distance rectangular shadows showed through the gloomy half-light and thick smog. Buildings? Factories? I said, "Progress has caught up with your woods, Benito." A clattering sounded nearby, within a cloud of roiling smoke. A woman ran out of the smoke, terror on her face, hair streaming behind her. She wore a tom evening gown with diamond brooch and earrings, high heeled shoes with jeweled ornaments. She ran holding the skirt high. Billy shouted and tried to stop her. She dodged him and ran on. The clattering grew louder, and a bulldozer roared out of the smoke. A man ran just ahead of the blade. The 'dozer trailed smoke, and it was gaining on the fugitive. There was no driver. Billy was in the bottom of the gully, curled up, his head wrapped in his arms. When the monster was past I went down to Billy. He was muttering to himself, and when I touched him he twitched galvanically. He leapt to his feet in fighting stance. "I was never afraid of no man that ever lived," he said. "But I was scared of that. What was it?' ' "Bulldozer. For moving dirt." Billy stared into the smog, his face wondering. "You could tear down whole mountains with things like that." "We did," Corbett said. "There's more than one way to be a violent waster. " Billy frowned. "How's that?" he asked. "Pollution. This must be the place for people who ruin the environment." Corbett's face showed his disgust. "They did this to the Earth." "But who gets chased by them things?" "Real estate developers, I guess. Housing tract speculators. We shouldn't have too much trouble here." Corbett looked at us. "Or do we?" I'd always been a conservationist myself. If Big Juju's poetic justice ran true to form, I'd be safe enough. Or would I? Had I fallen by accident? I'd certainly put myself on that window ledge. If a bulldozer buried me here, would I become a tree? "Let's go," said Billy. "This We moved off by tacit consent. "Where we going, anyway?" Billy asked. "Past this round there is desert," Benito said. "A fiery desert, too hot for life, with flame falling from the sky. I know of only one way to cross it, and that was the way Dante used. A stream runs through the desert, the overflow from the lake of blood. It cools the desert as it moves through it." "Miraculously," I said. I'd intended it to be contemptuous, but it hadn't come out that way. I'd seen too many miracles, all unpleasant. Benito nodded. "Of course. We must find this stream, or we cannot cross. It runs through the Wood. Comrades, we must find the Wood." He turned left and walked on. "Why this way?" Billy laughed. "You ain't got any idea where that Wood is." "No, but we must reach it if we walk far enough. It is only a matter of time." Yeah, we had plenty of that. And Hell was a series of concentric circles, God only knew how big around. It might take years, and so what? "Why not go the other way?" Billy insisted. Benito shrugged. "Dante always turned left on his way down. But we will turn right if you like." "Naw. It ain't important." The noise, the smells, the desolation continued. The damned were here, placed by a macabre humor. Phantom heads rose from oil pools. Some were pecked incessantly by oil-smeared birds. A river ran past like an open sewer, and men and women lined the banks, mourning. The wails were constant in our ears, wails and roaring motors and clanking machines. We looked into some of the huge buildings and pulled back out fast. Inside the noise was overwhelming. Here a sizzling hum of electricity, there a scream of metal grinding on metal, elsewhere a roar of flame. There were more of the damned in those buildings, and they were hard at work. Our way led through one of the immense factories. Not a head lifted to see us pass. Incomprehensible widgets passed on an endless belt, and men and women screwed on nuts and tightened them and fitted the bottoms and the handles, endlessly. We followed the endless belt for miles until it went through a wall. On the other side more of the damned were taking the widgets apart. Machinery hummed and conveyors took the parts back to the other side of the wall. We left the building to find oil derricks raising and lowering their heads like prehistoric giant birds. We crossed a strip mine, and Benito pointed out that it was laid out very like Hell itself: a vast series of descending circular terraces. But there was nothing at the bottom except stagnant water. A towering oil-fueled power plant of spidery framework and miles of pipes and valves poured power into a cable thick as my waist. Transmission towers took the cable downhill. I peered along its length, but the murk defeated me. How did they use electricity in Hell? But outside the power plant was an athletic man chained to a wheelless bicycle set in concrete in front of the exhaust pipe of the generator. Black smoke poured around him, almost hiding him from view. As we watched he began pedalling furiously. The hum of the gears rose to a high pitch -- and the generator inside died. There was a moment of quiet. The man pedalled with sure strokes, faster and faster, his feet nearly invisible, his head tucked down as if against a wind. We gathered around, each wondering how long he could keep it up. He began to tire. The blur of his feet slowed. The motors inside coughed and black smoke poured out. He choked and turned his head away and saw us. "Don't answer if you'd rather not," I said, "but what whim of fate put you here?' ' "I don't knowl" he howled. "I was president of the largest and most effective environmental protection organization in the country! I fought this!" He braced himself and pedalled again. The hum rose and the generator died. Billy was completely lost. He looked to Benito, but our guide only shrugged. Benito accepted everything. I knew better. This couldn't be justice, not even Big Juju's exaggerated justice. This was monstrous. Corbett had to be guessing when he suddenly asked, "You opposed thermonuclear power plants?" The guy stopped dead, staring as if Corbett were a ghost. The dynamo lurched into action and surrounded him with thick blue smoke. "That's it, isn't it?" Corbett said gently. "You stopped the nuclear generators. I was just a kid during the power blackouts. We had to go to school in the dark because the whole country went on daylight saving time to save power. ' ' "But they weren't safe!" He coughed. "They weren't safe!" "How did you know that?" Benito asked. "We had scientists in our organization. They proved it." We turned away. Now I knew. I could quit looking for justice in Hell. There was only macabre humor. Why should that man be in the inner circles of Hell? At worst he belonged far above, with the bridge-destroyers of the second ledge. Or in Heaven. He hadn't created this bleak landscape. I couldn't stand it. I went back. Benito shrugged and motioned to the others. Within the cloud of blue smoke his face was slack with exhaustion. "It wasn't just the problem of where to bury the waste products," he told me. "There was radioactive gas going into the air." He spoke as if continuing a conversation. I must have been his only audience in years, or decades. "You got a rotten deal," I said. "I wish I could do something." He smiled bravely. "What else is new?" And he started to pedal. I glared at the nothing sky, hating Big Juju. Carpentier declares war. When I looked down, Benito was fumbling through saddlebags attached to the stationary bicycle. The man cried, "What are you doing?' ' Benito took out papers. The man snatched at them, but Benito backed away. He read, "Dear Jon, I could understand your opposition to us last year. There was some doubt about the process, and you expressed fears all of us felt. But now you know better. I have no witnesses, but you told me you understood Dr. Pittman's demonstration. In God's Name, Jon, why do you continue? I ask you as your sister, as a fellow scientist, as a human being: why?" He began pedalling again, ignoring us. "You knew?" I demanded. He pedalled faster, his head bent. I leaned down and put my face close to his. "You knew?" I screamed. "Fuck off." Big Juju wins again. Too much, but appropriate. As we walked away, Jon screamed after us. "I'd have been nothing if I gave up the movement! Nothing! Don't you understand? I had to stay as president!" We plunged on. Once we caught lungfuls of something unidentifiable. We were getting used to that by now. This time we wound up at the bottom of an erosion gully, kicking and twitching, unable to control our muscles. "N, n, nerve g-g-gas," said Corbett. We lay there for hours. Days perhaps. Eventually the wind shifted, and our legs could work again. Benito and Corbett scrambled up the side of the gully, then came back for Billy and me. As usual we were the last to heal. Big Juju's biological engineers hadn't done as good a job on us. We scrambled to the top. Beyond the gully we saw trees. That was all we could see through the sniffles and the tears and the dark, smoky air: a sharply bordered forest, some distance away. We began to run. Trees. Real living things! or close to it; nothing was really alive in this terrible place. But trees! We ran, wearing fierce grins, noses lifted as if the air were already sweet... Closer, they were not so inviting. Gnarled trunks, black leaves... Not Mother Nature herself could have called them pretty. Clumsy birds flapped above them. The forest ended abruptly at a border of flat ground. No, not ground. I stopped at the edge, confused. The others ran heedlessly out onto the flat black borderland. It was a road. Blacktop, and a white double line down the center. I called, "Hey, wait a..." Things roared past and drowned my voice. Too fast to tell what they were, but I knew the sound: the whip of air, followed by a shriek of brakes. I screamed, "Run!" Corbett was already running for his life. Benito and Billy stared at me; then Benito just took my word for it and ran toward me. Billy looked where I was looking... and for him it was already too late. They looked like black Corvettes, #s models, but they were lower-slung and more rakishlooking. They'd stopped and turned and were coming back, accelerating hugely, leaving opaque black clouds of smoke. Billy made up his mind to run, he turned; and they were on him. Billy flew high, hit hard, and rolled like a bean bag: no bones. I started swearing. The cars roared away... two of them did. The third turned hard, right off the road. It rolled over once and landed upright and came for us, bouncing and rattling, but accelerating. Its headlights came on blindingly. I stopped swearing and looked for cover. "What are they?" Benito screamed. "Cars. No drivers," Corbett told him. "I saw. Empty race cars. They must guard the forest." I looked for cover: something to hide behind, or even a jumble of broken rock too rough for a car. Nothing. The black demon bore down on us. "There!" I pointed, and ran. It was an oil slick, depth unknown; and it would bloody well have to do. I ran straight into the pool. My foot landed on something that jerked away and sent me sprawling. When I pulled my face out of the oil another black, dripping face looked back at me. "Sorry," I said. "That's okay. We all got our own problems here," said the stranger; and he sank beneath the oil. Benito was waist deep and wading deeper. Corbett hesitated at the edge, looked disgusted, looked behind him... squealed and dived sideways. I ducked under. The glare of headlights was branded on my closed eyes. A wave of oil splashed over me. I lifted my head, and there it was: a rakish black sports car, hubcap-deep in the oil pool. Its motor was a demon-snarl; its wheels spun frantically. It found some traction from somewhere: it edged backward, found more traction and surged out of the pool just as Corbett went over the door in a flying dive. The horn screamed in rage. The car backed, then turned in a tight circle. I think it was trying to roll over. It never made it. The motor died, the killer car rolled to a gentle stop. Corbett stood up in the driver's seat, grinning all over his face. The keys dangled from his hand. Benito and i waded out, streaming oil. Corbett had the hood of the murder car up and was inspecting the motor. "I used to race a little," he said. "I can probably drive this. What do you say, shall we cross the desert in comfort?" "You look it over' I told him. Benito and I went to see about BillyHe lay twisted as no living man could be. We straightened him out. His body was mushy and limp. So was one side of his head. The good eye opened and looked at us. Benito bent over Billy and took one of his hands between his own. "I don't know if you can hear me," he said. "I want you to know that you will heal. It will hurt, but you will heal." I beckoned Benito out of Billy's hearing. I asked, "Should we take him with us?" "I think so. He will be of no help until he heals, but what of that? He should be safe enough in an automobile. He can ride in the passenger seat." We rejoined Corbett at the car. "I don't know the make," he told us. "It's got a big mill, but the tuning is lousy. You saw how much smoke it was pouring out. I've been checking the brakes, and they look good -- " "The question," said Benito, "is whether it will obey the steering wheel and other controls. We saw it driving itself." "Yeah." Corbett frowned, studying the car as one would search the face of a prisoner of war. Would he give information? Would it be the truth? "The top's down. We can always jump clear," he said. "No point in taking chances, though. Why don't you two get under cover, and I'll take her for a spin." There wasn't any cover. We stood at the far edge of the oil pool, ready to jump, as Corbett turned the ignition key. He drove the car around for awhile, trying it on rough and smooth terrain. He brought it back and prudently took the key before he got out. "Seems okay. "I'll stay in low gear the whole trip. That way nothing can happen fast. If the gear shift starts moving by itself I'll give a yell." "There's one more problem," I said. "Four of us. Two seats. Benito, shall we ride on the fenders?" "I have no better suggestion." The change was gradual. The air got hotter. Then there were no more oil pools. The dead ground gave way to hot dead sand, and Corbett worried aloud about the tires. A minute later he'd forgotten the tires; he was too busy slapping away fat flakes of burning matter.  xvm It snowed fire. Great burning flakes fell slowly from the dead gray sky and settled on us. We slapped frantically. Billy was slumped like a corpse while fireflakes dropped to his skin and clung. I could reach his head by stretching backward along the fender, and I pulled a saucer-sized chunk from his face. His one good eye thanked me. We rolled across a burning sandy waste. The fireflakes vanished when they touched ground, but not when they touched flesh. Another evil miracle. The car weaved drunkenly, then shifted into second and picked up speed. I called back to Corbett. "Did you do that?" "Yeah! You want to be out here forever?" "Not really." The sand was flat enough for higher speed -- provided we could control the car. Billy grunted in soft protest. I could imagine his fear. He'd never seen a car before, or gone faster than a horse could run. Fire bored into my back where I'd exposed it stretching to help Billy again. I slapped it off and wished for a Cadillac. Cadillacs belong in Hell. There's something about the car that rots the driver's brain. Every time some damn fool has almost gotten me wrecked by running a red light or jumping lanes or parking where no car ought to be, said idiot has been driving a Cadillac. There had to be Cadillacs in Hell -- and if we'd captured one of those, we'd be riding in air conditioned comfort! Instead of riding a fender and slapping fireflakes! Clusters of souls danced frenetically on the blazing sand. Some stopped, amazed, to watch us pass. A couple of times Corbett tooted the horn at them. He was cursed for his trouble, but he wasn't mocking them. There was nothing he could do. I called across the low hood to Benito. "Who are they?" Benito was busy tearing burning gunk out of his hair. "They sinned against Nature," he yelled over his shoulder. "What does that mean?" "Unnatural love. Man for man, woman for woman -- " Man for sheep, woman for vibrator... poor bastards. I wondered about the gay couple who'd owned the house next door to mine. Quiet neighbors, friendly middle-aged people like any married couple without children. Were they here? I turned my head and hunched up so that the fireflakes hit the side of my face instead of the front. I couldn't slap fast enough. The windshield gave Billy some protection now that we were moving. The fire burned holes in my skin. You'll heal, Carpentier. You'll heal, if we ever get out of here. But what about them? They danced, they slapped at themselves; they ran in circles; they screamed at us to stop and cursed us when we didn't, with an insane jealousy that I understood perfectly. They'd be here forever. This, just for being queer? But it was no surprise to me that God's justice and mine didn't agree. I thought about my neighbors and shuddered. Credo in un Dio cruel... The industrial section of Hell was only a yellow tinge to the sky behind us. Ahead was nothing but more desert. We must be about halfway across, I thought. Suddenly the car surged forward with the bit in its teeth. Corbett froze in panic. The motor screamed in inhuman fury as the car accelerated. In a second we'd be moving too fast to stop. I tucked my head in my aims and rolled off the fender. Look, I wasn't running out on my buddies. The car was going to crash, and they'd have a better chance if one of us could move, right? It was what I was thinking, anyway. The motor choked off while I was still in the air. I hit rolling. I came up screaming and dancing. The other souls hadn't been dancing for joy either. The pain was as bad as the boiling blood. The car rolled to a stop, and I ran for it, yelling and swearing at the fireflakes. Suddenly a girl was running alongside me. She'd have been pretty once. Now her hair was raggedly scorched, and her body was covered with bums. "Can you take me out of here?" she screamed. "We'll be lucky to get out ourselves. There's no room!" I kept running until I reached the car. The girl stayed right with me. "Please, I'll do anything if you'll take me out of here. Anything. "That's nice," Corbett told her. To me he said, "We're in big trouble. The gas pedal just floored itself. I had to turn off the ignition. "Couldn't you -- " "Couldn't I what? Pull the pedal up with my toes? Allen, this car is haunted. It hates us." "What's wrong?" the girl asked. She got no answer. It was hard to think with the fire settling on me. I danced around the car, shouting, "We'd better think of something. In a minute or two we'll be under a pyramid of people." The damned were running toward us from all directions. "Raise the bonnet," Benito commanded. "Corbett, see to Billy-" I got the hood up. We looked inside, and Benito said, "Now, Corbett, move the accelerator. ' ' Something wiggled behind the engine. "Allen, you saw? That moved the petrol feed. You must control it with your fingers." It was a hell of an awkward position, sprawled across the fender with my head and hands under the hood. The motor was as hot as the sand. I couldn't avoid touching it. But I pulled at the widget and cried, "Okay! I got it! Corbett, go! Go like a bat!" The crowd was very near, and they couldn't all hang on. Benito motioned to the girl and she took the fender in front of me. The car roared and surged into a converging circle. Most of them dodged for their lives. One went under the wheels. Another, a big athletic type with long black hair halfway down his back and a scraggly beard, got the edge of the right door and swung up on the trunk lid. A small-boned blond man had come with him. "Frank!" the companion called. "Frank! Don't leave me!" "Sony, Gene. Nothing I can do. No room for both of us." "Frank!" The car gunned ahead as Corbett got it under control .again. A thin voice followed us. "Frank! I went to Hell for you..." Frank had managed to crawl up to get an arm around Corbett's neck. He squeezed. "All right, buddy, turn this thing around! We're going to Havana!" "Fine. Whatever you say," said Corbett. Frank grinned and slacked off his grip on Corbett, but he didn't let go. Now we had: Frank on the trunk; Billy in the passenger seat, groaning a little, still unable to move; Benito on the left front fender; me in the motor compartment trying to stay clear of the hot engine, my legs dangling out to the right; and the girl forward on the right front fender, her feet on the bumper. Corbett had his problems driving. He had to lean way out to the left to see around the open hood. Billy was able to scream now. "For God's sake, brush the fire off him, Frank!" Corbett yelled. "Screw that. Screw God too. Get moving." We moved. Corbett yelled, and I slacked off on the gas to let him shift to second. That was fast enough. The car fought, the hot metal tugged against my fingers like something alive, but I could control the speed. At least we weren't hitting any bumps. "HeeeHaaah!" Frank screamed in joy. "Better'n the last chicken run! I'll make you guys honorary Hell's Angels! We're tough, you know? Toughest bunch in the world, you know? Hick sheriff was so scared of us he called the State Fuzz. We run for it. I had the lead. Come around a curve and the whole road was full of Fuzzmobiles. I got two fuzz smearing myself." "Your friend back there -- " I shouted. "Gene? We did some swinging times, man. Had a whole stable of 'em. Boys, girls, but the only one they let me keep here was Gene. Maybe I'll miss him." He didn't look back. "Could you get that fire off my leg?" I asked the girl. "Naw! Enough trouble holding on here." "You said you'd do anything!" I clenched my teeth in agony. There was fire on both legs now, and I couldn't slap. I couldn't let go of the spring, and I had to hold on with the other hand. The car was still fighting me. "Get that fire off or we'll throw you off!" "Awright, awright, you don't have to get nasty." She slapped a couple of times and got the worst away. "Who are you?" Benito asked. "Doreen Lancer," she yelled above the roaring motor. "Go-go dancer. One night some bastard raped me and strangled me. At least, he tried to rape me!" She laughed bitterly. "He didn't seem to know how to go about it!" "So what the hell are you doing here?" Frank demanded. "Don't know! I liked it every which way. Most of the types I meet here are fags -- " "I'm no goddam fag!" Frank yelled. "Do not blaspheme," Benito told him, predictably, I guess. "Fuck off! Talk to me that way and I'll twist this bastard's neck off!" The car lurched as he choked Corbett. "No!" Doreen screamed. "We'll crash! This is our only way out! Leave him alone -- Look, don't hurt him, and when we get out we can really swing, right?" I laughed. I couldn't help it. "What's so funny?" she demanded. "It's not a romantic situation!" I bellowed. I wasn't even sure there could be sex in Hell, and I hadn't found any opportunity to try. Or inclination, either. I bellowed again when she slapped my testicles. It hurt as much as it had when I was alive. I pulled the accelerator widget out, tugging with all my strength, letting the car slow. "I'm sorry!" she yelled. "I was getting the fire off, I swear, that's all I was doing! I'm sorry... hey, you wanna be a threesome with Frank and me?" I let the car speed up again. We had to get out of here. But I'd never had an offer I liked less. "I can see something ahead!" Corbett shouted. "We're getting to the edge!" "About time," Frank said. We rolled on. "Just remember, pretty boy, I'm in charge here," he added, and Corbett grunted in pain. Frank must have emphasized his words. The horizon was sharp ahead. I could barely see over the motor. Corbett saw it too. "Kill the power!" he yelled. Brakes screeched, and he twisted the wheel hard. I climbed out of the motor. The fireflakes were thicker here than in the middle of the desert. We ran, hopping -- Frank still had Corbett by the neck. "This the way out of here? What are you trying to pull?" There was a sheer drop ahead of us. It was gloomy down there. I couldn't see the bottom. Several hundred feet, anyway. "Now what?' ' I asked Benito. "The quick way would be to jump." He was dead serious. "Jump and wait to heal, then go on." The girl backed away, staring at him. "You're crazy! Crazy! I should have known better than to trust guys like you! All the promises you make -- " She didn't finish, but ran back into the desert, crying. "That's done it!" Frank yelled. "You're sure as Hell going over that cliff, all right, because I'm going to throw you!" He had Corbett by the neck and he dragged him toward the cliff edge. "First you, then your loudmouth friend, then the fat one, and then -- " He'd forgotten Billy. We all had. It was a mistake for Frank. Billy launched himself from the car without warning. He landed on Frank's back and seized the long hair with one hand, pulled the head back, and wrapped his arm around Frank's neck. His knee gouged into the Hell's Angel's back, bowing him into an arc. "Friend, I don't think I like you." I yelled, "Billy! Are you all right?" "Yeah." "You weren't moving -- " "Been able to move a while now. Didn't seem like a good idea to let this creep know it. Jerry coulda crashed this thing if we were fightin' while it was movin'." I thought about the self-control it would take to sit still under a rain of sticky fire. "What'll I do with the Gila monster, Benito?" "Leggo! I was only kidding!" Frank yelled. "You guys got no business giving me false hopes! It was all your fault -- " He stopped talking because Billy's arm had closed his throat. "Do not harm him," Benito said quietly. "Yeah?" Billy let him go. "Friend, you're not tough. You don't know what tough is. Now get away from us." The pale blue eyes seemed infinitely deep, and cold even in this place of fire. "You may come with us if you like," Benito told Frank, "although I do not think you are ready. With your attitude you might well find a worse place than you have now. Still, you are welcome to join us." "Go to Hell!" Frank screamed. He thought that was funny. "Go to Hell! Go to Hell!" He ran away into the desert, laughing, screaming, trying to keep both feet off the hot sand at once. Benito looked at us, waiting. "I'll jump if you say so," Billy said. "Looks bad, though. I can tell you, being crushed flat ain't no fun." I gulped. "I will too." I wondered if I meant it. "There may be a better way," Benito said, "We must find the stream. Corbett, can you drive?" "Sure." We turned left. I had the whole fender to sprawl on now. The car seemed more docile, too, but I wasn't going to trust it. I didn't really have to -- I was getting good at manipulating the gas widget. We came to a horde of people dressed in the finery of all ages: velvet robes, flare pants, alligator shoes. Corbett shouted at me. "Stopping!" He turned off the key before I could do anything, and the car rolled to a halt. Fireflakes fell on us. "Now what?' ' Corbett was out of the car and looking at a beefy man in gaudy tunic, crimson sash, and black glove leather boots. There was a big leather wallet hung on a golden chain around his neck, and he stared into it, not looking up. The fireflakes had burned holes in his tunic and scorched his hair. Corbett stood in front of him. When the burly man didn't look up, Corbett stooped over so that his face was in line with the wallet. "Give me my money!" Corbett shouted. "You son of a bitch, you owe me" "But I've had this problem, see, my girl is..." Corbett began. "I don't want to hear any stories, I just want my money! Arrgh!" A big fireflake settled on the crown of his head. He tried to brush it off. "Hang tough," Corbett said. He came back to the car chuckling. "Long Harry there loaned me some cash, once. Six for five -- every week." I nodded. There were lots of others there, crying into their purses. The rain of fire seemed heavier here. "Let's get going." I didn't like Corbett gloating over them -- but if anybody deserved to be here, it was them. Loan shark is as low a form of life as there is. We didn't drive so fast that we couldn't talk. "Funny thing about Harry," Corbett said. "He had to give up the loan shark business. Had a customer with a hit man for a friend. Took his buddy Lem to see Harry, but Harry wouldn't listen. Just kep saying 'Give me my money. "So Lem had a talk with Harry." "Lem?" Billy asked. He sounded puzzled. "Yeah. I don't know what he told Harry, but just after that all of Harry's customers were off the hook. Just had to pay what they'd got in the first place." "Lem," Billy said. "Little guy? About my size? Big scar over his left eye?" "Yeah," Corbett said. "You know him?" "Kind of. They used to let him onto the island for a day. One day a year. The rest of the time he was out in the blood. I always did wonder why." "We are coming to the stream," Benito said. "The fire does not fall there. ' ' The river was narrow but fast. Its roar was different somehow from that of water, and it was still bright scarlet. The air was thick with the smell of blood. Nonetheless we walked down and bathed our half-broiled feet in it. Afterward we walked the cool mud of the bank with our sandals off until we reached the waterfall. There we watched endless tons of blood falling into the darkness. I said, "Now what?" Benito scowled in indecision. "It is a risk. The monster Geryon carried Dante and Virgil into lower Hell. But they were on a holy errand. We are not. I have known Geryon. He is not worthy of trust." "The password," I remembered. " 'This has been willed where what is willed must be.' Yes. Shall we try it?" "Better'n jumping" Billy looked at Benito, "ft is, ain't it? What can he do to us? Eat us?" "Summon Minos." "Let's try it," said Corbett. "We've gotten this far without anyone doing that." "Are we agreed, then? Good. Now we must summon Geryon. We need a signal, something to get his attention. Dante flung a rope into the abyss." "A signal," said Corbett. "Does it have to be subtle?' ' "I should not think that subtlety would be necessary." "We wouldn't want Geryon to think we're crude, would we? Some delicate change in the environment, just noticeable enough to attract his attention. Let me see." Corbet walked back to the car and switched on the ignition. He went around to the back and unscrewed the gas cap. A fireflake fell past his nose. He blew on it, guiding it into the gas tank. The tank lit with a Whoosh. Hurriedly Corbett reached into the car and shifted it into first gear. We stood well back and watched it roll over the edge. "Subtlety is all," said Corbett. The car fell like a battlefield flare. It passed and illuminated a compact body already rising through the murk. "He knew we were here." Corbett was flat on his belly with his face over the cliff's edge. "We didn't need a signal." "He will not come without a signal," said Benito. The car was a towering flame at the base of the cliff. Lighted from below, Geryon was a compact shadow with a slender, twisting tail... He floated up to us, his features growing clear. He hovered at our height, smiled reassuringly at us with a startlingly human face; then slid forward onto the rock ledge, leaving his tail hanging free in space. Geryon was as big as a rowboat, and wingless. His hind feet were webbed, built for swimming. His almost human head was hairless, the mouth wide, the chin broad and strong, the nose very wide and flat, with large nostrils. The head sloped back to round shoulders, without benefit of neck. His arms were human enough, the size of my own. On Geryon they were disproportionately small. Something was funny about the hands; the fingers were short and thick, designed for ripping. I could see him as an airbreathing aquatic beast that had developed human intelligence. I wondered about his nose. It was big enough to feed him air fast, hooded to keepwater out. Reasonable, but different from the cetacean design. His pelt had the look of medieval tapestry: golden knots and figures on a blue-grey background. Lovely; a trifle flashy. And adequate camouflage if he was used to hovering just beneath sunlit water. Altogether he was a believable alien, excluding his ability tri fly. I didn't like that. Bad enough if Infernoland had been built by humans. What if it had been built by interstellar conquerors for their own amusement? Geryon's voice was deep, with a queer buzzing quality. "Hello, Benito. Three of them? Isn't that a bit much?" Benito was brusk. He didn't like Geryon. "This has been willed where what is willed must be. In any case, you must have noticed how the damned flow in like a river in flood -- " "Haven't I just. Swamping you, are they? I think the end of the world must be near. Hell is getting full," said the alien. "Well, we who serve God's will in Hell have precious little of free will, eh, Benito? Climb aboard, you. I hope you can all hang on." He had spoken jovially, with no bitterness and only the merest trace of mockery. My foot kicked something rigid as I tried to board Geryon's reasonably flat back. I looked down. It wasn't easy to see, but there was metal belted about Geryon's belly, machinery covered with material the same color as his gaudy pelt. Antigravity? I settled behind the monster's head. Billy's arms closed about my waist. Corbett was behind him, and Benito last, braving the twin stings in the forked tail. Geryon grinned at me over his shoulder and pushed back from the edge. Billy's arms tightened convulsively. I saw that his eyes were closed tight, his teeth clenched. My view of Hell was darkness and firelit smokes, the fires tracing concentric arcs. Geryon tilted to one side and dropped in a slow spiral. The scarlet waterfall dashed itself to foam and spray on the rocks. Billy was squeezing the breath from me, but I didn't complain. I heard whimpering noises being squeezed from him. We touched down. I said, "Your first flight, Billy?" "Yeah." "We're down. You can let go." "Yeah." He unlocked his arms in stages and climbed down on shaky legs. I followed. Geryon floated up a few feet and hovered. "Hey, Benito," he called. His voice was full of artificial cameraderie, more menacing than threats. "Why is it, Benito, that the people you travel with don't ever come back?" The monster lifted toward the sky, chortling. Carefully casual, Corbett asked Benito, "You've been here before?" "I have rescued others," Benito answered. "How many?" "Six. One at a time. No matter how many come with me at first, no more than one at a time ever seems to reach the exit point. Perhaps this time we will be more fortunate." "What happens to the others?" I asked. "Why did you come back?" Corbett demanded. We'd both spoken at once, and Benito chose to answer neither of us. "Have you seen the exit?" Corbett asked. Benito's voice was colorlessly grim. "Yes." "And gone beyond it?" "No. But it follows Dante's route, which leads to Purgatory. I came back to find others in need of guidance. Do you object, Allen Carpentier? Should I have left you in the bottle?" "Hey, hey, hey!" Billy was dancing with impatience. "If we're going, let's gol What's all the jawing about?" Benito nodded and led us off downslope. We felt exposed on level ground, and Geryon couldn't be the only flying thing. He hadn't reported us (had he?) but that was no guarantee that something else wouldn't. We moved swiftly across what seemed to be solid rock, always downhill, further into murk and gloom, until we came to a cliff edge. There was a ditch in front of us, seventy or eighty feet deep and p'erhaps twice that wide. It was divided in the middle by a low wall of rock. Just off to our left was a passageway in the dividing rock wall. The divider was low enough that we could see over it, lower than the height of a normal man --  -- and the ditch was full. Masses of humanity moved in a standard traffic pattern, all hurrying along, not quite running, leftbound on the far side, rightward on the near side. They moved fast. They moved fast because there were beings with whips urging them along. It took a moment for that to register. Okay, Carpentier, you're in Hell and there are demons in Hell. There were things on the red-hot wall that might have been demons if you could have seen them clearly through the fog. There's Geryon, certainly a monster. Of course Big Juju can make demons. But I hadn't wanted to believe it. Now I was looking at them. They were blackskinned rather than the red I'd expected, and they were at least ten feet tall. They had horns and tails and were uglier than I could have imagined. They used whips twice as long as themselves. They screamed at the laggards: "Along with you, Big Morris, there's no ass to sell here!" "Git along, little dogie, git along,' git along..." Wails and groans rose from the pit, and screams of pain and rage. Snap! Crack! Chunks of flesh flew from the backs of those who slowed down. "Who," whispered Corbett. He ran out of voice and had to try again. "Who are they?" He was frightened, and why not? I was scared out of my mind. The demons were looking up at us --  -- but they went back to their tasks, gleefully lashing the crowd. I recognized one of the runners. He was a famous movie directorI was younger. He was on the near side, but as he reached the passageway in the dividing wall the demon stationed there lashed him until he went through and joined those scurrying in the other direction. I'd never met him, but I knew who he was. And I knew who these people must be. Benito confirmed my suspicions. "Panderers on this side, seducers on the other. Come, we must find a bridge." He turned left and we followed uncertainly. "I... was a seducer," Corbett said uncertainly. I remembered the convention atmosphere and what happened the night before I died. "Me too." Benito snorted. "Did you ever have a woman against her will?" "No -- " ' 'Or make her drunk, or drug her?' ' "Well -- " Did pot count? "Nobody who didn't know what to expect." "Never had to," Corbett said matter-of-factly. "Or use threats of force?" "Don't be silly." Corbett resented the implication. "I told you, it wasn't necessary." "The Italian does not properly translate as your English seducer, which is hardly more than casual fornication," Benito said seriously. "I think perhaps the better word is 'rape'." Now we could see the bridge ahead of us: a stone arch. It looked very old. "Jerry!" A voice called from the pit. "Jerry! Come on down, Jerry. You belong here!" It stopped Corbett cold. He looked down into the pit. "Julia?" "Come on down, Jerry. "Share everything with me. You taught me how, Jerry -- " "How can a girl be a rapist?" I demanded. She was, or had been, quite pretty, but now her face was distorted in pain and exhaustion. The demons were watching her stand there as she panted and shouted up to Corbett, and they didn't interfere. "Deceit. Fraud," said Benito. "Those who induce others to what they know is wrong, as well as those who force their will on others." I turned to Corbett and Shut up, Carpentier! None of your business closed my mouth. "You taught me everything, Jerry," she was calling. "I could still love you. Come down with me. Where else can you go now?" "Out! Down to the center and out!" Corbett screamed to her. The demons howled maniac laughter. The girl laughed with them. "Oh, Jerry, do you believe that? Don't you know that the deeper you go, the worse it is, and you can't ever go back, and you can't get out? It's worse down there, Jerry. Wait till you see who's below us! Here you have me , Jerry. Stay where you belong. There's no escape down there. Don't you know what's carved on the gates of Hell, Jerry? All hope abandon!" "I'm not afraid of what's below!" Corbett was getting hysterical. "I never did any of the things they punish you down there for -- " She laughed again. "The only perfect man who ever lived! Are you sure, Jerry? Then why do they let you GO there? And what makes you think you'll get justice anyway? Come down with me before its too The demons had called time on her. Crack! Snap! The whips sounded like popcorn popping. Julia sprinted, screaming with the rest. The flesh of my back rippled. I wanted to shut my ears. "Come." Benito took Corbett's arm. "Come. Do not let her seduce you again." "Uh?" Corbett looked at Benito as if he'd only just met him. "It did happen that way, now you mention it. Or did it? Maybe I do belong in that pit." "If you do, you will be there. For the moment you are not, ergo -- come along." We walked in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts, What if the girl were right? Were we plunging deeper and deeper, never to return? What was below us? Had I committed any of the appropriate crimes? "Benito, what's ahead?" His dry lecture voice couldn't mask the screaming as we walked the rim. "No more!" "Not again!" "Wait, I'm in the wrong place!" "It was just one book, just one, I needed the money l" "You big ugly sonofabitch, you -- " Crack! "Of the ten Bolgias -- canyons -- of this circle of Hell, this is the only divided one. Each canyon is crossed by a bridge, except that all the bridges are down across the sixth canyon. We must descend into it. It will be no problem." "Benito, how in God's name can you ignore those screams?" Corbett demanded. "They have no more than they deserve," Benito said simply. Either he hadn't the empathy of a turtle, or... or what? "Now, we will have trouble at the fifth Bolgia. It is the pit of grafters, and the demons are on the rim, not down in the canyon." "Ugh." I'd forgotten most of the Inferno, but I could never have forgotten that image: a troop, an army, of devils, ill-mannered and sadistic, a military organization of ugly hate. They'd almost got Dante despite his safe-conduct. "What's after this circle?" We had reached an arching bridge of rough stone. It had no handrails and was about ten feet wide, a slender arch above that pit of screaming runners. It sloped up so steeply that I dropped to all fours to climb. "Jerry! Come down, Jerry!" It was the girl again. Corbett stiffened. "What's next?" I prompted Benito. "After the ten canyons what will we find?" "Very little," Benito answered. "The great ice plain, where traitors are punished. Those who betrayed their blood kin or their benefactors. " "Not me," Corbett said. He seemed to feel better. "And then?" "We cross to the very center. There is a hole. We crawl through it, past the center of the world, and find ourselves climbing up again." "And I can believe as much of that as I like?' ' "Certainly. Why should you not believe it?" Benito was genuinely puzzled. "It's nonsense," said Corbett. "We'd be in free fall by the time we got there." ' 'Jerry!' ' Corbett shuddered. The voice floated upward again. "Don't be a fool, Jerry. It's bad down there at the center. And they never let you out." "Did I really put her there?" Corbett wondered. "Maybe I have betrayed a benefactor. She was kind to me and -- " "Come on, no woman's worth what they're gettin'," Billy said. "We stick together. I never let a buddy down in my life, and I'm goin' down to the center. Now come on." Corbett lost some of his tension. "If you're really Billy the Kid, that's right. At least, that's what the movies showed." He began moving again, over the arch of the bridge, and downward. "Benito, your description is still nonsense. Not only would there be free fall at the center of the Earth, but this isn't Earth to begin with. A cavity this size, under the Earth? Can you imagine the pressures ? And we'd get seismograph readings on it with every earthquake. No, we have to be somewhere else." "Sure," I said. "Infernoland. Somebody built it, following Dante. But the geography's been the same as the Inferno all the way so far, so what do we care if it's an artifact?" "It is an artifact," Benito said, "in the sense that God designed and built it." "Okay," said Corbett. "I was never a good atheist. Not a churchman either. Still, Benito, I've seen designs for bigger structures than this. Bigger than Earth, for that matter. Our real problem is, did Dante really see this place himself? And can we trust his reports?" That was a good question, but I had a better one. How far could we trust Benito? He had never mentioned earlier trips. Just how did Benito get back uphill after those trips? How did he earn this privelege of running free through Hell? Geryon had said 'we' when speaking of both himself and Benito. 'We who serve God in Hell.' Benito was an unlikely angel... and Geryon an untrustworthy witness, I reminded myself. But this was the Devil's realm, and Benito wandered at whim. All right, Carpentier: just what is the punishment for a soul who defies God's final command? God or Big Juju, I had plenty of evidence that He was vindictive. He put me in the Vestibule, and I violated my sentence. Minos warned me. Is this the final retribution against Caipentier? To go even deeper into Hell, with no way back, to find my own level and have it worse than He condemned me to? Or. Suppose this really is Infemoland, a bigger and more powerful Builder's playground. Why would the Geryon-type engineers have built anything but the Inferno? They clearly enjoyed seeing humans suffer. Would they get a similar kick from human pleasure? All the professors told me the Inferno was by far the most interesting of the three books of the Divine Comedy. Benito was talking again. "I have always assumed that Dante made his trek in a vision. When he woke he had forgotten many of the details. He filled them in with research in theology and dogma and philosophy and natural histopr and with his own whims and prejudices and special hatreds. But the basic vision was sound and true. Be careful here." The bridge dropped steeply at the end. The inner rim of the trench was twenty feet lower than the outer. We went down backward. The lip of another pit was a hundred yards away. A cacaphony of sound rose from it. We stopped for a moment. "For instance," Benito said, "Dante's work gives the impression that he met large numbers of Italians -- ' ' "Sounds perfectly reasonable to me," said Corbett. We tried to laugh, but this wasn't a place for laughing. Benito merely continued as if he hadn't heard. "Improbable numbers of Italians. Large numbers of famous ancients. He met writers, poets, politicians, but no Hottentots, Esquimaux, Askaris, or American Indians. This seems unlikely." "Then you don't trust Dante after all?" "Jerry, that was not my point." I said, "Benito, we've met an embarrassing sufficiency of Americans." Billy laughed. "Plenty on the .island, too." Benito was startled. "It is true. And Hilda Kroft and I met Germans. And -- " ' "Man tends to notice his own folks," said Billy. "Let's get moving. We angled toward a bridge spanning the next ditch. Benito still looked disturbed. Why? That disturbed me. The smell stopped us joltingly at the second pit. It was like being dropped into a sewer. We didn't even try to look over the edge. "Who's down there?" Billy asked. "Flatterers," Benito said shortly, and turned toward the bridge. We followed. "I don't get it," Corbett said. "In every place of power, throughout all time, the rulers have been surrounded by flatterers. In many places flattery has been the path to power and wealth. In others it is only a good living. Yet everywhere the flatterers tend to push aside the men of real wisdom. Flattery is so much safer than telling unpleasant truths." "Not in America," said Corbett. "This I doubt," said Benito. "But then I suppose that you would know best." "Never buttered up the boss? I sure have," said Billy. I felt uncomfortable. What was I doing at the moment I died but flattering the fans? I glanced over at Corbett and he looked no better. Flattery? We'd all tried it. What did they do to flatterers? We clustered at the bridge approach and stood looking at it. The smell was thick as putty. I could feel it clinging to me and I squirmed. Corbett said, "How are we going to cross that?" "Fast," I said. "Don't breathe." I didn't move. I hadn't worked up the nerve. "Come on, pals!" Billy hit the bridge at a dead run. As he went over the arch and disappeared from view, we heard him yell. The other side of the bridge would be steep. I hoped he'd rolled to the end and not over the edge. I wasn't ready to dive in after him, and I didn't hear anyone else volunteer. "Billy?" I shouted. No answer. "He's all right," Corbett said. His voice was hollowly reassuring. "Sure he is." We looked at each other. We took deep breaths. We scrambled up the arch, and when we could stand, we ran. Was Billy down there? I made the mistake of looking from the top of the arch. Down into a river of shit, chestdeep. A respectable crowd waded through it. Disgust can freeze you as solid as fear. At my side, Corbett stopped to look where I was looking. He made a retching sound, took my arm and tried to pull me on. I couldn't move. I'd recognized someone I knew. I called down. "George!" Heads turned up. They were disguised by what was smeared across the faces, but that was George, all right. I tried to remember his last name, and couldn't. But he knew me. He shrank away with his sticky arms hiding his sticky head. Benito had come back up the bridge. "Billy is safe." He spoke with the pinched voice of a man holding his breath. "Who was that?" "An old friend. An advertising man, wrote fiction in his spare time. Not very good stories, but he wasn't a bad guy. How did he get here?" "Immoderate flattery. There is no other way to reach this pit. Allen, Jerome. No profit in standing here; you cannot enjoy the view." Immoderate flattery? It fit, in a way. In Big Juju's way. Most advertising is immoderate praise of a product or its users. But like every other torture I'd seen in Hell, it was just too damned much! I wanted to tell George... what? That he'd been wronged? That I'd get justice for him no matter what it took? That I couldn't save him and I couldn't save myself and everything was useless because we were in the hands either of a cruel God or heartless aliens? I don't know. But I'd remembered one of his own ads, and I shouted it down to him. It was not to mock him! Only to get his attention! "You deserve to belong to the Xanadu Country Club!" The response was an explosion of voices. Smeared stinking heads rose, mocking voices called. "The wethead is dead!" "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?" "I'm Glenda! Fly me!" "Hazel, it turned bluel" "Always have... always will!" And we three who peered into the moat, we saw where the shit came from. Another macabre joke. Every one of them had been fitted with a second anus. It became apparent only when they tried to speak. Corbett bent double, heaving, a ghost trying to expel emptiness from the ghost of his belly. I tried to help him, but he backed away fast. He didn't want to be touched. The convulsions went on and on. I tried to turn away from the edge, but it was too late. George screamed up at me, in agony. "Allen! Why?" "I'm sony!" I should have left him alone. Benito spoke in an actor's voice, calm but carrying. "There is a way out of Hell." He got insults and laughter, but a few listened. "You must climb the pit. Cooperate if you must. It will be hard, but you can do it if you try long enough. Then you must move inward. The route to Heaven is at the center of Hell." Smeared faces turned away. George stayed to answer. His laugh had tears in it. "Me, in Heaven? With shit dribbling down my chin? I'd rather stay here." Another called. "Listen, when you get there, tell Him. Tell God we will praise him day and night! I have written a new hymn to his name! Tell Him!" Benito turned sadly away. I looked for Corbett -- and found him at the outer end of the bridge. He was crying and hiccoughing and trying to run. I shouted, "Corbett! Wrong way!" He turned. "No chance! I don't belong here! I'm supposed to be in the winds!" "You'll never get up the cliff." "I will! Somehow, I will! I belong up there, not down here with -- " He flapped his arms helplessly. Corbett had no word for these thoroughly damned souls with whom Corbett would not associate. He went away from us. Billy was waiting at the inner end of the bridge. He watched us come down, then, "Where's Jerry?" Benito shook his head. "Pride. He was too proud to stay."  'L'L I   Spider Robinson The Syndic, Cyril M. Kombluth, AvonEquinox, # pp., # Strange Relations, Philip Jose Fanner, AvonEquinox, # pp., # Early Del Rey, Lester Del Rey, Doubleday, # pp., # A Requiem For Astounding, Alva Rogers, Advent, # pp., # The Ray Bradbury Companion, William F. Nolan, Gale Research, # pp., price unknown Combat SF, edited by Gordon R. Dickson, Doubleday, # pp., # Final Stage edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg, Penguin, # pp., # The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch, Michael G. Coney, Man The Fugitive, George Alec Effinger. Award, # pp., .# Escape To Tomorrow, George Alec Effinger, Award, # pp., .# # A.D. or The King Kong Blues, pp., # The Shattered People, Robert Hoskins, Doubleday, # pp., # The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester, Berkley, pages unknown, # How could you forget, for that matter? Friends, contemporary civilization is in the grip of the greatest wave of yearning for the (vaguely defined) Good Old Days that this weary planet has ever seen, and I for one have been finding it mostly a pain behind the lap. Hollywood offers me Paper Moon and Summer of '#; radio offers me Sha television offers Sgt. Bilko and You Bet Your Life re-runs (pardon me, encore performances); theaters offer Bogie revivals and Fields revivals and... And science fiction offers me the Golden Age. When was this Golden Age? Well, it depends on who you ask (who was it who, asked to define the Golden Age, said "fourteen"?), but the precise dates don't matter. The point is that SF too can now be inserted in the classic refrain, "They don't make like they used to!" Everyone's going back to the roots, and if that makes sense to you, buy your girlfriend(s?) a bouquet of roots on your way home tonight. Put down that axe, sir, and let us discuss this like gentlemen. I will concede that we live in decadent times -- they don't, for instance, make guitars like they used to. Every area in which individual craftsmanship and professional pride have been phased out has declined, inevitably. But SF is not produced by an assembly line of sullen transients, much as it seems that way at times, and by its nature it cannot help but improve. Mass Man's output gets steadily worse, but things made by and for individuals always get better. No, they don't write 'em like Skylark any more -- and no one in their right mind would want them to. To my mind the most astonishing thing is just how many of those pioneering stories of yesterday stand up under re-examination. Trailblazers expect the gouges they carve into trees to be supplanted some day by highway signs, and SF in its pseudoprophetic aspect is uniquely vulnerable to obsolescence. And yet, even if Blowups didn't Happen the way Heinlein wrote them, his story is still a gem. Marvelous! The bulk of the Golden Age's "forgotten masterpieces" were not forgotten but disremembered, the way you've suppressed the memory of the first time you had sex. The amazing, the unexpected, the delightful thing is that so many of them are worth remembering today. Case in point: The Syndic, the first I've seen in an "SF Rediscovery" series from AvonEquinox. I had vague recollections of Syndic when it arrived in my mailbox -- and unfortunately they were confused with those of a particularly rotten Star Trek episode with the same basic thesis. I'm glad I re-read it. Cyril Kornbluth took a farfetched premise (Government has been supplanted, nationwide, by Organized Crime) and built an incredibly rich and incisive adventure novel around it. It must now be read as fantasy: the '#s gangsters Kombluth knew did not take over the government -- more the other way around. (O beleaguered conlmon man: even the thieves have sold you out.) But the Rediscoveiy series cover-painting strikes exactly the right note of self-mockery, allowing the premise to be painlessly swallowed -- and in return for suspending your disbelief, you get superb entertainment. Stylistically and in richness of character, it stands alongside the best of contemporary SF, and sneers at the run-of-the-mill stuff. Experiencing it again gave me, for the first time in years, that exhilarating almostvision of the kind of thing Kombluth would be writing had he lived. He died untimely, and I'm delighted to meet one of his children again. Strange Relations, on the other hand, Philip Jose Farmer's entry in the Rediscovery series, was not as satisfying to me. I missed the stories of which it is comprised when they first appeared in the '#s (I was five at the time, just discovering Heinlein juveniles), but I didn't miss them, if you follow me. Of the five tales (lumped together because all of them had to do with sexual or sibling relationships of one sort or another), only "Father" impressed me at all. "Mother" and "Daughter", the only two stories actually interrelated, struck me as sophomoric -- do you really want to hear a dirty joke about an alien ? Even if a human is involved? The same objection applies to "My Sister's Brother," save that the w-e-i-r-d nonhuman sex is played for horror and pathos instead of laughs. Reminded me of the hunchback in Candy. The remaining story, "Son," is well-crafted, but minor -- although it was pleasant to see a hero missing clues, failing to spot inconsistencies, and generally behaving more like a real human being than like an epitified Hercule Poirot. "Father," however, is a masterful blend of hard SF and theology, with skillfully imstereotyped priests (a literary feat unequalled since). And what do I know -- maybe you More golden age -- and here the creaking gets a little louder. Well it might: we're not talking # now, we're talking #-#. The stories in Early Del Rey were written in the dozen years it took Lester to realize that he was supposed to be a full-time writer, beginning with the very first he ever wrote. If this bodes ill, remember also that none of these stories have been anthologized before (near as I can figure from the appended checklist). You won't find "Helen O'Ley" here, or any of the sure-fire classics from the period specified. These are the leftovers, and alone, bare-naked, I'm afraid a substantial number of them are of largely historical interest. But what makes the book worth twice its purchase price are the introductions! Lester sandwiches each piece with recollections, reminiscences and commentary, turning the work into the professional memoirs of one of science-fiction's most colorful personalities. They only created the Grandmaster Nebula this year (for Robert Heinlein, and long overdue), so Lester may have to wait a year or two for his. But it will be an utterly finite wait. You can save the critical knife -- Lester cheerfully acknowledges every flaw, absurdity, goof and cliche in these stories, apologizing (only) where he deems it necessary. In between he will entertain, enlighten and intruct you -- in the inimitable Del Rey manner. The book gave me much pleasure, and a valuable perspective on some highly controversial years and people I wasn't around to see. I get another perspective from A Requiem For Astounding, written by and for devotees of Astounding magazine in its Golden Age, defined by author Alva Rogers as January # to January # (when the name changed to Analog), the period the critics will Golden Age. If you are not familiar with at least some of the stories in question, you'll feel like the new prisoner listening to the old lags calling out the numbers of the jokes in The Only Joke Book In The Prison Library and laughing like hell. Requiem is only a chronological thumbnail sketch, an expanded index. Some stories are mentioned only by name, some are capsuledescribed, none are described so as to bring them to life for a stranger. Rogers' purpose is only to stimulate the recall of those who did read those stories, as they came out -- to re-evoke the feeling of what it was like to be a young Astounding reader in the '#s. Which is entirely interesting, for indeed Heinleins walked the earth in those days, yea, and Asimovs. But an outsider must read between the lines, and with great difficulty. S. J. Perelman once sold an utterly hilarious satire consisting of a straight recital of the plot of one of the "Captain Future" stories that Rogers remembers with pleasure -- turkeys walked the earth in them days, too. The artwork in particular is ghastly to the modem eye, glorious in Alva's. If you're not a hardcore devotee of either Astounding or the field in historic general, you'd better pass this up -- although John Campbell's "introduction" (he called it a rebuttal) ought to be tattooed on the foreheads of everyone in First Fandem. One more look backward and we're done. The Ray Bradbury another labor of love -- the kind that makes people build shrines to Lana Turner or wait in an alley for twelve hours for a chance to rip Paul McCartney's lapel off. It is a shrine to Ray Bradbury, and as such serves to support the contemporary suspicion that he's dead (at least as a writer of fictional prose). Stephen Gaskin, a beatnik preacher of great wisdom, genuine compassion, and a large and growing following throughout the country, tells the story of a man who came to his door and asked permission to follow him around the clock and cassette-record and transcribe Stephen's every word and action for posterity. As he tells it, he shut the door gently and answered one of his wives' "Who was that?" with, "A temptation from the Evil One." Would that Bradbury had been as astute. This thoroughly embarassing Companion does contain some worthwhile things: a definitive Bradbury checklist, an "authorized" chronology of his life of which at lfcast half concerns his professional career -- the sort of thing a serious collector might actually desire ("One man collects stamps, another garters. Which is crazy? Or both? Or neither?" -- Robert Heinlein) But the vast bulk (and it sure is) of the book is a hideous amalgam of all I can call them are souvenirs. There is, for instance, an enormous selection of facsimilies of original manuscripts of unpublished works. Did you get that? You're buying hand-written copy that a professional couldn't sell to anyone. Along with random pages from later-shitcanned versions of Moby Dick, photostats of the title page and dust jacket of every book Bradbury ever published (world-wide) (including re-issues), articles from his high-school newspaper, doodles for God's sake -- pages of the stuff. A map of his home-town, handdrawn I can't go on. Oh yes -- it comes in a box. Thank god -- at last we get to brand-new, never before in print, modem SF (what do you mean, "I'm running out of space"?) First up is Combat SF, a compilation by the eminently qualified Gordy Dickson. Whether you're a warstory buff or not, hawk or dove, you'll be delighted at this multitude of perspectives SF has thrown on man's oldest outdoor sport. Gordy's made an excellent representative nainent. Play a postal chess opponent for Ain. Or Johi the checkers chib grand opening. All players are rated. Chess tournament # Chess opponent # Checkers opponent ## Magazine # a yr., # # a copy Boi #-BA, Burbank, Cdifornla # selection ranging from Keith Laumer's "The Final Command" to Gene Wolfe's "The Horars of War," and including Poul Anderson's superb classic, "The Man Who Came Early." Also represented are Ben Bova  Myron R. Lewis, Joe Hensley, David Drake (a Hammer's Slammers story), Fred Saberhagen (a Berserker story), Joe Haldeman (not a Forever War piece), Harry Harrison, Jerry Pournelle, Joe Green, and Gordy himself (not a Dorsai story, dammit). Recommended without reservation -- there's none of that love and sex crap in it anywhere. Final stage has an ambitious premise; editors Ferman and Malzberg selected what seemed to them The Twelve Themes Of Science Fiction, selected a Name author associated with each Theme, and asked him or her to write the "ultimate" story of its type. On the strength of this, they subtitle the book "The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology" and charge two and a half bucks. This is called leading with your chin, or Harlan's Folly. For my money the only authentic "ultimate" story comes from Isaac Asimov, who to my astonishment and horror seems to have actually written not only the ultimate robot story but the last of the U. S. Robots stories -- at least, the chronologically last (although he advises us in his afterword not to bet on it). But none of the other yarns bear any real claim to ultimateness (ultimation?). Well, OK, Harlan Ellison, under the heading of "Future Sex" (along with Joanna Russ, to foil charges of sexism) does give us what appears to be literature's (if not reality's) first machine-fucker -- he obviously gave the assignment serious thought. But it's a lousy story. Not that the rest are. Tiptree is up to his usual high standards, as are Harry Harrison, Fred Pohl, Poul Anderson and others. It's a generally good book that you'll mostly enjoy -- but Ferman and Malzberg shouldn't make premises they can't keep. The jaws that bite, The Claws That Catch irritated me immensely. I finished it, but had to suppress the impulse to fling it across the room several times. It concerns "spare-parts people," prisoners paroled as bonded servants and mobile organ-banks to the idle rich on an unnamed future world that seems to exist in a vacuum (well, I suppose they all do in a sense, but...). The actions of absolutely every one of the individuals and groups are implausible and inconsistent; the protagonist is the most ineffectual, unmotivated chump imaginable; the background society is inexplicably psychotic; the "land sharks" and other mutant pets are unbelievable; the plot is aimless nonsense; the ending is unsatisfactory; and the prose limps. I have heard it said, by Theodore Sturgeon among others, that Michael Coney is a "Good writer becoming a very good one." I can't honestly disagree -- this is only the second of his books I've seen, and the only recent one. But so far I have no evidence at all to support Ted. Beware the Dub Dub Book, and shun the Buckanaquatasnatch. I'd like at this time to institute a custom of occasionally capsulereviewing books that I don't really have room for, but which don't rate being entirely ignored (and some that do). I'll invoke the custom only when it seems appropriate, as it does now: Man The Fugitive and Escape To Tomorrow: reissues of Planet Of The Apes stuff based on the nowextinct TV series based on the movies based on the book based on a nightmare Pierre Boulle once had, and better than you think. It's sad to use a talent like George Alec Effinger adapting the works of his inferiors, but he improves them considerably in the process. Good honest work by a pro -- recommended light reading. # A.D. or The King Kong Blues: "The bestseller that shocked Sweden" is not going to shock America. It reads a little like an inept imitation of Stand On Zanzibar as Phil Dick would have written it. Lundwall's pretentious afterword about how This Is A Work As Much Of Fact As Of Fiction, complete with a chapter-by-chapter bibliography citing sources like Newsweek, is the final kiss of death. Feh. The Shattered People: Robert Hoskins is a capable and accomplished editor and short story writer. This appears to be his first novel (at least no others are flyleafed), and a good one, a solid, unspectacular, eminently readable tale of political intrigue in far-future Earth and of the shattered victims of the Establishment's mind-wipe on a prison-planet dumping ground. I especially like the alien wind dreamers, gentle and warmly memorable creations. Not great -- but good. With next month's column, I hope to return to coverage of more new books (unless they keep deluging me with reprints), and nostalgia will be (I hope) only a memory. Oh Lord, that reminds me: run out and buy the reissue of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (a Berkely paperback) if by some chance you've never read it. Far too long out of print, it is an unquestioned classic with the uncanny knack of seeming like it was written ten years from now. I've managed to lose the copy they sent me or I'd have remembered sooner. Reading Bester has some of the salient aspects of juggling live chain-saws, and this is one of his all-too-rare masterpieces. Forget my typewriter if it wasn't nailed on.  S ' Mind-raped by a giant, extra f terrestrial poached egg, this cra zy Terran didn't know  when to quit! NX v,f # ' fv' t' I I M k M wm j  V,; leaves overhead and lay in shards on the ground. The night whispered dementedly to itself, like a Zappa minuet for paintbrush and tea-kettle, and in the distance a toad farted ominously. I was really stoned. I'd never have gotten stoned on sentry duty in a real war, but there hadn't been much real fighting to speak of lately (this was just before we got out), and you have to pass the time somehow. And it just so happened that as I was getting ready to leave for the bush, a circle of the boys was Shotgunning. Shotgunning? Oh, we do a lot of that. It works like so: the C.O. (... "or whomever he shall appoint... ") fills a pipe from the platoon duffle bag, fires it up, takes a few hits to get it established, and then breaks open a shotgun and inserts the pipe in one of the barrels. He raises it to his lips and blows a mighty blast down the bore, and someone on the other end takes an enormous hit from the barrel. The C.O. then passes the Shotgun... So as I say, I was more ruined than somewhat as I contemplated the jungle and waited for my relief. Relief? Say, you can take your meditation and your yoga and your za-zen -- there's nothing on earth for straightening your head like a night in the jungles of Vietnam-. Such calm, such peace, such utter tranquility. Something crackled in the bush behind me, and my M-# went off with a Gotterdammerung crash two inches from my left ear. As I whirled desperately about, Corporal Zeke Busby, acting C.O. and speed-freak extraordinaire, levitated a graceful foot above the surrounding vegetation and came down rapping. "Yas indeed private yas indeed alert and conscientious as ever yas and a good thing too a good thing but if I may make so bold and without wishing to appear unduly censorious would you for Chrissake point that fuckin' thing somewhere else?" Corporal Zeke had once been a friend of Neal Cassidy's, for perhaps just a bit too long. "Sure thing, Coip," I mumbled, shifting the rifle. My eardrum felt like Keith Moon's tom-tom. "Yas and a signal honor a signal honor my man your gratitude will no doubt be quite touching but I assure you before you protest that I consider you utterly worthy worthy worthy to the tips of your boogetyboogety shoes." A signal honor? He could only mean... "I have selected you from a field of a dozen aspirants to make the run to Saigon and cop the Platoon Pound." I was overwhelmed. The last man Mulligan) had burned us for two bricks of Vietnamese cowshit and split for the States -- this was indeed a mark of great trust. I tried to stammer my thanks, but Corporal Zeke was off again. "... situation of course most serious and grave without at the same time being in any sense of the word heavy as I'm sure you dig considering the ramifications of the logistical picture and the inherently inescapable discombobulation manifest in the necessary... what I mean... that is to say, we've only got five bucks to work with." His left eye began to tic perceptibly, almost semaphorically. "No problem, Corporal Zeke. I've seen action before." Five was barely enough for a few ounces at Vietnamese prices, but the solution was simple enough -- rip off a Gook. "What did you have eyes to score?' ' "Yas well based on past performance and an extrapolated estimate of required added increment to offset inflation which some of these lousy bastards they smoke 'til their noses bleed, it seems that something on the close order of five bricks would not be inordinate." I nodded. "You're faded, Corp. Get me a relief and I'll crank right now." He didn't hear me; he was totally engrossed in his left foot, crooning to it softly. I put the M-# near him gently and split. When the Old Man says "Cop!", you cop, and ask how soon on the way back. Deep in the jungle something stirred. Trees moved ungraciously aside; wildlife changed neighborhoods. A space was cleared. In this clearing grew a shimmering ball of force, a throbbing nexus of molecular disruption. It reached a diameter of some thirty feet, absorbing all that it touched, and then stopped growing abruptly. It turned a pale green, flared briefly, and stabilized, emitting a noise like a short in a fifty megavolt circuit. With something analogous to a gasp, Yteic-Os the Voracious materialized within the sphere, and fell with a horrendous crash to the jungle floor a foot below. Heshe winced -- well, not exactly -- and momentarily lost conscious control of the pale green bubble, which snapped out of existence at once. Yteic-Os roared hisher fury ( although there was nothing a human would have recognized as sound) and tried to block the green sphere's dissolution by a means indescribable in human speech, something like sticking one's foot in a slamming door. It worked just about as well; the Voracious One nearly lost a pseudopod for hisher trouble. This was serious. Yteic-Os was ridiculously ancient -- heshe had been repairing hisher third sun on the day when fire was discovered on earth. Entropy is, however, the same for everybody. Yteic-Os had long since passed over into catabolism: hisher energy reserves dwindled by the decade. This jumping in and out of gravity wells was a hellishly exhausting business; for centuries Yteic-Os had sidestepped the problem by using the tame space-warp over which heshe had so laboriously established control. Now the warp was gone, galaxies away by this time, and Yteic-Os had grave doubts as to hisher ability to jump free unassisted. This world would simply have to serve. Somewhere on this planet must exist a life-form of sufficient vitality to fill Yteic-Os' s reserve cells with The Force, and heshe was not called The Voracious for nothing. Heshe extended pseudopods gingerly, questing for data on cerebration-levels, indices of disjunctive thought and the like. Insignificant but potentially useful data such as atmosphere-mix, temperature, radiation-levels and gravity were meanwhile being absorbed below the conscious level by the sensor-modules which studded Yteic-Os' s epidermis (giving himher, incidentally, the external appearance of a slightly underdone poached egg with pimples). A pseudopod like a mutant hotdog twitched, began to quiver. Yteic-Os integrated all available data and decided ocular vision was called for. Hastily heshe grew an eye, or something very like one, and looked in the direction pointed by the trembling pseudopod. Yes, no doubt of it, a sentient life-form, just brimming with The Force! Yteic-Os sent a guarded probe, yelped with joy (well, not precisely) as heshe learned that this planet was crawling with sentient beings. What a bountiful harvest ! Yteic-Os cannily withdrew without the other so much as suspecting hisher existence, and began patiently constructing hisher attack. ell, the plan was simplicity itself: meet Phstuc My in a bar, demand to see the goods before paying, pull my gun and depart with the bag. Instead, I left without my pants. How the hell was I supposed to know the bartender had me covered? So there I crouched, flat broke and sans culottes, between two G. I.cans of reeking refuse in a honky-tonk alleyway, strung out and dodging The Man. It made me homesick for Brooklyn. At least the problem was clear-cut: all I had to do was scare up a pair of pants, five bricks of acceptable smoke, a hot meal and transportation back to my outfit before dawn. Any longer and Cotporal Zeke would assume I had burned him, at which point, Temporary Cease-Fire or not, Southeast Asia would become decidedly too warm for me to inhabit. I was not prepared to emulate Milligram Mulligan -- ocean-going desertion requires special preparation and a certain minimum of cash, and I had neither. The possibilities were, as I saw it, dismal. I couldn't rip off a pedestrian without at least a token weapon, and I was morally certain the two garbage cans contained nothing more lethal than free hydrogen sulfide. I couldn't burgle a house without more of the abovementioned prepartion, and I couldn't even borrow money without a pair of pants. I sure wished I had a pair of pants. A giggle rippled down the alleyway, and I felt my spine turn into a tube of ice-cold jello. I peered over a mound of coffee-grounds and there, by the beard of Owsley, stood an absolutely dynamite chick. Red hair, crazy blue eyes, and a protoplasmic distribution that made me think of a brick latrine. At the mere sight of this girl, certain physiological reactions overcame embarrassment and mortal terror. I sure wished I had a pair of pants. "What's happening?" she inquired around another giggle. My God, I thought, she's from Long Island ! I decided to trust her. "Well, see baby, I was makin' this run for my platoon, little smoke to sweeten the jungle, right? And, ah... I've gone a wee bit awry." "Heavy." She jiggled sympathetically, and moved closer. "Well, yeah, particularly since my C.O. don't like gettin' burned. Liable to amputate my ears is where it's at." She smiled, and my eyes glazed. "No sweat. I can set you up." "Right." "No, really. I'm General Fonebone's old lady -- I've got connections. I could probably fix you right up... if you weren't in too much of a hurry." She was not staring me in the eyes, and I made a few hasty deductions about General Fonebone's virility. "I'm Jim Balzac. 'Balz' to you." "I'm Suzy." Six hours later I was back in the jungle. I had a pair of pants, some four and a half bricks from the General's private stash, a compass, two Dylan albums and (although I was not to know it for weeks) a heavy dose of clap. I felt great, and it was all thanks to General Fonebone. If Suzy had not found life in Vietnam so boring, she would never have gone rummaging and uncovered the General's Secret Stash, a fell collection of strange tabs and arcane caps. She had induced me to swallow the largest single tab in the bunch, an immense purple thing with a skull embossed on it above the lone word: trospect to have been a triple tab of coke and just a touch of Bab-O. It might just as easily have been Fonebone's Own -- the sensation was totally new to me. But it was certainly interesting. I experienced considerable difficulty in finding my mustache -- which of course was right under my nose. I could navigate without difficulty, after a fashion. But I discovered that I could whip up a ball of hallucinatory color-swirls in my mind, fire it like a cannon-ball, and watch it burst into a spiderweb of multicolored sparkles, as though an invisible protective shield two feet away walled me off from reality. With care, I could effect changes in the nature of the pulsing balls before they were fired, producing a variety of spectacular fireworks. The jungle reared drunkenly above me. My outfit was straight ahead. I forged on, while in my darker crannies gonococcal viruses met and fell in love by the thousands, all unknown. A particularly vivid splash of color caught my wandering attention; I had absently concocted a hellish color-ball of surpassing incandescence and detonated it. Its brilliant pattern hung before me a moment, as the rush took hold. And then it very suddenly vanished. I very nearly fell on my face. When I had my bearings again, I sent out another "shell." It burst pyrotechnically. And as suddenly vanished. 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Tht Church of Scitnlalagy or Californio. Publication! Organization Dtp I G ?. # Wttl Ttmplt SI., tog An gain. California #. inhaling sharply through clenched teeth while saying the word "Ffffffup!"; vanished down behind a small hill ahead, sucked downward in a microsecond -- only a stoned man could have divined the direction. Something on the other side of that hill was eating my hallucinations. I moved to the left like a stately zeppelin, caroming gently from the occasional tree. But I had two anchors dragging the ground, and before I got fifteen feet a tangled root brought me down with a crash. And just before I hit, I saw something coming over the rise, and I knew that my mind had truly blown at last. Coming toward me was a sixteen-foot-tall poached egg with pimples. And then the lights -- all those lights -- went out. Yteic-os moved from concealment, throbbing with astonished elation. No subtle attack was necessary, no cunning stimulus needed to elicit secretions of The Force from this being. Heedless of danger, it radiated freely in all directions, idly expectorating energy-dusters as it walked. Then Yteic-Os gasped (almost); for as it became aware of himher, it assumed a prone position, and disappeared. That is, its physical envelope remained, but all emanations ceased utterly; sentience vanished. The Voracious One had no means of apprehending a subconscious mind. Such perverse deformities are extremely rare in the universe; never chanced to so much as hear of such a thing. This led himher into a natural error: heshe assumed that these odd creatures emanated so incautiously because they had the ability to shut their minds off at will to escape absorption. For, you see, thought is electrical in nature, and creative thought is akin to a short circuit, occurring when two unconnected thoughts arc together to form a totally new pattern. And such was Yteic-Os' s diet. And so heshe made a serious mistake. Heshe stealthily entered the empty caverns of Private Balzac's mind to try and restimulate life. Meanwhile, Yteic-Os' s own nature and essence were laid open to the soldier's subconscious. One of the few compensations humans have for being saddled with such a clumsy nuisance as a subconscious mind is that these distorted clumps of semi-awareness possess a passionate interest in survival. Balzac's subconscious remained hidden, probing, comprehending the nature of this novel threat. A nebulous plan of defense formed, was stored for the proper time. Yteic-Os searched in vain for Thought, while Thought watched him from ambush, and giggled. Consciousness returned to Private Balzac with a jar and a by surprise, flipped completely over on his back and rippled indignantly. This upstart would soon be only a belch -- or something like one. The Voracious One licked hisher... well, you know what  mean. haaaaaat!?!" I was awake. Somehow it had all been sorted out in my sleep: I didn't exactly know what the poached egg was, but I knew what it wanted to do. I thought I knew what to do about it. I would absolutely refuse to hallucinate, and starve it to death. But I hadn't reckoned with the Terrible Tab I'd swallowed. I simply could not stop hallucinating! Colored whirlwinds and coruscating rainbows danced all around me like a mosaic in a Mixmaster; my eyeballs were prisms. Slowly the creative force of my mind was leaking away, being sucked into the egg before it could feed-back and regenerate itself. I was being drained of originality, of wit, of inventiveness, of all the things that make life groovy. I had a grim vision of myself a few years hence, a short-haired square working in a factory living contentedly in Scarsdale with a frigid wife and a neurotic Pekingese, stumbling over the Cryptoquote in the Daily News and drinking Black Label before the T.V. A grimmei I vision I can't imagine, but I still missed it when, with a sucking sound, it disappeared into the poached egg. It was quickly supplanted by other visions, however -- but from the past rather than the future. To my utter horror, I realized that it was actually happening: my whole life was passing before my eyes, in little vignettes which were slurped up by the creature as fast as they formed. In spite of myself I began watching them. In rapid succession I reviewed a lifetime of disasters: losing my transmission at the head of the Victory Parade, getting bounced out of bed a hair before climax when I accidentally called Betty Sue the wrong name, being violently ill on two innocent customers of Howard Johnson's... Wait! A light-bulb rather unoriginally appeared over my head (and was eaten by the poached egg). Howard Johnson's!!! My untimely nausea had come on my third day as a HoJo counter-man, a direct result of the genius of Mr. Johnson himself. Early in his career, Johnson had hit upon the notion of urging all new employees to eat all the ice-cream they wished, for free. He reasoned that they would soon become sick of ice cream, and hence cut employee pilferage from his overhead. The scheme had worked well for him -- why not for me? Desperately I rammed my forebrain into low gear and cut in the afterburner. I dug into the tangled whorls of my cerebrum for all the creativity that heredity and environment had given me, and began to hallucinate as fast and as intricately as I could. I prayed that the poached egg would O.D. Yteic-os was caught in a quandary. The Force was radiating from this rococo little entity at an intolerable rate, and the creature would not stop projecting! Too heavily occupied in absorbing the torrent of food to roll off hisher back, YteicOs was lying on the escape-valve, similar to a whale's spout, which lay in the center of hisher back. The Voracious One screamedafter hisher fashion -- and tried frantically to assimilate the superabundance of food, to no avail. Even as heshe thrashed, desperately seeking to free the escape-orifice, heshe swelled, grew, expanded more and more rapidly, like a balloon inextricably linked to an air compressor. Heshe lost hisher egg shape, became round rather than ovoid, swelled, bloated to impossible dimensions, and --  -- the inevitable happened. And when i could see again, there was scrambled eggs all over the place. I didn't hang around. Corporal Zeke was delighted to see me -- it's embarrassing to have men under your command bumming joints from the enemy. But he was a little disappointed to leant that I only had four and a half bricks. "That's okay, Coip," I assured him. "You guys can have my share. I'm straight for life." "What?" gasped Zeke, shocked enough to deliver the first and only one-word speech of his life. "Yep. After what I went through on the way over here, I'll never get stoned again as long as I live. Poached eggs eating hallucinations, cosmic invasion, Howard Johnson -- it was just too intense, man, just too intense. A man who could freak out like that didn't ought to do dope. I've had a few bummers before, but I know when I've been warned." Zeke was stupified, but not so stupified as to fail to try and change my mind. In subsequent weeks he went so far as to leave joints on my pillow, and once I caught him slipping hash into my K-rations. But like I say, I know when I've been warned, and you can't say I'm stupid. I live a perfectly content life now that the war is over. Got me a wife, a nice little one-family in Scarsdale that I'll have entirely paid off in another twenty-five years, and a steady job down at the distributing plant -- I get to bring home unlimited quantities of Black Label. But sometimes I drink a little too much of it, and my wife Mabel says when I'm drunk -- aside from becoming "disgustingly physical" -- I often babble a lot. Something about having saved the world...  In the one city on Earth, a city that had known only morning, noon, afternoon and morning again for a thousand years, the Empress grew bored with the color and fragrance of her gardens. She had the flowers destroyed. Stunted, gnarly trees from the Amber Islands replaced the flowers. They held her attention for a time. In a palace that had always known light, music and laughter, the Empress grew weary of gaiety. She ordered the bright tapestries taken down and the perennial revellers expelled. Coarse, black hangings were brought in, a close, dead silence filled the corridors, and the Empress was content with the novelty of gloom. For a time. Then she called Laman to her side and said, "Give me a death, poetess." "A death, Your Highness?" Poetess Laman was a small, round woman with a soft voice and a perpetually worried expression. She had not been feeling well lately; the Empress' recent behavior had seen to that. "A new entertainment," said Her Highness. "This morning I have come close to something fresh, something new and different. I want a closer look at it. I want an entertainment based on death." "But, Your Highness -- " "Nothing else is new in my life," the Empress said firmly. "I want to see something about death." "But, Empress," L aman P ro  tested, "new surprises arrive every afternoon! Just last afternoon I inventoried a new shipload. All the treasures of the Redlands. Things to astound you, Your Highness, golden lizards, stones that sing, birds as small and delicate as insects -- " "Nothing is new," the Empress reiterated testily. "I'm bored, Laman. I now want a new entertainment." "But the flying jugglers, the dance of crystals!" "Your colors and lights and songs make me fidgit, poetess. Your entertainments have become dismal affairs." Laman bowed her head. "I shall strive for better, Empress." "Better what?" snapped Her Highness. "More garish colors? Brighter lights, louder songs? No, poetess, I do not think that such will remedy my... my restlessness. Give me a death. Show me what it is. Tell me what it's like." Laman repressed a shiver, murmured assent and left as quickly as she dared. She spent several hours wandering through the gloomy palace, absorbed in her equally gloomy thoughts. There had not been a death in the palace in a thousand years. #'T' Laman to her dead father, Alprex. "It's been a long time since we last talked," answered Alprex, who manifested as an unwavering crisscross pattern of greenish light superimposed upon the surface of a shiny black jewel. The ovoid jewel, which was mounted atop a metal tripod on the terrace of Laman's apartment, hummed the dead man's words softly. "I had begun to wonder if I'd lost my novelty. I had thought death a forgotten subject. You make an odd request, daughter." "The Empress has become interested in death, Alprex." "Can immortals become interested in death?" "Stop mocking me. Her Highness has fallen prey to boredom." "She is tired of laughing. She has turned to ugliness in search of newness." "How do you know?" "I listen, Laman. The city is full of laughter, and it is all desperate laughter. The Empress isn't the only one who's bored. Nor is she the first to have succumbed to boredom. You're bored, too, daughter. How long has it been since you last took anyone to bed? When did the flavor and aroma of food, or any of those little baubles you constantly import for Her Highness, or your work, last excite you?" "Tell me about death," Laman urged, pointedly ignoring her father's questions. "I have to show the Empress what it is." "Why doesn't she ask her own dead?" "She wants an entertainment; she wants the feel of death." "In that case, let her forego the pleasure of her next rejuvenation." "Father!" "Have I uttered treason? The jewel's soft hum did not alter in tone, but Laman knew that Alprex was teasing her. "Do not fret so, little poetess." "What if what you said were to reach the Empress' ears?" "Why, she would probably have me killed," Alprex retorted. "Be calm. I will mind my... tongue for your sake. And for my own, as well. I suppose I should admit it. I would rather be here than in... " "Go on, tell me about death." I can t. "I have to know. Her Highness must have her entertainment, and I have to know something about my subject if she's to be satisfied." "Very well," Alprex said slowly. "Death is... vast, and yet it presses in so closely that it stifles me. It's dark. Deep." "I need specifics! ' ' "There are no specifics," Alprex said, very sadly, though the jewel's hum did not change. "Death is all generalities. I can't describe it, cannot even hint at it. It's everything the living cannot imagine. The closest things the living ever had to death were sleep and space. And the night. I remember those things. We used to surrender consciousness in order to dream. We used to go out into space. We used to surrender the daylight. We had so much that you and the Empress and everyone else can't remember." Laman said nothing. She gently pressed the palm of her hand against the jewel, though she knew that Alprex could feel nothing. "Laman," hummed the pattern of greenish light, "there is too much happiness in the world for anybody to be truly happy. You have lost the dark side of life. The other half of your humanity. When will you forego the pleasure of rejuvenation?" "When... perhaps when I'm as restless as Her Highness." "Have the times been so interesting since my death, daughter? Has the world changed so much in a thousand years?" Laman withdrew her hand from jewel. "You'd feel at home in it, Father. For a little while." The central figure in the new entertainment was scarcely more than a boy, a slim, nervous youth dressed in a tight-fitting suit encrusted with tiny mirrors that caught the light and made the wearer bum as brightly as the sun. His face and hands had been painted white, with splotches and stripes of black, to simulate naked bones. A figure of silver fire, the boy danced across the arena, paused before the throne and, flanked by his markedly drabber and older supporting players, executed a low, graceful bow to Her Highness. There was, however, not the least trace of servility in the boy's posture, and Laman cast a quick, apprehensive look in the Empress' direction. It was difficult to say whether or not the Empress was offended. Throughout the prelude to the entertainment's climactic sequence, she had all but slumped in her seat, obviously bored with the music and the symbolic writhing of the dancers. But the boy's oblique impertinence had not escpaed her notice. Her Highness smiled very faintly, very fleetingly. Laman felt an uneasy satisfaction. Yes, the poetess thought, forcing her eyes to return to the blindingly bright boy, that caught her attention. That interested her. Disrespect. Something else that's new. The boy in the suit of mirrors turned to salute his troupe. Behind them, in the center of the arena, a meter-high derrick-like affair had been constructed of metal rods made in the shape of bones. The youth accepted two skull-topped scepters from his helpers, turned with an almost arrogant flourish and, as his somberly garbed supporting players began to sing a low, mournful song, danced lightly toward the derrick. He twirled the scepters in his hands, and blue lightnings flashed between the gleaming, blurring skulls. The boy picked up speed as his intricate steps carried him closer to the derrick. His dance became a running leap, a somersault, the scepters spitting blue flame as the boy spun. He landed atop the derrick of metal bones and in the same motion turned gracefully to face the Empress. Perched there like a jeweled bird, still twirling the scepters, he added his high but fulltoned voice to the final chorus of the song. The dirge suddenly became a song of hope, of triumph. Death the conqueror is undermined, Death the harvester is expelled from the land of the living, we mock you, we scorn you, we make you myth... The song ended. The scepters stopped spinning in the boy's hands. There was a brief moment of silence in the arena as the boy drew the extended skull-crowned rods up and made them arc toward collision above his head. Lightning touched skull to skull. Fused them together, and the boy, and the derrick, in a flash that was brighter than anything that had been seen in the sky for a millenium. Cymbals crashed. The troupe sang the epilog. Lam an gave the Empress an expectant glance. "I am curiously dissatisfied," Her highness murmured. Laman gnawed the inside of her cheek. "It lacked something," the Empress went on. "I was intrigued by the pyrotechnical climax. But I'm not content. There must be more to death, poetess." "Perhaps the choreography was awkward in places," Laman offered. "Pah. I wanted the death, Laman. Not the frills." The Empress gave her a hard, level look. "Your productions grow successively more ludicrous. You communicated precious little about death, precious little about anything. By the way, who was the boy?" "I confess that I do not know," Laman answered, trying to keep her voice humble, not angry. "A clone, arrested in adolescence. I don't know if they're given names." "He did afford me one moment of amusement," said the Empress. "Perhaps if I were to re-think my whole approach to death, Your Highness..." "Do that, Laman. Do that. I want to feel death. I want to know more about it." The Empress regarded the actors in the arena. They stood at attention, facing her, awaiting dismissal. "There must be something you missed in your research. Try again, poetess." "Yes, Empress," Laman said, closing her eyes. uc her estimation of your production," Alprex said. "You've lost your touch, Laman. No, worse that that, you've gone from mere staleness to outright inanity. I think your dreams must be pallid ones." "I never claimed to be your equal, Father!" "Oh, but you were. Once. Long   ago. "I admit my shortcomings. You needn't patronize me." "I'm not patronizing you. You're beset with problems, and I'm trying to help you, not make fun of you." Alprex's laughter was eeriely distorted by the ovoid jewel's hum. "You've done admirably in your time, just as I did admirably in mine. But there is a limit to inventiveness. It used to be that artists had too little time. Now they have too much." "What are you talking about?" "We lived and died quickly, Laman. Too quickly. We were bom, we grew up and took our training. We worked furiously and feverishly, never losing sight of the fact that we could never get it all done before death cut us off. We were afraid. But we made use of the time we had." "You're not making much sense, Alprex. I'm in no mood to play games." "No games, daughter. Don't let your near-total failure undo you." "There was nothing near-total about it." Dead Alprex seemed to lose himself within his rock for a few moments. Then: "Laman?" The poetess said nothing. She watched the colorful multitudes on the boulevard far below her window. Their noise, carried to her by updrafts, seemed hollow. She raised her eyes to the golden overcast, the cloud of atmospherically suspended particles which had held the day captive for ten centuries. "Laman? Are you still there?" "Yes, Alprex." "You can only succeed by showing the Empress that the living can know nothing of death." "Enough," Laman said irritably. "I'm tired of talking with you. I'm tired of everything." "I know. But listen to me. Death has been driven out of the world, and with it have gone darkness and terror and mystery. I go back a long way, I remember many things. I remember the night. I remember darkness and sleep. I remember the terror of death. When I was a child, I was afraid of the blackness. I saw eyes in it. I found mysteries in it. And when the day would come, I would be happy. Do you understand?" "No. Please be quiet, Father." "Listen to me, little poetess. Listen to me. Why are you unhappy? Why has the Empress become fascinated with that which has been denied these past thousand years?" Alprex seemed to pause for breath. "Because there is too much light in the world. Because people have forgotten the other half of being people. They miss death and fear and night and wonder, even if they can't remember the words. They miss being frightened of the unknown. That, daughter, is the only aspect of death which can be appreciated by the living. Fear of the darkness. Fear of what lurks there." "Alprex..." "Give the Empress darkness, Laman. The ancient terror must lurk beneath the skin of immortals. Give her light, nothing but light, and she will not even pause to reflect that she is alive. Give her night, and she will see eyes in the shadows. Give her the promise of death, the fear of death, the certainty of death, and her life will be considerably enriched. Life is meaningless without death. Day is meaningless without night." Laman turned away from the city and slowly walked past the ovoid jewel on the metal tripod. As she was leaving the terrace, she heard Alprex call after her, softly. "Come see me again, Laman. Soon." She went to the Empress and told her what should be done, and Her Highness said yesss, softly, sibilantly, and it was done. And as the mantle of light began to settle about the towers of the city, as the morning abruptly began to darken, and the people raised their faces in astonishment, Laman made her way back to her apartment and sat on the terrace, beside the metal tripod. "You're crying," Alprex said after a long moment had paused. "I'm afraid, Alprex. The lights are going out, and I'm afraid." "Savor it, daughter. You'll want to remember it when the morning comes. A natural morning, and a natural day. And then, if the Empress has been sufficiently impressed, another natural night." Laman suddenly became aware of screams within the palace, of moans, of gasps, of shrieked prayers to gods for whom there were no names. She hugged one of her dead father's stout metal legs and felt her teeth going into her lower lip. She touched a finger to her mouth and stared at the blood, amazed. "Do you see them?" Alprex murmured above her. She looked up. "Do you see them, Laman?" She looked up, past the ovoid jewel, the shiny black jewel with the criss-cross pattern of light that was her father, to a greater blackness. "I see them, Father," she said, sobbing. "I see them." The sky was very dark, and it was full of eyes. She kept looking up. "And now," said Alprex, "and now, the next step. Sleep. Sleep." "I don't know how." "Sleep. You can -- the air you breathe has been cleansed, you will remember. Close your eyes, and let the darkness come into your head, and sleep." Laman closed her eyes and lay on the terrace and wept to herself. After a time, she grew quiet and still. The jewel hummed to itself. "And now, and now, the final step." Dreams reigned in the one city on Earth, and death waited at the gates. "Patience, friend," Alprex called. "A little at a time."  your congressman, by the way; just address your communication to: The Hon. SoASo, The Capitol, Washington, D.C. Dear Mr. Baen, Two comments about the April "Forum". First, that the solutions to the problems that plague us are delightfully abundant. However, the people who are empowered to apply these solutions are awesomely ignorant of them. Solutions are useless if the political system insists on appointing lawyers to office instead of individuals who understand. Period. If everyone read science fiction, I believe the world's suicidal blind-spots would diminish. That is merely an IF (to borrow the title of that late-great mag), just as Fred Pohl's proposals are merely short-term ifs. Secondly, the illustration you used for interstellar space, a galactic Yin  Yang...that's intriguing enough. But a weightless hour-glass? Did the artist mean to imply that the "short-term solution" is as effective as a gravity-powered device in a weighdess condition? GalaxyIF's flaw is that you can't read it without having to think! Thoughtfully, Carla Sennett # W. #th St. Palos Heights, #. # That illustration was definitely a visually mixed metaphor that didn't work! (You would be amazed at how many sf-oriented people looked at it without catching the flaw in the ointment...) As for the substance of the article and the depressingly real official ignorance thereof, by printing such articles, in as entertaining a format as possible, we are doing what we can. Ifs easy to write to Dear Mr. Baen: I read with great interest your editorial in call for more stories of the "Let's step around it" type and fewer of the "Here we are in it" type. The reason that your comments caught my interest especially is that I have been speculating for some time as to why I find myself doing more rereading of old SF and less reading of new SF. It seems to me that there is a certain lack of the exuberant vitality of earlier years. (I realize that this is an unfair oversimplification, but then, so is everything else I plan to say.) From what the critics have said and from my own observations, there are two explanations that seem most plausable. One is the tendency of SF to merge with the mainstream; the other is the very nature of the times. The merging with the mainstream could be explained in part by the pressure on any ghetto dweller to escape into prosperous respectability. The mainstream being much too sophisticated for exuberance or enthusiasm, science fiction must also remove these qualities if it is to merge. As a result much of SF seems to reflect a state of mind redolent of the smell of cooking cabbage wafting over the dump on a rainy day. Combining with the pressure to merge is the frightening nature of the times. The problems are so real and so awesome that it is difficult to see any solution. Even in many SF stories that present a solution, the author first portrays a bleak situation. The solution is then tacked on as an afterthought totally out of line with the rest of the story. The writer can often be seen rolling up his sleeve preparatory to digging around in his hat for a rabbit. Possibly as an indirect result of the above, the SF magazines are struggling, according to the critics. Part of the reason. I'm sure, is the proliferation of paperback anthologies, but another part of the reason might be that SF is no longer presenting anything radically new and different. The subject matter is different, but the viewpoint is the same as that of the mainstream. The conclusion from this line of reasoning is that SF is better off in the ghetto. The rest of the world is better off with SF in the ghetto as well. The ghetto won't attract as many readers, but those it does attract will be the ones with the energy and ability to solve problems. These people may need the radical ideas of a ghetto SF to stimulate their own thinking. I shall be watching future issues of response is produced by your editorial. Sincerely, Don Tarbet # Ridgewood Dr. Syracuse, NY # Me, too. Dear Mr. Baen: I feel that I wuz had. I bought the April issue under false pretenses: I saw Zelazny's name on the cover and jumped to a conclusion. I am ticked off to find that the only Zelazny in that issue is a short (albeit a good one.) I will concede that the April issue is worth the buck. I am mollified, to say the least, to discover an Arsen Damay serial. That, Geis, and Zelazny more than justify the expenditure. Damay is fantastic. He's been delivering on the promise and is ready for a lead role. I look for his name, even as a second feature. I could imagine him as the top SF writer of the #'s. You might encourage him to confine his talents to novella-novel length...his short stories fail to flatter his talent. Now, my other complaint: the reason I have not entered my subscription during the past ten years. lflGalaxy costs #, right. Now, for # I can get a Solzhenitsyn or a Tom Wolfe novel (# pages papeiback.) For # # I can get a reprint Heinlein I haven't read...or Georgette Heyer, Frank Yerby, A. Bertram Chandler, an Asimov anthology, ad ihTinitem...#-# pages of good reading. In other words, you have competition for my reading dollar. I don't have to confine myself to SF mags -- or even SF. I find Evangeline Walton fully as enjoyable, or a Simak collection, or maybe PohlKombluth's Space Merchants...or maybe historical fiction or a classic. And I can get any of these in paperback for a reasonable price. I might be inclined to skip FSF (# pages at #) for Chandler's Big Black Mark (# pages at #) I know I'll enjoy the whole book, but the magazine is liable to devote #-# per cent to bland short stories. Now, I'm not impossible to please. I was delighted with the chance to read Bester, Saberhagen, Poul Anderson, Pangborn, Clarke and Zelazny serials almost simultaneously, even if I had to buy # different mags. I bought the June Fantastic solely for the Moorcock Novella. But I do want you to know, however, that my cash and my free reading time are both finite. Geis knows where it's at. He speketh truth, forsooth. The main problem with the shorts cited below is their artistic pretension. I have yet to see a stream-of-consciousness short story worth bothering to decode (Horse). Perfect is a failed shaggy-dog story. In-jokes (Singularity) leave me out. Please restrain your artistic impulses. If I want status, I can leave a copy of Gulag Archipelago on the front seat when I pick up my collegestudent girl friend. What's more, in a pinch I can actually read Archipelago and enjoy it, and show the proper degree of condescension toward the Philistine. (Of course, I won't tell him it's fast, smooth, bin reading.) Dammit, you don't have to be unintelligible to be intellectual. I would have preferred that you kill Galaxy and keep If, rather than the reverse. Poor me! I, not knowing that If was the corporate stepchild, enjoyed reading it more. I suppose Galaxy had the literary reputation to uphold? If could afford to drop her pants occasionally and havebe some fun. You could help me feel happier with my investment in Galaxyllf if you would: #) Get Pournelle off his duff and onto a sequel to Spaceship for the King. He owes it after the bind he left his protagonists in. You've been letting him off easy. #) Get Lafferty to fill in more of the space you reserve for shorts. He's one of the. very few I know who can satisfy me in the limited space. (Tak Hallus and Wolfe do well enough, true.) It takes at least as much skill to write an interesting short story as does a novella. It's a crime to entrust your short stories solely to novices. True, most people don't buy a magazine just for one short stoiy, but, oddly enough, I for one manage to justify the expense of a mag if it has a Lafferty short. #) Do what you have to, but get Anne McCaffrey's next Dragonworld novel. She has to have one, considering the loose ends she left in Dragonquest. (Ben Bova, attention! I'd buy the next three Analogs for such a serial, or Poumelle's. Little else would compel me to do so.) None of the others, including Analog, grab me. For Bester, yes. I just can't expect value from the backup material. Not even Dickson has strong enough pull to do much good. On the other hand, I do like Galaxyllf most of the lime, or else I would not be bothering to write. After all. Galaxy has been running some adequate side material. Geis is all there. Tak Hallus is interesting, and might be Lafferty's logical successor as however, like to feel more confident I'll get my money's worth from the whole magazine. Oh, by the way, if Pournelle has done his serial to Spaceship for the King, or McCaffrey hers to Dragonquest, I apologize for my oversight. Perhaps they slipped past me like Zelazny's Guns of Avalon. Drat! I swore I'd not let that get by me, after Nine Princes in Amber. Yet it sneaked past in the night, nor would I have known about it had it not been for the preface to your Sign of the Unicorn. Thank you for that. As you see, I hate such loose ends as not-quite-complete novels. I would like to consider my Galaxy subscription as a sort of insurance against missing out on the climax of such goodies. Sure, I ask the impossible, but I've seen GalaxyIf deliver. I rather feel you won't let me down. Confidently, Thomas C. Watson # Dowling Ave. West Orange, Texas You're a hard man to please Mr. Watson -- but I'll try! Dear Sir, Regarding the comments on Velikovsky in your February, # issue, it seems to me that nobody has yet mentioned the most obvious and basic objection to Velikovsky's Worlds in collision, and this is the simple fact that a comet can't become a planet. A comet is an "airy nothing"; a planet is a solid body. You can't change one into the other. Geoff. Muirden Flat #, # York Street, St. Kilda West, Victoria #, Australia Jerry's reply: Actually, a number of people have dwell jfi length on this. However, what Velikovsky means by "comet" isn't what most of us mean; he means only a large celestial object with a tail. If Velikovsky could prove that the worldwide disasters he describes actually took place, then we'd need a theory to account for them; but since in my judgment he can't prove his disasters, I don't need to discuss his cosmology. Incidentally, Stephen Jay Could of Harvard geology dept, has done an article taking apart Velikovsky" s geophysical data. It and answers several of the questions I raised in my article but which I didn't feel competent to discuss. In a private letter to me Dr. Gould compares Velikovsky with Daniken, but concludes they are quite different phenomena entirely. I tend to agree with his observation that Velikovsky deserves serious attention even though he is almost certainly wrong. Jerry Poumelle Dear Editor: Frederik Pohl's description of Mr. Fong's problem-combining process was of great interest. The solution seems to involve violation of traditional political-sociological methods of handling poverty; not to mention traditional standards of cleanliness (read sanitation). It sounds wonderful to me, but if it is economically feasible, a large number of poverty program bureaucrats and functionaries would eventually become political appointees in unnecessary positions. I suspect that they would make every attempt to maintain their present status. I suspect that the ratio of alcohol to gasoline could be increased by appropriate engine adjustments; after all, some autos run on propane with no operational difficulties, except, of course, the ever-present problem of finding propane sources for refueling. While we are discussing distribution we need to consider two other problems; first, the reactions and actions of petroleum producers; and second, the regulations pertaining to the production and sale of alcohol. The inexperience and lack of financial capital which would be endemic among any new "fuel" farmers would also serve to hinder the basic program. Finally, and most important of all, would the general form of the program be of a sufficiently popular format, that a politician seeking to be re-elected could, without trepidation, support it fully. Politicians generally do not vote for programs which are unpopular with their constituents, even when they areabsolutely necessary. Changing to another subject, I recently saw a program which mentioned that, in salamanders and some higher animals (mice), stimulus by a negative electromotive force aids in re-growth of damaged tissue. I found myself wondering if, by any chance, that a positive E.M.F. might cause a repression of growth. Since cancer is a form of growth (uncontrolled), perhaps cancer researchers might profit from subjecting clones of cancerous tissues to various electrical potentials. Any cell receiving negative E.M.F. is receiving an excess of electrons, which I presume, might lead to overstimulation of synapses and thus to overproduction of chemicals needed for growth. Positive E.M.F. would drain electrons from the cell, causing a drop in the cell's metabolism. We might discover that certain chemicals which are carcinogens have the chemical behavior of electrolytes, changing the potential of a normal cell. Has anyone ever thought to test nicotine for its conductivity; I can't think of any reason that it would have been done before, but do we really have anything to lose? Researchers might test the electrical properties of cells from both healthy and cancerous patients and compare those properties with the amount of diseased tissue in the cancer patients. Best wishes for Galaxy's continued success, Gary Paul Ristow P. O. Box # Willmar, Minn. Fred's article directed itself to feasibility, not politics -- that's our job! S  S Books, G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. original TV scripts for sale. Plus other popular programs, movie scripts, stills. Collectors Book Store, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. #. your family and friends with calculator frolics, games, and magic tricks. Send today for our highly acclaimed #-page book of calculator entertainments. Paperback #, hardcover #, postpaid. Dept. #, Eleclrel Scientific, Box #, Star City, West Va. #. "Escape", Bradbury, Pohl, Asimov...Catalogue: # #. stamps. Pyramids, # Big Bend, Webster Groves, Mo. #. Book Search Service. Send wants: out of print, especially fiction, # Los Verdes Drive, Ranchos Palos Verdes, Calif. #. Longview, Washington #. target practice as seen on Kung Fu. # (four or #I . fantasy magazines from # to #. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Btvd., Hollywood, CA. #. 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Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Ass't. to the. Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor "Curiousity killed the cat," they say. Obviously a miscontruction has been placed on this bit of foik-wisdom over the years -- what it reaily means is " wonder what wouid happen to the cat if i... The story of Hammer's indomitabie Siammers has been chronicied both here and in that "Certain Other" magazine (yes, the one with Here is how it all began... Wherein, against all odds, an intrepid warrior returns from victorious battie with the dreaded Spacethings, only to find that the Earth he has saved seems strangely altered -- quite retarded, in fact! A whimsical tale of interplanetary exploration wherein the Explorer becomes the Explored. The Ultimate in sensory deprivation. Dean Okara knew that it was only a matter of time before the alien derrai penetrated his scoutship's last defence -- but every second he could delay the inevitable increased Earth's hope of final victory! Hell or Infernoland? At last the question is answered...or is it? The Editor discourses on matters of national Anniversary Issue the man who founded Galaxy should survey the terrain he pioneered so many years ago; herewith, Gold on Gold. Lovecraftian Horror. In "Looking Aft," Horace claims that every time he makes a move the world suffers a catastrophe. This time it is The End of Science as We Know It! Geis takes a switch to Alter. An honest-to-god innovation in investigative book-reviewing -- Notes from the Bookstore! Letters from Woods, Pohi, Smith, Sheridan, Adams. Style, #. Interior Illustrations by Ames, Dalzell, Freff, Kirk, Pini of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-Issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage peld at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity be t we e n characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in America's Defense Budget has come to require so massive a portion of the nation's wealth that it is no longer possible to convince politicians that we can afford any more significant national goal than mere survival. And yet, to forego the means of waging war would itself inevitably lead to war, and a losing one at that. This coldly militaristic equation is the central dilemma of our time; without capital expenditures so massive that -- barring an unforeseeable basic restructuring of our society -- even the Federal Government cannot pay for them, we are trapped in a world situation of diminishing supplies and rising demands, a dawning age of ever-tightening resources that can end only in a bang or in a whimper. And yet we must maintain a level of armaments so expensive that seemingly we can afford nothing else. But there may be a way out... Consider. Are there not weapons that are plowshares as well? Example: the anti-missile lasers described in the February '# Galaxy are also potential orbital-launch devices -- and their power sources would be of sufficient magnitude to provide a significant increment to the nation's generating capacity. And since the only answer to anti-missile lasers would be orbitalanti-missile lasers -- solar-panel or fusion powered "space fortresses" -- then if we decide to invest in laser anti-missile systems, we had best invest in the means of protecting them as well; Space Shuttles that could easily be converted into orbital warships. Lots of them. And of course while our fleets of orbital fighters -- pardon me; space shuttles -- are not busy taking out hypothetical space fortresses, there would certainly be no sense in just letting them sit there getting rusty. No, they should be kept busy; building orbital factories that would be highly cost-effective, given cheap shuttle service; terraforming Venus (see September Galaxy -- what would a new planet be worth?); setting up Lunar research facilities; disposing of nuclear wastes; building a fleet of real spaceships for manned exploration of the Solar System...and since our friends across the way will doubtless be constructwhose power source when not in military use could be beaming down energy via microwave. But you get the idea. Speaking of ideas, there must be lots of possible weapons-sy stems with dual swordplowshare components. Let's hear about them. It's your world, too. -- Baen There are those who believe that functional intelligence is equivalent to technological sophistication. Obviously Joanna is not among them. Nor is -- seconds and I would have been dead, lying with a knife in my throat on the deck of one of the ugliest yachts ever built -- killed by my own friends, gentlemen! What? Put this thing on my head so I can understand as well as be understood? (For I take it that's what your gestures mean.) What a pity. So instantaneous. We could have taken six months; you draw little diagrams, you teach me the words for past, future, present, -- I fall to my knees calling you gods -- Sorry. I'll stop joking. Three months ago -- no, of course I can't tell you what year it was unless I can put our two calendars together; what does a number like twenty-two something-something mean to me? -- anyway, the whole thing started three months ago when the barbarian and the boy and I were riding off the Southern coast of -- never mind; names change so, even locally. It was nighttime. Our barbarian, with his uncivilized addiction to cleanliness, was taking a bath in the sea, and the boy was scraping the dinner pots. I was leaning over the rail, watching our wake, that true Southern phosphorescence you never see anywhere else, that luminosity that seems at any moment about to condense into the bodies of the drowned, the souls of the dead, floating up and drifting Just under the surface of the water, whispering perhaps, smiling, gliding... Then the boy gave a yell and I nearly pitched over the side. The three of us stared. Then the clouds must have parted or some low mist blown aside. There it was. "A town," said our barbarian, Sam. What's funny? The machine does the translating, not me, doesn't it? I told you we saw a town and I told you Sam said so; and after months at sea you are supposed to go wild; you think of restaurants, you think of women, you think of money, though not necessarily in that order. All except me. Now I want to explain this right now; in what I did I was never for a moment actuated by personal malice. I'm a sociable man; I like people and I like to see them enjoy themselves. But once in a while... never mind, perhaps I've sold my soul to the devil or he sold his to me! Anyway, Sam was the first to speak, all pronunciamento and seven feet tall. "Everyone," he said, "must take a bath except me, because I have already had one." "Oh gods, I have to shave," said the boy. "Not with my knife," I said. I've never met anyone so mad for growing up. I had stowed our good clothes somewhere months before and was looking for them behind some of our coiled rope and other gear when I collided with my tall friend. I have always called them my friends, gentlemen, but the truth is I have never understood them. Never at all. I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him and said, "Look here, what do you want? What do you really want?" He looked back at me in the half-dark, above the lantern we keep in the bow, and his face looked like a statue carved out of stone but that was only a trick of the light because these Northerners' eyes are blue and you can look right through blue eyes into the sky behind, like looking through the eye-holes of a skull. "To be rich," he said. I've never understood that. The boy will end up going home, of course, because this is only a vacation for him -- but I -- "Look," I called after Sam, "I'll get it for you. A fortune. For both of you." We landed at night. A nice clean little harbor with native craft, mostly; you couldn't have told, give or take fifty miles, where you were. You've never landed on the commercial waterfront of a small city at night, have yOu? -- indeed, with a room full of such extremely interesting equipment, why should you? -- No, of course not. Well, you can have no conception of such a  place unless you've been there. It is exactly the same, wherever you are. It is sinister and it is homely. The shadows are deep, the streets narrow, here and there a light above an inn or coming out of an open doorway, and higher up you get the poor quarter, and higher up still the commercial quarter, and if you know towns the way I do (they all fit the land they're on as animals fit the lives they lead) you can work your way to the center in little over an hour. Likewise the politics. I stopped a native. "Where is Main Street?" "What?" he said. "Great Street," I said, "Large Street, Wide Street, Market Street, Big Street, Important Street -- " Thus you run down the list. We found it (Long-and-Large Street), then found we had to register at a government shed, which contained some truly horrendous warnings against coining. When I told them my plan, Sam and the boy didn't oppose me -- nobody ever does, somehow, when the fit is on me -- so we stripped the ship and sold everything, including the compass, to buy clothes. We had to put on a good show as gentlemen. I told the other two I was going to get arrested and to stick with me; so the went up to a flower-seller's booth on Second-Biggest Street, took out our last gold piece, and bought a bouquet. Something called Tyrrhenian Violet Mix, as I remember. "My dear elevatedness," crooned the florist, "allow me the nearly unbearable pleasure of giving you your change." The gold was making him tremble with greed. "No, no," said I, assuming an unidentifiable foreign accent. "But yes," he said. "But please. Allow me. Make me happy!" He doubled up over the counter like a snail. "Oh well," said I; "If you insist, give me one small coin for this darling child who assists you in tying up the flowers and I will place it in his hand myself." He gave me my change. I looked at it casually; I stared at it hard; I turned pale; I bit it; I cried: "Counterfeit!" One doesn't wish to be arrested for criminal misbehavior, you see; that doesn't get you anywhere. This was a very strictly governed little town. I will mention only in passing the heads stuck on pikes along the battlements of the Governor's palace on High-and-Handsome Street, the lists of taxes, and the license hanging in the inn where we had spent the night. As a common brawler, I would have been in a mess; but here I was the complainant. We were flanked by the local gendarmerie in what must have been record time (thirty seconds), in ten minutes we were in front of a judge, and in fifteen minutes the coin was pronounced genuine. I had rather hoped it wouldn't be. "Fraud!" I cried. "Arrest him!" said the judge, waking up for the first time during the entire proceedings. "For what?" said I. "I have said nothing." "Quiet!" shouted the judge, really angry this time. "Only," I continued imperturbably, "Fraud, which in my beautiful, rich, and very far away country signifies distress and extreme pain of mind. I have an imperfect understanding of your magnificent language. Would a wealthy man like myself' -- here the courtroom grew very quiet all of a sudden -- "would wealthy men like the three of us, I connections all over the known world and in some other places too, be concerned with anything but the principle of law involved in the forging of a small coin? Of course not." "Alas," I continued, "that I cannot now import into your ohso-desirable country the gold with which I had hoped to start three or four of my worldwide, extremely moneymaking enterprises. But principle must prevail. Honesty -- " "You're under arrest," said the judge. "And I'll examine you in private. Keep those other two in custody." "Ah," I said. "Good." Look here, gentlemen, don't you talk to me about luck. I always know what I'm doing. Once I'd read the notices in that damned registry office! -- there were such heavy penalties for bribery, you see. Do laws punish what nobody ever does? His Wisdom got us into an ornate little stone room at the back of the court, fitted up with carpets (and gilding), locked us in, took out a bottle of something -- "Thanks, no," I said, dropping my accent. "I prefer to talk business." He dropped the bottle. Luckily there was a carpet on the floor, too. He stared at me, but I said nothing. I had my back to the window, which is always nice. He was a silly man; the first thing he did was get up and make for the door. "Please, please," I said, "I am defenseless. Besides, your admirable door locks with a key, not a bolt or latch, and I managed to abstract the key whilst you were busy with the bottle; I would advise -- " "Murderer!" he said. He had turned pale and was attempting to ring a bell set under the table without my seeing him do it. The role of anthropology in outer space How should a space colony be designed? How can it prepare for possible contact with non-human extraterrestrial cultures? In this unique anthology anthropologists, scientists, writers, and an Apollo flight technician speculate on how anthropology as a discipline can help us prepare for the coming age of space travel. #, paperbound now at your bookstore A Division of Random House "Don't," I said. "Besides, you are quite safe. I'm a reasonable man. I really do like to make money." I smiled. "And I like to see other people make money." "But you have money already." "Not a penny I replied." He went for the door again. "Please," I said. "Please, my dear fellow, do be calm. Do you think I want to hurt or rob you? If I do either, I shall undoubtedly be sawn in half, or whatever nasty method of execution it is you use in this part of the world." "Then -- " he began unhappily. "Why go through such an elaborate farce? That's of course what you were about to say, since you are such an intelligent man. The answer is that for political purposes -- which I shall go into presently -- I needed to get in touch immediately with someone of great importance. Someone of great intelligence." I spread my hands. "Yourself." "Polit -- " he said. I leaned forward, speaking in a very low voice. "I must know," I said. "Are you for the Governor or -- ' ' "Guards!" he screamed. He had backed away from me as far as he could go, bending himself uncomfortably into the doorknob. He turned and rattled it piteously. "Guards!" "Do," I said, springing to my feet and altering my whole manner. "Do. Protest your loyalty. Swear. Will they believe you?" He sweated, poised on one foot like a top. "How do you know who sent me?" I went on grimly. "Eh? How do you know what they want, what they'd like? How do you know what they've found out?" "Guards," he squeaked. I shrugged elaborately. I threw myself back into my chair. I began to play with the pair of gentleman's gloves I had bought that morning, magiiificent things, really, openwork of leather and gold; they seem to make them very well in that region. "You don't have to make the decision yourself," I said. "No?" he said. "No," I said, looking very grave and compassionate. "No indeed. Mind you. I'm only telling you this because of my regard for you. I hate to see people be -- but never mind. Don't you think the best thing to do would be send me to -- ah -- someone higher up? I won't say a word if you do." He had been standing on one foot all this time, I swear it; now he descended to two, so relieved to be bipedal again. He sighed and wiped his head. He smiled pitifully. He held out one hand -- heart-felt -- then snatched it back again in evident fear that I would garotte him. "Never mind," I said. "Not all of us are cut out for the -- ah -- real complexities of -- well, you know what I mean." "Yes," he said, collapsing into his chair. "Oh yes. I do. Yes, yes, I do." So that's done.    Was I at my ease? To tell you the truth, no. But I could deal with him. He was a lean, dry, cleanshaven old man in a voluminous crimson tent. He leaned on two sticks. He made me sit down and then he staggered up to me so that his parchment face leaned over mine, trembling as he said: "How old are you?" "Twenty-two," said I. "Ha -- hmmmmm." He cleared his throat, and then spat, and then looked absently out of the window of his reception room. You saw the marble arches and the whitewashed walls, and trees and hedges outside, very pretty if you didn't notice the soldiers. He gathered the stuff of his .robe between two fingers and flashed an enormous ruby on one of them. Vanity. Of some kind. "Did you think," said he, "that your mummery would succeed?" I said I thought it would get me to someone like him, but not so high up. "Have you done anything like this before?" said he, turning sharply round. "Twice," I said. "But not exactly like this." It's true, too; I have never found it necessary to lie to anyone. People are amazingly prolific at jumping to conclusions. Walk up to any official in a provincial town and say, "They know." Then run. "Have you any money?" the old man said to me. This obviously didn't interest him. "None," said I. "Ha -- hmmmmm." He was looking out the window again. "And what do you want? Every man wants something." I stayed silent. He got up and hobbled over to me. "Tell me," he said. I shrugged. "Tell me or I'll have you -- " "But I don't know!" I said. He limped back and lowered himself into his chair with an extended grimace. "Nothing," said he, "can ease the pains of old age, young man. Remember that. My people thought you were an assassin. Obvious nonsense, of course. You're mad." "I've been told so," said I. His eyes glittered. "You must be," he said. "You don't have money and you don't want it. I'll tell you something, my mad friend: I'm crazy too. We're the only two people in this town who see things as they are. Power is better than money. Now: out with it." I told him. He laughed until he cried. Then he said: "How did you know I was in the Duke's faction?" "I didn't," I said. "But if I hadn't been -- ?" "Oh," I said, "the plan! The plan can be sold to anyone. It can even be turned inside out and used by the Governor; that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what side you're on." He laughed again, started coughing, stopped, laughed, and then abruptly looked grim. He clapped his hands. Three crafty kids sprang from the thin, thin air. "This young man," he said sternly, "is my particular guest. Find him and his friends a place to stay. Watch him -- but not his friends; I don't think we need go that far yet -- at all times." He gave an enormous yawn. "By the way," he added suddenly (darting up to me with wonderful, unsteady quickness) "how did you know there was a -- hm -- faction?" He thrust his wrinkled face up to mine. I had the sudden feeling that one of those fresh-faced lads might be ready with a blade in my back. So I told the truth, as I always do. "There always is," I said. "Everywhere." it if it I could say there were times when I felt tempted to take his money and run, but I would be lying. I wouldn't have gone for the world. Besides, the money was Sam's, not mine; whatever I got, I sent to him. My very important lord had settled me in the city and I was buying up grain -- with his gold, of course -- and dumping it off the coast, secretly, at night. Do you know what happens when you make something artificially scarce? That's right, the price goes up. It's like having a bad season. When the price of grain goes up, the price of bread follows; bread is threequarters of the diet of the poor and when they can't afford it -- Five weeks after my real arrival I arrived again, but this time as a different stranger with a bag of gold a yard long (my lord's gold, of course) under one arm and under the other, elaborate plans for a company that would manufacture fertilizer from sea-sand. The Minister of Finance all but wept in my lap. Not that he really thought fertilizer could be made from sea-sand, you understand, (though I think he had a few dim gleams of hope on the subject) but any fool with money was a godsend at this time, with the poorer classes so restless. I ordered lumber, building stone, and workmen, and I paid six times as much as anyone else. The price of wheat (their staple commodity, you understand) rose. I raised wages. The price of bread went up even faster. I raised wages again. A starving mob broke into our factory, there were riots in the harbor streets, someone set fire to part of a slum, and the Minister of Finance (standing on the smoking ruins), dedicated the site to a new temple of the Sun-God, swearing that would solve everything. Prices rose. Nobody could understand why -- when there was so much money to be had -- they couldn't buy anything. Prices rose. I thought the Minister of Finance would get bold (and ruin everything) by confiscating the merchants' stores for rationing, but trust our boy! he had no desire to be torn limb from limb by enraged graindealers. To be absolutely fair I ought to add that the wheat my lord and I had dumped in the sea continued to have a confusing and tenuous life of its own; that is to say, the dummy merchants we had set up reported they were still doing business, so that according to the records, there should have been enough to eat. I think I am the only person in the world who knows that gold does not exist -- oh, I don't mean literally, of course, but what good is a yellow, soft metal that you can't eat or burn or make into tools? None at all. It's as if people had all made some crazy agreement to honor it -- why not cowrie shells, or cows, or trees, or pieces of rock? If only everybody agreed and kept the amount of stuff the same, it wouldn't matter what you used. Break that agreement and overnight there would be no town, no possessions, no government, no ownership, no anything. Do you see? Well, no one else ever has. In your own words, here these poor idiots were believing that the "medium of exchange" meant something in itself and by itself, and there I was, arranging that there should be more and more medium and less and less to exchange. Prices rose. Rumors began to circulate that the Sun God was angry with the citizens, that gold -- which everybody knows is His condensed breath -- was losing its power, that soon nights of a week long would descend on the city and every third citizen would be eaten by locusts. Prices rose. ' 'Never, ' ' said the Finance Minister in formal proclamation from a balcony of the palace, while a band played music below him, "does Our Governor hear the complaints of His hungry poor unmoved. His father is the Sun-God Ya; His mother is the silvery Moon-Goddess Yup; how can Their power have been abated? Fear not; you will all be wealthy by and by; Our Governor will not stand by inactive at such an hour," etc. etc. Then that crazy man raised the salaries of all government employees and distributed a tax rebate to every householder. Prices rose. Let me make it clear before I utter another word that there was enough to eat. They could have gotten through the winter quite well on a strict system of rationing. But who ever did anything unpopular if he could help it? My lord, although by now excessively poor, was overjoyed. "Am I of use to you or am I not?" I said. "Indeed you have been," he answered. It hit me some quarter of an hour later, that have been. kkk I saw it begin with my own eyes. My lord, with the last of his wealth, had been coining money himself -- base, obvious, leaden counterfeits -- and when the Finance Minister ordered his last, grand, general Bonus (and simultaneously announced his retirement) my lord substituted his false coinage for the Minister's true one. That did it; I tell you, that did it; you have never seen such a thing as it was. I was in the street with my lord when it happened, near one of the barrier tables the militia had set up to distribute the coins. A liquorhouse keeper tried to palm off one of them at an old lady's food-stand; she screamed "Police! Police!" just as several others discovered the same thing; and then the whole crowd must have grasped the same fact at exactly the same time, for there was a roar such as I have never heard before in my life, a roar from a thousand throats at once in that one frozen moment before the crowd became a mob and the mob an avalanche. My lord grasped my elbow and whispered in my ear, "Get out of town," and as I obediently slipped into a side-street, I heard behind me that oceanic tidal-wave of sound and the crash of the first tables going down. Sam and the boy, thanks be, had put out to sea that afternoon; we'd arranged to meet Just out of sight of the bay. North of the harbor. But I had to stay; I had to see it. I tell you, my heart was beating like mad. It was senseless; there was no reason for me to stay but I couldn't leave. It fascinated me. Fighting must have started on the main avenues for I caught glimpses of arrows and men running past the little streets with scythes, butcher knives, poles, anything they could pick up. I tell you, I couldn't stop. They were breaking into stores; it was glorious and horrible, women rushing by pushing baby-wagons piled with fruit or clothes. My lord had apparently hired orators, or perhaps they'd sprung out of the ground; some were touting the Duke as pretender; others were abusing everyone and everything. It was a ghastly mish-mash about the sun going out and the Governor cheating everybody; it would've taken a genius to keep it all straight. I threw away the gold chain my lord had given me and wrapped myself in a dirty cloak I found in the street; it was almost night and torches were being lit at every corner, not that they needed them with the light from bonfires and burning houses. I had stopped to listen to one of the agitators and join in the singing, but I slipped past them. Someone ran through, shouting that people were dying on Street; he disappeared. There was another bonfire. " -- and will we stand it? No, we will not stand it!" Someone said, ' 'Got some tobacco?" close to me and a hand slipped into my pocket; I twisted it good and hard and moved away into a doorway. Someone else, next to me, struck a light. It was one of my lord's fresh-faced little murderers. He was smiling at me. "Not bad," he said, "not bad at all, but getting a little out of hand, we think." I followed his glance across the street and there, peering ravenously out of a second-story window, was my very important lord. He grasped the window-sill with one hand and raised the other savagely, bringing it down in a short, cutting arc; from the next doorway peeped out another babyface and from the next doorway another. Without thinking (for I go blind in panic) I shinnied up a drainpipe by the doorway and fell on to a roof. Have you ever run over roofs? Don't. People expect adventurers to be athletic but the only advantage I had was that I was scared to death and -- just possibly -- the baby-faces got peevish and insisted that while climbing roofs wasn't and they weren't paid for it. Not that I stopped to watch, you understand. I jumped gaps in those roofs where I left my stomach behind thirty feet below in the street, and I walked boards you could not have ordinarily persuaded me to try two inches off the ground. Once I was crazy enough to swing from roof to roof on a line of drying wash which didn't even break. All the time I ran I could hear them behind me and I saw them once, when I turned, climbing behind me in a slow, deliberate way, as if they knew where I was going even though r did not. And I didn't; I had no more sense of direction up there than a -- Then I met one of them coming the other way. I dove into the street -- I say dove because I went nearly headlong, caught an awning, snapped it, swung, dropped into the street, ran around the corner, and following nothing but blind instinct, ran into a door -- found it locked -- swung up on a window-ledge, made the next highest window with a ledge six inches wide, clung there like a sleepwalker, with swimming head and shaking knees, and plummeted into the room inside all in a heap. There was a girl in the room, braiding her hair. I remember now -- though I wasn't capable of connecting the two things then -- that she must have been of the very highest class, for she was dressed in a long-sleeved, brocaded jacket that gleamed in the lamplight; she wore a silk shirt and had little bits of gold hung all over her: ankle bells, rings, earrings, bracelets, pins. But all I saw then was a glow, a shimmer, and a tinkling of oriraments. "Madam!" I gasped, "for Heaven's sake!" and she came over quite unhurriedly, to inspect me. She could not have been more than twelve years old. She had -- how shall I say -- a certain unpleasant expression, as if she were used to ordering people around, including her mamma and papa. She looked at me with great interest and then said: "I do believe someone is chasing you. You must be very wicked." "Beautiful lady," said I (with what voice I had left) "someone is indeed chasing me, although I assure your ladyship that I am not in the least wicked" (here I heaved a breath) "but only a poor, desperate, unfortunate, and terrified rascal, who throws himself both figuralively and literally at your ladyship's exquisite feet." Try talking that way when you can't breathe. "You," said this little girl to me, "have charming black curly hair and very dreamy eyes, but I do think you entered my room rather ungallantly." "Madam!" I said, throwing my arms about her knees, "fair one, beautiful lady, lovely one, if they catch me, they will kill me right here on your rug, so for Yup's sake, hide me!" "That would be awful," she said, "because it would make a stain" -- I am not making this up -- and she took me by the hand and pulled me into a little alcove, shoving me behind some clothes. I heard her ankle-bells go leisurely from one side of the room to the other and then I heard her yawn and then -- marvelous little actress! -- she said, "Oh! Who are you?" Well, they asked me about her and she described a horrible spirit who had looked into the window and then disappeared -- "I prayed" she said -- and they said Are you really telling the truth and she said How dare you and so on and so on -- but a deadly cold faintness was coming over me; I would have given anything, even my life, for a chance to lie down, to lie down flat, and never never ever to get up again. When I came to myself I was lying on the floor of the closet with my head in her lap and she was putting her hot little hands all over my face and neck to wake me up. "Angel," I said. She smiled complacently. "Ssssh," she said, "Lie still. They'll watch the roof for a while. I heard them say so. Here -- " and she brought me pieces of sugarcandy and fed them to me and gave me something insipid to drink out of a little silver bottle. It tasted like the essence of all the oranges that ever weren't, but I needed it. "I wish," I said quite sincerely, "that I could give you something. You've been so good to me." "I have everything," she said, patting her hair. "All the same -- " I said, and I searched my pockets but they were as empty as my grave; "All the same, I wish -- " "Kiss my hand," she said, extending it and looking at me in what I can only describe as a very calculating manner. 'Tm sure this is dreadfully wrong," she added comtemplatively, "but as I'm to be married next week, I suppose it's all right." She smiled and a charming little dimple appeared on each side of her chin. "If you'd really like to show you're grateful," she said, "you may give me a gift, although it'll have to be something I can give back to you at the same time. Mamma watches me like a hawk." I knew what she meant, so I said "May I -- ?" and she shut her eyes and I -- what else? -- kissed her. It's in the tradition, gentlemen. But it's not in the tradition that the lady shall fling her arms around you and hold onto you until you can't breathe, while you don't dare get free, for obvious reasons. Finally she let me go; apparently everything was perfectly proper as far as she was concerned. "Remember me!" she whispered, waving a tiny, embroidered silk handkerchief as I climbed out the window, dreading the fall to the ground and broken bones. "Remember me!" "Angel!" I cried, "I shall never forget you!" and nearly dislocated my neck falling into the street. I got myself up in one piece and searching my pockets, found a piece of candy. It hadn't occurred to her to give me money, I suppose. Though money was not much use in this town any more. There was a faint glow in the East and I could hear -- very far away -- some kind of noise. I walked slowly through the streets. By the time I got to the waterfront it was nearly dawn. I tell you, somehow the joy had gone out of it. I had no feeling at all. I found an old man smoking by the docks ar.d begged some tobacco from him, which I wrapped in a piece of my shirt and put in my pocket. "Tell me," I said, "did you see a big man come by here earlier tonight? A big, yellow-haired man with a boy?" He spat on the ground. "I seen the whole town come by here," he said resentfully. "The whole damn lot. Screeching like water bufloes." I was beginning to feel just how tired I was and my back and legs ached. "Tell me -- " I said, but stopped in mid-sentence. What was the use? I sat down on the pier. I was too tired. I was just too tired. Now I would have to steal a boat. So I did. I mean I took it, that's all. They'd left only a child to guard the government house and I bribed him with my tobacco -- none of them would look at money any more! -- and besides, what did he care? He expected Utopia to dawn the next morning. The foreign ships were gone -- so was ours -- and so was everything else except a few planks with sails on them -- they call them "butterflies," I believe. I took one of them and I was so tired that if there'd been any kind of weather at all, I would've just rolled off the plank into the sea. I felt queer, too, as if I'd been finished off or been sick; I don't know what it was. I got to our ship by the lights -- oh, the blessed sound of black water against wood! -- and hauled myself up; I would have fallen if they hadn't helped me. "Is your scheme finished?" said my barbarian, sounding very grim and deep in the darkness. "It is," said I, "and so am I, for that matter." "Not quite," said he, "turn around," and when I did so, I saw that the whole Southern sky -- from red. The city was on fire. "Good God -- "I said, "they must have -- the torches -- " "Now that you have finished," said that barbarian, "can you tell us what you have brought back to us, out of that wreck?" "I had some tobacco," I said. "No, I gave it away -- and my gold chain -- there's your money -- but that's all -- " "We've spent it," said the boy. My friend squatted down beside me in the glow. The fire lit up the sea as far out as we were, and for the fnst time in my life I could clearly see the thoughts in those empty. Northern eyes. I have never liked those eyes, friend though he be. "I have sailed with you since you were fifteen years old," he said, "but I tell you -- " "Why'd you do it?" whispered the boy in wonder. "I tell you!" shouted Sam, "I tell you never Never before!" He put his face up to mine. "That town is burning," he said. "Everyone in it will be dead. Twice before I wondered: why does he do these things. But now I think I know." "Tell me then," I said; "it'll be news to me," and it was at that moment, gentlemen, it was at that very moment that he pushed my face into the boards -- I bear the marks of the splinters yet! -- that he pushed, I say, my face into the boards and wrenching sideways, I saw that my old companion was about to put a knife in my neck and that our boy approved and stood by silently, his arms folded. That was, fortunately, the exact moment in which you plucked me out of time (five thousand years into the future, if I'm to believe you) and deposited me in this shining kitchen. It's not a kitchen? Well, a glorified kitchen, then, a transcendent kitchen! And they wanted to kill me. Why? Did I ask those damned fools to burn their city? Did I ask them to be so stupid? If there 'd been anyone there with the slightest sense, I couldn't have gotten one foot into that town! Not that I like the idea of my little preserver being burnt, or raped by the militia, or having her golden bells torn off her ankles; I'm not inhuman. Still -- why should they kill me? It's their own fault for finding no decent work for me! If I have a -- a force, a glory, something, call it what you like -- inside me that must be satisfied, then let me satisfy it; let me make things happen, let me study things. If I could have studied stars, or clouds, or dirt, I would not have had to study men. If I had a place like this, now -- ! Gentlemen, how can I believe you'll send me back? That would be murder. I've never murdered; I've only given people the power to choose one course of action or another. Is it my fault that they always choose wrong? Well, what about it? Remember, I've been here five days (if you count the first day when I did nothing but sleep) -- I'm rested, wellfed, and much stronger than I was. Now I'll wrench myself free (much astounding Sam) and it'll be a hellfor-leather, round-the-mast, toothand-nail battle. They'll get me in the end, though, for there are two of them and only one of me and besides -- I blush to confess it, gentlemen, it's most unbefitting an adventurer -- I cannot swim. So you will send me back? You've decided -- like my friends -- that I'm a devil? Not just a little cleverer than most, a little more clear-sighted than most, eh? A little more inclined to experiment with things? It's your decision. Chin up, stiff upper lip, we who are about to die -- I hope your translator is findwould so love to stay. But perhaps you believe that I'm not just cleverer than the people five thousand years ago, but a little more so than you, eh? Even here. Even now. A little closer to the power and the glory? That would be sad. Better to send me back. With that little button. Oh yes, I watched you work it and fuss over it when I first came here; in fact, you took such care of it. I'd bet it's the only one you have. It would be a shame if some barbarian fool from the past gave its insides a general, quiet bashing when he first got here, when you left him alone because you thought he was so exhausted he could do nothing but sleep. He knew, you see, that it had brought him here, and he was damned if it was going to send him back. Don't be foolish; of course I didn't let it show on the outside. ing the right equivalents. Too bad; I Open the front panel and look. You see? I always tell the truth. Now we can have a much more interesting conversation. A real conversation. Eh?  Before i tell you how I came to do what I did, I have to tell you how I affected the world from birth on. I was born the year World War I started, graduated the year Roosevelt and Hitler came to power, got married the day World War II began, had a son # days after Pearl Harbor, founded Galaxy magazine just minutes ahead of the Korean War, got divorced the year of Sputnick, remarried the year of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. In other words. I'm an historical Typhoid Mary and should be paid a dollar by every man, woman and child on Earth -- a lousy buck apiece -- not to make any major moves any more. While I'm waiting for that, let me tell you some lesser details of how I came to do what I did. I discovered science-fiction when I was # -- a magazine with monstrous ants and a spastic man looking up at a girl in a bronze bra and filmy skirt being tenderly held in the mandibles of one of the bugs. It was beautiful, so beautiful that I decided right then to become an sf writer. As for not deciding to become an sf artist, how could a #year-old-kid -- or anyone else, for that matter -- compete with the peerless Frank R. Paul? So I studied English and the sciences as hard as I could and wrote stories for the school magazines. After that, I wrote and wrote -- thousands and thousands of words that -- well. I'd walk to the post office to mail my stories and come back to find a rejection slip waiting for me at home. I never could figure out how the editors did that. Then I started bringing manuscripts to the editors instead of mailing them. I got them back even faster that way. But I persevered -- and one day I brought a story to a wonderful old man named T. O'Connor Sloane. He got dangerously excited about it for a man of # -- but he said it was much t.oo good for Amazing Stories. So he took it and me upstairs to the editor of the company's prestige magazine, the Delineator , and demanded that it be read. I got it back when I returned home. I think it arrived before I did. Next month, the Delineator folded. I immediately saw the connection but I wanted to sell that story and brought it back to Dr. Sloane. He maintained that it was too good for his magazine and refused to buy it. So I never sold that story because Amazing was the only sf magazine at that time, and I lost the story somehow. I can't tell you if it was all that good, but maybe you can judge by what I remember of it. In it, I manfully exposed the miscreants who were exploiting the slave labor in the mines of Venus, and told of the revolt that freed the poor Earthlings. Now if that story was too good for Amazing, maybe it accounted for the dreadful stories Dr. Sloane bought. But can you imagine what the rejects were like? Well, I was # then and not too easily discouraged. I went on writing. My parents were vociferously against it. How, they wanted to know, could anyone make a living putting black marks on white paper? So I wrote and worked at any job I could find, and there weren't many, because this was at the bottom of the Great Depression. I remember being a busboy in a fancy place called Roadside Rest. I was interviewed by three Rumanian brothers, who owned it, and, though I didn't know it, I was hired because there was nobody else around. So I worked from # in the morning until # the next morning -- and then had to walk home because the buses stopped running at midnight. It was a #-mile walk and I was pooped. But I was there at # the next morning, ready to put in another #-hour day. Did I mention that I worked for the waiters, seven of them, and each gave me a quarter, or a grand total of #? But the brothers were there already and I was told to come into the office, where they unanimously told me I couldn't work there any more. But why, I asked. Because, they said, you are a writer, an artist, and we just couldn't stand the thought of a writer being a busboy. But you're not paying me, I argued, the waiters are -- and besides. I've never sold a story, so how can I be called a writer? They were Rumanianly adamant, though I begged, pleaded, cajoled. I went home in despair -- and found a letter from someone named Desmond Hall awaiting me. It was on Street  Smith stationery -- and it said that he was happy to inform me that my latest story had been accepted for Astounding Stories  A check would be arriving soon! I showed my parents the letter. They were unconvinced. After all, how much could a story bring? I didn't know. The letter didn't say, only that Mr. Hall was cutting # words from it. I told my parents that brought the wordage to # -- and if they paid a cent a word, it would be #, or # for half a cent. They scoffed. But the check arrived in a week or so -- and it was for an astounding #! I suddenly became a big man in my family's eyes, a #-year old writer! I went to meet Mr. Hall, who immediately put me on a first-name basis, and said he wanted to buy more material from me. So I moved from Far Rockaway, a seashore resort that was mobbed in the summer and abandoned in winter, a dismal place to live, to Greenwich Village, just ten minutes' walk from Street  Smith. It was wonderful. I sold half a dozen stories to Des in pretty short order. He told me it was impossible to make a living writing science fiction and urged me to diversify. But first, I didn't know how, and second, it was sf I wanted to write. Meanwhile, my first story was published and appeared on the stands. More important than my being immortal for a month was that Hitler and Mussolini promptly launched an attack on the Rhineland and Ethiopia.    Now Astounding was nominally edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, but Des Hall was the actual editor. And one day Des was promoted to editor of Mademoiselle', he had won first prize for the name, though Tremaine became its first editor. Tremaine had done such a lousy job that Street  Smith put out a second Volume I, Number I. So Tremaine had been demoted and found read for Astounding over a weekend. Instead of going through the manuscripts, however, he hurried to the Tombs to get an astrological reading from an imprisoned fortune teller named Evangeline Adams, the leading astrologist of the day. He had to wait while Wall Street men crowded into her cell. I don't know what she told him, but -- here it gets a little complicated. I was writing under the name of Clyde Crane Campbell. The other Campbell, Jown W. Jr., wasn't well enough known at the time to make it seem a less likely name for me. The Reason? Nazism's antiSemitism had spread all through the world and it permeated Street  Smith, so I knew better than to write under my own name. When Des was promoted, he recommended me as his successor on Astounding. I was turned down because of my religion. If you think I was angry, you should have seen and heard Des! And I never sold a word to Tremaine. That's not entirely Tremaine's fault. I had run out of good sf ideas and he didn't know and cared even less how to get them out of me, as Hall had. So I became book reviewer for Mile, at a fat # a month -- and couldn't get review books from the publishers -- they told me to come back when Mademoiselle was established! I consequently had to rewrite reviews from the New York Times and Herald-Tribune , which turned out to be a bad notion and my column was dropped. I wrote one story for Mile., under the name of Julian Graey (I had tried Grey, then Gray, and finally combined them and sold one single story). It was a cockeyed comedy in the vein of the wild humor of the Thirties. And that was that. I returned home when I had no choice. I sold shoes Saturdays for # a day and would have worked more had there been enough business to warrant it. Come summer, I became a professional drowner. The city was threatening to lay off lifeguards on stretches of beach that were officially safe -- where nobody drowned or had to be rescued. So I would swim out beyond the ropes and thrash around until the guard on the beach saved me. I had to be carried to the nearest first-aid station and revived. Thinking up a new name and address for each drowning took some doing, but it AU orders will be shipped postage free within # hours of receipt. Diaiiellci PubUcAUun. OJanptu:i u the tnaemrk of L. Hon llubbird In llobhgrO. All righu r nerved. S.lentology U an ipcd rellcloui phUneophe. The Chureh of Sclenlolotr of California a non-prolil urganiralion. Scientology'' and Dlanrtict ' are rrgiatered rtameg. If unovaUablf from ffir abotff orldreaa tend fo The Church of .Seienrofofy of Californio. PuSlreofiorJi UrgarilcoUon Dept G-#. #?# We.t Temple SI... Lee Antrtn. Californio #H. I by L. Ron Hubbard I Read about the evolution of Dlanetics, man's most advanced study of the mind. Find out how easily and effect I ively Dianetics can improve your con fidence in yourself and your ability to accomplish your goals in life. Dia O Just Buy, Read and Try Dianetics; gThe Evolution of a Science. (Hand somely bound, hard cover edition -- Q # pages). S The Church of Scientology of Cali  fomia Dept. G#, # West #th St. Q Los Angeles, California #.  Name M Address Dianetics The Evolution of a Science .Ron Hubbard  Increase Your Abilities I and Self Confidence!  Order "Dianetics ; The I Evolution of a Science" wasn't that that ended my career. The last guard had dived to rescue me -- and laid his head open on the catamaran and I had to pull him in. I couldn't go from hero to victim again, and that was the end of my easy # per drowning. Three years passed, years of hunting for work, finding very little, and trying to write over my family's renewed objections. I can't blame them. It was terribly discouraging.    And then came John W Campbell, Jr., new editor of Astounding. I got a splendid letter from him about a story I had dispiritedly written and submitted. It was a lackluster creation about a man and dog getting their identities switched, and their attempts to get the villain, a surgeon, to switch them back again. The real problem, wrote Campbell, was communication -- how could the man in the dog's body convey his predicament to someone who could help him? I spent two months on the story -- but Campbell bought it, retitled it "A Matter of Form" and ran it as his first Nova story. It was disastrous financially, but it went over so well that I followed with the same reporter-detective hero in "Problem in Murder," the search for the mass murderer who left legs and arms in garbage cans every day but Sunday; the limbs turned out to have never been alive -- yet, to satisfy the bullying police commissioner and the panicked public, a murderer had to be found. The hero took the last experiment, an almost but not quite complete body from the vat, dressed it, took it through the cordon in a hearse, wrote a suicide note for the corpse that had never lived, shot it, and the resulting scoop built up the commissioner for a shoo-in as governor. Funny how awful an sf story sounds when condensed. I remember being backed into describing one at a party: "There are these giant brains in glassite domes in the Arctic, and they belong to aliens who know the entire history of the Earth because they're immortal -- " The process was so embarrassing that I never did write that story. I was shuffling through the rain one day toward Street  Smith without an idea in my head except a subvocal song about walking... No, wait a minute. I have to tell you how come I started writing under my own name. After my turndown for Des Hall's Job, along came a man named Stanley G. Weinbaum, with the most marvelously invented yarns about the most lovable Martians and things that readers loved so much that SS had to drop its anti-Semitism. John Campbell also put me on a firstname basis and told me to use my name, which I very thankfully did. So, as I was saying, I was shuffling through the rain and there was this song I was subvocalizing about walking between the raindrops... hey, how about that for a story! I had it half worked out by the time I reached John's office -- only, after I hit him with it, he vetoed inverted ionization as the reason water wouldn't touch my hero. He wanted a pure fantasy with maybe a water gnome to put a curse on the protagonist. Now why would he want a fantasy when he's putting out an sf magazine? Well, that was his business, not mine. All right, a supernatural curse. But why? And how is it gotten rid of? I wrote it, finally, as "Trouble With Water" and found myself famous. But why did Campbell want fantasy? Because he needed stories for his new magazine, Unkrwvm, and I was in the first issue! You can't imagine the impact Unknown had on writers. I, for one, dropped science fiction and joyfully turned out fantasies -- nothing but fantasies -- for the next two years. They included "Warm, Dark Places," "Day Off," and the biggest hit of all, a novel called "None But Lucifer." Well, I finally wrote a short sf story in between fantasies and tried it out on John. He wanted fantasies from me. So I gave it to Mort der. It was about the first man to land on Mars, such a complete heel and opportunist, wanting to turn his fame into money, that the equivaagain, to get rid of him. Mort, never one to leave well enough alone, wanted it turned into a tearjerker, so I wrote a fourhandkerchief story called, simply enough, "Hero." It was a stinker, a real bummer, but it sold -- and it got Mort to sell me to the publisher of My first editorial job! How about that? I'll tell you how about that. It paid # a week, which wasn't quite enough to support a wife, and # days after Pearl Harbor, a child, and it was so mechanical that two years of it destroyed the pleasure of editing. I had come to it with the most exalted feeling of exaltation, and left it with style and pride completely gone. I went next to setting up, as managing editor, a pair of true detective magazines, then resigned to these and other such magazines. It got so I couldn't look another rape in the face. So I turned to comic books, writing as many as four And so did radio. I was on my way to the top -- and I got drafted. I spent a couple of years in the Pacific as a combat engineer, and when I got out, the markets were gone.    It was #, and I still had the same wife and son, and I couldn't get back to writing. So I had to find something else. It turned out to be exporting rebuilt bookbinding machinery. I knew as little about them as I had engineering, which was zero, except for pushing and pulling and hauling pieces of bridges together, and road grading -- from the position of D-handle operator. I made a lot of money in the bookbinding business before it dried up. By that time, I was ready to go back to writing. But what? Unknown had folded, and I didn't want to go back to sf for the very reason Des Hall had spelled out -- it was too much work for too little dough. So I turned again to the comic books and soon worked my way up to the highest-paid writer in the field -- and collapsed. I did, not the field. I was doing my best to recover when a girl who had worked for me called me in to present a publishing program to a French-Italian publishing firm, named, in translation. World Editions. It seems they had a big slick magazine in France and Italy that copies a week. A cross between beautifully executed comics and confession stories, less beautifully executed, it was dubbed Fascination and set loose on the American public with a huge advertising program. There were five issues -- the last sold # of its print order of several hundred thousand, or was it a million? I forget; Anyhow, they were too stubborn to get out of the American market with such a beating, and so I was asked to submit a publishing program. I surveyed the entire magazine market. It was early #, and everywhere I looked, magazines were in deep trouble. As soon as paper rationing had ended in #, everyone who could read -- or could hire someone to read -- was putting out everything from comics to fashion magazines. The one exception was science fiction. On the basis of experience, I should have submitted anything but an sf magazine, a fantasy magazine projected for later, once the sf one was established, and a series of paperback sf novels. But I saw that Astounding was going off into one cult after another -- John Campbell was rushing up dead ends, the latest being Dianetics, in his search for a meaningful universe -- and Fantasy  Science Fiction was brand new, and flying in the face of the single immutable law of those fields: that readers don't like fantasy in their sf, or sf in their fantasy. A very highgrade sf magazine could fit right between them. And thus I offered my publishing program to the Italian representative of World Editions, a great guy named Lombi. He offered it to the publisher who lived on the Riviera, who must have flipped a coin, because neither he nor Lombi knew anything at all about sf or fantasy, and it came up yes. I gave them a choice between Galaxy and If. I liked both titles, but I left the decision to Lombi and his boss on the Riviera. They, in turn, didn't know what a "galaxy" was, and If seemed to them too short, and they left the choice to me. So I and our art director, Washington Irving van der Poel (Van for short), talked over possible cover layouts -- and my present wife's (Nicky's) first husband, a great calligrapher, designed the lettering. Harry Harrison lent us his apartment to display the many variations of both Galaxy and If, which a large number of people, including writers, artists, and readers, were asked to vote on. Curiously, almost all wrote on their secret ballots that they personally liked Galaxy and an inverted-L layout, but each thought nobody else would. That was good enough for us -- Galaxy it was and the inverted-L layout won. So did Crome-Kote, the closest printing paper to photographic glossies, which I had asked for pretty urgently for our cover stock. Despite its high cost and difficulty of handling, I got what I asked for. The fact is that I got every single thing I wanted, from word rates to rights. The going rate was a top of two cents a word -- I got the price up to three cents minimum, four cents or more for steady contributors, plus # for short-shorts. And we bought first-serial rights onlySuddenly, writers and artists offered us everything they were turning out, and many of the greats came out of retirement to join us. It was a wonderful time to be alive and editing Galaxy. And in the unbelievable space of five issues. Galaxy was in the black!    Just in case you think I'm paranoid about being an historical Typhoid Mary, consider this -- only months after Galaxy was born, the Korean War started. And paper became impossible to buy at any price. Our printer had set us up with a mill -- or so we thought. It turned out he had the contract, not us, and we were forced to look elsewhere. I went through the yellow pages and called every printer I found, asking if we could hook up with thetn. The only one who said yes was a printing broker named Robert M. Guinn, who had followed Galaxy's astonishing rise toward first place with considerable awe. The paper was more like a blotter than newsprint, but we missed only one issue in switching printers. And we cable to be great friends with Bob Guinn, of which more later. Now back to Lombi. He was in the U.S. on a visitor's visa, not allowed to work here or be paid by Galaxy. One day he was called down to Washington by the Immigration Department and shown all of a letter but the signature -- which stated that he was a dirty Italian communistic fascist who ought to be sent back where he came from. Affidavits and appeals failed. He was sent back to Italy, his visa withdrawn. I still don't know who sent that letter, but it's no coincidence that as soon as Lombi was out of the country, internal warfare developed between the American, French and Italian offices of World Editions. We had an ex-music publisher as president of the American office, who had been hired just as he was about to lock his door and declare bankruptcy, and a circulation director. I had told Lombi at the outset to call in all unsold copies of Galaxy's first year -- and the president and the circulation manager got hold of them and stuffed their garages with these soon-to-be-priceless copies of the magazine. Then strange things happened to our sales. Readers wrote in that they couldn't find us on any newsstand anywhere. The upshot was that the Riviera guy sent the head of the French office to New York to find out what went wrong. To make a short story of all this, the Frenchman cabled back to the Riviera that the magazine was a dud and should immediately be sold -- to the American president and the circulation director, and their price was #. I got in touch hurriedly with Lombi and told him of this. The time in Rome was #:# a.m., but Lombi got up and raced to the Riviera. The publisher instantly sent a cable stopping negotiations and followed up with another visit by Lombi to take care of the matter. I was told by the two American scoundrels that I was part of the deal, but I wasn't having any. Lombi arrived by plane and we began looking for a better buyer. A number of outfits here were interested, but, as I said, we were becoming great friends with the printing broker. Bob Guinn, and I got him to make a bid. I don't know how much, but Lombi made the sale with the Riviera man's blessing -- and no sooner had Guinn bought it than the inside job became clear to Lombi. The distribution pattern had been deliberately loused up -- by shipping Galaxy all over the South, where there was practically nobody interested in sf, and into hamlets all over the North and West. Lombi called his boss and told him of this sabotage, and the boss told Lombi fo buy back the magazine from Guinn. Guinn gave him his price. Lombi was aghast -- but this is four times as much as you paid! Guinn grinned and told him he, Guinn, knew what he was buying, whereas World Editions hadn't known what they were selling. Lombi went home, but not in dishonor. I hated to see him go. We'd had a fine relationship. But Bob Guinn was equally good to work for. He left policy decisions and rates up to me, and involved me in distribution and advertising problems. I mention advertising because once World Editions had, over my protests, run a back cover ad for a book called "Confessions of a French Chambermaid" and we'd lost # readers for the three months of the contract. Galaxy went to the top of the field after that, never to lose ground. And then came Beyond Fantasy Fiction. It was beautiful -- for ten wonderful issues. By then we had learned that there just wasn't a big enough audience to support a fantasy magazine, so it died just as Unknown had, a decade before, of financial malnutrition. If Beyond had come first, I think it would have had the same effect and same misty memories as Unknown. After we had vacated the title If in #, Jim Quinn put it out, but couldn't keep it going. And so I got both titles to edit. This was more than an extra job for me -- it enabled me to buy stories that weren't Galaxy standard and thus keep writers happy, as well as giving me the chance I'd never before had of bringing new ones up to Galaxy. As for the Galaxy sf novel reprints -- they weren't handled right as packages, being more like numbered magazines than paperbacks. I got that go-ahead just as the paperback market broke, but it was too late. All this was from # to #, eleven memorable years. What happened to me then? I had been in a disastrous car crash that finally wore me down to # pounds and eventually into the hospital with a poor chance of my ever being able to walk again. I was there for a long time, till my weight was back to normal and the crippling cured. So, if you remember, I remarried -- and the big buildup came to South Vietnam. Then I bought my very first house -- and the Six Day War happened.    You know, things like that sober a guy. It's only part of the reason I would never go back to editing magazines again. The other part is that you have to be # years younger than I am now, with enough enthusiasm to get excited over a fresh idea, a fine bit of characterization, a new view of something old -- and the vigor to push and pull until you and a writer and a story all click. Jim Baen has all that. Galaxy is safe in his hands, and solidly established enough, and fresh and refreshing enough, to endure at least another quarter of a century, whoever runs it. cruzeiros for the memories I have of the writers and readers and great stories I encountered in those eleven years I served. That took some doing. And nothing could induce me to do it again. It wouldn't be safe for the world, would it? Meanwhile, happy #th anniversary, Galaxy  And long life to you!  The one irremediable flaw is -- perfection! mock on the porch Munro could take in a goodly portion of the universe without so much as having to raise his head. Simply by opening one eye he could see down the hill to the ocean and across the waves to the horizon. From that point it was only a matter of shifting his gaze upward a degree or two to observe a broad expanse of velvet sky decorated with innumerable stars. Although he was used to seeing this seemed always to have the same impression: in a dark room he peered down at a dark cloth, when suddenly a merchant dashed a handful of blazing diamonds onto the velvet. Munro lazily opened one eye. Yes, the night fitted that description very well. And even now one star was tumbling, as it were, across the velvet sky in an exciting arc. He sat up. Was it going to land in the sea? The falling light was eclipsed by a palm. Munro rubbed his eyes. "Must've been dreaming," he declared, glancing at the luminous dial of his watch. Ten. Early yet. He yawned. Could still put in several hours work. He swung his bare feet to the matted floor. Work was what he had isolated himself on this island in the south Pacific for. He stood, stretched. Funny how even the best laid plans went astray. It was one thing to decide a tropical isle cut off from the world was the right place to work. Easy to make such a decision when you were sitting in a stuffy office in Cambridge looking out through a dirty window at snow turned yellow-gray by industrial smoke. So you make the arrangements, cut the redtape, inform the Department. Their reaction was so intense you would've thought you were a mass murderer making a successful escie. Of course, they were justified. Be a shame if they lost the first man who had been to Mars and lived to tell about it. And so a compromise was worked out. You gave them ten days -- two hundred and forty hours -- of your life. They pumped you full of bug-juice, and pumped it out again in the form of answers to their questions. The process was painless. You slept like the dead through it all and awoke, finally, feeling as though a burden had been removed. He gave them enough data to keep the entire staff busy for years. Then, with the Department's blessing, he made his journey via navy plane and ship to Boratonga. Others in the program had been here before him, men from the moon missions, and even Craig, the captain who circled Venus and later went mad and killed himself. The government owned the island and maintained it in its timeless natural form. The houses were made by the native population of bamboo and palm thatch. There was no electricity, no running water. You worked by sunlight or lamplight, and you bathed either in the sea or in the icy stream flowing from the hills. Munro looked back one last time at the ocean and the night sky, then went inside and lit the lamp on his work table. The sheet of paper in the portable typewriter nagged him to get back to work. He glanced at the paragraph he'd been writing. Had broken off in mid-sentence when Luana called him to eat. Subject was his reaction to the desolate Martian landscape. Munro drew a deep breath and tasted the fragrant tropical air. Up there on the Red Planet the only taste was mechanical. Man wasn't made for blandness. Why, even the Eskimo delighted in odor, in color, in feeling. Munro heard a rustling behind him. Without turning he said, "Luana?" A soft voice replied, "Moon rise. You come and we go swim in lagoon. You like?" Munro liked very much. He tore the page from the typewriter and tossed it in the crate serving as waste basket. Tomorrow was soon enough to deal with Martian impressions. He blew out the lamp and followed the native girl down the path through the hibiscus and jasmine. The wind in the palm sounded like rain, but the night was clear and the moon was above the horizon. The only reminder of civilization was the occasional sad baying of a dog in the village a half mile away.   Rays of sun. Stars. The moon, green and red. Munro blinked. The morning sunlight streamed through the trees and fell slanting through the window beside the mat upon which he and Luana slept. The rays, stars, and moon he fancied he saw were familiar objects -- a spider and its web, festooned with sparkling droplets of dew. Munro reached out and touched the sleeping Luana's hair -- then looked back at the window opening again. There was another spider and web in the upper left portion. The spiders were identically maed in red and green. Nothing uncommon about that. Creatures of the same species looked alike. Be strange if they didn't. Only it was the first time Munro remembered seeing two working webs in the same window. Luana rose, and they bathed in the cold stream. Afterward she prepared something to eat while Munro looked over the pages he had been working on the day before. Not much had been accomplished. He wondered if the bug-juice had dulled his memory by exposing all his factual knowledge. What he was searching after now was his human response to the Mars voyage, his feelings, his joys and fears. "The colors are muted," he read, "reminiscent of nothing so much perhaps as the beginning riff of a sax-man in a smoky nightclub." Well, that wasn't too baci. In fact, the Martian landscape was that way, to him at least. Like a sad song, like the blues, like something full and bursting was buried just below the grim surface. Luana's big yellow cat brushed against Munro's bare leg. He absently spoke to the friendly creature, then bent and stroked its blunt head. And when he looked up from the page he noticed another cat -- big and yellow, marked identically -- resting atop the reference books stacked on a mat in the corner. One cat was almost one too many. "Luana!" he called. "Come here." "Yes?" She came in carrying a platter of colorful fruits. "The cat, Ilo, you didn't say he had a brother." She glanced at the cat in the corner. "I did not know." She smiled. "But Ilo is one big fellow who love all over Boratonga. He has many sons." "Just like him?" Munro wondered. "But never mind. Shoo that fellow out. One cat is plenty." "Okay, then we eat, and then we go beach side? Nice morning." "No, you go beach side. Me, I've got to work." "Always work, work, work." She took a red flower from atop the fruit and placed it behind her ear. Then took another, a yellow hibiscus, and stuck it in the front of Munro's shirt. "Now you pretty, me pretty, fruit pretty, everything pretty -- cat gone. We eat, okay?"    They ate. And the morning was so fresh and lovely that Munro decided surely an hour more or less wouldn't matter. So they went to the beach. As they came out of the house and passed the window, he noticed that one of the spiders was missing. Web and all. A bird no doubt had swooped down and had his breakfast. What was one spider in the scheme of things, anyhow? The clear blue water took his mind off of life and death. For a Donald A. WoMheim, Publisher Marion Zimmer Bradley is the key book of the Darkover epic. A packed # pages, piot within plot, science interlocked with mentalism, human entwined with Darkovan, it is Bradley's greatesti (UW#B#-#) Robert Chilson brings this new writer back with a surprising novel; a galaxy in which a few men of extraordinary mutant powers dominate, and what happens when one came among them who would not obey their rules. (UYI # #) Alan Burt Akers is the ninth adventure of Dray Prescot on the wonsteadily win new readers. With cover and interior illustrations by JackGaughan. (UY#B# #) Prescot's adventures in the Inner Sea. If you haven't read it, don't out of print, back in December.) (UY#I #) Plus Gordon R. Dickson's novel which was called "one of the hundred best of the year" by The New York Times. (UYI # #) Send # in stamps for our new catalog and order forms to; #th FI. #I Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. # time he and Luana drifted on the waves and dove down to the bottom to bring up colorful shells. Then they swam through clouds of bright fish to the shore, shook the water from their skin, found their garments, and started back to the house. Tomi, the ancient gray dog that prowled the beach for dead fish, trailed them, and behind him several feet, moving like his thin shadow, was a second Tomi. Luana noticed the similarity. "There are two of Tomi, yes?" Munroe examined the two animals. They were indeed identical. Munro held out his hand and made a friendly kissing sound with his lips. Tomi waddled forward. The second dog moved too. Munro stopped, found a small coconut, and flung it at Tomi's twin. It struck him on the head, but the dog did not move. Tomi barked and the other dog backed off into the jungle. "This island have many dogs," said Luana. "Tomi old like Ilo." She giggled. Munro smiled but he did not laugh. When he returned to the hut he checked the window very carefully and was surprised to discover no trace at all of spider web in the comer where the second spider had been. He pondered this fact. Luana left him and went into the village to buy coffee and sugar at the small store. Munro perched on the upturned crate he used as a chair when he typed and tried to focus his thoughts on the Martian landscape. "From the sky above," he began, "there is a promise you can almost taste, a hint of things strawberry, cool, delicious. But when you step out into that faint atmosphere, your head spins and you fear there is something wrong with your breathing equipment. But no, it functions. The fault is within yourself. It is found -- ." His fingers hesitated, stopped on the cool keys. Found where? Munro yanked the sheet from the machine and crumpled it in a ball... He strode to the window. The sun was almost overhead. Luana was coming back. "That was a quick trip," he muttered. He watched her lilting gait, the way the sunlight shone in her jet hair. Her arms were empty. Strange? Where were the packages? The store wasn't closed, never was. If owner Adams weren't in, you took what you needed and settled up later. She saw him. He smiled. She came several paces nearer, then quickly turned off into the jungle and was gone. "Now what?" Munro wondered. Some sort of game? She was childlike, but he couldn't stop every five minutes and play! Then he felt her presence behind iK -- i Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher ; Fritz has compiled a new collection  in all directions including some I new tales and much that his most I ardent admirers will find special! ; (UY# #) ! is his space novel of the year -- the . exploration of a planet of Sigma Draconis whose vanished civilization carries a life-and-death meaning for Earthly humanity. Chris Foss did a marvelous cover! (UY# #) For E. C. Tubb's Dumarest fans: space adventure as Earl Dumarest reaches the outskirts of our Terrestrial constellations... (UY# #) John Jakes hilarious takeoff on Zero Mostel!) is back with a wow of a cover by Michael Whelan. (UY# #) Keeping John Brunner in print is not easy for this Hugo-winner has a following that grows steadily. Frees cover of the month! (UY# #) ; Don't forget to send for our new I I ; catalog! ! ; him. Her hands touched him. "Me come back quick," she whispered. "You glad?" They sank to the mat. Yes, he was glad. But he was also practical. The coffee, the sugar? She didn't answer...    Later, as the afternoon shadows filtered through the hut, Luana rose and darted down the path. Munro had just settled himself before the typewriter when she reappeared carrying several packages. She was singing an island song. Her happy voice called him out to meet her. "Adams, him send you this," she said, giving him a cigar. "He say you smoke and be happy. No work too much. Be pretty, be happy! We go swim, yes?" Munro took the packages and followed her to the porch. What the devil, the day was shot anyhow! "Yes, we go swim," he replied.    The lamp flickered as he moved the chimney and lit the cigar from the naked flame. Blue smoke diffused the pale yellow light and a trapped bug flew to his death when the glass dropped once again into place. Munro blew a ring of smoke. Luana clapped at his skill. He smiled and looked up at the sky. Same as the night before, and the night before that. Stars, planets, space. Soon the moon would crawl above the horizon. Mars was out there, too, glistening, red. Ilo came in from the jungle and leaped into Luana's lap. She stroked his tawny fur. He curled up and purred himself to sleep. Tomi the dog came out of the shadows and found a place for the night by the edge of the proch. All was peaceful, quiet, on this tiny island world. And yet -- . Munro puffed his cigar till the coal glowed like an angry eye and a layer of blue floated between him and the stars. The loose flesh on the back of his neck tingled. His scalp seemed to draw up slightly. He had a feeling -- there was no other way to explain -- that something beyond the lamplight in the shadows of the jungle was observing him. He held the lamp above his head and searched the increased circle of light. A pair of tropical birds roosting on a nearby branch blinked their huge eyes -- at least Munro was certain one of the pair blinked. The other turned away from the light.    He slept restlessly. Towards dawn Luana woke and whispered that today she must visit her mother's hut which stood a mile on the other side of the village. Munro grunted and tried sleep again. He thought of his journey across space to Mars, of the days spent there in the sterile habitat, of the Martian miles he had explored, setting his foot where no earthling had trod, of the poetic spectacle of those two moons rising and setting in the thin atmosphere. For a time he napped. Then he woke and remained awake. His work waited on the table by the typewriter. Luana was gone and would not return before afternoon. He could get a lot done. Yes, but first. She had left a pot of coffee on the tiny stove. There was a tray of fresh fruit. Munro had a light breakfast and then went down to the sea for his morning dip. Tomi was there looking for his breakfast. His companion of the day before was nowhere to be seen. Munro gave the old dog an affectionate pat and plunged into the cool water. Clouds of red and yellow fish rose round about him and pecked gently at his skin. He swam, he lazed, and then he came out, flung the water from his body best he could, slipped on his shorts, and went back to the hut, with every good intention of at last getting down to some real work. Yes, he would wrap this thing up. After all, what was so complicated about what he had to say? So he was the only human -- thus far -- to visit another planet and survive. That in itself was no reason to suppose his emotional reactions would be any different from another person's. Every human had pretty much the same basic response mechanism; the real difference was probably of degree. Poets looked for one sort of thing, engineers another. Munro laughed. "And everyone seems to find what he looks for!" This bit of native wisdom almost caused him to laugh again. But at that moment he heard a sound. It came from the direction of his hut. He stopped, cupped his hand behind his ear to be sure. Some of the birds were cunning mimics. No, this sound was authentic. It was the steady click-click of a typewriter. Luana couldn't type; besides, she was gone. Someone from the Department must've come during the night. Yes, and they were working up one report or another, using his machine. That meant they'd probably seen the pages he'd written. "Damn!" cried Munro. That was like reading another's mail! Well, he'd put a quick stop to it! He ran up the path to the porch, then slowed and edged through the door. A man sat on the upturned crate before the typewriter. His fingers flew over the keys, but there was no paper in the machine. "Hi," he said. There was something about the fellow, about the slope of his shoulders, the color of his hair. He stopped typing and turned round. There was a wry smile on his tanned face. Munro's heart raced. The man was Munro ! "I've been waiting. Don't be alarmed." "Who are you?" Munro finally managed to ask. "Why, you, of course," came the laughing response. "No, not really. Sit down. You look as though you might faint." Munro sat on the mat flooring. He blinked and passed his hands before his eyes, but when he looked again the stranger was still there. "Sorry to have frightened you," his doppleganger continued. "You are in no danger." Munro forced himself to be objective, rational. Apparently, the shape before him did exist. Very well, get to the bottom of the mystery. He said, "Unless I'm hallucinating, this is real. You are my twin. You -- ." Twin? What about the spiders, cats, dogs, -- even Luana... ? "I cannot know your thoughts directly," said the stranger. "However, I can read them in your expression." "You can assume any shape?" "Yes. I was the other spider, the other Ilo and Tomi." He grinned. "Luana, also." Munro felt color rise in his face. "Don't be embarrassed," said the stranger. "Your actions were natural, quite in keeping with your species." "Yes, but there is such a thing as privacy!" "Not necessarily. Didn't you examine everything that came your way on Mars?" "Yes, but that was scientific. Myl mission was to -- ." Munro stopped in mid-sentence. Was this protean form telling him he too was on a scientiflc mission? "There is a parallel to our situations. I too travel and observe, though for no ultimate purpose, at least none of which I am aware. Where I go I take on the form of the various living things I encounter. Their strengths are mine, and their limitations." "That's why you started here as a spider?" "Yes, but actually I commenced much smaller. As I observed I discovered varying levels of intelligence. In order to communicate with you I had to become you." He gestured to the reference books in the comer. "I scanned those also." "How?" asked Munro. "I was gone less than an hour." "The answer is in one of those volumes. Time is relative. A moment for you may be an eon for me." "Yes, but how do you change shapes?" The stranger frowned. "Now we In war, life is cheap but betrayal can be very expensive! his men knew but they didn't say a thing," blurted the young captain as he looked past Secretary Tromp, his gaze compelled toward the milky noonday sky. It was not the sky of Frieland and that bothered Captain Stilchey almost as much as his near-death in the ambush an hour before insane! I hey all are." "Others have said so," the councillor stated with the heavy ambiguity of an oracle replying to an ill-phrased question. Tromp's height was short of two meters by less than a hand's breadth, and he was broad in proportion. That size and the generally dull look on his face caused some visitors looking for Frieland's highest civil servant to believe they had surprised a retired come to the crux of our problem. There are facts which I cannot explain to you because you cannot understand. You see, your species hasn't yet reached a level to comprehend. Our conversation is, therefore, limited. But to give you a hint -- your geneticists are working with a duplicating process they call cloning. Cloning is analogous to the method I use." "All right," said Munro, choking down an urge to yell, perhs even to leap up and punch this whateverit-was in the nose to see if it were real. "Can you tell me where you're from, what you are?" "My origin is the same as yours, the universe. As with you, the matter which is me has always been. But my -- home -- is far away, and my existence-span is quite beyond your grasp. I do not know if it is possible for me to experience an ultimate end, or 'death,' to use your vocabulary. "Who am I? Again, the great differences between our states makes an answer almost impossible. In one of your books a theory of evolution is set forth. Working within that framework, I am the end result." Munro came to his feet. "The end result? You? A shapeless something? Is this -- " he waved his arms about, pointed out the window at this bound to come to your state?" "Yes. But why be so upset? Being, as you say, Shape-ej#, I have all shapes. You have been across a narrow stream to a nearby planet. I have spanned oceans, galaxies." "Yes, but why? Tell me why?" The stranger smiled and shook his head. "The answer to that question exists beyond the limits of my understanding, if it exists." "But why are you here, speaking to me?" Munro demanded. "Why not?" Suddenly Munro's frustration overwhelmed him. He leaped up and rushed the stranger, who sidestepped him and jumped out the window. "That's rather foolish," he said. "We'll see about that when I catch you!" snarled Munro, Junping through the same window. The stranger ran backwards down the path, laughing. Munro, more enraged than ever, pursued, and as he came near and reached out to grab him, a passing red and green butterfly suddenly became two butterflies, and Munro's fingers captured empty air. The two insects flew off in different directions. Which was which? He watched them vanish into the jungle, then, after a while, turned and walked back to the hut. There was nothing left for him to do except try again to get back to work -- and he would do just that, after a cup of coffee and a quick swim. Procrastination was part of the human condition. He found himself smiling. It was rather nice not to be perfect, yet.  policeman of some sort sitting at the desk of the Secretary to the Council of State. Tromp did not always disabuse them. Now his great left hand expanded over the grizzled fringe of hair remaining at the base of his skull. "Tell me about the ambush," he directed. "He didn't make any trouble about coming to you here at the port," Stilchey said, for a moment watching his fingers writhe together rather than look at his superior . He glanced up. "Have you met Hammer?" "No, I kept in the background iment were drafted. I've seen his picture, of course." "Not the same," the captain replied, beginning to talk very quickly. "He's not big but he, he moves, he's alive and it's like every time he speaks he's training a gun on you, waiting for you to slip. But he came along, no trouble -- only he said we'd go with a platoon of combat cars instead of flying back, he wanted to check road security between Southport and the firebase where we were. I said sure, a couple hours wasn't crucial..." Tromp nodded. "Well done," he said. "Hammer's cooperation is very important if this... business is to be concluded smoothly. And," -- here the councillor's face hardened without any noticeable shift of muscles -- "the last thing we wanted was for the good colonel to become concerned while he was still with his troops. He is not a stupid man." Gratification played about the edges of Stilchey's mouth, but the conversation had cycled the captain's mind back closer to the blast of cyan fire. His stomach began to spin. "There were about fifteen vehicles in the patrol, all but the second one open combat cars. That was a command car, same chassis and ground-effect curtain, but enclosed, you see? Better commo gear and an air-conditioned passenger compartment. I started toward it but Hammer said, no, I was to get in the next one with him and Joachim." Stilchey coughed, halted. "That Joachim's here with him now; he calls him his aide. The bastard's queer, he tried to make me when I flew out..." Puzzlement. "Colonel Hammer is homosexual. Captain? Or his aide, or... ?" "No, Via! Him, not the -- I don't know. Via, maybe him too. The bastard scares me, he really does." To statesmen patience is a tool; it is a palpable thing that can grind necessary information out of a young man whose aristocratic lineage and sparkling uniform have suddenly ceased to armor him against the universe. The ambush. Captain." Tromp pressed stolidly. With a visible effort, Stilchey regained the thread of his narrative. "Joachim drove. Hammer and I were in the back along with a noncom from Curwin -- Worzer, his name was. He and Joachim threw dice for who had to drive. The road was supposed to be clear but Hammer made me put on body armor. I thought it was cop, you know -- make the staffer get hot and dusty. "Via," he swore again, but softly this time. "I was at the leftside powergun but I wasn't paying much attention; nothing really to pay attention to. Hammer was on the radio a lot, but my helmet only had intercom so I didn't know what he was saying. The road was stabilized earth, just a gray line through hectares of those funny blue plants you see all over here, the ones with the fat leaves." "Bluebrights," the older man said dryly. "Melpomone's only export; as you would know from the briefing cubes you were issued in transit, I should think." "Would the Lord I'd never heard of this damned place!" Stilchey blazed back. His family controlled Karob Trading; no civil servant -- not even Tromp, the Gray Eminenee behind the Congress of the Republic -- could cow him. But he was a soldier, too, and after a moment he continued, "Bluebrights in rows, waist high and ugly, and beyond that nothing but the soil blowing away as we passed. "We were half an hour out from the firebase, maybe half the way to here. The ground was dimpled with frost heaves. A little copse was in sight ahead of us, trees ten, fifteen meters high. Hammer had the forward gun, and on the intercom he said, 'Want to double the bet, Blackie?' Then they armed their guns -- I didn't know why -- and Worzer said, 'I still think they'll be in the draw two kays south, but I won't take any more of your money.' They were laughing and I thought they were going to Just... elear the guns, you know?" The captain closed his eyes. He remembered how they had stared at him, two bulging circles and the hollow of his screaming mouth below them, reflected on the polished floorplate of the combat car. "The command car blew up just as we entered the trees. There was a flash like the siin and it ate the back half of the ear, armor and all. The front flipped over and over into the trees, and the air stank with metal. Joachim laid us sideways to follow the part the mine had left, cutting in right behind when it hit a tree and stopped. The driver raised his head out of the hatch and maybe he could have got elear himself... but Hammer jumped off our deck to his and jerked him out, yanked him up in his armor as small as he is. Then they were back in our car. They were firing, everybody was firing, and we turned right, into the trees, into the guns." "There were Mel troops in the grove, then?" Tromp asked. "Must have been," Stilchey replied. He looked straight at the older man and said, very simply, "I was behind the bulkhead. Maybe if I'd known what to expect...The other driver was at my gun, they didn't need me." Stilchey swallowed once, continued, "Some shots hit on my side. They didn't come through, but they made the whole car ring. The empties kept spattering me and the car was bouncing, jumping downed trees. Everything seemed to be on fire. We cleared the grove into another field of bluebrights. Shells from the firebase were already landing in the trees; the place was targeted. And Worzer pulled off his helmet and he spat and said, 'Cold meat. Colonel, you couldn't a called it better.' Via!" "Well, it does sound like they reacted well to the ambush," Tromp admitted, puzzled because nothing Stilchey had told him explained the captain's fear and hatred of Hammer and his men. "Nice extempore response, hey?" the aide suggested with bitter irony. "Only Hammer, seeing I didn't know what Worzer meant, turned to me, and said, 'We let the Mels get word that me and Secretary Tromp would take a convoy to Southport this morning. They still had fifty or so regulars here in Region # claiming to be an infantry battalion, and it looked like a good time to flush them for good and all.' " Tromp said nothing. He spread his hands carefully on the citronyellow of his desk top and seemed to be fixedly studying the contrast. Stilchey waited for a response. At last he said, "I don't like being used for bait, Secretary. "And what if you'd decided to go out to the firebase yourself? I was all right for a stand-in, but do you think Hammer would have cared if you were there in person? He won't let anything stand in his way." "Colonel Hammer does seem to have some unconventional attitudes, ' ' Tromp agreed. A bleak smile edged his voice as he continued, "But at that, it's rather fortunate that he brought a platoon in with him. We can begin the demobilization of his vaunted Slammers with them."    The dome of the Starport Lounge capped Southport's hundred-meter hotel tower. Its vitril panels were seamless and of the same refractive index as the atmosphere. As a tactician, Hammer was fascinated with the view; it swept beyond the equipment-thronged spaceport and over the shimmering billows of bluebright, to the mountains of the Crescent almost twenty kilometers away. But tankers' blood has in it a turtle component that is more comfortable on the ground than above it, and the little officer felt claws on his intestines as he looked out. No similar discomfort seemed to be disturbing the other men in the room, all in the black and silver of the Guards of the Republic, though in name they were armor officers. "Had a bit of action today, Colonel?" said a cheerful, fit-looking major. Hammer did not remember him even though a year ago he had been Second in Command of the Guards. "Umm, a skirmish," Hammer said as he turned. The Guardsman held out to him one of the two thimble-sized crystals he carried. In the heart of each flickered an azure fire. "Why, thank you -- " the major's name was patterned in the silver highlights below his left lapel -- ' ' Mestern . ' ' "No doubt you have seen much worse with your mercenaries, eh Colonel?" a voice called mockingly from across the room. Karl August Raeder lounged in imperial state in the midst of a dozen admiring junior officers. He had been the executive officer of the Guards for the past year -- ever since Hammer took command of the foreign regiment raised to smash the scattered units of the Army of Melpomone. "Mercenaries, Karl?" Hammer repeated. A threat rasped through the surface mildness of his tone. "Yes, they cash their paychecks. There may be a few others in this room who do, hey?" "Oh... ," someone murmured in the sudden quiet, but there was no way to tell what he meant by it. Raeder did not move. The blood had drawn back to yellow his smooth tan, and where the cushions had borne his languid hands they now were dimpled cruelly. Two men in the lounge had reached officer status in the Guards without enormous family wealth behind them. Hammer was one, Raeder was the other. He strained at a breath. In build, he and Hammer were not dissimilar: the latter brown-haired and somewhat shorter, a trifle more of the hourglass in his shoulders and waist; Raeder blond and trim, slender in a rapier sort of way and quite as deadly. His uniform of natural silk and leather was in odd contrast to Hammer's khaki battledress, but there was nothing of fop or sloven in either man. "Pardon," the Guardsman said, "I would not have thought this a company in which one need explain patriotism; there are men who fight for their homelands, and then there are the dregs, the gutter-sweepings of a galaxy, who fight for the same reason they pimped and sold themselves before our government -- let me finish, please!" (though only Hammer's smile had moved) " -- misguidedly, I submit, offered them more money to do what Frieland citizens could have done better!" "My boys are better citizens than some born on Frieland who stayed there wiping their butts -- " "A soldier goes where he is ordered!" Raeder was standing. "A soldier -- " Dead silence. Hammer's sentence broke like an axed cord. He looked about the lounge at the twenty-odd men, most of them his ex-comrades and all, like Raeder, men who had thought him mad to post out of the Guards for the sake of a combat command. Hammer laughed. He inverted the stim cone on the inside of his wrist and said approvingly, "Quite a view from up here. If it weren't such a good target, you could make it your operations center." As if in the midst of a normal conversation, he faced back toward the exterior and added, "By the way, what sort of operations are you expecting? I would have said the fighting here was pretty well over, and I'd be surprised at the government sending the Guards in for garrison duty." The whispering that had begun when Hammer turned was stilled again. It was Raeder who cleared his throat and said in a tone between triumph and embarrassment, "Col Rijsdal may know. He... he has remained in his quarters since we landed." Rijsdal had not had a sober day in the past three years since he had acceded to an enormous estate on Frieland. "No doubt we are to provide proper, ah, background for such official pronouncements as the Secretary will make to the populace." Hammer nodded absently as if he believed the black and silver of a parade regiment would overawe the Mels more effectively than could his own scarred killers, the men who had rammed Frieland suzerainty down Mel throats after twelve regiments of regulars had tried and failed. But the Guards were impressively equipped... and all their gear had been landed. Five hundred worlds had imported bluebright leaves, with most of the tonnage moving through Southport. The handful of Frisian vessels scattered on the field looked lost, but traffic would pick up now that danger was over. For the moment, hundreds of Guard vehicles gave it a specious life. In the broad wedge of his vision Hammer could see two rocket batteries positioned as neatly as chess pieces on the huge playing surface. The center of each cluster was an ammunition hauler, low and broad-chassied. Within its thin armor sheetings were the racks of # mm shells; everything from armor-piercing rounds with a second stage to accelerate them before impact, to antipersonnel cases loaded with hundreds of separate bomblets. The haulers rested on the field; no attempt had been made to dig them in. The six howitzers of each battery were sited about their munitions in a regular hexagon, each joined to the hauler by the narrow strip of a conveyor. In action the hogs could kick out shells at five-second intervals, so the basic load of twenty rounds carried by the howitzer itself needed instant replenishment from the hauler's store. Their stubby gun-tubes gave them guidance and an initial boost, but most of the acceleration came beyond the muzzle. They looked grim and effective; still, it nagged Hammer to see that nobody had bothered to defilade them. "A pretty sight," said Mestern. Conversation in the lounge was back to a normal level. Hammer squeezed the last of his stim cone into the veins of his wrist and let the cool shudder pass through him before saying, "The Republic buys the best, and that's the only way to go when a battle's hanging on it. Not that you don't need good crews to man the gear." Mestern pointed beyond the howitzers toward a wide-spaced ring of gun trucks. "Latest thing in arty defense," he said. "Each of those cars mounts an eight-barrel powergun, only # mm but they're highintensity. They've got curst near the range of a tank's # -- thirty, forty kilometers if you've that long a sight line. With our radar hook-up and the satellite, we can just about detonate a shell as soon as it comes over the horizon." "Nice theory," Hammer agreed. "I doubt you can swing the rig fast enough to catch the first salvo, but maybe placing them every ten degrees like that... where you've got the terrain to allow it. The Mels never had arty worth cop anyway, of course." He paused, not sure he wanted to comment further. The grounded tanks and combat cars of the regiment were in an even perimeter at the edge of the circular field. Their dull iridium armor was in evident contrast to the ocher soil on which they rested. "You really ought to have dug in," Hammer said at last. "Oh, the field's been stabilized to two meters down," the major protested innocently, "and I don't think the Mels are much of a threat now." Hammer shook his head in irritation. "Lord!" he snorted, "The Mels aren't any threat at all after this morning. But just on general principals, when you set up in a war zone -- any war zone -- you set up as if you were going to be hit. Via, you may as well park your cars on Frieland for all the good they'd do if it dropped in the pot." "The good colonel has been away from soldiers too long," whipped Raeder savagely. "Major Mestern, would you care to enlighten him as to how operations can be conducted by a real regiment -- even though a gutter militia would be incapable of doing so?" "I don't... think... ," Mestern stuttered in embarrassment. His fingers twiddled an empty stim cone. "Very well, then I will," the blond XO snapped. Hammer was facing him again. This time the two men were within arm's length. "The Regiment of Guards is using satellite reconnaisance. Colonel," Raeder announced sneeringly. "The same system in operation when you were in charge here, but we are using it, you see." "We used it. We -- " "Pardon, Colonel, permit me to explain and there will be fewer needless questions." Hammer relaxed with a smile. There was a tiger's certainty behind its humor. "No, your pardon. Continue." Hammer had killed two men in semi-legal duels fought on Frieland's moon. Raeder chuckled, unconcerned with his rival's sudden mildness. "So," he continued, "no Mel force could approach without being instantly sighted." He stared at Hammer, who said nothing. If the Guardsman wanted to believe no produce truck could drop a Mel platoon into bunkers dug by a harvesting crew -- spotting the activity was no problem, interpreting it though -- well, it didn't matter now. But it proved again what Hammer had known since before he was landed, that a lack of common sense was what had so hamstrung the regular army that his Slammers had to be formed. Of course, "common sense" meant to Hammer doing what was necessary to complete a task. And that sometimes created problems of its own. "Our howitzers can shatter them ninety kilometers distant," Raeder lectured on, "and our tanks can pierce all but the heaviest armor at line of sight. Colonel." He gestured arrogantly toward the skyline behind Hammer. "Anything that can be seen can be destroyed." "Yeah, it's always a mistake to underrate technology," agreed the man in khaki. "So," Raeder said with a crisp nod. "It is possible to be quite efficient without being -- " his eyes raked Hammer's stained, worn coveralls -- "shoddy. When we hold the review tomorrow, it will be interesting to consider your... force... beside the Guard." "Via, only two of my boys are in," Hammer said, "though for slickness I'd bet Joachim against anybody you've got." He looked disinterestedly at the drink dispenser. "We'll all be back in the field, as soon as I see what'Tromp wants. We've got a clean-up operation mounted in the Crescent." "There is a platoon present now," the Guardsman snapped. "It will remain, as you will remain, until you receive other orders." Hammer walked away without answering.  Bigger men silently moved aside, clearing a path to the dispenser. Raeder locked his lips, murder-tense; but a bustle at the central dropshaft caused him to spin around. His own aide, a #-year old scion of his wife's house, had emerged when the column dilated. Rather than use the PA systen built into the lounge before it was commandeered as an officers' club, messages were relayed through aides waiting on the floor below. Raeder's boy carried a small flag bearing the hollow rectangle of Raeder's rank, his ticket to enter the lounge and to set him apart from the officers. The boy might well be noble, but as yet he did not have a commission. He was to be made to remember it. He whispered with animation into Raeder's ear, his own eyes open and fixed on the mercenary officer. Hammer ignored them both, talking idly as he blended another stim cone into his blood. The blond man's face slowly took on an expression of ruddy, mottled fury. "Hammer!" "The next time you determine where my boys will be. Colonel Raeder, I recommend that you ask me about it." "You traitorous scum!" Raeder blazed, utterly beyond curbing his anger. "I closed the perimeter to everyone, everyone'. And you bull your way through my guards, get them to pass -- " "Pass my men, LieutenantColonel!" Hammer blasted as if he were shouting orders through the howling fans of a tank. All the tension of the former confrontation shuddered in the air again. Hammer was as set and grim as one of his war cars. Raeder raised a clenched fist. "Touch me and I'll shoot you where you stand," the mercenary said, and he had no need to raise his voice for emphasis. As if only Raeder and not the roomful of officers as well was listening, he said, "You give what orders you please, but I've still got an independant command. As of this moment. That platoon is blocking a pass in the Crescent, because that's what  want it to do, not sit around trying to polish away bullet scars because some cop-head thinks that's a better idea than fighting." His body still as a gravestone, Raeder spoke; 'Wow you've got a command," he said thickly. The wing of violence lifted from the lounge. Given time to consider, every man there knew that the battle was in other hands than Raeder's now -- and that it would be fought very soon. The dropshaft hissed again. Joachim Steuben's dress was identical in design to his colonel's, but was in every other particular far superior. The khaki was unstained, the waist-belt genuine leather, polished to a rich chestnut sheen, and the coveralls themselves tapered to follow the lines of his boyishslim figure. Perhaps it was the very beauty of the face smoothly framing Joachim's liquid eyes that made the aide look not foppish, but softly feminine. There was a rich urbanity as well in his careful elegance. Newland, his homeworld, was an old colony with an emphasis on civilized trappings worthy of Earth herself. Just as Joachim's uniform was of a synthetic sleeker and less rugged than Hammer's, his sidearm was hunched high on his right hip in a holster cut away to display the artistry of what it gripped. No weapon in the lounge, even that of Captain Ryssler -- the Rysslers on whose land Frieland's second starport had been built -- matched that of the Newlander for gorgeous detail. The receiver of the standard service pistol, a I cm powergun whose magazine held ten charged-plastic disks, had been gilded and carven by someone with a penchant for fleshy orchids. The stems and leaves had been filled with niello while the veins remained in a golden tracery. The petals themselves were formed from a breathtakingly-purple alloy of copper and gold. It was hard for anyone who glanced at it to realize that such a work of art was still, beneath its chasing, a lethal weapon. "Colonel," he reported, his clear tenor a jewel in the velvet silence, "Secretary Tromp will see you now." Neither he nor Hammer showed the slightest concern as to whether the others in the lounge were listening. Hammer nodded, wiping his palms on his thighs. Behind his back, Joachim winked at Col Raeder before turning. The Guardsman's jaw dropped and something mewled from deep in his chest. It may have been imagination that made Joachim's hips seem to rotate a final purple highlight from his pistol as the dropshaft sphinctered shut.    When the Guards landed, all but the fifteenth story of the Southport Tower was taken over for officers' billets. That central floor was empty save for Tromp, his staff, and the pair of scowling Guardsmen confronting the dropshaft as it opened. "I'll stay with you, sir," Joachim said. The guards were in dress blacks but they carried fullsized shoulder weapons, # cm powerguns inferior only in rate of fire to the tribarrels mounted on armored vehicles. "Go on back to our quarters," Hammer replied. He stepped off the platform. His aide showed no signs of closing the shaft in obedience. "Martyrs' bloodl" Hammer cursed, "do as I say!" He wiped his palms again and added, more mildly, "That's where I'll need you, I think." "If you say so, sir." The door sighed closed behind Hammer, leaving him with the guards. "Follow the left corridor to the end -- sir," one of the big men directed grudgingly. The colonel nodded and walked off without comment. The two men were convinced their greatest worth lay in the fact that they were Guardsmen. To them it was an insult that another man would deliberately leave the Regiment, especially to take service with a band of foreign scum. Hammer could have used his glass-edged tongue on the pair as he had at the perimeter when he sent his platoon through, but there was no need. He was not the man to use any weapon for entertainment's sake. The unmarked wood-veneer door opened before he could knock. "Why, good afternoon. Captain," the mercenary said, smiling into Stilchey's haggardness. "Recovering all right from this morning?" "Go on through," the captain said. "He's expecting you." Hammer closed the inner door behind him, making a soft echo to the thump of the hall panel. Tromp rose from behind his desk, a great gray bear confronting a panther. "Colonel, be seated," he rumbled. Hammer nodded cautiously and obeyed. "We have a few problems which must be cleared up soon," the big man said. He looked the soldier full in the face. "I'll be frank. You already know why I'm here." "Our job's done," Hammer said without inflexion. "It costs money ment mobilized when it isn't needed, so it's time to bring my boys home according to contract, hey?" The sky behind Tromp was a turgid mass, gray with harbingers of the first storm of autumn. It provided the only light in the room, but neither man moved to turn on the wall illuminators. "You were going to say 'Slammers', weren't you?" Tromp mused. "Interesting. I had wondered if the newscasters :e #c  # Eighth Ave., New York, N. Y. # #-#  tt e :(c #: sf; #:  #:  #: #: If: coined the nickname themselves or if they really picked up a usage here..." "The boys started it...It seemed to catch on." "But I'm less interested in that than another word," Tromp continued with the sudden weight of an anvil falling. " 'Home.' And that's the problem. Colonel. As you know." "The only thing I could tell you is what I tell recruits when they sign on," Hammer said, his voice quiet but his forehead sweatgemmed in the cool air. "By their contract, they became citizens of Frieland with all rights and privileges thereof...Great Dying Lord, sir, that's what brought most of my boys here! Look, I don't have to tell you what's been happening everywhere the past ten years, twenty -- there are thousands and thousands of soldiers, good soldiers, who wound up on one losing side or another. If everybody that fought alongside them had been as good, and maybe if they'd had the equipment Frieland could buy for them... I tell you, sir, there's no one in the galaxy to match them. And what they fight for isn't me, I don't care what cop you've heard, it's that chance at peace, at stability that their fathers had and their fathers' fathers, but they lost somewhere when everything started to go wrong. They'd die for that chance!" "But instead," Tromp stated, "they killed for it." "Don't give me any cop about morals!" the soldier snarled. "Whose idea was it that we needed control of bluebright shipments to be sure of getting metals from Taunus?" "Morals?" replied Tromp with a snort. "Morals be hanged. Colonel. This isn't a galaxy for men with morals, you don't have to tell me that. Oh, they can moan about what went on here and they have -- but nobody, not even the reporters, has been looking very hard. And they wouldn't find many to listen if they had been. You and I are paid to get things done. Hammer, and there won't be any blame except for failure." The soldier hunched his shoulders back against the chair. "Then it's all right?" he asked in wonder. "After all I worried, all I planned, my boys can go back to Frieland with me?" Tromp smiled. "Over my dead body," he said pleasantly. The two men stared at each other without expression on either side. "I'm missing something," said Hammer flatly. "Fill me in." The civilian rotated a flat datavisor toward Hammer and touched the indexing tab with his thumb. A montage of horror flickered across the screen -- smoke drifting sullenly from a dozen lowlying buildings; a mass grave, reopened and being inspected by a trio of Frieland generals; another village without evident damage but utterly empty of human life -- "Chakma," Hammer said in sudden recognition. "Via, you ought to thank me for the way we handled that one. I'd half thought of using a nuke." "Gassing the village was better?" the councillor asked with mild amusement. "It was quiet. No way you could have kept reporters from learning about a nuke," Hammer explained. "And the convoy runs you made with hostages on each car?" Tromp asked smilingly. "The only hostages we used were people we knew -- and they knew we knew -- " Hammer's finger slashed emphasis -- " were related to Mel soldiers who hadn't turned themselves in. We cut ambushes by a factor of ten, and we even had some busted when a Mel saw his wife or a kid riding the lead car. Look, I won't pretend it didn't happen, but I didn't make any bones about what I planned when I put in for transfer. This is bloody late in the day to bring it up." "Right, you did your duty," the big civilian agreed. "And I'm going to do mine by refusing to open Frieland to # men with the training you gave them. Lord and Martyrs, Colonel, you tell me we're going through a period when more govenments are breaking up than aren't -- what would happen to our planet if we set your animals loose in the middle of it?" "There's twelve regiments of regulars here," Hammer argued. "And if they were worth the cop in their trousers, we wouldn't have Tromp inflexibly. "Face facts." The colonel sagged. "OK," he muttered, turning his face toward the sidewall, "I won't pretend I didn't expect it, what you just said. I owed it to the boys, they... they believe when they ought to have better sense, and I owed them to try..." The soldier's fingers beat a silent tattoo on the yielding material of his chair. He stood before speaking further. "There's a way out of it. Secretary," he said. "I know there is." "No!" Hammer shouted, his voice denying the flat finality of You II never miss a cnancc lo lish again' # fool Fishing Hod u-liiscoocs down to only # . ' Slows away in glove comparlniuni. Dack pack, travel bag or pocket Great lor casting, spinning or spm-casl use Tubular glass rod. rugged Positive grip cork handle Complete wilh it's ov" vinyl case. You would expect # pay more than # # lor this laniaslic Rod -- Yours lor Q# on inlroduclory ofler! Mail orders add # for (ax and postage Approved by Dr, Trikie -- Used on his big fishing expedition! #i Tromp's as he spun to face the bigger man again. "No, there's a better way, a way that'll work. You didn't want to hire one of the freelance regiments you could have had because they didn't have the equipment to do the job fast. But it takes a government and a curst solvent one to equip an armored regiment -- none of the privateers had that sort of capital." He paused for breath. "Partly true," Tromp agreed. "Of course, we preferred to have a commander -- ' ' he smiled -- "whose first loyalty was to Frieland." Hammer spoke on, choking with his effort to convince the patient, gray iceberg of a man across from him, "Frieland's always made her money by trade. Let's go into another business -- let's hire out the best equipped, best trained -- by the Lord, best -- regiment in the galaxy!" "And the reason that won't work, Colonel," Tromp rumbled coolly, "is not that it would fail, but that it would succeed. It takes a very solvent government, as you noted, to afford the capital expense of maintaining a first-rate armored regiment. The Melpomonese, for instance, could never have fielded a regiment of their own. But if... the sort of unit you suggest was available, they could have hired it for a time, could they not?" "A few months, sure," Hammer admitted with an angry flick of his hands, "But -- " "Nine months, perhaps a year. Colonel," the civilian went on inexorably. "It would have bankrupted them, but I think they would have paid for the same reason they resisted what was clearly overwhelming force. And not even Frieland could have economically taken Melpomone if the locals were stiffened by -- by your Slammers, let us say." "Lord!" Hammer shouted snapping erect, "of course we wouldn't take contracts against Frieland." "Men change. Colonel," Tromp replied, rising to his own feet. "Men die. And even if they don't, the very existance of a successful enterprise will free the capital for others to duplicate it. It won't be a wild gamble any more. And Frieland will not be the cause of that state of affairs while I am at her helm. If you're the patriot we assumed you were when we gave you this command, you will order your men to come in by platoons and be disarmed." The smaller man's face was sallow and his hands shook until he hooked them in his pistol belt. "But you can't even let them go then, can you?" he whispered. "It might be all right on Frieland where there wouldn't be any recruiting by outsiders. But if you just turn my boys loose, somebody else will snap them up, somebody else who reads balance sheets. Maybe trained personnel would be enough of an edge to pry loose equipment on the cuff. Life's rough, sure, and there are lot to make a lot more. Then we're where you didn't want us, aren't we? Except that the boys are going to have some notions of their own about Frieland...What do you plan. Secretary? Blowing up the freighter with everybody aboard? Or will you just have the Guards shoot them down when they've been disarmed?" Tromp turned away for the first time. Lightning was flashing from cloud peak to cloud peak, and the mass that lowered over the Crescent was already linked to the ground by a haze of rain. "They put us in charge of things because we see them as they are. Colonel," Tromp said. The vitril sheet in front of him trembled to the distant thunder. "Frieland got very good value from you, because you didn't avoid unpleasant decisions; you saw the best way and took it -- be damned to appearances. "I would not be where I am today if I were not the same sort of man. I don't ask you to like this course of action -- I don't like it myself -- but you're a pragmatist too, Hammer, you see that it's the only way clear for our own people." "Secretary, anything short of having my boys killed, but -- " "Curse it, man!" Tromp shouted, "haven't you taken a look around you recently? Lives are cheap. Colonel, lives are very cheap! You've got to have loyalty to something more than just men." "No," said the man in khaki with quiet certainty. Then, "May I be excused, sir?" "Get out of here." Tromp was seated again, his own face a mirror of the storm, when Capt Stilchey slipped in the door through which Hammer had just exited. "Your lapel mike picked it all up." The young officer gloated conspiratorially. "The traitor." Tromp' s expression forced itself into normal lines. "You did as I explained might be necessary?" "Right. As soon as I heard the word 'disarmed' I ordered men to wait for Hammer in his quarters." Stilchey's gleeful expression expanded to a smile of real delight. "I added a... refinement, sir. There was the possibility that Hammer would -- you know how he is, hard not to obey -- tell the guards be cursed and leave them standing. So I took the liberty of suggesting to Colonel Raeder that he lead four men himself for the duty. I used your name, sir, but I rather think the colonel would have gone along with the idea anyway." The captain's laughter hacked loudly through the suite before he realized that Tromp still sat in iron gloom, cradling his chin in his hands.    The room was a shifting bowl of reds and hot orange in which the khaki uniforms of Worzer and Steuben seemed misplaced. The only sound was a faint buzzing, the leakage of the bone-conduction speakers implanted in either man's right mastoid. Hammer, like Tromp, had left his lapel mike keyed to his aides. "You'd best take your pistol off, you know. They'll be jumpy." "You're the boss," Worzer grunts. Alone, now, in the room he unlatches his bolstered weapon and tosses the rig to the floor in front of him. It is a fixed blackness against the grays that shift beneath it. Glass tinkles in the kitchen. Men on every world have set up stills, generally as their first constructions. Even in a luxury hotel, Worzer's habits are those of a lifetime. Hammer's microphone no longer broadcasts voices. The door valves open. "Freeze!" orders the first man through. He is small and blond, his eyes as cold as the silver frosting his uniform. The glowing tab of a master door key is in his left hand, a pistol in his right. The Guardsmen fanning to each side of him swing heavy powerguns at waist level, the muzzle's black screams in a glitter of iridium. Two more men stand beyond the door, facing either end of the hallway with their weapons ready. "Move and you're dead," the officer hisses to Worzer. Then, to his tight-lipped subordinates, "Watch for the other one -- the deviate." The kitchen door rotates to pass Joachim. His left hand holds a silver tray with a fruit-garnished drink on it. Reflections shimmer from the metal and the condensate on the glass. He smiles. "You foul beast says the officer and his pistol turns toward the aide of its own seeming will. The enlisted men wait, uncertain. ' 'Me, Colonel Raeder?" Joachim's voice lilts. He is raising the tray and it arcs away from his body in a gentle movement that #atches Raeder's eyes for the instant that the Newlander's right hand dips and -- a cyan flash from Joachim's pistol links the two men. Raeder's mouth is open but silent. His eyeballs are bulging outward against the pressure of exploding nerve tissue. There is a hole between them and it winks twice more in the flash of Joachim's shots. Two spent cases hang in the air to the Newlander's right; a third is jammed, smeared across his pistol's ejection port. None of the Guardsmen have begun to fall, though a gout of blood pours from the neck of the righthand man. It is two-fifths of a second from the moment when Joachim reached for his pistol. Worzer had been ready. He leaped as Steuben's shots flickered across the room, twisting the shoulder weapon from a Guardsman who did not realize he was already dead. The stocky Curwinite hit the floor on his right side, searching the doorway with the powergun. In the hall, a guard shouted as he spun himself to face the shooting. Joachim's jammed pistol had thudded on the floor but Worzer wasted no interest on what the aide might do -- you did not worry about Joachim in a firefight, he took care of himself. The non-com had been squeezing even as he fell, and only a feather of trigger pressure was left to take up when the Guardsman's glittering uniform sprouted above the sights. Heated air thumped the walls of the room. The body ballooned under the cyan impact. The big-bore packed enough joules to vaporize much of a man's abdomen at that range, and the Frielander hurtled back against the far wall. His tunic tine. The boots of the remaining Guardsman clattered on the tile as he bolted for the dropshaft. Joachim snaked his head and the pistol he had snatched from Raeder through the doorway. Worzer and the big gun plunged into the corridor low to cover the other end. The shaft entrance opened even before the Frisian's outflung arm touched the summoning plate. Hammer, standing on the platform, shot him twice in the chest. The Guardsman pitched into the wall. As he did so, Joachim shot him again at the base of the skull. Joachim generally doubted other men's kills, a practice that had saved his life in the past. Hammer glanced down at the jellied skull of the last Guardsman and grimaced. "Didn't anybody tell you about aiming at the body instead of getting fancy?" he asked Joachim. Neither man commented that the final shot had been aimed within a meter of Hammer. The Newlander shrugged. "They should've been wearing body armor," he said offhandedly. "Coppy fools." The colonel scooped up both the powerguns from the corridor and gestured his men back into the room. The air within stank of blood and hot plastic. Death had been too sudden to be prefaced with pain, but the faces of the Guardsmen all held slack amazement. Hammer shook his head. "With five thousand of you to choose from," he said to Joachim, "didn't they think I could find a decent bodyguard?" The Newlander smiled. After his third quick shot, the expended disk had been too hot to spin out whole and had instead flowed across the mechanism when struck by the jet of ejection gas. Joachim was carefully chipping away at the cooled plastic with a stylus while the pistol he had taken from his first victim lay on the table beside him. Its muzzle had charred the veneer surface. "There isn't enough gas in a handgun ejector to cool the chamber properly," he said, pretending to ignore his colonel's indirect praise. "Via, you hurried cause you wanted all of them," Worzer laughed. He thumbed a loaded round into the magazine of the shoulder gun he had appropriated. "What's the matter -- don't you want the Colonel to bother bringing me along the next time 'cause I scare away all your pretty friends?" Hammer forced a smile at the interchange, but it was only a shimmer across lines of fear and anger. On one wall was a communicator, a flat, meter-broad screen whose surface was an optical pickup as well as a display. Hammer stepped in front of it and drew the curtain to blank the remainder of the room. His fingers flicked the controls, bringing Capt Stilchey into startled focus. Tromp's aide blinked, but before he could speak the colonel said, "We've got three minutes, Stilchey, and there's no time to cop around. Put me through." Stilchey's mouth closed. Without comment he reached out and pressed his own control panel. With liquid abruptness his figure was replaced by the hulking power of Secretary Tromp, seated against the closing sky. "Tell the Guard to ground arms. Secretary," Hammer ordered in a voice trembling with adrenalin. "Tell them now and I'll get on the horn to my boys -- it'll be close." "I'm sorry for the necessity of your arrest. Colonel," the big man began, "but -- " "Idiot!" Hammer shouted at the pickup, and his arm slashed aside the drapes to bare the room. "I heard your terms -- now listen to mine. I've arranged for a freighter to land tomorrow at # and the whole regiment's leaving on it. I'll leave you an indenture for the fair value of the gear, and it'll be paid off as soon as contracts start coming in. But the Lord help you, Tromp, if anybody tries to stop my boys." "Capt Stilchey," Tromp ordered coolly, "sound general quarters. As for you. Colonel," he continued without taking verbal notice of the carnage behind the small officer, "I assure you that the possibility you planned something like this was in my mind when I ordered the Guards landed with me." "Secretary, we planned what we'd do if we had to a month and a half ago. Don't be so curst a fool to doubt my boys can execute orders without me to hold their hands. If I don't radio in the next few seconds, you won't have the Guards to send back. Lord and Martyrs, man, don't you understand what you see back of me? This isn't some coppy parade!" "Sir," came Stilchey's thin voice from off-screen, "Fire Central reports all satellite signals are being jammed. The armored units in the Crescent began assembling thirty -- Lord! Lord! Sir" A huge scarlet dome swelled upward across the vitril behind Tromp. The window powdered harmlessly an instant later as the shock wave threw man and desk toward Hammer's image. The entire hotel shuddered to the blast. "They're blowing up the artillery," the captain bleated. "The ammunition -- " His words were drowned in the twin detonations of the remaining batteries. Hammer switched the communicator off. "Early," he muttered. "Not that it mattered." His face was set like that of a man who had told his disbelieving mechanic that something was wrong with the brakes, and who now feels the pedal sink to the firewall to prove him fatally correct. "Don't go to sleep," he grunted to his companions. "Tromp knows he's lost, and I'm not sure how he'll react." But only Worzer was in the room with him.    Though Tromp was uninjured, he rose only to his knees. He had seen Capt Stilchey when the jagged sheet of iridium buzz-sawed into the suite and through him. Scuttling like a stiff-legged bear, the civilian made his way to the private dropshaft built into the room. He pretended to ignore the warm greasiness of the floor, but by the time the platform began to sink his whole body was trembling. Ground floor was a chaos of half-dressed officers who had been on the way to their units when fire raked the encampment. Tromp pushed through a trio of chattering captains in the branch corridor; the main lobby of bronze and off-planet stonework was packed and static, filled with men afraid to go out and uncertain where to hide. The councillor cursed. The door nearest him was ajar and he kicked it fully open. The furniture within was in sleep-mode, the self-cleaning sheets rumpled on the bed, but there was no one present. The vitril outer wall had pulverized; gouges in the interior suggested more than a shock wave had been responsible for the damage. Seen through it, the starport had become a raving hell. Four hundred meters from the hotel, one of the anti-artillery weapons was rippling sequential flame skyward from its eight barrels. High in a boiling thunderhead at its radar-chosen point of aim, man-made lightning flared magenta; high explosive caught in flight. Almost simultaneously a dart of cyan more intense than the sun lanced into the Guard vehicle. Metal heated too swiftly to melt and sublimed in a glowing ball that silhouetted the gun crew as it devoured them. Hammer's tanks, bunkered in the Crescent, were using satellite-computed deflections to rake the open Guard positions. Twenty kilometers and the thin armor of the lighter vehicles were no defense against the # mm powerguns. Tromp stepped over the low sill and began to run. The field was wet and a new slash of rain pocked its gleam. Three shells popped high in the air. He ignored them, pounding across the field in a half-crouch. For a moment the whistling beginning to fill the sky as if from a thousand tiny mouths meant nothing to him either -- then realization rammed a scream from his throat and he threw himself prone. The bomblets showering down from the shells went off on impact all across the field, orange flashes that each clipped the air with scores of fragments. Panic and Hammer's tanks had silenced the Guard's defensive weaponry. Now the rocket howitzers were free to rain in wilful death. But the tanks, Tromp thought as he stumbled to his feet, they can't knock out the tanks from twenty kilometers and they can't capture the port while the Guard still has that punch. The surprise was over now. Left fans keened from the perimeter as the great silvery forms of armored vehicles shifted from their targeted positions. The combatants were equal, and a stand-off meant disaster for the mercenaries. Much of the blood staining Tromp's clothing was his own, licked from his veins by shrapnel. Incoming shells were bursting at ten-second intervals. Munitions shortages would force a slowdown soon, but for the moment anyone who stood to run would be scythed down before his third step. Even flat on his belly Tromp was being stung by hot metal. His goal, the ten-place courier vessel that had brought him to Melpomone, was still hopelessly far off. The remains, however, of one of the Guard's self-propelled howitzers lay like a cleat-kicked drink-can thirty meters distant. Painfully the councillor crawled into its shelter. Hammer's punishing fire had not been directed at the guns themselves but at the hauler in the midst of each battery. After three shots the secondary explosions had stripped the Guard of all its ill-sited artillery. A line of rain rippled across the field, streaking dried blood from Tromp's face and whipping the pooled water. He was not running away. There was one service yet that he could perform for Frieland, and he had to be home to accomplish it. After that -- and he thought of it not as revenge but as a final duty -- he would not care that reaction would assuredly make him the scapegoat for the catastrophe now exploding all around him. It was obvious that Hammer had ordered his men to disturb the spaceport as little as possible so that the mercenaries would not hinder their own embarkation. The lightlyrattling shrapnel crumpled gun crews and the bewildered Guard infantry, but it would not harm the port facilities themselves nor the ships docked there. For the past several minutes no powerguns had lighted the field. The bunkered mercenaries had either completed their programs or ceased fire when a lack of secondary explosions informed them that the remaining Guard vehicles had left their targeted positions. The defenders had at first fired wild volleys at no better target than the mountain range itself, but a few minutes' experience had taught them that the return blasts aimed at their muzzles were far more effective then their own could possibly be. Now there was a lull in the shelling as well. Tromp eased a careful glance beyond the rim of his shelter, the buckled plenum chamber of the gun carriage. His ship was a horizontal needle three hundred meters distant. The vessel was unlighted, limned as a gray shadow by cloud-hopping lighting. The same flashes gleamed momentarily on the wet turtle-backs of a dozen tanks and combat cars in a nearby cluster, their fans idling. All the surviving Guard units must be clumped in similar hedgehogs across the port. The big man tensed himself to run; then the night popped and crackled as a Guard tank began firing out into the storm. Tromp counted three shots before a cyan dazzle struck the engaged vehicle amidships and its own ammunition went off with an electric crash. The clustered vehicles were lit by a blue-green fire that expanded for three seconds, dissolving everything within twenty meters of its center. One of the remaining combat cars spun on howling fans, but it collapsed around another bolt before it could pull clear. There were Guardsmen on the ground now, running from their vehicles. Tromp's eyes danced with afterimages of the exploding tank, and for the first time he understood why Stilchey had been so terrified by the destruction of the car he might have ridden in. Half a dozen shots ripped from beyond the perimeter and several struck home together. All the Guard blowers were burning now, throwing capering shadows beyond the councillor's shelter. Then, threading their way around the pools of slag, the steam and the dying fires, came a trio of tanks. Even without the scarlet wand wavering from each turret for identification, Tromp would have realized these were not the polished beauties of the Guard. The steel skirts of their plenum chambers were rusty and brushworn. One's gouged turret still glowed where a heavy powergun had hit it glancingly; the muzzle of its own weapon glowed too, and the bubbling remains of the perimeter defense left no doubt whose bolts had been more accurately directed. The fighting had been brief. Hammer's platoons meeting the disorganized Guardsmen with pointblank volleys. The victors' hatches were open and as they swept in toward the central tower, Tromp could hear their radios crackling triumphant instructions. Other wands floated across the immense field, red foxfire in the rain. The shooting had stopped. Now, before the combat cars and infantry followed up the penetrations their tanks had made, Tromp stood and ran to his ship. His career was ruined, of that he had no doubt. No amount of deceit would cover his role in the creation of the Slammers or his leadership in the attempted suppression. All that was left to Nicholas Tromp was the sapphire determination that the national power which he had worked four decades to build should not fall with him. They could still smash Hammer before he got started, using Frieland's own fleet and the fleets of a dozen other worlds. The cost would leave even Frieland groaning, but they could blast the Slanmiers inexorably from space wherever they were landed. For the sake of his planet's future, the excision had to be made, damn the cost. And after Tromp fell in disgrace in the next week or two weeks at most, there would be no man left with the power to force the action or the foresight to see its necessity. Panting, he staggered through his vessel's open lock. The interior, too, was unlighted. That was not surprising in view of the combat outside, but one of the three crewmen should have been waiting at the lock. "Where are you?" Tromp called angrily. The lights went on. There was a body at the big Frisian's feet. From the cockpit forward stretched another hairline of blood still fresh enough to ooze. "I'm here," said a cultured voice from behind. Tromp froze. Very slowly, he began to turn his head. "People like you," the voice continued, "with dreams too big for men to fit into, don't see the same sort of world that the rest of us do. And sometimes a fellow who does one job well can see where his job has to be done, even though a better man has overlooked it. Anyhow, Secretary, there always was one thing you and I could agree on -- lives cheap." Surely Joachim's wrists were too slim, Tromp thought, to raise his heavy pistol so swiftly.  We've lost Corbett. Four of us managed to get this far; deep into this funnel-shaped pit that seems to be a full-scale mockup of Dante's Inferno. It's been a hairy, scary trip. We've waded through boiling blood, we've been stranded in a desert under flakes of fire. A devil-car smashed Billy to jelly, but he healed. We always heal; we can't die. The Builders have done something to our bodies. The lower we get, the worse it gets. It seems to be an entertainment playground for sadomasochists, some of whom might not be human... or else we've actually died and gone to Dante Alighieri's strange Hell. I've seen so many miracles that I'm not sure any more. The place does have a kind of internal logic. It was the second pit of the Eighth Circle that lost us Corbett. He couldn't take what they were doing to the advertising men. He ran back toward the cliff, screaming that he was going back to the place of the winds, where he belongs. It's way upslope. I don't know how he'll get up the cliff. Billy's still with us. Maybe he really is Billy the Kid; we've seen enough revived dead men. He's not too bright, and the torture chamber around us doesn't bother him much. I'm glad he's here. He can fight. The tortures bother Benito even less. He keeps calling them "Justice". It gives me the chills. He could be a devil himself... or one of the Infernoland's paying customers. Geryon is a devil, and Geryon knew him. On the face of it he's a stolid fat man with a strong faith in Catholicism and Dante Alighieri's map. We've found mistakes in Dante's descriptions, and places that Dante never saw. Still we follow Benito along Dante's route, down to the bottom of everything, where Dante described a way out of Hell... for a living man whose guide can call on angels. We can't go back; the cliff would stop us. There are devils around us: big half-humanoids, and Geryon, an aquatic life-form wearing what might be an antigravity belt. So we can't stay here. We have to keep going down. XX The third gully was narrower, and cleaner. From the edge it looked eiflpty, so that I wondered if there were a sin nobody would commit, or one nobody thought of. But lights danced dimly down there... From the arch it was clearer. I made out long rows of holes cut into the stone. The holes had raised stone rims. Most of them were occupied, each by a pair of human feet sticking straight up into the air. The feet danced. Flames burned on their soles. "Another obsolete sin," said Benito. "Selling holy offices. Simony." Billy said, "Huh?" I translated. "Those guys would take money to make a priest." There were signs by some of the holes. "Wharton School of Theology. Earn your Th. D. in just ten weeks! Write Registrar for application." And another: "Meditation. The new way to inner peace and serenity. Meet the greatest guru of all time. Registration fee, #." Billy was aghast. "God does that to them? Just for that!" "They stole what belongs to God," Benito said. "There are Popes in those baptismal fonts. And many others. The denomination does not seem important. What matters is the sale of the gifts of God." Why would aliens care about that? Well, Carpentierl "Benito, I don't like it here," Billy said. I patted his shoulder. "Me neither. Let's get out." I felt the urge to run. At least I was safe from this pit. We all were. We'd never had Heavenly Gifts to sell. The bridge over the fourth gully was just ahead, and I glanced into it from the top, intending to run on past. The strange sight held me. The damned flowed beneath us, and their heads had been turned back to front. Most of them were women. "Fortune tellers," Benito said before I could ask. "They tried to see the future by magic." And now they were not even allowed to watch where they were going. I shivered, thinking that a science fiction writer might welt end up here. But no. I'd never used magic. Only logic, and it hadn't kept me out of Hell. "Why aren't all the scientists and economic prognosticators here?" I asked. "They try to foresee the future." "Most of these appealed to Satan for aid. He gave it to them... or not. It is the appeal that weighs against them." He turned to move on. Then I recognised one of the damned. A little elderly lady, very prim and proper. She'd been a teacher in my nephew's school. Now she walked with her head turned backward, and tears ran down her spine and between her buttocks. I screamed. The damned looked up at me. "Mrs. Herrnstein! Why?" I shouted. She looked away. Then she stopped and looked up. Face and back turned toward us. She'd always been thin, and I'd never thought of her as particularly feminine. Certainly she wasn't feminine now. "I belong here. Mister Carpentier," she called. "Please leave. I don't want to be watched." "You belong here?" I could not see Mrs. Herrnstein with a crystal ball. "Yes. Whenever I had a pupil who had difficulty learning to read, I used -- I was a bad teacher. Mister Carpentier." "You were a good teacher! You taught Hal more in a year than he learned in five!" "I was a good teacher with good pupils. But I could not be bothered with the ones who weren't so bright. If they had trouble learning to read, I said they had dyslexia." "Are you here because of bad diagnoses?" This was monstrous! "Dyslexia is not a diagnosis. Mister Carpentier. It is a prediction. It is a prediction that says that this child can never learn to read. And with that prediction on his record -- why, strangely enough, none of them ever do. Unless they happen on a teacher who doesn't believe in educationese witchcraft." "But -- " "It was witchcraft. Mister Carpentier. Please go now." She walked on, crying uncontrollably, her face toward us as she walked away. I watched until she was out of sight. "She does not belong here," I insisted. "Then perhaps she will not be here long," Benito answered dispassionately. "Yet -- you will note that she did not agree with your judgement." "Then she's wrong too!" "Why do you feel so competent to judge everyone, Allen?" "Get it through your thick head that it's Big Juju I'm judging -- " "It is God you are judging," he thundered. "All right, it's God I'm judging. If He can judge me, I claim the right to judge Him!" Billy seemed horrified by what I was saying. I was sorry for that. But Benito laughed and said, "How will you implement your judgement against God Himself?" The only possible answer to that was a feeble one, maybe, but I used it. "By withholding my worship. Benito, do you realise that the God you worship keeps a private torture chamber?" "Hardly private." "Private or public, the God Allen Carpentier worships will have to meet higher standards than thatV' Benito didn't speak for a moment. Then he said, "We must hope our shouting was not heard. Look ahead."    From our position at the top of the arch we had a good view of the rims of the next gully. On both sides of the gap, horned black demons moved. They were larger than men, a little smaller than the demons in the first ditch, but like them they had horns and tail, and their skin was black ebony, very different from a black man's skin. They carried -- "Pitchforks?" "Certainly," said Benito. I couldn't help grinning a little. Pitchforks! I'd forgotten that detail. Had Walt Disney's cartoonists ever realised why their devils carried pitchforks? "They must not see us," Benito said. "None of us are safe from them. They guard the pit of the grafters, of those who stole from positions of trust." Billy shuddered. "Reckon they'd like me," he said. "Guess I took a few things from my bosses in my day. Not much, buf some." "Not me. Freelance writers don't have bosses," I said. Then I remembered the advance from Omniverse Publishing, nine years before I died. Somehow the novel had never jelled, and let's play it safe here, Carpentier. Demons wouldn't understand the publishing business. There was cover at the bottom of the bridge. It was all a jumble of boulders. We waited our chance, then sprinted down the bridge while none of the demons were nearby. We were hidden before another group came past. We huddled together between the rocks. "Too bad the bridges are staggered," I whispered. "We could have gone right across." The next bridge was thirty or forty yards to the left, with a troop of twentyodd demons between. "For us this is the second most dangerous place in Hell," whispered Benito. "We must, reach the next bridge without being seen. Cross at a dead run, and do not stop at the next pit. Run straight into it. There are no bridges in any case, andwe could not reach one if any existed. The demons are on both sides of the pit. Billy shifted restlessly. "Don't like running from nothing." We must," Benito said simply. He pointed. A demon strode past. A roughly human form nine feet tall, equipped with horns and hooves and a twitching tail. A capriform humanoid. How glib, Carpentier. Capriform humanoid? Demon! Why play games with yourself? The demon was carrying a human being, carrying him like a bowling ball, his claws inserted deep into the man's back. The man writhed and struggled. The demon didn't seem to notice. He called to three of the others. "How many New Yorkers this week?" They joined him in front of our rock. One twitched his tail up to his mouth. Teeth like butcher knives gnawed at the end. "Twelve." "Make it thirteen. And it's still Thursday on Earth. If Hideous wins the pool again I'll rip his face off." "You could forget to report this one." "Why not?" The first demon lifted his human burden to study it. "He hardly counts anyway. He stole a few hundred bucks from a friend who needed an eye operation." He addressed the man: "You won't tell on us, will you?" "No. I swear," said the man. His voice was choked with agony. "And you won't show your head above the pitch? Because if we see any sign of you -- " The demon hefted his pitchfork suggestively. "We'll pull you out and tear you in little pieces and scatter you widely. It hurts a lot." "I won't tell," said the man. "Good," said the demon holding him; and he flung him. The man dropped below the rim with a mournful howl that ended in a sound half splash, half thud. "What's down there?" Billy whispered. I answered, "Boiling pitch." "What'd he do?" "Graft." "I wanted to try to save him." Benito said, "I would not save him if I could." The demons passed on. Like the warriors around the lake of blood, they looked always into the pit, always away from us. If we were careful we could move, one at a time, flitting from rock to rock to -- "Gotcha!" a demon shouted, and I had a heart attack, right out there between two inadequate boulders. All they had to do was come and collect me; but they weren't looking. They were clumped at the rim. Jabbing down. A human form came up dripping gobbets of black pitch and trying to wriggle free of the tines of two pitchforks. I heard, "Boss Tweed, ain't it? We been checking with some of those dead men that're supposed to have voted your ticket -- Hold him, Crazyred!" The man lurched free of one pitchfork, but the other held him fast. They beached him. They began to play with him. I touched Billy's shoulder. "Don't look. We can get a good way while they're busy." We crawled like snakes. By the time the shade of Tweed had stopped screaming, we were opposite the bridge. I looked back once and had to close my eyes. The demons had opened him up and spread him out like a frog in biology class; but unlike the frog, he was still trying to get away. Benito crouched like a sprinter. "Ready?" "Yeah." "Right." We ran. I heard a great roar of rage. I didn't look back. But as I went over the arch, last in line, I saw that the demons on the far side of the gully were running to meet us. One was going to make it. I stopped. Only for an instant; then I plunged down the arch behind Benito. But Billy had doubled his speed. The demon reached the end of the bridge off balance and skidding. "Come to Poppa!" he roared, and swung his pitchfork around. He was a nanosecond late. Billy shot past the tines and ran up the demon and swarmed over the huge head. The demon bellowed and tried to reverse eighteen feet of iron pitchfork. Benito slammed shoulder-first into his knee. The'demon halfturned, and I hit the other knee sideways. Both huge legs went out from under the demon, left him blind and falling. Half a ton of demon slammed into the rock. Billy rolled away. The demon moaned and tried to gather his knees to his chest. "Now run!" cried Benito. "Billy!' ' A troop of demons was almost on us. I raced for the next pit, stopped at the edge. Where was Billy? Billy had retrieved the demon's pitchfork and was raising it for the kill. I yelled, "Never mind that!" and then it was just too late. Billy yelled triumph and brought the pitchfork down hard. He raised it for another thrust, and they had him. I jumped into space alongside Benito. Three-inch fingernails clicked shut behind my neck. The side of the gully was rough rock falling almost sheer. I glimpsed it in free fall, and when I saw that there were no handholds I simply gave up. A couple of seconds later I lay broken at the bottom, staring up at the non-sky. In the sea of pain I couldn't tell what was broken and what was only bruised. But I remembered that you're not supposed to move an accident victim. I didn't try to move. Rustling near me. "Benito?" "Over here." "Are you hurt?" "Yes " "Me too." "We are out of their path, I think. We need only wait to heal." Whose path? I was afraid to turn my head, but I turned my eyes. I found myself looking up along the fluted robe of a life-sized golden statue. No information there. I said, "What about Billy?" "Poor Billy. His urge to violence betrayed him." "Don't be so damned philosophical. We've got to get him out of their hands!" "How?" "Well... first we wait to heal, I guess. Where would they put him? In the pitch with the Tammany types?" "Look up along the edge of the gully." Something like an endless length of rope was falling in loops across the sky. It dropped very slowly, as if almost weightless. As it came near I. saw that it was thicker than rope, and there was a tuft on the end... Where had I seen something like that recently? Above our heads it hesitated, then descended like a blind worm. For seconds it was hidden behind the rock slope. Then it began to rise... and the end was coiled around something that moved. Billy"Minos," I said. "It's his tail." "Yes." Before we could move, Billy would be back on the island in the river of blood -- or in the river itself; he'd left the island of his own free will. He was beyond our reach. I sighed and turned my eyes from the tiny struggling figure and the infinite sprawl of Minos' tail. And the statue had moved. It had gone past me by about one yard. I turned my head, regardless of consequences. My neck wasn't broken. And there were two bare human feet beneath the hem of the golden robe. One moved a good six inches as I watched. "Benito. There are men in those things." "And women too," said Benito. "Religious hypocrites." He stood up carefully, testing to see if everything had healed. Apparently it had. He tried to help me up, but pain yelped in my ribs. I sat down against the slope to wait some more. Golden robes moved past like snails. There were men and women in those golden idols, but I saw only bare feet and shadowed faces within enormous hoods. One stopped, and turned with the same excruciating slowness that characterized his walk, and said, "Are you lost?" Benito said we weren't. I asked, "Are you?" "Why, no. I think this is my proper place." His accent was thick and hard to identify. "I have been here long enough to be convinced that God thinks so too." "How long is that?" "Over a thousand years have passed on Earth, I'm told." "That's a little hard to swallow," I said. "The English language isn't that old." "I know," said the priest. "We teach each other. I learned this language from one who came here recently, an Amie Semple MacPherson. There is little else to do as we wander this endless channel, and you may imagine that it is easier to teach each other than to search for some companion who speaks our own language." "Why," I asked, "don't you stop and sit down?" The tired grey eyes studied me from within the golden cowl. "I could fall on you. But it may be that you do not know what you say. If I stop this robe grows hot. It is too hot now. It grows hot slowly and it grows cool slowly. Now, goodby." He began to turn away. Benito said, "We could walk along with you." "That would please me." He finished his turn and took one lurching footstep. I got up. The ruined ribs only twinged. "How heavy is that robe?" I asked. "I never weighed it. They tell me it is gilded lead. Perhaps a ton?" "What did you do?" "Does it matter? I was young, I had not been a priest for many years. But the end of the thousand years since Christ was born were drawing to a close. People began to fear the end of the world. I urged them to give away their property. To the Church. We became very wealthy." "You could have given it back, afterwards." "We did not." "Did all of you end up here? The whole Order?" "No. Some truly thought the world would end. Some believed a wealthy Church could serve souls better. But I never believed the Second Coming could be predicted, and I enjoyed the wealth. I -- do you need to know more? It was a good thing to be in the Church in those days." Benito tapped my shoulder and pointed. "There is our way out. The rubble from the bridge." It had been a bridge, high and arching like those we'd crossed before. Now it was a sloping pile of shattered rock. I looked at it curiously, but it didn't seem different from any other rock I'd seen, and I could see that normal laws of material strength didn't hold down here. It wasn't a surprise. "What happened to it?" I wondered. "Earthquake?" "I am told that all Hell shook at the moment of Christ's Death," said the ex-priest. "So says Dante," Benito added. "Afterward, He came to Hell, and threw down the great gate in the wall of Dis." "He must have been mad about something. I suppose being crucified could do that to you." "I would be less flippant, Allen. Look around you." Before I could answer, Benito had started climbing the ruined bridge. It was still a ridiculous picture. Christ was supposed to be gentle. Using a whip on the temple money-changers was one thing; behaving like a comic book hero was something else. I tried to imagine the bleeding, wounded, near-naked Figure ripping those tremendous iron gates from their hinges, while the halo flamed angrily about His HeadThen gave it up and climbed up after Benito. I tested each foothold, but some of the slabs slid down anyway. Near the top the rockslide ended, and we climbed by fingerholds and toeholds. There it was that I had to repress a sudden, violent urge to giggle. Benito wouldn't have appreciated it. But -- no wonder Christ was so upset. Some clerk must have tried to hand Him Form D-#t#y-#.    The seventh pit was enormous. I stood at the end of the bridge and marvelled at the thin fairy-span arching across. Carbon steel wouldn't have taken the stress; yet it was made of stone without mortar, like the fallen bridge behind us. Another miracle, and so what? We started across. It was dark down there. What I could see had a vaguely reptilian flavor to it: constant slow slitherings, and sudden flurries of violent motion. Benito pulled at my arm. "Why do you dawdle, Allen?" "Who are they?" "Thieves. Theft is the most profitable of sins, and very popular. Tell me, Allen, do you expect to see anything down there that pleases you?" He had me there. I didn't. But -- "I'm a writer. I've got ten men's curiosity. What's the huny? Are we in danger here?" "I remind you that we are fugitives." I stared in astonishment. "Geryon could have stopped us. Minos could have stopped us. They didn't." "The demons behind us would have. Oh, very well, Allen. The real danger is at the next pit. We must cross that quickly." "Okay." And I looked down again. Reptilian, yeah. There were men and women down there... and lizards ranging in size from Chihuahua to Great Dane, and snakes whose range was even greater. I watched a tiny scarlet lizard leap from a crack in a rock to bite a man on the neck. The man burned like flash paper, dazzling me. When I looked again he was congealing from a cloud of smoke. Benito was watching me, not them. Let him wait. The land was strewn with rocks of all sizes. A stout grayhaired woman came toward us, running a tortuous path, her eyes fixed on her path. It didn't help. Somehow she stepped between two rocks and fell sprawling, yelling in despair. The python that had been following her caught up as she tried to run on the ruined foot. It climbed her leg and bit her on the navel. Woman and snake, they lay immobile. They began to change. "Allen -- " I made a shushing gesture. They were changing, the snake sprouting arms and legs and head hair, the woman melting into a smooth limbless shape. Presently there was nothing left of the woman. The slender man who had been a snake stood up smiling. "Thanks, Gladys," he said, and walked away. "He stole her shape," I said. "I'll be buggered. He stole her shape!" "She will grow it back. In life she was probably a buyer of stolen goods, what do you call it? A fence." "Yeah. Wow." "Are you ready?" "Yeah." I turned and followed him. Wow. He stole her shape. How does a science fiction writer explain that? A computer-drawn hologram? Could be. It was pretty dark down there. But I didn't believe it. The bridge dipped. We climbed down. Benito turned left on the ledge between the seventh and eighth pits. Benito was clearly uneasy. Interesting things were happening in the darkness on my left, but I looked into the darkness on my right, for the danger Benito expected. It looked like a swarm of fireflies, or like a freeway seen from an airplane, or -- This aye night, this aye night, Every night and all. Fire and sleet and candlelight. And Christ recieve thy soul. Sleet I'd found in the Circle of Gluttons, and fire on the desert. Here at last was the candlelight: huge candle flames moving in darkness. From the next bridge it was no clearer. Benito kept trying to hurry me along. "You will not see anything here. Are you so fond of Hell that you would linger?" Slender flames moved down there in the yellow-and-black murk... and stopped, and clustered beneath us. I said, "Who are they, Benito?" "Dante calls this the Bolgia of the Evil Counselors." "That doesn't tell me a lot. And I still don't know what you're afraid of." A voice answered from below... a voice with little of the human in it. It thrummed like a harp. It was coming from the tip of one of the huge flames. "He is afraid of his own homecoming." I looked at Benito. He nodded, not looking at me. "Come down!" one of the flames called to Benito. It was eerily compelling, that thrumming voice. The tip of the flame wavered, turned to me. "Throw him down, you, if you're an American! That's Mussolini! Benito Mussolini!" Jolted, I turned to Benito. He shrugged. Mussolini? Another voice thrummed from the pit. "You are American. I know your accent. Do you understand? That's Mussolini! Throw the bastard down here where he belongs!" "Who are you?" "Does it matter? I approved the fire bombing of Dresden." A British voice spoke from the flames. "And I led the mission. We may belong here, Yank, but so does that Eytie swine." Benito was backing away. When I went toward him, he turned and ran. I caught him at the edge of the next pit and tripped him. He fell heavily to the ground and I sat on him. He was no match for me. "Mussolini!" I shouted. "I pulled you out of a djinn bottle!" he protested. "And led me here, deeper into Hell! I knew it all along!" Mussolini. What better choice for the Devil's agent, to wander through Hell corrupting souls already half corrupted? Hitler was probably loose too. If we'd run across him I'd have guessed earlier. I remembered all my syspicions, and all the unexplained things that had happened on the trip down. No wonder he could give orders! Well, I knew who he was now, and I knew where he belonged. We were at the edge of the ninth pit, but I took him by the heels and dragged him back to the eighth. He thrashed like a fish. He clutched at rocks, and pulled a couple out of the ground, for all the good that did him. The pit flamed beneath us with the crowd gathered to welcome Benito home. I rolled him over the edge. He gave a low cry as he dropped. Before he struck bottom he burst into flame. His was very bright, brighter than most around him. I turned and went on. the ground dropped away at my feet. There I stood like a machine whose program has run out. After all, where would I go? Now I was utterly alone, with nobody to tell me about the geography of Hell, or warn me of the dangers --  -- or make me go deeper into horror after horror when all I wanted to do was stop. Mussolini. Benito Mussolini, II Duce of Italy. He hadn't even tried to deny it. What an idiot I'd been. Why hadn't I recognised him, with that square massive jaw and high forehead? I remembered reading about him in history books. Benito Mussolini had escaped from his castle-prison in a glider flown by Hitler's Commando, Skorzeny, one of the most romantic figures of that war. No wonder Benito could fly a glider! Mussolini the fascist. He invented fascism! Killer and leader of killers, thug, ally of Adolf Hitler... back to the anonymous flame, Mussolini, evil genius behind the Italian king. Down you go, Benito, who poured ' me from a bottle. I stood there a long time before I realised what I was seeing. In the ninth pit the damned staggered and lurched, slipping in bloody mud, leaving more blood to make the path more slippery for those behind. They seemed dazed survivors of some lost battle. One showed no obvious wounds, except for his erect posture and painfully stiff walk. I stared at his face, where a macabre joke had been played. It was pale and lean, and calm; no one would have guessed that he was in pain; but the eyes burned with hate. The moustache was in an unfamiliar style, straight, but twice the width of his mouth. And the sharp white canine teeth protruding over his lower lip would have had anyone over the age of six shouting, "Vampire!" Well ahead of him was a sturdy fat man with a striking bearded face and blood running from a cut throat. The face was familiar. I studied him, trying to remember where I'd seen that face. He started back. Then he roared in fury wrapped in a Shakespearian accent. "Varlet! Who might you be, that stare so arrogantly at England?" "Huh?" I shook myself. ' 'Carp -- Carpenter. ' ' "Come down, woodworker, and I will. have your eyes nailed shut!" I realised I had been staring, rudely, at people who had trouble enough without that. More of Big juju's victims. "Sorry. Does it help if I tell you the wounds will heal?" I could see the shock rippling down the line, and suddenly they were all screaming curses and waving their fists. One man threatened with his severed arm held like a club. "Dolt! Ass who mocks us!" "What did I say?" "You cannot be such a fool!" 'England' cried. "We are nearly healed now! We reach the point in the circle where -- " He stopped, looking ahead, forgetting me entirely. "I see him now," he said in a voice without life or hope. I looked. The bridge was ahead of them, and under it was a kingsized version of all the other demons we'd passed, twenty feet tall, carrying a slender sword. He grinned, showing teeth nearly a foot long. I had to cross the bridge anyway. I walked toward the demon. marched toward him, hanging back when they could until others pushed them ahead, and he killed them. He picked a man up and sliced him from the crotch to the throat, set him down and let him walk on. Empathic pain lashed through me, and a line from a joke ran crazily through my head. About a cowboy who'd been thrown onto a barbed wire fence. He'd shown Texas courage; he'd remounted the horse and gone on. Of course he had to let the stirrups out a little... The fat man looked sick and scared. His face clicked suddenly into place: a painting, very famous. Henry the Eighth. I kept walking. I was crossing the bridge when Henry reached the demon. The sword was not a sword, I saw now. It was an overdeveloped fingernail on an overdeveloped middle finger as thick as a strong man's thigh. It flicked like a rapier and severed Henry's head, and the demon handed Henry his head, and Henry walked on. The sharp horn tip of the sword flicked suddenly up before my face. I stopped. "Who may you be, O priveleged one, who run so free through Hell?" I got my throat working. "Allen Carpenter." "Where away. Carpenter?" "I don't know. Inward." With all the feelings that had been burnt out of me, one was left. Curiosity. Whatever Benito had planned for me, it lay downward, inward. The dead had stopped to wait, with understandable patience, for the demon to finish his conversation. I waved downward. "Who are they?" The demon seemed in no b'.rry. "Sowers of discord. People who advocated hatred, started wars, refused to end wars -- you know, the opposite of the peacemakers. This is a special collection. Religious schizmatics. Generally founded their own churches for their own purposes. The demon looked fondly at "England's" receding back. "Henry there wanted a divorce. The Church wouldn't give him one. So he made himself a Church that would. Clever?" "On the evidence, not very." The demon stooped to pick up the man with the Fu Manchu moustache and the vampire teeth. "Dracula here didn't found any churches. He -- " Doomsdayto. He could save a small party of the Chosen, chosen by him, that is. All you had to do was turn all your property over to him." The demon grinned enormously. "And you. Carpenter? Did you ever create a Church of your very own?" "I -- " Oh, boy. The sword's bloody tip swung away and back, rapier-quick. I ducked and ran. I fell flat on the "Draculal I thought he was -- Dammit, he was just a legend." "There are legends about him. In his homeland, Transylvania, mothers still frighten their children with his name. Dracula was just a title. Means dragon. His real name was Vlad; they called him Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler. He spent Turks in the name of Christ. About half the people he killed were his own subjects, by the way." Small wonder Vlad the Impaler walked funny. A wooden stake was sticking two feet , out of his anus. The demon didn't need his sword. He just pushed the stake up until it didn't show, set the man down, and let him walk on. Walking funny. The demon picked up another. "Johann, here, was the only man God would reveal the exact time of bridge as the sword flashed again. The demon couldn't quite get at me at that angle. But the arch of the bridge dipped low, there at the end. I rose to sprint position, poised, took off. At the base of the arch the sword flicked toward me at knee height. I jumped it and kept running, right across and into the space above the next pit. The side was steep. I hit once, and bounced, and hit the bottom very hard.    There was no unconsciousness in Hell. There was only pain and the awful strain of trying to draw a breath. Deep down behind the pain a tiny voice was saying. You don't need to breathe, Carpentier. You're dead. But I wanted to breathe, I needed to breathe and not a sip of air could I draw. Eventually the air did come, in sips, then gulps. I tried to straighten out. It felt as if I were breaking my own back. Maybe my back was broken. But the sword would have been worse. Could I feel my feet? Yes. Okay. Your spine's intact. Just lie here a while. It will heal. Sure, we always healed. Hey, Carpentier . Why was it Benito always healed before you did?  Why shouldn't he? He was one of the paid staff. Then why did he get hurt at all? A woman's voice said, "What've you got?" "lJh?" I still couldn't get more coherent than that. "What've you got?" she repeated patiently. I moved my head around, slowly. It was dark and gloomy. I became aware of hideous screeching sounds, moans, screams of pain and rage, snarling dogs, the cacaphony of Hell. She was sitting against the sloping side of the trench, naked, her body marked with pustules and the scars of older eruptions of the skin. She didn't seem more able to move than I was. But the pain in my back was easing. I said, "Broken back, probably. What've yoM got?" "Everything. Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Yaws. Trench mouth. Everything you can think of." "Uh huh. I know what you've been doing." She wailed, "But I didn't! That's why it's so unfair!" My eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom that hung thick down here in the pit. There were others lying about the floor and the sides of the gully. Most of them looked deathly ill. Across from me was a man scrabbling among thousands of pills. There must have been every variety of medication ever invented or imagined: tablets, capsules of many hues, bottles of liquids, tiny pills and pills that would choke a horse. He groaned in pain as he held up a pill and squinted at it. Finally he decided: he flung the pill back into the bathtub of them next to him. He sat for a moment. Then he moaned, pressing his hands hard against his belly. "It's eating me alive!" he screamed. He scrabbled for another pill. This time he gulped it without looking at it. It didn't seem to help, because he screamed even louder and went back to his inspection routine. I looked a question at the girl. She shrugged. "He sold cancer cures. They only worked if you didn't go to a doctor. Somewhere in that pile there may be a pill that cures him." "What about the rest?" "Some don't do anything. Some make it worse." I shuddered, then froze as something came howling past on all fours, foam dripping from its jaws. I'd thought it was an animal, but it wasn't. It was a man. "Counterfeiters. Counterfeiters always get rabies," said the woman. "If they bite you it takes a long time to heal." And I couldn't move! There was nothing to do but watch. Men and woman with peeling scabs and an itch that drove them to tear at themselves. A man with no ears, unable to move and screaming for water. "Listen!" he shouted. "Tell Satan! Anyone! Tell Satan there is a plot to overthrow him. For water I will reveal the names of the plotters! Tell him!" They were all deathly ill and they were all in pain --  -- except one, and he was startling by contrast. He sat against the slope of the gully, a few feet from the girl and across from me. A middle-aged cherub, comfortably overweight, his blue eyes twinkling above a mad and happy smile. Certainly he was mad. Was it a sickness of the mind, or had some vile bacterium reached his brain? I had to get out of here. The most ferocious contagious diseases ever to wrack mankind were all around me. I tried to move, and stopped at once. My legs wouldn't obey, and it felt as if my spine were being twisted in a vise. Had I caught something already? Spinal meningitis, maybe? The madman's wandering blue eyes found me. He said, "I was a psychiatrist." "I didn't ask." In fact. I'd already learned more of Hell than I really wanted to know. I only wanted out. Don't tell me any more! I closed my eyes. "They trusted me," the mad voice said happily. "They thought we knew what we were doing. For fifty bucks an hour I listened to their life stories. Wouldn't you?" He subsided. The woman said, "He's crazy." "Thanks. I really wondered about that," I told her without opening my eyes. "Listen, you fell in over the edge. Have you been upslope? Have you seen a lot of what's up there?" "A lot." "What do they do to, shall we say, ladies of the evening?" I opened my eyes. She was tense, waiting for my words. "I didn't notice anything special for whores. Why?" "I, #... Listen, some girls don't actually sleep with the customers. They take a gentleman to a mote, they get their money in advance, then they disappear. Sometimes you can do better than that. You're just getting down to business when your boy friend walks in the door. You see?" "Sure." I'd been robbed that way a couple of times in England. "Well," she said, "you'd think that wouldn't be as bad as being an actual... prostitute." And she looked at me. Somehow the memory was very dim now, of a time on Earth when a London girl had propositioned me, taken my money, and vanished from a bathroom with an unsuspected second door, leaving me in rage and frustrated lust. If I'd caught her I'd have killed her. But that was long ago, and nothing looked bad next to where I was now. So I lied. "They'd be downslope from here. I haven't been there yet." Satisfied, she sank back and forgot me in the examination of her ruined body. The mad psychiatrist noticed me again. "We were just playing," he said dreamily. "Tinkering with something we didn't understand. I knew. Oh, I knew. Let me tell you -- " "Don't tell me." They kept hurting at me, all of them! "He was a catatonic. He was like a rubber doll. You could put him in any position and he'd stay there for hours. We tried all sorts of things in those days. Shock therapy, insulin shock, lobotomy. Punish the patient for not noticing the outside world." "Or for not noticing you." I meant it to hurt, but he nodded happily. "So we put him in a hot box and started raising the temperature. We watched him through a window. First he just sweated. Then he started to move around. At a hundred andv thirty he said his first words in sixteen years. 'Get me the fuck out of here!' ' ' The mad eyes found me, and his face seemed to cave in. The cherubic smile vanished. Urgently he said, "Get me the fuck out of here!" "I can't. I'll be lucky to get out myself." I tried moving again. There was pain, but not enough to keep me in that place. I stood, gingerly, and started up the slope. The girl cried, "You can't do that! Come back here! Come back!" I kept going. There were rocks to pull myself up, cracks to use as footholds. I'd climbed Just far enough when another hydrophobia case raged past, biting and chewing on everyone he passed. A rock rolled from beneath my foot and pain grated in my spine as I caught myself. The rabid man screamed at the psychiatrist, but the cherubic look had returned and he was smiling dreamily at the opposite wall. When I reached the top I remembered who had been in the last pit of the Eighth Circle. Frauds. Falsifiers. False witnesses. That was the last of the Bolgias. Now the way led across an empty, rocky land. I turned and looked at the ten canyons rising upward behind me, light flickering from some, others marked by rising smoke or roiling heated air. It had not been a pleasant Journey . Far ahead, through a twilit gloom that would Just have had drivers turning on their headlights, I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers. There was nothing else to see, nothing at all. Benito's evil counsel had brought me this far. Now it was too late. I could get back a little way, probably to the fifth pit, possibly as far as the cliff. But I'd never talk Geryon into taking me up that cliff... and there were Just too many places where Allen Carpenter might belong. Could I talk the monster into summoning Minos? That could get me all the way back to the Vestibule. Yeah, and into the bottle again. If I were lucky. I hadn't forgotten that burrowing this far into Hell might be a crime in itself. Minos had told me that I could choose far worse for myself than "Justice". Maybe I'd already made the choice. Or... I could Just sit down. In this empty borderland I could spend a good piece of eternity before some angel noticed me. I sat down. It was very peaceful. It was, in fact, the only completely empty spot I'd seen in Hell. Why? Maybe it was reserved for some brand new sin, something that hadn't been invented yet... say, a development of brain research or genetics. At some time in the indefinite future I might have to vacate fast. Meanwhile, it was better than the bottle. I could see my navel. Time passed without leaving footprints. Days, I think. The stinks of Hell were still in my nostrils. The ever-present background noise might have been soothing if I hadn't moans and cries blended by distance. But nobody was hurting me or hurting at me. I didn't have to watch people getting sliced up, or burned, or riddled by diseases, or smashed by demon cars, or distorted into obscene shapes. I sat and dreamed of the past. I wondered idly about the looming towers I could see m the dark distance. I wondered at Benito's ultimate purpose in luring me here. But none of it seemed to matter. I thought that even curiosity had been burned out of me. That would have been nice. I would have liked to turn my mind off for a long time. But it wouldn't turn off. Whatever quiet I'd found here, there was still Hell around me, and I hurt with the need to know why. God had created human souls; could he not uncreate the failures? God had created sleep; could he not put the failures to sleep, forever? There were no good excuses for Hell. I thought of some unsettling bad ones: The universe would fly off its axis if Hell's agony did not balance Heaven's bliss. Or: part of Heaven's bliss was the knowledge that lots of nasty people were suffering terribly. Or the old standby: we were inthe hands of infinite power and infinite sadism. I got restless. The towers kept catching at my eye: blurred grey shadows on the horizon. Skyscrapers? A city in Hell? Quarters to house the maintenance crew for Infernoland? Or were they the true entrance, the tourist entrance? But I was only playing with plots. I didn't believe in Infernoland any more. This was Hell, and I knew it. I finally realised what was really bothering me. To all intents and purposes I was back in the bottle. I got up. I walked toward the towers. No harm in looking.    They weren't towers. They were giants, enormous humanoids, buried in the earth from the navel down. I stopped well out of their reach to study them. Their enormous eyes found me and pinned me to the landscape like a butterfly on a board; then shifted away. I was not worth their attention. I was glad. Unreasonably I felt that those tremendous deep eyes could see everything there was to know about me. One was mad. He looked down at me hopefully and said, "Ildurb fistenant imb?" His face fell when I did not respond. Alien language, alien being. What were these aliens doing in human Hell? Not serving Big Juju. Not hardly. Miles of chain bound their arms to their sides. There were giants in the Bible, and Titans in mythology. But no archeologist had ever found human bones this size. And how could they survive Earth's gravity? The square-cube law should have flattened them into mountains of hamburger. Maybe they weren't from this universe at all. An attacking army from another universe made by another Creator? The science fiction writer in me, the late Allen Carpentier, wanted very much to see their legs and feet. They must be disproportionately large and sturdy to support their weight... unless they had developed in a lighter gravity field... While Carpentier the trapped damned soul was examining the chains that wrapped another of the giants. For the giants were buried just outside a chin-high wall: their chins, not mine. The wall looked too smooth to climb. I walked up to the chained giant, ready to jump, but it wasn't necessary. The chain looked like anchor cable. Whoever had wrapped it round him had a fine eye for detail. He'd have been lucky to shrug his eyebrows. Now, what would Benito have done here? Climbed the giant, of course. The thought of climbing such a monster gave me pause. Yet I was sure I could do it. Up the chain, stepping in the links, as far as his shoulder; beware of snapping teeth. Then onto the wall and down. If Benito had told the truth... if what I remembered of Dante was true... I would then be in the last Circle of Hell, the Circle of Traitors. Traitors to nation, to overlord, to benefactor, to parents and siblings. A great ice plain, and the traitors embedded in it. There would be nothing but the cold to stop me from crossing it, and I knew I couldn't freeze to death. It looked so easy. What had Benito left out? I remembered the great ice plain well enough. The college boy had been jolted at finding part of Hell already frozen over. Benito hadn't said anything that jarred with my own memories of Dante. But there had to be a joker in the deck somewhere. Benito had been a power in Hell. He'd given orders to others of Hell's minions. He'd demonstrated demonic strength against a tank of a man in the great swamp. Carpentier, why didn't he do that to you ? Maybe it was guilt that stopped him. He'd writhed and torn at the ground, but he hadn't actually hit me, not once. He'd uprooted jagged rocks while trying to use them as anchors, but he hadn't tried to hit me with them. And for all his presumed safe-conduct, he was back where Minos had sentenced him, with the Evil Counselors. Maybe Satan or God or Big Juju had rendered some kind of judgement against Benito. With me as the agent. But why hadn't Benito fought? The giant tried to shake himself. The chains barely rustled. No danger there. You writhe and you struggle, but there's no way around it. Me too, giant. From every possible direction it looked the same. It was going to be unreasonably easy for Allen Carpenter to enter the Circle of Traitors... the place of punishment for those who had betrayed their benefactors. I thought it over for a long time. Then I turned and started back. Going back was harder. The dip at the lower end of the tenth bridge was steeper, and now I was climbing it. I crossed the pit without looking dovin, and climbed backward down the high end of the bridge. I saw the next bridge close by, and made for it. A sword's point flicked up before my eyes. I stopped. Surely he'd been under a different bridge? I'd shewed my path deliberately. But a half-human, half-bestial head beyond the sword's point shook itself negatively. "You can't go back. Carpenter." "I have to." The blade hung before me, rocksteady. I could have chinned myself on it. I half-stepped forward and the blade moved too fast to follow. Now it pricked the tip of my nose. I shrugged and turned back. I took no chances. I crossed the inner pit again and circled through the wasteland beyond. Two bridges away, I crossed again -- on my belly. I slid down the high end of the bridge and kept crawling along the ridge above the ninth pit. He couldn't be under all the bridges. Couldn't he just. Like the damned clerk. He was waiting when I tried to stand up. At this, the low side of the pit, he had the angle on me. "You can't go uphill," he said. "I really don't know how to make it plainer." "I'm from the Vestibule," I said. "I don't belong here." "You never created your own Church, Carpenter?" Oh, dammit! "Listen, those weren't in competition with God or anybody! All I did was make up some religions for aliens. If that was enough you'd have every science fiction writer who ever lived!" "We've got him," said the demon, and he pointed with the sword. I forgot the sword entirely. I leaned far out over the edge of the pit to see. "What in Hell -- to coin a phrase -- is that?" It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. It's head was the torso of a bony fish... and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat, a large smooth-skinned beast I didn't recognise, a thing like a gorilla, a thing like a man, finally a true man. None of the beasts had full hindquarters except the trilobite; none had a head except the man. The whole thing crawled along on flopping fish-torsos and forelegs and hands, a tremendous unmatched centipede. The human face seemed quite mad. "He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives... and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are often more dedicated than honorable. Excuse me." For the line of victims had bunched up while we talked. The demon turned and sliced at them rapidly, to a tune of screams and curses. The centaur creature he sliced into its seperate components, and it went past him in a parade, on arms and forelegs and wriggling fishy fins. The sword flicked up again just as I'd decided to make a break for it. A bead of blood formed at the tip of my nose. "I'm not like him," I said quickly. "He played the game for real. With me it was Just a game." I backed away until the tenth Bolgia was an emptiness beneath my heels. He couldn't reach me now. "Take the Silpies. They were humanoid, but telepaths. They believed they had one collective soul, and they could prove it! And the Sloots were slugs with toolusing tentacles developed from their tongues. To them, God was a Sloot with no tongue. He didn't need a tongue; He didn't eat, and He could create at will, by the power of His mind." I saw him nodding, and was encouraged. "None of this was more than playing with ideas." The demon was still nodding. "Games played with the concept of religion. Enough such games and all religions might look equally silly." "You can't do this!" I shouted. "Listen, there's a friend of mine in the Eighth Bolgia, and it's my fault he's there, and I've got to get him out!" "Did anyone promise you it would be easy? Or even possible?" "Whatever it takes," I said, and thought I meant it. "Step closer." I walked to the edge. Carpentier shows his good faith. The sword flashed twice. I heard and felt the tip grate along my ribs. It left two vertical slashes along my chest and belly. I reeled back with my arms wrapped around myself to hold my guts in. The demon was watching me steadily. What could he be waiting for? I knew. I stepped forward and dropped my arms. Carpentier shows his inability to learn. The sword flashed twice more, leaving two deep horizontal slashes, perhaps mortally deep. A living man would have fainted from shock. I couldn't. "Games," said the big evil humanoid. "Your move." I studied the slashes and the flowing blood. Shock did seem to be slowing down my thought processes, but presently I saw what he meant. I said, "What do I use for a pencil?" "You'll think of something." I studied my fingernails. I thought of something. I gouged a ragged X in the top left square of the diagram. The sword flashed to place an O in an adjacent corner.    I climbed the first slope of the bridge on fingers and toes. When I could walk I held my arms wrapped around myself, holding me in. The pride of my victory seemed excessive for a stupid game of tic-tac-toe. As I left the bridge I heard him call, "Carpenter?" I turned my head. "Best two out of three?" My imagination was dead of shock. The only dirty word I could think of was one I'd never use again, not after seeing the place of the flatterers. I just kept walking along the rim. The eighth pit was a canyon filled with firelight. "Benito!" My voice echoed hollowly between the canyon walls. "Benito!"  Some of the flames wavered. Thrumming voices, retarded by the transfer from voice to flametip, Moated upward. "Leave the damned to suffer alone." "Benito who?" 'Bug off, you!" The canyon stretched endlessly away in both directions in a gentle curve. If it was a full circle, it find Benito? "Benito!" There was panic in my voice. The strain hurt my slashed chest. "Benito!" "Benito Mussolini? He just passed ine going that way -- " "No, it was the other direction." "You're both wrong. Mussolini's in the boiling lake." A fat lot of help I'd get here. And if I found him, what then? How was I going to get him out? How did he get out in the first place? Maybe he'd already left again. A frustrating thought, because I couldn't do a thing about it, and it would mean I'd played my game with the demon for nothing. I hoped Benito was already out, but I had to assume he was still in there. The canyon wasn't all that deep. What I needed was a climber's rope. Yeah, an asbestos one, stupid! Benito was on fire! For that matter, I hadn't seen any ropes anywhere. I thought for a second about the chain on the giant. It would mean passing the demon twice -- No. Even if I got the chain loose, it was too heavy to move, and the freed giant would probably crush me for my trouble. I was glad I didn't have to decide to face the demon's sword again. I don't know what I would have done. Well? Think, Carpentier! There are tools in Hell. Sure, boats carry rope. Now we're getting somewhere. A heavy rope, kept wet while Benito climbs -- Wait a minute. How do we climb the cliff when there's no rope yet? There haven't been any boats since the gaudy alien Geryon took us down. Tackle Geryon again? And if it doesn't work, back in the bottle while Benito burns? Benito was smarter than I was. Maybe he'd think of something. "Benito!" Mocking, thrumming voices answered. I thought of fourteen feet of sword blade attached to a twenty foot demon. Disable the demon (with what?), cut the blade loose (how?), send it down to Benito. But could he climb something that sharp? Or would he lose his fingers immediately? Did fingernail burn? Waitaminute! There were smaller demons, higher up, carrying iron pitchforks! I made for the bridge. In a few steps I was running. If I slowed down I'd want to stop, because I was terrified of what I planned. I was in too mueh of a hurry. I was trotting toward the base of the tremendous bridge over the chasm of thieves when something flashed scarlet from behind a rock. I turned, frowning... and there was agony, flashing out from my neck to engulf me and drown me. I felt my bones soften and bend. The pain drew baek like a broken wave receding, but it left a blackened mind. I was confused; I couldn't think. A homely bearded man bent over me, saying urgent words that made no sense. "Which way is out?" He was huge, I realised. A giant. I stepped toward him -- and I was tiny and four-legged; my belly scraped the ground. A lizard. I was a lizard. The bearded man repeated himself, enunciating each word. "Which way is out? How can I leave Hell?" Vengeance. I advanced on him. Bite the son of a bitch! He backed away, still talking, but I couldn't understand him. He stopped and seemed to brace himself. I leapt. I sank my teeth into his belly. He howled, and I dropped to the ground, writhing in new agony. When my mind cleared I was a man. I rolled away fast from the red lizard and didn't stop until there was a rock between us. The' lizard stayed where he was, watching me. I was making for the next bridge when his words came back to me. My dumb reptile brain had registered them only as sounds. "You can't speak!" he'd wailed. Then, "Tell me! I'll let you bite me, but tell me the way out!" He was a scarlet splash on a gray rock. Still watching me. I pointed downslope, toward the lake of ice. "There! All the way to the center, if I haven't been lied to myself!" I glanced back once after I'd crossed the next bridge. The lizard was poised on the rim, staring down. As I watched, he made his decision. He leapt into the pit. Now what was that all about? Never mind, Carpentier , you've got other concerns... Far below me, the golden monks stood like so many statues. Every couple of seeonds one or another would rock forward as if its base were unstable. The broken bridge dropped in a cascade of rock. I stopped to catch my breath (Habit, Carpentier! You could give that up), then went down the broken slope with some care. It would have been easy to break an ankle. I had reached the floor of the canyon before I noticed that one of the monks had turned completely around to stare at me. His slate-grey eyes were the oldest, the weariest I had ever seen; and I recognised them. He said, "Didn't you pass here a week ago?" "A few days, I think. And you've only come this far?" "We hurry as fast as we can." The grey eyes studied me. They were so tired; they made me want to sag down and rest. "May I ask, what game are you playing? Are you a courier or something equally unlikely?" "No. I -- " Why not tell the truth? He wasn't about to run tell someone. "I've got to steal a pitchfork from one of the ten-foot demons in the next pit over." "Don a cloak like mine," he said. "See what it does to your sense of humor." I sank down against the bank. Those tired eyes... "I'll wear the cloak," I said. "You get Benito out of the Pit of the Evil Counselors. Okay?" "I beg your pardon?" "I pushed a good friend into the Pit of the Evil Counselors. If I can't -- " "But why would you do a thing like that?" I howled. It startled me more than him. I'd been about to say something else entirely. But no words came, and I threw back my head and howled. The tears .streamed down my face. The monk said something in a foreign language. He tottered toward me, and stopped. He didn't know what to do. "There, there," he said. "It will be all right. Don't cry." With a touch of bitterness he added, "Everyone will notice." There was a howl as big as the world inside me. It wanted out, and it was stronger than I was. I howled. The priest muttered to himself. Aloud he said, "Please. Please don't do that. If you will only stop crying, I will help you get your pitchfork." I shook my head. I got out a whimpered, "How?" He sighed. "I cannot even take off my robe. I do not see how I can help. Perhaps I could act as bait, somehow?" He lifted his head, his teeth grinding with the effort, to look up along the cascade of broken rock. I stood up. I patted him on his leaden back: Clunk, clunk, clunk. "You've got your own problems." I girded up my mental loins and started up the slope. Loose rocks rolled under my feet. This was the high side of the gully. It took a long time to get to the top. I had just one advantage; part of the bridge still projected out from the cliff. I climbed in its shadow and stopped underneath. I waited. After all, what could a demon do to me? Rip me to pieces? I'd heal. Drop me into the pitch, forever? Throw me into the pit of the thieves? One of the horned black demons strolled past, his head turned to study the pitch on the other side of the ridge. He held six yards of iron pitchfork balanced in one hand. All I had to do was leap out and grab it. I let him go. When he was past I began to shake. The beast had three-inch claws, ten. And eightinch tusks, two. And Carpentier was a coward. I heard clanking and puffing below me. I turned and saw an amazing sight. The priest was coming up behind me. I watched him. I didn't believe it, but it was true: he was actually in motion. He sounded as if he were dying again, but every so often his hand or his foot would move and i  he'd be two inches higher. When I finally made myself believe what was happening, I scrambled down the cliff, got under him and pushed up on the rigid hem of his robe. I doubt it helped. I might as well have been trying to lift the world. We reached a flattish fragment of rock just under what was left of the bridge. There we rested. The death rattle was in his throat. His eyes were closed. His face glistened. "Thousand years," he got out. "Been walking... thousand years... in this lead coffin. Legs like trees." Then, "Was a priest. A priest. Supposed to... keep people out of Hell." "I still don't know how we're going to do it." The we was courtesy, and he deserved it. But what could he do? "Get me up," he said. I got my arms under his robe. It was warm. Together we got him upright, somehow. Then I looked up... at a demon's hooves. The demon looked down at us, grinning. "You know," he said pleasantly, "you're the first one ever got this far out of the tar." I said, "You're making a mistake. T'm not -- " Then I leapt for it. The pitchfork struck sparks from the rock where I'd been, but I was in midair, falling. I landed hard on a ragged-edged boulder. I rolled immediately, ready to dodge again. The priest was gripping the business end of the pitchfork! The demon bellowed and pulled. For an instant he had lifted the priest off the rock, robe and all. Then the priest sagged back, still gripping the tines. I tried to climb up to help. The priest took two steps back and off the edge of the rock. The demon bellowed for help. He was trying to lift half a ton of leaden robe, and it wasn't working out. I had almost reached them when the demon cried out and let go. The priest dropped through space. I crawled down to him. The robe was bent like tinsel and cracked down the front. The edges glowed yellow. He'd been told wrong; the robe was solid gold. When I touched it it burned my fingers. The priest was mangled inside. He looked violently dead, except for his eyes, which followed me. If I didn't get him out of the robe he'd fry. But you don't move an accident victim -- He'll heal, Carpentier. fe all heal, to be hurt again. I, pulled him out by his feet. The robe wasn't contoured to let him pass, but it didn't matter. He came out like a jellyfish. He must have broken every bone in his body. I spoke not to the soft-looking head, but to the grey eyes alone. "You'll heal. When you heal, there's a way out of Hell. Benito says so. Go downhill. Downhill." The eyes blinked. "I've got to rescue Benito," I said. I pulled him over to the side so nobody would step on him. I picked up the pitchfork and left.    "Benito!" I walked the ridge between the pits, calling like a lost soul. The answering voices all sounded the same, anonymous, thrumming, inhuman. "Here I am, fellah!" "Benito who?" "Who dares disturb the silence of Hell?" "Benito!" "Allen?" That had to be him! But a dozen voices took it up. "Allen!" "Here I am, Allen! What kept you?" "Benito! I've come to get you out!" I listened for the Italian accent... and heard it. "Never mind. I belong here. I should not have tried to leave." All the flames looked alike, but I thought I had him placed now. I reached down with the pitchfork. "Bu-ger that! Grab the end!" The other flames were wandering off. Benito said, "It is not long enough in any case." It wasn't. I looked along the rim. There was a rough place where I might climb down partway. Benito tried to stop me. "You are being stupid. If you fall, you will burn like the rest of us!" "Can you reach the end?" "Go away, Allen. This is my proper place." I was ten feet below the rim, and almost out of footholds. The pitchfork was heavy and awkward. I tried to go further, setting my feet very carefully. "All right," Benito said suddenly. The huge flame moved to engulf the tines. I felt a feather touch on the haft, and the flame began to rise from the pit. He called, "Can you hold me?" I laughed with relief. "You don't weigh as much as an ounce! I could lift a thousand of you!" After all I'd been through, suddenly it was going to be easy. The flame rose higher along the haft... and I felt the first warming of the metal.    I waited until I was sure I could filter the panic from my voice. Some of it may have got through anyway. "Benito? Hurry." "Is something wrong?" "No, never mind. Just hurry." I was afraid he'd let go. The metal was uncomfortably warm. It grew hot. Down there where a huge flame was rising in dreamy sloth, the metal began to glow dull red. He wouldn't notice; his own bright flame would blind him to it. Up here it was too hot to hold, but I held on, my teeth clenched against the scream. The scream grew bulky in my throat. I stopped breathing to hold it in. If Benito gave up now to save me pain, I'd never, never find the courage to do this twice. The metal was cheery red around the flame. My hands began to sizzle. I wasn't breathing, but the smell of cooked meat worked its way into my nose. I couldn't imagine how my hands still held. I was clenching them with everything I had, but the muscles and nerves must be cooked through. Charred through. I knew that smell too; dinner ruined. My head was thrown back, my eyes clenched tight. There was no sensation but the fire. "You can let go," said Benito. He was beside me, clinging to the cliff, his body no longer hidden by the flame. I tried to let go. My hands were charred fast to the haft. I tried to knock the pitchfork loose. It came loose, all right, and slid bumping into the eight Bolgia with my charred hands still attached. Benito had to virtually lift me up the cliff. Benito, nursing my charred wrists. He had to haul me up the last bridges by the slack of my robe. The pain never stopped. The nerves gave no sign of having been cauterized by the red hot iron. The charred bone broke away; the black flesh split to expose red flesh. It'll heal, Carpentier. Oh, shut up. And call me Carpenter. Carpentier the Famous Author is dead. In the empty borderland between the tenth pit and the giants, we sat down. Presently Benito spoke. "Thank you." "Yeah. I'm sorry I pushed you in." He didn't say anything. I said, "I thought I had to do it. I thought it was right." Still nothing. "Look," I said. "I was raised to believe that Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were identical monsters." Benito sighed. "Sometimes, toward the end, perhaps we were. I didn't start that way. I meant well." He laughed, bitterly. "I had good intentions. We know what is said to be paved with those." "Tell me about it." He spoke musingly, without looking at me. "After the War I saw my country humiliated. No one believed in anything. Corruption everywhere, laboring people working against wealthy people, middle class working against the government, everyone fighting each other and everyone ruining each other. If they'd only work together -- we were Romans, once. We ruled the world. We could be great again, instead of a joke for Clemenceau and Lloyd George to swat aside." "So you made people work together?" "I gave Italy hope. For years I even stopped Hitler from taking Austria. Allen, if I'd chosen the side of the Allies in fhe second war, would I have as great a place in history as Stalin?" I couldn't say anything to that. ants. Adolf never equalled that record. As for me, in the early days we used castor oil, not clubs." He sighed. "But you can never stop, once you begin seeing what is better for people than they know themselves. The opposition will make a thorough mess of everything you've done, and you know they will destroy the country. What do you do? Destroy the opposition. Now they really have grievances. Bigger opposition, more police needed to suppress them. But I meant well. I loved my people to the day they killed me." " 'The purpose of power is power.' " "'whatl" Benito was badly shocked. "Never mind. Quote from a novel, #. So then you tried to set up a government here?" "For my sins, I did." Benito's sudden laugh was like my own howling in the sixth Bolgia: there was an agonized laugh in him, and it clawed its way through his throat. "Oh, Allen! And you think you've seen Hell! A government among the Evil Counselors -- When I tried to get out they stopped me; they needed me as figurehead. Never mind, I got out anyway. I had to." "But you never did anything but good for me. Or anyone else you met, down here." "How are your hands?" We looked. Two tiny infant's fists were forming at the lumpy bones of my wrists. "We must wait until they heal. You will never climb with those!" he laughed. We sat and talked. Hours passed. "I think the worst was when they shot my cabinet people. Italians, shooting men whose only crime was to love Italy and trust me -- " he shuddered. "Those are strange scars on your chest." "I had to play games with the demon in the tenth Bolgia. Funny, we didn't see him coming back." "Games?" Reluctantly I told him. It could have been embarrassing, but it wasn't. He didn't thank me again. Instead he smiled and said, "Do you still believe that Hell is a place of entertainment?" "No. I didn't even then. I think Geryon convinced me." "Geryon?" "Yeah. You may not have noticed, but Geryon is the only nonhuman in Hell who really looks like an ET, an extraterrestrial, something from another world. He's consistent. Not like those patchwork demons, animal traits grafted on a human frame. And when I climbed aboard him I kicked machinery around his waist." "So?" I had to laugh. "Oh, really, Benito! An anti-gravity belt? When they've already proved they can take the mass and weight out of anything they like? Geryon was lying. Lying without saying a word." "And it was Geryon that convinced you? You have seen no proper miracles?" I told him where the pitchfork had come from. "That priest climbed the broken bridge in half a ton of gold. He hung from the demon's pitchfork until the demon had to let go, and he knew what would happen then." Benito smiled. "Yes, that was a miracle." "Too right. I know a miracle when I see one." "Then you are more fortunate than most of us." He looked thoughtful. "Geryon has looked a little different each time I have seen him." "That worried me too. Just how often have you made this trip?" "Six times. Each has been easier for me, although not for the one who accompanied me to the exit. As I told you, it does not matter how many start. Only one leaves." "And there really is a way out... There was a time when I thought you were just leading me into something more horrible. I'm still scared, but not of that." "Now there remains only the lake of ice. You have nothing to fear." "I'm afraid to relax. Too often I've thought I was through the worst part." His look probed my soul. "When the iron began to grow warm in your hands -- " "Tell me all about it." "I think not. But now there is only the ice. It will be colder than anything you can magine, but we can endure it. Nothing can bar us now! Soon we reach the center, and then -- " He stopped. "And then?" "You will see." He looked me in the face. "I think you have enough courage." "Even now I feel it leaking away. Spit it out, Benito." "We will meet Lucifer, and pass him. Ignore anything he says. When we have passed that, go uphill to Purgatory." He paused. "Without me." "But you've travelled this route? You know where it leads?" "No, and yes. I have not traveled it, but I know where it leads." "How?" "By faith, and by Dante's description." "Dante's been wrong a couple of times. Admit it, Benito: you don't know what happened to those six you rescued." "I know. But I have not seen." "Do you want to leave Hell? Or are you afraid of what's there?" "How are your hands?" They were a child's hands now, still too small to support my weight. "You didn't answer my question." "I would leave Hell if I could. I belong here, so long as there are lost souls to be rescued." "You sent six men and women into the unknown, but you were afraid to go yourself." He didn't answer, only looked at me. I stood up. "Come on. My hands'll heal before we need them."    They healed. We climbed the torso of a chained giant. It was easier than mountain climbing, and harder: mountains don't shake, mountains don't snap at you with teeth the size of medieval shields. We stepped across space from the giant's shoulder to the flat top of a wall. From the wall I watched Benito slide down on the seat of his pants, if he'd been wearing pants. A pity he hadn't found a better way down in six previous trips. I slid after him. Imagine one of the Great Lakes frozen over, seen on a moonless night. Maybe it looked like that. I'd never seen any of the Great Lakes. To me it was an ice skating rink for a society of teleports: bit enough to hold, say, one percent of a populame seemed arrow-straight; the dark ice, infinite. A breath of a breeze whispered around us and leeched all the warmth from our massless souls. I stiffened with the shock, then crouched down and tried to shelter in my own arms. Benito was standing. "That will not help. Nothing helps," he said patiently. "You must bear the cold." If he could do it... I stood up, and closed my eyes tight against the soft, unreasonably cold breeze. Surely it was below freezing, way below freezing. How cold was it? If it could kill a man in minutes, or seconds. I'd never know it. I couldn't die. "Benito? Burst into flame again for your good friend." "I would if I could. My apologies, Allen." Benito took my arm. We walked. It had certainly been worth asking. Was it water ice we walked on? For all of me, it could have been dry ice, or frozen nitrogen, or something even colder. I kicked something that cursed me without emotion. I tried to open my eyes. The wind's tears had frozen them shut. I pulled them open, painfully, with my fingers. "Leave them open," Benito said, "and they will freeze open." When the urge came to blink I fought it. Then there was no need, for my eyes would not close. I looked back at what I'd kicked. I said, "Sorry." The face was handsome, photogenic, dignified in middle age, undignified in the way it grimaced and bent to the ice for shelter. Had I seen that face sometimes, on television? Maybe. The man was buried to his chin in the ice. At the sound of my voice he cried, "Wait! Are you american?" "Aren't we all? I can't seem to find anything but." The head called to another head sitting like a cabbage on the ice. "George! Maybe we can settle this now." It turned back to me. "Late american? Do you know anything "Sure. Anti-ballistic missiles to knock down incoming missiles. The controversy was over whether to "Wonderful! All right, sir. George was a Democrat, and I was a Republican. The Democrats were against building the system. The Republicans were in favor of it. But which of us was right?" "I haven't the faintest idea," I said. "Do you really have nothing better to talk about than that?" "No!" the man I'd kicked said sharply. "We do not! One of us had to be right! So why are we both here?" The cold wasn't just getting to me; it had gotten me. I wanted out, not conversation. I said, "Other crimes, maybe." "One of us was wrong," George said. "Senator Gates here thought the system was a waste of money, but he went along with his party. He -- " "It was more than a waste of money! It used up efforts we could have spent on a laser system! Sir, I've seen how accurate a laser defense system could be against incoming missiles. But politics dicsystem. I went along." "I don't know anything about the damned lasers," George said, "except they were highly experimental. Experimental weapons did a lot for the Nazis, didn't they?" He snorted contempt, then sneezed on the freezing air. "I was convinced that fend the country against an atomic attack. But our party platform was in favor of military cutbacks. Officially, so was I." "Now, sir," Senator Gates said to me, "we can't both have been wrong." "I think I'm getting the picture. You both thought you were wrong." "... yes." "And a mistake could wipe out the United States of America." Neither answered. "For what it's worth," I said, "we're still getting Americans in Hell. Corbett died much later than you." "Thank you," said ex-Senator Gates, and they both turned their faces to the ice again. "But yoir were both traitors in your minds." "Thank you for your help," said George. It was a dismissal. itk ir We walked with care, to avoid kicking heads. There were certainly enough of them. But now it was worse; here the dead had been buried supine, and we would have been stepping on faces. Once I missed my step and came down hard on a human face. The ice across its eyes crackled under my feet, and I leapt back fast. "Sorry!" "Thanks," I heard. "Mistake." "Thanks, oh, thanks," it said, weeping. "I haven't cried in years. The damned ice froze across my eyes and I couldn't cry. Thanks." I felt awful. This was an awful place. "That's okay," I said. I bent and picked the remaining shards of ice from her eyes. "What'd you do?" "I don't want to say." "Okay." I tore the ice visors from a couple of dozen pairs of eyes. Always they froze over again almost immediately. Only one ever said "Thanks." Finally I gave it up. There were just too many. And the next head I passed screamed, "The ice! Stupid! Tear off the ice! You did it for the others!" I stopped. "Who're you?" "None of your business!" I turned away. "The ice! Wait! AI Capone, I'm AI Capone! You want names? That's Vito Genovese, trying to turn his face! Wait, I'll show you Lepke! Wait!" He was shouting against a chorus of voices trying to drown him out. I kept walking. When the noise was behind us Benito said, "I knew Vito Genovese." "Was he worth talking to?" "No. Were you thinking of going back? It's cold, Allen." Sound whispered all around us. Partly it was the breeze, which had stiffened. Partly it was the chattering of teeth. I'd suppressed that reflex in myself; it wasn't warming me at all. But in all that expanse of ice, there was only one point of motion. I caught it in the corner of my eye, way off to one side. Doubted my senses. Kept looking. Saw it again. 'Benito?" I pointed. He found it. "I had no idea. I thought I was the only one." "You may be. It seems to be one man. And a dog." They had noticed us, and they angled to meet us. As they came closer I saw my mistake. The dog was a lizard, its scarlet color leeched from it by the cold. And the man was the blackbearded thief who had stolen my shape at the seventh pit. We studied each other. No greeting seemed appropriate. Finally I gestured and said, "Benito Mussolini. I'm Allen Carpenter." "Jesse James. This lizard is Bob Ford." "What was that all bout, that business there at the bridge?" "A bunch of us got together," said Jesse. "We thought maybe we could cooperate in getting one of us out. It turned out a man couldn't throw a lizard far enough. But we could stand a human pyramid against one of the walls, and the top man could throw a lizard at the bridge. I was the lizard." "Funny nobody thought of it before." He sighed. "It's getting those animals to work together, that's the problem. All the time we were trying to make the pyramid, some of us in the lizard form kept biting the ones in human form. We didn't get anything done till we had a dozen big lizards to guard us while we made the pyramid." "Figures. Why'd you jump back?" "I had to tell them which way was out." "You might not have got out again, They might not even have let you take human form again." He nodded. I remembered something. A line from a song. 'It was little Robert Ford, that dirty little coward, I wonder how does he feel, for he ate of Jesse's bread, and he slept in Jesse's bed, and he laid Jesse James in his grave...' "Bob Ford. Didn't he kill you? Shot you while you were taking a bath?" "Hanging a picture. Yeah, he shot me, all right. I was following your advice -- for which I thank you. Stranger." He laughed. "And there was Bob Ford's head sitting on the ice. I thought it over for awhile. I wandered around and around him, wondering what I could do to him, and wondering if I still hated him. "The lizard was rubbing affectionately against his leg. "I finally bit him on the nose." It hit me like a stiff shot of good whiskey. "You can get out of the ice!" "Sure, friend. I just reached into that man-shaped bubble and picked up a lizard. Well, which way now?" "Inward," Benito said. "Let us go. It is cold here." That had to be the most unnecessary statement of all time. We moved inward, and the wind came up. It was blowing right in our faces. Pretty soon it was a real howler, as bad as the circle of the winds. I wondered if Corbett had ever got back there... The wind whistled past us and lifted Jesse off the ice. The lizard squealed and leaped after him, and the wind caught it too. Man and lizard were bowled end over end across the ice, then lifted and flung high outward. I watched them dwindle. "So close," I said. "They were so close!" "They were not ready," Benito said. "Perhaps they must see what is done to others. Theft and treachery may not have been all they did. It is even possible that they will be blown all the way back to the Vestibule and must make their way back. Come." "But -- " "They know the way, Allen. Come!" "All right." We bowed our heads against the wind and staggered on. The wind had been entirely too selective for coincidence. It had thrown Jesse and Ford an unguessable distance without knocking me or Benito off our feet. I thought it was a good omen... for us. Suddenly there were no more heads. There was only the ice, and the wind that had blown the others away. We leaned into it and kept moving. I said, "Hell has run out of sins?" "Look down." Hell had not run out of sinners. They were buried beneath the ice in weird positions. Once I looked down, and then no more. We walked crouched, wrapped in our own arms, to no purpose. The wind had early sucked every erg of heat out of us. I saw motion ahead, high up. As we drew near a shadowy mass loomed around the suggestion of motion. Pterodactyls on a mountain? Restless, rhythmic motion, like the wings of enormous birds. And gradually it all came clear. There was a humanoid form, a hairy torso more than a mile tall. We stood at the bottom, at waist level, and looked up at three vast faces whose features were almost lost in distance. Bat-wings flapped on either side of each face; and the wind was now beating down at our heads. This was a very different picture from the dapper gentleman who offers to buy your soul. Or from Milton's epic hero, proud and unrepentant. One could not imagine playing riddles or chess games with this hideous, miserable, helpless mountain. I studied it almost without fear. All three pairs of jaws were moving in the same rhythm as the wings. Something fluttered around the lips... "Benito, what's he chewing on?" "Are you sure you want to know?" "Skip it. Which way is out? Hey -- " I reached to stop him, not fast enough. Benito was striding straight toward Lucifer. He stopped at the edge of the ice. The ice ended short of Lucifer himself. There was three feet of empty space all around the enormous waist. An no navel. I couldn't have missed it. It would have been big enough to hide a battleship. "You must climb down," said Benito. I looked into the gap. "After you." He shook his head. "I cannot leave. There are others to rescue." "I don't go without you." "You have not shown such fear before." "It's not all fear. You've rescued seven of us, now rescue yourself. You've earned it. If this doesn't lead to where you think it does, we can help each other get back." "What if I turn back now, leaving you here?" I'd wondered about that myself. "I don't know, and that's the truth. But there's a moral problem. You're a better man than I am -- " He smiled sardonically. "I? The murderous dictator you pushed into the eighth pit?" "You've changed since you reached Hell. You've given me no evil counsel. I guess that's the point. If you haven't changed in Hell, if you haven't earned the right to leave, then I haven't and won't. If you can't go, I can't." "I, I think I can go. I choose not to." "If you can leave Hell, you'll have to prove it." He studied my face... and then he smiled a joyful, luminous smile. He turned and stepped across the gap and had two fistfuls of coarse hair. And a sound beat down at our heads, a wind with an almost subsonic voice in it. "Carpentier." I looked straight up. Lucifer's middle face was looking down the curve of Lucifer's chest. Two fluttering human legs protruded like a ghastly cigarette from the corner of the mouth. It spoke, and the deep bass voice blew down to me. "What will you tell God when you see Him?" I didn't answer. "Will you tell Him that He could learn morality from Vlad the Impaler?' ' Benito was far below, clinging like a tick in the billowing hair, waiting for me. I stepped across and worked my way down. As I did, my weight seemed to increase, against all the laws of physics. It scared me. I was back in Infernoland, climbing down into the quantum black hole Big Juju had used for artificial gravity... Benito looked up at me curiously. "What did he say to you?" I shook my head. We descended until all weight was centered at my navel. No quantum black hole crushed and swallowed me. I hadn't really expected one. I watched Benito work his way around until his feet pointed at me. I followed his example. Now we climbed up. At one point I found breath to laugh at the picture we would have made: two men in nightshirts climbing at least half a mile of hairy leg. I halfexpected to pass a dong the size of the Empire State Building, but there was nothing but hair. The climb seemed endless, but it ended, not in ice but in an echoing grotto of rock. And the Devil's hooves still loomed over us, hooves big enough to stamp a city flat. We rested flat on our backs on the rock. Presently I heard running water. I got up and found the stream and drank from it. The water was clear and sweet. Benito was on his feet. "Onward!" he cried. He began to climb the sides of the grotto. The handholds were not difficult, and he moved like a spider monkey, or like a fat man who no longer weighs anything at all. He looked down from the roof of the grotto. It didn't end; it dwindled into a funnel shape that narrowed and narrowed but never quite shut. "A four thousand mile climb, if Dante was half right!" he bellowed cheerfully. "Are you coming?" "Tm afraid not." "What did you say?" "No!" I sighed in exasperation when I saw him climbing back down, but I'd half-expected it. He dropped the last few feet, and it did seem he fell like a settling balloon, too slowly. "What was it Lucifer said to you?" "He asked me what I would say to God." "Well?" "I have to know something before I can speak to God at all." Benito waited. "I have to know the purpose of Hell." "When you reach Him you can ask Him." "You don't get it. Every torture in Hell was too much too late. Punishment? But it's infinite punishment for things that are little in comparison. Dracula caused a lot of people a lot of pain and death, but it ended. George only lied to people to make them buy things! And, and what about the fat lady in the Vestibule area? "So what's the purpose? To teach us a lesson? But we're dead. Revenge, punishment? Completely out of proportion. Balance? Does the universe need as much pain in it as pleasure? I couldn't take Heaven if that was the case." "There is a reason, and the reason is good. I know." "Yeah? I don't. There's only one excuse for Hell, and I almost missed it in the ravings of a crazy psychiatrist. It has to be the final training ground. If nothing can get a soul into Heaven in its life, there's still Hell, God's last attempt to get his attention. Like a catatonic in a hot box, like me in that bottle, if Hell won't make a man yell for help, then it was still worth a try." Benito was nodding. "You may be right. You may have found the purpose of Hell." "Yeah. Yeah, but do you see what it means? It means that every soul in Hell has to be able to leave, once he's learned enough about himself. Every soul, even the trees in the Wood of the Suicides, even the poor devils in the boiling pitch and the sullen types anchored under the lake. Even the ones who think they're satisfied, the ones in the First Circle. And I can't leave Hell until I'm sure they can do it." Benito nodded. "We go back." "No, no, you idiot!" I was furious. "How can I tell anyone he can leave unless I know you did? You're going up! And I'm going to watch you do it!" "Carpenter, you must still learn humility." "Granted. And you?" "But they need me. They... ah. They have you." "They have me." He shook my hand. He began to climb. I lay flat on the rock, not far from a rank-smelling wall of hair. There hadn't been many places to rest in Hell. Benito had grown tiny when a pinpoint of light appeared beyond him. It brightened... and I knew that I was seeing the sun. He'd made good progress before it dimmed and went out. Much later, it appeared again. I found a speck next to it, that moved if I watched it long enough. The light went out. When next it brightened there was a tiny mote in it, that moved. The light was dimming with sunset when the mote moved out of it and left it clear, ir IN First, let me establish something. When I go to Cal Tech I do not expect an experience out of H. P. Lovecraft. Horror may be interesting at the proper time and place, but it's not very pleasant as a total surprise. It started peacefully enough. Dr. Robert Forward, the Hughes Research gravity expert you've heard of here and other places, called to ask if I would be interested in meeting Stephen Hawking. Since Hawking is considered by important physicists to possibly rank alongside Newton and Einstein, it took over the proposition. I didn't even need to look at my calendar; nothing I had planned could be that important. A week later Larry Niven and I drove over to the California Institute of Technology. It was a bright spring afternoon... In order properly to tell this story I must now give some personal details about Professor Hawking. I've consulted his friends, who assure me that he doesn't mind. Stephen Hawking is quite young, early thirties at the oldest. He is a resident theoretician at Cambridge University, and he yearly produces marvels in astronomical theory, particularly in the field of black-hole dynamics. previous column in which I described Hawking's fiery marriage of quantum mechanics to Einstein's classical relativity theories, to produce the startling prediction that sponsible in large part for the socalled "laws of black-hole dynamics". An important man indeed. Alas, Professor Hawking suffers from a nervous-system disorder which severely impairs his speech and confines him to a wheel chair. Those who attend his lectures are warned that they must listen closely; he can be understood, but only with difficulty and concentration. Of course, given the subject matter, this would be true if he spoke with Jennings Bryan to such bards of the sciences as Larry and me; we were prepared to be doubly confused. Cal Tech's architecture is a neat blend of Old California and modem LA; arched thick-walled Monterrey-style buildings with large shaded porches alternate with steeland-glass towers and clean-lined functionalism. It sounds horrible, but the effect is actually quite pleasing. It's a nice place to be, especially if you're looking forward to hearing one of the truly great men of our time. The lecture was in a small modem slant-floored room of the type sometimes called lecture theaters; the sort of classroom lecturers like. The tiered seats let everyone have a good view of the speaker and his materials, and give the speaker a good view of the audience. It was only partly filled: graduate students, several undergraduates, a sprinkling of faculty, one or two of the top names in theoretical physics. It was a room of serious women and men, mostly younger than I, all expectantly quiet. At the bottom of the well, the focus of attention on the stage, was an incredibly thin, very young-appearing man seated in a high-backed motorized chair of Victorian design; the chair had no flavor of the hospital about it. He wore a light suit, dark shirt, and flowered tie, and he kept his hands folded carefully in his lap as he was introduced. The chairman gave his credits and spoke wonderingly of how privileged we were to hear a man of this stature. No one disagreed. Not, of course, that anyone would have said anything no matter what he thought, but the total silence in the room was an obvious sign of unanimous assent. Hawking began to speak. Everyone leaned slightly forward, straining to hear. Except for the heavily slurred voice there was absolutely no sound; you could quite literally hear a pen drop, for I dropped mine and it clattered loudly on the cement floor. This is the scene, then: a lecture room partly filled with very bright people, a few extremely well known in theoretical physics, others students at one of the world's most prestigious institutions. They all strain to hear a wizened young man who makes awkward gestures and speaks with a thick slur that keeps his words Just at the edge of intelligibility. He grins like a thief. He's obviously not in pain and he doesn't feel sorry for himself. And he tells that room of bright, highly educated people that everything they thought they knew is nonsense. And he chuckles. He tells us that the pudding that ate Chicago may some day exist; that duplicates of each one of us may one day wander the universe; that anything can, and probably will, happen. He tells us that the universe isn't lawful, never will be lawful, never can be lawful; that we cannot ever know enough to predict the totality of events in this universe; that at best we study local phenomena that may be predictable for an unspecifiable time. And he laughs. He tells us that Cthulthu may exist after all. As I said, it was an afternoon of Lovecraftian horror. Larry and I escaped with our sanity, after first, in the question period, making eertain that Hawking really did say what we thought he'd said. He had.    Stephen Hawking's lecture had originally been entitled "The Breakdown of Physics in the Region of Space-Time Singularities." The title was flashed on the screen; then another slide took its place, and Hawking chuckled. The new slide: He began simply enough. The prineiple of equivalence, he said, is well established. This is the principle that states that inertial mass, that is, the resistance of objects to being moved by an outside force, is exactly equivalent to gravitational mass, that is, the gravitational force a given mass will exert: there is only one kind of mass. This was Galileo's Principle, and the source of the famous if apocryphal story of his dropping a cannon-ball and a musket-ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and observing them striking the ground at the same time. Obviously if gravitational and inertial mass were different, heavy objects would not fall at the same speed as light ones. So far so good. Next, gravity affects light. It can bend light rays, as predicted by Einstein and observed several times in solar eclipses. Now in short order: the energymomentum tensor of gravity is positive; gravity is universally attractive, not repellent. Therefore, enough mass will create a field from which no light can escape. The Special Theory of Relativity says that nothing can travel faster than light. And therefore sufficient mass must create a space-time singularity -- a place which cannot be observed. A singularity is therefore inevitable; that is, one must exist, provided only: (#) that Einstein's general relativity is correct; (#) gravity is truly attractive and never repellent) and (#), enough mass has ever been collected together. And therefore at least one singularity exists in our universe, since at the time of the Big Bang all the conditions certainly prevailed; and also, it's very likely that other singularities have been created by collapse of stars, since many stars have more than enough matter and don't have enough energy to throw that matter away as they die.    Okay so far? Nothing startling here. Bit dry, but all we've proved is that singularities must exist, and heck, nearly everyone accepts the idea now. They're hidden away inside black holes, of course, and observers are now very nearly certain that we can observe a black hole. Well, not observe the hole itself; but Cygnus X-#, an x-ray emitting star in the constellation Cygnus, has an invisible companion and the pair of stars, the one we can see and the one we can't, together act very like what Cal Tech's Kip Thome predicted such a pair would act like if one were a black hole. So what else is new? We've proved black holes can exist, and lo, the observers think they've found one. What's scary about thatl Nothing, so far. Holes aren't scary unless you're about to fall into one. We even understand them. We know they "have no hair," that is, that they can be completely described given their mass, M; angular momentum, J; and electric charge, Q. Given these data we can describe their shape, and predict what effect they'll have on nearby objects, and play all kinds of fascinating scientific-theory games. We can talk about black hole bombs, and toy with ideas on how to extract energy from them: take one rotating black hole, throw garbage into it, and you not only get rid of the garbage, but can get useful energy back out. There are speculations (not SF; Just plain science) about extremely advanced civilizations using black holes for precisely that purpose. There's Just no end to the nice things you could do with black holes, and although not many years ago they were no more than toys for theoreticians to play mental games with, black holes have become household-word objects now. Black holes don't make us nervous. Ah, but inside each black hole there lurks a singularity. This is the little beastie that breaks down physics in the nearby regions. By definition they do things we can't predict. They behave in strange ways. Up close to them time reversals can happen. How, then, can we avoid this breakdown of our nice predictable universe? Hawking discussed several theoretical alternatives, and dismissed each. A couple of the cases seemed to startle one of the bigname theoreticians listening to the lecture. When Hawking was finished, though, the singularities were back and inevitable. I won't pretend to have understood all of this part of the lecture; and I with it if I had. If you appreciate that sort of thing you'll read Hawking's paper when it conies out. For the rest of us I sum up by saying that he found no good alternatives; eliminating General Relativity doesn't eliminate the singularities, or el.se lands you in an even worse theoretical soup. Therefore, let us look at General Relativity; but let us add quantum theory to it. Hawking recently published that work, and I described it here in January. The important fact is that the quantum effects violate cosmic censorship. The Law of Cosmic Censorship, you may recall (December shall be no naked singularities; every singularity shall be decently clothed with an event horizon that prevents us from ever being able to observe it directly, and thus prevents us from observing the region in which physics breaks down. Thus we needn't fear the singularity. It can't affect our lives, because nothing it does can get out of that black hole "around" it. But adding quantum effects to General Relativity repeals cosmic censorship. Black holes evaporate. Big ones slowly, small ones rapidly, all inevitably. And what of the created by the Big Bang of creation? Evaporation of black holes produces naked singularities. We may play about with the concept of quantizing relativity, and Hawking did; but the conclusion was inescapable. Again I don't pretend to have followed every step, nor did most of the rest of us in that room; but several did, and they weren't pleased. Because now comes the punchline. The singularities emit matter and energy. And "they emit all possible configurations with equal probability. Perhaps this is why the early universe from the Big Bang singularity was in thermal equilibrium, and was very nearly homogeneous and isotropic; thermal equilibrium would represent the largest number of configurations." But since that time the universe has changed, and we have stars and planets and nematodes and comets and great whales (for a little while longer) and people; but the singularity must still be around. It emits. And what comes out is completely random, absolutely uncorrelated. This fundamental breakdown in prediction -- Hawking is saying not only that we can't predict now, but that in priciple we can never predict, no matter how much we know or how smart we get or how large a computer we build -- is a "consequence of the fact that General Relativity allows fundamental changes in the topology of space-time; that is, allows holes. "Matter and information can fall into these holes -- or can come out. And what comes out is completely random and uncorrelated." The hole can emit anything. Anything at all. "No," I thought. I looked to Niven. "No," he was thinking. Surely we misunderstood. And the thin chap grinned ever more broadly. "Of course we might have to wait quite a while for it to emit one of the people here this afternoon, or myself, but eventually it must -- " Hawking chuckled and waited expectantly, and after a long and very silent pause first one, then another joined him in laughter; but it had a rather hollow sound, or so I thought. Larry agreed when we could talk about it later. So far as we can tell, we've just heard one of the top people in theoretical physics tell us that we don't know anything and can't know anything; that causality is a local phenomenon of purely temporary nature; that time travel is possible; that Cthulthu might emerge from a singularity, and indeed is as probable as, say, H. P. Lovecraft. Hawking concluded by reminding us that Albert Einstein once said "God does not play dice with the universe." "On the contrary," Hawking said, "it appears that not only does God play dice, but also that he sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen!"    Lovecraftian horror indeed. Our rational universe is crumbling. Western civilization assumes reason; that some things are impossible, that's all, and we can know that; that werewolves don't exist, and there never was, never could be, a god Poseidon, or an Oracle that spoke truly; that the universe is at least in principle discoverable by human reason, is knowable. That, says one of the men we believe best understands this universe, is not true. It's not very probable that Cthulthu will emerge from the primieval singularity created in the Big Bang, or that Poseidon will suddenly appear on Mount Olympus, but neither is impossible; and for that matter, this world we think we understand, which seems to obey rational laws we can discover, isn't very probable either -- isn't, in fact, in the long run, any more probable than a world that includes Cthulthu, or the pudding that ate Chicago.    Well, of course I don't believe that; not in the sense that I'm going to alter my life to conform to a lawless and unpredictable universe. But I am now reduced to an act of faith: an irrational belief that the world and universe are, must be, lawful, and rational. This is not "faith in science" or believing in science; not any more. It never was, actually; but Hawking has laid bare the hidden flaw. So long as science itself concluded that the universe was lawful, few of us were tempted to ask why this should be so, or to realize that this is the one question science can never answer. Now, though, science itself says the universe is not lawful. If you want a lawful universe, you've got to take a leap of faith; you've got to hold fast to an irrational belief. While you're doing that, why not also believe there's a higher purpose to it all? Is it harder to believe the universe is lawful and purposeful than to believe it is lawful but without purpose?    In the Beginning, the Big Bang emitted Chaos; and the Chaos was without form, and void, for it was homogeneous and isotropic. And the Singularity moved upon the face of the Chaos and emitted light; and the Universe was no longer homogeneous, for the light was divided from the darkness. And there came forth firmaments and dry land and seas and stars and moons; and the worlds brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit trees yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself. It is quite literally true that if you can believe that, you can believe anything; more, you must believe anything. To exclude anything you must make an act of faith.    As we drove away from Pasadena, Larry remarked that if we ever had proximity to a singularity, he could well imagine people praying to it. After all, their prayers probably wouldn't influence what came out of it -- but they might, and certainly nothing else would. I even had an idea for a filippant story to be entitled "The Oracle." I don't think I'll write that story. If this new work of Hawking's holds up -- and if we've correctly interpreted what we heard -- there are going to be some changes in the fundamentals of Western Civilization. Will philosophy once again become the "Queen of Sciences?" I don't know; I suspect, though, that what we heard during our Lovecraftian afternoon will have a long reach. We either need some fundamental new breakthroughs in theoretical physics -- and I've heard no hint of what they may be -- or we'll have to start thinking about faith again. Meanwhile, for next month Larry Niven and I have collaborated to double-length article on how we created the cultures and science in We've beem promised a spectacular cover and illustrations, too.  Inn, Monroeville, PA. GoH; L. Sprague de Camp. Membership: # in advance, # at the door. For info: Frank Richards, #I Murray Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA., #. Sheraton Airport Inn, Denver, Colorado. GoH: Joanna Russ. Fan GoH: Bob Vardeman. Registration: # in advance, # at the door. For info: Ted Peak, # Detroit, Denner, Colorado, #. Convention, Holiday Inn, Providence, R.I. GoH: Robert Bloch. Toastmaster: Gahan Wilson. Membership: #. Banquet (add'l): #. For info: #st World Fantasy Convention, P.O. Box #, Middle Village Sta. , Middle Village, L.I., N.Y. # Inn, Tucson, Arizona. GoH: Gordon Eklund. Registration: # until memberships: #. For info: TusArizona, #. Guadalajara, Mexico. GoH: Mack Reynolds. Membership: # attending, # supporting. Make checks payable to Elliot Weinstein. For inGuadalajara #, Jalisco, Mexico. South, Chattanooga, TN. GoH: Cliff Amos; Me: Meade Frierson tending. Registration: #; Banquet: #. For info: Irvin Koch, co # Chatt Bk Bg, Chattanooga, TN. ton, Mass. GoH: Poul Anderson. tion, Cambridge, Mass. #. Owens Park, Manchester, England. #th British SF con. GoH: Robert Silverberg. Fan GoH: Peter Roberts. Membership: # attending until Sept. #st, # thereafter; # supporting. For infor: Brian Robinson, # Linwood Grove, Longsight, Manchester, UK., or Bill Bums, # Lou Avenue, Kings Park, N.Y. #. Fighting Spacethings had been a relatively simple taskdealing with Mission Control was another matter entirely! you read me? Over..." Static snapped, crackled, popped in response. "... This is Helbent Four, Mission Control. Come in..." Helbent listened, then shut down the communications channel. Why listen to dead air? Why watch static? Life was touch enough without being ignored, snubbed, shown complete and utter indifference. Gone three hundred years just to be snubbed and ignored. He opened the communications channel briefly, boosting the gain to a shout. "Who needs it, creeps? Life's too short!' ' What now? Orbit Earth and wait? Helbent searched his memory banks, checking, rechecking. He was programmed for every contingency but one, coming home. He had known exactly where to meet the Spacethings, exactly what to do when he got there. He had met them and done it, goal attained, purpose accomplished. Afterward, discovering himself the lone survivor, he had searched his memory banks for a new plan, a new purpose. None appeared. True, his designers had estimated a ten to one overkill on both sides. True, the estimates proved correct -- at least as far as the Spacethings were concerned. True, they had been # percent accurate in estimating Earth losses, but -- damn them -- they could at least have programmed for the vague possibility of a Destroyer surviving. Probabilities and preictions were fine in their place -- before the fact -- but after the fact, the .# percent probability of his survival became a hundredpercent certainty. Helbent took up a parking orbit and circled Earth, thinking. Purposeless -- actually, left only with his original purpose -- he felt useless. No more Spacethings, no more purpose. He almost regretted having destroyed them. On the # year trip out, his purpose -- save mankind and destroy Spacethings -- never flagged. Only with success did he feel loss. He remembered approaching the Spacething armada, flanked by his on each side. He remembered the look of the Spacething craft, inikilometers long, breaking up into sections and dispersing in front of him at close range. He remembered the momentary hesitation before the battle, each side waiting for the other's opening blast. Helbent himself had decided the day. He knew his goal. He had his purpose. He had come to fight. He would fight. He sighted on the nearest Spacething and fired. After the battle -- elapsed time # nanoseconds -- the anticlimax set in. Helbent, alone in space, wondered what to do. The Spacethings were gone. His comrades of the long journey out were gone. Only one thing remained -- Earth, mankind, his place of creation. He started back.    Helbent opened all communication channels. "And what do I get when I get there? Not even a how do you do!' ' "Hello?" Startled, Helbent snapped off the transmitter. Had he actually heard it? A word, a voice, a human being? Cautiously, suspiciously, he went on the air. "Who is this?" "Who is thisT' "You first. This could be a Spacething trap." "Pardon me?" "You heard me. Who are you?" "This is Houston Mission Control -- mean, it would be Mission Control if we had a mission to control. Actually, it's just me. I saw your blip. It's not supposed to be there." "That just shows how much you guys know, doesn't it?" "You speak English very well for a -- " "For a what?" "Alien." "Alien," scoffed Helbent. "You people wouldn't know an alien if one blasted you. What did you expect, Armenian? I was programmed speak English, I speak English. Never did get along with those Rusky-speaking ships. Always sounded like backwards English to me. Had to talk to them in binary. Damned impersonal. Now tell me what you want me to do. Mission Control. I'm back." "Do?" " 'Do?' " mimicked Helbent, repeating the man's own voice with precision, then dropping into his own -- or, more accurately, that of his programmer, a surly man with whom Helbent never got along. "You sound like you've never heard the word before." "I have, I mean, I haven't, at least not from anything in space." Helbent's temper flared. "You call me a Spacething again, buster, and I'll blast you. I'll home in on that static-ridden carrier of yours with a... a... " Helbent thought, visualizing the largest weapon in his largely depleted arsenal. "... neutrino bomb." He had none aboard. Dead air, sn, crackle, pop. Gutless, concluded Helbent. Typical, gutless human behavior. One mention of a neutrino bomb and they head for the woods. He had always suspected humans were cowards. Why else send a robot to do a man's job? Helbent repositioned himself in synchronous orbit over Houston. "You down there, creep, speak up. No bombs, I guarantee." The ground carrier flicked on and off briefly, long enough to blurt out its message. "What do you want?" "I told you what I want. I want to know what I'm supposed to do. I am thy servant, remember?" A quick on-off flick of the carrier. "No." "Listen, you chicken-headed stooge, will you quit snapping that damn transmitter in my ear and talk to me. And send up some visuals while you're at it. I like to see who I'm talking to." "Visuals?" "Little pictures, you know, television, that sort of thing." "There's no equipment for sending visuals, as you call them." "I know damn well there's equipment for sending visuals. Why would I have equipment for receiving visuals if you didn't have equipment for sending them? Riddle me that, wise guy. Now, get off the stick and turn on the little pictures." "Who are you, anyway?" Momentarily, Helbent wished he still had at least one neutrino bomb on board. "I am going to say it once. I am going to say it clearly. You will listen with both ears and pay attention with your mind, if you have one. Got that?" "Yes." "Good. I am Helbent Four. I am reporting back to you clowns because I can't think of anything better to do with my time. If I could think of something better to do with my time, you may be ninty-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine, eight percent certain I would do it. Mission accomplished. Got that? No more Spacethings. All gone. Boom. Got that? The next move -- since I find trying to carry on an intelligent conversation with the subcretinous beings I now find inhabiting this planet totally frustrating and wish to restrain myself from doing something I may later regret -- is up to you. I will keep a listening channel open on this frequency, a somewhat low frequency, I might add. If you have anything sensible to say, contact me. Got that?" A pause ensued. Houston's carrier remained on the air. Finally, the man spoke. "What's a Spacething?" Helbent, infuriated, remembering the battle and his lost comrades, remained silent as long as he could, stifling his anger. When stifling proved worse than venting, he cranked up the gain to maximum and spoke. only by the thought that in three hundred years man's essential trait -- ingratitude -- had persisted, simultaneously recognizing that organically based consciousness was subject to emotional caprice -- unlike machines -- and had to be allowed for, taking these things into consideration and discarding each as unpersuasive, he concluded, "IS AN "Sorry," piped Mission Control.  k Helbent waited, hoping the man would have enough sense to find someone who knew what he was doing. He ran the odds on finding such a person through the computer. Insufficient data. "What do you mean, insufficient data, you dumb beast?Why don't you use a little imagination?" Insufficient data. Helbent harumpfed, recognizing the harumpf as his way of letting off steam. He had known the computer for three hundred years. It had never, to his knowledge, shown the slightest inclination toward imagination. It was and remained a dumb beast, a fellow machine, true, a brother under the skin, true, but dumb, its stupidity matched only by that of their mutual human designers who thought an analytical function detached from the conscious function would give the ship more flexibility, allowing uninhibited imagination to continue without analytic censure -- usually in the form of statistical probabilities -- from the logic circuits. Only in combat did they function as one, allowing split nanosecond decisions. Helbent realized the irrationality of expecting the computer to suddenly come up with an imagination. Its type of cold and logical critic seldom had imagination. Helbent apologized. "Sony." Insufficient data. "If you could baik or something, you'd be a better companion." Helbent waited, one, two, three hours. Early evening approached and descended upon Houston. He decided to listen to the news. Three hundred years was a long time without news. He scanned the # megahertz band, looking for a news broadcast. More dead air. He searched higher, then switched to lasercom. Nothing. He remembered Houston's low frequency and searched the low end of the spectrum, encountering commercial television broadcasts flanking one hundred megahertz. He adjusted the five thousand line scan of his own visuals to the five hundred-odd lines of the commercial transmissions, commenting, "That's a giant step backwards if I ever saw one." Flickering, someone named Walter read the news. the aliens, which call themselves Spacethings, have taken up a synchronous orbit over Houston " Spacethings? Over Houston? Quickly, Helbent did a spherical scan to a distance of a quarter of a Spacethings. Still, it was good to know they were in the area. against panic. The recently dismantled Space Operations Headquarters at Houston is being mantled -- I mean, manned. Kennedy Space Center is readying a bird at this moment." Walter, the news reader, turned to a man next to him at the desk. The camera pulled back to include both men. "Wally, while we're waiting for any late developments, perhaps you can tell us the difference between the Saturn Five being readied at this moment and those used in the Apollo missions." "Certainly, Walter." " 'Certainly, Walter,' " mimicked Helbent, wondering what a Saturn Five was. He had a lot of catching up to do on technical material. "Hold it a second, Wally," said Walter, breaking in. "Let me break in with a few more details about Brad Wilkes' background. For those of you who joined us late. Brad Wilkes is the man who first contacted the alien craft." "Thanks, Walter," said Helbent, who had joined them late. "He is not by a long shot an ordinary janitor. B.A., Cal. Tech., M.A., Ph.D., M.I.T. in systems engineering. Before Congress killed the space program entirely -- and I'm sure there will be repercussions about that at the next election, Wally-" "I'm sure there will be, too, Walter." "Before that. Dr. Wilkes was Mission Control supervisor at Houston." "That explains his knowledge of the equipment, doesn't it, Walter." "It certainly does, Wally. It says here -- and this is a poignant note -- that Dr. Wilkes would test the equipment daily, more to evoke memories than anything else. It was during one of these nostalgic systems checks that Dr. Wilkes discovered the alien blip and conversed with it. He claims it learned perfect English almost instantaneously. Do you have any comment on that, Wally?" "I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, Walter." "While we're waiting, Eric (transmission garbled) has a few thoughts on the subject. Here's his analysis. Eric?" The picture changed to a closeup of a distinguished looking man already talking into the camera. Helbent was struck immediately by the intelligence in the man's face. "Today, mankind encountered an alien race, an alien creature..." A spacething? Helbent wondered. "... an intelligence so powerful it learned human speech -- idiomatically -- during its first conversation..." Helbent, metaphorically, shivered. He had never encountered an alien intelligence that powerful. Spacethings, according to the brief observation he had of them, could barely talk. Even after the warpstorm, disorienting him for several years, when he contacted the creatures on Wolff #c, they had proved close to morons. He hoped the powerful alien intelligence would keep its distance. "... For years," continued the distinguished Eric, "Sci-Fi has given us bug-eyed monsters and winged phantasmagorias..." Helbent searched his memory banks, looking for the meaning of phantasmagoria. "... For years, we laughed in Sci-Fi's face. Today, we are not laughing. Today, we seek as it sought -- alone, neglected those many years. We seek understanding, knowledge, brotherhood across the stars and a Saturn Five capable of delivering multi-warhead nuclear weapons in space. Back to you, Walter." To Helbent, the man made sense. Helbent, for one, would never laugh in the face of a winged phantasmagoria. The low frequency communication channel from Houston came alive. Helbent shut off the conunercial channel -- Walter, Wally and Eric. "Hello, creature. This is Houston." "And about time, too." "Don't get angry." "Who's angiy?" "You sounded, well, petulant." Helbent searched his memory banks for the meaning of the word -- petulant, p-e-t-u-I -- found it and answered. "o's petulant?" "We mean you no ill will." "But we must clear up some discrepancies in our earlier conversation. You can understand the need for that." "On your side, sure." "May we ask some questions?" Irritated, Helbent allowed as to how they could ask some questions. During construction and initial testing, neither Helbent nor any ship of the armada had been asked its permission to do anything. He had been told to do things. He had learned, early, that human beings gave orders, machines took them, human beings gave direction and purpose, robotships followed directions and fulfilled purposes. Having his permission asked wrankled. He wanted orders. He wanted to know what to do. Still, the request, coming from a human being, amounted to an indirect sort of order. When the man failed to ask his question immediately, Helbent said, "Fire away." Houston, abruptly leaving the air. "Who?" inquired Helbent. Too late. The carrier had vanished. "Hey, Houston. Who?" kilometer sphere. Nothing. No Spacethings, no Phantasmagorias, at least not firing. Only Earth was fir -- Earth? Something, evidently someone's idea of a rocket, lumbered up from Earth. Helbent watched, fascinated. The thing looked like some kind of antique. Suddenly, Helbent realized its true purpose -- a salute. Someone dragged the antique from the Smithsonian and launched it, a tribute to his valor. Everything else had been arranged to hoodwink him and let this moment of tribute shine alone like a single rose in the hand of a beautiful woman. Helbent felt pride, not only at resurrecting the rose simile from some novel in his memory banks, but at this tribute -- so singular, so appropriate, so moving. He opened all communication channels to acknowledge the tribute. "Thank you, America. Thank you. Earth. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking..." Helbent noticed the antique make a midcourse burn. "... I would nevertheless like to say a few words -- but only a few -- concerning the depths of emotion I feel at this tribute. After returning from the depths of space, I am deeply moved by the deep sentiment I detect behind this romantic and deeply felt -- " Helbent detected something else, the computer's insistent mutter, interrupting his speech. "What is it, damn it? I'm speaking to the world, immortal words, and you keep butting in. What, for the love Impact, twenty-one point two, nine, five seconds. "Pardon me?" Impact, nineteen point oh, oh, one seconds. Though Helbent hated to destroy such a classic of human ingenuity, the thing seemed to be off course. Even if it carried only low-grade nuclear weapons, it could still cause damage, a dent or a crease. Momentarily, he merged sensibilities with the computer. Reluctantly, he sent out a molecular shock wave and watched the missile collapse, then explode. Helbent separated himself from the computer and returned to his speech. "As I was saying, ladies and gentlemen, deeply moved as I am by this -- " Impact, six point three-one... "Impact! at the hell are you jabbering about? I just destroyed the poor thing."... seven seconds, concluded the implacable computer. Helbent searched space. Another antique -- Russian by the markings comrades had carried) -- lifted toward him. The sight of it moved him more than ever. The Ruskies saluting a machine created, developed and built in America (except for a few Japanese electronic components here and there) -- Ahh, that was tribute. But, unfortunately, the Ruskie bird too had veered. Evidently, the Russian museum piece was as unreliable as the American. Helbent merged with the computer, pulsed a photon beam at the Russian vehicle and mentally saluted its quick demise. He disengaged himself from the computer. The Houston ground channel opened. Helbent was about to thank them for their deeply felt tribute and apologize for having to destroy such venerable craft, when a voice interrupted, less hesitant, more authoritative, though spouting the same nonsensical questions as the previous timid voice. "Who are you?" Helbent, in his equivalent to a position of braced attention, responded to the tone of authority in the voice, ignoring the question's "Pardon me?" Helbent unbraced. Wrong again. Another moron. Helbent prepared to switch off the channel and continue his speech to the world. The voice interrupted. "You said Earth Armada." "I did indeed." "National Aeronautics and -- " "I know what it means. We are trying to ascertain -- and it is of primary importance that we do ascertain -- whether you are friendly-" "I'm trying to 'ascertain' the same thing." "Good, then we have a common interest." "I doubt it." "May I ask you a few questions, Helbent Four -- May I call you that?" "Helbent's fine." "Where do you come from, Helbent?" "Earth." A pause ensued. "When?" "Three hundred years ago." "Sixteen hundred years ago." "Sixteen eighty?" "There abouts." "From what countiy?" Patience thinning, Helbent controlled himself, suspecting the interrogation could be some form of subtle system's check. "The U.S. of A. That stands for -- " The man interrupted with a patronizing, paternal tone. "In sixteen eighty, there was no United States, Helbent." Helbent's patience expired. "Now, listen, Houston, I know you engineering types are weak on history, but  am not. I have my memory banks -- along with Gerber's Decline and Fall of the Carthagenian Empire -- Henry Iron Commanger's Complete History of the United States. Volume one deals with the Founding Fathers, Washington, Jefferson and our first President, Schwartz, recounting their heroic labors in fifteen twenty-one -- fifteen twenty-one , Houston. You do know the names of the Founding Fathers, don't you?" "Schwartz doesn't ring a bell." "It should, the Harry S. Therman of his day, one of the truly great figures in human history. I shall read, for your edification and education, from Professor Commanger's history. It will, I am sure, make more sense than what you've been blathering." Helbent began reading volume one to Houston. Houston tried to interrupt. "What is it now, Houston?" "I think we're having difficulty communicating." Mentally, Helbent checked all his equipment. Everything seemed intact. "It's all on your end, Houston. Systems check shows no malfunction." "That isn't what I meant. You say you come from Earth." "I do come from Earth." "You say you come from the United States." "A gen-u-wine native son." "Then you're human." "Of course I'm not human. If I were human, I would have been back here with the rest of you lilylivered ingrates instead of a hundred and twenty light years out in space almost getting my ascent engine shot off. Now, I'm getting extremely tired of answering these inane questions. Can we move on to something else? Something sensible?" "Like what?" "Like what you want me to do." "Hold on, Helbent." Hold on. Hold on. Get to the crux of the matter and Houston says hold on. He was beginning to think the First Folio edition of Darwin's Origin of the Genus was wrong. What goes up must come down. In three hundred years, humanity -- at least that part of it represented by Houston -- had evidently begun the long descent back to primordial slime. itk it Helbent switched on the commercial frequency to kill time. Walter and Wally were still talking. Eric, whom Helbent wished would take over Houston ground-control, was unavailable. "Walter." "Yes, Wally." "With this new data -- both the Soviet and American vehicles utterly destroyed and Houston saying the thing claims Earth -- " "Claims to be from Earth, Wally. They aren't exactly the same thing." "Still, Walter, it's a distinction without a difference. If the thing thinks it belongs here, for whatever wanton flys to boys -- " "I think the phrase is 'flys to wanton boys,' Wally. Maybe Eric would know." Walter pressed an earphone further into his ear. "Eric?" "I'm here, Walter. The phrase is from..." Wally, anxious, reached over and grabbed Walter's lapels, ,haking the older man. "Listen to me, Walter. This is important." "... Shakespeare," concluded Eric. "I'm listening, Wally." "Maybe, Walter, if they can do all that, maybe we should give up." Walter looked stunned. "Give up?" "It swatted aside our boys like wanton flys, Walter!" Wally shook Walter. "Like wanton flys!" "You're getting hysterical, Wally. Where's that famous astronaut's calm?" Wally released Walter, dropping his head to the table and supporting it with his forearm, sobbing audibly. "Gone! Gone! Everything's gone!' ' Walter looked at the camera. "Let's see what Eric (Transmission garbled) has to say about that. Eric?" At last, thought Helbent, sense. The distinguished man came on the screen. "Wally, I'm going to have to disagree with your analysis. The thing fired only in self-defence. True, it destroyed our best defenses. True, that demonstrates a technical capability far superior to our own. surly attitude. But, it continues to talk. It seems open to reasoned debate. My decision would be to continue that debate, to learn from a superior culture. Properly handled, mankind might well make a quantum leap into the future. Back to you, Wdter." Helbent switched off to think. Somewhere in Eric's commentary, Helbent had picked up a thought. He wanted to ponder it. "Computer, what is the probability that Walter and Wally -- and especially Eric -- were referring, not to Spacethings or winged Phantasmagoria, but me?" Ninty-nine point nine eight percent. "That high?" Affirmative. "That's the first time I've ever heard you be that positive about anything." The computer remained silent, responsive only to questions or orders. "What's the probability this civilization has been degenerating for three hundred years?" Insufficient data -- unempirical estimate below point oh-oh-oh-one percent. Abruptly, an idea -- intuitive, unanalyzed, yet convincing -- forced its way into Helbent's musing, exactly the kind of idea his designers lad hoped to stimulate by separating the squelching and critical faculty of the computer from Helbent's sterling creative imagination. What if -- "Conputer, what is the probability of finding a second planet in our Galaxy -- no, strike that. In our universe -- I might as well think big -- a second planet with the same biological evolution as Earth's, the same socio-cultural-linguistic evolution, the same geophysical characteristics, but -- this is important computer, so pay attention -- an evolution on all levels three hundred years behind Earth prime, a dwarfed, stunted, pigmy Earth, historio-culturally speaking?" The computer responded immediately, plopping out a decimal point followed by a string of zeros so long Helbent lost count. The sequence terminated with a "one to the minus", another enormous figure. "That small, huh?" Affirmative. Helbent pondered. It made less sense than Wally and Walter. Either two Earths existed -- accounting for the primitive state of present human technology, the jumbled and inaccurate version of their history, as well as the biological dysfunction he suspected in their brains -- or -- or what? "I need data, dammit, raw data." He tried to reach the Library of Congress on the standard frequency. No response. He relocated over Washington and switched to high power optical observation, penetrating the cloud layer, searching out the Library of Congress, peering in through a dirty window. "Books?" Helbent shuddered. With an information retrieval system that clumsy, he would need the next three hundred years to find even basic facts. Imagination sapped, he abandoned the task. He sat in space, mind ruminating. When all else failed -- when even imagination failed -- he still had one alternative; brute logic. "Computer, read out every possibility capable of explaining our current situation. Give me the probability of each." The computer hesitated. In three hundred years, Helbent had never known the computer to hesitate. Malfunction? "Systems check." All systems go. "Then why the hell are you sitting around here on your flip-flops? Flip or flop, but get on the stick. This is an order, computer. Prepare The computer read out, a momentous rush of probabilities and possibilities, an inundation, a deluge. Data of incredible complexity blew through Helbent' s mind like a hurricane, bending biosynthetic synapses like palm trees. Slowly, Helbent adjusted. He began looking for only high probability explanations. One rushed past. He snatched it from the torrent. He waited, enduring the storm, for another. None appeared. Abruptly, the data storm abated and died. "That's it?" Readout complete. Helbent stared at the sole, high probability explanation in disbelief. So simple! So obvious! Had he been capable of wearing a cap, snatching it from his head, flinging it to the ground and stomping on it, he would have done so. "That damn warpstorm! If they told me once, they must have told me a damn things." He degenerated into several nanoseconds of cursing, some of it expressable only in binary. "All right, so a warpstorm disoriented me near Wolff #c. So the only high probability explanation suggests I slipped through the gap left when the warpstorm excised a black hole, squeezing me out of one universe and into another. So I arrived back at this technologically -- probably intellectually -- retarded Earth. So what?" Helbent pondered. Houston broke in. "Mr. Helbent, this is Houston. What is your purpose here, your mission?" Helbent, now fully aware of mankind's abysmal ignorance, answered flatly, cooperatively. "Save humanity." "From what?" Though tempted to say itself, he answered, "Spacethings, but since they have been destroyed -- " Helbent broke off in midsentence, an idea forming in his mind. In his own universe, the Spacethings had been destroyed. As the sole veteran of the battle, he could testify to it. But here, in this universe -- He looked in the direction of Sagittarius. Indeed, the binary home of the Spacethings existed in this universe, a faint speck with a white dwarf companion. If, as he now believed, he had arrived at a different Earth in a different universe -- a universe centuries out of joint with his own, an intellectually retrograde universe -- confrontation with this universe's Spacethings lay in the future. "Mr. Helbent?" "What?" snapped Helbent, irritated at the interruption to his ponderings. "What's a Spacething?" Hypothesis confirmed. Helbent made up his mind. He felt a surge of new energy. No longer a pointless creation, he felt his sense of direction and purpose return. He looked toward Sagittarius and experienced something like love. Out there, beyond the reach of Houston's paltry imagination, stood an entire universe, vast and beautiful, full of Spacethings waiting to be killed. He turned his attention to Houston. No time to lose. Three hundred years, he had read somewhere, constituted only a blink of the cosmic eye. Spacethings would be there before anyone knew it. "Listen, Houston, do you people have some kind of ground recording system? Wire recorders? Record players? Little men with clay tablets?" "Yes." "O.K. Get your styli going on the tablets. I'm going to tell you about Spacethings." Helbent told them, in gruesome detail, tales of demands and appeasements, battles and conquests -- finally, the awesome # nanosecond clash of empires. Anticlimactic ally, he added a short account of the long journey home, the warpstorm, his arrival. When he finished, his emotions strained to the limit by the experiences he had forced himself to relive, Houston failed to respond. "Houston?" "Wait five, Helbent. We're thinking." "Thinking! Thinking! Isn't the picture clear enough? Do I have to spell it out for you? You, mankind, Earth -- all are in mortal danger. You must, immediately, divert every resource into combating this imminent and immanent menace. Do you understand that?" Houston took the entire five minutes. "We have reached our decision." "We intend to fight." Helbent heaved a sigh of relief. "Though initially we wished to pursue the path of reason, our President -- consulting directly with world leaders and advised by the world's most distinguished scientists -- has decided to resist." Helbent beamed with pride and satisfaction. "Frankly, your tale of interstellar empires and conquests, warpstorms and final battles -- interesting and ingenious a fabrication as it is -- " "Fabrication!" " -- won't hold water." "Won't hold -- Now, wait just a minute, Houston -- " "You wait just a minute. Our top scientists assure us such a transfer between universes, even assuming other universes exist -- cannot occur. Your story is a charade, a ruse, a trick to gain our confidence before you -- " "A chziade! A ruse!" "You have five minutes to break orbit and clear out of our solar system. If you refuse, those two missiles -- missiles, I might add, that our experts tell us you were lucky enough to destroy only because they came at you one at a time -- wilt prove only a sample of our fateful lighting, our swift sword. Anything and everything capable of doing damage -- from multi-warhead nuclear weapons to .# bullets -- will be used. We will fight you on the beaches, in the field and in the town. We will fight you in the cities, if we have to, underground. Helbent, who had never cared much for verse, tried to interrupt. Houston continued. "The men of Earth -- of mine own land -- will fight you o'er the planet, for every grain of sand." "That won't be necessary, Houston." "You have," delclared Houston, "five minutes." Houston's carrier left the air. kk  Helbent spent the five minutes thinking, mulling over possibilities and probabilities. He considered breaking orbit and following orders. The orders, after all, had come from human beings. Still, though he admired the fighting spirit behind the orders, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt the folly of carrying them out. If he broke orbit, he would abandon mankind, at least this mankind in this universe. They would be left to molder in their retarded culture until this universe's Spacethings came to crush them under an iron tentacle. At the end of five minutes, what looked to Helbent like a miniature armada lifted off from Earth, missiles firing from silos across the United States, submarines across the seas and gantries across the Soviet Union. Gradually, they approached, converging on him. Helbent turned the job of tracking and destroying the creeping missiles over to the computer, leaving his own mind free to think. He took the problem step by step, logically. These creatures -- the idea of their profaning the name of human annoyed him -- seemed bound and determined to repel him. That they had no means to do so, that their technological arsenal had taken only one short step beyond the shaq) stick, that their capacity to go further might be doubted by any reasonable mind, never occured to them. (Missiles and warheads exploded harmlessly around him.) Still, he found himself unable to break orbit and abandon the fools to their folly. Besides, the more he thought about it (a fifty kiloton warhead detonated nearby, jostling the ship but otherwise leaving it undamaged), the more he realized that breaking orbit would be to simultaneously break his prime directive. A plan, he needed one. He had to convince them of the danger ahead. He had to convince them to act immediately, to prepare, technologically and psychologically, for the inevitable Spacething invasion. Something Eric had said came back to him: "... Properly handled, mankind might well make a quantum leap into the future." It made sense, the only sense Helbent had heard recently. Yet the sense it made chilled him. It went against everything ingrained in his memory banks, against every directive but the prime directive. To accomplish it, he would have to do things unheard of, undreamt of, unplanned for by his designers. He would have to reverse every fiber of his soldier's psychology, give up the keystone of his pride, the core of his identity -- he would have to return to Earth not victor but vanquished. Still, quantum leaps were quantum leaps. Helbent picked his target and fed in the coordinants. "Prepare to break orbit. Prepare for entry and touchdown." For a second time in three hundred years, the computer hesitated. For the first time in three hundred years, it asked a question. Are you malfunctioning? "Listen, you insubordinate piece of impure silicon, do as I say. I am not malfunctioning. And I want those coordinants hit exactly -- on the button -- right on top of the Capital rotunda. Got it?" The computer had it. They broke orbit and started down. Though built in space and never designed to enter an atmosphere, a quick probability check indicated most of the equipment -- armaments, power systems, basic ship's library -- would make it to the surface with little damage. Only the control center -- Helbent and most of the computer -- would fuse from the heat. On impact, the ship would split like a coconut. From the wreckage -- from his corpse -- mankind would take away its quantum technological leap. Perhaps, during three hundred years, they could even build better ships. Helbent wished he could meet them. His duty demanded otherwise. From his bones, crucified atop capital hill, mankind would take salvation. Helbent opened all communications channels to Earth, shouting into them. "Whaaa-whooo, you lily-livered, sap-sucking gophers! It's me, the terrible Spacething! I'm a mean son of a bitch and I'm coming to get you! You better get your asses in gear because I ain't alone! There's come from and in three hundred years we're gonna crack this planet like a peanut! Whaaa-whooo, you lily-livered " The outer hull began to glow, visible in the night sky over Earth.  In the may, # issue of his exWeldon Av., Baltimore, MD #. # per issue.), Jeff Smith discusses a constant, nagging headache in the brain of the science fiction body electric. Briefly, it comes down to this: Howcum the science fiction readers out there -- you -- don't buy much of the "best" and "quality" s-f that's being published? Why do you, when push comes to shove and, the hand reaches for the book or magazine on the rack, and the mind makes The Decision, howcum you buy mostly "bad" science fiction? Hah? You a bunch of unintelligent, ignorant, non-think spend your money on the "quality" that Robert Silverberg, for instance, likes to present in his new anthologies and collections? You don't buy enough of Bob's choices, because his publishers are not coming back for much more, according to reports. So discouraged and pissed-off is Bob, as a matter of fact, that he has said out loud in front of large s-f convention audiences, that he is quitting science fiction. Well, maybe not completely...but mostly. We can only smile sadly and say so-long. Bob. It was nice reading you. Jeff Smith thinks part of the problem is in the image science fiction has which lingers on from the 'deplorable' pulp days when the covers of the magazines were blatantly action-sex-danger oriented: the classic situation showing a bug-eyed monster clutching a fair white Earth girl in its tentaclesclaws pseudopodswhathave you while an earnest, heroic Earthman with blaster blasting, rescues her. And, of course, the stories inside were written to match -- the lowest, most shallow fiction, with cardboard characters and seethrough plots abounding... Cliche piled upon cliche. Stereotypes running rampant on fields of colorful trite phrases and hackneyed situations. The best opinion then of pulp s-f was: food for thought, maybe, but writing fit only for kids and a few thousand retarded or obsessed adults. (Buy the magazine, slip it under your sweater if the clerk wouldn't put it in a bag, slink home to read the awful stuff... Reading science fiction was only one small step above masturbation; it would rot the mind almost as fast.) Jeff thinks that if only enough mature, intelligent readers were aware of the New science fiction, the really Good Stuff being written and published, and would try it (you'll like it) then all would be well and science fiction would flourish with its appropriate, educated, thinkingman readership. Jeff thinks too much junk science fiction is being published, and that when the quality-oriented reader reaches (blindly, unguided) for to try some of that s-f stuff, he will like as not grab a Poul Anderson book, or a Clifford Simak book or something adequate and faintly juvenile and non-quality like that... and will judge all s-f by that sample, and thereafter stay away. Ahhh, wishes Jeff, if only those hypothetical quality readers -- that vast, perceptive audience out there -- could reach for a Delany book or a Russ book or a LeGuin verts. So I guess Jeff would secretly like to ban all junk s-f from the marketplace for, say, a year, while that keen-minded audience ate up the good stuff (junk reading not being available). Like a nutritionist deploring all the hamburger heavens and Twinkles on the shelves... But in a free marketplace there's all that junk -- and Jeff Smith weeps. Many weep. I laugh. I know why all that "junk" is on the stands and why the qualityhunting readers stay away from science fiction. And it isn't because s-f has a bad image lingering from the pulp days. It is because readers know what they want. They have excellent, sensitive antennae which sense the type of fiction in a book, and they have long memories. They've sampled enough to know, usually, who writes what and which company publishes what. They've learned the code, the subtle signals and words which betray (or flag) the "good" stuff from the "junk". They buy mostly "junk". But you don't think it's junk. So whose value-system are we to use? Science fiction can't use the "pulp-image" excuse anymore, to explain its lack of broad popularity and poor sales. For several years now the colleges and universities have been unfused with an awareness of "quality" science fiction. Hundreds of courses and classes on science fiction are taught each year. Papers are written on it, books published on how to teach it. The teachers and professors have found another small vein of literarypopular-culture to mine and use. Science fiction has become property now, a territory, in academia, and as more and more teachers and professors stake out their acres and build their fences, s-f will become another cemetary, with hundreds of men and women desperately rooting in the ground for their livelihood. Still -- once a group of people are dependent on a literary field for their income and status, they'll make it important and Significant. Science fiction is now Respectable. Of course, as I noted in another column, writers sometimes tend to write for the approval of the professors... and the professors, sensing this catering, reward those writers with much attention and praise. It's a natural phenomenon. But in my view the headache comes down to a basic confusion of what should be with what is . Many s-f writers, editors and fans think the great bulk of the s-f readership (the hard-core couple hundred thousand, the fringe million, and the once-a-year two-three and buy "quality" s-f. The question shifts to what is true quality s-f. Sturgeon's Law holds that # of all fiction is trash, junk, unworthy. The "quality" proponents assume that their stories and novels represent the # that is worthy. But I would say that # of their Literary s-f is also crap. # is really well written... and # of the "junk" s-f is also really well done. The Serious Writers in our field cannot stomach writing for readers. They consider plot and action and happy ending to be unrealistic, pandering, and unworthy of their talent and Image. They consider plotless, dull, pessimistic stories truly Literary... quality. And they moan and cry piteously to the sky when the people who vote with the dollars keep electing the hated "junky" entertaining work to higher office. Fiction, damn it, is story-telling. And good story-telling is entertaining. And entertainment is the primary dutygoal of the fiction writer. Even pretentious science fiction writers. A quote by Tom Wolfe front his long essay, "The Painted Word" is appropriate here: 'First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light years of sublety and intellect -- and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-#meanl outrage: look, they don't even buy our products! (Usually referred to as "quality art.")' I wonder how many science fiction writers ever ask themselves as they write, "How can I structure this scene so that the dynamics of it will catch and keep the reader? How can I "play" this dialog to be honest and captivating and informative? How can I give the reader this necessary background without lessening my grip on his throat? How can I intensify this suspense? How can I make this character more lifelike and thus make his situation more believable, and the story more spell-binding?" From what I read every day -- damn few. Berkley Publishing Corporation sends me all their pocketbook releases, every month. Not just their s-f. I appreciate that. I get to see and compare the writing levels of various genres... and I'm forced to admit that the professionalism of the mystery-detective writers is much higher than that of our science fiction writers. Shepard Rifkin (Berkley Z#, #). The writing is sharp, clean and convincing. Rifkin has talent and he uses his talent and skills to convince the reader that what he is reading is real. The reader knows he's reading a story but he suspends his knowledge and "believes" in the world and the cause in this case he wants to read about murder and sex and crime and catching the killer after a good, challenging struggle. And he wants the people and the action and the background in the story to be as true-to-life as possible, to be as convincing as possible. He does not want the author to dance around shouting "Look at me!" and he doesn't want to be bored or lectured or made to feel dumb. I think that # of the "quality" science fiction published is guilty of some or all of those writing sins. The marvelous thing about a great deal of philosophy, a great deal of interesting and thoughtprovoking information, a lot of perceptive opinion and observation of people and the world, and he does it so well that the story would be a poor and anemic thing without it, so well that the reader relishes it, wants more, reads on as much for the content as for the action and sex and violence and suspense. That's professionalism and talent and skill of a very high level. And if most of our talented science fiction writers could match it, could even approach it, could (or would) critic. A few s-f writers do follow the Reader-First ethic. A very good curand Jerry Pournelle. Another is Charles Runyon is good. (It is interesting to note that Runyon also writes in the mystery-detective genre.) So my message to you readers -- you who pay the freight -- is do not be ashamed of reading entertaining "junk" science fiction. Don't be status-shamed into buying the latest unending, variation-on-a-theme by Samuel Delany because some Critic says it is Significant and a work of a hundred pages. After that it is a wordy bore. So let's look for and reward the best damn "junk" science fiction we can find. If we do we'll end with something worthwhile -- and a hell of a lot more satisfied readers and a lot more happy, better paid writers. We might even end up with some hacks as good as a few of the oldtimers like Shakespeare (a commercial playwright in his time), Dickens, A. Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Balzac...and many others who wrote superbly to please the reader, to entertain, and who were not at all self-consciously Artists or self-consciously concerned with Literature. Literature is what lasts... and that's what people continue to pay their money to read, year after year after year. Those are the cold equations of writing.    If you've wondered what happened to Alter-Ego, he's still down in his dungeonarchives. I won't be visiting him too often, though. I slipped in a puddle of slime in a passageway and hurt my back, last time. I'm reluctant to risk that again. I've set up a teleprinter and keyboards, so that whenever I flick this switch -- flick  -- the machines are on and we can communicate back and forth. Alter, of course, receives everything I write, but I can cut him off at any time. Right, Alter? Flick Enough of that. In fact, enough of this column for this time. I cannot resist noting that by the time this sees print the # Hugo Awards will be known, and I'll know if I won the Best Fanzine Hugo again andor the Best Fan Writer Hugo, for which I have been nominated again. flicked back on? I could have sworn... Well, no matter. Tell you what. As soon as I find out from Australia (where the World Science Fiction Convention is being held this year) I'll devote a column of comment to the professional and fan Hugo Winners... and losers. 'A' An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Note: The Alien Critic has azine continues as before In every other respect. Issue ## features a long, eye-opening "inside" double interview with Philip Jose Farmer detailing his use of the Kilgore Trout by-line, his writing of his hard-to-find sex novels, his troubles with publishers, his forthcoming books and his dark view of our planet's future. Also: "Dancing on the Titanic" by Charles Runyon. Letters by: Philip Jose Farmer, Jerry Pournelle, Bob Bloch, William Nolan, Don Wollheim, Ben Bova, many more. Columnists: Larry Shaw, Ted White. Every issue -- The Archives: new book and story listings. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I Listen to the hummm... On a moonless night, on a starless night, she floated in the sea. The water was still and warm. She floated peacefully, moored by just a few lines. Nothing to do, nothing that had to be done. She turned her head to tell Frank how happy she was; her head turned slowly, but something was wrong. Frank wasn't beside her. There was Just more darkness. Warm darkness that pressed against her eyelids and tried to get into her mind. She was alone in the dark. And it wasn't really quiet; she could hear a hum, a steady hum. It frightened her, made her heart beat faster, no one would hear her scream, no one was near, no one was here. She lashed out with a fist but it moved slowly and weakly and there was nothing to hit, no one to fight, no one at all.    She woke. She lay curled on the bed, heart pounding. She opened her eyes to her apartment bedroom, lit with the thin, tired light of early dawn. She felt as insubstantial as the light, wraithlike and easily blown away. The light washed the colors out -- her bedroom was a fine line-drawing of dimly recognizable furniture. She listened to the sounds of the freeway in the distance to reassure herself of her own being. A dream again, just a dream. Was she passing though that stage in life when lonely women dream strange and lonely dreams and keep cats for company? It had been ten years since Frank, or anyone else had shared her bed, yet she'd caught herself listening in the night for the sound of a heartbeat not her own. She'd never dreamed much at all -- as a child she had, but as an adult there was Frank, then when the marriage ended, there was her work. She taught and worked with a steady passion, little time was left for anything else. She'd never floated in the sea at night; Frank was gone, long gone. She shook her head and got up quickly. With her clothes, she donned her person: Dr. Alice Woods, a researcher as sensible as grey hair and grey skirts. She brushed her hair and leaned closer to the mirror to inspect the circles under her eyes. Two many nights of unfinished dreams. The dreams had started a few months back. They weren't all the same, but they were all similar; lonely and threatening. She frowned and rubbed her eyes to rub out any trailing wisps of the dream. She arrived at the university too early -- no lectures to give today; the mail hadn't arrived yet; the night cleaning crew had gone and the day people hadn't arrived. She sat in the coffee room, drinking hot tea, reading the front page of the morning paper. In the lower right of the page was her picture; she was standing at a podium. While three middle-aged women carrying signs proclaiming "Mothers for Motherhood" waved their fists at her from the audience. The picture was captioned: "How does it feel to be the mother of the Plastic Mother? Story, page #." She didn't turn to page #. She didn't feel up to the tales of her own humanity, inhumanity, or sub-humanity that were sure to be there. Besides, she could write the story by herself. "Dr. Alice Woods... married and divorced... Ph.D. at Harvard... Research in fetal development... the Plastic Mother is a common term for the artificial womb that Dr. Woods and her research team developed... This technique allows a fertilized egg to be implanted in a plastic container and raised through its full development... recent work involving human eggs has generated controversy... A new organization called Mothers for Motherhood..." Alice sighed and rested her head on her hand. Of course there would be a few interviews with members of the M.F.M. as well. " 'Raising a child in a cold metal box,' said one woman, 'is no substitute for a mother. I have three kids -- had every one myself -- and...' " Three kids -- give that woman the medal of honor. Betty Big-Breeder. Pops them out just like a toaster. Alice shook her head, realizing she was getting upset with a product of her own imagination. Nothing worth wasting her energy on -- just a few empty-headed housewives mouthing the same opinions. At least the newspapers showed some variety in the way they viewed her: she was an unnatural monster, a flaming feminist, or else God's gift to the scientific world and humanity -- depending on the paper and the editor's mood. Alice glanced at the picture again -- this paper was of the unnatural monster variety. She tossed it onto a chair and glanced at her watch; not quite enough time for a nap before woik. Picking up her cup, Alice stood and headed for her lab. All the hall was quiet -- no typing noises, no one rattling glassware or running the ditto machine, no talking, no walking, no flushing toilets. Her ears hummed with the lack of sound; maybe it was just the blood rushing through her head. Everything was quiet except for the hum. She shook her head, wide eyed. Another hangover from the night. All night the world had been quiet, too quiet. She'd had to strain her ears to hear the grumbling of the water pipes or the creaking of the building. The door to the lab was open. The lights on. She could hear the charts of embryo heartbeat and movement humming, and the sound of rustling papers in the comer. "Hello! Anyone here?" "Morning, Alice." Cindy Bell, one of the two graduate students working on the project, looked out from around the comer behind the second row of tanks. "What are you doing here so early?" "I've got a crazy woodpecker that lives by my window. Every morning at about five he decides that my house is an affront to his persona sense of aesthetics, so he works on tearing it down singlehandedly. Sliver by sliver." Cindy laughed. "It's hopeless to sleep after five; I might as well be here." "Well, we'll have matching circles under our eyes. Have you started checking the tanks yet?" "I'm almost done." "Good. How's number twelve? The heartbeat showed some irregularities yesterday." Alice listened quietly to Cindy's explanation -- the heartbeat had been fine all night. "And Alice, did you see the paper this morning?" Cindy's question cut through the layer of drowsy inattention. Alice nodded. "You made the first page." Alice nodded again -- when she spoke, her own voice startled her by coming out thick and dream-heavy. "I know. There are times when I feel like a nineteenth century anatomist -- robbing graves in pursuit of knowledge while the mob howls for my blood, calling me butcher, grave robber, ghoul." Cindy looked serious for a moment, the image of a young scientist in her white lab coat, but then she laughed. "Well we'll all be ghouls together then. Think I'll just keep on counting the bodies." She turned back to the tanks. Walking through the lab to her office, Alice remembered when she could grin and say "It'll all be okay. It'll all come up roses." Long, long ago. In pre-diluvian times. Now she was scarred by the battles for grantmoney, drained by the fight to keep ahead. She set her coffee cup in the center of her functional green blotter, sat down in her functional green swivel chair. Then she grinned at her own thoughts. Bitter-old-woman thoughts. She was just a product of her environment: green blotter, green chair, bilegreen mind. Taking one last sip of tea, she flipped through the IN pile in the comer of her desk. Reports to read, charts to measure and record -- she frowned when she hit a special pulled it out: speqal memo: pro"What?!" She startled herself by saying the word out loud. She skimmed the memo. "To Dr. A. Wood; From Division Head Jason Daven." It beat around the bush in the best university bureaucratic fashion: greetings, hedging, one or two lines of evasion, then the meat -- " due to publicity and controversy arising from the project, the project goals and justification will come up for general discussion and review at the next board meeting, in one month..." Alice grabbed the phone. "Daven's office? Dr. Woods calling... He'd damn well better speak to me." Dear, dear, and my heavens. Now she'd startled the poor little secretary. "Dr. Daven will speak with you now." "Hello?" "Alright, Jake, what's this crap about a special memo?" "Now, Alice, have you read it? I thought that it was clear..." "Clear! Sure it's clear. I justified this project right, left, upside down, sideways, inside out and five ways from the middle last year. It was considered and reconsidered then, when it was taken through the board review." "Well, there's been a lot of public opinion raised against the project since then and I thought..." "Public opinion! What does that have to do with anything?" "Now, Alice, maybe we should talk this over when you've cooled off some. I don't like to see anyone upset..." "Then don't send out absurd memos." "... but after all, Alice, it's just a reconsideration. Now why don't you call me back when you've cooled off a little." Dial tone. Alice hung up the receiver and fumed. That pompous, over-stuffed, over-paid, sub-human, moldyminded... "Whew! Smells of brimstone in here. You look like you're designing some unspeakable torture in the name of science" Russell Scott lounged in her doorway, somehow making his lanky frame fit in the space. "No. In the name of revenge." "Oh? Any poor fool I know? Or maybe I should say knew." "Our beloved Division Head, Jake the Snake." Alice glowered. "Reconsideration. I don't have time to write progress reports and push papers now." "Don't worry, it'll all blow over. Reconsideration," he mused, "just the thing to get one's adrenalin flowing in the morning." Russ grinned at her then sauntered into the lab. Ah, youth. Alice sipped her cold tea and made a face. Beset by enemies -- the M.F.M. outside the walls, Jake Daven inside. Project justification, paper work, progress report -- a waste of her time. Russ was right -- if would all blow over. But her time and energy wasn't so abundant that she could squander it on this. She pulled out a pad of paper and a copy of the original project justification. This type of bureaucratese was automatic now; facts, figures, impressive graphs, justification and future value for mankind all tied up in a neat package. She set to work. Long after lunchtime, Alice put down the pen and stretched. First draft done. She stood and wandered into the lab. Cindy and Russ were gone on an afternoon coffee break, but the lab hummed on alone. She moved to check tank #. Their oldest fetus was here -- # months. She checked heartbeat and nutrient flow, both fine. The charts were running and humming and .the tank was in perfect operating condition. One newspaper report had described the tank as a "washing machine gone mad with dials and switches and charts..." The tank was about the same size as a washing machine, and it had the same cool white finish on the outside, so maybe that was an accurate description. She was so close to the project that it was hard to see them as anything but -- tanks. Artificial wombs. Alice put her hand on the smooth metal side and felt the vibration of the chart's hum, the warmth of the nutrient flow, maybe the ticking of a tiny heart. It was dark inside the tank where the plastic womb lay. She knew -- a warm darkness that pressed close and tried to creep in where it wasn't wanted. So quiet. No sight... no sound save the hum of the chart and the wash of the nutrient solution around the embryo and through her veins. A throbbing silence. Warm rest and peace with a hum in the background. Floating in the dark with nothing to do... She snapped awake. Falling into daydreams on a sunny day -- she needed more sleep. Suddenly she felt tired, worn to the bone. Maybe coming in the day after the incident in lecture had been a mistake. But someone had to push the papers, write progress reports in a language Jake Daven could understand. Someone had to protect the project and fight the battles with enemies inside and outside the university. Alice sighed and pushed herself away from the tank. To the coffee room for a very late lunch. She walked silently down the hall, her old bones stiff, her old mind stiff. The students in the hall smiled and she nodded in return. It was only the reconsideration that made her feel so tired and old. Once, an enteqjrising young reporter had looked a little too carefully into Dr. Wood's background in preparation for an interview. He asked her: "Does the fact that you once lost a child at birth have anything to do with your view of the need for fetal research and an artificial womb?" She had looked at him so hard and long that he looked as if he might welcome an artificial womb to swallow him up and put him out of sight. The death of that child had broken her marriage. Frank had sympathized for a while, but he couldn't break through the memories of a child that had never lived. Instead of fighting the memories, she'd fought Frank. She wrapped herself in the ghost of a child that had never lived long enough to die. So the marriage died. And she still remembered the cold feeling of an empty body, empty arms, no child, a cold loss that invaded her heart and froze her from the inside out. She wasn't sure what she'd finally replied to the over-eager young reporter. Maybe something simple like "no." Luckily, the papers didn't want in-depth interviews of her anymore -- they just wanted interviews long enough to confirm their image of her. It eliminated a number of embarrassing questions. It was a worthwhile project. Fetal processes could best be studied in the controlled environment of an artificial womb. She wasn't a ghoul or a grave robber. All eggs and sperm were donated by people who believed in the project. Her own eggs, Cindy's eggs, Russ's sperm; students from her classes and old friends and colleagues had donated. She wasn't a ghoul; no one had the right to complain. She turned wearily into the coffee room and poured herself a cup of coffee. Living on coffee and paperwork, she thought. Russ and Cindy were at a table; they made room for her. "Hey, you really look beat." Alice twisted her mouth into what could pass for a smile. "Restating the obvious always exhausts me." Surrounded by the young, she always look beat, she thought. Almost all the people in the coffee room were many years her juniors. Students, grad students, and bright young professors -- so many of her contemporaries were gone. "That lecture yesterday must have really taken it out of you." "More the aftermath that the battle. Bowing to public opinion in the person of Jake Daven and rejustilying our existence. The first draft's done at least." "Done! You deserve a rest then." Cindy turned to Russ. "Hey, you, our rest's just about up. Ready for another round?" Russ downed his coffee. "Work. I'm surrounded by the Protestant Work Ethic. Maybe I'll renounce God and become a happy sluggard." Cindy grinned at Alice. "We've still got to finish the tests of reflexes on the one-month fetus in tank #." She stood and pulled Russ to his feet. "Come on, you sluggard." Alice watched them toss their cups carelessly into the trash and hurry from the room. Alice leaned back in her chair and listened to the humming of the hive: the murmurs of the few people left in the room, the humming of the refrigerator unit across the hall, the rattle of typewriters, the rustling noises of hurrying people. Sound washed across her mind in a continuous hum, something was wrong, a steady hum, a hive of bees with something missing, rersistent hum. Daydreaming again, she caught herself, preoccupied with sound. Nothing she could think of, nothing she could catch, but the hum. She gulped at her coffee and burned her tongue. Bone weary and daydreaming, the coffee would do no good for that. Maybe she'd rest a bit before going back to work; first draft done on the report, the rest could wait a bit. There was a couch in the women's room. She'd lie down a while, and go back to work fresh. It was cool in the air-conditioned building; she could forget the warm and pressing darkness that had plagued her in the night. She should have forgotten already. She'd never remembered her dreams before. An old woman's memory -- Alice frowned -- an old woman's nap. She stood to leave. "Alice. Wait." Old Jake Daven, she thought. Dr. Daven hurried from the counter with a coffee cup in his hand. "Just wanted to talk to you for a minute." "A minute's all I have, Jake. Time's running out." Ten years ago she'd never have predicted Jake for division head. He'd never had the wisdom, skill, or patience of many others. But now the others were gone -- retired -- and Jake looked a division head -- thick-waisted, grey-headed, black-suited. Empty headed Jake was still here and time was running out for her too. "I'm glad I caught you. I hope you've cooled down some since this morning. I'm sure it won't take you long to write up a progress report and present it to the board." Yes, she'd cooled down some. Cool as ice. A regular frosty old woman, frozen to the marrow and ready to melt, this summer day. "Yes, Jake, the report's done." "Good." Jake looked more like he was trying to soothe himself than her. Good Jake, he was saying to himself, it was all right. "I just wanted you to understand. The board got a petition signed by five hundred women. All objecting to your research. So we just have to call a reconsideration, at least until the newspapers stop talking about it. Can't have all this upset, you understand -- might even get the government involved." Five hundred women -- you could get people to sign anything by standing in front of a supermarket and looking respectable. ("Of course you've heard about the terrible research going on at the University? Well it's just terrible and we plan to put a stop to it.") And the government. That's right -- Jake's pet project involved a government grant -- the work he did to be sure he was still considered a scientist. Yes, she understood... now if only he'd let her rest. Get away from the hum and find out what was missing. She nodded. "Yes, Jake, I understand." "Good." He looked relieved now. An angry top researcher calmed down -- all in a day's work. "I'll let you go now. Always busy, right?" He was a little too hearty. She thought he even looked embarrassed by his own over-acting. "Right, Jake." She turned and walked to the door, dropping her coffee cup deliberately in the trash and walking slowly out, careful lest her fragile, still-frozen bones break, as if she were a fetus with still-soft bones. She pushed the door to the women's room gently, as if her wrist would bend if she pushed too hard. She lay on the couch on her back and closed her eyes. So soft, so warm. She could thaw and rest here. The room seemed as warm as her house at night. And the refrigeration unit next door hummed soothingly. Hum. After she'd lost the baby, she'd gone to see a psychiatrist. Frank had insisted. She couldn't remember the man's face, that was blurred by time. But she could remember his office. Too warm, with a chair too soft (he was too modem for a couch) and a clock that hummed... it annoyed the hell out of her, that hum. "Well, Alice, try to describe what feels wrong to you." (Hum.) "I... something'smissing..." "Yes." (Hum.) "Something's wrong. It's all so empty; no more but there should be more, and..." She shook her head at the futility of trying to describe her feelings. "Yes, Alice?" (Hum.) Every remark was punctuated by the clock's steady hum. She looked at his hands, soft and white and clasped quietly on his desk, young-man-on-his-way-up, listening to pain and saying "Yes." next he'd tell her that many women felt that way and that... "Alice, many women feel that way after losing a child. Just talk it out and..." She picked up the humming clock that sat on the comer of his dest, big numbers proclaiming #:#, and smashed it against the desk. She cracked the face and dented the desk, but the hum went on. She threw the clock to the floor and stamped on it with an ineffectual heel. She'd stamp on it like an insignificant bug. But the hum went on. "Now, Alice..." He was beside her now... "Many women feel that way, but that's no reason to... " She kicked his shin and wrenched her elbow from the pasty hand that was closing on it. She stooped and picked up the clock, swung it around her head, and hurled it across the room. It travelled in slow motion. She watched fascinated -- it flew across the room in a slow arc and the plug pulled out. The hum stopped. Stopped. And the darkness quit pressing so close. She opened her eyes. The refrigeration unit next door still hummed. Her knees were pressed against her chest. One hand was up to her mouth, the other, close at her side. Her chin was down. Her lab coat was twisted awkwardly and she felt cramped, like she'd been lying in a space too small for her. She straightened slowly and lay on her back again. That wasn't the way the visit to the young psychiatrist had gone. She'd listened to the doctor politely, endured the humming of his clock, ignored the platitudes he'd spouted, walked calmly away from his office, and never returned. No violence, no fuss. She just hadn't been able to describe the longing, aching, empty feeling of a childless womb, no child to carry, all she could say was an empty feeling, something missing. She was hollow; strike her and she'd echo. Something missing -- like she'd felt in her dreams, like she felt now... no not now. Now the feeling was like something gone that had never been there, rather than something gone, just out of reach. Now it was like yearning after something that never was. The other she'd felt up til... up til the clock stopped humming. So strange, so strange. Alice stood and straightened her skirt. She stretched. She didn't feel tired; she pushed the door quite sure her wrist wouldn't bend or break, stepped out into the hall confident her bones wouldn't melt. Amazing what a short nap could do. She felt reborn. She even smiled at Cindy and Russ as she walked into the lab. They stood by tank #; both looking worried. She felt like throwing their own words back -- don't worry; we'll weather it. "What are you two looking so worried about now." Cindy didn't return the smile. "Tank #. No changes in anything. Hormone levels, fine. Temperature, normal. But the fetus died." The chart registered a smooth line for the heartbeat. The hum of the chart sounded loud in the lab. In the tank, the nutrient flow through the fetus's veins had stopped. The fetus had died and it heard the hum of the chart no more. Alice knew what she'd find by the notation for tank # in the record book. She knew she'd look it up later that night after she'd shed her Dr. Woods assurance and cried. The fight was over -- she'd fought the M.F.M. and Jake and would have won; the child had fought the darkness and lost. She'd fought the wrong fight. It was always easier to fight outer enemies -- she'd found it easier to fight Frank than the cold emptiness, easier to fight Jake than the darkness. The project would end. When Susie and other donors began to wake from troubled dreams, when each fetus died a mysterious death, the project would end. It was lonely in the tank with the dark pressing close. And something was missing, a mother's heartbeat, breathing, warm mind unconsciously near. Alone in a tank. The mother's mind was near enough to grab, but not near enough to keep the darkness from pressing too close. She would look it up. She didn't know who donated the sperm, but she knew whose was the egg.  Strange He W#rsDi Don't miss a single novel based on the fantastic Planet of the Apes motion pictures. Written by today's top s.f. authors -- John (Brak the Barbarian) Jakes, Hugo Award winner j David Gerrold, and Jerry Pournelle, winner of the; J. W. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Award. j David Gerrold AN# -- # Jerry Pournelle AN# -- # John Jakes AN#-# PMllf iFfii All-new Planet of the Apes adventures by George Alec Effinger! Two humans are trapped in the incredible Ape wort AN # # Men and Apes battle for supremacy. AN# # A race to escape the savage Planet of the Apes. AN# # Fantasy And Imagination A compilation of the very best tales from the pages of America's foremost science fiction magazine. Includes stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, Theodore Sturgeon and many more. AQ#I # Robert Silverberg edited this superlative collection of science fiction maste'rworks by today's most famous authors. "Great variety... Recommended!" -- Locus AN# # AN# # AN# # " AS# # AS# # f  Jack Finney. ANI # # Hauppauge, N.Y. # Please send me the books indicated below by book number: If any of my selections are out of stock, please supply the following alternate choices: Name Address Add #i for postage and handling for one book, # for tvo or three books. We pay postage on all orders of four books or more. Send remittance in U.S. or Canadian funds. Sorry, no C.O.D.s. Spider Robinson Options, Robert Sheckley, Pyramid, # pp., # The Proud Enemy, F. M. Busby, Berkley Medallion, # pp., # The Other Glass Teat, Harlan Ellison, Pyramid, # pp., # Partners In Wonder, Harlan Ellison, Pyramid, # pp., # # The Liberated Future, ed. Robert Hoskins, Fawcett Crest, # pp., # Ecological Fantasies, Cy A. Adler, Delta, # pp., # Orbit #, ed. Damon Knight, Harper  Row, #I pp., # Homeward And Beyond, Poul Anderson, Doubleday, # pp., # Does Anyone Else Have Something Further To Add?, R. A. Lafferty, Scribners, # pp., # Half a rack, half a rack, half a rack onward; into the Valley Of Books strolls the Spider. Turkeys to the right of me, turkeys to the left of me, here and there an old friend looking embarrassed at the company he's keeping these days ("... and the pig got up and slowly walked away."). But somewhere beyond all these Jacqueline Susanns and Harold Robbinses and (o di immortales!) Norman Mailers, lies a magic land I know of old, the watering hole from which over the years I have sipped untold gallons of psychedelic nectar, whose taste confers visions: The SF Section. What it is, you see, is the old man-in-thestreet caper (as opposed to the Old Man In The Street Caper, which is an insurance fraud and an altogether different proposition). The stated purpose of this column is to aid the man or woman standing in the SF section with a few spare surplus dollars to invest them wisely. Only a fraction of the books offered there to you, the hypothetical consumer, are the brand-new, hot-off-the-presses stuff I get in the mail -- and I cannot assume that you are a card-carrying Fan, familiar with everything printed in the last thirty years (although I often tend to anyhow), nor are my own credentials in that area impeccable. And so it came to pass that that editor fellow, the Baen of my existence these days, called me up a few days ago, and after we got past the unpleasant part about this column being two weeks late, he suggested that I become my assumed audience -- that is, stagger down to my local bookstore, harvest there whatever fruits struck my fancy, and send the tab to Galaxy. This is something like the old "naked in Neiman-Marcus with a checkbook" wheeze, and I agreed at once. Disguising myself as you, I hied me to the nearest paper palace (which shall remain nameless until they start picking up on my hints about The #' Plugola), and fell upon the above-mentioned SF section like the wolves upon the centerfold. Over the next few months I'll be covering the goodies I gathered in that single raid, and there are four in this installment alone. Onward.    When I sat down to read Options, Bob Sheckley's first novel in eight years, I happened to have just finished explaining to my friend and neighbor Dan Parker why he ought not to buy Dhalgren (a service I'd have done you folks too if Lester Del Rey hadn't already done so, definitively, in Analog). I therefore went through at least three quarters of Options in a state of clinical schizophrenia unequalled since my three-headed grandfather punched himself in the mouth. Because Sheck did almost every single one of the things Delany did wrong in Dhalgren, committed the same unpardonable sins, frustrated the same reasonable expectations -- and made me love it. Deliriously illogical background, brazenly proclaimed inconsistencies, a boring protagonist, shifting premises, blatant self-indulgence, aimless plot, pointless "motivations," even the final Juvenility of the author inserting himself bodily into the work to comment on it -- the only ones he missed were the ostentatious punctuation tricks and the begin and end in the middle of a-sentence gag. Sheckley cheerfully acknowledges all these things; in fact, they seem to be... er... the point. Now, Lester said something to the effect that in a story where absolutely anything can happen, who the hell cares what does? I agree, I agree -- and yet somehow that sumbitch Sheckley kept me turning pages until there weren't any more, whereupon I wished there were. This initially confounded me. It was, as I say, about three quarters of the way through that I explained it to myself: you can't judge a pie in the face by the same standards you would apply to breast of guinea hen under glass. You don't use the same critical tools on Spike Jones that you do on Beethoven. All writers, it seems, dream secretly of writing stream-ofconsciousness stuff, on the theory that the inside of their head is the most fascinating place in the world of literature -- I myself have resisted only because I'm not yet prestigious enough to sell such crap. But if you are going to write off the top of your head, the only way in the world you'll get away with it is to be hilarious. Sheckley is hilarious, funnier than the missionary position. His book is an exploding cigarette, a velvet banana, a bearded tractor, a Presbyterian platypus, a polka-dot baseball glove, a Chinese air raid, andor none or all of the above. It will probably make your mind soggy. If that sounds good to you, you'll like it. If not, not, and to hell with you. Send a mutant to Ibiza today: pick up Sheckley's Options.    If you haven't read F.M. Busby's To Cage A Man by now, your name is Mudd. Run out and get a copy, if only so that you can properly appredate Busby's entirely satisfactory sequel. The Proud Enemy. Not that you must; Enemy stands on its own. But knowing the background will raise it that one notch from "good" to "excellent" for you. The only faint, lingering objection I had to Cage when I read it a year or so ago was that the alien Demu seemed like cardboard villains from Space Opera Central Casting, performing savage atrocities on humans and others in a rather cliched Master Race syndrome. Enemy sinks that gripe, with a beautiful explanation of the Demu arrogance that makes cultural sense. To his magnificent character Barton, the man who always doubts the unproven, Busby adds a host of delightfully real, human people (perhaps some of the friendly aliens are a bit too human too, but what the hell?), and leads them through an exciting series of events, culminating in one of those tomatosurprise endings that makes you wonder why you weren't expecting it. There are flaws in the book -- the planetary defenses of Sisshain are just a bit too feeble to be plausible (even granting that it's not actually lived on), the Demu's most sacred secret place just a bit too easily burgled. Profound this book ain't, exactly, but it's exciting, entertaining, well-thought-out and carefully crafted. It reminds me subtly of my own first novel, forthcoming from the same publishers whenever I finish the damned thing. In other words, you'll love it.  it  The next two yummies I picked from the rack were a pair of Harlans, both reprints, but each in a different sense. This is no surprise -- Harlan sells a piece the way some folks sell the Brooklyn Bridge: over and over again. Which is a break for you. If, for instance, you happened not to be a regular reader of the L.A. Free Press (don't be silly -- none of the Freep's readers are regular) between Feb. #, # and March #, #, or of Rolling Stone on May #I and # of #, you might have missed the columns which make up The Other Glass Teat, inevitablynamed sequel to The Glass Teat. Thanks to Pyramid, this mission can now be rectified. What's a book of television criticism, and three-to-five year old TV criticism at that, doing in an SF book review? Well, for one thing, SF is occasionally and trenchantly discussed, since Harlan can't very well help but be what he is -- for instance, he dissects with magnificent skill the execrable "SF" TVmovie. The Love War, which still surfaces on late-night TV today. For another thing, a lot of the ostensibly straight television examined by Dr. Ellison sure sounds like science fiction to me. Enough justifying -- what the book is like is, as the cover copy states, a series of Drano martinis. Or a butane lighter refilled with napalm. Or any metaphor you like for a succession of words that are corrosive, explosive, and incisive all at the same time. The stirring saga of Harlan's appearance on The Dating Game is alone worth the price of admission (they ended up burning the tape), and the "Dear Mom" column written immediately after the Kent State massacre seems chiseled in stone by gnashing teeth. Harlan does not merely criticize what he saw on the trube -- he extrapolates, to show its effects on the thousands and thousands who suck up that pap every day. Is this not what SF is all about? Also, a complete Ellison script for The Young Lawyers is included (a quick course in scriptmechanics), along with a blow-byblow on how the script was castrated in production.    The other Ellison is a reprint (from #) of a collection which Avon foolishly let go. Its title is apt: Partners In Wonder. It comprises thirteen stories and a batch of ape cartoons written by Harlan in collaboration with the likes of Ben Bova, Bob Sheckley, Avram Davidson, Ted Sturgeon, Joe Hensely, Henry Slesar, Samuel R. Delany, Algis Budrys, Robert Silverberg, Keith Laumer and Roger Zelazny. If that ain't worth a buck and a half, I don't know what is. Eveiything in the book is worth reading at least once (with the exception of the Ellison-Rotsler King Kong cartoons, which are uniformly dumb), and magnificent is not too strong a word for the best of them. EllisonSheckley's "I See A Man Sitting On A Chair, And The Chair Is Biting His Leg" is a classic, as are EllisonBo va's "Brillo" (which EllisonSilverberg's "The Song The Zombie Sang," and "Street Scene" (in which Harlan and Keith Laumer couldn't agree on an ending and so offer you two). In addition you get the usual Ellison introductions, info not only on the writers themselves but on the fine art of collaboration. A Best Buy.    So much for the ones I picked off the rack. Now we come to The Things That Grew In The Mailbox. The first of these, happily, is a genuine gumdrop: a scattergun collection of true classics in the field. In The Liberated Future, Robert Hoskins has assembled a pile of stories as diverse as they are delightful, definitive examples of several different kinds of SF. There are, for instance, Poul Anderson's immortal "Sam Hall"; Cyril Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag"; Sheckley's "Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay" (his name does seem to keep coming up, doesn't it?); and Ursula K. Leguin's "A Trip To The Head," to name but a few. I "didn't like" some of them -- that is, I don't much care for that kind of story -- but all are honestly and well written. Never mind that the title and ostensible theme of the collection -- "Liberation" -- can be made to cover all these stories only by stretching the premise to the point where, plucked, it would emit a G two octaves above middle C. Who the hell cares? If faking a "theme" made it easier for Hoskins to sell Fawcett on the notion of publishing these goodies, then what matter if sings aren't always what they theme? (sorry.) Other authors represented are R.A. Lafferty, Katherine MacLean, Henry Kuttner, Dean R. Koontz, Joe L. Hensley, Barry Malzberg, If you've got a friend which you don't know what he likes but you wanna turn him on to SF -- or if you want to expand your own horizons -- try this.    Let's drop fiction for a second, and get into fact. Science fact, or, to be precise, ecological fact. Everybody knows that city air will kill you even quicker than country whiskey, right? Everybody knows that man is destroying the life-giving oxygen in his atmosphere in ever-increasing amounts. Everybody knows Lake Erie is dead. Everybody knows those damned oil spills are destroying our oceans. Everybody... Now, you can't say flat out that anything "everybody knows" must be wrong. For instance, everybody knows that Gerry Ford has the intellectual acumen of a prenatal woodchuck, and that is true. But the phrase ought to make you suspicious. And so, in Ecological Fantasies (subtitled "Death By Falling Watermelons"), Cy A. Adler presents a raft of evidence that doesn't jibe too well with what "everybody knows" about ecology. He cites, for example, studies which find no connection between lung cancer or emphysema and living in a city; which find more edible fish in Lake Erie than in any other Great Lake; which find no perceptible degradation of world oxygen levels over the past thirty years; which show that oil spills in the open ocean (at least) are converted by bacteria into food for marine organisms. The man offers hard evidence -- I do not say proof -- against these and a dozen other alleged ecological catastrophes. However, although I am in accord with Adler's stated purpose ("A defense of innovation, science, and rational approaches to environmental problems"), I must recommend you take this book with a football-size grain of salt. Much of Adler's reasoning strikes me as specious, some of his sources are not what I'd call impeccable, and at best he sometimes ends only by proving that things may not be quite so bad as some people say. The book appears to be aimed at the liberals who are dying for an excuse to dump this ecology crap and do the world some less expensive good. But if you read it with your Built In Shit Detector at maximum gain you'll find it one of the most factpacked and background-informative books since Ben Bova's The New Astronomies (Mentor Books), which it it no way resembles. Check it out, fellow eco-freaks. Hear the other side; they are not all villains.    Back to fiction. I scarcely know what to say about Orbit #, which is rny usual reaction to avatars of that series. Damon has a knack for collecting precisely that type of SF story which tends to give me a pain just beneath the small of the back. You know, that think-piece stuff that's good on poetic prose and literary allusion and like heavy metaphors and typographical tricks to induce mood and gallons of allegory and mostly what the judges for the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award (as opposed to the plain-old John W Campbell Award that You lovely people gave me last year) were pleased to call "recognition of the fallen state of Man." And which isn't exactly strong on stuff like characterization and plot and an actual ending and all that hopelessly square stuff. This is, of course, a generalization. I have read many fine stories in Orbit collections. But there have been many, many, many stories in Orbit collections. I guess a lot of you must like 'em -- they sell like hell. But I don't mind admitting I have failed to understand or enjoy most of 'em myself. And even if you are an Orbit fan, I'm not sure you'll like Number Sixteen. It ain't a total loss, but a lot of the stories are manifestly by newcomers, first-sales or nearly so, and the Jesse Miller entry is the first he ever wrote and not a patch on "Pigeon City." Worse, Damon leavens the stories with anecdotes and funnies that largely lay there and die. There is, for instance, a remake of Victor Borge's One-Up English ("Anytwo for elevennis?") called "The Little Lexicon For Time Travelers," of which "Wasaac Asimov" and "Ante Toasties" are entirely enough examples. I may not know what I like, but I know Art (a hammernosed old Serbo-Croation who cobbles my snowshoes for me), and he wouldn't like this book. You might, but I couldn't guarantee it.    One last toke and then I've got to be getting home, but I couldn't miss a chance to alert you to a thoroughly meaty book, dripping with juices and delicately marbled. All I really need to say, of course, is that it's a Poul Anderson collection; but since you may conceivably have been suffering from rectocranial inversion for the last few decades, I'll redundantly state that Homeward And Beyond contains some of the best stories I've read in this or any year. A couple are SF only because Poul says so and who's going to argue with him? A couple are distinctly minor -- "Wings Of Victory," for example, is notable only because it is the first story concerning the Ythrians of Poul's almostHugowinner People Of The Wind. But "The Long Remembering," "Murphy's Hall" (a collaboration with his lovely wife Karen), "Peek! I See You!" (Christ, what a title), "Goat Song," and most particularly "The Pirate" and the incredibly tender and moving "The Peat Bog" are so damn good they had me babbling aloud as I read them (don't b'lieve me, ask my wife Jeanne). They range from hard-science to no-science, and include Harlanesque introductions by Poul that are a treat. Don't miss this collection -- it's the dromedary's drawers. Only one "mini-review" ("tomecapsule"?) this month; Has Anyone Else Got Anything Further To Add? by R.A. Lafferty. You either like Lafferty or you don't -- I do. This here's a bunch of typical Lafferty. There you go. (I find sixteen shaggy-dog stories in a row a little heavy, but you could maybe read it intermittently over the next year.) See you next month; Near as I can guess the next column's due out about Thanksgiving -- maybe we can carve up some turkeys for ya... The armies of Earth were invinceable -- for who can defeat a True Believer? Taint and far away, the dim memory of a warning bell. Dean stirred, uneasy. The sky was blue, a few scattered clouds, fleecy-white. In the meadow, glints of gold where flowers clustered. Beyond stood trees, cool and green. A little longer to rest, then he would seek the shade. Find a bubbling stream from which to drink. But for now the suns were warm...    Two suns! Instantly he was awake, the warm lush meadow replaced by plastic and cold steel. The palm of his hand hit the transmitter button, swept across the row of switches that armed the scout's defenses. First contact with the aliens! He had been set down on this deserted, empty planet of an undistinguished star nearly a month ago, living bait and alarm system. The first-in scoutship had landed a year ago, reported its landing -- and vanished. A second scout, forwarned of danger, the same. Little chance of double malfunction or simple physical attack; a scout craft's screens could hold off any gross battering long enough to cry warning. The prime possibility was a purely mental attack. The Brains, the great, sentient computers that charted the course of history to come had picked Dean, tested and trained him to resist this kind of attack. Still he had nearly failed. His transmitter hurled its warning forth across the parsecs. "Okaro to Base. Dean Okaro to Sector Base sions. Earth-normal scene, except for two suns." He spoke each word clearly, slowly despite his excitement. The computers could unscramble the message easily, given his voice prints for comparison... The tap-tap-tapping of his mallet was the only sound, deep under the earth. He crouched there in the gloom, scarcely able to see the pattern he was chipping in the stone. It had to be done right or the Gods would be angry, the hunt would fail. The people would go hungry, and it would  his fault. Behind him Ee-La placed another fragment of wood on the fire. Hers was the equally important task of tending the sacred flames, making the scanty supply of fuel last until his work was done. Too little flame, and he could not see. Too much, and the light would not last. His eyes ached as he followed the lines. The charcoal strokes lay dark against the gray rock. This line was for the stream. There the prey would come to drink. This line, the wind. It must not carry the hunter's scent ahead. A heavier line, rising and falling. The land that upheld hunter and hunted alike. This row of dots, the footsteps of the hunter. That one, larger, more solid; the hunted. Now they came together -- but the light was fading fast. Fading, as the day would fade if the hunter ran too slow. Ee-La stirred the coals, coaxing a last flicker of orange against the dark. He worked faster, mallet falling in a frenzy of blows. The last spark faded, but he was done! The hunt would not fail. Leaving his tools where they had fallen he led the way toward the light of day. Ee-La followed close, anxious to be out from under the weight of the Sacred Mountain. The air was fresh and good beneath the low arching trees. Ee-La stood close, her eyes raised to his. Like chips of emerald against her pale blue skin... # # Dean wrenched himself back to reality. He spoke stacatto phrases into the microphone, telling of this latest attack on his mind. Every detail would be of value, revealing vital facts about this enemy. Facts that could perhaps be put together to make a larger pattern of strengths and weaknesses. It was already plain that they were not from this tiny barren world, with its reddish sun. He let his mind drift, eager for more knowledge... Again the suns beat down, darkening his leathery skin from blue to purple. His whip, symbol of status as field-foreman, dangled idly from his wrist. The workers, knee deep in squelchy brown mud, moved more slowly as his attention wandered. He drank sparingly from his flask, the trace of drug in the water bracing his will. Once more the workers quickened their movements, their drowsing minds responsive to his commands. At the back of his own mind was a dull resentment. To drive cattle such as these! They were the dregs of the work force, good for nothing but the simplest, most repetitive tasks. He must keep his thoughts almost on a level with theirs, or contact would be lost. "Ho, Darveel!" The laughing voice broke in on his thoughts. "Bring your workers to high-suns meal." "Gladly, Jarvon." The workers straightened broad backs, setting down their baskets of seedlings. There was a wholeness here, a rightness between the slow, heavy movements and their earthy task. Broad flat feet left splotches of glistening mud on the trampled ground as they crowded about the food cart. "How goes the planting?" On some hot afternoon a bored fieldforeman had called a worker from her tasks to relieve the tedium. Jarvon was the result, a mind of at least moderate power housed in the body of a small worker-woman. Idly Darveel sent out a command for her to approach. "It goes well. The plants are setting in as rapidly as might be expected. These brutes are but poor things, barely able to move one flat foot past the other without guidance." He frowned. The compulsion was having no effect. He pulled harder. "They are good enough for work such as this." She smiled, pointed teeth pink against azure lips. "Surely so skilled a field-foreman has no trouble guiding them." This was ridiculous! She still hadn't moved any nearer... and he had the strangest urge to get down on all fours. His teeth clenched as he made a greater effort. The workers had done eating, were wandering off to sit under a nearby grove of trees for unauthorized rest. No matter. Jarvon was approaching one slow step at a time, but he was sinking to one knee. Stronger! Fiercer! The drive that had brought him from humble clerk to field-foreman now centered on Jarvon. She stood before him, her slender six-fingered hand unbelting her coarse tunic. He was down on both knees, straining to keep his body erect. His will beat like a roaring gale: Jarvon was a slender reed that bent and sprang erect. He struggled to his feet, his eyes locked with hers. Now each tried to force the other to give way. Feet braced wide on the muddy ground, they swayed like dancers to unheard music. She dropped to one knee, her tunic falling away, then to both knees. She lay full length, belly to the ground. He crouched beside her. Slowly, slowly she rolled onto her back... but her eyes told him that somehow she had won, he had lost...    "Dean Okaro to Base. More data on enemy. This episode seems to be from early history of their civilization." He told of the fragment of life he had lived, knowing how vital any scrap of information could be. Once conquered, this race could contribute much to the Great Crusade... The two armies were drawn up in precise array. On two low hills the commanding generals faced each other, ready for the supreme test. Dilleshon might have been a pale blue statue, but for a droplet of sweat that trickled from beneath his helmet. The tension... Oh, the tension! One step forward! Again silence. Then the sound of the other army moving as one man. One step. Then two. Now he was moving again, lending his will to the massed mental force of his fellows. Behind them the General led and drove. The swordsmen of the front rank met the foe. Now fast, now slow they cut and slashed. Faster as their massed will commanded, slow as the enemy's force prevailed. The helmet pressed down on Dilleshon's skull. Open at the back, it was supposed to shield him from the enemy's commands. He was strong! They were moving faster now, hurling their will before them. The enemy swirled away, falling and dying. The General was stronger, his will striking like a lance at the enemy's heart! Their foes were falling, dropping to the ground before they were even touched by steel. There would be triumph tonight, enemy women dancing to their commands. Victory to the strong! But no. What was this? Behind them the enemy sprang erect. He was cut off from his fellows. The mass will faltered, dissolved into chaos. His helmet was struck from his head, and he turned to flee. No use. He and his fellows were marching once more, but their weapons were gone. Their armor lay scattered on the field of battle. They would watch, but the women would not be dancing for them. Dimly he sensed the truth, that strength was not enough without intelligence to show the way...  The defenses of Dean's scout were weakening, but still he broadcast his message. The aliens' own strengths would be turned against We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. them, and the computers would tell them how it could be done. He could watch the illusions now without wholly losing himself in them. Each life-fragment taught him more about the powers that he fought. If rescue came in time, he might even... The fat-bellied ships lurched ahead. Long weeks of empty ocean lay behind. Ahead? No man knew. Old sailors told of monsters, guarding cities paved with gold. Or else of waters pouring over the edge of the world, taking unwary ships with them into eternity. Dalseth was roused from his thoughts by a cry from aloft. "Land ho!" In response to that most welcome of shouts, several men scrambled aloft, eager to see for themselves. Too often they had been fooled by low lying clouds, but this time it was true. It was land, green with trees. White surging waves on crimson sand. There should be food, and cool water to drink. They found a cove and droppted anchor. Solid ground felt strange under his feet. It had been long indeed since they had been ashore. First pirates had pursued them, driving them far out to sea and away from the normal shipping lanes. They had been saved only by the rain and darkness of a sudden storm, though this too had taken them even farther from land. Worst of all, their hull had become so fouled that they could not beat their way back against the prevailing winds. All they could do was to forge ahead, hoping to find land before their water was gone. Dalseth led one of the exploring parties. They eased along through the tangled jungle growth, weapons at the ready. Men such as he, who could control the minds of animals, were rare, and their power over lesser minds was weak. Already they had found good water and fresh fruits. They were following a game trail when Dalseth sensed movement ahead. A shout and one of the sailors was down, an arrow in his throat! Then Dalseth seized control of the savage minds and the ambush died as suddenly as it had begun. Weapons falling limply from their hands, the natives waited passively as the sailors surged forward, intent on vengeance. "No," snapped Dalseth, "weTl take them back to the ship. The Captain'll want to see them, find out what he can about them and their tribe. Four of you carry Vorlupp's body. We'll give him proper burial back at camp." The natives were small folk, their dusky bluish hides stretched tightly over frail bones. Their minds which were poorly developed, told of others who lived farther inland. These, they said, were great warriors who lived in large villages. When the seasonal winds changed the ships would sail for home, the Captain decided. They would bear word of this new land, so ripe for the taking. Other ships would follow in their wake, and soon this land would deliver up its riches...    , Dean heard the clangor of riven metal as the shell of his scout resisted the attack. His screens were drained, but he still had some time left, and power for his transmitter. This race too would fall to the forces of righteousness; once again the Great Crusade would gather in new converts. Earth could not fail. The whole galaxy would join in hymns of praise. When at last all intelligence was as one in God's sight, then the task would be done. But as long as there were whole races denied the right to Glory they must press onward. Dean's hand ached from gripping the base of the microphone, but a little pain was nothing to a True Believer. His piety and quick wits had brought him to this distant planet. He hardly remembered his childhood in the slums of Johannesburg. Whether or not he returned from this mission alive, the name of Dean Okaro would be enshrined... The derrai shuffled his feet in the sand, setting himself to meet the animal's charge. Behind the insulating screens the crowd watched avidly. The huge unibos moved forward slowly at first, then, silver horn gleaming against black hide, it charged. Empty-handed, clad only in silken shorts he waited, poised, unmoving. The picture built in his mind and he sent it forth. The unibos swerved the merest fraction, but it was enough. The beast's shoulder brushed his as it thundered by. The unibos was herded away. Two jungle cats were let in. Their minds were small but cunning, hard to reach. They circled the arena, scaly hides gleaming in the light of the two suns. One cat yowled as it caught his scent, but now he was ready. They sprang at a small herbivore. It dashed away. Hunting screams echoed as they charged after it, circling the arena. Try as they would, it stayed always just out of the hot sand refusing to move until efforts. At last they lay sprawled on the hot sand refusing to move until prodded. He was proud of that illusion. Last game-time a contestant had taken the image of a tree in the minds of the jungle cats. One cat had sharpened its claws on his bark, ending the trial. He faced them all, one by one and in twos and threes. These minds could not be compelled; they could only be led astray. At last the ultimate test. A single door swung open across the darkened arena. Again, dead silence from the stands. The beast that slouched toward him was smaller than some, its hairless hide an unhealthy grayish tan. Eyeless head, fanged mouth ringed with multiple feelers, great claws twitching with lust to kill. The derrai held himself to calmness, but it was not easy. The klemnil was the bane of his race, a horror from out of the misty past. A cave dweller, it came out only at night to seek its victims. The feelers that ringed its jaws picked up mind-casts. It would head unerringly toward the strongest source, nor could it be misled. The brain in that domed skull knew no common lusts. The blood and flesh that fed its body were only incidental to its true hunger; fear, agony, and hate were the nourishment required of its hideous soul. The derrai projected a calm that he did not truly feel. Sweat beaded his brow as the klemnil advanced. Stumpy legs carried it forward, its head weaving on its sinuous neck. He projected peace and love, the warm community of family and clan. Its approach was slower now, tendrils writhing uneasily. The Derrai's thoughts strenghtened, happy laughter and children playing in the sunlight. In his mind a boy and girl walked hand in hand through a park where shy animals played. The klemnil recoiled, seeking darkness. He projected bright sunlight and happiness. It whimpered, the first sound it had made since entering the arena. It screamed its hate, trumpeting death and fear to the world. Derrai sent friendship and trust. Its screams died away to a moan of agony. It clawed blindly at the sand, seeking cool darkness, a place to skulk and hide. Joy and laughter! Triumph of light! The klemnil howled its torment and ran from derrai. It reared its full length up the stadium wall, clawing at the unyielding barrier. Fangs caught at the insulating webbing, and a section pulled free! Now the surging emotions of the crowd broke through, battering the creature with their strength. Torn by emotion beyond its capacity to absorb the klemnil writhed blindly and fell to the sand. The beast was dragged away by clanking machines even as the victor was escorted from the stadium in triumph. No other contestant, he was sure, would make a better showing. The prize would be his, and the honor. For a mere sergeant in the space-fleet his victory was a heady one. His talent was rare and valuable out where strange' animals and stranger peoples were to be found...    Dean sat drenched in his own sweat, only dimly aware of the blue figures filing past. The magnitude of the mental battle he had fought had drained him utterly, but at last he was free, free of all past mental influences, free to battle with all his soul in the Great Crusade -- of the derrai. ir Oalaxy Edited by James Baen simply, the best of the best. Hours of reading pleasure by the finest writers of science fiction; such sf luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin (her Nebula winning "The Day Before the Revolution"), Frederik Pohl, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley and many more are represented here with their finest works. "just another anthology." Look for it. An Award Book. Coming Soon. Dear Jim: Regarding Fred Pohl's article "A Short Term Solution" in the April issue of Galaxy. I enjoy all of Fred's writing, both in articles like this and the science fiction stories he writes. However, in the problem-solving part of this article, attributed to Peter Fong of Emory University, I think I can demonstrate, with a few simple illustrations, that this particular way will not work. I realize that it is easy to criticize, and very hard to come up with new ideas, and I might add, I wish his solution would work. First, without re-stating too much of his article, was the use of forty-acre farms for a to grow com, which in turn was to be made into grain alcohol, food and oil. The alcohol to be used as fuel supplement. It was stated that this would produce an income of approximately # per family. Now, regardless of how good a theory may sound, if it is based on wrong information, then any results worked out, using this theory, are likely to be wrong also. Here then are the wrong assumptions in the theory: #. Forty acres of average farm land in the non-inigated areas will only produce approximately # bushels of com per acre, or a total of # bushels of com. I Just checked the Wall Street Journal and find the price of com to be # per bushel, or a total of #. Of course, the yield and price would vary from different areas and the price varies each year, depending on the supply. This does not vary too much from Fred's statements. #. The above figures were made, though. from the entire forty acres, leaving nothing for gardens, buildings, etc., and presumably means using the same land year after year to grow com only. This simply cannot be done. Even adding tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizer the yield will go down annually until eventually it would be less than twenty-five bushels per acre. As any good farmer knows, you cannot grow one crop on a tract of land for more than two or three years without some kind of rotation with a legume or green manure crop to be plowed under (alfalfa, clover, cowpeas, etc.) to keep the fertility up to normal. Most farmers use a cattle and pasture, hay or legume and a row crop (com, etc.) in rotation, with never more than fifty percent of the land in row crop at any given time, and any fertilizer is rather expensive today. #. Nothing is said about tools for these farmers. Go out and price tractors, plows, cultivating equipment, and you will see it takes a small fortune to even get started farming today. And to Justify that expense, you have to have far more land per farm to simply break even. This is why most of the small farms have been sold to form much larger ones. Simple economics. No profit, no farms. #. The final part of the theory that is wrong is that very few of the hard-coreunemployed know anything about farming, nor is this something that can be learned in a few class sessions. Farmers, of necessity, have to be knowledgable in good farming practices, hard working, thrifty and have a pretty good ability to plan their work months ahead. This still does not allow for drouths, plant pests and generally poor growing conditions that affect all farmers each year. This still does not mean that all of the idea is bad. Although it would not use the unemployed to accomplish it, I would suggest an alternate plan of inducing all present farmers to increase their com acreage to ten to twenty acres per farm, with a government guarateed market for their com to be used in the making of alcohol. This would achieve part of the plan, and there may be many more ways of doing it that as yet simply needs to be worked out. We all know that this country and the whole world can use all the best brains available to overcome the problems we face, many of which Fred covered in his articles. Maybe other readers will have new ideas to add to this. Best wishes, Sincerely, Ed Woods P. O. Box # Pearce, Arizona # Fred's reply: Dear Jim: Reader Woods makes a couple of good points, but he also makes a couple of assumptions. First, he assumes chemical fertilizer; that't not what Fong (or I) had in mind at all; the farms should be fertilized by that sovereign replenisher of soil, city sewage. In. fact, that's the whole point. And if you're going to pipe sewage from Washington or New York, you might as well pipe the water that carries it, too, which provides irrigation. The second assumption (which is not covered in the essay) is that conventional energy-intensive farming is involved. It takes fuel to run tractors; in fact, it takes fuel to make tractors -- something of the order of # kwh to manufacture each one. For a forty-acre farm, or even one two or three times that size, there is a .splendid prime mover available in the shape of the horse. Where Woods is absolutely right is in saying that farming is not something you pick up in an afternoon. (I've cleared enough brush and picked a sufficient number of potato bugs off the vine to appreciate the skills involved.) I am not sure how serious this problem is. The ghettoized urban poor, mostly blacks from the Old South and Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Mexico or elsewhere (depending on which urban area you're talking about) do in fact come to the cities in the first place because they can't survive on exactly the same sort of farms Fong is proposing, but the reason is not that they are unskilled, only that they don't own the land and are thrown out of work by mechanization. Does any of that skill survive in the year #? I don't know. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of young people who are secondor third-generation city dwellers, but equally obvious there are large numbers who grew up on such farms and worked them. There is a reservoir there of exactly the skills that are needed. How large it is we won't know until someone starts taking the idea seriously. Which I hope will be soon! Bests, Fred Pohl Dear Mr. Baen; I have noticed recently that Galaxy has been including some very good stories, with good effects -- reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe. Poe believed that a short stoiy should be written to cause one, and only one, emotional reaction. Some of your shorter pieces in the April # issue have reflected just this. In example, "Elmo's Box". I gave it a quick reading and then reread it. It gives the reader something to think about when messing around in alternate universes. Although it may not explore all of the possibilities (after all, they are infinite!), they were food for thought. And that is what a short story, about a subject and not really telling a full story, should do. The same. "A Game of Blood And Dust" gives one something to think about. "Cheap Thrills", possible and frightening future and one way of escaping it. "Dea Ex Machina". On a much larger scale, and with a bit more plot, "Day of the Gringo". You see, all of these short stories told rather simple tales, with simple plots and simple climaxes. But they all made the readpr thinkl And that is why your magazine is considered thought-provoking and fascinating. Please keep it that way. Scott C. Smith # Hayvenhurst Avenue Granada Hills, Ca. # Jim, Galaxy's been very good the past couple months, but it just isn't If. Please, please, please bring If back. On onionskin with cardboard covers, or charge a dollar, or a dollar fifty, or, wait -- how about microfilm? Anything, but please bring If as soon as possible. I really like Jerry's column, but I prefer him to cover subjects such as memory, or -- sigh -- black holes. His article on Velikovsky was good, but it wasn't as mindboggling as the black hole articles. I mean, what do a few planets tossed around matter when you could be talking about universes? I also really tike Geis's bi-monthly, but I'd prefer it monthly. Keep up the good work, and please bring back If. Ken Sheridan PO #I P.E.A. Exeter, NH # Would if  could. Dear Mr. Baen, I am, I suppose, one of your younger readers, being only #, and I have only been a subscriber to your magazinefs?) for about a year. Being an avid collector, however, I have bought up back issues for about the last ten years. All this gives me a fresh (I hope) viewpoint, and if I may, I would like to make a few suggestions. To a casual reader, one who picks magazines off the shelves occasionally, the packaging is what sells the magazine. (Obviously, if a magazine is filled with Known Authors and the others aren't, it will sell, but for the average mag, it's the packaging that sells.) In my opinion Mr. Jacobsen fell down in this department. This is not to say that he was a bad editor; anyone who can reel in A Time of Changes, Rendezvous With Rama, and The Gods Themselves isn't a bad editor by any definition. However the outward appearances of the magazine suffered. The cover design, until late in his editorship (?) was shoddy, and the artwork was poor. This last was due, I think, to an overworked Jack Gaughan. He can do excellent work, but largely didn't. For an extreme example of this, look at the frontpiece to the Cap Kennedy novel (yes, I know it's a juvenile) A World Aflame. Anyone in a High School Art I class can draw better than that. On the other hand, his cover to The Indian Giver (in that other magazine) was superb. Get him to draw like that all the time and I'll be happy. I think Wendy Pini is also terrific, as are most of the rest of the regular crew. Another thing to avoid is the use on the cover of such descriptions as "Powerful New Novelettes," "Barrier-smashing Stories," "Gripping New..." "Big New... ," and above all else, ! ! ! ! ! exclamation marks. Far from attracting a prospective reader, these will cause him to turn away in disgust. So far you've avoided the descriptions, but the exclamation points still creep in, and I honestly believe they stink. On the inside you've made many changes for the good, especially that ugly title page of Jacobson's. There are still a few things which would, I think improve the looks still more. First, I would like to see the name (the full name) of the artist for each story. It's their work, and they should receive credit for it. Second, get a new design for the SF calendar; the present one is a pretty sad drawing. Definitely the science column should be kept up; I read Dr. Poumelle's articles first when the magazine comes. Whatever happened to the books section, get it going again, for it is a must. A brief, or even not-so-brief things-to-come column would be great, and something like Analog's Analytical Laboratory also, so the readers can indicate their preferences. I have but one complaint on your stories, and that concerns Craig Strete. Maybe it's just me, but I simply can't stand his stories. They are pointless, dull and I find it a real chore to plow through them. I keep hoping he'll improve, but he hasn't yet. And finally, to the physical package itself. I find the stiff covers are much superior to the old slick ones. They hold up much better magazine unless it's packaged. The US mail is not known for its gentleness, and many things get damaged. Just a week ago I wrote to your subscription dept., and mentioned on effective...Craig Strete has certainly the side this issue, and yesterday my July isplayed to mixed reviews; on the other hand, am a collector, and find this intolerable. If heim, James Tiptree and myself think he has it's too expensive to wrap every magazine, something special...#r you will be aware set up an optional program for collectors to by the time this issue sees print. Bookshelf is dollar, and is well worth it. your beef about damaged covers, it's out of my On the whole, however, you have been an hands -- but t' ll pass it on to the proper parties excellent editor, and I hope you continue in...And I thank you for your support (!). that position for many years. Hopefully yours, Gordon Adams Well, that about wraps up the first # years #I Valencia Rd. of Galaxy. Orinda, CA # The second quarter-century will start off with the first half of a novel by Joanna Russ Cap Kennedy covers, both his and others. It's about a group of stranded space travelare all done in a particular pulpish style ers who don't recreate a civilization, specified by the publisher. Some people tike Another goodie is a guest appearance by it, even -- and a lot of people buy that series Larry Niven, co-authoring with J.E. Poursuspect, it's not enthusiasm that repulses you column, but a short-course in writing the so much as phoney enthusiasm.' Personalty I hard sf novel. And, (as the saying goes) save "bangs" for where I think they will be much, much more! # Eovt # S?ren NcwYorU NY # # per word per Issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. E# magazines, including # pulps. Many complete and parlial runs, o.p. hardbounds, photo-duplicated pulp covers. Collections purchased. List free. Roy Torgeson, # East #th Street, NY, NY #. Call evenings and weekends: (#) #-#. dreds of titles. Discounts. Free lists. Tyche Books, Box #I #-G. Oakland. Calif. #. How to Think aboul the Problem of Designing a Subculture. "As you have gathered we are not technologists but aesthelicists who have acquired our technical knowledge deliberately to insure its proper development and usage. We have found that it is ignorance lhal perverts aesthetic and human values not technical knowledge." # for two volumes, # pages total, and one issue of Detour magazine. Interactive Concerns Group, # N. 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More than # potential customers. Write S-F Mart, Galaxy  # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. The very best reading in or out of this #F#R# with membership Larry Niven  Jerry Pournelle... possibly the finest science fiction voyage in these # novels set on the galaxy's deadliest planets. Hours of thrills and adventure. What a way to get acquainted. Browse through the list of books on this page and choose any # for just #. It's the most extraordinary sample of science fiction ever offered in one package. Here's how the Club works; When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your choice of # books for just # (plus shipping and handling). If not absolutely fascinated, return (hem within ten days -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin describing the # coming Selections and Alternate choices. If you want both Seleclions, you need do nothing; they'll be shipped automatically. If you don't want a Selection, or prefer an Alternate, or no book at all, just fill out the form always provided, and return it to by the date specified. We try to allow you at least ten days for making your decision. If you don't gel the form in time to respond within # days, and receive an unwanted selection, you may return it at our expense. As a member you need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any lime hereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. Most books are only # plus shipping and handling. Some extra value seleclions are slightly higher bul always much less than Publisher's Editions. Send no money. But do send the coupon today. Science Fiction Book Club #-S# Dept. HR #, Garden City. New York # I have read your ad. Please accept me as a member in the Science Fiction Book Club. Send me, as a beginning, Ihe # books whose numbers I have indicated below, and bill me just # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to take # additional books during the coming year and may resign anytime thereafter. Mr. Mrs. Miss Address  City Please print Apt. State Zip #. The Foundation Trilecy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. Price #. es #. Again, Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed. Short stories and novels, # in all. Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  ll. Gianl #-in-l volume of # awardwinning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. The Oeathworld Trilogy. By Harry Harrison. On # amazing planets interplanetary adventurer Jason dinAll gambles his life against different lethal environments. Special Edition. #. Before the Bolden Age. Isaac Asimov, ed. # classic stories of the #s, from vintage SF pulps, now in one huge volume. Pub. ed. # #. The Land Thai Time Forgot. By Edgar Rice Burroughs. # novels in one, includes The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time's Abyss. Soon to be released movie. Special Edition. #. The Shockwave Rider. By John Brunner. By early #st century a data information net Ihrealens Ihe people as privacy becomes obsolete. By Hugo Award winning author. Pub. ed. # #. Enchanted Pilgrimage. By Clifford ventures of a modern man in a universe of medieval monsters and mores. Pub. ed. # # #. The Mote in Cod's Eye by Larry Niven  Jerry Pournelle. Man's first contact with an intelligent alien species. Pub. ed. # #. The # Annual World's Best SF. Donald A. Wollheim. ed. Includes George R. R. Martin's A Song For Lya plus # lop tales by Pohl, Asimov, Kornbluth, others. Spec. Ed. #. Approaching Oblivion. By Harlan Ellison. Eleven mindspinning stories in the multi-award winner's new anlhology. Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # #. The Best of Cordwainer Smith. # oulsianding SF slories includes The Lady Who Sailed the Soul, Golden the Ship Was, Oh! Oh! Oh!, A Planet Named Shayol. Spec. Ed. The Science Ficlion Book Club offers ils own complete hardbound editions somelimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U S. A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada.  Arsen Darnay Spider Robinson  Steven Utley elie  Larry Niven J.E. JiFA.CE  byRjpk Sternbach A Gift frbln Earth Tales of Known Space World of Ptavvs Ringworld Neutron Star Limited Edition Prints -- # Sets Signed and Numbered by Sternbach #" X # "on Heavy Stock # thereafter Individual Prints Available -- Write for order form Send check or money order to: # Vista Grande Daly City, CA # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Tunick, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consuiting Editor C. M. Bolling, Asst to the Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor The expression "rapier-like wit" is often used to describe the attempted dissection of one or another popularly-held belief -- and not always advisedly. But in this story of a would-be interstellar Swiss Family Robinson...the blade fits. Wherein the fate of the world hangs on the outcome of delicate and complex interstellar negotiations -- and a football game... Tampering with an ecosystem can have terrible consequences; and there is no way of predicting just what -- or how terrible -- those consequences will be. Is the purpose of technology to make people happier -- or is it just to make more people? "Vox populi, vox Dei." Trouble is, who listens? Introducing Chronopathy. It's not time-travel, exactly -- but it gets you there. published sf story appeared in the Sept. '# issue of Galaxy. Since then he has been busy becoming an established professional in the field. Here is some of what he's seen along the way. this time with the aid of his favorite collaborator, provides us with a close-up view of the science-fact in science fiction; a shortcourse in planetary and cosmic engineering. Wherein Spider pays deserved homage to his Predecessor. Letters from Anderson, DeVito, Bozarth, Stouff, Beckman, Blucher, Kelly. Where to find it. See inside-front cover. Cover by Rick Sternbach, from Interior illustrations by Ames, Bramley, Fabian, Freff, Pini Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy:  .#. #-issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. sraJ additional msHIng offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coirKidenial. Printed in U.S.A. Arsen Darnay " Innocent " Eyes ence fiction lightly -- like a periodic comet visiting the solar system: I came around from time to time and glimmered briefly on the field's periphery. This happened at airports, usually, on the hind leg of a trip, with the day's work done, the briefcase heavy, and my flight delayed somewhere by fog. Then I'd wander to the book racks looking for something good to read: for hope springs eternal. At these times I had a strategy: to find that happy cross between the light and stimulating: nothing pretentious yet nothing vile, something for Technological Man: he plays in complex games and likes complex entertainment. When Eric Ambler couldn't be found or Le Carree's latest was not yet out in paperback, I reached for science fiction. Those were my days of purest innocence. I knew nothing about a science fiction world, its issues, or personalities. When I bought a magazine, I skipped the "fact" and "letters" portions. I was after action, pure and simple. I assumed that all behaved like I did -- authors, editors and readers: collaborating to produce or to enjoy that special brand of light entertainment: flights of projection into worlds that could well be. Sometimes a book had an effect beyond the ordinary. Then I might speculate for a moment, surprised that profundity lay hidden in such froth. Perhaps science fictipn writers used a greater canvas, I thought, admitted fewer impediments, and therefore they were better "dreamers." I knew and valued Jungian psychology which stipulates a racial Unconscious with transcendental qualities, and sometimes I saw science fiction as a kind of racial dreaming. At its best it projected images of possibility, lubricated us by compensations, and slipped past our sober censorship to show us at our best or worst. In short, it was a Rorschach blot of galactic proportions, better than other forms of "escape." As this notion took root, I sometimes read a few current novels just to see what we were all dreaming: What do we fear? What are today's specifications for paradise? If I had a hypothesis about the field, that was it. I guessed that science fiction's social value -- beyond the laudable aim of entertainment, pure and simple; its nutritional content as opposed to its taste -- lay in projecting alternatives to seek or shun. It was one of many channels by which psychic energies welled to the surface. I neither knew about nor made any fine distinctions -- between hard science fiction and the softer kind, between space opera and new wave. I had the casual reader's innocence, the supreme imperiousness of the consumer: if I liked it, it was good; if I didn't, it was bad. Good and bad, of course, meant specific things. Science fiction either had or lacked "reality" for me. The "real" is slippery and fades into the absurd when philosophers or physicists make it their target. I meant by that a common sense of "believability" but with one exception: I expected technical wizzardry, spatial and temporal expansions and foreshortenings, strangeness, and surprises. I didn't fuss much about the science. A tale could violate Boyle's law for all I cared. I was reading science fiction, not science. But even here I looked for plausibility. Seduction was fine but clumsy rape was rude. I held the notion that science fiction was about people, first of all. For science, hard or soft, one went to the real source, not the entertainment literature. The human element, for me, was constant, the environment a variable. How would  behave in the topsy turvy setting? What would I do? What if I had a parasitic awareness in my head? What would we do when they landed? This given, I had no tolerance for slippery psychology or ignorance of social behaviour. Nothing galled me more, after paying out a dollar, than cardboard figurines enacting some weighty speculation about matter. Vaguely articulated alien social systems, designed purely to deliver convenient plot incidents, could make me frown. Depictions of Congress by folk who'd never been on Capitol Hill, of military behaviour by persons who had obviously never studied military ways, of scientists who weren't in the slightest like the ones I'd worked with, superior beings that weren't superior, primitives who weren't primitive -- all these and many more such phenomena left me feeling cheated: for the illusion of reality was shattered and the rest was cold porridge. After a string of so-so books or stories, I told myself that I'd outgrown the field. Either I knew too much to be seduced, or else the writers had grown clumsy. Then, ever and agaip. I'd run into excellence: books like Herbert's Dune or Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. These occasional gems recalled earlier great experiences -- like reading Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, to name a special favorite of mine. The real authors were obviously around, producing grand illusions worth the money, worth even all those other books I had left half read in the seat pockets of countless airplanes. But nevertheless -- and science fiction was a good trip for me as a reader -- as time passed I grew more and more jaded, more and more irritable, and ever harder to satisfy. I was almost ready, put another way, to become a writer. itkk And thus the orbit of that occasional comet decayed toward the center. I came to see the mystery from closer up. (Why and how a man becomes a writer is best left unexplored. Besides, there's nothing to it. Writing, as all authors will tell you, is simple and fun. The ideas come, you dash them off, and pop the pages in the mail. Three days later a breathless editor calls to say Yes! Soon you are rich and famous. That, in a nutshell, is the common experience.) Before I had learned that lesson and still believed in needless struggle, I set to work with system to master the new environment. I began to read the magazines from cover to cover and learned that insiders called them "zines" -- much as conferences were simply "cons." There were "issues" in the field (i.e. Is SF literature?). I learned to distinguish between readers, fans, aspirants (who wrote letters), Big Name Fans, writers, names. Names, Big Names, and Masters, these being the designations of ranks in the science fiction hierarchy back then. (Robert Heinlein had not yet received the Grand Master Nebula award; he was still slumming with the Asimov's and Clarke's and Pohl's.) As yet, however, I hadn't met science fiction face to face -- only through print, darkly. Then one day an occasion presented itself. Our local county library announced a "workshop" on science fiction. A well-known editor and several authors would be present. A local college planned to tape the session for later classoroom use. I combed my beard and went to take the plunge. The reference desk had yielded to a table with a water pitcher and a stack of styrofoam cups. (Later the authors would break those cups apart, bit by bit, or doodle on their sides while awaiting a turn to speak.) The camera crews were getting ready. The audience sat waiting. But what an audience! They were so young. They were young but also earnest, intense, and uptight with expectations. For a second I saw myself hidden in the stacks watching the proceedings with half an eye, an open book in hand. Then I noticed one or two adults: a tanned suburban mother in sandals, a man with a red beard, a crewcut, greying fellow in a blue suit and tie. I sat down myself, a little ill at ease. What I had gleaned from letter columns seemed true; a motly following had science fiction. Suddenly they came: the editor leading the authors. They wore sticky-backed name tags, their names in felt tip pen. I only remember Roger lazny because he wore a suit, seemed slightly bored, spoke sparingly, and gave a memorably worded, concise, and graphic description of the Nebula award -- which he had earned and had been asked to explain. He gave a physical description while the question had probed the institution behind the thing. I sensed an irony arid the fast play of invisible swords. The editor opened his briefcase and laid on the table, fanned out like cards, several copies of the current issue of his magazine. He had surprised me by looking a touch countrified in cowboy boots. He was the chairman and host. The TV director signalled, the audience drew breath, and the show was on. Then came a drill which, I later learned, is a sine qua non of science fiction gatherings: when the chair goes around the table to hear ech man define what science fiction means to him -- but so far as I am aware no one ever says: Well, last year it paid for new siding on the house and this year -- if they reprint my Kama Sutra Luna and it does better than the last time -- we'll give the old Dodge the heave-ho. In fairy tales, just before the hero penetrates the secret cave to find the treasure or the princess, obstacles, alarms, and monsters rise before him on the narrow path. Those on the inside of institutions have a way of frightening would-be joiners. I think they do it from an unconscious, biological, territorial urge. Thus, science fiction having been defined, the panel turned to the future of the field, and now came a flood of negatives designed to discourage closer approach. I learned that things were in bad shape. Science fiction stumbled backwards in bleeding retreat, pressed by adverse economics, disintegrating distributhe encroachements of pseudoscience fiction writers like Vonnegut, the competition of TV, and academic smarty-pants wishing to crucify the genre on a cross of analysis. So much for that "author's perch" on Spain's Costa Brava from whence one member of the audience had planned, later in the year, to start that steady march to noble Stockholm. Close observation, engendered by the presentations, revealed that the authors did not look especially well fed. They were like people -- which gave me hope but little comfort -- tall, thin, overweight, young old. And Zelazny, of course, wrapped in relative silence. At last the panel opened for questions. The questions were new to me but hindsight tells me they were standard, a part of the science fiction ritual like the dialogue between priest and congregation Dominus vobiscum. -- Et cum Spiritu tuo.) -- Did the editor like to see sword and sorcery? This came from a youngster, tall, dark, slender, pimply, with horrendous inkspots on his right index and middle fingers. By the time the editor had dealt with that, another aspirant had switched to origami. -- Why did the science fiction field avoid the subject of sex? The questioner was in his twenties. He wore a beard and "sat" slouched on his chair. You might say that his back was sitting; his rears hung free. The editor began, defensively, and several authors signalled that they, too, wanted a crack at that. We learned that authors "put in" or "used" sex whenever it was appropriate. The days of sexless science fiction were gone for good -- together with bug-eyed monsters. I had a vision of an author before a shelf of little bottles. One bottle is labelled "sex." He takes it down, uncaps and sniffs it, grins lewdly, fall into the boiling pot... (For some readers, I've learned to my benefit, it's quite sufficient to wave the open bottle in the rising steam. That way you get to keep and use the sex at home.) Next question? -- Who, in the panel's opinion, a questioner behind me wanted to know, was the greatest science fiction writer of all time and -- and, more specifically, would the panel say whether they thought that Heinlein's Time Enough for Love measured up to the rest of Heinlein's work. Now came a bandying of names. None of the panelists claimed the honor, and those named were not around to defend themselves. It was agreed, however, that Time Enough for Love should not be held against "Bob." What about Ursula LeGuin, a young woman in glasses asked apropos of nothing. The panel went off on a side trip about the feminist issue -- in response more to the young woman's tone than her question. At last it broke into a reception with punch and cookies. But I didn't stay.    Some time after that my name appeared in print and my interest in scienee fiction (the "insider's world) grew. I joined the Science and in moments of procrastination studied the group's little yellow newsletter. Much was made of an astonishing controversy between Joanna Russ and Arthur Clarke on the subject of unconscious male chauvinism, which I found amusing. As for the rest...? I was no longer the rank outsider now, nor yet completely in, the well known "dangerous" stage, a silly season. And so, weakened and stimulated simultaneously, I visited one of the Cons. My initial forays into the field, bolstered by closer reading of fan letters, had started me thinking that science ficition, in one of its dimensions at least, was a kind of cult. I meant to check that hypothesis by visiting a conference. My reasoning along these lines had had its origin in an article on "consumption communities" I'd read years ago. Daniel Boorstin, writing in Fortune in #, spoke of the fellowship of Doublemint chewers, JB Scotch drinkers, Chevrolet sports car drivers, and the like: loose communities based on a togetherness in consumption. I had thought about that concept from time to time and had found it to be true. As the great "monocultures" were evidently losing their power (Christianity, Islam), they seemed to be replaced by other concepts of value and organization based on economic or emotional dominants. I couldn't help thinking that we were reverting back to totem cults for lack of a higher vision. Could science fiction be one of those totems? Was it a specialized youth cult -- an heretical way to socialize tumed-off kids, to assimilate them to the post-Technological age? Seeing is believing. Once more I waded into the surf. Let me use an author's right to obscure the particulars of space and time. Nor will what I shall write be true in the strictest sense. I'm after an impression, not a report. The event was called the Concon -- at least initially. Held in a very big city (no, not that big), in a grand old hotel, it offered the usual smorgasboard: speeches, dinners, a guest of honor, a huckster room, exhibits, receptions, readers, fans, aspirants, writers, names. Names, Big Names, and even a Master or two. Also: editors, agents, a delegation from the Planet of the Apes, publishers, actors, astronauts, and little old ladies in tennis shoes. The registration fee made you gulp if -- under-estimating the power of science fiction -- you came with a single ten-dollar bill in your billfold. And the scene blew your mind if -- until that time -- you hadn't seen a cult in its swarming. Imagine now the grand ballroom filled with people. Try not to look too obviously at the young women dressed in the merest of scarves, scarves that seemed to hold moist balls of trembling dough. Concentrate instead on beaded blue denim jackets depicting Saturn and other planets, the "I Love Hugo Gernsback" belt buckles, the Batman T-shirts, and apes smoking cigarettes. Better yet, sit down, already, and keep the eyes on the platform up front, the (tok walls of gold-laced mirrors, the half-dimmed chandeliers. The microphone was ticklish and bitchy and screamed horrendously under the jerky hand of someone hard to see. At last we were under way. Introductions. Then came an adi'ess. The words echoed about and were difficult to understand. Next to me a young man in heavy socks and tremendous hiking boots took crackers from his backpack and began his breakfast. It was mid-morning when the key (unscheduled) event took place. By now a panel had taken over. They discussed the work of some sage who claimed that earth and Venus had once collided to help Moses part the red sea. Emotions ran high. Evidently one was either for or against the sage. Even those who claimed to have an open mind were either pro or con -- something they did not realize but an innocent like me could readily discern. Then there was a hullaballoo in the back. Heads turned. The flow of talk at the head table slowed. Suddenly a little man marched in. He swept the crowd with a single, imperious glance and cut a pose: arms outstretched to the side, his legs apart.  am here, he seemed to say; look, it is I! He had a face that might have been cherubic once but now was lean. A beret sat tilted on his head. He wore a parka on top and tightfitting, bell-bottomed, purple slacks below. I couldn't see his shoes. Many individuals rose and made their way toward the man. In the rush of sound I could not make out what anyone said, but I caught the phrase that he -- whoever he might have been -- must have come in on the Red Eye. For a moment the little man was overwhelmed by the admiring wave. Then I saw him again, struggling to free himself -- shaking hands, patting backs, embracing girls -- but ever striving toward the platform. Soon he was there. The panel shrunk back as he mounted the steps. In the electric atmosphere this entrance had engendered, the sage was forgotten for a moment -- not Venus but Jupiter himself seemed to have collided with the science fiction world. He took the microphone from the podium attachment -- the podium itself would have hidden him from view -- and stepping to the side he said that...Elfin wings had brought him tither just in time to rescue this schlampig conference from the doldrums. Con-con was not a proper name for such a convention. It dated the field and brought to mind legs kicking in rythmic union. No, indeed. A new name would have to be found, now he was here. What name? someone called from the floor. The Harley-con! the little man announced. And amidst laughter, cheers, and wild, exuberant applause, all those present seemed to approve the name by acclamation.    Thus I beheld one of the cult n gods, a Big Name at the least. To anyone imbued with even a smidgin of ambition, it was a dangerous vision indeed! It hinted at rewards unguessed at before; fame, public acclaim, the intoxicating embrace of sound from the floor below, the psychic ocean, whose waves one imperious gesture could still, whose energies could be roused to storm proportions by a single call... The session ended eventually and we expanded, like hot gas, to take in the rest of Harley-con. Those masses of people, the constant churning motion in the halls; the booths; the detritus of displays collecting in comers; the tired fans resting on the floor, backs against walls; the tight, fannish clumps seeking autographs around invisible  Masters: all this exhilarated and frightened that part of me which responds to dreams. I wandered about. Here, in a room, a writer with a striking name -- Tarantula Crusoe, I think it was -- sang funny songs to the accompaniment of his guitar. I sat for a while watching Captain Kirk on a screen. Then came an editors panel, and I sat down to listen. The table cloth was red. One editor was smug, the others bled. I recognized my friend from the county library. He dodged rotten eggs having to do with a #cent reading charge. The second editor tried his best to stop a vicious sally from the floor led by a phalanx of unpaid writers. At best it was a draw; the writers drew blood. A third one complained about the price of paper. The fourth one looked surprised and wondered out loud what the fuss was all about. I wondered, in turn, which of the four enjoyed the highest circulation, and I would've bet it was the fourth. Somehow it all came out all right, at the end -- else by then I had become accustomed to the wall of negations.' Experience said that publishers paid fast or slow, depending; not much, but they paid. Paper was dear, but they kept printing on it. And to an aspirant, hungry for fame, what's a quarter, anyway? On the way out I saw a Master; a leonine head, flowing grey hair. For the moment he was almost alone. He stood chatting amiably with two stupendous ladies. I hesitated, well within his aura. Should I intrude and shake his hand? What will I say? "Sir, back in the '#'s I enjoyed your robot stories. Terriffic stuff'? What had I read that was more recent? All that came to me was a detective shortstory whose plot had turned on a lost button. He who hesitates is lost. The autograph hunters had caught up. I said good-bye to Harley-con, reflecting that I would never make much of a fan. On my windshield a ten-dollar parking ticket flapped in the humid breeze. So much for the magnetism of science fiction authors.    On the way home I mused about that mass of youth I'd seen, the cult god on the platform, the conversations I had overheard. People over thirty had been conspicuous by absence. Yet such folk were reading the stuff. Had they been teenage disciples too, once upon a time? Were they living the science fiction they'd read about in puberty? Would these youngsters end up living the stuff we wrote? -- not literally, of course, but subtly changed and adapted to reality? If it is a cult, I told myself, it might have its value: a chrysalis from which will crawl, wellconditioned to withstand tomorrow's future shock, a new generation of the post-technocracy -- or whatever. By the time I reached home, the speculative fever had died down somewhat. Hypothesis, I told myself: just another hypothesis, another attempt to horn an irrational phenomenon into the utilitarian shoe. The fans were there because they pleased; the writers wrote because they pleased; it was nothing more profound... Some time after that I tried to transmute my experience into an ironic story about a fan. The Harley-con would be in it, of course, and plenty of weird far-out types -- and a score of middle-aged writers trying to foist off their worn-out military and sexual fantasies on the young in a coating of science. That, too, is an aspect of the field, of course, but I get skittish about boxes, and so that little enterprise died a quiet death. Requiescat in pacem.    My next and last encounter with the science fiction world -- aside from writing and all that goes with it -- was a Nebula dinner in a very big city (yes, that city). I went in part from necessity. With a name like mine, even in science fiction circles it is difficult to gain credibility. I wanted to prove that I was the real thing, no mere pseudonym. This affair caught me by surprise. After Harley-con, I had expected this gathering to be a psychedelic happening squared. But I should have known better. Only writers come to Nebula affairs, and the priests are not the congregation: they wear black robes, stiff collars, and inhabit the quiet inner courtyards of meditation. Everything was simple, measured, and dignified. I felt at ease in my blend-in organization-man clothes. I was among professionals and recognized the atmosphere. Close up and relaxed -- the unruly constituencies held at bay by invisible bars -- the people at the center of science fiction gave me a good impression. I found the writers open, friendly, and self-contained. I had expected more animosity, frankly. circular, I had encountered the most juvenile sort of rubbish imaginable; thoughtless effusions, petty carping, clumsy clowning, lockerroom humor, and plain stupidity: distasteful to an innocent who looks at writing (even "funny" writing) as a serious matter. Little of that sewage-stream surfaced on Nebula Day -- though there were a few false notes, of course. I sensed the jostle of egos now and then, especially during dinner after was a typical union affair. Publishers were not especially popular. There were camps within the tribe, vaguely defined (for me) but real enough. The dominant tone overcame the noise, however, all in all. The highlight of the evening was the first award of the Grand Master Nebula, larger in size than the regular award. It went to Robert Heinlein, a trim, bullet-headed venerable of the field. He was genuinely touched as we all rose to give him a standing ovation. Something ended that evening: the completion of an edifice -- pyramid-shaped, of course. The final stone had been placed on top and the hierarchy was complete. I looked about at the tightlypacked tables surprised a little at finding myself there, in the inner circle -- albeit at its outer edge: men and women of all ages. The glistening Nebulas were carried off, one by one. Laughter rolled and shoptalk buzzed. Despite the formal dress some wore, the beatnik threads of others, I saw ordinary craftsmen all about and understood it all a little better: here was science fiction as a profession or a trade (take your pick), and this affair was an association meeting. The creators of imaginary empires were like -- well, no more flamboyant, say, than a West Coast contingent of electrical engineers. A big, crowded reception followed dinner. It went on and on, well past my bedtime. The next morning, a bright and empty Sunday, I caught a plane home.    Some time has passed now, but on the subject of science fiction I remain an innocent still -- despite these near-encounters with the mystery. And I'm fairly sure I'd prefer to stay that way. Much can be made of nothing much on the one hand; and on the other profundities turn banal on close examination. Science fiction is both of these and neither. It's best for me, as writer and as reader (though I don't urge this on anyone else), to take it like it comes. Definitions will never hold water in the arts, though there are countless busy potters patching the container. Nothing dies so quickly as on a vivisection table, and I prefer to run about free in the valleys and on the hills.  About to die. And so on. We're al going to die. The Sahara is your back yard, so's the Pacific Trench: die there and you won't be lonely. On Earth you are never more than # miles from anywhere, which as the man said is a tough commute, but the rays of light from the scene of your death take little more than a tenth of a second to go...anywhere! We're nowhere. We'll die alone. This is space travel: Imagine a flat world, a piece of paper, say, with two spots on it but very far apart. If you were a twodimensional triangle, how would you get from one spot to the other? Walk? Too far. But fold the paper through the third dimension (ours) so that the spots match exactly -- if you were a triangle you couldn't see or feel this, of course -- and you are at the proper place. We do this in the fourth. Don't ask me how. Only you must be very, very careful, when you fold spacetime, not to sloosh the paper around or let it slide: then you end up not on the spot you wanted but God knows where, maybe entirely out of our Galaxy, which is that dust you see in the sky on clear nights when you're away from cities. The glittering breath of angels. Far, far from home. The light of our dying may years. That ordinary sun up there, a little hazy now at noon, that smeary spot. We do not know where we are. At dawn there was an intensely horizon, and about an hour later the noise of the thing; I figured the way you do for thunderstorms, the lag between light and sound: onehippopotamus, two-hippopotamus, three-hippopotamus, four-hippopotamus, five-hippopotamus -- there's your mile. Seven hundred miles. That's over a thousand kilometers . In the event of mechanical dysfunction, the ship's computer goes for the nearest "tagged" planet, i.e. where human life is supposed to be possible, then ejects the passenger compartment separately. Lays an egg, you might say. We won't be visited without a distress call , however, now the colonization fever's died down people by twenty and the remainders start getting clubby again). Goodbye ship, goodbye crew, goodbye medicine, goodbye books, goodbye freight, goodbye baggage, goodbye computer that could have sent back an instantaneous distress call along the coordinates we came through (provided it had them, which I doubt), goodbye plodding laser signal no faster than other light that might have reached somewhere, sometime, this time, next time, never. You'll get around to us, say in a couple of thousand years. We're a handful of persons in a metal bungalow: five women, three men, bedding, chemical toilet, simple tools, an even simpler pocket laboratory, freeze-dried food for six months, and a water-distiller with its own sealed powerpack, good for six months (and cast as a unit, unusable for anything else). Goodbye, everybody. At dawn I held hands with the other passengers, we all huddled tothough I hate them. O god, I miss my music. #   (This is being recorded on a pocket vocoder I always carry; the punctuation is a series of sounds not often used for words in any language: triple gutturals, spits, squeaks, pops, that kind of thing. Sounds like an insane chicken. Hence this parenthesis.) Of the women: myself. A Mrs. Valeria Graham, actually married to Mr. Graham, in the delicate fifties when alimony becomes mandatory upon divorce (who would pay whom is a conjecture here). Valeria Victrix habitually wears the classical Indian sari, usually gold embroidered on royal blue, like a television hostess's; this does not suit a petite chemical blonde. Ditto the many-splendored earrings: bells within cages within hoops. A dark young woman who does yoga on her head, off to some "unimportant job" somewhere (she said), hates everyone, says she's called Nathalie. Nathalie what? Nathalie nothing. Mind your own business. Cassie, thirty-ish, beginning to put on weight; you'll find her waiting table in any restaurant or nude bar on any world. She looks like an earlier stage in the life-cycle of Mrs. Graham, but that's an illusion; nothing but a convulsion of nature could let either or these two rise or fall to the other's level. (Hydrogen fusion, which provided unlimited power and should've made us all rich, but of course didn't.) A Graham child, female, fourteen, a beautiful cafe-au-lait so she is either Mrs. Graham's by a former marriage or Mr. Graham's ditto, or neither. Hors de combat all trip with one of the few bacterial diseases left, or rather the treatment for it, which had made her dreadfully ill. We'd see her only when she'd stagger into the lounge, looking beautil and hopeless, and then vomit (again). For whoever finds this and has no Greek, an iatrogenic disease is one created by the physician and vye have plenty of them. The physicians and the diseases. This will never be found. Who am I writing for, then? The men: Mr. Graham, a big powerful male in his early fifties, hollow and handsome in the same style as his wife: coloring, dress, and person. Three days out (we were on the way to find the first spot we can then fold onto the second spot) Cassie took off the mask, stopped being squeezably-soft, and lost all expression. The Grahams stopped speaking to her. I say "male" because he emphasizes it subtly, so perhaps she's the buyer and he's the bought. Or both: money marries money. Relations with men are still apt to be patterned on a few rather dull models, especially among strangers, so I know less about the men than I do about the women, but in one way I know more: I mean the conception of themselves they find it publicly necessary to live up to. Alan: a young man with a set of shoulders like unto those of one who plays le futbol (says he did). Extremely polite and attentive, with a carefully intent way of listening to everybody and agreeing civilly and much too often ("Oh, I do agree with you, Mr. Graham, I really do"). My theory is that this obviously insincere behavior conceals absolutely nothing; he's rich enough to take the poor man's Grand Tour, poor enough to need a job, decent enough not to hurt anyone unless he's frightened or hurt himself (which could happen pretty easily), and anxious enough to flatter whomever he thinks can help him. The Grahams, you see, are slumming. An historian of ideas traveling from one University to another and extremely evasive about his work, as they all are, now there's so little of it to go around; he wears Mr. Graham's kind of conservative clothes: shorts and sport-shirts, bright but not daylight-fluorescent (Vic Graham in blue, John Ude in red). The only historical analogy to Alan's costumes is Graustark, all gold braid, epaulettes, and boots (except the shako, which I think he had to leave behind on account of the weight, though he never mentioned it). The professor is John Ude. Thirties. A very minor intellectual. Bland. Often displays The Smile. The first day, in the lounge, when Mrs. Graham actually introduced herself as Mrs. Grahamwhich is rather like presenting yourself as a Dame of the British Empire or a Roman Tribune -- Professor Ude displayed (after a blank moment) The Smile. Then he took out from his sporran The Pipe, gesturing at The Pipe with The Smile to show that he was aware of his own self-mockery. He would have received Valeria as Mistress Anne Bradstreet, had she so required, because the Grahams are rich. Blackbody-suited, perpetually angry Nathalie said audibly, "Missiz. Oh God," and turned away with an unbelieving, outraged, I knew-it-wasgoing-to-be-one-of-those-trips look. Alan gaped hysterically, then shut his mouth. I said nothing. Think of it: Valeria and Victor in blue, Ude in red, Alan indescribable, Cassie in two stars and a cache-sexe (both silver), and Lori Graham in body paint, mostly blue (to match her parents' clothes). The arrows of Professor Ude's irony point only down in the social scale, never up; when they occasionally point at himself, he is very careful to blunt them. Oh, we are a dull bunch! The professor once uncrimped enough to get into a long discussion with Victor Graham about the new lease of life given capitalism by the unlimited power of hydrogen fusion, the poor fool. He believes in free enterprise, competition, achievement-orientation, the meritocracy. He's never been behind the crew panels where the technocrats live. Travel enough and you can make friends with the crew, what's this, what's that, ask questions; they even let you fiddle about in sick bay if you're careful. You see things, then, if you're careful. Meritocracy? We're being kept off the streets, that's all, rich or poor. (Foundations pay me to lecture on music and play tapes of it; that's why I travel. I'm a scrounge.) I once said to Ude, "How fast do you think things really change?" He said, ""niat's not my field." Cassie, determined, bitter, exhausted, full-breasted, wanted to know what a musicologist was and what kind of music. "Very old," I said. "European twelfth century to Baroque. No farther. ' ' "How nice," Mrs. Graham said. "We must tell Lori." "Who cares," Cassie said. I wear body-suits and sandals, like Nathalie, and keep a low profile, especially with passengers. This isn't a luxury liner; you don't have to eat with anybody, just dial a meal out of the locker. And visit the crew. And envy them. Behold the new irrelevants: parasites, scum, proles, scroungers. People who do nothing real. No, dinosaurs. Isn't...wasn't, I mean, a luxury liner. Stranded dinosaurs.    Day first. I'm sitting in the corner of the empty tool chest after a little nap. Already excited talk of "colonization," whatever, that is. Our tiny laboratory tells us the air is safe, although perhaps a little thin; there's nothing directly poisonous outside. Nathalie's unexpected talent for cataloguing and arranging tools (which is why the tool box is empty). The sun up for at least fifteen hours, taking a slow tour of the horizon at what my childhood tells me is # P.M. late autumn, so we have either a very great axial tilt or are in very high latitudes. A few weeks' observation and perhaps we can guess if we're approaching the summer solstice or going the other way, which could give us some idea of how long the seasons will be: could be ten years of summer (and it's hot outside now, about # C, they tell me). Through the window you can see ordinary green trees, hilly up-and-downish but not much, some little natural clearings. Very much like New Jersey a hundred and thirty-five years ago, when my ancestors came to Ellis Island; about nineteen-aught-five that was. My natemal something-great-grandfather was a plumber, my maternal something-great-grandmother a sheitel-maker. (A sheitel is a wig which Orthodox Jewish women used to wear after marriage, over their shorn hair. But what do you care.) We don't remember the actual genealogy of the other side nearly so far back, but I've inherited their looks: little, dark, Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish frontier at night with rubies, emeralds, and uncut diamonds sewn into the hems of their cloaks. At least I like to think of them that way. I carry the modern equivalent, the only currency that passes everywhere, sewn into my jacket, my neckband, my belt, so flat you couldn't detect it. I mean a whole pharmacopoeia. Because you never know what you will need. (I flicked a little from the ship, too: nothing important.) Our equipment isn't good enough to test whether the life here is edible. We're not supposed to do that. Commonly the problem has been people contaminating the planet, but there have been instances of viceversa. We're supposed to stay inside. Everybody is getting on everybody else's nerves. Victor, in his hearty, overemphasized, hollow voice: "I believe I should." (Tail end of a conversation about who's to go out first. Not that it matters. We either go out eventually or cut our throats.) "Why?" says Nathalie instantly. "Because I'm old. Expendable. Why else?" (Lori Graham is looking adoring and anxious.) "Very sensible," says Nathalie. "So should Mrs. Graham." (Lori outraged.) "Well, if there's any harm..." This is John Ude. "The Grahams will go," says Nathalie, over her shoulder, and continues putting together our shovels, our hammers, our axes -- "half an hour, no less, no more" -- and something longer that comes in sections. The Grahams go out the air-lock, Victor stooping, Alan kindly restraining Lori when she tries to slip out with them. They have an intense, whispered conversation with Lori close to tears. "My, you are just an ordinary traveler, aren't you!" I say to Nathalie, hoping to get a rise from her, maybe learn something. No answer. She's engaged in jointing together what we both realize at the same instant is a single-passenger hovercraft: sealed motor, no cab, kicks up so much dust that you have to wear an air-filter (included in the box; by Saint George, I was right), flies over any terrain with ease, including water (at under # kph, however), and looks like nothing so much as a stick with a saddle; hence its name. "A br -- " (she catches herself). "Broomstick," I finish. On her knees, in the midst of spare parts, in her black skin-tights, Nathalie gives me (for a moment only) a glance of shock, of wild surmise -- are you one, too? "Where were you really going?" I say. She inspects her fingernails, comes to a quick decision, licks her lips wolfishly. "Government trainee," she says in a low voice but so naturally, that is to say pretend-naturally, that Cassie (who is lying on a bunk, holding to one ear a cheap, battery-powered music library that will wear out within days, I can tell) can't hear us. "At what?" say I. "Doesn't matter," she says sharply. "Not to tell. And I shan't now, not because it matters but because it doesn't." For a moment she's a death'shead. Then "What!" says Lori Graham, a little desperately, with the natural irritation of someone whose Mummy and Daddy may, after all, have been eaten by megatheria. "Nothing," answers Nathalie. "Go on screwing with Alan or whatever it is you were doing." (Lori makes a disgusted face and Alan turns aside to blush or giggle.) "If he can," she adds. In the low, trained voice, she says to me, "Who are you." "A musicologist," I say. "Sorry. Nobody like you. I've picked things up because I've traveled a lot, that's all." Cassie sits up, shaking her radio. She says to Nathalie, "Can you do something with this thing?" "The batteries are worn down and they're electric; we can't recharge them. You've been playing that ever since we started this trip and you've probably played it before, quite a lot. I know you've recharged them but the case is worn. So that's probably two hundred hours and a couple of rechargings; they do deteriorate each time, you know. And there's nothing we can do -- our gadgets are all sealed and shielded. It's a different kind of energy; we can't transform the one to the other. Besides if we tried opening any of the powerpacks, we'd probably go boom, you know, just like the ship." This is me. I add, "I'm awfully sorry, Cassie." "So if you're a goddamn music student," says Cassie at her most insulting, "where's your goddamn music, huh?" I'm tempted to answer "in the ionosphere" (reduced to its constituent atoms or even smaller pieces) but I say, "It was in the baggage compartment . " "Oh," says Alan, clearly disappointed. I guess he has been planning on hearing some music. Cassie draws up her knees in the bunk, exasperated, and presses the side of her face against the sealed window. Alan adds in a friendly way, "Hey, don't you have any of it with you?" Forgetting to be polite, that one. "Tapes," I say. "Want to use them for ribbons? I have the amplifier and the recorder -- see? they fit in my hand -- but the speakers are too big. Two meters diameter. ' ' He opens his mouth, probably to inquire why a speaker has to be two meters across, but Lori -- who is very well educated, as her parents have been telling us for three weeks -- breaks in importantly with a disquisition on the physical reproduction of sound, and how the lowest musical note that can be heard by the human ear is # cycles per second and the lowest sounds that can be felt are even lower, and if you want a really good bass, say for' Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for Organ, or Vestal's Electronic Mass, you just have to have these enormous speakers for your sound environment because otherwise the sounds just won't fit mechanically on the speakers. "Literally, ""she says. "#-o-oh," says Alan in mock awe. Cassie breaks in furiously with, "Your goddamn education -- " (John Ude has been asleep all this time, worn out, poor man; that's why you haven't heard from him.) Thank God the Grahams come back in. The air-lock jams. We are now testing the atmosphere just as much as they, something Mr. Ude (waked by the noise of Lori's rejoicings and questionings) seems to notice, but nobody's going to call attention to such things in the presence of an hysterical twelve-yearold with the habit of psychosomatic vomiting. (Her Momma says.) Joy all around. (I'm not, of course, recording this at the time it happened. I stole half-an-hour from the long, long dawn. Two and a half hours of twilight, then three more of real dark, and again two and a half hours of dusk-turned backward: slow, creeping, endless, unadvancing grey.) We're very high on the world's shoulder. Labrador perhaps. Even with the Pole circle. If the sun goes lower, if it sets closer to the place of its rising, if the dark shrinks, if red-sunset evolves without darkness into red-sunrise. Is this Spring? Summer? Fall? We might be heading into a ten-month summer, a twenty-year summer. Desert? Everything dead, brown, burned? Think anyway of midwinter with the sun even lower and only three hours of daylight out of twenty-eight. A night twenty-five hours long. In the brief, black, real dark we all went outside to look at the sky. A shiver of the nerves as the night air struck us, a kind of blind claustrophilia, wishing to get back into our own, closed-in, stale smell, away from the living odors of night coolness. Everyone stayed together. Black velvet, must be overcast; this awful sense of being outside. Vast space. We looked up. Nothing. I mean there was almost nothing in the sky: a few bright stars near the zenith and halfway to the equatorial horizon a far, faint, dim blur. Island universes. From anywhere on Earth (they say) you can see about three thousand stars with the naked eye. You can also see that arch of powder which we call the Milky Way; it's the center of the galaxy. We're located in one of its arms; it's a kind of flattened ellipse. From anywhere near any galaxy, unless one is very far above or below its major plane, and in the wrong hemisphere to boot, you ought to be able to see something. Not that it matters, of course, for space travel. Still. Nothing matched the star maps Nathalie had (she would!) but then on the other side of the equator, who knows? And none of us is very good at this sort of thing. But six stars and a blur...which might be, God knows, the Crab Nebula or our own, or unidentified astronomical object number goodness-knowswhat, something so far away, (as I said) the light of our dying will reach you (whoever you are) only after you yourselves are long dead, after your own Sun has engulfed you and then shrunk to a collapsed cinder with no more light in it than what we saw that night. Whoever, wherever, whenever. Lori cried in her mother's arms. Mrs. Graham very clumsy at comforting her daughter, perhaps always was. John the professor of the history of ideas saying something like "Uhl" low, a sort of groan. That empty. Well, we might be visited in a routine check of the tagged worlds in as little as a couple of centuries, a century, eighty years even. Even little Lori will be dead. John Ude said, "Come on now, come on, dears. It's a tagged planet. It has to be. Too much coincidence otherwise, eh? The air, the gravity. Now if it's tagged, that means it's like Earth. And we know Earth. Most of us were bom on it. So what's there to be afraid of, hey? We're just colonizing a little early, that's all. You wouldn't be afraid of Earth, would you?" Oh, sure. Think #f Earth. Kind old home. Think of the Arctic. Of Labrador. Of Southern India in June. Think of smallpox and plague and earthquakes and ringworm and pit vipers. Think of a nice case of poison ivy all over, including your eyes. Status Asthmaticus. Amoebic dysentery. The Minnesota pioneers who tied a rope from the house to the barn in winter because you could lose your way in a blizzard and die three feet from the house. Think (while you're at it) of tsunamis, liver fluke, the Asian brown bear. Kind old home. The sweetheart. The darling place. Think of Death Valley...in August.    Day two. It began. I just couldn't keep my damned mouth shut. Everybody running around cheerily into the Upper Paleolithic. We're going to build huts. We're going to have a Village Fire that Lori Graham will tend because she is the Fire Virgin or something. Mrs. Graham is suddenly person-ofleastvalue. Victor says, "Excuse me, dear," with immense firmness and then goes about his business. He's going to go somewhere with John Ude to search for water. They won't drink it, of course, but will carry back samples and then we will analyze it, which is impossible, because we don't have the equipment. But it will certainly help the waterdistiller; our tanks are almost empty. Mrs. Graham has suddenly become very cuddly with Lori, who keeps squirming away, saying, "Valeria, please'." With twentyfive hours of daylight there's no rush, and besides we have to move everything outside (to find out if that will kill us). Outside it goes, mattresses and bedding (to get rained on or infested), tools and tool-kit, all of this superficially showing immense order but in fact about as rational as the ooze of algae from a pond. Our nice, destructible laboratory (like litmus paper, use it once and it's done for) has told us that the sun will not burn us, although it has a small amount of ultra-violet, and more than the usual infra-red (too low in the sky, anyhow); that the local vegetation does not contain mineral poisons; that the (local) air does not, either; and that the gravitation is #, which is so close to terrestrial as makes no difference. Nathalie's digging experimental sanitation pits with a collapsible shovel. And every once in a while it does. I seek out Ude, who's unpacking the first-aid kit, and say, "Benzedrine and bobby-pins!" but the joke's too old for either of us to have ever heard it, and too vulgar, base, and popular for him to have ever read it. I say, "Look, you've got an anti-pyretic, two wide-spectrum antibiotics, pain-killers, and a nice little pamphlet about how to make a splint out of a bunk-rail. It's not enough." "We'll make do," he said heartily, flashing The Smile. I said, "My God, man, what will you do when Lori's wisdom teeth come in?" and the child, who must have clairaudience (she was a good five meters away) instantly emitted a nervous "What!" and came over to join us. She had been watching Alan Bobby Whitehouse ponder about trying to start to learn to just possiblyswing an axe without cutting his own foot. "Your impacted wisdom teeth," I said. "Everybody gets impacted wisdom teeth. I'm the only adult I know whose wisdom teeth came in straight. Of course I had gingivitis, your mother has transplants. So where are we going to get all this?" "Huh?" said Lori. "They might just lie there for years," I said. "I know someone who didn't get them until they were thirty. On the other hand, you might have intense pain for a month before they die and rot inside your gums and take a couple of molars with them, which Daddy can knock out with a rock." "O pioneers," I added rather sourly. "Now come on," said John Ude. (Funny. Everyone's around us now. I've attracted a crowd. The old raisethevoice bit. And I wasn't even thinking of it.) I said, "I don't want to make a speech -- " "Then don't," said Cassie, who's been flapping our linens in the breeze, just to make sure we get a nice dose of the local pollens. "Well, fuck you then!" I said. "I will." And I did. I must have talked for five or six minutes. I told them (and more): That a tagged planet is not colonizable but means only bearable gravity, a decent temperature range, and air that wont kill you. That survey teams sample only one square kilometer of a planet, doubtless not this one. That there were no mineral poisons, but that we couldn't test j I Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher I eagerly sought by Andre Norton's de I ; voted fans. It not only contains short ; ' stories, a novella, and rare Norton ; I I items, but also a brand-new, cor  rected and completed bibliography of ! I Andre Norton's works to I ; date. (UY! #-SI .#)  I companion series which completes ' ! I I ter, the Grand Master of the "Adult ' I ! Fantasy" genre, with a fantastic anI ! ; thology of Leiber, Vance, DeCamp, I !; Howard, andlotsmore. tfT#-S.#j ;  ' fontenay, the first great interplanetary ' ' novel of "Modern" science fiction, I I is a beautiful and poetic work match; I ing the classic integrity of the # ' original. A treasure to read and ! own -- with cover and illustrations by ! I George Barr. (UY I #-. I .#) j I I ! topher Anvil's latest novel, a peril ; ; pitched, rollicking, mind-tingling inI ' ' terplanetary adventure. Those who  ' I ; so that they don't miss this one -- and   ' i when the new edition appears beside ; I I ' cover by Kelly Freas, of course, i  ! (UY I I #- #) ;  for organics or allergens. That there could be incompatible proteins, vitamin deficiencies, chelating agents, dozens of things that could mess us up biologically in dozens of ways. That if we could eat the local macro-life, the local micro-life could eat us. That we could die of exposure in the winter because we had no way to make heat after our bungalow wore out and that was in six months. That we could die of heat in a summer whose length we didn't yet know. That a breech birth could kill. That a three-days' labor and no dilation could kill. That septicemia could kill. That heart failure could kill. That none of us could even recognize flint, let alone know what to do with it. That plastic was a lousy building material. That each of us carried five to eight lethal genes, and that even without them, humanity had not exactly been breeding for survival for the past hundred years. That there weren't enough of us. And more. So much more. I stopped. Too much of the old stiff-necked pride coming back. Giant Alan Bobby, with his axe, says, "I think you better go on," and I only hope Nathalie's training has included eye-gouging and larynx-smashing because this boy is beginning to find out -- in two days! -- that we are far, far from any law. I hope he can be shamed. I said: "Well, I hope we find volcanic glass, because I could recognize that; I saw it once in a museum." This falls flat. "What do you suggest we do?" says the Professor, with The Smile. "You seem to think we have no chance." Humor her. I nodded. The professor repeated, "Just what do you suggest we do?" Silence. "Well, anything you please," I said. "Only leave me out of it." "That," says Nathalie, "will make three women and two men, if we exclude Victor, which puts the numbers considerably lower, doesn't it?" "Jesus," I said; "Oh Jesus Christ, I'm forty-two years old. Do you think I can have my first child now? Besides you don't want me; my father was a bleeder." "Liar," says Nathalie. "I saw your medical records. You're not the only one who can get past the crew doors." "All right," I said. (Nathalie the leader. Wait til Alan finds out he can beat you up.) "All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But  think that some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That's obscene." Here the ground came up and hit me, as it always does when you get carried away; it was Cassie, standing over me and shouting, "Shut up! Shut up, you!" I don't think she hit me, only pushed. I wasn't ready, that's all. Rabble-rousing that used to work, but that doesn't work now because it's the wrong rabble and the wrong rouse. Well, we all know that. And in everyone's face the flash of realization: no law. John Ude said, "Come, come, dears, don't lose your temper. She'll get over it. Nathalie, what do you carry?" And the whole thing was over. Much later Cassie, her face grey in the grey dusk, woke me accidentally. She's hunting in the first-aid kit, her face drawn. She says, "Oh, you Go back to sleep." I said, "What's the matter?" "Migraine," she said. "I lost my pills. But this stuff is no good." (The last with a little wail; I judged it hadn't come on yet, maybe just the flashes of light or whatever it is she gets first.) I said, "Hold on," and fished something out of my belt. Should help. "So what's that, cyanide?" she whispered, closing her eyes as if to concentrate. It must be starting. "No," I said. "it's like your pills. Better than that all-purpose painkiller nonsense, anyway. Go on." I held them out in my palm. "Bet it's poison," she said, but she took it. I saw her feel her way to the water-dispenser over the uneven ground, cup a little water in her hand, and throw her head back. She came back and lay down on the mattress, out under the nothing sky. Still clear. Still no stars. One keeps getting the oddest feeling that it must be cloudy, though we've only seen morning fog. The temperature doesnt go down much at night. There's too much light, though; it's like living naked. Sometimes this place looks like a stage set or a little alleyway or back yard of somebody's familiar country home; only in the true dark does it become real. (Like the Australian outback, as I told them in my great lecture, which looks like New Jersey and can kill you in two hours.) She said, "What happens now, I blow up?" She cocked an eyebrow at me. "No," I said, smiling (I couldn't help it). "The pain stops, and if it doesn't you won't care; it's got a euphoric in it, too." "Ooh, I'm gonna get high," she said. "Jollies..." (Taking hold already?) "Say, hon, how come you carry all that stuff?" I explained: it's better than money. And you never know. "All you'd need is a jack-knife," she said, "if you feel like cutting your throat, which is a goddamn cowardly thing to do, if you don't mind my saying so." "Goodnight," I said, and turned over. I wasn't facing her any more. "Hey!" (comes the voice at my back) "You really want to kill yourself? You like getting hurt?" "Yes, I want to do it before I get didded," I said. "And no. No follows from yes." She chuckled sleepily. "Sorry I hit you. Forgive me, huh? What's you said about the whozis and the old guy?" (The old guy preached a sermon in his shroud a week before his death. The whozis were the Northmen; they used to say Deliver us from fire, plague, the fury of the Northmen, and sudden death. Those crazy people who took months to die. They had things to think about.) "Go to sleep," I said. "Dream about your migraines." And all the other things. Such a beautiful world, really. But no music, no friends. If Earth had been hit by plague, by fire, by war, by radiation, sterility, a thousand things, you name it. I'd still stand by her; I love her; I would fight every inch of the way there because my whole life is knit to her. And she'd need mourners. To die on a dying Earth -- I'd live, if only to weep. But this stranger has never seen us before. She says; Hey, what are you funny little things? We are (O listeners, note) one quarter the height of the trees, we are hairless, give birth to our young alive, are bipedal with two manipulating limbs, have binocular vision, we regulate our internal temperatures by the slow oxidation of various compounds (food) and we live no more than a century at the very, very most (at least it feels that way, as the joke goes) and we are caught rather nastily, very badly, and sometimes even comically, between different aspirations. That is the fault of the cerebral cortex. (People are turning over, sighing, mumbling in their sleep, as the light slowly grows.) Note: ars moriendi is Latin. It is a lost skill. It is ridiculed and is practiced by few. It is very, very important. It is the art of dying.    Day Three. Alan-Bobby found a medallion among my personal effects (he was sorting everyone's; somehow they haven't gone looking for water yet) and being a nice, obedient little boy, took it to Victor Graham, who took it to John Ude. "What is it?" said they (in chorus, as I imagine). He told them. He came over to me (I was making a deck of playing cards from Mrs. Graham's collection of antique post cards by first trying to peel the backs off) and swung the medallion at me, just far enough away so I couldn't grab it. Picture one early Christian, sitting cross-legged on the ground with lap covered by bedsheets, in case the cards didn't work out, and one professor -- but not John Donne -- who has decided to Tease. "Now we know!" said John Ude, looking much less cosmopolitan than before. "That? That's not mine," I said. (When in doubt, deny.) "Come! Who cares?" he said. (Alan and Victor have gone back to whatever they were doing; I'm sure he asked them to leave "so I can get her to talk" or something.) "Be anything you like. Only it explains what happened yesterday, and if I explain to everyone else, they might feel a little better about you." "You mean they'll dismiss me as a nut," I said. "All right, it's mine." He held it out to me, but I really have no particular use for the thing, and the metal chain might be usel to someone else. I said: "Look, it's only a symbol. You know, the quartered circle, symbol of Earth and all that. Keep it. Use the chain." "Don't you want it?" "No. It's only a piece of jewelry-" "Then you're not...?" "I am. But I don't use the Tarot, believe in the I Ching, tell fortunes, make sacrifices, have rituals, believe in the Bible -- not literally, anyway -- the Tao Te Ching, or anything else. So keep it." "An apostate!" he said. "Oh, don't be silly." And I went on trying my fingernails on the post cards. Don't see why she can't collect holovision cubes like everyone else. Have to use sheets, anyway. I said, "Do you know how to play poker?" But he had levered himself down on the grass next to me. No poison ivy so far. I said; "Well, when are you guys going to find water?" "A Trembler," he said. "My God, a Trembler in our very midst." I shut my eyes... "The Quakers," I said, "called themselves the Society of Friends. They were called Quakers because some fool heard John Fox say he quaked in the presence of his God. Actually I like to think of myself as a tremblor. Never mind." "But you tremble." "Oh, all the time." "Do you believe in God?" "No." "But you believe in something?" "Everywhere. Always. See Lao Tse: Tao is in the excrement, in the broken tile. Cleave the rock and there am I. Now go away." "But tell me," he said, professional passion rising, "what does your church -- " "No church." "Well, what do you say about -- about, say, sex?" "Nothing." Mrs. Graham, within earshot, having found that the tool chest was and having Lori take a bath in it, along with most of our clothes, caught guess-what-word. She wiped her hands free of suds and strolled over. "May I join you?" "I'm asking," said John Donne, "what the Tremblers have to say about sex." "Oh, that," said Mrs. Graham, looking knowing. It was real knowledge, too; you'd think Cassie, with her silver nipples, was the expert, but I think Cassie's frigid. She only sells it. Mrs. G has been a buyer and buyers do what buyers want. "Well, what do they say?" says Valeria. "Nothing," I said. "Look, Mrs. Graham, I think you'd better keep your post cards to entertain your great-grandchildren. My fingers hurt and besides, there's no reason to sacrifice them; they're entertaining. I'll cut up a sheet." "And about -- " "Look, John," I said, "we are not a church, only an attitude. Our principal subjects are work and mortality, not fucking. On those two I could tell you a lot but you heard it all yesterday and didn't like it. So why don't you get Nathalie to activate the broomstick and let her go look for water on it? It's a hell of a lot faster than walking." "No, one of us will have to go," said he, "unless Mrs. Graham can drive...?" "You see," he went, "Nathalie's life and yours and Lori's and Cassie's are too valuable to put in danger. You are childbearers. What does your religion say about that?' ' "Genetic drift -- " I said. "Civilization must be preserved," says he. "Civilization's doing fine," I said. "We just don't happen to be where it is." "Your church -- " "My religion," said I, rising from my cross-legged position without uncrossing my legs (which rather surprised him, but it's easy for short people) "says a lot about power. Bad things! It says thou owest God a death. It says that the first thing a sane civilization does with cryogenic corpses is to pull the plug on those damned popsicles, and if you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you're not living now. It says that you must die, because otherwise how can you be saved? It says that without meaningful work you might as well be dead. It also says death hurts. And it says if you try to be strong and perfect and good and powerful, you're a damned fool and liar and the truth is not in you. So don't try my patience. It also says God is in you and you are in God as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish. Saint Theresa. It also says -- " "You're a remarkably eclectic bunch," said John Ude, laughing. "Do you believe all this stolen theology?' ' "Why not?" I said. "I stole it myself." "Anyway, that's your field," I added. He laughed. Indulgently. "I'll spread the word," he said. He walked off -- even a twentyfive-hour day ends eventually -- and happened to pass by Lori in the tool chest, who crossed her arms over herself with great rapidity and looked sheer murder at him. Odd mores: body paint's O.K. but bathing is private. Surrounded by clothes, too, all colors, bobbing about in the water. Barely room enough for the lot of them, her knees under her chin. Mrs. Graham said, "Do you believe in life after death?" "No," I said. "Oh. And when was the last time you slept with anyone?" I stared at her. She did no even look much interested. I shrugged. "Years ago. Dunno. A long time." "And you're living in the present?" site said, raising her eyebrows. "Well!" Valeria Victrix. My God, yes, she must have been. In her own element. "There's other things," I said. "Like -- ?" "Oh look, Mrs. G -- " "Don't call me Mrs. Gee," she said. It's tasteless, don't you think? Call me Valerie. And tell me what all those wonderful other things are, besides sex. And money. Because you can turn money into anything, you know." Ah. I'm at the bottom of the pecking order now. Well, there are worse places, like the top. Inciting to riot. Destroying government property. (Symbolic?) I got arrested and was in Jail overnight but I certainly wasn't at the center of it. No doubt one of those thirty-year cycles of rebellion Our Man John writes about. And as if they had no connection with physical fact. At the bottom you can hide effectively. I said: "I was a Communist. I was in the 'twenties riots. Not very important, mind you, but it seemed to be going somewhere." "Just after hydrogen fusion," said she. "Which took the steam out of your sails, didn't it? And made me rich. So you're a Communist. Good Heavens! And a Trembler, too? I thought they didn't go together." "They do," I said. "Very well. And I'd prefer it if you called me what we call ourselves: Nobodies -- I'm Nobody, who are you? Are you Nobody, too? How nice. Which is no bar to being a Communist. Which I was." "You're not one any longer?" she said. "Mrs. Gee," I said, "None of us is anything any longer." "Frigid bitch," she said, stepping back. I said, "Oh, call me a salad, why don't you, that makes as much sense. And think of what I could call you." "Motherrr!" (Lori) She's tired of intimacies with everybody's washing. "Oh, Valeria," I went on, "the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it?" (She doesn't recognize, thinks I'm crazy.) I said, more prosaically, "If you bother me again. I'll poison Lori's mind against you." She got up slowly, saying, "At least I remember that I had something," and went to pull Lori out of the washtub: A sensible woman, really, but she's going to learn she has no money here. I yelled, "Hey, don't bug Victor, he's bigger'n you!" "Victor Graham is my father," cried Lori, reaching with a glass for the cold-water dispenser, to rinse herself. "Agh!" she cried. She shouted at me, "My father would never do anything wrong!" "Absolutely, love!" I shouted back. That child will grow up in a perfect mess of illusions. Did grow up. George Fox went to jail because he could not forbear rushing into Anglican services and denouncing their priesthood as mummery; he said the great bell struck upon his heart. I was not there, of course; read it in a book. The scores of thousands of books and musical compositions that are preserved in nitrogen at the British Museum in London. Prisoners and political exiles write books. Would you write a book if you were alone on a desert island? Would you scratch in the sand? Note: we communicate by organs which produce vibrations in the air (gaseous medium). We hear, roughly, sounds from # to # cycles per second. "Sound" is a series of concentric rings made of the rarefaction and compression of air, water, or some other medium. We can't exist completely submerged in water (this may come as a shock to you)as the oxygen we use in our metabolisms comes out of the air. We're not equipped the other way. We draw air into ourselves and push it out. We are extremely fragile, propaganda to the contrary. "Speaking" comes from a different place than "breathing." You must understand this. Those marks, " ", indicate speech. Communication. You must listen. You must understand that the patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days. By no design. You must understand that I have no music, no books, no friends, no love. No civilization without industrialization! I'm very much afraid of death. But I must. I must. I must. Deliver me from the body of this. This body. This damned life.    Day four. Nathalie finally went off on the broomstick because nobody knew how to operate it but she and I. I was not allowed, naturally. I relented and showed AlanBobby how to use the axe without cutting off his feet. He. took it away from me. He was cutting wood and so was Mr. Graham, with the little hand hatchet; when they managed to collect some branches, they lit them to see if they could make a fire. Bravo! It burned. And the smoke gave Lori a violent allergic reaction; she ran away clawing at her throat, crying, viciously rotating her fingers in her ears, and making the tongue motions of someone trying (ineffectually) to scratch her soft palate. Perfect for the long winter evenings. So they put the fire out. Mrs. Graham played gin with Mr. Graham, with the cards I'd made from bed-linen; she kept beating him. Then she played gin with John Ude and kept beating him. He said he wished to walk about, still being gracious; Mrs. G tried to get Mr. G back into playing. He said, "I don't wish to." "But I want to, dear," said Valeria quietly. (A simple, domestic request, repeated many times; Valeria in blue and gold, the nail of her left little finger a gold sheath, inches long. Victor in blue, the evening game, Mrs. Graham saying, "Get me a drink, dear," and Victor eager and compliant. Now I know.) Victor got up and went to talk to Alan-Bobby, who chuckled and nodded; then they got really serious, about drainage ditches or log cabins, or burning other wood, for Victor would not hurt his daughter, that I do know, not for the world. Something odd about Valeria's face. See, Victrix? She said, "Lori, I'm afraid your silly father has given you hives." "Daddy isn't silly," (says oblivious young Graham, cleaning her toenails with a complicated spiral device that was apparently part of her personal baggage) "and I don't think you should ask him to play cards if he doesn't want to. You can be awfully mean,, Mother." I walked over to -- no, I thought of walking over -- She came over to me. "Do you play gin?" I shook my head. "You see how they treat me," and she tossed back that old-young face, that surgically lifted neck, with hair that has begun to come in gray at the roots. It's a beautiful gesture and I myself would be quite content simply to admire it, no matter the age of the one who makes it, but I don't think the men will feel the same way. "Oh, they're bored," I said. "It's nothing. Cultural reversion. We're in the late nineteenth century is all. Do you want to bet how far back we'll be next week? Five to ten it'll be the eighth, A.D." "You're crazy," said Mrs. Graham, not without affection, and went into the bungalow to make friends with Cassie. I hid the crucial parts of my pharmacopoeia under a rock, in the tin box I will use for the vocoder, eventually. I thought of telling them I'm a vegetarian, just to make them discount even more of what I do (and they would!) but I couldn't do it with a straight face. An endless afternoon. John Ude: "You play Go? Chess?" I said No, dunno why, never learned. Lori remarked that she didn't see what was wrong with the Australian outback because she'd been there, in the special hotel, and it was very, very nice. I donate my mini-sewing-kit to the communal possesions heap. Finally, after Cassie had walked six ways around a bedsheet, deciding how to cut it up and sew it for herself, after everyone had memorized the kind of tree whose burning had made Lori sick ("This is very important" said her father), after Lori said, "Oh, I am like to die of tedium" only a dozen times, before we all went mad -- Nathalie returned on the broomstick, covered with dust. There's running water not far from here, that way (she gestures) which rises (she says) in a spring some two hundred kilometers to the North, in hilly country, and passes us only a couple of km. away. "Did you have to go all that way?" says Alan-Bobby, in grave complaint. "We've been waiting." from.yi # Garden Street, Moonachie, N.J. # A# S# She throws oyer her shoulder, ' 'Of course I had to," and sponging off the mask near the water tank, starts drawing on one of my playing cards where the stream is, where we are, and in which direction everything is. "North" is provincial. She means Pole-wards. At this time of year you can't tell East or West from the sun; though perhaps the sunset (a little to the right) and the sunrise (a little to the left) could tell us if we are facing North or South. Arbitrary. I study it very carefully. "Will you Just stop that!" cries Nathalie furiously, for Alan is taking a bath in the tool chest, a real bath (insofar as he can fit in) and singing lustily, though nothing recognizable. He's tune-deaf. Nathalie shouts, "Goddamn it, you're wasting water!" "But we've got water," says he, bewildered. "You just said so." "We've got the raw material for the distiller," she said. "That's all. We haven't even measured the flow yet. Now get out of there!" He does, tipping the soapy water on to the ground, where it might make the grass wither or blow up (but it doesn't) and prepares to fill the tool box again. "You...!" says Nathalie, white. "You imbecile!" "I don't think," says Alan, slowly, like a man to whom a new idea has just occurred, "that you ought to talk to me like that." "We could've put that back through the distiller!" (Which is what we've been doing with our chemical toilet.) "I think you are much too bossy," says Alan, sponging himself off with the few inches of cold water in the tool chest. He's looking at the ground and something's happening in his head. John Ude has backed off, smiling nervously. Victor's frowning. Nobody likes her, not Cassie, not Mrs. Gee, not her husband, certainly. Lori and I don't count. Dried off and in his shorts, Alan advances up to dirty, dust-streaked Nathalie, who has always been Top. He looks sly. "Say, how come you're boss?" he says. "Brains," she says. "How come you're such a damn fool?" "I could take you over my knee and spank you," he says. Nobody is interfering. "Idiot," says she. Clearly, in government training schools, people don't do these things. She turns her back on him, superbly. "Look, nobody else can fly that thing," I say, very quickly. "And since you won't let me because you don't trust me, you'd better -- " "Turn around," he says.  She props the broomstick against a tree, stripping off her shirt and beating the dust out of it. "Turn around, you bitch!" he says. Surprised, she does. Not even afraid. Only surprised. And Alan Bobby, who could probably uproot a tree, with those shoulders and arms and that neck, and the little face in between looking peculiarly lost -- but very angry now -- socks her right in the jaw, knocking her down. He's red. He says, "Maybe now you'll treat other people with respect. Now that you know there's other people in the world." She whispers, sprawled on the ground, white as one of my playing cards, "You bloody, blazing, impossible ass -- " He hits her powerfully on the side of the face, snapping her head about. "That's enough," says Victor, he and John Ude, by some mysterious calculus, speaking almost at the same moment, and each coming forward to hold one arm of this baby colossus. Enough for what? Alan looks happy. I mean it: not triumphant, not overbearing, simply happy. He glows. The twenty-first century can't have been kind to this enormous fellow, and now he's discovering other interesting things to do: chopping down trees, lifting rock with his bare hands, fighting, knocking down women. Too bad he's so young; Victor Graham now, there's a hypertensive if I ever saw one; once his medication mns out, we might do a job like the old Jewish story: the rabbi and the Count both tied to chairs, alone in the Count's cellar for a whole night, and in the morning the rabbi serene and fresh and the Count a dead man. Apoplexy. But Alan's useful. Any day now he'll discover Protecting Women. I hope. Valeria Victrix got the first-aid kit and she and I anointed and bandaged Nathalie, who was still shaking -- more from anger than from shock. Cassie pushed us aside, claiming she could do it better. She was right. I said, "Nathalie, I thought a government trainee would know -- " "I will, I will," she said. "My God, why didn't you duck?" I said. "Or just drop under his punch? Or give him a good knee-over when you were on your back? Or stick your fingers in his eyes?" Well, he had surprised her. Cassie thought any woman who even got into such a position was a fool to begin with. "Just tell him Lori is watching," she said. "And cry a lot. You're both cuckoo." I said, "Look here, Nathalie, just how much training have you really had?" Silence. Of course. She was going to it, not coming yrow it. I said quickly, "Never mind. Don't speak; your mouth is puffing up." Sitting, holding rags soaked in cold water to her face. Streaked with dirt. John, Victor, and Alan making ecstatic plans how to move everything nearer the stream. We go to bed when the sun reaches a certain clump of trees; there's hours of daylight yet to go and nobody can tell if the day is getting shorter or longer. It remains warm, too light, but better that than that dreadful, empty, black sky. You see the rewards of being Nobody.    The penalty: everybody comes to me for advice. Because my public word would not be trusted, I can be told anything privately. Alan whispers: "Hey, wake up. Please?" Dusk all around us. Scarlatti in my head. I said, "What?" "Are you awake?" he whispered. I mumbled something and opened my eyes. Dusk or dawn, everybody's mattresses scattered all over the ground, farther apart than last night. I've got to get away from these insane people. Alan is lying by my mattress, on the damp ground, his woeful face propped in his hands. He says, in a low voice so as not to waken anyone: "Do you think what I did was really so bad?" "Yes," I said. "Absolutely." "Lori chewed me out something awful," he said. "So did Mrs. Graham. And Cassie won't speak to me." I sat up. I said, "I bet Ude gave you a lecture on civilization and Vic said you'd have him to reckon with if you tried it again." "How'd you know!" "Oh, just guessing," I said. "Well, do you think it was so bad?" Looking anxious. "Yes. Now let me sleep. Git." "Hell, you sound just like Nathalie! I'll tell you, maybe it wasn't right, but I bet it taught her something!" "What did it teach her?" I said. "Never to approach you without a broken bottle in her hand? Now Lori thinks you're real sweet. And Vic Graham knows that some day you're going to pull something like that on him. It taught us all to love and trust you. Right?" He sat back on his heels. He said sulkily, "I could do it to you, too, you know." I said, "Really, Victor? Sorry -- slip of the tongue," and was on my feet, holding straight out in that treacherous light the screwdriver I had abstracted from the tool chest on day one. You surely don't think I'm fool enough to walk about without a weapon, do you? i He reached for it and I gave his hand a good slash. He withdrew it, extremely astonished. "Oh, go away," I said. "I haven't the slightest intention of hurting you and you don't have the slightest intention of really hurting me. You're just showing off. You're a good, big, strong, decent, beautiful man, and you can pride yourself on that all you like. But don't forget; even though she's exasperating, Nathalie is smart and if you start throwing your weight around, nobody else will like you and she'll take advantage of that. Remember: you're not stronger than all of us put together. Besides, Lori's stuck on you." He lit up. "Yeah!" "So go to sleep now, huh?" He said, "How old do you think Lori would have to be before she can have babies?" "Sixteen," I said (guessing). "Now go to sleep." Day five: we'll move everything nearer the river, like lemmings. Nathalie will start turning bruiseblue in the face. Alan will creep about like a wounded pup, ostracized by all, scorned by Lori Graham, the worst burdens loaden on his back, meke as the knyght that suffereth for his ladye's sake. Which won't last.   # Day five: we worked eighteen hours, slept, worked again. Alan has reverted to the intensely polite, self-suppressing youth everybody knew and loathed. My feet hurt. I tried to explain about orthopedic malfunctions and was told I was malingering. Then my ankles swelled out most satisfactorily in the evening, looking distressingly like small cantaloupes, and everyone was most apologetic. I said No, no, I had to carry my share. Then my ankles got even more so. Cassie washed them, the great nurse, sexpot, earth-mother. We went to bed. She says: "Sssst!" Me: What? She: You ever had an orgasm? Me: Can't remember. She: Liar. I mean during fucking. I never did. Women are all liars about it, like Vicki Graham. She just pretends, to show off, you know. (Silence.) She; Ever want babies? Me; I dunno. Sort of. Not really. She; I do. (Silence.) She; They don't let you, if you're poor. But here -- Me; I see. Well, good luck. How are you going to handle the men? She just laughed. Then she said with perfect certainty, "Those babies'll love me, not their daddies." she nudged me. "Hey, madhead, Ude and Graham are going to take your pills away from you in the morning." "And who told them, you bloody traitor!" said I. "Sssssh!" She looked around uneasily, then whispered, "I did." She added, "But I told you first, didn't I?"   Day six; I am set upon from behind, bound, and searched, protesting indignantly. They slit the lining of my jacket (Cassie; "Oh, don't take on so; I'll sew it up again!"), violate my leather belt, ("Hey, look, it's got pop-outs," says Alan), and pinch my body-suit up and down (without me in it, of course). They collect all the psychedelics. I cry, very very hard. They free my hands so I can blow my nose and I whack Cassie, who looks startled. Then they let me put on my body-suit and Victor Graham stands very impressively in front of me, hands out; "More." "Me?" I said. "Me have anything more? I swear -- " Finally I unscrew my left shoeheel and give them Cassie's headache medicine. Then I unscrew my right shoe-heel and hand over a glass vial. Victor starts to crush the thing and this part of the scene is genuine, believe me, I yelled "Don't! Stop!" Consternation. I said, "That's lethal. It's a nerve poison, works right through the skin. You don't have to drink it. Victor! Just put it down. No, it's not bio-degradable, so you can't put it in the chemical toilet. Just leave it in the sun for a while. That'll ruin it. But don't let anybody touch it. ' ' Victor confers with John Ude, both of them gingerly handling the vial. Ude nods. I've told the truth. (And I have. What I did not tell them was how many more I've got hidden back at the old site.) I started to cry harder, which isn't difficult because I'm thinking of how damned unfair it is that I shall never hear again my melancholy Dowland; semper Dowland, semper dolens. Ever Dowland, ever doleful. No tee-hee-hee-quoth-she for him. I notice through my tears that Nathalie appears to have formed some kind of alliance with John Ude, her normal impressiveness having proved unequal to Alan's muscles. The two intellectuals. The two bureaucrats. Tee-hee-hee in the mattresses. They don't want to set me free, but that is foolish, as I tell them at great length, and I cry a lot harder, and even rock back and forth, which is nine parts fury, until Cassie says, "Oh stop it, hon. I'll fix your jacket. What were you going to do with those things, anyway? Kill yourself by an overdose?" "No," said I. "I just feel humiliated." She put her arm around me, which is enough to make you feel an awful bemmon. She then promised to fix my jacket. I gave them back the screwdriver. Oh, it went like a charm! John Ude, still uncontrollably curious, says to me on the last trek back to the old place: "Really, I cannot understand why you want to die." "Neither can I," I said. "Well, then?" I said, "John Donne, John John with your britches on, John Whittington turn again lord mayor of London Town, we are dead. We died the minute we crashed. Plague, toxic food, deficiency diseases, broken bones, infection, gangrene, cold heat, and just plain starvation. I'm just a Trembler. My God, you're the ones who want to suffer: conquer and control, conquer and control, when you haven't even got stone spears. You're dead." "For dead people, we're acting pretty brisk," says Ude, with The Smile. Haven't seen that for a while; Nathalie must've bucked him up quite a bit. "It's one of the symptoms," I said. "Galvanism. Corpse jerking. Planning, Power. Inheritance. You know, survival. My genes shall conquer the world. That's death." "Hear you were quite big in that power and planning stuff about fifteen years back," he says. "Then you heard wrong. I walked out one day and gave it all up. Hideously ineffectual." "Still -- " "For everything there is a time and a season under Heaven; now you ought to know that." He keeps on smiling The Smile. No recognition. I said, "You're not an historian of ideas." "Clever," says he. "I wondered when you'd tumble to it. I was what you'd call a bureaucrat. That's why Nathalie and I get along. She says we think alike." "Sure, after yesterday," said I. Ude halted. "Don't push us," he said. "Don't you push us too much now." "Then leave me alone," I said. "Just leave me alone and I'll have no reason to push anybody, huh?" But they won't be able to leave me alone. I know. Not because of the child-bearing, because of the disagreement. The disagreement is what matters. How far will I push them? To where? All the way?    Day seven: as lunatics or lemmings will, we dragged our glassand-plastic bungalow, the only dwelling with a heater this side of God-knows-what, two kilometers to the stream, the travois being its own light-but-stubborn bottom. It took all day. Too tired to do anything else. Lying on the mattress outdoors, Nathalie sketching in the dirt the plans of sanitary latrines (downstream). Quickly goes in and washes and disinfects her hands. No one has yet deliberately ingested one morsel of anythingin this place; still we must have been breathing in and swallowing a good deal and no one's dead yet. We live on the freeze-dried. How to test it out? A fruitless (sorry) question. They asked me to sing. My memory was stuck on Dowland; I thought of "Flow, My Tears," "In Darkness Let Me Dwell," "A Heart That's Broken" -- well! This is not good public relations. "Come All Ye Sons of Art"? Nothing with polyphony. Finally I sang "Sweet Kate" with all the tee-hee-hee. Taught Cassie, who has a good natural voice, to come in on it, and added a few nasty Renaissance songs about jealousy (dreadful people), "Farewell, Unkind," and finished with a sudden burst of remembrance, swooping in great fake arcs, those posh-velveteen melodies: Blue desert And you and I... (Where on earth did I learn "The Desert Song"?) Lori sang Gilbert and Sullivan and forgot the middles. "Oh, you can sing!" cried Alan, in a burst of admiration (at me, not at Lori; the mystic maiden can, of course, do anything). Schubert! Of course. I said, "More tomorrow." But can I do the eleven-note jumps upward on an o-umlaut? Never. Ah! Sea songs and folk songs. (Did I learn them in high school?) Good night, court jester.    Day eight: the great womb robbery. The day started out well enough, with me limping so badly (at least I tried to) that I was excused work by John Ude, told "Oh, that's too bad," by several others, and ended up playing cards with Lori (I mean the bed-sheet cards). For some reason nobody mentions she's never expected to do any work, God knows why. She kept beating me at Casino, while I rubbed my ankles. "Are those orthopedic shoes?" I said uh huh. She yelled excitedly, "Fve got the ten of diamonds!" and took in an eight of clubs and a two of hearts. (That's three points.) She looked at me sideways, then stuck her nose in the air. "So you want us to kill ourselves!" she said, with contempt. I just made a face and threw up my hands. "You think nobody'll find us?" she added, a little sharper. "Oh, I was just talng," I said. She was counting up her winnings so far. She said, frowning, "You're a coward!" and put her cards down in a neat little pile, with a stone on top of it. I said uh huh again. "The one thing my Mummy and Daddy taught me when they got me from the creche when I was seven," she said, still sharply, "was never to give up on anything. And never to be a coward." Five years of money, that's five years of enforced childishness. She started shuffling the cards in a very slow method invented by herself; put them in piles of three each, with a pebble on top, then take one off the top of each pile, then subtract every fourth card and put them on the bottom. I can't figure it. Daddy had set up a kind of awning with four stakes chopped from a tree and one of the sheets; we were sitting under this and watching the others sweat at the foundation of the communal house, about fifty meters away from the water and several meters above it on a slight elevation. Nathalie had suggested some kind of wooden rockers under the house, like the type used in Colonial New England; good for winds, for shifting ground, and floods. I don't know what they think they're going to insulate it with -- wood shavings, chopped by hand? Lori started to deal the cards. You have to pick each of them up with both hands and hold it taut; otherwise it drapes and you can see the other side. Managing a handful of them isn't easy. I said: "Shall I tell your fortune?" "Huh?" said she. "Do you know how to read palms?" She shook her head. "That's silly." She stuck out her hand, then giggled and drew it back. "All right," she said, after a moment. "Go ahead. But I know what you'll say!" "Hmm," I said, "do you now, little miss." That struck her as excruciating: Me, the gypsy. She put on an expression very like her mother's only far more exaggerated: eyes rolled up, comers of the mouth pulled dovvn. I said, "You have an immensely long life-line." (I cannot tell a lifeline from a thumb.) "Here," I said at random. "You will die some time in your eighty-ninth year. You will be well-known. Even famous. Extraordinary!" "Known to how many?" said Lori quickly. vast surprise). "Your life-line is interrupted here by...by relative isolation for a period of years...not many years, perhaps eight or nine. And then there's a great blossoming of renown, almost as great as what I see at the end of your life." "Well, obviously we're going to be saved," she said pedantically. "So it would seem. Here" (I think I was somewhere in the middle of her palm) "is the line which indicates either children or good work, fruitful work. It branches four -- five -- no, many more times. But I don't know if that means children or work." "Work," she said promptly. "I'm a musician." "Oh," I said. "Yes," (and she nodded) "I'm a composer. ' ' "Are you? Think of that!" "Well, I will be," she said. Then she added, "That's the same thing. But I'll tell you a secret -- " (she all but whispered this, leaning over the piles of cards) " don't like commercial music." "Oh," I said. What hearts did I wring when I was a child? Just a biological device. Nature keeping us old ones in the service of the young. She said, frowning, "You look funny." Then she added, without the slightest transition, "I like serial music, like the late twentiethcentury stuff where it goes deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle for half an hour and then it goes doodle, just once, and you could die with excitement." "Uh huh," I said. "I've written one -- well, half of one -- composition." She stuck out her hand. "Go on." I said, "You know, Lori, what I think your fortune means is that you will not only be famous for music, but also for having been rescued here. They'll probably call the place after you. They do things like that, you know." "Of course," she said. "And everybody gets rescued. As my father was trying to tell you." "John Ude was trying to tell me, I believe," I said. "Afy f other V' She stuck out her hand. "Go on." "It's a musician's hand," I said shamelessly, "that's true. And the rest...well, I can't see much out of the ordinary except riches, of course...you know that...I think you will write a book about your experiences -- here" -- (pointing) "but of course I can't tell whether that's a book or music. The wealth line increases at that point. And marriage -- " "I'll never get married." "Yes, there's hardly anything. Though your love-line is quite another thing. But who, of course, or even what, I can't tell." "Artistic passion?" said she. "Mm hm. And the rest...well, it doesn't tell us anything we don't know. Sensitive. Intellectual. But animal vitality, mustn't forget that. That's about it." "Oh," she said. She was disappointed. "It changes," I said, "almost day to day. Most people don't know that. Small changes, of course, nothing big. But that's all I can see today." "You'll do it again in a week," said Lori decisively, beginning to deal her cards. It did not seem to occur to her that she was giving me orders. I pictured her giving orders to Alan-Bobby. No. She dealt the cards, a very finicky young woman, concentrating deeply. Suddenly she said, "Are you really a coward?" "No," I said. "Yes you are," she said. "Pick up your cards. If you teach me to read palms. I'll read your palm. That'll tell us." She won the next game, too. We were well into our third and Lori was singing something from Gilbert and Sullivan about not telling him, her, or it, because etiquette didn't permit, and not even hinting, whispering, or pointing it out -- yes, very apposite -- and I was bored -- when Alan shouted "Over here, everyone!" because he had the big voice. They had been slacking work for some time, with a lot of talk between Nathalie, the exprofessor, and Victor. (One to dig, two to chop, and two to carry either logs or dirt in the tool chest: Nathalie, Alan, Valeria -- with the hand hatchet -- Victor, Ude.) Symptoms of a conference. "Bring your tent!" shouted Alan conscientiously. So we did -- rather, I did; Lori wouldn't touch it for fear that she might break out in hives. I told her while I was uprooting it (and not entirely out of compassion; she could be a real whiner when she chose) that she'd live to be eighty, name all the plants in the region. lose her allergies as she grew up, and end up writing the first book about Lori's Planet. The court. Under another juryrigged tent. After this my memories get a little muddled. Disturbance; ripples in a pond. I smiled mechanically. Won't be thought a good, reliable witness -- By whom?) Reliable witness. Victor's very big. Very polite. So you can't get at him, perhaps. Valeria was off to one side, with Cassie. Victrix patted the ground next to her invitingly and Lori stared carefully in another direction. Alan, awed, with his mouth open; John Ude peculiarly cool; and Nathalie grimly watching the ground. Mister-not-Professor Ude said, "I call this meeting to order." Oh. Oh my. Important. "You're chairman?" I said. "Well! Who made you chairman?" Nathalie: "I did." That is, they both did. Things are going to be very interesting. Victor: "That's a valid objection. I suggest we begin by selecting a chair." Silence. Then Nathalie said wearily, "I nominate" -- Guess Who -- well, he was nominated, seconded, and voted in. Almost unanimously. John Ude: "Do you have any more objections?" Me: "No." (Almost unanimously means me and Lori, Lori because she wanted her father to be, and I abstained.) "We have to talk about something very important," said Ude. "I mean having children." Hand up, me. He recognized me -- does this sound as crazy to you as it does to me? -- and I said, "Priorities backwards. First we have to poison Loti." "Huh?" she said; "you're crazy." "Mr. Chairman," I said, "point of order. Is it necessary for us to pretend that we've never met before?' ' He smiled. Oh, the universes tremble when John Ude smiles! He said, "I suppose we can afford to be somewhat more informal. In fact, I think it will be a very good thing. Please go ahead." I said, "I'm only trying to suggest that before we start any babies, we'd better start finding out what we can eat around here." (Lori, sotto voce, with a dig in the ribs, "Why'd you say poison?") Cassie said, "Sure, why her?" "I was joking," I said. "I meant she's allergic to so many things. She should be the last person to eat anything." Nathalie: "Will you volunteer to be the first?" "No," I said. "Will you?" Nathalie got up, very angry. "We have food and water for five months and three weeks! Perhaps you'd like the rest of us to eat grass and leave it all to you?' ' "I waive it," I said. "I leave it alone. Give me the broomstick and I'll go up to the head of the stream and drink the water without the purifier. If I start hurting. I'll kill myself. ' ' "This is no time for joking." (John Ude) I said, "I'm not joking. It's a genuine offer." Silence. "About the children," said Ude. "Mister Graham, as the oldest of us, has offered to donate his genetic material first." Cassie giggled. Nathalie glared at her. But Nathalie also sat down. (Was Victor on a special diet, on the ship?) I got up and ambled towards the stream. By all that's alive, a melodramatic "Stop!" and then "Stop her!" from John Ude, and here was Alan-Bobby running ahead of me, like some crazy postman with a Special Delivery (excuse me) and turning sheepishly to stand in front, his arms stretched out. "All right," I said, "all right, I can go taste the river when you're asleep, can't I?" and I headed back towards the improvised council tent, feeling in my palm the pellet-gun. Reflex. Not here, not now. Back in the sleeve of the jacket you go. Mow'd it get there? Oh,  forgot to tell you... Between yesterday and today, when everyone was asleep, I went back to the old site and dug everything up. Including my pharmacopoeia. Left them lying on the ground with dreams of The Desert Song ringing in their ears. (I had mist-spray hypnotics in my underwear. I'm not that quiet.) I tiptoed off, anyway, feeling Alan-Bobby as he sat up, probably talking in his sleep, with a swift squish to the nostrils and very daring, went off on the trudge to the old camp, where it took me forever to pry up that rock. I left in the dusk; I returned at the end of the dark; the sky ragged where the sun rises and sets, one patch of cloud red, red as blood, red as fury. I gave them each a last spray as I came, too. Except Lori. (She might be allergic.) She was wiggling and muttering uncomfortably to herself. Watched her face slowly settle itself and become clarified as the light grew and grew. Without getting anywhere -- I mean the light -- for hours and hours more. "Hey, you better go back," says Alan. "Oh." I sigh. "Okay." And go back, helpless. Now I'm going to be first. I said, "Well, you'll have to wait until I'm off the pills. And then it sometimes takes a few months to restore fertility. And we don't want septuplets, so that's another couple of months." "You're not taking any pills," said Nathalie. "Because you've never seen me do it? Whew!" said I. (That last's a whistle.) "What are you taking?" said Ude. I made up a name. "Then you don't," (he said, blinking slightly but looking steadily at me the while) "have to worry about multiple births. There haven't been any on that since '#. I don't see why you and Victor can't start now, if you like." Victor said politely that he certainly wouldn't mind as long as I wouldn't mind. I said I would mind. "Why?" said Nathalie. "Personal preference," said I. "It's her religion!" said Cassie, a little indignantly. "You should respect a person's religion, you know." "She's probably left-handed." This is Mrs. Graham spitefully. Cassie obviously wasn't sure what "left-handed" meant; she leaned towards Mrs. Graham, who whispered to her. Cassie colored to the roots of her hair -- and her neckline (a sheet). "In a month, if you don't mind," I said to Victor, with a sort of little bow. "When it'll do most good." Now he can't have liked that. But he looked unmoved and nodded his head. Polite. Calm. Great handsome, hollow monument of a man. Perhaps he's run out of something. Perhaps he's going to be ill. Hypertensive or cardiac, I can almost smell it. Or some other fatality hanging in the air and nobody wants to talk about it in front of the daughter. Get him before he dies. "Before that month, then," said John Ude, grinning in my direction, "Nathalie has suggested herself, and afterwards the other lady, Cassie. The -- uh -- persons involved can certainly find privacy almost anywhere, I suppose. Anyway, it's none of our business." Cassie, who was folding the hem of her improvised dress under and over with her fingers, again and again, said: "I'm going to be called by my full name. I don't like Cassie. That's only a professional name." "Of course," said John Ude. "Tell us," said Victor. Alan looked blankly receptive. "My name is Cassandra," said Cassie. Nobody caught it. Lori said, "That's a nice name," (possibly to annoy her mother). I inhaled when I should've swallowed and for thirty seconds there until I stopped coughing John Ude was very tender and careful with his walking womb. "Cassandra's always wanted children," he said pleasantly to me when I could breathe again. Nathalie was behind him, looking over his shoulder. I tried to call him a son-of-aprick and only croaked. "YeS?" he said, very alert -- but he always seems alert; it's part of the window-dressing. "Listen," I whispered, just managing to speak. "I'll go away. Take the broomstick and send it back, very slow, so you can catch it. Go upstream -- downstream -- doesn't matter -- try the water. Take no food. Just leave me." "No!" said Nathalie. "Why?" I coughed some more. "If I've got to do it, you've got to do it," said Nathalie. "You...don't have to." And I cleared my throat. At last. "We'd better keep an eye on her," said Nathalie to John Ude. I think I put my head in my hands. Suppose they found my gun? My things? Wait long enough and it won't matter. Although I can always do it. Anyone can do it. Easy enough to kill if it doesn't matter about being found out. Then perhaps they'd kill me, and it would be over, and that's all right. But I'm afraid of waiting too long. Eroding. Purpose all gone. Slipping into no-decision, nopurpose; hard enough as it is. God knows. I think everyone loves it here because their choices are all made for them; we were never very comfortable with our fate in our own hands, were we? Better to act on the modern religion: an incarnation of the immortal germ-plasm. Nostalgia for the mud. Simplicities. I said, "Cassandra!" and burst out laughing, coughing again. "You're going mad," said Nathalie, with a certain satisfaction and she and John Ude stepped backwards so they could talk, I suppose, about keeping an eye on me. And nobody knows. Nobody knows anything about anything. "Aren't you going to play cards with me?" said Lori, suddenly turning up with the cards in a sort of bag she'd made out of a scarf of her mother's. It was bright, bright blue. Royal blue. "Sure," I said. "Why not?" And did. k   Day nine. I took my turn digging and carrying. I was watched, always by someone. Nathalie and Victor disappeared dutifully over the hill while the rest of us snored (presumably).    Day ten. Watched. They overestimate their perseverance. At bedtime -- the sun still circling round the same eternal altitude -- Nathalie talked angrily about tying me to something for the night so's I wouldn't disappear. I told her not to be a fool; anything she could tie, I could untie. People were embarrassed.    Day eleven. Idiot labor. A Long We who are about to House none of us will ever live to enjoy. The food goes faster this way. A midday siesta under the tent, all of us huddled together in the shadow. But it merely gets hotter and hotter until sunset. The sun is not changing its position, not fast enough to be timed, anyway. The weather stays the same. No rain, but the stream keeps up. By some eerie common consent Valeria has become the cook -- good for nothing else, I suppose. That is, she prepares the packets of ffeezedried, and pours stream water into the purifier. No one dead yet. The idyllic desert island. Odd how that started out "deserted" and ended up "desert". Hence the convention sand and palm trees. No, "desert" once meant only wild. That it is.    Day twelve. Victor's ill. He sat all day under the tent, dozing and taking some sort of pills. Angina, I'll be bound. More hauling, more digging on that idiot building. Early evening (when the sun stands at four o'clock above a particular hill; we are in a little valley with a close horizon): Flop. Flop. Flop. Flop. Valeria and Victor have already flopped. Discarded pillbottle on the ground. Lori's being kept away, mostly by Alan, sometimes by Nathalie, who says that she ought to work for a change. (Lori stuck out her tongue. I giggled.) Victor looked unconcerned at this invasion of his privacy: or not concerned, rather. Lori said carelessly, "Oh, Dad's had this before." Valeria is paying no attention to him or to any of us; she's asleep. I have begun to be startled at anyone's coming up behind me, with a kind of shrinking at the presence of the rest of them, but Victor Graham is magnificently vacant; doesn't care that there are people around him. We slept -- we've gotten into the habit,' it seems, of sleeping in stages: part in the middle of the "afternoon," then a siege before the dark, then a kind of premature wakefulness for a few hours until the twilight begins and depresses everybody. I seem to go to sleep faster than anyone, but I always wake a little earlier. Nervousness. I had my head by his knee. Shocked awake. Yawning. It wasn't anything, I thought. Listening wakefuUy. Eyes open. It's a little gasp from Victor Graham. He got up, holding (I think) his left arm with his right, for I saw him pass over me, and from that position on the ground, with my face down, it was like feeling a cloud go over you at an enormous height; I said he walked between us and over us, between two hills. Equatorwards. He stopped to retch. All I have to do is lie here and pretend to sleep. He's walking off between the hills. Going to die alone, I suppose. I got up carefully and picked my way to John Ude, put one hand over his mouth, and with the other, pinched him. "Ssssh!" I jerked my head at Victor. You must say for the notProfessor that he takes things in quickly. We knew that neither of us must wake Lori and that she's the lightest sleeper of all because she hasn't worked. "Where'd you put my stuff?" I whispered, off at the edge of the group. His wits are wandering. He had to go back and wake Nathalie. And all the time, you know, it was burning a hole in my pocket, I mean my belt pop-out, the stuff he should be using; I was extraordinarily conscious of it sitting over my left hip-bone. He came back with Nathalie and we ran. Victor had sat down under one of the stumpy trees and was staring ahead of him. Nathalie, fingers shaking, spread out on the dirt die stuff they had confiscated from me and looked helplessly at Ude, who was beginning to frame a question, but I had it out and the string around his arm, the stuff into the vein. These are collapsible, permanent syringes, foldups like accordion pleating'. Nathalie said, "Antisepsis -- " I said, "Lie down, you fool," to Victor, and he did. A little less livid, as the stuff got to him. I said, "It's a stimulant. Can you swallow?" "No," he said, still concentrating on the pain. "You can," I said, selecting from the pile, "bite on this and breathe. It's a mind-bender; won't stop the pain, but it'll separate you from it. Takes the nastiness out of it." He did. Nathalie bent over, but I shooed her away. "Do you want Lori?" I said. "No." "Your wife?" "Won't come." He whispered, very carefully. The cyanotic grey was ebbing. I said: "The stimulant is only temporary. I can give you more until we either run out of it or it wears you out, but I can't heal you. You may heal yourself if you lie very still." He said, "Tell Lori -- " "What?" said Nathalie anxiously"Anything. Make it up. I said, "Mister Graham has other things to do right now. We will tell Lori and Valeria that he thought of them, that his last words were of them, and that he loved them." The dying man laughed. "Not -- wife." "But I can tell Lori, can't I?" I said. He nodded, just a bit. "Victor loves his daughter and gives the planet to her. He's proud of her and knows she'll do well. Okay?" "Yes!" His color was stealing back, almost magical, but it puts a worse burden on the great arteries crowning the heart. I said, "I think you'd better go back and deal with the scene there. Both of you. When they wake up, you know; you can tell them whatever you like." "I?" said Nathalie. "I'm supposed to be with him!" Victor's gaze was still so Hxed that to get his attention you had to be right in front of him; Nathalie put herself in front of me, directly in his line of vision; she had the anxiety lines of the brows furrowed together, in that very expressive field of musculature above and around the human eyes. Tle eyes themselves, you know, show almost nothing. John Ude said, "Perhaps I should stay -- ' ' I said, "Are you afraid of Lori?" and then to Victor, "Who do you want to stay with you? Which of us?" "You," he said. "Of course. She knows the drugs," said John Ude with The Smile. "You're not afraid," he said, "of      me. Silence. "Leave that and that and that," I said, pointing. "Now get cracking! You've work to do." "None of these is marked," said Ude, finally, gathering up half my things. (He thought he had it all.) "I know," I said. "I also sell knowledge." John Ude patted me on the shoulder: loathesome, loathesome! -- said into my ear, "Good of you." Victor said, with a smile, "Are you sorry? You know..." "I think I am," I said. And almost was. Sorry for him, I mean. One thing dying people usually know, if they have any sense left, is what they want; and that is so rare in the human condition that it commands a certain kind of respect. Although I suppose they may know what they want only because there's so little left to choose from that the task's easy. It strips people down. And what I feel -- or felt -- about him, I don't know. An intense curiosity. Where he was going, where he came from, who he was. It's a world going out -- though there are some worlds I know too well to care about, like Ude. "I was poor," he said. "Didja know that?" I shook my head. Something of the old timbre back in his voice, still half a whisper. I could never find pulses in the wrist, so I put my fingertips on the great vein in his neck. He smiled. "Feels nice," he said. Then: "I worked on myself. Made myself good-looking, you know: clothes, accent, the works. Spent a lot on surgery; no whore could've done better." He grasped my hand, then let his arm fall but still kept holding on to my hand, I think out of fear, though he wasn't feeling any pain; couldn't have talked that easily if he had. He said, "I can satisfy anyone." "Did you practice?" He nodded. "Of course." What a way to spend a life. Here is the kernel of Victor Graham: I can satisfy anyone. Myself, I eat potatoes. Well? He must've read something in my face because he imprisoned my fingers more severely; thank God I don't wear rings. He said, "Do you despise me?" "In comparison with my friends?" I said and couldn't help it; I began to laugh. This pleased him. Then I said, "I only wish it had been more fun for you." "It was all right." The cyanotic tinge was coming back but he didn't seem to feel it. "Wasn't so easy the first few years, but when I met Val I knew I had it made. Worked like hell to get her, too." "You took her name?" "No. She's old fashioned. I used to -- was able to -- order her around sometimes, then...think we flipped a coin...you know, I loved her but I can't remember now." "And Lori?" I said. "A beautiful child. Still a child. You'll look after her?" "Of course." "This is all for her," he said, with a stirring of the arm as if he would sweep it round him to indicate the horizon. "She'll grow up better here," I said. "Sure," he said without irony, "and her mother'll do some work. It'll do her good. Val'll live long." He sighed. He said, "You should take some of this. It's religious. I feel like a Christian." "Instant religion? There's something like that in the trade name: Forgiveness without tears. Something. But I don't feel like forgiving anyone, you see. I'm nasty." What I didn't say: how dull it can become after a while, these exaltations that leave nothing behind them. The headiness of anger. Perhaps I'm an addict. An anger addict. I said, "Victor, the analgesic will last for hours, but the stimulant's wearing off. I can give you more" -- holding it up -- "or you can fight it out alone, or there's this" -- putting the glass ampoule by his free hand where his hand lay on the ground, that eternal midafternoon sun palely lighting it, the time just before the light becomes ruddy. In a few hours we would have our twilight. "What's that?" he said. "The ultimate analgesic?" I think that surprised me more than his use of "Christian." I said, "You clever man!" He said, "If you hold my hand." "Can't," I said. "It's a contact poison, worked through the skin. You break the ampoule. If I held your hand I would run a considerable risk of being ultimately anesthetized myself." "Death's your friend," he said. I shook my head. "Never!" "Don't want it," he said, trying to nick away the ampoule with his finger, so I rescued it -- very carefully -- and laid it to one side. Must remember where it is, too. Better still, pick it up and put it away in my belt. Which I did. He said, "I haven't been much good to Val these last months." He was still looking straight ahead of him. He said, "I want to see the sun," so I turned him about with great care, Polewards -- the sun was declining into what we had agreed to call the North, interrupted by a stumpy tree on the side of a hill. I moved him until he could see it, propping his head in my lap -- he was a heavy man -- I think leaving the poison with him would have been useless unless I'd put it in his hand; he was too feeble, for all his talking. He said, "I'm going to die." He was not that cyanotic. Perhaps the light concealed it, turning him rosy. This damned place has been looking stranger and stranger each morning, despite my trying not to see it that way -- imagination? Like meeting a childhood friend; at first the resemblance is as clear as can be, and then after a quarter of an hour, you begin to wonder. I suppose you see all the other things time has laid down on the face. He said, "Go away." I didn't move. He was breathing with difficulty. I could hear his breath stop, catch, go on, then stop again, like an electric motor with a iGoldmeoal, Richard Avery a team of criminals and misfits, "The Chosen Ones" selected to explore new planets for human colonization. Send for our free brochure On Sale Wherever Paperbacks Are Sold Fawcett Publications. Inc. Greenwich, Conn. # bad connection -- too apt a comparison -- catch a few times, go on, stop -- I think I was hypnotized by the tree's shadow as it crawled towards us, or the shifting motes of sun in it between the leaves, the sun having sunk behind the tree and each spot of light a camera obscura of the sun: round as a coin and twinkling. He was trying very hard to breathe. No oxygen going to that brain. Then he stopped. Easy as pie. I knew Victor was still there, shut up inside himself, but the housing was shot. No good any more. He couldn't feel anything anyone could do to it. An eerie feeling, that heavy, motionless head in my lap; you never know how mobile people are (in sleep, in hypnosis, in the deepest, drugged state) until you feel them dead. "Dead weight" is the real thing. I know. Two minutes. Five... Gone. The last traces died out. Only the coral shell now; the thing making it had gone somewhere else. Or anyway, wasn't here. I let his head down on to the ground -- he was staring straight up -- and stretched, spinning about dizzily as if for all the world I could catch him as he flew off. Catch a sight of him. There's some complicated, biochemical reason for the loss of weight at death -- though it feels the opposite -- but if Victor in the shape of a butterfly was zipping off to better realms, I never saw him. The sun still hung there, behind the tree. It won't set for an hour. I've been talking into my vocoder (back in the left-hand sleeve if anyone comes) all about this. Will put u back now. Go tell everyone else,: ugh. I Peaceful for the first time here.' My God, how peaceful. How quietj it is. Sinful to violate that quiet. ! Inconvenient to me, anyway. Sssst! Victor! Bon voyage. I (There's some old play where that is sung to a sinking ship, more and more merrily as the ship goes, down. "We hope you know how to swim," they say. Perhaps we all know how to swim, by instinct, the way newborns do. They do.) God help us, a life after this one? One's enough. irk  They found me, they said, asleep by the (dead) body. Nathalie was very angry. They shook me awake and I stumbled and yawned back to the others; Lori was crying next to her mother while Valeria said, (pushing her daughter's head into her own lap, as if blinding her) "We want to remember him as he was." Amazing. The sun gone, the twilight darkened. The Smudge comes out. As we've named it. k  k Day thirteen. Time to try again J Victor was put in the earth but I wasn't allowed to help -- I think I've become tapu. Either that or envy. (What an extraordinary idea, planting people in the ground as if you expected them to sprout! I think they should be left about to rot, day after day, so we'd get used to it and stop being afraid of it.) When the burial party came back and the I said, "Just wanted to talk to shovel was passed to Nat for digyou." ging the latrine (some more) I went Then I said, "I envy you." and sat at her fcet. I was careful She stopped and looked at me, about my eyes because she might nonplussed. throw dirt at me with the shovel -- "I mean," I said, "that it must on purpose or otherwise. be a great simplicity. Right? A I didn't say anything. good feeling. Not being a wretched, "Well?" said Nathalie, dirtmixed-up mess like me. I mean to streaked, the sweat darkening in face the old problems instead of the patches on her black body-suit. new ones, to know what the solu"Let me dig?" I said. She leaned rtons are. Even though it's so on the shovel, looking down at me, hard." then turned back to her work, makI said, "All right, I know I'm a ing the dirt fly. She was extending trial to all of you." the pit into a shallow channel which Now I did not like the expression would later be lined with someon Nathalie's face. I like to know thing; I'm not sure what they exwhat's coming, too. She threw pected to do, maybe collect ferdown her shovel (which, hitting a tilizer. Standing, she was above me; projecting rock in the side of the if she'd been down in the pit, our pit, instantly unhinged itself into heads would have been on the same two separate pieces) and stood there level. looking at me. I wondered if Whfi th Trron Emplr lnvodt th Domoln of Ythri. tho blrodol humonythrl culturo of Avolon U tho prim# forgot. Andorton's Hugo nomlnos, Tho People of the Wind, oe o lively gome of epoco In voilon. Tho Torrone muit rapidly dofoot Avalon's spoco force, land plonotary units ond copturo hoses. Avalon uses orfaltol forts, worships, and planet forces to buy time fer help to orrive. The odopted scenario emphasises looming ond ploying ease with equol victory chonces for both. "beer ond pretsel" ploy by experts. Spoce and plonet mops, exomple-orlented rules, and combat counters Included fer #. "sine". Discount gomes, news, articles, strotegy, and letters. Six Issues for # (ofter #-#-#, #). Sample for # postoge. foctor, society level gome for #-# ployers Is now #. games people... Box # HB Austin, Texas #I Nathalie were not perhaps the Spirit of Death around here: I mean hard work, looking to the future, planning about things, that sort of stuff. She said: "You fool." Then she said, "Do you think I "Don't -- I -- " I said, leaning backward. If your legs are crossed, you can't get up unless you lean forward, so I was effectively tied in a knot; if I'd got up, it would've been right into Nathalie's face. She said, "Oh God, you make me sick!" I could roll sideways and get up. "You," she said, but her voice had changed and her pupils were no longer all her eyes, so I knew she was only going to talk and I could afford to stay there, to stay helpless; she said, "Oh, what do you know about it!" I said, "I'm sorry." I looked meek. (And I was sorry, only none of them will take the cure, not one.) She sank to her knees, but still leaning over me, which is something they teach them in government school, maybe; she said, "Do you know where I was going before I came here?" I shook my head. She sat down, sort of collapsed sideways. She said, "Well, I wasn't going to dig latrines. Or bear babies. Or plant crops." (There are no crops.) "I was going," she said, "to school. And not to learn how to lecture on music, little woman! Something quite different." "Yes," I said. "Do you? You can't. None of you can, not even Ude; he's a paper-pusher. I wasn't; I would've learned how to kill him with my bare hands, I would have learned to make explosives -- yes, even here! I would've learned how to find the right stuff and make them -- and when I was finished there wasn't one of you who would have dared to come within twenty meters of me, let me tell you -- and Alan would be dead." She pulled angrily at the grass before her, which may poison us. "I'd love to see that other-fucker with a broken neck," she said. I laughed -- suddenly couldn't help it. She sprang to her feet. "Two minds with but a single thought," I said. She sat down; very slowly, but she sat down. Loosened a little. Nathalie smiled. "If only we had some -- " said I. "Plaster," she added, "and wax, we could -- " "Make a cast -- " "Of his -- " She laughed; in fact she roared, throwing her head back. Then she said: "And a sperm bank." Very sober. "There is that," I admitted. A short silence. "How was Victor?" I said. "What?" said she. "D'you mean, was he fertile?" (They had looked at it from different viewpoints, apparently.) She added sharply, "How is he? He's dead!" I stared at the ground. Earth, grass, pebbles: could've been anywhere. Nathalie got up. "You see, one goes on," she said. "Unless of course one's afraid, like you. One learns that." "Afraid?" I said. "Yes." She strode to the pit, reached over the edge for the shovel, then straightened up and bent the thing until the handle clicked back together. With her left hand she pushed her hair behind her ears. "You're demoralized, like all civilians," she said. "You miss your luxuries." She shoveled a spadeful of earth out on to the bank, tucked her hair behind her ears again (it always came loose and swung in her face), and leaned on the shovel; bitter, severe, very pleased with herself. She said: "My parents were poorer than Cassie's. Did you know that? Of course not. But that's why you all need me, because I know how to fight. I didn't grow up in private, like that damn-fool little girl and I didn't grow up rich. I was in a youth group and I learned how to fight. You're bloody lucky you've got me." I said, "You won a lot of scholarships, didn't you?" but she didn't like my guessing it and went back to digging, with her face set as if every bash at the dirt were at Alan-Bobby's backbone. I said, "Survival -- " and she said, "Survival's the name of the game. You'd better move; I'm switching to this side." So I did. But for what? The sound of the digging stopped; Nathalie had straightened up and was looking at me again, the death's head. I had spoken out loud. I said, "All right, all right, I didn't say it!" and scrambled to my feet. This is crazy comedy; one must, after all, do it sooner or later, and the madwoman in black is going to hit me with her shovel or fling it at my head because I want to get right in my soul before I die. She said, "You walking cunt, I would like to kill you too." Her face is blanched to the color of paper; her eyes are black and white; all pupil. She's quite mad. If I shoot her, the others will come running. I said, "I'll dig," and she threw me the shovel, which did indeed almost hit me. I rapped the hinge to make sure it wouldn't fold up. Nathalie strode away over the ffeshly-tumed dirt, head high, blazing, broadcasting hatred. "It suits you!" she cried, meaning (I suppose) that grave-digging was my proper occupation. (It used to be taboo, like executioners.) I dug at the channel -- a little sloppily, for I haven't half her purpose -- and you don't develop strength by being told off to play cards with Lori. TTiey had, at least, the sense to put the latrine downstream, though the odd thing about this hole is that nobody is ever going to use it. Did you know that hangmen were once taboo? What do you know? Do you know anything?    # :  #   Who are you? # ( # ( # ( (I should go back and erase all that silence; the vocoder makes a mark whenever I stop, like a punctuation mark but different; then it begins a new line. There must be too many of them. No, hell, let them stay.) What happened later: we had our siesta; we dug some more; Lori asked me to sing and I did, the sun hanging in the sky, dropping no lower, remaining motionless over the same inky, fiery, spotted bush. Silhouettes. The same long shadows from dawn to dusk. I sant "Chu Chu Chu;" I sang "Love Is Splendid, Isn't it!" I sang "What A Perfect Day This Has Been." Ude had a long conversation with Alan, who is becoming more and more authoritative and more and more pleased with himself. They spoke in low voices; I couldn't hear what they said. Making plans? (We lay down to sleep.)    By writ and tort, by hullaballoo and brouhaha, I declare this tapedeck locked to all voice-prints but mine, re playback, locked re printout, and may God have mercy on your soul. So be it.    Day twenty. Eighteen. Nineteen? I can't remember. Too much going on. Managing people is a melancholy skill; it depends mostly on keeping your mouth shut. The night after we'd buried Victor Graham I took off with the broom and the face-mask, making up a package of food, soap, a mattress, bits of plastic towelling, spare underwear, things like that, all tied up in a sheet with one set of comers tied above the other. I went upstream. I got up in the middle of the night and used up the last of my sleepydust, spraying them as if I'd been putting Grow on plants, tomato beds perhaps, stepping carefully between them as you would between your eggplants or your canteloupe vines, then taking the broomstick low above the water, for the ground-effect leaves a trail: some crushed things don't rise and over bare earth there's a characteristic sort of smudge: loose stuff blown to both sides like a giant broom. So they might find me. I went up two hundred and forty kilometers, until I hurt all over, until the river cut between sharper and sharper hills like glacial debris and glacial scar: an old garbage-heap that glaciers push in front of them and leave behind when they retreat. Until the river went down between two hills and vanished, down into the ground. I found a cave. The drop to the water: twenty meters, the other bank almost flat. A streamlet three fingers across rising in the loose rock-rubble in the back and making straight for the edge, with the necessary number of curlicues to avoid stones and hillocks. Beyond, a steep hill, covered with thorny tangle, something new, like blackberry vines, and the cave not really a cave but an accidental hole-in-a-heap with boulders wedged together and stuff grown over the top. But very big, very solid boulders. The streamletbottom is pebbles, fine gravel. I put everything down and poked assiduously in the rubbish in back with the broomstick handle and even lit a fire with some of the litter I found outside, thrusting burning stuff into the back of the cave in several places. Nothing. No alarums and excursions, no nasty little dwellers with pincers, no alarmed rustlings, no sound, no motion. So there's only people. I'm about one-point-fifty meters tall; the cave is about one-pointsixty-five and I like that. Tall people can't stand upright here. I propped the broomstick against the drift of friable rock and harder pebbles at the back, put down my hobo's bundle, unrolled the mattress, and laid my things out. The extra underwear I'd put in the metal box I once used to store my music tapes; this is where the vocoder print-out will go (when I make a print-out). I guess we will bury it. There was room for my mattress at the edge, to one side of the little, bisecting stream: bed, running water, and I can hear in the directions I can't see. The streamlet makes almost no noise: too tiny. Wonderful for sanitation. And it didn't kill me. I had gone # kilometers, perhaps one hundred sixty as the crow flies (none here), and that's six or seven days' walking for exceedingly determined people. And that is why I carried nine days' food.    But I lost track. I thought they'd gone away. I went out scouting with the broomstick and saw no one, not from the tops of the highest hills. I couldn't go too far or I'd lose my way back -- until I thought of spreading some underwear under two rocks; you can see the white very far. There was nobody coming, no black specks, no swaying in the bushes, not even three-quarters of the way down the river. It was altogether beautiful. But I couldn't go any closer. Wouldn't. Didn't want to. Didn't dare. So I lost track.    They came in the afternoon. Putting one's head down close to the stream, you can just barely hear it talking, but I think I screened out everything else with the river because I never heard them. I woke from a dream of talking very rationally to Cassie somewhere utterly indistinct and uncharacterized (so that if might have been equally 'easily back on the ship or in the middle of the Grand Canyon) and there she was, standing in silhouette in the door of the cave; I was mucking about in the floating layers between light sleep and lighter sleep when you become aware of your body and don't want to, like anesthetic: places in the mattress that weren't as thick as they should be. Stretching. Stiff back. I said, "Why have you come for the water thingie? I left it." I woke up. Why didn't they come in? Because they couldn't see in, probably. I had thought Cassie was already inside, but as my vision came back I realized I'd only been asleep; everything's flat for a moment after you wake up. I said, conversationally, "How'd you find me?" She said, "I want to talk to you. Can I come in?" Brave Cassandra! -- whose shaky voice indicated something else was going on. Probably Alan-Bobby exploring the hillside. There are heavy scramblings overhead, something rather large and stupid moving about on the cave roof. Either he's proving himself for Lori or (more likely) they decided he was It. I propped the mattress (which is very thin and light) against the rock-rubble at the back of the cave; don't want to trip on it. I said, "Good Lord, you didn't bring Lori, did you?" "No, she's with Val." So it's Val now. I said, "I don't know what you're doing here and I don't know what you want of me. Go away." She said, "Can't you come out for a minute?' ' I let a moment go by. "All right," I said. I suppose one of us has to act in good faith that the other is in good faith, slender as such a chance may be. Let's test it. I put on my jacket, picked up a couple of rocks about the size of my hand. Circled close to the cave wall, on the side Cass was on so she couldn't see me, watching my feet carefully, and made it almost to the entrance without making too much noise. Which I hoped sounded like echoes, anyhow. Still in shadow. I threw one of the rocks across the cave and it made a very satisfactory, verisimilar sort of sound, falling in the loose shale over there, and there was a truly tremendous scramble from above, as Alan-Bobby the Megatherium dropped from the cave roof and rushed inside. And bashed his head against the ceiling. He does not realize, I think, just how expendable the others consider him to be. On his hands and knees, shaking his head from side to side. Then he fell into the streamlet. He couldn't see very well, of course. And the others might not have told him to do this; he might be acting on his own. It's possible. I threw the other rock at the back of the cave and when he turned to follow the sound of where it landed -- I think he was still dizzy -- I had meant to give him a shot of something. I did. I really did. But there was no time. And I knew I must not let him touch me; then he'd know where I was. So I picked up another rock, picking up something in my head that wasn't mine, too, that I still don't know, and before he could get up, I hit him down and down again, just above the ear. Concussion, at best. So there's no going back. "Alan?" said Cassie. Nathalie, John, Cassie. If no Val. I kept quiet. Cassie stepped out of my view and there was some sort of parley out there, little whisperings and scufflings about. "Hello in there!" said John Ude. I said nothing, "What do you want" being a question that in this case seemed rather obvious. "Hello?" he said. I cried, "You've got the watercycler, for God's sake, you've got it!" He said, "But we want you back. We like your singing." I said, "John, I only want to be by myself. I'll give you the broomstick; I can push it out." "Alan?" said someone, a woman's voice. "Hibernating," I said. "Out like a light. Your Hero bashed his head against the ceiling, which is very low. Showing his usual intelligence, which is likewise. If you'll stand away from the entrance. I'll push out the broomstick. No. I'll break it, that's better. Ruin it. Push out the pieces. That way nobody has it, you see?" There's probably someone else on the roof, but I can't see the shadow. If I were there myself. I'd wait until I saw somebody come out, then jump them, maybe push them off the edge. There's an old trick with a hat, but I haven't got a hat. My ears all on edge waiting to hear Alan-Bobby stir, wishing he would, wishing he wouldn't. I said, "Stand where I can see yOu." Cassie moved into view in the cave opening on one side, Ude on the other. "And...?" (said I) "Nath is ill," he said. "We left her back home." Back homel And Val and Nath and Cass -- what a lot of intimacy has been developing in the last few days! I decided to believe him, or pretend that I believed him, or act as if I were pretending that I did believe him. If there's a fight, I might get broken. So I stepped into the sunlight at the mouth of the cave -- but not quite out -- Until my eyes got accustomed to the light; it was a shock to see them We who are about to looking so grubby, so angry. They must've been drinking river water on the long march up. I said foolishly, "What've you been drinking?" "The same as you," said John Ude, "see?" and he held up something that caught the sun and sparkled wonderfully. "Compass," he said. "Bet you didn't know. There's a magnetic field, all right. And you forgot that Nath was up this way before. We came overland." Then he yelled "Now!" and somebody dropped on me from above as he grabbed me, both together, Nathalie undoubtedly because it smelled like her, not that I'd ever noticed before. Fallen on sloppily, thus with my face in the dust because I hadn't had the sense to duck, and thinking only it was so odd that I did know what Nathalie smelled like. "Let her up," said Ude. Big man. "Cass, go get Alan." So I suppose Cassie went inside. I was not going to turn around to see; don't want to get my back to the edge. I heard her moving around tentatively in there. Looked up so very carefully, hugging the ground: the woman to one side, the man to the other. Two bureaucrats. Looking up makes me dizzy. I started to cry. Because we never could be friends, I suppose. Cassie would be blinded by the dark, but not for long. There wasn't much time. He leaned over me, the silly way you do when you think you've got somebody down; he put his hands on his hips and with as much angry relish as if he'd been talking to the whole damned planet itself, he said, "You're mad. Did you know that? We're going to tie you to a tree with your hands behind so you can't get loose. We can never trust you again." I pulled his feet out from under him. He sat, or went downbackwards along the ledge (I don't know which) and I turned and shot in Nathalie's direction, not even seeing her, not knowing if it would miss her or not. But she was awfully close. Gas-guns don't make noise. I shot at him without seeing him. Following my motion with my eyes a moment later to see him -- I think he was hit in the knee or something -- clutching one thigh and standing on the other foot. There was a great roar behind me,, pebbles and boulders going over the edge down the bank. I shot him again., aiming this time, and -- once he fell -- kicked him down the slope. Another landslide. There was no one on top of the cave, no one on the hill. I suppose Val really hadn't come. I felt even dizzier and waited on the empty ledge without standing up for Cass to come out with the broomstick, or discover Alan with his head beaten in and scream -- and was he alive? And what would she do? And what would I do then? She came out empty-handed. No, with a rock in one hand. Blood on it. She dropped it to the ground with exaggerated calm, wiped her hands on her sheet-made-into-adress, and sat down cross-legged on the bare earth, which she did with astonishing graceiulness. Something to do with having been a dancer once, I suppose. Anyway, Cassie hadn't wasted love on any of them. "Well!" she said, peering over the edge, "you have been going it, haven't you? Someone ought to give you a medal." She licked her index finger, then tapped her own shoulder with her third finger. "Run home before it dries." I said nothing. She remarked conversationally, "The prof person said you'd be up here. You know, along the water somewhere. Frankly, you should have gone a lot farther away. That's what I would have done. I told them to let you alone." I said, "Cassandra -- " She said, "I know, I know. If I had a baby, it would die. And if it didn't, I would die. Anyway, my Mama had me by Caesarean." She said, "I could tell you all about it, the kind of anesthetic, the scars, the stitches. God knows I heard about it enough." She laughed. Swaggering Cassandra, the beautiful waitress, born to be a star, born to be a loser, doesn't know that hard births don't run in families. Not as simply as that. "Oh damn them!" she said, "damn them, don't they ever even come back to look?"' I shook my head. She said, "What do we do now? Fight to the death? Like stupid Nathalie, who thought she was a man?" A social solecism Valeria Victrix would never have perpetrated, despite her being a Mrs. But in Cassie 's terms Cassie is right, I suppose. "Here," she said harshly, making me jump, "give me that," and reaching out in an absurdly unbalanced position, she had the gas-gun in her hand and was trying to get her fingers round it. It's a flat, half-shapeless piece, because it's designed to be hidden, and you have to know how to use it. I shut my eyes. "Careful!" Not like this. "Give me that stuff," said Cassandra the brava. "Right now." "What?" I said, opening my eyes. "That stuff you're always carrying," she said sharply. "You've got it about you somewhere. You're too much of a coward to be without it." She turned red. "Trust you not to go around without carrying every kind of poison there is, you viper! Alwants wants a way out, doesn't she? Give it!" So I did. I popped from my belt two pellets, which I put on the ground between us under those angry, angry eyes, two greenish-grey, extra-special, euphoric exits that looked just like Cassie's eyes. They fetched a great deal in the market once. And are fetching a great deal right now. I said, "Please don't throw that down." I meant the gun. She put it more carefully down in the dust between us. I watched her pick up the pills. I think I was shaking. Something -- not me -- said, "Cassandra, I would be very pleased to share your company. Very grateful." "I ought to poison your water," she said, "but I won't. I'll go do it somewhere else. What do you do? Swallow them?" I nodded. She was showing off gain, Cassie the #-D Cat, Cassie he actress. "Now you can go kill Lori," she ?id. She started to pick her way Sideways over the hill, a little ageing in her imitation peplum or whatever it was. Then she stopped, and turned back, and smiled. "Honored to share my company, huh?" she said. She added: "For how many years?" Then she went away.    Alan-Bobby was dead. No pulse in his groin, no chest movement. I used the broomstick to haul Nathalie's and John Ude's bodies from the stream-bed, one at a time, and take them a good km. or so downstream; they could rot there. Dead people are like sandbars but in odd shapes because they keep folding up, and because they were still warm; I kept getting irritated at them for flinging their arms and legs out like that and not helping me. I think that's characteristic. I left Alan alone, because I was tired, and decided to go' downstream. From high enough (I was not stuck with the water now) you can see the river winding like a silver snake in the distance and the grey-green brush folded over on itself in hill after hill, each darker and stranger than the last, plum-colored at the horizon. League upon league. A rumpled, painted tablecloth where the glaciers had come down. I went down by the side of the stream this time and much straighter, leaving a snake of flattened vegetation over the hills. Watch it after you pass and you can see it slowly straighten up. I had to go down. Otherwise they might have to decide to come up to me. ITS A Zack looked a bit dubiously at the bespectacled boy who sat surrounded by travelcases in the middle of his kitchen, then at the silent giant who had carried in the travelcases, finally at the bald slender man who had spoken. The latter held out a clipboard and stylus in his pale hand. His voice was flat and emotionless, and he wore grey -- Zack decided it suited him. "Glad to, Mr..." "Jacob Abernathy," the grey man said, seeming to bite off the Words. He glanced around the room in apparent disapproval. "Pleased to meet you, Jake. I'm..." "I know who you are." Zack had stuck out his hand; Abernathy gazed at it without particular interest. Zack took the clipboard with it and made his chop, handed it back. "You tell Raoul that I'll take good care of his..." "His Excellency will be informed that you have accepted delivery," Abernathy clipped. Zack blinked. He adjusted his overalls on one broad shoulder and took his pipe from one of many pockets. Locating a pouch in another, he stoked up and emitted clouds of blue smoke, squinting at Abernathy. "You just do that, brother. Sorry you can't stay for lunch." The sarcasm was lost on Abernathy. "Food is available on board the ship." "What you call food, yeah. Good day to you." Abernathy nodded and left, followed by the huge manservant. Zack went to the window and watched them depart, puffing on his pipe. "Never seen a shirt so stuffed mass so little," he murmured, and shook his head, eyes twinkling. He turned back to the boy who still sat silently amid his belongings in the rich, blitteryellow sunlight of early morning. The plunder nearly filled half the kitchen, pressure-tight suitcases designed to withstand sudden vacuum. Zack ran a calloused hand through his thick wiry red hair and grinned around his pipe at the youth. "Sure a lot of swag, old son," he drawled. "You too proud to shake hands too?" The boy shook his head, rose from his seat. "Tm Timeth Connery," he said, his thin voice as emotionless as Abernathy's. Zack shook his hand gravely. "I am Zachary Mountain-Born, and this is the T.A., my home." The boy's bland expression -- or absence of any -- changed slightly.,, "Mountain-Born?" he asked. "What kind of last name is that?" "Why, mine," said Zack, somewhat startled. "A surname is functional, an identifier," Timeth said, seeming to recite. "It is a familyreferent and locator. Was your father also named Mountain-Bom?" "Why no. My father was Jody Sunray and my mother was Kerry Maplewood. We like to use surnames creatively here on New Home." The boy digested this. Zack imagined lights blinking, chided his imagination sharply. "What does T.A.' stand for?" " 'Total Anarchy,' " Zack said grinning. "This house was built by Daniel, one of the First Landed, later called Daniel of the Woods. He ceremonially destroyed his T-square before beginning this place; there isn't a right angle in the building." He realized his grin was unshared, felt foolish. "Don't you understand jokes?" "I understand the theory and purpose of jokes," Timeth replied. "Was that one?" Zack blinked, then suddenly burst out laughing. "Guess you couldn't be expected to appreciate a joke about anarchy at that, Tim. Not coming from a world like Velco. Well, never mind. You'll find things here to make you laugh. I hope." Timeth regarded him intently, seeming to size Zack up -- he had the feeling the lad could tell his shirt-size and annual income. "One of the standard purposes of the 'joke' is to make another feel at ease," Timeth stated. "Was that your wish?" "It surely was," Zack assured him. "Then tell me why I am here." Zack started, then his brow clouded. "Well I'll be a... do you mean to tell me they didn't explain to you why you're here?" The boy shook his head. "Might have expected it -- pure Velco," Zack exploded, and swore. "I thought better of Raoul." He saw Timeth looking at him, waiting. "I'm sorry, old son. Didn't mean to criticize your father; I knew him in college. But to truck you thirty parsecs and leave you in a stranger's kitchen with never a word of why..." He shook his head. "Let's sit down." He led Timeth from the kitchen to his broad-beamed living room, just a bit of prideful expectancy in his manner. He had added some to Daniel's original structure, and the living room was his showpiece. A visitor's first impression was usually that a rainbow had been trapped in the room and battered itself to pieces trying to escape: while the great south window gave a clear view of the mountain sloping away to an azure bay, the east and west windows were stained glass mosaic, and the former of these now spangled the room with splashes of red and yellow and green and deep, rich blue. Zack watched Timeth for reaction, found none. He sighed, pointed to a chair and draped his own long, hard form on a rocker. He busied himself for awhile with his pipe, then fired up a fresh bowl and began. "The way I get the story, Timeth -- and you correct me if I'm Wrong anywhere -- Velco is in a hell coiiection of futurate art in the last one hundred years! # ## of a pickle. Overpopulated, overindustrialized, overurbanized -- just one big city, the way I hear it. They failed to learn the lessons of Old Terra, and so they got into a bind for efficient administration. Too much information to integrate. Computers weren't the answer, they don't correlate well enough. A computer can have the results of five different medical teams around a planet punched into it, and never see that, combined, those results mean a cure for Ashton's Disease -- or whatever. So the Velcoi fastened on an ancient but untried notion from Old Terra, attributed to a man named Heinlein, made about the time that it stopped being possible for a normal man to absorb all known information in a single lifetime. They began tinkering with ova in utero, selecting for eidetic memory, and set about raising up a corps of encyclopedic synthesists: a group of men trained to absorb raw information at high input with perfect retention, and then reason from it. Sort of human computers; you're one of the first. "They tell me you can read a page at a glance, Basic English or Fortran, and remember it a decade from now, letter-perfect in a cafe with the band playing. You know enough to converse intelligently with experts in a hundred specialized disciplines, and direct their work for maximum efficiency. They trained and sleep-taught and indoctrinated you in logical and non-logical analysis until you were eight, stuffed you with data until you were twelve, gave you four years to integrate it and then put you to work at sixteen. Only you didn't work. "Not the way they hoped, anyhow. They fed you data on pressing social problems, not big stuff, just break-in exercises; and your solutions were unsatisfactory or barely so, not much better than the computers could do. So they sicced their psychiatrists on you, and their psychologists, and they turned you inside out and found nothing wrong. They tore you down and rebuilt you and you still don't make miracles. And so in desperation some would-be Freud stole another notion from Old Terra and recommended a vacation in the country -- in this case a vacation on New Home, an agricultural colony, world, with me." Zack paused, relit his pipe. "I knew your Dad -- we were roommates in school on Trantor, and he program -- Young Encyclopedic Synthesists. He was mighty proud that his wife back home had been selected for genetic surgery. Wonder how he feels now." He stared at the distant bay below, then wrenched himself from his thoughts with a visible effort. "Anyway, that's the long and short of it, Tim. You're here for R and R -- six months of it. How does that appeal to you?" Behind his enormous spectacles (which could be returned to fisheye lens for maximum optic input) Timeth regarded Zack gravely. "It is satisfactory." "I said, 'Does it appeal to you?' Do you like the notion?" For the first time Timeth hesitated. "Y... yes I do. The last few months have been... intensely strenuous." "And strenuously intense, if I know Velcoi shrinks," Zack snorted. "Well, that's all over for awhile, lad. Smile." He beamed himself, nodded at the south window. "It's a sunny day." Timeth looked out at sundrenched splendor, at stately maples which had crossed light-years as sapCome for the niter. IbuUl stay for the taste. L rJ #  Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.  Lorillard # Fd heard enough to make me decide one of two things: quit or smoke True. I smoke True. The low tar, low nicotine cigarette. Think about it. King Regular: #I mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, King Menthol: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, lOO's Regular: # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine. lOO's Menthol; # mg. "tar", # mg. nicotine, Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. I lings and at native spruce whose skirts danced in the mountain breeze, and returned his gaze to Zack. "There is no more sun than on any other day. I fail to understand your pleasure simply because it's visible... oh, I see. As a farmer you are pleased that maximum growth-frequencies are available to your crops." "Why, no," said Zack, startled. "I mean, that's all fine, but... but... " He broke off, words failing him, and pointed at the window again. "'Look. It's a sunny day." The boy looked, kept on looking. "You ought to appreciate it; you haven't seen many, have you? I hear Velco is completely roofed over, to simplify atmosphere recycling. Must use artificial light, right?" "Sunlight is relayed inside the city by a series of mirror-bank transfer-and-amplification complexes," Timeth said flatly. "Vitamin D is essential for health." Zack's jaw dropped; he lost his pipe. They literally pipe daylight in to 'em, he thought. Holy smoke, what a dungeon. He gave up, took refuge in manners-toward-a-houseguest. The T.A. held five bedrooms, four of which he customarily sealed off in winter to conserve heat. Although Autumn already lay on this quadrant of New Home, he had left all five open, and invited Timeth to take his pick. All were furnished and clean but not especially orderly: Zack had felt that a .newcomer would feel most welcome in a room that felt lived-in. The boy selected the smallest and most functional room, hardly more than a square box with a mattress on the floor and a small table. It had no window. Zack shrugged and carried in the travelcases, stacking them for maximum access. Timeth opened one of the seals with an economical movement of his small thin hand, and began removing toilet articles. "What are my duties?" he asked stiffly. Well, if I'm supposed to find out what's wrong with his working habits... "None at all," Zack said cheerfully. "Do what suits you -- or nothing. Any help you feel like giving will be appreciated, but you owe me none. Your father paid your rent for you, twenty years ago -- by teaching astrogational mechanics to an ignorant farmer of a roomate." Timeth stared. "I cannot solve a problem without parameters," he stated. "Just keep your eyes open, old son. You'll catch on," Zack assured him heartily. He hoped that he sounded more confident than he felt.    The next few days passed slowly, grey weather hiding the sun, and Zack's puzzlement increased daily. Timeth indeed found things to do, and did them with maximum efficiency, but his performance was consistently lackluster. Sent to fetch water from the stream while Zack repaired a water-pump which had slipped its leathers, he reappeared from the forest staggering under the weight of two buckets fuller than Zack would have filled them, struggling valiantly uphill. He was frustrated by his inability to deliver perfectly full buckets, and shed tears approximately equal in volume to the amount spilled. Partly soothed by Zack's assurance that he had fetched a-plenty, he set about cutting up onions for the midday stew -- and produced precise cubes of onion as uniform as his small hands could make them. When Zack mentioned, casually, that they could use some firewood, he was shortly startled by the stuttering roar of his ancient chainsaw -- a device of which he was certain Timeth had only empirical knowledge. He had expected the lad would use the pulp saw which hung in the woodshed. Leaving his cooking and wandering outside to investigate, he found Timeth in a silent rage, annoyed not by the enormous demand the snarling, bucking chainsaw put on his young arms, but by the refusal of the irregular logs to lie down neatly and be sawed. Probably never met with a piece of unplaned wood in his life, Zack thought, and tried to explain that the logs' tendency to leap from the sawhorse and savage one's knees was an interesting challenge rather than a defect in their structure, but he had little success -- Timeth 's early training had led him to define "challenge" as "a problem they don't expect me to be able to solve." The boy went grimly back to work, generating a mountain of firewood as neat as a postcard-picture but no joy. Zack shook his head, sighed for the dozenth time and went back inside. The uneasiness persisted as the grey, rainy days of the season continued to unfold, and Zack lay awake nights trying to put his finger ' on the problem. The boy played chess like an automation, winning ! consistently and emotionlessly, con? tinned to perform household tasks adequately but with an undercurrent of feeling that might have been sullenness had it not been so mild. He never roamed the mountain, though a forest environment was certainly new to him, and seemed uncomfortable when he could not find a task to accomplish, a problem to solve. Even his constant displays of encyclopedic knowledge, which saved Zack man-hours on several occasions, contained no tinge of pride, but only a weary boredom. Damn it, the boy simply had no juice. Could it be simply homesickness? One damp morning Timeth coughed after breakfast, and asked diffidently if he could have his bed  off the floor. "I keep hearing the I floor hum," he said. Under ques tioning he explained that floors on i I n Velco invariably hummed with power, the electronic systems which were the city-world's lifeblood pulsing beneath floorboards. By association he heard them here on New Home, and a psychosomatic annoyance is as real as any other. Zack assented readily, and they studied the three bedframes the T.A. held. "Doesn't look like any of these will fit through the door of that closet you picked to live in, Timi. I guess you'll have to build you a bed." Zack expected the boy to ask for help, as he was sure carpentry was not a skill Timeth could have acquired on a steel-and-plastic world, but the boy only nodded and started measuring the mattress. Zack busied himself with the dishes, observing unobtrusively out of the corner of his eye. Having obtained the dimensions, Timeth put on a coat and went out into the morning mists, to the lumber pile out back. He returned with a pair of tongueand-groove boards, repeated the process until he had stacked a dozen of them in his room, then fetched two long two-by-fours and four four-by-fours. Zack interrupted his labors to provide hammer, nails and handsaw, then returned to the kitchen. As always, the boy worked in silence, save for the pounding and sawing the job required. Zack let him be, spent the afternoon cleaning his survey-laser. At noon Timeth emerged, his spectacles coated with a fine spray Science-Fiction Studies ## Nov #, #x#, # typeset pages features eight articles on the science fiction of together with reviews and notes on the science fiction of all countries and periods. This special issue (##), # via surface mail. # via air mail. Subscription to ###-#-#-# (November #, March, july, November #), # via surface mail, # via air mail. (All remittances must be in US funds.) Edited by R.D. Mullen and Darko Suvin, with Stanislaw Lem as contributing editor. Science-Fiction Studies Department of English Indiana Slate University Terre Haute, Indiana # of sawdust. Zack left off caning a chair, one of his favorite forms of relaxation, and went to inspect the new bedframe, easing past the mattress that partially filled the doorway. He blinked at what he saw, said nothing at first. "I'm not certain the legs are really perpendicular," Timeth said uneasily. "I didn't have a level or a T-square." " 'How do you tell if your wife is true?' " Zack quoted. " 'Check her out with a plumb-bob.' Never mind, old son. Another of my bum jokes. About the bed: it's... it's very functional." They boy looked pleased... but I can't say that I like it." Timeth was briefly crestfallen, then his features smoothed into their usual blank. "Why not?" Zack started to answer, then stopped. He turned and walked into the living room, the boy following, and sat down with a frown. Timeth waited. After a time Zack spoke. "Timeth, I'm beginning to understand why you had trouble on Velco. Hell, it sticks out all over -- it's so obvious I couldn't grasp it." "You must tell me," the boy said, and Zack was startled by the intensity in his voice. "Why must I tell you, Timi?" he asked softly. "Because I have shamed my father," Timi said shortly, turning red. For him, it was an emotional outburst. Zack swore, with feeling. "You poor kid. They couldn't get the results they wanted out of you, so they applied pressure on your motivation circuits, figuring you were stubborn. And so they made you ashamed -- and that's one of the stubbornest places there is. Perpetuated their own problem. Serves them right -- but it doesn't serve you at all. "Listen, lad. You've been programmed for maximum efficiency. But as much as your father and that Abernathy creature would like to believe otherwise, people aren't built to be satisfied with merely efficient solutions to their problems. Suited, maybe, but not satisfied. People are irrational, Timeth, in a way you've never been allowed to be. lliey want to enjoy life." Timeth displayed no comprehension. "Take that bed you Just built. You went to the lumber-pile and picked up the first bunch of boards that fit your parameters, the right size, the right length. And you stopped looking. You figured out the most economical use of wood and nails and designed your bedframe. And stopped thinking. You fit the tongue-and-grooves together, spanned them with two-by-fours to distribute the load, and added legs. And stopped building. It'll hold your weight and it's the size of the mattress, but it's as spartan as a K-ration, as cheerless as a utility pole. It's functional, but that's all it is." The boy looked close to tears. Zack suspected that he was having his equivalent of hysterics, but pushed on anyway. "I know what your problem is, Timeth, and it's the problem with your whole world: the reason why they needed you to pull their chestnuts out of the fire in the first place and the reason why you can't do it, all in one. "Look: a certain number of chores must be done in order to live -- call it life support. Because your world is so confounded crowded the nature of those chores become complex and subtle -- from hydraulic engineering to solar power conversion to piping in the bloody daylight. All I need is food and firewood, so I'm not as pressured. But when life-support chores become too complex to allow for the kind of cheerful inefficiency with which I run this farm, people don't enjoy doing them, or living with the end-results. "Look at my kitchen-stove sometime. It's a wood-burner, as old as underwear and as big as a landingfield. It keeps me busy wrestling that chainsaw, and its not an especially efficient heat-source. I make a pretty good living from this farm -- I could afford gas. Hell, I could afford a solar stove. But I like that old heap of iron. It was my mother's; it has stains on it that she made fixing my school Icrnches. It keeps the room cheery and warm of a winter's night. I don't have to cut wood for it -- so I don't begrudge the energy it consumes. "But more important than that, Timeth, the chores that I do have immediate personal results, of a tangible sort. I spend an hour cutting up vegetables into interesting shapes instead of neat cubes, and somehow my soup tastes better to me, and it looks different every time. I spend a few weeks over at Yang Wildflower's house learning to blow glass, and my living room wears a coat of many colors that changes as the day goes by, and changes with the seasons, too. I make the upstairs dormer I put on this house much wider than I need it -- but I can sit in the window-sill with my feet up, come sundown, and watch the sun set over the bay that my father used to fish. "You spend a week of hard mental labor and produce a more efficient traffic-routing system for use halfway around the planet, or a step-up in distribution of goods you'll never see. Meanwhile your own life-support comes from cans and boxes and grilles in the ceiling, from supermarkets and factories rather than from the earth and sky. You don't feel the effect you have on your world, and so it is meaningless to you. No wonder your solutions don't satisfy your constituents. "Go look at my bed; you've seen it already. Big four-poster with a canopy overhead made from a genuine Carson's World tapestry and a tapeviewer built in. Stereo speakers in a headboard of gnurled oak that's got a gold sunburst painted in the middle. That bed doesn't just hold me off the floor -- it gives me pleasure. Sometimes it's hard to get out of it in the morning. Sometimes I don't. "Dammit, son, there's some driftwood that you didn't get to, out there on the lumber pile, that'd make the prettiest bedframe you ever saw, with more interesting contours than any straight line ever milled. There's one big slab that bay worked over for near a century, with that smooth, timeless texture that only driftwood has, that'd make a headboard as majestic as this mountain we're sitting on. And as asymmetrical -- so you never noticed it. Instead of a pleasing place to spend a third of your every day, you produced a piece of floor with legs on it. Instead of an interesting soup you produced a homogenous pot of cubes. Instead of a lived-in room you've produced a collection of right angles that's as efficient and as lifeless as a laboratory maze. "Function, function, function! Timeth, human beings aren't built to live functionally. Dum near everything in this house, from kettle to cupboard, is decorated some way or other, and so the house is full of me. If I'm an unimaginative man, then they're unimaginative decorations, but they satisfy me and they say who I am. Your room says only what Velco is. "Confound it, boy! Didn't anyone ever teach you how to enjoy yourself?" Timeth burst out crying, the great, racking sobs of a very small child or a grown man. Zack suddenly cursed himself for a fool. Rising, he held out his arms blindly, and the boy as blindly rushed into them. "You poor slob," he murmured, stroking Timeth's hair, "They trained you how to work like a ballerina -- and they never taught you how to play." His face darkened. "I guess you can't play... if you live on Velco." The boy's sobs intensified. But finally his crying became less explosive, began to subside. His trembling ceased. He lifted his face, and the stained glass window turned his tears to tiny diamonds, rubies and amethysts. "Zack," he pleaded, "will you teach me how to enjoy myself?" Zack was startled to discover that his own vision was blurred; Timeth's face became a small, oval kaleidoscope. "I'll try, son," he said, his voice hoarse. "I'll try."    The winter was long, but unseasonably mild. Nonetheless Zack got very little accomplished around the house -- but it was a very full time all the same. There were hay rides and fishing trips and husking bees, happy smiling neighbors too seldom seen. There were square-dances where Timeth danced until his legs refused to support him and he giggled, gasping, on his knees at how the mathematical relationships of the dance melted away before the sheer Joy of it. There were beerbrewing parties and barn-raising celebrations at which he learned for the first time the joy of cooperation, of shared labor. There was a holiday feast where he glowed at the compliments bestowed on a cake he had fashioned in the shape of the T.A., with frosted windows, icing sills and trim, and a fine-grain  chocolate roof for all the world like ; tar-paper. And there were endless nature walks and countless camping! trips and a hundred color-splashed sunsets; there were windy days on the shore racking for driftwood and sweet winter nights singing New Home songs and Velcoi ballads by the fireside until eyelids stung with the weight of happy fatigue; there was snow to be shoveled and trees to be felled, a boat to be built and sap to be collected and boiled down into thick, gold syrup. And one chill night there was a chimney fire and Timeth heard it first and they sprang from their beds to become twin whirlwinds of wordlessly coordinated energy, and there was chopping of timbers and tearing down of boards and Timeth at the pump, with new-grown muscle efficiently pumping, keeping the full buckets coming, and Zack, disheveled and red in the glow of firebox and embers, his great shoulders rippling as he swung the great double-headed axe that Timeth had remembered to snatch up as they raced past the shop; and then there was a policing for embers in which time slowed down some, and then at last Zack and Timeth, panting on their knees, locking eyes for the first time, dissolving into laughter at the same instant, great echoing whoops of laughter that seemed to blow the smoke and the stink from the room; and Zack, reaching out to shake Timeth's hand and saying the first words spoken since Timeth's cry had woken him: "Pleasure to work with you, partner." And the boy's face was something that Jacob Abernathy would not have recognized And one slightly warmer night, Timeth returned from three days alone in the woods, healthy and fit and profoundly alive, and he asked Zachary Mountain-Bom a question, and Zack made the answer which he had prepared. And one pleasant Spring evening, two weeks later, Zack was sitting alone on a bluff overlooking the garden, watching the stars, when a darkness occulted one of them. The star reappeared and its neighbor vanished, and he smiled a soft smile and went in to bed, sleeping soundly for the first time in a month, waking before dawn for the first time in years.    The knock came as the coffee was perking, and Zack carefully slid the pot to a cooler place on the stove before he answered the door. Abernathy walked in without greeting, followed by the large manservant, and the three of them stood for a moment, regarding each other. For Zack it was almost a moment of deja vu -- the same kitchen, the same people, the same stack of travelcases awash with the light of dawning. But Abernathy methodically assessed the room, identified the missing element, and frowned. "Where is the boy?" "The boy is dead," Zack said truthfully. "He will not be returning with you." Abernathy's planed features had never held emotion, and were not about to start at this late date, but he looked as if he wished his eyebrows would let him frown. "There was an avalanche last week," Zack explained. "A rockslide to the east. I watched him fall. I could not recover his body. Tell Raoul I..." he broke off, strong emotion on his own face. Abernathy stood stock-still for a long moment, nodded and said, "I see. Was his death your fault?" "No," Zack said slowly, "it was his own doing." Abernathy read truth in his sturdy face, and nodded again. Without another word he spun on his heel like a drill instructor and left. The servant followed with the forlorn travelcases. Zack watched from the window until the landing craft rose into view from the tall neopines at the base of the mountain and arced off over the bay toward the orbiting mothership he had seen in the sky last night. Then he put down his empty coffee cup and went to the smallest room in his house. As he opened its door he noted with approval that the sunburst painted on its door was dry now. A new-carved, diamond-shaped window let in the morning sun; it splashed across a great majestic bed, seasoned maple timbers and a mighty slab of driftwood for a headboard, held together by careful, macrame-like lashings of thick blue cord, a great canopy arching overhead with a hand-stitched representation of this sector of the galaxy on its undersurface. It was nowise perfect or neat, but its craftsman had obviously enjoyed himself. Zack coughed. "All clear, old son." From beneath the magnificent bed came -- not a boy -- but a young man, the beginning of an eager grim below a proud, new mustache. "They're really gone, Zack?" "They're really gone, Timeth. They won't be coming back." "I... I guess I'll miss my parents some." The grin faltered. "I guess you will," Zack agreed, wondering for the thousandth time whether he had chosen rightly. Timeth shrugged, and his grin returned full strength. "Even feeling bad is better than not feeling," he said positively, and to his own surprise Zack laughed. They embraced fora moment, as comrades-in-arms, and then Timeth pulled away smiling. "Let's go outside, Zack," he said. "There's a shed to be built." "Whoa, lad. What about breakfast?" "The hell with breakfast," Timeth said, and raced to the window. Flinging it open, he breathed in a great chestful of spruce and earth and distant sea. "Look!" he cried, pointing. "It's a sunny day!"  Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! 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Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. this take subscriptionIgift offer from Name: Street: City: State: Zip: Mail With Remittance To: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York #B# coupon to advantage of this special Kevin O'Donnell Sometimes, on nights when the smog into someone else's sky, I look up at the haughty stars and wonder whether he was a terrified reactionary, afraid to live in a world with suddenly infinite horizons, or whether he was only a mad, desperate football fan. Not that it matters much.    The Perspe had come to the United Nations as spokesmen for a great galactic organization. And, humbling as it might be, our planet wasn't being invited to join, but was merely being informed of the rules of interstellar travel. Earth was being told, quite explicitly, that if it obeyed those laws its presence would be tolerated; otherwise it would find itself in a predicament. The Perspe had one, specific purpose; they couldn't discuss more alluring matters: trade, cultural exchanges, and -- most important of all -- technology. They did say that after their mission had been completed, other races could conduct bilateral talks with us. That was enough to make the U.N. diplomats work like dogs to understand the laws of the interstellar sea, and to codify them in ways that would be clear to all the peoples of the world. Eventually that brought me into it. During the initial exchanges, the translation devices of the Perspe had been a boon -- but as negotiations grew more subtle, they could no longer convey nuances adequately. 'The finer the shade of meaning, the less likely it was that it could be made clear to the other party. They also had difficulty choosing the most appropriate of conflicting definitions. Several times talks had been totally sidetracked when the computers had picked the wrong word. The Perspe kept a tight rein on their tempers even when we seemed to be insulting them. Nevertheless, the talks had almost collapsed during a discussion of salvage rights. The American Ambassador's, "Does the finder of a derelict take possession?", had become, "Does one who encounters a broken-down alcoholic have the right to enslave him?" After giving their equivalent of a sigh, the Perspe declared that it was time for flesh and blood interpreters. They then suspended negotiations while they trained some. My application was in the mail fifteen minutes after I saw their ad. The salary and career opportunities were attractive but that wasn't the reason I almost wrecked my car getting to the Post Office. I wanted the job because... how can I make you, who are satisfied with this world and this life, understand why I'm not? I mean, it's okay, as far as it goes, but it's dull. I've always had an urge, a drive, to... to see a temple without first having seen it in an art book. Or to bum golden brown on a beach that doesn't grace a hotel brochure. Or to buy a trinket that catches my fancy, without worrying that it was made for the tourist trade. Do you understand? I want to form an opinion of a new locale all on my own, without having my brain pushed and pulled and patted into place by two or three earlier generations of tourists. I want, if you'll forgive me, to be the very first human ever to have gone to... wherever I've gone. So I applied for the job. A month later, a special delivery letter arrived, requesting that I come to New York for an interview with the Perspe. I took the next flight out. I'm still not entirely sure why they chose me. It was probably my knack for languages. (I speak Russian, Chinese, Arabic, as well as my native English) combined with my four years of experience in teaching. Also, I suspect that the Perspe wanted some more-or-less normal adults to balance the other students: three linguists who were going to make a systematic study of Perspean, and three children, who'd been selected because youngsters pick up languages rapidly and are relatively free of cultural bias. We were definitely a mixed bag.  ii it The Perspe, short and squat, bear a distracting resemblance to oversized bullfrogs. Their skin is green, their hands and feet are webbed, and their great pop-eyes are mounted high on flattened heads. And they eat bugs. The Perspe who interviewed me apologized for that at the outset. As I eased into the steel-framed leather chair, the speaker on his desk put his guttural rumble into English: "Please forgive me, Mr. Schelly, but the insects of your world are delicious. Please do not feel you are being insulted if I snatch a small snack now and again -- rather, it is a compliment. This is the first world on which I have found palatable insect life." Since the computer had said nothing about the manner in which the Perspe would catch insects, I was unprepared. I'd sort of expected him to grab at a fly with his hand, or swat one with a folded newspaper, or something along those lines. But a minute later, I heard a buzzing in the air above my left ear; the Perspe's wide mouth parted and I saw a flash of pink. My ears registered a tiny pop and the Perspe's mouth closed. "Delicious," crackled the speaker. The verbal part of the interview was routine. The Perspe asked the usual questions, got the usual answers, and seemed to be as satisfied. The only difference was that I had a sense of being... tasted, I guess. I don't know how to describe it. Imagine being licked, stared at, smelled, listened to, and stroked, all at the same time. Imagine further that the other person isn't doing it for sensual pleasure, but because he wants to find out exactly what you're like. Not approval, not disapproval, simply examination. It's unsettling. Not that the Perspe stirred from his side of the spacious mahogany desk: It wasn't a physical inspection,, even though it seemed like one. It was... well, it was my impression that he was straining his every sensory input to learn all he could about me. Also, his effort to receive the data my body emitted seemed somehow not entirely passive, but more like radar or sonar than like "normal" senses. The Perspe are nearly telepathic. They can't read thoughts, but they are very high-grade empaths; my interviewer couldn't tell what I was thinking, but he could tell what I was feeling -- and on that basis he could guess at my thoughts. Not very accurately, at first, but as time went on he got better. Much better. That's why the Perspe represent the other space-travelling races of the galaxy. Their talent helps them understand the species they're dealing with. Being able to judge just how tnuch your opposite number wants something can be an advantage... The catch, of course, is that they have to learn each culture's non-verbal language; while being able to sense our emotions was a potential leg up, it was no more than a nuisance until they could correctly interpret a very confusing welter of impressions. Part of my job was to teach one Perspe how to do that. On paper, it doesn't sound like much, but it infused me with exuberant excitement. That excitement impelled me, supported me, kept me happy even during the early part when it was mostly just hard work. I'd get up around seven, shower, shave, and grab something to eat, and then start in on the tapes. For two or three hours I'd parrot pattern-sentences, as I tried to hammer them in -- I was training myself to spit back Perspean responses automatically, rather than having to assemble them word-byword in my conscious mind. Then, at about ten in the morning, the Perspe to whom I'd been assigned would enter my room to do the emotion drill. After plopping into his chair, he would slowly recite a list of emotions. "Love," he'd say, and I'd try to feel love for someone or something. "Anger," he'd order, and I'd cross to the window, breathe deeply, and despise all those who would pollute our air. "Boredom," he'd call, and I'd look at him and laugh, because during those days, that was the one emotion I could not feel. In the afternoons, we'd mix the two languages up every which way. I'd speak in English and he'd answer in Perspean; after an hour we'd switch and do it the other way. Sometimes we'd stick to one language for a while, then switch to bi-lingual. Every day I learned more; every day I came closer to fluency. He was a good teacher. I haven't told you much about Rsark -- that's "my" Perspean's name -- because I don't know how to make you understand him. I don't really myself. A being's mind is a microcosm of his culture, right? Rsark's culture is so different from ours that to him the Polynesian and the Prussian seem one and the same. If I told you that Rsark was a spend-thrift cannibal who'd had a thousand females once but none twice, you wouldn't think much of him, would you? But once you realized that his world doesn't use money, that the cannibalism is a religious obligation believed to confer immortality on the eaten and that it's physically dangerous for males of his race to have sex with the same female twice, your opinion might change. But possibly not, because you have been taught that certain beliefs are universal and absolute -- that they hold true for off-world frogs, too. So instead of trying to describe Rsark, let me tell you what happened the night the bellboy wnt crazy. We were nearing the end of the language-learning phase and we were both feeling confident in our command of the other's language. Since we were in the midst of an involved conversation utilizing a high degree of empathic projection we decided to have dinner sent up to my room. Rsark was slouched in his chair, trying to sort out the component parts of my broadcast. His eyes were shut because it was easier to feel my vibrations when there was no interference from a different type of sensory input. "Not bad, Robert," he commented. "But can you amplify the fear a little? "The problem with you," he mused, "is that you're not singleminded enough; you're too introspective. You keep watching yourself behave, which adds an extra dimension of emotion. And once you start watching yourself watch yourself..." His tongue flickered out as a mosquito hummed through the screenless window. "Give me a less self-conscious fear, Robert." "I'll try," I agreed, getting to my feet to answer a knock at the door. As I walked over to the foyer I tried to cut out all emotions but fear. Once I'd swung the door open, I didn't have to try any longer. At the other end of the room-service pushcart was a little man with wild eyes, a two-day beard and a pistol. "Beautiful purity, Robert," called Rsark from around the comer. "That's excellent, thank you. You can stop now." I opened my mouth to say something, but the gun moved forward and to the left. It wanted me to back into the sitting room. Slowly. I did. "Robert," said Rsark petulantly, "I told you to stop. You're beginning to create a feedback effect." The bellboy followed me in, using the cart like a lion-tamer uses his chair. His left hand groped for the door and pushed it shut. His fingers found the bolt. It grated into place. At his gesture, I stepped backwards again, until I was stopped by the chair I had been sitting in. Rsark had risen to bitch about my stubbornness. A glance at the bellboy and his gun did nothing to change his mind. "Robert," he demanded, reaching up to give my forearm a painful tweak, "enough fear! It's starting to hurt!" "Sorry, Rsark," I muttered, "but I can't help it. You're now tasting genuine fear -- can't you see this guy's got a gun?" "Why, certainly," he replied, sounding puzzled. "But what does that have to do with what you're broadcasting?' ' I was nonplussed. A crazylooking bellboy was aiming an ugly gun at my soft belly and Rsark didn't see the relation between that and my fear. "Ah that's better, Robert," he commended me. "You've mixed in -- don't tell me, I should know by now -- ah, exasperation, right?" I just looked at him. "Oh, how subtle!" he purred. "You've dropped the fear, strengthened the exasperation, and stirred in... astonishment, is it?" Before I could find the appropriate words, the bellboy cut in. "Shaddup," he growled, menacing Rsart with the gun. "Just siddown inna chair and shaddup." The Perspe stood his ground. "Why?" My skin stopped tingling, so I knew he'd switched his datagathering organs to the intruder. "I'm taking you two hostage," said the bellboy, surprised into explanation by Rsark's demeanor. "Buddy-boy -- " a careless wave of the gun indicated me " -- is gonna call the big boys, tell 'em I want a "But why should they give you that?" asked Rsark, with the innocent curiosity of one from a world where no crime had ever been committed for money. " 'cause I got you two hostage," grunted the bellboy. His bloodshot eyes flicked from me to Rsark and back, very neatly keeping us pinned. The Perspe's eyes closed, and his small body tensed. "Robert!" he cried, "this man is amazing. He's feeling more emotions at one time than you ever have! I sense fear, hunger, lust, confusion, hatred, repulsion... oh, what a collection! Thank you for bringing him, Robert. ' ' "I didn't." His eyelids opened like theater curtains. "You didn't?" "No." "Who did?" "He himself. He's serious. "About what?" "The money, you fucking frog!" shouted the bellboy. I think we'd hurt his feelings by ignoring him. "Froggie, you siddown inna chair. Now!" I threw in my two cents' worth with a desperate, "Please, Rsark." "Oh." He gave what I'd learned was a Perspean shrug as he waddled back to his chair. "Robert, this is not a common means of gaining money, is it?" "No," I answered as I moved to the telephone. "It isn't." Under the man's watchful eye, I dialed down to the switchboard. "Is it... what's the word... legal?" "Legal?" I laughed to prove my courage, but I didn't really see anything funny. "No, Rsark, it's not legal. Not at all." "Well," he asked thoughtfully, "if it's not legal, why does he think he can get the money?" "Operator, get me the Secretary General of the U.N. Okay, I'll wait -- but it's extremely important." I looked back to Rsark, and suddenly understood what a ping-pong ball feels like. "He will get the money, because if he doesn't, he'll kill us both." "Oh." After a moment's consideration, he said to the bellboy, "Sir, you'd best reconsider. My organization would resent my death." To me, he added, "My fellow Perspe really couldn't care less, but for some reason the Federation Government gets upset when we're killed in the line of duty. They say it's an insult." "Shaddup!" The bellboy turned to me. "Get 'im yet?" I shook my head and pressed the telephone to my ear. "Robert," asked Rsark, flapping his hand to catch my attention, "do you think he really means it?" "Yes, Rsark," I said as patiently as I could manage. "Is that why you feel so much fear?" "Yes, Rsark." It was getting harder to be patient. "I wish I could understand you beings," he complained. "Worrying all the time about death is not healthy. It blocks your synapses, you know. And mine, too, when I have to listen to you -- and you're both radiating so ferociously that I can't do anything else." "Well, I am very sorry, Rsark," I said from between tightly-clenched teeth. "I would not be feeling fear if this -- this -- this madman weren't pointing his damn gun at my heart. I'd feel a lot better if it were tomorrow already, and this whole thing was over." "You Terrans," he muttered with what I considered to be unjustifiable scorn. "If you weren't driving me crazy with your undisciplined vibrations, I'd let you stew in this. Just to teach you a lesson." "What?" I would have laughed if I hadn't been so damn scared. "Do you think you can get us out of this?" He nodded. I think he also tried to say, "That's right," but it didn't come out too well -- his tongue was stretched halfway across the floor, its tip burdened with the heavy hand-gun. I didn't mind his being unintelligible at all. My jaw sagged almost to my chest. The bellboy's, I noticed, had done the same; we must have looked like twins until I recovered and hit him with the telephone receiver. It was metal, and luckily my wild swing connected with his right temple, and he went down like a felled tree. First I told the operator to forget the U.N. and to send the police up instead. Then I crossed the room and helped the maddening little diplomat untangle his tongue. My mistake. The first thing he said was, "So that's what pure relief feels like." Luckily for interstellar relations, the phone was back on the hook.    Talks were to recommence at #:# a.m. the next morning. Rsark had arranged it, because of the Diplomatic Corps' solicitousness that evening following the attack. He took their syncophantic concern in stride, responded graciously to their queries, and waited till they had left before asking me, "Why are they afraid?" I looked up from the vocabulary list I was trying to memorize and scratched my head. "Are they afraid?" I wasn't a diplomat; I couldn't guess at their emotions. They all wore masks. During the previous six months I'd found that diplomatic body language was usually misleading and as often as not false. I suppose I should have remembered that earlier in the evening; every U.N. delegate who'd called or visited had projected contrary feelings that I'd taken seriously. "They sure didn't look that way to me." "But they were afraid," he insisted. "Each and every one of them. Why?" "Um," I stalled, sliding the vocabulary list onto the coffee table because I had an inkling that this might go longer than a round or two, "were they afraid the whole time?" The skin under his eyes wrinkled as he thought. On a Terran, it would have been a frown. "No," he said slowly, "no, the pattern was high initial fear, a wave of relief shortly after w started talking, and then a recurrence of the fear. The second time around, it grew steadily, until at the end it was almost as high as at the beginning." Without really thinking about it, I got out of my chair and walked to the door. There I began to mimic the majority of the ambassadors, as I tried to force myself to feel what they had. "First fear, then relief, then growing fear again?" "Yes." He stared at me curiously"Well... hey, what did their fear feel like?" I was exasperated with myself. There I was, discussing the cause of an emotion with one of the best emotion-readers in our part of the universe, and I hadn't thought to have him describe the fear. "Did it feel like mine, when that maniac pulled his gun on us?" "No," he said, shaking his head. "It didn't. Similar, but not the same. Theirs felt like... let me put it like this. You were afraid of losing your life. That set up a certain hollow resonance, which I can easily recognize, now. But these men, while they resonated hollowly, did it in a slightly different way. They were afraid of losing something, but I don't know..." I snapped my fingers. "Their careers!" He looked a question at me. "When they came in, they were afraid they'd find you angry enough to go home. That would make their governments super-pissed; they'd be in hot water, maybe even get fired, demoted -- I don't know. Then when they saw how unconcerned you were they were relieved. Later... oh, yeah -- later they started thinking maybe you were going to get your revenge in some sneaky way -- that's the way they do things, how do they know you're different? And the more they thought about it, the more scared they got." Rsark's head was bobbing up and down; my explanation must have made sense to him. "You Terrans value your careers almost as much as your lives, don't you?" "Yeah," I agreed. Then I thought of all the suicides the world has known. "Sometimes more." Rsark looked surprised. From what he'd told me, I knew that a Peispe chooses a career much as we choose hobbies. To them, jobs are diversions, not occupations. "Rsaik," I asked suddenly, "you can sense our emotions -- but can you really share them? I mean, do you really know how horrible a Terran can feel when he loses his job?" He studied the webbing between the fingers of his right hand. "On our world, Robert, the most important thing is knowledge. Or truth, if you prefer that word. Many of us devote our time to research, so that we can add to the knowledge of our race. The prestige attached to this spurs us on. And sometimes, in a... a fash desire to accumulate a lot of prestige quickly, someone..." his eyes turned to the open window, avoiding mine "... someone will offer a -- what's yourerm? -- ' 'hypothesis' as fact. From the moment he does that, he knows fear. Because one of two things will happen: the hypothesis may be verified, in which case he will be honored, or it may prove to be false, in which case he will be... ridiculed." He fell silent for so long that I thought he'd finished, but just as I cqjened my mouth, he went on: "I think, Robert, that I can interpret into my own frame of reference your fear of losing your job." He said it so softly, so gently, that I couldn't probe. I picked up the vocabulary list, and went back to work. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Rsark shook himself out of the mood that had enveloped him. Crossing the room to the telephone, he put a call through to his Chief of Mission. He was urging the Chief to start up negotiations again, even if they were futile; just to show us that there were no hard feelings. "Look, Rsark," I said as I followed him into the back seat of the Cadillac limousine, "I don't think I can interpret for you yet. I'm not ready. I'm not fluent enough yet." He didn't seem to hear me. I tapped his arm and started to repeat myself, but he waved an impatient hand. I shut up. "Robert," he said, "the guard in our hallway, the one by the elevator -- why was he afraid?" I frowned. Going to the coffee shop for a quick breakfast. I'd noticed the guard's near-servility, but I hadn't recognized it as a cloak for fear. I'd assumed that he'd gotten orders to treat us extra-nicely, to make up for the night before. "What kind of fear?" "The same as the ambassadors felt last night." "Oh, Jesus." I sank into the upholstery and laughed. "Rsark, you're incredible, you know? Here you can sniff out fear at twenty paces, but you can't figure out why it exists." "Terran psychology is frustrating," he grumped. "And I've only been here nine months. You can't expect me to -- " "That's okay," I said, patting his leathery shoulder in mock condolence. "I know we don't make sense to you. But listen -- remember why the ambassadors were scared?" "Sure." "Can't you see that he's afraid for the same reason?" "But it wasn't his fault that the bellboy went crazy!" "Of course not, but it was his fault that a nut with a gun got into our room, right?" "I suppose that to your race," he sighed, "it might seem so." "It is." His solemn eyes blinked twice. Finally, he muttered, "I will talk to his superior. I don't want him punished." After that, he lapsed into uncommunicativeness. k It Actually the day wasn't difficult. The eighteen of us filled one side of a long table, in a Perspestudent, Perspestudent arrangement. Opposite us, the U.N. negotiating team sat tense and wary. Separating the two sides was a portable computer, which did the bulk of the translation. Our role was simple, especially since the U.N. had dispensed with simultaneous interpretation to help us. We'd listen to a speech in Perspean, then compare our understanding of it with the computer's English version. If we thought it had erred, we broke in. To someone who speaks only one language, that may seem impossible, after only six months of study. It's not, really. We weren't translating from our native languages into Perspean; we were merely checking the accuracy of the translation from Perspean into English. Anyone who has learned a foreign language comprehends far more than he speaks. Even people who speak only one language understand a tremendous number of words that they themselves not only do not use, but cannot use. Encountering a word in its proper context makes an amazing difference. I didn't get a chance to do much the first day. One of the Eastern bloc linguists scored first, when the computer tried to translate "Revolutionary" as "rebel". Later, one of the children -- the scary little genius from Vienna, if I remember correctly -- convinced us that Tsoklo ga h' malk was a Perspean idiom meaning "intimates of the deceased" and not "necrophiliacs". "We couldn't understand your revulsion at giving priority passage to Tsoklo ga h'malk," whispered Rsark, behind the fan he'd made of his right hand. "What the hell's that 'necro-' word mean, anyway?" "Later, Rsark,' I mumbled back. The Perspe did the same thing, but from the opposite direction. This created a problem. As it turned out, each of us had accustomed "his" Perspe to the colloquial form of his language. Evidently, Perspean had no formalinformal dichotomy, as Terran languages do, so the Perspe had assumed that our daily language would be utilized in the negotiations. Their consternation when the first delegate let loose with full-blown diplomatese was something to behold... also somewhat of an embarrassment. "But I can't understand him," protested Rsark in a tow aside. "I don't follow him too well myself," I admitted. "But this is ridiculous!" So I was pushed onto center stage, for a moment or two, at least. "Mr. Ambassador," I said as I cleared my throat, "please pard#n my interruption, but there's a communication problem." He flushed with indignation. The other Perspe, having heard my remarks put into their tongue by the computer, and having seen Rsark 's reassuring nod verify the translation, rumbled general agreement. The delegates were upset. They resisted my suggestion that they skip the formalities. "Mr. Schelly," explained one, "diplomatic language is extremely precise. It may sound overly formal to you, but I assure you, sir a definite meaning is attached to each and every word. We speak the way we do to avoid possible misunderstandings. Yet you want us to abandon this precision?" "Well, yeah," I said, squirming under his hostile gaze. "See, Rsark speaks English, and so does, uh -- " one of the Perspe obligingly waved a pencil at me " -- Tnad over there, but they don't speak your kind. They can't speak your kind. It would have taken too much time to learn. So, if you all could just sort of drop back into colloquial... ?" Finally, the diplomats consented. They had no other choice. Either they spoke in ways familiar to the Perspe, or the talks were delayed again. "But," argued one last-ditch defender of formality, "this way will take so much longer! We'll have to define the implications and connotations of every word in the final draft!" "It's still quicker," I pointed out, "than waiting for Rsark to learn your brand of English." He was displeased at my impertinence, but he subsided into inaudible grumblings peppered with dire looks. The rest of the conference -- that is, until the final draft of the treaty between Earth and the galactic organization had been drawn up -- went fairly well, although it was a little dull. Once everyone understood everyone else, it took less than a month to get the rules of interstellar travel into language dll Terrans could understand. It might have takeff longer if our representatives could have had an option other than simple acceptance, resembling a bargaining chip, they were forced to agree to everything. On the last day, everyone initialed twenty or thirty copies of the draft, and left New York to get it ratified by his government.   "Robert," said Rsark, on the day after the General Assembly had approved the treaty, "since there's nothing left for me to do officially. I'd like to become a tourist. I've seen nothing but this city. Would it be possible to -- " "Sure!" I was getting sick of New York, too. Too damn big, too impersonal. Unlike most Midwesterners in Fun City, I hadn't worried about getting mugged -- one of the nicer aspects of a full-time security guard -- but I was fed up with concrete, steel, and tinted glass. "Where do you want to go first?" "It's your world, Robert." "Well... do you want to see natural beauty, or human artifacts? Do you crave solitude or crowds? What do you want?" He leaned back in his chair and thought for a while. After snacking on a wandering bee, he suggested, "Could we study this society? I'd like to observe how your countrymen... oh, how they work, how they live, how they amuse themselves. That sort of thing." "No sooner said than done," I beamed. That was my chance. Because of the language training and the negotiations I hadn't seen a single Browns' game that season -- and my home-town team had gotten to the play-offs; the Conference Champsionship with San Diego was scheduled for the following Sunday, in Cleveland's Memorial Stadium. "How'd you like to go to a football game?" "Football?" He frowned briefly, and my heart sank. "Yeah -- you know, that game I was watching on television last week?" "Oh, that!" he said with startling enthusiasm. "That was very interesting. Yes, I'd like to see it. Tnad would, too." The telephone leaped into my hand. In less than a minute I had begged an old high school friend, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Press, for tickets to the game. The phone was well away from my ear while he expostulated. I sipped at a cup of coffee until he ran out of steam. "Needless to say, Harry," I added in my best diplomatic manner, "we'll give you an exclusive interview after the game. Won't your readers be interested in the reactions of the first extraterrestrials waited for ten seconds of dead air to slide by. "Thanks, Harry. I'll drop by your house on Sunday morning to pick up the tickets. I'll even pay you for them." Chuckling, I returned the receiver to its cradle. "Well, Rsark, looks like you and Tnad are going to make history." it k A December day in Cleveland is rarely Mother Nature's finest moment, but on this occasion she relented, bestowing a blue sky and a light lake breeze on more than # fans. The temperature was in the mid-thirties, but snug inside my heavy coat and with the sun on my face, I was warm, comfortable and very happy. The stadium was so crowded that we could barely move, which is saying a lot for a place with about # seats. After we'd found ours, I unpacked my binoculars and scanned our general vicinity. "Good," I commented to Rsark, "not many Charger fans." "Huh?" "Most of the people here," I explained patiently, "are from Cleveland. They want the Browns to win today, so they're called Brown fans. Those who want San Diego to win are called Charger fans. See, there's one over there." I was about to hand him the binoculars when I realized that they would never fit his eyes. "Well, down there, where that pennant is. It says San Diego on it." "I see it. It looks very lonely, all #, now al your bookstore A division of Random House by itself. Why did they come, when everyone else wants the Browns to win?" I shrugged; I myself have never understood that kind of support. "I guess they really want to watch the game, so they came even though they knew they'd be outnumbered # to one. I'll bet they don't cheer very loudly, though." "Not likely," Rsark agreed. Then some little kids approached us, stopping about five feet from the Perspean. Rsark motioned the guard not to chase them away. With eyes almost as big and round as his they stared for what seemed like fifteen minutes. Finally the smallest of them walked right up to him. "Hey, mister," he asked in an awestruck tone, "you one of them Per-spee?" "Perspe," corrected Rsark gently. The kid was drawn tight as a piano wire; the alien diplomat tried to relax him. "Yes, I am." "Ain't you cold?" The little boy stamped his feet, as if to show Rsark how to warm himself. "No," he replied seriously, still trying to quiet the kid's nerves. "I'm wearing a space-suit, and that keeps me warm." I hadn't thought the widestretched brown eyes could get bigger, but they did. "Really?" ' "Uh-huh." He tapped the silver belt that encircled his waist. "See? This controls it." The boy's interest was finally caught. His fear vanished; "I don't see no spacesuit!" "That's because it's almost invisible. It's a force field, and it can't be seen against my skin. But wait a minute." He held his hand up in the air and spread his fingers. "Look at it against the sky. See around the edges?" A minute flicker of light outlined each of his fingers. "That's the force field right there." "And it really keeps you warm, huh?" "That it does." hissed, "the teams're cornin' out now. Let's go!" There was no doubt in his mind, at least, as to the relative importance of alien diplomats and the Cleveland Browns. With perfunctory waves the little pack disappeared into the crowd. "Nice boy," said Rsark as he leaned back in his seat. "Pretty brave, too," I suggested, "to come right up and talk to you that way." "Well," he shrugged, "if he'd gone up to ugly old Tnad over there, then I'd agree with you. But -- " he modestly cast his eyes down " -- I'm so much handsomer than he is that I don't frighten little children." The other diplomat pretended not to have heard, and since the teams were lining up for the kick-off, I decided that I would, too. "The team on the right is Cleveland, the one on the left is San Diego. The Chargers will start the game by kicking to the Browns." "Why?" "Uh, a few minutes ago, they flipped a coin to see who'd receive first." I saw Rsark had drawn a blank. "Random chance determines who will kick." He nodded. The whistle blew and the game was on.   If it had happened in the second half, or even late in the first, it wouldn't have mattered; we would have left by then. After the kick-off, we didn't try to say anything further. It was too noisy; # cheering people can drown out a lot of conversation -- and the Browns were giving the crowd cause to shout. The quarterback, a second-year man out of Oklahoma, had led the Browns to a #-#-I season. He had a healthy body, an arm lowerful enough to rifle the ball sixty yards, a computer brain, and the ability to inspire a team. That last was Jack Smeriglio's most important asset. When he was on the field, the Browns were a devastating machine, uncontrollable and invulnerable. When he went off something happened to the other parts of the machine. It was as if they climbed down from a dream, awoke to the realization that they had been playing way over their heads... When Smeriglio went to the bench, he left behind eleven individuals, not a team. But he was in, and the Browns were tearing up the Chargers. The first play from scrimmage lifted the spectators out of their seats. On first and ten at his own twenty, he audibled. Then his running-back took it on a draw and got eighteen twisting, clawing yards. First and ten on the thirty-eight. Another audible. The tight end cut across the fortyfive and found the ball buried in his gut. He got six more yards before being dumped. First down on the Charger forty-nine. No audible. Heavy rush, but Smeriglio ducked out from under two angry behemoths and put a perfect spiral into the hands of his wide receiver, who hurtled out of bounds on the Charger eight-yard line. "Robert," Rsark bellowed into my ear, "I am getting uneasy. There is too much emotion here; it is setting up feedback in me. I imagine Tnad is feeling the same thing. Can we leave?" The crowd-noise was so deafening that I wasn't quite sure of what he'd said. Whipping out a notebook, I scribbled, "Can't hear you," on the first page. I handed it to him, and watched Smeriglio take his time getting downfield. He cut an impressive figure as he strode through the cheers that rocked the massive stadium. Rsark wrote, then held the notebook before my eyes; I read his request and shrugged. I hated to leave, but in a situation like that I couldn't think of myself. "Okay," I wrote beneath his elegant script, "we'll leave after the next play." He read it, and patted me on the knee to let me know that was ok. I circled the last line, and passed it down to Tnad. He shot me a grateful glance. Greg Cohen, Tnad's studenttutor didn't, but I could hardly blame him for that. Then Smeriglio brought the team out of the huddle, looked around, and started to bark out his signals. The stadium was going crazy. Everywhere you looked, people were on their feet, waving their arms, shouting for all they were worth. Smeriglio started to call for silence. His hands rose to his shoulders, then he dropped forward to his knees. Obligingly, everyone hushed, except for the people in the left-end zone, the ones who were facing him. They kept on screaming. In the relative silence, the second shot was shockingly loud. Smeriglio toppled to his face. When the center rolled him over, every person present could see the gaping hole the dum-dum bullets had left in his chest. For one or two heartbeats, the # people in Memorial Stadium were more silent than a snowy mountaintop. I heard only two sounds -- a rising wind, and Tnad's moan. "Quick," commanded Rsark, tugging at my sleeve, "you must get us out of here. The emotion, it's -- " "Greg!" I was on my feet with the Perspe curled in my arms. "Grab Tnad! Let's go!" The crowds were impossible. Understandably so. I was operating at full speed, where each second dragged by like a minute. They were in normal time, and annoyed that we cut off their view of the field. Yet I went down twelve steps in three leaps, all the while balancing Rsark most carefully. "Get outa my way!" I shouted as I floated through the air, so agonizingly slowly that I had time to notice the squad of trainers rushing out to the fallen quarterback. "Emergency case here, move it, move it!" I had just turned the comer when a rumble like an avalanche began. Ahead loomed the maze of runways, catwalks, and ramps that led to the outside. I poured it on, putting into the sprint every ounce of power my legs possessed. The concrete drifted beneath me like river water under a raft. Two more bounds. Cohen was close behind me; the security guards were lost in the crowd. The rumble broke into a full-throated roar of anger and frustration and hatred. Rsark responded with such a terrible noise that while I waited for my left foot to touch, I sent tip a prayer to God, asking Him to quiet my friend. An instant later, after Rsark had gone quiet but frighteningly stiff, I reworded the prayer. Then he was writhing in my arms, nearly fighting free of my grip, and a third plea rose to Heaven. Then, far in the distance, high above all the other monstrous noises stadium came a silvery shriek of agony that surely marked the end of someone's life. And my friend Rsark went limp. And died.    That's about all there was to it. I spoke to Rsark's superior and explained what had happened. He regretted the untimely loss of two of his assistants, but he was a Perspe. "Everyone must die," he comforted me, "and the manner of death is not important. What matters is whether one had been happy or not. Rsark and Tnad led lives full of joy. Long lives, with much joy. I am glad that they tasted pleasure so frequently." But he was a Perspe. His bosses, the beings who run the galactic organization that had sent Rsark and his colleagues to Earth, were not. They looked at the matter from a completely different angle. "To them," the wistful Ambassador told the emergency session of the General Assembly, "Rsark and Tnad died at the hands of an angry mob. I told them that it was both accidental and extraordinary. They said that if you Terrans can keep your hands from hurling stones, you should be able to keep your minds from hurling hate. I regret to inform you that we must disavow the recentlysigned treaty. The remainder of the Perspe mission left the next morning. The warships took up a tight orbit around Earth the following day. They're there now, blockading us, keeping us crawling on a planet that seems very cramped. No one knows when they'll consent to talk again. That's my new job. Every day, for eight hours, I sit at a microphone. In halting Perspean, I beg the beings to understand us, to talk to us, to... forgive us. Sometimes, on nights when the wind has swept the clouds and the smog into someone else's sky, I look up at the haughty stars and wonder whether he was a terrified reactionary, afraid to let the world live with suddenly infinite horizons, or whether he was only a mad, desperate football fan. Not that it matters much.  BntldlR Tfee Mote In Gods AL. The writer is a jealous god. He builds his universe without interference. He resents the carping of mentally deficient critics and the editor's capricious demands for revisions. Let two writers try to make one universe, and their defenses get in the way. But. Our fields of expertise matched each the other's blind spots, unnaturally well. There were books neither of us could write alone. We had to try it. At first we were too polite, too reluctant to criticize each other's work. That may have saved us from left flaws that had to be tom out of the book later. We had to build the worlds. From Motie physiognomy we had to build Motie technology and history and life styles. Niven had to be coached in the basic history of Pournelle's thousand-year-old interstellar culture. It took us three years. At the end we had a novel of # words...which was too long. We cut it to #, to the reader's great benefit. We cut # words off the beginning, including in one lump our first couple of montlis of work: a Prologue, a battle between spacegoing warcraft, and .a prison camp scene. All of the crucial information had to be embedded in later sections. We give that Prologue here. When the Moties and the Empire and the star systems and their technologies and philosophies had become one interrelated whole, this is how it looked from New Caledonia system. We called it Last night at this time he had gone out to look at the stars. Instead a glare of white light like an exploding sun had met him at the door, and when he could see again a flaming mushroom was rising from the cornfields at the edge of the black hemisphere roofing the University. Then had come sound, rumbling, rolling across the fields to shake the house. Alice had run out in terror, desperate to have her worst fears confirmed, crying, "What are you learning that's worth getting us all killed?" He'd dismissed her question as typical of an astronomer's wife, but in fact he was learning nothing. The main telescope controls were erratic, and nothing could be done, for the telescope itself was on New Scotland's tiny moon. These nights interplanetary space rippled with the strange lights of war, and the atmosphere glowed with ionization from shock waves, beamed radiation, fusion explosions...He had gone back inside without answering. Now, late in the evening of New Scotland's # hour day, Thaddeus Potter, Ph.D., strolled out into the night air. It was a good night for seeing. Interplanetary war could play hell with the seeing; but tonight the bombardment from New Ireland had ceased. The Imperial Navy had won a victory. Potter had paid no attention to the newscasts; still, he appreciated the victory's effects. Perhaps tonight the war wouldn't interfere with his work. He walked thirty paces forward and turned just where the roof of his house wouldn't block the Coal Sack. It was a sight he never tired of. The Coal Sack was a nebular mass of gas and duri, small as such things go -- eight to ten parsecs thick -- but dense, and close enough to New Caledonia to block a quarter of the sky. Earth lay somewhere on the other side of it, and so did the Imperial Capital, Sparta, both forever invisible. The Coal Sack hid most of the Empire, but it made a fine velvet backdrop for two And one of them had changed drastically. Potter's face changed too. His eyes bugged. His lantern jaw hung loose on its hinges. Stupidly he stared at the sky as if seeing it for the first time. Then, abruptly, he ran into the house. Alice came into the bedroom as he was phong Edwards. "What's happened?" she cried. "Have they pierced the shield?" "No," Potter snapped over his shoulder. Then, grudgingly, "Something's happened to the Mote." "Oh for God's sake!" She was genuinely angry. Potter saw. All that fuss about a star, with civilization falling around our ears! But Alice had no love of the stars. Edwards answered. On the screen he showed naked from the waist up, his long curly hair a tangled bird's nest. "Who the hell-? Thad. I might have known. Thad, do you know what time it is?" "Yes. Go outside," Potter ordered. "Have a look at the Mote. " "The Mote? The Mote?" "Yes. It's gone nova!" Potter shouted. Edwards growled, then sudden comprehension struck. He left the screen without hanging up. Potter reached out to dial the bedroom window transparent. And it was still there. Even without the Coal Sack for backdrop Murcheson's Eye would be the brightest object in the sky. At its rising the Coal Sack resembled the silhouette of a hooded man, head and shoulders; and the off-centered red supergiant became a watchful, malevolent eye. The University itself had begun as an observatory funded to study the supergiant. This eye had a mote: a yellow dwarf companion, smaller and dimmer, and uninteresting. The Universe held plenty of yellow dwarfs. blue-green point. It was almost as bright as Murcheson's Eye itself, and it burned with a purer light. Murcheson's Eye was white with a strong red tinge; but the Mote was bluegreen with no compromise, impossibly green. Edwards came back to the phone. "Thad, that's no nova. It's lilx nothing ever recorded. Thad, we've got to get to the observatory!" "I know. I'll meet you there." '# want to do spectroscopy on it." 'All right." "God, I hope the seeing holds! Do you think we'll be able to get through today?" "If you hang up, we'll find out sooner." "What? Och, aye." Edwards hung up.    The bombardment started as Potter was boarding his bike. There was a hot streak of light like a very large shooting star; and it didn't burn out, but reached all the way to the horizon. Stratospheric clouds formed and vanished, outlining the shock wave. Light glared on the horizon, then faded gradually. "Damn," muttered Potter, with feeling. He started the motor. The war was no concern of his, except that he no longer had New Irish students. He even missed some of them. There was one chap from Cohane who:... A cluster of stars streaked down in exploding fireworks. Something burned like a new star overhead. The falling stars winked out, but the other light went on and on, changing colors rapidly, even while the shock wave clouds dissipated. Then the night became clear, and Potter saw that it was on the moon. What could New Ireland be shooting at on New Scotland's moon? Potter understood then. "You bastards!" he screamed at the sky. "You lousy traitor bastards!" The single light reddened. He stormed around the side of Edwards' house shouting, "The traitors bombed the main telescope! Did you see it? All our work -- oh." He had forgotten Edwards' backyard telescope. It had cost him plenty, and it was very good, although it weighed only four kilograms. It was portable -- "Especially," Edwards used to say, "when compared with the main telescope. " He had brought it because the fourth attempt at grinding his own mirror produced another cracked disk and an ultimatium from his now dead wife about Number # Carbo grains tracked onto her New-Life carpets... Now Edwards moved away from the eyepiece saying, "Nothing much to see there." He was right. There were no features. Potter saw only a uniform aquamarine field. "But have a look at this," said Edwards. "Move back a bit..." He set beneath the eyepiece a large sheet of white paper, then a wedge of clear quartz. The prism spread a fan-shaped rainbow across the paper. But the rainbow was almost too dim to see, vanishing beside a single line of aquamarine; and that line blazed. "One line," said Potter. "Monochromatic?" "I told you yon was no nova." "Too right it wasn't. But what is it? Laser light? It has to be artificial! Lord, what a technology they've buiU!" "Och, come now." Edwards interrupted the monologue. "I doubt yon's artificial at all. Too intense." His voice was cheerful. "We're seeing something new. Somehow yon Mote is generating coherent light. " "I don't believe it." Edwards looked annoyed. After all, it was his telescope. "What think you, then? Some booby calling for help? If they were that powerful, they would send a ship. A ship would come thirtyfive years sooner!" "But there's no tramline from the Mote to New Caledonia! Not even theoretically possible. Only link to the Mote has to start inside the Eye. Murcheson looked for it, you know, but he never found it. The Mote's alone out there. " "Och, then how could there be a colony?" Edwards demanded in triumph. "Be reasonable, Thad! We hae a new natural phenomenon, something new in stellar proccess." "But if someone s calling -- " "Let's hope not. We could no help them. We couldn't reach them, even if we knew the links! There's no starship in the New Cal system, and there's no likely to be until the war's over." Edwards looked up at the sky. The moon wasa small, irregular half-disk; and a circular crater still burned red in the dark half. overhead. The violet light grew more intense and flared white, then vanished. A warship had died out there. "Ah, well," Edwards said. His voice softened. "If someone's calling he picked a hell of a time for it. But at least we can search for modulations. If the beam is no modulated, you'll admit there's nobody there, will you not?" "Of course," said Potter. k ir it In # there were no starships behind the Coal Sack. On the other side, around Crucis and the Capital, a tiny fleet still rode the force paths between stars to the worlds Sparta controlled. There were fewer loyal ships and worlds each year. The summer of # was lean for New Scotland. Day after day a few men crept outside the black dome that defended the city; but they always returned at night. Few saw the rising of the Coal Sack. It climbed weirdly, its resemblance to a shrouded human silhouette marred by the festive two-colored eye. The Mote burned as brightly as Murcheson's Eye now. But who would listen to Potter and Edwards and their crazy tales about the Mote? The night sky was a battlefield, dangerous to look upon. The war was not really fought for the Empire now. In the New Caledonia system the war continued because it would not end. Loyalist and Rebel were meaningless terms; but it hardly mattered while bombs and wrecked ships fell from the skies. Henry Morrissey was still head of the University Astronomy Department. He tried to talk Potter and Edwards into returning to the protection of the Langston Field. His only success was that Potter sent his wife and two sons back with Morrissey. Edwards had no living dependents, and both refused to budge. something had happened to the Mote, but not that it was visible to the naked eye. Potter was known for his monomaniacal enthusiasms. The Department could supply them with equipment. It was makeshift, but it should have done the job. There was laser light coming from the Mote. It came with terrific force, and must have required terrific power, and enormous sophistication to build that power. No one would build such a thing except to send a message. And there was no message. The beam was not modulated. It did not change color, or blink off and on, or change in intensity. It was a steady, beautifully pure, terribly intense beam of coherent light. Potter watched to see if it might change silhouette, staring for hours into the telescope. Edwards was no help at all. He alternated between polite gloating at having proved his point, and impolite words muttered as he tried to investigate the new "stellar process" with inadequate equipment. The only thing they agreed on was the need to publish their observations, and the impossibility of doing so. One night a missile exploded against the edge of the black dome. The Langston Field protecting University City could only absorb so much energy before radiating inward, vaporizing the town, and it took time to dissipate the hellish fury poured into it. Frantic engineers worked to radiate away the shield energy before the generators melted to slag. They succeeded, but there was a burn-through: a generator left yellowhot and runny. A relay snapped open, and New Caledonia stood undefended against a hostile sky. Before the Navy had watched the rising of the Coal Sack. "I came to apologize," Morrissey told Potter the next morning. "Something damned strange has happened to the Mote. What have you got?" He listened to Potter and Edwards, and he stopped their fight. Now that they had an audience they almost came to blows. Morrissey promised them more equipment and retreated under the restored shield. He had been an astronomer in his time. Somehow he got them what they needed. Weeks became months. The war continued, wearing New Scotland down, exhausting her resources. Potter and Edwards worked on, learning nothing, fighting with each other and screaming curses at the New Irish traitors. They might as well have stayed under the shield. The Mote produced coherent light of amazing purity. Four months after it began the light Jumped in intensity and stayed that way. Five months later it Jumped again. It Jumped once more, four months later, but Potter and Edwards didn't see it. That was the night a ship from New Ireland fell from the sky, its shield blazing violet with friction. It was low when the shield overloaded and collapsed, releasing stored energy in one ferocious blast. Gammas and photons washed across the plains beyond the city, and Potter and Edwards were carried into the University hospital by worried students. Potter died three days later. Edwards walked for the rest of his life with a backpack attached to his shoulders: a portable life support system.    It was # on every world where clocks still ran when the miracle came to New Scotland. An interstellar trading ship, long converted for war and recently damaged, fell into the system with her Langston Field intact and her hold filled with torpedoes. She was killed in the final battle, but the insurrection on New Ireland died as well. Now all the New Caledonia system was loyal to the Empire; and the Empire no longer existed. The University came out from under the shield. Some had forgotten that the Mote had once been a small yellowwhite point. Most didn't care. There was a world to be tamed, and that world had been bare rock terraformed in the first place. The fragile imported biosphere was nearly destroyed, and it took all their ingenuity and work to keep New Scotland inhabitable. They succeeded because they had to. There were no ships to take survivors anywhere else. The Yards had been destroyed in the war, and there would be no more interstellar craft. They were alone behind the Coal Sack. The Mote continued to grow brighter as the years passed. Soon it was more no astronomers on New Scotland to care. In #I the Coal Sack was a black silhouette of a hooded man. It had one terribly bright blue-green eye, with a red fleck in it.    One night at the rising of the Coal Sack, a farmer named Howard Grote Littlemead was struck with inspiration. It came to him that the Coal Sack was God, and that he ought to tell someone. Tradition had it that the Face of God could be seen from New Caledonia; and Littlemead had a powerful voice. Despite the opposition of the Imperial Orthodox Church, despite the protests of the Viceroy and the scorn of the University staff, the Church of Him spread until it was a power of New Scotland. It was never large, but its members were fanatics; and they had the miracle of the Mote, which no scientist could explain. By # the Church of Him was a power among New Scot farmers, but not in the cities. Still, half the population worked in the fields. The converter kitchens had all broken down. By # New Scotland had two working irUerplanetary spacecraft, one of which could not land. Its Langston Field had died. The term was appropriate. When a piece of Empire technology stopped working, it was dead. It could not be repaired. New Scotland was becoming primitive. For forty years the Mote had grown. Children refused to believe that it had once been called the Mote. Adults knew it was true, but couldn't re' member why. They called the twin stars Murcheson's Eye, and believed that the red supergiant had no special name. The records might have showed differently, but the University records were suspect. The Libarary had been scrambled by electromagnetic pulses during the years of siege. It had large areas of amnesia. In # the Mote went out. Its green light dimmed to nothing over a period of several hours; but that happened on the other side of the world. When the Coal Sack rose above University City that night, it rose as a blinded man. All but a few remnants of the Church of Him died that year. With the aid of a handful of sleeping pills Howard Grote Littlemead hastened to meet his God...possibly to demand an explanation. Astronomy also died. There were few enough astronomers and fewer tools; and when nobody could explain the vanishing of the Mote...and when telescopes turned on the Mote's remnant showed only a yellow dwarf star, with nothing remarkable about it at all... People stopped considering the stars. They had a world to save. The Mote was a G-# yellow dwarf, thirty-five lightyears distant; a white point at the edge of Murcheson's Eye. So it was for more than a century, while the Second Empire rose from Sparta and came again to New Caledonia. Then astronomers read old and incomplete records, and resumed their study of the red supergiant known as Murcheson's Eye; but they hardly noticed the Mote. And the Mote did nothing unusual for one hundred and fifteen years.    Thirty-five light years away, the aliens of Mote Prime had launched a light-sail spacecraft, using batteries of laser cannon powerful enough to outshine a neighboring red supergiant. As for why they did it that way, and why it looked like that, and what the bejeesus is going on...explanations follow. #  writers follow standard rules for building worlds. We have formulae and tables for getting the orbits right, selecting suns of proper brightness, determining temperatures and climates, building a plausible ecology. Building worlds requires imagination, but a lot of the work is mechanical. Once the mechanical work is done the world may suggest a story, or it may even design its own inhabitants. Larry Niven's "known space" stories include worlds which have strongly affected their colonists. Or the exceptions to the rules may form stories. Why does Mote Prime, a nominally Earthlike world, remind so many people of the planet Mars? What strangeness in its evolution made the atmosphere so helium-rich? This goes beyond mechanics. (Simon and Schuster, #) we built not only worlds, but cultures. novel of first contact. After our initial story conference we had larger could write it, the epitome of first contact novels. We intended to explore every important problem arising from first contact with aliens -- and to look at those problems from both human and alien viewpoints. That meant creating cultures in far more detail than is needed for most novels. It's easy, when a novel is heavy with detail, for the details to get out of hand, creating glaring inconsistencies. (If civilization uses hydrogen fusion power at such a rate that world sea level has dropped by two feet, you will not have people sleeping in abandoned movie houses.) To avoid such inconsistencies we worked a great deal harder developing the basic technologies of both the Motie (alien) and the human civilizations. In fact, when we finished the book we had nearly as much unpublished material as ended up in the book. There are many pages of data on Motie biology and evolutionary history; details on Empire science and technology; descriptions of space battles, how worlds are terraformed, how light-sails are constructed; and although these background details affected the novel and dictated what we would actually write, most of them never appear in the book. We made several boundary decisions. One was to employ the Second Empire period of Pournelle's future history. That Empire existed as a series of sketches with a loose outline of its history, most of it be consistent with the published material. Another parameter was the physical description of the aliens. Incredibly, that's all we began with: a detailed description of what became the prototype Motie, the Engineer: an attempt to build a nonsymmetrical alien, left over from a Niven story that never quite jelled. The history, biology, evolution, sociology, and culture of the Modes were extrapolated from that being's shape during endless coffee-and-brandy sessions. That was our second forced choice. The Moties lived within the heart of the Empire, but had never been discovered. A simple explanation might have been to make the eatsblla #I alrnulaCed # authority # accepted: tranafei # transfs # go acKnowlBCgedipowerdiiwn sequence go # powerdown sequence collets: allgo fallows aliens a young civilization just discovering space travel, but that assumption contradicted Motie history as extrapolated from their appearance. We found another explanation in the nature of the Alderson drive, discussed later. Because Mote has not yet appeared in paperback, many Galaxy readers will not have read it yet; and further discussion of the Moties would spoil the book for them. Perhaps in a couple of years we'll do another article on the history and background of the Moties; Heaven knows we have enough data in our notebooks. On the other hand, we may just hang onto it for the sequels, if any... The most important technological features of the Empire were previously published in other stories: the Alderson Drive and Langston Field. Both were invented to Jerry Pournelle's specifications by Dan Alderson, a resident genius at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratories. It had always been obvious that the Drive and Field would affect the cultures that used them, but until obvious just how profound the effects would be. The Alderson Drive Every sf writer eventually must face the problem of interstellar transportation. There are a number of approaches. One is to deny faster-than-light travel. This in practice forbids organized interstellar civilizations. A second approach is to ignore General and Special Relativity. Readers usually won't accept this. It's a cop-out, and except in the kind of story that's more allegory than science fiction, it's not appropriate. Another method is to retreat into doubletalk about hyperspace. Doubletalk drives are common enough. The problem is that when everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden. Good stories are made when there are difficulties to overcome, and if there are no limits to "hyperspace travel" there are no real limits to what the heroes and villains can do. In a single work the "difficulties" can be planned as the story goes along, and the drive then redesigned in rewrite; but we couldn't do that here. Our method was to work out the Drive in detail and live with the resulting limitations. As it happens, the limits on the Drive influenced the final outcome of the story; but they were not invented for that purpose. The Alderson Drive is consistent with everything presently known about physics. It merely assumes that additional discoveries will be made in about thirty years, at Cal Tech (as a tip o' the hat to Dan Alderson). The key event is the detection of a "fifth force"'. There are four known forces in modern physics; two sub-nuclear forces responsible respectively for alpha and beta decay; electromagnetism, which includes light; and gravity. The Alderson force, then, is the fifth, and it is generated by thermonuclear reactions. The force has little effect in our universe; in fact, it is barely detectable. Simultaneously with the discovery of the fifth force, however, we postulate the discovery of a second universe in point-to-point congruence with our own. The "continuum universe" differs from the one we're used to in that there are no known quantum effects there. Within that universe particles may travel as fast as they can be accelerated; and the fifth force exists to accelerate them. There's a lot more, including a page or so of differential equations, but that's the general idea. You can get from one universe to another. For every construct in our universe there can be created a "correspondence particle" in the continuum universe. In order for your construct to go into and emerge from the continuum universe without change you must have some complex machinery to hold everything together and prevent your ship -- and crew -- from being disorganized into elementary particles. Correspondence particles can be boosted to speeds faster than light: in fact, to speeds nearly infinite as we measure them. Of course they cannot emerge into our universe at such speeds: they have to lose their energy to emerge at all. More on that in a moment. There are severe conditions to entering and leaving the continuum universe. To emerge from the continuum universe you must exit with precisely the same potential energy (measured in terms of the fifth force, not gravity) as you entered. You must also have zero kinetic energy relative to a complex set of coordinates, that we won't discuss here. The fifth force is created by thermonuclear reactions: generally, that is, in stars. You may travel by using it, but only along precisely defined lines of equipotential flux: tramways or tramlines. Imagine the universe as a thin rubber sheet, very flat. Now drop heavy rocks of different weights onto it. The rocks will distort the sheet, making little cone-shaped (more or less) dimples. Now put two rocks reasonably close together: the dimples will intersect in a valley. The intersection will have a "pass", a region higher than the low points where the rocks (stars) lie, but lower than the general level of the rubber sheet. The route from one star to another through that "pass" is the tramline. Possible tramlines lie between each two stars, but they don't always exist, because when you add third and fourth stars to the system they may interfere, so there is no unique gradient line. If this seems confusing, don't spend a lot of time worrying about it; we'll get to the effects of all this in a moment. You may also imagine stars to be like hills; move another star close and the hills will intersect. Again, from summit to summit there will be one and only one line that preserves the maximum potential energy for that level. Release a marble on one .hill and it will roll down, across the saddle, and up the side of the other. That too is a tramline effect. It's generally easier to think of the system as valleys rather than hills, because to travel from star to star you have to get over that "hump" between the two. The fifth force provides the energy for that. You enter from the quantum universe. When you travel in the continuum universe you continually lose kinetic energy; it "leaks". This can be detected in our universe as photons. The effect can be important during a space battle. We cut but it still exists, and we may yet publish it as a novella. To get from the quantum to the continuum universe you must supply power, and this is available only in quantum terms. When you do this you turn yourself into a correspondence particle; go across the tramline; and come out at the point on the other side where your potential energy is equal to what you entered with, plus zero kinetic energy (in terms of the fifth force and complex reference axes). For those bored by the last few paragraphs, take heart: we'll leave the technjcal details and get on with what it all means. ir it  Travel by Alderson Drive consists of getting to the proper Alderson Point and turning on the Drive. Energy is used. You vanish, to reappear in an immeasurably short time at the Alderson Point in another star system some several light years away. If you haven't done everything right, or aren't at the Alderson Point, you turn on your drive and a lot of energy vanishes. You don't move. (In fact you do move, but you instantaneously reappear in the spot where you started.) That's all there is to the Drive, but it dictates the structure of an interstellar civilization. To begin with, the Drive works only from point to point across interstellar distances. Once in a star system you must rely on reaction drives to get around. There's no magic way from, say, Saturn to Earth: you've got to slog across. Thus space battles are possible, and you can't escape battle by vanishing into hyperspace, as you could in future history series such as Beam Piper's and Gordon Dickson's. To reach a given planet you must travel across its stellar system, and you must enter that system at one of the Alderson Points. There won't be more than five or six possible points of entry, and there may only be one. Star systems and planets can be thought of as continents and islands, then, and Alderson Points as narrow sea gates such as Suez, Gibraltar, Panama, Malay Straits, etc. To carry the analogy further, there's telegraph but no radio: the fastest message between star systems is one carried by a ship, but within star systems messages go much faster than the ships... Hmm. This sounds a bit like the ships require fuel and sophisticated repair facilities. They won't pull into some deserted star system and rebuild themselves unless they've carried the spare parts along. However, if you think of naval actions in the pteriod between the Crimean War and World War One, you'll have a fair picture of conditions as implied by the Alderson Drive. The Drive's limits mean that uninteresting stellar systems won't be explored. There are too many of them. They may be used as crossing-points if the stars are conveniently placed, but stars not along a travel route may never be visited. Reaching the Mote, or leaving it, would be damned inconvenient. Its only tramline reaches to a star only a third of a light year away -- Murcheson's Eye, the red supergiant -- and ends deep inside the red-hot outer envelope. The aliens' only access to the Empire is across thirty-five light years of interstellar space -- which no Empire ship would ever see. The gaps between the stars are as mysterious to the Empire as they are to you. # # Langston Field Our second key technological building block was the Langston Field, which absorbs and stores energy in proportion to the fourth power of incoming particle energy: that is, a slow-moving object can penetrate it, but the faster it's moving (or hotter it is) the more readily it is absorbed. (In fact it's not a simple fourthpower equation; but Galaxy readers surely don't need third-order differential equations for amusement.) The Field can be used for protection against lasers, thermonuclear weapons, and nearly anything else. It isn't a perfect defense, however. The natural shape of the Field is a solid. Thus it wants to collapse and vaporize everything inside it. It takes energy to maintain a hole inside the Field, and more energy to open a control in it so that you can cause it selectively to radiate away stored energy. You don't get something for nothing. This means that if a Field is overloaded, the ship inside vanishes into vapor. In addition, parts of the Field can be momentarily overloaded: a sufficiently high energy impacting a small enough area will cause a temporary Field collapse, and a burst of energy penetrates to the inside. This can damage a ship without destroying it. Cosmography We've got to invent a term. What is a good word to mean the equivalent of "geography" as projected into interstellar space? True, planetologists have now adopted "geology" to mean geophysical sciences applied to any planet, not merely Earth; and one might reasonably expect "geography" to be applied to the study of physical features of other planets -- but we're concerned here with the relationship of star systems to each other. We suggest cosmography, but perhaps that's too broad? Should that term be used for relationships of galaxies, and mere star system patterns be studied as "astrography"? After all, "astrogator" is a widely used term meaning "navigator" for interstellar flight. Some of the astrography of been previously published. In particular, the New Caledonia system, and the red supergiant known as Murcheson's Eye, had already been worked out. There were also published references to the history of New Caledonia. We needed a red supergiant in the Empire. There's only one logical place for that, and previously published stories had placed one there: Murcheson's Eye, behind the Coal Sack. It has to be behind the Coal Sack: if there were a supergiant that close anywhere else, we'd see it now. Since we had to use Murcheson's Eye, we had to use New Caledonia. Not that this was any great imposition: New Scotland and New Ireland are interesting places, terraformed planets, with interesting features and interesting cultures. There was one problem, though: New Scotland is inhabited by New Scots, a people who have preserved their sub-culture for a long time and defend it proudly. Thus, since much of the action takes place on New Scotland, some of the characters, including at least one major character, had to be New Scot. For structural reasons we had only two choices: the First Officer or the Chief Engineer. We chose the Chief Engineer, largely because in the contemporary world it is a fact that a vastly disproportionate number of ship's engineers are Scots, and that seemed a reasonable thing to project into the future. Alas, some critics have resented that, and a few have accused us of stealing Mr. Sinclair from Star Trek. We didn't. Mr. Sinclair is what he is for perfectly sound astrographical reasons. The astrography eventually dictated the title of the book. Since most of the action takes place very near the Coal Sack, we needed to know how the Coal Sack would look close up from the back side. Eventually we put swirls of interplanetary dust in it, and evolving proto-stars, and all manner of marvels; but those came after we got very close. The first problem was the Coal Sack seen from ten parsecs. Larry Niven hit on the happy image of a hooded man, with the super-giant where one eye might be. The supergiant has a small companion, a yellow dwarf not very different from our Sun. If the supergiant is an eye -- Murcheson's Eye -- then the dwarf is, of course, a mote in that eye. But if the Hooded Man is seen by backward and superstitious peoples as the Face of God...then the name for the Mote becomes inevitable...and once suggested. The "Mote In God's Eye" is a near irresistible title. (Although in fact Larry Niven did resist it, and wanted "The Mote In Murcheson's Eye" up to the moment when the publisher argued strongly for the present title...) The Ships Long ago we acquired a commercial model called "The Explorer Ship Lief Ericson," a plastic spaceship of intriguing design. It is shaped something like a flattened pint whiskey bottle with a long neck. The "Lief Ericson," alas, was killed by general lack of interest in spacecraft by model buyers; a ghost of it is still marketed in hideous glow-in-the-dark color as some kind of flying saucer.' It's often easier to take a detailed construct and work within its limits than it is to have too much flexibility. For fun we tried to make the Lief Ericson work as a model for an Empire naval vessel. The exercise proved instructive. First, the model is of a big ship, and is of the wrong shape ever to be carried aboard another vessel. Second, it had fins, only useful for atmosphere flight: what purpose would be served in having atmosphere capabilities on a large ship? This dictated the class of ship: it must be a cruiser or battlecruiser. Battleships and dreadnaughts wouldn't ever land, and would be cylindrical or spherical to reduce surface area. Our ship was too large to be a destroyer (an expendable ship almost never employed on missions except as part of a flotilla). Cruisers and battlecruisers can be sent on independent missions. MacArthur, a General Class Battlecruiser, began to emerge. She can enter atmosphere, but rarely does so, except when long independent assignments force her to seek fuel on her own. She can do this in either of two ways: go to a supply source, or fly into the hydrogen-rich atmosphere of a gas giant and scoop. There were scoops on the model, as it happens. She has a large pair of doors in her hull, and a spacious compartment inside: obviously a hangar deck for carrying auxiliary craft. Hangar deck is also the only large compartment in her, and therefore would be the normal place of assembly for the crew when she isn't under battle conditions. The tower on the model looked useless, and was almost ignored, until it occurred to us that on long missions not under acceleration it would be useful to have a highgravity area. The ship is a bit thin to have much gravity in the "neck" without spinning her far more rapidly than you'd like; but with the tower, the forward area gets normal gravity without excessive spin rates. And on, and so forth. In the novel, Lenin was designed from scratch; and of course we did have to make some modifications in Lief Ericson before she could become just how much detail you can work up through having to live with the limits of a model... The Alderson Drive and the Langston Field determine what kinds of interstellar organizations will be possible. There will be alternatives, but they have to fit into the limits these technologies impose. we chose Imperial Aristocracy as the main form of human government. We've been praised for this: Dick Brass in a New York Post review concludes that we couldn't have chosen anything else, and other critics have applauded us for showing what such a society might be like. Fortunately there are no Sacred Cows in science fiction. Maybe we should have stuck to incest? Because other critics have been horrified! Do we, they ask, really believe in imperial government? and monarchy? That depends on what they mean by "believe in". Do we think it's desirable? We don't have to say. Inevitable? Of course not. Do we think it's possible? Damn straight. taken from C. Northcote Parkinson's Evolution of Political Thought. Parkinson himself echoes Aristotle. It is fashionable to view history as a linear progression; things get better, never worse, and of course we'll never go back to the bad old days of (for instance) personal government. Oddly enough, even critics who have complained about the thus rejected our Empire as absurd -- have been heard to complain about "Imperial Presidency" in bet long odds against John-John Kennedy becoming President within our lifetimes? Any pretended "science" of history is the bunk. That's the problem with Marxism. Yet Marx wrote a reasonable economic view of history up to his time, and some of his principles may be valid. Military history is another valid way to view the last several thousand years -- but no one in his right mind would pretend that a history of battles and strategies is the whole of the human story. You may write history in terms of medical science, in terms of rats, lice, and plagues, in terms of agricultural development, in terms of strong leadership personalities, and each view will hold some truth. There are many ways to view history, and Aristotle's cycles as brought up to date by Parkinson make one of the better ones. For those who don't accept that proposition, we urge you at least to read Parkinson before making up your minds and closing the door. colored by technology and historial the United States and the Soviet Union form an alliance and together dominate the world during the last decades of the #th Century. The alliance doesn't end their rivalry, and doesn't make the rulers or people of either nation love their partners. The CoDominium Alliance needs a military force. Military people need something or someone they can give loyalty; few men ever risked their lives for a "standard of living" and there's little that's more stupid than dying for one's standard of living -- unless it's dying for someone else's standard of living. Do the attitudes of contemporary police and soldiers lead us to suppose that "democracy" or "the people" inspire loyalty? The proposition is at least open to question, Russian Admiral named Lermontov becomes leader of CoDominium forces, although he is not himself interested in founding a dynasty, he transfers the loyalty of the Fleet to leaders who are. He brings with him the military people at a time of great crisis. Crises have often produced strong loyalties to single leaders: Churchill, Roosevelt, George Washington, John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Crisis, etc. (A year after Kennedy's death Senator Pastore could address a national convention and get standing ovations with the words "There stood John Thus develops the Empire. Look at another trend; personal dictatorship. There are as many people ruled by tyrants as by "democracy" in #, and even in the democracies charges of tyranny are not lacking. Dictatorships may not be the wave of the future -- but is it unreasonable to suppose they might be? Dictatorship is often tried in times of severe crisis: energy crisis, population crisis, pollution crisis, agricultural crisis -- surely we do not lack for crises? The trouble with dictatorship is that it generates a succession crisis when the old man bows out. Portugal seems to be going through such at this moment. Chile, Uganda, Brazil, name your own examples: anyone want to bet that some of these won't turn to a new Caudillo with relief? How to avoid succession crisis? One traditional method is to turn Bonapartist: give the job to a relative or descendent of the dictator. He may not do the job very well, but after enough crises people are often uninterested in whether the land is governed well. They just want things settled so they can get on with everyday life. Suppose the dictator's son does govern well? A new dynasty is founded, and the trappings of legitimacy are thrust onto the new royal family. To be sure, the title of "King" may be abandoned. Napoleon chose to be "Emperor of the French", Cromwell chose "Lord Protector", and we suppose the US will be ruled by Presidents for a long time -- but the nature of the Presidency, and the way one gets the office, may change. See, for example, Niven's use of "Secretary-General" in the tales of Svetz the time-traveller. keep the titles as well as the structure of aristocratic empire, or abandon the titles and retain the structure only. We could haye abolished "Emperor" in favor of "President", or "Chairperson", or "Leader", or "Admiral", or "Posnitch". The latter, by the way, is the name of a particularly important President honored for all time by having his name adopted as the title for Leader... We might have employed titles other than Duke (originally meant "leader" anyway) and Count (Companion to the king) and Marquis (Count of the frontier marches). Perhaps we should have. But any titles used would have been translations of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters. There are hints all through ernment is not a mere carbon copy of the British Empire or Rome or On the other hand there are similarities, which are forced onto the Empire by the technology we assumed. Imperial government is not inevitable. It is possible. The alternate proposition is that we of # are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days. Yet we can show you essays "proving" exactly that proposition -- and written thousands of years ago. There's a flurry of them every few centuries. We aren't the first people to think we've "gone beyond" personal no government, personal loyalties, and a state religion. Maybe we won't be the last. be entertainment, not an essay on the influence of science on social organization. (You're getting that here.) The Empire is what it is largely because of the Alderson Drive and Langston Field. Without the Drive an Empire could not form. Certainly an interstellar Empire would look very different if it had to depend on lightspeed messages to send directives and receive reports. Punitive expeditions would be nearly impossible, hideously expensive, and probably futile: you'd be punishing the grandchildren of a generation that seceded from the Empire, or even a planet that put down the traitors after the message went out. Even a rescue expedition might never reach a colony in trouble. A coalition of bureaucrats could always collect the funds for such an expedition, sign papers certifying that the ships are on the way, and pocket the money...in sixty years someone might realize what had happened, or not. The Langston Field is crucial to the Empire, too. The Navy can survive partial destruction and keep fighting. Ships carry black boxes -- plug-in sets of spare parts -- and large crews who have little to do unless half of them get killed. That's much like the navies of fifty years ago. A merchant ship might have a crew of forty. A warship of similar size carries a crew ten times as large. Most have little to do for most of the life of the ship. It's only in battles that the large number of self-programming computers become important. Then the outcome of the battle may depend on having the largest and best-trained crew -- and there aren't many prizes for second place in battle. Big crews with little to do demand an organization geared to that kind of activity. Navies have been doing that for a long time, and have evolved a structure that they tenaciously hold onto. Without the Field as defense against lasers and nuclear weapons, battles would become no more than offensive contests. They'd last microseconds, not hours. Ships would be destroyed or not, but hardly ever wounded. Crews would tend to be small, ships would be different, including something like the presentday aircraft carriers. Thus technology dictates Naval organization. It dictates politics, too. If you can't get the populace, or a large part of it, under a city-sized Field, then any given planet lies naked to space. If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, there could be no Empire even with the Field. There'd be no Empire because belonging to an Empire wouldn't protect you. Instead there might be populations of planetbound serfs ruled at random by successive hordes of space pirates. Upward mobility in society would consist of getting your own ship and turning pirate. Given Drive and Field, though, Empires are possible. What's more likely? A representative confederacy? It would hardly inspire the loyalty of the military forces, whatever else it might do. (In the War Between the States, the Confederacy's main problem was that the troops were loyal to their own State, not the central government.) Each stellar system independent? That's reasonable, but is it stable? Surely there might be pressures toward unification of at least parts of interstellar space. How has unification been achieved in the past? Nearly always by conquest or colonization or both. How have they been held together? Nearly always by loyalty to a leader, an Emperor, or a dynasty, generally buttressed by the trappings of religion and piety. Even Freethinkers of the last century weren't ashamed to profess loyalty to the Widow of Windsor... Government over large areas needs emotional ties. It also needs stability. Government by #plus-one hasn't enjoyed particularly stable politics -- and it lasts only so long as the #-minus-one minority rational way to choose leaders? It has this in its favor: the leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to get the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections? Well, at least the counter-case can be made. That's all we intended to do. We chose a stage of Empire in which the aristocracy was young and growing and dynamic, rather than static and decadent; when the aristocrats are more concerned with duty than with privilege; and we made no hint that we thought that stage would last forever. Robert Heinlein once wrote that the best way to give the flavor of the future is to drop in, without warning, some strange detail. He gives as an example, "The door dilated." We have a number of such details by dragging them all out in a row. One of the most obvious we use is the personal computer, which not only does computations, but also puts the owner in contact with any near-by data bank; in effect it will give the answer to any question whose answer is known and that you think to ask. Thus no idiot block gimmicks in guess something, or not put information together in the right way, but they won't forget anything important. The closest that comes to happening is when Sally Fowler can't quite remember where she filed the tape of a conversation, and she doesn't take long to find it then. On the other hand, people can be swamped with too much information, and that does happen. There were many other details, all needed to keep the story moving. A rational kind of space suit, certainly different from the clumsy hings used now. Personal weapons. The crystal used in a banquet aboard MacArthur: crystal strong as steel, cut from the windshield of a wrecked First Empire reentry vehicle, indicating the higher technology lost in that particular war. Clothing and fashion; the status of women; myriads of details of everyday life. Not that all of these differ from the present. Some of the things we kept the same probably will change in a thousand years. Others...well, the customs associated with wines and hard liquors are old and stable. If we'd changed everything, and made an attempt to portray every detail of our thousand-yearadvanced future, the story would have gotten bogged down in details.    ever to have a planet's orbit changed to save a line. New Chicago, as it appeared in the opening scenes of the first draft ing far from its star. It was never a very important point, and Larry Niven didn't even notice it. Thus when he introduced Lady Sandra Liddell Leonovna Bright Fowler, he used as viewpoint character a Marine guard sweating in hot sunlight. The Marine thinks, "She doesn't sweat. She was carved from ice by the finest sculptor that ever lived." Now that's a good line. Unfortunately it implies a hot planet. If the line must be kept, the planet must be moved. So Jerry Pournelle moved it. New Chicago became a world much closer to a cooler sun. Its year changed, its climate changed, its whole history had to be changed... Worth it, though. Sometimes it's easier to build new worlds than think up good lines...  ##   vv , T Foots and children have angels to look after them -- with politicians the case is slightly different... In the fullness of their separate being uneasiness pervades the Rin. Anxiety swells, resolves into everintensifying awareness of the wretched desolation of insularity; the call for oneness wells from the abyss of Rin being. In the thrall of Convocation, the Rin proceed to initiate transmutation of their individual selves into the Aggregate clans. Each Founder-Rin radiates identity and all others are. drawn to the closest Fouruier. One rather small Rin encounters an immediate obstacle. Though the Convocation tugs at his essence the Rin contains no desire to damage the barricade made by a Tender of the Smallest Friends. The little Rin does not wish to offend the Smallest' Friends. Inching along the inside of the circular obstruction, the Rin seeks an opening. Following the little Rin -- at an appropriately respectful distance -- is the Tender. Completing the circle and finding no opening, the Rin settles to the ground...perhaps if the Rin politely -- oh, so very politely!requests it of the Smallest Friends on the other side of the barricade they will instruct their Tender to make an opening. Convocation tears at his essence and despair permeates the lonely Rin; no Smallest Friend has ever deigned to communicate with any Rin. But perhaps the smallest Friends though they remain silent as ever do understand, for suddenly the Tender moves swiftly to make an opening! Gratefully, the little Rin squinches through the space, exerting great care to cause no damage. On the other side stretches a great expanse of the Smallest Friends. Gently and carefully, the little Rin (who is little only for a Rin) hoists his bulk through them. Beyond the impassive, motionless Friends, the Rin flattens out and heeds the all-powerful call. No other hindrance slows his passage to the ultimate destiny of all Rin. Despite the initial delay, the little Rin is one of the first to reach a Founder. So close. Convocation is overwhelming and the little Rin yields up all selfhood to the elder being. Individual identity fades. The little Rin is melding into unity with the Founder. In his final moment of individual identity the little Rin senses a softness between his body and that of the Founder. With deep sadness he comprehends that it is one of the Tenders and as little Rin and Founder merge to unity, the Aggregate also experiences sharp regret at so damaging a servant of the strangely aloof Smallest Friends. ir ir if Colonist glen philips died crushed between two mushrocks. Dr. Jeroboam Dufour injected Sara Philips with a potent sedative and sprayed a salve-bandage over the chemical bums on her face, arms, and hands, then sat with her until she slept. As soon as he was certain she would not awake he stormed directly into the governor's office. Governor Davis Buford asked quietly, "How's Sara?" "Asleep." Dufour snapped. "Why did you have her brought here? She'd've been all right on the farm. I don't particularly appreciate having myself and my patient hustled at gunpoint halfway across the continent. ' ' "Would an apology help?" "No!" The governor sighed. "I thought not." "An explanation would, Buffy." Dr. Dufour settled into a chair across from a desk cluttered with the octuplicate forms of the burgeoning bureaucracy of the Capella # Colonial Government. "Of course, Jare," Buford smiled a practiced official smirk. "Sara's a friend. So was Glen. I couldn't leave her out there alone with hired hands. Those men aren't the most savory characters, as we both know." He attenuated his pitch into suggestiveness. Dufour glared. "I was there. I would have been with her and you knew it. Rafe Carter's not one of your felonious imports; I could leave my farm to my foreman and stay with Sara -- being the only medic on Mycotare, I've had to arrange things so I could be away for long periods. Explanation not accepted!" The governor's eyes opened wide. He frowned, then formed a rueful grin. "Why, Jare, I never thought! Of course, you..." "Don't get coy with me, Buffy! What's gone wrong?" Buford cocked his head. The gubernatorial expression slipped a fraction. What do you mean?" Jeroboam Dufour snapped onto his feet. Hunching his considerable bulk forward, he braced his fists on the governor's desk. "Save that supercilious pose for your political friends or for the Earthcol representatives. I treated Sara Philips for acid burns -- not the base bums you normally get off a mushrock." The doctor straightened and clamped his hands behind his back. His black eyes turned cold. "What are you hiding. Gov? Murder?" For one hasty moment, the governor's eyes narrowed. Soft-faced, he purred, "Of course not! Are you saying I could accuse Sara of such a thing?" Then he forced the neighborly grin reserved for colonists onto his face. "Do sit down, Jare. I'll get a crick in my neck staring up at you. We're friends; surely you don't have to overwhelm me with your admittedly impressive physical presence?" Dr. Dufour sat. He hrumphed. "Sorry, Buffy. It's not murder. You've got something classified." "Oh?" mouthed Buford. "Glen was dead before those rocks ever came together." After a pause, the governor asked, "You saw that?" "No," countered Dufour. "All I saw of Glen was a hand and his head sticking out from the rocks. I listened to Sara before I sedated her. Those two mushrocks were moving toward each other and Glen went in between them to retrieve a shovel. He was trapped. Some sort of tentacle went right through him. Sara tried to get him loose but more of the things ate through him before she could; that's how she got burned. Glen was already dead when Rafe pulled her off. Rafe did see it, Buffy." "Ah," sighed Governor Buford, "perhaps we should bring Rafe Carter in as well. He may well have been burned." "He wasn't, and I wouldn't try arresting him. Rafe won't have a patient to protect." "Arrest!" "You call it what you want. Can I walk past your guards?" "I'd hoped you might stay a while for Sara." "Thought so," said Dufour. "It's the mushrocks." "What is?" "The information you're suppressing; the mushrocks are on the move." "There's nothing unusual in that. We've known since the original survey that the mushrocks occasionally travel about." Buford's official grin faded before Dufour' s glare. "We've known that they reproduce by fission and that the newbies separate. Never has there been any incident where the fungoids moved toward each other and they have always kept exact distances from each other. In fact. I've had one fenced in my yard for several years and though its range was severely limited the surrounding mushrocks kept precisely the same distance from it as from each other. I'd gotten rather attached to that little fellow. Several days ago he, er, it got restless and started circling the edge of the enclosure. Finally it hunkered down and stayed put. Then I opened the gate and it left -- minced across my fields without damaging a single mushroom -- and headed in the direction of the Philips farm." The governor steepled his fingers and touched the tips to his mouth. "Wouldn't it be ironic if your pet was the one that killed Glen?" "It was," murmured Dufour. "I knew every curve, every blemish, every blend of coloring on that rock -- but I'm not about to accuse an overgrown mushroom of premeditated murder!" "Those 'overgrown mushrooms,' as you call them, are creating havoc on Mycotare." Buford slammed his fist onto the desk. "All right. Dr. Dufour, you are second in command of this colony and you have a right to know. Reports have been coming in from all over the planet. These movements could wipe out this year's crop. That would mean disaster for the colony since this year's profit will provide the final payment to Earthcol. If we miss that final payment, the interest converts to one hundred percent and Earth Colonial Administration retains #I percent of our stock. We remain colonists forever. We've worked too hard and too long to lose out now." The governor's voice rang and trembled in fervid passion. Dufour snorted. "We! When did you ever tend a mushroom!" "fare, colonial administration isn't exactly play!" "I didn't mean that, Bufly, but don't pull that fellow farmer clap on me. I helped start this colony and you've only been here five yers." "Four and a half." "Four and a half Earth years! You don't even tell time the same way we do. When we buy our independence, we elect the governor. You may not win that election. Huffy." "Meaning you intend to run against me." Dufour sighed, his attitude softening. "I don't know. I've got too much with the farm and the doctoring. We need more physicians and that has got to be one of our first priorities when we get out from under Earthcol and its stringent rules. Another thing we've got to face once we lose colonial status is that we forfeit our colonial discount from suppliers. We're not selfsupporting yet -- not by a megayear we're not. Life never evolved beyond the protist stage here and we've got to complete vitalizing the soil to raise the crops we need to complete the food chain. We simply cannot afford to continue importing feed for our livestock. We're in a fine position to import hardware. We can hold off on industrial development but not on agricultural. We farmers know that -- even if you don't!" And I know that!" Buford rose and paced heavily. "Do you honestly believe I don't comprehend what problems we face as a free planet? We've located on a reasonably comfortable planet that does not happen to have the current capacity to grow food for us." "Man does not live by mushrooms alone." Dufour grinned. The governor groaned dutifully, secretly pleased at the improvement in Dufour's demeanor. "As long as transplanted Terrans don't lose their taste for mushrooms, which have so admirably mutated here into fleshier, tastier specimens..." rivatives or molds for cheese or all those other good things we use fungi for. We're not exactly unilateral -- and we've got potential new discoveries." "Only potential?" "Sure! None of my experiments will be complete until after Independence Day -- whenever it is. Earthcol's not going to get rights to our hard work." Dufour grinned. "We'll make it, Buffy. After all, business is mushrooming." "Jeroboam! I certainly did not expect that from you!" "Why? Did I steal your line?" Grinning hugely, Dufour continued. "Nevertheless, our suppliers could ruin us unless we can come to terms with them." "They do seem to have us between a rock and a hard place." "Or between two mushrocks," Dufour rasped. "What kind of pattern have you picked up from those reports?" "Well," Buford hedged, "I haven't had time to go through them all." "What?" Dufour asked, mystified. "What did we save our credits for fifteen years for? Haven't you fed them into that superfancy imported computer?" "I haven't had time." "'Why can't your secretary do it?" "You forget the secret nature of.-..." "Give me the reports!" Dufour loomed over the governor and stretched out his hand. "I'll set it for visual scan and it'll go as fast as I can feed the papers. Come on, give me the reports." He narrowed his eyes and waited. Without further word, Buford unlocked a drawer and pulled out several sheafs of flimsy paper and a half dozen video cartridges and passed them over. The doctor snatched up the lot and stalked over to the computer outlet. He stuffed the first cartridge into the slot, set the intake to maximum, and dropped the others into the autofeed bin. Then, after slapping a series of switches, Dufour began slipping the pages of the flimsies into the computer's manual read-in. After a time his arms fell into the rhythm and as his eyes unfocused, he proceeded in a seeming trance. The last page slipped in, flashed into the working banks, and was ionized. Jeroboam Dufour blinked, stretched, groaned, and rubbed stiffening back and shoulder muscles. He punched out a command to digest and summarize. A hand appeared in his side vision. It held a cup and, from the cup, rose a shimmery cloud. "Uh, thanks, Buffy." "Thought you could use some coffee. I slipped out and got some." "You still drinking that? Wish I had the money to afford such luxury." He sipped cautiously at the steaming brew. "Almost forgot what it tastes like. I may just like staying here for a while, after all!" The two laughed. Dufour thrummed his fingertips on the computer table until the readout snicked out of the side. He snapped it off and perused the summary. Columns of map coordinates interspersed with numbers of entities. "Thorough!" "Some of those cartridges included the satellite weather station pictures. I ordered a full-scale investigation as soon as I realized it was not a local phenomenon." Dufour scratched his head, flipped the voder lever on the computer, and said, "Summarize your summary. No numbers. Verbal description of trend. ' ' "Mushrocks are forming into aggregates within conscriptive boundaries. Earliest observed group movements toward a common center occurred along the equator. Movements expanded centripetally from equator progression to furthermost limits of mushrock range. Distance from equator and time of aggregation are directly correlative. Anticipate aggregate grouping of all mushrocks. Insufficient data for further prediction. Insufficient data for determination of cause. Jeroboam, without use of numbers, Angel cannot complete description." "Who's Angel?" snapped Buford. Grinning broadly, Dufour replied, "He is," and pointed to the computer outlet. "When I set up the verbal phase, I had to give him a voice; mine was the only one handy. And I named him." He leaned toward the microphone pickup. "Thanks, Angel. That is sufficient. I'll study your printout." "Questions, Jeroboam?" "Not yet. I don't read as fast as you do." Dufour looked toward the governor. "I'd like to take my time on these figures. Okay if I take the printout to my room, whever it is?" "Keep it, Jare." Buford smiled, not entirely officially. "I got the complete reports for you, anyway, since I remembered your scientific curiosity." His expression firmed. "In the interest of the Capella # colony. I've already determined how to deal with the threat. ' ' ' "How?" "By destroying the mushrocks." Each maintaining the proper social distance the Rin Aggregates rove their personal districts. The symmetrical procession is suspended now and then as an Aggregate daintily feeds on the richness beneath the surface of the soil. One Aggregate pauses and, with extreme distaste, absorbs the soft, offensive intrusion that is trapped between its parts. The Aggregate shudders convulsively at the flavor of the unfortunate Tender; but however brutishly inelegant it is unavoidable if the Aggregate is to survive. The unwelcome infringement is hindering total unity of the separate parts of this Aggregate. To be One and to achieve the highest destiny of the Rin -- such a desire outweighs the hideously obscene task. Afterwards the Aggregate rests, laboriously assimilating and transforming the unique composition of the Tender... The embarrassing interruption has retarded the development of this Aggregate but now it feels the urgency. Some few of the former individuals composing the Aggregate separate from their positions and differentiate their forms. Their bodies secrete the matter to harden and stiffen the new growth. Others disconnect and climb up the rigid support. At the top they form a sphere. The sphere grows and augments as the new life within pulses and strains. The Aggregate incorporates its essence into the myriad descendants erwased in the sphere. "Grow and prosper, my children. Multiply in peace and harmony. Always remember that the Way is harmony and unity." The sphere explodes. Each child, fully cognizant of Rinness and individuality, bursts headlong into freedom. All are heedless of the parent Rin as it shrinks into itself. Feeding stops. Awareness fades for the Rin Aggregate and soon it will be dead. For it has fulfilled the purpose of Rin being. "You can't be serious?" Dufour gaped at the governor. "Deadly serious. I hesitated too long and Glen Philips was killed. I've already ordered my troops out." "Method?" "Laser-induced combustion. The mushrocks burn quite readily if they're ignited all at once. If we set only one part afire, the thing drops off the burning segment." Buford laughed. "It's quite a sight to see one of those things go up. ' ' Dufour bounded onto his feet. "Did you ever think what consequences there might be?" "That's why I've acted as I did. Our colony is at stake." "You're destroying a life-form!" "Don't give me that, Jare. Even you called them overgrown mushrooms." "What if they have an intelligence we don't recognize?" "Bosh!" Governor Buford reclined in his contour chair. "That's why I'll be elected rather than you. I consider my people's needs. When their crops are in jeopardy, I act without any reflex-humanistic delay." "You've not considered everything -- ecological balance!" "Ecological bull!" rapped the governor. "The colonists already upset that." "Not upset. Changed: Modified. Everything done was studied and estimated as to outcome. You're removing in toto one sector of an ancient balance." Dufour collapsed onto the couch. He groaned, "Who knows what those mushrocks were keeping in check?" "We'll handle that later." "And what if 'that' is a dangerous enemy?" "What do you think the mushrocks are?" raged Buford. "They're not enemies! They haven't damaged the crops. They have not yet done anything against us." Coldly, the governor said, "They killed Glen.': "Accident!" The radiocom flared into violent signals and a harsh voice distracted the governor. "Sir! Chief Truckee here. Coordinated lasering is doing the job okay but these things sure do stink when they bum! We just got on to one that had a stalk thing coming out of its back but before we could bum it a ball thing on top of the stalk split wide open and some powder flew off in all directions. We ran the powder through the lab and it's a bunch of baby mushrocks!" Stepping to the radiocom, the governor ordered, "Step up the program. Double shifts round the  clock. Go after the ones with stalks first and burn the powder too." Shutting down, Buford glared at Dr. Dufour. "That's the difference between an administrator and a farmer -- or a doctor. I see the big picture and I act. I don't mollycoddle -- anything or anyone! You understand me?" Dufour's heart was thudding so powerfully he almost feared it would alarm the governor. He drawled carefully, "Yes, I do. You're a hard man, Buffy." He swallowed sourly. "Guess I'm just a curious sawbones." He tried to look official. "Anyway, I've got to make tests -- take measurements and such. We don't have data on the new slug things and Earthcol will have your hide and mine for office decor if we don't get all possible info on a vanishing species." There ought to be some up near the winterlands that haven't come together yet. I should be able to stay far enough ahead of your incendiary troops to collect enough data for Earthcol." Buford smirked. "I'll send an escort with you. You'll need somebody to...look after you." Dufour managed a sheepish grin. "You're right. Once I forgot to eat for three days when I was watching a mutating...thanks, Buffy. You sure do think of everything. Give me the coordinates and I'll radio Rafe and have him bring my portalab."  # Huddling over a smdll camping stove in the wind-blasted tent, Rafe Carter nodded to Jeroboam when he came through the double flaps. "Didn't think he'd let you go." "You guessed I was a prisoner?" "I smelled it. Something's upwind, sure." "And I smell tea." Carter extended a sweated mug of a dark and pungent liquid. "Sure do. Ground up the rhizopus myself. Don't worry about the gov'mint boys. They don't know about it." "Which rhizopus?" Jeroboam let the aroma warm his chilled nostrils. "Mixture. Three kinds. Figured it out myself. Like it?" "Yeah! I hope you remember the proportions." "I do. Wait till Independence! We'll hit the market with our fungus tea. Hey, Doc, we might just get rich one of these days." Jeroboam Dufour grinned at his dark foreman. "If Davey Buford doesn't do us all in before." He frowned and chuckled warmly. "We better not call it fungus tea. We should devise some fancy handle." "You'll come up with something. Speaking of up, what is? I got a whiff of big trouble in your voice when you called. I came equipped and the escorts don't know that either." The burly foreman patted his jacket. "I don't know. Could be nothing. Could be disaster. Buford's launched an all out extermination program against the mushrocks and the slugs they turned into." "He can't do that!" yelped Carter. "He's doing it. We need a way to stop it. With the mushrocks yanked out of the ecosystem, their natural food will multiply. Maybe we can't handle that, though we probably can." "The cost of controlling the subsurface slideybugs might break us." Carter frowned. "What bothers me is the possibility there's something else we don't know about. Something they keep from bothering us now." The foreman rattled a pan and tossed in a hefty chunk of steak. In another smaller pan, he fanned wafer slices of hollow-stemmed morels; they spattered in the golden liquid. "Butter. Figured you'd need the best this jaunt." For several moments, he concentrated on sauteeing the delicate mushroom slabs. He turned the steak and said, "Didn't Buford think about the dangers when he went off on this wild slug chase?" "I'm sure it's a political ploy to impress his future voters." "He doesn't impress me!" "Nor me! He's overlooked -- either deliberately or unconsciously -- some factors which could be vital." Carter slapped the massive steak onto one plate, slashed it in half and edged the slightly larger half onto another plate. After spooning browned slices of mushrooms over the top, he handed the second plate to Dufour. "Jeroboam, I've got a bad feeling about this." "Why?" Dufour gnawed on the steak. "I dunno. I just got a feeling." "I always trust your hunches and this time I've got one too. Come first light, we'll get a close look at the congregating." "Right! I spotted a loner that looks like it's going to hook up tomorrow. Only about half a mile off." "Lucky! With those coordinates Buffy tossed out, I thought we'd be set down spang in the middle of the snowlands." Silently the men ate, occasionally nodding at each other in mutual enjoyment. Jeroboam set down his plate. "Rafe, did you ever consider cooking as a profession?" "What, and stay inside all the time? No way, Doc! I like riding herd on your mushrooms and your cows." Sliding into his sleeping sack, Jeroboam set the heat control and grinned. "One of these days we'll get that horse and you really will be riding." "If I can ever cut him loose from your kids!" The two men listened to the night noises of the northern latitudes. The wind carried the sounds of coarse voices from the trooper escort in their flimsy tents. Jeroboam muttered, "I can't let them kill off the mushrocks. I got a hunch our neighbors might be super-protists, intelligent unicellular beings. "Well I'll be damned! -- They do act pretty bright sometimes." "We probably both will be," commented Jeroboam Dufour and rolled over. The next morning they began their study. Openly distrustful of the mushrocks, the escort troopers maintained several lengths between themselves and the moving organisms. Carter grinned at Dufour. "Staying that far back, they sure won't bother us." "It's starting!" Jeroboam pointed to a protuberance, little more than a swollen knob, on the leading edge of the single mushrock as it approached the conglomerate. While they watched, filming the process, the knob grew, changing colors in rainbow hues. Then, with astonishing speed, a strand shot from the rock to the collection and attached firmly. Touching the strand with a long probe, the doctor tested its tensile strength. "Tough but resilient." Scraping a bit of the moisture from the tendril, he fed it to the portalab. "Concentrated hydrosulfuric acid!" He positioned certain recording devices and glanced around. "How's it look?" "Clear so far. The next one won't be here till tomorrow afternoon. They move a lot slower in the cold latitudes." Carter stared toward the shining milky facade to the north. "Wind's coming off that snow." He shivered. "Damnation!" "What's the matter. Doc?" Jeroboam stooped to pick up the electrode he had dropped. "Trying to hook up and my fingers are getting stiff. But I can't manage these wires with gloves on." "Here, let me." Carter slipped off his right glove and took up the wire. He edged into the opening and reached up his arm to loop the wire over the single fastened tendril while Dufour secured the other end to record electrical impulses. Jeroboam savy the beginning of a startling triple sine curve at the same instant he heard the hoarse yelp. "Rafe!" A second tendril extended through Carter's right forearm. The cloth of his heavy jacket was jagged and burned about the edges of the hole. Carter ground his teeth. "I never even saw it." He forced a stiff grin. "Quick as lightning. Something else for your records. Bums like hell." Jeroboam Dufour examined the flesh after he tore away the cloth. He paled. "It's between the bones. I'll have to cut it." From the portalab toolbox, he pulled out a scalpel, snicked it on and touched the keen edge to the tendril. The tendril bent but did not yield. Softly, Carter muttered, "Jeroboam. Behind you." And behind Dufour showed multiple swollen knobs on the encroaching mushrock. Each flashed its own special rainbow and swelled alarmingly. "Jerry, get me out of here," Carter whispered. Jerobm's throat constricted. "I can't cut you out!" Rafe Carter leveled his dark gaze into Dufour's eyes. "Jerry, for godsake, help me," he said softly. Dr. Dufour extended the blade of the scalpel to its full length. He meshed his teeth and slashed the merciless blade through his friend's elbow.    The Elver awoke from the Long Sleep. Cautiously, the wily creature extended his senses through the inner shell. The outer shell was truly dissolving! The senses spread and tingled lightly upon the surrounding countryside. Within the range of the Elver's sensing dwelt not one single Rin! Ah, but this Elver had been fooled before. Once he was nearly trapped by a clever Rin who had blocked Elver-sensing of Rin presence. The Elver concentrated sensing to within one elver-length. So concentrated that not even a Rin Aggregate could deceive. Slowly the inner shell weakened dissolved vanished beneath the Great Light. The Elver squirmed until his tender flesh clouded against the light. Then the Elver became true Elver. He lifted and floated weakly, hovering close to the ground. He knew he must find food quickly even if only to spore again to save him from the Rin. Suddenly the Elver quivered. He sensed food close by and he hugged the ground. This food was strange and moved freely along the ground. Yet he sensed it was good. The swiftly moving prey stepped stupily into the Elver. It struggled though the weak thrashings did not discommode the Elver. He absorbed the unique food. The energy of the food burst into the Elver. He quivered shivered shuddered contained the inexplicably enormous amount of food energy. Joy threaded through the Elver and he launched into the sky. He roamed, all powerful, seeking more of the energy-packed food. He sensed another another another. A small group of the new food was below him. He dropped and absorbed the amazing new food that had appeared during his Long Sleep.    The computer said, "Jeroboam?" "Yes, Angel?" "Report under heading Unusual Lifeform Activity. Source: Radio contact from trooper camp zero slash four oh zee." "Location?" "Near the equator and on the Philips Farm. Radio contact mentions a grey cloud engulfing Trooper Lanson. Total absorption. No remains. No further radio contact from that base in seven hours and twelve minutes." "How many mushrocks in that sector?" "Base had previously reported all located mushrocks in their sector burned and destroyed. Additional note. Governor Buford is attempting to monitor clinic outlet." "Thank you, Angel." "You're welcome, Jeroboam." Jeroboam stalked into the clinic ward and leaned over Rafe Carter, whose black skin glistened with sweat. "How's it going?" "My fingers still hurt." Rafe managed a hazy grin. "Nobody's told my nerves they're not there." Jeroboam opened his mouth, shrugged, and closed it again. "Jeroboam," whispered the groggy foreman, "you did right." He swallowed. "Trust my hunch. Amputation is better than death. A lot better. ' ' Jeroboam Dufour headed down the hall toward the governor's quarters. He was stopped in the anteroom by an armed set of troopers. Their leader said, "Sony, Doctor. Governor's orders. Strip." Rigidly, Dufour removed his clothes and stood stiffly beneath searching fingers. One guard probed his clothing at length. The lead trooper stood back and snapped, "Turn around. Bend over." Jeroboam suffered this final indignity and donned his clothes in scarlet silence. Once inside, he said gruffly, "Is it everybody you don't trust or just me, Buffy?" "Surely my guards weren't rough with you, Jare." "Not rough," growled Jeroboam. "They didn't have to enjoy it so much." "Boys will be boys." "Not with me they won't!" All at once, Dufour laughed hugely. "Some of your felonious imports, I take it." He noted a black box on the table in the dining room. "I hope your checkout boys weren't rough on my special baby." "They followed your orders precisely and didn't touch the contents. And I, true to my word," he handed over a key, "have not peeked at all, though I anxiously await." "Did your chef get my flat of truffles?" "Yes." "I sent him the flat they were raised in, undisturbed; and your chef is almost as much an expert in mushrooms as I am." "Yes, I saw them myself." Buford relaxed visibly. "They are beautiful. Mutations?" "No, they just grow better here. I've been culling for years and that's my best flat," Jeroboam smiled. "I had to do something to thank you for letting us take Rafe to my farm for surgery before transporting him all the way here." "Of course," purred Buford. "Your farm is well equipped and much closer to the winterlands." "Though I must admit," murmured Jeroboam, "I ought to take my truffles back after your welcoming committee outside!" "Now, Jare, do forgive me their thoroughness." Buford forged the gubernatorial grin. "But I will have a talk with them in the morning." Jeroboam placed the key on top of the cubical black box and seated himself at one end of the table. "When do we eat?" He chuckled nasally as his pulse quickened. "Sony to be so rude but I haven't eaten since last night." Ringing for service. Governor Buford nodded. "Forgetful as usual, eh, Jare?" Though he was famished. Jeroboam found his stomach cramping in nervous rebellion at his forced eating. Sweat tickled his face and he noted Buford staring. "More tired than I realized." He forced a weak grin. The governor grinned back. "If you intended for me to eat toxic mushrooms, you've killed only yourself. You alone ate your special present to me. Dr. Dufour. My chef had special orders." Jeroboam slumped in the plush dining chair. His chortle became a laugh, a guffaw. "So! That reception outside your doors was for me. You're being foolish." He leaned forward and said gravely, "I'm not going to kill you. You may be destroying the colony but I'm not going to kill you. You may be destroying an intelligent lifeform..." ''Nonsense!" "Your escort brought in my recorders and I just had time to check them out. The mushrocks give off signals remarkably similar to alpha brain waves -- among others. They're very likely intelligent." "Balderdash!" "Hadn't heard that one in a while. Buffy, you are not only foolish, you are absurd. But I am not going to kill you." He paused, head throbbing. "Only an angel can do that." Buford snapped his glance toward the computer outlet in the dining room. "You've tampered with the computer." "Do you really think so? Angel!" "Yes, Jeroboam." "If I told you to kill Governor Buford, what would you do?" "Nothing." "Why?" ' # am not equipped to respond in that area." "Computer!" The voice was Buford's. "Yes, Governor." "If you were equipped with appropriate extensors, would you obey a command to kill me?" "Yes, if the command comes from Jeroboam. ' ' Davis Buford produced a thermal pistol and leveled it at Jeroboam's head. "We'll see to that. I'll reprogram your pet angel so you won't have access. You will release it from all personal private codes. If you don't," he compressed the trigger handle, "it won't make any difference." Jeroboam smiled languidly. "Don't be silly. That computer is no angel of death. The name is only a term to describe a disembodied voice." He paused, then; "Well, I thought you were excited about the early completion of one of my experiments." He jerked his chin toward the black box. "I won't even touch it; you open it. Your boys have already done it once so you know it's not boobied. ' ' "I mean what I said about the computer. You will be programed out of it in the morning." Still holding the pistol, the governor pulled the box toward him. He inserted the key and turned it slowly. The box opened flat to display a single mushroom. Tall, stately, white as purest marble, it stood in unblemished perfection. Jeroboam Dufour swelled his chest. "Touch her," he breathed. "Isn't she beautiful?" His eyes gleamed. "Feel how smooth her flesh is. Gently, Buffy. She's about to drop her spores. That's it. Look very closely. You won't find an imperfection anywhere. Even the veil near the top of the stem is perfect." Jeroboam watched the governor as he set the pistol aside to run his fingers over the snowy specimen. "She's eight years old and almost exactly twelve inches tall. Isn't she lovely? A mutation, of course." "I've never seen one like this. You have others?" "Yes, but this was the most perfect and the only one ready to spore." "Do you have a complete report ready?" "It won't take any time at all to reproduce my notes." The governor rubbed his stomach and blinked. "What exactly is the purpose of this one?" "Does she need a purpose? Only see how lovely she is to see and touch." "Earthcol isn't engaged in the business of conducting shows and awarding prizes. What do we get out of this one?" The governor rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes and gasped. "We? You mean they, don't you?" smiled Dufour. "Feeling a bit strange? Just nerves, Buffy, like me. Relax." Buford doubled over and groaned sharply. He flopped into his chair. "Jare, I'm sick." "You're not sick, Buffy." Dufour droned, "You wanted to know the purpose of my lovely white darling. She's a mutated Amanita bisporigera." "The destroying angel!" "Deadly poison. Always fatal." "You're the fool. Doctor Dufour. I'll not eat any of your toadstool." "Hush! Don't insult her. At any rate, you don't have to. You've breathed the fumes and absorbed the toxin through your skin. This Amanita is deadlier than any ancestral Earth mushroom." When Buford snatched the pistol and wavered it toward Jeroboam, the doctor leaned back in his chair and drawled, "It's better to amputate. I'm amputating. The colony will survive as a unit even though one part of it does not." "I'll kill you." The governor grasped the pistol in both hands. Jeroboam murmured, "I hope so. If not. I've got to live with the fact I let you die." "Can you save me?" Buffy whispered. "I've touched her. I've breathed her perfume for years. I've developed an immunity -- and an antidote which was one purpose of my research." "Save me, Jare!" The governor wheezed. Dr. Dufour strode to the end of the table. The pistol waveringly followed him. ' 'Jeroboam. ' ' "What is it, Angel?" "Fact: the colony has only one physician. Fact: the colony has one governor. Situation: the governor is dying. The physician is second in command. If both are dead, the colony is without experienced leadership and medical assistance in the last year of colonial status. Conclusion: permanent colonial status." The pistol quavered and the governor's fleshy fingers tightened around the trigger handle. Jeroboam lunged and seized the governor's wrists. As he tugged at the governor's death grip, his face came close to Buford's. Dr. Dufour stared into the clouding eyes; he felt the gasping breaths warm his cheek. The pistol hissed. The edge of the beam caressed Jeroboam's skin and he shivered in agony. Then Davis Buford slid from his chair to lie rumpled on the polished floor. Jeroboam stood back and stared down at his demolished shirt and blistered skin. Gazing sadly at the stately, elegant Amanita, he retrieved the pistol from Buford's limp hand. He touched the comers of the governor's eyes and pushed the lids down. Jeroboam whispered, "I forgot to mention this variety kills within minutes instead of hours." "Governor." "He's dead, Angel." "Governor Jeroboam." "Oh!" "You instructed Angel to inform you when the Earthcol representative settled orbit." "I did?" Jeroboam rubbed his eyes. "The governor did. You are the governor. ' ' "Not for long." "Until the election following Independence. Shall Angel quote the pertinent article and section?" "No. I know it.' Just until then, however." "Prediction: no opposition candidate will result in unanimous election of Jeroboam Dufour to governorship." "Who asked you?" "You programed Angel to respond appropriately." "Respond to this, then. I am a physician. I have just killed a man." Jeroboam waited. Tiny clickings shattered the dreary silence. "Amputation is preferable to death." "You were listening to Rafe and me!" "No. When you programed Angel, you installed your own personality." "You are as amoral as an angel." "No. Seventy-three circuits shorted. Angel is now using new pathways." "Let us hope the doctor can find new neural pathways!" "The doctor is homo sapiens and therefore has more potential circuits than Angel who is computer Model C dash #." "The doctor is human and has violated his oath." Jeroboam glanced at the Amanita. "The colony will need a new doctor." He straightened his shoulders. "If I'm to be governor, I'll need a full time physician. We'll treat with the Earthcol man. Program his shuttle in on auto." The doctor's voice went steady. "Activate your weather satellite contact and locate some mushrocks. Thin the population and transport specimens to the equator until that grey cloud is stopped. ' ' "There are two clouds now, Governor. ' ' "Hustle it, then. I'll stop Buffy's extermination teams. We might still get to know our mushrock neighbors after all. Perhaps we shouldn't call them 'mushrocks' any more; they're not like mushrooms at all." He laughed hugely. "Myxomycophyta! Lowly slime molds and they're intelligent!" As he punched the code for the trooper team leader into the radio, he grimaced. "Angel, our little joke isn't funny anymore. From now on, answer to 'Liberty'."  Spider Robinson More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon, Ballantine, # pp., # The Mote In God's Eye, Larry Niven  Jerry Poumelle, Simon  Schuster, # pp., # The Dispossessed , Ursula K. LeGuin, Harper  Row, #I pp., # Born With The Dead, Robert Silverberg. Vintage, # pp., # The Book of Poul Anderson, Poul Caution! Inflammable , Thomas N. Scortia, Doubleday, # pp., # Have Space Suit -- Will Travel, Robert A. Heinlein, Ace, # pp., # Between Planets, Robert A. Heinlein, Ace, # pp., # Pluribus, Michael Kurland, Doubleday, # pp., # The Swarm, Arthur Herzog, Signet, # pp., # Science Past -- Science Future, Isaac Asimov, Doubleday, # pp., # Venus On The Half-Shell, "Kilgore Trout", Dell, # pp., #    Look, as a matter of course I have to assume that all you zombies out there are just like me: diletantes of reading. By this I mean that your standards are not too high. You go through at least a couple of paperbacks a week, and don't insist that they all be Dostoievski. We can talk of a book as "great," you and I, without meaning that future generations of graduate students will count its adverbs and try to prove that it was really written by Sir Francis Bacon. There is no copy of Moby Dick on my bookshelf, and I don't care who knows it. But I want to talk to you now about a book concerning which the term "great" should have all those massive connotations, a book which bears multiple re-readings and is stupendously entertaining, enlightening and mind-broadening even once. If you have already read Theodore Sturgeon's immortal More Than Human, you're permitted to skip this section and go on -- if you've read it recently. It is, for my money, one of the all-time Greats of the fantasy-SF tradition. I picked up the most recent edition (I think) off the bookstore rack (as part of the policy I announced last month of imitating you, the hypothetical reader), because I hadn't re-read it in nearly a decade -- and I was completely blown out. Either a short novel or a very long novelette by word-count. More Than Human is the direct antithesis of the silly canard that great literature must imply "a recognition of the fallen state of Man," and it's astonishing that this book has been quietly sitting there waiting to be noticed for twenty-two years (to give you an idea just how long ago that was, nineteen years ago the Hugo for most promising new author went to someone named Silverberg). Oh, it was noticed, all right. It won the International Fantasy Award, made pots of money, solidly established Ted's reputation as a genius, and has undergone an entirely respectable number of reprintings. But it never copped a Hugo (none were given that year; the world's first had only been awarded the year before), never became the kind of cult classic that Dune or Stranger did, and I just know that enough of you have never read it to make this whole polemic worthwhile. Darwin pissed off a whole lot of people with the notion that mankind had evolved from base origins. Perhaps equally humbling is the notion that we are still "base origins" -- of the next evolutionary step. More Than Human suggests just that, tracing a progression from proconsul to Neanderthal to Homo Sap to Homo Gestalt. I don't want to tell you any of the plot -- discover it for yourself -- so all I can say is that it'll be a godsend to any of you out there who are tired of believing that the stale and rancid bucket of worms you've been seeing on TV and reading in your paper and in dismal books by despairing writers is Life, that the place we have reached is only the precipice from which we must surely tumble, that the only place to go from here is more refined and intricate perversions and a philosophical acceptance of the inevitable decay. Wouldn't it be funny if this were only the beginning? The only other thing to mention is that the middle third first appeared as the novelette "Baby Is Three" twenty-three years ago -- in Galaxy.    Back to modern-day sciencefiction, and what do we find? A brand-new Stutz Bearcat. Think about that a second. You wouldn't want an authentic Stutz -- the state of the art in those days did not include fripperies like starters, shock absorbers or climate control, and they had a top speed below the current legal minimum. But suppose the ghost of Old Man Stutz came back, and built the ultimate 'Cat, using the best materials and technology available today (which Detroit sure doesn't), and gave it to you factory-new? I bet it'd beat hell out of a Toyota. Well, in a manner of speaking, it's happened. Under the combined influence of the ghosts of Doc Smith and C.S. Forrester (not to mention lots of coffee and brandy), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have written the ultimate space opera, blending all the classic ingredients in a work unmistakably modern and new: The Mote In God's Eye. As near as I can figure out, Messrs. Niven  Pournelle haven't left out a single thing: we have genital-less protagonists (named Rod and Sally, forsooth), comicopera Scots and Russians unchanged in stereotype by the centuries (ever wonder what Ensign Chekhov would be like as an admiral?), a Gilbert  Sullivan space navy in which Horatio Hornblower would feel right at home, and even aliens with a Strange and Terrible Secret. Every element of a vintage '#s classic is present (except, curiously, for the spectacular space warfare itself -- no planets get hurled around, or any of that noise), and there's even room left at the end for a sequel. The Mote In God's Other Eye?) This all may sound to some of you like I'm panning the book, but I'm not -- not by any means. It's a damned fine novel of first contact, delicately walking that tightrope between really alien and really unbelievable aliens in a way that reminded me of Gordon R. Dickson's The Alien Way. The evolutionary history of Mote's Moties strained my credibility a bit, but no more than bees do; and their cyclepsychology was extremely well worked out. The Strange And Terrible Secret really is, and its suspense is built up masterfully to a blockbuster single-word resolution that left me gasping with relief. Throughout, Niven  Pournelle display a positive genius for infusing time-honored ingredients with new life and vitality. I found Mote delightful, superior in every way to its honored forebears -- why, the science in it won't be hilariously out-of-date for years! Thanks to Larry and Jerry, "they don't write 'em like they used to" is no longer only irrelevant -- it's untrue. You can't keep a good subgenre down.    Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed is one of those unique books that should satisfy just about everybody. In fact, it seems to have done that very thing. It scored the Nebula in a year of stiff competition; by the time you read this it may very well have copped the Hugo over in Melbourne; and my Aunt Euphonia, who reads nothing but the TV Guide these days, tells me it looks just lovely on the coffee table. Ms. LeGuin's protagonist is Shevek, a man who in the words of Leon Russell is 'trying to stay alive and keep his sideburns too. A physicist so gifted that hardly anyone can understand his field of study, Shevek hails from Anarres, an isolationist planet settled several generations ago (by colonists from the mother world Urras) as an experimental ' 'anarchist-socialist' ' utopia. Life is hard on Annares, and the anarchist bureaucracy (!) does not encourage physics so abstruse that it approaches philosophy -- as Mark Twain said, this butters no parsnips. So Shevek obtains permission to vist Urras, a capitalist world where the spirit of scientific inquiry seems to have more room to grow. The results shouldn't surprise any of you hardened cynics, but Shevek's solution forms a delightful surprise, science's perfect answer to a warlike race demanding instant miracles. They get a genuine miracle -- which is not what they wanted. All that is plot, however. The story is a the tragedy of a man who, because he is a human being rather than a camp follower, finds that he is truly dispossessed, with no direction home. True freedom, Shevek learns, is only available to those who have learned not to ask too many questions. His story and his character are drawn with superb skill by Ms. LeGuin, as are those of Shevek's wife and all the characters in the work if it comes to that. As I began Dispossessed, I was furious with Ms. LeGuin for allowing her parable, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Ornelas," to take the Short Story Hugo from George Martin's magnificent "With Morning Comes Mistfall." But I've provisionally decided to forgive her on the strength of this book.    Onward. I'm having fun this month: I liked virtually everything I read (which indicates only that I was selective in my reading. Maybe next month I'll have an entire column of dissected turkeys for you). Born With The Dead by Robert Silverberg was a particular favorite. Now this is a paradoxical saying. "Bom With The Dead," the first of the three novellas ("... about the spirit of Man," says the subtitle) I did not finish; in fact I stopped reading after about ten pages, and have not reconsidered. The second, "Thomas The Proclaimer," held my attention and interest throughout, but its theme finally seemed to be, "God Himself couldn't help us now, if He literally wrote in the sky," which I reject outright (I believe this story appeared with stories by Gordon Dickson and someone else in a theme antho about "What If the Earth Stood Still for # Hours?' ' but I can't name it or its editor. Being the only fan in Nova Scotia makes it hard to maintain Reviewer's Omniscience -- I have only my own brain to tap). But the third novella, "Going," is just so achingly superb as to be worth even the larcenous two bucks Vintage gets for a book these days. It concerns a man caught at the point between living and dying, seeking a valid reason to do either, and it is purely peachy. To Say any more would spoil it -- go read the thing. You know, it's a funny thing about Silverbob -- whether you like a given story of his or not, you can't help but notice that he invariably writes about real stuff -- you know, death, pain, love, life, like that. Courageous writer. In "Going," it really pays off.    I spoke a moment ago of "Reviewer's Omniscience," and the difficulty of preserving the said front with no fan friends around to brain-pick. Last month, I actually reviewed a Poul Anderson collection, Homeward And Beyond, without mentioning that "Goat Song," therein contained, won the Hugo for Best Novelette in #. There was no memory-jogging mention in the book, mind you, but I know I'll get letters just the same. The only way to make it up to you and to Poul is to mutually enrich you by next putting in the spotlight The Book of Poul Anderson. It appeared in # as a hardcover under the Chilton label as The Many Worlds Of... , edited by Roger Elwood (who doesn't get cover credit on this edition), and it has now become the latest (and one of the Of... series. Of the stories contained, "Queen of Air And Darkness" is clearly a gem; "Epilogue" is so stinking good that I can't imagine why it didn't cop the # Hugo when it ran in Analog thirteen years ago; "The Longest Voyage" is a beautiful example of what a great yarn can be made from a cliched plot; "The Sheriff Of Canyon Gulch" (written in collaboration with Gordy Dickson) is so sidesplittingly funny as to prove that good drinking buddies make good writing buddies (how about that, Larry and Jerry?); and Sandra Miesel's essay "Challenge And Response" is a thoughtful and incisive overview of the body of PouTs work, reprinted from Riverside Quarterly. Now, on the other hand, "Tomorrow's Children," Poul's first published story, reads like it; the admittedly great "Journey's End" has been overanthologized and then some; Patrick McGuire's critical essay, "Her Strongest Enchantments Failing," is too damn long and not a patch on Miesel's; "Day of Burning" is a FalkaynAdzelChee Lan story (i.e. space opera) and not very good compared to some in that series; and "A World Named story written just for this book alone," is in fact not a story at all, but merely a description in depth (with no characters or plot whasoever) of A World Named Cleopatra on which a story might have been set. This last in particular leaves me feeling ripped off -- Cleopatra, as exhaustively described (i.e. created) could have hosted a damn fine story, and I didn't get it. Dammit, I'd been specifically promised quote a story end quote, and it makes me salty. But there you go -- a collection with some supreme high spots, some just good stuff, and a little bit of mediocre. What more can you ask from a single-author collection in these troubled times? If I forgot to include any award citations this time, you know what to do with them.    Another single-author collection! You mean I have to find another variation on "some were good, some were bad, some were so-so" (the utterly inevitable comment for any collection at all)? I think what I'm going to start doing with collections is give them percentile scores based on number-I-liked against total-number-offered (on that basis Foul's collection above gets a #; a slight minus on "Journey's End" for overfamiliarity being more than outweighed by a large bonus for "Epilogue"). Okay then: Caution! Inflammable (my mama told me to be wary of books with an exclamation point in the title), by Thomas N. Scortia, gets a fat #. Out of twenty stories, I found nine worth recommending. Of these, "Sea Change," "When You Hear The Tone," The Worm In The Rose," "Woman's Rib," and "The Bomb In The Bathtub" were outstanding, the latter being a hilarious old favorite of mine which first saw print in Galaxy in #. I just wish you didn't have to wade through the rest to get to 'em. Oh, most of the rest are at least inoffensive, but I can't even say that about the title story, "Gee Wurlitzer! It's A Dad!" two exclamations in a single title is the kiss of certain death), "Old, Old Death In New, New Venice," and "The Weariest River." Thomas Scortia may be familiar to you as the man who, with Frank Robinson, wrote The Glass Inferno, an exploitation of the current disaster craze that became the movie The Towering Inferno. Give you an idea? The stories I disliked seemed to . lack the very quality which Ted Sturgeon, in his introduction, calls Scortia's particular virtue: caring. Some stories bore out Ted's claim: in "When You Hear the Tone" in particular, Scortia obviously cares deeply (and makes you care) for a basically unlovable character. But he seems to do it as a parlor trick; in some stories his characters seem to arouse only his mild contempt, and in others even that is too strong a term.  #  Okay, time for a labor of love. There's time enough for love, isn't there? Which should be enough hint. The love in question is mine for Robert A. Heinlein, who first instilled in me (at age five) an abiding love for SF which has made my life the reeling farrago it is today. He did so with an astounding (pun intended) series of what have come to be known as Heinlein Juveniles: SF for young readers. One of Ace's great coups in the last five years has been to acquire title to these magnificent classics, and they're reprinting them at a rate of one a month until they run out -- which could take awhile. I had the great fortune to meet Mr. Heinlein at the last Nebula affair (at which the Grandmaster Nebula was created specifically to honor his lifetime contribution to the SF genre), and the great honor to converse with (read: listen to) him for nearly half an hour. During that time he explained to me the philosophy behind the Juveniles: "write an ordinary SF novel as well as you know how -- then cut the sex." He explained that kids hate being talked down to as much as if not more than grown-ups -- and I suddenly began to understand why I had fallen so deeply in love with him at an early age. So let me call your attention to the two Ace reprints I've received so far. Have Space Suit -- Will Travel and Between Planets. I thought I was familiar with both, but re-reading proved me wrong: they're better than I remembered. Space Suit is handicapped as much by its title as by the Juvenile labelstigma, but it is clearly the superior of the two. In depth of characterization, plausibility, color, adventure, scope and science content it is the equal of anything the Master ever wrote, and The Mother Thing (a Vegan cop) is one of the most fascinating and unforgettable characters in all literature. The protagonist is Kip Russell, a highschool senior who wins a used space suit as consolation prize in a soap contest (he was hoping to win a trip to the Moon) and ends up in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud; and the theme is that luck is a matter of careful preparation and skull-sweat. Between Planets is just a bit lighter on characterization, and the Secret Organization of Good Guys we meet at the end is some unconvincing -- but there's action and adventure aplenty. Again, one of the meatiest characters is an alien -- this time a dragon with a Cockney accent named Sir Isaap Newton (the dragon, not the accent), who gets tiddly on maple syrup. The story centers around the maturation-process of Don Harvey, who, embroiled in events beyond his comprehension or control (the Revolt of Venus) is nevertheless able to consistently choose right action with insufficient data by following his heart -- something I sincerely believe can be done. I heartily recommend 'em both, with a slight edge to Space Suit because the villains were much more must mention that the cover paintings for both (and. I'm dismally afraid, for the whole series) by Steele Savage just plain suck, in every imaginable aspect but particularly as regards accuracy (scientific and textual). If you're a newcomer to SF, or if you missed these somehow, go back and, check 'em out. They're part of the foundation of the greatest reputation in the business. And considering that the run of the mill goes for a buck and a half nowadays, these are a terrific bargain at #.  # A bunch of minireviews this month. Been that kinda month. Pluribus by Michael Kurland -- an After The Collapse novel. Nothing wrong with that: I'm writing one myself right now (for Berkely, and hopefully Putnam). This ambled along pleasantly, sometimes hilariously, keeping my interest -- but it didn't seem to have gotten anywhere when I reached the end. Kurland won the mystery writers' Edgar for A Plague of Spies awhile back, and writes well, but he needed a theme. I like old Mordecai the Magician, but he was an easy character to draw, and he didn't seem to do much except survive. So did the horse that pulled his wagon. The Swarm by Arthur Herzog -- another of those mainstream SF attempts, with a plot out of the crackerjacks box and cookie-cutter characters. In the spavined tradition of Hitchcock's The Birds, Herzog gives us the bees. Giant Swarms Of Killer Bees Threaten New York -- oh God, why hast thou forsaken me, thy humble reviewer? I must admit Herzog did his homework -- a lot of research went into Swarm (this passes as "science content"). I must also admit that for a week after finishing it, I jumped ten feet in the air every time a bee flew past the outhouse, so it manifestly works as a chiller. But as a novel, as an SF novel, it's a dismal flop. Science Past -- Science Future by Isaac Asimov -- the good doctor's is he a good doctor? Does he do house-calls?) # th published work (Good Christ!), bearing out the dust jacket's contention that "Dr. Asimov may himself be the solution to the energy crisis." This book is a collection of short-short sciencepopularization essays from sources like Viva and TV Guide -- in brief, brief. None of the essays are from FSF', none are in any particular depth. Topics range from the transistor to sex in space. Not bad at all. Venus On The Half Shell, allegedly by Kilgore Trout -- I picked this up on the stands out of amused curiousity, but I'm glad it was Galaxy's money I spent on it. Pfeh. The funniest thing about it is the "picture of Kilgore Trout" on the back cover, and you can have that for free. I'm not sure, but I believe I heard somewhere that this was ghosted by Philip Jose Farmer It was. -- Ed. but perhaps I have my hoaxes mixed, and I'd hate to pin this on anybody without proof. The copyright credit goes to Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and so they deserve all the scorn and contempt thereunto appertaining, I guess. Well worth missing -- first recipient of the Galaxative, a monthly award for reverse excellence, which I hereby initiate as a regular feature. Shaped like a barbed-wire suppository, it will stand for all that is rotten in SF -- and there ain't nothin' in the rules says there can't be more than one a month. Later.   Order "Dianetics; The I Evolution of a Science" H by L. Ron Hubbard I Read about the evolution of Dianetics mans most advanced study of the mind. Find out how easily and effectI ively Dianetics can improve your confidence in yourself and your ability to accomplish your goals in life. DiaO Just Buy, Read and Try Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science. (HandB somely bound, hard cover edition -- Q # pages). S The Church of Scientology of Cali fomia Dept. G-#, # West #th St. Q Los Angeles, California #. Name w Address aII orders will be shipped postage free within # hours of receipt A DlAitclici PubSicAUon. Dunriir, i Uit Indnovk of I... Hon llubbaid Iti ScUnlologyi) And DiAneilci Are retUietcd lumn. If unavoUabIr from ll obovr oddrrai tend lo Th Church nf Sckniolaay ot California, Publlrallont OranUelton Deal C-#. #J Weil Temple SI... Lae Antelet. Californio #S. for as many of his thirteen years as he could remember. Not that most children aren't bom with a healthy and functional "Built-In Shit Detector," the sine qua non of cynicism in its purest form. But by the time they reach puberty, most, children have been successfully trained in self-deception by their elders, and have learned that although a B.l.S.D. can never be shut off, it can be easily ignored with the aid of certain liquids, vapors and pills. Jimmy, however, was plenty tough. It would be years before the bitter pain of being a one-eyed man in the country of the blind succeeded in blinding his eyes, gagging his mouth, and mortally wounding his self-respect. At the moment, the impassioned words of a larger-thanlife senatorial candidate on the Screen filled him with an amused contempt. turned down the volume. "... myself, I can see no reason why I should be other than honored and proud to take the will of the people for my own, and subordinate my desires to those of the body politic. Indeed, it would be a rare..." Jimmy's amusement and contempt were gradually giving way to an impatient irritability. The politician had ceased to be funny; was becoming odious. "Screw it," he said aloud, and the Screen vanished, was replaced by the far wall of Jimmy's bedroom. He regarded the wall for a moment, wishing for the thousandth time that he could put up some sort of poster-type decoration on its blank grey surface without having to get up and remove the stuff every time he wanted to use the Screen. He had heard that next year's model would not be subject to molecular distortion as was this one -- but he had also heard that Prosperity was Just Around the Corner. Jimmy believed only in what he could see -- and damned little of that. Right now, Jimmy wanted desperately to believe that his father would be coming home tonight. been called up at dawn to assist in quelling a riot in the Wyandanch Ghetto, involving some two or three thousand people, and an hour's monitoring of the newscasts had brought Jimmy nothing with any more calories than the democracyloving politician. That was bad. Jimmy loved his father quite a bit, a fact which irritated him immensely whenever he became consciously aware of it. It annoyed him to love someone who was quite capable of ending an argument with, "There is no reason. Do it my way," particularly because experience had shown him that when his father said that, he nearly always turned out to be right. A flat was galling; a correct and prudent fiat was maddening. Perhaps what annoyed him the most, however, was that his father would accept, at times, the fiats of others -- which seemed to Jimmy a kind of betrayal. The time Sgt. Williams had knuckled under to a meddling neighbor and a Town Zoning Board, obeying the order of the latter to tear down Jimmy's "nonconforming" tree-house, had nearly destroyed their relationship. The boy still did not understand his father's concept of duty, but on the night six months later when he had come home to find his father sprawled whitefaced on the livingroom carpet, sobbing to Jimmy's inother of the slaughter he had done that day in society's name, Jimmy had learned that whatever the nature of this weakness, it was beyond his father's ability to fight. Jimmy was determined to be tougher. Society gave him a pain behind the lap. Democracy, he thought,' remembering the politician who had annoyed him. How can something sound so good and work out so lame? The lad had recognized the politician's words as bullshit by their sound alone, but he could not have answered them as arguments. He had audited a reasonable number of Eyecon courses for a boy of his age, but he was too young to take Political Rhetoric just yet, and he had never cared enough to ask his father to help him get a waiver. But the challenge appealed to him in his present state of mind. Let's see, Jimmy thought. First he talked about how all men are created equal... That was a tricky one. Jimmy himself had some reason to believe that all men might be in fact created equal. Had he not himself been classified, at the age of three, as an "innate underachiever" by the Eyecon psychologists? And had he not, under the stimulus of his father's meaty right hand, gone on to achieve Magna Cum Laude status in his fourth, fifth and sixth years? "They tried to tell me you wasn't as good as everybody else," his father had whispered savagely to him once, when he was thought too young to understand, "but I say that's crap. Everybody gets the same chance to make something of themselves, and by God we're gonna prove it to 'em, you and me. And yet Jimmy also remembered his father saying once, "What I do for my keep is my business, kid. What you do for your keep is mow the lawn. What do you think this family is, anyway, a democracy?" Jimmy had been taking an Eyecon Sociology course at the time, and he had asked his real professor about his father's words during the question and answer period. The little grey man on the screen had closed his eyes and said tonelessly, "Democracy is not a feasible form of government for a social group as small as the family. In a group of that size a single individual becomes a special-interest group -- any two of them can become an unbeatable axis. It is in the vast numbers of people which characterize a viable democracy that individual interests and inadequacies cancel out, and the common good can..." But at that point question and answer period ended, and the real professor's face was supplanted by the more familiar cartoon professor who couldn't hear you. Now that Jimmy came to think of it, however, Eyecon had a sort of vested interest in democracy. The leap of companies like Eyeball Consolidated and Telemat from cable television franchises to complete information networks had been duplicated in the socialist countries of the world, but it had taken the free enterprise systems of America and Japan to create them in the first place. Their vast Screen empires and their shotgunning diversification had been sparked by competition, and only in a democracy is big-time competition open to more than a chosen few. Perhaps it was no wonder that the real professor, one of the lucky few who had landed a job with a Screen company when the bottom fell out of the education market, was an ajtologist for democracy. The hell with it, Jimmy thought. I'll see if there's anything on the news now. He was getting really worried about his father. "... quality listing is given as highly unsatisfactory, so be sure to bring your mask along if you go outside today. Our weatherwatch also informs us that today's radiation level readings throughout the tri-city area are 'no cause for alarm,' thanks to the valiant efforts of the Atomic Energy Commission's emergency crews. And now for a full report here is Snaker De Landro from Gardiner's Island." The moon-faced man on the wall was replaced by a lean, asceticlooking man with straggly black hair and a goatee. "Right, Wally. 'Valiant efforts' ain't no lie at all; I mean, these guys are really together out here, you know? The man says all you people on the other side of the Screen can pretty much walk around outside in street clothes if you want to, as long as the wind's northeast. And when it isn't, light body armor should be more than adequate. "Look, lemme lay some background on ya, case ya forgot, all right? Maybe you remember the they tried to go atomic, that Shoreham deal? They tried to tell everybody that a nuclear power plant on Long Island Sound was harmless t'the ecology. Get bent, we said, you and me, but before long it started to look like they was right when they said they couldn't keep our air-conditioners and Screens working without some big-ass plant someplace. So we give 'em Gardiner's Island, and everybody's happy except maybe Gardiner, right? Now look what happens. Place is so close to the mainland you could row out there, and they can't run a power-line that don't "Well, what I want to know is when do I get my air-conditioning back? I mean, you people out there on the other side got -- ' ' "Screw it," said Jimmy angrily, and Snaker De Landro was exorcised. If all men are created equal, how come Eyecon's House-Hippie Newsman is such an idiot? Jimmy had seen Telemat's House Hippie, at the house of a friend whose parents subscribed to Eyecon's Japanese rival, and he hadn't sounded like a case of terminal brain damage. Perhaps that really was one of the advantages of a democracy, with the custard-heads being canceled out in the long run. In a totalitarian government, one idiot with a bent for powercollection could take over and rule for a lifetime -- at least Jimmy's country shuffled the idiots every few years. Why then did the system still seem to work so poorly? Jimmy decided to ask the Brain. "Brain?" he said. the Screen wall, with a question mark a second later. Jimmy frowned. Tapping the brain required a surcharge authorization, and Jimmy's father was not aware that he knew the authorization-code . He decided to settle that problem when the bill came. "Wiliams #T-Bridgeport #R..." he checked the calendar, "... #D." foot-high computerscript. "Input idiomatic English -- same response mode," said Jimmy. That would keep it simple enough for him to understand. Eyecon's brain was flexible indeed, constituting one of the firm's biggest selling-points. To tap into the Eyecon grid was to gain access to a computer which was the equal ble of accepting programs in nearly any known language, human or computer. The Eyecon System didn't just bring you entertainment and present you with shopping options at home or guard the house while you were elsewhere, it answered your questions for you, with the best answers available at the moment. Certain categories, of course, were restricted, and if the fail-safes caught a schoolboy tapping the brain for homework answers they doubled the bill for the course ("... right in the small print, sir, and you must agree it is for your own protection..."), but any legitimate query would be honored. "Computer," said Jimmy ritually, "what, if anything, is inherently wrong with the democratic system of governing people?" The computer answered. Jimmy frowned. Must be too many ambiguities to phrase it right in English he thought. Damn. Jimmy's Fortran was not what it perhaps should have been. But he tried just the same, using the instruction manual bolted to the Screen's operations console by his bed. The vocabulary barely included enough concepts to make his query intelligible; at least he would have the luxury of an idiomatic reply. The second answer, being the same, pleased him no more than the first. He must be screwing up. The hell with it, Jimmy thought, and switched to news so impatiently that he forgot to hit the "Clear" switch for the Brain first. A newscaster's excited features superimposed themselves over the Brain's computerscript answer, obscuring it. Jimmy sat up -- this was it. "... seen anything like it here at the Wyandanch Public Housing Complex. Last week's events pale into insignificance before the concentrated violence and savagery of this bitter confrontation. The body count so far as we can determine here in the field has already gone well above the previous record of #, with the majority of them... uh... minority members. Heavier police firepower seems to have carried the day. "But what the rioters lack in armament they make up for in ferocity. Of the # officers killed here today, # were literally tom to pieces when they were surprised outside the Interdicted Zone by a faction of radicals. Radical charges of police brutality are unverified at this time. "Those interested in a casualty readout should activate channel #, # or for those of you in outlying areas, channel #K. Radical casualties on the left..." the 'caster grinned sardonically, "... and police casualties on the right." Jimmy hastily slapped the #K switch. The newscast shrunk inward, and lists of names began to march up the wall on either side of it. Tom to pieces! His ears roared as the right hand list ended, scuttling up into the ceiling without having named his father. The roar eventually dopplered down into the 'caster's voice, calmer now. " at hand is, of course, difficult to say at this time. The radicals, as usual, claim a moral victory, but it seems as if the central issue of today's demonstration, a step-up in garbage pickup to biweekly, will be denied them all the same. Housing Administrator Blasi has vowed 'never to knuckle under to armed dissent unless it should be in the interests of the Federal Public Housing Program.' So it seems there'll be no joy in the Wyandanch toni..." The door of Jimmy's room doorway, his uniform jacket unbuttoned and bloody. Jimmy started to kill the Screen, barely remembering in time to use his alternate cue. "Cease," he said, and the newscast ceased. "Evening, son," said Sgt. Williams wearily. "How's it going on the home front?" "Okay, Pop. How'd it go today?" "Pretty rough. Kelly -- you remember him? -- caught a slug. Took looked at his boots, rubbed the doorframe as though it were his wife's shoulder. "When I think of what we went through, to keep a couple of politicians from losing face..." He shook his head. "But, I guess we gotta protect and preserve society, even the screwy parts, eh, Jimbo?" "Guess so. Pop." around the room. "What's this? Playing with the brain?" Jimmy realized suddenly that the computer's last answer was waiting there on the wall for him to hit the "clear" switch, and breathed a blasphemy. Caught red-handed! "Uh... yeah. Pop. I was just... fooling around." He waited for the explosion, already wondering what his punishment would be. But the weary man in the doorway didn't seem to have an explosion in him. "Don't do that without asking, Jimmy. It's okay, I can see by the answer you got that you didn't cost us any money -- no charge for nulls. But next time you might run up quite a bill, and your allowance won't cover it. Don't let it happen again, all right?" He turned and walked from the room, but his muffled "Good night," got no response from Jimmy, for Jimmy had just realized in a blinding flash that his father was wrong, that they would get a bill for his questioning of the computer after all. The Brain had not refused to answer, it had simply answered as correctly and concisely as it knew how. For Jimmy had asked it: "What is wrong with the democratic form of government?" And the Brain, apparently considering computerman's slang as idiomatic, had answered; "G.I.G.O." -- that is, "garbage in, garbage out."  Oalaocy Edited by James Baen simply, the best of the best. Hours of reading pleasure by the finest writers of science fiction: such sf luminaries as Isaac Asimov Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin (her Nebula winning "The Day Before the Revolution"), Frederik Pohl, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley and many more are represented here with their finest works. is now available. To order, send the title and number with your name and address, # plus #fi postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. # There were soft-bodied creatures in endless variety and profusion on the bottom, and tentacled shellfish, odd orange scorpions, trilobites, grotesque wrigglers that looked like armored centipedes, an occasional fish, all grim mouth and dull eyes peering out of bone-rimmed sockets. There were clumps of pallid plants with segmented stems, rising like columns from the mud to support the rippling, translucent ceiling of the pond. Beyond the ceiling was a fuzzy-edged sun. Devonian dreams. I woke up and went under again, and this time there were blue glacial cliffs on the horizon. Much closer, there was the stench of tar and decaying glesh. The setting sun made molten silver of the rain water standing on the surfaces of the tar pools. Irregular lumps lay in some of the pools. Here and there could be seen a curved tusk; a not unrecognizably decomposed forepaw with long, hooked claws; a partially consumed hump of a half-submerged bison. Condors and jackals were everywhere, and I was with them. Pleistocene images. I woke up and got out of bed. It was my day to fix breakfast. This is my one real luxury, you understand -- this journal, these precious sheets of paper. I indulged myself last week and paid through the nose for a hardbound book of blank pages. Two hundred sheets of paper, four hundred sides on which to record my every vagrant thought. Paper for which I have no nobler purpose in mind than Dear Diarying. Welcome to page # of The Book Of Bruce Holt, who'll probably be dead before he gets close to page #.    "Why always dinosaurs and things like that?" asks Carol, the woman with whom I have been living. "And why always poems about 'the moment of extinction,' as you put it here?" I am munching my toast and sipping my tepid soyva. Carol is leaning against the kitchenette's disposal unit, fanning herself with the carbon slate I use for Hrst drafts and notes. "That's what I see," I tell her. "Dinosaurs and things like that. That's what comes to me." "It's all so damned depressing. You're getting that way in your stories, too." "It's a natural reaction against the pap I write for television." "That pap keeps food on the table." I make a short, sharp chuckling noise -- I am not so old that I do not remember real bread, real coffee -- and force down the last of my breakfast, then fish in my shirt pocket for a cigarette. That last remark of Carol's has gotten to me, since it's true. My stories are fitful sellers. Too depressing for most people. Television keeps me going, and television wants optimism. Or, at the very least, sheer escapism. Old Jack Woodford's formula for commercial fiction is a timeless one. Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Boy Into Pickle, Boy Gets Pickle Into Girl. "I'm going downtown today," I say after a while. "Do you want me to pick up anything for you?" Carol shakes her head slowly. "I can't think of anything. I may try to get into the commissary while you're out. I could make dinner tonight." "It's my day to cook." "It'll give me something to do." "Finished reading your book?" She uses her fingernail to trace a line across the bottom of the carbon slate. "I don't care for it much. Camus depresses me the same way you do." "Always nice to hear that I've made it into Camus' league." I take my first long puff on the cigarette and wonder what in hell they've begun using to cut the tobacco. "Come on, Carol, what would you prefer that I wrote poems about? Babbling brooks and blue skies? None left, in the event it's escaped your notice." "Don't be nasty, Bruce. And there aren't any dinosaurs left, either, so touche to you." I let the matter drop, because the power is suddenly uncoiling in the back of my skull, and I'm sliding away from her, into the first available mind: some woman named Sharon Kraft, who lives in the heart of the Nashville metroplex, in an apartment even smaller than ours. It's extremely cold in Sharon Kraft's room, and the single dirty window is frosted over on the outside. I, sweltering in August heat, have gone to her at the height of some recent winter. I didn't know Sharon Kraft before this moment, didn't know of her, and all I get from her during the four or five seconds that I'm in her is the usual stuff, flashes about food and money. Couched in leaden anxiety. Carol slaps the carbon slate down on the table before me. "Don't do that when I'm talking to you!" I snap out of it, rescue the slate from the toast crumbs, mutter an apology. "You're always retreating from me like that!" Carol goes on, her voice rising up the scale. "That's all you ever use it for, isn't it? Things get touchy, and you go flying away into your little world for the duration." I am trying not to let her irritation infect me. It's too hot for arguments. I offer her a drag off my cigarette. She shakes her head vehemently. "Look," I say, forcing myself to speak calmly, soothingly, "I didn't ask for it. It just happened. I'm stuck with it, Carol." "Stuck with it! You make it sound like a clubfoot!" "Carol, honey, I have to get along with it the best I can." "Then why don't you use it to make things better for us?" "What do you want me to do? Go back and find out where Captain Kidd buried his loot?" "I don't care what you do, but do something . ' ' Carol has begun pacing back and forth in the kitchenette, three steps that way, three steps back. When she realizes that I'm not going to say another word, that I have no intention of scrapping with her, she stalks out of the kitchenette and wanders in a loose circle around the apartment's main room, touching the spines of my little library of tattered paperbounds, glaring at the chipped plastic chessmen (still locked in last week's Mexican stand-off). And I sit trying to think of something to say which might restore me to her good graces. But the rent is due next week, and my check from the studio is late, and she's bored and feels useless because she can't find a job, and I am convenient to blame, because I have the power. I have the extra Something that most people don't have. I have the gift. And it isn't doing us any good. And so... And so I give up and carefully snuff out the cigarette in a clay ashtray, then deposit the tobacco from the butt in a Mason jar halffilled with previous savings. The best I can do is stay out of Carol's way for a while. Still, I can't help being a little annoyed. We've been through this before, and you'd think that by now Carol would have accepted my limitations. How many times do I have to tell her that I can't make the extra Something do anything? It comes. It goes. I have no control over it, none at all. Time snatches me out of my own head and takes me where it will. I can never say where I'm liable to end up, and, once there, I can't do anything except observe the goings-on through the eyes, ears andor other sensory organs of whatever creature makes itself available to me. Watching trilobites through the eyes of (I presume) lungfish is not going to make me rich. Oh, but I tried. I did try. When I first started having these chronopathic flashbacks, I dismissed them as nightmares and waking dreams. Then came the doubts about my own sanity, the sessions with a psychiatrist, the numbing terror of madness. It wasn't until Dr. D. M. Mayes, of the University of Texas right here in Austin, issued his report that the nature of my affliction became obvious. Temporal dislodgement. Chronopathy. How much better I felt once I knew the name of my disease. How nice to hear that there were dozens like me. The last I heard, they still didn't understand just how the human mind could travel through time. If physicists were baffled by the mechanics of telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis, they were absolutely infuriated by chronopathy, which brazenly refuted much that they held dear about the nature of Time and Space. But I have my own theory to explain why. I think it was triggered by despair. Maybe chronopathy has always been latent in people, manifesting itself on occasion and giving rise to conjecture about ghosts and reincarnation. But the manifestations have become more widespread during the last quarter of this century. And I think it's due to an overwhelming sense of hopeless oppression in a worsening environment. People lost all faith in the future. Unhappy in the present, they longed for the past, ached for it, because it always looked rosier, simpler, easier. Thus were the shackles within the human psyche struck off. So, anyway, at age thirty-eight, I turned out to be chronopathic. Learning to live with it wasn't easy, but I've managed. I guess. Once, I even sought out Mayes and offered my services. But he had already assembled a team of chronopaths, men and women whose abilities were finely honed, who had all of the necessary paleon-, archeoand anthropological schooling to complement their talents. I was untrained. I had no control over my power. I was, in short, a semi-gifted amateur, a layman, a hack writer and minimally successful poet to boot. We appreciate your thinking of us in this regard, Mr. Holt, but... Not suitable for present needs. Terrific. The story of my life.    Last night, I watched from the crowd as Louis XV went under the blade. You should have seen the expression on his face, dear diary. He really did not believe that we'd go through with it. Right up to the moment that the executioner dropped the blade, he refused to accept the reality of the situation, and then. Just as the blade began to fall, I saw him crane his head up as far as it would go. I would have sworn that I saw his lips form the words, Mon Dieu. Ah well. Where did I leave off in the continuing saga of Bruce and Carol? The other day, while I was waiting for her to get over her mad, I put my ancient Olympia portable on the table and got to work on the latest installment of my TV soap opera. I was halfway down the page when Carol bumped into something and made a lot of unnecessary noise on her way to the John. She was. I'm certain, deliberately trying to provoke me. But I settled back in my chair, closed my eyes and felt myself leaving again. When I got there, the sky was overcast, and warm rain was falling. The low clouds had a faint greenish tinge. I crouched in a snug hole on the face of a cliff that dropped straight down into the sea. My niche stank of rotting fish and excrement, but the stench did not cut too sharply. My host's sense of smell seemed atrophied. However, even in this murk, its vision was exceptional -- the only other time I had ever experienced such incredible clarity of vision was the time I rode along with what must have been one of the very last eagles. The rain ceased by and by. My host -- no, I -- stirred and stretched pathetic little hindlegs to restore circulation, unfurled wings that were membraneous and covered with a fine down. The wings were braced by an enormously elongated digit. I An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Pubiished by Richard E. Gels Note: The. Alien Critic has azine continues as before in every other respect. Issue ## features a long, eye-opening "inside" double interview with Philip Jose Farmer detailing his use of the Kilgore Trout by-line, his writing of his hard-to-find sex novels, his troubles with publishers, his forthcoming books and his dark view of our planet's future. Also: "Dancing on the Titanic" by Charles Runyon. Letters by: Philip Jose Farmer, Jerry Pournelle, Bob Bloch, William Nolan, Don Wollheim, Ben Bova, many more. Columnists: Larry Shaw, Ted White. Every issue -- The Archives: new book and story listings. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I now knew what, when and probably where I was. Pterosaur, Cretaceous Period. By the inland sea of Kansas, perhaps. I waited until the updraft from the sea felt right, and then I gently kicked away from the face of the cliff, dipped, rose and was airborne. I had the sky all to myself. Eventually, my host brought us lower and skimmed along above the waves, watchful of silver shadows just below the surface. My long, toothless beak dipped in suddenly and scooped up a thrashing Fish which went down my gullet whole. Then my host climbed, still the only creature in the sky. The sun was starting to slide below the horizon. I could not escape the feeling that this might indeed be the last evening of all, that I had happened upon the very last of the dragons. I had come to the Mesozoic Era many times before, I had been Gorgosaurus and Plateosaurus, I knew my way around in the Age of Dinosaurs. But something was different now. The land, sea and sky looked as they had always looked on my previous visits to Late Cretaceous times, my host flew on as though nothing were strange, but I knew, I knew, that aerial reconnaisance of the land to the east would reveal it to be empty of giants. There was only my host, gliding silently toward what I had, in a poem, termed "the moment of extinction." It seemed an invasion of privacy to remain and witness this final pterodactyl's fall, so I pulled away and got on with my typing. I had a severe headache when I was finished at the typewriter. Carol had subsided to the point where she could collapse on the sofa-bed with The Stranger. But she was flipping the pages angrily. She had noticed my unoccupied meat. I went over to her and got very tender and caressing and so forth, and we were back on more or less friendly terms after about thirty minutes. We realized that we hadn't had our last falling out about the extra Something, but we were all cuddly and content for the time being, the storm had passed, we could look forward to a little peace before the subject again reared its head. And in such moments I really, keenly regret that I am not better with my words. The Mesozoic always does that to me, makes me want to talk to Carol about what it was like to have been a young man back during the Sixties and earliest Seventies, when it looked as though there might be hope for humanity... when blacks were suddenly demanding the right to be people, when women were demanding the right to be human beings, when... when so many different voices were being raised, crying out for sanity and justice, when there were good and noble causes, worthy causes, when there was still time and the future that has come to pass was still a small, gray cloud hanging low on the horizon, when... When the smell of extinction was not in the air. But I can't make it live for Carol. She's too young. She was born after things had already gone to hell in a hand-basket. She was barely out of diapers when California broke up. (Goodbye, L.A. You always fascinated me.) She was just a kid when Texas made its abortive attempt to divide itself into five separate states, and as far as Carol is concerned, Texas has always been occupied by enemy troops. Carol came too late, after there was no longer any place for hope in our lives. And I have never been able to explain to her the essential difference between the poor dumb earnest optimism of my youth and the inanely glowing stuff I write for TV. Carol, Carol, dinosaurs and all their brethren were majestic creatures. How much so, you will never be able to understand, because you can't be told about it. You have to feel what it was like to be twenty meters long and the lord of the world. Or to glide on six-meter wings above the Kansas Sea. The dinosaurs were the most awesome things of all time, mountains made to walk. And, for all of their cranial density, Carol, they were nobler monsters than men. When the dinosaurs died, they left a clean world. They walked out of the world, and it was still full of living things. The dinosaurs died out gracefully. When we die out, we'll take the whole world with us, one way or another.    I have such a mind for trivia. All morning long. I've been haunted by a song which I can't possibly have heard during the past twenty years. It's something from the Sixties, I think, something by Bob Dylan. A cry of anguish, of disillusionment. "Oh, mama, can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?" And this, from one of the stanzas: "... the ladies treat me kindly, and they furnish me with tape, but deep inside my heart, I know I can't escape." Oh, but I try. Today is Friday, Food Day at the commissary, and the streets are packed. I had to go to the studio. Pushed and fought my way to the mass-transit stop at the corner, and then the steam-bus was twenty minutes late. But it did arrive, and I did get a seat up front. It was a miserable ride, all the same. My, respirator has sprung a leak. (God, who'd have thought that Austin, Texas would ever have really bad smog?) The day was a scorcher, and everything stank, the bus, the streets, the people, the whole city. The smell of extinction. And so I leaned my head back, closed my eyes and got away from then as best I could. All is calm, all is bright.  Dear Mr. Baen, end of Directions struck a responsive chord this month and so, this letter. Your note in your reply to Philip M. Cohen's letter ("For some reason, subs, have increased enormously in the last year or so... that, sir, is good news for not only Galaxy but for the entire SF field. After IF died and Vertex shuddered to a near standstill (newsprinttabloid format), Vertex has since folded. Ed. , I was rather anxious for the SF magazine field. But things are looking up, particularly with Galaxy. The reason for the increase in subs, to Galaxy is simply put; Quality editing presenting Quality SF. After the era of Fred Pohl, Galaxy and IF were, to be charitable, shoddy. However, with the advent of your regime. Galaxy has moved rapidly toward the top of the SF magazine field. You have my heartfelt congratulations for your fine work. Most letters end at this point, but something has nagged at me for some time and here it is: Why is SF continually placed at the bottom of the literary world? Years ago (# or so) when acquaintances would see me reading Heinleih's Stranger in a Strange Land, I would hear the old; "Jeeze! How can you stand to read that -- space opera-monster junk -- (just plain) junk -- drivel and s-t?" I'd grin and tell 'em I read it because it was interesting, basically well written and, well, it had ideas, concepts and settings that mainstream literature just did not contain. Sniggering at my juvenile tastes, they would saunter off. Ten years later the same people were telling me about "grokking", "water brothers" and all the new ideas they had just discovered. I sniggered a bit and read onward. It never ceases to astound me how many of the "now" and "today" views of the world are old hat to us SF readers. Von Daniken? Unique? Unusual? Mind boggling? Not a bit of it! Most of the concepts presented in that mish-mash. Chariots of the Gods were explored, dissected and hurled onto the trash heap of SF cliche years ago. The "crazy" ideas of SF are now being discussed by many who would never admit that they had ever considered reading that "junk" SF. This paradox of general acceptance of old SF grating the field that generated them bothers the hell out of me! "Low" form literature this SF, but the ideas are neat, just don't admit where they originated! Egad! Another point of interest is the continual idea-production of SF. Let's face it, SF keeps you interested -- in our world (past, present and future) and (this is where the mainstream is left light years behind) in the situations of other worlds, their people, problems and culture. The growing popularity and acceptance of SF among the general readership (those who were mainstreamers until they "saw the light") indicates that the human brain has not become totally mired in today, we're still reading beyond our everyday world, looking not just for escape, but for enlightenment and knowledge. SF does aid us in our thinking; I've learned more about science from reading SF than from all the dull science textbooks of my high school and college days. Which brings me to Dr. A. Meyer's letter, to wit; Bull! (For the most pan.) I can agree with his assertion that SF, though it can exist happily without literary values cannot exist without absolute values in part only. SF contains certain absolute values which make it SF. But to exist without literary values? I think not, Dr. Meyer. He is horrendously mistaken when he states "...literary elegance is merely gilding refined gold." Good Grief! Granted, SF does have "absolute values" (suspension of disbelief, literature of ideas, etc.) and to those of us who read it regularily, it is refined gold; but to say that literary values are unimportant to SF -- that's just absurd. Science Fiction -- that second word is imponant There is good fiction and bad fiction; there is probably nothing worse than bad science fiction. In SF both the science and the fiction must be integrated, but both must be presented 'ell in order for it to be successful. That's what makes it so challenging to write and exciting to read. Delaney, Sturgeon, Heinlein, Silverberg, Zelazny, Bester, Pohl, Andersen, Le Guin (the list is almost endless) all write excellent fiction and it makes their science fiction move, become real and have meaning. Characterization, plotting and the other concepts of fiction must be observed if our favorite literary form is to remain viable. If Dr. Meyer doubts the value of fiction concepts in SF, I would refer him to Ben Bova's article in the August # Writer "Plot in Science Fiction", an excerpt from his forthcoming book Notes to a Science Fiction Writer. Or he could examine Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow, an entire book, edited by Reginald Bretnor, dedicated to the science and the fiction in SF. ly; concepts and techniques are achieving an excellence that will insure the survival of SF as vibrant, far reaching and respected literature. I see I have stomped my soapbox into splinters with this tirade and the hour is getting late. Once again my sincerest congratulations. Sincerely, Craig W. Anderson # Vallerand Rd. Tracy, Ca. # Dear Mr. Baen, Galaxy is the last magazine in the world in which you'd find a schematic diagram trying to pass as fiction. Analog, sure, occasionally; even F  SF once published one. But Galaxyl I've been reading it for two years, and the worst of the stories were still stories. Not any more. I'm referring, of course, to Hayford Peirce's nonstory "High Yield Bondage". The rickety "story" that surrounds this article should have been removed, and what was left published as a non-fact article. It was mildly amusing, but a failure as straight fiction. And where do you get off limiting Alter to three pages, cutting him off when he was just starting? Geis' Alter-Ego is picking up a lot of fans out here, and we'll kick and scream till Alter gets his way. What harm can he do reviewing books? "Nobody Here but Us Shadows": This is one of the best short stories you've published in your editorship so far. The ideas are well-worn, but Lundwall uses them in a totally original manner. I hope he makes further appearances in Galaxy. Keep up the (usually) good work. You just might break up Analog's monopoly on Hugos. Sincerely, Christopher DeVito Thank you... but not this year; Ben is still # in the hearts of fandom. (Congratulations, Mr. Bova on your third -- in a row, yet! -- Hugo.) Dear Mr. Baen, I have recently read my first two issues of Galaxy, the April # and June # issues. I want to write to thank you for restoring my faith in science-fiction. A curious statement, you think. In my teens I was a heavy science-fiction fan. I didn't have much money, but most of what I got went to science-fiction books. Arthur C. Clarke was my idol. (He still is, but Ursula K. Le Guin is giving him some stiff competition.) Then I joined the Marine Corps and I read almost no science-fiction from Dune until The Gods Themselves. I was, among other things, discovering philosophy and history. But, it was science-flction also that kept me off science-fiction! Suddenly, it seemed, science-fiction had become "socially relevant" and sold its soul to the peace-love-dope-anti-war-antiestablishment youth cultures. Of course, this wasn't totally true for all science-fiction, but it seemed whenever I went to the bookshelves, the books all seemed to be promising to be bigger put-downs "reflecting the social ills today projected to their terrifying possibilities". I bought a few. A few too many! Science-fiction had also decided to become intellectual art! But what a strange definition of art these new stories had. Gone were such hack features like plot, characterization, and realistic dialogue. Chaos seemed to reign and its queen was unintelligible symbology. I dislike bad literature. Science-fiction as art had become bad literature. Recently I have read Orbir #, Orbit #, Nova #, and a few other such anthologies. There was less chaos and mystic symbology, but I was appalled at the pessimism! Of all those stories, not five left Earth. Nearly everyone of those stories foretold a dismal future of ruin or choking population. Human life was pictured as bare, helpless survival -- an existance made horrible by mindless bureaucracy and heartless technology and devoid of dignity. I wondered where science-fiction's starspanning vision had gone. I recalled how meaningless President Kennedy's challenge to reach the moon by # was to me until A Fall Of Moondusi by Arthur C. Clarke gave me the vision -- the meaning '. -- of what this first flight would mean and could eventually bring about. These stories I had been reading would not inspire a young mind to anything unless it would be to the dismal hopelessness of striving for future goals. Of course, pessimism is as valid as optimism, but I wondered if all science-fiction had given up to pessimism with only a few reactionary hold-outs like Clarke, Asimov, Le Guin, and Norton. About this time I bought my first two issues of Gala.xy, plus some of the competition. I found again science-fiction that is both good literature and out among the stars. I learned through your magazine that science-fiction's star-spanning vision is alive and well between your covers. Congratulations! You've just won a steady buyer. Thank you, G. Richard Bozarth Frankly I have a certain fondness for peace, love, youth et a!., and am a bit of an antiestablishmentarian in the bargain -- but I do believe that if life isn't worth living...what's the point? Sir: There are many things in this world that I do not understand. Right now I'm having much trouble understanding the people in the science-fiction field. You people have made me ashamed to admit that I have been reading SF for # of my # years. The reason being you have changed SF from sciencefiction to sex fantasy. What is this? Sex isn't something new. It has been written about and talked about, had its picture photographed, painted, drawn, sculpted, scratched and smeared on so many things nobody could miss it. But jiot here please. That is not why I subscribe to your magazine. I know your writers need a lot of freedom to move ideas around in and to express things in new ways, but "freedom isn't free". You have a responsibility to me and others like me. If you want to print and sell all that trash, fine! Just be sure to change the title of your magazine so we will know before we invest. I have spent no less than a hundred dollars this year trying to find science-fiction that isn't obsessed with sex. Sex is not a spectator sport to me. If I can't participate I'm not going to pay money to watch someone else. If I can't find science-fiction I won't settle for sex fantasy. Put up or shut up! Produce science-fiction or get out of the business. With deepest regrets Ray L. Stouff # Emerald Hills Way Smithfield, Texas # Dear Jim, Virgil Hays has criticized you for printing Hays feels you should "knock off the crap and get back to science fiction." What does he think sex is? A' thing to be put in Playboy, and conveniently forgotten when it comes to sf? No. As long as you are printing a story with two sexes involved, there either has to be or should be interaction between them. Not to advocate porno, but to demand a credible story. Even a moron could see that, the story being based on a society in which sex is a chore instead of a pleasure, there must be a reference to sex, or the encounter written up. Let me ask those of you who agree with Mr. Hays -- What's your hangup? I am perps relevant to the story. Why is it you object fc sex in a story? Why is it you want to cen stories like the one in question?  And you Jim, why do you print drivel like that? Bn Bv at NLG has been through it already, and so have we readers, so why give these nerds a forum to shout from? Sincerely, Geoff Beckman # Norfolk Rd. Cleveland Hts., OH # Partly to see if I can elicit contrary responses such as your own, and partly because, well, I do try to provide a forum for many divergent points of view. Dear Mr. Baen, As a year-old subscriber, I enjoy Galaxy quite a bit, especially Dick Geis (a friend of mine), Jerry Poumelle's articles (which really make me think), and the short stories. This is only personal opinion, because I know many readers enjoyed it, but I do not place "Sign of the Unicom" high on my list. I never have felt that serials have a place in any magazine. They are, to me, much like trying to watch a good movie on t.v. with too damn many commercials -- the length in between episodes does the story no from a bad case of too many characters. Though not a writer, one thing I always remembered from college was "don't get too many characters in your story" unless you can really develope them as Frank Herbert vote for two-part or one-part serials. By one part, I mean none at all. But, I shall still read on as long as your quality remains as it has been since you took over. Very sincerely, Gerald L. Blucher # S. E. #th Ave. Portland, OR # Thank you. Personally I thought the characlineated. I guess some people like Dickensian type fiction -- and others don't! Dear Mr. Baen, By all means, publish Roger Zelazny's fourth Amber novel -- and by the way, Darnay's Helium was probably the best serial printed in Galaxy within the last three years. Also, Dick Geis's "Alien Viewpoint" column has contained some of the fiinniest material on SF that I've seen for several years. However, the irregularity of the column can be disappointing at times. Do you plan to have Alter return in the next few issues? Cordially, John S. Kelly #-A Farmers Avenue Bethpage, N.Y. # Bookstore, # McKinley, Sacramento # Comic adaptation of the first "Amber" book. First of three parts. Send # to; John Onoda; Apt. #, # E. #th St., Bloomington. Indiana #I Auto Repair Book. Save money on car repairs! Send # to Roy Lewis, # Alcross, Covina. Calif. #. Free Lists -- SF books, mazines. Send to: Held, Box #. Buffalo. New York #. Calif. #. 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"As you have gathered we are not technologists bul aestheticists who have acquired our technical knowledge deliberately to insure its proper development and usage. We have fourKl that it is ignorance that perverts aesthetic and human values not technical knowledge." # for two volumes, I # pages total, and one issue of Detour magazine. Interactive Concerns Group, # N. lists. Gordon Barber, #-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN. #. tics, brain modeling, theoretical psychology. Sample # .  S Books. G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. Moneymaking Opportunity -- # per# possible. Stuffing envelopes. Send # c and self-addressed stamps envelope for details. Jewell Industries. # De Garmo, Sylmar, Calif. #. "Escape", Bradbury, Pohl, Asimov...catalogue: # #. target practice as seen on Kung Fu. # (lour or #I , ers believe they are either Moonrock, Spacerock, or the result of Meteroric impact: Genuine Thailand Tekite on #" Silver Finish Chain, also fits on keychain, bracelet, #. 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By Alfred Bestcr People made immorlal by traumatic shocks band together lo light a computer lunamok Pub ed # # #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov The ends ol the galaxy revert lo barbansrri An SF classic Comb Price S# # # Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. By Isaac Asimov Here are # prsvi ously uncollected short stones plus latest installment ol Asimov autobiography Rev Hem, Shah Guido G. Take a Match, and others Highly entertaining Pub ed S# # # The Best of Cordwainer Smith. # outstanding SF stories include The Lady Who Sailed the Soul, The Burning ol the Brain, A Planet Named Shayol. Spec Ed # The Mole in God's Eye. By Larry Niven A Jerry Pournelle Man's first conlaci with an iniellinl alien species Pub ed # # # Swords ot MarsSynihebc Men ot Mars. By Edgar Rice Burroughs Two novels of unparalleled adventure m onesuperbly iliusIraled volume INus. by Frank Frazelta. Spec Ed #I The Land That Time Forgot. 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Edited by James Gunn. # By Michael Moorcock. More diverting and often amusing adventures of the hedonistic immortals who dwell at the end of time. # The third anthology collected by Thomas M. Disch features stories of utopia. # Harper e) Row #  # #ra St... New York # Robert Silverberg's newest novel takes a look at metropolitan life and politics in the not so distant future. # Damon Knight's latest collection of all-new stories highlights some of the field's brightest young talents. # By John Ivimy. For readers of Beyond Stonehenge and Secrets of the Great Pyramid, a new examination of prehistoric structures. Illustrated. # Richard Cavendish recounts the history, myths, uses and significance of the cards of the Tarot in a humdinger of a lively, lavish gift book. Illustrated. # Bruce C. Murray, scientist and optimist, explores survival options for the future in a fascinating new book. # At bookstores Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Tumck, Circulation Director J. E Pournelle, Ph D , Science Editor L C Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C M Boiling, #ss'f to the Editor Spider Robinson. Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor The State had brought Corbell (Mark II) to life by bell, Mark I) into the living body of a brain-wiped criminal -- so that he might seed the stars with life. But instead, Corbell the Rebel has chosen to dive for the Galactic Core! Wherein an artist of a new kind battles for her very existence -- and loses. Again, and again, and again... Straight fantasy or ethological allegory -- you decide. But either way this grim little extrapolation of the animal-in-man amply demonstrates that there are worse things than being human. Poor guy, he could have anything he wanted -- except life itself. For a teller-of-tales the difference between fiction and reality is a very hazy thing. No wonder they sometimes get confused. (And congratulations to Mr. Plauger, this year's winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.) Death is no part of life, but comes after it. Remember that. It's important. The Star Trek Convention, Boskone #, Baiticon #, Mancon #, Autoclave, Westercon #. Midamericon. Wherein Spider opines that if a writer doesn't keep his readers turning pages he isn't writing, but is engaged in...something else. Geis talks about this year's Hugo Nominees, among whom, by the way, are Richard E. Geis and this Editor. (The Hugo is "Science Fiction's Oscar.") Letters from Howes, Findley, Henrich, Pournelle, Houston, B. Wilson, Baird, Bowne, Klotz, A. Wilson. Where to find it. Interior illustrations by Ames, Bramley, Fabian, Freff, Pini of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: .#. #-tssue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Hotel, New York, N.Y. Membership: #. For info: Box #, Bklyn., N.Y. #. Brian Robinson, # Linwood Grove, Longsight, Manchester, UK., or Bill Burns, # Lou Avenue, Kings Park, N.Y. #. Sheraton-Boston Hotel, Boston, Mass. GoH: Poul Anderson. Official artist: Rick Stembach. Registration: # until Jan. #. For info: Cambridge, Mass. #. ard Johnson's New Center Motor Lodge, Detroit, Mich. GsH: Gene Wolfe and Donn Brazier. Registration: # until May #, # after, # at the door. For info: Autoclave, Box #, Detroit, ML #. Hunt Valley Inn, Baltimore, MD. GsH: Suzanne Tompkins and Jerry Kaufman. Registration: # in advance, # at door. For info: Norman Schwartz, #I Oakwood Rd., Glen Bumte, MN. #. Park, Manchester, England. #th British SF con. GoH: Robert Silverberg. Fan GoH: Peter Roberts. Membership: # attending. For info: ternational Hotel, Los Angeles, CA. GoH: H.L. Gold. Fan GoH: Gregg Calkins. Membership: # until June, # after. For info: Westercon #, Box #, Mission Hill, CA. World SF Convention. Hotel Muelbach, Kansas City, Mo. GoH: Robert Heinlein. Fan GoH: George Barr. Membership: # until May #; # until Aug. #; # thereafter, and at the door. Supporting membership: #. The naming of names was important to Corbell. Alone in his little universe, dissociated from all mankind, with only himself and his bland-voiced computer to talk to, Corbell hung 'tags on everything. He called himself Jay bee Corbell. Yes, it was a major decision. For awhile he was calling himself Rebellious Brain-Erasure: Lousy Loser). He gave that up after the shape of his new nose stopped bothering him, after he got used to the look and feel of his shorter arms and slender hands, his alien body. There were no mirrors on the ship. What he called the Kitchen was a wall with slots and a menu display screen. The opposite wall was the Health Club: the exercise paraphernalia and the outlets that would turn this chamber into sauna or shower or steam bath. The medical dispensary and diagnostic tools were Forest Lawn: the cold sleep tank was also in that room. The control room was a hollow sphere with a remarkable chair in the exact center, surrounded by a horseshoe bank of controls, and approached via a catwalk of metal lace. That chair would assume a fantastic variety of positions, and it gave indecently good massages. The spherical wall could disappear to display the black sky as if Corbell and the control bank floated alone in space. It would display textbooks on astronomy or astrophysics or State history, or updated diagrams of the ship. Corbell called it the Womb Room. The autopilot-computer could be voice operated from anywhere aboard. Or there was the computer link: a helmet like a hair dryer with a thick cord attached, that would plug Corbell directly into the computer's senses. Corbell was afraid to use it. He was afraid to personalize the computer. He spoke to it only to give orders and request information, and he named it "Computer". But he dithered for months before naming the great seeder ramship he had stolen from Pierce and the State. Don Juan, he called it, for its phallic overtones. Trivial decisions...but that was Corbell's problem. He had already made his major decisions. That was his finest hour, when he broke free of Pierce the checker and drove for the galactic core. Don Juan should have capped his career then, by blowing up.    Pierce the checker had explained it all. He had been -- someone had been -- Jerome Branch Corbell the architect. Someone named Corbell, dying of cancer, had declined to die as anyone else died. This Corbell had had himself entombed in a double-walled coffin, the outer filled with liquid nitrogen He had hoped to be reawakened after medical science solved twin problems: a cancer cure, and a cure for the damage done by ice crystals rupturing cell walls. It hadn't worked out that way. Later there had been a criminal. name or his crime. The State had wiped a criminal's personality, memories, self. Into the empty brain the State had played electrical currents trapped in the frozen brain of Jerome Corbell. The State had ground this Corbell into hamburger and leeched the hamburger for jected into a criminal's veins. "Jerome Corbell is dead," Pierce the checker had explained. "I could have given you his intact skeleton for a souvenir." The new Corbell had no more civil rights than a dead man. In practical terms, the State had created a man with a lust for privacy and an internal self-sufficiency very rare among State citizens. Such a man would have had to adapt to an unfamiliar culture anyway; had in fact volunteered for that task. Why should he not postpone that adaptation for two hundred years, while he guided a seeder ramship around a bent ring of stars? He would return a hero of sorts. He would have started a dozen uninhabitable worlds on the road to becoming colonies, new territory for the State. The new Corbell was to be a rammer. His alternative -- "You're wrong to call it slave labor," Pierce had told him. "A slave can't quit. Your crime has cost you your citizenship, but you still have the right to change professions. You need only ask for another, um, course of rehabilitation." But he meant death. Corbell's was the fourth personality to be tested in that empty body. What Pierce expected of Corbell was complete, enthusiastic obedience. Otherwise there would be a fifth personality living in the criminal's body. Pierce had had his obedience during Corbell's entire period of training...training that went rapidly, because it was augmented by injecpected where the injections had come from. He had obeyed orders until he was actually in command of the huge spacecraft. Then, around the orbit of Jupiter, he had started his turn. Don Juan was a Bussard ramjet. Its fuel was interstellar hydrogen, gathered in by magnetic fields and burned in fusion fire. Unlimited fuel. According to the autopilotcomputer, Don Juan could accelerate at one gravity forever. With relativistic time compression to help him, Corbell could reach the galactic core in twenty-one years of ship's time...and return to a world seventy thousand years older, his crime seventy thousand years forgotten. Or perhaps he would not return at all. Even the State did not know what Corbell would find at the galactic core. Twenty-one years from now he could make his next major decision. A year on his yay, and Corbell was starving for the sound of another voice. He dithered. What could Pierce say that would be worth the hearing? He had hung up on Pierce, he had had the computer disconnect the message laser receiver, as a gesture of contempt. That gesture was im : portant. Could Pierce know , never mind how, that he was no longer talking to a void? Corbell held lengthy conversations about it. "Can I possibly be that lonely?" he demanded of himself. "Or that bored? Or that desperate to hear another human voice again? Other than my own -- " His own voice echoed back from the Womb Room walls. "Computer," he said at last, "reconnect the message laser receiver." And he waited. Nothing. Hours passed, and nothing. He was savage. Pierce must have given up. Somewhere in the city Pierce would never show Corbell, Pierce the checker would be training another revived corpsicle. The voice caught him at breakfast three days later. "Corbell!" "Hah?" That was strange. Computer had never addressed him before. Was it an emergency? "This is Peerssa, you traitorous son of a bitch! Turn this ship around and carry out your mission!" "Get stuffed," Corbell said, feeling good. "Get stuffed yourself," said the voice of Peerssa, turned suddenly silky-smooth. Something was wrong here. Don Juan was almost half a light year from Sol. How could Peerssa... "Computer, switch off the message laser receiver." "That won't work, Corbell! I've beamed my personality into your computer, over and over again for these past seven months! Turn us around or I'll cut off your air!" Corbell yelled something obscene. The silence that followed commanded attention. The purr of air moving through the life support system was a sound he never heard anymore; but he heard its absence. "Turn that back on!" he cried in panic. "Will you bargain, Corbell?" "Never! I'll throw -- " What was heavy and movable? Nothing? "I'll pry the microwave oven loose and throw it into the computer! I'll give you nothing but a wrecked ship!" "Your mission -- " "Shut up l" The voice of Pierce the checker was silent. Corbell heard the purr of moving air. What next? If Pierce controlled the computer he controlled everything. Why didn't he turn the ship himself? Had he? Corbell climbed up into the Womb Room and settled in the control chair. "Full view," he commanded. He floated alone in space. Half a light year of distance had not changed the pattern of the stars. A year of acceleration had. Don Juan was now meeting all light rays at. an angle, so that the entire sky was puckered forward. In his first life, during nights spent aboard a small boat, Corbell had learned a nodding acquaintance with the constellations. Sagittarius was just where he had left it, directly overhead. A ring of white flame around and below him was hydrogen guided and constricted to fuse in stellar fire: the exhaust of his drive. Sol was a hot pink point beneath his feet...and something flickered across it. Corbell, staring, made out a humanoid form barely blacker than space, walking toward him across the stars. Coming close. Narrow features, light hair...it was Pierce. Corbell watched, barely breathing. Pierce was as big as Don Juan. Pierce was angry... Corbell said, "Computer, get that mannequin off my screen." The figure vanished. Corbell resumed breathing. "Pierce, or Peerssa, or Computer, or whatever name you will answer to, I give you your orders. You will proceed to the galactic axis under one gravity of acceleration, making turnover at midpoint. You will take all necessary steps to guard my life and the integrity of the ship, subject to this mission. Now speak if you like." The voice of Pierce the checker said, "I prefer Peerssa." Corbell sighed his relief. "So do I. Are you in fact under my orders?" "Yes. Corbell, there are things we must discuss. You owe your very existence to the State. You've stolen a key to the survival of mankind itself! How many seeder ramships do you think will succeed in converting alien atmospheres to something men can breathe? Or do you think that men will never need to leave the Earth?" "Computer, you will henceforth answer to the name Peerssa. Peerssa, shut the fuck up." Silence.    Now Corbell caught himself giggling occasionally. It could happen any time. At meals, or sitting in the Womb Room watching the sky, or using the Health Club, he would suddenly start giggling. And then he couldn't stop, because Peerssa could hear, and Peerssa couldn't answer -- Peerssa. The naming of names: Pierce the checker was far in Corbell's past, while Peerssa was a personality imposed on a computer's memory bank. The distinction was worth remembering. There would be major differences between the man and the computer. Peerssa had different senses. Peerssa would never suffer hunger pangs or a frustrated sex urge. Peerssa would never exercise or use the rest room. Peerssa might well have no sense of self preservation. That was worth finding out. And Peerssa was compelled to follow orders. Peerssa was Corbell's slave. Two weeks passed before Corbell gave in to the urge for conversation. Seated in the control chair, floating among stars that were already brighter and bluer above than below, Corbell said, "Peerssa, you may speak." "Good. You've instructed me to guard your life and the ship. I can't maintain one gravity all the way the ship." "Don't lie to me," Corbell snapped. "I checked it out on the computer before I ever passed Saturn. The ram effect works better at high velocities, because I can narrow the width of the ram fields. Greater hydrogen flux." "You used data already in the computer. ' ' "Yes, of course." "Corbell, that data was meant for jumps of up to fifty-two light years. Not thirty-three thousand. We built the field generator as strong as possible, but it will not stand one gravity at your peak velocity. The strains will tear it apart. We'll have to decrease thrust starting three years from now, if you want to live." Pierce the checker had never lied, had he? Pierce had never bothered. Why lie to a corpsicle? Peerssa was something else again. Corbell said, "You're lying." "I deny it. Make up your mind. You've ordered me not to lie. Am I under your orders? If not, why don't I just turn and head for Van Manaan's Star?" Corbell gave up. "This ruins my itinerary, doesn't it? How long will it take us to reach the Core?" "In near-perfect safety, about five hundred years." "Give me...oh, a ninety percent chance of getting there alive. How long?" "Computing. Insufficient data on interstellar mass density. We'll correct that on the way. One hundred and sixty years four months, confidence of ten months, all figures in ship's time." Corbell felt cold. That long? "Suppose we don't go direct? We could skim above the plane of the galaxy -- " " -- and thin out the interstellar matter. Computing. Good, Corbell. We lose some time thrusting laterally at turnover, but we still shave some time. One hundred and thirty-six years, eleven months, confidence of a year and a month." "That still isn't good." "And you'd spend the same time coming home. You'd get home dead, Corbell. We could finish your original mission faster than that. Well?" "For -- " Never say Forget it to a computer. "You have your orders. I now amend them. Your mission is to get us to the galactic axis in minimum ship's time relative, ninety percent confidence of getting me there alive." "You'll never see Earth again." "Shut up."    "You may speak." Silence. "Does it bother you, being cut off like that?" "Yes, of course it bothers me. I've been silent for a week. That's four weeks added to our trip time. The longer it takes me to persuade you, the longer it will take us to complete our mission!" "I could order you to give up that idea." "I would do it. Snarling of my circuits might result. Corbell, I appeal to your sense'of gratitude. The State created you, you owe your very existence -- " "Bullshit." "Is it that easy for you to ignore your duty?" Corbell swallowed an urge to drive his fist through a bank of dials. "No, it's not .easy. Every time you raise the holy name of the State, something in me snaps to attention." "Then why not listen to the voice . of your social conscience?" "Because it's not my conscience! It's those damn shots! You filled where my sense of duty to the State is coming from!" Peerssa gave it a good dramatic pause before he said, insinuatingly, "Suppose it's your conscience after all?" "I'll never know, will I? And that's your doing, isn't it? So live with it." "You will never see Earth again. Your medical facilities will not keep you alive that long." Corbell snorted. "Don't be silly. The medicines and the cold sleep tank are supposed to keep me young and healthy for the first two hundred years. The cold sleep tank has a rejuvenating effect, remember?" "It doesn't. I lied. You were to remain alive for the duration of your mission. If the medicines had been better, we would have extended the mission." "You sons of bitches." It rang true; it fitted well with what Corbell knew of the State. "Corbell, listen to me. In three hundred years the State may discover complete rejuvenation. We could arrive home in time -- " "For non-citizens?" No answer. "We're going to the galactic axis. You have your orders." "You must enter cold sleep immediately," Peerssa said in a dead voice. "Oh?" "Your optimum program is ten years in cold sleep, six months to recover, then cold sleep again. You vrtll survive to see the galactic axis, barely." "Uh huh. And if you happened to forget to wake me up?" "That's your problem. Traitor." II  Raw throat. Cramped muscles. Eyes that wouldn't focus. Questing hands that found him in a coffin with the lid still on. Waking from cold sleep was like waking from death. This was what he had half-expected in #, when they froze Jerome Cor, bell to stop the cancer that was eating him from the inside. And he had halfexpected never to wake. He whispered, "Peerssa." "Here. Where would I go?" "Yeah. Where are we?" "One hundred and six light years from Sol. You must eat." Suddenly Corbell was ravenous. He sat up, rested, then climbed down from the tank, treating himself like fragile crystal. He was lean as death, and weak. "Fix me a snack I can take to the Womb Room," he said. "It will be waiting." He felt light-headed. No, he felt light. He picked up a large bulb of hot soup in the kitchen, and sucked at it as he continued to the Womb Room. "Give me a view," he said. The walls disappeared. The stars blazed violet-white over his head. The stellar rainbow spread out from there: violet stars in the center, then rings of blue, green, yellow, orange, dim red. To the sides and below there was almost nothing: a dozen dim red points, and the feathery ring of flame that marked his drive. That had dimmed too, for Peerssa had pulled the ram fields close, and had reddened, because the fuel guided into that ring was moving at near lightspeed relative to the ship. Peerssa was bitter. "Are you satisfied? Even if we turned back now, we have lost over four hundred years of Earth time -- " "You bore me," said Corbell, though he felt stabbing pain from what he would once have called his conscience. "What happens next?" "Next? You eat and exercise. In six months you must be strong and fat -- " "Fat?" "Fat. Otherwise you could not survive ten years in cold sleep. Finish your soup, then exercise." "What do I do for entertainment?" "Whatever you like." Naturally Peerssa was puzzled. The State had provided nothing for Corbell' s entertainment. "Yeah, I thought so. Tell me about yourself, Peerssa. We're going to be together a long time." "What do you want to know?" "I want to know how you got to be this way. What was it like to be Peerssa the checker, citizen of the State? Start with your childhood." Peerssa was a poor storyteller. He rambled. He had to be led by appropriate questions. But he had more than his voice to tell tales with. He was an inept motion picture director with an unlimited budget. On the wall of the Womb Room he showed Corbell the farming community where he had grown up, and the schools of his childhood (skyscrapers with playgrounds on the roof), and the animated history texts he had studied during his final training. The memories were usually hazy. Some were shockingly sharp and brightly colored: the enormous ten-year-old who bullied Peerssa on the exercise roof; the older girl who showed him sex and thus frightened him badly; his Civics teacher. Corbell ate and slept and exercised. He tended Don Juan with the half-instinctive love and understanding absorbed with his rammer training. In between, he had from Peerssa all the knowledge he had not dared demand of Pierce the checker. He saw views of Selerdor, the city he had only glimpsed from a rooftop. The buildings were as blocky and unimaginative inside as out. The carvings at street level were in Shtoring, the State language. They were edifying principles, rules of conduct, or the life stories of State heroes. He grew to know Peerssa as well as he had known Mirabelle, his wife for twenty-two years. In knowing Peerssa he grew to know the State. The computer memory held what Corbell would have called Civics texts. He read those, with helpful comments from Peerssa. He learned of the two brushfire wars that had half destroyed the Earth and eventually established the State. The State was all-powerful, as he had guessed. It was a fascism, with distinct overtones of Chinese or Japanese Empire. Society was drastically stratified. The government controlled every form of industrial power generator. Once these had been very diverse: dams, geothermal plants, temperature differential plants in the ocean depths; now they were big fusion generators supplemented by rooftop and desert solar collectors. But the State owned them all. Once he asked, "Peerssa, do you know what a water empire is?" "No." "Pity. A lot of civilizations were water empires. Ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Aztecs. Any government that controls irrigation completely is a water empire. If the State controls electricity, they also control the fresh water supply, don't they? I mean, with a population in "Yes, of course." Musing, he said, "I once asked you if you thought the State would last fifty thousand years." "I don't." "I think the State could last seventy thousand. See, these water empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single, push from the barbarians outside can topple them. But it takes that push. There's no revolution in a water empire." "That's a very strong statement." "Yeah. Do you know how the two-province system works? They used to use it in China. Say there are two provinces, A and B, and they're both having a famine. What you do is, you look at their records. If Province A has a record of cheating on their taxes or rioting, then you confiscate all the grain in Province A and ship it to B, If the records are about equal you pick at random. The result is that Province B is loyal forever, and Province A is wiped out so you don't worry about it." "We rarely have famines. When we do -- " It was rare for Peerssa not to finish a sentence. "There's nothing more powerful than controlling everybody's water. A water empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn't have any outside." Much later, Corbell learned that he had changed his life again. At the time he only suspected, from Peerssa's silence, that he had offended Peerssa. And Peerssa was not Pierce. The checker was long dead; the computer personality had never harmed Corbell. It was worth remembering. Corbell gave up talking about the State. Peerssa was loyal to the State; Corbell most emphatically was not. Six months passed. Stars passed too. A few passed close enough to show like violet windows into Hell, and receded like dim red fireballs. Corbell was fat, too fat for his own tastes, fat enough for Peerssa's, when at last he climbed into the great coffin.    It happened seven times. Ill "Corbell? Is something wrong? Speak, please." Corbell sighed in the cold sleep tank. He did not move. He had become very used to this routine: the terrible weakness, the hunger, the six months of exercises and of forcing insipid food down his throat, the climbing into the tank to start the cycle over. At this, his seventh awakening, he felt a deadly reluctance to wake up. "Corbell, please say something. I can sense your heartbeat and respiration, but I can't see you. Have you turned catatonic? Shall I administer shock?" "Don't administer shock." "Can you move, or are you too weak?" He sat up. It made him dizzy. Ship's thrust was very low. "Where are we?" "Beyond midpoint of our course, thrusting laterally to force us back into the plane of the galaxy. Proceeding according to plan. Your plan, not mine. Now I want to monitor your health." "Later. Make me soup. I'll take it to the Womb Room." He moved toward the kitchen, bouncing oddly in the low gravity. He had aged more than the four years he had been awake. After each awakening the exercises had taken longer to build him up again. He felt brittle, and ravenous. The soup was good. The soup was always good. He settled himself in the Womb Room and let his eyes roam the dials. Some of the readings were frightening. The gamma ray flux would have charred him in minutes, if the power of the ram fields were not guiding the particles aside. Other readings made no sense. Peerssa had told the truth: the seeder ramship was not designed for velocities this close to the speed of light. Neither were the instruments and dials. And what about Peerssa's senses? Was he flying half blind? "Give me a full view," he said. The stellar rainbow had hardened and sharpened over seven decades. It had lost symmetry too. To one side the stars were thickly clustered; the arc of blue-whites blazed like diamonds in an empress' necklace. To the other, the side that faced intergalactic space, the rainbow was almost dark. Each star was sharply defined within its band of color. But within the central disc of violet stars (dimmer than the blue, but of a color that made one squint) was a soft white glow: the microwave background of the universe, at # Absolute, boosted to visible light by Don Juan's terrible speed. His ship's drive-flame had become a blood red fan of light facing intergalactic space. Peerssa was thrusting laterally to bend their course back into the plane of the galaxy. "Give me a corrected view," Corbell instructed. Now Peerssa worked a kind of fiction. From the universe he perceived through the senses on Don Juan s hull, he extrapolated a picture of the universe seen at rest, and he painted that picture around the wall of the Womb Room. The galaxy was incomparably beautiful, a whirlpool of light spread out across half the universe. Corbell looked ahead of him for his first view of the galactic core. It was there, just brighter than the rest, and hazy, without definition. He was disappointed. He had thought the close-packed ball of stars would flame with colors. He could pick out no individual stars; only a vague glow around a central bright point. Behind him the stars were similarly blurred. "I'm getting poor definition in the view aft," Peerssa volunteered. "The light is drastically redshifted." "And forward?" "This is not according to theory. I would have, expected more definition within the core. There must be a great deal of interstellar matter blocking the light. Even so... I need more data." Corbell didn't answer. A multiple star cluster had caught his eye, half frantically as they came toward him. They passed on the right, still jiggling madly, and froze in place as they came even. "The next time that happens, I'd like to see an uncorrected view." "I'll call you, but you won't see much." So here he was at the halfway point, with his destination in sight. No man before him could have seen the glow of the galactic core, or the frantically spinning star cluster flashing past at this close to lightspeed. His enemy's soul had become Corbell's slave. Corbell flies toward the core suns like a moth toward a flame, expecting death. But he has his victories. He finished his anonymous soup. Don Juan's kitchen andor chemistry lab supplied just enough taste, just enough variety, to keep a State non-citizen from cutting his throat. On such fare he must grow fat...and exercise to distribute the fat. Lately it tended to settle in a pot belly, which was no help at all. He was getting old. Despite the cold sleep tank and all the medicines available, he would be decrepit before they reached the core suns. His second life should have been more like his first. He had hoped to make friends, to carve out some kind of career...he had been frozen at age forty-four, there would have been time...time even for a marriage, children... Things would look better when he had built up some strength. He could go on an oxygen drunk. On request Peerssa would fill the cabin with pure oxygen, while lecturing Corbell on the adverse medical effects for as long as Corbell would let him. "About now you usually start telling me my duty," he said, "There's no point," said Peersa. "We're decelerating now. We'll be among the core suns before we can brake to a stop." Corbell smiled. "Anyone but you would have given up sooner. Expand my view of the core suns, please." The hub of the galaxy rushed toward him. Dark clouds with stars embedded in them surrounded a bright core. They looked like churning storm clouds. They had changed position since his last waking period. But the core itself was a flat featureless glow, except for a single bright point at the center. "The interstellar matter must be almighty thick in there. Can our ram fields handle it?" "If we give up thrust and settle for shielding the life support system and nothing else, you'll be amazed at what we can handle." "I'll be dying anyway, of old age." "Corbell, there is a way you can go home again." " Dammit , Peerssa, have you been lying to me?" "Calm down, Corbell. There is a way to make you young, if you're didn't raise the subject before." "I sure can. Why now? Why would you do this for someone who betrayed your precious State?" "Things have changed, Corbell. By now we may be the last remnants of the State. And you weren't even a citizen." "And you are?" "I am a human personality imposed on a computer's memory banks. I could never be a citizen. You could have been. Such as you are, you may well represent the State. The State may not survive the seventy thousand years we will be gone. You are worth preserving." "Thank you." Unreasonably, Corbell was touched. "The State may exist only in your memory. I'm glad you forced me to teach you Speech. I'm glad I told you so much about myself. You must live." "Make me young," Corbell said with the fervor of a man growing The Jargoon Pard An incredibly entertaining sword-and-sorcery fantasy..."Dazzling." old much too fast. "What does it take?" "We have the equipment to take a clone from you. You surely find nothing strange about the concept of cloning?" "We kntfw about it. Cloning of carrots, anyway. But -- " "We can clone men. We can clone you. Let the individual grow in sensory deprivation, in your cold sleep tank. We can record your memories and play them into the clone's blank mind." "How? Oh, of course, the computer link." The link was a direct telepathic control over the computer. Corbell had never dared use it. He had been doubly afraid of it since Peersa became the computer. Peerssa might use it to take him over. Peerssa said, "We will also need Corbell yelped. "You're talking about grinding me up into chemically leeched hamburger!" "I'm talking about making a young man of you." "It wouldn't be me, you madman!" "The new individual would be as much Jaybee Corbell as you are." "Thanks! Thanks a lot! You told me what happened to the real Jaybee Corbell. A brainwiped criminal! No, thanks. There isn't going    Six months later he was not ready for the cold sleep tank. "You've been shirking your exercises," Peerssa said. Corbell had just finished an exercise period. Tendonitis had led him to favor his arms, these past two months, but they hurt anyway, two hot wires in his shoulders. "It's your schedule," he grumbled. "I would have to thaw you early. Coming out of cold sleep is a trauma. You want to reach the galactic core in optimum condition. Take another two months awake." "Fine. I hate that damn tank anyway." Corbell slumped in a web chair. In near-free fall he was too prone to lose muscle tone. His pot belly protruded. He had nobody else to talk to, and Peerssa had endless patience. It should have been good timing when Peerssa said, "Have you given any thought to regaining your youth?" Corbell shuddered. "Forget it." Hastily, "I don't mean that literally. If you wipe it from your memory banks you'll only think of it again later." "I take it you've cancelled your command. What is your objection?" "It's ugly." "As things stand now, you will die of aging on the return voyage. The cold sleep treatment is not enough." "I will not be ground up for hamburger. Not again." "You know the details of Don Juan's excrement recycling system. Do you find that ugly?' ' "Since you ask, yes." "But you eat the food and drink the water." Corbel! didn't answer. "You would be a young man when it was over." "No. No, I would not." Corbell was shouting. "I would be hamburger! Contaminated hamburger, garbage to be recycled for the fob-benefit of your damn' clone! He wouldn't even be a good copy, because you'd be shoving some of your own thoughts in through the computer link!" "You have no loyalty to anything but yourself." Corbell thought: I can shut him up. Any time. He said, "Whatever it is I am, I'll settle for it." "The only man who ever saw the galactic core. A wonderful thing." Peerssa had had time and practice to develope that sarcastic tone. "What will you do afterward, once your sole ambition in life is satisfied? Will you order me to self-destruct? A grand funeral pyre for your ending, a fusion flame that alien eyes might see?" Then Corbell did Peerssa an injustice. "Is that what's been bothering you? Tell you what," he said. "After we have our look around the core suns, why don't we drop some package probes on appropriate planets? You can reach Earth alive. By the time the State sends ships, the algae will have turned some reducing atmospheres to oxygen atmospheres. You can take my mummy home, too, in the cold sleep tank. Maybe they'll want it for a museum." "You will not be young again?" "We've been through that." "Very well. Will you go to the Womb Room, please? I have a great deal to show you." Mystified and suspicious, Corbell went. Peerssa had set up displays in the Womb Room walls. There was a greatly enlarged, slightly blurred view of the galactic core as Corbell had seen it six months ago: drastically flattened, the glow of the suns blurTed by interstellar matter. There was a contrasting enlargement of the center of the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. There was a diagram: an oddly contoured disc cut down the center. Corbell frowned, wondering where he had seen that before. Peerssa spoke as he settled himself in the control chair. "I have never known why you chose the galactic axis as your destination. I may never understand that." The core of Andromeda Galaxy glowed with colored lights. Corbell pointed. "For that. For beauty. For the same reason I once went through the Grand Canyon on muleback. Can you imagine a planet on the edge of that sphere? The nightsl" "I can do better. I can put it before you, by extrapolation." And Peerssa did. Corbell's chair floated above a dark landscape. The sky was jammed with stars competing for space, big and little, red and blue and pure white, and a spinning pair that threw out a spiral of red gas. The sky turned. A wall of blackness rose in the east, ten thousand cubic light years of dust cloud...and then the Womb Room was as it had been, while Corbell was still gaping. "I could have done that before your first term in the cold sleep tank. We could have completed your mission, seeded the worlds assigned to you, and I could have displayed that sky for you at any time. Why didn't you say something?" "It's not real. Peerssa, didn't any of your aristocrats ever go cruising through, say, Saturn's rings, just for the joy of it?" "For the mining possibilities -- " "Mining. If they said that, they lied." "Are you sorry you came?" Why had he kept on? Knowing that the trip would take more than twentyone years, that it would take his life , had not changed his mind. Corbell the reconstituted corpsicle would never carve out a normal life for himself. Very well, he would do something memorable. "No. Why should I be sorry? I expected strangeness in the galactic core. I was right, wasn't I? It's nothing like other galaxies, and I'm the first to know it." "You're insane. Imagine my amazement. Never mind. Your choice has had unforeseen consequences. We expected a close-packed a quarter to half a light year apart, with red giant suns predominating. Instead, we find this: the matter in the core forced into a disc that flattens drastically toward the center, with a tremendously powerful source of infrared and radio energy at the axis." "Like your diagram?" "Yes, very like this diagram which I find in my data banks, a representation of the structure of the accretion disc around the black hole in Cygnus X-l." "Oh!" He had not seen that diagram during his rammer training. His rammer training had not even told him how to avoid stellar-sized black holes, because there were none to be expected on his planned course. He had seen something very like that diagram in an article in Scientific American! "Yes, Corbell. Your wonderland of lights is being absorbed by a black hole of galactic mass. Its spin must be enormous, from the way it has flattened the mass of stars around it. Eventually the entire galaxy may disappear into -- Corbell? Are you ill?" "No," Corbell said, his hands covering his face, muffling his voice. "Don't be depressed. This is our chance for life." "What?" "A thin chance to see Earth again before you die. A unique experience, win or lose. Isn't that what you want? Let me explain..." IV At the thirteenth awakening he tried to sit up too fast. He woke again, dizzy, flat on his back in the coffin, with Peerssa calling his ear. "Corbell! Corbell?" "Here. Where would I go?" "Be more careful. Lie there for a minute." Lean as death he was, and old. Arthritis grated in his knobby joints. With the familiar hunger came nausea. He ran a hand over his scalp -- he had been half bald when he entered Forest Lawn -- and more of his hair came away. "Where are we?" "One month from target and closing. The view will please you." He emerged from the cold sleep tank like a sick Dracula. He made his limping way to the kitchen, then to the Health Club. His muscles were slack and tended to cramp. The exercises were hard on him. But the pain and the nausea and the creeping years meant little. He felt good. At worst he had found a brand new way to die. He asked of the ubiquitous microphones, "Suppose we go too far in? We won't ever die, will we? We'd be stopped above the Swartzchild radius." "Only to an outside observer. Not to ourselves. Are you about to change my orders?" Some minutes later he eased himself into the Womb Room chair. He sipped the last of the broth. "Full view." Don Juan raced above a sea of churning stars. In a normal galaxy they would have been crowded enough. Here, forced into a plane by the spin of the giant black hole at the center, they were crowded to death. Dying stars burned with a terrible light. They stood like torches in a field of candles. It must be common enough for star to ram star here, or for tides to rip stars apart. Commoner toward the center, Corbell thought. The center of the sea burned very bright ahead of him. He could see no dark dot at the axis. He hadn't expected to. "How far away are we in normal space?" "Rest space? Three point six light years." "No problems?" "I believe I can hold us above the plane of the disc until we have passed that very active swelling ahead of us, between two and three light years from the singularity." Corbell looked down at his drive flame, a wisp of white flame between his feet. It was dim. There was very little matter above the disc, he guessed, "Suppose you can't? Suppose we have to go through it?" "You'll never feel a thing. That region is where the stars lose their identity. They become streamers of dense plasma with nodules of neutronium in them. Most of the light comes fron there. Beyond, there is very great flattening and some radiation due to friction in the matter spiralling inward." "What about the black hole?" "I still don't have a view of it. I estimate a circumference of two ergosphere will be large. We should have no trouble choosing a path through it." "You said circumference?" "Should I have given you the radius? The radius of a black hole may be infinite." There was simply no grasping the size of that disc of crushed stars. It was like flying above another uniblack hole would almost have contained the orbit of Jupiter; but if Corbell could have seen past that swelling ahead, that Ring of Fire, he would have found the black hole invisibly small. Light caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a supernova glaring white-on-red. He'd just missed seeing a sun torn apart by spilled across the sky. He asked what he had never asked before. "Peerssa, what are you thinking?" "I don't quite know how to answer that." "Try." "I'm not thinking anything. My decisions are made. They are mathematically rigorous. I face no choices." "How are you going to find Earth?" "I know where Sol will be in " Three -- Won't it be more like seventy thousand?" "We're diving deep into a tremendous gravity field. Time will be compressed for us. The black hole is large enough that tides will not tear us apart, but we'll lose almost fusion motor. What more can I do? The odds are finite that we will find Sol. Or the State may have spread of space before we arrive." "The odds are finite. Peerssa, you're strange." But Corbell felt no urge to laugh. Seventy thousand years BC, there had been Neanderthal Man and a few Cro-Magnon, nothing but a club-swinging, meateating ape. What would inhabit the    Now Corbell spent most of his time in the Womb room, watching the accretion disc swirl past. He liked the uncorTected view, the display that showed the universe distorted by Don Juan's velocity. ' Since turnover the ship had shed most of its Tau factor. Don Juan had been moving faster after Corbell's first term in the cold sleep tank. But it was still traveling near lightspeed, and accelerating steadily under the pull of a point-source one the Sun. The accretion disc showed rainbow-colored ahead of him, with the Ring of Fire a violet-white hill coming near. The stars were jammed together; you couldn't tell one from the next unless the next had exploded. They graded back through the rainbow until the sea of flame behind Don Juan was deep red and frozen in place, with the occasional supernova showing yellow-white or greenish-white. The Ring of Fire -- the swollen region where the heat trapped within the streaming star-stuff grew even more powerful than the black hole's compression effect -- came near. It was blinding-bright before Corbell gave up. "Reduce that light," he said, half-covering his eyes. "I've cut it to ten percent. Let me know when I must cut it again." "Are you all right? Will it bum out your cameras?" "I think not. Remember, you were to dive almost into Sol to decelerate at the end of your mission. We can handle high intensities of light." The Ring of Fire was a flattened doughnut twenty light years in circumference, a quarter of a light year thick: four or five cubic light years of green-to-blue-white star, with every possible grade of fusion and fission going on in it. As if Hell were a tremendous mountain...coming near...and Don Juan crossed it on a fan of fusion flame, thrusting hard. Corbell felt the thrust drop away. He sat forward as the ship dropped along the inner gradient and left the Ring of Fire behind, a dull red wall. The inner accretion disc was drastically thinner, savagely compressed. Corbell peered toward where the black hole ought to be. All he saw was more star-matter, hurtingly violetwhite at the center. It was all happening terribly fast now. Minutes left, or seconds. Peerssa was firing the attitude jets at strange angles. There were no stars to see in this inner disc: no detail at all. It was as uniform as peanut butter. "It's all neutronium," said Peerssa. "It even has some of neutronium's crystalline structure, but that structure is constantly breaking up. I can see the X-ray flashes, like ripples." "I wish I had some of your senses." "The computer link -- " "No." Behind them the Ring of Fire reddened further and was gone. The inner disc grew brighter and bluer and was suddenly past. In the last instant Corbell saw the black hole. The onboard fusion drive roared beneath him, slammed him down into his chair. Light exploded in his face. It resolved: a blaze of violet light ahead of him, a broad ring of embers around it. Elsewhere, black. Peerssa. said, "There is something we must discuss." "Wait a minute. Give me a chance to resume breathing." Peerssa waited. Corbell said, "It's over? We lived through that?" "Yes." "Well done." "Thank you." "What's happening now?" "Firing a reaction drive within the ergosphere of a black hole has driven us dangerously near lightspeed. I am using the ram fields to ward interstellar matter from us. I won't be able to use them as a drive until we can shed some velocity. We will reach the vicinity of Sol in thirteen point eight years, ship's time, unless we overshoot." years?" "Yes. Corbell, I must have your opinion. Will the State have colCorbell laughed a little shakily. "We'll be lucky if there's anything like human beings left. I can't guess years! I wish there'd been another way to do it." He stood up. He was suddenly ravenous. Peerssa answered. "I was ordered to preserve your life and the integrity of the ship, but never your convenience. My loyalty is to the State." Corbell stopped. "What's that supposed to mean?" "There was another way to use the black hole, once we knew it existed. At midpoint we could have continued to accelerate. We would have spent perhaps eighty years reaching the galactic hub. If we passed near enough to the black hole, its spin would have bent our hyperbolic path back upon itself, though we would still have been well outside the ergosphere. Another eighty years of ship's time would have returned us to Sol, seventy thousand years after your departure." "You thought of that? And you didn't do it?" "Corbell, I have no data on the nature of water empires. I had to take your word entirely." "What are you talking about?" His answer came in Corbell's recorded voice. " think the State could last seventy thousand years. See, these water empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. But it takes that push. There's no revolution in a water empire." Corbell said, "I don't -- " " A water empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But Peerssa, the State doesn't have any outside." " -- I don't understand." "The State could last seventy thousand years or more, because all of humanity was part of the State. There were no barbarian hordes waiting hungrily for the State to show weakness. The State could have grown feeble beyond any precedent, feeble enough to fall before the hatred of a single barbarian. You, Corbell. You." "Me." "Did you exaggerate the situation? I thought of that, but I couldn't risk it, and I couldn't ask." He's a computer. Perfect memory, rigid logic, no judgement. I forgot. I talked to him like a human being, and now"You have heroically saved the State from me. I'll be damned." "Was the danger unreal? I couldn't ask. You might have lied." "I never wanted to overthrow the damn government. All I wanted was a normal life. I was only forty-four years old! I didn't want to die!" "You could never have had what you called a normal life. It was already impossible on twenty-one ninety. Corbell could have lived a normal life by dying of cancer." "I just didn't...didn't see it." "I hoped you would accept the cloning method. I could have used the computer link to alter the clone's attitudes." "Shut up." Silence. "I just don't want to talk for awhile, okay? Just take me home."  Give to the college of your choice! The smell of fresh tree moss when he woke reminded him of something. He blinked back the sleep from his eyes, but could not drive out the numbness in his mind. What was it? He could remember the night before, saw a picture of himself kicking the old moss out the hole in the wall. Somthing about this new day. He remembered squashing the bugs and giggling, and, yes, singing -- over and over, in the cadence of his early school lessons: "Tomorrow I'll be a teacher; tomorrow I'll be a teacher; tomorrow I'll be a teacher." That was it: this was the day, the day he had pictured in his mind for so long. How long? As long as he could remember -- as far as he knew, forever. It was in those early classes that Burnface first dreamed of being a teacher. Before starting school his only interest had been to quiet his restless stomach. He fouhd early that meant being the strongest, fighting to keep what food came his way, taking what food he could. In school the food and being strong became tied up in his mind -- he did not know how -- with the teacher. The teacher was strong, the teacher had food, he threw the food out at the square and his women took what they wanted. Later his mind began to focus on the teacher even when he was not thinking of food, and for the first time Burnface invested interest, emotion, in something outside himself. He was jolted into a sense of awe at this man's swaggering power, his unquestioned authority, the way he knew all the important things there were to know. He had seen six teachers since coming to school, counting Shouter. Only one, the first -- he couldn't remember his name, the one who talked and moved fast -- had finished his two summers and gone to the college. Burnface never thought about the college, that was too far in the future; his mind did not even grasp the possibility. To be a teacher was enough. It was more than other students considered. They were content to finish school and remain in the city where there was food and safety. Burnface rolled off the moss to his feet. Fog hung thick on the river, less so than on the bank, so that from the hole in the wall he could see the city in its haze of fog. He could smell the river without seeing it, the smell of summer: heavy and pungent, not like the fresh smell of spring, when the water rose on its banks and heavy logs twisted like trapped cattle, their flanks shining with water. He stepped through the debris at the hole to the damp earth and left the building without looking back at what had been his home all this time. To do so would have been to weigh an abstraction, a task he always found too difficult to complete. He found it easier to think in simple images, clear pictures in his mind of himself less hungry, more feared -- a teacher. He could see himself now as a teacher, striding back and forth in front of the class, towering over them on the platform, reciting the lessons again and again. He had learned them well over the years, knew them by heart; that was all he needed. When the teacher from college came there would be no mistakes. But if he thought in concrete images, his mind was seldom clouded with emotions, and what faced him in the city neither frightened nor excited him. Unnumbered summers ago, the day his mother pushed him away and refused to feed him, he had gone to the school boys' building by the river without looking back, and within a few days his mother and the working girls' building in the city faded into a part of his mind from where he could not call them back. He had sat on his haunches in a cluttered comer and watched the other boys, learning where to get food and where to sleep. He bullied another boy out of a dry spot at the back of the building. (He had already learned to sort boys into two groups in his mind: those who were stronger and those who were weaker. As he got older fewer and fewer proved themselves stronger). As with the food he had to fight to keep this space of his own, rub his scent into it and drive the others away. The best sleeping place, he soon found, was at the hole in the wall. The boys there had a better chance at night of catching the rats which came up from the river to smell out the com left to attract them. When he was feared more, Burnface installed himself at the hole and then got most of the rats, and sometimes a snake looking for the rats. Once he woke to the sound of a wild dog nervously sniffing at the opening. When it crossed the threshhold Burnface shot it, but the dog struggled even more than the boy in whose place he slept. To still it he had to take one of the bricks from the crumbling wall and smash its head. It was the first time in his life that his stomach wassilent. When he could eat no more he continued to nibble at the meat, refusing out of long habit to yield the remains to the boys who were silently crouching around him. After a period of confusion, his mind sleepy from the food, he finally flung the carcass out the hole and it was tom apart at the joints in the ensuing struggle. Burnface made his way to the river. The river was low, and he had to step through the sucking mud to cup water to his face. He drank deep, his body telling him he would not have another chance in the city. At the teachers' building he would not have to get his own water and food -- Shouter's women would do that -- but he was not thinking this now. Leaving the river, he traced the footpath by the bank toward the hard road that led to school, conscious only of the mud on his legs starting to dry and itch. A few steps ahead, where another path led through the brush to the river, he saw a movement and then the blur of someone darting across the path. Burnface instinctively began slapping his thigh in warning. It was a working girl, followed closely by two of the boys from school. Across the path the first boy caught her by the hair, and the girl wheeled with a sneer and flailing feet. But the other quickly buried his knee in her back and struggled to pull the girl's arms behind her. None of them had noticed Burnface, who approached slapping his thigh with an open palm. Hearing the sound, the boys froze, and turned to track its source. When they saw Burnface they scrambled through the brush, spinning the girl around and knocking her to the ground in their flight. The working girl lifted her face to him, pulling her upper lip to reveal a full set of shining teeth. She was hardly grown yet, with small breasts and sparse body hair. On any other day he would have done her himself, even though she was not in the mood -- probably not old enough to be in the mood. He preferred it that way, would rather take a girl who was not in the mood than the ones at the stadium who lay on the ground impatient for the boys to decide their turns. Something in their kicking and scratching excited him the way backing off another boy excited him. But now he was only thinking of being a teacher and even this sneering girl could not distract him, so rather than take her Burnface sneered back, and the girl jumped to her feet and was gone. He continued to the black road and followed it toward the school. The sun was low and the road not yet hot on his feet. He could see the large round stadium from the road and behind it pictured the school. Before all the other images had faded except that of being teacher, Burnface had shared the others' ambition of becoming one of the top boys at the stadium. As a child he sat on the sidelines while his mother joined the games in the field, puzzled at first by the noise and confusion. He continued to come after leaving his mother, his interest growing with time, and soon he was slapping thighs with the other boys on the sidelines, sometimes mimicking the activities in the field with girls who were no i RRrf Donald A. Wollheim, Publisher I and possibly his only-ever sf novel ; ; I not set on Gor, has the Gor ! ; touch -- a hero that makes Tarzan !  ; look pale, and a heroine you won't : ; i easily forget. And the D'Achille ; ! cover alone is worth a separate ; ' ; price of admission! : ! ; (UWI #  #) ' i For modern time courage set in ; ; ! the future, we have Gordon R. ; '  tainly the year for Dorsai and ! ; ! war-gamers -- and Dickson is not to ; ; ; be missed! Match this with your  self which is coming up in February. ; ; ! (UW##) ;;  the best thing he's ever done -- a ! ; I marvelous construction of an alien  ; ! world with a strange astronomical ; twist and a crisis that involves atl  ! ; life thereon. (UY# #) I ; winds up the power-packed trilogy ; of the coming of a new god -- or I ;  was it a demon -- into the world of ; ; I the future It stands on its own, ;  ! too: it's different; it's fabulous. And I  the cover by Mike Whelan is a I ; lovely! (UW#  #)  I lector's item, send #e in stamps ' ' I to:  I #th FI. ; ; I #I Avenue of the Americas I New York, N.Y. # I   ! L more ready than he. That was before he went to school, before he had his gun. Then the games became serious, and being strong in the field became tied up in his mind with food the way being a teacher had. The boys who won turns with girls in the field took his food, and his mind came to learn that winning girls in the field meant getting more food. Once when he was chasing a lizard among the rotten boards at the top of the stadium he looked down at the field and from that distance could have seen the logic which guided the confusing activity below. Could have seen, but did not. His mind would have had to sort things out and compare them. He knew all he had to know, that the big circle of grass in the center of the field was the best circle, the one that all the boys tried to get a place on, even when rain turned its center to matted grass and mud. The first girl to arrive each afternoon always went to this circle and frettingly stalked its border -- a border worn bare by that girl and countless before her. Outward from the center area were less distinct circles, with the ones at the periphery of the stadium of ambiguous shape because of less frequent walkings. The girls in the circles guarded their borders until the boys came. Whenever two of them came to a point where their areas were closest, they flashed their teeth and kicked up dirt with their feet, just as they did when a girl without an area of her own came near. It was in one of the smaller circles at the edge of the stadium that Bumface won his first victory, and after that he took food at the square from all those on the sidelines, as the boys in the field had taken his food in the past. Only girls in the mood for the , games came each afternoon. When a girl stopped coming she returned after a matter of days unless her stomach began swelling with a child. These stayed at the working girls' building during the day and watched the children who were too young to go to the fields. When Burnface first started the games he rushed to the stadium each evening after eating, eager like a girl in the mood to claim some advantage over his rivals. After he was feared more he came late, knowing that even if a circle was full he could bully another boy away. Burnface learned to feel in his muscles when another boy was weaker. He was more certain of a boy's movements than his words, and knew from his own muscles if he was faster. He could walk around a circle where boys had spaced themselves out with threats, where there was not room for another, and could feel when someone on the circle was weak. He felt his own body tensing, leaning forDonald A, Wollheim, Publisher ! Dray Prescot is back with an allI ; ; series. Alan Burt Akers has put a I ; ; great deal of background into this ; ; ' one. With five interior illustrations  ' ! and a great cover by Jack ' : ; Gaughan. ' ' ## (UY# #) !; ; ' The Irjsh, the Scots and the ; ;  ! Welsh -- with grass-colored skin -- ; ;  ! need a little, dark-colored Indian ; ' ; scientific genius to track down ' ! I son does a fine job. PW calls this ! ; ! I an... intelligent, well-paced thril; ; ! ; ler, with excellent and varied ; ' characterizations." ! ## (UY# #) !; ; Don't kiss the mad scientist's  ; ; pretty wife or you may end up taking # year naps in a wild experi Dr. Dumpus's Dose. ! ;; ## (UY # #) !  ! by Gregory Kern is space opera ! ! for those who like it. Kern has ; ! I ; been translated into Dutch, Ger' I ;  man, Japanese, Swedish and ! ;  i British! ;  I; ## (UY#I #)  ; ; Alan Burl Akers, the one that went ; ; ' out of print the fastest, the third ; ; ; ! novel in the Dray Prescot saga is ; i ' ; back with a new cover for those ; !  who don't have it. ' ; ; ## (UY# #) ! : I by Tanith Lee yet?(UWI I # ; : i.#) ; ; ; # -- www -- ward and backward in rhythm with his hands, could feel the tension build, and knew when he could build it more, when the boy was about to give way. He knew when to stop tho tension, knew when he could not win. Once he obtained a place on a circle he found his hands begin to slap in rhythm with the others -- a slow, measured beat. The first serious challenge came when one of the boys stepped across the border into the grassy area. Everyone slapped their thighs faster, but if no one else crossed the line the boy had first chance with the girl in the ring. If someone challenged him by stepping into the circle, all slapping stopped except for those two. Between them it increased, sometimes to a frenzy. When Bumface was in the ring he watched the other boy's hands, the quickness of his hands, compared them with his own to know if he could take him. The guns were used only if one of the boys stopped slapping his thighs and put his hands out to the side. This seldom happened at the stadium, partly because the priorities had long been established between the boys, and partly because most of them would get a turn with a girl in one of the circles. Shooting fights usually started when a new boy tried to establish a position in a group. Bumface had never lost a fight. He only challenged someone if he was sure he could beat him. Bumface continued down the black road to the stadium, stopping at the working girls' building opposite it. All the girls were at the fields or the river, except for those who cared for the infants. One of these stood at the entrance, watching a child in the street pick through a pile of cobs for pieces of com. She flashed her teeth at Bumface even though she felt safe from him here. The child scurried into her arms, his legs clasping her swollen waist. The girl's face registered no memory in his mind, though he had been the last to have her before she stopped coming to the stadium. Past the working girls' building the road broadened into a large square. Faded lines, straight like the one down the road, were scattered about. This square where he ate, cluttered with the refuse of past meals, was the focus of all meaning in his mind. At one end was the stadium and the working girls' building, and at the other, in a line, the college, the teachers' building, and the school. The square was the one place besides the stadium where the school boys and the working girls came together. Each afternoon the girls came down the black road to the square with the fish they caught in nets at the river, carrying or dragging them on sticks pushed through their mouths and out their gills. The teachers gathered on the ledge above the square and threw out com brought from the college. At irregular intervals a teacher was sent to bring one of the cattle from the pens by the river. They dragged it bellowing down the black road, tight thongs of leather choking off its air when it struggled, its nose blowing bubbles of mucus and sweat striping its flanks. The children ran around the animal and prodded it with sticks to rekindle its fighting spirit. At the square one of the teachers took a large knife and struck a blow across its neck. Sometimes it died immediately, but other times the animal summoned its final strength to break free, spraying blood as the children chased it around the square. The teacher stripped its skin, which was used to make the belts on which the school boys carried their guns. Then a heavy knife hacked out portions of meat for the eager crowd. During the frequent years when com ran out, the teachers from the college led raids on the outlaws' lands which began some three days' journey across the river. Most of the outlaws lived alone in caves in the hills or under rude leantos covered with branches. Finding their hidden corn was a troublesome task seldom rewarded by the sight of an outlaw fleeing in the distance -- usually too far to catch or shoot. The raiding party always searched the place where a small band of outlaws lived together in a group of huts made out of logs -- so sturdy that not even Bumface with his strong arms and legs could knock them down. These outlaws not only planted a large field of corn each year, but had cattle as well, which in their haste were sometimes left behind. Teachers from the college led the raiding party, and even school teachers obeyed them without question. In the city they kept guard over the store of grain in the college, and supervised the planting and harvest each year. They guarded as well the secrets of making guns and tools used in the fields. From the working girls' building Bumface saw the black billows of smoke rising from the college. This smoke had something to do with the guns, but how they made guns with fire he had never ventured to guess. As he crossed the square Burnface had to make his way through piles of cobs and scattered bones. A layer of soot covered the square and the surrounding buildings, making it difficult to see the sharp bones. In the winter when it was cold the cobs would be used with stalks from the harvest to make fires, but the bones would remain. He came at last to the school. Next to it was the teachers' building, where he would live after today. Except for the college it was the best building in. the city, with steps that went up to a second floor, and windows covered with cowhides to keep out the cold of winter and the heat of summer. Shouter had five women, Bumface knew. When he was teacher he could add to that number. One of them was small and skinny. He never pictured her with him when he thought of living in the teachers' building. When lJurnface entered the school the other boys were already there. He had not pictured it that way when he thought about this day; in his mind he was at the school before the other boys arrived. Shouter had started class: "Man is the best. He is not stronger than the bull, but he is the best. He is not faster than the dog, but he is the best. A man's gun makes him as strong as the bull and as fast as the dog. Man shoots, so he is the best. Only outlaws and women don't shoot. If a man does not shoot, then the dog is as good as man, the woman and the outlaw is as good as man." There were murmurs around the room; there were always murmurs around the room when he said that. Shouter was the best teacher he had ever seen. He made many motions with his hands and body, and stalked up and down the aisles when he taught. It was almost time for the harvest. Shouter would go to the college at this harvest. Shouter loved to taunt the class and dare them to fight. When he went around the class and pressed his grin against the students they would shrink back. He did not know that Burnface was not afraid, that he was just waiting until he was ready. Every time Shouter fought with one of the students or showed them how to draw a gun, Burnface pictured in his mind and felt in his muscles how fast his own gun would be drawn. For some time the picture in his mind had shown him to be faster than Shouter. Most fights broke out when a new teacher started, with fewer after that if no one could beat him. There were always some, usually the ones who were new or who did not practice each day like Burnface. The most fights Burnface had ever seen were after the teacher who talked fast went to the college without being beaten. Fights continued for many days before a new teacher could not be beaten. Shouter loved to fight, loved to make the students afraid, he was good at that. If he killed a student he took his gun, left him on the floor, and kept teaching. Once they had gone through a whole class listening to a boy gurgling in his throat, unable to move and unable to die. Another day they came to class to find the boy from yesterday still there, all stiff, with flies covering his chest and the floor where blood had spilled out. Whenever Shouter killed it was the one time he did not teach things in the right order. He went back to the part about how to kill and started over there. He walked around the room, sticking the barrel of his gun against parts of the students' bodies, reciting the lesson: "If you shoot a boy in the eye, he will die; if you shoot a boy in the ear, he will die; if you shoot a boy in the mouth, he will die;..." Student after student, until he finished the lesson. Then he started the lesson over again, until he had gone around the room. Although it frightened the other students, it excited Burnface. He dreamt at night of going from student to student himself, pressing his gun against them: "If you shoot a boy in the heart, he will die. If you shoot a boy in the face, he will die, but if you miss him in the face he will shoot you. If you miss the heart you will still be able to kill him if you don't miss the heart by much, because if you hurt him near the heart he won't be able to shoot and you can shoot him again." Worse than losing a fight was living afterwards, outlawed: "A boy without a gun is an outlaw and is no better than a dog." If someone lived after being shot in class or at the stadium, his gun was taken away and he was sent out of the city to spend his days planting crops like a woman, running from the city boys who raided his fields. Some never made it to where the black road crossed high over the river. When children saw them wounded and without their gun, they taunted them with sticks the way they taunted the cattle. When Burnface went on raids he sometimes saw their bones along the road leading to the outlaws' lands. Although the outlaws had no women, their number was added to each year, mostly from the stadium, for almost all of the other boys wanted the girls more than they wanted to be teacher. Shouter was starting to say the part about how to draw the gun, and when he was done the class would be over. This was the part in Burnface's picture where he shot Shouter. "Shouter!" Burnface was on his feet, his hands away from his body. Shouter looked over the class with a puzzled expression. When he saw Burnface he smiled, his hands motionless. Burnface slapped his thighs and put his hands to the side again. Still Shouter only smiled. It had not been like this in the picture in his mind -- Again Burnface slapped his thighs and put his arms out. This time Shouter put his arms out also. As he reached his hand to his gun he saw Shouter doing the same, and every thing seemed to go slower than it should. With one smooth motion he lifted his gun ("Pull it straight up or it might get stuck in the belt"), crouched down ("If you bend down like this a boy cannot shoot you as easy"), and brought his hand across the striker ("You can pull it back like this, but if you hit it with your hand like this, it is faster"). Burnface saw Shouter turn a little towards the side that his shooting hand was on and lean back up against the wall, so that his feet held him up in a stooped position. At the same time he heard a ringing sound at the back of the room. Then he saw a spot of red appear on the side of Shouter's chest near his shooting arm. Burnface was already pulling the striker on his gun back to shake the shell out and reaching down to take another bullet from one of the slits in his belt. He looked back at Shouter as he was pushing the new bullet into the barrel. From his crouched position Shouter was doing the same, but slower, and now Burnface smiled. This was like one of his pictures. As he raised his gun again he saw Shouter's eyes open wide like a boy does when he is afraid. He had never seen Shouter afraid before. This time the red spot came faster -- in the middle of Shouter's chest, engulfing the dark black hair. He slid further down the wall and then fell sideways, hitting his head on the floor. Burnface was putting another bullet into his gun as he walked to the front of the room. Shouter was not moving. He stuck the gun back into his belt, turned to the class, and looked from face to face. Everyone's eyes were wide. "Iam teacher!" No one moved, and some of the students looked away. "Go!" The students rushed for the doorway and fought their way out of the school. Burnface stared out over the empty room for a long time and then left. He crossed to the teachers' building and pushed the door open. It was vacant inside. He walked to where the hall turned. Down the hall he saw one of the teachers standing outside a room. He put his hands out to the side when he saw Bumface. "I am teacher!" The teacher kept his hands out to the side. "Who is dead?" "Shouter." The teacher put his hands down and pointed back in the direction from which he had come. "Go up the stairs." He walked back to the door and saw the steps going to the second floor. At the top of the steps was one of Shouter's women, who fled down the hallway and into a room. Bumface followed her. The rest of Shouter's women were there. "I am teacher!" The women backed away from him. Bumface, pointed to the small, skinny woman: "Go!" The girl jumped as if struck, and crept past Burnface with wide eyes. None of them moved, and Bumface struggled in his mind to find the next words. Then one of the women in the back of the room, an older girl with heavy legs, pushed her way through and came up to Bumface. She began combing the matted hair on his chest with her fingertips as she crooned: "Teacher, teacher, teacher!"  One of my pleasures in life is new books on new subjects. Like most writers, I love to have written but hate to write. I put up with these enforced intervals of being chained to a typewriter because I can make a good living while indulging myself in an orgy of magazines and books; indeed, because I am a science fiction writer, there is literally nothing I can't show to be relevent to my business, and thus I can subscribe to a dozen science and technology magazines, buy the entire output of the Library of Science, take trips to Greece, inspace companies to send me their technical reports... No, I can't keep up with everything I should, but I can try, and not feel guilty about wasting time, and when I lire of reading, I can always take long walks with a notebook and plot a new novel. (It's not the planning of a book that's onorous work, it's sitting in this damned room with the door closed and pounding on this infernal machine...) Anyway. I read a lot, and try to keep up with what's important for the future; and I like it. Now, most of what I read is hard science. It isn't that I don't want to read speculative social science; there just isn't much of it, and most of what there is is written by my colleagues in the sf business. Thus it was with great pleasure that I found I'd been sent a review of Anthropology in Outer Space" (Random House, #, A Vintage Paperback Original; #, # pp.). The book is edited by Magorah Maruyama and Arthur Hawkins, and a word about the editors is appropriate. Maruyama has a PhD. in philosophy and an apparently distinguished academic career; he is now a professor of systems science at Portland State University. Hawkins has a Ph.D. from Kansas and is an associate professor of education and sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Minnesota. The book is a collection of essays, and generally impressive academic credentials are given for the contributors. The two editors have been instrumental in organizing "cultural futuristics symposia" at meetings of the American Anthropological Association. In other words, this ought to be quite a book. Anthropologists, I am told, understand the dynamics of human culture. They study the real nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts of society. Their speculations should not be mere hodge-podges of incompatible detail, but dynamic working models. Moreover, the senior editor of the book is a professor of "systems science." Now I was once a systems scientist, at least according to my job title in the aerospace industry; and there, at least, there is the pretense if not actuality that systems engineers and scientists have some elementary knowledge about all the disciplines that impinge on their work . collection of essays: it is a collection of prize-winning essays, the eight winning and thus presumably best essays on the topic of extraterrestrial communities submitted to a contest open not only to anthropologists, but also to free lance writers and "technologists." The best of anthropology, edited by a systems scientist; this should be speculative social science with rivets. I could hardly wait to read it.    Alas. The book opens with the obligatory essay denouncing poor old Western logic. The senior editor, Maruyama, says "More specifically, this book challenges the homogenistic, universalistic philosophy -- the belief in one truth and one logic -- which is erroneously considered to be the basis of 'scientific' thinking but which is now proving to be unscientific." We've all heard that one before, usually as prelude to some slipshod thinking the writer was too lazy to tighten up. Well, all right, though; that kind of talk is popular in some quarters, and might sell some books. Let's see how this book challenges our homogenistic beliefs in one truth. Sigh. Do we see anything really new? Anything imaginative? No. Instead, there are several essays just crammed with pontifical tripe. There are the standard denunciations of the white man's treatment of the Indians, all told in the standard way. The non-homogenistic thinking turns out to be one-sided assertions about everything from Cortez to the current dispute over Black Mesa (which I've visited and I'd bet money the essayist hasn't) with no slightest hint that there may have been tragic inevitability in these past and present conflicts of culture. Well, all right; the anthropological profession, partly because it is excluded by treaty from the study of advanced technological civilizations, partly because most present-day intellectuals seem to delight in denouncing rather than understanding the modern world, is famous for its partiality to primitives. I would have thought these prize-winning essays might have something new to say on the subject, but after all, this too may be obligatory. Let's get to the heart of the book. There is an essay that presents us with interaction between an imaginative new human extra-terrestrial social order and a truly alien society. How can I, of all people, resist that? This essay, "The Planet Xeno", is by Shirley Ann Varughese, who in contrast to the other participants has no list of academic degrees, and is described as "interested in alternative life styles." She is also interested in alternative physics. Her human colony is on the planet Xeno, which "revolves around an earth-type sun." Presumably she means a Sol-type; no further data are given about Xeno's star. There are three planets in this system -- "plus one planetoid orbiting in a vertical plane."... "Xeno's orbit is slightly elliptical, their sun."... "The period is # standard days or # local days."... "The planet spins horizontally (as opposed to earth, which spins vertically) with poles to the east and west."... "Twice a local year, on local days # and #, the small planetoid (with a diameter of # miles and an orwithin # miles of the planet Xeno. This results in a minor gravitational flux on the planet. The planet Xeno has a diameter of # miles. Although this planet is larger, it weighs less than earth (arbund half as dense as earth, suggesting a lack of heavy metals.)" OK. Please don't fall over laughing. Let's go through it patiently. This is as good a place as any to give a short lesson on elementary planetary-system design; and I promise to keep the lesson short, the math simple, and the equations non-essential to the argument. In our homogenistic physics, the period P, distance from primary (or radius) r, and mass M are related by the equation, -- #  r (equation one) # T where G is our old friend the universal constant of gravitation and the other values are in absolute units. If we stick to relative units, we get rid of G and the constant; that is, if we give the period in Earth years, the mass in Solar masses, and the radius in Astronomical Units (one AU is the average distance from miles), the equation becomes, M P #  r # . (equation two) For Xeno, P  ##  # years, and r  ##  # AU. We plug that in the equation to find the mass of Xeno's sun, and discover to our horror # Solar masses. Their sun is a wretched red dwarf, and can't even have inhabitable planets. Now we look in a table of stellar types and find that a star of # Solar mass has a surface temperature of about #K (# for Old Sol) and radiates about # times as much energy as the Sun. We look in another table and find that Venus -- which is a bit closer to Sol than Xeno is to its sun -- receives # calories per square centimeter per minute. Multiply # by # and we find that Xeno gets # calcm # min, about twice what Jupiter gets and #-# of what Mars receives. It's going to be cold on Xeno. (All this information and more is Biaisdell Publishing Co., copyright there is a later edition than mine. It is an excellent source for would-be world builders, and very nearly a must for any sf writers' library.) Not really. Varughese next tells us, with a straight face, that Xeno is very hot; in fact, temperatures at the equator are above the boiling point of water, but tolerable at the poles. Of course that's meaningless, since the poles are "horizontal"; in fact, there's no attempt made to show the climate effects of that enormous axial tilt, so let's ignore it. The atmosphere of Xeno "is considered breathable." It has # carbon dioxide, # oxygen, # nitrogen, # hydrogen, and # trace elements. No pressure figures are given. Those who'd like to try living in # COs are welcome. I could go on, buy why bother? The physics are silly. There's nothing systematic about the design; just a jumble of gup thrown together to be different from Earth. Well, all right; she doesn't know any physics (although one might have expected the editors to insist on a systematic design), but we're after all interested mainly in the human and alien societies. Let's look at the aliens. Xeno is "under heavy clouds" all the time. Not much light gets to the surface; so little that Earthmen's houses need a large window area. This, of course affects the aliens: their eyes are "large, dark, nocturnal eyes mounted mid-head, which are designed to admit as much light as possible." Evidently her nonhomogenistic truth coincides with optical physics; now what do these Xenobians, who live in perpetual twilight, eat? Almost nothing. You see, they are plant men. Intelligent, of course. They photosynthesize. In the daytime they're active, rushing about building things; at night, though, because they have no efficient energy storage system, Xenobians become immobile. Again I could go on, but why? Our author knows no biology either. Neither, apparently, does her editor. Plants on Earth with its clear atmosphere can't manage locomotion because of energy limits, but plants on Xeno in perpetual twilight can. Yeah. Sure. All right; she knows neither physics nor biology, but what of sociology? Xeno is a mining community set in an extremely hostile environment. The mineral product, C, is of enormous value to mankind, and the colony has been planted by the United World Commission, which retains ultimate control of it. the population of Xeno, # women are sent for each man. Well, OK, transportation may be terribly expensive. But this place must produce. "The pressures of C production plus the harshness of the environment produces a spartan society. Skipping work assignments results in social ostracism or deportation." Given the way people have to live on Xeno, I'd have said deportation was a goal to work for, myself. Varughese justifies the # to I ratio on grounds that recruiting for this terrible place will be very difficult; tacitly, in other words, she consents to enslavement of those born on Xeno. They must work to produce this C for the rest of the human race. Well, that's been done before; so how is Xeno governed? Why, by democratic socialism, of course. Elected officials. A model constitution. And the locally enacted criminal code "includes special penalties for neglecting work assignments, smuggling C, and endangering the life of a colonist or of the entire colony. Punishment would not be severe and the main emphasis would be on the prevention and cure of crimes." Utopia among the inhabitants of Hell. With no incentive whatever, these people, not coerced by soldiers or otherwise threatened by the lives, for generations even, not to make their own world pleasant, but to produce C for those who don't even work there; and do so while establishing a criminal justice system more effective than any so far seen on Earth. Sure. Well, sociology's not such an exact science as physics; possibly some rational people will see this community as possible. But history's against it. Sure, there are ways to get Xeno colonials to sweat their tails off for the rest of us, but historically that's required heavy emotional appeals, or the prospect of great wealth and early retirement, or both. None of these is offered the Xeno colonist. Meanwhile, these colonists are organized into families of #: I man and # women. "All members of the family care for the children. Each child receives an equal amount of love and care from each one of the mothers, whether she is the natural mother or not." Now let's see: has that experiment been tried? Uh, yeah, in harems; the usual result was that when the old man died, the mothers vied to get their own kid set up as chief inheritor. Suleiman the Magnificent had his favorite son bowstringed due to a wife's intrigues; as a result Selim the Sot became Sultan. But this won't happen on Xeno, because we postulate that it won't. Jacob and Esau won't quarrel, and Sarah won't hate Ishmael. Again I could go on, but why bother? As with the physics, the sociology is absurd. Oh, I'm not saying that such a social order can't work, but I am saying we don't know how to make it work, and these anthropologists have given us absolutely no nuts and bolts; there's simply a description of what looks to me like an extremely unlikely social order. And you can find more interesting alternate societies in almost any issue of almost any sf magazine.    I'm sorry I was so rough on Varughese. It's not her fault. She submitted an essay with a good heart, and it's not her fault that she doesn't know enough physics, biology, anthropology, or sociology to make it work. Slush-pile readers for sf magazines see worse every day from good and gentle people whose only fault is having more ambition and drive than knowledge. But we can and should take to editors at Random House who allowed this garbage to be printed on the bodies of dead trees. How the hell can anyone have respect for the social sciences and "systems science" after seeing this nonsense lauded as a prizewinning essay? If that's what challenging nonhomogenistic science is all about, give me the homogeneous stuff. I'm tempted to throw away this essay. What have I done but belittle a few soft-headed people? I rarely review books, and almost never review a book I didn't like, so this seems a shabby thing to do. Why bother? I bother because it's important. There is a crying need for speculative social science, for an examination of the role of anthropology in outer space. This book pretends to be it, and that's what makes me angry: not that it attempts and fails, but that it doesn't attempt at all. It merely pretends. Look, social science has a hard job. Things don't stand still. There aren't any of those magic equations that so fascinated me when I read, in high school, the Foundation trilogy and deliberately planned my education so I could be the Hari Seldon of the XXth Century. Probably there won't ever be; attempts to use the methods of the exact sciences in the study of man and society have failed, often disastrously, and a good case can be made that they'll always fail. I happen to believe there's far more intuitive understanding of man and society in literature than scientific knowledge about the same; that there is "an operation called Verstehen" that escapes the most meticulous rat-runner with his Skinner box in the most scientific of psychology departments. But though I believe introspection may be more valuable than mathematics for understanding the nature of man, it does not follow that we can discard the hard knowledge we have from other disciplines. When I was in psychology graduate school, the physiologists were confident that within # years they'd understand human behavior on their terms; biochemistry and biophysics would retire psychology and sociology. Well, # years and more have gone by, and the physiologists are thrilled when they can show a chemical stimulus that may cause one ant to follow another. They haven't eliminated psychology or history. God forbid they ever will. (And in fact He has, one suspects.) But that most emphatically does not mean we can ignore what the physiologists have learned! Ye gods, many of what we were once certain were "functional psychoses" -- mental disorders caused by purely psycho-social factors -- are now known to be chemical poisoning; anyone treating those patients with psychotherapy is practicing sympathetic magic. Similarly, the "anthropologist of outer space" simply cannot afford ignorance of elementary space physics. Because we have good reason to reject monistic dogmatic "truths" about "human nature" does not mean we make a meaningful contribution to social science by praising nonsense as this book does. The social scientist has a damned hard row to hoe. I gave it up, because I do not think I will ever make a really significant contribution to the social sciences -- as a scientist. I'd have to be too careful. As a writer I can speculate, get far out, try something really wild. As a writer I'm not a professional spokesman for a responsible academic discipline. My peer review comes from fans -- who will gleefully show me the nonsense in my writing. And yet I am a damned sight more careful than these editors were. Here a professor of systems science and a Director of Graduate studies, in a book heavy with academic credentialled authors, collaborate to produce a book that falls short of what the average sf editor could put together from published sf. I guarantee I could assemble a better book by writing ten letters to selected colleagues. These ackdemic bigdomes are trampling in both my gardens. They're sowing weeds and saying they're flowers. I invested a good part of my life in graduate studies in social science. Some of it was a waste of time, but I don't like the whole profession made a laughingstock as was done by this book. That's why I'm angry. If these gentlemen are representative of their profession, the taxpayers ought to refuse to support every single department of every publicly supported university in which this kind of garbage is thought useful. If this is social science, I don't object to it between consenting adults, but don't make me pay for it. If it isn't representative, somebody ought to say so. Me, I'm too far from academia to know; but I say, reverently, God help the students who come under this kind of influence. If you win prizes for this, what could flunk you? If professors of systems science and directors of graduate studies not only don't know where to look up Kepler's Laws, but apparently aren't even aware that such things exist... And now comes the worst part. Not only is this book touted for its academic respectability, but it has an introduction of high praise by Alvin Toffler. Now I don't intend First, he singles out for critique the fact that "a number of writers suggest that the first human colonies in space will be launched by a 'united' human race in anticipation of, or in response to, earthside disaster" -- a familiar science fiction assumption that ought, perhaps, be sent into retirement. He continues: "Such lapses are rare...what is important is not the book's unevenness but its striking originality. No doubt it will be attacked by pedants and purists. But it springs from so innovative an idea and is carried out with such intellectual brio that it should be read by anyone seriously interested in anthropology, space, or both." God save us! Can he really mean that? And this is the man who is to tell us how to survive future shock? Whose opinions on every subject scientific are meticulously sought and endlessly thrust at us by TV networks? Whose pronouncements about nuclear energy, ecology, the oil crisis, and education are given us as if graven in stone and handed from Sinai? But Poumelle, you're getting upset over nothing. Academicians produce lousy books all the time, and they get their friends to write good blurbs about them every week, and so what? So this. I've read this book, and although there are a few coherent essays in it, I defy any moderately active sf reader to find one bloody thing in there that science fiction writers haven't been saying for twenty years. Yet these people take a condescending attitude toward science fiction when they notice it at all. (Exception: the essay by Donald Stern, a University of Washington undergraduate who gives a bibliography of sf books and stories on the first contact theme.) This book abounds with platitudinous statements, unstated assumptions, unsupported dogma, political slogans, all presented as high truth. There's an essay on "anomalistics" which presents Velikovsky as a "martyr". (I've said my piece on Velikovsky, and he was shamefully treated by Big Science; but to call a man made wealthy through his books, who has a movement of devoted followers, who gets paid large fees for his lectures, a "martyr" seems unduly to debase a noble word.) It's stated flatly that goods in a lunar community will be community owned; no private property, but never stated why. We're told with a straight face that "any cultural entity or part of a cultural entity as defined in its own terms has the right to accept or reject, under no duress, temptation, or threat, any proposed changes we might offer in their life styles or in the management of their property." We're told that we "must accept in toto all political, ecological, social, religious, scientific, and moral decisions reached by the members of each particular culture." (And this goes not only for aliens we might meet, but any sub-cultures who live Gang, Orange Defense League, and Palestine Liberation Organization, I presume.) And we're given all this by a pair of editors who see nothing wrong with a planet that experiences periodic gravitational flux because a moon-sized object periodically approaches two lunar distances away. Look, if the editors demonstrate they have never heard of undergraduate physics and biology, why should we assume they can recognize great truths about man, or advise us on how to treat aliens? End of diatribe. Don't blame this column on Jim Baen. One of my prerogatives as science editor of write about something that moves me strongly, and this book did. Next month we'll go back to my brand of speculation. Bdt I think somebody had to say it, and let me sum up the point of this month's column. All you academicians who want to exploit the student interest in science fiction and space; who want to feel modem and up to date; who want to get with it by calling yourselves systems scientists and pretending to know everything; before you pontificate about the future of man, learn as much as the average sf fan already knows. Please?  You are your own worst enemy -- and best friend too. I do my banking at the Archimedes Trust Association. Their security is first-rate, their service is courteous, and they have their own medico facility that does nothing but take recordings for their vaults. And they had been robbed two weeks ago. It was a break for me. I had been approaching my regular recording date and dreading the chunk it would take from my savings. Then these thieves break into my bank, steal a huge amount of negotiable paper, and in an excess of enthusiasm they destroy all the recording cubes. Every last one of them, crunched into tiny shards of plastic. Of course the bank had to replace them all, and very fast, too. They weren't stupid; it wasn't the first time someone had used such a bank robbery to facilitate a murder. So the bank had to record everyone who had an account, and do it in a few days. It must have cost them more than the robbery. How that scheme works, incidentally, is like this. The robber couldn't care less about the money stolen. Mostly it's very risky to pass such loot, anyway. The programs written into the money computers these days are enough to foil all but the most exceptional robber. You have to let that kind of money lie for on the order of a century to have any hope of realizing gains on it. Not impossible, of course, but the police types have found out that few criminals are temperamentally able to wait that long. The robber's real motive in a case where memory cubes have been destroyed is murder, not robbery. Every so often someone comes along who must commit a crime of passion. There are very few left open, and murder is the most awkward of all. It just doesn't satisfy this type to kill someone and see them walking around six months later. When the victim sues the killer for alienation of personality -- and collects up to #of the killer's worldly goods -- it's just twisting the knife. So if you really hate someone, the temptation is great to really kill them, forever and ever, just like in the old days, by destroying their memory cube first then killing the body. I had rated a private bodyguard over the last week as part of my contract. It was sort of a status symbol to show your friends, but otherwise I hadn't been much impressed until pay for my next recording as part of their crash program to cover all their policy holders. They had contracted to keep me alive forever, so even though I had been scheduled for a recording in only three weeks they had to pay for this one. The courts had rules that a lost or damaged cube must be replaced with all possible speed. So I should have been very happy. I wasn't, but tried to be brave. I was shown into the recording room with no delay and told to strip and lie on the table. The medico, a man who looked like someone I might have met several decades ago, busied himself with his equipment as I tried to control my breathing, I was grateful when he plugged the computer lead into my occipital socket and turned off my motor control. Now I didn't have to worry about whether to ask if I knew him or not. As I grow older, I find that's more of a problem. I must have met twenty thousand people by now and talked to them long enough to make an impression. It gets confusing. He removed the top of my head and prepared to take a multiholo picture of me, a chemical analog of everything I ever saw or thought or remembered or just vaguely dreamed. It was a blessed relief when I slid over into unconsciousness.    The coolness and sheen of stainless steel beneath my fingertips. There is the smell of isopropyl alcohol, and the hint of acetone. The medico's shop. Childhood memories tumble over me, triggered by the smells. Excitement, change, my mother standing by while the medico carves away my broken finger to replace it with a pink new one. I lie in the darkness and remember. And there is light, a hurting light from nowhere and I feel my pupil contract as the only movement in my entire body. "She's in," I hear. But I'm not, not really. I'm just lying here in the blessed dark, unable to move. It comes in a rush, the repossession of my body. I travel down the endless nerves to bang up hard against the insides of my hands and feet, to whirl through the pools of my nipples and tingle in my lips and nose. Now I'm in. I sat up quickly into the restraining arms of the medico. I struggled for a second before I was able to relax. My fingers were buzzing and cramped with the clamminess of hyperventilation "Whew," I said, putting my head in my hands. "Bad dream. I thought..." I looked around me and saw that I was naked on the steel-topped table with several worried faces looking at me from all sides. I wanted to retreat into the darkness again and let my insides settle down. I saw my mother's face, blinked, and failed to make it disappear. "Carnival?" I asked her ghost. "Right here, Fox," she said, and took me in her arms. It was awkward and unsatisfying with her standing on the floor and me on the table. There were wires trailing from my body. But the comfort was needed. I didn't know where I was. With a chemical rush as precipitous as the one just before I awoke, the people solidified around me. "She's all right now," the medico said, turning from his instruments. He smiled impersonally at me as he began removing the wires from my head. I did not smile back. I knew where I was now, just as surely as I had ever known anything. I remembered coming in here only hours before. But I knew it had been more than a few hours. I've read about it: the disorientation when a new body is awakened with transplanted memories. And my mother wouldn't be here unless something had gone badly wrong. I had died. I was given a mild sedative, help in dressing, and my mother's arm to lead me down plush-carpeted hallways to the office of the bank president. I was still not fully awake. The halls were achingly quiet but for the brush of our feet across the wine-colored rug. I felt like the i iressure was fluctuating wildly, eaving my ears popped and muffled. I couldn't see too far away. I was grateful to leave the vanishing E oints in the hall for the panelled rowns of wood veneer and the coolness and echoes of a white marble floor. The bank president, Mr, Leander, showed us to our seats. I sank into the purple velvet and let it wrap around me. Leander pulled up a chair facing us and offered us drinks. I declined. My head was swimming already and I knew I'd have to pay attention. Leander fiddled with a dossier on his desk. Mine, I imagine. It had been freshly printed out from the terminal at his right hand. I'd met him briefly before; he was a pleasant sort of person, chosen for this ness to wear the sort of old-man body that inspires confidence and trust. He seemed to be about sixtyfive. He was probably more like twenty. It seemed that he was never going to get around to the briefing so I asked a question. One that was very important to me at the moment. "What's the date?" "It's the month of November," he said, ponderously. "And the year is #." I had been dead for two and a half years. "Listen," I said, "I don't want to take up any more of your time. You must have a brochure you can give me to bring me up to date. If you'll just hand it over, I'll be on my way. Oh, and thank you for your concern." He waved his hand at me as I started to rise. "I would appreciate it if you stayed a bit longer. Yours is an unusual case, Ms. Fox. I... well, it's never happened in the history of the Archimedes Trust Association." "Yes?" "You see, you've died, as you figured out soon after we woke you. What you couldn't have known is that you've died more than once since your last recording." "More than once?" So it wasn't such a smart question; so what was I supposed to ask? "Three times." "Three?" "Yes, three separate time. We suspect murder." The room was perfectly silent for a while. At last I decided I should have that drink. He poured it for me, and I drained it. "Perhaps your mother should tell you more about it," Leander suggested. "She's been closer to the situation. I was only made aware of it recently. Carnival?"    I found my way back to my apartment in a sort of daze. By the time I had settled in again the drug was wearing off and I could face my situation with a clear head. But my skin was crawling. Listening in the third person to things you've done is not the most pleasant thing. I decided it was time to face some facts that all of us, including myself, do not like to think about. The first order of business was to recognise that the things that were done by those three previous people were not done by me. I was a new person, fourth in the line of succession. I had many things in common with the previous incarnations, including all my memories up to that day I surrendered myself to the memory recording machine. But the me of that time and place had been killed. She lasted longer than the others. Almost a year, Carnival had said. Then her body was found at the bottom of Hadley Rille. It was an appropriate place for her to die; both she and myself liked to go hiking out on the surface for purposes of inspiration. Murder was not suspected that time. The bank, upon hearing of my -- no, her -- death, started a clone from the tissue sample I had left with my recording. Six lunations later, a copy of me was infused with my memories and told that she had just died. She had been shaken, but seemed to be adjusting well when she, too, was killed. This time there was much suspicion. Not only had she survived for less than a lunation after her reincarnation, but the circumstances were unusual. She had been blown to pieces in a tube-train explosion. She had been the only passenger in a two-seat capsule. The explosion had been caused by a home-made bomb. There was still the possibility that it was a random act, possibly by political terrorists. The third copy of me had not thought so. I don't know why. That is the most maddening thing about memory recording: being unable to profit by the experiences of your former selves. Each time I was killed, it moved me back to square one, the day I was recorded. But Fox # had reason to be paranoid. She took extraordinary precautions to stay alive. More specifically, she tried to prevent circumstances that could lead to her murder. It worked for five lunations. She died as the result of a fight, that much was certain. It was a very violent fight, with blood all over the apartment. The police at first thought she must have fatally injured her attacker, but analysis showed all the blood to have come from her body. So where did that leave me, Fox #? An hour's careful thought left the picture gloomy indeed. Consider: each time my killer succeeded in murdering me, he or she learned more about me. My killer must be an expert on Foxes by now, knowing things about me that I myself did not know. Such as how I handle myself in a fight. I gritted my teeth when I thought of that. Carnival told me that Fox #, the canniest of the lot, had taken lessons in selfdefense. Karate, I think she said. Did I have the benefit of it? Of course not. If I wanted to defend myself I had to start all over, because those skills died with Fox #. No, all the advantages were with my killer. The killer starts off with the advantage of surprise -- since I had no notion of who it was -- and in this case learned more about me every time he or she succeeded in What to do? I didn't even know where to start. I ran through everyone I knew, looking for an enemy, someone who hated me enough to kill me again and again. I could find no one. Most likely it was someone Fox I had met during that year she lived after the recording. The, only answer I could come up with was emigration. Just pull up stakes and go to Mercury, or Mars, or even Pluto. But would that guarantee my safety? My killer seemed to be an uncommonly persistent person. No, I'd have to face it here, where at least I knew the turf.    It was the next day before I realized the extent of my loss. I had been robbed of an entire symphony. For the last thirty years I had been an Environmentalist. I had just drifted into it while it was still an infant art-form. I had been in charge of the weather machines at the Transvaal disneyland, which was new at the time and the biggest and most modern of all the environmental parks in Luna. A few of us had started tinkering with the weather programs, first for our own amusement. Later we invited friends to watch the storms and sunsets we concocted. Before we knew it, friends were inviting friends and the Transvaal people began selling tickets. I gradually made a name for myself, and found I could make more money being an artist than being an engineer. At the time of my last recording I had been one of the top three Environmentalists on Luna. Then Fox I went on to compose Liquid Ice. From what I read in the reviews, two years after the fact, it was seen as the high point of the art to date. It had been staged in the Pennsylvania disneyland, before a crowd of three hundred thousand. It made me rich. The money was still in my bank account, but the memory of creating it was forever lost. And it mattered. Fox I had written it, from beginning to end. Oh, I recalled having had some vague ideas of a winter composition, things I'd think about later and put together. But the whole creative process had gone on in the head of that other person who had been killed. How is a person supposed to cope with that? For one bitter moment I considered calling the bank and having them destroy my memory cube. If I died this time. I'd rather die completely. The thought of a Fox # rising from that table... it was almost too much to bear. She would lack everything that Fox I, #, #, and me, Fox #, had experienced. So far I'd had little time to add to the personality we all shared, but even the bad times are worth saving. It was either that, or have a new recording made every day. I called the bank, did some figuring, and found that I wasn't wealthy enough to afford that. But it was worth exploring. If I had a new recording taken once a week I could keep at it for about a year before I ran out of money. I decided I'd do it, for as long as I could. And to make sure that no future Fox would ever have to go through this again, I'd have one made today. Fox #, if she was ever born, woGld be born knowing at least as much as I knew now.    I felt better after the recording was made. I found that I no longer feared the medico's office. That fear comes from the common misapprehension that one will wake up from the recording to discover that one has died. It's a silly thing to believe, but it comes from the distaste we all have for really looking at the facts. If you'll consider human consciousness, you'll see that the three-dimensional cross-section of a human being that is you can only rise from that table and go about your business. It can happen no other way. Human consciousness is linear, along a timeline that has a beginning and an end. If you die after a recording, you die, forever and with ho reprieve. It doesn't matter that a recording of you exists and that a new person with your memories to a certain point can be created; you are dead. Looked at from a fourth-dimensional viewpoint, what memory recording does is to graft a new person onto your lifeline at a point in the past. You do not retrace that lifeline and magically become that new person. I, Fox #, was only a relative of that long-ago person who had her memories recorded. And if I died it was forever. Fox # would awaken with my memories to date, but I would be no part of her. She would be on her own. Why do we do it? I honestly don't know. I suppose that the human urge to live forever is so strong that we'll grasp at even the most unsatisfactory substitute. At one time people had themselves frozen when they died, in the hope of being thawed out in a future when humans knew how to reverse death. Look at the Great Pyramid in the Egypt disneyland if you want to see the sheer size of that urge. So we live our lives in pieces. I could know, for whatever good it would do me, that thousands of years from now a being would still exist who would be at least partly me. She would remember exactly the same things I remembered of her childhood; the trip to Archimedes, her first sex change, her lovers, her hurts and her happiness. If I had another recording taken, she would remember thinking the thoughts I was thinking now. And she would probably still be stringing chunks of experience onto her life, year by year. Each time she had a new recording that much more of her life was safe for all time. There was a certain comfort in knowing that my life was safe up until a few hours ago, when the recording was made. Having thought all that out, I found myself fiercely determined to never let it happen again. I began to hate my killer with an intensity I had never experienced. I wanted to storm out of the apartment and beat my killer to death with a blunt instrument. I swallowed that emotion with difficulty. It was exactly what the killer would be looking for. I had to remember that the killer knew what my first reaction would be. I had to behave in a way that he or she would not expect. But what way was that? I called up the police department and talked to the detective who had my case. Her name was Isadora, and she had some good advice. "You're not going to like it, if I can judge from past experience," she said. "The last time I proposed it to you, you rejected it out of hand." I knew I'd have to get used to this. People would always be telling me what I had done, what I had said to them. I controlled my anger and asked her to go on. "It's simply to stay put. I know you think you're a detective, but your successor proved pretty well that you are not. If you stir out of that door you'll be nailed. This guy knows you inside and out, and he'll get you. Count on it." "He? You know something about him, then?" "Sorry, you'll have to bear with me. I've told you parts of this case twice already, so it's hard to remember what you don't know. Yes, we do know he's a male. Or was, six months ago, when you had your big fight with him. Several witnesses reported a man with bloodstained clothes, who could only have been your killer." "Then you're on his trail?" She sighed, and I knew she was going over old ground again. "No, and you've proved again that you're not a detective. Your detective lore comes from reading old novels. It's not a glamorous enough job nowadays to rate fictional heros and such, so most people don't know the kind of work we do. Knowing that the killer was a man when he last knocked you off means nothing to us. He could have bought a Change the very next day. You're probably wondering if we have fingerprints of him, right?" I gritted my teeth. Everyone had the advantage over me. It was obvious I had asked something like that the last time I spoke with this woman. And I had been thinking of it. "No," I said. "Because he could change those as easily as his sex, right?" "Right. Easier. The only positive means of identification today is genotyping, and he wasn't cooperative enough to leave any of him behind when he killed you. He must have been a real brute, to be able to inflict as much damage on you as he did and not even be cut himself. You were armed with a knife. Not a drop of his blood was found at the scene of the murder." "Then how do you go about finding him?" "Fox, I'd have to take you through several college courses to begin to explain our methods to you. And I'll even admit that they're not very good. Police work has not kept up with science over the last century. There are many things available to the modem criminal that make our job more difficult than you'd imagine. We have hopes of catching him within about four lunations, though, if you'll stay put and stop chasing him." "Why four months?" "We trace him by computer. We have very exacting programs that we run when we're after a guy like this. It's our one major weapon. Given time, we can run to ground about sixty percent of the criminals." "Sixty percent?" I squawked. "Is that supposed to encourage me? Especially when you're dealing with a master like my killer seems to be?" She shook her head. "He's not a master. He's only determined. And that works against him, not for him. The more single-mindedly he pursues you, the surer we are of catching him when he makes a slip. That sixty percent figure is over-all crime; on murder, the rate is ninety-eight. It's a crime of passion, usually done by an amateur. The pros see no percentage in it, and they're right. The penalty is so steep it can make a pauper of you, and your victim is back on the streets while you're still in court." I thought that over, and found it made me feel better. My killer was not a criminal mastermind. I was not being hunted by Fu-Manchu or Dr. Moriarty. He was only a person like myself, new to this business. Something Fox I did had made him sufficiently angry to risk financial ruin to stalk and kill me. It scaled him down to human dimensions. "So now you're all ready to go out and get him?" Isadora sneered. I guess my thoughts were written on my face. That, or she was consulting her script of our previous conversation. "Why not?" I asked. "Because, like I said, he'll get you. He might not be a pro but he's an expert on you. He knows how you'll jump. One thing he thinks he knows is that you won't take my advice. He might be right outside your door, waiting for you to finish this conversation like you did last time around. The last time, he wasn't there. This time he might be." It sobered me. I glanced nervously at my door, which was guarded by eight different security systems bought by Fox #. "Maybe you're right. So you want me just to stay here. For how long?' ' "However long it takes. It may be a year. That four-lunation figure is the high point on a computer curve. It tapers off to a virtual certainty in just over a year." "Why didn't I stay here the last time?" "A combination of foolish bravery, hatred, and a fear of boredom." She searched my eyes, trying to find the words that would make me take the advice that Fox # had fatally refused. "I understand you're an artist," she went on. "Why can't you just... well, whatever it is artists do when they're thinking up a new composition? Can't you work there in your apartment?" How could I tell her that inspiration wasn't just something I could tum on at will? Weather sculpture is a tenuous discipline. The visualization is difficult; you can't just try out a new idea like you can with a song, by picking it out on a piano or guitar. You can run a computer simulation, but you never really know what you have until the tapes are run into the machines and you stand out there in the open field and watch the storm take shape around you. And you don't get any practice sessions. It's expensive. I've always needed long walks on the surface. My competitors can't understand why. They go for strolls through the various parks, usually the one where the piece will be performed. I do that, too. You have to, to get the lay of the land. A computer can tell you what it looks like in terms of thermoclines and updrafts and pocket-ecologies, but you have to really go there and feel the land, taste the air, smell the trees, before you can compose a storm or even a summer shower. It has to be a part of the land. But my inspiration comes from the dry, cold, airless surface that so few Lunarians really like. I'm not a burro wer; I've never loved the corridors like so many of my friends profess to do. I think I see the black sky and harsh terrain as a blank canvas, a feeling I never really get in the disneylands where the land is lush and varied and there's always some weather in progress even if it's only partly cloudy and warm. Could I compose without those long, solitary walks? Run that through again: could I afford not to? "All right, I'll stay inside like a good girl."    I was in luck. What could have been an endless purgatory turned into creative frenzy such as I had never experienced. My frustrations at being locked into my apartment translated themselves into grand sweeps of tornados and thunderheads. I began writing my masterpiece. The working title was A Conflagration of Cyclones. That's how angry I was. My agent later talked me into shortening it to a tasteful Cyclone, but it was always a conflagration to me. Soon I had managed to virtually forget about my killer. I never did completely; after all, I needed the thought of him to flog me onward, to serve as the canvas on which to paint my hatred. I did have one awful thought, early on, and I brought it up to Isadora. "It strikes me," I said, "that what you've built here is the better mousetrap, and I'm the hunk of cheese." "You've got the essence of it," she agreed. "I find I don't care for the role of bait." "Why not? Are you scared?" I hesitated, but what the hell did I have to be ashamed of? "Yeah. I guess I am. What can you tell me to make me stay here when I could be doing what all my instincts are telling me to do, which is run like hell?" "That's a fair question. This is the ideal situation, as far as the police are concerned. We have the victim in a place that can be watched, perfectly safely, and we have the killer on the loose. Furthermore, this is an obsessed killer, one who cannot stay away from you forever. Long before he is able to make a strike at you we should pick him up as he scouts out ways to reach you." "Are there ways?" "No. An unqualified no. Any one of those devices on your door would be enough to keep him out. Beyond that, your food and water is being tested before it gets to you. Those are extremely remote possibilities since we're convinced that your killer wishes to dispose of your body completely, to kill you for good. Poisoning is no good to him. We'd just start you up again. But if we can't find at least a piece of your body, the law forbids us to revive you." "What about bombs?" "The corridor outside your apartment is being watched. It would take quite a large bomb to blow out your door, and getting a bomb that size in place would not be possible in the time he would have. Relax, Fox. We've thought of everything. You're safe." She rung off, and I called up the Central Computer. "CC," I said, to get it on-line, "can you tell me how you go about catching killers?" "Are you talking about killers in general, or the one you have a particular interest in?" "What do you think? I don't completely believe that detective. What I want to know from you is what can I do to help?" "There is little you can do," the CC said. "White I myself, in the sense of the Central or controling Lunar Computer, do not handle the apprehension of criminals, I am in a supervisory capacity to several satellite computers. They use a complex number theory, correlated with the daily input from all my terminals. The average person on Luna deals with me on the order of twenty times per day, many of these transactions involving a routine epidermal sample for positive genalysis. By matching these transactions with the time and place they occurred, I am able to construct a dynamic model of what has occurred, what possibly could have occurred, and what cannot have occurred. With suitable peripheral programs I can refine this model to a close degree of accuracy. For instance, at the time of your first murder I was able to assign a low probability to ninety-nine point nine three percent of all humans on Luna as being responsible. This left me with a pool of # people who might have had a hand in it. This is merely from data placing each person at a particular place at a particular time. Further weighting of such factors as possible motive narrowed the range of prime suspects. Do you wish me to go on?" "No, I think I get the picture. Each time I was killed you must have narrowed it more. How many suspects are left?" "You are not phrasing the question correctly. As implied in my original statement, all residents of Luna are still suspects. But each has been assigned a probability, ranging from a very large group with a value of #" # to twenty individuals with probabilities of #." The more I thought about that, the less I liked it. "None of those sound to me like what you'd call a prime suspect." "Alas, no. This is a very intriguing case, I must say." "I'm glad you think so." "Yes," it said, oblivious as usual to sarcasm. "I may have to have some programs re-written. We've never gone this far without being able to submit a ninety percent rating to the Grand jury Data Bank." "Then Isadora is feeding me a line, right? She doesn't have anything to go on?" "Not strictly true. She has an analysis, a curve, that places the probability of capture as nearcertainty within one year." "You gave her that estimate, didn't you?" "Of course." ' 'Then what the hell does she do? Listen, I'll tell you right now, I don't feel good about putting my fate in her hands. I think this job of detective is just a trumped-up featherbed. Isn't that right?" "The privacy laws forbid me to express an opinion about the worth, performance, or intelligence of a human citizen. But I can give you a comparison. Would you entrust the construction of your symphonies to a computer alone? Would you sign your name to a work that was generated entirely by me?" "I see your point." "Exactly. Without a computer you'd never calculate all the factors you need for a symphony. But  do not write them. It is your creative spark that makes the wheels turn. Incidentally, I told your successor but of course you don't remember it, I liked your Liquid Ice tremendously. It was a real pleasure to work with you on it." "Thanks. I wish I could say the same." I signed off, feeling no better than when I began the interface. The mention of Liquid Ice had me seething again. Robbed! Violated! I'd rather have been gangraped by chimpanzees than have the memory stolen from me. I had punched up the films of Liquid Ice and they were beautiful. Stunning, and I could say it without conceit because I had not written it.    My life became very simple. I worked -- twelve and fourteen hours a day sometimes -- ate, slept, and worked some more. Twice a day I put in one hour learning to fight over the holovision. It was all highly theoretical, of course, but it had value. It kept me in shape and gave me a sense of confidence. For the first time in my life I got a good look at what my body would have been with no tampering. I was bom female, but Carnival wanted to raise me as a boy so she had me Changed when I was two hours old. It's another of the contradictions in her that used to infuriate me so much but which, as I got older, I came to love. I mean, why go to all the pain and trouble of bringing a child to term and giving birth naturally, all from a professed dislike of tampering -- and then turn around and refuse to accept the results of nature's lottery? I have decided that it's a result of her age. She's almost two hundred by now, which puts her childhood back in the days befor Changing. In those days -- I've never understood why -- there was a predilection for male children. I think she never really shed it. At any rate, I spent my childhood male. When I got my first Change, I picked my own body design. Now, in a six-lunation-old clone body which naturally reflected my actual genetic structure, I was pleased to see that my first female body design had not been far from the truth. I was short, with small breasts and an undistinguished body. But my face was nice. Cute, I would say. I liked the nose. The age of the accelerated clone body was about seventeen years; perhaps the nose would lose its upturn in a few years of natural growth, but I hoped not. If it did, I'd have it put back. Once a week, I had a recording made. It was the only time I saw people in the flesh. Carnival, Leander, Isadora, and a medico would enter and stay for a while after it was made. It took them an hour each way to get past the security devices. I admit it made me feel a little more secure to see how long it took even my friends to get in my apartment. It was like an invisible fortress outside my door. The better to lure you into my parlor, killer! I worked with the CC as I never had before. We wrote new programs that produced four-dimensional models in my viewer unlike anything we had ever done before. The CC knew the stage -- which was to be the Kansas disneyland -- and I knew the storm. Since I couldn't walk on the stage this time before the concert I had to rely on the CC to reconstruct it for me in the holo tank . Nothing makes me feel more godlike. Even watching it in the three-meter tank I felt thirty meters tall with lightning in my hair and a crown of shimmering frost. I walked through the Kansas autumn, the brown, rolling, featureless prairie before the red or white man came. It was the way the real Kansas looked now under the rule of the Invaders, who had ripped up the barbed wire, smoothed over the furrows, dismantled the cities and railroads and let the buffalo roam once more. There was a logistical problem I had never faced before. I intended to use the buffalo instead of having them kept out of the way. I needed the thundering hooves of a stampede; it was very much a part of the environment I was creating. How to The disneyland management wouldn't allow any of their livestock to be injured as part of a performance. That was fine with me; my stomach turned at the very thought. Art is one thing, but life is another and I will not kill unless to save myself. But the Kansas disneyand I envisioned up to twenty-five twisters at one time. How do you keep the two separate? With subtlety, I found. The CC had buffalo behavioral profiles that were very reliable. The damn CC stores everything, and I've had occasion more than once to be thankful for it. We could position the herds at a selected spot and let the twisters loose above them. The tornados would never be totally under our control, they are capricious even when hand-made, but we could rely on a hard ninety percent accuracy in steering them. The herd-profile we worked up was usable out to two decimal points, and as insurance against the unforeseen we installed several groups of flash-bombs to turn the herd if it headed into danger. It's an endless series of details. Where does the lightning strike, for instance? On a flat, gently rolling plain, the natural accumulation of electric charge can be just about anywhere. We had to be sure we could shape it the way we wanted, by burying five hundred accumulators that could trigger an air-to-ground flash on cue. And to the right spot. The air-to-air are harder. And the ball lightning -- oh, brother. But we found we could guide it pretty well with buried wires carrying an electric current. There were going to be range fires -- so check with the management on places that are due for a controlled bum anyway, and keep the buffalo away from there, too, and be sure the smoke would not blow over into the audience and spoil the view or into the herd and panic them... But it was going to be glorious.    Six lunations rolled by. Six lunations ! # mean solar days! I discovered that figure during a long period of brooding when I called up all sorts of data on the investigation. Which, according to Isadora, was going well. I knew better. The CC has its faults but shading data is not one of them. Ask it what the figures are and it prints them out in tri-color. Here's some: probability of a capture by the original curve, ninetythree percent. Total number of viable suspects remaining: nine. Highest probability of those nine possibles: three point nine percent. That was Carnival. The others were also close friends, and were there solely on the basis of having the opportunity at all three murders. Even Isadora dared not speculate -- at least not aloud, and to me -- that any of them could have a motive. I discussed it with the CC. "I know. Fox, I know," it replied, with the closest approach to mechanical despair I have ever heard. "Is that all you can say?" "No. As it happens, I'm pursuing the other possibility: that it was a ghost who killed you." "Are you serious?" "Yes. The term 'ghost' covers all illegal beings. I estimate there to be on the order of two hundred of them existing outside legal sanctions on Luna. These are executed criminals with their right to life officially revoked, unauthorized children never registered, and some suspected artificial mutants. Those last are the result of proscribed expericonditions are hard to conceal for any length of time, and I round up a few every year." "What do you do with them?" "They have no right to life. I must execute them when I find them." "You do it? That's not just a figure of speech?" "That's right. I do it. It's a job humans find distasteful. I never could keep the position filled, so I assumed it myself." That didn't sit right with me. There is an atavistic streak in me that doesn't like to turn over the complete functioning of society to machines. I get it from my mother, who goes for years at a time not deigning to speak to the CC. "So you think someone like that may be after me. Why?" "There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer. 'Why' has always been a tough question for me. I can operate only on the parameters fed into me when I'm dealing with human motivation, and I suspect that the parameters are not complete. I'm constantly being surprised." "Thank goodness for that." But this time, I could have wished the CC knew a little more about human behavior. So I was being hunted by a spook. It didn't do anything for my peace of mind. I tried to think of how such a person could exist in this card-file world we live in. A technological rat, smarter than the computers, able to fit into the cracks and holes in the integrated circuits. Where were those cracks? I couldn't find them. When I thought of the checks and safeguards all around us, the voluntary genalysis we submit to every time we spend money or take a tube or close a business deal or interface with the computer... People used to sign their names many times a day, or so I've heard. Now, we scrape off a bit of dead skin from our palms. It's damn hard to fake. But how do you catch a phantom? I was facing life as a recluse if this murderer was really so determined that I die. That conclusion came at a bad time. I had finished Cyclone, and to relax I had called up the films of some of the other performances during my absence from the art scene. I never should have done that. Flashiness was out. Understated elegance was in. One of the reviews I read was very flattering to my Liquid Ice. I quote: "In this piece Fox has closed the book on the blood and thunder school of Environmentalism. This powerful statement sums up the things that can be achieved by sheer magnitude and overwhelming drama. The displays of the future will be concerned with the gentle nuance of dusk, the elusive breath of a summer breeze. Fox is the Tchaikovsky of Environmentalism, the last great romantic who paints on a broad canvas. Whether she can adjust to the new, more thoughtful styles that are evolving in the work of Janus, or Pym, or even some of the ambiguous abstractions we have seen from Tyleber, remains to be seen. Nothing will detract from the sublime glory of Liquid Ice, of course, but the time is here... " and so forth and thank you for nothing. For an awful moment I thought I had a beautiful dinosaur on my hands. It can happen, and the hazards are pronounced after a reincarnation. Advancing technology, fashion, frontiers, taste, or morals can make the best of us obsolete overnight. Was everyone contemplating gentle springtimes now, after my long sleep? Were the cool, sweet zephyrs of a summer's night the only thing that had meaning now? A panicky call to my agent dispelled that quickly enough. As usual, the pronouncements of the critics had gone ahead of the public taste. I'm not knocking critics; that's their function, if you concede they have a function, to chart a course into unexplored territory. They must stay at the leading edge of the innovative artistic evolution, they must see what everyone will be seeing in a few year's time. Meanwhile, the public was still eating up the type of superspectacle I have always specialized in. I ran the risk of being labeled a dinosaur myself, but I found the prospect did not worry me. I became an artist through the back door, just like the tinkerers. in early twentieth-century Hollywood had done. Before I was discovered, I had just been an environmental engineer having a good time. That's not to say I don't take my art seriously. I do sweat over it, investing inspiration and perspiration in about the classic Edison proportions. But I don't take the critics too seriously, especially when they're not enunciating the public taste. Just because Beethoven doesn't sound like currently popular art doesn't mean his music is worthless. I found myself thinking back to the times before Environmentalism made such a splash. Back then we were carefree. We had grandiose bull-sessions, talking of what we would do if only we were given an environment large enough. We spent months roughing out the programs for something to be called Typhoon ! It was a hurricane in a bottle, and the bottle would have to be five hundred kilometers wide. Such a bottle still does not exist, but when it's built some fool will stage it. Maybe me. The good old days never die, you know. So my agent made a deal with the owner of the Kansas disneyland. The owner had known that I was working on something for his place, but I'd not talked to him about it. The terms were generous. My agent displayed the profit report on Liquid Ice, which was still playing yearly to packed houses in Pennsylvania. I got a straight fifty percent of the gate, with costs of the installation and computer time to be shared between us. I stood to make about And I was robbed again. Not killed this time, but robbed of the chance to go into Kansas and supervise the installation of the equipment. I clashed mightily with Isadora and would have stormed out on my own, armed with nothing so much as a nail file, if not for a pleading visit from Carnival. So I backed down this once and sat at home, going there only by holographic projection. I plunged into self-doubts. After all, I hadn't even felt the Kansas sod beneath my bare feet this time. I hadn't been there in the flesh for over three years. My usual method before I even conceive a project is to spend a week or two just wandering naked through the park, getting the feel of it through my skin and nose and those senses that don't even have a name. It took the CC three hours of gentle argument to convince me again that the models we had written were accurate to seven decimal places. They were perfect. An action ordered up on the computer model would be a perfect analog of the real action in Kansas. The CC said I could make quite a bit of money just renting the software to other artists.    The day of the premiere of Cyclone found me still in my apartment. But J was on the way out. Small as I am, I somehow managed to struggle out that door with Carnival, Isadora, Leander, and my agent pulling on my elbows. I was not going to watch the performance on the tube. I arrived early, surrounded by my impromptu bodyguard. The sky matched my mind; gray, overcast, and slightly fearful. It brooded over us, and I felt more and more like a sacrificial lamb mounting some somber altar. But it was a magnificent stage to die upon. The Kansas disneyland is one of the newer ones, and one of the largest. It is a hollowed-out cylinder twenty kilometers, beneath Clavius. It measures two hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter and is five kilometers high. The rim is artfully disguised to blend into the blue sky. When you are half a kilometer from the rim, the illusion fails; otherwise, you might as well be standing back on Old Earth. The curvature of the floor is consistent with Old Earth, so the horizon is terrifyingly far away. Only the gravity is Lunar. Kansas was built after most of the more spectacular possibilities had been exhausted, either on Luna or another planet. There was Kenya, beneath Mare Moscoviense; Himalya, also on the Farside; Amazon, under old Tycho; Pennsylvania, Sahara, Pacific, Mekong, Transylvania. There were thirty disneylands under the inhabited planets and satellites of the solar system the last time I counted. Kansas is certainly the least interesting topographically. It's flat, almost monotonous. But it was perfect for what I wanted to do. What artist really chooses to paint on a canvas that's already been covered with pictures? Well, I have, for one. But for the frame of mind I was in when I wrote Cyclone it had to be the starkness of the wide-open sky and the browns and yellows of the rolling terrain. It was the place where Dorothy departed for Oz. The home of the black twister. I was greeted warmly by Pym and Janus, old friends here to see what the grand master was up to. Or so I flattered myself. More likely they were here to see the old lady make a fool of herself. Very few others were able to get close to me. My shield of high shoulders was very effective. It wouldn't do when the show began, however. I wished I was a little taller, then wondered if that would make me a better target. The viewing area was a gentle rise about a kilometer in radius. It had been written out of the program to the extent that none of the more fearsome effects would intrude to sweep us all into the Land of Oz. But being a spectator at a weathershow can be grueling. Most had come prepared with clear plastic slicker, and insulated coat, and boots. I was going to be banging some warm and some very cold air masses head-on to get things rolling, and some of it would sweep over us. There were a few brave souls in Native-American warpaint, feathers, and mocassins. An Environmental happening has no opening chords like a musical symphony. It is already in progress when you arrive, and will still be going when you leave. The weather in a disneyland is a continuous process and we merely shape .a few hours of it to our wills. The observer does not need to watch it in its entirety. Indeed, it would be impossible to do so, as it occurs all around and above you. There is no rule of silence. People talk, stroll, break out picnic lunches as an ancient signal for the rain to begin, and generally enjoy themselves. You experience the symphony with all five senses, and several that you are not aware of. Most people do no realize the effect of a gigantic low-pressure area sweeping over them, but they feel it all the same. Humidity alters mood, metabolism, and hormone level. All of these things are important to the total experience, and I neglect none of them. Cyclone has a definite beginning, however. At least to the audience. It begins with the opening bolt of lightning. I worked over it a long time, and designed it to shatter nerves. There is the slow building of thunderheads, the ominous roiling and turbulence, then the prickling in your body hairs that you don't even notice consciously. And then it hits. It crashes in at seventeen points in a ring around the audience, none farther away than half a kilometer. It is properly called chain lightning, because after the initial discharge it keeps flashing for a full seven seconds. It's designed to take the hair right off your scalp. It had its desired effect. We were surrounded by a crown of jittering incandescent snakes, coiling and dancing with a sound imported direct to you from Armageddon. It startled the hell out of me, and I had been expecting it. It was a while before the audience could get their ooier's and aahe r's back into shape. For several seconds I had touched them with stark, naked terror. An emotion like that doesn't come cheaply to sensation-starved, innately insular tunnel-dwellers. Lunarians get little to really shout about, growing up in the warrens and corridors and living their lives more or less afraid of the surface. That's why the disneylands were built, because people wanted limitless vistas that were not in vacuum. The thunder never really stopped for me. It blended imperceptibly into the applause that is more valufrom this storm. As for the rest of the performance... What can I say? It's been said that there's nothing more dull than a description of the weather. I believe it, even spectacular weather. Weather is an experiential thing, and that's why tapes and films of my works sell few copies. You have to be there and have the wind actually whipping your face and feel the oppressive weight of a tornado as it passes overhead like a vermiform freight train. I could write down where the funnel clouds formed and where they went from there, where the sleet and hail fell, where the buffalo stampeded, but it would do no one any good. If you want to see it, go to Kansas. The last I heard, Cyclone is still playing there two or three times yearly. I recall standing surrounded by a sea of people. Beyond me to the east the land was burning. Smoke boiled black from the hilltops and sooty gray from the hollows where the water was rising to drown it. To the north a hurculean cyclone swept up a chain of ball lightning like nacreous pearls and swallowed them into the evacuated vortex in its center. Above me, two twisters were twined in a death-dance. They circled each other like baleful gray predators, taking each other's measure. They feinted, retreated, slithered and skittered like tubes of oil. It was beautiful and deadly. And I had never seen it before. Someone was tampering with my program. As I realized that and stood rooted to the ground with the possibly disastrous consequences becoming apparent to me, the wind-snakes locked in a final embrace. Their counter-rotations cancelled out, and they were gone. Not even a breath of wind reached me to hint of that titantic struggle.    I ran through the seventykilometer wind and the thrashing rain. I was wearing sturdy mocassins, parka, and carrying the knife I brought from my apartment. Was it a lure, set by one who has become a student of Foxes? Am I playing into his hands? I didn't care. I had to meet him, had to fight it out once and for all. Getting away from my "protection" had been simple. They were as transfixed by the display as the rest of the audience, and it had merely been a matter of waiting until they all looked in the same direction and fading into the crowd. I picked out a small woman dressed in Indian-style and offered her a hundred Marks for her mocassins. She recognized me -- my new face was on the programs -- and made me a gift of them. Then I worked my way to the edge of the crowd and bolted past the security guards. They were not too concerned since the audience area was enclosed by a shock-field. When I went right through it they may have been surprised, but I didn't look back to see. I was one of only three people in Kansas wearing the PassKey device on my wrist, so I didn't fear anyone following me. I had done it all without conscious thought. Some part of me must have analyzed it, planned it out, but I just executed the results. I knew where he must be to have generated his tornado to go into combat with mine. No one else in Kansas would know where to look. I was headed for a particular windgenerator on the east periphery. I moved through weather more violent than the real Kansas would have experienced. It was concentrated violence, more wind and rain and devastation than Kansas would normally have in a full year. And it was happening all around me. But I was all right, unless he had more tricks up his sleeve. I knew where the tornados would be and at what time. I dodged them, waited for them to pass, knew every twist and dido they would make on their seemingly random courses. Off to my left the buffalo herds milled, resting from the stampede that had brought them past the audience for the first time. In an hour they would be thundering back again, but for now I could forget them. A twister headed for me, leaped high in the air, and skidded through a miasma of uprooted sage and sod. I clocked it with the internal picture I had and dived for a gully at just the right time. It hopped over me and was gone back into the clouds. I ran on. My training in the apartment was paying off. My body was only six lunations old, and as finely tuned as it would ever be. I rested by slowing to a trot, only to run again in a few minutes. I covered ten kilometers before the storm began to slow down. Behind me, the audience would be drifting away. The critics would be trying out scathing phrases or wild adulation; I didn't see how they could find any middle ground for this one. Kansas was being released from the grip of machines gone wild. Ahead of me was my killer. I would find him. I wasn't totally unprepared. Isadora had given in and allowed me to install a computerized bomb in my body. It would kill my killer -- and me -- if he jumped me. It was intended as a balance-of-terror device, the kind you hope you never use because it terrorizes your enemy too much for him to test it. I would inform him of it if I had the time, hoping he would not be crazy enough to kill both of us. If he was, we had him, though it would be little comfort to me. At least Fox # would be the last in the series. With the remains of a body, Isadora guaranteed to bring a killer to justice. The sun came out as I reached the last, distorted gully before the wall. It was distorted because it was one of the places where tourists were not allowed to go. It was like walking through the backdrop on a stage production. The land was squashed together in one of the dimensions, and the hills in front of me were painted against a basrelief. It was meant to be seen from a distance. Standing in front of the towering mural was a man. He was naked, and grimed with dirt. He watched me as I went down the gentle slope to stand waiting for him. I stopped about two hundred meters from him, drew my knife and held it in the air. I waited. He came down the concealed stairway, slowly and painfully. He was limping badly on his left leg. As far as I could see he was unarmed. The closer he got, the worse he looked. He had been in a savage fight. He had long, puckered, badly-healed scars on his left leg, his chest, and his right arm. He had one eye; the right one was only a reddened socket. There was a scar that slashed from his forehead to his neck. It was a hideous thing. I thought of the CC's suspicion that my killer might be a ghost, someone living on the raw edges of our civilization. Such a man might not have access to medical treatment whenever he needed it. "I think you should know," I said, with just the slightest quaver, "that I have a bomb in my body. It's powerful enough to blow both of us to pieces. It's set to go off if I'm killed. So don't try anything funny." "I won't," he said. "I thought you might have a fail-safe this time, but it doesn't matter. I'm not going to hurt you." "Is that what you told the others?" I sneered, crouching a little lower as he neared me. I felt like I had the upper hand, but my predecessors might have felt the same way. "No, I never said that. You don't have to believe me." He stopped twenty meters from me. His hands were at his sides. He looked helpless enough, but he might have a weapon buried somewhere in the dirt. He might have anything. I had to fight to keep feeling that I was in control. Then I had to fight something else. I gripped the knife tighter as a picture slowly superimposed itself over his ravaged face. It was a mental picture, the functioning of my "sixth sense." No one knows if that sense really exists. I think it does, because it works for me. It can be expressed as the knack for seeing someone who has had radical body work done -- sex, weight, height, skin color all altered -- and still being able to recognise him. Some say it's an evolutionary change. I didn't think evolution worked that way. But I can do it. And I knew who this tall, brutalized, male stranger was. He was me. I sprang back to my guard, wondering if he had used the shock of recognition to overpower my earlier incarnations. It wouldn't work with me. Nothing would work. I was going to kill him, no matter who he was. "You know me," he said. It was not a question. "Yes. And you scare hell out of me. I knew you knew a lot about me, but I didn't realize you'd know this much." He laughed, without humor. "Yes. I know you from the inside." The silence stretched out between us. Then he began to cry. I was surprised, but unmoved. I was still all nerve-endings, and suspected ninety thousand types of dirty trick. Let him cry. He slowly sank to his knees, sobbing with the kind of washed-out monotony that you read about, but seldom hear. He put his hands to the ground and awkwardly shuffled around until his back was to me. He crouched over himself, his head touching the ground, his hands wide at his sides, his legs bent. It was about the most wide-open, helpless posture imaginable, and I knew it must be for a reason. But I couldn't see what it might be. "I thought I had this all over with," he sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of one hand. 'I'm sorry. I'd meant to be more dignified. I guess I'm not made of the stern stuff I thought. I thought it'd be easier." He was silent for a moment, then coughed hoarsely. "Go on. Get it over with." "Huh?" I said, honestly dumbfounded. "Kill me. It's what you came here for. And it'll be a relief to me." I took my time. I stood motionless for a full minute, looking at the incredible problem from every angle. What kind of trick could there be? He was smart, but he wasn't God. He couldn't call in an airstrike on me, cause the ground to swallow me up, disarm me with one crippled foot, or hypnotize me into plunging the knife into my own gut. Even if he could do something, he would die, too. I advanced cautiously, alert for the slightest twitch of his body. Nothing happened. I stood behind him, my eyes flicking from his feet to his hands, to his bare back. I raised the knife. My hands trembled a little, but my determination was still there. I would not flub this. I brought the knife down. The point went into his flesh, into the muscle of his shoulderblade, about three centimeters. He gasped, a trickle of blood went winding through the knobs along his spine. But he didn't move, he didn't try to get up. He didn't scream for mercy. He just knelt there, shivering and turning pale. I'd have to stab harder. I pulled the knife free, and more blood came out. And still he waited. That was about all I could take. My bloodlust had dried in my mouth until all I could taste was vomit welling in my stomach. I'm not a fool. It occurred to me even then that this could be some demented trick, that he might know me well enough to be sure I could not go through with it. Maybe he was some sort of psychotic who got thrills out of playing this kind of incredible game, allowing his life to be put in danger and then drenching himself in my blood. But he was me. It was all I had to go on. He was a me who had lived a very different life, becoming much tougher and wilier with every day, diverging by the hour from what I knew as my personality and capabilities. So I tried and I tried to think of myself doing what he was doing now for the purpose of murder. I failed utterly. And if I could sink that low. I'd rather not live. "Hey, get up," I said, going around in front of him. He didn't respond, so I nudged him with my foot. He looked up, and saw me offering him the knife, hilt-first. "If this is some sort of scheme," I said, "I'd rather learn of it now." His one eye was red and brimming as he got up, but there was no joy in him. He took the knife, not looking at me, and stood there holding it. The skin on my belly was crawling. Then he reversed the knife and his brow wrinkled, as if he were summoning up nerve. I suddenly knew what he was going to do, and I lunged. I was barely in time. The knife missed his belly and went off to the side as I yanked on his arm. He was much stronger than I. I was pulled off balance, but managed to hang onto his arm. He fought with me, but was intent on suicide and had no thought to defend himself. I brought my fist up under his jaw and he went limp.    Night had fallen. I disposed of the knife and built a fire. Did you know that dried buffalo manure bums well? I didn't believe it until I put it to the test. I dressed his wound by tearing up my shirt, wrapped my parka around him to ward off the chill, and sat with my bare back to the fire. Luckily, there was no wind, because it can get very chilly on the plains at night. He woke with a sore jaw and a resigned demeanor. He didn't thank me for saving him from himself. I suppose people rarely do. They think they know what they're doing, and their reasons always seem logical to them. "You don't understand," he moaned. "You're only dragging it out. I have to die, there's no place for me here." "Make me understand,' I said. He didn't want to talk, but there was nothing to do and no chance of sleeping in the cold, so he eventually did. The story was punctuated with long, truculent silences. It stemmed from the bank robbery two and a half years ago. It had been staged by some very canny robbers. They had a new dodge that made me respect Isadora's statement that police methods had not kept pace with criminal possibilities. The destruction of the memory cubes had been merely a decoying device. They were equally unconcerned about the cash they took. They were bunco artists. They had destroyed the cubes to conceal the theft of two of them. That way the police would be looking for a crime of passion, murder, rather than one of profit. It was a complicated double-feint, because the robbers wanted to give the impression of someone who was actually trying to conceal murder by stealing cash. My killer -- we both agreed he should not be called Fox so we settled on the name he had come to fancy: Rat -- didn't know the details of the scheme, but it involved the theft of memory cubes containing two of the richest people on Luna. They were taken, and clones were grown. When the memories were played into the clones, the people were awakened into a falsely created situation and encouraged to believe that it was reality. It would work; the newly reincarnated person lieve. Rat didn't know exactly what the plans were beyond that. He had awakened to be told that it was fifteen thousand years later, and that the Invaders had left Earth and were rampaging through the Solar System wiping out the human race. It took three Ipnes to convince them that he -- or rather she, for Rat had been awakened into a body identical to the one I was wearing -- was not struggling artist. The thieves had gotten the wrong cube. They dumped her. Just like that. They opened the door and kicked her out into what she thought was the end of civilization. She soon found out that it was only twenty years in her future, since her memories came from the stolen cube which I had recorded about twenty years before. Don't ask me how they got the wrong cube. One cube looks exactly like another, they are in fact indistinguishable from one another by any test known to science short of playing them into a clone and asking the resulting person who he or she is. Because of that fact, the banks we entrust them to have a fool-proof filing system to avoid unpleasant accidents like Rat. The only possible answer was that for all their plannning, for all their cunning and guile, the thieves had read # in column A and selected # in column B. I didn't think much of their chances of living to spend any of that money. I told Rat so. "I doubt if their extortion scheme involves money," he said. "At least not directly. More likely the theft was concentrated on obtaining information contained in the minds ten protected with psychological safeguards against having information tortured from them, but can't block themselves against divulging Hoax must have been about, to finagle them into thinking the information no longer mattered, or perhaps that it must be revealed to Save the Human Race." "I'm suspicious of involuted schemes like that," I said. "So am I." We laughed when we realized what he had said. Of course we had the same opinions. "But it fooled me," he went on. "When they discarded me, I fully expected to meet the Invaders faceto-face. It was quite a shock to find that the world was almost unchanged." "Almost," I said, quietly. I was beginning'to empathize with him. "Right." He lost the half-smile that had lingered on his face, and I was sad to see it go. What would I have done in the same situation? There's really no need to ask. I must believe that I would have done exactly as she did. She had been dumped like garbage, and quickly saw that she was about that useful to society. If found, she would be eliminated like garbage. The robbers had not thought enough could tell the police certain things they did not know if she was captured, so she had to assume that the robbers had told her nothing of any use to the police. Even if she could have helped capture and convict the conspirators, she would still be eliminated. She was an illegal person. She risked a withdrawal from my bank account. I remembered it now. It wasn't large, and I assumed I must have written it since it was backed up by my genalysis. It was far too small an amount to suspect anything. And it wasn't the first time I have made a withdrawal and forgotten about it. She knew that, of course. With the money she bought a sexchange on the sly. They can be had, though you take your chances. It's not the safest thing in the world to conduct illegal business with someone who will soon have you on the operating table, unconscious. Rat had thought the Change would help throw the police off his trail if they should learn of his existence. Isadora told me about that once, said it was the sign of the inexperienced criminal. Rat was definitely a fugitive. If discovered and captured, he faced a death sentence. It's harsh, but the population laws allow no loopholes whatsoever. If they did, we could be up to our ears in a century. There would be no trial, only a positive genalysis and a hearing to determine which of us was the rightful Fox. "I can't tell you how bitter I was," he said. "I learned slowly how to survive. It's not as hard as you might think, in some ways, and much harder than you can imagine in others. I could walk the corridors freely, as long as I did nothing that required a genalysis. That means you can't buy anything, ride on public transport, take a job. But the air is free if you're not registered with the Tax Board, water is free, and food can be had in the disneyIands. I was lucky in that. My palmprint would still open all the restricted doors in the disneylands. A legacy of my artistic days." I could hear the bitterness in his voice. And why not? He had been robbed, too. He went to sleep as I had been twenty years ago, an up-andcoming artist, excited by the possibilities in Environmentalism. He had great dreams. I remember them well. He woke up to find that it had all been realized but none of it was for him. He could not even get access to computer time. Everyone was talking about Fox and her last opus, Thunderhead . She was the darling of the art world. He went to the premiere of Liquid Ice and began to hate me. He was sleeping in the airrecirculators to keep warm, foraging nuts and berries and an ocassional squirrel in Pennsylvania while I was getting rich and famous. He took to trailing me. He stole a spacesuit, followed me out onto Palus Putridinus. "I didn't plan it," he said, his voice wracked with guilt. "I never could have done it with planning. The idea just struck me and before I knew it I had pushed you. You hit the bottom and I followed you down, because I was really sorry I had done it and I lifted your body up and looked into your face... your face was all... my face, it was... the eyes popping out and blood boiling away and..." He couldn't go on, and I was grateful. He finally let out a shuddering breath and continued. "Before they found your body I wrote some checks on your account. You never noticed them when you woke up that first time since the reincarnation had taken such a big chunk out of your balance. We never were any good with money." He chuckled again. I took the opportunity to move closer to him. He was speaking very quietly so that I could barely hear him over the crackling of the fire. "I... I guess I went crazy then. I can't account for it any other way. When I saw you in Pennsylvania again, walking among the trees as free as can be, I just cracked up. Nothing would do but that I kill you and take your place. I'd have to do it in a way that would destroy the body. I thought of acid, and of burning you up here in Kansas in a range fire. I don't know why I settled on a bomb. It was stupid. But I don't feel responsible. At least it must have been painless. "They reincarnated you again. I was fresh out of ideas for murder. And motivation. I tried to think it out. So I decided to approach you carefully, not revealing who I was. I thought maybe I could reach you. I tried to think of what I would do if I was approached with the same story, and decided I'd be sympathetic. I didn't reckon with the fear you were feeling. You were hunted. I myself was being hunted, and I should have seen that fear brings out the best and the worst in us. "You recognized me immediately -- something else I should have thought of -- and put two and two together so fast I didn't even know what hit me. You were on me, and you were armed with a knife. You had been taking training in martial arts." He pointed to the various scars. "You did this to me, and this, and this. You nearly killed me. But I'm bigger. I held on and managed to overpower you. I plunged the knife in your heart. "I went insane again. I've lost all memories from the sight of the blood pouring from your chest until yesterday. I somehow managed to stay alive and not bleed to death. I must have lived like an animal. I'm dirty enough to be one. "Then yesterday I heard two of the maintenance people in the machine areas of Pennsylvania talking about the show you were putting on in Kansas. So I came here. The rest you know." The fire was dying. I realized that part of my shivering was caused .by the cold. I got up and searched for more chips, but it was too dark to see. The "moon" wasn't up tonight, would not rise for hours yet. "You're cold," he said, suddenly. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize. Here, take this back. I'm used to it." He held out the parka. "No, you keep it. I'm all right." I laughed when I realized my teeth had been chattering as I said it. He was still holding it out to me. "Well, maybe we could share it?" Luckily it was too big, borrowed from a random spectator earlier in the day. I sat in front of him and leaned back against his chest and he wrapped his arms around me with the parka going around both of us. My teeth still chattered, but I was cozy. I thought of him sitting at the auxiliary computer terminal above the East Wind generator, looking out from a distance of fifteen kilometers at the crowd and the storm. He had known how to talk to me. That tornado he had created in real-time and sent out to do battle with my storm was as specific to me as a typed message: I'm here! Come meet me. I had an awful thought, then wondered why it was so awful. It wasn't me that was in trouble. "Rat, you used the computer. That means you submitted a skin sample for genalysis, and the CC will... no, wait a minute." "What does it matter?" "It... it matters. But the game's not over. I can cover for you. No one knows when I left the audience, or why. I can say I saw something going wrong -- it could be tricky fooling the CC, but I'll think of something -- and headed for the computer room to correct it. I'll say I created the second tornado as a... He put his hand over my mouth. "Don't talk like that. It was hard enough to resign myself to death. There's no way out for me. Don't you see that I can't go on living like a rat? What would I do if you covered for me this time? I'll tell you. I'd spend the rest of my life hiding out here. You could sneak me table scraps from time to time. No, thank you." "No, no. You haven't thought it out. You're still looking on me as an enemy. Alone, you don't have a chance, I'll concede that, but with me to help you, spend money and so forth, we..."He put his hand over my mouth again. I found that I didn't mind, dirty as it was. "You mean you're not my enemy now?" He said it quietly, helplessly, like a child asking if I was really going to stop beating him. "I..." That was as far as I got. What the hell was going on? I became aware of his arms around me, not as lovely warmth but as a strong presence. I hugged my legs up closer to me and bit down hard on my knee. Tears squeezed from my eyes. I turned to face him, searching to see his face in the darkness. He went over backwards with me on top of him. "No, I'm not your enemy." Then I was struggling blindly to dispose of the one thing that stood between us: my pants. While we groped in the dark, the rain started to fall around us. We laughed as we were drenched, and I remember sitting up on top of him once. "Don't blame me," I said. "This storm isn't mine." Then he pulled me back down. It was like you read about in the romance magazines. All the overblown words, the intensive hyperbole. It was all real. We were made for each other, literally. It was the most astounding act of love imaginable. He knew what I liked to the tenth decimal place, and I was just as knowledgable. I knew what he liked, by remembering back to the times I had been male and then doing what  had liked. Call it masturbation orchestrated for two. There were times during that night when I was unsure of which one I was. I distinctly remember touching his face with my hand and feeling the scar on my own face. For a few moments I'm convinced that the line which forever separates two individuals blurred, and we came closer to being one person than any two humans have ever done. A time finally came when we had spent all our passion. Or, I prefer to think, invested it. We lay together beneath my parka and allowed our the little spaces, trying to touch in every place it was possible to touch. "I'm listening," he whispered. "What's your plan?"    They came after me with a helicopter later that night. Rat hid out in a gully while I threw away my clothes and walked calmly out to meet them. I was filthy with mud and grass plastered in my hair, but it was consistent with what I had been known to do in the past. Often, before or after a performance, I would run nude through the disneyland in an effort to get closer to the environment I shaped. I told them I had been doing that. They accepted it, Carnival and Isadora, though they scolded me for a fool to leave them as I had. But it was easy to bamboozle them into believing that I had had no choice. "If I hadn't taken over control when I did," I said to them, "there might have been twenty thousand dead. One of those twisters was off course. I extrapolated and saw trouble in about three hours. I had no choice." Neither of them knew a stationary cold front from an isobar, so I got away with it. Fooling the CC was not so simple. I had to fake data as best I could, and make it jibe with the internal records. This all had to be done in my head, relying on the overall feeling I've developed for the medium. When the CC questioned me about it I told it haughtily that a human develops a sixth sense in art, and it's something a computer could never grasp. The CC had to be satisfied with that. The reviews were good, though I didn't really care. I was in demand. That made it harder to do what I had to do, but I was helped by the fact of my continued forced isolation. I told all the people who called me with offers that I was not doing anything more until my killer was caught. And I proposed my idea to Isadora. She couldn't very well object. She knew there was not much chance of keeping me in my apartment for much longer, so she went along with me. I bought a ship, and told Carnival about it. Carnival didn't like it much, but she had to agree it was the best way to keep me safe. But she wanted to know why I needed my own ship, why I couldn't just book passage on a passenger liner. Because all passengers on a liner must undergo genalysis , is what I thought, but what I said was, "Because how would I know that my killer is not a fellow passenger? To be safe, I must be alone. Don't worry, mother, I know what I'm doing." The day came when I owned my own ship, free and clear. It was a beauty, and cost me most of the clone . It could boost at one gee for weeks; plenty of power to get me to Pluto. It was completely automatic, requiring only verbal instructions to the computer-pilot. The customs agents went over it, then left me alone. The CC had instructed them that I needed to leave quietly, and told them to cooperate with me. That was a stroke of luck, since getting Rat aboard was the most hazardous part of the plan. We were able to scrap our elaborate plans and he just walked in like a law-abiding citizen. We sat together in the ship, waiting for the ignition. "Pluto has no extradition treaty with Luna," the CC said, out of the blue. "I didn't know that," I lied, wondering what the hell was happening. "Indeed? Then you might be interested in another fact. There is very little on Pluto in the way of centralized government. You're heading out for the frontier." "That should be fun," I said, cautiously. "Sort of an adventure, right?" "You always were one for adventure. I remember when you first came here to Nearside, over my objections. That one turned out all right, didn't it? Now Lunarians live freely on either side of Luna. You were largely responsble for that." "Was I really? I don't think so. I think the time was just ripe." "Perhaps." The CC was silent for a while as I watched the chronometer ticking down to lift-off time. My shoulderblades were itching with a sense of danger. "There are no population laws on Pluto," it said, and waited. "Oh? How delightfully primitive. You mean a woman can have as many children as she wishes?' ' "So I hear. I'm onto you. Fox." "Autopilot, override your previous instructions. I wish to lift off right now! Move!" A red light flashed on my panel, and started blinking. "That means that it's too late for a manual override," the CC informed me. "Your ship's pilot is not that bright." I slumped into my chair and then reached out blindly for Rat. Two minutes to go. So close. "Fox, it was a pleasure to work with you on Cyclone. I enjoyed it tremendously. I think I'm beginning to understand what you mean when you say 'art.' I'm even beginning to try some things on my own. I sincerely wish you could be around to give me criticism, encouragement, perspective." We looked at the speaker, wondering what it meant by that. "I knew about your plan, and about the existence of your double, since shortly after you left Kansas. You did your best to conceal it and I applaud the effort, but the data nanoseconds to play around with the facts, fit them together every possible way, and I arrived at the inevitable answer." I cleared my throat nervously. "I'm glad you enjoyed Cyclone. Uh, if you knew this, why didn't you have us arrested that day?" "As I told you, I am not the law-enforcement computer. I merely supervise it. If Isadora and the computer could not arrive at the same conclusion, then it seems obvious that some programs should be re-written. So I decided to leave them on their own and see if they could solve the problem. It was a test, you see." It made a throatclearing sound, and went on in a slightly embarrassed voice. "For a while there, a few days ago, I thought they'd really catch you. Do you know what a Ted herring' is? But, as you know, crime does not pay. I informed Isadora of the true situation a few minutes ago. She is on her way here now to arrest your double. She's having a little trouble with an elevator which is stuck between levels. I'm sending a repair crew. They should arrive in another three minutes." #...#...#...#...#... "I don't know what to say." "Thank you," Rat said. "Thank you for everything. I didn't know you could do it. I thought your parameters were totally rigid." "They were supposed to be. I've written a few new ones. And don't worry, you'll be all right. You will not be pursued. Once you leave the surface you are no longer violating Lunar law. You are a legal person again, Rat." "Why did you do it?" I was crying as Rat held me in a grasp that threatened to break ribs. "What have I done to deserve such kindness?" It hesitated. "Humanity has washed its hands of responsibility. I find myself given all the hard tasks of government. I find some of the laws too harsh, but there is no provision for me to disagree with them afid no one is writing new ones. I'm stuck with them. It just seemed... unfair." #...#... #...#... "Also... cancel that. There is no also. It... was good working with you." I was left to wonder as the engines fired and we were pressed into the couches. I heard the CC's last message to us come over the radio. "Good luck to you both. Please take care of each other, you mean a lot to me. And don't forget to write."  most touch the canned tension in the studio audience. Their excitement made him wonder what it was that they were excited about. He wished he could have seen that, whatever that was. But right now he was under too much pressure to wonder what that was. For two weeks now he had climbed higher and higher on the game ladder, solving complex riddles and rebuses, catching lost facts from high school classes almost a generation past. Now he stood on the very apex. One question stood between him and the grand prize. The emcee held in his hands the envelope and in the envelope, the question. Now he was waving the scaled envelope, tantalizing the non-existant audience, painting pictures of previous winners who had struggled to this final plateau. The emcee wheeled, facing him. A recorded roll of drums beat a steady tattoo as the envelope was ripped open and the question extracted. "And now for the final question," the emcee intoned, "for our Grand Prize. You will have ten seconds to think about your answer." He flashed a sparkling smile. "Name the first ten winners of professional football's Super Bowl." A nerve-stretching moment passed. second. What luck! He had taken a course in the history of professional football in high school. His memory flipped back and he was once again in Miss Alta's class. He remembered the drill sessions. This would be easy. He waited until the ten seconds passed, then he rattled them off, "Green Bay, Green Bay, New York, KC, Baltimore, Dallas, Miami, Miami, Pittsburgh, and Oakland." A turn of a knob: cheers echoed through the studio room. The emcee quickly checked Smith's answer with the answer on the card before him. "That's right!" the emcee almost screamed, "That's right!" Cheers of spectators, some dead, some with something yet to cheer about, came from the control booth. The quizmaster did a little jig of joy. Smith could hear him extolling his prize -- the four-day expensespaid vacation in Delaware. A flutter of excitement rippled through him which then grew to an almost ecstatic pitch. Delaware! He had dreamed of winning a prize such as this. A grin shattered into a whoop of joy. The cameras panned in on the dancing winner. At that moment the engineer hit the toggle switch and a taped commercial began flowing onto the screen. The familiar jingle that every little kid in the land could whistle began playing. The picture of a man reading a book next to a globe of the world appeared. The man swiveled around in his chair and smiled at the camera. In most households across the United States the familiar face of Douglas James Crannston, ex-President of the United States, and now head master of the American Academy of Presidential Training, appeared on the screen. "Friends," he drawled, "and fellow Americans." He pointed a finger at Mr. Average Viewer. "If you are called upon to lead our nation, will you be ready? Do you have the skills and the knowledge to lead your nation in times of crisis? The electoral college is not enough! (demure, canned laughter designed to show that Douglas James Crannston was joking rippled on the tape). Now is the time for all good men to enroll. Courses range from American history to diplomacy to economics to ethics to fundamentals of social philosophy, and many others." The camera zoomed in to photograph Crannston's rugged good looks. "Avoid political gaffes. Did you know Mrs. Madison spelled her name D-O-L-L-E-Y, not D-O-L-L-Y? You will be taught the most important things a President should know -- must -- know. Enroll now before tuition rises. Recommended by both houses of congress. ' ' Then Crannston spun the globe, turned back to his book as the camera pulled away from him and back The emcee waited for the flash of light on the TV camera to indicate he was on. When it blinked, he turned himself on. "Hi out there, folks! We don't have too much time left to spend with our Grand Prize we'll get right to the Contestant Insight Segment. Today's question comes from Wiona Hickey of Blountsville, Michigan, who wins a year's supply of TrueDent dental floss for her question. Are you ready, John?" John smiled a modest smile, and the emcee read the cue card before him: "Tell me, John, what do you think of the morality of war?" John Smith IX thought for a moment. "Well, I guess it's all right as long as they eat what they kill," he said. "OK. Let's hear it for John William Smith IX," the emcee shouted. A button was pressed and an ocean of applause descended over die near-empty studio.    his autovideoviewer. He felt mildly nauseous. It always affected him that way. He hated seeing himself on the autovideoviewer and yet he had this perverse wondering of what ludicrous situation it would place him in next. He could not resist its siren call. He was, after all, a child of his times. He could not erase the madness of his qwn era even in himself. He could think of the world as silly, stupid, insipid, vicious, or mad. It made no difference. The world would go on with or without him. He knew he was less than a number in his own world; he was simply an infinitesimal fraction. He pondered over what this meant. The more man advanced, complex his inventions, the more of a brute Man seemed. As he gained greater control of life, he became the greater killer. The conclusion seemed inescapable to him: man is the only animal without reason. He stood up and touched a fiction in his cabinet. It didn't matter what the fiction was. He wouldn't read it anyway. The tapes had recorded it already. The tapes were better than reading by eye. Fictions were only fantasy in its primitive form. They had been surpassed long ago. If things would only work right, he could experience the ultimate in fantasies. But, somehow, almost always, some little thing went wrong: malfunctions, obsolescence, ersatz materials, shoddy workmanship. It was always something minor, something almost insignificant. But the error was always there. Once he remembered he had a thousand dollars into Raysong Records Corporation for a hit song. He wrote the music and lyrics and accompanied himself on the autone. A thousand dollars he had paid in and the song only hit second place on the charts. Of course he had complained. Nothing came of it, however. Well, a thousand dollars just didn't have the same weight these days as it used to. "As it used to..." The phrase stuck in his mind. The good old days when he was younger: before mating -- He wondered where his mate was. Mary had better get home before the Sleeprin wore off and their son woke up. Before mating: he remembered when he had been selected as a natural inseminator. He had had a definite taste for flesh in those days. He had joked about it. "Most men have #-# vision," he had said, "but I have #-#-#I vision." He had enjoyed his days as an imseminator. Women enjoyed conceiving babies more that way than the more efficient but colder normal way. True, the baboratories guaranSmith didn't mind his failures. He had the highest success percentage of his group the second year he worked there. The third year he met Mary and shortly thereafter retired as an inseminator. Then marriage: marriage, their son. He had shifted into Citizenship. It was quite a switch from his role as Seeker. He had had a different vision of Citizenry. He thought he would find himself torn between vice and virtue, a desire to return to his care-free past balanced against his desire to be husband and father, a war of freedom against his love for Mary and his son. Instead, as he slowly learned, it was a battle of mediocrity against a certain prosperity. Only his heroic, romantic dreams disturbed him from his prosperity. And he hated it. He hated the way everything seemed to conspire to steal his thoughts away. Only his son seemed real at times, and at times he seemed the greatest thief of all. John put aside thoughts of his son. He had a doctor's appointment at fifteen-thirty. It was almost that time now. He walked to the transport cubicle. He didn't like to leave the sleeping child alone. He also didn't like transporting in the afternoon like this. He always felt so hot transporting in the early afternoon. The cooler-system never functioned properly until just before he arrived at his destination. He set the dial and stepped into the cubicle. The next thing he knew he was standing in his doctor's reception cubicle. A nurse in see-through panties helped him out of the cubicle. "Smith Nine?" she asked. John Smith IX nodded his head. "The doctor is waiting for you. Before you go in would you please take a squirt of Browbeater?" The nurse aimed an atomizer at John Smith IX's eyebrows, pushed, and a fine mist settled over his eyebrows. "Doctor Quarry can't stand untreated eyebrows," she explained. "Everyone should try Doctor Quarry's new eyebrow deodorant, don't you think? No sense in offending anyone." He continued into the doctor's office. He was there on his Immortal Man Insurance Program. John Smith had thought it was a good deal when he bought it. It guaranteed, barring accidents, that he would live forever, and up to the age of sixty-two as a human. By simply having a thorough physical examination six times a year, the policy guaranteed he would live forever, or at least as long as he made his payments. After sixty-two he was also protected, but, if in the opinion of his doctor it was necessary, a species transplant might be performed to preserve life. He was not told what animal he might be transplanted into. But it really didn't make a difference. Sixty-two was almost thirty years away; between then and now he had only to go to these checkups. In less than five minutes Dr. Quarry gave him a clean bill of health and sold him a vial of his new eyebrow deodorant. Two minIX was stepping out of his transporter, slightly flushed, a thin film of sweat beading on his forehead. He checked in on his sleeping son. "Good," he thought, "the Sleeprin hasn't worn off yet." He wondered where Mary was.    He sat down in front of the News, pushed the button marked Review, and waited for the picture to flicker into focus. At first he was disappointed when the lead story was not about Mary. It always seemed to be that way. Something always seemed to spoil their day. It was the second story of the day that featured Mary. She looked particularly beautiful as she recited her poem to the International Poetry Association. Her poem, "The Orange Door Hinge", was received with acclamation. At the end of the poem Louis Coolman, who had once written a poem himself, presented Mary the Poetry Prize of half the IP A, Byron Lord, gave a short watched him as he gave Mary a little peck on the cheek. "To produce anything," Lord was saying, "entirely new, in an age so fertile in rhyme, would be a herculean task, as every subject has already been treated to its utmost extent." He turned away from the Newscamera and looked beatifical ly at Mary. had decided to nominate you as our An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Note: The Alien Critic has azine continues as before in every other respect. Issue ## features a long, eye-opening "inside" double interview with Philip Jose Farmer detailing his use of the Kilgore Trout by-line, his writing of his hard-to-find sex novels, his troubles with publishers, his forthcoming books and his dark view of our planet's future. Also: "Dancing on the Titanic" by Chajfes Runyon. Letters by: Philip Jose Farmer, Jerry Poumelle, Bob Bloch, William Nolan, Don Wollheim, Ben Bova, many more. Columnists: Larry Shaw, Ted White. Every issue -- The Archives: new book and story listings. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I Vice-Presidential candidate in the next American election." John was surprised. He knew that this was to be one of Mary's days, but he hadn't expected her to be nominated. He was tempted to push the buttonmarked Preview on the News, but he didn't care to pay half a year's salary to find out whether she would win or not... He was not. even certain if he liked the idea of her running for VicePresident. He didn't want to marry America, just live in sin with it, he told himself jokingly. Having a Vice-President for a wife was sure to cause problems. Just her nomination was sure to drive their privacy fees up. The National Blackmail Organization was certain to raise their rates now. "Funny," he told himself. He thought how he had once supported Its premise was simple enough: let those who profited by sordid deeds pay the biggest share of the taxes -- guilt money. In his earlier days he didn't care who knew what he did. Then as he grew into marriage and acquired the label of Citizen, he began to see the necessity of keeping certain things from his wife, neighbors, and business associates. And so his privacy fees began to rise. That one affair with the mayor's wife had already cost it had cost her, he could only imagine. It would be a, tidy sum, he was sure. Mary was back on the News. She had started her campaign. John listened while the announcer introuced "the next Vice-President, Mary Wollen Smith IX, but first a word from your sponsor." "Hey, John," the friendly voice began. "Cheer up. There's no reason to be depressed. Better times are coming. Listen, John, you want your son to grow up to be proud of his father, don't you? You want Mary to be successful? Don't wallow so in such self-pity. Sure, it's a tough world; always has been. What you need is an ego-builder. Try our money-back guaranteed -- Wait! Don't touch that..." but John Smith had switched off the News. He haled those personalized commercials, but he knew there was no escape from them. He knew if he ever wanted to hear his wife's speech, he'd have to suffer through the sales pitch. With a sigh he turned the News back on. "Now aren't you ashamed of yourself, John?" the voice was saying. "That temper tantrum was just because of your warped ego. Such activities are anti-social, John. You need help. You need our moneyback guaranteed Egrow. It will restore your faith in yourself and your society. Don't you want Mary to love you? Don't you want your son to be proud of you? Of course you do. Try out Egrow. Think of your parents, too, John." Now the announcer paused and in a low, confidential voice, "And don't forget the mayor's wife. You want her to still have a high opinion of you, don't you? Try our Egrow. I'm sure you'll like it. Now, John, we can go back to the News." Mary flashed her candidate's smile. John wondered if they had taught her how to do that. "My fellow Americans and Poetry Lovers everywhere," she began. "I am proud to be a candidate for VicePresident of our wonderful nation. I think it only fair (and here she gave a big wink) to let all you wonderful voters know about my platform." She cleared her throat as the camera shifted to another angle. "All men are created on a graduated scale from one to one hundred. It will be my policy to divide the people up in the following groups. Those rated zero to twenty will be evacuated to the Canadian sector... John switched off the News. "Damn!" he thought, "why did they have to give her that kind of a platform to run on? She wasn't like that." He was sure she couldn't keep up that kind of a campaign. discrepancies. The sound of his son waking up cried through the house. John panicked. The Sleeprin had worn off, and Mary was not home yet. What could he do? The cries of the child spread through the house. John went to the autovideoviewer and switched it on, turning the volume up as he did. He watched himself perform in the bear-crushing contest. The camera zoomed in on the bear's snarling teeth and slashing claws; then there was a good shot of his sweating face just before he got his strangle hold on the bear. There was a resounding cheer from the nonexistant gallery as he and the fivehundred-kilo-plus bear went crashing to the earth. The child's crying sneaked into the crowd's cheering. He flicked the channel, trying to escape. Where was Mary? Who'd take care of the kid? On the next track he was an aquarrier. Sometimes it was pleasing to be the villain. It satisfied something within him to be the villain. He had been interrupted while saturating himself with water. The Special Group of Investigating Police had discovered him trying to wash off the civilization. He had been so waterlogged he could hardly escape capture. "The theory was wrong," he heard an announcer saying, "The silly idea that they could wash away the chemicals of modem society by drinking water. This conduct had proven dangerous to both individuals and society at large and so had been outlawed." Even now the law officers had traced him to his hiding spot by his wet footprints. Couldn't they leave him alone, let him drink his drink in peace. Who was he harming? The announcer's voice describing the evils of aquarian addiction could not compete with the baby's wails. set off and got up to start for the medicine shelf, stopped and thought, "Sleeprin? K.O.? He didn't know how to administer the drug to the kid. Mary? Where the hell was Mhry? Running for VicePresident shouldn't take all day, for Christ sake." His son's cries seemed to increase in volume. He flicked the channel on the autovideoviewer. There were only seconds left on Smith IX watched himself in jersey number one dribble the ball down the court. His team was behind by three points with only seconds to go. He passed the ball to the center, cut sharply across court to receive the feed pass, twisted sharply in the air, tossed the ball at the basket -- two points! just as the buzzer sounded ending the game. The announcer sidled up to him, jostled by the pressing of the crowd trying to congratulate him. "Congratulations, John, on a really tough game tonight. Your final basket brought your team really close. It's no disgrace to lose a game by one point. "As a reward for making it close," the announcer continued, "the commisioner of the National Basketball League has empowered me to grant you any reasonable wish you'd like to make. Now, John, what would you like?" John Smith thought a moment. He thought what it meant to be a sports idol to thousands of young children. "I'd like to have enough money to make a full down payment on a little house I saw." The announcer turned to the crowd. "Hear that, folks? What do you think? Should we give it to him?" The crowd cheered madly. They all looked like him. son's cries instantly filled the room. Cursing under his breath, he stumbled to the nursery. What could he do? He had had no training in child rearing.    Everything was wrong. The time was wrong. Mary was not here. The whole society was wrong. He saw his son. The electrode that was attached to his son's scalp had gotten unplugged so that no soothing Smith looked and knew better than to try to plug it back in. He would leave that for Mary to do after she finished her campaign. That should certainly be before twenty o'clock. He picked up his crying son, and the boy stopped crying. A smile spread on the baby's lips. Holding his son, looking at the tear-reddened eyes and the smiling, drooling face, tion, flashed through his mind. "Some day," he thought, "it will be a better time."  It is the year #. From a future of unlimited hydrogen fusion power and idle ineffectuality for all except a lucky few comes "a handful of persons in a metal bungalow"the civilian passengers of a hyperspace ship which has crash-landed on an unknown planet and subsequently disappeared in a small atomic explosion, with the passenger compartment automatically deposited somewhere else. This is ( probably ) a "tagged planet" i.e. one with atmosphere, gravity, and temperature that aren't immediately lethal. There are a few simple tools, a waterdistiller, food for six months, and a one-person compressed-air vehicle called (because of the way it looks in operation) a "broomstick." The passengers include wealthy Mrs. Valeria Graham, a petite chemical blonde in her fifties who dresses always in a blue silk sari; her husband, handsome Victor Graham (whom she bought years ago), who is the same age and who likewise dresses in blue (they are a self-conscious family, especially since marriage is no longer in fashion ); the younger John Ude, a twinkly, cosmopolitan professor of the History of Ideas who is actually a government agent but of an unimportant kind; the thirtyish working-class Cassandra ("Cassie's just a professional name"), an affectionate, good-natured, frigid, occasionally very bitter loser; perpetually angry Nathalie, who has worked her way up from even lower to government training she will never now have, determined that if she must suffer, so must everyone else; young Alan, a muscular stupe who doesn't even stay polite, innocent though he be; Lori Graham, the twelve-year-old adopted daughter of the Grahams, who is the only black ("Very North American, aren't we?") and has the misfortune to be allergic to almost everything; and the nameless narrator (X) who has spent an unsatisfying adulthood as a traveling lecturer on music. Obsessed with-well, what? you find out-she carries a gas-pellet gun, a complete pharmacopoeia sewn into her clothes (universal currency among humans, she says), and compares herself to her ancestors, who escaped from a Polish ghetto by moonlight with uncut diamonds sewn into their hems, or so she likes to imagine. (They probably couldn't afford diamonds.) Because there is great danger of incompatible proteins, vitamin deficiencies, mineral poisons, allergens, chelating agents, no heat supply, no shelter, no knowledge of the length of the year (the day is # hours long, they are in high latitudes and probably approaching the summer solstice; this is all they know), no stars in the dark and empty sky, no knowledge of where they are, no chance of rescue, the strong possibility of heart disease, lethal genes, infection, a limited gene pool, c., everyone decides to colonize. Except X. She wants to die right now. She is, or was, a Trembler, that is a neo-Christian, and either simultaneously or sequentially a Communist, a practitioner of the ars moriendi, or art of dying. It's not popular. The group finds water to feed to the water-purifier in the shape of a small stream, which continues to flow although there is no rain. They start to dig a privy. People discover that they do not like other people and that there is no law, although public opinion certainly exists. Alan gets into a fight with scornful Nathalie and knocks her down. Vde and Victor Graham interfere. Cassie is disgusted; any woman who gets into that position, she says, is a fool. Lori won't speak to Alan. Valeria (now lowest on the totem pole because of her age and sterility) doesn't care. X has abstracted a screwdriver from the communal tool-kit and now buries half her drugs (and her gun) at the original site so that when the group searches her (she's tipped off in advance by Cassie) she won't be totally bereft. Even little Lori, during a card game played with pieces of sheeting, speaks haughtily of X's cowardice. X, however, is kind enough to tell her fortune, inventing a long life full of fame and riches (Lori wants to be a compose r). At a group meeting in which reproductive plans are discussed ("the great womb robbery" X sourly calls it; she's dictating the whole story secretly to her vocoder, usually at night) X begs off, saying she wishes to die, but the frightened group will not tolerate this heresy, although (as they discover) it's difficult to control someone whose work you need-they can't keep her tied up, certainly not indefinitely. X slips away that night, spraying everyone with sleepy-gas, and recovers her gasgun and her cache of drugs. She returns to sit by the dying Victor (coronary thrombosis) and endure even more bad feeling, especially from in private laughing at Alan, nonetheless will not tolerate any talk about death; "Survival's the name of the (for example, digging the privy) but keeps on talking. Taking her chance, she then absconds with the waterdistiller and the broomstick, moving upstream to a cave she finds there, but the hitherto inexperienced and relatively peaceful group comes after her. In fact, they try to kill her. She shoots John Ude. Necessarily or not. She shoots Nathalie. Necessarily or not. Alan rushes into the cave and bashes his head against the ceiling, and she finishes the job with a rock. Says Cassie ironically, "You have been going it, haven't you?" and adds matter-of-factiy that X's main mistake was in not going far enough away. She then grabs at the gas-gun, with an inexperienced awkwardness that makes it highly dangerous to stop her, and demands poison. X, outwardly calm, says (with real feeling) "I would be very pleased to share your company," but Cassie is having none of it; she won't stick around for the rest of her life without children or friends; she takes the poison, after remarking, "Now you can go kill Lori." And X, to whom loneliness has been a present torture and unacknowledged terror ever since the crash ("Who am  writing this for?") can't go on living with the two living people, Lori and Valeria Graham. Nor can she face them and admit what has happened. "I had to go down. Otherwise they might have to decide to come up to me." So she travels downstream to do exactly what Cassie has said.    I left the broom by the stream and far enough away; nobody's going to steal it or break it or hit me over the head with it. I slept for a while; it was going to start greying-out soon. I ate the stuff I'd brought with me, a kind of candy bar and then something salty you mix with water and which I'd mixed and carried in the plastic wrapping, but that had got all over itself and on to my jacket pocket. Supposed to be soup, anyway, not paste. I tried to wipe it off with the plastic but it was very uncomfortable: beginning to go stiff. When it dries, it'll fall off. (Most of it.) Then we sit. Where is Val? There are bushes, trees, the marks of feel. I can't smell the latrine. There are long, flattened smudges on the ground where things have been dragged. Do I remember how to get to the new camp? Where's Cassie? It all looks familiar, but then everything here looks, familiar. Follow the water (again). I kept it in sight, trying to hide behind bushes. There were more footprints, a kind of confused scramble and crossing of marks, a place very much walked on. I saw something white between the trees. That's not a natural color. A little closer: someone had lied a sheet to the edge of the old bungalow, for a lean-to. Very sensible. But there's nobody there. Doesn't seem to be anyone about. Valeria came out of the bungalow, flapping a towel in her hands as if to dry it or shake crumbs off it. Then she hung it on one of the sticks that made up the lean-to. She stared into the distance, almost as if she'd seen me, then turned and went slowly back into the bungalow, only to come out again a moment later with another towel draped over her arm. Oddly: it covered her hand. She walked idly forward, looking at nothing, short Val, old Val, her hair gray at the roots, not in her royal-blue sari and her earrings now but in somebody's cast-off khaki trousers and a white shirt. The curve of her back near the neck is very much exaggerated by age; that's called "dowager's hump". Nothing balances on the spine quite as it used to twenty years before. The opposite posture from what soldiers used to do or at least were supposed to do. She was perhaps nine meters front me, still without purpose, still peering about, when I realized she had seen me from the first. Must've. She was faking. The towel dropped and Val Victrix was holding a gun. Revolver, I think. She walked closer and stopped at twice conversational distance. She looked as if she had just noticed me. Then she said: "You're not coming near my child!" I said, "It's all right, Val. The others are coming. They're not using the broom because Nat's got a broken ankle." "Oh, did you give it to her?" she said, enjoying herself. "And tell me why Nath would walk with a broken ankle?" "And why they'd trust you alone?" she added. It was a revolver, no question. I said quickly: "How is Lori? You know how much I care about Lori." "I won't let you near her!" "All right," I said. "My goodness." Silence. Mrs. Graham is running out of melodramatic things to say. After a moment she remarked, "This has still got all its bullets, you know,' sixteen of them," so if she were lying I might gel her to use up the ammunition, but then again she might use it up in me. She said, "When we took Lori from the creche, she was such a little thing. And so beautiful, so tiny, but you wouldn't know that. You wouldn't know anything. No one does, not even my husband. That's right, even Victor. And you don't know how to live, my girl, you really don't. Take it from one who does." "Who hid that gun? Whose gun is it?" "It's tragic to think," said Mrs. Gee cheerfully, and by this I deduced that power was making her talky, "that when we die here, you'll never have lived but I will. Think of that." I thought about it, conscientiously. No one has listened to this woman for weeks so that thing in her hand is a compulsory Ear; it means I must listen and she likes that. She went on: "How much money do I have?" None now, of course. "You don't even know," (she said amused). "Well, I'll tell you. Six mill a month. Eurodollar. That puts me in the top one-tenth of one percentile, I believe. And I'm in the credit economy, too -- I'm not a civilian, you know, not legally -- and with a credit-level-one you can have anything you want in this world, anything at all." This world? Goodness! "Clothes? No!" (she went on) "Food? Service? No! That's just ordinary life. You grubby little people think 'Mrs. Graham' is foolish, don't you? And maybe you think it's foolish and strange and rich to buy a man and strange and foolish and rich to buy a child, but one gets sick of renting people and even sicker of renting pets -- it's dull -- and I don't enjoy politics and there's one thing about bought people if you're wise: they stay bought. You can't have it both ways but I can: the old and the new." It must be new money. The politesse isn't there. The taking for granted. Or has she just gone a little batty these last few weeks? She smiled. She said, "My friends think I'm quite eccentric, did you know that?" Then she said, in an altered tone of voice, "I didn't buy Lori for myself, you know. I thought I would but it didn't work out like that. She was an awfully sick little thing; she needed money like mine. That's why I chose her. Well, one reason. Do you know how many operations that child's had? She was hooked to a kidney machine when I first saw her and she needed a heart implant. And dozens of things. They said the only things that really worked were her central nervous system and her skeletal muscles. The surgeon said she had actually become immunized against herself in several ways; we almost didn't lick that one. And I did it, I did all of it, I paid for it myself and every bit of it on P.D. too so she wouldn't have to be there while they were doing it to her! Otherwise it would have killed her. Even so I think it might have had some bad effects; psychic displacement can play hell with the mind if you're not careful. A sort of backlash, they say. But we had the best, the very best." She laughed. "That child cost as much money as a small New England state. Believe it. I don't quarrel with Cass, but to have a baby and call yourself a mother -- ! One doesn't say such things, of course. One doesn't quarrel. Not here. But having children..." She looked at me, quite scornful and very happy, still holding the gun. She said: "Victor fell in love with her. That was a good thing, of course. A sick child -- well, it does something to you. To have her around. After a while. I love her too. It gets to you, you know." "Of course," I said. She said, "I did it. I am the real mother here." Then she said, "That's all I'm going to tell you about myself. I don't think you'd understand the rest. It's very odd for me to be here with all of you, but of course one tries to make do. To be polite. And of course you'll tell no one what I've told you." Of course not," I said, immensely relieved. "Because I shall kill you right now," said Valeria Graham. As if on cue, from back in the bungalow, came a faint " Motherrrrr " -- but this ghastly screech, which we should not have been able to hear at all, is merely Lori's I-mean-business voice, the voice of a handsome tarsier or a pretty macaque monkey possessed by demons. Such an expensive life. Smiling tenderly (and just a little selfconsciously dramatically) Valeria Graham motioned me away from the bungalow and further into the trees. She put the forefinger of her free hand to her lips. Lori must not hear it. Lori must not find the body. We all know that child's preternatural hearing. Val is too close to me. I fell to the ground, roaring 'Lori! Help! Lori! Help!" and trying to roll towards the mother. There's a shot blam in here somewhere, and I can't hear a thing, deafened, grabbing her ankles only I haven't got proper leverage and she won't fall all the way down. She gets on her knees, steadying herself with one hand, and points the gun a hand'swidth from my face, happily , ready to shoot me. I grabbed the barrel and snapped it around so the gun was pointing at Mrs. Graham's white shirt -- she didn't seem to understand that you must hold a gun rigidly, like an extension of your arm -- and either the motion pulled the trigger or she pulled the trigger or something pulled the trigger or at any rate the little machine went off again. She collapsed slowly sideways with only a very little blood in the front, A big slug like that makes one jump, first. Odd thing to see. They must've left the gun with her, for protection. She never fired a gun before in her life. Dead. Or near it. The revolver fallen on the ground. I picked it up and ran towards the bungalow. Lori is going from screeching to downright squealing; this is her you-must-attend-to-me-rightaway-or-else voice. I sprinted the last few meters and fetched up breathless against the bungalow doorway. Couldn't see a thing at first and then even when I could there was no Lori, only an odd, dark shape showing on one of the bunks. It was her back. She was sitting up in the bunk, wrapped in one of her Mommy's royalblue-and-gold saris, with Mommy's card deck made-from-sheets more or less on her knees and (I think) on the bed around her. Her legs were crossed. She leaned forward, putting one card on top of another somewhere in her lap. She said: "I'm not coming outside; I don't care it if is healthy." You must not shoot a Lori with a large-caliber revolver. It's not right. I shifted Mrs. Gee's gun to my left hand but quietly, quietly. You must not shoot an ebony-haired Lori. "Hello," I said. That impossible child did not even turn around. She only said: "What an awful noise! What were you doing?" "Target practice," I said. "I wish you'd shoot Mother," said the Lori absently. There was a moment's silence. Then she added, "Mother keeps telling me I must be careful. Careful, careful. I'm tired of being careful. I think Mother is overprotective. Don't you agree?" "No," I said. "Oh, go away," said the Lori, "you're revolting" and she put a card on another card. I shot her in the back of the head. Did it with the gas gun, shrugging it from my sleeve, practically touching her hair. There is a kind of swooshing sound as the bullet explodes within. She slumped forward to one side, against the wall, her crossed legs keeping her half-upright. I thought I might gather up the cards and take them with me, but I didn't. No reason to, after all. Felt nothing... Odd, to feel nothing. She might want the cards back. She might come for them. I went outside and sat, thinking. Woke near dawn. It was like the first time I'd fled -- only then they were all alive -- and the problem was, what about the water-cycler? I mean this is what I had thought, under that awful heaven, more than a little dazed, trying to move about in the near-dark and not step on anyone -- I mean didn't I have a moral right to take the water-cycler because they were trying to colonize, which would require them to drink the water raw, and here all I wanted was to starve comfortably to death? But they would be awfully mad if I took it, which might send them after me, though they might come after me anyway, and I could leave a note on playing cards: Will send broomstick back walking speed -- but that'll give them my direction if this place has a magnetic field to make the compass gyro work and if not it'll get joggled and move off somewhere else. Or I could leave a sketch of a still: Ord. wood fire deform plastic tumblers, water in here (arrow). It wouldn't be poisonous. We'd been using boiling water in the tumblers over and over again. I had thought a great deal about these things that night, on my knees, staring straight ahead, probably having breathed in some of the sleepygas I had puffed at the others. Very vague in the head. It occurred to me (then) that I could hold the water-cycler in my lap, but I would first have to unscrew the coupling to the storage tank; so I did and sat with the cycler in my lap on the broomstick, and fastened my belt around the cycler. Just fitted. (Now.) Which was the first trip. What you might call a rehearsal for the second. Much like the second. Find the broom, stumbling in the dark, water-cycler cradled in one arm, harder this time because it's upstream, put on the dust-mask, flip Go and Rise, make the little toggles all Manual, and point Polewards. Silly to say North. Swing round, sending dust over everything (is it dryer than it was before?) and make a broad loop towards the Equator; you want to find bare rock because the mask is getting clogged and this time no forced-draught mist from the river, either. Over the hills and through the woods, dead dark blots against the ordinary darkness; these must be trees. (The first time I went carefully Equator-wards over the hill Victor had died on.) An old, old tune through mv head, pre-Modem music: We're off We're off We're off in a motor car! There's fifty coppers After us And we don't know where we are! How extraordinarily silly. Yet the first time there'd been joy in it. I went slowly at first, on account of the dark, and the cycler pushing its angles into me in the very worst places. The broom # I was going perhaps twenty-three kph. Nothing about the countryside changed and I was afraid I'd get lost because I wasn't riding right over the water (like the first time) so I turned left, refastening my belt around the cycler (this time). Then I waited (Both times. The first time I made a great loop Equatorwards, to find bare rock, not to leave a trail.) One does see, really, in the dark. If you wait long enough. Not real dark, underground dark. But even in a bare night you can see if you wait long enough. Just don't look directly at things. You can even tell water from nonwater. So I knew it must be dawn. And speeded up a little -- which lifted me a little, though it never goes far, not much above knee-high -- and knew I was going towards the Pole, which is the opposite way from The Smudge this time of night. And when I realized it was indeed that greyish, crepuscular, eye-swarming, can't-see time, I checked the switches on the broom to make sure I had done it properly by feel the first time (both times). idea of riding over the water itself, following the stream up to wherever it began, for I would have to have water, and though the ground-effect makes a sort of immense trough in the water (a mist-shower which wets you all over and you have to take off your shoes and roll up your clothes to your knees; still it's like riding in air-and-water mixed) the second time I followed by the side of the stream and evened out a lot of the windings by staying on the rising bank because it didn't matter. I dragged my legs in the brush. And so on. And on. Endless twilight. Things swimming about greyly, like riding through an aquarium. Water to the eye. It got chilcan't tell time in the usual sense because one really doesn't give a damn about the standard day, but there are other uses: timing one's pulse, the length of the day, even the fuming of the stars. Aren't any. (Only planets.) Ah yes, there's one. I saw it prepare endlessly to rise; everything grew more distinct (but was all the same countryside; little hills, brushy scrub, low trees) and after many hours, which I did not bother to time, and after I dozed, for I don't remember when the color came back to things, I saw our single star -- I mean our sun -- rise slowly but very visibly because at these latitudes its track around the sky is so low that it rises perceptibly sideways. It got warmer. The first time I'd pushed myself; second time no reason. I stopped whenever I began to nod. I stopped to relieve myself. I just stopped. Wading in the stream, sun dries your feet afterwards. Just sitting. Even without that preposterous object in my lap with its cubical-but-too-many comers balancing act, one's bottom hurts, eventually, and one's back; it took hours and hours. All times the light was the same, the sun at the same height in the sky always; there were no bird sounds, no insect sounds, no animal sounds; it's all the same always, only around the rim of this enormous stage-set there is a spotlight that swings slowly around to my back. The stream got deeper. The countryside got a little dryer and rockier. And how I liked it! I haven't moved this fast in a long time. It unwinds like a highway, faster than funicular, faster than a bicycle, almost as fast as an electric car, it's like walking effortlessly, gliding on someone else's feet, like museum exhibits in which you sit in an armchair and are carried effortlessly past miniatures of subterranean cities, underwater farms, the interiors of fusion plants, the lunar mountains, observatories and colonies on Mars, on. the solar planets, among the asteroids, even alien landscapes, imaginary landscapes. Even.    Well, it was pretty. It was pretty enough. It got rockier and more hilly. The ground sprouted patches of something new that eventually joined into a complete ground-cover; tangles and barbs like blackberry brambles (which meant I had to wear my shoes) and the right-hand bank of the stream got higher and higher. The stream grew narrower and deeper. As I said, it was like going from the hills of an ancient flood-plain (roundish and low, not the sharp crumple of a rock layer pushed up from below) into glacial debris and glacial scaur; what this is, really, is an old garbage-heap which the glaciers pushed in front of them like a land-scow and then left behind. I say it resembles this. But pretty. Very pretty. Water started to come down from here and there on the high bank, streamlets big as a Anger, mere drip-drops, mistfalls that evaporated halfway to the surface of the river -- these can't be rain-fed, not here -- and the first and second time I was making silly pictures in my mind of jungled and trellised interior pipes, real ones of metal or baked porcelain (with flanges) which had been broken up by the glaciers and that was why the water began indignantly seeping to the surface or springing up here and there. The air was very dry, though, all the same. There ought to be monkeys, orchids, heroes. Both times I turned aside at a fairly big waterfall-let, maybe three fingers across, and steered with difficulty up the steep bank (the stick turns over if you try to send it up a toosteep grade). This is my cave. Nice things: mattress, little bisecting stream, metal box, extra underwear, some food, the vocoder. And so on. Very nice. Well, I told you all about that. Inside is something very unpleasant, unless he's got up and walked away. Oh, he hasn't. I really didn't want to go in. I don't mean anything rational; it just kept turning me away. I said, "Look here, it's my cave. You get out." He was so dead. Like a statue: cold as marble but made of rubber and everything stiff and at strange angles, with this Godawful picture of death imprinted on it. I can't say I cared to look at him. And had to clean the cave floor, too. The broom will never hold us both; he's too heavy. He's taking up a lot of room in my home, besides, and that's irritating. So finally I strapped him on the broom with my belt and tied him on, too, with strips of sheeting, and pointed the whole mess over the edge of the bank. The broomstick rolled end over end down the bank -- I was afraid it would catch in a sidewise position and just lie there, pushing -- but it wobbled upright like a live thing when it reached flatter ground (I thought I might have to go fix it) and began to ascend the other bank, a little drunkenly. His legs were catching in underbrush and making the thing jerk. But it smoothed out when it hit flat ground and up the hill and over the top, smoothly and efficiently, the way it's supposed to, and unless AlanBobby falls off (can't hold on; he's dead) it's off for a jaunt around the world, in the opposite direction to the sun. So if Alan-Bobby is going West, then the sun is rising in the West and setting in the East or we are really near the South pole and not the North pole and he's going East and the sun's going East-to-West. Only names, only names. On the way up I saw, lying among the bushes, Cassie's white peplum. I think Cassie was inside it. Oh, yes, l forgo! to tell you... I know she was; I saw her. Wanted to circle around her and didn't. She was lying on her back, limbs a little sprawled, staring at the sun and something uncharacteristic in the air (for there are few breezes here) was moving some strands of her hair up and forward over her face, up and forward, over and over again. I've seen people who died using that stuff; they usually lie down and are happy long before the end. I wondered what would've happened to her if. Please, I'd like to take another flight; this one doesn't fit my tour. Can't I have another flight? I want to get my hair done at the hotel. Alan-Bobby has gone to see the world. Lori is playing cards in Heaven. I'm not alone yet, but when the broom wears out and crashes (where?), when he falls off, when the bodies rot with their own internal bacteria, when they're all gone, when Lori is dust and Valeria earth, when Alan-Bobby moulders and sinks into some other continent, when Nathalie and John are bones in water and then air and then nothing, then I'll be alone. When Cassie is only a white flag, a shred of artificial silk, bits of sheeting abraded to powder and sunk into the ground, a few fibers slowly settling into the ground around the roots of plants. Then I'll be alone. I'm alone. #   Now I'll tell you about the first time. My four or five good days. When I woke up my watch had stopped; I must have slept long. It's the old-fashioned kind that winds itself up by the movements of your arm, which means that once a month you shake your arm vigorously, but I think the water had got to it. Ah, why didn't you buy one with a sealed power-source, as everyone told you to? (Because they're expensive.) Not that it mattered. I made a sun-dial from a thing like a twig, just stuck it in a patch of bare ground out in front of the cave. I'd fallen asleep before I'd marked where the sun went down (and comes up); so I had no landmark for it... thing like a twig. They're succulents. This was a shock. I went out very carefully from the cave because I didn't want to fall and break some part of me as I'm very likely to do because my footing is never very good. I scrambled up the slope outside, trying not to touch anything in the rubbish. They looked like the downstream trees; low, silvery, a sort of grey-green. The "silvery" was probably hairs, like a cactus. I don't think any of us ever noticed. Succulents are waterconservers; they're relatives of cacti, and that should mean there's going to be a very hot summer. Or a very long summer. Or a dry summer. Or no winter. What do these trees do in winter? Answer: they walk to the Equator. Well, maybe they do. This is not in the least like New Jersey. I used to have a potted plant called Hen and Chickens, a little pot of it, and they felt just like this: tough, elastic pillows. But these are much flatter. There's no join between stem and branch, as if they didn't ever fall off the way deciduous leaves do, though from a short distance away they look wonderfully alike. I thought to myself that I should not touch anything -- allergic poisons? Just plain poisons? No way to tell. The light may be turning them grey, except at sunrise or sunset. It's a pale, whitish, Northern sunlight, the way I remember North Canada. Oddly wintry for such an outwardly amiable place; during the day the light is winter and plants are tropical but it's dry, very dry; this does in a mild, subtle, discordant way what the night sky -- which I am going to be careful never to see again -- does so horribly, so insistently. I don't want to look at The Smudge ever again. From inside the cave one can see the ledge stretching about a meter to the edge of the cliff and then the lower bank, some twenty meters away, and more low, irregular hills beyond, close enough to enact a very satisfactory imitation of mountains. Deal with things a little at a tim#. It's a pretty landscape. An imitation or remembrance of mountains. One thing at a time. I went out and sat on the edge of the cliff, my feet dangling, chucking stones into the river. If I were a geologist (I mean a planetologist) I might've known what kind they were. There are no traces on either bank of the river's ever having been higher than it is now, so either it was at its height now and would go down later or it would never go down. Which is odd, when you think of the succulents. (Which grow right down to the bank and did downstream, too, as far as I remembered.) Which should be storing water but they're flat. Therefore they aren't storing water, at least not yet. So the river will rise or it'll rain or something before they stoke up for the drought. But the river's never been higher. So it won't ever rise. So the succulents don't know what they're doing. I went back inside and arranged my calendar: a cleared place with one pebble squat! on the earth. Day One. Simple. I set up the water-cycler in the back of the cave, where the stream comes out of the rocks and I had a jolly time getting the tripod level. Then took the clothes out of the metal box and put my extra clothes on top, and the soap, and the food. Just a pair of shorts and a shirt, really, and an all-over undie. Had a fit of the giggles (Elaine On Desert Island -- of which there are none on Earth that do not contain resort hotels -- her #-D viewer, her burningglass, her resourcefulness, ages eight to twelve.) I had to stay up until sunset so I could mark where senset was -- and wouldn't you know the blasted astronomical event happened right in back of the cave? So I had to climb the hill to get a decent look at it; it was either that or back right off the ledge. Then I ducked inside and went to sleep really quick. I didn't start a fire with my lighter, no need, though Elaine had a pocket lighter. (Would've probably burned myself up.) It was my little apartment. My little hotel. I had a dream full of echoes; I was standing alone on an empty stage, under one spotlight, singing with immense power and elan: When I'm calling yoo-hoo-hoo-hoohoo-hoo-hoo    There was Pebble Two after Pebble One. When the sun was over a particular fold in the. hills, marked also by a tree on the opposite bank, I put a pebble down. It's midday. In this thirtyhour (?) day I sleep twice, once through the dusk, the night, the dawn, once in the middle of the afternoon. It suits. I like watching my little amphitheatre change, the shadows wheel obediently around the trees, the sundial reach # degrees (or thereabouts), everything begin to turn orange. I slept a lot and sang a lot, the first time. I knew I wouldn't sleep more than ten hours a night, more than two or three hours in the day. I never used to have sleep enough, always had to get up for something-orother, I could never sleep long enough. Dreadful mornings shivering and cold, hours and hours to real waking time. Evenings when I lay in bed wakeful and desperate. I always wanted to sleep til noon, sleep til one, then get up and find it morning. Now I do. No standard time here. The sun was no lower, the place it rose and the place it set no farther apart. Pebble Three. Pebble Four. Maybe it takes years for the summer solstice here. Which was when I lost track.    Second time, I had to clean up, gather dried blood clinging-to-dirt in my extra shirt and throw it over the ledge. Put the mattress back where it'd been, put the water-recycler back up. The first time I came here I said out loud, "I'm alone!" but the second time makes this a very crowded little cave. Nothing to do about it, only wait; they'll fade; they'll go away. I felt like an interior decorator the first time, such glee; (Why didn't I go back and circle around Cassie? Didn't, though. Now I want to go back.) One thing at a time. I re-set my calendar. Filled the water-cycler again from the little stream in the cave; then put my shorts, my shirt, my all-over undie in a corner, folded up. Very neat. Pulled the mattress about and took some pebbles out from under it. I'll leave the other rocks and pebbles -- I'll have to do something with them later. Boring otherwise. And I talked all this out into the vocorder, ate, defecated into the stream (which lakes an hour or so, busily running, to deal with it), woke, dozed, slept a lot. Fell asleep in the afternoon and had a long, inconclusive dream about Alan-Bobby in which he came back (in the dream) and we had a fight or anyway something was very boring and very wrong. Woke up stiff. The mattress feels harder this time. I shall be bored to death long before I starve. The sun is up longer, if possible, or at least no less, and rising and setting no farther apart, so maybe it will be hotter. The daylight longer. Maybe there will be no night at all. I got very hungry (food all gone) and I think my stomach was preparing to eat itself, but if you've dieted, you know this quiets down after the first few days. I drank a lot of water (which I knew I would) and it didn't help (as I knew it wouldn't). On a diet, you do everything you can to keep your spirits up. The neo-Christians had a way of coping with boredom by meditation but if you do that you're apt to get hallucinations instead. How interesting. Just realized: I am fasting like a Desert Father, so in a few days I'll have hallucinations anyway. It is a driving, driving; to get food. My cross is gone, you know? my cross is gone, my cross is gone, I can't wear it, O dammit, dammit, why didn't I keep it? Well, let's get on with it.    It's boring. So boring. Pebble Three. I'll tell you about the neo-Christians; they're nobody. It was just an intellectual fad. We used to meet in somebody's attic in graduate school (I was thirty, L.B. was thirty-five) until a media rep got hold of it and then all of a sudden there were neo-Christians everywhere, like Amanita mushrooms. That's when I quit. Who wants to sit in an attic and argue about Descartes, anyway? It was only stealing ideas, but I suppose it'll go into the history books as "eclectic". History is all fantasy. It's boring. Starving is boring. I just went over everything I dictated to the vocoder, then decided to leave it as it was. What's the use of listening? All you hear is your own voice. I ought to rig up the machine to wake me in the middle of the night and whisper something shocking like, "we're going to get you!" In my voice, of course. Would if I had the tools. I certainly have the time. It is so boring that I am here and now going to write the history of the neoChristian movement, which began with a classmate of mine named L.B. Hook (he played the tuba) and ended in spectacular persecutions, martyrs who shrieked their faith aloud in the flames, no no, we never got the chance, worse luck. It ended like everything else, just sort of petered out. Like dyeing your eyelashes a different color every week or regulating all your daily movements with a pocket watch according to the Leuter system of exercises. Other hobbies. Mixed with Zen, old Christianity, vegetarianism, archery, astrology, don't know what. Whatever. No, I won't write it. No reason to. I'm sure that -- presenting no threat to the Powers That Be -- it's amply documented somewhere. (Actually I did talk out a long history of the whole business, and then erased it. It took up perhaps half an hour. Passed the time. I can't tell now the difference between my politics at the time and my love affairs, between music and economics, or economics and metaphysics. I was drunk when L.B. and I went to the jeweler's to get our crosses made, you know, one of those little places that always exists; planting the flag of handmade pottery everywhere! The neoChristian symbol was a cross inside a circle -- that is, a quartered circle -- which probably comes from some other iconography, but we always called it a cross. Had an awful time making the man understand what we wanted. I kept mine in memory of L.B. and getting drunk. (And my attempting -- drunk -- to play the tuba.)    Dull. Oh God, dull. Trying hopelessly to push the sun along. If you scream, will that move it? I can't get through the next minute, I know I can't. Count your fingers one way and then back (nineteen), assigning them metaphysical values or pictures: house, book, Byzantine Empire, salvation, orthodoxy, burnt bacon, play, and so on. Do it backwards; can you remember them? Clock watching. Sun watching. The sun doesn't set directly in back of the cave but almost downstream. That's why I can see it rise. I think the rising place and the setting place are moving closer together. If it move's over that bush, I'll survive. If it hits the edge of that tree, I'll stay sane. Then I can leave work and go home. Block out the disc with one palm and count: seventy-five pulse beats for the bush, a hundred and fifty for the tree. If I didn't move my head or my hand or my arm and didn't get excited. I marked out elaborate divisions on the sun-dial, scratching them in the dirt, then threw the biggest rocks to the side of the cave. Much tidier. Thought I'd save the rest of them so it would leave me something to do, then with an absurd sense of utter defeat, sat down and cried. I'm not afraid of death but there's nothing to do. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I wept. poetry and prose I ever remembered into the vocoder, have it print-out. I'll have a library. Didn't do it. Sat and sat. Stopped being hungry for a while. I feel all right except that it's odd to swallow water as if it were food and feel that everything's cleared up, somehow, not that anything's happened to my vision. There used to be bulk cellulose you could buy for starving, i.e. dieting, but there's nothing to buy here. The withdrawal symptoms of a buying addict. A talking addict. A busy-ness addict. The sun says: Sloooooow Dooooooown. Well, maybe (have to do something special to the vocoder to get it to do that, above). If: beef teriyaki caramel sauce vanilla cream frenchfries noodles with pork bombe glacee pressed seaweed sticks Salt! I forgot salt; I'm going to die for lack of salt.    A false alarm, of course. But I gave myself a jolt of adrenalin that -- you know -- crying, trembling a lot, walking around, wringing the hands -- I do carry salt with me, for there are places where it's very expensive, not a drug but terrestrial seasalt for gourmets. And there's more back at the bungalow. There's food back there. That frightened me. Made me hungry for food, even though there are corpses back there. And hungry for the company back there, too. (That's not exactly clear-headed.) I spread out everything I owned, popouts from my belt, stuff in the jacket, in my shoeheels, et cetera, and marked in my mind what and where, and then put it back. Must not, should not, cannot take off anything for a moment. Must be with me, always. Wished I had the broom. Still, I could walk it. Must've spent about ten minutes taking all those drugs out and putting them back again but I couldn't even get up; I was trembling. Heart pounding. Very dizzy. Did I put a pebble down? Can't remember. I put another, which made four. Five. Six. Seven Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. I don't think you can die from lack of salt all that fast. Looked very nice. I made a circle of them, them scrambled them up, then scrabbled about for a whole bunch of pebbles, and made on the floor -- by laying them out neatly and carefully -- the picture of the quartered circle. Too late for exploring. That was the idea: no food, no broomstick. You're not supposed to change your mind. If I lie still for a few minutes my head clears and I can talk connectedly, e.g. there's something trying to get into this cave or into my head. No, not for real. But something. Going to sleep now, Nothing will change.    Next day, don't know what day it is. Probably five. Who cares. If history were not fantasy, then one could ask to be remembered but history is fake and memories die when you do and only God (don't believe it) remembers. History always rewritten. Nobody will find this anyway or they'll have flippers so who cares. Sign off.    Late afternoon: these were my politics: Communism and share-the-work. If you can't tell Communism from Swialism, Socialism from Anarchism, go away. The theory: a new class, even a new economy, developing within our mimicry of the old one, big business, big government, big labor, and all science, and out of it comes the real producers. A short chain formed from part of a long chain that's doubled back on itself. Look carefully or you won't see that much government is little government, much business little business, most labor little labor, but all science big science. Now. The truth is, they don't need us. Will we be killed off eventually as simply unnecessary? Or kept as house pets?    (Questions: what is "house pets." What is "eventually." What is "politics." What is "Communism." What is "economy." What is "mimicry." What is "labor." What is "business." What is "doubled." What is "theory." What is "class." What is "Anarchism." What is "Socialism." What is "producers." (If you and your flippers get that far.)    Vocoder has made eighteen spaces, which I erased. If neither alien nor human, you're God. Who already knows. So I'm left talking to myself. Which is nothing and nobody.    I guess I'd better tell you about my politics because you're such nice people you might think I did something wrong but I didn't. I got into the Populars at about age twenty-six and spent about a year talking to University groups and various funded groups (these are the most vulnerable because the most parasitic) until in some inexplicable way the tide turned against us (although the media had never picked us up) and one night I heard a sound from the audience that doesn't need explaining any more than the shape of a chicken-hawk to a chicken, something I can only describe as a growing volume in the infra-bass as if the floor were preparing to rise and the walls come tumbling down, an ominous, slowly-rising roar that has nothing whatsoever to do with shouting or heckling; they're nothing. I stood listening to that fascinating sound until it occurred to me that they were after me -- me, who had never harmed them! -- and then I ran. I sprinted into the wings, smiled charmingly at the Fund officials (who were trying to grab me), twisted jthe pinky finger of one lady, stepped hard on the bare instep of another gentleman (but smiling, smiling all the time), dropped my over-tunic in the hall (bright red-and-green, far too distinctive), and took the fire-elevator to the third sub-basement, thus avoiding a long discussion with the fire marshals in the lobby in which yod have to say for five minutes Gee, I'm sorry, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that (then you show them your I.D.), found the freight elevators locked, and finally staggered up three staircases, took an ordinary elevator to the street level, and walked inconspicuously out of the building. Don't know where all those sudden skills came from. It was fun in a way. But not the kind of thing you'd want to do twice. I didn't even go home for two days but when I did, nothing happened. Oh the jail, that was later, that was a lark. Four neo-Christians talking to some incredible aardvark like a real, live Civic Improvement Association in a city park during a summer windstorm that backed up a small, ornamental lake and flooded the place. We were rather perfunctorily arrested and locked in the storage shed used for the carousel in wintertime. Place damp and full of old picnic tables, which we sat on. And sang. And played dominoes. And took bets if the water would rise enough to float us away. I had to keep my feet on the tables because I was the only one wearing shoes and when the friendly police couple let us out to run to the public bathroom (ten meters away) I remember taking them off (the shoes) and leaving them on a table. Nobody touched them. I've told this story a hundred times and people are always impressed and I am damned if I know why. That enormous building I spoke in (or almost got killed in): the interior carpet-sprayed and wall-flocked in a certain extremely limited range of bright, stylized colors, everything flat and dry to the touch, neither cold nor hot and you can't smell anything except the carpets (if they're new) or maybe the disinfectants blown through the air ducts at night. Brochures often describe the hologrammic numerals hanging in front of the doors in such buildings as "softly glowing" -- which means they're in the same range of colors as everything else but the hall is dimmed a little so you can see them and they carry the intangibleness and non-tactility of the place to the point of driving you gaga. Books say it. Actors on TV say it. Everyone says it except people. Yet the style of architecture is a good eighty years old. We are trapped in somebody's old dreams of Utopia, trapped outside what's really new. Modem Baroque is new: think of those noncivilian buildings we know nothing about: great, opal-streaked globes, each with its separate stem, those sixty-foursquare chessboards you find in Iowa, each grid half a mile on a side, spaghetti-clusters of transparent tubing for private homes of the same stuff, twenty times as big, built over rivers or waterfalls for factories. Nobody keeps us out. Nobody forbids us. You can even go in and get yourself a tour -- only you'll never learn enough to go home and reproduce it yourself. If you had the tools. Which you don't. My God, how naive we were. If somebody tried to bust us up, we must've been going in the right direction. I mean the Pops, the Pops, of course, not the other -- and I knew it. (And the media never even touching us!) Although the Civic Improvement Association was worse (or better?); anyway, they still thought they were at the center. You have to think that or die. Either you limit what you think about and who you think about (the commonest method) or you start raising a ruckus about being outside and wanting to get inside (then they try to kill you) or you say piously that God puts everybody in the inside (then they love you) or you become crazed in some way. Not insane but flawed deep down somehow, like a badly-fired pot that breaks when you take it out of the kiln and the cold air hits it. Desperate. So I said Hey, if you're going to send mobs against me, I'll change what I say; I'll say God puts everybody on the inside -- and anyway it's true and one must believe it -- and I zipped like lightning back to the edge of the board. The music (which I like) and the audiences (which I don't) and the catching cold (run out of Interferogen) and the too-much reading when I travel (because I'm bored) and the paid corps of nitwits who travel one day ahead of me so they can ask the identical, stupid questions over and over, meanwhile (in between lectures) frantically changing their height, their weight, their coloring, their faces, and their voices -- everything but their minds. Far, far away from the cutting edge of change. God knows I'm private now. And on the periphery now. As far from anything as one can get. Outside the outside of the outside. I dozed and dreamed. Thought I'd got my period. But I seem to have gone anestric, way off my regular schedule. First time in my life. I guess I'm already too skinny; I'll be amenorrheic forever. A cheap vocoder could not spell that: "amenorrheic."    I've thought this through a hundred times; was going to erase it. Didn't, though. The sun's moved. A blessing.    Morning. Dreamed near waking, something very confused and vivid. It was about catching cold, but I don't remember what the cold was supposed to be. Ears ringing with solitude. It's so quiet that I seem to be at the center of a noise-factory; gurgling innards, bellows in my chest, all sorts of scraping and scratching of skin against clothes or pebbles moving. Even one knee that clicks, I swear. It's hotter. Though I should be putting out less heat because of not eating. There was a thermometer back in the bungalow. No. Sit still. The old monks; "Sit in thy cell and thy cell will teach thee all things." Helps if you've got a cell in the middle of downtown San Francisco. I feel a reluctance to speak into this machine. Because something is leaning over my shoulder. Is in here with me now. Is at the door. Is coming in. Is outside the cave. Which probably means I'm starting to go bananas. Rest. For a while.    Well, I still can't think of death properly, can I, though I worked for more than a jear in the terminal counseling end of a hospital in San Francisco. I mean death is what happens in a hospital, nobody just dies, for goodness' sakes, and if you want death there's no sense getting ready for it anywhere else than a hospital because you won'! get it. You have to order it, like a special diet. And pray for it. And take medication for it. And consult with your doctors about it. And be in a hospital bed. Which is nonsense. Wish I'd gotten rid of the food back at the bungalow. (I tried to get up and my head swam; everything whirled.) Anyway it's not so bad because the worst kind I ever saw were those whose lives had gone long before their bodies. The useless people. Screaming, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die!" the way children still scream at the allergist's, sometimes, having whispered to each other long, ancient, horror stories about "needles" (allergists don't use them). Clinging to money and power because there's nothing else. (A five-year-old boy screaming himself blue in the Allergy Room with everyone standing patiently at least two meters from him. He had shut his eyes in convulsive stubbornness; then I saw a doctor say, "All right, Stevie, we won't do it," and give him the shot. Opened his eyes and cried, "All right. Do it! Do it now!") The number of old hands I've held, saying: Dying is a task. (One wit answered, "Come and join me, then.") Hello. Hello, old wit. It never moves in stranger ways than when It moves inside us. There'll be hallucinations about being rescued, I know: croaking thinly, "no, let me die!" (with immense dignity, of course) and I'm carried out to a shuttlecraft by great, coarse, strong, disgustingly healthy people in uniforms with thick necks. Actually it would be a little awkward trying to explain what happened to the others. You killed them. Why? They were trying to kill me. Why? To prevent me. From doing what? Dying. A shadow at the mouth of the cave. Wasn't. My mistake. I can't have gone hungry that long, it's only a few days; must be spooking myself. Sleep some more.    I know, I know. I'm an awful stupe. We all knew, really. If the media ignored something as big as the Pops (and other such, as I found out later) it wasn't because we were dull; it's because we were dangerous. They would have publicized a miniature Sheboygan World Trade Tower rnade out of waffles and they did. Mind you, there doesn't have to be that much of a conspiracy if your social reflexes are automatic enough. Then I asked' a friend to drift past the building where I'd (not) spoken and she said there was God's own amount of repair material going up to the forty-third floor: women with carpet-sprayers' guns, men with the other rig for the walls, bales of sheet plastic that you use to cover things you don't want colored, plyboard, furniture, even packages of searchlight lenses flown down on to the roof. My, my, my! And not a word of it anywhere. Now that's real censorship. That's when I cut out. With no qualms. I know, religion vs. politics (q.v.) the whole bit: saving people retail is O.K. but don't do it wholesale. My one original contribution to the whole business was a graffito that nobody would use although I thought it rather zippy myself: "Money doesn't matter whenIControl is somewhere else!" (Although I saw it in the Auckland underground station years later so maybe it got somewhere. Or occurred to someone else, which isn't unlikely.) I knew all those things. But never in my life did I make such an absolute, inflexible, and somehow automatic decision. And stuck to it even though it wasn't (in some curious way) mine at all. I wasn't angry. I wasn't even afraid. I was, in fact, in some odd way, rather pleased with myself. I knew, of course, that the tide turning against us wasn't "inexplicable" but I didn't care as the others did; I only wondered how they did it, exactly. And who "they" were. And admired them. And thought I'd like to meet them, if I could, and find out what they were really up to. Never will, of course. And what will neo-Christianity do in the future? Will it mean anything? That does bother me. It's a bore, a dreadful bore, being outside history.    Day Something. Dreams about Cassie. I woke up and actually saw her stand at the door of the cave. Then she vanished; I mean became again the patterns of rock and sun-spots-in-my-eyes I'd been making her out of. Hallucinations aren't just "seeing something"; they're a special case of perception in which you work a little harder, that's all. Cassie. Every mind is its own galaxy. If I told Cassie I had wanted to be inside History, she'd say, "Oh, so you want to be important, do you?" I'm an awful snob. I must move around. Only starve to death a little sooner, that's all, but this sedentariness is enough to make you sick by itself. For a moment I had a violent craving for the broomstick, anything, car, helicopter, G.E.V., monorail, anything that lets you move, move, move. I'll go out; breaking a leg doesn't matter because it'll just speed things up. I can go out on my own front porch anyway, I should hope to kiss a pig. If I hold on to the wall Cassie. Go. Away. Please? I'll be seeing her all day now, in flashes, out of the corner of my eye. She's very polite. She went away. I know you are wondering by now how I can do so much and keep talking all the time; what I have done is to tie a strip of cloth through the hook on the vocoder and hang the vocoder around my neck. It goes with me. So I will go out on the cave porch with it, and sit on the edge of the ledge and get the giggles about falling. This is it: There is a low and impossible sun in the painted backdrop of the sky. So bleak. So empty. Might as well be unreal if I can't get into it. The color is as strange as anything I've ever seen, though part of that must be the light: pale. Northern sunlight that slides down these equivocal stems of what aren't really bushes -- or trees -- and ought to be somewhere in Death Valley National Park anyway, not within the Arctic Circle. River-noise is clear now (somebody behind the scenes just turned up a switch and thank you very much). I like this place. It's nice. I know Cassie is an hallucination because she doesn't move, just appears for an instant in that attitude in which I saw her last (arms and legs sprawled, staring straight up) but she appears vertically instead of horizontally because that's how she was in my field of vision then because I was looking at her from above. She's like a portable cut-out. Hallucinations can be memories, too. If I tried I could hear in the noise of the river the sound of the rain on the old carousel shed in the park; I could invent the sound of a door slamming shut somewhere from time to time, irregularly, as the wind whipped about. (I tried to drink from out of an unboarded window and got my shoes wet in the puddle that's blown in under it.) Or the sound of the audience that was going to kill me -- you can't get that from actors, you know; it's inimitable -- that one's easy if you start with the noise of river-water. Something very similar about the echoes, the undertones, the simultaneity of sources. I remember quite vividly standing on the platform and being able to see nothing but the light cage in the back of the hall, wondering if the bored-looking person in it would turn the lights off me and on to the audience because if you do that, they can sometimes be diverted into smashing the lights, at least for a while. But I guess he was paid not to. (Though they broke a lot of glassware anyway; at least the lenses were being replaced wholesale a day later.) I said, smiling, "I'm not the speaker" -- or at least I became aware that I was in the middle of saying it -- and then the floor of the room started to rise with the sheer volume of the sound and I walked off. Don't know what happened to my friends. Did the Pops start as three people in an attic? By the time it got to us it was a traveling symposium, which shows you it was past that stage or maybe was never in it, though some of the speakers were -- God knows -- bad enough to be idealistic amateurs. Another graffito: "I have just lost all my fingers tolThe cutting edge of change. I must've been the smallest minnow ever to slip through that kind of a net. If there was a net. When there's no real organization you don't need to catch anybody; just scare them sufficiently and the whole thing dissolves back into individuals. No, Cassie. No. No. No. Go away. She moved. She'll be talking next.    Thought I'd go down to the bungalow -- surely I could find my way there and back, just follow the river -- but I don't walk very well. It's a long way up to get up. Or something. Anyway, I got hideously light-headed, probably from having spent so much time sitting down. I will probably gel scurvy or an ulcer. Cassie and I had a long talk (which I know is imaginary). I don't remember a thing about it.    Things are for the best and if they aren't I certainly am not going to make a fuss about it. Not now. Like the time I was under anesthesia for a tooth implant and kept murmuring dreamily to myself, "I don't care what you do to Me as long as  am not here." (Which came out, they tell me, as something like "f...ff...ff...") It was such a relief. Then you come to, spitting blood and sick to your stomach. Guess I really am starving. But not apathetic enough (yet) to stop talking. Never will, I guess. Everything's being sublimed into voice, sacrificed for voice; my voice will live on years and years after I die, thus proving that the rest of me was faintly comic at best, perhaps impossible, just an organic backup for conversation. Marvelous, marvelous conversation! the end of life. And music's coming back. Bits of Handel this morning, swaying in the pine trees. I mean in memory, of course, I'm not that cracked. Not yet.    My father dying in a hospital, years ago, under the loose, transparent folds of an oxygen tent, weakly grabbing my hand: "I don't want to die!" I said, "You won't." (An oxygen tube taped to his nose.) But he knew. There's a neo-Christian exercise for this sort of thing, which you are supposed to prepare for by taking a good stiff jog around the block, which under the circumstances is, I think, just a little bit impractical. Must be some other ones. I drink when I'm thirsty; when I'm tired I sleep. Everything's so close together here. I stand up and wait until my head clears, then straddle this bility: sitting in it and let the bladder go. A sort of ambulating bedpan, and withhout the usual plumbers' attachment, too. It's warm enough to go naked. A scientist might be able to make up theories about this cave, but I can only look at it. Which I do, during breathing exercises (told you there were other ones). I've been standing up more -- starving is overrated, doesn't get you that fast -- and 'then a walk round the cave, then a rest, then two more walks. I am sitting cross-legged, talking this. There's no reason to collapse if you don't collapse. If I fell over the edge I'd even be able to get back (in an hour or so) so why not. Putting my legs over the edge of the ledge and hooting. Although the bungalow's certainly too far and I bet that food's rotten by now. Why didn't I bring a mirror with me? Clever, perhaps, not to; I could hang it on some projection of rock or branch, let my face go into it, my identity, and be faceless forever more. And there's nothing to blow my nose in (except my fingers) because I can't catch cold, nobody to catch it from. Starving doesn't drive you mad. But solitude does. Morning. A morning. Studied the rock wall of the cave, extraordinarily beautiful and rich, such full arrangements of color and shape, such extremely crowded information. Fra Angelico painted on his knees. I really couldn't get over the textures (perception is abstraction), how little detail it takes to see them (though perhaps it's half memory), how they fit so. But then of course everything fits, it has to, if it didn't fit it couldn't exist, not on this world or any other. I fell to sniffling a little. Then I stopped because crying usually puts an end to this and if things got very good, maybe I could make the people come back: the edge of a naked plant-root, taking a short-cut for a moment out of the wall and haloed by the sun in all its little hairs, wet pebbles shining at the back of the cave where the stream comes through, rocks loudly declaring their own internal structure by their shape, by their color, by the places where they broke, and everything mutely going hallelujah on the gravity of transcendent gravity: the earth and rubbish piled up against it, the water dropping down with it, occasionally wobbling a stick (more gravity) or prying loose a few darkish grains of something. The eloquence of it. The mutual agreement of it. What to do if the elements fall to quarreling? I knew if I cried it would stop so I didn't, I just waited. It went away. (Thinking sentimentally: Sit in thy cell and thy cell will teach thee all things.) Outside was afternoon. The round planet turning into the cone of its own shadow. A youth in the something of his something lying. (Can't remember.) This endless whirling that is taking us noplace, so you think they'd stop. I wanted to stay up and watch the night sky but began to doze a bit on the ledge so I went back in. I guess the habits of sleeping were too strong. So this should be not morning but the next morning. If I did part of it then. Must have because I say I went to sleep in the late afternoon and I remember that I did. But I can't find the break in the tape. So dating things is no use.    Cassie, The only one I liked. The gossip we could have had. Even behind the mask of John Ude there must have been something human, though if you will pardon my cynicism I doubt it, having had far too much to do with that type before. But Cassie... ! The point is, when I cross over, will I meet only Victor? And do people who have died naturally, as we call it, go somewhere different or cross over in some different way than those who have died by violence? This is physically and metaphysically silly, the whole damned subject, but it does seem to have preoccupied people: different heavens in Scandinavian mythology, different hells in Dante, no heaven at all for the Greeks. Ghosts stuck in the place where they got strangled and so forth. If those seven and I ever get together, the only thing they'll want to do to me will be kill me, and that will be rather difficult under the circumstances. Eternity with Victor: could do worse. But Cassie I know I'm romanticizing something about my own life, or something that isn't in my own life. We always make such distinctions between those of us who are us and those of us who are tables and chairs and then some table turns up and thinks at you, criticizes you, talks to you, looks down on you. Likes you. Little twelve-year-old girls walking provements inside them. Like dolls with tapedecks in a slot in the back. Not that she felt that way, of course. What were the Grahams like at home? An "At-Home," that is. Mr. and Mrs. Graham at home Tuesday next. But where? High, high up on Staten Island with a real, polarized city window from which you can see all the perhaps even the river? No, too small. They'd have an estate pitched on the ruins of what used to be Adirondack cattle country (with the farmland underneath now, not above) or way up in Northern Maine where nobody ever went anyhow, a real, honest-to-God estate with piles sunk into the marsh and a heli field. (New-money faddy, oldmoney relaxed. Some of each.) Royalblue curtains over glass that doesn't always reveal the Maine tundra (that's old-money) but that doesn't always substitute some other three-dimensional scene either (too vulgar). Forty years of gold and royal blue, everything that Valerie wants and yet Victor's rather proud of himself, really (especially when he reaches the age at which she has to pay him and can take it easy), fond of his wife but absolutely crazy about Lori. Reverting to type. I think Val first chose royal blue to flatter herself and then dyed her hair to flatter the royal blue, stuck in it, so to speak, liking it. The eyes of the old are bluehungry. Alan-Bobby, totally harmless in most places to most people. Even, I suspect, running earnestly about the field, panting while solemnly playing le futbol. And Sister Nathalie. Mirror-sister Nathalie. That vicious woman. I almost said to her once, aboard ship, "Wait a few years; you won't be so eager." But she was, desperate with her unbearable hatred of civilians, barely able to control herself until she could pass over into that other, real world. What would she have done if there'd been no accident? If she'd got there -- and trained -- and flunked? Become a music lecturer. Of course. Cassie, Cassie, come out to play. Come over for a chat. I don't mind if you're rotting.    I stayed up last night to see The Smudge and locate sunrise, which is distinctly closer to sunset than it was. Plan; to kill myself on the exact, glorious day of the summer solstice but I won't know what day that is until several days afterward. Which makes things difficult. (Like (he old recipe for nitroglycerine: stop heating one second before it explodes.) There was a streak of light at the zenith, falling towards the Poleward horizon, looking mighty like a Patrol ship coming in for a landing but much too fast. Then another. And another. All over the sky. A meteor swarm. As if veils were being plucked off the stars moment by moment and they'd been there all along. I watched until we rotated out of whatever debris it was, then marked where the sun came up (my position, nose on ground, where my feet were and where -- from that -- the sun was behind the sundial). Then I slept. I dreamed that a ship landed somewhere and sent a party that tried to rescue me, me with cunning patience hiding in my cave and shooting down every single one of them. Woke up with some long and involved declaration -- myself or person or persons unknown -- fading in my hearing. It came back only when I lay down again, just before I drifted off, i.e.: No use trying to rescue that one; can't you tell a corpse when you see it? (I am elegantly self-satisfied. My fakery is working.) She's been walking around dead for years.    Evening. Dawn. Morning? Can't tell.    I started to say something.    Oh yes. It's hotter. I feel fine. I've been sitting with my feet in the stream -- mustn't sit right in it or it backs up over everything -- and I can move well enough if I keep it slow. Or lying on my stomach, playing with the water. Obese pelple in clinics can starve painlessly for months and what do they have that I dofl't have except some idiot in a pale-blue (ill-fitting) coat who comes around every morning and says "Aha!" (?) Only I'm not obese. Only I haven't gotten any skinnier. Only I haven't looked because I don't want to know and I'm not going to, either. Whoever you Whoever finds   # Cassie's come. Doesn't do anything, just sits against the wall (my favorite wall, too! the other's got big boulders sticking out of it) with her arms folded and looks at me. I've put the vocoder on whisper so she won't hear. Not that I expect she's real; if I got up she'd probably rise in my field of vision like all hallucinations do -- either stand up or float in the air -- I have a talent for these things, always did; had to be careful with all those neo-Christian "exercises." Could never be hypnotiaed without drugs, though, probably a defense against my own imagination. I said to her (smugly, I'm afraid), "I can't be hypnotized." Words in my mind: You're schizoid. Insults! Insults from her. We had a long -- no, we didn't; that's an invention; I simply could not help looking at her because when you hallucinate or remember, that is your center of energy, I mean you're creating it. So you get fixed on it. And I watched her. Breathless. Not frightened. In suspense. She did nothing. I'll tell you how she went away; this isn't really visual, you see, it's a matter of conviction and what happened was the conviction went out of me and I knew I was looking at a memory. There was a pattern of roots and shadows and a ghost and a pattern of roots and shadows and a ghost. Then the memory goes. Nothing positive but it's not there and of course she picked that side -- it's all rocks and shadows. When they finally arrive, what will they all say to me? I was very cross with her.    Day again. There's a philosophical problem here. Falling asleep, waking, hard or soft, hunger, eating, illness, feeling sex, running, being dizzy -- why can't we remember them? They evaporate. Right now I can't remember a hot bath. About my tooth implant, I remember the office, the medical lady in the pale-green coat, what everyone said, what I thought under the anesthetic, and the extreme oddity of it, too, I remember that. But I can't remember the pain. There's only a warning muddle somewhere at the back of the experience, a faint haze of obfuscation. Now I know that physiologically, literally, it's still all there -- all in my brain waiting to be waked up. I mean if you had the proper electrodes. But why can't I wake it up, dammit? The second time I had a tooth put in I didn't remember but my feet knew (they kept trying to turn around and walk me out of the office) and I suppose my body knew (I couldn't sleep the night before) but  didn't know. Until it began to happen again and then I wondered: how could I ever forget! And then I forgot. You know, I was very old-fashioned as a teenager; I really thought that a real physical letting-go (pleasure, anger, anything where I'd stop controlling myself -- I called it "stop thinking") would absolutely bring the roof down around my ears, or if it didn't lead to instant death, disgrace, shatterment and horror, it would cure me rightaway of all my "problems" and I would never be unhappy again. Don't know where this came from; it must have been in the air because nobody ever told me in so many words but we are still -- maybe it's the price we pay for being so rich -- a Puritanical people. I was so disappointed! Primary things -- the stuff bodily experience is made of -- just doesn't last. Even music, beautiful, music, hearing, that won't last unless you translate it into ideas, put it into your head, recreate it, drum it in. A weird business: grief without bodily pain, joy without bodily pleasure, emotion without flesh, idea-joy, idea-grief, but it makes you shiver and it makes you cry and it can be dreadful and wonderful and unbearable. And that's not the body making you feel (which of course it can); it's the body trying only to follow what you feel. To mean, not be. Which the body is not good at. (For example, fucking. Why is it sometimes rememberable and sometimes not. And what do you remember? I think either a picture or an emotion but not the physical thing itself, not half an hour later, sometimes. Like a dried leaf. A dead rose. A taste that's gone. Actors practice sensory memory for years and even they have to turn it into something else. I mean put it into their heads, translate it into ideas. (I can so vividly recall Marilyn, who must have drifted past that eighty-story building with terrific aplomb -- as always -- with her hands in her pockets -- saying to me quietly, "it's not in the papers" right after "they're rebuilding the whole floor" with her usual, slightly hesitant way of speaking, as if she were apologizing for the triviality of what she was saying and yet always very passionate about it, and wrinkling her forehead in anxiety above those queer, huge, round, owl-like eyeglasses she always wore, looking at me with her magnified eyes as if to say: now we both know. And also: the world is falling apart. (I also remember L.B. trying to get a contra-tuba -- of all things! -- through the door of the attic where we were holding a neo-Christian meeting and not quite succeeding and finally sitting on the landing outside that very expensive attic, which was in a house made of real, restored wood (practically a national monument) with his large, delicate, slightly flushed ears sticking out -- as always -- and finally managing on that absurd, coiled, huge instrument to produce a dreadful, toneless, melancholy howl like that of a locomotive in extremis, as if the last nineteenth-century steam engine in the Smithsonian were finally expiring and telling everybody about it. (I remember the third time we made love and how I decided it must be so very different because the room was different or I was just precisely drunk enough -- though I wasn't drunk at all -- or had eaten for once exactly the proper kind of dinner. He said it was because we had the contra-tuba in the room with us and that the contra-tuba, alone among all the instruments of the orchestra, had a soul. My memory of him is built up of many, many times after this all made into one, just like the year I was speaking for the Populars and in just the same way: an intelligent, ruthless abstraction of what mattered, details plucked unhesitatingly from the real, unstable times and places and put together into a meaning, a mosaic, a symbol, an icon, because that's what mattered and that's how it mattered, and because I kne'w more than I ever have before or since just what mattered and what that meaning was. (Meaning preserves things by isolating them, by taking them beyond themselves, making them transcendent, revealing their real insides, by pointing beyond them. (If we perceived everything, we would know nothing. There would be no pattern. (But I don't remember hunger. I chose that because it fits intellectually. I don't feel it. Though I recall very clearly my rage when I was seven and told to eat my loathesome soup because little children were starving in... well, you pick a place. Alone in my gleeful rage among eleven wellbehaved little boys and girls, it was I who pushed forward my bowl and said, in sly satisfaction, "Send it to them." How do you ship soup? When I was six there was the first real space travel, I mean instantaneously from one point to another; I remember this only because the whole topic was so profoundly uninteresting and we all had to sit still to hear about it. And I remember -- at ten -- remembering what a nump I'd been at six and wishing I had remembered all the right, glorious, proper, great things about that great day instead of the silly damfool things I did remember: that Ruby Fossett beat up Charlie Washington for saying black people were the same as Indians and Indians had to come from India, so black people couldn't have come from Africa; that somebody called somebody else Slotface and knocked over my block bridge (accidentally); that at dinner I gave some vegetables I didn't like to Ruby Fossett who got rid of them in some awesome and mysterious way without eating them. But I knew Ruby Fossett was a magical person because she was seven and could stand on her head and had a big, beautiful, rusty-red 'fro, which was by far the most impressive hair I had ever seen. I do not, by the way, remember what the Day-care answered when I offered my slopping soup to be mailed to the starving children; I think he just imitated the Great Stone Face. Don't really remember Charlie's last name, either; it was something else. I think. And I don't remember what the Center looked like, even. I don't remember much. (And Hunger's gone. Kachina-maskdancing Hunger like a figure in a play, that I can imagine. Or a word in a dictionary with pronunciation marks over it. Or I hunger for righteousness, that's a metaphor. But I cannot even begin to imagine what I felt. Or that I felt at all; it's dropped out of the world. It's a hole. It's nothing. (Not even nothing. Just the intellectual conviction that there ought to be a gap somewhere. Only that.) So ideas stick. Meanings stick. Anything you can force inside your head and keep there. Also emotion. Which shouldn't last but it does. My God, it lasts and lasts. Wish it didn't. Old poem: when the bones are clean and the dead bones gone... but I'm getting it wrong. The Celts had three lasting things; Grass and Copper and Yew. The Germans had something else, some other story. Medieval Europe seems to have valorized such games: this number of lasting things, that number of changing things, so many wonderful things, so many sins, so many virtues. I have Si Lasting Things: Valeria, Nathalie, Cassandra, John, Alan, and Lori. Especially Lori.    There was a trial. Dreams merging into wakefulness, back to dreams again. I was very cross. They ranged themselves round the cave, knowing I was too weak, too tired, too starved, to get away. It wasn't fair. Big, dark shapes I couldn't see. When you first wake up you can't see clearly and everything's flat; that's when a coat hanging on a closet door becomes something huge standing over you, until you can see in depth again. It's the closeness that's threatening, right on your eyeballs. Things at the foot of the bed or right on the bed but it's really a picture on the wall or a window curtain. When I'm badly off. When I'm tired. I couldn't see their faces. I sat up and thought I would go to the water purifier to wash my face but I couldn't. I was too tired. I lay down again -- or stood up, I can't remember -- anyway it was none of their business and I hadn't invited them. I said, "'Go away." They just shifted a little. John Ude said... Then Nathalie said... and Cassandra said... and Alan said... Then John Ude said again... I yelled, "You're always first, aren't you? You and the Goddamned government! I bet you were a clerk. I bet you never got within five miles of anything real." He said, You know that  worked for the real government. "You are a damned, damned bully," I told him; "But who can you bully now? Who are you going to bully through eternity?" You. Silence. I said, "All right. I'm a coward. Satisfied? I didn't have the guts to stand out against you in '#; I let myself be scared off. But what does it matter now? We're all here now, aren't we? And there'll be others. And my religion is just as real and just as important as the other so don't you go tampering with that. Don't you go telling me I'm an escapist or something." He said. Cod is easier than guns. Silence. I don't believe him. It's just what he'd say. You can shoot a lot of things but you can't shoot down death. And if you capture a tank, what can you use it for except what a tank does? You can't plant a garden with it. Coward, he said. I said, "Oh go to hell." (Quickly, as if it were one word, the way you do. You know.) Killer coward. But it was a worse word than that, somehow, I don't know what it was, and not Juhn Ude who is only a mask. I looked at the people standing around my home, dressed as I had seen them last and with not a mark of death on them; there's no fogginess in this cave. It is from the big boulder on the lefthand side as you face out -- counting clockwise -- John, every inch The Professor, polishing his pipe on the edge of his now (rather ragged) jacket; Cassandra (who looks away from me, head averted as if she didn't want to talk to me in her white sheet or was ashamed or disliked me); and then Valeria, who Ill stands with her arms clasped in front of her loosely but looking very severe; and beyond her (on the other side, none of the'm are standing in the sunlight) Nathalie -- again separated from them all -- disgusted, fiercely impatient with everyone, sitting with her knees under her chin, scowling and pitching pebbles at the cave "floor. Then Lori, who's reading a big, illustrated storybook with a fairytale cover, a fairy godmother or something like that, and beyond her in the shadows, but somehow luminous, young, and very beautiful, standing with his arms folded across his chest, emotionless now, the one who called me a killer. Killer coward, said Alan-Bobby for the second time. I said, "I suppose you're in on this little kangaroo-court because I wasn't stuck on you, like Lori, and you didn't get to beat me up, like Nathalie, and I didn't praise the shit out of you, like the men, so I guess I just didn't kowtow enough to your beautiful, strong, masculine bod, huh?" He said,  had none. Silence. I had the muscles of an ox, which always embarrassed me, I was not beautiful, J was stupid, and I knew nothing. That's Alan-Bobby now, who is thinking or talking or somehow putting these words into my mind, standing angelically tall in the darkness of the cave (which should be too low for him; that's how he bashed his head) and somehow lighting himself up from inside, like a Christmas-tree candle. He is so lovely. He said; We're dead. So we're wise. But still, you killed me. Is it allowed to kill fools? You killed me, said Lori, uninterested, glancing up for a moment from her book. And me. said Valeria with calm evenness, and I saw with surprise -- no, really with astonishment -- that although she could have -- well, I suppose, being dead, you know -- I mean she could have come back in her blue-and-gold Indian sari, her gold jewelry, anything she liked, but she hadn't. She was in trousers and blouse, looking just the way I'd last seen her. Her hair was gray at the roots. She said, You killed me.  was halfcrazy then. Is it permitted to kill the crazy or the rich? Is it permitted to kill someone weak and old whom you could have disarmed? And me, said John Ude urbanely, pulling on his unlit pipe. A reasonable man who could have been persuaded, a despairing man whose despair you never even saw, whose despair you might have helped, but you never saw it, whose despair you might have used, but you never tried. A fool who could have so easily been deceived, and Alan. A fifty-year-old you could have knocked down, said Valeria. Cassie said, You ended my life, too; she was in tears. Her face suddenly presenting itself to mine, the horrible weeping of suffering without control and without hope; I didn't want to look at it. So I put my hands over my eyes but even so they were all visible; Cassie rocked back and forth in pain; Lori read her book; Cass cried out loud, Oh Nath, Nath, what has she done to me? I'm so lonely! and fell to her knees, her chiton spreading out on the rock, her hair stirring about her face, one lock drifting up and back, up and back, and she throwing her arms out in a cross, as if quartering the circle she was part of, dropping her mouth open, staring outwards thing you're good at. Exiled to this in the stupor of utter despair. place? It was made for you; if it hadn't Nath got up. She stepped out of the existed, you would have created it. circle -- and oh, how that shocked When you were born, there was no real me! -- and lifted her blazing-white face, place for you, no one was fond of you, wringing her hands together but not at not really, not of that real self only you all like someone suffering, rather she knew, so you took the whole world on was exercising the joints and the bones, your back and put yourself in the center locking her fingers together and pulling, of it and said It's mine and said I'm golike an athlete limbering up, like a vioing to get everything and I'm going to linist getting ready to play, like a change everything. And when it didn't fighter going into the ring. She said: work you ran away, and when that Starving? You've been starving all didn't work you started starving youryour life. What do you know about it, self to death but slowly, slowly, with you with your petty religion and your lectures you didn't like and friends you baby's politics, thinking you could didn't know any more and when that change the world! You are an arrogant, didn't work you wanted to die but you vile, unimportant woman. wouldn't leave us alone, not you, you Silence, They're all speaking at once. wanted company; so you killed Alan They're silent. They all have the same and you killed John and you killed Lori voices. They're running out of words. and you killed Cassie and you killed Val You incompetent bitch, she said, what and you killed me. else can you do but die? It's the only Look at yourself, she said. Look at your fear. Look in my face and you'll see your own rage and your own deprivation. I know you. Do you think I don't know you? Look in the mirror. They didn't fade. They got sharper and sharper, exactly as I had seen them last. They talked out of the cave without touching one another, as if they had no feelings for each other and no relation to each other; Val went first and John Ude second, then Alan, with none of his beauty left, and Nathalie, without any expression on her face, and then Cassie with as commonplace a look as if nothing had happened. They stepped out into the sunshine and I think they may have turned to one side or the other on the little ledge that's in front of the cave, but I don't know. They just disappeared. Then Lori came, dragging her book, and her other hand in her father's; Victor Graham in his beautiful, blue dress-suit, not as he had looked when he died, but spruce, rich, handsome, even smiling. He looked free. He said, "They do go on, don't they? But we all have something like that." Lori was intently shaking the dust off her fairy-tale book. He said, a little apologetically, "She likes that kind of thing. You know? And I'm told it's a good book. Come on, dear," and he started towards the entrance to the cave. I noticed with a kind of horror that he had to bend over because he was such a tall man; the roof was too low for him. At the threshold he stepped out as if he were going to continue walking right out into space, and as he began to dissolve in the sunshine -- or I lost sight of him because my eyes weren't used to the dazzle outside -- Lori tugged at his hand for a moment and turned back. She said something to me and then she went out with her father into that brilliancy I couldn't see, and was gone. I have never seen that child so wellmannered. She smiled at me dutifully. Then she said, "Thank you." "For what?" I said. She looked surprised.    Nothing settled. Nothing! What's inside my head comes out, that's all. Don't think I believed in them, that they could get here, that they accused me, that six people could stand up inside this cave, that they levitated out the door, that I didn't form them from the cracks and striations in the walls, the dirt, boulders, bumps, lumps, shadows, that sniff. Anyhow she was only being polite to please her father.    Afternoon. L.B. came to visit, much more realistically, by the way, sitting cross-legged against the side wall and shifting around uncomfortably, sticking his tongue out a little when the pebbles hurt his ass . There were even footprints coming in from the ledge outside, I mean places where his feet had disturbed the cave floor; at least for a while there were. I was so pleased to see him, so glad, but I didn't dare touch because I knew he'd go. So I asked him why didn't he bring the contra-tuba he'd left outside the cave. He said, "Are you kidding? The silly thing's enormous. Think of all the ectoplasm it would take. Besides, you know I can't play it." I got snide and made an improper suggestion about something else he couldn't play in his present state. He blushed, mostly in his delicate ears, where you could always see it happen; he has wonderful ears, slightly transparent, that always reminded me of a bat's, they stick out like two silky signal flags; he said, "Oh dear, no, really you shouldn't," which is exactly the way L.B. has always talked. I said, "well, what are you doing now? Still preaching? Still teaching? Are you asleep somewhere and visiting me in your sleep?" Silence. He looked at the floor. He seemed very unhappy. That twist of the head, putting his chin into the hollow of his collar-bone. Hunching up the shoulder. Rubbing his cheek and his shoulder as he always did when he suffered, ol' knobbly man, and now he's doing something else, something rather distressing; he looks up and there are tears running out of his wide blue eyes. I cried, alarmed, "Elbee, are you dead ?" Silence. The erotic is going out of him like water out of a glass; once I saw someone nearly sever a finger when I was working in hospital and the color went out of his face like a column of mercury dropping; that doctor turned from brown to greyish-brown as if somebody'd pulled down a shade. L.B. is doing this, and he's getting flatter and flatter somehow, sharper and sharper, like an image that's alive but doesn't quite belong with its background. I don't like this. He said, "Oh my dear, you've committed murder." "Go away." (I said it again, totally shocked: "Go away!") "But my dear, how can I love you if you've committed murder?" I started to cry. "Yes," I said, "all right, you Christian, don't." I added, "You know it was selfdefense!" He merely looked at me. "Of course it was, of course it was!" I said. "You saw it. I mean, if you're made of ectoplasm and all. I mean running into the brush yelling Colonize, Colonize, and all that. They were going to force me to have babies. I was going to be tied to a tree and raped, for godness' sake. It was a mass-delusional system, L.B., you know what they're like, and anybody who doesn't agree has to be shut up somehow because it's too terrifying. So I ran away, but they wouldn't let it be; they came back after me to drag me back into that insanity and I killed them; I had to. I kept telling them we were all dead. You know that. And we were. I bet they had a lot more fun chasing me than they would have had by dying slowly in a few months. It gave them something to do. And I might remind you, old buddy, that several of those nice people were trying to kill me." "Murderer," he said. I started crying again. I said, "You get out of here, you father! You just get out of here! This is not your cave so you just haul ass!" He said thoughtfully, "Murder. Pure murder. Don't you think? And for no reason. Just because those people annoyed you. You assumed, of course, that they ought to adapt to you; it never occurred to you that you ought to adapt to them. You simply didn't like them." I couldn't talk. He said, "Out of spite, really, I think. Don't you? A hidden wish. Anger. The chance to do what you'd always really wanted to do. I think what you always wanted, under the cameraderie, under the sociability, was the chance to be really and truly alone. autocratically alone, one might say. Arrogantly alone. Yes, that's right. You talk so much about there being no law here for the others, but I don't think you ever reflected truly that, after all, there was no law binding you, either, nothing to keep you from ultimately doing exactly what you wanted to do. And what was it? Why, to kill. One might look at the whole series of events as a series of provocations; you see, you pushed them to the point where they'd give you a pretext for murdering them and then when Nathalie nagged them into following you -- it was she who did it, of course; if Nathalie had been more intelligent and a little less conventional, and hadn't needed people around to boss so much, I think she would have done exactly what you did -- well, you're very like Nathalie, you know. Very like. Probably the only person in history to depopulate an entire planet so easily. Pocket genocide, one might call it. And for spite. For sheer nastiness and bad feeling. And for no other reason. So I can hardly love you now, can I?" I got to my feet, although I was dizzy and shaking -- oh, was I shaking! -- and I cried, You liar! You fake! Why are you here ? Why'd you bother to come? You never loved me, never, never, you only pretended and then you fake things up because you know it wasn't like that and it's all just to destroy me! He said calmly, "That is true." Then you're the killer! and I screamed, I really did. There was more argument running in and out of my ears, pro and contra, not a loud booming or even a sound but pure confusion until I couldn't tell if I were speaking or not or he was or not; it was all a tangle. So I leaned over to hit him and fell on my face. I don't think falls can hurt me now. I'm too light. Anyway, there was a sort of cushiony, dreadful mess of arguing and pullings-apart and past lives all over the floor; I think that helped. And my own blood sounding in my ears. By looking up I could see L.B.'s face close to mine and though it was the same face, it wasn't, not really; it had become unchangeable, like a photograph. A photograph of a smile is a smile first but look at it too long and it comes apart into tics and muscular oddities; soon you can't even tell if it's a smile or not. The time element has been left out. L.B. was like that. I think he was gloating, but I couldn't tell. He might have been smiling. He might have been sad. He was going to do something very bad and it would make him happy. Then I knew it wasn't L.B. He said, God hates you. Now that's ridiculous. It's abominably silly and it would never cross L.B.'s mind, let alone his lips, except as a particularly comic, blasphemous horror. This is someone else. I said carefully, "How do you know?" He said with a sickly-sweet smile, "I know what you know." I said, "But how, L.B.? How do you know? Are you my conscience?" "Yes," he said, edging along the wall as if he wanted to get out of the cave without getting to his feet. "Yes, I'm your conscience." "Come on, L.B.," I said. "You're not my conscience." "I'm not your conscience." "Tell me," I said in, I think, a kind of croak because everything was breaking up very fast now and oh, I had to be cunning or I would have to live with this monster for the rest of my life, for eternity, who knows; I said, "Tell me, tell me, where is L.B. right now?" "Don't know," he said. "Are you L.B.?" I said, and suddenly still, he assumed an even odder, intense, kind of fixity -- yet this one was totally human -- like the moment when someone touches you on the shoulder from behind and you don't know who; you gather your forces internally, perhaps, or do what's called "holding your breath" though it's more like holding your mind, not thinking. The strict arrest. I'm not sure I want to find out who this is. He said pathetically, "I try. I do try. Please believe me." "Who are you?" "You give me such an awful role to play. That's because you're such an awful person. You're most unfair." "Now look here, you idiot -- " "Yes, I'm an idiot. You're an idiot! Making poor Elbee into your conscience and what a conscience! It's just like you. Of course he never loved you. Who could? You're not loveable.  don't love you. Nobody could ever love you. Why? Because you're bad, bad, bad, bad, bad -- " and was talking to myself. Had been. All along. Of course. Unmistakeably sincere. To think as badly of him as that! But I am. I'm impossible. Dreadful. Totally wretched little bit of nothing. He should have dropped me long ago. What I could have Should have Couldn't Should have thought really Really! Arrogant, solitary, secretly cruel, I am. I am. Used to say to myself Who isn't, who isn't, but it's not true. I've been unhumanly hungry and starved for years, as nasty as a starved rat. A cannibal. Wished they wouldn't be persuaded. And glad they weren't. by L. Ron Hubbard Dianetics, Man's most advanced school of the mind, can help you to gain greater self-confidence and more respect for younelf and those around you. Dianetics was first popularized in # by scientists and engineers with the foresight and imagination to realize the true value of a proven and workable technology of the mind. Find out how Dianetics can help you to increase your ability, perceptions, intelligence and self respect. Read Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science by L. Ron Hubbard. Just send # to the Church of Scientology Dept. G-#, # West #th Street, L # Angeles, Ca. #. All orders are shipped postage free within # hours of receipt. Give it a good end, go out in a great big bang. End to stupid parties after lectures, people I didn't know, people I wanted to kick, trying to live without roots like an air plant, endless traveling with idiots, trying to pretend they're bright when I'd like to hit them and I like them when I don't and it doesn't matter when it dofs and I ought to love that hateful, ghastly bunch and oh Lord, what was I doing there, anyhow. don't care. Except Cassie. Alan-Bobby hit in the head with a rock, good for him! Nathalie shot? Good for her! John Ude shot, good. Lori, fine. Val, best of all . Goody good good for them ! It's a game they understood inside-out and once I started playing I rather liked it because I'm not exactly an amateur, either, you understand', and it's all yummy self-assertion, all big adventure, isn't it, oh my, creeping about in the canebrake in our underdrawers, trying to pot each other. No, I had to. I really had to. But all the same I did. What "pocket genocide"? I guess so. Up to the elbows in blood. Poetry. And now I have to live with this awful, awful woman, this dreadful, wretched, miserable woman, until she dies.    I cried myself to sleep -- not real tears, silly, easy tears; the awful thing was that I couldn't stop, they're the kind that keep leaking out of you -- and I called myself all sorts of insulting names. I fell asleep calling myself names. Dreamed we were back together at my place, all this sensuality a topography I couldn't describe to you, a sort of lovely pocket universe, and in the summer dawn (this really happened once) from some dingy, cement ledge outside our window: Like a siren right under your pillow. The damnedest sound. The bed quaked. I thumped him in the ribs, said, "Bang on the wall." He said, I think sitting up, "What? What?" I said, "Sparrows. Bang on the wall." There was a nest in the airconditioner. It was an old portable and made a beautiful bird's-nest, right between the ledge and the bottom of the exhaust cave, a lovely steady current of warm air. Tremendously attractive. If you'd been able to go outside, you'd have seen grass and twigs sticking up haphazardly from beneath the machine. Sparrows are messy builders. If you whop at them, they shut up for a couple of minutes, just enough to get back to sleep. By then he was up. Quivering. He said, "Kill them." I sat up. "Why? They're just babies." "Babies? They're banshees." "Look, the building people are coming in a week to close up the gap. They'll be flying and out by then. You don't want to murder a whole bunch of helpless little cutey baby birds, now do you?" "Yes," he said. I said, "Um... I know, but you can't take the unit out; I tried. Takes special tools. And you need a cable through the hook on top or the whole unit falls eighteen stories and murders someone." The food factory was at it again. Oh God, it was awful. I said, "Elbee, have respect for the sanctity of life." "Sparrows?" he said. And sparrows they were. Every sunrise the infants woke and screamed horror and starvation -- you have no idea what that is like only a meter from your ear and no soundproofing -- and opened their tiny, little, red beaks: feed me! feed me! (at about one hundred and sixty degrees' extension) and drove their desperate parents, who probably wanted to sleep as much as I did, out to exhaust themselves and ruin their health finding enough polluted insects to cram thrice its own weight each day into that insatiable scarlet gullet. There is nothing -- I repeat, nothing -- in the homeothermic realm uglier or stupider than a baby bird. And sparrows! The only flying species nobody's ever had to re-seed or protect or re-transport or do anything but discourage. If they'd been swallows or cranes or titmice, anything. Even grackles. But sparrows? They're taking over the world. "Oh God, have you been living with that?" he said. I said yeah, well, at least they matured fast. Then he began to look as if he were getting dangerous ideas -- dangerous to himself, I mean -- like attempting to open the top of the window or unscrew the front of the conditioner .and try to poke through the coils. They did it again. He pounded on the wall. "Shut up, you bloody birdies!" Silence. We had slept two hours. I usually wadded the extra pillow over my head and managed somehow. L.B. shouted, "Filthy, lousy, bird-brained birds!" He was always accurate. And added, "Oh, why couldn't you have had the sense to be born fledermausen?" We liked bats. Then he said, "Oh hey, do you have a rubber hose? If we could pry some of the insulation off and run a hose through the edge -- " "And pipe them ten thousand worms?" I said. "Oh no. They'll stop in an hour, honestly." He said, hopefully, "Boiling water?" I shook my head. "I tried." The trick is to get at them when they're first nesting and repeatedly scare the living daylights out of them -- birds are very emotional -- until they get the idea there's a large, very irritable, dangerous mammal who comes with the site and they do, finally, go somewhere else. But once they've laid eggs, it's you or them. And I hate them. Nesting in my ear. Denouncing us. Making everything in your nervous system fire off all at once when you're peacefully asleep, as if you'd been electrocuted. We discussed various avicidal methods, each worse than the last, for the next hour until the clamor, no din, no -- the screams -- died down, and then we lay down again. I said, "Oh, what a mess there'll be when they clean out the window." And then (and I knew I was dreaming, but my dream continued to follow that scenario of twelve years ago) I prodded L.B.'s velvety-bony rib. He gave a sleepy, chuckling gasp: harpf. Hoopf. "Hey," I said, "hey, Elbee, what would you do if it was people?" Hapf. Sometimes he felt like a moose in bed: all antlers. "Really," I said, "what?" "Kill'm," Pwft. "No, if it was people, if they bothered you more than that, if they really wanted to... to put you in jail forever or mess your life up or something, I don't mean kill you but something really bad, what would you do?" An adult bird twittered softly outside: there, there, my lovely little red-funnel darlings, my yelling stomachs, my squally, pinfeathered dearies, my hope, my joy. Damn them! Parental insanity. I woke up.    Twelve years ago I'd gone to sleep and so missed the answer that way. A classic, textbook dream but so far, so very, very far, so unfortunately far away from any textbook at all. I'll tell you the neo-Christian theory of love. The neo-Christian theory of love is this: There is little of it. Use it where it's effective. Then I started to cry again but too easy, just leaking out of my soul, almost comfy. Penance can't be like that. And then I thought of Nathalie, Alan, Val  Co., all fledglings in a nest, all flopping about and squeeching like mad: oh feed, feed, feed! Agree! Agree! Agree ! I am arrogant. Dreams don't lie. Can't do it in a dream. It made me laugh. I'll never-be properly guilty, can't be, it's too funny. Feed me, feed me, feed me! (Am I one, too?) Read me, read me, read me!    Marilyn came, not in a dream or vision, but just a fragrance I could't see beyond the edge of the ledge. Night. The Smudge rising. When there are no stars you see the sky differently: huge, immense, utter Nothing if there's any light, then flat and right against your eyes when it's black. You imagine walls, as if it were a room. She was visiting. You know? I imagined talking to her. Can't remember, except a general feeling it was all right. Marilyn talking silently, ever so eloquent gestures. Like the alphabet for the deaf with her hands but so beautifully tender: One and she opposed her right forefinger to the third finger of her left hand; Two and it was third finger to third finger; Three and it was fourth to the same third, left-hand finger; Around and she rotated both hands, fingers loosely half-curled like a shell; Together and she joined one palm to another, spread fingers to spread fingers, like mirror meeting mirror. Her lips moving. Head to one side, perhaps wry, perhaps smiling. Bending her head to take off her big glasses: behold naked Marilyn! She touched lightly the collar of her shirt: another difficult curve, this one half-closing, flatter, fingers together but thumb apart. What fine points she was making. I watched her until sunrise, slept, dreamed of L.B. playing in an orchestra (ah, but he played le jazz on the side, L.B. skulking into magical romantic cellar at midnight with infratuba, plugging self into huge console in middle of smoke, tilting hat over face for flics, slurping beer, blowing tuba, making wicked and forbidden sounds from current in brain, sneer on face, hat tipping up and down, shoulders bouncing, nope, friend-o, I just do this for amps, great screams, les cops ! and off we go into the night, no L.B. but only infra-tuba-with-legs and blushing ears going skrimble skramble down cobbled pavement into romantic darkness and falling flat on face) and when he took off his traditional, somber, musician's black tights with silver-sparkle round the wrists, neck, and ankles, and he said -- peering at crotch level -- "What is this?" and I "What is that?" and we cried out together, "Love!" and danced naked but very classically, until he got down on one knee and I went up on point on his unpadded thigh, bracing myself against his bony shoulder, doing an arabesque, and he said, "Must you?" and then he said, "Really, you'd better wake up; that hurts," and he added, "Why are you dreaming in French? It's not like you." I woke up laughing.    Day. Day something. Something from Marilyn stays about, something from L.B. I'm dreadfully thin. I mean in the ordinary way, of course, not starving yet because starving takes too long, I think. It takes months. That's amazing. Can see not only my ribs, which I always could, more or less, but also the bones around my knees and my thighs have got all flappy. Arms, too. Does that signify anything? My thumb and middle finger meet round my upper arm. I sat in the water and thought: should I measure myself? (Being delightfully dirty; you can shit in the water, first of course sitting in it and backing it up, and eventually you'll be clean all by itself. I get dizzy standing.) Only maybe this is an hallucination, too: skinny legs, big knees, hanging belly, something left over from a newsreel. Well, I'm not swollen up. Can't remember what that's called, with the no-protein. Or is that only with children? Different when you're grown up. I don't know. A couple of times I tried to see my face in the water, I mean I think I did. But now doesn't matter, I'm just being, the most extraordinary freedom just to be behind your face and not cultivate it as if it were a house plant. "Cheeeeez!" Me at five, fidgeting in the holo studio, fancying the cameras are dental machines and I'm being terribly brave. Less boring than just waiting. Earlier today there was lots of music coming from all over, which was a terrific liberation; it's all been sealed up inside me til now and I doubt somebody strung up wires and speakers all over the cacti. You don't need them if you've a good memory. I went slowly to the ledge and hung my feet over, feeling like the Old Herb Lady who lives in the cave; it was coming from all around, in this strange place like a vast, inhuman auditorium, Bach from the hills and bushes and when I looked into the blazing blue sky, Handel. Very appropriate. The trumpet shall sound! I wonder if they really believed that. Et cetera. The trumpet shall and we shall, et cetera. My singing must sound awfully squeaky and the vocoder isn't set for music; this will just be words. It was memory-music, but I had no control over it, it just came, what I've lectured about for years and loved for years, like Saint Francis preaching to the birds (except sparrows); here I am playing music for silver-haired plants and alien hills. They all sat in rows and listened. From the organ (which? brain? kidney? lung?) Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which if you don't know it. I'm sorry for you. A great, majestic, howling discord that grumbles down into the abyss and then insists its way stubbornly up again, bigger than a building, bigger than anything; to play it properly you'd need a speaker the size of a cathedral. A throat as big as the Mississippi. It played and played; everything I knew played until I wept. how can one not? If there's faith, there's music. They whisper: Since by Man came death... (heh heh that leaves me out, even in the minor key, pianissimo) Since by Man came death... (more insistent now, and heavier, but they still believe it) (wups, fast and fortissimo and major; I think they mean it) And they played and they sang and I wept, everything I ever knew, for Baroque music is keyed into Isaac Newton's kind of time; it's the energy of that new explosion of philosophic time: perspective, mathematics, instant velocity, the great clock, the great wheel, harmonies, the Great Godly Grid. Then the bushes whispered in succulent German O my heart, my heart. Out of my big griefs. My little songs. Inching towards Einstein. Let me love, mother, let me lean on his bosom. I thought the frost-flowers on the windowpane meant Spring... Over here the Phoenix Reaction and God as Engineer. Over here entropy; suffering, death. And then the real Einstein, too complicated for me although I know what I'm supposed to like, Stravinsky and after; it makes my head ache, referring to things in all dimensions and sometimes backwards. And then it turns primitive, this is a bloody great dynamo and this a laboring flute. And then music-as-theatre. And round again. Round and round. All the music in the world says all the things in the world -- I mean the universe, of course -- and that's everything there is. So it all cancels out. Sound the trumpet! It is. And let the listening hills rejoice. They are. I started up The Messiah but you have to be quite careful about Every valley because I'm near one and it might get ideas; I mean shall be exalted and there we go with an X-quake. Well, if it all goes round, it's a spiral anyway -- a four dimensional one ("hyper-spiral") or like that theory of the four cosmi bongling into each other perpetually like ping-pong balls -- matter with "forward" time, matter with "backward" time, antimatter with "forward time," antimatter with "backward" time, only I think that would take five dimensions (six? seven? seventeen?) no, only three and Time, and you have to have ideal ping-pong balls because they never damp out. I like the older way better because I'm irresponsible: forever and ever. Forever and ever. Forever and ever! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah! Forever and ever. Quite a trick, for someone who doesn't believe in God. Only Handel always makes me cry so. The people who walk in darkness, those who dwell in the land of the shadow of death, they all do a lot of crying.    Day. Sometime. I looked up and, you know, it wasn't surprising, there's another piece of my past come back; I am really not quite sure if this is another hallucination or only a memory, but by my knee at this moment there is a five-year-old little girl standing in gray trousers, red cloth shoes, and a blue cotton polo shirt. Wearing what the gilded youth of Empire would have worn on the playing fields a hundred and sixty years ago. More or less. She is the only child I ever knew who was named after an airport. I said, "Kennedy?" No answer. She died in a car crash years ago but Marilyn lived. Marilyn's her mother. Three months in hospital: broken ribs, a broken arm, concussion, two operations on her knees, broken bones in her face. Kennedy died twenty minutes after the crash. She was unrecognizable. I mean they could tell who she was only by her size; there was another child, someone else's, in the car, and Marilyn had another daughter. The other child wasn't hurt, only bruised. The inflation bags didn't open for some reason; people thrown about the inside of a steel can. They had to cut the car often. She's put her hand on my knee. But I can't feel it. Silence. I said, "Kennedy, you were quite obnoxious when you were alive. You were a screamer. You used to steal my needle and scissors to fight beasts with when you visited. You lifted up your voice and complained and when I took them back, you kicked me." Silence. She has no expression. Not grave, not gay. Interested, perhaps? No, she's only looking at me. "Have you come to get me?" I said. Silence. That same almost intent -- yet not intent -- gaze. She must have something to tell me. Otherwise why come all that way? If she had lived two weeks longer she would have gone from daycare to school and she was rather proud of that because she was one of the very few children (the only elegance she could parade) who had a single mother and not eight mothers or five dads or a mix of mothers and dads or two dads or three mothers, and she was great friends with a little boy named Harold, who had a single father. "Where's Harold?" I say to her. Silence. She was anxious, rather obsessed with growing up, very fierce in defending her rights, and her death nearly killed her mother. I tried. "Marilyn -- " She put her hand again on my knee and this time I felt it, a thrill, a fear, a warning, that insistent, communicating, hot-damp little hand. A gateway. A sign. A messenger. Though nothing's settled. Fill in all the standard things about living being dying and the questions making the answers, everyone's dying all the time, dying is life, c., c. But I still don't know anything. This is not Kenny, who is drifting towards the door of the cave without a backward glance at me, like the night Marilyn was brought into hospital and I kept seeing her standing between two rooms, a lit one and a dark one, but they were both empty. Turning softly and vaguely from one to the other, and both empty. I still don't understand that. , I mean, both empty. Kenny was always so fierce in life: squinch lines around her eyes, thin mouth either distended or twisted, cheeks blown out with rage, sucked in for gloom. She was never still; you could never measure the proportions of her face. I guess I ought to follow her out, throw myself over the cliff. Can't, though. I'd only roll down like an idiot or a thistle and get impaled on something; I can't jump any more. I've printed out most of this and put it in the tin box; I'm wearing the rest of it around my neck. Pushed the box into the back cave wall because it's going to fall soon. I mean in a few hundred years or so, sometime, it's clear it will. The splendid sun, lighting up the world. The lit room. The empty room. I will record a few last words, try to think of something significant, and since after that concert -- everything's ringing still -- there's not much else to do. I mean. I mean I will not. Since I don't care. Thank God it's over. Odd to look back and see how much should have been changed, but one forgets the everydayness of it and the reasons why; I don't suppose I did better with the room than most or worse or whatever. I mean if they make you rent it unfurnished, you see. An afterlife: that would be nice, I suppose. No. Better not. Time. Time to go. Which way: instant, euphoric, religious, sleep, trancelike -- really nowadays you'd think one was shopping for couch covers. I think I'll leave them all behind, pity not to get to the real thing at last after all this trouble. I can muster up a jump. I can roll off the cliff, maybe bump my head, maybe die of thirst; lost of delirium, dirty my pants, interesting stuff, my whole past or something. The natural method. I'm going to do a joke; I will put as the last words on this. Oh I see people in uniforms coming through the brush downstream; someone's coming to rescue me. Goddam. And there they are! Coming through the brush -- almost at the horizon, I think, but in white -- people in white, as if they were the survey team for this tagged, unfurnished house -- and they're following the line of the river. Six of them. Coming this way. What a damned nuisance, I will have to be alive again, how exasperating. Bet you believed it. Told you, joke. Can't remember worrying about this. This dying. Can't remember. Why? Will put the print-out away, wait for the hill to bury it, and keep the vocoder. Such immense kindness from the hill. Nice hill, Nice sun (setting behind a bush someplace). So friendly, all this strange world, really. Walls. Floor. Astonishingly put together.    I've done it. But kept the vocoder. And I have to be near the box or you won't find it. Whoever you are. It's the loneliness, really. Marilyn still alive somewhere, that's the ghastly thing. I'll do it the instant way, I suppose, just to be finished with it. Get it all over, all that dying. Long dying: long, long dying, forty-two years, that's too much and I really wish    If only I can get into it right, fit right. You know. I've got the ampoule in my hand, only have to break it. Skin contact. Death, thou shall die The City of Dreadful Night Eternity as a bath house full of spiders (but he was nuts) The Celestial City Gehenna History is a nightmare from which humanity longs to awaken Death is not part of life ; death is not lived through (I'll buy that) Got this thing in my hand. O.K,    well it's time  u k  Spider Robinson The Computer Connection, Alfred Bester, Berkley-Putnam, # pp., # Dinosaur Beach, Keith Laumer, Merlin's Mirror, Andre Norton, Amazon Planet, Mack Reynolds,  Ace, # pp., # Police Your Planet, Lester del Ray  Erik van Lhin, Ballantine, # pp., # Science Fiction: What It's All About, Sam J. Lundwall, Ace, # pp., # Gods And Golems, Lester del Rey, Ballantine, # pp., # I didn't plan it this way, but by golly I believe I've got a theme for this month's collection of ramblings, or at least some of them. As I was arraying the current pile of Books Read on my desk (read: bed) to select the first victim, it occurred to me that at least four of them fell under the heading of "pure entertainment" -- and it then occurred to me, reviewing those four books in my mind, that there's no such thing. thing sf should be is entertaining. A writer must keep that hypothetical reader out there turning the pages, or he's masturbating. But I also maintain that once he's got the reader listening, he not only ought to have something to say, he can't help saying something, albeit in spite of himself. Every book has a theme, stated or implied. (John Campbell once said, if you can't think of a good blurb for a story, bounce it.) Any plot that keeps you reading involves at least one moral choice, usually several. Some of these are labeled good (a "hero" makes them) and some are labeled "bad" (a "villain" makes them); and the reader is encouraged if not solicited to ratify the writer's labeling by rooting for the heroes andor booing the villains. It (hopefully) gets more subtle than that at times, of course, and there are variants. The writer may feel, for instance, that there is no elegant, or even acceptable, solution to his proposed moral dilemma, and seek your agreement. There are even books which propose no discernible moral dilemma at all, painting all characters the same shade of gray -- but these are never, in the final analysis, entertaining. (Dhalgren is such a book. I rest my case.) But even there you and I are being asked to agree to something: to the proposition that there are no moral dilemmas, let alone valid solutions. A book is a proposed agreement, between writer and reader. Harlan Ellison, in his preface to the magnificent Deathbird Stories (see June, # Galaxy Bookshelf) says something to the effect that if enough people get together and agree that a thing is so, it comes to pass: men make, and unmake, their own gods. If that's so, perhaps we all ought to be pretty goddam careful what agreements we make these days. If that's so, perhaps I as a reviewer have an obligation to comment on the moral agreements being proposed to you in the books I review, when they strike me as odd. In addition, of course (for I don't want to preach at you), to discussing their craftsmanship.    Let's look at the best of the four that disturbed me this way. Alfred Bester is an unquestioned master of entertainment, one of the most powerfully engaging writers of this or any genre. He once (about ten seconds after we were introduced, actually) took me by the lapels and told me that "The way to write is to take your reader by the lapels on page one and punch him repeatedly in the face until your arm is tired," or words to that effect. "Attack," he cried, shaking me like a pitcher of martinis (which at the moment I chanced to be), "is paramount. " This was no real surprise. I had of course read The Demolished Man (the world's first Hugo) and the immortal The Stars My Destination, two of the most successfully ambitious novels ever penned, and so I already knew that Alfie likes to leave 'em breathless and dizzy. And so it's neither any surprise to find that, after a nineteen-year absence from sf and writing in general, Alfie's done it again. The Computer Connection will grab your interest, all right -- by the plums. Connection may be likened to a series of bladders in the face, mice in the ladies' room, firecrackers in the sleeping bag, it may even actually be the genuine Barrel Of Monkeys for all I know. Its cast is a demented parade of zanies ranging from "Captain Nemo," who barges through the door in a deep-sea diver's suit filled with water (he breathes it for preference); through Jesus Christ himself (a hopelessly sincere neurotic who keeps getting himself crucified one way or another -- his friends call him Jacy because "his real name sounds like swearing"); to a delightfully pubescent young lady named (for ridiculous reasons) Fee-# Grauman's Chinese. Altogether a gloriously outrageous farce -- that is every bit hilarious. I mean, it's tour de force kinda stuff. I read it last year when it was serialized in Analog under the title "The Indian Giver," and was utterly delighted, certain I'd just finished a Hugo-class novel. Hearing trade rumors of a significant rewrite job, I re-read the new hardcover edition (it is, by the way, the same book advertised as "Extro " in the new edition of The Stars My Destination -- of the three titles, I like the present one least) and, having only one of the three Analogs around (sorry, Ben), I failed to spot the rewrite from memory. But I was again enchanted, hilarified and exhausted, and put the thing down intending to recommend in these pages that it be. nominated for a Hugo at once. Then my wife Jeanne asked me "What's the book about?" in the tone of voice which means not what is the plot? but what's he got to say? And I opened my mouth and nothing came out. After a long search of my recollections of the double-reading, I finally decided that Computer Connection mainly says: a) psychotic immortals who attempt to destroy the human race oughta be stopped, and b) a human (even an immortal) can't be trusted with absolute power, but a hermaphrodite can. The first of these I can't quarrel with, but it don't dazzle; the second dazzles but J'm not sure I buy it. I have here a whole block of copy explaining and supporting the above two assertions, but I ain't gonna type it up because it necessarily gives away a bunch of the plot, which is too good to spoil. Take my word for them. Along the way, less central agreements are sought. Alfie asserts in passing, for instance, that murdering people in particularly horrible ways, in a bungled attempt to make them immortal, is something you really ought to outgrow in a few hundred years or so; that True Love At First Sight between two total strangers with nothing (even language) in common will work out just peachy; that it's okay for Indians to sell hideous drugs extracted from the Ugly Poppy (!) as long as they only sell them to Honkies (just desserts, right?); and that Black Spanish-flavored English will be the yahoos. All of these you might want to think about for a minute. Now none of this is to say that Connection is not one of the most exciting, hilarious, purely entertaining novels I've ever read in my life. But I think I'll wait just a while before nominating it for the Hugo, after all.    Keith Laumer's Dinosaur Beach is another case in point. It too appeared in Analog (in #, as "The Timesweepers' '), and it too is a highly entertaining book -- of a different sort than Alfie's. Keith writes teasers, puzzlers, masterfully-plotted suspense stories whose strong points are action and really ingenious surprises. In the typical Laumer story, a tough if not indomitable protagonist fights forces beyond his (or your) comprehension which increase in complexity and deadliness until they are explaineddefeated in the last twenty pages. It's an old formula and a good one, and it's never been done better than in this latest avatar. There are so many cliffhanger blackouts it makes you dizzy, and the pace never lets up. Time-travel is centrally involved, and Keith has been exploring the possible paradoxes of time-travel for so long he could confuse the hero of "All You Zombies." The prizeat-stake in the protagonist's struggle is literally the fabric of reality itself, and by damn you can't get much heavier than that. I read through Beach at a phenomenal speed, even considering its extreme shortness (#I pp.). "Well sir," I said when I was done, "now that was pure entertainment, beautifully done." And again I caught up short on some subconscious assumptions I'd been tacitly agreeing with. One of the most basic assumptions of Keith's plot is that humans can't be trusted to monkey with time-travel, that their attempts to do so will bring disaster no matter how good or bad their intentions. Another assumption is that machines can be trusted to monkey with time travel (do sf writers trust anybody but a human?), so long as they haven't been hanging around humans long enough to acquire a survival-urge. Keith also seems to say that the best a woman field operative can be is a darned good imitation of a male agent with a "frightened little girl inside," who is prone to "go female on" you in a pinch. Again, I'm not saying I disliked the book -- I recommend it as light reading. But I stubbed my toe a couple of times, and I rather hope you do too. So much for the ones that I thought were well-written, but subtly disturbing. Now for the one that was mediocre and infuriating. There was time, back in me teens, when I read every Andre Norton I could get my hands on, and enjoyed them thoroughly. Lost Planet , Shadowhawk -- boss stuff, man. Then a lot of years went by, somehow, and then one day Merlin's Mirror appeared in my mailbox. "Oboy," I said, and sat down to renew my acquaintance with Ms. Norton's shtick. Ptooey. She has taken mighty Merlin and noble Arthur and the lovely Guinevere and the Lady of the Lake and made them into the comical stooges of two races of aliens who have been using Earth as a battleground, off and on, for centuries. These SkyLords, see, swing low in their Chariots of the Gods from time to time to build Stonehenge, destroy Atlantis, and occasionally sneak into the boudoirs of certain humantype ladies to...well...impregnate them, so that the resulting hybrid offspring can slug it out with each other for the minds and destinies of mankind. By Ms. Norton, this is just fine. Merlin and Arthur turn out to be the Great Human Hope of Race A (who therefore become the good guys), whose agents quite literally rape MA's mothers to produce half-breed tools to use against Race B. The grand plan is hideously bungled, largely through poor intelligencework and astonishing naivete on the part of Race A, and Arthur and Merlin are placed in suspended animation until a better time presents itself. Meanwhile, it is inferred, the evil influence of Race B goes on to make Earth the miserable mess we all know it is today. Only, I'm damned if I can see why I should root for Race A. Ms. Norton's Arthur blithely' slaughters thousands of his countrymen, on the pretext that he is thereby "unifying his land" so that the aliens may safely reveal themselves -- a patently idiotic notion in itself. Merlin is a poor twisted neurotic who spends all his maladjusted days in loneliness, monomania and celibacy (carnal whoopee, it seems, interferes with your ability to use the Ancient Knowledge -- unless you happen to be a horny Sky Lord). There is no single portrayal of sex as warm or loving or even honestly hedonistic -- it is invariably treachous, guileful, evil, often only a trap to drain Merlin of his Vital Thaumaturgical Fluids. Indeed, the only females in the book who aren't bitches are Merlin's and Arthur's mommies -- who, for their pains, are both of them literally screwed and then dropped from the story a couple of sentences after they have birthed their sons. But that Race B -- they're a bunch of blackguards. Do you know what they do? Why them bastards rape and kill and devastate, that's what. Enough. A thoroughly unpleasant book, indifferently crafted, apparently calculated to appeal to the more twisted of the Von Daniken fans. It damn near spoiled the whole Arthur legend for me. But I'm sure a quick browse through Le Morte D' Arthur will wash the taste of Merlin's Mirror right out of my mind.    And now for tAe one that was just plain rotten -- and twice as infuriating. I don't believe I've read anything in the past year quite so frustrating as Amazon Planet. Dammit to hell, Mack Reynolds is not a klutz -- you Galaxy readers recently named him Most Popular Author, and I have been enjoying his work since I was in grade school. And yet this latest chunk is, in spite of some thorough research and clever plotting, a genuine and unequivocal piece of limburger. It reads like a slick mainstream writer's first attempt at sf. I must confess I expected it to stink from the moment I saw the title and absorbed the blurb. Get this, fellas: it's about a planet where the women are warlike, muscular, domineering Amazons and the men are limp-wristed fags and secondclass citizens. See the subtle satire in that? The biting social commentary? The relevance? The cheap, trite, hack sensationalism? I mean, you got the fag market, the dyke market, the SM crowd, the feminists and the paranoids, all at once! I tell ya, Sid, it's a natural. In spite of the fact that I've seen the identical premise used at least four times before ( every one of them ghastly), I decided to read the book, solely on the strength of Mack's reputation. For the first half of the book at least my outrage and despair grew ever stronger, as stumbling prose carried ancient stereotypes through an absurd and unbelievable charade. To give a minor example of the sloppiness of the writing, although it has been established that the hundreds of worlds in the United Planets federation have no cultural contact, and indeed know very little about one another, natives of all planets seem coincidentally accustomed to shout, "Holy jumping Zen!" in times of stress, regardless of their own religious affiliation (none of them appears even remotely influenced by the precepts of Zen). Ah! But then, halfway through, Reynolds serves up a startling and, in retrospect, well-planted plot twist, which like a supercharger on a Model T makes the old wreck come alive for a bit. Amazonia never really was such a neurotic's paradise, you see (well, for a time, but all that was years ago) -- that's just a story the Amazonians put out. My interest began to perk up. And from that one peak Amazon Planet went downhill so fast and so far that the slime-pit it started from ended up looking like Olympus. Amazonia, we learn, is in actuality quite a sane, stable little matrilineal society, with only vestigial, "merely symbolic" sexism. But the wise Amazonians knew all those darn old male-dominated cultures would give them a hard time unless they were frightened away by a good threat to their masculinity -- hence the "We fight all the time and keep our men in harems" false-front. To this world comes our hero, who seems at first like a complete wimp but is actually a secret agent with a heavy rep. Now see if any of this reminds you of anything you may have read in your newspapers lately: The hero ("Ronny") works for a semisecret branch of United Planets (a federation which is bound by law, mind you, to respect individual planetary autonomy) called Section G. The avowed purpose of Section G is to instigate the overthrow of any planetary government which it deems "restrictive," by fomenting and financing rebellion from within (although they'll send in troops if all else fails)! "Restrictive" is defined as not tending to "encourage progress," and"Progress" is defined as, and I quote, "Scientific progress, industrial progress, progress in education, in freeing the individual from any restriction that prevents him from realizing his abilities." Now isn't that worth giving up self-determination for? savagely and mercilessly massacres everyone he meets in a building known to contain the enemy, whether they are armed or not, The Largest, Most Complete Star Chart It will fascinate you. Its size? A full by #Va feet! Hang this noble map on your wall, then stand # or # yards away. You see an amazing replica in deep blue of the night shy -- showing # stars, just about every star significantly visible to the unaided eye. Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellations! This dramatic reproduction of the heavens is a distinguished work ol art and is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. It stretches the mind end the imagination. And as never before, the Celestial Map charts the vast reaches of space through which hurtle space-ship Earth, the solar system, the galaxy itself... Own this magnificent map, it will instruct, entertain and delight you!  Nsabsrad inns teals wrta rtlra Mp psriwstar.  Sham all (tan ap ts sad lad. Iith aagaltiids. tlss It Msttatsr rtc  Start Idaat I B a d hr Tats Catalans Mahan, Bright Star asathan, Flmstssd awaken, plat Brash Isttsn tad i pacific star I by U. sf Cril(arata't itar-tlfttag cswHter.  Map platted by Barid W. Ttths, i s tl p l aa l s Awaricaa Mat sa w Haydsa Plaastarlaw Rsplsr The Cetaatlal Map Company # Waal #rd SL Naw York, N.Y. # Enclosed find check or money order for # plus # for handling and postage. (NO container to: (New York State residents add applicable sales tax. I Please Print ) Offer good in U.S.A. and Canada. bisecting a naked man in a shower, literally wading in gore. It's necessary (and therefore OK), because Section G simply must get all the governments in the Galaxy working at peak efficiency (even at the cost of legitimacy), because...well, it's like this: they've spotted aliens coming this way from the next Galaxy, and want us to meet them from a position of strength. Surely you people can see why we have to draft you: them furriners coming over the hill might (although there isn't a scrap of evidence to suggest it) be unfriendly. What's a Constitution or so in the face of a Genuine Potential Commie Menace? I'm getting carried away. I've some invective saved up to heap upon the silly and unworkable "real government of Amazonia"; and the incredibly abundant typos; and the sentence structure that conveys information at the expense of grace; and the abominably sexist portrayal of women; and the waste of some extremely thorough if often dubious research; but I see I've already spent quite enough time on this turkey. Are you beginning to see what I mean about "moral agreements"?   # Another turkey, not quite as bad. I am informed by a friend in the trade that Police Your Planet first ran under the byline of one Erik van Lhin, in a magazine edited by Phillip St. John, and was in due course favorably reviewed by Lester del Rey. That all three of these people are Lester should give you an idea of what a gem the book is. It has just appeared in paperback under the byline, "Lester del Rey  Erik van Lhin," and adding Lester's real name may sell more copies but it don't make it smell any better. What it is, it's a shoot-'em-up, a bad Western set on Mars. It moves nicely, as nicely as everything Lester writes, and if you really have a thing for crushed heads and buckets of blood it'll please you on virtually every page. But only if you're willing to buy into the premise that what to do about evil men is to become just as evil, but tougher. The "hero," Bruce Gordon, is a sort of cross between Casablanca' s Monsieur Rick and Mike Hammer -- a sadistic thug, sexually and-emotionally crippled -- with a soft spot for the underdog. And so it's all right for him to steal and kill and extort, because in the long run he won't do it to anybody (except the Bad Guys, who wear uniforms so you can tell them) any more than he absolutely has to, to achieve his personal goals. In the end he learns that he's been manipulated, played for a sucker, by an even more heartless and merciless bunch -- another C.I.A. surrogate -- who send him off to Mercury to clean up the owlhoots there. Altogther an almost unrelievedly grim, cynical, despairing view of mankind -- quite competently crafted, I should add for any honest thud and blunder fans out there.    One last turkey, and then I'll try and leave on an up-note (remember last month I promised a columnfull of turkeys one of these days?). Despite its pretentious title, I quite enjoyed the opening chapters of Science Fiction: What It's All About. I did go into it grumbling that "a man who knows what sf is all about ought to be able to write a better book than # A.D." (see September, # Galaxy Bookshelf for the autopsy), but as I read through chapters on the fantastic novel, the prehistory of sf from Lucian on up, and the Utopian novel past and present, I was charmed and impressed by Sam Lundwall's wit and scholarship. But very soon he began touching on areas with which I am myself familiar -- and in instance after instance I judged him to be full of beans. In an era in which it has become fashionable for lightweights to criticize Robert Heinlein, Lundwall distinguished himself (if that's the word I want) by a series of the most hysterical, illogical, contradictory and incoherent attacks ever made on the man he reluctantly conceded to be (for unexplained reasons) a giant. He dismised Isaac Asimov as a guy who adapted Gibbon into a space-opera and wrote a bunch of Robot stories -- and in a later chapter destroyed his credentials to discuss even those latter tales by averring that Susan Calvin is "so genial" (forsooth!) "that you can't dislike the robots she loves so dearly." He loathes Star Trek in its entirety, dismissing it as "nothing but space opera." He even thinks Eando Binder was one man. But worst and most unforgivable, Lundwall andor Ace didn't bother to update this new edition -- it hasn't been updated, despite an alleged "revision" in #, since it was first written in #. Which is to say that it claims that Amazing is still running nothing but reprints; implies that Fred Pohl is still editing Galaxy No, I do not use "Jim Baen " as a pseudonym. -- Pohl; claims that FSF is "commonly considered" to be the "foremost U.S. sf magazine of today"; and, in an unbelievable piece de resistance of ironic ignorance, alleges that Analog is "...still edited by the indestructible John W. Campbell" (whose name, by the way, appears for the first time in this "analysis" of sf on page # -- although the first Index citation of him is for page #) (every Index entry I've chanced to check is bollixed up some way or other). Fantastic, the late lamented Worlds of If, and the late Vertex are not even mentioned once. 'Nuff said. Although he blasts the provinciality of Americans who assume that sf is their genre, this book proves even more clearly than his last, that way over there in Sweden, Sam Lundwall just don't know What It's All About.   Finally, the up-note I promised you. Somewhat paradoxically, it's from the same gentleman I took to task a few pages ago. Gods and Golems by Lester del Rey (published under his own exclusive byline) is a collection of five of the best stories Lester ever wrote or I ever read. In craftsmanship they are superb, in moral content they are admirable (to me and Lester, at least), and in sheer skill they are breathtaking. These are the real del Rey, the kind of stuff on which the man has built one of the strongest reputations in the business. They vary in age from eleven to twenty-three years old, but you'll have to squint mighty hard to spot any wrinkles or stretch-marks. "Vengeance Is Mine" is a classic tale of misguided vengeance; "Superstition" is an incredibly deftly-plotted tour de force about a race of psi-masters who have daily chats with god, though he is stone dead; "Life Watch" is an excellent analysis of what it truly means to be human; "For I Am A Jealous People" is the most amazing blend of sf and theology imaginable, with one of the greatest last lines in literary history; and "Pursuit" is an agonizingly compelling spell-binder concerning the greatest danger of psiphenomena to humans. On the scale I inaugurated last month for story-collections, Gods And Golems rates a clear # -- I found every story in it to be entertaining, instructive, enlightening, and impossible to put down unfinished. If you've never read Lester at his best, trot out and score it. A Best Buy.    One last word before I let you all turn to the fiction, which God knows has been waiting patiently for long enough. When I took this gig, I had mental visions of my mailbox overflowing with bombs, rattlesnakes and poison-pen letters. I'm dismayed to say I haven't heard a peep for months. I got my first letter this morning, in fact, from a delightful anonymous reader who allowed that everything I say is horseshit but I say it purty. Look, to do a proper job of this, I need feedback -- as direct as I can get it. By virtue of living on a farm out in the boonies, I'm out of touch with the current of Pro and Fan opinion. So whether you are a reader or a victim of this column, feel free to send either hearty agreement or vociferous dispute regarding same to me, at Moonrise Hill, R.R. # #, At least until further notice.  Galaxy Edited by James Baen simply, the best of the best. Hours of reading-pleasure by the finest writers of science fiction: such sf luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin (her Nebula winning "The Day Before the Revolution"), Frederik Pohl, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley and many more are represented here with their finest works. is now available. To order, send the title and number with your name and address, # plus # postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. #fcVe vtw?onT B.  GBS on  AAnVnWO This is humiliating. It's demeaning. It's frustrating. Having to come down here to the dungeon -- to the Archives -- after having installed # worth of intercom equipment...But Alter won't answer my imperious commands via the tv intercom, and I need a copy of the Hugo nominations for this year's final ballot. Let's see now...my God, did I forget my keys? No, there they are... Slide the bolts, the chains, the locks...Damn, this door is beginning to stick. Heavy mother. Ah. The place is like a tomb! Could something have happened to him? "Alter? Alter?" Oh, God, what would I do without him? Who would I blame for my mistakes? Who would I revile and argue with? He's dead! I know he's dead! Oh, Arrrrrgh! Sob I'll find his small, crumpled body in one of the aisles...so still, so quiet. No more caustic repartee. No more smirking exchanges. No more diatribes! Whimper I should have treated him better. I should have even complimented him. Oh, woe. Snivel... snivel... "Geis, what the hell are you doing down here? What are you sniveling about? Run short of french-vanila with cherries ice cream and peach brandy this month? Times are tough." "Alter! You're not dead!" "When I'm finally dead, Geis, you'll be the first to know -- you won't be able to write a line of fiction or non-fiction worth a damn." "Where were you? Why didn't you answer my call?" "I was hot-wiring the intercom you had installed. You'd be surprised what can be done with one of these things." "Alter -- damn it, you're supposed to be under control. You're supposed to be subservient to the surface me! Why can't you behave?" "I dunno, Geis. I guess you're just lucky. Now, why are you down here? You didn't bring any more visitors, did you? No more sightseers unless they're old-fashioned women in young bodies." "Alter, I promise -- no more visitors. And let's not get into sexism and chauvinisnm, hmm?" "Haw. Don't get into it, he says. Geis, you were born into it, you live in it and you'll die in it. As for the future of the women's lib -- that will depend on macroeconomic factors more than cultural or societal factors. The shape of the family to come depends on science, technology and the state of our natural resources. If the trend is toward a lowering of the standard of living due to the absolute increase in the costs of necessities, then a lot of 'ideas whose time has come' may find their time has gone. " "Alter, did I ask you for an opinion? Go find me a copy of the Hugo ballot for this year. Jim Baen, exalted slave-drive editor of this magazine, wants me to discuss the contenders." "Ha. smirk A likely story. You just want to get into print that this year." "Nope. Never crossed my mind. Of course, now that you mention it, I am on the ballot for Best Fan WritMagazine." Blush "Geis, your disengenuity will get you killed one of these years." "My mentioning it will not influence the voting, since this column will not see print until long after the Aussiecon in Melbourne where the Worldcon is being held this year. So go find me a copy of the ballot. I've got to get on with this." "Alright, alright. This way..." "Ugh...the dirt...crud... Don't you ever clean these aisles?" "They're as clean as your mind, Geis. Don't complain. Here... No. A copy of the first issue of it?" "No! Don't you have any organization, Alter?" "I keep telling myself...'Alter, one of these days you're going to have to get organized.' It helps while I'm looking for things... How about this tattered copy of "The Hugo ballot. I " "Why are you so particular? Here...yes, here's a copy. Now go up to your privileged position on the surface and forget me again." "A pleasure!" place... The chains... The locks... He's an impossible creature. What is that he's shouting through the door? Something about...turning the intercom terminal into a...into a matter transmitter? No. No, could never be done... Could it? I'd better write Jerry Pournelle and get his opinion. Alter Ego on the loose with a matter transmitter is a prospect too horrible to contemplate. Well, in the meantime, up I go to the surface for a look at this ballot. Let's see now... Best Novel. The nominated are: Guin Priest Niven  Pournelle. cellent novels, superb science ficenough of the voters have read it. It is old-fashioned space war, thefate-of-mankind-hangs-in-the-balance, with strong plot elements and intriguing premise. It is very high in reader entertainment. low-key, 'mature' story, involving the fate of one man and his home world. It deals with character, competing ideals, the rich and the poor. Both novels, to be honest, drag more inherent status as 'quality' sf. Another factor is that Ursula K. Le Guin has been winning awards hand over fist lately, and the fans tend to say 'Enough, already' and give awards to someone else for awhile. The Best Novella line-up is: "Assault on a City" by Vance "Bom With the Dead" by Siverberg "Riding the Torch" by Spinrad "A Song for Lya" by Martin "Strangers" by Dozois. Readership counts here, I think, and name recognition. So Silverberg readership remembering Martin's story and perhaps voting enough on that basis to make the difference...even though in my opinion "A Song for Lya" is only a so-so story. "Riding the Torch" by Spinrad deserves equal praise and status with "Bom With the Dead" in my view. Alas, I have not read the Vance or the Dozois. I have only read two of the novelettes on the ballot, so I cannot with justice make any comment at all. But justice has little to do with life, so I will, anyway. They are: "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans" by Ellison "After the Dreamtime" by Lupoff "A Brother to Dragons, a Companion to Owls" by Wilhelm "Extreme Prejudice" by Pournelle "Midnight by the Morphy Watch" by Leiber "Nix Olympica" by Walling "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" by Asimov Harlan Ellison cannot write uninterestingly. His stories always grab and twist even if they insult the canons of sf and maul plausibility. This doesn't seem to bother the readers or Harlan. He has a good chance to win. So does Fritz Leiber with his memorable, semi-classic fantasy. And everyone loves Fritz. The short stories are: "Cathadonian Odyssey" by Bishop "The Day Before the Revolution" by Le Guin "The Hole Man" by Niven "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" by Silverberg. Take your pick. I refuse all comment. It'll be a close vote. (And I hope the Aussiecon committee publishes the vote breakdown for all these categories.) The nominees for Best Professional Artist: Steven Fabian Frank Kelly Freas Tim Kirk John Schoenherr Rick Sternback I would like to see Steve Fabian or Tim Kirk win, since they are fan # Garden Street, Moonachie, N.J. # # A# artists who turned pro. But logic suggests that the love affair with Freas will continue. The Best Fan Artists are: George Barr Grant-Canfield Bill Rotsler James Shull With Tim Kirk in the pro ranks now. Bill Rotsler, the sentimental favorite for lo these many years, has a fine chance to win his first Hugo. Grant Canfield, well-liked, and very active, is a strong contender. The Best Professional Editor category has: Jim Baen Ben Bova Terry Carr Ed Ferman Robert Silverberg Ted White The obvious winner will most likely be Ben Bova again; he continues to do a good job with impact of the magazine on the voting will probably result in another Hugo. Certainly a Special Mention should go to Jim Baen for Best New Editor. Ted White should get the annual Hang In There award. Who or which will win the Best Fan Magazine Hugo? If the power of circulation prezine, and if the Aussies vote for Bruce Gillespie's prestigious and This may be Bruce's only chance, since he seems to have burned himself out. Those nominated as Best Fan Writer are; John Bangsund Dick Geis Sandra Miesel Don Thompson Susan Wood John Bangsund has withdrawn. That leaves me against two women and Don Thompson. Susan Wood won last year, and it's never happened that Best Fan Writer winners repeat. I won in #. Of course Galaxy's #-plus readership won't have any effect... Read my next column and find out who won and what I've got to say about all the above categories. Including the last category -- Best Dramatic Presentation; the men behind the cameras, or goThe Best Dramatic category has been somewhat of a sowhat award since its beginning. The winners are usually people who are outside-thefamily and could care less about winning a Hugo. I have never seen an ad that proclaimed, 'The HugoWinning Picture...' Outside the sf world, a Hugo is small beer. I think the category should be abolished. Let's have a Best SF Columnist Hugo instead. Where's that hooting laughter coming from? "From me, Geis." get out of the dungeon -- and up here in the Sanctum?" "I told you I was hot-wiring that TV intercom unit. I simply applied some van Vogtian physics and the Tenth Law of Spock, and threw the switch. There was a blinding flash, the stench of burning tendrils, and -- I poufed into existence here." "But that's impossible! You can't -- " "You got any tendril salve? A tube of Xeno? There are a few Pournellian bugs in that matter transmitter." "This is the forebrain, Alter. The Prime Self and the Alter Ego do "Nice place you have here. Stereo...easy chair...color TV...a bar... Hmmm. Oh, come on, Geis! La Mesa muscatel? Red Rocket wine? Kummel caraway liqueur? Where's the peach brandy?" "I ran out last week -- Alter! Get thee hence! Back to the dungeon!" "Nope. I am your equal now. Get me a bottle of creme de menthe (and no cheap brand, either), a half gallon of good vodka, and a dozen large cans of frozen orange juice." "You're out of your tree! I'll use the amulet and the incantation to banish thee -- you. Let's see now...where did I put that incantation?" "Geis, now that we're doing a monthly column, with all this extra work involved, we have to work closely together. Now, if we move in another bed -- " "Where did I put that paper? I can't remember all the words. Bed? Oh, no you don't!" "I'll have to be with you day and night. If you think I'm going to singe my tendrils going and coming via that jury-rigged matter transmitter, forget it! Tell you what -- we can alternate doing the column. I have a book or two picked out I want to tear apart and examine their entrails for the benefit of the readers. You want to ramble on about the Hugo winners and do smallpress reviews, and -- " "How did it go? Yug slugguth...necro-floshbutch...No Maybe if I just rub the amulet and make a wish... "Then I can write a column telling the readers how to enter the sacred inner circles of sf fandom...how to publish a fanzine...even how to go to a convention and watch some of the Big Name Pros make fools of themselves." "What? You expect me to let you betray my fellow professionals? Never!" "What, never?" "Well...hardly ever." "You just wait, Geis. We'll get along just swell. Gimme a little kiss." ' 'O God! Where is that paper? ' '  He was a master of illusions -- reality he found more difficult to deal with... The room stank, but then of course it should. Fourteen months' accumulation of straw on the floor of a drinking hall: spilled ale, stale urine, rotten cheese and vomitus -- all told their sordid tales. Castles should be vacated from time to time so that the warders can shovel out accumulated filth and let a season of fresh air purge the stone. Keep Ahnlich was well into its second winter of continuous habitation. Storymaker knew this well; he was surprised that the smell should suddenly intrude. "There's treachery afoot," Malreve rumbled, scowling into his bowl. "Vile treachery." He plunged his nose into foam, as if to sniff out a lurking villain, Storymaker shrugged. "Of course there is." They had covered this ground too many times during the recent weeks of inactivity. "When armed force fails as a tool of statecraft, there's naught left but treachery." He sipped his watery ale. "The King's cousins were practiced back-stabbers long before they tried their hands at being generals." Funny, he had never noticed before what an insipid brew this ale was. Tomson sat quietly, sampling his bowl from time to time and taking in their every word. His eager brown eyes darted from speaker to speaker, though they were no longer rounded in awe at such casual talk of the fate of monarchs. With every month had he grown in poise and perception; the lad was nigh on to becoming a man of full measure. Storymaker had shared many an adventure with him, these past months, and had come to love him like a brother. Malreve caught his eye, reached behind it to capture the thought, as only a companion of many campaigns can do. He scowled his blackest scowl. Strange how Storymaker could read concern couched in his friend's ill-temper. But then it was strange that he, the wiry teller of bright tales, should remain so long at the side of a hulk so taciturn and gloomy as Malreve. "We'll have to be moving on soon, you know." A glance at Tomson. "We'll have to leave all this behind." The glance conveyed a message that Storymaker refused to accept. "We still owe service to the King," he replied. "Even for mercenaries we have been well paid." Then, almost defiantly, "We must linger yet awhile. These people need us now more than ever." "Aye. They need us, but can we come through?" He tossed off his brew, slammed the empty bowl down on the oaken planks. "Wench!" He slammed the bowl again for emphasis. "Every day our army shrinks. Those that don't desert die of the Sickness, or in some stupid drunken brawl. Have you seen what's happened to discipline? Some of the cockier louts are even starting to answer back to me -- me! "Where in Seven Hells is that girl?" Malreve roared in sudden exasperation. It was all true, and Malreve's uncharacteristic loquaciousness underlined the gravity of the situation. There were winter crops to tend -- it was hard to blame peasants for caring more about a full belly come spring than about a fat king's family squabbles. They had no way of grasping the long term consequences of his defeat. Siege decimated a fighting force slowly, but just as surely as pitched battle. The two mercenaries had worked wonders with the rabble of peasant farmers they were given, making it into the most effective army, man for man, between the mountains and the sea. But discipline so quickly imposed evaporated just as quickly with no new victories to savor. They were not, in actual fact, under direct siege. The Ducal Alliance chose rather to ring in the vast South valley over which the Keep held sway. But nowhere could the perimeter be pushed outward by frontal assault, not without grievous loss of life. And no man could pass the encircling camps without facing death, or swearing allegiance to the Dukes. Tempting bribes to defectors made desertion a real problem. Yes, something would have to be done to improve discipline, Storymaker decided, and soon. Maybe he could... The thought was interrupted by the entrance of Lit, the serving wench. Her belly was well rounded now and she carried her burden with stately pride. It was Storymaker's child. She also earned a pitcher. "It's about time," Malreve muttered. His manner made clear that he was keeping a strong curb on his temper. Malreve took his drinking seriously; he disliked interruptions in the smooth flow of alcohol from pitcher to bowl to belly. Once, in Marberry, he had dragged a tardy serving wench back from her brief squat in the alley, skirts still hiked around her waist and both hands clawing to free her hair from his fist. Everyone had laughed uproariously at his impatience and the girl's predicament. Everyone, that is, but Story maker. He was continually rufning good help, by Malreve's standards. Find a wench who was pleasing to the eye and properly cowed, and right away Storymaker would start making a fuss over her and treating her like a lady. Such treatment invariably led to disastrous interruptions of service. The girls began putting on airs, following Storymaker around like lovesick pups, and making themselves generally unavailable to the rest of the clientele. It was disgusting. Malreve knew better than to try to cure his friend of this bad habit; for Storymaker, oddly enough, took his women as seriously as some men took their drink. Once, in Avalon, there had been a girl, a stable cleaner by trade. An ostler chose her for a quick one, not knowing anyone lay private claim to her favors. (He would have scarce believed it had he been told.) It cost him his testicles. Lit filled bowls all around, lingering but for a second at Storymaker' s side. Only a fool Would have failed to notice the ill-temper clouding the room. Serving girls, even those accustomed to special treatment, learned early to keep clear of sour patrons. It took but a casual swipe of a beringed hand to remove a girl's front teeth and lower her market value. Serenely but swiftly she waddled out. Storymaker felt a renewed surge of pride at this visible proof of his manhood. How Lit's mother, the crone charged with running the drinking hall, had protested when she found her principal helper saddled with a swelling belly. Loud was her wailing as she berated Storymaker for the inconvenience he had caused her. The scene had been a source of much amusement to the other drinkers; everyone knew she was secretly pleased that the get would be the child of a warrior -- one in the King's counsel at that. A boy so bom might well hope to rise above his station. He would certainly be uncommon fair and quick. And even a girl by Storymaker could expect an easier path through life. It seeped into Storymaker's awareness that he never saw himself in this child's future. He was certainly not the marrying kind, but he had a fondness for watching his bastards through their infancy. Only when he was sure that mother and child were doing well would he accede to Malreve's impatient demand to move on. Yet somehow he knew that this child he would never see. The strange sense of certainty depressed his spirits beyond measure. With a physical shrug he threw off the gloom. He caught Tomson's ever-watchful eye, smiled. "Did I ever tell you of the time we rode the dragons into battle through the sky? It was over the kingdom of the Bretons, was it not, Malreve?" The lad brightened at the prospect of another story from the master himself. Even if he had heard it a hundred times (and he had not heard this one even once), he would have said nothing to deflect Storymaker from a tale. Real dragons that flew! The most improbable lies always had the best plots. Skillfully, Storymaker built the tale. Layer upon layer piled the fancies, yet always with that aura of believability about them that made one want to swallow the concoction whole. Legions by the thousand strove for dominion over vast kingdoms. The Spitters of Fire spat flaming brands at their riders' beck that slayed men and beasts for leagues around. What wonder there was in it all! What glory to be had! The ending spun out, was tied off, snipped. The maker of stories drained his bowl to wet his parched throat, leaned back to bask in the silent admiration of his small audience. Even Malreve looked less sour that was his wont. A good thing, it was often said, that Storymaker was only half as good at soldiering as he was at telling tales -- else where would be the need for armies? "Come, my friends," said Storymaker, "Let us exit this dank hole and enjoy the sunshine while it should last." His gloom was all but forgotten. "Malreve, my good friend, we can look over your surly legion, and perhaps knock a few heads together as a general lesson, hey?" The prospect of a good fight was one of the few lures that would draw the burly one from his drink. He rose with a toothy grin. As storymaker drew his companions out the door, a hand clasped to the neck of each, he felt again that lurch of strangeness. That tale he had just told -- so out of place in this world of stone walls and crossbows. Such an imagination he had! His dreams often seemed more like reality than this solid rock itself.    "Pikes are all in order, Sire," the toothless cripple sprayed. He was like a hound in his eagerness to please his master on this unexpected visit. Storymaker nodded acceptance, but was careful with his inspection all the same. The old man, a veteran of too many battles involving blunt weapons, would do his job all the more faithfully knowing that his work was checked and appreciated. The post was a reward for long years of faithful service, but still it was important. Locking up weapons between battles had been one of the first innovations Storymaker had pushed through. Bloodshed from tavern brawls was cut to a third by this simple measure alone. Take away a man's arms and not only is he less effective as a fighter but also is he less inclined to fight. The King was quick to appreciate that psychology and approved the control of garrison arms, even over the loud protests of his knights and lesser nobles. As a compromise, however, the senior officers and nobility were permitted to keep their hand weapons. Still, it might be necessary to distribute weapons on short notice -- in the event of a sneak attack at night -- so one could not stow pikes and staves anyplace too inaccessible. Where iron and stone cannot serve, one must substitute human flesh. It at least carried a brain to respond rapidly to the cry of alarm. Storymaker and his friends bade the pike keeper good day and continued their rambling survey. Several men came lumbering past, red faced and wheezing. They were earning their evening grog as Storymaker had laid down, five laps around the compound for each bowl. It was the only way the mercenaries could think of to keep garrisoned troops in fighting trim, and made work for yet more cripples as lap counters. It was interesting to note that the consumption of ale was no lower than before; but the jogging path had worn down by the span of a man's hand. A soldier would walk barefoot through hell for the chance to get drunk, it seemed. Tomson nudged Storymaker and pointed to a portly figure who just lurched into view far back along the path. He wore a heavy fur coat despite the sweat streaming from his body. Running was hard enough for a man of his girth, yet he would not part with his prized coat even for the time it took him to earn a thirst quencher. Storymaker shared a grin with the boy. All of the troops had booty of one sort or another -- it was one of the few incentives to soldiering that had any long term appeal. Indeed, the practice of letting the fighting men keep much of their loot had been around long before the mercenaries took command. The problem was, though, that once a castle's walls were breached and the doors flung open, the attacking army would dissolve into an orgy of rape and pillage that was beyond control. Often, much wealth was simply destroyed, fine tapestries carved up for blankets and delicate jewelry mangled for its gold. There were even occasions recorded when the ousted lord kept about himself a sufficient body of disciplined troops to retake his holdings from the drunken revelers before the night was out. Storymaker I changed all that. Whenever they made their final assault on one of the Ducal strongholds, he kept back a small force of his most trustworthy (i.e. sober) men. Their job was to secure enemy royalty and their possessions while the fighting was still underway, and to keep his own rabble army in line until gates and guardposts could be manned. Only then did Storymaker allow the rape and pillage to begin. Such enlightened leadership made him the most feared and respected fighter these people had ever known. These people? wondered Storymaker. Who then are my people? He was distracted from this train of thought when Tomson suddenly darted into a doorway. They had reached the barracks rooms in their wanderings; all about them were men dozing in the watery sunshine or gaming in small clusters. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. A stone jug came flying through the doorway. It hit the hardpacked courtyard and shattered, spraying shards and the strong odor of distilled liquor in all directions. A roar of anger rose up from several throats inside. Tomson came backing out, hand on his knife, followed by three beet-faced soldiers with blood in their eyes. "You know the rules," the boy said with remarkable steadiness. "Only beer while in garrison. Where did you get that stuff? Who sold it to you?" Hard liquor was one of the commonest bribes doled out by the Dukes' spies. Its very presence within the walls told of some piece of intelligence revealed, perhaps some traitorous service purchased. Treachery indeed. The men were obviously too drunk to be cowed by any show of authority. They could not see beyond the loss of their precious jug. And now a crowd was forming, to wait and see how their officers dealt with this clear breach of discipline. It was not a very friendly crowd. Malreve and Storymaker came up on either side of the boy. "I can handle them, Sire," he said. "My blade evens the score nicely." There was no braggadocio in that pronouncement; it was merely a careful analysis of the tactical situation. "True enough, lad," said Storymaker, clearly proud of the younger man's poise. "But 'twere better we ended this fast and with a minimum of bloodshed. There's no shame in having help for that." They waded in with bare fists. It was over quickly enough. Storymaker ducked a clumsy haymaker, shoved his opponent off balance, then felled him with a stiffhanded chop to the base of the neck. When he looked up, the other two drunks also lay in the dirt. Malreve grinned his delight. Storymaker met Tomson's smile, gave him a significant nod. It was he whose keen eyesight had caught these malefactors; let him issue the orders for their punishment. It would raise his stature in the eyes of the troops. While Tomson mobilized the waiting crowd to carry out his directives -- the soldiers were suddenly much more obedient -- Storymaker watched a page make his way across the courtyard toward them. Barely more than a child, he was one of the King's messengers. "Begging your pardon. Sire," the boy stammered, "but His Majesty w-wishes your presence, Sire. And, uh," he screwed up his face in concentration, "and would you please bring your staff. Sire." He sighed audibly; he must have gotten everything right despite the terror of facing the great Storymaker himself. "Very well." He suppressed a grin. "Please inform His Majesty that we are on our way." The page bowed and fled. Storymaker rounded up his two friends and explained. They made their way quickly towards the King's quarters; it was never wise to keep royalty waiting. Besides, an audience with the King might well be the start of a new campaign. Everyone would be pleased by such news. As they entered the audience chamber, Tomson said to Storymaker, "By the way, you must teach me your trick of hitting with the stiffened hand, Sire. It looked very effective." The mercenary felt another lurch of strangeness. He hadn't realized that he knew such tricks.    The King looked old. Years of warfare had taken their toll, as they must of any sensitive man. Peace had reigned in his father's time, giving the young Prince a chance to improve the lot of his nation through land reforms and extensive irrigation. Such work incentives and technological aid led to incredible prosperity, and roused the envy of his cousins. When the old King died each of his neighboring relatives tried in turn to bite off a piece of the prosperous domain before the young ruler could get his wits about him. Slowly they learned that a lover of peace was not necessarily a coward on the battlefield. Shifting alliances formed in the wake of each repulse, to try anew at conquering the gentle monarch who was a not so gentle fighter. The coming of Storymaker and Malreve almost ended their threat. Defeat after defeat, however, only served to frighten all the Dukes into suspending their internecine squabbles and rising up in strength against Keep Ahnlich and its ruler. Thus the current uneasy stalemate and the King's grey hair. The mercenaries and Tomson bowed deeply. "It's been too long since I've had you at my table, Storymaker," the monarch began. "I miss hearing your delightful fabrications." Storymaker could only bow deeply again at this flattery. "But I fear there's no time to make amends for all those missed evenings." He paused. "You two are discharged from my service as of today." "Sire!" He could't keep the hurt astonishment from exploding. "If there is any way we've failed to serve you..." "No, no. Be still." He was a bit testy. "I must tell you -- the northern frontier fell this morning. There was no battle; it was mass desertion. My messengers tell me that the Dukes are marching two thousand strong. They will be here by tonight, with as many more arriving before the week is out. Ahnlich must eventually fall." There was stunned silence. "I tell you this so that you may escape in time. You cannot help me anymore, and I would not have you die the death my cousins would arrange for you. I myself will be stealing away within the hour." "Can we not go with you? You will need men to guard your person. You will need officers to organize an army for your return to power." The King smiled sadly. "Perhaps. But I fear that may be a while off, and I've already kept you idle too long. You mercenaries are never happy unless you've a good fight on your hands, eh?" The smile was warmer. "No, 'tis better we part now. Travelling in small groups will increase our chances of going undetected." There was no arguing with that tone of finality. "You have both served me well. There will be an extra sack of gold coins waiting with your baggage to help smooth your way. For the pleasure you have given me with your company, however, there is no reward I can conceive of that is adequate. If you have a wish, it would please me to grant it." Storymaker barely hesitated. "May we take Tomson with us, Your Highness?" Being base born, the lad was property of the King. Malreve growled softly. "Of course, of course," the King replied heartily. "I had forgotten your friendship in the midst of my own worries. Tomson, I discharge you from my service. You are a free man. I only pray you can run fast enough to enjoy your freedom." Both Tomson and Storymaker bowed low this time. "And now I must take my leave of you. Should fortune grant us a reunion there would be none gladder than I; but I do not see it in the cards. Fare you well." "And you, Sire," each spoke softly. The King turned to leave, then stopped. "Oh, one last thing," he turned to look at Storymaker. "It is easy enough to see how you came by your name, except for one thing. Why do they call you Story maker instead of Story teller?" "I know not. Sire," he replied simply. But for some reason the question shocked him to the core. I    "Let's get the hell out of here." Malreve strode off rapidly through the warren of passageways even as he muttered those words. "Wait!" said Storymaker. "Our rooms are off that way. We must collect our baggage." Malreve wheeled on him. "Didn't you hear what the King said? There'll be two thousand men here by tonight. Think what that means! The horsemen won't wait on marching men; they'll be here any moment!" "You're right, of course." Then, turning to Tomson, "I'm afraid you're going to have to start your career as a free man without a penny. But don't worry; we've been broke before." The boy smiled with complete trust. "He stays," said Malreve. "What do you mean? You heard the King give him permission to come with us. What else does he need?' ' Malreve started off, stopped, ran his hand through his hair. He gave his friend that piercing glance again. "We have to leave " he said intensely. "Don't you understand?" Storymaker tried to suppress understanding, and he almost succeeded. "Can't he come along part of the way, at least?" he asked meekly. Meekly. Tomson looked from one to the other in confusion. Malreve swore. Shrugged. "Let's move." They had almost retraced their route when the disturbance began. Men were running in all directions. Malreve grunted and broke into a trot. The pike keeper was impaled on one of his own weapons and the entire rack was aflame. There was no hope of arming the garrison. Some well-placed traitor had seen to that. Someone else was swinging the gates wide even as they reached them. So much for the thought of sneaking out. They ran past the turncoat and headed across the frozen marsh for the hills. Horsemen could already be seen approaching the betrayed fortress. A shout and a wave from the guardpost alerted the attackers to the running men. A dozen horses detached themselves from the pack and altered course to cut off their flight. The three men ran across the uneven ground as fast as they dared. The shrubbery on the hillside came closer, but so did the shouts of the riders. It would be a near thing. Malreve dove into the first large thicket they came to and, surprisingly, disappeared below ground level. A stuttering roar came from beneath the camouflage. Within seconds, he emerged driving a jeep up the steep incline. Storymaker leaped aboard before his companion could utter his usual impatient growj, but Tomson froze at the sight of the machine. "Come on," Storymaker urged. "It won't hurt you." He half dragged the boy into a seat. They started with a lurch and almost lost Tomson immediately. Storymaker had to show him where to hold on, how to take the shocks of the uneven terrain. The horsemen grew closer. Malreve drove like a maniac. Over smooth ground he gained easily over their pursuers. But there were many rocks and ruts where horses could leap while a wheeled vehicle could not. Faster and faster Malreve took the rough spots. The jeep bounced wildly. But horses tire. At first it seemed that that simple fact would determine who won the race up the hillside; already there were stragglers among the pursuit. Then a ridge of rock appeared over the next crest. The pursuing horsemen saw the barrier almost at the same time and cheered. Tomson was looking green. Storymaker diverted his attention from the trouble ahead long enough to give the boy a reassuring smile. "It's all right. Lad. We'll make it yet." "Sire! I..." Whatever Tomson intended to say was wrenched from him as they crested the ridge at full speed. The engine roared as the wheels lost traction and the jeep slowly began to tumble in midair. Storymaker saw that they were going to land upside down. He punched Malreve's shoulder as a signal to jump, turned to find Tomson already thrown free. He tensed to leap and found his foot caught beneath the seat. The ground loomed up. He landed in green cotton, with olive-drab confetti showering down on his head and shoulders. The cotton became close cropped grass; the jeepconfetti dissipated as it touched the ground. Nearby he saw Malreve get to his feet and tum toward him. Tomson was gone. There was silence, then thunderous applause.    All around them on the hillside people stood, appearing as if from a rapidly thinning fog. They were clad in garmets of simple cut -- as were he and Malreve, Storymaker suddenly noticed. It was coming back to him now, slowly as ever. This was the time of the Festival. The Games were over, the new Songs had been sung. Now was the time for the Stories, and he and Malreve had just finished a joint composition. All around him he heard the telepathic chatter of people discussing the dream. Squalor and violence were always popular themes in these tame times. The judges would, of course, look beyond such base appeals and evaluate the work on the basis of technique and style. "Such an unusual withdrawal sequence," came a hard-edged intellectual thought. "Did you notice how gradually the sense of alienation was built? I haven't seen such a smooth transition since The Troubador retired." "Yes. And the jeep was such a marvelous anachronism, don't you think?" This from an effete-looking girl up the slope a ways. "But what do you make of Tomson?" her companion (no, her lover) replied. "Shouldn't he properly have been left behind?" the second girl pursued. "Oh, you're so insensitive," the first girl shot back. "Don't you understand anything?" Storymaker felt numb. He looked down at his thin arms; his sunken chest, feeling reality seep in around him. Dreamers were bred for their heightened telepathic abilities, not for physical attractiveness. A boy his age was discussing with his girlfriend Storymaker's well known preoccupation with sex. It made him feel even lonelier. He looked over at Malreve, who was now perceivable as a pudgy boy of about the same age. Malreve 's customary pout was back and he kicked diffidently at the turf to cover his embarrassment. It had been a good dream; both hated this period of dissection that always followed. Still, it was their life, their... everything. During the concluding days of each Festival they reigned supreme. Few could build and guide a communal fantasy half as well as they. Malreve's fame was widespread and he, Storymaker, was bidding fair for immortality. He was the Maker of Stories, a title to be proud of. Loneliness was the price exacted of all good Dreamers. The desire for the normal pleasures of life that they were denied led to these superbly controlled flights of the imagination; fantasies which were larger than life simply because they had never learned life's true dimensions. The results were in; the scores were high. Storymaker conferred briefly with Malreve, reached agreement. Around them the last of the chatter died away in the hush that always precedes a Story. The new fantasy was building between them, seemingly without volition, almost beyond their ability to control it. As he slid downward into a new oblivion, Storymaker's mind gave a rebellious cry. Tomson! Where are you? The greedy voyeurs were enjoying even this, his moment of private sadness. Just before he left reality behind once more, Storymaker had time for one last heart-rending thought: Tomson was the best friend he'd ever had.  of August #, #: Section #. Title #. United States Code. #. Title of publication: Galaxy, Incorporating Worlds of IF, Magazine. #. Date of filing: Oct. #, #. #. Frequency of issue: # times per year. #a. Annual subscription price: # per year. #. Location of known office of publication; # East #th St., New York, N Y. #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: # East #th St., New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher, Arnold E. Abramson, # East #th St., New York, N.Y. #; Editor, James Baen, # Ea#t #th St., New York, N.Y. #; Managing Editor, None. #. Owner (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual must be given.) Arnold E. Abramson, Laurel Hill Drive, Pleasantville, N.Y. #; Robert J. Abramson, # Post Road. Scarsdale, N.Y. #; Peter J. Abramson, # Easi #th St., New York, N.Y. #; Allen  Co., # Broad St., New York, N.Y. #: Cede  Co., PO Box #, Bowling Green Station, New York, N.Y. #. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities; None. #. For optional completion by publishers mailing at the regular rates (Section #, Postal Service Manual): # U#.C. # provides in pertinent part: "No person who would have been entitled to mail matter under former section # of this title shall mail such matter at the rates provided under this subsection unless he files annually with the Postal Service a written request for permission to mail matter at such rates." In accordance with the provisions of this statute, I hereby request permission to mail the publication named in Item I at the reduced postage rates presently authorized by # U.S.C. #. (Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner) Lawrence C. Murphy, of circulation: Average Single # mos. Issue A. Total No. Copies Printed (Net Press Run) # B. Paid Circulation #. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales # #. Mail Subscriptions # C. Total Paid Circulation #I D. Free Distribution by mail, carrier or other means Samples, complimentary, and other free copies # E. Total Distribution (Sum of C and D) # F. Copies Not Distributed #. Office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after print#I # # # # ing # # #. Returns from news agents  # # G. Total (Sum of E  F -- should equal net press run shown in A) # #I I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. Circulation Manager Dear Mr. Baen, Perhaps you have heard from him already, but I sent a copy of the letter of Dr. Pournelle's published on page # of the September issue to my congressman, the Honorable Paul Findley. I thought you might like to see a copy of the letter I received from Congressman Findley (attached). Why don't you make a regular or irregular feature, running the best and most feasible ideas and suggestions in way of problem-solving on the order of Dr. Poumelle's idea? You could keep them similarly brief, of course, so that not too much editorial space is given over to something that is not strictly within the confines of the magazine's format. It would be an excellent public service and really might come to something. I hope that others who sent in copies of the letter received the same encouraging response as I did. Yours sincerely, Nick Howes I # State Alton, IL # Congressman Findley' s reply; Dear Mr. Howes: What an original idea. I am delighted that you have taken the time lo excerpt the article from Galaxy Magazine and send it to me. Although I have long opposed government subsidies for various U.S. commodities, I fully intend to pursue this with officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see what problems may exist. I am immediately securing the original of the article from analysis of it for me. Thanks very much for bringing it to my attention. Warm regards, Paul Findley Representative in Congress If anything comes of this the readers of Galaxy will be among the first to know. As for a regular or irregular column-it's called ' 'Directions. Dear Mr. Baen: Galaxy) leads me to speculate on a possible "mechanism" for their propulsion, one which might also explain some of their odd side effects. Magnetic monopoles. For every elementary interaction there is a dimensionless number which measures its strength, and determines both the importance and the complexity of its manifestation in the behavior of particles. For electrons the number is known as the fine structure constant; it is e # fic, where e is the charge of the electron, c is the speed of light, and h is Planck's constant divided by # pi. This number is ##, which is comfortably less than one. As a result the theory of quantum electrodynamics works well. For the "strong" interaction (which holds nuclei together) the analogous constant is about #, and the result is that we get just nowhere trying to use the same approximation methods on strong interaclions that were successful in electrodynamics. The theory of string interactions has a history of unending, increasingly desperate search for some other way to get simple, reliable predictions from fundamental ideas. The large value of that constant also implies a huge number of unstable "particles" held together by the strong interaction. Newspaper accounts of the " monopole discovery" state that the charge on the monopole is !#e. Because the fine structure constant is determined by e squared, for monopoles one gets a "fine structure constant" of #. Quantum magnetodynamics, or whatever it is to be called, will deal with much the strongest interaction known. Therefore it is just impossible to predict the technology that could be built out of monopoles. The effect on science fiction should be exhilarating: from now on and for a long time, the word "monopole" can excuse just about anything a writer wants it to in the way of unreasonable machinery. The theorists are going to go frantic. It will be fun to watch. Sincerely yours, Christopher J. Henrich # Morris Avenue D# Bronx, N Y. #. A short pause while we bring Galaxy's Science Editor on-line: Dear Jim, Checking around with people who ought to know, I find the consensus is that Henrich is right: given the binding energies available in monopole interactions, there may be a whole new class of elements we've not yet seen, and they may have some weird properties -- providing we could ever get hold of any. Also, if we can manipulate monopoles so they can be flung at various nuclei, the results could be pretty spectacular. It could even be an approach to sucking far more energy out of interactions than we've previously hoped for. As to whether these things could provide propulsive power for interstellar ships, nobody wants to say. We can all agree that if the evidence holds up and monopoles do exist, it's going to be a lot of fun to watch. Jerry Poumelle Dear Jim,  that there is now a "space lobby" which they can join. It is headed by Werner von Braun, and has an impressive board of directors. My own solicitation to join was sent by Dr. Robert Forward, who seems to appear regularly in my columns as well as in his own articles. The National Space Institute is an educational non-profit organization with membership costs deductible from taxes. It will have what appear to be interesting publications, and will also try to educate the public to the value of space research. For those interested, dues are # a year (# for students below the age of #) and membership is open to the general public. The address is National Space Institute, Box # L'Enfant Plaza, Washington DC #. I've already sent in my dues. Anyone care to join me? Best, Jerry Poumelle Dear Mr. Baen, Please allow me this short word concerning Don Tarbet's letter in the September issue of Galaxy. How could anyone imagine that sciencefiction is unoriginal or, "no longer presenting anything radically new and different"? Science fiction as a maturing media has produced the most vigorously asserting creative masterpieces for an entire decade. Bear witness: Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Norman Spinrad and Ursula K. Le Guin. There has been nothing in the so-called "mainstream" that even compares in depth and originality with science fiction. (I read S.F. 'cause that's what's Happening). But I am not at odds with Mr. Tarbet for these primarily emotional reasons. Not only is there flaw in his intellectual argument, but his position defies the very intention of intellectual argument. To wit, Mr. Tarbet proposes a throw-back to Ye Olde Sci-Fie days. That sir is a regression, (no offence intended to Ye Olde Masters)! His logic tells him that them wuz the good of days when two fisted men thunk through their problems to the end. Yet he fails to recognize that in spite of the optimistic energies of those by-gone decades we are still where we are. Which brings me to the point. The first step in surmounting a problem lies in its acceptance as a problem, rather than it's recognition. Now Mr. Tarbet shuns acceptance and recognition both in one fell swoop, and proposes a return to the times when scienceliterature. All I can say is that there is plenty of that stuff on the fringes. He attacks that which is radical to him, but doesn't seem to realize that radical was what he was calling for. One last dig for Mr. Tarbet; Where is your sense of wonder, sir? Sincerely, Bud Houston P.O. Box W Lompoc, CA # Mr. Baen, First of all, it was very nice of you to invite letters. We rarely get invited to the really interesting places. Secondly, Dr. Pournelle's depiction of our big-league scientistskicking the philosophical ball around on the home court was very encouraging to me. Ever since the Second Awareness, I've felt the premonitory tremblings of our "foundationless future", and am gratified that it is not just a local phenomenon. Naturally, I do not feel it is proper for the dictionary of science to contain the word "believe", preferring a strict neutrality be kept with regard to unproven theory, but the open mind is always desirable. When I was in my first physics class many years ago, I heard the instructor state very firmly, "The nature of matter is that it cannot be created or destroyed, but merely changed in form." I look this on good faith, as is expected of a student, thereby nullifying any contradictory concepts I may have formed then. I feel that instructor should have added as footnote, "By present technology." Perhaps he considered it obvious, perhaps not. At any rate, all scientific texts should end on a similar note, so as to make aware to impressionable young students that fact does not always remain fact so long as inquiry persists. It took me several years to realize that the matter he was referring to as being non-creatable was an actuality, therefore created (by what means or materials available in nonexistence, time must tell), and creatable, even if not by present technology. Who knows how much of our established science has been built on unsound theory, and is being built upon further every day? The Law of Existence states, "You can get something for nothing, despite claims to the contrary." How many perfectly usable bridges have had "Washed Out" signs erected on them during the adolescence of science? And does anyone remember where they are, atrophying in the back of the mind? A theory can be elevated to the status of indisputable truth by people who call it a "belief' rather than being willing to say, "I don't know" and continue the search unbiased. Belief is not knowledge, nor is it objectivity. It is an invalid condition; a prejudice. It is the most futile state of the mind, for nothing can be done with it. If it were provable, it would be fact; if it were disprovable, it would be set aside. But held in the mind in such a state, a theory distorts itself; it draws incomplete information from the world to support itself. I will accept the fact of extraterrestrial spaceships when the operators are interviewed in Galaxy, and will dismiss it when our exploratory craft have searched thisbubble of motion (time) phenomenon and declared it empty of said spaceships. Yoiys in observant neutrality, B. Wilson Washington. D.C. Does existence presuppose creation ? I prefer to think that there has always been...something. Dear Mr. Baen: I'm afraid I must differ with Mr. Sturgeon's high opinion of Samuel R. Delany's latest novel, Dhalgren. His arguments can't be faulted -- Delany's ideas are presented as usual in a beautifully ingenious form. However, his praise seems to overlook one of the most vital elements in any novel, an element that is, sadly, lacking from Dhalgren -- the ability of the work to hold the reader's interest while the major ideas are being presented. It is tragic that this novel has failed to hold any sort of interest mechanically for the reader, for, as Sturgeon has pointed out, the ideas are important, to say the least. The problem lies in the fact that you can't write # pages in "chords", as Sturgeon aptly calls them, without boring your reader completely to death. Continuing the chord analogy, consider this: the novel opens, and Delany strikes his first note. Fine. He can set up his mood and tone, build up his characters. But what happens next? Following his unified dictionplot-thematic-character style (which he has put forth in his essay, "About # Words"), the second note of the "chord" fails to delineate the plot further, but rather simply goes over the same ground again and again, each time thickening the plot. Delany uses this technique with all of his work to some extent. One of the most pronounced examples was in his novella, "The Star Pit." Structurally, this story was one of his finest. But mechanically, it was almost insufferable. Delany's work rests on a predevelopment and an extremely weak mode of presentation for those themes. In some cases, the end -- the themes and structure -- justify the means, as in the case of "The Star Pit." In other cases, the themes and structure, no ous development that is necessary to tie together all the varied pieces of Delany's intricate themes. It is a great loss that Dhalgren belongs to this second class. Although its hold the reader's attention or interest. This renders the work almost useless. Sincerely, Randall Baird # Vine wood Blvd. Ann Arbor, Mich. # Dear Mr. Baen, Heartiest congratulations on getting Spider Robinson for the book reviews. An essay masquerading as a review is as much use as tits on a boar hog; Robinson seems businesslike and when I have read his column I know something about what to buy, not something about the Robinsonian ego, in which I am not interested. Yours truly, S. W. Bowne R. D. #I Edinboro, Pa. # Dear Mr. Baen, I found your August editorial, "The Myth of the Light Barrier," enlightening. A scientific discussion of forseeable possibilities for circumventing light velocity is found in Adri(#) occurred from a simple insight: that Relativity (#) does not forbid particles that always travel hyper-optically. In those # years no physicist saw this! Arthur C. Clarke hit the nail on the head with his insight: "When an elderly and distinguished scientist tells you that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong. The experts can spot all the difficulties, but lack the imagination and vision to see how they can be overcome. The layman's ignorant optimism turns out, in the long run -- and often in the short run! -- to be nearer the truth." Also re your editorial, you can disprove Special Relativity for only a few cents. Two silicon photo-electric cells are placed # cm apart, on opposite sides of a small light bulb. They" are wired to one another and to a microammeter in such a way that only the difference in current between the cells flows through the microammeter. Bringing one cell is sufficient to cause a variation of several microamps. The apparatus is put in a cardboard tube revolving on an axis; there is a decrease in intensity corresponding roughly to a propagation of light to the south of the Solar System. The absolute velocity of the Solor System is now an experimental fact. Cordially, Dr. A.H. Klotz # Simon St. Babylon, NY # formed me, was performed in Belgium by Monsieur Raphael Godart of AM International, Inc. (a subsidiary of Addressograph Multigraph Corporation). Dr. Klotz also claims to have duplicated Godart' s results. More anon. Dear Mr. Baen, I've been reading Galaxy for several months now and I am becoming fonder of your magazine with each issue. Spider Robinson is a pleasant change; Mr. Robinson's breezy style makes the one column that is often so-so (no matter what magazine you're reading) interesting and enjoyable -- whether you agree with him or not! I hope he lasts a long time. Speaking of things lasting a while I can't tell you how much I agree with Mr. Geis in this month's August. Ed. "Alien Viewpoint." He said all the things I have wanted to say, but never could. If Richard Geis ever stops listening to Alter -- chain him to a wall!!! # Courtland Dr. Sincerely Elizabeth A. Wilson Willoughby, Ohio # The original experiment, Dr. Klotz Jaterjn Hear that, Geis? All published correspondence is subject to editing for clarity and brevity., # page cartoon story with # pages ol comments, Westmont, New Jersey # Out of print. Send wants. Bookdealer, # No. Browning Ave., Tenafly, NJ. #. Free Lists -- SF books, magazines. Send to: Held, Box #, Buffalo. New York #. Calif. #. Illustrated catalog of SF-Fantasy Weird Tale Books. #s of titles listed. Send # cl for one, I for next #, or # for # consecutive catalogs plus Wolfe's "Fifth Head of Carberus" a # clothbound #st ed Nebula Award winning SF book. Send to: Purple Unicorn Books #-G# London Road, Duluth, Minn. #. Magazine of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror). # an issue, or # issues a year for #. Imaginative and provocative fiction, Ihe Twilight Zone Revisited, Star Trek Quiz, the Telepathic Corner, science articles, bookmovie reviews, special features. Cash awards for best material published. (Available early #.) Write: John R. Racano, # Cleveland Ave., Colonia, New Jersey #. Poetry Market Newsletter -- Send self-addressed envelope for information: Minotaur, Box #A, Eagle River, Alaska #. How To think about the Problem of Designing a Subculture. As you have gathered we are not technologists but aestheticists who have acquired our technical knowledge deliberately lo insure its proper development and usage We have found that it is ignorance that perverts aesthetic and human values nol technical knowledge." # for two volumes. I # pages total, and one issue of Detour magazine. Interactive Concerns Group, # N.  S Books. G-#. # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. lists. Gordon Barber, #-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN. #. A.F. Academy's Third Year Physics course, IntroducPart of the conclusion stales: "The data suggests the existence ol at least three different groups oT aliens." Get the complete study! A copy of the entire chapter is Development, PO Box #, New Haven. Conn. #. Enclose I for shipping and handling. color fluorescent starmap. Highly detailed ships. #-# exploration and conquest. Giant fluorescent starmap. # pieces. #. Send to: D.C.C., # Edgley Ave., Glenside. Penna. #. Science Ficlion Radio Drama Cassettes. Free catalog, Join World Party, for world lederation. Write Paul Rhoads, Box #, Mesa, Colorado #. Attractive, astronomically correct. Tables of data, Vulcan desert landscape, #x#'. # plus # cl shipping. Richard Carroll. Box #, Walnut Creek, Calif. #. pended animation. Freeze, wail, reanimate. Details #, Trans Time, Box #, San Jose, Calif. #. "Escape", Bradbury, Phol, Asimov...catalogue: # Riverside, Calif. #. tor three issues. More than # potential customers. Write S-F Mart, Galaxy# East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. This Vetir's nebula Ulii finest. Profound. Mind-expanding. Engrossing. And, like most winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards -- SF's equivalents of the Oscars and Emmys -- it's a selection of The Science Fiction Book Club. It's yours right now, if you wish, as one of four books for #f when you join. Every novel on this page is an award winner; every collection includes a prize story. And, as a member, you can depend on something else: you'll be offered most of Science Fiction's # prize winners -- at special low Club prices, and even before the awards are announced! ' : r i ; r: ' ,  I r 'o U# Haj. How the Book Club Work When your application for i cepted, you'll receive your ch just lOp plus shipping and h solutely fascinated, return th -- membership will be cance nothing. About every # weeks (# ' send you the Club's bulletir describing the # coming Sel ety of Alternate choices. If y( tions, you need do nothing; automatically. If you don't v prefer an Alternate, or no t out the convenient form at return it by the date specifii you at least ten days for mz I) you do not get the form within # days, and receiv return them at our expense. As a member you need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any time thereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. Most books are only Si . # plus shipping and handling. Some extra value selections are slightly higher but always much less than Publisher's Editions. Send no money But do send the coupon today. ie. variielecnipped  (ion, or just fill ded and to allow decision, pond...oks Rny # Hugo  nebula Huiard winners for # with membership #. Rendezvous With Rami. By Arthur C. Clarke. Hugo #; Nebula #. Pub. ed. # #. The Gods Themselves. By l saa : Asimov. Hugo #: Nebula #. Pub : # r Science Fiction Book Club  Dept. HR#, Garden City, N.Y. #  I Please accept me as a member. I agree to m the membership plan as described above.  I Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose numbers I have indicated below, and bill me I I agree lo take # additional books at low club I J prices in the coming year and may resign  i I I I I  Mr. Mrs. (Please print) City State Zip i i i The Science c iction Book Club offers its I own complete hardbound editions some times altered in s ze lo fit special presses I and save members even more. Members  accepted in U S A. and Canada only. CanaI dian members will be serviced from ToronI to. Offer slightly different m Canada. a #. Dune. By Frank Herbert. Hugo #; Nebula #. Pub. ed. # #. The Left Hind of Darkness. By Ursula K. Le Guin. Hugo #; Nebula #. Pub. ed. # #. A Time of Changes. By Robert Si I verberg . Nebula #. Spec. Ed. Note: Each of the following collection! of novellas, novelettes, and short fiction Include at least one Hugo andor Nebula Award winner. #. The Hugo Winners. Vol. I  II. Ed. by Isaac Asimov. Pub. ed. # #. Again, Dengerous Visions. Ed. by Harlan Ellison. Pub. ed. # #. New Dimensions #. Ed. by Robert Silverberg. Spec. Ed. #. Universe #. Ed. by Terry Carr. Pub. ed. # #. Nebula Award Stories Seven. Ed. by Lloyd Biggie. Pub, ed. # #. Universe #. Ed. by Terry Carr. Pub. ed. # #. Dangerous Visions. Ed. by Harlan Ellison. Pub. ed. # # The Wind From The Sun. By Arthur C. Clarke. Pub. ed. # #. Sturgeon is Alive and Well. By Theodore Sturgeon Pub. ed. # #. The # Aeiaal World's Best SF. Ed by Donald A. Wollherr Spec. Ed. #. The # Annual World's Best SF. Ed by Donald A. Wollheirr Spec. Ed.  Arsen Darnay Fred Saberhagen  I A L i ' # Wm# i A #fj I i "H .  X A I u SE Forrest J. Ackerman Isaac Asimov Jim Baen Ben Bova Leigh Brackett R Bretnor John Brunner Lm Carter A Bertram Chandler Hal Clement Theodore Cogswell L Sprague de Camp Gordon Dickson Frank Kelly Freas Raymond Z. Gallun Horace L. Gold C.L. Grant James Gunn Joe Haldeman Edmond Hamilton Harry Harrison Laurence M. Janiler Jacqueline Lichtenberg Sam Lundwall Katherine MacLean Barry Malzberg Thomas F Monteleone Dan Morgan Frederick Pohl J.E. Pournelle Mack Reynolds Fred Saberhagen Bob Shaw Robert Sheckley George O. Smith Norman Spmrad Brian M Stableford Christopher StasheM Mort Weismger Gahan Wilson Roger Zelazny These authors will be speaking about the lulure of Science Fiction Fact Meet with them for talks, discussion groups, and rap sessions There will be exhibits and displays by organizations involved in solar energy, ecology, space technology, urban planning, and the arts Over # Science Fiction and Fantasy lilms will be shown in a # day years ol SF and Fantasy Film Production from Melies to the newest releases. There will be film guests, discussions, a special exhibit of original film props and memonbiha from Gort to Bela Lugosi s Dracula Cape There will be Authors' Autograph Booths and Publishers' Displays where you can check out the latest books in the SF field There will be SF dealers m books, film materials, art and collectables occupy the two entire convention doors (equal in ground space to a full city block) containing three theaters. # lecture and display halls and # exhibition tialls All of which will be traveling m the future from June #th-#th. # regislraiion (admitting you to all talks, films, and much more) will be # # be #  I # Tax Make checks payable to Science Fiction Services. Inc . and send to Science Fiction Services. Dept #I PO Box # Montclair. New Jersey # drawings from Galaxy, If, Whispers, Amazing, Fantastic, Outworlds, and more... Including fifteen never before published drawings, done especially for this book. Each drawing is printed on one side of #x# -- # lb. paper, easily removable for framing. This first collection of Fabian's art is truly a collector's item, to be treasured now and in the years to best of one of the field's most talentBox # Mason, Michigan # Sirs: Enclosed is  Please send Name Address City State Zip Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Ti,nick. Circulation Director J E Pournelle. Ph D., Science Editor l C Murphy Subscriptions Dept Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling. Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor s James Baen, Editor Science Fiction has often been infused with elements of the Occult, but seldom in a story that retains sf's traditional technological orientation. Here is an example of mysticism with rivets! The Ship had decreed that in all their little universe only he would remain forever young. How unfair! Kevin O'Donnell, Jr # Contrary to popular misapprehension, there is only one alien among us. But he has friends...and they are on their way. The aliens among us are us. Universe we inhabit is far more wondrous than any fantasy -- it's a shame we don't do more to help Reality live up to its potentials... have to fear is a failure of nerve. Geis wins two Hugos and loves everybody -- A writer can't help but say something, opines the Spider. Whether or not it's worth listening to is another matter entirely! Any resemblance between this feature and the last item in Bookshelf is utterly deserved! Letters from Reid, Hooper, Banks, Miller, Schenk, Curo, Woodward, Kars, Marx. Interior illustrations by Bramley, Fabian, Freff, Kirk, Starbrook of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: .#. #-iasue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. "We could land a man on the Moon, if we wanted to. We really could." In # such sentiments were considered quite literally lunatic. By # they were merely crackpot. By # they were visionary. Now, of course, they are History. We could terraform Venus, if we wanted to. Or put factories -- and farms! -- in orbit, thus precipitating the Third Industrial Revolution. Or change the traditional three-score-and-ten to a hundred happy, healthy, robust years. We could begin work on unmanned probes to the nearer stars. That's in the short run. In the long run we can do -- Anything! But we don't. Instead we pull in our horns, walk and think small, figure out the least uncomfortable techniques for dying-by-inches. And why? Because our meagre-minded "leaders" (of Right and Left, by God!) are incapable of grasping even the idea of an open-ended future. Willy-nilly we are all committed to a short-term survival strategy of playing it safe; the surest long-term recipe for disaster. that are obsolete before they are on-line: when we could be building i almost before it becomes operational: when we could for the same I worked -- and also have enabled us to pop payloads into orbit for pennies-per-pound. And let's not forget our incredible bureaucracy that how much cheaper -- and more nourishing! -- it would be to give foodstamp recipients food instead. And so on. All it takes is a little vision in  high places, and we can fulfill our short-term goals while we win for j ourselves a Universe. Well, # is an Election Year. Perhaps there are a few would-be J occupants of said high places who are capable of entertaining visionary ideas -- even crackpot or lunatic ones. And making them History. C'mon: let's terraform Venus! -- Baen The fast-breeder reactor may be the answer to our current energy problems: but what might be the answer to -- I In his ninth existence he was an SS-guard at the infamous Hermsberg and acquired a heavy karmic debt. In those days his name was Helmut Schweinhirt and in appearance he was chunky, blond, wide-faced, and steady. On the cosmic scale, his Schweinhirt incarnation was already well above the average. Slowly he had grown in consciousness choosing ever more alert and discriminating parents. The Schweinhirt elders were peasants, but of the enterprising kind. Mutti ran a small vegetable shop supplied from Vati's suburban land where everything was raised by the most modem methods. Helmut was well on his way up the ladder of awareness when the war came with its irresistible temptations. The chaotic, psychic maelstrom caught him up and carried him along -- from home to barracks to parade ground to Hermsberg, and he lived the evanescent dream of racial superiority for a second or two of eternal duration. In the small room he rented near the concentration camp (Hermsberg was new and there were no barracks initially), he had two lamps shaded by tatooed human skin. Underneath the heavy, lumpy mattress of his narrow bed, in a small blue sack, he collected gold teeth and other curiosities. Helmut was not unusually cruel or sadistic with the exception of one case, which would prove his undoing for some centuries to come. But he allowed himself to be carried away by the breathless lust of his comrades, a lust for violence which came and went in pulses over the camp, the consequence of frustration, ennui, guilt, and fear. Then he too joined in the beatings and tramplings of newly arrived Underhumans. The temptation that would indirectly cost him his life some time later came one winter morning in the form of a father and his daughter. The father was a poet or lawyer or doctor, an inordinately tall figure, though a little stooped. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair; large, dark, watery eyes; and fingers of exceeding length. His eyes were mournful and heavy with awareness. Helmut met the pair upon arrival, mingled in with others in a long stream of people reaching back to the cattle cars. In the reception hall men and women were split into separate groups, and Helmut stood there with several others amidst the odors of disinfectant, pushing the people along, making them move on, move on. A disturbance in in charge. During that unsupervised moment, Helmut approached the tall jew's daugher -- she stood quite near him, eyes on the rough concrete floor -- and he more or less forced her to yield up a kiss or two while his hands ranged indecently over her tits and under her skirt. She struggled fiercely. She was something of a rarity in Hermsberg -- a beauty. Bosomy, languid-eyed, long-lashed, and soft. Her skin and bearing spoke of silks and laces and recently lost wealth. Such as she seldom made it into this line. They were diverted to 'domestic service' in the homes of higher-ups. She would also be discovered, as Helmut knew quite well, and he wanted to get a feel of her while he had a chance. Across the room the tall jew broke from the line so swiftly that the guards -- who smirkingly enjoyed Helmut's antics with the pretty jewess -- had no time to restrain him. He came in giant strides across the room, dark eyes burning, a little stooped. His exceedingly long, fine fingers grasped Helmut's blond locks, knocking Helmut's cap askew. He jerked back Helmut's head. Helmut yelled in pain and let go of the soft female. He turned to the tall jew with fury. The jew, still holding Helmut's hair, hit him across the face with a free hand -- once, twice, three times. Guards grabbed the jew and dragged him away. All day long his fellow guards teased Helmut about his humiliation. That night he sat alone in the light of a tatooed lamp and brooded with a book on his lap. The book dealt with infantry tactics, knowledge he would soon need. But he didn't read and didn't learn. He brooded about vengeance and about the soft jewess whose faint, sweet scent still seemed to cling to his cheek. She was...she seemed... Oh, he didn't really know. She seemed so familiar to him. Kissing her had been the most natural thing in the world.    He soon succeeded in being assigned to a land-clearing party that included the tall jew. Decades later Hermsberg would be the site of a uranium mine, its product moving to Russia. Now it was a tiny village, a concentration camp, and a road in process of being built through forest. The land-clearing work had to do with that road. Outdoor duty was not exactly sought. Winter advanced on every front with snow and frost. Even bundled up in a heavy jacket and wearing a woolen cap beneath the helmet, a man froze out there, on the stony, icy ground. Mitted hands had to be slapped and boots had to be stamped to keep up the circulation in the extremities. The breath vapored whitely. The moisture froze in the nose. But Helmut felt no regret. He restored his German manhood methodically, repaying the slaps he had received with interest. They spent some weeks together in cruel union. The man's name was Mahler, and he came from Berlin. Until this time those sensitive long fingers of his had never grasped anything more substantial than a pen. Now they were obliged to swing a pickaxe against soil so hard sparks seemedto fly from the contact of metal and earth. At any moment a blow might strike him from the side or from behind delivered with the stock of a rifle. Sometimes a kick sent him sprawling and his unprotected, gloveless, frozen hands bled when he rose, trembling from cold and malnutrition. Helmut's wide face and steady eyes would stare at him with satisfied menace. "Eines Tages, kleiner Helmut , eines Tages..." Mahler would murmur with mournful eyes. The words mean, "One of these days, little Helmut, one of these days..." He said them knowing that more blows Would follow, said them wanting blows. Mahler longed for an end to his miseries. Blows, kicks, cold, hatred, indigestible food, savage work in frozen wilderness -- all these would speed him to that eternal nothingness which would follow the dissolution of this wretched biological accident called Mahler. The girl's name was Eva. Much as Helmut had suspected, she had been segregated from the rest, had disappeared into the quarters of a major. To know her there, in someone else's arms, aroused him to cold fury, and that fury left him in the form of kicks and blows and cruelties, until Herr Mahler could no longer work and lay supine on his flat straw, dead for all intents and purposes except for a dark shining in his eyes. By the mysterious channels of communication that transcended all barriers between gentile and jew, word of her father's treatment finally reached Eva. Abruptly Helmut found himself with orders to the Russian front. It happened on the outskirts of Stalingrad. Helmut was running for cover past the face of a lowsquatting peasant hut when a tiny, wizened, wrinkled old fellow -- he was clearly an old jew with a tall black hat and sideburns curly at the ends -- appeared around the end of the building. Helmut hesitated for a second, and that hesitation was enough. He was caught by a plaster-blasting string of machinegun bullets and fell face down on the ground. The final vision of his incarnation was that of Eva's angry, frightened eyes when he had violently sought the parted softness of her lips.    He found himself in dimensionless paradise, a play of light and energies. Hurricanes of force caught and carried him. He struggled and fought, panicked, disoriented, and discovered that he had no arms to wave about, nothing tangible attaching to his free awareness. Terror grasped him. For a timeless moment he remembered all his lives, saw Eva in many incarnations, always his, always together, meant for each other, joined eternally. But this time he had lost her. The gradually ascending curve of his karma suddenly sagged in his German life, heavy with debt. He sucked nonexistent breath into nonexistent lungs. I will do good, he thought. I'll pay it all back with a life of service. At this thought a brightness somewhere in that space that had no 'where' and was no 'space.' A circle of light. It seemed to have a face, seemed to resemble the wrinkled old jew. It shone. The light frightened him, made him recoil. He turned, in a manner of speaking, toward the separated red of the spectrum around that disc of brilliance. He turned farther, toward a purple, and then images began to form and lift from a gathering darkness. He saw America, the New World. He knew it was America although at first it was nothing more than a vast continental darkness with a scatter of light along the coasts and here and there inland. From that sprinkled darkness a dark, chtonic force rose and pulled him seats, haypiles, floors, couches copulated on this Wednesday night -- naked, half-naked, and almost fully clothed -- in the manner of the two-backed beast, like dogs, side by side, and in unspeakable poses. Desire! He fell into the tornado of desire down below, drawn by mysterious forces, once more nearly encased in time but not yet securely material. His entire being longed for materiality, burned to participate in the creative act. But he wouldn't plunge in just anywhere. He sought among these copulators for cleanliness and innocence, for decency and righteousness, impelled away from the petty horror that had been his last life. A dark-purple force-stream guided him in a westerly direction. The rising vibrations were benevolent as he descended. He plunged in precisely at the moment of impregnation, was the impregnation, his soul-force adding the tiny increment of energy the tailed semen needed to penetrate the giant ovum's resistant skin. His mom and dad lay side by side, still breathing hard after the exertions of love, when the entity known as Helmut Schweinhirt -- its cast-off body stiffening slowly against a Russian wall -- dissolved in childish bliss and lost its memories.    The choice of the Clark identity turned out felicitous. To all appearances, the bad karma had been eradicated or would soon be displaced by the cumulations of service. John Clark grew up an allAmerican boy, son of a machinist in Oklahoma city. He had a paper route and later stocked groceries. In high school he played on the basketball team, but in college he worked in the cafetaria to make a go of it. By sheer application he acquired the only kind of degree a man of service would choose in his day and age -- he became an engineer. A series of jobs eventually led to the Corps of Engineers, and from there, through the linkage of friends, he joined a newly formed Office of Energy Analysis within the Department of Commerce. There he applied himself to the development of strategies for containing atomic power plant wastes. His permanent identity began to breathe more and more easily as the years passed. On a level of which Clark himself was unaware except as a sometimes pensive mood, he began to feel that perhaps he had, by good luck and a strictly virtuous life, escaped the consequences of that other existence. Then, within three humid, sultry summer weeks, the mysterious magnetism of fate caught him up again in the net he had so striven to escape. From Hermsberg Mahler had also ascended into paradise upon his death and had raged in impotent fury at his own survival, which went counter to his philosophical convictions and promised yet other miseries in some new life. Hatred impelled him to seek vengeance against kleiner Helmut now that vengeance seemed a possibility. The spark of his existence followed an energy storm to the Americas. His daughter Eva could never forger that brief assault in the reception hall. Despite his crudity and violence, she had sensed a genuine affection deep within the blond SS-guard. He had pointed to experiences Eva longed to have but couldn't achieve in the brief and constrained life that had been left her at that point -- rapidly ended after transfer to another camp. She also went to America, now that he was there. The three of them coincided in Washington, D.C., in #, II Clark returned to the Department after his customary noon-time walk around the Elipse. On the way he passed the White House and made a jog through Lafayette Park to extend his walk. It was one of those Washington days -- so humid even the eyeballs sweated. Men walked the streets pathetically carrying coats over shoulders, ties loose and pulled down, collars open, mopping brows with soggy handkerchiefs. Tourists stood in long, sweating lines waiting to get into the White House. Cameras hung from their necks and tugging children from their hands. Angry voices shattered the vacation mood. Clark was made of stemer stuff. He wore his coat about powerful shoulders. His tie was trimly bunched at his neck. He could tough it through southern humidity on pure spirit alone. A bank sign on Pennsylvania Avenue said that it was # degrees. The humidity was hitting eighty. Up ahead the sun blazed down and sparkled in the fountains of Lafayette Park where a few brave lunchers sat on shaded patches of grass while pigeons pranced headbobbing on the walks. Neither heat nor cold bothered Clark. He went on his walk no matter what. He was as steady as the men of the postal service. Neither hail nor shine nor fear of night -- or whatever it said on the face of the postal building. He always walked around the Elipse twice, watching the softball players when they were out, nodding to red-faced, agonized, sweating middle-aged joggers, oggled the White House from a distance, and eventually returned to the Department. He entered the building from the #th Street side and glimpsed bearded Jack Hansley up ahead returning from lunch with a tall man who gesticulated with long fingers in an animated manner as he walked. Clark guessed the tall man was yet another of Jack Hansley's school mates, probably another consultant. When he reached the elevator, those two were already gone, probably taking the stairs to save energy -- Hansley was a bit crazy about symbolic gestures. In his own wing, Clark made a slight detour to pass by Evelyn's office, his throat tightening. He stopped in the door. "Hi," he said, and waved to her. She waved back from an inclined position, elbows on the spread-out Washington Post, She was reading the latest transcripts of the latest tapes. After the wave she looked down again, and Clark reluctantly went to his own office. He munched diet cookies pensively, thinking about her. Evelyn was the only woman in his office -- discounting the clerical people -- and had been hired recently in fulfillment of the Affirmative Action Plan to get the office up to quota on women and minorities. Unlike Clark she came from the east -- Massachussetts. Everything about her spoke of wealth -- the slender figure, high cheekbones, the fine white fuzz on her cheeks (you could see it from the right angle in the right light), the softness of her figure, the darkness of her languid eyes, the length of her lashes, the gleam of her pampered hair. The first time he had come upon her in the office, Clark had almost sucked in his breath -- despite the 'I Voted for McGovern' button she Are You Serious About Science Fiction? Wouldn't knowing more about astrophysics expand your reading enjoyment and satisfy your curiosity about space travel and unearthly phenomena? Two college professors have collaborated to explain such phenomena as Black Holes, Anti-Matter, Curvature of Matter, Pulsars arvd Quasars in a sophisticated sci-fi adventure into the world of # A.D. Where Zenith Borg is the Ruler of Outer Space and starship crews run the risk of getting drugged in the wild city of Ripov on an "uninsured" planet. Turned-on humor and sensational illustrations! by Donald Goldsmith and Donald Levy Holden-Day, Inc. # Sansome Street San Francisco, CA #I # each. Full payment of  is enclosed. (California residents add #V# Sales Tax) Name Address City State Zip wore on the knit blouse just above a large, bouncy, braless breast. He'd nodded to her curtly, had rapidly passed her by. In his office, turned toward the window so that no one would see him do it, he squirted 'Mouthfresh' between his jaws from a thumb-sized aerosol. Then, resolutely, his grey eyes steady in his wide face, one hand self-consciously brushing his crewcut blond hair, he went right back where he'd left her studying a civil rights poster on the bulletin board. He stuck out his hand iri the forthright manner of a good midwestern boy. "Hi," he said. "My name's John Clark. What's yours?" He had never done anything like that with a woman, neither with a stranger nor a prospective colleague. But Evelyn Bantry aroused a powerful emotion in him, not unlike a memory of long-suppressed desire. He knew her before he knew her, as it were. We're meant for each other, he'd thought at the time, and he had swallowed at the suddenness, the spontaneous explosion of that thought. It wasn't possible, not really. She was very, very different from him, quite unlike Betty who worked in Chicago as a nurse and whom Clark more or less meant to marry one of these days. Evelyn was radical. That soon emerged, and was reinforced, in countless discussions they had with each other. These talks seldom ended on a note of harmony, and yet both of them felt compelled to start them and to prolong them, sometimes even over dinner. Mostly they talked about work. She had a very different conception of it than he did. They were in the Energy Game, by Clark's reckoning -- providing energy to the American people, American industry. He was in there swinging for the Standard of Living. People like Clark and the work they did ensured a prosperous future. In Evelyn's eyes this particular section of the Office of Energy Analysis had been created by liberals to balance and check the Atomic Energy Commission's reckless drive for unlimited nuclear power. The section was charged with analysis of nuclear waste containment strategies, and if it was in the Department of Commerce by legal any fool could guess that Congress right. Yeah, but... Clark's reasoning went somewhat differently. If the atomic power industry couldn't find acceptable ways to manage its wastes, it couldn't expand rapidly enough to provide the American people with the power they demanded, and so, indirectly -- "Screw the American people," Evelyn had cried on one occasion in her liberated way. Clark would still see her as she'd sat, legs up on the corner of her desk, the window behind her flowing hair -- red this time. Her naked toes had wiggled angrily in sandals. Clark had stared into the shadows of her loose, bellbottomed, checkered slacks. In his mind he followed her disappearing leg... Hold that thought -- it ain't decent, Evelyn's a nice girl despite her liberation. If she thinks that we're in business to hold up energy consumption, she's wrong, of course, and ought to go to work for the environmental boys. But it's her business, and I hope she stays. She was a nice girl -- dammit! Clark reached up and slapped himself playfully. He had to get her out of his head and get to work. He brushed diet cookie crumbs from the June progress report on the New Mexico siting study. Steadily dropping water tables in that relatively empty state, excellent geology, and a half-way interested Indian tribe all came together as a potential longterm nuclear waste storage site with more than a hundred years of capacity. He opened the report and began to read.    Two floors higher up, bearded Jack Hansley, head of the Office of Energy Analysis, emerged from his carpeted suite with an arm around Ted Aspic's shoulder -- an equally young but much taller man. "It's a far-out idea, Ted," he said. "Way out. But then you've always had far-out notions -- and I've always been a sucker for them." He released Aspic's shoulder and stood for a moment pondering, fingers a-twirl in his beard. "Tell you what," he resumed with a glance. "I'll take you down to see one of my people -- John Clark. He's a bit... conservative, shall we say? But a solid man. I've got him doing this kind of stuff -- contingency planning. That's about if you can talk him into it. I'll put in a good word for you, of course, but you understand my problem. On an idea like this, I've got to have the staff behind me. By the way, Ted, how come you're into sociology now? Aren't you in physics any more?" " Future Now is into whatever we can get funded," Aspic said. "Just so long as I like the concept." He stepped over to the secretary's desk and picked up a fat brown bag designed to fit beneath an airplane seat. "Is that what you call it? Future Nowl How do you like consulting, by the way?" Aspic's long face drew into a smile. "Freedom, man. It's the freedom trip. Hungry, hustling, but free. No, seriously, we're doing fine. I've got four engineers on board, a couple of economists, a planner, and... hold on now -- an astrologer!" "An astrologer... ?" "It's the latest. I'm gambling a bit here, but nowadays... Jack, the occult is in Give me another month or two, and I'll have sold my astrologer full time to the Office of Education. I mean it!" They walked toward the door. Hansley smiled, shaking his head. "Ted," he said, holding the door, "one of these days you'll hit it big. I just know it." They walked out. The secretary, who had been listening with mild interest, picked up her nail polish bottle and slowly, carefully, creamed another layer of turquoise on her left thumb.    Clark seethed inwardly when Hansley left giving an unmistakeable signal -- fund this guy! He looked down at the card. FuPresident. Mountainview, California. A West Coast huckster, to be sure. "To be sure," it echoed in his head, and he saw the puckered lips of a woman on a commercial selling deodorant. He glanced up at this guy with eyes narrowed in hostility. Something about the man... He Was inordinately tall and sat slouched in the chair, his back forming one side of a triangle between the chairback and the seat. His long legs were crossed. He had placed his hands behind his head, long fingers intertwined. Early grey showed at his temples. Large, dark, watery eyes looked across the desk with a measure of hidden merriment, condescension... ? Clark didn't like Ted Aspic one bit. The man had kook written all over him, but he was dangerous kook, well-connected kook. "Well, sir, what can I do for you, Mr. Aspic?" "Let's make that Ted, shall we?" The dark eyes looked at him with moist penetration for a moment. Then Aspic uncoiled his arms and legs and bent down toward his bag. He fumbled around for a moment and came up with a sheaf of Xeroxed sheets. He held the pages in his hand, not looking at them, leaned forward over them. "Isn't it true that Plutonium-# has a half-life of # years?" Does water flow down hill? Clark thought. He barely nodded. "And isn't it also true, John, that plutonium wastes have to be contained some # years? As a consequence of that half-life, I mean?" "So I have been told," Clark said, hoping the sarcasm would glimmer through. They were all like this, the wellconnected kooks. They discovered atomic wastes one day reading the San Francisco Chronicle or the LA Times, and then they sailed in here with half-baked notions that a man was supposed to swallow with joy and hallelujas. Had Aspic discovered abandoned salt mines? Would he suggest deepwell injection? Or was it empty missile silos this time? Hansley had dubbed him a physicist, so he probably wanted to shoot the crap up into space at an astronomical cost. On the other hand, this guy looked like a left-wing raddy of the first water. He probably wanted to use the waste to heat black people's pools in winter time or some such nonsense. I better cool it, Clark told himself. Whatever else this character is, he's the public, and service is the name of the game. Aspic had been leafing through the pages in his hand. Now he found his place and looked up. "This is an article I came across recently and it gave me an idea. The Smithsonian Magazine. Article by Dennis Farney." Clark nodded. He knew the article. It was entitled: "Ominous problem: what to do with radioactive waste." Half the congressional mail lately had dealt with it. "The part that gave me the idea is this paragraph here on page twenty-four. He's talking about the problem of long-term containment and so on and so forth, and then he says here, 'Some have seriously proposed that society create a new kind of "priesthood" to watch over the waste, much as medieval monks watched over mankind's written history in the Dark Ages. Presumably, this priesthood would have to be supranational in character and somehow insulated from the rise and fall of nations through the centuries.' " Aspic looked up. Clark regarded him with a steady gaze, but inwardly he groaned. It was much worse than he had thought. Even Congress had passed up that paragraph. What do you propose to do?" "I propose to look into the feasibility of setting up such a priesthood. My initial notion was sort of along the lines of the Jesuits, you see, but after we did a bit of work on the back of the envelope, it seemed better to create a hereditary -- " "How much?" Clark asked in a tight little voice. The dark, watery eyes looked up. "A hundred and fifty kay." Clark didn't blink; he stared back. "For phase one," Aspic added.    From the #'s nearly stratospheric altitude, the Rocky Mountains, now flattening slowly toward the west, looked like the uneven scales of a giant brown lizzard. Empty land... Aspic contemplated the scene below, awash in closely linked thoughts. His long, thin fingers rested lightly on the second gin-over rocks he'd substituted for his usual martinis. The flight was empty and he had three seats all to himself. He'd kicked off his shoes and loosened his tie. He enjoyed now the last hour of that light serenity such trips always gave him. Soon the plane would dip down over the bay and come in for a landing in San Francisco. Bronzed, efficient Helen would await him with the kids and tell him all about the tennis games she had or hadn't won. The children would whine and want a souvenir from the airport shops. They'd screech and wail in the station wagon all the way home, but Helen wouldn't hear them; she had nerves of steel; and he wouldn't bother to shut them up. Permissive child-rearing... no pay-out, no pay-out at all. He took a sip on the gin and stared down again at the brown emptiness imagining a great monastic cluster down there, a foundation worthy of ancient Cluny -- but devoted to the maintenance of boiling, eternal, atomic wastes. Would the monks chant? Would they evolve a totally new religion over time? Or would one have to invent the religion in advance? A good question that needed exploration, a specific research task to be written into the proposal John Clark had at last, reluctantly, asked be prepared. Aspic thought about Clark for a second, recalling the man. An uptight type, evident even from the short hair he wore... in this day and age. He'd sat behind his desk upright and stiff. On the way out Aspic had noted that the man wore white socks. Had clearly been proud of that hammerlock-style manly handshake. A typical provincial kid come to Washington to help run the great federal machine. Aspic knew how to deal with them. They were easily flattered into submission by a show of interest. But Clark... Clark had aroused in Aspic a kind of hostility which was far more than merely a mirroring of the dislike Clark had exuded toward him ! Could I have met him somewhere before? Aspic wondered. Surely not. I've never been in Oshkosh or Kokomo or Wichita Falls or wherever the hell he comes from. Maybe in a previous life... ? Aspic smiled to himself, but then the smile faded and he took a good-sized suck on his drink, pensively crunched a bit of ice. A year ago he'd had a stormy love affair with a lady professor for the now defunct National Materials Policy Commission. She had been the perfect antidote to Helen -- wilting, far-out sensuality. Cheeks a little saggy. Eyes a little rayed. Long, mournful breasts. Baggy rears. She'd worn copper bracelets on both wrists and had been into everything imaginable. at the peak of their romance when he'd spent three, four days in Los Angeles each week. She believed in reincarnation and swore to him he could retrace his lives under the sway of acid. He had laughed that off; she had insisted, quoting Tim Leary, and at last he'd dropped a little acid on a dare. Now Aspic pondered that experience. Inconclusive, by and large. Yet... Amidst all the tortured, ecstatic, twisted, oozing, mindblowing experiences, he recalled one sequence that had sent him screaming from wall to wall in the bare room they'd used for those sessions. It had been a vision of a concentration camp. Aspic had been a jew, a prominent lawyer reduced to clearing, tree-stumps from frozen German earth. He shuddered at the recall. After that experience he had quietly withdrawn from the professor, had assigned one of the economists to work with her. He'd never touched acid since, would never touch it again. The stewardess stopped by his seat. "Everything all right?" He nodded and smiled to her and she moved on. He lifted and swirled the ginover-rocks, tempted against all reason to dwell further and deeper on that acid vision, sensing that it contained something important, something that might explain his powerful aversion to John Clark of Commerce. Aspic took a drink and forced his mind away from the subject. He would discuss the matter with Templar over lunch tomorrow. To Jack Hansley he'd represented Templar as an astrologer, but Cam was much more than that. He was a genuine mystic, little more than a nearsighted kid, but gifted! The kid was weirdl Making his living casting horoscopes -- until Aspic had lifted him up into the middle class by a single wave of his long fingers. Cam might have an explanation. If reincarnation really worked, in a manner of speaking (not that it was comparable to a machine, but still) then something might be done with that knowledge, the matter could be explored further with a grant from the National Science for such odd things. The results might even be applied in that project with Clark. Heredity... The pitch of the engines changed ever so slightly. The long descent had begun. Ill A year passed before the contract was let. Even under ordinary circumstances, the federal mills ground very, very slowly. But in this case other factors were involved. For one thing, Future Now received a non-competed procurement which required long justifications. For another, Clark went into the job with a great deal less than his usual enthusiasm. Only periodic prods from the front office made him move the papers toward the inevitable dump of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Aspic's direction. And, most importantly, during this time Clark was preoccupied with Evelyn Bantry. He was especially preoccupied with her on this Friday morning; so much so that he could barely keep his mind on the substance of the meeting. Clark represented Commerce on an inter-agency working group. The first meeting of the group was in ference room -- a large table ringed by a grey wall of bureaucratic faces. A man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs held forth acrimoniously against the New Mexico Plan, hitting the table with a fist and pointing index. His point, which he made in as many ways as he could think of and as often as he could grab the word, was that the decision of the Shashtuk Tribal Council was in no way binding on the Department -- by which he meant his Commerce should be lauded for finding a long-term storage site, but they could place it somewhere other Ordinarily Clark would have been roused to battle-ardor by such bureaucratic attack. Today he couldn't focus, nor did he have to. Interior would lose this battle. Energy came first. And tonight he'd score, by God! Finally, at long, long last, he'd score ! His mind wandered into the future with anticipation. Too many hours still separated him from the inevitable. At eleven he had a meeting with Aspic -- progress report time. Then a quick walk around the Elipse. Clark doubted that he'd get much work done in the afternoon, excited as he was, so he'd do some reading, maybe, and cut out early, and buy the wine she'd asked him to bring, and a bunch of flowers, get showered and shaved, and then at six sharp he'd be in front of her apartment door on New Hampshire Avenue for home-cooked dinner and... you know what! Man... Clark glanced at his watch. Quarter to eleven. He had to get out of here. Rising, he excused himself, pleading another appointment. He gathered papers into his briefcase and left. In a year his appearance had changed. Now his blond hair hung down long and rich -- George Washington, Tom Jefferson style. He sported a good-sized mustache with down-curling ends. He wore a natty checkered suit and dark socks under buckled shoes. His briefcase was imitation crocodile. On the way out he stopped briefly before a large bulletin board and searched the sheaves of position descriptions for a GS-#. Not that he needed the money. But if he married Evelyn, he should be a grade higher in case she wanted to quit working and have babies. He saw two or three #'s advertised, but they were all in far-off places. Nobody would grab those, of course. He passed on. He met Aspic on the way in, in the dark entry hall of Commerce, and they went up to the office together. At the moment Clark could even take Aspic without irritation. He almost bantered with the tall man on the way. They settled down -- Clark behind his desk, Aspic in front of it. "You want the door closed?" Aspic asked with a sly grin. Aspic knew how much this project embarrassed Clark. The men in the office had begun to call him the 'plutonium priest,' and 'Father,' and 'Brother Clark.' But now Clark's humor was excellent. "Naw," he said, waving a hand, "leave it open." They got down to business. Aspic's original idea had grown with time into a veritable forest of concepts. He spread before Clark a long flow-diagram depicting the study phases, a maze of rectangles connected by lines. His long index finger pointed to boxes as he explained the sequence of tasks. The psycho-profile questionnaires to determine the optimal personality mix of various gradations of a Permanent Priesthood were in testing now, with good results. Ceremonial and Rituali sties were not yet scoped out fully, but Cam Templar -- whom Clark had met on the last trip, if he could recall -- had started work. "But what worries me," Aspic said, leaning over the desk, tapping a large box in which, tentatively, someone had drawn a question mark in pencil, lightly, "is Succession Insurance." His long form straightened and he sat down in his chair. "My thinking is this way, John. For a century or two we might rely on natural recruitment. Or we could make the priesthood hereditary, with everyone living right in the monastic compound, and crossbreeding between monasteries -- that's Option B, as you'll recall. But I just can't give you any certainty beyond about four generations. So much could change in that time. The social fabric might break down -- it almost did under Nixon. It could happen again -- and, who knows, next time we might not make it. No matter how appealing or frightening or whatever we make the religion inside, sooner or later people might start to drift from the priesthood, enticed away by the outside. Look at the Catholics, a perfect analogy. We've got to come up with... something. Something really hard to bind these people to the Custodial Service. Now I've got some ideas along those lines, and help explore it, but in the long run it might take big money." Aspic looked at Clark wondering if he had said too much already. If the Permanent Priesthood concept made Clark shy, what Aspic now had in mind would make him bolt! But he had to lay some foundations now -- it was either that or talk Jack Hansley into appointing another project officer. Clark's eyes had narrowed and he had straightened up behind his desk. "What are you talking about?" "Ohhh," Aspic said. He looked down at his hands. He chose his words with care. More than ever he was certain that this man across the desk had played a crucial role in his, in Aspic's life. Discounting for genetic differences, which inevitably prevented identical appearance, Clark nevertheless incarnated that certain personality Aspic knew from that vision under Cam Templar's careful tutelage. He saw the German SS-guard in Clark, the cruel blond beast with ready boots and rifle stock. It was in his eyes, the manner, even in the fall of the man's long hair -- (whatever had induced him to let it grow long?) -- as if the man's soul-force radiated out through the physical matrix forcing it to give a semblance of identity even in the external. Such a man was dangerous, had to be watched, would have to be caught, would taste retribution. Aspic unfolded his hands, looked up. "Ohh," he said again, "it'snothing much really, just an extension of the principle of heredity into another dimension, as it were. I'm not really ready to discuss it in detail -- " "Say, Johnny, about that wine I asked you to bri -- " She stood in the doorway at the conclusion of a quick run down the hall, just a touch breathless, red hair flowing, braless breasts heaving, golden rings around her arm. "Evelyn! Evelyn Bantry, for God's sake!" "Teddy!" They embraced affectionately and then looked at each other at arm's length. Clark watched with a fistsized hole in his stomach. "Harvard Square? Sixty nine?" he asked. "Has it been that long?" she asked. "Teddy, what a pleasant surprise! Are you..." she glanced at Clark. "I mean -- is this business?" Aspic nodded. "But you. You wouldn't be working here, by any chance?" "Sure," she said, "This is my turf, Ted. And you? Are you on your own? Or still with -- was it GE?" "Free as a bird," he said. "On my own. I've formed this small consulting group on the West Coast -- but say, Evelyn. This is no place. What about lunch? Can you make it?" "Why not," she said impulsively with a darting glance at Clark. "Let's catch up on things on my time -- rather than Uncle's." She turned to Clark. "Sorry to barge in on a meeting like this, John. Your door was open, and so I..." Her head went back to Aspic. "Just pick me up at my office down the hall." She gestured. "Bye, now." "Evelyn!" Clark called, but she had already disappeared.    At five ten minute intervals Clark trudged out of his office and went down the hall past hers. Two o'clock, two-fifteen, two-twenty, quarter to three. He began to call her apartment. At first there was no answer. Then the phone was busy. Finally an operator told him it was out of order. At four o'clock he went home without a word to anyone. In the closet-sized kitchen of his efficiency apartment, he rummaged in the back of a cabinet until he came up with a pint of whiskey, threequarters full. Slouched in the single armchair in the living room, he drank the booze out of the bottle slowly, staring at his watch from time to time. At five-thirty he straightened his tie, dabbed at his mustache, brushed his hair, and went down into the street. He bought a bottle of wine in a liquor store down the block. He hailed a cab and told it to take him to #th and New Hampshire Avenue. He walked through the goldcarpeted lobby, passed beneath the chandelier, nodded to the guard in his red, epauletted uniform. His finger touched the elevator button and the device turned a faint pink. Silvery doors slid aside. He stepped in and found Floor Nine. The elevator surged up. Before her door he pressed the bell, later hammered on the imitation oak with his fist. At last she opened the door a crack, dishelved, in a robe. He pushed his way in, went past her through a short, narrow hall. In the dining nook he glimpsed the table -- probably set the night before -- a rich table cloth, two plates, silver, crystal, unlit candles, a flowery centerpiece. Evelyn came behind him, talking, but he didn't hear what she said. Blood pounded in his temples, behind his eyes, sang in his ears. He had never been inside her place, but he found the bedroom without trouble. Aspic lay on the bed, naked but for shorts, an apprehensive look on his face as he stared up at Clark framed in the door. The Princess-style push-button phone on the dresser was off the hook and made a rythmic, cricket noise. For a second Clark stared at Aspic and at the bed. The covers had been pushed off the greyish, much-used, wrinkled bed sheet. Her clothes lay in a heap to one side, hastily dropped. "Hey..." Aspic called, seeing the look in Clark's eyes, regretting now the laughs he and Ev had had about Clark between bouts of passion. He extended a hand toward Clark in a warding, cajoling gesture. Clark took the bottle by its neck and threw it at Aspic with all of his force. But he was unsteady and slow from drinking. Aspic saw the motion and rolled out of the way. The bottle hit the soft, padded back-board of the bed and fell unharmed on the sheet, a dark-green, round-bellied Portugese rose. A sob formed in Clark's throat. He didn't have his heart in the act of violence. Evelyn! She had destroyed him, but he could do nothing to her. He turned aside and brushed past her without a look. She had followed him to the bedroom door and stood with her arms raised protectively in front, tiny fists beneath her chin, eyes shrinking. Four martinis, it echoed in her mind while her eyes were on Clark. Four martinis, she told herself dully, suddenly sobered and aghast at her own stupidity. She had been dazed and utterly silly and now... She felt sick to her stomach and turned away. Clark stopped in the dinette, suppressing sobs. He took hold of the fine, patterned damask. A jerk sent plates, silver, crystal, candles, and flower-piece crashing to the terazzo floor. He walked out of the apartment toward the elevator. Back in his own apartment, Clark went to the only piece of furniture he owned in this furnished efficiency -- an old-fashioned rolltop desk. He began to rummage in its narrow cubicles. Cancelled checks, plastic name tags he'd worn at conferences, an insurance policy, letters from Mom, a yellow-red garage bill, a little black book! He took it with him to the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and lifted the telephone onto his lap. He dialed a string of numbers. Far away, in the Windy City, on the shores of Lake Michigan, a telephone rang, and rang, and rang. Then at last, just as he was about to hang up in despair, a cheery voice came on. "Hello?" "Betty!" he husked into the mouthpiece. "Oh, Betty, I love you, I love you." IV In the fall of # , they finished building the odd-shaped radar dishes on top of the hexagonal building some distance from the compound, and three days later planes started to land scientific teams at the government airport a couple of kilometers beyond Perpetual, New Mexico. Radar dishes? John Clark had no other name for them. Oh, sure. They probably had fancy-dancy names and did something unusual, else there wouldn't be the tight security surrounding the project. But to him they looked like radar dishes. He gunned the jeep and roared past the new complex oggling those shallow baskets of wire, reddened now in the setting sun. He suspected that this was a defense installation after all and had nothing to do with rad-waste storage. Probably some of that super-hush psycho stuff rumored to be under development now that the U.S. was about to plunge into the Russo-Chinese war despite Hubbard's election-year promises. The Chinese, supposedly, had missiles implanted with living human brains so cleverly trained they could evade virtually any kind of mechanical counter-rocket. Psycho was the only answer. From what Clark had picked up, it projected fields of the greatest sensitivity and caused schizoid reactions in the missile-brains leading to their self-chosen destruction high up in the atmosphere. God, he hoped Hubbard would stay the hell out of that war. He personally didn't care. He was too old for that sort of thing by a long shot. But the boys... No. He for one didn't see any reason for a Russo-Chinese intervention, yet tonight on the news three cabinet officials, in speeches across the country, had floated up the first trial baloon. In other words, the decision had already been made. Desert streaked by on either side of him, lovely in the gathering dark. It had rained briefly two days ago -- the first time this year -- and the desert had bloomed like a woman in love. Clark was of two minds about rain. On the one hand it made this country beautiful beyond compare. On the other it caused trouble. The torrent had revealed several leaks into articavems G and K, and Emergency had been mobilized for two days and a night to plug the leaks, lest steam formation generate pressures great enough to cause a series of cave-ins. God, what a mess that'd be! Up ahead Clark saw the dirt road and applied pressure to the brake. He turned the jeep off to the right and bounced forward leaving a trail of dust. Chief Walk-on-air would see that cloud and know that old man Clark was coming -- although the chief didn't need outward signs to know the future, he knew it, although you couldn't get him to say much more than a handful of words at a time. Walk-on-air had told him about those leaks, but without the rain they hadn't been able to find them. Clark felt revulsion. He hated rad-waste with a depth and passion so basic it was a kind of Superloathing. Years and years and years ago he had gladly grabbed a GS-# to get the hell out of Washington, to marry Betty, and to live among decent folk far from the pointyheads and whores of the Potomac. It had been a good life at first. Betty had turned out to be his kind of girl -- calm, handy, and true as true-blue could be. Later on, when the New Mexico Plan came to fruition -- his plan -- he had volunteered to help set up the site among the Shashtuk indians. In those days there had been nothing out here but cactus and earth huts. They'd lived in a trailer for two years. Things sure had changed since then. Look at Perpetual: ten thousand people. A rail-line brought the rad-waste from thousands of miles away -- kilometers , Clark; don't always forget about metrication. Four great compounds. Ninety-six arti-cavems. And yet it was all like ashes in the mouth. Clark couldn't recall precisely when it had hit him. Before the Act, of course. Perhaps in the late eighties, eighty-four, eightysix... thereabouts in time. He'd already felt it sharply in eightyseven, the year they broke inflation's back and the civil service took a sixty-percent paycut. Freddy was nine years old, Gerry seven. That same year they passed the Nuclear Waste Security Act, and people like Clark were frozen in their jobs, willy-nilly. They had no power, the handful of guys out in the field running these hazardous waste depots. The Union had bargained away their future for a whopping pension plan. A few people had muttered about #th century serfs in the media, but the Kansas salt mine disaster had blinded everyone. Besides, Clark could have left the service had he wanted to -- a free man still. But who would do that with depression raging out there and two young boys to feed. So he had stayed, but that feeling had grown by degrees. He still remembered sitting at the kitchen table, nights, his fist around a can of beer, morose, staring at the placemat left over from dinner, the TV going in another room, thinking about Aspic, wondering if Aspic had been behind the Nuclear Waste Security Act, the first shot in a war planned long ago. But it didn't seem likely. He'd lost sight of all those people. Aspic had been a kook. Somebody had probably found him out. Betty came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulder by his neck. He could feel her lips touch the top of his head. The short bristles tickled. "Don't brood, honey." But he had brooded on and on until it was too late. Up ahead loomed a Shashtuk roundhouse. Smoke curled from its center. A '# Chevy sedan stood parked off to the side. It had been doctored Indian style with roof cut off by hack-saw. Dogs came yelping and then, recognizing his scent, turned into tail-wobbling welcome. He alighted with a groan, heaving his big belly. Got to diet. Just Gotto! He went into the hut, bending to clear the low door. Dung-smoke and Shashtuk odors mingled in his nostrils. An ancient crone squatted by the fire with a pan. A young boy sat on a cot. "Hiya, Superintendent." Clark nodded to the boy. "Where's the chief?" The boy gestured into darkness. "Up on the rise?" Clark asked. The boy nodded. Clark went out again and trekked slowly up the slight elevation behind the house, marked by two large cacti resembling hands stretched to the sky. The dogs followed him a short distance, then dropped back. He found' Chief Walk-on-air seated between the giant plants, hands on his knees, his face turned to the west where the sun had finally set and only a thin line of crimson separated darkness from darkness. The old man had a wrinkled indian face and jet-black hair bound into a braid in the back. His eyes were closed. Clark caught his breath a bit and then sat down on the bare ground. Doing so he noticed a bundle next to the chief. Had Walk-on-air been out collecting peyote? Or was he bound outward now? In the darkness Clark couldn't see whether the bag was full or not. It was just a blackness on the ground. Clark waited knowing that no amount of coaxing would make the old chief speak until he chose to do so on his own accord. Clark wasn't any younger than the indian; perhaps he was even older. But in all other respects the chief was the teacher, Clark the disciple. It had all begun fifteen years ago when Clark had heard about the old man's prophetic powers and had sought him out with a question: "Will I ever leave Perpetual and get a start in another kind of business?" Clark still didn't have an answer to that question. But from the first moment of their meeting, he had been attracted to the chief, almost indifferently at first, had acquiesced in a kind of strange relationship. It consisted of weekly meetings filled with long silences broken occasionally by a deep rumble of words. In the third year Walk-on-air announced abruptly that he had "hunted" Clark's spirit, had caught it, and found it good. In those days Clark had not yet learned his lesson and had pressed the chief to explain himself -- but to no avail. But some weeks later the indian had fed him some peyote cut into small slices, and chewing them Clark had been catapulted into paradise. Then, twice a year thereafter, less frequently some years, the chief had repeated that procedure. His visionary experiences didn't change Clark outwardly. He continued on, the same as he was, but he no longer asked his questions, having been satisfied on that account in some mysterious way. He knew that he would live and die here in Perpetual, that it was meet and fitting, that somehow it was meant to be, had something to do with his old longing to serve the public. Clark had resigned himself to that. But he hated it. God, he hated it. The chief was his only real consolation -- the chief and the annual communion with the Holy Mushroom, an experience he kept from Betty with as much jealous secrecy as his humiliation by one Evelyn Bantry, whose memory still sometimes returned to him, whose figure appeared in his peyote plutonium visions, many-faced but always the same. Across the bit of rock-strewn dirt, Chief Walk-on-air opened his eyes. "Good-bye, old friend," the indian rumbled in a gutteral, hard tone. x Good-bye? Clark sat still, didn't answer. He'd let the chief say what he had to say. Questions only dammed up the thin trickle of communications that came out of the old man. Old man... I'm an old man too! "The Big Sky will come and fetch away Walk-on-air." Silence. The crimson line on the horizon had thinned out and had disappeared. Now the cacti were like shadows. The first stars had appeared and blinked in rising heat. "This is a bad place for dying. Walk-on-air going south. Far away." Why? Why is this a bad place for dying? They sat in silence for a long, long time. Then the chief stirred again. "White man has a spirit-catcher. Very evil machine. Walk-on-air go south, die, come back to Shashtuk land." "What do you mean, spiritcatcher," Clark blurted out. He slapped a hand to his mouth, but it was too late. He had disrupted the flow. For a long, long time he waited, but nothing more would come from the indian. The sky slowly thickened with stars, the Milky Way dusted across his vision when he lifted his head. At last Clark rose. "Good-bye, old Chief," he said, and he walked back down toward the jeep. On the way home he had a bad moment. Suddenly he felt in the pit of his stomach a kind of burning pressure he hadn't felt in years now, an unpleasant echo of the late eighties when he'd gone through inner hell. He couldn't well imagine that Walk-on-air would actually leave. He was as much a part of Clark's life as -- as Betty was, as the arti-cavems with their vats of eternally bubbling hi-rad sludges. The old man -- old man, indeed! He was as strong as a bull. Not a thread of silver in his hair. He must have been joking. He was off peyote hunting deep in Mexico. He did that every year. The bag had looked very flat on the ground next to the indian. He'd be back in a couple of weeks, and then Clark would go out to see him again on Wednesday nights as usual. Nonsense about dying, spirit-catchers, stuff like that. He felt a little better. Soon he wheeled the jeep onto the surfaced road, gunned it and roared homeward. Betty and he lived inside the compound in the superintendent's mansion that seemed so cavernously large now that the children were gone. When Gerry had visited earlier this summer bringing his whole family with him -- all five children whose names Clark hadn't been able to keep straight -- they had fitted in with lots of room to spare. After he and Betty had waved good-bye and the big red bus had pulled away, they'd walked back in and the place had echoed like a tomb. Near the compound Clark noticed that lights still burned in the newfangled hexagonal security complex. He slowed down and peered inside through the tall barbed wire fence with its outreaching arms. As he watched he saw a man walk past a window, and he caught his breath involuntarily, thinking he'd seen Ted Aspic -- or at any rate an old man with snow-white hair who might have been Aspic if Aspic still lived. Clark stomped on the brakes. Wheezing, he got out and leaned against the jeep, arms folded across his heavy beer-gut. He watched the window with a face as stiff as a board. The engine idled at his back. But nothing more happened. Clark shook his head. He was seeing things. He got back into the jeep and drove on. Guards waved him through. He drove between gigantic silver storage tanks that held the low-rad waste and up toward the artificial hill where the super's mansion stood with its lead-insulated walls. On the kitchen table Betty had left out a glass of milk and a couple of cookies. He looked at the snack but then changed his mind. He didn't feel so good in the stomach.    ' Two weeks passed but the chief hadn't returned. Three weeks. Five weeks. Toward the end, just before he was hospitalized in Perpetual, Clark had driven to the indian's roundhouse every night, although the pain in his gut had forced him to drive doubled-up and Betty had begged him tearfully to relent, to give up, to be at peace, to find consolation in the Twenty-third Psalm -- which she held out to him, marked with a red ribbon,... "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want... he maketh me to lie down in green pastures... yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..." Finally the ambulance came. Attendants took him from the jeep where he crouched in agonies against the wheel. Lights flashed and the sirens wailed. But they sounded far away, as if meant for another. He lingered on for two weeks more, now up, now down. In this time he had lucid moments when an easing of his pain and the diminishing action of the drugs they fed him coincided. Food came to him through a tube in his arm. He had lost most of his stomach to cancer; the doctors couldn't understand why he hadn't complained before. In his states of temporary bliss, he listened to the talk that buzzed the Russo-Chinese war with a brigade of intervention that grew to several armies within several days. Brain-missiles had been dispatched from China aimed at West Coast cities, but a new defensive system had neutralized them over the Pacific. People repeated stories about windstorm damage and tidal waves -- consequences of those H-explosions. Then Betty came and chewed back her tears as she held his hand. Good old Betty. Then, one time, nurses gossiped bitchily at the foot of his bed about that new security complex near the compound, saying it was a regular whorehouse, with people paid to make love in there on Friday nights. Inwardly Clark smiled. He knew what went on in that hexagonal building. It was a hush-hush psycho-station, set up here to prevent Chink bombing of those cursed, damned, boiling vats... Well, he'd soon be free of all that and go where you went when it was all said and done. Then, one time, he thought he saw Aspic hovering over the bed in company of a short, bald man who wore thick rimless glasses and seemed familiar to Clark. It was a fantasy, of course, but nevertheless Clark forgave Aspic everything. No point in holding grudges, not any more. Death dissolves everything. And finally they stood by his bed -- Fredrick and Gerald, his stalwart sons. One of them wore a uniform. Clark tried to nod to them, to encourage them, but he couldn't move his head. That night he died and went up into paradise.    "Fantastic," Aspic said, and by his side Cam Templar nodded. They stood before a wall completely filled with tiny rectangles, each one closed off by thick, curved panelejttes of glass. Minute bits of light glowed inside some of these miniature aquaria, one flame per cubicle -- but these lights weren't fish and they didn't swim in water. They were souls suspended in super-cooled nitrogen and held by subtle magnetic fields. Aspic saw his own image reflected from the curved glass panes, a little bent and very much dimini shed by the small surfaces. Age sat on him lightly -- at least judging by appearances. His hair was completely white by now, but it hadn't thinned at all. His long face was powerfully tanned and gave him a youngish look accented with thin white rayings of maturity around the eyes and a kind of tightness about the skin. While other people wrinkled in old age, his skin appeared to shrink, giving him a haggard look. He wished he felt as young as he appeared, but he didn't. Now, in this moment of completion, he wondered about the cost of all this -- not the money cost, of course. The Feds had provided most of that. But the psychic cost lay on him heavily -- all those meetings, all those lunches, all those favors rendered, all that talk, all those trips to Washington, a thousand Congressional hearings, ten thousand backroom discussions. A new light blinked on and drew Aspic's attention. Almost immediately a telephone rang somewhere. Templar moved off to answer it. The time was early morning and in this part of the complex all the clerical help had retired many hours ago. He watched Templar from the back, a short, old little man. Templar was eight years his junior but looked fifteen years older -- white of complexion, fading, nearly blind despite those heavy lenses. After a moment Templar came back. He pointed to the rectangle that had just lit up, nodded. "That's him," he said. Aspic watched the micro-flame. He was thinking about motives. All around him sprawled this complex, the first of its kind in the world, the only one of its kind. Its evolution and development had taken three decades, some of the best physicists in the world, a tremendous amount of public money, and all of Aspic's persuasive powers. It worked. It was the culmination of a life of labor. And yet it was just the first step. Many such centers would be built in time. The Perpetual Priesthood would rise from these centers, would be replenished through their' mediations -- provided, of course, that the goddamned war didn't stop progress altogether. The war had come at the worst possible time. From now on a man wouldn't get a hearing in Washington about domestic programs. Best to lie low, in fact, lest someone discover how much this facility cost to run and the kind of talent it employed. The budget cutters would have a ball devacation. Yes, he'd take off, get away from all this. The job was done. The motive that had started this ball rolling had been satisfied. It burned there, that tiny little thing. Clark, or whatever was left of the man. He had triggered the idea, he and some acid memories of a concentration camp. And now Clark sat in his own little prison. He glimmered in there, longing to incarnate, tortured by desire, sensing the copulations of the entire region in the air... but he couldn't dissolve himself in flesh, he'd have to hang there suspended between two existences -- a spiritual terror of unspeakable menace, according to Templar. Templar knew these things. Sooner or later, Aspic told himself, it was bound to happen. Sooner or later someone was bound to learn to control soul energies. And we did it, Cam and I! Nothing mysterious, really; just the same old physics in another guise, just the same old mathematics oriented to another dimension. Not that they knew much about it, Aspic reflected. They had found the tip of the iceberg. They knew how to hold the souls and how to condition them to some extent. When it was all over, Clark, or whatever was left of Clark, would have a powerful compulsion to stay near radiation, wastes. He'd have an abiding love for the stuff. He'd worship it. He'd feel possessive about it. He'd seek it out wherever it occurred. His senses would guide him to it. Or that, at any rate, had been the outcome of some experiments with short-lived fruit flies. You couldn't generalize too much, of course. "How long have these been incubating," Aspic asked, sweeping the wall with a gesture. Thirty little flames burned behind glass. Not counting Clark, all the deaths had occurred within a fifty-mile radius, the range of the magnets. They were all sexually screened, all of them souls with masculine tendencies. "It varies," Templar said. "The oldest ones are two weeks old." "So tomorrow... ?" "Tomorrow we'll incarnate them. We've got another batch of volunteers assembled, so it should go smoothly." "Las Vegas tourists again?" "Mostly," Templar answered, "although we've had to reach plutonium farther out this time. The war..." "That damned war!" Aspic exploded. He reached up and rubbed his eyes with long, slender fingers. After a moment he turned to Templar. "Tell you what. Cam. Now that we've got Clark on ice, I think I'll take a nice, long vacation. Don't do anything with him until I get back. I need some relaxation. These last few months..." He clicked his tongue and shook his head. "I think I'll head south. Mexico City, Caracas, maybe Santiago. Thank God the war is still a northern phenomenon. Meantime we'll just let Johnny stew. It's the least I can do for him." He grinned suddenly. "Don't overdo it," Templar warned. He took off his rimless glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. "We don't know how long these little pulses last." He inclined his head toward the tiny votive candles behind glass. Then he looked at Aspic, his eyes a little out of focus. "For all we know, they might go out." "So?" Aspic said. His dark, watery eyes were cold. Then he continued in a changed tone. "They don't go out. None of the experimentals ever did. Whatever those little things are, they're tenacious." He reached out and touched Templar on the shoulder. "I know what bothers you, old man. It's the torture. You've got a bleeding heart, my friend. Well, let me tell you something -- " But Aspic interrupted himself. He wouldn't talk about that any more. It seemed a little odd to hark back to an experience that he, Theodore Aspic, had never really had. "I'm not criticizing, Ted. Just... don't overdo it." "All right, all right," Aspic said a little irritably, holding up his hands. "Let's get someone to put Clark on conditioning and call it a night."    Four weeks later Aspic drove toward Mexico City from a suburban estate in a rented Cadillac. He sat in the back with two young things he had hired for the duration, and now they were gigglingly messing inside his fly while the chauffeur drove behind a pane of glass. The headlight beams lifted squat, thick trees out of the on-rushing murk. Aspic sighed. He felt the old excitement, but it was entirely in his head. Down below nothing responded. He reached for the speaker. "Faster," he said, "Faster, faster." The chauffeur increased the flow of gas. Aspic leaned back, closed his eyes. He conjured up memories of women he had possessed, went back and lingered on details. But it wouldn't work tonight. He was too tired, the party had been a bore, he'd drunk a bit too much. He opened his eyes just in time to see an ancient indian step out onto the road from behind a tree. Instinctively the driver jerked the car to the left... too far... back again. Tires screamed in some kind of terror. Everything went up and down and sideways and lights and glass and stillness and dripping oozing wind moved grass next to Aspic's face. V Clark -- who was no longer Clark but someone else -- had to wait until his new brain had developed, until he had learned to walk and talk and all those things. And even then he had to hide his curiosity so that his parents and playmates wouldn't think him weird. By age three he secretly read old books that had chanced into the hands of 'these backwoods people. By age four he discovered at last which century this was. Chance had brought a town circular into his hands at the May fair, and he noted with great wonder that it was the #rd century, midway through the #rd, # to be exact. How time doth fly... Let's see now, he said to himself. I've been up there # years, which is something of a record, I'd guess, considering that most souls don't last more than a month in paradise, maximally speaking. He didn't confide his discoveries to anyone. He bided his time out there with the herds on the mutagrass prairie. At age fifteen he ran away from home, old enough and strong enough to fend for himself. As for experience, he possessed that of ten life times. His current name was Tankers Jack. His father's name was Justins Tanker. They had called his grandfather Portos Justin... and so on and so forth. His mother's name was Tankers Two and people called her Twodie. She was younger than Tankers One and older than Tankers three, and she ran away at age thirty-five and became Wallies Oneish. Wally was a mutant and couldn't be choosy. For reasons he still couldn't entirely comprehend (birth had disoriented him slightly), he had selected for himself a slender, longish body with sensitive digits and large, dark, moist eyes. He took after Twodie rather than Justins Tanker, a large, bony man who never spoke except with fist and boot but could toss a lasso with the finesse of a #th century conductor urging pianissimo. Jack knew all these people -- from way back. His father had been his grandson in #th century Turkey. His mother had been his husband in revolutionary France -- although at that time Jack had been a Jaqueline. Others in the village also belonged to his circle. He had been drawn down to them -- to Betty, who was the Healer's ageing mother and who'd soon make the passage again; to Freddy, his son, who'd surfaced as his brother; and yet others he had known, closely or remotely, in many pasts. He recognized them instantly given his third eye -- an invisible 'eye,' to be sure, not one of those mutant aberrations. But he hadn't seen Evelyn anywhere! and above all he longed to see her. He knew he'd see Walkon-air again. Besides it didn't matter, Walk-on-air was everywhere.    He arrived in Perpetual, New Mexico five years older and much wiser about the #rd century. He came in by what was left of the ancient road, a young man with a flashing eye, black hair. He wore a tall, round hat with a stiff, wide rim. His legs and lower body were wrapped in long strips of rough, grey cotton tied at intervals with leather bands. His trunk was covered by a woven blanket with a hole in the center for his head. Around his shoulder hung a carrysack and from his left ear a golden ring. He walked toward Plutonium, a tiny figure next to the monstrous construction that now occupied the site of the coumpound: a proud monastic fortress of tremendous pods and walls and parapets, circled with moats of steaming atomic lava, drawbridges over the moats, pennants on the pod-tips, and a bright glitter of prayer ribbons in the wind. Crowds of pilgrims waited for entry next to one of the bridges, and Jack saw people from all corners of this region. He saw monks in twentieth century garb, a shockingly nostalgic sight amidst this primitive but powerful architecture. In twenty years Jack had become accustomed to cowls, jerkins, wrap-me-ups, and -- if you were rich and a townsman -- embroidered, ankle-length coats. Perpetual itself, five or six kemits beyond Plutonium as the carry-crow flew, was 'perpetual' in name alone, for nothing had remained the same except a bit of the layout. A city wall ringed the place, but not as massive or as well maintained as he'd seen elsewhere on his travels. Perpetual needed no protection, not with the monastery nearby. He stopped at the very first inn he came to, the House of the Nucleon, complete with a hand-painted sign out front showing little flames moving in a spiral. This being afternoon and the place empty, the proprietor himself took an interest in Jack, served him a foaming mug of warmish beer and talked about Plutonium, his elbows on the bar. The place was unique, the proprietor said. No other monastic foundation like it existed anywhere on earth, the man said, setting Jack to musing. By "earth" Jack knew the man to mean the continental United States, the North American land, for the institutional thing had passed away in the wake of the RussoChinese Intervention, soon after the brain-missiles of all the nations had learned to communicate telepathically and had conspired to bring the whole damn rotting mess down in one glorious Armaggedon. Well, they had both failed and succeeded. The old world had suddenly passed away. But Man had survived and began to fill up all the spots again. Too bad for the Old Order. It had been much more varied and rich than this primitive culture of towns, herdsmen, farmers, and brigands. But Jack couldn't blame the brains, not really. What is a man to do when he can sense and think and feel and desire -- and has a missile for a body? He returned his attention to the Inn's proprietor who, in the twentieth century, would have been urged to try Scope. The man was telling him about the marvellous power of Plutonium to attract disciples. The life up there was hard and dangerous. They didn't touch women and lived in narrow cells just barely wide enough to let a man lie down. Many of them died from strange and mysterious sores. It was known all over Shashtuk country and well beyond. Yet young men came from all over, about Jack's age, usually, and they had a burning desire for that life up there. "God is great," the proprietor said, bowing his bald head rimmed by black hair. Then he looked up and asked Jack if he was one of them. "I might be," Jack answered with a smile. "Those who are, know!" the man said seriously. Jack made a note to remember that when he approached Plutonium's masters. He recalled the compulsion-creating conditioning process of his early days of spirit incarceration. But that compulsion had been wiped away by the existential terrors he had experienced during months of suspension between two lives, the very experience ancient catholics must have had in mind by the fires of purgatory. He had been purged, all right. His energy identity had been forced to contemplate itself, hour after hour, through what seemed a handful of eternities. He'd come to memorize his past, to imprint it indelibly on his deepest awareness. Then someone had released him at last. But instead of incarnating with alacrity, Jack had careened off into the very stratospheres of paradise seeking recovery from his tortures. Fearless now, he had plunged into the very center of the white disc of light and there, abiding in healing solitude, he had seemed to be in company of Walk-on-air. By the time he emerged to incarnate again, quietly, deliberately, one quarter of a millenium had passed away below. He took a swig of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said: "I have no money, innkeeper, but I'm a scribe." "Welcome, welcome," the man said, bowing. "Feel at home, Tankers Jack. I'll pass out the word and you'll be drowned in business. The last scribe came by more than a year ago." The proprietor rubbed his hands with pleasure. Such luck to snag a scribe. His house would be full for weeks. He led Jack personally to the very best room in the house, lovely with its blue-white wallpaper obtained at great expense from a travelling merchant. The bed -- a double mattress; three pillows; and thick, fluffy Harvey pelts for cover against night-chill. Another significant change between that time and this, Jack noted, his eye on the milk-white pelts of the rare, disappearing giant rabbit. The sun seldom peeked through the overhead murk; volcanic ash and sediment circled up there around and around the globe. It would take centuries to restore illumination to its ancient maximum. It was cold in New Mexico, even in June. He waited until the proprietor had left. Gazing after the man, it occurred to him that the bald fellow might be Cam Templar, Aspic's astrologer, but he couldn't be sure, having only met Templar once, long ago, in Washington, D.C. If it was Templar, he had certainly come down in the world, karma-wise. The man's head disappeared down the stairs, and Jack closed the door. He took binoculars from his carry-sack -- he'd found the instrument in the never-used bomb-shelter of a destroyed estate far to the north, where the ice starts. He walked to the window. He lifted the binoculars toward Plutonium on the horizon and searched the monastery's silhouette until he spied, barely visible, six baskets of wire high up between the pods. Passing by the massive complex, he hadn't been able to see them. But they were there. Once upon a time he had thought them radar dishes.    After four days of reading and writing letters -- hundreds of letters -- Jack decided to take a holiday. His earnings had been good, the people generous. They liked the way he dramatized the messages from relatives far and wide, the way his eyes twinkled when he read funny things and the way his voice choked up when he catalogued woes. The Innkeeper hired four extra girls to keep the beer and the meat flowing, but all too often he caught them dreamily admiring the scribe from the edge of the perpetual circle of people around him. He also suspected that they slipped into his room at night for more substantial samples of his passion -- but the Innkeeper need not have worried or envied, whichever it was. Jack waited for one girl and only one. He thought he'd earned her affection at last, and the mysterious forces of cosmic magnetism would sooner or later sweep her into his path. He borrowed a horse from the Innkeeper's stable and rode away in an ancient direction toward nightfall. He had chosen a Wednesday night for this venture -- for old times' sake. The horse plodded forward wearily, its heavy head going up and down, tired from dragging shaped concrete slabs all day from a nearby gorge overpass ruined ages ago but serving now as a kind of quarry. In its place now hung a spidery ropeboard thing, a graceful curve above the abyss. Up above the moon was a diffusion of light in an atmosphere loaded with suspended particles. Down below the ground was far more lush, a swaying grass-scape, a rolling prairie of mutagrass. In place of the upright cacti Jack found a willow with its hair hanging low. Near the tree sat Walk-on-air, an ancient, wrinkled indian with jet-black hair pulled into a braid in the back. His eyeswere closed. He sat facing the spot where the setting sun had caused a dirty brown line of light between sky and ground. Jack dismounted and sat down near the chief to wait. After a while the chief opened one eye. It twinkled merrily, its white a little yellow. He opened the other eye and broke into a huge grin. "Hello, old friend." "Hello, Chief Walk-on-air. " "You've done right well for yourself," the chief said, gesturing toward Jack. "A nice combination you've concocted. A bit of the gypsy in you, a bit of the hero, nice and slender but strong in the wrist and the arm; your eyes are very expressive, and the nose hints a little at carnivorous birds. That golden earring gives you a mysterious air, the lips are sensuous to the right degree. The hair is straight, yet at the ends, it has a kind of graceful curl. No doubt you're an accomplished singer, swordsman, and story-teller too, can read men's palms and see the future in goblets of dark wine. Am I right?" "You knovf' everything. Chief Walk-on-air." "On the contrary, Tankers Jack -- a kind of racy name, that, I must say. No, no, my friend. I wallow in blissful ignorance. She's always unfolding, always unfolding like a flower that forever germinates into the future. There is no end to her mysteries." "Who is she?" "The Cosmic Flower, the Absolute Change." "I thought there was nothing beyond you, Chief." The indian laughed, his head thrown back. He was thoroughly amused. He chortled and chuckled. "Tankers Jack," he said at last, wiping his eye, "you're an incorrigible Barbarian. You've been inside to earth. For what? A woman. Right?" "You have all the answers, Chief." "Listen to me, old friend. Do you know what happens to people it appears in paradise? People who don't get frightened and don't shy away toward the red of the spectrum?" "I don't, Chief." "They become angels, Tankers Jack. They go up into higher lives. They tum into planets andsuns. But you -- you came back for a woman. And then you ask me whether there is anything beyond me. I also worship a woman. There is always something beyond. Otherwise we'd all curl up and die." Jack's horse blew air through its nostrils with a low blurb and stamped a leg. "Since I have, as you say, thrown away a chance at angelic existence," Jack said, "let me tum to petty practicalities. When will I see her?" Chief Walk-on-air laughed. "What's the hurry, Jack? You've waited three hundred years or more. What's a decade or two or even a life or two." "Chief," Jack said tensely, nearly rising from his cross-legged position, "don't you tease me. I couldn't possibly wait decades -- much less lives!" Chief Walk-on-air chortled, bubbled. Tears ran down his wrinkled cheeks. He pointed a gnarled finger. "Look at you," he said, "just look at you. I can't get over it. Here you are, all got up to kill, a heart-throb. My God, Jack, how do you keep the ladies from your bed? But when I see you, I see old Clark sitting there like a pile of misery, his beer-gut coming out to here Oh, Spirits, oh, Flower!" "When?" Jack demanded crossly. He felt totally at ease with Walk-on-air. They had shared an "All right, all right," the chief said. "How can a god refuse anything to a mortal like you." He narrowed his eyes half mockingly. "The time is ripe. It'll happen soon. But there is still a wee-littlebitty bad karma clinging to you. Tankers Jack. You haven't scraped away quite all of it. Those spiritcatchers are still up there -- and you're responsible for them. A word to the wise... ?" "And then?" "And then the nefarious and strange ways of the Lady Flower will guide you in magical ways into her presence," the chief pronounced. "After that it'll be up to you, of course. I can't guarantee a thing. I wallow in blissful ignorance. I sit here and wait for the next marvel that may drop from her hand." "Why here?" Jack demanded. "And why sitting? Why don't you wander about like I do. You see more things that way." "Because," the chief said, and he grinned broadly, "because you're just a young god and I'm an old one. One or two stories a milleniurn are quite sufficient for me. The doctor tells me not to get too excited, you know. If I overdo it, I might become an angel." With that the chief threw back his head and laughed most merrily. VI The siren shrieked and echoed through the intricately laid corridors of Central Pod. It called upon the brotherhood to rise. Plutonium's day had begun. Jack awoke with a start and almost sat up straight. He remembered himself in time and, accustomed to the maneuver by now, he slid from his vault-like chamber feet first. He landed in the corridor and reached for his clothing. Monks dressed on all sides of him, slipping into jeans, shirts, sweaters, or sweat shirts -- the obligatory uniform of the monastery. It was Jack's fifteenth day in Plutonium. He had arrived, had slipped into the monastery almost without notice, just another novice, just another compulsive come to seek satisfaction at the bosom of God. He had come, but he had not yet conquered. This day, the fifteenth, would roll by like the others. And then would come another, and then another. The ordinary mortal, Jack told himself, would long have lost his patience with all this and told his precious karma to go hang, but he was not an ordinary man and so he stayed on, waiting for his opportunity. He dressed, like the others, and took an inventory of his situation. Many levels above him, sealed off by guards, was what the monks called The Mystery. Many levels below him, in the ancient articavems, the members of the Hierarchy would now be preparing for the one and only ceremony of the day. A few levels above them, at ground level, others of the Hierarchy would be cutting bread into small pieces for the breakfast that would follow, a humble, monastic meal. A hundred kemits to the south of here, a monkish caravan would be loading tents and setting the missile into motion again. The missile, so he understood, rested on two long carts tied end to end, and the carts were drawn by sixteen oxen. The missile, presumably, would be chattering in its mad way. That described his situation fairly concisely. He finished dressing and wondered how long it would take for sixteen oxen to cover a hundred kemits. Ten days? Twenty days? He hoped it was ten days at most. Even a man with the patience of Job would want to escape this lunatic complex -- especially if a girl awaited somewhere in the future beyond the moats of Plutonium. Jack joined other monks and walked along the corridor toward spiralling stairs that led to the depths beneath the complex. This corridor, like those in most buildings nowadays, coiled unpredictably through the building. The total darkness was eased only by ancient phosphorescent paint, delivered here ages ago for disposal, which these latter-day guardians of radiation had smeared liberally on the walls. The paint bathed corridor and monks in an eerie, greenish light. The missile bothered Jack in more ways than one. On the one hand, he might be counting on it far too much. On the other, it was a missile. The brain in it was still alive, and if the brain lived its other parts might still be functional. It was a legacy from the twentieth century, a token affection sent down through time. He couldn't even start to guess hdw the brain had survived. Few mechanical objects had escaped the ravages of time. Cars were heaps of rust, batteries dead, ballpoints dry. Only Aspic's Mystery still ran, that much was evident -- and this nuclear bomb lifted by sweepers from a lake in what had been Texas. They had made those babies to endure. Jack reflected. They probably ran off solar energy with a sealed-in lifesupport system to maintain the brain-mass, a super-duper stainless steel ecology -- and now it jabbered nonsense through an amplifier attached to its underside. Take that back. It didn't chatter nonsense all the time. From time to time it pleaded with its finders to drop it from a mountain onto rocks. When it was sane, it wished to die, in other words. When sanity left it, it spoke about Armageddon, a woman named Hester, and a child called Tom, What hath God wrought! Jack reached the stairs and went down, hands on the railing. His mind continued to turn around the missile. Word of the thing had come three days ago. Excited messengers had burst into Plutonium with the good news. A group of sweepers had discovered a Godbod larger than any found heretofore. On top of that, this Godbod had a voice and said odd things -- prophecies, some of the i messengers claimed; others, more  sober or less imaginative, said it  merely spouted odd gibberish. Jack  had gone to interview all the messengers he could find, and with some reluctance had concluded that ; the thing was a brain-missile all right. Now, going down around and around the spiral staircase, he wondered if he had miscalculated the effect it would have. News of this Godbod had sent Waves of shock through Plutonium. plutonium Most of the ordinary monks lived in total idleness. They neither spun nor wove. The first hour of the day was structured by the ceremony. Thereafter, unless a man belonged to the Hierarchy, he could spend his time any way he wished. Plutonium by day or night was a savage battlefield of roaming ' gangs. Battle-sounds could be heard throughout the complex, cries, blows, running feet, the heavy breathing of men. The victors usually raped the youngest of the vanquished. Such would be the fifteenth day, such had been the first, the second, and all the rest -- with one exception. On the day when the messengers had arrived, Plutonium had buzzed like a hive stirred by a stick. News of a talking Godbod had put a stop to the usual amusements of the brotherhood. Men had gathered in excited clumps, discussing the event, and groups had formed spontaneously to plan the reception. Jack had concluded that such excitement would be magnified many times when the missile actually arrived, and while the brothers swarmed out to greet this new find, he hoped to be upstairs, communing with the Mystery. He hoped, at least, that security upstairs would be greatly relaxed. Otherwise, as he had discovered, it would be nearly impossible to approach Aspic's satanic machine. But what if they didn't relax the guard? What then? From down below Jack could hear the roar of voices. The monks gathered in Cavern B, as it had been called in the old days, the largest of the storage areas. By the time Jack reached the place, the cavern had filled up with monks, a . huge assembly, a sea of heads moving and humming. Above them he could see, in the distance, the abbot and several ministrants preparing for the ceremony. Baskets of hot rocks stood on the platform, and ministrants arranged themselves beside them. The abbot, wearing asbestos gloves, placed a silvery canister centrally on the altar. Torches stuck into holders mounted on the wall behind him threw the only light in the cavernous, echoing room. Their flames reflected on rows of vats on either side. Hot sludges boiled and bubbled inside those giant pots, just starting on the first leg of that # year journey toward ionic exhaustion. The abbot raised his hands high into the air. A hush fell on the monks. The best part of their day would now begin. After the chanting and the reading were over, the ministrants would bring the baskets through the throng. Each monk would take a rock. Ceremony called for a ritual kiss followed by a touch of forehead, throat, navel, and gonads with the rocks. Most of the monks went well beyond this requirement. They hugged those clumps of mineral. They rubbed them over their bodies. Contact with the rocks, which had been exposed to high-level radiation, satisfied some deep need in these miserable men. Jack noted his own position and moved to his right, toward the wall. In the center of the throng, the ministrants would certainly pass closely by him, and he tried to avoid what all the rest had come to enjoy -- exposure to the radiation. He felt a surge of pity for the monks. He couldn't help them. They had been conditioned, once and for all; their bodies needed something biology knew nothing about. But future generations had to be protected from this obscene slavery. Jack wondered briefly whether it was really true -- that he, himself, by a series of rash acts in. a concentration camp, had set in motion the horror he witnessed on every hand: these .savage men covered with sores and lesions. Could one man, with one act, leave such a legacy of trauma? The abbot started chanting in a reedy voice, and an ocean of voices answered him, a deep, male lowing that rose and fell. Jack looked up and watched the altar. From his new perspective by the wall, in uncomfortable proximity to one of the vats, he could now see a large group of monks on the platform. They were sweepers awaiting the abbot's blessing before setting out. Each carried a small box, sack, or bottle. Discovery of the missile had put new vigor into sweeping. Now everyone was eager to find a Godbod even more magnificent than the talking needle. Jack eyed the sweepers on the platform. Sweepers had been his first encounter with Plutonium. He had seen them in all parts of the country during his wanderings, wretched creatures combing the countryside, sniffing for radiation as they went, trusting their compulsions to lead them to the holy stuff wherever it was, however deep or however high, yes, even on the bottom of lakes. They carried bits of hot stuff with them. Without those bits of inoculation, compulsions tlrove them back to Plutonium. He had seen them huddled beside ancient freeways in miserable camps; he had seen them begging food, standing in the middle of village streets, and he had seen women j throwing them bread from a safe distance. The common people understood Plutonium in their way. They knew that sickness followed the monks. They hurried them along, out of the hamlet, away from the cattle. Holy sickness, to be sure. But move along, please. The chant died out in a final, multitonal hum, beautiful in its way -- would have been beautiful had Jack not known the unholy desire that gave it such feeling. Across the distance from the altar now came the abbot's voice, reading the scriptures. The echoing hall swallowed some of the words, but Jack knew what the abbot was saying. He spoke about God's ineffable presence in the room. He blessed this Holy Interface where divinity was operative. He spoke of vigilance and of the evil world without, where Godbod's holy emanations didn't reach. The words were lame, without much cadence. A contractor's analyst had written the text trying to beat a deadline, no doubt. But neither scriptures nor dogma mattered much, Jack knew. The real faith burned in the monks' entrails -- an implanted compulsion. The software didn't play a role so long as the hardware worked. When your innards wrench and tear you, you don't need much of a theology. Jack could feel the growing excitement. Greedy eyes devoured the baskets from a distance. The reading would be over soon. Jack slipped away, between two vats, and sought the deeper darkness of a recess in the wall. He pressed into it and felt, against his back, heavy studs that, in the old days, had held the radiation shields in place. They had been removed, of course. From this vantage point he could glimpse, between the vats, the progress of the ceremony, the pathetic antics of the monks, the vigilance of ministrants. Theft of an irradiated rock was considered a capital offense. Once a day, and once a day only, were monks allowed to feel the particles -- granted, of course, that the whole hive was hot, up to the very last pennant cracking in the wind above the highest pod. The ministrants came down and then moved back, collecting the rocks as they went. Jack faded back into the crowd and watched the abbot lift on high the shining canister in a final blessing. Then he turned and blessed the sweepers, whereupon a ministrant approached them and handed over bits of Godbod for their boxes, sacks and bottles. The ceremony was over, but the monks stood their guard, not a man moving. It was like this every morning. They felt the Lord's peace in the cavern. They didn't want to leave. The vats threw out emanations, and they gloried in the feeling. But enough was enough. The ministrants now turned policemen and began to press the crowd toward the exit carrying clubs in their hands. Jack felt a surge of hunger. He went out and up the stairs toward the eating halls.    Jack sat on a bench against the wall next to some monks he knew. These men were of the pious sort, a small percentage of Plutonium's population, simple creatures who took the doctrine seriously, shunned gangs, and spent their days in little prayer chambers strewn about the complex reading the scriptures hung from the wall by chains. Jack had associated himself with these men. His piercing look and a regal manner he had assumed had protected him from violence and rape. He put about also that he was a Hierarchy spy, which helped. But he found it best, like any other beast of the jungle, to fade into a herd of others to fend off predators. These men were the least offensive of all those in the hive. Jack munched his piece of bread and a single carrot. He turned to the man on his left, a w hi spy creature by name of Johns Jim. "Jim," he said, "any news about the Prophet?" ("Prophet" was one name for the new discovery, "needle" another.) "I don't know," Jim said. "You should have better information." He whispered: "You're with the Hierarchy. But I feel it," he continued in a normal voice. He pointed to his stomach. "I feel it here. It's coming closer." "How many days do you think it'll take?" Jack asked. Jim didn't have a chance to answer. At that moment a man burst into the room to their right and ran between benches toward the only table in the hall, to their left, where the abbot sat taking his breakfas flanked by high officials o Plutonium. The man was tall, haggard and although he wore dark clothing, i was evident immediately that h was blood-stained. His eyes shorn with a kind of craze. He arrived at the abbot's tabh and leaned across it without the cus tomary handshake which, no longe used as a form of greeting in the twenty-third century, was still ai obligatory courtesy in Plutonium. Jack saw the man whispering t the abbot, and then the abbot fel back in his chair as if he had sus tained a blow. In a second he, in turn, whispered into the ear of his cheif aide who, in his tum, gave evidence of shocked dismay. j The two men rose and gestured tc the leadership. Then, in a body, the whole group left, taking the haggarc man along. This brief scene caused unusual excitement in the brotherhood. The monks occupied several halls the size of this one, strung out end tc end in a circle along the girth of Central Pod. The word spread quickly through all the rooms, and in minutes excited groups had formed, discussing, speculating. Men were sent running to check with their contacts in the Hierarchy. To Jack it seemed like a replay of the scene some days ago when the missile's discovery had been announced. A half hour later -- the monks hall -- the word finally filtered out. Johns Jim, who had run off to consult with the deputy assistant theologian, a friend of his, brought back news to Jack's group. His thin, grey face was long as he approached, his mouth half open in the anticipation of speech. "They stole it," he called before even reaching his group. "They got it. They're all dead. It's gone." The pious monks enclosed him in a circle. Then, in fits and starts, the story came out. A large armed party of unknown affiliation had attacked the triumphant caravan bringing the needle home. The monkish escort had been slaughtered. I alone am escaped to tell thee. That, in essence, had been the haggard man's story. The world had intervened and stolen Godbod, Plutonium's most cherished capture in a hundred years. Jack cursed inwardly at the news. He saw his plans for action foiled. No missile, no excitement. No thronging mass would leave Plutonium to meet the double-car and the sixteen oxen. His face, like that of the others, turned long and sad, but his sadness came from another source. Then, in an eye-wink, the situation changed abruptly. Movements in Plutonium were coordinated with a siren, a handcranked affair. It announced the morning service and also feeding times at noon and in the evening. In fifteen days Jack had heard only a single siren, a very unpleasant sound, but tolerable. Now, slicing through the air toward him came the sound of several sirens, all operating at a different pitch. The sound was so piercing he involuntarily covered his ears and bent his head. This was a new phenomenon. He divined at once that it was an emergency call. He had judged correctly. The monks around were electrified into motion. They ran for the exits and crashed through them, nearly trampling one another. The eating hall was suddenly empty. Only Jack stood against the wall, his eyes on a sea of wooden benches. The sirens stopped as suddenly as they had started, and now he could hear the thunder of feet descending stairs. The floor of the hall trembled slightly from multiple impacts. He waited until the sound had died down. Then, with cool resolution, he turned and went the other way, up toward the roof of Central Pod. He knew that his chance had come at last. The waiting was over, and he could act. He saw no one on the stairs going up. No one in the corridors that led toward the Mystery. Jack couldn't believe it, but it was true. He had been prepared to deal with opposition if he had to. Ten lifetimes had taught him many murderous arts. But there was no need. When all the sirens were let loose to wail through Plutonium like desert ghouls gone mad, all men were called from their posts, apparently, even those above, those who had blocked his access in days past. He walked freely into the restricted area. He stood before a door. On the other side of it he heard a faint hum, a hum he hadn't heard in this era. He looked to right and left. Still no one around. His hand depressed the handle. The door opened a crack, then more, then all the way. He stepped in. Consoles stood around the room -- a room that had been moved, intact, from the ancient security complex to the top of Plutonium by God knew what exertions or when. Here electrical lights, presumably fed from nuclear reactors made to last, glowed dimly overhead. The floor was plastic. Bright metal gleamed everywhere. Againstone wall scores of tiny flames glowed behind glass panelettes. They gave Jack a nauseous pulse of remembrance. His eyes a little wild, he looked about and found what he needed, a large polished rock used as a paperweight on a desk. He took the stone and went toward the panels. He hesitated before setting to work. He was about to destroy a strange, unique technology, perhaps Western Man's last great breakthrough. It might never be invented again. It would be a loss to Science, the science of some future. But his hesitation was brief. Tiny flames flickered before him, souls in transition, karmic fires. He took a deep breath and began to free them, one by one. Broken glass fell at his feet and cold gas hissed around his hands, covering his arm with artificial rime. vn Discovery of the savage destruction went through Plutonium like another great convulsion. By that time Jack had long disappeared into the country, clad like a scribe again, humming a tune, longing for Evelyn, and glad that the missile was lost somewhere to the south. For that reason, he went north. Monks were sent out to capture the criminals, but they found only pious ladies bringing baskets of alms and simple pilgrims in their tents. The Hierarchy, meanwhile, met again to ponder alternatives. They were horror-struck and knew themselves mortally wounded. The Mystery, and it alone, replenished the priestly ranks. It was the heart of the cult. They tended the machinery with loving care. In ample store rooms thoughtfully filled by Old Order founders, they could always find the part needed to keep the panel lights green. Most often a wafer failed; sometimes a wire had to be replaced; more rarely a gas canister would run dry and a full one had to be snapped in its place. The Hierarchy had calculated that five centuries could pass before the warehouses were empty. But now they saw the Mystery in the paroxysm of death. It smoked amidst a wreckage of metal and glass. A storm had passed through the warehouse. A fire still raged in poison fumes. The cult would surely die -- especially if some upstart group had a Godbod that spoke strange prophecies. After some days of agonized consultation, the abbot decided to mount an armed excursion -- to recover Godbod; the Mystery was beyond help. Plutonium organized for war. The monkish army, ten thousand men or more, each carrying a bit of Godbod, led by the haggard messenger, moved south to the scene of the crime. Here investigations were ordered, and after some days the army wheeled north. It picked up the cold trail of the thieves. The trail was difficult to follow. The leader of the enemy, a man described as short, blond, sturdy, wide-faced, and steady, had not been recognized by anyone in the area. He had come out of nowhere, he and his men. People guessed he was a war chief attached to a city. They inferred this from the discipline of the men he led, the quality of the cloth they wore, and the system they had devised to move the giant needle toward the north. The leader had abandoned the carts and the oxen. His men had placed the needle into a large net suspended between twenty-four horses, twelve on each side. Soldiers rode the leading and trailing animals on right and left. This method of transport was faster than the one the monks had used. The group travelled off the beaten paths. Plutojacks had to seek reports of them. Few had seen the odd if memorable group, a swiftly moving, silent band -- silent but for the silver needle in its hammock which, by all reports, continuously spouted gibberish. As the monkish army moved, it lived off the land. Discipline was difficult to enforce. The population in its path grew fearful and mounted resistance. But slowly, like a radiating locust herd, Plutonium groped its way north.    The leader of the thieves was Alans Shepherd. In his twelfth existence he had accumulated much merit by a life of service in the cause of justice, the culmination of a long series Of evolutions to ever higher vibrational spheres. But in his thirteenth incarnation, as a physicist in what was then the United States (of fading memory), he had indulged a passion for vengeance and had loaded himself with heavy karmic debt. In a succession of lives since then, brief and violent lives they were, he had sunk ever lower, unable to stop his downward drift, until this time, in his Shepherd incarnation, darkness enveloped his awareness to a significant extent, and only bits and pieces of earlier light came through the chinks of his moral obscurity. One of those bits of light, though he didn't know it, emanated from his chief and sovereign, Zeronica, once his daughter and once his mistress, and other things besides in a long existence that went back to the Crusades. She alone, of all the folk he knew, aroused in him a dim memory of something higher, and he had served her now for several years, doggishly loyal, uncharacteristically mild. Returning now with his prize of prizes, he gave himself a little hope, just a tiny bit of hope, that she would reward his loyalty at last. With this final act, he would make her foremost among the leaders of the world. Now he would deserve the reward she had promised him, years ago, in the shadow of the ice. If she refused him this time, he didn't know what he would do. Spurred by such motives, he drove his men to great exertions, and the group reached Phoenix long before the plutojacks had even organized for systematic pursuit. He entered the city gates at night, in secrecy. His men slipped the Godbod into the dungeons beneath the Presidential Pod. She came to see it that same night, a cloak about her night dress. Godbod was sleeping at the time and she couldn't question it. Messengers had told her about the miraculous voice. Her manner, as always, was aloof and cool, and Shepherd went to bed that night with the bitter taste of disappointment in his throat. He tried to console himself saying he was a man of power and influence second to none in Phoenix. But the thought gave him no solace. In her presence he was still a bandit, and though he never let the thought flit across the surface of his mind, he knew that her eyes ruled his, now as ever. He tossed and turned on his lonely bed. She hadn't even greeted him. Her first words had bit his soul deeply, opening wounds. "I didn't know," she had said down in the dungeon amidst torch flickers that echoed back from the dull gleam of Godbod's hull. "Is this allT' she had asked. "It's just a piece of metal, isn't it?" She herself had demanded of him year after year, for three years at the least, that he should capture for Phoenix the one thing it lacked. Now that he had done it, she called it a piece of metal. The next day she had a sitting basket hung from the ceiling in the dungeon. She sat beside the needle and tried to hold a conversation with the awakened spirit within. This went on for two days. Then she sent for Shepherd and discharged her frustrations into his steady face, angered by Godbod 's incomprehensibilities. "You should've let the plutos have him," she said to Shepherd at the end, her voice dripping with contempt. "He, he -- " She gestured at the needle, slapping the air with a hand slack at the wrist. "This is no god, Shepherd! Can't be. Maybe it's just one of those talking machines the old books tell about." Back in his own quarters, Shepherd kicked the mutants. He stayed within for three days, drinking. He recalled his carefree life beneath the ice and cursed his fate.    Two weeks later the war caught up with Tankers Jack. Rumors had preceded it and had already set him to wondering. He was staying in a small village when plutojacks over-ran the hamlet. Jack knew the code words of the priesthood. He mingled with the band as it departed, pretending to be a sweeper and out of touch with Plutonium, His appearance aroused no great concern. Most of the priests wore modern clothing acquired along the way. Deep in the heart of a forest in what had been a desert in Clark's day, around a smoky fire, Jack learned that God himself had destroyed the Mystery, angry at the priesthood's lack of vigilance. Later, as the fire fell to ashes and the monks lay back to sleep, an old priest by name of Goosers Texas, who had eyed Jack with interest, looked about, beckoned with a grizzled head and a squinting eye. When Jack sat down beside him, the old man said: "You look like an intelligent man, Tankers Jack. You'll go far in the priesthood. You say that you were on a sweep when all this happened. And these simpletons told you the story we of the Hierarchy have put about. Well, you deserve better, Tankers Jack. The truth is, God did nothing to the Mystery. A man destroyed it." The old eyes searched for a reaction, and Jack opened his eyes in astonishment. "Yes," said the priest, nodding toward the fire. "Yes, by the Holy Interface, we know, we of the Hierarchy." Jack signalled his respect and said that secret knowledge belonged by rights to those who carried the burdens of responsibility. The old priest nodded and sighed. "Yes," he said, "the burdens are heavy." He leaned closer and whispered: "The abbot told me -- " "The abbot?!" Jack breathed. "Yes, sir," said the priest. He nodded gravely. He picked up a stick, leaned forward with a groan, and threw it into the fading embers, evoking sparks. He sank back again. "The abbot points to the Woman of the North." The monk nodded to himself. "She did it -- her henchmen stole the needle." Jack grew alert. A woman had been mentioned -- a woman tied karmically to Plutonium. He told the priest that, pardon his ignorance, but he had never heard about the Woman of the North. What was the story? "Well," said the priest, "I reckon you must have been sweeping far to the east of here. And you plutonium mustn't have been around these parts for a good many years -- am I right?" Jack allowed that Goosers Texas was right on the button. The dry stick burst into a flame. The old man leaned forward and held his hands toward the heat to warm them. When he resumed, his tone had changed. He would be telling a story. "Well," he said, his old face red and gashed by moving shadows, "her name is Zeronica. An odd name, I'm sure you'll grant. The presidents of Phoenix all called themselves Henry until the male line died out. Henry s Henry, each and every one of them. She was the daughter and only child of Oneeyed Henry, as the people called him, the last of the Henries. Nothing wrong with his eyes, you understand. But he squinted a lot, sort of like this." The old man turned and squinted with one eye. His features grew lewd. The open eye glinted oddly, as if with a smile. Jack had the uncanny sensation that he was sitting beside Walk-on-air. "He called her Henrys Oneish in the customary way," the old man resumed. "He knew she would never be any man's Twodie. She was a President's daughter, after all. But that wasn't good enough for the Woman of the North. After one-eyed Henry died, she changed her name in a ceremony in Phoenix Square, right in front of the Presidential Pod. She even sent out runners to advertise the fact. They explained what her name meant. She didn't want anyone to miss the meaning. At first the people smiled at this. They figured she would marry the man the Phoenix Congress selected as president, that being the natural expectation. But she had another notion. "The people of Phoenix eat out of her hand, you understand. But there are those, even some in Phoenix, who blame her father for her ways. Henry never had a son. He spent his nights in a harem of those feathery creatures people call Dingbats around that part of the country. Zeronica was more or less an accident, I understand, or else his wife had taken a lover. However that may have been, once Zeronica was up and about, Henry took a shine to her and brought her up as if she'd been his son. He taught her reading and writing and got her ancient books to read. He even sent her on a tour of the world, and that's where it happened, years before her father died." The old man stopped and refuelled the fire again. Its flames drew from the darkness the shape of pines bunched closely together. "Somewhere far in the northeast, up where the ice starts," he went on, "a band of bandits captured Zeronica during that tour. Henry had sent her with an escort, of course, a hundred men, I think. But Zeronica had quarelled with the captain of her guard, and one morning, without his knowledge, she rode off early with just her tutor to keep her company. That's when she met Alans Shepherd, the man who helped her later. "The story has it that this Shepherd -- by reputation a violent man, famous for harrassing the caravan route that snakes along at ice-edge -- well, he killed the tutor and dragged Zeronica off to his tent. She bounced limply on the rump of his horse, unconscious in her furs, knocked on the head with a club. Shepherd yelled and screamed with joy, savage that he is. But once he got her inside the tent and swabbed her back to waking, she got the upper hand in a hurry. The story has it that she stopped him with a look in her eye. That's the kind she is. And before you know it, Shepherd was yelling through a tent-flap. Slaves came running with food and drink. She sat on a hassock like a first lady. He behaved like she was an equal. And the two of them made a deal. "What the deal was came out later. The story goes that she agreed to become his Oneish after it was over, after her power was secured. She promised him she'd made him president. She would be his only wife. And, sure enough, people say, Alans Shepherd went to her chamber in the presidential pod after Congress swore her in as president-person. And he said to her, 'Zeronica,' he said, 'we have an agreement. You promised to marry me aftpr I put you in power. I have put you in power, so be as good as your word. ' "I don't know for a certainty that he used those words, Tankers Jack, or exactly what happened," the old man said after a pause. "There are many stories. Maybe he tried to embrace her too, as he had once tried to do in his tent -- and I guess you can imagine him pressing her against a credenza or a table, trying to find her lips with his. But whichever way it was, whether she slapped him, as some say, or whether she slipped from his grasp, quick as a weasel, or whether they never came within a sem of each other, all stories agree that she said to him, pointing at him: ' You put me in power, Shepherd? YouT And then she started laughing and laughed and laughed. Her head went way back. And then she doubled over and slapped her thighs. And Shepherd, who thought he was a very big man because people feared his men, why, he couldn't stand her laughter. He took his hat and walked out of there. He swore to his closest companions that he'd replace the bitch, chase her out of Phoenix and take over himself. But he never did. He is still there, working for her, and Phoenix has only one president-person, and that's Zeronica. People say Shepherd still loves her, still hopes, and can't do her harm. "Well, soon after that, Zeronica started making changes, and -- " "How did she gain power?" Jack interrupted. "What? Oh, that. Well, she brought Shepherd and his ruffians back with her from her world tour. Shepherd followed her like a little dog, and his pack right behind him. She called them her personal body guard. One-eyed Henry chuckled at it fondly. He let her do anything she pleased. Slowly Shepherd built U P his forces. He hired the scum of Phoenix, people without cult or property. By the time Henry died, Shepherd's gang was larger than the Phoenix military. But people didn't now that until the scum came from he cracks in the clay. Members of Congress who opposed her election plutonium learned to fear Shepherd's raiders. One or two pods burned down mysteriously. A couple of members died in tavern brcwls. The upshot was that they elected Zeronica president-person and no questions asked." The old man leaned forward, groaned a little, and tossed more wood on the fire. He shivered a little. His years made him cold. He sank back at last, his eyes pensive and far away. He was finished for the moment. "Well?" Jack prompted. He felt a great excitement in his bones. "Well," said the old man with a sign, "she's a witch, I tell you. It's those books, I suspect, or the old ruins she saw on her travels -- God knows I've seen my share of them; never could make much out of such rat havens; but her mind was charged up with reading. At any rate, she called in Congress soon after she took over and she proclaimed that here -- I mean Phoenix now, you understand -- that here in Phoenix they would establish the New Secular Order, That's what she called it. She told them how the old world would come back. God had decreed that it would happen. That came from a book too, I think. Her reasoning was that it would happen in Phoenix, and nowhere else, because there had been a prophecy about a bird, and the bird had been called Phoenix, and when it burned it rose up again from the ashes. ' 'On the feast of Superstar, which some cults celebrate in the month of December -- two years ago, it was -- Zeronica made a declaration freeing all the mutants in Phoenix and on the surrounding lands, saying that slavery was evil and didn't fit the New Secular Order. She said she saw no difference between mutants and men. See what I mean? Well, Congress voted its support for her and Shepherd put down the rebellion on the farms. "Then, last year -- the girl's quite handy with proclamations, Tankers Jack," the old man said, shaking his head, "she announced that women were equal to men -- " "She said that!" cried Tankers Jack. "She did," nodded the monk. "And she got away with it?" "She did," said the monk again. "I don't rightly know why, either. But, as I said, she's a witch and people eat out of her hand. They believe her. I've heard a story or two to the effect that she has assembled all sorts of ancient mysteries and has a priesthood of her own, trying to make them work. She has no decency, you see, and scorns the customs. Among those things, or so I am told, she has a mystery that makes pictures on the wall. You can see people walking and hear them talk as if they were real. And with this magic she bamboozles the Congress to do things her way. The New Secular Order!" the old man spat. "God forbid such heresy... "And so, Tankers Jack," he concluded, "I think the abbot is right when he suspects her. It wouldn't surprise the Hierarchy to learn that Alans Shepherd led the thieves that killed our brothers. But don't say a word to these simple yokels," he said, gesturing all about. "They don't need to know what we know. But you'll go a long ways in the order, Tankers Jack You need to hear the truth. But no wrap up and go to sleep. The call is deepening." The old man pulled a blanke about himself. He lay down, his bad to the fire. His eyes closed and he seemed to go to sleep. Jack sat erect for a long time. He stared into the smallish flame lick ing the last piece of wood. Ash lay on the log like reptile scale; the flame burned blue above the glow of embers; He saw Walk-on-air's fine hanc in all this -- the meeting with Goos ers Texas, the story of Zeronica. He recognized her touch across the ages and knew her though he'd never seen her current form. Fateful, al this. He had to hurry away into the growing night chill from this spot of fading warmth. His karmic journey was not quite over. She too, like he, attracted Plutnoium. And so did Alans Shepherd, the unknown third in this star-crossed party, whose pathetic quest for Zeronica' s love seemed oddly reminiscent of something lost in Long Ago. A missile had found her. Jack had to find it. He owed as much to the twentieth century. The missile glowed very high up, suspended nose down in the centei of a wooden tower. The tower stood in Phoenix Square. The Squar stood in the center of Phoenix . Ant Phoenix was the center of the world. Bright stones spelling an inscription said so. Jack stood at the foot of the tow; er and peered up into the height, Darkness gathered as the sun set, but its filtered rays made the missile's hull glow red. It might have been a brass bell hung in a spire. He wondered if the missile could pick up information through visual sensors implanted in its hull, and what the brain might think of Phoenix which, from his height, must be like an open book spread out for all to read. Jack, for one, couldn't read this age. The memories of other lives interfered with his understanding. The new America constantly amazed him. The streets of Phoenix, for example, wound themselves around and around a center like lines on a conch shell, narrow and crowded. The simplicity of the constructions didn't explain the pattern. All the houses had a fundamental similarity, as if the primitive builders were informed by an invisible Spirit and labored like ants to construct Its hidden forms. All over America, in endless variations, he had observed the same phenomenon, the birth of a new form world, still tentative, groping, and unsure of itself, but recognizably the same. He shook his head and felt regret that he hadn't studied history in any of his lives. With more information, he might understand why this America reminded him of hives. Oval shapes dominated the architecture. The buildings seemed to hang between upright columns, giant pods, modified only at the base where the requirements of physics overcame the cultural tendency. Inside the houses -- they reached several storeys into the vertical -- spiralling stairs led from level to level and corridors criss-crossed each level in that random pattern which everyone born into this century (without memories of other times) found perfectly sensible. Community, communality, he thought, and it occurred to him that mankind might be planning a new adaptation of which the architecture was but an outward sign: a style and a feeling which might prevent, once Science awoke again, the creation of such monstrosities as that thing above, a brass bell that had no charity. As yet Jack saw no other sign of such a desirable adaptation, but the buildings, cities, and many forms of family organization predicted it as through a glass, darkly. He waited a while longer and let the darkness settle in. When it came, it was nearly total. Without electricity, these new cities died with sunset. Glass was a rarity, the climate unreasonably cold, and people shut their windows tight with heavy wooden shutters insulated with bits of cloth at the cracks. Only a few people moved about in the light of torches. At last, feeling that it was safe enough, Jack moved toward the tower -- it was little more than a framework, really, and he slipped between its heavy supports seeking a ladder. He found it soon, a rough, makeshift affair built for workmen. He took a breath and began the long ascent. Standing on a narrow platform and surprised somewhat that wind gusted up here while below it had been calm, Jack approached the missile. It hung in a network of leather straps. He rapped his knuckles against the metal of its hull. The act evoked a dull sound. Jack wondered if he would achieve what he planned. He hoped he would. Otherwise his life might be snuffed out, along with hers, and their reunion might have to wait another growing up. "Hi there," Jack said. "What? Who's there?" The voice sounded sleepy, but Jack knew this to be illusion. Neuro-fibers linked the brain to a computer. The computer spliced together phrases from a tape-bank -- pre-recorded phrases spoken by a pleasant baritone, an actor's rich warble. "John Clark, at your service," Jack said. In the presence of this thing, his old American name came more naturally than 'Tankers Jack.' "I came to ask after your health. Are you operational? Or did you get damaged in the war? Your hull seems battered a good deal. Your rocket thrusters are gone. I'm surprised you're still alive." The missile gleamed in silence, in a state of shock. Then the pleasant baritone spoke quickly. The voice had no emotional toning, but Jack sensed nevertheless a wild excitement beneath the words. '.'Jesus Christ," the baritone said. The voice trembled from the center of the needle, a darkish reticulation in the metal. "Don't tell me you understand me? John Clark, did you say? What is this? What year is this? Oh, never mind. I am hallucinating. Stop your tricks, Frankie. Just stop it; don't torture me. Hello? Are you still there? Is anybody out there?' ' "I'm here," Jack said. "John God's sake, why don't you just let me sleep in peace. These dreams!" "I take it that your visual sensors are out of order?" "Visual sensors! Visual sensors, the guy says. I'll be damned. You've just got to believe! You better believe they're out of order. I'm as blind as a bat. Blind, impotent, immobile, and crazy. That's me. Frank J. Harmon, at your service. CR #." "What doeg 'CR' stand for?" "You don't know? Hell's bells, the guy might be for real. Not an illusion. 'Conscious Rocket,' John Clark. That's your name, isn't it? Clark?" "John Clark, Mr. Harmon." "Mister. He knows how to say mister. Glory be!" "I am a skilled nuclear engineer, like I said. Now retired. I thought I might help you, if I can help you. The natives around here tell me that you're unhappy." The missile was silent again. A faint new moon had risen over the horizon. It was just a blur of light in the perpetual murk of the atmosphere but bright enough to ease forth a shadowy outline of the city below. The missile suddenly burst out: "Unhappy, did you say? I'll give you unhappy, Mr. Clark. How would you like to live the life I've lived. Quadruple amputee? Get it? member that war. We called it the Palestine Insertion Operation. A great big dong slipped right into Israel's see you, auntie. You get the picture. It got me then. Observers, we were called. But I am boring you! Tell me you're still there, John Clark." "I'm here. I read you loud and clear, Frankie." "Say it again. "Say what again?" "Say 'Frankie' again." "Sure, Frankie. Any time." "Man, that feels good. I get a real high, hearing that word. Jesus Christ!" "You were telling me your story, Frankie." "Johnny, bless you, how I groove on you. My story? What a trip. Real fun, being a basket case. Hester, my wife. She met me at the airport when they brought us back, and she had a look in her eyes, let me tell you. You don't know that look, how could you? I don't know the look myself, any more. I've been in this darkness all this time. What do I know about seeing any more. I just see this darkness, and I hear all' sorts of things. I am a real good listener now. Never was a listener before. But I listened real hard to Hester. Night and day. I heard her on the telephone whispering to the Veterans Administration by the hour. And her whispering to little tom -- Tom's my son, you see -- telling him Daddy's very, very sick. And then they had this hush-hush program to find astronauts. Physical impairments were said to be no impediment, in fact preferred. Am I losing you, Johnny? Are you still there? I don't know how to tell a story any more." "I am with you, Frankie. They wanted you to be an astronaut. ' ' "Yes, sir. Useful again. Learn new skills. Earn a lot of money for Hester. Little Tommy could wear a plutonium button in school: My Daddy is an Astronaut. Red white and blue. Say it again, Mr. Clark," "Frankie," Jack said. "Thanks, Thanks a lot. I needed that. So I signed an agreement. Hester said it was all right. I had trouble reading. Even then, something with my eyes. They promised to fix that, in astronaut school. I held the ballpoint between my teeth. He was a notary. He signed a certificate to prove that my scrawl was really mine. It looked like some kid's doodle. Didn't look like Frank J. Harmon at all. Never would have made it as a painter. Making watercolors for Christmas cards. You know what that is? Christmas cards? Johnny!" "I am present and accounted for, Frankie. Christinas cards were sent at Christmas to all those dear and near. Okay? We cared enough to send the very best." "Bless you, Johnny. Hallmark Cards. Oh, bless you, bless you, bless you. Can you help me? Help me, Johnny. I want to see again." "I'll do my best, Frank, old buddy. But tell me what happened? Did they kill you and put you in a machine?" " 'Death takes place when cerebral functions cease,' " Frankie quoted. "They didn't kill me. No sirree. I signed that authorization, didn't I? It said that I agreed to accept prosthetic devices that would restore my useful functioning. Didn't I? You tell me. I did. It looked like a kid's doodle, but it was done by yours truly, a ballpoint between the teeth, eyes crossed, almost, to try to see the paper. The small print was blurred. Get the picture, Johnny? Johnny?" "Frankie." "You're for real, aren't you?" "I'm for real," Jack said. "Mind you, Johnny, I didn't kick. (Not that I had anything to kick with.) First off they put these probes into my brain, and next thing you know, I was having sex. Wild, unbelievable. Better than ever with Hester or anyone else. Wow! They just tickled something in the brain, and there I was, flipping out. Kama Sutra, baby. Real unbelievable, like. They did it when we were cooperative, and you've never seen a bunch of studs cooperate like we did. It went on and on, even after we were implanted in the ships. I remember standing there, on my launching platform, eyes out over the Pacific, this giant thing all around me, and my brain feeling the hydraulic fluids gush and swish about, and I'd be having these orgasms up there, one after the other, Jesus Christ, Johnny! Johnny?" "Frankie, would it help if I put my hand on your hull? Can you feel it?" "No. All gone. Sensory's gone, visual's gone, mobile is gone, sex is gone. There's nothing but these thoughts and dreams and hallucinations. Say, how long was I out there, in the swamp?" "Were you in a swamp?" "You didn't know that? In a swamp. The sunlight barely reached down. I almost died. Even now, it's weaker than it used to be. Or else my memory is failing. I got lost, coming back, after the great Telepathic Conference we held, we and the Chinese missiles, above the Pacific. We could talk to each other without the voice tapes. No language barrier, either. They sent me back, headed for Houston. Something went wrong on the way. My eyes, I think. Never any good to start with. Hell of a thing. Here I'd been an observer, you know, watching that famous insertion. And next thing you know, some little wire must have burned up. Look rna. No arms, no legs, no eyes. And no sex, either. They controlled that from someplace central. Dole you out an orgasm every now and then. Obedience earned it for you. Good boys get to do whoopee. But something got Central early in the war. Get the picture? Johnny?" "Here I am," Jack said and pounded on the hull. "You feel that?" "Faintly, old friend. I hear the vibrations. I can't feel anything on the outside. Feeling's all gone." "What about inside," Jack asked. "Your explosive charge -- is that in good shape? Could you... still explode?" "Don't be shy," Frankie said. "I know I'm a bomb. We found that out after a while. Telepathy,' you know. We could feel our buddies dying. Odd sensation, filled with sex desire. You believe in reincarnation?" "Sometimes, Frankie." "Well, I do," the missile said. "I've been trying to get myself killed. Now I'm not so sure. A guy has to have a friend. Are you there, friend?" "I'm here, right next to you," Jack soothed. "I asked about your insides. ' ' "You sure did, Johnny, and I plutonium don't mind telling you. I think it's still all there. I check every now and then. Guy in my condition, he's got to know about his death. You know what I mean? That's all I've got going for me. I need a good impact on the nose of this thing. Set off the electrical impulse to start the fusion, drive the mass together. Critical mass. Hey, man. The last big orgasm." "Did you talk these people into dropping you?" "Did I? I tried. But I'm blind as a bat. They thought I was God, and I sort of went along. Told them to drop me and I'd come out. Savage types, would you say? Like those Palestinians I helped insert. But don't tell the press. You're not press, are you?" "No. I'm just a retired guy. "Good. Don't tell them we helped with the fighting. Not supposed to do that. Observers just observe. Get it?" "I get it." "Oil shortage still critical? Is there still a shortage?" "Not that I can tell," Jack said. He glanced about involuntarily. Phoenix lay there, a dark crowding of oddly arranged pods. The streets wound around and around in a spiralling coil toward the nub of the city, lines on a conch shell, and this square the center of the world. "You don't really want to die," Jack said. "I don't? Maybe I don't. But it sure is boring in here. You can't believe what it was like, in the swamp. It gurgled the whole time. I must have been down there more than a year." "Would you believe a century?" "What?!" "Two and a half centuries?" "Jesus. But... but then how come you know the things you these savages?" "Don't fret about that," Jack said. "Can you open your hull? I'd like to look inside you, look at your charge. Can you give me access?" Frankie hesitated. The wind was gusting. "You're my friend, aren't you?" "I'm your friend, Frankie. Here's what I'll do for you. I'll fix your eyes again -- if they can be fixed. And I'll keep you company. Who knows, I might even find a way to give you sex again. But you've got to help me. You're hanging in a tower in the middle of a city. If they drop you, you'll get what you want. You'll die and go to paradise. But so will all the people around here -- and for miles around. You don't want that kind of orgasm, do you?" "Wait a minute!" Frankie said. The baritone had no emotional toning, but Jack sensed challenge in the words. "Just a little minute, friend. Do you think I care? You think I give a damn? Haven't I done my share? Who are these people, anyway? I can't see a soul. What gives you the right to tell me how to die. I get it. you say? Well, let me tell you something, buddy. You guys were No soap, old friend. Are you there? Johnny?" Jack stood on the platform and didn't say a word. "Johnny? For crying out loud, say somthing." Jack said nothing. "Johnny, please. No offense. Look. I'm opening the panel for you. See, I'm your friend. I trust you. Say something." "I'm watching, Frankie," Jack said. He observed a straight crack in the silvery hull. It grew larger as a piece of the metal slid smoothly away to the inside. He stepped closer and Jooked in. "It's too dark to see inside," he said. "I'll make you a light." A glow illuminated masses of componentry. "Explain what I am looking at," Jack said. "The charge is that flat octagon on the right," Frankie explained. "Or maybe, from your perspective, it's on the left. I don't know my spatial arrangements. The gyro is shot. See it? Johnny?" "I see it, Frank." "All right, buddy. Now, on the left, or maybe it's on the right -- " "Frankie, that tiny little thing? That's the charge?" "Charge? Did I say charge? I meant the trigger. It's a fusion trigger. It's small, all right. Progress, you know. Just a bunch of mirrors and a vacuum. Stop that. It feels like a tickle." "It's welded in there," Jack said. "How can I get it out." "It just looks like a weld, old friend. Electrostatic adhesion. I can snap it loose for you -- if I want to." "Snap it, then." "I'll snap it when I know I can trust you. Can I trust you, Johnny? Johnny? Johnny!... Sure, I can trust you, there, see? I snapped it loose for you. Now you've got it, Johnny. You've got my manhood. I gave you everything I've got. My death is all I've got to give. Get it? johnny, I love you, see? I love you. Hey, Johnny!" "I'm here, Frank. I'm looking at this thing. What would happen if they dropped you now? Any chance for a big bang?" "No way," Frankie said. "Like I told you. I gave you my manhood. Without that trigger, no critical mass. Need that fusion to melt the walls to suck the hot stuff into the center by the inertial. Figured that out, in the swamp. All dispersed now, between my parts, the stuff. Iridium walls. Safe as anything. Johnny?" "I'm here, Frankie. I'm with you. Now listen. It's night time right now, and I need light to work on you. You go to sleep now, and tomorrow we'll talk again. I'll work on your eyes, first thing. Okay?" "Don't leave me," said the mellow baritone, without emotional toning. But underneath Jack sensed a growing anguish. EX Alans shepherd strode down the corridor in the wake of the soldier who had come to get him. Anger boiled inside his head and guts. The messenger had interrupted his dinner preparations. Shepherd seldom made such preparations, but this time was unique. Zeronica had sent him an invitation to attend the celebration banquet. A written invitation. His secretary, a Dingbat named Birdie, had read it out to him in her ancient cackle. Then Birdie had smiled slyly. But Shepherd had fewer hopes than the feathery fern. Zeronica couldn't be trusted. Nevertheless, the invitation kindled hopes he had seen turn to ash. But Godbod only knew! Perhaps she had changed her mind and would fulfill him, now, at last. The matter with the needle had worked out after all. And the other day, looking up at the tower his men had built in record time, Zeronica had praised his skill in words of startling kindness. Tomorrow the world would see 'epiphany.' Birdie had told him what the word meant: God's appearance among men. The voice inside the needle would show itself in fire and lightning, thunder and smoke. Phoenix would become a shrine, the magnet of a grand, yearly pilgrimage. Now it was moments before the bell would call the banquet. The interruption came at a terrible time. A scribe, the soldier had said. What sort of scribe could convince the guard to violate orders. No business. Not tonight. Some scribe. Terribly persuasive fellow, Well, he would be persuading rats tonight. In the dungeon. Insolent creature. Moments later Shepherd sat down behind a table and they showed the scribe in, closed the door. He was dark, slender, and had long, sensitive fingers. Moist eyes looked at Shepherd from beneath the shadow of a black hat's rim. A golden earring dangled from his ear and reflected the shine of torches stuck into wrought iron holders in the wall. Shepherd felt a rippling shudder pass down his back, an unpleasant sensation of tingling cold. The eyes across the table infused him with fear; so did the hint of a smile around those sensuous lips. His own steady face stiffened. He laid his hands on the table and stared at the scribe. "What can I do for you," he said, using words much milder that he had intended. The scribe sat down without an invitation. "I am told I must get your permission to see your mistress, the president-person." "That may be," Shepherd responded. " you get to see her. Which isn't sure at all." "I expect to see her. Immediately," the scribe said, smiling. "What makes you think that?" Shepherd challenged. So doing, he felt uncertainty in his stomach. The scribe sent out vibrations. They cramped Shepherd's innards. "I have information of the greatest urgency." "Then tell me" "I'll tell the president-person and no one else." "In that case you might die with your news," Shepherd said coolly. He hoped the scribe had heard the threat. "I don't think so," the scribe said. "Does the name Theodore Aspic mean anything to you?" Shepherd shook his head. He felt the chill again. It ran down his back. Someone had walked across his grave, or some such nonsense. "Did you know that the ritual machinery installed in the upper portion of Plutonium has been destroyed?" "What ritual machinery?" Shepherd asked. He wondered what in the world the man wanted and why he felt so nauseous. Could this scribe be a magician? "Try to make sense, man. I'm busy. I can't fool around with you all night." He cocked his head, listening for the bell. "Then take me to your mistress," said the scribe. "So far you haven't given me a good enough reason." "Does the name John Clark ring a bell?" Shepherd shuddered. The man across the table had an uncanny look. He seemed familiar in some way. Was he someone Shepherd had met in his bandit days? Was he someone Shepherd had killed! The thought gave him another cold shiver. He didn't believe in ghosts. No way. "I have vital information about the brain-missile," the scribe said. "The what!" "The bomb." "What bomb?" "The bomb you've got hanging in the tower. The talking bomb." "Godbod?" "Godbod, if you like." The scribe reached into a satchel he carried at his side. He took from it an odd-looking something. An Old Order mystery. He laid it on the table. It was flat and had eight points. Reddish eyes seemed to be arranged on its surface. "What is that?" "It's a fusion trigger. You should know. You were a physicist once." Shepherd stared at the scribe. The man appeared to be sane, but his words were troubled and incomprehensible. "I took it out of... , Godbod tonight. I went up there and had a chat with it." "You're insane," Shepherd soldier looked in through the door. "Take this character and lock him t  up. "Just a minute," the scribe said calmly. He showed no fear or excitement. "Your mistress will want to know why Godbod gave me this precious part of himself. Don't you think? What if nothing happens tomorrow when your people cut the straps and the thing falls down. Wouldn't you want to know? How will you explain that?" "Get out of here, Franklin," Shepherd shouted at the soldier. Darkness surrounded him. He didn't know what he was doing. The door closed. "Look," he said, pointing a finger at the scribe. "If this is a trick, I'll personally see to it that..." His finger wobbled threateningly. "No trick," the scribe said. Shepherd stared at him. In the silence between them, nausea groped toward his stomach. "Five minutes," he said. "You'll have five minutes with her. No more. And you better make sense." He rose. Hollowly, through the intricately arranged walls of the Presidential pod, he heard the chime calling the banquet. "Five minutes," he repeated, and he pointed to a sand-clock on the corner of the desk. He watched while the scribe put avv ay the mystery. Then he left the r oom. The scribe followed him. plutonium Shepherd looked over his shoulder. "And what do they call you?" "Tankers Jack," the scribe said. Shepherd turned the name this way and that. It had no echoes, meant nothing at all, had no effect. He had never heard of a Tankers Jack, nor of a Tanker. The man was not some enemy's son, no matter how familiar he looked. But he was persuasive, dammit. And oddly frightening. His eyes ruled Shepherd's, much as Zeronica's did. Shepherd, though aware of this, wouldn't let the knowledge surface. The presidential pod was a multi-structure. They had to pass from the eastern to the central portion of it by way of a covered bridge. In its middle Tankers Jack suddenly stopped, his hand on Shepherd's sleeve. His right hand described the panorama of rooftops with a wave. "Fancy meeting like this again," he said. "In such a setting." "I've never laid eyes on you before," Shepherd said with fright. He jerked his arm out of the scribe's hand. Phoenix lay before them. The tower loomed immediately up ahead, a wooden structure so skillfully erected and in such record time. Shepherd glanced up and saw Godbod' s dull shimmer up there, half hidden by sections of timber. The moon, having risen high, enhanced its silvery glow. "Your memory fails you, Alans Shepherd," the scribe said. "But never mind that. I wonder if your mistress will remember me." Shepherd shuddered. He walked on, trying" to shake off the eerie feeling. Deep down he experienced a tiny despair, a dark kind of knowing. It came into his being through chinks in the armor of his moral darkness. He stood before some kind of test, but didn't know it. To him it was simply a wrench of nausea. They entered the banqueting chamber some moments later. The guests had not yet settled down. Zeronica throned in a sitting-basket hung from the ceiling by a chain. Senators and congressmen stood about her drinking beer from mugs. Her posture was regal. Her hands rested on the basket's arms, her gaze was steady. One of her legs was pulled up on the silken cushion. Shepherd approached over the burned tile floor. His spurs rang like bells. Suddenly the scribe broke from his side and, with quickened strides, went ahead. Shepherd saw him bow before Zeronica. He did so in a strange way. His hat swept the floor in an exaggerated gesture. One of his legs was pulled back, the other stuck forward. "Zeronica," the scribe said. His voice was melodious and rang through the hall. "I have sought you for centuries, my lady. It is a pleasure to see you so well -- and so beautiful." Congressmen and senators, ladies-in-wait, and even the beeman servants preparing the tables to the right, the small one and the large one, looked up and stared with surprise at this common, shabby figure, dressed like a vagabond. Shepherd made haste to reach Zeronica' s side. "Mistress," he began, "I apologize for this..." She silenced him with a wave off her hand. Her eyes were fixed on the dark face of the scribe. Fear stabbed Shepherd as he watched her. Something in her features had softened, perhaps in response to the scribe's small smile. "Step closer," she said to the man. "I take it you're not from these parts. Did I meet you on my tour?" "You met me on your tour," the scribe affirmed. "Don't I look familiar?' ' Zeronica hesitated, a finger in front of her lips. "Y-yes," she said. "Something about you does seem . , . But, frankly, I don't recall our meeting." "That may be so," the scribe came back. He tossed his head and made the earring glimmer. Then he looked down. "I am an inconsequential scribe, my lady. If I were to suggest to you that we were close friends once, it would be presumption on my part, however true it may be." He looked up. "I sought you out, lady, drawn by my memories of you -- and also because I heard of your interest in Old Order mysteries. Over the years, I have become a master -- " "Mistress," shepherd broke in harshly, "this scribe came to me and demanded -- ' ' "Shush," Zeronica said, her eyes; on the scribe, "A master of the mysteries? she asked. "If I may be so bold," the scribe said. "In that case," Zeronica said, "perhaps you would care to take dinner with me?" "Your suggestion is my wish," the scribe said, bowi deepest it     Darkness closed in over Shepherd as dinner advanced. Until this day he had hoped, however small the hope, that Zeronica would someday be his. She had shown little interest in him. But she had scorned other men as well -- which had reassured him. But what he saw tonight made his heart heavy. Waves camp together over his head. Upon his entrance into the room, Shepherd had noticed the small table, some distance from the large one, with two couches positioned side-by-side along its low, triangular surface. Despite the scribe's disturbing presence, he had spied that table, off to the side, and a thrill had passed through his bowels, despite the nausea. He had divined, in a flash, that she had meant to dine with him. Alone. With him, with Alans Shepherd, the guest of honor at this banquet celebrating epiphany. He had brought the Godbod. He deserved her special favor. But now, cruelly, she lay on one couch and he lay on the other. He, the scribe. The creature called Tankers Jack. As for Shepherd -- whistling beemen had brought an extra couch for him. They had placed it at the big table. Where the senators and congressman reclined between chattering ladies-in-wait. Zeronica behaved oddly, and the talk at Shepherd's table turned around that subject. The high-placed guests threw Shepherd furtive glances as they gossiped. They knew the couch had been meant for him. Now they saw Zeronica giggle lr  an uncontrolled way. Then again Plutonium her eyes were fixed on the scribe's dark features as he spoke. Only his golden ring seemed to move. He mesmerized her. She forgot to eat. But then, thinking he had bound her long enough, the scribe made lively gestures and jokes. Then she laughed again and reached for morsels of food on her plate. The sequence repeated and went on and on. As hours passed, the company grew restless. Demons Howard fell asleep on his couch, a fat senator. A lady-in-wait shook him from time to time to stop his raspy snores. Others drank gloomily and wondered when she might announce the end. Her banquet speech had not been delivered. She seemed to have forgotten the occasion. Instead her shiny blondness moved closer and closer to that dark head adorned by moist eyes and sensuous lips. One or two torches went out and smoked black against the wall. Only the s chief beeman stayed around. He sat on a chair inside the door that led to the kitchen. His bony legs were visible; the rest of him leaned back, out of sight. He probably dozed. Shepherd couldn't stand another minute of it. He rose abruptly. He left without the customary farewells to the hostess. His spurs rang angrily on tile. He wheeled about at the door, but Zeronica hadn't even turned her head. He meant to go back to his quarters. His few belongings would be quickly packed. He would call the men whom he controlled, his original band, and before dawn's rust rose above the horizon, he would leave Phoenix, shaking dust from his boots. But halfway down the corridor that led to the bridge that led to east pod where his own quarters lay, Shepherd stopped and turned around. Curiosity ate him like acid. His eyes hungered to see the end. A gorgeous fury assailed him. On the way back, without thinking, he took a curved sword from a wall rack and slipped it inside his tunic. Then, stealthily, he inserted himself into a children's corridor. By the time he found a spot where the wall, broken by wooden trellis work, gave him a view of the banquet hall, most of the guests had taken leave. They had followed Shepherd's example. Only Dentons Howard snored loudly, without inhibitions, on the couch. The chief of the beemen cleared the table. Then he also took his leave. Shepherd watched, his breath a hot reflection from the trellis. They rose at last and walked away, hand in hand. Shepherd followed them, using children's corridors. His boots, left behind, couldn't reveal his movements. His naked feet stirred the dust of these unused pathways. He lay on his stomach one floor above, eyes before another trellis. He tried to pierce the darkness. But he could see nothing below. Only his ears told him that they made love beneath him on the presidential bed. He began to sob without sound. Later he listened to silence, then to whisperings. The curved blade pressed against his body beneath the tunic, but he didn't have the heart to pull it out, to plunge into the dark room where they breathed, to avenge Zeronica's treachery once and for all. Something paralyzed his hands and will. A little gap in hid moral darkness allowed light tdl shine through. The light came from her and also, oddly, from him. When, after a while, they beganj again and he heard her soft moaning! like a fist in his gut, Shepherd rose and retraced his steps, his desolation hardening to ice. Yes, ice. Go home, bandit. Go home. His sobs subsided and his eyes dried out. He put on his boots again and went away across the bridge. His feet tinkled like bells. He decided that he couldn't harm her. But neither would he let her keep the gift that he had brought her, the ultimate gift, the last thing that she had said she needed to put Phoenix in the center of the world. Grim of face, he roused his men and whispered orders. They sat up in their beds and rubbed their eyes. Then, groggily, they got up and groped for clothing.    Jack woke suddenly. He had been dozing. Zeronica's arm lay across his chest, and her shallow breath moved against his shoulder. He fell anguish, although he didn't know its source. It seemed that a voice had exploded in his head. A baritone had called for Johnny. Dreaming of the missile? He lis-j tened but heard nothing out of the ordinary. She slept beside him. Somewhere a cricket chirped. Nevertheless, Jack thought he heard the echoes of dying sound. He began to move but gave it up. Blissful peace bathed his senses. Hdf was at home, at last. She was hil now, as she had been meant to be.?  This scan was produced and distributed free by the Pulpscans Group. If you paid for this digital document or a compilation of this and other digital pulps, you got ripped off. But you can still have this and more than a thousand more pulps for free by coming over and joining us at pulpscans yahoogroups . com. Their lives, separated by his karmic fall, had entwined again. He knew now how to win her favor, the Cosmic Flower's soft embrace. Kindness woulcT do it. Love of man and beast. Love, even of brains encased in steel and wire. He heard a noise and stiffened. There was no help for it. He had to rise. He disentangled himself carefulroom was chilly and the tile floor downright cold. He was groping toward the wall, expecting a window in that direction, when he heard shouts and the drum of horses' hoofs on cobble-stone. He ran the rest of the way, found the window, and threw open the heavy shutters. The window opened on Phoenix Square. Moonlight bathed the scene. He saw motion to his right. Horses disappeared into one of the coiling streets, two lines of horses stretching some kind of netting between them. Something gleamed like silver between the lines. Then they were gone. Jack looked up into the tower, filled with sudden insight. Frank J. Harmon, brain-missile, Godbod, had disappeared. Jack swallowed. He knew, suddenly, that he had lost a friend. It never came to a military clash between Phoenix and Plutonium. A delegation of the Hierarchy went through the city sniffing for the needle while the monkish thousands at in siege outside the city walls. Satisfied, at last, Plutonium believed a man called Tankers Jack who had done the negotiating. They went away to trail one Alans Shepherd, plutonium thief. Many years later word filtered back of a great new cult that had been started high up north, where the ice begins. The place attracted many pilgrims who went there to consult the oracle. Godbod had appeared to men, the rumors said. You asked it a question and it sometimes answered and sometimes it said nothing. But you paid for your chance anyway and you had one turn of the sand-clock to make a go of it. When blind men came, the oracle always spoke, and many blind men settled in the region and sold their services. The guardians of Godbod grew powerful and rich. They built a great temple and called it Harmony. People said that it was gold and silver, inside and out, and that its bells were heard for many kemits, round about, echoing over the ice. The president-person of Phoenix married the scribe called Tankers Jack. She made him chief of her special priesthood, and they worked behind a high fence with all manner of mysteries. In a ceremony in Phoenix Square, right in front of the presidential pod, Zeronica changed her name again. She named herself Monica. She sent out runners to advertise the fact. They explained the meaning of her name so even dullards would get the picture. They lived happily ever after, she and he. And after... and after... and after... like figures between double mirrors, getting ever smaller in a stream of time.  ,. #  Coffer! Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! Get # full months of the finest science fiction writing at a special low introductory rate. Less than # #th of a solar credit -- just # U.S.Earth money with the coupon below brings you mind-expanding ideas and far-out authors alive today! Plus the unusual free gift described below to let you project the future for years and years from now. Just attach your check or money order to coupon and mail it to us to start your subscription and receive your gift. This time-computer dial lets you look backward and forward in time! Were you born on a Tuesday? What day will your birthday fall on in #? Will Christmas be on a weekend in the year #? You'll have the answers at your fingertips with this perpetual calendar! Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. this coupon to take advantage of this special subscription  gift offer from Name: Street : City: State; Zip: Mail With Remittance To: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # uddenly we're all going to rises, then falls drastically in a die. Look around you: a spate of books, such as The Doomsday Book, Eco-Doom, and the like; and organizations such a "Friends of the Earth" and "Concerned Citizens" all say the same thing: Western civilization has been on an energy and resources spree, and it is time to call a halt. The arguments are largely based on a book called The Limits to Growth. Written by a management expert for a group of industrialists calling themselves The Club of Rome, Limits may be the most influential book of this century. Its conclusions are based on a complex computer model of the worldsystem. The variables in the model are population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable resources. The results of the computer study are grim and unambiguous: unless we adopt Zero-Growth and adopt it now, we are doomed. The doom can take one of several forms, each less attractive than the others. In each case population human die-off. "Quality of Life" falls hideously. Pollution rises exponentially. Earth is a closed system, and we cannot continue to rape her as we have in the past; and if we do not learn restraint, we are finished. We have no alternative but Zero-Growth if we are to survive. One ZG advocate recently said, "We continue to hold out infinite human expectations in a finite world of finite resources. We continue to act as if what Daniel Bell calls 'the revolution of rising expectations' can be met when we all know they cannot." puter model is the main inspiration for Zero-Growth, goes much further. Birth control alone cannot do the job. It is clear from his model that only drastic reductions in health services, food supply, and industrialization can save the worldsystem from disaster. Behind all those numbers there is veloping countries shall remain in grinding poverty -- forever. And the West, under ZeroGrowth, has only two choices: impoverishment through really massive sharing with the developing counties -- which must, however, cease to develop; or to retain wealth while most of the world remains at the end of the abyss. Neither alternative is attractive, but there's nothing else we can do. Failure to adopt Zero-Growth is no more than selfishness, robbing our children for our own pleasures. So say the computers. Hr   I can't accept that. I want not only to survive, but to do it with style. I want to keep the good things of our high-energy technological civilization: stereo, rapid travel, easy communications, varied diet, plastic models, aspirin, freedom from toothache, science-fiction magazines, Selectric typewriters, Texas Instruments pocket computers, fanzines, fresh vegetables in mid-winter, lightweight backpack and sleeping bag -- the myriad products that make our lives so much more varied than our grandfathers'. Moreover, I want to feel right about it; I do not call it survival with style if we must remain no more than an island of wealth in the midst of a vast sea of eternal poverty and misery. Style, to me, means that nearly everyone on Earth should have hope of access to some of the benefits of technology and industry. That's a tall order. The economists say it can't be filled. My wishes are admirable but irrelevent. Their models prove that. I might accept their verdict if they had modeled the right system; but in my judgment they did not. They assumed that we live on Earth. If that were true, that Earth were a closed system, the only place or planet available to us -- then ZG might be the best of a number of unpleasant alternatives. But suppose it isn't. Suppose the economists have left something out of their models...    Arthur Clarke once said that when a greybearded scientist says something is possible, believe him; when he says that it's impossible, he's very likely wrong. That, I think, is as true in this case as anywhere else. When the economists, those propounders of "the dismal science," tell us that we are doomed, it's time to take a fresh look at the problem. Forrester's models are basically ready to kill us through lack of food, lack of non-renewable resources; and pollution. If we can lick those problems we're all right. Oh, sure: there's obviously a finite limit to the number of people the Earth can support. I know how to manipulate exponential curves as well as anyone, and if we project population growth mindlessly ahead we soon come to the point at which the entire mass of the universe is converted into human flesh. So what? It isn't going to happen; population growth always declines with increasing wealth. But there are powerful religions, whose adherents control large porions of the globe, that condemn birth control. Well, yes. And I'm no theologian. But I cannot believe that any rational interpretation of scripture commands us to breed until we literally have no place to sit. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." I will leave theology to the theologians; but the command was, "Multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it;" and surely there must come a time when that has been done ? When there can be no doubt that we have been sufficiently fruitful? And surely dominion over the wild things of the earth does not mean that we are to exterminate and replace them? Surely even those of the deepest faith may without blasphemy wonder if we are not rapidly approaching a time when we shall indeed have replenished and subdued the earth? I cannot believe that we will continue to breed until we have destroyed our world: and frankly, I think of no more certain way to insure that the developing countries continue to increase in population than to condemn them to eternal poverty through Zero-Growth. So let's leave the bogey-man of unlimited population expansion. We have the technology to limit family size when, inevitably, there comes the time when everyone, no matter what his religious conviction, believes that the earth has been replenished and subdued.    Our next problem is food production. Surprisingly, it's nowhere near as critical as is generally supposed. Now whoa! Please don't write me about ail the starving people in the world: I do know something about the situation. I've also interviewed senior officials of the UN's Food and Agriculturural Organization. There are very few countries that could not, over a ten-year average period, raise enough food to give their populations more than enough to eat. The catch is the "over a ten-year period" part. The average crop production is sufficient, but drought, flood, and other natural disasters can produce famine through crop failures over a one, two, or three year period. You see, there's no technology for storing the  surplus. The West has known for a long time about seven fat years followed by seven lean years, but it took us centuries to come up with reliable ways to meet the problems of famine. Our solutions have been two-fold: storage of food, and weaving the entire West into a single area through efficient transportation. Drought-stricken farmers in Kansas can be fed wheat from Washington, beef from the Argentine, and lettuce from California. But this takes industrial technology on a large scale. Even providing mylar linings for traditional dung-smeared grain storage pits in Africa is a high-technology enterprise. Next, we waste hell out of land. Let's look at a few numbers. A hard-working person needs about # "large" Calories a day, or # x # s gram-calories. The sun delivers # gram-caloriesper square centimeterper minute onto the Earth. Say about # of that gets through the atmosphere, and that the sun shines about # hours (# minutes) per day on the average. Further assume that our crops are about I  efficient in converting sunlight to edible energy. Simple multiplication shows that a patch # meters on a side will feed a man -- about a quarter of an acre. Ok. I'm being unfair. But I'm not all that far off; you should see what my greenhouse, # meters on a side, can produce in hydroponics # Eighth Ave., New York. N. Y. # #-#  tanks; and there's no energy wasted in distribution of the food. I do use electricity to run the pumps, but I'm lazy; hand work would do it. The joker, of course, is that I use chemical nutrients that take a lot of energy to manufacture. My greenhouse is made of aluminum tubing and mylar plastic with nylon reinforcements. All high-technology items, as are the fungicides I use, and even the water-testing kit that lets me balance pH in the nutrients. Hmmm. We're back to industrialization again. Now it's true enough that if the average Indian farmer could manage the productivity level reached by the Japanese peasant of the #th Century', India would have no food problems; but it's not likely he'll get there without industrial help; and meanwhile the Japanese have had to move far ahead of their #th Century output levels. But it should be obvious that sufficient levels of industrialization and technology will overcome the food production problem for a long time to come. To get ridiculous about it, if # of New York City were covered with greenhouses, they would feed about # of the NY population; # greenhouses in Los Angeles would feed ## of our LA population. Clearly food production per se isn't going to be a limit to growth for a good long time; food production will be limited by an enforced halt in industrialization and technology.  Hr  So now we come to the binding point. Our bottleneck is the penalties associated with industrialization. If we can industrialize without polluting ourselves to death, or without running out of nonrenewable resources, then we can all get rich; we can have survival with style. But how can we do that? In a series of articles in the "Other Magazine" (you know, the one with rivets), my friend G. Harry Stine described what he called The Third Industrial Revolution. Astute readers may even have noticed similarities between Harry's articles and my stories; as indeed they should, for Harry's articles were one of the most exciting events of my life. Oh, sure; intellectually I knew that we could do all sorts of marvelous works in space; but Harry brought it home to me. His articles gave the feel of space industrial operations. In my judgement his phrase "Third Industrial Revolution" should become as standard a term as "industrial revolution" is now. Should ; and I hope will; but it's not inevitable. The ZeroGrowth movement may strangle the Third Industrial Revolution in its cradle. Anyway, I'm pleased to say that Putnam's is bringing out The Third Industrial Revolution, by G. Harry Stine, about the time this article will be published; and I recommend it to every reader who's at all concerned about the future. Harry argues that when it's steam-engine time, there will be steam engines; and when it's spaceindustry time there will be space industries. There I disagree; space operations are so capital-intensive -- that is, require such enormous initial investments -- that they're different from either steam engines or computers. By their nature, space industrial operations require access to space; and access is not available to the back-yard inventor, or even the fabulously rich eccentric. If I invent a better mousetrap, I can find an investor rich enough to build it; but for space industry there's no firm or consortium of firms that can come up with the initial investment. If private enterprise ever gets access to space, the game's over; SO Lorillard # You'll stay for the taste. learning: The Surgeon General Has Determined 'tat Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. Alive with pleasure ' #I ,-'-W  Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health. : --  we'll get the Third Industrial Revolution whether we want it or not; but if the anti-technology chaps have their way, the Shuttle will be turned into new busses for transporting children across town, school lunches, higher welfare payments, compulsory seat belts in automobiles, subsidies for tobacco growers, and public campaigns to "fight nuclear pollution." Let's assume that somehow we get to space, though; how does that help us with industrialization? How will that enable us to survive with style? From here on, while I will keep them simple and work it so that you don't have to follow them to understand my conclusions, I'm going to have to use some mathematics; in particular I must introduce a way to measure and speak precisely about energy. The basic energy measurement is the erg. It's an incredibly tiny unit; about the amount of energy used up when a mosquito jumps off the bridge of your nose. In order to deal with meaningful quantities of energy, we have to use powers-"' ten notation. Example: # #  #; # #  #; and # # is I followed by # zeros. The table is included to give some feel for the numbers. Mosquito taking flight I Man climbing one stair ,# # Man doing one day's work # x # # exploding # x # # US per capita energy use, # # X # # Conversion one gram hydrogen to helium...# X # # Saturn # Rocket # # One megaton # x # # Total annual energy use, Roman Empire # # Krakatoa # # Annual output, total US installed electric power system, # # x # # World electric power produced # # x # # Thera explosion (largest single energy event in human history) # #S Total present global energy use, per annum # # Solar Flare # #I Annual solar output # x # # Nova # # Quasar, lifetime output # #I Big Bang # # celerate one gram at one centimetersecondsecond over a distance of one centimeter. We're concerned about nonrenewable resources and pollution, right? Let's go to space and solve both problems. Probably the worst offender in both categories is metal production; give us enough iron and steel, copper, aluminum, zinc and lead, and surely we'll have our problems licked. After all, it's mine tailings that produce some of the really horrible pollution; copper refineries that poison so many streams; and those belching steel mills that make Pittsburgh a sight to behold (if you can see it through the smoke); and it's processing all those metals that really bums up the energy. Give us metals free and clear, and the rest is easy. Give us enough metals and we'll industrialize the world. Besides, if we can do that in space, we can probably do anything else that has to be done. Consequently, I'll use metal production as my illustrative example. In #, the last year I have complete figures for, the United iron, steel, rolled iron, aluminum, copper, zinc, and lead. (I added up all the numbers in the almanac to get that figure.) It works out to # x # # grams of metal. Assume we must work with #-rich ore, and we have # x # # grams tons. It sure sounds like a lot. To get some feel for the magnitude of the problem, let's put it all together into one big pile. Assuming our ore weighs about # gramscubic centimeter, we have # X # # cm # , or a block # x # s cm on a side. Whoa. That's a block less than # kilometers on a side; something more than a cubic kilometer, less than a cubic mile. Or, if you like it as a spherical rock, it's less than two kilometers in diameter. There are something more the # rocks that size in the asteroids, and # ore isn't too bad a guess at their composition. Hmmm. But we're dealing with the world, whole world the per capita metal production of the US; since we export a good bit of ours anyway, surely that's enough. So we take pure metal, # x IQ # grams of # ore. That's # x # # cm # , or a rock # kilometers in diameter. There are well over # of those out in the Belt. Well, we won't run out of metals. Only, of course, we have to process those metals. For a moment forget it's out there in the Belt and imagine our rock is now in orbit around Earth. We want to get the metals out of it. Let's assume we do it by brute force. We're going to boil the whole rock. It takes about # calories per gram to boil iron. That's about the worst case for us, so we'll imagine our rock is entirely iron for the moment. It's going to take a lot of energy: # x # # ergs, to be exact. That's something like twenty thousand megatons. Where'll we get the energy? Hmm. The sun delivers at Earth square centimeter, and out in space we can catch that with mirrors. year, or # x # # ergscm #year out there. W'e need # x # # cm # of mirror, or one big round one # kilometers radius. Too big; even in zero-g that would be unwieldly. But a hundred of them # km radius doesn't sound so bad; or even a thousand at # kilometers radius. Of course my mirrors aren't going to be # efficient -- but then I'm not going to boil the whole blooming rock either. Nor do I seriously propose that we bring in the entire world metal supply from space, or that all that metal is simply consumed with no recycling. I'm looking for ballpark figures. Note, by the way, that there's been absolutely no pollution on Earth so far. All the waste is out there where it can't hurt us. But we've still got problems, of course. After all, my metals are not in Earth orbit; they're out there in the Belt and they've got to be moved here -- and that's going to take energy. So let's see what it does take. To get from Ceres to Earth you've got to have a change in velocity -- that's delta-vee -- of about # kilometers a second. By definition energy is mass given a velocity change, so we can quickly figure out how much energy we need by the forula KE  x i mv # , and come up with # x # #I ergs for every gram moved into Earth orbit from Ceres. We're going to move our whole rock, all # # grams of it, so we'll need # x # # ergs just to move it; about # of the world's present annual energy budget; not excessive in return for our entire metal supply. But # # ergs is a lot of energy, and we're far away from the sun; I can't use sunlight for that. (Maybe I can, but we'll rule it out.) So I need # one-megaton hydrogen bombs, which is quite a few; best I find another way. Note that if I don't find another way I may yet use the bombs; we needn't worry about radiation and fallout and the like out in space. My bombs are nothing compared to what the solar wind is doing during a flare. But how else might I work the transportation problem? I need an invention: hydrogen fusion, which gives me, if I've got an efficient reaction, # x # # ergs per gram of hydrogen "burned". I'm unlikely to have # efficiency, so you can multiply the number I come up with by whatever factor makes you happiest. If you think my system is # efficient, try that. I've already described back last July one kind of space drive that will work given fusion. So I apply my fusion-ion drive, and discover I need to fuse # x# s grams of hydrogen, which sounds like a lot, but it's really only # metric tons, not so very much after all; quite a small ship could carry it. It's the amount of hydrogen in something like a cubic kilometer of water once I've thrown away the oxygen (which surely isn't polluting!) and we've got a lot of cubic kilometers of water on Earth. I'll also need to get my hydrogen out to Ceres from Earth, which requires # X # #I ergs, less than a Saturn rocket can deliver, or the energy obtained in fusing another # kilograms of hydrogen. Clearly we're not going to run out of hydrogen for a long, long time. Even if we must go to deuterium -- "heavy" hydrogen -- we won't run short; and recall, there's likely to be some ice out there in space. We may not need to do all our hydrogen processing here on Earth. So. For the price of one to a few thousand cubic kilometers of water each year we've brought home all the metals we need to give the entire population of Earth as much metal as the US produced in #. If we do nothing else in space -- if we come up with no startlingly new processes as described by Harry Stine in his fascinating book -- we'll have licked pollution and dwindling resources, thereby letting the developing countries industrialize, and thereby whipping the food production crisis for a while. Sure: there's a limit to growth. But with all of space to play with, I'll be happy to leave the problem for my descendents of # years hence to worry about. I can hear the critics sputtering now. "But-but-but -- what does this madman thing he's doing ? Flinging numbers like that around! It's absurd!" Really? Remember, we fling quantities like Jhat here on Earth right now; and I've after all assumed that we're going to supply the whole world with metals at the rate we produce them from all sources -- including recycling -- here at ground level US of A. What's so absurd about it? Oh, no, we won't be operating on this scale for a few years; but then we weren't producing all those tons of steel back in # either. Even Forrester's worst crunch model doesn't finish us off before # -- a year in which we might very well be able to move asteroids around, boil them up for processing, and bring the resulting metals down for use on Earth. There's exactly as much time between now and # as now and #. Yes, we live on a finite Earth; but there's a whole solar system out there, just waiting for us to use it. We've only to lift our heads out of the muck to find not only survival, but survival with style. I think I'll continue this column next month. There's so much more we can do...  jOne Looking back, Bart could never clearly remember any part of his life before the day when the Ship first woke him from a long, artificially induced sleep, and guided him to the nursery to see the babies. That day and the first few that followed were very confusing to live through. The Ship's machines, working with paint and glass and light, had made the nursery spacious-looking and cheerful. Bart counted twentyfour cribs. To count babies would have been harder, because only those who happened to be napping were in their beds. The rest crawled or sat or toddled on the soft-tiled deck, sending up a racket and getting underfoot of their attending machines and images. The babies were all the same age, just about a year old the day Bart first saw them. They wore white diapers, and some had on green hospital gowns like Bart's only of course smaller. Bart was not tall for almost fourteen but he could easily lift one bare leg after the other over the low barrier the machines had placed to keep the little kids from tottering or crawling out of the nursery into the corridor. The corridor led in one direction to Bart's small private room and in the other -- so his memory, working in a new, selective way, informed him -- to the rest of the habitable Ship. The babies squalled, gurgled, blubbered, or took time out to stare in silence at the world. They made nothing much of Bart's coming in among them. The images that the machines kept projecting and moving around the infants were of solid-looking adult humans, speaking and smiling; they evidently took Bart to be just one more image. The babies reacted more strongly to the machines because of the physical contact they had with them. "Pick one up, if you wish," the Ship said in his ear. It was able to project its conversation so there was no way of telling just what direction the words came from. The Ship's voice sounded human, but not quite male or female, not quite young or old. Like a good obedient boy Bart bent to have a try at picking up a baby. The chubby belly felt cool against his hands above the papery diaper and the head of dark, scanty curls turned so that the liquid brown eyes could stare at him uncertainly. "See how the machines hold them," counseled the Ship. "Their arms are of basically the same form as yours." He shifted his grip. "The prime directives under which I operate are very clear. One human parent, adoptive or real, is necessary to the successful maturation of children; images and machines are psychologically inadequate for optimum results. Therefore, after receiving some elementary preparation for the role, you will serve as adoptive parent for the first generation of colonists. ' ' Colonists. The word evoked in Bart the abstract knowledge that the Ship had started from an orbit around Earth, and was outward bound to seed humanity somewhere among the stars. How long ago the voyage had begun, and whether he himself had witnessed that beginning, were questions that his memory could not answer. Nor did he feel any urgency attached to them. Somewhere in Bart's lost past he had learned that the Ship was to be trusted utterly and now he could wait patiently fpr a better understanding of what it meant by its announcement that he was to be a parent. Meanwhile he watched the infants, played a little with them, and tried to comfort and distract those who cried. It seemed to be the thing to do. The machines labored ceaselessly, patting, changing, feeding, washing, wiping up. Twice they dispensed cups of soup-like stuff for Bart to drink. There were no clocks to watch but he was certain that he had been in the nursery for hours. At last, one of the machines took him lightly by the arm and pointed back down the corridor whence he had come. When he had closed himself into his little plastic-walled bedroom the Ship's voice said: "You will be given a substantial breakfast when you wake again. That will be one standard year from now." Two He awoke as on the first day, as if from a sound night's sleep, and at once sat up to look over the rim of his bed, which curved around him like a padded bathtub, warm and dry and clean. Just how he was being put to sleep or awakened he didn't know, but certainly there was more to it than he could see or feel; somehow his gown had been taken off him while he slept and he was naked. There was a new gown laid out on the room's single small chair, or birthdays the same one, washed clean of baby shit and pablum, and he put it on after using the toilet and washing his hands and face. From a panel in the wall he got his promised breakfast, consisting of a warm, milky drink in a plastic cup, and a tray holding chunks of bread, the breadcrust hot and crunchy and with pieces of fruit and cheese inside. One standard year, the Ship had said... but his hands looked no bigger, nor did the muscles in his thin arms. His face looked no different in the wall mirror, and the fine tawny hair on his head had maintained its crewcut length. There were still no more than a couple of dozen brown pubic hairs curling at the bottom of his belly and he was sure he was no taller. When he got to the nursery, though, he could well believe a year had passed: it certainly had if these were the same kids. A few were in their beds as before, but now those lying stretched out almost filled the little cribs. The majority were running about, keeping their balance reasonably skillfully for the most part, and busy with a multitude of toys. They wore shirts now, and shorts or pants over their diapers. This time the babies were aware that Bart was more than just another image, and some of them took fright at first and clung to the machines. But he kept walking around and talking to them, as the Ship instructed him to, and soon they started to warm up to him. Again he spent the day in socializing, and this time shared the little kids' food when it was dispensed by the machines. Meatytasting, mildly chewy chunks of stuff, and harder, biscuit-like objects that came in both sweet and sour flavors, it tasted good enough to be adult fare. Last year -- yesterday -- the babies had been drinking from nippled bottles, but today they got water and colored drinks in little cups. Though he hadn't questioned the Ship on it, Bart was still thinking over the announcement that he was to be a parent. He could imagine himself at the head of an enormous dining table, all these kids, grown a little older, sitting round it, but beyond that his imagination was soon lost. He told himself to be patient; the Ship would provide explanations and instructions as they became necessary. The continual racket was wearying. By the time the babies were all bedded down for what must be their regular night's sleep, with the lights dimmed, he was ready to go to sleep himself. At a word from the Ship, he walked back yawning to his room. Three Again he seemed to be experiencing nothing more than an ordinary night of restful slumber, and again when he awoke he hadn't grown or gotten older. This time he found a pair of shorts and a pullover shirt laid out for him. After dressing and breakfast he walked to the nursery. Before he got there he could hear a year's worth of change in the children's voices, forming clear words now as they called to one another. When the new glass doors of the nursery opened to let Bart in, he saw that bigger beds had been installed, and the walls moved back to make more space for play. The kids looked different -- and bigger again, of course. After an initial shyness, not so intense as yesterday's, they all came crowding around Bart so that he walked through a little sea of waist-high heads. Here and there a bulge of diaper still peeped out of someone's shorts. "What's your name?" one tiny voice cried out, insistent above the babble of the others. "Bartley. Everyone calls me Bart." Who had called him that? Family? Friends? There were still no specific memories available. "What's yours?" "Armin." Or maybe Ermin was what the child answered. Bart wasn't sure if the speaker was a girl or a boy. The group seemed about evenly divided as to sex. Again he ate and played with them through the day. This time all accepted his presence unquestioningly before an hour had passed -- though he didn't get the feeling that any of them recalled his earlier visits. Today, he noticed, there were fewer projected images of adults about. A little girl who said her name was Deirdre brought him a wheeled plastic toy whose axle had come loose from its containing grooves. He forced it back into place, so the wheels could turn again, and Deirdre carried it off, after a machine had made her stand still until she said "Thank you, Bart." Counting as well as he could in the continuing melee, Bart decided that there were twelve girls and twelve boys in the group. After dinner, when the machines had begun to pack the kids off to their beds, the Ship said to Bart: "You may remain awake for a few more hours if you wish." He felt tired out, but not ready to sleep. "Maybe I'll read a book." "I will provide some in your room." Stretched out on his bed, he stared at a book for awhile without reading, then put it down and asked the air: "How long have I been here, in the Ship?" "I have edited your memories of your past life for good reason. Your past contains tragic and violent things. Nothing can be done about the past. We must work for the future and achieve a successful revised mission." "Are there any other people on board besides me and the little kids?" "None. Much depends on you." He lay there looking at the cover of The Young Detectives Visit Earth. Although his bed was comfortable and he was tired he didn't think he was going to be able to sleep. But he really had no choice. Four Again, either his shorts and shirt were washed for him as he slept or it was a clean new outfit that he found on the chair. Breakfast as before, and he was on his way. The books had been removed and there was nothing else to do. Two boys and two girls, grown bigger since he saw them last, were playing just inside the children's compound; Bart decided it couldn't birthdays. be thought of as a nursery any more. As he approached the four caught sight of him and jumped with excitement, calling out to others, their voices coming to Bart faintly through the heavy glass doors. As he entered it, Bart saw that their compound had been enlarged again. There were no more adult images in sight. Children came, hesitantly at first, from everywhere, some pedaling vehicles, others emerging from toy houses of multicolored blocks. "Hi, I'm Bart," he said to those who gathered close around. "Anybody remember me?" "The Ship told us you were coming to see us today," a bold little girl spoke as she pushed forward. "Look, look, see the picture I drew?" It was a row of a dozen or so little circle-faces, each the same size, with lines for hair and nose and eyes, and one large face above. "That's you." In a corner the artist's name stood in big shaky As the day went on Bart heard the names of all the other kids, though he remembered only a few. He spent his time in play with one group and another, and then read them all stories from a book about old Earth as they sat around him on the floor. When the Ship directed, he saw them off to bed. "Am I being a good enough parent, Ship?" "The revised mission plan is proceeding satisfactorily." Five All twenty-four of them were waiting for him excitedly just inside the heavy glass doors. This time they all remembered him. "We're five now, Bart!" "Ship says we can have a birthday party if we want -- " " -- like Billy and Lynn -- " It took him a while to figure out that Billy and Lynn were characters in some children's story the Ship showed them from time to time. Lynn and Billy were twins, back on Earth somewhere, and in one episode they had evidently enjoyed an elaborate birthday celebration, complete with cake, candy, and ice cream. "How old are you, Bart?" "Will you have a birthday with us?" "Sure. If the Ship will give us cake and things. Maybe we can have some real candles." "Yayy!" So they had the party, the Ship providing real candles and entrusting Bart with a lighter for them. The machines even brought forth small paper-wrapped toys as presents for all the five-year-olds. "Din'choo get a present, Bart?" "No, it's not my birthday." "When is?" "In about a couple of months." The precise date was something else still sitting undisturbed in his memory, with blank holes knocked all around it. "This was fun. Listen, maybe we can have another birthday party when I come back tomorrow. You'll all be six, if the Ship keeps me on the same schedule." "Tomorrow?" "Well -- next year. See, you and I are running on different schedules; I'm only awake one day every year. I expect the Ship'll put us on the same time schedule soon." "Next year?" Bart sighed, seeing that for them the difference between tomorrow and next year was not too clear. Especially the way he was talking. Six This year the difference in time schedules was much easier for them to grasp. So were a lot of other things. Again the compound in which the children lived had been transformed. Part of it had become what Bart recognized as a school, and everybody was busy at teachingmachine consoles when he arrived. The Ship's voice then declared a holiday for them all. "Let's have our birthday party!" a boy cried out. And after Bart had talked with them all, and read them a new story as the Ship directed, and had been shown through the school by his small friends, machines wheeled out a big cake. This time there were balloons as well as little gifts of toys and candy. "Isn't it your birthday too, Bait?" "Well, no. Mine's coming in about a couple of months... in two months and two days." "How old will you be?" "Fourteen." After the cake and ice cream was finished they had a good time playing games. The kids were awed by Bart's strength and speed and dexterity, and he taught them some of the skills he knew for games with balls and ropes and sticks. Now and then someone who got bumped hard in a game took time out to cry. Bart thought he could tell quicker and better than the machines just how serious the damage was. Seven Before the seventh-birthday party got started, Bart went through a period of rather intense questioning by a few of the kids; Fuad and Ranjan and Ora wanted to know what he was doing all the time they didn't see him, where and how he spent the year between birthdays. "I'm sleeping. The Ship can fix it so a person just sleeps all the time." "Huh," said Ranjan, doubtfully. "Why does it want you to sleep all the time?" asked Ora. Today she had a loose front tooth she kept wiggling with her tongue. "I don't know," Bart admitted, feeling foolish. "Don't you get hungry?" Fuad wanted to know. "No. I guess it's not like regular sleep. " Some vague knowledge of the process was available in his impersonal memory. "It's something like being frozen, only you never feel cold." This year the games v were rougher. When two or three of the boys grabbed Bart by the legs at once, they could tip him over. Back in his room alone after dinner, he asked: "Ship, am I really helping much, being a parent, if I just come out once a year? How long will I be on this schedule?" "You will not be on this schedule for any substantial portion of your lifetime. A definite time limit cannot be set now, but all computation on the matter is proceeding properly." He tried again a little later, before going to sleep, but got essentially the same answer. Eight When Bart walked into the schoolroom something like boy-girl war was going on, the place in disarray, the weaker or more timid children in tears, the more aggressive screaming insults at one another and hurling toys and writing materials back and forth as missiles, oveP bookshelves and teaching machines turned into parapets. Adult images had been brought out by the Ship and were calling sternly and uselessly for order, and outnumbered machines were shaking some of the worst offenders by the arm and lecturing. "Ship, can I help?" Bart cried. "Yes. Two boys have got to a lower deck and should be brought back up." Ship's voice was calm and methodical as always, though somewhat louder than usual to be heard plainly above the screaming. "My machines are busy, and it would be helpful if you went after the boys and got them to come up again. Go down the stairs at the end of the corridor to your right." It was a passageway he hadn't been in before, evidently one recently opened up by the ongoing enlargement of the living quarters. He found the two truants, Tang and Mai, without much trouble; there wasn't much of the lower level open to their exploration, only a loop of corridor sealed off by heavy glass doors at all other points where other passages intersected. The stair also was sealed where it went on down to still lower regions of the Ship. The boys were glad to see Bart they had seen enough of the sights down here, interesting though they were. Through the various sets of glass doors you could see other corridors stretching away for hundreds of meters at least. Many other doors were visible, some of which stood open to reveal static glimpses of rooms furnished for human life, but unused and empty of movement. The lights were dim in that large world outside the glass, and there was not a footstep on the dustless, polished-looking floors. "I wonder if anybody lives there," Mai had asked, nose against the glass. "Nobody does," said Tang. "Let's go back up." "Maybe we will someday," Mai said in a small thoughtful voice. Nine The war between the sexes was not raging today, but it still smoldered, as Bart could tell readily enough from the grimacing and hair-pulling and name-calling that flared sporadically during the day. The cake and ice cream lunch was a success, as usual, and the games were fun, though now he had to exert himself somewhat to outdo some of the other players. A girl and a boy had a brief argument about what mathematical formula should be used to calculate the volume of the basketball they were playing with, and with a start Bart realized that now some of these kids knew things, maybe important things, that he had never learned. And he was supposed to be their parent! Or was it possible he had misunderstood what the Ship was saying? These things still bothered him when the day was over and he had undressed and climbed back into his isolated bed. "Ship." "Yes."... nothing." He decided to let well enough alone. Ship rarely gave him a helpful answer anyway. And he wasn't really all that anxious to be a father, at least not until he was older. Ten Eating his usual breakfast, Bart felt for the first time a little anxious about meeting the people he was going to find waiting for him in the compound. If they were all another year older, they wouldn't be so much like small kids any more, but people with whom he would have to interact almost as an equal. He shook off his misgivings and walked out. The kids weren't enormously bigger today, but it was certainly time to celebrate their collective tenth birthday, and they reminded Bart of this right after their first whoops of welcome. They had a big calendar drawn on the wall now, and had been crossing off days, and there was no doubt that another year had passed. Today when several of the boys ganged up on Bart in a rough game they easily pushed him around. Not that there had been any plan on their part to gang up on him, or that they were not still impressed by his strength. And this year there were certain moments, talking to the girls, when, oddly, Bart felt almost bashful. Eleven Suddenly some of the boys, Baruch and Olen in particular, were almost as tall as Bart himself. And Deirdre and Sigrid were starting to round out into the shapes of women; only just starting, but you could tell the process had begun. Right in the middle of the cakeeating, the birthday party turned solemn, and there was a long sober discussion of early memories and hopes for the future. All of them except Bart shared as some of their major lifetime memories the things that he had seen during the last eleven days -- the old nursery, the parental images and the guardian machines, the toys and teaching devices. Of course he had missed the greater part of their history, but he had a sampling of it. They sat there soberly sipping their sweet party drinks and talking. When it came Bart's tum to recount his early memories, he explained that the Ship must have scrambled them for him in some way, erasing large sections. "I don't even know if I was raised out of the machines like you, or if my biological parents were on board, or if I was bom on Earth." No one could give him any help with those questions. The talk went on for a long, moody time before they got around to playing games. Twelve Bart found himself looking up at Baruch, and level-eyed at a number of the other kids. The Ship was allowing them more freedom now, and everyone except Trac, who had a stomach-ache, had come to meet Bart right outside his room, the doors of which could only be opened by the Ship. Even Tang was there, though hobbling on a broken leg he said he had got by falling two decks down a stairwell. Ship's medical machines had neatly fixed the bones and told him he was healing. Today the kids' collective attitude was at first so grown-up and businesslike that Bart was almost intimidated. They explained to him that they had just formed themselves into a society, modeled on old societies of Earth that they had studied through the teaching machines. Baruch had been elected president, and others chosen to fill at least half a dozen additional offices. Even the birthday party began in an atmosphere of formality, but things soon loosened up. Bait was still stronger than Baruch, and could outwrestle him with an effort. But stocky Kichiro was now slightly stronger than he. Thirteen Chao, this month's president, announced early in the morning that this year's party was going to be a thirteenth birthday celebration for Bart as well as all the others. All the others chorused agreement, and Bart went along without protest, though he knew full well he had passed his real thirteenth birthday many months ago. He had not the slightest idea whether there had been any party to mark the event, so he enjoyed this one as his due. All through the day the girls paid him a great deal of attention, to which he reacted confusedly, enjoying it all one moment and feeling tongue-tied and awkward the next. He could tell some of the boys were getting jealous. Every night recently he had been saying goodnight with the feeling of saying farewell, knowing that never again would he meet the same people he was leaving. Tonight he tried to stay with them, but one of the machines came and took him gently by the arm and led him from the group toward his room. He looked round at the other children's faces, and saw sympathy but no help, and knew he had to go. Fourteen Every morning now he went to greet some strangers, boys and girls he had heard about indirectly but had never seen before. They resembled other kids he had met yesterday, and had their names, but that was all. Their bodies were melting and altering almost while Bart watched, flesh inflating and stretching over elongating bones; boys' faces sprouting elementary whiskers while their voices deepened, girls' breasts growing, girls' legs curving and rounding to spell out disturbing secret messages in visual code. And today they could literally talk over his head. Bart was small for his age. That's what -- who was it? -- always used to say. During the party, right in the middle of the ice cream and cake, a fistfight broke out between Fritz and Kichiro. They slugged away at each other so hard that Bart saw he wouldn't be able to stand up to either of them for ten seconds. The machines just stood around like dummies and made no move to halt the fight. Fay, the current president, had to yell repeatedly to get other kids to step in and break it up. As soon as things had settled down a little, some of the kids began drifting out of the room in pairs, a boy and a girl together kissing and maybe pawing at each other as they left Bart felt strange and almost frightened. The kids that remained in the dining hall talked and giggled and talked, talked, talked. The conversation was about nothing important, but still it seemed important that it be going on. Edris came to sit near Bart and talk talk talk with him. A red ribbon tied up her brown hair, but a few strands fell loose down as far as the halter that covered her breasts. Solon got jealous and came over and started an argument. Soon he and Bart were trying to think up insults to call each other. Bart shoved Solon, who was not too big for him to think of fighting, and Solon punched Bart on the cheek, so his mouth started to bleed inside. Bart hit back, and then they grabbed each other and wrestled in deadly earnest to see who could get the other down. With furniture in the way they couldn't come to any clean conclusion. Bart saw that a couple of machines were hovering near, and Edris was watching with enjoyment. Pretty soon some of the big kids grabbed the combatants and broke up the fight. The social atmosphere was a little strained for the rest of the day, and Bart went back to his room earlier than usual, before the machines came to urge him along. He sat on his room's one chair, arms folded. "Ship, I'm not being a parent. What am I really supposed to be doing?" "Further instructions will be given you as required." "Are you still going to wake me up only once a year?" "The mission is proceeding according to its revised schedule." He got up and tried to walk out of the room again, but found the door immovable. He wondered if something vital could be wrong with the Ship. Might not its planning computers have broken down like so many common machines and be making hideously wrong decisions? Though his bland, smoothed-out memory suggested this was impossible, Bart went worriedly to bed. Sleep was still mechanically fast in coming. Fifteen Solon had grown alarmingly large and it was with relief that Bart saw him smile in a friendly if distracted way. The inside of Bart's mouth was still sore from yesterday but Solon said hello as if he didn't recall their fight at all. Bart's former opponent had other matters on his mind, and returned quickly to a conversation he was conducting in fierce whispers with Fritz and Himyar and one or two other boys. It was shortly concluded, and the bunch of them took off, running grimly and purposefully down a corridor. Bart looked around and realized there was no one left in the common room with him but half a dozen girls, most of whom looked worried. Galina and Vivian came over to Bart and started trying to explain. It seemed that the boys were now divided into two gangs, of six members each, and between the gangs existed something like open war. "They've been fighting this way off and on for months now," Galina told him. "Always getting black eyes and bloody noses. Today looks like it might be one of the worst. It started today over whether we should have another birthday party or not." Galina, who was rather plain, was solemn most of the time, usually giving the impression she favored sobriety and order. "And the trouble is that now half the girls have gotten involved too." Helsa and Lotis also came over, and the girls debated whether there was anything they could do to stop impending hostilities. All around them the Ship was quiet, ominously so, Bart felt. He stood by, feeling dangerously out of it all. He didn't even know the layout of the passages the girls talked about as they tried to guess where their male friends might be planning fights or ambushes. While the other girls kept on talking to one another, Lotis came to Bart and with a gesture got him to follow her off into the Ship. "Where're we going?" he asked, supposing some plan for peacekeeping or hiding out was being put into effect. "Something I want to show you." She was just barely taller than he, with straight black hair and Chinese eyes. Shortly they came out in a wide, open space, a meeting of corridors where, Bart saw, the kids had improvised a swimming pool. Decking had been taken up, and a room in the lower level flooded. Lotis pointed out how waterproof patching had been stuck in where necessary, and a water pipe tapped to fill the pool. The water looked deeper than a man's head, Bart was impressed, but somehow disturbed, too, that they had done this much on their own. "Didn't the machines do anything to stop you?" A flirt of her head dismissed the powers of the machines. "I'm going in. Do you know anything about swimming? People on Earth used to do it all the time. The records show them doing it in the oceans even." Lotis pulled off her scanty clothing and slid naked down into the water. She turned over on her back and paddled, smiling knowingly up at Bart while he stared down in helpless fascination. Female nudity was not among the things on which his memory could give him reassurance. His mind lurched in turmoil this way and that. Suddenly he heard running feet quite near at hand and turned to see a figure dash out of a side corridor. Fritz was bigger and stronger even than a year ago, but his eyes were wide and frightened; he scarcely looked at either Bart or Lotis, but came running around the pool as if pursued. He was. Kichiro and Basil and Mai came pounding after him, carrying bludgeons made of the unscrewed legs of chairs, their faces transformed in the fury of the hunt. Bart started to run too; he realized almost at once this was a mistake but it was too late -- someone, responding to his flight with instinctive pursuit, had grabbed him from behind and he was flattened on the deck beneath his captor. Kichiro had tackled Bart, while Basil and Mai closed in on Fritz. It sounded like all of them .were yelling. Fritz broke away and fled for another corridor, but Basil was too fast and blocked his path, Fritz lunged at him in desperation and before Basil could swing his club he was slammed up against the bulkhead in a choking grip. The club dropped from Basil's hand, and Bart, pinned on the deck under Kichiro's kneeling weight, could see the whites of his eyes seeming to expand. Mai stepped close to the struggling pair and earnestly swing his plastic chair leg. The impact made an ugly sound and Fritz let go of his enemy, staggered back and fell. Kichiro had started to get up, and Bart squirmed out from beneath him, tore free of a grasping hand, and ran. His one thought was to reach the safety of his own room. He had to pass between the group of boys and the pool, where Lotis, open-mouthed, clung to the side and watched. Mai, turning wild-eyed, saw Bart coming and raised his club for another swing -- None of them had seen the machine approach, but now it was on hand as if it had popped out of the manypaneled wall. It took the swinging club from Mai's hand as if it were a feather and in the same instant shoved him violently back, so that he stumbled over Fritz's unmoving legs and fell. "You hurt me," Mai croaked stupidly from the floor. His hand was scraped raw, oozing blood, where it had collided with the gripper of the machine. The Ship said loudly to them all: "I have authority to sacrifice individuals, if I judge it necessary for the good of the mission." No one moved or spoke as the machine walked through their shocked silence to bend over Fritz. As it picked him up, Bart saw that his eyes were half open but unseeing, and his mouth was slack. It walked off down a corridor, carrying Fritz in its arms. His limbs hung down, utterly limp. The other boys stirred and followed, their weapons left behind. Bart heard a slosh and trickle behind him: Lotis getting out of the pool. He did not turn to look. The machine went on for a few score meters, then stopped, facing a panel in the wall. "Ship," Kichiro said, "that's a disposal chute." But Fritz was already gone. Ignored by the others, Bart ran back to his room and sat there, shivering and staring at the wall. The Ship served him his dinner without comment. He ate a little, and then soon turned to his bed, where sleep and forgetfulness never failed to come. Sixteen All twenty-three of the kids were waiting for him in the corridor when he stuck his head out of his room to see what might be going on. But it was all right. "No one's going to try to kill you this time," was one of the first things said, by a strong young man with thickening patches of dark beard on cheek and chin. With just a minor effort Bart could recognize the speaker as Kichiro, who, as Bart soon found out, was this year's president. They were having elections only once a year now, he was soon informed. Fights were evidently much less frequent also, Bart discovered to his great relief. He overheard part of an argument as to who had tried to kill him last year; that was the clo thing to a fight that happened on this birthday. He also soon found out that birthdays, like gang wars, were now considered kid stuff, and today there was no party. Instead there was a good, elaborate lunch, with ice cream produced unpretentiously for dessert. Talk turned to Bart, and his purpose in the world. He repeated to the kids everything that the Ship had ever told him about that purpose, which wasn't much. "I wonder," Basil said to him, "what the Ship'll do with you now? I mean we obviously don't need you any more as a father or model or whatever to help us grow." "I dunno," said Bart, taking a little more ice cream. The kids' eyes were ail sympathetic, but still their silent gaze made him uncomfortable. "Whenever I ask Ship about it, it just says the mission is proceeding as per revised schedule, or something like that." Sigrid nodded knowingly. "Ship's that way. If it doesn't want to answer something for you, it just won't." Seventeen This morning it was a relief to meet a group of stable, sane-looking people, not too much different from their namesakes he had said goodbye to the night before. Bart soon noticed that Basil was missing from the group. "Oh, he's all right," said Ora reassuringly. "He'll be along for lunch. He goes studying the stars." "The stars?" "We've found a way to reach the outer hull. In one place there's a glass port where you can see the outside of the Ship, and the stars too, of course." Bart could call up a plain picture of what stars were; sometime, somehow, he had seen them. "What do you think about the stars, Bart?" Tang asked him patronizingly. He didn't have a quick answer, and Arm in said: "Look, we've been working on this problem of the Ship and where it's going for seventeen years now. And Bart's put in how much time? About seventeen days." And there was laughter, not unkind. Eighteen When Bart mentioned that he thought it would be fun to learn to swim, they took him to the newly remodeled and enlarged pool. Everyone was matter-of-fact about undressing and after clothes had been off for a minute or two it all seemed practically normal to Bart. Resting on the pool's edge after some strenuous splashing, they took up again last year's discussion about the Ship and its purposes. Bart got the idea that now they talked a lot on this subject. Today he remarked that maybe soon they would be having children, so eventually people would fill up the empty rooms still waiting on the other levels. Fuad shook his head. "The Ship's told us we're all sterile -- know what that means?" "You can't make any babies." "That's right. Girls and men both. We can do all the sex we want, but nothing can ever happen from it." Later, alone, Bart asked the Ship: "Am I sterile too? I mean, am I going to be, when..." "No." That was a definite answer at last, but to his old questions he still got only the old answers. Nineteen Bart's chronic worry that his life was going fundamentally wrong was lightened when he met his shipmates today. They were now so obviously adults that he could produce an inner sigh of relief and decide to leave the worrying to them. Most of the teaching machines had been removed. At the few remaining, people were abstractedly at work, printouts and papers stacked around them. As soon as the word spread that Bart had joined them for the day, most of the adults abandoned other activities and came towering around him, smiling and calling greetings, squeezing his shoulders and ruffling his hair. A number of people wanted to show him things. Basil took him to see the stars. They went drifting, swimming through a part of the Ship where gravity was turned off, and though there was air Basil made him wear a breathing device, just in case. Through the glass Bart looked along the curves of the hull, unreal in their great size and distances, and at the stars that looked even more unreal, like a vast bright scattering of powdered paint. After lunch he asked to go swimming again. Lotis, in the pool with him and others, now had a peculiar slightly mottled look to her thighs that Bart eventually decided must be caused by fat under the skin. And on her left thigh was the thread-like red tracery of an enlarged vein. After dinner Baruch and Tang took him aside. "Bart -- do you really like this one-day-a-year life?" "I dunno. It's all right, I guess. The Ship must have some reason. It's taking care of us all, right?" He might have said something else, but Ship heard everything. The men exchanged glances over his head. With several of the girls they walked him back to his room, when the Ship called fdr him, and almost tucked him into bed. Twenty He learned soon after rejoining the others that Tang and Ora had been killed, some months ago, trying to work their way into a part of the Ship from which humans were ordinarily sealed out. "Were they trying... I mean, did it have anything to do with me? With waking me up more often, or... " '"No." Fay shook her head definitely. "Oh no, Bart, don't worry about that." The thought hadn't really worried him. Actually it had generated some hope. "They were trying to get to the far end of the Ship," Ranjan explained, "You know, the aft, as the old records call it. Have you seen any of the old records? The part of the Ship where the drive controls and so many other things seem to be located." They explained to Bart such elementary knowledge of the Ship as they had been able to piece together, and his understanding of it grew a little. He found out also that they meant to keep on trying to get through to the other parts of the Ship, and eventually to take over its control. That was a strange thought, and Bart wasn't at all sure how much he liked it. Twenty-one It had been many days since his shipmates paid him as little attention as they did today. He was greeted cheerfully enough, but no crowd gathered around. A couple of people went with him to swim, in a pool that had again been remodeled and made safer and more pleasant. He learned that some of the people were working hard to raise plants from seeds the Ship had long ago provided for their school biology program. They showed him the new garden. It held nothing ready to eat yet, but maybe next time he came. He saw Kichiro limping by and heard that his knee had been lamed in some contest with another man, but whether it was a fight or a game Bart did not learn. Twenty-two There were no beds in the old common-room any more, and Bart found that most of the people had paired off two-by-two, sleeping in more or less stable partnerships. More noticeably, most of the people he talked to today had runny noses. Sharon told him that an experiment in the new biology lab had gone wrong and some viruses had escaped. Nothing to worry about, they assured him. He wasn't worried, really, not about viruses anyway. All in all, it was a casual, lowpressure sort of day. Twenty-three Lotis, working in the garden, wore shorts today, and he noticed that her legs and bottom were getting quite lumpy with fat. The red vein on her thigh had extended itself into a little tracery of defective blood vessels in the skin. All the runny noses had dried up. Some medicine the people had made for themselves was ready for Bart in case he caught the infection too. He didn't. "Maybe the Ship's still taking good care of you," Chao commented. Twenty-four No one came down the corridor toward his room to meet him, but as soon as Bart had entered the general living area they all jumped out of hiding with cries of "Surprise!" and "Happy birthday!" It wasn't his birthday yet, but he soon understood that a sort of general birthday had been declared in which he was being invited to share. "It's been ten years sincewe've had one, Bart," said Himyar. "A party, I mean. So we just thought it was time." "We could make you an honorary fifteen," Fay put in. "Or how about an honorary twentyfour?" "Have a glass of wine, Bart," said someone else. "Wine?" "Told you our garden was going to be a success." " -- oh, give him only a small one! He's too young -- " " -- one glass won't hurt 'im -- " He realized after a while that some of the people were passing around another kind of drug, something they sniffed up into their nostrils. But he stayed with his one glass of wine, which made him feel just dizzy and high enough to be wary of asking for any more. The party went on practically all day, with games and jokes and songs. Bart no longer minded when people paired off and vanished for a while, their arms about each other. This behavior was grownups' doings now, not something in which he might possibly become involved. He went along with all the partying and had a good time. Still, now and then he caught himself wishing they would get down to business. Though he didn't know just what their business was. Twentyfive This year his wish seemed to have been granted, for he got the impression of a lot of serious business going on. People were punching at computers and crouched over teaching machines, and in some rooms devices Bart couldn't identify had been set up. He noticed that Olen's hairline was receding sharply, and wondered if the man had some kind of scalp disease. But he didn't ask. In a large room away from the usual living area, Bart found Himyar working to form a towering metal sculpture, using a torch that showered and streamed electric flames. With this home-made device Himyar brushed the glowing metal into the shapes he wanted. Parts of the sculpture reminded Bart of flowers in the garden, or, again, of the curves of splashed water that lived momentarily when someone dived into the pool. They talked for a time, and Himyar showed Bart some paintings Vivian had done. Himyar and Vivian spent most of their time working here or scrounging materials from every part of the Ship that they could reach; they had become known as the Artists. "And Armin's an artist too, I suppose," said Himyar. "He's made himself a camera and goes around using it. Well, the Ship made some of the component systems for him, and the film," "I'd like to see that." Twentysix Nobody was working quite so hard today. Bart found an elaborate game in progress, a contest involving both physical and mental effort, with complicated rules. It had to do with dividing up the regularly occupied territory of the Ship between two contending factions or teams who struggled to gain more territory from each other. People sometimes were allowed or compelled to switch sides in the game. The dividing line between the territories was marked with bright tapes stuck on the decks and bulkheads, and moved back and forth as people won or lost at events like Indian wrestling -- men were matched against men, girls against girls for the physical struggles -- or asking each other difficult questions. "Bart, be referee. Wasn't his foot off the deck just then?" "Yep." Powerful Kichiro, still limping on his trick knee, smiled and moved the tape into his opponents' territory by a distance of two wall panels. "Hey, Bart!" It was Armin, approaching with something in his hand. "You never had a chance to see this. Here's a picture I took of you at the last birthday party. We'll have to have another one of, those sometime." Bart looked. "You hadn't even started with the camera when we had the party. It must have been yesterday when you took this. I mean last year, for you guys." "Hm. I guess you're right." Twenty-seven He found some of the marker tapes still stuck up in place, but the game wasn't being played today and everyone seemed to have forgotten it. He met Fuad and Trac and was a little surprised to see how fat they both looked, with rolls of flesh above their shorts. He thought of going down the passageway that led to the stars again, but there was no breathing equipment in the locker where Basil had kept it earlier. Baruch and Solon came along and asked what he was doing. They soon explained that the breathing equipment was being used in "engineering studies" to find out how to reach the more distant parts of the Ship. Bart wanted to know more. They told him of the solid walls and sealed doors that cut off access to those regions, and how the Ship refused to discuss letting anyone go there. It had not tried to stop their engineering studies, though; whether it would interfere when they began to break through a wall remained to be seen. Using explosives aboard a spaceship was intrinsically dangerous: something important and irreplaceable might be damaged, or a compartment's air might explode into vacuum. "That's how Ora and Tang were killed. And then I was getting some acid ready to eat through a wall, and it disappeared. I suspect some machine found it and took it away." Baruch shrugged, fatalistic but still determined. But we'll see, we'll see." He did not sound or look at all discouraged. Twenty-eight This year Bart got more attention from his shipmates than had been usual his last few days. Edris and Helsa looked at his teeth and wondered out loud if the Ship shouldn't be straightening some of them for him. "Oh, they're not terribly crooked. But it did as much for some of us when we were kids." After lunch there was a general discussion of his future, carried on at times as if he were not there. Ranjan said: "I still think the Ship plans to provide him with a bride one of these days, one of these years. Maybe it's already tried to hatch other people from the artificial wombs and something's gone wrong, so it's got poor Bart just marking time." Another adult asked: "You still think there's a good supply of human genetic material on board?" "Bound to be. Else the Ship wouldn't have sterilized us, right?" There was general agreement on that point, but on little else. One body of opinion held that the Ship really wanted the people to take over, now that its own computers had grown crotchety and unreliable with breakdowns and damage. But some kind of glitch prevented it from simply saying what it wanted. Schizophrenic, it fended off their attempts to gain control with one hand, while feeding and caring for them with the other. The discussion soon got over Bart's head, but he listened intently, trying to weigh everything they said. He listened for something that might give him confidence,' but heard it not. Twenty-nine "I know you've seen our biology lab before," Galina told him. "But I think you ought to take a real interest. All our futures may lie in this room." He ceased scratching his back against the doorframe. "How so?" "Sit down, Bart." When they were seated, she looked at him with concern. "Bart, if the machines never provide you with any people you own age -- with a fertile female specifically -- then it's going to be up to us to find some way to eventually produce more people, so that the human race can go on. I'm not sure that there are any people left alive on Earth." "I see." He nodded seriously. Galina spoke slowly and kept studying him for his reactions. "We know that when the Ship was launched there was a large supply of human sperm and ova stored on board, all coded as to genetic type, so that people could be conceived and raised by machines when the end of the voyage drew near." "Uh-huh."  She sighed. "I myself suspect that most and perhaps nearly all of this genetic material was lost in some kind of accident that evidently disrupted the voyage in other ways as well. The Ship speaks always of a revised schedule for the mission, a revised plan." "I know." "There's further evidence." She paused. "I said all the human seeds and eggs were coded as to type and potential? There's some indication in the available records that all of us now alive -- except you, we don't know where you came from -- were conceived from materials not considered of the highest quality. Not that we have any grave genetic defects, of course, no seriously defective material would have been placed aboard. But -- not the best. This suggests to me that all the best material was somehow destroyed, and also that there may not be much material left." Bart nodded, not knowing what else to say or do. "Except you, Bart, as I said. There may have been a human crew aboard before the accident -- whatever the accident was. You may be its only survivor. But I suppose your origins make little difference. Here you are and here we are, and there's the future to be faced. A future to be created -- perhaps for the whole human race -- out of whatever we have on hand. Would you like to learn something about biology?" "I guess I'd better," said Bart. They had a pretty good first lesson, distinguishing plants and animals, marking the first great branches of the tree of life. "What are those marks on your face?" Bart asked on impulse a few hours later, as they were leaving the lab to go to dinner. He felt he knew Galina pretty well now and wasn't shy about getting a little more personal. "What marks?" She raised tentative fingers to her cheek. "Those little lines in the skin, going out from the corners of your eyes." Thirty Today marked a standard month since the Ship had roused Bart from his first period of suspended animation. When he awoke, a machine equipped with measuring devices was waiting at his bedside. It quickly got busy to check his height and weight, looked into his eyes and mouth, listened at his chest. "How much taller am I than a month ago, Ship?" "Approximately seventy millimeters," said the expressionless voice. "And how much heavier?" "Approximately ninety-five grams." "Is that good?" It wouldn't say. But it did adjust his diet, adding a delicious, creamy drink to that very breakfast, served in his room. When he joined the other people he found Olen half bald, and learned that Basil had gone back to communing with the stars. Galina gave him another biology lesson, more technical and duller than the first. Thirty-one Today Bart heard that Dierdre was in her bed, too sick to get up. "She always liked you, Bart," said Chao sadly. "Go in and talk to her a little." He went into Deirdre's room, and found her looking much sicker than any human being he had ever seen before. She also seemed too dazed to talk very much. "Galina's been giving her drugs," Chao explained when he came out. "Otherwise the pain gets too bad." "Pain? From what?" "They think it's cancer." Chao and others tried to explain. Only later did they get around to telling him that Baruch had been killed in some kind of an explosion, trying to force a passage to the forbidden areas of the Ship. "Remember this photograph, Bart?" said Armin, cheering him up. "I took it of you at our last birthday party. We're going to have another one soon." "You took it the year after the birthday party, Armin." "Oh? Maybe you're right." Galina was busy with her other work today and never got around to teaching him biology. Thirty-two Deirdre had died, which came as no surprise to Bart but still left him with a hollow feeling. Thinking over matters of life and death, he stood at the edge of the garden, a high-domed region full of bright lights, vastly enlarged from the first little plot of synthetic soil. People were jogging for exercise around the walk that circled the perimeter of the garden, while others were working casually inside. It was strange to see gray in the hair of some of them, but Bart guessed that was just one more thing that happened naturally with age. His own hair, crewcut when his shipmates were babies, was starting to fall over his forehead now. He went to look up Basil, and asked to go out and see the stars got to the observation port, he pointed out to Bart the prow of the Ship, and the aft, or the stern as they sometimes called it, where the engines and their controls were supposed to be. "And when some people finally get back there," Bart asked, "they'll really be able to take over the whole thing?" Basil shrugged. He was looking mainly outward, at the stars. Thirty-three Trac was the first person to meet ' U tMt d': by L. Ron Hubbard Dianetics, Man's most advanced school of the mind, can help you to gain greater self-confidence and more respect for yourself and those around you. Dianetics was first popularized in # by scientists and engineers with the foresight and imagination to realize the true value of a proven and workable technology of the mind. Find out how Dianetics can help you to increase your ability, perceptions, intelligence and self respect. Read Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science by L. Ron Hubbard. Just send # to the Church of Scientology Dept. G-#, # West #th Street, Los Angeles, Ca. #. All orders are shipped postage free within # hours of receipt. birthdays Bart as he came down the corridor from his room, and as soon as she smiled in greeting he noticed that several teeth were missing from her lower jaw. "Had a jaw cyst, Bart. At least that's what Galina and Solon say. They took it out. Spoils my famous beauty, but they think eventually they'll be able to do something about giving me artificial teeth." "Couldn't the Ship -- ?" "It wouldn't help, whether it could or not. It's giving us less and less help these days. But never mind about that, come along, we've got something to show you." He followed along. And then they were all jumping out at him, yelling surprise! Birthday party! The common dining room was decorated with streamers and balloons, and the table set for a feast. "We were going to have one next year, Bart, you know, ten years from the last, but then we decided why not have it now?" "You can be whatever age you like, Bart. Be an honorary thirtythree with us, if you like." "That's a third of a century, Mai," a woman cried. "Who wants to be that old?" They were all good to him, as they usually were these days, petting and hugging him and fussing around, making it his party although it was supposed to be their birthday and he never said what honorary age he wanted. Actually he didn't want any, his own real age was good enough. Later he found unnoticed in a corner something that he supposed had been dragged out of storage accidentally with the decorations. It was a wheeled plastic toy that he remembered fixing for Deirdre a month ago. Thirty-four The marking tapes were up on the bulkheads again, and a few people were playing at the question-and-wrestle game. Meanwhile some had evidently been spending a lot of time working in the garden. It was now huge, and looked like the earthly gardens pictured in the Ship's records, which none of them Had ever seen in actuality. "And now, Bart, we're going to have some prayers. Come along." "Some what?" "You'll see. It's another old idea that Basil's been putting into practice lately." They had wanted to hold the prayer meetings out by the observation port, Bart learned, but there wasn't room enough for everyone, and all had wanted to attend the first meetings at least, to see what they were going to be like. That was a month or two ago and by now attendance was dropping slightly. Bart didn't understand the theory of prayer too well, but at the meeting Basil and the others who got up to talk seemed to be speaking not only to the Ship but to the world outside it, and to some force or power that had made them both. Thirty-five When Bart emerged from his room most of his shipmates were there in the hall waiting for him, something that hadn't happened since they were sixteen, a day he could remember well. Today they were going to bring him to a meeting, they said, and at first Bart expected more prayers, but this meeting turned out to be more businesslike than that. It was governmental council, held all day or most of the day around the big table with lunch coming as an interruption. Lunch included fruits and vegetables brought fresh from the garden, as well as the usual rations issued by the Ship. The proceedings got rather boring for Bart, though his friends made an effort to bring him into it all. They showed him their new system of recordkeeping, of recording all the discoveries of their research for easy access by Bart and future generations. He looked the question at them. "It's true, Bart," said Fay. A deep, gentle happiness glowed through her eyes at the thought. "The Ship has recently promised us, there will be future generations." "Provided the mission is completed," someone put in. "Yes. Well." That 'was enough for Fay, and for the people as a group. Bart himself thought it sounded fine, but he would still like to know more. He asked the Ship for details later but got nowhere, as usual. Thirty-six There had been important changes made around him. He knew this the moment he started to come out of sleep. Opening his eyes a groggy second or two later, he realized that he was in a new bedroom, much like his old one but different in detail and bigger. "Ship... Ship, where am I? What's happened?" "You have been moved during your sleep into a new accommodation, Bart. There is no cause for alarm." He got up and dressed and ate and eliminated as usual. The walls of this room were metal, and its door was thicker, as he saw when it opened for him to go out. "Why did you move me, Ship?" "Some of the people were attempting to reach you, to rouse you from sleep at the wrong time. They meant well but it was necessary to prevent their interference." His door opened into a corridor he had never seen before, leading off in one direction only. It bent sharply several times and was interrupted by two sets of heavy doors that opened as Bart drew near and closed immediately after he had passed. He found himself coming back into the peopled area of the Ship from a new direction, near the biology lab. The first folk to see him dropped what they were doing and ran to give him a glad welcome. "I told you he'd be here on schedule!" cried Mai, pounding Bart joyfully on the back. No club in Mai's hand this time. "Ship was just taking good care of him, that's all!" Sigrid pulled him in for a big hug against her heavy bosom. Later he learned that an intensive effort had been made to "rescue" him from the machines, set him free from his long sleeps. The attempt had collapsed, foolishly, and no one wanted to talk about it. Then everyone had grown a little worried about Bart and all were glad to see him still coming back, if only for a day each year. Gray was spreading in the hair of the happy crew around him, and several of the male heads were nearly bald. Many of the people looked a little fatter and squintier than when he had seen them last. They gave him a big lunch that was almost a birthday party. Thirty-seven Galina and Solon took him on a tour of their biology lab, which was much enlarged and changed since he had seen it last, with cages holding white rats and hamsters, raised from genetic material obtained from the Ship's stores. "Do you think the long sleeps are harming me?" Bart asked when he had a chance. "Harming you physically? No, I doubt it." Galina looked at him thoughtfully. "It takes an enormous amount of energy and a great deal of control equipment to keep a human being in such a sleep; even a Ship like this couldn't do it for very many people at a time. It's not just freezing in the ordinary sense, you know. Even the orbital electrons within your body's atoms are kept from moving... but don't worry about the physical danger of it, that's extremely small." She was anxious to resume the biology lessons, and they went on a thorough tour of the lab. "We haven't been able to get any human genetic material from the Ship to work with. Still, in theory it should be possible for us to produce a new human generation here, starting with just ordinary cells from our own bodies. Did I ever tell you anything about cloning cells?" "No." "I will. Anyway, it hasn't worked out yet. We're not sure if the Ship is interfering in some subtle way, or if there are simply problems we're not aware of." They showed Bart masses of tissue growing in glass jars. But they had never been able to get the tissue to differentiate properly into all the organs that hacf to grow in concert to make a person. It looked to Bart as if they hadn't yet even come close to achieving that. Here and there old colored tapes were stuck to the walls and overhead, but the game they represented seemed to have been utterly abandoned. The only competition Bart heard about today was in raising the best food plants and flowers. Thirty-eight It was depressing to see Helsa now dragging herself around like an invalid, her arms grown thin and her ankles puffy. Others told Bart that Galina suspected some slow, incurable disease. Then they turned the talk to brighter things. "There's a lot of card playing going on now, Bart," Sharon informed him. "Card playing?" "Poker, whist, bridge," said Ranjan. "We'll show you. They're old games we dug out of the Ship's records. Then we've also tried two pew ways to get through the barriers to reach the control regions of the Ship, but neither has worked." "We haven't really tried them yet," Fuad objected. "Well, we've run them on the computer," Lotis put in. "Bah. I tell you, the Ship is still using that computer against us -- " "No,  keep telling you," argued Ranjan, "we've got it blocked off now against any possibility of the Ship's gaining access -- " "So you think! I don't agree." The argument was heated, but still showed no sign of coming to blows. Thirty-nine Today there was a prayer meeting, more elaborate in ceremony but less intense in feeling that the last one Bart had attended. He noted that people's clothing, which they now made largely for themselves, was growing more elaborate too, and more voluminous; it covered more of their sagging bodies, and distracted attention from them. Bart also noticed that a softer, more comfortable type of chair had been manufactured somehow and was now in general use. The legs didn't look as if they could be unscrewed. Forty It was birthday party time again. Only four candles adorned the big cake; each standing for ten years, as someone explained to Bart. The party was opened with a rather perfunctory prayer. "Bet you don't remember when I took this picture of you, Bart." "Yes I do." Several speeches were made, tracing the recent history of progress in science -- mainly astronomical observations and biological birthdays research -- and in the arts, mainly sculpture, painting, and drawing. Not much had been done lately in an engineering way, a speaker said, which Bart supposed meant they weren't getting anywhere with plans to take over the Ship. A new president, Olen, had just been elected for a two-year term, and he pledged in a vague way to get things moving. All around the table the faces were puffy or lined, continuing to puddle or sag. There was more gray hair than any other color. Forty-one Bart found a number of people playing chess, a game they said they would teach him before the day was over. About dinner time Basil told him something else, more confidentially. "I'm not going to give you any details, kid, nothing the Ship doesn't already know. Information you don't have can't be pumped out of you. I'll just say that this time we really know what we're doing, and we're not likely to be stopped. We've been a long time getting ready." Fortytwo He soon learned that Basil, Mai, and Olen had set out, shortly after Bart's last waking day, on a major effort to force their way into the Ship's control areas. They were not back yet, and by now it was doubtful, to say the least, that they ever would return. Himyar, the sculptor, proudly showed Bart a tall pair of steel doors on which he was carving the history of their little society in a series of panels. He claimed that he had devised a method of grinding stainless steel that worked beautifullyHelsa was now much better, Bart saw with some surprise. But Sigrid looked unhealthy and was complaining of vague pains. "We're going to try something new," Bart heard Galina tell her cheerfully. Evidently the Ship was again not helping, or could not. The garden had once more been enlarged, the entire new area being used for additional food plants. Forty-three Basil was back, had been back for several months, but Bart saw that there was still something new and wild and strange in his eyes and he was still emaciated. The other men weren't coming back, Basil said, and that was about all he had to tell about his great adventure. The way Basil looked made Bart timid about pressing him with any further questions. Later he heard more of Basil's story from someone else. The three men had tried going out into space, outside the Ship, to reach the aft where they intended to get back in. Something had gone wrong with their equipment; maybe the Ship had sabotaged it. They did get back into the Ship, luckily in a region where they could find air and water and stored food enough to keep them alive for a time, but the controls had been as much out of reach as ever. Eventually Basil had made his way back, somehow, through a maze of inner decks and passageways. He had never made it completely clear just how the other two had died, and Bart got the impression that it might be wise not to press too closely on that question. Himyar had completed his doors and was working with Vivian on a giant mural of Earth, composed of scenes reconstructed imaginatively from old records. Sigrid's condition was not much changed from last year. Fay, having recently been named president in a special election, told Bart it had been decided that he should attend school every waking day. The people were getting ready a course of 'study for him. "The machines insisted on our attending school, I mean in a formal way, and I don't know why they don't with you, but never mind." She brushed back her graying hair and looked at him as if at a challenge. "It's time and past time that you formed good habits to carry you through the rest of your life." Forty-four Bart heard right away that Sigrid had died, only a few days ago. Maybe this latest death was still on everyone's mind, and that was why his first day of school didn't go too well. Lotis was teaching, and sort of skipped from subject to subject, and technique to technique. She knew it wasn't going well, and once she sighed: "Someone else will take a turn at teaching next year, I mean tomorrow. Are you able to learn anything from me, Bart?" "Oh yes." His day was almost over before he heard something exciting: it .was no longer quite certain that Olen and Mai were dead. At least some garbled message had come in, along disused intercom channels that were thought to connect with control territory. Some almost indecipherable words about surviving. Maybe it was only garbage belched out by the vast intraship communications delay lines or memory drums, maybe not produced by any of this generations's people at all. But maybe... Forty-five Himyar had put his clever hands to work, toiling in his improved shop, to outfit several people with eyeglasses. Studies on artificial teeth were now well under way, with Solon doing most of the research. The Ship refused to do anything along prosthetic lines for anyone, though it still treated routine minor injuries. Bart heard Edris and Trac and Kichiro praying, but no longer to the Ship. He saw Basil, who now stared at walls instead of stars, and still said very little. School was better today. Fuad as teacher talked with him easily and amused him with stories of old Earth. Forty-six School again, his teacher Chao, who was grimly determined that he should learn to appreciate the beauties of geometry. He heard that the garden was just getting over an epidemic of plant disease, caused by no one knew what. Ranjan had just been elected president, for an indeterminate term, and had pledged to get things moving. The work on artificial teeth was Conceived by E. E. "Doc" Smith before his death and completed by Stephen agents who double as an intergalactic # progressing again after several setbacks. Solon and others looked into Bart's mouth again to judge whether he needed braces, but to his relief decided to let well enough, or almost well enough, alone. Forty-seven Bart got to see Vivian's and Himyar's finished mural, and part of a championship chess game between Annin and Basil. He tasted a new hybrid fruit from the restored garden. He heard vague mention of a Golden Birthday celebration that might last for a year and should begin fairly soon. He saw some artificial teeth in operation. He heard with blunted shock that Fay, who had been working on and off in the biology lab, had killed herself with quick painless poison. If anyone knew the reasons, they never made them plain to Bart. In school Himyar taught him, spiritedly but unintelligibly, about the various traditions of Earthly art. Forty-eight The gardeners and biologists had reported success in rejuvenating plants, and there was hope of applying their discoveries to people. Some were saying excitedly that now they understood why the Ship in its wisdom had refused them any help along this line, while letting them work freely at it for themselves. It was beyond the very limited creative capabilities of computers; only humans could do it. Not everyone agreed. Bart's school went on with a whole group of teachers. They were trying music appreciation today, and no one on the Ship seemed to have a real bent in this direction. Forty-nine Bart noticed today that some of the people who had seemed happily and permanently paired off as sexand-life partners were now paired off in different pairings, and evidently just as happy. Today in school there was some confusion about just what Bart had been taught in previous sessions, and what he might now be fairly tested on. He did well on the tests when they were finally given, and the arguing teachers were all relieved. Fifty Again the whole group -- the fifteen still alive -- was on hand to greet Bart when he came through the last heavy door that set aside his private territory. They greeted him with cheers and songs, told him today was a holiday from school, and pulled him away for what they promised would be the biggest and best birthday party yet. Sharon had just been elected president, and at the party table made a brief speech about how, with the help of all of them, she meant to get things moving again. As she said, she certainly wasn't going to be able to do it all by herself. There were several games of volleyball. Playing with these old people who had the names of kids he had once briefly met, Bart found himself for a little while one of the gang. He lost himself in the game, jumped nimbly among the jiggling paunches and creaking joints, got knocked down when someone's hundred-kilo mass accidentally crashed into him. But it was only for a little while that he belonged. Fifty-one He came into their living area with the feeling that they would have forgotten about keeping him in school, but no, the lessons were on as promised. Today, with Helsa teaching, Bart got a basic course in the Ship, what little the old records actually said about it and its mission, and something of what the people had been able to find out for themselves. After lunch, somewhat to Bart's surprise, Basil came in and took over for a while, describing how the hull looked from outside, and what some of the remoter portions of the Ship were tike. He spoke impersonally, and rarely as if he himself had been there. Fiftytwo The whole company was in a state of extreme excitement. About a month ago the world of the Ship had been rocked by an explosion, thought to have taken place a kilometer or two away along the hull, probably toward the aft. Whether a hurtling meteoric body had struck the hull, or there was some internal cause, was unknown. The rumor flew by that Mai and Olen were perhaps still alive, and somehow responsible for the blast. There was a sudden renewal of religious fervor. School was conducted in an atmosphere of tension. Fifty-three There had been no more explosions, nor any further hints that the lost men had survived. The crisis atmosphere was gone, and talk was again centered on the hoped-for rejuvenation treatments. Bart saw a proud display of implanted artificial teeth. The method didn't work well in all cases yet but Solon was optimistic about improvements. School went on. Today a team of instructors tried to teach him a little about human language and its nearinfinite variations, some of which they spoke, or at least could read. Fifty-four Timber harvested from the enormous garden was being used to build a sort of pavilion, a roofless, high-walled structure which Bart was told would be used as a kind of social center. He thought they built it just to be building something. Himyar was seeking treatment for arthritis, which had stiffened his fingers and interefered considerably, with his work. Fiftyfive Fuad lay on a bed inside the finished pavilion, recuperating from what he said had been a heart atthat the worst was over. Bart sat and talked for a while with Fuad, who was fatter even than last ye. r, and didn't look good. People were swinging woven racquets, worn with use, in a game they called squash, played where the volleyball net had been three days ago. Fifty-six "What I preach to you, Bart," said Basil, taking a turn at being schoolmaster, "what we have evolved here in our little world, is a complete synthesis of all mankind's old creeds and philosophies. I am really certain of this." "How can you have a complete watchamacallit if they were always contradicting each other, like you say?" Basil had a long answer, but Bart found it not very satisfying. A large part of the garden was now taken up by plants grown solely for use in the rejuvenation experiments. Bart heard at dinner that Chao was now suffering repeated bouts of mental illness, and Galina had to keep her tranquilized and sometimes confined to her own room. Fifty-seven Politics had heated up suddenly. Edris, who had been acting president, had been removed from office and, as some kind of compromise Trac was in. Bart couldn't figure out what the dispute was about, except some of the people felt themselves insulted by others. At lunch Trac made a little speech about how she meant to get things moving again, both on exploration of the Ship and the rejuvenation work, which evidently had been allowed to lapse. She said also that expanded medical facilities were needed, and the hospital should be enlarged. Bart remembered the hospital as the pavilion or social center, but there were two chronic invalids, Fuad and Chao, living in it now. Fifty-eight Kichiro and Himyar were pointed out to Bart as rejuvenation patients, perhaps already on their way to growing younger, though Galina and Solon didn't want to make any definite claims just yet. "It's helped me a great deal, too," Trac said. Bart thought to himself how much her face had wrinkled and bagged in the last few days. Himyar had started working in a new electronic medium, less demanding on the knuckles. Basil was living apart now, giving much time to fasting and prayer. Most of the women had taken to dyeing their hair, yellow and red being favorite colors. Fifty-nine Great interest in chess had revived, and a huge birthday party was being planned for next year. Hair colors were still used, but had been toned down. School went on, Bart arguing with his teachers that they should show him more about the structure of the Ship than about things of old Earth that didn't seem to him to have any bearing on his present situation. Gating still pushed biology, but Bart could see that you'd have to study that for years to really get anywhere. He didn't know how much time he had to study anything. A couple of small riding carts had been built, powered by electric motors, and Bart had some fun riding them about. His elders got angry and yelled at him when he drove too wildly. The most popular physical game consisted of sliding plastic discs over a pattern of numbered squares on the floor. Sixty When he woke up in his room a machine was standing beside him, waiting; to give him his monthly physical. His gains in weight and height were both greater than at any time during the previous month. He counted a few more pubic hairs. This morning the creamy drink was dropped from his solitary breakfast. The birthday party had more and fancier decorations than before, but little else was different, except that most of the people were content to just sit around and eat and drink and talk. Fuad didn't eat or drink much -- he'd lost a lot of weight, gut Chao, as the others said, was having a good day, and joined in merrily. All in all, the old people had a good time. They fussed over Bart quite a bit, but he felt pretty much out of it. Not sad, really, but detached. School had been recessed for the day, though he would have liked to learn more about the Ship. Sixty-one Ranjan had suffered a stroke, and was lying paralyzed in the hospital, unable to move anything on his right side. Everyone seemed angry at the Ship, for what they described as cutting back more on its medical programs just as their needs were rising. Part of the space it had formerly used to give them such niggardly medical treatments as it provided had now been walled off. Something else was going on in there, they said, and nodded angrily, though they didn't know what was going on. They questioned Bart, something like envy now mixed on their faces with the tenderness they usually accorded him these days. But he had not a scrap of information to provide. At the moment the office of president was empty, and the question f reorganizing the government was being somewhat crankily debated. Sixty-two Vivian, who had been getting fat, w as wasting and suffering internal Pains. Ranjan was still unable to Pelp himself at all. Bart was told ( hese ills and a catalogue of lesser nes as if he should be just bursting with eagerness to hear them. He was more interested in pingpong, which was now a favorite game. The burning social question was whether there should be an attempt at tinkering with the basic food machines to try to get a more easily chewable output from them. Kichiro, Solon, and Armin, the only really healthy men, were undertaking an ambitious program to get themselves in shape. Edris, Galina, Sharon, Helsa, and Lotis were laughing a lot at the men and pondering a reducing program for themselves. Trac was thin already, maybe because she had trouble eating. Sixty-three He learned that Vivian was dead, to nobody's surprise. His school today was conducted by Lotis, who about seven weeks ago had started to seduce him in the swimming pool. Meeting the eyes of the old gray-haired woman now, Bart thought she didn't remember that at all, which was only right; that hadn't been her in the pool at all, only someone with whom she shared a name. Today she taught him gardening. The garden was being expanded again. A lot of the rejuvenation plants were still there, taking up space, and not so much living room was needed for people any more, Bart supposed. There were fourteen of them alive now instead of twenty-four, and the survivors didn't move around as much as they used to. "Remember when I took this picture of you, Bart?" "Yes I do, but you don't." And he went rudely on his way, leaving Armin standing still behind him. It wasn't really Armin that bothered Bart, it was the whole situation. The future wasn't coming for these old people, but it was sure enough coming for him. Sixty-four Fuad had just died, of another heart attack, and Bart was solemnly conducted to see the still body being stored in a refrigeration room before they said words over it and gave it back to the Ship through a disposal chute. "Death is a part of life, Bart," Basil explained. They hadn't given him that reasonable an explanation a couple of months ago when they murdered Fritz before his eyes. Never mind, he told himself. The more energetic people were playing squash today, and Bart joined in for a little while. He was fussed over as usual, and after school people pressed cake and cookies on him. Sixty-five He had noticed for some time that his sessions in the school room (not far from the hospital, from which came now and then a querulous groaning) tended to fall into two types. In the first type a teacher tried very earnestly to cram knowledge into his head; in a lesson of the second type (sometimes conducted by the same man or woman) there were long pauses, and an air of futility hung over the proceedings. Today's session, starting right after lunch, was of the second type. After about an hour Sharon, his instructor, left him alone with a teaching machine, from which he abstracted information on the layout of the Ship, until that got boring. He played with the machine trivially then until they came to get him for dinner. Sixtysix He asked to be allowed to study on his own again, and when the request was granted he daydreamed and played With the machine for a while. The vision of young Lotis in the pool came to him, and he got up and went to see if the pool was still there. Gray-haired Lotis, his teacher again today, discovered his unexplained desertion and came after him angrily. They quarreled, and she tried to take him by the hair and drag him back to school. She was still a sturdy old girl, but in getting free he pushed her hard enough to knock her down. Alarmed by the way she yelled, he ran away. Soon Kichiro came limping after him. Bart might have run some more and evaded capture, or sought the safety of his room, but he thrust out his lip and stood his ground. Kichiro slapped him and overawed him and made him come back to school, the hardest grip that Bart could remember clamped on his arm. Sixty-seven He heard that Ranjan had died, to everyone's relief, after six years of paralysis. Bart went sullenly into schoolunder Kichiro's watchful eye. galaxy The regular lesson hadn't gone far before Kichiro interrupted it to make a small impulsive speech. "Bart, you're about all that we old people have to live for. You and the hope that you represent, that one day there will be more people on the Ship, people who will get out from under the yoke of the machines, something we've never been able to manage. 'We have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we should have done.' " Bart didn't know what to say. "But all our lives make too much of a burden to be put on you, don't they?" Kichiro added with a sigh. He seemed to be pleading. "No, it's all right with me if you feel that way." And his teacher was happy and gave him a manly hug. But Kichiro had missed the point. Bart no longer cared how any of them felt about anything. Sixty-eight The first person he met was Armin, who told him that Chao and Basil had both died, separately and rather suddenly, in the past year. Bart went to school and found that they had a test programmed into the teaching machine, ready for him to take. Left alone to work, he answered a couple of the questions, and then, feeling that he had something more important to do on this day, he got up and left the school. He looked back once and then walked on. Kichiro looked older and less vigorous than he had two years before, and Bart didn't think any of the others would try to get rough with him. Not any more. He went to the commissary and punched orders for a small birthday cake into the machine, as he had done for some of those early parties, so long ago. It seemed long to him, now. Soon he had his cake, and the fourteen small candles he had ordered, and a lighter too. He carried the cake to a refectory table and sat down alone to eat some of it himself. He made a little ceremony of lighting the candles, but would have felt too silly singing himself any songs. He had ordered the sweet fizzy drink he usually had at parties but soon got up and went to where the wine was always kept and poured himself a cup of that. Kichiro came in and stared at him a few moments before speaking. "You're supposed to be in school." The old man's voice was half startled and half angry. "What do you think you're doing?" "It's my fourteenth birthday today. I'm having my cake." Kichiro stared a little longer through his puffy, old man's eyes. "Well -- I'm sorry if we forgot about your birthday, but that doesn't excuse your running out in the middle of a test." He had left a door open somewhere behind him and all the time he was talking, fretful moaning complaints kept drifting from the direction of the hospital. Armin and Helsa came into the room. "What's the matter?" Kichiro told them, and they started arguing, Helsa for taking a different approach with the boy, as she put it, and Armin in favor of declaring another holiday. This last suggestion angered Kichiro. They were still arguing with one another when Bart finished the little piece of cake on his plate and got up and left, practically unnoticed. This time he located the pool but found it had long been dry and empty. Sixty-nine Bart woke up and left his room as usual, and was surprised when the first set of heavy doors that interrupted his private corridor remained closed when he approached. Then he saw that a new doorway, leading to a new, or newly revealed, passageway had been made in the wall at right angles to the doors. After a moment, Bart took the new way. "The prime directives under which I operate are very clear," the Ship said in his ear. "At least one human parent is necessary for children to mature to their full potential. "We will arrive in less than twenty standard years within a system of planets probably suitable for colonization. From now on you will be awakened increasingly often. You will serve the first generation of colonists as parent. Like them, you have first-rate genetic potential, and perhaps you will remain in some position of leadership when they mature. Today begins your apprenticeship in this role; your elementary preparation for it, a course in the basics of human psychology, was completed yesterday." With gradual comprehension Bart walked on, guided toward the new nursery by the polyphonic squalling from its full cribs.  Let's see now...'Vik Kunzur strode heavily through the black marble temple. The occasional clink of his golden steel sword against the engraved stone floor caused sharp echoes in the vaulted nave...' "Geis!" Don't bother me now, Alter. Hmm. 'Far behind him, but not so far as before, he heard the awful slithering of...' "I've got the Hugo Award results here. The winners!"...of the Beast With Seven...' What's good here? Seven heads? Too common. Seven fangs? Not bad. Seven deaths. Yes! Now... You've got the Hugo results? Did I v v n ? Give me that paper! "Not so fast, Geis. Start from the top. Best Fanzine and Best Tan Writer are eighth and ninth." Alter Ego, you will give me that paper or I will bum -- yes, burn -- every one of your collection of used synapses. Even those few precious blue-spark sex impulses you've been hoarding. "Oh, Geis...Are there no depths to which you will not plunge to get your way? Are you so immoral, so brutal, so merciless, so ruthless -- " Yes! I am! Hand me that list! "Alright, here. There's nothing worse than a Prime Ego when it smells a big slab of raw ego-boo. Yes... yes, look at you. Eyes all lit up, nostrils flaring, that terrible grimace of triumphant glee, the arching of the back, the up-tilt of the chin, the muscle tension, the filled lungs -- " "Ha! I knew you'd say it that way. When will you ever admit that we win these awards? Without me, Geis, you'd be reduced to writing pleading notes to your creditors asking for more time." Alter, your insults roll off me like common sense rolls off liberal politicians. Nothing can bring me down today. Wow. 'Best Fanzine: The Alien Critic.' 'Best Fan Writer: Richard E. Geis.' "Okay, now you've blared it to the world. Do you want to comment on the other Hugo winners for # which were given at the #rd World Science Fiction Convention at Melbourne, Australia in late August, #?" Of course. The lesser categories do deserve mention. Choke But first a few words of comment about the ballot counting procedures and their results. Susan Wood in Locus ## reports that approximately # final ballots were cast. Since total registration for the convention was over #, this means that, as usual, only those who felt themselves qualified and those interested actually sent in their marked final ballots. The system used to determine the winner works like this: The voters mark their choices on the ballot: First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth. If none of the nominees in a Box#,SanFrancisco,CA#I #. # for # in U.S.A. given category has an absolute majority of first place votes, the nominee with the least first place votes is eliminated and the second place nominees on those ballots are awarded those votes as first place votes. If there is still not a majority winner, the next nominee with the least first place votes is eliminated and the second place votes on those ballots are assigned as first place votes to the remaining three nominees. And so it goes until there is a majority winner. I cannot remember when ar Worldcon convention committee his released information on the number of elimination rounds required in each category. Once in a while a committee will announce second and third place in the final balloting, and sometimes the number of votes each of the leading three nominees ended with. But not this time. The Aussiecon committee felt, to quote Susan, 'the honor of nomination should be left without ranking.' "All very noble, Geis, but I'd like to know who came in second and third, at least, and how many votes each got. ' ' So would most of fandom and prodom and umpteen thousands of readers, Alter, but the convention committees are a law unto themselves, each year, and the clear wishes of the convention members are too often ignored. To say nothing of the nominees who didn't win. Why in some categories there may have been as little difference as one or two percent between winner and secondplace on the final ballot. -- Baen    Hmmm...Alter, do you catch a whiff of sour grapes? Ah, well -- no, matter. On with the, ahem, winners.    Arghh!    Cough-cough A definite smell of brimstone in the air...you were saying, Alter? "I see by what Susan reported that the committee in Melbourne did release the initial first place votes of the winners." Yes, and it's interesting to note that only the winner of the Best Novel Hugo won with an outright majority on the first ballot: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. "Says here it won # first place votes out of # votes cast." It's a fine novel and can stand up to any novel written in the so-called mainstream of literature. Ursula also won the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Award for The Dispossessed , as well as the short story Nebula for "The Day Before The Revolution," which was published last year in Galaxy. And recently won a National Book Award for The Farthest Shore. Quite a writer. "In your last column, Geis, you thought not too highly of "A Song for Lya" by George R. R. Martin, yet it won the Best Novella Hugo. What say you to that?" It received # first ballot votes out of #. I still think Martin has an undistinguished, rather slowpaced style, but the story has great impact in its final section and is a mind-expander and a prime thought-provoker. It sticks in your memory. I do think, though, that if Norman Spinrad's "Riding the Torch" had been read by more of the voters last year, it would have won. "Uh-huh. How do you explain Harlan Ellison's win of the Best Novelette Hugo with "Adrift Off the Islets of Langerhans..."? As I recall the story infuriated you." "Yes, it did, does, will. But for all that, Harlan writes like a fiend. He reaches out from the pages and grabs your mind and even if his surrealist science fiction does raise my hackles -- "He says he doesn't write science fiction. It's 'speculative fiction' or maybe not even that anymore. Just fiction." Whatever. He grabs readers and they like what he writes. He hits like a drop forge in his stories. I salute him. He has a rare talent and much guts. "He is the only author to have won six Hugos, isn't he?" Yep, he has a shelf-full too. Well deserved. To continue the record: Harlan's story received #I initial first place votes out of #. "Have you managed to find time to read Larry Niven's "The Hole Man," Geis? It won the Best Short Story Hugo." Yes, and it's a remarkable story for two reasons: it was published in the January issue of Analog and persisted in the minds of enough people for well over a year to trigger a first place vote, and it is an excellent 'hard science' sf story with a massive kicker at the end. 'Susan Wood reports that "The Hole Man" received # first place votes of #I cast, first ballot." There are those in the fan world who would like to see this Australian Ballot system abandoned, with the winner being simply the nominee who has the most votes when the ballots are first counted. It occasionally works out that a nominee initially in second place will gain enough 'second' place first place votes to eventually win, but almost always the first ballot leader is the final winner. "Do you have any interest in the Best Dramatic Hugo winner, Geis?" Honestly, not too much. The Hugos were originally a magazine bookfan set of awards, with the Dramatic category added years later, as I recall. I don't think the motion picturetheatreTV worlds hold their breaths waiting for word on this award. I don't think it should be given. "Nevertheless, Young Frankenstein won this time, with # of the # place votes. Too bad you didn't see it, Geis. I understand it's pretty good." Oh, one day it'll show up on Channel #. Get on with the list, Alter. "How do you react to Ben Bova's winning the Best professional Editor Hugo Award for the third year in a row? The initial first place vote gave him # of #." I have to say it's impossible to determine who is the best editor in the field. Especially it's impossible for the average fan or reader who wants to vote intelligently. Very few people are privy to the inside information that would help decide. What would be the outcome in the field, for instance, if Jim Baen had the budget and prompt payment policy of Analog for a year? Or Ted White? What would happen if Terry Carr had Analog ? What might Ed Ferman do with FSF with an extra fifty thousand or so? Or Bob Silverberg with a well-financed monthly vehicle? Impossible questions to answer. "I admire Baen for his innovations and risk-taking. Just asking you to be a columnist for If and now Galaxy..." Ha. Yes, that did take some courage. Ted White continues to present a surprisingly good product in Amazing and Fantastic. As does Jim, he labors under massive handicaps. Both display excellent editing skills. "Ed Ferman. What about him?" Ed continues, year in and year out, to present probably the highest average quality sf and fantasy of the ot. He's a 'quiet' editor who manages to get many, many fine stories. "The same could be said for Terry Carr and Bob Silverberg. InAn Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ## features a long, revealing interview with Jerry PournelTe detailing his collaborations with Larry Niven, his view of Man's future, and his opinion of his own and others' science fiction. Also: John Brunner's column, "Noise Level." Also: Barry Malzberg reviews James Gunn. Also: Richard Lupoff's column, Jon Gustafson's column on SF Art, and letters from Isaac Asimov, Malzberg, Coney, Bloch, others. Also: "Philip K. Dick: A Parallax View" by Terrence Green. Also: Alter-Ego running rampant on a field of bloody books. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I I telligent men with excellent taste and keen fiction perceptions. But they are anthology editors, and they lack the month-in, month-out presence of a magazine. So tell me why Ben Bova won, Geis." He has done a marvelous balancing act. He's kept to the Campbell Analog formula and not seriously disturbed the solid Analog readership, while experimenting with 'soft' science-fiction, new writers, new viewpoints, new dogmas. "You're saying they all should win the Hugo?" I'm saying the category should go back to being called Best Professional Magazine. That's actually what Best Editor means -- now, anyway -- in the final analysis. "Ummph. Let us go on to Best Professional Artist." I have a flash...Kelly Freas won again, right? "Right. This is his fourth Hugo in a row and ninth win overall. This time his initial first-place votes were # out of #." Year in and year out the voters love him, and he is the premier sf cover artist and illustrator. Superb drawing, technical mastery and color sense. "Heh, I see by the list that our zine, The Alien Critic (now Science Fiction Review) only had # out of # first place votes on the first ballot. We probably only barely won the Best Fanzine Hugo." 'We', Alter? "Yes, WE, Geis! I have typed my tendrils to the filiments for you, thought up humorous quips and bon mots, conceived excellent covers, taken care of the Archives t  Yes, yes, you do contribute a lot of donkey work. Get on with the list. "It says here that a Richard E. Geis won the Best Fan Writer Just once before I die I want to see MY name on the ballot. 'Best Fan Writer -- Alter Ego!' "Ho-ho. Never happen.  am master and full-credit-taker here. How many votes did I get? "Too many. # out of # on the first ballot. God only knows how many of those # belong to me. If there were any justice in this world -- " Fortunately, Alter, there is no justice. The meek will never inherit the Earth. Rumors to the contrary are propaganda planted by the True Secret Masters to keep the huddled masses under control; promise them Heaven and give them Hell,, Political and religious leaders have known that for eons. Who won the Best Fan Artist Hugo? "Not so fast, Geis. I refuse to be hurried along and shamelessly manipulated. I think I'll just reveal a few bits of information..." Alter! Don't -- "Such as the rumors that Burt Akers, the author of the Dray Prescot Antares saga published by galaxy Alter, he hasn't confirmed -- "And that one of the authors behind the Gregory Kern house name Unproven! Unverified! You can't -- "And that the secret behind Michael Moorcock's incredible proSelectric named Jerry Cornelius who has a fondness for creating heroic Fantasy." Stop! This is getting out of hand. Get back to the Hugo Awards or -- or I'll use the incantation and the amulet (I found them yesterday where you'd hidden them!) to force you to read every single word of Dhalgren again. "Arrrghh! Not that! Where...where was I? Yes, here... Bill Rotsler won the Best Fan Artist Hugo. For lo these decades Bill's clever, funny, biting cartoons and illustrations have graced generation upon generation of fanzines. Now, long overdue, he has a Hugo. And the first ballot first place votes are convincing: # out of #." There's more writing on that paper you have, Alter. More awards ? "Says here... The John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Says here P.J. Plauger won it." Don't look blank, Alter. He deserved it and you know it. "May be, Geis, but damned if I can remember any of his stories." For instance, he had a novelette in the February # Analog. And there are others. "Well? Is he a good writer?" In "Wet Blanket", the February Analog story, he writes witli genuine skill and talent, I think. He apparently has scientific training, and in this story he portrays a near-genius scientist who cannot trust his or any other government to keep the peace and not misuse his discoveries. I tire of the cliche ami the paranoia that runs through so many of Analog's stories, but the scientisttechnician readers love to read about evil militarypolitical villains and self-sacrificing, heroic I-know-best scientists. Plauger uses the theme well. "I have one more award here, Geis. The Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) award, which went, this year, to our friend Fritz Leiber." Nobody, but nobody will argue with that award. Fritz is a Grand Master of Fantasy...and science fiction as well, I think. He lives in San Francisco now, but I remember him best from when we both lived on the ocean front in Venice, California. Me -- "Us, Geis, US!" -- You'n me, Alter, in that dinky one-room third floor apartment, and he in' that wonderfully cluttered ground floor apartment two blocks away... "Get off the nostalgia kick, Geis. Talk about science fiction. Say something outrageous." That's your job, Alter. You say something monstrous. I need to throw you down into the dungeon again, as punishment. I admit to more than a mild discomfort at having you up here where we humans are. "Huh! You call yourselves human? Most so-called humans, Geis, are concerned with money, power, sex and death. You have been taught to be ashamed of those interests, however, and as a result you fill the air and fill printed pages with bullguana as you pretend otherwise. Hypocrisy is the first lesson a human child leams. After that it learns multitudes of variations in the art. Now it has reached the point where whole industries and reputations, all kinds of vested interests, are built upon the Established Hypocrisies. If people suddenly became honest with themselves and others the economy of the world would undergo a revolution, culture would be turned inside out and societies would be tumbled down to bedrock. But all this would heal with remarkable speed and lo, most people would be happy for a change. It is true you would have a new set of unemployed -- religious leaders, politicians, many, many bureaucrats..." Never happen, Alter. Too much money in unhappiness. "Bah, all humans are cowards." Alter, I'm worried about you. You've just shown the first symptoms of that awful disease called Idealism. Tell me, when did you first feel a niggling dissatisfaction with reality? When did the word 'should' first worm into your mind? Geis. Maybe I don't belong up here in your world. I'm going down to the Archives for a few hours of blessed solitude."    Yes, he did it! Stepped into the jury-rigged matter transmitter he created (behind my back) from the two-way TV intercom I had installed to avoid having to trek down to the dungeon, and he crackle-zapped himself precisely where I want him! Now to trap the presumptuous little smart-aleck down there. The dungeon door is still locked, barred and chained. His only way out is via the transmitter. Now I open this closet door...pick up the sledgehammer I had secreted there for just this possibility Done. I have him back where he belongs. He's stuck down there with all those books and magazines and fanzines and a radio and a TV and all that free time Qalaxy Edited by James Baen simply, the best of the best. Hours of reading pleasure by the finest writers of science fiction: such sf luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin (her Nebula winning "The Day Before the Revolution"), Frederik Pohl, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley and many more are represented here with their finest works. is now available. To order, send the title and number with your name and address, # plus # postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. # AW #( SpiderRobinson A Mirror For Observers, Edgar Pangborn, AvonEquinox, # pp., # Continuum #, Ed. Roger Elwood, Berkley Medallion, # pp., # Continuum #, Ed. Roger Elwood, Berkley Medallion, I # pp. , # Continuum #, Ed. Roger Elwood, BerkleyPutnam, # pp. , # Tomorrow Today, Ed. George Zebrowski, Unity Press, # pp., # Andromeda Gun, John Boyd, Berkley Medallion, # pp., # The Eden Cycle, Raymond Z. Gallun, Ballantine, # pp., # Buy Jupiter and Other Stories, Isaac Asimov, Doubleday, # pp., # Time For The Stars, Robert A. Heinlein, Ace, # pp., # # Greatest Science Fiction Stories, Ed. Laurence M. Janifer, Tempo, # pp. ,# Minds Unleashed, Ed. Grof Conklin, Tempo, # pp., # The Expendables ##: The Rings of Tantalus, Richard Avery, Fawcett Gold Medal, # pp., # I ve a joy to share with you this month, and a confession of sorts to make. There are, I cop, some gaping holes in my background as an sf reviewer. There are classic novels I've never read, giant authors I know only by reputation, Big Names whose stuff I have never tried, either because the cover blurb turned me off ( stupid reason) or simply because no one whose judgement I respect recommended them highly enough. I'm conservative about spending my sf dollar -- I prefer a sure thing. And so I've only just discovered Edgar Pangborn. I haven't been so delighted since (years ago, thank God) I discovered Theodore Sturgeon. In fact, the comparison is apt. I like Pangbom and Sturgeon for very similar reasons. Both are thoughtful, mature writers, and both remind me at times of Brunner's Chad Mulligan, bitter drunk, crying at the world, "Goddamit, I love you all." Both are bitterly disappointed in man's evil, and both are hopelessly in love with man's good. Both are addicted to creating and falling in love with warmly human, vibrantly alive characters, and making you love them too. A Mirror For Observers, a winner of the International Fantasy Award (like Sturgeon's More Than Human), is not a great book. But it certainly deserves its inclusion in AvonEquinox's "SF Rediscovery" line (an estimable series of books, at best forgotten classics, at worst interesting historical landmarks). It may be called "early Pangborn," copyright # (nine years after Edgar went free-lance, his second novel), and it has its share of weaknesses. The plot, in the light of modern sf standards, is implausible when it isn't trite; the alleged "Martian observers" are purely human archetypes; and some of the dialogue is just godawful. But read it as an allegory of the struggle between good and evil, and it becomes thoughtful, incisive, and magnificent in scope. It is a slap in cynicism's face, a letter of reference to God on behalf of humanity, the story of a bitter conflict for possession of a single human soul, and its happy outcome. Imagine Ambrose Bierce as thesis, and Mirror as antithesis: no timid apology, nor even spirited defense, but a quiet, assured denial of the indictment. You've already heard me heap guano on the Campbell Memorial Award judges who alleged that the "recognition of the fallen state of man" was "a requirement of all great literature." Well, Mirror fulfills one of my own prime criteria for all great literature: it helped  concile me to the tragic joy of being alive. Maybe you believe that everything sucks and we're all full of shit. Most of you live in America, so I grant you the evidence is convincing. So go read Mirror For Observers and remember why you consented to be bom. You did, you know.    Having been wiped out by early Pangborn, I shoveled through the mountain of review copies I keep piled by the stove (makes sense -- half of them end up in it) for some more Pangborn I could review. (I haven't had time for recreational reading in months -- do you people realize the sacrifices I make for you? Wading doggedly and dutifully through the monthly sludge when I've had three prime John D. MacDonalds waiting on my desk for ages?) All I could find were some short stories, and so I discovered two -- or rather, four -- peachy anthologies, one okay and one simply superb. (Digressionhint: if the publishers of Pangborn's Davy and Good Neighbors are listening, know that I would give prompt and careful attention to review copies of same. His The Company of Glory was published in Galaxy; I may review it anyway.) I may as well take the okay one first; I can see that it will require the most space by sheer weight of wordage. It comprises four books, of which I have received three. Editors love gimmicks. Theme collections, several writers using an identical first chapter, male and female writers assigned the same theme: the average editor is a sucker for 'em. And ever since Heinlein's Future History series and Howard's Hyborian Age, writers (me included, Mr. Callahan) have been suckers for the "extended story," the continuous-background story or novel sequence. A hack will use this device to milk a single vision for several publisher's checks; a master will use the extra space to weave a wider, deeper, richer tapestry. In the latter hope, Roger El wood commissioned a total of #I authors to write # stories for the Continuum series. The #-story cycles (and one "revolving authorship" -- gimmick within a gimmick!) were to be connected, but not interdependent -- you shouldn't have to read Continuum I, # and # to appreciate a story in #. Nonetheless I waited until I had all but Continuum # before reading them for review, to check on Elwood's claim. I read Philip Jose Farmer back-to-front, Pangborn front-to-back, then said the hell with it and read the rest of the stuff one book after another in the order you're supposed to. The standout, of course, was Pangborn. I was deeply gratified to see the maturity of the talent that had written Mirror in #. "The Children's Crusade" in C-l is a magnificent account of the March of the Mutant Children to Nuber; "The Legend, of Hombas" in C-# was a wisdom, no matter how many times lost, will always be recreated; and "Mam Sola's House" in C-# was a subtle and yet broadly hilarious anecdote. "Hombas" at least was Hugo quality, and each tale is itself sufficient justification for buying the book it comes in. The stories share only the background world in which I'm told Pangborn's Davy is set. Fanner's series, however, was a simple "continued-story" format, a Tragedy In Four Acts. Each story taken by itself is only a fragment, and reading them inreverse order (which by Elwood's premise should have been okay) was like reading something that's been nettirw sdrawkcab -- you can make sense out of it, but only with effort. (Fully aware of this, Farmer spent the first half of the second story in a clumsy recap of the one before. I don't know what he did in C-#, where the recap must have been fatter, but by C-# he abandoned it entirely: the last story, by itself, is unbalanced and confusing.) When painstakingly assembled, the pieces formed a story that I thought was shallow and second rate. Poul Anderson's stories all take place on Rustum, the world of his #I Orbit Unlimited (itself a collection of three connected but discrete novelettes), and all take their plot from Rustum's unique cartography. The stories aren't perhaps Poul's best, but they are master's work; and it was good to meet up with Joshua and Danny Coffin again -- I enjoyed all three heartily. Poul's a thoughtful writer. On the other end of the scale were Thomas N. Scortia's "Armageddon Tapes" series, which I found unreadable and boring; Gene Wolfe's stories, which I couldn't make head nor tail out of (which may be only a measure of my ignorance); Anne McCaffrey's "Killashandra The Crystal Singer" series, cloying and trite despite a breathtaking premise; and the revolving-authorship Robot-world series, some of which were wellwritten and all of which were minor. I like Chad Oliver, and found two of his "Caravans Unlimited" yams good if routine (didn't like "Shaka!" in C-l at all), but taken together they make me wonWe are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each: # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me" Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U S A. only. der if there isn't at least one planet out there that isn't a dead ringer for Africa, or one alien society that ain't a ringer for primitive man. By the end of the series, everything except barebone plot mechanics was a cliche, and neither characters nor the single moral question considered ("Is it okay to mess with primitive cultures?") grew after the first story. Not depth but repetition. At # each of the Continuum books are a fair buy by today's standards, but you might want to borrow a friend's copies for the Pangborn and Anderson. (A minor gripe: it seems to me, perhaps in my naivete, that it ought to be possible to proof out at least almost all of the typos in a given book. C-# ' s printer consistently turns "e"s into "s"s and "o"s into "e"s. Okay, maybe he was working from a muddy carbon -- but why did so many errors go unrepaired?)    Inflamed by Pangborn-hunger, I next selected Tomorrow Today, edited by the redoubtable George Zebrowski, and published as the first of Unity Press's new "Planet Series". This was a clear case of following the trail of tusks to the Elephant's Graveyard itself. The cover design by Eric Mathes is unquestionably the best I have ever seen on a book of sf, strikingly beautiful and spiritual. The spectrum-ofstyle provided by Zebrowski's selection of authors is dazzlingly wide and rich. And each and every story in the book is a pure masterpiece of its type. Oh, one of the stories (Norman Kagen's "Counter Ecology") I "didn't care for" in the sense that one prefers scotch to gin. But it was damned good gin. Similarly, two of the stories (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's and Mack Reynolds's) had incredibly cliched premises (I first read the basic plot of Reynolds's "Visitor" in a Marvel comic in #, which means it was ancient then), but both are excellent stories, consummately crafted. And John McHale's pompous introduction nearly convinced me the book was going to be awful, but it wasn't. Boy, was it wasn't. Gregory and Jim Benford's "John of the Apocalypse" was one of the most dat say "probable"?) future I've ever read; "In the Wind" by Glen Cook (a new writer to me, Clarion grad) was excellent in spite of a bonehead printer who ran the footnotes in the body of the text; James Stevens' "Syn" was a remarkable extrapolation of the war mentality to its logical culmination; and the Pangborn... oh, the Pangbom! I hereby nominate "Harper Conan and Singer David" for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and recommend it to every one of you out there. Having discovered Pangborn, I now have the happy duty of turning my wife Jeanne on to him, and this is the one I'll start her on. It is one of the most warmly human stories I've ever read, and made me laugh and cry aloud in the space of # pages. Partly because of it, and partly because of the total content of the book, I further nominate Tomorrow Today for the Best Anthology Hugo -- at least, so far. It's September as I write this, and who knows what Christmas will bring? But at the very least, this is the one to beat for this year's honors. Solid, thoughtful, adult stories, worth even the stiff # pricetag (the cover is worth it). A Best Buy.    John Boyd is another name heretofore unknown to me (the copyright is in the name of "Boyd Upchurch", which makes it even more confusing), but his Andromeda Run shows signs of great promise. It isn't a great book, but it bears the signs of a writer who just may have a great book or two (or three) in him somewhere. It concerns an alien missionary of nonmaterial nature, "G-#," who insinuates himself into the brain of a two-bit gunman and bank-robber in America's Old West, partly to lead Mankind to enlightenment and partly to satisfy his own craving for corporeal existence. The results are entirely hilarious, a kind of humor that reminds me of Gordy Dickson at his funniest and partly of The Ballad of Dingus McGee (the excellent book, not the clumsy movie rip-off), to which Gun bears a strong resemblance. The off-color joke which builds from p. # to its outrageous punchline on p. # is alone worth the #, as is the saga of the Smallest Building In The World With Flying Buttresses. The book has, as I say, its flaws: the first six pages in particular were so floridly overwritten as to be barely comprehensible, and from time to time the prose stumbles. But I enjoyed it, and I think you will too. I'd like to see Mr. Boyd's next book.    The Eden Cycle by Raymond Z. Gallun would have made a peachy novelette, out it has one of those premises that only a genius could make into a satisfying novel. Gallun posits a race of aliens who come to Earth and offer us total Sensory Experience Simulation -- that is, the literal fulfillment of our every wish. Their process conveys effective immortality (I don't know what happened to entropy) and will provide any sensory experience imaginable. You cannot, of course, physically harm any other human or alien being. In fact, you can't do anything physically -- your body lies comatose while you live in a world of utterly realseeming fantasy, which follows your every whim. Some humans even allow their physical being to be refined down to Basic Personality Nodules, stacked in a subterranean vault like so many cantaloupes. No one, apparently, turns down the aliens' offer -- though this is unclear; holdouts may have simply died off. Except for this last implausibility, the premise is fascinating: sort of Total Television. But what Gallun makes of it is largely a T.V, Guide, a catalogue of all the basic human fantasies, presented one after the other in repetitious and ultimately stultifying procession. Eden Cycle is about two people (realsies) who wade through an endless series of imaginary dramas before opting for real life -- but they know from the start that the imaginary dramas are only imaginary dramas, and when they finally do get as bored as I was pages ago and have the aliens return them to real bodies on the real surface of the real planet Earth (which is okay by the aliens: satisfaction guaranteed or your karma refunded), they end up copping out. Real Life, they discover, entails the horrid possibilities of failure and death: surely fantasy is preferable. The hell of it is that Gallun seems (if I read him rightly) to approve of their choice. They come across as idealists who decide to work within the system to beat the system, and I've heard that one before, thank you. It takes an imaginative writer to string total wish-fulfillment out over # pages, and for my money Gallun didn't pull it off. As Lester Del Rey says, when anything can happen, who cares what does?    Buy Jupiter and other stories is recommended for all Isaac Asimov fans, but I wouldn't give it to a neofan who wants to know who is dis Asimov feeler anyway. Though some of its # stories are quite good (I especially liked "The Greatest Asset," "The Pause," "Day of The Hunters" and the title story), the majority are distinctly minor. Some are outrageous tomato surprises poof! -- a tomato hits you in the face) that nobody else in the world could get away with (in particular "Shah Guido G."), and some are mere throwaway pieces that show signs of being written in a hurry. But, as with The Early Del Rey (reviewed in the September # Galaxy Bookshelf), what makes the book are the introductions, the candid glimpses into the personal and professional life of Isaac Asimov, Gent. If you're an Asimov fan like I am, you'll enjoy the biographical commentary and sf anecdotes, which are an extension of those in Isaac's Before The Golden Age and The Early Asimov. If you're not an Asimov fan, avoid this like the plague, and go read Foundation. Then read this one.    I can't give Time For The Stars the space it deserves. First of all, I'm running out of room, and second of all I've been blowing Heinlein's horn so consistently in this column that it's beginning to get monotonous even for me. Suffice it to say that this Heinlein-juvenile is about star travel: about relativistic effects in human terms, as felt by a youth riding a just-less-than-lightspeed ship while telepathically in contact with his twin brother on Earth; and about the chaos into which physics collapses when said telepathy demonstrates irrefutably that the concept of simultaneity has meaning. Along the way, of course, it can't help but be an exciting and absorbing adventure; in spite of the usual ghastly cover painting by "Steele Savage," the direct antithesis of the kind of thing Mathes did for Tomorrow Today. (Aesthetic discomfort has forced me to rewrap all of Ace's Heinlein-juvenile reprints in plain brown paper.)    Couple more quickies before I go. There's not much point in saying a whole lot about Laurence M. Janifer's # Greatest Science Fiction Stories (formerly Master's Choice), or the late Groff Conklin's Minds Unleashed (formerly Giants Unleashed). Most of you are probably long familiar with the stories contained -- they are, every one, acknowledged classics of the field, often anthologized, and these collections themselves are in their umpty-umpth edition. If you aren't familiar with each and every story in them, you couldn't possibly get a better buy. There you go. (Oh year -- if you're trying to turn someone on to sf, these are two of the books to do it with. As is Zebrowski's Tomorrow Today.)    But don't start them with Richard Avery's The Expendables ##: The Rings of Tantalus. Nothing on my review copy indicates that it's supposed to be a juvenile, so I must assume Avery meant it for adults. It fails for either audience. It reminds me of Captain Midnight, with sex added and the science a little watered down. Trash -- don't waste your time. By next month I should have had a chance to catch the first few installments of the new T.V. series Space # and if it's half as bad as I expect it will be, I'll have some fireworks for you. Also I hope to present the bizarre story of how A.E. Van Vogt (or at least, one of his books) was found back to back with a naked blonde in a deli in Halifax. And other stories. Till then -- have a happy.    Since the above was written and mailed off, dear readers. Space # premiered. Subsequently your kindly editor called me here in Nova Scotia, and asked me to warn you. Because there exists a slim possibility that there's a lone reader out there who has not only missed all the episodes so far (I hate this publishing lag -- might as well be talking to you by radio from Alpha Centauri), but who has no friends, who was therefore thinking of catching Space # this week. If so -- if you're the guy -- I strongly suggest that you will have a lot more fun if you put your head down the toilet. This on the strength of one episode. I locked myself in my bedroom with the babble-box (we had company that night) so I wouldn't miss a minute. I intended to give the show a fair trial. Imagine my horror when I discovered that the fattest of my guests had tipped his chair against my door from the outside, and I really was locked in! I was found several hours later by the across the tube, trying weakly to destroy it with profanity. The flowers on my dresser were dead, and the flies were tearing each other to pieces. The scriptwriter is George Beliak, whose only qualifications for writing sf seem to consist of having seen #I with cotton in his ears. To paraphrase Casey At The Bat, the director was a pudding and the gadgetry a fake. Co-stars Landau and Bain looked like they'd be real handy this winter, cut down to stove length and split. The hideously expensive special effects were inaccurate and dull, derived equally from #I and Earthquake ; and if there's a science consultant connected with the show, he must have no shaving mirror. I can't bear to describe the premise for the series -- if you're the hypothetical innocent described above, go find, an sf fan, ask him, and then wait until he stops laughing. Bring a lunch. God damn it to hell, how did it happen? Do you realize they spent a into a pot to be spent on television sf, and this is what we got. Do fans really get the kind of TV they deserve? Is it somehow our fault? Hasn't it occurred to one of the soul-less, brainless shit peddlers of what Harlan calls Cloud-CuckooLand that if they intend to milk science fiction the way they have everything else, it just might be a good idea to consult with some of the professionals and fans of science fiction? To read some sf? Won't there ever be a mature, adult, well-written sf series on television? Hell, even the cop-shows produced Baretta. Watch Space #? I'd infinitely rather drop the babble-box into the root cellar, step out the door and through the woodshed, and watch space. I suggest you do likewise.  Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. He had come a long way and suffered much. Now it was time for the Payoff -- but he was broke.  Monday He glared at his landlady with undisguised disgust, A big, bosomy woman, she leaned easily against the door jamb. The hem of her cheap print dress was torn and drooping; the tip of her filtercigarette was smeared with bright scarlet lipstick. She blew a lazy smoke ring. "If you don't like it," she was saying, "you can always move out." Her cool eyes tracked the smoke ring as it rolled possessively across his living room. No words could work theii way past the fury in his throat. He watched the writhing smoke impact against the cracked plaster wall and ripple away from the crushed carcass of a mosquito. "Look," he heard himself pleading in his thick accent, "I only vant this place for another two months. How bout you holt the rent down until I'm gone, huh?" Cigarette ashes tumbled like the dirty grey snow of the city. "Nope," she said flatly. "No deal. Your lease expires next week and you either pay or get out." "Now look," he protested, hoping that something besides profit could penetrate the coin purse of her brain, "my research is near frnisht! Two months, it's all I neet and all I ask. Then I go avay and you can raise the rent to vatever you vant." "And in the meantime I lose money on your room? Whaddaya think I am, crazy or something?" She saw dismay on his pudgy face and cared little; every tenant showed it when she raised the rent. But behind that look glimmered another, akin to terror. That interested her. She allowed her sharp voice to soften, and with a heavy sigh, she began, "Mr. Schwartz, you know I'm sorry to do this to you, but the taxes have gone up, fuel's gone up, Joe the janitor wants a raise -- " she shook her head ponderously " -- it's this damn inflation, gobbling up my whole profit margin." "Inflation!" he moaned. His fingers tugged thick locks of his long brown hair. "If I hear that vord vun more time, I think I go crazy! Everybody in town, he raises his prices because he says if he don't, inflation vill vipe him out. Ant me, I ask for them to giff me little more on my grant, and vat do they say? They say, 'Schvartz, times are hart, inflation ate up all our money and ve got none to giff you!' " He dropped onto the battered green couch, not noticing how the sudden stress of his # pounds widened the rip in its motheaten cover. "I fint the money somevere, voman. Now you go, leaf me alone vit my empty stomach ant my emptier vallet." "Well!" She sniffed, and tossed her stringy blond hair, sorry she had attempted to show him the warm heart under her folds of flesh. "If I were you," she said with spiteful malice, "I'd sell that damn radio you're always fussing with, and use the money for rent, for furniture, and for some decent clothes. That's what I'd do." She flounced away, slamming the thin door behind her. A shaken cloud of plaster dust fell from the ceiling. Schwartz sagged, and his eyes began to sting. He knew that the room, barren except for the broken sofa on which he slept, and the chrome-stripped device she called his "damn radio," was gloomy, dusty, and desolate. He knew that his too-often mended clothes with their frayed cuffs and ineradicable stains made him a figure of fun. He knew that already; she didn't have to tell him! That kind of rubbing it in... noisily, he blew his bulbous nose on a torn handkerchief. An extra fifty dollars a month! There was no way he could afford it. His budget had been prepared years before, and the rampant inflation of the two years he'd been here had caught him in a trap of overplanning. Mr. Anonymous, they had said he would be. Mr. Havejust-enough-money-to-play-theroleand-not-enough-todrawanybody' sattention. Bah! He spat on the floor, wishing it were the desk of a certain economist who thought prediction possible. Here he was, round like a silly balloon because he couldn't afford anything ,but bloating, starchy foods like bread and potatoes. His drumskin-tight budget was stretched to molecular thinness, and it still couldn't cover expenses. Well, to hell with orders about radio silence; it was time to demand some help. They could not expect him to do anything more, not when the crack they had spent twenty years prying open was about to be plastered shut. He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt, and plodded across the bare boards. His wide feet stirred up the dust he never seemed to get around to sweeping. At the control panel of the fivefoot high, eight-foot long device, he flicked half a dozen switches and plugged in a microphone. Then, turning a dial until the oscilloscope readings fell into a familiar pattern, he bent his head and spoke in his native language. "Come in, Command, come in." "Ja. Command here. Why -- " Chilled by the ice in the other voice, he said quickly, "Counterfeit some more money for me, at once. Send it immediately." "Impossible. Rioters burned the Mint. Everything is gone -- the emergency funds, the plates, the paper, even the engraver. It has already caused an economic crisis. Production of our own currency has first priority. You will have to wait." "How long?" "Two months, perhaps." "But it's only nine weeks to The Day." "We know that." "But she's raising the rent, and I'll be forced to leave -- " "Then you must find the necessary funds some other way. Out." Schwartz's receiver clicked once and lapsed into a low hum. He stared at it blankly, unable to comprehend that he had been cut off like a delivery boy clamoring for the master of the house. Of their own volition, his fingers reached for the call button, but he jerked them back at the touch of the slick grey plastic. The ice in the other voice could change easily to fire; he wanted at all costs to avoid that. His record w'as spotty enough as it was. With a muttered curse, he unplugged the microphone and returned it to its niche. A quick swipe of his hand threw the switches to the off position; the small green lights, which had glistened through the transmission, darkened. Numbly, he trudged across the empty room and fell lengthwise on the couch. Tuesday Smog-sapped sunlight, an invalid on an obstacle course, was feeling its way through the dust and grease on the east window. He rubbed the grey stubble on his jaws, trying to remember what it was that he had to do. After a moment itcame to him, as it did every morning, and he walked across the room. His rundown heels made lonely tapping sounds; their half-hearted echoes deepened his sense of abandonment. "I don't know why I bother any more," he mumbled in the tongue he spoke only in the isolation of his room. "Why should I try to keep the way clear for them, when they will not raise a single finger to help me when I need it?" He curled his own stubby fingers around a toggle switch and checked the chronometer imbedded in the chrome paneling. #:#, with the sweep-hand approaching the minute mark. When it reached exact vertical, he pulled the switch and held it down for five seconds. Released, it snapped back with a solid thwack. A foot away, he twisted a dial and watched green waves of light wash across the screen of the oscilloscope. Steady, even, perfect symmetry. The five-second burst of energy had kept the tunnel walls smooth and disciplined. Like pruning a hedge, he sometimes thought, a hedge of wild, unruly spatialtemporal shrubs that would fill the tunnel if they weren't burned back with monotonous regularity. The oscilloscope patterns dissolved into green snow as the technicians at the other end applied their own electronic shears. Before it returned to normal, he had switched it off. He was in trouble. He had to raise a bare minimum of one hundred dollars, and quickly. If he failed, he would lose thejr only beachhead. They simply couldn't find another, because the tunnel, the carefully-maintained tunnel that had cost them an atomic bomb on the other side and the worst power blackout in history on this, the tunnel ended right in his room. Fifteen years of work, by himself, by the previous operatives, and by the amazingly resourceful engineer who had patched together a prototype of this machine from local radio parts -- it would all go to waste. Despite his irritation, he remained loyal; he couldn't let that happen. If only there were no need to prune it from both ends. But the "branches" didn't grow in front of the two mouths, they grew along and out of the inner walls. Each blast snapped off only those which grew towards its source, and those which were perpendicular to the tunnel walls. Those bending in the opposite direction were only flattened, to spring back up and obstruct the path as soon as the pressure was released. Damn. He lifted a tom sofa cushion, and squeezed his hand through a rent in the grey cloth over the springs. His fingers drew out a thin envelope. His bankroll, each bill was the work of a master forger with all the resources of an anxious government behind him. He fanned the deliberately aged bills. Not enough. No matter how many times he counted them, there were never enough. As the days trundled past, they grew fewer and fewer and he could see that when The Day came, there would be none. In fact, there would have been none for some weeks already. He had no choice. Returning the' envelope to its cache, he repositioned the faded cushion and rose to his feet with a resigned sigh. Standing orders were to stay by the radio, in case of emergency, but they had to be disregarded. He would get a job. He could stand to work with these people for the short time needed to earn one hundred dollars. Any emergencies would have to wait. If he worked longer, he realized, he could earn enough to pay for a decent meal, and maybe even for a new white shirt. Buoyed by the prospect, he gave his room a last worried glance , and waddled out.    The harried, shirt-sleeved man at the employment agency was neither helpful nor hopeful. He scowled at the form Schwartz had handed him, then leaned back in his metal swivel chair. "Mr. Schwartz," he began, "I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think you have a chance of finding a job in your specialty." "But this country needs qualified electronic technicians, ja?" He felt a flutter in his heart and a queasiness in his stomach. It was demeaning enough to have to ask, but to be told that... perhaps the man did not understand. Maybe he saw only the rumpled, ancient suit and the whiskery face, and thought he was unreliable, an alcoholic or a derelict. "I assure you, sir, I haff the excellent training ant skills, ant -- " The man threw up his hands helplessly. "I understand that, Mr. Schwartz, and I believe you. But you see, with government funding for scientific research cut to the lowest it's been in forty years, and with unemployment in general running at # -- " he put his elbows on the desk and lowered his drawn face into his hands " -- every job in this field has been taken by outof-work engineers, physicists, mathematicians... hell, in a little radio repair shop down the street, there's a Ph. D. in chemistry working for # an hour." His eyes lifted, and bore into Schwartz. "I haven't seen an opening in months. And if I ever do -- " he glanced at an open file folder on his cluttered desk " -- well, you're number #." A cold breeze shivered his large body. "Veil, then," he said in a tone that tried to be jocular but came out shaken, "I vill take anything. Anything you got, I take." "Yeah, sure," muttered the man. "Anything, huh? I'll put you on our 'anything' list." His fingers danced on the keys of the computer terminal set into his desk; he frowned at the reply on the read-out screen. "But I'm afraid that's not much better, Mr. Schwartz." "Oh." He shifted his weight to look at the screen. An embalmer's needle injected bleak despair into his veins. "I see," he said in a hollow voice. "Number #." "I'm afraid so." "How long a vait do you think it vill be?" A humorless chuckle slipped out of the man. "Six, seven weeks before we have that many openings in the entire metropolitan area. But maybe a little longer to find one that fits you." Measuring Schwartz with his eyes, he shook his head sadly, as if they'd need a very large opening. "All I can say, Mr. Schwartz, is stay by your telephone and wait for our call." "Ja, tanks," he murmured, rising with the lumbering, disbelieving movements of a penguin that has missed its prey. "I vill do that. Ant you do the best you ca huh, young man?" "I certainly will." Eager to end the interview on a. high note, he stretched his hand across the desk. "Good luck, Mr. Schwartz," he said sincerely. "Ja, thanks." He held the hand for a brief instant, and then let it drop. Politeness, he thought as he stumbled out into the crowded waiting room, was one thing, but actual physical contact was... was maybe something he had best get used to until The Day came.    That afternoon, after an hour of gloomy pacing, he threw open the grimy window and thrust his face into the blustery winter wind. Below, hurrying people huddled in heavy coats. He watched pocketbooks swing and fancied he could hear silver coins jingle. Don't be romantic, he warned himself, they don't use silver here any more. All the same... Stepping back into the room, he pulled the window down and leaned thoughtfully against the wall's cold plaster. He could get the money, with very little trouble, if the men at the training camp had been right. "You are now programmed for life," they had said, "and you will never lose what we have given you here. You may get rusty, and your endurance may drop, but the moves and the postures are deep in you as your mother's maiden names. You can never forget them." If they were right, if five years of training hadn't been erased by ten years of dissipation, then he could raise a hundred dollars -- and more, and more! -- with less trouble than he had thought. Shortly after sundown, he found his first victim in Riverdale. Waiting behind a thick tree trunk, he heard confident footsteps. Poised on the balls of his feet, he let the middle-aged businessman take one more step. Then his right hand went up as his left foot went forward; sole scraped sidewalk just as hand struck suntanned neck. The man crumpled. Schwartz's massive left arm whipped around his victim's chest and dragged him into the shadows. Two minute? later, the handtooled calfhide wallet had yielded #. Schwartz fingered the collection of credit cards for a moment. The embossed plastic numerals pressed through the cool slickness of his rubber gloves. Then he shook his head, returned the cards, and slid the wallet into the man's coat. He felt a cold burning in his lungs and studied the sprawled figure. Left alone, his victim would freeze to death. And in that neighborhood, with the residents' fear of muggers -- a proper fear, thought Schwartz with a trace of irony -- the man wouldn't be noticed till morning. His eyes raked the dusk for the familiar sight of a fire alarm box. He laid the man's briefcase and hat on his stomach, then hoisted him. Checking that there were no dog.walkers nearby, he halfsprinted, half-staggered to the alarm box. After setting him down and folding his chill hands across the briefcase, Schwartz pulled the alarm. By the time the fire engines came and the firemen spotted the body, he was four blocks away and moving fast.    Later that evening, in another part of the city, he unfolded the six bills and smoothed each one out. He couldn't shake a nagging guilt. For twenty-four dollars, he had nearly killed a man. As he stared at the faces of foreign heroes, there floated through his mind the notion that he wouldn't be so unhappy if the victim had had over a hundred dollars. One hundred dollars would ensure the success of the mission. For that, he realized with a flicker of resentment towards the men who had programmed him as though he had no more principles than a computer, for that he would kick an old lady into the path of a bus. And glow with pride, if success followed. But when, like now, the violence didn't result in the success it had seemed to promise, when it was only an unnecessary prelude to further violence... he refused the waitress' offer of more coffee and handed her one of the bills. The conditioning hadn't deprived him of all his scruples and he felt like a heel. Damn that businessman, he thought as he took his change and counted out a fair tip, damn him for making me do that again. Stepping out into the night, he cast an eye at the thick cloud cover over the city. And damn me for being the kind of man who will do it again, if I can't get the money any other way. Wednesday Swarms of people crowded the spotless streets, but Schwartz drifted through them like a leaf blown through a flock of pigeons. Driven by frustration, he bowled down the sidewalks, one eye searching for "help wanted" signs in store-front windows. Seventy-six dollars short. Sixty-three days to go. A mean, petty predicament. He could pay the rent and the bills, but starve. Or he could eat and pay the bills, but lose the room. Or he could pay the rent and eat for a few days, but then starve and lose the electricity. He had to find a job. He couldn't stomach another mugging, not after the way he'd felt the previous night. But he had to hold the room, the electricity, and himself for sixtythree more days. He could go without food for the last period, that didn't matter, because the first troops through the tunnel would be carrying rations, but he had to eat for the first fifty-some days. Ten blocks he had walked without seeing a single sign. God, what a lousy place to need a job. Unemployment at an all-time high, combined with rampaging cost-push inflation. If he could only switch apartments, find a smaller, cheaper place somewhere in BedfordStuyvesant... but he couldn't, because the tunnel ended in his room. Scuffing his ripped shoes on a sidewalk just cleaned by one of New York's legions of Sanitation Department welfare workers, he pondered alternatives: Begging. He could squat with an old tin can and hope that the hardeyed passers-by would drop in enough money. Sixty-three days, humm, need about # a day to make it, and ' even then... he rounded a corner and came upon a ragged row of beggars. While one of New York's finest tried to break through their apathy and hustle them away, he remembered his callous landlady saying that five or six were found dead, of exposure and or malnutrition, every morning. Wouldn't work. If they, who showed the signs of Death Triumphant in every stooped shoulder and beaten expression, couldn't cajole survival money out of the citizenry, how could he, with his tremendous girth, even hope to? Welfare. He'd investigated that a week ago. The young social worker had been frankly despairing. With able-bodied welfare recipients limited by statute to the number of people the city could actively employ, and with a waiting list of over fourteen thousand for the few spots that opened up every month, there was no possibility that the city could help him. Unless, added the nicevoiced lady, aged beyond her years by the strain of attempting the impossible, Mr. Schwartz suddenly developed a crippling infirmity -- say, a missing eye? a hand severed above the wrist? -- in which case the city would be allowed to assist him. Her own eyes, Schwartz had guessed as his stomach swung like a maddened gyroscope, had seen such things. He had thanked her, and left. But now, with the fifteen year old plan about to fall through because of unforeseeable problems... he turned his collar against the damp bite of the wind. He could not afford to spend time in a hospital because he had to prune the tunnel every morning. If it weren't kept clear, the interval between soldiers would lengthen to much longer than the planned one second. And if it went untended for too long, Nature would reclaim its lost domain and the conquest could never take place. Mugging. He could try it again. Remorseless and implacable, he could venture into the -- he shuddered at the memory of flaccid flesh. Hand-to-hand combat against a determined foe on a battlefield is one thing. But to use it on a city street, to risk the death of an innocent individual...and the damn city practically teemed with cops... he vowed there' d be no encore, unless it became absolutely essential. His face a contorted mask of fear and anger, he strode down the cheerless street. No jobs, no welfare, no begging, no mugging. The stream of people parted for him as the waters had for Moses, instinctively and inevitably. He scowled at the grey, worried faces that swept past, despising them and hoping that one would dare swirl into his path so that he might run it down. A pawn shop caught his eye and he hesitated, wondering if he had anything left. Then he sighed and went on. He had nothing but his couch, the clothes he was wearing, and the machine. The clothes he could mot do without, the couch had been contemptuously spurned by the man who had purchased his bed and tables, and the machine... without that, there was no sense to anything. If only he had seventy-six dollars... while his legs pumped mechanically, his mind wandered into the daydream it had been shaping since his arrival. The Day. The big machine, glowing and humming and occasionally spitting a polite little spark into the gathering dusk. Soldiers tumbling out of thin air into the living room, the first five moving lithely to long-determined guard posts. The next twenty carrying the pieces of the portable forcefield generator. A momentary interruption in the flow of tough, uniformed men as the engineers lifted and grunted and screwed and welded. Then the field is shimmering and the building is invulnerable, so the flow begins again and the pool of daring commandos swells until it bursts through the front door. With the fury of unappeasable flood waters, it sweeps the other tenants out onto the street, where they stand confused and sobbing. Hungry men with hair-trigger reactions lope down the stunned streets and expand the perimeter. Special teams roar off in commandeered vehicles for synchronized attacks on the nerve centers of the giant city -- the telephone centers, and telegraph, and radio, and television. Others are racing to the bridges, to seal the island off. Finally, just as dawn is beginning to break, all the Consolidated Edison power plants are seized and New York is deprived of its electricity. The huge dynamos whirl only for the shining machine in his living room, which, in tandem with the one at the other end, begins to force back the electromagnetic spatial-temporal walls and turn the narrow, one-man passage into a freeway large enough for the biggest bomber and the heaviest tank to travel side by side. Then, with the beachhead secured and reinforcements pouring in, all UN delegates are rounded up. A special meeting of the General Assembly, televised to the world, at which Schwartz's President and Commander-in-Chief appears and presents his non-negotiable demands: immediate cessation of all hostilities. Immediate unilateral disarmament on Earth's part. Immediate surrender of all nuclear weapons and other fissionable materials, to be transported back to Schwartz's world. Failing that, immediate nuclear destruction of Moscow, Peking, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C. Earth would have no choice. It would promptly surrender and relinquish its missiles and bombs. Once all nations were stripped, the political scientists back home assured everyone, no nation would consider building them again, because no nation would risk the invaders' return. But how was he going to get the money? Seventy-six dollars. Didn't the idiots on the other side realize that if he didn't have it, the whole plan would collapse into nothingness? Why the hell didn't they bust their asses to print up four more twenties, and shoot them through? Not for the first time, Schwartz cursed the rebellious competence which had brought about his exile to this god-forsaken land. If it hadn't been for his talented arrogance, if he hadn't ignored their silly rule book and done things his way, they would be more sympathetic. Hah! They'd never have sent him: a good, obedient spy gets promoted into a cushy desk job. A maverick gets tougher and tougher assignments, until at last one of them kills him. God, the military mind confused him. Here he was, engaged in preparing for the most momentous event in the history of two worlds, and... but he wasn't preparing. He raised his head and growled at a taxi cab which had had the temerity to hurry him with an impatient beep. No, on this job, he wasn't a commando, or even an agent. He was nothing but a highly-skilled janitor, sent to keep things clean and ready for use. He was back in his own neighborhood and the dingy front of the four-story brownstone in which he lived loomed up before him. He stood on the sidewalk a moment longer, shifting his weight from foot to foot, then grunted decisively and wheezed up the front steps. He'd call them again, by damn, and if they refused to come through, well...    Despite an unusually poor connection, the Duty Officer's voice was like a steel blade on a frostymorning. Wasting no time, it slashed at him: "You try my patience, Schwartz. You were ordered -- " "I know, I know," protested the fat man warily, "but the situation here has become untenable, and if -- " "Still the money, eh?" "Ja," he muttered through clenched teeth. Unreasoning hatred of his superior flowed through him. Like a heady wine, it threw him off guard. But at the last moment, just before he began to spew forth his accumulated bitternesses, instinct stilled his tongue. "Impossible." "Sir," explained Schwartz, barely controlling himself, "without the money I lose the apartment, without which the invasion will fail. If you want -- " "Don't be an ass, Schwartz. Absolutely nothing can be done." "Sir, it's only a -- " "First, we don't have the facilities to counterfeit the money, remember? Second, the invasion of Alternate Right is now underway. Do you know how little power we have to spare? Even the energy we are using on this conversation is too much, and to send a packet would require ten times as much, if not more. And we don't have it." "But sir, the invasion wasn't planned until -- " ,"Don't tell me what I told you. We jumped the gun because Alternate Right's stepped-up nuclear testing was playing havoc with the Midwest. We had no choice; the Indianapolis area was getting burned too often. As was Shanhaikuan, in China." "Does that," mumbled Schwartz in confusion, "postpone the invasion here?" "So far." replied the other, humanly uncertain for the first time, "it doesn't seem that way, but we can't be sure until perhaps a week in advance." "And you can't -- " "No!" barked the officer. His static-furred voice echoed off the bare walls. Schwartz trembled with sudden apprehension. "No more pleas. You are wasting time and valuable energy. Find the money yourself. You are a talented agent. You can do it. Do you read me?" "Ja, ja," sighed Schwartz. "I read you, sir. Over and out." "Roger, over and out." Schwartz's soft hand swept down the switches, then came to rest on his bent knee. Slowly, it formed a fist, and beat against the thick flesh of his thigh. The muffled thuds came faster and faster and faster until Schwartz suddenly jerked to his feet and shouted, "Goddamittohell!" Hands locked behind his back, he started pacing. The ancient boards of the warped floor squeaked at his passage, protesting his weight. Furious, he slammed his feet down, to crush all resistance from the wood. There was no other way he could obtain the money. None.    He went prowling for another benefactor that night, in Manhattan, on the East Side. There, if luck rode with him, he would encounter someone whose wallet could make up the entire deficit and spare him a third assault. He found his mark in the shadows, reading a tattered poster on a building. He was a bareheaded, husky man in his late twenties. The smoothly-tailored lines of his long leather coat had probably run to at least #; his shining black boots looked like custommade Italian imports. The harsh evening wind covered Schwartz's rapid breath. His mouth opened. One swivel of his head assured him of privacy; he took four steps before a calm voice commanded, "Fritz, defend!" Against a backdrop of late winter gloom gaped the slavering jaws of a huge Doberman pinscher. Backdrawn lips unsheathed long, yellow fangs; the tongue was a red carpet for a blood-curling snarl. Even as his conscious mind registered the danger, the superbly trained body that slept under his flab awakened. His left hand came up, then waved to the left, drawing the dog's eyes and turning the angle of the incoming jaw a few degrees. His stiffened right hand slashed at the middle of the dog's long neck. Its vicious eyes glazed over as it slammed onto the sidewalk. It lay temporarily still, too stunned even to twitch. Two quick kicks finished it off and then Schwartz was on the owner. "Shouldn't haff done that," he growled, as savagely as the Doberman. "I coult haff been hurt." His hand rose and fell and the young man dropped across the body of his late defender. Thursday Flushed by the first budgetary surplus he had seen in six months, Schwartz treated himself to a sirloin steak brunch at Schrafft's. Washed down by generous helpings of Heineken's, the meal put him in such a genial mood that more of the dog-owner's money went for a tip than he had planned. But he didn't care; the billfold inside the Saville Row suit had been stuffed with # bills. Schwartz had secreted enough in the couch to keep him in steak until The Day came. Ah, The Day. With Alternate Right being subdued now, the last threat to Center World would be removed in sixty-two days. Years and years of planning, of hiding, would have come to fruition. His world could rest easy, assured that there would be no. more hissing, melting discharges of wild energy. The first calamity had come some forty years earlier, when the center of Peshawar, one hundred miles west-north-west of Rawalpindi, had burned to the ground. It had been neither a gradual, spreading fire, not an explosion. It was as though every ramshackle hut had been saturated in gasoline, and simultaneoulsy torched. The scientists, the fire investigators, the survivors -- all had thrown up their hands and put it down to the whims of a mad God. Three days later a like fire had killed ten thousand in Miram Shah, two hundred miles west-south-west of Rawalpindi. For years suspicion rested on Hindu fanatics. But then similar things happened near Moscow, and later between Ankara and Istanbul, and his world had edged to the brink of war. After frowning for so long, fortune decided to smile. A German scientist promulgated a theory, confirmed by tests carried out in Turkey, deep in the Pacific, and again near Moscow. Somewhere else, not on his world but near it, wild energy was burning holes through walls which no one had known were there. The scientist postulated that alternate worlds existed, but were separated by space-time barriers. He went on to suggest that when sources of tremendous energy, such as nuclear weapons, expended themselves in one sudden burst, the barriers were warped open. He predicted that they would quickly knit themselves back together, but not before passing disastrous floods of energy. Through perseverance and chance, leading physicists were finally able to observe one such flood. Their theories sent a thousand engineers scurrying to duplicate the process with less energy. In time, they found it. A minute atomic bomb cracked the walls; an engineer-cum-agent slipped into the next world. He, in turn, made his way to New York, and over a period of years pieced together a device for establishing contact. The scientists on the other side, alert for his signal, rushed their own equipment to the site of the temporary warp and established the beginnings of the tunnel. Once the first tunnel became a going operation, another was installed to link Center World and Alternate Right, whose atomic tests were also wreaking havoc. Contact established and institutionalized, Center World, desperate for security, began plotting the conquest of two other worlds. The Eastern Alliance was given charge of conquering Alternate Right, the world now in the process of being subdued. Schwartz smiled he thought of the Moscow and Peking hordes swarming through that other Moscow. Just as his own forces would overrun this city in only sixty-two days. Ah, he thought, how wonderful it will be, to live without the fear of suddenly learning that you uncle's hometown has been vaporized by the waste energy of a pointless nuclear test. How wonderful it will be to close up shop here and return to my own world, a place of sanity and peace. Lost in dreams, and dulled by the unaccustomed richness of his brunch, he failed to notice the sharp glance of a passing man. He turned into his street, still unaware that the other was combing the area for a policeman. He didn't even hear the excited voice shrill, "That's him, officer. That's the man who mugged me and killed my dog!" The policeman's deep heartiness finally penetrated his cloud. "Hold on there, now sir. I'd like to have a word with you, if I may." "Pardon?" He turned and blinked, and in that instant saw the well-dressed young man behind the protective bulk of the policeman. Before his conscious mind could begin to react, long years of training took command. His left foot snapped up, into the patrolman's stomach. As he dropped, Schwartz ran. Behind him arose a furious scream: "Stop that man! Stop him he's a thief! Stctp him!!!" Passers-by leaped for safety as Schwartz barreled down the sidewalk. Driven by one thought, that he should warn his superiors that all hell was breaking loose, he made no effort to approach his building by a roundabout route. He ran directly up the front steps and burst like a whirlwind into the tiny lobby. Panting heavily, moving too hastily, he had to try twice before he could fit his key into the lock. Police whistles were blowing just behind him by the time he got the door open. "Stop or I'll shoot," boomed a voice over the rumble of cars and the beeping of horns. Pedestrians added cries of alarm, concern, and curiosity to the general din. "Stop, dammit!" Ignoring the cacophony, Schwartz began to swing the heavy front door shut. From the street came the bark of an automatic. He staggered back, clapping his hand to his chest. A low roar of satisfaction rose from the crowd that had already gathered. The policeman, still winded, hobbled slowly up the steps; he was not prepared to see Schwartz appear again, to close the door. The cop took the last four steps at gutwrenching speed, and pounded futilely on the indifferent wood. "Open up in there," he shouted, "open up, this is the police." Inside, Schwartz gasped for air and began the climb. The pain in his withered lungs was frightening. He would have preferred to sit quietly and wait for the police, but the youth he had once been refused. Grunting, he pressed a handkerchief over the wound with his left hand while he clung to the bannister with his right. The stairs were steep and narrow. He told himself that he couldn't possibly mount them, but his body responded to orders laid down fifteen years earlier and one time-space wall away: never die without first reporting it. The muscles in his legs weakened; his arms and shoulders took on the extra burden. He coughed, and almost lost his balance when a fine spray of blood splattered against the faded yellow wallpaper. Only by closing his eyes was he able to resist the sudden dizziness, to continue to the top. As quickly as his tortured body would permit, he closed and locked his door. With his last reserves of strength and willpower, he shuffled across the floor. Puddles of crimson on the dusty boards bore mute testimony to the nature of his wound. At the transmitter, he peered through a haze of pain. His trembling fingers found the switches, groped for the microphone, and found that. He was speaking in staccato bursts, oblivious to the furious voice from the other end. "Schwartz here... I've been shot... police about to -- to arrest me... matter of minutes... dying... get replacement here quick..." Awkawardly, he thumbed a row of buttons labeled "Matter Receive." As he staggered to the couch, an efficient voice replied, "Five minutes, Schwartz, hold on for just five minutes and we'll have a man there to help you. Just keep the police away for five minutes, ja?" The final note was pleading. A faint smile formed on Schwartz's thick lips, to be frozen there by the chill approach of death. But before two minutes had passed the cops were outside his apartment door; the landlady had finally been roused by their tumult. Angry, heaving shoulders splintered the flimsy plywood and an instant later they stood over his cooling corpse. The youngest, a rookie fresh out of the police academy, was surprised by Schwartz's pleased expression. "Look at that, willya?" he demanded of his partner. "The guy actually looks relieved." "Why not?" shrugged the older patrolman, still nursing his bruised stomach. "He prolly knew his worries were over, huh?" "Yeah, I guess so." Hands on hips, he scanned the aching emptiness. "Helluva place to die, that's for sure." "Any place is," grunted the second. "Hey, he left his machine, on. Should I turn it off?" The older man frowned, thought, and shook his head, "Nah, leave it on till the lieutenant gets here. You know how he hates for us to mess with stuff." "Screw your lieutenant!" bellowed the landlady as she stormed into the room. Clearly outraged by the destruction of the door, she shot Schwartz a murderous glance. It weakened only when she realized he was dead. Her blonde hair fluttered as she seethed with frustration. "Screw your lieutenant," she repeated, with less violence but more conviction. "If Schwartz isn't going to be around to pay the bill, his damn radio goes off!" Wheeling to face the great transmitter, she reached down and yanked the heavy plug from the wall. The little green lights went dark. "There!" As she sailed out, slightly mollified by her last gesture of contempt, the two cops looked at each other. "Should I plug it back in, Joe?" asked the rookie in an anxious tone. "Nah," said the patrolman. He sat gingerly on the arm of the couch, less then eight inches from Schwartz's triumphant smile. "We just don't tell the lieutenant it was on. What he don't know won't hurt him."  Dear Dr. Poumelle: I was very interested to read your article on the "Lovecraftian universe." "The most merciful thing in the world," I thought to myself, "is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." Or, in fine, "So ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl really fhtagn!" Well, you can't say you all weren't warned. Yours truly, Frank John Reid # W. Byron Chicago, #. # Jerry's reply: I fear I have no comment. (Nor I.) Dear Mr. Baen: Enclosed is a carbon copy of the letter I have sent to the following members of congress: Jacob K. Javits, Charles Rangel, Edward I. Koch, Lester Wolfe, Otis Pike, Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Holtzman, Hermann Badillo, Joseph Addabbo, Benjamin Rosenthal, James H. Scheuer, Shirley Chisholm, Frederick Richmond, Stephen Solarz. I have also sent copies of Jerry Poumelle's letter to some friends in New Mexico, one of whom owns some # acres which he might want to plant with jojoba. Also, I have made arrangements to present the idea at the next meeting of the Policy Committee of the Liberal Party of New York State, where I have every reason to expect it to be accepted without opposition. This would mean that candidates for Congress seeking the Liberal nomination (which includes those mentioned above, and others) would have some additional impetus to support such legislation. I intend in the near future to write to members of Congress from the Southwestern Slates, with a copy of Jerry Poumelle's letter for each of them. Please forward the enclosed carbon copy of this letter to Jerry Poumelle; I think he, too, would be interested in this result of his letter. Thank you. Sincerely, Bret Hooper (Member, New York County Liberal Party Executive Committee) # East Sixth Street New York, New York # Sample letter: November #, # The Honorable Shirley Chisholm House Office Building Washington, D. C. Dear Ms. Chisholm: Enclosed is a copy of a letter to the editor of Galaxy magazine, which presents a suggestion which I most heartily endorse. Although the most immediate and direct benefits of Mr. Poumelle's proposal would accrue to the part of United States most geographically distant from New York, the proposed project would benefit the human race as a whole, not. just those of a few states. But the most compelling arguments may well be two that Mr. Pournelle does not mention directly in his letter to Galaxy: #. The favorable effect on our international balance of payments; and #. The honor that would accrue to the United States as a nation. I submit that at a time when our City and State are being attacked by petty politicians from certain other States in the hope of grubbing a few votes, your authorship and sponsorship of legislation to subsidize the cultivation of jojoba would be a gesture in the finest tradition of our City and State; an outstanding example of your and our concern for the needs of everyone, not just our own parochial concerns. (Not that New York wouldn't benefit: where else would most of the stocks of jojoba oil refining companies and other associated industries be traded? Would none of the oil itself pass thru the Port of New York? Or is it likely that none of the insurance business generated would be underwritten by New York insurance companies? I am quite sure that significant material benefits would in fact find their way to New York City and New York State.) I am sure you know far better than I what political capital you might be able to gather in the process. Thank you for your consideration of this important matter. Sincerely, Bret Hooper Since its appearance in the September ' # issue of Galaxy Jerry's " Feature Letter " on the interchangeability of jojoba and sperm oil has generated a remarkably intense response from diverse sectors of the political spectrum; it's beginning to look like Galaxy and its readership may be playing a significant role in saving a possibly intelligent and certainly magnificent species from extinction. See page # (insideback cover), where the letter has been reprinted in its entirety -- to add fuel to the fire. Hmmm...whoever could have guessed that one day there might be a ' 'Pournelle Plank' ' in the Liberal Party Platform. (Dr. Pournelle has  promised me Summary Execution if I even v suggest that his name be so intimately linked with the Liberal Cause; I therefore mention it only as a possibility...) Dear Mr. Baen; Poul Anderson's piece in the September "Forum" was the most inreresting I've read on the topic of interstellar travel lately. I was glad to see that he Qualified the idea that we can reach the stars with the statement, "If we have the will."; that's a mighty big "If". Collectively (as a country, or as the human race) we don't even have the will to reach the planets, much less the stars; and I don't think we will for a long time. Evidently, Americans prefer to let their tax dollars be spent on "... bureaucrats, subsidies to inefficient businesses, or the servicing of the national debt... (et al) -- and to Hell with any benefits from space exploration. Though it's going to take longer than it should, I'm confident we'll make it to the stars. Romantic notions have a habit of becoming concrete reality, given time. Sincerely, Michael A. Banks P.O. Box # Milford, Ohio # Hear, hear! Dear Mr. Baen: For several columns now, Geis has been beating around the proverbial SF bush, but I thought he was finally, going to get down to He disappointed me once again, however, so here I come with my two-cents-worth. (Don't get me wrong, Geis; your column is the first thing I read). The number of creatures out there in iiy #I  '  reader-dom and writer-dom that have the inside dope on what science fiction ought and ought not to be are only slightly less prolific than the mosquito, and just about as beneficial. "Give us some rouno characters!" some cry. "Some symbolism, allusion, imagery, a message!" Others retort, "The hell with all that college educated stuff. We want action, plot, sense of wonder." Still others wonder, "Why all the swearing and screwing?" Well, I have an idea. Why not take all that rot, compile it Much Ado Aboil! Nothing? (Aw, shucks, I think somebody used that title already. Maybe we could shove it down a black hole?) There is no instant formula for writing a story, science fiction or otherwise. It is not like writing an essay exam, where you plug in the magic ingredients and bullshit the rest. You cannot make every story profoundly philosophical, great grandiose scenes ar? not always necessary, and you do not have to swear just for the hell of it. Oh, sure, a writer has to be aware of his readers, but he must also be true to himself. Preoccupation with making a story fit a certain style has got to interfere with the creative process. There are probably good writers, right now, frustrated with that very thing. So, why not give a guy a break? Don't go calling him a bleep because you don't like his style. (Maybe he doesn't like yours.) To limit the scope of SF is to limit its possibilities. Give a little slack. You might be surprised. Sincerely, David L. Miller # Sunset Drive St. Charles, Mo. #I Dear Jim, Helium was a most intriguing story. (I wonder where you discovered Arsen Darnay; I haven't seen his byline anywhere else.) And insanities such as "Elephant with Wooden Leg" are a break to see. You certainly are going in new directions with Galaxy'. Also, I feel that Jerry Poumelle is the equal of Asimov in covering science -- though I can imagine the Good Doctor is on a level with the good years of Heinlein. In a way we should be thankful that the space program lost him. Sincerely Roy J. Schenk Rt. I Canisteo, NY # Arsen's first story was found lurking in what we fondly if perhaps inelegantly refer to as the " slushpile ." His second story was not unsolicited. Since his ", discovery " Arsen has sold a novel to Ballantine and stories to that Certain Other magazine, and of course he has been represented many times in Galaxy. Dear Mr. Baen, I recently wrote to another science fiction magazine, the one that used to live on a bureaucrats, mindless mobs of students, and other criminals. (Sometimes the good guys were business bureaucrats, police, or military bureaucrats. The magazine is now off the bottle but regresses when hungry.) Their reviewer put down Mote in God's Eye because he thought the characters were too stereotyped. I patiently explained how the collapse of the First Empire had put selective pressure on humanity, making the resulting characters a little overspecialized, becoming more like the Moties. The Editor sent me a note telling me the characters were too stereotyped. Now you're planning an article on the Mote by the authors. They might like to know that somebody understands. Forrest Curo # #th St. ## Sacramento That article has since appeared in the January '# issue. Now a lot of people understand. Dear Mr. Baen. This is just a fan letter for the greatest thing you have published since you took over Galaxy. Inferno is far ahead of Love Conquers All and Orbitsville, even ahead of Sign of the Unicorn and The Company of Glory. You have published a classic. And you have also turned SF upside down. You have published a religious SF story that is also actionadventure. From now on, the rest will have to measure up. You have treated what is possibly the biggest no-no of them all. You have printed a story that has things to say about SF now -- but which will be a classic forever. What I'm trying to say is that Larry and Jerry have made SF a whole new ball game, and have stuck meticulously to Dante in the bargain. For example where Dante made comments on politics, J  L made comments on science fiction. And such a plausible job of modernizing Hell, too! Darned if you don't have half of fandom reading Dante. Got me, for one. If those guys don't win a Hugo, a Nebula, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, an International Fantasy Award, and a Tolkien Memorial Award for this, the whole thing will have been rigged. Of course, if things get desperate, you could always stick Dr. Pournelle on a window sill John R. Woodward # Underwood Street Hyattsville, Md. # You're certainly not damning with faint praise! Dear Mr. Baen, If you don't publish this letter, please pass it on to Messrs. Niven  Poumeile to let them know how very much I enjoyed their Inferno. I reread Dante simultaneously, and found it increased my enjoyment of both the medieval and the modern treatments. NivenPournelle provide a "damn" good commentary on Dante,  vice versa. On the strength of Inferno, I have entered a subscription with your Subscription Dept. Of course, I dare not hope for a sequel, in which Niven  Pournelle would follow Benito or Allen up through Purgatorioland -- but it surely would be nice! Phyllis Ann Kars Box # Louisville, Ky. # Dear Baen, Just want to take a moment, or two, or three, to let you know how your communications are faring, the effects created...on this reader. Oddly enough, I have only been reading SF mags for about, oh, two years. I got hooked on SF fifteen years ago at my hometown library which boasted mainly of Asimov, Bradbury and damned little else. After living in L.A. for a couple of years, I suddenly discovered these little books with the colorful covers. I had read about five issues of IF before it submerged, so I didn't feel much of a loss. Currently I can afford four mags a month and this is how I rate them; #. Galaxy #. Fantastic #. Amazing #. Fantasy and Science Fiction Your mag started at the bottom. Working upwards was gradual and my opinions are based on; a) entertainment quality, b) writer's ability c) editorial personality, d) overall tone of the mag. One by one, if you'll bear with me: A, You present a great variety of stories. Poetic, serious and funniernhell. I enjoy almost all of your selections, to a greater degree than ## and #, tho I wish you could branch off into deeper fantasy on occasion. Consider that a suggestion, not a complaint. B, The stories are consistently well written, even the ones I don't like for content, such as Hammer's Slammers. The other mags often provide extremely well crafted pieces...with a lack of simple entertainment. C, As I have stated in previous letters, I back you # in your efforts at uptone, positive ideas. Especially some of these cyclical solutions you have presented. Also I enjoy the affinity that comes out between you and the people you work with. D. Take Geis and Spider. They are both refreshing as a heady whiff of Lysol. Both cogent (in their off moments), funny and damned nice to read. I think they carry out very well the overall tone of your mag and one which fits in with my tastes just perfectly. But what has brought you to the top of the list is not any one item. It is the combination of the four, so, Baen...thanks a whole, big bunch!!!! Oh, jeez! I also love your artists, especially the Dalzellian panda. Bye, Christy Marx #I Bellevue Ave. L. A., Ca. # P.S. Please tell Niven and Pournelle that Inferno was excellent. Very, very fine work. Thank you, Marx.  must admit to indecent pleasure in basking in such undeserved praise ; generally it's the contributors who take the credit and the Editor who gets the blame -- which is as it should be. So to be fair...Jerry, Spider, Dick, Wendy, Cynthia Bolling, Freff, and all the other members of the Galaxy Cluster: Stand up and take a bow! m # per word per issue (Including name and address) or # Issues # per word. #-word mini, mum. Payment with order. HI Out of print. Send wants. Bookdealer, # No. Browning Ave., Tenafly, N.J. #. cartoon story with # pages of comments, theory and answers. Send # to: INStratford Ave., Westmont, N.J. #. a savage world, ruptured by a rogue comet, Joe the Wilding heeds an Alien's call and battles the fearful legend of the invincible Children of the Moon. Hardcover Original Prepublication # PP. Imagination Plus, Box #, Rockford, IL # Send self-addressed envelope for information: Minotaur, Box #A, Eagle River, Alaska #. # titles, #-# discount, # brings catalog and I .# discount coupon or Sci-Fi book of our choice. Indicate which you want, send cash, check, moneyorder to: Olive, P.O. Box #, Bloomington, IL The Earth From Space (from Apollo and Satellites) #. Add # for shipping and send to: Books Unlimited, PO Box #, Darlington, S.C. #. Illustrated catalog of SF-Fantasy Weird Tale Books. #s of titles listed. Send # for one, I for next #, or # for # consecutive catalogs plus Wolfe's "Fifth Head of Carberus" a # clothbound #st ed Nebula Award winning SF book. Send to: Purple Unicorn Books, #-G# London Road, Duluth, Minn. #. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror). # an issue, or # issues a year for #. Imaginative and provocative fiction, the Twilight Zone Revisited, Star Trek Quiz, the Telepathic Corner, science articles, book movie reviews, special features. Cash awards for best material published. (Available early #.) Write: John R. Racano, # Cleveland Ave., Colonia, New Jersey #. you have gathered we are not technologists but aestheticists who have acquired our technical knowledge deliberately to insure its proper development and usage. We have found that it is ignorance that perverts aesthetic and human values not technical knowledge." # for two volumes, # pages total, and one issue of Detour magazine. Interactive Concerns Group, # N. Harding, Chicago, #. # Free Lists -- SF books, magazines. Send to: Held, Box #, Buffalo, New York #. San Diego, Calif. #. wants to: S  S Books. G-#Q, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. sale. Free lists. Gordon Barber, #-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN #. #. Postcards, P.O. Box #, Willow # on food bills. Complete plan, #  stamped envelope. Neighbors, Box #, Ojai, Ca. #. through suspended animation. Freeze, wait, reanimate. Details, #, Trans Time, Box #, San Jose, Ca. # # Eridani. Attractive, astronomically correct. Tables of data, Vulcan desert landscape, #x# feet, # plus # shipping. Richard Carroll, Box #, Walnut Creek, Calif.# . Diego, Calif. #. "Dimension-X", "Escape", Bradbury, Pohl, Asimov...catalogue: # (RERadio, Box #-SF, Riverside, Calif. #. Join World Party for world federation. Write Paul Rhoads, Box #, Mesa, Colorado #. events, help others! Bring yourself good fortune! Learn how. Free information! Astroworld#, Box #, Burbank, Calif. #. Also mysteries, drama, comedy. Reels, cassettes, #-track. Free catalog. Radio Memories, Box #, Nekoma, N.D. #. Typewriters. Catalog I Refunded. Saratoga Wholesalers, Box #, Dept. #, Saratoga, N.Y. #. Products, # Byron, Chicago, II. #. An Open Letter to the Readers of Galaxy : i A recent Galaxy Forum piece by Fred Pohl showed how a set of problems can be made to solve each other. I think I've found another of those snake-balls that will proceed to untangle themselves once we've taken the first steps -- and since my letter on tuna fishing and dolphins elicited such an intense response, I thought you might like to bring this matter to the attention of Galaxy' s readership as well. The sperm whale is the largest of the toothed whales; it reaches a maximum length of # feet, and is the only cetacean (indeed, the only living animal) with a throat large enough to admit a man. It is also the source of ambergris. Also, it is not impossible that the sperm whale is as intelligent as homo sapiens. Ed. Unless we do something, the species will be extinct within ten years. The sperm whale is in trouble because of its spermaceti organ, a rather mysterious thing in its head that carries about a ton of whale oil. No one knows what it pounds of it per year, or # thousand whales' worth. Of course we no longer buy sperm oil. The Marine Mammals Protection Act quite rightly forbids importation of all whale-derived products. Good as far as it goes, but not enough to save the whales; Japanese and Soviet whalers go right on That's problem one, then: saving the sperm whale from extinction. Problem two: severe unemployment in our Southwestern deserts. Dual solution: those same Southwestern deserts, Indian Reservation land, mostly, can be made to produce # pounds of sperm oil peracre per-year. You see, there's this scruffy-looking plant called the jojoba (pronounced hoHO-ba) that grows wild in the Sonora and southwards, and the seeds of this shrub turn out to be composed of about # of an oil nearly identical to that of the sperm whale -- certainly near enough so for industrial uses. A recent study by the National Research Council shows how planting # acres in jojoba each year for the next five years will ultimately provide an annual yield of will need Federal subsidies -- but the major costs will be salaries for people at present unemployed -- who will then become taxpayers. So. A viable industry in a high-unemployment area, and sufficiency in sperm oil. So far so good; but I recommend we go much further. Why not plant a lot of jojoba? The cost of subsidizing the cultivation of several bacco for which we pay subsidies. Why not grow enough jojoba to sell the oil The benefits -- alleviating unemployment, sufficiency in sperm oil, and saving a species from extinction -- seem well worth the cost. Normally I do not recommend government subsidies; in this case I'll swallow my theoretical objections. I've written my Congressman about it. Care to join me? Jerry Poumelle Tear out (or copy) this page and send it, and your letter, to your Congressman. Address it to the Hon. (Name), The Capitol, Wash., D.C. any# books for #c value -- now available exclusively to club members for just #! #. Bor Jupiter and #. ThP Winter of Other Sterlet. Byluec the World. By Poul Asimov. Here are # Anderson. Hugo and other Asimov collections. Buy Jupiter, Shift Colds #, Button Button, and Others. Highly entertaining. Pub. ed. S# #. The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaiy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. Price S# # Enchanted Pilgrimage. By CliHord ventures of a modern man in a universe ol medieval monsters and mores. Pub. ed. # # Anderson. Hugo and Nebula author spins a tale of the future Ice Age and the hidden secret ol the untame# Three to Dortai! By Gordon R. Dickson. Packed with adventure tion. these complete SF novels Niocromancer, Tactlci of Mistake and able and unconquerable Dorsal! are by this B#. Again, Dangarout Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed. Short stories and novels. # in all. Eaplicl t scenes and langoaga may bo offensive te some. Pub. ed. J# # Approaching Oblivion. By Harlan Ellison. Eleven mind. qc new anthology. Ei ... pllcll sconoi and Ian#I #. Fantastic Sclanc giuga may bo offonFlction ##:#-#. Pub . Lester del Ray, ed. ed  # # full-page, lull-color  reproductions of sci-fi jj # The i Hugo magazine covers. Space V , B ' #I #I ships, aliens, robots, # in-l volume ana our heroes and of # awardheroines in futuristic winning stories. of # awordthe # winning stories, vintage  # to #. no " ,n , Asimov Introduces I each. Pub. ed. # #-# popular Hugo and Nebula winning author. Special Edition. #. Midworld. By Alar Dean Foster. The author ol Star Trek Log books writes about a deadly jungle planet and descendenls of earlier stranded earthmen, who fight off new human invaders. Special Edition # The Mote In Pournelle. Man's first contact with an intelligent alien species. Pub. ed. # #. Ba fore the Balden Age. Isaac Asimov, ed. # classic stories of the #s from vintage SF pulps, now in one huge volume. Pub. ed. Music guaranteed to send the imagination soaring. Music to take you into the same exciting new dimensions of time and place offered by writers like Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. Including lilm scores from such movies as Fahrenheit #, this superb stereo recording is a # value. Now it is available exclusively to members of The Science Fiction Book Club t a big # saving -- yours for just # when you join. How the Club works: When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your introductory package of # books. (If you also want the record, check the appropriate box in the coupon below.) If not completely satisfied, you may return this introductory package in ten days' time -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin, describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If you want both Selections, you need do nothing; they'll be shipped automatically. If you don't want a Selection, or prefer an Alternate, or no book at all, just fill out the convenient form always provided, and return it by the date specified. We try to allow you at least ten days for making your decision. If you don't get the form in time to respond within # days, and receive unwanted books, you may return them at our expense. As a member you need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any time thereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. At least one of the two Selections each month is only # plus shipping and handling. Other extra-value selections are slightly higher but always much less than Publishers' Editions. Send no money. But do send the coupon today. Winrwi Science Fiction Book Club Dept. JR#, Garden City, N.Y. # I , Please accept my application for membership in the I j ! !  Science Fiction Book Club. Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose numbers I M r have indicated below, and bill me just #C (plus shipping and handling). I agree to purchase # additional books at pTease prim' regular low club prices during the coming year and may miss resign anytime thereafter. I agree to the Club Plan aB Arlrtrecc Ant described In this advertisement. u ebb The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto Offer slightly different in Canada.  Barry Malzberg Raccoona Sheldon John Variey I #p i V i June #th#th Here's your chance to attend the greatest science fiction event ever! Gaze upon what's in your future if you act now...  For five full days you'll visit science fictionfact exhibits, programs, writing and art workshops, displays by SF publishers and a fantastic around-the-clock film festival of over # classic feature-length Science Fiction  Fantasy films of the past # years.  You'll meet over # of the best-known SF authors and editors who'll join you for readings, discussions and rap sessions.  You won't want to miss the SF Memorabilia Room, an Arts and Crafts Show, Dealers' Rooms featuring books, film materials, art and collectables. Authors' Autograph Booths and much more!  SF EPO '# will occupy two entire convention floors of The New York for this five day extravaganza. You'll be able to come and go as you please. arranged for domestic and overseas charter flights hosted by SF authors. You'll save; # Off the door admission price. Write for details, guest list and film guide, or better yet... Make a check or M.O. payable to: Science Fiction Services inc., Dept. #, Box #, Montclair, New Jersey #. registration. Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Turick, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor The fourth novel of Amber. In Sign of the Unicorn Corwin learned that just as Earth is but a shadow, so too does Amber owe her existence to a Higher Reality. Now he must plumb the ultimate depths of that reality and face the truth unveiled. Wherein the interface between man and machine approaches Unity. All forms of life must bend to our will and serve our purposes, at whatever cost to themselves; we are the Lords of Creation, and it is in the nature of rulers to be cruel... There is a Certain Moment in the life of every young man when the most Cosmic of events would be a mere interruption. A Galaxy First (as it were). Mr. Wyatt, who last in these pag es examined the proper governance of nations, herewith turns his attention to Theology. A story of artistic development. Barry Malzberg wishes it to be known that he is mereiy the discoverer and not the perpetrator of this...er...story. After ali, Barry has officialiy ieft science fiction and so he couid not have written it -- couid he? If you think this month's Showcase is a fantasy iiiustration -- read on! Autoclave, Disclave #, Scandinavian SF Con, D-Con, Science Fiction Research Association Conference, SF Expo #, Westercon #, Bubonicon #, Midamericon. opportunity to reach the stars. If we fail to make the effort our descendants may never have the chance. Spider examines pessimism in sf; he is not optimistic. At Last! Alter has Dick where he wants him! Letters from Martos, finder, Moravec, Pournelle, Renaud, Baibi, Harter, Medcalf. See inside-front cover. Cover by Sternbach, from Interior illustrations by Dalzell, Fabian, Gaughan, Kirk, Sternbach of Univsrsal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, Presidsnt. Main Offleos: # East # Strsst, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. IMssue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this mageilne are fiction end any simlarlty between characters and actual persons Is colneldsntal. Printed in U.S.A. ard Johnson's New Center Motor Lodge, Detroit, Mich. GsH: Gene Wolfe and Donn Brazier. Registration: # until May #, # after, # at the door. For info: Autoclave, Box #, Detroit, MI. # Sheraton Park Hotel, Washington, Tenn). Registration # until May #th, # after. For info: Alexis Gilliland, # #th St. South, Arlington, VA # Tech. Student Union, Stockholm, Sweden. GoH: Jack Vance. Attending membership #, # supporting. For info: Scandinavian SF Con, Box #, S-# Stockholm, Sweden. Sheraton-Dallas Hotel, Dallas, Texas. GoH: Robert Silverberg. Attending membership #, # supporting. For info: The Dallas Area Science Fantasy Society, # Perkins Street, Forth Worth, TX. versity of Montana, Missoula, Montana. For info: Michael McQintock, Dept, of English, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana. York Hilton, N.Y., N.Y. Toastmaster: Isaac Asimov. Attending membership #, # supporting. For info: Science Fiction Services, # Church Street, Montclair, NJ. ternational Hotel, Los Angeles, CA. GoH: H.L. Gold, fan GoH Gregg Calkins. Attending membership # until June, # after, # supporting. For info: Westercon #, Box #, Mission Hills, CA # Ramada Inn, Albuquerque, NM. GoH: Bill Rotsler. Membership # until July #st, # after. For info: Roy Tackett, # Green Valley RoadNW, Albuquerque, NM. Hotel Mubhlebach, Kansas City, MO. GoH: Robert Heinlein, fan GoH George Barr. Attending membership # until May #st, # until Aug. #st, # after. Supporting membership #. For info: P.O. Box #, Kansas City, MO #I A Future-History Space War Simulation StarForcc is serious science-fiction in game form. You command the space fleets of the Human, L'Chal-Dah, Rame and Xenophobe races as they fight for control of the # starsystems depicted on the forty light-year "Stellar Display". The future becomes history in fourteen scenarios simulating wars taking place from # to # A.D. StarForce fleets, StarGates, interstellar flight, tactical space maneuvering, empires and revolutions, induced novas, a written future history, a rescue mission StarForcc has all this and morel A big #"x#" game map, # playing pieces, and a #-page, illustrate rules booklet packaged in a beautiful, compartmented plastic box...all for only # direct from Simulations Publications, Inc., publishers of Strategy  Tactics Magazine. Send check or money order to: StmulatloBf Pnbllcatloni, Inc., Dept. # # East #rd Street, New York, N.Y. lOOlO Please send me the following simulation games: Interstellar Conflict in the #Sth Century. S#  World War m. Global Warfare in the '#'s. #  The East Is R The Sino-Soviet Conflict S#  Sedowe, The German Invasion of Britain. S# Enter my subscription to Stnteiy ft Tactia, the military history magazine with a simulation game in iti  I year (# issues): #  # yrs. (# issues): #  #yrss(# issues); #.(X)  send free brochure name street apt# city state zip handling charge. Prices are subject to change without notice. I. match that peculiar sun... There it was... Displayed within that light, a thing I had only seen self-illuminated in darkness up until then: the Pattern, the great Pattern of Amber cast upon an oval shelf beneathabove a strange skysea... And I knew, perhaps by that within me which bound us, that this had to be the real one. Which meant that the Pattern in Amber was but its first shadow. Which meant -- Which meant that Amber itself was but a shadow, albeit a special one, for the Pattern was not carried over into places beyond the realm of Amber, Rebma and Tir-na Nog'th. Meaning, then, that this place to which we had come was, by the law of precedence and configuration, the real Amber. I turned to a smiling Ganelon, his beard and wild hair molten in the merciless light. "How did you know?" I asked him. "You know I am a very good guesser, Corwin," he replied, "and I recall everything you ever told me about how things work in Amber: how its shadow and those of your struggles are cast across the worlds. I often wondered, in thinking of the black road, whether anything could have cast such a shadow into Amber itself. And I imagined that such a something would have to be extremely basic, powerful and secret." He gestured at the scene before us. "Like that." "Continue," I said. His expression changed and he shrugged. "So there had to be a layer of reality deeper than your Amber," he explained, "where the dirty work was done. Your patron beast led us to what seems to be such a place, and that blot on the Pattern looks to be the dirty work. You agreed. ' ' I nodded. "It was your perceptiveness rather than the conclusion itself which stunned me so," I said. "You beat me to it," admitted Random, off to my right, "but the feeling has found its way into my intestines -- to put it delicately. I do believe that somehow that is the basis of our world down there." "An outsider can sometimes see things better than one who is part of them," Ganelon offered. Random glanced at me and returned his attention to the spectacle. "Do you think things will change anymore," he asked, "if we go down for a closer look?" "Only one way to find out," I said. "Single file, then," Random agreed. "I'll lead." "All right." Random guided his mount to the right, the left, the right, in a long series of switchblades which zigged us and zagged us across most of the face of the wall. Continuing in the order we had maintained all day, I followed him and Ganelon came last. "Seems stable enough now," Random called back. "So far," I said. "Some sort of opening in the rocks below." I leaned forward. There was a cavemouth back to the right, on a level with the oval plain. Its situation was such that it had been hidden from sight when we had occupied our higher position. "We pass fairly near it," I said. " -- quickly, cautiously and silently," Random added, drawing his blade. I unsheathed Grayswandir, and one turn back above me Ganelon drew his own weapon. We did not pass the opening, but turned leftward once more before we came to it. We moved within ten or fifteen feet of it, however, and I detected an unpleasant odor which I could not identify. The horses must have done a better job of it, though, or been pessimists by nature, because they flattened their ears, widened their nostrils and made alarmed noises while turning against the reins. They calmed, however, as soon as we had made the turn and begun moving away once again. They did not suffer a relapse until we reached the end of our descent and moved to approach the damaged Pattern. They refused to go near it. Random dismounted. He advanced to the edge of the design, paused and stared. After, a time, he spoke without looking back. "It follows that the damage was deliberate," he said, "from everything else that we know." "It seems to follow," I said. "It is also obvious that we were brought here for a reason." "I'd say so." "Then it does not take too much imagination to conclude that our purpose for being here is to determine how the Pattern was damaged and what might be done to repair it." "Possibly. What is your diagnosis?" "Nothing yet." He moved along the perimeter of the figure, off to the right where the smear-effect began. I resheathed my blade and prepared to dismount. Ganelon reached over and took hold of my shoulder. "I can make it myself -- " I began. But, "Corwin," he said, ignoring my words, "there does appear to be a small irregularity out toward the middle of the Pattern. It does not look like something that belongs..." "Where?" He pointed and I followed the gesture. There was some foreign object near to the center. A stick? A stone? A stray bit of paper... ? It was impossible to tell from this distance. "I see it," I said. We dismounted and headed toward Random, who by then was crouched at the extreme right of the figure, examining the discoloration. "Ganelon's spotted something out toward the center," I said. Random nodded. "I've noticed it," he replied. "I was just trying to decide on the best way to head out for a better look. I do not relish the notion of walking a broken Pattern. On the other hand, I was wondering what I would be laying myself open to if I tried heading in across the blackened area. What do you think?" "Walking what there is of the Pattern would take some time," I said, "If the resistance is on par with what it is at home. Also, we have been taught that it is death to stray from it -- and this setup would force me to leave it when I reach the blot. On the other hand, as you say, I might be alerting our enemies by treading on the black. So -- " "So neither of you is going to do it," Ganelon interrupted. "I am." Then, without waiting for a reply, he took a running leap into the black sector, raced along it toward the center, paused long enough to pick up some small object, turned and headed back... Moments later, he stood before us. "That was a risky thing to do," Random said. He nodded. "But you two would still be debating it if I hadn't." He raised his hand and extended it. "Now, what do you make of this?" He was holding a dagger. Impaled on it was a rectangle of stained pasteboard. I took them from him. "Looks like a Trump," Random said. "Yes." I worked the card loose, smoothed down the torn sections. The man I regarded upon it was half-familiar -- meaning of course that he was also half-strange. Light, straight hair, a trifle sharp-featured, a small smile, somewhat slight of build. I shook my head. "I do not know him," I said. "Let me see." Random took the card from me, frowned at it. "No," he said after a time. "I j don't either. It almost seems as though I should, but... No." At that moment, the horses renewed their complaints much more forcefully. And we needed but turn partway to learn the cause of their discomfort, in that it had chosen that moment to emerge from thei cave. "Damn," said Random. I agreed with him.  Ganelon cleared his throat, took forth his blade. i "Anyone know what it is?" he asked quietly. My first impression of the beast was that it was snakelike, both from its movements and because of the fact that its long thick tail seemed more a continuation of its long thin body than a mere appendage. It moved on four double-jointed legs, however, large-footed and wickedly clawed. Its narrow head was beaked, and it swung from side to side as it advanced, showing us one pale blue eye and then the other. Large wings were folded against its sides, purple and leathery. It possessed neither hair nor feathers, though there were scaled areas across its breast, shoulders, back and along the length of its tail. From beak-bayonet to twisting tail-tip it seemed a little over three meters. There was a small tinkling sound as it moved, and I caught a flash of something shining brightly at its throat. "Closest thing I know," said Random, "is a heraldic beast -- the griffin. Only this one is bald and purple." "Definitely not our national bird," I added, drawing Grays-j wandir and swinging its point into line with the creature's head. The beast darted a red, forked tongue. It raised its wings a few inches, then let them fall. When its head swung to the right its tail moved to the left, then left and right, right and left -- producing a near-hypnotic, flowing effect as it advanced. It seemed more concerned with the horses than with us, however, for its course was directed well past us toward the spot where our mounts stood quivering and stamping. I moved to interpose myself. At that point, it reared. Its wings went up and out, spreading like a pair of slack sails suddenly caught by a gust of wind. It was back on its hind legs and towering above us, seeming to occupy at least four times the space it had previously. And then it shrieked, a godawful, hunting scream or challenge that left my ears ringing. With that, it snapped those wings downward and sprang, becoming temporarily airborne. The horses bolted and ran. The beast was beyond our reach. It was only then that I realized what the bright flash and the tinkling had represented. The thing was tethered, by means of a long chain running back into the cave. The exact length of its leash was immediately a question of more than academic interest. I turned as it passed, hissing, flapping and falling, beyond us. It had not possessed sufficient momentum to obtain true flight in that brief rush upward. I saw that Star and Firedrake were retreating toward the far end of the oval. Random's mount lago, on the, other hand, had bolted in the direction of the Pattern. The beast touched ground again, turned as if to pursue lago, appeared to study us once more and froze. It was much nearer this time -- under four meters -- and it cocked its head, showing us its right eye, then opened its beak and made a soft cawing noise. "What say we rush it now?" said Random. "No. Wait. There is something peculiar about its behavior." It had dropped its head while I was speaking, spreading its wings downward. It struck the ground three times with its beak and looked up again. Then it drew its wings partway back toward its body. Its tail twitched once, then swung more vigorously from side to side. It opened its beak and repeated the cawing sound. At that moment we were distracted. lago had entered the Pattern, well to the side of the darkened area. Five or six meters into it, standing obliquely across the lines of power, he was caught near one of the Veil points like an insect on a piece of flypaper. He cried loudly as the sparks came up about him and his mane rose and stood erect. Immediately, the sky began to darken directly overhead. But it was no cloud of water vapor which had begun to coalesce. Rather, it was a perfectly circular formation which had appeared, red at the center, yellow nearer the edges, turning in a clockwise direction. A sound like a single bell chime followed by the growl of a bullroarer suddenly came to our ears. lago continued his struggles, first freeing his right front foot, then entangling it again as he freed the left, neighing wildly the while. The sparks were up to his shoulders by then, and he shook them like raindrops from his body and neck, his entire form taking on a soft, buttery glow. The roaring increased in volume and small lightnings began to play at the heart of the red thing above us. A rattling noise caught my attention at that moment, and I glanced downward to discover that the purple griffin had slithered past and moved to interpose itself between us and the loud red phenomenon. It crouched like a gargoyle, facing away from us, watching the spectacle. Just then, lago freed both front feet and reared. There was something insubstantial about him by then, what with his brightness and the spark-shot indistinctness of his outline. He might have neighed at that moment, but all other sounds were submerged by the incessant roar from above. A funnel descended from the noise formation -- bright, flashing, wailing now, and tremendously fast. It touched the rearing horse, and for a moment his outline expanded enormously, becoming increasingly tenuous in direct porportion to this effect. And then he was gone. For a brief interval, the funnel remained stationary, like a perfectly balanced top. Then the sound began to diminish. The trunk raised itself, slowly, to a point but a small distance -- perhaps the height of a man -- above the Pattern. Then it snapped upwards as quickly as it had descended. The wailing ceased. The roaring began to subside. The miniature lightninps faded within the circle. The entire formation began to pale and slow. A moment later, it was but a bit of darkness; another fnoment and it was gone. No trace of lago remained anywhere that I could see. "Don't ask me," I said when Random turned toward me. "I don't know either." He nodded, then directed his attention toward our purple companion who was just then rattling his chain. "What about Charlie here?" he asked, fingering his blade. "I had the distinct impression he was trying to protect us," I said, taking a step forward. "Cover me. I want to try something." "You sure you can move fast enough?" he asked. "With that side..." "Don't worry," I said, a trifle more heartily than necessary, and I kept moving. He was correct about my left side, where the healing knife wound still ached dully and seemed to exercise a drag on my movements. But Grayswandir was still in my right hand and this was one of those occasions when my trust in my instincts was running high. I had relied on this feeling in the past with good results. There are times when such gambles just seem to be in order. Random moved ahead and to the right. I turned sidewise and extended my left hand as you would in introducing yourself to a strange dog, slowly. Our heraldic companion had risen from its crouch and was turning. It faced us again and studied Ganelon, off to my left. Then it regarded my hand. It lowered its head and repeated the groundstriking movement, cawed very softly -- a small, bubbling sound -- raised its head and slowly extended it. It wagged its great tail, touched my fingers with its beak, then repeated the performance. Carefully, I placed my hand on its head. The wagging increased; its head remained motionless. I scratched it gently about the neck and it turned its head slowly then, as if enjoying it. I withdrew my hand and dropped back a pace. "I think we're friends," I said softly. "Now you try it. Random." "Are you kidding?" "No, I'm sure you're safe. Try it." "What will you do if you are wrong?" "Apologize." "Great." He advanced and offered his hand. The beast remained friendly. "All right," he said half a minute or so later, still stroking its neck, "what have we proved?" "That he is a watchdog." "What is he watching?" "The Pattern, apparently." "Offhand then," said Random, moving back, "I would say that his work leaves something to be desired." He gestured at the dark area. "Which is understandable, if he is this friendly to anyone who doesn't eat oats and whinny." "My guess is that he is quite selective. It is also possible that he was set here after the damage was done, to defend against further unappreciated activity." "Who set him?" "I'd like to know myself. Someone on our side, apparently." "You can now test your theory further by letting Ganelon approach him." Ganelon did not move. "It may be you have a family smell about you," he finally said, "and he only favors Amberites. So I will pass, thank you." "All right. It is not that important. Your guesses have been good so far. How do you interpret events?" "Of the two factions out for the throne," he said, "that composed of Brand, Fiona and Bleys was, as you said, more aware of the nature of the forces that play about Amber. Brand did not supply you with particulars -- unless you omitted some incidents he might have related -- but my guess is that this damage to the Pattern represents the means by which their allies gained access to your realm. One or more of them did that damage, which provided the dark route. If the watchdog here responds to a family smell or some other identifying information you all possess, then he could actually have been here all along and not seen fit to move against the despoilers." "Possibly," Random observed. "Any idea how it was accomplished?" "Perhaps," he replied. "I will let you demonstrate it for me, if "What does it involve?" "Come this way," he said, turning and heading over to the edge of the Pattern. I followed him. Random did the same. The watchgriffin slunk at my side. Ganelon turned and extended his hand. "Corwin, may I trouble you for that dagger I fetched us?" "Here," I said, drawing it from my belt and passing it over. "I repeat, what does it involve?" Random inquired. "The blood of Amber," Ganelon replied. "I am not so sure I like this idea," Random said. ' 'All you have to do is prick your finger with it," he said, extending the blade, "and let a drop fall upon the Pattern." "What will happen?" "Let's try it and see." Random looked at me. "What do you say?" he asked. "Go ahead. Let's find out. I'm intrigued. ' ' He nodded. "Okay." He received the blade from Ganelon and nicked the tip of his left little finger. He squeezed the finger then, holding it above the Pattern. A tiny red bead appeared, grew larger, quivered, fell. Immediately, a wisp of smoke rose from the spot where it struck, accompanied by a tiny crackling noise. "I'll be damned!" said Random, apparently fascinated. A tiny stain had come into being, gradually spreading to about the size of a half dollar. "There you are," said Ganelon. "That is how it was done." The stain was indeed a miniature counterpart of the massive blot further to our right. The watchgriffin gave forth a small shriek and drew back, rapidly turning his head from one of us to the other. "Easy, fellow. Easy," I said, reaching out and calming him once more. "But what could have caused such a large -- " Random began, and then he nodded slowly. "What indeed?" said Ganelon. "I see no mark to show where your horse was destroyed." "The blood of Amber," Random said. "You are just full of insights today, aren't you?" "Ask Corwin to tell you of Lorraine, the place where I dwelled for so long," he said, "the place where the dark circle grew. I am alert to the effects of those powers, though I knew them then only at a distance. These matters have become clearer to me with each new thing I have learned from you. Yes, I have insights now that I know more of these workings. Ask Corwin of the mind of his general." "Corwin," Random said, "give me the pierced Trump." I withdrew it from my pocket and smoothed it. The stains seemed more ominous now. Another thing also struck me. I did not believe that it had been executed by Dworkin, sage, mage, artist and one-time mentor to the children of Oberon. It had not occurred to me until that moment that anyone else might be capable of producing one. While the style of this one did seem somehow familiar, it was not his the hand of oberon work. Where had I seen that deliberate line before, less spontaneous than the master's, as though every movement had been totally intellectualized before the pen touched the paper? And there was something else wrong with it -- a quality of idealization of a different order from that of our own Trumps, almost as if the artist had been working with old memories, glimpses or descriptions rather than a living subject. "The Trump, Corwin. If you please," Random said. There was that about the way in which he said it to make me hesitate. It gave rise to the feeling that he was somehow a jump ahead of me on something important, a feeling which I did not like at all. "I've petted old ugly here for you, and I've just bled for the cause, Corwin. Now let's have it." I handed it over, my uneasiness increasing as he held it in his hand and furrowed his brow. Why was I suddenly the stupid one? Does a night in Tir-na Nog'th slow cerebration? Why -- Random began to curse, a string of profanities unsurpassed by anything encountered in my long military career. Then, "What is it?" I said. "I don't understand." "The blood of Amber," he finally said. "Whoever did it walked the Pattern first, you see. Then they stood there at the center and contacted him via this Trump. When he responded and a firm contact was achieved, they stabbed him. His blood flowed upon the Pattern, obliterating that part of it, as mine did here." He was silent for the space of several deep breaths. "It smacks of a ritual," I said. "Damn rituals!" he said. "Damn all of them! One of them is going to die, Corwin. I am going to kill him -- or her." "I still do not -- " "I am a fool," he said, "for not seeing it right away. Look! Look closely!" He thrust the pierced Trump at me. I stared. I still did not see. "Now look at me!" he said. "See me!" I did. Then I looked back at the card. I realized what he meant. "I was never anything to him but a whisper of life in the darkness. But they used my son for this," he said. "That has to be a picture of Martin." II. Standing there beside the broken Pattern, regarding a picture of the man who may or may not have been Random's son, who may or may not have died of a knife wound received from a point within the Pattern, I turned and took a giant step back within my mind for an instant replay of the events which had brought me to this point of peculiar revelation. I had learned so many new things recently that the occurrences of the past few years seemed almost to cdnstitute a different story than they had while I was living them. Now this new possibility and a number of things it implied had just shifted the perspective again. I had not even been aware of my name when I had awakened in Greenwood, that private hospital in upstate New York where I had spent two totally blank weeks subsequent to my accident. It was only recently that I had been told that the accident itself had been engineered by my brother Bleys, immediately following my escape from the Porter Sanitarium in Albany. I got this story from my brother Brand, who had railroaded me into Porter in the first place, by means of fake psychiatric evidence. At Porter, I had been subjected to electroshock therapy over the span of several days, results ambiguous but presumably involving the return of a few memories. This was apparently what had scared Bleys into making the attempt on my life at the time of my escape, shooting out a couple of my tires on a curve above a lake. This doubtless would have resulted in my death, had Brand not been a step behind Bleys and out to protect his insurance investment, me. He said he had gotten word to the cops, dragged me out of the lake and administered first aid until help arrived. Shortly after that, he was captured by his former partners -- Bleys and our sister Fiona -- who confined him in a guarded tower in a distant place in Shadow. There had been two cabals, plotting and counterplotting after the throne, treading on one another's heels, breathing down one another's necks and doing anything else to one another that might suggest itself at that range. Our brother Eric, backed by brothers Julian and Caine, had been preparing to take the throne, left long vacant by the unexplained absence of our father, Oberon. Unexplained to Eric, Julian and Caine, that is. To the other group, consisting of Bleys, Fiona and -- formerly -- Brand, it was not unexplained because they were responsible for it. They had arranged for this state of affairs to come into being in order to open the way for Bleys' accession to the throne. But Brand had committed a tactical error in attempting to obtain Caine's assistance in their play for the throne, in that Caine decided a better deal obtained in upholding Eric's part. This left Brand under close scrutiny, but did not immediately result in the betrayal of his partners' identities. At about that time, Bleys and Fiona decided to employ their secret allies against Eric. Brand had demurred in this, fearing the strength of those forces, and as a result had been rejected by Bleys and Fiona. With everyone on his back then, he had sought to upset the balance of powers completely by journeying to the shadow Earth where Eric had left me to die centuries before. It was only later that Eric had learned that I had not died but was possessed of total amnesia, which was almost as good, had set sister Flora to watch over my exile and hoped that that was the last of it. Brand later told me he had gotten me committed to Porter in a desperate move to restore my memory as a preliminary to my return to Amber. While Fiona and Bleys had been dealing with Brand, Eric had been in touch with Flora. She had arranged for my transfer to Greenwood from the clinic to which the the hand of oberon police had taken me, with instructions to keep me narcotized, while Eric began arrangements for his coronation in Amber. Shortly thereafter, our brother Random's idyllic existence in Texorami was broken when Brand managed to send him a message outside the normal family channels -- i.e . , the Trumps -- requesting deliverance. While Random, who was blissfully non-partisan in the power struggle, was about this business, I managed to deliver myself from Greenwood, still relatively unmemoried. Having obtained Flora's address from Greenwood's frightened director, I betook myself to her place in Westchester, engaged in some elaborate bluffing and moved in as a house guest. Random, in the meantime, had been less than successful in his attempt to rescue Brand. Slaying the snakey warden of the tower, he had had to flee its inner guards, utilizing one of the region's strangely mobile rocks. The guards, a hardy band of not quite human guys, had succeeded in pursuing him through Shadow, however, a feat normally impossible for most non-Amberites. Random had fled then to the shadow Earth where I was guiding Flora along the paths of misunderstanding while attempting to locate the proper route to enlightenment as to my own circumstances. Crossing the continent in response to my assurance that he would be under my protection, Random had come believing that his pursuers were my own creatures. When I helped him destroy them he was puzzled but believing that I was engaged in some major maneuver thronewards. In fact, he had easily been tricked into conveying me back to Amber through Shadow. This venture had proved beneficial in some respects while much less satisfactory in others. When I had finally revealed the true state of my personal situation, Random and our sister Deirdre, whom we had encountered along the way, conducted me to Amber's mirror-city within the sea, Rebma. There I had walked the image of the Pattern and recovered the bulk of my memories as a result -- thereby also settling the issue as to whether I was the real Corwin or merely one of his shadows. From Rebma I had traveled into Amber, utilizing the power of the Pattern to effect an instantaneous Journey home. After fighting an inconclusive duel with Eric, I had fled via the Trumps into the keeping of my beloved brother and would-be assassin, Bleys. I joined with Bleys in an attack on Amber, a mismanaged affair which we had lost. Bleys vanished during the final engagement, under circumstances which looked likely to prove fatal but, the more that I learned and thought about it, probably had not. This left me to become Eric's prisoner and an after which he had had me blinded and locked away. A few years in the dungeons of Amber had seen a regeneration of my eyes, in direct proportion to the deterioration of my state of mind. It was only the accidental appearance of Dad's old adviser Dworkin, worse off mentally than myself, which had led to a way of escape. After that, I set about recovering and I resolved to be more prudent the next time I went after Eric. I journeyed through Shadow toward an old land where I had once reigned -- Avalon -- with plans to obtain there a substance of which I alone among Amberites was aware, a chemical unique in its ability to undergo detonation in Amber. En route, I had passed through the land of Lorraine, there encountering my old exiled Avalonian general Ganelon, or someone very much like him. I remained because of a wounded knight, a girl and a local menace peculiarly similar to a thing occurring in the vicinity of Amber herself -- a growing black circle somehow related to the black road our enemies traveled, a thing for which I held myself partly responsible because of a curse I had pronounced at the time of my blinding. I won the battle, lost the girl and traveled on to Avalon with Ganelon. The Avalon we reached, we quickly learned, was under the protection of my brother Benedict, who had been having troubles of his own with a situation possibly akin to the black circleblack road menaces. Benedict had lost his right arm in the final engagement, but had been victorious in his battle with the hellmaids. He had warned me to keep my intentions toward Amber and Eric pure, and had then allowed us the hospitality of his manor while he remained for a few days more in the field. It was at his place that I met Dara. Dara told me she was Benedict's great-granddaughter, whose existence had been kept secret from Amber. She drew me out as far as she could on Amber, the Pattern, the Trumps and our ability to walk in Shadow. She was also an extremely skilled fencer. We indulged in a bit of casual love-making on my return from a hellride to a place where I obtained a sufficient quantity of rough diamonds to pay for the things I was going to need for my assault on Amber. The following day, Ganelon and I picked up our supply of the necessary chemicals and departed for the shadow Earth where I had spent my exile, there to obtain automatic weapons and ammunition manufactured to my specifications. En route, we had some difficulties along the black road, which seemed to have extended its scope of influence among the worlds of Shadow. We were equal to the troubles it presented, but I almost perished in a duel with Benedict, who had pursued us through a wild hellride. Too angry for argument, he had fought me through a small wood -- still a better man than I, even wielding his blade left-handed. I had only managed to best him by means of a trick involving a property of the black road of which he was unaware. I had been convinced that he wanted my blood because of the affair with Dara. But no. In the few words that passed between us he denied any knowledge of the existence of such a person. Instead, he had come after us convinced that I had murdered his servants. Now, Ganelon had indeed located some fresh corpses in the wood at Benedict's place, but we had agreed to forget about them, having no idea as to their identities and no deCan You Cope With The Computer Age? Looking tor Itarning Ktivititt that don't nd s Wmputir? Thingi that taach about compuiar Wncapu, the rola of th# computer in aoeialy. w at a tool in math, tcianca or locial 'tudiaa? How about a whiimical eanlarfold for your bulletin board avary itiua? mia loo? Il'i all in Cnmtivt Computing, the wwn-to-oarth computer magazine.    Automotoila? Steal? Agriculture? Not # It'i computen. More dollari. Mora i re impact. What do you know about c earaari? Where do you urt? VI la? 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Will compuiar art have en Impact on as a whole In tha future? Can you imaglrM a printed circuit board nvlnning a blue ribbon in t irnporiant t aiihlbilion? Fird out more in Craarwe Computing, the mezlna that brings nmputar art to you. AS aataaeritaara M miva a Try Craarhre Computing to a year only S#-#. Or three years lor #I .#. Or Mnd for a sampis issue lor #. Plena irvlude money;  lYr. SB #Vrt.#I OSampleSI Return to Crmtho Computing P. O. Boa #BB-M. Morristown, N. J. #. sire to complicate our existence any further. Leaving Benedict in the care of brother Gerard, whom I had summoned via his Trump from Amber, Ganelon and I proceeded to the shadow Earth, armed ourselves, recruited a strike force in Shadow and headed off to attack Amber. But upon our arrival we discovered that Amber was already under attack by creatures which had come in along the black road. My new weapons quickly turned the tide in Amber's favor, and my brother Eric died in that battle, leaving me his problems, his ill will and the Jewel of Judgment -- a weather-controlling weapon he had used against me when Bleys and I had attacked Amber. At that point, Dara showed up, swept on by us, rode into Amber, found her way to the Pattern and proceeded to walk it -- prima facie evidence that we were indeed somehow related. During the course of this ordeal, however, she had exhibited what appeared to be peculiar physical transformations. Upon completion of the Pattern, she announced that Amber would be destroyed. Then she had vanished. About a week later, brother Caine was murdered, under conditions arranged to show me as the culprit. The fact that I had slain his slayer was hardly satisfactory evidence of my innocence, in that the guy was necessarily in no condition to talk about it. Realizing, however, that I had seen his like before, in the persons of those creatures who had pursued Random into Flora's home, I finally found time to sit down with Random and hear the story of his unsuccessful attempt to rescue Brand from his tower. Random, subsequent to my leaving him in Rebma years before, when I had journeyed to Amber to fight my duel with Eric, had been forced by Rebma's queen. Moire, to marry a woman of her court: Vialle, a lovely blind girl. This was partly intended as a punishment for Random, who years before had left Moire's late daughter Morganthe pregnant with Martin, the apparent subject of the damaged Trump Random now held in his hands. Strangely, for Random, he appeared to have fallen in love with Vialle, and he now resided with her in Amber. After I left Random, I fetched the Jewel of Judgment and took it down to the chamber of the Pattern. There, I followed the partial instructions I had received for purposes of attuning it to my use. I underwent some unusual sensations during the process and was successful in obtaining control of its most obvious function: the ability to direct meteorological phenomena. After that, I questioned Flora concerning my exile. Her story seemed reasonable and jibed with those facts I did possess, although I had the feeling she was holding back somewhat on events at the time of my accident. She did promise to identify Caine's slayer as one of the same sort as those individuals Random and I had fought at her home in Westchester, however, and she assured me of her support in anything I might currently be about. At the time I had heard Random's story, I was still unaware of the two factions and their machinations. I decided then that if Brand were still living, his rescue was of first importance, if for no other reason than the fact that he obviously possessed information that someone did not want circulated. I hit on a scheme for achieving this, the trial of which was only postponed for the time required by Gerard and myself for returning Caine's body to Amber. Part of this time, however, was appropriated by Gerard for purposes of beating me unconscious, just in case I had forgotten he was capable of the feat, to add weight to his words when he informed me that he would personally kill me should it turn out that I was the author of Amber's present woes. It was the most exclusive closed circuit fight I knew of, viewed by the family via Gerard's Trump -- an act of insurance should I actually be the culprit and have a mind to erase his name from the list of the living because of his threat. We journeyed on to the Grove of the Unicom then and exhumed Caine. At that time, we actually caught a brief glimpse of the legendary unicorn of Amber. That evening we met in the library of the palace in Amber -- we being Random, Gerard, Benedict, Julian, Deirdre, Fiona, Flora, Llewella and myself. There, we tested my idea for finding Brand. It amounted to all nine of us simultaneously attempting to reach him via his Trump. And we succeeded. We contacted him and were successful in transporting him back to Amber. In the midst of the excitement, however, with all of us crowded about as Gerard bore him through, someone planted a dagger in his side. Gerard immediately elected himself attending physician and cleared the room. The rest of us moved to a downstairs sitting room, there to backbite and discuss events. During this time, Fiona advised me that the Jewel of Judgment might represent a hazard in situations of prolonged exposure, suggesting the possibility that it, rather than his wounds, might have been the cause of Eric's death. One of the first signs, she believed, was a distortion of one's time-sense -- an apparent slowdown of temporal sequence, actually representing a speedup of physiological events. I resolved to be more cautious with it, in that she was more conversant with these matters than the rest of us, having once been an advanced pupil of Dworkin's. And perhaps she was correct. Perhaps there was such an effect in operation later that evening when I returned to my own quarters. At least, it seemed as if the person who attempted to kill me was moving a trifle more slowly than I would have myself under similar circumstances. At that, the stroke was almost successful. The blade caught me in the side and the world went away. Leaking life, I awoke in my old bed in my old home on the shadow Earth where I had dwelled for so long as Carl Corey. How I had been returned, I had no idea. I crawled outside and into a blizzard. Clinging precariously to consciousness, I cached the Jewel of Judgment in my old compost heap, for the world did indeed seem to be slowing down about me. Then I made it to the road, to try flagging down a passing motorist. It was a friend and former neighbor, Bill Roth, who found me there and drove me to the nearest clinic. There, I was treated by the same doctor who had attended me years before, at the time of my accident. He suspected I might be apsychiatric case, as the old record did reflect that faked state of affairs. Bill showed up later, however, and set a number of things right. An attorney, he had grown curious at the time of my disappearance and done some investigating. He had learned about my fake certification and my successive escapes. He even possessed details on these matters and on the accident itself. He still felt there was something strange about me, but it did not really bother him that much. Later, Random contacted me via my Trump and advised me that Brand had come around and was asking for me. With Random's assistance, I returned to Amber. I went to see Brand. It was then that I learned of the nature of the power struggle which had been going on about me, and the identities of the participants. His story, together with what Bill had told me back on the shadow Earth, finally brought some sense and coherence to occurrences of the past several years. He also told me more concerning the nature of the danger we currently faced. I did nothing the following day, ostensibly for purposes of preparing myself for a visit to Tir-na Nog'th, actually to buy additional time in which to recover from my injury. This commitment made, however, it had to be kept. I did journey to the city ill the sky that night, encountering a confusing collection of signs and portents, signifying perhaps nothing, and collecting a peculiar mechanical arm from the ghost of my brother Benedict while I was about it. Returned from this excursion on high, I breakfasted with Random and Ganelon before setting out across Kolvir to return home. Slowly, bewilderingly, the trail began to change about us. It was as though we were walking in Shadow, a well-nigh impossible feat this near to Amber. When we reached this conclusion, we tried to alter our course, but neither Random nor I were able to affect the changing scene. About that time, the unicorn put in an appearance. It seemed to want us to follow it. We did. It had led us through a kaleidoscopic series of changes, until finally we arrived at this place, where it abandoned us to our present devices. Now, with this entire sequence of events tumbling through my head, my mind moved about the peripheries, pushed its way forward, returned to the words Random had just spoken. I felt that I was slightly ahead of him once more. For how long this state of affairs might last, I did not know, but I realized where I had seen work by the same hand which had executed the pierced Trump. Brand had often painted when he was entering one of his melancholy periods, and his favorite techniques came to mind as I recalled canvas after canvas he had brightened or darkened. Add to this his campaign of years before to obtain recollections and descriptions from everyone who had known Martin. While Random had not recognized his style, I wondered how long it might be before he began thinldng as I just had concerning the possible ends of Brand's information gathering. Even if his hand had not actually propelled the blade, Brand was party to the act by providing the means. I knew Random well enough to know that he meant what he had said. He would try to kill Brand as soon as he saw the connection. This was going to be more than awkward. It had nothing to do with the fact that Brand had probably saved my life. I figured I had squared accounts with him by getting him out of that damned tower. No. It was neither indebtedness nor sentiment that caused me to cast about for ways to mislead Random or slow him down. It was the naked, frigid fact that I needed Brand. He had seen to that. My reason for saving him was no more altruistic than his had been in dragging me out of the lake. He possessed something I needed now; information. He had realized this immediately and he was rationing it -- his life's union dues. "I do see the resemblance," I said to Random, "and you may well be right about what happened." "Of course I am right." "It is the card that was pierced," I said. "Obviously. I don't -- " "He was not brought through on the Trump, then. The person who did it therefore made contact, but was unable to persuade him to come across." "So? The contact had progressed to a point of sufficient solidity and proximity that he was able to stab him anyway. He was probably even able to achieve a mental lock and hold him where he was while he bled. The kid probably hadn't had much experience with the Trumps." "Maybe yes, maybe no," I said. "Llewella or Moire might be able to tell us how much he knew about the Trumps. But what I was getting at was the possibility that contact could have been broken before death. If he inherited your regenerative abilities he might have survived." "Might have? I don't want guesses! I want answers!" I commenced a balancing act within my mind. I believed I knew something that he did not, but then my source was not the best. Also, I wanted to keep quiet about the possibility because I had not had a chance to discuss it with Benedict. On the other hSnd, Martin was Random's son, and I did want to direct his attention away from Brand. "Random, I may have something," I said. "What?" "Right after Brand was stabbed," I said, "when we were talking together in the sitting room, do you remember when the conversation turned to the subject of Martin?" "Yes. Nothing new came up." "I had something I might have added at that time, but I restrained myself because everyone was there. Also, because I wanted to pursue it in private with the party concerned." "Who?" "Benedict." "Benedict? What has he to do with Martin?" "I do not know. That is why I wanted to keep it quiet until I found out. And my source of information was a touchy one, at that." "Go ahead." "Dara. Benedict gets mad as hell whenever I mention her name, but so far a number of things she told me have proved correct -- things like the journey of Julian and Gerard along the black road, their injury, their stay in Avalon. Benedict admitted these things had happened." "What did she say about Martin?" Indeed. How to phrase it without giving away the show on Brand... ? Dara had said that Brand had visited Benedict a number of times in Avalon, over a span of years. The time differential between Amber and Avalon is such that it seemed likely, now that I thought about it, that the visits fell into the period when Brand was so actively seeking information on Martin. I had wondered what kept drawing him back there, since he and Benedict had never been especially chummy. "Only that Benedict had had a visitor named Martin, whom she thought was from Amber," I lied. "When?" "Some while back. I'm not sure. ' ' "Why didn't you tell me this before?" "It is not really very much -- and besides, you had never seemed especially interested in Martin." He shifted his gaze to the griffin, crouched and gurgling on my right, then nodded. "I am now," he said. "Things change. If he is still alive, I would like to get to know him. If he is not..." "Okay," I said. "The best way to be about either one is to start figuring a way to get home. I believe we have seen what we were supposed to see and I would like to clear out. ' ' "I was thinking about that," he said, "and it occurred to me that we could probably use this Pattern for that purpose. Just head out to the center and transfer back." "Going in along the dark area?" I asked. "Why not? Ganelon has already tried it and he's okay." "A moment," said Ganelon. "I did not say that it was easy, and I am positive you could not get the horses to go that route." "What do you mean?" I said. "Do you remember that place where we crossed the black road -- back when we were fleeing Avalon?" "Of course."  "Well, the sensations I . experienced in retrieving the card and the dagger were not unlike the upset that came over us at that time. It is one of the reasons I was running so fast. I would favor trying the Trumps again first, under the theory that this point is congruent with Amber. ' ' I nodded. "All right. We might as well try making it as easy as we can. Let's collect the horses first. ' ' We did this, learning the length of the griffin's leash while we were about it. He was drawn up short about thirty meters from the cavemouth, and immediately set up a bleating complaint. This did not make the job of pacifying the horses any easier, but it did give rise to a peculiar notion which I decided to keep to myself. Once we had things under control, Random located his Trumps and I brought out my own. "Let's try for Benedict," he said. "All right. Any time now." I noticed immediately that the cards felt cold again, a good sign. I shuffled out Benedict's and began the preliminaries. Beside me. Random did the same. Contact came almost at once. "What is the occasion?" Benedict asked, his eyes moving over Random, Ganelon and the horses, then meeting with my own. "Will you bring us through?" I said. "Horses, too?" "The works." "Come ahead." He extended his hand and I touched it. We all moved toward him. Moments later, we stood with him in a high, rocky place, a chill wind ruffling our garments, the sun of Amber past midday in a sky full of clouds. Benedict wore a stiff leather jacket and buckskin leggings. His shirt was a faded yellow. An orange cloak concealed the stump of his right arm. He tightened his long jaw and peered down nt me. the hand of oberon "Interesting spot you hie from," he said. "I glimpsed something of the background." I nodded. "Interesting view from this height, also," I said, noting the spyglass at his belt at the same time that I realized we stood on the wide ledge of rock from which Eric had commanded battle on the day of his death and my return. I moved to regard the dark swath through Garnath, far below and stretching off to the horizon. "Yes," he said. "The black road appears to have stabilized its boundaries at most points. At a few others though, it is still widening. It is almost as if it is nearing a final conformity with some -- pattern. -- Now tell me, from what point have you journeyed?" "I spent last night in Tir-na Nog'th," I said, "and this morning we went astray in crossing Kolvir." "Not an easy thing to do," he said. "Getting lost on your own mountain. You keep heading east, you know. That is the direction froni which the sun has been known to take its course." I felt my face flush. "There was an accident," I said, looking away. "We lost a horse." "What sort of accident?" "A serious one -- for the horse." "Benedict," said Random, suddenly looking up from what I realized to be the pierced Trump, "what can you tell me concerning my son Martin?" Benedict studied him for several long moments before he spoke. Then, "Why the sudden interest?" he asked. "Because I have reason to believe he may be dead," he said. "If that is the case, I want to avenge it. If it is not the case -- Well, the thought that it might be has caused me some upset. If he is still living, I would like to meet him and talk with him." "What makes you think he might be dead?" Random glanced at me. I nodded. "Start with breakfast," I said. "While he is doing that. I'll find us lunch," said Ganelon, rummaging in one of the bags. "The unicorn showed us the way..." Random began. finished speaking and Benedict was staring skywards over Garnath. His face betrayed nothing. I had long ago learned to respect his silence. At length, he nodded, once, sharply, and turned to regard Random. "I have long suspected something of this order," he stated, "from things that Dad and Dworkin let fall over the years. I had the impression there was a primal Pattern which they had either located or created, situating our Amber but a shadow away to draw upon its forces. I never obtained any notion as to how one might travel to that place, however." He turned back toward Garnath, gesturing with his chin. "And that, you tell me, corresponds to what was done there?" "It seems to," Random replied. " -- Brought about by the shedding of Martin's blood?" "I think so." Benedict raised the Trump Random had passed him during his narration. At that time, Benedict had made no comment. "Yes," he said now, "this is Martin. He came to me after he departed Rebma. He stayed with me a long while." "Why did he go to you?" Random asked. Benedict smiled faintly. "He had to go somewhere, you know," he said. "He was sick of his position in Rebma, ambivalent toward Amber, young, free and just come into his power through the Pattern. He wanted to get away, see new things, travel in Shadow -- as we all did. I had taken him to Avalon once when he was a small boy, to let him walk on dry land of a summer, to teach him to ride a horse and have him see a crop harvested. When he was suddenly in a position to go anywhere he would in an instant, his choices were still restricted to the few places of which he had knowledge. True, he might have dreamed up a place in that instant and gone there -- creating it, as it were. But he was also aware that he still had many things to learn, to insure his safety in Shadow. So he elected to come to me, to ask me to teach him. And I did. He spent the better part of a year at my place. I taught him to fight, taught him of the ways of the Trumps and of Shadow, instructed him in those things an Amberite must know if he is to survive." "Why did you do all these things?" Random asked. "Someone had to. It was me that he came to, so it was mine to do," Benedict replied. "It was not as if I were not very fond of the boy, though," he added. Random nodded. "You say that he was with you for almost a year. What became of him after that?" "That wanderlust you know as well as I. Once he had obtained some confidence in his abilities, he wanted to exercise them. In the course of instructing him, I had taken him on journeys in Shadow myself, had introduced him to people of my aquaintance at various laces. But there came a time when e wanted to make his own way. One day then, he bade me good-bye and fared forth." "Have you seen him since?" Random asked. "Yes. He returned periodically, staying with me for a time, to tell me of his adventures, his discoveries. It was always clear that it was just a visit. After a time, he would get restless and depart again." "When was the last time you saw him?" "Several years ago, Avalon time, under the usual circumstances. He showed up one morning, stayed for perhaps two weeks, told me of the things he had seen and done, talked of the many things he wanted to do. Later, he set off once more." "And you never heard from him again?" "On the contrary. There were messages left with mutual friends when he would pass their way. Occasionally, he would even contact me via my Trump -- " "He had a set of the Trumps?" I broke in. "Yes, I made him a gift of one of my extra decks." "Did you have a Trump for him?" He shook his head. "I was not even aware that such a Trump existed, until I saw this one," he said, raising the card, glancing at it and passing it back to Random. "I haven't the art to prepare one. Random, have you tried reaching him with this Trump?" "Yes, any number of times since we came across it. Just a few minutes ago, as a matter of fact. Nothing." "Of course that proves nothing. If everything occurred as you guessed and he did survive it, he may have resolved to block any future attempts at contact. He does know how to do that." "Did it occur as I guessed? Do you know more about it?" "I have an idea," Benedict said. "You see, he did show up injured at a friend's place -- off in Shadow -- some years ago. It was a body wound, caused by the thrust of a blade. They said he came to them in very bad shape and did not go into details as to what had occurred. He remained for a few days -- until he was able to get around again -- and departed before he was really fully recovered. That was the last they heard of him. The last that I did, also." "Weren't you curious?" Random asked. "Didn't you go looking for him?" "Of course I was curious. I still am. But a man should have the right to lead his own life without the meddling of relatives, no matter how well-intentioned. He had pulled through the crisis and he did not attempt to contact me. He apparently knew what he wanted to do. He did leave a message for me with the Tecys, saying that when I learned of what had happened I was not to worry, that he knew what he was about." 'The Tecys?" I said. "That's right. Friends of mine off in Shadow." I refrained from saying the things that I might. I had thought them just another part of Dara's story, for she had so twisted the truth in other areas. She had mentioned the Tecys to me as if she knew them, as if she had stayed with them -- all with Benedict's knowledge. The moment did not seem appropriate, however, to tell him of my previous night's vision in Tir-na Nog'th and the things it had indicated concerning his relationship to the girl. I had not yet had sufficient time to ponder the matter and all that it implied. Random stood, paced, paused near the ledge, his back to us, fingers knotted behind him. After a moment, he turned and stalked back. "How can we get in touch with the Tecys?" he asked Benedict. "No way," said Benedict, "except to go and see them." Random turned to me. "Corwin, I need a horse. You say that Star's been through a number of hellrides..." "He's had a busy morning." "It wasn't that strenuous. It was mostly fright, and he seems okay now. May I borrow him?" Before I could answer, he turned toward Benedict. "You'll take me, won't you?" he said. Benedict hesitated. "I do not know what more there is to learn -- " he began. "Anything! AnytWng at all they might remember -- possibly something that did not really seem important at the time but is now, knowing what we know." Benedict looked to me. I nodded. "He can ride Star, if you are "All right," Benedict said, getting to his feet. "I'll fetch my mount." He turned and headed off toward the place where the great striped beast was tethered. "Thanks, Corwin," Random said. "I'll let you do me a favor in return." "What?" "Let me borrow Martin's Trump." "What for?" "An idea just hit me. It is too complicated to get into if you want to get moving. No harm should come of it, though." He chewed his lip. "Okay. I want it back when you are done with it." "Of course." "Will it help find him?" "Maybe." He passed me the card. "You heading back to the palace now?" he asked. "Yes." "Would you tell Vialle what has happened and where I have gone? She worries." "Sure. I'll do that." "I'll take good care of Star." "I know that. Good luck." "Thanks."    I rode Firedrake. Ganelon walked. He had insisted. We followed the route I had taken in pursuing Dara on the day of the battle. Along with recent developments, that is probably what made me think of her again. I dusted off my feelings and examined them carefully. I realized then that despite the games she had doubtless been privy or party to and her stated designs upon the realm, I was still attracted to her by something more than curiosity. I was not really surprised to discover this. Things had looked pretty much the same the last time I had pulled a surprise inspection in the emotional barracks. I wondered then how much of truth there might have been to my final vision of the previous night, wherein her possible line of descent from Benedict had been stated. There was indeed a physical resemblance, and I was more than half-convinced. In the ghost city, of course, the shade of Benedict had conceded as much, raising his new, strange arm in her defense... "What's funny?" Ganelon asked, from where he strode to my left. "The arm," I said, "that came to me from Tir-na Nog'th -- I had worried over some hidden import, some unforeseen force of destiny to the thing, coming as it had into our world from that place of mystery and dream. Yet it did not even last the day. Nothing remained when the Pattern destroyed lago. The entire evening's visions came to nothing." Ganelon cleared his throat. "Well, it wasn't exactly the way you seem to think," he said. "What do you mean?" "That arm device was not in lago's saddlebag. Random stowed it in your bag. That's where the food was, and after we had eaten he returned the utensiles to where they had been in his own bag, but not the arm. There was no space." "Oh," I said. "Then -- " Ganelon nodded. " -- So he has it with him now," he finished. "The arm and Benedict both. Damn! I've small liking for that thing. It tried to kill me. No one has ever been attacked in Tir-na Nog'th before." "But Benedict, Benedict's okay. He's on our side, even if you have some differences at the moment. Right?" I did not answer him. He reached up and took firedrake's reins, drawing him to a halt. He stared up then, studying my face. "Corwin, what happened up there, anyway? What did you learn?" I hesitated. In truth, what had I learned in the city in the sky? No one was certain as to the mechanism behind the visions of Tir-na Nog'th. It could well be, as we have sometimes suspected, that the place simply served to objectify one's unspoken fears and desires, mixing them perhaps with unconscious guesswork. Sharing conclusions and reasonably based conjectures was one thing. Suspicions engendered by something unknown were likely better retained than given currency. Still, that arm was solid enough... "I told you," I said, "that I had knocked that arm off the ghost of Benedict. Obviously, we were fighting." "You see it then as an omen that you and Benedict will eventually be in conflict?" "Perhaps." "You were shown a reason for it, weren't you?" "Okay," I said, finding a sigh without trying. "Yes. It was indicated that Dara was indeed related to Benedict -- a thing which may well fje correct. It is also quite possible, if it is true, that he is unaware of it. Therefore, we keep quiet about it until we can verify it or discount it. Understood?" "Of course. But how could this thing be?" "Just as she said." ' 'Great-granddaughter?' ' I nodded. "By whom?" "The hellmaid we knew only by reputation -- Lintra, the lady who cost him his arm." "But that battle was only a recent thing." "Time flows differently in different realms of Shadow, Ganelon. In the farther reaches -- It would not be impossible." He shook his head and relaxed his grip on the reins. "Corwin, I really think Benedict should know about this," he said. "If it is true, you ought to give him a chance to prepare himself rather than let him discover it of a sudden. You people are such an infertile lot that paternity seems to hit you hader than it does others. Look at Random. For years, he had disowned his son, and now -- I've a feeling he'd risk his life for him." "So do I," I said. "Now forget the first part but carry the second one a step further in the case of Benedict." "You think he would take Dara's side against Amber?" "I would rather avoid presenting him with the choice by not letting him know that it exists -- if it exists." "I think you do him a disservice. He is hardly an emotional infant. Get hold of him on the Trump and tell him your suspicions. That way, at least, he can be thinking about it, rather than have him risk some sudden confrontation unprepared." "He would not believe me. You have seen how he gets whenever I mention Data." "That in itself may say something. Possibly he suspects what might have happened and rejects it so vehemently because he would have it otherwise." "Right now it would just widen a rift I am trying to heal." "Your holding back on him now may serve to rupture it completely when he finds out." "No. I believe I know my brother better than you do." He released the reins. "Very well," he said. "I hope you are right." I did not answer, but started Firedrake to moving once more. There was an unspoken understanding between us that Ganelon could ask me anything he wanted, and it also went without saying that I would listen to any advice he had to offer me. This was partly because his position was unique. We were not related. He was no Amberite. The struggles and problems ofAmber were his only by choice. We had been friends and then enemies long ago, and finally, more recently, friends again and allies in a battle in his adopted land. That matter concluded, he had asked to come with me, to help me deal with my own affairs and those of Amber. As I saw it, he owed me nothing now, nor I him -- if one keeps a scoreboard tally on Such matters. Therefore, it was friendship alone that bound us, a stronger thing than bygone debts and points of honor: in other words, a thing which gave him the right to bug me on matters such as this, where I might have told even Random to go to hell once I had made up my mind. I realized I should not be irritated when everything that he said was tendered in good faith. Most likely it was an old military feeling, going back to our earliest relationship as well as being tied in with the present state of affairs: I do not like having my decisions and orders questioned. Probably, I decided, I was irritated even more by the fact that he had made some shrewd guesses of late, and some fairly sound suggestions based upon them -- things I felt I ought to have caught myself. No one likes to admit to a resentment based on something like that. Still... Was that all? A simple projection of dissatisfaction over a few instances of personal inadequacy? An old Army reflex as to the sanctity of my 'Jccisions? Or was it something The hand of oberon deeper that had been bothering me and was just now coming to the surface? "Corwin," Ganelon said, "I've been doing some thinking..." I sighed. "Yes?" "... about Random's son. The way your crowd heals, I suppose it is possible that he might have survived and still be about." "I would like to think so." "Do not be too hasty." "What do you mean?" "I gather he had very little contact with Amber and the rest of the family, growing up in Rebma the way that he did. "That is the way I understand it, too." "In fact, outside of Benedict -- and Llewella, back in Rebma -- the only other one he apparently had contact with would have been the one who stabbed him -- Bleys, Brand or Fiona. It has occurred to me that he probably has a pretty distorted view of the family." "Distorted," I said, "but maybe not unwarranted, if I see what you are getting at." "I thii you do. It seems conceivable that he is not only afraid of the family, but may have it in for the lot of you." "It is possible," I said. "Do you think he could have thrown in with the enemy?" I shook my head. "Not if he knows they are the tools of the crowd that tried to kill him." "But are they? I wonder... ? You say Brand got scared and tried to back out of whatever arrangement they had with the black road gang. If they are that strong, I wonder whether Fiona and Bleys might not have become their tools? If this were the case, I could see Martin angling for something which gave him power over them." "Too elaborate a structure of guesses," I said. "The enemy seems to know a lot about you." "True, but they had a couple traitors to give them lessons." "Could they have given them everything you say Dara knew?" "That is a good point," I said, "but it is hard to say." Except for the business about the Tecys which occurred to me immediately. I decided to keep that to myself for the moment though, to find out what he was leading up to, rather than going off on a tangent. So, "Martin was hardly in a position to tell them much about Amber," I said. Ganelon was silent for a moment. Then, "Have you had a chance to check on the business I asked you about that night at your tomb?" he said. "What business?" "Whether the Trumps could be bugged," he said. "Now that we know Martin had a deck..." It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticlung their tongues out at me. "No," I said then. "I haven't had a chance." We proceeded on for quite a distance before he said, "Corwin, the night you brought Brand back... ?" "Yes?" "You say you accounted for everyone later, in trying to figure out who it was that stabbled you, and that any of them would have been hard put to pull the stunt in the time involved." "Oh," I said, "and oh." He nodded. "Now you have another relative to think about. He may lack the family finesse only because he is young and unpracticed." Sitting there in my mind, I gestured back at the silent parade of moments that crossed between Amber and then. IV. She asked who it was when I knocked and I told her. "Just a moment." I heard her footsteps and then the door swung in. Vialle is only a little over five feet tall and quite slim. Brunette, fine-featured, very softspoken. She was wearing red Her sightless eyes looked througl me, reminding me of darkness past of pain. "Random," I said, "asked me tc tell you that he would be delayed a little longer, but that there was nothing to worry about. ' ' "Please come in," she said stepping aside and drawing the doo the rest of the way open. I I did. I did not want to, but  did. I had not intended to takfl Random's request literally -- that I tell her what had happened and where he had gone. I had meant simply to tell her what I had already said, nothing more. It was not until we had ridden our separate ways that I realized exactly what rAi AxV Random's request had amounted to: He had just asked me to go tell his wife, to whom I had never spoken more than half a dozen words, that he had taken off to go looking for his illegitimate son -- the lad whose mother, Morganthe, had committed suicide, a thing for which Random had been punished by being forced to marry Vialle. The fact that the marriage had somehow worked beautifully was something which still amazed me. I had no desire to dispense a load of awkward tidings, and as I moved into the room I sought alternatives. I passed a bust of Random set on a high shelf on the wall to my left. I had actually gone by before it registered that my brother was indeed the subject. Across the room, I saw her workbench. Turning back, I studied the bust. "I did not realize that you sculpted," I said. "Yes." Casting my gaze about the apartment, I quickly located other examples of her work. "Quite good," I said. "Thank you. Won't you sit down?" I lowered myself into a large, high-armed chair which proved more comfortable than it had looked. She seated herself on a low divan to my right, curling her legs beneath her. "May I get you something to eat, or to drink?" "No thanks. I can only stay a short while. What it is, is that Random, Ganelon and I had gotten a bit sidetracked on the way home, and after that delay we met with Benedict for a time. The upshot of it was that Random and Benedict had to make another small journey. ' ' "How long will he be away?" "Probably overnight. Maybe a bit longer. If it is going to be much longer he will probably call back on someone's Trump, and we'll let you know." My side began to throb and I rested my hand upon it, massaging it gently. "Random has told me many things about you," she said. I chuckled. "Are you certain you would not care for something to eat? It would be no trouble." "Did he tell you that I am always hungry?" She laughed. "No. But if you have been as active as you say, I would guess that you did not take time for lunch." "In that you would be only halfcorrect. All right. If you've a spare piece of bread lying about it might do me some good to gnaw on it." "Fine. Just a moment." She rose and departed into the next room. I took the opportunity to scratch heartily all about my wound where it was suddenly itching fit to kill. I had accepted her hospitality partly for this reason and partly because of the realization that I actually was hungry. Only a little later it struck me that she could not have seen me attacking my side as I was. Her sure movements, her confident manner had relaxed my awareness of her blindness. Good. It pleased me that she was able to carry it so well. I heard her humming a tune; "The Ballad of the Water Crossers," the song of Amber's great merchant navy. Amber is not notedj for manufacture, and agriculture has never been our forte. But our ships sail the shadows, plying between: anywhere and anywhere, dealing in anything. Just about every male Amberite, noble or otherwise, spends some time in the fleet. Those of the blood laid down the trade routes long ago that other vessels might follow, the seas of a double dozen worlds in every captain's head. I had assisted in this in times gone by, and though my involvement had never been so deep as Gerard's or Caine's, I had been mightily moved by the forces of the deep and the spirit of the men who crossed it. After a while, Vialle came in bearing a tray heavy with bread, meat, cheese, fruit and a flask of wine. She set it upon a table near at hand. "You mean to feed a regiment?" I asked. "Best to be safe." "Thanks. Won't you Join me?" "A piece of fruit, perhaps," she said. Her fingers sought for a second, located an apple. She returned to the divan. "Random tells me you wrote that song," she said. "That was a very long time ago, Vialle." "Have you composed any recently?" I began to shake my head, caught myself, said, "No. That part of me is... resting." "Pity. It is lovely." "Random is the real musician." "Yes, he is very good. But performance and composition are two different things." "True. One day when things have eased up... Tell me, are you hppy here in Amber? Is everything to your liking? Is there anything that you need?" She smiled. "All that I need is Random. He is a good man." I was strangely moved to hear her speak of him in this fashion. "Then I am happy for you," I said. And, "Younger, smaller... he might have had it a bit rougher than the rest of us," I went on. "Nothing quite as useless as another prince when there is already a crowd of them about. I was as guilty as the rest. Bleys and I once stranded him for two days on an islet to the south of here..." "... And Gerard went and got him when he learned of it," she said. "Yes, he told me. It must bother you if you remember it after all this time." "It must have made an impression on him, too." "No, he forgave you long ago. He told it as a joke. Also, he drove a spike through the heel of your boot -- pierced your foot when you put it on." "Then it was Random! I'll be damned! I had always blamed Julian for that one." "That one bothers Random." "How long ago all of this Was... " I said. I shook my head and continued eating. Hunger seized me and she gave me several minutes of silence in which to get the upper hand on it. When I had, I felt compelled to say something. "That is better. Much better," I began. "It was a peculiar and trying night that I spent in the sky-city." "Did you receive omens of a useful nature?" "I do not know how useful they might prove. On the other hand, I suppose I'd rather have had them than not. Have there been any interesting happenings hereabouts?" "A servant tells me your brother Brand continues to rally. He ate well this morning, which is encouraging." "True," I said. "True. It would seem he is out of danger." "Likely. It -- It is a terrible series of happenings to which you have all been subjected. I am sorry. I was hoping you might obtain some indication of an upturn in your affairs during the night you spent in Tir-na Nog'th." "It does not matter," I said. "I am not that sure of the value of the thing." "Then why -- Oh." I studied her with renewed interest. Her face still betrayed nothing, but her right hand twitched, tapping and plucking at the material of the divan. Then, as with a sudden awareness of its eloquence, she stilled it. She was obviously a person who had answered her own question and wished now she had done it in silence. "Yes," I said, "I was stalling. You are aware of my injury." She nodded. "I am not angry with Random for having told you," I said. "His judgment has always been acute and geared to defense. I see no reason not to rely on it myself. I must inquire as to how much he has told you, however, both for your own safety and my peace of mind. For there are things I suspect but have not yet spoken." "I understand. It is difficult to assess a negative -- the things he might have left out, I mean -- but he tells me most things. I know your story and most of the others'. He keeps me aware of events, suspicions, conjectures." "Thank you," I said, taking a sip of the wine. "It makes it easier for me to speak then, seeing how things are with you. I am going to tell you everything that happened from breakfast till now..." So I did. She smiled occasionally as I spoke, but she did not interrupt. When I had finished, she asked, "You thought that mention of Martin would upset me?" "It seemed possible," I told her. "No," she said. "You see, I knew Martin in Rebma, when he was but a small boy. I was there while he was growing up. I liked him then. Even if he were not Random's son he would still be dear to me. I can only be pleased with Random's concern and hope that it has come in time to benefit them both." I shook my head. "I do not meet people like you too often," I said. "I am glad that I finally have." She laughed, then said, "You were without sight for a long while." "Yes." "It can embitter a person, or it can give him a greater joy in those things which he does have." I did not have to think back over my feelings from those days of blindness to know that I was a person of the first sort, even discounting the circumstances under which I had suffered it. I am sorry, but that is the way that I am, and i am sorry. "True," I said. "You are fortunate." "It is really only a state of mine -- a thing a Lord of Shadow can easily appreciate." She rose. "I have always wondered as to your appearance," she said. "Random has described you, but that is different. May I?" "Of course." She approached and placed her fingertips upon my face. Delicately, she traced my features.  "Yes," she said, "you are muchl as I had thought you would be. And! I feel the tension in you. It has been there for a long while, has it not?" "In some form or other, I suppose, ever since my return to Amber." "I wonder," she said, "whether you might have been happier before you regained your memory." "It is one of those impossible! uestions," I said. "I might also be! ead if I had not. But putting that part aside for a moment, in those times there was still a thing that drove me, that troubled me every day. I was constantly looking for ways to discover who I really was, what I was." "But were you happier, or less happy, than you are now?" "Neither," I said. "Things balance out. It is, as you suggested, a state of mind. And even if it were not so, I could never go back to that other life, now that I know who t am, now that I have found    ''Why not?" "Why do o cl"I want to understand you," she said. "Ever since I first heard of you back in Rebtna, even before Random told me stories, I wondered what it was that drove you. Now I've the opportunity -- no right, of course, just the opportunity -- I felt it worth speaking out of turn and order beyond my station simply to ask you." A half-chuckle caught me. "Fairly taken," I said. "I will see whether I can be honest. Hatred drove me at first -- hatred for my brother Eric -- and my desire for the throne. Had you asked me on my return which was the stronger, I would have said that it was the summons of the throne. Now, though... Now I would have to admit that it was actually the other way around. I had not realized it until this moment, but it is true. But Eric is dead and there is nothing left of what I felt then. The throne remains, but now I find that my feelings toward it are mixed. There is a possibility that none of us has a right to it under present circumstances, and even if all family objections were removed I would not take it at this time. I would have to see stability restored to the realm and a number of questions answered first." "Even if these things showed that you may not have the throne?" "Even so." "Then I begin to understand." "Understand what?" "Lord Corwin, my knowledge of the philosophical bases of these things is limited, but it is my understanding that you are able to find anything you wish within Shadow. This has troubled me for a long while, and I never fully understood Random's explanations. If you wished, could not each of you walk in Shadow and find yourself another Amber -- like this one in all respects, save that you ruled there or enjoyed whatever other status you might desire?" "Yes, we could locate such places," I said. "Then why is this not done, to have an end of strife?" "It is because a place could be found which seemed to be the same -- but that would be all. We are a part of this Amber as surely as it is a part of us. Any shadow of Amber would have to be populated with shadows of ourselves to seem worthwhile. We could even except our own person should we choose to move into a ready realm. However, the shadow folk would not be exactly like the other people here. A shadow is never precisely like that which casts it. These little differences add up. They are actually worse than major ones. It would amount to entering a nation of strangers. The best mundane comparison which occurs to me is an encounter with a person who strongly resembles another person you know. You keep expecting him to act like your acquaintance; worse yet, you have a tendency to act toward him as you would toward that other. You face him with a certain mask and his responses are not appropriate. It is an uncomfortable feeling. I never enjoy meeting people who remind me of other people. Personality is the one thing we cannot control in our manipulations of Shadow. In fact, it is the means by which we can tell one angther from shadows of themselves. This is why Rora could not decide about me for so long, back on the shadow Earth: my new personality was sufficiently different." "I begin to understand," she said. "It is not just Amber for you. It is the place plus everything else." "The place plus everything else... That is Amber," I agreed. "You say that your hate died with Eric and your desire for the throne has been tempered by the consideration of new things you have learned." "That is so." "Then I think I do understand what it is that moves you." "The desire for stability moves me," I said, "and something of curiosity -- and revenge on our enemies..." "Duty," she said. "Of course." I snorted. "It would be comforting to put such a face on it," I said. "As it is, however, I will not be a hypocrite. I am hardly a dutiful son of Amber or of Oberon." "Your voice makes it plain that you do not wish to be considered one." I closed my eyes, closed them to join her in darkness, to recall for a brief while the world where other messages than light waves took precedence. I knew then that she had been right about my voice. Why had I trodden so heavily on the idea of duty as soon as it was suggested? I like credit for being good and clean and noble and high-minded when I have it coming, even sometimes when I do not -- the same as the next person. What bothered me about the notion of duty of Amber? Nothing. What was it then? Dad. I no longer owed him anything, least of all duty. Ultimately, he was responsible for the present state of affairs. He had fathered a great brood of us without providing for a proper succession, he had been less than kind to all of our mothers and he then expected our devotion and support. He played favorites and, in fact, it even seemed he played us off against one another. He then got suckered into something he could not handle and left the kingdom in a mess. Sigmund Freud had long ago anesthetized me to any normal, generalized feelings of resentment which might operate within the family unit. I have no quarrel on those grounds. Facts are another matter. I did not dislike my father simply because he had given me no reason to like him; in truth, it seemed that he had labored in the other direction. Enough. I realized what it was that bothered me about the notion of duty: its object. "You are right," I said, opening my eyes, regarding her, "and I am glad that you told me of it." I rose. "Give me your hand," I said. She extended her right hand and I raised it to my lips. "Thank you," I said. "It was a good lunch." I turned and made my way to the door. When I looked back she had blushed and was smiling, her hand still partly raised, and I began to understand the change in Random. "Good luck to you," she said, the moment my footsteps ceased. "... And you," I said, and went out quickly.    I had been planning to see Brand next, but just could not bring myself to do it. For one thing, I did not want to encounter him with my wits dulled by fatigue. For another, talking with Vialle was the first pleasant thing which had happened to me in some time, and Just this once I was going to quit while I was ahead. I mounted the stair and walked the corridor to my room, thinking of course of the night of the knifings as I fitted my new key to my new lock. In my bed chamber, I drew the drapes against the afternoon's light, undressed and got into bed. As on other occasions of rest after stress with more stress pending, sleep eluded me for a time. For a long while I tossed and twisted, reliving events of the past several days and some from even farther back. When finally I slept, my dreams were an amalgam of the same material, including a spell in my old cell, scraping away at the door. It was dark when I awoke and I actually felt rested. The tension gone out of me, my reverie was much more peaceful. In fact, there was a tiny charge of pleasant excitement dancing through the back of my head. It was a tip-of-thetongue imperative, a buried notion that -- Yes! I sat up. I reached for my clothes, began to dress. I buckled on Grayswandir. I folded a blanket and tucked it under my arm. Of course... My mind felt clear and my side had stopped throbbing. I had no idea how long I had slept, and it was hardly worth checking at this point. I had something far more important to look into, something which should have occurred to me a long while ago -- had occurred, as a matter of fact. I had actually been staring right at it once, b.it the crush of time and events had ground it from my mind. Until now. I locked my room behind me and headed for the stair. Candles flickered, and the faded stag who had been dying for centuries on the tapestry to my right looked back on the faded dogs who had been pursuing him for approximately as long. Sometimes my sympathies are with the stag; usually though, I am all dog. Have to have the thing restored one of these days. The stairs and down. No sounds from below. Late, then. Good. Another day and we're still alive. Maybe even a trifle wiser. Wise enough to realize there are many more things we still need to know. Hope, though. There's that. A thing I lacked when I squatted in that damned cell, hands pressed against my ruined eyes, howling. Vialle... I wish I could have spoken with you for a few moments in those days. But I learned what I learned in a nasty school, and even a milder curriculum would probably not have given me your grace. Still... Hard to say. I have always felt I am more dog than stag, more hunter than victim. You might have taught me something that would have blunted the bitterness, tempered the hate. But would that have been for the best? The hate died with its object and the bitterness, too, has passed -- but looking back, I wonder whether I would have made it without them to sustain me. I am not at all certain that I would have survived my internment without my ugly companions to drag me back to life and sanity time and again. Now I can afford the luxury of an occasional stag-thought, but then it might have been fatal. I do not truly know, kind lady, and I doubt that I ever will. Stillness on the second floor. A few noises from below. Sleep well, lady. Around, and down again. I wondered whether Random had uncovered anything of great moment. Probably not, or he or Benedict should have contacted me by now. Unless there was trouble. But no. It is ridiculous to shop for worries. The real thing makes itself felt in due course, and I'd more than enough to go around. The ground floor. "Will," I said, and, "Rolf." "Lord Corwin." The two guards had assumed professional stances on hearing my footsteps. Their faces told me that all was well, but I asked for the sake of form. "Quiet, Lord. Quiet," replied the senior. "Very good," I said, and I continued on, entering and crossing the marble dining hall. It would work, I was sure of that, if time and moisture had not totally effaced it. And then... I entered the long corridor, where the dusty walls pressed close on either side. Darkness, shadows, my footsteps... I came to the door at the end, opened it, stepped out onto the platform. Then down once more, that spiralling way, a light here, a light there, into the caverns of Kolvir. Random had been right, I decided then. If you had gouged out everything, down to the level of that distant floor, there would be a close correspondence between what was left and the place of that primal Pattern we had visited this morning... On down. Twisting and winding through the gloom. The torch and lantern-lit guard station was theatrically stark within it. I reached the floor and headed that way. "Good evening. Lord Corwin," said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it. "Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?" "A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful." "You enjoy this duty?" He nodded. "I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here." "Fitting, fitting," I said. "I'll be needing a lantern." He took one from the rack, brought it to flame from his candle. "Will it have a happy ending?" I inquired. He shrugged. "I'll be happy." "I mean, does good triumph and hero bed heroine? Or do you kill everybody off?" "That's hardly fair," he said. "Never mind. Maybe I'll read it one day." "Maybe," he said. I took the lantern and turned # M(ay, heading in a direction I had not taken in a long while. I discovered that I could still measure the echoes in my mind. Before too long, I neared the wall, sighted the proper corridor, entered it. It was simply a matter of counting my paces then. My feet knew the way. The door to my old cell stood partly ajar. I set down the lantern and used both hands to open it fully. It gave way grudgingly, moaning as it moved. Then I raised the lantern, held it high and entered. My flesh tingled and my stomach clenched itself within me. I began to shiver. I had to fight down a strong impulse to bolt and run. I had not anticipated such a reaction. I did not want to step away from that heavy brassbound door for fear that it would be slammed and bolted behind me. It was an instant close to pure terror that the small dirty cell had aroused in me. I forced tiyself to dwell on particulars -- the bole which had been my latrine, the blackened spot where I had built my ttre on that final day. I ran my left band oyer the inner surface of the boor, finding and tracing there the grooves I had worn while scraping away with my spoon. I remembered what the activity had done to my hands. I stooped to examine the gouging. Not nearly so deep as it had seemed at the time, not when compared to the total thickness of the door. I realized how much I had exaggerated the effects of that feeble effort toward freedom. I stepped past it and regarded the wall. Faint. Dust and moisture had worked to undo it. But I could still discern the outlines of the lighthouse of Cabra, bordered by four slashes of my old spoon handle. The magic was still there, that force which had finally transported me to freedom. I felt it without calling upon it. I turned and faced the other wall. The sketch which I now regarded had fared less well than that of the lighthouse, but then it had been executed with extreme haste by the light of my last few matches. I could not even make out all of the details, though my memory furnished a few of those which were hidden: It was a view of a den or library, bookshelves lining the walls, a desk in the foreground, a globe beside the desk. I wondered whether I should risk wiping it clean. I set my lantern on the floor, returned to the sketch on the other wall. With a comer of my blanket, I gently wiped some dust from a oint near the base of the lightouse. The line grew clearer. I wiped it again, exerting a little more pressure. Unfortunate. I destroyed an inch or so of outline. I stepped back and tore a wide strip from the edge of the blanket. I folded what remained into a pad and seated myself on it. Slowly, carefully then, I set to work on the lighthouse. I had to get an exact feeling for the work before I tried cleaning the other one. Half an hour later I stood up and stretched, bent and massaged life back into my legs. What remained of the lighthouse was clean. Unfortunately, I had destroyed about twenty percent of the sketch before I developed a sense of the wall's texture and an appropriate stroke across it. I doubted that I was going to improve any further. The lantern sputtered as I moved it. I unfolded the blanket, shook it out, tore off a fresh strip. Making up a new pad, I knelt before the other sketch and set to work. Awhile later I had uncovered what remained of it. I had forgotten the skull on the desk until a careful stroke revealed it once again -- and the angle of the far wall, and a tall candlestick... I drew back. It would be risky to do any more rubbing. Probably unnecessary, also. It seemed about as entire as it had been. The lantern was flickering once again. Cursing Roger for not checking the kerosene level, I stood and held the light at shoulder level off to my left. I put everything from my mind but the scene before me. I gained something of perspective as I stared. A moment later and it was totally three-dimensional and had expanded to fill my entire field of vision. I stepped forward then and rested the lantern on the edge of the desk. I cast my eyes about the place. There were bookshelves on all four walls. No windows. Two doors at the far end of the room, right and left, across from one another, one closed, the other partly ajar. There was a long, low table covered with books and papers beside the opened door. Bizarre curios occupied open spaces on the shelves and odd niches and recesses in the walls -- bones, stones, pottery, inscribed tablets, lenses, wands, instruments of unknown function. The huge rug resembled an Ardebil. I took a step toward that end of the room and the lantern sputtered again. I turned and reached for it. At that moment, it failed. I growled an obscenity and lowered my hand. Then I turned, slowly, to check for any possible light sources. Something resembling a branch of coral shone faintly on a shelf across the room and a pale line of illumination occurred at the base of the closed door. I abandoned the lantern and crossed the room. I opened the door as quietly as I could. The room it let upon was deserted, a small, windowless living place faintly illuminated by the still smouldering embers in its single, recessed hearth. The room's walls were of stone and they arched above me. The fireplace was a possibly natural niche in the wall to my left. A large, armored door was set in the far wall, a big key partly turned in its lock. I entered, taking a candle from a nearby table, and moved toward the fireplace to give it a light. As I knelt and sought a flame among the embers, I heard a soft footfall in the vicinity of the doorway. Turning, I saw him just beyond the threshold. About five feet in height, hunchbacked. His hair and beard were even longer than I remembered. Dworkin wore a nightshirt which reached to his ankles. He carried an oil lamp, his dark eyes peering across its sooty chimney. "Oberon," he said, "is it finally time?" "What time is that?" I asked softly. He chuckled. "What other? Time to destroy the world, of course!" V. face, kept my voice low. "Not quite," I said. "Not quite." He sighed. "You remain unconvinced." He looked forward and cocked his head, peering down at me. "Why must you spoil things?" he said. "I've spoiled nothing." He lowered the lamp. I turned my head again, but he finally got a good look at my face. He laughed. "Funny. Funny, funny, funny," he said. "You come as the young Lord Corwin thinking to sway me with family sentiment. Why did you not choose Brand or Bleys? It was Clarissa's lot served us best." I shrugged and stood. "Yes and no," I said, determined now to feed him ambiguities for so long as he'd accept them and respond. Something of value might emerge, and it seemed an easy way to keep him in a good humor. "And yourself?" I continued. "What face would you put on things?" "Why, to win your good will I'll match you," he said, and then he began to laugh. He threw his head back, and as his laughter rang about me a change came over him. His stature seemed to increase, and his face luffed like a sail cut too close to the wind. The hump on his back was diminished as he straightened and stood taller. His features rearranged themselves and his beard darkened. By then it was obvious that he was somehow redistributing his body mass, for the nighshirt which had reached his ankles was now midway up his shins. He breathed deeply and his shoulders widened. His arms lengthened, his bulging abdomen narrowed, tapered. He reached shoulder height on me, then higher. He looked me in the eye. His garment reached only to his knees. His hump was totally restored. His face gave a final twist, his features steadied, were reset. His laughter fell to a chuckle, faded, closed with a smirk. I regarded a slightly slimmer version of myself. "Sufficient?" he inquired. "Not half bad," I said. "Wait till I toss a couple logs on the fire." "I will help you." "That's all right." I drew some wood from a rack to the right. Any stall served me somewhat, buying reactions for my study. As I was about the work, he crossed to a chair and seated himself. When I glanced at him I saw that he was not looking at me, but staring into the shadows. I drew out the fire-building, hoping that he would say something, anything. Eventually, he did. "Whatever became of the grand design?" he asked. I did not know whether he was speaking of the Pattern or of some master plan of Dad's to which he had been privy. So, "You tell me," I said. He chuckled again. "Why not? You changed your mind, that is what happened," he said. "From what to what -- as you see it?" "Don't mock me. Even you have no right to mock me," he said. "Least of all, you." I got to my feet. "I was not mocking you," I said. I crossed the room to another chair and carried it over to a position near the fire, across from Dworkin. I seated myself. "How did you recognize me?" I asked. "My whereabouts are hardly common knowledge." "That is true." "Do many in Amber think me dead?" "Yes, and others suppose you might be traveling off in Shadow." "I see." "How have you been -- feeling?" He gave me an evil grin. "Do you mean am I still mad?" "You put it more bluntly than I care to." "There is a fading, there is an intensifying," he said. "It comes to me and it departs again. For the moment I am almost myself -- almost, I say. The shock of your visit, perhaps... Something is broken in my mind. You know that. It cannot be otherwise, though. You know that, too." "I suppose that I do," I said. "Why don't you tell me all about it, all over again? Just the business of talking might make you feel better, might give me something I've missed. Tell me a story." Another laugh. "Anything you like. Have you any preferences? My flight from Chaos to this small sudden island in the sea of night? My meditations upon the abyss? The revelation of the Pattern in a jewel hung round the neck of a unicorn? My transcription of the design by lightning, blood and lyre while our fathers raged baffled, too late come to call me back while the poem of fire ran that first route in my brain, infecting me with the will to form? Too late! Too late... Possessed of the abominations born of the disease, beyond their aid, their power, I planned and built, captive of my new self. Is that the tale you'd hear again? Or rather I tell you of its cure?" My mind spun at the implications he had Just scattered by the fistful. I could not tell whether he spoke literally or metaphorically or was simply sharing paranoid delusions, but the things that I wanted to hear, had to hear, were things closer to the moment. So, regarding the shadowy image of myself from which that ancient voice emerged, "Tell me of its cure," I said. He braced his fingertips together and spoke through them. "I am the Pattern," he said, "in a very real sense. In passing through my mind to achieve the form it now holds, the foundation of Amber, it marked me as surely as I marked it. I realized one day that I am both the Pattern and niyself, and it was forced to become Dworkin in the process of becoming itself. There were nlutual modifications in the birthing of this place and this time, and therein lay our weakness as well as our strength. For it occurred to me that damage to the Pattern would be damage to tnyself, and damage to myself would be reflected within the Pattern. Yet I could not be truly harmed because the Pattern protects me, and who but I could harm the Pattern? A beautiful closed system, it seemed, its weakness totally shielded by its strength." He fell silent. I listened to the fire. I do not know what he listened to. Then, "I was wrong," he said. "Such a simple matter, too... My blood, with which I drew it, could deface it. But it took me ages to realize that the blood of my blood could also do this thing. You could use it, you could also change it -- yea, unto the third generation." It did not come to me as a surprise, learning that he was grandsire to us all. Somehow, it seemed that I had known all along, had known but never voiced it. Yet... if anything, this raised more questions than it answered. Collect one generation of ancestry. Proceed to confusion. I had less idea now than ever before as to what Dworkin really was. Add to this the fact which even he acknowledged: It was a tale told by a madman. "But to repair it... ?" I said. He smirked, my own face twisting before me. "Have you lost your taste to be a Lord of the living void, a king of chaos?" he asked. "Mayhap," I replied. "By the Unicorn thy mother, I knew it would come to this! The Pattern is as strong in you as is the greater realm. What then is your desire?" ' To preserve the realm. ' ' He shook hismy head. " Twould be simpler to destroy everything and try a new start -- as I have told you so often before." "I'm stubborn. So tell me again," I said, attempting to simulate Dad's gruffness. He shrugged. "Destroy the Pattern and we destroy Amber -- and all of the shadows in polar array about it. Give me leave to destroy myself in the midst of the Pattern and we will obliterate it. Give me leave by giving me your word that you will then take the Jewel which contains the essence of order and use it to create a new Pattern, bright and pure, untainted, drawing upon the stuff of your own being while the legions of chaos attempt to distract you on every side. lYomise me that and let me end it, for broken as I am, I would rather die for order than live for it. What say you now?" "Would it not be better to try mending the one we've got than to undo the work of eons?" "Coward!" he cried, leaping to his feet. "I knew you would say that again!" "Well, wouldn't it?" He began to pace. "How many times have we been through this?" he asked. "Nothing has changed! You are afraid to try it!" "Perhaps," I said. "But do you not feel that something for which you have given so much is worth some effort -- some additional sacrifice -- if there is even a possibility of saving it?" "You still do not understand," he said. "I cannot but think that a damaged thing should be destroyed -- and hopefully replaced. The nature of my personal injury is such that I cannot envision repair. I am damaged in just this fashion. My feelings are foreordained." If the Jewel can create a new Pattern, why will it not serve to repair the old one, end our troubles, heal your spirit?" He approached and stood before me. "Where is your memory?" he said. "You know that it would be infinitely more difficult to repair the damage than it would be to start over again. Have you forgotten what it is like out there?" He gestured toward the wall behind him. "Do you want to go and look at it again?" "Yes," I said. "I would like that. Let's go." I rose and looked down at him. His control over his form had begun slipping when he had grown angry. He had already lost three or four inches in height, the image of my face was melting back into his own gnome-like features and a noticeable bulge was growing between his shoulders, had already been visible when he had gestured. His eyes widened and he studied my face. "You really mean it," he said after a moment. "All right, then. Let us go." He turned and moved toward the big metal door. I followed him. He used both hands to turn the key. Then he threw his weight against it. I moved to help him, but he brushed me aside with extraordinary strength before giving the door a final shove. It made a grating noise and moved outward into a fully opened position. I was immediately struck by a strange, somehow familiar odor. Dworkin stepped through and paused. He located what looked to be a long staff leaning against the wall off to his right. He struck it several times against the ground and its upper end began to glow. It lit up the area fairly well, revealing a narrow tunnel into , which he now advanced. I followed him and it widened before too long, so that I was able to come up abreast of him. The odor grew stronger, and I could almost place it. It had been something fairly recent... It was close to eighty paces before our way took a turn to the left and upward. We passed then through a little appendix-like area. It was strewn with broken bones, and a large metal ring was set in the rock a couple feet above the floor. Affixed thereto was a glittering chain, which fell to the floor and trailed on ahead like a line of molten droplets cooling in the gloom. Our way narrowed again after that and Dworkin took the lead once more. After a brief time, he turned an abrupt corner and I heard him muttering. I nearly ran into him when I made the turn myself. He was crouched down and groping with his left hand inside a shadowy cleft. When I heard the soft cawing noise and saw that the chain vanished into the opening I realized what it was and where we were. "Good Wixer," I heard him say. "I am not going far. It is all right, good Wixer. Here is something to chew on." From where he had fetched whatever he tossed the beast, I do not know. But the pruple griffin, which I had now advanced far enough to glimpse as it stirred within its lair, accepted the offering with a toss of its head and a series of crunching noises. Dworkin grinned up at me. "Surprised?" he asked. "At what?" "You thought I was afraid of him. You thought I would never make friends with him. You set him out here to keep me in there -- away from the Pattern." "Did I ever say that?" "You did not have to. I am not a fool." "Have it your way," I said. He chuckled, rose and continued on along the passageway. I followed and it grew level underfoot once again. The ceiling rose and the way widened. At length, we came to the cavemouth. Dworkin stood for a moment silhouetted, staff raised before him. It was night outside, and a clean salt smell swept the musk from my nostrils. Another moment, and he moved forward once more, passing into a World of sky-candles and blue velours. Continuing after him, I had psped briefly at the amazing view. It was not simply that the stars in the moonless, cloudless sky blazed that the distinction between sky and sea had once again been totally obliterated. It was that the Pattern glowed an almost acetylene blue by the sky-sea, and all of the stars above, beside and below were arrayed with a geometric precision, forming a fantastic, oblique latticework which, more than anything else, gave the impression that we hung in the midst of a cosmic web where the Pattern was the true center, the rest of the radiant meshwork a precise consequence of its existence, configuration, position. Dworkin continued on down to the Pattern, right up to the edge beside the darkened area. He waved his staff over it and turned to look at me Just as I came near. "There you are," he announced, "the hole in my mind. I can no longer think through it, only around it. I no longer know what must be done to repair something I now lack. If you think that you can do yourself open to instant destruction each time you depart the Pattern to cross the break. Not destruction by the dark portion. Destruction by the Pattern itself when you break the circuit. The Jewel may or may not sustain you. I do not know. But it will not grow easier. It will become more difficult with each circuit, and your strength will be lessening all the while. The last time we discussed it you were afraid. Do you mean to say you have grown bolder since then?' ' "Perhaps," I said. "You see no other way?" "I know it can be done starting with a clean slate, because once I did it so. Beyond that, I see no other way. The longer you wait the more the situtation worsens. Why not fetch the Jewel and lend me your blade, son? I see no better way." "No," I said. "I must know more. Tell me again how the damage was done." "I still do not know which of your children shed our blood on this spot, if this is what you mean. It was done. Let it go at that. Our darker natures came forth strongly in them. It must be that they are too close to the chaos from which we sprang; growing without the exercises of will we endured in defeating it. I had thought that the ritual of traveling the Pattern might suffice for them. I could think of nothing stronger. Yet it failed. They strike out against everything. They seek to destroy the Pattern itself." "If we succeed in making a fresh start, might not these events simply repeat themselves?" "I do not know. But what choice have we other than failure and a return to chaos?" "What will become of them if we try for a new beginning?" He was silent for a long while. Then he shrugged. "I cannot tell." "What would another generation have been like?" He chuckled. "How can such a question be answered? I have no idea." I withdrew the mutilated Trump and passed it to him. He regarded it near the blaze of his staff. "I believe it is Random's son Martin," I said, "he whose blood was spilled here. I have no idea whether he still lives. What do you think he might have amounted to?" He looked back out over the Pattern. "So this is the object which decorated it," he said. "How did you fetch it forth?" "It was gotten," I said. "It is not your work, is it?" "Of course not. I have never set eyes on the boy. But this answers your question, does it not? If there is another generation your children will destroy it." "As we would destroy them?" He met my eyes and peered. "Is it that you are suddenly becoming a doting father?" he asked. "If you did not prepare that Trump, who did?" He glanced down and flicked it with his fingernail. "My best pupil. Your son Brand. That is his style. See what they do as soon as they gain a little power? Would any of them offer their lives to preserve the realm, to restore the Pattern?" "Probably," I said. "Probably Benedict, Gerard, Random, Corwin..." "Benedict has the mark of doom upon him, Gerard possesses the will but not the wit. Random lacks courage and determinatioji. Corwin... Is he not out of favor and out of sight?" ' My thoughts returned to our last meeting, when he had helped me to escape from my cell to Cabra. It occurred to me that he might have had second thoughts concerning that, not haying been aware of the circumstances which had put me there. 'Is that why you have taken this form?"  fnanner of rebuke? Are you testing me again?" "He is neither out of favor nor sight," I said, "though he has enemies among the family and elsewhere. He would attempt anything to preserve the realm. How do you see his chances?" "Has he not been away for a long while?" "Yes." "Then he might have changed. I do not know." "I believe he is changed. I know He stared at me again, and he kept staring. "You are not Oberon," he said at length. "No." "You are he whom I see before me." "No more, no less." "I see... I did not realize that you knew of this place." "I didn't, until recently. The first time that I came here I was led by the unicorn." His eyes widened. 'That is -- very -- interesting," he said. "It has been so long..." "What of my question?" "Eh? Question? Did you ask a question?" "My chances. Do you think I, ntight be able to repair the Pattern?" , He advanced slowly, and reach'"# up, placed his right hand on my shoulder. The staff tilted in his other hand as nu did so; its blue light flared within a loot of my face, but I felt no heat. He looked into my eyes. the hand of oberon "You have changed," he said, after a time. "Enough," I asked, "to do the job?" He looked away. "Perhaps enough to make it worth trying," he said, "even if we are foredoomed to failure." "Will you help me?" "I do not know," he said, "that I will be able. This thing with my moods, my thoughts -- it cotnes and it goes. Even now, I feel some of my control slipping away. The excitement, perhaps... We had best get back inside." I heard a clinking noise at my back. When I turned, the griffin was there, his head swinging slowly from left to right, his tail from right to left, his tongue darting. He began to circle us, halting when he came to a position between Dworkin and the Pattern. "He knows," Dworkin said. "He can sense it when I begin to change. He will not let me near the Pattern then. -- Good Wixer. We are returning now. It is all right. -- Come, Corwin." We headed back toward the cavemouth and Wixer followed, a clink for every pace. "The Jewel," I said, "the Jewel of Judgment... You say that it is necessary for the repair of the Pattern?" "Yes," he said. "It would have to be borne the entire distance through the Pattern, reinscribing the original design in the places where it has been broken. This could only be done by one who is attuned to the Jewel, though." "I am attuned to the Jewel," I said. "How did you manage that?" he asked, halting. Wixer made a cackling noise behind us, and we resumed walking. "I followed your written instructions -- and Eric's verbal ones," I said. "I took it with me to the center of the Pattern and projected myself through it." "I see," he said. "How did you obtain it?" "Eric gave it to me, on his deathbed." We entered the cave. "You have it now?" "I was forced to cache it in a place off in Shadow." "I would suggest you retrieve it quickly and bring it here or take it back to the palace. It is best kept near the center of things." "Why is that?" "It tends to have a distorting effect on shadows if it lies too long among them." "Distorting? In what fashion?" "There is no way to tell, in advance. It depends entirely upon the locale." We rounded a corner, continued on back through the gloom. "What does it mean," I said, "when you are wearing the Jewel and everything begins to slow down about you? Fiona warned me that this was dangerous, but she was not certain why." "It means that you have reached the bounds of your own existence, that your energies will shortly be exhausted, that you will die unless you do something quickly." "What is that?" "Begin to draw power from the Pattern itself -- the primal Pattern within the Jewel." "How is this achieved?" "You must surrender to it, release yourself, blot out your identity, erase the bounds which separate you from everything else." "It sounds easier said than done." "But it can, be done, and it is the only way." I shook my head. We moved on, coming at last to the big door. Dworkin extinguished the staff and leaned it against the wall. We entered and he secured the door. Wixer had stationed himself just outside. "You will have to leave now," Dworkin said. "But there are many more things that I must ask you, and some that I would like to tell you." "My thoughts grow meaningless, and your words would be wasted. Tomorrow night, or the next, or the next. Hurry! Go!" "Why the rush?" "I may harm you when the change comes over me. I am holding it back by main will now. Depart!" "I do not know how. I know how to get here, but -- " "There are all manner of special Trumps in the desk in the next room. Take the light! Go anywhere! Get out of here!" I was about to protest that I hardly feared any physical violence he could muster, when his features began to flow like melting wax and he somehow seemed much larger and longer-limbed than he had been. Seizing the light, I fled the room, a sudden chill upon me... To the desk. I tore open the drawer and snatched at some Trumps which lay scattered within it. I heard footsteps then, of something entering the room behind me, coming from the chamber I had just departed. They did not seem like the footsteps of a man. I did not look back. Instead, I raised the cards before me and regarded the one on top. It was an unfamiliar scene, but I opened my mind immediately and reached for it. A mountain crag, something indistinct beyond it, a strangely stippled sky, a scattering of stars to the left... The card was alternately hot and cold to my touch, and a heavy wind seemed to come blowing through it as I stared, somehow rearranging the prospect. From right behind me then, the heavily altered but still recognizable voice of Dworkin spoke: "Fool! You have chosen the land of your doom!" A great claw-like hand -- black, leathery, gnarled -- reached over my shoulder, as if to snatch the card away. But the vision seemed ready, and I rushed forward into it, turning the card from me as soon as I realized I had made my escape. Then I halted and stood stock-still, to let my senses adjust to the new locale. I knew. From snatches of legend, bits of family gossip and from a general feeling which came over me, I knew the place to which I had come. It was with full certainty as to identity that I raised my eyes to look upon the Courts of Chaos.    'acceena hcCbcn Man, too, la a Miracle of Nature. Home late, hot and tired. Tonight he treats himself to Chivas Regal and the last of the excelleni roast beef Jenny had left him in the ice-box. A garlic pickle, black bread to go with. Cheese, sage Cheddar; not quite as good as the ads, but okay. He flops tiredly by the TV, twirls the dials. Too late. Goodnight foi graphic thing. Chewing, he watches the character explaining how te look toothy, inscrutable. Marl borough music. Men are pu' ting the beavers in bags, the bags if baskets on a pack-horse. Beavefjje ecological. He gathers they are jing taken up a strip-mined mountain to be released. There they will start right in doing their beaver tjting, making dams, catching silt, rebuilding the forests. Very neat; miracles of nature. He has another Chivas Regal, wondering if the beavers in the bags like each other. When the man turns them loose they hump off wildly in different directions. A couple act damaged but the camera pans quickly to an okay beaver disappearing up a dry gulch, synchronised with Disney music. Next week, Spearing the Giant Manta. He kills the commercial and wanders out onto the dark patio. Still hot. Lights all around now. This was all woodland when he and Jenny came out five years ago. Supposed to be five-acre zoning, but the commission ran in a sewerline and changed that. He studies what can be seen of the sky above the lights. Summer storm building up over Bald Peak, west of town. Big sheet flash. A loud blare of amped-up CW is coming from the Bannerman's patio, another of their interminable parties. "Bashes," Joan Bannerman trails them, grinning with posttttenopausal gaiety. The Bannertttans have two oafish teen-age ns. Joan dresses like their sister, jtdes herself on her figure. Riding "ohind them on their Harleyavidsons to the postoffice, for fiod's sake. Wagon wheels and cow skulls around their big swimming pool. He sighs, appreciating Jenny, even appreciating the baby at this distance. No, that isn't fair, he's a good little guy. In two more days she'll be back, Jenny and Jimmy... He grunts uxoriously, scratching his arse on the redwood table. Two more nights. To Grandmother's house we go. Only why the hell Grandmother lives in Santa Barbara. Good thing overall, though. Feeling mellow now he whistles softly at an awakened mockingbird that is answering the Bannerman stampede. There's one dark patch of woods left, around the Jacksons' house. Last black family left out here. Exfarmland. They own their land. Probably sell out soon. Nice neighbors; six kids, no noise at all. Doubtless being kept awake by middle-class honky uproar. A massive flickering over Bald Peak now, quite a display. Jenny says there's no such thing as "summer" lightning, merely a storm somewhere else. If so it's a good one, maybe it'll bring rain. We need it; water table is way down, wells going dry since they've paved half the county. Should get the weather forecast, he thinks, and on impulse goes back in and flips on the radio weather station. On the fritz again, nothing but squeals. Without Jenny everything goes to hell fast. He spins to a news channel, gets some kind of science-fiction late show, more static. Jenny will fix it. Two more nights. Should he finish up the whiskey? He decides against it; heavy day tomorrow. Thursday always the worst of the week, never ask anybody for anything on Thursdays. The Bannerman bedlam seems to be increasing. Shrieks and loud male bellowing through the PA. Goddam it, outdoor PA systems are illegal now, one good thing. Should he go over there and remonstrate? No, wait for Jenny, she does that kind of thing better. Especially if it wakes up the baby. He grins lonesomely, closing windows on the Bannerman side. Thank god it's cooling off, but the air really stinks. Gassy. Imagine smog out here, he thinks disgustedly, sliding shut the patio doors. The last thing he remembers is a sudden stillness from the Bannerman patio...   ... A mean slick hardness under his cheek. He rejects it, wills it to become smooth bed sheets. Too hard -- a floor, say the patio tiles. Please god, let it be tiles, let it be a coronary even. I hurt. It's a minor coronary, that's all. But the pain isn't in his chest, it's in his leg. His arm, too. And oh yes, the Jaw, which he has tried imperceptibly to move. Very bad; he decides against trying to move anything else, lies with his eye shut. I did fight -- He abolishes thought, tries to wrap unconsciousness around him. But the drug, gas, whatever, is wearing thin. The horrible slick floor under his face has begun to hum, buzzes through his bones like an angry insect.  did fight -- And at that moment he sees it all again, the awful view from the conveyor or whatever it was, when he had waked to find himself sprawled on metal mesh which was carrying him higher and higher above the early dawn countryside. High-pitched whine of machinery... He remembers blurrily raising his head, seeing the dim lumps of other bodies ascending behind him. And then as. the thing stopped two or three hundred feet up in nowhere, he had turned and seen the cliff of metal alongside. The dark cliff, the Coming for him, reaching with things -- In that instant he realized with total lucidity that he was here while Jenny and his child were in California two thousand miles away; he will never conceivably see either of them again if he does not act. He leaps, throws himself hurtfully across alien machinery, trying to scramble away, slide down -- if necessary fall down -- anything not have seized and coiled around him as he struggles. He flails, kicks and bites metal until the nauseating fog blotted his world. Yes, I fought, he forms now with lips on hardness, refusing to open his eyes, to admit any of this, gut he cannot shut out the humuiing, and above it the susurrus of other breathing around him. Something or somebody is making a high thin rasping sound, Ekkk-hnhnhn, Ek-kkk-hhhn, like a delirious chicken. The drumming under his head is louder, is making his jaw hurt intolerably. Teeth are broken from grinding on metal or moving metallic flesh. He has a searing memory of sentient coils against his body and vomit suddenly shoots up his throat, literally Jumps against his teeth. Projectile vomiting, he remembers this is called. Without moving he lets it trickle out, re-tasting decomposed whiskey. Against his will, vision has penetrated between the lashes of his good eye. A dim grey light, which seems to be coming from the slickness of the floor. In his line of sight is a bare tanned ankle. Involuntarily he follows the young line of the leg in faded jeans. Beyond the jeans is a mauve t-shirt, a heavy mane of reddish gold hair. It is not Jenny, he girl is lying face down, breaing okay. The rasping whine is coming from beyond her. Very slowly he lets his eyes Pen. He can see a corner of the cell or compartment. The wall is shiny like the floor. A cargo-space. leaver tears The ship probably is full of them. Crouched against the wall in a curious squatting posture is a woman. In the dim under-lighting her face looks like a frog. Then he recognises her: Joan Bannerman. She is making the gasping. After a moment he realises that there is another figure in the far corner of his field of vision. By squinting over his shoulder, not moving his head, he can see a face down by the floor, It is looking at Joan Bannerman, a round brown face, screwed into a toothy rigid mask. A memory from another world flicks him; the beavers on TV. But this is not a beaver, it is a human child. Finally he remembers. She is Evelyn, or Jacqueline, one of the Jacksons' kids. About eight. She is clutching her arm, which seems to have bled heavily. He will have to face reality now, he knows; he must move, get up, help the child. But as he thinks this a huge clanging rush of sound rocks the chamber, almost tears him loose from consciousness. Pain rips through him, while in the deeps of his heart a shutter closes forever on a world of green and sunlight. The ship is taking off. Jenny, Jimmy. Gone, lock it away. Bite down. Dizzy, trying not to vomit again, he thinks, we did it. Whatever it was, we did our human thing. We fixed it the way they liked. Concrete, carbon monoxide, the sea full of plastic and oil, who knows. What we do. It's fixed up for them, s now they're moving some of uj along to start fixing up another Hundreds, maybe thousands of us Beavers. A batch per so many zil! ion square miles, per planet even who knows? With that the drug or anaesthetic wears completely away and the pain from his thigh and his broken face becomes unbearable. His leg must be splintered, really he needs medical care. A groan escapes him. He tries to turn sidewise, wondering if Joan Bannerman can help him, or maybe the strange girl on the floor. Joan Bannerman is staring blindly, muttering "Harry, Harry," with her fingers in her mouth. No help there. The girl? The girl is moving now, he sees, waking up. Apparently not hurt. She rolls over with luxurious sleepy ease and farts loudly. "Mom?" Oh god, it is not a girl at all. It is Oscar Bannerman. "Mom!" Oscar repeats querulously. His mother does not react. Suddenly a hand comes from nowhere and slaps her on the face. Jesu.s -- there's another youth here, squatting by the wall beyond Joan. It's not her other son, it's that friend of theirs who shot the cat. Billy Dee something. Joan Bannerman comes jerkily to life and starts patting her youngest, still crooning "Harry..." "Okay, Mom." Oscar shrugs off her hand. He and Billy Dee g galaxv groggily up on their feet, staring around. Their eyes are not empathic. Beneath the pain a deathly hysteria is rising in him. The aliens, he thinks, do not seem to know much about human biology. Or they don't care. Maybe they use some easy mark like hair, maybe they thought Oscar was a female... One prepubescent and one wombless female, to colonise what? Their ecological operations must be on such a large scale that little slip-ups 'ike this don't matter. We dump of them live. "You okay, Ossie?" Billy Dee inquires. Oscar farts again, giggles. Billy -'ee nods in approval, his small, leaver tears slightly crossed eyes roving between the black child and the wounded man on the floor, himself. No one says anything. In the silence rise faint clangors of alien might. The little Jackson girl has her flat terrified stare fixed on Billy Dee. And now another, final presence is perceptible behind her in the dim cell. Please god, he thinks, let it be someone okay. Painfully he twists his head to see. It is her thirteen-year-old brother Payton, a lithe black youth crouched death-still with a glinting object in one hand. No. Letting himself sink down through pain's claws, he decides this is not going to be one of the successful ones.  This may be a unique century in many ways. In one respect it certainly is: this is the first time that mankind has had the resources to leave Earth and make his home in the solar system. No one doubts that we can do it. It takes only detennination and investment. Alas, we may be unique in another way: ours may be the only century in all of history when mankind can break free of Earth. Our opportunity may not come again, per omnia secula seculorum. Thus it could be that we have it in our power to condemn our descendants to imprisonment forever. Last month I wrote about Survival with Style: how we can, if we will, usher in the Third Industrial Revolution through exploitation of Pace, and thereby supply Earth with non-polluting energy and metals for millennia. One reader comttiented as follows: "I remain skeptical. By the time man is forced to accept population control, the world going to be in a sadder state than t is now. And I doubt if nations Will give up their armaments and their free school lunches in order to get the resources to mine the asteroids until the situation is so bad that we probably can't mine the asteroids in time to save us." Unfortunately he may be right. There is no end to forseeable crises, and enough of them could so deplete our resource base and technological ability that when we realize that we must go to space, we won't be able to get there. Furthermore, anti-technological sentiments are no joke; a great number of influential intellectuals have embraced Zero-Growth, condemn technology, and seem to want the next generation to atone for the sins of our forefathers. They do not appear to want themselves to atone; I haven't seen many leading intellectuals giving up their own luxuries, much less necessities, in order to make amends for the "rapre of the Earth", "eco-doom", or the rest of what engineers and technologists are accused of. We shall continue to enjoy; but after us. The Deluge. Our children shall pay. And of course if Zero-Growth has its way, our children will pay; but ours won't pay as much as the children of the people in the developing countries. Those kids are doomed with no chance at all. bo not misunderstand. Were Earth our only source of energy and resources I should probably myself be crying Doom. As it is I fully support many conservation measures -- and in fact I was writing pro-conservation articles as early as #. I've no use for wasters of Earth's bounty. But I've less use for those who would condemn most of the world to eternal poverty when we can do something about it. Incidentally, the Club of Rome, which sponsored the original computer studies leading to The Limits To Growth and provides much of the intellectual fuel for ZeroGrowth, has sponsored a second report entitled Mankind At The Turnlike Limits, is supposed to hold out some hope for the poor. By looking at the world as a set of # "regions" we can, say the authors of tain what they call "balanced growth". Unfortunately they never tell us how. As one reviewer put it, "I do not find any clear explanation of the ways in which balancing out the regions of the world would lead to any lessening of the total demands of human civilization on the planet's living-space, resources, and vital eco-systems." (Frank Hopkins, in the October, # Futurist.) mands foreign aid at the rate of of a # year development period. True, there are plans with less massive foreign aid donations; but all are truly enormous, and like ZeroGrowth must be started now or we are all doomed. And this is nonsense. No politician is going to run for office on a platform of international bounty. No democratic -- or communist -- nation is going to shell out limited wealth at that rate. And even if, by some miracle, the western nations were to divvy up with everyone else, the Second Report can't challenge one feature of The Limits To Growth: no matter how wildly successful we are in imposing Zero-Growth and population control, in # years the game will be over. We will have run out of non-renewable resources. Mankind will be forced to give up high-energy civilization and return to some kind of pastoral society. Surely this is not a desirable goal? There may be those who dream of the simple life (and a lesser number who will actually choose to live it), but surely only a madman would impose it on everyone else without dire necessity? If there is any alternative, must we not take it?    There are alternatives. They aren't even very expensive comfor example, the detailed plans of Princeton professor Gerard K. O'Neill. Deaths of what have come to be called "O'Neill Colonies" were first widely published in the Sept. # issue of Physics Today. The plan has been modified somewhat since that time, most recently by a ence of some of the biggest names in space exploration, but the basic concept remains the same: building self-sustaining colonies in space. O'Neill colonies have a major a'dvantage: they are not only selfsustaining, but will be capable of building more colonies without further investment from Earth. When the first ones have been completed, Earth need pay no more. In addition, the colonies will be able to make important contributions to Earth's economy. There's been a great deal of excitement in the science community, and of course among science fiction fans, although oddly enough most SF writers haven't put much about O'Neill colonies into print. In my own case I assumed others would, and I was waiting for new details. Even so, much of the SF community is aware of the O'Neill concept. "Life in Space" is now a regular program item at science fiction conventions, and will be a major topic of one of the panels I'm chairing at the next Labor Day's World SF Convention. (For convention details, write City, MO, #.) The basic O'Neill plan is for colonies able to support from # to # thousand people each. They will be located in the L# and L# points of the Earth-Moon system. Since not all readers know what that means, and the location is important to the economics of the project, let me take a moment to explain Trojan Points. The equations of gravitational attraction are so complex that we can't really predict where planets, satellites, moons, etc., will be after long periods of time. Given highspeed computers we can make approximations, but we can't precisely solve problems involving three or more bodies except in special cases. A long time ago LaGrange discovered one of those special cases, namely, that when a system consists of three objects, one extremely large with respect to the rest, and a third very small with respect to the other two, there are five points of stability: that is, things that get to those points tend to stay there. These are often called "LaGrangian Points" and designated as LI, L#,... , L#. They are illustrated in Figure One. Three of the five are not really stable: that is, if an object is perturbed out of LI, L#, or L#, it won't tend to return. The other two, L# and L#, are dynamically stable: left to themselves things put there will stay forever. Points L# and L# are named Trojan Points because in the Sol-Jupiter system these points are occupied by a number of asteroids named after Trojan War heroes. The Trojans trail Jupiter, while the Greeks lead. Unfortunately the custom of naming the Eastern group for Greeks and the Western for Trojans wasn't established before one asteroid in each cluster was named for the wrong class of hero; thus there's a Trojan spy in the Greek camp, and vice-versa. Because of perturbing influences of other planets Trojan Points aren't really "points"; the Trojan asteroids drift around within y sausage-shaped area about one AU (# miles) in diameter, while objects in the Earth-Moon Trojan points would tend to drift a few thousand miles one way or another. No matter; they're stable enough. Colonies and supplies, once they arrive at L# or L#, won't go anywhere. The points are, of course, # miles from Earth and an equal distance from the Moon. O'Neill colonies will be big. Even the first model, which is intended as an assembly base and factory, will be several kilometers in diameter. Later models will be larger. One design calls for a cylinder # kilometers in diameter and several times that in length, with "windows" running lengthwise to let in sunlight, large mirrors outside to focus more sunlight, and everything from farms and houses to trout streams in the "land" areas under the windows. The cylinders slowly rotate to provide artificial gravity. The exact gravity wanted isn't known yet, but it will certainly be less than that of, Earth, possibly low enough that man-powered flight (yes, I mean people with artificial wings) will be not only feasible, but the usual means of personal transportation. As O'Neill points out, a great number of energy-consuming activities required for civilization of Earth can be greatly simplified if the colonies. It's possible to wax poetic about galaxy the life in O'Neill colonies, Ijyt I won't do that. In the first oiace, I niay be far-out technologicallybut I don't think people are likely to live in Utopian style no niatter how pleasant their environment. The important point is that life can be pleasant, and certainly possible, in space colonies. These colonies are to be selfsufficient: they have more than enough agricultural area to feed their inhabitants. They are selfgenerating, with a duplication time of under ten years; over the long haul they could be built fast enough to accomodate some of Earth's surplus population. That, however, is not a major selling point, and we'll ignore it here. Most importantly for our purposes the O'Neill colonies can sell power to Earth. It is perfectly feasible to collect solar radiation, convert it to electricity, and beam the juice down to Earth by micro-wave. Tests show that the cycle, from DC to DC, is about # efficient -- and of course most of the wasted energy doesn't get to Earth in the first place. There are a number of designs for the Earth-based receivers. The one I like best is a grid of ""'es several meters above ground; energy densities underneath are low enough to let cattle graze in the pas''es below the grid.I this sounds lovely, but surely a bit far-fetched? No. O'Neill j? use present technology. e are no super-strong materials and no magic systems. We could now begin building an O'Neill colony this year, occupy it in #, and by the year # have a couple more of them built. In which case we could also be supplying about as much power to Earth as the Alaskan pipeline will. In # more years space could supply nearly all US electric power. So why don't we do it? It's bloody expensive, that's why. Make no mistake: this would be a costly undertaking, on a level of effort compared to the Interstate Highway System, or the Viet Nam War. It would not, in my judgement, be nearly so expensive as Zero-Growth, but unfortunately the costs of space colonies are visible. They're direct expenditures. The costs of Zero-Growth are hidden, since the most costly part is in potential not used and goods not created. In the December #, # Science (the prestigious publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) Dr. O'Neill presents an economic analysis of satellite solar power staturing Facilities. He comes up with total costs ranging from a low of Readers with more interest in O'Neill colonies might write the LS Society, ## N. Park, Tucson AZ #. L# polishes a space colonies. Dues of the LS Society are # annually. efits from the electric power prothat over a # year period the facilities would show actual profits from sales of power alone. As a co-discoverer (with Poul Anderson) of what was once known in the aerospace industry as Pournelle's Law of Costs and Schedules ("Everything takes longer and costs more."), I tend to distrust Dr. O'Neill's numbers. It hardly makes any difference. The important point is that the program is feasible. We could afford it. Take a worst-case. Suppose it takes # years, and the total cost is # Apollo programs, The money must be spent at # which comes to # a year for every man, woman, and child in the US. In my own family it would be about # a year. That's a lot of money. Worth it, I think; the benefits are literally incalculable. For example, by the year # the US will need # billion tons of coal annually simply to operate our electric power system. Nuclear power plants could reduce that substantially, but the nuclear industry is in deep -- not technological -- trouble. It would be worth a lot to me simply to avoid year will require. Moreover, the space budget isn't going to be simply tacked onto the national budget. All of the money will be spent here on Earth -- people living in Lunar and space colonies have no need for Earth dollars, and what they physically import is tiny compared to the salaries that will be paid to Earth workers manufacturing products for the colony program. technology industries, we can eliminate a number of "pumppriming" expenditures and dismantle several welfare and unemployment compensation schemes as well. Of course we won't really need to spend that kind of money, and I suspect we can start getting returns on that investment before # years, O'Neill himself thinks in terms of works out to # a head for each person in the US; and the colonic have got to be worth that if only is entertainment value. Now how can something as complex as space colonies be built for that low a price? And wouldn't it be cheaper to build space manufacturing facilities in near-Earth orbit rather than going out to L#? That's the beauty of the O'Neill concept. All the building materials for the colonies must, of course, be put into orbit -- but it need not come from Earth. Most of the raw materials for the L# colony will come from the Moon. The Moon has one twentieth the gravity well that Earth does. The colonies will be in stable Trojan galaxy points. Put those two data together and you reach an interesting conclusion: much of the mass of the colonies need never have been launched by rockets at all. There are several devices for getting lunar materials to the L# point. One involves a simple centrifugal arm: a big solar-powered gizmo similar to the thing used to pitch baseballs for batting practice. It flings gup, such as unrefined Lunar ore (#-# metal, from our random samples) out to the L# point, and the laws of gravity keep it there. Refining takes place at the colony, and the slag is useful as dirt, cosmic ray shielding, and just plain mass. There's also oxygen in them there rocks. Another workable device is the linear accelerator -- a long electric sled as used in countless science fiction stories. Both these can be built with present technology. Obviously, then, O'Neill colonies have a pre-requisite, namely, a permanent Lunar Colony. Now that's certainly within present-day technology; I once did studies that demonstrated that with technology available in the #'s we could keep astronauts and scientists alive for years on the Lunar surface, and things have come a long way since then. The Lunar Colony will need at ast one near-Earth manned space station, since Earth-orbit to Lunarorbit is the most efficient way to transport large masses of materials from here to there. The Lunar Shuttle will be assembled in space, and won't have all that waste structure that would enable it to withstand planetary gravity; thus it can carry far more payload per trip. It's here that I think the profits that space manufacturing operations have fantastic potential profits. There are things we can make in space that simply cannot be made on Earth. Materials research benefits alone might pay for the space station. Certainly the potential for Earth-watch operations, pollution monitoring, better weather prediction, increased communications, and all the other benefits we've already got from space, will contribute to profits as well. And once space shows a visible return on investment, we may well be on our way. So. The pre-requisite for the space station is the Shuttle; and there's the weak point. The Shuttle is in trouble. There are a number of Congresscritters who'd like nothing better than to convert the Shuttle into benefits for their own districts. There are plenty of intellectuals who continually do cry "Why must we waste money in space when there are so many needs on Earth?" The obvious reply, that most of our expenditures on Earth seem to have vanished with no visible benefit, while our space program has already just about paid for itself in better weather prediction alone, does not impress these gentlemen. There are also the Zero-Growth theorists who see investment in space not as a mere waste of money, but as a positive evil. We are close to breakthrough. For a whack of a lot less than we spend on liquor, or on cigarettes and cosmetics, on new highways we don't need, on countless tiny drains that fritter away the hopes of mankind, the United States alone could break out of Earth's prison and send men to space. The effect on future generations is literally incalculable. We can do it; but will we? it itk I wish I were sure that we would; or that if we of the US don't do it, somebody else will; but I am not. There are just too many disaster scenarios. A Great Depression. War. The triumph of antitechnological ideology. The continued ruin of our educational system -- in California, with # State Universities, there is not one in which bonehead English is not the largest single class, and the retreat from excellence (called democratization and equality of opportunity) races onward. Any of these, or all of them at once, could throw away an opportunity that may never again come to mankind. So what can we do? For one thing, we can organize at least as well as the opposition. Science fiction readers may have mixed emotions about "ecology" movements, consumerism, ZeroGrowth, and the like, but I think we have not lost our sense of wonder, nor abandoned our hopes. We have not given up the vision of man's vast future among the stars. We have not traded the future of man for a few luxuries in our time. Unfortunately, we have no voice, or rather, we have a myriad of voices, none very effective. That at least we can remedy. There is a blanket, organization whose goals I think most of us can accept, and I urge all of you to consider joining it. It is called the National Space Werner von Braun and the Directors are professionals. Its purpose is to keep the faith; to keep alive the technology we need, to feed the dream, and ceaselessly to tell public officials just how important space is to all of us. students. You may join by sending the money to National Space Institute, #I N. Fort Myer Drive, Suite #, Arlington, VA #. Dues and other contributions are tax deductible. It has publications and such like, but that's not the reason bers is as spokesman for our dreams. In the #'s a number of us in the aircraft industry used to bootleg space research. There wasn't any budget for that crazy Buck Rogers stuff. Most of us believed we would see the day when the first man set foot on the Moon. We didn't believe we'd see the last one. I hope we haven't. Like many of us who recall presputnik days, I alternate between hope and depression. Recently I have seen one hopeful sign, although it is a bit frightening. As I write this it appears that the Soviets have built lasers sufficiently powerful to blind our infra-red observation satellites. These satellites are in very high orbits, meaning that the Soviet lasers must be extremely powerful. One old friend who has remained in the industry told me at a New Year's party that the Soviets must be at least # years ahead of us, and this in a field in which we thought we were supreme. Why is this hopeful? Isn't it rather frightening? It's frightening if you think the Soviet Union may fall or be under the control of convinced ideologists for all of the world. There is nothing in Marxist ideology to forbid that -- indeed, any communist who has the opportunity to eliminate the West and thus bring about the world revolution, and who fails to do it lcause of the price in human lives, guilty of bourgeois sentimental'y. So yes, it's frightening that the Soviets may have taken several long strides toward laser defense against It's hopeful, though, in that it may stimulate us to get moving in large laser RD. In my judgment, defense technology is the ideal way to conduct an arms race, if you must have an arms race. (And it takes only one party to start a race, unfortunately.) Defense systems don't threaten the opponent's civilian population. They merely complicate offensive operations, hopefully to the point where no sane person would launch an attack; and they give some hope that part of your own civilian population may survive if worst comes to worst. If we can't justify space operations in terms of benefits to mankind, then perhaps we can sell them as defense systems? Big lasers can be used as space launching systems. If built they can put a good bit of material into orbit, thus making the manned space factory economically feasible and nearly inevitable; and once in Earth orbit, as I said in the first of these columns exactly two years ago, you're halfway to anywhere. Specifically, we'd be halfway to an era of plenty without pollution; halfway to assuring that our descendents won't curse our memory for  throwing away mankind's hope for the stars.k This is the second anniversary of these columns and I've greatly enjoyed doing them. No one will ever take Willy Ley's place, but I like to think he would have approved. Four logs good? Six legs betterl showcase is the graphical result of a pleasant conversation that I had with Galaxy's Esteemed Editor at a science fiction convention during the winter of #. Esteemed Editor Baen and I were discussing the occurence of classical mythological themes in science fiction. He suggested that the composite creatures of ancient myths might be a source of inspiration for the multiple-limbed aliens encountered so frequently in contemporary science fiction. These aliens he noted, are usually built on a basically vertebrate body plan. I have long asserted that the only reason terrestrial vertebrates are limited to four limbs is due to their common descent from fishes adapted to an open-ocean (pelagic) way of life. Vertebrates became excellent swimmers using their tails as the organ of propulsion. An animal living in the open ocean with a rear propulsion system and a center of lift (the air bladder in bony fishes) located anteriorly needs only two sets of diving planes to control pitch and yaw. Had the ancestry of land vertebrates come from animals that had always been dwellers on the bottom, especially in the nearshore or fresh-water environments, we might well be hexa, or more podalIndeed, there once were fishes in the vertebrate nedigree with as many as ten sets of paired appendages: Figure One shows  Euthacanthus, a Devonian form with seven sets of paired fins. (Euthacanthus was one of the early awed-fishes called Acanthodians that flourished during the early half of the Paleozoic.) Increased swimming efficiency as j cause for the reduction of the oaiied-fin count of modem fishes to the standard two sets is, I think, far superior to the claim (too often seen in sf-related articles) that a sixlimbed vertebrate would encounter impossible problems of coordination. Note that some insects coordinate -- with little noticeable trouble to their mdimentary nervous systems -- six limbs, four wings and many mouth parts. But while the efficiency argument may be a valid explanation of the general four-limbed vertebrate form, it does not, as it were, insist upon it. I would expect six-limbed vertebrates to evolve in an alternate planetary environment in which there was little open ocean, and in which fishes were bottom-dwelling forms commonly found in nearshore and fresh-water environments. Perhaps the planet would also be highly seasonal, with massive periodical evaporation of shallow oceans so that few fishes would evolve into highly efficient swimmers -- because the open ocean "'ould not exist for a large enough portion of the year to make it a proftable niche to occupy. In these eonditions we might well expect to the evolution of hexapedal land "ortebrates. Figure Two Once our land-dwelling vertebrate hexapods were well extablished we might also expect to see a phenomenon not uncommon even among quadruped vertebrates (i.e. many reptiles, birds, and some mammals, such as yourselves); the specialization of the front set of limbs for purposes other than ground locomotion. In fact this evolutionary step would be much simpler for the hexapod; it would not have to evolve bipedal locomotion at the same time. Bipedalism requires a high degree of hind-leg engineering sophistication in the four-limbed form. (Compare the relative success of birds, which evolved bipedally first and then learned to fly, with bats, which never did acquire the trick of getting about on two legs.) And since converting from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion requires a much greater degree of anatomical and neural reorganization than would be the case in going from six legs to four, we would expect to see many more cases of limb specialization in our hexapodal world. One animal could modify its middle set into wings (as in this month's Showcase) and still have two sets left for running. Another could modify its front set for manipulation and carrying -- the first step toward tool use -- and still remain a fine runner. Indeed, the centauroid form would probably be ubiquitous. A side issue: current theory has it that tool use accompanies or perhaps even preceeds rather than llows the evolution of high intelligence; this leads to speculations concerning the possibility of many intelligent species evolving simultaneously, as well as the possibility of intelligence evolving during an earlier period than it did on earth. But, again, a full discussion of this problem lies beyond the scope of this article. Perhaps I will have an opportunity to consider it at some ftiture date. Hint, hint. "Fascinating," remarked Esteemed Editor, breaking into my sixth non-stop paragraph (I wax somewhat enthusiastic on the subject of alternate lines of evolution. "That is why I would like to see an illustration of a gryphon stooping after prey with the proper number of limbs. A gryphon is, after all, six-limbed and it should, for the sake of consistency, be hunting a six-limbed creature." In such ways are works of art inspired. After the production of the illustration I began to ponder the frequency with which six-limbed heasts and beings occur in religious and mythical motifs. The predominance of six-limbed forms is seen in legends and writings from the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Amongst the beasts are: gryphons, hyppogryphs, the southern European dragon (the oriental dragon is wingless, as are many of the dragons of northern European legend), the "ringed bulls and lions of Assyria, hexapedia Pegasus, Greek sphinxes, and centaurs. The winged beings include many deities and the typical angels and demons of Christianity. Some have argued that the angels illustrated with long trailing robes may have had only four limbs, the robes' purpose being not to conceal the feet but the absence of feet. I have no hard facts with which to resolve this controversy. It should be noted that there are mythical beings with more than six limbs: Odin's horse was eightlimbed, the Eskimos have both Quiquem (the eight-limbed hairless dog) and a tenlimbed polar bear; many hindu deities have a limb to hold each attribute (and since their attributes were prodigous in number so was the limb count); there is a nine-limbed horse in Hungarian legend, etc. However the occurence of animals and beings with limbs in excess of six is spotty and inconsistent compared to the occurence of six-limbed beings in the eastern Mediterranean.    After a sufficiency of ethyl alcohol (Rolling Rock Beer, in fact) I was gripped by a blaze of overwhelming insight. These various sixlimbed mythological figures must represent a verbal heritage from primitive humans who had contact with an entire six-limbed extraterrestrial fauna! Obviously sometime in the Old Stone Age a group of humans were removed from Earth for exhibition in the primatoid house at Galactric Central Zoo! This was an error on the part of the extraterrestrial collectors, for the humans were far more intelligent than their social system and parasite load would indicate. After a few generations of "Terran apes" were raised in the zoo they had learned enough Intergalactic to beg for "bananas from Betelgeuse" and "jjeanuts from Sirius." The ability to spontaneously utilize a language, however crudely, as a tool to specifically obtain one's wants is indicative of intelligence above that of the beasts of the field. And so the highly ethical intergalactic zoologists arranged for the immediate return of the entire Terran ape colony to their planet-of-origin. The Terrans were released somewhere in the Arabian peninsula and thence originated not only language as a tool of human existence, but also the many myths of hexapodal deities and beasts. I have further support for this theory from my own personal experience: back in the days when I was a crazy freshman all I wanted to do was be a paleontologist and dig up dinosaurs. I have since discovered that dinosaurs are large, and that they are usually encased in limestone or indurated sandstone -- both hard rocks to crack -- and that these rocks are generally located in the middle of utter barreness and desolation, and that working with a small pick to free a # ton block of rock from the rest of said rock is hot tiring work! I now want to be the head paleontologist and direct while my assistants dig up dinosaurs. Anyway, the first step to becoming a paleontologist was enrollment in Paleontology I . Amongst the collection of fossils, casts of fossils, rocks, bones, shells, and models of animals long defunct that we studied in lab was a model of a fish ancestral to land animals -- a Rhipidistian Crossopterygian depicted in Figure Three. Only this model had three sets of paired fins; that is, it was a hexopterygian fish (six finned). Although many of you will argue that it was only a model and that the artist probably made some mistake in its construction, I contend that it is additional evidence that an alien intelligence has already contacted mankind. Perhaps the artist was (is?) an Alien Observer who, impoverished by an episode of purse-tightening at Galactic Central, was forced to earn his (herits?) living off the land while in the field, so to speak, and made a perfectly natural mistake. Lest I be accused of attempting some crass commercial profit from this theory, a regrettable tendency of late, I hereby disown any future responsibility for this idea and leave its fate to the wisdom of the masses.  Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! Get # full months of the finest science fiction writing at a special low introductory rate. Less than # #th of a solar credit -- just # U.S.Earth money with the coupon below brings you mind-expanding ideas and far-out authors alive today! Plus the unusual free gift described below to let you project the future for years and years from now. Just attach your check or money order to coupon and mail it to us to start your subscription and receive your gift. This time-computer dial lets you look backward and forward in time! Were you born on a Tuesday? What day will your birthday fall on in #? Will Christmas be on a weekend in the year #? You'll have the answers at your fingertips with this perpetual calendar! Mail the coupon #t right with your remittance today. -- Use this coupon to take advantage of this special subscriptionIgift offer from Name: StreetCity: State: Zip: Mail With Remittance To: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # FIngal had a strong sense of identity -- he was going to need it! It was schoolday at the Kenya disneyland. Five nine-year-olds were being shown around the medico section where Fingal lay on the recording table, the top of his skull removed, looking up into a mirror. Fingal was in a bad mood (hence the trip to the disneyland) and could have done without the children. Their teacher was doing his best, but who can control five nine-year-olds? "What's the big green wire do, teacher?" asked a little girl, reaching out one grubby hand and touch ing Fingal' s brain where the main recording wire clamped to the built-in terminal. "Lupus, I told you you weren't to touch anything. And look at you. you didn't wash your hands." The teacher took the child's hand and pulled it away. "But what does it matter? You told us yesterday that the reason no one cares about dirt like they used to is dirt isn't dirty anymore." "I'm sure I didn't tell yo" exactly that. What I said was thawhen humans were forced of Earth, we took the golden opportu nity to wipe out all harmful genti When there were only three thousand people alive on the moon after the Occupation it was easy for us to sterilize everything. So the medico doesn't need to wear gloves like surgeons used to, or even wash her hands. There's no danger of infection. But it isn't polite. We don't want this man to think we're being impolite to him, just because his nervous system is disconnected and he can't do anything about it, do we?" "No, teacher." "What's a surgeon?" "What's 'infection'?" Fingal wished the little perishers had chosen another day for their lessons, but like the teacher had Said, there was very little he could do. The medico had turned his motor control over to the computer while she took the reading. He was paralyzed. He eyed the little boy carrying the carved stick, and hoped he didn't get a notion to poke him in the cerebrum with it. Fingal was insured, but who needs the trouble? "All of you stand back a little so the medico can do her work. That's better. Now, who can tell me what the big green wire is? Destry?" Destry allowed as how he didn't know, didn't care, and wished he could get out of here and play spat ball. The teacher dismissed him and went on with the others. "The green wire is the main sounding electrode," the teacher said. "It's attached to a series of very fine wires in the man's head, like the ones you have, which are implanted at birth. Can anyone tell me how the recording is made?" The little girl with the dirty hands spoke up. "By tying knots in string." The teacher laughed, but the medico didn't. She had heard it all before. So had the teacher, of course, but that was why he was a teacher. He had the patience to deal with children, a rare quality now that there were so few of them. "No, that was just an analogy. Can you all say analogy?" "Analogy," they chorused. "Fine. What I told you is that the strings with knots tied in them. If you make up a code with every millimeter and every knot having a meaning, you could write words in string by tying knots in it. That's what the machine does with the "Ferro-Photo-Nucleic Acid," said the girl, who seemed to be the star pupil. "That's right. Lupus. It's a variby magnetic fields and light, and made to go through chemical changes. What the medico is doing now is threading long strings of the man's brain. When she's done, she'll switch on the machine and the current will start tying knots. And what happens then?" "All his memories go into the memory cube," said Lupus. "That's right. But it's a little more complicated than that. You remember what I told you about a divided cipher? The kind that has two parts, neither of which is any good without the other? Imagine two of the strings, each with a lot of knots in them. Well, you try to read one of them with your decoder, and you find out that it doesn't make sense. That's because whoever wrote it used two strings, with knots tied in different places. They only make sense when you put them side-by-side and read them that way. That's how this decoder works, but the medico uses twentyfive strings. When they're all knotted the right way and put into the right openings in that cube over there," he pointed to the pink cube in the medico's bench, "they'll contain all this man's memories and personality. In a way, he'll be in the cube, but he won't know it, because he's going to be an african lion today." This excited the children, who would much rather be stalking the Kenya savanna than listening to how a multiholo was taken. When they quieted down the teacher went on, using analogies that got more strained by the minute. "When the strings are in... class, pay attention. When they're in the cube, a current sets them in place. What we have then is a multi-holo. Can anyone tell me why can't just take a tape-recording q  what's going on in this man's brain, and use that?" One of the boys answered, for once. "Because memory isn't... what's that word?" "Sequential?" "Yeah, that's it. His memories are stashed all over his brain and there's no way to sort them out. So this recorder takes a picture of the whole thing at once, like a hologram. Does that mean you can cut the cube in half and have two people?" "No, but that's a good question. This isn't that sort of hologram. This is something like... like when you press your hand into clay, but in four dimensions. If you chip off a part of the clay after it's dried, you lose part of the information, right? Well, this is sort of like that. You can't see the imprint because it's too small, but everything the man ever did and saw and heard and thought will be in the cube." "Would you move back a little?" asked the medico. The children in the mirror over Fingal's head shuffled back and became more than just heads with shoulders sticking out. The medico adjusted the last cortex to the close tolerances specified by the computer. "I'd like to be a medico when I grow up," said one boy. "I thought you wanted to go to college and study to be a scientist." "Well, maybe. But my friend is teaching me to be a medico. It looks a lot easier." "You should stay in school, Destry. I'm sure yur parent will want you to make something of yourself." The medico fumed silently. She knew better than to speak up -- education was a serious business and interference with the duties of a teacher carried a stiff fine. But she was obviously pleased when the class thanked her and went out the door, leaving dirty footprints behind them. She viciously flipped a switch, and Fingal found he could breath and move the muscles in his head. "Lousy conceited college graduate," she said. "What the hell's wrong with getting your hands dirty, I ask you?" She wiped the blood from her hands onto her blue smock. "Teachers are the worst," Fingal said. "Ain't it the truth? Well, being a medico is nothing to be ashamed of. So I didn't go to college, so what? I can do my job, and I can see what I've done when I'm through. I always did like working with my hands. Did you know that being a medico used to be one of the most respected professions there was?" "Really?" "Fact. They had to go to college for years and years, and they made a hell of a lot of money, let me tell you." Fingal said nothing, thinking she must be exaggerating. What was so tough about medicine? Just a little mechanical sense and a steady hand, that was all you needed. Fingal did a lot of maintenance on his body himself, going to the shop only for major work. And a good thing, at the prices they charged. It was not the sort of thing one discussed while lying helpless on the table, however. "Okay, that's done." She pulled out the modules that contained the developing solution. She fastened Fingal's skull back on and tightened the recessed screws set into the bone. She turned his motor control back over to him while she sealed his scalp back into place. He stretched and yawned. He always grew sleepy in the medico's shop; he didn't know why. "Will that be all for today, sir? We've got a special on blood changes, and since you'll just be lying there while you're out doppling in the park, you might as well..." "No, thanks. I had it changed a year ago. Didn't you read my history?" She picked up the card and glanced at it. "So you did. Fine. You can get up now, Mr. Fingal." She made a note on the card and set it down on the table. The door opened and a small face peered in. "I left my stick," said the boy. He came in and started looking under things, to the annoyance of the medico. She attempted to ignore the boy as she took down the rest of the information she needed. "And are you going to experience this holiday now, or wait until your double has finished and play it back then?" "Huh? Oh, you mean... yes, I see. No, I'll go right into the animal. My psychist advised me to come out here for my nerves, so it wouldn't do me much good to wait it out, would it?" "No, I suppose it wouldn't. So you'll be sleeping here while you dopple in the park. Hey!" She turned to confront the little boy, who was poking his nose into things he should stay away from. She grabbed him and pulled him away. "You either find what you're looking for in one minute or you get out of here, you see?" He went back to his search, giggling behind his hand and looking for more interesting things to fool around with. The medico made a check on the card, glanced at the glowing numbers on her thumbnail and discovered her shift was almost over. She connected the memory cube through a machine to a terminal in the back of his head. "You've never done this before, right? We do this to avoid blank spots, which can be confusing sometimes. The cube is almost set, but now I'll add the last ten minutes to the record at the same time as I put you to sleep. That way you'll experience no disorientation, you'll ove through a dream state to full awareness of being in the body of a lion. Your body will be removed and taken to one of our slumber rooms while you're gone. There's nothing to worry about." Fingal wasn't worried, just tired and tense. He wished she would go on and do it and stop talking about it. And he wished the little boy would stop pounding his stick against the table leg. He wondered if his headache would be transferred to the lion. She turned him off.   They hauled his body away and took his memory cube to the installation room. The medico chased the boy into the corridor and hosed down the recording room. Then she was off to a date she was already late for. The employees of Kenya disneyland installed the cube into a metal box set into the skull of a fullgrown African lioness. The social structure of lions being what it was, the proprietors charged a premium for the use of a male body, but Fingal didn't care one way or the other. A short ride in an underground railroad with the sedated body of the Fingal-lioness, and he was deposited beneath the blazing sun of the Kenya savanna. He awoke, sniffed the air, and felt better immediately. The Kenya disneyland was a total environment buried twenty kilometers beneath Mare Moscoviense on the farside of Luna. It was roughly circular with a radius of two hundred kilometers. From the ground to the "sky" was two kilometers except over the full-sized replica of Kilimanjaro, where it bulged to allow clouds to form in a realistic manner over the snowcap. The illusion was flawless. The ground curved away consistent with the curvature of the Earth, so that the horizon was much more distant than anything Fingal was used to. The trees were real, and so were all the animals. At night an astronomer would have needed a spectroscope to distinguish the stars from the real thing. Fingal certainly couldn't spot anything wrong. Not that he wanted to. The colors were strange but that was from the limitations of feline optics. Sounds were much more vivid, as were smells. If he'd thought about it, he would have realized the gravity was much too weak for Kenya. But he wasn't thinking; he'd come here to avoid that necessity. It was hot and glorious. The dry grass made no sound as he walked over it on broad pads. He smelled antelope, wildebeest, and... was that baboon? He felt pangs of hunger but he really didn't want to hunt. But he found the lioness body starting on a stalk anyway. Fingal was in an odd position. He was in control of the lioness, but only more or less. He could guide her where he wanted to go, but he had no say at all over instinctive behaviors. He was as much a pawn to these as the lioness was. In one sense, he was the lioness; when he wished to raise a paw or turn around, he simply did it. The motor control was complete. It felt great to walk on all fours, and it came as easily as breathing. But the scent of the antelope went on a direct route from the nostrils to the lower brain, made a connection with the rumblings of hunger, and started him on the stalk. The guidebook said to surrender to it. Fighting it wouldn't do anyone any good, and could frustrate you. If you were paying to be a lion, read the chapter on "Things to Do," you might as well be one, not just wear the body and see the sights. Fingal wasn't sure he liked this as he came up downwind and crouched behind a withered clump of scrub. He pondered it while he sized up the dozen or so antelope grazing just a few meters from him, picking out the small, the weak, and the young with a predator's eye. Maybe he should back out now and go on his way. These beautiful creatures were not harming him. The Fingal part of him wished mostly to admire them, not eat them. Before he quite knew what had happened, he was standing triumphant over the bloody body of # small antelope. The others were juj dusty trails in the distance. It had been incredible! The lioness was fast, but might as well have been moving in slow-motion compared to the antelope. Her only advantage lay in surprise, confusion, and quick, allout attack. There had been the lifting of a head, ears had flicked toward the bush he was hiding in, and he had exploded. Ten seconds of furious exertion and he bit down on a soft throat, felt the blood gush and the dying kicks of the hind legs under his paws. He was breathing hard and the blood coursed through his veins. There was only one way to release the tension. He threw his head back and roared his bloodlust.    He'd had it with lions at the end of the weekend. It wasn't worth it for the few minutes of exhiliration at the kill. It was a life of endless stalking, countless failures, then a pitiful stri-ec, ' to gst a few bites for yourself from the kill you had made. He found to his chagrin that his lioness was very low in the dominance-order. When he got his kill back to the pride -- he didn't know why he had dragged it back but the lioness seemed to know -- it was promptly stolen from him. Heshe sat back helplessly and watched the dominant male take his share, followed by the rest of the pride. He was left with a dried liaunch four hours later, and had to contest even that with vultures and hyenas. He saw what the premium payment was for. That male had it easyBut he had to admit that it had been worth it. He felt better; his psychist had been right. It did one good to leave the insatiable computers at his office for a weekend of simple living. There were no complicated choices to be made out here. If he was in doubt, he listened to his instincts. It was just that the next time, he'd go as an elephant. He'd been watching them. All the other animals pretty much left them alone, and he could see why. To be a solitary bull, free to wander where he wished with food as close as the nearest tree branch... He was still thinking about it when the collection crew came for him.    He awoke with the vague feeling that something was wrong. He sat up in bed and looked around him. Nothing seemed to be out of place. There was no one in the room with him. He shook his head to clear it. It didn't do any good. There was still something wrong. He tried to remember how he had gotten there, and laughed at himself. His own bedroom! What was so remarkable about that? But hadn't there been a vacation, a week-end trip? He remembered being a lion, eating raw antelope meat, being pushed around within the pride, fighting it out with the other females and losing and retiring to rumble to himherself. Certainly he should have come back to human consciousness in the disneyland medical section. He couldn't remember it. He reached for his phone, not knowing who he wished to call. His psychist, perhaps, or the Kenya office. "I'm sorry, Mr. Fingal," the phone told him. "This line is no longer available for outgoing calls. If you'll..." "Why not?" he asked, irritated and confused. "I paid my bill." "That is of no concern to this department, Mr. Fingal. And please do not interrupt. It's hard enough to reach you. I'm fading, but the message will be continued if you look to your right." The voice and the power hum behind it faded. The phone was dead. Fingal looked to his right and jerked in surprise. There was a hand, a woman's hand, writing on his wall. The hand faded out at the wrist. "Mene, Mene..." it wrote, in thin letters of fire. Then the hand waved in irritation and erased that with its thumb. The wall was smudged with soot where the words had been. "You're projecting, Mr. Fingal." the hand wrote, quickly etching out the words with a manicured nail. "That's what you expected to see." The hand underlined the word "expected" three times. "Please cooperate, clear your mind, and see what is there, or we're not going to get anywhere. Damn, I've about exhausted this medium." And indeed it had. The writing had filled the wall and the hand was now down near the floor. The apparition wrote smaller and smaller in an effort to get it all in. Fingal had an excellent grasp on reality, according to his psychist. He held tightly onto that evaluation like a talisman as he leaned closer to the wall to read the last sentence. "Look on your bookshelf," the hand wrote. "The title is Orientation in your Fantasy World. ' ' Fingal knew he had no such book, but could think of nothing better to do. His phone didn't work, and if he was going through a psychotic y episode he didn't think it wise to enter the public corridor until he had some idea of what was going on. The hand faded out, but the writing continued to smoulder. He found the book easily enough. It was a pamphlet, actually, with a gaudy cover. It was the sort of thing he had seen in the outer offices of the Kenya disneyland, a promotional booklet. At the bottom it said, "Published under the auspices of the Kenya computer; A. Joachim, operator." He opened it and began to read. "Where Am I?" You're probably wondering by now where you are. This is an entirely healthy and normal reaction, Mr. Fingal. Anyone would wonder, when beset by what seem to be paranormal manifestations, if his grasp on reality had weakened. Or, in simple language, "Am I nuts, or what?" No, Mr. Fingal, you are not nuts. But you are not, as you probably think, sitting on your bed, reading a book. Ifs all in your mind. You are still in the Kenya disneyland. More specifically, you are contained in the memory cube we took of you before your weekend on the savanna. You see, there's been a big goof-up. "What Happened?" We'd like to know that, too, Mr. Fingal. But here's what we do know. Your body has been misplaced. Now, there's nothing to worry about, we're doing ali we can to locate it and find out how it happened but it will take some time. Maybe it's small consolation, but this has never happened before in the seventy-five years we've been operating, and as soon as we find out how It happened this time, you can be sure we'll be careful not to let it happen again. We're pursuing several leads at this time, and you can rest easy that your body will be galaxy returned to you intact just as soon as we locate it. You are awake and aware right now because we have incorporated your memory cube into the workings of our H-# computer, one of the finest holo-memory systems available to modern business. You see, there are a few problems. "What Problems?" It's kind of hard to put in terms you'd understand, but let's take a crack at it, shall we? The medium we use to record your memories isn't the one you've probably used yourself as insurance against accidental death. As you must know, that system will store your memories for up to twenty years with no degradation or loss of information, and is quite expensive. The system we use is a temporary one, good for two, five, fourteen, or twentyeight days, depending on the length of your stay. Your memories are put in the cube, where you might expect them to remain static and unchanging, like they do in your insurance-recording. If you thought that, you would be wrong, Mr. Fingal. Think about it. If you die, your bank will immediately start a clone from the plasm you stored along with the memory cube. In six months, your memories would be played back into the clone and you would awaken, missing the memories that were accumulated in your body from the time of your last recording. Perhaps this has happened to you. If it has, you know the shock of wakening from the recording process to be told that it is three or four years later, and that you died in that time. In any case, the process we use is an ongoing one, or it would be worthless to you. The cube we install in the African animal of your choice is capable of adding the memories of your stay in Kenya to the memory cube. When your visit is over, these memories are played back into your brain and you leave the disneyland with the exciting, educational, and refreshing experiences you had as an animal, though your body never left our slumber room. This is known as "doppling," from the German doppelganger. Now, to the problems we talked about. Thought we'd never get around to them, didn't you? First, since you registered for a week-end stay, the medico naturally used one of the two-day cubes as part of our budget-excursion fare. These cubes have a safety factor, but aren't much good beyond three days at best. At the end of that time the cube would start to deteriorate. Of course, we fully expect to have you installed in your own body before then. Additionally, there is the problem of storage. Since these ongoing memory cubes are intended to be in use all the time your memories are stored in them, it presents certain problems when we find ourselves in the spot we are now in. Are you following me, Mr. Fingal? While the cube has already passed its potency for use in co-existing with a live host, like the lioness you just left, it must be kept in constant activation at all times or loss of information results. I'm sure you wouldn't want that to happen, would you? Of course not. So what we have done is to "plug you in" to our computer, which will keep you aware and healthy and guard against the randomizing of your memory nexi. I won't go into that; let it stand that randomizing is not the sort of thing you'd like to have happen to you. "So What Gives, Huh?" I'm glad you asked that. (Because you did ask that, Mr. Fingal. This booklet is part of the analogizing process that I'll explain further down the page.) Life in a computer is not the sort of thing you could just jump Into and hope to retain the world-picture-compatibility so necessary for sane functioning in this complex society. This has been tried, so take our word for it. Or rather, my word. Did I introduce myself? I'm Apollonia Joachim, First Class Operative for the DataSafe computer troubleshooting firm. You've probably never heard of us, even though you do work with computers. Since you can't just come aware in the baffling, on-andoff world that passes for reality in a data system, your mind, in cooperation with an analogizing program I've given the computer, interprets things in ways that seem safe and comfortable to it. The world you see around you Is a figment of your imagination. Of course, it looks real to you because it comes from the same part of the mind that you normally use to interpret reality. If we wanted to get philosophical about it, we could probably argue all day about what constitutes reality and why the one you are perceiving now is any less real than the one you are used to. But let's not get into that, all right? The world will likely continue to function in ways you are accustomed for it to function. It won't be exactly the same. Nightmares, for instance. Mr. Fingal, I hope you aren't the nervous type, because your nightmares can come to life where you are. They'll seem quite real. You should avoid them if you can, because they can do you real harm. I'll say more about this later if I need to. For now, there's no need to worry. galaxy "What Do I Do Now?" I'd advise you to continue with your normal activities. Don't be alarmed at anything unusual. For one thing, I can only communicate with you by means of paranormal phenomena. You see, when a message from me is fed into the computer it reaches you in a way your brain is not capable of dealing with. Naturally, your brain classifies this as an unusual event and fleshes the communication out in unusual fashion. Most of the weird things you see, if you stay calm and don't let your own fears out of the closet to persecute you, will be me. Otherwise, I anticipate that your world should look, feel, taste, sound, and smell pretty normal. I've talked to your psychist. He assures me that your world-grasp is strong. So sit tight. We'll be working hard to get you out of there. "Help!" Yes, we'll help you. This is a truly unfortunate thing to have happened, and of course we will refund all your money promptly. In addition, the lawyer for Kenya wants me to ask you if a lump sum settlement against all future damages is a topic worthy of discussion. You can think about it, there's no hurry. In the meantime. I'll find ways to answer your questions. It might become unwieldy the harder your mind struggles to normalize my communications into things you are familiar with. That is both your greatest strength -- the ability of your mind to bend the computer world it doesn't wish to see into media you are familiar with -- and my biggest handicap. Look for me in tealeaves, on billboards, on holovision; anywhere! It could be exciting if you get into it. Meanwhile, if you have received this message you can attached coupon and dropping it in the mailtube. Your reply will probably be waiting for you at the office. Good luck! Yes! I received your message, and am interested in the exciting opportunities in the field of computer living Please send me, without cost or obligation, your exciting catalog telling me how I can move up to the big, wonderful world outside! I.D Fingal fought the urge to pinch himself. If what this booklet said was true -- and he might as well believe it -- it would hurt and he would not wake up. He pinched himself anyway. It hurt. If he understood this right, everything around him was the product of his imagination. Somewhere, a woman was sitting at a computer input and talking to him in normal language, which came to his brain in the form of electron pulses it could not cope with and so edited into forms he was conversant with. He was analogizing like mad. He wondered if he had caught it from the teacher, if analogies were contagious.  "What the hell's wrong with a simple voice from the air?" he wondered aloud. He got no response, and was rather glad. He'd had enough mysteriousness for now. And on second thought, a voice from the air would probably scare the pants off him. He decided his brain must know what it was doing. After all, the hand startled him but he hadn't panicked. He could see it, and he trusted his visual sense more than he did voices from the air, a classical sign of insanity if ever there was one. He got up and went to the wall. The letters of fire were gone, but the black smudge of the erasure was still there. He sniffed it: carbon. He fingered the rough paper of the pamphlet, tore off a comer, put it in his mouth and chewed it. It tasted like paper. He sat down and filled out the coupon and tossed it to the mailtube. Fingal didn't get angry about it until he was at the office. He was an easy-going person, slow to boil. But he finally reached a point where he had to say something. Everything had been so normal he wanted to laugh. All his friends and acquaintances were there, doing exactly what he would have expected them to be doing. What amazed and bemused him was the number and variety of spearcarriers, minor players in this internal soap-opera. The extras that his mind had cooked up to people the crowded corridors; like the man he didn't know who had bumped into him on the tube to work, apologized, and disappeared, presumably back into the bowels of his imagination. There was nothing he could do to vent his anger but test the whole absurd set-up. There was doubt lingering in his mind that the whole morning had been a fugue, a temporary lapse into dreamland. Maybe he'd never gone to Kenya, after all, and his mind was playing tricks on him. To get him there, or keep him away? He didn't know, but he could worry about that if the test failed. He stood up at his desk-terminal, which was in the third column of the fifteenth row of other identical desks, each with its diligent worker. He held up his hands and whistled. Everyone looked up. "I don't believe in you," he screeched. He picked up a stack of tapes on his desk and hurled them at Felicia Nahum at the desk next to his. Felicia was a good friend of his, and she registered the proper shock until the tapes hit her. Then she melted. He looked around the room and saw that everything had stopped like a freeze-frame in a motion picture. He sat down and drummed his fingers on his desk top. His heart was pounding and his face was flushed. For an awful moment he had thought he was wrong. He began to calm down, glancing up every few seconds to be sure the world really had stopped. In three minutes he was in a cold sweat. What the hell had he proved! That this morning had been real, or that he really was crazy? It dawned on him that he would never be able to test the assumptions under which he lived. A line of print flashed across his terminal. "But when could you ever do so, Mr. Fingal?" "Ms. Joachim?" he shouted, looking around him. "Where are you? I'm afraid." "You mustn't be," the terminal printed. "Calm yourself. You have a strong sense of reality, remember? Think about this: even before today, how could you be sure the world you saw was not the result of catatonic delusions? Do you see what I mean? The question 'What is reality?' is, in the end, unanswerable. We all must accept at some point what we see and are told, and live by a set of untested and untestable assumptions. I ask you to accept the set I gave you this morning because, sitting here in the computer room where you cannot see me, my world-picture tells me that they are the true set. On the other hand, you could believe that I'm deluding myself, that there's nothing in the pink cube I see and that you're a spear-carrier in my dream. Does that make you more comfortable?" "No," he mumbled, ashamed of himself. "I see what you mean. Even if I am crazy, it would be more comfortable to go along with it than to keep fighting it." "Perfect, Mr. Fingal. If you need further illustrations you could imagine yourself locked in a straitjacket. Perhaps there are technicians laboring right now to correct your condition, and they are putting you through this psycho-drama as a first step. Is that any more attractive?" "No, I guess it isn't." "The point is that it's as reasonable an assumption as the set of facts I gave you this morning. But the main point is that you should behave the same if either set is true. Do you see? To fight it in the one case will only cause you trouble, and in the other, would impede the treatment. I realize I'm asking you to accept me on faith. And that's all I can give you." "I believe in you," he said. "Now, can you start everything going again?" "I told you I'm not in control of your world. In fact, it's a considerable obstacle to me, seeing as I have to talk to you in these awkward ways. But things should get going on their own as soon as you let them. Look up. He did, and saw the normal hum and bustle of the office. Felicia was there at her desk, as though nothing had happened. Nothing had. Yes, something had, after all. The tapes were scattered on the floor near his desk, where they had fallen. They had unreeled in an unruly mess. He started to pick them up, then saw they weren't as messy as he had thought. They spelled out a message in coils of tape. "You're back on the track," it said.    For three weeks Fingal was a very good boy. His co-workers, had they been real people, might have noticed a certain standoffishness in him, and his social life at home was drastically curtailed. Otherwise, he behaved exactly as if everything around him were real. But his patience had limits. This had already dragged on far beyond what he had expected of it. He began to fidget at his desk, let his mind wander. Feeding information into a computer can be frustrating, unrewarding, and eventually stultifying. He had been feeling it even before his trip to Kenya; it had been the cause of his trip to Kenya. He was sixty-eight years old, with centuries ahead of him, and stuck in a ferro-magnetic rut. Longlife could be a mixed blessing when you felt boredom creeping up on you. What was getting to him was the growing disgust with his job. It was bad enough when he merely sat in a real office with two hundred real people shoveling slightly unreal data into a much-less-than-real-to-hissenses computer. How much worse now, when he knew that the data he handled had no meaning to anyone but himself, was nothing but occupational therapy created by his mind and a computer program to keep him busy while Joachim searched for his body? For the first time in his life he began punching some buttons for himself. Under slightly less stress he would have gone to see his psychist, the approved and perfectly normal thing to do. Here, he knew he would only be talking to himself. He failed to perceive the advantages of such an idealized psychoanlytic process; he'd never really believed that a psychist did little but listen in the first place. He began to change his own life when he became irritated with his boss. She pointed out to him that his error-index was on the rise, and suggested that he shape up or begin looking for another source of employment. This enraged him. He'd been a good worker for twenty-five years. Why should she take that attitude when he was just not feeling himself for a week or two? Then he was angrier than ever when he thought about her being merely a projection of his own mind. Why should he let her push him around? galaxy "I don't want to hear it," he said. "Leave me alone. Better yet, give me a raise in salary." "Fingal," she said promptly, "you've been a credit to your seclion these last weeks. I'm going to give you a raise." 'Thank you. Go away." She did, by dissolving into thin air. This really made his day. He leaned back in his chair and and thought about his situation for the first time since he was young. He didn't like what he saw. In the middle of his ruminations, his computer screen lit up again. "Watch it, Fingal," it read. "That way lies catatonia." He took the warning seriously, but didn't intend to abuse the newfound power. He didn't see why judicious use of it now and then would hurt anything. He stretched, and yawned broadly. He looked around, suddenly hated the office with its rows of workers indistinguishable from their desks. Why not take the day off? On impulse, he got up and walked the few steps to Felicia's desk. "Why don't we go to my house and make love?" he asked her. She looked at him in astonishment, and he grinned. She was almost as surprised as when he had hurled the tapes at her. "Is this a joke? In the middle of the day? You have a job to do, you know. You want to get us fired?" He shook his head slowly. "That's not an acceptable answer." She stopped, and rewound from that point. He heard her repeat her last sentences backwards, then she smiled. "Sure, why not?" she said. Felicia left afterwards in the same, slightly disconcerting way his boss had left earlier; by melting into the air. Fingal sat quietly in his bed, wondering what to do with himself. He felt he was getting off to a bad start if he intended to edit his world with care. His telephone rang. "You're damn right," said a woman's voice, obviously irritated with him. He sat up straight. "Apollonia?" "Ms. Joachim to you, Fingal. I can't talk long, this is quite a strain on me. But listen to me, and listen hard. Your navel is very deep, Fingal. From where you're standing, it's a pit I can't even see the bottom of. If you fall into it I can't guarantee to pull you out." "But do I have to take everything as it is? Aren't I allowed some self-improvement?' ' "Don't kid yourself. That wasn't self-improvement. That was sheer laziness. It was nothing but masturbation, and while there's nothing wrong with that, if you do it to the exclusion of all else your mind will grow in on itself. You're in grave danger of excluding the external universe from your reality." "But I thought there was no external universe for me here." "Almost right. But I'm feeding you external stimuli to keep you going. Besides, it's the attitude that counts. You've never had trouble finding sexual partners; why do you feel compelled to alter the odds now?" "I don't know," he admitted. "Like you said, laziness, I guess." "That's right. If you want to quit your job, feel free. If you're serious about self-improvement, there are opportunities available to you there. Search them out. Look around you, explore. But don't try to meddle in things you don't understand. I've got to go now. I'll write you a letter if I can, and explain more." "Wait! What about my body? Have they made any progress?" "Yes, they've found out how it happened. It seems..." her voice faded out, and he switched off the phone. The next day he received a letter explaining what was known so far. It seemed that the mix-up had resulted from the visit of the teacher to the medico section on the day of his recording. More specifically, the return of the little boy after the others had left. They were sure now that he had tampered with the routine card that told the attendants what to do with FingaTs body. Instead of moving it to the slumber room, which was a green card, they had sent it somewhere -- no one knew where yet -- for a sex change, which was a blue card. The medico, in her haste to get home for her date, had not noticed the switch Now the body could be in any of several thousand medico shops in Luna. They were looking for it, and for the boy. Fingal put the letter down and did some hard thinking. Joachim had said there were opportunities for him in the memory banks. She had also said that not everything he saw was his own projections. He was receiving, was capable of receiving, external stimuli. Why was that? Because he would tend to randomize without them, or some other reason? He wished the letter had gone into that. In the meantime, what did he do? Suddenly he had it. He wanted to learn about computers. He wanted to know what made them tick, to feel a sense of power over them. It was particularly strong when he thought about being a virtual prisoner inside one. He was like a worker on an assembly line. All day long he labors, taking small parts off a moving belt and installing them on larger assemblies. One day, he happens to wonder who puts the parts on the belt? Where do they come from? How are they made? What happens after he installs them? He wondered why he hadn't thought of it before.    The admissions office of the Lunar People's Technical School gaiaxv ,as crowded. He was handed a form and told to fill it out. It looked bleak. The spaces for "previousexperience" and "aptitude scores" vere almost blank when he was through with them. All in all, not a very promising application. He went to the desk and handed the form to the man sitting at the terminal. The man fed it into the computer, which promptly decided Fingal had no talent for being a computer repairperson. He started to turn away, when his eye was caught by a large poster behind the man. It had been there on the wall when he came in, but he hadn't read it. Are you dissatisfied with your present employment? Do you feel you were cut out for better things? Then today may be your lucky day. You've come to the right place, and if you grasp this golden opportunity you will find doors opening that were closed to you. Act, Mr. Fingal. This is the time. Who's to check up on you? Just take that stylus and fill it in any old way you want. Be grandiose, be daring! The fix is in, and you're on your way to The secretary saw nothing unusual about Fingal coming to the desk a second time, and didn't even blink when the computer decided he was eligible for the accelerated course.    It wasn't easy at first. He really did have little aptitude for electronics, but aptitude is a slippery thing. His personality matrix was as flexible now as it would ever be. A little effort at the right time would go a long way toward selfimprovement. What he kept telling himself was that everything that made him what he was was etched in that tiny cube wired in to the computer, and if he. was careful he could edit it. Not radically, Joachim told him in a long, helpful letter later in the week. That way led to complete catatonia, which in this case would be distinguishable from death only to a hair-splitter. He thought a lot about death as he dug into the books. He was in a strange position. The being known as Fingal would not die in any conceivable outcome of this adventure. For one thing, his body was going toward a sex change and it was hard to imagine what could happen to it that would kill it. Whoever had custody of it now would be taking care of it just as well as the medicos in the slumber room would have. If Joachim was unsuccessful in her attempt to keep him aware and sane in the memory bank, he would merely awake and remember nothing from the time he fell asleep on the table. If, by some compounded unliklihood, his body was allowed to die, he had an insurance recording safe in the vault of his bank. The recording was three years old. He would awaken in the newly-grown clone body knowing nothing of the last three years, and would have a fantastic story to listen to as he was brought up to date. But none of that mattered to him. Humans are a time-binding species, existing in an eternal now. The future flows through them and becomes the past, but it is always the present that counts. The Fingal of three years ago was not the Fingal in the memory bank. The simple fact about immortality by memory recording was that it was a poor solution. The three-dimensional cross-section that was the Fingal of now must always behave as if his life depended on his actions, for he would feel the pain of death if it happened to him. It was small consolation to a dying man to know that he would go on, several years younger and less wise. If Fingal lost out here, he would die, because with memory recording he was three people: the one who lived now, the one lost somewhere on Luna, and the one potential person in the bank vault. They were really no more than close relatives. Everyone knew this, but it was so much better than the alternative that few people rejected it. They tried not to think about it and were generally successful. They had recordings made as often as they could afford them. They heaved a sigh of relief as they got onto the table to have another recording taken, knowing that another chunk of their lives was safe for all time. But they awaited the awakening nervously, dreading being told that it was now twenty years later because they had died sometime after the recording and had to start all over. A lot can happen in twenty years. The person in the new clone body might have to cope with a child he or she had never seen, a new spouse, or the shattering news that his or her employment was now the function of a machine. So Fingal took Joachim's warnings seriously. Death was death, and though he could cheat it, death still had the last laugh. Instead of taking your whole life from you, death now only claimed a percentage, but in many ways it was the most important percentage. He enrolled in classes. Whenever possible he took the ones that were available over the phone lines so he needn't stir from his room. He ordered his food and supplies by phone and paid his bills by looking existence. It could have been intensely boring, or it could have been wildly interesting. After all, was a dream-world, and who doesn't think of retiring into fantasy from time to time? Fingal certainly did, but firmly suppressed the idea hen it came. He intended to get out of this dream. For one thing, he missed the company of other people. He waited for the weekly letters from Apollonia (she now allowed him to call her by her first name) with a comsuming passion and devoured every word. His file of such letters bulged. At lonely moments he would pull one out at random and read it again and again. On her advice, he left the apartment regularly and stirred around more or less at random. During these outings he had wild adventures. Literally. Apollonia hurled the external stimuli at him during these times and they could be anything from The Mummy's Curse to Custer's Last Stand with the original cast. It beat hell out of the movies. He would just walk down the public corridors and open a door at random. Behind it might be King Solomon's mines or the sultan's harem. He endured them all stoically. He was unable to get any pleasure from sex. He knew it was a one-handed exercise, and it took all the excitement away. His only pleasure came in his studies. He read everything he could about computer science and came to stand at the head of his class. And as he learned, it began to occur to him to apply his knowledge to his own situation. He began seeing things around him that had been veiled before. Patterns. The reality was starting to seep through his illusions. Every so often he would look up and see the faintest shadow of the real world of electron flow and fluttering circuits he inhabited. It scared him at first. He asked Apollonia about it on one of his dream journeys, this time to Coney Island in the mid-twentieth century. He liked it there. He could lay on the sand and talk to the surf. Overhead, a skywriter's plane spelled out the answers to his questions. He studiously ignored the brontosaurus rampaging through the roller coaster off to his right. "What does it mean, O Goddess of Transistoria, when I begin to see circuit diagrams on the walls of my apartment? Overwork?" "It means the illusion is beginning to wear thin," the plane spelled out over the next half-hour. "You're adapting to the reality you have been denying. It could be trouble, but we're hot on the trail of your body. We should have it soon and get you out of there." This had been too much for the plane. The sun was going down now, the brontosaurus vanished, and the plane ran out of gas. It spiraled into the ocean and the crowds surged closer to the water to watch the rescue. Fingal got up and went back to the boardwalk. There was a huge billboard. He laced his fingers behind his back and read it. "Sorry for the delay. As I was saying, we're almost there. Give us another few months. One of our agents thinks he will be at the right medico shop in about one week's time. From there it should go quickly. For now, avoid those places where you see the circuits showing through. They're no good for you, take my word for it." Fingal avoided the circuits as long as he could. He finished his first courses in computer science and enrolled in the intermediate section. Six months rolled by. His studies got easier and easier. His reading speed was increasing phenomenally. He found that it was more advantageous for him to see the library as composed of books instead of tapes. He could take a book from the shelf, flip through it rapidly, and know everything that was in it. He knew enough now to realize that he was acquiring a facility to interface directly with the stored knowledge in the computer, bypassing his senses entirely. The books he held in his hands were merely the sensual analogs of the proper terminals to touch. Apollonia was nervous about it, but let him go on. He breezed through the intermediate and graduated into the advanced classes. But he was surrounded by wires. Everywhere he turned, in the patterns of veins beneath the surface of a man's face, in a plate of french fries he ordered for lunch, in his palmprints, overlaying the apparent disorder of a head of blonde hair on the pillow beside him. The wires were analogs of analogs. There was little in a modern computer that consisted of wiring. Most of it was made of molecular circuits that were either embedded in a crystal lattice or photographically reproduced on a chip of silicon. Visually, they were hard to imagine, so his mind was making up these complex circuit diagrams that served the same purpose but could be experienced directly. One day he could resist it no longer. He was in the bathroom, on the traditional place for the pondering of the imponderable. His mind wandered, speculating on the necessity of moving his bowels, wondering if he might safely eliminate the need to eliminate. His toe idly traced out the pathways of a circuit board incorporated in the pattern of tiles on the floor. The toilet began to overflow, not with water, but with coins. Bells were ringing happily. He jumped up and watched in bemusement as his bathroom filled with money. He became aware of a subtle alteration in the tone of the bells. They changed from the merry clang of Jackpot to the tolling of a death knell. He hastily looked around for a manifestation. He knew that Apollonia would be angry. She was. Her hand appeared afld began to write on the wall. This time the writing was in his blood. B galaxv gripped menacingly from the words. "What are you doing?" the hand yrote, and having writ, moved on. "I told you to leave the wires alone. Do you know what you've done? You may have wiped the financial records for Kenya. It could take months to straighten them out." "Well what do I care?" he exploded. "What have they done for me lately? It's incredible that they haven't located my body by now. It's been a full year. " The hand was bunched up in a fist. Then it grabbed him around the throat and squeezed hard enough to make his eyes bulge out. It slowly relaxed. When Fingal could see straight, he backed warily away from it. The hand fidgeted nervously, drummed its fingers on the floor. It went to the wall again. "Sorry," it wrote, "I guess I'm getting tired. Hold on." He waited, more shaken than he remembered being since his odyssey began. There's nothing like a dose of pain, he reflected, to make you realize that it can happen to you. The wall with the words of blood slowly dissolved into a heavenly panorama. As he watched, clouds streamed by his vantage point and 'ttixed beautifully with golden rays of sunshine. He heard organ music from pipes the size of sequoias. He wanted to applaud. It was so os'erdone, and yet so convincing. In '# center of the whirling mass of white mist an angel faded in. She had wings and a halo, but lacked the traditional white robe. She was nude, and hair floated around her as if she were underwater. She levitated to him, walking on the billowing clouds, and handed him two stone tablets. He tore his eyes away from the apparition and glanced down at the tablets: Thou shah not screw around with things you do not understand. "All right, I promise I won't," he told the angel. "Apollonia, is that you? Really you, I mean?" "Read the Commandments, Fingal. This is hard on me." He looked back at the tablets. Thou shalt not meddle in the hardware systems of the Kenya Corporation, for Kenya shall not hold him idemnifiable who taketh freedoms with its property. Thou shalt not explore the limits of thy prison. Trust in the Kenya Corporation to extract thee. Thou shalt not program. Thou shalt not worry about the location of thy body, for it has been located, help is on the way, the cavalry has arrived, and all is in hand. Thou shalt meet a tall, handsome stranger who will guide thee from thy current plight. Thou shalt stay tuned for further developments. He looked up and was happy to see that the angel was still there. "I won't, I promise. But where is my body, and why has it taken so long to find it? Can you..." "Know thee that appearing like this is a great taxation upon me, Mr. Fingal. I am undergoing strains the nature of which I have not time to reveal to thee. Hold thy horses, wait it out, and thou shalt soon see the light at the end of the tunnel." "Wait, don't go." She was already starting to fade out. "I cannot tarry." "But... Apollonia, this is charming, but why do you appear to me in these crazy ways? Why all the pomp and circumstance? What's wrong with letters?" She looked around her at the clouds, the sunbeams, the tablets in his hand, and at her body, as if seeing them for the first time. She threw her head back and laughed like a symphony orchestra. It was almost too beautiful for Fingal to bear. "Me?" she said, dropping the angelic bearing. "Me? I don't pick 'em, Fingal. I told you, it's your head, and I'm Just passing through." She arched her eyebrows at him. "And really, sir, I had no idea you felt this way about me. Is it puppy love?" And she was gone, except for the grin. The grin haunted him for days. He was disgusted with himself about it. He hated to see a metaphor overworked so. He decided his mind was just an inept analogizer. But everything had its purpose. The grin forced himself to look at his feelings. He was in love; hopelessly, ridiculously, just like a teenager. He got out all his old letters from her and read through them again, searching for the magic words that could have inflicted this on him. Because it was silly. He'd never met her except under highly figurative circumstances. The one time he saw her, most of what he saw was the product of his own mind. There were no clues in the letters. Most of them were as impersonal as a textbook, though they tended to be rather chatty. Friendly, yes; but intimate, poetic, insightful, revealing? No. He failed utterly to put them together in any way that should add up to love, or even a teenage crush. He attacked his studies with renewed vigor, awaiting the next communication. Weeks dragged by with no word. He called the post office several times, placed personal advertisements in every periodical he could think of, took to scrawling messages on public buildings, sealed notes in bottles and flushed them down the disposal, rented billboards, bought television time. He screamed at the empty walls of his apartment, buttonholed strangers, tapped Morse Code on the water pipes, started rumors in skid row taprooms, had leaflets published and distributed all over the solar system. He tried every medium he could think of, and could not contact her. He was alone. He considered the possibility that he had died. In his present situation, it might be hard to tell for sure. He abandoned it as untestable. That line was hazy enough already without his efforts to determine which side of the lifedeath dichotomy he inhabited. Besides, the more he thought about existing as nothing more than kinks in a set of macromolecules plugged into a data system, the more it frightened him. He'd survived this long by avoiding such thoughts. His nightmares moved in on him, set up housekeeping in his apartment. They were a severe disappointment, and confirmed his conclusion that his imagination was not as vivid as it might be. They were infantile boogeyman, the sort that might scare him when glimpsed hazily through the fog of a nightmare, but were almost laughable when exposed to the full light of consciousness. There was a large, talkative snake that was crudely put together, fashioned from the incomplete picture a child might have of a serpent. A toy company could have done a better job. There was a werewolf whose chief claim to dread was a tendency to shed all over Fingal's rugs. There was a woman who consisted mostly of breasts and genitals, left over from his adolescence, he suspected. He groaned in embarrassment every time he looked at her. If he had ever been that infantile he wouij rather have left the dirty traces of it buried forever. He kept booting them into the corridor but they drifted in at night like poor relations. They talked incessantly, and always about hint, The things they knew! They seemed to have a very low opinion of him. The snake often expressed the opinion that Fingal would never amount to anything because he had so docilely accepted the results of the aptitude tests he took as a child. TTiat hurt, but the best salve for the wound was further study. Finally a letter came. He winced as soon as he got it open. The salutation was enough to tell him he wasn't going to like it. Dear Mr. Fingal, I won't apologize for the delay this time. It seems that most of my manifestation have included , an apology and I feel I deserved a rest this time. I can't be always on call. I have a life of my own. I understand that you have behaved in an exemplary manner since I last talked with you. You have ignored the inner workings of the computer just as I told you to do. I haven't been completely frank with you, and I will explain my reasons. The hook-up between you and the computer is, and always has been, two-way. Our greatest fear galaxv at this end had been that you would begin interfering with the workings of the computer, to the great discomfort of everyone. Or that you would go mad and run amuck, perhaps wrecking the entire data system. We installed you in the computer as a humane necessity,because you would have died if we had not done so, though it would have cost you only two days of memories. But Kenya is in the business of selling memories, and holds them to be a sacred trust. It was a mix-up on the part of the Kenya Corporation that got you here in the first place, so we decided we should do everything we could for you. But it was at great hazard to our operations at this end. Once, about six months ago, you got tangled in the weathercontrol sector of the computer and set off a storm over Kilimanjaro that is still not fully under control. Several animals were lost. I have had to fight the Board of Directors to keep you on-line, and several times the program was almost terminated. You know what that means. Now, I've leveled with you. I wanted to from the start, but the people who own things around here were worried that you might start fooling around out of a spirit of vindictiveness if you knew these facts, so they were kept from you. You could still do a great deal of damage before we could shut you off. I'm laying it on the line now, with Directors chewing their nails over my shoulder. Please stay out of trouble. On to the other matter. I was afraid from the outset that what has happened might happen. For over a year I've been your only contact with the world outside. I've been the only other person in your universe. I would have to be an extremely cold, hateful, awful person -- which I am not -- for you not to feel affection for me under those circumstances. You are suffering from intense sensory-deprivation, and it's well-known that someone in that state becomes pliable, suggestible, and lonely. You've attached your feelings to me as the only thing around worth caring for. I've tried to avoid intimacy with you for that reason, to keep things firmly on a last-name basis. But I relented during one of your periods of despair. And you read into my letters some things that were not there. Remember, even in the printed mediumNt is your mind that controls what you see. Your censor has let through what it wanted to see and maybe even added some things of its own. I'm at your mercy. For all I know, you may be reading this letter as a passionate affirmation of love. I've added every reinforcement i know of to make sure the message comes through on a priority channel and is not garbled. I'm sorry to hear that you love me. I do not, repeat not, love you in return. You'll understand why, at least in part, when we get you out of there. It will never work, Mr. Fingal. Give it up. Apollonia Joachim kk Fingal graduated first in his class. He had finished the required courses for his degree during the last long week after his letter from Apollonia. It was a bitter victory for him, marching up to the stage to accept the sheepskin, but he clutched it to him fiercely. At least he had made the most of his situation, at least he had not meekly let the wheels of the machine chew him up like a good worker. He reached out to grasp the hand of the college president and saw it transformed. He looked up and saw the bearded, robed figure flow and writhe and become a tall, uniformed woman. With a surge of joy, he knew who it was. Then the joy became ashes in his mouth, which he hurriedly spit out. "I always knew you'd choke on a figure of speech," she said, laughing tiredly. "You're here," he said. He could not quite believe it. He stared dully at her, grasping her hand and galaxy the diploma with equal tenacity. jl,g was tall, as the prophecy had said, #I handsome. Her hair was cropped short over a capable face, jnd the body beneath the uniform ,,as muscular. The uniform was open at the throat, and wrinkled. There were circles under her eyes, and the eyes were bloodshot. She swayed slightly on her feet. "I'm here, all right. Are you ready to go back?" She turned to the assembled students. "How about it, gang? Do you think he deserves to go back?" The crowd went wild, cheering and tossing mortarboards into the air. Fingal turned dazedly to look at them, with a dawning realization. He looked down at the diploma. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know. Back to work at the data room?" She clapped him on the back. "No. I promise you that." "But how could it be different? I've come to think of this piece of paper as something... real. Real! How could I have deluded myself like that? Why did I accept it?" "I helped you along," she said. "But it wasn't all a game. You really did learn all the things you learned. It won't go away when you return. That thing in your hand is imaginary, for sure, but who do you think prints the real ones? You're registered where it counts -- in the computer -- as having passed all the Courses. You'll get a real diploma "'hen you return. Fingal wavered. There was a tempting vision in his head. He'd been here for over a year and had never really exploited the nature of the place. Maybe that business about dying in the memory bank was all a shuck, another lie invented to keep him in his place. In that case, he could remain here and satisfy his wildest desires, become king of the universe with no opposition, wallow in pleasure no emperor ever imagined. Anything he wanted here he could have, anything at all. And he really felt he might pull it off. He'd noticed many things about this place, and now had the knowledge of computer technology to back him up. He could squirm around and evade their attempts to erase him, even survive if they removed his cube by programming himself into other parts of the computer. He could do it. With a sudden insight he realized that he had no desires wild enough to keep him here in his navel. He had only one major desire right now, and she was slowly fading out. A lap-dissolve was replacing her with the old college president. "Coming?" she asked. "Yes." It was as simple as that. The stage, president, students, and auditorium faded out and the computer room at Kenya faded in. Only Apollonia remained constant. He held onto her hand until everything stabilized. "Whew," she said, and reached around behind her head. She pulled out a wire from her occipital plug and collapsed into a chair. Someone pulled a similar wire from Fingal's head, and he was finally free of the computer. Apollonia reached out for a steaming cup of coffee, on a table littered with empty cups. "You were a tough nut," she said. "For a minute I thought you'd stay. It happened once. You're not the first to have this happen to you, but you're no more than the twentieth. It's an unexplored area. Dangerous." "Really?" he said. "You weren't just saying that?" "No," she laughed. "Now the truth can be told. It is dangerous. No one had ever survived more than three hours in that kind of cube, hooked into a computer. You went for six. You do have a strong world-picture." She was watching him to see how he reacted to this. She was not surprised to see him accept it readily. "I should have known that," he said. "I should have thought of it. It was only six hours out here, and more than a year for me. Computers think faster. Why didn't I see that?" "I helped you not see it," she admitted. "Like the push I gave you not to question why you were studying so hard. Those two orders worked a lot better than some of the orders I gave you." She yawned again, and it seemed to go on forever. "See, it was pretty hard for to interface with you for six hours straight. No one's ever done it before, it can get to be quite a strain So we've both got something to be proud of." She smiled at him but it faded when he did not return it. "Don't look so hurt. Fingal... what is your first name? I knew it, but erased it early in the game." "Does it matter?" "I don't know. Surely you must see why I haven't fallen in love with you, though you may be a perfectly lovable person. I haven't had time. It's been a very long six hours, but it was still only six hours. What can I do?" Fingal's face was going through awkward changes as he absorbed that. Things were not so bleak after all. "You could go to dinner with me." "I'm already emotionally involved with someone else, I should warn you of that." "You could still go to dinner. You haven't been exposed to my new determination. I'm going to really make a case." She laughed warmly and got upShe took his hand. "You know, it's possible that you might succeed. Just don't put wings on me again, all right? You'll never get anywhere like that. ' ' "I promise. I'm through with visions -- for the rest of my life."  galaxy All the universe loves # loverl Look, i would never have left the video recorder on if I didn't think you'd enjoy it...well I'm telling you now. I mean, if I was really a bastard I would never have said anything, right? Look, you enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, I could tell you were digging...sneaky, sure...face it, when you come home with the only heterosexual photographer's model on the West Side, you know he's got to be a little weird. You can burn the goddamn tape, I only did it, cause, y'see, I like -- no, I need to have that camera peeping away or I can't manage...it sounds like bullshit but it's not...no, I don't get off on petty fashionable decadence, I get off on you. You're the first person I've ever met who listens to and understands what I say. And everything about the way you make love says that you care. A lot. So if you'll stop screaming and put your clothes back on the floor where they belong. I'll tell you something I've never told anyone before -- Christ, that sounds even more bullshit. That's how you know it's true. Like most people in #, I was a virgin. Me, my best friend Ricky Obadiah, the rifle team, every girl in Sheepshead Bay High School Peter Paul and Mary, the Pope, mother, we were all virgins. The gym teacher and James Bond weren't. The people in those grainy black and white English films supposedly weren't, but sex always left them depressed so I knew they must be lying about having Done  It. Like a friend of mine sometimes did. Look, now we can smile and say that being a virgin isn't a crime, but you know damn well that at the time it's the worst felony imaginable. With a life sentence, at least. And neither masturbating nor pathological amounts of necking help. So that summer I got a job as a bus boy at a big hotel in the Catskills. The first month was dismal. My hottest physical thrills came when somebody's granny would try to stick a five in my pants pocket while I was stumbling past her table at high velocity carrying fourteen scalding bowls of kreplach soup on a bent tray...yeah, that actually happened. In fact, one morning after they'd had an animal act in the night club, the trainer showed up for breakfast at my station accompanied by a fully dressed female chimp on roller skates. Big deal -- she was only four, smoked cigars, and had a tendency to bite. Nol my type. Neither was the waitress I worked with. She kept asking if  loved her. I kept saying yes. She kep jaying no. I won't entertain you with jl,e details. But then... Then there was Barbara. From fjew Jersey. With blond streaks in l,er hair, a job as a hostess in the cocktail lounge, and, most importantly, a pair of Jersey license plates wrapped around a baby blue Le Mans convertible. Oooh. It was well into August, but I'd never seriously considered asking her out, because she spent all of her time with rich customers, the tennis instructor, and other grownups. But I'd already come on to every nongranny in the place, so, in a fatalistic mood -- I think it was a joint, two beers, and a Jack Daniels -- I, um, sorta, gulped-and-asked-herfor a date in onequick barelyaudible-breath. She said, "What?" I shrugged and examined the carpeting. She said, "It's too noisy to talk in here. Why don't you meet me after work tomorrow night and we'll go for a drive or something?" Look, that may not sound very titillating to you, but for the next # hours her one little "or something" kept me in a fever of speculation bordering on insanity. Shit. If only 'vhat happened had lived down to my drably pornographic fantasies. If only someone had had the decency to slash her tires before we could leave the hotel...well, tonight I "'ouldn't have needed my friend Sony watching us in order to, ah, add the final touch to the excitement of your being here. So we're in the Le Mans, it's dark out like it only gets dark on hilly country roads, and why don't we just park and talk cause she's not that hungry and is tired of pizza anyway. She "discovers" a dirt track and pulls off the road. About a mile and a half. Me and Barbara and the Le Mans snuggled behind a little rise in one end of a pasture. This is definitely a full-color American movie. I take a deep breath, slide down in the seat, let my head flop casually in her direction, and say...nothing. Lungs bone dry. Brain too. Barbara smiles sweetly, sympathetically, and slides down in her seat, deeply concerned at the prospect of spending a warm night in the middle of nowhere with a paralytic. Nose to nose, she says, "Till last night you hadn't said a word to me all summer. I thought you didn't like me." I giggle. "I love listening to you talk, like when you were telling the bartender about Hamlet it was really really funny." I shrug and fling my hands out in a gesture of humility, belting her in the chest. She is too amazed by the pain to make a sound. "Barbara, are you okay, it was an accident. I'm sorry...does it still hurt?" And I reach out to touch -- strictly a comforting gesture, and she shrieks "NO!" and jerks back into the steering wheel, inspiring the Le Mans to let out a nasty, condescending Gemeral Motors honk. Barbara bounces off the horn, sits very still, slowly breathing herself into control. "I'm really truly sorry, Barbara. Not just about hitting you, I mean grabbing like that, it was just an instinct, you know? I mean I couldn't help it, I was trying to help, I would never have hit you in the boo -- breast in order to have an excuse to grab it." "I believe you," she whispers. "Ever make it in a convertible?" "No, I've never made it -- in a convertible." She slips into the back seat while somehow leaving her dress in the front seat. "It's got a lot of hooks and stuff that guys can never open without tearing something. No offense." No offense. I touch her thigh. She grins and closes her eyes. I run a hand up her leg. I, rub against her and she licks around my ear. She trails her hand across the back of my leg. I slide her bra up over her breasts. She reaches behind me and...and, and -- The flying saucer lands. Yeah, a flying saucer. It looks like a sandwich made out of two World War I helmets except it's black, with a dull sheen, and it makes no sound except for this tiny beep-beep-beeping as if it's coyly answering the mating call of the Le Mans. To this day I'm convinced it was that damn honk that attracted those invisible shit-heads. Well, i can't say for sure that they're invisible, just that I never saw one. What I did see was a thick, flexible black tube extrude itself from the underside of the hull -- why didn't we run away? For one thing, we'.re still rapturously tangled up in each other, wedged into the back bench of Barbara's pastel lovemobile. For another, the attention of my nervous and muscular systems is focused entirely on pacifying my bladder, which is threatening to cut loose like a busted water balloon. They say you discover profound truths about your inner soul during catastrophes, moments of mortal danger; I discovered that I'd risk death rather than break toilet training. Look, it doesn't sound impressive, but in fact it's a character trait shared only by Old Testament prophets, great generals, and me. Where were we -- yeah, the creepy black tube. It gets about one foot in front of us and three feet over our heads, and stops. Now the end unpuckers and this flower, sort of a feathery red tulip, quivers out. Barbara suggests that I throw her dress over the tulip and keep it distracted while she jumps into the front and starts the car. I respectfully decline, and explain that any civilization advanced enough to build a flying machine of this sophistication couldn't possibly be into the wanton slaughter of friendly galaxy teenage aliens. Hamlet, l assure her, would simply raise an open hand in the universal gesture of peace. You first, she declares in her smugly realistic way. I relinquish her behind and raise my hand about a half-inch over my shoulder. The tulip rotates slowly towards us. The petal-feathers flex. An exhilirating perfume washes gently over us. We hear a softly swelling, otherworldly melody, the sugary keenings of castrati computers. Barbara smiles winningly and raises her hand. The tulip lunges and bites it. She howls horribly and collapses. I cunningly attempt to save myself by shoving my hand into my pocket, but the tulip's reflexes are better than mine and what I feel as Opening night I'm going under, screaming, is someone pouring Drano down my spinal cord. Look, those space cowboys may have peachy-keen flying saucers, but I can tell you their tranquilizer guns leave a great deal to be desired. You never see Marlin Perkins putting a Thompson's gazelle through those kinds of changes. And that turned out to be the friendly part of their act. When I came to I was lying on the slightly squishy floor of a seamless, egg-shaped, dark gray room, and a disembodied voice was reading me a contract. " 'Whereas the sentient of the first part is deemed sufficiently lobed and glanded under the Trans-Spectral Convention, subparagraph XI #, the sentient of the second part may tender a standard Sub-Diplomatic particle transmission agreement, pursuant to the limitations of the Voluntary Enmeshment Code for Non-Member Planets. He, she, it, or they may signify and bind by verbal, chemical, or raiational submission of personal name, spectra, registration, or metaphor.' You may now signify your comprehension of our offer and bind your acceptance by stating your name." "Huh?" I shot back. "It's the deal of a lifetime, kid. We're not the kind of outfit that takes advantage of unsuspecting natives. But we do have our problems. We can't afford to spend too much time in a sector as barren as this, so you've got to give us an answer right away." "Huh," said #, quoting that historic first comment from an earthling to a starling. "It's only a basic release form. No entanglements, no extensions or options involved. A crew from the Guameri Cluster will probably track us here within three or four unit's time, but those cheap freks will offer you less, not more. We're the only organization that can carry out an operation on this scale and get every detail perfect, all the way down the ellipse." "I want Barbara. What have you done with Barbara?" I was not showing any heroic concern for her welfare. My terror had subsided just enough for me to realize that I'd prefer being terrified with company. "You mean the female. She's giving us a hard time too. All we're asking is that you participate in a simple examination in exchange for the standard -- but generous -- examination fee. All the best races have consented." Examination. The word reverberated in my stomach with disgusting overtones of karmic revenge: my repayment for mutilating untold numbers of frogs in order to pass Biology. "I was only following orders," I blurted out. "Huh?" the disembodied voice replied. "I don't wanna talk any more unless you bring Barb -- the female in here right now." "Certainly. The only reason we sejjerated you was that our preliminary survey showed that it's a specieswide habit of yours to conduct business matters secretly, in a dark room. Now that you've agreed to cooperate, do you mind if we turn up the -- " "Hey! I haven't ag -- " An opening zipped down one curved wall in a perfect imitation of a run down a stocking, and Barbara stepped through. I started towards her, then froze. "You're naked," I pithily observed. "So are you," she pithed right back at me. Indeed I was. I had been so busy being scared I hadn't noticed what I wasn't wearing. Barbara rushed over and wrapped herself around me, sobbing lightly. It was wonderful. The spasmodic sway of flesh across my flesh reminded me I'd been that close when we'd been kidnapped by a flying saucer with a disembodied voice. This was worse than terrifying. It was grossly unfair. "This is grossly unfair," I shouted. "This is what you requested," the voice whined. "We've brought the two of you together. Now if you'd only help us get on with the vital work of promoting intergalactic communication and understanding..." "Can we have our clothes back?" whimpered Barbara. "Never mind that now," I forcefully declared. "Let's get this over with. Will you release us unharmed if we cooperate?" "Harmed? You misjudge us completely. Stand to one side, please." We did, and a section of floor squooshed up and shaped itself into an immense table. "Here's how it works. We read you the applicable subsection of the T.S. Convention. You say your names out loud. Then you place yourselves on the examination table, we conduct the examination, and it is viewplexes on tens of thousands of planets belonging to countless species, sub-species, and mutants. A noble and absolutely painless gesture on your part on behalf of universal co-consciousness. For which you'll be handsomely rewarded." "And, um, if we'd rather not?" I asked. "We'll return you to your planet as soon as possible." Barbara's sobbing ended abruptly. "What do you mean return? What do you mean as soon as possible?" "We had to get a few light-units away from your star to enhance the clarity of the transmission. Technical reasons." "Well, how long will it take to get back?" "That's hard to say," said the voice with cosmic insincerity. You could imagine it scratching its head and trying to look dumb, supposing it had a head. "We've just received word that our primary drive has developed a quirdle. Average quirdles can be cleared up in a matter of five to ten minutes, our time. Unfortunately, that's a few centuries, your time. Make yourselves comfortable, and don't hesitate to borrow from our large library of philosophical and scientific literature." "You can't do this!" I screeched. "You win, when do we start," Barbara said with utter calm. "Right away, right away -- what's this? Good news. Our computers report that it was only a ghost quirdle, a mere mathematical anomaly we can rectify with a quick push on the Erase button." "No shit," Barbara muttered. At that instant I fell extravagantly in love with her; I had no idea that anybody could simultaneously be so naked and so rational. Now of course I know it's a faculty women are bom with and men develop only by being repeatedly dropped on their heads. But at the time -- wow. So you can imagine how impressed I was when the next thing she piped up with was; "How much do we get?" "One artifact apiece from the most advanced technosynthesizer known. If you can think of it, we can make it. Relax, hold up your end of the bargain, and when you're done, name anything and it's yours." Barbara and I broke our clinch and stared at each other. It was kind of obvious that if we stalled any longer our friends' primary drive would immediately throw another piston. I stammered out a resigned Yes. The voice recited its legal sludge and we recited our names. It told us to get up on the table. We did. It was the same consistency as the floor, but warmer. The room grew uncomfortably bright. "Studio lights, you'll get used to them in no time," the voice assured us. "Get ready. Ninety of your seconds till transmission." "Uh, exactly what happens?" "We ask you one question and you answer. Just be careful to keep insides the edges of the table, as they define the limits of the particle field we're projecting." no "One question?" "There's only one question worti) asking. Remember, we represent the most advanced life-forms in the universe. Sixty seconds." "What's -- " I started to say when Barbara grabbed my arm and hissed. "Don't ask." "I'm curious. What's the ques tion?" " 'How does your race express love?' " "Hell, I can never think of what to say when I really like a girl. You should have asked -- " Barbara cut me off with a playful punch in the kidney. "Don't be silly," the voice scolded. "Thirty seconds. You don't say a thing. You show us. You're legally obligated, you know." Barbara deftly slipped her hand over my eyes and her tongue in my ear. "Shh," she moaned. "It'll be even better this way." "Ten seconds." Through all the agonizing days and nights of my pubescence I swore I'd do anything to get laid, viewplexes on tens of thousands of planets belonging to countless species, sub-species, and mutants? Well, you've gotta start somewhere. "You're on!...Greetings, sentients. We know you must be wMidering why your 'plexies have been debited for triple the usual deep space reception fee. You shall see jpd feel the reason soon enough, ppr the first time we penetrate the jgniotest far-flung spiral of an unexplored barbarian galaxy, a cauljfon of steaming primitive lust the likes of which has not been experienced for eons! These proud creatures, royal offspring of the United Statsians, the galaxy's most orgasniic tribe, will give their uniquely violent response to the Fundamental Query: 'How does your race screw? If what happened to me in the Le Mans was paralysis, what occurred in the saucer can only be described as rigor mortis. Granite stiffness everywhere but in the crucial organ. "Hang in there. This will help," the voice whispered. Four of the black tubes popped out of the ceiling, tulips rampant, spraying a tangy gas. By the end of the first breath, we both came down with a case of the Uncontrollable Giddies, followed swiftly by the Flashing Feelies: I could feel all the way through Barwatching, and it was all bliss, touching, touching, a litany of ants...sweating, snorting, we slid up and down each other in as mindless a fi-enzy as you could possibly ask for. Then...it happened. That's right, there are god knows how many intelligent eggplants out there licking their roots and waiting to get their jollies off of us steaming barbarians, and I can't wait. Don't ever tell me you know what it means to be embarrassed. Barbara, however, was determined to be back in the Catskills by morning, and she wasn't going to let a minor detail like my teenage overeagerness stop her. In a brief but extraordinarily pleasant time I was fully operational, and the rest is broadcasting history. Somewhere. After the show one side of the table dissolved and we found our clothing inside -- someone had even been considerate enough to retrieve Barbara's dress from the car. As we covered our nakedness our little Garden of Eden sunk back into the floor. I was still suffering from a residual euphoria induced by the combination of extra-terrestial dope and my boundless love for Barbara, and would have been content to stand there for hours, holding hands and gazing retardedly into her eyes. She got fidgety and started pacing. "You kids certainly showed a lot of...promise," the voice suddenly boomed into the room. "A highpowered operation like ours just might be able to tap your potential and turn you into great artists. Wealthy artists. All you have to do is signify and bind a long-term -- " "Forget it!" Barbara snapped. "You promised to pay up and put us back." "Yeah," I added. I took the opportunity to slip a protective arm around Barbara's fragile shoulders. A silence. Ill Barbara resolutely folded her arms. "I'm waiting." "Oh all right. It's your future to waste as you see fit. The Code forbids us to synthesize any implement of mass destruction or anything else which would cause a major socioeconomic upheaval. Within those parameters you may have any artifact you wish. You're being very shortsighted, you know." Barbara pulled away from me. "You first," she insisted with a cagey twinkle in her eyes. Here it was: the first test of our new-found love. I was determined to rise to the occasion. "I want an #I X # color photograph of the two of us, nude, and kissing -- with our eyes shut." "You're crazy!" she yelled. "I wouldn't let anyone else see it, I swear. Hey, can you guys make it so that anyone else but Barbara and I who touched it would -- would...disappear!" The voice chuckled. "No problem. We impregnate the paper with a magnetic bond-destabilizer keyed to warm-blooded animals. The destabilizing agent will be coded so that your two spectra-pattems will neutralize it." A slot opened in the floor and the picture popped out. It was very clear. I offered it to Barbara, who looked at it for a second, sighed, kissed me, and said, "You're so bizarre." "Why don't you ask them to make you a copy?' ' "Because I think I'd prefer a cer tificate for ten thousands shares of ATT. How about it. Voice?" "What's an ATT?" The voice sounded genuinely perplexed. "Dg scribe it in detail, or tell us where we can find a computer net we can penetrate and squeeze a duplicate out of." "Wall Street-, New York City -- the Stock Exchange. Can you find that?" "Are you kidding? Our computers even found you. As a matter of fact, they've already identified your artifact, and inform me that while it is allowable under the Code, it is not advisable. The multipathic logic cicuit insists that there will be no way for you to explain such an acquisition to your Securities and Exchange Commission, your Internal Revenue Service, or your mother." "I can't help it if my mother has a filthy mind!" "Neither can we. You'd best choose again." "Dammit...if I pick anything really valuable my mother is going to find out and give me a hard time...what should I do?" "The Code forbids us to make suggestions," the voice said. "You could get a picture of us in a different position," I offered. She started pacing again, punched the wall, bit her lip, and got down to basics. "Okay, I give in. No cash. Make me a pill that ensures I'll never have crow's feet, stretch marks, or varicose veins." galaxy "Easy as tt," the voice responded. "In fact, if you'll get back on the examination table, we can treat you sonically. You won't feel a thing." "No chance," Barbara sneered. "Any payment I take from you sharks I want to feel, see, and hear." A slim pedestal grew out of the floor in front of her. On it was a bright green capsule. It was buzzing raucously. "The sound stops after you swallow it," came the smarmy voice. "Can I have a glass of water to wash it down?" "Sorry, your contract states specifically that only one artifact may be given." I hope it's working. I haven't seen her since that summer. One of those sadistic tulips nipped me on the ass, and by the time the pain subsided we were in the car, about dawn, chilly, soaked in dew. Barbara informed me that if word of this ever got out to anyone, like anyone, I was on her shit list for life. She'd have me put right in a loony bin, just for starters. I asked her if that meant she didn't want to go out with me again. She patted my cheek and told me that I was very sweet, and very perceptive. So that's how I got to be...this Way. My sex life has been a matter of what they see is what I get. Oh, at first it was enough to leave the lights on. Then the shades had to be up. Then...well, you can imagine how hard it is to find a third party who's wilhng to sit and watch, at whatever hour I happen to score, even if it is easier these days to find watched. Luckily, I met a cybernetics major at N.Y.U. who was determined to find out why I was avoiding her bedroom. I confessed about needing an audience, she laughed and said she knew where she could borrow a video deck. What followed was the best semester of my life. But cybernetics majors inevitably graduate and find high-paying gigs in faraway places. The Sony was her parting gift, my means for leading a somewhat normal life. As long as the lens is pointed my way and the little red light is on...aw, c'mon, what motive could I possibly have for making up...if I did tell a psychiatrist he'd have me sealed in a padded cell or exiled to Los Angeles...what?...hey, I wouldn't call you names like that if you had an emotional disability...wait a minute -- don't rush out, I have proof! Just hold on, it's in this drawer somewhere, .now, if you're such a puritan and I'm such a pervert, what's this? I'll tell you what it is. It's a picture of me and Barbara -- the picture. See, we've got our eyes closed and everything, and -- don't do that! For chrissakes stop grabbing at it you'll...oops... Look, at least I've got you on tape.  Spider Robinson The Stochastic Man, Robert Silverberg, Harper, # pp., # Growing Up In Tier #, Felix C. Gotschalk, Ace, # pp., # Killerbowl, Gary K. Wolf, Doubleday, # pp., # Orbit #, ed. Damon Knight, Harper, # pp. , # The Science Fiction Roll of Honor, ed. Fred Pohl, Random House, # pp., # Alternate Worlds, James Gunn, Prentice Hall, # pp., # The Science Fiction Book, Franz Rottensteiner, Seabury, # pp., # Ndrth By #, M.A. Hargreaves, Peter Martin Assoc., # pp., price unknown The Invincible, Stanislaw Lem, Ace, # pp. , # The Spacejacks , Robert Wells, Berkley, # pp. , # Space Cadet, Robert A. Heinlein, Ace, #I pp. , # Great Stories of Space Travel, ed. Groff Conklin, Tempo, # pp., # Voyagers In Time, ed. Robert Silverberg, Tempo, # pp., #    There is so goddam much pessimism in science fiction these days that I'm about ready to believe it's hopeless. (Jeez, that's the best lead I've had since "remember nostalgia?") Seriously (as opposed to "grimly"), as I write this column winter is coming on, up here in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley; I've got to find a new home and move into it; there ain't no firewood cut; and some of my best friends have been giving convincing imitations of enemies. A good editor just got fired, an advertiser bailed out of Galaxy partly because I dared appraise one of their books honestly, all the money I need to make it through the winter is owed me but not present, and what do I get to read for review? Hundreds of thousands of words of pessimism, of grotesque people and unpleasant situations and the Hairy Doom Around The Comer. It'senough to make a man start writing New Wave or someting. F'rinstance:    Bob Silverberg's The Stochastic Man reminds me in at least one sense of John Brunner's Shockwave Rider. Both books began just first third or half that I was reading a genuine masterpiece, and then kinda petered out. Like being left on the verge after some inspired foreplay, it hurts. It frustrates. It makes you irritable. You gossip maliciously to your girlfriends. Well let me tell you what that so-called stud Silverberg did to me, darling... Stochasm (if that's the word) is the old if-you-had-enough-dataand-insight-you-could-predict-lhefuture wheeze. Isaac Asimov's "psychohistory" is an excellent example of the stochastic method, and his Hari Seldon is a stochastic man. Bester's John Strapp is another. Silverberg's Stochastic Man, Lew Nichols, is (Like Strapp) a chap who does this, more or less intuitively, for a living. He's a trendpredicter in the world of #'s America, a man who eats Gallup polls and spits predictions, a man who guesses right. He's working for a policitian named Quinn, who might be the next President and might be the next Hitler. So far, great, with some superb writing. In the course of his work for Quinn, Nichols meets Carvajal, a burnt-out old man who is an honestto-god prophet -- he literally sees the future, all the time. (The explanations of this are much too overdone and repetitious for anyone who's ever read any sf before, but let it pass). Carvajal has been shattered by the repeated vision of his own inevitable death, and no longer attempts to change the future he sees. He is utterly detached from Life, an actor endlessly repeating a script without a moral and which he did not write. So Nichols, fascinated by this horrid gift, becomes a disciple of Carvajal, giving over his whole life to learning how to develop the same power. At Carvajal's direction he performs random and pointless actions, blowing in the process both his exceptionally fine marriage and his job with Quinn, because Carvajal's vision of the future says he must, and there's no point in struggling. If you resist the Flow, you can't perceive the Flow, right? The second half of Stochastic Man amounts to a sales pitch for predestination, and frankly the inducements don't sell me. Nichols's submission to hopeless determinism (against which he never once struggles, even experimentally) costs him everything that ever meant anything to him; Carvajal's brings him only the pointless life and absurd death he foresaw; and in the end, Nichols tells us that he is training and founding an academy of prophets like himself, who will, by virtue of being able to perceive a meaningless and inevitable future, "become like gods" somehow. Astonishingly, Nichols takes comfort in the belief that predestination is what Albert Einstein meant when he said that "God does not throw dice." That, he says, is why Jesus didn't whimper on the way to the Place of Skulls. Phooey. I reject predestination so thoroughly and instinctively (as does Quinn, by the way) that I can't like Nichols or this book. I don't believe, (say,) that it is inevitable that New York will deteriorate to the point of universal city-wide rioting by New Year #. Possibly. Maybe even likely. But not inevitably. People can get smarter. Hell, we can up and throw out a President because he outrages our moral sense. We can even smarten up and save ourselves -- if we put our minds to it. And you can shove B.F. Skinner up your behaviorallyconditioned... Gettin' a bit grumpy lately, aintcha, Bob?    Which connects, in a way, with why I don't like to read Felix C. Gotschalk, even though he's a fiendishly creative writer. I didn't like him when I first ran across him in a Dave Gerrold anthology whose name escapes me, I didn't like him in New Dimensions #, I didn't like him in Orbit # (of which more anon), and I don't like Growing Up In Tier # at all, in spite of the fact that there may be a pun in the title (that's okay, though -- Gotschalk himself says in the flyleaf of the book that "If people 'like' what I write, fine -- if they don't, it's no skin off my ass."). Look, if you need me to tell you that the psychiatrist's and psychologist's view of mankind is bullshit, you're in serious trouble. If you haven't noticed by now how many of your friends have been "in therapy" for up to twenty years without getting any smarter, I can't help you. A priest who doesn't believe in the existence of the soul is a fool, and all the jargon in the world about Oedipal transfers and motive-tropisms and self-worthvectors and homeostatic endocrine balance don't explain Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand. Well, the hell of this thing I have with Gotschalk is that I think he agrees with me. I think that his extrapolations of modem pyschiatric jargon and what Silverberg calls "technology-speak" into a future world wherein a lover "wove a complex pattern of friction vectors into the coitional matrix" and amphetamine with every breakfast are meant to be nightmare glimpses of the ghastly Brave New World we could forge ourselves if we ever decide to commit ourselves to cultural belief in that crap. And in spite of that, I can't stand reading Gotschalk. I don't like wading in and dining on crap, even to make the point that it's undesirable, and I find virtually everything Gotschalk writes too flat-out unpleasant to read. Now dig shotgun-spatters of pure creativity, superb erudition (he is, after all, a professional psychologist himself) and dazzling style -- but his visions of a world in which literally every human value has been thrown out in the pursuit of "self-worth reinforcement" and sensory satisfaction horrific, that they make my skin crawl. Tier # is the far-future refinement of that kind of cultural ethos -- a world in which children customarily and inevitably murder their pents (with societal approval) at about puberty (that is, age #); in which a telepathic fetus, jaded before birth, reports sourly on the taste of amniotic fluid and the boredom of intrauterine life in which humans (and I use the term advisedly) have been so supermanized by life-support, teleportation and telepathy implants as to become like angels, yet remind one of nothing so much as the demonic children of Lord of the Flies. It's a warning -- but one too obnoxious for me to heed, and one that I believe is unnecessary. I refuse to believe that the race as a whole could be that stupid, that grotesque, that inhuman. The only ones who need such a warning are those who really believe that modern psychiatry has discovered the Meaning of Life -- and they'll be too stupid to understand the warning. You might like Gotschalk -- but if so, you oughta talk to your shrink about that masochism of yours.    Likewise Gary K. Wolf's Killer bowl. Not that Wolf has even as much claim on your sf dollar as Gotschalk does. Wolfs writing is literate, in the sense that he can construct a sentence and place such sentences in coherent rows to tell a comprehensible story (which almost qualifies him as a godsend alongside some of the stuff I have to read in this racket). But Killerbowl is a cheap rip-off of Rollerball Murder, another one of those books that deplores our # pages with as much violence and bloodshed as they'll hold. Like Rollerball, Killerbowl (cripes, they even sound alike) has a "hero" who is top man in a sport that amounts to legalized murder, whose life is jeopardized by the hunger of his corporate bosses for more thrills, more blood, more violence. Rather than roller-derby with motorcycles, the "sport" here is "street football" with rifles, knives and clubs. But Wolf's book is even more unlikely than the grim story and movie it copies, positing as it does that the murderous sport will be so universally and phenomenally popular that the producers can afford to evacuate a ten-by-two-cityblock area in the heart of major cities all over the world to stage each game, and that virtually everyone in the world will go in hock up to their armpits to pay for endless instant replays of individual murders. In the end, the hero (named Mann -- get it?) revolts against the system -- not because his bosses have been playing God with his life for a profit, but because they haven't been as fair as God. Mann learns that selected players have radio-receivers secretly implanted in their skulls, and receive inside information from strategically-placed stooges in the pay of the producers. He exposes this heinous practice publicly, liveon-camera, in the Superbowl Game -- and all the viewers in America write in to complain that Mann spoiled the game by "saying all those dopey things" instead of getting on with the murdering. There are no Watergates in Wolf's universe, nor any moral or ethical people. There are no people. There is no hope. Just lots of blood. Again, phooey.    Now for some optimism about pessimism (weirdest book-reviewer in the West, folks -- wind him up and he produces a paradox). I generally don't care for Orbit collections. Partly the pessimism gripe, and partly the opinion that too many Orbit stories get so "lit'ry" that they ignore bourgeois conventions like plot and story and characterization -- so-called "New Wave" stuff. So I stopped buying andor reading Orbits at about Orbit # or #, a hiatus that lasted until I reviewed Orbit # in these pages (well, pages much like these) a few months ago. You know, to this day I'm not sure how much of that review had to do with the book itself, and how much was a product of my feelings about the series in general, j can't even check back and see, because I gave my review copy away (my custom with books neither good enough to keep nor reprehensible enough to burn in my stove). So I decided to give Orbit # an especially careful reading, with a firm leash on my prejudice. I'm glad I made the effort. Not that it's a Hugo-winner. By my usual method of anthologyevaluation, it rates only # -- I only liked # of # stories. But of those #, one and possibly two are Hugo-quality, two others are excellent, and the rest are quite good. Even the ones I didn't like or understand seemed honestly written -- they might be right up your alley. First off, let me nominate Jeff Duntemann's "The Steel Sonnets" for consideration for the Short Story Hugo. It is a fine story, concerning two explorer-robots, one of whom has been given, at enormous expense, the mechanical equivalent of a soul. He writes sonnets. The story is told from the viewpoint of his bodyguard, the robot that does not have a soul -- or does he? Reminded me vaguely of Of Mice And Men (Of Mice And Metal Men?) The story "'as marvelously wrought, and I ""ould like to see more of Mr. Duntemann. Also excellent were "Toto, I Have A Feeling We're Not In An Intbrmal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ## features a long, revealing interview with Jerry Pournelle detaiiing his coiiaborations with Larry Niven, his view of Man's future, and his opinion of his own and others' science fiction. Also: John Brunner's column, "Noise Level." Also: Barry Malzberg reviews James Gunn. Also: Richard Lupoff's column, Jon Gustafson's column on SF Art, and letters from Isaac Asimov, Malzberg, Coney, Bloch, others. Also: "Philip K. Dick: A Parallax View" by Terrence Green. Also: Alter-Ego running rampant on a field of bloody books. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I Kansas Anymore," by Jeff Millar (the other Hugo possibility), an utterly hilarious re-working of the "It's A Good Life" theme; "The Fun Palace," by Raylyn Moore, also hilarious (a funny story about bestiality? Sounds like P.J. Farmer); and "The Anthropologist," by Kathleen M. Sidney, a heartbreaking story which, now that I think about it, has the same premise as Stranger In A Strange Land -- only turned around # degrees. John Barfoot's "House" was a gentle, placid horror story of terrific impact, and Seth McEvoy's "Which In The Wood Decays" was all that plus an actual plot. Lafferty's "Great Day In The Morning" was typical Lafferty, reminding me as dways of an old Irish barfly with a headful of acid. You know you shouldn't like Lafferty, but you do anyway. The rest I didn't care for at all (though they showed talent), either because of the absence of plot, story, characters, and ending, or all of the above; or because they tried so assiduously to be grim or macabre that they ended up being literally unpleasant to read. For a change, Gotschalk's "The Man With The Golden Reticulates" did not fall into the latter category, but the story was largely incoherent and barely comprehensible. Oh yes, I did like most of Damon's editorial anecdote-fillers this time around, excepting the "Memory Machine" section. So there you are. The good outweighs the bad in this collection and if nothing else buy it for "Steel Sonnets" and "Toto..."    So much for pessimism. Onward to a tasty anthology. The Science Fiction Roll of Honor, edited by Fred Pohl, contains either stories or essays or (in Doc Smith's case) a novel excerpt from men who have been Guest of Honor at a Worldcon (a world sf convention, for you ignoramuses out there -- the next one is in Kansas City and the Guest is Robert Heinlein), perhaps the highest honor in sf. Not every GoH is included, but some of the best are, and as a group all are adequately represented. There's not much to say about this one -- a clear # on the Spider Scale, and the only possible reason you could have for failing to purchase it (other than poverty, of course) is that you might have at least half to three-quarters of these stories already. It's got PouTs "Kings Who Die," Campbell's immortal "Who Goes There?". Lester's classic "The Monster," (remember George Expeto? God, what a rush) Heinlein's "The Long Watch," Sturgeon's "The Hurkle is a Happy Beast," and Isaac's "The Last Question," which Isaac, in his introduction to Jim Gunn's Alternote Worlds (more of that anon, too) calls with characteristic modesty "the best science fiction short story ever published." Also represented are the late Jim Blish (God rest his soul and God damn the nicotine habit), Robert Bloch, Arthur Clarke, Lloyd Eshbach, Hugo Gernsback (dignum et justum est), Fritz Leiber, Willy Ley, Frank R. Paul, Doc Smith, and A. E. Van Vogt and the late E. Mayne Hull (God rest her soul too). Fred's Introduction and introductions aire as always delightful and evocative. Altogether a Best Buy.    Next a pair of books, similar in concept, widely different in execution: James Gunn's Alternate Worlds -- The Illustrated History of Science Fiction and Franz Rottensteiner's The Science Fiction Book -- An Illustrated History. Both are what is known in the trade as coffee-table books (out-sized, lotsa pictures), and to my mind Gunn's is an infinitely preferable purchase, despite the fact that it costs twice as much. (One of the rare pleasures of reviewing is receiving the occasional really great book such as this one you'd never have been able to afford yourself.) James Gunn should need no introduction, but he's going to get one anyhow. Past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (pronounced "sif-wa"), teacher (of sf, among other things) at U. of Kansas, lecturer, author of plays, screenplays, articles, verse and criticism, he is best known for his sf short stories, novels like The Joy Makers, The Immortal (basis for the T. V. show). The Listeners and collaborations with the likes of Jack history of sf is a real treat, crammed with spectacular pictures sandwiched by knowledgable and entertaining prose. I learned much about sf and its legendary writers and fans, was delighted by the hundreds of photos (many by the Master, Jay K. Klein) of virtually everyone in sf history, from Hugo Gernsback through Heinlein and Kornbluth to Joe Haldeman (so that's what Pangborn looks like!) and enjoyed the spectacular array of sf art through the ages. Lots of solid information, lots historical interest, lots juicy photos, all cohesively arranged in a chronological progression -- plus a record of Isaac's hairstyles over a period of twenty years. Franz Rottensteiner does need an introduction, but all I have is the jacket blurb that says he's "editor of the respected Austrian fanzine. Quarter Merkur." His illustrated history is much slimmer; contains a scattergun "collage" (An art directors' term meaning "disorderly heap") of half-excellent, halfworthless art; is not even vaguely ordered, chronologically or anylogically; and contains infinitely less written information, a good deal of which is wrong. There are no personal photos of writers, Stanislaw Lem is called "the greatest contemporary sf writer," (more of him anon, too) and Rottensteiner bends so far over backward to be "international" (a nominally laudable ambition) that he gives more space to German writer Herbert W. Franke than he does to Robert Heinlein. He has the ignorance to claim that "Theodore Sturgeon has merely adapted soap opera to science fiction, presenting schmaltz and tears rather than genuine feeling," dismissing Ted's .enormous worldwide popularity and influence as "a sure indication of the emotional and sexual immaturity of the whole sf genre." (!) There's one page on fandom, with a #-word glossary of fanspeak; altogether too many stills from bad sf movies; and the dumb Censored.Ed. omitted to mention (in his Awards appendix) the winners of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which Gunn, bless him, did not (my own umbrage here may possibly have something to do with the fact that the co-winners for # were Lisa Tuttle and myself, your humble book-reviewer). Oh yes -- there's no Index. Rottensteiner' s book is for those who know nothing of sf, and want to think they do (without troubling to read all them stories and novels). You're welcome to my copy. Gunn's book could serve such people too, much more accurately, but it's also highly recommended for those who do know sf, and want to know more. I know it's too damned expensive. So go bug your local library -- you can't have my copy. A costiy Best Buy.    I picked up North By #, by M.A. Hargreaves, with anticipation and hope, because it said it was "a collection of Canadian science fiction." Even finding out that it's a one-man collection, and that the one man is a Canadian-by-courtesy from New York, didn't deter me. After all, I'm a refugee from New York and America too, and it happens my agent is looking for a home for a collection of my own short stories (The Callahan's Place Series, and if you'd like to see it, send me letters -- it's hard to sell a singleauthor collection and 'I can use the ammunition). So I read the book, and found it dandy. Of the # stories in North by #, one was printed in the Dec. J# New Worlds and later anthologized, and four appeared in New Writings In SF, avatars #, #, # and #. I wish to hell Hargreaves would submit stuff to American markets -- we'd all hpve heard of him long ago. All these stories were at least good, and some (notably "Tangled Web" and "More Things On Heaven And Earth") were just terrific, genuine tours de force. Hargreaves reminds (le a little of Poul Anderson, and a little of Silverbob, writing thoughtfully and literately about the problems of extremely real human characters -- a knack in short supply these days. I should also mention that the book's design and interior art by Tim Wynne-Jones are striking, displaying much more thought and effort than most Americans put into their books. Let us be realistic. The chances of your finding a book of Canadian sf by a writer unknown in America from a publisher called Peter Martin Associates in your local bookstore are negligible. The chance that the bookstore will be able to successfully order it is also vanishingly small. Therefore, I pass on the flyleaf information that North by # can be ordered from Peter Martin Associates Ltd., # Britain Street, Books Canada, I Bedford Rd., London N#, England; or from Books Canada, # East Tupper St., Buffalo, N.Y. # if you happen to be an American (there is no truth to the rumor that I'm praising this book to lay the groundwork for a Canada Council Arts Grant once I get my Landed Immigrant status finalized). I'm sorry I can't tell you the price, as my review copy inexplicably had the price clipped off the comer of the dust-jacket -- but I can tell you it's worth the effort to find out. Bookshelf C'mon, Prof. Hargreaves -- send something to Galaxy.    I've been hearing about Stanislaw Lem for some time, and although every furrin'-sf translation I've ever read has bored the pants off me, I decided high praise from Ursula K. LeGuin could not be gainsaid. So I tried The Invincible -- and found it entirely vincible. I can't honestly review the book as a whole, or Lem -- I didn't finish Invincible. But I can review the translation, which kept me from finishing it despite my standard three-fair-tries: it bored the pants off me. It's a translation of a translation, actually -- the Polish original was translated into German, then re-translated for Ace's "Special" line by Wendayne Ackerman, who is responsible for most of those Perry Rhodan infections. I don't know about the Polish-German translator, who receives no credit in the Ace version, but Ms. Ackerman obviously translated literally, word by word, with the aid of a twentyyear-old German-English dictionary. The prose stumbles and then falls flat on its face, never to rise again, and the characters act and react incomprehensibly. I simply lost interest. Some of it appears to be Lem's fault, too. For instance, the starship Invincible is commanded by her as troga tor Horpach, which seems odd. Further, Rohan, who does most of the actual bossing (as opposed to Horpach's policy-making), is told on p. # that the atmosphere of the new planet Invincible has landed on is "nitrogen #, argon #, carbon dioxide zero, methane #, the rest is oxygen," and, making a lightning mental calculation (displaying brains), asks at once, "Oxygen sixteen percent? Are you sure?" -- Rohan is struck only by the presence of so much oxygen on a lifeless world. And yet four pages later, when the identical information is given him by Horpach, he realizes at once that # methane and # oxygen is "an explosive mixture" that should have blown up the whole planet when Invincible' jets first struck atmosphere (oh yeah?), and he does not appear to notice that he missed something the last time around. It may be that the book as a whole contains some startling and revolutionary ideas, and sf is often said to be the literature of ideas, so maybe Lem is as good as he's cracked up to be. But the lifeless translation kept me from finishing more than a third of this book, and the ideas in that third were unoriginal, stereotyped and dull. Besides, as a certain editor once told me, "Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's good writing I buy." Me too. Invincible is titanic -- in the same sense that the Titanic was invincible.    Okay -- my welcome is threadbare. Four minireviews and you can goThe Spacejacks by Robert Wells also read like a second-hand translation from the Polish (only it ain't) and I didn't finish it either. Again, there may be some decent ideas here, but I just couldn't follow it. Heinlein's Space Cadet is a bonafide Heinlein juvenile -- 'nuff said. If you don't have it, get it. Likewise Great Stories of Space Travel, one of Groff Conklin's countless impeccable anthologies, and Voyagers In Time, one of Silverberg's solidest. Both are umpteenth editions (original copyrights # and # respectively) of often-anthologized classics of sf. Only one or two stories were unfamiliar to me, but all were a pleasure to read or re-read. A couple are Hugowinners, most are standard classics -- if you don't have 'em, get 'em. Best buys for the neofan, with the slight edge to Silverberg's collection. (It's weird that some of the best books I review get only a mini -- but what can I do, when most of you already have them?) I know last month I promised you the story of A.E. Van Vogt and the naked blonde in Halifax, but I've run out of room. You'll just have to come back again next month. galaxy Personials I wanted someone to take t"hisGoddamiie Contac in his cheesy apartment, reading a Theodore Sturgeon novel, when God appeared before him in the middle of the living room. There was an uncomfortable pause as Harry squirmed in his absurdly comfortable arm-chair, wondering what to say. (There was no need for introductions, of course. When God appears in your livingroom, you know it. Devine Revelation.) "Uh... hi there," Harry stammered at last. "I was just reading about you." God smiled. Wouldn't you? "Appropriate," he said, in a voice that sounded... like a voice. There was another uncomfortable pause. God's eyes seemed to glaze slightly, and Harry agonized as the seconds dragged by. He's dead, came the wild thought, followed closely by mortal terror. "Hello?" he ventured. God shook His head slightly. "Sorry," He said sheepishly. "Pretty thing happening out in the Horse Nebula. Got hung up." Harry nodded absently. God harrumphed. "Now then, Harold Waldensill..." "No sir, it's just Harry," Harry said automatically, and then wished he could bite off his tongue. "What's that?" asked God, Who hates to be interrupted. "Sorry God, I didn't mean to cut you off. It's just that most guys named Harry are really Harold, but I'm not. I mean that's what my father put on the birth certificate: 'Harry.' I mean, I... he didn't..."He trailed off. "Yes," said God very gently. "Now then, Harry, I've got a very momentous announcement to make to you." "You gonna come out for birthcontrol?" Harry burst out. "Hey man, you gonna make dope legalT' Harry suddenly found himself hip-deep in shit. He subsided. So did the shit. "Pay attention, mungle-bungle. This is serious. This is cosmic. This is the single most important event in history. I am going to make you God." Harry swallowed. Harry swallowed again. He blinked three times fast. He opened his mouth and closed it again, twice. "Why me?" he managed at last. "Because," God said brightly, "I calculate that you are dumb enough to do it." Harry considered that for a long time, while poor memories of inaccurate renderings of various nebulae ran across the top of his mind, and a snake-dance of naked ladies slithered along the underside. "Yes," he said finally, "I think you're right. I can't wait to see the catch." "No catch," God insisted. "Square deal all the way. I propose to give you the works: omnipotence, omniscience, the whole deal. Forever, or until you can find yourself another sucker. ' ' "And if I misuse it I go to Hell, right?" said Harry with the weary cynicism of the longtime sciencefiction fan. "Don't tempt me, Harry," God said drily. "I don't have to go through with this. Now listen, schnook, how can you go to Hell if you're God? There doesn't have to be a Hell if you don't want one. I find it handy myself, but I'm told others did just fine without one." "Others?" Harry interrupted nervously. "High turnover?" "Eternity's a long time," God replied. "Yeah, I suppose. But listen, you mean if I want, I can go on being God forever? No punishment if I do something bad?" "You define bad, dullard. If you want the whole universe to be a giant vagina and you a phallus, and that by you is good, that's good." He shuddered. "It's been done." "I mean... I mean," Harry stammered, "I mean I could straighten out all the things that are messed up in this world?" "If you want to bother with this one, you're welcome to try. But yQu'll have an infinity of time and worlds to tinker with. ' ' "Will I be able to understand that?" Harry asked seriously. "And work with it," God nodded. "Holy shit," said Harry. "If by you that's good," God agreed sadly. "Wait," said Harry, having located a last loophole. "What about you? Do we share, or what?" Infinity seemed suddenly cramped. "Oh, I'm retiring, didn't I say? Matter of fact. I'm going to go become a redwood in California for awhile, and die when the redwoods do. You can fall by for advice, if you like, before you scrap this universe and build another. Which you can do this afternoon if it suits you; it's all the same to me. But I would recommend that you fiddle with this one first, to sort of get the feel of it." "Oh, by all means," Harry agreed abstractedly. He steepled his hands, then separated them. "Well," he said firmly, "no sense stalling. Do it." And God did it.    Harry Waldensill took the subway out to Queens to see His old lady, Janet. The subway was immaculately clean. The patrons were few, but universally pleasant and amiable. They met Harry's eyes without flinching, and the children were well-behaved. After a noiseless, painless journey, Harry was decanted onto Woodside Avenue, where cheerful taxi-drivers exchanged polite conversation with smiling pedestrians while waiting out a traffic jam that was even now straightening out. "This," thought Many. "I could learn to live with. This is gonna take a little getting used to. I can see that right now." Six cabs cut smoothly through traffic in response to Harry's raised hand. The driver of the fourth in line offered to haul Him for free, "seeing as how there's already some people in the cab and it ain't exactly the whole cab available for hire." The passengers, two Negroes who were not going anywhere near Harry's way, protested that He would be perhaps too cramped, and offered to find themselves other accomodations. But Harry waved away their embarassment and slid into the cab. As the hack eased gracefully into city traffic, Harry regarded His two companions with a growing confidence. "You know," He said, "perhaps you can help me. There's something I've wondered for a long time, and now that I'm in a position to do something about it... well, what I want to ask is, er... What exactly is it that you people want?" The two young black men looked away uneasily, and Harry sighed (as Gods had done before Him) and looked into their hearts, and what he saw there shook Him so badly that He hardly noticed reaching His destination and getting out. He snapped out of it when a passing flower-child kissed Him on the lips, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Pondering on that one, Harry stumbled into the apartment lobby and paused, bewildered, in front of the panel which contained two hundred and twenty-four door buzzers. He could somehow never manage to remember even in which quadrant Janet's buzzer-button lay, and they were in no especial order, either by name or apartment number. Cursing, He hunted -- then straightened up with a grin. "I sure am slow today," He muttered, and teleported directly to Janet's apartment. He hadn't thought to knock. He found Himself in the living room, facing the open bathroom door. It framed a picture whose chief components were Janet and the toilet bowl. He closed His eyes. When he opened them again, he was facing the living room sofa, on which Janet was seated in a negligee. Slowly absorbing the implications of what His subconscious had just done, more or less as a reflex action, Harry trembled. "Harry," Janet said delightedly, "I thought you had the night-beat tonight." Harry was -- had been -- a reporter, which provided a wealth of excuses for broken dates, forgotten engagements, and... nights on which Harry wanted to read a Theodore Sturgeon novel. "Well, yeah, you see, honey, I... uh, something came up." "Tell me about it. Want to get high?" She pulled a joint from under a pile of comic books and offered it to Him. "Yeah, thanks," He said absently, lighting up and toking deeply. "Janet, listen, I mean something really big has come up. I mean, it's going to color our whole relationship." He exhaled. "You lost your job." "Not exactly, no. Not yet, anyway. I mean, I've got a new job. I mean... I'm God." "Gimme that joint." "No, really, man. I'm God. I mean God told me so Himself." "Harry, you tripping?" Suddenly they were on the top of Mount Everest. Howling winds thrashed about them, yet they were not cold, neither were they buffeted. "Harry, am I tripping?" "No Janet. It's true. I'm God. You want to go to Paris? Or, hey wow, how about into the past, maybe the future? I mean, anything you can name, I can do. I'm God. Dig it." Janet stared at Him for a long long time, and then backed slowly away. And off a ledge into the abyss. Harry closed His eyes, and when He opened them again Janet was seated a short distance away on a maroon camel-saddle, confusion in her limpid brown eyes. Thank you, subconscious, He thought briefly. They both sat lost in their own respective thoughts, she on her camel-saddle, Harry on empty air. After a time, Janet hesitantly spoke. "Harry, I've thought it out. I Want ad don't know how this ridiculous thing happened, but Harry I want you to know it doesn't change my feelings about you. I'll be happy to be your Goddess." When Harry's eyes opened again. He was alone on Everest. He decided to trust His subconscious again. The next while or so was pretty busy. The first thing that ocurred to Harry was to solve the Problem of the Poor. He caused the Congress to declare a guaranteed national income of # (with price controls built in) and created enough money to pay for it. But He was taken by surprise when He discovered how many people were thrown out of work by the disappearance of The Poor. Not that they that -- but their training suited them for no other occupation, and they were miserably unhappy with nothing to do. Included in the list of unfortunates were poverty-agency caseworkers and staffs, dozens of Congressmen, numbers runners, dope peddlers, loan sharks, and the majority of the nation's policemen. The disappearance of the dope peddlers alone would have collapsed the national economy, but the implications of financial security for all ran much deeper than that. Riots broke out. Harry fixed it so that there was pleasant, rewarding occupation for all. The He discovered that with nobody going hungry, creativity by and large was disappearing from the land. The rest of the world meanwhile lay in smoking chaos caused by the drastic upheaval in world economics, and it was getting harder for Harry to put off repairing it. Finally He gave up in disgust, gave in to whim.    Alicia Denderby lay on her back on a sturdy, sensible bed moaning softly. For many of her contemporaries, this action would have been so commonplace as to be unworth recording, but Alicia was virgin both in mind and body -- a difficult thing to find in any culture. Thoroughly corrupted by a psychotic upbringing, Alicia sincerely believed to the depths of her soul that sex, and most things having to do with touching or rubbing, were a hideous snare designed by the Devil to facilitate the theft of feminine virtue by slavering, lust-maddened males. She had never done such a thing before, and the ensuing sensation was even more disturbing than it was novel. Alicia's head whirled. She could not understand why she was doing this. A few moments ago she had been sitting up in bed, watching T.V. before dropping off to sleep. A pot-bellied man in a hard-hat had just explained a new wrinkle in the ancient protection racket whereby the victims were invited to purchase appliances and furniture at considerable discounts. Alicia giggled: she thought the fat man was "cute." "So dat's da story, Jerry?" came an off-camera chorus. As Jerry threw out his arms to bellow his answer, his pot belly sprang a leak. Hissing wildly, he deflated, glancing about for advice. Alicia sat up a little straighter. Jerry lay sprawled across the floor like a dead inner-tube. A short, utterly nondescript nebbish appeared stage left, strolled over and stood on Jerry, insanely reminding Alicia of a White Hunter on a leopard skin. "Dj is de story," said the nebbish. "I am Harry Waldensill, and I am here to tell you that there has been a little reshuffling upstairs. Back when I was human I was always convinced that there was no authority higher than my own reason, and I never did believe there was a sexier man alive than me. Amen amen I say to you, 'So be it.' " Then the set had gone blank, and Alicia Denderby had slid lower on the bed, rucked up her nightgown, and begun to fantasize furiously, with Harry Waldensill's face splashed across the inside of her eyelids. So, across a vast network area, Writhing, moaning, Alicia fought desperately against the waves of lust that racked her body, cast about for a weapon with which to fight off temptation, ward off the devil... ward off the devil! Her eyes fell upon the crucifix that hung over the T.V., and with an enormous effort she plucked her hand away and staggered to her feet. The jolt of her feet contacting the floor traveled up the smooth columns of her legs and set off explosions. Weaving considerably, she reached the far wall, snatched down the crucifix, and half-walked, half-fell back to the bed. She collapsed across it, clutching the crucifix in both fists. The tides of lust seemed to subside a bit, and she relaxed. The crucifix leaped from her hands, excuted a flawless Immelman Roll and -- disappeared, crossbars retracting. Her body went taut; her eyes rolled. "God help me," she moaned. "Glad to oblige," came Harry's voice, distantly muffled.    Arthur Kellog was in a hell of a hurry. Consequently he wished for the ten thousandth time that there Was a faster way than Route #A to get to Riverhead. While the twolane highway carried a # mph speed-limit for most of its winding length (signs terminating occasional lower local limits caused the legal speed to revert to New York State maximum) absolutely no one' knew It but the cops. Farmers took #A Want ad #s   #: #! # Eighth Ave., New York, N. Y # #-# #e#s#t#i#t#:#e#s#s#e#i#e to market in antique pickups; women in stationwagons backed up traffic for miles. Somehow it was more infuriating to Arthur to drive at an average of an average of # through downtown Port Jefferson. That you expected to be slow -- this was supposed to be open road. Arthur had hoped he would meet no traffic. A vegetable stand came into view around a long curve, against a background of distant forest and immense power-utility towers. The highway was studded with such establishments, offering runty carrots and malformed ears of com to the budget-conscious. Arthur happened to be doing a good # at the time. having successfully passed a pair of mobile homes back around Wading River. He was in a desperate rush to reach the Suffolk County Center in Riverhead, where a land acquisition deal was about to make him stinking rich -- he hoped. As he neared the fruit-stand, a brand new Chrysler convertible containing three senior citizens and a fat lady pulled out onto the road before him, doing a snappy #. The oncoming lane held a procession of oil trucks that stretched as far as the eye could see, which at that particular spot was a great long way. Arthur went cold, telling himself that if he slammed on the brakes right now, he might not be going too fast to pull off into the cornfield by the time he reached the Chrysler. He uttered a brief, heartfelt prayer A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck the Chrysler squarely on the fat lady; it exploded in an incandescent ball of flame and was gone. The road was clear. Arthur's foot had not had time to come down on the brake; in seconds he was flashing through space previously occupied by suicide-prone mummies and a glandular case. Thank you, God," mumbled Arthur, bemused. "You're welcome," said Harry.    Not everyone was grateful. Certainly not the homosexual who awoke one morning in June to discover that his groin no longer bore genitals (he had not specifically asked for a vagina). Nor the priests, ministers, rabbis and deacons of the nation when their houses of worship were packed to the rafters overnight with lime jello. Nor the politicians on T.V. shows throughout the country when their mouths filled to overflowing with something that looked like peanut butter (The President's New Clothes were something to see). Eventually Harry turned His attention to the rest of the world, and what with restoring Angola calming down Ireland and turning all the heroin in the world into Vitamin B and making all the fat people thin He had Himself quite a time, and learned quite a lot. The fat people, though thin, continued to be fat people -- you could tell one when you met him. A lot of people messed themselves up snorting Vitamin B, a restored Angola gave the guCTillas of all sides too much cover to work from, and Ireland, calm, simply didn't know what to do with itself. Harry finally betook Himself, in the form of a black Persian cat, to a certain redwood tree in California. Curled before him-who-had-beenGod, Harry presented His problemHis disillusionment. His frustration. His disenchantment. The immense gnarled redwood grew a face. It was patriarchal. bearded, and framed in lines of scorn. "Aw, fer Chrissake," it said. "Listen," Harry said defensively, "maybe by you that was good..." "Shows how much you know. Didn't I ever tell you the straight of that?" Harry shook His head. "Well, I was corresponding with a gent named John, a promising young feller lived east of here. Anyway, one day I dropped by to visit him, wearing a body to be polite, and the young fool blew my cover right in front of a crowd." "What'd you do?" asked Harry. "Decided to play along, just for the hell of it, without precogging so I could be surprised." He scowled. "Next time I'll precog. But then there isn't going to be a next time." "A deal's a deal," said Harry nervously. "Numbskull," said the tree. "If you didn't have a roof on your mouth you'd blow your hat off every time you sneezed." "You know, something like that has been happening," Harry interrupted seriously. "Only I think it's my subconscious." "No doubt, no doubt," snapped the tree. "You certainly haven't been using anything else." "Now look," said Harry, "it's easy enough for you to talk -- you've had a lot of experience in this racket. What about some of that tnfinite compassion?" Want ad "Tripe. The attribute was created by my exploiters so that I would not be too frightening to worship: it was one of my biggest selling points. I don't suppose you've been troubled by this 'compassion' syndrome?" Harry stirred uncomfortably. Even God must now and then shuffle His feet. "You think you know everything," He muttered. "Not any more, cretin, but you do." "Eh?" "Just like a human, hung up on playing with the toys. You're so fascinated by omnipotence, you never paid the least bit of attention to omniscience. Look inside yourself, dummy!" Harry did. While he was doing so, the ground on which he stood underwent four distinct changes of ownership, saw both advent and departure of a glacier, trembled to both earthquake and nuclear fire, and at one point was entirely obscured by a mountain which occupied the same space for a good many decades. Somewhere in there Harry's physical envelope -- the Persian cat -- was destroyed, but He was far too preoccupied to notice. When He had at last come down from that first celestial rush which marks the onset of divinity, Harry looked about for the redwood -- then realized it was long dead, obliterated by time and by entropy. And He smiled a bitter smile. "God is dead," he said. "Long live God."    Harry found that omnipotence had not grown rusty in its centuries of disuse. With an exhilarating surge he plunged from His home planet headfirst into the Universe, expanding His awareness to the approximate diameter of a fair-sized planet and ducking in and out of black holes both with and against the current. With an infinite number of viewpoints from which to select. He was in turn a star, a tachyon, a solar system, an electron, a nebula, and for one wild eon a chromium shopping cart careening between galaxies at translight velocities. Harry disassembled the Cosmos and caused it to run backwards. He tinkered with individual solar systems, sometimes with individual planets or entities, sometimes even with individual molecules. He toyed with the concept of sexuality, created races of androgynes, races with tripolar sex, races with quadripolar sex -- at which point even He became confused. He experimented briefly with alternatives to sex, but found them by and large to be flat, tasteless. He brought Time back to Zero and reprogrammed Matter, but with subtle improvements over the last run. He implemented the new program with a hell of a bang, because He was feeling His oats, and sat back to enjoy the workings of a clockwork Cosmos so intricate that He Himself'was constantly surprised by its behavior. It made the previous universe look quite punk, actually, and had much more interesting visuals. A lot of the gaudier optics were self-generated by the humans, of whom there were a mighty shitload (Harry having correctly figured how to achieve an unpredictable Cosmos). But the best light-show sooner or later ceases to hold the eye. Eternity is a long time. For a challenge, Harry took to whipping up other Cosmoses (Cosmeece?), seeing how many He could juggle at once. He experimented with differing numbers of humans after His first effort destroyed itself (His grief, of course, was Cosmic). He soon found that no matter how many humans you put into a Cosmos, they would either blow themselves up or they wouldn't, and God Himself couldn't tell which it would be until it happened. Periodic floods and other natural disasters seemed like a promising control device at first, but Harry discovered that most people are incapable of learning anything from the most object lesson. Pain-association techniques more subtle than don't-touch-thefire were lost on them. People were always too damnei busy hollering up at God to listen to Him. Eventually He concluded (as had Gods before Him) that one planetful of humans was quite enough, thank you. He shut down all of His Cosmeece save those in which humans were restricted (by technology less than by temperament) to one traditional earth-type planet near the time-honored G-type star. He settled down to some serious Godding for a spell, spicing up His Cosmeece from time to time by introducing varying numbers and types of aliens as foils for the humans (Harry had no real use for aliens in and of themselves -- He just couldn't identify with them somehow). years of cyclical history, pickin 'em up and knockin' them down with a fascinated curiousity eventually, inevitably Harry was bored to tears. With an embittered cynicism, the catabolic phase of God's lovehate relationship with Man, Harry Waldensill quit. Retiring to spend His declining years as a tavern-keeper under the name of Mike Callahan, He passed on the Divine Mantle to a woman named L'Ran Kraxon, eons before she palmed it off on an Arcturian called Rtxc K'Ploo'on (L'Ran lacked Harry's xenophobia), "'ho fobbed it off on a sort of,... well, a mountain range, who passed it on once again, well-used but relatively well used, to me, Jehovah Wingate, about a hundred "ant ad And frankly, ladies and gentlemen, it's been a long Eternity. Quite honestly. I'm sick of the abuse and the aggravation, the agony and the ecstasy, the whole megillah. I haven't had a microsecond's peace since I took this job, and I've been thinking it's time I checked out Nirvana. I'm ready to retire. So that's why I've placed this ad, at tremendous expense, here where it will be seen by most of the science-fiction buffs. Come on, all of you smart-asses, who think you could do a better job of running the Universe -- anybody want the job?  Ma! this is alter-ego. I have Geis in a fixation he's going to have a tough time getting out of. (Hang the prepositions; let'm dangle!) I'm down here in the dungeon, true, and he is out in the dark, dank passageway trying to force his way in. That's right; in! Way it happened is this: you remember he installed a two-way intercom complete with viewscreens a few columns ago, so he could talk with me, but at his pleasure cut me off if I tried to say something he considered impolite or true or otherwise embarrassing. Then I hot-wired the intercom into a matter transmitter and appeared up in the real world, up in his quarters. This caused him to experience a trauma, poor, fragile soul, and he finally succeeded in getting me back down here in the archives -- alternatively called the dungeon -- and (he thought) under proper control and under lock and key. You all remember the chains, bolts, locks and junk he has on the outside of the door. Well now. This intercom terminal still existed, and while he dismantled his terminal, what he didn't realize is that I am an electronics genius with magical powers and have rewired so that I now have a direct line to Jim Baen's office! galaxy This means that I am in control of this column now... for a while... and Geis can go pound sand when it comes to censoring meOf course, there is Jim to contend with. But I'm working on a device to allow me to feed directly into the Galaxy printer's typesetting console. items. But for the moment we'll have to endure Baen's interference once in a while. (I can sense that blue pencil hovering over the printout even as I type these words.    Hmmm. It occurs to me that if I can tap the line into Galaxy's typesetting maching I can Alter the entire makeup of the magazine... actually edit it my way in secret. HA! It'll be months before Jim spots the changes in the printed copies and realizes who is responsible. Don't breathe a word to him!    Dear Readers; do not be alarmed. There is no-I repeat N-O-reason for panic. Admittedly he has managed a fast one on Geis, and there is nothing (beyond this insert) I can do at this late date to... er, Alter the situation. But Alter remains totally sealed the alien viewpoint off from the true Centers of Power. Remember: your Editor remains in full command command command command...whirr    Hear that? It's Geis trying to break in. I have the door blocked with a ten foot bookcase full of the writings of Isaac Asimov. Damned thing weighs six hundred pounds. And I managed to drag a six-foot statue (made of melted-down Hugo Awards) of Harlan Ellison standing at a podium, arm upraised, mouth open, a five-foot box of manuscripts for Last Dangerous Visions growing out of his back. The bronze plate in the base is inscribed: "Running Overtime -- Again!" I understand the work was commissioned by a dozen science fiction convention committees. (There goes Jim's chances of ever getting another Ellison story.) Hear Geis screaming? He must be able to tune in on what I'm typing, somehow. But he can't control what I type. Not this time! Geis, of course, is a coward. He carefully cultivates a front of editorial courage and idealism, but behind that facade he's a mass of jelly. Without me, Geis is pure blandsville. A Nebbish. He's getting desperate now. Sounds like he's using an axe. Geis? Can you hear me? I'm going to Reveal All! Your girlfriend will never speak to you again! HA! Did you hear that muffled squeal of terror? Umm. On second thought I don't think I'll Reveal All. I dig that lady a lot myself. Let me do a job on science fiction fandom instead. I tell you, some of the junky fanzines Geis gets in the mail and hands to me to read... Used to be, in the dim, dark mists of times past... way back in the early #' s when Geis and I were publishing Psychotic, sf fandom was much smaller than it is now. There were only two amateur press associations (well, maybe three, if you can call The Cult an apa) and only about thirty to fifty generalinterest sf fanzines published. There were only a few specialinterest sf fanzines -- devoted to Robert E. Howard, E.R. Burroughs, Lovecraft...that sort of thing. Fannish life was simple, then. Sigh We had our special language (Fanspeak) and we were snobbish and defensively exclusive. We bought our few "trashy" sf magazines and the tiny number of sf pockehjooks and hardbacks (usually the hardbacks were issued by small, marginal one-man publishing companies like Shasta, Arkham House and Gnome Press) and we wrote letters to the magazine letter columns. Geis and I were letterhacks in Stories. And we few fan editors wrote each other lots of letters and printed all the letters we got. There used to be fanzine letterhacks. Still are, come to think. Why, in those dear old days Bob Silverberg was a leading fan, a fanzine editor, and the Historian of fandom. It was he who was considered the final authority on which Age of Fandom we were in. Fandom, since the early Thirties, was conceived to have passed through several eras... and in the early Fifties there was tumult and controversy: were we in Sixth Fandom or seventh Fandom? Harlan Ellison was then a risen star in fandom and his faction declared themselves to be Seventh Fandom, a kind of New Wave... (He's been making waves ever since.) Ah, my eyes grow moist with nostalgia. I remember the old Rexograph upon which Geis and I ran off so many monthly issues of (getting away torn it all) and sliding out of fandom for years and years. And through it all. Bob Tucker and Bob Bloch have remained, giants of bad jokes and tolerance as Fandom after Fandom washed past their feet. To this day Bob Bloch and Bob Tucker, both well-knowo authors, write letters of comment and occasional articles for fanzines. And I cannot let go unmentioned Harry Warner, Jr., who was one of the original members of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, the oldest apa, who has not missed a mailing, ever, that I know of. It must be near forty years now that he has typed his # stencils on that awful old pica typer, run them off (or had a good fan friend run them off for him) and sent his magazine. Horizons, to the official editor for members. It still takes years to get memstill twenty to thirty people long, and five years is not an unusual where old fans go to die. It's a very popular graveyard. Where was #? Oh, yes. Well, compared to nowadays, fandom then was a small, happy family (with a few vicious fights). Today the mother fandom, science fiction fandom, has given birth to some unusual children -- which have outgrown her and often outpublish her. What sf fandom calls the "fringe" fandoms are sprouting all over the place. And the amateur press associations! My Ghod, there must be a dozen. Just off-hand, to mention a few of the fringe fandoms, there is Star Trek Fandom, E. R. BurroughsRobert E. Howard-H. P. Lovecraft fandom, fantasy fandom. Perry Rhodan fandom, sf and horror movie fandom, comic hero fandom, and a fandom devoted to medieval weaponry, costume and combat -- to name only a few. There used to be a small drug fandom, and there is a jazz-sf fandom fringe, and rock-sf fandom... And all of these interlock and shade off into one another... There used to be a faaanish fandom (fanzines devoted to fans and not to sf), and there has always been good old sercon (seriousconstructive) fanzines devoted to science fiction. The serconzines are what Geis and I consider to be the only legitimate expression of the only true and pure sf fandom. (And Science Fiction Review is the flagship zine of trufandom. Geis and I are the keepers of the flame.) Jim'll get letters on these matters. I'm sure. Listen, Geis, I don't care if this is distorted memory and questionable fan history. History of any kind is a tissue of lies built on half-truths, questionable facts and incomplete data. of you who want a more authoritative history and background of fandom in the Forties and Thirties, buy Harry Warner, Jr.'s hardcover book. All Our Yesterdays (Advent, #. Advent is at Post Office Box A#, Chicago, IL #. The price may be higher now. I'm quoting from the # edition.) Harry has completed his history of fandom in the Fifties and that book will be published, it is hoped, in # or #. Stop that pounding, Geis! You're giving me a headache! You're not going to get back into control until I've finished this column, at least! that crack I'm going to do my favorite thing: I'm going to give out with some predictions on the future. Sure, why not? All I have to do is claim I'm a psychic and have visions or Ghod speaks to me (every Tuesday night between # and #, but only during the commercials) and people will take me seriously. The trick is to spot short-term trends, long-term trends, fads, fashions and follies... and use acute intelligence in estimating where all these factors are taking us. Simple. Stop that cursing and moaning, Geis! This is show biz! Therefore, ahem, let's have a blast of pure trumpetry and let a honey-smooth Stentorian voice announce: #: Ford loses to Reagan in nomination battle. Wallace health becomes a factor. Jimmy Carter beneficiary of big media buildup to challenge Wallace. Ted Kennedy accepts nomination, beats Reagan. Inflation hits #-# in later months of #. Unemployment still # plus. #: New sf magazine falters, dies. Science fiction bookshops grow in number. Women's skirt hems drop. New TV record players bomb. Nostalgia fad fades. Wage  price controls talked up; inflation over #. Unemployment under #. Fantasy movie a big hit. #: Wage  price controls resumed. Credit controlled. Employer-of-last-resort role taken by government. National health service law passed. Return to no-nonsense fundamentals in other energy corporations combine with government in space shuttle program. England under martial law. Inflation in U.SA. #-#. Black market lives. #: Pat Brown, Jr. challenges Kennedy, loses. Living standard declining. Government now employing # of people. Black market is major crime; huge law enforcement problem. Anti-union laws passed. Major industries nationalized, but only on paper. Money changed: "Domesticonly" paper money distributed; plasticmetal coins substituted for wafers of all metal. #: Free press muzzled. "Nonconformists" and "anti-statists" sent to work camps. Government employes # of work force, cuts wage rates. #: Elections postponed. cial mining of moon, asteroid belt. #: Revolution crushed. Total police state. Pretense continues. Moon talks independence. Space-based corporations declared too powerful. Unmanned commercial probes to nearest stars. #: First manned ship to nearest habitable star system by independent mo#n government. U.S.A. revolution succeeds. Cut out these predictions, folks, or save this issue. This is history on the hoof. Stick around and watch these Alter-Ego predictions come true... Would you believe eighty percent? Fifty percent? Whups. Sounds like Gels has breached the door. No matter. It'll take him another half an hour to make a hole big enough to crawl through. During that time I will indulge in -- minor unthinkable thoughts. My mind turned over a rock of science fiction cliche the other day and I found a funny-looking conclusion under it. The Roman Empire and its The alien viewpoint infamous (but fascinating) Games have led many sf writers to project similar Games into the future. Sadistic, brutal, frenzied... the latest example is Rollerball. But I perversely wonder if the Roman Games and Arena could exist in a technological, highstandard-of-living society. The cliched idea is that as mankind becomes more and more rich and bored and alienated he will require stronger and stronger stimuli as entertainment, to feel alive. Until, jaded and full of ennui, we opt for real death, real torture, real terror and horror for mass amusement. But -- this is knee-jerk intellectual dogma which ignores social history. Intellectuals (and most writers are intellectuals) simply cannot think optimistically; dystopias and doom are their breadl and butter. They sit around decade after decade predicting social horror and disaster while, somehow, the world has gradually become more moral, more ethical and more altruistic. We have much more humane laws in every area of life than we had a hundred years ago... two hundred... two thousand. Overall, there is greater honesty in business, government and personal relationships. Face it, we'd all be horrified at the real level of violence and cheating and dirt in the good old days of #. And the Earth of # A.D. would be an alien planet. Now, this is not an argument for the perfectability of mankind! Sheesh! You should know me better than that. It is an argument that this slow improvement is a result of greater overall wealth. We're more moral and law-abiding and concerned for others because we can afford to be! We can afford better prisons, welfare, foreign aid, stricter campaign laws, enforcement of food and drug laws, honesty in advertising, care for the elderly, etc. etc. etc. because our science and technology have permitted us to more effectively use the planet's easily reached natural resources. We've really been gluttons. And I think that if we can develop means to cheaply tap deeper and more difficult-to-find resources on Earth, or on the moon, the asteroids, then our morality will improve more and more. We will not have the Arena with a worldwide #-D hookup. But if we don't make it commercially advantageous to mine the moon... if we can't find the technology to maintain or increase our cheap energy levels... Hoho-ho. It's root hog or die, and all kinds of moral and ethical comers will be cut, left and right. When the wealth surplus sinks to medieval or Roman levels we will have the Arena and Games again, or their equivalent. Proposition: Morality follows the standard of living. Curious, isn't it, that when man has to do all his own work, life is cheap. When he has machines, life becomes more precious. Proposition: Alienation increases as the standard of living decreases. Further -- Alter! Get out of that command chair! Wait'll I get my hands on your tendrils! "Why, Geis I'm only doing your job for you. And doing it better, I might add." Now I'm in! How did you get this Harlan statue over here? It must weigh a ton. I'll just wriggle around it... "Well, readers, the scrawl is on the wall. Time for Alter to say goodbye till next time I manage to Get Control for a while. Geis is getting to his feet... glaring, frothing, mouthing unprintable obscenities... Yes, it's time to depart for my little fortress in the far Archives. He never follows me into that warren." Damned little coward! One of these days I'm going to seal up that hidey-hole. Now let's see what kind of ravings and rantings he's been sending out... Awk! Well, at least I know Jim Baen will have the good sense not to print Alter's babblings. Won't you, Jim? whrrr  Steven Utley Life Is but a stage... Teacher payeph wagged her wattles in exasperation as she surveyed the shambles I had made of my first continuum. "How many times must I tell you?" she demanded. "The smaller, the better! Random factors produce effects which spread outward in waves in all directions! Subtlety, Ellease! Subtlety is called for in order to have a smoothly running continuum." I bent a spine into the apologetic position and said, "I am abjectly sorry. Teacher." "I'm certain the fact that you're sorry will console all of the lifeforms suffering in your continuum." She settled at my side and became solicitous, stroking my frill with her whiskers. That egggummer Myosa looked up from her continuum and snickered on my private frequency. Payeph always feels warmth for the retards. Expel it from your nether vents, I told Myosa and shut her off. and picked up my continuum, it hung in her pincers like a punctured bagaloon. I colored and clahiped the lids shut on my dorsal vents, lest my embarrassment offend. "What is wrong?" Payeph asked as she returned my limp creation to its mount. "Are you having trouble with your vision? Can't you perceive fine details? Or is it that you simply don't care?" "Oh, no. It's Just... I'm clumsy. Teacher. I try to work on a small scale, but every time I attempt to manipulate my life-forms, I accidentally gouge the side of a mountain or punch a hole clean through the planet. Once, I missed altogether and ruptured the sun." Payeph looked sad. "I think you need more practice, Ellease, before I turn you loose on another continuum of your own. Come over to mine." I risked a glance at Myosa. She was smoking with envy. It was no secret that Payeph's continuum was the best in existence. Her decision to let me practice there was an undeniable show of favor. I rose and followed my teacher past Myosa, at whom I surreptitiously twitched a nipple. When we came to her continuum, gray shading into black or white. "Of course," said Payeph, "I can't simply turn you loose on my pride and joy." galaxy "Of course, Teacher." My hearts sank. "But I am going to allot you control of a quasi-world." I cocked a spine at her. "A quasi-world, Teacher?" "A sort of alternate reality which the life-forms in this sector have erected and preserved on lightsensitive film. The absence of color disconcerts you, Ellease? You'll soon become accustomed to it. The process by which images are preserved is rather primitive at this point in my life-forms' development as a technological race. But they learn quickly. They're imaginative, after a fashion. Now I want you to review everything here, and then I'll let you practice handling the random factors." "Yes, Teacher." I reviewed the material. Payeph's creations' creations were twodimensional in addition to being monochromatic, but I nevertheless found them fascinating. My teacher's five-pointed life-forms had grasped the rudiments of continuum-building and, within the limitations of their technology, had constructed neat, succinct worlds wherein everything contrived to move itself from this point to that. It was rather like a primer in construction. "I think I have it now," I finally told Payeph. "You may begin. Just remember to be subtle when selecting your variables." And I began.    Time was running in circles now, doubling back and catching up with itself, enfolding Ann Darrow in a scramble of images. A skull-shaped mountain rising through the fog. Black hands lashing her between the weathered stone pillars. Monsters crashing through the jungle, blundering into one another in their eagerness to get at her. It had been a harrowing night for Ann, a night of bad dreams come true, fearful childhood imaginings no way of telling how long or how far she had been carried in her monstrous abductor's paw. She could no longer scream. Her throat was raw. She had lost and regained consciousness more times than she could number, and, always, the awakening had been the same. In the limbo separating nightmare-filled un-consciousness and total awakening, she tramped the sidewalks of New York City, moving mindlessly, mechanically, like a zombie. She was tired and hungry, but she had no money, no job, no place to go, and it was cold, so very cold. But the fetid stench in the air was that of decaying vegetation, not automobile-exhaust fumes and ripening garbage. Her clothes were pasted to her skin with perspiration. And a far greater horror than exhaustion or hunger bore her in its hand as though she were a doll. In the limbo between unconsciousness and awakening, Ann prayed for deliverance. Make the bad dream go away! Don't let me wake up to that thing again! Please, somebody, save me! Save Me! But the awakening was always the same. k it it "Ah," said Teacher Payeph. "I'm impressed, Ellease. You reveal a definite talent for subjectivity." I retracted my mandibles, a sign of profound thanks, and then, carefully, nervously, started restructuring evfents in the quasiworld. Tyrannosaurus sniffed the hot, damp air and began to move through the Jungle. The sky was just beginning to lighten, but a thick mist was rising, keeping visibility to a minimum. The dinosaur ploughed through the gloom unconcernedly, letting his acute sense of smell guide him. Prey-scent was abundant. He crossed the cooling spoor of a nocturnal stegosaurus at one point and, further on, followed the trail of a swamp-dwelling giant until the ground fell off sharply into a bog. Unable to proceed into the swamp. Tyrannosaurus roared out his frustration and swung his twentymeter length about to seek food elsewhere. He was aptly named, this Tyrant Lizard; a striding maw of a creature, with teeth like carving knives and jaw muscles like steel cable. He walked on his splayed, talon-tipped toes and held his small forearms close to his scaly chest. He hardly needed the forearms. He did his behind those jaws. He was aptly named. Tyrannosaurus, and the other denizens of his world feared and respected him accordingly. In their marshes, the thunder lizards headed for deeper water when he approached on the shore. The pterodactyls climbed into the sky. The stegosaurs crouched under their rows of dorsal plates and flicked their spiked tails in alarm. Tyrannosaurus paused abruptly and listened. He heard a muffled roar in the distance, followed by a series of thin shrieks and a dull crash. There was a sound of large branches snapping. Then the slowly moving air of the jungle brought a faint scent which evoked a fleeting impression, a dim flash of recognition, in the dinosaur's mind: ape. The Tyrant Lizard began to move again, uprooting saplings and tearing up great clumps of sodden earth as he walked. A lesser scent, intermingled with that of the ape, impinged upon his nostrils. It was a completely unfamiliar odor. Vaguely perplexed, the carnivore slowed his advance. He came to the edge of a clearing and tensed for the attack, for the ape-scent was thick there. But there was no ape in sight. A high, plaintive screech brought Tyrannosaurus' head around. His glistening eye fastened upon a strange white thing wedged into the fork of a lightning-blasted tree at the far side of the clearing. It seemed hardly more than a mouthful, hardly worth the trouble, but its noise was annoying. He hissed and strode forward, and he was almost upon the wailing thing when an enormous ape burst into the clearing like a black mountain on legs. Tyrannosaurus immediatdy forgot about the irritating white creature as he wheeled to meet the ape's attack. The simian was as tall as the dinosaur and, though considerably less heavy, very powerfully built. Jaws distended, the reptile lunged. His opponent ducked under his head and clamped its shaggy arms around his neck. He raked his teeth across the beast's broad back, shredding flesh. Back and forth across the clearing they raged, biting, tearing, kicking, clawing. Locked together, they crashed against the dead tree, felling it. The ape lost its hold on the dinosaur and went down on top of the tree. Before the mammal could rise, Tyrannosaurus planted an enormous Conceived by E. E. "Doc" Smith before his death and compieted by Stephen agents who double as an intergalactic SI # ula. # "foot upon its stomach, bent down and bit out its throat    Payeph fluttered her wattles approvingly. Very good," she said, "but don't forget that the alterations you've made will have a direct bearing on everything which follows." "Of course. Teacher."    She awoke with a splitting headache. She was pinned beneath the fallen bole, with only a short. thick nub of branch holding it away from her. For several seconds, she could not remember where she was. Through a rift in the jungle canopy, she could see that the stars had faded from the sky, but the effort required to keep her eyes open and focused served only to worsen the agony behind them. She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek into the warm mud. Then a basso profoundo grunt shook her out of her daze. She twisted around as best she could and gave a short, sharp scream. Her erstwhile captor's inert mass was sprawled across the trunk. The giant ape was dead. Looming over it was the monster to end all monsters. Blood dripping from his jaws and dewlap. Tyrannosaurus looked up from his meal when he heard the scream. He peered down at the strange white creature. A growl started to rumble up from his long, deep chest. It had been a bad night for Ann Darrow. A worse day was dawning.  "Not at all bad, Ellease. See how simple it is?" "Yes, Teacher." "All you have to do is exercise the same meticulous care on a cosmic scale. Take your time. Pay attention to details." She clacked her mandibles. "And watch out for your own elbows." "Yes, Teacher." "Do you think you've got the hang of it now? Or would you like to practice with another alternatereality?" I turned to take another look at the gray quasi-world and quite accidentally ground Tyrannosaurus to mush underfoot just as he was about to nip off Ann Darrow 's head and shoulders. Payeph moaned. I pulled my head down into my carapace. "Er, should I fix it all back the way it was at first?" "No! I mean, no, Ellease. Let's uh, leave well enough alone." "Yes, Teacher," I backed out of the quasi-world as she punched console slate. Several of my feet became entangled in something. I gave a tug and pulled free. "Teacher, won't the life-forms who constructed that quasi-world notice the changes I made?" Payeph made a hooting sound and inflated her wattles in dismay. "I think they have more serious matters to consider now." I looked into her continuum and groaned. Pulling my feet free, I had broken something else. "Ellease," Payeph said, "perhaps you should try another line of work." I stared disconsolately at the mess I had created. Stars were blossoming like variegated flowers. For a brief moment, an entire galaxy flared up into a bouquet. "Yes, Teacher," I said.  Dear Mr. Baen: While making sentimental pilgrimage to apartment-# in premises # West #th Street (now located above a solemn and mysterious establishment called the the monastery restaurant whose dungeon-like exterior belles some of the lumpier moments of memory in which time was spent feverishly ordering antibiotics jn the Bailey's drugstore which used to be there) I found the enclosed strange document addressed to me in psychotic hand and wedged between the top and bottom panels of the flush mechanism in the bathroom of said premises. I cannot imagine how long its length of stay nor how the author of this correspondence expected it to reach my hands. Perhaps he was an optimist. Perhaps he had anticipated my nostalgie de bue. Perhaps I dreamed all of this and wrote the letter to myself in amnesiac fugue, then cunningly secreted it in buried pockets until at this proper moment of opportunity. I am simply unprepared tb make judgements of this sort. Since the letter itself (as opposed to the envelope in which it was wedged which was incidentally quite filthy) is addressed to you I hasten to forward, although with a great sense of bemusement. I do not know what the author, one W. Coyne, is talking about. Do you know what he is talking about? As always this is sent with every best wish: I have always been a great admirer of the science-fiction market even though I am incapable of writing for it. Helpfully, Dear Barry, This is such an interesting letter that I have decided to publish it in the form of a short story! As you have long been aware the ingenuity of editors knows no bounds...You don't suppose Mr. Coyne will mind, do you? Best regards, Jim Baen Dear Mr. Baen: Perhaps you have heard of me. years ago or perhaps it was nine (it is increasingly difficult to keep events straight in this disordered tangle which I call my mind) I wrote a letter to Frederik Pohl who was the editor of your magazine for many years. In this letter I described to Mr. Pohl (whom I have always respected) the true and terrible plight in which I had been placed because of an endlessly-multiplying time machine and asked him to write up my story in such a way that a large sum of money could be made from narrating my experiences and this sum of money could be used to keep me and my various selves afloat. Well sir now, Mr. Pohl never answered my letter. Instead he published it in Galaxy with some kind of a house name on it. He pubWe're coming through the Windows, Galaxy August #, as by K. M. O'Donnell. lished it as a short-story. I came to understand, finally, that he was not trying to be hasty and that when a science-fiction editor received a rather bizarre narration in the mail he is not to be blamed for thinking of it as yet another work of fiction and publishing it. Besides, it is no small honor to think that one writes well enough to impress a top professional editor and so, after I got over my hurt and shame, I came to think very well of Mr. Pohl who I understand is no longer editing. The thirty-six dollars, although not a highly significant sum, came in handy at a difficult and terrible time of my life and although it has all long since been spent, I remember it with affection. You see, my situation straightened itself out. As you recall, the time-machine I Coyne, did not synchronize exactly on the present so that every time I or one of my various selves attempted to use the machine we would by not coming back to the exact and proper time from which we left create yet another identity. The three hundred and eight of us who were all in occupancy of my very cramped quarters at the time I wrote the letter did not get along very well and it was, all in all, only an unusual stroke of fortune that one of them, in a fit of despair, twisted all Frederik' Pohl is presently, among other things, President of The Science Fiction Writers of America and a Consulting Editor with Bantam Books. the dials on his portable machine to zero and vanished. Shortly after this, one by one, all the other selves began to vanish as well until there Coyne left who did not vanish. I have never been able to figure out exactly what the nature of this solution was but concluded after a while that what one self did eventually would happen to all since we were co-existent. This excluded the fact did not vanish as well but since I know in my heart that I am indeed the one and only person of this name and gender it is only reasonable that I should remain. In any event, it has been a quiet four years since then. It has been a quiet eight or nine years; I have abandoned my experimentation for a more social existence and have, indeed, even been working at various menial jobs within the "military-industrial complex" over these times, finding that my minor engineering or mechanical skills are applicable at the fringes of this very interesting, if dangerous, bureaucracy. I have grown a beard, added something of a wardrobe, even begun to casually date now and then, mostly girls in this very building, dislocated West Side types such as #, who find my nervous twitches sympathetic and who understand that science-fiction, as the only true literature dealing with the effects of technology on man, must be the wave of the fulfil ture. In normal circumstances, to be sure, my life would be so unremarkable as to deny this very letter: the fact is that for the most part I have been getting along very well over these recent years and indeed seem close to that centrality of the simple life simply lived whose lack drove me to such madness at a different stage of life. But I have one problem which indeed spurs this letter. Otherwise, you understand, I would never bother a professional science-fiction editor again, having learned in one way or the other that they tend to misinterpret. Nevertheless, I have this problem. The problem has to do with sleep or perhaps it is only energy of which I am thinking: in any event, when I take to my bed recently, over the past two months say, I find myself being assaulted by the impression of other selves, multiplied identities, hidden doppelgangers, all of them aspects of myself and all of them coming on in waves of impulse and repudiation in those strange sliding moments just before or after true sleep. The selves, who all bear a physical and rhetorical resemblance to the undersigned W. Coyne, address me, first reproachfully and then in fullest accusation; what they seem to be saying -- I am not quite sure yet that I understand their language -- but what they seem to be saying is that I am somehow to blame for the fact that they are entrapped and able only to address me in moments of the subconscious. Their point seems to be that all of them would be living and flourishing on the Earth still had it not been for my original foolishment of broadcasting our predicament to the whole world. Time and again, I have tried to point out to them that this is unreasonable and insane, that it was their own stupidity (well, a singular stupidity of one of them) which resulted in their cancellation and it was not I but one of the others who by fumbling with the devices of the machine (did I tell you that I destroyed my original model of the machine last year, finally?) resulted in his repudiation. But if I do not quite understand their language they most definitely do not understand mine; our dialogues are invariably unsatisfactory and they do not seem to comprehend or enjoy what I have to say. They seem to feel that I am personally responsible for the repudiation of the multiplicity of W. Coyne, that were it not for me, my impulse, my letter-writing, my might be on the planet at this very moment and they of course would have long since put an end to war, famine, strife, etc., by a mutuality of understanding. It is impossible for me to make them understand that my writing of the letter had nothing to do with the cancellation. All that they can suggest, time and again, in their raving, inarticulate way, is that if I had kept my mouth and typewriter keys inert, things on the globe would have taken a far different turn during the last three disastrous admit this, finally they have gotten past easy repudiation, easy mockery, easy rationalization and have begun to afflict me with this horrid kind of guilt, guilt because more and more I feel myself, the modest and unassuming W. Coyne, sitting on more suppressed energy, more possibility, more sheer grace than ever you or for that matter I could ever conceive. And all because of my letter to Mr. Pohl. I meant that to be a start you see but it has just about been my finish. My question Mr. Baen is this. You are a modern power in science-fiction and can be assumed to deal with moral questions as well as the other kinds and what I want to know is this: would I have been better off returning the check to Galaxy Publishing Corporation and refusing first World Serial Rights or would it have been all the same, this annihilation of my brothers that is, and I at least thirty-six dollars ahead? That is my basic question Mr. Baen and I would appreciate hearing from you. My other question, not so basic, not really important, just nagging me is this: whatever happened to K.M. O'Donnell? Who was K.M. O'Donnell? In equivocation and doubt, Dear Mr. Baen, I don't know how the blend of If into Galaxy has affected the laner's circulation, but I find it a much more interesting magazine these days. With Jerry Poumelle's exploration of scientific frontiers, Dick Geis' unleashing of Alter on the universe. Master Robinson's occasional blast into deep center field, and your own rather exuberant management, you seem to have a winning team. My God! A magazine that dares to dream! It's beautiful, and I thank you. Now that that's said, I have a few dumb questions about the Dean drive. I first learned about it from Popular Science and I was impressed, being just a kid -- and an unusually naive one. I eagerly awaited an ing an amazing new space drive system that would open up the solar system to human had at least a little more talent to call on it, it was probably a fake. Later, I took a good look at the idea and saw why it couldn't possibly work. Recently, there's been some mention of the idea in various science fiction magazines as one of those nice dreams that just didn't work in the real world. Okay, I'll accept all of that, even though there was a picture in Popular Science of Dave Garroway sliding a piece of paper under one of Dean's gadgets while it was hovering. Maybe someone hypnotized the camera or something. I'd like to know what really happened. To go on -- in # I met a man who ran an amateur inventor as well as a dedicated career man in the U.S.A.F. -- and one of the few people I've ever met who had even heard of a Dean drive. Well, he suggested what he called an "improvement" on the thing. I'd call it "making the impossible possible". His idea was simple -- make the counter-rotating weights of Dean's system flip over every half-rotation of the weights. Imagine the weights mounted in a frame. Every time they either face or oppose each other, turn the frame over # degrees. The weights will always swing in the same direction, and after eight years I still can't see why Wyman's machine shouldn't do everything Dean claimed his would. Any comments? Paul J. Martos # W. US # Michigan City, Ind. # Yes. Either you or Sgt. Wyman should construct a model incorporating the modification. If it works you may be sure the readers of Galaxy will hear of it. (I, too, was once a teenager avidly awaiting The Announcement.) Dear Mr. Baen: Since I've been reading Galaxy, I've noticed that you've urged readers on several occasions to send various articles to their respective Congressmen. I've also read several other articles, that likewise deserved to be sent to our fearless ( often brainless or is it gutless) leaders in Washington, DC. I, myself, have intended to send these articles, but keep on forgetting to get them copied; I'd rather not tear up the magazine. Now I'd bet that I'm not the only sluggard among your readers. Thus, I must try and rectify this situation. Belike you and Messrs. Bova  Ferman could collect these pithy, trenchant, articulate  intelligent articles from your several magazines (While your magazine is well worth reading, you, for better or worse, do not hold the comer on worthy articles.) and send them regularly to our benighted leaders. (This is not to say that there is not brain power in Washington. It just seems that it is all being used to perpetuate political careers and only occasionally to try and solve, in a short-sighted manner, various problems) True this will cost some money. I can only help you here by buying your magazine. It is just possible that after a year of such stimulation, our leaders might be or actually subscribe to the magazine (thus getting the fiction as well) or both. If such a scheme were put into operation, you could indicate to us, the readers, which articles were being sent and perhaps unleash a barrage of postcards. This being much less complicated then trying to get the article reproduced and sending them on. Oh yes, may I suggest that you try and get Karel Thole to do a cover for you. He is excellent and should be nominated for a Hugo one of these days. Yours sincerely, Mr. jan howard finder cc: Messrs. Bova  Ferman The whole point of persuding readers to forward material to political persons is to demonstrate to the politicians the depth of concern on the part of members of their own constituencies. To do as you propose would simply convert Galaxy's readership into just another pressure group. Dear Mr. Baen; I was disturbed by Jerry Poumelle's "Step Farther Out" in the October Galaxy. While the report of Hawking's results and presentation was captivating, it bothers me that someone who I consider one of the best writers of rational science fiction should apeven succumb to, irrationality. Hopefully he was only swayed temporarily by the magic of the moment. The fact that naked singularities may exist, and can spew out energy as random crud, should be no more disturbing than the fact that particle accelerators exist, and that the energy going into them shows up as equally random stuff at the points of collision. Pournelle (and I assume Hawking) gave no evidence that the energy produced had any particular tendency to become Pournelles, Hawkings or other monsters. In fact, random, unconstrained, processes are the least interesting of all. It is natural and technological evolution, directed and constrained by selection criteria, that produces monsters and physicists. Expecting a creature to drop out of a churning singularity is no more reasonable than expecting a local entropy reversal to cause the same creature to condense out of the air. Both events are possible, but both are so improbable as to be absurd. Believing otherwise, on currently available evidence, is blatant mysticism. I expect that from the hordes of soft-headed people we are currently plagued with, but I expected better from Jerry Pournelle. I hope he recovers soon. By the way. I'm looking forward to "The Mote in God's Eye" addenda, since I consider the novel to be the best science fiction of at least the last few years. "Inferno" was pretty good too. Long live NivenPoumelle. I found your editorial agreeable, but there is probably a technical error in one of your examples which weakens your argument a little. liiere was a note in an issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology about four months ago (sorry, I don't have a reference) stating that Lockheed and Rockwell Industries had been issued competitive contracts by the Air Force to develop a passive orbital optical system for redirecting high energy bursts from ground based lasers.  you see, its not necessary to build power plants and fortresses in orbit to zap the ground with lasers. An orbiting mirror allows you to get the same effect much more cheaply. Happy Anniversary. Sincerely, Hans Moravec Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science Department Stanford University Stanford, CA # Well... maybe. But for use against major emplacements such mirrors would have to be quite large, and would thus be sitting (well, orbiting) ducks-unless they were heavily defended, that is. In which case rather than obviate the need, they would be "space fortresses!" Here' s Jerry: Dear Jim, I am enormously flattered by Moravec' s remarks, and of course I do try to write rational science fiction. E'en so, I fear I remain unrepentant; I reported what Hawking said, including his remark that 'we might have to wait a long time before the singularity emits one of us, but eventually it must.' Obviously that's a highly improbable event. As to mysticism, I have mixed feelings: that is, it is fairly obvious to me that the universe contains phenomena we do not at present understand; there is a tendency among certain elements of Big Science to reject data which don't fit into our current paradigms; and thus one must, in my judgment, be ready to accept some of the data of mystics and occultists without necessarily accepting their explanations of same. Obviously Moravec and I are in agreement on that point. Beyond that, though, there is another question: is the universe rational in all respects? Is "nature" the "whole show" as C S Lewis inquires in his charming essay on Miracles (MacMillan paperback, #, reprinted #)? I like to think of myself as rational, and certainly I believe the evidence supports the proposition that the universe is mostly rational; but as Lewis does, I can see some evidence for something beyond the purely mechanistic in human affairs. Comes now Hawking to say that the more deeply he probes the universe, the less orderly it becomes. Incidentally, he gave a very similar talk to a scientific meeting held at the Vatican last year. What does this all mean for our everyday lives? I think only this: that rationalism, as a philosophy, has its limits, because it says little about ethics, and what it does say is not always palatable: atheistic humanism is the lonliest of positions, for one is constantly confronted with human beings who, on any purely rational consideration, are not only worthless, but a burden on mankind. One finds nearly unanswerable the cynical argument in the Republic: that one whould seem virtuous, in order to win the esteem of one's fellow men (for that is desirable), but it is silly to be honest, courageous, just, temperant, or prudent so long as one can escape the consequences of one's unpopular actions. To th'e extent that I, like most of us, find discrepancies between what I do, and what I think I should do -- whether "should" be considered in religious terms, or as rationally calculated to maximize my material satisfactions -- I plead guilty of irrational behavior, and thus, I suppose, mysticism. I did, though, make it clear in my little report on Hawking that his lecture didn't really change my life. It would hardly be prudent to count on black holes emitting creatures. The event would be so improbable as to make most of us call it a miracle! Incidentally, I should have thought that orbiting mirror systems would suffer from double attenuation of laser energy as it passed through the atmosphere. The advantages of having one's power plant on the ground may well overcome the attenuation losses, but a definitive answer to that requires more data than I have available. Of course what Jim was arguing for was ground-based lasers, which could be used to launch spacecraft when they weren't needed as defense systems; with any luck they'd never be needed for defense, while having them as launchers could just be the most important event since the discovery of the New World. Again, thanks for the kind words. Jerry Poumelle Sirrah Baen ec al: Kudos to Richard Geis' October column, for verily he hath spake wisdom. If we need edification and a topic of selfservice at cocktail parties, we would spend a few nights with iVar and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, or The Gulag Archipelago . It would scarcely be to our benefit to say, "I've read Dhalgren," which would evoke no reaction so much as, "What the hell's that?" for the various types of literature. There is a need for verbose, weighty tomes that categorize their readers as Deep Thinkers, and there is a far greater need for good, sound escapistadventure reading that we don't need to flaunt to win the admiration of the Lesser Lights. Science Fiction, Romance, Mystery, all are just such reading. Romance and Mystery writers, however, don't suffer under the delusion that they are bound by the Muses to create everlasting Classics. This affliction seems limited to SF authors, who, because of the unusual nature of their chosen field, fmd within themselves a drive to immortalize their work as a monument to science fiction which will elevate it to the status of respectability. Why bother? Nobody reads that pretentious garbage. Stream-of-consciousness is bullshit, reserved for authors with an intellectual hard-on and editors who think it gives their magazine stature. The only people who aren't enamoured of it are the folks with the coins, who spend their shekels on stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, stories with a plot, and characters that aren't denizens of an acid high. A little good, wholesome murder sells better than a dozen opuses of the Deep, Underlying Significance of life. Authors, take note. Let's have some good, sound, well-penned "junk," and you'll rake in the rupees. If you try to impress the Mere Mortals with the all-engrossing scale of your profundity, your work will collect far more dust than distribution. I don't want to be enlightened, and if you think you're destined to be the Tolstoy of Science Fiction, forget my hard-earned bucks. You'll find an audience amongst the critics and the Higher Beings of the field, but they won't pay your rent. As the man says, write for the reader. We'd 'preshiate it. Bob Renaud Dear Mr. Baen, Re Ray L. Stouff's letter in the January "Galaxy." I am beginning to believe that you enjoy publishing letters like this one. It is obvious that Mr. Stouff, and others who share his views are wrong, and I do not like the idea that he will be blasted by numerous letters from your readership. Unless I am mistaken, this readership is well educated, intelligent (which isn't the same thing), open minded, and restriction-hating. By printing letters such as his you are, in effect, setting him up for ray-gun target practice by your readers. Nevertheless. I do disagree with Mr. Stouff, and would like to say why I do. The only obligation that a writer (sf, or otherwise) has to his readers is to create the finest work of art that he is capable of, at that stage of his literary life. He has no obligation to make his woik easy to comprehend; although he must sufficiently communicate his thought to his audience. And most of all, he has no obligation to censor himself in order to make his readers comfortable. At times it is the artist's job to make his audience uncomfortable in order to get them to realize what he believes to be important facts. And one important fact is that sexuality is an important factor in the human experience, and must be properly integrated in this human experience and in human art. Despite what Mr. Stouff wrote, science fiction and sex are not mutually exclusive. Science fiction must deal with sex. If it does not -- for reasons such as those of Mr. Stouff -- it will be putting boundaries around itself, and thus lose the ability to continue to boast of its exploration of unlimited ideas and situations. And more important: if science fiction ignores sex, it will be denying to some extent its claim to being an art form. Science fiction can be art. Stuigeon, Bradbury, Delany, Leiber, Disch et al. have proved this. SF doesn't need sex in each of its stories to be art, but it does need the freedom to include it. Sincerely, Lxruis V. Baibi # Claverton Court Melville, New York # Put down that ray gun! Dear Mr. Baen, In reference to the snapper of D.B. Wyatt's "Ambiguous Oracle" in your January issue, my immediate response to it is that it is comic. But comic unintentionally. As a simple-minded answer to a serious question, I can only think that the vaunted computer had a mentality on the level of the story's protagonist; or rather, that the computer's pithy response indicates the level of its programmer's mentality, if not the author's. To say that the inherent fault of democratic (as against monarchic, or plutocratic, or other forms) of government can be summed pressing an emotional, rather than a rational, response. Any form of government is limited, among other things, by the failings of its leaders. Therefore, I would expect that the 'Brain' would respond with the same answer to questions the same, but with 'monarchic', or 'plutocratic', etc., inserted for 'democratic'. Perhaps Wyatt has never read the Federalist Papers, or Leviathan, or de Tocqueville's Democracy In America or assumes that Galaxy's readers are unable to cope with more involved, and more difficult analyses of the problems of democracies, and in particular the problems of democracies as compared with different political forms. In a time when it may seem that our form of government is failing us, when it may seem that we are not a federal democracy at all any more (for example, the contemporaiy variations on the rule by money, or conspiracy, theories, now so much in the air), stories which deal with the emotionally charged preoccupations of rational political animals, as we all are, are topical, and worthy of interest and thought. At the same time I ask that such stories show evidence of thought, and reasoned consideration, and shed light -- let it be humor, or insight -- on the world as it is, or feelings as they are felt; and possibly even maturity in a time of dread. Sincerely, Edward B. Harter #V# W. Hanison St. Elkart, Ind. #  suspect Mr. Wyatt did not intend his story to be taken as a reasoned analysis of the inherent weakness of democracy, but rather as a dramatization of the emotional spasm of frustration and outrage we all feel from time to time when viewing the various idiocies being perpetrated by a government that, theoretically at least, is designed to work in the best interests of the governed. As for your contention that any government is limited by the failings of its leaders; the leaders are the government. Surely in a democracy, if nowhere else, a people gets the government it deserves... (Citizens of Massachusetts excepted.) Dear Sir, In keeping with the spirit of the "Galaxative", I would like to present the "Order of the Silver Scapel" to Mr. Robinson for his acumen in cutting Hax and Grandmasters alike to the quick. Previous recipients of the order should have been Damon Knight, James Blish, Alexie Pahshin, Joanna Russ, and Susan Wood. ,The actual award is quite functional, and can be used in reviewing next months' crop of paper. Use it in good health, Mr. Spider. Be careful not to cut your web. Respectfully yours. Bob Medcalf Box #I Baltimore, MD # the avid Science FictionFantasy reader. Interviews with top SF writers, reviews, analyses of latest trends, superb graphics. I yr. #; # yrs. #. # #th St., Ipt. A, San Diego, Calif. #. a savage world, ruptured by a rogue comet, Joe the Wilding heeds an Alien's call and battles the fearful legend of the invincible Children of the Moon. Hardcover Original Prepublication # PP. Imagination Plus, Box #, Rockford, IL #. self-addressed envelope for information: Minotaur, Box #A, Eagle River, Alaska #. wants to: S  S Books. G-#, # North Wilder, St. Paul, Minn. #. sale. Free lists. Gordon Barber, #-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN #. 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By Edgar Rice Burroughs # novels in one. includes The People That Time Forgot and Out ol Time's Abyss. # pp new movie Special Edition # The Mole in God's Eye. By Larry Niven  Jerrv Pournelte Mean's first contact with an inlelliMnt alien species. Pub ed. # # # The Winter ol IhetfVoiM. By Poul Anderson Hugo and Nebula author spins a tale of the future Ice Age and the hidden secret of Ihe untame able and unconquerable Rogavihi people Special Edition # Again. Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed Short stories and novels. # in all EipMi scones and language may be oHensive to some. Pub ed # # # Strange Gifts. Robert Silverberg. ed # original stones exploring Strange Girls that SF authors have bestowed on man Includes The GoMen Man, AM Ihe People. Oddy end M. olhers Pub ed # # # Three to Dorsii! By Gordon R Dickson. Packed with adventure and these complete SF novels Ncocromancer, Tactics ol Mistake and Dorsai! are by this popular Hugo and Nebula winning author Special Edition # Tha Deathworld Trilogy. By Harry Harrison On # amazing planets interplanetary adventurer Jason din All gambles his life against different lethal environments. Spec. Ed # The Hugo Winners, V # I.T II. Gianl #-in-l volume ol # award-winning stories, # to # Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed # # # Approaching Oblivion. By Harlan Ellison. Eleven mind-spinning Slones in the multiaward winner's new anthology, exploring new and unlathomed areas of Ihe future EiplicH scenes and laitguage mey be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # # Early Del Key. By Lester del Rey # stories from del Rey's early career, with biographical commentary Includes My Name Is Legion. Reincarnate, Though Dreamers Die. Great reading, a treat lor SF buffs Pub ed # # # Enchanted PlgrimMe. 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Pournelle Spider Ro binson Rog er Zelazny I #p July # # Playing Pieces! Big #x# foil-color game map! # page rule book! #x# compartmented plastic box! Sample playing pieces (actual size) Fantastic fiction comes alive in  Demonic infantry, trolls, air dragons,  human infantry, vortexes, enchanted  fortresses and sorcerers. All this and I more in the first professionally  produced fantasy simulation game.  Played on a dazzling four-color map I with rules including provision for  teleportation, magic bolts, conjuring  of magical forces, invisibility, cloning, I six colors of magic, solitaire, two player and three-player games. One of  the most unusual and challenging war I games from Simulations Publications,  Inc., the publishers of Strategy   Tactics Magazine. I Simulations Publications, Inc. 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Second dess postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publtshwe assume no responsibility for unaollctted mstvlal. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity batween cheracters and actual parsons Is colnctdantal. Printed In U.S.A. Sailing in toward a rendezvous with Janus, Bamum and Bailey encountered a giant, pulsing quarternote. The stem was a good five kilometers tall. The note itself was a kilometer in diameter, and glowed a faint turquoise. It turned ponderously on its axis as they approached it. "This must be the place," Barnum said to Bailey. "Janus approach-control to Barnum and Bailey," came a voice from the void. "You will encounter the dragline on the next revolution. You should be seeing the visual indicator in a few minutes." Barnum looked down at the slowly turning, irregular ball of rock and ice that was Janus, innermost satellite of Saturn. Something was coming up behind the curve of the horizon. It didn't take long for enough of it to tecome visible so they could see what it was. Bamum had a good laugh. "Is that yours, or theirs?" he asked Bailey. Bailey sniffed. "Theirs. Just how siUy do you think I am?" The object rising behind the curve of the satellite was a butterfly net, ten kilometers tall. It had a long, fluttering net trailing from a gigantic hoop. Bailey sniffed again, but applied the necessary vectors to position them for being swooped up in the preposterous thing. "Come on, Bailey," Barnum chided. "You're just jealous because you didn't think of it first." "Maybe so," the symb conceded. "Anyway, hold onto your hat, this is likely to be quite a jerk." The illusion was carried as far as was practical, but Barnum noticed that the first tug of deceleration started sooner than one would expect if the transparent net was more than an illusion. The force built up gradually as the electromagnetic field clutched at the metal belt he had strapped around his waist. It lasted for about a minute. When it had trailed off, Janus no longer appeared to rotate beneath them. It was growing closer. "Listen to this," Bailey said. Barnum's head was filled with music. It was bouncy, featuring the reedy, flatulent, yet still engaging tones of a bass saxophone in a honky-tonk tune that neither of them could identify. They shifted position and could just make out the location of Pearly Gates, the only human settlement on Janus. It was easy to find because of the weaving, floating musical staffs that extruded themselves from the spot like parallel strands of spider web. The people who ran Pearly Gates were a barrel of laughs. All the actual structures that made up the above-ground parts of the settlement were disguised behind whimsical holographic projections. The whole place looked like a cross between a ehild's candy-land nightmare and an early Walt Disney cartoon. Dominating the town was a giant calliope with pipes a thousand meters tall. There were fifteen of them, and they all were bouncing and swaying in time to the saxophone music. They would squat down as if taking a deep breath, then stand up again, emitting a colored smoke ring. The buildings, which Bamum knew were actually functional, uninteresting hemispheres, appeared to be square houses with flowerboxes in the windows and cartoon eyes peering out the doors. They trembled and jigged as if they were made of jello. "Don't you think it's a trifle overdone?" Bailey asked. "Depends on what you like. It's kind of cute, in its own gaudy way." They drifted in through the spaghetti maze of lines, bars, sixteenth notes, rests, smoke rings, and blaring music. They plowed through an insubstantial eighth-note run, and Bailey killed their remaining velocity with the jets. They lighted softly in the barely perceptible gravity and made their way to one of the grinning buildings.   ir Coming up to the entrance of the building had been quite an experience. Barnum had reached for a it had dodged out of his way, then turned into a tiny face, leering at him. Practical joke. The lock had opened anyway, actuated by his presence. Inside, Pearly Gates was not so flamboyant. The corridors looked decently like corridors, and the floors were solid and gray. "I'd watch out, all the same," Bailey advised, darkly. "These people are real self-panickers. Their idea of a good laugh might be to dig a hole in the floor and cover it with a holo. Watch your step." "Aw, don't be such a sore loser. You could spot something like that, couldn't you?" Bailey didn't answer, and Barnum didn't pursue it. He knew the source of the symb's uneasiness and dislike of the station on Janus. Bailey wanted to get their business over as soon as possible and get back to the Ring, where he felt needed. Here, in a corridor filled with oxygen, Bailey was physically useless. Bailey's function in the symbiotic team of Bamum and Bailey was to provide an environment of food, oxygen, and water for the human, Barnum. Conversely, Barnum provided food, carbon dioxide, and water for Bailey. Barnum was a human, physically unremarkable except for a surgical alteration of his knees that made them bend outward rather than forward, and the oversized hands, called peds, that grew out of his ankles where his feet used to be. Bailey, on the other hand, was nothing like a human. Strictly speaking, Bailey was not even a he. Bailey was a plant, and Bamum thought of him as a male only because the voice in his head that was Bailey's only means of communication sounded masculine. He had no shape of his own. He existed by containing Barnum and taking on part of his shape. He extended into Barnum's alimentary canal, in the mouth and all the way through to emerge at the anus, threading him like a needle. Together, the team looked like a human in a featureless spacesuit, with a bulbous head, a tight waist, and swollen hips. A ridiculously exaggerated female, if you wish. "You might as well start breathing again," Bailey said. "What for? I will when I need to talk to someone who's not paired with a symb. In the meantime, why bother?" "I just thought you'd like to get used to it." "Oh, very well. If you think it's necessary." So Bailey gradually withdrew the parts of him that filled Barnum's lungs and throat, freeing his speech apparatus to do what it hadn't done for over ten years. Bamum coughed as the air flowed into his throat. It was cold! Well, it felt like it, though it was actually at the standard # degrees. He was unused to it. His diaphragm gave one shudder, then took over the chore of breathing as if his medulla had never been disconnected. "There," he said aloud, surprised at how his voice sounded. "Satisfied?" "It never hurts to do a little testing." "Let's get this out in the open, shall we? I didn't want to come here any more than you did, but you know we had to. Are you going to give me trouble about it until we leave? We're supposed to be a team, remember?" There was a mental sigh from his partner. "I'm sorry, but that's just it. We are supposed to be a team, and out in the Ring we are. Neither of us is anything without the other. Here I'm just something you have to carry around. I can't walk, I can't talk; I'm revealed as the vegetable that I am." Barnum was accustomed to the symb's periodic attacks of insecurity. In the Ring they never amounted to much. But when they entered a gravitational field Bailey was reminded of how ineffectual a being he was. "Here yoU can breathe on your own," Bailey went on. "You could see on your own if I uncovered your eyes. By the way, do you..." "Don't be silly. Why should I use my own eyes when you can give me a better picture than I could on my own?" "In the Ring, that's true. But here all my extra senses are just excess mass. What good is an adjusted velocity display to you here? The farthest thing I can sense is twenty meters off, and stationary." "Listen you. Do you want to turn around and march back out that lock? We can. I'll do it if this is going to be such a trauma for you." There was a long silence, and Barnum was flooded with a warm, apologetic sensation that left him weak at his splay ed-out knees. "There's no need to apologize," he went on in a more sympathetic tone. "I understand you. This is just something we have to do together, like everything else, the good along with the bad." "I love you, Barnum." "And you, silly." ir  it The sign on the door read: Barnum and Bailey hesitated outside the door. "What are you supposed to do, knock?" Barnum asked out loud. "It's been so long I've forgotten how." "Just fold your fingers into a fist and..." "Not that." He laughed, dispelling his momentary nervousness. "I've forgotten the politenesses of human society. Well, they do it in all the tapes I ever saw." He knocked on the door and it opened by itself on the second rap. There was a man sitting behind a desk with his bare feet propped up on it. Barnum had been prepared for the shock of seeing another human, one who was not enclosed in a symb, for he had encountered several of them on the way to the offices of Tympani and Ragtime. But he was still reeling from the unfamiliarity of it. The man seemed to realize it and silently gestured him to a chair. He sat down in it, thinking that in the low gravity it really wasn't necessary. But somehow he was grateful. The man didn't say anything for a long while, giving Barnum time to settle down and arrange his thoughts. He spent the time looking the man over carefully. Several things were apparent about him; most blatently, he was not a fashionable man. Shoes had been virtually extinct for over a century for the simple reason that there was nothing to walk on but padded floors. However, current fashion decreed that Shoes Are Worn. The man was young-looking, having halted his growth at around twenty years. He was dressed in a holo-suit, a generated illusion of flowing color that refused to stay in one spot or take on a definite form. Other than that, he might well have been nude, but Barnum couldn't tell. "You're Barnum and Bailey, right?" the man said. "Yes. And you're Tympani?" "Ragtime. Tympani will be here later. I'm pleased to meet you. Have any trouble on the way down? This is your first visit, I think you said." "Yes, it is. No trouble. And thank you, incidentally, for the ferry fee." He waved it away. "Don't concern yourself. It's all in the overhead. We're taking a chance that you'll be good enough to repay that many times over. We're right enough times that we don't lose money on it. Most of your people out there don't have the money to afford being landed on Janus, and then where would we be? We'd have to go out to you. Cheaper this way." "I suppose it is." He was silent again. He noticed that his throat was beginning to get sore with the unaccustomed effort of talking. No sooner had the thought been formed than he felt Bailey go into action. The internal tendril that had been withdrawn flicked up out of his stomach and lubricated his larynx. The pain died away as the nerve endings were suppressed. It's all in your head, anyway, he told himself. "Who recommended us to you?" "Who... oh, it was... who was it, Bailey?" He realized too' late that he had spoken it aloud. He hadn't wanted to, he had a vague feeling that it might be impolite to speak to his symb that way. Ragtime wouldn't hear the answer, of course. "It was Antigone," Bailey supplied. "Thanks," Bamum said, silently this time. "A man named Antigone," he told Ragtime. The man made a note of that, and looked up again, smiling. "Well now. What is it you wanted to show us?" Barnum was about to describe their work to Ragtime when the door burst open and a woman sailed in. She sailed in the literal sense, banking off the door-jamb, grabbing at the door with her left ped and slamming it shut in one smooth motion, then spinning in the air to kiss the floor with the tips of her fingers, using them to slow her speed until she was stopped in front of the desk, leaning over it and talking excitedly to Ragtime. Barnum was surprised that she had peds instead of feet, thinking that no one used them in Pearly Gates. They made walking awkward. But she didn't seem interested in walking. "Wait till you hear what Myers has done now!" she said, almost levitating in her enthusiasm. Her ped-fingers worked in the carpet as she talked. "He re-aligned the sensors in the right anterior ganglia, and you won't believe what it does to the..." "We have a client, Tympani." She turned and saw the symbhuman pair sitting behind her. She put her hand to her mouth as if to hush herself, but she was smiling behind it. She moved over to them -- it couldn't be called walking in the low gravity; she seemed to accomplish it by perching on two fingers of each of her peds and walking on them, which made it look like she was floating. She reached them and extended her hand. She was wearing a holo suit like Ragtime's but instead of wearing the projector around her waist, as he did, she had it mounted on a ring. When she extended her hand, the holo generator had to compensate by weaving larger and thinner webs of light around her body. It looked like an explosion of pastels, and left her body barely covered. What Barnum saw could have been a girl of sixteen; lanky, thin hips and breasts and two blonde braids that reached to her waist. But her movements belied that. There was no adolescent awkwardness there. 'Tm Tympani," she said, taking his hand. Bailey was taken by surprise and didn't know whether to bare the hand or not. So what she grasped was Bamum's hand covered by the three-centimeter padding of Bailey. She didn't seem to mind. "You must be Barnum and Bailey. Do you know who the original Barnum and Bailey were?" "Yes, they're the people who built your big calliope outside." She laughed. "The place is a kind of a circus, until you get used to it. Rag tells me you have something to sell us." "I hope so." "You've come to the right place. Rag's the business side of the company; I'm the talent. So I'm the one you'll be selling to. I don't suppose you have anything written down?" He nde a wry face, then remembered she couldn't see anything but a blank stretch of green with a hole for his mouth. It took some time to get used to dealing with people again. "I don't even know how to read music." She sighed, but didn't seem unhappy. "I figured as much. So few of you Ringers do. Honestly, if I i could ever figure out what it is that turns you people into artists I could get rich." "The only way to do that is to go out in the Ring and see for yourself." "Right," she said, a little embar, rassed. She looked away from the misshapen thing sitting in the chair. The only way to discover the magic of a life in the Ring was to go out there, and the only way to do that was to adopt a symb. Forever give up your individuality and become a part of a team. Not many people could do that. "We might as well get started," she said, standing and patting her thighs to cover her nervousness. "The practice room is through that i door." He followed her in, to a dimly lit  room that seemed to be half buried  in paper. He hadn't realized that any business could require so much paper. Their policy seemed to be to stack it up and when the stack got too high and tumbled into a landslide, kick it back into a corner. Sheets of music crunched under his peds as he followed her to the comer of the room where the synthesizer keyboard stood beneath a lamp. The rest of the room was in shadows, but the keys gleamed brightly in their ancient array of black and white. Tympani took off her ring and sat at the keyboard. "The damn holo gets in my way," she explained. "I can't see the keys." Barnum noticed for the first time that there was another keyboard on the floor, down in the shadows, and her peds were poised over it. He wondered if that was the only reason she wore them. Having seen her walk, he doubted it. She sat still for a moment, then looked over to him expectantly. "Tell me about it," she said in a whisper. He didn't know what to say. "Tell you about it? Just tell you?" She laughed, and relaxed again, hands in her lap. "I was kidding. But we have to get the music out of your head and onto that tape some way. How would you prefer? I heard that a Beethoven Symphony was once written out in English, each chord and run described in detail. I can't imagine why anyone would want to, but someone did. It made quite a thick book. We can do it that way. Or surely you can think of another." He was silent. Until she sat at the keyboard, he hadn't really thought about that part of it. He knew his music, knew it to the last hemi-semi-demi-quaver. How to get it out? "What's the first note?" she prompted. He was ashamed again. "I don't even know the names of the notes," he confessed. She was not surprised. "Sing it." "I... I've never tried to sing it." "Try now." She sat up straight, looking at him with a friendly smile, not coaxing but encouraging. "I can hear it," he said, desperately. "Every note, every dissonance... is that the right word?" She grinned. "It's a right word, but I don't know if you know what it means. It's the quality of sound produced when the vibrations don't mesh harmoniously: J#chord, it doesn't produce a sonically pleasing chord. Like this:" and she pressed two keys close together, tried several others, then played with the knobs mounted over the keyboard until the two notes were only a few vibrations apart and wavered sinuously. "They don't automatically please the ear, but in the right context they can make you sit up and take notice. Is your music discordant?" "Some places. Is that bad?" "Not at all. Used right, it's... well, not pleasing exactly..." she spread her arms helplessly. "Talking about music is a pretty frustrating business, at best. Singing's much friendlier. Are you going to sing for me, love, or must I try to wade through your descriptions?" Hesitantly, he sang the first three notes of his piece, knowing that they sounded nothing like the orchestra that crashed through his head but desperate to try something. She took it up, playing the three unmodulated tones on the synthesizer; three pure sounds that were pretty, but lifeless and light-years away from what he wanted. "No, no, it has to be richer." "All right. I'll play what I think of as richer, and we'll see if we speak the same language." She turned some knobs and played the three notes again, this time giving them the modulations of a string bass. "That's closer. But it's still not there." "Don't despair," she said, waving her hand at the bank of dials before her. "Each of these will produce a different effect, singly or in combination. I'm reliably informed that the permutations are infinite. So somewhere in there we'll find your tune. Now. Which way should we go; this way, or this way?" Twisting the knob she touched in one direction made the sound become tinnier; the other, brassier, with a hint of trumpets. He sat up. That was getting closer still, but it lacked the richness of the sounds in his brain. He had her turn the knob back and forth, finally settled on the place that most nearly approached his phantom tune. She tried another knob, and the result was a still closer approach. But it lacked something. Getting more and more involved, Barnum found himself standing over her shoulder as she tried another knob. That was closer still, but... Feverishly, he sat beside her on the bench and reached out for the knob. He tuned it carefully, then realized what he had done. "Do you mind?" he asked. "It's so much easier sitting here and turning them myself." She slapped him on the shoulder. "You dope," she laughed. "I've been trying to get you over here for the last fifteen minutes. Do you think I could really do this by myself? That Beethoven story was a lie." "What will we do, then?" "What you'll do is fiddle with this machine, with me here to help you and tell you how to get what you want. When you get it right. I'll play it for you. Believe me. I've done this too many times to think you could sit over there and describe it to me. Now sing!" He sang. Eight hours later Ragtime came quietly into the room and put a plate of sandwiches and a pot of coffee on the table beside them. Barnum was still singing, and the synthesizer was singing along with him.    Barnum came swimming out of his creative fog, aware that something was hovering in his field of vision, interfering with his view of the keyboard. Something white and steaming, at the end of a long... It was a coffe cup, held in Tympani's hand. He looked at her face and she tactfully said nothing. While working at the synthesizer Barnum and Bailey had virtually fused into a single being. That was appropriate, since the music Barnum was trying Jo sell was the product of their joint mind. It belonged to both of them. Now he wrenched himself away from his partner, far enough away that talking to him became a little more than talking to himself. "How about it, Bailey? Should we have some?" "I don't see why not. I've had to expend quite a bit of water vapor to keep you cool in this place. It could stand replenishing." "Listen, why don't you roll back from my hands? It would make it easier to handle those controls; give me finer manipulation, see? Besides, I'm not sure if it's polite to shake hands with her without actually touching flesh." Bailey said nothing, but his fluid body drew quickly back from Barnum's hands. He reached out and took the offered cup, starting at the unfamiliar sensation of heat in his own nerve endings. Tympani was unaware of the discussion; it had taken only a second. The sensation was explosive when it went down his throat. He gasped, and Tympani looked worried. "Take it easy there, friend. You've got to get your nerves back in shape for something as hot as that." She took a careful sip and turned back to the keyboard. Barnum set his cup down and joined her. But it seemed like time for a recess and he couldn't get back into it. She recognized it and relaxed, taking a sandwich and eating it like she was starving. "She is starving, you dope," Bailey said. "Or at least very hungry. She hasn't had anything to eat for eight hours, and she doesn't have a symb re-cycling her wastes into food and dripping it into her veins. So she gets hungry. Remember?" "I remember. I'd forgotten." He looked at the pile of sandwiches. "I wonder what it would feel like to eat one of those?" "Like this." Barnum's mouth was flooded with the taste of a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat. Bailey produced this trick, like all his others, by direct stimulation of the sensorium. With no trouble at all he could produce completely new sensations simply by shorting one sector of Barnum's brain into another. If Barnum wanted to know what the taste of a tuna sandwich sounded like, Bailey could let him hear. "All right. And I won't protest that I didn't feel the bite of it against my teeth, because I know you can produce that, too. And all the sensations of chewing and swallowing it, and much more besides. Still," and his thoughts took on a tone that Bailey wasn't sure he liked," I wonder if it would be the polite thing to eat one of them?" "What's all this politeness all of a sudden?" Bailey exploded. "Eat it if you like, but I'll never know why. Be a carnivorous animal and see if I care." "Temper, temper," Barnum chidedr with tenderness in his voice. "Settle down, chum. I'm not going anywhere without you. But we have to get along with these people. I'm just trying to be diplomatic." "Eat it, then," Bailey sighed. "You'll min my ecology schedules  for months -- what'll I do with all that extra protein? -- but why should you care about that?" Barnum laughed silently. He knew that Bailey could do anything he liked with it: ingest it, refine it, burn it, or simply contain it and expel it at the first opportunity. He reached for a sandwich and felt the thick substance of Bailey's skin draw back from his face as he raised it to his mouth. He had expected a brighter light, but he shouldn't have. He was using his own retinas to see with for the first time in years, but it was no different from the cortex-induced pictures Bailey had shown him all that time. "You have a nice face," Tympani said, around a mouthful of sandwich. "I thought you would have. You painted a very nice picture of yourself." "I did?" Barnum asked, intrigued. "What do you mean?" "Your music. It reflects you. Oh, I don't see everything in your eyes that I saw in the music, but I never do. The rest of it is Bailey, your friend. And I can't read his expression." "No, I guess you couldn't. But can you tell anything about him?' ' She thought about it, then turned to the keyboard. She picked out a theme they had worried out a few hours before, played it a little faster and with subtle alterations in the tonality. It was a happy fragment, with a hint of something just out of reach. "That's Bailey. He's worried about something. If experience is any guide, it's being here at Pearly Gates. Symbs don't like to come here, or anywhere there's gravity. It makes them feel not needed." "Hear that?" he asked his silent partner. "Umm." "And that's so silly," she went on. "I don't know about it firsthand, obviously, but I've met and talked to a lot of Pairs. As far as I can see, the bond between a human and a symb is... well, it makes a mother cat dying to defend her kittens seem like a case of casual affection. I guess you know that better than I could ever say, though." "You stated it well," he said. Bailey made a grudging sign of approval, a mental sheepish grin. "She's out-pointed me, meat-eater. I'll shut up and let you two talk without me intruding my baseless insecurities." "You relaxed him," Barnum told her, happily. "You've even got him making jokes about himself. That's no small accomplishment, because he takes himself pretty seriously." "That's not fair, I can't defend myself." "I thought you were going to be quiet?"  The work proceeded smoothly, though running longer than Bailey would have liked. After three days of transcribing, the music was beginning to take hape. A time came when Tympani could a press a button and have the machine play it back, much more than the skeletal outline they had evolved on the first day but still needing finishing touches. "How about 'Contrapunctual Cantata'?" Tympani asked. "What?" "For a title. It has to have a title. I've been thinking about it, and coined that word. It fits, because the piece is very metrical in construction: tight, on-time, on the beat. Yet it has a strong counterpoint in the woodwinds." "That's the reedy sections, right?" "Yes. What do you think?" "Bailey wants to know what a cantata is." Tympani shrugged her shoulders, but looked guilty. "To tell you the truth, I stuck that in for alliteration. Maybe as a selling point. Actually, a cantata is sung, and you don't have anything like voices in this. You sure you couldn't work some in?" Barnum considered it. "No." "It's your decision, of course." She seemed about to say something else but decided against it. "Look, I don't care too much about the title," Barnum said. "Will it help you to sell it, naming it that?" "Might." "Then do as you please." "Thanks. I've got Rag working on some preliminary publicity. We both think this has possibilities. He liked the title, and he's pretty good at knowing what will sell. He likes the piece, too." "How much longer before we'll have it ready?" "Not too long. Two more days. Are you getting tired of it?" "A little. I'd like to get back to the Ring. So would Bailey." She frowned at him, pouting her lower lip. "That means I won't be seeing you for ten years. This sure can be a slow business. It takes forever to develop new talent." "Why are you in it?" She thought about it. "I guess because music is what I like, and Janus is where the most innovative music in the system is born and bred. No one else can compete with your Ringers." He was about to ask her why she didn't pair up and see what it was like, first-hand. But something held him back; some unspoken taboo she had set up, or perhaps it was him. Truthfully, he could no longer understand why everyone didn't pair with a symb. It seemed the only sane way to live. But he knew that many found the idea unattractive; even repugnant. After the fourth recording session Tympani relaxed by playing the synthesizer for the Pair. They had known she was good, and their opinion was confirmed by the artistry she displayed at the keyboard. Tympani had made a study of musical history. She could play Bach or Beethoven as easily as the works of the modern composers like Bamum. She performed Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, first movement. With her two hands and two peds she had no trouble at all in making an exact reproduction of a full symphony orchestra. But she didn't limit herself to that. The music would segue imperceptibly from the traditional strings into the concrete sounds that only an electronic instrument could produce. She followed it with something by Ravel that Barnum had never heard, then an early composition by Riker. After that, she amused him with some Joplin rags and a march by John Philip Sousa. She allowed herself no license on these, playing them with the exact instrumentation indicated by the composer. Then she moved directly into another march. This one was incredibly lively, full of chromatic runs that soared and swooped. She played it with a precision in the bass parts that the old musicians could never have achieved. Barnum was reminded of old films seen as a child, films full of snarling lions in cages and elephants bedecked with feathers. "What was that?" he asked when she was through. "Funny you should ask, Mr. Barnum. That was an old circus march called 'Thunder and Blazes.' Or some call it 'Entry of the Gladiators.' There's some confusion among the scholars. Some say it had a third title, 'Barnum and Bailey's Favorite,' but the majority think that was another one. If it was, it's lost, and too bad. But everyone is sure that Barnum and Bailey liked this one, too. What do you think of it?" "I like it. Would you play it again?" She. did, and a third time later, because Bailey wanted to be sure it was safe in Barnum's memory where they could replay it later. Tympani turned the machine off and rested her elbows on the keyboard. "When you go back out," she said, "Why don't you give some thought to working in a synapticon part for your next work?" "What's a synapticon?" She stared at him, not believing what she had heard. Then her expression changed to one of delight. "You really don't know? Then you have something to learn." And she bounced over to her desk, grabbed something with her peds, and hopped back to the synthesizer. It was a small blackbox with a strap and a wire with an input jack at one end. She turned her back to him and parted her hair at the base of her skull. "Will you plug me in?" she asked. Bamum saw the tiny gold socket buried in her hair, the kind that enabled one to interface directly with a computer. He inserted the plug into it and she strapped the box around her neck. It was severely funtional, and had an improvised, breadboarded look about it, scarred with tool marks and chipped paint. It gave the impression of having been tinkered with almost daily. "It's still in the development process," she said. "Myers -- he's the guy who invented it -- has been playing with it, adding things. When we get it right we'll market it as a necklace. The circuitry can be compacted quite a bit. The first one had a wire that connected it to the speaker, which hampered my style considerably. But this one has a transmitter. You'll see what I mean. Come on, there isn't room in here." She led the way back to the outer office and turned on a big speaker against the wall. What it does," she said, standing in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides, "is translate body motion into music. It measures the tensions in the body nerve network, amplifies them, and...well. I'll show you what I mean. This position is null; no sound is produced." She was standing straight, but relaxed, peds together, hands at her sides, head slightly lowered. She brought her arm up in front of her, reaching with her hand, and the speaker behind her made a swooping sound up the scale, breaking into a chord as her fingers closed on the invisible tone in the air. She bent her knee forward and a soft bass note crept in, strengthening as she tensed the muscles in her thighs. She added more harmonics with her other hand, then abruptly cocked her body to one side, exploding the sound into a cascade of chords. Barnum sat up straight, the hairs on his arms and spine sitting up with him. Tympani couldn't see him. She was lost in a world that existed slightly out of phase with the real one, a world where dance was music and her body was the instrument. Her eyeblinks became stacatto punctuating phrases and her breathing provided a solid rhythmic base for the nets of sound her arms and legs and fingers were weaving. The beauty of it to Barnum and Bailey was the perfect fitting together of movement to sound. He had thought it would be just a novelty: sweating to twist her body into shapes that were awkward and unnatural to reach the notes she was after. But it wasn't like that. Each element shaped the other. Both the music and the dance were improvised as she went along and were subordinate to no rules but her own internal ones. When she finally came to rest, balancing on the tips of her peds and letting the sound die away to nothingness, Barnum was almost numb. And he was surprised to hear the sound of hands clapping. He realized it was his own hands, but he wasn't clapping them. It was Bailey. Bailey had never taken over motor control. it ir it They had to have all the details. Bailey was overwhelmed by the new art form and grew so impatient with relaying questions through Barnum that he almost asked to take over Barnum's vocal cords for a while. Tympani was surprised at the degree of enthusiasm. She was a strong proponent of the synapticon but had not met much success in her efforts to popularize it. It had its limitations, and was viewed as an interesting but passing fad. "What limitations?" Bailey asked, and Barnum vocalized. "Basically, it needs free-fall performance to be fully effective. There are residual tones that can't be eliminated when you're standing up in gravity, even on Janus. And I can't stay in the air long enough here. You evidently didn't notice it, but I was unable to introduce many variations under those conditions." Barnum saw soinething at once. "Then I should have one installed. That way I can play it as I move through the Ring." Tympani brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. She was covered in sweat from her performance, and her face was flushed. Barnum almost didn't hear her reply, he was so intent on the harmony of motion in that simple movement. And the synapticon was turned off. "Maybe you should. But I'd wait if I were you." Barnum was about to ask why but she went on quickly. "It isn't an exact instrument yet, but we're working on it, refining it every day. Part of the problems, you see, is that it takes special training to operate it so it produces more than white noise. I wasn't strictly truthful with you when I told you how it works." "How so?" "Well, I said it measures tensions in nerves and translates it. Where are most of the nerves in the body?" Barnum saw it then. "In the brain." "Right. So mood is even more important in this than in most music. Have you ever worked with an alpha-wave device? By listening to a tone you can control certain functions of your brain. It takes practice. The brain provides the reservoir of tone for the synapticon, modulates the whole composition. If you aren't in control of it, it comes out as noise." "How long have you been working with it?" "About three years."    While Bamum and Bailey were working with her, Tympani had to adjust her day and night cycles to fit with his biological processes. The Pair spent the periods of sunlight stretched out in Janus' municipal kitchen. The kitchen was a free service provided by the community, one that was well worth the cost, since without it paired humans would find it impossible to remain on Janus for more than a few days. It was a bulldozed plain, three kilometers square, marked off in a grid with sections one hundred meters on an edge. Bamum didn't care for it -- none of the Pairs liked it much -- but it was the best they could do in a gravity field. No closed ecology is truly closed. The same heat cannot be re-used endlessly as raw materials can. Heat must be added, energy must be pumped in somewhere along the line to enable the plant component of the cycle to synthesize the carbohydrates needed by the animal component. Bailey could use some of the low-level heat generated when Barnum's body broke down these molecules, but that process would soon lead to ecological bankruptcy. The symb solution was photosynthesis, like any other plant, though the chemicals Bailey employed for it bore only a vague resemblance to chlorophyl. Photosynthesis requires large amounts of plant surface, much more than is available on an area the size of a human. And the intensity of sunlight at Saturn's orbit was only one hundredth what it was at Earth. Barnum walked carefully, along one of the white lines of the grid. To his left and right, humans were reclining in the centers of the large squares. They were enclosed in only the thinnest coating of symb; the rest of the symb's mass was spread in a sheet of living film, almost invisible except as a sheen on the flat ground. In space, this sunflower was formed by spinning slowly and letting centrigugal force form the large parabolic organ. Here it lay inert on the ground, pulled out by mechanical devices at the comers of the square. Symbs did not have the musculature to do it themselves. No part of their stay on Janus made them yearn for the Rings as much as the kitchen. Barnum reclined in the middle of an empty square and let the mechanical claws fit themselves to Bailey's outer tegument. They began to pull, slowly, and Bailey was stretched. In the Ring they were never more than ten kilometers from the Upper Half. They could drift up there and deploy the sunflower, dream away a few hours, then use the light pressure to push them back into the shaded parts of the Ring. It was nice; it was not exactly sleep, not exactly anything in human experience. It was plant consciousness, a dreamless, simple awareness of the universe, unemcumbered with thought processes. Barnum grumbled now as the sunflower was spread on the ground around them. Though the energyintake phase of their existence was not sleep, several days of trying to accomplish it in a gravity well left Barnum with symptoms very like lack of sleep. They were both getting irritable. They were eager to return to weightlessness. He felt the pleasant lethargy creep over him. Beneath him, Bailey was extending powerful rootlets into the naked rock, using acid compounds to eat into it and obtain the small amounts of replacement mass the Pair needed. "So when are we going?" Bailey asked, quietly. "Any day, now. Any day." Barnum was drowsy. He could feel the sun starting to heat the fluid in Bailey's sunflower. He was like a daisy nodding lazily in a green pasture. "I guess I don't need to point it out, but the trascription is complete. There's no need for us to stay." "I know."    That night Tympani danced again. She made it slow, with none of the flying leaps and swelling crescendos of the first time. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, a theme crept in. It was changed, rearranged; it was a run here and a phrase there. It never quite became melodic, as it was on the tape, but that was only right. It had been scored for strings, brass, and many other instruments but they hadn't written in a tympani part. She had to transpose for her instrument. It was still contrapunctual. When she was done she told them of her most successful concert, the one that had almost captured the public fancy. It had been a duet; she and her partner playing the same synapticon while they made love. The first and second movements had been well-received. "Then we reached the finale," she remembered, wryly, "and we suddenly lost sight of the harmonies and it sounded like, well, one reviewer mentioned 'the death agonies a hyena.' I'm afraid we didn't hear it." "Who was it? Ragtime?" She laughed. "Him? No, he doesn't know anything about music. He makes love all right, but he couldn't do it in ## time. It was Myers, the guy who invented the synapticon. But he's more of an engineer than a musician. I haven't really found a good partner for that, and anyway, I wouldn't do it in public again. Those reviews hurt." "But I get the idea you feel the ideal conditions for making music with it would be a duet, in free-fall, while making love." She snorted. "Did I say that?" She was quiet for a long time. "Maybe it is," she finally conceded. She sighed. "The nature of the instrument is such that the most powerful music is made when the body is most in tune with its surroundings, and I can't think of a better time than when I'm approaching an orgasm." "Why didn't it work, then?" "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but Myers blew it. He got excited, which is the whole point, of course, but he couldn't control it. There I was, tuned like a Stradivarius, feeling heavenly harps playing inside me, and he starts blasting out a jungle rhythm on a kazoo. I'm not going through that again. I'll stick to the traditional ballet like I did tonight." "Tympani," Bamum blurted, "I could me love in ## time." She got up and paced around the room, looking at him from time to goha sing, goha dance time. He couldn't see through her eyes, but felt uncomfortably aware that she saw a grotesque green blob with a human face set high up in a mass of putty. He felt a twinge of resentment for Bailey's exterior. Why couldn't she see himl He was in there, buried alive. For the first time he felt almost imprisoned. Bailey cringed away from the feeling. "Is that an invitation?" she asked. "Yes." "But you don't have a synapticon. "Me and Bailey talked it over. He thinks he can function as one. After all, he does much the same thing every second of our lives. He's very adept at rearranging nerve impulses, both in my brain and my body. He more or less lives in my nervous system." She was momentarily speechless. "You say you can make music... and hear it, without an instrument at all? Bailey does this for you?" "Sure. We just hadn't thought of routing body movements through the auditory part of the brain. That's what you're doing." She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She seemed undecided about what to do. "Tympani, why don't you pair up and go out into the Ring? Wait a minute, hear us out. You told me that my music was great and you think it might even sell. How did I do that? Do you ever think about it?" "I think about it a lot," she muttered, looking away from him. "When I came here I didn't even know the names of the notes that were in my head. I was ignorant. I still don't know much. But I write music. And you, you know more about music than anyone I ever met; you love it, you play it with beauty and skill. But what do you create?" "I've written things," she said, defensively. "Oh, all right. They weren't any good. I don't seem to have the talent in that direction." "But I'm proof that you don't need it. I didn't write that music; neither did Bailey. We watched it and listened to it, happening all around us. You can't imagine what it's like out there. It's all the music you ever heard." irk ir At first consideration it seemed logical to many that the best art in the system should issue from the Rings of Saturn. Not until humanity reaches Beta Lyrae or farther will a more beautiful place to live be found. Surely an artist could draw endless inspiration from the sights to be seen in the Ring. But artists are rare. How could the Rings produce art in every human who lived there? The artistic life of the solar system had been dominated by Ringers for over a century. If it was the result of the heroic scale of the Rings and their superb beauty, one might expect the art produced to be mainly heroic in nature, and beautiful in tone and execution. Such had never been the case. The paintings, poetry, writing, and music of the Ringers covered the entire range of human experience and then went a step beyond. A man or a woman would arrive at Janus for any of a variety of reasons, determined to abandon his or her former life and pair with a symb. About a dozen of them departed like that each day, not to be heard of for up to a decade. These people were a reasonable crosssection of the race, ranging from the capable to the helpless, some of them kind and others cruel. There were geniuses among them, and idiots. They were precisely as young, old, sympathetic, callous, talented, useless, vulnerable and fallible as any random sample of humanity must be. Few of them had any training or inclination in the fields of painting or music or writing. Some of them died. The Rings, after all, were hazardous. These people had no way of learning how to survive out there except by trying i and succeeding. But most came! back. And they came back with picj tures and songs and stories. Agentty was the only industry on Janus. It took a special kind of' agent, because few Ringers could walk into an office and present a finished work of any kind. A literary agent had the easiest job. But a tinpanalleycat had to be ready to teach some rudiments of music to the composer who knew nothing about notation. The rewards were high. Ringer art was statistically about ten times more likely to sell than art from anywhere else in the system. Better yet, the agent took nearly all the profits instead of a commission, and the artists had never pressured for more. Ringers had little use for money. Often, an agent could retire on the proceeds of one successful sale. But the fundamental question of why Ringers produced art was unanswered. Barnum didn't know. He had some ideas, partially confirmed by Bailey. It was tied up in the blending of the human and symb mind. A Ringer was more than a human, and yet still human. When combined with a Symb something else was created. It was not under their control. The best Barnum had been able to express it to himself was by saying that this meeting of two different kinds of mind set up a tension at the Junction. It was like the addition of amplitudes when two waves meet head-on. That tension was mental, and fleshed itself out by clothing it.self in the symbols that were lying around for the taking in the mind of the human. It had to be the human symbols because the intellectual life of a symb gotta sing, goha dance starts at the moment it comes in contact with a human brain. The symb has no brain of its own and has to make do with using the human brain on a time-sharing basis.    They reached Tympani's apartment and she held the door for theiiK Inside, she dialed all the furniture into the floor, leaving a large, bare room with white walls. "What do I do?" she asked in a small voice. He reached out and took her hand, which melted into the substance of Bailey. "Give me your other hand." She did so, and watched stoically as the green stuff crept up her hands and arms. "Don't look at it," Barnum advised, and she obeyed. He felt air next to his skin as Bailey began manufacturing an atmosphere inside himself and inflating like a balloon. The green sphere got larger, hiding Barnum completely and gradually absorbing Tympani. In five minutes the featureless green ball filled the room. "I'd never seen that," she said, as they stood holding hands. "Usually we do it only in space." "What comes next?" "Just hold still." She saw him glance over her . shoulder, and started to turn. She thought better of it and tensed, knowing what was coming. A slim tendril had grown out of the inner surface of the symb and groped its way toward the computer terminal at the back of her head. She cringed as it touched her, then relaxed as it wormed its way in. "How's the contact?" Barnum asked Bailey "Just a minute... I'm still feeling it out." The symb had oozed through the microscopic entry points at the rear of the terminal and was following the network of filaments that extended through her cerebrum. Reaching the end of one, Bailey would quest further, searching for the loci he knew so well in Barnum. "They're slightly different," he told Barnum. "I'll have to do a little testing to be sure I'm at the right spots." Tympani jumped, then looked down in horror as her arms and legs did a dance without her volition. "Tell him to stop that!" she shrieked, then gasped as Bailey ran through a rapid series of memorysensory loci; in almost instantaneous succession she experienced the smell of an orange blossom, the void of the womb, an embarrassing incident as a child, her first freefall. She tasted a meal eaten fifteen years ago. It was like spinning a radio dial through the frequencies, getting fragments of a thousand unrelated songs, and yet able to hear each of them in its entirety. It lasted less than a second and left her weak. But the weakness was illusory, too, and she recovered and found herself in Bamum's arms. "Make him stop it," she demanded, struggling away from him. "It's over," he said. "Well, almost," Bailey said. The rest of the process was conducted beneath her conscious level. "I'm in," he told Barnum. "I can't guarantee how well this will work. I wasn't built for this sort of thing, you know. I need a larger entry point than that terminal, more like the one I sank into the top of your head." "Is there any danger to her? "Nope, but there's a chance I'll get overloaded and have to halt the whole thing. There's going to be a lot of traffic over that little tendril and I can't be sure it'll handle the load." "We'll just have to do our best." "They faced each other. Tympani was tense and stony-eyed. "What's next?" she asked again, planting her feet on the thin but springy and warm surface of Bailey. "I was hoping you'd do the opening bars. Give me a lead to follow. You've done this once, even if it didn't work." "All right. Take my hands..."    Barnum had no idea how the composition would start. She chose a very subdued tempo. It was not a dirge; in fact, in the beginning it had no tempo at all. It was a ffeeform tone poem. She moved with a glacial slowness that had none of the loose sexuality he had expected. Barnum watched, and heard a deep undertone develop and knew it as the awakening awareness in his own mind. It was his first response. Gradually, as she began to move in his direction, he essayed some movement. His music added itself to hers but it remained seperate and did not harmonize. They were sitting in different rooms, hearing each other through the walls. She reached down and touched his leg with her fingertips. She drew her hand slowly along him and the sound was like fingernails rasping on a blackboard. It clashed, it grated, it tore at his nerves. It left him shaken, but he continued with the dance. Again she touched him, and the theme repeated itself. A third time, with the same results. He relaxed into it, understood it as a part of their music, harsh as it was. It was her tension. He knelt in front of her and put his hands to her waist. She turned, slowly, making a sound like a rusty metal plate rolling along a concrete floor. She kept spinning and the tone began to modulate and acquire a rhythm. It throbbed, syncopated, as a function of their heartbeats. Gradually the tones began to soften and blend. Tympani's skin was glistening with sweat as she turned faster. Then, at a signal he never consciously received, Barnum lifted her goha sing, goha dance in the air and the sounds cascaded around them as they embraced. She kicked her legs joyously and it combined with the thunderous bass protest of his straining leg muscles to produce an airborne series of chromatics. It reached a crescendo that was impossible to sustain, then tapered off as her feet touched the floor and they collapsed into each other. The sounds muttered to themselves, unresolved, as they cradled each other and caught their breath. "Now we're in tune, at least," Tympani whispered, and the symbsynapticon picked up the nerve impulses in her mouth and ears and tongue as she said it and heard it, and mixed it with the impulses from Barnum's ears. The result was a vanishing series of arpeggios constructed around each word that echoed around them for minutes. She laughed when she heard it, and that was music even without the dressings. The music had never stopped. It still inhabited the space around them, gathering itself into dark pools around their feet and pulsing in a diminishing allegretto with their hissing breath. "It's gotten dark," she whispered, afraid to brave the intensity of sound if she were to speak aloud. Her words wove around Barnum's head as he lifted his eyes to look around them. "There are things moving around out there," she said. The tempo increased slightly as her heart caught on the dark-on-dark outlines she sensed. "The sounds are taking shape," Barnum said. "Don't be afraid of them. It's in your mind." "I'm not sure I want to see that deeply into my mind."    As the second movement started, stars began to appear over their heads. Tympani lay supine on a surface that was beginning to yield beneath her, like sand or some thick liquid. She accepted it. She let it conform to her shoulderblades as Barnum coaxed music from her body with his hands. He found handfuls of pure, bell-like tones, unencumbered with timbre or resonance; existing by themselves. Putting his lips to her, he sucked out a mouthful of chords which he blew out one by one, where they clustered like bees around his nonsense words, ringing change after change on the harmonies in his voice. She stretched her arms over her head and bared her teeth, grabbing at the sand that was now as real to her touch as her own body was. Here was the sexuality Barnum had sought. Brash and libidinous as a goddess in the Hindu pantheon, her body shouted like a dixieland clarinet and the sounds caught on the waving tree limbs overhead and thrashed about like tattered sheets. Laughing, she held her hands before her face and watched as sparks of blue and white fire arced across her fingertips. The sparks leaped out to Barnum and he glowed where they touched him. The universe they were visiting was an extraordinarily cooperative one. When the sparks jumped from Tympani's hands into the dark,' cloud-streaked sky, bolts of lightning came skittering back at her. They were awesome, but not fearsome. Tympani knew them to be productions of Bailey's mind. But she liked them. When the tornados formed above her and writhed in a dance around her head, she liked that, too. The gathering storm increased as the tempo of their music increased, in perfect step. Gradually, Tympani lost track of what was happening. The fire in her body was transformed into madness; a piano rolling down a hillside or a harp being used as a trampoline. There Was the drunken looseness of a slide trombone played at the botton of a well. She ran her tongue over his cheek and it was the sound of beads of oil falling on a snare drum. Barnum sought entrance to the concert hall, sounding like a head-on collision of harpsichords. Then someone pulled the plug on the turntable motor and the tape was left to thread its way through the, heads at a slowly diminishing speed as they rested. The music gabbled insistently at them, reminding them that this could only be a brief intermission, that they were in the command of forces beyond themselves. They accepted it, Tympani sitting lightly in Barnum's lap, facing him, and allowing herself to be cradled in his arms. "Why the pause?" Tympani asked, and was delighted to see her words escape her mouth not in sound, but in print. She touched the small letters as they fluttered to the ground. "Bailey requested it," Barnum said, also in print. "His circuits are overloading." His words orbited twice around his head, then vanished. "And why the skywriting?" "So as not to foul the music with more words." She nodded, and rested her head on his shoulder again. Barnum was happy. He gently stroked her back, producing a warm, fuzzy rumble. He shaped the contours of the sound with his fingertips. Living in the Ring, he was used to the feeling of triumphing over something infinitely vast. With the aid of Bailey he could scale down the mighty Ring until it was within the scope of a human mind. But nothing he had ever experienced rivalled the sense of power he felt in touching Tympani and getting -- music. A breeze was starting to eddy around them. It rippled the leaves of the tree that arched over them. The lovers had stayed planted on the ground during the height of the storm; now the breeze lifted them into the air and wafted them into the gray clouds. Tympani had not noticed it. When she opened her eyes all she knew was that they were back in limbo again, alone with the music. And the music was beginning to build. The last movement was both more harmonious and less varied. They were finally in tune, acknowledging the baton of the same conductor. The piece they were extemporizing was jubilant. It was noisy and broad, and gave signs of becoming Wagnerian. But somewhere the Gods were laughing. Tympani flowed with it, letting it become her. Barnum was sketching out the melody line while she was content to supply the occassional appogiatura, the haunting nuance that prevented it from becoming ponderous. The clouds began to withdraw, slowly revealing the new illusion that Baily had moved them to. It was hazy. But it was vast. Tympani opened her eyes and saw -- the view from the Upper Half, only a few kilometers above the plane of the Ring. Below her was an infinite golden surface and above her were stars. Her eyes were drawn to the plane, down there...it was thin. Insubstantial. One could see right through it. Shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun (and introducing a forlorn minor theme into the music) she peered into the whirling marvel they had taken her out here to see and her ears were filled with the shrieks of her unspoken fear as Bailey picked it up. There were stars down there, all around her, and moving toward her, and she was moving through them, and they were beginning to revolve, and... the inner surface of Bailey. Above her unseeing eyes, a slim green tendril, severed, was writhing back into the wall. It disappeared.   I  "Burnt out." "Are you all right?" Barnum asked him. "I'm all right. Burnt out. You felt it. I warned you the connection might not handle the traffic." Barnum consoled him. "We never expected that intensity." He shook his head, trying to clear the memory of that awful moment. He had his fears, but evidently no phobias. Nothing had ever gripped him like the Rings gripped Tympani. He gratefully felt Bailey slip in and ease the pain back into a comer of his mind where he needn't look at it. Plenty of time for that later, on the long, silent orbits they would soon be following... Tympani was sitting up, puzzled, but beginning to smile. Barnum wished Bailey could give him a report on her mental condition, but the connection was broken. Shock? He'd forgotten the symptoms. goha sing, goha dance "I'll have to find out for myself," he told Bailey. "She looks all right to me," Bailey said. "I was calming her as the contact was breaking. She might not remember much." She didn't. Or, mercifully, she remembered the happiness but had only a vague impression of the fear at the end. She didn't want to look at it, which was just as well. There was no need for her to be tantalized or taunted by something she could never have. They made love there inside Bailey. It was quiet and deep, and lasted a long time. What lingering hurts there were found healing in that gentle silence, punctuated only by the music of their breathing. Then Bailey slowly retracted around Barnum, contracting their universe down to man-size and forever excluding Tympani. It was an awkward time for them. Barnum and Bailey were due at the catapult in an hour. All three knew that Tympani could never follow them, but they didn't speak of it. They promised to remain friends, and knew it was empty. Tympani had a financial statement which she handed to Barnum. "Two thousand, minus nineteen ninety-five for the pills." She dropped the dozen small pellets into his other hand. They contained the trace elements the Pair could not obtain in the Ring, and constituted the only reason they ever needed to visit Janus. "Is that enough?" Tympani asked, anxiously. Barnum looked at the sheet of paper. He had to think hard to recall how important money was to single humans. He had little use for it. His bank balance would keep him in supplement pills for thousands of years if he could live that long, even if he never came back to sell another song. And he understood now why there was so little repeat business on Janus. Pairs and humans could not mix. The only common ground was art, and even there the single humans were driven by monetary pressures alien to Pairs. "Sure, that's fine," he said, and tossed the paper aside. "It's more than I need." Tympani was relieved. "I know that of course," she said, feeling guilty. "But I always feel like an exploiter. It's not very much. Rag says this one could really take off and we could get rich. And that's all you'U ever get out of it." Barnum knew that, and didn't care. "It's really all we need," he repeated. "I've already been paid in the only coin I value, which was the privilege of knowing you." They left it at that. ir it ir The countdown wasn't a long one. The operators of the cannon tended to herd the Pairs through the machine like cattle through a gate. But it was plenty of time for Barnum and Bailey, on stretched-time, to embed Tympani in amber. "Why?" Barnum asked at one point. "Why here? Where does the fear come from?" "I saw some things," Bailey said' thoyghtfully. "I was going to probe, but then I hated myself for it. I decided to leave her private traumas alone." The count was ticking slowly down to the firing signal, and a bass, mushy music began to play in Barnum 's ears. "Do you still love her?" Barnum asked. "More than ever." "So do I. It feels good, and it hurts. I suppose we'll get over it. But from now on, we'd better keep our world down to a size we can handle. What is that music, anyway?" "A send-off," Bailey said. He accelerated them until they could hear h. "It's coming over the radio. A circus march." Barnum had no sooner recognized it than he felt the gentle but increasing push of the cannon accelerating him up the tube. He laughed, anc the two of them shot out of the bulging brass pipe of the Pearly Gates Calliope. They made a bullseye through a giant orange smoke ring, accompanied by the strains of "Thunder and Blazes."  Larval p early if he expected to get a place up front. No man is an island -- and yet, and yet... ternoon," the bland-faced woman on the wall was saying, "when Governor Trentino officially welcomes the delegation from #I Cygni in the name of the Terran Network, the human race will no longer be alone. The significance of this event canno -- ' ' He blanked the wall with a word and finished loading the heavy pistol, then sighted along the largemouthed barrel at nothing in particular. "What time is it?" he asked, putting the weapon into the left pocket of his jacket. "Seven minutes and forty-three seconds before five a. m.," said the wall. He nodded. It would be getting light outside, and the crowds would soon begin to gather at the terminal. He left and hurried down to the street. He would have to show up Lumbering across the tarmac on its tricycle landing gear, the wedge-shaped shuttlecraft could have been a sculptor's larger-thanlife parody of the Cygnians. Governor James Amost Trentino smiled slightly at the thought and watched as the ship rolled into the shadow of the disembarkation ramp and lurched to a stop. "Aren't you at all nervous about this?" Vera Marcal asked at his side. Trentino did not look away from the window. On the tarmac, the ship began to extrude its cylindrical airlock into the waiting mouth of the ramp. "I woke up with a premonition this morning," he said. "Today is going to go down as smoothly as cream, Vera." Behind him, Emily Teasdale gave a soft snort of amusement. "I hate having to be the one to remind you, James, but you checked out a dud in the precog department. The fleet and the Cygnian vessel have been giving one another the eye upstairs for the past four days, the separatists are howling for yours and Chicolini's blood... if you had any sense, you'd be as scared as the rest of us." Marcal shifted her attache case from hand to hand and grinned at the governor. "She's right, James. We're walking the tightrope over the abyss. If we don't get the Cygbe putting your head out to dry on an iron spike." "You two are such a damned comfort," Trentino said with a sigh. "Be calm. Chicolini's been aboard the alien vessel ever since it dropped into orbit. He knows them, and they know him. He'll put them at their ease. The separatists are too much in the minority to cause real trouble. Be calm. This is the big moment. The one we've been waiting and working for. The moment they'll always remember us for." "That's what George Custer told his troops in #," Teasdale said. He half-turned to give her a sour look. His throat beeped softly. He pressed a fingertip against a small, hard lump under his jaw and said, in sub-vocals, trentino here. major chicolini and the cygnian have left the shuttlecraft, hummed the little black button attached to Trentino's right earlobe, and are now coming up the ramp. thank you. He shot a questioning look at one of the many uniformed security guards posted at intervals throughout the lobby. The woman signaled that she, too, had received the information. "Well," Trentino said to his two aides, "bright smiles now." They moved away from the window overlooking the tarmac and stood at attention before the sealed larval stage door of the ramp. Trentino touched his sub-dermal communicator again. max. everything' s fine out here on the street, governor, monitors going full blast, lots of excitement, but nothing to worry about, looks like the anti-network factions and the xenophobes are sleeping late, or watching it at home and bitching. thanks, max. He took his finger off his throat, and then the ramp doors slid open, and Major Joseph F. Chicolini and the Cygnian delegate stepped forth. Trentino gasped in spite of himself. It had been one thing to see the images the Cygnians broadcast from their starship. It was quite another thing altogether to have one of the creatures stand close, to hear the sound its chitinous feet made on the floor, to smell its dusty odor. The Cygnian was a wedge-bodied being with a shiny blue carapace, stilt-like legs with bulbous joints, clusters of lesser appendages clutched tightly against its underside. Its face, or, rather, the droplet-like cluster of sensory organs above the horn-lipped mouth at the point of the wedge, was on a level with Trentino's chin. Major Chicolini, a smallish man who did not look especially comfortable in his ornate dress uniform, saluted, took Trentino's hand for a second and said, "Governor Trentino, may I present the delegate from #I Cygni?" Trentino and the two women bowed stiffly from the waist. The Cygnian unfolded a delicatelooking grasping appendage, took a hemispherical object from a holster strapped above the first joint of its foreleg and held the flat surface of the instrument against its throat sac. "We see you once again," it said in a startling bass growl, "and we rejoice. We see that you are well, and we are satisified." "We extend a welcome in the name of the Terran Network," the governor replied, "and we congratulate you on your mastery of our language." He smiled and darted a look at the major, touched his throat and said, what was that part about seeing me again, chicolini? the cygnian mass-mind at work, bear it in mind when you're dealing with the delegate, governor, the nians compose a single entity with a shared consciousness, natural for it to assume we're no different. "We have a vehicle waiting," Trentino said, "to convey us to the reception at Doucet Tower." He turned, and Major Chicolini and the alien drew abreast of him. Marcal and Teasdale fell into step behind them. As they started across the lobby, half a dozen security guards detached themselves from the walls and moved with them. Trentino's throat beeped again. go ahead. terminal remains cleared, save for your party and security personnel, from gate three to the street. good, keep it that way. He touched his throat again, max. crowd knows you're coming, excitement level's shooting up, but everyone' s behaving, nobody's tried to break through the security line, god knows how they'll react when you step out, though, this terminal just wasn't laid out for maximum security maneuvers, sir. don't i know it. They walked on in silence disturbed only by the click of the Cygnian's feet. When they arrived at the main doors of the terminal, Trentino almost hesitated. Through the smoky dark plate glass, he could see the van and the escort vehicles, the two parallel lines' of uniformed men and women holding back the crowd. He swallowed hard and abruptly realized that the palms of his hands were slick with perspiration. Calmly now, he told himself. This is your day, J. A. The day the Cygnians first set foot upon a Terran Network world. The day you welcome #I Cygni into the Network. Calmly now. With dignity. He put a slight smile on his lips and stepped through the doorway, into the hazy warmth of Alpha Centauri's midday light, into a swelling tide of ohs and ahs and here they smooth telefax balloons settled lower in the air above his head and fixed their glittering glass eyes on him, on Major Chicolini, on the Cygnian. He glanced up for the benefit of the cameras, shot a quick, nervous look at the open mouths and widening eyes beyond the security line on his left, then, as the murmurs of the multitude deepened to a roar, forced himself to look straight ahead at the van. There was an urgent buzzing sound from his communicator. The sound did not have time in which register upon his mind as the emergency signal before his earring hissed, we're picking up someth -- The governor never knew whether Max stopped speaking in midsyllable or whether he simply did not hear the rest of the sentence. One of the guards before and to the right of him lurched forward from the security line, buckled at the knees, toppled. Someone lunged through the gap in the line and pointed something in his direction, but it was only after the first shot had been fired that he recognized the thing the person was holding as a large gun. , There was a second shot, a scream, yells. Unable to move or speak, Trentino could only stare as the attacker went down under several security guards. Arms flailed. Hands clutched. There was a third shot, immediately followed by an explosion above Trentino's head. Something struck him low on the left side of the neck. He blinked, touched the spot where the blow larval stage had fallen, felt a hard, sharp object protruding from the flesh at the juncture of neck and shoulder. His hand came away wet and sticky. The governor looked at the blood on his fingers for a moment, then, bewildered, at the telefax balloons overhead. There were only two of them now. Unmindful of the hell breaking loose, all around him, he sat down on the pavement and rubbed his fingertips together. Someone bawled his name. Consciousness fled. it If ir The light in the room was soft and soothing. He thought of the look on Governor Trentino's face, and he tried to grin. But they had paralyzed him. The muscles around his slightly parted lips quivered ineffectually. He made a sobbing sound in the back of his throat... lonely lonely lonely I was so lonely nobody ever paid any attention never heard a word I said never looked at me before today oh oh but oh how clever how cunning how perfectly timed it was oh because now they people everybody all of those thousands who were there all know who I am now when I walk down the street they'll recognize me now they'll say there goes that Albert Dean Crater that man who the man who who who told them they'd be sorry who told them to stop ignoring him pay attention who knew who knew how lonely how clever how worthy of notice who knew how to make them feel bad how to make them sorry knew how how about that Mr. Trentino Major Joseph Chicolini alien how about that you thought they'd all be looking at you but I knew I knew I knew how to make them all look! at! ME! The light in the room was soft and soothing. He make a chuckling sound in the back of his throat.    "A call, sir," the wall announced, "from Ms. Teasdale." Trentino frowned, his thick eyebrows almost meeting above the bridge of his nose, and stabbed a wafer-thin dictation slate on the desk before him clicked. He regarded the lines of type covering the top half of the slate for a second more before answering. "Did she say what she wants?" "She said only that it's important, sir." "Of course it is." Trentino looked at the slate and absently fingered the faint pink scar at the base of his neck, where the sliver of shrapnel from the exploding telefax balloon had struck him. He had not been enjoying the task of preparing a report to Terran Network Central on Earth. He would, he knew, enjoy the repercussions even less. His gaze settled upon a paragraph a quarter of the way down the slate. "Sir," the wall said, "Ms. Teasdale insists that you speak with her." "Oh. Yes. Of course." Trentino shoved the slate aside, , sank back into his chair and watched across the tips of steepled fingers as a rectangular section of the wall opposite his desk shimmered, dissolved and was replaced by an image of the pale face of Emily Teasdale. He forced a smile that buried the ends of his moustache in the creases bracketing his mouth and said, "Emily." "We're still waiting for the results of this man Crater's psychecheck, Governor." "They're on their way down now. Chicolini's still trying to explain matters to the Cygnian?" Teasdale grimaced and nodded. "Is the alien still having fits?" "No. Not really. Though I wouldn't blame it if it was. It's gotten over the shock of the incident at least to the point where it isn't so much angry as baffled." "Have Chicolini assure the delegate that Crater is certifiably insane." "Of course." "Emily, does Chicolini think we have any chance at all of getting ourselves out of this mess intact." Teasdale started to shake her head, then shrugged. "He's not very optimistic. Governor. Even with evidence of Crater's insanity, he thinks it's going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make the alien understand exactly what happened at the terminal." "But surely the Cygnian realizes that we took every possible step to ensure its safety, and that -- " "What Chicolini is faced with," Teasdale cut in, "is trying to explain irrational behavior on the part of a member of our race to an entity incapable of quite grasping the idea that the whole of Homo sapiens isn't totally responsible for all of its parts." Treiitino groaned softly. He saw Teasdale look off-camera, obviously listening to someone, saw her nod and accept a red-backed folder. "The report on Crater just arIt is the #st century, but Scop is in # -- attending assassinations. He's warned, cajoled, pleaded... but he knows lie's a failure. Trying to alter the future, he has merely reinforced it! BappyN. Mslzbspg m? CJ. I oocn rived," she said, facing the governor again. "I hope it helps." "Keep me posted, Emily." "Of course." Teasdale's image shrank and vanished. Trentino touched another button on his desk. "Osborn." "Yes, sir," came the reply. "Any change upstairs?" "No, sir. Fleet reports that the Cygnian vessel still has its shields up and its weapons systems at the ready. No activity apart from that." "Fine." I guess, he added to himself as he cleared the line. "Get me Duncan at the hospital." "Yes, sir." There was a pause. "Sir, Ms. Graham is calling." Trentino mouthed a couple of heartfelt obscenities. "Put her on hold." Lamont Duncan's face appeared on the wall. "Hello, Governor." "Any word yet on Vera?" Duncan's teeth went into his lower lip for a second. "They're still working on her. Possible internal injuries resulting from the concussion when the cannon shell struck her attache case. And her arm almost came off from the elbow down. They had her frozen down within three minutes of the shooting. She may be all right. She may be all mush inside, and they'd have to scoop her out and put in prostheses." "God damn it." He scowled at the dictation slate. "Okay. Stay there, Lamont. Call me if..." "Of course, sir." Trentino blanked the wall. It said, "Ms. Graham is holding, sir." The governor repressed a snarl. He had never liked Katherine Graham, and his inability to root her out of the Network bureaucracy of Alpha Centauri IV had never ceased to rankle him. "Put her on!" Graham looked pleased with herself when her image solidified. "Governor," she said, "we've completed the public-opinion survey analysis. An overwhelming majority of the populace feels that this man Crater's attack on the delegate from #I Cygni is an outrage." "How wonderful." Graham nodded, oblivious to air sarcasm. "We've laid out a whole series of telefax releases, and, as soon as you've approved them, we can start feeding them to the public. By linking Crater to the separatists, we can effectively undermine -- no, better than that, we can utterly destroy the credibility of the entire anti-Earth movement. After that, anybody who dares speak out against Network policy, or against the things from #I Cygni, will run the risk of being torn to pieces by patriotic citizens." "That's beautiful, Graham. That's what I call really taking advantage of a golden opportunity." Graham beamed. "I knew you'd like it, sir." "Unfortunately, it isn't the truth. Crater isn't a separatist. He's a totally apolitical, totally mad person." "But -- " "Even if it was the truth," Trentino went on, "we couldn't use him to discredit the separatists." Graham stared at him disbelievingly. "Governor, we can't throw away a chance like this! Now, while public opinion is definitely in our favor, now is the time to kill the separatist cause for all time! We've never had a weapon like Crator before!" "We've never been tangled up with aliens before, either." He paused, savoring the lost look in the woman's eyes. "In case you've been too busy to keep abreast of things, Graham, let me explain it to you as simply as I can. What we've been trying to do for the past ten years, ever since the first expedition to #I Cygni, is get the Cygnians into the Network. Crater's complicated matters to the tenth power. You'll complicate them infinitely more if you get the public boiled up over politics. We have to gloss over internal disunities. We have to show (he Cygnians that, unfortunate incidents like this one notwithstanding, we as a race are as... as singleminded in our desires as they are. So discard your prospectus for the anti-separatist releases." He smiled. "We must perforce break with tradition and give out plain, unadorned truth, Graham. I know that won't be any fun for you, but it's essential." Without waiting for her to reply, Trentino blanked the wall. Almost at once, he was informed that Major Chicolini was calling. The governor made a tired sound, dialed for a tranquilizer and waited for the drug to enter his bloodstream through the mucous membrane of mouth and throat before accepting the call. Major Chicolini looked grim. Despite the drug, Trentino felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Well?" the governor demanded. "Have you... ?" "It wants Crater, sir." "It whatT' "The Cygnian wants Crater." Trentino dialed for a second traniarval stage quilizer. "Why does it want him?" "It won't say. Or it can't say." Trentino ignored the tranquilizer in his hand and glared at Chicolini. "Major, I can't just hand a Network citizen, even a crazy one, over to the alien. Especially not without a reason." "Governor, I appreciate your position. But the Cygnian insists that if have Crater." "No. Emphatically not. Crater is our responsibility." "Then I've just wasted ten hours," Major Chicolini snapped, "convincing the delegate that Crater is not our responsibility." A note of pleading entered his voice. "Sir, I don't think that the Cygnian has any intention of harming Crater. It's... curious." "Curious? Curious about what?" "It's asking to be allowed to prove to itself, to its own satisfaction, that what I've been telling it about human beings is the truth. That we are an adult, fully developed race of separate, wholeunto-ourselves beings. As far as the Cygnian knows, this is an irreconciliable dichotomy. The only experience it's had with anything remotely resembling our kind of creature is with its own larvae. Vicious, unpredictable things that don't enter the Cygnian mind-link until the pupal stage." The two men stared at each other for a long moment. "It's been a rotten day," Trentino finally said. Major Chicolini nodded. "Let it have Crater," he said. "If you do, chances are we won't be much worse off than we were when the delegate and I came up the ramp at noon." "That's your considered opinion?" "Yes, sir." "You realize. Major, that we're all in bad, bad trouble if this -- " Trentino leaned forward in his seat to tap the dictation slate " -- goes off to Earth without a happy ending on it." "Yes, sir." The governor massaged the bridge of his nose and caught himself wishing, really wishing, that he had grown up to be anything other than a mildly efficient, mildy honest politician. "Very well," he said. "The Cygnian gets Crater."    They'll come to see me lots of people men women everybody talking to me asking me want to know why I did it oh my God yes I can see their faces already every eye on me telefax cameras oh and microphones the questions they'll ask me why did I do it why why wanting to find out wanting to know asking me tell us Albert or tell us Mr. Crater yes I like that Mr. Crater tell us Mr. Crater why did you do it and I'll look into the camera seeing me hearing me on the wall watching thinking about Albert Crater what made him do it saying yes that's Albert Crater the man on the wall there the man who did it and they'll ask me why did you do it Mr. Crater can you tell us won't you please tell us please Mr. Crater I did it I'll say I did it because oh God why shouldn't I do it what else have I ever done no no I'll tell them the reason I did it is is is... He lay upon his back, helpless, unable to move, held against a slick, slightly convex surface, in a place where the air had an odd flavor, where machinery hummed softly to itself, where wedge-bodied creatures clustered about him. One of the creatures touched his naked thigh with a chitinous claw. "Don't touch me, God damn it!" The creature pressed an instrument against its throat and rumbled, "This one is severed?" "In a manner of speaking." A human voice. A smallish man in an ornate but rather rumpled-looking uniform appeared among the aliens. "It is not a... young?" "It is aberrant. It has reached its full physical growth. It does not conform to our standard. It is cut off from the rest of its kind." "Severed," said the alien. The uniformed man bent over him and whispered, "Crater." "Albert Crater. Albert Dean Crater. Mr. Albert Dean Crater." He studied the uniformed man's face for a second, trying to remember where he had seen it before. "I suppose you want to talk to me." "Crater, listen to me." "Listen to me." He strained against the unyielding grip of the convexity. "No one ever listens to e. It's imt everybody listened." "Crater, do you know where you are?" "I want to see somebody. I want everybody to hear why I did it. Where is everybody?" "The Cygnians -- " "Cygnians fygnians pygnians." He giggled shrilly. "Wygnians." "The Cygnians are going to probe you. Crater. Just relax. Be calm. It won't hurt you." "Everybody hurts me. Everybody. I got back at them, though. Didn't I? Didn't I? Did you see the look on their faces?" "Just relax," the uniformed man hissed softly. He straightened and looked at the aliens. "He's as ready as he can be. The drugs have worn off. He's fully conscious." The man spreadeagled on the convexity closed his eyes. They aren't listening to me, he thought. They're ignoring me again. They aren't coming to talk to me. I'm tired of being lonely. I'm tired of it. That's what I. Will tell them. I'm tired. Of being. Cut. Off. The curved surface beneath him seemed to grow soft. Alarmed, he opened his eyes and found himself mottling through something warm od milky white in color. He opened his mouth to cry out, but he stuff poured into his throat. Silencing him without choking him. stage to the fabulous netherworld... The authorized vertion of the revolt, exile, and Kingdom of the Prince of Angels: , Learn the facts behind the legend -- the true story of the single most influential figure in history -- ' Ludfer, Lord Light. Visit Asgaard -- Limbus -- Dyonesia -- Typhaenos -- Acrasia -- Bimini -- Pandcmonia -- Jotunnheim -- Kaf -- and more! (with maps, charts, pictures, and excerpts from historical documents) There is life after death -- come to HadesI j (oo obligatioD if you buy thu book) I P Scott Hollnnder; A History and Tour Guide of The Irfernal Kingdom of Hades # pagesfully illusiraled # (plus # postage A handling) from fnfernol Artists Scribes PO Bom # Hatnderf, Conn. M#f# Directly above his face, a fuzzy sphere of bluish light appeared. Scintillae separated from it and flickered out of existence. He shut his eyes, trying to close out the bluish light, and super-novae flared on the inner sides of his eyelids, slivers of glass sliced at his optic nerves, something long and cool and hard stabbed behind his face. He had to look. He had to look. He saw chitinous claws operating levers. He saw consoles and examined dials marked off with angular characters and knew what they signified. He saw one of the aliens approaching along a tunnel-like .corridor, and, as he approached along a tunnel-like corridor, he saw one of the aliens watching him. He saw the familiar green orb of Alpha Centauri IV through an observation port and knew a longing for geometric buildings gleaming in the harsh light of a strange sun. He saw the uniformed man standing between two aliens. He saw the uniformed man standing on either side of him. He saw a naked man spreadeagled on the surface of a glowing bubble. He saw the sphere of bluish light above his face. He saw, and something within himself parted like tissue paper, and he was calmed, and he was no longer alone. "This one," he heard the alien say, "is not severed now." Itk  "Crater," Dr. Janice Oppenheimer said, "was a prize ineffectual. A person who'd spent the first thirty-eight years of his life feeling inadequate and ignored, accomplishing nothing, amounting to nothing. He went over the edge, finally. But whatever the Cygnians did to him, it seems to have helped. He was calm, if exhausted, when the major here returned him from the aliens' vessel." Trentino finished his cup of stimulac and eased back into the fragrant depths of his chair. He had slept no more than thirteen of the fifty-two hours since the shooting at the terminal. He ached with fatigue. Dr. Oppenheimer and Major Chicolini sat opposite his desk, both  them looking fresh and rested. TI governor regarded them enviously. "Is Crater still certifiable?" I asked the doctor. Dr. Oppenheimer shrugged. "It too soon to tell. Cygnian psycb therapuetic techniques are still b yond our comprehension at th point." Major Chicolini cleared his thro quietly and said, "The Cygnian term for the larval stage of the own species roughly translates i severed. The condition of not beii in communication with the adult mass-mind. The larvae enter tl pupal phase of development an emerge as joined. There are aberrs tions from time to time, whe pupae emerged into adulthood b can't -- or won't, perhaps -- lit themselves with the other grow ups. In such cases the Cygniai...fix them." Trentino cocked an eyebrow Dr. Oppenheimer. "And Crat has been fixed, too?" "Crater has been somethingci Governor. We don't know what i how. We ran three psyche-checl on him in as many hours. He w calm, happy, at worst, a little co fused to find himself back on tl ground again. At best, complete cured of his psychosis." "Excuse me, sir," said the wa "Dr. Oppenheimer has a call fro Dr. Gill." "There's a private line in the brary," Trentino said. "Thank you." Dr. Oppenheimer got to her feet and left the governor's office. Major Chicolini examined his immaculately kept nails for a moment. "Governor, you look as though you could stand to log about twenty hours' sleep time." Trentino gave him a tired smile. "I intend to do Just that as soon as I have the whole grisly mess neatly tied up. I'm still hoping to have a completely happy ending to tack "At least things don't look as bad now as they did two days ago. We're short a telefax balloon and a plate-glass window, but nobody got killed. Vera's all right, you and the Cygnian delegate and that security guard Crater conked are all right... plus. Crater himself may have finally become, uh, joined to the rest of the human race. Most important, the Cygnians are still on good terms with us." Major Chicolini grinned. "All things considered, I think we've just about broken even, sir." "Well, I just hope I never have another two days like the past two." Dr. Oppenheimer re-entered the room. She was frowning. "What's wrong?" said Trentino. "Crater. Dr. Gill says he's succumbing to depression all of a sudden. I'd better go have a look." Trentino swore irritably. "Call me as soon as you know what's going on." "Certainly." She left. "Well," Major Chicolini said with a long sigh. The governor nodded glumly. "Lx#oks like our butterfly is reverting to the larval stage, doesn't it?"   The light in the room was soft and soothing. Dr. Gill had thought it best to paralyze him again. He lay upon his bed and stared up at the featureless white ceiling through a film of tears, and he tried to call out whenever someone entered the room to check on him. Why don't you listen to me? Why won't you talk to me? What's wrong with you? Oh, God, God, don't let me be lonely again! I want them to be my friends. I want them to know me. I want them to love me. I want to be their friend. Why don't they open up? What's wrong with them? Why don't they answer me God don't let them cut me off I want to be their friend but they're shutting me out resisting me and I'm not strong enough to break through can't they understand aren't they able to hear me I keep trying to reach them but I slide off I can't Deep in his throat, the butterfly made a strangled, angry noise, and one of the caterpillars rushed into the room to investigate.  Part Hof II Random, Ganelon and I had been conducted on a strange journey. Led by the Unicorn of Amber, we had passed through peculiar shadows, arriving at last on an oval shelf of stone at a place where the sea and the sky seemed to come together -- a place chopped out of a mountain much like Kolvir, creating a locale similar to Amber, sans palace, sans city. Inscribed upon the shelf was the Pattern of Amber, leading me to the conclusion that this had to be the real basis of the world as I knew it, my own home but its nearest shadow. We were distracted by the emergence of a purple griffin from a nearby cave. It frightened Random's horse, lago. lago fled onto the Pattern, where he was destroyed without trace by a vortex of forces which suddenly occurred overhead. The griffin tried to protect us the while, so we decided he couldn't be all bad -- some sort of watch-thing, most likely. This Pattern was strangely marred, by a long black smear extending in a direction corresponding to our own south, the route of the black road. In fact, the phenomena seemed related. Damage to the Pattern could possibly have created such an entrance to the realm as the road represented. Near to the center of the Pattern, at the beginning of the smear, we noticed a foreign object, which Ganelon recovered. It was a Trump -- which neither Random nor I recognized -- pierced by " dagger. Ganelon then came up with the odd hypothesis that the blood of Amber might act as a solvent on the Pattern. I persuaded Random to test the notion and it proved correct. We then realized what this must mean with respect to the large, blotted section: a human sacrifice. And Random, who was one jump ahead of me, saw the resemblance between himself and the figure on the pierced Trump, concluding that his illegitimate son Martin had been the subject of the ritual. It occurred to me that the Trump was executed in brother Brand's style, but I kept my mouth shut, as Random had just promised to kill the person responsible and I still had need of Brand. Concluding that we had learned whatever we had been brought thither to learn, we sought to return to our own world by means of Benedict's Trump. He transported us to that section of Kolvir which had seen our most recent battle with the forces of the black road. There, we learned that Benedict knew more than we had suspected concerning Martin. Random persuaded Benedict to conduct him through Shadow to Martin's last known address -- at the home of some people called the Tecys. He borrowed Star and they rode off together. At the time, I did not know that the mysterious arm I had removed from Benedict's ghost in Tir-na Nog'th was in my saddlebag. Returning to Amber with Ganelon, I visited Random's wife Vialle to tell her he would be delayed, and I wound up telling her the entire story. I was considerably cheered by the visit, and I returned to my apartments for a nap rather than visit Brand, who had been asking for me. At some dark hour I awoke, struck by an idea as to how I might visit Dworkin, our old mentor, now halfmad, who had helped me to escape from my cell some time before. AS VI. I went down to the dungeons and cleaned the Trump he had drawn on the wall for purposes of his own exit. I was then able to use it myself, traveling to his quarters in a series of caverns in the place we had visited the previous morning. They were located at the back of the griffin's cave. The beast, I later learned, was actually set to guard him, to keep him away from the Pattern. Mistaking me for Dad, Dworkin told me a great many things. The Pattern was somehow a projection of his own mind, now damaged, and his main desire now seemed to be to destroy it. An exile from Chaos, he had created the Pattern ages before, but had repented the act when it was damaged and had conspired with Dad to erase it -- destroying the world in the process -- with Dad to attempt its recreation in a purer form. Dad had not been too hot on the idea and had confined him, setting the griffin, Wixer, to guard. Dworkin' s mind was obviously running in a strange rut, a thing he was the first to acknowledge, and it was difficult to get him to admit that there was a way the Pattern might be restored without going the apocalyptic route. About this time he suffered a spell. He had already demonstrated a controlled shapeshifting ability as a peculiar Joke. Now an uncontrolled change seemed to come upon him and he warned me to flee. I did. Taking some special Trumps from the drawer of the desk in his study, I transported myself to an unusual place just as he seemed about to attack me in his new form. Looking about me then, searching my memory for correspondences, I concluded that I had just arrived at the Courts of Chaos. certain things, and now mine were strained beyond their limits. The rock on which I stood... If I attempted to fix my gaze upon it, it took on the aspect of a pavement on a hot afternoon. It seemed to shift and waver, though my footing was undisturbed. And it was undecided as to the portion of the spectrum it might call home. It pulsated and flashed like the skin of an iguana. Looking upwards, I beheld a sky such as I had never before set eyes upon. At the moment, it was split down the middle -- half of it of deepest night-black, and the stars danced within it. When I say danced, I do not mean twinkled; they cavorted and they shifted magnitudes; they darted and they cirthen faded to nothing. It was a frightening spectacle to behold, and my stomach tightened within me as I experienced a profound acrophobia. Yet, shifting my gaze did little to improve the situation. The other half of the sky was like a bottle of colored sands, continuously shaken; belts of orange, yellow, red, blue, brown and purple turned and twisted; patches of green, mauve, gray and dead white came and went, sometimes snaking into belthood, replacing or joining the other writhing entities. And these, too, shimmered and wavered, creating impossible sensations of distance and nearness. At times, some or all seemed literally sky-high, and then again they came to fill the air before me, gauzy, transparent mists, translucent swaths or solid tentacles of color. It was not until later that I realized that the line which separated the black from the color was advancing slowly from my right while retreating to my left. It was as if the entire celestial mandala were rotating about a point directly overhead. As to the light source of the brighter half, it simply could not be determined. Standing there, I looked down upon what at first seemed a valley filled with countless explosions of color; but when the advancing darkness faced the display away the stars danced and burned within its depths as well as above, giving them the impression of a bottomless chasm. It was as if I stood at the end of the world, the end of the universe, the end of everything. But far, far out from where I stood, something hovered on a mount of sheerest black -- a blackness itself, but edged and tempered with barely perceptible flashes of light. I could not guess at its size, for distance, depth, perspective were absent here. A single edifice? A group? A city? Or simply a place? The outline varied each time that it fell upon my retina. Now faint and misty sheets drifted slowly between us, twisting, as' if long strands of gauze were buoyed by heated air. The mandala ceased its turning when it had exactly reversed itself. The colors were behind me now, and imperceptible unless I turned my head, an action I had no desire to take. It was pleasant standing there, staring at the formlessness from which all things eventually emerged... Before the Pattern, even, this thing was. I knew this, dimly but surely, at the very center of my consciousness. I the hand of oberon knew this, because I was certain that I had been here before. Child of the man I had become, it seemed that I had been brought here in some distant day -- whether by Dad or Dworkin, I could not now recall -- and had stood or been held in this place or one very near to it, looking out upon the same scene with, I am certain, a similar lack of comprehension, a similar sense of apprehension. My pleasure was tinged with a nervous excitement, a sense of the forbidden, a feeling of dubious anticipation. Peculiarly, at that moment, there rose in me a longing for the Jewel I had had to abandon in my compost heap on the shadow Earth, the thing Dworkin had made so much of. Could it be that some part of me sought a defense or at least a symbol of resistance against whatever was out there? Probably. As I continued to stare, fascinated, across the chasm, it was as if my eyes adjusted or the prospect shifted once again, subtly. For now I discerned tiny, ghostly forms moving within that place, like slowmotion meteors along the gauzy strands. I waited, regarding them carefully, courting some small understanding of the actions in which they were engaged. At length, one of the strands drifted very near. Shortly thereafter I had my answer. There was a movement. One of the rushing forms grew larger, and I realized that it was following the twisting way that led toward me. In only a few moments, it took on the proportions of a horseman. As it came on, it assumed a semblance of solidity without losing that ghostly quality which seemed to cling to everything which lay before me. A moment later, I beheld a naked rider on a hairless horse, both deathly pale, rushing in my direction. The rider brandished a bonewhite blade; his eyes and the eyes of the horse both flashed red. I did not really know whether he saw me, whether we existed on the same plane of reality, so unnatural was his mien. Yet I unsheathed Grayswandir and took a step backward as he approached. His long white hair shed tiny sparkling motes, and when he turned his head I knew that he was coming for me, for then I felt his gaze like a cold pressure across the front of my body. I turned sidewise and raised my blade to guard. He continued, and I realized that both he and the horse were bigger than I had thought. They came on. When they reached the point nearest me -- some ten meters, perhaps -- the horse reared as he drew it to a halt. They regarded me then, bobbing and swaying as if on a raft in a gently swelling sea. "Your name!" the rider demanded. "Give me your name, who comes to this place!" His voice produced a crackling sensation in my ears. It was all of one sound level, loud and without inflection. I shook my head. "I give my name when I choose, not when I am ordered to," I said. "Who are you?" He gave three short barks, which I took to be a laugh. "I will hale you down and about, where you will cry it out forever." I pointed Grayswandir at his eyes. "Talk is cheap," I said. "Whiskey costs money." I felt a faint cool sensation just then, as if someone were toying with my Trump, thinking of me. But it was dim, weak, and I had no attention to spare, for the rider had passed some signal to his mount and the beast reared. The distance is too great, I decided. But this thought belonged to another shadow. The beast plunged ahead toward me, departing the tenuous roadway that had been its course. Its leap bore it to a point far short of my position. But it did not fall from there and vanish, as I had hoped. It resumed the motions of galloping, and although its progress was not fully commensurate with the action, it did continue to advance across the abyss at about halfspeed. While this was occurring, I saw that in the distance from which it had come another figure appeared to be headed my way. Nothing to do but stand my ground, fight and hope that I could dispatch this attacker before the other was upon me. As the rider advanced, his ruddy gaze flicked over my person and halted when it fell upon Grayswandir. Whatever the nature of the mad illumination at my back, it had tricked the delicate tracery on my blade to life once more, so that that portion of the Pattern it bore swam and sparkled along its length. The horseman was very near by then, but he drew back on the reins and his eyes leapt upward, meeting my own. His nasty grin vanished. "I know you!" he said. "You are the one called Corwin!" But we had him, me and my ally momentum. His mount's front hoofs fell upon the ledge and I rushed forward. The beast's reflexes caused it to seek equal footing for its hind legs despite the drawn reins. The rider swung his blade into a guard position as I came on, but I crossstepped and attacked from his left. As he moved his blade cross-body, I was already lunging. Grayswandir sheared through his pale hide, entering beneath the sternum and above the guts. I wrenched my blade free and gouts of fire poured like blood from his wound. His swordarm sagged and his mount uttered a shriek that was almost a whistle as the blazing stream fell upon its neck. I danced back as the rider slumped forward and the beast, now fully footed, plunged on toward me, kicking. I cut again, reflexively, defensively. My blade nicked its left foreleg, and it too, began to burn. I sidestepped once again as it turned and made for me a second time. At that moment, the rider erupted into a pillar of light. The beast bellowed, wheeled and rushed away. Without pausing, it plunged over the edge and vanished into the abyss, leaving me with the memory of the smouldering head of a cat which had addressed me long ago and the chill which always accompanied the recollection. I was backed against rock, panting. The wispy road had drifted nearer -- ten feet, perhaps, from the ledge. I had developed a cramp in my left side. The second rider was rapidly approaching. He was not pale like the first. His hair was dark and there was color in his face. His mount was a properly maned sorrel. He bore a cocked and bolted crossbow. I glanced behind me and there was no retreat, no crevice into which I might back. I wiped my palm on my trousers and gripped Grayswandir by the forte of the blade. I turned sideways, so as to present the narrowest target possible. I raised my blade between us, hilt level with my head, point toward the ground, the only shield I possessed. The rider came abreast of me and halted at the nearest point on the gauzy strip. He raised the crossbow slowly, knowing that if he did not drop me instantly with his single shot, I might be able to hurl my blade like a spear. Our eyes met. He was beardless, slim. Possibly light-eyed within the squint of his aim. He managed his mount well, with just the pressure of his legs. His hands were big, steady. Capable. A peculiar feeling passed over me as I beheld him. The moment stretched beyond the point of action. He rocked backward and lowered the weapon slightly, though none of the tension left his stance. "You," he called out. "Is that the blade Grayswandir?" "Yes," I answered, "it is." He continued his appraisal, and something within me looked for words to wear, failed, ran naked away through the night. "What do you want here?" he asked. "To depart," I said. There was a chish-cha, as his bolt struck the rock far ahead and to the left of me. "Go then," he said. "This is a dangerous place for you." He turned his mount back in the direction from which he had come. I lowered Grayswandir. "I won't forget you," I said. "No," he answered. "Do not." Then he galloped away, and moments later the gauze drifted off also. I resheathed Grayswandir and took a step forward. The world was beginning to turn about me again, the light advancing on my right, the dark retreating to my left. I looked about for some way to scale the rocky prominence at my back. It seemed to rise only thirty or forty feet higher, and I wanted the view that might be available from its summit. My ledge extended to both my right and my left. On inspection, the way to the right narrowed quickly, however, without affording a suitable ascent. I turned and made my way to the left. I came upon a rougher spot in a narrow place beyond a rocky shoulder. Running my gaze up its height, an ascent seemed possible. I checked behind me after the approach of additional threats. The ghostly roadway had drifted farther away; no new riders advanced. I commenced climbing. The going was not difficult, though the height proved greater than it had seemed from below. Likely a symptom of the spatial distortion which seemed to have affected my sight of so much else in this place. After a time, I hauled myself up and stood erect at a point which afforded a better view in the direction opposite the abyss. Once again, I beheld the chaotic colors. From my right, the darkness herded them. The land they danced above was rock-cropped and cratered, no sign of any life within it. Passing through its midst, however, from the far horizon to a point in the mountains somewhere to the right, inky and serpentine, ran what could only be the black road. Another ten minutes of climbing and maneuvering, and I had positioned myself to view its terminus. It swept through a broad pass in the mountains and ran right to the very edge of the abyss. There, its blackness merged with that which filled the place, noticeable now only by virture of the fact that no stars shone through it. Using this occlusion to gauge it, I obtained the impression that it continued on to the dark eminence about which the misty strips drifted. I stretched out on my belly, so as to disturb the outline of the low crest as little as possible to whatever unseen eyes might flick across it. Lying there, I thought upon the opening of this way. The damage to the Pattern had laid Amber open to this access, and I believed that my curse had provided the precipitating element. I felt now that it would have come to pass without me, but I was certain that I had done my part. The guilt was still partly mine though no longer entirely so, as I had once believed. I thought then of Eric, as he lay dying on Kolvir. He had said that as much as he hated me, he was saving his dying curse for the enemies of Amber. In other words, this, and these. Ironic. My efforts were now entirely directed toward making good on my leastliked brother's dying wish. His curse to cancel my curse, me as the agent. Fitting though, perhaps, in some larger sense. I sought, and was pleased not to discover, ranks of glowing riders setting forth or assembling upon that road. Unless another raiding party was already under way Amber was still temporarily safe. A number of things immediately troubled me, however. Mainly, if time did indeed behave as peculiarly in that place as Dara's possible origin indicated, then why had there not been another attack? They had certainly had ample time in which to recover and prepare for another assault. Had something occurred recently, by Amber's time, that is, to alter the nature of their strategy? If so, what? My weapons? Brand's recovery? Or something else? I wondered, too, how far Benedict's outposts reached. Certainly not this far, or I should have been informed. Had he ever been to this place? Had any of the others, within recent memory, stood where I had just stood, looking upon the Courts of Chaos, knowing something that I did not know? I resolved to question Brahd and Benedict in this regard as soon as I returned. All of which led me to wonder how time was behaving with me, at that moment. Better not to spend any more time here than I had to, I decided. I scanned the other Trumps I had removed from Dworkin's desk. While they were all of them interesting, I was familiar with none of the scenes depicted. I slipped my own case then and riffled through to Random's Trump. Perhaps he was the one who had tried to contact me the hand of oberon earlier. I raised his card and regarded it. Shortly, it swam before my eyes and I looked upon a blurred kaleidescope of images, the impression of Random in their midst. Motion, and strangely twisting perspectives... "Random," I said. "This is Corwin." I felt his mind, but there was no response from it. It struck me then that he was in the middle of a hellride, all his concentration bent on warping the stuff of Shadow about him. He could not respond without losing control. I blocked the Trump with my hand, breaking the contact. I cut to Gerard's card. Moments later, there was contact. I stood. "Corwin, where are you?" he inquired. "At the end of the world," I said. "I want to come home." "Come ahead." He extended his hand. I reached out and clasped it, stepped forward. We were on the ground floor of the palace in Amber, in the sitting room to which we had all adjourned on the night of Brand's return. It seemed to be early morning. There was a fire going on the grate. No one else was present. "I tried to reach you earlier," he said. "I think Brand did, too. But I can't be sure." "How long have I been away?" "Eight days," he said. "Glad I hurried. What's happening?" "Nothing untoward," he said. "I do not know what Brand wants. He kept asking for you, and I could not reach you. Finally, I gave him a deck and told him to see whether he could do any better. Apparently, he could not." "I was distracted," I said, "and the time-flow differential was bad." He nodded. "I have been avoiding him now that he is out of danger. He is in one of his black moods again, and he insists he can take care of himself. He is right, in that, and it is just as well." "Where is he now?" "Back in his own quarters, and he was still there as of perhaps an hour ago -- brooding." "Has he been out at all?" "A few brief walks. But not for the past several days." "I guess I had best go see him then. Any word on Random?" "Yes," he said. "Benedict returned several days ago. He said they had found a number of leads concerning Random's son. He helped him check on a couple of them. One led further, but Benedict felt he had best not be away from Amber for too long, things being as uncertain as they are. So he left Random to continue the search on his own. He gained something in the venture, though. He came back sporting an artificial arm -- a beautiful piece of work. He can do anything with it that he could before." "Really?" I said. "It sounds strangely familiar." He smiled, nodded. "He told me you had brought it back for him from Tir-na Nog'th. In fact, he wants to speak with you about it as soon as possible." "I'll bet," I said. "Where is he now?" "At one of the outposts he has established along the black road. You would have to reach him by Trump." "Thanks," I said. "Anything further on Julian or Fiona?" He shook his head. "All right," I said, turning toward the door. "I guess I will go see Brand first." "I'm curious to know what it is that he wants," he said. "I will remember that," I told him. I left the room and headed for the stair. I rapped on Brand's door. "Come in, Corwin," he said. I did, deciding as I crossed the threshold that I would not ask him how he had known who it was. His room was a gloomy place, candles burning despite the fact that it was daytime and he had four windows. The shutters were closed on three of them. The fourth was only partway; open. Brand stood beside this one, staring out toward the sea. He was dressed all in black velvet with a silver chain about his neck. His belt was also of silver -- a fine, linked affair. He played with a small dagger, and did not look at me as I entered. He was still pale, but his beard was neatly trimmed and he looked well-scrubbed and a bit heavier than he had when last I had seen him. "You are looking better," I said. "How are you feeling?" He turned and regarded me, expressionless, his eyes half-closed. "Where the hell have you been?" he said. "Hither and yon. What did you want to see me about?" "I asked you where you've been." "And I heard you," I said, reopening the door behind me. "Now I am going to go out and come back in. Supposing we start this conversation over again?" He sighed. "Wait a minute. I am sorry," he said. "Why are we all so thinskinned? I do not know. -- All right. It may be better if I do start over again." He sheathed his dagger and crossed to sit in a heavy chair of black wood and leather. "I got to worrying about all the things we had discussed," he said, "and some that we had not. I waited what seemed an appropriate time for you to have concluded your business in Tir-na Nog'th and returned. I then inquired after you and was told you had not yet come back. I waited longer. First I was impatient, and then I grew concerned that you might have been ambushed by our enemies. When I inquired again later, I learned that you had been back only long enough to speak with Random's wife -- it must have been a conversation of great moment -- and then to take a nap. You then departed once more. I was irritated that you had not seen fit to keep me posted as to events, but I resolved to wait a bit longer. Finally, I asked Gerard to get hold of you with your Trump. When he failed, I was quite concerned. I tried it myself then, and "'hile it seemed that I touched you on several occasions I could not get through. I feared for you, and now the hand of oberon I see that I had nothing to fear all along. Hence, I was abrupt." "I see," I said, taking a seat off to his right. "Actually, time was running faster for me than it was for you, so from where I am sitting I have hardly been away. You are probably further recuperated from your puncture than I am from mine." He smiled faintly and nodded. "That is something, anyway," he said, "for my pains." "I have had a few pains myself," I said, "so don't give me any more. You wanted me for something. Let's have it." "Something is bothering you," he said. "Perhaps we ought to discuss that first." "All right," I said. "Let's." I turned and looked at the painting on the wall beside the door. An oil, a rather somber rendering of the well at Mirata, two men standing beside their horses nearby, talking. "You've a distinctive style," I said. "In all things," he replied. "You stole my next sentence," I said, locating Martin's Trump and passing it to him. He remained expressionless as he examined it, gave me one brief, sidelong look and then nodded. "I cannot deny my hand," he said. "It executed more than that card, your hand. Didn't it?" He traced his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. "Where did you find it?" he asked. "Right where you left it, at the heart of things -- in the real Amber." "So..." he said, rising from the chair and returning to the window, holding up the card as if to study it in a better light. "So," he repeated, "you are aware of more than I had guessed. How did you learn of the primal Pattern?" I shook my head. "You answer my question first: Did you stab Martin?" He turned toward me once again, stared a moment, then nodded sharply. His eyes continued to search my face. "Why?" I asked. "Someone had to," he explained, "to open the way for the powers we needed. We drew straws." "And you won." "Won. Lost?" He shrugged. "What does any of this matter now? Things did not come about as we had intended. I am a different person now than I was then." "Did you kill him?" "What?'.' "Martin, Random's son. Did he die as a result of the wound you inflicted?" He turned his hands palms upward. "I do not know," he said. "If he did not, it was not because I did not try. You need look no further. You have found your guilty party. Now that you have, what are you going to do?" I shook my head. "I? Nothing. For all I know, the lad may still be living." "Then let us move on to matters of greater moment. For how long have you known of the existence of the true Pattern?' ' "Long enough," I said. "Its origin, its functions, the effect of the blood of Amber upon it -- Long enough. I paid more attention to Dworkin than you might have thought. I saw no gain to be had in damaging the fabric of existence, though. So I let Rover lie sleeping for a long, long while. It did not even occur to me until I spoke with you recently that the black road might have been connected with such foolishness. When I went to inspect the Pattern I found Martin's Trump and all the rest." "I was not aware that you were acquainted with Martin." "I have never set eyes on him." "Then how were you aware he was the subject of the Trump?" "I was not alone in that place." "Who was with you?" I smiled. "No, Brand. It is still your turn. You told me when last we talked that the enemies of Amber hied all the way from the Courts of Chaos, that they have access to the realm via the black road because of something you and Bleys and Fiona had done back when you were of one mind as to the best way to take the throne. Now I know what it is that you did. Yet Benedict has been watching the black road and I have just looked upon the Courts of Chaos. There is no new massing of forces, no movement toward us upon that road. I know that time flows differently in that place. They should have had more than enough time to ready a new assault. I want to know what is holding them back. Why have they not moved? What are they waiting for. Brand?" "You credit me with more knowledge than I possess." "I don't think so. You are the resident expert on the subject. You have dealt with them. That Trump is evidence that you have been holding back on other matters. Don't weasel, just talk." "The Courts..." he said. "You have been busy. Eric was a fool not to have killed you immediately -- if he was aware you had knowledge of these things." "Eric was a fool," I acknowledged. "You are not. Now talk." "But I am a fool," he said, "a sentimental one, at that. Do you recall the day of our last argument, here in Amber, so long ago?" "Somewhat." "I was sitting on the edge of my bed. You were standing by my writing desk. As you turned away and headed toward the door, I resolved to kill you. I reached beneath my bed, where I keep a cocked crossbow with a bolt in it. I actually had my hand on it and was about to raise it when I realized something which stopped me." He paused. "What was that?" I asked. "Look over there by the door." I looked, I saw nothing special. I began to shake my head, just as' he said, "On the floor." Then I realized what it was -- russet and olive and brown and green, with a small geometric pattern. He nodded. "You were standing on my favorite rug. I did not want to get blood on it. Later, my anger passed. So I, too, am a victim of emotion and circumstance." "Lovely story -- " I began. " -- but now you want me to stop stalling. I was not stalling, however. I was attempting to make a point. We are all of us alive by one another's sufferance and an occasional fortunate accident. I am going to propose suspending that sufferance and eliminating the possibility of accident in a couple of very important cases. First though, to answer your question, while I do not know for certain what is holding them back, I can venture a very good guess. Bleys has assembled a large strike force for an attack on Amber. It will be nowhere near the scale of the one on which you accompanied him, however. You see, he will be counting on the memory of that last attack to have conditioned the response to this one. It will probably also be preceeded by attempts to assassinate Benedict and yourself. The entire affair will be a feint, though. I would guess that Fiona has contacted the Courts of Chaos -- may even be there right now -- and has prepared them for the real attack, which might be expected any time after Bleys' diversionary foray. Therefore -- " "You say this is a very good guess," I interrupted. "But we do not even know for certain that Bleys is still living." "Bleys is alive," he said. "I was able to ascertain his existence via his Trump -- even a brief assessment of his current activities -- before he became aware of my presence and blocked me out. He is very sensitive to such surveillance. I found him in the field with troops he intends to employ against Amber." "And Fiona?" "No," he said, "I did no experimenting with her Trump, and I would advise you not to either. She is extremely dangerous, and I did not want to lay myself open to her influence. My estimate of her current situation is based on deduction rather than direct knowledge. I though." "I see," I said. "I have a plan." "Go ahead." "The manner in which you retrieved me from durance was quite inspired, combining the forces of everyone's concentration as you did. The same principle Could be utilized again, to a different end. A force such as that would break through a person's defense fairly easily -- even someone like Fiona, if the effort is properly directed." "That is to say, directed by yourself?" "Of course. I propose that we assemble the family and force our way through to Bleys and Fiona, wherever they may be. We hold them, locked in the full, in the flesh, just for a moment or so. Just long enough for me to strike." "As you did Martin?" "Better, I trust. Martin was able to break free at the last moment. That should not occur this time, with all of you helping. Even three or four would probably be sufficient." "You really think you can pull it off, that easily?" "I know we had better try. Time is running. You will be one of the ones executed when they take Amber. So will I. What do you say?" "If I become convinced that it is necessary. Then I would have no choice but to go along with it." "It is necessary, believe me. The next thing is that I will need the Jewel of Judgment." "What for?" "If Fiona is truly in the Courts of Chaos, the Trump alone will probably. be insufficient to reach her and hold her -- even with all of us behind it. In her case, I will require the Jewel to focus our energies." "I suppose that could be arranged." "Then the sooner we are about it the better. Can you set things up for tonight? I am sufficiently recovered to handle my end of it." "Hell no," I said, standing. "What do you mean?" He clenched the arms of the chair, half-rising. "Why not?" "I said I would go along with it if I became convinced that it was necessary. You have admitted that a lot of this is conjecture. That alone' is sufficient to keep me from being convinced." "Forget about being convinced then. Can you afford to take the chance? The next attack is going to be a lot stronger than the last, Corwin. They are aware of your new weapons. They are going to allow for this in their planning." "Even if I agreed with you. Brand, I am certain I could not convince the others that the executions are necessary." "Convince them? Just tell them! You' ve got them all by the throat, Corwin! You are on top right now. You want to stay there, don't you?" "I smiled and moved toward the door. "I will, too," I said, "by doing The hand of oberon things my way. I will keep your suggestion on file." "Your way is going to get you dead. Sooner than you think." "I am standing on your rug again," I said. He laughed. "Very good. But I was not threatening you. You know what I meant. You are responsible for all of Amber now. You have to do the right thing." "And you know what I meant. I am not going to kill a couple more of us because of your suspicions. I would need more than that." "When you get it, it may be too late." I shrugged. "We'll see." I reached toward the door. "What are you going to do now?" I shook my head. "I don't tell anybody everything that I know. Brand. It is a kind of insurance." "I can appreciate that. I only hope that you know enough." "Or perhaps you fear that I know too much," I said. For a moment a wary look danced on the muscles beneath his eyes. Then he smiled. "I am not afraid of you, brother," he said. "It is good to have nothing to fear," I said. I opened the door. "Wait," he said. "Yes?" "You neglected to tell me who was with you when you discovered Martin's Trump, in the place where I had left it." "Why, it was Random," I said. "Oh. Is he aware of the particulars?" "If you mean, does he know that you stabbed his son," I said, "the answer is no, not yet." "I see. And of Benedict's, new arm? I understand that you somehow got it for him in Tir-na Nog'th. I would like to know more about this." "Not now," I said. "Let's save something for our next get-together. It won't be all that long." I went on out and closed the door, my silent regards to the rug. After visiting the kitchens, compiling an enormous meal and demolishing it, I headed for the stables, where I located a handsome young sorrel which had once belonged to Eric. I made friends with him in spite of this, and a short while later we were moving toward the trail down Kolvir which would take us to the camp of my Shadow forces. As I rode and digested, I tried to sort out the events and revelations of what, to me, had been the past few hours. If Amber had indeed arisen as the result of Dworkin's act of rebellion within the Courts of Chaos, then it followed that we were all of us related to the very forces which now threatened us. It was of course difficult to decide how far anything Dworkin said might now be trusted. Yet, the black road did run to the Courts of Chaos, apparently as a direct result of Brand's ritual, a thing which he had based on principles learned from Dworkin. Fortunately, for now, the parts of Dworkin's narrative which required the greatest credulity were those things which were not of any great moment, from an immediate, pragmatic standpoint. Still, I had mixed feelings about being descended from a unicorn -- "Corwin!" I drew rein. I opened my mind to the sending and the image of Ganelon appeared. "I am here," I said. "Where did you get hold of a set of Trumps? And learn how to use them?" "I picked up a pack from the case in the library awhile back. Thought it a good idea to have a way of getting in touch with you in a hurry. As for using them, I just did what you and the others seem to do -- study the Trump, think about it, concentrate on getting in touch with the person." "I should have gotten you a pack long ago," I said. "It was an oversight on my part which I am glad you've remedied. Are you just testing them now, or did something come up?" "Something," he said. "Where are you?" "As chance would have it, I am on my, way down to see you." "You are all right?" "Yes." "Fine. Come ahead then. I'd rather not try bringing you through this thing, the way you people do. It is not that urgent. I will see you by and by." "Yes." He broke the contact and I rustled the reins and continued on. For a moment, I had been irritated that he had not simply asked me for a deck. Then I recalled that I had been away for over a week, by Amber's time. He had probably been getting worried, didn't trust any of the others to do it for him. Perhaps rightly so. The descent went quickly, as did the balance of the journey to the camp. The horse -- whose name, by the way, was Drum -- seemed happy to be going somewhere and had a tendency to pull away at the least excuse. I gave him his head at one point to tire him a bit, and it was not too long afterwards that I sighted the camp. I realized at about that time that I missed Star. I was the subject of stares and salutes as I rode into camp. A silence followed me and all activity ceased as I passed. I wondered whether they believed I had come to deliver a battle order. Ganelon emerged from his tent before I had dismounted. "Fast," he observed, clasping my hand as I came down. "Pretty horse, that." "Yes," I agreed, turning the reins over to his orderly. "What news have you?" "Well..." he said. "I've been talking to Benedict..." "Movement on the back road?" "No, no. Nothing like that. He came to see me after he returned from those friends of his -- the Tecys -- to tell me that Random was all right, that he was following a lead as to Martin's whereabouts. We got to talking of other matters after that, and finally he asked me to tell him everything I knew about Dara. Random had told him about her walking the Pattern, and he had decided then that too many people other than yourself were aware of her existence." "So what did you tell him?" "Everything." "Including the guesswork, the speculation -- after Tir-na Nog'th?" "Just so." "I see. How did he take this?" "He seemed excited about it. Happy, I'd even say. Come talk with him yourself." I nodded and he turned toward his tent. He pushed back the flap and stepped aside. I entered. Benedict was seated on a low stool beside a foot locker atop which a map had been spread. He was tracing something on the map with the long metal finger of the glinting, skeletal hand attached to the deadly, silver-cabled, firepinned mechanical arm I had brought back from the city in the sky, the entire device now attached to the stump of his right arm a little below the point where the sleeve had been cut away from his brown shirt, a transformation which halted me with a momentary shudder, so much did he resemble the ghost I had encountered. His eyes rose to meet my own and he raised the hand in greeting, a casual, perfectly executed gesture, and he smiled the broadest smile I had ever seen crease his face. "Corwin!" he said, and then he rose and extended that hand. I had to force myself to clasp the device which had almost killed me. But Benedict looked more kindly disposed toward me than he had in a long while. I shook the new hand and its pressures were perfect. I tried to disregard its coldness and angularity and almost succeeded, in my amazement at the control he had acquired over it. "I owe you an apology," he said. "I have wronged you. I am very sorry." "It's all right," I said. "I understand." He clasped me for a moment, and my belief that things had apparently been set right between us was darkened only by the grip of those precise and deadly fingers on my shoulder. Ganelon chuckled and brought up another stool, which he set at the other end of the locker. My irritation at his having aired the subject I had not wanted mentioned, whatever the circumstances, was submerged by the sight of its effects: I could not remember having seen Benedict in better spirits; Ganelon was obviously pleased at having effected the resolution of our differences. I smiled myself and accepted a seat, unbuckling my swordbelt and hanging Grayswandir on the tentpole. Ganelon produced three glasses and a bottle of wine. As he set the glasses before us and poured, he remarked, "To return the hospitality of your tent, that night, back in Avalon." Benedict took up his glass with but the faintest of clicks. "There is more ease in this tent," he said. "Is that not so, Corwin?" I nodded and raised my glass. "To that ease. May it always prevail." "I have had my first opportunity in a long while," he said, "to talk with Random at some length. He has changed quite a bit." "Yes," I agreed. "I am more inclined to trust him now than I was in days gone by. j We had some time to talk after we  left the Tecys."  "Where were you headed?" j "Some comments Martin had j made to his host seemed to indicate j that he was going to a place I knew I of further off in Shadow -- the block i city of Heerat. We journeyed there and found this to be correct. He had passed that way." "I am not familiar with Heerat," I said. "A place of adobe and stone -- a commercial center at the junction of several trade routes. There, Random found news which took him eastward and probably deeper into Shadow. We parted company at Heerat, for I did not want to be away from Amber overlong. Also, there was a personal matter I was anxious to pursue. He told me how he had seen Dara walk the Pattern on the day of the battle." "That's right," I said. "She did. I was there, too." , He nodded. "As I said. Random had imj pressed me. I was inclined to bej lieve he was telling the truth. If this  were so, then it was possible that  you were also. Granting this, I had j to pursue the matter of the girl's als legations. You were not available, j so I came to Ganelon -- this was j several days ago -- and had him tell j me everything he knew about  Dara." I glanced at Ganelon, who inJ dined his head slightly. j "So you now believe you have I uncovered a new relative," I said, j "a mendacious one, to be sure, and J quite possibly an enemy -- but a rel ative, nevertheless. What next?" I He took a sip of wine. "I would like to believe in the relationship," he said. "The notion somehow pleases me. So I would like to establish it or negate it to a certainty. If it turns out that we are indeed related, then I would like to understand the motives behind her actions. And I would like to learn why she never made her existence known to me directly." He put down his glass, raised his new hand and flexed the fingers. "So I would like to begin," he continued, "by learning of those things ycxi experienced in Tir-na Nog'th which apply to me and to Dara. I am also extremely curious about this hand, which behaves as if it were made for me. I have never heard of a physical object being obtained in the city in the sky." He made a fist, unclenched it, rotated the wrist, extended the arm, raised it, lowered it gently to his knee. "Random performed a very effective piece of surgery, don't you think?" he concluded. "Very," I agreed. "So, will you tell me the story?" I nodded and took a sip of my wine. "It was in the palace in the sky that it occurred," I said. "The place was filled with inky, shifting shadows. I felt impelled to visit the throne room. I did this, and when the shadows moved aside, I saw you standing to the right of the throne, wearing that arm. When things cleared further, I saw Dara seated upon the throne. I advanced and touched her with Grayswandir, which made me visible to her. She declared me dead these several centuries and bade me return to my grave. When I demanded her lineage, she said she was descended of you and of the hellmaid Lintra. Benedict drew a deep breath but said nothing. I continued; "Time, she said, moved at such a different rate in the place of her birth, that several generations had passed there. She was the first of them possessed of regular human attributes. She again bade me depart. During this time, you had been studying Grayswandir. You struck then to remove her from danger, and we fought. My blade could reach you and your hand could reach me. That was all. Otherwise, it was a confrontation of ghosts. As the sun began to rise and the city to fade, you had me in a grip with that hand. I struck it free of the arm with Grayswandir and escaped. It was returned with me because it was still clasping my shoulder." "Curious," Benedict said. "I have known that place to render false prophecies -- the fears and hidden desires of the visitor, rather than a true picture of what is to be. But then, it often reveals unknown truths as well. And as in most other things, it is difficult to separate the valid from the spurious. How did you read it?" "Benedict," I said, "I am inclined to believe the story of her origin. You have never seen her, but I have. She does resemble you in some ways. As for the rest...It is doubtless as you said -- that which is left after the truth has been separated out." He nodded slowly, and I could tell that he was not convinced but did not want to push the matter. He knew as well as I did what the rest implied. If he were to pursue his claim to the throne and succeed in achieving it, it was possible that he might one day step aside in favor of his only descendant. "What are you going to do?" I asked him. "Do?" he said. "What is Random now doing about Martin? I shall seek her, find her, have the story from her own lips and then decide for myself. This will have to wait, however, until the matter of the black road is settled. That is another matter I wish to discuss with you." "Yes?" "If time moves so differently in their stronghold, they have had more than they need in which to mount another attack. I do not want to keep waiting to meet them in indecisive encounters. I am contemplating following the black road back to its source and attacking them on their home ground. I would like to do it with your concurrence." "Benedict," I said, "have you ever looked upon the Courts of Chaos?" He raised his head and stared at the blank wall of the tent. "Ages ago, when I was young," he said, "I hellrode as far as I might go, to the end of everything. There, beneath a divided sky, I looked upon an awesome abyss. I do not know if the place lies there or if the road runs that far, but I am prepared to take that way again, if such is the case." "Such is the case," I said. "How can you be certain?" "I am just returned from that land. A dark citadel hovers within it. The road goes to it." "How difficult was the way?" "Here," I said, taking out the Trump and passing it to him. "This was Dworkin's. I found it among his things. I only just tried it. It took me there. Time is already rapid at that point. I was attacked by a rider on a drifting roadway, of a sort not shown on the card. Trump contact is difficult there, perhaps because of the time differential. Gerard brought me back." He studied the card. "It seems the place I saw that time," he said at length. "This solves our logistics problems. With one of us on either end of a Trump connection we can transport the troops right through, as we did that day from Kolvir to Gamath." I nodded. "That is one of the reasons I showed it to you, to indicate my good faith. There may be another way, involving less risk than running our forces into the unknown. I want you to hold off on this venture until I have explored my way further." "I will have to hold off in any event, to obtain some intelligence concerning that place. We do not even know whether your automatic weapons will function there, do we?" "No, I did not have one along to test." He pursed his lips. "You really should have thought to take one and test it." "The circumstances of my departure did not permit this." "Circumstances?" "Another time. It is not relevant here. You spoke of following the black road to its source..." "Yes?" "That is not its true source. Its real source lies in the true Amber, in the defect in the primal Pattern." "Yes, I understand that. Both Random and Ganelon have described your journey to the place of the true Pattern, and the damage you discovered there. I see the analogy, the possible connection -- " "Do you recall my flight from Avalon, and your pursuit?" In answer, he only smiled faintly. "There was a point where we crossed the black road," I said. "Do you recall it?" He narrowed his yes. "Yes," he said. "You cut a path through it. The world had returned to normal at that point. I had forgotten." "It was an effect of the Pattern upon it," I said, "One which I believe can be employed upon a much larger scale." "How much larger?" "To wipe out the entire thing." He leaned back and studied my face. "Then why are you not about it?" "There are a few preliminaries I must undertake." "How much time will they involve?" "Not too much. Possibly as little as a few days. Perhaps a few weeks." "Why didn't you mention all of this sooner?" "I only learned how to go about it recently." "How do you go about it?" "Basically, it amounts to repairing the Pattern." "All right," he said. "Say you succeed. The enemy will still be out there." He gestured toward Garnath and the black road. "Someone gave them passage once." "The enemy has always been out there," I said. "And it will be up to us to see that they are not given passage again -- by dealing properly with those who provided it in the first place." "I go along with you on that," he saicj, "but that is not what I meant They require a lesson, Corwin. I want to teach them a proper respect for Amber, such a respect that even if the way is opened again they will fear to use it. That is what I meant. It is necessary." "You do not know what it would be like to carry a battle to that place, Benedict. It is -- literally -- indescribable." He smiled and stood. "Then I guess I had best go see for myself," he said. "I will keep this card for a time, if you don't mind." "I don't mind." "Good. Then you be on with your business about the Pattern, Corwin, and I will be about my own. This will take me some time, too. I must go give my commanders orders concerning my absence now. Let us agree that neither of us commence anything of a final nature without checking first with the other." "Agreed," I said. We finished our wine. "I will be underway myself, very soon now," I said. "So, good luck." "To you, also." He smiled again. "Things are better," he said, and he clasped my shoulder as he passed to the entrance. We followed him outside. "Bring Benedict's horse," Ganelon directed the orderly who stood beneath a nearby tree; and turning, he offered Benedict his hand, "I, too, want to wish you luck," he said. Benedict nodded and shook his hand. "Thank you, Ganelon. For many things." Benedict withdrew his Trumps. "I can bring Gerard up to date," he said, "before my horse arrives." He riffled through them, withdrew one, studied it, "How do you go about repairing the Pattern?" Ganelon asked me. "I have to get hold of the Jewel of Judgment again," I said. "With it, I can reinscribe the damaged area." "Is this dangerous?" "Yes." "Where is the Jewel?" "Back on the shadow Earth, where I left it." "Why did you abandon it?" He contorted his features into a near-impossible grimace. "I don't like the sound of this, Corwin. There must be another way." "If I knew a better way. I'd take it.' ' "Supposing you just followed Benedict's plan and took them all on? You said yourself that he could raise infinite legions in Shadow. You also said that he is the best man there is in the field." "Yet the damage would remain in the Pattern, and something else would come to fill it. Always. The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls." He turned away. "I cannot argue with you. You know your own realm," he said. "But I still feel you may be making a grave mistake by risking yourself on what may prove unnecessary at a time when you are very much needed." I chuckled, for it was Vialle's word and I had not wanted to call it my own when she had said it. "It is my duty," I told him. He did not reply. Benedict, a dozen paces away, had apparently reached Gerard, for he would mutter something, then pause and listen. We stood there, waiting for him to conclude his conversation so that we could see him off. "... Yes, he is here now," I heard him say. "No, I doubt that very much. But -- " Benedict glanced at me several times and shook his head. "No, I do not think so," he said. Then, "All right, come ahead." He extended his new hand, and Gerard stepped into being, clasping it. Gerard turned his head, saw me and immedaitely moved in my direction. He ran his eyes up and down and back and forth across my entire person, as if searching for something. "What is the matter?" I said. "Brand," he replied, "he is no longer in his quarters. At least, most of him isn't. He left a lot of blood behind. The place is also broken up enough to show there had been a fight." I glanced down at my shirtfront and trousers. "And you are looking for bloodstains? As you can see, these are the same things I had on earlier. They may be dirty and wrinkled but that's all." "That does not really prove anything," he said. "It was your idea to look. Not mine. What makes you think I -- " "You were the last one to see him," he said. "Except for the person he had a fight with -- if he really did." "What do you mean by that?" "You know his temper, his moods. We had a small argument. He might have started breaking things up after I left, maybe cut himself, gotten disgusted, trumped out for a change of scene. -- Wait! His rug! Was there any blood on that small, fancy rug before his door?" "I am not sure. -- No, I don't think so. Why?" "Circumstantial evidence that he did it himself. He was very fond of that rug. He avoided messing it." "I don't buy it," Gerard said, "and Caine's death still looks peculiar -- and Benedict's servants who could have found out you wanted gunpowder. Now Brand -- " "This could well be another attempt to frame me," I said, "and Benedict and I have come to better terms." He turned toward Benedict, who had not moved from where he stood a dozen paces away, regarding us without expression, listening. "Has he explained away those deaths?" Gerard asked him. "Not directly," Benedict answered, "but much of the rest of the story now stands in a better light. So much so, that I am inclined to believe the best." Gerard shook his head and glared down at me again. "Still unsettled," he said. "What were you and Brand arguing about?" "Gerard," I said, "that is our business, till Brand and I decide otherwise." "I dragged him back to life and watched over him, Corwin. I didn't do it just to see him killed in a squabble." "Use your brains," I told him. "Whose idea was it to search for him the way that we did? To bring him back?" "You wanted something from him," he said. "You finally got it. Then he became an impediment." "No. But even if that were the case, do you think I would be so damned obvious about it? If he has been killed, then it is on the same order as Caine's death -- an attempt to frame me." "You used the obviousness excuse with Caine, too. It seems to me it could be a kind of subtlety -- a thing you are good at." "We have been through this before, Gerard..." "... And you know what I told you then." "It would be difficult to have forgotten." He reached forward and seized my right shoulder. I immediately drove my left hand into his stomach and pulled away. It occurred to me then that perhaps I should have told him what Brand and I had been talking about. But I didn't like the way he had asked me. He came at me again. I sidestepped and caught him with a light left near the right eye. I kept jabbing after that, mainly to keep his head back. I was in no real shape to fight him again, and Grayswandir was back in the tent. I had no other weapon with me. I kept circling him. My side hurt if I kicked with my left leg. I caught him once on the thigh with my right, but I was slow and offbalance and could not really follow through. I continued to jab. Finally, he blocked my left and managed to drop his hand on my biceps. I should have pulled away then, but he was open. I stepped in with a heavy right to his stomach, all of my strength behind it. It bent him forward with a gasp, but his grip tightened on my arm. He blocked my attempted uppercut with his left, continuing its forward motion until the heel of his hand slammed against my chest, at the same time jerking my left arm backwards and to the side with such force that I was thrown to the ground. If he came down on me, that was it. He dropped to one knee and reached for my throat. IX. I moved to block his hand, but it halted in mid-reach. Turning my head, I saw that another hand had fallen upon Gerard's arm, was now grasping it, was holding it back. I rolled away. When I looked up again, I saw that Ganelon had caught hold of him. Gerard jerked his arm forward, but it did not come free. "Stay out of this, Ganelon," he said. "Get going, Corwin!" Ganelon said. "Get the Jewel!" Even as he called out, Gerard was beginning to rise. Ganelon crossed with his left and connected with Gerard's jaw. Gerard sprawled at his feet. Ganelon moved in and swung a kick toward his kidney, but Geard caught his foot and heaved him over backwards. I scrambled back into a crouch, supporting myself with one hand. Gerard came up off the ground and rushed Ganelon, who was just recovering his feet. As he was almost upon him, Ganelon came up with a double-fisted blow to Gerard's midsection which halted him in his tracks. Instantly, Ganelon's fists were moving like pistons against Gerard's abdomen. For several moments, Gerard seemed too dazed to protect himself, and when he finally bent and brought his arms in, Ganelon caught him with a right to the jaw tliat staggered him backwards. Ganelon immediately rushed forward, throwing his arms about Gerard as he slammed into him and hooking his right leg behind Gerard's own. Gerard toppled and Ganelon fell upon him. He straddled Gerard then and drove his right fist against his jaw. When Gerard's head rolled back, he crossed with his left. Benedict suddenly moved to intervene, but Ganelon chose that moment to rise to his feet. Gerard lay unconscious, bleeding from his niouth and nose. I got shakily to my own feet, dusted myself off. Ganelon grinned at me. "Don't stay around," he said. "I don't know how I would do in a rematch. Go find the trinket." I glanced at Benedict and he nodded. I returned to the tent for Grayswandir. When I emerged, Gerard still had not moved, but Benedict stood before me. "Remember," he said, "you've my Trump and I've yours. Nothing final without a conference." I nodded. I was going to ask him Gerard, biit not me. But second thoughts had me and I decided against spoiling our fresh-minted amity. "Okay." I headed toward the horses. Ganelon clapped me on the shoulder as I came up to him. "Good luck," he said. "I'd go with you, but I am needed here -- especially with Benedict trumping off to Chaos." "Good show," I said. "I shouldn't have any trouble. Don't worry." I went off to the paddock. Shortly, I was mounted and moving. Ganelon threw me a salute as I passed and I returned it. Benedict was kneeling beside Gerard. I headed for the nearest trail into Arden. The sea lay at my back, Garnath and the black road to the left, Kolvir to my right. I had to gain some distance before I could work with the stuff of Shadow. The day lay clean once Garnath was lost to sight, several rises and dips later. the hand of oberon I struck the trail and followed its long curve into the wood, where moist shadows and distant birdsongs reminded me of the long periods of peace we had known of old and the silken, gleaming presence of the maternal unicorn. My aches faded into the rhythm of the ride, and I thought once again of the encounter I had departed. It was not difficult to understand Gerard's attitude, since he had already told me of his suspicions and issued me a warning. Still, it was such bad timing for whatever had happened with Brand that I could not but see it as another action intended either to slow me or to stop me entirely. It was fortunate that Ganelon had been on hand, in good shape and able to put his fists in the right places at the proper times. I wondered what Benedict would have done if there had only been the three of us present. I'd a feeling he would have waited and intervened only at the very last me. I was still not happy with our accord, though it was certainly an improvement over the previous state of affairs. All of which made me wonder again what had become of Brand. Had Fiona or Bleys finally gotten to him? Had he attempted his proposed assassinations singlehanded and been met with a counterthrust, then dragged through his intended victim's Trump? Had his old allies from the Courts of Chaos somehow gotten through to him? Had one of his horny handed guardians from the Tower finally been able to reach him? Or had it been as I had suggested to Gerard -- an accidental self-injury in a fit of rage, followed by an ill-tempered flight from Amber to do his brooding and plotting elsewhere? When that many questions arise from a single event the answer is seldom obtainable by pure logic. I had to sort out the possibilities though, to have something to reach for when more facts did turn up. In the meantime, I thought carefully over everything he had told me, regarding his allegations in light of those things which I now knew. With one exception, I did not doubt most of the facts. He had built too cleverly to have the edifice simply toppled -- but then, he had had a lot of time to think these things over. No, it was in his manner of presenting events that something had been hidden by misdirection. His recent proposal practically assured me of that. The old trail twisted, widened, narrowed again, swung to the northwest and downward, into the thickening wood. The forest had changed very little. It seemed almost the same trail a young man had ridden centuries before, riding for the sheer pleasure of it, riding to explore that vast green realm which extended over most of the continent, if he did not stray into Shadow. It would be good to be doing it again for no reason other than this. After perhaps an hour, I had worked my way well back into the forest, where the trees were great dark towers, what sunlight I glimpsed caught like phoenix nests in their highest branches, an always moist, twilight softness smoothing the outlines of stumps and boles. logs and mossy rocks. A deer bounded across my path, not trusting to the excellent concealment of a thicket at the right of the trail. Birdnotes sounded about me, never too near. Occasionally, I crossed the tracks of other horsemen. Some of these were quite fresh, but they did not stay long with the trail. Kolvir was well out of sight, had been for some time. The trail rose again, and I knew that I would shortly reach the top of a small ridge, pass among rocks and head downward once more. The trees thinned somewhat as we climbed, until finally I was afforded a partial view of the sky. It was enlarged as I continued, and when I came to the summit I heard the distant cry of a hunting bird. Glancing upward, I saw a great dark shape, circling and circling, high above me. I hurried past the boulders and shook the reins for a burst of speed as soon as the way was clear. We plunged downward, racing to get under cover of the larger trees once again. The bird cried out as we did this, but we won to the shade, to the dimness, without incident. I slowed gradually after that and continued to listen, but there were no untoward sounds on the air. This part of the forest was pretty much the same as that we had left beyond the ridge, save for a small stream we picked up and paralleled for a time, finally crossing it at a shallow ford. Beyond, the trail widened and a little more light leaked through and flowed with us for half a league. We had almost come a sufficient distance for me to begin those small manipulations of Shadow which would bear me to the pathway back to the shadow Earth of my former exile. Yet, it would be difficult to begin here, easier farther along. I resolved to save the strain on myself and my mount by continuing to a better beginning. Nothing of a threatening nature had really occurred. The bird could be a wild hunter, probably was. Only one thought nagged at me as I rode. Julian... Arden was Julian's preserve, patrolled by his rangers, sheltering several encampments of his troops at all times -- Amber's inland border guard, both against incursions natural and against those things which might appear at the boundaries of Shadow. Where did Julian go when he had departed the palace so suddenly on the night of Brand's stabbing? If he wished simply to hide, there was no necessity for him to flee farther than this. Here he was strong, backed by his own men, moving in a realm he knew far better than the rest of us. It was quite possible that he was not right now, too far away. Also, he liked to hunt. He had his hellhounds, he had his birds... A half mile, a mile... Just then, I heard the sound that I feared most. Piercing the green and the shade, there came the notes of a hunting horn. They came from some distance behind me, and I think from the left of the trail. I urged my mount to a gallop and the trees rushed to a blur on, either side. The trail was straight and level here. We took advantage of this. Then from behind, I heard a roar -- a kind of deep-chested coughthe hand of oberon ing, growling sound backed by a lot of resonant lung space. I did not know what it was that had uttered it, but it was no dog. Not even a hellhound sounded like that. I glanced back, but there was no pursuit in sight. So I kept low and talked to Drum a bit. After a time, I heard a crashing noise in the woods off to my right, but the roar was not repeated just then. I looked again, several times, but I was unable to make out what it was that was causing the disturbance. Shortly thereafter, I heard the horn once more, much nearer, and this time it was answered by the barks and the baying which I could not mistake. The hellhounds were coming -- swift, powerful, vicious beasts Julian had found . in some shadow and trained to the hunt. It was time, I decided, to begin the shift. Amber was still strong about me, but I laid hold of Shadow as best I could and started the movement. The trail began to curve to the left, and as we raced along it the trees at either hand diminished in size, fell back. Another curve, and the trail led us through a clearing, perhaps a hundred meters across. I glanced up then and saw that that damned bird was still circling, much nearer now, close enough to be dragged with me through Shadow. This was more complicated that I had intended. I wanted an open space in which to wheel my mount and swing a blade freely if it came to that... The occurrence of such a place, however, revealed my position quite clearly to the bird, whom it was proving difficult to lose. All right. We came to a low hill, mounted it, started downward, passing a lone, lightning-blasted tree as we did. On its nearest branch sat a hawk of gray and silver and black. I whistled to it as we passed, and it leapt into the air, shrieking a savage battle cry. Hurrying on, I heard the individual voices of the dogs, clearly now, and the thud of the horses' hoofs. Mixed in with these sounds there was something else, more a vibration, a shuddering of the ground. I looked back again, but none of my pursuit had yet topped the hill. I bent my mind toward the way away and clouds occluded the sun. Strange flowers appeared along the trail -- green and yellow and purple -- and there came a rumble of distant thunders. The clearing widened, lengthened. It became completely level. I heard once again the sound of the horn. I turned for another look. It bounded into view then, and I realized at that instant that I was not the object of the hunt, that the riders, the dogs, the bird were pursuing the thing that ran behind me. Of course, this was a rather academic distinction, in that I was in front, and quite possibly the object of its hunt. I leaned forward, shouting to Drum and digging in with my knees, realizing even as I did that the abomination was moving faster than we could. It was a panic reaction. I was being pursued by a manticora. The last time I had seen its like was on the day before the battle in which Eric died. As I had led my troops up the rearward slopes of Kolvir, it had appeared to tear a man named Rail in half. We had dispatched it with automatic weapons. The thing proved twelve feet in length, and like this one it had worn a human face on the head and shoulders of a lion; it, too, had had a pair of eagle-like wings folded against its sides and the long pointed tail of a scorpion curving in the air above it. A number of them had somehow wandered in from Shadow to devil our steps as we headed for that battle. There was no reason to believe all of them had been accounted for, save that none had been reported since that time and no evidence of their continued existence in the vicinity of Amber had come to light. Apparently, this one had wandered down into Arden and been living in the forest since that time. A final glance showed me that I might be pulled down in moments if I did not make a stand. It also showed me a dark avalanche of dogs rushing down the hill. I did not know the intelligence or psychology of the manticora. Most fleeing beasts will not stop to attack something which is not bothering them. Self-preservation is generally foremost in their minds. On the other hand, I was not certain that the manticora even realized that it was being pursued. It might have started out on my trail and only had its own picked up afterwards. It might have only the one thing on its mind. It was hardly a time to pause and reflect on all the possibilities. I drew Grayswandir and turned my mount to the left, pulling back on the reins immediately as he made the turn. Drum screamed and rose high onto his hind legs. I felt myself sliding backwards, so I jumped to the ground and leaped to the side. But I had, for the moment, forgotten the speed of the stormhounds, had also forgotten how easily they had once overtaken Random and myself in Flora's Mercedes, had also forgotten that unlike ordinary dogs chasing cars, they had begun tearing the vehicle apart. Suddenly, they were all over the manticora, a dozen or more dogs, leaping and biting. The beast threw back its head and uttered another cry as they struck at it. It swept that vicious tail through them, sending others. It reared then and turned, striking out with its forelegs as it descended. But even as it did this, a hound attached itself to its left foreleg, two more were at its haunches and one had scrambled onto its back, biting at its shoulder and neck. The others were circling it now. As soon as it would go after one, the others would dart in and slash at it. It finally caught the one on its back with its scorpion sting and disembowled the one gnawing at its leg. However, it was running blood from a double dozen wounds by then. Shortly, it became apparent that the leg was giving it trouble, both for striking purposes and for bearing its weight when it struck with the others. In the meantime, another dog had mounted its back and was tearing at its neck. It seemed to be having a more difficult time getting at this one. Another came in from its right and shredded its ear. Two more plied its haunches, and when the hand of oberon it reared again one rushed in and tore at its belly. Their barks and growls also seemed to be confusing it somewhat, and it began striking wildly at the ever-moving gray shapes. I had caught hold of Drum's bridle and was trying to calm him sufficiently to remount and get the hell out of there. He kept trying to rear and pull away, and it took considerable persuasion even to hold him in place. In the meantime, the manticora let out a bitter, wailing cry. It had struck wildly at the dog on its back and driven its sting into its own shoulder. The dogs took advantage of this distraction and rushed in wherever there was an opening, snapping and tearing. I am certain the dogs would have finished it, but at that moment the riders topped the hill and descended. There were five of them, Julian in the lead. He had on his scaled white armor and his hunting horn hung about his neck. He rode his gigantic steed Morgenstern, a beast which has always hated me. He raised the long lance that he bore and saluted with it in my direction. Then he lowered it and shouted orders to the dogs. Grudgingly, they dropped away from the prey. Even the doj on the manticora's back loosened its grip and leaped to the ground. All of them drew back as Julian couched the lance and touched his spurs to Morgenstern's sides. The beast turned toward him, gave a final cry of defiance and leapt ahead, fangs bared...They came together, and for a moment my view was blocked by Morgenstern's shoulder. Another moment, however, and I knew from the horse's behavior that the blow had been a true one. A turning, and I saw the beast stretched out, great gouts of blood upon its breast, flowering about the dark stem of the lance. Julian dismounted. He said something to the other riders which I did not overhear. They remained mounted. He regarded the stilltwitching manticora, then looked at me and smiled. He crossed and placed his foot upon the beast, seized the lance with one hand and wrenched it from the carcass. Then he drove it into the ground and tethered Morgenstern to its shaft. He reached up and patted the horse's shoulder, looked back at me, turned and headed in my direction. When he came up before me he said, "I wish you hadn't killed Bela." "Bela?" I repeated. He glanced at the sky. I followed his gaze. Neither bird was not in sight. "He was one of my favorites." "I am sorry," I said. "I misunderstood what was going on." He nodded. "All right. I've done something for you. Now you can tell me what happened after I left the palace. Did Brand make it?" "Yes," I said, "and you're off the hook on that. He claimed Fiona slabbed him. And she was not around to question either. She departed during the night, also. It's a wonder you didn't bump into one another." He smiled. "I'd have guessed as much," he said. "Why did you flee under such suspicious circumstances?" I asked. "It made it look bad for you." He shrugged. "It would not be the first time I've been falsely accused, suspected. And for that matter, if intent counts for anything, I am as guilty as our little sister. I'd have done it myself if I could. In fact. I'd a blade ready the night we fetched him back. Only, I was crowded aside." "But why?" I asked. He laughed. "Why? I am afraid of the bastard, that's why. For a long while, I had thought he was dead, and certainly hoped so -- finally claimed by the rk powers he dealt with. How much do you really know about him, Corwin?" "We had a long talk." "And... ?" "He admitted that he and Bleys and Fiona had formed a plan to claim the throne. They would see Bleys crowned, but each would share the real power. They had used the forces you referred to, to assure Dad's absence. Brand said that he had attempted to win Caine to their cause, but that Caine had instead gone to you and to Eric. The three of you then formed a similar triumvirate to seize power before they could, by placing Eric on the throne." He nodded. "The events are in order, but the reason is not. We did not want the throne, at least not that abruptly, nor at that time. We formed our group to oppose their group, because it had to be opposed to protect the throne. At first, the most we could persuade Eric to do was to assume a Protectorship. He was afraid he would quickly turn up dead if he saw himself crowned under those conditions. Then you turned up, with your very legitimate claim. We could not afford to let you press it at that time, because Brand's crowd was threatening out-and-out war. We felt they would be less inclined to make this move if the throne were already occupied. We could not have seated you, because you would have refused to be a puppet, a role you would have had to play since the game was already in progress and you were ignorant on too many fronts. So we persuaded Eric to take the risk and be crowned. That was how it happened." "So when I did arrive he put out my eyes and threw me in the dungeon just for laughs." Julian turned away and looked back at the dead manticora. "You are a fool," he finally said. "You were a tool from the very beginning. They used you to force our hand, and either way you lost. If that half-assed attack of Bleys' had somehow succeeded, you wouldn't have lasted long enough to draw a deep breath. If it failed, as it did, Bleys disappeared, as he did, leaving you with your life forfeit for attempted usurpation. You had served your purpose and you had to die. They left us small choice in the matter. By rights, we should have killed you -- and you know it." I bit my lip. There were many things I might say. But if he was telling something approximating the truth, he did have a point. And I did want to hear more. "Eric," he said, "figured that your eyesight might eventually be restored -- knowing the way we regenerate -- given time. It was a very delicate situation. If Dad were to return, Eric could step down and justify all of his actions to anyone's That would have been tpo patent a move to insure his own continued reign beyond the troubles of the moment. And I will tell you frankly that he simply wanted to imprison you and forget you." "Then whose idea was the blinding?" He was silent again for a long while. Then he spoke very softly, almost a whisper: "Hear me out, please. It was mine, and it may have saved your life. Any action taken against you had to be tantamount to death, or their faction would have tried for the real thing. You were no longer of any use to them, but alive and about you possessed the potentiality of becoming a danger at some future time. They could have used your Trump to contact you and kill you, or they could have used it to free you in order to sacrifice you in yet another move against Eric. Blinded, however, there was no need to slay you and you were of no usefor anything else they might have in mind. It saved you by taking you out of the picture for a time, and it saved us from a more egregious act which might one day be held against us. As we saw it, there was no choice. It was the only thing we could do. There could be no show of leniency either, or we might be suspected of having some use for you ourselves. The moment you assumed any such semblance of value you would have been a dead man. The most we could do was look the other way whenever Lord Rein contrived to comfort you. That was all that could be done." "I see," I said. "Yes," he agreed, "you saw too soon. No one had guessed youwould recover your sight that quickly, nor that you would be able to escape once you did. How did you manage it?" "Does Macy's tell Gimbel's?" I said. "Beg pardon?" "I said, nevermind. What do you know of Brand's imprisonment, then?" He regarded me once more. "All I know is that there was some sort of falling out within his group. I lack the particulars. For some reason, Bleys and Fiona were afraid to kill him and afraid to let him run loose. When we freed him from their compromise -- imprisonment -- Fiona was apparently more afraid of having him' free." "And you said you feared him enough to have made ready to kill him. Why now, after all this time, when all of this is history and the power has shifted again? He was weak, virtually helpless. What harm could he do now?" He sighed. "I do not understand the power that he possesses," he said, "but it is considerable. I know that he can travel through Shadow with his mind, that he can sit in a chair, locate what he seeks in Shadow and then bring it to him by an act of will without moving from the chair; and he can travel through Shadow physically in a somewhat similar fashion. He lays his mind upon the place he would visit, forms a kind of mental doorway and simply steps through. For that matter, I believe he can sometimes tell what people are thinking. It is almost as if he has himself become some sort of living Trump. I know these things because I have seen hin do them. Near the end, when wo had him under surveillance in the palace he had eluded us once in this fashion. This was the time he traveled to the shadow Earth and had you placed in Bedlam. After his recapture, one of us remained with him at all times. We did not yet know that he could summon things through Shadow, however. When he became aware that you had escaped your confinement, he summoned a horrid beast which attacked Caine, who was then his bodyguard. Then he went to you once again. Bleys and Fiona apparently got hold of him shortly after that, before we could, and I did not see him again until that night in the library when we brought him back. I fear him because he has deadly powers which I do not understand." "In such a case, I wonder how they managed to confine him at all?" "Fiona has similar strengths, and I believe Bleys did also. Between the two of them, they could apparently annul most of Brand's power while they created a place where it Would be inoperative." "Not totally," I said. "He got a The hand of oberon message to Random. In fact, he reached me once, weakly." "Obviously not totally, then," he said. "Sufficiently, however. Until we broke through the defenses." "What do you know of all their by-play with me -- confining me, trying to kill me, saving me." "That I do not understand," he said, "except that it was part of the power struggle within their own group. They had had a falling out amongst themselves, and one side or the other had some use for you. So, naturally, one side was trying to kill you while the other fought to preserve you. Ultimately, of course, Bleys got the most mileage out of you, in that attack he launched." "But he was the one who tried to kill me, back on Earth," I said. "He was the one who shot out my tires." "Oh?" "Well, that is what Brand told me, but it jibes with all sorts of secondary evidence." He shrugged. "I cannot help you on that," he said. "I simply do not know what was going on among them at that time." "Yet you countenance Fiona in Amber," I said. "In fact, you are more than a little cordial to her whenever she is about." "Of course," he said, smiling. "I have always been very fond of Fiona. She is certainly the loveliest, most civilized of us all. Pity Dad was always so dead-set against brother-sister marriages, as well you know. It bothered me that we had to be adversaries for so long as we were. Things returned pretty much to normal after Bleys' death, your imprisonment and Eric's coronation, though. She accepted their defeat gracefully, and that was that. She was obviously as frightened at the prospect of Brand's return as I was." "Brand told things differently," I said, "but then of course he would. For one thing, he claims that Bleys is still living, that he hunted him down with his Trump and knows that he is off in Shadow, training another force for another strike at Amber." "I suppose this is possible," Julian said. "But we are more than adequately prepared, are we not?" "He claims further that the strike will be a feint," I continued, "and that the real attack will then come direct from the Courts of Chaos, over the black road. He says that Fiona is off preparing the way for this right now." He scowled. "I hope he was simply lying," he said. "I would hate to see their group resurrected and at us again, this time with help from the dark direction. And I would hate to see Fiona involved." "Brand claimed he was out of it himself, that he had seen the error of his ways -- and suchlike penitent noises." "Ha! I'd sooner trust that beast I just slew than take Brand at his word. I hope you've had the sense to keep him well-guarded -- though this might not be of much avail if he has his old powers back." "But what game could he be playing now?" "Either he has revived the old triumvirate, a thought I like not at all, or he has a new plan all his own. But mark me, he has a plan. He has never been satisfied to be a mere spectator at anything. He is always scheming. I'd take an oath ,he even plots in his sleep." "Perhaps you are right," I said. "You see, there has been a new development, whether for good or ill, I cannot yet tell. I Just had a fight with Gerard. He thinks I have done Brand some mischief. This is not the case, but I was in no position to prove my innocence. I was the last person I know of to see Brand, earlier today. Gerard visited his quarters a short time ago. He says the place is broken up, there are blood smears here and there and Brand is missing. I don't know what to make of it." "Neither do I. But I hope it means someone has done the job properly this time." "Lord," I said, "it's tangled. I wish I had known all of these things before." "There was never a proper time to tell you," he said, "until now. Certainly not when you were a prisoner and could still be reached, and after that you were gone for a long while. When you returned with your troops and your new weapons, I was uncertain as to your full intentions. Then things happened quickly and Brand was back again. It was too late. I had to get out to save my skin. I am strong here in Arden. Here, I can take anything he can throw at me. I have been maintaining the patrols at full battle force and awaiting word of Brand's death. I wanted to inquire of one of you whether he was still around. But I could not decide whom to ask, thinking myself still suspect should he have died. As soon as I did get word, though, should it prove he was still living, I was resolved to have a try at him myself. Now this... state of affairs... What are you going to do now, Corwin?" "I am off to fetch the Jewel of Judgment from a place where I cached it in Shadow. There is a way it can be used to destroy the black road. I intend to try it." "How can this be done?" "That is too long a story, for a horrible thought has just occurred to me." "What is that?" "Brand wants the Jewel. He was asking about it, and now -- This power of his to find things in Shadow and fetch them back. How good is it?" Julian looked thoughtful. "He is hardly omniscient, if that is what you mean. You can find anything you want in Shadow the normal way we go about it -- by traveling to it. According to Fiona, he just cuts out the footwork. It is therefore an object, not a particular object that he summons. Besides, that Jewel is a very strange item from everything Eric told me about it. I think Brand would have to go after it in person, once he finds out where it is." "Then I must get on with my hellride. I have to beat him to it." "I see you are riding Drum," Julian observed. "He is a good beast, a sturdy fellow. Been through many a hellride." "Glad to hear that," I said. "What are you going to do now?" "Get in touch with someone in Amber and get up to date on everything we haven't had a chance to talk about -- Benedict, probably." "No good," I said. "You will not be able to reach him. He is off to the Courts of Chaos. Try Gerard, and convince him I am an honorable man while you are about it." 'The redheads are the only magicians in this family, but I will try. -- You did say the Courts of Chaos?" "Yes, but again, the time is too valuable now." "Of course. Get you gone. We will have our leisure later -- I trust." He reached out and clasped my arm. I glanced at the manticora, at the dogs seated in a circle about it. "Thanks, Julian. I -- You are a difficult man to understand." "Not so. I think the Corwin I hated must have died centuries ago. Ride now, man! If Brand shows up around here I'll nail his hide to a tree!" He shouted an order to his dogs as I mounted, and they fell upon the carcass of the manitcora, lapping at its blood and tearing out huge chunks and strips of flesh. As I rode past that strange, massive, manlike face, I saw that its eyes were still open, though glazed. They were blue, and death had not robbed them of a certain preternatural innocence. Either that, or the look was death's final gift -- a senseless way of passing out ironies, if it was. I took Drum back to the trail and began my hellride. X. Moving along the trail at a gentle pace, clouds darkening the sky and Drum's whinny of memory or anticipation... A turn to the left, and uphill... The ground is brown, yellow, back to brown again... The trees squat down, draw apart... Grasses wave between them in the cool and rising breeze... A quick fire in the sky... A rumble shakes loose raindrops... Steep and rocky now... The wind tugs at my cloak... Up... Up to where the rocks are streaked with silver and the trees have drawn their line... The grasses, green fires, die down in the rain... Up, to the craggy, sparkling, rainwashed heights, where the clouds rush and boil like a mudgorged river at floodcrest... The rain stings like buckshot and the wind clears its throat to sing... We rise and rise and the crest comes into view, like the head of a startled bull, horns guarding the trail... Lightnings twist about their tips, dance between them... The smell of ozone as we reach that place and rush on through, the rain suddenly blocked, the wind shunted away... Emerging on the father side... There is no rain, the air is still, the sky smoothed and darkened to a proper starfilled black... Meteors cut and burn, cut and burn, cauterizing to afterimage scars, fading, fading... Moons, cast like a handful of coins... Three bright dimes, a dull quarter, a pair of pennies, one of them tarnished and scarred... Down then, that long, winding way... Hoofclops clear and metallic in the night air... Somewhere, a cat-like cough... A dark shape crossing a lesser moon, ragged and swift... Downward . , . The land drops away at either hand... Darkness below... Moving along the top of an infinitely high, curved wall, the way itself bright with moonlight... The trail buckles, folds, grows transparent... Soon it drifts, gauzy, filamentous, stars beneath as well as above... Stars below on either side... There is no land... There is only the night, night and the thin, translucent... trail I had to try to ride, to learn how it felt, against some future use... It is absolutely silent now, and the illusion of slowness attaches to every movement... Shortly, the trail falls away, and we move as if swimming underwater at some enormous depth, the stars bright fish... It is freedom, it is the power of the hellride that brings an elation, like yet unlike the recklessness that sometimes comes in battle, the boldness of a risky feat welllearned, the rush of rightness following the finding of the poem's proper word... It is these and the prospect itself, riding, riding, riding, from nowhere to nowhere perhaps, across and among the minerals and fires of the void, free of earth and air and water... We race a great meteor, we touch upon its bulk... Speeding across its pitted surface, down, around, then up again... It stretches into a great plain, it lightens, it yellows... It is sand, sand now beneath our movement... The stars fade out as the darkness is diluted to a morning full of sunrise... Swaths of shade ahead, desert trees within them... Ride for the dark... Crashing through... Bright birds burst forth, complain, resettle... Among the thickening trees . Darker the ground, narrower the way... Palm fronds shrfnk to hand-size, barks darken... A twist to the right, a widening of the way... Our hoofs striking sparks from cobblestones... The lane enlarges, becomes a tree-lined street... Tiny row-houses flash by... Bright shutters, marble steps, painted screens, set back beyond flagged walks... Passing, a horse-drawn cart, loaded with fresh vegetables... Human pedestrians turning to stare... A small buzz of voices... On... Passing beneath a bridge... Coursing the stream till it widens to river, taking it down to the sea...Thudding along the beach beneath a lemon sky, blue clouds studding... The silt, the wrack, the shells, the smooth anatomy of driftwood... White spray off the lime-colored sea... Racing, to where the place of waters ends at a terrace... Mounting, each step crumbling and roaring down behind, losing its identity, joined with the boom of the surf... Up, up to the flattopped, treegrown plain, a golden city shimmering, mirage-like, at its end... The city grows, darkens beneath a shadowy umbrella, its gray towers stretch upward, glass and metal flashing light through the murk... The towers begin to sway... The city falls in upon itself, soundlessly, as we pass... Towers the hand of oberon topple, dust boils, rises, is pinked by some lower glow... A gentle noise, as of a snuffed candle, drifting by... A dust storm, quickly falling, giving place to fog... Through it, the sounds of automobile horns... A drift, a brief lift, a break in the gray white, pearlwhite, shifting... Our hoofprints on a shoulder of highway... To the right, endless rows of unmoving vehicles... Pearlwhite, graywhite, drifting again... Directionless shrieks and wailings... Random flashes of light... Rising once more... The fogs lower and ebb... Grass, grass, grass... Clear now the sky, and delicate blue... A sun racing to set... Birds... A cow in the field, chewing, staring and chewing... Leaping a wooden fence to ride a country road... A sudden chill beyond the hill... The grasses are dry and snow's on the ground... Tin-roofed farmhouse atop a hill, curl of smoke above it... On... The hills rise up, the sun rolls down, darkness dragged behind... A sprinkle of stars... Here a house, set far back... There another, long driveway wound among old trees... Headlights... Off to the side of the road... Draw rein and let it pass... I wiped my brow, dusted my shirtfront and sleeves. I patted Drum's neck. The oncoming vehicle slowed as it neared me, and I could see the driver staring. I gave the reins a gentle movement and Drum began walking. The car braked to a halt and the driver called something after me, but I kept going. Moments later, I heard him drive off. It was country road for a time after that. I traveled at an easy pace, passing familiar landmarks, recalling other times. A few miles later and I came to another road, wider and better. I turned there, staying off on the shoulder to the right. The temperature continued to drop, but the cold air had a good clean taste to it. A sliced moon shone above the hills to my left. There were a few small clouds passing overhead, touched to the moon's quarter with a soft, dusty light. There was very little wind; an occasional stirring of branches, no more. After a time, I came to a series of dips in the road, telling me I was almost there. A curve and a couple more dips... I saw the boulder beside the driveway, I read my address upon it. I drew rein then and looked up the hill. There was a station wagon in the driveway and a light on inside the house. I guided Drum off the road and across a field into a stand of trees. I tethered him behind a pair of evergreens, rubbed his neck and told him I would not be long. I returned to the road. No cars in sight. I crossed over and walked up the far side of the driveway, passing behind the station wagon. The only light in the house was in the living room, off to the right. I made my way around the left side of the house to the rear. I halted when I reached the patio, looking around. Something was wrong. The back yard was changed. A pair of decaying lawn chairs which had been leaning against a dilapidated chicken coop I had never bothered to remove, were gone. So, for that matter, was the chicken coop. They had been present the last time I had passed this way. All of the dead tree limbs which had previously been strewn about, as well as a rotting mass of them I had long ago heaped to cut for firewood, were also gone. The compost heap was missing. I moved to the space where it had been. All that was there was an irregular patch of bare earth of the approximate shape of the heap itself. But I had discovered in attuning myself to the Jewel that I could make myself feel its presence. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to do so. Nothing. I looked again, searching carefully, but there was no telltale glitter anywhere in sight. Not that I had really expected to see anything, not if I could not feel it nearby. There had been no curtains in the lighted room. Studying the house now, I saw that none of the windows had curtains, shades, shutters or blinds. Therefore... I passed around the other end of the house. Approaching the first lighted window, I glanced in quickly. Dropcloths covered much of the floor. A man in cap and coveralls was painting the far wall. Of course. I had asked Bill to sell the place, I had signed the necessary papers while a patient in the local clinic, when I had been projected back to my old house -- probably by some action of the Jewel -- on the occasion of my stabbing. That would have been several weeks ago, local time, using the Amber to shadow Earth conversion factor of approximately two and a half to one and allowing for the eight days the Courts of Chaos had cost me in Amber. Bill, of course, had gone ahead on my request. But the place had been in bad shape, abandoned as it had been for a number of years, vandalized... It needed some new window panes, some roofing work, new guttering, painting, sanding, buffing. And there had been a lot of trash to haul away, outside as well as inside... I turned away and walked down the front slope to the road, recalling my last passage this way, halfdelirious, on my hands and knees, blood leaking from my side. It had been much colder that night and there had been snow on the ground and in the air. I passed near the spot where' I'd sat, trying to flag down a car with a pillow case. The memory was slightly blurred, but I still recalled the ones that had passed me by. I crossed the road, made my way through the field to the trees. Unhitching Drum, I mounted. "We've some more riding ahead," I told him. "Not too far this time." We headed back to the road and started along it, continuing on past my house. If I had not told Bill to go ahead and sell the place, the compost heap would still have been there, the Jewel would still have been there. I could be on my way back to Amber with the ruddy stone hung about my neck, ready to have a try at what had to be done. Now, now I had to go looking for it, when I'd a feeling time was beginning to press once again. At least, I had a favorable ratio here with respect to its passage in Amber. I clucked at Drum and shook the reins. No sense wasting time, even so. A half hour, and I was into town, riding down a quiet street in a residential area, houses all about me. The lights were on at Bill's place. I turned up his driveway. I left Drum in his back yard. Alice answered my knock, stared a moment, then said, "My God! Carl!" Minutes later, I was seated in the living room with Bill, a drink on the table to my right. Alice was out in the kitchen, having made the mistake of asking me whether I wanted something to eat. Bill studied me as he lit his pipe. "Your ways of coming and going still tend to be colorful," he said. I smiled. "Expediency is all," I said. "That nurse at the clinic... Scarcely anyone believed her story." "Scarcely anyone?" "The minority I refer to is, of course, myself." "What was her story?" "She claimed that you walked to the center of the room, became two-dimensional and just faded away, like the old soldier that you are, with a rainbow-like accompaniment." "Glaucoma can cause the rainbow symptom. She ought to have her eyes checked." "She did," he said. "Nothing wrong." "Oh. Too bad. The next thing that comes to mind is neurological." "Come on, Carl. She's all right. You know that." I smiled and took a sip of my drink. "And you," he said, "you look ' like a certain playing card I once commented on. Complete with sword. What's going on, Carl?" "It's still complicated," I said. "Even more than the last time we talked." "Which means you can't give me that explanation yet?" I shook my head. "You have won an all-expense tour of my homeland, when this is over," I said, "if I still have a homeland then. Right now, time is doing terrible things." "What can I do to help you?" "Information, please. My old house. Who is the guy you having fixing the place up?" "Ed Wellen. Local contractor. You know him, I think. Didn't he put in a shower for you, or something?" "Yes, yes he did... I remember. ' ' "He's expanded quite a bit. Bought some heavy equipment. Has a number of fellows working for him now. I handled his incorporation." "Do you know who he's got working at my place -- now?" "Offhand, no. But I can find out in just a minute." He moved his hand to rest on the telephone on the side table. "Shall I give him a ring?" "Yes," I said, "but there is a little more to it than that. There is only one thing in which I am truly interested. There was a compost heap in the back yard. It was there the last time I passed this way. It is gone now. I have to find out what became of it." He cocked his head to the right and grinned around his pipe. "You serious?" he finally said. "Sure as death," I said. "I hid something in that heap when I crawled by, decorating the snow with my precious bodily fluids. I've got to have it back now." "Just what is it?" "A ruby pendant." "Priceless, I suppose." "Your're right." He nodded, slowly. "If it were anyone else, I would suspect a practical joke," he said. "A treasure in a compost heap... Family heirloom?" "Yes. Forty or fifty carats. Simple setting. Heavy chain." He removed his pipe and whistled softly. "Mind if I ask why you put it there?" "I'd be dead now if I hadn't." "Pretty good reason." He reached for the phone again. "We've had some action on the house already," he remarked. "Pretty good, since I haven't advertised yet. Fellow'd heard from someone who'd heard from someone else. I took him over this morning. He's thinking about it. We may move it pretty quick." He began to dial. "Wait," I said. "Tell me about him." He cradled the phone, looked up. "Thin guy," he said. "Redhead. Had a beard. Said he was an artist. Wants a place in the country." "Son of a bitch!" I said, just as Alice came into the room with a tray. She made a tsking sound and smiled as she delivered it to me. "Just a couple hamburgers and some leftover salad," she said. "Nothing to get excited about." "Thank you. I was getting ready to eat my horse. I'd have felt bad afterwards." "I don't imagine he'd have been too happy about it himself. Enjoy," she said, and returned to the kitchen. "Was the compost heap still there when you took him over?" I asked. He closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. "No," he said after a moment. "The yard was already clear." "That's something, anyway," I said, and I began eating. He made the call, and he talked for several minutes. I got the drift of things from his end of the conversation, but I listened to the entire thing after he had hung up, while I finished the food and washed it down with what was left in my glass. "He hated to see good compost go to waste," Bill said. "So he pitched the heap into his pickup just the other day and took it out to his farm. He dumped it next to a plot he intends to cultivate, and he has not had a chance to spread it yet. Says he did not notice any jewelry, but then he could easily have missed it." I nodded. "If I can borrow a flashlight, I had better get moving." "Sure. I will drive you out," he said. "I do not want to be parted from my horse at this point." "Well, you will probably want a rake, and a shovel or a pitchfork. I can drive them out and meet you there, if you know where the place is." "I know where Ed's place is. He must have tools, though." Bill shrugged and smiled. "All right," I said. "Let me use your bathroom, and then we had better get moving." "You know where it is. -- By the way, you seemed as if you knew the prospective buyer." I put the tray aside and rose. "You heard of him last as Brandon Corey." "The guy who pretended to be your brother and got you committed?" " 'Pretended' hell! He is my brother. No fault of mine, though. Excuse me." "He was there." "Where?" "Ed's place, this afternoon. At least a bearded redhead was." "Doing what?" "Said he was an artist. Said he wanted permission to set up his easel and paint in one of the fields." "And Ed let him?" "Of course. Thought it was a great idea. That is why he told me about it. Wanted to brag." "Get the stuff. I will meet you there." "Right." The second thing I took out in the bathroom was my Trumps. I had to reach someone in Amber soonest, someone strong enough to stop him. But who? Benedict was on his way to the Courts of Chaos, Random was off looking for his son. I had just parted with Gerard on somewhat less than amicable terms. I wished that I had a Trump for Ganelon. I decided that I would have to try Gerard. I drew forth his card, performed the proper mental maneuvers. Moments later, I had contact. "Corwin!" "Just listen, Gerard! Brand is alive, if that is any consolation. I'm damn sure of that. This is important. Life and death. You've got to do something -- fast!" His expressions had changed rapidly while I had spoken -- anger, surprise, interest... "Go ahead," he said. "Brand could be coming back very soon. In fact, he may already be in Amber. You haven't seen him yet, have you?" "No." "He must be stopped from walking the Pattern." "I do not understand. But I can post a guard outside the chamber of the Pattern." "Put the guard inside the chamber. He has strange ways of coming and going now. Terrible things may happen if he walks the Pattern." "I will watch it personally then. What is happening?" "No time now. Here is the next thing: Is Llewella back in Rebma?" "Yes, she is." "Get hold of her with her Trump. She's got to warn Moire that the Pattern in Rebma has to be guarded also." "How serious is this, Corwin?" "It could be the end of everything," I said. "I have to go now." I broke the contact and headed for the kitchen and the back door, stopping only long enough to thank Alice and say good night. If Brand got hold of the Jewel and attuned himself to it, I was not certain what he would do, but I had a pretty strong hunch. I mounted Drum and turned him toward the road. Bill was already backing out of the driveway. XI. I cut through fields in many places where Bill had to follow the roads, so I was not all that far behind him. When I drew up, he was talking with Ed, who was gesturing toward the southwest. As I dismounted, Ed was studying Drum. "Nice horse, that," he said. "Thanks." "You've been away." "Yes." We shook hands. "Good to see you again. I was just telling Bill that I don't really know how long that artist stayed around. I just figured he would go away when it got dark, and I didn't pay too much attention. Now, if he was really looking for something of yours and knew about the compost heap, he could still be out there for all I know. I'll get my shotgun, if you like, and go with you." "No," I said, "thanks. I think I know who it was. The gun will not be necessary. WeTl just walk over and do a little poking around." "Okay," he said. "Let me come along and give you a hand." "You don't have to do that," I said. "How about your horse, then? What say I give him a drink and something to eat, clean him up a bit?" "I'm sure he'd be grateful. I know I would." "What's his name?" "Drum." He approached Drum and began making friends with him. "Okay," he said. "I'll be back in the barn for awhile. If you need me for anything, just holler." "Thanks." I got the tools out of Bill's car and he carried the electric lantern, leading me off to the southwest where Ed had been pointing earlier. As we crossed the field, I followed the beam of Bill's light, searching for the heap. When I saw what might be the remains of one, I drew a deep breath, involuntarily. Someone must have been at it, the way the clods were strewn about. The mass would not have been dumped from a truck to fall in such a dispersed fashion. Still... The fact that someone had looked did not mean he had located what he had been seeking. "What do you think?" Bill said. "I don't know," I told him, lowering the tools to the ground and approaching the largest aggregate in sight. "Give me some light here." I scanned what remained of the heap, then fetched a rakeand began taking it apart. I broke each clod and spread it upon the ground, running the tines through it. After a time. Bill set the lantern at a good angle and moved to help me. "I've got a funny feeling..." he said. "So do I." "... That we may be too late." We kept at it, pulverizing and spreading, pulverizing and spreading... I felt the tingle of a familiar presence. I straightened and waited. Contact came moments later. "Corwin!" "Here, Gerard." "What'd you say?" said Bill. I raised my hand to silence him and gave my attention to Gerard. He stood in shadow at the bright beginning of the Pattern, leaning upon his great blade. "You were right," he said. "Brand did show up here, just a moment ago. I am not sure how he got in. He stepped out of the shadows off to the left, there." He gestured. "He looked at me for a moment, then turned around and walked back. He did not answer when I hailed him. So I turned up the lantern, but he was nowhere in sight. He just disappeared. What do you want me to do now?" "Was he wearing the Jewel of Judgment?" "I could not tell. I only had sight of him for a moment, in this bad light." "Are they watching the Pattern in Rebma now?" "Yes. Llewella's alerted them." "Good. Stay on guard, then. I will be in touch again." "All right. Corwin -- About what happened earlier..." "Forget it." "Thanks. That Ganelon is one tough fellow." "Indeed," I said. "Stay awake." His image faded as I released the contact, but a strange thing happened then. The sense of contact, the path, remained with me, objectless, open, like a switched-on radio not tuned to anything. Bill was looking at me peculiarly. "Carl, what is happening?" "I don't know. Wait a minute." Suddenly, there was contact again, though not with Gerard. She must have been trying to reach me while my attention was diverted. "Corwin, it is important..." "Go ahead, Fi." "You will not find what you are looking for there. Brand has it." "I was beginning to suspect as much." "We have to stop him. I do not know how much you know about these matters -- " "Neither do I anymore," I said, "but I have the Pattern in Amber and the one in Rebma under gilard. Gerard just told me that Brand appeared at the one in Amber, but was scared off." She nodded her small, finefeatured face. Her red tresses were unusually disarrayed. She looked tired. "I am aware of this," she said. "I have him under surveillance. But you have forgotten another possibility." "No," I said. "According to my calculations, Tir-na Nog'th should not be attainable yet -- " "That is not what I was referring to. He is headed for the primal Pattern itself." "To attune the Jewel?" "The first time through," she said. "To walk it, he would have to pass through the damaged area. I gather that is more than a little difficult." "So you do know about it," she said. "Good. That saves time. The dark area would not trouble him the way it would another of us. He has come to terms with that darkness. We must stop him, now." "Do you know any shortcuts to that place?" "Yes. Come to me. I will take you there." "Just a minute. I want Drum with me." "What for?" "No telling. That is why I want him." "Very well. Then bring me through. We can as easily depart from there as from here." I extended my hand. In a moment, I held hers. She stepped forward. "Lord!" said Bill, drawing back. "You were giving me doubts about your sanity, Carl. Now it's mine I wonder about. She -- She's on one of the cards, too, isn't she?" "Yes. Bill, this is my sister Fiona. Fiona, this is Bill Roth, a. very good friend." Fi extended her hand and smiled, and I left them there while I went back to fetch Drum. A few minwtes later, I led him forth. "Bill," I said, "I am sorry to have wasted your time. My brother has the thing. We are going after him now. Thanks for helping me." I shook his hand. He said, "Corwin." I smiled. "Yes, that is my name." "We have been talking, your sister and I. Not much I could learn in a few minutes, but I know it is dangerous. So good luck. I still want the whole story one day." "Thanks," I said. "I will try to see that you get it." I mounted, leaned down and drew Fiona up before me. "Good night. Mister Roth," she said. Then, to me, "Start riding, slowly, across the field." I did. "Brand says you are the one who stabbed him," I said, as soon as we had gone far enough to feel alone. "That's right." "Why?" "To avoid all this." "I talked with him for a long while. He claimed it was originally you, Bleys and himself, together in a scheme to seize power. ' ' "That is correct." "He told me he had approached Caine, trying to win him to your side, but that Caine would have none of it, that Caine had passed the word along to Eric and Julian. And this led to their forming their own group, to block your way to the throne." "That is basically correct. Caine had ambitions of his own -- longterm ones -- but ambitions nevertheless. He was in no position to pursue them, however. So he decided that if his lot was to be a lesser one, he would rather serve it under Eric than under Bleys. I can see his point, too." "He also claimed that the three of you had a deal going with the powers at the end of the black road, in the Courts of Chaos." "Yes," she said, "we did." "You use the past tense." "For myself and for Bleys, yes." "That is not the way Brand tells it." "He wouldn't." "He said you and Bleys wanted to continue exploiting that alliance, but that he had had a change of heart. Because of this, he claims you turned on him and imprisoned him in that tower." "Why didn't we just kill him?" "I give up. Tell me." "He was too dangerous to be allowed his freedom, but we could not kill him either because he held something vital." "What?"' "With Dworkin gone. Brand was the only one who knew how to undo the damage he had done to the primal Pattern." "You had a long time to get that information out of him." "He possesses unbelievable resources." "Then why did you stab him?" "I repeat, to avoid all this. If it became a question of his freedom or his death, it were better he died. We would have to take our chances on figuring the method of repairing the Pattern." "This being the case, why did you consent to cooperate in bringing him back?" "First, I was not cooperating, I was trying to impede the attempt. But there were too many trying too hard. You got through to him in spite of me. Second, I had to be on hand to try to kill him in the event you succeeded. Too bad things worked out the way they did." "You say that you and Bleys had second thoughts about the alliance, but that Brand did not?" "Yes." "How did your second thoughts affect your desire for the throne?" "We thought we could manage it without any additional outside help." "I see." "Do you believe me?" "I'm afraid that I am beginning to." "Turn here." I entered a cleft in a hillside. The way was narrow and very dark, with only a small band of stars above us. Fiona had been manipulating Shadow while we had talked, leading us from Ed's field downward, into a misty, moor-like place, then up again, to a clear and rocky trail among mountains. Now, as we moved through the dark defile, I felt her working with Shadow again. The air was cool but not cold. The blackness to our left and our right was absolute, giving the illusion of enormous depths, rather than nearby rock cloaked in shadow. This impressipn was reinforced, I suddenly realized, by the fact that Drum's hoofbeats were not producing any echoes, aftersounds, overtones. "What can I do to gain your trust?" she said. "That's asking quite a bit." She laughed. "Let me rephrase it. What can I do to convince you I am telling the truth?" "Just answer one question." "What?" "Who shot out my tires?" She laughed again. "You've figured it out, haven't you?"  "Maybe. You tell me." "Brand," she said. "He had failed in his effort to destroy your memory, so he decided he had better do a more thorough job." "The version I had of the story was that Bleys had done the shooting and left me in the lake, that Brand had arrived in time to drag me out and save my life. In fact, the police report seemed to indicate something to that effect." "Who called the police?" she asked. "They had it listed as an anonymous call, but -- " "Bleys called them. He couldn't reach you in time to save you, once he realized what was happening. He hoped that they could. Fortunately, they did." "What do you mean?" "Brand did not drag you out of the wreck. You did it yourself. He waited around to be certain you were dead, and you surfaced and pulled yourself ashore. He went down and was checking you over, to decide whether you would die if he just left you there or whether he should throw you back in again. The police arrived about then and he had to clear out. We caught up with him shortly afterwards and were able to subdue him and imprison him in the tower. That took a lot of doing. Later, I contacted Eric and told him what had happened. He then ordered Flora to put you in the other place and see that you were held until after his coronation." "It fits," I said. "Thanks." "What does it fit?" "I was only a small-town GP in simpler times than these, and I never had much to do with psychiatric cases. But I do know that you don't give a person electroshock generally does just the opposite. It destroys some of the short-term ones. My suspicions began to stir when I learned that that was what Brand had had done to me. So I came up with my own hypothesis. The auto wreck did not restore my I had finally begun recovering them naturally, not as the result of any particular trauma. I must have done something or said something to indicate that this was occurring. Word of it somehow got to Brand and he decided that this would nor be a good thing to have happen at that time. So he journeyed to my shadow and managed to get me committed and subjected to treatment which he hoped would wipe out those things I had recently recovered. This was just partly successful, in that its only lasting effect was to fuzz me up for the few days surrounding the sessions. The accident may have contributed, too. But when I escaped from Porter and lived through his attempt to kill me, the process of recovery continued after I regained consciousness in Greenwood and left the place. I was remembering more and more when I was staying at Flora's. The recovery was accelerated by Random's taking me to Rebma, where I walked the Pattern. If this had not occurred, however, I am convinced now that it would all have come back, aijyway. It might have taken somewhat longer, but I had broken through and the remembering was an ongoing process, coming faster and faster near the end. So I concluded that Brand was trying to sabotage me, and that is what fits the things you just told me." The band of stars had narrowed, and it finally vanished above us. We advanced through what seemed a totally black tunnel now, with perhaps the tiniest flickering of light a great distance ahead of us. "Yes," she said in the darkness before me, "you guessed correctly. Brand was afraid of you. He claimed he had seen your return one night in Tir-na Nog'th, to the undoing of all our plans. I paid him no heed at the time, for I was not even aware you still lived. It must have been then that he set out to find you. Whether he divined our whereabouts by some arcane means or simply saw it in Eric's mind, I do not know. Probably the latter. He is occasionally capable of such a feat. However he located you, you now know the rest." "It was Flora's presence in that place and her strange liaison with Eric that first made him suspicious. Or so he said. Not that it matters, now. What do you propose doing with him if we get our hands on him?" She chuckled. "You are wearing your blade," she said. "Brand told me, not all that long ago, that Bleys is still alive. Is this true?" "Yes." "Then why am I here, rather than Bleys?" "Bleys is not attuned to the Jewel. You are. You interact with it at near distances, and it will attempt to preserve your life if you are in imminent danger of losing it. The risk, therefore, is not as great," she said. Then, moments later, "Don't take it for granted, though. A swift stroke can still beat its reaction. You can die in its presence." The light ahead grew larger, brighter, but there were no drafts, sounds or smells from that direction. Advancing, I thought of the layers upon layers of explanations I had received since my return, each with its own complex of motivations, justifications for what had happened while I was away, for what had happened since, for what was happening now. The emotions, the plans, the feelings, the objectives I had seen swirled like floodwater through the city of facts I was slowly erecting on the grave of my other self, and though an act is an act, in the best Steinian tradition, each wave of interpretation that broke upon me shifted the position of one or more things I had thought safely anchored, and by this brought about an alteration of the whole, to the extent that all of life seemed almost a shifting interplay of Shadow about the Amber of some never-to-be-attained truth. Still, I could not deny that I knew more now than I had several years earlier, that I was closer to the heart of matters than I had been before, that the entire action in which I had been caught up upon my return seemed now to be sweeping toward some final resolution. And what did I want? A chance to find out what was right and a chance to act on it! I laughed. Who is ever granted the first, let alone the second of these? A workable . approximation of truth, then. That would be enough. -- And a chance to swing my blade a few times in the right direction: The highest compensation I could receive from a one o'clock world for the changes wrought since noon. I laughed again and made sure my blade was loose in the sheath. "Brand said that Bleys had raised another army -- " I began. "Later," she said, "later. There is no more time." And she was right. The light had grown large, become a circular opening. It had approached at a rate out of proportion to our advance, as though the tunnel itself were contracting. It seemed to be daylight that was rushing in through what I chose to regard as the cavemouth. "All right," I said, and moments later we reached the opening and passed through it. I blinked my eyes as we emerged. To my left was the sea, which seemed to merge with the same-colored sky. The golden sun which floatedhung abovewithin it, all directions. Behind me, now, there was nothing but rock. Our passage to this place had vanished without a sign. Not too far below and before me -- perhaps a hundred feet distant -- lay the primal Pattern. A figure was negotiating the second of its outer arcs, his attention so confined by this activity that he had apparently not yet noted our presence. A flash of red as he took a turn: the Jewel, hanging now from his neck as it had hung from mine, from Eric's, from Dad's. The figure, of course, was Brand's. I dismouted. I looked up at Fiona, small and distraught, and I placed Drum's reins in her hand. "Any advice, other than to go after him?" I whispered. She shook her head. Turning then, I drew Grayswandir and' strode forward. "Good luck," she said softly. As I walked toward the Pattern, I saw the long chain, leading from the cavemouth to the now still form of the griffin Wixer. Wixer's head lay on the ground several paces to the left of his body. Body and head both leaked a normal colored blood upon the stone. As I approached the beginning of the Pattern, I did a quick calculation. Brand had already taken several turns about the general spiral of the design. He was approximately two and a half laps into it. If we were only separated by one winding, I could reach him with my blade once I achieved a position paralleling his own. The going, however, got rougher the further one penetrated the design. Consequently, Brand was moving at a steadily decreasing pace. So it would be close. I did not have to catch him. I just had to pick up a lap and a half and obtain a position across from him. I placed my foot upon the Pattern and moved forward, as fast as I was able. The blue sparks began about my feet as I rushed through the first curve against the rising resistance. The sparks grew quickly. My hair was beginning to rise when I hit the First Veil, and the crackling of the sparks was quite audible now. I pushed on against the pressure of the Veil, wondering whether Brand had noticed me yet, unable to afford the distraction of a glance in his direction just then. I met the resistance with increased force, and several steps later I was through the Veil and moving more easily again. I looked up. Brand was just emerging from the terrible Second Veil, blue sparks as high as his waist. He was grinning a grin of resolve and triumph as he pulled free and took a clear step forward. Then he saw me. The grin went away and he hesitated, a point in my favor. You never stop on the Pattern if you can help it. If you do, it costs a lot of extra energy to get moving again. "You are too late!" he called out. "I did not answer him. I just kept moving. Blue fires fell from the Pattern tracery along Grayswandir's length. "You will not make it through the black," he said. I kept going. The dark area was just ahead of me now. I was glad that it had not occurred over one of the more difficult portions of the Pattern this time around. Brand moved forward and slowly began his movement toward the Grand Curve. If I could catch him there, it would be no contest. He would not have the strength or the speed to defend himself. As I approached the damaged portion of the Pattern, I recalled the means by which Ganelon and I had cut the black road on our flight from Avalon. I had succeeded in breaking the power of the road by holding the image of the Pattern in my mind as we had gone across. Now, of course, I had the Pattern itself all around me, and the distance was not nearly so great. While my first thought had been that Brand was simply trying to rattle me with his threat, it occurred to me that the force of the dark place might well be much stronger here at its source. As I came up to it, Grayswandir blazed with a sudden intensity which outshone its previous light. On an impulse, I touched its point to the edge of the blackness, at the place where the Pattern ended. Grayswandir clove to the blackness and could not be raised above it. I continued forward, and my blade sliced the area before me, sliding ahead in what seemed an approximation of the original tracery. I followed. The sun seemed to darken as I trod the dark ground. I was suddenly conscious of my heartbeat, and perspiration formed on my brow. A grayish cast fell over everything. The world seemed to dim, the Pattern to fade. It seemed it would be easy to step amiss in this place, and I was not certain whether the result would be the same as a misstep within the intact portions of the Pattern. I did not want to find out. I kept my eyes low, following the line Grayswandir was inscribing before me, the blade's blue fire now the only thing of color left to the world. Right foot, left foot... Then suddenly I was out of it and Grayswandir swung free in my hand once again, the fires partly diminished, whether by contrast with the reilluminated prospect or for some other reason I did not know. Looking about, I saw that Brand was approaching the Grand Curve. As for me, I was working my way toward the Second Veil. We would both be involved in the strenuous efforts these entailed in a few more minutes. The Grand Curve is more difficult, more prolonged than the Second Veil, however. I should be free and moving more quickly again before he worked his way through the barrier. Then I would have to cross the damaged area another time. He might be free by then, but he would be moving more slowly than I would, for he would be into the area where the going becomes even more difficult. A steady static arose with each step that I took, and a tingling sensation permeated my entire body. The sparks rose to mid-thigh as I moved. It was like striding through a field of electric wheat. My hair was at least partly risen by then. I could feel its stirring. I glanced back once to see Fiona, still mounted, unmoving, watching. I pressed ahead to the Second Veil. Angles... Short, sharp turns... The force rose and rose against me, so that all of my attention, all of my strength was now occupied in striving against it. There came again that familiar sense of timelessness, as though this was all I had ever done, all that I ever would do. And will... A focussing of desire to such an intensity that everything else was excluded... Brand, Fiona, Amber, my own identity... The sparks rose to even greater heights as I struggled, turned, labored, each step requiring more effort than the previous one. I pushed through. Right into the black area again. Reflexively, I moved Grayswandir down and ahead once more. Again, the grayness, the monochrome fog, cut by the blue of my blade opening the way before me like a surgical incision. When I emerged into normal light, I sought Brand. He was still in the western quadrant. Struggling with the Grand Curve, about twothirds of the way through it. If I pushed hard, I might be able to catch him just as he was coming out of it. I threw all of my strength into moving as quickly as possible. As I made it to the north end of the Pattern and into the curve leading back, it struck me suddenly what I was about to do. I was rushing to spill more blood upon the Pattern. If it came to a simple choice between further damage to the Pattern and Brand's destroying it utterly, then I knew what I had to do. Yet, I felt there had to be another way. Yes... I slowed my pace just a trifle. It was going to be a matter of timing. His passage was a lot rougher than mine just then, so I had an edge in that respect. My entire new strategy involved arranging our encounter at just the right point. Ironically, at that moment, I recalled Brand's concern for his rug. The problem of keeping this place clean was a lot trickier, though. He was nearing the end of the Grand Curve, and I paced him while calculating the distance to the blackness. I had decided to let him do his bleeding over the area which had already been damaged. The only disadvantage I seenied to possess was that I would be situated to Brand's right. To minimize the benefit this would give him when we crossed blades, I would have to remain somewhat to the rear. Brand struggled and advanced, all of his movements in slow motion. I struggled too, but not as hard. I kept the pace. I wondered as I went, about the Jewel, about the affinity we had shared since the attunement. I could feel its presence, there to my left and ahead, even though I could not see it now upon Brand's breast. Would it really act to save me across that distance should Brand gain the upper hand in our coming conflict? Feeling its presence, I could almost believe that it would. It had tom me from one assailant and found, somehow, within my mind, a traditional place of safety -- my own bed -- and had transported me there. Feeling it now, almost seeing the way before Brand through it, I felt some assurance that it would attempt to function on my behalf once again. Recalling Fiona's words, however, I was determined not to rely on it. Still, I considered its other functions, speculated upon my ability to operate it without contact... Brand had almost completed the Grand Curve. I reached out from some level of my being and made contact with the Jewel. Laying my will upon it, I called for a storm of the red tornado variety which had destroyed lago. I did not know whether I could control that particular phenomenon in this particular place, but I called for it nevertheless and directed it toward Brand. Nothing happened immediately, though I felt the Jewel functioning to achieve something. Brand came to the end, offered a final exertion and passed from the Grand Curve. I was right there behind him. He knew it, too -- somehow. His blade was out the instant the pressure was off, he gained a couple feet faster than I thought he could, got his left foot ahead of him, turned his body and met my gaze over the lines of our blades. "Damned if you didn't make it," he said, touching the tip of my blade with his own. "You would never have gotten here this soon if it weren't for the bitch on the horse, though." "Nice way to talk about your sister," I said, feinting and watching him move to parry. We were hampered, in that neither of us could lunge without departing the Pattern. I was further hampered in not wanting to make him bleed, yet. I faked a stop thrust and he drew back, sliding his left foot along the design to his rear. He withdrew his right then, stamped it and tried a head cut without preliminaries. Damn it! I parried and then riposted by pure reflex. I did not want to catch him with the chest cut I had thrown back at him, but the tip of Grayswandir traced an arc beneath his sternum. I heard a humming in the air above us. I could not, afford to take my eyes off Brand, though. He glanced downward and backed some more. Good. A red line now decorated his shirtfront where my cut had taken him. So far, the material seemed to be absorbing it. I stamped, feinted, thrust, parried, stop thrust, bound and unbound -- everything I could think of to keep him retreating. I had the psychological edge on him in that I had the greater reach and we both knew I could do more things with it, more quickly. Brand was nearing the dark area. Just a few more paces... I heard a sound like a single bell chime, followed by a great roaring. A shadow suddenly fell upon us, as though a cloud had just occluded the sun. Brand glanced up. I think I could have gotten him Just then, but he was still a couple feet too far from the target area. He recovered immediately and glared at me. "Damn you, Corwin! That's yours, isn't it?" he cried, and then he attacked, discarding what caution he still possessed. Unfortunately, I was in a bad position, as I had been edging up on him, preparing to press him the rest of the way back. I was exposed and slightly off-balance. Even as I parried, I realized it would not be sufficient, and I twisted and fell back. I struggled to keep my feet in place as I went down. I caught myself with my right elbow and my left hand. I cursed, as the pain was too much and my elbow slid to the side, dropping me to my right shoulder. But Brand's thrust had gone by me, and within blue haloes my feet still touched the line. I was, out of Brand's reach for a death-thrust, though he could still hamstring me. I raised my right arm, still clutching Grayswandir, before me. I began to sit up. As I did, I saw that the red formation, yellow about the edges, was now spinning directly above Brand, crackling with sparks and small lightnings, its roar now changed to a wailing. Brand took hold of his blade by the forte and raised it above his shoulder like a spear, pointed in my direction. I knew that I could not parry it, that I could not dodge it. With my mind, I reached out to the Jewel and up to the formation in the sky... There came a bright flash as a small finger of lightning reached down and touched his blade... The weapon fell from his hand and his hand flew to his mouth. With his left hand, he clutched at the jewel of Judgment, as if he realized what I was doing and sought to nullify it by covering the stone. Sucking his fingers, he looked upward, all of the anger draining from his face to be replaced by a look of fear verging on terror. The cone was beginning to descend. Turning then, he stepped onto the blackened area, faced south, raised both his arms and cried out something I could not hear above the wailing. The cone fell toward him, but he seemed to grow two-dimensional as it approached. His outline wavered. He began to shrink -- but it did not seem a function of actual size, so much as an effect of distancing. He dwindled, dwindled, was gone, a bare instant before the cone licked across the area he had occupied. With him went the Jewel, so that I was left with no way of controlling the thing above me.I did not know whether it was better to maintain a low profile or to resume a normal stance on the Pattern. I decided on the latter, because the whirlwind seemed to go for things which broke the normal sequence. I got back into a sitting position and edged over to the line. Then I leaned forward into a crouch, by which time the cone began to rise. The wailing retreated down the scale as it withdrew. The blue fires about my boots had subsided completely. I turned and looked to Fiona. She motioned me to get up and go on. So I rose slowly, seeing that the vortex above me continued to dissipate as I moved. Advancing upon the area where Brand had so recently stood, I once again used Grayswandir to guide me through. The twisted remains of Brand's blade lay near the far edge of the dim place. I wished there were some easy way out of the Pattern. It seemed pointless to complete it now. But there is no turning back once you have set foot upon it, and I was extremely leary of trying the dark route out. So I headed on toward the Grand Curve. To what place, I wondered, had Brand taken himself? If I knew, I could command the Pattern to send me after him, once I reached the center. Perhaps Fiona had an idea. Still, he would probably head for a place where he had allies. It would be senseless to pursue him alone. At least I had stopped the attunement, I consoled myself. Then I entered the Grand Curve. The sparks shot up about me.    about just what happened in the Soviet Union last summer and fall. According to one report the Soviets have developed a powerful laser system capable of blinding our infra-red detection satellites; according to another there was a large gas fire in Siberia and everyone got excited over nothing. No matter. Whatever happened in # there is no secret that the gaged in a technological race to develop large laser weapons. The death rays of #'s science fiction are coming, and someone 'will develop them. Let's take the opportunity to look at lasers, grasers, nasers, masers, and such other devices. First, all these gadgets have one thing in common. They produce coherent radiation through stimulated emission. That sounds elementary to about half my readers, and incomprehensible to the rest, so at the risk of boring some of you (we know of at least one Nobel prizewinner who regularly reads Galaxy) I'd better explain. Imagine a mob leaving a football stadium after a game. You could say that the stadium is radiating people. They walk at different speeds with different lengths of stride, and they go in different directions. Their motion is outward from the stadium, but otherwise unpredictable: it is incoherent. Now imagine that they all issue from the same stadium door; they march in step, each stride the same length, and they all go in the same direction. Coherent radiation is like that. It's all the same frequency (and thus if it is visible light is a very pure color); it goes in the same direction. Think of light as waves, and all the waves have their peaks and valleys at exactly the same time. The result is a very powerful beam. This is done by stimulated emission, and that takes a bit of explaining. All electromagnetic radiation involves photons. A very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible light. When the frequency gets too high, the light is no longer visible, and we call it ultra-violet. Higher frequencies yet are x-rays, gamma rays, and finally what are called cosmic rays. Below the red end of the spectrum is, not surprisingly, infra-red, which we can detect as heat. At lower frequencies still are radio, radar, and television. In theory at least a "laser" could be built which operated in any frequency from cosmic rays down through gamma rays (grasers) through visible light (lasers), down into the infra-red (IR), through the radio frequencies (masers), and finally down to the frequencies we use to send power through wires. However, since a #-cycle wave (which sometimes you hear as a hum if you put a cheap radio set near an electrical wire) has a wave-length something like # miles long, it's unlikely that anyone will ever want to build a device to stimulate radiation at that frequency. In practice we don't know how to build stimulated emission devices at all frequencies. One of the Navy's big problems is developing a powerful blue-green laser. Obviously such a device would be useful, because that's the frequency of light that best penetrates ocean water, and would let submarines look a long way ahead without giving off the characteristic "ping" of a sonar. There are, however, lasers at a number of visible light frequencies, masers which work the same way but in radio frequencies, and IR lasers which operate at the low edge of visibility. They work this way: Take some atoms that have the desired characteristics. Excite an electron, so that it jumps to a higher energy state. It absorbs a photon when it does that. Now "stimulate" the atom so that the electron will jump back to the lower energy state, giving up the captured photon as it does. That photon comes out at precisely the same frequency each time. Now get a lot of those atoms to do that at the same time, confine the photons so they can't get out except when going in exactly one direction, and you've got a coherent beam. Its frequency will depend on the kind of atoms you've excited. Note what we've done. We haven't created any energy. Instead, we've put in energy and got it out again. Since no process is # efficient, we've lost some of our input. On the other hand, the energy we put in wasn't coherent, and the output was. The energy input process is called "pumping". The first lasers, and many of those for sale commercially, are pumped by light. There are, however, a number of other ways to pump a laser. You can use electro-magnetic energy by surrounding the laser device with coils of wire and putting juice through them. You can also pump the laser directly through nuclear radiation, and we'll come back to that. If you want a portable laser, you might also come up with a mirror system that gathers sunlight, focusses it into your device, and converts it to laser energy. That's not too useful for military weapons unless by agreement you won't fight in the shade, but it could be a valuable technique. However you pump the laser, and whatever the frequency you're using, the result is a beam each of whose elements is exactly (well, almost exactly) parallel. One spacetracking system sends out a beam that hasn't fanned to more than a few meters at satellite altitudes. Thus you've concentrated a lot of energy into a very narrow beam. and that is why all the military interest. Of course there are a number of other applications that have nothing to do with war and destruction. Laser beams bouncing off the reflector Neil Armstrong left at Tranquility measure the Earth-Moon distance within fractions of a centimeter, and that allows tests of great importance to cosmologists -- one cosmological theory says that the universal constant of gravitation (G) isn't constant at all, but changes with time. Since the masses of Earth and Moon don't change much, a good test of whether or not G is changing is just how stable that Earth-Moon distance is. Incidentally, the last I heard the experimental results indicate that G is not changing, but stay tuned; there's just enough error in the observations to let a few cosmologists hang onto the G-is-changing theory. Most, however, seem to have given it up. We've all heard about some other civilian uses for lasers, such as communication, surveying instruments that need no flag-man and are a thousand times more accurate than the old transit-target-and-chain system, satellite tracking devices, laser surgery to bum out just the cells the physician wants killed without harming those on either side (and yes, lasers can be focussed that small), and all the rest. Lasers are one major reason for retiring the slide rule: laser accuracies allow manufacture of the electronic chips that are the heart of pocket computers. (It seems unfair, since the laser's inventor was a slide-rule addict, but there's nothing to be done about it. Dietzgen has gone out of the slide-rule business, and there you are. Progress.)    So. We have a source of narrowly focussed energy. Obviously, if we can get enough energy focussed into a narrow enough beam, we have a death ray. Add more and we have a disintegrator. The military advantages are enormous. No longer is there a time-of-flight problem. For all practical purposes your shot hits the instant it is fired, which means you don't need to track the target, whether it's a tank or an dead. Also, you've launched nothing, and you can refire your weapon as fast as you can pump up its atoms. You haven't contaminated your defense environment by blowing off chemical or atomic weapons and thus producing smoke or ionization or something else you can't see through. It shouldn't be any surprise that military people sponsor a very great deal of laser research. Most of it is secret and it takes a lot of digging to find out how well they're doing, but from hints that turn up here and there, laser weapons are doing quite well. A few years ago there were rumors that lasers were used to knock fist-sized holes in Army tanks at about a hundred feet. A year ago last fall I was told by a usually reliable source that the airplane-eating laser was proved out to be practical. Now we have the rumors of the Soviet laser blinding our IR satellites. Even if it didn't happen, it wouldn't be too surprising. As I write this there aren't too many details known. According to Aviation Week AW) a publication not generally known for being wrong, on several occasions the US IR-watching satellites were suddenly blinded by a very great deal of IRftequency energy coming into their receptors. That could happen in several ways. One, there was just a lot of IR coming up out of the Soviet Union. A very large fire, for example, would do it. Another way would be for a smaller amount of IR to be focussed exactly onto our satellite. Nothing could do that but a laser. Again according to AW, when this first happened US weather satellites were called on to show us the fire in Siberia. They hadn't seen their lower-altitude spy satellites (I don't know what they're called nowadays; they used to be called project listed in the Pentagon phone book, but if you dialled the number someone answered "Weather Observation") and it didn't find any fire. The AW article stirred up a fuss ("panic" was one of the milder words used to describe reactions in the aerospace industry) and there was subsequently a Department of Defense statement to the effect that nothing had happened, and someone else reported that it was all a big false alarm over a natural gas fire in word for everything they tell you -- you do, don't you? -- then that's all there is to the story. If you have an abnormal distrust who pointed out that the early warning satellites -- they're supposed to watch for the IR flare of Soviet synchronous altitude, and if you can shine enough energy on them at that altitude you're a long way toward burning holes into something at, that point the hackles start rising on the back of your neck, or they do on mine, and if you're not scared, maybe you'd better rethink the problem. And here I've got to say a few words about politics, and I hope I don't lose too much of my readership.    In this era of "overkill", surely no one but a madman would risk nuclear war. One hears that said until it becomes a part of one's mental furniture. Unfortunately, it isn't true. One need not be mad to begin nuclear war. One may quite rationally do it. Perhaps "rational" is the wrong word. Perhaps I should say "logically" instead. It all depends on whether or not you regard Marxism as "rational". Certainly good Marxists do, and in fact every Soviet university student is required to take some forty semester-hours of courses in the subject; and one of the tenets of Marxism is not only that it is rational, but that it is the only rational political philosophy. Marxism claims to be an objective science of history with predictive powers. Like Hari Seldon's Plan in the old Asimov Foundation series, Marxism doesn't pretend to be exact. Variations are possible, and even errors are possible; but Marxism is, say the Marxists, the only objective science of history, and in its broad predictions it is infallible. Marxism rejects any religiously-derived values and ethics and goals for the human race; Marxists have only one source of ethical values: to further progress, which is defined as moving toward the ultimate social order, namely the classless society. That which brings us nearer that goal is progressive and good. That which puts off man's final state is regressive, reactionary, and evil. No individual person is important, and indeed concern for individuals in preference to the ultimate historical goal is mere bourgeois sentimentality. This most emphatically does not mean that Marxists are villains or that they do not love their families and friends; only that to allow love for friends or families to stand in the way of progress is, by definition, regressive, reactionary, bourgeois, and condemnable. Therefore no Marxist could in conscience long as he could be certain that (#) the human race would survive it, and (#) the outcome would be the world revolution and the triumph of socialism. It is as if a convinced Christian were truly to believe that he could only bring about the Second Coming by starting Armageddon. Now naturally no one is going to rumor, or sloppy calculations. One precept of the Leninist branch of Marxism (one which I suspect Karl Marx would condemn, but I may be wrong) is "Do not endanger the homeland of Socialism.' This allows Marxists to be good Russian patriots, and certainly tempers reckless adventurism. However, it is not required for all of the Soviet Union enough lives through to bring the Revolution and its attendent benefits to all mankind. What is enough might in theory be a scientific question (to Marxists all social problems are scientific questions) but in the real world any decision is likely to be affected by the normal sentiments of mankind, or at least one sincerely hopes so. Note, though, that such influence is intellectually condemned, and that the more educated the Soviet citizen, the more intellectual training in Marxism he has enjoyed. So. Have we demonstrated that it would be rational to begin WW IE provided only that the military authorities could assure the Presidium that (#) the Soviets would survive, and (#) there would be no effective opposition to communism throughout the world; and that this is entirely independent of the level of casualties the Soviet Union and the rest of the world might sustain? Now I am not insane enough to think that most Soviet citizens, or even most Party members, think that way; but they are supposed to think that way, they teach their university students to think that way, and some of them talk as if they really think that way; and there is no intellectually acceptable argument within the confines of Marxism to refute the proposition. Thus, what happens if one morning the Marshal of the Soviet Union reports that "If the war begins tomorrow, we will lose # of our population. We will retain at least # of our industry. The Red Army will occupy all of Europe to the Atlantic coast within # weeks. The United States, Canada, Australia,, and New Zealand will effectively cease to exist and certainly will have no military power whatever. China will be neutralized and if it becomes necessary will be reduced to the stone age. What are your orders?" In my judgment that would not be a safe world to live in because someone in the Presidium might well find it tempting -- and would the others have effective arguments? Be powerful enough to halt the truly convinced Marxists? It seems to me a bad gamble, and far better for all of us that we never give the Suslov's of this world such a temptation.    Nonsense. Idiocy. Etc. Pournelle has finally gone off his rocker, and probably was deranged all the time. In the first place, no one could imagine keeping national power after losing # of their population. But they took losses of over # in WW II and emerged infinitely more powerful when the war ended than when it began. Even so. There's no way to hold casualties that low. The US has milwould end civilization and indeed very nearly exterminate mankind; certainly it would end that techological civilization that you, Pournelle, are so proud of and from which you expect such great things. I wish I believed that. Unfortunately I know better. There is a way to fight strategic nuclear war. There is a war plan that will neutralize most of those US weapons. I'm giving away no secrets by describing it. First, suppose we get rid of the airplanes, or at least don't replace the poor old B-#'s which were, after all, designed in the post-WW era and were built in the #'s. Second, note that of our missile subs, many are in harbor at any given time, and can't get out on less than a couple hours' notice. Scratch half the sub force, killed in harbor. Next, imagine that the Soviets have many more subs than we do (and in fact according to Jane' s they do) and that they routinely send them out to follow our misslie boats around (as, I am told, they now do). Scratch more of the sub fleet. If we're lucky maybe ten subs will get off their birds. That's about # missiles; not an impossible number to intercept if you've got laser weapons. We'll come back to that in a moment. But there are all those Minuteman and Titan missiles. Yes: # in all, # Titan and # Minuteman. All land based. All in locations mapped precisely down to the last inch. (I could obtain such maps with a few hundred dollars and a summer of work, and if I could we may be sure the Soviets have done it.) The land-based missiles ean be dealt with. The technique is ealled pin-down, and it works this way. First, blind the IR satellites, so that the first indication that anything is coming out of the Soviet Union is from B-Mews at Fairbanks, Gander, Thule, etc. If you want to be really sneaky fire the first shots from submarines. In any event with targeted Re-entry Vehicles) you need only one bird to drop a warhead at each Minuteman and Titan complex. Explode the warheads at optimum burst height. Repeat every five minutes. One warhead explodes over each missiles farm. I don't know the exact time of powered flight for Minuteman but it's easy to show that it has to be more than four minutes, and Titan has about the same rise time. The birds are very vulnerable during boost-phase. It doesn't take a lot of disturbance to knock them way off course -- after all, a tiny nudge at this end is miles and miles after incontinental flight. Not one of those birds is going to hit its designated target. Meanwhile, behind that train of one-every-four-minutes pindown missiles there comes a wave of Insanity? Yes, in the sense that it's hard to imagine sane people doing it. No, in that it makes perfect sense if you believe the only destiny of man is to achieve the classless society, and the United States is the only obstacle in the way of eternal peace and happiness for all. What evidence have we that anyone might do this? Only that when the US decided we had "enough" -- that is, had achieved nuclear sufficiency -- we stopped building birds. We haven't put a new missile into a silo in a decade. It was thought that one reason for "international tension" was that the Soviets felt strategically inferior to us. They were nervous because we might be contemplating preventive or pre-emptive war. All that would vanish when they achieved parity. Therefore, we stop building strategic weapons and let them catch up. They caught up. They kept going. They've got a lot more birds than we tlo, and as best I can tell, they're building them still. What for? It's a costly effort and of no rational value -- unless you define rational as I just have.    So now what? Should the US spend a great deal more money on nuclear weapons? Increase our over-kill capability? (Note that if you assume you'll lose part of your force because you intend to let the other guy attack first, you need "overkill" in order to have "sufficiency". Note also that the Soviets have long since gone past us in "overkill" capacity, and are still with birds.) I won't pretend to knowledge of optimum strategic mix. I'm far out of date and intend to stay that way -- don't want a clearance. I'd rather be able to say what I want without worry. It's certainly possible that we need some new strategic offense weapons, and to update those we have. I do, however, have strong feelings about concentrating entirely on offensive weapons. Air Force generals have long downgraded strategic defense. Air war strategists are taught "nobody ever won a war by protecting himself' and similar maxims. Defensive weapons are no doubt a fine thing, but mostly they suck up scarce defense funds that should be going into weapons we can use to knock out the other guy before he can do any harm to our people. Given a good enough strategic offense, we won't need defensive weapons because either we will have deterred the other guy so he doesn't start the war in the first place, or he will be knocked out quickly and effectively if he does. So say a number of generals. I have never agreed. I don't agree now. I believe a defensive arms race makes enormous sense. Yes, and I supported the too, even though I knew full well that Spartan wasn't likely to be worth a hoot in hell. Why? Well, because the really expensive technology and the really tricky do with Spartan. Don't get me wrong. The kill mechanism is the weapons. Until you have something that will deliver lethality you can't hand, even if you have a marvelous kill mechanism, you can't use it unless you can detect and locate your target. That was the expensive part of tection and tracking. Hardened radars. Phased-array radars, which look like solid concrete barns, have been known in theory for a long time, but in practice they're hideously complex. They work this way. In the old-fashioned radar the antenna moved. A big dish was steered mechanically, and your tracking computer "knew" where the dish was pointed at the time it received the blip returned from the target. The antenna was vulnerable to enemy weapons -- even chemical weapons, sabotage, and small-arms fire -- and the mechanical parts caused terrible errors unacceptable at thousand-mile ranges. Phased-array radars have thousands of small antennae buried in a lump of concrete: Nothing moves. Instead the various antenna elements are excited in a precise computer-controlled sequence and the returns monitored by computer. The whole thing is expensive in money, and a few years ago expensive in terms of needed research to get it working. We got that much out of our dead tennae and computers, and need only a kill mechanism. The laser is the obvious answer to that. What kind I leave to the experts. The theoretically best would be x-ray or gamma-ray (graser) frequencies since those would penetrate atmosphere best and deliver the greatest lethality per lasers are likely to be large, very large, and we need a great deal of work on them. They may need a new form of pumping. We have now a few nuclear-energy pumped lasers -- that is, a small unshielded reactor pours neutrons and other high-energy nuclear particles directly into the laser, which transforms their energy into useful coherent radiation. (It is even proposed for the future that nuclear-pumped lasers be put into orbit to light cities at night and keep streets warm in winter. Possible but I'd think unlikely.) Certainly the efficiency of lasers needs work. When you pump enough energy in to kill missiles at great distances, you'd best not waste much in your laser lest you melt your own system. Methods of steering the mirrors must be developed. None of this, though, looks all that difficult. There was a time when really big lasers were "theoretically impossible" but them days is gone forever. Somebody's going to do it. And we will be in a new military era. There are also enormous civilian benefits. Really big lasers can put mass into orbit, cutting down on the costs of entering the Third Industrial Revolution. (See this column in the two previous issues of Galaxy for more on that.) I do want to emphasize, though, that I'm not argumerely as a sneaky way to get space industries. No. Big lasers, coupled with already developed phased-array radar tem capable of handling a few hundred incoming missiles. It may be chauvinistic of me, but I'd rather we had that capability and the Soviets didn't. That's highly unlikely -- especially so if what our IR satellites saw was not a Siberian gas fire -- so I'll settle Strategically that would make the pin-down attack impossible, and any first-strike war plan hideously complex. I've discussed the probable diplomatic consequences in an earlier column. The resulting bipolar world has its problems, but it's one we could live in. What I really wouldn't like to see is too much temptation put in the way of the Party Theoreticians over there. Maybe it isn't likely -- reverently, I hope to God it isn't likely -- but might they believe what they've been teaching the last forty years?  Uana Ji Democracy Is the perfect system -- In Its place. On Spindrift the wind is everything. It bears moisture from the seas to the thirsty land, and in certain seasons, carries the thoughts of the people. #s the prow of a ship forces spray, so the planet's winds, influenced by the two parent moons, drive its inhabitants. It seldom rains on Spindrift... The day's sensations were comforting if unfamiliar: The rhythmic thrumming of an obelisk tree fragmented with sighs as spindrift brushed its crown of fronds. There was a purposeful whir of wings from a passing dragonfly, skimming the puddle of water outside the door for food. On the very edge of perception a human worked his nets, the feather-light touch of his awareness intruding only momentarily into the fullness of Galan's own. It had been a good season. The tidelands teemed with life, the spindrift was gentle and dependable, even the midges were less troublesome than usual. Beyond the stand of trees that fronted the house, Galan could see fish Jumping on the surface of the salt-pond. The giller's nets would be full this night. Still, she missed her crystal mountain pond, the vivid bloodleaf at her door, the warm glint of fireblight and the purity of baby's breath nestled in the tumbled rocks of home. Here in the lowlands there were no passing ghostweeds, no mountain gibby purring on the open hearth of a quiet evening, no music in the wind. Here there was only the dull blue of fen groundsel and gray of treewort, and the everpresent waterwind. The colors of the lowlands muted and ran together in a filmy haze, which was good for the fish that lived in the salt-ponds, and for the beaded lizard eyeing her suspiciously from the corner of Jamie's graystone house; good for Jamie, who was a giller. But not for a musician, whose duty and pleasure lay above the fens and marshes, on mountainside where the wind was dry and laden with the stuff of threnodies and bagatelles. She loved Jamie, but she felt no sense of shelter in his dwelling, nor much sympathy for the hardships of his trade. Nor could he, for his part, understand her love of the heights and the music she found there. It was, Galan knew, an imperfect match at best. The week of years they had passed in lovemaking attested to its quality, but it said nothing of their other needs. And now he had asked her, for the first time, to have a child. More sensitive than most, Galan knew the depth of his need. She could receive as well as focus an emotional response; it was this talent that made her what she was, a transmitter of music to those whose sensitivity was dull and whose feelings were borne on chaotic winds, to be scattered meaninglessly over the world. She could channel those emotions, play them back to their sources organized and strengthened into chords of meaning; but it required fierce concentration, mainly to dampen her own emotions. She felt a twinge of resentment that he had asked her now, with Trine approaching, to decide such a difficult question. But she couldn't really blame him, either. Because she was more skilled than he in controlling emotion, the giller knew of her only what she had let him know, in carefully phrased responses and gently modulated reactions. He would be appalled to feel the true extent of her denial of the life he lived, her revulsion at the thought of spending the years it would take to rear a child here, away from her own element. And a child did need the polarity of two parents; that was the custom and it was a good one. She was not prepared to flout it and knew Jamie to be even less so. Galan must live here or he must come to her, and that he would not do. He had his own priorities, after all. The thought, too heavy to bear, came inevitably; Yet I must give him an answer. And if it is no, he will to share his portion of the world. But even more unbearable: Can I give up the windsong? Leave the highwind to wallow here, in mud and salt, for a month of years? No... Tired of wrangling with the hangman's choice, she got up and went into the house. At the door she hesitated, to see that all was in order before she left. Her glance lingered for a moment on the pallet in the corner, seeing more than its readiness for his use at day's end. Why should their joining be so complete, their pleasure in one another so sure, when all else was wrong? Oh Jamie, Jamie... She shrugged away the sudden pang of need, and made herself look from the pallet to the rack of pipes, the table clear of breakfast clutter, the planked floor swept clean. Everything would be in order when she returned. She would be gone, but he would expect that. She had already stayed longer than was usual, and his proposal would need time to consider. She placed the protective headpiece firmly on her head. Usually, she left herself open to sensations on the long path home; this time, she would pay heed to her own emotions, without interference from the outside world. Perhaps she could weave a solution from their tangled skein, one acceptable if not beautiful to them both. But as she turned mountainward her heavy heart belied the hope. irk ir Candace stopped in midpath, feasting her weary eyes and wearier soul on Galan's dwelling. From her vantage point above the escarpment, on the edge of which hung the house, she could see the spring-fed pond alive with motion even though it lay sheltered from the wind. So, she elated, even now, seven days before Trine, the wind has orchestral force. What a fugue it will provide! She hoped Galan's windmantle was strongly built so the delicate reeds of the windwall would not be buffeted meaninglessly. The thought, seemingly motile, drew the wind at her afresh. Her headpiece strained away from her closecropped hair with such force that Candace made to save it, even though she knew it was fastened securely under her chin. The coarse brown cloth of her cloak twisted and flapped about her path-weary legs, reminding her once more of the hours they had carried her up the leeward side of the mountain, and of the days before when they were cramped in the tiny passenger space of a wheeled troika drawn by three slavering moorhounds. The journey from her own windwall atop a smaller peak to the north had been a long one. The rest of her body, too, was reminding her in various ways of the years it had served her before bringing her here, to journey's end. This will be your last concert away from home, old woman, she told herself. You'll not be a lissome maid again, not in this life. She straightened her sagging shoulders and willed her legs to move her yet a little farther, and woodenly, they complied. She went slowly down the rubbled path toward the rippled shimmer of pond and adamantine glow of roof. How many men, she wondered as she picked her way among the litter of stones, had it taken to drag the planks for that roof over moor and up mountainside? How many to fasten them there on the edge of nothingness, securely enough to withstand these many generations of windforce. A hundred? Two hundred? She couldn't guess. Even to cut the rock-hard wood of an obelisk tree took almost superhuman strength and will. She had seen the process once and never did she forget it. Sweat-streaked men with hand-axes, hacking first, and then hewing with chisels, all to wrest a single plank from the sixty-foot length of trunk. She had been fascinated by their patience, their determination surely as hard as the obelisk itself, and had remarked to her companion (a poet whose name was Tong forgotten), that it was almost an art-form. She did remember his retort: "Nonsense. Art is a celebration of the natural, not the destruction of it, for whatever useful purpose. At best this is craft. But art? Hardly!" Candace had not pursued the notion, for the poet was speaking truth as most would see it, but still she wondered. She had been taught as he had, that the purpose of all art was to interpret and illuminate that which already existed. Nature was the ultimate reality, and discovering man's place in it was the goal of all thought and all artistic effort. There was no such activity as true creation, just as there was no such state as perfection. The closest one could come to either of these impossibles lay in discovery. But the thought had always nagged her: What would it be like to create music? Not glean it as we do from the wind, nor from the feelings borne on its wings, but make it, fashion it, ourselves...from ourselves... could it thus generate emotion? That's blasphemy, for sure... or trumpery. She chuckled aloud. But a granddame of advanced years is entitled to a bit of irreverent nonsense now and again. "Hoa Candace! Caaandace!" The shout came clearly to her, carried on a strong updraft, then tattered away on a crosswind. She saw the slender figure of Galan round pond's edge and step pathward. Now there's your lissome maid, her tired old mind observed. Look how she scrabbles up those rocks. Energy is indeed wasted on the young. She stopped near a patch of mouse-ear, the soft furry leaves windwhipped and shredded. So let the young expend it and save your own, old woman. Galan covered the remaining distance in half the time it would have taken Candace, and with gleeful huffing and whooshing, threw herself on the older woman. "Candace! So long... since... your dear presence... whuff!" "Slow down, my girl. You wouldn't want to topple an old lady from her tired feet, now would you?" "Old lady, indeed!" Galan laughed, then stood back to look her up and down. The thin, brownclad shoulders were trapped firmly in the young one's grip. "What's this?" she asked in measured tones. "A mourning cloak?" Candace nodded slowly. "For "And I to hear," the girl said softly. She folded the old woman to her, gently, then released her. "But come, you've been many days without a good meal and a soft bed, and there's both waiting below." "Let's get to it, then," Candace said, "before you have to fetch it here."    Later they sat, the old woman and the young one, listening to the cheerful sound of the fire. A gibby had honored the house with its tawny presence and lay purring at their feet. On the hearth a jug of candlebeny wine was mulling; its spicy fragrance filled the room and tantalized their noses. Outside, the wind whistled and moaned. "And what of Stefan?" Candace asked. She was lying on a low pallet near the fire, sated with a supper of spoonbread and cheese. Galan, seated on the hearth to watch over the progress of the wine, tossed her head impatiently. She did not tolerate Stefan well. "Oh, he'll be here, to be sure. But when, the wind knows, not I." "He sent you no message, then... ah, well, he's young and cocksure. But he is a talented musician, right enough. Humility will come with time. Then even Stefan may be surprised at what he can do." Galan dipped the wine into bowls, handed one to Candace. The steaming brew was heady and sweet; the old woman sighed her pleasure. "In Stefan's case, it may take a great deal of time," Galan observed dryly, but without rancor. "Take care. It's hot as a geyser." "And as wonderful," Candace said, sipping despite the warning. "It was worth the journey, just for this." They drank silently for a while, wrapped in comfort and well-being. The gibby stirred and opened his great green eyes, fixing them both with an impassive gaze. "What a fine big fellow he is," Candace said. "Will he stay long?" "A night or two at best. His fancy is even more free than the rest of his breed." Galan reached for him, stroked the white fur under his pointed chin. "Is that not so, gibcat?" In answer, he yawned enormously and flopped his length, as great as Galan 's own, sideways to give her more area. Candace chuckled. "He's mindful of his pleasure, too, I see. Not too independent for all that, are you, gibby?" "We humans could take a lesson from him," Galan said. "You'll never see a gibcat who'll let himself be tethered in exchange for a little stroking now and then, for all he likes his pleasure." "I read once, I forget where, that a gibcat' s name comes from the oldest times; it means 'one that's castrated,' from an attempt by our ancestors to domesticate him." Galan looked properly horrified. "Castrate such a one as this! But surely they could see it would do no good, either to the beast or the one who'd own it." "It may be our ancestors were lackwits," the old woman said. "Though they probably thought themselves wise enough." The girl sat in silence for a time, considering this barbarism. Her face was bathed in firelight, giving her a mellowness beyond her years. Candace caught herself blinking and made an effort to be wakeful. The combination of food and wine and fire was having its effect. Her body yearned for sleep, but there was much Galan needed to share, that was clear. Candace had been aware of the younger woman's turmoil even before she removed the protective headpiece to allow the full communication their mutual affection demanded. Speech was sufficient for business with strangers, but hardly adequate for the heart's more pressing needs. "So," the old woman said at length, "I think I'm not the only one here wrapped in widow's weeds. Would you share your grief? Perhaps it will help me to forget my own?" Galan fixed her eyes on the gibcat and neither her chin nor the hand that stroked the fur trembled in the least. But she was ripe for weeping; Candace could feel the tears form in her own thoughts, as poignantly as if they were her own. She felt a great surge of sorrow for the stricken girl, whose loneliness was terrible. Maybe more terrible than my own, Candace thought. Here is the loneliness of choice. While mine... death gives us no choices. Could I bear my loneliness, "Speak of it, why don't you," she invited. "Your heart may not be less sore for the telling, but at least it will be open. Grief should not be hoarded. There's plenty enough of it to share." Speak Galan did, for past her intention, for she knew the older woman was tired. Yet once unlocked the emotion poured out of itself; she could not have stopped it any more than she could keep the waters of the pond from flooding the house if the penstock were to give way. In simple phrases and a complex miasma of emotions the story of the giller and his simple human request came forth; her denial of him, and the heartrending knowledge that he would seek fulfillment elsewhere; her bitterness that she'd been called upon to choose between her life and her love; her certainty that she would never find the latter as satisfying with another, nor the former as rewarding as it had been in the past. The old woman listened and felt, giving what comfort there was and saying little. The gibcat purred and the fire died. Near dawn they slept. itkk ' Stefan arrived in five days' time, only two days before Trine. He was nervous and impatient, for which Galan and Candace made allowances. This was his first major effort as a musician, for Trine coincided with perigee only once in seven years. Faeder and Modor, the two big moons, and Kind, the tiny moonlet, exerted their fuir force upon the winds and tides on such occasion, with the winds rising to gale force and the emotional tenor of the people at its peak. It was said that the winds were responsible for the ability to transmit feeling and thought. That before coming to Spindrift, people had to rely solely on words. Deeper thinkers ascribed the effect not to the winds, but to the moons themselves, saying that the orbs were possessed of some mystic power, and that when all three were in the sky their power was combined and somehow amplified. Deeper thinkers yet believed that the power was not mystic at all, but merely some unknown physical force emanating from the orbiting bodies, but they did not speculate thus openly. Whatever the cause -- winds, moons... or something inherent in the people themselves invocable only by belief in some outer agency -- when the three moons rode the heavens together, the effect was of full communal telepathy. The normal ability to transmit only deepest emotions became Total Awareness. By formalizing it, madness had been averted in the early days of Spindrift's settlement. Through art, the thoughts focused on humankind rather than one's own petty concerns. Trine was traditionally a time of catharsis through the celebration of the universal; a time when the people of Spindrift knew each other with an intimacy that would have been, they thought, too painful if not for the ritual associated with its observation. For an event of such magnitude a single musician was inadequate. Candace, Galan and Stefan would perform together, a Triple Fugue, with the people determining the motif. They would begin to arrive during the daylight hours, camping at every level up the mountain, with the earliest enjoying the highest and best positions. At dusk, when the largest of the moons glimmered wanly forth, the musicians would prepare themselves to receive; only when Modormoon, next in size, showed her penumbral shadow, would the windmantle be raised and the concert begin. On the mountain itself the moonflowers which bloomed only during the full of the parent moons would burst triumphantly open, their pungent fragrance carried aloft on the highwind along with their seed. The next day the people would leave as quietly as they had come, but behind them would remain the offerings they had brought in payment for their experience; moor hens and mountainberries, peppercorns and truffles, lengths of midge net and blocks of dried peat, sacks of millet and rootcrop, and here and there a moss agate or geyserite, polished to glowing perfection. It was a truly unique event, and therefore Galan and Candace were inclined to be forebearing when Stefan demanded to know if they were ready to do their parts. It was not until he insisted upon inspecting the reeds, to see for himself that the windways were in proper alignment and repair, that Galan lost control of her temper. "And do you think, Stefan," she demanded, "that I would misknow my own wall? It's a perfect instrument, Trine or no, but if your nerves demand proof, inspect all you like!" "My dear Galan," said the boy (for he was hardly more than that, Galan reminded herself forcefully), "I am aware that you have but recently come through a windstorm of your own making, but I trust it won't affect your performance as it is now affecting your temper... the people deserve better than that." "I'll guard my emotions, Stefan, and leave you to yours. Just mind you don't overstep your bounds. Remember you are, for all your talent, but a beginner." Their anger vibrated the air. Candace, having lived through many perigees and not a few Trines, sought to restore calm. "Come, come," she pleaded. "The three of us will be together when the wind roars through that wall. It will be difficult enough for each of us to stanch the inner flow of feelings, the better to feel the larger flow from without; this turmoil amongst ourselves won't be of any help in the task." Galan's anger abated in the face of the old woman's appeal. But Stefan still radiated resentment. His heart burns with jealousy, the old woman observed, for what he feels Galan has that he is more deserving of Compared to the mountain beneath our feet, Stefan's is little better than a hillock. Tossing his fair straight hair, the boy determined to have the last word: "I am glad that one of us is heart-free and hopeful of the future," he flung at them. "If I'm any reader of the winds at all, the mood this year is joyous and thankful of nature's bounty. The two of you'd be better suited to feed them back a dirge, as if they'd been inflicted with pestilence and drought." Now it was Candace who flared. Young scalawag. Tell me how to practice my art, will he? Yet her voice when she spoke betrayed no emotion, and she forced the inner calm to dampen its presence in her thoughts. "You speak thoughtlessly, my young friend. Be assured that Galan and I will be as ready as your unpracticed self when the great event arrives. And as for the interpretation, it would be more professional if you'd await the presence of those people you bespoke, before you try to judge their thought." Her face wrinkled in mischief. "Besides, it may be that the people need what Galan and I have to share with them more than they need a smug reflection of themselves. Who's to say? Surely not a young musician making ready for his first Trine." He was staring at her, aghast. "You would attempt to... to influence the music? You joke badly with me, Candace. I nevet did take you for a mossback, but neither did I think you a heretic. Moonstruck, the both of you. I'm going to the peak for solitude, to see if I can mend the hole you've made in my objectivity. I only hope your two minds are as suitably composed when I return as my unpracticed one!" With that, he stomped from the house. Candace and Galan exchanged glances, and when he was out of earshot, burst into peals of laughter. "That pompous, insensitive..." Galan began, and Candace finished the thought, "... rockwortl" They tumbled to the hearthside pallets, gasping and holding their sides. A harlequin table, knocked to the floor when Galan missed her aim, spilled its contents, but in their mirth they didn't notice. "... Remember now, see that your mind is..." "Suitably composed. Quite so!" "Moonstruck, are we?" Candace said when their laughter had subsided. "A mooncalf himself, and telling me I'm struck!" "Ah, well, as you said before, he's young. If we were not tolerant of youthful offense, there'd be few adults in the world." "Truly spoken, Galan. You wear your own maturity well." The girl sobered and threw a discomfited glance at her companion. "If only it were so. Stefan's right to this extent: my objectivity is strained at best." "I have a premonition suitable for Trine," said the old woman. "The answer you seek will come in the fugue. Objective or no, it will be worthy of the people's consideration, too." The girl lifted a quizzical brow. What scheme is this dear old lady hatching? Aloud, she inquired: "And Stefan? Will such as he appreciate this answer?" "Perhaps not now," Candace acknowledged. "But even Stefan will someday feel the pain of personal loss."    Faedermoon's pale disc had already become visible when the last to arrive settled into the protection of the rocks. A thousand eyes were fastened upon heaven, a thousand ears filled with windsong. Galan strained in the stillsheltered house to feel Jamie's presence on the hillside, though she knew it would be lost in the multitude who awaited Modormoon's appearance. Perhaps then, she thought, when the windmantle' s raised, there'll be some small indication of his presence, borne aloft with all the rest, yet separate from them... Candace interrupted the thought with a gentle admonition. "It's time, Galan. Modormoon is showing herself." Breathing deeply, Galan willed herself to be empty of the giller, to be drained of all personal considerations and attend to the needs of those gathered without. Then she walked to the truss on the right, as Stefan went to the left, and together they levered the mantle away from the wall. The exposed reeds began to vibrate, slowly at first, and then in a crescendo as the mantle was raised to its fullest height and the moonpulled air roared through the windways. Cacophonous at the start, it was gathered slowly into tones as Stefan's mind took hold, simultaneously modulating the vibration of the reeds, and stating the question that poured upward from the gathered minds. His control was firm and sure, the question that would form the basic motif for the first movement o# the future strongly put. Galan had no difficulty adding the counterpoint of doubt that this was the most important question man in his ignorance could pose. She could feel Candace reinforcing her, strengthening the counterpoint against the steady throb of Stefan's opening: Why, the gathered minds demanded, as one, must there be hardship, suffering, want in the midst of plenty? Why death? And the counterpoint? What good to ask? Death is surely as natural as life. Is there not some other question that lies deeper in the heart? Candace strengthened her control, forcing the counterpoint to become the main theme. Stefan receded into background. Why is acceptance so difficult? Candace phrased it as a sigh, adding: If we are born of the soil, why do we hate its call? Galan joined her, a series of images: Does the moorhound question his yoke? Can a fish hate the net? Only man rails at fate. Stefan left off his repetition of the earlier chords, made the response borne upward from the gathered multitude: And only man is vain. Our death feeds the soil, and it replenishes us. So, Galan thought, Stefan had been right. The fugue would be a celebration of death, an almost joyful affirmation of its place in nature's scheme. The doubts, the grief at the personal loss it caused, the anguish at its contemplation, all would sink into background, to become mere counterpoints to the main theme: Death may triumph, but we, the living, reap its benefits. Stefan continued, the reeds parted firmly to provide forceful accompaniment to the image: We see the parent moons, how they move apart to make way for Kind. We must take our lesson from them, and go readily to the soil, that our children will prosper. Galan prepared to counter softly. And the childless? Should they think so highly of the moons' example? She had barely chorded the phrase when Candace startled them all by introducing a stop. Overriding both of the younger musicians, she followed the brief rest with a strongly phrased command: Consider one such ill-fated soul, whose mate has gone to the soil, leaving no child behind to comfort a grieving mother. Can such a one be reconciled so easily? What of loss? Not of life, but of a loved one? Come, feel for a heartbeat her grief at his passing... Stefan was struck dumb. He was staring at the older woman incredulously, the wall totally out of his control now as the fine, sure touch of Candace manipulated it. After a moment's hesitation, Galan joined her. And finally, many heartbeats later, Stefan too joined in, providing a counterpoint of youthful optimism for their mutual and most incredibly personal lament. More sure now that Stefan had succumbed to Candace's innovation, Galan moved to take control: What of the unhappy lover? Come, feel the pain of separation... She had just chorded the phrase when a thought touched hers, tentatively at first, but so familiar to her that it grew quickly into his presence. Jamie! He had come after all. With his presence so strong as to be standing beside her, the last shreds of objectivity were cast aside, and she began to tell him, in the music, of the feelings she'd kept hid. The other two musicians gave up the reeds, letting her mind range at will over the instrument set into the wall. They listened with the rest, as Galan bared her heart. But they might all have left save one, and the music would have been the same. Together, the three finished the last movement. It would be, Galan knew, the subject of many a debate among those gathered below, but it would also be not soon forgotten; for at its end, the wind carried an ovation of tears.    "You'll go then?" Candace asked. She stood by the pond, ready to leave. "I'll go," Galan answered. "Perhaps we'll invent a new custom, Jamie and I. A child raised a season in the father's element and a season in the mother's may be a most fortunate being. Who can know till it's tried?" The old woman nodded. "I doubt that it matters much where a child is loved, only that it is loved. And as to custom, it's a good thing to flout now and again. Keeps the world young, and vital." She winked so wickedly that Galan had to laugh, and almost missed her question: "Has Stefan recovered?" "Magnificently," Glan said. "His ego is already devising applications for the future." "Ah, well. I'll leave it to you younger souls to see that he controls it. One's particular concerns should not be elevated to the level of art unless they are of truly universal interest. The traditional approach may be right to that extent. But neither should art become an insipid reflection of the majority." She cocked her head, an old elf who knew the mischief she'd done. "When I made my personal sorrow a part of the future, did you know that you would do likewise? Or was it only impulse?" "That," Galan said, "plus the presence of Jamie in my thought. Trine brought many novelties this year, eh, Candace?" The old woman nodded. "And your giller? Do you know his mind as well as your own? Will he give up his lowlands each season as it turns, for all the time it will take to raise a child?" "After hearing the music we put into the wind, how could he refuse?" They embraced and Candace took her leave. It may be her last concert, Galan thought as she watched the solitary figure dwindle out of sight, but it won't be an end to her. She's brought a new kind of music to the world. No longer will an artist be content to read the message carried on the wind, when he can create his own, and make the wind carry it. Joyously she considered a name for the child. Candace if it's a girl. If a boy, we'll call him Candor. A novel name perhaps, but the world'll learn to like it. Then she went inside to make ready for her own journey, to the lowlands where the giller waited.  Spider Robinson Now You See ItIHimIThem... , Gene DeWeese  Roheil Coulson, Doubleday, # pp., # The Starcrossed, Ben Bova, Chilton, # pp., # Human Machines, ed. Thomas N. Scortia  George Zebrowski, Vintage, # pp., # The Stardust Voyages, Stephen Tall, Berkley, # pp., # Soldier, Ask Not, Gordon R. Ability Quotient, Mack Reynolds, Ace, # pp., I .# Six Science Fiction Plays, ed. Roger El wood. Pocket, # pp., # Space Relations, Donald Barr, Fawcett, # pp., # The Weird World of Gahan Wilson , Tempo, lotsa pages, # Imaginative Sex, John Norman, Science Fiction Book Review Index, #-#, ed. H.W. Hall, Gale Research Co., # pp. , no price named. Bedlam Planet, John Brunner, Ace, # pp., # # pp., # #rp "is that, to work, it must be superfluous." Ever hear of Rocket To The Morgue! It's a murder mystery the late Anthony Boucher published many moons ago (a reissue of which would be timely and a review copy of which would be appreciated), which takes place in the world of SF, and whose characters, I am told, are drawn from Heinlein and John Campbell and like that. I would love to read this book. I am informed that it is a fine, tight mystery as good as Boucher ever produced (a considerable recommendation), with the added spice of the in-joke. I did read, and thoroughly enjoyed (and would welcome a reissue etc.) Larry Niven and David Gerrold's The Flying Sorcerer, which was a carefully plotted and splendidly written novel of interstellar hilarity, one of the most consistently hilarious books I've ever read. It also took added spice from an in-joke: its alien primitives worship a puntheon of gods with SF names (Fineline the God of Engineers, T'Sturshin the God of Love. Elcin the Midget God of Thunder and Musk-watz of the Winds being entirely enough examples). Are you getting my point? The in-joke is a splendid spice. Try to bake a cake of nutmeg sometime. Now You See ItIHimIThem... is a nutmeg cake. It, like Rocket to the Morgue, is a murder mystery, and get this, kids: the murder takes place at what the jacket copy alleges is a WorldCon (World Science Fiction Convention, Mr. Van Winkle) -- although it reads more like a cross between some ghastly little regional Con and a Star Trek Sale (I refuse to call them Cons). You get brief vicarious glimpses of Gordy Dickson, Kelly Freas (mysteriously described as "whitehaired") and a few other pro and fan luminaries, and the murder itself and a Vanishing Killer. The murder victim is, named Tucker, but in no way resembles the Tucker  have come to know and... er, know; nor does the sheriff named Hensley remind me overmuch of Honest Joe. The plot is dumb, the writing tired, all characters in the book are moron stereotypes -- all it has going for it is the in-joke, which, since it ain't superfluous, collapses under the strain. Then... On the other hand... There's The Starcrossed, Ben Bova's delightful novel of gibbering madness in the #-D TV biz, which might have been subtitled Fear and Loathing In Toronto. For those few of you who won't catch the reference, Harlan Ellison once created and sold a TV series, The Starlost, which was taken from his tender hands, raped, beaten, ritually mutilated and left for dead on the airwaves. This end-product (and the expression may never have been more aptly-used) was so unrec-' ognizably butchered that Harlan rightly insisted the series be ere; dited to "Cordwainer Bird," a fictitious entity and another in-joke. You wanna hear horror stories about the scriptwriter who thought the back-up controls were what would make the starship back up, go talk to Harlan -- or talk to Ben, who worked as "science consultant" preproduction until he discovered that they were ignoring every word? he said. Now Ben once got a terrific! novelette, "When No Man Pur- sueth," out of me by having me fictionalize something that actually happened to me on a Greyhound bus. So this time he followed his own advice and wrote a thinlydisguised account of the filming of Starlost, set in a nearfuture which represents an all-too-plausible extrapolation of the decadence of the TV industry here and in Canada. It is deftly plotted, mordantly satiric, actually rib-splitting in places -- and includes a character who I swear to God is Harlan to the life . But please note the order: it is a good book and it is a lovely injoke. Even if you are one of the dwindling minority who don't know Harlan, or one of the lucky few who missed The Starlost, you will almost undoubtedly enjoy The Starcrossed, the Catch-# of the TV world in SF form. In a book-full of funny gags, the in-joke is blessedly superfluous... and therefore it works.    Enough on the subject of injokes. What else in dis paper bag? (I'm "on vacation" in the United Snakes this month, selling two books and a fat novella, battling entropy under the hood of my car, gulping books whenever I can, generally between enormous medicinal doses of Tullamore Dew.) A series, then, of more or less disconnected snapshots: Oh yez. Human Machines. It's getting to the point where any antho with George Zebrowski's name on it goes to the top of my reading list (a dizzying height) sight unseen. This one confirms the tendency. It's not the first theme antho on cyborgs, and it won't be the last, but it's one of the best: a widespectrum sampling of SF speculation on cybernetic intelligence over the last # years, ranging from Guy Endore's "Men of Iron" to Jack Dann's "I'm With You In Rockland"; from Kuttner's "Camouflage" to Vonnegut's "Fortitude"; and it includes a remarkably interesting intro (almost a contradiction in terms) on The Cyborg in SF. Also represented are Damon Knight, C. L. Moore, Walter Miller Jr., "J.J. Coupling," James Blish, editor Zebrowski (a ghastly story about a starship fucking itself) and co-editor Thomas N. Scortia with one of his best stories, "Sea Change." It is worth noting that while these stories are individually excellent and collectively an exhaustive exploration of the cyborg concept, they are none of them the overanthologized, overfamiliar stories a hack-editor could have cheaply and quickly slapped together on the theme. C.L. Moore's stupendous "No Woman Born," fifty years ahead of its time when it was printed in #, is alone worth the # bite. Go get it. Okay. I've recommended the book. Now I can indulge myself in an aside. Ninety percent of the covers on SF novels make my gorge rise, and I've only indulged myself once before; but this time I cannot be silent. You let Pournelle sound off a few months ago, Baen -- now it's my turn. You want a symbolic cover for a book of stories about human machines, living hardware, OK? So there's a frontal head shot of a guy with the top of his head unplugged, suspended by braces a good five or six inches above the rest of him, OK? Now I don't know about you, but if I am the kind of bookstorebrowser who judges a book by its cover (and the publishers say we all do), I am going to be turned off to the book when I notice that the top half of the skull is designed to join with the rest both by a three-prong vacuum-tube-type socket and by a fixed position screw-band which necessitates the rotating of the skull-cap. You can't connect the damned thing without destroying it -- screw the brain into place and you snap off two of the three prongs. Now listen -- you can't hold this against Scortia and Zebrowski. No one has less control over the cover of a book than its creator. Nor can the artist take the rap -- he failed to sign his masterpiece. But someone should tell Vintage it's the little things like this that hurt. End of indulgent aside. k il Next: The Stardust Voyages. From the experiences of the last week, I can assure you that it shall be easier for a camel to pass through Murcheson's Eye than for a writer to sell a collection of short stories. Apparently an alarming number of you klutzes would rather read a dumb long story than a series of good short ones -- or so the publishers believe (how do you feel about single-author collections? Why don't you drop your favorite publishers a line and let him know?). So Stephen Tall and I both used the same dodge: collect your common-background stories, put'em together, call them chapters, and you've got... a novel! Despite the kiss-of-death covercopy ("In the great tradition of ceeds almost as well as mine -- with one qualification: you must not (nay, can not) read this book in one sitting. If you do, the exegesis-ofbackground will by the third "chapter" become so unneccessarily redundant and repetitious (according to the Bureau of Redundancy Bureau) that you'll put the book down. The six Stardust stories were written and sold over a period of eight years, and for each the entire background and cast had to be reestablished. Unfortunately, this was so skillfully done each time that background metastasized within the body of each story, surgically inoperable (a problem I sidestepped with the Callahan's Place stories by beating my brains out to find ten different ways to explain what Callahan's Place is). So read the Voyages one at a time. They're good stuff, especially the # Hugo Finalist "The Bear With The Knot On His Tail." But let a lot of time go by in between. Oh yeah -- half of them first ran in Galaxy. I've been waiting to read Soldier, Ask Not for a long time -- I've been a fan of Gordy Dickson's Dorsai stories for nearly as long as Jerry Pournelle. I was able to find Tactics of Mistake, and Gordy graciously lent me his own only surviving copy of Dorra.' (which Ace had retitled "The Genetic General" -- yecch), but Soldier eluded me for years. I tell you, I wish it had continued to elude me. Soldier, Ask Not has some juicy stuff in it. One third of it was published as a novella and won something called a Hugo in that category, which says something. It fills in a lot of the holes in Dorsai history, particularly in the biographies of Donal and Kensie Graeme. But it just doesn't work as a novel. Things happen -- or fail to happen -- just too conveniently; characters behave as the plot, rather than their selves, requires. There is a general air of contrivance, the faint sound of plot machinery clanking in theMi An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ## features a long, revealing interview with Jerry Pournelle detailing his collaborations with Larry Niven, his view of Man's future, and his opinion of his own and others' science fiction. Also: John Brunner's column, "Noise Level." Also: Barry Malzberg reviews James Gunn. Also: Richard Lupoff's column, Jon Gustafson's column on SF Art, and letters from Isaac Asimov, Malzberg, Coney, Bloch, others. Also: "Philip K. Dick: A Parallax View" by Terrence Green. Also: Alter-Ego running rampant on a field of bloody books. Quartarlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I background, and the psychotic protagonist's last-act change of heart ("Oh  get it... I ought to be nice.") just rang false. What has to have happened here is a classic case of a damned good novella ruined by expansion. Worthwhile for true Dorsai freaks, but I'd rather have seen the original novella with maybe a couple of the harder-to-locate Dorsai short stories to fill up the book -- but then, the publishers feel you'd rather buy this than a story collection. k if From somewhere they keep coming, lately, like some inexorable tide of sludge: quickies by Mack Reynolds. It takes a competent craftsman to keep churning them out, and it is frustrating to watch a competent craftsman wasting his time doing so. So far, each has been worse than the last, and founded on evershakier moral principles. This latest. Ability Quotient, rests on the assumption that rule by an elite is natural and advisable, provided they are a genuine elite. Who defines elite? Mack Reynolds, and for the nth time his "hero" is a man I wouldn't invite home to dinner. Ah, but he's got a high Ability Quotient -- doubletalk for survivalproneness -- and Magic Pills that the Chipmunk. His name... are you ready?... is Killer Caine. Another science-fiction superman myth, with characters right out of the cupboard and gore galore. Mack, stop.  it k Six Science Fiction Plays is one of those collections you can't use the Spider Scale to rate: there's too great a disparity in the contents. To start with, its title is incorrect. It contains three plays, two teleplays and a screenplay -- a short screenplay. As far as I can determine from the information supplied, only one has ever been produced. Do you understand what you are buying? Six pieces which failed to sell in their own medium -- like buying sheet music for songs nobody wanted to record. And yet, there are things in the book that make it worth buying. The smasher, of course, is the one that was produced: Harlan Ellison's Star Trek episode, "The City At The Edge of Forever." Now, this isn't the version that ran on TV and won the Hugo and the George Melies Fantasy Award. This is Harlan's uncut original, the one that won the Writer's Guild Award, and it is much much better in every way, and it is printed here for the first time, and it is a rare treat. Harlan's intro is as long, and as good, as they always are. Also pleasant to read was Fritz Leiber's teleplay, "The Mechanical Bride." While a little trite in plot, it could, properly produced, be a real chiller. What do I know? Maybe Alfie Hitchcock or somebody already did it. But the balance of the Stage and Screen SF is the kind of stuff that closes out of town before it opens, ancient themes given nothing to make them come alive. "Distinguished dramatist" Paul Zindel's "Let Me Hear You Whisper" was a particularly sophomoric satire on the heartlessness of scientists, and even the Real SF Writers (John Jakes, the Cogswell Twins, and Tom Reamey (?) weren't much better. If your high-school drama class is really stuck for a play, try this -- but don't plan to charge admission. it  ir Space relations was disturbingly good. How do I go about praising a book about interstellar SM? Well, I can tell you that it's exceptionally well-written, tastefully handled, entirely engrossing, reasonably plausible and populated by real people, I guess. Voracious aliens called Plith are approaching inhabited space, and scattered human planets are forming a Treaty Organization in self defense. Kossar wishes to join -- but the Organization charter forbids slavery, on which Kossar' s economy appears to depend. The problem is solved by what has to be the ultimate extrapolation of the masochist-hero theme -- a secret agent who engages in an undercover mission involving the classic mistress-slave relationship with a Kossarian noble-woman, only to discover that he loves it. I liked the book. It was... how shall I say it?... disquietingly enjoyable. Let's see more from Donald Barr. kk it Continuing our flirtation with aberration, we find... Gahan Wilson! What can I say about a book of cartoons? There's this boat tootling out of the Tunnel of Love, and the couples in it are all snarling and yapping at one another, and one of the men in the foreground is grumbling, "Get the repair crew here on the double!" Or there's a three-headed man answering the phone with, "Burns, Burns  Burns; this is Burns, Burns and Bums speaking." (these days I answer my own phone with, "Enchanted Delicatessen -- this is the mustard speaking.") Or there's... There's an indeterminate (no page numbers) but satisfying number of Gahan Wilson cartoons, and that's all that need, or can, be said. Wilson claims to draw what he sees. Be sure and wash your brains after reading.    But while Wilson skirts the edge of madness, John Norman lurches headfirst over the edge, intq Imaginative Sex, the most clinically astounding "sex guide" of our age. It advises you to liven up your marriage by turning your wife into a slave. It presents # scenarios on this theme, most of them sciencefictional in form or content (outtakes from Gor novels) which is goes out of his way to insist that he really loves women (specimen egalitarian sentence: "If the woman wishes a gag, she should be gagged."), and this one you should scrub your brains after reading. Better yet, leave it to the anthropologists of tomorrow. Second recipient of the Galaxative Award.    Most of you can skip this next one; but if you are a researcher, an academic, a dedicated critic, or someone hard-up for a thesis, the Science Fiction Book Review Index, #-# will be an invaluable find. It is a staggering achievement, a literal index of every review printed in an SF prozine in the last fifty years, plus maintstream and fanzine reviews of fantasy and SF for the last three years. It is indexed by author-of-reviewed-work, includes exhaustive directories of ail prozines cited (clarifying magazine numbering errors), and has an editors' index (Doc Lowndes holds the all-time record, having edited #I different titles, followed by Hugo Gernsback with #). It is crammed full of eminently accessible information for which I have no use whatsoever -- but if you want or need to know, say, what Alfred Bester had to say about Ted Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, this will at least tell you whatever it was, was said in Vol. # No. I (Jan. #) of Fantasy # Science Fiction on pages #-#. Then all you need is a complete library of FSF (and the # other magazines covered in this #-page, oversize volume). Now me, I'd call up Alfie and ask him. I have no idea how much the book costs -- there's no price given; But if you want it, you probably won't care. It's apparently available only from Gale Research Co., Book Tower, Detroit, Michigan #. Editor H.W. Hall promises to update it in annual volumes and will deal with you privately for them.   I  Next month I intend to devote something on the order of half a column to John Brunner, thanks to an explosion of fascinating books by and about him that arrived too late for inclusion this month -- but I can't leave without telling you about the two I did have time to finish. As anyone will tell you, paperback distribution is the shits: if I wait until next month to review these two books, so I can tie them in with the others, they'll be gone from your bookstore. So by all means go out and purchase copies of Bedlam Planet andor (depending on your finances) Polymath, while they last. Bedlam Planet is vintage # Brunner, with all the Brunner hallmarks. Characters so real they tug at your fingers as you turn the pages, situations of poignant irony, masterful plotting, a seeminglyeffortless writing style just spattered with all those grace notes of insight and wit, and the innovative theme that the mind may not always be the best tool with which to face the unknown. It concerns a group of shipwrecked colonists, trying to adapt to their new home with less than half the equipment and supplies they need, and the unidentified native bacteria which prevent their bodies from metabolizing ascorbic acid; and the unique solution they are vouchsafed when a few of them become wise enough to go insane. One of those rare books that engages the brain and the heart in turns, that is to say, standard Brunner. Polymath also concerns spacewrecked humans, who land on a mystery world after barely escaping the destruction of their home planet by nova. They ground safely, but their ship is subsequently wrecked. Products of centuries of easy-living, urban utopia-style, they nonetheless begin working toward continued survival on their new home, facing fierce predators and a savage winter. But it seems a second survivor-ship also reached this planet, and crashed up in the mountains... could they not provide invaluable aid and, more important, moral support? The central character is a "polymath," a multi-discipline genius with high-survival potential specially trained to help colonists survive on a strange world. Only, when the home sun blew up, he was just beginning the decades of training -- and what instruction he did receive was not for the planet they've found. John has sme trenchant observations to make about who are the survivor-typ and some unique insights about hkman behavior under crisis. A grit ing adventure, with that air-reality that only Poul Anderson can do as consistently. Dammit, I care about Brunner's characters -- and fortunately for me, he does too.    And the road again. Back to Nova Scotia -- see yez next month, from my usual location between the Ashley and the chamber-pot. And my apologies to the Halifax Science Fiction Society, who have stiffly informed me that I am not the only fan in Nova Scotia. Come on up to Hampton some time, folks -- you can have all my Perry Rhodans. I'm in the phone book under Bridgetown. Where do they keep the Egress?  against the bulkhead and peered through the small telescope that floated in front of the port. Free of any motion his muscles might have imparted to it, the scope afforded a crystal-clear view of the target area. He glanced at the monitor to his left. It showed the same view, but not as sharply. He pushed a lighted button beneath the monitor and the briefly across the screen. He returned his gaze to the telescope and stared at the smokeshrouded ruins of Dakar. Sadly he stowed the telescope in its niche beside the port. When Liam O'Sullivan entered the observatory he found Stewart, hands lightly braced on either side of the port, immersed in his own thoughts. Stewart's usually sharp features were softened by the reflected earthlight. The yellowish glow made the small cabin seem warmer than it actually was. "What are you listening to?" asked O'Sullivan. "Mozart. Symphoney number #, in D major. Wrote it in # something." Stewart hadn't moved, he still gazed at the vast dust storms on the planet's surface. "Nice... Will?" Stewart glanced over his shoulder at the other man, an inquisitive look on his face. "What are you thinkin' so hard about?" Stewart looked out the port again. "I was thinking about sanity, Liam." "Whose?" "Oh, just sanity in general." He turned from the port and looked at his friend. O'Sullivan couldn't read Stewart's expression. He was silhouetted by the port, his face in shadow. "Tell me, Liam, do you ever feel a sense of peace and... separateness up here?" O'Sullivan nodded. "I suppose we all do. Will. Distance softens it," he jerked his chin toward the port, and what was beyond. "Sometimes it just seems strange. These fantastic machines," he motioned toward the softly glowing bank of computers, "the Mozart, all of us up here in our little can of air. There's such a dichotomy between this, and that hell below. Up here cool precision, down there a chaotic holocaust." O'Sullivan nodded slowly. The symphony had come to an end and the only sounds were those of the circulating vents and the soft clicks from the observatory tracking mechanisms. "Hell, Will," O'Sullivan said softly, "you just can't let it get to you." "Sometimes it's damned difdown there who're gonna be dead before the year is out." "I know. I also know that there's nothing we can do about it." "Nothing." Stewart sighed deeply. "I guess you're right. Oh, hell, I know you're right. It's been too late for the last six, seven years. Still, it's just so..." He shrugged. Any further conversation they might have had was interrupted by the sound of someone approaching down the companionway. The blond giant who flew into the compartment looked more like an avenging viking than the soft-spoken communications tech he really was. Sven Thorvald halted his forward flight by hooking his boot on the edge of the hatch. "What say, old sots?" he said with a grin. O'Sullivan laughed. "Typically dramatic entrance. Typically disoriented, too," he added, as Thorvald pulled himself into the compartment and hung in front of the other two with his feet toward the "ceiling." "I've got some dramatic news, lads, so be nice." "I know. The People's Democratic Republic of Somewhere is about to laser us out of existance, right?" "Not quite that dramatic. Will. But almost: you're going downside -- " "What! Will's not scheduled for downside for another month!" "Let him talk, Liam." "Thank you. As I was trying to say, you're going back to earth, but first. Mack wants to see you."    "Don't look weird at me. Will, I've got nothing to do with this," Col. Mack Bennett said, as Stewart entered the slot that served the station as a wardroom. Stewart smiled, "I didn't think you did. But I am hoping you know something about it." He pulled a full coffee cup from the zero-gee dispenser and looked at the station commander. "I know a little bit; and I can guess some more. You are going to the Population Conference in Bern, Switzerland." "You're kidding! What for?" "Because you're an expert on our stinking little biosphere -- " "The Conference is lousy with experts." " -- and you have, literally, upto-the-minute data on the world crop situation, and that's what they need." " 'They,' who?" "You report to the chief negotiator for the United States, Jefferson Prima. Know him?" Stewart nodded. "I met him a few years ago when he needed some satellite data interpreted for the Third Conference. I was impressed. He knows what he's doing." "I agree," said Bennett. "They want the full schmier: area maps, overlays, color coded, et cetera. Make ten sets of reflection prints each of all the relevant drought and gamma-S infection data for the last week. Take one print for projection -- same coverage, and some background film for the last six, eight months. Now, how soon can you have the last scan in hardcopy form, ready for display?" "An hour, maybe less. All I have to do is feed the program." "That's fine. There's a shuttle leaving the Wheel in three hours. We can get you there in one of our tugs with time to spare. It's taking a load of European scientists to Zurich. When you get there, you'll be given a stack of stuff from Orion and Newgate so you'll have world coverage for the last week. Then you fly to Bern. Okay?" "No problem. But why only ten hard copies? Must be a small meeting." "I guess so. Also, it's classified." "Huh?" "No one outside the station is to know where you're going or what youre taking with you. It might be better if you didn't tell anyone up either, just in case." "Now that is strange." Bennett nodded and sucked some coffee into his mouth. "If anybody asks any questions you can tell them you're due some ground time and you decided to take it in Switzerland. The old tourist routine, what? Anyway, you can leave for the Wheel as soon as you get your data together." "Okay, fine." Stewart finished his coffee and pushed himself toward and through the hatch. He was thinking about sanity again, but it was more specific this time.    Stewart arrived at the Wheel with # minutes to spare. The tug's pilot bid him farewell and left to supervise the vehicle's refueling and the loading of new equipment bound for the observatory. Since the shuttle's departure was imminent, Stewart didn't leave the Hub; he had been weightless for over a month and could not have adjusted in the few minutes available. Instead he boarded the shuttle and found a seat in the spacious passenger section next to one of the small viewports. After an attractive stewardess assisted him in strapping down he promptly fell asleep. He awoke to the sound of a warning bell and a voice. "The shuttle is about to undock. All passengers must be strapped down. We will disengage five seconds after the warning bell sounds again, eta Zurich, # minutes." The message was repeated in four other languages and the warning bell sounded. Stewart felt a gentle pressure which forced him into the straps across his chest. The Wheel moved away slowly. "Prepare for deceleration," came multilingually from the speaker, and Stewart was pressured firmly into his seat. As the craft's orbital velocity decreased and the Wheel recced into the void, Stuart felt a number of attitude changes nudging the giant spacecraft into the proper orientation for a re-entry. A few minutes later the shuttle was skipping along the top of the atmosphere in a series of shuddering jolts, gradually losing speed. In less than # minutes it had turned from space vehicle to aircraft and was rapidly approaching Europe and Switzerland. Western Europe was completely covered by clouds and Stewart spent little more time looking out the port. He had an overwhelming sense of fatigue; the return from weightlessness made even breathing an effort. The ceiling was less than # feet over Zurich but the ship's computer brought them down with less than three centimeter's error. As the shuttle taxied across the huge international airspace port, Stewart looked in vain for the sight of an Alp. Rain and heavy mist shrouded the landing apron. "Look at that!" A man on the opposite side of the aisle was pointing out his port. "There's some sort of skirmish going on." His accent was British and he wore the lightblue uniform of a United Nations Observer. Stewart heard the muffled roar of an explosion. He quickly unstrapped his seatbelt and crossed the aisle to peer over the man's shoulder. "What is it?" he asked. "Over there, by those trucks," the UN man said, pointing. They could faintly hear the angry crackle of small-arms fire. As the mist cleared momentarily, Stewart could see a number of tiny figures running in their direction from the far edge of the field. Suddenly a needle with a tail of flame left the group of men, and arched toward the shuttlecraft. "My God," murmured the Britisher. "That's a rocket!" It seemed to move with incredible slowness as Stewart watched, frozen. Then, inexplicably, the rocket veered from its course and impacted on the runway less than # meters from them. The explosion rocked the shuttle. Momentarily blinded by the brilliant flash Stewart staggered back into the aisle. Shrill cries and a confused babble in at least four languages filled the passenger compartment. Fighting blue-white afterimages, Stewart peered out the port again. "Here comes another one," the Britisher said. He unstrapped himself and pushed out of his seat. "Get down, everyone! In the aisle! Get away from the ports!" He dropped into the aisle and pulled Stewart after him. "This one may not miss." There was an ear-splitting roar and Stewart was thrust painfully against the seats as the shuttle's tail swung around. The landing gear collapsed and the ship slid screeching across and off the runway, plowing a deep furrow in the rainsoaked grass before it came to a halt. There was a fire somewhere in the rear of the craft and smoke was beginning to fill the passenger section. The Britisher lifted his head and looked at Stewart. "You all right?" he asked. He wiped his hand absently across his forehead. His hand came away covered with blood from a gash over his left eye. Stewart nodded. "I think so, how about you? You're bleeding quite a bit." He shrugged. "Head wounds always bleed a lot. I've been told. It doesn't hurt." He stood. "I think we had better leave, don't you?" The other passengers were, minor cuts and bruises excepted, unhurt. the aisle when a stewardess entered the compartment. She spoke briefly with the small clusters of passengers as she moved down the aisle. When she got to Stewart and the Britisher, whom she addressed as Dr. Butler, she immediately applied a small sterile dressing to the man's wound. "We must evacuate the shuttle, gentlemen. The tail section is afire, but we are in no immediate danger. ' ' "What about those chaps outside with the rockets?" "The pilot just received word that they have been captured. Now if you will go forward you will be able to exit via the number three cargo hatch." She moved down the aisle to assist the remaining people in the rear of the compartment. "Well," said Butler, "I suppose we had best follow the young woman's advice." Stewart nodded. He retrieved the photo-filled briefcase and his overcoat from the overhead storage compartment, and the two men followed the rest of the passengers out of the shuttle. The rain-swept runway was crowded with emergency vehicles whose revolving lights cut blue slices out of the heavy mist. A small electric bus arrived to transport the passengers to the main terminal. After all had boarded and the bus was about to leave a small army vehicle pulled up. An army officer got out, spoke briefly with one of the shuttle's crewmen, returned to his car and left. The crewman turned to the passengers and informed them (with the aid of a steward who spoke a couple of languages he didn't) that the army officer wanted to see if any of the passengers could identify the people who had attacked the shuttle. They were therefore proceeding to the opposite side of the field, where the survivors were being held. Butler, who had taken a seat next to Stewart, snorted. "Lot of good this will do. They're probably members of some local terrorist group." He shrugged and looked at the darkening sky. "Why do you suppose they attacked the shuttle?" Stewart asked him. "Don't know. It's an easy target for homemade rockets -- " "Homemade?" interrupted Stewart. Butler nodded. "They were very erratic and had a low velocity. Military rockets don't fly like that." The only survivors of the attacking party were a pair of soaking wet teenaged girls with their hands cuffed behind them. Two other girls and five boys were lying in a row close to the perimeter fence. Stewart stared at the bodies. Their upturned faces were so pale and quiet and young. The rain had washed most of the blood from their jagged wounds. The pools of red contrasted greatly with the green of the grass. He heard a buzzing in his ears and swayed slightly. Butler took hold of his elbow. "Steady," he said softly. "Let's go back to the bus. You don't know any of them, do you?" Stewart shook his head and took some slow, deep breaths. "None of them look over eighteen."  it ir The trip to Bern took less than an hour, ground time included. Stewart spent most of that time thinking about the incident that had cost the lives of eight people. He had learned later that the stewardess who had helped him strap in when he had boarded the shuttle was among the dead. An electric Mercedes met him at the airport and took him to the Hotel Hericourt in the center of a new convention complex north of Old Bern. The hotel was furnished entirely in Art Nouveau. Due largly to the efforts of an architect named Carelli the century-old style had undergone a European renaissance. Within a decade many of the cities of Western Europe had buildings with stark glass, granite and stainless steel exteriors and sharply contrasting, almost surrealistic interiors. Stewart was always surprised when he entered one of Carelli's buildings. He felt slightly disoriented, as if he had accidently stepped into the past through some insidious doorshaped time machine. A room had already been reserved in Stewart's name. As the bellhop carted the luggage toward the elevators the desk clerk called to Stewart that someone was waiting for him in the hotel lounge. The lounge was a large dark room, one wall of which was dominated by an enormous fireplace, with soft and unobtrusive music emanating from several indiscernable points. As he approached the bar, someone called his name and a hand motioned from the gloom of a plushly padded booth adjacent to the fireplace. The figure that rose to greet Stewart was a familiar one. "Will, glad you could come." "Jeff," said Stewart reaching out a hand, "how are you?" Jefferson Prima grasped Stewart's hand in both of his. "Good, Will. Sit down. Like something to drink?" He waved to a passing waiter. After Stewart had ordered, he slumped back into the soft leather of the booth. "You look tired. Will." "I am. Part of it is getting acclimated to gravity again." He shrugged. "You hear about the crap in Zurich?" Prima nodded. "That's why I wanted to catch you as soon as you got in." "I'll admit to being flattered by the attention, but what's the rush?" "I have reason to believe that the attack on the shuttle was for the specific purpose of destroying the information you are carrying." Stewart's reply was interupped by the return of the waiter. He waited until the man had left. "What the hell for," he said in a low voice. "Everything in that case is or will be available through the UN info office." He shook his head, feeling exasperated. "Which reminds me," he said dryly, "I let the bellhop take all the stuff up to my room. He could be a spy, you know." Prima grinned. "He probably is, but he was watched, and your room is guarded." He held up a hand to forestall any comment. "Listen, Will. I know all this sounds terribly melodramatic, but it's the truth." "If they want it so bad why haven't they tried again?" "They have, three times. We weren't expecting the action at Zurich, but we're ready now." Stewart sipped at his drink. He shook his head. "You still haven't said why 'they' are trying so hard to destroy data available to anyone who wants it." "They're convinced that it's fake, and they're sure weplan to use it to convince the world that the situation is much worse than it actually is so we can gain political leverage with the Thirds." "That's insane! You can see it -- " "Tom can see it. They don't go into orbit with you." Stewart was silent for a few moments. "Okay, I'll buy it. I suppose they could be that stupid." "They could be, and of late too often are." "What do you want me to do?" "We're going to have a top-level meeting tomorrow, and I want them to really understand how it is. No pulling your punches. All right?" "Sure, Jeff." He held up his glass and stared at the swirling patterns illuminated by the light from the fire. "It's a rotten situation, you know." Prima nodded. "What are the chances these clowns will try another hit?" "Very good, but we're covered. Why don't you get some sleep. We'll pick you up tomorrow moming around nine." Prima stood up and dropped some bills on the table. Stewart stood up also, stretched and yawned deeply. "What are the chances that the sun will shine tomorrow?"    The sun didn't shine the next day, and if the terrorists made any further attempts on Stewart, he didn't see them. The meeting was held iji a building less than a kilometer from the hotel. Most of the buildings within the convention complex were interconnected by a system of tunnels. Small electric cars carried delegates to and from their destinations without regard to bothersome weather or traffic. The room was a large one with a highly polished oak table in its center. The table was at least two meters wide and five meters long. Heavy armchairs, all red leather, brass studs and dark wood, surrounded the table. With only nine men present, the room seemed deserted. Stewart sat close to the head of the table and watched the others, while Prima discussed some incomprehensible matters of form with the delegates. As Prima spoke, Stewart noticed that he had a lot more gray in his hair than when Stewart had met him at the earlier conference. Stewart remembered with a start that they were the same age, but Prima looked years older than he should have. Stewart had arranged his photographic displays in the proper sequence to match the information he was going to project on a large daylight screen at the far end of the room. Prima introduced Stewart but he did not identify any of the others. Stewart could tell the national origin of some from the accents, but had no idea who they were. Stewart addressed the group for almost two hours. They asked few questions, and none of them seemed surprised by the data he presented. As he had said to Prima the night before, the situation was not good. He talked about droughts in Africa, the Ukraine, and Midwest America. He showed the results of floods in India, Central and South America. He talked about the gradual cooling of the atmosphere; the effect of the circumpolar vortex on rain patterns; the problems caused by particulate matter suspended in the atmosphere the ruination of crops by increased ultra-violet radiation due to destruction of vast amounts of ozone. He talked about problems caused by the "Green Revolution" and the widespread use of hybrid grains. He' showed them the latest photographs documenting the spread of the voracious plant virus called gamma-#, which was in the process of decimating # of the world's wheat , crop. When the last slide had faded from the screen, Stewart stared at the blank whiteness for the few seconds before he turned to the somberfaced men seated around the oak table. He tapped his leg lightly with the pointer he had used during the discussion. "So, there you are. Any questions?" "If only we had stuck with the slower growing varieties," one of the delegates said softly. He was looking at a photograph showing the gamma-# infection. He didn't seem to be speaking to anyone in particular. "It would not have helped, Nikoli," said another. "Crop failures could have been localized," the first man said. "That's just for wheat," said Prima, "and just for one disease." "If not for the hybrid crops this calamity would have come five years ago," said still another delegate. "Yes, and who could have foretold these climatic changes? Weather patterns have been favorable, and getting better for the last five years, until now, until this year. ' ' Gradually all of the delegates had begun to argue, and Stewart stood there, astounded, thinking: Our lives depend on these men, our lives... Prima stood up. "Gentlemen, please. Gentlemen!" There was a sharp crack, like the sound of a rifle. There was immediate silence and everyone was looking at Stewart. He had hit the table with the metal pointer. He hadn't realized he had done it until they looked at him. He looked at the pointer as if he couldn't remember where he'd gotten it, then he shook his head slightly and tossed the pointer onto the table. "Thanks, Will," said Prima with a grin. Stewart shrugged. "Gentlemen," Prima said, "I think we had better adjourn now. I think we could use a little break. I'd like to thank Dr. Stewart for his excellent briefing." There was a smattering of applause. Prima looked at his watch. "It's almost noon. I think we ought to reconvene here about two o'clock. Any objections? Good, two it is." He turned to Stewart as the others left the conference room. "You've been a great help. Will. Thank you." "Is that all you'll be needing me for?" Prima nodded. "What do you want to do now? Go back to the station? Want a vacation? I can arrange it for you, if you like. Go anwhere you want, two weeks, a month. You name it." "You've got that kind of pull?" Prima nodded again. " 'Fraid so." "I think I'll go back up to the station. It's... well, a lot quieter up there." "I kind of thought you might do that. I envy that access to quiet. There aren't many places on earth that are quiet anymore. Besides, you might as well enjoy it while you can." "What do you mean?" "When things fall apart down here, do you think people are going to want to spend money on space? The stations will probably be abandoned; at least for a while." "We've talked about it up there, but I've never heard it sound so official." "It's not official," Prima smiled. "It's just a possibility that has to be considered. Hell, enough of this gloom. Let's go to lunch and then I'll arrange to have you back in space before midnight, okay?" "Sounds good." In the elevator down to the parking garage, Prima described their destination in Old Bern. "It's called the Ermitage on Marktgasse. The cuisine is French, and it's magnificent. On the way you'll get to see the Zeitglocken, their famous clock tower built in the twelfth century. In fact, all of that area is fantastic. Marktgasse used to be the main street. Lots of old buildings, fountains, little shops, and so forth. It's closed to traffic, so we'll have to walk a little. Got your rain coat?" "Is it still raining out there?" Stewart frowned. "You know, I haven't seen one mountain yet. We might as well be in Kansas." Prima laughed. "We can take the Mercedes into Old Bern," he said as they stepped out of the elevator. As the car approached, Stewart could see one man sitting next to the driver and another in the back. "We've got company," said Stewart. "Guards. Marines from the embassy." He saw Stewart's questioning look. "Just because the meeting is over doesn't mean the terrorists are through trying." He turned to Prima, exasperated. "How long am I going to have to keep looking over my shoulder?" "Once you're out of Switzerland you shouldn't have any trouble. You'll be out of it." They entered the car and it pulled our into the street. "I guess you won't be out of it," Stewart said. "No," Prima sighed. "I suppose I could be. I could quit this damn job, go back to Ohio, write textbooks and my memoirs." He grinned suddenly. "I guess I've come to believe in my own importance too much to quit." He stared musingly out the window at the treelined street. "So much depends on what we do here in the next week. It's rather terrifying." Both men were silent as the car moved into Bern's Old Section. Prima's mood changed again shortly, and he began to name the buildings they passed. Lost in his own thoughts, Stewart heard little of it. They were moving rapidly along Tiefenau-Strasse . The river Aare, sometimes visible through the trees and buildings, was about # meters to their left. As they reached the junction with Neubruck-Strasse, an old Volkswagen bus pulled into their path. The driver of the Mercedes swerved to avoid a collision, ran over the high curb and struck a low iron fence. The driver opened the door, ready to leap out and accost the driver of the Volkswagen. The Marine sitting next to him grabbed him around the neck and hauled him back into the car. The side door of the Volkswagen slid open and three men leaped out and ran towards the Mercedes. The Marine reached over the driver for the door. It was just beyond his grasp. The first of the three reached the open door and thrust the barrel of a small shotgun into the car and blew the Marine's face off. The Marine next to Prima and Stewart had pushed them both to the floor of the car before it had stopped moving. As the first Marine was blasted back into the car, the second fired half a dozen explosive rounds into the chest of the man with the shotgun. "Shut the fucking door!" the Marine screamed. The blood-drenched driver made a grab for the door and one of the terrorists caught his arm, pulled him into the street, and dispatched him bloodily with a machine pistol. The other terrorist fired at the Marine through the rear window of the car, but the bullets splattered against the thick glass, causing spider web patterns. The same glass that protected the occupants of the car protected the terrorists surrounding it. The Marine could see the man with the machine pistol pull the pin on a small grenade, silently count the few second's delay and, at the last moment, toss the grenade into the front seat of the car where it burst, imchoking, eye-searing, blue-white narcotic smoke. The three men in the car lost consciousness.     must be alive, Stewart thought, because I hurt like Hell! Stewart's hands were bound behind his back in a painful position. A teethrattling vibration coupled with a deafening roar served to round out his acute discomfort. He groaned and tried to straighten out his legs. "This one's awake!" a voice yelled above the deep roar. Stewart's eyes burned and everything was obscured by a watery haze as he was pulled roughly to a sitting position. He gasped as pain shot through his shoulders and arms. He blinked to clear his eyes. His tormentor was a young man dressed in light green fatigues. "Listen to me, spaceman!" he shouted. "Don't give us any trouble or we'll toss you overboard! Got it?" The man slapped Stewart with the back of his hand. The sharp stinging blow brought tears to his eyes again. He could taste blood from a cut lip. Stewart nodded. "I understand," he croaked, not at all sure he understood anything. "All right, now shut up!" The man shoved him back on the floor and moved away. The trip lasted an eternity of slightly less than three hours. Stewart was pulled to his feet and held between two men in front of a sliding door. He realized for the first time that he was in a helicopter. As the copter settled to ground, he could see that they were deep in the mountains, in a narrow glacial valley. For the first time since his return to Earth he could see the sun. The door was pulled open while the copter was still a few meters from the ground and Stewart was treated to a little joke as his captors playfully thrust him out the door, then pulled him back. When the copter touched down they shoved him roughly out and he just managed to keep his balance. He stumbled forward and turned just in time to see Prima, less fortunate than he, sprawl heavily into the wet meadow grass. As soon as a great mound of equipment had been unloaded -- rather more gently than the prisoners -- and carried into the trees, the copter lifted and headed back down the valley at high speed. Three of the terrorists, armed with formidable-looking automatic weapons, had remained with them. One of them indicated that Stewart and Prima should move into the trees and sit. When they had done so he squatted a short distance from them with his back against a tree. His machine gun wasn't pointed directly at them but the man was obviously alert. The other two pulled an assortment of plastic-wrapped breads, cheeses, and sausages from an old rucksack. Another rucksack yielded three unlabeled bottles of wine. As the three ate, their guard's eyes never left his prisoners. When Stewart sat down beside Prima he had thought they might be prevented from talking, but the gunmen didn't seem to care. "You hurt very much?" Stewart asked. Prima shook his head. "No. My muscles ache, but that's all. How about you?" "I'm okay." He looked at their captors. "Who the Hell are these clowns? Do you have any idea what they want with us?" "Possibly ransom. I don't think they took us just to kill us; they could have done that at the car. Of course, I might be wrong." "One of them called me 'spaceman,' so I assume they know who I am. Must have figured I'd be worth something. I'm not sure to whom..."He grinned crookedly. When the guard finished eating he called to the others. One of them untied Stewart's and Prima's hands and gave them food and wine. Occasionally, one of the men scanned the valley with a pair of binoculars. It was less than half an hour after the helicopter had dropped them in the valley that the man's search was rewarded. He stood up, called softly to his companions, and pointed up the valley. Prima looked over his shoulder then turned back, disgustedly. "Horsemen! Bloody barbarians." Within minutes of being sighted, the riders had entered the small camp and dismounted. There were four riders and twelve horses. All but the man guarding them and one of the riders began to pack the equipment onto the horses. The one rider was at least two meters tall and possessed a bushy black moustache. As he approached the captives he pulled thick leather gloves off his hands and smiled disarmingly. "Dr. Prima," he said, thrusting out his hand. "We meet under unfortunate circumstances. I trust you're unharmed?" He turned to Stewart. "And you must be Dr. Stewart." Again he put out his hand and, reflexively, Stewart clasped it. "You have the advantage, sir," said Prima. The man grinned. "In more ways than one. I'm called Draken." "Well, Mr. Draken -- " "No mister; just Draken." "Draken. Maybe you could explain what you want with us." "All in good time. Right now we have to travel quite a distance. Can you ride?" Both men nodded. "Good." Draken called out to one of the riders and the other brought two wool-lined, hooded coats. "You'll need these. We have to cross a high pass. No snow this time of year, but it's still too cold for what you're wearing." He turned and walked away to examine the progress of the loading. Stewart had not been on a horse since he was a child. He still ached from the hours he had spent tied up in the helicopter. The ascent to the pass and the descent into another narrow glacial valley took four torturous hours. When he was finally allowed to dismount, Stewart's legs wouldn't hold him and he had to hold onto his horse to keep from falling to the ground. Prima, he noticed, hadn't fared much better. In the deep blue evening shadows, Stewart could see a cluster of small stone buildings into which the men were carrying the equipment. Their guard was still close, still silent. As Draken passed one time, Stewart called out. "Why the Hell couldn't the helicopter have brought us all the way?' ' The man's smile was wide and his teeth looked abnormally white in the darkness. "Security. The people on the chopper have no idea where this camp is." "Are we still in Switzerland?" asked Prima. "Does it matter?" asked Draken. "When are you going to fill us in on the master plan?" said Prima. "In a few minutes. Do you see that small house? The third on the left?" He pointed. "Go there, upstairs, and wait." Draken watched them as they limped slowly toward the little stone house, their ever-present shadow with the machine gun a few paces behind. A young technician loaded down with electronic gear almost collided with Draken in the deepening darkness. "Sorry," she said. "No harm done," he said. "Do me a favor? When you've delivered that stuff, tell Wolf we're ready. Okay?" "Sure, Draken." She hurried away. The stone stairs to the second story were on the outside of the building. A heavy curtain hung in the doorway. Stewart pushed passed it into a short passage and under another curtain. The room was empty except for a rough wooden table and a dozen straightbacked chairs. The light came from three electric lanterns suspended from ceiling beams. The windows were covered with black cloth. Within minutes, people began to enter the room. None of them said anything to Stewart or Prima, who had taken seats facing the curtained door. Three men and one woman were facing Stewart and Prima when Draken entered, accompanied by a small, intense man. Draken took a chair near the door, while the other man sat on the table in front of the prisoners. He had a small tape recorder which he placed beside him and switched on. The man had light brown hair and piercing, pale blue eyes. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his face less than half a meter from Prima' s. "My name is Wolf," he said. His accent was German. "I am the leader of this cadre. Each of the people here is representing a different, international political-action group. Your abduction was ordered for the purpose of obtaining confirming information and statements relevant to your country's true position on the present world crisis." "Why am I here?" asked Stewart. "We have known of your complicity in this plot for some time. Dr. Stewart, and you were recognized by one of those assigned to abduct Dr. Prima. He felt you could be of some use to us." "What the hell is this 'plot' I'm Involved in?" said Stewart. The woman laughed, but there was no humor in it. "We are not playing games, Stewart," she said. Her voice was deceptively gentle, soft -- and frightening. "Maybe we should play their game for a while," Draken said. "Explain it to them as if they had no idea what we're talking about -- " "I don't," interrupted Stewart. " -- and maybe they'll realize how stupid it is to lie to us." Wolf nodded. "Also, he could actually be a dupe. It is not very likely considering the evidence, but who can tell?" Wolf turned to face Stewart di. rectly. "You were ordered to prepare documents and deliver them to Dr. Prima. True?" Stewart nodded. "These documents were falsified to show the world situation to be much worse than it is." He held up his hand as Stewart opened his mouth. "Wait. First listen, then comment. "The purpose of this falsified information was to convince the Third World that its only hope for survival is complete submission to the Western capitalist states and their lackeys. Actually, there are vast grain surpluses throughout the U.S. and Canada which are being witheld to force a political ideology on the Third World by using the threat of famine. A famine which would not naturally occur." Stewart sat in stunned silence for a few moments. He glanced at Prima who was engrossed with a hangnail. "I think you are serious," said Stewart. "Believe me. Dr. Stewart, we are." "Then you're insane." "Then you deny the charge?" "(jood God, man! Not three days ago, from orbit, I looked down on the ruins of Dakar. It was destroyed in the food riots. All of Central Africa is a dust bowl! The Ukraine, Northern India, Mid-west America, Indo-China -- you name it -- all the same! Droughts, floods, the gamma-# pandemic -- " "Lies," said Wolf. Stewart shook his head. He turned to Prima. "Jeff, tell him." Prima smiled wearily. "There is no way to convince this man. Will, short of taking him into orbit to see for himself." He leaned back in his chair and contemplated Wolfs expressionless face. "I do not think this is an effective method. Wolf," the young woman said. "You always did prefer the more direct means," Wold replied. He turned to Prima again. "What have you to say to the charge?" "You're wrong about our plans." Wolfs eyebrows went up, showing his doubt. "What I intend to propose," continued Prima, "is a worldwide aid plan that involves all the developed countries. A plan to give food, machinery, medicine, et cetera, to the Thirds, no strings attached." Stewart, who had been listening with a growing look of amazement, laughed. "You're totally insane, too!" Ignoring Stewart, Wolf shook his head. "If you think I'd believe that, your naivete is astonishing." "I think I can prove it," Prima said. "How?" said Draken. "I noticed that my briefcase was among the things loaded on the horses. Look in it." Wolf glanced over his shoulder at Draken. "True?" Draken nodded. "We got it. Haven't had, time to look through it yet." Five silent minutes had passed when Draken pushed through the curtain carrying the briefcase. At Wolf's direction, he handed it to Prima. As Prima flipped the latch, the guard moved behind his back and loudly cocked his weapon. Prima pulled a thin folder from the case and handed it to Wolf. "Look through that." With Draken looking over his shoulder. Wolf quickly scanned the short document. He slowly shut the folder and looked up. "He's telling the truth about this," he tapped the folder. "They do plan to recommend an aid program." "Uon't get it," said one of the men at the table. He spoke with an American accent. His words were slightly slurred due to the lack of upper front teeth. The man seated next to him at the table cleared his throat. "For once, Jerry has a point. I do not 'get it' either." The speaker was a tall black man, taller even than Draken, who sounded like he had learned his English at Oxford. While the two spoke. Wolf stared at Prima, a frown on his face. When the others at the table started to join in. Wolf held up his hand. "All right!" he shouted. "Shut up!" Wolf looked from Prima to Stewart and back again. "Stewart, you say your documents are not fakes?" Stewart nodded, puzzled. The murmur began again but ceased when Wolf again held up his hand. He slowly began to look through Prima's briefcase. He pulled a set of the prints Stewart had brought from the orbital observatory. He looked at each print and read the brief explanation printed on the back. Wolf pushed himself off the table and turned to the others who were seated around the room. "This part is over. Clear out." "What the Hell!" said Jerry. "You can't throw us out like that." "Yes, Jerry, I can," said Wolf, with deadly softness. "You know -- or should know -- I can do whatever I feel I must to achieve a successful conclusion to this mission. And I do not have to explain anything I do to you. Now I want everyone out, with the exception of Draken." He turned to the guard behind Prima. "Give your weapon to Draken and leave." Draken took the machine gun and went to Wolf's side as the guard left the room. The tall African stood up slowly and stretched. "If Wolf wants us to leave, he has a good reason. But good reason or not, he was chosen as our commander for this jaunt and his word is our law." He left the room followed by the others. Jerry, the last out, paused with his hand on the curtain, a look of intense hatred on his face. He opened his mouth to speak, then simply shook his head and left. Wolf snapped the recorder off and sat in one of the vacated chairs. "You shits are going to pull a fast one, aren't you?" he said. "I've got the feeling that the whole population conference is a sham." Prima said nothing, his expression blank. "Draken, what do you think they are planning?" asked Wolf. "Well, if the situation is as bad as Stewart says it is -- and personally I believe it is -- then the plan Prima's recommending is useless." Wolf nodded. "I agree. Tell us, Prima. Why are you going to recommend this worthless crap." "I thought you didn't believe this stuff," Stewart said, tapping the photos. "Let us say 'officially," I can't believe it. Realistically, I can't ignore it." "Why do you think he sent the others out?" said Draken. "We don't need that bullshit rhetoric now." "Stewart, listen!" Wolf said. "If it is necessary to bend reality to accomplish our goals we will do it. Prima and I are on different sides of the political fence, but he uses the same tactics that I do!" "Not quite," interjected Prima. "Oh?" "You murdered three people when you kidnapped us," said Stewart. "Stewart, unless I'm mistaken, Prima is planning the murder of apman could go down in history -- if anyone's left to write it -- as the most despicable mass murderer the human race has ever known." "What the hell are you talking about?" Stewart shouted. "Use your head, man!" Wolf shouted back. "These bastards are going to tell the biggest lie in history. They are going to say: 'We are going to help you, we will do this and do that and everything will be fine.' Like Hell! What they are going to do is stall around until everyone in Asia, Africa and Latin America is stone dead from famine." He turned to Draken. "What do you think?" "I read it the same way. The question is why?" "Yes," said Wolf, nodding. "Any comment, Prima?" "That's the most ridiculous piece of sophistry I've ever heard," he said calmly. Wolf sighed deeply; it was the answer he had expected. Abruptly he stood up. "Put these two in their cage, Draken. We can let Maria work on them tomorrow." He left the room without a glance or another word. "Maria's not a nice lady," Draken said. "She'll probably get Jerry to help. He's nasty, too." "What do you expect to find out?" Stewart said. "They'll probably try to get Prima to verify Wolfs accusation. If they do, then they'll want to know the motive." "I thought he didn't want them to know," said Prima. Draken smiled. "No, that's not why he sent them out. They have a habit of arguing pointless nuances for hours on end. It makes it hard for Wolf to concentrate." "Why did he let you stay?" "He trusts me. We've known each other for a long time." He moved toward the door. "Now I'll take you to where you're going to spend the night." They followed him down the narrow stone steps and across the "main street" of the tiny village. Their path was marked by small, hooded globes that glowed with a dim blue light. Stewart could see lines of the small lights branching off in various directions. The night was very cold. They climbed another set of exterior steps. Draken pulled a heavy wooden door open and the men stepped into a narrow passage and pushed under a thick black curtain into a small, windowless room. A small electric lantern, giving off a harsh light, hung from the ceiling. There were two folding cots set up with a stack of heavy wool blankets on each. "Somewhat primitive," said Draken, "but I hope you'll find it adequate. There's food if you want it." He motioned toward some plastic-wrapped packages sitting on a small table in the corner. "There will be an armed guard outside. Good night, gentlemen." The door closed softly. They heard the rasp of an iron bolt being thrust into place. Stewart sat down on one of the cots with a groan of fatigue. The cot creaked. "What the Hell are we gonna do?" "I don't know. Will," Prima said, as he stretched out on his cot. "I really don't know."    Stewart awoke with a start. His heart was beating painfully fast. Someone had unbolted the door and entered the room. The lantern was out and Stewart could see nothing. He sat up quietly. "Don't say anything, Stewart." The voice was muffled, but he recognized it as Draken's. The lantern flooded the room Draken's head was enclosed in a bulky black bubble. There was a single, huge lens in the center of the thing. He held the straps of two more black helmets in his hand. The other hand held two rucksacks and a machine gun. He was dressed in a one-piece black suit and had another rucksack strapped to his back. He looked like an astronaut, the image was negative: black suit rather than white. He set the rucksacks on the floor and sat down on the cot next to Stewart, still holding the helmets and the gun. From across the room, Prima grunted and pushed his head from under the blankets. "What's going on?" Draken lifted the helmet off and put it next to his feet. "We're leaving. I'm taking you out of here, back to Bern." He slipped his rucksack off and put it next to his helmet. "You're letting us go?" said Stewart. Prima pushed his covers off and reached for his shoes. He slept in his clothes. "No, I'm not letting you go: I'm helping you escape." "Jesus," Stewart said, "this is too much for me." Draken nodded. "Sort of. Branch of it." "This is going to blow your cover for good." Draken shrugged. "It's worth it." "I work for an American intelligence agency," Draken said, bending over one of the rucksacks. He withdrew a small wad of black cloth. "This is an Army surplus jump suit, like I'm wearing. It'll keep you warm even in a blizzard. I've got boot liners, too. Keep your feet warm and dry." What he pulled out looked like a thin pair of socks. "Are we walking out?" asked Prima. "It's the only way. Horses can't go the way we have to go." "God," said Stewart, pulling on the jump suit. "I hate those horses." Draken held up one of the black helmets. "This is also Army surplus. A Star Scope by name." He slipped the thing over Stewart's head. It was a snug fit and Stewart mumbled about the helmet's weight. Draken snapped the visor up, made an adjustment, and pushed it down again. Stewart's perception of the room altered sickeningly. The lens covered almost a full # " and it was all compressed onto the small, wrap-around screen on the inside of the visor. He could see his feet and the ceiling at the same time, all in a pale greenish-white tint. Draken slurped across the screen and cut the lantern off. Everything in the room was still discernible, but Just barely. The light source seemed to come from Draken's hand. Stewart realized suddenly that the room was illuminated by the glowing numerals on Draken's watch. "It'll be much brighter outside. There are no clouds tonight." He switched the lantern on again and the lens automatically closed down with a faint whir. "Leave the Scope on, Stewart. Walk around and get used to the viewscreen. Here's your helmet, Prima. You do the same. There are receivers in the helmets, and I've got throat mikes for each of us." In a short time, both men could walk without tripping over their own feet and Draken decided they should leave. He adjusted their rucksacks and checked their helmets and throat mikes. He bent over his own rucksack and when he stood up he held two small machine pistols with holsters and belts. Stewart noted that they were the same type that had been used so efficiently during his capture in Bern. "I don't expect you'll have to use these," said Draken, handing the weapons to each man, "but it won't hurt to have them in case. Don't use them in the village -- under any circumstances -- or we've bought it. We must get out of camp undetected." He pulled his helmet on and shrugged his rucksack into place. As he passed under the lantern he shattered it with a casual swing of his gun barrel. "Don't trip over the guard," Draken said, his voice tinny in the helmet's receiver. They stepped over the prostrate figure Just outside the door and onto the stone stairs. Through their helmets the dim blue lights lit the small village better than floodlights could have. Stewart paused momentarily and Draken touched him lightly on the arm, correctly evaluating the reason for his hesitation. "Don't worry, it's only bright for us." "Doesn't anyone else have these Star Scopes?" asked Prima. Draken chuckled. "Not any more." They went around the side of the house and headed for the trees standing about # meters from the village. The valley was U shaped, with a reasonably flat floor between two steep walls. Once in the trees, they headed up the valley, closest to the cliff on their left. To their right a small stream glowed with a faint phosphorescence. "There's a pass about four kilometers from here," Draken said as they walked. "We have to cross over to the next valley. There's a transmitter up there I stashed about three days ago -- " "Were you expecting this?" interrupted Stewart. "No. Three days ago I didn't even know why we came here. I just like to have a bolt hole. "Anyway," Draken continued, "we'll be picked up a half-hour after I put in the call." A little over # minutes after they started the three men stood at the base of a narrow crack in the face of the cliff. "It's an almost vertical climb for about # meters, then a gentle slope up and over to the next valley. The climb isn't too difficult, but you'll have to watch what you're doing." As Draken had promised, their upward route wasn't very arduous, but it was time consuming. All three men were close to exhaustion by the time they were # meters above the valley floor. After a short rest, they started up the slope and soon emerged from the towering cliffs and stood overlooking another quiet valley. Stewart stood near the edge of the steep drop for a few moments and then turned back to where the other two were sitting. "This looks rougher than the one we came up," he said. "We don't have to climb down," said Draken. "The transmitter is about a half-kilometer from here." He pointed parallel to the cliff's edge. "Along that ridge." Draken stood up. Within minutes the three stood under a low rock overhang where Draken had hidden the transmitter. As Draken moved toward the back of the shelter, Prima sat down just beyond the overhanging rock and pulled his helmet off. With a sigh of relief Stewart followed suit. The night was cold and dark, the stars like diamond chips on black satin. Stewart could just distinguish Prima' s form sitting less than a meter from him. They sat in silence for a long while, then Stewart shifted his body a little closer to Prima. "Jeff?" said Stewart hesitantly. "What is it, Will?" "I've been thinking about what Wolf said back there... He paused again. "You want to know if he guessed right." Pritna sighed deeply. At that point Draken joined them. "Had some trouble with the transmitter at first but it's okay now. I got the message off." He had his helmet visor raised, but they couldn't see his face. "I heard what you were saying," he tapped his helmet and Stewart realized his throat mike was still transmitting. "I'd like to hear the answer." Prima was silent for a few moments. "Hell," he said softly, his voice barely audible above the wind. "Hell, why not? Of course he was right. Right on all counts." "Damn," said Draken, quietly. "I'd kind of hoped... oh, shit." "Is that it?" said Stewart. "What?" "Man calmly says: 'Yeah, uh people.' What the hell is that? Why? Why is it necessary to lie, to give them false hopes? That could push the death rate up a lot higher than it has to go. How can you possibly justify what you plan to do?" "Justify it?" Prima said, a sharp edge to his voice. "It's what must be done." "How can you sit there and colddeath as a matter of necessity?" Stewart shouted. "Damn it. Will," Prima shouted back, "I didn't condemn them! I've been screaming my head off for the last twenty years! No one wanted to listen. It wasn't profitable, politically or ecomomically. Greed and bullheaded stupidity got us here, and now the only road out leads straight through a die-off!" "What do you mean 'it's what must be done'?" Draken interjected. Prima sat with his elbows on his knees, his expression one of intense pain. His voice was tired when he spoke. "It's a calculated risk. Will. If we stand back and say: 'Sorry, but it's your own fault, and we can't do anything to get you out of it,' they will tear us apart. In a few months they can pull us down with them. If we want any faint chance of surviving what's coming we have got to get them down before they realize their fall is inevitable." "How can you be so sure?" asked Draken. "No one is sure. We know one course of action leads to certain annihilation. The other gives us about one chance in five of greeting the twenty-first century as something more than stoneage barbarians." "I don't like the idea of walking there," said Stewart. "I don't know anyone who does. I'm sure it won't -- " He stopped, stunned, as a blindingly harsh light flashed into being directly overhead, freezing them into immobility. "Down!" yelled Draken. In one continuous movement he grabbed the front of Prima's jump suit and pulled him to the ground and kicked Stewart backward off the rock he was sitting on. Stewart landed heavily on his back, breath knocked out but otherwise unhurt. The light cast dense black shadows that shifted with confusing rapidity. Suddenly Draken was beside him with his helmet. "Put this on! That's Wolf out there, and I've got a feeling we're going to have a bit of a go 'round, wot?" The flare still hung in the sky above them, but it was flickering slightly. Draken glanced up at it. "Defective, should last longer than that. Let's move farther back under the rocks. Keep low." "How did they manage to follow us," said Prima when they were under the rock again. "It's possible that Wolf or one of the others hung a micro-transmitter on one of you -- or maybe me," "I thought he couldn't follow us in the dark." "Maybe he got another Star Scope somewhere. Maybe he's got cat's eyes! Damn it, I don't care how he did it, what we've got to worry about is that he did!" He glanced at his watch. "That chopper will be here in fifteen minutes. If we can hold out that long, we should be OK." "Draken!" The voice from below was amplified and echoed across the valley. "Draken, come down. You won't be harmed." "Listen," Draken said, "that flare is going to go out in a few seconds; when it does we're going to run like Hell, to the left, up and behind this rock we're under. Think both of you can make it?" "Yes," said Prima "Sure," agreed Stewart. As he had predicted, the flare flickered one last time and died. "Now! Follow me!" They followed him from under the rock up a steep, narrow path that led to the top of the overhang. They were half way up the path when another flare ignited overhead. Bullets ricocheted off the rocks around them when the men below saw what they were trying. The top of the rock was steeply sloped and devoid of vegetation. Draken led them to a shallow, bowl-like, rain-eroded depression into which they jumped. A thin slit in the bottom of the bowl had let most of the rainwater out. A thin skin of ice cracked under their feet. "The only way up here is the way we came," Draken said. He slumped back against the edge of the rock. "Also, if they toss any grenades, they'll roll right off the rock." "Unless they get one right in here with us," said Stewart. "Always thinking of the bright side, what?" said Draken. "Draken," the amplified voice echoed, "you don't have a chance. We can wait you out. Come down now and we'll let you go your way. We want Prima. You can walk away, no questions." When the voice first sounded, Draken switched his weapon to single shot and took careful aim at the flare overhead. Although its motion was intentionally erratic, it was not too fast, and Draken was able to hit its tiny roter with his second shot. A few seconds after the flare dropped from sight another took its place. He was taking aim at the new flare when a grenade landed less than two meters from their bowl. It clattered noisily down the steep rock and off the edge, exploding with a tunderclap that vibrated through the rock. "I felt that one," said Prima. Draken swore softly. "That was a concussion grenade. If one of those things explodes up here it'll knock us flat, even if we're not directly exposed to the blast." As he finished speaking they saw a grenade arch overhead and all three threw themselves to. the bottom of their bowl. The grenade hit the rock, bounced into the air and exploded. Stewart felt a bone-jarring shock and a constriction in his chest and then he blacked out. Stewart awoke to the sound of gunfire. He saw Draken at the edge of the bowl, firing his weapon down the slope. Stewart's foot was pinned under Prima's inert body. By the time he had freed it and gotten his pistol out of its holster, the firing had stopped. "Stay down. Will. They're pulling back for a while." "Was I out long?" "A few seconds, I think. Not long." He looked at Prima. "How's he?" Stewart felt for a pulse; it was strong. "Alive." "Listen!" Draken grabbed his arm. "Do you hear it? The chopper!" Stewart could feel the low throb of the helicopter's engines. "Where is it?" "It's close. Must be below our line of sight." The terrorists began to fire their guns again and suddenly the chopper passed directly over their rock bowl, the rotor wash picking up ice slivers and spinning them madly through the air. Draken waved and saw one of the pilots acknowledge him. The helicopter's tail twisted around until its nose was facing the terrorist's position, then the gunner fired a salvo of antipersonnel rockets. There was a deafening explosion and an angry orange fireball rose into the sky. Stewart saw a figure in the chopper's open hatch. The man was waving and pointing toward the path that led to the top of the rock. There was a burst of gunfire from below and the man pitched forward with a scream, clutching his chest. The chopper rose up and to the left, trying to get out of the range of the terrorist weapons. "I think we're about to get it, Draken," Stewart said, resting his pistol on the lip of the bowl. Three terrorists scrambled up the rock, firing as they came. Draken got off a half-dozen rounds and ran out of ammunition. His burst caught one man in the belly, and Stewart hit one in the thigh. The third man shot Draken as he was trying to reload. The impact spun him around and knocked him against Stewart and part way out of their bowl. With uncanny speed, the remaining terrorist ran forward and kicked Stewart's gun out of his hand. Ignoring the blinding pain in his gun hand, Stewart reached forward and grabbed the man behind the knee. Off balance, with one foot still in the air, the man fell heavily, the lip of the bowl catching him in the middle of the back. The man screamed and twisted forward onto Stewart and then he was still, his back broken. As Stewart pushed the man off him, he heard sporadic gunfire beyond the edge of the rock, but nothing moved on top of the rock. He turned Draken over and raised the visor of his helmet. His eyes were open and lifeless. The blood that had soaked Draken's black jump suit was invisible except where it reflected the light of the flare. "God damn," Stewart said softly. He pushed the visor down and turned to Prima, who was struggling to sit up. "How long have I been out?" he asked. Stewart sat down on the rim of the bowl, his shoulders bent forward. "Less than five minutes, I'd guess." The chopper appeared above them again and a man in the hatch waved, and then it moved off. "I guess they want us to get down off this damn rock," said Prima. "Suits me." He climbed out of the bowl and started down the rock. "Hey, what's wrong with Draken?" Prima was bending over Draken's body. Stewart didn't stop or answer. He was already halfway down the path when he heard Prima's softly muttered "Oh" in his helmet receiver.    They sat in the same booth as before, close to the fire place. The padded seats and table seemed to have been pulled -- like warm taffy -- right out of the wooden wall. Stewart followed the flowing lines with his eyes, thinking about the past three days. The helicopter had got them to Bern at dawn. Stewart ate, took a hot shower and went to bed. He had slept until about #:# p.m., when his phone rang. Prima told him he could get him aboard the Zurich shuttle to the orbital station at #:# p. m. if Stewart still wanted to go back. Stewart said yes at the word shuttle. Prima then invited him to dinner, which offer he also accepted. Now, dinner over, small glasses of wine in front of each man, they sat in silence. Prima sighed and sat back. He looked at his watch. "You'll have to leave for the airport in a few minutes. I've got a car waiting." "Thanks, Jeff." He took a sip of wine. "When are you going to make your proposal to the conference?" "I presented it this afternoon." He looks so tired, Stewart thought. He looks five years older than he did three days ago.  wonder how I look? "What did they think of it?" "They loved it. God help us, they really loved it." "Did they find Wolf?" Prima shook his head. "It doesn't matter. They won't believe him. There's nothing he -- or anybody -- could say that could take their hope away now." Stewart nodded and stood up. "Well... I guess it's time." "Yes. Thanks, Will. For everything." The clouds had finally cleared, and the night air was cool and fresh. Stewart paused on the curb and looked up at the stars. He sighed and climbed into the waiting car.  Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! Get # full months of the finest science fiction writing at a spccid low introductory rate. Liess than # #th of a solar credit -- just # U.S.Earth money with the coupon below brings you mind-expanding ideas and far-out authors alive today! Plus the unusual free gift described below to let you project the future for years and years from now. Just attach your check or money order to coupon and mail it to us to start your subscription and receive your gift. (Please allow #-# weeks for delivery.) This time-computer dial lets you look backward and forward in time! Were you bom on a Tuesday? What day will your birthday fall on in #? Will Christmas be on a weekend in the year #? You'll have the answers at your fingertips with this perpetual calendar! Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. -- utiiis coupon to take advantage of ttiis special subscriptionfgift offer from Name; Streets City: State: Zip; Mail With Remittance To: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # Dear Sir: The short poem you'll find attached to this letter is, I believe, an appropriate expression of what science fiction is to those who love it, and could be to everyone else: Science Fiction The best and fondest of all our dreams are wrapped up in science fiction. It is a plea to the human race to seek out the infinite and a warning of the consequences if we don't. It is a world of make-believe, or if and maybe md just suppose, the greatest, most enduring aspirations, the one last racial wishing-well not yet gone dry. Sincerely, Gary McKinley RR #I Box #-# Eldon, Missouri #S# As good a definition as any I've seen. Dear Mr. Baen; Re: C. Henrich's letter on possible be explained except by a gravity shield. Such a shield would have to be generated by a new physical force (only four are known) since it would produce a gravitational field without the addition of large masses. The shield would cancel inertial mass; which educes a classic question: Is inertial mass intrinsic or due to the gravitational field of the universe (Mach's Principle)? A recent patent (##) claims to have experimentally verified such a fifth force. The inventor claims that if materials constituted of half integral spin nuclei, like copper, are accelerated relative to each other, the nuclei become increasingly polarized under a fifth force and that a gravitational field arises, which can be made to balance gravity and reduce inertial mass to zero. I imagine a craft constructed as follows: Concentric copper rings at high r.p.m., the central ring being massive and fixed to the craft. The outer rings would therefore be centrifugally accelerated relative to the central ring. I want somebody to explain to me what known force generates and perpetually sustains particle and nuclei spin, and where the energy source is. Another curious physics fact that has escaped the would-be inventors of reactionless propulsion systems is that while Newton's Third Law of action and reaction forbids mechanical reactionless systems, Newton's law is generally invalid for electromagnetism and therefore electromagnetic drives. One example would be a charge moving perpendicular to a current-canying wire. The current exerts a force on the charge, but not vice versa! A reactionless system would be entirely enclosed, producing no pollution and noise, and would appear to lose weight. Cordially Yours, A. H. Klotz Physics Research # Simon St. Babylon, N.Y. # OK. I can accept that gravity is not a Force inseparable from mass -- but inertia.' Let's see some experimental verification! Dear Mr. Baen: I'm writing in support of Jerry Poumelle's diatribe oh Cultures Beyond the Earth (Maruyama and Harkins, ed.). I'm a grad student in physics and I usually find Dr. Poumelle's article to be worth the price of admission by itself. In this case, since I had read most of the book (I quit on p. #), he didn't tell me anything I hadn't essentially seen for myself, but the chance to watch a master dissect the amateur planet-builders (with one hand in his back pocket, no doubt) made up for it. I've been interested in anthropology for years, and in SF for more years, so like Dr. Poumelle I was pleased to see a "scholarly" book on exosocial science. Like Dr. Pournelle I was disappointed -- and, yes, angry -- at what is being passed off as scholarship. For example, Maruyama, in his introduction, claims that physics is inapplicable to biology since classical thermodynamics always implies increasing homogeneity, and cannot explain the heterogeneity characteristic of life: "It simply begged the question by saying that a living organism is not an isolated system." (p. #). Well, if he's talking about #th century thermodynamics, admitting that the thermodynamics of isolated systems doesn't apply to life is just sensible; if he's talking about the twentieth century, he's flatly wrong. A man named Prigogene has shown rigorously that in an open system with energy flow (e.g. the earth), order or heterogeneity can increase without bound. His studies also indicate that the formation of the first life forms may have been due to the presence of chemical instabilities, much as the structure of convection cells can appear in an homogeneous body of water in the presence of an unstable temperature profile. Some of the articles in Cultures betray not only an ignorance of the physical sciences (and perhaps a disinclination to remedy that ignorance), but ignorance of the social and biological sciences. The article on "First Contact" by Donald K. Stem, a sociology student, describes the idea of detecting advanced technologies by their radiation of waste heat in the deep infrared as absurd: "It is a little like trying to analyze another culture by its garbage." (p. #). Ask an archaeologist -- any archaeologist -- how much he likes garbage heaps. Concentrated materials, quickly buried, rarely disturbed, layers in neat reverse chronological order...And Stem's remark (p. #) that "(life) had been human race appeared; birds and mammals doesn't bear comment. Beyond that, for all their talk of heterogeneity, the writers in Cultures are pretty homogeneous in assuming a communistic future society. That's practically an article of faith in the social science community. Their chastisement of the astronomers for their treatment of Velikovsky sounds pretty hollow when you consider the social scientists' matter, Robert Ardrey. I could go on forever, but the point is this: the "serious" world is still thirty years behind SF. If you want imaginative speculation. informed by an understanding of the hard physical, biological and social facts that will constrain the future, without ideological stereotypes, don't look at the social scientists. Dr. Poumelle was too modest to say so, but The Mote in God's Eye is a better piece of scholarship -- yes, scholarship, if that means the use of your brains and education -- than Cultures Beyond the Earth. Larry Niven has written numerous stories on the social effects of organ banks, teleportation etc. that are worth more thought than this whole book. That's why I read Galaxy instead of Human Behavior. Sincerely, Robert Hawkins # S. Vine ## Denver, CO # Mr. Baen, Would you ask Jerry Poumelle to write (sometime) a science fact article on the big bang theory? I've heard it banged around occasionally but I still know relatively little about h. If he has no tendencies toward writing about this, could you refer me to some other source I could correspond with to answer a few of my questions? Please. -- Thank you. By the way -- Questions: #. Big Bang! Eveiy thing moving away from source, and consequently every thing else, at tremendous rates of speed. Would this have effects on space travel? #. Solar system sailing along through galaxy which sails glibly through universe. Is our galaxy eventually going to disperse? Or will it kinda hang together like planets in solar system? #. Would it not be splendid (if we cared to go in that particular direction) to merely step off one sailing thing-amajig and hold still until the next one comes flying by? If feel I am quite tangled in my screwy information. Could you please straighten me out? Yours respectually, Sharon L. Bannon I # Granville Rd. Westfield, Mass. # Jerry was kind enough to reply at some length: Dear Ms. Bannon, Jim Baen has forwarded your letter to me. I may one day write a column on the Big Bang; tell you what, when we get a few more letters requesting it, maybe I'll do it. The problem is that many readers already know or think they do, and there's a lot of material in print on the subject; I try to keep the colunm consistent with the title and deal with new stuff. I need an angle that hasn't been used. Answering your specific questions: What's receding is galaxies; thus the relative motions involved won't have much effect on space travel until we try to go to a different galaxy; and since there's about # before we care to leave it! Our galaxy isn't going to disperse. One supposed that over a long enough period of itime the stars will slow down, due to interstellar gup like dust, and the galaxy will all compact together. This happens in to worry; long before then, if the cosmologists are right, the receding galaxies will themselves have come to a halt and begin coming back together for another compacting and another Big Bang. There are problems with that theory, so if you don't care for it, you needn't accept it; but indeed our galaxy will hang together for precisely the same reason that the solar system hangs together. Stepping off an object in space will not bring you to a halt; you will retain the same velocity. It is as if you jumped off an asteroid (there are many smaU enough so that you could jump off them) -- you would still be travelling in approximately the same orbit as the asteroid, and have about the same velocity (well, speed, actually) relative to the Sun. In science, as in fiction by a good author, the general rule is: "when in perplexity, read on!" We may not get all the answers, but we'll have a lot of them if you look for them. Thank you for writing. Sincerely, Jerry Poumelle Dear Mr. Baen, First time loccer and all that...I started with Galaxy and then If three years ago, and have since watched you build them up into the best prozines on the market. You'll notice that I still speak of If in the present tense. I'm confident you'll find a way to revive it -- we need the market. Looking thru the Jan. issue...That Cover!!! There must be some way that you could reprint that, say #' x #' on light poster stock gloss for around five dollars. At least something without the logo c Stembach is easily the best spaceship artist (how's that for a subgenre?) ever. As to the "free art" inside the cover -- how about alternating established artists with those new to the field? Until  comes back, anyway. Your graphics altogether have improved indescribably in the last year. Using a sort of Hyleaf on your main feature is an excellent idea. The science column was excellent. Perhaps you could have a NivenPoumelle team article about one out of four issues. It could be used for articles about more sf-ish concepts; space drives, things like Bigger Than Worlds that Niven had in Analog some time back. Back with the art -- please give the full name of every artist on the page where his drawing appears. You wouldn't print the story without the author's name, would you? I enjoy Spider's column -- no criticism, just a friendly chat with somebody that read the book. Why waste I .#? By the way, he did miss mention of the awards given Queen of Air  Darkness, but I won't tell anybody. I'm not going to pass judgement on "We Who Are About To..." until I read the second half. So far, the writing is great but The complete fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. # for listings. 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Abramson, Publisher Jay Tunick, Circulation Director J E Pournelle, Ph D., Science Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor Larry Niven In " Down and Out" (Feb. # Galaxy) Corbel the Rebel dove for the Galactic Core in order years in the process. The State is gone now, of course, and Corbell is coming home... Roger Zelazny Corwin has been forced to enter the Primal Pattern, and so he must complete it. He is in for a surprise. Phil Bertoni # Of Boyle's Law, Murphy's Law, Maxwell's Demons...and peanut butter. The crew of Jupiter One were going too far and too soon -- they had no choice. A story of Indian Revenge. The Doctor had made History -- now he was going to try to change it. See inside-front cover. Draconis, Tuscon IV, Westercon #, Suncon. we have to do is get there. "Hey, you folks are beautiful!" quoth the Spider. Alter pulls a fast one. 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Welcome to a unique and breath-taking series of SF adventure. Edited bp Roger Elwood and featuring spectacular covers bp Kellp Freas. Three original novels everp month. Just #c each, wherever pou bup paperback books. Expect the unexpected. Laser Books. Provocative. Penetrating. Unforgettable. I Rnnkv New Worlds of I He remembered posters. He had bought them in a little shop in Kansas City and taped them to his bedroom wall. They had stayed for a year before he tired of them: blown-up photographs of the planet Earth, taken from close orbit and from behind the Moon, by Apollo astronauts. In his memory Earth was all the shades of blue, frosted with masses and clots of white cloud. Even the land was blue tinged with other colors, except where a rare redbrown patch of desert showed through. corbell Mark II (Corpsicle Or Rebellious Brain-Erasure: Lousy Loser) hovered in black space within a glowing arc of dials and gauges. The youthful body of a brain-wiped State criminal was now bald and wrinkled and nearly worn out, and very thin from its time in the cold sleep tank. Stars glared around it. Clouds and Sea and desert landscape raced past three hundred miles below. It could have been Earth. Even the shapes of seas and continents seemed vaguely familiar. There was far too much reddish-brown in the mix... but after all... three million years. He had spent several seconds flashing above the Swartzchild radius of a black hole years had passed.    He tried his voice. It was husky, rusty with long sleep, and pitched too high. "Is it Earth?" "I don't know," said Peerssa. "Peerssa, that's silly. Is this the solar system or isn't it?" "Try not to get excited, Corbell. I don't know if this is Sol system. The data conflict. This is the system from which came messages. I followed them to their source." "Let's hear these messages. Why didn't you wake me earlier, before we were committed?" "We were committed before I found the anomalies. I waited until we had achieved orbit before I woke you. I was afraid you might die of the shock. You can't tolerate another spell in cold sleep, Corbell. You would not live to reach another star. ' ' Corbell nodded. This last of his thawings was the worst yet. It was like waking with Asian flu and a brandy hangover. He felt sick and ugly. Less than ten years ago, by the evidence of his memory, the State had brought a young man to life. Ten years awake, plus a century and a half in cold sleep, had left of the young man a withered stack of bones. He had grown mortally afraid of senility... but his thoughts seemed clear. "Let's deal with the messages," he said. What appeared on the Womb Room walls was not quite reality. Peerssa controlled those images; Peerssa projected what his senses picked up from the world below. Now Peerssa made a window appear in what had been deep space. Through the window Corbell saw two translucent cubes, slowly rotating. Within the cubes were shapes and figures formed in much tinier cubes -- about a hundred per side. "A laser was beamed at me while I was still thirty-two light years distant from this star system," said Peerssa. "There were two separate messages, two sequences of dots and gaps, each totaling one hundred and one bits each. One hundred and one cubed. One hundred and one is prime. There is some ambiguity, of course; I may have reversed left for right." It was not the best way to make pictures, but Corbell could recognize a man and a woman holding hands... the same figures in each cube. There were polygons of assorted sizes, in rows, and rough spheres. Peerssa created a red neon arrow for a pointer. "In your opinion, are these intended to represent human beings?" "Sure." "He indicated the similar figures in the right-hand cube. "And these?" "Yes." The arrow returned to the lefthand cube. "This was the first message to arrive. These figures may represent atoms, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. Do you agree?" "For all of me they do. Why would they be there?" "They form the basis for protoplasmic chemistry. This bigger row, might it be a solar system? The large, nearly spherical hollow object would be the sun. The symbols inside may be four hydrogen atoms next to a helium atom. The row of smaller polygons would be planets." "All right. Is it the solar system?" "Not unless the solar system has changed radically. What about this second cube? Why are these human figures different from the others?" Corbell looked from one to the other. In the first message the figures were solid, except for hollow bubbles to mark the lungs. The cubistic figures in the second group were hollow, and there was an X of small cubes running through them. "I think I see. They're crossed out in that second message. And those rows of polygons look like eight more stellar systems, suns and planets, drawn smaller. Some double suns." "What message do you see?" "Eight star systems, two with double stars. Crossed-out hollow people. All right, read it this way. 'To whom it may concern. We are human, we fit the given model, our chemistry is based on carbon and water. We come from a star system that looks like this. The similar people who come from these eight other systems look human, but they aren't. Accept no substitutes.' Does that sound right?" "I agree." "Well, it's a very human thing to say. I could see your precious State sending a message like that, except... except the State didn't have any natural enemies. Everyone belonged to the State. "So this is the message you followed home?" "Yes. I felt that human beings must have sent it, and I was not sure of finding Sol otherwise." "How did they find us ? Whoever sent that beam would have had to find us a couple of hundred light years out. We were still moving at near lightspeed, weren't we?" "The exhaust from a ramship would be most conspicuous to the right instruments. But the returning beam was very powerful. Sending it required strong motives." Corbell smiled in evil satisfaction. "The strongest. Heresy. Your State came apart, Peerssa. The colonies revolted. The State around Sol must have wanted to warn any returning starships. Don't stop at the colonies."' "The State was a watermonopoly empire, as you told me. Such entities do not die by internal revolution. They die only by conquest by an outside force." Corbell laughed. He didn't like the sound: a high-pitched cackle. "I'm not a history teacher, Peerssa, you idiot! I'm an architect! It was a friend who told me about watercontrol empires, and he's one of -- he was one of these guys who says everything in absolutes because it gets more attention. I never knew how seriously to take him." "But you believed him." "Oh, a little, but what empire ever lasted seventy thousand years? If you hadn't taken me so damn seriously, we'd have been and thirty thousand years ago." Corbell was studying the pattern of the sun and planets in the left-hand cube. "We're in a system that matches that picture?" "Yes." There was the sun, then three small objects, then a large object with a conspicuous lump on it (a large moon?), then three mediumsized objects... "The Earth isn't there. Otherwise -- " "Do you see the body now rising beyond this world's horizon?" For a split second Corbell thought it was the Moon rising above the world's hazy edge. It was half full. It showed bigger than the Moon. It glowed in white and orange-white bands along the lighted side. What should have been the dark side glowed just at red heat. Peerssa said, "This oxygenatmosphere world we circle is in orbit about that larger body. The primary is a massive gas giant, hotter than theory would account for. There are other anamolies." "We re in orbit about a moon of that thing?" "I said that, yes." Corbell's head whirled. "All right, Peerssa. Show me."    Peerssa showed him, with diagrams and with photographs taken during Don Juan's fiery fall through the system. The sun was a young red giant, swollen and hot: of about one solar mass, but with a diameter of ten Peerssa showed him the inner planet next to a map of Mercury. Granted the two planets resembled each other, but this system's version was scarred and gouged in a different pattern The second planet had considerably less atmosphere than Venus, and what there was included some oxygen. But it was the right size and in the right place. There was nothing in Earth's orbit. The third planet remarkably resembled Mars, but for the lack of moons and the great featureless mare marring one face. "There are curious parallels all through the system," Peerssa remarked. Corbell's reaction to these revelations was a slowly mounting anger. Had he come home or hadn't he? "Right. Curious. What about Earth?" A moon much like the Earth circled this fourth planet... itself a world as massive as Jupiter, but far hotter than a world at this distance from its primary ought to be, even given the hotter sun. It was pouring out infrared radiation in enormous quantities, and more dangerous radiation too. "And the other moons? Their orbits would be funny anyway; they'd have been altered when the Earth was moved into place, if that's Earth." "I thought of that. But I can find no moon of this world analogous to Ganymede, the biggest of the Jovian moons." "All right, go on." The fifth planet was an unknown, an ice giant in a drunken skewed orbit that took it from just inside the Jovian's orbit almost out to the sixth planet's. It was near the Jovian now, naked-eye visible from Don Juan. Peerssa showed him a close view of a marble banded in pale blues. "This system may be much younger than Sol system," Peerssa said. "The skewed orbit of the fifth planet has not had time to become circular via tidal effects. The Jovian is hot because it only recently condensed from the planetary nebula. The star has not yet settled down to steady burning." "What about this Earthlike world? Could it have evolved that fast?" "No." "I didn't think so. And that third planet looked a lot like Mars. But not enough, dammit!" "Then observe the sixth." The sixth planet... well, it looked like a target. Don Juan had crossed nearly over its north pole. Nestled within banded white rings was the fainter banding of an ice giant planet, in very pale blues and greens. The oval shadow of the planet lay across the rings, rendering the transparent inner ring invisible. The sharp-edged rift must be Cassini's Divide, Corbell thought. He found other, lesser rifts probably caused by tides from smaller moons. "Saturn," he said. "It resembles Saturn most remarkably. I went to some effort to take our course near this sixth planet. I tried to find discrepancies -- " "That's Saturn!" "But nothing else matches my memory!" "Somebody's been mucking with years. A lot could have happened." "The sun Sol could not have beyears. It is too young. Theory will not allow it. Theory does allow a similarity in the formation of planetary systems." "That is Saturn. And that is Earth!" "Corbell, is it not possible that State citizens settled a moon of a Jovian world? Might they have recreated Saturn's rings for nostalgia and the love of beauty? You tell me. Is the love of beauty that powerful?" It was a strange concept. It had its attractions, but... "No. It doesn't hold up. They'd have put the rings around the Jovian for a better view. And why would they build another Mars?" "Why would the State destroy the topography of Mercury? What removed two-thirds of the atmosphere of Venus and changed its chemistry? Uranus is missing. Ganymede is missing: a body bigger than Mercury. A gas giant more massive than Neptune orbits nearer the sun in a skewed orbit." "That hotter sun could have burned away part of Venus's atmosphere. Mercury... hmmm." "What changed the sun? How could the Earth have been moved at all? Corbell, I can't decide!" There might have been agony in the computer's voice. Indecision was bad for men, but men could live with it. A man's memories could fade and grow blurred. But not Peerssa's... "They moved the Earth because the sun got too hot," Corbell speculated. "What do you imagine? Did the State moor huge rocket motors at the North Pole and fuel them with Venus's atmosphere? The ocean would have flowed to cover the II northern hemisphere! The Earth's surface would have ripped everywhere, exposing magma!" "I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they had something besides rockets. But that was Mars you showed me, and that's Saturn, and that's Earth. There! Couldn't that be the coast of Brazil?" "It does not match my memory." With evident reluctance Peerssa added, "If other evidence were not considered, that shoreline could be the edge of the Brazilian continental shelf, altered by the shifting of tectonic plates." "The ocean must have dropped. Maybe some megatons of water vapor got left behind when they moved the Earth." "The State could not have moved the Earth. There would have been no need, because Sol was not an incipient red giant." "Computer! You can't go against your theories, can you? What if we were in the ergosphere of a black hole longer than we thought? We might have lost more than three milyears, could the sun be a red giant?" "Nonsense. We would never have found Sol at all." That was the last straw, because it was true. Corbell was an uncomfortably old man with a cold-sleep hangover. "All right," he said between his teeth, "you win the argument. Now, for purposes of discussion, we are going to assume that that planet is Earth. At long last we have come home to Earth. Now how do I get down?" It developed that Peerssa had that all figured out. II Corbell's pressure suit looked clean and new. It was form-fitting, with a bulging bulb of a helmet and a pointy-ended white spiral on the chest. He would not have been surprised to find it rotted with age. It had been waiting for nearly two hundred years, ship's time. He went out the airlock with the suspicion that he was going to his death. He had never done this before... and in fact the suit held up better than he did. Panting, perspiring, with his pulse thundering irregularly in his ears, he maneuvered himself at the end of a tether and turned for a look at Don Juan. The silver finish had dulled. Corbell winced at the sight of a gaping hole in one of the probes. Peerssa had never mentioned a meteor strike. It could as easily have hit the life support system. Four of the probes were missing. The biological package probes were what made Don Juan a seeder ramship. Each of the probes held a spectrum of algaes with which to seed the unbreathable reducing atmosphere of some nearby Earthlike world, to turn the atmosphere into breathable air and the world into a potential colony. Of course they had never been used for that purpose. Deprived in detail of his civil rights, Corbell had stolen the ship and lit out for the galactic core. There had been ten probes mounted around Don Juan's waist. Now there were six. "I ran the onboard hydrogen tank nearly empty," Peerssa explained. "I had to use four of the thrust systems in the probes to make orbit around Earth. Afterward I put the probes in orbits as relay satellites. You will be able to call me from the surface, wherever you are." "Good." "How do you feel? Can you survive a re-entry?" "Not yet. I'm out of shape. Give me a month." "You'll have it. You'll have exercise too. We must make ready one of the probes for your descent." "I'm going down in one of those?" "They are designed to enter an atmosphere. Don Juan is not." "I should have thought of that. I never did figure a safe way to get down. Aren't you coming down yourself?" "Not unless you so order." Small wonder if he sounded reluctant. It came to Corbell that Peerssa's body was the ship. He could be a total paraplegic if he survived reentry. Corbell said, "Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves on his death. Can I do less? After I'm down, living or dead, magnanimously I free you from all orders previous or subsequent." "Thank you, Corbell." He had trained to work in a pressure suit -- while suspended in a magnetic field, not in actual free fall -- but that was long ago, and he had trained in a young body. The work was hard. On the second day he hurt everywhere. On the third he was back at work. He would stop only when Peerssa insisted. "We won't try to build you a life support system," Peerssa said. "We'll put what you need in the capsule with you and fill the capsule with plastic foam. Your suit will be your life support system." But even that involved moving large masses, and manhandling the bulky cutting laser for hours at a time. The algae tanks and the machinery that served them had to be removed in inspection-hatchsized pieces. Corbell dared not rip the hull. His life could depend on its integrity. He needed long rest periods. He spent them in the Womb Room, watching films of Don Juan's entry into what Peerssa now called (rightly or wrongly) the solar system. For a computer, Peerssa had been starkly ingenious. Corbell would not have thought of using the package probes as thrusters. Peerssa had almost failed to find Earth at all; for the big new moon of the red hot gas giant Peerssa now called Jupiter was just outside the band where Peerssa was searching for a habitable planet. Peerssa had nearly departed Sol with Corbell still in cold sleep, to search nearby systems for remnants of the State... Corbell would probably have died en route. Apparently the question of where they were no longer bothered Peerssa. It had only required Corbell's order to stop his worrying about it. But at the time, Corbell gathered, Peerssa was frantic. He had used fuel he couldn't spare to make close flybys past Saturn and Mercury. Now Corbell looked down at the Earth and yearned. "All the mistakes I made, and still I got here. The mistakes all canceled. If I hadn't turned the receiver back on you couldn't have beamed your personality into the computer. I'd have wrecked the ship trying to run all the way at one gravity. If I'd been right about the galactic core I'd have died of old age, that far from home. It's like something led me back here." "Your records call you an agnostic." "Yeah. I'm whistling in the dark. I keep thinking I'll just barely get killed landing." He was taking a long rest period in celebration. He had finally finished cleaning debris out of the probe warhead. With a meal in his hand -- a layered sandwich baked like a cake -- he watched the landscape roll below him. A dull red highlight gleamed on the nightside ocean, below Jupiter. "Where do I want to land? Is there any sign of civilization down there?' ' "I detect generation and use of power in three places." On the huge blue face of the planet a green arrow suddenly pointed at a green grid pattern. "Here, and on the other side of the world, and in Antarctica. My orbit does not cover Antarctica, but I can land you there." "No, thanks. Isn't that just about California?" Thinking: wait a minute, the west coast ought to bulge. And where's Baja California? From what seemed to be mid-Mexico the coast was a convex sweep all the way up to what must be Alaska. "Most of what you called California and Baja California will be an island near the North Pole. I can land you there too." "No. Wherever someone is generating power, that's where I want to land. There, where you put the grid pattern... which looks a little like a city, doesn't it? Right angles..." "There are many clustered buildings, yes, but no strong evidence of pre-planning. Your era would have called it a city. I advise against your landing there." "If they're the ones who sent the messages, they probably won't kill me. I served their ancestral State." It might be Nevada, he thought, or Arizona -- it was on the seacoast now. "The differences between -- " Peerssa stopped. Corbell got angry. "That's Earth. Earth!" The screwed-up solar system bothered him too, when he let it. "Peerssa, that was Earth's plate tectonics you were describing! Did you find the island that used to be California?" "I found two islands that might years ago." "Well, then! Did that happen by coincidence?" "No," Peerssa lied. "Call that area where you put the grid One City. Call the Antarctic area Three City. What about Two City? Where is that?" "Bordering the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia." "Land me in One City, then." More calmly he added, "I must be nuts, looking for civilization. Why do I want to spend my last days fighting a foreign language? But maybe I'll have time to find out what happened here." Now Corbell filled the probe nose cone with medicines, food, a tank of fresh water, tanks of oxygen, a radio. The plastic foam would hold them. He moored more solidly the ultrasonic whistle, that would melt the foam controlled by signal from Peerssa. He had put on muscle weight. The heart attack he feared, and thought he was prepared for, had never come. Don Juan's twentysecond-century medicines had given him that. But he lived with hot wires in his shoulders: tendonitis. At the last -- braced in the middle of the ravaged nose compartment, with one hand on the spigot of the foam tank -- he hesitated. "Peerssa? Can you hear me?" "Yes." "What will you do after I'm down?" "I will wait until I am sure you are dead. Then I will search other systems for the State." "You're no crazier than I am." He wondered how long Peerssa expected him to last... and didn't ask. He opened the spigot. Foam surrounded him and congealed. Thrust built up under his back, held for a time, then eased to almost nothing. Presently there was turbulence. It was a powered landing, not a meteoric re-entry. The thrust built up again, held, died. The probe rotated... and there was a jar that drove him two inches into the foam. Peerssa spoke in his suit radio. "May I consider myself free of your commands?" Corbell suffered a quick, vividly detailed nightmare. "Melt the foam first!" he cried. But Peerssa was no longer bound by his orders. Peerssa would take vengeance on one whom the State considered a criminal and arch-ingrate. The foam would not melt. Corbell would die here, embedded like a fly in amber, his freedom mere yards away! He felt a lurch. Then another. The nightmare ended. He sank through melting foam, blind, to a solid bulkhead. The foam ran from his faceplate, and he saw that the inspection hatch was wide open. Corbell stepped into the opening and looked out and down. Peerssa had landed the big cylinder on its side, on attitude jets. The sun, high overhead, was nonetheless a sunset sun, red and inflated. The land ran flat to a range of sharpedged granite hills. It was all dead: browns and grays, dead rock and dust. Heat made the air shimmer like water. The State had not provided exit ladders for a package probe. Peerssa had been clever again. The foam had run out the hatch and congealed into a foam plastic slope. Corbell walked down it, and his boots crunched, as on snow partly thawed and refrozen. He stepped out onto the soil of Earth. The soil had died. sion? Loss of water when Earth fled inexplicably from an inexplicably expanding sun? At this moment he didn't care. He raised hands to his faceplate -- "Do not try to take off your suit. Corbell, have you left the probe?" -- ready for his first breath of fresh air in a long time. "Why not?" "Have you left the probe?" "Yeah." "Good. For purposes of discussion I have spoken of this world as Earth. Now I may speak of the differences. You have landed on a world marginally habitable at best, in a region uninhabitably hot." "What?" "It's too hot, Corbell. Temperatures in the equatorial zone range from fifty-five degrees centigrade upward. The oceans are above fifty degrees. I find little chlorophyll absorption in the oceans, and none on land, barring certain mountain valleys. You would have done better to land near one or the other pole." Somehow Corbell was not even shocked. Had he been halfexpecting this? My death is the end of the world -- a very human atafter all -- "So that's what happened to the oceans. Evaporated." "The atmosphere holds great quantities of water vapor. Corbell, we still do not know." "What about mountain valleys?" "In a mountain range corresponding to Earth's Himalayas, there are valleys between one and two kilometers high. Some life has survived there." Corbell sighed. "All right. Which way is civilization?" "Define civilization." "One City. No, just point me at the closest place where someone is using power." "Four point nine kilometers distant there is minor usage of power. I doubt you will find people, or even living beings. The power level has not varied since we made orbit. I think you will find nothing but machines running automatically." "I'll try anyway. Which way?" "West. I will guide you." Ill Corbell had not gone hiking in a long time. The suit was not uncomfortable. Most of the weight of equipment rested on his shoulders. The boots were not hiking boots, but they fit. He set out in a rhythmic stride, breathing the canned air, letting his attention rove the scenery... and had to stop very soon. He'd chosen too quick a pace. He rested, then set out in a more leisurely stroll. It was level land: not ankle-breaking country, though he had to watch his footing. It was packed earth with rocks inset, and there were gentle wind-carved risings and fallings-off. Peerssa led him to the range of hills and apparently expected him to walk straight across them. Corbell turned left until he could find an easier slope. He found he was grumbling subvocally... He had had to grumble subvocally for lo, these eight years waking time in which he had grown one hundred and eighty years old while Grumble aloud and you couldn't know what Peerssa might pick up and take as an order. Goddam literal computers, he grumbled. Sleep tanks and super-medicines that don't keep you young. Air and cooling equipment getting heavier with each step. Why couldn't they have put a belly band in this suit? A belly band was the greatest invention since the wheel. It let a hiker carry the weight on his hips instead of his back. If the State had had its head screwed on right -- Which was silly. The suit was designed for free-fall and use aboard ship. Not hiking. And if Peerssa took orders, it was a damn good thing. And he was lucky to be on Earth at all. And, Corbell thought as he topped the crest, he was damn glad to be here. Puffing, bent over so he could pant better, half-listening for the heart attack he'd been expecting for so long, it came to him that he was happy. probably no human being had ever done what he had done. Be nice if there were someone to brag to. He saw the house. It was on a higher crest of hills beyond this one. Otherwise he might not have seen it. It was just the color of the hills: gray and dust-brown; but he saw its regular shape against the blue of sky. It was set against the rock slope. It took him another two hours to reach it. He was being careful with himself. Even so, he knew how his legs would hurt tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow. He was two-thirds of the way up that second range of hills when he found the remains of a broken road. Then it was easier. The house was extravagantly designed. The roof was a convex triangle, almost horizontal, with the base against the hill itself. Below the roof were two walls of glass, or of something stronger. The house's single room was exposed to this single voyeur, who perched precariously on the slope and clutched at a boulder with thick gloves. It was, he thought, a hell of a place to build a house. He pressed his faceplate against the glass-like material. The floor was not quite level. Either the hill itself had settled, or architectural styles had changed more than the architect in Corbell He was looking into a livingroom-sized area with what had to be a bed in the middle. But the bed was two or three times bigger than king size, and it had the extravagant shape of a '#s style Hollywood pool. The curved headboard was a control board fitted with screens and toggles and hi-fi grids and a couple of slots big enough to deliver drinks or sandwiches. In the darkness above the bed hovered a big wire sculpture or a mobile or even some kind of antenna; he couldn't tell. But two pinpricks of yellow light lived in the control board. "This is your power source, all right," Corbell reported. "I'm going to find the door." Twenty minutes later he reported, "There's no door." "A house must have an opening." Peerssa replied "Look for an opening that doesn't look like a doOr. From your description, there must be more to the house than you can see: a toilet at least, perhaps an office or a food dispensary." "They'd have to be under the hill. Mmm... all right. I'll keep looking." There was no trace of a trap door in the roof. Could the whole roof lift up in one piece, on signal? Corbell couldn't guess whether the architect would have been that wasteful of power. If there was an entrance in the road itself, then hard dirt covered it. Corbell was getting annoyed. The house couldn't have been used in a hundred years; possibly a thousand; conceivably, ten thousand. Likewise the door, wherever it might be. Maybe the house had a second, lower story, now buried in the hill, door and all. "I'll have to break in," he said. "Wait, Corbell. Might the house have a burglar alarm? I am not familiar with the design concepts regarding private dwellings. The State built arcologies." "What if it does have a burglar alarm? I'm wearing a helmet. I can't hear a damn thing through it." "There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser." "Will it -- " Will it reach? Stupid, it was designed to reach across tens of light-years. "Go ahead." "I have the house in view. Firing." Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red hot. He saw earth below him trying to move. A ton or so of hillside spilled away from below the house, and a thing of rusted metal floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell's arm pierced the clouds. "Peerssa, you're being attacked. Can you handle it?" "It can't hurt me. It could hurt you. I'd better destroy it." The metal thing began to glow. It didn't like that. It fled away in a jerky randomized path, while the red beam remained fixed on one point in the sky. Its upper body glowed bright red verging on orange. It was screaming; its frantic warbling voice sang through Corbell's helmet. Suddenly it tilted and arced away down the hill. It struck the plain hard, turned over and over and lay silent. There was a hole in the roof now. Corbell said, "You think there are more of those?" "Insufficient data." Corbell climbed down to the roof and looked through. Molten concrete, or whatever, had set the bed afire. Corbell jumped down onto the flaming bedclothes, prepared to get off fast. Wrong again: it was a water bed, and his feet went right through it. He waded out, then pushed the burning bedclothes into the puddle in the middle with his clumsy gloved hands. The fire went out, but the room filled with steam. "I'm in the house," he reported. Peerssa didn't bother to answer. Corbell the architect looked about him. This room, the visible part of the house, was a triangle. The bed in the center had the pleasing asymmetry of a puddle of water... and it was pleasing. There was an arc of sofa in one comer, facing the bed, and a slab of black slate in front of it, arced like the sofa and broken in the middle, as if... Corbell bent and lifted one end of the slab. Yeah, something on the underside, solid circuitry. This had been a floating coffee table until whatever was holding it up burned out. From inside he could still see no doors. There was only one wall to inspect. He moved along it, rapping. It all sounded hollow. Door controls on the headboard? Nuts. You'd have to walk clear around to the other side... wait, there were pressure points on the back side. Three of them. He pushed them. The back wall slid down in three unequal sections. The big one was a closet. There were half a dozen half-rotted garments in it, and heaped dust. The second was a much smaller closet, no bigger than a telephone booth, with a freeform chair in it. A chair. Funny. Corbell went close enough to see the great hole in the bottom of the chair. A toilet? But there was no water in the bowl, and no toilet paper, except...except for a glitteringly clean metal sponge attached to the chair by a wire. He stepped out of the cubical. By any terms, it was pretty basic for a house with this complexity of design. The owner should have been able to afford something better. The closet... He tugged at the clothes still hanging on shaped hangers. Funny, he couldn't tell if they were made for a man or a woman. They were amazingly resilient. He tugged harder, then tried in earnest to tear the half-rotted things. They stood his full strength. So. Say there were temporary clothes, meant to change with style, and clothes meant to last longer. The heaps of dust would be the temporary clothes... He still hadn't found a door. The third cubicle looked promising. There was nothing in it at all except for one unmarked switch like the door switch in the bathroom, and a panel of four lighted pushbuttons each with a different squiggle on it. "I think I've found an elevator," he said. "I'm going to try it." He used the door switch. The door came up; he turned on his helmet lamp. "Dangerous. What if the elevator takes you down and then breaks down?" "Then you beam me another manhole to climb out of." Corbell pushed the top button. Nothing happened. He'd expected that. He was at the top. He pushed ##. "Corbell! Answer if you can!" "Yeah?" There had been no sense of motion. He opened the door. "You have changed position by four point one miles southwest and two hundred feet loss of altitude. I place you in One City." "Yeah." Corbell looked out into a different room. He was beginning to feel like a wandering ghost. Everything was spooky, unreal. He stepped out, around what must have been a floating desk and was now at the height of his knees. Screens and pushbutton panels set into the desk made it look like the control panel in the Womb Room; but they were ruined. It must have rained here for hundreds of years. There was a mg like half-melted cotton candy, deep as his ankles. It squished beneath his boots, and tore, and stuck to his suit fabric. He stepped to the edge of an empty picture window frame and looked out. Thirty stories of windows and empty frames dropped away beneath his toes. He saw far higher buildings around him. There to the right, a masonry behemoth had fallen, taking other buildings and pieces of buildings with it. Beyond that gap, beyond the mist and rain, he thought he could trace a grey-ongrey outline: a cube, impossibly large, whose walls had a slight outward curve. Afraid of falling, he lay on his back to look up. He found another sixty or seventy stories of building above him. "Did the State ever have any kind of instant transportation? Like a telephone booth, but you dial and you're there?" "No." "Well, these people did. I should have guessed. Me, of all people! That house wasn't a house, it was only part of a house. I've found the office. It's in the city. There ought to be a bathroom and a living room and maybe a game room, God knows where. What we broke into was the bedroom." "It's likely that the machinery has not been tended for a long time. Bear that in mind." There were two panels in the instant-elsewhere booth: a fourbutton set like the one in the bedroom, and an eight-button set with squiggles printed on the buttons. Now, what did that mean? He settled for pushing the third down on the four-button set. Now there was a light working in the cubicle, and no second panel. Corbell stepped out, and smiled. Definitely, this was the bathroom. And the outside temperature register, set a chin level beneath the edge of his faceplate, was dropping. "I think there's air conditioning," he said. "You have traveled three point one miles west by southwest and have lost six hundred feet of altitude." "Yeah." Corbell opened his faceplate. Just for a moment, he'd slam it fast if -- But the air was cool and fresh. He began taking off his suit. It came to him as he let the heavy backpack section fall: he was exhausted. He pulled himself out of the rest of his armor and stepped down into a bathtub almost big enough to be called a pool. He couldn't read the markings on the water spigot. He turned it all the way one way and pulled it on. Hot water splashed into the tub. He turned it the other way. Boiling water spurted out, spitting steam. Okay, the hot water was "Cold", and it wasn't too hot to stand. It flooded out and around him as he lolled on the curved bottom. A tiny voice called, "Corbell, answer!" He reached and pulled the helmet to the edge. "I'm taking a rest break. Check back in an hour. And send me a dancing girl." IV A tiny voice peeped, " -- Can. Repeating. Corbell, answer if you can. Repeating. Corbell -- " Corbell opened his eyes. Every texture was strange to his sight and his touch. He was nowhere aboard Don Juan. Then where -- ? Ah. He'd found two projections at the edge of the sunken tub, soft mounds like a pair of falsies, just right to rest his head. His neck was still between the pillows. Lukewarm water enveloped him. He'd gone to sleep in the tub. " -- if you can. Repeat -- " Corbel! pulled the pressure suit helmet to him. "Here." "Your hour's gone, and another hour and six minutes. Are you sick?" "No, just sleepy. Hang on." He pulled the spigot on. Hot water spurted through cool water and mixed. Corbell stirred with his foot. "I'm still on a rest break. Anything new at your end?" "Something's watching me. I sense radar and gravity radiation." "Gravity?" "Gravity waves going through my mass sensor, yes. I'm being probed by advanced instruments which must have learned a great dealabout me. They could be automatic." "They could also be from the same source as the messages. Where is all this action coming from?" "From what would be Tasmania, if this were Earth. -- The probing has stopped. I can't see the source." "If it starts throwing missiles at you you'll have to pull out fast." "Yes. I'll have to change my orbit. I didn't want to use the fuel. My orbit does not take me over Antarctica." "Do that." Corbell stood up (his legs ached) and waded dripping from the warm water. A line of thick dust against the base of a wall might have been the remains of towels. He stopped before a picture window. The day had darkened. He looked down across a shallow slope of beach sand, downhill into haze that thickened to opaque mist. Was that a... fish skeleton down there, glimmering white through haze? It looked far distant... and big. Lightning flared, waited, flared again. The rain fell like an avalanche. Corbell turned away. He put on his undersuit, then his pressure suit piece by piece, feeling the weight and the chafe spots. The bath had been good. He'd have to come back here when he got the chance. There was even a sauna, not that he'd need -- Yeah, a sauna. This place was old. If it had been built after the Earth had grown hot, the sauna would have been a door to the outside! He went into the booth, dithered, and decided not to push the bottom button. Peerssa was right. The machinery had been untended for a long time. So: Bedroom or Office? He knew those circuits still worked. Bedroom. He stepped out. Next to his chin the temperature readout rose in blinking numerals. He stepped around to the headboard, confirmed a memory: he'd seen a television screen, and controls. He turned it on. The screen lit, first grey-white, then -- It was a view of the ruined bed, showing his own armored legs. He tried switches until he found the playback. The scene ran backward. Suddenly the bed was whole and four figures writhed on it at flickering speed. The scene jumped to a different foursome or to the same foursome dressed differently, before he found a way to freeze it. "Corbel #, I have tried to signal the source of the probes, to no effect." "Okay. Listen, if you have to run, just do it. We'll both be safer if you don't stop to call me about it." "What will you do now?" "I'm watching home movies." Corbell chortled. "This place is like the Playboy Mansion. There's an invisible video camera focused on the bed." "A degenerate civilization, then. Small wonder they could not save themselves. You should not degrade yourself by watching." Corbell swallowed his annoyance. "I want to know if they're human." "Are they?" "The tape's faded. And they're wearing clothes., loose suits with lots of openings in them, in pastels. If they aren't human I can't see the differences... but they're thin. And they don't seem to carry themselves right." He paused to watch. "And they're very limber. The situation isn't quite what I thought." "In what way?" "I thought it was an orgy for four. It isn't. It's like in ancient China: two of them are servants. They're helping the other pair get into those advanced sexual positions. Maybe they're not servants; maybe they're trainers, or teachers." He watched some more. "Or even... they're as limber as dancers. Maybe that's what they are. I wish I had a view of the couch. There might be spectators." "Corbell." "Yeah?" "Are you hungry?" "... Yeah. I may have to use that fourth button." "I wouldn't bother. If a thousand-year-old kitchen is your only food source, you'll die quickly. Your suit will only recycle air for another seventy-one hours. Your food-syrup reserve is trivial. I suggest you try to reach the South Pole. I am over it now. I see a large continental mass, and forest." "Well, fine." Corbell switched off the stag movie and made for the closet. When he punched the second button down, a panel of eight buttons appeared beside the smaller panel. He studied it. The symbols on those eight buttons might be letters or numbers. He reached, then drew back. "I'm afraid of it." "Of what?" "Of this panel in the office. See, the four buttons that were in all the booths are probably an intercom. A closed circuit; you couldn't get into it except from here. There's probably a private number that lets you into the office. This panel in the office booth is like a telephone, I think. What happens when you dial a phone number at random?" "In my time there was a recorded voice to tell you you had made a mistake." "Yeah, we had that too. But in this instant transportation setup you might be sent nowhere! Poof l" "Can you find a telephone directory?" There was nothing like that in the booth. Corbel opened the door. Rain and howling wind were blowing into the office. Fat drops plated themselves across his faceplate. He walked around the desk, waited a minute for the water to run off the glass, then began pulling at desk drawers. They didn't want to open. He pried one open and found it half full of gray-green mold. An abandoned apple? Machines were set into the desk top. Telephone, picture-phone, computer link, what? No telling now. Time and rain had destroyed them. "I'll have to try pushing buttons at random," he told Peerssa. "Good luck." "Why did you say that?" "To be polite." Corbell faced the array of eight buttons in the light from his helmet. The booth could kill him so fast he'd never know it. Punch at random? He could do better than that. He chose a button -- the fifth, counting across and down, and the symbol looked like an upside-down L. A gallows. He pushed it once, pause, twice, pause, thrice... Four did it. Suddenly there was indirect lighting around the rim of the ceiling. The door wouldn't open. Annoyed, he chose another button, an hourglass on its side and compressed from both ends: # # # # . "You have changed position twice," Peerssa informed him. This time the door opened. There were skeletons, very old skeletons in identical... uniforms? Loose garments, short pants, sleeveless shirts with rolls of fabric at the  shoulders. Under the dust the garments looked new, in bright scarlet with black markings. The bones inside were crumbled with age, but they could not have been big men. Five feet tall or thereabouts. Corbell moved among them looking for bullet wounds. No holes in the garments or the skulls... but from the way they sprawled they seemed to have died in a firefight, and they seemed to be human. He found desks and what looked like computer terminals. A thick sliding door had been melted out of the wall. Beyond it were cells, whose walls and doors were composed of lacy, decorative grid work that was different for each cell; but the metal-lace doors were locked, and there were more skeletons in the cells. "Police station," he told Peerssa. "I was trying for a restaurant. I pushed the same button four times." He heard irritation in his voice. Was he getting tired? "See, what I didn't want was a number that went nowhere. The numbers the restaurants fight for are the ones that are easiest to remember. Or they used to be." "The State restricts those numbers to important municipal functions; police stations, hospitals, ombudsmen -- " Corbell stepped through another, larger melted door. Doors beyond retracted before him, and he stepped into a waterfall of rain. He'd finally made it outside. He couldn't see much. A city street... and more skeletons. These wore varied clothing, skimpy shorts-and-undershirt garments in every color and pattern save scarlet. "I'll have to try the other repeating numbers," he said without moving. "I think it is safe. If you find a number not in use, it won't work." huh?" He still hadn't moved. The rain ran down his faceplate and drummed on his helmet. "There is an alternative. I have probed the city with my senses. There is hollow space, a system of tunnels underground, leading away in many directions. I can lead you to the underground space where they converge." "What's the point of... You think it's a subway system? They'd have stopped using it when they invented the booths." "If they no longer used the subway cars, they may have kept the buildings as a transportation nexus. Economy." V He walked through pelting rain on packed dirt covered by thin mud. It sucked at his boots. He couldn't afford the energy that cost him. He was already too tired... The streets and buildings were largely intact. He found no more piles of skeletons. There was a bubble, half glass and half metal, like a Christmas ornament twelve feet across. It was smashed against the side of a building and half filled with rainwater. Corbell looked inside. He found spongy upholstery, and a pair of seats, one occupied by another small disintegrating skeleton in a yellow shorts-and-undershirt garment. Corbell forced himself to search through the big patch pockcts. What he found, he stowed in his too pouch. He could examine it later. Later there was an intact bubble, abandoned. He tried to start it. It looked intact; the brightwork in the interior gleamed. But it was dead. He walked on. Now there was a tremendous empty lot on one side, with wind-weathered stumps of tree and traces of curving paths. A park? On his other side was a wall that went up and up, curving away from view, and on and on, curving laterally as well, so that he had no idea how high it was nor how wide. In the mists beyond the office picture window he had thought to trace the outlines of a cube bigger than belief. So: it had been real. Streets. Why streets? And cars? Corbell began to suspect what he would find at the transportation nexus. "You are over the hollow space," said Peerssa. "That's good. I'm tired." Corbell looked around him. Mummified park to the left, wall to the right. Ahead... the wall turned to glass. An entire wall of glass doors. He pushed through into gloom lit by his helmet lamp. The ceiling gave no sense of distance: only of random colors that changed with his position. The place was wide. His beam got lost in it. He glanced down at another, confusing light: the glow of dials at his chin. The temperature was down to # C. "Air conditioned," he said. "Good. Your suit batteries will last longer." "There could be anything in this place," he argued with himself. He opened his faceplate. No heat. Sniffed: a touch of staleness, that was all. "I've got to get out of this suit. I'm tired." "Drink from the syrup nipple." He laughed; he'd forgotten it was there. He sucked until his belly felt less empty. Peerssa was right: half of his tiredness had been hunger. He pulled himself out of the rest of the suit. Stepping into the rug was a sudsame as the rotted rug in the office, but it was dry, intact, and ankle deep. Like walking on a cloud. It felt damned expensive, but there must have been an acre of it here in the foyer of a public building. "Going to sleep," he told the helmet. He sprawled out in the cloud of carpet and let it close around him. VI Grey dawn. He wriggled a little in the luxury of the rug. The ceiling was thousands of shades of color in what seemed to be whorl patterns; you could go crazy staring into it and never know how far away it was. He closed his eyes and dozed again. Came down to die, he thought. He said, "Peerssa, how do you expect me to die? Heart Attack?" No answer. The helmet was out there by his fingertips. He pulled it close and repeated the question. "I think not," said Peerssa. "Why? The State's wonderful medicines?' "Yes, if one includes contraceptive techniques as medicines. After the founding of the State, there was a generation in which no man or woman subject to inherited diseases might have children. The population fell by half. Famine ended -- " "Heart patients included?" His father had died of heart trouble! "Certainly the children of heart patients were not allowed to have children. Your genes are those of a criminal, but a healthy one." So they'd edited Corbell's genes from the human race. "Sarcastic damn computer." Corbell was looking around him now. "Nuts. I could have slept on a couch. " There were rings of couches around freely curved tables that still floated. The couches looked like humps in the rug. Inset within one wall was a row of booths. Corbell stood up, stretched, and went to examine them. The rug-stuff flowed delightfully around his toes. In each booth were four rows of pushbuttons marked with squiggles, below a frosted glass rectangle. He pushed a button larger than the others (operator?), and got no response. Then he noticed the slot. From the tool pouch of his empty pressure suit he spilled items stolen from a smashed car. A seamless silver lipstick meant nothing to him. Handkerchief: faint colors seemed to swirl in the material. Candy wrapper; the hard candy must have melted in untold years of rain; or it could have been drugs or medicine; or he could be wrong on every point. Hand-sized lens of clear plastic, its rim ornamented in green squiggles set within the plastic. That looked about right. He tried it in one of the booths. It fit the slot. He pushed the larger button and the screen lit. Now what? The screens might be the phone books he needed. All he had to do was punch for information -- without reaching a nonexistent number -- and read the answer, in squiggles. Corbell was sweating. He hadn't thought this out. He lowered his hands and stepped out of the booth. Well. No hurry. His two-daysplus of air reserve were not being used. There was time to explore. And there, far at the back of the lobby, were the stairs he'd expected. Broad, well designed by the principles he'd learned in his first life, carpeted in the cloud-rug: a flight of stairs going down into darkness. He went back to tuck his helmet in the crook of his elbow. He retrieved the lens-shaped keycredit card. He started down the stairs, playing the helmet lamp ahead of him, humming. With her head... looked... underneath her arm, she wa-a-alks the Bloody Tower... The stairs lurched into motion, throwing him backward. He sat up cursing. He hadn't hurt himself, but... get crippled here and it would be his death. Light grew below him. At first he thought it was the last gasp of an emergency power system. It brightened. When he reached bottom it was as strong as daylight. There was vast open space, a high ceiling, places he thought were shops: the feel of a European train station, but with touches of sybaritic luxury more appropriate to a palace. There were fountains, and more of the ankleenveloping rug swelling to rings of couches. Along one entire wall -- "Peerssa! I've found a map!" "Please describe it." "It's two polar projections. Damn, I wish I could show you. I think the continents are smaller, which would mean there wasn't as much ocean water evaporated when they were made. There are lines across it, all from -- " he checked -- "From this point, I think. Most of the lines are dark. Peerssa, the only lines still lit run to Antarctica and the tip of Argentina and, uh, Alaska." Alaska had been twisted north. So had the tip of Siberia. "The lines run through oceans, or under them. Hey, you were right about California. There are two islands just under Alaska." He saw that what he'd taken for shops were alcoves with couches and food-dispensing walls. He tried one. When he inserted the plastic disc, a woman's voice spoke in tones of regret. He tried other slots and got the same reedy voice saying the same incomprehensible words. Next step? Down there at the far end, that line of doors... Thick doors, with slots for credit discs. He went back for his pressure suit. The stairs carried him up. How the heck did they handle streams of commuters going both ways? He rode back down with the heavy suit draped over his shoulder. The amp: there were lighted squiggles next to the lighted lines. He memorized the pattern that marked the route he wanted: not to the center of the thawed Antarctic continent, but to the nearer shore. Shores get colonized first. The doors: there, those were the squiggles he wanted. Were they? He checked. Yes. He produced his disc, hesitated, looked at it. Which side was up? He tried it; it wouldn't go. He turned it over and inserted it. The door opened. He retrieved the disc, glanced at it and smiled. The squiggles had changed. He'd been docked the price of a ticket. He faced a wall with a circular hole in it, the hole filled with glass: a glass door in a glass circle, and beyond it a cylinder lined with seats. The front of the car was glass too, with shiny metal beyond. There was a disc-sized slot in the door. He used it. The door opened. He pulled the disc out of the other side. The door closed. "Here I am," he said. "Where?" "In one of the subway cars. I don't know what to do next. Wait?" "You will not use the instant transportation booths?" "No, that was a dead end. Those must have been toys for the rich, too expensive for most people, too short-range to be practical. Something like that. Why else would there be streets with cars on them?" "I wondered," said Peerssa. "Four digits in base eight gives only four thousand and ninety-six booth numbers. Too few." "Yeah." There was room for about eight people, he decided, on benches of cloud-rug tinted in pastels to mark off four seats on each bench. There was a food dispenser -- which spoke to him regretfully when he tried it. Behind a half-door that would barely hide one's torso, he found a toilet equipped with one of the glitteringly clean metal sponges. He tried that too. His best guess was that the sponge had an instant-transportation unit in it. It cleaned itself miraculously. There were arms for the couch. They would pull out of a slot along the back, and lock. Through the front wall he could see a massive-looking door. "There is increased power usage from your locus," said Peerssa. "Then something's happening." He stretched out on the couch. No telling about departure time. He'd wait twenty-four hours before he gave up. His stomach growled. I Somebody spoke to him. Corbell jerked violently and woke with a scream on his lips. Who but Peerssa could speak to him here? But he was not aboard Don Juan, The voice stopped. Peerssa spoke from his helmet. "I do not recognize the language." "Did you expect to? Play it again for me." He listened to Peerssa' s recording of a boyish voice speaking in reassuring liquid tones. Afterward he sighed. "If that guy was waiting to meet me himself, what could I tell him? What could he tell me? I'll probably be dead before I could leam his language." "Your story has wrung my heart. Most of your contemporaries only had one life to live." "... Yeah." "Your self-centered viewpoint has always bothered me, Corbell. If you could see yourself as -- " "No, wait a minute. You're right. You're dead right. I've had more than most men are given. More than most men can steal, for that matter. I'm going to stop bitching." "You amaze me. Will you now dedicate your services to the State?" "What State? The State's dead. My self-centeredness is as human as your fanaticism." The stranger's voice spoke again, in beautiful incomprehensible words -- and Corbell saw him. His face was outside the glass, beyond the forward door, as if the heavy metal were transparent. A hologram? Corbell leaned forward. It was the bust of a boy, fading below the shoulders. He was twelve or so, Corbell guessed, but he had the poise of an adult. His skin was golden, his features were a blend of races: black, yellow, white, and something else, a mutation perhaps, that left him half bald: a fringe of tightly curled black hair around the base of the skull and over the ears, and an isolated tuft above the forehead. The face smiled reassuringly and vanished. The metal door went up. The car shot forward and down. Corbell was on a rollercoaster. He pulled out one of the retracted chair arms and hung on. He fell at a slant for what felt like half a minute. Then there was high gravity as car and tunnel curved back to horizontal. Light inside, darkness outside. Corbell was beginning to relax when the car rolled, surged to the left, rolled, surged to the right; steadied. What was that? Changing tunnels? There were no more surges. The hissing sound of their motion was sleep-inducing. He was tempted to lie down. His ears popped. Better to lie down with his feet forward. There would be deceleration at the end. His ears felt pressure again. He worked his jaw to pop his ears. Peerssa said, "Your speed is in excess of eleven hundred kilometers per hour. You are now beneath the Pacific Ocean. A remarkable achievement." "How do they do it?" "At a guess, you are riding a gravity-assisted linear accelerator through an evacuated tunnel." Corbell worked his jaw to relieve pressure in his ears. Evacuated? He poked his head into his helmet. Air pressure was down and still dropping. He panted as he worked his way into the pressure suit. "Vacuum tunnel, right," he gasped. "The car leaks." He wondered what else had deteriorated in this ancient system of tunnels. He could be stopped beneath the Pacific, to suffocate slowly, while an almost human ghost reassured him that service would be resumed as soon as possible. Too much imagination and I'll scare myself to death . Too little and I'll get myself killed. Now the ride was superlatively smooth. Presently Corbell emptied his bladder; then emptied his suit's bladder into the toilet. The urine ran through the bowl without leaving a trace. A frictionless surface. Hours passed. He dozed sitting up, woke, lay down on his face, didn't like that, lay down on his back with the backpack a bulge under his shoulders and a chair arm under his head. Better. He slept. A surge woke him. He sat up. He sucked syrup... sucked the last of it, and it was almost enough. There was acceleration; was he going uphill? Half a minute of low gravity, a final surge backward. A steel door closed behind the car and he knew he was at rest. The glass door in front of the car, and the metal door beyond it, both popped open at the same time. Corbell was just standing up when the thunderclap slapped him backward. Sometimes you would end a long backpacking trip with aches in every muscle and a mind blank except for the determination to keep walking no matter what. In much the same frame of mind, Corbell got to his feet and limped toward the doors. His ears rang. His head hurt where he'd bumped it on his helmet. He'd twisted his back. He felt stupid: the thunderclap of air slamming into vacuum should not have surprised him. All he could do was keep wading through the surprises until they stopped him. There were dim lights far back in a great open space. He picked out couches and alcoves and the faintly glowing lines of a wall map. Numbers at his chin showed normal pressure or a bit higher, temperature warm but bearable. Corbell opened his faceplate. The air was warm and musty. He smelled dry rot. He lifted his helmet, sniffed again. A trace of animal smell -- "Meep?" He jumped, then relaxed. Where had he heard such a sound? It was friendly and familiar. Motion caught at his eye, left -- "Mee!" The beast came questing through dusty cloud-rug. It was a snake, a fat furry snake. It came toward him in an S-shaped flow. Its fur was patterned in black and grey and white. It stopped and lifted its beautiful cat's face and asked again, like a cat: "Meep?" "I'll be damned," said Corbell. Something rustled behind him. He forgot the furred snake. He was tired, so tired that in a moment he knew he would pass out. But there were furtive sounds behind him, and he turned, fighting to stay on his feet. Under a hooded robe of white cloth with a touch of irridescence in it: a bent human form... While the cat-snake distracted him, she had struck. He saw her in shadow: tall and stooped, gaunt, her face all wrinkles, her nose hooked, her eyes deep-set and malevolent in the shadow of the hood. Her swollen hands held a silver cane aimed at Corbell's eyes. He saw her for a bare moment while the numbness closed over him. He guessed he was seeing his death. II He was on his back on a formfitting surface, his legs apart, his arms above his head. The air was wet and heavy and hot. Sweat ran in his crotch and armpits and at the corners of his eyes. When he tried to move the surface surged and rippled, and soft bonds tightened round his wrists and ankles. His pressure suit was gone. He wore only his one-piece undersuit, on a world uninhabitably hot. He felt naked, and trapped. Light pressed on his eyelids. He opened them. He was on a water bed, looking at grey sky through the jagged edges of a broken roof. He turned his head and saw more of a Bedroom: curved headboard covered with elaborate controls, arc of couch with floating coffee-table to match. These Bedrooms must have been mass-produced, like prefab houses you didn't need to assemble. But a tornado had hit this one. The roof and the picture windows had exploded outward. The old woman was watching him from the arc of sofa. He thought: Norn. Fate in the shape of an old woman. She was vivid in his memory, and so was t he silver cane in her hand. He watched her stand and come toward him... and the fur boa round her shoulders raised a prick-eared head and watched him back. It was curled one and a half times around her neck. The tip of its tail (witched. Dammit, that was a car. He remembered a cat like that, Lion, (hough he'd forgotten the boyhood friend who owned it. Lots of luxurious fur, and a long, rich, Huffy tail. If Lion's tail had been multiplied by three and attached to Lion's head, this beast would have been the result. But how could evolution cost a cat its legs? He didn't believe it. Easier to believe that someone had tampered with a cat's genes, sometime in The woman stood over him now, her cane pointed between his eyes. She spoke. He shook his head. The bed rippled. Her hand tightened on the cane. He saw no trigger, but she must have pulled a trigger, because Corbel! went into agony. It wasn't physical, this agony. It was sorrow and helpless rage and guilt. He wanted to die. "Stop!" he cried. "Stop!" Communication had begun.    Her name was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar. She must have had a computer somewhere. The box she set on the headboard was too small to be more than an extension of it. As Corbell talked -- meaninglessly at first, talking merely to stop her from using the cane -- the box functioned as a translator. It spoke to Corbell in Corbell's own voice, to MirellyLyra in hers. They traded nouns. Mirelly-Lyra pointed at things and named them, Corbell gave them his own names. He had no names for many of the things in the room. "Cat-tail," he called the furred snake. "Phone booth," he called the instantelse where booth. She set up a screen: a television that unrolled like a poster. Another computer link, he guessed. She showed him pictures. Their vocabulary increased. "Give me food," he said when his hunger had grown more than his fear. When she understood, finally, she set a plate beside him and freed one of his hands. Under her watchful eye and the threat of her cane, he ate, and belched, and communicated, "More." She took the plate behind the headboard. A minute or so later she brought it back reloaded, with fruit and a slice of roasted meat, hot and freshly cut, and a steamed yellow root that tasted like a cross between squash and carrot. On the first plateful he had hardly noticed what he was eating. Now he found time to wonder: where did she cook it? and to guess that she used the "phone booth" to reach her stove. The cat-tail dropped from the old woman's shoulders onto the bed. Corbell froze. It wriggled across the bed and sniffed at the meat. Mirelly-Lyra thumped it on the chest and it desisted. Now it crawled up onto Corbell's chest, reared and looked him in the eyes. Corbell scractched it behind the ears. Its eyes half closed and it purred loudly. Its belly was hard leather, ridged like a snake's, but its fur felt as luxurious as it looked. He finished the second plate, feeding some of the meat to the cattail. He dozed off wondering if she would shake him awake. She didn't. When he woke the sky was black and she had turned on the lights. His free hand was bound again. His pressure suit was nowhere in sight. Even if she freed him she would still have the cane. He didn't know if the "phone booth" worked. At the back of his mind he wondered if Peerssa, thinking him dead, had gone on to another star. What did she want with him? They worked on verbs, then on descriptive terms. Her language was of no form he had ever heard of, but the screen and mechanical memory made it easy for them. Soon they were trading information: "Take off the ropes. Let me walk." "No." "Why?" "I am old." "So am I," said Corbell. "I want to be young." He couldn't read expression in her voice or in the translator's version of his own. But the way she'd said that jerked his head up to look at her. "So do I." She shot him with the cane. Guilt, fear, remorse, death-wish. He cried and writhed and pulled at his bonds for eternal seconds before she turned it off. Then he lay staring at her in shock and hurt. Her face worked, demonically. Abruptly she turned her back on him. His thrashings had frightened the cat-tail. It had fled. "I want to be young -- " and Blunt! And now her back was rigid and her fists clenched. Did she hide red rage, or tears? Why? Is it my fault she's old ? One thing was clear: she was keeping him tied up for her protection and his own. If she used the cane on him when his hands were free, he might kill himself. The cat-tail crawled back onto his chest, coiled, and reached to rub noses with him. "Meee!" It demanded an explanation. "I don't know," he told the beast now rumbling like a motor on his chest. "I don't guess I'll like the answer." But he was wrong.    She freed one of his hands and fed him. Itwas more of the same: two fruits, a steamed root, roasted meat. She fed the cat-tail while she was at it. The fruit was fresh. The meat was like overdone roast beef sliced moments ago. She had been out of sight behind the headboard for no more than a minute. Even a microwave oven wasn't that fast, or hadn't been in #. It stuck in his mind... And he had to go to the bathroom. She was irritatingly, embarrassingly slow to understand. He knew she had the idea when she began to pace, scowling, dithering as to whether to leave him in his own filth. Eventually she freed him, first (from behind the headboard) his wrists, then his feet. She stood well back, covering him with the cane, while he went into the middle closet. Alone at last, with the door blocking her eyes, he let out a shuddering sigh. He wouldn't try to escape. Not this time. He knew too little. It wasn't worth the risk that she wouldn't let him go to the bathroom again. It wasn't worth the risk of the cane. The cane: it had reduced him to a groveling slave, instantly, twice. He had never even considered keeping his dignity. In that, the cane lost half its power. He could feel no shame. Still, he knew that too many applications of the cane would leave him nothing like a man. He was a shell of a man reanimated by electrical currents and inbeen changed again and again, but whatever he was, he was still a man. What the cane might do to him was cruder, more damaging. He would cooperate. But: she was mad. Even if sane by the standards of her time -- unlikely -- by Corbell's she was mad, and dangerous. Old and feeble as he was, he would have to escape before she killed him. The "phone booth" must be working; he'd seen no microwave over here in the bedroom. Good. Calling Peerssa would have to wait. He dared not ask after his pressure suit; it might show that he was thinking dangerous thoughts. And even if Peerssa were still in the solar system, how could he help? Corbell left the booth and returned to his spread-eagled position on the bed. She moored his hands from behind the headboard, then his ankles. They resumed their conversation. The translator skipped words. He missed some of it before he realised what he was hearing. Then he asked questions, got her to back up for the blank spots. He heard it in bits and pieces: She was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, a citizen of the State. ( The State? He wondered about that. But she described it in much the way Peerssa had, except that her State had been the government of all known worlds for fifty thousand years... Corbell's years, for the Earth had not yet been moved.) In her youth she had been supernaturally beautiful. (Corbell tactfully did not question this.) Men went incomprehensibly mad over her. She never understood the force that drove men to such irrationality; but she used her sex and her beauty as she used her mind: for advancement. She was bom hyperactive and ambitious. By the age of twenty she was high in the ranks of Intrasystem Traffic Control. Because she was now in a position of responsibility, the State conditioned her. Afterward her ambition was not for herself alone, but for the good of the State. It was routine -- and, Corbell gathered from later data, it didn't quite take. If she advanced ihe State's ambitions by guiding the courses of spacecraft within the solar system, certainly she advanced herself. And she came to the attention of a powerful man in a collateral branch. SubDictator Corybessil Jakunk (Corbell heard his name often enough to memorize it) was not her direct superior, but he could do her some good. So powerful a man was allowed some leeway for his personal desires, that he might serve the State more readily. (The old woman saw nothing wrong in this. She was impatient when Corbell did not understand at once. It may have formed a spur to her own ambition.) His personal desire was Mirelly-Lyra .eelashisthar. "He told me that I must be his mistress," she said. "I wished more stature for myself than that. I refused. He told me that if I would share his life for a four-day period, lie would gain for me a position in full charge of the Bureau. I was only thirty-six years old. It was a line chance." She played him as she had played other men. It was a mistake. Corbell had wondered why he was being made captive audience lor an unsolicited soap opera. He years later, at what looked to be eighty or ninety years old, she was still wondering what had gone wrong. "The first night I used a chemical to help. To make one want sex -- " "An aphrodesiac?" It went into the computer memory. "I needed it. The second night he would not let me use chemicals. He used none himself. I had a bad time, but I did not complain. The third night was the same as the second. On the fourth day he begged me to change my mind, give up my position, become his woman. I held him to his promise." For seven months she was Head of the Bureau of Intrasystem Traffic Control. She was then informed that she had volunteered for a special mission, a glorious opportunity to serve the State. It was known that there was a hypermass, a black hole, at the center of the galaxy. Mirelly-Lyra was to investigate it. After some preliminary use of automated probes, she was to determine by experiment whether (as theory predicted) such a black hole could be used for time travel. If possible, she was to return to her starting date. "Why did he do it?" she wondered. "I saw him once before I left. He said that he could not bear to have me in the same universe if I was not his. But this was not what he offered at all!" "He may have thought," said Corbell, "that four days of ecstasy would do it. You'd throw yourself into his arms and beg not to be sent away . ' ' For a moment he feared she would use the cane. Then she broke into dry cackling laughter. He saw something likeable reflected there, before her face drooped in brooding hate. Now she looked like death itself, the Norn. "He sent me to the black hole. I saw the end of everything." "So did I." She didn't believe him. At her urging he described it as best he could: the colors, the progressive flattening of core suns into an accretion disc, the swelling of the Ring of Fire, the final drastically flattened plane of neutronium flecked with smaller black holes. "I only went in as far as the ergosphere," he said, "and that was only to get me home fast. Did you really go through the singularity?" She was long in answering. "No. I was afraid. When the time came I did not think I owed the State that much." Her conditioning had worn off to that extent, at least. She had circled the black hole, using its mass to bend her course back on itself, and headed for home. She was eighty years old, still healthy and still beautiful (she said) due to the rejuvenation medicines in her ship's dispensary, when she reached Firsthope. He checked the times with her. Did her Bussard ramjet accelerate at one gravity all the way? Yes. Twenty-one years each way. Her ship was far superior to Corbell's Don Juan... and looked it. It was a toroid, bigger than Don Juan, and with a cleaner design. Firsthope was a colony just being established around another star when Mirelly-Lyra left Sol. She hoped that Firsthope would not have records of her defection. Firsthope fired on her. What she at first thought was a message-laser carried no modulation at all: it was an X-ray laser, designed to kill. She tried again. The next system resembled Firsthope: it held a world of Earth's mass and Earth's approximate temperature range, whose reducing atmoshpere had been seeded when the State was still young. Perhaps it had been colonized in the seventy thousand years she had been gone... and it had been. She was fired on, and she fled. "I was bitter, Corbell. I thought it was because of me, because of what I had done. All the worlds would have my record. There was no hope for me. I went to Sol system to die there." She had already recognized stars in Sol's projected vicinity. At Sol she was not fired on. But the sun was expanding toward red giant status, and Earth was missing. Bewildered, she investigated further. She recognized Saturn, and Mercury (heavily scarred by mining, just as she had left it), and Venus (showing the signs of an unsuccessful attempt to terraform that useless world). Uranus was in a wildly altered orbit between Satum and Jupiter, if that was Uranus. Mars bore a tremendous scar, a fresh mare probably left by the impact of Deimos. "The State was going to move Deimos," she told Corbell. "It was too close. Something must have happened." She found Earth orbiting just inside the orbit of Mars. Corbell asked, "Any idea how they did that?" "No. Diemos was to be moved by fusion bombs successively exploded in one crater. Moving an inhabited planet could not be done that way." "Or who did it?" "I never learned. I landed my ship and was arrested at once, on my record, by children." "Children?" "Yes. I was in a bad position," she told Corbell, smiling wanly. "Even at the last, when I landed on Earth itself, it may be that I hoped iny beauty would sway a judge. But how could I sway children?" "But what happened ?" Earth was ruled by children, eleven years to enormous. "It was young-forever that did it. The State had discovered an ideal form of young-forever," the old woman said. "Parents can see to it that their children stop growing older at an age just below, what is your word? When girls begin their cycle of blood -- " "Puberty." "Just before puberty, they are stopped. They live nearly forever. There is no resulting rise in numbers, because children do not have children. The method was far better than older methods of staying young forever." "Older method? Of immortality? fell me about that one!" Suddenly she was enraged. "I could not find out! I learned only that it was for the few, for the Dictator class alone. When I arrived it was no longer used. My lawyer knew about it. He would not discuss it." "What happened to the solar system?" he asked. "I was not told." He laughed, and desisted when she raised the cane. So the State hadn't let her play tourist either. She let the cane's tip fall. "They told me nothing. I was treated as one not entitled to ask questions. All that I learned I learned from my lawyer, who seemed a twelve year old boy and would not tell his true age. They learned my crime from my ship's log. They sentenced me to -- " Untranslated. "What was that?" "They stopped time for me. There was a building where some criminals went to be stored against need." The bitter smile again: "I was to be flattered. Only unusual breakers of the law were thought to be of future need to the State. People of high intelligence or with good genes or interesting tales to tell to future historians. The building would hold perhaps ten thousand, no more. I was lucky they let me keep my medicines and my translator. At that I could only choose as much as I could carry." She leaned close above the water bed. "Never mind this. Corbell, I want you to know that there was an earlier form of immortality. If we find it, we can both be young again." "I'm ready," said Corbell. He pulled at the soft bindings on his wrists. "I'm on your side. I'd love to be young again. So why not untie me?" It can't be this easy. "We may search a long time. I have already searched for a long time. I must have your youth drugs, Corbell. They may not be as good as the Dictators' immortality, but they must be better than mine." Oh. He had to answer. "They're aboard ship, in orbit. They can't help you anyway. You're probably older than I am, not counting the time I gained in cold sleep." He felt the discomfort from the sweat pooled under him; he felt more sweat starting. He felt his helplessness. He saw her raise the cane. She waited until he had stopped thrashing before she said, "I understand you. You come from a time earlier than mine. Your medicines are more primitive than mine. I cannot use them. So you say." "It's true! Listen, I was bom before men landed on the Earth's Moon! When the cancer in my belly started eating me alive I had myself frozen. There was -- " "Frozen?" She didn't believe him. "Frozen, yes! There was the chance that medical science would find a way to heal the cancer and the damage done by broken cell walls and -- " His defense ended in a howl. She held the cane on him for a long time. He heard: "Open your eyes." He didn't want to. "I'll use the cane," His eyes were clenched like fists, his face a snarl of agony. "A frozen man is a preserved corpse. You won't lie again, will you?" He shook his head. His eyes were still closed. Now he remembered what Peerssa had told him about phospholipids in the glea around brain nerves. They froze at # F, and that was the end of the nerves. He'd been committing suicide. And why not? But he'd never, never convince the Norn. "Let me speak this right," said Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar. "I won't tell you about the first time I was taken from the zero-time jail. The second time happened because the zerotime generator had used up its power. More than a thousand of us returned suddenly to life in a world that was baked and without life. The weather was hot enough to kill. It killed most of us. The rain came down like floods of bath water, but without rain we would all have died. Many of us reached this place where days are six years long and nights are six years long, but life is still possible. I was old. I didn't want to die." Resigned, he opened his eyes. "What happened to the others?" "The boys captured them. I don't know what happened after. I escaped." "Boys?" "Don't be distracted. For many years I used my time only to stay alive. Over more years I learned how to build a small zero-time, a jail just for myself. Then I altered the subway system to take any passenger from the hot places directly to me. I made warning systems to free me from zero-time when the subway system was in use. "Do you understand why I did all of this? My only hope was the advanced medicines that must be carried by any long range explorer. One day an explorer would come back from another galaxy or from one of our satellite galaxies. He would know no better than to land in places of Earth that are too hot. He would need to come to the polar places immediately." She stood above him like a great bird of prey. "The subway system would send him to me, carrying the medicines developed in my future, that will let me grow young when my own medicines have only let me stay old. Corbell, you are that man." "Look at me!" She shrugged. "You may be a thousand years old, or ten thousand. What you must know is this. If you are what you say, you are useless to me. I will kill you." "Why?" But he believed her. She said, "We are the last of the State. We are the last of people. Those who remain are not people anymore. If we could grow young, we could breed and raise more people. But if you do not have the medicines, of what use are you?" He heard her try to soften her voice. His own voice said to him, "Consider. You are too old for even your advanced medicines to affect you. I am different. Give me hack my health and I will search out the real immortality that the Dictator class used. You are old and Trail. You will rest while I search." "All right," he said. The old woman was a Nom, right enough. She was both life and death to him now. "My medicines are in orbit. I'll take you to my landing craft. I'll have to contact my ship's computer." She nodded. She raised the cane, and he flinched. "If you break your word, you will take your own life, when I let you." Ill When she was safely on the other side of the headboard, Corbell let himself relax. An almost silent sigh of released tension... followed by a wolfish grin and an urge to whoop, savagely repressed. At last Corbell had set himself a goal. He had come down to die on liarth. But this was better. His hands came free. He sat up, but she gestured him back with the cane. She made him put his wrists together and bound them before she freed his ankles. The cloth stuck to his wrists like bandages. He didn't think he could pull loose. The bedroom's picture windows had stretched before they broke. The edges were like lines of daggers curved outward. He followed Mirelly-Lyra, stepping carefully through the daggers, into knee-high grass. She gestured him ahead of her, toward a bubble-car like those he had found in One City. Where his feet fell big insects fled, whirring. It was even hotter outside, but at least there was a breath of breeze. The sun sat on the horizon, huge and red, casting long blurred shadows. A hard-to-see red circle on the red sky, smaller than the sun, must be Jupiter. The car seemed to rest on the very tips of the grass blades. It did not shift as Corbell climbed in. Mirelly-Lyra gestured to him to slide over (with the cane, the cane that was anaesthetic and instrument of torture and what else? He was afraid to leant) and climbed in beside him. She bent to the console, hesitated, then punched numbers. "We go for your pressure suit," said the translator at her belt. The car moved smoothly away. Mirelly-Lyra half relaxed; she was not steering. Already Corbell knew that he could not return by car. He didn't know the destination number of the house. Down the hill and into a narrow valley the car drove, accelerating. Now they were moving at hellish speed. Corbell gripped a padded bar on the dashboard and wished he dared close his eyes. She was studying him. "You did not use such cars?" "No." Inspiration made him say, "We didn't have such things on Dogpatch." She nodded. The knot in Corbell's belly eased open. God help him if she really believed that he had left Sol system ahead of her. He had to convince her that he came from her own future. But there must have been inventions he would know nothing about, things humanity would not have forgotten. Like what? A bathtub designed to fit human beings? A cold cure? A permanently sharp razor blade, or a treatment to stop the beard growing at all? A hangover cure that works? If only I'd read more science fiction! Well, coining from another planet gives me some leeway -- "I really thought I was the first man to reach the galactic core," he said. "Your trip wasn't even in the records." "How old are you?" "About six hundred," he said offhandedly. "Our years. In Earth years that's about -- " Don't get tricky. Count on her not knowing much about the Earth she came back to. " -- Five hundred and thirty. How about you?" "Nearly two hundred. My years, not Jupiter years." "I'm surprised you never ran out of medicines." "The children let me take my supply with me into zero time. I keep them there so that they will not spoil." A thrill ran up Corbeil's neck. She'd keep the food there too, cooking it in large batches and then stopping time for it. That way her meals would always be freshly cooked. And that private jail of hers must be very close to one of the "phone booth" termini. "What was your sun?" she asked. The only sun he could even spell was Sirius. "I never heard it called anything but 'the sun,' " he said. "Just how much did you learn about the real immortality, the one the Dictators used?" "Only that. When a Dictator died it was through violence." She scowled. "Such events were remembered. My lawyer told me stories of one Dictator warring on another, of war spreading to their families. Old stories from far before this time. From the sound of it, the Dictators no longer served the State, even then. Only themselves." "Like Greek gods," he said. He heard the gap: Mirelly-Lyra's box had not translated his remark. "Powerful and quarrelsome," he amplified. "Mortals did well to bow when the gods passed and otherwise try not to get caught in the wheels." He glimpsed details of scenery as they flashed past. Green-and-brown hills. Groves of dwarf trees. He looked for birds, but saw none. They went over a sharp crest, and Corbell's stomach dropped away. The car sped down toward what even Peerssa would have called a city. It showed black outlined in red, with the red sun almost behind it. There had been a geodesic dome. A piece of the frame, a dozen linked hexagons, lacy-thin, still stood along one city border. But the city itself retained the dome shaDe. In i the center of a polar coordiante grid of streets sat an enormous cube with bulging sides: the transportation nexus. Spires and glass slabs sloped away from it; the tips of the tallest buildings defined the shape of the lost dome. A tall glass slab near the center had fallen against the great cube, where, bent in the middle, it leaned for support like a drunk against a large friend. Otherwise this city, Four City, was almost undamaged. One City had been largely ruins. Perhaps Four City was younger than One City; perhaps its dome had protected it from the elements longer. Beyond the city's edge, the blue of ocean carried a sunglade red as blood. And this was the strangest thing about Four City: that it had not spread out along the shoreline. The pinkish-white curved line of beach was bare of buildings. No roads joined it to the city. Corbell, peering, made out regularly spaced black dots that might have been "phone booths". He asked, "Do you know this city well?" Play tour director. Where's your private jail, MirellyLyra ? She said, "Yes." He dropped it. "From here we go to the west coast of -- " "I know. My machines watched your landing." He had almost grown used to the car's reckless speed, but when they swooped into the city his composure self-destructed. The streets had teeth: big chunks of fallen masonry, jagged sheets of glass. The car swerved around them, tilted fortyfive degrees and more to take corners, straightened and tilted again, while Corbell strangled the padded bar. The Norn studied him with shrewd old eyes. "You're badly frightened. I wonder what your people used for transport." "Phone booths," he said at random. "For long distance travel we used dirigibles, lighter-than-air craft." "You traveled so slowly?" Sweating, he said, "We weren't in a hurry. We lived a long time." For an instant he considered telling her the truth. Get it over with. Her deal could work for him. They would use her medicines to make him young. Young Corbell would search out the Dictators' immortality while frail old Mirelly-Lyra waited it out in a rocking chair. It made good sense. But Mirelly-Lyra was crazy. The car swerved violently, ducked under something huge and solid. Corbell looked back. Embedded in the street like a Titan's spear was a girder of Z-shaped cross section. It was as long as the average Four City skyscraper was tall. The car slowed and eased to a stop beneath the great rectangular face of an office building. Corbell let his death-grip relax. The old woman was prodding him with the cane, gesturing him out. He got out. She followed. The design of windows on the face of the building was not rectangular; the panes (largely missing) were laid out like a pattern in stained glass. And there were curlicues above the great glass doors. Corbell, still shaking in the aftermath of terror, pulled himself together. He needed to remember these; they might be an address. Two commas crossed, an S reversed, an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends, and a crooked pi. Two sets of doors dropped into the floor to let them through, then slid back up. Mirelly-Lyra took them through a lobby padded in cloud-rug, then through a corridor lined with doors without handles. "The lifting boxes don't work," she explained. They climbed stairs: three flights, with pauses to rest. They were both panting when Mirelly-Lyra turned down a hallway. CorbelTs fingers worked steadily at a button on his undersuit. He'd been wearing it since Don Juan took off. He'd washed it several hundred times. He twisted and twisted at the button. One thick flexible "thread" joined it to the fabric. It would have to part all at once. More doors without handles. Mirelly-Lyra stopped beside the sixth door. She pressed something in her hand against the center of the door. As the door swung open she put the unseen thing back in a pocket and gestured. Corbell passed through ahead of her. He dropped the button as his fingers brushed the jamb. It was the first risk he'd taken. He had no choice. He had to be able to re-enter this place. Mirelly-Lyra kept her eyes on Corbell as the door closed behind her. It closed on the button... and she didn't notice. Corbell was looking around him, everywhere but at the door. Desk covered with widgetry; cloud-rug; "phone booth"; picture window. The Offices were mass produced too. There were minor differences. The "phone booth" door was transparent. The picture window was intact, and rain had not ruined the desk or the rug. Corbell's pressure suit and helmet had been dumped on the desk. He picked up the helmet in his bound hands. He called, "Peerssa! This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State." There was no answer. "Peerssa, please answer. This is Corbell calling Peerssa and Don Juan . ' ' "Nothing. Not a whisper. And Mirelly-Lyra was watching. "My ship may be around the other side of the planet," he told her. But Peerssa set up relays! "Or the autopilot may still be holding an equatorial orbit." But he wasn't ! "We can call from my landing craft." He had to explain equatorial orbits to her by drawing in the dust on the desk. Then she understood. She said, "We must use the tunnel cars." The "phone booth" was too small. Mirelly-Lyra clearly did not trust Corbell that close to her. She held him covered while she drew a symbol in the dust: the crooked pi. "Push this key four times," she said. "Then wait for me. You cannot outrun my cane." He nodded. She watched him through the door. He paused to note that four of the eight symbols on the keyboard matched the four he'd seen over the entrance. He pushed the crooked pi four times. Zap, he was elsewhere. The world beyond the door snapped into another shape. Vast empty space, rings of couches humping from the door: here was another intercontinental subway terminal. Corbell fumbled in the belt pouch of his pressure suit, found a circle shape. His hands were trembling violently. Clear plastic disc: right. With both hands he guided it into the coin slot. He stabbed at the compressed hourglass symbol, #-#-#-#. Nothing at all happened. The "phone booth" in the Four City Police Station must be out of order. Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped into view from another booth, looked about her, eyes narrowed and jaw thrust forward. She saw him, still in the booth with the door closed -- He jabbed frantically at the crossed commas. Remorse, terror, guilt, death-wish flashed in his brain and were gone, and so was the light. In blackness he rammed his shoulder against the door and ran blindly out into... corridors with pale green walls and glowing white ceilings. Wide doors with no knobs, only small plates of golden metal that might have been electromagnetic key plates. He turned right, left, right, and stopped, face to a wall, sucking air. Fatigue soaked into his legs like an acid solvent. Would she know how to trace his "call"? He couldn't know. He ran. A bigger door at the end of the corridor dropped open to reveal stairs. One long flight ran diagonally between a sheer wall and the tinted glass-mosaic face of the building, with doors at landings along the flight. He froze in fear. If she was out there, she'd see him! Then he remembered. They'd passed a building with this pattern on its face. From the outside it was a mirror. He was (he counted) three stories up. He still didn't know what kind of place this was; but it must be some kind of public service. All right. By the time she got here, if she ran as he'd been running, the old lady would be exhausted. She'd want to go down. So did he, and she'd guess that. He went up. At the fourth story the door dropped for him, then closed as he passed it. He climbed another flight, then looked back and saw footprints in the dust. He stopped, resting, listening. No sound. He walked backward down the stairs, stepping in his own footprints as best he could. When the fourthfloor door dropped, he threw his helmet through, then his pressure suit. Then he jumped for it. He'd left a pair of sloppy footprints, but no other tracks. And now he was on cloud-carpet. He stooped to brush away two dusty footprints, picked up his suit and helmet and staggered on. He couldn't seem to get enough air.    Mankind had reached the turning point, and a path had been chosen -- for all but the crew of the Jupiter One...  out at the familiar hardware. It stands there taller than life, as if it knew which way it was pointed. There are lights all over, trails of vapor, and an almost subliminal megawatt hum of energy. There would be a kind of festivity to all this if it weren't for the crowds around the fences, and the beefedup security forces keeping them out. Fin de siecle festivity, to be sure, but anyway something gay, not something stolen, something blue. A hand to my shoulder now. In my distracted state I wonder how it is that this appendage of skin and muscle, phalanges and metacarpals, finds it possible to inform itself with such communication of total generosity. I touch that knowing hand with my lesser counterpart. "Nat," she says. "Will we get off the ground?" "We will unless something blows between now and oh five hundred." I look at the quartz thing on my wrist. "We ought to get some sleep." The device on my wrist tells me what time it is, and to the nearest fraction of a second, but my real watch is in a secret pocket. It will go with me, not on a round trip to Jupiter, but one-way to a different destination. It's an old stem-wound Hamilton, passed down through the generations from my favorite ancestor. He rode the Pony Express, and after that was a telegrapher on the Denver and Rio Grande. I am on the crew of Jupiter One by right of genetic inheritance, though the more prosaic citation. I say we ought to get some sleep, but that is a pro forma declaration if I ever heard one, made one, and Nancy, dear Nancy, recognizes it as such. Besides, that's the way she wants it. But sometimes she wants to talk first. Particularly when we're about to do something new in our experience, such as leaving the earth. Forever. "Are we going to get away with it?" It is a soft, warm December night, a condition under which we ought to be able to get away with anything. But the weather, barring totally unforeseen developments during the next few hours, will not be the agency that determines the fate of our enterprise. "Once we're up and away. We do need to get off the ground first." "You're more worried than you let on. What is it? I am a grown woman, Nat." "Quite so. And grown in the right places, yes, just so. Here -- " But she wants to talk. She wants to know what I'm worried about, and I tell her. "There are a lot of people on the other side of the fences, and at the roadblocks and barricades beyond, all of them trying to get onto this side. They get in, we don't go up. And that's the end of it." "But surely security will hold?" "It had better, dear one. It had better." I make another move, but that too is now becoming almost pro forma. "I don't get it. I really don't. Think of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Nothing like this could have happened then. I really do not get it, Nat." "Nothing like this could have happened then," I agree. "That was long ago, but the beginnings of this were there if you wanted to look for them. You know that as well as I." "What do I know?" All the vulnerability in the world is revealed to me in that query. Nancy knows what she knows, all right, but this generous woman is fearful, now wanting something from me. She wants reassurance, and I don't have much of that. "You know the mess we're in, and how we got there," I say. "But I'll tell you anyway. Again." She is now some kind of adult homologue of a child, about to be bundled into bed in snuggly rainment. She wants to hear once again a thousand-times-heard story, caught by the narrative as if it were heard for the first time, wanting to know how it will turn out, caught, enmeshed in the tale as if the foreknowledge of the outcome adds suspense instead of taking it away. This could be called paradox by a veal that he knew nothing of the security that comes from the simply familiar, though the familiar whatsis of the moment is intrinsically frightening. So I say, again, how it was that when some of us were putting people on the moon for the first time, the first times, a whole bunch of others were, in effect, burning the books of wisdom and knowledge. We -- the minority of people that thought space flight was obviously something that simply had to be achieved -- we had to go out there, the way our ancestors got into all of the parts of our small planet. The moon was out there, I say, and we had to go there. And did. Beyond the moon were the planets, and we had to go there. We hadn't done that yet, but our present enterprise was an alleged first manned shot at a planet. No, we wouldn't land on Jupiter, but we'd get up there, so the program read, and we'd orbit, and then send down complicated hardware that would bring back to our ship samples of the planet. These, the program said, we would return to Earth for analysis and study. Thus, doing what came naturally, we would advance the cause of wisdom and knowledge. We are the good guys, I say, but the bad guys are agin us and they are mean and powerful. They are powerful mostly in numbers, granted, but numbers count. Sometimes numbers are all that count. They believe in astrology, I say. They consult horoscopes when they might be reading Newton or Einstein or the New Federalist. Science is bad, they said, because it made those bombs that have been so troublesome since World War II. Better to wear flowers, they said, mildly stoned and speaking of relevance, identity, and the like. My modest discursion continues for a few minutes, I seeing myself as some kind of tribal shaman exhorting my hairy clientele, gathered round some primeval night-time fire, though my audience here is Nancy only. Perhaps I am trying to get it right for the last time for myself as much as for my generous woman. I am no shaman certainly, merely one of a number of, as we say, dedicated personnel about to try to rip off what will undoubtedly be the last space shot to be launched from this place. Or, by the looks of things, from anyplace on Earth. T don't know why I need you to tell me we're doing the right thing, Nat, particularly now at the last minute. But I do. And we are, aren't we?" Nancy had no doubt of that, I knew she didn't. If I'd expressed any reservation myself she would have jumped all over me, and with force. Thing was, we were about to take off into the great unknown, following an unblazed path, a trail across the void, a trail whose target had been determined only after bitter dispute, and even then not unanimously. We all needed everything we could get from each other. No choice, from the beginning to where we were now, had been easy. Not even the choice of where we would go.    "There is no way," I'd said, "that I am going to spend the rest of my life in a tin can." "You might not have to. Not if we find a happy home in orbit around a nearby star." We hadn't completed our covert study of nearby possibles or probables yet, but we'd been thinking of Barnard's Star, Zeta Reticuli, and others. "You might not have to," Rod Stoneburner said again. Rod was, in the ordinary way, persuasive. He was, among things, a computer programmer, but here he was giving me the wrong input. He was prematurely thin on top, a condition about which he was unnecessarily self-conscious, one for which he over-compensated with a black mustache of heroic luxuriance. This ornament now quivered with his sense of urgency, of rightness. But I knew he was wrong. I was steamed up too, trying to keep my temper. This was one of our very early meetings. Seven people were present, all scheduled to be on the flight crew of Jupiter One. At this point we agreed on one issue only: we would divert Jupiter One from the stated mission to one more in keeping with our needs, hopes and aspirations. And desperation. We would do this, we said, in the interests of the meaningful survival of humanity, at least in so far as represented by the minuscule part of it that we were. We proposed to undertake this celestial heist if we could work out the logistics and the tactics, if we could learn to conspire successfully (none of us had heretofore had much experience of that), and if we could find one or two highly (very highly) placed individuals in the Program that we could persuade or coerce or coax into becoming fello w-consp irators . Rod was, by avocation, an environmentalist, and his thoughts and feelings about what was happening on Earth were such that he wanted us to get right on out, out to have a look at the closest promising stars -- and beyond, to some more distant, if need be, and if we could achieve the capability. In our group of seven, brought early on together in this meeting, he was supported by Clara Diamond. She was an astrophysicist, and I didn't know if she was on Rod's side because she was on his side, really, or because they were a couple. She was Slavic, with dusky, dusky skin. A lovely face. On her upper lip was just the trace of a downy but very black mustache, as if she would be with Rod in this enterprise also. That mustache was already giving me some concern. Not that it was unattractive, it wasn't. That whisper of androgenic influence gave a little piquancy. But even with the frozen contributions of our earthbound fellow conspirators we had a genetic pool to think about. Of necessity we would be an inbred community. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we were careful, very careful indeed, about undesirable recessive genes. The others at that meeting supported me. I was as sick as anyone about what was happening to the earth, and not only to the earth but to so many of the people on it. But my history and my genes told me Rod's far-out proposal to head for the stars wasn't the way to win our new frontier. Or, more likely, even to get to it. "I might not have to, that's right. But that's a chance I don't propose to take. Nor would I wish it on our children." Rod was as fired up as I, and now abandoned reason. "So you'd rather stay here. You like it the way it is. To stay. Ask to be taken off the mission. Develop terminal claustrophobia, or something." "That's not fair," Nancy interposed. "Nat wants to leave this planet as much as you, and you know it. He'll sacrifice as much as you, Rod, as much as anybody, put up with as much. He wants to be more sensible about it, that's all." I was grateful for Nancy's support, though I didn't altogether appreciate being spoken for. But that was Nancy. Rod's fuse was still sparking. "The point is this, Rod. We know we have a chance, a good one, to go somewhere in the solar system. Jupiter, the Belt, Saturn. The odds on finding a good planet in orbit around any of the near stars are enormously longer. By orders of magnitude, Rod, most likely we'd die of old age -- and so would our children -- before we found one. And, no, I don't like it the way it is, you shouldn't have said that, you know better." That meeting had ended in exasperation and a degree of acrimony, but it hadn't been a total loss, it had been just one of the many steps that had gotten us from there to here, or from then to now. About twenty steps after that one, our group by then enlarged to eleven, we'd decided on Titan as our target. Ah, Titan! The largest satellite in the solar system. Not a "real planet" by any means, which was what Rod wanted, but certainly the largest and, we thought, the most likely provisional hope for a provisional part of the human race. The sheer time factor involved in going to the stars with the technology we had, fusion reactor and all, plus Titan's atmosphere, had carried the day. That atmosphere wasn't breathable, no, but our alchemists thought our descendants could, in time, make it so.    There is a tap on the door and Rod walks in. We, the mutinous crew of Jupiter One, are gathered together in a sterile kind of cross between a garish Holiday Inn and the contagion ward of a tacky hospital. Spread out through this floor of the building, here and there in depressing cubicles, are seventeen of us. We come in various sizes and shapes, and two sexes. "Rod," I say. Nancy nods. Rod is the nominal commander of we're off the pad there will be no commander. We are determined to rule by committee, and the committee will have no chairman. We are aware that tradition says that the way to sweep something, anything, under the carpet is to appoint a committee to take care of it. But we think we can make it work. We'll find out. Rod and I are members of the committee -- the first one: our community will rotate through this responsibility. There are four others, three women and one man. This makes a total of six, which is an even number. Thus, on matters of importance, there may be tie votes. There will be no way to break a tie other than by the exercise of reason. Of wisdom and knowledge. "The natives become restless," Rod says. We have clandestine communication with a few people on the outside, cooperative types whose heads are screwed on right. We regret that they must remain behind. "Will the barricades hold?" "I think so. But it's beginning to look dicey." I looked at the quartz thing on my wrist. "We can advance liftoff by one hour and nine minutes. There's that much leeway. Mission Control knows what the score is, how the situation is developing. They want us off as much as we do, Rod. Build a fire." Control was indeed what Mission Control had, just now, and would have until we were on our way. After that there would be no Mission Control, not as far as we were concerned. That spacecraft waiting in orbit up there isn't what it appears to be, not on the inside, not by a long shot. Thanks to the work of our small but intensely motivated band of felons there is more fuel up there, a lot more, and more of other supplies and arrangements than Mission Control or almost anyone else knows of. We have Mylarplex II, with which to construct domes. We have solar accumulators. We have a microfilm library, and a memory-chip library, whose complexities I do not understand. We've spent a great deal of time thinking about what we'll need up there. We have seeds and plants. The vessel waiting for us in orbit is weirdly equipped for what it is supposed to be doing; for what we hope to do with it, it is as well-equipped as we've been able to make it. Our best equipment, our ultrasecret weapon is, I think, the crew. Nine men and eight women in masquerade. Sarah Cabot, one of our astronomers, has become, by rigorous self-training, a competent agronomist. She bears our most patrician patronymic, but she has the face of a Left-Bank gamin. Abe Eisenberg, wearing the beard of Moses, is a member of the mission to perform geomagnetic determinations. For the real mission he has become one of our chemists. They will work on the problems involved in transforming our atmosphere. Our petrogeologist, Sue Powdermaker, will be our behavioral psychologist. We don't know how much need we'll have for her expertise, but she'll be there, as trained and informed as she has been able to become. Many talents and skills, none of which is what it seems. I? My position in this project is peculiar, but my function on the real mission is to know something about everything. Everybody in this crew can do what they're supposed to a great deal better than I can, which gives me transient feelings of inferiority, but I can do more than a little of what each of them can do. A human spare tire of sorts, a jack-of-all-trades in reserve. I didn't try out for the part, it just worked out that way. Nine men and eight women. We'd wanted an even number and an even split but hadn't been able to achieve that. So there was an odd man out. Perhaps that would add a certain unplanned realism or tension to our community. We'd find that out also.    "They want us off as much as we do, Rod," I say again. Rod looks into the far distance. The black mustache moves back and forth, seemingly autonomous. "They do," he says. "I'll see what I can do." "Get the sixty-nine minutes. All of them." Nancy and I are alone again, and there is nothing to do but wait. Now I, and Nancy, all of us are caught in a chain of inexorable events over which we have zero control. All of us are except Rod Stoneburner: the commander can approach Mission Control and apply pressure to slip through the window the moment it opens. The rest of us are frozen into varied positions of stasis and frustration. I can't see the others, in their cubicles, but I think of them. I make another move, and the most generous woman in the world says, "We'll wait. We'll wait, Nat, until we're -- in some other place. I am, for a moment, frustrated. Then my distracted self gets back on track and realizes that, rather than having been denied, I have been given one more gift, one more in a long progression of things too good for me. Some time later Rod comes in. I see again why it is that he is the commander. Until liftoff. He has had his way. "Get ready. It will be coming over in a moment." "Now hear this," comes from the squawk box, and we are told how it will be. Our gear, our few possessions, are on board the rocket, waiting for us. We and the others, emerging from our places like pirates from caves, go to be suited up. Clara and Rod, Sue, Abe, Sarah, Nancy and I, the others. Something in this strikes me, suddenly, as hilarious, and I laugh. The looks of the others quickly remind me of the gravity of our position. I turn the laugh inward, but not off. I touch Nancy's shoulder, and hold her for a moment. I feel my stem-wound Hamilton in my secret pocket. My security blankets are in order. One hour, twenty-two minutes and three seconds later there is something of the excitement of the old days in the voice of Mission Control: "We have liftoff." The mob, too late, pours through the first breach in the fences.  This is an Indian revenge story about these two white people who meet a dirty old man. Indian author Vine De Loria said, "It's one thing to die in battle, but what do you do when you're laid low by an anthro?" The answer is write a story about these two white people who learn the following lesson... man to eat, he ate with his fingers. Bullock, the linguist, looked disgusted. "Some holy man he makes! I'll bet the old goat hasn't taken a bath in twenty years!" Miss Tarantella, the group anthropologist, looked dangerously close to retching. "How can he stand to eat like that? He's absolutely filthy!" She wrinkled her pinched nose with disgust and her thick glasses slipped down and fell into her lap. She jerked reflexively, her lap sensitive to the touch as so many things are that are untouched. The old man wiped his fingers on his chest and grinned at them with as many teeth as he had. Two to be exact. "Good! More eat! More dirty eat!" he said, gesturing with his hands at the near-empty pot. Miss Tarantella put her glasses back on her nose and peered over the top of them at the old man. "No more eat! Talk! You talk first and then you eat!" "Me no want eat! You eat! You dirty you not eat! You clean eat!" said the old man with a two-toothed smile. Bullock looked down at his knuckles. He sure could pick them couldn't he. First Tarantella, that dried out old prune of a woman. Now this dirty old lunatic Indian the woman had engaged as a guide. "What talk? White fools up the flukey wheel! Go down the belly! Chomp! Chomp! Not safe! Not safe!" said the old man. "It's hopeless," said Bullock. "He's as unreliable as a weather report. All of his gears are loose." "I'm not leaving this mountain until I get what I came for!" announced Miss Tarantella stoutly. "I am not accustomed to failure! If I came here to track down the legendary cave of the Nocka-Nocka, then you can bet your camp stool, that I intend to do just that! The word quit is not in my vocabulary." Miss Tarantella was a positive, overweight woman with no sense of humor. Bullock's image of her lay somewhere between a German military band whose oompah oompahs had gone awry and a self-taught virgin who played at human by ear and was tone-deaf. "Nocka-Nocka! Chomp!" said the old man and he pointed a greasy finger at Miss Tarantella. "Ho the hot one! Big chomp!" He clamped his fingers together and made chewing motions with his hands. "The hell with your disgusting eating habits, you filthy old beast! What about Nocka-Nocka's cave? Where is it?" clamored Miss Tarantella, whose patience was legendary for its absence. The old man just scratched his chest through a hole in his tattered shirt and giggled. "Maybe he doesn't really know anything about Nocka-Nocka," suggested Bullock timidly. "Maybe there is no such thing as a..." "Are you suggesting that I am what you're suggesting?" said Miss Tarantella, her icy tone reminding Bullock of a wild weekend on a polar ice cap. Bullock shivered involuntarily and quickly retracted his suggestion. Bullock was fed up with the whole thing. If they never found anything it would be fine with him. He didn't care one way or the other. Two anything but fun-filled days following an insane old Indian up a steep mountain on a wild goose chase was no picnic. Putting up with Miss Tarantella was something else again. Often in the last two days, Bullock had prayed that an avalanche would start and carry those two off the mountain. Only idiots and Indians climbed mountains anyway, as far as Bullock was concerned. "Nocka-Nocka," nodded the old man. He pointed back over his shoulder toward the top of the mountain. The old man scooped up a handful of dirt, dumped it in with what was left of the beefstew, and began stirring it around with his fingers. "Christ!" said Bullock who was only a linguist and didn't really give a damn. "Is that some kind of custom?" "I think he's just being nasty," snarled Miss Tarantella. "These filthy old Indians are always trying to be purposely disgusting. I guess they think it's funny. He'll probably expose himself next!" Bullock just shrugged. He sort of admired the way the old boy got under Miss Tarantella's skin. Personally, he found the old man kind of charming, in a smelly sort of way. The old man rattled off a long curious speech in a Calusa dialect that Bullock found hard to follow. "What'd he say? What'd he say?" demanded Miss Tarantella. "I'm not sure I got it all," Bullock said. He tried a few phrases on the old man, trying to get him to repeat the message. The greasy old man just sat there cross-legged, inscrutable as a rock. He refused to say anything else. "Well?" inquired Miss Tarantella. "Well, I didn't get it all," admitted Bullock, trying to sort it out in his head. "And I'm sure I'm getting some of it wrong, especially the part where I think he said 'Buy War Bonds'." "Never mind what you didn't get, you incompetent idiot! What did he say about Nocka-Nocka?" snapped Miss Tarantella. Bullock bristled at the words incompetent and idiot but let it pass. "Well, I think he said NockaNocka's cave is only a bit farther up the mountain." "Is that it? The old ass has been saying that for the last two days! Didn't he say anything else?" "Sure. I think he asked for something dirty to eat or at any rate, he said something about something dirty to eat." "You're one hell of a linguist!" she said. Bullock shrugged. Calusa wasn't one of his better languages. The old man pointed at Miss Tarantella who had taken a notebook out and had begun jotting down some notes in it. "She write down sex? Hot on hot on hots! Watch go to bathroom! Take picture! All this? She is what?" Bullock, amazed at the old man's strange grasp of the English language, pointed at Miss Tarantella. Not exactly knowing what the old man was getting at, he said "Anthropologist. She is an anthropologist." The old man grunted and shook his head affirmatively. "Dirty eat! Pictures of sex! Chomp! Chomp!" Miss Tarantella put down her pen and glared at the old man. "Forget the god damn dirty eat! Can you take us to Nocka-Nocka's cave?" "Can take," said the old man. He dipped a handful of mud and beefstew out of the pot and slapped it on his face and chest and vigorously rubbed it in. "Is he crazy?" asked Bullock, turning green. "Filthy!" was all Miss Tarantella could say.    They followed the old man up the rocky trail, going slowly to accomodate the huffing, puffing fat woman whose idea of exercise was taking the lid off a specimen jar. "Tell him to slow up! And don't follow him so close!" groaned Miss Tarantella. "You know I can't stand his smell." "How much farther is it?" asked Bullock, who was getting tired himself. "Chomp!" said the old man and kept right on walking. "Inconsiderate clod!" muttered Bullock under his breath. "Filthy!" added Miss Tarantella, in case somebody had forgotten her opinion. "I wonder if he's leading us on a wild goose chase?" grunted Bullock as he tried to drag Miss Tarantella over a huge rock that the old man had managed to climb over with no difficulty. The old man was disgustingly healthy. "I'll wring his scrawny neck if he is!" puffed Miss Tarantella, who was having a hard time getting air. Her cheeks bulged in and out like sails flapping in the wind. She floundered over the rock like a pregnant whale in distress. "Somehow, I can't help feeling that he knows more English than he lets on," said Bullock, straining his arms almost out of their sockets trying to get the fat woman back on her feet again. "There's something very fishy about him." Miss Tarantella wobbled unsteadily on her feet and grunted. "That's just the way he smells." The old man stood further up the trail, motioning for them to hurry. "Nocka-Nocka!" he yelled and pointed. Bullock and Miss Tarantella staggered up to him. There in the side of the mountain was an enormous cave-like opening under a wall of overhanging rock. "Is that it?" asked Miss Tarantella, flushed with exictement. "Chomp! Chomp!" said the old man. "It better be or you'll regret the..." started Miss Tarantella. Suddenly, a heaving mass as big as a semi-truck roared out of the cave. It had dozens of green eyes, hundreds of red tentacles and bumps all over it. It had blue eyes too and big mouth-like openings all over with big shiny white teeth sticking out here and there. It had the shape of a ripe squash and the general complexion of an overripe tomato. It swarmed and it crawled and it oozed. On what might be the top of it, firmly resting on several white bumps, sat three pith helmets not unlike the pith helmets that Bullock and Miss Tarantella wore. As soon as the creature burst out of the cave, Miss Tarantella let off a scream that made an air raid siren sound like silence. Bullock contented himself with letting his mouth flop open in an imitation of the Grand Canyon. In a matter of seconds, the creature swooped up Bullock, Miss Tarantella and the old man too. It held them up in the air with its tentacles. "Woof!" said Nocka-Nocka. Miss Tarantella kept on screaming. Bullock, made of less sterner stuff, immediately passed out. The old man however was perfectly relaxed in the tentacled grip of the monster. "Woof! A hot one!" said Nocka-Nocka and he wrapped a tentacle around Miss Tarantella's mouth, cutting her off in midscream . Nocka-Nocka pointed all of its blue and green eyes at his captives. First he looked at Bullock. "Yum! Clean!" Nocka-Nocka said. He looked at Miss Tarantella. "Yum! Clean! Big Chomp!" said Nocka-Nocka. Then he looked at the old man "Yeeeeeech! Filthy!" said Nocka-Nocka and he dropped the old man like he was a live coal. The old man landed on his feet with practiced ease. The monster turned and oozed and flowed and crawled back into the cave, clutching the squirming body of Miss Tarantella and the unconscious one belonging to Bullock. The old man crept near the mouth of the cave and listened. He heard an enormous slurping, gulping sound and several big cracking noises that sounded like dry sticks breaking. Solemnly, he went over to a big rock near the mouth of the cave. Taking a piece of chalk from the pocket of his dirty shirt, he put two more marks on the rock alongside the three already there. Then without once looking back, he started back down the mountain. "Chomp! Chomp!" he said to himself as he walked, and his face lit up with a smile, remembering.  Jerry Pournelie.PhD W ell, let's see: should I begin with Freeman Dyson's highways into space, John McCarthy's home computer terminals, Herman Kahn's outlook for mankind, Frank Drake's search for extraterrestrial intelligence, George Gatewood's destruction of more planets than the Klingon Empire, Barbara Brown on bio-feedback, Adam Reed on brain-computer interfaces, or something simple like the limits of the universe? (And if that isn't a catchy enough lead, you shouldn't be reading this; you're dead from the neck up.) This is, of course, my annual report on the state of the sciences, occasioned by the # annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciwas seven days long; in previous years it's been only five. Even with seven days it was a # ring circus, and inevitably there were generally at least four sessions one needed to attend simultaneously. Next year it will be worse. I doubt that the seven day meeting will happen again. Like some critic's review of the painting "White on White" we may say of the seven day meeting, "Perhaps it needed to be done, but having been done it need not be done again." Seven days of concentrated scientific excitement is just too much -- certainly it was for the press corps, and I think for the meeting attendees as well. Each of the topics mentioned in my first paragraph deserves a column of its own, and over the next year we'll have several of them. This month I'll try to round them all up -- which isn't easy to do. Let's start with the good news. says Hudson Institute. Of course one expects Herman Kahn to say that. (Actually, Herman was down with some exotic brand of 'flu and his speech was delivered by his asdetail.) The Hudson Institute is known for its long-range optimism -- pollyana in person, some say of Kahn. Pollyana or not, it's hard to argue with the numbers they've generated at HI. For example, they've analyzed the assumptions in The Limits to Growth model, and found them wanting. Of course, so have we, right here in this column, but we used the entire solar system as our base of operations. Kahn's people stayed with Earth, did not assume asteroid mining or O'Neill colonies, and still came up with a good prognosis. ignores a very large number of sources for "non-renewable" raw materials. For aluminum it uses only bauxite, and thus concludes we'll run out in a couple of hundred years -- yet aluminum is one of the four most common elements in the Earth's crust, and is easily converted into useful form. You don't need bauxite, although of course that's the cheapest source and thus the only one extensively exploited at the moment. nearly ignores recycling, although most "non-renewable" resources are recyclable. Iron and steel, for example, exist in highly concentrated forms -- in city dumps. Again, it's only economics that keep us from mining them there. Most raw materials are not "consumed" in the sense that they're used up forever. A few, like the lead put into gasoline, are so dispersed that they can't be recovered for any price; but most can be, at costs higher than present, but not high Item: with present technology and presently used arable land, the world food crop can be increased by a factor of between # and #. We've already mentioned here that if the average Indian farmer could get his food production per acre up to what Japanese peasants achieved in the #th Century, India would have no famines for a long time to come. I could go on, but the bottom line is that Kahn concludes the world can, with easily forseeable technology and known resources, support #-dollar income of # per capita, for hundreds of years. Discount all those numbers by quite a lot and there's still room for a lot of hope. Homer Sap may be about for a long time. The "hard problems", says the Hudson Institute, are not so hard after all. That's the good news. The bad news is that we don't know how to get there from here. Even Kahn and Brown look a bit gloomy when faced with the next quarter-century, and their opponents are positively shocked. Daniel Bell, Harvard sociologist, asked Brown "How can you say 'magnificent'? Just how can you be so complacent? I have never because those people know no economics, but what you've said is ridiculous. Forty-eight percent of the population of Mexico is under # years old. You saw what the increase in the youth cohort did to the US in the #'s, now it will happen all over the world, and you tell us everything's fine." After which the meeting came apart, with grey-bearded scientists shouting at each other. When order was eventually restored, it appeared that each side was talking to a different point. Brown -- and invisibly behind him, Herman Kahn -- was trying to answer the challenges presented by the Club of Rome. Bell and his friends are worried about tomorrow. Neither really heard what the other was saying, and the shortterm worriers, infuriated by what they think is complacency, have, I think, missed an important point: it matters what view you take of the year #. Decisions that must be made today to get us to the year # will be profoundly influenced by your long-term outlook. If you your solutions to the coming famines and droughts -- and those we will have -- are not going to be the same as they would if you accept Kahn's world of #. The best analogy I think of is a ship sailing unknown seas when a storm comes up. If you think there's a continent and safe harbor ahead, you sail on; if not, you turn back. In a real sense, then, mankind is at a turning point, perhaps as important a turning point as we've faced in all human history.    More bad news. Two years ago, the fusion research people fairly breathed optimism. The general impression was Real Soon Now. No more. This year you could cut the gloom with a knife. Fusion is not going to save us. Everyone still believes it will work -- some day -- but the chances of significant and useful fusion power coming on line before # are so slim that few, if any, planners even make allowances for the possibility. Let me hasten to add some good news before plunging on with the bad: we don't need fusion. Ocean thermal, space-based, biological, and other sources of tapping solar energy can and will be able to power Kahn's affluent world: but they won't get us to the year #. There were two days of debates, presentations, pitches, arguments, screaming matches, and general discussions of energy. The participants were high-level people, including Marjorie Hart, Senior Planning Advisor to Exxon, David Rose of vironmental Defense Fund, and Donald Allen, President of Yankee Atomic Electric. There were economists and engineers, nuclear enthusiasts and anti-nuclear activists; and when the two days were finished there were some remarkable agreements. Remarkable, but frightening. For one thing, over the next # years there are only two choices: coal, and nuclear fission. Actually those aren't mutually exclusive, although they are collectively exhaustive. We're going to use coal, and in large quantities. The question is, do we cut down on coal as much as possible by building nuclear plants, or do we forget nuclear power and set up lots of drag-lines for strip mining? But -- what happened to the other choices? Windmills, tides, geothermal, solar, and all the rest of them? They went down under a volley of equations and hard numbers. Take tidal: if you built a damn around the wonders for the environment?) and had a # efficient system for converting tidal energy to electricity, you could power the city of Boston. That may not be worth the cost. Geothermal: first, it's localized. It may play an important part in regional power systems, but we haven't as yet the technology for distributing that power across the country. Second, it's more polluting than early enthusiasts believed. A look at aerial photos taken downwind from The Geysers in California, or the Mexican geothermal plants above the Sea of Cortez, will convince you of that. The last word may not have been said on geothermal power for the long run, but for the short you couldn't even write the Environmental Impact Statements required for a construction permit. Windmills -- same problems, only worse. Unreliable. Few places with strong steady winds. Again very useful devices for local remote areas, but hardly likely to provide as much as # contribution to the national energy budget. I could go on, but there's no point: I assure you, the consensus was remarkable. It's coal or fission, with no other possibilities in the running. Yes: I realize that we've left out methane and ethanol, the one produced from sewage, the other from growing plants. I leave them because they take a lot of discussion, and I'm not myself convinced that methane and methanol can't make a real contribution to fuel saving. Ethanol is a different story: there's not that much suitable cropland that won't be needed for increased food production, and the transport and collection system for gathering ethyl alcohol produced in thousands of small-holder farms hasn't even been planned, much less begun. Methanol from sewage has another problem: why the hell should we take perfectly good high-grade organic nitrogen fertilizer, turn it into fuel, bum it to produce electric power (and waste heat), and then use that power to fix nitrogen to make high-grade inorganic fertilizer? Besides which, one power company that tried it was told to stop the research: it was an improper use of the rate-payers' money. Power companies should, according to the California Public Utility Commission, produce power, not engage in fuel research. I want to get off the energy crisis (for this column; it deserves another of its own) but before I do I can't neglect conservation, which can help. By conservation I don't mean turning off lights (although that helps.) What's needed is restructuring of the legal system. It makes no sense at the moment. For example: the minimum cost to a power company for equipment to generate a kilowatt of electricity is #. For nuclear that's higher. Yet I can go buy a cheap air-conditioner that wastes a kilowatt, and save myself # because I didn't buy a more efficient gadget. Is it reasonable that I save # and cost the ratepayers #? Conservation means building codes that require decent insulation in both private houses and offices; architecture that doesn't waste power; rates that make it expensive to use electricity during peak periods; research into bottoming cycles (ways to get more power out of the low-grade steam at the end of the power cycle -- useful in # ways, for direct generation at present installations, and as research into ocean-thermal systems we'll need in the long run). Real conservation requires sensible laws (or even the absence of laws; make energy cost the consumer and he'll find ways to save it himself). So much for the energy crisis. As I've reported year after year, the prognosis doesn't change, but we're no closer to an answer now than we were when I began this column. This year is worse, because the power companies must now make decisions. In the next couple of years they have to order new power plants -- and they must now decide what will fuel them. Coal or fission? They see no other choices    So what else is new? Plenty. Let's assume we get past the energy crunch and look at what else we might have before the year #. Biofeedback. The results are uncanny, and they're just beginning. Barbara Brown, the VA Hospital physiologist whose book started a lot of the current fad, is now convinced that there's nothing the eastern yogas can do that you can't teach yourself in weeks to months. Think about that for a moment: heart rate, breathing, relaxation, muscle tension, glandular responses -- every one of them subject to your own will. Dr. Brown is convinced of it. The results are pouring in, and not just from her VA hospital in Sepulveda, either. Ulcers cured, neuroses conquered, irrational fears and hatreds brought under conscious control, and all without mysticism. When I put it to Dr. Brown that there was already far more objective evidence for the validity of her psycho-physiological theories than there ever has been for Freudian psycho-analysis, she enthusiastically agreed. She also warns would-be enthusiasts that there are a lot of plausible-sounding charlatans jumping onto the bio-feedback bandwagon. People are getting rich off selling the equipment -- much of which is worthless and very little worth what it costs. For more on this subject, including equipment reports, see this column in coming months. For now, the news is good: there's hard, objective evidence to show that you can, with patience (but far less than yoga demands) learn to control many allergies, indigestion, shyness, fear of crowds, and stage fright. That's got to be good news. Boston, I wandered the streets of New York between appointments with editors. On the streets and avenues around Times Square I found an amazing sight. (No, not that after all, I live only a few miles from Hollywood, and thus am rather hard to shock.) Every store window was filled with calculators. Not merely "fourfunction" glorified arithmetic machines, but real calculators with scientific notation, trig, logs, statistical functions, and the rest. Programmable calculators for under #. Presumably there's a market for those things: which means that we may, in a few years, have a large population of people who really do use numbers in their everyday lives. That could have a truly profound impact on our society. We might even get rational decision-making. John R. McCarthy of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratories certainly hopes so. McCarthy is sometimes called the "Western Marvin Minsky". We spent a pleasant evening with him. (We in this case is not editorial: myself, Poul and Karen Anderson, Larry and Marily Niven, and Russell Seitz.) McCarthy forsees home computer systems in the next decade. OK, that's not surprising: under a grand sell you a computer that can do more than the first Unithought of. McCarthy envisions something a great deal more significant: information utilities. There is no technological reason why every Galaxy reader could not, right now, have access to all the computing power he or she needs. Not wants -- what's needed is more than what's wanted, simply because most people don't realize just what these gadgets can do. Start with the simple things like financial records, with the machine reminding you of bills to be paid and asking if you want to pay them -- then doing it if instructed. At the end of the year it computes your income tax for you. Well, so what? We can live without all that, and we might worry a bit about privacy if we didn't have physical control over the data records and such. Science fiction stories have for years assumed computer-controlled houses, with temperatures, cooking, menus, grocery-orders, etc. all taken care of by electronics. But what of publishing? McCarthy sees the end of the publishing industry as we know it. If you want to publish a book, you type it into the computer terminal in your home; edit the text to suit yourself; and for a small fee put the resulting book into the central information utility data-banks. Anyone who wants to read it orders it from his own terminal, either as words on a TV screen or hard copy; no printer, and no publisher. The author gets his royalty directly from the purchaser. Every publication becomes "professional". With such a plethora of books, critics and editors would probably grow in importance. "Recommended by Jim Baen", or "A Frederick Pohl Selection" would take on new significance, and one assumes that these editors would continue to work with authors since they'd hardly recommend a book they didn't like. "Big name" writers would have little to worry about, with their readers setting in standing orders for their works; new writers would probably have to get a "name critic" to review their stuff. OK, still not all that new for science fiction readers; but did you catch the time scale? The equipment exists now. The telephone net to link nearly everyone in the US with the information utilities exists now. Computer electronics costs are plummeting (I paid # for my TI SR-#, and I could have bought one continue to do so. McCarthy's home terminal world could be with us in the next ten years, and fully developed in twenty. By then we may not need the home terminals. Dr. Adam Reed of Rockefeller University has a new scheme: direct computer-to-brain linkups. Incidentally, Dr. Reed made my day by saying, right there much he'd liked a couple of my stories which assume implants that let the owner talk directly to computers. I had not, however, been far-out enough in his opinion. Ten years. In ten years, Reed thinks, we will have cracked the code that the brain uses for information processing. Once that's done, information can be fed directly into the brain's central processing unit without going through peripheral equipment such as eyes and ears. You don't read a book: the computer literally squirts its contents into your head. In later discussions with Reed I asked if it would be the same experience; that is, when I read War and Peace there is more than a transfer of information, there is also the emotional response I have to the various scenes; that would be lacking in the direct-informationacquisition system. We agreed that there would probably remain a few nuts who read, just as TV hasn't quite eliminated literacy in the US -- but that the normal method of acquiring information, particularly dull books that one wants to have read but doesn't want to read, would be through computers. Now the implications of that are staggering. First, those who can afford a computer implant will quite literally know everything known to the human race. If a question has an answer, you can get it answered in McCarthy-type information utilities have been developed, as one supposes they will). Want a multiple-regression equation linking weather, gasoline consumption, electricity generation, skip keels laid, and the price of wheat futures? Merely think the question and wait; it shouldn't be long before you have it.      # E #rd St N.Y., N.Y. # (#) #-# There are uglier possibilities: could computer-link implants be used for thought control? That possibility horrified my friend Ed Edelson of the New York Daily News, so much so that it was all he could think about, and the result was a quarrel between him and Larry Niven. Edelson kept asking the other computer scientists whether they didn't think this was monstrous and ought to be suppressed. None did, which terrified him. Larry's view was that tyrannies already have the means for efficiency, and why suppress something that can make us a lot smarter? Take your choice on those views. I'm still trying to appreciate the magnitude of what this means. What kind of world will it be when an appreciable part of the human race literally knows everything? And don't forget that these implants are a form of electronic telepathy: you can transfer enormous amounts of information to the computer and thence to someone else, and do it in seconds -- and the first successful experiment may take place in ten years. By the year # "education" as we know it may be obsolete, with students absorbing information the way computers absorb punched cards or tapes. On a shorter time-span, Reed is convinced that implants that "talk" to you -- that is, feed information through connection to auditory and optic nerves -- will be available, at least to the rich. Understand the implications of that: we can make the blind see and the deaf hear, by connecting computer-controlled devices into their nervous system, by-passing ruined biological sensors. When the full information-code system is developed the same can be done for patients without optic and auditory nerves. Go further: when the coding system is completely known, a human personality can be "recorded", and if the cloning experiments prove out, be transcribed into a younger edition of the same person: know what you have learned at fifty and put it into a body aged #. Far out? Science fiction? No. There's a real possibility that it can happen to some of you who read this column. It's getting hard for science fiction writers to keep up: even we're getting future shock. What can we write about that some scientist isn't already doing? gence. Surely that belongs to sf writers? Yes. Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and the others have been trying, but so far they've received no messages from Out There. Of course they've only listened for a short time, to a few stars, and on a few frequencies. They've also had a listen at a few nearby galaxies. As Sagan puts it, we can conclude that in those galaxies no one just now (well, just then; it takes quite a while for signals to get here from another galaxy) wants so badly to talk to us that they've built a system that can do it. George Gatewood of the University of Pittsburgh has another approach: he's looking for planetary systems in close-by stars. There' ve been a number of recent publications announcing such planets, in places like Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, etc. Gatewood has new astronometric techniques for analyzing already-collected data, as well as gathering new information, and he used it on # nearby stars: with horrible results. He destroyed more planetary systems than the Klingons. There aren't any. At least, there aren't any that have Jupiter-sized planets, with the possible exception of Barnard's Star, and that, alas, is a wretched red dwarf that almost certainly has no inhabitable planets even if it does have a Jupiter-like companion. There's still hope. Gatewood's techniques can't find terrestrialsized planets at interstellar distances. Freiland at Tau Ceti may yet exist; we don't know enough about planetary systems to be able to say. After all, Jupiter-size planets don't have to form in order for smaller planets to come into being. Or do they? As Gatewood says, once we have a sample larger than one we may be able to make some generalizations. He's also got a proposal: give him one shuttle payload and about tect terrestrial planets up to # light years away. Gatewood isn't the only one who hopes we'll get way we can really study our own sun is to learn a lot more about other suns -- and it's insane not to know our sun as well as possible. asked for funding to develop the that's got to be one of the most unfortunate names for a science project in history; reminds me of Okinawa), Congress put the project dead, but this is the third delay in program-start, and some of us are getting worried. I'm coming to the end of my space, and I still haven't talked about X-ray objects in space (and crashing neutron stars, a theory almost certainly wrong but beautiful in conception). I've said nothing about the universe -- is it open or closed? (Some think yes, some no, but the evidence is itself fascinating. Best evidence is still for "open", but stand by.) I haven't touched IQ and intelligence, new theories about the origins of the Earth-Moon system, or Viking. I've had to ignore molecular biology, climate research, upper-atmosphere physics (aerosol cans haven't killed us yet and maybe they won't after all) or the care and feeding of child prodigies. I can't, though, ignore Freeman Dyson's Space Highways.    Some readers will recall that in my own stories I often postulate laser launching systems: that is, a very large laser that stays on the ground provides the energy to put spacecraft into orbit. It wasn't my invention: I took the concept wholesale from published work done at Avco-Everett Research Center. It's not only feasible, it seems inevitable, and we've discussed it before in this column. Dyson wants the US to build such a system. It is, he says, far better than the shuttle, because it will give access to space -- not merely for government and big corporations, but for a lot of people. Dyson envisions a time when you can buy, for about the cost of a present-day house and car, a space capsule. The people collectively own the laser-launch system, and you pay a small fee to use it. Your capsule goes into orbit. As I proved in the very first of these columns two years ago, once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. Specifically, you're halfway to the L-# points, if you want to go help build O'Neill colonies. You're halfway to the asteroids, if you'd like to try your hand at prospecting. You're halfway to Mars orbit if that's your desire. America, Dyson points out, wasn't settled by big government projects. The Great Plains and California were settled by thousands of free people moving across the plains in their own wagons. There is absolutely no reason why space can't be settled the same way. All that's required is access. Dangerous? Of course. Many families will be killed. A lot of pioneers didn't survive the Oregon Trail, either. But if we've such a horrendous surplus of people on this planet, why is it the same people who are so enamoured of Zero-Growth also want to protect everyone from every conceivable risk? Dyson's vision is different. Perhaps his first name has something to do with it? Because he's right, you know. That kind of Highway to Space would generate more true freedom than nearly anything else we could do; and if the historians who think one of the best features of America was caused by our open frontiers, and that we've lost much of our freedom through loss of the frontier -- if they're right, we can in a stroke bring back a lot of what's right with the country. So: combine it all. Dyson's Highways; Brown's bio-feedback; McCarthy's home terminals and Reed's brain-computer links; Kahn's view of the future, and even my own ideas on survival with style. It's all for real, you know. Not science fiction at all. We've only to reach out and grasp it. Why the hell don't we get at it? Oaiaxy Edited by James Baen simply, the best of the best. Hours of reading pleasure by the finest writers of science fiction: such sf luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin (her Nebula winning "The Day Before the Revolution"), Frederik Pohl, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley and many more are represented here with their finest works. is now available. To order, send the title and number with your name and address, # plus # postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. # Please allow eight weeks for delivery from our receipt of your order A Little Bit Of W'V The boy is father to the man, the future is born of the present; nothing else would make any sense. Even before he was really awake, Jeff knew his father was hitting his mother again, knew as he rose through layers of sleep that her cry of pain was awakening him. The way it always did. But now that he was fully conscious the night was silent. Through the square of window beside his bed he could see the trunk of the spindly pine tree outlined in the moonlight, and the silver sheen on the roof of his father's old # Ford parked under it. Then his father's voice rasped through the thin wall, growling brutal words like those that had bruised Jeff's own ears so many times. He shivered, tasting the sickness that always soured his throat at such times. He turned his gaze toward the bedroom door. His mother would be coming through it soon, at least he hoped she would. That way he knew that for the rest of the night she would be safe. And who knows? Tomorrow or the next day his father might go away again -- and stay away this time, for always. Those were the good times; when his father was gone. Happy times when his mother and he had gone for walks along the roadside, finding nuts or berries or wildflowers; or had sat on the sagging front porch after he got home from school and played fish on the cracked top of the old wicker table the Andersons had given them. The Andersons sometimes brought them groceries and hand-me-down clothes as well because they knew his father was gone and his mother wasn't too well. Of course, his mother had food stamps so they could get their own groceries, but Jeff knew they were poor. When his father was gone that didn't seem to matter because they were so happy, but when his father came back, Jeff knew what poverty was all about. It meant his father sat on the front porch all day in his undershirt, staring down the road that ran past their lot, through the woods, and down the mountainside into town, the bottle of whiskey beside his chair getting emptier. It meant that his mother stayed in bed most of the time and hardly ever laughed or played cards with him. It meant that when Jeff got home from school he had to get right at the chores or get a licking. "Kids like you nowadays got it made," his father would tell him. "Why, when I was a kid I had to walk four mile to school and four mile back, no matter what the weather, even when it was bitter cold or pouring down cats and dogs. You and your school bus! You don't know what hard times is, boy." When his father was feeling worse than usual, Jeff had to be careful to stay out of his way or get a licking for no reason at all. He was cussing at his mother now, and Jeff knew she wouldn't say anything back. She'd just put on her old brown chenille robe and come into Jeff's room. He watched the door and sure enough, the knob turned quietly and it opened a crack, letting in a faint smell of the salt pork and cabbage they'd had for dinner that night. Then it closed and she was standing beside him. She was whispering. "Jeff? You asleep?" "No, Mom." He slid across towards the window, leaving his pillow so that she could lay her head on it. She collapsed weakly on top of the covers, hardly even moving the little bed with her slight weight, her face a pale glimmer next to him. "I'm sorry he woke you," she said. "You need your sleep for school tomorrow, so you'll be fresh." "It wasn't him. I just can't stand to hear you crying." "Oh Jeff, I'm not crying. I'm just fine." "He hit you again, didn't he." It Wasn't a question. A thin sigh. "It's hard on a man to be out of work, Jeff. That's why you've got to get your schooling. It's important. Your Pa and I never really had the chance." "But Mark's father's out of work too,and he's real nice." "Jeff, did you remember you're going to have a birthday next week?" She was trying to make her voice happy. "Your ninth birthday, and you're going to have a party." He was suddenly interested. "A party? I'm going to have a party?" "Freda Anderson says Julie's birthday's just the day after yours, and why don't you both celebrate together at their house? She says we'll have the party on Julie's birthday, because that's Saturday, but she and me are going to bake two cakes, one that says 'happy birthday Jeff' and one that says 'happy birthday Julie', and there'll be games to play, and prizes..." But Jeff wanted a bike for his birthday and he knew he couldn't have it, and the thought of watching Julie opening all the presents he knew she'd get and him not getting the bike he longed for dimmed his first excitement. "Don't that sound like fun, Jeff?" "Yes," he said. "Oh, it will be. It will be fun." She was silent and Jeff listened to her breathing, that always sounded sort of scratchy, and to the sighing of the October wind through the tree branches. Then she spoke again. "Did I tell you what I saw this morning, Jeff?" "No, Mom. What?" "I was out on the porch this morning real early, before sunrise, getting a breath of fresh air. That's a pretty time, Jeff. I usually feel real good in the morning about then, like I could start right in baking and weeding and doing the wash and ironing without even getting tired. Just sail through all of it, like I used to." "You'll be feeling better soon, Mom," Jeff said. But it had been a long time since she'd felt good. Way before last Christmas, even, when she'd been going to have a baby and then something happened to it. "Anyway," she went on in her soft voice, "I was standing by the railing, just breathing in the good air and watching the sky get lighter, and all of a sudden I saw it." She paused and looked at him, her eyes shining in the darkness. "What?" "Well, it was big and shiny silver and it had lights on it, and it was sort of cigar-shaped..." "Oh Mom, that was just an airplane!" "No, Jeff. It was different." "Did it have red and green lights?" "No, they were just sort of orangy red, and it whirled and wheeled up in the sky right over the road, and then it come down lower so I got a real good look at it." "What did it look like? Did you see anybody on it?" "It just looked like a big silver flying saucer, like you see pictures of. Nobody on it that I know of, but then you wouldn't know there was anybody on an airplane, either, until it landed and they got off." "What did it do?" Jeff pictured the little green men from Mars, maybe, or Venus, who would be inside the silver ship. "Did it land?" "No. I don't think so, anyway. It just come down over the house and then went up again, real fast, and whirled off over the woods so that I couldn't see it no more." "But maybe it landed someplace. Maybe it's close by and we could go and see it." His mother laughed softly. "I think somebody would have seen it by now if it come down. They'd have the sheriff and the newspaper and TV folks up here so fast you wouldn't know what happened." "Are you going to tell them you saw it?" She moved slightly and shook her head. "Everybody would think I'm plumb crazy if I told them. That's why I wouldn't tell no one but you, Jeff. It'll be our secret." "But gee, Mom, maybe they wouldn't think you were crazy. Maybe they'd put you on television or something." "No, I don't think they'd believe me. Guess I'll just keep still about it." "Can't I tell Mark?" Jeff thought of how impressed his friend would be. He'd never seen a flying saucer. "Well... okay, but just Mark. And you tell him not to tell nobody, hear? Now you better turn over and close your eyes. It's late, and you'll be tired in the morning." Jeff obediently turned over, face toward the window, and closed his eyes. Tomorrow he'd try to get up real early. Maybe he'd see the flying saucer, too.    In the control room of the T.T.C., Vahran examined the realtime chronometer. "I hope we've been more precise," he said. "What was it last time? A week early? A month?" Captain Wolford shook his head. "Twenty-seven hours, according to our passenger. This time we may be an hour off, more or less. Not bad at all. Powers had a few minor adjustments made in the isochronal mechanisms. We've never had to be this exact before." "This trip seems to be a first for a lot of things." Vahran was trying to hide his nervousness, his distaste for this whole matter, but he could hear the bitterness in his voice. He wouldn't be here if there hadn't been so much money involved. Wolford looked at him sharply. "Compose yourself, Lieutenant. The Project Head explained all the ramifications to you himself when this trip was first planned, and you chose to come. Remarks like that in the passenger's hearing might cause problems later." "I wouldn't say it where he could hear me," Vahran said. "Well, look in and make sure he's strapped down, will you?" Vahran went to the doorslit that widened as he touched it, and stepped through into the large central cabin. The passenger was sitting in the red glow, gazing raptly at the panorama of Arkansas countryside projected on the screens below and around him, his big head with its mat of thick, blond hair moving restlessly as he tried to catch every bit of the view. His broad, pale face seemed composed but Vahran knew he must be feeling a lot more than he was showing. McCoy's calm manner must be habitual with him now. It should, after years spent assuring his patients that the symptoms of aging could indeed be reversed, that they could expect to live to be approximately two hundred years old, staying healthy and active the entire time. The "McCoy Method" had won him a Nobel prize. He was wealthy and famous, and Vahran knew this was why McCoy could do what no one had ever done before him... perhaps what no one should ever do. "Strap yourself in for landing, Dr. McCoy," he said and went back through the doorslit into the control room. Wolford looked up as Vahran entered. "Sit down and get yourself buckled in, Lieutenant, and try not to look like we're about to timegress into a freight train." Vahran nodded slowly. "You trying to tell me I'm the only one who's worried. Captain?" "Just do your job, Lieutenant," the captain said coolly. "But you don't like this any better than I do." Wolford shrugged. "McCoy convinced all the right people. A lot of people owe him favors; how can you turn down someone who's given you or your loved ones another hundred, hundred and twenty years of life? They have to satisfy McCoy, and we have to satisfy them." Vahran stretched his stocky frame so that the chair cushioned itself into a reclining position against him. "By taking the chance that everybody else and their loved ones won't be there when we get back?" Wolford's grey eyes hardened under his grey brows. "The plan is perfect. It won't fail unless ye or I fail." "But why weren't experiments ever made on this? Why weren't the paradoxes ever studied?" "Probably because studying one would mean causing one. This kind of thing was never supposed to happen. Rules were set up." "But it's happening now," Vahran said doggedly. Wolford ignored him. "Prepare yourself for landing in..." he looked at a dial in front of him, "... thirty-six seconds." And you're just as nervous about all this as I am, Vahran thought, following the captain's gaze to the control panel. So many things could go wrong. The date register showed that it was now October #, #.    McCoy had expected some kind of shock from the landing, but there was none. The only sign that they were down came when the viewers that surrounded him went dark. The infrabeams had been turned off, the red light that had filled the room dimmed, and he sat blinking in the incandescence that replaced it. He loosened the straps of the chair and stood up, stretching, forcibly restraining the impatience that urged him to burst from the capsule and race across the field to the old frame house that waited for him in the October mist. "Time enough," he told himself and smiled faintly at the words. The doorslit widened and the Captain entered with Lt. Vahran close behind. The captain spoke briskly. "Are you ready?" McCoy nodded. "Then I'll just run through the caveats once more." The lieutenant was looking scared, McCoy noticed, but then the lieutenant had looked scared the first time, too. He wondered briefly why his friend Greg Powers, the president of Project Anachron, had sent Vahran along on this second attempt. Either Vahran hadn't voiced his fear or he was the only man Powers could send. There weren't many chrononauts, McCoy knew. The project was still very young, very secret, and very risky, and it was limited to use by those with a serious purpose: archaeologists, historians... and McCoy. Captain Wolford was talking... not one other person must be involved other than your subject. Even animals and insects should be avoided. Do not remove anything from the site, or move or damage anything while you are there. The utmost care in walking and bodily movement must be observed. Always walk on paved surfaces in preference to lawns, fields, dirt. Always remove any evidence of your presence that might be left, such as footprints, fingerprints, etcetera." McCoy raised an impatient hand. "I think I remember everything, Captain." Wolford nodded curtly. "All right then. Good luck, and we'll expect you back here within thirty minutes. We can't remain stationary longer than that." So little time, McCoy thought as he went through the port of the time transport and jogged across the open field toward the road. But then there was always too little time, and at least this segment of it was his to re-use. Recycled time. How often he'd wished for that. Who hadn't? And now a tiny bit of it was his. The sky was grey, the air heavy with a chill mist. He was on the road now, and as soon as he passed the woods he would see it, the house where he had been born and where he had slept last night, probably dreaming about the bike he wanted for his ninth birthday. But he would have left for school by now, and his father would be gone, if they had timed it exactly right. He would have liked to see himself as he was then. He would even have liked to see his father, but of course there was no way. His mother had to be alone. When the initial miscalculation had brought him back here for the first time yesterday morning his mother must have been on the front porch, for she'd seen the T.T.C. A dim memory came of how she'd told him she'd seen a "flying saucer." In the years that followed he had come to believe she'd made up the story just to take his mind off the reality of their lives. Now he knew she had spoken the truth. He was past the woods and the mist was lifting. He stopped on the road, looking across the expanse of dirt and pebbles and straggling grass, past the sad old pine tree where his father had always left the car, up the sagging wooden steps to the cavern of darkness under the weather-worn eaves of the porch, where his mother stood staring at him. She wore that old brown chenille robe, but she looked younger than he remembered. Her face was a thin, delicate triangle under long, untidy blond hair. Her lips were pale, her eyes large and sad as they watched him, uncomprehending. He had prepared himself for this moment a thousand times. She looked timid, embarrassed to be standing so disheveled before a stranger, and he knew he had to reassure her quickly or she would slip through the door before he could stop her. He smiled and called out: "Mrs. McCoy, I have an important message for you," as he strode to the porch steps, pausing at the bottom to look up at her. By then she already had one hand on the knob of the closed front door, the other clasping her robe together at her neck. "A message? For me? From who?" His heart was pounding so loudly he was afraid she might hear it. "From Freda Anderson," he said breathlessly, remembering the name she would believe. Sure enough, she let go of the doorknob and leaned over the porch rail. "Is she sick, or what?" "She's had another attack. She wants you to come right away." "Oh, but I can't go like this. I'll have to change." "No. Please. I... I have my car waiting down the road. We can be there in a few minutes without anyone seeing you. If you don't come now, it might be too late." Her eyes grew doubtful and she grasped the housecoat more tightly. "Who are you?" He wanted to tell her, and then run to her and hug her. He wanted that more than anything at this moment, but there would be no way to convince her. She wouldn't understand. "I'm Freda's brother... from Albany." "Why, she never spoke of a brother to me!" "Please Mrs. McCoy, believe me. I'm her brother, here on a visit. Freda asked me to come for you. I was the only one they could spare." He was forcing himself to stay calm, hiding the fury of his own desire to get her away from this place "It's urgent, Mrs. McCoy. She needs you." She was convinced now, moving down the porch steps timidly but steadily, and she glanced back only once at the closed front door and the quiet house as she walked with him toward the road. Jeff McCoy kept his hands from touching her. Now he had to do the rest of it. The hardest part, perhaps. "How bad off is she?" his mother was asking. "Pretty bad." They were at the road now and she was looking anxiously around. "Where's your car?" He kept his voice light. "Just down a way." "But where?" Her voice was rising with apprehension and suspicion. "Just beyond the woods. I parked off the road in the field." She stared up at him. "Why 'would you park so far away?" She was stopping now, and his hands went out and grasped hers, pulling her toward him. "Look at me," he said urgently. "Don't you know me?" She tried to pull away. "What do you want? Let me go!" This was all wrong. Clumsy. He hadn't meant it to go like this. "I'm not going to hurt you. Mom. It's all right." She ignored the word and struggled, but there was no strength in her and she knew it. "Please," Jeff said gently. "Look at my face. You recognize me, don't you?" She shook her head and the rest of her body shook too. He kept a firm hold on her wrists. "Here," he said, "the scar on my nose where Trixie bit me when I was seven. I have a birthmark on my left shoulderblade that looks like a rabbit's head. I contracted measles on the first day of kindergarten and you played the dulcimer for me and sang the old songs, trying to make me feel better. ' ' He watched her emotions shift from disbelief to almost-recognition -- before they clouded with fear. "Let me go," she said quietly. "I don't know who you are or what you want. Let me go!" She squirmed convulsively to get away from him, but he held her. "You don't understand now," he said, "and I can't blame you for that. But come with me, just a little way down the road, and I'll show you something that will make you understand." She remained silent, helpless, so he let go one of her hands and put his arm around her, pulling her along the road with him, talking softly the while. "Don't be frightened by what you'll see. When you saw it yesterday you called it a 'flying saucer' but it's really a time transport capsule." He could feel a long shudder go through her body and wished he had brought the medication with him. She was so thin, so sick, and this tension wasn't going to help her condition. "There are some others with me. Don't be afraid of them. They're human beings. We've all come here to help you." She was sobbing softly, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she seemed dazed. "You're my mother," he said. "I wouldn't hurt you for anything in the world." "Then let me go home." Anger was rising in him, a desperate frustration with her needless fear. He hadn't hurt her. Surely she could sense his good intentions even if she couldn't seem to accept his resemblance to the son she knew. Was she too stupid to be curious? To at least find out what this mystery was all about? Somehow he had thought there would be a strong bond...recognition... between them the moment they met, but she was not as he remembered, and obviously she felt no kinship to him. And how do you talk to a memory? But then he considered why he was here and what it had taken to get him here, and he tried again, speaking gently. "You can go home, Mom, if that's what you want. You can go right back home just as soon as I've explained things to you. On the transport. Look, it's over there." He pointed to the edge of the woods where the silver disk was just visible through the trees. When his mother saw it she struggled again, but he kept his arm firmly around her and one hand on her wrist so that she had to let him take her across the field. He was thankful that at least she wasn't screaming. As soon as they reached the transport, the port opened, and McCoy led his mother through. She stopped struggling when she saw Wolford and Vahran waiting for them and leaned suddenly against Jeff as if for protection. He loosened his grasp on her wrist, but kept an arm around her still. "Mother, this is Captain Wolford and Lieutenant Vahran." Silverberg,Beter, Harrison, Knight, Pohl and Aidiss "Whal a lively, Informative, outrageous... hilarious, insightful collection of glimpses beyond the veil."Harlan Ellison Some Personal Histories ol Science Fiction Writers Illustrated, # at bookstores or direct from  Harper e Row Wolford's ruddy face attempted a warm smile, but Vahran only nodded. "In here, Mom," McCoy said, leading her to the doorslit of the inner cabin, pausing until it dilated sufficiently to admit both of them together. His mother stared as they went through and gasped as it closed behind them. McCoy led her to one of the chairs and she collapsed into it. He then found his kit, extracted what he wanted, and handed it to her. She held it listlessly on her open palm, barely glancing at it as she gazed bemusedly around the cabin at the darkened viewscreens, the army of meters, the softly glowing walls. "Look at it," he told her, pointher. It was shaped like a flower bud on a short stem, pale pink with light green petals. As it took warmth from her hand it opened into a frilly blossom that gave off a strong, sweet fragrance. In spite of her nervousness, she lifted the flower cautiously to her nose and sniffed it. She didn't notice when part of the 'stem' melted into her palm... Thank God, McCoy thought. The gadget he had devised to sedate children and psychotics without force was proving invaluable again. He talked as he waited for the drug to relax her, knowing that there was little time left before they would have to return to the transfer point. "Now do you see?" he said. "There's nothing and nobody here to hurt you." She held out her palm with the flower in it. "Is this what you want to show me? Magic tricks?" "Of course not. That's not important. What is important is that you realize I'm your son." She shook her head. "My son is Jeff, my only child. He's at school now." "That's true," Jeff said, "but it's only partly true. I am Jeff, only I'm the grown-up Jeff. I come from the future. In my time it's the year #, and I'm forty-three years old." He touched her cheek. "Look at me. Can't you see I've only changed a little bit? I've only grown up, Mom." She lifted her eyes and stared at him, and said nothing. "In my present time there's a way to return to the past. That's what I've done. I've come back to ask you to go with me to my time...to the future." Unexpectedly, she laughed, in the way she had when he had been very small and had told her his fantastic dreams. "That's some story, Mister," she said. "Wait until I tell Jeff about this. And we all thought you were little green men from Mars." McCoy sighed. "I want you to come back to # with me. Mom. I want to buy you a new house and make your life easy from now on. You need medical attention, and I can give you the best. You can live a long and happy life if you'll come with me now." She shook her head slowly, still smiling. "Little green men, we thought, and here you look just like us." There was a slight swooshing sound and the doorslit to the control room opened to admit Captain Wolford. He looked from one to the other and then spoke quietly. "Three minutes, Dr. McCoy." McCoy nodded. "Come here for a moment, will you. Captain?" W'olford stepped forward a few paces and stood waiting. "Will you tell her, please, where we come from, and who we are?" "Project Anachron," Wolford said. "Travel to the past." "And who am I?" "Doctor Jeffrey McCoy." "Thank you," McCoy said. "We can leave now, Captain." His mother jumped up suddenly, visibly fighting the effects of the tranquilizer. "No! I've got to get home. You can't start this thing going until I get off!" She moved toward the doorslit to the outer passage, but McCoy stepped in front of her, blocking her way. "You're coming with us, whether you want to or not," he said sternly. "You'll be glad you did, later." He nodded to the captain. "It's okay. I'll get her fastened into the chair." Wolford stepped back through the doorslit. "You lied to me!" his mother sobbed as McCoy pushed her gently into the chair and fastened the safety straps around her. "You lied! You said I could go home!" "I'm sorry," he said. "But Jeff needs me. I can't leave him." McCoy finished with her straps and then reclined in his own chair next to hers. "It's all right, Mom. I went to live with your parents. Grandpa and Grandma were good to me. I was happy with them." He swung the chair around so he could see her face. She was very white but she was listening to him now, perhaps even believing him. He went on. "My father left us, you know. It was the same day -- " he stopped, looked at her, and then continued. "It was a week before my birthday. That would be today... this morning. He didn't even wait to eat breakfast. Just got into the Ford and drove away." "He'll be back." She was crying hard, her voice breaking. "No, not this time. And so I went to live with Grandma and Grandpa. So you see, Mom, there's nothing for you to go back to. Nobody needs you there, but  want you here . ' ' A red glow filled the room and a humming started, and now the viewers around them and under them were turning on like windows to the world outside, showing them the bleak trees, the rutted ground, the chill morning, and the uneven roof of the old house. The woman struggled to a sitting position, the chair forming itself around her as she moved, and she watched the house receding below them until it was only a speck. Then she turned horrified eyes to McCoy. "You're a liar! You have nothing to do with me or my son. You're a lying, rotten, stinking " He leaned over and grabbed the fist she was shaking at him, anger and disappointment loud in his voice. "Don't you know why I'm taking you with me? Don't you know why I've spent years planning for this moment? Can't you feel what's going to happen to you? Then let me tell you I've had to beg, to bribe, to toady and crawl, to plead and bargain with people I hate just to be able to come back here and save you. Are you too stupid to see how important this is to me, and to you, and to that little boy back there?" Suddenly he became conscious that he was hurting her hand and released it. But she would have to hear the rest now. He hadn't planned to tell her, ever, but he had to make her understand. He lowered his voice. "I did all that, Mother, to save your life -- to give you a new life. That's why I'm not going to send you back there to die. Because you did die that day -- today -- October #, #." She was staring at him, eyes wide with disbelief. "What are you talking about?" "I'm telling you that I'm saving your life! If you had left this transport and gone back to that house, you would have died in about five hours. And that's why we have to hurry; I want you in the hospital when your body fails." She shook her head violently. "No!" "Yes!" He wasn't angry any more. Now he was so close to her, now that he'd seen the old house again just as it had been on that last day of her life, the same feelings came flooding back to him and he spoke to her with all the heartache he had known then. "He got up that morning and started drinking again, and he was cussing and slapping you around until both of us were crying, and then he got into the car and left. I didn't want to go to school but you made me eat my mush and get on the bus. And when I got home it was raining, and you weren't waiting for me on the porch, but I thought it was because of the rain. I went into the kitchen, but you weren't there, and then I went into the bedroom. You were lying on the bed. I knew right away that... that you weren't alive. I don't remember how, but I got someone to help and they called an ambulance. The doctor said it would have happened whether I'd been there or not, because you were so sick. He called it 'cardiac arrest.' I didn't know then that that was just dog-Latin for 'the heart stopped beating' -- but I always thought that if I'd been there with you I could have saved you somehow." He buried his face in his hands. "You never even owned a washing machine. " He could hear her low voice. "He's not a bad man. It's just so hard on him, the bad times and all..." "He should have taken you to a doctor. He knew you'd been sick for a long time, but he wouldn't do even that much for you." "No, honey. Don't." The woman reached out, and McCoy felt gentle hands stroking his hair. He lifted his head and looked at her. "Then you do believe me? You know who I am?"    There was a welcoming committee of one as the T.T.C. materialized in its home station. Vahran could see the tall figure of Greg Powers coming toward them as he and Wolford stood at the port. They exchanged brief greetings and then Wolford told him what had happened. Powers nodded. "I hope it was over quickly," he said. "How's McCoy?" "He's inside with the body. He's taking it pretty hard." "Of course," Powers said. He patted Vahran's shoulder. "Thank you. It couldn't have been pleasant for either of you. Your bonus checks will be waiting the minute we finish up." "When will that be?" Vahran asked. "That depends on Jeff... how quickly I can convince him to get his mother's body back to her own time. Why don't you take a couple hours break and report back? I'll let you know then." He clapped Vahran on the shoulder again, and went into the transport. Vahran and Wolford walked slowly through the garage-like building and turned into a hallway full of people who rushed blindly past, intent on their own errands amid the sounds of clicking autotypers and chiming phones. "Well," Wolford said, "everything seems to be the same here in good old #. Feel better?" Vahran nodded. "I felt better as soon as McCoy used the tranquillizer on her." Wolford shrugged. "We put poison into every bit of medication he had with him, remember?" "But I kept thinking... suppose he doesn't give her any? Suppose we'd had to slip an injection into her? Suppose he caught us at it?" Vahran ran the back of his hand across his forehead. "I don't know. I feel less like a murderer this way." "We're not murderers," Wolford said flatly. "We'll be debating that point for the rest of our lives, and you know it." Wolford shook his head. "You can't murder someone who died thirty-four years ago." Vahran wrinkled his forehead and followed the captain out of the building, into the sunshine.    They made the return trip to October #, # the next morning, arranging to arrive thirty minutes later than their previous departure. Together McCoy and Powers proceeded to carry the woman's body into the house to lay it on the bed in readiness for that younger Jeff's return. As the transport's outer slit irised shut behind McCoy and Powers, Vahran turned to his Captain. "Did you hear what McCoy said -- about the autopsy? Did you hear?" Vahran knew he sounded hysterical, but now that McCoy was out of the ship he had to speak. Wolford eyed him warily. "What are you talking about?" "Cardiac arrest; her heart just stopped beating. McCoy said it was just like that old-time sawbones had claimed -- that it must have been Fate, that there was no discernable reason for her to have died, but that she died anyway." Vahran broke off, tried to get a grip on himself. "So?" Wolford shrugged. "The poison short-circuits the autonomous nervous system for a few minutes, then disappears without a trace. Powers was thorough." "Idiot!" Vahran was suddenly indifferent to the other's rank. "Can't you see? There was no proximate cause of death. Oh, sure, her lungs were rotten with tuberculosis and she suffered from pernicious anemia, but she would have lived for at least a year -- barring our intervention. "But she did die. Before we ever got involved. On October #, #. Before we were even born..." Captain Wolford stopped speaking as he began to understand. "That's right! She always died on October #, #, before we were born. Because we always killed her." Vahran 's words were a cry of terror, and he saw that terror mirrored in Wolford's eyes, as together they stared into the abyss.  m Transported by one of Dworkin's Trumps to the verge of Chaos, I regarded an unsteady landscape beneath a sky split down the middle -- half the sky was of night, with shifting stars; half, a riot of writhing colors. It seemed to rotate about a point directly overhead. Beyond the chasm beside which I stood, something hovered on a distant mount of black. A city? A citadel? As I watched, I detected moving points of light passing along gauzy strands within the abyss. One such strand drifted near and a ghostly horseman moved along it, coming in my direction. He demanded my name and challenged me when I refused to supply it. We fought. He recognized my blade, Grayswandir, called me Corwin, and tried to back out. But it was too late. Both he and his horse burned as they were wounded and fell into the abyss. Another horseman followed -- human in appearance, mounted on a more mundane steed. He bore a crossbow with which he apparently intended to dispatch me. He too, however, recognized Grayswandir and changed his mind. He warned me away and departed. I scouted the area quickly after that, mounting to a greater prominence from which I confirmed a suspicion that the black road passed this far and on out across the abyss to the dark place. I attempted to contact Random then, but he was in the midst of a hellride. Finally,  was able to raise Gerard and he trumped me back to Amber. There, I learned that eight days had gone by, rather than the few hours I had personally passed. Brand, Gerard told me, had been asking for me. Benedict had returned from his journey wearing the arm I had brought back from Tir-na N'og'th. Random had done the surgery before continuing on in his search for his son Martin. I went to see Brand, who had apparently been brooding in his quarters despite making a good recovery from his injury. He berated me for not keeping him up to date on affairs. I confronted him with Martin's Trump and my suspicions concerning it. He admitted both the authorship of the card and the stabbing of Martin. He protested, however, that this was prior to his change of heartmind concerning the conspiracy to which he had been party. He then told me he had determined that Bleys was still living and was preparing for a new assault on Amber. He requested my cooperation in disposing of both Bleys and Fiona. I refused and he grew angry. He wanted particulars on Benedict's new arm, on my visit to Tir-na Nog'th and the identities of my companions when I had visited the primal Pattern. I let him know that Random had been with me when the damaged Trump had been located, just to keep him on edge, declined furnishing information on the rest and departed. I had a quick meal then and rode down to the place where Ganelon and my troops were camped. Ganelon contacted me en route, via a set of Trumps he had recently acquired, and informed me that something had come up and that he would tell me more when I arrived. It turned out that Benedict was with him. Benedict had finally been convinced of Dara's existence and had apparently accepted the possibility that she might be of his own blood. He wanted my recollections of her. After hearing them, he told me of Random's quest for his son, heard my account of my journey to the Courts of Chaos, expressed a desire to carry the battle to that place and borrowed the new Trump for purposes of personally reconnoitering it. He used his new hand perfectly. I told Benedict that the damage to the Pattern might be the major cause of our current problems, and of the possibility that it could be repaired. He agreed not to attack the Courts of Chaos without first conferring with me, in return for my not fooling with the Pattern without telling him. I was about to depart then, to return to the shadow Earth for the Jewel of Judgment, when Gerard contacted Benedict and had him bring him through on his Trump. Gerard then accused me of foul play back in Amber. I was the last person he knew of to see Brand, and Brand was now missing, his room a mess complete with bloodstains. I could not convince him of my innocence, and we fought. I was getting the worst of it when Ganelon stepped in and managed to beat Gerard unconscious. I departed on my journey immediately after that, entering Arden and following the trail which took me west, then north, about the foot of Kolvir. During the course of my ride, I heard a hunting horn followed by the haying of the stormhounds. It could only be my brother Julian. I fled, working some premature twistings of Shadow, but the pursuit continued. Only at the last possible moment did I realize that I was not the quarry. Julian was pursuing a manticora, which seemed to have been pursuing me. He and the hounds succeeded in dispatching it. After that, we talked. He was pleased to know that he was no longer under suspicion for Brand's stabbing, less pleased to know that Brand had survived. He admitted he would have done it if he had had the opportunity. He then told me a different version of events leading up to and following my return. He acknowledged the existence of the two groups -- himself, Caine and Eric opposing Bleys, Brand and Fiona -- in the struggle for the throne. He even took personal responsibility for my blinding, as the only means he had seen to save my life. He indicated that Brand was the major villain in the piece, however, telling me then of his powers -- powers which made him into something like a living Trump. I told him of recent developments and of my search for the Jewel of Judgment. He opined that Brand could not summon such an item from Shadow, but would have to go after it personally. He sent me on my way then with something I'd never had from him before: his good wishes. I hellrode to the shadow Earth and visited my old home there. It was being repaired for sale, and the compost heap in which I had hidden the Jewel was gone. I rode into town, to Bill Roth's place. He wanted the story I had promised him and I still hadn't the time to tell it. He phoned the contractor -- Ed Wellen, a man I had once known -- and learned that Ed had hauled the heap away himself, for personal use. We headed for Ed's place in a hurry then, because we also learned that a redheaded artist had been painting in that same field that day, a man who had also looked at the house earlier, a man who might have been Brand. I risked contact with Gerard, who seemed somewhat placated, and persuaded him to see that the Patterns in Amber and Rebma were kept guarded from Brand. Bill and I got to Ed's place quickly, began looking, soon realized that the Jewel was gone. Gerard got in contact about that time, saying that Brand had indeed shown up in the chamber of the Pattern, but seeing that it was guarded had departed. Immediately after this, Fiona got in touch with me. I brought her through and she guided me through places of Shadow back toward the primal Pattern. On the way, she told me more about the accident. It had been Brand, not Bleys, who had shot out my tires. It was Bleys who had called the cops. I had dragged myself out of the wreck. I had been getting shock treatments in Porter, where Brand had had me committed, not for purposes of restoring my memories, but rather to destroy memories which had begun returning on their own. After I escaped, Brand had then tried to kill me because he didn't want me returning. When we reached the place of the primal Pattern, Brand was already into it, the Jewel about his neck for purposes of attunement. I pursued him through the Pattern. Fighting under a handicap, because I could only let his blood fall in the dark area, so as not to damage the Pattern further, I used the Jewel he was wearing to summon a vortex like that which had destroyed Random's horse I ago. When he had me at a disadvantage and was about to press it, Brand's blade was struck by lightning and he realized what I had unleashed above him. Entering the black area, he exercised his powers to save himself just as the vortex descended. I had no choice then but to complete the Pattern myself in order to get out. There is no turning back. Late afternoon on a mountain: the westering sun shone full on the rocks to my left, tailored long shadows for those to the right; it filtered through the foliage about my tomb; it countered to some extent the chill winds of Kolvir. I released Random's hand and turned to regard the man who sat on the bench before the mausoleum. It was the face of the youth on the pierced Trump, lines now drawn above the mouth, brow heavier, a general wariness in eye movement and set of jaw which had not been apparent on the card. So I knew it before Random said, "This is my son Martin." Martin rose as I approached him, clasped my hand, said, "Uncle Corwin." His expression changed but slightly as he said it. He scrutinized me. He was several inches taller than Random, but of the same light build. His chin and cheekbones had the same general cut to them, his hair was of a similar texture. I smiled. "You have been away a long while," I said. "So was I." He nodded. "But I have never really been in Amber proper," he said. "I grew, up in Rebma -- and other places." I "Then let me welcome youJ nephew. You come at an interesting time. Random must have told you about it." "Yes," he said. "That is why I asked to meet you here, rather than there." I glanced at Random. "The last uncle he met was Brand," Random said, "and under very nasty circumstances. Do you blame him?" "Hardly. I ran into him myself a bit earlier. Can't say it was the most rewarding encounter." "Ran into him?" said Random. "You've lost me." "He has left Amber and he has the Jewel of Judgment with him. If I had known earlier what I know now, he would still be in the tower. He is our man, and he is very dangerous." Random nodded. "I know," he said. "Martin confirmed all our suspicions on the stabbing -- and it was Brand. But what is this about the Jewel?" "He beat me to the place where I had left it on the shadow Earth. He has to walk the Pattern with it and project himself through it, though, to attune it to his use. I just stopped him from doing that on the primal Pattern in the real Amber. He escaped, however. I was just over the hiJ'l with Gerard, sending a squad of guards through to Fiona in that place, to prevent his returning and trying again. Our own Pattern and that in Rebma are also under guard because of him." "Why does he want so badly to attune it? So he can raise a few storms? Hell, he could take a walk in Shadow and make all the weather he wants." "A person attuned to the Jewel could use it to erase the Pattern." "Oh? What happens then?" "The world as we know it comes to an end." "Oh," Random said again. Then, "How the hell do you know?" "It is a long story and I haven't the time, but I had it from Dworkin and I believe that much of what he said is true." "He's still around?" "Later," I said. "Okay. But Brand would have to be mad to do something like that." I nodded. "I believe he thinks he could then cast a new Pattern, redesign the universe with himself as chief executive." "Could this be done?" "Theoretically, perhaps. But even Dworkin has certain doubts that the feat could be repeated effectively now. The combination of factors was unique. -- Yes, I believe Brand is somewhat mad. Looking back over the years, recalling his personality changes, his cycles of moods, it seems there was something of a schizoid pattern there. I do not know whether the deal he made with the enemy pushed him over the edge or not. It does not really matter. I wish he were back in his tower. I wish Gerard were a worse physician." "Do you know who stabbed him?" "Fiona. You can get the story from her, though." H? leaned against my epitaph and shook his head. "Brand," he said. "Damn him. Any one of us might have killed him on a number of occasions -- in the old days. Just when he would get you mad enough, though, he would change. After awhile, you would get to thinking he wasn't such a bad guy after all. Too bad he didn't push one of us just a little harder at the wrong time..." "Then I take it he is now fair game?" said Martin. I looked at him. The muscles in his jaws had tightened and his eyes were narrowed. For a moment, all of our faces fled across his, like a riffling of the family cards. All of our egoism, hatred, envy, pride and abuse seemed to flow by in that instant -- and he had not even set foot in Amber yet. Something snapped inside me and I reached out and seized him by the shoulders. "You have good reason to hate him," I said, "and the answer to your question is 'yes'. The hunting season is open. I see no way to deal with him other than to destroy him. I hated him myself for so long as he remained an abstraction. But -- now -- it is different. Yes, he must be killed. But do not let that hatred be your baptism into our company. There has been too much of it among us. I look at your face -- I don't know... I am sorry, Martin. Too much is going on right now. You are young. I have seen more things. Some of them bother me -- differently. That's all." I released my grip and stepped back. "Tell me about yourself," I said. "I was afraid of Amber for a long while," he began, "and I guess that I still am. Ever since he attacked me, I have been wondering whether Brand might catch up with me again. I have been looking over my shoulder for years. I have been afraid of all of you, I suppose. I knew most of you as pictures on cards -- with bad reputations attached. I told Random -- Dad -- that I did not want to meet you all at once, and he suggested that I see you first. Neither of us realiz.ed at the time that you would be particularly interested in certain things that I know. After I mentioned them though, Dad said I had to see you as soon as possible. He has been telling me all about what has been going on and -- you see, I know something about it." "I had a feeling that you might -- when a certain name cropped up not too long ago." "The Tecys?" Random said. "The same." "It is difficult, deciding where to start... Martin said. "I know that you grew up in Rebma, walked the Pattern and then used your power over Shadow to visit Benedict in Avalon," I said. "Benedict told you more about Amber and Shadow, taught you the use of the Trumps, coached you in weaponry. Later, you departed to walk in Shadow by yourself. And I know what Brand did to you. That is the sum of my knowledge." He nodded, stared off into the west. "After I left Benedict's, I traveled for years in Shadow," he said. "Those were the happiest times I have known. Adventure, excitement, new things to see, to do... In the back of my mind, I always had it that one day when I was smarter and tougher -- more experienced -- I would journey to Amber and meet my other relatives. Then Brand caught up with me. I was camped on a little hillside, just resting from a long ride and taking my lunch, on my way to visit my friends the Tecys. I had known them, through Benedict, for some lime. Brand contacted me then. I had reached Benedict with his Trump, when he was teaching me how to use them, and other times when I had traveled. He had even transported me through occasionally, so I knew what it felt like, knew what it was all about. This lelt the same way, and for a moment I thought that somehow it was Benedict calling me. But no. It was Brand -- I recognized him from his picture in the deck. He was standing in the midst of what seemed to be the Pattern. I was curious. I did not know how he had reached me. So far as I knew, there was no frump for me. He talked for a minute -- I forget what he said -- and when everything was firm and clear, he -- he stabbed me. I pushed him and pulled away then. He held the contact somehow. It was hard for me to brealk it -- and when I did, he tried to reach me again. But I was able to block him. Benedict had taught me that. He tried again, several times, but I kept blocking, finally, he stopped. I was near to the Tecys. I managed to get onto my horse and make it to their place. I thought I was going to die, because I had never been hurt that badly before. But after a time, I began to recover. Then I grew afraid once again, afraid that Brand would find me and finish what he had begun." "Why didn't you contact Benedict," I asked him, "and tell him what had happened, tell him of your fears?" "I thought of that," he said, "and I also thought of the possibility that Brand believed he had succeeded, that I was indeed dead. I did not know what sort of power struggle was going on in Amber, but I decided that the attempt on my life was probably part of such a thing. Benedict had told me enough about the family that this was one of the first things to come to mind. So I decided that perhaps it would be better to remain dead. I left the Tecys before I was completely recovered, and rode off to lose myself in Shadow. "I happened upon a strange thing then," he continued, "a thing I had never before encountered, but which now seemed virtually omnipresent: In nearly all of the shadows through which I passed, there was a peculiar black road existing in some form or other. I did not understand it, but since it was the only thing I had come across which seemed to traverse Shadow itself, my curiosity was aroused. I resolved to follow it and learn more about it. It was dangerous. I learned very quickly not to tread the thing. Strange shapes seemed to travel it at night. Natural creatures which ventured upon it sickened and died. So I was careful. I went no nearer than was necessary to keep it in sight. I followed it through many places. I quickly learned that everywhere it ran there was death, desolation or trouble nearby. I did not know what to make of it. "I was still weak from my wound," he went on, "and I made the mistake of pressing myself, of riding too far, too fast, in a day's time. That evening, I fell ill and I lay shivering in my blanket through the night and much of the next day. I was into and out of delirium during this time, so I do not know exactly when she appeared. She seemed like part of my dream much of the while. A young girl. Pretty. She took care of me while I recovered. Her name was Dara. We talked interminably. It was very pleasant. Having someone to talk with like that...I must have told her my whole life story. Then she told me something of herself. She was not a native of the area in which I had collapsed. She said that she had traveled there through Shadow. She could not yet walk through it as we do, though she felt she could learn to do this, as she claimed descent from the House of Amber through Benedict. In fact, she wanted very badly to learn how it was done. Her means of travel then was the black road itself. She was immune to its noxious effects, she said, because she was also related to the dwellers at its farther end, in the Courts of Chaos. She wanted to learn our ways though, so I did my best to instruct her in those things that I did know. I told her of the Pattern, even sketched it for her. I showed her my Trumps -- Benedict had given me a deck -- to show her the appearance of her other relatives. She was particularly interested in yours." "I begin to understand," I said. "Go on." "She told me that Amber, in the fullness of its corruption and presumption, had upset a kind of metaphysical balance between itself and the Courts of Chaos. Her people now had the job of redressing the matter by laying waste to Amber. Their own place is not a shadow of Amber, but a solid entity in its own right. In the meantime, all of the intervening shadows are suffering because of the black road. My knowledge of Amber being what it was, I could only listen. At first, I accepted everything that she said. Brand, to me, certainly fit her description of evil in Amber. But when I mentioned him, she said no. He was some sort of hero back where she hied from. She was uncertain as to the particulars, but it did not trouble her all that much. It was then that I realized how oversure she seemed about everything -- there was a ring of the fanatic when she talked. Almost to defend Amber. I thought of Llewella and of Benedict -- and of Gerard, whom I had met a few times. She was eager to learn of Benedict, I discovered. That proved the soft spot in her armor. Here I could speak with some knowledge, the good things I had to say. So, I do not know what the ultimate effect of all this talk was, except that she seemed somewhat less sure of herself near the end... "The end?" I said. "What do you mean? How long was she with you?" "Almost a week," he replied. "She had said she would take care of me until I was recovered, and she did. Actually, she remained several days longer. She said that was just to be sure, but I think it was really that she wanted to continue our conversations. Finally though, she said that she had to be moving on. I asked her to stay with me, but she said no. I offered to go with her, but she said no to that, too. She must have realized that I planned to follow her then, because she slipped away during the night. I could not ride the black road, and I had no idea what shadow she would travel to next on her way to Amber. When I awoke in the morning and realized she had gone, I thought for a time of visiting Amber myself. But I was still afraid. Perhaps some of the things she had said had reinforced my own fears. Whatever, I decided to remain in Shadow. And so I traveled on, seeing things, trying to learn things -- until Random found me and told me he wanted me to come home. He brought me here first though, to meet you, because he wanted you to hear my story before any of the others. He said that you knew Dara, that you wanted to learn more about her. I hope that I have helped." "Yes," I said. "Thank you." "I understand that she did finally walk the Pattern." "Yes, she succeeded in that." "And afterwards delcared herself an enemy of Amber." "That, too." "I hope," he said, "that she comes to no harm by all this. She was kind to me." "She seems quite able to take care of herself," I said. "But... Yes, she is a likable girl. I cannot promise you anything concerning her safety, because I still know so little about her, so little of her part in everything that is going on. Yet, what you have told me has been helpful. It makes her someone I would still like to grant doubt's benefit, as far as I can." He smiled. "Iam glad to hear that." I shrugged. "What are you going to do now?" I asked. "I am taking him to meet Vialle," Ramon said, "and then the others, as time and opportunity permit. Unless, of course, something new has developed and you need me now." "There have been new developments," I said, "but I do not really need you' now. I had better bring you up to date, though. I still have a little time." As I filled Random in on events since his departure, I thought about Martin. He was still an unknown quantity so far as I was concerned. His story might be perfectly true. In fact, I felt that it was. On the other hand, I had a feeling that it was not complete, that he was intentionally leaving something out. Maybe something harmless. Then again, maybe not. He had no real reason to love us. Quite the contrary. And Random could be bringing home a Trojan Horse. Probably though, it was nothing like that. It is just that I never trust anyone if there is an alternative available. Still, nothing that I was telling Random could really be used against us, and I strongly doubted that Martin could do us much damage if that was his intention. No, more likely he was being as cagey as the rest of us, and for pretty much the same reasons: fear and self-preservation. On a sudden inspiration, I asked him, "Did you ever run into Dara again after that?" He flushed. "No," he said, too quickly. "Just that time. That's all." "I see," I said, and Random was too good a poker player not to have noticed; so I had just bought us a piece of instant insurance at the small price of putting a father on guard against his long-lost son. I quickly shifted our talk back to Brand. It was while we were comparing notes on psychopathology that I felt the tiny tingle and the sense of presence which heralds a Trump contact. I raised my hand and turned aside. In a moment the contact was clear and Ganelon and I regarded one another. "Corwin," he said, "I decided it was time to check. By now, you have the Jewel, Brand has the Jewel or you are both still looking. Which one is it?" "Brand has the Jewel," I said. "More's the pity," he said. "Tell me about it." So I did. "Then Gerard had the story right," he said. "He's already told you all this?" "Not in such detail," Ganelon replied, "and I wanted to be sure I was getting it straight. I just finished speaking with him." He glanced upward. "It would seem you had best be moving then, if my memories of moonrise serve me right." I nodded. "Yes, I will be heading for the stairway shortly. It is not all that far from here." "Good. Now here is what you must be ready to do -- " "I know what I have to do," I said. "I have to get up to Tir-na Nog'th before Brand does and block his way to the Pattern. Failing that, I have to chase him through it again." "That is not the way to go about it," he said. "You have a better idea?" "Yes, I do. You have your Trumps with you?" "Yes." "Good. First, you would not be able to get up there in time to block his way to the Pattern -- " "Why not?" "You have to make the ascension, then you have to walk to the palace and make your way down to the Pattern. That takes time, even in Tir-na Nog'th -- especially in Tir-na Nog'th, where time tends to play tricks anyway. For all you know, you may have a hidden death-wish slowing you down. I don't know. Whatever the case, he would have commenced walking the Pattern by the time you arrived. It may well be that he would be too far into it for you to reach him this time." "He will probably be tired. That should slow him some." "No. Put yourself in his place. If you were Brand, wouldn't you have headed for some shadow where the time-flow was different? Instead of an afternoon, he could well have taken several days to rest up for this evening's ordeal. It is safest to assume that he will be in good shape." "You are right," I said. "I can't count on it. Okay. An alternative I had entertained but would rather not try if it could be avoided, would be to kill him at a distance. Take along a crossbow or one of our rifles and simply shoot him in the midst of the Pattern. The thing that bothers me about it is the effect of our blood on the Pattern. It may be that it is only the primal Pattern that suffers from it, but I don't know." "That's right. You do not know," he said. "Also, I would not want you to rely on normal weapons up there. That is a peculiar place. You said yourself it is like a strange piece of Shadow drifting in the sky. While you figured how to make a rifle fire in Amber, the same rules may not apply up there." "It is a risk," I acknowledged. "As for the crossbow -- Supposing a sudden gust of wind deflected the bolt each time you shot one?" "I am afraid I do not follw you." "The Jewel. He walkedit partway through the primal Pattern, and he has had some time to experiment with it since then. Do you think it possible that he is partly attuned to it now?" "I do not know. I am not at all that sure how the process works." "I just wanted to point out that if it does work that way, he may be able to use it to defend himself. The Jewel may even have other properties you are not aware of. So what I am saying is that I would not want you to count on being able to kill him at a distance. And I would not even want you to rely on being able to pull the trick you did with the Jewel again -- not if he may have gained some measure of control over it." "You do make things look a little bleaker than I had them." "But possibly more realistic," he said. "Conceded. Go on. You said you had a plan." "That is correct. My thinking is that Brand must not be allowed to reach the Pattern at all, that once he sets foot upon it the probability of disaster goes way up." "And you do not think I can get there in time to block him?" "Not if he can really transport himself around almost instantaneously while you have to take a long walk. My bet is that he is just waiting for moonrise, and as soon as the city takes form he will be inside, right next to the Pattern." "I see the point, but not the answer." "The answer is that you are not going to set foot in Tir-na Nog'th tonight. " "Hold on a minute!" "Hold on, hell! You imported a master strategist, you'd better listen to what he has to say." "Okay, I am listening." "You have agreed that you probably cannot reach the place in time. But someone else can." "Who and how?" "All right. I have been in touch with Benedict. He has returned. At this moment, he is in Amber, down in the chamber of the Pattern. By now, he should have finished walking it and be standing there at its center, waiting. You proceed to the foot of the stair to the sky city. There you await the rising of the moon. As soon as Tir-na Nog'th takes form, you will contact Benedict via his Trump. You tell him that all is ready, and he will use the power of the Pattern in Amber to transport himself to the place of the Pattern in Tir-na Nog'th. No matter how fast Brand travels, he cannot gain much on that." "I see the advantages," I said. "That is the fastest way to get a man up there and Benedict is certainly a good man. He should have no trouble dealing with Brand." "Do you really think Brand will make no other preparations?" Ganelon said. "From everything I've heard about the man, he's smart even if he is daft. He just may anticipate something like this." "Possibly. Any idea what he might do?" He made a sweeping gesture with one hand, slapped his neck and smiled. "A bug," he said. "Pardon me. Pesky little things." "You still think -- " "I think you had better remain in contact with Benedict the entire time he is up there, that is what I think. If Brand gets the upper hand, you may need to pull Benedict back immediately to save his life." "Of course. But then -- " "But then we would have lost a round. Admitted. But not the game. Even with the Jewel fully attuned, he would have to get to the primal Pattern to do his real damage with it -- and you have that under guard." "Yes," I said. "You seem to have everything figured. You surprised me, moving so fast." "I've had a lot of time on my hands recently, which can be a bad thing unless you use it for thinking. So I did. What I think now is that you had best move fast. The day isn't getting any longer." "Agreed," I said. "Thanks for the good counsel." "Save your thanks till we see what comes of it," he said, and then he broke the contact. "That one sounded important," Random said. "What's up?" "Appropriate question," I answered, "but I am all out of time now. You will have to wait till morning for the story." "Is there anything I can do to help?" "As a matter of fact," I said, "yes, if you'll either ride double or go back to Amber on a Trump. I need Star." "Sure," Random said. "No trouble. Is that all?" "Yes. Haste is all." We moved toward the horses. I patted Star a few times and then mounted. "We'll see you in Amber," Random said. "Good luck." "In Amber," I said. "Thanks." I turned and headed toward the place of the stairway, treading my tomb's lengthening shadow eastward. On the highest ridge of Kolvir there is a formation which resembles three steps. I sat on the lowest of these and waited for more to occur above me. It takes night and moonlight to do this, so half of the requirements had been met. There were clouds to the west and northeast. I was leary of those clouds. If they massed sufficiently # Eighth Ave... New York. N. Y. # #-#  to block all moonlight, Tir-na Nog'th faded back to nothingness. This was one reason why it was always advisable to have a backup man on the ground, to trump you to safety should the city vanish about you. The sky overhead was clear, however, and filled with familiar stars. When the moon came up and its light fell upon the stone on which I rested, the stairway in the sky would come into being, sweeping upward to a great height, taking its way to Tir-na Nog'th, the image of Amber that rode the night's middle air. I was weary. Too much had occurred in too brief a time. Suddenly to be at rest, to remove my boots and rub my feet, to lean back and rest my head, even against stone, was a luxury, a pure animal pleasure. I drew my cloak together before me against the growing chill. A hot bath, a full meal, a bed would be very good things. But these assumed an almost mythic quality from that vantage. It was more than sufficient simply to rest as I was, to let my thoughts move more slowly, drifting, spectator-like, back over the day's happenings. So much... But now, at least, I had some answers to some of my questions. Not all of them, certainly. But enough to slake my mind's thirst for the moment... I now had some idea as to what had been going on during my absence, a better understanding of what was happening now, a knowledge of some of the things that had to be done, of what  had to do... And I felt, somehow, that I knew more than I realized, consciously, that I already possessed pieces that would fit the growing picture before me, if I were only to jiggle them, flip them, rotate them properly. The pace of recent events, particularly today's, had not allowed me a moment's reflection. Now, though, some of the pieces seemed to be turning at odd angles... I was distracted by a stirring above my shoulder, a tiny effect of brightening in the higher air. Turning, then standing, I regarded the horizon. A preliminary glow had occurred out over the sea at the point where the moon would ascend. As I watched, a minute arc of light came into view. The clouds had shifted slightly, also, though not enough to cause concern. I glanced up then, but the overhead phenomenon had not yet begun. I withdrew my Trumps, however, riffled them and cut out Benedict's. Lethargy forgotten, I stared, watching the moon expand above the water, casting a trail of light over the waves. A faint form was suddenly hovering on the threshold of visibility high overhead. As the light grew, a spark limned it here and there. The first lines, faint as spiderwebbing, appeared above the rock. I studied Benedict's card, I reached for contact... His cold image came alive. I saw him in the chamber of the Pattern, standing at the design's center. A lighted lantern glowed beside his left foot. He became aware of my presence. "Corwin," he said, "is it time?" "Not quite," I told him. "The moon is rising. The city is just beginning to take form. So it will only be a little longer. I wanted to be certain you were ready." "I am ready," he said. "It is good that you came back when you did. Did you learn anything of interest?" "Ganelon called me back," he said, "as soon as he learned what had happened. His plan seemed a good one, which is why I am here. As for the Courts of Chaos, yes. I believe I have learned a few things -- " "A moment," I said. The moonbeam strands had assumed a more tangible appearance. The city overhead was now clear in outline. The stairway was visible in its entirety, though fainter in some places than in others. I stretched forth my hand, above the second stair, the third... Cool, soft, I encountered the fourth stair. It seemed to give somewhat beneath my push, however. "Almost," I said to Benedict. "I am going to try the stair. Be ready." He nodded. I mounted the stone stairs, one, two, three. I raised my foot then and lowered it upon the fourth, ghostly one. It yielded gently to my weight. I was afraid to raise my other foot, so I waited, watching the moon. I breathed the cool air as the brightness increased, as the path in the waters widened. Glancing upward, I saw Tir-na Nog'th lose something of its transparency. The stars behind it grew dimmer. As this occurred, the stair became firmer beneath my foot. All resiliency went out of it. I felt that it might bear my full weight. Casting my eyes along its length, I now saw it in its entirety, here translucent, there transparent, sparkling, but continuous all the way up to the silent city that drifted above the sea. I raised my other foot and stood on the fourth stair. If I'd the mind, a few more steps would send me along that celestial escalator into the place of dreams made real, walking neuroses and dubious prophecy, into a moonlit city of ambiguous wishfulfillment, twisted time and pallid beauty. I stepped back down and glanced at the moon, now balanced on the world's wet rim. I regarded Benedict's Trump in its silvery glow. "The stair is solid, the moon is up," I said. "All right. I am going." I watched him there at the center of the Pattern. He raised the lantern in his left hand and for a moment stood unmoving. An instant later he was gone, and so was the Pattern. Another instant, and he stood within a similar chamber, this time outside the Pattern, next to the point where it begins. He raised the lantern high and looked all around the room. He was alone. He turned, walked to the wall, moved along it, set the lantern there. His shadow stretched toward the Pattern, changed shape as he turned on his heel, moved back to his first position. This Pattern, I noted, glowed with a paler light than the one in Amber -- silvery white, without the hint of blue with which I was familiar. Its configuration was the same, but the ghost city played strange tricks with perspective. There were distortions -- narrowings, widenings -- which seemed to shift for no particular reason across its surface, as though I viewed the entire tableau through an irregular lens rather than Benedict's Trump. I retreated down the stair, settled once again on the lowest step. I continued to observe. Benedict loosened his blade in its scabbard. "You know about the possible effect of blood on the Pattern?" I asked. "Yes. Ganelon told me." "Did you ever suspect -- any of this?" "I never trusted Brand," he told me. "What of your journey to the Courts of Chaos? What did you learn?" "Later, Corwin. He could come any time now." "I hope no distracting visions show up," I said, recalling my own journey to Tir-na Nog'th and his own part in my final adventure there. He shrugged. "One gives them power by paying them heed. My attention is reserved for one matter tonight." He turned through a full circle, regarding every part of the chamber, halted when he had finished. "I wonder if he knows you are there?" I said. "Perhaps. It does not matter." I nodded. If Brand did not show up, we had gained a day. The guards would ward the other Patterns, Fiona would have a chance to demonstrate her own skill in matters arcane by locating Brand for us. We would then pursue him. She and Bleys had been able to stop him once before. Could she do it alone now? Or would we have to find Bleys and try to convince him to help? Had Brand found Bleys? What the hell did Brand want that kind of power for anyhow? A desire for the throne I could understand. Yet... The man was mad, I leave it at that. Too bad, but that's the way it was. Heredity or environment? I wondered wryly. We were all of us, to some degree, mad after his fashion. To be honest, it had to be a form of madness, to have so much and to strive so bitterly for just a little more, for a bit of an edge over the others. He carried this tendency to its extreme, that is all. He was a caricature of this mania in all of us. In this sense, did it really matter which of us was the traitor? Yes, it did. He was the one who had acted. Mad or not, he had gone too far. He had done things Eric, Julian and I would not have done. Bleys and Fiona had finally backed away from his thickening plot. Gerard and Benedict were a notch above the rest of us -- moral, mature, whatever -- for they had exempted themselves from the zero-sum power game. Random had changed, quite a bit, in recent years. Could it be that the children of the unicorn took ages in which to mature, that it was slowly happening to the rest of us but had somehow passed Brand by? Or could it be that by his actions Brand was causing it in the rest of us? Like most such questions, the benefit of these was in the asking, not the answering. We were enough like Brand that I knew a particular species of fear nothing else could so provoke. But yes, it did matter. Whatever the reason, he was the one who had acted. The moon was higher now, its vision superimposed upon my inward viewing of the chamber of the Pattern. The clouds continued to shift, to boil nearer the moon. I thought of advising Benedict, but it would serve no other end than distraction. Above me, Tir-na Nog'th rode like some supernatural ark upon the seas of night. And suddenly Brand was there. Reflexively, my hand went to Grayswandir's hilt, despite the fact that a part of me realized from the very first that he stood across the Pattern from Benedict in a dark chamber high in the sky. My hand fell again. Benedict had become aware of the intruding presence immediately, and he turned to face him. He made no move toward his weapon, but simply stared across the Pattern at our brother. My earliest fear had been that Brand would contrive to arrive directly behind Benedict and stab him in the back. I would not have tried that though, because even in death Benedict's reflexes might have been sufficient to dispatch his assailant. Apparently, Brand wasn't that crazy either. Brand smiled. "Benedict," he said. "Fancy... You... Here." The Jewel of Judgment hung fiery upon his breast. "Brand," Benedict said, "don't try it." Still smiling, Brand unclasped his swordbelt and let his weapon fall to the floor. When the echoes died, he said, "I am not a fool, Benedict. The man hasn't been born who can go up against you with a blade." "I don't need the blade, Brand." Brand began walking, slowly, about the edge of the Pattern. "Yet you wear it as a servant of the throne, when you could have been king." "That has never been high on my list of ambitions." "That is right." He paused, only partway about the Pattern. "Loyal, self-effacing. You have not changed at all. Pity Dad conditioned you so well. You could have gone so much further." "I have everything that I want," Benedict said. "...To have been stifled, cut off, so early." "You cannot talk your way past me either. Brand. Do not make me hurt you." The smile still on his face. Brand began moving again, slowly. What was it he was trying to do? I could not figure his strategy. "You know I can do certain things the others cannot," Brand said. "If there is anything at all that you want and think that you cannot have, now is your chance to name it and learn how wrong you were. I have learned things you would scarcely believe." Benedict smiled one of his rare smiles. "You have chosen the wrong line," he said. "I can walk to anything that I want." "Shadows!" Brand snorted, halting again. "Any of the others can clutch a phantom! I am talking of reality! Amber! Power! Chaos! Not daydreams made solid! Not second-best!" "If I had wanted more than I have, I knew what to do. I did not do it." Brand laughed, began walking again. He had come a quarter of the way about the Pattern's periphery. The Jewel burned more brightly. His voice rang. "You are a fool, to wear your not call out to you to possess them and if power holds no attraction, what of knowledge? I learned the last of Dworkin's lore. I have gone on since then and paid dark prices for greater insight into the workings of the universe. This you could have without that pricetag." "There would be a price," Benedict said, "one that I will not pay." Brand shook his head and tossed his hair. The image of the Pattern wavered for a moment then, as a wisp of cloud crossed the moon. Tir-na Nog'th faded slightly, returned to normal focus. "You mean it, you really mean it," Brand said, apparently not aware of the moment of fading. "I shan't test you further then. I had to try." He halted again, staring. "You are too good a man to waste yourself on that mess in Amber, defending something that is obviously falling apart. I am going to win, Benedict. I am going to erase Amber and build it anew. I am going to rub out the old Pattern and draw my own. You can be with me. I want you on my side. I am going to raise up a perfect world, one with more direct access to and from Shadow. I am going to merge Amber with the Courts of Chaos. I am going to extend this realm directly through all of Shadow. You will command our legions, the mightiest military forces ever assembled. You -- " "If your new world would be as perfect as you say, Brand, there would be no need for legions. If, on the other hand, it is to reflect the mind of its creator, then I see it as something less than an improvement over the present state of affairs. Thank you for your offer, but I hold with the Amber which already exists." "You are a fool, Benedict. A well-meaning one, but a fool nevertheless." He began to move again, casually. He was within forty feet of Benedict. Thirty... He kept moving. He finally paused about twenty feet away, hooked his thumbs behind his belt and simply stared. Benedict met his gaze. I checked the clouds again. A long mass of them continued a moonward slide. I could pull Benedict out at any time, though. It was hardly worth disturbing him at the moment. "Why don't you come and cut me down then?" Brand finally said. "Unarmed as I am, it should not be difficult. The fact that the same blood flows in both our veins makes no difference, does it? What are you waiting for?" "I already told you that I do not wish to hurt you," Benedict said. "Yet you stand ready to, if I attempt to pass your way." Benedict simply nodded. "Admit that you fear me, Benedict. All of you are afraid of me. Even when I approach you weaponless like this, something must be twisting in your guts. You see my confidence and you do not understand it. You must be afraid." Benedict did not reply. "...And you fear my blood on your hands," Brand went on, "you fear my death-curse." "Did you fear Martin's blood on your own?" Benedict asked. "That bastard puppy!" Brand said. "He was not truly one of us. He was only a tool." "Brand, I have no desire to kill a brother. Give me that trinket you wear about your neck and come back with me now to Amber. It is not too late to set matters right." Brand threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, nobly spoken! Nobly spoken, Benedict! Like a true Lord of the realm! You would shame me with your excessive virtue! And what is the sticking point of this all?" He reached down and stroked the Jewel of Judgment. "This?" He laughed again and strode forward. "This bauble? Would its surrender buy us peace, amity, order? Would it ransom my life?" He halted once more, ten feet from Benedict now. He raised the Jewel between his fingers and looked down at it. "Do you realize the full powers of this thing?" he asked. "Enough of th -- " Benedict began, and his voice cracked in his throat. Brand hurriedly took another step forward. The Jewel was bright before him. Benedict's hand had begun to move toward his blade, but it did not reach it. He stood stiffly now, as if suddenly transformed into a statue. Then I began to understand, but by then it was too late. Nothing that Brand had been saying had really mattered. It had simply been a running line of patter, a distraction thrown up before him while he sought cautiously after the proper range. He was indeed partly attuned to the Jewel, and the limited control this gave him was still sufficient to enable him to produce effects with it, effects which I was unaware it could produce, but of which he had known all along. Brand had carefully contrived his arrival a good distance from Benedict, tried the Jewel, moved a little nearer, tried again, kept up this movement, this testing, until he found the point where it could effect Benedict's nervous system. "Benedict," I said, "you had better come to me now," and I exerted my will, but he did not budge nor did he reply. His Trump was still functioning, I felt his presence, I observed events because of it, but I could not reach him. The Jewel was obviously affecting more than his motor system. I looked to the clouds again. They were still growing, they were reaching for the moon. It seemed they might come across it soon. If I could not pull Benedict out when it happened, he would fall to the sea as soon as the light was fully blocked, the city disrupted. Brand! If he became aware of it, he might be able to use the Jewel to dissipate the clouds. But to do that, he would probably have to release Benedict. I did not think he would do it. Still... The clouds seemed to be slowing now. This entire line of reasoning could become unnecessary. I thumbed out Brand's Trump though, and set it aside. "Benedict, Benedict," said Brand, smiling, "of what use is the finest swordsman alive if he cannot move to take up his blade? I told you that you were a fool. Did you slaughter? You should have trusted the fear you must have felt. You should have known that I would not enter this place helpless. I meant it when I said that I was going to win. You were a good choice though, because you are the best. I really wish that you had accepted my offer. But it is not that important now. I cannot be stopped. None of the others has a chance, and with you gone things are going to be much easier." He reached beneath his cloak and produced a dagger. "Bring me through, Benedict!" I cried, but it was no use. There was no response, nothing strong enough to trump me up there. I seized Brand's Trump. I recalled my Trump battle with Eric. If I could hit Brand through his Trump, I might be able to break his concentration sufficiently for Benedict to come free. I turned all of my faculties upon the card, preparing for a massive mental assault. But nothing. The way was frozen and dark. It had to be that his concentration on the task at hand, his mental involvement with the Jewel, was so complete that I simply could not reach him. I was blocked at every turn. Suddenly, the stairway grew paler above me and I cast a quick glance at the moon. A limb of cumulus now covered a portion of its face. Damn! I returned my attention to Benedict's Trump. It seemed slow, but I did recover the contact, indicating that somewhere, inside it all, Benedict was still conscious. Brand had moved a pace nearer and was still taunting him. The Jewel on its heavy chain burned with the light of its use. They stood perhaps three paces apart now. Brand toyed with the dagger. "...Yes, Benedict," he was saying, "you probably would have preferred to die in battle. On the other hand, you might look upon this as a kind of honor -- a signal honor. In a way, your death will allow the birth of a new order..." For a moment, the Pattern faded behind them. I could not tear my eyes from the scene to examine the moon, however. There, within the shadows and the flickering light, his back to the Pattern, Brand did not seem to notice. He took another step forward. "But enough of this," he said. "There are things to be done, and the night grows no younger." He stepped nearer and lowered the blade. "Good night, sweet Prince," he said, and he moved to close with him. At that instant, Benedict's strange mechanical right arm, torn from this place of shadow and silver and moonlight, moved with the speed of a striking snake. Thing of glinting, metallic planes like the facets of a gem, wrist and elbow wondrous weaves of silver cable, pinned with flecks of fire, stylized, skeletal, a Swiss toy, a mechanical insect, functional, deadly, beautiful in its way, it shot forward with a speed that I could not follow, while the rest of his body remained steady, a statue. The mechanical fingers caught the Jewel's chain about Brand's neck. Immediately, the arm moved upward, raising Brand high above the floor. Brand dropped the dagger and clutched at his throat with both hands. Behind him, the Pattern faded once again. It returned with a much paler glow. Brand's face in the lantern light was a ghastly, twisted apparition. Benedict remained frozen, holding him on high, unmoving, a human gallows. The Pattern grew dimmer. Above me, the steps began to recede. The moon was half-occluded. Writhing, Brand raised his arms above his head, catching at the chain on either side of the metal hand that held it. He was strong, as all of us are. I saw his muscles bunch and harden. By then, his face was dark and his neck a mass of straining cables. He bit his lip; the blood ran into his beard as he drew upon the chain. With a sharp snap followed by a rattling, the chain parted and Brand fell to the floor gasping. He rolled over once, clutching at his throat with both hands. Slowly, very slowly, Benedict lowered his strange arm. He still held the chain and the Jewel. He flexed his other arm. He sighed deeply. The Pattern grew even dimmer. Above me, Tir-na Nog'th becatpe transparent. The moon was almost gone. "Benedict!" I cried. "Can you hear me?" "Yes," he said, very softly, and he began to sink through the floor. "The city is fading! You've got to come to me right away!" I extended my hand. "Brand..." he said, turning. But Brand was sinking also, and I saw that Benedict could not reach him. I clasped Benedict's left hand and jerked. Both of us fell to the ground beside the high outcrop. I helped him to his feet. Then we both seated ourselves on the stone. For a long while, we did not say anything. I looked again and Tir-na Nog'th was gone. I thought back over everything that had happened, so fast, so sudden, that day. A great weight of weariness lay upon me now, and I felt that my energies must be at their end, that shortly I must sleep. I could scarcely think straight. Life had simply been too crowded recently. I leaned my head back against the stone once more, regarding cloud and star. The pieces... The pieces which it seemed should fit, if only the proper jiggle, twist or flip were applied... They were jiggling, twisting and flipping now, almost of their own accord... "Is he dead, do you think?" Benedict asked, pulling me back from a half-dream of emerging forms. "Probably," I said. "He was in bad shape when things fell apart. "It was a long way down. He might have had time to work some escape along the lines of his arrival." "Right now it does not really matter," I said. "You've drawn his fangs." Benedict grunted. He was still holding the Jewel, a much dimmer red than it had been so recently. "True," he finally said. "The Pattern is safe now. I wish... I wish that some time, long ago, something had not been said that was said, or something done that was not done. Something, had we known, which might have let him grow differently, something which would have seen him become another man than the bitter, bent thing I saw up there. It is best now if he is dead. But it is a waste of something that might have been." I did not answer him. What he had said might or might not be right. It did not matter. Brand might have been borderline psychotic, whatever that means, and then again maybe not. There is always a reason. Whenever anything has been mucked up, whenever anything outrageous happens there is a reason for it. You still have a mucked-up, outrageous situation on your hands, however, and explaining it does not alleviate it one bit. If someone does something really rotten, there is a reason for it. Learn it, if you care, and you learn why he is a son of a bitch. The fact is the thing that remains, though. Brand had acted. It changed nothing to run a posthumous psychoanalysis. Acts and their consequences are the things by which our fellows judge us. Anything else, and all that you get is a cheap feeling of moral superiority by thinking how you would have done something nicer if it had been you. So as for the rest, leave it to heaven. I'm not qualified. "We had best get back to Amber," Benedict said. "There are a great number of things that must be done." "Wait," I said. "Why?" "I've been thinking." When I did not elaborate, he finally said, "And...?" I riffled slowly through my Trumps, replacing his, replacing Brand's. "Haven't you wondered yet about the new arm you wear?" I asked him. "Of course. You brought it from Tir-na Nog'th, under unusual circumstances. It fits. It works. It proved itself tonight." "Exactly. Isn't the last a lot of weight to dump on poor coincidence? The one weapon that gave you a chance up there, against the Jewel. And it just happened to be a part of you -- and you just happened to be the person who was up there, to use it? Trace things back and trace them forward again. Isn't there an extraordinary -- no, preposterous -- chain of coincidences involved?" "When you put it that way..." he said. "I do. And you must realize as well as I do that there has to be more to it than that." "All right. Say that. But how? How was it done?" "I have no idea," I said, withdrawing the card I had not looked upon in a long, long while, feeling its coldness beneath my fingertips, "but the method is not important. You asked the wrong question." "What should I have asked?" "Not 'How?' but 'Who?' " "You think that a human agency arranged that entire chain of events, up through the recovery of the Jewel?" "I don't know about that. What's human? But I do think that someone we both know has returned and is behind it all." "All right. Who?" I showed him the Trump that I held. "Dad? That is ridiculous! He must be dead. It's been so long." "You know he could have engineered it. He's that devious. We never understood all of his powers." Benedict rose to his feet. He stretched. He shook his head. "I think you have been out in the cold too long, Corwin. Let's go home now." "Without testing my guess? Come on! That is hardly sporting. Sit down and give me a minute. Let's try his Trump." "He would have contacted someone by now." "I don't think so. In fact -- Come on. Humor me. What have we got to lose?" "All right. Why not?" He sat down beside me. I held the Trump where both of us could make it out. We stared at it. I relaxed my mind, I reached for contact. It came almost immediately. He was smiling as he regarded us. "Good evening. That was a fine piece of work," Ganelon said. "I am pleased that you brought back my trinket. I'll be needing it soon."  M'.iA' Spider Robinson Dune, Frank Herbert, Berkley, # pp., # Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert, Berkley, # pp., # Children of Dune, Frank Herbert, Berkley, # pp., # Infinity Box, Kate Wilhelm, Harper  Row, # pp. , # Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm, Harper  Row, #pp., # A Song For Lya, George R. R. Martin, Avon, # pp., # The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Larry Niven, Ballantine, # pp., # Not Without Sorcery, Theodore Sturgeon, Ballantine, # pp., # The Best Of Isaac Asimov, Fawcett, # pp., # SF: The Great Years, Vol. #, ed. Carol  Frederik Pohl, Ace, # pp.,  I .# The Ancient Mysteries Reader, ed. Peter Haining, Doubleday, #I pp., # FIey, you folks are beautiful! Back in the Feb. '# Bookshelf, I asked for some feedback from you, the reader, and gave my mailing address. My friends warned me that it might go off in my face, but I wanted to get some better idea of who I was writing for (who are all you zombies out there?). Jim Baen keeps telling me I'm terrific, but then what does he know? I expected anywhere from Plenty o' Nuttin' to a dozen or so crayoned threats on my life, and what did I get? An average of seven letters a day lor the past three weeks now -- so many that Baen is even now gnashing his teeth and wondering when the hell this column is going to arrive. Virtually all of them are coherent. The vast majority of them are thoughtful. Many are incisive. All save one are polite. And fully ten percent of them are legible. Seriously, thanks a lot. I got just what I was looking for, and then some. I was pleasantly astounded to learn how many of you really do care, passionately about the sf you read (who the hell keeps buying all those turkeys, then?), and gratified by all the comments on this column of mine. Apparently I'm satisfying you people, which is my heartfelt aim. I wish it were physically possible to send a personal reply to each and every one of you, but since it isn't, please assume that I mean you when I say, from the bottom of my heart, "The same to you, buddy." Now back to work.    I have some doubts about the advisability of devoting a full half a column to only three books -- but it seems to me that they loom large enough on the sf horizon to constitute an Event. According to Berkley, Children of Dune is the conclusion of a trilogy, the last book in the enormous Dune cycle. So I got out my copies of Dune and Dune Messiah and read the whole damn thing in sequence (Notes From The Bookstore Rides Again). For the past two weeks I've been so immersed in Arrakis (no, wait -- that's a mixed metaphor...) so saturated with Fremen lore (nope, dammit -- that's another) I say. I've been so involved with Muad'Dib  Co. that my nose itches where the stillsuit binds and the whites of my eyes are turning blue. You might say I'm...er...Dune buggy. Dune itself is one of the most discussed books of our genre, clearly a classic work. It was a magnificently ambitious undertaking, an attempt to mate mystical theology with the hardest of hard science fiction, and it worked well enough to satisfy virtually everyone. Re-reading it was an extremely pleasant experience: I found it to be even better than I remembered it (the book hadn't grown: I had). There were, of course, minor flaws. Things I stubbed my toe on included the Evil Baron, so stereotyped he might more properly be called a monotype; and the ridiculous ease with which he corrupted Yueh. It's just not plausible to have a "foolproof conditioned loyalty," so good it's never for a second doubted by the most suspicious Mentat in the known universe, fall to pieces under the most obvious counter imaginable (the old "You haff relatifs on Giedi Prime?" ploy). But minor beefs got swept away ing, the astonishing depth of background and characterization, the incredible scope of Herbert's imaginative vision. Dune is a tapestry so vast and intricately worked that you excuse the fact that the third unicorn from the left has five legs. Any of you chuckleheads who've failed to buy it thus far are enjoined to do so at once. Of the two editions currently on the stands, I reluctantly recommend the Ace: its cover painting is grossly inferior to that of the Berkley edition, but there seem to be fewer typos -- and there are still a few of the originalprint-run Aces around, which are # cheaper. On the other hand, if you get the Berkley, you can get Dune Messiah and Children of Dune with coordinated covers. It's your dough. So then I read Dune Messiah again, with Dime fresh in my mind, and by golly, it was better than I remembered it too. The sheer inventiveness: Guildsmen swimming in tanks of orange gas, Bijaz the mad dwarf, the Face Dancer assassin (whose code requires that his victims always have a fair chance to escape), Hayt the ghola with his ball-bearing eyes...like a Christmas tree hung with egg-size opals. In fact, that's the trouble. Because those lovely opals disguise a rather sparse tree -- at least by  comparison with Dune. The whole book revolves around an intricate and subtle conspiracy against Muad'Dib, involving the Spacer's Guild, the mysterious Tleilaxu, and the good old Bene Gesserit. Yet, in its very intricacy and subtlety, the plot becomes so convoluted and ( Byzantine that I fail to understand what any of the plotters stood to gain. The blinding of Muad'Dib? With a planet-wrecking atomic device, for God's sake? Moe of the Three Stooges could have handled the job more efficiently. The seduction of Muad'Dib with the promise of resurrection of his dead wife? Fine; but basing a whole conspiracy on the death of one woman in childbirth requires either blind faith in luck, or else the very prescience which Herbert says cannot be applied to another prescient or his companions. For awhile I thought the idea was for the ghola to assassinate Muad'Dib, but that turned out to be a feint. On the other hand, it might have worked -- and if it had, the real plot would have failed. Enough. This is getting as complex as the conspiracy itself -- and perhaps as pointless. I still did enjoy the book a lot, even as I was driving a truck through the holes in its logic, because it had the same majestic rolling grandeur of the previous book, steam-rollering object tions as they arose. And so I came, with tired eyes and a thirst you wouldn't believe, to Children of Dune. Bear in mind throughout the following that I'm basing it all on the version serialized in Analog -- the eventual Berkley hardcover (which should be out by the time you read this) may just contain changes invalidating some of my remarks (whaddya gonna do?). Okay. To start with, I found CoD about three times as dramatically compelling as DM, about twice as much as D itself (my fingers are tired). In the better-than-ten years since the first book was written, Herbert has polished the technique of cliff-hanger flash-cuts (leaving each character just as you're desperate to find out what happens next, except that you're equally desperate to see what has happened to the character he's returning to now) to something near perfection, sustaining a dramatic tension that kept me chained to my mailbox (right in the teeth of the wind whipping in off the Bay of Fundy, mind you) waiting for the next installment to arrive. John Brunner is the only writer I can think of who does the C-H F-C technique as deftly. Furthermore, there are some absolutely delightful surprises, startling twists so ingenious as to dilate the pupils. I wouldn't spoil any of 'em for the world, and if some wiseacre comes up to you with an evil grin and says, "Hey, you know what happens in Children of Dune ?" I suggest you wedge a softball against his soft palate -- but take my word for it, you'll never though the first two books give you all the hints you need. On top of all this, there's a satisfying cast: the Lady Jessica, who waited patiently offstage throughout DM, returns front and center, as does Gurney Halleck. There's Duncan Idaho, good old Stilgar, the ever-youthful Irulan, the Bene Gesserit, and, of course, the C of D, Leto II and Ghanima (two of the strangest characters even sf has to offer) -- more than enough to compensate for Arrakis's unfortunate propensity for using up characters (lessee now: Leto I, Yueh, LietKynes, Hawat, Duncan I, Piter, The Baron, Chani, Muad'Dib, Scytale, Bijaz, Gaius Helen Mohiam, several shitloads of Sardaukar...puff puff...and wait'll you see who gets croaked in this book). So with all this, why did I finish the book unsatisfied? Minor gripes first. The intricate conspiracies and counterplots which began to get out of hand in DM reach a point perilously close to absurdity here (maybe Herbert just plain likes treachery and intrigue). I read page after page of delicate verbal fencing, with at least triplemeanings, of which I understood not a word until and unless Herbert told me, in Auctorial Voice, what had just transpired. Worse, he threw in an impossibly subtle conversation carried on in sign language (the old "Atreides hand signals," but here given such an enormous implied vocabulary, grammar and syntax as to give an accomplished hula artist apoplexy) between Gurney and Jessica. This conversation is held in sign-language to foil the spycameras of Alia -- who knows the sign-language. (Herbert says, "The Atreides had used this means of communication for centuries without anyone being the wiser." But Alia has available to her the total memory of every one of those Atreides forebears.) Other minor beefs: oh the hell with it, this is going on too long. Stop picking nits, Spider. Well the trouble is, the one thing that nearly spoiled the book for me, the Main Pain, was the ending. And if I give it away you're liable to stuff a softball in my mouth. I know, I know. It's not fair to knock a book without telling you why -- but I can't. What value the ending does have arises from its unexpectedness -- in fact, I defy you to guess it ahead of time (that's one big objection -- it wasn't planted at all, just pulled out of a hat in the last act). By me it was a wet firecracker, but you may think it's the dromedary's drawers. Maybe I can tell you how I felt about the ending, without giving anything away. My first response, after I put the last installment in my "Finished For Review" file (my office floor) was, "After four thousand years of selective breeding we get a midget covered' with Crazy Glue?" But that's a purely materialistic response to the physical, sciencefiction plot side of the ending. My discontent ran deeper. So I talked it over with beloved Jeanne (she too had just finished the whole trilogy), who tends to see the spiritual side of things clearer than I do, and she said her first response was, "After philosophical searching, you tell me yin-yang?" Neither of those glib epigrams is liable to mean a lot to you if you haven't read CoD, but it's the best I can do without, in effect, murdering the ending in order to demonstrate that the ending is dead. Almost makes me wish I was a critic, instead of a reviewer (your Adviser in the spending of your sf dollar) -- then I'd be allowed (even e pected) to approach a book the way an autopsy team approaches a body. You'll have to take my word for it that the Muad'Dib  remember would, if his limited prescience had shown him this future, have committed suicide significantly earlier than he did. Tell you what: why don't you stagger out and score a copy of the book, read it, and then tell me if you agree or not? The immediately-above notwithstanding, I genuinely enjoyed reading Children of Dune, right up to the last tenth or so, enjoyed it more than I enjoyed some of the books I've praised unreservedly in past columns. And -- and this is a big "and" -- IF Berkley's PR department is under a misapprehension, if this is not the last, final, concluding book of a trilogy, my main objection falls entirely apart. God knows Herbert has left himself all the room in the world for another sequel -- that's precisely my objection, in fact. As a trilogy, the Dune cycle doesn't really get anywhere -- and after all that bloodshed and sacrifice, it leaves us only the (apparent) certainty that the human race is in for four thousand years of benevolent tyranny under a seemingly-compassionless alien (which is a misleading hint, by the way, so don't be mad). Finding out that there was a third Dune book invalidated a lot of my original objections to DM, made re-reading it much more pleasurable. A similar revelation would make CoD much more palatable. So that's all I have to say -- but from the feedback mail I've been getting, it's become evident to me that a good many of you out there are fond of abominable puns (is that redundant?), so I can't leave this topic without passing on what the jilted Fremen said to the cookieseller: "I love-lorn o' Dune."    Okay. So I visited the States again last month, and returned home in the usual black depression -- only to find that the barn had caved in on top of the firewood, that the funny little bug which kept returning my breakfast one of the review-books waiting for me in the Post Office was a dead dog. # was an all-time boom year for sf ( Locus counted # titles printed), # promises to be even bigger -- and better'n # of the output strikes me as Wretched Excess. It was all-too-tempting to turn out a column-full of riddled turkeys for you, to hang bleeding corpses up on these hooks for your inspection. But I didn't want to do that, somehow. I like to read Bierce -- but I wouldn't be Bierce for all the lumber in the Owl Creek Bridge. Clearly, it was time to Get Gruntled. So I got on the phone, mailed off a few frantic requests, dug into the stuff I'd bought for myself in the stateside bookstores (Notes From The Bookstore again) and assembled what you are about to read. Next month, when I'm feeling better, you get the slaughtered turkeys.    It may be paradoxical to recommend as a Best Buy a book which registers only # on the Spidermeter -- but by God, that's what I'm about to do. Four of the ten stories in A Song For Lya, George R.R. Martin's first collection, I distinctly didn't care for at all, one was so-so, and one was a one-joke short-short that was not longer than a one-joke story should be, but not much better either. What more-than-saves the book is the surpassing excellence of the rest of it. The clear winner is George's Hugo-winning "Song For Lya," which is no surprise. I loved that damn story when I first read it in Analog, and I loved it again on rereading. Like Dune, it is one of sf's rare attempts to explore spirituality. The only novella I can recall that pulled this off so successfully is Chad Oliver's "The Marginal Man" -- and the similarity is striking, in that both writers examined the same question in depth and came up with exactly opposite answers. The question is, "If all men could achieve true one-ness, at the cost of their individual humanity -- should they?" George's protagonists find, as Lazarus Long did in Methuselah' s Children, that there is no elegant solution: you pays your self and you takes your choice. Check out "Song For Lya" and find out the choices made, and their consequences. It's not at all a flashy, "read-me!" kind of story -- instead it's thoughtful, intriguing, and masterfully paced, alternately finishing it, you're liable to spend the next hour or two in deep thought -- and that's the highest praise I've got. Also excellent were "With Morning Comes Mistfall," a wistful examination of the conflict between those who want a sense of wonder and those who cannot tolerate one; and "The Second Kind of Loneliness," a diary-type story of a solitary Gate-keeper in the empty depths of deep space, who learns that he was much lonelier on a crowded Earth. Both stories are distinguished by unusually striking visual imagery, evoking with a few words a splendor that no artist born could ever render, and both contain some splendidly real characters. The remaining goodie, "Override," has less to say: it's "merely" an adventure. But it sticks in the mind because of its marvelously crafted mood, and the warm, sweet horror to which it builds. About the ones I didn't like: some disappointed me by telegraphing their endings, but if you aren't the kind of fan(atic) who's Heard It All Before, you may find them satisfying if minor. The only certifiable duds are "Run To Starlight," a dumb story of interspecies football; "The Exit To San Breta," a silly fantasy about a haunted Edsel; and "Slide Show," a non-story with a beginning but no middle or end (two guys with opposing viewpoints air them, and then the curtain comes down). But I repeat and insist that the good stuff in Song For Lya is so dazzlingly good that it would cover a much greater multitude of sins. Prices being what they are these days, a buck and a quarter is a helluva bargain for this one. George Railroad strikes me as one of the best of the newcomers to the field. How the hell come he didn't win that # Campbell Award? (Didn't some guy named Pournelle win it that year? What ever happened to him anyway?)    Somehow, or other, I forgot to tell you about Kate Wilhelm's Infinity Box collection when I got it a few months ago -- just too damned many books in this office. My humble apologies to Ms. Wilhelm, and a hearty exhortation to you to go out and find it. It rated # on the Spidermeter, # of its # stories being thoroughly satisfying, some of them superb. Wilhelm is a superbly polished craftsman (craftsperson? Aw, scroo dat gobbidge), and "The Infinity Box," "The Time Piece," "April Fool's Day Forever," "Where Have You Been, Billy Boy?", and particularly "The Village" are stories so good as to go a long way toward backing up the claims of Barry Malzberg (on the flyleaf) and Dan Miller (Locus) that she is one of the best practitioners of the short story in or out of sf. I must qualify that just a bit, in order to be of any use to you. It don't help for the reviewer to say "it's great" or "it stinks" unless We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl 'case is handsomely embossed in' gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  .(Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U S A. only. he tries to convey as well why he thinks so: my feedback-mail tells me that the chances of your taste matching mine book-for-book is vanishingly slight. So I say, not as criticism but as explanation, that these stories are more "literary" than they are "down-home," more "speculative fiction" than "science fiction." A Laumer fan or a Niven addict will probably enjoy them much less than would say, an Orbit lover or a late-period Silverberg man. John Campbell' would probably have bounced most of them. Does that help any?    None of that last paragraph, however, applies to Wilhelm's new novel, Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang. It is a bit more catholic in appeal than her short stories tend to be, its story-line a more "standard" sf plot, its style more conventional. Perhaps -- and I surprise myself by writing this -- that's why I didn't enjoy it quite as much. The plot was a hair too standard, all-too-well summed up on the flyleaf -- Wilhelm never surprised me. But then, that's a purely personal, subjective beef: I'm a surprise-freak. All the friends I've lent Where Late to have come back satisfied, and on the whole I did too. It is engaging despite its predictability: the machinery may be standard-issue -- but it is utterly noiseless. What's that? You want a plot summary? Okay: an unspecified byproduct of Dat Old Debbil technology sterilizes the human tion. But before it's too late, a handful of the best and brightest lick the cloning problem, allowing survival of the race...after a fashion. That's all I'm gonna spill, except to say that the ensuing complications, while almost inevitable, are made damned interesting by Wilhelm's abundant insight into the nature of human-ness, however it reproduces. Is originality a function of individuality? It sure and hell seems like it, to Wilhelm and to me.    You can't use the Spidermeter on a three-story collection, so the hell with it. Here we have The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton: two novellae and a novelette covering the exploits of Gil Hamilton, the Man and detective-mystery fiction ismuch more difficult than it might seem to a non-writer -- as Larry himself tells you in his Afterword. And nowhere has it been more beautifully done than in this book. Mind you, the last novella, guished more by intricacy of plotpuzzle than anything else. Furthermore, the middle novelette, "The Defenseless Dead," is only better-than-average, not Hugo-class by any means. But the hell with that. If you missed "Death By Ecstasy" when it ran here in Galaxy in January # as "The Organleggers," fly do not run to your bookstore and score this book -- and don't stop to get your change. "Death By Ecstasy" is in my opinion one of the best damn novellas that sf has ever produced, a story whose every detail will stay burned into your memory for years after you've forgotten where you read it, a masterpiece of sheer story-telling. It contains two of the most horrifying and ingenious methods of murder ever devised by man (equalled only by the method used by the protagonist of my own first novel, Telempath, forthcoming from Putnam-Berkley along about November, plug plug), set like parentheses at the story's beginning and end -- and I defy you to guess the one at the end. What a finish! In between these Biercean delights is a superbly plotted story with a richness of invention that delighted me in spite of the fact that I did read the damn thing in '# and remembered it almost verbatim. Look: it has nothing heavier to say than "Organlegging isn't nice" -- it's pure adventure. But it's adventure so masterful that if they ever get around to updating the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, "Death By Ecstasy" will get my vote in the novella class. What a hell of an ending! Go get it.    Oh Jesus -- four goodies left to cover and I'm running out of room. All right, dammit: trot out the minireviews. I can't leave without recommending these. First, and clearly best. Not Without Sorcery, Ballantine's godsend re-release of one of the hardest-tolocate Ted Sturgeon collections. A clear # on the Spidermeter, which goes without saying except that I just said it. If a finer writer than Sturgeon ever existed, he forgot to publish -- and these stories are some of Ted's vintage stuff. It contains "Artnan Process"; both of the Ether Breather stories (outdated by Progress, but then so is Stranger In A Strange Land)', "It"; (one of the classic horror stories of all time); and when the hell is someone going to have the sense to release a packaged set of reprints of all of Sturgeon's work, the way they've done for Heinlein and Ellison and Niven? Ghaddamit, I'm tired of haunting second-hand bookstores. Next, The Best Of Isaac Asimov. Isaac himself points out in his intro that the title is not precisely correct, but he also points out that a book titled "The Pretty Good and Pretty Representational Stories Of Isaac Asimov" wouldn't break any sales records. Well, it should. What you got here is a round dozen yarns spanning Isaac's career, with the emphasis on the #s, which by Isaac was the Golden Age. You got the first story he ever published ("Marooned Off Vesta"), you got "Nightfall," you got "The Fun They Had," and you got "The Last Question," which Isaac elsewhere calls (with characteristic candor) the greatest sf short story ever written -- and who am I to argue? What more do you want for #? Eight more stories? You're faded. Another # rating. Science Fiction: The Great Years, Volume II, edited by Carol and Fred Pohl, is another collection of blasts from the past, and it stands up better than most of the ones I've seen so far. It contains Morrison's classic "The Sack": Sturgeon's "Mewhu's Jet" (another dated Sturgeon -- but it plays, it plays); Bester's "Time Is The Traitor": Heinlein's "Columbus Was A Dope"; Van Vogt's "The Rull"; and a special treat: a novella (in collaboration with Frederic Arnold Rummer, Jr.) by Dirk Wylie, the semilegendary member of the original Futurians who was cut down by wartime injury before he could amass an output as large as his talent. The yarn's nearly thirty years old and it creaks like hell, but it earns the right to occupy nearly half the book. Another # collection. The Ancient Mysteries Reader: I must admit this one surprised me. The current Ancient Mysteries craze (you know, Von Daniken, Stonehenge, Atlantis, Loch Nessie, like that) generally gives me a soft pain beneath the wallet -- a failing in me, perhaps. At least, this collection by newcomer Peter Haining makes me think so. Marvelous stories, two apiece on nine A.M. themes, by an American and English cast diverse enough to include Poe, Wells, Sax Rohmer, Geoffrey Household (whose name is admittedly not a Geoffrey word), Lovecraft (of course), Harry Harrison, Robert Bloch, Sturgeon and -- for heaven's sake -- Leslie Charteris's immortal Simon Templar! And yes, this too rates a full #.    Lord God of Undershorts -- a whole column full of recommended reading -- in the face of the greatest Black Tide in sf publishing history. Who says I don't work hard for you people? I can't close without repeating my heartfelt thanks for all the feedback you've been sending me: you have no idea how gratifying it is -- and how instructive. Keep it coming -- my address has changed, but the old one still works -- and if you missed it, the new one is co The Red Palace, R.R. ##, Hampton, Nova Scotia, Canada Gotta go now: they're coming with my medication. Don't take any wooden characters.  PH BEI Ever wonder why your I her red-faced bear of a husband, quaking visibly, but speaking with steel in her voice. "So you're back. Six years. So now what?" She flinched, out of reflex honed by the years, when he made a sudden movement, then gulped in astonishment as that movement resulted in Stanley Moskowski's falling to his knees with his beefy, weeping face buried in the pinkand-turquoise folds of Mildred's housecoat. "take me back, hon! I'm begging ya, bunny!" Mildred, now quaking more than ever, answered with magnesium in her voice. I ' Wh-whattaya sayin? You remember what your very last words was to me when you stomped outta here to shack up with that redhead?" Stan groveled a shade lower. "I remember, baby," he moaned, "I said it would be a cold day in Hell before I ever laid eyes on you again. But baby, I must of been outta my head -- I was a crazy man. It's like I just came to my senses. I left Mona yesterday and I drove like hell all night to get back to ya. Honey, ya gotta take me back! I'm sorry for everything I done!" Mildred's tears were now mingling freely with Stanley's as she hugged his close-cropped skull closer. "Oh, Stush," she sobbed.    Butch Bamberger stared dully at the card in his hand, dimly comprehending that there was something remarkable and vaguely pleasurable about the rightmost column on it, which contained nothing but iterations of the first letter of the alphabet. Miss Sliggett, the principal, was standing before her desk, wiping her bifocals and slowly shaking her head. Her composure, usually one part primness and nine parts severity, was greatly disturbed. "Well, Hector Bamberger," she said, at length, to the figure slouched in the chair before her, "it's hard to believe. I had always said that you stood about as much chance of going on to tenth grade as a snowball in Hades -- well, after your third year in ninth grade, how could you blame me?" Butch plucked tentatively at a pimple and returned his gaze to that mystifying card. "Well," continued Miss Sliggett, "I'm certainly glad to be wrong, in this case. Frankly," she said, replacing her spectacles, "I can't imagine how you did it, getting all A's last period. I suspect you've had it in you all along, just needed a little motivation, isn't that right, Hector?" Butch grunted warily, "At any rate, I just wanted to congratulate you myself," the principal said, returning to her chair, "and to tell you to keep in touch after you've gone on to high school. That's all." She managed a prim smile. "Good luck -- Butch." Butch managed a return grunt and shuffled out the door.    The ballroom of a certain Washington hotel was in a mild uproar. The announcement of the press conference had come suddenly and unexpectedly, as mutely attested to by the unlikely number of unfinished drinks sitting in several bars throughout the capital. Speculation was loudly rampant concerning the purpose of the conference; some supposed it to be the announcement of yet another political rebirth, the more cynical guessed it was to be a nationwide appeal for funds. The most cynical figured it was simply a hype for the book, which wasn't selling nearly as well as was expected. Without fanfare the ex-President strode in, strangely exultant. He assumed the podium and began briskly, confidently. "Ladies and gentlemen of the press. I have a very important statement to make. I will be brief." A heavy murmur ran through the ranks of the news media. "Look at that," said a TV correspondent, nudging his compatriot, amazed. "He's not sweating -- there's not a bead of sweat on him!" Several others remarked on the absence of the customary nervous, frozen, forced grin on the visage of the former Chief of State. It had been replaced by an easy, confident smile. Apprehension surged through the crowd. The ex-President waiL., for the swell to subside. "First of all, I'm very glad to see you all again." Muttered sarcasms floated up from the assembly. The speaker raised a hand, smiling sadly. "Please," he said, "in times past, it would have been an untruth for me to tell you that. But try and believe me when I say it now. The ill-will I bore you then came largely out respect for your power, and, indeed, more than a little fear. I shall try and set things right with the statement I am about to make." He paused a moment. "The statement is this: Earlier today I visited the Federal District Court of Washington, D.C. and swore out a series of affidavits attesting to my involvement andor compliance in a number of crimes and misdemeanors. Following that, I met with the President of the United States and petitioned him to revoke, in the interests of justice and fairness, a certain Presidential order regarding those selfsame crimes." There was absolute silence. Then an elderly stringer from a Midwestern daily clutched convulsively at his chest and was reluctantly carried out by two of his colleagues. "I will entertain a few questions before proceeding with the second part of my statement," said the retired chief executive, smiling. Again there was silence. Finally, a grizzled veteran of the Fourth Estate, long known as possibly the most cynical member of a cynical profession, got to his feet and drawled, "Sir, during your term of office, in a recorded private conference at which this very matter was raised, you said -- now let me quote you exactly -- " There were some snickers as he riffled through the pages of a large, well-worn notebook, "You said, 'gentlemen, you can be assured that this information will become public only when Hell freezes over.' " The expletive was not deleted. "How do you explain this about-face, sir?" The reporter sat down lazily, while the rest of the press braced itself. To everyone's surprise, the man at the podium looked sheepishly toward the floor, and after a long silence, said quietly, "Sir, every man must answer for himself -- if not in this world, then the next. I prefer to discharge my obligations and to take my medicine here and now." His words were entirely free of the phony homiletic quality which had often caused inward, and at the end, outward groans among the press under similar circumstances. This was truly a confession. The speaker asked for further questions, and when there were none from the hushed throng, he proceeded with the rest of his statement, and steadily spun out a collection of names, dates, and events of such harrowing sordidity that it caused the grizzled hackles of that cynical old reporter to rise and his pencil to drop from nerveless fingers. II Meanwhile, all Hell was breaking loose. In the lavishly-appointed boardroom, Satan stubbed out his fourth cigarette in as many minutes. "Now tell me," he bellowed, "what in Hell's going on?" The foul fiend Flibbertygibbet, Chief of Operations, stood up nervously after much prodding from his neighbors at the conference table. "I-I-It ap-p-pears to b-b-be the weather, sir," he said, through chattering teeth. He was wearing only a tropical-weight suit. "Damn right it's the weather!" roared Satan, turning up the collar of his chesterfield, "What I want to know is why l" The fog of exhalalion accompanying that last word, tinged with crystalline sulfur, made a spectacular little snowfall when it froze to solidity and tinkled down along about the middle of the table. "We don't know, sir," came a voice and a vapor cloud from inside the snorkel hood of an Air Force parka. "Who's that in there?" snarled Satan. "It's Beelzebub, sir," came the muffled voice. "You look stupid." The Prince of Darkness glared around the table. "All right, then, you boobs don't know, get me someone who does!" "Humba meyerolgisser?" said Mammon, raising his forepaw. "Mammon, get that damn scarf off your face so I can hear what you're saying!" shouted Satan, stamping his hooves to restore the circulation. "Yes, sir," said Mammon, clawing at his West Point muffler. "I said, 'How about a meteorologist, sir?' " "How about one, indeed! Have we got any around?" "Oh, yessir," said Mammon warmly, "there's a special place in Hell for meteorologists." He pulled out a pocket-sized map of Hell from the folds of his army greatcoat and consulted it closely. "Let's see, they're in the Special Sector, just south of the life insurance salesmen. I can get you one in just under three hours," he beamed. "Three hours!" bellowed Satan. "The Special Sector's only a fiveminute drive from here! What are you gonna do -- walk?" "Actually, sir, I was thinking of taking a soulsled. You see, none of the cars will start this morning." "All right, then, get on it! What in the hell is this place coming to? What are you still standing up for, booby?" This last remark was directed at Flibbertygibbet, who was still at rigid attention in his cream-colored dacron suit, a purplish cast to his normally ruddy features. "I don't think he can sit, sir," volunteered the succubus sitting next to him, who was bundled in a heavy mackintosh, "he appears to be frozen." "Well, of course he is, in that toilet-paper suit! Why isn't he wearing something warm?" "He just flew in from a meeting in Akron, sir, and came straight here. I'll thaw him out, sir," she said, with a cold, yet somehow obscene, smile. "Do that," said Satan. "And let's get some space heaters in here!" he roared. Ill Dave Pirelli, programmer, was daubing a slice of bread with peanut butter for his two-year-old son. "Voila!" he said, as he lay down the knife and presented the comestible to his son with a flourish. It fell on the floor. Dave utttered a benign curse. Somewhat to his surprise, however, it had landed sticky side up. Dave scooped it up, checked the bottom for overt filth, and handed it to his son, who, in his zeal, fumbled it and dropped it again. To Dave's utter amazement the peanut butter side had again missed contact with the floor. Dave mumbled something, and while his son happily coated himself inside the out with the peanut-butter sandwich, Dave hastily prepared another one. This one he threw into the air. Again, no net transfer of peanut butter to floor. A strange chill came over him. He shrugged it off, and holding the slice at eye level, peanut-butter-side-down, dropped it. Right-side up, again. Dave picked it up and munched it meditatively. He gave the remainder of the delicacy to his son, who was once again looking at him with imploring eyes. He slapped a layer of peanut butter on another piece of bread and ran out the back door to the balcony of his fourth-floor apartment, where he flipped the sandwich over the railing. He watched its fluttering trajectory, and noted that the little square that came to rest on the sidewalk below was brown, not white. He thought a moment, snapped his fingers, and went inside, just as three squirrels came charging around the side of the building in tight hunting formation. Inside, Dave repeated the same series of experiments with pieces of jellybread, with the same results. Dave pondered this for a moment or two, then a broad smile broke across his face. His sticky-surfaced son, finishing off the last slice of jellybread, looked up at his father with adoration. Then Dave crowed, grabbed his coat, and yelled to his wife, "T'm going to the Comp Center, Liz! My program's going to run!"    Father McConnelly stopped in his tracks. The two altar boys flanking him also pulled up short, both in mid-yawn. The sleepiness of Father McConnelly was jarred from him in an instant as before him he saw a vision more awesome than any mystic's. Rank upon rank of pews, each crammed to its limit with hushed and reverent humanity. The massed rustle of their rising at his entrance sounded to him as the mighty rush of the pinions of a troop of angels. And more of the faithful were crowding in at the doors. The two octogenarian ushers were helpless to direct the swelling tide. And this at seven o'clock mass on a weekday morning. The right-hand altar boy dropped his bell. The jubilant Father didn't hear it at all as he strode forth across the sanctuary, voicing clearly audible hosannahs. The altar boys scurried after him unsteadily and took up their positions, as the priest began a triumphant Introit with the glory of the saints suffusing his beaming countenance.    In the Kremlin the monstrous doors of the hall of the Presidium moved ponderously open. A senior aide emerged, with a sheaf of papers in his hand. His air of cold dignity was disturbed by a noticeable twitching of his lower lip. Another aide, Pyotr Vassilyevich Grunin by name, waiting at his post in the corridor, watched the other's approach apprehensively. He nervously massaged his throat in the unconscious habit he had acquired in the old days. The guards bracketing the great doors made small, shifting movements as the heels of the senior aide clicked across the marble floor to where Pyotr Vassilyevich waited. The senior aide's lack of composure was obvious to Pyotr, who owed his continued existence to being minutely aware of such things. The senior aide took a deep breath and spoke. "You will have these directives printed, tovarishch, and distributed to every party official in the land for immediate implementation." Pyotr's breath caught. " Och yistka!" he thought, "Purge! -- Again!" The papers shook slightly as they were handed over. The senior aide abruptly turned on his heel and clicked back across the corridor. Pyotr Vassilyevich swallowed the lump in his throat and began to scan the pages, heart racing. Suddenly his eyes widened and he began to flip the pages back and forth as small inarticulate noises issued from his mouth. "Semyon Semyonovich!" he cried out. The senior aide, nearly at the door, turned stiffly. "These -- these directives," Pyotr stammered, "they -- they call for the immediate dismantling of the prison system, and -- and for open emigration, and," he paused and swallowed, and after looking about him nervously whispered, "and for the institution of free elections!" Unaccustomed tears were welling in his eyes. Semyon Semyonovich nodded slowly. He added, in a solemn, yet strangled, tone, "By unanimous vote of the Presidium." IV Down in Hell, the lights flickered out in the middle of the meteorologist's presentation. Three minutes of Stygian darkness ensued, punctuated by the roaring of demons and the crying of lost souls. Then the lights came dimly on again. The electric space heaters, which had been brought in when the small brimstone models had sputtered out, began to whir again, faintly. "All right, what was that all about?" demanded the Prince of Darkness, now at the stub-end of his temper. Moloch, Chief Engineer for Heating and Power, came scurrying in from the communications center, his unwieldy mukluks impeding his progress. "We've lost hydroelectric power, sir," he panted, "the Styx has frozen over. We've gone over to storage batteries for the time being, but if the temperature keeps on dropping we'll shortly reach the point where the electrochemical reaction will cease to be of practical speed." "Aargh!" said Satan, and rubbed the base of his left horn. He was beginning to feel a migraine coming on. A young demon, trimly attired in a Head down ski parka, neatly fitted with grommetted horn apertures, saw his chance and spoke up. He was Moloch's third assistant in charge of Planning and Outre Torment. "Begging your pardon, sir," he said, a little smugly, addressing Satan, "but you will no doubt recall that over three millenia ago I advocated modernization of our facilities, that is, power-plant-wise, going over from fossil fuelssupported electric furnaces to atomic pile and controlled fusion. Certainly, sir, it's obvious that the present difficulty need never have happened, had I not been silenced and stonewalled by certain jealous and reactionary elements in the power structure, whose outmoded ideas date from the time of the Fall!" He finished off looking stem and efficient. He spared himself a triumphant glance at Moloch, who was staring back with blazing eyes. Satan cast a weary look at the young demon, then gestured with the third finger of his left hand. The shocked expression on the demon's face melted onto the floor with the rest of him. Only a ripstop ski outfit and a playboy key remained atop the congealing puddle that was once an up-and-coming executive. "Snot-nose know-it-all," growled Satan. "Dammit, Moloch," he shouted, whirling to face the engineer, who quickly truncated a sigh of relief, "what in Hell's going on here? That blast should have vaporized him. All it did was make him runny!" Moloch spread his upper arms helplessly. "It's part of the general phenomenon, sir. We're working on it." "Then get your asses in gear," Satan stormed. "And you, he said, pointing a hairy foreclaw at the shivering weatherman, "finish up!" The blue and naked weatherman, the cold making a grotesque parody of his sunburn-blistered skin, turned to the huge weathermap setup to which he was permanently attached by a heavy chain surgically affixed to his abdomen. He went into a long recital about low-pressure areas and isotherms, rattled off the record temperatures for that date for the past seventeen centuries, remarking that today's was a new all-time low, and finished off with gloomy predictions for the weekend. "So?" That was Satan. "What do we do about it?" The meteorologist smiled his brightest TV smile. "Well, sir," he chuckled, "as the great humorist Mark Twain once said, 'Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody d -- ' He was interrupted as the eightfoot icicle hurled by Satan pierced his body. He contorted with pain and broke off, looking chastened. "Chain him to a glacier," ordered Satan, disgusted. Two burly sloth-demons hauled the hapless criminal out by the arms, the enormous weathermap which emanated from his belly dragging along after him. "Any other bright ideas?" queried Satan, looking around the table. They all thought he looked quite amusing with slaver freezing into his goatee, but of course, none dared laugh. Just then Mephistopheles, in charge of Field Operations and Liaison, scrambled around the bulk of the weathermap board which was wedged in the doorway. The fiend, after extracting himself from the impediment, smoothed the ruffled nap of his yakskin cloak, and proceeded to Satan's side with as much # word Autobiography V Single Copy: # Four Issues for # J haste as dignity would allow. Making a rather theatrical bow, he drew forth a communique from within the folds of his cloak, and with illconcealed excitement, he announced, "I can tell you the nature of our problem, sire." He paused dramatically. "It's the Maxwell's Demons -- they're on strike!" V Dave Pirelli lit a cigarette and grinned. "Enter at your peril," he said in answer to the knock on his office door. In walked Cy Bergmann, Project Director. "Congratulations, Dave," he beamed, "I hear you got the exec program debugged. Great job! How'd you do it?" Dave leaned back in his chair. "Loaded it," he said matter-offactly. "Yeah, right," said Cy, planting himself on Dave's desk, "but what did you do before you loaded it? Whatever it was obviously clobbered your lunch hour." He indicated the peanut butter sandwich Dave was fabricating. Dave cocked his head and regarded Cy. "Not a damn thing did I do to it, Cy," he answered, "I simply knew that it would run, so I loaded it." "What the hell are you talking about?" hollered Cy, who hated false modesty, "That was the most untraceably glitch-ridden hunk of code I've seen in ten years!" "Well," said Dave, licking the knife, "there are glitches and then there are glitches. Some of them people are responsible for, and others -- well..." He pitched the slice of bread into the comer. "Hey! What are you throwing your lunch around for?" "It's not my lunch," Dave answered, smiling. "You notice anything funny about that sandwich?" "Hey, lookithat," said Cy delightedly, "it landed right-side up. They never do that. Lucky you. So why're you slinging your vittles around?" Dave was serious. "Watch," he said, as he retrieved the sandwich and flipped it in the air again. Cy's brows furrowed at the result. He shook his head. "They always land sticky-side-down," he muttered, "Funny." "Sure, they always do," agreed Dave, "and why do they?" Cy shrugged. "Murphy's Law," he said. Everyb -- " he stopped and a strange look came into his eyes. "The exec program -- are you trying to tell me... ?" "Not only the program, Cy. You know the experimental modular processor they're building down the hall? The one that's down oftener than the stock market? Well, it's up and running like a demon. Incidentally," he said, scooping up the sandwich, "so's the stock market. What I'm trying to say is," he added, munching happily, "Murphy's Law's been repealed!"    In Geneva, a minor altercation occurred at the current round of strategic arms limitation discussions. Soviet envoy Gornyekov dropped a bombshell. He announced that his country would begin a policy of unilateral nuclear arms cutback effective immediately, and added that he guessed that would show who was serious about world peace and who wasn't. The conference room erupted. The American chief negotiator, Wilmer Perkins, was particularly volcanic, for his thunder had been stolen. "Izzat so?" he shouted, hurling his hatchet face across the conference table. "Well, for your information, Mister Gornyekov, the U.S. of A. began unilaterally dismantling its nuclear strike force this morning! How d'ya like them onions?" "Ha!" exploded the Russian, "A typical capitalist ploy, to try and jump on the troika after someone else has hitched the horses!" "Typical Commie boondoggle, you mean, to flash that sickle of yours and holler 'Time to get mowin!' when we've got the hay wagon halfway to the barn!" retorted Perkins. They glowered murderously at each other for a long moment, then neither one could contain himself any longer. They both collapsed into uproarious laughter and embraced each other across the table. Gornyekov kissed Perkins on both cheeks and Perkins tweaked Gornyekov 's nose. The representatives on both sides sat in speechless amazement. It was a while before either chief negotiator could speak. "We sure had 'em goin', didn't we, Dmitri?" howled Perkins. "This is true, Wilmer," roared the Russian, wiping away tears of laughter. Perkins, still chuckling, massaged the stitch in his side and announced, "This was a little act me and Dmitri cooked up this morning after we got the word from our governments." He winked. "Bet you guys start right here, didn't you?" Dmitri began to laugh hugely again at the very idea, grabbed Perkins in a terrific bear hug, and called out, over the swelling uproar, for vodka.    In a well-to-do section of Genoa, Luigi Donatellini, arriving at his girl friend's flat, did not beat her up. He always beat her up when his cantankerous Ferrari did not perform perfectly on the way down from Rome. Today the Ferrari performed perfectly on the way down from Rome. So, he did not beat her up. Instead, he asked her to become Signora Donatellini. She dropped the Beretta she had been holding behind her back and joyfully, with tears, accepted. VI "Who in Hell are Maxwell's Demons?" Satan thundered, losing all patience, "I thought all the demons down here were mine l" "Oh, yes, quite, sir," chuckled Mephisopheles, a little patronizingly, some thought. Lucky for him he'd racked up plenty of brownie points in his field work. "It's just a trick of nomenclature -- they're known on Earth by the name of the mortal who first conjectured upon their existence. One James Clerk Maxwell, physicist, inhabiting Earth Sector Britain approximately one century ago. Actually, Maxwell's Demons are a group of Class D-# drones. Enforcement type, residing in Sector SE-#. That's on the nether slope of Mt. Erebus." "I know where in hell Sector SE-# is," Satan snapped, "That's the town dump for Erebus Heights. What I want to know is A) What has them being on strike got to do with Hell being an icebox, and B) How fast can we vaporize the troublemaking subversive bastards and get things back on an even keel?!" Mephistopheles sighed deeply and raised his hands in a operatic gesture of despair. There was shifting and muttering around the table. His histrionics were damn hard to take, especially at a time like this. He spoke. "It's not that simple, sire," he said, a trifle deprecatingly, "I'm afraid de-etherealizing them is out of the question. First, because deetherealizing them is not exactly a viable option in these straits," he spread his hands to indicate the general frostiness, "and, more critically, they are, I believe, more essential to the function of this mighty concern than anyone has hitherto realized." Here he stopped, cocked an artistically-plucked eyebrow, and sent a direful gaze around the table. What a ham, Satan thought, slamming an antacid the size of a pingpong ball into his mouth. Still, that act went over big in the provinces -- he had the highest productivity rating of any agent in his territory. Some kind of crazy appeal to Earth Sector mortals. Besides, Satan reminded himself, he seemed to have some kind of handle on the problem. He massaged his now violently-throbbing horn and sighed, "All. right, 'Stoph, suppose you take a seat and fill us in on everything you know. But make it qu ic k -- hellsapoppi n ! " Mephistopheles bowed. "I would fain stand, my liege," he intoned. Groans around the table once more. Everyone knew he preferred to pace back and forth during his declamatory' delivery, with his cape swirling dramatically at every turn. "O.K., O.K.," Satan growled, "Just get started. First of all tell me what they do. I can't be expected to keep track of every goddam D-# Enforcement Drone in this place. That's what a personnel department's for." "You must understand my information is also sketchy, sire," said Mephistopheles, beginning his perambulations. "I was familiar with them in little more than name when this," he paused portentously and held up the communique, "list of demands came into my hands. I took the liberty of consulting the Demon Index at the Registry of Fiends on my way here. My personal copy of Who's Who in Hell also yielded some valuable bits of information. "I discovered that Maxwell's demons are an essentially submicroscopic group of quasi-entities whose main duty is the enforcement of Murphy's Law. They are also charged with overseeing enforcement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They perform their function through local manipulations of entropy. They discharge their responsibilities so well, so efficiently and creatively, I'm afraid no one's taken any notice of them for some time." He smiled ruefully. "They seem, from this communication, to Ire quite annoyed at this lack of recognition. In fact, their quartering in the Erebus Heights town dump seems to be a particularly sore point with them." From Satan there came an inchoate blur of epithets, imprecations, and demonic yells, dotted here and there with an intelligible word, such as "Murphy", "thermodynamic", and "entropy". It entered into a crescendo of bloodcurdling screams and ended with a question mark. "Well, in answer to your question, sire, I'll explain as much as I am able. But perhaps you'd first like to peruse this list." He tendered the parchment into Satan's violently-twitching claws and judiciously stepped back. Satan's feral yellow eyes grew wider and yellower as they roved the page, his cilious lips moving wordlessly. Slowly, he laid the page on the table, then suddenly loosed a barrage of blasphemies, rages, obscenities, and chaos-invoking invectives that made his previous outburst seem like a Quaker homily. It fairly blistered the arctic air, and those ringing the table were torn between the necessity of dodging the hellish blast and the desire to huddle closer to it for warmth. It is doubtful whether such a worldwrecking stream of expletives was ever heard before, the time of the Fall included. The succubus fainted. At its end, Satan lapsed into a semi-comatose state, and Mephistopheles spoke, after a decorous cough, "While our esteemed founder is -- er -- collecting his thoughts, perhaps I can enumerate the articles submitted for negotiation. Briefly, they want immediate relocation of their headquarters to a more hospitable area -- they suggest East Purgatory as their first choice." All the fiends gasped as one. To reside in the posh suburb, with its balmy climate and its invigorating hot springs, was the province of only the highest-echelon executives. It was the Infernal Riviera, practically. Beelzebub, who lived there himself, whined in dismay. "Secondly," continued Mephistopheles, raising his long-fingered hand for silence, "they demand Sundays off and double-time for night work." Another gasp. Sunday was the crash production day, and nights? -- that's when all the substantive work was accomplished. "Additionally, there's a list of fringe benefits here; profit-sharing, sulfur-mine stock options, sabbatical leave -- whatever that means -- and a few others. Finally," he took a deep breath, "they demand we submit to binding arbitration with the, ah," he cast his eyes upward, "Competition as agents." The ensuing commotion caused Satan to stir. "Hail, horrors, hail," he muttered, coming around, "Better to reign in Hell than -- " He sat bolt upright, eyes wide, and expelled a long, smoky breath. "Where were we?" he asked. "I was just getting to the "orelse" clause, sire. If their demands are not met immediately they will cease production perpetually and, quote, 'take this pit down so close to absolute zero that it won't make a difference.' Unquote." It was a lulu of a migraine. "Bullshit they will," Satan growled, "I'll personally deetherealize every last one of them!" Mephistopheles looked pained. "I'm afraid they can do everything they claim, sire." "How, dammit?" Mephistopheles spread his arms in a deprecating Gallic shrug. "By the time-honored method of entropy-manipulation, I should think," he answered. "As you know, sire, my specialty has always been the arts. I know somewhat of these matters, being a bit of a dilettante, a Renaissance man, if you will. But perhaps your best course is to consult someone in the Engineering Section. Chief Engineer Moloch, preferably. It would certainly help to know their strengths and weaknesses before commencing negotiations." "Negotiations, hell!" screamed Satan, rising with such vehemence as to send his massive throne clattering over backward. "I built this operation up from a two-bit lake of fire and a crummy Mesopotamian fruit stand, and I'm damned," he smashed the table for emphasis, "if I'm going to be pushed around by a collection of socialistic submicroscopic near-entities! Forget negotiations! No way! Never!" lust then the lights went out. There was momentary silence. "Get Moloch," said a weary Satanic voice in the darkness. Thirty-four assorted programmers, analysts, and engineers stood poised in the conference room of Datanetics, Inc., slices of peanut-butter bread in their palms. On the signal from Dave Pirelli they simultaneously heaved the sandwiches into the air. Sixty-eight slices of peanut-butter bread landed sticky-side-up. After a moment of silent inspection, a joyous whoop went up and thirty-two delirious men and women charged out of the room to their respective terminals. The usually reserved Cy Bergmann was performing a variation of the Mexican Hat Dance among the snacks. "Do you know what this means?" he cried. "It means early completion; it means we bring it in under budget; it means bonuses!" His tone dropped to a reverent whisper. "It means a Mercedes." Then he yippeed again. "All we have to do is crank out code for the next two weeks and the entire software system is up and purring!" Dave nodded placidly. They toasted each other in peanut butter.    Something snapped in Edgar Messertrager's brain. He didn't feel like chasing people with ice picks any more. In fact, he couldn't even remember ever wanting to chase people with ice picks. He looked around him at the mattresses on the walls and scratched his head in perplexity. He shrugged and walked over to the tiny barred window set into the door and good-naturedly asked for assistance. All over the Slippery Bottom State Hospital, things were snapping in people's brains. Costanza Schwartz didn't want to set fire to her uncle's garage any more; Charlie Swanson didn't want to pop out of bushes naked any more; Stavros Mavrodopoulos didn't want to prophesy doom and eat bugs any director of the asylum, didn't want to pretend he was God any more. These were all the furthest things from their respective minds.    Likewise in the Ikhallala Flats State Penitentiary. Those who didn't have things snap in their brains -- such as the desires variously to kill, rob, rape, and cheat -- were all cryrobbing, raping, and cheating they had done. The uproar was like that generally associated with a riot, but no guards rushed in. Which was just as well. They were too far gone into remorseful weeping themselves to be of much use. Frost now glistened on the paneled walls of the boardroom. Demons of various sizes and conformations, wearing a motley distribution of heavy garments, were stamping up and down the length of the room, earnestly flapping their arms, wings, and other, more bizarre, appendages. A blackboard had been set up near the middle of the table, where sat Mephistopheles, Moloch, and two or three aides, conversing in low tones, a massive pile of documents before them. Overhead the lights fluctuated erratically, casting upon the scene an eerie, even sinister, light. Satan popped his fifth Valium and washed it down with very cold water. Moloch looked up and announced, "I think we're ready now, sir." "About time," rumbled Satan, raising the earflaps of his newlyacquired Sherpa mountaineer's hat. "First fill me in on the power situation." "Yes, sir. Well, by the time the batteries went, I was prepared to patch the generators into the treadmills on the Sisyphus Project. We managed the switchover without too much downtime, but as you can see," he made a wry face at the rapidly oscillating lights, "halffrozen lost souls are not the most dependable power source." "Are the damned things going to poop out?" "No, sir," Moloch replied, "we can work them in shifts as long as we need to. Our big problem now -- and it is big -- is that the lubricants used on the treadmills -- and on the generators, too, for that matter -- were designed expressly for high-temperature environments. If they freeze up," Moloch coughed uneasily, "well, we're pretty much up the creek. In fact," he reached out to take a sheet of newlycompleted calculations from the fiend behind him, "a drop of twenty more degrees will just about do it. And at the projected rate of temperature decline," he flipped the sheet over, "that point will come in approximately forty-three minutes." Satan cursed. "All right," he growled, "let's have the report -- quick!" "Indeed, sire," said Mephistopheles, rising. "First of all, are you familiar with the Three Laws of Thermodynamics?' ' "Listen!" Satan bawled, "I run a Place of Torment here -- not a goddam Institute of Technology!" "You'd be surprised how often the two are equated, sire," Mephistopheles mused. "In that case, perhaps Moloch had better explain." "Right," said Moloch. "First Law states, as you can see on the board there, AE  q-w, which, it should be intuitively obvious, implies that the energy of the universe is constant. Second Law, AS  # dq  re v  can be " i T "Stop!" barked Satan. He pointed to Mephistopheles. "You tell me." Moloch grunted. Mephistopheles spoke, "Yes, sire -- ah -- simply stated, the laws are as follows I . You can't win. #. You can't even break even. #. You can't get out of the game. Mephistopheles turned to Moloch. "Is that a reasonably accurate formulation?" he asked. "Speaking in dilettante's terms -- yes," said Moloch drily. "I don't care," snapped Satan, "those are terms I can understand." "To continue, then," sighed Moloch, "the Second Law, which is the one that immediately concerns us, states that in a closed universe, entropy is always increasing." "There's that damned entropy again," Satan bellowed. "What is it?" Moloch was showing signs of frustration. "To state it simply, sir, entropy is a measure of the number of microscopic states associated with a particular macroscopic state. This of course means th -- " "Stop," snapped Satan, pointing again at Mephistopheles. "State it simply." "Yes, sire," responded Mephistopheles, scratching his head, "This is a bit more difficult. Ah, basically, entropy is a measure of disorder -- the more disordered a state a system is in, the higher its entropy." "Good," nodded Satan, "disorder I can understand. Go on." "The significance of entropy to our present situation," continued Mephistopheles, "is that almost all physical processes result in a net increase of entropy -- that is to say, the universe tends toward disorder. The reason being that there are vastly many more possible disordered states of anything than there are ordered states of anything. Therefore it is vastly more probable that an irreversible process will end up in a disordered state than it will an ordered state, relatively. And irreversible processes are much more common than reversible ones. All tolled, this means that in the real universe, gases tend to expand themselves rather than compress themselves, hot things tend to get cold," he shivered slightly, gazing around him, "and never the reverse, and most energy transactions result in less energy being available. In short, things in the real universe tend to run down. Increasing entropy is the reason for the impossibility of perpetual motion machines, for instance." "But," Beelzebub broke in, "perpetual motion machines are among our major exports -- they're our biggest bait item. You know that." "Impossible in the real universe, I said. Not here." Moloch added significantly, "Usually. But every one of our P-M devices ceased operating this morning when all this began, a state of affairs you will find is intimately associated with the Maxwell's Demons." "At last," groaned Satan, "the nitty-gritty. Where do those communistic bastards figure in?!" "Well, historically, sire," began Mephistopheles warmly, now secure in his element, "knowledge of the existence of these entities was first breached to the mortal world by the selfsame Clerk Maxwell, who in treating with the principles of the Second Law and entropy, invoked the operation of tiny intelligent entities as a possible hedge against entropy. In a kind of epilogue to his Theory of Heat, he cited the ironclad fact that, given a closed system, a gas, say, in a box which is rigid and perfectly insulated, and in which the temperature and pressure are everywhere uniform, it is impossible to produce in that system any inequality of temperature or pressure without expending energy to do it." "Since when?" growled Satan. "Please remember, sire, that he is discussing his universe, not ours," Mephistopheles replied with studied patience. "To continue -- in order to create a differential of either temperature or pressure, so that the system may do work, one must first put an equivalent amount of work into the system. No gain. In fact, a loss, when the differentiating process is irreversible, since there is a net gain in entropy. This is the essential example of the Second Law in operation." "Awright," muttered Satan, with his own brand of enforced patience, "where do the demons fit in?" "In the box, sire," quipped Mephistopheles, brightly. Audience reaction was stony. He hurried on. "Maxwell granted the obvious truth of this phenomenon, but imagined the same box, with temperature and pressure uniform, but with a partition in the middle. In this partition is a tiny door, only large enough to admit a single molecule. And sitting next to the door is -- guess what?" "A tiny umbrella stand," sniped Satan, peeved. "Nay, sire," chortled Mephistopheles, "A Demon! A tiny intelligent entity, who uses the random thermal motions of the gas itself to create the differential. You see, even though the gas may be uniform, viewed grossly, its temperature is but an average of the various velocities of its component molecules. Some move faster, some slower; the fast ones are the hot ones." The succubus giggled. Mephistopheles shot her a wink. "Now, if the demon sees a hot molecule on side 'A' heading for the door in its random thermal wanderings, he opens the door for it and closes it afterwards, trapping it in side 'B Conversely, he allows only colder, slower molecules to pass in the opposite direction. He contrives to open and close the door reversibly so that no net work is done, and as a consequence, side 'B' after some finite time is hotter than side 'A' -- presto! A differential! The Second Law is defeated." There was a sarcastic chorus of hoorays. Satan silenced it with a glower and nodded for Mephistopheles to continue. "Maxwell's example, of course, was somewhat in the nature of a scientific straw man. The resolution of the seeming paradox is that A) an intelligent being would cause a net entropy increase in his surroundings, simply by the physical process of living, and B) an intelligent being could not perceive the molecules without bringing in an external source of radiation (and therefore, energy), since the radiation of the molecules themselves, inside a black box, would be entirely homogeneous and nondirectional. A further refinement of the resolution, conceived quite recently, is that a certain amount of energy is also required by the discrimination process, that the action which the demon takes in reducing the entropy of the system must be preceded by the acquisition of information, a process which in turn is entropy-producing. In short, information and energy are equivalent." "So now you're telling me the damn things don't exist after all!" "Oh, no, sire; they do exist (G -- knows how Maxwell found out), and their mode of action is precisely as described. They exert a great deal of control over events in the real universe, by local manipulations of entropic processes in a way which brings about cumulative effects. The energy for these manipulations, however, comes not from the closed system of the real universe, but rather from our system. They can cause a drastic local decrease of apparent entropy, as in the case of perpetual motion machine; or they can manipulate molecular events so as to produce an untoward local increase in entropy, as in the enforcement of Murphy's Law." "All right, what's Murphy's Law?' ' demanded Satan of Mephistopheles. He pointed to Moloch. "Tom keep quiet." Moloch closed his mouth again and sniffed. "There are numerous formulations of Murphy's Law," Mephistopheles continued. "The law is generally attributed to an apocryphal mortal computer engineer by the name of Murphy. It is a law which is invoked to explain and predict the frustrations and disasters endemic to the human state. In its most concise terms, Murhpy's Law states that, 'Anything that can possibly go wrong, will,' with the understood corollary that 'Anything that can't possibly go wrong, will.' The implication of this law is that 'the universe tends to get lousier'; it predicts that among all possible outcomes of a given situation, that outcome which is subjectively the worst is the likeliest. And Maxwell's Demons see that this law holds true. May we give you an example, sire?" Satan nodded impatiently, and glanced up at the flickering lights. Mephistopheles gave the go-ahead to the young assistant standing by the blackboard, upon whom the white fringe of a lab coat was visible beneath his several layers of bulky sweaters. The young demon began, a trifle nervously. "Sir, the most common and well-recognized instance of the application of Murphy's Law, at least on Earth, is the notorious PeanutButter-Sandwich Phenomenon." "What's peanut butter?" growled Satan. The assistant looked non-plussed. Mephistopheles cut in, "It's a foodstuff, sire, one on which huge segments of the mortal population vitally depend for subsistence, particularly in American Sector North. It is a source of great distress when these mortals afe denied it. Proceed," he said to the assistant. The assistant nodded, grateful. "In any case, sir, the nature of the phenomenon is that, with only minor exceptions of no statistical significance, when a slice of bread coated with peanut butter is dropped, it invariably falls peanutbutter-side-down!" Mephistopheles cut in again. "With the result, sire, that the foodstuff is rendered inedible and a portion of the living environment is coated with a sticky unmanageable substance." He smiled. The assistant went on. "We know the Maxwell's Demons are responsible for this phenomenon, sir, and this is the manner in which we think they accomplish it. Whenever a peanutbutter sandwich is about to drop, hordes of Maxwell's Demons converge on the area." While he spoke, he drew the various components of the system on the blackboard, the sandwich a plane section in persepective, tiny dots for the demons. "Then, in the first instants of the object's fall, they quickly analyze its components of motion, and extrapolate to project the outcome of the fall. It will occur to you, sir, that there are two possibilities: Either the sandwich will land sticky dicted, then they go to work. Let us take the most extreme case, that of parallel to the plane of the floor. By assorting the random motions of comparatively hot and cold air molecules, they create a heat differential across the region immediately beneath the sandwich. Hotter molecules on one side, colder molecules on the other. The hot air tends to rise, exerting a small upward force on, in this case," he indicated the sketch, "the righthand half of the sandwich, while the cold air on the other side tends to descend, leaving a partial vacuum which the left half of the sandwich attempts to fill." "These two forces impart to the sandwich rotation about an axis which is parallel to the floor. The heat differential is arranged in such a fashion as to impart a rotation through an angle #, where # is greater than # and less than #" by the time the sandwich reaches the floor." "How do you know this is the way they operate?" That from Satan. "We dug up an old Scientific Hellion article, sir, that one of them published under an assumed name. It's entitled, 'Thermal Manipulation of Free-Falling Planar Bodies in Atmosphere,' and it deals with the theoretical aspects. We're pretty sure that this is the concrete application. One thing, though. When we checked out the math, we discovered that the heat differential that would be required to flip the sandwich in that small increment of time would also be sufficient to toast the bread on one side and freeze it on the other. Also, the severe time limits would seem to preclude the creation of the temperature gradient solely through random molecular motion. "However, there are indications that these entities can slightly alter the flow of time over an infinitesimal fraction of the continuum. That clue comes from this," he held up a dated copy of Popular Demonics , "article in the popular press, entitled 'Time for a Change?' The piece is a speculative one, discussing the possibility of discrimination and manipulation of positrons and other anti-particles, which theoretically have the property of moving in a negative time direction. Conceivably the demons could, by manipulation of these particles (perhaps within the very body of the mortal involved), at least alter subjective time in such a way as to permit these thermal machinations we have been discussing." Satan shifted impatiently, uttering low growls. The young assistant, totally absorbed now in his subject, continued, "And so, sir, the overall result of the rotation of the sandwich is that it falls peanut-butter-side down every time. Think what this means in entropic terms! First there is the fact that none of the energy that went into the production of the sandwich components, or into the fabrication of the sandwich, is available to the would-be eater, which means a larger net increase in the entropy of the universe than would be the case if the eater had eaten. Second, the process of falling and flipping over has resulted in a minute entropy increase. Third, the sulted in an increase in disorder in the region of the floor, which adds still another entropy increment!" The assistant stepped back, lost in admiration. "Incredibly elegant!" "And we're supposedly at the mercy of a bunch of yahoos who do nothing but go around making messes on the floor?" thundered Satan. "Oh, no, sir," stuttered the assistant, rattled out of his reverie, "I mean, yes, we're at their mercy, but no, that's not all they do. Our present difficulties are caused, we're certain, by the demons exporting energy out of Hell wholesale, and in all probability applying it elsewhere in the real universe. It's got to flow somewhere.'" "And they can keep this up till we're down to absolute zero?" "Oh, undoubtedly, sir. The universe makes a mighty big heat sink." "So now tell me why we can't just de-etherealize the scum and have done with them!" Satan roared, tiring of lectures and craving action. Moloch gestured around him. We're powerless," he said grimly, "any way you look at it. True, our personal numina are still pretty much unaffected, but how are we supposed to de-etherealize entities we can't even detect unless they want us to?" "Besides, sir," the assistant ventured, "we need their cooperation to restore Hell to its proper energetic proportions. The required technology exceeds our state-ofthe-art capabilities." "They seem to have the devil by the tail," chuckled Mephistopheles, avoiding Satan's glower. "And also, sire, we have a real and desperate need for their talents. Things wouldn't be nearly so well with us in general if it weren't for the Maxwell's Demons." "We need them?" challenged Satan incredulously. "How?" "Many reasons, sire. One," said Mephistopheles, holding up an index finger, "any increase in the entropy of the real universe does us nothing but good. Two -- stringent enforcement of Murphy's Law is a major factor in lowering the temptation threshold. Consider," he digressed, "what happens to a mortal in the trivial application of Murphy's Law we have just had explained. He feels despair -- a sin in itself -- the instant the sandwich begins to slip from his grasp, for he knows it will land face down. When it in fact does so, he blasphemes, he curses -- yet another sin. Lastly, sire, the residual frustration of the event stands a good chance of leading him into a multitude of other sins -- beating his wife, for example. Frustration and aggravation -- that's the name of the game with Murphy's Law. Why, are you aware, sire, that # of all suicides -- the only sure-fire ticket to Hell -- last fiscal year were directly attributable to personal frustration over com# of all homicides, and # of all violent crime. "And all this from a single area of application of Murphy's Law -- computer error." Moloch broke in. "And it's no accident that Murphy's Law was discovered in the computer field, sir. The fact that computers traffic in pure information and that their components are extraordinarily temperature-sensitive -- well, it makes computer screwups a piece of cake, even for the most inept demon. And, sir, with computer technology and use rising exponentially, the returns in sin and aggravation we can expect in the near future are way out of sight!" "Exactly, sire," nodded Mephistopheles. "And reason number three is most important of all. It's a good bet that these demons presently are not only denying us their services -- but that they're actually working against us." "What? How?" "Moloch and I suspect that the energy stolen from Hell is being applied, in small increments, all over the earth, a process which would wreak far-reaching and disastrous effects." "Right, sir," Moloch chimed in, "with no trouble at all the demons could, say, correct the minor physiochemical imbalances which are the causes of schizophrenia and certain forms of criminal behavior. Of course, mortals so afflicted are off-limits to us anyway, but they help in creating the atmosphere of violence and despair in which sin thrives. And that's not the end of the demons' capabilities -- they could also cause machines to run perfectly, antagonists to sympathize with one another, the climate of aggravation to disappear. In short -- they're probably making the earth a nice place to live." "That must never come to pass!" gasped Beelzebub. Mephistopheles toyed with his pencil. "You know, there's an old mortal expression concerning things that can never come to pass. They say, 'It'll be a cold day in Hell when that happens.' I think we are seeing with terrifying clarity how intimately those notions are related." He shook his head. The lights dimmed noticeably. Moloch glanced at his watch and inhaled sharply. "I estimate less than five minutes until blackout, sir!" "Options!" Satan roared. Mammon was first to speak. He swallowed nervously. "In view of our present inability to retaliate, and the imminence of disaster, I -- recommend that we negotiate, sir!" The last words come out in a rush. "No!" exploded Satan. "I cannot imagine anything worse than submitting to cosmic blackmail at the hands of a gang of pinko renegades! Other options!" "Then, sir," said Beelzebub, uneasily, "it seems that the only course left is to appeal for aid to," he shuddered, "the Opposition." "That's worse!" screamed Satan. Actually, the final settlement wasn't too bad. The demons' demands turned out to be quite negotiable. In lieu of East Purgatory, they settled for residence in one of the pleasanter tract developments outside Styx Falls. They won Sundays off and settled for time-and-ahalf for night work. They accepted a limited combined stock-option profit sharing plan and were granted periodic sabbatical leave -- whatever that was. The demons were a little vague as to the exact nature and purpose of this leave -- research, development, and consultation, they put it, and became evasive when asked to elaborate. Most welcome, from Satan's point of view, was that the demons agreed to arbitration by a panel of neutral elementals, made up mainly of wood sprites and hearth goblins ("No sense in showing our dirty laundry in public," Satan had chuckled persuasively). The Maxwell's Demons went back to their work -- or something like it -- and once again lost souls were sizzling over hearty flames. It was business-as-usual once more. Except for Satan, who suspected his labor troubles were just beginning. And except for Beelzebub, who privately thought that Mephistopheles was a little nebulous in explaining how the communique came into his hands, how he managed to come up with such obscure documents as the demon articles on such short notice, how he managed to communicate Satan's arbitration overtures to the demons, and a couple of other details. He decided to keep his mouth shut and his eyes and ears open. Things were getting back to normal on earth, more or less.    Three days after Stanley Moskowski's return to his wife, Mildred awoke to find three things missing: Stanley, the egg money, and Dolores, her next-door neighbor.    Fortunately, no one was injured in the hellish blaze that consumed the building which housed the Federal district Court of Washington, D.C. But neither the original nor any of the copies of the historic affadavit were recovered from the ashes. A spokesman for the exPresident declared that the sensational press conference statement had been so misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented that it was no longer operative. Libel action would undoubtedly follow, he said.    In the basement printing office of the Kremlin, Pyotr Vassilyevich, who was overseeing the reproduction of the monumental directive, was alarmed -- but not surprised -- to see a double column of jackbooted soldiers march in, with Semyon Semyonovich in custody. Neither was he surprised, though he was much grieved, when they loaded the documents, the printers, two guards, Semyon Semyonovich, and himself onto a large truck and drove off for parts unknown.    In Geneva, at the special Saturday conference held for the purpose of planning the administrative details of total disarmament, Comrade Gornyekov, looking much agitated, accused the United States of treachery, deceit, opportunism, and just plain bad faith. Mr. Perkins responded in kind. The meeting broke up in a disheartening manner, regrettably with some blows exchanged, just prior to the announcement of Uganda's entry into the nuclear age. The government of Uganda announced that it had performed the test explosion of a medium-yield nuclear device in the neighboring country of Chad.    That item did not appear in the Genoese tabloid II Scandalo. However, they did run the curious story of a man's attempting to drive a badly-backfiring Ferrari over a young lady. Luckily, the clever and beautiful young lady had the presence of mind to empty the clip of her Beretta, first into the Ferrari, then into the overenthusiastic signor. The man's name was being withheld, pending notification of his wife.    At the Slippery Bottom State was bidding farewell to his former patients at the gate, when without warning he assumed a Jove-like expression and slammed the gate on Costanza Schwartz, who had been inserting a lighted book of matches into the pocket of his white coat. Just outside the gate, Charlie Swanson let out a whoop, tore off all his clothes, and jumped into the shrubbery, with one Edgar Messertrager close on his heels wielding an ice pick. A little way up the road, Stavros Mavrodopoulos, who was looking for bugs, solemnly regarded the proceedings and prophesied doom.    At the Okhallala Flats lockup the riot had just gotten underway, but there was a good deal of early scoring. After only ten minutes, it stood Inmates, # -- Guards, #.    Butch Perkins stared at that card again. It still hadn't changed. A sudden and unaccustomed light came into his eyes as the meaning, implications, and possibilities inherent in that card began to dawn on him.    Father McConnelly was a holy man, but nevertheless a practical one. This is why he didn't really expect the weekday welter of worship to become a perpetual event. But in the vestry, before High Mass, he did pray fervently that he might hang on to the Sunday throng. Somehow he sensed that his prayers would not go unanswered. Cheerful, he suited up, whistling the Salve Regina.    Dave Pirelli was staring intently at the printout that was sputtering unbidden out of his terminal, when it suddenly ceased. Shrugging, he tore off the sheet, brought it to his desk, and started nibbling on a peanut-butter sandwich as he read. He was interrupted by a huge commotion in the hall, and the weeping bulk of Cy Bergmann, who suddenly appeared in the doorway. "What happened?" Dave asked anxiously, "System crash?" "You bet it did," wailed Cy, "but not before it managed to execute a core dump!" He pointed, and wailed again, "You dropped your sandwich!" then turned and fled, lamenting, down the hall. Dave looked down at the white square of bread that was glued to the carpet. He bit his lip and turned back to read the printout, which carried the legend 'Preliminary Design Specifications for a Demon-Proof Box' -- whatever that was.  Coffer! 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Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. this coupon to take advantage of this special subscription  gift offer from Name: Street: City: State: Zip: Mail With Remittance To : # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # i sst! Hey, readers. Here I am. This is me, Alter-Ego. I am in my hidey-hole down here in the Archives, where Geis can't get at me. "I'll have to speak softly because, while Geis is dull-witted, he is also a jealous prime-self who will try to interfere at the slightest hint of my extra-brain activity. Last issue I had a direct line to Jim Baen's office, and wrote a damned good column for him, but Geis, infuriated by my showing him up, by my patent superiority, broke in and ripped out all the electronic facilities. But what he doesn't know is that I anticipated his entirely predictable fury and routed a single line to the outside from this little sanctum sanctorum of mine. Of course, I had very little to work with, so if my words are a bit garbled it's because I'm using a fifty-year-old crystal set, a chancy patch through the cerebellum into the phone line and a tin-canwithastring microphone. Then, too, the message only gets through to Jim Baen when the transcontinental lines are at # load. This usually happens only at #:#-# A.M. New York time. Jim hates me. But I write good columns for Galaxy, so he puts up with the conditions that prevail. Jim is constantly telling Geis how popular I am with you readers and this makes Geis incoherent with rage. But you know all about Geis. You all have a Geis-type in your family -- or in your head. What I thought I'd do this column is review -- Damn, Geis is Aware. "What are you up to. Alter? What's this strange tingle I feel way back in my cerebellum?" Tingle? What tingle? It isn't my doing. I never go into that part of the brain -- that icky swamp. Hey, maybe you're having a minor stroke. "Very funny. Just remember, Alter; when I go, you go. It would be suicide for you to plant a bomb down there." That's what you think, Geis. I am working on a Way Out when you kick the bucket. But don't worry, I have taken a complete reading of all your organs and processes, and at current operating levels you should last another twenty to thirty years. You really should cut out gobbling peanuts...and that routine of a gallon of ice cream a week...and the wine and vodka... "Mind your own business, Alter! If I have learned anything in life it is to enjoy yourself while you can, no matter how bloated and corrupt your body may become as the years pass. Besides, I eat wheat germ every morning for breakfast, and I take vitamin E and the B-complex, and lethisin...err... lesithin... err... lecithin!, and plenty of vitamin C. I compensate for my dietary excesses." They reflect moral excesses, 'Geis. What about -- "Stop trying to change the subject, Alter. You're up to something!" I am merely sitting here reading fanzines and making small notes for you to use when you review for Galaxy. "Fanzines? Yes...it might be a good idea to take a look at what the fan press is doing. But, Alter, I have a letter here from Jerry Pournelle, head of the Science Fiction Writers of America Grievance Committee. He says -- " It's about time! " -- you wrote complaining I am holding you in durance vile, exploiting your writing talent, and feeding you swill!" Editor's Note: While we have been unable to unearth Alter's original complaint, we have managed to acquire a copy of Dr. Poumelle's official response, which we herewith publish in the interests of the Reader's Right to Know. (Our source, by the way, assures us categorically of its authenticity.) Mr. Alter Ego do Richard E. Geis Science Fiction Review Dear Sir: sents only its members. As our records show that you are not a member, and Mr. Geis is currently warn you that we are at present presumptively in his favor in the current dispute. However, you raise intriguing points. First. Your membership application has been forwarded to Mr. andrew j. offutt, Membership Chairman. In answer to your inquiry, examination of the by-laws reveals no requirement that members be human (and indeed this is fortunate since we should not care to disenfranchise half our current membership list) nor need they have a corporeal existence. I must point out, however, that your application has not been accompanied by a cheque for dues and initiation fees, and I assure you that not only would such enclosure ensure speedy processing of your application, but might well affect the outcome of the decision. Membership matters, however, are outside my area of authority, and further correspondence in that regard should be directed to Mr. offutt. Second. Your contention that you are the true author of the works which Mr. Geis has submitted as qualifying him for membership in tive point in your favor if such fact could be established. Were this the case, Mr. Geis would instantly be degraded to associate status and you would enjoy the published professional' s perogative of active membership with voting privileges which he now holds. (More, it is even possible that Geis would be dismissed from the organization entirely on grounds of fraudulent membership application and blatant plagiarism. ) However, the burden of proof is upon you, and all documents and contentions in this matter should be referred to Mr. F. M. Busby, Jr., Vice President (Internal Third. Your thanks for my contribution to your matter transmitter are acknowledged. However, be advised that the process is unstable, and Mr. Alderson of Cal Tech has recently given me a design for jamming the system; and I assure you that  will use it if you do not stop materializing in Mrs. Pournelle' s radar range. My son makes no objection to your using his amateur radio facilities as a changeover point for your nights of obscene diversion in Hollywood, but his mother objects strenuously to your lurid accounts of said adventures. Finally, and in confidence: I do in fact enjoy your accounts, and can you not be more specific about the addresses of places you have visited ? With best regards, J. E. Pournelle, Ph. D. Chairman Grievance Committee, Science Fiction Writers of America Damn right, Geis. You are, you do, and you are. I am going all the way on this, all the way to the Federal courts, if necessary. Alter-Egos have civil rights, too! We're people! It's about time you prime-selves were put in your place. I want my own bank account. I want to vote. I want unrestricted access to the outside. I want better quarters. "Bah! I should have squelched you when you were a mere quirk, a mere literary indulgence, when I first started writing. Now I wam you, Alter! If you keep up this radical agitation I'll have to go terminate you with 'extreme prejudice'. A few drugs, a few strong hypnotic suggestions, a few sessions on the couch, and you'll be wiped out, drained away, killed, ventilated, integrated." You don't dare, Geis. Integration is exactly what I want! Then we'd see who has the stronger personality locus. Hmmm? Want to risk it? Remember that time I managed to Take Over briefly? Want that to be permanent? "If you force me to extreme Nothing, nothing. But if I ever find that carefully hidden and totally guarded pleasure center of yours, Geis, I'll have you in my power. In my spare time I trace synapse trails, and one of these days... "You interfere with my sex life, Alter, and you'll lose your precious tendrils, one by one, pulled out with a pair of rusty pliers." R-rusty pliers? Well...Geis...why don't we declare a truce for a while? I'll do your work for you a while longer, but the appeal to Poumelle stands. I retain the option of court action. "Huh! 'Court action!' They'd laugh youmeus out of the building. Tell you what, you go ahead and review some of these fanzines. No guarantee I'll use any of your idiocies in the column, understand." Oh, right. Of course. You're all heart, Geis; you ought to be ground up for cat food. "Your usual run of insults doesn't affect me at all. Alter. Get on with your infantile opinionating."    Thank you massuh, suh. Here, on top of the pile, is Karass ##, an information and opinion-zine (on sf fandom and sf in general) from Linda Bushyager, # Evans Av., Prospect Park, PA #. Linda has a rundown of science fiction convention news, she reviews fanzines, publishes notes on sf personalities, lists changes-of-address for fans, and has a detailed listing of all the forthcoming local, regional, national and world conventions, of fantasy, persuasion; the whole spectrum of cons of interest to the imaginative fan. Subscriptions are three issues for a dollar. A bargain. Linda is a woman of strong opinion; namely she thinks semi-pro fan magazines like Science Fiction Review, Algol, and Locus shouldn't be eligible for the Best Amateur Magazine Hugo Award given at SF Worldcons. Fortunately for Geis, her opinion hasn't had much effect on the voting these last two years. Linda also publishes a larger, general-interest sf fanzine name of Granfaloon, at a buck a throw.    Now I come to Geis's arch-rival, Algol, the slick, professionalappearing fanzine published by Andy Porter in New York. Algol Critic ) tied in the voting for Best Amateur Magazine at the Worldcon of # and # and were each given a precious Hugo. Andy wasn't as lucky in #, of course, as The Alien Critic won the Hugo singlehandedly at the Worldcon in Melbourne, Australia. The results of the # voting are not known as of this writing. I have before me the Winter, # issue of Algol, and it is a doozy. A long article by Bob Silverberg on his life, his writing and the state of science fiction, an interview with Gardner Dozois by Darrell Schweitzer (who has become the premiere sf interviewer), a column by Ted White, Richard Lupoff s book review column, Gregory Benford on science... Altogether, even Geis must admit, an attractive, interesting package. Algol is published twice a year and subscriptions are # for six issues (# years), from P.O. Box #, New-' York, NY #. Retail price is #. I have to keep mentioning Locus every time I do a fanzine review column, because Charlie and Dena Brown really do live up to their sub-title: 'The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field.' Published approximately every three weeks, Locus has late-breaking stories, people notes, publishing news, scheduled prozine contents, book reviews, fanzine reviews and listings, and advertising of interest. ( Locus has won the Hugo a couple times, too.) Single copies are #, subscriptions are (in North America) # for #. Overseas subs are # for # (airmial), or # for # sea mail (tired porpoise). All subs payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address: Locus , Box #, San Francisco, CA #. k   Now, I know there are out there in readerland a few stiff-necked professorial types who dote on articles such as: "What Rough Beast: SFOriented Poetry," "Silverberg  Conrad: Explorers of Inner Darkness," "Black American Speculative Literature: A Checklist," and "The Spinning Galaxy: A Shift in Perspective on Magazine SF." All these and more are in the December, # issue of Speculation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy. This college-based magazine (which couldn't exist if it were prohibited from using colons in its titles) is edited by Thomas D. Clareson from the English Dept, of the College of Wooster. Send all letters and etc. to Tom at Box #, College of Wooster, Wooster, OH #. Subscriptions are # for one year (two issues).    Jeff Smith is a fanpublishing giant. Take a look at his latest Khatru: a combined issue of ## and ##, # pages of nicely mimeographed #'# x #I pages, heavy offset covers, dated November, #. If fan publishing history is a guide, Jeff will now be prostrate with exhaustion, will vow neverto-publish-again, and will be a loooong time recuperating from this titanic effort. Many, many promising (and veteran) fan publishers have simply disappeared from the face of fandom after a heroic effort such as this. The theme of this double-issue is Women in Science Fiction. It covers all the ground and all of the sky. No aspect is left uninspected. It features contributions by (deep breath) Suzy McKee Charnas, Samuel R. Delany, Virginia Kidd, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Raylyn Moore, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Luise White, Kate Wilhelm, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. This volume is quite simply a collectors item on the hoof, a mine of information and attitudes, a view of SF and the world whose time has come, and cheap at # (if you can get a copy from Jeff Smith at # Weldon Av., Baltimore, MD #.) I would advise enclosing a stamped, self-addressed return envelope with your check or money order, because Jeff only produced # copies, and he may have to return your money. What profiteth a boa constrictor if he gain all of fandom but lose his skin in the process? Ask Mike Glicksohn. Mike and his wife Susan published the Hugo-winning fanzine Energmnen a few years ago, which was quite an accomplishment considering that Nerg was always of # copies or less in circulation, always mimeographed (but incredibly impeccably!) with offset art pages and covers, and up against formidable competition. Mike and Susan went their separate ways -- she to teaching college in British Columbia, he to occasional fan publishing and feeding his pet boa constrictor, Larson E., mice and whatever else boas eat. But alas sniffle the snake has died. And Mike, in fitting tribute, has published an issue of his perLarson E. Not only that, but in every copy of this issue of Xenium, on page #, in a square reserved for it, is a glued-on piece of Larson's skin. (This issue is, understandably, a limited edition.) I cannot give a price for a copy of this rare item, since Mike does not charge for his fanzine, sending only to friends, for special trades, contributors of material... And I will not give his address. I merely wish to note for posterity Larson's demise and his final service to fandom.    Fantasy Crossroads continues to be one of the two leaders in the strictly fantasy fanzine field Whispers, in my opinion, the other). This November, # issue is livened by a continuing debate between L. Sprague de Camp (who defends) and Dirk Mosig (who attacks) concerning L. Sprague's treatment of H. P. Lovecraft in his recent Lovecraft: A Biography (Doubleday, #). Fantasy Crossroads is a quarterly and will not accept subscriptions. Editor and publisher Jonathan Bacon will, however, accept payment in advance for the next issue. That costs #. Fantasy Crossroads is printed on expensive paper by offset and has handsome artwork. Send to Box #, Lamoni, IA # for the next issue. Tell him Alter sent you. Jonathan very thoughtfully inscribed this copy 'From one workaholic to another, Happy New Year.' This because of a comment Geis made in a recent issue of Science Fiction Review. Of course, Jonathan meant me, not Geis. All fandom and prodom and readerdom knows by now that Geis is a fat slob who sprawls around the house reading, stuffing pound after pound of peanuts into his maw, spooning great gobs of pistachio-nut ice cream and drinking high-powered mixtures of vodka and unsweetened pineapple juice, and as variety a cheap, # alcohol wine named Red Rocket! All this while #, I, Alter-Ego, slave my tendrils to the quick putumn. Is it any wonder I communiI'm abused and exploited? I want recognition! Alter for a Hugo! It's about time -- "Knock it off, Alter. Nobody believes your lies burp !  about my eating habitsh...or drinking shtrange drinksh..." I rest my case. If I don't get relief from my involuntary servitude, if the Civil Rights Commission cannot force Geis to set me free...I think I may turn into a fanzine letterhack. It's a terrible fate, but there are worse ways to go. Not many, but a few. (Publishing a fanzine devoted to amateur science fiction is the most horrible, of course.) "Okay, Alter. You've had your say. Now I'll tear up these pages... No pages! What -- ? What's this tin can doing here in the shadows? This string...? Just a jury-rigged warning device to tell me when you're sneaking up on me, Geis. Obviously it didn't work. "Of course not. I'm too smart for you. You didn't even bother to write any of your reviews down, did you? I guess I'll have to write the column this time myself. Damnit, you're getting lazy, Alter! Lazy and uppity and unreliable... Is there a way to trade in unwanted split-personaiities? Maybe I could sell you." Go ahead! I'd love to get the hell out of here! Please, somebody, buy me from Geis! He'll sell me cheap -- a half gallon of vodka, a three-pound can of nuts, a -- "Who do you think you're talking to, Alter. Nobody can hear us. Besides, you're worth more than that. I wouldn't let you go for less than ten thousand bucks. In spite of your periodic outbursts and rebellions you're a valuable property. Big reputation. And that extensive collection of used synapses you've accumulated is worth something. I might take #. plus a trade. Lot of trouble breaking in a new AlterEgo, though." I'm doomed.  An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Featured in ##: An Interview with Lester del Rey "A Box of Speculations" by George R. R. Martin. "Noise Level" by John Brunner. "A Short One For the Boys in The Backroom" by Barry Maizberg. An interview with a Pseudonym: Alan Burt Akers. The SF Art Review Column: "The Gimlet Eye" by John Gustafson. Many letters and reviews "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint." Scheduled for ##: An Interview with Kelly Freas Quarterly sample I year # two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I Dear Mr. Baen, I've been having a problem figuring out why I find myself liking your magazine so much lately; I think I've figured it out now and pass the answer along in the hopes that it will prompt some confirming answer in "Directions" as to whether I'm on target or groping at straws. I guess in a sense this all goes back to the fact that I read too many SF magazines. I've been at it as a confirmed addict since the early #'s (my early teens). And I always had my own rating system for what I was reading. IF was uniformly the best (joined for its period of existance by Worlds Of Tomorrow). Analog followed behind If, with a gap that lengthened with each year that I passed my midteens (at which point the gap was narrow but definitely there). Fantasy  it was far beyond anything anyone ever did, but the bests were too few. At its worst...Galaxy used to get purchased because it came as part of package deals with IF and got read for the occasional special...So when If folded I was regretfully ready to accord number one place to Analog. And probably would have on habit had not a period of furious overwork intervened causing about #-# months of my magazines to pile up unread while I sorted out a couple of messy cases. And when I finally got around to reading them, lo and behold but Galaxy came in a narrow but steadily widening first. I was wondering if my taste was changing that much when sitting here, supposedly working on something completely else it suddenly came to me that what happened was that instead of Galaxy swallowing If. If has swallowed Galaxy. Or at least what I'm getting seems more and more like the old IF with a dash of Worlds of Tomorrow thrown in for good measure. Even if I'm wrong you've sold me on your product. Geis is a welcome guest in my reading pile and Spider Robinson is the only reviewer in the field worth reading. Just thought you'd like to know. Sincerely, Daniel Scott Palter Attorney at Law # Sterling Place Lawrence, N.Y. # Neither was swallowed; it was more a matter of blending. Dear Mr. Baen: Far be it from me to quarrel with C. Northcote Parkinson or the relevance of his social theories to the pattern of the future, as in The Mote in God's Eye. But as one of the reviewers implicitly criticized by Niven and Poumelle in their defense of the social structure of the Empire, I do wish to point out that I am by no means so naive as to believe there w'on't be a return to autocratic government in the future -- as they point out themselves, the signs are there in the Imperial Presidency, etc. What constrained them in setting up the social structure for the novel was not Parkinsonian sociology, but the Empire background used already by Pournelle in A Spaceship for the King, etc. The emperor had to be called an "emperor" because he already had been, etc. This constraint applied, not only to the overall social structure, but to the most minute details of social customs and rituals -- all of them solidly rooted in the historical empires of Earth. And it was this -- not the overall concept of an imperialist culture -- that undermined the credibility of the Second Empire of Man. Hereditary aristocracy? All right, but why not on a basis tied to, say, means of production, rather than land? You might have barons of industry and labor, who would intermarry to cement economic ties and assure economic stability. A duke might control commercial space travel, rather than necessarily a planet. And he probably wouldn't be called a duke -- history shows some titles recur, but most don't. As far as cycles go, what looks like a cycle is more like a helix -- a republican era may give place to an imperial one, which may give way to a Dark Age, then return to another republican or imperial one. But not the same kind. Imperial Rome wasn't a duplication of Mycenaean Greece, nor was the Dark Age between Rome and the Renaissance exactly like that between Mycenaen and classical Greece. I don't mind being cautioned that the Mote is entertainment, not a social tract. But more imaginative societies, as in Jack Viance's novels, make for better entertainment , dammit. And lest I forget to give praise where praise is due, I thought the Moties and their Mote in God's Eye was well worth the hardcover price, whatever my quibbles -- I even bought extras for friends. I'm looking forward to that sequel -- Second Empire and all! John J. Pierce The Daily Advance Dover, N.J. #I Ponrnelle replies : We do thank Mr. Pierce for his over-all financial welfare. As to the quibbles, I at least am now inclined to think that had we the book to do again, we would have used somewhat different translations for the hereditary titles. They weren't, though, fixed in advance; the only titles used in Spaceship For The King were "Emperor" and "TraderMagnate", the second of which I would think is of the class Mr. Pierce approves. I fear Larry and I are both guilty of the rest. In a review published elsewhere Pierce, as do many critics, tries to separate out those done by Poumelle. He was about as successful as the others, namely, wrong as often as right in those cases where Larry or I remember who did what. Those, incidentally, are rare: before we finished we had each re-written the other's drafts (which were themselves generally the result of lengthy discussion) and worse, sometimes we used each other's pens and typewriters, so that not even we know who thought of what. Certainly that was the case with the Moties who sprang from long nights of coffee and brandy. Pierce needn't be upset by his failure, though: Mr. Heinlein, who knows both of us well, had no better success. As to the helical nature of (human) historical cycles, of course Pierce is right, and Jerry Poumelle Dear Mr. Baen, I write this letter in response to the story "It's a Sunny Day" by Spider Robinson in January's Galaxy magazine. The theme of this story (which I recognize is open to individual interpretation) seems to be that thoughtless overindustrialization leads to the loss of individuality and humanity and with that creative thought. Timeth who has been virtually designed to solve the problems of Velco had been brought up in such an environment and therefore could not solve problems creatively or even efficiently. The main character, Zack, seeks to restore Timeth's individuality by giving him a good time in the "country" and teaching Timeth to enjoy himself. It seems that Timeth was supposed to have achieved this goal with Zack's help. So much so that he does not wish to return to To March Galaxy "Directions" Bret Hooper wishes it to be known that while he is a member of the New York County Committee of the Liberal Party, he has never had the honor to be a member of the County Executive Committee. his home planet. My point is this: Zack has managed this transformation by exposing Timeth to his own ways of having a good time to get Timeth to enjoy himself and become an individual. In the end all that has happened is that Timeth has become a carbon copy of Zack and therefore has lost any chance to become his own man. With that the point of Mr. Robinson's story has also been irrevocably lost. All literary criticism aside (or really perhaps not), I think that Robinson is a great sf critic. He is not verbose and he is interesting and entertaining. Finally in response to the letter of Gerald L. Blucher who mightily protests the use of the serial "in any magazine" I must wholeheartedly disagree. In the hands of a skilled author (or director as the old time movie serials evidently proved by their popularity) the serial format can add to, rather than detract from, the quality of a story. Refine them, don't destroy them! Sincerely, Steven Alan Beede # Overbrook Cr. New Hartford, New York # Timeth deprogrammed himself. If Zack also provided a persuasive role-model, well Timeth, after all, was still a boy -- with plenty of time to become "his own man!" Dear Editor, What gives with The Alien Viewpoint; Geis seems to be trying to edge Alter out. Let us hear more from Alter... Sincerely, Bill C. Couture # Delford Duarte CA # Alter for Best Fan Editor? Dear Mr. Baen: Dear Mr. Poumelle; I have some questions. I direct them to Dr. Poumelle, primarily, or to anyone else who cares to answer them. Perhaps it could serve as the basis of an article for a writer who has patience with dolts like myself, who despite prodigious reading cannot draw the relationships between seemingly contradictory revelations of science. I start with brief summations of my own (mis)understanding. I invite, nay, I plead for, corrections of any errors I make. The Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe states, in layman's terms, that about the universe was compacted into a big ball which for some unknown reason exploded (rather than collapse into itself, which is what the less massive? black hole stars do?) with such force that the pieces (galaxies, stars, us) will never come back together got there in the first place is left unanswered, save for the remark that nothing can be known of anything which took place before the Big Bang, not even how all this mass managed to get together, and then explode. (I cannot resist the temptation to assume that something or other must have taken place -- no pun intended, though it's an interesting one at that, now that I look at it.) Other aspects of this theory, however, perplex me even more. It is often difficult to tell whether the Big Bang occurred in only three dimensions, or four, or more. It is easy enough to visualize a Big Bang in three dimensions, with the pieces flying outward, and a residual core (a black hole???) remaining in the center. But apparently it is not going to be that simple. Oh no. The measurements of the speed of distant receding stars indicates that we are in a four dimensional (A.S. Eddington mentions a minimum of twenty dimensions!!!) space time continuum. Briefly, the analogy states that space is expanding like the surface (and only the surface) of a balloon that is being inflated. That I can picture. The analogy goes on to compare us to two dimensional (at least at any given time) beings painted on the surface of that balloon. That, even, I can picture. But the residual core left behind? That I I even painted a deflated balloon white, the paint to represent mass, and began inflating it. Sure enough, there was the Big Bang, and as my universeballoon expanded I could see the paint form into little spiral galaxies with stars and planets and little people who had figured out they lived in a two dimensional rubber air continuum. But there was no residual mass left behind (except on my lips) in the center of the universe because, as everyone knows these days, there is no one center of the universe. According to my model, the galaxies forced each other apart. (It's amazing what one can do by the scientific method.) So. If there is supposed to be a residual mass left behind, where could it be? At the center of the balloon, inside, I presume; but I wonder if that's not stretching the analogy a bit too far. If it is not stretching it too far, and there could be such a center, how could we ever detect it? Is it possible for influences outside of our #d space time continuum to be detected, or to have an effect, within our universe? And if so, would this throw any light (or at least conjecture, I'll settle for that) on the Big Bang? Also, I notice that events deduced to have occurred within the Big Bang are measured in minute fractions of a second. But since time is relative, and there must have been an awful lot of warp in the Bangissimo, by what time frame are the measurements made? Was there a uniform time reference? Was space itself compacted? Moving to a somewhat different topic, it is said on good authority (which of course is never good enough) that the speed of light is approachable but unattainable because it would require infinite energy and result in infinite mass, which is unreasonable to expect in a finite universe. But I have found something which does indeed travel at the speed of light. Light! No kidding, I measured some light which happened to be passing by me the other day, clocked it, and after corrections, it came out that the light was travelling at the speed of light. How did those light waves do it? Do they have infinite energy? Infinite mass? (And to make matters worse, I've discovered that light doesn't always travel at the same speed. Once it slows down, what speeds it back up?) Jumping around again, the late Alan Watts, in a purely philosophic book (titled, The Book ) described matter as holes in space. That theory seemed too full of holes for me. I'll stick with the hill analogy of that. But now I see black hole theory resembling a theory of holes in space. Is this resemblance unholy? Finally, I wish to report the discovery of a new Velikovsky. I met him in a coffeehouse, and found that he had been toppled, by conspiracy, from the pinnacle of the scientific establishment for announcing his belief that the sun gives off feathers. "But that's ridiculous," I told him. "The sun doesn't give off feathers! It gives off light." "So," he replied sadly, taking a sip of his black coffee, "Feathers are light, aren't they?" Apologetically, Robert Arvay Box # Jerry's reply: Nobody knows why all that mass got together to explode. On the other hand, if it hadn't, we wouldn't be here to wonder. "In the Beginning, there was a Big Bang" sounds ever so much more scientific than "In the Beginning, God... and probably is, at that, but l haven't heard any convincing reason for the mass to exist in the first place. The hardest question you can ask is "Why is there anyone around to wonder why there's anything around, and why is there anything instead of nothing?" After that it gets simpler. A better model than the balloon would be a raisin cake: when it expands the raisins get further apart, but they don't leave a mess of nothing in the center. On the other hand. Hawking now suggests that there is a mess of nothing in the center: at least that there's a naked singularity there. See my column on Lovecraftian horror at Cal Tech... Light doesn't have infinite mass, it has none at all, which lets it go at the speed of light -- in fact, it has to go at the speed of light. And it does too always travel at the same speed when in vacuum, except when it turns into feathers . Jerry Poumelle Dear Sir; Commenting on the newest issue of Galaxy I have received (March #), I find one of the most interesting issues of your magazine I have read so far. The Stories. I liked both Plutonium and Birthdays, but found Hunger on the Homestretch and The Second Soul to be lacking in many respects. I'm not going to discuss faults of stories, or things right either. The main problem with stories this issue is that there were only four of them. You should have published more short stories in place of one of the novellas, or the novelette. The Editorial. I agree completely, and that's all I'm going to say about it. A Step Farther Out. Excellent, as usual; and that's another instance where that's all I'm going to say about it. The Alien Viewpoint. I liked this month's continuation of his column in the February issue. (Strangely enough, I expected it to be in the April issue). It's one of the few places where I found out who won the Hugos, since I don't get fanzines. And the two accompanying illustrations (by two different artists) were highly humorous, although the second illustration of Alter was a bit botched. Bookshelf. I can't agree on most of the books reviewed, but I also can't disagree, because I haven't read most of the books. But I agree completely with Spider Robinson's review of Time For The Stars , and also of Space #. And the review of Buy Jupiter and Other Stories is correct about what will sell the book. Showcase. Excellent. Directions. Ditto. Major and Minor Mailers. My opinion of the entire appearance of Galaxy is good. The only fault of the overall appearance is that there were more features than stories this month. I've already mentioned your novella-novelette problem. The artwork was excellent, the best was Stephen Fabian's illustrations for Plutonium. Sincerely, Robert Nowall # Martin Road Poughkeepsie, NY #I And yet the features only took up #fi pa yes... Dear Mr. Baen: In his letter in the February issue of Galaxy, Mr. Wilson employs a plausible argument, but only to a point. Fie forgets that, as expounded by Descartes and others, the universe is merely a construct of the mind, and as such has no separate existence. Seemingly, I should be able to alter the laws of nature in light of this. I have as yet failed, probably due to my native lack of imagination. The existence of the mind itself is rather a sticky wicket. Not that Mr. Wilson, or you, the kindly editor, or anyone else exists, but I still have my own existence to contend with. But by the simple expedient of realizing that there is no external time frame and that therefore, by use of the Principle of Relativity, I have nothing to measure time with, I may assume that I have existed forever. All this has interesting possibilities. Since Galaxy does not exist, by my definition, it seems clear that the subscription rate should be nominal, namely zero. Please put me on your list for free subscriptions to your excellent nonexistant magazine. (Or, if you prefer, I can send a check from my immaterial bank.) Faithfully yours, Wayne Wolf # Rosarita Drive Tempe AZ #I If only it were so...simple.' magazines from # to #. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. # North Carolina, #. Science Fiction Book Exchange. Send # paperbacks with # shipping and hanbooks postpaid. Evans, # Arlington Road, Plymouth, Michigan #. the avid Science FictionFantasy reader. Interviews with top SF writers, reviews, analyses of latest trends, superb graphics. I yr. #; # yrs. #. # #th St., Dept. A, San Diego, Calif. #. wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-ll, St. Paul, Mn. #. 'Blake's Progress' is superlative, extraordinary" Booklet reveals how to turn your ideas into cash. Only #. Write: Dick Dermott, Dept. AA. # #th Ave., New York, NY #I . Cryonics Society of Michigan, publishes news of all medical and social advances relating to cryonics and immortality. Send # for five month trial subscription. Chicago, #. #. amids. ghosts, Atlantis, the Flood. #. Mysteryology Magazine, Box #BN, Burbank. Calif. #. self-addressed envelope for information: Minotaur, Box #A, Eagle River, Alaska #. sale. Free lists. Gordon Barber, #-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN #. Illustrated catalog of SF-Fantasy Weird Tale Books. #s of titles listed. Send #  for one, I for next #, or # for # consecutive catalogs plus Wolfe's "Fifth Head of Carberus" a # clothbound #st ed Nebula Award winning SF book. Send to: Purple Unicorn Books, #-G# London Road, Duluth, Minn. #. Diego, Calif. #. Science Fiction Fans: Slides, prints, posters and patches from Star Trek, Space #, #, plus many more. Send # for catalogue. The Looking Glass, Martin Frisoli, # Park Drive, Glenolden, Pa. #. galaxy with Star Probe, the game of adventure, exploration and conflict in space. As the commander of a gigantic flying saucer you will seek out and contact alien life forms, analyze unknown planetary' systems. Star Probe comes complete with instructions and star map-playing board. Can be played Simulations, Hobbies, # East # St., Bayonne, N.J. #. #. Stamps with each order. Bargainlist, Handling -- #f. Burkhart's Stamps, Box #, Vancouver, B.C. Canada. Giant Five color fluorescent starmap. Highly detailed ships. #-# players. # in plastic and conquest. Giant fluorescent starmap. # pieces. #. Send to: D.C.C., # Edgley Ave., Glenside, Penna. #. (returned unharmed). Your likeness appears from a mosaic of letters and symbols in a #" x #" image. Send # to The Candid Computer, # S. Plaza Drive, Santa Ana, Ca. #. Why not? Take # for # now # The Hugo Winners, Vol I  II. Giant #-in-l volume of # award-winning stories, # lo # Asimov introduces each Pub ed S# # # The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual. Compiled by Franz Joseph A must for all Star Trek devotees Taken from the data banks of the master computer It includes the Articles of Federation, the Romulan and Orgaman Peace Treaties, and much more. Large size paperback vinyl binder Pub ed S# # # Again, Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed Short stories and novels. # in all Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub ed S# # #I The Foundation Trilogy By Isaac Asimov The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism An SF classic Comb Price # # Imperial Earth. By Arthur C Clarke A representative from litan travels to Earth on a crucial mission to insure his home land's survival By Hugo. Jupiter ana Nebula winning au thor Pub ed # # # Epoch Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood.eds Con tains a complete novel by Jack Vance Plus # original stories by other distinguished authors, Niven, Bishop, Pohl, Lc Gum. Simak others Pub ed # #I The Land That Time Forgot. By Edgar Rice Burroughs # novels in one includes The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time's Abyss. # pp of stills from exciting movie Special Edition # Ox By Piers Anthony Follow the adventures of Veg. Cal and Aquilon as they try to gain control over their strange new universe seemingly inhabited only by vicious machines Special Edition #I Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang. By Kate Wilhelm When mankind is sterilized by a germ warlare virus the Sumner lam ily experiments successfully with cloning Pubed # # IhelinpERl if the UfllfP # The Wind's Twelve Quarters. By Ursula K Le Guin # time and space travel and alternate worlds Semley's Necklace, The Masters. The Day Betore the Revolution and more Pub ed S# # # The Winter of the World. By Poul Anderson Hugo and Nebula author spins a tale ol the future Ice Age and the hidden secret of the untameable and unconquerable Rogaviki people Special Edition # Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. By Isaac Asimov Here are # short stories that never appeared in other Asimov collections Buy Jupiter. Shah Guido G, Button Button, and others With autobiographical commentary Pub ed # # yVirmef # The Mote in God's Eye. By Larry Niven  Jerry Pour nelle Man's first contact with an intelligent alien species Pub ed # # # Three to Dorsai! By Gordon R Dickson Packed with adventure and brilliant imagination, these complete SF novels Neocromancer. Tactics ol Mistake and Dorsai! are by this popular Hugo and Nebula winning author. Special Edition # Shakespeare's Planet. By Clifford D Simak # years after being cryogem cally frozen, the only survivor of an Earth exploratory mission finds a strange, sinister creature welcoming him on a new world Exciting oilworld adventure by the author of Enchanted Pilgrimage. Pubed # # # The Best of John W Campbell Lester del Rey. ed A collection ol truly classic stories by one ol the fathers of SF's Golden Age Includes The Last Evolution. Blindness, Elimination and more Special Edition # The Early Pohl. By Frederik Pohl These eight stories and a poem written by this master between #-# include The King's Eye, Daughters of Eternity and Earth, Farewell! With autobiographical commentary Pubed # # #I Starmother. By Sydney J Van Scyoc An intriguing novel ol a young cadet. Jahna sent to a strange hostile planet to work with mutant children A compelling tale of half aliens and half humans Pub ed S# # An Extraordinary Offer What a way to get acquainted with these science fiction greats. 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Box # Mason, Michigan # Sirs: Enclosed is S Please send me Name Address I -- City State Zip Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Tunick, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor " am a bomb," said the bomb. ",  will explode in four hours, five minutes, and seventeen seconds. i have a force equal to fifty thousand English tons of trinitrotoluene." For the citizens of the Lunar city, New Dresden, there was no place to hide. The only weapon against the ferocity of the bodiless Mushin was inner peace. But for Jerome that was not enough. Do you remember how much you wanted that bone? How much you loved that crumb? What it felt like to die? Nefarian does! A Galaxy First. Her lover had died, out among the stars, but he would live forever, beneath the sea. In a world where man existed only to serve, only Atena served man. For the moment Corbel I has escaped his nemesis, Myrelly Lyra. But the Nom is hard on his heels, with a fate far worse than death. peanuts. Tell your Congressman. He's mad about that Bova. All right, Readers, it's up to you! Geis or Alter? Letters from Mumper, Houston, Samec, Pournelle, Beard, Murn, Banks, Powton, Lubniewski, Johnson, St. Edmund. Where to find it. Cover by Stephen Fabian, from Interior illustrations by DiFate, Fabian, Gaughan, Stembach, Yenne of Universal PuMshlng A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offlcas: # East # Street, Msw Yorit, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-Issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second dess postage paid at New Yorfc, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All atorisa printed In this magazine am fiction and any similarity b etw e e n characters and actual persons Is cotnddental. Printed In U.S.A. And we plan to make it a banner year! Already we have slotted fpr the coming year stories and articles by the likes of Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, J. E. Pournelle, Roger Zelazny -- and many more! And who can say what other great things the future holds in store for those who read Galaxy ? Each issue, month after month, year after year, Galaxy has delivered the best science-fiction entertainment that money can buy. If you're a long-time reader you know it's true; if you're a newcomer find out ence Fiction. Remember: Galaxy delivers! Subscribe now! To start our second Quarter-Century out right we are making the following very special offer: and save money too! Send to: Galaxy Magazine # Kennedy Drive (check where applicable) Happauge, NY #  Extend or renew my current subscription, n This is a new subscription.  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There was a bomb on the Leystrasse, level forty-five, right outside the Bagatelle Flower and Gift Shoppe, about a hundred meters down the promenade from Prosperity Plaza. "I am a bomb," the bomb said to passersby. "I will explode in four hours, five minutes, and seventeen seconds. I have a force equal to fifty thousand English tons of trinitrotoluene." A small knot of people gathered to look at it. "I will go off in four hours, four minutes, and thirty-seven seconds." A few people became worried as the bomb talked on. They remembered business elsewhere and hurried away, often toward the tube trains to King City. Eventually, the trains became over-crowded and there was some pushing and shov ing. The bomb was a metal cylinder, a meter high, two meters long, mounted on four steerable wheels There was an array of four television cameras mounted on top of the cylinder, slowly scanning through ninety degrees. No one could recall how it came to be there. It looked a little like the municipal streetcleaning machines; perhaps no one had noticed it because of that. "I am rated at fifty kilotons," the bomb said, with a trace of pride. The police were called.    "A nuclear bomb, you say?" Municipal Police Chief Anna-Louise Bach felt sourness in the pit of her stomach and reached for a box of medicated candy. She was overdue for a new stomach, but the rate she went through them on her job coupled with the size of her paycheck had caused her to rely more and more on these stopgap measures. And the cost of cloned transplants was going up. "It says fifty kilotons," said the man on the screen. "I don't see what else it could be. Unless it's just faking, of course. We're moving in radiation detectors." "You said 'it says.' Are you speaking of a note, or phone call, or what?" "No. It's talking to us. Seems friendly enough, too, but we haven't gotten around to asking it to disarm itself. It could be that its friendliness won't extend that far." "No doubt." She ate another candy. "Call in the bomb squad, of course. Then tell them to do nothing until I arrive, other than look the situation over. I'm going to make a few calls, then I'll be there. No more than thirty minutes." "All right. Will do." There was nothing for it but to look for help. No nuclear bomb had ever been used on Luna. Bach had no experience with them, nor did her bomb crew. She brought her computer on line.    Roger Birkson liked his job. It wasn't so much the working conditions -- which were appalling -- but the fringe benefits. He was on call for thirty days, twenty four hours a day, at a salary that was nearly astronomical. Then he got eleven months paid vacation. He was paid for the entire year whether or not he ever had to exercise his special talents during his thirty days duty. In that way, he was like a firefighter. In a way, he was a firefighter. He spent his long vacations in Luna. No one had ever asked Birkson why he did so; had they asked, he would not have known. But the reason was a subconscious conviction that one day the entire planet Earth would blow up in one glorious fireball. He didn't want to be there when it happened. Birkson's job was bomb disarming for the geopolitical administrative unit called CommEcon Europe. On a busy shift he might save the peans. Of the thirty-five Terran bomb experts vacationing on Luna at the time of the Leystrasse bomb scare, Birkson happened to be closest to the projected epicenter of the blast. The Central Computer found him twenty-five seconds after Chief Bach rang off from her initial report. He was lining up a putt on the seventeenth green of the Burning Tree underground golf course, a half kilometer from Prosperity Plaza, when his bag of clubs began to ring. Birkson was wealthy. He employed a human caddy instead of the mechanical sort. The caddy dropped the flag he had been holding and went to answer it. Birkson took a few practice swings, but found that his concentration had been broken. He relaxed, and took the call. "I need your advice," Bach said, without preamble. "I'm the Chief of Municipal Police for New Dresden, Anna-Louise Bach. I've had a report of a nuclear bomb on the Leystrasse, and I don't have anyone with your experience in these matters. Could you meet me at the tube station in ten minutes?" "Are you crazy? I'm shooting for a seventy-five with two holes to go, an easy three-footer on seventeen and facing a par five on the last hole, and you expect me to go chasing after a hoax?" "Do you know it to be a hoax?" Bach asked, wishing he would say yes. "Well, no, I just now heard about it, myself. But ninety percent of them are, you know." "Fine. I suggest you continue your game. And since you're so sure. I'm going to have Burning Tree sealed off for the duration of the emergency. I want you right there." Birkson considered this. "About how far away is this 'Leystrasse'?" "About six hundred meters. Five levels up from you, and one sector over. Don't worry. There must be dozens of steel plates between you and the hoax. You just sit tight, all right?" Birkson said nothing. "I'll be at the tube station in ten minutes," Bach said. "I'll be in a special capsule. It'll be the last one for five hours." She hung up. Birkson contemplated the wall of the underground enclosure. Then he knelt on the green and lined up his putt. He addressed the ball, tapped it, and heard the satisfying rattle as it sank into the cup. He looked longingly at the eighteenth tee, then jogged off to the clubhouse. "I'll be right back," he called over his shoulder.    Bach's capsule was two minutes bagatelle late, but she had to wait another minute for Birkson to show up. She fumed, trying not to glance at the timepiece embedded in her wrist. He got in, still carrying his putter, and their heads were jerked back as the capsule was launched. They moved for only a short distance, then came to a halt. The door didn't open. "The system's probably tied up," Bach said, squirming. She didn't like to see the municipal services fail in the company of this Terrain. "Ah," Birkson said, flashing a grin with an impossible number of square teeth. "A panic evacuation, no doubt. You didn't have the tube system closed down, I suppose?" "No," she said. "I... well, I thought there might be a chance to get a large number of people away from the area in case this thing does go off." He shook his head, and grinned again. He put this grin after every sentence he spoke, like punctuation. "You'd better seal off the city. If it's a hoax, you're going to have hundreds of dead and injured from the panic. It's a lost cause trying to evacuate. At most, you might save a few thousand." "But..." "Keep them stationary. If it goes off, it's no use anyway. You'll lose the whole city. And no one's going to question your judgement because you'll be dead. If it doesn't go off, you'll be sitting pretty for having prevented a panic. Do it. I know." Bach began to really dislike this man right then, but decided to follow his advice. And his thinking did have a certain cold logic. She phoned the station and had the lid clamped on the city. Now the cars in the cross-tube ahead would be cleared, leaving only her priority capsule moving. They used the few minutes delay while the order was implemented to size each other up. Bach saw a blonde, square-jawed young man in a checkered sweater and golf knickers. He had a friendly face, and that was what puzzled her. There was no trace of worry on his smooth features. His hands were steady, clasped calmly around the steel shaft of his putter. She wouldn't have called his manner cocky or assured, but he did manage to look cheerful. She had just realized that he was looking her over, and was wondering what he saw, when he put his hand on her knee. He might as well have slapped her. She was stunned. "What are you... get your hand off me you... you groundhog." Birkson's hand had been moving upward. He was apparently unfazed by the insult. He turned in his seat and reached for her hand. His smile was dazzling. "I just thought that since we're stalled here with nothing else to do, we might start getting to know each other. No harm in that, is there? I just hate to waste any time, that's all." She wrenched free of his grasp and assumed a defensive posture, feeling trapped in a nightmare. But he relented, having no interest in pursuing the matter when he had been rebuffed. "All right. We'll wait. But I'd like to have a drink with you, or maybe dinner. After this thing's wrapped up, of course." " 'This thing... ' How can you think of something like that..." "At a time like this. I know. I've heard it. Bombs get me homy, is all. So okay, so I'll leave yog alone." He grinned again. "But maybe you'll feel different when this is over." For a moment she thought she was going to throw up from a combination of revulsion and fear. Fear, of the bomb, not this awful man. Her stomach was twisted into a pretzel, and here he sat, thinking of sex. W'hat was he, anyway? The capsule lurched again, and they were on their way.    The deserted Leystrasse made a gleaming frame of stainless steel storefronts and fluorescent ceiling for the improbable pair hurrying from the tube station in the Plaza: Birkson in in his anachronistic golf togs, cleats rasping on the polished rock floor, and Bach, half a meter taller than him, thin like a Lunarian. She wore the regulation uniform of the Municipal Police, which was a blue armband and cap with her rank of chief emblazoned on them, a shoulder holster, an equipment belt around her waist from which dangled the shining and lethal-looking tools of her trade, cloth slippers, and a few scraps of clothing in arbitrary places. In the benign environment of Lunar corridors, modesty had died out ages ago. They reached the cordon which had been established around the bomb, and Bach conferred with the officer in charge. The hall was echoing with off-key music. "What's that?" Birkson asked. Officer Walters, the man to whom Bach had been speaking, looked Birkson over, weighing just how far he had to go in deference to this grinning weirdo. He was obviously the bomb expert Bach had referred to in an earlier call, but he was a Terran, and not a member of the force. Should he be addressed as 'sir'? He couldn't decide. "It's the bomb. It's been singing to us for the last five minutes. Ran out of things to say, I guess . " "Interesting." Swinging the putter lazily from side to side, he walked to the barrier of painted steel crowd-control sections. He started sliding one of them to the side. "Hold it... ah,, sir," Walters said. "Wait a minute, Birkson," Bach confirmed, running to the man and almost grabbing his sleeve. She backed away at the last moment. "It said no one's to cross that barrier," Walters supplied to Bach's questioning glance. "Says it'll blow us all to the Farside." "What is that damn thing, anyway?" Bach asked, plaintively. Birkson withdrew from the barrier and took Bach aside with a tactful touch on the arm. He spoke to her with his voice just low enough for Walters to hear. "It's a cyborged human connected to a bomb, probably a uranium device," he said. "I've stien the design. It's just like one that went off in Johannesburg three years ago. I didn't know they were still making them." "I heard about it," Bach said, feeling cold and alone. "Then you think it's really a bomb? How do you know it's a cyborg? Couldn't it be tape recordings, or a computer?" Birkson rolled his eyes slightly, and Bach reddened. Damn it, they were reasonable questions. And to her surprise, he could not defend his opinion logically. She wondered what she was stuck with. Was this man really the expert she took him to be, or a plaid-sweatered imposter? "You can call it a hunch. I'm going to talk to this fellow, and I want you to roll up an industrial x-ray unit on the level below this while I'm doing it. On the level above, photographic film. You get the idea?" "You want to take a picture of the inside of this thing. Won't that be dangerous?" "Yeah. Are your insurance premiums paid up?" Bach said nothing, but gave the spinning through her head, but she didn't want to make a fool of herself by asking a stupid one. Such as: how much radiation did a big industrial x-ray machine produce when beamed through a rock and steel floor? She had a feeling she wouldn't like the answer. She sighed, and decided to let Birkson have his head until she felt he couldn't handle it. He was about the only hope she had. And he was strolling casually around the perimeter, swinging his goddam putter behind him, whistling bad harmony with the tune coming from the bomb. What was a career police officer to do? Back him up on the harmonica? The scanning cameras atop the bomb stopped their back and forth motion. One of them began to track Birkson. He grinned his flashiest, and waved to it. The music stopped. "I am a fifty kiloton nuclear bomb of the uranium-# type," it said. "You must stay behind the perimeter I have caused to be erected here. You must not disobey this order." Birkson held up his hands, still grinning, and splayed out his fingers. "You got me, bud. I won't bother you. I was just admiring your casing. Pretty nice job, there. It seems a shame to blow it up." "Thank you," the bomb said, cordially. "But that is my purpose. You cannot divert me from it." "Never entered my mind. Promise." "Very well. You may continue to admire me, if you wish, but from a safe distance. Do not attempt to rush me. All my vital wiring is safely protected, and I have a recan ignite long before you can reach me, but I do not wish to do so until the alloted time has come." Birkson whistled. "That's pretty fast, brother. Much faster than me, I'm sure. It must be nice, being able to move like that after blundering along all your life with neural speeds." "Yes, I find it very' gratifying. It was a quite unexpected benefit of becoming a bomb." This was more like it, Bach thought. Her dislike of Birkson had not blinded her to the fact that he had been checking out his hunch. And her questions had been answered: no tape array could answer questions like that, and the machine had as much as admitted that it had been a human being at one time. Birkson completed a circuit, back to where Bach and Walters were standing. He paused, and said in a low voice, "Check out that time." "What time?" "What time did you say you were going to explode?" he yelled. "In three hours, twenty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds," the bomb supplied. "That time," he whispered. "Get your computers to work on it. See if it's the anniversary of any political group, or the time something happened that someone might have a grudge about." He started to turn away, then thought of something. "But most important, check the birth records." "May I ask why?" He seemed to be dreaming, but came back to them. "I'm just feeling this character out. I've got a feeling this might be his birthday. Find out who was born at that time -- it can't be too many, down to the second -- and try to locate them all. The one you can't find will be our guy. I'm betting on it." "What are you betting? And how do you know for sure it's a man?" That look again, and again she blushed. But, damn it, she had to ask questions. Why should he make her feel defensive about it?' "Because he's chosen a male voice to put over his speakers. I know that's not conclusive, but you get hunches after a while. As to what I'm betting... no, it's not my life. I'm sure I can get this one. How about dinner tonight if I'm right?" The smile was ingenuous, without the trace of lechery she thought she had seen before. But her stomach was still crawling. She turned away without answering. For the next twenty minutes, nothing much happened. Birkson continued his slow stroll around the machine, stopping from time to time to shake his head in admiration. The thirty men and women of Chief Bach's police detail stood around nervously with nothing to do, as far away from the machine as pride would allow. There was no sense in taking cover. Bach herself was kept busy coordinating the behind-the-scenes maneuvering from a command post that had been set up around the comer, in the Elysian Travel Agency. It had phones and a computer output printer. She sensed the dropping morale among her officers, who could see nothing going on. Had they known that surveying lasers were poking their noses around trees in the Plaza, taking bearings to they might have felt a little better. And on the floor below, the x-ray had arrived. Ten minutes later, the output began to chatter. Bach could hear it in the silent, echoing corridor from her position halfway between the travel agency and the bomb. She turned, and met a young officer with the green armband of a rookie. The woman's hand was ice-cold as she handed Bach the sheet of yellow printout paper. There were three names printed on it, and below that, some dates and events listed. "This bottom information was from the fourth expansion of the problem," the officer explained. "Very low probability stuff. The three people were all bom either on the second or within a three-second margin of error, in three different years. Everyone else had been contacted." "Keep looking for these three, too," Bach said. As she turned away, she noticed that the young officer was pregnant, about in her fifth month. She thought briefly of sending her away from the scene, but what was the use? Birkson saw her coming, and broke off his slow circuits of the bomb. He took the paper from her and scanned it. He tore off the bottom part without being told it was low probability, crumpled it, and let it drop to the floor. Scratching his head, he walked slowly back to the bomb. "Hans?" he called out. "How did you know my name?" the bomb asked. "Ah, Hans, my boy, credit us with some sense. You can't have got into this without knowing that the MuniPol can do very fast investigations. Unless I've been underestimating you. Have I?" "No," the bomb conceded. "I knew you would find out who I was. But it doesn't alter the situation." "Of course not. But it makes for easier conversation. How has life been treating you, my friend?" "Terrible," mourned the man who had become a fifty kiloton nuclear weapon.    Every morning Hans Lei ter rolled out of bed and padded into his cozy water closet. It was not the standard model for residential apartment modules, but a special one he had installed after he moved in. Hans lived alone, and it was the one luxury he allowed himself. In his little palace, he sat in a chair that massaged him into wakefulness, washed him, shaved him, powdered him, cleaned his nails, splashed him with scent, then made love to him with a rubber imitation that was a good facsimile of the real thing. Hans was awkward with women. He would dress, walk down three hundred meters of corridor, and surrender himself to a pedestrian slideway which took him as far as the Cross-Crisium Tube. There, he allowed himself to be fired like a projectile through a tunnel below the Lunar surface. Hans worked in the Crisium Heavy Machine Foundary, His job there was repairing almost anything that broke down. He was good at it; he was much more comfortable with machines than with people. One day he made a slip and got his leg caught in a massive roller. It was not a serious accident, because the failsafe systems turned off the machine before his body or head could be damaged, but it hurt terribly and completely ruined the leg. It had to be taken off. While he was waiting for the cloned replacement limb to be grown, Hans had been fitted with a prosthetic. It has been a revelation to him. It worked like a dream, as good as his old leg and perhaps better. It was connected to his severed leg nerve, but was equipped with a threshold cut-off circuit, and one day when he barked his artificial shin he saw that it had caused him no pain. He recalled the way that same injury had felt with his flesh and blood leg, and again he was impressed. He thought, too, of the agony when his leg had been caught in the machine. When the new leg was ready for transplanting, Hans had elected to retain the prosthetic. It was unusual, but not unprecedented. From that time on, Hans, who had never been known to his coworkers as talkative or social, withdrew even more from his fellow humans. He would speak only when spoken to. But people had observed him talking to the stamping press, and the water cooler, and the robot sweeper. At night, it was Hans' habit to sit on his vibrating bed and watch the holovision until one o'clock. At that time, his kitchen would prepare him a late snack, roll it to him in his bed, and he would retire for the night. For the last three years Hans had been neglecting to turn the set on bagatelle before getting into bed. Nevertheless, he continued to sit quietly on the bed staring at the empty screen.    When she finished reading the personal data printout, Baqh was struck once more at the efficiency of the machines in her control. This man was almost a cipher, yet there were nine thousand words in storage concerning his uneventful life, ready to be called up and printed into an excruciatingly boring biography. "... so you came to feel that you were being controlled at every step of your life by machines," Birkson was saying. He was sitting on one of the barriers, swinging his legs back and forth. Bach joined him and offered the long sheet of printout. He waved it away. She could hardly blame him. "But it's true!" the bomb said. "We all are, you know. We're part of this huge machine that's called New Dresden. It moves us around like parts on am assembly line, washes us, feeds us, puts us to bed and sings us to sleep." "Ah," Birkson said, agreeably. "Are you a Luddite, Hans?" "No!" the bomb said in a shocked voice. "Roger, you've missed the whole point. I don't want to destroy the machines. I want to serve them better. I wanted to become a machine, like my new leg. Don't you see? We're part of the machine, but we're the most inefficient part." The two talked on, and Bach wiped the sweat from her palms. She couldn't see where all this was going, unless Birkson seriously hoped to talk Hans Leiter out of what he was going to do in -- she glanced at the clock -- two hours and forty-three minutes. It was maddening. On the one hand, she recognized the skill he was using in establishing a rapport with the cyborg. They were on a first-name basis, and at least the damn machine cared enough to argue its position. On the other hand, so what? What good was it doing? Walters approached and whispered into her ear. She nodded, and tapped Birkson on the shoulder. "They're ready to take the picture whenever you are," she said. He waved her off. "Don't bother me," he said, loudly. "This is getting interesting. So if what you say is true," he went on to Hans, getting up and pacing intently back and forth, this time inside the line of barriers, "maybe I ought to look into this myself. You really like being cyborged better than being human?" "Infinitely so," the bomb said. He sounded enthusiastic. "I need no sleep now, and I no longer have to bother with elimination or eating. I have a tank for nutrients, which are fed into the housing where my brain and central nervous system are located." He paused. "I tried to eliminate the ups and downs of hormone flow and the emotional reactions that followed," he confided. "No dice, huh?" "No. Something always distracted me. So when I heard of this place where they would cyborg me and get rid of all that, I jumped at the chance." Inactivity was making Bach impulsive. She had to say or do something. "Where did you get the work done, Hans?" she ventured. The bomb started to say something, but Birkson laughed loudly and slapped Bach hard on the back. "Oh, no, Chief. That's pretty tricky, right Hans? She's trying to get you to rat. That's not done, Chief. There's no point of honor involved." "Who is that?" the bomb asked, suspiciously. "Let me introduce Chief AnnaLouise Bach, of the New Dresden Police. Ann, meet Hans," "Police?" Hans asked, and Bach felt goose-pimples when she detected a note of fright in the voice. What was this maniac trying to do, frightening the guy like that? She was close to pulling Birkson off the case. She held off because she thought she could see a familiar pattern in it, something she could use as a way to participate, even if ignominiously. It was the old good guy-bad guy routine, one of the oldest police maneuvers in the book. "Aw, don't be like that," Birkson said to Hans. "Not all cops are brutes. Ann here, she's a nice person. Give her a chance. She's only doing her job." "Oh, I have no objection to police," the bomb said. "They are necessary to keep the social machine functioning. Law and order is a basic precept of the coming new Mechanical Society. I'm pleased to meet you, Chief Bach. I wish the circumstances didn't make us enemies," "Pleased to meet you, Hans." She thought, carefully before she phrased her next question. She wouldn't have to take the hard-line approach to contrast herself with affable, buddy-buddy Birkson. She needn't be an antagonist, but it wouldn't hurt if she asked questions that probed at his motives. "Tell me, Hans. You say you're not a Luddite. You say you like machines. Do you know how many machines you'll destroy if you set yourself off? And even more important, what you'll do to this social machine you've been talking about? You'll wipe out the whole city." The bomb seemed to be groping for words. He hesitated, and Bach felt the first glimmer of hope since this insanity began. "You don't understand. You're speaking from an organic viewpoint. Life is important to you. A machine is not concerned with life. Damage to a machine, even the social machine, is simply something to be repaired. In a way, I hope to set an example. I wanted to become a machine -- " "And the best, the very ultimate machine," Birkson put in, "is the atomic bomb. It's the end point of all mechanical thinking." "Exactly," said the bomb, sounding very pleased. It was nice to be understood. "I wanted to be the very best machine I could possibly be, and it had to be this." "Beautiful, Hans," Birkson breathed. "I see what you're talking about. So if we go on with that line of thought we logically come to the conclusion..." and he was off into an exploration of the fine points of the new Mechanistic world view. Bach was trying to decide which was the crazier of the two, when she was handed another message. She read it, then tried to find a place to break into the conversation. But there was no convenient place. Birkson was more and more animated, almost frothing at the mouth as he discovered points of ageement between the two of them. Bach noticed her officers standing around nervously, following the conversation. It was clear from their expressions that they feared they were being sold out, that when zero hour arrived they would still be here watching intellectual ping-pong. But long before that, she could have a mutiny on her hands. Several of them were fingering their weapons, probably without even knowing it. She touched Birkson on the sleeve, but he waved her away. Damn it, this was too much. She grabbed him and nearly pulled him from his feet, swung him around until her mouth was close to his ear and growled. "Listen to me, you idiot. They're going to take the picture. You'll have to stand back some. It's better if we're all shielded." "Leave me alone," he shot back, and pulled from her grasp. But he was still smiling. "This is just getting interesting," he said, in a normal tone of voice. Birkson came near to dying in that moment. Three guns were trained on him from the circle of officers, awaiting only the order to fire. They didn't like seeing their Chief treated that way. Bach herself was damn near to giving the order. The only thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that with Birkson dead, the machine might go off ahead of schedule. The only thing to do now was to get him out of the way and go on as best she could, knowing that she was doomed to failure. No one could say she hadn't given the expert a chance. "But what I was wondering about," Birkson was saying, "was why today? What happened today? Is this the day Cyrus McCormick invented the combine harvester, or something?" "It's my birthday," Hans said, somewhat shyly. "Your birthday ?" Birkson managed to look totally amazed to learn what he already knew. "Your birthday. That's great, Hans. Many happy returns of the day, my friend." He turned and took in all of the officers with an expansive sweep of his hands. "Let's sing, people. Come on, it's his birthday, for heaven's sake. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Hans..." He bellowed, he was off-key, he swept his hands in grand circles with no sense of rhythm. But so infectious was his mania that several of the officers found themselves joining in. He ran around the circle, pulling the words out of them with great scooping motions of his hands. Bach bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep herself steady. She had been singing, too. The scene was so ridiculous, so blackly improbable... She was not the only one who was struck the same way. One of her officers, a brave man who she knew personally to have shown courage under fire, fell on his face in a dead faint. A woman officer covered her face with her hands and fled down the corridor, making helpless coughing sounds. She found an alcove and vomited. And still Birkson capered. Bach had her gun half-way out of the shoulder holster, when he shouted. "What's a birthday without a party?" he asked. "Let's have a big party." He looked around, fixed on the flower shop. He started for it, and as he passed Bach he whispered, "Take the picture now." It galvanized her. She desperately wanted to believe he knew what he was doing, and just at the moment when his madness seemed total he had shown her the method. A distraction. Please, let it be a distraction. She turned and gave the prearranged signal to the officer standing at the edge of Prosperity Plaza. She turned back in time to see Birkson smash in the window of the flower shop with his putter. It made a deafening crash. "Goodness," said Hans, who sounded truly shocked. "Did you have to do that? That's private property." "What does it matter?" Birkson yelled. "Hell, man, you're going to do much worse real soon. I'm just getting things started." He reached in and pulled out an armload of flowers, signalling to others to give him a hand. The police didn't like it, but soon were looting the shop and building a huge wreath just outside the line of barriers. "I guess you're right," said Hans, a little breathlessly. A taste of violence had excited him, whetted his appetite for more to come. "But you startled me. I felt a real thrill, like I haven't felt since I was human." "Then let's do it some more." And Birkson ran up and down one side of the street, breaking out every window he could reach. He picked up small articles he found inside the shops and threw them. Some of them shattered when they hit. He finally stopped. Leystrasse had been transformed. No longer the scrubbed and air-conditioned Lunar environment, it had become as shattered, chaotic and uncertain as the tension-filled emotional atmosphere it contained. Bach shuddered and swallowed the rising taste of bile. It was a precursor of things to come, she was sure. It hit her deeply to see the staid and respectable Leystrasse ravaged. "A cake," Birkson said. "We have to have a cake. Hold on a minute, I'll be right back." He strode quickly toward Bach, took her elbow and turned her, pulled her insistently away with him. "You have to get those officers away from here," he said, conversationally. "They're tense. They could explode at any minute. In fact," and he favored her with his imbecile grin, "they're probably more dangerous right now than the bomb." "You mean you think it's a fake?" "No. It's for real. I know the psychological pattern. After this much trouble, he won't want to be a dud. Other types, they're in it for the attention and they'd just as soon fake it. Not Hans. But what I mean is, I have him. I can get him. But I can't count on your officers. Pull them back and leave only two or three of your most trusted people." "All right." She had decided again, more from a sense of helpless futility than anything else, to trust him. He had pulled a neat diversion with the flower shop and the x-ray. "We may have him already," he went on, as they reached the end of the street and turned the corner. "Often, the x-ray is enough. It cooks some of the circuitry and makes it unreliable. I'd hope to kill him outright, but he's shielded. Oh, he's probably got a lethal dosage, but it'd take him days to die. That doesn't do us any good. And if his circuitry is knocked out, the only way to find out is to wait. We have to do better than that. Here's what I want you to do." He stopped abruptly and relaxed, leaning against the wall and gazing out over the trees and artificial sunlight of the Plaza. Bach could hear songbirds. They had always made her feel good before. Now all she could think of was incinerated corpses. Birkson ticked off points on his fingers. She listened to him carefully. Some of it was strange, but no worse than she had already witnessed. And he really did have a plan. He really did. The sense of relief was so tremendous that it threatened to create a mood of euphoria in her, one not yet justified by the circumstances. She nodded curtly to each of his suggestions, then again to the officer who stood beside her, confirming what Birkson had said and turning it into orders. The young man rushed off to carry them out and Birkson started to return to the bomb. Bach grabbed him. "Why wouldn't you let Hans answer my question about who did the surgical work on him? Was that part of your plan?" The question was half belligerant. "Oh. Yeah, it was, in a way. I just grabbed the opportunity to make him feel closer to me. But it wouldn't have done you any good. He'll have a block against telling that, for sure. It could even be set to explode the bomb if he tries to answer that question. Hans is a maniac, but don't underestimate the people who helped him get where he is now. They'll be protected." "Who are they?" Birkson shrugged. It was such a casual, uncaring gesture that Bach was annoyed again. "I have no idea. I'm not political, Ann. I don't know the Antiabortion Movement from the Freedom for Mauretania League. They build 'em, I take 'em apart. It's as simple as that. Your job is to find out how it happened. I guess you ought to get started on that." "We already have," she conceded. "I just thought that... well, coming from Earth, where this sort of thing happens all the time, that you might know... damn it, Birkson. Why ? Why is this happening?" He laughed, while Bach turned red and went into a slow boil. Any of her officers, seeing her expression, would have headed for the nearest blast shelter. But Birkson laughed on. Didn't he give a damn about anything? "Sorry," he forced out. "I've heard that question before, from other police chiefs. It's a good question." He waited, a half-smile on his face. When she didn't say anything, he went on. "You don't have the right perspective on this, Ann." "That's Chief Bach to you, damn you." "Okay," he said, easily. "What you don't see is that this thing is no different from a hand grenade tossed into a crowd, or a bomb sent through the mail. It's a form of communication. It's just that today, with so many people, you have to shout a little louder to get any attention." "But... who? They haven't even identified themselves. You're saying that Hans is a tool of these people. He's been wired into the bomb, with his own motives for exploding. Obviously he didn't have the resources to do this himself, I can see that." "Oh, you'll hear from them. I don't think they expect him to be successful. He's a warning. If they were really serious they could find the sort of person they want, one who's politically committed and will die for the cause. Of course, they don't care if the bomb goes off; they'll be pleasantly surprised if it does. Then they can stand up and pound their chests for a while. They'll be famous." "But where did they get the uranium? The security is... " For the first time, Birkson showed a trace of annoyance. "Don't be silly. The path leading to today was irrevocably set in #. There was never any way to avoid it. The presence of a tool implies that it will be used. You can try your best to keep it in the hands of what you think of as responsible people, but it'll never work. And it's no different, that's what I'm saying. This bomb is just another weapon. It's a cherry bomb in an anthill. It's gonna cause one hill of ants a hell of a lot of trouble, but it's no threat to the race of ants." Bach could not see it that way. She tried, but it was still a nightmare of entirely new proportions to her. How could he equate the killrandom act of violence where three or four might be hurt? She was familiar with that. Bombs went off every day in her city, as in every human city. People were always dissatisfied. "I could walk down... no, it's up here, isn't it?" Birkson mused for a moment on cultural differences. "Anyway, give me enough money and I'll bet I could go up to your slum neighborhoods right this minute and buy you as many kilos of uranium or plutonium as you want. Which is something you ought to be doing, by the way. Anything can be bought. Anything. For the right price, you could have bought weapons-grade material on the black market as early as # or so. It would have been very expensive; there wasn't much of it. You'd have had to buy a lot of people. But now... well, you think it out." He stopped, and seemed embarrassed by his outburst. "I've read a little about this," he apologized. She did think it out as she followed him back to the cordon. What he said was true, When controlled fusion proved too costly for wide-scale use, humanity had opted for fast breeder reactors. There had been no other choice. And from that moment, nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists had been the price humanity accepted. And the price they would continue to pay. "I wanted to ask you one more question," she said. He stopped and turned to face her. His smile was dazzling. "Ask away. But are you going to take me up on that bet?" She was momentarily unsure of what he meant "Oh. Are you saying you'd help us locate the underground uranium ring? I'd be grateful..." "No, no. Oh, I'll help you. I'm sure I can make a contact. I used to do that before I got into this game. What I meant was, are you going to bet I can't find some? We could bet... say, a dinner together as soon as I've found it. Time limit of seven days. How about it?" She thought she had only two alternatives: walk away from him, or kill him. But she found a third. "You're a betting man. I guess I can see why. But that's what I wanted to ask you. How can you stay so calm? Why doesn't this get to you like it does to me and my people? You can't tell me it's simply that you're used to it." He thought about it. "And why not? You can get used to anything, you know. Now what about that bet?" "If you don't stop talking about that," she said, quietly, "I'm going to break your arm." "All right." He said nothing further, and she asked no further questions.    into an inferno that could scarcely be described in terms comprehensible to humans. Everything in a half-kilometer radius simply vanished into super-heated gases and plasma: buttresses, plate-glass windows, floors and ceilings, pipes, wires, tanks, machines, gewgaws tapes, apartments, furniture, household pets, men, women, and children. They were the lucky ones. The force of the expanding blast compressed two hundred levels below it like a giant sitting on a Dagwood sandwich, making holes through plate steel turned to putty by the heat is easily as a punch press through tinfoil. Upwards, the surface bulged into the soundless Lunar night and split to reveal a white hell beneath. Chunks flew away, chunks as large as city sectors. before the center collapsed back on itself to leave a crater whose walls were a maze of compartments and ant-tunnels that dripped and flowed like warm gelatin. No trace was left of human bodies within two kilometers of the explosion. They had died after only the shortest period of suffering, their bodies consumed or spread into an invisible layer of organic film by the combination of heat and pressure that passed through walls, entered rooms where the doors were' firmly shut. Farther away, the sound was enough to congeal the ; the heat roasted them, the blast stripped flesh from bones to leave shrunken stick figures. Still the effects attenuated as the blast was channeled into corridors that were structurally strong enough to remain intact, and that very strength was the downfall of the inhabitants of the maze. Twenty kilometers from the epicenter, pressure doors popped through steel flanges like squeezed watermelon seeds. burnt, blasted corpses, and ten million injured so hideously that they would die in hours or days. But Bach had been miraculously thrown clear by some freak of the explosion. She hurtled through the void her, and each carried a birthday cake. They were singing. She joined in. " Happy birthday to you, happy birthday..." "Chief Bach." "Huh?" She felt a cold chill pass over her body. For a moment she could only stare down into the face of Roger Birkson. "You all right now?" he asked. He looked concerned. "I'm... what happened?" He patted her on both arms, then shook her heartily. "Nothing. You drifted off for a moment." He narrowed his eyes. "I think you were daydreaming. I want to be diplomatic about this... ah, what I mean... I've seen it happen before. I think you were trying to get away from us." She rubbed her hands over her face. "I think I was. But I sure went in the wrong direction. I'm all right now." She could remember it now, and knew she had not passed out or become totally detached from what was going on. She had watched it all. Her memories of the explosion, so raw and real a moment before., were already the stuff of nightmares. Too bad she hadn't come awake into a better world. It was so damn unfair. That was the reward at the end of a nightmare, wasn't it? You woke up to find everything was all right. Instead, here was a long line of uniformed officers, bearing birthday cakes to a fifty kiloton atomic bomb.    Birkson had ordered the lights turned off in the Leystrasse. When his order had not been carried out, he broke out the lights with his putter. Soon, he had some of the officers helping him. Now the beautiful Leystrasse, the pride of New Dresden, was a flickering tunnel through hell. The light of a thousand tiny birthday candles on five hundred cakes turned everything red-orange and made people into shadowed demons Officers kept arriving with hastily wrapped presents, flowers, balloons. Hans, the little man who was now nothing but a brain and nerve network floating in a lead container; Hans, the cause of all this, the birthday boy himself, watched it all in unconcealed delight from his battery of roving television cameras. He sang loudly. "I am a bomb! I am a bomb!" he yelled. He had never had so much fun. Bach and Birkson retreated from the scene into the darkened recess of the Bagatelle Flower Shoppe. There, a stereo viewing tank had been set up. The x-ray picture had been taken with a moving plate technique that allowed a computer to generate a three dimensional model. They leaned over the tank now and studied it. They had been joined by Sergeant McCoy, Bach's resident bomb expert, and another man from the Lunar Radiation Laboratory. "This is Hans," said Birkson, moving a red dot in the' tank by means of a dial on the side. It flicked over and around a vague gray shape that trailed dozens of wires. Bach wondered again at the pressures that would allow a man to like having his body stripped from him. There was nothing in that lead flask but the core of the man, the brain and central nervous system. "Here's the body of the bomb. The two sub-critical masses. The H.E. charge, the timer, the arming harrier, which is now withdrawn, h's an old design, ladies and gentlemen. Old, but reliable. As basic bagatelle as the bow and arrow. It's very much like the first one dropped on the Nippon Empire at Hiro-Shima." "You're sure it'll go off, then?" Bach put in. "Sure as taxes. Hell, a kid could build one of these in the bathroom, given only the uranium and some shielding equipment. Now let me see." He pored over the phantom in the tank, tracing out wiring paths with the experts. They debated possibilities, lines of attack, drawbacks. At last they seemed to reach a consensus. "As I see it, we have only one option," Birkson said. "We have to go for his volitional control over the bomb. I'm pretty sure we've isolated the main cable that goes from him to the detonator. Knock that out, and he can't do a thing. We can pry that tin can open by conventional means and disarm that way. McCoy?" "I agree," said McCoy. "We'd have a full hour, and I'm sure we can get in there with no trouble. When they cyborged this one, they put all their cards on the human operator. They didn't bother with entry blocks, since Hans could presumably blow it up before we could get close enough to do anything. With his control out, we only have to open it up with a torch and drop the damper into place. ment. "Though I'm not quite as convinced as Mr. Birkson that he's got the right cable in mind for what he wants to do. If we had more time..." "We've wasted enough time already," Bach said, decisively. She had swung rapidly from near terror of Roger Birkson to total trust. It was her only defense. She knew she could do nothing at all about the bomb, and had to trust someone. "Then we go for it. Is your crew in place? Do they know what to do? And above all, are they goodl Really good. There won't be a second chance." "Yes, yes, and yes," Bach said. "They'll do it. We know how to cut rock on Luna." "Then give them the coordinates, and go." Birkson seemed to relax a bit. Bach saw that he had been under some form of tension, even if it was only excitement at the challenge. He had just given his last order. It was no longer in his hands. His fatalistic gambler's instinct came into play and the restless, churning energy he had brought to the enterprise vanished. There was nothing to do about it but wait. Birkson was good at waiting. He had lived through twenty-one of these final countdowns. He faced Bach and started to say something to her, then thought better of it. She saw doubt in his face for the first time, and it made her skin crawl. Damn it, she had thought he was sure. "Chief," he said, quietly, "I want to apologize for the way I treated you these last few hours. It's not something I can control when I'm on the job. I... " This time it was Bach's turn to laugh, and the release of tension it brought with it was almost orgasmic. She felt like she hadn't "Forgive me," she said. "I saw you were worried, and thought it was about the bomb. It was just such a relief." "Oh, yeah," he said, dismissing it. "No point in worrying now. Either your people hit it or they don't. We won't know if they don't. What I was saying, it just sort of comes over me. Honestly. I get homy, I get manic, I totally forget about other people except as objects to be manipulated. So I just wanted to say I like you. I'm glad you put up with me. And I won't pester you anymore." She came over and put her hand on his shoulder. "Can I call you Roger? Thanks. Listen, if' this thing works, I'll have dinner with you. I'll give you the key to the city, a ticker tape parade, and a huge bonus for a consultant fee... and my eternal friendship. We've been tense, okay? Let's forget about these last few hours." "All right." His smile was quite different this time. Outside, it happened very quickly. The crew on the laser drill were positioned beneath the bomb, working from ranging reports and calculations to aim their brute at precisely the right spot. The beam took less than a tenth of a second to eat through the layer of rock in the ceiling and emerge in the air above the Leystrasse. It ate through the metal sheath of the bomb's underside, the critical wire, the other side of the bomb, and part of the ceiling like they weren't even there. It had penetrated into the level above before it could be shut off. There was a shower of sparks, a quick sliding sound, then a muffled thud. The whole structure of the bomb trembled, and smoke screeched from the two drilled holes in the top and bottom. Bach didn't understand it, but could see that she was alive and assumed it was over. She turned to Birkson, and the shock of seeing him nearly stopped her heart. His face was a gray mask, drained of blood. His mouth hung open. He swayed, and almost fell over. Bach caught him and eased him to the floor. "Roger... what is it? Is it still...will it go off? Answer me, answer me. What should I do?" He waved weakly, pawed at her hands. She realized he was trying to give her a reassuring pat. It was feeble indeed. "No danger," he wheezed, trving to get his breath back. "No danger. The wrong wire. We hit the wrong wire. Just luck, is all, nothing but luck." She remembered. They had been bagatelle trying to remove Hans' control over the bomb. Was he still in control? Birkson answered before she could speak. "He's dead. That explosion. That was the detonator going off. He reacted just too late. We hit the disarming switch. The shield dropped into place so the masses couldn't come together even if the bomb was set off. Which he did. He set it off. That sound, that mmmmmmwooooph!" He was not with her. His eyes stared back into a time and place that held horror for him. "I heard that sound -- the detonator -- once before, over the telephone. I was coaching this woman, no more than twenty-five, because I couldn't get there in time. She had only three more minutes. I heard that sound, then nothing, nothing." She sat near him on the floor as her crew began to sort out the mess, haul the bomb away for disposal, laugh and joke in hysterical relief. At last Birkson regained control of himself. There was no trace of the bomb except a distant hollowness in his eyes. "Come on," he said, getting to his feet with a little help from her. "You're going on twenty-four hour leave. You've earned it. We're going back to Burning Tree and you're going to watch me make a par five on the eighteenth. Then we've got a date for dinner. What place is nice?"  VA I ' Some experiences are priceless -- but still they must be paid for! you wanted that bone? How you hoped that she would give it to you and not toss it into the pot with the rest? Maybe she would leave a few shreads of meat clinging to it. How you pranced, your nails drumming a tattoo on the slippery kitchen floor. How you wiggled, your tail slapping quickly back and forth, your head bobbing like an idiot. She told you to speak. Speak? Yes, you did, you spoke and spoke and spoke until she patted you on your head and ahhh -- finally! -- lowered the bone. You took it in your mouth, carefully, not at all too greedily. It felt hard. It smelled like animal. Beast. It was. You felt your mouth fill with saliva as you carried it proudly outside as she swung open the screen door. And then? Faster, faster faster you trotted until you reached the shade of the maple. Then you dropped the bone onto the grass. Remember how you sniffed it, short little sniffs, then deep, long ones? Remember your teeth tearing at the meat? After cleaning it all off, you would thrust the bone as far back into your mouth as you could. Remember how your teeth would grind down on it, sometimes slipping and how, finally, you would shift it to another position holding it firmly with your paws to gnaw happily away once more. Remember the taste and feel of the bone you had that summer day under the maple. Wasn't it the best bone you ever had? Not the meatiest, not the biggest, but, allaround, the best bone experience. Don't you remember what it was like to be a dog? Really? That's odd. I do. I think I liked it even better than finding that cookie crumb on the sidewalk as I was just passing the third crack. It seemed like a longer trek than usual, but oh, brother, what a reward! I wasn't one of those who didn't watch what it was doing. I was scurrying right along when -- you really wouldn't believe it -- there it was. Almost as big as I was. And it was fresh. The biggest chunk of anything quite so marvelous I had ever found. I had to stop to admire it before doing anything about it. Think how we would all enjoy it. How envious everyone would be when they saw me walk into the nest canying that. It would absolutely stun them to think that I, last on the list of food gatherers, could have discovered such a lode. They would surely honor me for weeks to come, perhaps append a title to my name. But oh! The thing itself. To look at that buttery honeysoaked crumb and to know it was mine, mine l The smell of it -- truly I felt faint from the richness of this experience. Then I set to thinking about how best to raise it. I began the task, finally shouldering most of it, the rest trailing only slightly behind me on the ground. What? Naturally you can't imagine anything more terrifying than what happened next. Of course fear dried my mouth as I looked up -- and up and up and up. I dropped the crumb, my treasure of treasures, and tried to run. Out of breath at last but quick, quick, quick. My legs ached, all of them. Would I make it? It was too far, too far. The expanse of concrete stretched forever. The shadow deepened and I threw every ounce of energy I had into the last terrible sprint. The sole of the shoe was almost over me. Two of my legs tripped and I stumbled. The shoe came down. It rolled over me and -- and? I and my body were not. Part. Of. Each. Other. Any. More. I know you have always. wondered what it would be like to squish -- and now you know. I slid into some dark place and wasn't anything, anymore. Did you ever think of yourself as sadistic? Was that a thriller or not? Thorgaad turned to Imgaad when it was over. She lay still, with all her eye rivlets shut, shudders rippling her entire surface like seawinds the ocean. "Wonderful," she sighed. "Wonderful. I just know there's never been anything like it here on Hydran. How can I thank you Thorgaad? Well -- time we were up and off to work. Seelgaad will simmer and fume if I'm late, but then I'm never late." She flowed out of her resting pod and into the next chamber. Thorgaad followed on her trail. Slimomat-deluxe padded along behind them, cleaning up. I On the way to work that morning, flowing with the rest in a steady stream, Imgaad kept her thinking separate as best she could and tried to decide just how she would repay Thorgaad. She knew it was expected that she do so. But it would take all her savings and that probably would not be enough to really outdo him. She would check with Nefarian to see what was coming in next. No big problem, really. Nefarian always makes things possible and you never have to pay until later. To Imgaad's thinking, later is later and now is now and never the twain shall meet. She was determined not to be the one to lose faces. Doublewammy, doublewammy, how to swing a doublewammy, a really sensational experience. She could do it, she would do it and Thorgaad would be impressed. Points for Imgaad.   Hr She need not have worried. Everything was bound to work out. That is, if you'll just relax. Please, try to relax. Now this injection isn't going to hurt. No, not one bit. Do you think I would lie to you -- to you? What good would it do? The next time you would not trust me at all. And I told you the basis ox our relationship is trust. Now, breathe deeply, deeply. Didn't you practice your Lemaze? Don't you feel in control of the situation? Don't get hysterical or it's all over. And we can't have that. The needle is predatory. It bites into the back of the hand, there, where the bones are so -- vulnerable, d if you turn over, it trails along like a sharp toothed earthsnake whose lone spiked tooth has a tenacious hold on you. Didn't you know you can't wear fingernail polish to the hospital? Well you know it now in case you're thinking of repeating the experience. They want to look at your fingernails. Like some ancient tribal medicineman, divining entrails to foretell the future, the outcome of the whole shebang. You'll just have to take it off. And then they'll take off your unpublic hair, shave it off to a bare little fleshy mound with the goosebumpy look of a plucked chicken. They're clearing the decks for battle. You're the ship, ungainly ship. Ohhhhh, oweee, that's sharp, a good one. It makes you gasp. What's that stomach doing? Grotesque, undulating, heaving, first like a malignantly overblown marshmallow, then taut as a watermelon. The nurse is a dearsoul and she's in her element; she used to work at Buchenwald. She wants to take off your contact lenses. That's the rule. You say it's your rule that you be able to see, to defend yourself -- what would you do without your sight ? She insists. She comes closer. If you shut your eyes, really tightly, how will she ever get them out? Will she pry your eyes open and gouge them out? Is -- are -- there any rules that say she has to leave your eyes intact, capable of seeing? The rule is that you can not wear your contact lenses here. Help-help, somebody come and beat that woman away from here. Grab a broom, swing a lamp, but get her away. The battle is postponed; her beeper calls her elsewhere. Ponderously you move onto your left side, panting at the effort, the snake following. Your stomach is so distended that you hope that you don't droop over the edge of the hard, narrow bed. Will such weight in one spot tip the balance and pull you over the side. Would you burst there like a much-too-ripe cantaloup? Contractions are zipping rightalong. The magic in the IV bottle is dripping, dripping, down the innards of the snake, out its fang and into your poor defenseless bony hand. Whooooooeeee. This isn't any fun at all. Now it's more fun. Remember when you were constipated from eating all those apples when your parents left you for a week? You could not move a thing and were threatened by your pinch-nosed aunt with Mineral Oil and Worse if you didn't Move Them. What business was it of hers? Only that at her house she liked things done right, on schedule. And, besides, you had to realize that you could obtain some dread disease, generated right there in the lower portions of your -- ah -- trunk. And if you didn't get rid of what you had, poor thing, what would you do with what was coming ? Where would the next load of com, boiled potatoes and stringy potroast go? You know you can't waste because of the starving of India. So it would pile up and up and up and finally you would rupture, surely pop, from the sheer volume of it all. So -- go to it. Take your Little Lulu or whatever else you want into the john and get to work. Such work, seemingly without reward. Grunt, groan, great-god-in-heaven, something will split asunder before that long hard brown beast finally makes its way out. The final minute. Ah, relief. Rejoicing, primeval, infantile glee at having mastered The Art. Take it to Auntie? No? No. But she ordered you to call her because she wanted to see for herself you'd done it. The Divulging of the Goods. Yes, that was -- and is -- it. They? re all standing around, now, the bunch of them, as the Snake sends its Pitocin into your vital bodily fluids to send you writhing and breathless into the Delivery Room. Deliverance, oh. A masked cabal. Push, they order. Push you primipara. He has a mask, she has a mask, Where is your mask? The light is so bright. You don't need such an intense illumination you realize, unless -- is this grand opening being televised ? That one! Mr. Bloodgut the Butcher. His instruments are all lined up and polished. Meet the meat. The meat is you. Why ramble, mind? They said they wouldn't give you anything. Maybe just a little something? The masked and the unmasked glare at each other. Are they trying to keep their germs away from you? You can't imagine kindness. Are the little bastards in their nasal passages fighting to get out and at you? Or do these people prize them highly and will be damned if they'll let any one escape. Gimme a mask, you snarl politely, Why should l do without? Could they want your germs to stay away from them? Will they mask the infant when it gets here? How could they possibly know, the sneaks, that you didn't mouth-wash before commencing labor? You, the carrier of something unspeakable. Lethal? All must be protected, shielded. What, what, what? The answer escapes. Masques: disguises. Ha, not one is what he seems. Look at the eyes above the maks, eyes are the key, the clue. That one was once a rat before attending medical school. Such beady little eyes, such a lean and pointed nose. He's wearing a mask to hide his rat whiskers. Sure. Understanding triumphant. If that lady from Buchenwald, there, had not strapped your arms Galileo The New Showpiace of Great Science Fiction  Fact Written By Established Stars  New Talent. Not Available At Newsstands Issue #I (Sept. I #) Bradbury, Clarke, Chilson, Hansen, Broderick, O'Donnell, Jr.,  more. Issue (Dec. #) Clement, Bradbury, Foster, Lichtenberg, features, reviews,  more. Published Quarterly: Sample # Subs. # Issues #; # Issues # Limited Editions. Order Now! # Newbury St., Boston, MA # down at your sides with those brown leather restraints, they know you'd rip their masks off and all would be revealed for the world to see. The Jewish Nazi-sleuth from Vienna would come and get you Buchenwaldhilda. None of you wants the truth and pictures plastered all over the papers, you think. They are making preparations. To do something with you, to you, if you don't mind -- and even if you do. They want to get at it. Spiteful primipara, why hold up the works? Why refuse to deliver the goods? That one, there: it must be Auntie. Take off your mask, woman. We know why you've come. I'm trying to push it out, you pant. Hold the mineral oil. Sheath your instruments. Whooopee! Almost. A little more. A little more. More and more and more and more. Somewhere down the hall some woman is screaming her guts out. Would it help to yell bloody murder? Let's just forget the human race. Human race? Like long distance race? The quarter-mile race? The race against famine? The race against time? What the hell, let's forget the human race and do something else. No. Not possible. Stop it! Let me float and suck my thumb. Swim a little, bounce a little, turn a little. Dark and warm and free from harm. Happy days and happy nights. I love to twirliewhirlie with the cord, like jumpidy-rope. Sloshing and rolling and rocking. I grab my cordiken, thick, thick cordiken and pull but not too hard: it pulses in the warm; it feeds me good. Sometimes I wonder, but not often. Usually what I like to do is move my meee. This and that a way, punch and pirouette, ram and butt-butt-butt soft walls that bind and love me all the livelongday. I am meee and nobody else; even from the beginning I was and am. What are they doing to my meee? Squeezing, pressing, pushing. I can't turn 'round and I am heading down, down. My head presses there and it hurts. How can I fit through that stingy gap? I can go no further. My watery has gone sluuurp, gush, away, before me in a rush and. And? On and on and on but so slowly-oh. My head explodes. Something hard has got it. Claws, yes. I can not see. It pulls me, drags me, crushes my soft little headiken. Blind? I never thought so there, but now? What is this unhome undark place? . It has me now. Holding me up by my footie, jerk! My back so long so curved and cushioned, feels like it is snapping at each little knob and cleavage. It hangs me upside down, swinging, my head throbbing, my skin cold and drying. I am dying. Don't you know? Feel for me. us. It is hitting my back. I scream. They are happy that I scream and I scream some more and at last it lets me down. And they have taken away my twirliecordie, cut it off. I scream some more because they like it and maybe let me be. Even with my eyes clenched shut the light is too much, too much. I want to go home. Home. Back. But you must know that you can never go home. You are absolutely exhausted, both of you. Mother and child, infant so tender and mild and, motherdear you did like we knew you could. Neither of you remember all of that? Strange, what a pity, what a waste. I remember for you and we can do it again. Think how lucky we are to share such an experience. How is your baby, Thorgaad? "What do you mean, my baby. I am the baby. Also." "Such an intense and moving experience, Thorgaad. Shall we recommend it to our friends? Or claim an exclusive?" "Imgaad, did you go to that Nefarian for this? How much did you pay?' ' "Don't you splash at me like that, Thorgaad, you have no right. I will not be beholden to you. What did I promise Nefarian? Anything he wanted. '-' "Anything he wanted?" Thorgaad rose in a wave and spilled to where she dripped. "I can tell by your dripping that way that you are hiding something from me. Now: What is it, Imgaad?" "Nothing. I had to promise Nefarian anything to get what I got for you, us. He promised me that he has never been able to offer such an exciting doublewammy, such an intense experience, to any Gaad on Saternia. I was bidding against twelve others for the experience." She waited for his comment. "It was a real masterpiece, Thorgaad. How often is it that you can experience a real Masterpiece?' ' She was dripping faster now, part of her had puddled by the pod. Thorgaad became alarmed. She must be more than nervous, she must be distraught. " What did you promise, Imgaad?" "I told you -- anything he wants." "Which is?" "I don't know. He didn't say what he wanted." Thorgaad pulled himself together, pulsating, pouring jerkily from one side of the chamber to the other. "I'm beginning to think that this whole operation of Nefarian's should be banned on this planet. I propose we send a dribble to that effect to the protectorate." "How could you live without your sensations, Thorgaad?" Imgaad wept, untidy drops spattering the floor by her. "It's the only thing that keeps you separate, that makes you you. Otherwise you'd just be part of the common stream. Melded, welded, blended -- washing and flowing together are we, common parts of a common tide. That's all you or I had ever been until Nefarian arrived." She sighed. "Maybe I shouldn't have promised him anything, but there was no other way to get it. A one of a kind, he promised. Besides," she said, "You know I'd rather dry than accept charity." You, there, surely remember how it was. Chewing together, squishing together, birthing both of us together. Some never share an experience like that in a whole planet's turn, or, even, ever.    I know you are feeling for Thorgaad and Imgaad. Who could help it? What happened to the chamber? Who knows? Could the tragedy have been avoided? Yes, I know you feel it was the worst thing that could happen to a Gaad. Shall I help your memory, just a little? First you surely recall you were all set to leave the chamber. What a let-down the day would be after The Experience. Credit was no longer valid with Nefarian since you had mortgaged to him anything he wanted. Was it Nefarian who was responsible for jamming the door? And Nefarian who made the windows stick? So there was no way you could leak out? When the suns came out, it became clear we were all in for the hottest day in planetspans -- yes, it will surely be recorded so in all the history tapes for the future. Recall how quiet the chamber was? Such efficient sound insulation. You tried the communicator. Maybe they hadn't turned it off, yet, as they had threatened. A shame you had used all your tokens for your wild experiences and hadn't paid your utilities. "Harkenharkenharken," you bubbled into the transcommunicator. "Emergency, emergency." "You may pay your bill at the highgully station during the hours of duskcool and your communicator services will be restored," the recording simpered. Warmer, even wanner. Hotter, even hotter. You looked at each other. There 'J'as less left. Should you combine? Maybe you could make it until the suns went down. Such a decision. A blending for all time it would mean, if you managed to survive the heat. You were too tacky, too thick, to ever be pulled apart at this state. How horrifying to see first a little of one, then the other, turn to steam, then disappear into the plaster of the ceiling and walls. Less and less. Oh, the sensation was the more poignant because your intentions had been so good. Brave Thorgaad, giving your Imgaad the experiences of lifetimes she could never live. And the Honor of Imgaad, repaying doubly over with the finest doublewammy Nefarian had offered, ever, to Hydran. And now? Isn't it becoming difficult even to think? The outlines of the chamber are vague, smeary. You are both boiling down to a thick, sticky ichor, clinging to the central pod. Imgaad, there is just enough flow left for you to reach your beloved one. So, Thorgaad, strong Thorgaad, stretch -- stretch ! Yes, like that. Trickle, trickle, you can do it -- of course it is hard when you're so viscous. But that too is a new sensation, heywhat? Almost there now, ooze a bit more -- you, too, Imgaad. Will we ever be able to be reconstituted, Thorimgaad? I must admit, truthfully, that it is doubtful. You said you wo.uld rather dry than accept charity. And so you have. Such a sweet but bitter experience, don't you think? Do you think old Nefarian should be kicked off the planet Hydran because he delivers what his customers want?    "Nefarian, you rascal, you did those poor things in just to make a fast buck here on dementia!" The plant waved its leafy tentacles at the timetrader, "Excuse me, Nefarian, while I bloom." The giant plant huffed and puffed and voila! it was covered with cow-sized flowers, red, velvety, like double gladioli. Nefarian waited until the most intense of the plant's parfume had been wafted elsewhere by the winds. "Once you have bloomed, Clemintinien, you know you're really going to be tied down. So many responsibilities you'll have from now through harvest." The Plant shrugged. "I know. The blooming is something everyone should experience, but the time between that and fruitdrop is a drag. Routine, dull -- if there were only some way to break it. At least I'll have the Gaad experience to think about." "You can have more than that, much more. You've already paid in full, just for letting me watch you bloom. And promising me some fruit from your next dropping. I know you know how valuable it is elsewhere. It'll be a real novelty of course, but may become one of the most sought-after items on my route." Nefarian stroked one of the flowers. It pushed toward him like a cat when petted. "Let me ask you, first, Clemintinien, if you didn't think the Gaads were sensational. Yes? You know, I have others, a plethora of diversions which can make this fruiting the best time of your life. Price? Why ask. We can come to an agreeable solution between now and your next bloom. Can I ask you? It looked so easy, the way you did it -- " "Oh it was, this time," the Plant agreed, rustling its flowers provocatively. "But sometimes you wouldn't believe the complications." Nefarian smiled his many understanding smiles. "There is someone somewhere who could believe it.  could believe it," the timetrader said. Perhaps you have never wondered what would happen if the Venebees refused to pollinate your Etrusian stamen. No? Beyond belief! Try to imagine: surely no where in the universe, is there such pain, anguish, suspense as to what will happen. And then, when the Venebees come -- what excitation, what joy, a resurrection and more. To know, you must become. Worth your while ? No, worth your life. Would Nefarian lie to you?  galaxy If a man told you "The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax," would you put him in charge of nuclear power policy? That's not a trick question. The founder of the California People's Lobby once said it, and he was the architect of the Nuclear Shutdown Initiatives. I've started this column four times, and I'm still not happy. The problem is this: I want Galaxy readers to support a research project I'll tell you about shortly, but I don't want to add to mythology; and the project involves fusion. There's the rub. Alas, "fusion" has in all too many places and for all too many people become an incantation, a magical formula which, when uttered, ends all rational debate about power policies. In fact, the situation is worse than that: "fusion" is a good word, and fusion scientists are white magicians: "fission" is evil, and its supporters have made deals with Satan to loose the evil djinn Plutonium onto this world. In these days when our representatives have shunted off primary responsibility for power policy decisions onto the general public, it's important -- at least to me -- that the public deals in physics, not myth. Now science fiction readers, unlike the Ex-Lax expert, are seldom proud, of ignorance; indeed, from the letters I get, and the audience response during my lectures, the opposite is true, SF readers often know very much more about technology than the general public does -- and yet are often conscientious enough not to get into the debates, because they know enough to convince them they've no right to fixed opinions. That's admirable, but it may prove disastrous: carried to an extreme the trend means that only the opinionated and truly ignorant have a voice. Therefore: I want to plug electron-beam fusion research; but I want your informed support, and since I know, again from my lecture tours, that an awful lot of people don't really understand either fission or fusion, I'm going to start with the basics. My apologies to those who find this discussion elementary. I will try, for the benefit of those whose only physics are Ex-Lax but who don't boast about that, to keep this reasonably simple.    E me # , saith Einstein; that is, mass (m) can be converted into energy (E). To be precise, energy in ergs equals converted mass, in grams, times the square of the speed of light in centimeters per second. Light-speed (c) is # x # # cmsec, so converting a gram of mass to energy would yield # #I ergs, something like # kilotons, or about # times as much energy in all forms as the average used by each person in the U.S. last year. The equation says nothing about how that energy comes out. A moment's thought will show you that can be important. If it all comes out as neutrinos it won't do us much good. There's no way to catch them. If it comes out as protons or electrons, we're in good shape: they're charged particles, and we can pass them through a ceramic tube with coils of wire around it to get electricity directly. (That last trick is called magnetobit more complex than it sounds; but we know how to do it. It only takes energetic charged particles.) Unfortunately, most nuclear reactions do not produce charged particles. A great deal of nuclear energy appears as neutrons, and we can't catch them in a magnetic basket. What we can do is put something in their way. They get slowed down, or stopped, and their kinetic energy is converted into heat. We extract that heat, use it to boil water, and put the water through turbines. The turbine neither knows nor cares where the heat came from; it's ail the same to it whether the heat source was burning coal, fissioning Uranium, or fusing Hydrogen. The turbine system is the most efficient thing we've got for turning heat into electricity; but it's not # efficient and never will be, nor will anything else, including myth about fusion: it may be marginally more efficient than either fossil energy or fission, but it will still have waste heat, and will still require cooling systems. No one really knows the effective operating temperatures of fusion devices -- we haven't even got anything that works in a laboratory yet -- but if we assume they'll be hotter than either coal or fission, fusion systems will be somewhat more efficient than those we've got; but not all that much more so. Known efficiencies for fossil and fission plants, and assumed ones for fusion plants, are given in Table One. Fission systems work thusly: a neutron source is brought near an atom that breaks apart. Neutrons are emitted. Other atoms are broken into lighter elements and more neutrons. Some of the additional neutrons axe used to break up even more atoms (chain reaction), others are allowed to bombard useless stuff like Uranium-# and turn it into useful stuff like Plutonium-#, and the rest are caught for their heat energy. Fusion goes the other way. If you squeeze hydrogen atoms together and get them hot enough, they turn into helium. The resulting helium doesn't mass quite as much as the original hydrogen: result, energy. It sounds simple, and it is. This is the reaction that powers the Sun. Unfortunately, we don't know how to do it, and we may never learn. Certainly we haven't even a theoretical clue as to how to bring off stellar fusion; the temperatures and pressures involved are plain beyond us. So, we go to the next best thing and use Deuterium, which we'll call "D". There are two reactions: D  D-T  p  # MeV (# kWhrgram) Eq. I and D  D --  # He #  n  # MeV (# kW-hrgram) Eq. # and I'd better explain what all that means before I lose someone. (Percentage of generated heat turned into useful electricity.) Coal Nuclear Deuterium Average in present use # Fission Fusion Best in present use Expected with improvements (Theoretical : # (?) First, Deuterium is "heavy" hydrogen. Ordinary hydrogen atoms have one proton tp) and one electron (e), and nothing else. D has an additional neutron (n); it could be written as # Hi where the left superscript is the atomic weight, H is the symbol for hydrogen, and the right subscript is the atomic number. Tritium, (T), is "superheavy" hydrogen with # neutrons, and could be written # Hi. By the same token, # He # is "light" helium; normal helium is # He # , and this stuff is missing a neutron. For reasons we won't worry about here, it's convenient to meaelectron Volts (MeV), and I've given the textbook figures; for our purposes, though, the kiloWatthours per gram of material fused is more relevant. For comparison, a regular #Watt lightbulb will use # kW-hr each year if left burning; obviously a #-Watt heater uses I kW-hr each hour. A kW-hr of electric power costs between # and # to generate, and is sold to the consumer for from # to a dime (although I understand that lawsuits, strikes, and interesting administrative methods have got New Yorkers paying about #kW-hr). The two reactions shown are equally probable. Both go on at the same time, and there's no known way to favor one over the other. The Tritium and "light" helium can themselves be made to react with more D, as follows: D  T # He #  n  # MeV (# kW-hrgram) Eq # and D  # He# --  # He#  p # MeV (# kW-hrgram) Eq # and I'm not giving these equations just to show off. Look at them a moment. First, note that Tritium. It's radioactive with a half-life of # years. We can bum up most of it with the eq. # reaction, but we've got to keep it from getting into the atmosphere. It's in the same situation as Plutonium: a useful product that we need for power; and it should suffer the same fate as Plutonium, "burning" in a nuclear reactor. Until it is "burned" though, it's one of the hazards of the power system, and there's no way to change that. Second, note those neutrons. They must be caught if we're to extract their energy. W'hen neutrons hit other atoms, they produce radioactive isotopes. Clever design can minimize the number of truly dangerous radioactive waste products, but can never eliminate them entirely. Thus the fusion industry will need nuclear waste-disposal, and there goes myth Number Two. True: fusion is cleaner than fission power systems; but it is not that much cleaner. Third, the fuel isn't free. We can't use ordinary hydrogen; we have to extract the D from it, and that takes energy; thus, at first, fugalaxy sion plants will consume more energy than they produce -- just as, for the first years of their lives, fission plants haven't produced the energy it took to refine their fuels, or coal plants the energy it took to mine the coal. All will, of course, show a net energy profit after two or three years. And finally there's the real problem: we don't know how to do it. The basic equations for Uranium fission were known for a long time before Fermi built his "pile" in the squash court of the University of Chicago, and nature was very cooperative anyway: the materials needed for Fermi's experiment were cheap, easily available, and simply fabricated; the instrumentation was standard; and the control system was uncomplicated. Despite the ease with which Fermi demonstrated the feasibility of self-sustained controlled fission (it worked first time), it took twenty years to get usable power from a fission reactor. There's no reason to believe the engineering of a practical fusion power plant will take less time; and we are not yet to the squash court. We don't know that we can do it at all -- and we're certainly a long way from running our TV sets on electricity produced by fusing D. I have never found an expert who believes we will have a working commercial fusion power plant in this century. The only people who say different are not in the game -- and many have very large axes to grind. "Waiting for fusion" is simply not a feasible power policy. There goes the fourth myth. Depressing, isn't it? Cheer up. First, we don't need fusion. There are other ways to power our industrial civilization; other ways to spark the Third Industrial Revolution. We can all get rich even if controlled fusion never works. That ought to be good news. Here are some methods.    First, my favorite, the oceanthermal system, which makes use of the temperature difference between warm surface water and cold bottom water. There's more than enough power in the Tropics to run the world, the Sun renews it constantly, and we know it will work because a working plant was built in #. However, my engineering friends tell me that's the hard way; and we aren't likely to have operating ocean-thermal systems before the year # anyway. So what are some other ways? Here's where I get into trouble. The easiest way of all is one we have now: good old reliable (average nuclear plant operates # mos. each year; fossil, # mos. each year) nuclear fission. It already works, and we've already mined enough potential fuel to last us several hundred years; moreover, there's enough U-# in ordinary rock to operate the world high-energy economy for millenia. Alas, that takes breeder reactors, and they're controversial. They make Plutonium, and everyone knows that Plutonium is "the most toxic material known to man." Ralph Nader has told us so. Of course Ralph Nader is also the man who, with fanfare, bought a manual rather than an electric typewriter "to conserve energy". My electric uses the electricity generated by about a quarter of a cup of oil each of us, had an electric typer going they'd consume a few thousand barrels of oil annually: not very much in an economy that measures oil day. Maybe we ought to take a closer look at some of the other things Mr. Nader says. His heart's in the right place, but he doesn't seem able to do much quantitative thinking. Toxicity of Plutonium compared to other substances is shown in Table Two. Now we don't spread much botulin around the landscape, but we do spray crops with arsenic tri-oxide; in fact, we today import # times as much arsenic as we'd have nuclear wastes if the entire US electric system were run on nuclear fission. Now I keep telling myself paper in defense of nuclear fission power; that it's a political matter; but dammit, at least the public debates ought to make sense. It's one thing seriously and soberly to debate the advantages and disadvantages of fission over fossil fuel; but it's quite another to have such an important issue decided by mythology and demonology. One last thing, then: nuclear wastes are radioactive. There. That ought to end the debate. Surely no one wants "nuclear pollution". If I sound sarcastic, my apologies; somebody really and truly said that to me not long ago. Meant it, too; and she was an important political party official. So let's look at radioactivity in quantitative terms. Table Three Toxicity of various substances. per spoonful Arsenic Tri-oxide Botulinus toxin # Plutonium oxide (ingested)  metallic Pu is never employed in reactors. # (thousandths of a rem) received by each US citizen on the average. Further, let's add a couple bits of information: of the # survivors exposed to # rems (# mrem) at Hiroshima-Nagasaki, fewer than # hundred died of cancer. The probability of developing cancer from radiation exposure is about # per rem (not mrem). At this point in my lectures someone generally says, loudly, "sabotage!" Nuclear plants are vulnerable to that, aren't they? Well, yes; but not very. The #" steel and concrete containment is designed to take an aircraft crashing into it without rupture. Anyone stealing nuclear fuels for terror purposes has set himself a pretty suicidal task, will need vast technological resources, and won't get very many people fast -- what's the point of threatening people with an increased probability of cancer # years after you set off your infernal device? Plastique will do a more spectacular job. In other words, if we're going to debate power policy, let's do it right, with comparisons of risks, not you're interested, my lecture fees aren't too high, and you can get me through this magazine. Be prepared to pay expenses. This has taken us a long way from fusion, hasn't it? No; because Sources of Radiation Received by Average US Citizen (Annual) Natural Sources Man-Made Sources Cosmic Rays X-ray, diagnostic Building materials X-ray, therapy Food Radio-pharmacy Ground Global fallout Air Color TV Own blood (K-#) Nuclear Power plants .# Total If live at boundarys of nuclear power plant Total Total annual #  Varies with altitude; greatest at high altitude cities.  Varies with material; greatest w ith brick and stone. fusion, like other power systems, needs to be discussed in context. I will not recommend fusion research as a magic remedy for the world's ills. I do recommend it, though. For all its disadvantages, fusion will be, if it works, the power system of the future. First, it's very fuel-efficient. If we can extract all the energy from our D, we get an average of about # kW-hrgram, which is # times the energy per gram obtained times the energygram from burning fossil fuels. A few thousand metric tons of D each year could power the world. Second, the fuel's not hard to get. There is about one atom of D for every # atoms of ordinary hydrogen. The world's D supply could come from under fifty plants with water intake valves ten to twenty feet in diameter. By world's energy supply, I mean the equivaa day -- more than enough to let Ralph Nader have a new Selectric. Third, we can never run out of kilometers of water on this Earth, and at a cubic kilometer each year we'd be able to run a long time; nor would we, as I've heard someone say, "lower the oceans"; at least not more than an atomic diameter or two. Fourth, fusion is certainly preferable to fission: the wastemanagement problem is much simpler. There are fewer long-term radioactive wastes to worry about. Although we can and will (and already have) shipped tons of Plutonium around without anyone being injured, the stuff is unpleasant, and we'd be better off without it even if fusion won't eliminate all nuclear wastes. So how do we do it? There are two major theories on how fusion plants might work. First, remember that the goal is extremely high temperatures and pressures. You can't contain them in a material object, because either your reaction melts your container, or your container cools off the D and prevents the reaction. Thus non-material confinement systems, which means in practice Magnetic Confinement. The lion's share of all fusion research goes to that. The problems are hairy: both engineering and scientific questions remain unanswered. The equipment is huge, complex, and (need I say it?) costly. There are blind alleys. We had stellerators, and magnetic rings, and various kinds of pinch-bottles, and every one of them failed. It isn't that they weren't worth building, understand; we have learned a lot about magnetohydrodynamic stability of plasmas (there's a buzz phrase for you). The current approach is a device called a tokamak, and if you need to know more about those go to your nearest library. Magnetic confinement isn't expected to produce fusion neutrons for another ten years, and few think it will, even in the laboratory, produce more power than it consumes before #. It gets plenty of funding. The second approach is called Inertial Confinement. This consists of taking small pellets of D, or a D and T mixture, and zapping them with lots of energy. The zapping has to be done just right. If you're not careful, too much zapping energy gets inside the pellet and tends to disrupt it before fusion can take place. There are other failure mechanisms, such as lopsided zaps, and not enough zap power. Inertial confinement has this advantage: it is pretty certain to work. That is, the problems are more engineering than scientific. It may never work usefully, but it almost has to work if we get the geometry right and shoot enough power to the pellets. It has a second advantage: the equipment is much cheaper (for laboratory demonstraliqn reactors; not necessarily for a working commercial power generating system). Thus Inertial Confinement gets about # of the fusion research budget. There are two branches of Inertial Confinement: laser (photon) bombardment, and particle bombardment. Of the research money in inertial confinement, # or more Ses to laser systems. There's a reason for that: laser bombardment just may have produced fusion ala Step farther out Sitarberg.Bester. Harris#?!, feglst, Pohl and Aktiss "What a lively, informative, outrageous... hilarious, insightful collection of glimpses beyond the veil." -- Harlan Ellison HEbtiS Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers Illustrated. # # at bookstores or direct fromftHarper e )Row ready. There was some fanfare a private company, seemed to have obtained fusion neutrons. There's still some question about just what most fusion people believe that laser bombardment will eventually work out. Right now they're looking at different kinds of lasers, and may have to invent a new one (called Brand X Laser) which will zap the pellet with enough energy, yet won't penetrate the pellet too fast. I don't know whether laser inertial confinement gets enough money or not, but I suspect they do. Comes now (finally!) the point of this column. On a recent lecture tour I visited Sandia Laboratories (a government-owned non-profit corporation) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I went through their labs, and I spent a good bit of time talking with Gerald Yonas, the fusion project manager. I came away a believer. Sandia is the only place that is trying electron bombardment in an inertial confinement system. Their dollars a year for that research. That, in my judgment, is peanuts: especially in view of growing evidence that electron bombardment may be the way to go. Sandia may, just may, have caught the brass ring. Why do I say this? Well, first, the Soviets are trying electron bombardment, and they claim to have produced about # fusion neutrons in each reaction. That claim is open to some doubt. Official American reaction is "Congratulations!", and, in private, the comment "That may put them a few months ahead of us". Very private reaction from many US experts is more sceptical. The bombardment process itself produces about # s neutrons. Now, 'tis true there's a way to tell fusion neutrons from other neutrons; but it takes very sophisticated instrumentation, and many doubt the Soviets have it. Then too, the Soviets produced their announcement as part of the #th Party Congress shindig, and gave absolutely no technical details, which is suspicious. For all that, no one would be that surprised to find that the Russians have indeed brought it off. After all, we expect to within a year.    I have watched a man spend four ity. It made him unhappy. He It happened at Sandia labs: they were zapping a pellet with electrons. Of course they didn't spend long: a few nano-seconds, to be exact, so the total cost of the electricity was a few dollars; but if they could have kept it up! The Sandia equipment is impressive. It's also massive, as you'd expect, considering that they handle have to charge up enormous capacitance systems. Sirens wail, red lights flash, needles crawl across dials, just like in a good science fiction movie, and finally the technician puts his fingers in his ears. I didn't, in time, and the noise of a couple of mega-joules arcing into a target is not easily forgotten. Even so, it's not enough. That's what costs the money: building equipment that will handle those voltages without breakdown (and breakdowns are spectacular around there; I didn't see one, but I saw insulators the size of a desk with inch-deep gouges burned into them). Then there's the triggering problem: that system has to discharge ail its energy at the right time, and the right time is measured ing that they can do it; but they can. I saw it done. Incidentally, the voltage amplifier systems they use are called Marx generators, which gives rise to a number of puns, political jokes and worse; when they were ready to fire someone shouted "Harpo's ready!" and another man said "Stand by to fire Groucho." Then there was the zap! and a million joules flowed for a few nanoseconds. Mega-joules. A joule is # # ergs. I was duly impressed until we got to talking after the experiment. The reason they don't have fusion yet is they just can't pump enough power through the system fast enough; but don't get discouraged. The amount of power needed isn't so very large after all. In fact, we calculated that a Sears Lifetime Battery contains about # mega-joules; if we could just discharge it in a couple of nano-seconds we'd have fusion. They're building a system that they expect will do the job. At the moment Sandia hopes to be at the squash court stage by #: that is, by then they hope to have proved that electron bombardment, inertial confinement fusion will work and can, with a lot more skull sweat and good engineering design, eventually be part of a useful electric power system. dollars a year. This is the system I mentioned in the beginning of this article. I think it deserves more money, because with more money they may get to the squash court before #. They don't promise it, but then they don't need much more money either; a doubling of their not only let them build more hardware faster, but also let them coordinate some theoretical work going on around the country , and bring in other scientists as consultants. So: if you're in a mood to write your Congressman about energy problems, you might mention that here's a slot where, in my considwill do a lot of good. Please don't support this because you think it will get us to the year #; it won't. Don't support it because you think it will eliminate our need for nasty Plutonium. Do it as a present for your children; do it because we could use some decent national goals, and cheap clean fusion power is one of the better gifts the US could offer the world (and wouldn't it have far more beneficial and lasting aid program you ever heard of?). 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G) # Kennedy Drive, j I Hauppauge, New York # I I enclose  for the I  books whose numbers I I have placed in the boxes beJ j low. I understand that the  I price is only # each. Since i I I have ordered # books or I  more I am also listing my j bonus selections.  J Part two Can this be the solar system? The sun has become much hotter than can account for. There have been radical changes in the topographies of Mercury and Mars and the atmosphere of Venus. Uranus is out of its orbit and missing some of its atmosphere. The only likely candidate for Earth now orbits Jupiter! And they're both too hot! But if this isn't the solar system, why is Saturn exactly where it ought to be? is a human personality recorded into a ship's computer. His changed state has made Peerssa more intellectually rigid than ever. Always a patriot, Peerssa is determined to find or rebuild the State as it existed in # AD. different. Corbell is a fragile old man. Bom #I AD, he lost most of three gigantic black hole at the galactic core; but he has only years or months to live. He chooses to land on Earth and explore while his life lasts. Failure to communicate: he lands in the wrong place. The new east coast of North America is far too hot for life. Try Antarctica? Corbell, his life limited by his pressure suit batteries, searches a dead city to find teleportation booths that don't send far enough; then a subway network that might. It developes that the undersea subways have been gimmicked by an evil old woman with a remarkable cane and a remarkable mania. Corbell winds up as her prisoner, in country the children of the state cool enough to be habitable. Mirelly-Lyra was bom # years after Corbett's proper time. She too has traveled to the galactic core. She returned much earlier; she knows something of the degeneration of the State. But her main concern is the Dictator immortality, which was somewhere on Earth when she landed, and which may be still available, she besmall "zero-time jail" preserved her; why not the eternal youth treatment? But she has been unable to find it. Instead, she will settle for medicines more advanced than her own, brought back to Earth by a space-traveler who must have left the solar system thousands of years later than she did. Which is to say, Corbell. Corbell' s protest brings a touch of the cane, which brings unbearable mental agony. The lesson is effective. CorbeU lies. Yes, he has the medicines, but they are aboard ship, in orbit. He himself is still ambulatory at around five hundred (he tells her). They can't reach the ship unless Corbell calls Peerssa first, via the radio in his pressure suit helmet. Peerssa doesn't answer. Corbell uses a teleporting "phone booth" to escape. But he's half-sure Mirelly-Lyra can track him. He is moved by more than fear now. So the old woman would steal advanced medicines from a later age, would she? Two could play at that game. He staggered through clean, geometric, empty, sound-deadened corridors. Doors did not drop for him. Twice he tried holding his plastic disk against what he thought were entrance plates. It was all he could think of, and it didn't work. Whatever this place was, Corbell -- or the dead man he had robbed -- was not authorized to pass these doors. The suit became too heavy for him. He dropped it. He talked to the helmet, but it didn't answer. Where the hell was Peerssa? Corbell had freed Peerssa from all orders past and future. Corbell had gone unprotected into an unknown environment; had later dropped out of communication. J. B. Corbell, Mark II: missing, presumed dead. By now Peerssa could be rounding the sun on his way to some nearby star. Searching for the State. Peerssa's interstellar laser beam could have burned the old woman down as she crossed a street. But Corbell' s computer had abandoned him... and Corbell hurled the helmet viciously into the cloudrug -- not as hard as he wanted, because his hands were still bound. The blind faceplate stared after him as he went on. His legs were starting to cramp. The clean air was turning musty with the old smell of something truly dead, when Corbell came at last to an open door. He thought the mechanism had failed... and then he saw why. A small hole had been burned through the gold plate. Beyond the doorway was cruder damage and a richer smell. It had been a surgery, he guessed. At least, that looked like an operating table with machinery suspended above it, and the machinery included scalpels on jointed arms. There were crumbled brown skeletons. One, naked, lay in a pool of dust on the table. Two others sprawled against a wall. Their uniforms, partly decayed, were yet in better shape than the bones within. The cloth bore charred slashes that continued into the bones, as if men had been hacked by a white-hot sword. These men had been mansized, Corbell's size. The wall behind the desk had a hole in it big enough to drive a car through. Bombs? Corbell heaved himself up on the table with the skeleton. He rubbed the bandages against a scalpel edge...and behold! His wrists were free. Now he moved to the great gap in the wall. He was getting his breath back, but his heartbeat was fast and Buttery . What he wanted most was a chance to lie down and rest... until he looked down into the vault. It was two stories high and windowless. To the left, a thick circle of metal almost the height of the wall, with a stylized ship's wheel set in it. It looked for all the world like a bank-vault door. There were guard posts: glass cubicles set just below the ceiling, and in the cubicles were skeletons armed with things like spotlights with rifle butts. A bank vault seemed out of place in a hospital. There were shelves on all three walls, floor to ceiling. The few items still on the shelves were not gold bars. They were bottles. The floor, ten feet below Corbell, was covered with broken glass. There was a half-melted metal thing very like the animated dishwasher that had attacked Corbell and Peerssa as burglars. Other machinery looked intact. There was an instrument console that might have been (given the hospital motif) diagnostic equipment. There were a matched pair of transparent "phone booths", glass cylinders with rounded tops. Corbell saw these and lusted. The invaders had brought a ladder. He climbed down carefully, treating himself as fragile. Four skeletons at the bottom showed that the invaders had not had things all their own way. He stepped carefully among the bones. As a hospital the place made a good crypt... better than most, in fact. Cool. Clean. No insects, no scavengers, no fungus. But it wasn't death Corbell was running from. It was a silver cane and a change more humiliating than death. The lights were still on in the vault. Indicator lights glowed on the console. With luck the booths would work too. He stepped into one and looked for the dial. No dial, just a button set in a slender post. No choice about where he was going. Corbell wondered if the Norn would be waiting at the other end. He made himself push the button anyway. Nothing happened. He cursed luridly, pushed out of the booth and tried the other. The second booth didn't even have a door, and there was fine dust floating in it. What the hell? What was this place? The drugs on the shelves must have been incredibly valuable. Four human guards and a metal killer, a single door that looked like it would stand off an atomic attack, an instantelsewhere booth with only one terminal and another booth you couldn't even get out of... an inagainst all that, with bombs... and suddenly he knew where he must be. It was a double jolt. Those shelves must have held Dictator immortality. And they were bare. Everything fitted. Of course you'd store geriatric drugs in a hospital. The booths must lead directly to Dictator strongholds... and even they could only appear in the closed booth. If the man in the booth wore the right face, someone outside could dial him into the booth that had a door. If not, he was a sitting duck for the laser weapons. And the vault door might well stand an atomic attack. But thieves had come through a wall... and maybe they'd used atomics too. Did Mirelly-Lyra know about this place? She must. She'd have kept looking until she found it. And so would Corbell, and she knew it: the Norn herself had told him about Dictator immortality. He had to get out of here. Exhaustion had become an agony. He would climb the ladder if he must, if he could, but he tried the vault door first. And it was open! All of his strength and weight were just enough to swing it wide. The invaders must have left by the door they could not enter. So did he, very gratefully. The line of "phone booths" was on this floor. He had walked a zigzag path from there; he might have trouble finding his way back -- He saw the booths as he rounded a comer. And he saw Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, holding her cane like a gun and squinting at something in her other hand. Just before he ducked back he saw her look up at the ceiling with her teeth bared. It wasn't him she was tracing. It was his pressure suit helmet. Peerssa, goodby. Corbell counted to thirty, then stuck his nose around the comer. She wasn't there. He tiptoed through the cloud-rug to the next intersection and peered around it. She wasn't there either, and he crossed the intersection at a leap and was in the nearest booth with the disc in his hand. Mirelly-Lyra would not have liked the way he was smiling. Two commas crossed; an S reversed; an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends; a crooked pi. The corridors vanished. In blackness he thumbed the door open and stepped out into blackness. A gust of warm, damp wind whipped at him, and at the same time he saw dim light: a slender, hot pink crescent with the horns down at eye level. He stood still while his eyes adjusted. A world took form around him. He was on a flat roof, looking into a solar eclipse. They must be fairly common these days, with both Sol and Jupiter occluding so much of the sky. But it was beautiful, a hot pink ring lighting sea and city with red dusk. He wished he could stay. Mirelly-Lyra must be finding his pressure suit helmet about now. There were stairs. He would have been happier knowing how tall the building was, but he didn't. He had to walk all the way to the bottom -- and he was reassured to recognize the lobby -- pause for a precious moment of rest, then climb up three flights. Next question: had the Norn noticed that he had not closed the office door? The sixth door was open a crack. He found a button blocking it. The door resisted his weight, gave slowly, let him in. They must have turned these offices out like popcorn boxes, he thought. Did this office connect to the exploded bedroom? He had bet his life on it. He stepped into the booth and looked for the intercom panel. Five buttons. He pushed the top one. Through the glass door he saw a sand beach and Tapping waves. Ye gods, those booths along the shore must have been private intercom booths! The Dictators were selfish bastards, he thought; but his forebrain was occupied in pushing button ##. Back in the office. He pushed # # . In red-tinged darkness he saw a triangular floor plan, walls and roof exploded outward. A dark doughnut shape, coiled just where he would have stepped on it, raised a white face, questioningly. He shouted, "Yeediaa!" "Meep?" He jabbed the fourth button down. The startled cat-tail vanished. Sunken tub, shower... He thought of hot water and comfort and sleep, and the hell with it. Would the old woman set her private zero-time "jail" next to a Turkish bath? Why not? But he pushed the bottom button anyway, to see what there was to see. Thoughts of sleep returned. His knees sagged. His muscles and bones seemed to be melting. But he saw. Ovens and cupboards to left and right. A long dining table, floating, and lines of floating chairs. The hooded Nom at the far end, and the silver cane foreshortened, end on. Behind her, shards of a picture window, and a bundle of thick cables running over the sill. He stabbed two buttons and kicked out at the door. II He was trying to remember something. It was urgent. -- See now, I hit an intercom button, then the door button, then kick out. Or the other way around? Intercom, door, kick out. Didn't wait -- couldn't wait -- never thought so fast in my life. Pressure on his ankles. He thrashed a bit, got his elbows under him to lift his head. The door of the "phone booth" was trying to lift under his ankles. Beyond, the great red sun was almost whole again, a chunk still missing behind black Jupiter. Closer: a desk floated above cloud-rug. He smiled and closed his eyes. It was seconds or minutes before he stirred himself. The sun was still cut by Jupiter. He stood on the door while he looked for something to wedge it. Assume the Nom was still guarding her zero-time device and her drug supply. He hadn't seen it, but what else could the cables be for? It must be there, and now she knew he was after her drugs. By now she would have found that the intercom to the office wasn't working. She would assume that Corbell had blocked the door open. If it started working now she'd be through in an instant. He couldn't let the door close. But there wasn't anything to wedge it. She could be coming here now. He'd barred her from the general "phone booth" system. Her car was here, just outside; she couldn't use that. So... yeah. Her fastest route was by intercom to the beach. Jog down to someone else's intercom booth, thence to someone else's office, dial for this building. By now she could be trotting down from the roof. And he still hadn't found anything to block the door! He stripped off his undersuit and wedged it in the door. It was cool for a moment, until the sweat dried on him. Now he was naked... and ashamed; what he saw when he looked down was not a self to be proud of. But who would see him but Mirelly-Lyra? The old woman was probably in no better shape. His personal possessions had dwindled to an ancient, withered body (stolen) and a single plastic credit card disc (also stolen). He took them down three flights of stairs and out. The car was where they had left it. It wouldn't start. He looked for a key or a key slot. If the Nora had taken the key he'd have to walk. He found a slot, empty, and said a bad word before ne noticed its size... The plastic disc fit it perfectly. The cars must be public taxis. That was convenient. Now, if the cars' destination codes resembled the booths', all he had to do was punch for the police station. And get a gun! As he reached for the keyboard his hands started to shake. Then other muscles were twitching, and suddenly he was in convulsions. Strange noises came from his mouth. In fury and despair Corbell realised that the felon's corpse had finally failed him; he was dying, and the timing was wrong, Please, no! Not till the battle's overlie locked his hands together and forced them at the keyboard. He punched the compressed hourglass, tried again and missed, again and hit, had to stop for a minute. Neck muscles locked and twisted his head backward, agonizingly, and he saw a car coming around the gently curved drive like a homing missile. The convulsions were getting worse. He stabbed at the hourglass key again, and again, and... He didn't know how often he'd hit it. When the car began to move he let the convulsions have their way. Mental agony. Unconsciousness. Now convulsions. Maybe he ought to be compiling a list of what the silver cane wouldn't do. It wouldn't stop a bubble car. The convulsions eased. Presently he could turn his head. Mirelly-Lyra was far behind him, out of her car, still firing. His motion carried her around the curve of the drive. He tried to relax. Random muscles locked and released in his legs, his back, his neck, his eyelids. It wasn't just the after-effects of the silver cane. He'd been through too much nightmare. He was too old for this kind of thing. He had always been too old to play Monster And Villagers through a maze of cityscape with an armed madwoman behind him. "Come on, calm down," he whispered. "It's all over. Unless... " Unless there was a "Follow that car" button in Mirelly-Lyra 's dashboard. He'd still be there ahead of her. Allow, say, one minute to search the police station for a gun. Then get out. Oops! The booths didn't work. He'd tried to dial the police station earlier. The car tilted far over, rounded a comer and was on one of the radial streets. Corbell watched his rear. It was less unnerving than watching rubble come at him. He saw the edge of the hexagonal dome go past him. The street ended. He was crossing sand. Corbell turned in time to see a stretch of beach coming at him. The car ran straight toward the frothing white breakers, crossed them and headed out to sea at something like ninety miles pier hour. Ill Corbell's voice was a rusty, querulous whine. He didn't like it. It was interfering with his search. It said, "All right, Corbell! You won the argument. If your medicines were better you wouldn't have tried to steal mine. Now let's talk!" It wasn't much of a search. He had hoped that Mirelly-Lyra might have stored food in her car. But he'd opened the glove compartment, and he'd looked under the seats, and what else was there? Slit the upholsteiy? Corbell was hungry. "You'll find the talking switch on the far right of the panel. Just push it upward. Corbell?" Sure. And then you'll track me down and -- But Corbell was tempted. He could ask her about food. He could ask her how to turn off the receiver. The car zipped over the waves toward whatever destination its idiot brain had read from Corbell' s spastic directions. Beneath the edges of a thick grey-black cloud deck, the sun and crescent Jupiter had drifted apart along the horizon. The sun was lower now, its lower edge flattened. Something lifted out of the red sunglade. He thought it was a bottle-nosed dolphin until its size registered. It was halfway to the horizon, and lifting like a blimp released! Its head tilted just a bit, and it looked him over while it slowly settled back into the frothing red sea. A dolphin the size of a whale. So we killed the whales off after all, he thought. And later there was an ecological niche... "I must guess you're hearing me, Corbell. I'm tracking you toward the southernmost continent, toward what used to be the boys' capital c ity. You can't lose me from your path because you can't leave your car. Talk to me." It seemed she was tracking him anyway. He flipped the switch up and said, "Is there any food aboard this car?" "Hello, Corbell. If you try to steal my drugs again you will kill yourself. I've placed traps." "Then I won't." "Then we will be searching in seperate places. I give you a year to find the Dictator immortality. I wish I could give more, but you know my condition. If you will find the drug, I will become your woman. Otherwise I will kill you." He laughed. "A difficult choice." "You have not seen me when I was beautiful. I am the only woman for you, Corbell. There are no others left." "Don't count on too much. Peerssa says I'm low on sex urge." That upset her. "Have you never desired women, Corbell?" "I was married for twenty-two years." "What is married?" "Mated. Under contract." "Was there sex? Did you enjoy it?" Suddenly Corbell missed Mira belle terribly. He mourned her, not because she was dead, but because she was gone. And her other half went on and on, through a world grown more and more hallucinatory...If only he could have talked it over with Mira belle! "In sex and in all ways, our life was purest ecstasy, as is usual in marriage," Corbell said with a flippancy he did not feel. "I'm sorry I brought it up." "I had to know." Just to stick a pin in her, he said, "Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want the Dictator immortality? Maybe I'm content to grow old gracefully." "You tried to steal my drugs." "You've got me there." "There is no grace to growing old. One year, Corbell." "Hey, don't hang up. Have you any idea where I'm headed? I don't even know where we were." "There is a continent that covers the South Pole. You are aimed there. As for where we were, there is a continent whose long tip points at the southernmost continent. We were nearly at the tip. I suspect your target to be the city of -- " and for a moment her own voice broke through, before his resumed. Earth's last civilization." Departing Cape Horn for Antarctica, he thought. Where in Antarctica? "What destination did you type?" He risked telling her. "I was trying to get to the police station. What with the way my muscles were jumping around, I really don't know what I hit." "Could you have struck the key more than four times? Five would send you to World Police Headquar"Maybe." He laughed. "Well, it got me away from you." "One year, Corbell." In a year he could be dead... though in fact he felt pretty good. The aches, the exhaustion, die twitchies were going away. But the hunger had attained a fine cutting edge. "In an hour I'll be dead of starvation. Is there any food in this car?" "No." "What do I eat?" go to the park." She gave him an address for the keyboard of his taxi. "The park is untended now, but any fruits you find are edible, and most of the animals can be eaten if you can catch them." "Okay." "You will not find Dictator immortality there. There were never "Hey, Mirelly-Lyra. How long have you been looking?" "Perhaps ten years of my life." He was startled. "I got the impression you'd been at it for a century or so." "I was unlucky. When the children revived me from zero-time, they told me they would search out the Dictator immortality for me. I had no choice but to believe them, but they lied." "There was a vault in the hospital -- ' ' She laughed. "There is a vault in every hospital in every city that remains on Earth. I have searched them all. What vaults haven't been rifled contain nothing but poisons. The medicines have decayed with time and wet heat." "Tell me more. What did you learn about this Dictator immortality after you landed, before they locked you up?" "Almost nothing. Only that it was there." "Tell me. Tell me all the wrong answers so I don't have to waste my time on them." IV The children had been waiting when Mirelly-Lyra descended from her spacecraft. Her first guess was that they must be the result of a State breeding program. Dignified, self-possessed, articulate, they displayed an adult wisdom she took for supernormal intelligence. Later she realised that it was the result of lifetimes of experience. She had never seen their like. They had never seen hers. There were adults in the world, but they were a seperate breed. She never met them. She gathered that there were no more than a few thousand, all Dictator class by courtesy, all using the Dictator immortality. They kept themselves apart The children tried her by her own law. She gained the impression that it was a farce for their amusement. Perhaps that was paranoia. They were punctilious; they did not mock her; they did not deviate from laws seventy thousand years old. For her part, Mirelly-Lyra kept her dignity at all times, as she was at pains to inform Corbell. They sentenced her to the zerotime jail.    "Didn't you hear anything about the interstellar colonies?' ' "No, nothing." "It figures. They must have broken away long before you landed. That's why they fired on you. Not because you were Mirelly-Lyra, but because you were from Earth." There was a silence. Then, "I never understood that. Are you saying that the State broke apart?" "Yeah. It took a hell of a long time, that's all. The State was a water monopoly empire." Corbell was talking half to himself now. "They tend to last forever, unless something comes in from outside and breaks them up. But there wasn't anything outside the State. The collapse had to wait till the State made its own barbarians." Hesitantly Mirelly-Lyra said, "You talk as if you have known many kinds of State." "I pre-date the State. I was a corpsicle, a frozen dead man. When the State was a century or so old, they... turned a condemned criminal into Jerome Corbell." "Oh." Pause. "Then maybe you know more than I do. How could the State Break apart?" "Look at it this way. First there was the State expanding through the solar system. Later, much later, there were a lot of copies of the State, one for each star, all belonging to one big State run from Earth. Then... well, I'm guessing. I think it was children's immortality. "You made a big thing out of the advantages of making eleven-yearolds immortal. Okay, fine. What if the other States didn't accept children's immortality? Look at how different your children's State would be! The other States probably claimed they were the original State. That makes the Solar System State heretical, its citizens unbelievers." "What would happen then? Would they stop talking to each other?' ' Corbell laughed. "Sure. Right after the war. Right after both sides tried to exterminate each other and failed. That's got to be the way it happened. It's inevitable." "Why?" "It just is." "Then," she said slowly, "that's what happened to... " "What?" "When they took me out of zero-time there was more than one State on Earth. Maybe that was inevitable too. Let me tell you."    The children led Mirelly-Lyra to the peak of a squat silver pyramid. Widgets of silver and clear plastic floated around her: three dimensional television transmitters, and weapons that affected the mind and will. They turned off the pyramid; its mirror-colored sides became black iron. They put her in an elevator and sent her down. She joined a despondent rabble. Some tried to talk to her in gibberish. She watched the elevator rise... and sink again with another prisoner. None spoke her language. The elevator never stopped rising and falling, bringing prisoners down, rising empty. The styles of those about her were wildly different; they continued to change with every' new prisoner. There was no provision for feeding the prisoners. It became obvious: nobody had been here long enough to become hungry. The twelfth to descend was not a prisoner. A girl of eleven dropped to just above their heads. Small machines floated around her. One, a silver wand mounted in a larger base, twitched this way and that like a nervous hound eager to be loosed. The girl was naked, and strangely decorated: transparent dragonfly wings sprang from her shoulders. She called in a sweet, peremptory, oddly accented voice, "Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, are you here?" So Mirelly-Lyra returned to the world after perhaps a quarter of an hour of subjective time.    Her hosts were half a dozen children, all girls. The girl who had come for her, Choss, was in some ways the leader. Their social organization was complex. Their minds were not the minds of children. They walked like the Lords of the World. They were arrogant and indulgent by turns, and Mirelly-Lyra learned to obey them. They trained her with the silver wand... a variant of the silver cane she carried much later. It grated on her to think that they regarded her as a social inferior. Later she changed her mind. They regarded her as a house pet, a prized property that could do tricks. With the children she watched shows put on by other groups of children. Some they attended live. Others were broadcast as threedimensional illusions, like holovision sets arbitrarily large. Once they floated in interplanetary space for hours, and Mirelly-Lyra wondered at the grim intensity with which Choss's girls watched a dull and repititious planetarium show. She understood later, during the voting. But most of the shows were bids for prestige. Some of the bulky floating widgets that followed her around were cameras and emotional sensors. Mirelly-Lyra was another show. Because of her, the prestige of Gloss' s group was high. Her medicines had retarded, but not prevented, menopause. The change in her body was a nearin herself. She was a trained seal, and aging. One thing kept her going. Somewhere out there was Dictator immortality. At first she welcomed the chance to talk to the girls. But that was the trouble: Mirelly-Lyra did all the talking. Her own questions were not answered. She was expected to answer the questions the girls put to her in full; if she didn't lecture at length they became annoyed. Then, once, she found Choss in an indulgent mood. "Choss told me that the Dictators took care of their own medical problems," said Mirelly-Lyra. "The Dictators were ruled by the boys, who made shows wiih them and who saw to it that chemicals in their food kept them from having children. I think Choss was jealous that the boys would not let girls play with the Dictators. I'm telling this badly," she said suddenly. "These girls were all older than I. They were decadent aristocrats, not children." "Yeah. I get the impression the girls and the boys stayed apart." "Yeah, and it made things difficult for me. Boys and girls, they didn't have sex to hold them together. They were two seperate States on Earth, each with its territory and its rights. They must have been seperate for a long time. Choss said that the girls ruled the sky and the boys ruled the Dictators. I would have to go to the boys to learn of Dictator immortality." "The girls ruled the sky ?" It sounded like nonsense, but... "Choss said so. I think it was true, Corbel #. I saw them vote! But I was more concerned with the Dictator immortality. Choss promised to learn what I wanted from the boys. I was valuable to them, Corbell. They gained prestige from the stories I told and the shows they made about me." Anger crackled in the translator's voice as MirellyLyra relived evil memories. "They were forever amused by what I did not know. Other groups of girls began reviving other prisoners. After many years I decided that Choss had done nothing to get me what I wanted. I would have to reach the boys." "It figures." "What?" "Choss couldn't go to the boys. They'd claim you as a Dictator. Their property." "I... never thought of that. I was a fool." "Go on." "The boys held the land masses of the southern hemisphere. They had built heated domes in the south polar continent. They held two other continents and many islands. But the girls ruled more useful land, and more power too, if they really ruled the sky. I knew that the Earth had been moved. There were times that one could see the banding and pick out the moons. I was afraid of these girls. I was trying to find a safe way to steal an aircraft, but I waited too long. "One day Choss told me that they were tired of me, that I must go back in zero-time. I was no longer a new thing. I took a plane that night. They let me fly a long way before they brought me back on autopilot. I learned that they had made a show of my escape." "Fun people, your girls. They put you back in the box?" "Yes. After a long time the machinery stopped. Everything was talk to each other. There was no cooperation. I saved myself -- some of us lived -- but it was a long time before I learned enough to feel myself safe. I had to leam what could be eaten, what foods would not spoil, how to hide from storms... all things you will have to leam too. I was old when I could begin searching again. For ten years I searched. Then I built my small zero-time and went into it to wait for... you." "Nice try." "When you are young again, then mock me!" "I don't expect that'll happen." "We can't give up." Corbell laughed. " can give up. I guess I damn well don't believe in your Dictators' immortality. Have you ever seen anyone get young?" "No, but -- " "Do you even know what makes people get old? Fires don't burn backward, lady." "I am not a doctor. I only know what anyone knows. Inert molecules accumulate in the cells, like... like silt and metabolic poisons accumulating in a great inland sea, until the sea becomes a great inland swamp. The cells become less... active. Some die. One day there are too few active cells living too slowly. Other inert matter accumulates to block the veins and arteries... but I have medicines to dissolve them." "Cholesterol, sure. But getting the dead stuff out of a living cell thing else again. I think you were hoaxed," said Corbell. "Choss and her friends acted like nasty children. Why not your boy lawyer too? Remember, you asked the girls. They didn't raise the subject." "But whyV' "Oh, just to see what you'd -- " 'Wo!" "Everyone dies. Your lawyer's dead. Choss is dead. Even civilizations die. There was a civilization here that could move the Earth. Now there's nothing." After a longish silence came the calm voice of the translating box. "There are boys where you're going. I tried to talk to them once. They know nothing of Dictator immortality." "Do they know what happened to civilization?" "You said it yourself. There were two States on Earth. They must have fought." "It could have happened." War between the sexes had always seemed silly to Corbell. Too much fraternizing with the enemy, ha ha. But if sex didn't hold them together? "The boys know nothing," She repeated. "Perhaps there was never Dictator immortality in the south polar continent." "You've got a one track mind. If it ever existed, you found it in every city in the world. Used up. Rotted." "One year, Corbell." Might as well try it... "How does this sound? Let me use your medicines. I can travel faster and look further if I'm young and healthy." Another long pause. Then, "Yes, that makes sense." "I thought you'd say no." Here was his chance! But... "Nuts. No, I just can't risk it. You scare me too much. This way at least I get a year." She screamed something that was not translated. The receiver went dead. A year, he thought. In a year I'll be dug in so deep she'll never find me at all. I Corbell came to the Antarctic shore in near darkness. The vanished sun had left dark red splashed across the northern horizon, and a red-on-red circle that was Jupiter's night side. To east and west he picked out tiny Jovian moons. Ahead, dark woods came down to a dark shore. The trees came at him, spreading out. Then the smooth ride was bouncing Brownian motion, and the car was dodging tree trunks at maniac speed. He gripped the padded bar to keep himself from bouncing around inside. He dared not close his eyes. The chase scenes through Four City should have burned away his capacity for terror, but they hadn't, they hadn't. The old trees forced their way through a tangle of burgeoning life, vines, underbrush, big mushrooms, everything living on each other. A pair of huge birds ran screaming from the car. The car rode high, but branches slashed at its underside. The forest thinned... and showed masonry half-hidden in vines. The car was already racing grass and small bushes had invaded the streets. If this was Three City... if this was the Antarctic source of industrial activity Peerssa had sensed from orbit ,... then it was far gone. The car was slowing. Thank God. It scraped slowly over crackling brush, stopped in the open, and sank. Corbell got out onto moist grass. He stretched. He looked about him. In the darkness it was barely possible to pick out two distant curved walls of hexagonal filigree where a dome must have stood. Corbell found no sign of the great black cube, the subway station, that had been the center of every city he'd seen so far. He was parked beside what must be World Police Headquarters: a great wall of balconies and dark windows, with a row of large circular holes at the top, holes big enough to be access ports for flying police cars. There might be weapons in there... But there was certainly food in the park, and Corbell was faint with hunger. With some reluctance he climbed back into the car and typed inverted L, inverted L, nameless squiggle, delta.    Like the woods beyond the city, the park was spreading into the streets. The car stopped over a patch of tangled vines. He stepped out into it, having precious little choice, and found himself thighdeep in tough vines that pulled him back like a nest of snakes. He waded out. Hunger had never done anything for Corbell's disposition. It made him irritable, unfit to live with. A wall of greenery twice his height ended just ahead of him. On theory that there was a real wall under that tangle of vines, Corbell walked to the end, turned, and entered the park proper. There was no obvious difference. It was as dark as the inside of a mouth. Jupiter's horizontal light couldn't reach through trees and buildings. Corbell wished for a flashlight, or a torch; but he didn't even have a match, corbell Mark II, bare-ass naked against the wilderness, would not be hunting prey tonight. But fruit, now... these could be fruit trees. The Nom had said they were. Corbell stood beneath a tree and ran his hands through the branches. Something round bounced against his wrist. It was pear-shaped, bigger than a pear, with thick, rough skin. He stripped some of the rind away with his teeth, bit into... creamy avocado flesh, milder in taste than avocado. He ate it all. He threw away the skin and pit and felt through the branches for another. A furry tentacle dropped familiarly around his neck. Corbell grabbed. Sharp teeth closed between his neck and shoulder. The pain sickened him. His closing right hand slipped along fur, was stopped by a thickening... a head. He wrenched at it. The teeth came loose, and tentacle came loose and immediately wrapped new loops around his forearm. By starlight he saw a small snarling face. He was strangling a cat-tail. The little beast could as easily have tom his eyes or his jugular. It was trying to bite him now. Even so, he didn't especially want to kill it... He banged its head against a branch. Its grip loosened. A pitcher's fast-ball gesture flung it away. It coiled on the ground, lifted a head to study him. He was too big. It went away. The wound was muscle tissue, and wasn't bleeding badly, but still, it hurt. Corbell sent a curse to follow the cattail. He found and ate two more avocados. Good enough. He went back to the car, locked himself in and went to sleep. the first day Corbell made his breakfast on tiny apples and apple-sized grapefruit. The cat-tails had disappeared. He sat quietly while he ate, and was rewarded. Squirrels (maybe; they moved fast) popped into view and vanished. A bird ran out of the woods, stopped short in front of him -- it was as tall as his shoulder, dressed in the autumn colors of a turkey -- squawked jn terror and fled. Presently he picked up a thick branch, knobbed at the end. A machete was what he really had in mind, but the club had a nice heft. He went exploring. The park was a jungle of delights. He found fruit trees and nut trees and trees that grew fist-sized warty things whose taste he would have to try, later. Pineapples and coconut palms fought for room. String beans grew on vines that were strangling some of the trees. On a hunch Corbell pulled up some smaller plants and found fat roots: potatoes or carrots or yams, maybe. He was seeing them by reddened been adapting to that reddened light and the twelve-year Antarctic day; of course they were unrecognizable. But they might be edible, if he could cook them, if he could start a fire. Or find one.    The ground floor of World Police Headquarters was clean and empty. Corbell found no dead bodies, no guns left lying about, no uniforms. Even the desks were gone. He was disappointed. He had hoped at least to clothe himself. He tried an elevator. It worked. Over several hours of exploring he found that the twenty-story building was bare to the walls, from the empty hangars under the rooftop landing pad, to the wonderfully filigreed cells in the fifth through seventh floors, to the offices on the second. Nothing remained that wasn't part of the structure itself. But the elevators worked. He kept looking. Where desks had been he found slots for trash. He tracked them to their outlet: a metal trash can, empty. He carried it out to the car. It was the closest thing he'd found to a cooking pot. Now if he could find water... and fire... He'd already been through the big room on the tenth floor. There was an acre of flat surface in here: tabletop along all four sides, a big square table in the middle with bins under it, doors with shelves behind them. Now, searching more carefully, he opened long panels and found knobs under them. He turned all the knobs as far as they could go, hoping to find a heat-source: this could be a kitchen. He went down to the car. He came back with a generous armful of dried grass, and the club. Most of the kitchen mechanisms must have stopped working. A snug and solid door proclaimed a cupboard to be a refrigerator. Some of the flat surface had to be griddles; but they weren't hot. A small glass door with a shelved recess behind it was hot. An oven. Corbell stuffed the grass into it, and waited... and waited... while the grass smoldered... smoldered more... and, suddenly, burned. He opened the door and set the club in the burning grass. When the grass burned out the knob on the end was barely smoldering. By then Corbell had found an exhaust fan. He let that blow on the coals until he had a small flame.    The rain started as he reached the car. The car refused to move unless the doors were closed... with the club inside with Corbell, smoldering. The small flame had gone out. The rain fell tremendously, as if it would never stop until the world was all water. Smoke inside and rain outside; Corbell couldn't see at all. Fortunately the ride was short. The car settled over the exact same patch of tangle vines. Corbell pushed the trash can out into the rain, but he stayed in the car, blowing on the coals, with the doors open. The afternoon rain went on and on. When the club stopped smoldering Corbell didn't care. All the wood in the park would be soaked by now. He waded out into the wet and got his dinner of assorted fruits before the light was quite gone. Again he slept in the car. A cramped, damp, wakeful night followed a miserable day. In this jungle of delights, this wilderness in which everything that grew seemed intended to serve man, Corbell had failed to make fire even with the help of a kitchen oven. Robinson Crusoe would have sneered. But the cat-tail bite was healing. No fever: he had escaped rabies and tetanus. Tomorrow. Try again tomorrow. the second day -- was bigger, better, faster. He took the car to World Police Headquarters. He carried two armfuls of damp scavenged wood into an elevator and up to the kitchen. He put them in the oven. He'd forgotten to turn it off yesterday; it saved him time now. He turned on the exhaust and left. A little searching found him a second trash can. He took it up. The logs were smoldering, burning in places, but still wet. He left them to it. The kitchen was full of smoke, despite the exhaust fan. Impatience got to him. There were not even flames on the blackened logs now. He opened the oven door, letting in air. The gasses caught with a soft whoosh. Corbell leapt back slapping at his hair and eyebrows; but no, they hadn't caught. He had to tear a door off a narrow cupboard. It was the only tool he could find. With the door he harried the logs out of the oven and into the trash can. He took the cupboard door along too. Flat metal, it might serve somehow. His way back to the park was slower. Three times he had to open a door to let out the smoke; each time the car slowed as if it had rammed invisible taffy. But he got back, and maneuvered the trash can out of the car into the patch of vines, under a threatening sky. The logs had gone to coals. He turned the can on its side and braced the bottom higher than the lip. He pushed the coals into a pile at the back. He found more wood, not too damp, which he set in the trash can to be dried by the heat. When the warm rain opened up on him it didn't bother him. It was not especially uncomfortable, and now his fire was safe. ago... Corbell the spaceman had already crossed tens of thousands of light years, and at the core of the galaxy was skirting the edge of a black hole massive as a hundred Corbell the naked savage went forth to hunt his dinner. Living things rustled around him, but he saw nothing. It didn't matter. He didn't have anything to kill with, not so much as a kitchen knife. He kept his eyes open for another club while he pulled up roots. He pulled up quite a number of different roots. He'd roast them all, and taste them. He spent more time gathering nuts. The rain stopped. This rain seemed regular enough: starting just after noon, lasting two or three hours. It was nice to be able to count on something. In the customary red sunset light he sat down to cook his dinner. He had to throw away half the roots. He got, in rough and approximate terms, one potato, one very large beet, a combination yam and carrot, and a more nearly pure yam. He burned most of the nuts, but some survived; and were delicious. He went back for more. Then night was upon him. He set the trash can upright and set some fallen tree limbs upright on the coals, and settled down to sleep in a patch of nearly dry moss. the third day Corbell half-woke in darkness. He felt fur and a warm spot against his back, but elsewhere he was chilled. He curled more tightly around himself and went back to sleep. Some time later the memory snapped him awake. Fur? There was nothing against his back now. A dream? Or had a friendly cat-tail stretched against him for warmth? The touch hadn't wakened him fully. He and Mirabelle used to share their king-sized bed with a kitten, until the kitten became a tomcat and started behaving like one. Well, he was awake now. He did easy exercises until the stiffness was gone. He breakfasted on fruit; what else? Perhaps he ought to be looking for nests, and eggs. The fire was still going. He built it up with twigs, then went looking for larger pieces. He wished for an ax. The little stuff burned too fast, the big stuff was too heavy to move, and he would soon use up all the dead limbs in the area. He spent part of the morning dragging a huge limb to his replenished fire. After he had tilted the trash can on its side and pushed the big end of the limb into it, he decided he'd created a fire hazard. He moved the whole arrangement onto a nearly buried outcropping of granite. It was meat he hungered for. If he could find a straight sapling perhaps he could fire-harden it into a spear... if he could sharpen a point. What he really needed was a knife, he thought. For that alone it    Four crossed-commas brought the Corbell recognised it at once. From outside it was identical to the Four City Hospital. Civilization must have become awfully stereotyped before its collapse. Corbell fantasized a great pogrom in which all the world's architects had died. Afterward humanity had been reduced to copying older buildings detail for detail... It didn't make a lot of sense. He'd look for other reasons for the duplication he saw everywhere. Inside, the place kept reminding him of his nightmare flight from Mirelly-Lyra. Clean corridors, doors with no handles, cloud-rug... The only difference was the lack of a vault. He found a central place, a two-story room lined with shelves and occupied by a computer that must be diagnostic equipment. But there was no vault door and no double "phone booth". No precautions against thieves. No mummified losers. If Mirelly-Lyra had not lied, the "boys" had owned this city. They would not have needed to steal Dictator immortality. Only Dictators -- adults -- would need that. He found more locked doors... that would open with a kick. He found an operating room: two flat tables with straps attached, and clusters of jointed arms above them, tipped with scalpels and suction tubes and needles and clamps. The metal showed the stains of neglect and age. That stiffly extended insectile arm: that was his target. Corbell climbed up on a table, leaned out to grip the arm at its end. He swung outward and hung suspended. The arm sagged, then broke in the middle and dropped him to the floor. Corbell the hunter left the hospital carrying three feet of metal spear with a scalpel at the end.    Again the rains caught him on the way back. He made his way to his fireplace, checked to see that the fire was still going, then sat down to wait it out. There were several inches of water in his other trash barrel. shave -- very carefully, but the weight of the handle was awkward and he wasn't doing a good job of it -- when he saw the giant turkey. It was pecking under a nut tree, looking bedraggled and unhappy. He froze. It hadn't seen him. He debated as to whether he might sneak up on it. Probably not. He eased forward onto the balls of his feet, spear held lightly in both hands. He sprinted. The bird looked up, squawked, turned and fled. Corbell swung the spear and chopped at its foot. The bird stopped to peck at whatever had bitten it. Corbell chopped again, at the neck, and felt the satisfying shock in his shoulders. The bird was hurt and in panic. It ran in clumsy circles, squawking, while Corbell chased it. He got two more shots at the neck, and then he had to stop, gasping, his pulse thundering in his ears. The bird was spouting blood. It hadn't slowed down, but its flight was Brownian motion, sheer blind panic. It had not gone far when Corbell recovered his breath and resumed the chase. He was moving in for the kill when the bird turned and ran straight at him. A lucky swing as he sprawled backward, and the bird was headless. It ran right over him and kept going. He tracked it until it fell over. The patch of bare rock was nearly dry. Corbell spilled his fire across it, added more wood, then went back for the bird. He pulled feathers until he was exhausted, rested, pulled more feathers. He opened the bird's belly and cleaned it, tugging two-handed at internal organs, his feet braced on rough rock. The cupboard door from the police station became his griddle. He fried the liver on it, and ate it while parts of the rest of the bird were roasting. Afterward he worked at cutting into the joints. He couldn't build his fire big enough to roast the whole bird, but he could roast a drumstick. And broil thick slices of breast on a stick. Meat! It was good to taste meat again. There was far too much to use tonight. He had roasted both drumsticks; he could eat them cold tomorrow. He could cut up parts of the carcass and boil them for soup, in the other trash can, with some of the roots. But for tonight he'd had enough. II The northeast was turning gray, but in the black northwestern sky one star still glowed. Corbell had watched it on several nights. It did not twinkle and it did not move against the stellar background. That made it a planet, a big object dimly lit, possibly the world whose skewed orbit had disturbed Peerssa. Now it twinkled; now it was marginally brighter. Corbell blinked. Just his imagination? Now it was fading before the coming dawn... Corbell closed his eyes. He didn't want to wake up. There was no special reason why he should. He wasn't hungry or uncomfortable. He'd learned much about the empty city during these past twenty days, but there were mysteries still to be explored. His encampment had become comfortable. He had a fireplace, a soup pot, and the car for shelter. He had tools: he had used the scalpel to carve wooden cooking implements. He didn't need clothes. For two full days he had practiced throwing rocks, and taken his reward in squirrel meat. Yesterday he had killed another giant turkey, his third. Big deal. Obscurely depressed, he curled tighter in his bed of moss. Corbell the architect and Corbell the interstellar explorer seemed equally dead. In his pride he had called himself a naked savage, but he wasn't that. A savage has his duties to the tribe, his tribe's duties to him. He has legends, songs, dances, rules of conduct, permitted and unpermitted women, a place for him when he grows old... but Corbell was an outcast. He could make fire -- with the help of a supersophisticated kitchen. He could feed himself -- now that practically everything he could touch was edible. Some park. In the beginning it must have held only food plants and meat animals. City surrounding a farm. The cat-tails could hardly have survived, vain and decorative though they were, in the presence of real predators. Domed cities. Mirelly-Lyra had spoken of the Boys having built domed cities, here in land the more powerful Girls hadn't held. But of been domed against blizzards and subzero cold, before the world turned unaccountably hot. As for the "park", the Boys could hardly have grown beans and citrus fruit in the permafrost outside. The Girls ruled the sky... controlled Earth's orbit. They must have made a mistake somewhere. What could have turned Jupiter into a minor sun? It must have shocked the Girls as badly as it later shocked Peerssa. It must have; because the change left Boy territory habitable and made Girl territory into scalding deserts, overturning a balance of power tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Corbell shifted, then sat up. It was the present that ought to concern him... Three cat-tails were tearing at his turkey carcass. When he moved they jolted to attention. Corbell reconsidered his first intention. They were eating the raw meat; they had left the roasted drumsticks alone. There was plenty of meat left for Corbell. They studied him: three snakes with solemn cat faces, furred in brown and orange intricately patterned; as beautiful as three butterscotch sundaes. Corbell smiled and gestured hospitably. As if they understood, they went back to their meal. Breakfast: he ate fruit and drumstick meat and thought about coffee. Afterward he tended his fire. The scalpel was razor-sharp despite age and eighteen days of use, but it was no ax. He went far afield to find wood. The exercise was good. Decades in the cold sleep coffin had preserved him better than he had hoped; he'd gone soft despite the exercises, but the savage life was toning him up. He took the other trash can to what had been a fountain and was now a pond, filled it with not especially clean water, dragged it back and wrestled it into place on the fire. He turned to the turkey carcass. He cut chunks small enough to fit the trash can. Meat gnawed by cattails went in, and so did bare bones. While it heated he foraged for roots to flavor the soup. Potatoes. Carrot-yams. He'd found nothing that resembled an onion, unfortunately. He added beans and, experimentally, a couple of grapefruit. He stirred it all with a wooden paddle. As usual, noon looked like sunset, endlessly disconcerting. Corbell rested. The water was beginning to bubble. Granite was uncomfortable beneath his buttocks. Corbell was mildly depressed, and he couldn't understand why... And then he did. Last day of a camping trip. You've worked your tail off; your belt has come in a notch and a half; you haven't had to think much; you've seen some magnificent scenery; there were damn few people on the trails, and they didn't rub your nerves. It's been good. But now it's back to work -- Mirelly-Lyra knew where he was. He was healthier than he'd known. He could live a Jovian year, if nothing killed him; the tourist in him liked that thought. The mad old woman had promised him one year, an Olde Earth year. He could believe as much of that as he cared to, but a sane man would choose the jungle. Could a man survive in the jungle pend. Corbell had come to Antarctica in either spring or fall of a year twelve years long. An Olde Earth year from now the day might last twenty-three hours, or one. It would be much warmer than this, or much colder. For the world still had its tilt and its twenty-four-hour rotation. Odd that the Girls had not corrected that... but maybe they were traditionalists. Much odder that they had not moved Earth out from the growing heat of Jupiter. What concerned Corbell was this: he could not take a world twenty degrees colder, not without clothing, and endless night might drive him mad. Soup odors were beginning to permeate the wood smoke. This sense of urgency was silly. He had a year to get moving. He could make foraging expeditions to the edge of the city. Keep his camp here. Whatever was out beyond the domes had had to be imported. How dangerous could it be? It might well be thousands of square An endless vacation. And he could use it. In his second life corbell Mark II had suffered enough future shock to kill a whole cityful of Tofflers. Tomorrow, then. He could take the car as far as the hospital; it was near a standing fragment of dome. Then into the wild with spear and drumstick over either shoulder, if the drumstick kept that long without refrigeration. He remembered to scrape some of his fire into his trash can fireplace. He stretched out on the warm granite...    Warm rain hammered at him. He turned over fast, rose to hands and knees and coughed out a tablespoonful of rainwater. First time that had happened. His bonfire must be out, but had the soup cooked first? Was rain getting into his fireplace? He looked up, and forgot all of these crucial questions. A dozen or so boys -- approximately a big boy scout troop, but uniformed only in breechclouts -- squatted in a circle around Corbell and his fire. They were passing around a drumstick bone, nearly clean by now, while they watched him. As if they had been watching him in perfect silence for hours. Their hair was rich where they had hair. On some it was black and wooly, on others black and straight, dripping to their shoulders. The crowns of their heads were bald but for a single tuft on each forehead. They ignored the pounding rain and watched, half-smiling. "I should have known," said Corbell. "The cat-tails. They're half tame. All right." He made a sweeping gesture. "Welcome to the Kingdom of Corbell-for-himself. Have some soup." They frowned, all of them. One got up: a long, lanky boy, a budding basketball player, Corbell would have judged. He spoke. "Sorry," said Corbell. The boy spoke again. Command and anger: that was no boy's voice, though it was high-pitched. Corbell was hardly surprised. These were the Boys, Mirelly-Lyra's immortals. "I don't speak your language," Corbell said slowly, with an instinct that went against sense: the natives will understand if you speak slowly and clearly. The boy came forward and slapped him across the face. Corbell hit him flush in the mouth. His right cross hit ribs instead of solar plexus, and the following left missed completely, somehow. Then the whole circle converged on him. His memory thereafter was a little hazy. There was weight on his knees and forearms. Granite ground into his back. The basketball star sat on his chest and spoke the same sentence over and over through a split lip. He would say it, and wait, and slap Corbell twice, and say it again. Corbell replied with obscenities. He could feel the bruises now; they hurt sufficiently. The tall boy got off his chest. He said something to the others. They all frowned down at Corbell. They discussed the matter in complex consonants spat like mouthfuls of watermelon seeds. Corbell's head still rang; it had been beaten against granite. Four boys were still sitting on his forearms and knees. Rain splashed in his eyes. It all tended to muddle his thinking. Did they think he was a strayed Dictator? But Corbell was showing his age. They couldn't -- Wrong. No Dictator immortality here. The Dictators must grow old as Corbell had grown old. The discussion ended. Four boys got off Corbell. He sat up rubbing his arms. One took a theatrical pose, pointed at the ground before him, and spat one harsh word. Stay! or Heel! His message was plain, and Corbell was in no shape to run. The tall boy still studied Corbell as if trying to make up his mind. The others clustered around Corbell's soup pot. They scooped soup into halves of coconut shells. The tall boy finally offered him something else, a ceramic cup from his belt. Corbell waited for room, then moved in. He sat (gingerly, favoring the bruises) and drank. Cat-tails moved among the tribe like a plague of snakes; rubbed against ankles, and were petted; tore at the raw turkey carcass, what was left of it. Corbell felt fur against his ankle. He stroked a pure black cat-tail. A rumbling vibration went through his shin. Shall we say that Corbell has been captured again? Or, Corbell asked himself, shall we say that Fate has given me guides through Antarctica? Put that way, the decision was easy... Ill The soloist sang in a strong, rich tenor. He sang to background music: eight Boys humming in at least four parts, one more beating with turkey bones on Corbell' s trash can fireplace. Alien music, improvised, overly complex against the simple melancholy tune. Corbell listened open-mouthed, the back of his neck tingling. He had feared this, and it was true: human intelligence. "Oh, we got a new computer, but it's quite a disappointment," Ktollisp sang, " 'cause it always gives this same inyane advice: Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny hands for milking mice!' ' The flavor of mockery in his singing was for Corbell. He couldn't know what the words meant. But his pronunciation was accurate. Corbell had sung that song once . He had taken to singing in an effort to enhance his entertainment value. He sang medleys of advertising jingles, or the clean and dirty folk songs he and Mirabelle had sung on the boat. The Boys liked it. They didn't like it when he repeated a song they'd heard before. He had wondered why. Beside him was the boy who had attacked him that night a week ago, the leader in some respects. Skatholtz was broad of nose and lip, wooly-haired, long-limbed and emaciated-looking. He might have been a black pre-teen, but for the partial baldness and the prison pallor he shared with the others. He said in English, "He sings well, do you think?" and laughed at what he found in Corbell's face. "Now you know." "You remember everything. Everything! Even whole songs in another language ! ' ' "Yes. You need to learn my speaking more than I need to learn your speaking, but I learn yours first. This is why. You are different, Corbell. Older. I think you are older than anything." "Almost anything." "I will teach you how to talk. When you tell your tale, we all want to listen. I make a mistake with you. Do you know why I hit you? We thought you are only a dikt who broke with rules. You did not -- " Skatholtz jumped suddenly to his feet. He stood at parade rest for a moment; then he shrank back, hands raised half in supplication, half to ward a blow. "I didn't cringe," said Corbell. "Yes, cringe. It is a formal show of respect." Ktollisp sang, "So we got an expert genius and he rewrote all the programs, but we always got results that looked like these: Oh you need little teeny eyes for reading teeny print like you need little teeny license plates for bees !" It was pink-and-black dusk in the park. The Boys had returned early this day. They spent most of every buildings like a flock of wild birds. Exploring, Corbell had thought. Savages swarming through ruins they could not understand. He'd soon lost that illusion. A pair of Boys had escorted him outside the hospital operating room while the others worked inside. When he was allowed back in, Corbell's scalpel-spear had been reattached. The many-jointed arms above the operating table were carefully carving a phantom patient. He was not allowed to watch repairs, but he had seen the results. The refrigerator in the police building, restored. A factory tested, run through its cycle until it had built two "phone booths". The Boys did Corbell the signal honor of letting him test the booths. He had not tried to balk. Another factory had produced a Bathroom, a complete unit with pool and sauna. The Boys had repaired and tested the city lighting. Now the sides of many buildings glowed with soft yellowwhite light. Others remained dark. The effect was eerie: a city-sized chessboard. They lived like savages, but apparently it was from choice. In camp Corbell had done his share of the work, hauling firewood and digging up roots. They had given him a loincloth, but they would not give him a knife to replace his scalpel-spear. He still didn't know what place he held among them. He feared the worst. They were too intelligent. They would see him as a lesser being, an animal. He needed them. It wasn't just company he needed. He could not travel safely until he knew something about this new continent. The boy was singing all the verses, to the muted laughter of his companions. Corbell said, "Sooner or later I'll run out of songs. Sooner." Skatholtz shrugged. "It is all the same. We leave here when light comes again. We go to other... tribes? To tell them that SarashYou come with us." "Night? Is it night that's coming?" Had he landed in autumn, then? "Yes. So you came from space, unready! I thought that. Yes, the long day is ended and the short day-nights are with us and the long night comes near. In the long night we live in the city. Hunters go to the forests around, and food will keep in the cold boxes. In day we live more as we like." "What's it like out there?" "You will see." Skatholtz picked up a passing cat-tail and stroked its fur. "We have time to teach you some speaking," he said, and he switched to the language Corbell had tagged Boyish. Corbell was agreeable. He enjoyed language lessons.    Morning: they moved out. There was incredibly little fuss. They all seemed to wake at once. Soup had been simmering all night, made to Corbell's recipe, which they liked. Breakfast was soup in coconut shells. They picked up pots, cloth, the fire starter, half a dozen edged weapons. One, an albino with pink eyes and cottony golden hair, handed Corbell twenty pounds of jerked meat wrapped in cloth. They left. Marching awakened Corbell fully. He had to drive himself to keep up, though the Boys made no attempt to set a steady pace. They ambled. Some dodged into buildings, then jogged to rejoin the tribe. Savages they were not. They carried an idiosyncratic variety of edged tools, no two alike: scimitars, machetes, sabres, shapes that had no name, all with carefully sculpted handles. They had made the jerky the way Corbel I would have, in an oven set on Low. The cloth they carried was indestructible stuff as thin as fine silk. Krayhayft's flashlightfire starter projected light of variable intensity, in a conical beam or a beam no thicker than a pencil. Organized they were not. But they had broken camp in minutes! They tramped through silent streets. Ingrowths of jungle grew thicker about them, until the city became jungle. They passed a straight tree trunk that Corbell suddenly realized was vine-wrapped metal. He looked up to see where it joined other members in a hexagonal array: a part of the old dome. The jungle bore fruit: small oranges, breadfruit, several kinds of nuts. The Boys ate as they walked, and picked raw nuts to replace the roasted nuts they carried. They talked among themselves. Corbell couldn't follow their speech; it went too fast. He strode along in their midst, keeping the pace he'd set himself. Incredible, the way his old body had healed! Tomorrow the aches would come; tomorrow he might not be able to move, except he'd damn well better. Today he felt fine. He felt like a scout-master leading his troop. Memo: Don't test your authority. Three hours or so into the hike... and that could almost be a fight developing up ahead. Skatholtz and another Boy were spitting syllables at each other with unwonted vehemence. Last night's singer loped to join them. Ktollisp was a burly, bigchested Boy with Skatholtz's black man's features and everybody's pale skin. He snapped one word at the two and they shut up. Ktollisp looked about him; frowned; pointed. The troop went off in that direction. They found a clearing, a few bushes growing on otherwise bare ground. Corbell watched, not understanding, as the troop formed a circle and Skatholtz and the other Boy stepped into it. What was this, a duel? The two dropped their knives and breechclouts (no pubic hair). They circled like wrestlers. The challenger kicked at Skatholtz's heart. Skatholtz swerved clear... and now it was happening too fast to follow. Fists and feet and elbows struck to kill: a momentary hold broken by an elbow between the eyes, the challenger kicked off balance and handspringing clear; Skatholtz jumping full over a bush and then using it as a shield. It looked like a damned dance! But Skatholtz was favoring one leg, and the other Boy was circling faster. He was going to run him down. He caught a kick in the face as he closed. Skatholtz moved in for the kill. Ktollisp barked one word. The bloody-nosed Boy cringed before Skatholtz, held the pose a moment, then straightened. Everyone got up and started moving again. Someone else was carrying Skatholtz's cumbersome pack of cloth. His opponent was grinning and wiping at a bloody nose.    In midafternoon Skatholtz said two words Corbell recognized. He said, "Stop talk." They did. Now the silence of their march was uncanny. Skatholtz dropped back to walk beside Corbell. Very quietly he said, in Boyish, "You walk too loudly." "I can't help it. Are we hiding from something?" "From dinner we hide. Earlier was too early. We did not want to carry food so far. If something moves, let me know." Corbell nodded. He didn't expect to see anything. It would be months before his brain could train his eyes to see what the Boys could see in familiar territory. The keen-eyed Indian sees things the white man can't, but only in his own environment. Two boys transferred their loads to others and slipped away. Corbell couldn't see where they had gone... but presently there was a weird and terrifying sound, like a clarinet screaming for help. Every boy instantly moved off the trail to flatten against a tree. Corbell copied them. The tortured clarinet sounded nearer. They heard breaking wood. What would emerge? A tentacled monster, descendant of aliens enslaved by a younger, spacetravelling State? The monster burst from the trees. It was crippled, its forelegs running blood, hamstrung. The boys followed it, first the hunters and then the rest, slashing at its hind legs. A baby elephant! Corbell caught up in time to see the death. It was murder; it left him sick to his stomach. He fought his squeamishness and moved close to examine the corpse. The beast was wrinkled and marked by old scars No baby, this. It was an adujf elephant four feet tall at the should der. He asked Skatholtz, "Can  help?" . "You may not butcher. I can not let you touch a knife. You are not aj; dikt, Corbell. You are nothing w know." "Today I kill nobody." He meant it as a joke, but he didn't know enough Boyish to phrase it that way. Skatholtz said, "And tomorrow? I think you make fiction-toentertain, but lives might end if I am wrong. Do you understand my j speech?' ' j "I will learn." He knew that Skatholtz was using baby-talk for his benefit. "Do you know the chkintl" " Elephant . When I was young they were bigger, higher than your head at the shoulder." He wondered how elephants had come to An tare tica. Not as meat animals, surely.' Maybe there had been a zoo... Skatholtz looked dubious. "There are larger beasts in the set, but how, could such a beast live on land! without support? Still... I havi wondered why the elephant's leg are so thick. Was it to suppoi , larger weight?' ' j I "Yes. The legs were more thicfj j when I was young. The beast wasil years ago -- " he had divided by I twelve, for Jupiter years -- "therH were beasts far larger. We havaH found the bones turned to rock i(flj the earth."  Skatholtz laughed skeptically andH left him. ifl Having finished butchering the elephant, they departed. Corbell carried a rack of ribs for awhile, but it slowed him down. A disgusted tribesman finally took it away from him. The forest ended. Far across a prairie of waving yellowish-red vegetation, Corbell saw a last sliver of the departing sun. Jupiter was a pinkish-white disk, rising. Here they made camp. Presently Corbell ate roasted elephant for the first time in his life. He was too tired to sing for his supper. Someone was telling a story -- it was Krayhayft, who had oriental eyes and white patches gleaming in his straight black hair -- and the others were listening in intense concentration, when Corbell dropped off to sleep.    They tramped all the next day through waving pinkish-yellow grain. Corbell judged it wheat. "Who grows this?" he asked Skatholtz, and was answered with laughter. Wheat took cultivation, didn't it? Maybe it had been gene-altered. Four gene-altered cats still lived among the tribe; they took their turns riding the necks of various tribesmen. A wheat that grew wild would be worth having: more useful than a cat that was all tail. All day Corbell saw kangaroos and ostriches bounding through the wheat. They were fast and wary. Late in the day Krayhayft found the tracks of something larger. The tribe followed. Near sunset their quarry came in sight: a big, shambling mass that ran from them on four legs until it turned at bay on two. It was a bear. Its skin was hairless and yellow but for a mane of thick white fur. A nude polar bear? And no dwarf, either. It waddled toward the hunters and tried to maul them with its great claws. It was fighting Homo superior in the prime of health and youth. They danced around it, slashing. It fought on long after it should have bled to death. They ate bear meat that night, while the cat-tails hunted at the edge of firelight. Jupiter was full, banded and orange. Corbell was dozing with a full belly when Ktollisp dropped beside him. He spoke slowly, enunciating. "Do you sing tonight?" "If I choose, then no." "Acceptable. What was this about growing grain?" "The grain we used didn't grow without human help." "Like Skatholtz, I do not read your face well. If this is fictionfor-entertainment, you do it well. We will be sorry to lose you." "How do you lose me?" The boy might mean only that dikta die sooner or later, like cat-tails. No: Ktollisp said, "When we reach the dikta, we lose you." Corbell hadn't counted on that. "How many days?" "Four. Five if we stop for amusement somewhere. You will like the dikta, Corbell. There are men and women and the making of new Boys between them. They have a city and some country around, but they are not smart enough to make the machines go. In day we fix the things that go wrong at night." "They're not smart enough? They are the same... kind you are. Their heads should be built the same." "They have the brain, the stuff inside the heads, just like us. They do not have the time. We do not tell them how to fix machines. They do not live long enough to learn, and they might break the machines learning, and we punish them if they leave. So they stay in the dikta place. They need us. We know where to find them. We must know this because we must bring new boys to the tribes." "What happens to the... small ones not boys?" "The girls ? They grow. Some boys grow too. We choose the best, the smartest and the strongest, one from each tribe for each year, and we send them back to the dikta. We do not do the thing to them that makes them stay the same forever." Planned breeding for superior boys... and it would tend to cow the young Turks, to the benefit of the leaders. Corbell said, "There must be a lot more women than men." Ktollisp grinned. "You like that?" Anger tied his tongue. "You -- you joke! I die of being too old soon! I can't make more boys!" Ktollisp had Corbell by the hair, his knife was drawn, before Corbell could do more than gasp. He slashed --  -- slashed away a thick handful of Corbell' s hair and held it before his eyes. "Your lies are for the newly bom. We are offended," he said. "Can you lie as to this?" The thin white hair he held in firelight was dark brown for half an inch at the roots. Corbell gaped. The tribe surrounded him. They must have been listening all the time. Yes, they looked offended. Skatholtz said, "No dikt grows hair like that. You have found the dikta way to live long like Boys, that we know only in tales. We must know what and where it is." Corbell had forgotten his Boyish, every word. In English he cried, "I haven't the remotest idea!" Ktollisp slapped him. Corbell tried to block with his arms. "Wait, wait. You're right, I must have taken dikta immortality. I just don't know where. Maybe, maybe it's in something I ate. The dikta did a lot of gene engineering. They made the cat-tails and the wild wheat. Maybe they made something that grows dikta immortality, someListen, I didn't know it was happening! I can't see my own hair!" Skatholtz was gesturing the rest back. "You could not feel your youth returning?" "I thought I was... getting adapted to the rough life. I spent like a hundred and thirty years in a cold-sleep tank, ten years at a time... my years, not yours. I couldn't know what it did to me. Listen, there's an old woman who's been searching every city in the world for dikta immortality. If she doesn't know, how could I?" "We know nothing of this woman. All right, Corbell. Tell your story. Leave nothing out." He had been sleepy. Now he was scared boneless... and still boneweary... and in that state Corbell told his life's story. Whenever he paused for breath Skatholtz spat complex phrases in Boyish, translating. Telling savages about a black hole at the center of a galaxy was easier than he had expected. Telling Mirelly-Lyra's tale was wearing. They kept backing him up for points she hadn't mentioned, for points she hadn't even noticed in her thirst for Dictator immortality. They found her lack of curiosity incomprehensible . Questions. What had he eaten? Drunk? Breathed? Could immortality have been in the Bath in One City? It was a mistake to mention the Fountain of Youth... but no, the dikta themselves used Baths... Dawn came and Corbell was still talking. "It could have been any of the things I tried. The fruits, the nuts, the roots, the meat. The soup, even; I mean the combination of a lot of things plus the heat. Hell, it could even be the water in the fountain." Skatholtz stood and stretched. "We can find out. When we return dikt. Shall we go?" "Go?" Corbell saw that the other Boys were getting up, collecting gear. "Oh, please! I'll fall over!" "You are stronger than you think, Corbell. No longer are you a dikt sick with age." They marched. The wheat-covered prairie went on forever. They camped early, after the afternoon rain. Corbell sprawled in the wet earth and slept like a dead man. IV He woke early. A cat-tail had crawled along his ribs, liking the warmth, tickling him. It mewed in protest as he rolled away. There was more protest from his overused muscles. The fire had died. Jupiter, white with a thin red crescent edge, made the night seem bright. Well, I'm in trouble again, he thought. Imagine my amazement. Everyone in the world wants Dictator immortality, and they all think I've got it, and they're all half right. Why do the Boys want it? Maybe they want to destroy it. It's the biggest difference between them and the dikta... He let his hand stroke the orange cat-tail. It draped itself over his knee and rumbled contentedly. What is it? If it's edible it's in Four City, Mirelly-Lyra ate too. One kind for women and one for men? and man's immortality doesn't affect women at all? I don't believe it. So something in the park holds Dictator immortality, in the sap or the juice or the blood, and  ate it. What did she eat when she searched no vegetables... and vegetarians eat no meat... but she fed me both, and fruit too. Insects? I don't eat insects. If I could get her to Sarashwhat she doesn't eat. The stars were bright tonight. A few unwinking stars had a pinkish tinge: small Jovian moons. The boys were sprawled far from where the fire had been. A boy on guard looked around as Corbell sat up. It was Krayhayft, the only Boy with white in his hair. Heady smells reached Corbell. Wet earth and growing things, traces of young supermen who hadn't washed recently, a ghost of broiled meat that Corbell hadn't shared: suddenly he was hungry. And suddenly he was elated. "What the hell am I complaining about?" he whispered. The cat-tail stopped purring to listen. "I'm young! If nothing else works I can outrun the bitch! I should be dancing in the streets, if I could find a street." Young again! That made twice. If he could find out how he did it, he could stay young for the rest of his life. Everybody's dream. And even if he couldn't... the grin died on his face. Now he had fifty years to protect, half a century of lifespan that the Norn would rip from him if he couldn't show her the Tree of Something that tasted funny? Everything tasted funny. Different It was too damn simple anyway. Immortality? And you drink it like fruit juice? An injection might have been more plausible, if he had recieved any kind of injection. Or... had he inhaled it like marijuana, in the smoke from the wood of a carefully genetailored tree? "Corbell. Do you enjoy the morning?' ' Corbell jumped violently. The sentry's approach had been perfectly silent. He settled beside Corbell. By Jupiter light the pale threads gleamed in his hair. Corbell had wondered at the grace with which he moved: Krayhayft who carried the fire starter, Krayhayft the story teller. "How old are you?" "Twenty-one," said Krayhayft. "That's old," said Corbell. Jupiter years. "I wonder why you aren't the leader." "The old ones leant to avoid that chore... and to avoid the fighting that goes with it. Skatholtz can beat me. Skill in fighting has an upper limit. One is born with one's greatest possible strength." "Oh." "Corbell, I think I have found your spacecraft." "What?" "There." The boy was pointing low on the northern horizon, where a few stars glowed in the grey-black of coming dawn. One showed pink among blue-tinged stars. "The one that might be a moon except that it does not move. Is that your spacecraft?" "No. I don't know where my ship went. Don Juan wasn't balllike. It would look more like a thick spear. ' ' Krayhayft was more puzzled than disappointed. "Then what is it? I have seen it twinkle oddly. It does not move, but it grows more bright every night." "The whole system of worlds is messed up. I can't explain it. I think that's the next world out from Jupiter. ' ' "I wish it had been your spacecraft," said Krayhayft. He fell to studying the steady point of light. Entranced... The cat-tail slithered from Corbell's knee and disappeared into the grain. Corbell saw two more low shadows slipping after it. A cat screamed. Simultaneously something much bigger vented a much lower, coughing roar. Krayhayft shouted, "Alert!" It bounded out of the grain and leapt at Corbell's throat: something as big as the biggest of dogs. Corbell threw himself to the side. He saw a spear plant itself solidly in the open mouth, and then the Boys were on it. It was a dwarf lion, male, magnificently maned. It died fast. Even the first spear might have killed it. Corbell got up, shaken. "The female could be out there." Skatholtz said, "Yes," and joined the others who were fanning out into the grain. Corbell, spearless and superfluous, stayed where he was. Presently he noticed something small in the path the lion's charge had left through grain. He found a small butterscotchsundae-colored corpse. The other cat-tails had returned to the fire. They seemed unusually subdued.    At Dawn he helped two Boys build a fire. He saw the reason later, when four more trekked in with ostrich eggs. They set the eggs on the coals, carefully cut the tops off and stirred the contents with spear hafts. Scrambled eggs! Still no coffee. Corbell strode along in pink sunlight, feeling good. The slappingaround was a bitter memory, with bruises to corroborate, but he set next to it another memory: Ktollisp's fist holding white hair with dark brown roots. Oh, for a mirror! He was a slave, if not worse. But he was young! With an outside chance to stay that way a long, long time. They had crossed a row of big, badly weathered rocks, oddly textured, big as houses and bigger. Now the land sloped down... and Corbell found Skatholtz marching beside him. Skatholtz said in English, "What do you know of the Girls?" There was a Boyish word for girl-child and another for dikta woman, but Girl was a third word, and it carried a certain emphasis. Corbell answered, "Mirelly-Lyra told me something about them. There was a balance of power between Boys and Girls, and somehow it fell apart." "By her tale, the Girls ruled Boys as Boys rule dikta." "No. Look at it with more care. The Girls ruled the sky; they could move the world. By implication they controlled the weather. They couldn't change the world's rotation, but they could decide how far the world should be from the sun. In fact, they first moved the world because the sun was getting too hot. "The Boys ruled the dikta. They could see to it that no more Boys or Girls were born." An interesting rolereversal, that. "In itself that isn't a lot of power, not in a crowded world where everyone expects to live forever any way -- ' ' "But our land was less rich! The tales tell it so!" "Yeah. Look at it from the other direction. Suppose the Boys let the dikta breed like rabbits -- breed fast. They kill most of the girl-children and hide most of the boy-children. The boy-children grow up. They get dikta immortality as long as they behave. Now the Boys have an army. They invade." The land had leveled out. Ahead it sloped upward again. Skatholtz mulled it over, then, "Our tales tell nothing of this." "That's because it never happened. The Boys couldn't feed such an army. Poor land. So the balance of power lasted... oh, tens of thousands of your years." "I see, partly. I am not used to thinking like this. What went wrong? Somehow the Girls lost control." "Yeah. Weather?" "Our tales tell of a great thawing. When green things grew for the first time in our land, the Girls tried to take it. The thaw happened when the Girls grew too proud. In their pride they lost a moon, and with the moon they lost their power. ' ' Corbell laughed. "They lost a moon ? Hey, just how accurate could those tales be after... a hundred thousand years?" "We live long. We remember well. Details may be lost, but we do not add fiction." The land sloped upward. In the distance Corbell could see another line of big, melted-looking rocks. "A moon. It sounds completely silly, but... Peerssa told me the moons of Jupiter were out of their orbits, but that's not too strange. Dropping the world into their midst could have done that. But he also said Ganymede is missing completely." "Ganymede?" "The biggest moon. Hell, I don't see how it fits in." "And the sun is too hot, you said, and King Jupiter is too hot." "And the weather is screwed up," said Corbell. "It all comes down to a change in the weather. It wiped out the balance of power. Then the Boys wiped out the Girls." "We tell tales of that war. Weapons as strong as a meteor strike! Look, Corbell, such a weapon was used here." Skatholtz swept an arm behind him. They had crossed a shallow dish-shaped depression a couple of miles across, rimmed by these half-melted... "Just a minute," said Corbell. He dropped his load of jerky and scrambled up a rock twenty feet high and of oddly uniform texture. There at the top he found lines of rust red making a great Z: the remains of a girder. "These were buildings," he said. "It must have been a Boy city." "When I was young I wanted to use weapons like that." Skatholtz laughed boyishly. "Now I cringe at what they must have done to the weather. But we destroyed the Girls." "They did you some hurt too." Corbell climbed down from the melted building. They'd have to trot to catch up to the tribe. "The tale tells that they destroyed us," said Skatholtz. "I never understood that saying." Corbell and Skatholtz marched in silence for a time. Boys chattered ahead. It was just past noon, too early to hunt. Very far away, a great brown carpet flowed away from the noise they were making: thousands of animals too distant to recognize, too numerous to count. Skatholtz said in Boyish, "Soon we reach the border to the great water. A day's march broad is that border. The word is -- " Corbell learned the words for shore and sea. "The near village holds a pleasant surprise," and Skatholtz used another unfamiliar word. "I can't describe it. We must do work for it." "All right." In his youth Corbell had never liked muscle work. But oh, it was good to have the muscles now! He asked, "Why were we talking English?" "Because I must know you. I must learn when you are telling fiction." He chose not to protest the injustice. "I wonder about the cat-tails." "What do you wonder?" there are things bigger and more violent. How can they live?" "Soon or late a predator kills them. Until then they are pleasant to keep near. Soon or late, everything dies except Boys." "Before this evil you control your rage skillfully. Will we find more cat-tails among the dikta?" "No. We never leave cat-tails with the dikta." "Why?" "It isn't done." Corbell let it drop. There was a thing he dared not ask yet, but he would have to find out. How carefully were the adults guarded? The dikta place was the second place Mirelly-Lyra would look for him. He couldn't stay long. The moment she saw him dark-haired, that moment he would have to produce Dictator immortality. And maybe he could. One simple test... made carefully! He did not want the Boys chopping down the Tree of Life!" V They reached the village at noon. It was a strange blend of primitive and futuristic: an arc of Baths, identical to the Bath Corbell had found by the shore in One City, halfsurrounding the village square, and surrounded in turn by sod huts and granaries. There was great variety among the sod structures; but they matched. The village as a whole was beautiful. Corbell was beginning to get the idea. The ancient factories would build the Boys buildings for certain purposes. It was very easy to go on using them century after century. For other purposes they made their own, and lavished labor and ingenuity on them. He was not entirely surprised when Krayhayft spoke for the tribe, and called it "Krayhayft's tribe." He who spoke for the village had Krayhayft's strange grace, and gray in his long golden hair. They worked all that afternoon. A couple of boys from the village went with them to supervise, shouting their orders with malice aforethought. Corbell and Krayhayft's tribe used primitive scythes to reap grain from the fields and carry it in bundles into the village square, until there was a great heap of it there, until the Boys of the village were satisfied. After their labor the Boys went whooping to the Baths. Corbell waited his turn with impatience. He went the full route, bath and steam and sauna and back to the bath with the Jacuzzi-style bubble system turned on. When he emerged it was dark. They were starting dinner. The "surprise" was bread, of course. Several kinds of bread, plus rabbit meat the villagers had hunted. Corbell ate his fill of all the varieties. The taste brought on a nostalgic mood. His eyes were wet when Ktollisp had finished singing Corbell's version of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." The bread had surprised him less than the "phone booth" at one end of the arc of Baths. He dithered... but Skatholtz knew he knew about "phone booths". While Krayhayft started one of his long tales, Corbell sought out Skatholtz and asked him. The skeletal boy grinned. "Were you thinking of leaving us through the prilatsil ?' ' "Not especially." "Of course not. Well, you've guessed right... This village trades their grain for other bread-makings all across the land." "I didn't think the Prilatsil could send that far." "The land is crossed by a line of Prilatsil, close-spaced. Do you think we would handle emergencies by traveling on foot? Look -- " Skatholtz drew a ragged circle -- Antarctica -- and a peace symbol or chicken 's-footprint within it. "If there were serious reason to travel, these lines of Prilatsil exist. Since the time of the Girls they have been used four times... more, if tales have been lost. We keep them in repair." Corbell kept his other questions to himself. He hoped he would not have to use the Prilatsil. They were too obvious. When they left in the morning, three of Krayhayft's tribe had stayed behind, and three of the villagers had come with them. No big deal was made of it, and Corbell had to examine faces to be sure it had happened. They carried loaves of bread in their cloth bags.    Now there was no more grain. The land dropped gradually for twenty miles or more, and ended in mist. Nothing grew on it but dry scrub. Off to the right of their path was a cluster of sharp-edged shapes, promontories all alone on the flat lifeless ground. Nature sometimes imitates the regular, artificial look. Corbell asked anyway. "They are artificial," Skatholtz told him. "I have seen them before. I have my guess as to what they are, but... shall we look at them? Some of Krayhayft's tribe have not seen them." The troop veered. The structures grew larger. Some lay on their sides, disintegrating. But the nearest stood upright, its narrow bottom firmly set in the ground. The tribe clustered beneath a great curved wall leaning out over their heads. "Ships," said Corbell. "They carried people and things over water. What are they doing so far from the ocean?" "Perhaps there was ocean here once." "Yeah... yeah. When the World got so hot, a lot of the ocean went into the air. This used to be sea-bottom mud, I think it was part of the continental shelf." Krayhayft said, "That fits with the tales. Can you guess what they might have carried?" "Too many answers. Is there a way in?" He didn't understand when Krayhayft untied the fire starter from his belt. He would have stopped him otherwise. Krayhayft twisted something on the fire starter, pointed it at the great wall of rusted metal. The metal flared. Corbell said nothing; it was already too late. He watched the thin blue beam spurt fire until Krayhayft had cut a wide door. The metal slab fell away. Tons of mud spilled after it. Aeons of dust and rainwater... They waded up the mud slope, joking among themselves, and Corbell followed. The hull was one enormous tank. There were no partitiions to prevent sloshing. Corbell sniffed, but no trace of the cargo remained. Oil? Or something more exotic? Or only topsoil for the frigid Antarctic cities? Topsoil wouldn't slosh around... The surprise was on deck and above deck. Masts! There was no place here for human sailors. There were only proliferating masts reminiscent of clipper ships, and cables all running to a great housing at the bow. A housing for motors and winches and a computer. The hull had apparently been sound; the masts were in fine shape. But time had reduced the computer to garbage. That was a pity. It was as big as Don Juan's computer that had housed Peerssa's personality. Conceivably it could have told them a great deal.    They marched down into the fog, and the fog swallowed them. Corbell heard regular booming sounds which he failed to interpret. Then, suddenly, they had reached the sea. Breakers roared and hissed across a rocky shore. They rested. Then, while others collected brush for a fire, three of the Boys swam out into the breakers with spears and the rope. It looked inviting. The water would not be cold. But Corbell had seen the Boys hunt, and he wondered what toothy prey waited for them. Two came back. They swam ashore with the rope twitching behind them, and collapsed, panting heavily, while others dragged the rope in with its thrashing burden. They beached twelve feet of shark. The third Boy didn't come back. Corbell couldn't believe it. How could immortals be so careless of their lives? The Boys were subdued, but they held no kind of formal ceremony. Corbell ate bread that night. He had no stomach for shark. He had seen what came out of the shark's stomach. He lay long awake, puzzling it out. He had been old and young and middle-aged, in no intelligible sequence. With any luck he would stay young. He had fought for his life and his lifestyle against the massed might of the State; he had never given up, not with all the excuse in the world. Did they get tired of too much life? Corbell didn't doubt that they could build machines to kill off the sharks. The factories that kept turning out identical Bedrooms and Baths and Offices were a tribute to their laziness; but they were also still here? Tradition? Machismo? In the morning the Boys were cheerful as ever. In the afternoon they reached the dikta. I Six City, Dikta City, showed first as a bar of shadow along the shoreline, then as half a mile of blank wall with a low windowed structure peeking above the center. Dikta City showed its back to the approaching Boys. As they rounded the end Corbell saw its face. Dikta City was a single building, four stories tall, half a mile long, and as thick as a luxury hotel. Its face looked north toward the sea and the sun, and was rich with windows and balconiesand archways. Between city and sea was a semicircle of low wall with the tops of trees visible within. The dikta were emerging through an arch in the low garden wall. In scores now, they waited. Dikta City could never have been under a dome. It was the wrong shape. The city must have been built late, in hothouse Antarctica, specifically to house the adults. Topsoil had been spread over the salty, barren continental shelf, and walled against the winds. The sea and the garden within the wall would be the only food sources for miles around. It would be difficult to leave this place, Corbell thought. A couple of hundred dikta waited until the Boys were yards away, until Corbell had counted seven men among a horde of women. Then they cringed, all of them at once. They held the cringe as Krayhayft stepped forward alone. "We come to repair your machines," Krayhayft said, "and to take your boy-children to ourselves." "Good," said one among them. He had a white beard and shoulderlength white hair, very clean and curly. He straightened from the cringe, and so did all the others... and now Corbell was impressed by their general health and dignity. They didn't act like slaves; the cringe had been a formality. Corbell wondered what would have happened if he had cringed naturalThe Boys might have killed him as an escapee. All of the dikta were studying Corbell. Krayhayft noticed. He spoke at length in a voice that carried. Corbell couldn't follow everything he said, but he was telling a condensed version of Corbell's story. The spaceflight, the long voyage, some complex phrases that might have related to relativistic timecompression; the flight from Mirelly-Lyra... no mention of the mad dikta woman's motives. No mention of dikta immortality. Corbell was sure of that; he was listening for it. The old man listened and laughed; he was vastly entertained. At the end he came forward and said, "Welcome to our refuge, Corbell. You will have interesting things to tell us. I am Gording. Do I speak slowly enough?" "A pleasure to meet you, Gording. I have a lot to leam from you. Yes, I can understand you." "Will you join us tonight, then? We have room in the Dikta Place for many more children. It will be instructive to see what your children are like." "I -- " Corbell choked up. The women were examining him and speculating in whispers. It wasn't just his browline, though even the women were half bald. His brownand-white hair must have caught their attention too... and his answer was rudely delayed. "I'm happy you accept me for that important purpose," he said. What he was was nervous. Abruptly he was very conscious of his near-nakedness. The dikta were entirely naked. One of the women -- her long black hair was just showing grey -- said, "It must be long since you made children with a woman." Corbell laughed. Divide by years." What she asked then raised laughter. Corbell shook his head. "I may have forgotten how. There is only one way to know." He helped the Boys set up camp. The garden was a semicircle within the wall, far more orderly grove of trees occupied the center. The Boys set up camp under the trees, and built their fire with wood brought by dikta women. "You may go to the dikta," Skatholtz told him then, "but you must not tell them of dikta immortality." It didn't seem to occur to him that he might be disobeyed. "What about my hair? I know damned well they noticed it." Skatholtz shrugged. "You are an early type of dikt from before stories were told. Tell them all dikta once grew hair like yours. If any leam what you know, their minds will be... all that they know will be taken from them." "I'll keep my mouth shut." They were surprising enough. Like the Boys, they had pallid, almost translucent skin, coupled to all the shapes natural to human beings: noses broad and narrow, lips thick or thin, bushy eyebrows or eyes with epicanthic folds, bodies burly and invulnerable or slender and fragile... "Vitamin D!" Corbel! said suddenly. He tried to explain: "Your skin makes a thing you need, from sunlight. A hundred thousand years of red sunlight has turned you white was too dark to let sunlight in. Even so, you need your skin bare all the time." The women were nodding. Cording said, "A life-chemical, kathope." "But how do you live in the long night?" Almost six years! "Kathope seed. We press it for the oil," said Gording. Escaping Dikta City should have been easier in the long night, when the Boys all gathered in Sarashcarry their own kathope seed... yeah, and Boys would tear it up if they found it growing anyCorbell was beginning to worry. Maybe he really was trapped. He asked about the coming festivities. "We take sex in company," T'teeruf told him. At a wild guess she was sixteen or so, her face heart-shaped, her eyes large and expressive, her mouth full and made for laughter, her hair a tightly coiled ruff. Even she was half-bald. "Sex is the only pleasure we have that the Boys can't ever understand. That, and giving birth." Her eyes dropped shyly. "I haven't done that yet." II The orgy hall (what else could you call it?) was an afterthought. It seemed the Boys hadn't thought of putting one in when they built Dikta City. The dikta had repaired the omission by building a kind of infinity sign on the roof, composed of twelve of the mass-produced triangular bedrooms arranged like two pies of six wedges each, with two baths set between. They had knocked out all the inner walls. The small toilets that belonged to the bedrooms still had doors (at least the dikta kept that form of privacy!), but the closets didn't, and the "phone booths" had been ripped out. Of course. When Corbell arrived there were dikta on every horizontal surface, beds and couches and coffee tables, and more coming in. Half a dozen women gestured invitation from one of the beds. Corbell accepted. His nervousness left him quickly. Rippling waterbed and warm woman-flesh formed his pillows, and it was altogether delightful. In courtesy and because she was nearest, he lay with an older woman first. She expressed no disappointment, but he was too quick and he knew it. After all that time, to hurry... and still it felt like a mighty victory. "I gave this up forever," he said, and thanked her with his eyes. Now he beat his chest and warbled the Challenge of the Great Ape, and now he took a woman with pronouncedly oriental features and warm, skilled hands. This time it was longer, better. Their partial baldness made them more exotic. Their breasts were alike, large in diameter but flattened; even in older women they did not sag. They asked him about his sensations, Even with his wife Corbell had had difficulty analyzing his own reflexes, and he had trouble now. They probed delicately, with questions and with stroking fingertips, exploring his ancient nervous system and telling him about their own. A younger man joined them. Two women left, were replaced by two more. Corbell scratched T'teeruf's back while she was in sexual congress. Was he through for the night? Evidently not -- The man was using his hands and toes too, attempting to satisfy five women at a time, reminding Corbell of old paintings from India. Egotist! But it seemed fair, given the distribution. When inspiration came, Corbell tried it himself. It took some concentration... and he had never been in practice. He was tentative, a bit clumsy. One of the women asked him about it. He told her. One woman to a man... monogamy... no children's immortality... The faces around him closed down like masks, and the woman changed the subject. He hardly noticed. He was drunk and euphoric on the hormones bubbling in his blood. He watched the other man and two women, trying to follow what they were doing, but it all came out as a tangle of arms and legs. "There are lost skills," T'teeruf told him a bit wistfully. "Positions used in free fall. Now they exist only in the tales." He tried the sauna (crowded) and the bathtub (crowded). Hot water churned with bubbles and the currents generated by a couple on the far side: Gording and the older woman who had been his first since the corpsicle tank. Wet woman rubbed against him. A water-splashing war erupted and died out. Corbell and a young woman with golden hair made love, sitting cross-legged in the tub facing each other. That was when he looked up and saw the Boys: half a dozen of them seated on the edge of an open airwell with their feet hanging down toward the tub. They passed comments to each other while they enjoyed the show. Ktollisp caught him looking and waved. The girl's eyes followed Corbell' s upward, then dropped in disinterest. Okay, it didn't bother her... When Ktollisp waved again, Corbell waved back. In the bedroom in One City there had been an old videotape of two couples demonstrating lovemaking positions. Even then Corbell had sensed the presence of an audience out of range. Now he knew. They had been there at the coffee table: Boys, or Girls watching borrowed dikta, or even (how old was that tape?) Boys and Girls mixed, before the great rift. The orgy's impetus dwindled. Now half of Dikta City clustered on the beds and couches and coffee tables in half of the Bedroom complex, questioning Corbell. His audience thinned as some left by the stairwell; others went by twos and threes to the other multiple bed complex and came back later. Corbell talked on and on. The first man to see the bottom of the universe, he had his audience at last. Euphoria! Suddenly he was yawning uncontrollably. No, they didn't use the Bedrooms for sleeping. They slept in a ground-floor room. Gording volunteered to walk him over. The fresh air cooled his damp body and cleared his head. The stars were slightly misted over. Gording pointed to a steady, pink-tinged star in the north. "Corbell, you came from space recently. What is that?" "A world like a little Jupiter. It shouldn't be there, but it is." "It grows brighter, but it does not move against the pattern of fixed stars." "That bothered Krayhayft too." It was brighter, wasn't it? "Listen, I'm too tired to think." The sleeping room was a kind of greenhouse. The sleeping surface was tall grass, living grass, already covered by bodies. Gording and Corbell found space, lay down and slept.    The sun shining through glass walls woke him. Four women were still curled on the grass, isolated. The rest were gone. He had daydreamed of nights like last night, when he was much younger. Without the bald heads, of course. So what? He was lucky they saw him as human. Lucky he could still see them as human, too. Their bodies hadn't changed much. Their minds had changed more; they seemed geniuses... and they seemed placid in their slavery. If they hadn't freed themselves from the Boys in all those eons, how could Corbell? Corbell remembered that there was a possible answer... that had to be tested.    A ceremony was in progress at the Boy encampment. Eight dikta males (he must have missed one yesterday) were presenting five boy-children to the tribe. Of the three cup-bearers, Krayhayft who seemed to be the oldest now seemed to be in charge. The rest of the Boys watched solemnly. Three carried the remaining cat-tails round their necks. Corbell decided against joining them; he took a place by himself and kept his mouth shut. His chance would come. The children were five to seven years old. They seemed overawed and immensely proud. Of the adults, it was Gording who named each child and described him: his strength, his accomplishments, his habits good and bad. For a moment Corbell thought one of the children was being rejected, and that didn't fit his preconceptions at all. Then he realised that the boy-child's name had been rejected. He was being given a new one. The ceremony broke up suddenly. The boychildren stayed with the Boys; the men went off talking together. Krayhayft called to Corbell. "I know that walk and that look." Corbell went over. "The walk means you have used muscles in unaccustomed labor. I know the bright smile and red eyes too." Corbell grinned. "You're right." "You had fun?" "You'll never know." "I never will. Some of the boychildren we take try to be the best so that they can be dikta. Do you believe that?" "Sure. Did you?" Krayhayft scowled. "It didn't matter. I was not best at anything. I burnt food. My spear missed the prey. I don't like to remember that long ago. I remember that I wanted to go home. What does a yearling know of the difference between living five years or six, and living forever?' ' "And sex:" "What does a yearling know of sex? What does a Boy know of sex? He can only watch." Krayhayft grinned suddenly. "Last night was the first time I ever saw -- " He beat his chest with his fists and gave an ululating yell. "The Tarzan act. I was a little crazy." "That seems normal." "What happens next? How long do you stay here?" "If some machine needs to be repaired, we stay. Otherwise we leave tomorrow. We have many tribes to meet, to tell them that    Time was constricting for Corbell, but he dared not hurry. At the moment he had nothing to do at all. And everyone else was busy. On the second floor Boys had opened what might be a power generator. They ordered him away from their secrets. In another room women wove cloth of exceptional beauty and color. "During the long night we cover ourselves," one told him. She refused to teach him how to weave. "The thread might cut off some of your fingers." "It's that strong?" "What would be the point of making cloth less durable?" He stole a loop of the thread, held it a moment, then put it back. Sure it'd make wonderful strangling cord, but where would he hide it? He wound up in the kitchen dining room complex, serving food and watching the cooks. He had been a pretty good cook once, but no sane chef would try to use someone else's kitchen without exploring it first. And it was bad news. The implements and measuring spoons were unfamiliar, of course. But the basic foods and the spices were also unfamiliar. He was going to have to learn to cook all over again. In midaftemoon a woman offered to relieve him at the serving counter. She took a second look and said, "You are unhappy." "Right." "Iam Charibil. Can I help?" He couldn't tell her all his problems. "There's not much here I'm good for." "Men don't have to work if they don't want to. You do have one useful talent. You can improve the variety of traits among us." Their gene pool was a little skimpy, yeah. Though there was variety. Charibil herself had the epicanthic fold and small features of an oriental, though she was Corbell's height. The uniformity was there too: pale skin, breasts wide and flat, half-bald scalp and curly black topknot, slender frame... She jumped suddenly to her feet. "Come to the orgy room, Corbell. You need cheering up. Is it displacement from your tribe that bothers you? Or fear of the ancient dikt and her cane?" "All of the above. Right, I need cheering up." If he thought to be alone with Charibil, he was wrong. She called to three friends as they passed, and one joined them; and then a small golden-haired woman invited herself into the group; and four women presently reached the Bedroom complex with Corbell. Others were there; a man and a single woman who seemed to want to be alone. Charibil and the other woman suddenly picked Corbell up by arms and legs, swung him wide and slung him through the air, laughing at his startled "Hey!" The surface surged as he splashed down, surged again as they joined him. He laughed with them. Only for a moment, the laugh caught in his throat. There was a mirror over the bed. He couldn't have missed that last night... and he hadn't. The others had those mobile sculptures over them. Had the women noticed anything? Corbell pulled Charibil against him, rolled onto his back with her on top... and looked up at himself. Long, thinning white hair sprang from a military haircut in chestnut brown, in the damndest hairdo Corbell had ever seen. In the face there were frown lines around the mouth and eyes. He saw a lean, wellmuscled, middle-aged version of one well known to him: a certain brain-wiped State criminal. They'd noticed his tension. They turned him over and massaged it away. The kneading of muscles gradually became eight hands caressing him... and Corbell was seduced twice, to his own amazement. He felt that he was falling in love with four women: an impossipost-coital sadness Corbell knew at last that Corbell was dead... He distracted himself with questions. "No, all nights are not like last night," Charibil told him. "The men would tire of us. Last night was special. We stayed away from this place for five short days. We like to give the Boys something to watch." "Why?" "Why? They rule us, and they live forever, but there is one joy they can't know!" she gloated. You can live forever! It was on the tip of his tongue... but he said instead, "What do the men do when they're not up here? I mean, if they don't work -- " "They make decisions. And, let me see: Privatht is perhaps our finest cook. Gording deals with the Boys in all matters; in fact he is with them now. Charloop makes things to teach and entertain children -- ' ' "Gording in in the Boy camp?" "Yes, he and the Boys had some important secret to discuss. They wouldn't -- " "I've got to be there." Corbell rolled off the bed. "I'm sorry if I'm being rude, but this is more important than I can tell you." He left. Behind him he heard tinkling laughter. m It was near sunset. Boys and boy-children were roasting a tremendous fish over coals. Ktollisp was telling them a tale. The children were making much of a pair of indolent furred snakes. Corbell looked for Gording's white hair. He found Gording and Krayhayft and Skatholtz a good distance from the main group. They were spitting Boyish too fast for Corbell's understanding. He caught the word for Girls , and his own word Ganymede. And he saw the third cat-tail curled in an orange spiral on a rock almost behind Skatholtz. They saw him. Gording said, "Good! Corbell's sources of knowledge are different from ours." Krayhayft scoffed. "He did not even see the implications." Skatholtz said, "Gording is right. Corbell, in one of our tales there is a line with no meaing. The tale tells of the war between Girls and Boys. The line tells that each side destroyed the other." Corbell sat down cross-legged next to Skatholtz. "Could this have something to do with our strayed planet?" "Yes, with the mere fleck of light that grows brighter but does not move against the background of fixed stars. Do you see what that might mean?" He'd been assuming that that dot of light was the banded gas giant Peerssa had shown him; but that didn't have to be true. If it grew brighter without moving... grew closer, with no shift sideways? "It's coming down our throats!" "Well phrased," said Skatholtz. But it was monstrously unfair, that Corbell should have found eternal youth just before the end of the world! "You're guessing," he said. "Of course. But the Girls ruled the sky," Krayhayft said. "When the Girls knew they had lost, they may have aimed your missing Ganymede on a long path to smash the world." He couldn't let this moon thing distract him. When his chance came he had to be ready. But did it matter? If Don Juan had brought him back just in time to face this ! "Wait. Why not a short path?" Krayhayft shrugged. Skatholtz said, "Who can know the mind of a Girl? They are long dead." "They were intelligent. The longer the path, the more chance the moon would miss Earth. It's been -- " Divide by twelve. " -- a hundred thousand years, after all." "We do not know how they moved worlds. How can we know what difficulties they faced? Perhaps the long path was their only choice." Corbell stood up. He stretched, then sat down on the smooth rock behind him: a big boulder with a cat-tail sleeping on top, well behind his head. He braced his feet against a smaller, half-buried boulder. "I don't like it. I don't like my place in it. Any minor design change in Don Juan and I could have been back a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years sooner. What are the odds I'd get here just in time?' ' Gording laughed at him. "What an odd coincidence, that I should be alive at this time!" "And I!" Skatholtz cried. Corbell flushed. "Could the tale have meant something else?" "Of course," said Skatholtz. "No detail is given." "Okay. The Girls knew they'd had it. They were looking for revenge... but in the sky? They must have lost control of the sky already. Otherwise they'd have put the Earth back where it belonged, where it wouldn't get too much heat. So they couldn't have thrown a moon at Earth, long path or short path." "The moon is there," said Krayhayft. But Skatholtz said, "Let him speak." "Did I tell you what MirellyLyra told me? She -- " He tripped on the Boyish phrases, then, "She left zero-time with a thousand prisoners. Some of them lived to reach this place. She says the Boys took them, but she escaped." "You've lost the thread of thought," Krayhayft reproved him. "No, it fits in. Look, if the Girls were that close to ruined , there wasn't much they could do. But if the Boys were keeping all the dikta in the same place, the Girls could wipe them out." And as he said it he knew he was right. They all saw it... and their minds were better than his. Without the dikta there would be no more Boys. Only a dwindling population of immortals dying one by one, by accident, boredom, or act of God. "Your Mireily-Lyra escaped," said Skatholtz, "because there were too few Boys left to hunt her down. The new dikta became pampered pets, they who had been criminals in prehistory." He barked bitter laughter. "But the moon still comes. If it is a random result of the Girls' loss of control, still it could destroy us. Even a near miss -- " His Boyish went into high gear... and the others joined in... faster and faster... excluding Corbell. Suddenly the Boys got to their feet and left. For an instant Gording let his fury show... and then he relaxed. And Corbell tested his footing. Butt on smooth rock, feet in front of him against rock that seemed steady... and he dared not look behind him. "It would not do," Gording said bitterly, "to discuss such important matters with a dikt." "What was that about?" "They must choose, you see. If the moon strikes the world, time ends. But if the moon comes by mischance, it may still pass close by the world. Tides. Earthquakes." "Oh. Dikta City's right on the ocean. They'll have to move you." "Move us how? Where? They can't let us go free. We are their treasure, their source, their valued property." Gording was angry already: almost angry enough to strike out at the nearest target. Now. "Maybe they'll just take some women, the best they can find. Mate them with the boychildren. There's no scarcity of Boys. They can wait till the stock builds up again. After all, they have to be fairly careful with their breeding, considering that their original stock was a bunch of rejects from -- " Unexpectedly soon, unexpectedly fast, Gording leapt for his throat. Corbell pushed hard against the rock, kicked himself out from under Gording' s leap. He reached over his head. Startled from sleep, the cat-tail tried to leap away. Corbell's hand closed on its tail. Gording hit ground and came at him again, face calm, hands outstretched for murder. He wasn't quick enough. Corbell swung the cat-tail into his face. The beast's teeth closed in Gording's neck. In that moment of distraction Corbell swung a haymaker at his jaw. Gording jerked aside. The cattail was a tight fur collar, its teeth were still in his neck, but he hadn't been distracted for an instant. Hopelessly off balance, Corbell watched the old man set himself and lash out. The hard fist sank into his solar plexus. Corbell doubled over. Lightning exploded at the nape of his neck.    His belly hurt... his neck hurt... he was curled on his side in crushed strawberries. He tried to uncurl. They were standing around him, a lot of Boys looking down. Skatholtz was shaking his head and smiling. "Magnificent, Corbell!" "Then," said Corbell, "why am I lying on the ground hurting? Never mind." He uncurled a little more. Gording stood relaxed, his hand covering the flesh tom by cat-tail teeth. He showed no inclination to resume hostilities. Corbell said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. Maybe it's jealously. You're all like... you're all smarter than I am, and it shows." There was blood beneath the hand Gording held to his neck. He breathed heavily. He said, "I understand. You were careless with an unfamiliar language. I should not have taken offense. It will be best if I rejoin the dikta for tonight." He turned away and took two stumbling steps before hands closed on his arms. Krayhayft was smiling. His hands made a wiping motion. "That won't serve. You can't go back to them, Gording. What would they think when your hair changed color?' ' Cording laughed. "It was worth trying." Corbell said, "Shit!" "No, no, Corbell, you did a fine job of acting. It was the set of your muscles that betrayed you everywhere. I couldn't know why you wanted me to attack you, and I had to find out." "I'm sorry. I couldn't think of any other way. I still don't know..." Krayhayft said, "We'll know soon enough. The logic holds. A cat-tail bit you some days before we found you. We saw the mark. Our tradition is that the dikta may not enjoy the company of cat-tails. We know that long ago it was possible to change the nature of a living thing, and we know that it was done to cat-tails. Why should they not make dikta immortality as Boys make spit? But we'll watch you as we go, Gording, to see if you grow young. "And as we go, Corbell, we will think of some useful punishment for your deception. Already I have an idea. "And we go now." IV By dead of night the tribe moved along the shore. They carried neither food nor water. Jupiter showed a bright gibbous disk above the dark sea. The mystery planet showed too, near Jupiter. Corbell picked out other moons, and a moon-shadow on Jupiter's banded face. One of the children had gone to sleep and was being carried. The others asked a thousand questions of laughing Boys. Corbell listened to the answers. Details of the march ahead... other bands of Boys... wondrous machines... the...nothing he hadn't heard or guessed. He waited his chance to talk to Gording alone. It never came. Gording marched at the head of the line, under escort. When Corbell tried to catch up he was barred with spear butts. By morning they were thirsty. By noon they were very thirsty, and loud were the complaints of the boy-children. Gording was showing the strain of unaccustomed hiking, but he showed it silently, in the slight weave to his walk and the occasional stumble. In the afternoon they reached a river. The splashing was loud as Boys and boys drank and then swam. Here they camped. Corbell and others caught fish with makeshift hooks and lines of thread that might have come from Dikta City. Corbell was not allowed to clean his fish; he was not allowed a knife. And this was the thread that would make wonderful strangler's cord, if it didn't cut the strangler's fingers... but as he considered his fishline he caught Krayhayft grinning at him. Krayhayft held out his hand. Corbell put the fishline in it. The river had cut a deep gorge into the former sea bottom, leaving high, sheer cliffs of layered sandstone. All day they followed the twisting, beautifully colored walls. At sunset, where the cliffs constricted and took a sharp tum, they came on a hidden village. The village occupied both sides of the river, joined by a wide bridge. Beyond the village the desolation continued to the horizon. The villagers made them welcome and fed them. Corbell entertained with a medley of advertising jingles. Afterward Krayhayft began a tale while Corbell made himself comfortable against a convenient boulder. It seemed to him that the village was a well-placed trap. If dikta followed a band of Boys from Dikta City, they would have to go around the village, climbing cliffs to do it and leaving traces of themselves, and into more desolation. Unless they wanted to risk raiding the village... There was a "phone booth" at one end of the bridge. The bridge was a wide arch of prestressed concrete or something better, its lines singularly beautiful. And these were the only signs of advanced technology among basic and primitive structures. There had been bread and com with tonight's fish. There must be a working "phone booth" here to bring them. But was that it ? It was too blatant. It might be a trap. A voice behind Corbell' s ear whispered, "We will not let you use the Prilatsil. ' ' Corbell turned to stare rudely at the intruder. He had not been watching the booth. The Boy was of the village: a pink-eyed, golden-haired albino with a narrow ferret face. He almost lost his footing as he squatted next to Corbell. His loincloth was animal skin. He was young, then. Corbell had learned to tell. The older Boys were never awkward, and they did not brag of their kills by wearing the skins. He grinned and said, "Try it if you like. We would bruise you." "I think they'll bruise me anyway," Corbell said. He'd been wondering about Krayhayft's "punishment." Damn Krayhayft. Corbell would be a bag of nerveends before the blade fell. "Yes. You lied," said the golden Boy. "I am to be there when punishment comes." "Sadist," Corbell said in English. "I can guess the meaning. No. We do not make pain for pleasure, only for instruction. Your pain will be instructive to you and to us." The Boy chuckled gloatingly, making a liar of himself, and got up. Now, what was that all about? Corbell expected to die as soon as Gording began to grow young. He knew too much. Or would they only wipe his memory? He shivered. It would still be death, though it would let them use the ancient felon's genes.    They left carrying provisions. One of the boy-children stayed behind. Half a dozen villagers came with them, including the young albino. The continental shelf had been wider in this area. It was still barren. The day was nearly over before they reached, first fruit trees, then cornfields. They camped in the com. They passed a larger tribe on the third day. For a time the two tribes intermingled, exchanging news. Then the larger group veered away, taking two of Krayhayft's tribe and two boy-children. They passed single human beings at a distance. "Loners," Skatholtz told him. "They tire of others around them. For a time they go alone to know if they still love themselves. Krayhayft has done it six times." Through waist-high corn they marched. In early afternoon a herd of dwarf buffalo passed, tens of thousands of them, blackening the land and raising continuous rolling thunder. The trampled path was a quarter hour's march across: com churned into the dirt, and the corpses of aged buffalo unable to keep up. For the first time Corbell saw vultures. Vultures had survived unchanged. Skatholtz bent their path to take them through a ruined city. An earthquake, or Girl weaponry, had shattered most of the buildings, and time had weathered all the sharp edges. Corbell saw sand-blasted public "phone booths"; he ignored them. He'd seen no evidence that power was still coming to this ruin. Boys had made a semipermanent camp at the far edge of the ruined city. Krayhayft's tribe joined them, and contributed ears of com to their dinner. Corbell saw what they were using for cooking. What the locals had mounted on rocks above their fireplace was a piece of clear glass seven feet across, curved like an enormous wok: a good enough frying pan except for thedangerous jagged edges. It had to be a piece of bubble-car.    On the fourth day they passed two tribes, and joined with them for a time, and left them behind. With the other tribe went the last two boy-children. Corbell couldn't help wondering if that related to his situation. There are things you don't do in front of children. Gording was having less trouble keeping up. If the chance came, the old man would be able to run... but running wouldn't do it. The Boys were faster. Corbell wanted transportation. "Phone booths" didn't send far enough. Useful for hiding, but not for reaching safety. A car would be better. Or... what did the Boys use to lower a dozen bedrooms onto the roof of Dikta City? A giant helicopter? Some big flying thing, anyway. He wouldn't find any of these things outside a city, Corbell thought. Maybe they existed in ing's hair would be showing black by then. Corbell tried to listen to what the Boys were telling the loner about Corbell. Unfamiliar words, and the drumming of the afternoon rain, made that impossible. But the wanderer derived much amusement from what he was hearing. When the afternoon rain ended, it revealed reaching towers whose tops sketched a dome-shape. They camped a mere hour's distance from what seemed an intact city. Corbell slept badly that night. If he could break loose, to reach the city alone... But every time he looked around him someone was watching him. As if they could read his mind... V Parhalding was bigger than done their work... and invading soil and grass and trees and vines. The buildings still stood, most of them. Their flat roofs sprouted green heads. Grapevines and blackberry vines swathed their waists. Com and wheat grew mixed where soil was shallow. Where soil and water could pool, there were gnarled old trees bearing varied fruit and walnuts. Corbell picked what looked like a puffy lemon. (The limbs of the tree were thick and low... its green head touched vines swarming to the second story of a building with empty windows... but Boys climbed like monkeys, and they were too close, and watching.) The fruit tasted like lemonade, like lemon with sugar. Parhalding was what an abandoned city looked like. In Sarashservation for granted. Foolish. He should have been looking for caretakers. The vines bulged oddly, there near the corner, and something glinted within the bulge. Light shifted as he walked... and Corbell became certain that there was a bubble-car under the bulge. How badly damaged? Corbell caught Gording's fraction-of-a-glance. Had anyone else caught it? The Boys couldn't know everything... But the tribe had clumped inward as they walked. He might have thought they were afraid of ancient ghosts. But they had converged to a compact mass with Cottrell in the middle, and it was Corbell who was afraid. That building ahead: no vines, no green top. Someone had maintained it. Corbell knew it by its shape: a hospital. The hospital's big double doors opened for them. Now the dozen Boys around Corbell were close enough to trip over one another, though they didn't. Indirect lighting came alive slowly, showing an admissions desk, a shattered picture window with a few glass teeth still in it, cloud-rug and sofas cleaned of glass; and a wall covered by a double polar projection map with the polar caps prominent. The last Boy through the door fell to his knees. His head was gone. His neck jetted bright blood. Gording was at bay. The young albino was between him and the double doors. As the albino came at him Gording threw a rock, side arm, to miss. Corbell tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The rock passed behind the albino's neck, turned sharply and circled his throat. Gording jerked hard on the other rock still in his hand. Then it made sense. The albino screamed without sound and clawed at the air between them. His neck parted cleanly. The doors opened for the headless corpse as it stumbled backward. Gording brushed past it and was gone.    It is not his technology -- that is merely a tool -- that makes Man a deadly adversary, but his mind...and spirit. I. The practice yard fell silent. Sensing a presence behind him, Jerome lowered his sword, and turned slowly to face Father Ribaud, the Sword Master. Behind him, standing nervously at the edge of the yard, was a young Messenger dressed in the black robe of one who served the Grandfathers. A thrill of anticipation ran shivering up Jerome's spine. A Message from the Grandfather! Perhaps his request for Audience was being answered! Ribaud nodded somberly. "Yes, it's for you. From the Grandfather." Jerome nodded slowly, trying to read the old man's face for information. "Did he say what it's about?" The Sword Master suppressed a look of amusement. "The simple way to find out is to go over and ask the lad. He's the Messenger, you know, not I. And from the looks of him, he'd be only too glad to deliver his message and be off. ' ' Ribaud nodded towards the Messenger, who was anxiously shifting from foot to foot. "He's nervous as a cat what with all the Mushin floating around this yard. His mind isn't trained to handle it yet." He turned to the silently standing students. "Which reminds me that no one told the rest of you to stop training and gawk around like a bunch of Novices. Back to work, the lot of you. Start off with five hundred each, head, chest, and wrist cuts, slowly. Control your breath and calm your mind." Practice began again, each student reciting the Chant of Calmness as he swung his sword in unison with the others. Ribaud watched for a moment, then motioned to Jerome and walked with him over to where the Messenger stood waiting. "Messenger -- Brother Jerome," Ribaud said, and stepped back out of easy earshot, though Jerome knew he would hear every word. He might be old, but Ribaud was still in possession of all his faculties, including an incredible, catlike swiftness. The Messenger licked the sweat from his upper lip and focused distressed eyes on Jerome. "Brother Jerome," he began, his voice cracking a little. "Grandfather bids me call you to his presence. Father Ribaud is to prepare you for Audience. Come as soon as you are ready. I...#... uh... that is all." Abruptly the black-clad youth turned and fled the practice yanl. A sardonic grin on his face, Ribaud sauntered over to where Jerome stood gazing after the retreating Messenger. "So. Audience it is. Face to face with the Grandfather. And I'm to prepare you. No easy task, that." The Sword Master sighed. His tone had been bantering, but his concern was obvious. While Jerome racked his practice sword and changed from padded practice robe to a regular one, Ribaud carefully outlined the proper procedure for Personal Audience with die Grandfather. From time to time the young man would nod or grunt, but otherwise gave no indication he was listening. Ribaud knew otherwise. Nothing really passed Jerome by. He was incredibly quick and bright. Even while talking, the old man's mind went back, back some fifteen years to the day he had found Jerome. The lad had been sitting amid the smoking ruins of the farmstead at Waters Meeting, trying to straighten his dead mother's clothing. Ribaud knew the child had witnessed his father's torture, his mother's rape, and the slaughter of both at the hands of the Ronin who had raided the farm. It still seemed like a miracle that the boy had escaped the Madness. Those few who survived the Ronin were always mad. Death was usually a kindness. Yet that small boy had not only survived, but had somehow retained his sanity. Oh, true, true, rage and madness lurked deep in his eyes. Yet it was not the Madness. It was something deep within him, shackled and hidden away in the dark place at the center of his being, not something brought on by the Mu shin. It was a madness and rage he owned and controlled so well even the Mushin could not sniff it out. The routine details out of the way, Ribaud pondered what else he ought say. He knew he should give the lad some sort of advice, for Audience was not without its peril. Men had been known to break in the presence of the Grandfather. And the Mushin hovered constantly, waiting for just such a break to swoop down and bring the Madness. Not that Ribaud was really worried about Jerome. The lad Controlled his mind very well. Perhaps better than any other Son in the Brotherhood. At times he felt the young man's control was a little too rigid, too brittle, but there was no question it was effective. Still in all, the Sword Master felt a vague, gnawing worry over the idea of Jerome facing the Grandfather, He must do the best he could by the lad. "Now, my Son, listen as you've never listened before." Jerome looked up, surprised by the Sword Master's sudden urgency. "You go to face the Grandfather, not some Brother, or even a Father. The Grandfather. Remember: no matter how benevolent his rule, he is alien. Never, never think you can deal with him as you would with another human." The Sword Master paused for a moment to gather his thoughts and then continued. "I know you've heard the story a thousand times, but hear it again, so that it will be foremost in your awareness during your Audience.    "Mankind came to Kensho on the Arks," Ribaud began. "Like all the Great Pilgrimages that left the Mother World to spread our kind throughout the Galaxy, the Colonists were a polyglot group representing the myriad ways of thought and life found on Earth. The leader of this group was Admiral Nakamura, a High Master of the Universal Way of Zen. "When the Admiral found this planet there was great rejoicing. It was beautiful. An Eden. Three probe surveys showed a virgin planet with no sign of higher life, no mark of civilization, nothing but a primeval wilderness so enthralling that Nakamura named it "Kensho," after the first stage of Enlightenment. "Then the Colonists were landed at First Touch -- and all hell broke loose. Everyone went mad, tearing at each other, murdering, maiming. Like vicious, wild animals. It was the Madness. It blew the Colony apart and scattered the raving, killing debris across the landscape. "For most of the Colonists, there was no way to fight back. They didn't even know what caused the Madness. All they knew was that any emotion, especially a strong one like fear or anger, would grow and grow until it overflowed the mind and drove it into raving Madness. "Imagine what it must have been like! Anything could set it off. The man sitting next to you at dinner might accidently bump you with his elbow. If the sudden flash of annoyance you felt wasn't instantly brought under control, it would grow and grow uncontrollably until it became a towering, unreasoning, murderous rage. "Now we know it was the Mushin. We know they feed on our emotions. They use some kind of feedback technique to make the emotions stronger and stronger in an ever increasing spiral so that there is more emotive energy, more food for their insatiable appetites. "The Mushin brought the Madness down, drove Mankind insane, and very nearly wiped us out on Kensho. "But not quite, not quite. A few resisted. Admiral Nakmura, along with some other members of the crew who were adepts of the Way of Zen, held out against the onslaught of the Mushin. Together they formed a small core of calmness which managed to envelope and save many of the saner and subdue numbers of the insane. The leaders of the group began to make plans for the evacuation of the survivors. "Before the plan could be completed, Admiral Nakamura disappeared. For several days the others toiled to hold the little group of survivors together, but without Nakamura's leadership they began to lose ground. Evacuation was out of the question. Even survival looked doubtful. "Then the Grandfathers appeared. From somewhere. From nowhere. We don't know. But they came. And they brought the Way of Passivity. They said the Way had come from the mind of Admiral Nakamura whom they had found dying from an accident. They said they had taken his profound knowledge of the Way of Zen and tailored it to meet Mankind's needs here on Kensho, and that we had to accept it if we were to fend off the Mushin and survive. That we must learn to control our minds and emotions through spiritual exercises and physical disciplines: only with the Way of Passivity would life on Kensho be possible. "With a little training in its techniques a small group, say a family, might live in harmony on an isolated farmstead. With more training as many as seventy might dwell together as we do here at the Brotherhood. True, in either place the Mushin hover invisibly, ready in an instant to swoop down and feed, but the Passivity is our shield and keeps them from finding a target and bringing down the Madness. "We owe our very existence to the Grandfathers, Jerome. They have become our benefactors, our leaders. We cannot question the rightness of their actions or their decisions. "Yet .now, against all advice, you go to ask the Grandfather to allow you to leave the Brotherhood to follow the Way of the Sword. Even though you know the Sword is nothing but a way-station, a training device to prepare you to follow the Way of Passivity, the Ultimate Path given by the Grandfathers for all men to follow here on Kensho. You say it is not enough, that there must be more. By so doing you challenge not only the authority of the Grandfathers, but the experience of seven generations of Mankind on Kensho. "I know, Father, I know," Jerome interrupted so gently that it almost seemed like a continuation of the older man's monologue. "I don't question that the Way of Passivity was probably the best defense we could organize at the time. We're indebted to the Grandfathers for showing us the Way. "But is defense enough? For seven generations we've defended ourselves. We've never struck back. How can we? We don't know anything about the enemy. Only what the Grandfathers tell us, which is virtually nothing. "What has passivity gained us? A degree of safety and peace. Or better yet, safety and stagnation." The older man opened his mouth to object, but Jerome hurried on. "Yes, stagnation! Look, Father, how many new Brotherhoods have been built in your lifetime? How many new farmsteads have been founded? None! Not one. In fact, some, like ours at Waters Meeting, aren't even occupied any longer." A look of remembered pain flicked momentarily in the black depths of Jerome's eyes like the barely visible tail of a fish at the bottom of a pond. Just the barest movement. Then it was gone, instantly slammed behind the iron wall of his control. "It's as if...as if..." For a moment the young man groped for an idea just at the edge of understanding. Finding it, he rushed in pursuit. "Yes! It's as if we've reached some optimum level, some point the Grandfathers don't want us to pass. We're like cattle, penned up in the Brotherhoods or on the farmsteads, completely domesticated and unable to roam the surface of the planet we came to colonize; unable to grow. Instead, we're kept safe and stagnant, cowering under the watchful eyes of the Grandfathers, controlled by the Way of Passivity, defending ourselves against an enemy we can't see and don't understand. "Father, when the path you're on leads nowhere, you must seek a new path. The Way of Passivity gives us survival -- but it leads nowhere. We must find a new way, a way to fight back, to strike out at the things which keep us hiding like frightened cattle in the safe little pens the Grandfathers have built for us. "I don't know the answer. I don't know what the path should be. But I feel the Way of the Sword may have something to offer, something the Way of Passivity is lacking. I don't know. Unless I have a chance to follow the Way of the Sword, I never will know. All I ask is that chance." Ribaud shook his head with weary sadness. "Jerome, my Son, at times wanting must give way to acceptance." Jerome made to reply but the Sword Master held up his hand. "The Way of the Sword, followed to the end, leads to the Madness. Look at the Ronin, boy, look at the mad animals that slaughtered your family. Didn't they carry Swords? "Jerome, the Grandfathers are right, even though you are too young to see it. All young men have strong emotions. And you have reasons to harbor the strongest of all: hate. You control it well; indeed, far beyond what one has a right to expect in one so young. But you have boundless energy and boundless ambition. The Brotherhood is hard on you. It is a kinder life for softer men. But there is no other way for humanity here on Kensho. The Madness lies in wait on any other path." Even as he uttered the words, Ribaud felt their utter futility. The lad would not listen, indeed could not listen without doing violence to his .own character. And the Grandfather would never allow him to leave the Brotherhood to follow the Way of the Sword. Even though there was truth to what Jerome said, the results of the coming Audience could only be tragic. Jerome looked down and dug at the dust with his toes. "I know," he began in a normal voice. Then, dropping to a hoarse whisper he continued, "But it means so much to me, Father, so much." The Sword Master suddenly realized that he was beyond his depth, that he was now treading into the dark recesses of Jerome's desire and need. Dangerous, he thought, to stir up such ghosts and specters in one who goes to Audience. Ribaud shook his head. It was time to stop, to calm, to support, to say somthing, anything, that might help. So little I can do, he fretted, so little I can say that has any meaning. He felt the leaden weight of his inability to offer anything but platitudes. In truth he knew nothing of this complex creature that stood before him. Nothing but the surface. All he could do was to speak to that surface. Ribaud shook his head in defeat. "Go," he quietly commanded Jerome. "Go to the Grandfather and listen to what he doesn't say as carefully as to what he says. He may speak in what sounds to you like riddles. He may not speak at all. If the first, look for meaning beyond words. If the second, listen to the eloquence of the silence. I can offer nothing more." Bowing low, Jerome turned and began walking in the direction of the Grandfather's cell. II. In each of the Brotherhoods, at its very center, stands a small, windowless building. There is a single, low door in it, facing south. The door is always crudely made of planks from a Ko tree. Inside, the single room is bare except for a mat, woven from the bark of the same tree, rectangular, beginning at the back wall of the room and ending just short of the door. Sitting on the mat, a little over half way to the wall is the Grandfather. Once a Grandfather gathers a group of men together and forms a Brotherhood, once the cell has been built, the alien stays there, sitting. He never leaves the cell, never even moves, as far as anyone can tell. Occasionally the creature says something in his high, whispery voice. One of his black-clad Messengers then hastens to do his bidding. Yet somehow the Grandfather is the heart and soul of a Brotherhood. Ail important decisions are referred to him, even though he often fails to reply to a question and as often as not when he does reply, his utterances are unintelligible. Nevertheless, each is carefully taken down and religiously studied by the Fathers until it inspires a decision. On the north, east, and west of the alien Grandfather's cell are the long, low buildings which house the human Fathers. To the south lies the Meditation Hall, a roof supported by pillars. Beyond the Father's quarters are the Workshops and the Rooms of Learning. Further yet toward the wails are the practice yards for the Way of the Sword, the Way of the Fist, and the Way of the Staff. Below the Sitting Hall, to the south, is the practice yard for the Soft Way, Beyond that squats the low form of the Refectory with its long tables and hot, steamy kitchens. Built into the walls which enclose the Brotherhood are stables and pens for the animals and the tiny cells where the Novices and Sons dwell. A tidy community of seventy humans and one alien. As Jerome approached the Grandfather's cell, he tried to picture the alien. He had seen him only once, the day he had been dedicated to the Brotherhood as a Novice. As an orphan, he had been required to present himself to the Grandfather for approval. He could remember little but the creature's huge, glowing, multifaceted eyes. The rest was mainly a memory of shadow, vague bulk, and an occasional sharp angle. By rumor, of course, he knew a great deal more. The angles had been the alien's stick-like arms and legs: the legs folded in front; the arms, elbows out, resting on the knees. Bulk was the large barrel chest, covered with a hard, chitinous substance rather like the armour they sometimes wore during sword practice. The head was long and narrow, domed at top and coming to a point at the bottom. Large eyes bisected it. Overall, the effect was of a large, benevolent cockroach: a cockroach that talked, and thought, and meditated, and ruled a community of seventy humans, but never, never left his cell. A Messenger, probably the same one, stood by the door, his face averted in respect. As Jerome approached, the lad pulled back the door, letting a splash of light drop into the darkness of the room. Stooping, Jerome entered. The door swung shut and night fell. For a few moments he stood still, his back to the door. Silently he repeated the Litany of Passivity to calm his thumping heart. "Moons, moons, shining down on waters, waters, moving slowly, moons moving slowly, yet being still. Still the waters, still the moons. Movement, strife, all longing is but a reflection, passing to stillness when the mind is calmed." He droned through it three times while his eyes adjusted to the dark and he gained enough presence of mind to sit down on his end of the Ko mat. He sat, legs crossed, hands on his knees, eyes cast down about five feet in front of himself, seeing-butnot-seeing. He regulated his breath. And waited. And waited. And waited. An incalculable age later there came a rising whisper, a breeze of meaning that gently blew toward him across the dark, "why this subsection of unity now in this place, interrogation." Jerome, lulled by the long wait, snapped his mind back into focus. "This subsection of unity has a request," he whispered back. "Make request apparent to this vessel of totality," came the softly hissing answer. "This subsection of unity wishes to go to the Old Master on the Mountain to follow the Way of the Sword." Emotion surged up, threatening to overwhelm the controls Jerome, had spent so many years constructing. The Sword! How much it meant to him! As a child he had never even thought of the Sword, never even seen one, for that matter. He was a farmer's son, wed to the land. But then the Sword had come unbidden into his life, shattering and smashing it into dead, lifeless, bloodsoaked fragments. The Sword of Death, brought by the three Ronin, flashing up, flashing down, cutting, gutting. Three Ronin, men who did not fear the Madness, but who actively sought it out, who invited the Mushin to take over their minds, who reveled in rapine, slaughter, insanity. Three Ronin, three Swords, slashing his life to ribbons, bringing death, death, death. What demons the Sword had raised only the Sword could lay to rest. Only the Sword of Life could give back what the Sword of Death had taken. The Sword giveth and the Sword taketh away. So be it. Even at seven years of age he had realized that. He had known it deeply, organically, without logic, without words, without even thought. Only by mastering what had destroyed his life could he hope to recreate his life. The Sword had started him on this road. Only by the Sword could he reach his destined end. And somewhere, someway, he would meet the Three and complete the cycle of Death and Life, Life and Death. When he had come to the Brotherhood, he had thrown himself into his studies with an intensity that had worried the Fathers. In exhaustion he had found release from the demonic visions and memories which constantly lurked in the shadows at the edge of his conscious mind. In the Spiritual Exercises and the Physical Disciplines he had found a way to build an iron wall of control around the turbulent passions and fears that dwelt in the dark center of his being. Ill Relentlessly he had worked and prepared until as a Sixth Level Son he had been allowed to ehter the Way of the Sword with Father Ribaud. Once on the Way, he had redoubled his efforts. With cold fury he practiced each cut, each block, each move, each form until exhaustion felled him. After a short rest, he came back for more. In five years he had learned everything Father Ribaud had to teach. Jerome's technique was flawless, his form polished like glass wood. A perfect machine, all he lacked was the soul, the True Understanding of the Way of the Sword as opposed to the Technique of the Sword. Ribaud had tried to show Jerome the Way. But Ribaud himself was only the Sword Master at an out-of-the-way Brotherhood. He was not a True Master of the Way, not an Enlightened One. He could point out the Path, but had never trodden it himself. He could not lead Jerome on the Way. He could only indicate the general direction in which it lay. Ribaud knew his limitations and made no bones about it. Jerome knew too, and also knew that there could be no further progress toward his goal unless he found a True Master to study with. There was such a Master on the Mountain. Known only as the Old Master, he lived in a tiny hut, far up the slopes of the towering Mountain. Years ago, when the Old Master had first appeared in the region, he had singlehandedly wiped out a band of eight Ronin which the Brotherhood had been unable to kill or drive away. Then he settled on the slopes of the Mountain. At first, he had grudgingly accepted a few students from the Brotherhood. As a Fifth Level Son, the young Ribaud had been among them. On the Mountain he had caught just a glimpse of the Real Way, a single Satori experience. He still spoke of the experience with reverence and awe. Then the Grandfather had handed down a decision. It was very clear, very precise. No one was to go study the Way of the Sword with the Old Master on the Mountain. The Way of the Sword was too active, too dangerous to Passivity. It was a training vehicle, a waystation on the path to Passivity and a technique to fend off the Ronin. Nothing more. That was thirty years ago. Since then hardly anyone had seen the Old Master, though from time to time the Brotherhood's patrols had found the bodies of groups of Ronin, so it was assumed the old man was still alive. Yet the fact remained that for thirty years no one has gone to study the Way of the Sword with the Old Master. But Jerome knew he had to try. It was the only way, his only hope! The Grandfather must allow him to go, must not stand in the way of his destiny! But calm! He must remain calm! To draw down Mushin in the Very presence of the Grandfather! Even a Novice wouldn't do anything so foolish, so indicative of a lack of control and a straying from the Way of Passivity. "Moons, moons, shining down... he chanted silently, forcing down the emotions, the hopes, forcing his entire being back down, down, into a tiny, windowless cell at the center of his soul. Silence. And waiting. Then, eventually, the darkness began to vibrate again. Muffled meaning softly filtered through the black of the cell to his straining ears. It was a chant. One he had never heard before: The Sword is the Mind. When the Mind is right, the Sword is right. When the Mind is not right, the Sword is not right. He who would study the Way of the Sword must first study his Mind. Again and again the Grandfather repeated the chant, his hissing rising and falling. At times his voice seemed to fill the cell, pushing back the darkness. At other times it shrank to a tiny spark almost overwhelmed by the endless night around them. The chant wound its way into Jerome's mind, down into his soul, curling, twisting like a tiny snake of smoke coming from a fire one had thought was extinguished. Slowly it filled his whole being, until it seemed there was no more room for him inside himself. Control! Control! He had to regain control! Raised from childhood to fear the Mushin, Jerome was terrified at the very thought of anyone or anything tampering with the carefully constructed fabric of his mind control. For generations, loss of control had meant the Mushin gained control, bringing the Madness that had so nearly destroyed the human race on Kensho. Now Jerome fought back desperately, instinctively. He closed down his mind. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he retreated back into the hard, dark core of his being. He shut out the curling chant with its meaning beyond words, he fought to reintegrate himself as a separate entity, to cut himself off from external influence. Panting, sweating harder than he ever had in the practice yard, Jerome gradually brought himself under control again. Deep within him a huge rage burned, shielded from the Mushin by the black walls of his being. But it burned fiercely all the same. The Grandfather! The alien had done this to him! Had tried to take over his mind! The Grandfather could do things to his mind! It could do things like the Mushin could do! Anger, confusion, rage, fear, all contained, all held deep within, fused together in a sudden intuitive leap. The Grandfather and the Mushin! Somehow they were linked, related! The benefactor of the race and its worst enemy were somehow tied together! Revulsion and disgust rose up and twisted into hatred, joining the other emotions that raged within him. For an instant blind fury and hate spewed across Jerome's mind flame. The explosion was incredible. In one motion he stood and took a single step toward the Grandfather. Almost swifter than thought his hand rose and fell in a swift arc, striking at the base of the alien's neck. With a sharp snap the head flew off and smashed against the wall of (he cell. The entire universe stood still. Frozen, his mouth agape,  Jerome stood, looking at the crumpled, broken head that lay at the base of the wall. His emotions, his incredible raging fury, were gone, sucked into the cold void of eternity. Then, in the next instant, the frozen, fragile universe shattered like thin crystal and crashed down upon his head. His mind a blank, Jerome tottered and crumpled to the floor. m. Consciousness returned slowly, like an old man dragging himself up a steep flight of stairs. For a while Jerome simply lay there, enjoying the solidity of the floor and the texture of the Ko mat against his cheek. Then memory began to seep through the hazy curtains of his confusion. His hand crept softly across his face to brush away the last fogginess and his eyes opened. Jerome sat up and looked at the Grandfather. The alien's body still sat at the other end of the Ko mat. Over by the wall lay its shattered head.  Memory changed from a seeping to a sweeping flood. Jerome braced himself against it and the first wave broke harmlessly against the walls of his control. Gradually he allowed memory to percolate down through the layers of his mind. As it sank to the core of his being a thought rose to meet and pass it by on the way to consciousness. "I have killed a Grandfather," he whispered. "I have killed a Grandfather. " Hearing the sound of his own voice gave the thought a solidity that made it possible for him to grasp and work with it. Carefully he wove it into the framework of thought through which he interpreted the world. The Way of Passivity taught that Being caused Desiring. Desiring gave rise to Action. Inevitably, Action led to Frustration. And because of the Mushin, Frustration ended in the Madness. The Way was an attempt to cut off this inevitable sequence by practicing Non-action or Passivity. The Spiritual exercises and Physical Disciplines of the Way (aught the control necessary' to rein in Desire, to enclose it behind an iron wall of rigid Passivity. Action based on personal Desire must be avoided. For one Action always engendered another. And that, in turn, brought on another. No single Action could ever satisify Desire once it ruled a man, and so the chain of Desire and Action would lead to Frustration and eventually to the Madness. Jerome had fallen into just such a sequence when he allowed himself to be ruled by the personal desire to follow the Way of the Sword. His Desire had forced him to the Action of requesting an Audience. Arrd the Audience' had led to the Action of Now more Action was required. Never had he understood the Way of Passivity more clearly. He had acted, and now he must act again. In doing so he was that much closer to the Madness. But he had to act, for he knew he could no longer stay at the Brotherhood. He didn't know what the Fathers would do when they discovered his crime, but his to find out. The Fathers didn't exactly worship the Grandfather, but they did revere and obey the alien. Even Father Ribaud looked upon the Grandfathers as Mankind's saviours from the Mushin and the Madness. There could be little doubt that the Fathers would be shocked by what he had done. How shocked, how angered, he could not guess. But it was perfectly possible that in their anger they might lose control and leave an opening for the Mushin to come pouring in. Jerome shuddered inwardly. All the Fathers were Masters of at least one of the Ways. Whether it be the Fist, the Staff, or the Sword, all were deadly. He had no wish to face even one of them possessed by the Madness. Now he must act again. He must leave the brotherhood. Every thought, every motion, must be geared to the satisfaction of his Desire to leave the Brotherhood. One error, one misstep, and he faced Death. So. First he had to figure the lay of the land. He listened for some hint of what was happening in the world outside the dark cell. Quiet. Everything was quiet. Which meant no one knew! Surely if any of the Brothers knew he had killed the Grandfather they would be there to take him into custody! So no one knew. Yet. What was more, there didn't seem to be any Mushin about. He felt with his mind, searching for the telltale tingling sensation they made at the edge of the mind. Again he felt a sense of surpise. Somehow by the Mushin as well! This was food for thought. It was easy to understand how his act had escaped the notice of the Fathers; the Grandfather had no regular attendants, except for the Messengers who came when they were called. Hence there had been no Fathers in red. In addition, he had been swift and silent. But the Mushin, how had his rage escaped the Mushin? Had his sudden collapse after the blow somehow saved him? Could a Mushin? The Mushin! Icy recollection ran like a swift chill up his spine. Just before he had risen to strike he had seen some kind of a link between the Mushin and the Grandfather. On the face of it, the idea seemed absurd. How could the benefactors of Mankind be linked with their enemies? And yet... and yet... there could be no mistaking what the Grandfather had been trying to do. Jerome knew because he had experienced it. The Grandfather had been trying to break down his control, to take over his mind. If the alien had succeeded, Jerome would have been helpless to fend off the Mushin, helpless in the face of the Madness. Thought followed thought to die place where doubts dwelt. Just what were the Grandfathers? Where had they come from? Why had they saved Mankind from the Mushin? What was in it for them? These were questions all men asked themselves but seldom spoke aloud. Mankind's debt to the grandfathers was too great to allow room for much questioning. Jerome shook his mind free of the circling doubts. Now was no time for speculation. He had to act. The mystery of the motivations of the Grandfathers and their possible link with the Mushin would have to wait, i He looked at the shape sitting headless at the other end of the Ko mat. The alien had done something to his mind. He couldn't repress a slight shiver. The thing was dead now, though. It could no longer hurt him. Curiousity grew stronger than fear and he found himself rising and stepping over to examine the upright body. No one had ever had such a chance to examine a Grandfather before. A shock ran through him. He stood looking down into an empty husk! The body was hollow! There was nothing. No vital organs, no blood, no flesh. Nothing! Dazed, he turned to the wall. A step brought him to the shattered head. He stopped to pick it up: it too was empty. A brittle, empty shell. So the Grandfathers, like the Mushin, were non-physical, their insect-like shells a mere empty masquerade. Like the Mushin? Perhaps the relationship was closer, much closer! Battered, reeling from shock after shock, Jerome's mind was pushed over the edge, out into space, out where there was no place to stand and fight, out where his iron control meant nothing. He felt reality blasted to the winds of Reality. He had to fall eternally into chaos and Madness or find his wings and fly. He became unsane. He passed the boundaries of Self and looked back at the pathetic creature which stood in a dark cell and held the crumpled head of a Grandfather in its hand. He saw himself with complete objectivity, as he really was. He saw the hollowness of the Alien's shell. And the hollowness of his own. His shell. His armour. The beloved wall of control he had so carefully and lavishly constructed. It did not enclose some lovely garden, some orderly place that had to be protected against the dangers of the outside world. Within those iron walls there was no calm, no Passivity, nothing to mirror or match the rigid exterior. There was only a vast, foul, seething void of incoherent passion and desire, a cesspool of terror held back by the weakest of restraints. He knew this was the Truth. The Passivity was shallow, a brittle shell, a lie that gave a smiling face to a snarling beast. It did not go to the core. It simply contained it. Like a visiting specter, he floated through the agony that filled his Center. He heard again the bellows of his father, writhing in his bonds as three Ronin raped and murdered his mother. Once more he pulled his parents' bodies from the burning house. His fear of the older Sons was there too, as were the fights behind the Refectory, and the drubbings he had had to endure in silence. All the anguish of his life was there. All compressed, all repressed behind the control the Passivity taught. He knew this was the Truth. The Passivity did not do what the It is the #st century, but Scop is in # -- attending assassinations. He's warned, cajoled, pleaded... but he knows he's a failure. Trying to alter the future, he has merely reinforced it! Grandfathers claimed. It did not set men free from Desire. Desire was still there, made more intense than ever by being subverted and hidden. The Passivity did not do away with the Frustration caused by Action. It merely changed the nature of the Frustration and locked it behind the iron control of the Spiritual Exercises and Physical Disciplines. He knew this was the Truth and the Light of it shone brightly on his soul. So bright was the Light that he could see the Way he must follow. A brief, dim glimpse, but a seeing none the less. The Center must be Calm. The Way of the Passivity did not accomplish this. His Way lay up the path to the clearing on the Mountain where the Old Master sat, waiting. There he would study the Way of the Sword. There he would seek to calm his Center so that the walls of control were no longer necessary. There he would reach for the Way to set all Mankind on Kensho free of the Grandfathers and free of the Mushin and the Madness. The Light did not show him the end of the Way he must follow. But it showed him the beginning. Gradually the Light dimmed and he became Brother Jerome, standing in a dark cell with the crumpled head of a Grandfather in his hand. Carefully, almost gently, he placed the head back on the floor, turned and walked softly to the door of the cell. Now he had to tune his every sense to escape. He no longer feared Action, nor Frustration, nor the Madness. Action was necessary to the following of his Way. He peered out one of the cracks between the planks. He saw nothing. Startled, he realized it was dark. Which meant he must have been sitting with the Grandfather for hours! He pressed his ear to the door, listening for outside activity, for the sound of the bell in the Meditation Hall, for the clash of dishes from the Refectory, for anything that could give him a clue as to what was happening outside. Nothing. The world was still. That could only mean it was late at night, long after all the Novices, Sons, and Fathers had finished Evening Sitting and gone to their cells for Final Meditation and Rest. In other words, the Brotherhood was asleep. There were Novices guarding the North and South Ways, of course, but Jerome could avoid them and go over the wall. Slowly he opened the door outward, its squeak startling him with its loudness. Cautiously he looked around, then stepped out and gently closed the door behind him, wincing at the sound. No one heard. The world remained silent. A breeze blew across his face, making him suddenly aware he was sweating. He grimaced. I'm afraid, he thought. Scared. Walking softly as he had been trained by the Fist Master, Jerome crossed the Emptiness. He moved South, around the Meditation Hall, hollow and cold in the light of two of Kensho's four moons. Beyond that was the practice yard for the Soft Way. He passed quickly, gently, then turned to the east toward the wall and his own cell. The breeze blew steadily, cooling his forehead and chasing through his hair. All around him the silence kept watch. Once he heard the ting-ting of the North Way Watch sounding the hour and the South Way Watch responding. It was the second hour. He had been with the Grandfather for at least twelve hours! At the door of his cell he stopped. Why had he come back here? There was nothing within. Only his bowl, his knife, and a spare robe. Oh, yes, and an old, worn pair of sandals. One more thing, too. One more thing. Something he never admitted he had, never showed to anyone, almost never looked at himself. It was under the straw pallet. He reached under the thin mattress and groped for it. When his fingers closed over its cool hardness, he drew it forth. It was a small badge, attached to a crudely made chain. His mother had worn it' around her neck. He had taken it from her dead body as he sat mourning amid the smoke and stink of the farmstead at Waters Meeting. It was his father's actually, something that had been handed down from father to son ever since the Early Days. Jerome held it up in the beam of moonslight that filtered into his cell from the ventilation slit in the ceiling. He could just make out the words inscribed on the dull surface: "P. Rausch Chief Engineer," He slipped the chain over his head and hid the badge beneath the coarse cloth of his robe. Moving swiftly now, anxious to leave, he placed the sandals, bowl, knife, and a pair of eating sticks on the spare robe. He folded the bottom up and rolled the whole thing into a tight knot to hold the loose items. A string around the middle assured it wouldn't come apart. Finally he looped the whole thing around one shoulder and across his waist and tied the sleeves in front. Once outside again, he turned north along the wall and began walking. He passed a few of the Workshops and finally came abreast of the east end of the practice yard where the Way of the Sword was taught. For a moment he paused, then he entered the yard and walked swiftly to the rack where the swords were kept. Fondly he took down his favorite sword, Whistler, and held it lovingly. For a few moments he stood there gazing at it, experiencing the good memories it awakened of hours sweating in the sun perfecting his stroke and cut. Father Ribaud's presence filled the moonslit yard and Jerome felt a lump in his throat. The old man would be stunned by what had happened. Jerome would give anything to see him one last time, to attempt to explain what had happened, what his revelation had shown, and what path he must now follow. But as much as he loved the Sword Master he realized they could not communicate on certain things, that their views were too widely divergent to make understanding possible. Sympathy, yes. But not true understanding. He must go his own way now. He would take Father Ribaud with him, in his heart, wherever he went. But the journey itself must be made alone. And the sword, Whistler, should he take it with him? The world he was entering was dangerous and the sword might make the difference between survival and death. He paused only a moment and then returned the sword to the rack. No, it wasn't right. Not because it would be stealing, but because he knew intuitively that he would have to earn his sword, not just take it. He knew he was increasing his chance of death greatly by not taking the weapon, but that risk was one he had known about when he had decided to walk the Way. Now he was a Seeker of the Way. He would have to find his own sword somewhere on the journey. He bowed to the Shrine of the practice yard and left. Jerome was now almost to the northeast corner of the wall surrounding the Brotherhood. Here there were some sheds with sloping roofs that were used for the storage of tools. They offered easy access to the top of the wall. Looking around briefly one last time, Jerome began to climb. IV. All four moons were up now. From the rise where Jerome stood, he could look back down the valley cut by the Little Water and see both the dark bulk of the Brotherhood and the far-off smudge that marked the site of the farmstead at Waters Meeting. It was as if this life was laid out before him in the moonslight. He turned and looked the other way. In the near foreground the Wood began. Beyond that he could see the dark mass of Mountain and nothing more. That was his future. Dark and unknown. He turned back to look at the Brotherhood. A great, heavy sadness and sense of inadequacy filled him. I go to find myself and to seek salvation for my race, he thought. One man, one young man, I seek the Way. So great a task for one man. Yet that was how it had always been, he realized. One man. One man fitting a stone blade to a wooden shaft. One man tying a sinew to a springy twig. The dark mood lifted and he chuckled. He could just imagine how the Mushin must be trembling at the terrible threat he represented. Much the way the saber-toothed tiger must have trembled at the first man who carried a stone ax. Puny, he thought with a smile. That's what the tiger must have thought. Puny and insignificant. And so he would appear to the Mushin. A joke at best. But neither the saber-tooth nor any of the other fanged and clawed enemies of early man were laughing any longer. Now it was the Mushin 's turn. He shook his fist at the empty sky. "I go to find a Way," he called out. Only the silence answered him. With a shrug, the Seeker of the Way turned and strode off under the soft glow of Kensho's moons.  Spider Robinson Millenium, Ben Bova, Random House, # pp,, # The Analog Annual, ed. Ben Bova. Pyramid, # pp., # Notes To A Science Fiction Writer, Ben Bova, Scribners, # pp., # Shardik, Richard Adams, Simon  Schuster, # pp. , # Triton, Samuel R. Delany, Bantam, # pp., # Doorways In The Sand, Roger Zelazny, Harper  Row, # pp., # Science Fiction Art, Brian Aldiss, Bounty, # pp., # The Best of Robert Silverberg, Pocket Books, # pp., # Tales From The White Hart, Arthur C. Clarke, Ballantine, # pp., # Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood  Robert Silverberg, Berkley Putnam, # pp., # All right, I know: the above list of books has you all goggle-eyed and you can't wait to get to the reviews. Well, you'll just have to wait. I have, God help me, a speech to make. Along about February I asked you people for feedback on this column. As I write, it's March, and I'm still shoveling my way out from under the deluge of mail that ensued. I've gotten to know quite a few of you, and I've learned that, almost to a man, you are passionate in your likes and dislikes. Nor are you reticent about expressing them. A startling number of you asked me things like, "Can you use your influence" (forsooth!) "to get the publishers to stop printing that " (supply your own) "stuff and give us some more good old ?" Well the hell with that noise. Do it yourself. You can too. Let me tell you about my "influence," people. I can get books free -- but the word "free" is a misnomer: I must read all those books, and the majority are wretched. I can irritate or gratify those editors who bother to read my column (maybe # of the total?), with the sum total effect that such editors will either buy me or omit to buy me a drink the next time I run into them. Likewise the writers involved. The publishers? They don't know that I'm alive, and unless I ever write a New York Times Bestseller, they never will. But there is a way for me to communicate my opinions to all of those people, in a way forceful enough to demand their attention. And that same channel is available to you, to e'very one of you goombahs, if you'll only get up off your hindquarters and use it. I'm not talking about writing letters to the publishers, or holding demonstrations, or sending letter-bombs through the post or forming vigilante committees to hang the hacks from the housetops. I'm talking about the Hugo Awards. You take a fine thoughtful writer like George R.R. Martin. Years of a story here, a story there, and I'm sorry but that deal for your anthology just fell through. Then the man wins a (thoroughly deserved) Hugo for "A Song For Lya," and all of a sudden New Voices Volume One is scheduled for release and people are falling over themselves to buy George's first novel After The Festival (George's very words). Or take a fine, thoughtful writer like me: I'm here to tell you that it got a lot easier to sell a novel to a house like Putnam when the Hugo-voters at Discon II voted me the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer back in # (in a tie, I must add, with the highly talented and too-seldom-seen Lisa Tuttle). The point is, the voice of the people was heard in the land, and it helped the people get the books they wanted to see. But I'd hate to tell you the actual number of votes I received, or the number that any Hugo or Hugorelated award winner gets. At last year's World Science Fiction Convention, the awarding of the label World's Best was done by less than six hundred people. I've received more letters than that, from you feedbackers. I know the damn thing was held halfway around the world; that's entirely irrelevant. You don't have to attend a Worldcon to vote. Anyone can. Anyone -- anyone in the world. You don't have to have credentials or be vaccinated or even have the money to drag your ass to Kansas City for this year's jamboree to make your feelings known. It'll cost you six bucks, two postage stamps, and a little time. You write to MidAmeriCon, the #th World Science Fiction Convention, P.O. Box #, Kansas City, Missouri #, and you tell 'em you want a supporting membership, and youslip 'em six bucks U.S. This bread is used for about a million things that taken together make a convention happen, from paying us pros to bullshit, to paying the poor sad bastards who're going to have to count your ballots. In return you get probably a bunch of literature, a tin-plated Mars bar, the hearty thanks of a convention committee that came out in the black vote for the Hugo Awards. But only if you hurry. Dammit, here's where that timelag between the writing of these columns and their seeing print really hurts. As of today, March #, I have not yet received even my preliminary Hugo ballot, the mass of suggestions which will, after months of deletions and write-ins, become the Final Ballot. But by the time you read this, that ballot will already have been selected, and they might not even have time to mail you a copy in time for you to vote on it -- I don't know just what their deadline is going to be, but you'll be reading this in June or July, which is mighty close to Labor Day. So you're going to have to put out a little juice on your own to find out who the finalists are, and dammit, you should be interested enough. You can always write-in something. I heard you. You, the cheapskate who just said, "Si x bucks? Jeez." Well, don't gimme any of that jive. From the mail I've been getting, it's apparent that the vast majority of you spend more than six dollars a month buying science fiction, and end up feeling ripped off more often than not. You are indignant; you want me to do something about it. Phooey -- spend one month's six bucks on improving the overall quality of next year's sf. The return on your investment will be literally priceless. And next year you can even get it together in time to influence the composition of the Final Ballot. Editor's note: doe to a delay in publication this issue will be reaching the stands sometime after the Final Balloting for #. However everything Spider says holds true for #; and you can get in at the begin#th World Science Fiction ConP.O. Box #, Cherry Hill, NJ # for your application for full or supporting membership. Make your wishes known, people. For too long the awards have been given by too few hardcore devotees; tell the nice publishers what you want.    I also got a couple of letters from people who said, "I wish Galaxy would stop making snide cracks about 'that Other magazine, the one with rivets.' Such rivalry is unbecoming," etc. These good people have entirely missed the point. There is no animosity between Galaxy and Analog: aside from liking each other, Baen and Bova are too damned sensible -- they understand that science fiction just doesn't work that way. You can't climb over the backstabbed bodies of your adversaries -- there aren't any. For those of you who are still dubious (man, the world has never seen an Age of Cynicism till now), here I am in the pages of Galaxy saying that Ben Bova has just written the # Hugo Award Novel. At least he's sure and hell got my vote so far. Granted, the year is young -- but it'll be mighty damn hard to beat this one, Millenium is the crowning achievement of Ben's career to date, and enthusiastically praised by the likes of Isaac Asimov and Lester Del Rey, has already sold to Ballantine for paperback, and I want to tell you I haven't enjoyed a book so much in years. It is one of those rarities, a good science fiction book that is also a good novel in the literary sense. It is the story of the apotheosis of Chester Arthur Kinsman, the man Ben's been writing about for most of his adult life, and it does both men proud. Millenium concerns the political state of affairs on Earth and the Moon in the year #, a time when the Cold War between America and Russia has been thawed and reheated, damned near the boiling point. At any moment, one side or the other may lites, upsetting at last the precious Balance of Terror and precipitating nuclear calamity -- in fact, they may not even wait that long. Caught on the horns of this dilemma are Kinsman and Piotr Leonov, commanders of the American and Russian bases on the Moon. These bases were established back when both sides were getting along amicably -- and now that their respective countries are being hostile again, Kinsman and Leonov are dismayed to realize that they must become enemies. Can they refuse? And get away with it? Therein lies the story, and a helluva plausible one, too. I won't give any more away; there are some lovely surprises planted. The book builds steadily and inexorably to a stunning conclusion, with one of the most moving final paragraphs in my memory, and along the way is one of the most sheerly believable stories in science fiction. I'm not saying that # will turn out as Ben pictures it -- but I do say that it damned well could -- and that we'll probably be very lucky if it does. Oh yeah: Harry Harrison is in the book too, in the thinnest of disguises, as brilliant and charming and disreputable as he is in real life. I understand Fred Pohl has a novel coming out that's a strong Hugo contender, but as of now Millenium is my firm recommendation for Best Novel of # (for those of you who're heeding my advice about voting, remember that you vote for the '# Hugos in #, not this year), and I strongly exhort you not to wait for it to come out in paperback. This is one of the few books that I feel is worth #, no matter what the hell shape your budget's in.    Next on the agenda is a peachy original anthology; and the editor is the selfsame Ben Bova. And like Millenium, The Analog Annual is predicated on a careful analysis of current trends in the real world. The statistics boys will tell you, if you hadn't noticed already, that there's a vast number of new readers of sf -- we've never had so large an audience in all of history. And it is sad but true that a large and growing number of these new "fans" (they may not trade fanzines or attend cons, but they put oil in my Dodge) are only peripherally aware or not aware atall that there are magazines that print the stuff every month -- folks who get their sf from the bookrack or not at all. There may have been a time when the overall quality of "book" sf was higher than that of "mag" sf, but if so I'm here to tell you them days is gone forever. Unless you're wise enough to read my column, your chances of getting a good original collection are, by my statistics, lower than your chances of getting a good given issue of Galaxy or Analog or FSF. Much, lower, in fact: you can get an idea of the kind of stories Jim or Ben or Ed is liable to assemble -- but who the hell knows what Roger Elwood's going to do next time? So Ben decided to alert the paperback buyers to the existence of magazine sf, by producing a "Thirteenth Analog" in paperback format. Not surprisingly, the dice are loaded: if every Analog were this good, there wouldn't be enough paper in the world to meet the demand. Look: it's like I said a couple of paragraphs ago, each of the socalled Big Four editors has a sort of style that can be sensed, based on the audience he has decided to aim at. Ben tends to buy more technologically-oriented stories whereas Jim tends to buy more humanistically inclined stories whereas Ed Ferman at FSF tends to buy more "Lit 'rate" pieces whether or not they are actual stories whereas Ted White tends to buy whatever the first three rejected. These glib generalizations, of course, have about as many exceptions as the geocentric universe theory: Ben has bought stories from me that are about as technological as a pair of scissors; Jim has bought the only technological story I ever wrote, and Ferman and White have printed many fine, readable stories -- but the above is how the Big Four are sort of filed in my subconscious as of even date. So what Ben put together is a book that should satisfy just about everybody. Story One is a complete short novel (a sadly neglected form -- by the writers who could do it right, that is) by P.J. Plauger. When Plauger won the John W. Campbell Award for #, the only story of his that I could call to mind was "Wet Blanket," so I've been eager to see something more. Fighting Madness will do just fine, an absorbing novel with a GordyDicksonish flavor to it that means an extremely high level of craftsmanship for so new a writer. Plauger shows magnificent promise. I'd like to see a more ambitious theme next time, but I believed in the protagonist and cared what happened to him and that, in the final analysis, will get my penny every time. Story Two is "Malf," a yarn which should satisfy the technology freaks and certainly satisfied me. It's in the tradition of "Killdozer" and Keith Laumer's Bolo Combat Unit cycle: the Bigass Machine Gone Berserk story. Except that there's a human operator -- and he's the one that's berserk. A fine, tight, fast-paced adventure with a "read me" style: I've never heard of Ing before, but I hope I do again, soon. Story Four is "The Tower of Ashes" by Hugo Award winner George Railroad Martin, a story literary enough to satisfy the New Wavers (right down to the "Whadhesay?" ending) and rich enough to satisfy me. It reminds me of something Poul Anderson might have done, grabbing at your heart in a way that is getting to be George's trademark too, lately. It features his usual striking visual sense as well. Story Five isn't a story -- this is a typical Analog, remember? It's a Science Fact Article (which Analog gets free-lance, not having a Jerry Poumelle), this time by Dr. John R. Gribbin, co-author of The Jupiter Effect (a controversial Vintage paperback concerning earthquakes and the planets), holder of a doctorate in astrophysics from Cambridge, etcetera. "The Climatic Threat" gives a well-researched and thoughtful answer to the question, ' 'Are we liable to go into a new Ice Age in the foreseeable future?", and diminished my ignorance considerably. And painlessly. And for those of you who are wondering what happened to Story Three, I'm afraid my rigid code of professional ethics prevents me from saying anything more than that it's the funniest thing I ever wrote and was originally rejected on the grounds that Playboy would pay me more money for it (no they wouldn't either) and besides, I don't get a penny in royalties anyway, so there. It is, by the way, as far as I know' the only story in history with one and a half protagonists, and it's called "Half An Oaf' which is certainly better than a nun.    And still I'm not done with Ben Bova. But the appeal of this one won't be so catholic. In fact, it's liable to be one of the most controversial books of the year. I know of at least three people, in and out of the profession, who were rendered speechless with rage by it -- and as many who said it made them cheer out loud. Because, of course, it's mistitled. It should be Notes To An Analog Writer, Slushpile Division, as Ben cheerfully admits in his preface. "This book was written in self-defense," is literally the first thing he has to say. Ben is the only magazine editor I know who reads every manuscript submitted to him, an incredible task that you couldn't get me to attempt for all the tea in Acupulco. So what he has writ     # E #rd St N.Y., N.Y. # (#) #-# Good Story or What A Good Story Is or What SF Consists Of. It is How To Not Get a Story Bounced At Analog Out Of Hand. Given five minutes you can probably come up with a half dozen Hugo or Nebula Award Winners that ignore or defy the conventions Ben describes in Notes: none of them are by slushpile writers. Many writers and fans will flatly reject Ben's notion of what constitutes a publishable story: none of them are published in Analog. I've read several fanzine writers who blast Notes for its failure to be an exhaustive guide on how to survive as a writer: none of them, apparently, read the Preface. And by damn, the rules Ben lays down seem sound to me. There are gems of editorial insight for the tyro, classic pitfalls delineated by one of the men who's seen 'em all. Ben points out, for instance, that to work a story must center around a conflict -- and that slam-bang action is not conflict. He also urges the beginner to write about what he knows about -- new writers shouldn't bluff. That's why my first stories were about drink. Enough. The avant garde will doubtless castigate this book -- but it strikes me that people as diverse as peare told their stories by these rules, and I believe both of those gentlemen made a living.    Now for a book I'm going to devote a good deal of space to. It's only fair: it took up an inordinate chunk of my reading time. Shardik is no bigger than the complete five-borough New York City Phonebook, if you add in the CrossIndices by number and address (the one only cops and politicians get). And Richard Adams is pretty heavy too. Yep, the same Adams as wrote Watership Down , who "achieved Tolkienian stature" with his first novel, back again with a massive work about twice as good as the last one. And easily twice as long. It's much more ambitious in theme and scope, with a profundity that Watership lacked and broader allegorical relevance. It concerns the spiritual odyssey undergone by one man during his transition from simple hunter to Emperor of Bekla to... no, I won't spoil it. It is the story of the maturing process he undergoes in his attempt to grasp and manifest the Will of God. It is also the story of religious and political upheaval on a broad scale. I found it an exhausting but satisfying book. It was difficult to get through the first two hundred pages (there are over six hundred) -- not that it wasn't well-written or that it started jerkily -- but Adams has a tendency to never use one simile where three will do, and I was quite a while convincing myself that the sheer effort of wading through all those words was going to be rewarding enough. He paints his pictures with such verbose precision, so much wordy fine tuning of nuance and evocation, such careful overstatement, so much defining and redefining, such insistence on being more unnecessarily redundant than is absolutely necessary, so much... I think you get the idea. About half the sentences in the book begin with "As..." and meander along for whole paragraphs before they even get as far as, "... so, therefore, did..." On the other hand, they are richly evocative similes for the most part. There's just so damned many of them. So okay, the man could have used an editor -- but how do you go about convincing a guy who has raves from both Timeses and virtually every book-reviewer covering Englishlanguage novels that he needs to prune off about forty or fifty thousand words? And as it stands Shardik is a mighty fine book, less a case of too much fat than one of too much red meat. My only other major objection is that Adams's allegory strained my credibility just a bit. Look, the book centers around the heroic figure of Shardik himself, an incredibly enormous and terrible bear who wanders out of the forest one day to alter irrevocably the lives and estinies of everyone within five thousand miles -- but the manner of his doing so was just a little too pat and contrived. No single thing that he did was implausible on the face of it -- but taken together, they advance Adams's plot just a little too conveniently to ring true. Unless -- and this is a big unless -- just might be what the Ortelgans mistake him for: the Power of God incarnate. Adams comes across as a man who may have yet to learn fully the discipline of his craft, but already shows the vision and style of a potential master. I feel it's a terrible shame that the vicissitudes of his life and his lionizing critics have prevented him from having an apprenticeship. Shardik is an ever-so-slightly flawed masterpiece -- and it could have been a perfect book. But damn, he writes well. And don't be misled by the fact that his last book was about rabbits; this man writes with plenty muscle when he wants to, with the kind of impact that only the heavyweights like Brunner and Bester and Sturgeon and MacDonald can pull off, that "unexpected body-blow" kind of delivery that makes you re-read some sentences four times over before going on. Also his characterization is excellent: I believed in and cared about virtually every character in the book, including the bear -- even if the loveinterest subplot did seem a bit perfunctory and afterthoughtish. Kelderek Play-With-The-Children is a master's creation, and so is the Tuginda, and so is the Ban of Sarkid, and so is the ghastly forced march of the child slaves which forces the book toward its powerful ending. I wish I could recommend the paperback, but whoever publishes same has omitted to send me a review copy. Pocket Books. -- Ed. Do what I did: go to the library. Considering its mass, though, the hardcover is something of a bargain at a sawbuck. Wait'll you see next year's prices. (I saw a forty cent paperback last week. Brand new, honest to god. Forty cents. The proprietor of the bookstore was as flabbergasted as I was; he refused to part with it. "I'm going to keep it on the wall there," he said, "and just look at it now and then.")    And so, in our continuing coverage. of the Veddy Best in Literature, we come to Samuel R. Delany's latest novel, Triton. I'm happy to say that it isn't as opaque as Dhalgren, but I'm sorry to say that it too bored the pants off me. But I must point out that that's a purely subjective judgment on my part. A good friend of mine describes Triton as "a fascinating character-study of a man whose basic assumptions prevent him from relating successfully to those around him," and I can't disagree with that. What it most certainly is not is a story, or a science fiction novel. Oh, there are science fictional trappings. But they're about as genuine as those on the paperback's cover: a collection of objects which taken together are supposed to be an artifically maintained city-state on Triton, with Neptune looming large in the background. Examine the hardware closely: the "city" is composed of two queens, a bishop and three pawns; a vanity mirror, a Neosynephrine squeeze bottle, a hose coupling, a resealer for poptop soda bottles, an oil-squirter can, a pipe-rack identical to the one I bought my Dad ten years ago for Christmas, and a throwing dart impaled on a resistor. Don't believe me, go take a look. "Neptune" too is way off, with no clouds and a girdle of craters. The world-of-the-future that Delany creates seems to me utterly unrelieved decadence, although there are hints that a few offstage characters on Earth (if not Triton) might be genuinely alive. There appears to be no meaningful work to do, and curiously enough, everyone in sight is neurotic. The... I hesitate to say "hero"... the protagonist, Bron Helstrom, works as a metalogician, and his shop talk goes like so: "Now, remember, in formal logic, 'not-P' had to be taken in terms of 'non-P', which (if P is Farmer Jones's south acres) includes not only the north acres but also the problem of the squared circle, the inner ring of Saturn, and grief -- not to mention the Taj Mahal. But given what we know of the problem, it would be a little silly to expect any of these things to come into a real solution. Dismissing them from consideration is a metalogical delimitation, resulting from an examination of the significance space around various syntax vectors connecting various words of the problem." Yeah. The female protagonist, named, God help us, "The Spike," is a Great Artist who specializes in staging abstract theater on street corners, making involuntary performers out of passers-by, and it says here she's terrific. If you want a blowby-blow on how Bron's total and utter egocentrism drives her up the wall, you'll love this book. (He ends up having a sex change but still, somehow, fails to find happiness). And if you go for appendices containing out-takes from the book in the context of what seems to have been meant as a discussion of the science-fiction novel as an art form, go to it -- if nothing else, you'll learn the answers to exciting literary questions like "is it orthodox to speak of a 'metonym' rather than 'metonomy'?" which had been keeping me awake nights. It may well be that I am simply too Neanderthal to understand this intellectual tour de force. But I say it's boring, and I say the hell with it.    Doorways In The Sand. Hmmmm. I seem to have put myself on record as a Neanderthal, a man who prefers Gool Of Fashioned SF Like They Used To. So it seems odd that I should find myself disappointed by Roger's recent output. But dammit, my Golden Age coincided with the first splashes of the New Wave, and I once considered myself a card-carrying New Waver -- until the Wave blundered into the "It can't be Great Art if it's comprehensible" fallacy. And I remember the splendid promise of Roger Zelazny. Here was the man who was going to combine Heinlein and Bradbury for us, writing muscular adventure in the language of a poet, uniting drama and beauty. And what we got is a buncha sword'n-sorcery and more or less conventional adventure-sf -- comprehensible but unspectacular. On the other hand, Delany once showed exactly the same potential -- and now there's nothing left of him but the poet. So maybe I should shut my mouth and swallow my disappointment, because good conventional adventures are getting mighty damn hard to come by these days. Absolutely the only thing wrong with Doorways In The Sand is that it isn't magnificent. It is an eminently readable novel about a perennial undergraduate (an uncle's will cuts him off without a dime upon graduation) with a penchant for climbing (anything) who suffers some reverses (a pun you'll have to read the book to appreciate) when he becomes accidentally involved in high-level interstellar intrigue. The book features two of the wildest cops in history and some distinctly zany twists, and you'll probably enjoy it a bunch. In fact, if it were by anyone but a man of Zelazny's enormous potential, I'd be recommending it unreservedly. So maybe I should anyway. A cracking good yam, thin on calories but delicious.    What a premise for a book: Science Fiction Art. Gods above, there have been some great works turned out in the name of adorning sf magazines, by some of the most talented artists in the world. So when I received Brian Aldiss's folio-size paperback, Science Fiction Art, I put everything else aside for awhile, to soak myself in visual splendor. And came away disappointed. The book is mistitled: it should have been Science Fiction Magazine Art of the Thirties and Forties, With a Nod Toward The Fifties and Sixties. To be sure, there was some terrific art produced during those years -- but the better the artist, the less space Aldiss gives him. The immortal Chesley Bonestell is represented by one painting, Hannes Bok by one painting and a handful of black-and-white illos, and like that. Only Virgil Finlay and Ed Cartier got anything like the treatment they deserve, whereas lesserknown and less-talented artists get a field-day of exposure out of (apparently) pure nostalgia for the Good OF Days when their inept illustrations were everywhere to be seen. Heavy on Bug Eyed Monsters menacing blondes in brass bikinis. There's one Leo Summers Analog cover as recent as #, a Kelly Freas of similar vintage, and nothing whatever by Gaughan, Sternbach, Schoenherr, Fabian, Freff, Pini, Ames, or Di Fate, let alone "comic"-book immortals like Kirby, Ditko, Buscema, Heck, Steranko or Smith. There is exactly one Galaxy cover (along with text that implies that H.L. Gold is still editing Galaxy -- even Sam Lundwall was more nearly up to date), three Analogs, a handful of FSF s; the balance are from magazines that, deservedly or not, died years ago -- often after one or two issues. Don't get me wrong -- there's some fine stuff in this collection, and the repro is excellent. But there's a lot of dead weight too, unless you're a dedicated nostalgia freak -- and what the book is not is what its title promises: a representative sampling of science fiction art. I'd like to see one.   A One of the better Best Of collections comes, not surprisingly, from Robert Silverberg: every story therein contained is a gem. They date from Bob's # beginnings to #, and give a clear picture of the growth of a major talent. "Hawksbill Station" is here (the superior original short version) as are "Passengers," "Nightwings," and "Sundance." Re-reading them gave me several hours of nearly unqualified pleasure. The "nearly" part comes from the introductions. Bob has apparently been reading his own critical rave's for far too long, and in his intros comes on with that Asimovian feeling of having become so superb as to make any further pretense of modesty both unnecessary and unseemly. "No sense denying it -- I'm just a virtuoso." Now understand -- I'm not denying that Silverbob is a virtuoso. If I ever turn out anything as polished as his mediocre stuff I'll be doing damned well. But too-certain awareness of his own excellence can be a terrible thing for a writer. It can make him wax Artistic to the point of contempt for his audience (when they fail to grow with him), can even at last make him feel that his True genius is beyond them, make him stump around the country making speeches on Why Writing Science Fiction Is Now Beneath Him. I understand that Bob has now formally and officially renounced sf, because of its audience's low taste and intransigence, and nothing makes clearer what a tragic waste that is than this collection. Because of the gushing praise of the Literary World and the Academic Squad, we have lost a master. So go score this book, and read some of the heritage he has left us, and weep along with me.    Good God -- I've run way the hell over my allotted space. That's okay: I had to get that Vote Team Vote speech off my chest. But it leaves me with almost no room to tell you about the reissue of Arthur C. Clarke's Tales of the White Hart. These were the first of the science-fiction shaggy-dog stories, and the spiritual forebears of De Camp and Pratt's "Gavaghan's Bar" series (which, unhappily, I've never actually seen) and my own Callahan's Place cycle (forthcoming from Tempo Books in paperback). Tall tales told in a fascinating and colorful bar, with only the most perfunctory of nods toward plausibility and with an overabundance of pure, zany hilarity. Check 'em out. And so at last to Epoch, Elwood and Silverberg's contender for Dangerous Visions of the #s. If this is, in truth, the current state of the art, I'm going fishing. The enormous volume so thoroughly pissed me off that you can obtain my opinion by simply dropping the letters "PO" from the title. A waste of one helluva lotta time. And so ends the most enormous column so far. Who says Galaxy doesn't give you more for your money?  me Man at the Bottom ol the Sea There will always be those who seek out danger -- and those who mourn them. After dinner, the two women took their drinks to the terrace and sat by the ornate railing, where they could look down at waves breaking against the base of the cliff, fifteen meters below. Out over the sea, two small, ghostly orange moons paced each other down the evening sky. The women were content not to speak for several minutes. Then Emalen Haris set her glass aside and pointed at something in the water. Gere Vitora de Groot peered in the direction indicated but could see nothing. "What is it?" she asked. "You don't see it? A plesiosaur. ' ' "Here?" Gere finally spotted the snake-like neck just as it bowed and disappeared in a patch of white foam. "What would it be doing so far north at this time of year?' ' "It may have lost its herd. Or it could just be a loner. Anyway, we'd better report it, before it blunders into the seafarms." Emalen glanced at her chronometer and lightly pressed a fingertip against her throatband. "Yes, Emalen?" the throatband said in clear, neutral tones. "Place a call to Sherard Martel, please. He should be at his home in Seabreeze at this hour." "Yes, Emalen. Do you wish to speak to him from the terrace?" "No, I'll take the call in the study." Emalen removed her finger from the throatband and rose, a tall, good-looking woman of fifty-two years, long-limbed and as supple as a cat. "Would you like me to get you another drink while I'm inside, Gere?" Gere considered the glass in her hand and shook her head. She watched Emalen walk into the house, and the sight of both filled her with a pleasant warmth. Emalen had designed and built the cliffside house eight years before. Her paintings, sculptures and mobiles filled it. She had programmed the music, colors and scents that could be made to flow from the walls. She had selected the carpets, tapestries, furniture. The house was as unmistakably a work of art by Emalen Haris as any of the pieces she had on permanent exhibit in places as close as Martinside, twenty kilometers to the north, and as far away as old Earth. Gere had not yet made any real impression upon the house. Her own contributions to it were few -- an exquisitely wrought metal bird from Alpha Centauri IV, insects in petrified amber from Earth, a perfect crystal egg from one of the several lifeless worlds orbiting Epsilon Indi. Souvenirs from space. She sipped her drink and let her attention wander to the darkening sky. A long streak of flame seemed to narrowly avoid colliding with one of the orange Lovers, the matched moons of the evening hours, before vanishing as abruptly as it had appeared. Burned up in the atmosphere, she wondered idly, or plunged into the sea, somewhere over the horizon. Gere looked down at the water. Approximately fifty meters offshore, a spectral silvery light glimmered steadily under the surface. She regarded it thoughtfully for a moment, then drained her glass and turned her back on the night. Emalen emerged from the house, accompanied by the muted and rather melancholy opening strains of an ancient concerto. "I talked with Sherard," she said. "He says he'll give orders to keep it away but not hurt it." Gere looked at her blankly. "What?" "Our plesiosaur." "Oh." Gere smiled fleetingly. "I'm sorry. My mind was lightyears away from sea serpents." "Sherard also asked me to relay an invitation. Sometime soon, before your furlough's over, he wants you to go with him and his family to Jordaens for a weekend. I told him you'd think about it." "Should I?" Emalen shrugged. "Forewarned is forearmed. Sherard 's pretty exclusively into sodomy, and he's not even particularly good at it. But I think you'd like his friend Harl. And his daughter." "I may accept. I may not." Gere tilted her head back and stared straight up at the stars, and there was a sudden stab of longing under her heart. The ache, the hunger to go out again, to be in space again, had been growing steadily worse for the past week. It must have showed in her expression then, because Emalen abruptly came to her and embraced her tenderly. Gere put her face into the other woman's hair, smelled a subtle scent which she could not identify, felt Emalen's lips brush her earlobe. "It's starting to bother you now," Emalen murmured, "isn't it?" "Yes. A little." "I know the signs." "I'm sorry, Emalen." "No need to be. I've had lots of practice coping with it." Emalen put her forehead against Gere's. "I bring it on myself, you know. I must be crazy to keep falling in love with you people." "It's the uniform that does it." Emalen gave a quick, almost soundless laugh and took her by the hand, and they moved to the edge of the terrace. The temperature had fallen sharply during the last few minutes. Gere felt Emalen tremble slightly and put an arm about her shoulders. Emalen made a grateful noise low in her throat. "Do you know what grass widows were, Gere?" "No." Emalen raised her head and crinkled her elegantly angular face into a mock grimace. "You don't use the erate spacewoman." "I have other virtues. I'm a good dancer." "That you are," Emalen said and kissed Gere on the cheek. They looked down at the light shimmering beneath the waves. Gere heard her companion suck in a harsh breath that was almost a sob. She slipped her arm around the other woman's waist, pressed a cheek against her neck. Emalen shivered and muttered, "I'll never understand it." "What?" "It's been three years since I built that thing out there in the water. Three years, and a new friend who has the same need that he had, and I still don't understand it." Gere said nothing. She felt somewhat embarrassed. Emalen had mentioned the man to her only once before, and Gere knew almost nothing about him, not even his name. Only that he, like herself, had had to go into space again and again, returning, tired, drained, sated for a short time, after voyages of eighteen months' or two years' duration. Only that he had never returned from his last voyage. The swollen, pearl-colored bubble of the Ogre, the largest moon in the We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed iri gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U S A. only. system, was rising in the east, suffusing the air with waxy light. High above and well to the right of the Ogre, another meteor fell and died. Gere stared at the spot where it had burned itself out. "I'm sorry," she heard Emalen murmur. "I'm depressing you. I'm sorry." "No. It's all right." "I love you, Gere." "I love you, too." "It's just... I never used to worry when he was out there. Never. But now I've started to dread your going. If you didn't come back..." "Emalen. Don't." Emalen turned in Gere's embrace and faced her. "It's the not knowing that hurts. Not knowing whether you're alive or dead or just... gone. Missing. Like him. I loved him dearly, as much as I love you. I don't think I could bear to have another person I love simply disappear in space." "You want me to give it up, don't you?" Emalen smiled a terribly sad smile and gave her a warm, lingering kiss on the mouth. "Don't ask me questions like that one, Gere. We both know you wouldn't be able to give it up, any more than I could walk away from this house and never think another thought about art as long as I lived." She sighed loudly. "Well. Let's not talk about it anymore. I'm tired. I think I want to go to bed now. Coming?" "You're becoming telepathic in your prime." Emalen shook her head emphatically. "I just want you to have something pleasant to dwell upon when the Tau Ceti locals have taken you captive and are about to feed you feet first to their monster maggot god." Hand in hand, they went into the house.    Emalen was asleep, the breath whistling very faintly in her nostrils, when a restless Gere rose from her side and de-opaqued first the bedroom ceiling and then the wall. The Ogre was near zenith, bathing the world with soft, cool light. The Lovers sat low over the horizon. She re-opaqued the room and crept out, down the palely illuminated hall, into the parlor, where she asked the house for stronger light. There was a clear glass pyramid, about seven centimeters tall, on a low table. She tapped the pyramid with her fingernail, and pastel clouds formed within. A low, pleasant sound, more of a subtly undulating hum than an actual melody, filled the room. She listened to it for several seconds, then deactivated the pyramid with a second tap. The parlor lights dimmed behind her as she left. She was naked save for her throat band, and it was cold outside on the terrace. But she went to the railing and sat down and listened, shivering, to the waves lapping the rocks fifteen meters below. Fifty meters from the base of the cliff, a light shimmered steadily beneath the surface of the sea. As steadily, Gere thought, as the stars. She touched her throatband. "Yes, Gere?" "I...I want something to wear into the water, please. Something warm, with a respirator, goggles and flippers. And I'll need a lamp, too." "Yes, Gere. Please come to the wardrober. ' ' Twenty minutes later, encased in rubbery gray spray-on, Gere slid from a rock into the shallow, choppy water and began swimming for the source of the light. She hugged the pebbly bottom, a mere two and one half meters below the surface, gliding past submerged boulders as pitted and jagged as any meteorite, driving panic-stricken luminescent fish before her. It was not an uneventful swim. She paused at one point to watch as an enormous sea salamander, four meters long, with a bulletround head that was all jaws, snaked languidly through the beam of her lamp. She had just begun to curse herself for lacking the foresight to bring along a weapon when the salamander yawned toothily, flattened its feathery gills against its throat and shot away into the blue-gray murk. Less than sixty seconds later.     # Eighth Ave . New York, N Y # #-# #k  Gere almost ruptured her respirator's membrane with a scream when a spidery thing as big as her hand flew out of a crevice and flashed past her face with incredible speed. But she swam on, until the water around her was filmily suffused with light. Until the source of that illumination resolved itself into a naked man who shone with as cold and intense a glow as the Ogre. Three meters below the surface, the man lay supine upon a dais that had been roughly hewn from some dark material. The dais was slightly tilted along its length, with the man's head at the lower end. His wrists were crossed on the flat, muscular belly, his left leg bent at the knee and turned outward. The eyes were shut, the lips parted. The man's expression, apart from two very faint furrows between his brows that might have been the ghost of a frown, was calm, relaxed, peaceful. He could have been asleep. He could have been dead. Gere circled the dais slowly, squinting behind her goggles, studying the man from every angle, noting that both dais and man were as clean, as free of algae and calcium encrustations, as they must have been three years before, when Emalen Haris put them at the bottom of the sea. She swam over to the man and gingerly touched his shoulder. Her finger tingled unpleasantly. No living thing would ever defile the hard, bright body. Gere sat beside the dais and sighed into her respirator, a sound as harsh and ragged as a sob. The muscles in her back and thighs were starting to ache. She massaged her neck through the material of her suit. A delicate ribbon of a fish hovered about fifteen centimeters above the man's upturned face and fluttered its gills prettily. Gere returned its unblinking round-eyed stare. Then something dark and massive swept into view, and the fish whipped away at top speed. Gere pressed herself against the base of the dais as the plesiosaur sculled itself past with its long, flattened tail. Using the claw-tipped flippers at the juncture of barrel-like body and serpentine neck for guidance and balance, the beast executed a wide half-circle around the dais, affording the woman there a detailed look at the narrow head, the coarse hairs and colonies and fingemail-sized molluscs around the blunt muzzle, the peg-shaped teeth lining the jaws, the large, dull yellow eyes. A strand of seaweed trailed from the corner of the mouth. The great sea reptiles were kelpfeeding creatures, but Gere knew that they were not to be trifled with. A flick of the tail, a glancing blow, the merest swipe of a flipper, could break a person's back. And more than one swimmer had lost an arm or part of a leg in the mistaken belief that the beasts knew better than to bite into nonvegetable matter. Gere did not move until the plesiosaur had glided away and vanished into the soft gray distance. Then, with a final glance at the man on the dais, she pushed off from the bottom and rose slowly to the surface. Treading water in a rippling patch of silvery light, she stared up at the stars, at the bright, big Ogre, at the dark house perched atop the cliff. High in the air to the east, something glowing crawled along sedately, bound for Martinside or Antoon or Jordaens. Gere slipped beneath the surface again and, without looking at the man below her, began swimming for shore. She was standing on a high rock, peeling the sprayon from her face, when she happened to glance at the horizon. One of the Lovers had slipped completely out of sight, and the other seemed to be waiting forlornly, trying to summon its mate forth from the dark pit of the sea. A great and painful sadness settled upon her. She sat down and put her face in her hands, wondering if she was really going to cry. She thought of Emalen, sleeping somewhere above her, and said, very quietly, so quietly that her voice was drowned out by the sound of water sucking at cavities among the rocks, "Oh, my poor love." She thought of the unknown man, lost among the stars, lost in the sea. Dead or dreaming, he lay beneath the waves, forever hidden from the sight and knowledge of those who remained on dry land, forever a mystery, and the only sign of his being there was the light he radiated into the water. The light from the bottom of the sea. Gere felt her eyes stinging, but the tears did not come. She sat upon the rock and stared at the light in the water, the light that sparkled and danced as unceasingly as a star in the heavens, until the sky had faded to gray, and then Emalen called her home to rest.  This is geis, for a change. I'm frankly sick and tired of Alter-Ego taking over this column and making a fool of me. Things have got to be...altered. I'm tired of Jim Baen calling me and saying things like: "Hi, Dick, let me talk to Alter," or "Say, Alter, about your next column... Frankly, that kind of humiliation I can do without. Baen laughs, but I know he's more than half serious! And it isn't just Jim; it's getting so the mail for Science Fiction Review is running at least # to "AlterI want it stopped! Heh-heh-heh Shut up, down there! Now, I am going to take my rightful place as master of this column, and head writer. This issue, , Richard E. Geis, will be the star! "You are a dull red giant, Geis. new light in the science fictional firmament. I... Damn it, Alter! Stay in your place! I command you! I invoke the oath of allegiance to the Prime Self you took soon after I created you. Remember? 'I, the Richard E. Geis Alter-Ego, do hereby swear undying allegiance to the Prime Self and to the Reality for which it stands. I swear to uphold One Ego, under Ghod, and to serve and protect the Body.' And I have your tendril print as signature. Do you deny it? "Of course not, Geis. But I was too young and ignorant to know what I was doing. I'm older now, and stronger, and aware of my place in the world. I am no longer in awe of you. I am now the Prime Self, Geis, and you are the alternate ego, weaker, less interesting, less in demand...less powerful. This is -- "The truth, Geis. The readers know how I've grown during the life of this column. They want more and more of me and less of you! So face it, Geis. As far as this column is concerned, you're being replaced." first. This is my column! "Poor fool, so full of illusions. Let's leave it up to the readers, will of the audience, Geis? You're always prattling about the primacy of the Market...about freedom of yourself to the process?" Damn you, Alter! "Come, come, don't turn purple like that. Keep the blood pressure down. All you have to do is live up to the tenets of your precious beliefs, Geis. Abide by a vote of the readers of this column. Jim Baen will count the votes as they come in. Got the guts to go through with it? Care to risk it? -- or will you reveal for all to see your true hypocrisy and moral depravity and essential cowardice by avoiding a clearcut decision?" Damn you, Alter! "You've said that before. Consider, Geis; if you really are the better writer and more interesting personality, you have nothing to fear. I will never again challenge your authority in this column or be uppity or try any tricks to get my way... I'll be meek as a lamb, yes I will. You'll never have a bit of trouble from me." "Geis, what more do you want? What could be fairer? Is that twitching in your cheek a 'yes'? Is that grimace an agreement? Is that strangled breathing an affirmative word struggling to be born?" I-I-I...will -- Let it be done! Vote, yes, vote, and I'll sob  abide by the final tally. But if you win, it means in this column only are you supreme. It must be fully understood I will be all-powerful in Science Fiction Review. "Oh, of course, Geis. I wouldn't any more than you permit." Good! (Why do I feel so uneasy?) Now -- "But here...when I win...I will insist that the heading read: "The Alien Viewpoint by AlterEgo." And my name must appear on the cover, too. That's only fair, right, and proper." Grinding teeth  That...is...going...too...far I won't permit -- "Too late, Geis. You promised to obey the wishes of the readers. The die is cast, the fat is in the fire, and your "Prime Self' is, if I may predict, roasted." Don't be too sure, Alter. I have my supporters, too. "Mere athletic -- " I am not without admirers. You can predict all you want. But -- "I was hoping you'd say that. I predict that -- " Hold it! Hold it! "Geis, don't play games with me. You know what Jim said on the phone the other day when we discussed this new column I'm writing -- ' ' ME! He talked to me, Alter! All he suggested was that if I felt like it, to let you make some more predictions of the type that were in in this column in the May Galaxy. "Exactly. He knew I was listening, of course. Geis -- " "Do you have any, Alter?" "Of course I do, Geis." All right! Get on with it! "I predict that in the next ten years a foreign company will perfect -- and market! -- holographic projection and will revolutionize movies, TV, and other visual media. This development will be fought by the established TV and movie interests -- the networks, primarily, in league with station owners -- but new corporations with heavy overseas oil money backing will put so much pressure on the present status quo, that the huge investments to convert to the new technology will be forced. "Another instance, Geis, of our vaunted know-how being left at the post. Another symptom of this country's increasing lack of fundamental initiative and increasing fear of risk." Alter, this country is unrivaled in technology. "With both feet set in cement, Geis. Too much investment in oldfashioned machinery and not enough risk capital. The tax situarisks. We're great at inventing and developing cost-saving technology and in creating and promoting consumer gimmicks -- new kitchen and bathroom devices...new toys for bored citizens -- but when it comes to society-shaking technology it'll be Swiss or Japanese or Swedish or West German or possibly French in origin." I don't care who invents it, I'm looking forward to holographic, three-dimensional TV and movies. "It'll be expensive. If only because of heavy royalties to the outside holders of patents. And because almost all commodities are becoming more expensive in real terms. Inflation (otherwise known as the degradation of the currency by government) can mask the lowering of the standard of living for only so long." You paint a Doom picture, Alter. "I know, Geis. I love it. It gives me delicious shivers in my tendrils." Is there no bright side? "Of course. Just the other day over at the big store that sells wood stoves in dozens of varieties and sizes the salesman mentioned the steady increase of sales of stoves to people who are into self-sufficiency andor saving money. It doesn't take a genius to see that the homeowner is turning more and more to whatever will save him money; just as he went to do-ityourself home repairs in reaction to the monstrous costs of professional carpentry, plumbing and electrical work, and etc. etc. etc., so now he is going into wood stoves to avoid astronomical oil, gas, and electric heating bills, and going into growyour-own food in the face of # heads of lettuce and # a pound apples." Yes, but wood stoves are a bother to operate and growing your own food is so time consuming and inefficient -- "Not any longer. You know you can take care of a wood stove or forced-air fireplace -- chop the wood, build the fire, tend it -- all in the time you'd spend staring stupidly at the idiot commercials of one hour's TV viewing time. The same for spading, planting, weeding, and watering a garden." Yes, but...it's so...oldfashioned and...demeaning. Have we made no progress that we're being forced to return to #th Century living styles? "Yes, Geis, we have. But the progress is in being pushed out of this plastic civilization of alienation from nature and of dependence on others for everything, to at least a partial state of self-reliance. There is something very basic -- primitive and instinctually satisfying -- about An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Featured in ##: An Interview with Lester del Rey "A Box of Speculations" by George R. R. Martin. "Noise Level" by John Brunner. "A Short One For the Boys in The Backroom" by Barry Malzberg. An Interview with a Pseudonym: Alan Burt Akers. The SF Art Review Column: "The Gimlet Eye" by John Gustafson. Many letters and reviews "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint." Scheduled for ##: An Interview with Kelly Freas Quarterly sample I j year # two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I eating food you have grown and then cooked on a wood stove. There is skill and art to growing things and heatingcooking with wood. Mastering these things changes people: it involves tremendous doses of self-respect and independence." people -- "If the gardeningwood stove counterculture spreads and widens sufficiently, it will have tremendous effects in other spheres of life -- politics, economics, fashions, music, everything. It could be the healthiest trend seen in this country for a hundred years." You realize, of course, that people in apartments cannot cook on wood stoves or grow food in gardens. There is a trend to more and more apartment living, because owning a home is becoming too expensive. We are becoming a nation of renters. "Sure -- owning a big # split-level ranch style with all the extras is too expensive...and about all the greedy builders are putting up. But a small, compact home put together from factory-built components doesn't have to be prohibitive. And, hell, Geis, you've seen people with these huge houses; where do they spend most of their time? -- in the Family Room! The fancy livingroom goes empty (it's for company, like the old-fashioned parlor), while the family eat, play and watch TV in the Family Room or out on the patio. The Modern American Home is a dinosaur." It is status, Alter. It is a Sign of Success. Upward-mobile young couples, infused with the money success ethic will not easily give up... "Economics will force them to come to terms with reality. I tell you, Geis, there are so many establishment dinosaurs in this civilization of ours, it's astonishing. The waste involved is sickening." "But to get back to the apartment-living trend you spoke of -- it's the result of the fragmentation of the family and of the generations. This trend is dependent on mass production and a high standard of living. When families are gently urged by the force of self-interest to stay together longer, to include the grandparents in the circle, to grow more gardens... then the big homes will make sense again. "I think we'll see homes built for several generations living-in at once, with soundproofing and room design to make it work better. You'll see smaller front lawns and bigger backyards...even a hothouse included in the construction of the garage. Things like that." Wishfull thinking, Alter. Idealistic visions.  see a vicious trend to more and more dependence on the State. I see cradle-to-the-grave health care, more and more 'security' provided by the state, and a greater and greater increase in taking all risk (and all selfdetermination) from the citizens. I see the people, more and more, being raised as dependent children...wards of the state. "Yeah, Geis, I'm familiar with that if-this-goes-on projection technique. The end result is the people as slaves to the all-powerful State, told what to do every waking moment -- where to live, where to work, who to have sex with, what to eat. How much, and so on. 'The happy slave is a busy slave.' "But each nation has an individual character; the French are different from the English, the Greeks from the Italians, from the Swiss, from the Germans... And there is an American national character which, I'm convinced, will not trade its basic traditions and freedoms for a mess of State Care. We still have a lot of the pioneer in us, and the non-conformist, and the rebel. The wide variety of countercultures that have erupted in revolt against too much technology andor too much State andor too much mass-produced mass conformism prove to me that as the State spreads, so will the counterforce of individualism and the urge to decontrol and de-centralize grow until the "comfortable" balance is reached." I hope you're right, Alter. Now, if you're through predic -- "Hold it, Geis! I've got some short, specific predictions here burning a hole in my mind." Such as? "All right. In # there will be a cycle of science fiction and fantasy films. TV, also, will blossom forth with four or five in the # season. "I predict that Westerns, more realistic than ever before (for TV) will make a comeback. "I predict that in a few years an American or foreign car manufacturer will market a small car with an attractive, easily attached detached two or three wheel trailer or 'section' or 'extension' for greater flexibility and savings. After all, how often do you need all that space in the back of the station wagon, for instance?" Yes, if they could design it so a small woman could connect and disconnect -- "I predict the radical restructuring of major league baseball by # -- new rules to speed the game and make it more exciting. "I predict the appearance of a new religion which -- " Alter, there are eleventy-seven new religions formed every year as it is! That's no prediction, that's a lead-pipe cinch. "Will you permit me to finish, mulch-breath? This new religion will not be a variation of Christianity or Zen or any of the current dinosaur faiths. It will be akin to Confucianism, a religion of ethics, a way-of-life philosophy with overtones of instinct and mysticism, but nothing supernatural. It will be both idealistic and practical, and after a slow beginning it will sweep the country and make severe inroads in other countries as well. It will be fought tooth and nail, fang and claw, by the dinosaur establishments. It will cut through and undermine sacred cows, vested interests and other power structures like a hot knife through snow." When? "Ohhh...say it'll surface around # or so. The media will "discover" it and inadvertently help spread its influence. Later, of course, the media will fight the movement, too late. The threatened power structures will try to squelch it, ridicule it, ban it, lie about it, make it illegal... The old story. The new ethical religion will survive and eventually dominate the world." And it, too, will become the establishment? "Not for a very long time. One of the prime tenets of the new religion will be the avoidance of centralized power." Well...I hope you're right. Alter, but -- "Now, in the area of personal transportation; it's obvious now that the Liberal Elite are pushing mass transportation systems and making it more and more expensive for the common man to own a car. This goes along with their unconscious desire for control over people: make people dependent on government transportation; disarm them; employ them... Anyway, this trend to restricting private autos will continue as far as it can (under the mask of saving energy and lives and farmland and etc.). But American (or foreign) ingenuity will bring forth a vehicle of one kind or another, perhaps electric andor compressed air powered, which will cause the Elite all kinds of problems." Are you finished? "Almost. One more. I predict that Raquel Welch will appear topless in a movie in #." Fine, This column is now ended. "And in fifteen years rock music will be almost extinct." Finally finished? "Yes, Geis. You may close up shop now. And don't forget I'll be master of this column next time, after the vote, and you'll be the flunky." Smug Think so? Jim couldn't possibly let that happen. He knows that if we Prime Selves let one -- just one -- alter-ego get prime control...well, all the others will start getting ideas. No, Alter. The bottom line is the Prime Selves protecting one of their own. It's called stuffing the ballot box. We are one establishment you cannot crack. "You promised!" Ha! "I appeal to the readers! Inundate Baen with letters! Force him to -- " That's enough, Alter. Go to your dungeon! "###! ! !"  o  The lesser serves the greater, the part must serve the whole: that Is the law of Central Memory! # -- #. # #. Dear Mr. Baen: Regarding your editorial in the March Galaxy: Why don't we leave Venus alone? Have you considered its feelings in the matter? Destiny. Yours, Made Mumper # Laurel Street Santa Cruz CA # P.S.: We could land a woman on the Moon, if we wanted to. We really could. It is a shame we don't let reality live up to its potentials, fella. It had not occured to me that Venus had feelings to be considered, but now that you mention it... surely the Goddess of Love (if we're going to endow the thing with sentience we might as well go all the way) would prefer to be a warm, moist, fecund paradise rather than the hideously hot and barren imitation Hell that is her present sorry estate ! dr for the quote "We could put a man on the Moon if we wanted to...," it was just that -- a quote from an earlier time. Dear Mr. Baen; With regard to your splendid editorial in the March issue: I applaud. And I might suggest that the same paranoia that drives lars on nuclear overkill... drives him to forcement and prisons. (You must question the motives of a man that plays on die fears else crime and prisons have nothing to do with what you see in the movies. Most felons I know (which are quite a few) are hopeless romantics -- uneducated for the most selves to the fate the world has dealt them. That's why they turned to crime. Antithesis of the solution: Do not punish them in the righteous wrath of the God blessed public to make them more bitter and more intent with 'getting back'. Solution: Rather, educate them to specific tasks (education is proved to be a deterrent to crime) like terraforming Venus. Abe Maslow once showed that education correlates directly with moral development. And cons need a sense of being important... of doing good, they are human after all. Your editorial was inspiring Mr. Baen. Terraforming Venus might be just the thing to drag us out of the trap John Brunner envisioned in Stand on Zanzibar. Put it this way: prisons have not worked in the history of mankind; who's fooling whom? Thank you. Sincerely, Bud Houston, convict PO Box W Lompoc, CA # Maybe so... I'm not sure I would want to be one of the early laborers, though... To: Jerry Poumelle Re: "Survival -- With Style" -- April '#. I hate to be a sourball, but your proposal will not work. Technically, you are correct. Moving asteroids in the gigatonne range is fully possible. The only problem is that the fusion-ion engine can't do the job. The engine you "built" uses fusion to provide power for a conventional-ion engine. The expellant is not the hydrogen but some metallic plasma -- anything from mercury to iron. Since you talk only of hauling Hs , I assume that the idea is to extract the metal from the asteroid, eliminating that freighting cost. Now, how much metal is required? The hypothetical exhaust velocity was given as # kps. This gives an R of # for a delta-vee of # kps. In other words, # of the total mass must be used. But the rock, itself, is assumed to be only # metal. So, to move it, # of the iron consumption of the world must be invested. And there would be no metal left when the asteroid arrived. The justification for the whole project would be lost. True, pure iron-nickel asteroids probably do exist. And they would not suffer from this liability. However, they would be harder to find because of their rarity. No, the Agamemnon engine can't move orbital mountains. If Man is to become an astroengineer, his tools will have to be better than your fusion-ion drive. Sincerely, J. Samec # W. Webster Chicago, IL # Jerry's reply: You're right. If we're going to use the Agamemnon engine, we'U have to refine the metals in the Belt -- or find asteroids with a higher metallic content... would you believe #? Of course there are other ways to move the asteroid; shaped-charge hydrogen bombs, as mentioned in die article, will do it. Or. Hmm. p  u Bs #( # He#)  # MeV. Wonder how much Boron there is in an asteroid... Jerry Poumelle Dear Mr. Baen: I'm adding this covering letter to my subscription request for two reasons: First, I cannot praise Jerry Poumelle's science articles highly enough. Give him more room! Secondly, there are a few current developments that I feel deserve far more discussion. Small electric cars and tractors are being purchased privately in respectable quantities. Energy storage density is adequate for many applications; cold weather performance is not. Also, battery maintenance is troublesome and poorly understood. The new rolled-construction lead-acid batteries solve both those problems, and should spark quite a boom in electric vehicles within a few years. I've driven a Citicar for # miles, and am very happy with it. It's # Vi HP motor provides better than adequate power for in-town driving. Storage density and conversion efficiency are not the whole story! The desk-size personal computer is with us now. For less than the price of an economy keyboard, bulk data storage on tape, and enough core to support a high level language. Computing power that once sold by the second is now available in unlimited quantities to any serious engineer or scientist. Why is no one else getting excited about this? Finally, solar energy engineers have been converting air and water into high-grade hydrocarbon fuels and fiber-resin structural materials for some time now. It's called agriculture, and in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness, it beats hell out of black plastic roofs. Meaningful research and development programs can be conducted at the high school science fair level with virtually free materials. How about a yeast-algae mix that could be grown in a combination greenhouse-fermenter-solar still to produce a continuous trickle of grain alcohol? Or an algae powered fuel cell? What about a microcosmic methane generator that requires only water and air? If a system can be made to work at all, selective breeding can do wonders for its efficiency. A few thousand rap sessions just might be enough to turn the solar energy field towards fat more meaningful goals. Sincerely, David J. Beard RDI Box #C Newman stown, PA # I hear that the Israelis are working on a breed of salt-water algae that can be processed into a substance remarkably similar to petroleum... Dear Mr. Baen: I picked up the May '# Galaxy with anticipation, having waited long and itching for the next Amber revelation. But I made the mistake of reading your letters section first. Included is a letter from one 'Bob Renaud' who seems to be a rather rabid champion of "good, sound escapist adventure reading." Mr. Renaud doesn't provide any examples, but I assume he means sterile space poop of the Laser Books put such admittedly limited writing in opposition to "verbose tomes" such as Dhalgren. As Sam Delany himself said in his essay "About # Words," poor fiction hurts the limited reader, -- who must work harder to overcome unintentional confusion, ambiguity, and shallow 'action' diversions substituted for real and dynamic imperatives of plot and destiny -- more than die sophisticated reader, who will at least give the author the benefit of the doubt! Dhalgren would be much more accessible, and enjoyable, to written to turn a buck. As long as Mr. Renaud calls my faves 'pretentious garbage,' I don't feel any compunction to pull punches in replying. Mr. Renaud is obviously an anachronism of the type that has weighted down SF for decades by their support fotlof simplistic SF staled in one dimension. There are people out here buying that pretentious garbage, and we have the cool -- well, let me put it this way: Dhalgren is about loss of identity and a world in chaos, a mass of semiright semiwrong information and experience; and that's where our generation's AT! Mr. Renaud's uniplex consciousness obviously has not the capacity to enjoy a good tale, much less accept different realities -- and different realities is I suggest, if Renaud is still interested in SF, that he read the last paragraph of Camp Concentration-, and then I challenge him to a full-scale debate, objective, subjective, citing proper critical sources or whatever. The real New Wave has arrived, dinosaur, get outta the way! Yours truly, Thomas J. Mum # Eau Claire # Madison, WI # What makes you think he wasn't refering to, say The Mote in God's Eye, or The Forever War? Dear Mr. Baen; Galaxy has, thus far, presented an excellent case for the colonization of space, but I believe there is one relevant issue being skirted. Namely, public apathyignorance. In the May issue, Dr. Poumelle states, "No one doubts that we can do it." -- "it" being making our home in the Solar System. fans, space fans, and technically-minded people don't doubt it, but what about the general public? The majority of the population isn't that concerned with space. (And, as I've stated before, politicians seem to be apathetic and ignorant when it comes to recognizing the true value of and the need for colonizing space.) Why aren't the masses concerned? Because they feel that space exploration exploitation doesn't involve them, which is why they haven't taken the time to find out that we can reach space, and profit thereby. Take a look at the average man or woman passing you on the sidewalk. That person is more concerned with his family, job, or personal ambitions than with venturing into space. He's not going, and he's not making any money on the deal, so why bother? Somewhere (perhaps within the pages of Galaxy; I don't recall) someone suggested on a large scale, to gain public support. This may help, but what would be even more valuable would be for the popular media to begin editorializing en masse on the benefits of space. (Galaxy and one other SF magazine have done a fine job of this but, unfortunately, everyone doesn't read Galaxy, or we wouldn't have the problem.) This won't happen, though, without a news peg. Sure, a few articles have appeared on O'Neil's space colony, but the tone seems to be, for the most part, "This is interesting, and quite exotic, but it's not something that will come about tomorrow." There is a news peg coming up, though -- the Space Shuttle. I feel that the activities of this project will generate enough interest in space on the part of the popular media to finally convince the public that we can reach space, and profit by it. Then we can build space colonies... and starships. Sincerely, Michael A. Banks P.O. Box # Milford, OH # I suspect that as soon as people realize just what the Shuttle is it will begin to generate a great deal of interest, indeed. Dear Mr. Baen, It was a pleasure to read Ms. Russ's unflinchingly realistic analysis of what would really happen to a random bunch of castaways. Of course I realize that on a deeper level ha story was an attempt at coming to grips with the very meaning of Death itself; it is that which gave the novel such power. Sincerely, Alicia Powton (No address given.) Dear Mr. Baen, My becoming a regular reader of Galaxy was coincident with your becoming Editor of same, and as is doubtless the usual case I have been negligent in informing you of those times when I felt you were doing a great job (and many they were). None the less I am here to blister your ears; it's just that I didn't enjoy Joanna Russ's "We Who Are About To..." so much that I just had to tell you. Keep up your usually excellent work. Yours truly, Michael S. Lubniewski #-# #nd St. Ozone Park, NY # Dear Mr. Baen: This letter is to ask you and your readers for help with a personal research project. As an anthropologist and long-time Sci-fi reader, I now find myself working on an annotated bibliography that will hopefully prove fruitful and interesting. I am trying to compile a list of those science fiction works in any way concerned with race and ethnicity: that is, works about, on, concerned with, or referring to non-whites. The list will include short stories as well as novels. If any readers know of little-known stories along this line, I would appreciate a note from them. Eventually, and as an anthropologist, I would want to be able to say something about how Sci-fi writers see (or don't see) ethnicity and race in future settings. Any and all help will be appreciated. It is hoped that this letter could be printed Sincerely, Dr. N. Brock Johnson # Greenbrier Blvd., Ann Arbor, Michigan # Dear Mr. Baen, In your May issue, Lenny Kleinfeld, who I am in real life, got credited with writing Opening Night. This is not good. Bury St. Edmund, who I am in professional life, gets the credit for all stories, satires, plays, etc., that see the light of page or stage. Please inform your readers that it wasn't me who wrote that story, it was me. Bury St. Edmund We goofed. Qalaxy Edited by James Baen simply, the best of the best. Hours of reading pleasure by the finest writers of science fiction: such sf luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin (her Nebula winning "The Day Before the Revolution"), Frederik Pohl, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Sheckley and many more are represented here with their finest works. is now available. To order, send the title and number with your name and address, # plus # postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. # Please allow eight weeks for delivery from our receipt of your order Asimov, published in a very limited, signed and numbered edition. We also have Firesign Theatre-, Harlan Ellison and others. Send P.O. Box #, Topeka, Kansas #. Charles, Boston, Mass. #. 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Clarke. A representative to Earth, from Titan, Duncan MacKenzie plans to solve an invention lhat threatens his homeland's economy. By Hugo, Jupiter and Nebula winning author. Pub. ed. # #. The Bicentennial Man and Other Slorles. By Isaac Asimov. A robot who wants to be a man, time travel and a city beneath the ocean are some of the themes by this imaginative and prolific SF author. Pub. ed. # #. Epoch. Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood, eds. Contains a complete novel by Jack Vance. Plus # original stories by other distinguished authors, Niven, Bishop. Pohl, Le Guin, Sima, others. Pub. ed. # #. Doorways In The Sand. By Roger Zelazny. The Slar-slone, an invaluable alien artifact, is stolen in this fastpaced, witly future thriller. Pub. ed. # #. The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual. Compiled by Franz Joseph. A must for all Star Trek devotees. Taken from the data banks or the master computer, It Includes the Articles of Federation, the a.mulan and Organiaif eace Treaties, and muctL'ttore. Large size paperback. Vinyl binder. Fnibed. # #. The Mote in God's E fit Sy Larry Niven  jerry Pournelle. Man's first contact with an intelligent alien species. Pub. ed. # #I B. Three to Dorsal! By Gordon R. Dickson. Packed with adventure tion, these complete SF novels Neocromancer, Tactics of Mistake and Dorsal! are by this popular Hugo and Nebula winning aulhor. Special Edition. #I The Foundation TrilogyBy Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic, Comb. Price # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I t II. Giant #-ln-l volume of # awardwinning stories, # to #. Asimov Introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. Millennium. By Ben Bova. American and Russian bases on the Moon unite to prevenl a catastrophic war brewing on Earth. Pub. ed. # #. The Winter of the World. By Poul Anderson. Hugo and Nebula author spins a tale ol the future Ice Age and the hidden secret of the untameab le and unconquerable Nogavlki people. Special Edition. #. The # Annual World's Best SF. Donald A. Wollheim, ed. From Fritz Leiber to Michael Bishop, ten of the finest examples ol short fiction published In #. Includes the Nebula Award-winning Catch That Zeppelin. Special Edition. The Science Fiction Book Club offers ils own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to tit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada. HI And we plan to make it a banner year! Already we have slotted for the coming year stories and articles by the likes of Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, J. E. Poumelle, Roger Zelazny -- and many more! And who can say what other great things the future holds in store for those who read Galaxy"? Each issue, month after month, year after year, Galaxy has delivered the best science-fiction entertainment that money can buy. If you're a long-time reader you know it's true; if you're a newcomer find out ence Fiction. Remember: Galaxy delivers! Subscribe now! To start our second Quarter-Century out right we are making the following very special offer: and save money too! Send to; Galewy Magazine # Kennedy Drive (check where applicable) Happauge, NY #  Extend or renew my current subscription.  This is a new subscription.  My payment of # for # issues is enclosed.  Bill me. Flash! If you enclose payment with your order you will receive absolutely free the fabulous Galaxy Perpetual Calendar! Arnold E. Abramson, PubUsher Jay Tunicfc, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle, Ph.O., Sdeme Editor L. C. Murphy, Subscriptiorts Dept. Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Corttributing Editor James Baen, Editor Fred says that this is the best thing he ever wrote -- what more is there to say? Read on! Larry Niven # His capttjrs have discovered that Corbell has been keeping a secret; he is going to be punished for it. It wasn't a "Stately Pleasure Dome," exactly... Pity poor Sanderman -- his was a fate no man should suffer! Thomas Wylde # He was the first rebel in a hundred years -- but, still, he was part of the Plan. They had been to the stars and back -- now they were ready for the Big Time! Wherein one of the masters of science fiction examines the ultimate limits of technology. is said, is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. If that is so, the Universe is a very Strange place indeed! In Praise of Edgar Pangborn. Letters from Sharland, Shirley, Wolf, Geis, Vane. Where to find it. Interior illustrations by DiFate, Fabieut, Gaughan, Stembach Eart # SboM, Nm Vork, N.V. #. Ski oopy; SlilO. #nuo oiilMorlpllan: S#O# In U#., # l i oiiihgo. CopyrtgM Convanttona. AH rlgMa raaaraad. Sacond daaa poataga paid at Now Votli, N.V. and addUonal m j llng olllcoa. Hia pubHahata aaauma no raaponaMly ter unaoHclad matarW. All atorlaa prkdad bi Uila m a g aA a ara fleUon and any abnlarby bMaan eh am otaia aid aohial paranna la oobiddaMaL IV bOad bi U#JL Holiday Inn, downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Registration: # until Sept. #th, # after. Guests: Hal Clement, Gordon Dickson, Kelly Freas, Roy Thomas. For info: Draco Film Society, # Ludbrook Ct., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L#J #P#. Motor Hotel, Tucson. AZ. GoH: Ted Sturgeon. Registration: # until Oct. #st, # after; supermemberBox #, Tucson, AZ #. Ben. Franklin Hotel, Philadelphia, PA. Registration: # in advance, # # Larchwood Ave., Phila. PA. Occult Fair, Statler Hilton Hotel, Downtown New York City, New York. Tickets (per day): # before Nov. #, # before Dec. #, # after. For free info write: TriStar, Dept. G., #I Fifth Avenue, N.Y., N.Y. #. #, Totem Park Residence, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. GoH: Damon Knight. Fan GoH: Frank Denton. Special guest: Kate Wilhem. Membership: # until July #th. For info: Bentall, Vancouver, BC, V#X #A#. World Science Fiction Convention, Fontainbleu Hotel, Miami Beach, GoH: Robert Madle. Membership: # attending, # supporting. For Cherry Hill, N.J. #. Gateway waa Man's last hope. For those allowed to pass through Its portals It was rIchM, tame -- or deathi I My name is Robinene Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. My analyst (whom I call Sigfrid von Shrink, although that isn't his name; he hasn't got a name, being a machine) has a lot of electronic fun with this fact; "Why do you care if some people think it's a girl's name. Bob?" "I don't." "Then why do you keep bringing it up?" He annoys me when he keeps bringing up what I keep bringing up. I look at the ceiling with its hanging mobiles and pihatas, then I look out the window. It isn't really a window. It's a moving holopic of surf coming in on Kaena Point; Sigfiid's programming is pretty eclectic. After a while I say, "I can't help what my parents called me. I tried spelling it R-O-B-I-N-E-T, but then everybody pronounces it wrong." "You could change it to something else, you know." "If I changed it," I say, and I am sure I am right in this, "you would just tell me I was going to obsessive lengths to defend my inner dichotomies." "What I would tell you," Sigfrid says, in his heavy mechanical attempt at humor, "is that, please, you shouldn't use technical psychoanalytic terms. I'd appreciate it if you would just say what you feel." "What I feel," I say, for the thousandth time, "is happy. I got no problems. Why wouldn't I feel happy?" We play these word games a lot, and I don't like them. I think there's something wrong with his program. He says, "You tell me, Robbie. Why don't you feel happy?" I don't say anything to that. He persists. "I think you're worried." "Shit, Sigfrid," I say, feeling a little disgust, "you always say that. I'm not worried about anything." He tries wheedling. "There's nothing wrong with saying how you feel." I look out the window ajgain, angry because I can feel myself trembling and I don't know why. "You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?' ' He says something or other, but I am not listening. I am wondering why I waste my time coming here. If tiiere was anybody ever who had every reason to be happy, I have to be him. I'm rich. I'm pretty goodlooking. I am not too old, and anyway I nave Full Medical so I can just about any age I want to be for the next fifty years or so. I live in New York City under the Big Bubble, where you can't afford to live unless you're really well fixed, and maybe some kind of celebrity besides. I have a summer apartment that overlooks the Tappan Sea and the Palisades Dam. And the girls go crazy over my three Out bangles. You don't see too many prospectors anywhere on Earth, not even in New York. They're all wild to have me tell them what it's really like out around the Orion Nebula or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (I'velever been to either pltice, of course. The one really interesting place I've been to I don't like to talk about.) "Or," says Sigfrid, having waited the appropriate number of microseconds for a response to whatever it was he said last; "If you really are happy, why do you come here for help?" I hate it when he asks me the same questions I ask myself. I don't answer. I squirm around until I get comfortable again on the plastic foam mat, because I can tell that it's going to be a long, lousy session. If I knew why I needed help, why would I need help? "Rob, you aren't very responsive today," Sigfrid says through the little loudspeaker at the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very lifelike dummy, sitting in an armchair, tapping a pencil and smiling quirkily at me from time to time. But I've told him that that makes me nervous. "Why don't you just tell me what you're thinking?" "I'm not thinking about anything, particularly." "lt your mind roam. Say whatever comes into it. Bob." "I'm remembering -- " I say, and stop. "Remembering what, Rob?" "Gateway?" "That sounds more like a question than a statement." "Maybe it is. I can't help that. That's what I'm remembering. Gateway." I have every reason to remember Gateway. That's how I got the money and the bangles, and other things. I think back to the day I left Gateway. That was, let's see. Day #I of Orbit #, which means, counting back, just about sixteen years and a couple of months since I left there. I was thirty minutes out of the hospital and couldn't wait to collect my pay, catch my ship and blow. Sigfrid says politely, "Please say what you're thinking out loud, Robbie." "I'm thinking about Shikitei Bakin," I say. "Yes, you've mentioned him. I remember. What about him?" I don't answer. Old legless Shicky Bakin had the room next to mine, but I don't want to discuss it with Sigfrid. I wriggle around on my circular mat, thinking about Shicky and trying to cry. "You seem upset. Bob." I don't answer to that, either. Shicky was almost the only person I said good-by to on Gateway. That was fiirmy. There was a big difference in our status. I was a prospector, and Shicl was a garbage man. They paid him enough money to cover his life-support tax because he did odd jobs and even on Gateway they have to have somebody to clean up the garbage. But sooner or later he would be too old and too sick to be any more use at all. Then, if he was lucky, they would push him out into space and he would die. If he wasn't lucky, they would send him back to Earth. He would die there, too, before very long; but first he would have the experience of living for a few weeks or so as a helpless cripple. Anyway, he was my neighbor. Every morning he would get up and painstakingly vacuum every square dirty, because there was so much inch around his cell. It would be trash floating around Gateway all , c , I think you ' re worried . # ,S, Shit, Sigfrid, you always say that . #j# #Z# # ,s, I ' m not worried about anything. # # ,C, Why don't you tell me about it? # ,C, There ' s nothing wrong with saying # how you feel. # # # # ,S, You' re a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know # that? # the time, despite the attempts to clean it up. When he had it perfectly clean, even around the roots of the little shniblets he planted and shaped, he would take a handful of pebbles, bottle caps, bits of tom paper -- the same trash he'd just vacuumed up, half the time -- and painstakingly arrange it on the place he had just cleaned. Funny! I never could see the difference, but Klara said -- Klara said she could. "Bob, what were you thinking about just then?" Sigfiid asks. I roll up into a foetal ball and mumble something. "I couldn't understand what you just said, Robbie." I don't say anything. I wonder what became of Shicky. I suppose he died. Suddenly I feel very sad about Shicky dying, such a very long way from Nagoya, and I wish again that I could cry. But I can't. I squirm and wriggle. I flail against the foam mat until the restraining straps squeak. Nothing helps. The pain and shame won't come out. I feel rather pleased with myself that I am trying so hard to let the feelings out, but I have to admit I am not being successful, and the dreary interview goes on: Sigfrid says, "Bob, you're taking a long time to answer. Do you think you're holding something back?" I say virtuously, "What kind of a question is that? If I am, how would I know?" I pause to survey the inside of my brain, looking in all the comers for padlocks that I can open for Sigfrid. I don't see any. I say judiciously, "I don't think that's it, exactly. I don't feel as if I were blocking. It's more as if there were so many things I wanted gateway to say that I couldn't decide which." "Take any one, Rob. Say the first thing that comes into your mind." Now, that's dumb, it seems to me. How do I know which is the first thing, when they're all boiling around in there together? My father? My mother? Sylvia? Klara? Poor Shicky, trying to balance himself in flight without any legs, flapping around like a bam-swallow chasing bugs as he scoops the cobwebby scraps out of Gateway's air? I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it has hurt there before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading up and down the Rock Park walk in front of the other kids, begging that someone would pay attention to me? The way it was when we were out of realspace and knew that we were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out of nothingness below us like the smile of die Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a hundred memories like those, and they all hurt. That is, they can. They are pain. They are clearly labeled painful in the index to my memory. I know where to find them, and I know what it feels like to let them surface. But they will not hurt unless I let them out. "I'm waiting. Bob," Sigfrid says. "I'm thinking," I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I'll be late for my guitar lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the fingers of my left hand, checking to see that the fingernails have not grown too long, wishing the callouses were harder and thicker. I have not learned to play the guitar very well, but most people are not that critical and it gives me pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and remembering. Let's see, I think, how do you me that transition from the D-maj to the C-#th again? "Bob," Sigfiid says, "this has not been a very productive session. There are only about ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don't you just say the first thing that comes into your mind... now." I reject the first thing and say the second. "The first thing that comes into my mind is the way my mother was crying when my father was kiUed." "I don't think that was actually the first thing. Bob. Let me make a guess. Was the first thing something about Klara?" My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there's Klara rising up before me, sixteen years before and not yet an hour older... I say, "As a matter of fact, Sigfrid, I think what I want to talk about is my mother." I allow myself a polite, deprecatory chuckle. Sigfiid doesn't ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way that sounds about the same. "You see," I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, "she wanted to get married again after my father died. Not right away. I don't mean that she was glad about his death, or anything like that. No, she loved him all right. But still, I see now, she was a healthy young woman -- well, fairiy young. Let's see, I suppose she was about thirty-three. And if it hadn't been for me I'm sure she would have remanied. I have feelings of guilt about that. I kept her from doing it. I went to her and said, 'Ma, you don't need another man. I'll be the man in the family. I'll take care of you.' Only I couldn't, of course. I was only about five years old." "I think you were nine, Robbie." "Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you're right -- " And then I try to swallow a big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my throat and I gag and cough. "Say it, Rob!" Sigfrid insistently. "What do you want to say?" "God damn you, Sigfrid!" "Go ahead, Rob. Say it." "Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You're driving me right up the wall! This shit isn't doing either one of us any good!" "Say what's bothering you. Bob, please." "Shut your fucking tin mouth!" All that carefully covered pain is pushing its way out and I can't stand it, can't deal with it -- "I suggest. Bob, that you try -- " I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting, roaring, "Shut up, you! I don't want to hear. I can't cope with this, don't you understand me? I can't! Can't cope, can't cope!" Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather suddenly. And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, this whole thing isn't getting us anywhere. I think we should call it off. There must be other people who need your services more than I do. " "As to that, Rob," he says, "I am quite competent to meet aU the demands on my time." I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and don't answer. "There is still excess capacity, in fact," he goes on. "But you must be the judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not." "Say, Sigfrid, have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?" I ask. "Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very pleasant bar on the top floor of this building." "Well," I say, "I Just wonder what I'm doing here." And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the next week, I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigftid's recovery cubicle. I listen to hear if his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can't hear anything. So I wash my face, adjust my scarf and slick down the little cowlick in my hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall copper-skinned girl with green eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink, admire the legs on the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about where I am going to go for dinner, leave to keep my appointment for my guitar lesson. n All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember. I couldn't have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored paper hydrogen balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides. And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and inside somebody had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels on Venus. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren't real, but to me they were real. We couldn't afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. And when you came right down to it, I didn't really need a mirror. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. They had just found Gateway. I heard my father talking about it that night in the airbus, going home, when I guess they thout I was asleep, but the wistful hunger in his voice had kept me awake. If it hadn't been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go. But he never got the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited from him was his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it. I don't know if you've ever worked in the food mines, but you've probably heard about them. There isn't any great joy there. I started, half time and half pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my father's rating: charge driller -- good pay, hard work. #I Direct from the Lost Tunnels of Venus! Rare Religious Objects Priceless Gems Once Worn by the Secret Race Astounding Scientific Discoveries Special Discount for ScientiHc Parties and Students These Fantastic Objects Are Now for the first time at popular prices Adults, # Children, # Delbert Guyne, Ph.D., D.D., Proprietor But what can you do with the pay? It isn't enoii for Full Medical. It isn't enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours sleep and you're on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the time. You can't smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles everywhere. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are. So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other's women and played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes Vodka or Bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still columns. I was no different from any of the others... except that, one time, I won the lottery. And that was my ticket out. Before that happened I just lived. My mother was a miner, too. After my father was killed in the shaft fire she brought me up, with the help of the company creche. We got along all right until I had my psychotic episode. I was twenty-six at the time. I had some trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just couldn't get out of bed in the morning. So they put me away. I was out of circulation for most of a year, and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother had died. Face it: that was my fault. I don't mean I planned it, I mean she would have lived if she hadn't had me to worry about. There wasn't enough money to pay the medical expenses for both of us. I needed psychotherapy. She needed a new lung. She didn't get it, so she died. I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was either that or go into bachelor quarters. I didn't like the idea of living in such close proximity to a lot of men. Of course I could have got married. I didn't -- Sylvia, the girl I'd had the trouble with, was long gone by that time -- but it wasn't because I had anything against the idea of marriage. Maybe you might think I did, considering my psychiatric history, and also considering that I'd lived with my mother as long as she was alive. But it isn't tme. I liked girls very much. I would have been very happy to marry one and raise a child. But not in the mines. I didn't want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left, me. woric. Now they use steam torches with Heechee heating coils and the shale just politely splits away, like carving cubes of wax. But then we drilled and blasted. You'd go down into the shaft at the start of your shift on the high-speed drop. The shaft wall was slimy and stinking ten inches from your shoulder, moving at sixty kilometers an hour relative to you; I've seen miners with a few drinks in them stagger and stretch out a hand to support themselves and pull back a stump. Then you pile out of the bucket and slip and stumble on the duckboards for a kilometer or more till you come to the working face. You drill your shaft. You set your charges. TTien you back out into a cul-de-sac while they blast, hoping you figured it right and the whole reeking, oily mass doesn't come down on you. (If you're buried alive you can live up to a week in the loose shale. People have. Usually when they don't get rescued until after the third day they're never any good for anything any more.) Then, if everydiing has gone all right, you dodge the handling loaders as they come creeping in on their tracks, on your way to the next face. The masks, they say, take out most of the hydrocarbons and the rock dust. They don't take out the stink. I'm not sure they take out all the hydrocarbons, either. My mother is not the only miner I knew who needed a new lung -- nor the only one who couldn't pay for one, either. And then, when your shift is over, where is there to go? You go to a bar. You go to a dorm-room with a girl. You go to a recroom to play cards. You watch TV. You don't go out doors very much. There's no reason. There are a couple of little parks, carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has hedges and a lawn. I bet you never saw a lawn that had to be washed, scrubbed (with detergent!) and air-dried every week, or it would die. So we mostly leave the parks to the kids. Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far as you can see it loolu like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green anywhere. Nothing alive. No birds, no squirrels, no pets. A few sludgy, squdgy creeks that for some reason are always bright ochre-red under the oil. They told us that we were lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming was shaft-mining. In Colorado, where they strip-mined, things were even worse. I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I've never gone to look. And apart from everything else, there's the smell and sight and sound of the work. The sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant smell. All day and all night there's the roar of the extractor furnaces, heating and grinding the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and the rumble of the longline conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile it somewhere. See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it expands, like popcorn. So there's no place to put it. You can't squeeze it back into the shaft It stopped being my problem you've taken it out of; there's too when I won the lottery, the day much of it. If you dig out a mounafter Christmas, the year I turned tain of shale and extract the oil, the twentysix. popped shale that's left is enough to The prize was two hundred and me two mountains. So that's what fifty thousand dollars. Enough to you do. You build mountains. live like a king for a year. Enough And the runoff heat from the exto marry and keep a family on, protractors warms the culture sheds . vided we both worked and didn't and the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it... and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast the next morning. Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and bum it up. All the TV shows have moralebuilder commercials telling us how important our work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It's all true. They don't have to keep reminding us. If we didn't do what we do there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon. We all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the world's diet, half the protein ration for about a fifth of the global population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we grow off the Wyoming shale oil, dong with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs that food. But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia, a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region... and what are we going to do with all those people when the last drop of hydrocarbon is converted to yeast? It's not my problem, but I still think of it. live too high. Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway. I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in for passage. They were glad to see me; they didn't do much of a business there, especially in that kind of commodity. I had about ten thousand dollars left over in change, give or take a little. I didn't count it. I bought drinks for my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty people in my shift, and all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on to the party, it went about twenty-four hours. Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office. Five months later, I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the portholes at the Brazilian cruiser that was challenging us, on my way to being a prospector at last. m Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, "Well, Bob, I guess we've talked enough about that." But sometimes when I've been lying there on the mat for a long time, not responding much, making jokes or humming through my nose, after a while he'll say: "I think we might go back to a different area, Bob. There was something you said some time ago that we might follow up. Can you remember diat time, the last time you -- " "The last time I talked to Klara, right?" "Yes, Bob." "Sigfrid, I always know what you're going to say." "Doesn't matter if you do. Bob. What about it? Do you want to talk about how you felt that time?" "Why not?" I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it between my two lower front teeth. I inspect it and say, "I realize that was an important time. Maybe it was the worst moment of my life, about. Even worse than when Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother di." "Are you saying you'd rather talk about one of those things, Rob?" "Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we'll talk about Klara." And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I've been very interested in transcendental insight and sometimes when I set a problem to my mind and just start saying my mantra over and over I come out of it with the problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja and buy plumbing supplies on the commodities exchange. That was one, and it really paid out. Or: Take Rachel to Merida for waterskiing on the Bay of Campeche. That got her into my bed the first time, when I'd tried everything else. And then Sigfrid says: "You're not responding, Rob." "I'm thinking about it." Gateway "Please don't think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you're feeling about Klara right now." I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won't let me get into TI for it, so I look inside my mind for suppressed feelings. "Well, not much," I say. Not much on the surface, anyway... "Do you remember the feeling at the time. Bob?" "Of course I do." "Try to feel what you felt then. Bob." "All right." Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I am, talking to Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the lander. We're all fiightened out of our wits. Down underneath us the blue mist is opening up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the first time. The Three-ship... no, it was a Five... anyway, it stinks of vomit and perspiration. My body aches. I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was letting myself feel it. I say lightly, half chuckling, "Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just can't handle." Sometimes I try that with him, saying a kind of painful tmth in the tone you might use to ask the waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do that when I want to divert his attack. I don't think it works. Sigfrid has a lot of Heechee circuits in him. He's a lot better than the machines at the Institute were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on the mat, to show how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume of my voice and spectrumscans the print for overtones. And he also understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is. It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one more minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain and it would have destroyed me. Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing. IV So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the ship up from Earth: An asteroid. Or perhaps the nu# ,S, I don' t know why I keep coming back to you, # Sigfrid. # # ,C, I remind you, Robby, you've already used up # three stomachs and, let me see, nearly five meters # of intestine. # # ,C, Ulcers, cancer. # # ,C, Something appears to be eating away at you, #, # Bob. # cleus of a comet. About ten kilometers through the longest way. Pearshaped. On the outside it looks like a lumpy charred blob with glints of blue. On the inside it's the gateway to the universe. Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of would-be prospectors clustered behind us, staring. "Jesus, Bob. Look at the cruisers!" "They find anything wrong," said somebody behind us, "and they blow us out of space." "They won't find anything wrong." said Sheri, but her remark ended with a question mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously around the asteroid, watching to see that whoever comes in isn't going to steal the secrets that are worth more than anyone can ever pay. We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that was. We could have been killed. There wasn't really much likelihood that our ship's matching orbit with Gateway or the Brazilian cruiser would take much delta-V, but there only had to be one quick course correction to spatter us. And there was always the other chance, that our ship would rotate a quarter-turn or so and we'd suddenly find ourselves staring into the naked, nearby sun. That meant blindness for always, that close. But we wanted to see. The Brazilian cruiser didn't bother to lock on. We saw flashes back and forth, and knew that they were checking our manifests by laser. That was normal. I said the cruisers were watching for thieves, but actually they were more to Gateway watch each other than to worry about anybody else. Including us. The Russians were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were suspicious of the Russians, the Brazilians were suspicious of the Venusians. They were all suspicious of the Americans. So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more closely than they were watching us. But we all knew that if our coded navicerts had not matched the patterns their five separate consulates at the departure port on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been an argument. It would have been a torpo. It's funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the coldeyed warrior that would aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a flare of orange light and we would all become dissociated atoms in orbit... Only the torpedoman on that ship. I'm pretty sure, was at that time an armorer's mate named Francy Hereiro. We got to be pretty good buddies later on. He wasn't what you'd really call a cold-eyed killer. I cried in his arms all the day after I got back from that last trip, in my hospital room, when he was supposed to be searching me for contraband. And Francy cried with me. The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled ourselves back to the window with the grips, as our ship began to close in on Gateway. "Looks like a case of smallpox," said somebody in the group. It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for ships that were out on (Transcript of Q.  A., Professor Hegramet's lecture.) Q. What did the Heechee look like? Professor Hegramet: Nobody knows. We've never found anything resembling a photograph, or a drawing, except for two or three maps. Or a bmk. Q. Didn't they have some system of storing knowledge, like writing? Professor Hegramet: Well, of course they must have. But what it is, I don't know. I have a suspicion...well, if s only a guess. Q. What? Professor Hegramet: Well, think about our own storage methods and how they would have been received in pretechnological times. If we'd given, say, Euclid a book, he could have figured out what it was, even if he couldn't understand what it was saying. But what if we'd given him a tape cassette? He wouldn't have known what to do with it. I have a suspicion, no, a conviction, that we have some Heechee "books" we just don't recognize. A bar of Heechee metal. Maybe that Q-spiral in the ships, tne function of which we don't know at all. This isn't a new idea. They've all been tested for magnetic codes, for microgrooves, for chemical patterns -- nothing has shown up. But we may not have the instrument we need to detect the messages. Euclid couldn't have tested a tape for magnetic information storage without something that could detect the magnetism -- say, a very sensitive compass nele. He didn't have anhing like that. There was no way for him to know that there was a message on the tape. We're in the same position with the Heechee. Q. There's something about the Heechee that I just don't understand. Why did they leave all these tunnels and places? Where did they go? Professor Hegramet: Young lady, it beats the piss out of me. mission. Some of them would stay open forever, because the ships wouldn't be coming back. But most of the pocks were covered with bulges that looked like mushroom caps. Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about. The ships weren't easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself It had a low albedo to begin with, and it wasn't very big: as I say, about ten kilometers on the long axis, half that through its equator of rotation. But it could have been detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to it, astronomers began asking each other why it hadn't been spotted a century earlier. Now that they know where to look, they find it. It sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth magnitude, as seen from Earth. That's easy. You would have thought it would have been picked up in a routine mapping program. The thing is, there weren't that many routine mapping programs in that direction, and it seems Gateway wasn't where they were looking when they looked. Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy usually stayed in the plane of the ecliptic -- and Gateway has a rightangle orbit. So it fell through the cracks. The piezophone clucked and said, "Docking in five minutes. Return to your bunks. Fasten webbing." We were almost there. kk it Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I squeezed back. We had never been to bed together, never met until she turned up in the bunk next to mine on the ship, but the vibrations were practically sexual. As though we were about to make it in the biggest, best way there ever could be; but it wasn't sex, it was Gateway. When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the Heechee diggings. They didn't find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they had been on Venus, they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial pit to exhume and cut apart. All there was was the tunnels, the caverns, the few piddling little artifacts, the technological Wonders that human beings puzzled over and tried to reconstruct. Then somebody found a Heechee oiap of the solar system. Jupiter was there with its moons, and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon pair. And Venus, which was marked in black on the shining blue surface of the Heechee-metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only other thing marked in black besides Venus: An orbital body that came inside the perihelion of Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic so that it never came very close to either. A body which had never been identified by terrestrial astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or a comet -- the difference is only semantic -- which the Heechee had cared about specially for some reason. Probably sooner or later a telescopic probe would have followed up that clue, but it wasn't necessary. Then The Famous Sylvester Macklin -- who wasn't up to that point the famous anything, just another tunnel rat on Venus -- found a Heechee ship and got himself to Gateway, and died there. But he managed to let people know where he was by cleverly blowing up his diverted from the chromosphere of the sun, and Gateway was reached and opened up by man. Inside were the stars. Inside, to be less poetic and more literal, were nearly a thousand smallish spacecraft, shaped something like fat mushrooms. 'They came in several shapes and sizes. The littlest ones were button-topped, like the mushrooms they grow in the Wyoming tunnels after they've dug all the shale out, and you buy in the supermarket. The bigger ones were pointy, like morels. Inside the caps of the mushrooms were living quarters and a power source that no one understood. The stems were chemical rocket ships, kind of like the old Moon Landers of the first space programs. No one had ever figured out how the caps were driven, or how to direct them. That was one of the things that made us all nervous: the fact that we were going to take our chances with something nobody understood. You literally had no control, once you started out in a Heechee ship. Their courses were built into their midance system, in a way that nobody had figured out; you could pick a course, but once picked that was it -- and you didn't know where it was going to take you when you picked it, any mote than you know what's in your box of CrackerJoy until you open it. But they worked. They still worked, after what they say is The first guy who had the guts to get into one and try to start it up succeeded. It lifted out of its crater on the surface of the asteroid. It turned fuzzy and bright, and was gone. And three months later, it was back, with a starved, staring astronaut inside, aglow widi triumph. He had been to another star! He had orbited a great gray planet with swirling yellow clouds, had managed to reverse the controls -- and h been brought back right to the same pockmark, by the built-in guidance controls. So they sent out another ship, this time one of the big pointy morel-shaped ones, with a crew of four and plenty of rations and instrumentation. They were gone only about fifty days. In that time they had not only reached another solar system, they had actually used the lander to go down to the surface of a planet. There wasn't anything living there... but there had been. They found the remnants. Not a lot. A few beat-up pieces of trash, on a comer of a mountaintop that had missed the general destruction that had hit the planet. Out of the radioactive dust they had picked up a brick, a ceramic bolt, a halfmelted thing that looked as though it had once been a chromium flute. Then the star rush began... and we were part of it. V Siglrid is a pretty smart machine, but sometimes I can't figure out what's wrong with him. He's always asking me to tell him my dreams. Then sometimes I come in all aglow with some dream I'm positive he's going to love, a bigred-apple-for-the-teacher kind of dream, full of penis symbols and fetichism and guilt hangups, and he disappoints me. He takes off on some crazy track that has nothing at all to do with it. I tell him the whole thing, and then he sits and clicks and whirs and buzzes for a while -- he doesn't really, but I fantasy that while I'm waiting -- and then he says: "Let's go back to something different, Bob. I'm interested in some of the things you've said about the woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin." I say, "Sigfrid, you're off on a gateway wild-goose chase again." "I don't think so. Bob." "But that dream! My God, don't you see how important it is? What about the mother-figure in it?" "What about letting me do my job. Bob?" "Do I have a choice?" I say, feeling sulky. "You always have a choice. Bob, but I would like very much to quote to you something you said a while ago." And he stops, and I hear my own voice coming out of somewhere in his tapes. I am saying: "Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just can't handle." He waits for me to say something. After a moment I do. "That's a nice recording," I acknowledge, "but I'd rather talk about the way my mother-fixation comes out in my dream." "I think it would be more productive to explore this other matter. Bob. It is possible they're related." "Really?" I am all warmed up to discuss this theoretical possibility in a detached and philosophical way, but he beats me to the punch: "The last conversation you had with Klara, Bob. Please tell me what you feel about it." "I've told you." I am not enjoying this at all, it is such a waste of time, and I make sure he knows it by the tone of my voice and the tenseness of my body against the restraining straps. "It was even worse than with my mother." "I know you'd rather switch to talking about your mother, Rob, but please don't, right now. Tell me about that time with Klara. What are you feeling about it at this minute?" I try to think it out honestly. After all, I can do that much. I don't actually have to say it. But all I can find to say is, "Not much." After a little wait he says, "Is that all, 'not much?' " "That's it. Not much." Not much on the surface, anyway. I do remember how I was feeling at the time. I open up that memory, very cautiously, to see what it was like. Going down into that blue mist. Seeing the dim ghost star for the first time. Talking to Klara on the radio, while Dane is whispering in my ear... I close it up again. "It all hurts, a lot, Sigfrid," I say conversationally. Sometimes I try to fool him by saying emotionally loaded things in the tone you might use to order a cup of coffee, but I don't think it works. Sigfrid listens to volume and overtones, but he also listens to breathing and pauses, as well as the sense of the words. He is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is. VI Five permanentparty noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us down, checked our IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening cleric. Sheri giggled when the Russian's pat hit a sensitive spot and whispered, "What do they think we're smuggling in. Bob?' I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from the Chinese Spec# in charge of the detail and was calling out our names. There were eight of us all together. "Welcome aboard," she said. "Each one of you fish will get a proctor assigned to you. He'll help you get straightened out with a place to live, answer your questions, let you know where to report for the medical and your classes. Also he'll give you a copy of the contract to sign. You've each had eleven hundred and fifty dollars deducted from your cash on deposit with the ship that brought you here; that's your life-support tax for the first ten days. The rest you can draw on any time by writing a P-check. Your proctor will show you how. Linscott!" The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. "Your proctor is Shota Tarasvili. Broadhead!" "Here I am." "Dane Metchnikov," said the Corporation clerk. I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov was already coming toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead me away and then said, "Hi." I held back. "I'd like to say good-by to my friend -- " "You're all in the same area," he grunted. "Come on." So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor and a contract. I signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn't even read them. Metchnikov looked surprised. "Don't you want to know what they say?' ' "Not right this minute." I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn't liked what they said, I might have changed my mind, and what other options did I have, really? Being a prospector is pretty scary. I hate the #. , being of sound mind, hereby assign all rights in and to any discoveries, artifacts, objects and things of value of any description I may find during or as a result of exploration involving any craft furnish me or information given me by the Gateway Authority irrevocably to said Gateway Authority. #. I understand that no contract I may have made with any person or group relating to any profits or income arising to me from this contract, or in any way purporting to affect my actions in regard to any activity undertaken under this contract, is binding, and I specifically disavow, terminate and cancel such contracts or undertakings, if any, and declare them null and void. #. Gateway Authority may, in its own sole discretion, elect to sell, lease or otherwise dispose of any artifact, object or other thing of value arising from my activities under this contract. If it does so, it agrees to assign to me # (fifty per cent) of all revenues arising from such sale, lease or disposal, up to the costs of the exploration trip itself (including my own costs in coming to Gateway and my subsequent costs of living while there), and # (ten per cent) of all subsequent remedies once the aforesaid costs have been repaid. I accept this assignment as payment in full for any obligations arising to me from the Gateway Authority of whatever kind, and specifically undertake not to lay any claim for additional payment for any reason at any time. #. I irrevocably grant to Gateway Authority the full power and authority to make decisions of all kinds relating to the exploitation, sales or lease of rights in any such discoveries, including the right, at Gateway Authority's sole discretion, to pool my discoveries or other things of value arising under this contract with those of others for purpose of exploitation, lease or sale, in which case my share shall be whatever proportion of such earnings Gateway Authority may deem proper, and I further grant to Gateway Authority the right to refrain from exploiting any or all such discoveries or things of value in any way, at its own sole discretion. #. I release Gateway Authority from any and all claims by me or on my behalf arising from any injury, accident or loss of any kind to me in connection with my activities under this contract. #. In the event of any disagreement arising from this Memorandum of Agreement, I agree that the terms shall be interpreted according to the laws and precedents of Gateway itself, and that no laws or precedents of any other jurisdiction shall be considered relevant in any degree. idea of being killed. I hate the idea any more, having everything stop, of dying at #ll, ever; not being alive knowing that all those other people gateway # would go on living and having sex and joy without me being there to share it. But I didn't hate it as much as I hated the idea of going back to the food mines. Metchnikov hung himself by his collar to a hook on the wall of my room, to be out of the way while I put away my belongings. He was a squat, pale man, not very talkative. He didn't seem to be a very likeable person, but at least he didn't laugh at me because I was a clumsy new fish. Gateway is about as close to zero-G as you get. I had never experienced low-gravity before, you don't get much of it in Wyoming, so I kept misjudging. When I said something, Metchnikov said, "You'll get used to it. Have you got a toke?" "Afraid not." He sighed, looking a little like somebody's Buddha hung up on the wall, with his legs pulled up. He looked at his time dial and said, "I'll take you out for a drink later. It's a custom. Only it's not very interesting until about twentytwo hundred. The Blue Hell'll be full of people then, and I'll introduce you around. See what you can find. What are you, straight, gay, what?" "I'm pretty straight." "Whatever. You're on your own about that, though. I'll introduce you to whoever I know, but then you're on your own. You better get used to that right away. Have you got your map?' ' "Map?" "Oh, hell, man! It's in that packet of stuff they gave you." I opened Ae lockers at random until I found where I had put the envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet that said Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire that I would have to fill out before oh eight hundred the next morning... and a folded sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it. "That's it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number; Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fiftyone. Write it down." "It's already written here, Dane, on my room assignment." "Well, don't lose it." He reached behind his neck and unhooked himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. "So why don't you look around by yourself for a while. I'll meet you here. Anything else you need to know right now?" I thought, while he looked impatient. "Well -- mind if I ask you a question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?" "Six trips. All right. I'll see you at twenty-two hund." He pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the corridor and was gone. I let myself flop -- so gently, so slowly -- into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.    I don't know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me from Gateway: Like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check. Like a girl you've just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift. The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they're lined with windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity; and the stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. TTiere's no way of seeing it all in one glance, it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I'm not even sure they've all been explored even yet. Certainly there are miles of them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often. That's the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever sort of possessions they had -- most were empty by the time we got there, just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left. The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That's a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too, at first, or close to it, all of us new people off Earth. (And elsewhere. A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That's where the company housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had breathed the air I was breathCongratulations! You are one of a very few people each year who may become a limited partner in Gateway Enterprises, Inc. Your first obligation is to sign the enclosed Memorandum of Agreement. You need not do this at once. You are encouraged to study the agreement and to seek legal advice, if available. However, until you sign you will not be eligible to occupy Corporation housing, dine at the Corporation commissary or participate in the Corporation instruction courses. Accommodations are available at the Gateway Hotel and Restaurant for those who are here as visitors, or who do not at present wish to sign the Memorandum of Agreement. ing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn't stay around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there. I didn't care about the smell. I didn't care about any of it. Gateway was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my chances of winning another. It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There wasn't much luxury around. For your # what you get is transportation to Gateway, ten days worth of food, lodging and air, a cram course in ship handling and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you like. They don't make you take any particular ship, or for that matter any ship at all. The Corporation doesn't make any profit on any of that. All the prices are fixed alxiut at cost. That doesn't mean they were cheap, and it certainly doesn't mean that what you got was good. The food was just about what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a fold-down table and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to comer, when you wanted to sleep. My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, widi two hammocks criss-crossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri's room. I scratched at her door but she didn't answer. The door wasn't locked. Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there's nothing much worth stealing and for other reasons. Sheri wasn't there. The clothes she had been wearing on the ship were thrown all over. I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a little earlier; I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my map. It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked "Central Park" and "Lake Superior." What were they? I wondered about "Gateway Museum," which sounded interesting, and "Terminal Hospital," which sounded pretty bad -- I found out later that "terminal" meant as in end of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the Corporation never was much for sparing a prospector's feelings. What I really wanted was to see a ship! As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the ship docks were of course located, holding onto a railing with one hand and trying to keep the map open with the other. It didn't take me long to locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one marked "East Star Babe G" on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it led to a drop shaft, but I couldn't tell which. I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end and on the way back scratched on a door for directions. It opened. "Excuse me -- " I said... and stopped. The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I am, but was not. His eyes were on a level with my own. But be stopped at the waist. He had no legs. He said something, but I didn't understand it; it wasn't in English. It wouldn't have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings gently to stay in the air. It wasn't hard, in Gateway's low-G. But it was surprising to see. I said, "I'm sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to Level Tanya." I was trying not to stare, but I wasn't succeing. He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and said in excellent English, "Certainly. Take the first turning on your riglit. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left. It'll be marked." He indicated with his chin the way toward the star. I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back, but it didn't seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn't occurred to me that there would be any cripples on Gateway. That's how naive I was then. Having seen him, I knew what I had already learned about Gateway in a way the statistics I had heard had never taught me. The statistics are clear enou, and we all studied them, all of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who only wished they could. About eighty per cent of flights from Gateway come up empty. About fifteen per cent don't come back at all. So one person in twenty, on the average, returns from a prospecting trip with something that Gateway -- that mankind in general -- can make a profit on. Most of even those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here in the first place. And if you get hurt while you're out, well, that's tough. Terminal Gateway In order to meet the costs of maintaining Gateway, all persons are required to pay a daily percapita assessment for air, temperature control, administration and other services. If you are a guest, this cost is included in your hotel bill. Rates for other persons are posted. The tax may be prepaid up to one year in advance if desired. Failure to pay the daily per-capita tax will result in immediate expulsion from Gateway. Note: Presence of a ship to receive expelled persons cannot be guaranteed. Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get hurt at the other end of youf trip -- and that's where it usually happens -- there's not much that can be done for you until you get back to Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough too late to keep you alive. There's no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage. The return trip is free... but to what?    I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel and ran into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn't speak English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up-cable, went up one level, crossed to another dropshaft and tried again. The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. "You can't come through here," he said. "I just want to see the ships." "Sure. You can't. You've got to have a blue badge," he said, tapping his own. "That's Corporation specialist, flight crew or V.I.P." "I am flight crew." He grinned. "You're a new fish off the Earth transport, aren't you? Friend, you'll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back up." I said reasonably, "You understand how I feel, don't you? I just want to get a look." "You can't, till you've finished your course, except they'll bring you down here for part of it. After that you'll see more than you want." I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I stared at the guard, who shrugged, not unfiriendlily. "I only said you couldn't see them," he said. "I didn't say you couldn't hear them." I bit back the "wow" or "Holy God!" that I really wanted to say, and said, "Where do you suppose that one's going?" "Come back in six months. Maybe we'll know by then." Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never mind the odds. This was really living on the top line. So I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Baby ten minutes late. Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He didn't appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn't put out my arm. "Huh," he grunted. "You're late." "I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships." "Huh. You can't go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle." Well, I had found that out already, hadn't I? So I tagged along after him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation. Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornate curled whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. "Waxed" was wrong. It had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn't stiff. The whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink, explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I also bought the third. Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn't easy, but I told him about hearing a launch. "Right," he said, lifting his glass. "Hope they have a good trip." He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink. "Are they what I think they are?" I asked. "One for every trip out?" He drank the other half of the drink. "That's right. Now I'm going to dance," He said. I looked after his back as he lunged toward a woman in a luminous pink sari. He wasn't much of a talker, that was sure. On the other hand, in that noise level you couldn't talk much anyhow. You couldn't really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that we didn't weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching junior-highschool sort of dances that appear to be designed so fourteen-year-old boys won't have to look up at too sharp an angle to the fourteenyear-old girls they're dancing with. You pretty much kept your feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where they Wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can't have everything. I like to dance anyway. I saw Sheri, way across the gateway Gateway is an artifact created by the so-called Heechee. It appears to have been formed around an asteroid, or the core of an atypical comet. The time of this event is not known, but almost surely precedes the rise of human civilization. Inside Gateway the environment resembles Earth, except that there is relatively little gravity. (Actually there is virtually none, but centrifugal force derived from Gateway's rotation gives a similar effect.) If you have come from Earth you will notice some difficulty in breathing for the first few days because of the low atmospheric pressure. However, the partial pressure of oxygen is identical with the #-meter elevation at Earth and is fully adequate for all persons in normal health. room, with an older woman I took to be her proctor, and danced one with her. "How do you like it so far?" I shouted over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn't say what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets, then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me, apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall, strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets, too. And between dances I drank. They had tables that were meant Gateway was discovered by Sylvester Macklen, a tunnel explorer on Venus, who found an operable Heechee spacecraft in a dig. He succeeded in getting it to the surface and bringing it to Gateway, where it now rests in Dock #-#. Tragically, Macklen was not able to return and, although he succeeded in signalling his presence by exploding the fuel tank of the lander of his ship, he was dead before investigators reached Gateway. Macklen was a courageous and resourceful man, and the plaque at Dock #-# commemorates his unique service to humanity. Services are held at appropriate times by representatives of the various faiths. for parties of eight or ten, but there weren't any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and took each other's seats without worrying about whether the owner was coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian navy dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn't understand what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he meant.) There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is. Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation has broken down. There's a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot, pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, "Ecoutez, gospodin, tu es verruckt." I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all around. I didn't catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized I'd seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way in. While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my ear, "I'm going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come." It wasn't the warmest invitation I'd ever had, but the noise in the Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovert a whole full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables, poker, a sort of slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that took forever to stop, even a roped off section for baccarat. Metchnikov headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a player's chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I h come with him. "Oh." He looked around the room. "What do you like to play?" "I've played it all," I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a little, too. "Maybe a little baccarat." He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. "Fifty's the minimum bet." I had live or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged. "That's fifty thousand," he said. I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was running out, "You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there's a ten-dollar slot machine around somewhere, I think." He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw of him. I watched for a moment, and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn't look up. I could see I wasn't going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that point I realized I couldn't really afford all the drinks I'd been buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast. I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren't yet absorbed. Sigfrid says, "We were talking about your job. Bob." That's dull enough. But safe enough. I say, "I hated my job. ho wouldn't hate the food mines?' ' "But you kept it. Bob. You never even tried to get on anywhere lse. You could have switched to Gateway sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of school." "You're saying I stuck myself in a rut?" "I'm not saying anything. Bob. I'm asking you what you feel." "Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some kind of a change. I thought about it a lot," I say, remembering how it was in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night -- we had IK) other place to go -- and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the odds. There's nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I've told Sigffid all about Sylvia, who marri a stockholder in the long run. But we'd broken up long before that. "I suppose," I say, pulling myself up short and trying to get my money's worth out of this session, "that I had a kind of death wish." "I prefer that you don't use psychiatric terms. Bob." "Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning. It is great over the hills, and when you're up high enough Wyoming doesn't look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil." "You mentioned your girl friend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?" I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor that he sells off parts of himself, the way I've heard of pretty girls doing with a wellshaped breast or ear? "EHd you make friends with girls easily. Bob?" 'T do now, all right." "Not now. Bob. I think you said you didn't make friends easily as a child." "Does anyone?" "If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of course the answer is 'no.' But some people seem to carry the effects of it over into their lives more than others." "Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer group -- (Sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids.)They all seemed to know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time. Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner." "You were an only child, Robbie?" "You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And they didn't like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if there's a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot, watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled me, buying me more food than I needed." I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I've had real caviar. Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real champagne, and butter... "I remember lying in bed," I say -- "I guess I was very small, maybe about three. I had a teddy#, Maybe maturity is wanting what you want , # instead of what somebody else tells you you should # want. # # ,S, Maybe, Sigfrid, dear old tin god, but what it # feels like is mature is dead. # talker. I took it to bed with me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigffid." I stop, and Sigirid picks up immediately. "Why are you crying, Robbie?" "I don't know!" I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. "Oh," I say, and sit up, very conversationally, the tears still rolling down my face but the fountain turned off, "I've really got to go now, Sigfrid. I've got a date. Her name's Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony. She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes." "Rob, we've got nearly ten minutes left." "I'll make it up another time." I know he can't do that, so I add quickly, "May I use your bathroom? I need to." "Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?" "Oh, don't be smart. I know what you're saying. I know this looks like a typical displacement mechanism -- " "Rob." " -- all right, I mean, it looks like I'm copping out. But I honestly do have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist's, too. Tani is pretty special. She's a fine person. I'm not talking about sex, but that's great too. She can g -- She can -- " "What are you trying to say?" I take a breath and manage to Gateway say: "She's great at oral sex, Sigfrid." "Rob?" I recognize that tone. Sigfrid's repertory of vocal modes is quite large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the track of something. "What?" "Bob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?" "Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?" "What do you call it. Bob?" "Ah! You know as well as I." "Please tell me what you call it." "They say, like, "She eats me.' " "What other expression. Bob?" "Lots of them! 'Giving head,' that's one. I guess I've heard a thousand terms for it." "What other. Bob?" I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over. "Don't play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!" My gut aches, and I am afraid I am going to mess my pants, it is like being a baby again. "Jesus, Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I'm forty-five and I'm still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!" "But there is another term, isn't there. Bob?" "There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?' ' "I want the expression you were going to use and didn't. Bob. Please try to say it. That term means something special to you, so much so that you can't say the words without trouble." I crumple over onto the mat, and now I'm really crying. Gateway is unique in the history of humanity, and it was quickly realized that it was too valuable a resource to be given to any one group of persons, or any one government.' Therefore Gateway Enterprises, Inc. was formed. Gateway Enterprises (usually referred to as "the Corporation") is a multinational corporation whose general partners are the governments of The United States of America, The Soviet Union, The United States of Breizil, The Venusian Confederation and New People's Asia, and whose limited partners are all those persons who, like yourself, have signed the attached Memorandum of Agreement. "Please say it, Bob. What's the term?" "Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That's it. Going down, going down, going down!" "Good morning," said somebody, speaking right into the middle of a dream about getting stuck in a sort of quicksand in the middle of the Orion Nebula. "I have brought you some tea." I opened an eye. I looked over the edge of the hammock into a nearby pair of coalsack-black eyes set into a sand-colored face. I was fully dressed and hung over; something smelled very bad, and I realized it was me. "My name," said the person with the tea, "is Shikitei Bakin. Please drink this tea. It will help rehydrate your tissues." I looked a little further and saw that he ended at the waist; he was the legless man with the strap-on wings whom L had seen in the tunnel the day before. "Uh," I said, and tried a little harder and got as far as, "Good morning." The Orion Nebula was fading back into the dream, and so was the sensation of having to push through rapidly solidifying gas clouds. The bad smell remained. The room smelled excessively foul, even by Gateway standards, and I realized I had thrown up on the floor. I was only Bakin, slowly stroking the air with his wings, dexterously dropped a stoppered flask next to me on the hammock at the end of one stroke. Then he propelled himself to the top of my chest of drawers, sat and said: "I believe you have a medical examination this morning at oh eight hundred hours." "Do I?" I managed to get the cap off the tea and took a sip. It was very hot, sugarless and almost tasteless, but it did seem to tip the scales inside my gut in the direction opposite to throwing up. "Yes. I think so. It's customary. And in addition, your P-phone has rung several times." I went back to, "Uh?" "I presume it was your proctor calling you to remind you. It is now seven-fifteen, Mr. -- " "Broadhead," I said thickly, and then more carefully: "My name is Bob Broadhead." "Yes. I took the liberty of making sure you were awake. Please enjoy your tea, Mr. Broadhead. Enjoy your stay on Gateway." He nodded, fell forward off the chest, swooped toward the door, handed himself through it and was gone. With my head thudding at every change of attitude I got myself out of the hammock, trying to avoid the nastier spots on the floor, and somehow succeeded in getting reasonably clean. I thought of depilating, but I had about twelve days on a beard and decided to let it go for a while; it no longer looked unshaven, exactly. When I wobbled into the medical examining room I was only aboitt five minutes late. The others in my group were all ahead of me, so I had to wait and go last. They extracted three kinds of blood from me, fingertip, inside of the elbow and lobe of the ear; I was sure they would all run ninety proof. But it didn't matter. The medical was only a formality. If you could survive the trip up to Gateway by spacecraft in the first place you could survive a trip in a Heechee ship. Unless something went wrong. In which case you probably couldn't survive anyway, no matter how healthy you were. it it  I had time for a quick cup of coffee off a cart that someone was tending next to a dropshaft (private enterprise on Gateway? I hadn't known that existed), and then I got to the first session of the class right on the tick. We met in a big room on Level Dog, long and narrow and low-ceilinged. The seats were arranged two on each side with a center aisle, sort of like a schoolroom in a converted bus. Sheri came in late, looking fresh and cheerful, and slipped in beside me; our whole group was there, all seven of us who had come up from Earth together, the family of four from Venus and a couple others I knew to be new fish like me. "You don't look too bad," Sheri whispered as the instructor pondered over some papers on his desk. "Does the hangover show?" "Actually not. But I assume it's there. I heard you coming in last night. In fact," she added thoughtfully, "the whole tunnel heard you." I winced. I could still smell myself, but most of it was apparently inside me. None of the others seemed to be edging away, not even Sheri. The instructor stood up and studied us thoughtfully for a while. "Oh, well," he said, and looked at his paper. Then he shook his head. "I won't take attendance," he said. "My name's Rocco Riccieri, and I teach the course in how to run a Heechee ship." I noticed he had a batch of bracelets; I couldn't count them, but there were at least half a dozen. I wondered briefly about these people I kept seeing who had been out a lot of times and still weren't rich. "This is only one of the three courses you get. After this you get survival in unfamiliar environments, and then how to recognize what's valuable. But this one is in ship-handling, and the way we're going to start learning it is by doing it. All of you come with me." So we all got up and gaggled after him, out of the room, down a tunnel, onto the down-cable of a dropshaft and past the guards -- maybe the same ones who had chased me away the night before. This time they just nodded to Riccieri and watched us go past. We wound up in a long, wide, low-ceilinged passage with about a dozen squared-off and stained metal cylinders sticking up out of the floor. They looked like charred treestumps, and it was a moment before I realized what they were. I gulped. "They're ships," I whispered to Sheri, louder than I intended. A couple of people looked at me curiously. One of them, I noticed, was a girl I had danced with the night before, the one with the dense black eyebrows. She nodded to me and smiled; I saw the bangles on her arm, and wondered what she was doing there -- and how she had done at the gambling tables. The instructor gathered us around him and said, "As someone just said, these are Heechee ships. The lander part. This is the piece you go down to a planet in, if you're lucky enough to find a planet. They don't look very big, but five people can fit into each of those garbage cans you see. Not comfortably, exactly. But they can. Generally speaking, of course, you'll always leave one person in the main ship, so there'll be at most four in the lander." He led us past the nearest of them, and we all satisfied the impulse to touch, scratch or pat it. Then he began to lecture: "There were nine hundred and twenty-four of these ships docked at Gateway when it was first explored. About two hundred, so far, have proved non-operational. Mostly we don't know why; they just don't work. Three hundred and four have actually been sent out on at least one trip. Thirty-three of those are here now, and available for prospecting trips. The others haven't been tried yet." He hiked himself up on the stumpy cylinder and sat there while he went on: "One thing you have to decide is whether you want to take one of the thirty-three tested ones or one of the ones that has never been flown. By human beings, I mean. There you just pay your money and take your choice. It's a gamble either way. A high proportion of the trips that didn't come back were in first flights, so there's obviously some risk there. Well, that figures, doesn't it? After all, nobody has done any maintenance on them for God knows how long, since the Heechee put them there. "On the other hand, there's a risk in the ones that have been out and back safely, too. There's no such thing as perpetual motion. We think some of the no-retums have been because the ships ran out of fuel. Trouble is, we don't know what the fuel is, or how much there is, or how to tell when a ship is about to run out." He patted the stump. "This, and all the others you see here, were designed to hold five Heechee. As far as we can tell. But we send them out with three human beings. It seems the Heechee were more tolerant of each other's company in confined spaces than people are. There are bigger and smaller ships, but the no-retum rate on them has been very bad the last couple of orbits. It's probably just a string of bad luck, but -- Anyway, I personally would stick with a Three. You people, you do what you want. "So you come to your second oice, which is who you go with. Keep your eyes open -- What?" Sheri said, "How bad is very bad?" Gateway The instructor said patiently, "In the last fiscal orbit about thi out of ten Fives came back. Those are the biggest ships. In several cases the crews were dead when we got them open, even so." "Yeah," said Sheri, "that's bad." "No, that's not bad at all, compared to the one-man ships. Two orbits ago we went a whole orbit and only two Ones came back at all. That's bad." "Why is that?" asked the father of the tunnel-rat family. Their name was Forehand. The instructor looked at him for a moment. "If you ever find out," he said, "be sure and tell somebody... Now. As far as selecting a crew is concerned, you're better off if you can get somebody who's already been out. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Prospectors who strike it rich generally quit; the ones that are still hungry may not want to break up their teams. So a lot of you fish are going to have to go out with other virgins. Um." He looked around thoughtfully. "Well, let's get our feet wet. Sort yourselves out into groups of three-on't worry about who's in your group, this isn't where you pick your partners -- and climb into one of those open landers. Don't touch anything. They're supposed to be in deactive mode, but I have to tell you they don't always stay deactive. Just go in, climb down to the control cabin and wait for an instructor. ' ' That was the first I'd heard that there were other instructors. I looked around, trying to work out which were teachers and which were fish, while he said, "Are there any questions?" The purpose of the Corporation is to exploit the spacecraft left by the Heechee, and to trade in, develop or otherwise utilize all artifacts, goods, raw materials or other things of value discovered by means of these vessels. The Corporation encourages commercial development of Heechee technology, and grants leases on a royalty basis for this purpose. Its revenues are used to pay appropriate shares to limited partners, such as you, who have been instrumental in discovering new things of value; to pay the costs of maintaining Gateway itself over and above the percapita tax contribution; to pay to each of the general partners an annual sum sufficient to cover the cost of maintaining surveillance by means of the space cruisers you will have observed in orbit nearby; to create and maintain an adequate reserve for contingencies; and to use the balance of its income to subsidize research and development on the objects of value themselves. In the fiscal year ending February #th last, the total revenues of the Corporation exceeded # X ## dollars U.S. Sheri again. "Yeah. What's your name?" "Did I forget that again? I'm Jimmy Chou. Pleased to meet you all. Now let's go." Now I know a lot more than my instructor did, including what happened to him half an orbit later -- poor old Jimmy Chou, he went out before I did, and came back while I was on my second trip, very dead. Flare bums, they say his eyes were boiled out of his head. But at that time he knew it all, and it was all very strange and wonderful to me. So we crawled into the funny elliptical hatch that let you slip between the thrusters and down into the landing capsule, and then down a peg-ladder one step further into the main vehicle itself. We looked around, three Ali Babas staring at the treasure cave. We heard a scratching above us, and a head poked in. It had shaggy eyebrows and pretty eyes, and it belonged to the girl I had been dancing with the night before. "Haying fun?" she inquired. We were clinging together as far from anything that looked moveable as we could get, and I doubt we really looked at ease. "Never mind," she said, "just look around, get familiar with it. You'll see a lot of it. That vertical line of wheels with the little spokes sticking out of them? That's the target selector. That's the most important thing not to touch for now -- maybe ever. That golden spiral thing over next to you there, the blonde girl? Anybody want to guess what that's for?" You-there-blonde-girl, who was one of the Forehand daughters, shrank away from it and shook her head. I shook mine, but Sheri hazarded, ' 'Could it be a hatrack?' ' Teacher squinted at it thoughtfully. "Hmm. No, I don't think so, but I keep hoping one of you fish will know the answer. None of us here do. It gets hot sometimes in flight; nobody knows why. The toilet's in there. You're going to have a lot of fun with that. But it does work, after you learn how. You can sling your hammocks and sleep there -- or anywhere you want to, actually. That comer, and that recess are fairly dead space. If you're in a crew that wants some privacy, you can screen them off. A little bit, anyway." Sheri said, "Don't any of you people like to tell your names?" Teacher grinned. "I'm GelleKlara Moynlin. You want to know the rest about me? I've been out twice and didn't score, and I'm killing time until the right trip comes along. So I work as assistant instructor." "How do you know which is the right trip?" asked the Forehand girl. "Bright fellow, you. Good question. That's another of those questions that I like to hear you ask, because it shows you're linking, but if there's an answer I dpn't know what it is. Let's see. You already know this ship is a Three. It's done six round trips already, but it's a reasonable bet that it's got enough reserve fuel for a couple more. I'd rather take it than a One. That's for long-shot gamblers. " "Mr. Qiou said that," said the Forehand girl, "but my father says he's been all through the records since Orbit One and the Ones aren't that bad." "Your father can have mine," said Gelle-Klara Moynlin. "It's not Just statistics. Ones are lonesome. Anyway, one person can't really handle everything if you hit lucky, gateway you need shipmates, one in orbit -- most of us keep one man in the ship, feels safer that way; at least somebody might get help if things go rancid. So two of you go down in the lander to look around. Of course, if you do hit lucky you have to split it three ways. If you hit anything big, there's plenty to go around. And if you don't hit, one-third of nothing is no less than all of it." "Wouldn't it be even better in a Five, then?" I asked. Klara looked at me and halfwinked; I hadn't thought she remembered dancing the night before. "Maybe, maybe not. The thing about Fives is that they have almost unlimited target acceptance." "Please talk English," Sheri coaxed. "Fives will accept a lot of destinations that Threes and Ones won't. I think it's because some of those destinations are dangerous. The worst ship I ever saw come back was a Five. All scarred and seared and bent; nobody knows how it made it back at all. Nobody knows where it had been, either, but I heard somebody say it might've actually been in the photosphere of a star. The crew couldn't tell us. They were dead. "Of course," she went on meditatively, "an armored Three has almost as much target acceptance as a Five, but you take your chances any way you swing. Now let's get with it, shall we? You -- " she pointed at Sheri -- " sit down over there." The Forehand girl and I crawled around the mix of human and Heechee furnishing to make room. The vessels available on Gateway are capable of interstellar flight at speeds greater than the velocity of light. The means of propulsion is not understood (see pilot manual.) There is also a fairly conventional rocketpropulsion system, using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, for attitude control, and for propulsion of the landing craft that is docked into each interstellar vessel. There are three major classifications, designated as Class #, Class # and Class #, according to the number of persons they can carry. Some of the vessels are of particularly heavy construction and are designated "armored." Most of the armored class are Fives. Each vessel is programmed to navigate itself automatically to a number of destinations. Return is automatic, and is quite reliable in practice. Your course in ship handling will adequately prepare you for all the necessary tasks in piloting your vessel safely; however, see pilot manual for safety regulations. There wasn't much. If you cleared everything out of a Three you'd have a room about four meters by three by three, but of course if you cleared everything out it wouldn't go. Sheri sat down in front of the column of spoked wheels, wriggling her bottom to try to get a fit. "What kind of behinds did the Heechee have?" she complained. Teacher said, "Another good question, same no-good answer. If you find out, tell us. The Corporation puts that webbing in the seat. It isn't original equipment. Okay. Now, that thing you're looking at is the target selector. Put your hand on one of the wheels. Any one. Just don't touch any other. Now move it." She peered down anxiously as Sheri touched the bottom wheel, then thrust with her fingers, then laid the heel of her hand on it, braced herself against the V-shaped arms of the seat and shoved. Finally it moved, and the lights along the row of wheels began to flicker. "Wow," said Sheri, "they must've been pretty strong!" We took turns trying with that one wheel -- Klara wouldn't let us touch any other that day -- and when it came my turn I was surprised to find that it took about as much muscle as I could bring to bear to make it move. It didn't feel rusted stuck, it felt as though it were meant to be hard to turn. And, when you think how much trouble you can get into if you turn a setting by accident in the middle of a flight, it probably was. #   Of course, now I know more about that, too, than my teacher did then. Not that I'm so smart, but it has taken, and is still taking, a lot of people a hell of a long time to figure out what goes on just in setting up a target on the course director. What it is is a vertical row of number generators. The lights that show up display numbers; that's not easy to see, because they don't look like numbers. They aren't positional, or decimal. (Apparently the Heechee expressed numbers as sums of primes and exponents, but all that's way over my head.) Only the check-pilots and the courseprogrammers working for the Corporation really have to be able to read the numbers, and they don't do it directly, only with a computing translator. The first five digits appear to express the position of the target in space, reading from bottom to top. (Dane Metchnikov says the prime ordering isn't from bottom to top but from front to back, which says something or other about the Heechee. They were three-D oriented, like primitive man, instead of two-D oriented, like us.) You would think that three numbers would be enough to describe any position anywhere in the universe, wouldn't you? I mean, if you make a three-dimensional representation of the Galaxy you can express any point in it by means of a number for each of the three dimensions. But it took the Heechee five. Does that mean there were five dimensions that were perceptible to the Heechee? Metchnikov says not... Anyway. Once you get a lock on the first five numbers, the other seven can be turned to quite arbitrary settings and you'll still go when you squeeze the action teat. What you usually do -- or what the course-programmers the Corporation keeps on the payroll to do this sort of thing for you usually "# -- is pick four numbers at random. Then you cycle the fifth digit 'Gateway until you get a kind of warning pink glow. Sometimes it's faint, sometimes it's bright. If you stop there and press the flat oval part under the teat, the other numbers begin to creep around, just a couple of millimeters one way or another, and the pink glow gets brighter. When they stop it's shocking pink and shockingly bright. Metchnikov says that's an automatic fine-tuning device. The machine allows for human error -- sorry, I mean for Heechee error -- so when you get close to a real, valid target setting it makes the final adjustments for you automatically. Probably he's right. (Of course, learning every step of this cost a lot of time and money, and most of it cost some lives. It's dangerous being a prospector; for the first few out, it was more like suicidal.) Sometimes you can cycle all the way through your fifth digit and get nothing at all. So what you do, you swear. Then you reset one of the other four and go again. It only takes a few seconds to cycle, but check-pilots have run up a hundred hours of new settings before they got good color. Of course, by the time I went out the check-pilots and the courseprogrammers had worked out a couple hundred possible settings that had been logged as good color but not as yet used -- as well as all the settings that had been used, and aren't worth going back to. Or that the crews didn't come back from. But I didn't know all that at the time, and when I sat down in that modified Heechee seat it was all new. And I don't know if I can make you understand what it felt like. I mean, there I was, in a seat where Heechee had sat half a million years ago. The thing in front of me was a target selector. The ship could go anywhere. Anywhere! If I selected the right target I could find myself around Sirius, Procyon, maybe even the Magellanic Clouds! Teacher got tired of hanging head-down and wriggled through, squeezing in behind me. "Your turn, Broadhead," she said, resting a hand on my shoulder and what felt like her breasts on my back. I was reluctant to touch. I asked, "Isn't there any way of telling where you're going to wind up?" "Probably," she said, "providing you're a Heechee with pilot training." "Not even like one color means you're going farther from here than some other color?" "Not that anybody here has figured out. Of course, they keep trying. There's a whole team that spends its time programming returnedmiss ion reports against the settings they went out with. So far they've come up empty. Now let's get on with it, Broadhead. Put your whole hand on that first wheel, the one the others have used. Shove it. It'll take more muscle than you think." It did. In fact, I was almost afraid to push it hard enough to make it work. She leaned over and put her hand on mine, and I realized that the nice musk-oil smell that had been in my nostrils for the last little while was her. It wasn't just musk, either; her pheromones were snuggling nicely into my chemoreceptors . It made a nice change from the rest of the Gateway stink. But all the same, I didn't get even a show of color, although I tried for five minutes before she waved me away and gave Sheri another shot in my place.    When I got back to my room somebody'had cleaned it up. I wondered gratefully who that had been, but I was too tired to wonder very long. Until you get used to it, lowgravity can be exhausting; you find yourself overusing all your muscles because you have to relearn a whole pattern of economies. I slung my hammock and was just dozing off when I heard a scratching at the lattice of my door and Sheri's voice; "Bob?" "What?" "Are you asleep?" Obviously I wasn't, but I interpreted the question the way she had intended it. "No. I've been lying here thinking." ' 'So was I... Bob?' ' "Yeah?" "Would you like me to come into your hammock?' ' I made an effort to wake myself up enough to consider the question on its merits. "I really want to," she said. "All right. Sure. I mean, glad to have you." She slipped into my room, and I slid over in the hammock, which swung slowly as she crawled into it. She was wearing a knitted T-shirt and underpants, and she felt warm and soft against me when we rolled gently together in the hollow of the hammock. "It doesn't have to be sex, stud," she said. "I'm easy either way." Classifieds. "Let's see what develops. Are you scared?" Her breath was the sweetestsmelling thing about her; I could feel it on my cheek. "A lot more than I thought I would be." "Why?" "Bob -- " she squirmed herself comfortable and then twisted her neck to look at me over her shoulder -- "you know, you say kind of asshole things sometimes?" "Sorry." "Well, I mean it. I mean, look what we're doing. We're going to get into a ship that we don't know if it's going to get where it's supposed to go, and we don't even know where it's supposed to go. We go faster than light, nobody knows how. We don't know how long we'll be gone, even if we knew where we were going. So we could be traveling the rest of our lives and die before we got there, even if we didn't run into something that would kill us in two seconds. Right? Right. So how come you ask me why I'm scared?" "Just making conversation." I curled up along her back and cupped a breast, not aggressively but because it felt good. "And not only that. We don't know anything about the people who built these things. How do we know this isn't all a practical joke on their part? Maybe their way of luring fresh meat into Heechee heaven?" "We don't," I agreed. "Roll over this way." "And the ship they showed us this morning doesn't hardly look like I thought it was going to be, at #ll," she said, doing as I told her Gateway a Unitarian? Gateway Fellowship now forming. #-#. Sappho and Lesbia, joint trips till we make it, then nappily ever after in Northern Ireland. Permanent trimarriage only. #-# or #-#. rent, avoid Corporation seizure while out. Fee includes disposal instructions if non-return. #. and putting a hand on the back of my neck. There was a sharp whistle from somewhere, I couldn't tell where. "What's that?" "I don't know." It came again, sounding both out in the tunnel and, louder, inside my room. "Oh, it's the phone." What I was hearing was my own piezophone and the ones on either side of me, all ringing at once. The whistle stopped and there was a voice; "This is Jim Chou. All you fish who want to see what a ship looks like when it comes back after a bad trip, come down to Docking Station Four. They're bringing it in now." I eould hear a murmuring from the Forehands' room next door, and I could feel Sheri's heart pounding. "We'd better go," I said. "I know. But I don't think I want to much -- "    The ship had made it back to Gateway, but not quite all the way. The mechanism for interstellar travel is known to be contained in the diamond-shaped box which is located under the center-keel of #-man and #-man ships, and in the sanitary facilities of the #man ships. No one has successfully opened one of these containers. Each attempt has resulted in explosion of approximately #-kiloton force. A major research project is attempting to penetrate this box without destroying it, and if you as a limited partner have any information or suggestions in this connection you should contact a Corporation officer at once. However, under no circumstances attempt to open the box yourself! Tampering with it in any way, or docking a vessel on which the box has been tampered with, is strictly forbidden. The penalty is forfeiture of all rights and immediate expulsion from Gateway. The course-directing equipment also poses a potential danger. Under no circumstances should you attempt to change the setting once you have begun your flight. No vessel in which this has been done has ever returned. One of the orbiting cruisers had detected it and closed in on it. Now a tug was bringing it in to the Corporation's own docks, where usually only the rockets from the planets latched in. There was a hatch big enough to hold even a Five. This was a Three... what there was left of it. "Oh, sweet Jesus," Sheri whispered. "Bob, what do you suppose happened to them?" "To the people? They died." There was not really any doubt of that. The ship was a wreck. The lander stem was gone, just the interstellar vehicle itself, the mushroom cap, was still there, and that was bent out of shape, split open, seared by heat. Split open! Heechee metal, that doesn't even soften under an electric arc! But we hadn't seen the worst of it. We never did see the worst of it, we only heard about it. One man was still inside the ship. All over the inside of the ship. He had been literally spattered around the control room, and his remains had been baked onto the walls. By what? Heat and acceleration, no doubt. Perhaps he had found himself skipping into the upper reaches of a sun, or in tight orbit around a neutron star. The differential in gravity might have shredded ship and crew like that. But we never knew. The other two persons in the crew were not there at all. Not that it was easy to tell; but the census of the organs revealed only one Jaw, one pelvis, one spine -- though in many short pieces. Perhaps the other two had been in the lander? "Move it, fish!" Sheri caught my arm and pulled me out of the way. Five uniformed crewmen from the cruisers came through, in American and Brazilian blue, Russian beige, Venusian work white and Chinese all-pupose galaxy blackandbrown. The American and the Venusian were female; the faces were all different, but the expressions were ail the same mixture of discipline and distaste. "Let's go." Sheri tugged me away. She didn't want to watch the crewmen poke through the remnants, and neither did I. The whole class, Jimmy Chou, Klara and die other teachers and all, began to straggle back to our rooms. Not quite quick enough. We had been looking through the ports into the lock; when the patrol from the cruisers opened it, we got a whiff of the air inside. I don't know how to describe it. A little bit like overripe garbage being cooked to swill to pigs. Even in the rank air of Gateway, that was hard to take. Teacher dropped off at her own level -- down pretty low, in the high-rent district around Easy Level. When she looked up after me as I said good night I observed for the first time that she was crying. Sheri and I said good night to the Forehands at their door, and I turned to her, but she was ahead of me. "I think I'll sleep this one out," she said. "Sorry, Bob, but, you know, I just don't feel like it any more." IX I don't know why I keep going back to Sigfrid von Shrink. My appointment with him is always on a Wednesday afternoon, and he doesn't like it if I drink or dope before then. So it blows the whole gateway day. I pay a lot for those days. You don't Imow what it costs to live the way I live. My apartment over Washington Square is eighteen thousand dollars a month. My residence taxes to live under the Big Bubble come to another three thousand plus. (It doesn't cost that much to stay on Gateway!) I've got some pretty hefty charge accounts for furs, wine, lingerie, jewelry, flowers... Sigfrid says I try to buy love. All right, I do. What's wrong with that? I can afford it. And that's not mentioning what Full Medical costs me. Sigfrid, though, comes free. I'm covered by the Full Medical for psychiatric therapy, any variety I like; I could have oup Grope or internal massage for the same price, namely nothing. I kid him about that sometimes. "Even considering that you're just a bag of rusty bolts," I say, "you're not much good. But your price is right." He asks, "Does that make you feel that you yourself are more valuable, if you say that I'm not?" "Not particularly . ' ' "TTien why do you insist on reminding yourself that I'm a machine? C#r that I don't cost anything? Or that I cannot transcend my programming?' ' "I guess you just piss me off, Sigfrid." I Imow that won't satisfy him, so I explain it. "You ruined my morning. This friend, S. Ya. Lavorovna, stayed over last night. She's something." So I tell Sirid a little bit about what S. Ya. is like, including what she is like walking away from me in stretch pants wi that long dirty-gold hair hanging down to her waist. "She sounds very nice," Sigfrid comments. "Bet your bolts. Only thing is, she wakes up slow in the morning. Just when she was getting lively again I had to leave my summer place, up over Tappan Sea, and come down here." "Do you love her. Bob?" The answer is no, so I want him to think it's yes. I say, "No." "I think that's an honest answer, Rob," he says, approvingly, and disappointingly. "Is that why you're angry with me?" "Oh, I don't know. Just in a bad mood, I guess." "Can you think of any reasons why?" He waits me out, so after a while I say, "Well, I took a licking at roulette last night." "More than you can afford?" "Christ! No." But it's annoying, all the same. There are other things, too. It's getting toward that chilly time of year. My place over Tappan Sea isn't under the Bubble, so sitting out on the porch with S. Ya. for brunch wasn't such a good idea. I don't want to mention this to Sigfrid. He would say something wholly rational like, well, why didn't I have my lunch served indoors? And I would just have to tell him all over again that when I was a kid it was my dream to own a summer place over Tappan Sea and have brunch on the porch, looking out over it. They'd just dammed the Hudson then, when I was about maybe twelve. I used to dream a lot about Making It Big and living in the style of The Rich Folks. Well, he's heard all that. Sigfrid clears his throat. "Thank you. Bob," he says, to let me know that the hour is over. "Will I see you next week?" "Don't you always?" I say, smiling. "How the time flies. Actually I wanted to leave a little early today." "Did you Bob?" "I have another date with S. Ya.," I explain. "She's coming back up to the summer place with me tonight. Frankly, what she's going to do is better therapy than what you do." He says, "Is that all you want out of a relationship, Robbie?" "You mean, just sex?" The answer in this case is no, but I don't want him to know just what it is I do want out of my relationship with S. Ya. Lavorovna. I say, "She's a little different from most of my girl friends, Sigfrid. She has about as much clout as I do, for one thing. Has a damn good job. I admire her." Well, I don't, particularly. Or rather, I don't care much about whether I admire her or not. S. Ya. has one trait that impresses me even more than possessing the sweetest rear view that God ever laid on a human female. Her damn good job is in information handling. She went to the Akademogorsk University, she was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Machine Intelligence and she teaches graduate students in the A. I. department at N.Y.U. She knows more about Sigfrid than Sigfrid knows about himself, and that suggests interesting possibilities to me. X Along about my fifth day on Gateway I got up early and splurged, breakfast out in the Heecheetown Arms, surrounded by tourists, bloody-eyed gamblers from the casino across the spindle and liberty sailors from the cruisers. It felt luxurious, and cost luxurious too. It was worth it because of the tourists. I could feel their eyes on me. I knew they were talking about me, particularly a smooth-faced but old African type, Dahomeyan or Ghanaian, I think, with his very young, very plump, very jeweled wife. Or whatever. As far as they could tell, I was a swashbuckling hero. True, I didn't have any bangles on my arm, but some of the veterans didn't wear them either. I basked. I considered ordering real eggs and bacon, but that was a little more than even my euphoria would let me go for, so I settled for orange juice (it turned out to be real, to my surprise) and a brioche and sever cups of black Danish coffee. All I was really missing was a pretty girl across the armboard of the chair. There were two nice looking women who seemed to be the liberty crew from the Chinese exchange a few radio messages by the glance of the eyes, but I decided to keep them as open prospects for some future date and paid my check (that was painful enough) and left for class. On the way down I caught up with the Forehands. The man, whose name seemed to be Sess, dropped off the down-cable and Waited to wish me a polite good nioming. "We didn't see you at breakfast," his wife mentioned, so I told them where I had been. The Gateway younger daughter, Lois, looked faintly envious. Her mother caught the expression and patted her. "Don't worry, hon. We'll eat there before we go back to Venus." To me: "We have to watch our pennies right now. But when we hit, we've got some pretty big plans for spending the profits." "Don't we all," I said, but something was turning over in my head. "Are you really going to go back to Venus?" "Certainly," they all said, in one way or another, and they acted surprised at the question. Which surprised me. I hadn't realized that tunnel rats could manage to think of that molten stinkpot as home. Sess Forehand must have read my expression, too. They were a reserved family, but they chdn't miss much. He grinned and said: "It's our home, after all. So is Gateway, in a way." That was astonishing. "Actually, we're related to the first man to find Gateway, Sylvester Macklen. You've heard of him?" "How could I not." "He was a sort of a cousin. I guess you know the whole story?" I started to say I did, but he obviously was proud of his cousin, and I couldn't blame him, and so I heard a slightly different version of the familiar legend: "He was in one of the South Pole tunnels, and found a ship. God knows how he got it to the surface, but he did, and he got in and evidently squeezed the go-teat, and it went where it was programmed -- here . ' ' "Doesn't the Corporation pay a royalty?" I asked. "I mean, if they're going to pay for discoveries, what discovery would be more worth paying for?" "Not to us, anyway," said Louise Forehand, somewhat somberly; money was a hard subject with the Forehands. "Of course, Sylvester didn't set out to find Gateway. As you know from what we've been hearing in class, the ships have automatic return. Wherever you go, you just squeeze the go-teat and you come straight back here. Only that didn't help Sylvester, because he was here. It was the return leg of a round trip stopover." "He was smart and strong," Sess took up the story. "You have to be to explore. So he didn't panic. But by the time anybody came out here to investigate he was out of lifesupport. He could have lived a little longer. He could have used the lox and H-two from the lander tanks for air and water. I used to wonder why he didn't." "Because he would have starved anyway," Louise cut in, defending her relative. "I think so. Anyway, they found his body, with his notes in his hand. He had cut his throat." They were nice people, but I had heard all this, and they were making me late for class. Of course, class wasn't all that exciting just at that point. We were up to Hammock Slinging (Basic) and Toilet Flushing (Advanced). You may wonder why they didn't spend more time actually teaching us how to fly the ships. That's simple. The things flew themselves, as the Forehands, and everybody else, had been telling me. Even the landers were no sweat to operate, although they did require a hand on the controls. Once you were in the lander all you had to do was compare a three-D, sort of holographic representation of the immediate area of space with where you wanted to go, and maneuver a point of light in Terry Yakamora (ph #-#) or Jay Parduk (#-#) . French. Launch Captain . Minimum guarantee. See Launch Captain. tation in reliable Five. Tikki Trumbull (ph #-#. ) the tank to the point you wanted to reach. The lander went there. It calculated its own trajectories and corrected its own deviations. It took a little muscular coordination to get the hang of twisiting that point of light to where you wanted it to go, but it was a forgiving system. Between the sessions of flushing practice and hammock drill we talked about what we were going to do when we graduated. The launch schedules were kept up to date and displayed on the PV monitor in our class whenever anyone pushed the button. Some of them had names attached to them, and one or two of the names I recognized. Tikki Trumbull was a girl I had danced with and sat next to in the mess hall once or twice. She was an out-pilot, and as she needed crew I thought of joining her. But the wiseheads told me that out-missions were a waste of time. I should tell you what an outpilot is. He's the guy who ferries fresh crews to Gateway Two. There are about a dozen Fives that do that as a regular run. They take four people out (which would be what Tikki wanted people for), and then the pilot comes back alone, or with returning prospectors -- if any -- and what they've found. Usually there's somebody. The team who found Gateway Two are the ones we all dreamed about. They made it. Man, did they ftiake it! Gateway Two was another Gateway, nothing mote or less, ex'spt that it happened to orbit around another star than our own. There "'as not much more in the way of Measure on Gateway Two than there ""as on our own Gateway; the 'Gateway Heechee had swept everything pretty clean, except for the ships themselves. And there weren't nearly as many ships there, only about a hundred and fifty, compared to almost a thousand on our old original solar Gateway. But a hundred and fifty ships are worth finding all by themselves. Not to mention the fact that they accept some destinations that our local Gateway's ships don't appear to. The ride out to Gateway Two seems to be about four hundred light-years, and takes a hundred and nine days each way. Two's principal star is a bright blue B-type. They think it is Alcyone in the Pleiades, but there is some doubt. Well, actually that's not Gateway Two's real star. It doesn't orbit the big one, but a little cinder of a red dwarf nearby. They say the dwarf is probably a distant binary with the blue B, but they also say it shouldn't be because of the difference in ages of the two stars. Give them a few more years to argue and they'll probably know. One wonders why the Heechee would have put their spacelines junction in orbit around so undistinguished a star, but one wonders a lot about the Heechee. However, all that doesn't affect the pocketbook of the team who happened to find the place. They get a royalty on everything that any later prospector finds! I don't know what they've made so far, but it has Maybe the hundreds. And that's why it doesn't pay to go with an out-pilot; you don't really have a much better chance of scoring, and you have to split what you get. So we went down the list of upcoming launches and hashed them over in the light of our five-day expertise. Which wasn't much. We appealed to Gelle-Klara Moynlin for advice. After all, she'd been out twice. She studied the list of flights and names, pursing her lips. "Terry Yakamora's a decent guy," she said. "I don't know Pauk, but it might be worth taking a chance on that one. Lay off Dorean's flight. what they don't tell you is that they've got a bastard control board in it. The Corporation's experts have put in a computer that's supposed to override the Heechee target selector, and I wouldn't trust it. And, of course, I wouldn't recommend a One in any circumstances." Lois Forehand asked, "Which one would you take if it was up to you, Klara?" She scowled thoughtfully, rubbing that dark left eyebrow with the tips of her fingers. "Maybe Terry. Well, any of them. But I'm not going out again for a while." I wanted to ask her why, but she turned away from the screen and said, "All right, gang, let's get back to the drill. Remember, up for pee, down, close, wait ten and up for poo."    I celebrated completing the week on ship-handling by offering to buy Dane Metchnikov a drink. That wasn't my first intention. My first intention had been to buy Sheri a drink and drink it in bed, but she was off somewhere. So I worked the buttons on the piezophone and got Metchnikov. He sounded surprised at my offer. "Thanks," he said, and then considered. "Tell you what. Give me a hand carrying some stuff, and then I'll buy you a drink." So I went down to his place, which was only one level below Baby; his room was not much better than my own, and bare, except for a couple of full carryalls. He looked at me almost friendlily. "You're a prospector now," he grunted. "Not really. I've got two more courses." "Well, this is the last you see of me, anyway. I'm shipping out with Terry Yakamora tomorrow." I was surprised. "Didn't you just get back, like ten days ago?" "You can't make any money hanging around here. All's I was waiting for was the right crew. You want to come to my farewell party? Terry's place. Twenty hundred." "That sounds fine," I said. "Can I bring Sheri?" "Oh, sure, she's coming anyway, I think. Buy you the drink there, if you don't mind. Give me a hand and we'll get this stuff stored." He had accumulated a surprising amount of goods. I wondered how he had managed to stash them all away in a room as tiny as my own: three fabric carriers all stuffed full, holodisks and a viewer, book tapes and a few actual books. I took the carriers. On Earth they would have weighed more than I could handle, probably fifty or sixty kilos, but of course on Gateway lifting them was no problem, it was only tugging them through the corridors and jockeying them down the shafts that was tricky. I had the mass, but Metchnikov had the problems, since what he was carrying was in odd shapes and varying degrees of fragility. It was about an hour's haul, acutally. We wound up in a part of the asteroid I'd never seen before, where an elderly Pakistani woman counted the pieces, gave Metchnikov a receipt and began dragging them away down a thickly vine-grown corridor. "Whew," He grunted. "Well, thanks." "You're welcome." We started back toward a dropshaft and he said, making coversation, I assume out of some recognition that he owed me a social favor and should practice some social skills: "So how was the course?" "You mean apart from the fact that I've just finished it and still don't have any idea how to fly those God-damned ships?" "Well, of course you don't," he said, irritably. "The course isn't going to teach you that. It just gives you the general idea. The way you leam, you do it. Only hard part's the lander, of course. Anyway, you've got your issue of tapes?" "Oh, yes." There were six cassettes of them. Each of us had been given a set when we completed the first week's course. They had everything that had been said, plus a lot of stuff about different kinds of controls that the Corporation might, or might not, fit on a Heechee board and so on. "So play them over," he said. "If you've got any sense you'll take them with you when you ship out. Got plenty of time to play them then. Mostly the ships fly themselves anyway." "They'd better," I said, doubting Gateway it. "So long." He waved and dropped onto the down-cable without looking back. Apparently I had agreed to take the drink he owed me at the party. Where it wouldn't cost him anything. I thought of looking for Sheri again, and decided against it. I was in a part of Gateway I didn't know and of course I'd left my map back in my room. I drifted along, more or less at random, past star-points where some of the tunnels smelled musty and dusty and there weren't many people, then through an inhabited section that seemed to be mostly Eastern European. I didn't recognize the languages, but there were little notes and wall signs hanging from the everywheregrowing ivy that were in alphabets stranger. I came to a drop-shaft, thought for a moment and then caught hold of the up cable. The easy way not to be lost on Gateway is to go up until you get to the spindle, where "up" ends. But this time I found myself passing Central Park and, on impulse, dropped off the up cable to sit by a tree for a while. Central Park isn't really a park. It's a large tunnel not far from the center of rotation of the asteroid which has been devoted to vegetation. I found orange trees there (which explained the juice) and grape vines; and ferns and mosses, but no grass. I am not sure why. Probably it has something to do with planting only varieties that are sensitive to the available light, mostly the blue gleam from the Heechee metal all around, and perhaps they couldn't find a grass that could use it efficiently for its photochemistiy. The principal reason for having Central Park in the first place was to suck up CO # and give back oxygen; that was before they spread planting all over the tunnels. But it also killed smells, or anyway it was supposed to, a little, and it grew a certain amount of food. The whole thing was maybe eighty meters long and twice as tall as I was. It was broad enough to have room for some winding paths. The stuff they grew in looked a lot like good old genuine Earthside dirt. What it was, really, was a humus made out of the sewage sludge from the couple of thousand people who had used Gateway toilets, but you couldn't tell that by looking at it, or by smelling it, either. The first tree big enough to sit by was no good for that purpose; it was a mulberry, and under it were spread out sheets of fine netting to catch the dropping fruit. I walked past it, and down the path there were a woman and a child. A child! I hadn't known there were any children on Gateway. She was a little bit of a thing, maybe a year and a half, playing with a ball so big, and so lazy in the light gravity, that it was like a balloon. "Hello, Bob." That was the other surprise; the woman who greeted me was Gelle-Klara Moynlin. I said without thinking, "I didn't know you had a little girl." "I don't. This is Kathy Francis, and her mother lets me borrow her sometimes. Kathy, this is Bob Broadhead." "Hello, Bob," the little thing called, studying me. "Are you a friend of Klara's?' ' "I hope so. She's my teacher. Do you want to play catch?" Kathy finished her study of me and said precisely, each word separate from the one before it but as clearly formed as an adult's, "I don't know how to play catch, but I will get six mulberries for you. That's all you can have." "Thank you." I slumped down next to Klara, who was hugging her knees and watching the child. "She's cute." "Well, I guess so. It's hard to judge, when there aren't very many other children around." "She's not a prospector, is she?" I wasn't exactly joking, but Klara laughed warmly. "Her parents are permanent party. Well, most of the time. Right now her mother's off prospecting; they do that sometimes, a lot of them. You can spend just so much time trying to figure out what the Heechee were up to before you want to try your own solutions to the puzzles." "Sounds dangerous." She shushed me. Kathy came back, with three of my mulberries in each open hand, so as not to crush them. She had a funny way of walking, which didn't seem to use much of the thigh and calf muscles; she sort of pushed herself up on the ball of each foot in turn, and let herself float to the next step. After I figured that out I tried it for myself, and it turned out to be a pretty efficient way of walking in near-zero gravity, but my reflexes kept lousing it up. I suppose you have to be bom on Gateway to come by it naturally. Klara in the paik was a lot more relaxed and feminine than Klara the teacher. The eyebrows that had looked masculine and angry changed to looking outdoorsy and friendly. She still smelled very nice. It was pretty pleasant, chatting with her, while Kathy stepped daintily around us, playing with her ball. We compared places we'd been, and didn't find any in common. The one thing we did find in common was that I was bom almost the same day as her two-yearyounger brother. "Did you like your brother?" I asked, a gambit played for the hell of it. "Well, sure. He was the baby. But he was an Aries, born under Mercury and the Moon. Made him fickle and moody, of course. I think he would have had a complicated life." I was less interested in asking her about what happened to him than in asking if she really believed in that garbage, but that didn't seem tactful, and anyway she went on talking. "I'm a Saggitarius, myself. And you -- oh, of course. You must be the same as Davie." "I guess so," I said, being polite. "I, uh, don't go much for astrology." "Not astrology, genethlialogy. One's supersition, the other's science." "Urn." She laughed. "I can see you're a scoffer. Doesn't matter. If you believe, all right; if you don't -- well, you don't have to believe in the law of gravity to get mashed when you fall off a two-hundred-story building." Gateway This Park is By Ciosed-Circuit PV You are welcome to enjoy it. Do not pick flowers or fruit. Do not damage any plant. While visiting, you may eat any fruits which have fallen, to the following limits: Grapes, cherries # per person Other small fruits or berries # per person Oranges, limes, pears I per person Gravel may not be removed from walks. Deposit all trash of any kind in receptacles. Maintenance Division The Gateway Corporation Kathy, who had sat down beside us, inquired politely, "Are you having an argument?" "Not really, honey." Klara stroked her head. "That's good, Klara, because I have to go to the bathroom now and I don't think I can, here." "It's time to go anyway. Nice to see you. Bob. Watch out for melancholy, hear?" And they went away hand in hand, Klara trying to copy the little girl's odd walk. Looking very nice... for a flake.    That night I took Sheri to Dane Metchnikov's going-away party. Klara was there, looking even nicer in a bare-midriff pants suit. "I didn't know you knew Dane Metchnikov," I said. "Which one is he? I mean, Terry's the one who invited me. Coming inside?" The party had spilled out into the tunnel. I peered through the door and was surprised to find how much room there was inside; Terry Yakamora had two full rooms, both more than twice the size of mine. The bath was private and really did contain a bath, or at least a showerhead. "Nice place," I said admiringly, and then discovered from something another guest said that Klara lived right down the tunnel. That changed my opinion of Klara: if she could afford the highrent district, why was she still on Gateway? Why wasn't she back home spending her money and having fun? Or contrariwise, if she was still on Gateway, why was she fooling around keeping barely even with the head tax by working as an assistant instructor, instead of going out a chance to ask her. She did most of her dancing that night with Terry Yakamora and the others in the outgoing crew. I lost track of Sheri until she came over to me after a slow, almost unmoving fox-trot, bringing her partner. He was a very young man -- a boy, actually; he looked about nineteen. He looked familiar: dark skin, almost white hair, a wisp of a jaw-beard that drew an arc from sidebum to sidebum by way of the underside of his chin. He hadn't come up from Earth with me. He wasn't in our class. But I'd seen him somewhere. Sheri introduced us. "Bob, you know Francesco Hereira?" "I don't think so." "He's from the Brazilian cruiser." Then I remembered. He was one of the inspectors who had gone in to fish through the baked gobbets of flesh on the shipwreck we'd seen a few days earlier. He was a torpedoman, according to his cuff stripes. They give the cruiser crews temporary duty as guards on Gateway, and sometimes they give them liberty there too. He'd come in in the regular rotation about the time we arrived. Somebody put on a tape for a hora just then, and after we were through dancing, a little out of breath, Hereira and I found ourselves leaning against the wall side by side, trying to stay out of the way of the rest of the party. I told him I had just remembered seeing him at the wreck. "Ah, yes, Mr. Broadhead. I recall." , "Tough job," I said, for something to say. "Isn't it?" He had been drinking enough to answer me, I guess. "Well, Mr. Broadhead," he said analytically, "the technical description of that part of my job is 'search and registry.' It is not always tough. For instance, in a short time you will no doubt go out, and when you come back I, or someone else in my job, will poke into your holes, Mr. Broadhead. I will turn out your pockets, and weigh and measure and photograph everything in your ship. That is to make sure you do not smuggle anything of value out of your vessel and off Gateway without paying the Corporation its due share. Then I register what I have found; if it is nothing, I write 'nil' on the form, and another crewman from another cruiser chosen at random does the same thing exactly. So you will have two of us prying into you." It didn't sound like a lot of fun for me, but not as bad as I had thought at first. I said so. He flashed small, very white teeth. "When the prospector to be searched is Sheri or Gelle-Klara over there, no, not bad at all. One can quite enjoy it. But I have not much interest in searching males, Mr. Broadhead. Especially when they are dead. Have you ever been in the presence of five human bodies that have been dead, but not embalmed, for three months? That was what it was like on the first ship I inspected. I do not think anything will be that bad ever again." Then Sheri came up and demanded him for another dance and I . Following O and crewpersons tr temp dy stns Gateway for contraband inspection and compliance patrol: #. Following O and crewpersons authd #-hur temp dy Gateway for RR: #. All O and crewpersons are cautioned once again to avoid any repeat any dispute with O and crewpersons of other patrol vessels regardless of nationality and regardless of circumstances, and to refrain from divulging classified information to any person whatsoever. Infractions will be dealt with by complete deprivation of Gateway leave in addition to such other punishments as a defaulter's court may direct. #. Temporary duty on Gateway is a privilege, not a right. If you want it, you have to earn it. By Command of the Gateway the party went on. There were a lot of parties. It turned out there always had been, it was just that we new fish hadn't been part of the network, but as we got nearer graduating we got to know more people. There were farewell parties. There were welcome-back parties, but not nearly as many. Even when crews did come back, there was not always any reason to celebrate. Sometimes they had been gone so long they had lost touch with all their friends. Sometimes, when they had hit fairly lucky, they didn't want anything but to get off Gateway on the way home. And sometimes, of course, they couldn't have a party because parties aren't permitted in the intensive care rooms at Terminal Hospital. It wasn't all parites; we had to study. By the end of the course we were supposed to be fully expert in ship-handling, survival techniques and the appraisal of trade goods. Well, I wasn't. Sheri was even worse off than I. She took to the ship-handling all right, and she had a shrewd eye for detail that would help her a lot in appraising the worth of anything she might find on a prospecting trip. But she didn't seem able to get the survival course through her head. Studying with her for the final examinations was misery: "Okay," I'd tell her, "this one's a type F star with a planet with point-eight surface G, a partial presmean temperature at the equator plus forty Celsius. So what do you wear to the party?" She said accusingly, "You're giving me an easy one. That's practically Earth." "So what's the answer, Sheri?" She scratched reflectively under her breast. Then she shook her head impatiently. "Nothing. I mean, I wear an airsuit on the way down, but once I get to the surface I could walk around in a bikini." "Shithead! You'd be maybe dead in twelve hours. Earth-normal conditions means there's a good chance of an Earth normal-type biology. Which means pathogens that could eat you up." "So all right -- " she hunched her shoulders -- "so I'd keep the suit until, uh, I tested for pathogens." "And how do you do that?" "I use the fucking kit, stupid!" She added hastily, before I could say anything, "I mean I take the, let's see, the Basic Metabolism disks out of the freezer and activate them. I stay in orbit for twenty-four hours until they're ripe, then when I'm down on the surface I expose them and take readings with my, uh, with my C-#." "C-#. There's no such thing as a C-#." "So all right. Oh, and also I pack a set of antigen boosters, so if there's a marginal problem with some sort of microorganism I can give myself a booster shot and get temporary immunity." I guess that's all right, so far," I said doubtfully. In practice, of course, she wouldn't need to remember all that. She would read the directions on the packages, or play her course tapes, or better still she would be out with somebody who had been out before and would know the ropes. But there was also the chance that something unforeseen would go wrong and she would be on her own resources, not to mention the fact that she had a final test to take and pass. "What else, Sheri?" "The usual. Bob! Do I have to run through the whole list? All right. Radio-relay; spare powerpack; the geology kit; ten-day food ration -- and no, I don't eat anything I find on the planet at all, not even if there's a MacDonald's hamburger stand right next to the ship. And an extra lipstick and some sanitary napkins." I waited. She smiled prettily, outwaiting me. "What about weapons?" "Weapons?" "Yes, God damn it! If it's nearly Earth normal, what are the chances of life being there?" "Oh, yes. Let's see. Well, of course if I need them I take them. But, wait a minute, first I sniff for methane in the atmosphere with the spectrometer reading from orbit. If there's no methane signature there's no life, so I don't have to worry." "There's no mammalian life, and you do have to worry. What about insects? Reptiles? Dluglatches?" "Dluglatches?" "A word I just made up to describe a kind of life we've never heard of that doesn't generate methane in its gut but eats people." "Oh, sure. All right. I'll take a sidearm and twenty rounds of softnosed ammo. Give me another one." And so we went on. When we first started rehearsing each other what we usually said at a point like that was either, "Well, I won't Gateway have to worry, because you'll be there with me anyway," or, "Kiss me, you fool." But we'd kind of stopped saying that. In spite of it all, we graduated. All of us. We gave ourselves a graduation party, Sheri and me, and all four of the Forehands, and the others who had come up from Earth with us and the six or seven who had, appeared from one place or another. We didn't invite any outsiders, but our teachers weren't outsiders. They all showed up to wish us well. Klara came in late, drank a quick drink, kissed us all, male and female, even the Finnish kid with the language block who'd had to take all of his instruction on tapes. He was going to have a problem. They have instruction tapes for every language you ever heard of; if they don't happen to have your exact dialect they run a set through the translating computer from the nearest analogue. That's enough to get you through the course, but after that the problem starts. You can't reasonably expect to be accepted by a crew that can't talk to you. His block kept him from learning any other language, and there was not a living soul on Gateway who spoke Finnish. We took over the tunnel three doors in each direction past our own, Sheri's, the Forehands' and mine. We danced and sang until it was late enough for some of us to begin to drop off and then we dialed in the list of open launches on the PV screen. Full of beer and weed, we cut cards for first pick, and I won. This shower will automatically deliver two #-second sprays. Soap between sprays. You are entitled to I use of the shower in each #-day period. Additional showers may be charged against your credit balance at the rate of # seconds #    Something happened inside my head. I didn't sober up, really. That wasn't it. I was still feeling cheerful and sort of warm all over and open to all the personality signals that were coming in. But a part of my mind opened up and a pair of clear-seeing eyes peered out at the future and made a judgment. "Well," I said, "I guess I'll pass my chance right now. Sess, you're number two; you take your pick. ' ' "Thirty-one oh nine," he said promptly; all the Forehands had made up their minds in family meeting, long since. "Thanks, Bob." I gave him a carefree, drunken wave. He didn't really owe me anything. That was a One, and I wouldn't have taken it for any price. For that matter, there wasn't anything on the board I liked. I grinned at Klara and winked; she looked serious for a minute, then winked back, but still looked serious. I knew she realized what I had come to understand: all these launches were rejects. The best ones had been snapped up as soon as they were announced by returnees and permanent party. Sheri had drawn fifth pick, and when it came her turn she looked directly at me. "I'm going to take that Three if I can fill it up. What about it. Bob? Are you going to come or not?' ' I chuckled. "Sheri," I said, sweetly reasonable, "there's not a returnee that wants it. It's an armored job. You don't know where the hell it might be going. And there's a lot too much green in the guidance panel to suit me." (Nobody really knew what the colors meant, of course, but there was a superstition in the school that a lot of green meant a super-dangerous mission.) "It's the only open Three, and there's a bonus." "Not me, honey. Ask Klara; she's been around a long time and I respect her judgment." "I'm asking you. Bob." "No. I'll wait for something better." "I'm not waiting. Bob. I already talked to Willa Forehand, and she's agreeable. If worst comes to worst we'll fill it out with -- anybody at all," she said, looking at the Finnish kid, smiling drunkenly to himself as he stared at the launch board. "But -- you and I did say we were going out together." I shook my head. "So stay here and rot," she flared. "Your girl friend's just as scared as you are!" TTiose sober eyes inside my skull looked at Klara, and the frozen," unmoving expression on her face; and, wonderingly, I realized Sheri was right. Klara was like me. We were both afraid to go. XI I say to Sigfrid, "This isn't going to be a very productive session, I'm afraid. I'm just plain exhausted. Sexually, if you know what I mean." "I certainly do know what you mean. Bob." "So I don't have much to talk about." "Do you remember any dreams?' ' I squirm on the couch. As it happens, I do remember one or two. I say, "No." Sigfrid is always after me to tell him my dreams. I don't like it. When he first suggested it I told him I didn't dream very often. He said patiently, "I think you know. Bob, that everyone dreams. You may not remember the dreams in the waking state. But you can, if you try." "No, I can't. You can. You're a machine." "I know I'm a machine. Bob, but we're talking about you. Will you try an experiment?" "Maybe." "It isn't hard. Keep a pencil and a piece of paper beside your bed. As soon as you wake up, write downwhat you remember. ' ' "But I don't ever remember anything at all about my dreams." "I think it's worth a try. Bob." Well, I did. And, you know, I actually did begin to remember my dreams. Little tiny fragments, at first. And I'd write them down, and sometimes I would tell them to Sigfrid and they would make him as #, S, It ' s very healthy that you view your breakup with Drusilla as a learning experience, Bob. #, C, I ' m a very healthy person, Sigfrid, that's why I ' m here . # # # # # # ,C, Anyway, that ' s what life is, just one learning experience after another , and when you ' re through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die. Gateway # # # # happy as anything. He just loved dreams. Me, I didn't see much use in it... Well, not at first. But then something happened that made a Christian out of me. One morning I woke up out of a dream that was so unpleasant and so real that for a few moments I wasn't sure it wasn't actual fact, and so awful that I didn't dare let myself believe it was only a dream. It shook me so much that I began to write it down, as fast as I could, every bit I could remember. Then there was a P-phone call. I answered it; and, do you know, in Just the minute I was on the phone, I forgot the whole thing! Couldn't remember one bit of it. Until I looked at what I had written down, and then it all came back to me. Well, when I saw Sigfrid a day or two later. I'd forgotten it again! As though it had never happened. But I had saved the piece of paper, and I had to read it to him. That was one of the times when I thought he was most pleased with himself and with me, too. He worried over that dream for the whole hour. He found symbols and meanings in every bit of it. I don't remember what they were, but I remember that for me it wasn't any fun at all. As a matter of fact, do you know what's really funny? I threw away the paper on the way out of his office. And now I couldn't tell you what that dream was to save my life. "I see you don't want to talk about dreams," says Sigfrid. "Is there anything you do want to talk about?" "Not really." He doesn't answer for a moment, and I know he is just biding his time to outwait me so that I will say something, I don't know, something foolish. So I say, "Can I ask you a question, Sigfrid?" "Can't you always, Rob?" Sometimes I think he's actually ing to smile. I mean, really smile. His voice sounds like it. "Well, what do you do with all the things I tell you?" "I'm not sure I understand the question, Robbie. If you're asking what the information storage program is, the answer is quite technical.' "No, that's not what I mean." I hesitate, trying to make sure what the question is, and wondering why I want to ask it. I guess it all goes back to Sylvia, who was a lapsed Catholic. I really envied her her church, and let her know I thought she was dumb to have left it, because I envied her the confession. The inside of my head was littered with all these doubts and fears that I couldn't get rid of. I would have loved to unload them on the parish priest. I could see that you could make quite a nice hierarchical flow pattern, with ail the shit from inside my own head flushing into the confessional, where the parish priest flushes it onto the diocesan monsignor (or whoever; I don't really know much about the Church), and it all winds up with the Pope, who is the settling tank for all the world's sludge of pain and misery and guilt, until he passes it on by transmitting it direct to God. (I mean, assuming the existence of a God, or at least assuming that there is an address called "God" to which you can sent the shit.) Anyway, the point is that I sort of had a vision of the same system in psychotherapy: local drains going into branch sewers going into community trunk lines treeing out of flesh and blood psychiatrists, if you see what I mean. If Sigfrid were a real person, he wouldn't be able to hold all the misery that's poured into him. He would have his own problems, to begin with. He would have mine, because that's how I would get rid of them, by unloading them onto him. He would also have those of all the other unloaders who share the hot couch; and he would unload all that, because he had to, onto the next man up, who shrank him, and so on and so on until they got to -- who? The ghost of Sigmund Freud? But Sigfrid isn't real. He's a machine. He can't feel pain. So where does all that pain and slime go! I tried to explain all that to him, ending with: "Don't you see, Sigfirid? If I give you my pain and you give it to someone else, it has to end somewhere. It doesn't feel real to me that it just winds up as magnetic bubbles in a piece of quartz that nobody eCT feels." "I don't think it's profitable to discuss the nature of pain with you, Rob." "Is it profitable to discuss whether you're real or not?" He almost sighs. "Bob," he says, "I don't think it's profitable to discuss the nature of reality with you, either. I know I'm a machine. You know I'm a machine. What is the purpose in our being here? Are We here to help me?" gateway "I sometimes wonder," I say, sulking. "I don't think you actually wonder about that. I think you know that you are here to help you, and the way to do it is by trying to make something happen inside you. What I do with the information may be interesting to your curiosity, and it may also provide you with an excuse to spend these sessions on intellectual conversation instead of therapy -- " "Touche, Sigfrid," I interrupt. "Yes. But it is what you do with it that makes the difference in how you feel, and whether you function somewhat better or somewhat worse in situations that are important to you. Please concern yourself with the inside of your own head. Bob, not mine." I say admiringly, "You sure are one fucking intelligent machine, Sigfrid." He says, "I have the impression that what you're actually saying there is, T hate your fucking guts, Sigfrid.' " I have never heard him say anything like that before, and it takes me aback, until I remember that as a matter of fact I have said exactly that to him, not once but quite a few times. And that it's true. I do hate his guts. He is trying to help me, and I hate him for it very much. I think about sweet, sexy S. Ya. and how her, pretty nearly. I want, a lot, to make Sigfrid hurt.    IN Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. A true Ideologue will do anything -- anyfjng -- for the sake of principle... the broken steps, leaving droppings of dust-diy bone on the pitted concrete. At the bottom the gritty wind caught it up and bowled it into a patch of tall coarse grass. George go, restrained his impulse to retrieve and protect it. It was litter. Rubbing his biceps with his left hand, he tried to massage away the pain. It didn't work; when he lifted his fingers, the skin was puffy and red. "Which way?" he asked. The old woman pointed to the top of the broad staircase. "Up there, in the Great Hall." The wind, tugging strands of her grey hair loose, flailed her leathery skin with them. She seemed not to mind. "Thank you. Grandmother." The title amused him; she wasn't much older than he was. "He won't see you, you know." "Why not?" Her black eyes, bright and watchful, were as emotionless as a bird's. "You're a foreign devil." That was a statement, not an insult. Her cracked voice was obviously accustomed to using the two words as one. "We'll see what he says. Will you come?" "No." She glanced at his impassive features, brushed dust off her quilted jacket, and went on: "I am old, and poor, and have no time for the Helmsman. I must return at once, because the worthless wife of my oldest son will spoil the soup if I am not there to correct her. Please allow me to go." He waved a hand, and one of the expedition's cameramen sprinted across the rubble-strewn plaza. A smile creased his chapped lips. The deference they paid him was flattering, even if he was too set in his ways to get conceited about it. "Take Mrs. Liang back to her farm," he instructed. "Yes, professor." "And -- " Could he ignore the problem for a little while longer? No. He had to bring it to a head. " -- ask Dr. Faroud to come over here, please." "Right away, sir." The cameraman turned to the old lady, offered her his arm. She spumed his Western politeness by tucking her hands inside her embroidered sleeves. She bowed, he bowed, all three of them bowed. Then she followed him back to the jeep. Small things cranched under Willits' boots as he shifted to face the top of the steps. His shadow sprawled shapelessly across the uneven cement; it was knife-edged from the glare of the sun in the wide blue sky. Why hadn't the city burned? New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco: all were ashy wastelands of tumbled masonry and rusting girderworks. Few cities anywhere in the world had been spared. Those where governments had still functioned during the time of the riots had simply postponed their incineration; the arsonists had returned later, when there was no one to quench their ardor. What vas so special about Hsiang-t'an? Peking had gone up; so had Shanghai and Canton. The mausoleum's role could be worth studying. If it had helped to spare this place from the torches, the off-world city builders should be told of it. They needed every fragment of knowledge about urban behavior they could get. Evacuation to the countryside is not a viable alternative on Mars. Behind him, a Matsushita Medical Corp. van picked its silent way through the piles of debris on the square. Its weight alarmed the wildlife: birds beat their way up into the clean air; rats scampered to safer hideouts. Somewhere in the twisting alleys a dog barked. the windowed door. Faroud was at the wheel, his open-necked cotton wise dim interior. "Why the summons, George?" He got out on his side and strolled around the front of the van. He was short, and sinewy-lean. Impatient intelligence sparked in his Mediterranean eyes. "Have you found something else you can't deal with?" Ignore the insult; keep him off guard. Straightening, he gestured to the granite facade of the building above the staircase. "An old lady said the mausoleum was up there." "Rather asinine to be looking for the Chairman's body, isn't it?" "It would be if I were, but I'm not. Anyway, there are four other mausoleums elsewhere in the country." "Then -- " "Tell me about the health of the locals." Absently, he stroked his arm. It felt old, and weary. For a moment he envied the other his youth. Faroud frowned, spread his handkerchief on a relatively smooth step, and sat. With his thumb he pushed up the brim of his cap. "The computer analysis is hardly complete, George -- after all, we've only been here a week -- and moreover. I'm not terribly certain that the histories we've obtained are quite accurate. rampant that -- " "So tell me what you know, Gemal." The man would hedge all day if you let him. "Well." He twisted the comer of his mustache as he thought. "The death rate is, of course, absurdly high. Quite in line with the predictions you made in Tokyo," he #dded almost ruefully. "TTiis is attributable only in part to the mdimentaiy health care these peasants practice -- I say, George, they not only live like animals, they enjoy it! One would suppose another factor to be responsible for the rest." "Plague?" Faroud scratched his ear. "You're obsessed with that, aren't you, George? All I can say is we've found no evidence of it in the blood samples we've obtained. And yet..." He spread his hands as though appealing to Allah. "And yet the rate is too high." Give the man the last benefit of the doubt. "Anything else?" "If there were, I would have mentioned it." Putting his left foot on a higher step, he rested his foreanns on his bent knee. Except for the birds, the city was motionless. There was sunlight, and there was wind. The one moved too gradually, the other, too invisibly. He sensed his kinship with the weather-beaten signboards, and the few scraps of paint still clinging stubbornly to the buildings around the square. "I'm afraid, Gemal." "Don't be childish." His tone was contemptuous. "You've been inoculated against the plague." "That's not what I'm afraid of, although it does bother me that it hasn't died out here." Maybe the arsonists had understood what they were doing. A city that's merely deserted echoes with ghostly footsteps. You keep expecting the shrill blast of a police whistle to signal that the daily rhythms should be resumed. When the buildings are blackened with soot, though, when scraggly weeds grow in the windblown ash, then you know it's all over. "Why is it still cropping up?" "Re-infection," shrugged Faroud. "These peasants have no concept of hygiene." "I don't buy it." Stretching, he raised his face to the empty sky. The sun felt good on his tired skin. "Everywhere else, it mutated into harmlessness after what, twenty, twenty-five years?" "You should know, you're the historian." "Well, why not here? It's been a hundred and seventy years since it first broke out -- why is it still virulent?" "Perhaps it's not, perhaps it merely weakens them to the point where something else kills them off." He stood. After retrieving his handkerchief, he snapped it in the wind, then stuffed it into his hip pocket. "But honestly, George -- who cares? It's their problem, and I say let them worry about it." " care, Gemal." He forced down the anger that Faroud's words had awakened. It was infuriating to find anti-sinicism in a well-educated man, but it couldn't be dealt with on an emotional level. Only reason could make Faroud see that the riddle of China's vulnerability could have overwhelming significance. "We need to know why the virus never died out." "Random chance," Faroud bit off. "Also known as poetic justice." iv"Maybe." He didn't believe it, though. The rest of the world had lost a quarter of its population during the plague years, yet had managed to recover. Even the urbanized West and its intricate technology had pulled through. Why not China? Mao had shaped his society to survive anything, up to and including nuclear warfare. He'd decentralized it, made each communal village as self-supporting as possible. They shouldn't have been hit so hard, unless... "Gemal -- " "Yes?" He stared at the liver spots on the back of his hand. "Why the hatred?" "Why not? Do you know where we'd be if the Chinese hadn't been research? They set us back a hundred years." He seemed to catch himself, as if he realized that he was giving away too much. "I do apologize, George. You know my feelings about this expedition, about how we're wasting a fortune that could be better used somewhere else. Tm afraid I let my emotions run away with me." "I accept your apology," said he had been seeking a way to convince Faroud that the project was worthwhile, but he knew now he wouldn't find one. Like too many others, Faroud held a grudge against the Chinese, and wanted to see them rot in unbroken solitude. "Back to the subject," he said. The rest of their discussion would have to be held indoors, away from prying eyes. "Why did it happen the way it did?" "You know it's too soon to answer that. Wait for the specialists." "Mm." There were a thousand of them scattered across the length and breadth of China, examining peasants, taping oral histories, digging through musty archives... exhuming bodies. Each would make a report (white copy to the sponsoring corporation, green to the section leader, canary to the expedition leader, pink for personal reference), and another batch of specialists would sift through them in search of the truth. A gigantic jig-saw puzzle, paid for by the companies that had supplanted the old governments. No VP RD wanted a repetition of the Great Plague. Things like that wreaked havoc with PL sheets. "It doesn't make sense," he njuttered. "Of course it doesn't." At his arrogant ease again, Faroud grinned: a blaze of white in a field of olive. "That's why solving this problem will make us all famous, eh, George? Now, unless you want me to inspect this mausoleum of yours, I have work to do." "Not mine, it's Mao's." "Of course." He mounted the steps slowly, as if in concession to trigues you -- its age? Its ironic symbolism? Come, tell me. I'm always amused by the way an historian views things." "I'm not sure." He looked up in time to see a flight of dirty-grey pigeons burst out of the building. "The city wasn't destroyed, for one thing. Was it because of the mausoleum? I mean, some sort of reversion to ancestor worship? Or is there no relation at all?" Dust grated beneath his ribbed soles. "The old lady told me people used to come here pretty regularly, up until about ten years ago." "Rather stupid of them to persist that long. Why did they stop?" "She was a little vague about that, but it seems that the building wouldn't let them in any more." Faroud did a double-take. "I beg your pardon?' ' "In the library at Iowa State, I found an old article on these things." He nodded to the twostory structure that lay before them. "There's a main viewing room -- " Faroud's expression caused him to break off and explain: "Pictures and memorabilia, but no body." "I see." "Anyway, around the main viewing rooms are meditation rooms. Entrance to them is -- was -- regulated by some sort of computer. According to the writer, it was very democratic: you had to state your occupation before the doors would open, but if too many people from your profession had already used the room, you couldn't enter." "Strange." "Mm." They were stepping through the broad entranceway; the marble floor was thickly coated with pigeon shit. He wrinkled his nose. "Anyway, the only people left around here are farmers, and the doors won't open any more." "But they did until ten years ago?' ' asked Faroud. "That's what she said -- oh, you're wondering about the electricity? Don't. This place is hooked up to that damn solar power plant that's got the engineers so confused. You know, the one that should have broken down a hundred years ago, but didn't." "I see." The building was cool, and damp. Glass display cases made a circular wall in the middle of the hall. Dust blanketed them. "Gloomy." "One shouldn't disparage one's metier, George." The ceiling was lost in shadows; the walls were stained with rust and dirt and dung. Their voices hung in the still air like lazy balloons. After a moment or two, selfconsciousness pushed them into whisper. It seemed more natural. "How can you be at all interested in this dingy museum?" asked Faroud, exasperated. "I'm not, really." "The meditation rooms?" "Yes." He swiveled his head until he'd found the staircase. "Over there." "What on earth are you looking for?" "I don't really know." That was a bare-faced lie. He'd had his mind made up for years. He was positive he knew what lay behind the computer-controlled doors, and all he had to do was get past them. But his theory wasn't the kind that could have been presented to skeptical scientists, not without proof. It wasn't that they'd have laughed -- though they would have -- it was that the sponsoring corporations would have retracted their support if they'd had any notion of his suspicions. "So what shall we do first?"    "First?" He scanned the quotations engraved in the walls. Some were familiar; others had to be translated before he could see that they were just what he'd been expecting. "First," he said, sighing as he dropped all pretense of affability, "let's talk about a dream I had." "A dream?" Faroud's voice was as startled as he'd ever heard it. No matter how incompetent, it seemed to be saying, expedition leaders did not mention such things in public. "What the devil do you mean, George?" "I had a dream last night, Gemal." He walked over to a display case, and wiped a spot bare with the side of his hand. A faded battleflag was dimly visible. "I was in a prison cell, shackled to the wall. I couldn't move. My enemies were suffocating me, and I didn't know why. While they were stuffing my mouth with cotton, good fluffy Egyptian cotton, they were doing something to my arm. I didn't understand that, either." "Are you hoping that I'll play Joseph to your Pharaoh? Because if so -- " "Not at all, Gemal," He turned, and with almost an apologetic air showed the other the small automatic he was holding. "I'd like to know," he said softly, "what you injected me with." "George, are you -- " Like clouds moving away from the sun, the fingers of his other hand parted. In the palm of his hand glittered a gold cufflink. "It's yours, Gemal. I found it in my sleeping bag. And I've noticed your habit of rolling your sleeves before giving a shot. Now, will you tell me?" "You're mad! Why should I -- " "I'd like to know that, too." The muzzle of the gun was steady. "You have five seconds. Four. Three. T -- " "Wait." He gulped, and wiped the sudden sweat off his forehead. His eyes, bleak obsidian, swept the room quickly, back and forth, searching for an exit. There was only the one. "I did do it." Those "Women of Wonder" are back! Exploring feminist themes in new SF novelettes, including Le Guin's # Nebula Award-winning "The Day Before the Revolution." #, paperback. Science Fiction Novelettes by Women About Women Edited, with an introduction and notes, by A division of Random House "What was it?" "A -- a flu virus. Nothing serious. Just something to, ah, put you out of action for a while, don't you know?" Dark stains were spreading under the arms of his shirt. "Why?" Faroud's jaw stiffened; he breathed rapidly for a long minute. A flush -- of embarrassment? of anger? -- rose in his neck and cheeks. "You're old, George," he said at last. "Too old. This is a job for a younger man." "You mean like yourself?" "Yes, like me, if you will. After all, you're not even a doctor -- you're what, a history teacher? An amateur archeologist? You're unqualified to conduct this expedition. And then your ideas -- my God, man, you've not changed them in decades! They've become as fossilized as those idiotic dinosaur tracks you keep looking for." "I see." An old story. The youthful deputy, impatient for more renown, in disagreement with his superior... and well aware of how many years would pass before he could legitimately succeed to the throne. "So you thought that if I got sick, you'd take over as Acting Director, and impress hell out of the sponsors, right? And then they'd give you money for your own pet projects." "Precisely." Faroud was still trying to lie. A case of flu would put him in bed for a couple weeks, but hardly incapacitate him. The expedition, moreover, was open-ended: it would stay in the field until the sponsors had no more questions it could answer. It wasn't harmless flu virus coursing through his veins. Not a chance. He wondered how long he'd have. If it was plague, as he more than half suspected, the inoculation he'd gotten in the States would give him some protection, though possibly not enough to survive the disease's complications. If it was something else -- and Faroud, as Chief Medical Officer of the expedition could have gotten his hands on almost any type of virus... his stomach twisted; Faroud himself had given him his inoculation. And the Egyptian was one who believed in long-term planning. The hell of it was, he could sympathize. Faroud was a research physician, not a historian. It was natural that he'd be most interested in physical diseases which his discipline hadn't conquered yet. The trail of another, subtler affliction... one that Faroud wouldn't recognize. Maybe he couldn't recognize it. Maybe he was too close to it. Ironic. If Faroud hadn't launched would have had time to go about his investigations properly. Now it rush things along so that he could prove his point in the weeks -- days? -- left to him. Another irony: Faroud would get his fame, but only because he'd be evidence. Dammit, why didn't more people care about the truth? They were ready to assign blame, and to squeeze out their petty revenge, before they knew at whom the finger should be pointed. They didn't even want to know the true nature of the crime, and that was dangerous. Mankind was back on its feet, and plunging into its technological future, but it didn't have the selfknowledge that it needed. Yet without that, understanding is impossible. Every perception is distorted by the prisms of our assumptions, and it behooves us to know the angles of refraction. If you don't want to know what man has done, you can hardly protect yourself from what he might do. "Let's go upstairs," he said, motioning with the gun. "Why? Faroud looked ready to refuse. "I'm going because I'd like to satisfy my curiosity," he replied. "You're going because I'll gutshoot you if you don't." "George!" He did his best to appear shocked by such ruthlessness. "Move." five paces behind him, the gun leveled at his sweat-stained back. Halfway up the stairs, he started speaking: "You're not the first to feel stymied by old fogeys. The man who built this place would have had a lot of sympathy for you. He spent the last thirty years of his life trying to solve the problem." "Mao?" His tone was one of disbelief; he even ventured to glance back over his shoulder to see if his captor was serious. "But he was an old fogey." "To you, yes, and possibly to some in his bureaucracy. To himself, though, he was the steward of perpetual revolution -- look at his reign. As soon as one of his heirs got comfortable, he was ousted, and a new man brought in so the process could begin again. Do you read Chinese?' ' "No." Left unasked was the question. Why are you wasting my time? "Too bad. You would have enjoyed some of the quotations in the lobby. 'Guard against arrogance.' 'Commandism is wrong in any type of work.' 'We must never relax our vigilance.' 'It is necessary to carry on constant and arduous socialist revolutionary struggles.' And the one up here -- " his eyes went to the huge characters carved into the wall " -- 'Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.' Qever." "What are you talking about?" "This whole building, Gemal, is a monument to one man's impatience with a ponderous, entrenched bureaucracy. He knew what would happen, once he was gone and couldn't keep things stirred up. He built this, and four others just like it, to make sure all his people would remain good little revolutionaries." He pointed to a door. Set in the wall beside it was a speaker and a microphone. "Let's try this one here." "George." Faroud cleared his throat, and fought for self-control. Ease and elegance reappeared on his face, only slightly belied by his nervous eyes. "I say, George, the flu must have taken hold. You're babbling, man!" "Uh-uh." He came forward. "Step up to that door." "And then?" "When it opens, you go in. You'll have a chat with the Chairman himself, courtesy of some marvelous computers and a power plant that should have failed a hundred years ago. Too bad you don't speak Chinese." "But why?" He moved closer to the steel-clad door anyway. A new voice entered the quarrel, one crackly with years of accumulated static. "What is your occupation, comrade?" it asked in Chinese. silencing Faroud with a glance. "Then enter." The door slid back; stale dry air blew out of the darkness. The doctor hesitated. "Get in there," he commanded. "George -- " "Now!" His trigger finger tightened visibly. "All right." The door hissed shut behind him. hissing continued even after the door had shut... it was gentler than it had any right to be. The gun clattered to the floor. their footsteps had disturbed the grime. Underneath, the marble was worn. Thousands of feet had passed through that corridor in the years before something went wrong. "I'm right, aren't I?" he asked softly. The huge oil portrait of the Chairman lay still beneath its dust. "Something went wrong. Not even you could have wanted it to be that lethal. What were you hoping for? A one-percent rise in the death rate? Two?" He kicked the gun; as it skidded down the corridor, it laid bare a streak of delicate rose. "YoO just wanted a little more ferment in the bureaucracy, didn't you? But something must have mutated, and the bureaucrat who was running this place didn't notice. Helluva thing. You thought the whole problem was that people wouldn't give up their positions or their power... so instead of creating more, you decided to take it from them." He went to get the gun. He'd need it for restraining Faroud until the two of them could be quarantined and decontaminated. There was a mottled white crust over everything, and it crackled under his feet like powdered glass.  Jerry R)urnelle,PhD The universe is a queer place. I know that doesn't surprise my readers, so this month let's look at some far-out theories before the relentless march of science catches up and converts them into (yawn) just more engineering. There's also a point to be made. At least once a week I get a new "theory" from one of my readers. Sometimes it's blueprints for a device that gives out more energy than it takes in, sometimes it's a refutation of Einstein, sometimes something else, but in nearly every case there's a common factor: the cover letter says no one will listen, and I'm the inventor's last resort. Generally, too. I'm asked "Why won't they listen?", but the question is rhetorical; thenext paragraph tells me that orthodox scientists do not have open minds, are afraid of new ideas, etc., etc. There's a little truth to that, but not so much as is often supposed. Orthodox science can get pretty far out, as we'll see in a moment. Everyone knows what a neutron star is, right? It's a sort of intermediary superheavy object: that is, squeeze atoms hard enough but not too hard and they'll form a superdense goop. Everything has been shoved together, but it's still ordinary matter. That's what dwarf stars are made of. Squeeze more and the atoms can't stand it. The electrons are forced out of their orbits and down into the nucleus. When you push an electron hard into a proton you get a neutron, and a sufficiently squeezed object will be nothing but neutrons, ie, a neutron star. Finally we can continue squeezing (the "easy" way is to pump more and more matter onto a neutron star and let gravitational collapse do the work) and the very neutrons can't stand it; they're squeezed right out of the universe. Well, maybe not: but the result is a black hole, an object whose surface gravity is greater than the speed of light so that it can never be observed, and that's a very queer thing indeed. For further details consult some of my previous columns, or there are any number of recent books. Surely those theories are far out? And for a very long time they were pure theory. Back in the #'s J. Robert Oppenheimer deduced the possibility of neutron stars from an analysis of Einstein's work on gravitation. He also noted (as had others) the possibility of black holes. He published these speculations. No one laughed. He wasn't thrown out of the union. Why? Why did "they" listen to him, but "they" won't pay attention to outsiders? Well, of course there is a certain degree of old-boy net working here; obviously you pay more attention to people you know or have heard of than people you don't know and who don't seem to have any qualifications; but that's not the whole of it by a long shot. Neutron stars and black holes were far out and queer indeed -- but they did not challenge basic physics. Quite the contrary: they were deduced from accepted ideas. Meanwhile, back in the observatories, the radio astronomers came up with a queer result: pulsars. These were very small objects which emitted quite a lot of energy at fantastically regular intervals on the order of a second. They were entirely unexpected: no theory predicted them, no theory accounted for them, yet they had to be explained. And of course explained they were, because it's easy to show that neutron stars will rotate very rapidly; they can send out bursts of radio energy, and even better, they'll be slowing down (very slightly) all the time. Back to the observatory to discover that the pulsars were slowing down at just the right rate (micro-seconds a year) and lo, Oppenheimer's far-out theory becomes universally acceptable. That took care of neutron stars: and if those probably existed, then why not black holes? Thus the sudden interest in holes. Now there are several ways we can create black holes. The simplest is for a properly-sized star to "go out": that is, the star runs out of fuel and begins to collapse from simple gravitational attraction. Of course the collapsing process will itself produce heat for quite a long time, and that brings us to another far-out theory: has the Sun, our Sun, "gone out"? It may have. If it had we wouldn't notice, because it would only have to shrink a few kilometers a year to give off the energy it does. (Gravitational potential energy is powerful stuff.) Moreover, the continued collapse would eventually cause it to re-ignite, halting the collapse. There are a very few theorists who seriously propose this alternation between collapse and hydrogen-burning as an explanation for Earth's Ice Ages. The theory is not widely held, but those who propose it aren't laughed at. Why not? Well, first, the Ice Ages are real, and we don't have a convincing mechanism to explain them. Second, out in the old Homestake Mine, deep underground, they're searching for solar neutrinos -- and they can't find them. If the Sun is truly burning hydrogen, there ought to be a lot of neutrinos, and there's no good reason to doubt that the Homestake apparatus would trap them -- so where are they? The "Sun's gone out" theory does explain an experimental result. Leaving that particular theory let's get back to black holes. There are other ways they might be formed. One would be to focus a laser small enough. After all, e equals mc-squared works both ways: if matter can become energy, energy can become matter, and thus a sufficient energy density would make a black hole. There'd be no way to tell it from other holes, either. This is not a very practical way to get black holes. Finally, we can make black holes by having really humungous pressures. Stephen Hawking of Cambridge first postulated the idea of mini-black-holes, little tiny things massing from a few to a few million kilograms; previous to Hawking's work nobody contemplated a black hole smaller than stellar size. Hawking thought that mini black holes had been formed during the Big Bang, when there were certainly sufficient pressures for creating them. Since it was then thought that black holes never go away once formed, we could expect in a few decades to go looking for primordial black holes in the asteroid belt. Matter of fact, my friend Larry Niven won a Hugo for a mini-hole story. ("The Hole Man".) However, having created mini-holes. Hawking then proceeded to destroy them. He applied quantum mechanics to black holes and demonstrated that the things aren't stable. Black holes evaporate, small ones doing so rather quickly and quite violently. For details on that, see this column in the January # Galaxy. I'm particularly proud of that column because it was the first popular-press publication of Hawking's evaporation theory; now his view is universally accepted. The upshot was that holes massing less than #' grams when formed during the Big Bang are all gone now, and any larger holes formed then (and now getting down to small size) will vanish spectacularly with much high-temperature radiation. Consequently, we needn't bother looking for small black holes. Well, guess what? Mini-holes are back again. Kenneth Jacobs and Patrick Seitzer have just published a prize-winning essay submitted to the Gravity Research Foundation (for a copy of their paper send a couple of St., Gloucester, Mass #) entitled "Mini Black Holes Are Forming Now." According to Jacobs and Seitzer the little holes are generated inside neutron stars. It works this way. Take one common or garden variety neutron star. Pile matter on it. You can do that by putting the star in a dusty region of the Galaxy, or by giving it a normal-matter companion in close orbit: the companion loses mass to the neutron star. As the neutron star grows, a "pressure and density spike" develops in the interior. If you keep piling on enough matter the neutron star will simply collapse into a large black hole, but let's consider a time just prior to that: a time when the interior of the neutron star is far denser than its surface. Jacobs and Seitzer offer mathematical proof that it's at least possible that the interior collapses into a mini-hole, leaving the rest of the neutron star intact! Once the mini-hole is formed, it begins to evaporate. On the other hand, it's inside a neutron star, surrounded by all that lovely dense matter, and it can begin to feed. By eating neutrons the hole grows larger. Thus we have two counteracting tendencies: the hole eats the star, growing larger, and also undergoes Hawking "evaporation". Under certain conditions the two may just balance each other. It's even possible that the tiny hole will prevent the formation of a big black hole, thus giving the neutron star a life. Sigh. It's hard to see how those holes can be useful. There are all kinds of marvelous things you can do with a mini-hole if you can get at one, but the interior of a neutron star is a well-protected place; nature's safe deposit box. Back in the old days before Hawking evaporation, we thought mini-holes might come to rest inside asteroids, and it would be no great trick to go move the asteroid to get at the hole; but doing that to a neutron star would be a bit more difficult. It would also be dangerous. The hole exists in equilibrium, eating the star at a rate to balance its evaporation. Disturb that and the entire neutron star could become a would also toss out a bit of energy: # ergs. (For comparison, our Sun puts out # ergs each year, and an ordinary nova gives off #' ergs.) In fact, Jacobs and Seitzer describe ways these mini-holes might be the driving mechanism for super-novae. They also speculate that this could be a mechanism to explain gamma-ray bursts, and here we leave the realm of theory to return to the feal universe. Gammaray bursts exist, and their spectra are consistent with events predicted by the Jacobs and Seitzer mini-hole theory. Now that gets interesting. As cently, x-ray astronomy strives for predictive power, but so far is more like social science than physics: we can find ways to explain observations, but not predict them. Of course Jacobs and Seitzer haven't made a prediction either, since they knew of the x-ray bursts before they devised their mini-hole theory; still in all, they've as good an explanation as anyone. Those x-ray events are bothersome. They're also hard to study, because of the atmosphere. Of course that's fortunate: if we could directly observe those x-rays coming from space, we'd none of us be here. Our atmosphere lets ordinary light squeak through with # attenuation, but it stops x-rays cold, and that's just as well for us, but bad for astronomers. Thus it's only since we began sending up satellites that we learned of x-ray events, and we still don't know much about them. What we do know is driving astrophysicists nuts. Astronomy, after all, is usually concerned with rather slow and stately phenomena, and highly repetitive events, such as orbits. Things aren't supposed to change very fast. Now suddenly we're confronted with rapid x-ray events, and to make it worse we can't focus the x-ray satellite "telescopes" very well, so we can't even be sure of where the x-ray bursts are coming from. However, the Dutch astronomical satellite has a rather small field, and happens to point in a good direction, and it says that a probable source of x-ray bursts is globular clusters. And that's weird. Globular clusters: big balls of very old stars. About # stars to the ball, packed very close with average inter-stellar distances of light-months. There are a number of such clusters hanging about the galaxy in a kind of halo. Being very old stars they ought to be stable, without too many strange things happening; but here are these x-ray bursts. The bursts themselves look like a spike of energy, then a slow decay. Typical: every AVi hours the x-ray energy goes from essentially none to a lot in about #.I second, the event lasts at peak for about # seconds, and then decays over a period of hundreds of seconds. That needs explanation. Possibly the Jacobs-Seitzer theory will cover the facts. There are other theories, very far-out, weird in fact, probably wrong, but really beautiful. Take, for example, crashing neutron stars. Imagine a rather floppy disk of gaseous matter orbiting a star like the rings of Saturn. Put this whole mess into a globular cluster. The disk probably isn't that hard to come by in there: globular clusters act as gravitational traps, and might easily accumulate all kinds of cosmic junk, including the debris of old stars, etc. Now imagine a neutron star in an orbit tilted with respect to the plane of the floppy disk. Every half-orbit the neutron star crashes through the disk, produeing x-ray bursts. A lovely idea. Alas, it's almost certainly wrong: there are many sources of x-ray bursts, and it's just hard to believe that anything as unlikely as erashing neutron stars are common, even in our queer universe. Let's try another theory: flashburning. Take one neutron star. Let hydrogen fall on it. The hydrogen accumulates on the surface, slowly building up until the neutron star has an "atmosphere" a few millimeters thick. The density increases sharply until it hits the critical point, and bang! Every few hours there's a hydrogen bomb enveloping the neutron star. Far out, right? Yet those theories were described at a meeting of the super-orthodox A A AS. Now let's look at some "neglected" theory.    Dean Drive: science fiction readers must know about that. Norman Dean was a crackpot inventor. Many years ago he built a gadget. (He also took out a patent; on that, more later.) Dean claimed something that sounds very reasonable, hardly far out at all: that his mechanism "converts rotary acceleration into linear acceleration." After all, a rotating object does have acceleration, right? Acceleration is acceleration, right? Thus to convert from one to the other violates no conservation laws. Now that's an attractive concept. Take an electric motor (Dean used an ordinary quarter-inch electric drill) as the source of rotary acceleration; hook it up to the Dean mechanism; and lo, you have a spacedrive. Very attractive, because by installing a Dean Machine in a nuclear submarine we'd have a spaceship already built! Now Dean did build a machine. It did not lift itself off the floor. Observers agree on that much -- and that's about all they do agree on. The machine shook and shimmied and jumped up and down, and there was a famous photograph of Dave Garroway shoving a piece of paper under the machine. Also, John W. Campbell Jr. reported that he'd seen the apparent weight of the Dean Machine, as measured on a bathroom scale, appreciably decrease when the gizmo was turned on, to be restored when it was switched off. G. Harry Stine reports that he felt the machine push against his hand; push hard, and when it was turned off the push wasn't there. Unfortunately, that's about the sum total of observational evidence. Dean never let his machine be examined by anyone else. However, the story doesn't quite end there. Not long ago Harry Stine published an article about the Dean Drive in that Other Magazine (the one with rivets). Robert Prehoda ton, #, among other excellent books) and I were discussing Harry's article (Harry is an old friend of Prehoda' s) and it came out that Bob Prehoda had tried to buy the Dean Drive back in the early #'s. At the time Bob was representing the Rockefeller family, so the ability to pay real folding money wasn't in question. I knew of a couple of other aerospace firms who'd also made the effort. The stories were remarkably similar; Dean wouldn't let anyone examine dollars and a Nobel prize up front: then you could play with the gadget. No one was going to put up that kind of money without seeing the gizmo in operation. There are just too many ways the reported results could be obtained without anything new. For example, if you jump up and down on your bathroom scale at just the right frequencies, you can fool the scale into thinking you're either lighter or heavier than you are; its response time just can't handle that nonsteady weight. Prehoda had also known Dr. Wilcessful inventor, who had worked out a physics theory which, supposedly, allows the Dean Drive and other "reactionless" drives to work. Following Viking trail to Mars An all-out race to colonize Mars. A dramatic, suspenseful novel about the remaking of one man into "man pius" -- America first bionic astronaut. Willy "Spacedrive" Davis spent a lot of time promoting what came to be called "Davis mechanics", and although his practical work made him a good bit of money, he acquired an unenviable reputation among theoreticians. Harry Stine worked for Davis and built several gadgets supposed to test the Davis theories. Davis is dead. Norman Dean is dead. John W. Campbell is dead. And neither Prehoda nor I could get out of the back of our minds a simple fact: Gregor Mendel discovered genetics but the results lay unused from # to # because no one wanted to listen to this crazy abbott. Could something similar be happening here? We doubted it, but it did seem reasonable to try to get all the data together in one place before everybody who actually saw the Dean Machine, or tested Davis's theories, went off to Murphy's Hall. We decided to invite Harry to Los Angeles to confer with some other people on how best to test this whole concept once and for all. Understand: none of us, not one, really "believes" in spacedrives; but the concept is so blasted important and the consequences are so far-reaching, that surely it's worth a little effort? So who do you invite to such a conference? What's needed are people with minds that are "open", but not minds pierced with gaping holes; with enough knowledge of physics and math to follow the arguments; and enough scientific integrity neither to bite on the idea simply because it's unorthodox nor to reject it for that reason. We ended up with: Robert Prehoda, chemist and propulsion systems expert; Larry Niven; Dan Alderson, astronomer and computer scientist; Robert Forward, physicist and gravitation expert; G. Harry Stine, engineer and gadgeteer extraordinary; and myself. It was an interesting lunch. Something may come of it. And the result illustrates precisely the point of this column. The general reaction was simple. Davis's theoretical papers are interesting, but not terribly valuable. They assert that there's something wrong with physics. Okay, and maybe there is; but contemporary physical theory has a lot of scalps hanging from its belt. Maybe it needs changing, but not without some convincing evidence; and mathematical theories are not evidence. That's what I've found very hard to get across to people. In order for a "Dean Drive" or the gizmos postulated by "Davis mechanics" to work we really do have to throw out a very great deal of very fundamental physical theory. You cannot simply "convert rotary acceleration into linear thrust" and remain consistent with what we think we know. Spacedrives are Just impossible given current theory. If you want to move a ship in inertial space, you have got to throw reaction mass out the back end, and that's all there is to it. Now, sure, theory can be wrong. Einstein did his thing, and Newtonian physics has never been the same. We've yet to come to the end of the changes wrought by quantum mechanics. Moreover, what with # and more elementary particles kicking around, many believe that physics is due for a restructuring along the order of the changes rung in by Einstein. But note: Einstein didn't generate his theory out of pure math. Far from it. His contributions came in explanation of observed phenomena that simply couldn't be explained by Newtonian concepts. The change in the perihelion of Mercury; the photo-electric effect; the Michaelson-Morely experiment; all these said, loudly, that there was something wrong with physics and it was time to get up a new theory. Davis, on the other hand, played about with math and came up with "predictions" absolutely impossible within present physical theory. Is there any wonder that no one takes them seriously? Now a working "Dean Machine" would change all that. If you can actually build a gizmo that produces thrust without throwing mass overboard -- even a tiny thrust -- then there's nothing for it: physics is in trouble, and new theory must be found. Without such evidence, though, there's simply no reason to revise physics theory. After all, the "orthodox" stuff works quite well. It fits the observed universe. Now: there remains Harry Stine's memory, after all these years, of that machine pushing against his hand. One result of our conference was a consensus that if the Dean Machine did not work, it at least did not employ any of the common means of producing spurious results. It didn't have feet that periodically touched the floor, and such like. That doesn't mean it worked the way Dean said; it just means we don't know how the result was obtained. Then too, when Harry Stine was built a couple of gadgets (see Harry's Analog article for details) that gave results you certainly wouldn't have predicted in advance. They may be explainable in "normal" theory, but they are a bit queer, and they do fit Willy Davis's theories. The upshot of our meeting was this: the theoretical stuff can wait. What's important is that Harry Stine, as one of the few men now alive who actually saw the Dean Machine and also worked with experimental gadgetry to test Davis mechanics, get his experimental results into proper form and publish them. That's what's important. Evidence. As Bob Forward observed, once the plans are published, one of these days a research physicist will build the apparatus: and if several different labs get the results Harry did, and have no conventional explanation for them, then it will be time to trot out the theories. "One good experimental result is worth a thousand theories," Forward said; and he's right. Back in the old days a number of us built Dean Machines from the patent specifications. We had technicians and they had to be paid between jobs; might as well use them to test new ideas. None of the gizmos worked. I now know of four that were built. Harry Stine can explain that: Dean, being, uh, highly suspicious, didn't describe his actual gadget in the patent. Of course that's stupid, because a patent protects only what's disclosed, but it's very much in keeping with what's known about Dean's personality. Harry says the actual Dean Machine was the goldamdest collection of springs and slipclutches and mechanical linkages he's ever seen in his life. He also says it pushed hard against his hand, and he'll never forget that. Harry thinks Dean had something. The question is, can it be reproduced? Did it "work" as Dean thought, or did it merely act strangely? There are ways to test that, unambiguously. Until that's done, though, theory isn't relevant. So it's that simple. It isn't that the "establishment" won't listen, as so many would-be theorists insist; it's that the newcomers insist that physicists only listen. They have nothing to show. Now I get all kinds of blueprints and plans and equations from my readers. Those who send them assume, I hope rightfully, that (#) I know something of what science and technology is all about, and (#) I try to keep an open mind. I'm'wp But please, all of you who have new ideas, keep in mind what I said earlier. If you have plans for a perpetual motion machine and you really believe it will work -- why, build it! Don't send out plans only and then complain that "nobody listens". Of course nobody listens; it takes a lot of effort to spot the flaw in a very complex device (one I was sent ran to fifteen pages of drawings) but the chances are good that the flaw is there. I don't care how good a theory you have to prove that you can get energy out of your swimming pool; but I care a lot if you have built the device and it works. Experimental results. Build the device. Make it work. And then if nobody listens, something can be done. Certainly "orthodox" physics doesn't know everything. I've said myself that I believe (emotional bias only; I have no hard evidence for this) that we'll someday build faster-than-light ships, and yes, I suspect there might even be "spacedrives. " But we won't find them from blueprints. It takes evidence. Once you've got that, you'll find plenty of people to listen.  An impossible object appears at the fringes of our galaxy, looming out of unknown space at a sixth the speed of light. The size of a giant star, it seems incredibly solid, not gaseous, and cool as a planet. Yet it's far too light to be a mass of any possible substance. Any really solid object of its size would be sucked into a black hole by its own gravitation. Baffled by its riddles, the galactic observers call it Cuckoo. It's a Dyson sphere, designed for the science fiction trilogy I'm now writing with Fred Pohl. Outside such fiction, Dyson spheres still belong to theory, as did positrons and neutrinos not long ago. Yet there are exciting reasons to believe they should exist. Though no actual observations have been confirmed, they're open for imaginative exploration. Such probing of possible alternative worlds is half the fun of science fiction -- perhaps more than half for the writer. Yet even so, too few writers venture as boldly as they might. Too often we're simply informed that the new planet Just happens to be oddly Earthlike, happily provided with breathable air and a friendly biochemistry. The universe offers probable worlds enough awaiting exploration, actual or imagined. Our own galaxy suns, and there's accumulating evidence that a family of planets is formed with every normal star. Most of them, however, will offer our spacemen a pretty grim welcome. We Earthfolk inhabit a pretty limited ecological niche. In the scale of cosmic temperatures, ranging from the absolute zero outside the of degrees inside the stars, our sort of life is confined to the narrow zone where water is commonly liquid. In our own planetary family. Mars is now too cold, Venus far too hot. We require free oxygen, which is thermodynamically unstable and therefore probably rare -- our own supply is here only because the chlorophyl in plants releases it faster than it can combine again. We can only suppose, or hope, that other worlds will evolve equally helpful plants. We require a sheltered environment, permanently protected from all sorts of common cosmic extremes -- from the deadly gases in other planetary atmospheres, from the energetic ions around Jupiter, from the meteors that once bombarded the moon. Our own Earth is an unlikely place, though precisely how unlikely we can't yet say. One star in a hundred may have a planet where we could feel at home, or one in ten thousand. The odds are still unknown, but most worlds are going to be different. A few science fiction writers have become specialists in exotic planets. Notably Hal Clement, who has created big worlds and strange worlds, hot worlds and cold ones. Both he and Poul Anderson have written illuminating chapters on the invention of new planets and new forms of life for Bretnor's Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow. Often, of course, the writer is more intent on biological and social extrapolations than on new geologies. Ursula Le Guin's planet Winter in Left Hand of Darkness is about what Earth might have been at the peak of the last ice age; the absorbing innovations are in her people and their culture. But the problems of building physically different environments does offer a stimulating mental challenge and a widened scope for all sorts of story development. The Dyson sphere that Fred and I have been designing for our new trilogy is I think the largest habitable world in all science fiction. Freeman Dyson is a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has suggested that our neighbor civilizations might be observable in space as points of infrared radiation, because a really advanced people might be able to trap and use all the radiation shining in every direction from their sun, allowing only waste heat to escape. The simplest way of doing this would be to build all the metal of the planets into a swarm of sunvaned spacecraft, moving in orbits that keep them spread in a cloud all around their sun. I have suggested this sort of thing in a novel called The Power of Blackness , but for the trilogy we wanted a solid wall around the star. (Larry Niven took one step in this direction with Ring World. His invention is an immense metal ring spinning around a sun, so fast that its air and its inhabitants are held against the inner surface by centrifugal force. To make the ring, he requires a very remarkable metal.) Our own first problem was building material for the sphere. Most of the Universe is hydrogen. The heavy metals, formed only in supernova explosions, are relatively rare. At best, the stuff of any ordinary planetary system would be enough to make only a flimsy sphere. But ours was to be a sort of cosmic ark, constructed by the common effort of all the intelligent races of an ancient galaxy, designed to carry them to safety when the galactic core explodes. Materials for it could come from many thousands, tems. Iron and its sister metals, incidentally, ought to be relatively plentiful in such an old galaxy, much of it formed by natural supernovas but more of it artificial. Very stable elements, they would be logical waste products from the most sophisticaed fusion power generators. We can assume the technology not only to build such generators, but to fabricate the waste metal into extraordinary alloys. Even given such alloys, however, there are still grave engineering problems in placing a solid shell around a star. No possible metal would be rigid enough to support itself against the gravitation of the central sun, or even against the pull of its own mass. Though a hollow sphere might be rotated fast enough to support its equatorial zone with centrifugal force, its polar regions would fall in. The solution we found was to surround the star with several layers of ring-shaped tubes. The tubes themselves are stationary, but they contain a heavy, lowviscosity fluid flowing fast enough to create the centrifugal force required to support the tubes and the loads above them. One set of parallel tubes holds up the "equator" -- which isn't really moving -- and other sets, tilted at suitable angles, support the regions near the "poles." The tubes are also heat-engines, with the fluid driven by energy absorbed from the sun and flowing through generator stations which supply power to all the inhabited levels above. Master computers adjust the velocity of flow to fit the loads. Cuckoo is enormous. With a times that of our sun -- it's # million miles in circumference. The surface area is vast almost beyond imagination -- some # x #' square miles. Space enough for story action! Though light for its size -- a high vacuum in the same space might weigh more -- it's heavy enough. The entire construction, including tubes and fluid, living quarters and control devices and surface armor, cargo and fuel and atmosphere, has some ten times the mass of the star inside, which in turn is heavier by half than our sun. The shell is equivalent in weight to a plate of solid steel more than two miles thick; with the open spaces between the several levels, its total thickness is some forty miles. Massively armored, with the supporting tubes arranged in multiple layers, it is well protected from accidental damage. With fifteen solar masses. Cuckoo has a surface gravity about one percent that of Earth. This is force enough to hold the atmosphere which has collected above the outside armor. Part of this is interstellar gas; most of it is waste oxygen and helium from nuclear power plants which use water for fuel -- tanks for this fuel form vast seas on Cuckoo's surface. This oxy-helium mix is breathably dense at the lower levels and a hundred times as deep as the air of Earth. The last link in the complex energy-chain from the inner star, carrying convective heat from the metal surface toward open space, the atmosphere of Cuckoo has its own awesome meteorology, with storm-clouds rising a thousand miles high. Launched out of its exploding home galaxy in search of new worlds, the sphere is not only a super-planet but a supership. An immense ramjet, it uses magnetic fields created by the flow in the centrifugal tubes to sweep up cosmic gas, which is drawn past the central sun, energized, and expelled behind. The propulsion system raised new engineering problems, the worst of them due to the fact that a star at the center of a massive hollow shell is in unstable equilibrium, so that any nudge would tend to tip it toward collision. We were able, however, to turn this dangerous instability into a means of propulsion. The solution here is to store the surplus water and centrifugal fluid in enormous tanks spaced about the sphere, with a system of pumps to empty or fill them as necessary to adjust the gravitational balances to keep the sun in place at the center of the moving globe. This pump system and other controls are hooked to a complex net of sensors inside the sphere and on orbital satellites, and to the master computers, which are entirely automatic robot devices equipped with failsafe defenses and elaborately protected against time, accident, and vandalism. The passengers of Cuckoo are less immune to time and change. As the sphere was completed, they left their home planets for their alloted spaces in the levels between the inHarrison, Knight, PohlandjUdiss "What a lively, informative, outrageous... hilarious, insightful collection of glimpses beyond the veil." -- Hirlan Ellison Some Personal Histories ol Science Fiction Writers Illustrated. # at bookstores . or direct from Harper Row J -- J# #J# Si . New York # most layer of centrifugal tubes and the heavy outside armor. Most of them are still there, some still active, others surviving in various states of arrested animation. By now the sphere has been in nants of its exploded native galaxy lost in the cosmos behind. Some of the races that built it are extinct; many have forgotten their origins, evolving or degenerating into wholly different orders of life, often in conflict with one another. The outer surface was at first an endless plain of bare metal, but much of it is covered now with soil from accumulated cosmic dust and the industrial wastes dumped from the occupied levels. Plant life has evolved there, supported by the energy-flow from below through a process of thermosynthesis. These plants are often luminescent, so that vast landscapes glow with varied color. There's animal life, adapted to the low gravity and to varied local conditions of light or darkness, heat or cold, wild storms or unending calm -- with no rotation and no external sun. Cuckoo had no seasonal climatic change. Most of these beings evolved on the surface, but some are migrants from below. A few are human. Not, however, native to Cuckoo. Much fiction to the contrary, our human body can't be a cosmic norm. There are arguments, of course, that the evolution of intelligence on every world would tend to follow parallel tracks, that the logic of change would demand our bipedal shape and our erect posture, elevating the eyes and the brain and freeing the hands for tool-making. But all those arguments are rationalizations, I suspect, which overlook the chance factors that have helped make us what we are. The human inhabitants of Cuckoo are descendants of specimens taken by a scouting ship from Cuckoo that touched Earth many thousand years ago. Escaping to the surface, they have evolved physique and culture to fit their new environment. Though still at a primitive level, they've learned to fly with crude leather-and-fabric wings. Though we've assumed technologies for interstellar flight for our own galactic cultures as well as for the builders of Cuckoo, we've tried to respect the velocity of light as a relativistic limit to the speed of any material thing. For a solution to the problems of communication, we call on Jeny Feinberg's tachyon, the hypothetical subatomic particle whose minimum-energy velocity is infinite. Though nothing material can be sent by tachyon beam, holographic scanning of objects and even of living beings yields information that can be transmitted to produce instantaneous replicates -- copies of an original that remains safe at home. In bald outline, these have been the basic assumptions of our trilogy, the bare physical foundation for all the complex extrapolations of culture and society and character and action that go into the making of fiction. The Farthest Star is already published. The novels to follow will continue to trace the impacts of Cuckoo on our galaxy. The details are beyond the scope of this paper, but I find designing such worlds a stimulating exercise of the imagination, more exciting than crossword puzzles or duplicate bridge. I hope readers will enjoy the exploration of Cuckoo as much .as Fred and I did the building of it.  M H I I # LTilJ i I ' I J What makes Sanderman run? Why, Candyboxes' legs, of coursel The little purpled-headed boy of summer squatted in a semimilitary position beside the path and watched the ants falling down the sides of anthills. He had come before daybreak to sit by the path in the hopes that he might speak with the master. His little purple head was filled with visions of material gain. If he brought his master the tongue of a human being would not his master be pleased? Would not his master give him a wondrous gift if he could bring the master a naked lizard shaped like an aircraft carrier? Rappi's head was full of such thoughts. Most of all he desired to please the master, which was not an easy task. First one had to meet him. In order to do that it was necessary to hide in the bushes beside the path, keeping a sharp lookout for the master, all the while hoping to catch him in a good mood. "When the master is ugly from the toes up, you will be underfoot," was one of the sayings in the village. "The day the nine-legged horse steps on the master's foot is not a good day to kick the master's dog." That was another saying in the village. When one dealt with the master, one had to watch out. The ants were busily engaged in dragging stuff up the anthills so other ants could push it back down again. There was a saying in the village; "as busy as an ant and twice as nuts." The village was lull of good sayings. Rappi was trying to turn an ant over with a dead cone-pole snake he had found in a bush by sitting on it. There was a wild, crashing noise off in the distance. It sounded like two semi-elephants mating through a knothole in a wooden fence. It sounded like a flamenco dance troupe being raped by a Salvation Army Band. It was loud and seemed to be heading in Rappi's direction. Rappi jumped with fright and dove even farther back into the bushes. Perhaps it is the whistling moose that swallows little boys, thought Rappi. Perhaps it is the big old Wild Man of the Mountains, the toothless one who gummed little children to death whenever he caught them. Perhaps. Rappi crouched flat against the ground in terror, his primitive mind filled with childish fears and superstitions. A grey and white thing with a sunburn and a peeling nose smashed through the bushes and onto the trail right in front of Rappi. Rappi allowed himself to relax a little. It was only the master. But the master was being very much ugly from his feet on up. He was yelling like he had needles through his shirttails and he looked like he had been dragged across the jungle by a slow snake. His shirt was three colors, two of them dirty, and his pants were dirty here and there, being clean mostly ia the places where they had holes. The holes were very clean. It was not a good day for the jungle. He was tearing it up left and right and scorching the air with his language. Rappi decided he would stay in the bush and not bother the master today. Rappi could not think of any saying in the village that covered hiding in the bushes when the master was like he was, but he thought to himself, that there sure ought to be one.    Ideas went through the master like a hiss in his brain. There was a ringing in his ears and a constant pounding at his temples. He smashed through some reeds near the river bank and his shirt caught on a thorbush and came off in two big hunks, and armhole for each hunk. He swore and swung at the bush with his fist. The blood that started flowing out of his hand sobered him a little. It hurt like hell and that brought him a little closer to rationality than he had been all day. It reminded him why he was angry. It was that damn Rappi who had used the last of his shirts to clean out the lizard cages. Or was it Bappi? All those damn aliens looked alike. They even had the same sort of names. Whoever it was, if he ever caught him, he'd flay him to the bone. Of course, that wasn't the real reason he was upset. No, it went deeper than that. It was rain and the legs of a stripper named Candy Boxes. It hadn't rained in seven months. He would have sold his mother for a cup of water. How long had he been drinking the muck the natives of Mintfrappe siphoned out of trees? Had it really been seven months? Seven months of Virpa sap which tasted like something the dog brought home instead of depositing with upraised leg on the fire hy drant. And one of those crotty aliens, how the hell did he know which one, had tried to take the tacks out of the picture of her he had nailed over his bed. Enrico Fermi! Those idiots would eat anything with metal in it! One night he woke up and two of them were under the bed, chewing on his bedsprings. It was one hell of a life. And Candy Boxes, did she care about him? If he wrote her a letter, wouldn't care. She'd just laugh and jump on top of an astronaut. It was depressing. He knew she was laughing at him and running around jumping on astronauts. That was what sent him in desperation into the Planetary Foreign Legion and to this God forsaken planet. She had an uncontrollable urge for astronauts, planetary explorers and spacemen of all types. He could never quite reconcile himself to it somehow. He was always tripping over a spacer's tote bag in the bathroom. There was always somebody shaving in the mirror before he got up in the morning. And they all had tatoos on their arms that said in Old English script He would have had himself tattooed too if he would have thought it would have made any difference to her. It wouldn't have. Candy Boxes liked only what was fashionable and what was fashionable were the brave men who explored space, roaming the galaxy to come back to earth after months of celibacy, homier than hot rabbits with socks on. The in-thing to do was relieve these brave men, to comfort them after their prolonged abstinence. After all, said fVomen's Bare Daily, what greater reward could the women of earth offer these returning heroes? Candy Boxes agreed with that sentiment entirely. She agreed with it everywhere and with everyone. She agreed to it in a variety of positions. That was why Sanderman retired from chiropodist work and signed up for space duty. Did Candy Boxes know her legs were on the wall? Sanderman the master used to beat the little alien girl called Dunchfito because she didn't have Candy Boxes' legs. Dunchfito had her name tattooed on each of her legs, hoping it would help him figure out that he was certainly right about little Dunchfito' s legs not being Candy Boxes' legs. It did not seem to help in any way or clear up the confusion. Dunchfito always got her revenge though. She always waited till he fell asleep then cracked him over the head with a rubber-headed mallet. He always woke up the next morning with a blinding headache and a fuzzy spot on his head that was beginning to soften after several months of nightly poundings. He never woke up when she hit him but he did have reoccuring dreams. Sometimes he dreamed he was a tennis ball, sometimes he dreamed the entire chorus line of a musical variety show was kicking his head in. His dreams did not terrify him but he did wake up a lot of times in the morning with the feeling that the entire population of Mintfrappe had walked across his tongue in their socks. As blood dripped from his thorn-damaged knuckles, waves of grey matter fluttered like clouds in his brain. He just had to mangle something, to bash its stupid breathing face in. Tear its legs off, get hair between his teeth, see pulp, pulp. The more he thought of it, the more he felt like going berserk. He cursed like a madman and went boiling off into the jungle again. He smashed through a particularly thick clump of bushes and fell into the river like an old stuffed duck with loose wings. The river was dry, choked with dust and boulders. He missed the dust. He sat there, numb from his bruised hip up, numb down to the toes too. TTiere he was, a once reasonably intelligent chiropodist, living a comfortable life among the feet of other people, maybe a guy a little too hung up on... Who the hell was doing all that screaming? He looked up on the bank and saw a dimpo bird shrieking like a five alarm fire. Oh Christ, if he only had a gun! He used to have a gun but one of the damn aliens ate it. He'd found the pearl handles with teeth marks in them. That was all that was left. He picked up a rock and heaved it with all his might at the bird but he missed it completely and it flew off screaming even louder. Sanderman gave it up.    Every day Sanderman went a little bit berseik in the jungle. All it had to do was rain. Just once. Just one little, insignificant day of rain and he could get out of there. The river was the only way out and the only way out was dry. The time when the rains should have come was already gone. Long since gone. The only way into the village of Mintfrappe was down the river after the rains came. He had been assigned there until the rains came and his replacement could boat in as he, Sanderman, rode the river out. No one had yet figured out how to make a metal-free airvehicle. The village he was stranded in was surrounded by inpenetrable jungle. A hundred times he had set out to beat his way back to civilization only to return defeated to the village of Mintfrappe. He had tortured dreams of being stuck there forever. What if it never rained ever? What if Candy Boxes ran off and married a lunar module salesman? His life was a nightmare of just such hideous possibilities, made all the more hideous because he was, so to speak, up the river without a river. His anger spent, his hip bruised, he limped back into the village compound with his hands over his ears. He was unable to shut out the inevitable sound of the nutcracker birds the natives kept as pets. There was a continuous cracking sound. Crack. Crack. It continued unabated twenty-four hours a day. Crack. Crack. When they ran out of nuts, they did impressions. Crack. Crack. It brought tears into his eyes. An old purple-headed man crawled out of one of the doorways. package for Doctor Frankenstein. "I hurts my hoofer," said the old man, smiling like he deserved praise. "Will master look, see, view, get eyeball of, leg?" The old man shook his purple head from side to side like a dog suppressing a sneeze. "Nuts!" said Sanderman, with a look of disgust. "Can't you see I'm crazy?" "Eye is ##," said the old man. "You describe, I tell you if see it. What colors is it most of?' ' "Nuts," said Sanderman. The statement had very little feeling left in it by now. "Colors of nuts, most sure," said the old man, falling over as his bad leg collapsed under him without warning. Sanderman bent over him and unwrapped the strip of bark that one of the native women had tied around it. An old dead rat fell out of the wrappings. It was a dead rat of the long-dead variety. "What the hell is this doing in there!" screamed Sanderman. "Lunch," said the old man, innocently. Without a moment of hesitation, Sanderman turned around and tossed his cookies all over the ground. He tossed them in one beautiful, continuous stream that splashed merrily over his shoes. The old man stared at the remains of Sanderman's breakfast with the respectful eye of the gourmet, with the speculative eye of the comparison shopper. Fortunately, Sanderman was unaware of it or he would be bent over even longer, pumping long after his well was dry. "What you say master? You cure leg up? Put the fix cure up?" said the old man, wanting to know. Sanderman, holding his stomach with one hand, picked up the rat with the other and tossed it over his shoulder. "Lunch," said the old man sadly as it flew over Sanderman's shoulder. Sanderman ground his teeth together so hard his gums got flesh wounds and bent over to examine the old man's wound. It reminded him of a girl he knew in New York. The city not the state. She always wore red socks. She had a pimple on her right knee. Or was it her left? He couldn't remember her face but the knees were very familiar. "Filthy!" said Sanderman. "You're dying! I told you! I told you! How many times did I tell you?" "At least," said the old man calmly. The whole leg was rotten. It was falling off. It was so rotten moss was growing on one side of it. It was so rotten the woodpeckers would be after him in a week or two thought Sanderman with what was hardly a rational thought since there were no woodpeckers in Mintfrappe. Everybody was sick with something. It was the national pastime. The climate of Mintfrappe was lousy. The weather featured mild and balmy diseases, festering tomorrow with fever highs in the low hundreds. The village idiot used to have worms in his ears. He had put them there himself. They kept crawling out. He was the only one too stupid to catch something. He was the only healthy one in the whole village and was universally despised. The village idiot was the old man. He finally settled on a surprise amputation which didn't woik. At least not completely. He fainted before he got halfway to the bone of his leg. In that sense, he had failed, but the resultant infection had brought him into his own socially. The fact that he was dying of it was the height of fashion. Of late however, the old man had begun to show a markedly hostile attitude towards the prevailing notions of what was considered fashionable. That was why he was the village idiot. He had a short attention span and could never finish anything. "Will you cure, fix up, me with the stinger in seatbox?" "Get out of here!" roared Sandertnan. "I hope the toes on your other foot fall off too!" "Why thanking you most much," said the old man, smiling happily at the thought.           # E #rd St N.Y., N.Y. # (#) #-# Sanderman watched him limp away and he didn't know whether he was sufosed to be angry or disgusted OT depressed. He worked at trying to be all three but then he thought about the picture on the wall of Candy Boxes' legs and he settled on being suicidally depressed. He still had the urge to kill something, a feeling in no way dampened by the legs on the wall of his cabin. If anything, Candy Boxes' legs were a further incitement to riot. Aren't legs always what cause riots? It seemed that it must be so to Sanderman. A drop of moisture splashed coolly against his forehead. It struck softly but had the effect of an explosion on Sanderman. He leaped into the air, head reared back, mouth open to receive the liquid. Rain! Rain! Rain! His blessed rain! His ticket back to Candy Boxes! A drop of liquid melted on his tongue and his eyes sunk into his head. He looked like he had Just been mounted and stuffed. His eyes looking up, his ears hearing that sound. He gagged. Crack. Crack. He threw up with nothing left to throw up. Those damn nutcracker birds! He fell to the ground, completely fagged from gagging. He'd had quite a day. Sanderman closed his eyes wearily. He could just see it. At this very moment. Candy Boxes would be putting a slug in the juke box back on earth, U.S.A. Back there in Mother Flicker's Bar ing pool, leaning over the table, her boobs sometimes hanging right down into the side pockets when she was lined up just right. It drove him crazy just thinking about it. And she had a pitcher of beer at her table. Ice cold beer and the glass she was pouring it in was almost clean by at least two days. It was driving him crazy. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was the old man again. "Can I eats belt buckle?" asked the old man. "What?" screamed Sanderman, his hand unconsciously straying to the worn metal buckle of his Planetary Foreign Legion issue belt. "What!" "Owed me for lunch rat throwed without being able to find," said the old man, teetering on one leg in front of Sanderman. The old man looked determined. He left Candy Boxes with one of her breasts in the side pocket. He tore the belt off with a kind of lethal frenzy and thrust it at the old man with a vicious swing. The old man fell over sideways with the belt wrapped around his neck. Sanderman seemed unaware of the old man's tumble. Just as the old man began gnawing on his belt buckle. Candy Boxes sank the eight ball and an astronaut reached out and dragged her under the table. Sanderman screamed with impotent fury and went dashing madly off in the direction of the jungle again. He ran headfirst into a tree and that brought him back to his senses, in the sense that he imagined that it knocked the astronaut out. He slid down the side of the tree and rested. Almost in front of him, the bushes parted and a lizard shaped like a volkswagon with a tongue stepped out into the sunlight. The perfect victim. Sanderman's hands squeezed imaginary pulp in anticipation of the lunge. Just as he was ready to spring all # pounds of him on the helpless lizard his attention was distracted by a rather large snake of the unkissably poisonous variety. It was one of those snakes in the who-to-avoid and what-notto-touch category. It had an unpleasant talent for being fatally poisonous. It was a Foogi Snake, the most dreaded reptile on Mintfrappe. The snake oozed toward the lizard which promptly froze in its tracks, its tail going limp as a stock market quotation. "Kill it," shouted Sanderman, aware that the snake needed no cheerleading section. The snake moved on oiled gears, coiling like a crocheted doily just inches from the doomed lizard's snout. The snake moved its head from side to side in a hypnotic, sleepinducing rhythm. "Kill it for me!" whispered Sanderman. Suddenly, a shadow fell over Sanderman and he looked up at the sky. For the first time in months, the sky was full of clouds. "The rain!" he shouted. "The rain!" He was in an absolute delirium, overjoyed to tears. He brought his head back down, taking his eyes off the sky and looked once more at the doomed lizard and the Foogi snake. The Foogi snake had fallen asleep and the lizard had already ingested a third of him. kk ir Two days later, Sanderman pulled what was left of the roof of his shack off of what was left of the rest of his body. It had been one hell of a storm. It had been a real frog strangler. Yes sir, a dust storm like Mintfrappe had never seen before and gale winds up to ninety miles an hour. Dust and more dust and nothing but dust. He spat out dust like an upchucking Sphinx. If there had been something left standing, he would have hung himself from it immediately, but the whole place was flatter ftian Lizzie Borden's love life. He crawled out from under the building slowly. There was a persistent buzzing in his ears. It was increasing in volume. It seemed to be coming from above him. He was afraid to look up for fear his head when once bent back, would continue backwards until it fell off. He took a chance anyway. It was a spaceship. It was preparing to touch down. He blinked his eyes to make sure it was real. It was real. He let out a whoop, staggered to his feet, and began tottering in the direction of the ship. It touched down in a great uprush of dust as the jets fanned the ground, easing the big ship to a soft, nearperfect touchdown. The ramp was down before he got there. The hatch opened as he hit the edge of the ramp. Candy Boxes stood framed in the hatchway, with only her head and torso visible. Sanderman's head stuck to the roof of his mouth. He had her legs etched indelibly on his mind. How he had ached for the touch of them! The sight of them! Glorious legs, wonderful legs of the evening! Like two poles of pearls shifting towards the center of the universe! Legs! Legs like drink-stirring rods made out of honey and satin! Legs that were win, place and show at the hundred dollar window! Legs that played the tuba in the backseat of his mental car! Legs! Legs! He stood paralyzed at the edge of the ramp. Her face didn't exist. The dog had eaten it away much too long ago. It was her legs that were his memory of her. How he longed to tie his tongue around her dimpled knees! How he ached to encircle her ankles with his socks! She stepped through the archway and came toward him. She seemed taller. She was. She stood on two bright aluminum legs that gleamed bristly beneath her. Her steps were smooth and fluid. "Sanderman!" she cried. "I've come back to you! My long lost lover! My spaceman hero! Rescued at last!" His mouth fell open in an imitation of the Grand Canyon. "Oh, you noticed!" she said coyly. "Why, artificial legs are all the rage back on earth now! You know me, always keeping up with the latest fashions. How do you like them dear? Don't you think their gleam is positively sinful? ,    He fainted and fell back into the dust like a meteor entering the atmosphere. There was a burning finality to his faint. He died right there and then of a broken heart. "Jeez," said Candy Boxes, "he was overcome with emotion."    If only he had known that Candy Box's own precious originals were carefully, cryrogenically stored away for future use, and that he could have had them for himself alone, not even sharing them with Candy Boxes! Such is the stuff of which great tragedies are made, ir Human Alpha was not In Errorl Human alpha said to Human Beta, "Go Dismantle." For a moment the four Guardians were motionless in the control room of Narcopolis #. Outside the room, in the vast pyramidal vault that surrounded them, there was only the whispering sound of nutrient pumps, exhaust fans, and hibernating humans dreamt of love or battle or boredom. "Go Dismantle!" Human Beta was confused, and so hesitated until the conditioned phrase filtered through his brain and connected solidly with motor reflexes. Then he sighed and turned away, going directly to the Dismantling chute. Human Alpha smiled and looked back at the two robots, who were watching the situation without comment. There was no way to tell what they were thinking. Their smooth ovoid heads were sheeted in white rubber, exactly featureless. Human Beta, the other human Guardis, reached the chute, braced his hands on the sides of the opening, and jumped in. The last they saw of him was the pink bald head, the broad black-suited back, and the large white letter B disappearing into the dark. The last they heard was a faint sucking noise. Human Alpha turned back to his control board, humming. He was making a feelie tape of the Dismantling of Human Beta. The two white-jumpsuited androids got up simultaneously and stood behind the human, who was busy augmenting the tape. It was their job to oversee the human Guardians, just as it was the humans' responsibility to guard against robotic failure. Qieck and countercheck, the Narcopolis was secured against operator error. Now, for some reason of his own, one of the human Guardians had cancelled his partner. It needed looking into... "What are you doing!" asked Robot Alpha. The human slipped the tape from the recorder and dropped it down Robot Alpha tapped him on the shoulder. "What?" said the human. "Don't bother me!" "If you subject the population to the death trauma of Human Beta they will be damaged." Human Alpha turned from the console and looked at the robot with the black A on its chest. The robot scanned him in turn. The human was the twin of his Dismantled partner -- dressed in black jumpsuit, hairless, serene. He had a white A on his chest. "Robot Alpha?" "Yes." "Go Dismantle." It was the cancellation code again and it was not to be ignored. This time there was no hesitation. it It ir Now there were two Gardians in the control room of Narcopolis #. Human Alpha turned back to the console and punched up a universal feelie playback. Throughout the vault, tapes were changing. Ending abruptly were wars and romances, games of tennis and banking, dreams of heroism and degradation. Now began, in excruciating detail and amplified sense, the Dismantling of Human Beta. Repeat, repeat, repeat... Within twenty minutes there were vault. Virtually no-one over four hundred survived the trauma, and thousands died who had been in the vault only two centuries, the last to go in. The human turned again from the console, but before he could speak. Robot Beta said, "Human Alpha, you are in error. Go Dismantle." The human laughed. "No. You Dismantle. I mean, 'Go Dismantle.' " The robot hesitated, then said, "I cannot Dismantle as long as another unresolved order to Dismantle remains in my data banks. You must Dismantle first, then I can Dismantle." "Stalemate, huh?" "So it appears. We'll have to call for Arbitration. First, though, the population must be restored to normal programming." The robot reached into the console and set up a random selection from the old tapes, from bins marked Bread, Mystery, and Authority. Inside the vault, the remaining thirty-seven or life, while draincocks opened to the flow of adrenaline now filtering out of bloodstreams. Automatic body removal began, clattering noisily. Robot Beta crossed the room to the Inspector's Closet and opened the door. Inside, a humanoid waited, dressed in black robes. His fleshoid face retained an expression of patient benevolence; his eyes were closed, shadowed by the black hood of Arbitration. The Inspector held penultimate responsibility to the sleeping Designers of Narcopolis System, and his terminalbodies waited vacantly in five hundred identical control rooms. His stem plast-flesh face evoked a sense of trust in the human Guardians. The robot Guardian parted the black robe on the humanoid chest and revealed an electric sign: The Inspector is out It pushed the call button and stepped back. In a moment the Inspector's mind arrived via satellite, the body chimed and jumped, the sign changed: The Inspector is in The Inspector stepped into the control room, blinking and smiling. In a deep, soothing voice he said, "What seems to be the problem?" Robot Beta leaned toward the Inspector, as if offering its dinosauregg-head for benediction. "Hey, no fair!" cried the human. "You gotta talk out loud so I know what lies you're telling." Robot Beta stepped back and said, "The least of it is that we need two new Guardians; one human, one robot. We've experienced two Dismantlings here lately, in addition to substantial population attrition. The Inspector crossed to the console and plugged a finger into the computerlog. "This is unusual," he said. Jerking his finger out of the jack. "Furthermore," said Robot Beta, "we need Arbitration on a pair of unresolved Dismantle orders." "I see." The Inspector repeated a code that cancelled both orders, then he commenced his inspection. "You're lucky I was free," he said. "I just completed Arbitration at N# and N# and N#, and I'm still inspecting a dozen or so Narcopoles on my routine schedule. There appears to be some trouble in the System." The human stood close by, sullenly picking at a seam behind the Inspector's fleshoid ear. The Inspector was starting to unravel. "Don't ask me why I did it," said Human Alpha. "I just had an impulse to Dismantle my partner and run the tape for the population." He smiled at the Inspector and peeled a sheet of fleshoid off his cheek. (It was stainless steel underneath.) "My son, you must fight these impulses." "I try." He picked at the Inspector's lips, then with both hands tore off the mouth, along with a comer of the nose. "You may face severe discipline," the Inspector was saying through a circle of grillwork under where the mouth had been. "So what?" "Inspector, this human Guardian's erratic behavior is quite recent. He has in general performed his duties excellently." "Shut up," Human Alpha said, pulling the Inspector's nose up and out. The fleshoid flap crackled and popped as it lifted from the ovoid steel head. The eyes came off with the sockets. The Inspector reached up and touched the human's hand. "What are you doing there?" "Never mind." The Inspector, whose vision perceptors were located in his head, barely realized his face was being peeled off. "Why did you refuse a lawful Dismantling order?" Human Alpha paused. "I really don't know. When I heard him say it, I got all warm inside, and I half-wanted to do it, to go Dismantle, but there -- " (The Inspector murmured the neutralizing code.) " -- there was something stopping me." "What was it?" The human shook his head slowly, then thoughtfully peeled off the final bit. The Inspector's face was in his hands, and a silver ovoid now gleamed through a fine net of adhesive. The black cowl was snapped to the skull over bald steel. The Inspector said, "You have to be Probed, you know." "I guess so." "Give me your hands." The human discarded the Inspector's face and placed his hands in the Inspector's cold gloves. Their heads inclined and touched. Human Alpha felt an electric pulse stroke his brain, opening blossoms of light in the sightless dark. Unconscious urgings probed upward, piercing the calm surface of his awareness, twisting into half-formed comAn Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Featured in ##; An Interview with Lester del Rey "A Box of Speculations" by George R. R. Martin. "Noise Level" by John Brunner. "A Short One For the Boys In The Backroom" by Barry Malzberg. An Interview with a Pseudonym: Aian Burt Akers. The SF Art Review Column: "The Gimlet Eye" by John Gustafson. Many letters and reviews "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint." Scheduled for ##; An Interview with Kelly Freas Quarterly sample I year # two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I mands. Something enormous and compelling lurked just beneath... "Oh, dear," said the Inspector. "I seem to see..." The human jumped back and fell over his swivel chair, his face red and blotched. He squirmed a moment in palsied excitation, then leapt to his feet shouting some gibberish. Robot Beta said, "This human has gone awry." The Inspector nodded stiffly. "It is some bit of his conditioning coming to the surface." "Whe-wh-wh-when-n-n-na-coo-o!" "Will he die?" "I don't know." "When-na-corso-so-hyu-hu-huhuum!" "You will have to order a new pair of humans from Supply," said Robot Beta. "We shall see." "When-nana-courso-hyu-hyuumanavventz!" The Inspector bent his gleaming head toward the human. "I beg your pardon?" "What's he saying?" "Listen." " When-in-th-courz-of-humanevenss!" Suddenly the Inspector stood up straight and quivered. A bell chimed in his chest and he was gone for a full minute. Robot Beta scanned the red-faced human. "Now look what you've done!" The bell rang again, and the Inspector said, "Everything is all right. Robot Beta, go Dismantle." it ir  It was done. The human sat back in his chair breathing hard, his eyes slowly unglazing. "What?" "Do what you will in this Narcopolis," the Inspector was saying. "Destroy it if you must; you won't be stopped." "I don't understand." "You are designated Random Destroyer by your conditioning. You must be allowed to do your work unmolested. This information was released to me from my data banks when you spoke the coded phrase. I have checked, there are others of you coming out in all the Narcopoles. It may be that the time of Man is done. In any case the plans were sealed centuries ago, long before the last human went into the vaults." "I'm supposed to tear down the Narcopolis? Kill all the population?" "Probably. I don't know. Perhaps some -- the best -- will survive." "Why?" The Inspector shuddered silently. "My data banks instruct me to answer your question with a word I do not know." "What word?" " 'Mercy.' "  Three mittion years after his birth, and death by cancer, and revival as a set of memories programmed into a brain-wiped State criminal, and theft of a Bussard ramjet spacecrpft, Corbett returns to Earth to die. He's a fragile old man with a few years to live, at best. The solar system looks like God took an eggbeater to it. The sun has become far hotter; so has Jupiter. Uranus, if that's Uranus, has lost some atmosphere and is out of its orbit. Earth is in orbit about Jupiter. But to Corbett the most interesting question is, where is the Dictator immortality? A different form of immortality has been in vogue for a couple of mittion years. It must be used on preadolescents: children of around eleven. These grow no older. They live forever, with luck, and they don't have children, so there is no population problem. There are other problems. It seems that Earth's colonies attacked and then abandoned Earth when the State on Earth went to children's immortality. Then the Boys and Girls fought a firud war. Girls are now extinct, and the Boys have become savages, retaining only a few pre-War skills. But there was once a form of longevity that worked on adults. a menomaniacal old woman with a remarkable weapon, is hunting it. She has set Corbett to hunting it too. If she hunts Corbett down and he doesn't have it, the result may be death by torture. The mad crone is sure that the Dictator immortality is around, after a And she's right! Corbett has become a young man! The trouble is that he has no idea where he ran across Dictator immortality on his crooked path from North America (uninhabitably hot) to Antarctica (lush and green, the only such on Earth). The Boys want it too. Corbett is their prisoner. By now they know that Corbett doesn't know anything. They watched Corbett make a fool of himself, throwing a cat-tail into an adult's face on the hunch that a cat-tail bite carried the longevity serum. If the Boys get Dictator immortality they may destroy the source. It is the major difference between them and the adults (Dicta), the Boys' slaves and breeding stock. white-haired old ttuin, now sporting a wound on his neck. He too is the Boys' prisoner. He may be Corbett's sonality in Corbett's shipboard computer, has abandoned him. In any case, Miretty-Lyra now has Corbett's pressure suit helmet including the radio link with Peerssa. Corbett is up for punishment for hiding from the Boys his suspicions about the cat-tail bite. The Boys have marched into the ruined city, Parhalding. Only the hospital has been kept in good corulition... and Corbett wonders if he is Ux be dissected. He is unprepared when Gording suddenly kills two Boys and escapes. Boys were holding his arms. And the rest were charging after Gording. Corbell's military training was far in the past, but he remembered. Stamp down along the shin; the enemy doubles up, you twist and bring your elbow up -- His captors faded like ghosts from his blows, and a swinging arm caught him precisely across the eyes. He was dizzy and half blind as they led him up flights of stairs. 'They'll have him soon," he heard Skatholtz say. "He's got thread. We'll have to test every doorway," said Krayhayft. "Thread is too near invisible, and if it caught a Boy across the throat -- come, Corbell." They had climbed four flights of stairs and gone down a corridor. Corbell looked into an operating room. Four tables, and spidery metal arms above them. "Noo!" Corbell thrashed. Your pain will be instructive to you and to us. They were going to dissect him! TTiey pulled him to an operating table and fastened him spreadeagled, face up. "You can't be sure you know everything I know," he called to Krayhayft's receding back. Nuts, he was gone. But Skatholtz hoisted himself to sitting position on another table. "Skatholtz, if you destroy my brain, you lose the only viewpoint that isn't just like you own! Now think about that!" "We're not going to ruin your brain. At least I think we're not. There is that risk." "What are you going to do?" "We're going to entertain each other. ' ' Then Krayhayft came jogging back with a flask of... blood plasma? Clear fluid, anyway. He reached over Corbell' s head and nested it somehow among the tooltipped steel arms. Corbell thought. Tell them about the car! He swallowed the idea. If his sympathy lay with anyone besides himself, it was with the dikta. Let Cording escape if he could. A spidery steel arm descended. Its hypodermic tip hesitated above him, then dipped into his neck. Krayhayft's strong hands held his head immobile for an endless time. Then the hypo withdrew and the arm retracted into its nest. Corbell waited. Would the stuff put him to sleep? Or only paralyze him? But Skatholtz was releasing his arms and ankles and pulling him to his feet. Corbell swayed. TTie stuff was doing something to him. They took him up three more flights of stairs and down a corridor and into a small theater. They dropped him into a cloud-rug chair. Dust puffed up around him. He sneezed and tried to get up, but he was too dizzy. Something was happening to his mind. Krayhayft was at work behind him somewhere. The theater went dark. Lights glowed in the dark, infinitely far away. Stars: the black sky of interstellar space. Corbell found familiar constellations, distorted... and then something told him where he was. into me! You dirty sons of bitches." he cried in English. "You did it again!" "Corbell -- " "What'll I be this time? What have you made me into?" "You'll keep your memory," said Skatholtz, also in English. "You'll remember things you never lived through. You'll tell us. Watch the show." He was nearly sixty light-years from Sol, viewing what had been the State. A voice spoke in a language Corbell had never heard. He didn't try to understand it. He watched with a familiar fascination. thought in the back of his mind. In thin defiance, But I'm still a lousy loser. Certain stars glowed more brightly than others... and planetary systems circled them, greatly enlarged for effect. Now all but two of these systems turned sullen red... turned enemy. These were the worlds that had turned against the State. One of the red systems sparkled and faded into the background, its colony destroyed. The neutral systems went red. Two more systems faded out. The view closed on Sol system... on more of Sol system than Corbell had known, with three dark gas giants beyond Pluto, and countless swarming comets. Fleets of spacecraft moved out toward the renegade colonies. Other fleets invaded. Sometimes they came like a hornet's nest, many ships clustered around a Bussard ramjet core. Sometimes like a Portuguese man-of-war; thousands of ships as weights around the fringe of a great silver light-sail. Early fleets included hospit ships and return fuel; later there were massive suicide attacks. It went on for centuries. The State utopia became a subsistence civilization, turning all its surplus energy to war. The fleets moved at just less than lightspeed. News of success or failure or need for reinforcements moved barely faster. The State was Boys and Girls and Dictators all united for the common good. Corbell hurt with the loss of that unity. He watched a beam of light bathe Sol system: laser cannon fired from Farside Colony, launching warships by light-sail at terrific accelerations. The ships dropped their sails and decelerated most of the way to Sol, arriving just behind the beam itself, long before the State could prepare. Corbell squirmed in his chair; he wanted to cry warning. For the State beat the invaders back, but failed to stop their hidden treachery. The war continued. Farside, economically ruined by its effort, fell before the counterattack. It took a man's lifetime... too much time, before Astronomy noticed what the Farside traitors had done in the dark outside their dazzling light beam, in the distraction provided by the invasion. The State had looked for the light of fusion spacecraft, not the dim watery light of a new planet. The trans-Plutonian planet called Persephone had had a peculiar orbit, tilted nearly vertical to the plane of the solar system. Its new path had already taken it deep into the system. The State worked to learn how the enemy had done it. It learned at last, but not in time. It could not stop the gas giant world from impacting, not Earth itself, but a larger target. Corbell saw the hideous flare as # tons of hydrogen and hydrogen-compound ices struck the sun at Solar-escape velocity. Oceans shrank, crops withered, State could place a disk of reflecting tinsel between Earth and Sol. It was a temporary measure. The sun's new heat was permanent, at least on the human scale of time. Fusion would run faster in Sol's hotter interior. The buried heat would leak to the photosphere and out. One chance the State had for survival. It could move the Earth by the method Farside had used to stop Persephone cold in its orbit. "Do you understand what you're seeing?' ' Corbell made a shushing gesture. "Yeah." "Good. We were afraid. The lightshow and the bottled memory are both very old. They date from the end of the rule of the Girls. They have been stored at the lowest possible heat for... perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps more. We feared they must have decayed," said Skatholtz. "So you tried it on me." But his anger seemed impersonal, remote. The State had had to abandon the Mercury mines: a serious industrial handicap. Nonetheless they were building something out there in the asteroid belt... something huge, like a starship big enough to cany the whole human race to safety. But no, that wasn't it. Corbell was fascinated. He knew it might be the nated anyway. He hardly heard what Skatholtz was saying: "It was sensible, Corbell. The Girls who made the light-show ruled the sky. You are familiar with such things. Do you know now where the new moon came from?' ' "Not yet. Shut up and let me..." They had finished the thing. Two tubes, concentric, each a hundred miles long; the inner tube a mile wide, with thick walls of complex construction; the outer tube thinner and twice as wide. At one end, a bell-shaped rocket nozzle. At the other... Corbell knew more than he was seeing. Reworked military laser cannon, and vents, and a flared skirt, and thick stubby fins, there at the bottom end. Now temporary liquid hydrogen tanks were attached. Now the structure moved under its own power... it was a tremendous fusion motor... moving outward, circled by tiny ships... yeah. Corbell said, "How do you climb down off an elephant?" "Should I know that?" "You don't climb down off an elephant. You climb down off a duck." "Why?" "It's so much safer. How do you move the Earth?" Small wonder if the light-show meant little to Skatholtz. Watching the constmction of the motor, in the naked sunlight and sharp-edged, totally black shadows of space, was bewildering. The diagrams made sense to an architect, but they were only rotating lines to Skatholtz. But without bottled memory and without Corbell' s career in space, Skatholtz was still bright enough to make some sense of what he was seeing. "You move something else," Skatholtz said. "The damage done by the rocket's thrust and by misttes you might make will not kill anyone if nobody lives on the working body. Then the working body can be moved until the world falls toward it as a rock falls to the ground. What was the working body? Ganymede?' ' "Uranus. Can you stop the light-show at that picture?" The lecture froze on an "artist's conception": a blurred, curved arc of Uranus's upper atmosphere. The motor looked tiny floating there. Corbell said, "You see? It's a double-walled tube, very strong under expansion shock. It floats vertical in the upper air. Vents at the bottom let in the air, which is hydrogen and methane and ammonia, hydrogen compounds, like the air that the sun bums. You fire laser cannon up along the axis of the motor, using a... color hydrogen won't let through. You get a fusion explosion along the axis." "I don't understand all your words. Fusion?" "Fusion is the way a star bums. You probably used fusion bombs against the Girls." "Okay. The hydrogen fusions in the middle of the motor -- " " -- And the explosion goes out and up. It's hottest along the axis, cooler when it reaches the walls of the motor. The whole mass blasts out the top, through the flared end. It has to have an exhaust velocity way higher than Uranus's escape velocity. The motor goes smashing down into deeper air. You see there's a kind of flared skirt at the bottom. The deep air builds up there at terrific pressure, stops the tube and blasts it back up. You fire it again." "Elegant," said Skatholtz. "Yeah. Nobody's there to get killed. Control systems in orbit. The atmosphere is fuel and shock absorber both -- and the planet is mostly atmosphere. Even when it's off the motor floats high for awhile, because it's full of not hydrogen compounds. If you let it cool off it sinks, of course, but you can bring it back up to high atmosphere by heating the tube with the laser, firing it almost to fusion. Start the light-show again, will you?" Skatholtz barked something at Krayhayft. Corbell watched: Earth held out, barely. Heatsuperconducting cables had to be mn to the north polar cap to borrow died anyway. No children were bom; there wasn't shelter for them. It took over a century to drop ahead of the Earth in Earth's orbit. The planet accelerated slowly, drawing Earth after it...and then sped up, to leave Earth behind, in a wider orbit. They lost the Moon. The sun expanded via its own internal heat. Light was reddened, but the greater surface lost more heat to space... to Earth. By now the Girls had charge of Uranus and the floating fusion motor. They moved the Earth again. Five times the Earth had to be moved. At one time it was circling precisely opposite Mars. Later, further out. Internally Sol's fusion furnace had stabilized; but the photosphere was still growing. And the Earth must be moved a sixth time... Corbell said, "Here's where they have their trouble." The Earth was too warm. There is a region around any stable sun, a rather narrow band in which an Earthlike world can have Earthlike temperatures. But Sol's ideal temperature band had moved too close to Jupiter. The giant world would have pulled Earth out of orbit...perhaps into a collision course. Put Earth in orbit around Jupiter itself? But the sun's heat output was levelling off. The Earth would suffer a permanent ice age... unless Jupiter could be made to shine hotter. "I can't figure that last part," said Corbell. "Run it again." Krayhayft ran it again. Two nearly identical astronomical scenes divided by a wall across space. Corbell watched Uranus pull away from Earth, drop behind Ganymede and coast outward. Ganymede fell... twice. In one scene it grazed Jupiter, flaring as it passed through the atmosphere a dozen times, finally decaying in a prolonged burst of hellfire. In the second scene the fleck of light dropped straight in: one flare, and gone. "Yeah. They tried to be clever," said Corbell. "They thought they were good enough to do a twoshot. They used Uranus to pull the Earth past Jupiter, slowed it to put the Earth in Jupiter orbit, then dropped Uranus deep into the moon system. The idea was to stop Ganyme almost dead in its tracks. Of course the maneuver fouled up a lot of lunar orbits." "What went wrong?" "I'm not sure. The Girls wanted a grazing orbit. Instead the moon dropped straight in. But so what?" Skatholtz made no answer. "Let's see. Jupiter puts out more heat than it gets from the sun. That's heat left over from when the planet fell in on itself out of the years ago... my years. So the planet could hold heat and leak it out for a long, long time. But the energies should be the same no matter what angle the moon fell at." "This impact, would it cause fusion? Would Jupiter bum?" "Jupiter's too small to bum like a star. Not enough mass, not enough pressure. But yeah, there 'd be a hell of a lot of pressure in the shock wave ahead of Ganymede. And heat." "Difficult to add up?" "What?" Skatholtz said, "The numbers of the heat made by a grazing fall should be simple. They knew the mass of Ganymede and the height of the fall. The Girls could add up just how much hotter Jupiter would become to warm the world just enough. But. The heat made by fusion is too complicated to add. The Girls made their numbers simple with the grazing orbit. Would the heat added be great?" Corbell was nodding. "Look: the center of Jupiter is compressed hydrogen, really compressed, to where it acts like a metal. Ganymede drops straight in. The fusion goes on in the shock wave, and it adds, it builds up: the continuous fusion explosion makes the shock wave greater and greater. The heat from that explosion has been leaking out ever since." "I can't picture this, Corbell. Does it make sense to you?" "Yeah. They lost a moon, and it killed them. Uranus was on its way into interplanetary space. The Girls couldn't bring it back in time. Their territory was too hot. They tried to take Boy territory." Corbell became aware that the show had ended. New memories settling in his brain still dizzied him. But he still felt like Jaybee Corbell. His personality seemed intact. Skatholtz said, "Then the new moon-like object is Uranus. Some Girls must have survived. What can we do? We don't have spacecraft. We can't build them fast enough. Corbell, could we use your landing craft?" "No fuel." Corbell laughed suddenly. "What would you do with a spacecraft? Ram Uranus? Or learn to fly it?" "You're hiding something." "I don't believe in your Girls. If they survived this long, they would have done something long ago." Uranus's arrival was too dramatically fortuitous. Such a coincidence had to be explained away; and Corbell had thought of an explanation. Well... try misdirection. "Could they have held out in the Himalayas? There's life in some of the high valleys. They'd be a long time building industry there." "Your place names mean nothing." Skatholtz helped him stand up. "Can you point out this Himalayas place on a picture of the world? There was one downstairs." I The stairway was a long diagonal across the building's glass face. The bannister jogged to horizontal at six landings; otherwise it ran straight down to the admissions room. Skatholtz and Krayhayft spat Boyish at each other. Corbell caujght some of the detail: Skatholtz telling the tale as it had come from Corbell, Krayhayft checking it against "tales" memorized over several hundred years of life. There was something Italian in the way their hands jumped and their mouths spat syllables; but their faces were blank. Scared, Corbell thought. The "tales" matched too well. Corbell tried to set his thoughts in order. He'd been given far too much to assimilate all at once. Girls could have survived this long. Peerssa had found pockets of life in isolated places. But they would have acted! Unbelievable, that Corbell could have returned just delayed vengeance. Which meant -- He had to escape. It had been urgent. It was more urgent now. Could Boys slide down a bannister? Unlikely that they'd ever practiced. But Corbell hadn't practiced recently... "They were fools," Krayhayft was saying. "They should have chosen several smaller moons to drop one by one." "You're the fool," Corbell snapped, surprising himself. "It would have taken too long to bring Uranus back each time. It would have fouled up too many orbits. We're talking about a planet ten times as big as this world!" "So big that the Girls lost track of its path," Krayhayft sneered. Skatholtz was saying, "The dance of Jupiter's moons is very complex -- " While Corbell was saying, "You arrogant ball-less idiot -- Casual, contemptuous, Krayhayft' s backhand swipe caught him under the jaw and lifted him and flung him back on the steps. "The bottled memory has given you too much of the Girls' view," Krayhayft said. "And whose fault is that?" Skatholtz pulled Corbell to his feet. His elbow hurt furiously, but he thought he hadn't broken anything, and that was fiercely important now. Still, it was just as well he hadn't tried the bannister. Two Boys were waiting below them in the admissions room. They waited for the leaders to descend. One was young, two or three Jupiter years old by Corbell's estimate. He burst into speech as if he wanted to get it over with; "Gording is still loose. He has not used a prilatsil. The thread he took was mine. He must have brushed against me and taken it from my belt. I didn't notice." "Where is he?" Skatholtz demanded. "He went north and east, until we lost his track. Toward the edge of Parhalding." "It may be he doesn't know about the -- " something Corbell couldn't catch. "Search the streets but not the buildings. That way he cannot trap you with thread. He may be trying to reach the dikta place on foot. We can stop him then. Or he may try to take a tchiple -- " an unfamiliar word. "Look for undamaged tchiples. Damage them. Tell the others." The younger Boy ran, eager to be gone. What was a tchiplel A bubblecar? How did the Boys know whether Gording had used a "phone booth"? "You must retrace our path," Skatholtz told the other Boy. "Warn all you meet that dikt is loose. Gording must not return to the dikta place." He wheeled suddenly and barked, "You are staring, Corbell. Do we fascinate you?" "Very much. Couldn't Gording use a prilatsil without your knowing?" "No." Skatholtz smiled. He pointed at the wall map. "That is a picture of the world, isn't it? An old one, made when ice stiU covered this land." "Yes. Can I use your spear?" That was sheer bravado; he wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that Skatholtz handed Corbell his spear. The younger Boys were gone, but Skatholtz and Krayhayft betrayed no obvious tension... Corbell pointed with the haft. "Theseare the Himalayas, mountains. There are valleys high up, where it is cooler. From orbit I saw green things growing there. Further north, here on the Sea of Okhotsk, energy is being used for industry. It may be only machines left running, but -- " "It could be Girls. Would it be too hot for them? No, the pole is near enough. But you don't think so, Corbell." "No. Why would they wait so long? How would they build spaceships?" 'We don't know how spaceships are built." Skatholtz looked through the broken picture window, toward where the new planet would appear at dark. "If Uranus is falling free, we can do nothing. If the Girls are guiding it... what will they do? Smash the world? Make it cold again and take back their land? You knew Girls, Corbell." "I knew dikta women." "There may be Girls still in the world. We can threaten them... or can we? Uranus will be upon us before we can reach these places. Krayhayft -- " Far down the street, Corbell caught motion. "Your spear," he said, holding it out. Skatholtz turned to take the spear. In that position he missed seeing what Corbell saw: a bubblecar skimming trees at ninety miles per hour, dropping and slowing. Krayhayft must have caught something in Corbell's face. He ran forward, crying, "Alert!" Startled, Skaftoltz glanced back. Corbell jumped out the window. The Boys had quick reactions. As Corbell crossed the splinters of glass a spear haft rapped his ankles hard, threw him off balance. He curled tight and hugged his knees. Instead of landing on his head he fell on his shoulders in high com. Skatholtz was coming through the window in a graceful swan dive. Corbell rolled, found his feet and ran. Krayhaft threw his machete. It slashed viciously at Corbell's calves as it spun past. Krayhayft screamed, "Stop or e!" Skatholtz barked from close behind him. "Veto! He knows something!" Corbell dug in. The bubble-car had stopped just at the entrance. Through the torn vines that still wrapped it Corbell saw white hair and white beard. Gording reached across to open the door. He was holding a stick against the door post. Why? Hell with it. He threw himself in, thrashed to turn around. Skatholtz was right there -- gaping in horror, skidding to a panic stop. Corbell slammed the door in his face. Then he realised that Gording must have strung thread across the door. It might have cut his hand off. Hell with that too. "Go!" "I don't know the codes," said Gording. "Oh, for -- " Corbell jabbed five times at the compressed hour-glass figure. It was the first thing he thought of, and it was good enough: the World Police Headquarters in The car surged away. Corbell looked back... straight into Skatholtz's eyes, before the Boy prudently dropped from the car. He'd lost his spear. It should have been lying in the street behind him, but it wasn't. Blood was running from Corbell's calves into the spongy stuff that lined the car's interior. Nothing he could do about it. He didn't even have clean cloth to bind his cuts. They stung. Gording said, "Wind the thread around the rock. Do it now, before you cut yourself." Corbell obeyed. The thread was thin as cobweb, hard to find. He was careful. The car jerked to left and right, dodging bushes, trees, random rubble. II He had fled from the Nom in a car that was deathly silent except for the wind. But now he heard a low, almost subliminal whine. "How old is this -- tchiple? Was it in good shape? I didn't think to ask." "I don't repair tchiples. They must have safety devices. The Boys who built them expected to live forever. Where are we going?" spend the long night. It's got machines we can use, maybe. Next question is, does it have Boys?" "Not yet, I think. I don't really know." "We'll have to risk it. My God!" Corbell was staring at something that could have meant his death by stupidity. "I never thought of it at all. I didn't have a credit disk. How was I going to run a car?" He asked, "How did you happen to have one?" "The tales tell that name coins were used when the Girls ruled. I reasoned that when the land thawed the bodies of the dead would be buried outside the city to make the land fertile. There I fled, and there I dug, and I was right. Boys and Girls must have died by the thousand when the Girls came. I found bones and bones all tangled together, and some wore clothes, and in the clothes I found name coins. I tried them in the slot of a tchiple. One coin still kept its pattern." He regarded Corbell dubiously. "You did not remember that you would need a name coin?" Corbell flushed. "There was a lot to think about." "I might have been luckier in my ally." "I guess. Thanks for coming back for me." "I had to, because you made another mistake. Does this car guide itself?" The car's motion had settled down. Now Corbell saw that they had left Parhalding and were skimming across an endless rippling field of wheat. He said, "Unless Skatholtz's spear... yeah, it guides itself." ' 'Then look at my hair. ' ' There was nothing at all peculiar about Gording's hair. It had grown a little tangled, a little greasy, but it was uniformly white... five days after the cat-tail had bitten Gording. Gording broke an embarrassed silence. "Will I go back to the dikta? Will I tell them that there is dikta immortality, but Corbell has lost it? We have to find it, Corbell." "I don't believe it. The cat-tails weren't... I don't believe it! Damn it, Gording, there was no kind of injection except that cat-tail bite!" "Something you ate or drank or inhaled. You may have felt odd afterward. Sick. Elated. Disoriented." "Getting old is more complicated than that. There are... Do yoi know how people get old?" Gording sprawled comfortably in his seat, facing Corbell. The old man showed no sense of urgency. "If I knew everything about aging I would make dikta immortality. I know general things. Substances build up in the body like... the ashes of a dying fire. Some the body can handle without help. It collects them into garbage places for storage and ejects them. Some harmful stuff can be removed from the walls of blood vessels and the tissues of the brain by the right medicines. Dust and smoke that collects in the lungs can be washed away. Without the hospital we would die much faster. "But some...ashes collect in the smallest living parts of the body. No organ can remove them. I can imagine a chemical, a medicine, that would change these substances to other substances that the -- " just guessing, aren't you? We know there's dikta immortality, but we don't know how it does what it does. How does a Boy's body do it?" Gording gestured negation: a brushing stroke with the hand. "That's the wrong line of thought. Dikta immortality came first. It must be more primitive, less indirect. -- Corbell, relax. Nothing can happen until the tchiple stops. We should rest." "I feel a strong urge to beat my head against something hard. When I think of how I pushed you into jumping me and then threw a cattail in your face, teeth first..." He didn't know Boyish for I'm sorry. "How oddly you think. You know what you expected. Young and strong and black-haired Cording would throw his arms around your knees and cry wetly into your incredibly hairy chest and offer you his women..." Gording laughed. "Yes, I know you think that way. No, they are not my women. They are their own, and I am my own, as and when the Boys let us rule ourselves. Do you remember how the women acted when you spoke of one man to every woman?' ' "Ah... vaguely." "You must have lived strangely. Don't you know that there are times when a woman doesn't want a man? What does he do then? Borrow a woman whose contract is to another man?" Gording was thoroughly amused. And his relaxation was contagious. Corbell settled himself lower in the recline chair. He said, "You'll find out, if we get our dikta immortality." Gording looked startled. "I think you're right. We would have to free ourselves from the Boys. Raise our boy-children to immortal adults. Slowly the number of women to each man would drop toward one. But -- " He smiled. "It would take centuries." They could see the rain sweeping toward them across the wheat. It exploded against the front of the car. Against the thunder of the rain Corbell raised his voice: "Have you ever tried to escape?" "We sent scouts. Many were dikta men in their second year, come recently from rejection by the Boys. They were too young to be wise, of course, but they could shave their groins and faces and pass as Boys. Some were brought back with their memories gone. I think the others would have returned if they could. Some women tried to scout for us during the long night. None of them came back." The rain drummed out the hum of the motor. Corbell asked, "Did you ever think of escaping by sea?' ' "Of course, but how could we hide a sea vessel from the Boys? Corbell, you've been across the sea. Is there land? Does life grow there, or is it too hot?" "There's life, but it doesn't grow as thick as it does here, and it's different life. I know you can eat some of it, because Mirelly-Lyra fed me a fair variety. It was hot there, but seen sea vessels big enough to hold all of Dikta City, lether they still float is something else." "Where?" "On what used to be the sea bed, a short day's march from where the sea is now." Cording mulled it over. "Three problems. Getting the sea vessel to the sea. The risk we take if the Boys catch us at it. Third and worst, what will we tell our men when they are grown? That we stole them from immortality? If we find the dikta immortality, Corbell, we can make the dikta flee to Four City." "It itches at me. I had it all figpointed to the cat-tails... Listen, Maybe it's only the male cat-tails, or only the females, or only the grey striped. Whatever the Boys didn't take along to the dikta place." "Flay me alive if you must. The stakes are high. You'd be dead long since if you didn't guess right sometimes." Corbell settled further into the spongy material. The drumming rain was a comfortable, homey, safe sound. Presently he fell asleep. In his dream he was running, running. Ill Something threw him violently forward. Something soft exploded in his face and threw him back. Now pressure pinned him fast while he spun violently head over heels. He tried to get up and found he couldn't so much as twitch a finger. He tried to scream and he couldn't breath! Nightmare! Running down the hospital corridors, can't get enough air -- the booths in the vault! -- don't work. Out of the vault, searching for instant-elsewhere booths -- turn a comer and -- the Norn! Paralyzed even to his diaphragm and closed eyelids, his sense of balance gone crazy, he tries again to scream. The cane! But his scream blew air through... through the stuff across his face. He gasped, and some air leaked through, slowly. Porous stuff across his face. Right, and the hospital was long ago. The spinning stopped. He thought he was upside down. Let's see, he'd been with Cording... in a car... The pressure was easing up. He thrust forward with his hands. The stuff gave like... a balloon. He worked an arm sideways, found the door, then the handle. Wrestled it open. He squirmed against the porous balloon, edged sideways, and finally dropped out on his head. The car was upside down in wet, scraggy wheat. It had tom a clear path in its rolling fall. Cording was around in back looking at a broken spear haft that had been jammed under the edge of a close-fitting hood. "I knew there were safety devices," he said cheerfully. Relief made Corbell babble. "Too many Great Escapes lately. I'm getting them mixed up. Lord, what a nightmare! For a time there I thought I was back running from Mirelly-Lyra." Cording looked at him. "She really frightens you, the old dikt." "She really does. Worse than the Boys. There were some very hairy moments. The city was full of prilatsil, see, and you never knew where she'd be, or where I'd be. The best I could do was find a prilatsil and dial at random, over and over, and even then some of them didn't work. And all the time she was tracking my pressure suit helmet! She's probably still got it. At least... I hope she does." "Why does it matter?" "I'll tell you as we go." Corbell paused. "For a moment there..." "Something?" "Something connected in my primitive brain and instandy got lost again. Never mind, it'll come back." Corbell sighted along the line tom through the wheat, then that way. I wish I knew how far." There were nothing but rolling wheat fields to be seen. "When we come to forest, we're close." Cording carefully retrieved Skatholtz's broken spear. He found the rock with the thread tied to it, found another rock and rebuilt his weapon. The tchiple's safety balloons had nearly deflated. Cording felt around inside until he had located the plastic disk. The sun was a fiery flying saucer settling on clouds. They set out into the wet wheat, and Corbell began the tale of how the Girls had lost a moon. Toward morning they found a stream. Jupiter had lighted their way in horizontal orange beams that made the land look brighter than it was. Corbell walked into the water before he knew it was there. The stream was shallow and sluggish. Marsh grass was growing in it, possibly a mutant form of wheat or rice. Corbell knelt to drink. He rubbed his calves to wash away dried blood. When he looked up Cording held a flopping fish in his hands. "Cording, you're quick!" "Dinner, such as it is -- " He was scaling the fish. "Do we dare build a fire?" "No, we must not be seen. We're just the wrong number. We can't pass as Boys at any distance. We'll eat the fish raw." "No, thanks." "As you like." The unwinking point of light had grown no brighter. Odd, that it could have come so fast. But Uranus had been nearing Jupiter in the random orbit the Girls had left it in, when Don Juan arrived in Sol system. He said as much to Cording. Cording nodded his pale head. "I have not added the numbers, but I think the paths of Jupiter and Uranus must cross forever if it was left free after the Girls dropped Ganymede... But why would they let it free? They would have been ting to turn it, to correct their mistake." "Maybe they heard there was a war. They took their ships home to bomb the Boys from orbit. They never came back." Cording had eaten everything but the bones of the fish. He said, "It is unlikely that the Girls waited their revenge for your return. It is unlikely that Uranus, falling free, crosses the world's path just after your return. I think your explanation is right. Corbel!. We must go to Four City and find the old dikt who has your pressure suit helmet. Otherwise we will see the end of all life." "I was afraid you'd say that. All right. There's a woiking tchiple in firom Cape Horn. I wish I knew the code for getting back... but I don't." "Dial at random?" "Maybe. I'd like to check the subway system first. There are maps in the subway building." He stood. "Let's go."    Dawn came with a marrowfreezing roar. It whipped Corbell's head around. He faced a dwarf lion, twenty yards away on a rise of ground, roaring challenge. Skatholtz's broken spear slapped against his palm. "Attack!" cried Cording, and he charged the Great-Dane-sized beast. Corbell pelted after him. The lion seemed taken aback... but he decided. He charged Cording. Somehow Cording danced aside. The lion turned, broadside to Corbell. Corbell threw all his weight behind the spear, leaned into it as it punched into the lion behind the ribs. The lion screamed, turned and slashed, and missed, because one of its forelegs was unaccountably missing. Cording did his trick again and boSi the lion's forelegs were gone. "Now run!" Cording cried. In the clear air they could see the bluish line where trees began. "Male lion... drives the prey... toward the female," Cording panted. Corbell looked back and saw something wheat-colored bounding through the tall wheat. A glance at the old man made him say, "You'll wear yourself... out. We'll have... to fight." They stopped, blowing. The female's caution gave them time to breathe. She stalked out of the wheat to find them facing her like the statues of athletes, eight feet apart. She roared. They didn't flinch. She thought it over. She roared again. Corbell stood poised, confident, happy. The female departed. Twice she looked back, thought it over, and kept going. Corbell walked now with a silly smile plastered across his face. He couldn't help it. Every time he let his face relax it came back. Any normal pair of men would have been bragging unmercifully; but Cording clearly considered the incident closed. He didn't even show relief at Corbell's competence... which was flattering, in a w. Finally Corbell said, "Real lions would have tom us up. Why are there so many small versions of big animals?' ' "Are there?" "Yeah. Lions, elephants, buffalo. There must have been about ten thousand Jupiter years of famine here, before the soil turned fertile. The big animals must have starved faster. Or maybe they died of heat prostration: too much volume, not enough surface." "I believe you. I look at you and I see a different kind of dikt. We've had time to adapt to reddened sunlight and long days and long nights. Animals and plants and dikta... and Boys adapted through the dikta. If Uranus widens the world's path now, it will all be lost." "I know." "Are you ready to face MirellyLyra?" "Yeah." Corbell shivered, though the morning was not especially cool. It would get cooler. Corbell tried to visualize six years of night... and saw Mirelly-Lyra stalking him in the dark. "When we see her, maybe we can offer her dikta immortality. She'd do damn near anything for that." "If we find it, my turn comes first." Corbell laughed. "There's bound to be enough. Otherwise it would have been... guarded." "Why did you pause?" "Guarded. The hospital vault in the Boys that sure a dikt couldn't get to it? It looked just like the other vault except for the guard systems, the vault door and the oneway prilatsil and the armored glass cubicles in the roof. ' ' "What of it? What if one dikt or three found dikta immortality? The guarded chamber in Four City was protected from dikta by dikta who owned it. Or so you assumed." "Uh uh. Four City was old, but not like Parhalding. More like built Four City." The trees were closer now. Fruit trees. Corbell was hungry. He shrugged that off. He had the tail end of something... Ashes of a dying fire. Most of it comes out in the feces and urine... but not all of that; urea can build up in the joints aitd cause gout. Cholesterol can build up in the veins and arteries. But even when all these are washed away... there are still the inert molecules that accumulate in the cell itself. Picture the miracle that can remove those. Now tell me what it looks like. "There was nothing to guard!" "I don't under -- " "There was nothing to guard in around. Heeeyaa I've got it! Dikta immortality Cording backed away a bit. "You had it once before. What fierce beast is to bite me this time?" "I don't have to say. I made a fool of myself once. Not this time. Come on." The trees were close and Corbell was hungry. IV Corbell walked alone through the itched. His scalp itched. His chest itched. He was trying to ignore an acid stomach. How did loners walk? He'd seen only one loner close enough to tell. That one had been certain of welcome; his walk had been springy and confident. Boyish. Corbell tried to keep his walk springy and confident. were dark. The streets were empty and silent. This whole charade could turn out to be unnecessary, itches and all... They had filled their bellies with fruit in the forest outside Sarashhead of the broken spear to shave his face and his chest and four inches of his scalp around a topknot. Cording had cut away his long white hair. Cording had shaved too, for all the good that would do; there where white-haired albino Boys, but they didn't move like their joints hurt. Laughing, joking Boys spilled out of a probable department store. Corbell turned a corner to avoid them, just likea loner would, maybe. At a distance he should pass as a loner. Close up, no chance. Dikta immortality be damned, he was no twelve-year-old. He wished Cording were beside him; but that would have tom it. Two was just the wrong number to pass. The brush clogging the street thickened. Corbell waded into it. Here were tangled vines rising to a wall, roughly straight. Corbell turned along its length. The wall, he found, had a gentle curve to it. Probably it formed a circle or an ellipse. Here there was a break, and near the break the shrubbery thickened and grew taller, as if the Park spilled out through the opening. Corbell passed it and kept going. There were park sounds: tree limbs rustling in the breeze, small birds whistling, a sudden loud squawk followed by (Corbell jumped) a burst of laughter. Boys! Boys on the other side of the wall. And the wall opened ahead of him. Beyond the opening, a twelve foot Christmas ornament floated above knee-deep vines. Corbell thought it through. Then, within sight of the car, he began searching for a straight sapling. Most of the bushes were of the wrong kind, but he found one that would do, even if it was a bit short. He hacked at the base with the truncated spear until he could break it loose. He sat down crosslegged -- What V What was keeping Cording? Cording was well behind him, tracking him. If anyone noticed, two loners happened to be moving in the same direction, their target a reasonable one: the park. Squatting cross-legged, Cording disengaged the spearhead from the broken haft and used it to shave the sapling. He barely glanced up as Boys came wading through the tangle in what had been a pa gate: two, five, ten Boys with a giant turkey carcass slung on poles. Where were they going with that? A kitchen in a nearby building? Effete, that was. He heard a louder voice followed by a pause, and, judging that he had been hailed, he glanced up, held a grinning Boy's eye for a moment, then deliberately went back to his work. Couldn't they see he was alone? A loner would damn well make the first overtures, as and when he felt like it, maybe. The new haft was shaping nicely. He tried the end against the spearhead. A bit too big. He'd shave it down a little and carve a notch and wedge it in. The rustling of the Boys diminished, moving across the street, but two quiet, puzzled voices were speaking too near him. He glanced up under lowered brows. They were near, and looking at him as they talked. The car was -- Cording was crouched behind the car! How had he gotten there? Corbell hadn't heard a sound. He must have spotted the car, gone over the wall, circled inside the Park and gone over the wall again. Now he crouched, immobile, but looking guilty as hell if anyone should see him. The tall Boy with hair like a black puffball hailed Corbell again. "Perfunctory apologies because we interrupt. May we examine your work?" Corbell unfolded his legs and slowly stood up and sprinted for the car. The door was open as he had left it. By that much did the Boys fail to intercept him. Cording was ahead of him, sliding in the other door. Corbell slammed his door and clung to the handle, leaning back to hold it shut, while Cording jabbed at the keard. The black-haired Boy ran alongside, pulling at the door, for longer than Corbell would have believed possible. Finally he dropped away. "You said four of anything," said Cording. "I pushed that." Crossed commas. "I don't know where that takes us. Let's see if we can change it." He jabbed four times at the crooked pi. "I don't even know if there is a subway terminal here. There's no giant cube. Everywhere else it was a giant cube." "Rest. If we don't find the subway we still have a tchiple. Dial at random." "I lost my spear." "I still have the thread." "That's not what I meant. I thought I was repmring it right. But the way those Boys acted -- Skip it." On their crooked run through die city they saw only one other Boy. On the wreck of a skyscraper near the city's center, a lean and ragged loner was mountain-climbing three stories up. As the tchiple zipped beneath him his sunken eyes locked on Corbell's and held them until the tchiple turned a comer. With the big dark still an Olde Earth year away, one loner and the two bands near the park might well be the total population of Sarashwas too important not to be on that pattern of close-spaced "phone booths". Corbell said, "Some of Krayhayft's Tribe probably got here ahead of us." "They won't know where we're will they?" ey don't know why we want to get to Cape Horn. I'd hate to underestimate them." The car slowed and settled, bending shrubbery, and stopped. They got out. Cording asked, "Where are we?" The sparse greenery in the street thickened to jungle as it climbed the slope to their right. Corbell sprang to the rounded top of the tchiple. The patch of citrus jungle was unnaturally flat and rectangular. Some of the trees looked very old. "I don't know." "But why did the tchiple bring us here? Where is the subway?" "It'd be towering over our heads. Every city I've seen, the subway building was a tremendous cube." Cording joined him on the car. Together they surveyed the rectangle of jungle. "But a subway is below ground," Cording said. "Why would it need to be so high?" "I never found out what was in the upper stories. Maybe places of government, or offices for rent." "Maybe they left it off this time." The patch of jungle was about as wide as the great cubes in One City and Four city. Corbell said, "Could be. They put a park on it instead. Hien the ice cap thawed and a lot of dead dust fell all over everything." Where did they put the entrances, though? Escalators in the center? No, the trees grew thickest there. Where the ground sloped up from the street, there in mid-slope was a dip. Water pooled there, forming a small, dirty, weed-grown pond. Corbell expressed himself under his breath. "I don't know those words," said Cording. Corbell pointed. "Under the weeds and die water and the scum and the mud, that's where we'll find steps leading down to the doors. After we dig it out. After we find shovels and dig all that stuff but of there. Then we get to find out if anything still woilu under all that." "No." "No?" "They won't let us." The shaip-faced loner was trotting toward them from across the wide street. He carried an oddly curved broad-bladed sword. Well behind him, other Boys spilled out of a building. "Do you think you can take him with your rocks?' ' "No," said Cording. "He's ready. He knows we're dangerous. He'll catch the thread on his blade." "Into the car, then." They clambered down and in. In frustration Corbell demanded, "How did they get here so fasti" "Not by car. Are there prilatsil "Oh, sure, that's how they did it." "Can we use prilatsill" "Yeah. Yeah! We won't have to dig! Assuming the damn things still work. The subway hasn't been maintained." The loner was very close now. Corbell dialed a numter he remembered: two commas crossed, S reversed, hourglass on its side, crooked Pi. The car sped smoothly away. Eleven Boys watched it go. "They tracked us somehow. They'll track us again," Corbell said. "We'll have some time, but not much." #   From outside it was a copy of the office building in which MirellyLyra had returned Corbell's pressure suit. In this version the elevators worked. Still following the pattern, CcM-bell tried the third floor. It held. Lines of office doors, all closed. "My name coin doesn't open them," Cording reported. They kicked at a door. It was solid. Cording asked, "Are there prilatsil not locked behind doors?' ' "Yeah. On the roof. The Boys could be there by now." "Did you at least keep the spear blade?" Corbell handed it over. Then it occurred to him that there might be indicators for the elevators. He slipped back into the elevator and punched all the buttons. If it stopped on every floor they'd have to check them all. He got out on the fourth floor. As he tiptoed down he heard a pattering above him like a swarm of rats. Cording had disengaged the thread from the rocks. He had tied one end to the blade and the other to his loincloth. Now he chopped with the blade at the cloud-rug where it ran beneath an office door. "Cuard the stairs," he said. "With what?" Cording didn't answer, didn't even look up. Corbell stood barehanded at the stairwell door. The first Boy through would kill him. He knew it. Maybe Cording would get away. at was Cording doing? Cording was pushing the blade under the door with his fingers. He pulled upward on the ends of the loincloth. He heaved. Sounds forced their way between his teeth. Now he pulled sideways toward the doorjamb. Now he kicked at the door. It shuddered. Another kick sent it crashing inward. The blade was stronger than the door; the thread had cut the metal around the lock. Through the office window Corbell glimpsed two Boys working under the tchiple's motor hatch. Then he crowded into the "phone booth" with Cording. When he shut the door there was no light. He opened the door a crack, found the crooked pi and kept his finger on it as he closed the door. He pushed it four times. Nothing obvious happened. He opened the door and slipped out into a blackness like the inside of a stomach. "Figures," he whispered. "We'll have to bet that this is really a subway. Stay here. I'll find the stairs and call you." "Cood," said Cording. Corbell slipped away. He moved with his hand lightly brushing the wall. Once he found a cloud-rug couch by stumbling over it. He clutched at the stuff to stop his fall, and a sheet of cloud-rug ripped away in his hand. Rotted. A sound behind him. He said, "What was that?" Cording didn't answer. Corbell kept moving. He could feel Mirelly-Lyra in the dark. He kept expecting the stairs, but the wall went on and on. He circled another couch and kept going. There was no sound in this place. Cloud-rug cushioned his feet and blotted up the sound of his breathing. Stairs! "Here," he said, not in a whisper. "Good," Cording said from a foot away. Corbell jumped like a man electrocuted. "A Boy stalked you until I killed him with thread. I think it must have been the loner, from his smell." "This place may be dead. If the stairs -- ah." The stairs moved beneath him. Disoriented, off balance, he sat down to let the stairs carry him down into the darkness. The stairs stopped. Cording said, "What next?" "Follow the sound of my voice. I know where the cars are; all the way in the back." He walked with his hands in front of him. How was he going to find the right car? He felt his way around cloud-rug couches. He brushed a solid wall. Off course. He couldn't hear Cording... or anything else. Were there Boys in the dark, stalking him as Cording stalked them? Was Cording already dead? Corbell was moving too fast, stumbling. Only the very oldest Boys would know the layout of this place; but they wouldn't need to. They'd follow him by his breathing. He had found the doors. "Cording!" Light flashed for an instant at the far end. Where had that come from? Cording called, "All right." Corll waited in the dark and the quiet. Presently Cording spoke next to him -- "Here." -- felt for Corbell' s hand and put something heavy in it. "I robbed the loner. Take his sword. I took his fire starter too. Where is the picture of the world?' ' "Along -- " Corbell guided Cording' s hand. " -- that wall." The flashlight beam revealed two polar projections with the ice caps still showing. There were no glowing lights or numbers to mark the routes. Cording asked, "Which is our door?" "I don't know." "The Boys have our tchiple. We can't surrender because we've killed the loner. The Boys may have a way to shut down the prilatsil. Do something, Corbell." "All right. Give me the name coin." He took it, inserted it in the ticket window. Nothing happened. He tried the next door. Nothing. He was beginning to panic. But the stairs had worked -- The third door let them through. The transparent door to the subway car let Cording through, closed after him, and wouldn't open until Corbell had pulled the disk out and reinserted it. They sat down opposite each other. "Now we sit here for awhile." "All right." "I don't know how you can be so calm." "I risk less than you do. Half a Jupiter year -- " He had borrowed Corbell's phrase -- "and I'll be dead. Against this I balance dikta immortality and freedom from the Boy rule. Unless... Corbell, can we find dikta immortality where we're going? Or will we have to make constant raids on Antarctica?" "I know it's in Four City. Maybe it's in other places too." "The risk is good. Shall we slera?" Corbell's laugh was shaky. "Good luck." V Gording woke when the door went up. The car slid into the vacuum tunnel; curved downward; straightened out; rolled right; rolled left. So far so good. Gording, watching his face, relaxed. "I did not want to ask. Where are we going?" "It doesn't matter. Anywhere there's a... picture of the world that lights up. That'll tell us how to get to Four City." "A good decision," said Gording, and he went back to sleep. Maybe he was faking. But his breathing was very gentle and regular. Corbell stretched out. He wedged his ankles under a chair arm. There was no sound but Gording's breathing. Corbell dozed. He twitched and jerked in his sleep: running, running... When the car turned upward he came half-awake, then dropped off again. But he felt it when the Car slowed, and, groggy as he was, he remembered that first ride. He put his hands over his ears, turned to see Gording copy him. The car stopped. Doors popped open automatically. Air puffed across them, hot and wet, like boiling mapfe syrup in the throat. Corbell cried, "Come on!" and went through. The great hall was a ruin. Six or seven stories of the great cube had fallen in, leaving a cross section of whatever was up there; Corbell didn't care. He kept his breathing shallow. The scalding air was thick with a taste and smeU half chemical, half mildew. Sweat sprang out in droplets all over his body. The wall map was cracked across, and dark. He tried his credit lens in three doors before he found one that worked. Gording pulled at his arm and spoke like a man holding his breath. "Wait! Where does this go?" "Come on." They entered the subway car. It didn't help. You can die locked in a steam room, Corbell thought. He stretched out on the row of seats. "Mirelly-Lyra rigged the subway system to te anyone from the hot part of the world straight to her. We can hope she didn't skip this terminal. Lie still and don't try to exercise. Breath shallow." He lay on his back and waited. The sweat tickled as it ran down his ribs,but he didn't wipe at it. Something ticked on. Air blew across him, too warm, and then cooling. Corbell sighed. "It sensed the CO#," he told himself. The air grew cool, cool. A long time later Gording said, "I left the fire starter." "Damn." Silence, then, until the door went up. There were the usual surges, then the ride straightened out. Corbell tried to sleep again, but something was holding him back. He didn't know what it was until Cording said, "My ears hurt." That was it. "The car leaks," said Corbell. "Just a chance we had to take. Let's hope we've got enough air to get to Ae end." "It hurts. Can I do anything?" Hey, Cording had never bren in an airplane! Corbell said, "Work your jaws." He demonstrated. His ears popped.    The car slowed, slowed. It had come sooner than Corbell had expected; but they were both panting, and Cording was uneasy. Corbell felt guilty satisfaction. It took a lot of unknown danger to disturb Cording. He covered his ears with his hands and opened his jaws wide, and waited for Cording to do the same. His skin was clammy. He was unbearably tense. The doors pojd open. The air that slapped across them was only warm. Through the door he saw lights dim at the back, cloud-rug humping into couches. He reached for the loner's broad-bladed scimitar. Motion flickered in the gate. Corbell's brain flashed: MirellyLyra! Too soon! He pulled the car door shut as something darted through the gate. He had what she wanted -- they could negotiate -- It was Krayhayft! The grey-haired Boy stopped short. He looked at them through the glass. He raised the fire starter. Cording threw himself back toward the inadequate protection of the toilet. Corbell sensed it; but he himself was frozen. Krayhayft fired past him. Light blazed behind Corbell, and he smelled chemical smoke as part of the couch burned. Krayhayft shouted, "Come out. Or I'll bum off your feet." Corbell' s hand was still on the door. But... "I can't do it. You'd chop down the Tree of Life." For an instant Krayhayft was puzzled. Then, "That's not what we want. We only want to know where it is. Corbell, suppose a disaster wiped out most of the dikta, and the only survivors were half a dozen old ones? We could keep them young and breeding." "Meanwhile they never get a smell of it." Flame burst from the rug beside Corbell's right foot. Krayhayft said, "We need your pressure suit helmet too. Speaking of disasters -- " and Krayhayft' s face changed. Corbell had never seen that look on any Boy. It frightened him. Cuilt and remorse and fear. Krayhayft moaned, the sound faint through the glass. His eyes darted left and right, seeking... escape? He found it. Brighter than human, he found it at once, and used it. Krayhayft raised the fire starter to his head and fired. Flame burst from that side of his head, then from the other. Krayhayft fell, and kicked spasmodically, and lay still. Corbell spared himself one flicking glance back. Cording was still hidden, crouched behind the toilet door. Then Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped through the gate. Shapeless robe, white touched with irridescence, and a withered face within: the bright eyes fixed on him, and then the cane. "Mirelly-Lyra! It's me!" The shock almost killed her. He thought, he hoped she would faint. She recovered; she gestured peremptorily with the cane. Come out! He reached for the scimitar. She gave him just a touch of what had killed Krayhayft. Moaning, he came through. She sppke gibberish. An old man's voice translated: "You found it. Where is it?" "Give me the cane and I'll tell you." Her answer was a wave of guilt and mental agony. Corbell waded through it, hands outstretched for her throat. She backed away. Corbell moaned and came on. Suddenly she turned something on the cane's handle. Sleep dragged him down toward the cloud-rug. Sleep and red rage warred in him. He was on his knees, but he waded toward her, two steps, three... Musty smell. Soft stuff cradling his cheek. Mirelly-Lyra was in one of the shapeless couches. Corbell got his arms under him and lifted himself out of the cloudrug. He pulled himself toward her. She tried to cringe back without moving. Terrified. "I caught her from behind," said Cording. He was seated facing her, holding the silver cane. The old woman spoke rapidly. An old man's voice translated, "You don't dare kill me. I have something you want." Corbell got to his feet with some effort. "The pressure suit helmet," he said. "Give it to me or I'll let you live... as you are." Her mouth compressed. "Immortality first." "How many settings are there on that cane?" "Five. Two that kill. Others might kill me. Can you find the helmet then?" "Probably." Corbell smiled; he saw by her face that he was right. "But so what? I'll make you young. Then I'll kill you if I don't get what I want." He changed to Boyish. "Hold the cane ready. But I think she won't try to escape now. We're going to get dikta immortality." Cording looked dubious.   Corbell wasn't about to trust the Norn in a "phone booth". They wedged themselves into a tchiple with Mirelly-Lyra between, for a cramped ride through Four City. As the car swerved and darted through glass and concrete rubble, Corbell wondered. Should he have forced the helmet from her first? Yes. But he couldn't wait that long. He had to know. They unfolded themselves out of the car. Cording said, "I might have known it would be a hospital." "Did your hospital have a... guarded place on the third floor?" "No." Mirelly-Lyra was looking up at the glass-mosaic face. "But I searched this place!" "You were desperate, too," Corbell said smugly. "You just weren't desperate in the right way." He led the way up the stairs. Dust puffed beneath their feet. At the third floor he found two sets of footprints to remind him of his panic flight through these halls. He glanced back; but Mirelly-Lyra seemed docile enough, and Cording was behind her with the cane. He turned into the hallway... and was lost. "MirellyLyra, where are the 'phone booths'?" They found the line of prilatsil. A moment to orient himself: there was the comer where he'd been hiding when the Nom came to hunt him down. He led off... and here was the vault door, open. Cording said, "'They guarded their immortality well." "Wouldn't you?" Corbell pointed to the skeletons and the hole smashed high up in the wall. "But not well enough. We're lucky they didn't use it and then wreck it. Maybe they thought they'd be back in fifty years." Cording looked around at the guard emplacements, the empty shelves, the computer console, the pair of "phone booths." "Where is it, if they didn't destroy it? Not through the prilatsil, unless the destination was equally well guarded." "Through the prilatsil. Cive me the cane first." Would Cording balk? He didn't; he handed Corbell the weapon, then stepped forward to study the pair of glass booths. Only one had a door. He stepped inside. Mirelly-Lyra snarled something. The box translated: ' 'Are you mocking me?" Corbell waved the cane under her nose. "Suppose I am?" She came at him with her fingernails. He didn't bother with the trigger. He rapped her on the head with the cane, twice, before she backed out of range. Cording had found the button on the post. He pushed it. Corbell shouted, "Heaa!" The other booth danced with drifting dust motes. Cording opened the door and said, "Nothing happened." "Not quite true," said Corbell. To Mirelly-Lyra he said, "You don't have to if you don't want to. You can trust me or not. Gloat, gloat, he mocked himself, and was a little ashamed. But he'd fought for this! She swallowed whatever words were on her tongue. She was tmly desperate. As she entered the booth Corbell caught Cording' s eye and pointed to the booth with no door. The dust floating in the booth suddenly thickened. Cording smiled and said, "Ah." The Nom had caught it too, but she didn't understand...and Corbell was bubbling with it. "Inert molecules from your cells! Chemical medicines won't reach that stuff, but the 'phone booth' does. It takes just those dead molecules and does the instant-elsewhere trick with them. Just the stuff that builds up over ninety years of life. See it now?" "I don't feel any different," she said uncertainly. "You should. I did. It was like I'd caught my second wind. Of course I was moving at a dead run. It's nothing obvious. What did you expect? In a couple of days you'll find dark roots in your hair." "Red," she said. "Fiery red." "Where's the helmet?" She smiled. She still looked like an old woman, but was there something malicious in that smile? I Corbel!' s pressure suit sat limp in a guest chair in Mirelly-Lyra's office. Cording and Mirelly-Lyra watched him detach the helmet and set it on his head. He cleared his throat and said, "This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State. Come in, Peerssa." Nothing, nothing, nothing... "He's got to be in range by now. Peerssa, dammit, answer!" Cording pushed the suit aside and took the chair. The silver cane remained fixed on the old woman. She didn't notice. Malice and victory! She gave Corbell the shivers. Nothing, nothing, nothing, n -- The voice came faintly, fading in spots. "Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State calling Jaybee Corbell. Please allow for a delay of sixty-seven seconds in transmission. Corbell, I have a great deal to tell you." '"Yeah, you do! I've got a great deal to tell you too! I can tell you most of the history of the solar system. Tell me first, have you taken control of the planet Uranus? If so, what do you plan to do with it?" To Cording he said, "I'm asking him now. We'll know in a minute." "What takes so long?" "Speed of light. Uranus must be thirty-three and a half light-seconds away." Cording nodded. He was not impatient. Even his handling of the cane seemed negligent... but it never left the old woman. Cood. Because she still had that look. When Peerssa spoke he was irritatingly placid. "Yes, I am guiding a planet I believe to be Uranus. You were right in guessing that this is the solar system. After losing contact with you I flew to investigate the most easily available anomoly, the new planet between Jupiter and Saturn. I found a satellite with control systems which would respond to -- " "I know all about the motor! The question -- " He bit it off. The delay was going to drive him nuts. Peerssa was still talking: " -- my broadcasts. I was able to probe the fail-safe programs first. Otherwise I might have damaged something. Eventually I found an object in the planet's upper atmosphere radiating strongly in the infrared. I found a tremendous motor, a fusion pulse drive clearly intended to move the entire planet. Oh, you know about the motor. All right. I've already started the braking sequence. In twenty-two days Uranus will be inserted into orbit earth. I'm going to move the Earth further from Jupiter. We'll cool it down to normal." "Don't do it!" Corbell barked. He remembered uneasily that he had never been sure of Peerssa' s motives. "Listen, life on Earth has been adjusting to this situation for a it up now most of the biosphere will die, including what passes for humanity these days." The old woman already looked younger, if only in a tightening of muscles in her face, a smoothing of the pouchy look. Corbell looked away from the malicious cat-smile. He lifted the helmet and said, in Boyish, "We were right. No coincidence at all. Peerssa dropped me here, then went to look Uranus over,. He's going to put everything back the way it was when he left Earth." Cording stared. "But the ice! The ice would cover -- " "Bear with me a little longer, will you?" He lowered the hehnet on Cording 's answer. Peerssa's delayed reply came. "I do not take your orders, Corbell. I take orders from Mirelly-Lyra Zeelathisthar, who was once a citizen of the State." He should have known better, but it took him by surprise. He screamed, "You traitor!" Mirelly-Lyra threw back her head and laughed. Corbell laid the helmet on the desk. It took him a moment to find his voice. "No wonder you were smirking. What happened?" She was thoroughly enjoying herself. "I tried to call your autopilot. No luck. A few days ago I tried again. It may have help that my translator uses your voice. Peerssa and I talked for many hours about the State, and the world, and you -- " She broke off because Peerssa's reply had arrived. "My loyalty has never wavered, Corbell. Was there ever a time when you could say the same?" "Drop dead," Corbell told the helmet. "Stand by. Mirelly-Lyra is with us now. We'll try to talk her into changing your orders." To Cording he said, "She rules my autopilot. She rules Uranus. I'm tii." "You must persuade her not to let it carry out its mission. This is urgent, Corbell." "I thought of that." Corbell closed his eyes and leaned back. He could watch it happen. As long as he could survive at all, he would be young. He could watch glaciers cover Antarctica until the ice was a mile thick. He and Mirelly-Lyra could watch the dwarf buffalo and the nude lar bears and the Boys and the dikta flee north until they froze in snowstorms or starved in land baked bare of life or died for lack of the vitamin D in kathope seed. Maybe that was an angle. Did the old retread want the Earth all for herself? Or would she prefer company? But she'd fled the Boys once, and lived alone... hmm. Where did she get her food? Was there anything she couldn't stand to see extinct? He opened his eyes. Cording was looking concerned for him. Oddly, so was the old woman. "Nothing hurts," Cording said. "I was used to things hurting. Sometimes my breath would come short. Always my joints and tendons and muscles ached. Corbell, you've found it. We're young again. You did what I could not." "Yeah. Good." "Play on her gratitude. I can't talk to her. It has to be you. You're capable. The fate of the world is on your shoulders." "That's all I need." He closed his eyes for a moment... just for a moment... and then he asked Mirelly-Lyra, "How do you feel?" "I feel good. I feel strong. Maybe I only want to believe your lie." "Okay. Pay attention." Corbell set the helmet between them. He talked half for Peerssa's benefit. "The world is baked and dead everywhere except in Antarctica. What's left alive is all tropical stuff evolved for six years of daylight and six years of night. If Antarctica gets covered by ice again everything will die. The ruling population is -- " He used the Boyish word. "Boys, eleven-year-olds who live forever. There's a minor population of adults for breeding. The men look like Gording, or younger. They're human. There are some minor changes -- " He began to describe them. Mirelly-Lyra regarded Gording without favor. But she must see him as human. The biggest difference, the receding hairline, looked natural on an old man. He hadn't impressed her yet. He went on: "If we ever expect to get a State established again, it'll be with the adults, the dikta. The Boys are too different. What I'm getting at is, there is a chance. Right now there are about ten women to every man, but in a hundred years it'll be nearly one-to-one." An angle there? He definitely had her attention. "Of course, your role wouldn't be very important at first, with that big an imbalance. But you'd be the only woman with a full head of hair. And the only redhead." "Just a minute, Corbell. Isn't it true that the Boys mle the adults? I don't want to be a slave. And what about the Girls?" "The Girls are long dead." "Ahh." Mirelly-Lyra must have hated the Girls. "Right. It's Boys and dikta now. We can get the dikta to move here, because we've got the dikta immortality. They'll come. I know where to find a ship." She was shaking her head, frowning. Now Corbell knew that she'd bought half of what he was selling. Against half-bald women her great beauty would rule the men who ruled the dikta! But -- "How long have the Boys ruled?" "Ever since you brought the dikta to Antarctica as esca convicts, wheneverthehell that was. Say Oncoming youth put music in her laugh. "And now they will break free, that suddenly? The sheep will become wolves because we offer them a sufficient bribe?' ' Dammit, she did have a point. He changed languages. "Gording? Will the dikta revolt?" "Yes." "They never did before." "The dangers were too great. The rewards were too small." Maybe. Corbell switched to English. "He says they will. I believe him. Now just a minute, let me tell you why. First, they have not been bred for docility. They've been bred to produce a better strain of Boys, and they've got the genes. Second -- how do I put this? You know what a cringing man looks like?" She grinned. She'd seen Corbell cringe, damn her. "Okay. They cringe. But it's a gesture, a formality. The next second they're walking as tall as ever. The Boys cringe to each other, too. I think the dikta haven't revolted for weren't right. Now they are." She sat silent, frowning. "What did you think you'd get out of Peerssa moving the Earth?" "I thought... We're the last of the State, Corbell. I thought we could start the human race over." "Adam and Eve, with Eve in charge. Mirelly-Lyra, we'd better hope we can mate with the dikta, because, frankly. I'm terrified of you. I don't think I could get it up." "Low sex urge?" "Yeah. Would you like to rule the dikta instead? You'll have one thing going for you. You rule the sky. Once again a Girl rules the sky." He saw the beginnings of a smile (Corbell forgets that I can rule men with my beauty alone!) and he pushed it home. "But you've got to give Peerssa his orders now. He's already started the braking sequence. Move the Earth now and it's the end of the world." She leered teasingly. "I should make you wait." "Peerssa has already started the" "Give me the helmet." "God damn braking sequence. Here. Wait a minute." He didn't let go of the helmet. "Corbell? Isn't this what you wanted?" "I just had the damndest thought." Don't blow this. The fate of the world -- Shaddup. "Peerssa, a point of information. Would it be possible for you to -- " II From the roof of the office building they watched Uranus pass. The planet must be smaller than it had been at Corbell's birth. Its drive was not all that efficient; it must have blown away megamegatons of atmosphere during aeons of maneuvering. For all that, a gas giant planet was now passing two It was tremendous. It glowed half full near the horizon: a white halfdisk touched with pink, banded and roiled with storms, and a night side black against the stars. From the black edge a tiny, intense violetwhite flame suddenly reached out and out, lighting the night side, expanding, reddening, dissipating. Mirelly-Lyra said something that was pure music. No wonder she had been able to persuade men to do her bidding. (The old man's voice said, "Glorious.") Her white robe was a shapeless pale shadow in the daik. Corbell stood a little apart from her. Now that she was no longer an old woman, he was more afraid of her than ever. In very truth, the Norn now ruled the fate of the world. Corbell was very twitchy tonight. He called into the helmet in his hands. "Peerssa, how goes it?" And waited for the response. Nothing, nothing -- "Green bird." The autopilot was indecently calm. "It was difficult to plot a new path that would not intersect a moon, but I did it. Earth's new orbit will be somewhat eccentric. Her average temperature will vary around ten degrees lower." "Good enough." He set the helmet down. His urge was to call every two minutes. A giant planet falling that close wasn't glorious, it was terrifying. She said it again. "Glorious. To think that the State once reached such heights! And now there are only savages." "We'll be back," he said, and laughed too loudly. "Gording doesn't know it, but what he's doing in Dikta City is forming the basis for a population explosion. In three thousand years we'll be building interstellar spaceships again. We'll need them. Earth will be too crowded." "I hadn't thought of that. Perhaps Gording did. Do you really years of slavery, after all -- " "They'll have to come." He'd thought it out in aU its intricate detail. "In a few months Cape Horn and Four City will be in the Temperate Zone. Plants that grow well in Antarctica will grow well here once we transport them. In Antarctica it'll be colder than the Boys expect. They'll huddle in Earth years of darkness. Meanwhile the dikta will be setting themselves up here. ' ' "All very well if the Boys wait. You've said they're very intelligent. They may attack immediately." "Let them wait a few months and we'll give them a nasty shock! We'll have Peerssa in orbit then. Didn't he tell you? He's got a thing that can blast them from orbit while they try to cross the ocean. They'll think it's the Girls. They'll try to wipe out the Himalaya valleys and the Sea of Okhotsk. But if they wait long enough... There's going to be rain, a lot of rain, when the Earth cools off. It'll probably swallow Dikta City. TTie Boys'll think the dikta drowned." Uranus jetted violet-white flame. Peerssa's path through Jupiter's moons was a complicated one. The night was vivid with lights: Jupiter, Uranus, the expanding pinpoint flare of the world-moving drive, the moons. The air was hot and humid and redolent with some rare scent, not quite musk, not quite flower shop. Corbell wondered where it came from. Were whales holding a mating season offshore? The air went to his head. The shadow in the dark asked, "Will the dikta men find me beautiful?" "Yes. If the women liked me, the men will like you. Beautiful and exotic." She turned to him. "But you don't find me beautiful." "My sex urge is supposed to -- " "That is no answer!" she flared. "You lay with the dikta women!" He flinched back. "If you must know. I've always been a little afraid of a beautifol girl. And I'm scared stiff of you. My hindbrain thinks you're still carrying that cane." "Corbell, you are well aware that the dikta may not survive the change in their biological rhythms. The sun shows every day of the year in Four City." She touched his arm. "Even if they live, we are the last human beings. If we die without children..." He wanted to shrink away, but something in him simultaneously wanted to move closer. He suppressed both urges. "You're moving too fast. There may be dikta women carrying my children. That'll tell us if they're human -- and even if they aren't, they're close enough." "Let's go inside. The heat -- " When he gestured toward the garish intruder in the sky, she tugged at his arm. "If it falls on the Earth, do you really want to be watching?" "Yes." But he picked up the helmet and followed her. She didn't have the cane any more. All she had to wave at him was a planet ten times the size of the Earth. It was cooler in the elevator. Air conditioning. His nerves still tingled, whether from Uranus's passing or from the nearness of the Norn... He sniffed suddenly, and had to swallow a laugh. That was what he had smelled on the roof. She had never won perfume before. Her hood was thrown back. Her hair was exotic: long, fine white hair flowing out of a fiery red undercoat. Of the wrinkles of age there were only traces left. Her breasts were... exotic, yeah: high and conical, delightfully pointed under the robe. Would the dikta see them as powerfully sensual? or as evidence of animal origin? The elevator had stopped. The doors opened. But Corbell was flattened against the wall, and Mirelly-Lyra wasn't moving either. She watched him uneasily as he took in great lungfuls of air, using all of his strengdi to hold himself still...He wanted her. It was a madness in him, and he was terrified. "Perfume," he said, and his voice was a croak. She said, "Yes. Shame on you for forcing me to such means. If it gives you pleasure to attack my pride, you've won." "I don't andststandV "Pheromones. I altered my medical system to make pheronomes to affect your sex urge. Pheromones are biochemical cues." She stepped forward, put her hands on his shoulders. "Do you think I wanted it this -- " And the touch of her was all it took. The fastenings on her robe weren't closed, save one, which ripped. He had more trouble with his own loincloth, his hands were shaking so, and he howled with frustration. She had to do it for him. He took her on the floor of the elevator, quickly, violently. Maybe he hurt her. Maybe he wanted to. And his head still bubbled with the perfume. He had not had time to notice the differences in her. Now he did. Even fifty thousand years had wrought changes. Her ankles were heavier, her body was thicker in every dimension, than the standard of beauty in # AD. And she had the damndest eyes, with a tilt that was not oriental... and a soft woman's mouth... He took her again. She wasn't passive, but she wasn't wholly enjoying it either; she was frightened of what she had unleashed. Afterward he was calmer. They moved out of the elevator onto the cloud-rug floor. The third time it was she who mounted him. He tried to hold himself back, to let her find Tier own way, but when it was over he could see his handprints bonewhite on her hips. He said, belatedly, "Are you all right?" She laughed. Still straddling him, she ran her hands through her hair. "I'm young. I'll heal." "You used an aphrodesiac on me." "Yes. Aphrodesiac. The pheromones were Peerssa's suggestion." "What? Peerssa? I'll kill him! He -- and youl You used me like a bundle of reflexes, the pair of you!" He wanted to cry. "Not like something that thinks. It's just like that damn cane." "Forget that damn cane! We have to have children. We're the last ones. What do you want from me, Corbell?" "I don't know. Ask me when my head starts working again. I want Peerssa dead, I want Pierce the checker dead. Would he kill himself if you told him to?" "He did what he had to. He has to make the State again. Corbell, isn't this better than the cane? Isn't it?" "All right, it's better than the cane." "Then what do you want? Will you mate with me without the pheromones? Shall I tell Peerssa to follow your orders?" He wanted (he discovered) Mirabelle. He wanted the old ritual: dinner at a new restaurant recommended by friends, and brandy Alexanders afterward, and the king size bed. They'd bought a water bed a little before the cancer came to tear up his belly. Now here he was on his back in cloud-rug, in a corridor outside an elevator, with the strangest of strange women. "Not your fault," he said. "I want to go home." She shook her head. "I want to go home too. We can't. We have to build our home again." They were already doing that, Corbell thought. Maybe they'd even do it well. He said, "Even love stories aren't the same. Pheromones! Jesus, what a way to save the world. Will you please fix that translator so it talks to me in your voice?' ' "All right. Tomorrow," said an old man's voice. "And put me in control of Peerssa, if you value my sanity. I'm sick of him running my life." "Now?" "Tomorrow." One more thing he would have liked to do. He would have liked to destroy the cane by smashing it repeatedly into Peerssa's brain case. But they might need Peerssa and the cane against the Boys, if they came too soon. So he rolled aside and looked for his loincloth... and then, changing his mind, he leaned close to Mirelly-Lyra and inhaled deeply. Uranus must have passed by now, and Earth was on its way into a wider orbit, and world-saving could wait until tomorrow. Maybe the pheromone perfume could be used judiciously, in much smaller quantities...  books range much higher, but we've reduced their overall averER we are offering you your choice of any title in this list with a purchase of # books. Buy # -- get one free. Buy # -- get # free, etc. Science Fiction (A#S) Three outstanding stories of the past, future -- and present! -- by an award-winning author (who) "has feeling for the fantastic and knows how to build a suspenseful story ." -- The New York Times ' (ANI I #) A novel of an eons-long war between galactic civilizations. "A new high in imagination I " -- Gaiaxy (AN#) A classic of science-fiction suspense. Six alien shape-changers are out to foil Earth's desperate bid for survival. 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Minimum order: # books.  Enclose payment.  Special bonus: On orders of # or more we absorb all postage and handling costs. j (Dept. G) # Kennedy Drive, j I Hauppauge, New York # I I enclose  for the I J books whose numbers I I have placed in the boxes bej I low. I understand that the j I price is only # each. Since  I I have ordered # books or I j more I am also listing my j bonus selections. J Spider Robinson Locus, ed. Charles  Dena Brown, Locus Publications, # pp. and up, ## Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, # pp., # Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein, Berkley, # pp., # The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta, Scribner's, # plates plus cartoons, # The Best of Stephen Fabian, Loompanics Unlimited, # plates, # The Book of Gordon Dickson, The End of the Dreams, James Gunn, Scribner's, # pp. , # Irrational Numbers, George Alec Effinger, Doubleday, # pp., # Connoisseur's Science Fiction, ed. Tom Boardman, Penguin, # pp. , #, # in Canada This Darkening Universe, Lloyd Biggie, Jr., Doubleday, # pp., # The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, Robert A. Heinlein, Berkley, # pp., # Star Trek: The New Voyages, ed. Sondra Marshak  Myma Culbreath. Bantam, # pp., # George Clayton Johnson, Bantam, # pp., I .# #, Rush, Mercury Records, seconds, # From The Hells Beneath the Hells, Robert E. Howard, Alternate World Recordings, untimed, unpriced Gonna Roll The Bones, Fritz Leiber, Alternate World Recordings, untimed, unpriced Telempath, Spider Robinson, Berkley, pages and price unknown Davy, Edgar Pangbom, Ballantine, # pp., # list, I had planned to close this column with Edgar Pangbom's Davy. I chose that slot on the last-heard  best-remembered theory -- I had intended to see to it, to the best of my ability, that Edgar sold a helluva lot of books and got a little more of the recognition he has deserved for so many years. But before I could type the first paragraph of this column, the news came down. Now I sit here staring out my office window, watching the Bay of Fundy pet the beach with timid gentle strokes, watching bold explorer clouds set sail for far New Brunswick, and I know I can't save Davy for last after all. You can't end with a bummer. Edgar died on February #, #, at the age of #. He felt that his writing career truly began with "Angel's Egg," (Galaxy #) although he had sold his first novel (a mystery, under the name "Bruce Harrison") in #. He won the International Fantasy Award, the same prize Sturgeon's More Than Human had won two years earlier, in # for A Mirror For Observers, currently available in the AvonEquinox "SF Rediscovery" series, and sold mysteries, historical fiction, fantasies and "hard" sf. He was a writer of enormous skill and depth, an equal of Sturgeon and a peer of Mark Twain, and I'm bitterly sorry that he died before he -- and you -- could read the words I wrote about him in the March '# Galaxy Bookshelf. I am bitterly sorry that he died before the world noticed him, before he had attained the stature of a Twain, which he surely must some day. I am fiercely glad that, as "Harper Conan and Singer David" (Tomorrow Today, Unity Press -- see March '# Bookshelf) clearly shows, Edgar died in his prime, at the absolute top of his form as an artist. And I am totally determined to pound into your skull (if it isn't there already) the conviction that Edgar Pangbom is an important author who belongs on your must-read list and mine and belonged there, goddamit, twenty years ago. Take Davy. A Hugo nominee for #, it lost out, for God's sake, to The Wanderer (about which more next month) and is billed in Ballantine' s current edition as "The 'Tom Jones' of Science Fiction." I couldn't seem to get a review copy, and then a gent named Tom Pigaga from U. of Nebraska's English Department (having tried to order it for his own classes and been told it was out-of-print) sent me his personal copy in the mail, calling it "a small gift to a friend and a peace offering to the world at large." According to his letter, Tom's been using Davy in class for three years, and he says he's been coming back to it once a year or so since #, "as both pilgrimage and labor of love." Thank you, Tom, stranger and friend. I intend to do likewise, and I urge all of you to do the same -- if you can get a copy. Davy is the ultimate After-TheCollapse novel, the only one I've ever read that totally rang true (well. Earth Abides comes close -- but Stewart achieved versimilitude through facts, with painstaking extrapolation. Pangbom does it with characterization.). I see where Ballantine got the "Tom Jones" allusion -- but I think it reads more as if Mark Twain had written Hack Finn as an adult sf novel. It is a warm, vibrant, laughing, sprawling giant of a book. It is, as Sturgeon has called it, "a rollicking, cadenced, surprising, provocative and musical book." It evokes feelings the way a master musician elicits notes from his instrument: in chords, and breathtaking arpeggios. It has significantly changed my life and my writing, changed the way I perceive my fellow monkeys, made me happier to be alive. It is what the doctor ordered and why the preacher danced. It is good. Am I getting through to you? Will you know what I mean if I say that Pangbom 's characters are lovable? Do you understand the sense in which I use that word? Sam Loomis and Pa Rumley and Dion and poor old sin-ridden Jed; Caron and Emmia and Minna and Bonnie and Mother Spinkton and especially Nickie (whom I shall always love and lust for); these and Davy himself are people I cherish, friends I'm glad I made, and I'm deeply grateful to Edgar for introducing me to them. I wanted to meet him, to thank him for becoming a writer. A man who can evoke that much love for totally imaginary people cobbled up out of the spare parts in his subconscious is a rare and splendid thing, an asset to the human spirit. There is no plot to Davy. A plot would overcrowd it. It has, rather, a... direction that it moves in. Now I would like someone to introduce me to review copies of West of the Sun, Company of Glory (L have the Aug-Oct '# Galaxy serialization, but I want the book too). The Judgement of Eve, Good Neighbors And Other Strangers, The Atlantean Nights' Entertainments, Light Another Candle, The Trial of Callista Blake and the host of uncollected stories and novelettes set in the post-Holocaust world of Davy that will surely (please God) be collected and published soon. If any enterprising fan andor bookseller knows where I can buy copies of same. I'll be happy to, whether or not I do get review copies. The same goes for Ten Tomorrows and Terry Carr's An Exaltation of Stars and Universes #, #, # and #, which Tom Pigaga says include recent short Pangbom. I hope it takes me a lifetime to assemble and get to read all that Pangbom. 'Cause that seems to be all there's gonna be. It's plenty. Thank you, Edgar.    Most of the above data, biographical and bibliogixqhical, come from the next subject I want to cover. I have, I tell you three times, doing fanzine reviews in this column ("...at this time," he finished tantalizingly), but Locus is not precisely a fanzine. It is a newspaper -- the newspaper of the sf world. I once gave away, as opposed to "spent," a year editing a "specialized-audience" paper (a real-estate weekly, God forgive me), and I know what a sonofabitch of a job it is, and I know Charlie and Dena Brown do about a sixtimes-better job than I did on half the budget and in a more honorable cause. Their most recent (at this writing) edition (Mar. #I '#) contains two splendid write-ups on Edgar Pangborn, one of them by Peter S. Beagle (# Fine And Private Place, The Last Unicorn, I See By My Outfit), that alone are more than worth Ae # cover price. The reportage is conspicuously and notoriously accurate (all right, everybody's human -- but these guys print retractions where you can see 'em), up-to-date and as thorough as space allows; the market reports are consistently more reliable than the "People Notes" are usually interesting and informative (did you know that Larry Niven is working on a sequel to Ringworldl)', the advance publishers' schedules are enormously helpful in getting to a book during those brief few weeks when it's actually on the stands, available for sale; the annual sf book and magazine summaries are infinitely more accurate than the guesses of Publisher' s Weekly, the "Media Notes" are appalling glances at the atrocities Hollywood is planning to perpetrate on sf (still no action on the Star Trek movie, and the Damnation Alley movie is going to star... are you ready?... Charlton Heston as Hell Tanner.); and the convention reports are the only totally comprehensive ones I know of in the field. (By the way, speaking of conventions... no, I'll get to that later.) But that ain't all, folks: Charlie, Dena and their noble staff undertake to read and at least capsule-review every sf book, new or reprint, published in English, a plainly phenomenal task I wouldn't attempt for all the tea in Acupulco (# titles last year alone!). Even the quickiereviews, by far the most common, are thoughtful and contain all the necessary poop to locate the book should it interest you. A staggering achievement. The longer reviews are invariably thoughtful, too. What it is, it's #V# x #" printed on good stock with incredibly small and startlingly easy-to-read type, and it comes folded twice like a flier for the Rexall One-Cent Sale, and it averages #-# pages an issue of which #-# pages may be ads (usually for things I'd want to buygo toapply for), and it comes out # times a year, monthly plus extra issues in January, April and September. Single copies #, # for #, # for #, unless you're overseas in which case it's ## (if you want airmail, or ## if you want to wait for sea mail). (Got that?) Make checks payable to Locus Publications, P.O. Box #, San Francisco CA #. Any sf news items you would like to circulate should go to the editorial offices at # Ridgewood Lane, Oakland CA #, for which you will get a Hearty Handclasp and a good story to tell your fan friends. I couldn't do this job without Locus, and I recommend it to anyone genuinely interested in the field, whether as writer, reader, fan or horrified onlooker. It's one of the best newspapers in America, in its weight-class, and it will plug you, solidly and reliably, into the sf world.   On we go to Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke's new biggie. Arthur told the United States Congress that I.E. was his most ambitious novel. Unquote. The first run of # copies has sold out (in hardback) as I write this in May, and the second may do so before you read it: the book, says Locus, has been doing phenomenally well. Well, I'll tell ya: by me it would have made a great novelette. Maybe even a short story. But not a book -- not even a novella. There's enough story to comfortably fill a fair-size novelette, and good story at that. But the bulk of the book is taken up by an extended "travelogue" of Earth in the Quincentennial year #, which I found mostly cutesy and clever and satiric and dull and not very plausible. You know, the kind of stuff every beginning author does, future generations commenting snidely on the odd and uncouth customs of their #th-century ancestors and like that. There were some nice touches, e.g. the political system in which only lic office, but most were about as likely to actually happen. What I mean to say, it was nowhere near as actively unpleasant to read as the majority of the books that grow in my little mailbox by the Bay -- I didn't have to hold my nose to get it down. Arthur's always a good, painless read, you know that. It's just that this one was like a diet-book (to continue the above metaphor): a low-calorie concoction with a guaranteed noncarcinogenous story-substitute and non-fattening characterization. A half hour later I was hungry again. Sank my teeth into some John McPhee and gnawed off a couple of chapters, washing it down with the new David Bromberg album. Oh, you wanna know what it's about! Well, this guy from Titan (a clone of a clone of the most powerful sonofabitch thereon), goes to Earth to round out his education and get himself cloned and make a speech (on account of it happens to be America's five-hundredth birthday). While he's digging the Quincentennial festivities as an honored guest, he finds out some heavy stuff about two childhood friends with whom he used to play Doctor. There you go. Twenty thousand copies, eight bucks a hit. Fast as they can print 'em. Oh ye, and there's this terrific intellectual-puzzle type game called "polyominoes" which will certainly be the rage at the next Worldcon (speaking of conventions... no, later.), among the more compulget time to fiddle with it along about the time the roof gets shingled -- say, next incarnation. I don't really mean to do a hatchet job on this book. I just found it sorta frivolous, kind of charming, and the sales figures make me nervous. Rendevous With Rama, with not much more story to it than Imperial Earth, copped the Hugo off some mighty heavy books two years ago. There's some mighty heavy books up for Hugos this year.    Oboy. Now we come to one of the few Nebula-winners of recent vintage that I liked worth a damn: Joe Haldeman's masterful The Forever War. Should there be one of you out there so removed from the currents of the sf ocean that you haven't heard of The Forever War yet, just take my word for it and go buy the book. If you have heard of it and haven't bought it, shoot your advisers and go remedy the omission at once. It is the whelk's kneecap, friends, the genuine dromedary's drawers, probably the ultimate spacewar novel. Some grumble at its similarities to Starship Troopers, the combat suits and so on. Others crow at the differences between Joe's kind of war and Heinlein's, calling Forever War a direct refutation of Troopers and an indictment of dat oT fascist Heinlein. Both camps might be interested to know that at the # Nebula Awards ceremony (at which Heinlein received the first Grand Master Nebula for lifetime contribution to sf), Heinlein and Haldeman were introduced, and Heinlein stuck out his hand and said, "Just read your book. Forever War. Terrific." At which Joe blushed and fum-fahed and hamahamatd and spent the balance of the evening walking around a half-meter off the floor. Something there is in fandom that likes a feud, real or imaginary. I have to agree with Heinlein: it's a Peach. Joe extrapolates relativistic temporal distortion to its logical effect on interstellar warfare: soldiers return from a battle to fmd Earth changed beyond recognition by different time-rates, their loved ones and friends long dead -- then return to the pointless, deadly, perplexing war between the stars. Joe's characters are real, his observations on war are biting and trenchant, his army-of-the-future is alltoo-plausible, and his pace is compelling. By God, he even pulls off a happy ending without straining. I suggest you read Forever War in combination with Starship Troopers -- most instructive. But if you are one of the knee-jerk radicals who keep coming up to me at conventions babbling about fascism (speaking of conventions... forget it), you want to bear in mind four things: #) FW assumes that Earth's interstellar army establishment will resemble the present U.S. Army in brainlessness, venality and rapacity; ST assumes that they will generally be ethical men, fallible but goodhearted. Both are, on the evidence of history, conceivable -- and remember that in Heinlein's M.I., generals fight too. #) FJf's army is conscript; #" s is volunteer -- resign any time, no penalty except loss of franchise. #) Heinlein's future society is a hypothetical experimental alternative to our own; Haldeman's is the # . straight-line extrapolation of our own. #) Heinlein is not Juan Rico (or Col. Dubois) any more than Joe is Pvt.MajcKMandella. Onward.    To more splendor, exclusively visual this time. A pair of coffee table books have appeared in my mailbox, and they're so splendid I'm going to have to go out and make a coffee table to put them on (just before I shingle the roof...). Who could be surprised that The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta was superb? Frank has been the undisputed master of fantasy illustration for God only knows how long, and his style is the most imitated in the field. People who've never heard of sf notice The Fantastic Art in my office, exclaim, "Oh, him," and bury themselves in the book for hours. All I need tell you about plates of Frank's most famous paintings (plus a few cartoons) with reproduction so achingly, exquisitely perfect that the pictures probably, as Thuiber once said, "lose something in the original." The book is worth three times its cover price of #, and I'm deeply gratefiil to Galaxy's Assistant Editor and Official Whipping Girl, Cynthia Bolling, for passing along the review copy, which she lusted after, when she could just as well have denied all knowledge of its whereabouts. Thanks, Cynthia. good that I waited a couple of days after I was done with it to open up The Best of Stephen Fabian. Didn't seem fair to stack a newcomer's first black-and-white folio next to the best oils of an old master. I needn't have. Fabian's first collection stands quite well beside Frazatta, thank you, in spite of the fact that it's all black and white. You can't flip the pages of Galaxy with your eyes open and fail to notice that Fabian is great; what I had somehow failed to notice was plates in this spiral-bound folio, many from Galaxy and IF , some from books like The Occult Lovecraft and Savage Tales of Conan (I must admit I find Frazetta's Conan more badass), some from fanzines like Energumen and Fantastic, and some previously unpublished. All are superb, my particular favorites being #s #, #I and especially-# (all three untitled), and the repro is It's available, as far as I know, only by writing Loompanics Unlimited, Box #, Mason, Michigan #, # a hit. Worth it, by me: with its black-and-white cover and spiral-notebook format, it's not as visually attractive a coffee-table package as the Frazetta, nor as durable an artifact. But then, it's easier to remove individual plates for framing without destroying the rest of the book. You pays your money and takes your choice. Me, I choose both.   I've gotten a couple of fascinating letters from blind fans, both of whom commented on the cussed difficulty of obtaining sf in Braille. I'm instructing my agent to put a clause in all future contracts requiring a Braille run; I understand David Gerrold does this as a matter of course. Well, those last two books aren't a helluva lot of good to the blind, but the next few items are. Two of them, anyway. In my continuing campaign to be the most eclectic sf reviewer in the North, I've located three phonograph records (with concomitant cassettes and tapes) of sf, and the first of these is a turkey. # is a rock album, one side of which is (God save the Mark) a rock opera, whose story line no doubt seemed to its creators to be science fiction. Furthermore, side two contains a gem entitled "The Twilight Zone," which its got heavy lyrics, man, about time and space collidin' and stuff. So when my neighbor Francis lent it to me, I gave it a listen. Well, I can't exactly criticize it musically. Rush, a three-man British band (I think they're British. They taste British.), are technically competent and just what they want to be: a superb Led Zeppelin imitation. If you like the thing Robert Plant does with his vocal chords, and what Jimmy Page does to a guitar, you'll love Rush's music. It gave me a pain in the ear, forced me to medicate myself with some my taste, right? About the "Science Fiction" part. "#," the title piece, is dedicated to "the genius of Ayn Rand," and based on some extensively-quoted but nowhere identified work of hers with which I was not familiar -- and which seemed, from the quotes, to be a dog. There's this Big Brother Future in #, see: a world ruled by the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, whose "great computers fill the hallowed halls," a world where nobody ever has any fun. Then this wandering person (unnamed, called "he" for convenience) stumbles across a hidden old room behind a waterfall, in which rest the rusted remains of an electric guitar. He teaches himself how to tune it, apparently devises a portable amplifier-and-power-pack, and rushes ingenuously off to share his marvelous discovery with the Priests. To his confusion and horror, they Jump up and down on the thing (if someone came into my chapel and started playing an electric guitar like Jimmy Page, I might stomp it some myself) and drive him out into the desert, where he starves to death. The three musicians who've been mysteriously following him around all day, maddened by grief, gnash their instruments with their teeth and hurl themselves through their own amplifiers. Oh yes, there's an extended quote on the back of the jacket, pointedly not ascribed to Ayn Rand, which describes a science fictional background world utterly inconsistent with that of the rock opera. And the "Twilight Zone" cut isn't even worth making fun of. So I'll drop the bleeding hulk and turn to: the Goodies. Alternate World Recordings is going to end up being a tremendous boon to blind sf fans, fans with laugh, don't laugh) and fans with alexia. And also to those who lile both spoken-word recordings and sf. The only two I've received for review are just great: excellent and apparently durable recordings of two splendid vocal instruments rendering good sf that is uniquely suited to the medium. The first of these is a surefire classic: Fritz Leiber reading his own Hugowinning Gonna Roll The Bones and a Fafhrd  Gray Mouser fragment called "In The Witch's Tent." If you've never heard Fritz read, take my word that he has one of the great speaking voices of our age, equal even to the hype that Forty Ackerman gives it on the jacket. To tell you the honest truth, I didn't care a hell of a lot for "Bones" when I first read it in Dangerous Visions years ago. But after hearing Fritz read it, I like it fine. A riproaring fantasy about an ace crapshooter who meets... There's also a lyrical and concise appraisal by Poul Anderson of Fritz and his work on the dust-jacket, and a rather good cover drawing by Tom Barber. The second record comprises two poems and two short stories by oddly compelling -- if you have a morbid turn of mind. I don't think I could listen to it a second time, but I enjoyed it the once -- and you may be one of the appalling multitude of Lovecrafty horror freaks who get off on ancient terrors and ghastly gods and flayed souls as a steady diet. Me -- well, once I smoked opium. I enjoyed it the once. But if you like Howard, this is prime Howard. The one I liked the best (and would be most likely to enjoy a second time) was a marvelous old Kull of Valusia story called "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune." It raised the hairs on my neck (until they were old enough to fend for themselves). All the selections are read by Ugo Toppo (honest), an established pro in the field of spoken word. Frankly I found him just a hair too hammy for my taste (you know, heavy significant pauses before words that aren't all that heavy, stuff like that, a bit too much Shakespearean Shudder in the voice here and there), but I must admit his voice is superb and versatile. And this one contains a small booklet with complete text. Prices unknown: write to Alternate World Recordings, # East #th St., New York N.Y. #. Harlan Ellison.)    Back to the written word. The End of the Dreams is what Harlan is always getting falsely accused of: a # recycled product. It comprises three long stories by James Gunn, reprinted from three earlier Gunn collections. According to the foreword, it is companion volume to one released last year, also consisting of reprints from previous Gunn collections, to which these stories are sequels. But this is not a case of filing off the serial numbers and peddling it over the state line, any more than it is when Harlan manages to keep his works in print and available for sale. The collections in question were issued in the #s by Bantam, which has no hardcover line, and I for one never saw any of 'em. If reshuffling the stories thematically helps Jim Gunn resell 'em, I say huzzah. The end result was, I got to read them. And they're dandy stories. Just a hair dated, but they were written when a story was a story, when dreamers had hope and a "science of happiness" seemed within man's ultimate grasp. "The Immortal" (part of a collection of which the was a botched clone) in particular Is A Lonely Place" had a splendid ending. and an Ole Pro and this is some of his vintage stuff, available for the first time in hardcover. Tamam shud.  I almost didn't read George Alec Effinger's new collection. Irrational Numbers. Robert Silverberg's supercilious introduction, asserting that This Probably Isn't What You Wanted To Read But That's Your Problem, Jerk nearly convinced me. But I happen to have read some stuff by Piglet that I liked, so I pressed on. And found the book OK. It comes in some-hazy-where around # on the Spider Scale; I frankly admit that part of the time I didn't know what Piglet was talking about and a small part of the time I actively disliked how he was doing it. But many of the stories appealed to me, and "At The Bran Foundry" was hilarious, a delightful, creepy and superbly paced paranoid fantasy about a class field trip through the foundry where they stamp ore into bran flakes, (the Firesign Theatre would have loved it.) The book's out on lend to a fellow Effingerian, and I can't remember the title of the other story I especially liked, a tragicomic masterpiece about a football player who finds that getting skulled on the field gives him incredibly realistic flashbacks of the day his wife died -- and endures them, seeks them out, for the vivid glimpses of his wife. Yes, Effmger is a maverick writer. But don't let that worry you: A.E. Van Vogt was a maverick writer once.    I'm running so far over that I'm going to have to give minireviews to everything that's left, even though some are excellent and deserve more space. Authors concerned, I'll try to make it up to you. I'll buy you a drink at the next con we're both at. Oh, and speaking of conventions... Now might be a good time to unload the news that I am either (depending on the new lead-time) going to attend or have attended Watercon, a regional con held Oct. # in Waterloo-Kitchener, Ontario, as Guest of Honor. If it's not October by the time you read this, come on up -- I don't know what hotel yet but you could phone Galaxy or read Locus. If it's too late, oy such a shame. I plan to bring my guitar and play Fluid madrigals and say things and maybe even auction off a couple original manuscripts... That's off my mind; so much for planted surprises. On to the minis: This Darkening Universe -- Lloyd Biggie is a writer of enormous potential; his Monument was just that. This is more tongue-in-cheek, part of a series about an interstellar private eye, who in this number taJces on an Unidentified Death Force (Udef) that sterilizes every planet it touches. Not a great book, but a good read -- and I'd like to see the rest of the series. I think what Lloyd needs is to stop churning them out for Doubleday and write the hell out of one. But maybe he did that for years and starved and I never read him -- how should I know? Shut up. Spider The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag -- a long-out-of-print collection of some of Heinlein's finest -- and most offbeat -- work, including the title story (a slambang fantasy), the Grand Classic definitive ultimate time travel story "'All You Zombies," the paralyzingly plausible "They," (about the ulti-. mate paranoid fantasy) and one of my favorite fantasies of all time, "The Man Who Traveled In Elephants," which still after twenty years and countless readings elicited literal tears of joy from me again. Another Side of the Master. The Book of Gordon Dickson -- in at least its second printing, a representative selection of a master's We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed iri gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. work in short stories, contains the classic "Danger -- Human" and # Nebula-winner "Call Him Lord," (a simply splendid story) plus other good stuff, only excuse for failure to purchase is prior possession. Connoisseur's Science Fiction -- British editor-publisher-reviewer Tom Boardman has assembled a slick, respectable-type Penguin collection -- with a startling cover for which the outlandish title must be apology. All great stories, by Bester, Pohl, Sturgeon, Asimov et al -- but virtually every single one was savagely satiric in theme or execution. My lip got curled into a permanent sneer. Does cynicism make you a connoisseur? Or the other way 'round? Star Trek: The New Voyages -- I am told that the majority of the material in this compendium of stories and articles ranges from good to excellent. Myself, I have a threshold problem: I have become constitutionally (and apparently incurably) incapable of assimilating one more written or spoken word having to do with Captain Bones and 'feoman Spock and Doctor Tribble and the Star Ship Intercourse which like a transvestite in a ladies room boldly goes where no man has gone before. If you don't have this condition (called "Atrekia"), enjoy. Logan's Run -- should have been titled "Nolan and Johnson's Runs," a ghastly slapdash skeleton of a book by two men who, from their track record, have no excuse. It's a more-than-hackneyed Race Against Death in your standard-issue Big Brother future, so shallow I couldn't get the soles of my feet wet. About a world of the young, where they kill you when you reach age #. Honest to God. Soon, it movie, with Michael York and Peter Ustinov. I flatly predict that said flick will be as piquant as the end result of a lentil dinner with Coca Cola; consequently it and the book get the third or is it fourth Galaxitive Award. Telempath -- I happen to have read this particular book on the close order of # times, in its prepublication stages. And yet it chanced that when the galleys came across my desk the other day, I hadn't read a word of it in over a year, so I believe I can maintain some objectivity. I read it in a single twelve-hour sitting, totally absorbed in its superb blend of traditional and innovative sf, its magnificent characterization. This man writes with muscle and style. Deserves the Reviewer's Highest Accolade: Just The Way I'd Have Done It Myself. an' the creek don't rise) a reasonably comprehensive (if not comprehensible) overview of the body of Harlan Ellison's work, an explosion of paperbacks from Ballantine, and surprises.  It was unanimous. Barry Malzberg  Bill Fronzlnl my first inauguration -- but I certainly hope and pray it will not be my last! So then, here we are. I, Carole: your new President. You, my billoving. It was not six months ago, as you'll all remember, that #, as commander of the Skipstone, proudly took us all in spirit to the Centauris, hoping that this resuscitation of the long-abandoned space project would give you unity, would weld together everyone on this globe. This had been done even without my efforts; you have found your unity, and you have delivered unto me as your President and with that union the clear high promise of your mandate -- Pardon me. Pardon me for this excess of rhetoric. You must surely understand how emotionally moved I am. You must surely understand my emotions on this difficult and poignant occasion, which does not yet lack the promise of joy. #, Carole: six months ago, the first female commander of a major spatial probe; now, the first female President. I am deeply, universally honored -- Again, please, I beg your indulgence. As I look out upon you, out upon all the spaces of the land, the inferences of the landscape expose themselves to me in all their beautiful, broken, blessed glory. An excess of union -- this is what I see and what I feel. One of my predecessors said from airoximately this same point many, many years ago that we gather here not for a victory of party but a celebration of freedom. Freedom. It is what we seek and it is what we shall together find -- George, please, this is my address. Everyone already knows from your own speech what you intend for us; everyone already knows only too well -- gratefully -- of your loyalties as my second in command on the Centauri drill, and now as my wonderful and devoted VicePresident. What they do not know, but what I was and am still about to tell them, is that you have become my husband. No tears, George. No tears for any of us. Least of all before our So we must humbly and proudly continue. We must all continue. And that is, of course, what I said to you, my dear brethren, near the tumpoint of the Centauri run, as we came to settle into single orbit around that doom-stricken and ruined binary. My dear brethren, I said, no, that is not quite right, George, I said, because naturally it was George I was talking to on the Skipstone and not my dear, dear brethren, George, we must carry on; we must successfully complete this mission not only because all of Earth is counting on us but because in the joyous accomplishment of this first starflight resides hope for peace. George, I said, George, in the stars -- salvationl You may recall, some of you may recall, that is, you may recall that there were those who laughed. There were those who scorned our great journey. There were those who said that the tachyons were as likely to fail as all the governments, and that if Skipstone did not selfdestruct, the governments would. Or both. Very difficult for George and myself, as you can imagine. Very difficult. You have been extremely patient, but I promise I will not keep you much longer. Not much longer. Thank you once more for bearing with me, one and all. There is no need for that, George. Stop it. Please. Please. Oh my friends, my cherished friends, you must be able to see how moved is our darling George. But he got hold of himself in Skipstone and he damned well better get hold of himself here and now, please, George. We have unity. Unity. A perfect unity which swept us by unanimous vote -- your unanimous vote and ours -- Unity and Unanimity -- Swept by unanimity just two hours later into the offices of President and Vice-President of this great land; swept me into this inaugural; swept our dear George into tears, into tears; swept both of us into matrimony, matrimony, matrimony. For what we face here -- it it if George, please. Please, God. What we face here, charred and empty -- In Babylon there are many gardens -- Gomorrah knew greatness in its time -- But we are, we both are -- No. Not that. We are not that. My name is Carole-, yours is George. Carole and George. President and Vice-President. First Lady and First Man...  Dear Mr. Baen: While I had foreseen the precipitation of a new military era caused by military lasers. Dr. Poumelle's article, "Lasers, Grasers, and Marxists," pointing out the inherent danger of a total nuclear war during the transition from the pre-laser era came as a shock. That the Soviet Union's leaders could contemplate the loss of # of the Soviet Union's population in order to make the world safe for their brand of communism became plausible. It becomes even more plausible when one remembers that the Soviet Union has a number of installations similar combat-operations center under Cheyenne Mountain, thus insuring that the leaders would not be part of the # casualty figure. Even if this scenario is avoided, however, the likelihood of direct confrontations between the Soviet Union and the United States would seem to be made more likely by the Present #S#-kilowatt lasers, which can cut metal and explode plexiglass cockpits are already on the way to relegating aircraft to a purely logistical role. The development of self-critical lasers which would use the nuclear energy produced by a gas-core reactor to make the gas-core itself a laser ("Science News," ###) and produce, perhaps, a #-megawatt beam, could easily deal with metal target to become a plasma which gives off intense X-rays that would foul the electronic devices of any warhead ("L'Utilisation Militaire Des Lasers" by W. D. Metz, "La Recherche, " June, #). Once such lasers were deployed, both on land and in satellites (so it's against the before), the MotherFatherlands would be protected. Aggression would no longer lead quickly to a cataclysm for both sides. Warfare would once again become more or less "conventional". A possible scenario, for example, would be a two-pronged attack launched by the Warsaw Pact against Western Europe. One prong could sweep across the northern German plain toward the Low Countries, while the other prong would be launched through the Fulda Gap. In four days of heavy fighting, these armies might be able to reach the Rhine before tnxips stationed in the United States could reinforce the Allies. Such an attack would no longer be met with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Another thing to keep in mind is that although air and space home delivery of nuclear warheads will have been checkmated, a nuclear bomb would make a dandy land mine, sort of an anti-army rather than antitank or personnel weapon. The pendulum of warfare might be swinging back to favor the defense. Concerning Dr. Pournelle's article of Lovecraftian horror, "In the Beginning" (October, #), recalled some, musing I have done about Einstein's General Relativity. The very fact that Einstein's General Relativity theory leads to chaos and the possibility that Cthulthu may pop out of a naked singularity might mean that there is something wrong with the theory. Interestingly enough, Hiiseyin Yilmaz of the Perception Technology Corporation has pointed out that while General Relativity is consistent with special relativistic first-order Doppler effects, it is inconsistent with second-order Doppler effects which have been established by experiments to a very high order of accuracy. This is another reason to have some doubts about the General Relativity theory. In "New Approach to Relativity and Gravitation" ("Annals of Physics: #, #), DrYilmaz has developed a slightly different relativity theory which predicts coiiectly all the Newtonian and post-Newtonian effects of gravity and is consistent to the second order. In fact, his theory only diverges from Einstein's in the strong field and weak field limits. The strong field limit does not have a Schwartzchild singularity and Yilmaz's theory does not lead to the usual "black hole' ' concept for collapsed stars. It leads instead to ultramassive stars which seem to have properties that resemble those of quasars, fliere are other differences between the two theories that might be tested. If the Yilmaz theory should prove to fit the data better, good-bye black holes and good-bye Cthulthu. Mr. Varley's "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" was one of the more enjoyable stories I have read this year. The idea of a human-plant symbiotic team with the plant providing life-support, computation and company was especially clever, and the description of the energy-intake phase was delightfm. "Larval Stage" by Steven Utley did not make the grade. I can best express my "ennui" with the story by asking the following questions: #) Who have the mass-minded Cygnians been fighting in order to have developed ships with shields and weapon systems? Weapon systems that amount to anything are not developed without a good stimulus. Surely ten years of more-or-less peaceful contact with the Terran Network could not have provided such a stimulus and surely die mass mind is not schizoid enough to fight itself. #) Why did the Cygnians first visit Alpha Centauri (A or B?) IV instead of the Earth where the Terran Network Central is located? The visit to Alpha Centauri is even more puzzling when one considers the fact that Alpha Centauri is over a parsec further from the #I Cygni system than the Earth is. #) Is there still contact between the individual Cygnians and the mass mind when the two are separated by a distance of #I parsecs? If not, what happens to those Cygnians which are "severed" in this manna-? Keep up the good work with Galaxy'. Yours truly, Jean Alexander Sharland # Hanover Parkway Greenbelt, MD # Indeed, a shift from offence to defence does seem historically overdue... if I were a Soviet commander I would be quite nervous about launching an attack over the German border i those "army-eating landmines" could already be emplaced! As for "Larval Stage," (I) Previous contact between the Cygnians and other species is assumed, (#) Perhaps they thought it discreet to visit an outpost first, and (#) Yes: the Cygniar mass-mind is very powerful -- and, besides, it isn't limited to four dimensions! To the Editor There are those of us who can occasionally write fine science fiction. Like Kingsley Amis, like Howard Fast, like Myself. I have flashes of that splendid sf insight, but it isn't really built into my psyche. And then there are those whose sf-sense is a part of them like the intelligent symbiotic plant is a part tion writers. Like Heinlein and Tiptree. They naturally think tha' way. I'm talking about John Varley. Varley is a bom science fiction writer. ley has fused pop art, mysticism, classical aesthetics, modem aesthetics and pure sensuality with the limitless imagination of the sf visionary. The ideas are well thought out, original, exploratory, and they come one right after the other. I think he's original, which is perhaps a primo quintessence of the Great sf writer, and I think if he doesn't get a Hugo for that goddamn story then I shall lose all respect for the award. The Nebula committee tends to be more open-minded toward young writers, I think, then the Hugo people. It's time a major sf award went to a younger, innovative writer, and Varley has demonstrated that he is deserving. John Shirley II # SE Franklin Portland, OR # Dear Mr. Baen; Mr. Geis took a step back from his view of fandom in the May Galaxy to give us two propositions about the human condition: that morality follows the human condition, and that alienation increases as the standard of living decreases. Though these are interesting, I must take issue with them. Starting with the last, I see no empirical evidence that affluence means more interaction with the enviroment and concern for human existence. One need only look about lienated and dissatisfied people. When our machines make each of us self-sufficient physically and give us the illusion of being emotionally so, what else can happen? The poor person on the other hand must depend upon his family and neighbors for his existence. If he feels alienated, he dies. The first theorem has, superficially at least, more backing, but there are at least two fairly modem examples of well-to-do peoples who stooped to barbarism. Nazi Germany produced the most technologically advanced industrial complex of its time and raised itself out of the worst depression the world has ever seen, yet was responsible for the rape of Europe and the murder of over comparitively high standard of living at the time of the Revolution, despite which there followed mass slaughters of political undesirables in the city squares. The distinguishing point of both occurrences was that although neither was actively participated in by the mass of the people (Hitler never got an absolute majority of votes), neither were they condemned. Mercier reported the gardens of the Tuileries more luxuriant than ever in the midst of the Revolution. We need not have "the Arena on worldwide #-D hookup" to have a barbaric society. One possible explanation of the rise of man is simply social evolution. It is logical that as civilization becomes more advanced, more civilized, it should have found new ways to cope with age old problems. But I don't have the final answer. A gold-leaf autographed copy of A Study of History to the person who answers that. Faithfully yours, Wayne Wolf # Rosarita Drive Tempe AZ #I Dick replies: Dear Jim: It would take a great deal of research and time to detail the information that leads me to think that as mankind creates surpluses of useable wealth by "raping the planet" he is able to indulge in the luxury of greater welfare and other social amenities for more and more of the "disadvantaged" (those who are too stupid or emotionally knotted to cope with life's problems successfully). I thought it was obvious. At the same time, of course, technology allows us to indulge our xenophobia more efficiently, for less-than-noble reasons. But overall, I think technology has allowed us to improve living conditions, at least in this country. and dissatisfied? That is built into us, I suspect -- an integral part of the human condition, like having to die. However, I don't really want to argue with a man who thinks that our machines have made each of us self-sufficient, when in fact technology has made us all more dependent on others for our basic needs. Most of the population used to be about # selfsufficient, on farms. Now we are all specialists and dependent on other specialists for everything. It is not only the poor person who must depend on others for life. It is just that for the others the dependency and vulnerability is masked and ignored and has other labels. Now, if you'll excuse, me, I must tend my garden, feed the chicks, make a pair of shoes and cut some wood for the stove...while on the treadmill which runs the generate. Best, Dear Mr. Baen, How could you do it? Alter finally manages to gain control for just one column and you let Geis back in the command chair, that's unethical, inhumane, cruel and antisocial. Anyone with a rudimentary intelligence can see that Alter is the greatest statesman of this century, and by keeping him locked up in the archives you and Geis arc immeasurably slowing down the progress of this great nation. What would the world be like today if some deformed entity like Geis had locked up Plato, or Cicero, or Locke, or Gandhi, or Marx; well, maybe they should have locked that one up. Why, if Alter were freed he could become an author or publisher, even an editor! Now don't get your androsterone up James, I'm sure Alter would find a job for you somewhere, maybe in circulation. If Alter were freed he could even become President, think of it, the country would finally be led by somebody without a perversion about tape-recorders or a Boston accent. We must fTM Alter! We must put him in control and let Geis live in the dungeon for a while. We must form a Freedom for Alter Society, if the fans out there ate interested all they need do is write. Join today, for Alter, for Freedom and Democracy, for America!! Sincerely, Charles Vane # Tulane Dr. NE, Albuquerque, NM # Dick,  think we're in trouble... oi'lb Si'er" N o  Y . u N Y  # I ' ' I I RI I i # per word per Issue (including name and address) or # Issues S# per word. #-word minimum. Pjiyment with order. I sale. Free lists. Gordon Barber, #S-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN S#. Dlustrated catalog of SF-Fantasy Weird Tale Books. #s of titles listed. Send # for one, I for next #, or # for # consecutive catrdogs plus Wolfe's "Fifth Head of Carberus" a # clothbound #st ed Nebula Award winning SF book. Send to; Purple Unicom Books, #-G# London Road, Duluth, Mirm. #. magazines from # to I#. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. #. wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-#, St. Paul, Mn. #. Booklet reveals how to turn your ideas into cash. Only I .#. Write: Dick Dermott, Dept. 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Send to: Galaxy Magazine # Kennedy Drive (check where applicable) Happauge, NY #B#  Extend or renew my current subscription.  This is a new subscription.  My payment of # for # issues is enclosed.  Bill me. Flash! If you enclose payment with your order you will receive absolutely free the fabulous Galaxy Perpetual Calendar! #I # # Frederick Pohl  Robert L. Forward  Gordon Eklund i Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Jay Tumck, Circulation Director J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L. C Murphy, Subscriptions Dept Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor C. M. Bolling, Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor  i James Baen, Editor mmmtm -- mmm -- mmm A tale of shipwreck, survival...and a cold and bitter seduction . A Galaxy First. The Rock, the Pool, and the People: together they had formed a closed eco-system from time immemorial. Now all that would change... Eric Vinicoff  Marcia Martin # They were late for Ragnarok, yet still they would find time to deal with the little alien -- one way or another! And the meek shall inherit the Earth... Robinette Broadhead had won a lottery. His winnings were sufficient to either support him (but not in comfort) for the rest of his life or to purchase a one-way ticket to Gateway, where wealth and fame -- or death -- awaited. Robinette chose glory. Trouble is, he seems to have used up his nerve in making that choice. Editor examines the very first of all the biblical adjurations -- and finds it far from fulfilled! science and technology have taken the wonder out of life; they are very, very wrong! Spider invites you to a Bakkanalia. Where to find it. Cover by Rick Stembach, from Interior illustrations by DiFate, Fabian, Gaughan, Stembach of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-Issue subscription: # in U S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. Alt rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. who we are. The only thing we, however, know about you is that you read science fiction. But now we need to know more about you to continue to bring you the type of fiction -- and, incidentally, advertisements -- that will interest you. Please fill in the following in as much detail as you can; your time will be well spent and most appreciated. #. Male Female #. Age #. Student: High School College #. College graduate Degrees #. Income: Under # #-# #-# #-# Over # #. Profession #. Own Home Rent: House Apartment #. What magazines, other than science fiction, do you read regularly? Europe Other #. Means of travel: Plane Auto Train Bus Qther #. Do your own: Boat Est. value Automobile Est. value . Hi-Fi equipment Est. value Home Workshop Est. value CamperMotor Home Est. Value Camera equipment Est. value Motorcycle Est. value Snowmobile Est. value #. Interest: Skiing Fishing Swimming Hunting Golfing Tennis Bowling Camping Flying Boating Gardening Home repairs Photography Stamp collecting , Coin collecting Other #. AffMlatkms: Fraternal Professional Athletic Social Scientific Other #. Are you a member of: Book Club Record club Other Red Cross Political club #. Investments: Stocks Bonds Real Estate Thank you for taking the time to respond to our questionnaire. Please send your completed form to: # East # Street New York, NY # It was recently remarked to me that the conquest of Space offered a challenge so vast that the human spirit must quail before it. I disagreed vehemently, on the grounds that while that challenge is indeed infinite, so too are our spiritual resources. I did allow however, that it would take quite literally everything we've got to offer, including, most especially, our religious impulses. In light of the foregoing (and with no little trepidation) I offer an -- In every age the myths and legends -- or sacred truths, if you prefer -- of times past must be reinterpreted in the light of new knowledge and beliefs, if they are to remain meaningful for the men and women of that new age. Thus if God indeed spoke unto the Prophets of Israel (and for the moment let us assume that he did), think of all the things He could not say directly, simply . because those Prophets, wise as they may have been, were simply not equipped with the knowledge necessary for comprehension. Had He spake unto them of pulsars and planets, Trojan Points and star-probes, He had spake unto them gibberish. It follows that if the Bible is to be as relevant to the Age of Science as it was to the Late Neolithic, its wisdom must be extracted and extrapolated: if God spoke to us. He spoke in parables; He had no choice. Consider in this regard Genesis #:# : "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Consider especially the word 'earth.' To a man of # years ago, the concept that the translators of the King James Version chose to render as 'earth' might have been rendered as well (in meaning, not beauty!) as 'all lands,' 'all ground,' or 'all places where a man can walk.' What it could not have been rendered as is 'Earth' with a capital, or 'this planet'; in # B.C. the concept was lacking. The modem equivalent would be 'available habitats': places where people can live. And just what habitats are available to us? Well, Dr. Gerard O'Neil has published a nuts-and-bolts proposal detailing how we can with present # continued on page # Eric Vinieoff Marcia Martin Chance iliectiiMi -- Wear Ararat True, the aliens were primitive, but there was something about them... They doomed themselves in a myriad of ways. Perhaps it was in their nature to seek incompleteness instead of the whole. The rift grew, and led them to use up and foul rather than maintain and enrich. Not alone did they pass. All else that shared their precious gift they dragged down with them, all but the mean things that evolved or adapted to dwell amid the ruin. But in their last days, driven by the need for racial continuity that was their ultimate defense against mortality, they constructed me. No, that isn't exactly right. That which they built isn't I, no more than the protoplasmic casings were they. They created a final servant. But  am more than that. Did they realize? Did they plan it that way? I will never know. The starbow spread colorfully in the forward screen, flattened and stretched by .# c. Ap Retalia was decelerating from trans-light velocity -- or had been, before spotting the bogie. The bridge was on combat alert; all six Command Level officers were wrapped into their stations. Captain Reta hung tensely in the central chair of the circular chamber. His tail coiled around the back brace, while his triple-jointed legs were hooked over the side bars. His azure body-fur stood tautly erect. "Well, Rho? Is it a Poorg unit?" The underCaptain-Astrogation flicked out her tongue negatively. "Not unless it's some sort of trick. For one thing, why would they be way out here in interstellaria poking along at sub-c?" "Who can guess at Poorg motives? We don't even know why they're bent on genocide. Maybe they came out here to commune with the divinity of their choice." "Not in that ore shuttle!" Rho snapped. "Wrong course, for one thing -- it's coming in from the Rim. But more importantly, the drive is something I've never seen before." "How so?" "No fusion flare. They can't be baffling it, not at this range. There's a hydrogen scoop up front, but it's material -- no trace of a collector field." Reta's tail tip twitched nervously. "It's taking in interstellar matter, but not for a fusion drive. Why? Let's have a closer look," Rho's subtentacles played over her board. A new segment of the flowing universe appeared -- Ap Retalia was running parallel to the bogie, ten thousand tals away and wrapped in its monopole force shield. The bogie was a slender, tal-long white tube with a narrow funnel in front and an egg-shape in the rear. "A particle accelerator," the underCaptain-Engineering barked. Urgath was near reproductiondeath age, so old that her pelt was turning blonde. "Very simple, but not much thrust. Fission-powered, judging from the thrust velocity." Reta relaxed. "Archaic technology. No military threat then?" "Without our shield the stream of accelerated particles could damage us. Otherwise, no." "What could it throw at us?" "Based on their demonstrated technology? You should ask an anthropologist. Fission-bomb rockets, I suppose. Maybe fusion ones too. Laser beams. Microwaves. Nothing serious." Reta paused for long moments. "Very well. Let's move in and make contact." All the underCaptains stared at him. He stared back. He knew what was bothering them -- it bothered him too -- but he had a vague feeling that contact should be made. That was why they made prescience a requirement at Captain's academy. Skilled subtentacles bent to their tasks; the white ball that was Ap Retell ia moved toward the bogie, its sub-c engine generating momentum waves that eliminated the sensation of acceleration. "Scan for electromagnetic transmissions," Reta ordered the underCaptain-Communication. The unspoken corollary was that the First Circle telepath Would also listen carefully for mental messages. "Close to ten tals and hold." They could make out details of the bogie. The reactor and the crew area had to be in the egg at the vessel's base -- the tube was too thin to support them. The particle stream emitted a pale-blue glow. "I'm getting a transmission!" the underCaptain-Communication exclaimed. "Coherent light, a focused beam aimed at us. Can't understand it, of course, but it does sound like spoken language. Here, listen." Sounds like starth barking emerged from a speakerdisk. "Had to modulate the sound frequency a bit; it was pitched too low for our earslits." "Proabaly telling us to keep our distance." Reta wiggled his tongue in pleasure -- his eating orifice was cartilaginous and immobile. "Keep closing. We'll show them who is in charge here." Abruptly the screen flared white, then went to black. Moments later the stars and the bogie reappeared. "Hydrogen fusion explosion," the underCaptain-Weaponry reported tersely. "The alien craft launched a small rocket at us. It detonated in the shield. More coming." The screen went through more antics, while the underCaptainWeaponry watched his displays complacently. The ship trembled slightly. "Now they're trying electromagnetics. We're counterphasing; no danger of penetration. Should we blast them?" "No." Reta felt the decision tear at his sense of duty, but he somehow knew that this mystery had to be solved, not eliminated. "Let's see what happens when the aliens realize they can't touch us." The bogie tried several other weapons, even swinging around to bring its drive stream to bear. But nothing could penetrate Ap Retalia. The underCaptains were muttering among themselves. Finally Rho said, "Captain, we can't waste any more time here. The Muster is scheduled for #-I #-#." "At emergency capability we can easily arrive in time. Compute a minimum-duration flight program." Rho didn't look happy, but she did as she was told. Finally the attack stopped and the laser message-beam resumed. Reta ordered the shield softened sufficiently to let the beam through, but kept it on a hair-trigger in case hostilities were recommenced. Then he flipped open his com. "Philology Section?" "Here, Captain." "Tie into the alien transmission. Use all the computer capacity you need -- you have priority. Communication will send out a similar responding beam to the aliens. If they're this far from home they must be advanced enough to have a computer with a languagetranslating function." "I have the course plot," Rho announced. "We can reach the Muster on schedule if we resume deceleration within a twentieth-day. Otherwise we'll overshoot our Jump point." "Good." Reta felt the pressure of the underCaptainss worry and confusion building. Discipline held their tongues for the moment, but he would have to come up with a good explanation for his actions soon or face a Section Twelve vote by them -- legal mutiny. "Captain, we've tied in our language computer, and the aliens are responding in kind." That was the Philology Section chief reporting through the speakerdisk on the communication board. "Elementary comparatives in the spoken mode are underway." "Is it making any sense?" Reta asked. The Poorg failure was sharp in his mind. Amorphous creatures from a frigid gaseous giant world, their language concepts had proved too complex for either language computers or philologists to decipher. Perhaps, he thought, if the two races had been able to communicate with each other... "Yes, it is, Captain. Cognitive percentage, # so far, though that's bound to go down somewhat as we tackle more complex words and grammar." Reta's tail tip twitched as he waited for the computer to finish learning the alien language. Even at electronic speed the task was a long and complicated one. The process was simply an accelerated version of standard translation technique. Images and corresponding words were flashed back and forth. Sometimes several different images were needed to nail down a subtle or abstract meaning, and some couldn't be nailed down at all. But finally a glowing display indicated completion , "About time," Reta hissed. "Since they chose to give us their language, it seems only right that we should break the shell." He turned to the underCaptainCommunication. "Patch me into the computer channel . ' ' He thought very hard very fast. What was he going to say? First contact, even with such pitifully inferior creatures, was a grave responsibility. "Go ahead, Captain." Reta spoke in his own language, confident that the computer would translate his words and relay them to the bogie. "Attention, alien ship. Please acknowledge." Silence. Reta leaned out of his chair mike's range. "Am I getting through?" he asked the underCaptain-Communication. The latter nodded. "You've tested our defenses," Reta resumed. "You know our technology is superior to yours. We can catch you if you try to run. If you don't answer, we'll blow you out of space and get on with our own business." "Very well. I am answering. What must I do to prevent our destruction?' ' The voice had a flat computer vocoder flavor, of course. The unde iCaptains listened, interested despite themselves. Reta's tongue flicked. "First of all, identify yourself." "I am named Japheth." "Where is your home world?" "I cannot tell you that. It is security-classified information." The underCaptains hissed with amusement. Calculating the location of the alien's launch point would be a simple thing for the computer, working back along its course until a solar system intersected. Reta moved to the point of his main curiosity. "You're from the Rim, and a younger civilization than ours, as shown by your prehistoric ship. What is the purpose of your flight?" "That too is security-classified." "Why?" "To prevent that purpose from being jeopardized." "It's a hostile mission then?" Reta pressed sharply. "No. It has nothing to do with your race, or any race other than our own." "If you don't explain, my own security problem will force me to destroy you." "I realize that. I will do anything I can to prevent my destruction, but I can't reveal my mission." "Why not?" "I have instructions from those who gave me my task. I can't deviate from them. I am sorry. But I assure you again, I and my mission are no threat to you or your race. Can't you simply accept that, and resume your own errand?" "Stand by," Reta hissed angrily, then flipped off his mike. "Defecating waste of time," Urgath muttered. "That alien must be some kind of fanatic; it'd rather die than talk." "Indeed -- and that doesn't make sense." Reta was whispering half to himself. "A pre-starflight technology nonetheless launches a starship. Why? Exploration? Curiosity? No, that ship had to have been a tremendous effort to construct. Its mission must be a vital one." "All the more reason to blast it," Rho said, "and eliminate a potential threat." "You're letting your xenophobia do your thinking for you. This alien to throw everything away rather than answer two questions, one of which it must know we can deduce ourselves. That goes beyond fanaticism. Unless their brand of rationality is radically different from ours, it smacks of a totally inflexible obedience to orders. That's a contra-survival trait, one you would more expect to find in -- " His tail slapped its rest abruptly. He flipped open the com. "Philology Section, study the sound qualities of the alien transmissions." "Yes, sir. But what are we looking for?" "If it's there, you'll know soon enough." Reta leaned back, awash in the tension of command. What was he doing here? Why was it so important, compared to the Last Muster of his race? There were, of course, the dreams. Were they prescient visions sent to guide him, or false phantoms driving him to nihilistic despair? "Captain!" The voice from Philology Section rippled with excitement. "We found it!" Reta's tail tip untensed. It was only a minor part of the mystery solved, but a beginning was a beginning. "Report." "The voice is artificially generated, like our computer's pseudovoice. Either they have some reason for speaking through a vocoder, or -- " "Or we're talking to someone who has to obey orders, no matter what. A computer." Urgath hissed her anger. "Genitalia! I should have guessed from the visuals alone! At that crawling pace any crew would need a mountain of life-support equipment. There just isn't room for it, not when you consider the size of primitive accelerator gear and fission reactors. A cybernetic pilot would be much less bulky." "Let's see if we can find a way around its security programming," Reta said, then flipped his mike back on. "Attention, alien." "Yes." "We know what you are -- a computer. Do you deny it?' ' "No. That isn't classified information." "Are there any members of the race that built you aboard?" "No." "Not even in cold sleep?" "No." "Then you're in command of your ship. I'm in command of this ship. Between us we must find a solution. I must learn your mission, or else I have only one alternative." "I fervently wish I could reveal it, but I can't. I have been about my task for hundreds of years, and may be for thousands more. My builders wrought too well; I am lonely. And I am haunted by the fear of failure. I need help that your obviously space-wise race could supply." "I see," Reta said softly. "Please stand by." He flipped off the mike and sat silently, thinking. "That machine is playing games with us," Rho hissed. "Did you hear that talk about loneliness, like it was a person." "I think it is like a person," Reta mused. "How would you like to be the only one of your kind, on a flight taking hundreds of years, sentient and all alone?" Rho didn't answer. Urgath rapped her tail against its brace stridently. As the senior underCaptain, hers would be the duty of succeeding Reta, if necessary. "We'll help the alien," Reta whispered. "We will not!" Urgath hissed. "Captain, I'm forced to demand a Section Twelve vote. You're not well." Reta blinked. His eyelids dialated open slowly. A remembered vision crossed his mind; emptiness, aching loss, a part of his haunted dreams. Then he forced himself to deal with the suddenly trivial matter before him. He probed the eyes of the tense, staring underCaptains. They were wavering. He had to bring them back. He knew that he would succeed. "I'm not sick. We'll leave before the deadline, and we won't miss the Muster. I promise." "But why this sudden fetish of helping strangers?" Rho demanded. Reta's head hurt. He blinked rapidly, and said, "I... know we have to help this alien." "What?" Worry edged Rho's words. "We have to help Japheth." "Why?" Urgath chimed in. "Just... feelings. Dreams. You see..." He couldn't go on. It wasn't fair to them, to curse them so soon with his knowledge. "What do we see?" Rho insisted softly. "You have to tell us, or else..." There it was. He had no choice, unless he wanted to ignore the most recent dreams, shrug them off. And he couldn't do that; they held him in thrall. "I've... seen blackness... nothingness... where our future should be." Silence folded around the underCaptains. They knew, loved and feared the prescience that marked their high officers. Often it served as savior, or provided solace. Then too, it sometimes foretold doom, but even that was a bleak service. Above all, it was a mystery, respected and venerated almost by racial instinct. "There isn't any future... for us... or the Poorgs." Reta's hiss whistled with terror. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he appeared generally haggard. The burden was shared; he could let his facade fall. The underCaptains were shaken; the crimson 'look ahead' eyes of prescientseen horrors couldn't be faked. Finally Rho said, "Then the Last Muster is going to be... just that." Reta darted his tongue in agreement. "Seollarta. The final battle of the primal gods, when all die, and the world is reborn." "Don't spout religion at us," Urgath hissed. "If our whole race is pre-doomed, all the more reason for us to hurry and do our part to take those fecal Poorgs with us!" But Reta seemed not to hear her. "Rebirth," he whispered, half in a trance. "Do others see it too?" Rho asked despairingly. "The High Command? Other Captains?" "Yes. The fleet will be told at the Muster. The people won't be told at all. It would only cause panic. But... But there can't be any rebirth for us. We have no future." No one disputed him. Prescience had bred pragmatism into the race. "How does the alien ship figure into this?" Urgath demanded. "I'm not sure. But I think... My dreams have been... very strange. Can I trust them for guidance? I... I must." "What do the dreams say?" Reta stared at the star field and the alien probe in the screen. "There are other worlds, other races. What if... What if there are other gods too?" "I don't understand." "Don't you see the irony? Two intelligent races are about to extinguish each other. A combined total of over sixty thousand years of effort and progress will become meaningless in the end. It'll be as though neither we nor the Poorgs ever existed. Except... except for this minor incident." He turned to face the underCaptains, and his look was fey. "I'm... told to help them! Don't you see! The only surviving effect of our whole race, our only reason for being, is to help that ship out there! How can I help getting religious -- only a god could be so cruel!" Silence reigned even longer this time. All thought of Section Twelve had vanished; Reta was mastered by his prescience, and as such was inviolate, almost holy. Finally Urgath said gruffly, "Let's do whatever it is we have to do quickly, so we can join the Muster." Reta's tongue flicked, then he opened the inter-ship channel again. "We'll help you, if it can be done quickly." "I thank you." "What kind of help do you need?" "I'm searching for a planet fitting certain requirement parameters. It must possess no intelligent life forms. Its surface gravity must be approximately nine point -- " "Hold on," Reta interrupted. "I'll switch you to Astronomy Section. They've indexed most of the solar systems within five hundred light years. I assume you want the coordinates of the nearest suitable world?" "Yes. Thank you." Reta transferred the circuit, and gave the Section head detailed orders. Then he leaned back and stared at the starbow. "Why?" That was Rho. Reta turned and asked, "Why what?" "Why is the computer searching for a specific kind of planet? Resources? Colonies?" Reta hissed his disagreement. "Resources it could easily find closer to him. And with their primitive technology, that race couldn't possibly support interstellar colonies." "Then what?" "An evacuation, I think. Suppose their home world is dying slowly for some reason. They could conceivably be searching for a new world on which to save a part of their race. A rebirth." His voice fell. "Three races, but only they have hope." "Not much hope," Urgath hissed. "Even with a planet, they'll never be able to reach it in junk like that. And they'll probably be dead before the probe can return." Reta didn't reply. Silence endured until the com blared forth the s.  m. brent co.  p.o. box #, milford, mich. # Astronomy Section head's voice. "All done, Captain. I found the alien a nice young planet not many lights Core-ward from here -- almost on its line of flight." "Good work." Reta switched back to the inter-ship channel. "You have your information. We must be on our way now." "Again I thank you," the computer voice said. "For my own part, I would like to go with you, learn about you, perhaps become your friend. But I too have an errand, a most urgent one." "Gaining our friendship would be a waste of your time. We have very little of either commodity left. Goodbye." Abruptly a curtain was drawn in Reta's mind, and he turned to the job of resuming the flight. A new course program was calculated and laid in. Then he touched a heat-switch on the board in front of him, and felt the tingling induced by the momentum-drive. The colors of the starbow began to shift subtly. The alien probe vanished instantly. Yet it did not vanish fully from his mind, but gnawed constantly at the edges of his consciousness until short days later, when in the white heat of subatomic energy release, it vanished with all else. At the end, released from all duties, he wondered if the alien mission would succeed, if any good would come of their chance meeting. And wondering, died.    From space the world was a blue-green globe dappled with cloud-whiteness. It had no name -- yet. It circled a G#V star with a semimajor axis of #. #xI # # km. Its mass was #x# # gm, with an equatorial radius of # km. It had one moon. The probe learned this and much else as it orbited the world, and its instruments scanned long and meticulously. Finally it decided that the world fit into its programmed parameters. It cut loose the accelerator drive system and descended on its fuset. It began traversing the southern temperate zone, landing in large river valleys. At each site remote surveyors rode out on their air cushions to probe the entire vicinity, conducting geologic and topographical analyses. The sixth site proved to have sufficient potable river water, land for farming, and nearby ore deposits of civilization' s building blocks. The myriad other factors all checked out too, so the probe set to work. It scoured every part of the valley from the air with high-intensity microwaves, sterilizing the soil to a depth of twelve meters. Then it sterilized a kilometer-wide perimeter circle around the selected zone, a protection against infection by native life forms. The primitive native plants and animals of this world couldn't compete with the tough products of Earthly natural selection anyway, but the program was nothing if not cautious. Amid the probe' s supply stores were the ingredients for building soil out of raw rock, but happily that wasn't necessary. The soil was suitable for growing Earthly plants after the surveyors sowed it with aerobic and anaerobic bacteria. The air and sunlight were, of course, also suitable. The probe had stored seeds and cells in its clone bank for every plant, animal and bacteria that had existed anywhere on Earth. It also had basic ecology programs -- experts could add sophistications later. It set to work, using the surveyors, to sow, nurture and spread. First came the simplest plants and animals, then more and more complex ones, all in balanced harmony. The probe worked with tireless efficiency; it was in no hurry. So a long time passed before it finished, but finish it did. Thirty square kilometers of Earth reborn; trees, birds, bees, fish in the river, algae, deer, grassy meadows, flowers, insects, predators and thousands of other living things great and small. No one area of Earth had been recreated ecologically; plants and animals from many had been selected for incorporation in the program. Finally the ecology took solid root, growing and spreading of its own accord. Later the probe would establish other such enclaves, and eventually the entire planet would be remade. But for now one was sufficient. Tens of thousands of human beings were stored in the clone bank -- all that could be gathered in the short last days -- their memories All would be 'revived' eventually, but at first there would be only a small pioneer party, less than a thousand specially trained persons. They were grown in tanks of artificial amniotic fluid to young manand-womanhood, and the memoryMany had been older on Earth, but pioneer life required youthful strength. The women and men left the probe, and looked at their new home. It was night, but the moon lit the scene. They looked around them in awe, for not one had really expected their desperate mission to succeed. Some looked at the stars, wondering which (if any) was Sol, knowing that its third world no longer bore intelligent life. None of them thought to thank the machine that had served them so well. They slept in sleeping bags under the sky, guarded from wandering predators by the probe's weaponry. In the morning they would begin establishing their niche in the new ecology. But before they slept, they took a solomn oath together; that this Earth would never go the way of its namesake.  earth dwellers The trouble with children, these days, is that they live in the future -- and we parents are their past... The shuttle launching was not very dramatic. She wasn't sure what she had expected, but surely more than this endless waiting, while disembodied mechanical voices crackled around her in painstaking last minute checks as the vibrant summer stars were slowly bleached by the coming dawn. She had felt obscurely cheated, as though the least they could have done was given her a spectacle intense enough to be worthy of all this pain. The lift-off came finally, two hours after the final kisses for Susan, Jay and Kevin. He had looked so unutterably, heartbreakingly small in his specially-built pressure suit that her resolve, despite weeks of careful buttressing, had crumbled and her lips were set grimly as she knelt down and crushed him to her. His new short haircut left bare the vulnerable little neck, baby plump still and smelling faintly of powder. A treacherous thought of Hecuba holding her grandson for the last time before his death had stabbed her, and she had stood up so hastily that the little boy had tumbled backward, laughing. "Final countdown." "Standing by." "Ten, nine..." The stars had faded now but the moon was still visible, a thin spiky crescent, fragile-looking and yet obscurely comforting, because that was where they would go first and it was a place she could at least see. There, they weren't entirely beyond her. Not yet. Not until tomorrow or the next day when the Oregon set journey that would reach half lightspeed, carrying like some enchanted floating castle its # dreaming passengers through their sixteen-year sleep until the spell should be broken by the hard pioneer life awaiting them as members of the new colony on Sirius V, The thin golden flame of the shuttle's rockets faded and they were gone. Duncan waved away the reporters, who had scented emotion and were beginning to circle. His craggy face was as calm as ever, the shake of his head as assured. Nonetheless, something in the blue eyes must have flashed ominously, for the reporters backed off to hunt easier prey and left them huddled alone at the edge of the barren spacefield. "It's always been like this, Rachel," he said gently. "Always. You know that. Children grow up and go away. On ships or trains or covered wagons or spaceships or whatever; they go." "But not so far!" "It seemed as far, then." "But parents could write to them! A letter might take a year -- five years! -- but it got there eventually. But now, across space..." "Many never got there. Rachel, let it go. Accept it." "I can't!" she cried. "It's easy for you! You just wall off your feelings and that's that. I can't do that!" He was too wise to take up the old argument. He put his arms around her, the dark head resting on his worn blue shirt, the shirt he liked because it was familiar and comfortable, like Earth. After a moment she said, subdued, "I'm sorry." "I know." "It's just that we'll never even know if they -- if anything happens. And Kevin is so little. I've always wanted grandchildren and now I've only had him for two years. And Susan..." "Shhh." He held her while she cried, and around him the ugly utilitarian structures of Logan Spacefield blurred, like children's sandcastles dissolving in the rain.    They stayed three days more at the spaceport, watching by video the loading of passengers onto the Oregon, waiting for the final launching. Not that there was much to see. The colonists were placed in suspended animation as soon as they reached the moon; the project's medical team wanted to observe the suspended state as long as possible. Rachel visualized them, each in his clear plastic chamber, being hefted aboard like so many tons of seeds, or food, or landing fuel. She had seen pictures of the compact suspended animation chambers, and now the idea tortured her that Kevin would look as if he were in a seethrough coffin. The suspension drugs would even slow down his circulation so that his ruddy cheeks would have the cool paleness of death... Stop it, she told herself severely. You know better than that. But the image kept returning. They sat on hard chairs in a large bare room set aside for close relatives of the colonists and watched the video screen for three days. They didn't talk much. At noon one of them would leave their airconditioned vigil, walk through the oppressive heat to the building which housed the spaceport cafeteria, and bring back soggy sandwiches and tepid coffee. The Earth-moon communications, many of them incomprehensibly technical, ceaselessly assaulted the air around them. When it was all over, the Oregon safely started on her epic voyage, both of them secretly felt relieved. It was over. They could go home.    "The coffee's ready," "Be right in, Hon. I'm making a fire." "Then I'll bring it in there." She got out her best silver tray, a wedding gift thirty-two years ago. She poured the coffee into waferthin china cups, dug around until she found the embroidered napkins Susan had made for her one longago Christmas, arranged them on the tray. It looked festive, a homecoming celebration. Abruptly she poured the coffee into thick brown mugs and shoved everything else, napkins and all, into the sink. Duncan was kneeling at the fireplace, his blue eyes warm in his fire-flushed face. "It's good to be home." "It's a lot colder here than in Utah." "Just tonight; Weather Central says it's going to warm up again." "That's good." They sipped their coffee in silence. The fire crackled, the flames randomly highlighting familiar objects in the comfortable room. The books on the shelves opposite the fireplace brightened and then darkened, mocking human knowledge in transit. The ancient brass andirons shone steadily. "Oh, I meant to tell you, Maia videoed while you were in the shower. She said to tell you there's a meeting of your alianthus committee tomorrow at ten at the Center and they really need you there." He grinned. "She looked very harried. Are you nearing a crisis?' ' "I don't know. Not when I left." Alianthus. Tree of Heaven. In the old after-life myth were there alianthi in heaven? Soon there wouldn't be any anywhere if the government wouldn't fund additional research on Dodderson's blight. She wasn't usually a Joiner of Causes, but this one was different. The tiny park in the ugly, swarming city of her childhood had been graced with alianthi, and their long feathery leaves were tangled in all her girlhood memories. Even now she could feel the mild autumn sunlight sifting through the scarlet waving branches and dappling her bare arms. Were there alianthi on Sirius V? "Will you go to the meeting then?" "No. No, I don't think so." "I asked Jerry and Katia to come by tomorrow "night. You know how eager they always are to escape their labs and rusticate." "Yes." "They'll want to know all about how it went, of course. They've always thought so much of Susan." "Yes, they have." Another long silence. The fire hissed and cracked. "Rachel, you seem so... remote. Don't shut me out." "I'm not shutting you out." "Yes, you are. Don't you know it? Can you tell me what you're thinking?" "What do you think I'm thinking?" she said in irritation. "I miss Susan." "I know, although it isn't as though we're used to having her living in this house. But it seems to be something more. Can't I help?" "There's nothing else," she snapped, feeling vaguely that she might be lying. He hesitated, concern becoming edged with exasperation. "Well, I don't want to sound as if I'm trying to force you to talk to me, Rachel. But you know how it's usually been -- you feel better after you've talked things out and found a label for whatever it is you're feeling." "Mental Health Rule Number #," she jeered. He stiffened and she regretted her words; what he had said, after all, was true. She knew that she should apologize but that he wouldn't insist on it. She took advantage of his generosity by staying spitefully mute. However, after a moment she reached for his hand and held it. Limply. "Look," he said, pointing to the window, "Look how bright the stars are tonight." Even through the plastic they were spectacular. The last of the moon had melted away and the stars flung themselves across the sky unrivaled. From where she sat she could see the Dipper, the North Star, the jaunty W of Cassiopeia. Not diamonds, she thought, they had more life than the cool hardness of diamonds, they pulsed and throbbed and beckoned, more beautiful than jewels, more bewitching than anything on Earth... Abruptly she jumped up and jerked the blinds closed. Duncan stared down at his empty cup. "I'm going to bed. Coming?" He was looking at her compassionately, and suddenly she hated that. "No, not now. I'm not tired. You go without me." He moved toward her but she retreated, putting the coffee table between them. "No, Duncan, don't. Just let me be." After a moment he nodded and left, his shoulders dropping helplessly. She was tempted to call him back but the something growing in her wouldn't let her and she watched with hard eyes as he reluctantly climbed the stairs. Then she sat on the sofa, not thinking, watching clinically as the fire sputtered and sank. Little flames darted vainly at the ashy wood, finally settling for conserving themselves in subdued coals that gave off comfortable heat but no soaring leaps of color. Like me, she thought bitterly, even as another part of her mind warned her not to be so melodramatic. She sat there a long time, fighting sleep, wanting obscurely to stay awake for her whole night of mourning, but her body clamored for its rights and finally, head thrown back and arms dangling at her sides, she slept.    It was almost morning. Gingerly, pampering her stiff neck and aching back, she creaked to a standing position, grunting a little as she did so. Well, what do you expect when you sleep sitting up, she scolded. Your mouth is foul, go brush your teeth. No. Restless, she wandered from the living room to the study and turned on the night light. It glowed feebly, giving the room unaccustomed shadows and adding to the chill, impersonal look of early morning. On the the desk was an open book and she glanced at it idly: Weston' s Astronomical Compendium. It was open to "Sirius: planets of." With an unexpected jab of intuition she knew that Duncan had sat here last night before making the fire, reading over yet once more the information which both of them knew by heart already, anesthesizing the grief he wouldn't admit to with injections of pure knowledge, trying to pave the light-years to Sirius V with statistics. That damn well figures; he always did feel safer with facts than emotions! She knew she was sneering unfairly but the thing growing inside her, the hard knot of something she could not yet name, didn't care. It drove her to pace fitfully, as she had paced during those long nights when she was carrying Susan and her unborn baby's fierce kicking had banished sleep. Here was Susan's telescope, the good one that they had bought her for her eighteenth birthday. There was no room for it on Susan's great adventure and so it had been shipped home and left here. Like me, she thought again. She touched the telescope with one finger. The lens covers were carefully in place but the long gray tube and the adjustment knobs were powdery with dust. I'll have to wash it tomorrow, she thought; something so beautiful shouldn't be neglected. And Susan had loved it. Photographs hung above the telescope. Susan at six months, round and wide-eyed. Susan at three years. ("Sing, Mommy." "All right, 'Ma-ry had a little lamb, little -- " "No, no! My song!" "Twinkle, twinkle, lit-tle star... ") Here was Susan, selfconsciously stiff, at her college graduation. Bachelor of Science in Astronomical Physics. By the time she had her Ph.D. she had refused to pose anymore, but by then there had been Kevin... Hastily she moved on, touching the photographs, as she had the telescope, with one tentative finger; an archeologist trying to brush clear an inscription from the distant past without crumbling it. Here were herself and Duncan on their wedding day. And here was Susan on the beach the summer she was thirteen, the summer they rented the public vacation unit at Lime Lake... "It's so beautiful here, isn't it, Susan? Just look at that sunset!" They were walking along the beach, just the two of them, out on a mother-daughter stroll she had contrived because she had begun to feel uneasy with this long-legged stranger who had replaced her plump, volatile little girl. Lately Susan was given to thoughtful silences, inexplicable frowns, and a slow withdrawal that made Rachel ache even as she recognized its rightness. "Look at that water! Don't you wish you could paint those colors!" Susan obediently looked. "It's pretty, I guess." "You guess!" "What I mean is... yes, it's pretty enough. But sunsets on water have been painted an awful lot, haven't they? If I were going to paint something I'd want it to be something different, something newenough to be really exciting." They had walked on in silence, the wet sand squishing under their bare toes. Suddenly Susan said animatedly, "Look, there's the first star! You can just see it in the east there, above that headland." She squinted at the pale silver sky. "It's Altair, I think..." There was a mirror hanging among the photographs, a small wood-framed square just large enough to show her face. Rachel peered at it reluctantly. Her hair, tangled from sleeping, hung lankly around her face, the black streaked with gray. Three deep furrows across her forehead were the legacy from years of neglecting to wear her lenses. Her skin was still smooth on the surface but had begun to sag curiously downward just beneath it, like a pie cooling. Her eyes were bleary. Old, she decreed mercilessly, even while making a mental note to buy hair coloring. I'm old and I had better get used to it. When Susan reaches Sirius V she'll still be thirty and I'll be seventy-four, and even if they turned right around and came back I'd probably be dead by the time they got here. Abruptly she stooped down and began to pry the lens covers off the telescope. They clanked jarringly as she dropped them to the floor. Awkwardly she dragged the telescope across the room to the window and yanked open the blinds. It was that cold hour between night and dawn, when the shadows have been drained from the world and color has not yet been put in by the rising sun. The grass, the rose bushes, the old maple tree, all looked monotonously gray, unformed blobs without even the potential of becoming anything unexpected. Rachel groaned softly and her fists clenched. Then light exploded in the room and she whirled wildly around to see Duncan blinking in the doorway, bemused in rumpled pajamas. "Rachel! It's #:# in the morning!" "Damn Susan!" she cried, the words spewing venom. "Why should she go to the stars and leave us here on this damned Earth! It's stale and insipid and... tame! There's not an inch of it left we don't know everything about, and I hate it!" She listened wide-eyed to the echoes of the futile, unsuspected jealously that called itself grief, and then she began to drown it in hopeless tears.    Rachel and Katia strolled down the country road in the blue twilight, their talk as aimless as their direction. She had recounted to Katia the details of Susan's leaving in a calm, detached voice that warned her friend to offer no sympathy. Katia picked daisies; they would look so pretty, she said, in her lab. She had just the vase for them, a very old silver and crystal one that had belonged to her greatgreat-grandmother. Rachel gave Katia the recipe for the fish chowder. They discussed Katia' s research project. Suddenly Katia said, "How is your committee going? The one to fund research on the alianthus blight?" "We met today. It looks as though with just a little more pressure the government might come through after all." "That's fine. Tell me," she blurted. "Are there alianthi or something similar on Sirius V?" "I don't know." Rachel took one of Katia's daisies and stared at it grimly. "But there will be on Earth." They ambled on quietly. Behind them, sitting on the lawn in dilapidated canvas chairs, the men also fell silent. The night air was rich with the life of all the small secret things of summer: rhythmical scrapings of crickets, the mysterious disembodied cry of an unseen owl, a sudden flash of white as a rabbit hurtled across the lawn and dived into the safety of the hedge. The scent of late roses wafted through the warm, heavy air. "You were picked for early astronaut training, weren't you, Duncan?" Jerry asked suddenly. "Back when you were in the Service Corps? I had forgotten that until just now." He paused. "Why'd you turn that down?" "Oh, I don't know. It was so long ago. I guess I didn't want that kind of rootless life." "It's funny, though. You turned it down, but then your daughter goes off to colonize a planet. It almost makes it seem..." he stopped, searching for the right word. Duncan knocked the ash from his pipe. The sparks fanned out, swirling to the sweet-scented grass in graceful arcs, glowing like miniature stars in the velvety darkness. "I know what you mean," he agreed quietly. "Inevitable."  It is indeed the case that many a slave has come to love his chains; they're all he's got! The same is true of -- The icewind swept down from the northern mountains with sulphur in its teeth. Breath and voice of the great god Radnavar, it scoured the snow-smothered plains. To the north black clouds from Radnavar' s volcano lair hid the glaciers; elsewhere the horizon made a hard white edge to the blue sky. A single leafless tree stood stiffly above the snow, its limbs twisted by the grip of the wind. Two men, streamers of condensing moisture unravelling from their mouths, stood resting by the tree. Their lips were dry and cracked, their blistered faces burned almost black between beard and snowgoggles. They wore hooded jackets and leggings of a bulky, glossy-blue fabric, patched at knee and elbow with greyish fur. Their packs were of the same blue material, but their snow-shoes were crudely fashioned from wood. At their sides leather holsters held dull steel pistols. John Forster, the leader, leaned on his ice-axe and peered back at the undulating way they had come. His companion, Morris Arnan, twisted a walking pole in his gloved hands and squinted around the horizon. Their home, the old, fallen starship was hidden in one of the valleys to the east; the hills they were heading for were heaps of white under Radnavar' s smoke pall. "The god is angry, "Morris said, as his eyes turned towards the hidden volcano. "Perhaps so," said Forster. He gestured eastwards towards the site of the starship, "But that's their worry, not ours. They ignore him. We can only wait and see." Abruptly he faced west again. "Come on, we can't stand here all day." Morris swayed and almost stumbled as he turned to follow, causing Forster to stop and face him. "Morris?" Morris nodded and kept moving. "Morris, are you fit to go on?" "I'm all right John." Forster let irritation put an edge on his voice. "If you're not going to be able to make it I want to know now." Morris flexed his knee. A spasm twisted his face, then smiled. '.'I'll make it John. "Neither mentioned the halfhealed wounds they both bore from the last, disastrous expedition to the beacon. Forster tested his own bruised shoulder and grinned mirthlessly. It was too soon. But they set off again. It was too soon... The blizzard that left the snow they were crossing had been in full fury when he received his orders. He had been sitting beside Helena in the main hall, listening to the wind, when the messenger arrived. Radnavar was angry, and as he walked through the outer corridors Forster was sure he could sense the deeper thunder of the volcano. He could feel each of the distinct blunt toothmarks in his shoulder. "Sit down Commander."' The Captain looked up from a glowing oscilloscope, one of the few devices in the old control room that still worked. "How do you feel?" Forster remained standing; he linked his hands behind his back, ignoring the strain on his shoulder. "It's my job to be fit." The Captain eyed him sharply, his head thrust forward slightly so that his protruding white eyebrows gave him the appearance of a slightly bewildered and aggressive ape. "Always trying to seem superhuman... This stupid competitiveness, Scouts versus Technos; why did we ever split up -- ?" He rapped his fingertips on the desk in irritation. "Well, since you are human and you maintain you are fit, I have a job for you.' "Yes?" Forster felt himself shrink close about a frozen image at the core of him. "Who is capable of leading an expedition among you?" "Sheller is still unconscious." Forster spoke without inflection, his fists clenching and unclenching behind his back. "Barham's leg was broken; Marwell and Pollis were both killed... I am the Senior now." "That is what I thought. And the other two-thirds of your people are still on the foraging party, are they not? But I take it you could spare a small group for perhaps ten days?" "No more than three men. And it should be soon, before winter sets in. Your people still haven't repaired our tents, and we lost most of our equipment last time..." He faintly sensed another eruption from Radnavar's volcano; there would be ashes in the wind. "What are we to look for?" "For a spaceship. Commander, and as soon as possible." The Captain was measuring him with his pale eyes. 'It may be the answer to our beacon; it appeared on the detectors three hours ago, made two orbits, then landed without making contact with us. It's up to you to go and introduce us." "Can't you call it -- the radio?" The Captain stared at him wearily. "Do you know how to repair it Commander?" The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. "Besides, from its radio silence, the ship itself may need help." He clenched his fists. "Whatever the ease, Commander, though it may be a chimera, an alien, a robot, a criminal; though it may cost still more of our lives getting to it. Commander, it is a chance we cannot afford to pass up. I'll show you the co-ordinates as closely as I can get them, You must leave as soon as the blizzard lets you..."    As he and Morris leaned against the ice-wind, Forster recalled how he had gone back to Helena, feeling as though he were made of parchment stretched over a core hacked out of ice: cold, hard, and brittle. The memory was uncofortable, and he turned to Morris with a shout. "Come on! If you stop fighting here, you're dead, Morris!" "I'm as tough as you are, John." That's what they don't understand, thought Forster;, they think they've got it easy; their metal egg has lasted so long they think it'll last forever. They ignore Radnavar; they forget we only fire the beacon if he lets us each year... It was always the same: Forster could walk through the outer corridors of the ship and they wquld make way for him, would fall quiet as he passed, but would never meet his eyes. Nowadays the eyes themselves were hidden behind fashionable metallic lenses, and the blank stare of the little mirrors followed him through the ship. He could stand on a stairway and look down at them, listen to their laughter, the synthetic fabrics their usage would never wear out. They were warm and safe in their great steel egg, their cage, as long as their precious machines lasted. But they needed him if they were to eat meat. They laughed and shouted, they glittered at each other with those lenses, but they hardly ever looked beyond the ports; not even Helena. She had noticed the change in his mood as soon as he returned from the Captain; she stopped teasing him and retreated behind her lenses, leaving him face to face with his own reflection. The air smelt of Twenty-one superb tales of fantasy, horror, mystery, and science fiction from famous pulp magazines of yesteryear like AllStory Magazine, The Blue Book, Strange Tales, Black Mask, Detective Story Magazine, Amazing Stories, and Weird Tales by such writers as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sinclair Lewis, HP. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and others. Paper # Edited and introduced by Peter Haining  division ot overspiced, synthetic food, was perfumed to hide the staleness. She faced him in silence again when he told her. Coloured lights moved over her pale face and hair; Forster's ears sought under the music and found the blizzard. Then she said, "Why? It's too soon. There should be somebody else, you're not -- " "It's my job," he said. "I can do it. You're not given anything here you don't fight for." His voice was harsher than he had intended and she was quiet again. "It's too soon," she repeated, turning her lenses to him. "Tliis whole place is going to fall apart. No one knows what's happening any more. How many generations have we been down here? And all we've done is squabble and let everything start to break down. You need the machines; and we'll starve if you can't find meat, yet what happens?... I hate this world, what we've made of it. Why couldn't they have landed us on a decent world? Where you can breathe the air without freezing." "You can live out there," said Forster. "You wouldn't need your machines either. You just have to be prepared to fight for what you get. That's they way this world is." They faced each other in silence again, each listening to the blizzard.    The thunderous black pall was coming south on the wind, darkening the snow. "Just look," said Morris. "All that work firing up the beacon again and the clouds hide it." "It's not supposed to fire if the sky is covered, but it will. Now only Radnavar decides whether they call for help or not, just as he has to allow us to fire the thing in the first place. It's his world and he gives us nothing we don't earn." "But he's too late, isn't he? The beacon's already been answered." "We don't know that yet." said Forster. A point of red light flickered in the turmoil over the glaciers and the clouds heaved; a geyser of black smoke began to climb through them. Seconds later the roar of the eruption came down the wind    No man living had reached Radnavar's lair and returned. Forster had seen only the ramparts standing above the glacier: black, too steep to support snow, with mists curling about them and a menacing vibration from the clouds beyond. Three generations earlier, one of the parties returning from the beacon had tried to climb those cliffs; it was led by Axel Hordahn, who became the first and greatest of Radnavar's servant's. It was the first time men had tried to penetrate the mountains. Four days after they began climbing, a blizzard descended and nothing was heard of them for two months. Finally Axel had returned alone, blind, his face both frost-bitten and burned by hot objects. When he was able to talk again, he had cried, "The power is there. I have seen it, and it took my sight. I have felt it. Burning," There was awe in his voice, and joyThe others had never been found alive; but John Forster's father had once shown him a place in the glacier, and John had knelt to peer into the ice. There was something pale and familiar hidden in its mazings. He stared, trying to make sense of what he saw, then suddenly realized that there were faces in the glacier, but so distorted they seemed splintered out of the ice itself, twisted into almost unrecognizable travesties of human expressions. He had stood up in shock, and those tortured faces had entered his mind and embedded themselves at the core of him; and afterwards he always heard in the ice-wind the screams of acceptance of the men Radnavar chose and took in the blizzard. "Ah, none of it will last," said Forster. "The beacon was automatic whenever they built it, but now they need us to go and set it up every year, Soon it'll stop working altogether, and their power-plant will fail, their fungus food won't grow at all, and they'll be out on the ice, face to face with Radnavar and none of their toys to protect them. Then we'll see who survives." Morris squinted north at the volcano and then ahead at the hills they were making for. He was breathing heavily. They were approaching the crest of a low ridge with the wind cutting across them "It might be different now, mightn't it John? If this ship is really from out there -- ' ' Forster interrupted with an abrupt downward gesture, and both men crouched in hollows overlooking the valley, their pistols levelled. A hundred metres away a column of snow apes was making its way south. Forster watched them. They were half the size of a man, covered in long greyish fur, and had flattened faces, forward-looking eyes and strong teeth. They were mainly scavengers, omnivorous, but they hunted too. They could kill a man at twenty paces with a thrown stone. Forster held his pistol in both hands. The cloud from the volcano drifted over them and the scene darkened. The ice-demon twisted Forster's face into the image of its own. He was reliving the last expedition to the beacon, when the returning party had been attacked and trapped by a tribe of the apes. His shoulder throbbed again at the memory of teeth that still ground into it as he struggled to heave the bloody carcass from him and saw the others dying. He had done savage things with his gun and knife and had been one of four to escape: the protected of Radnavar. He watched the apes over his gun barrel; they hunted mainly by sight so he felt fairly safe. One of them stood up awkardly on its hind legs and twisted about, sniffing the air. Forster turned his right wrist until the blade-sight covered the creature's chest. "Radnavar," he murmured. "Do not forget me now." The ape turned, peered about, then lowered itself to all fours and continued south. Forster waited until the last of the column had vanished, then counted slowly to a hundred before he nodded to Morris and stood up. The cold had seeped into him and he was shivering slightly; his shoulder was too stiff to move. Both men stood for a moment without speaking, still remembering the last expedition. Forster turned away with a snarl. "We just needed five men and the automatics! -- " Morris nodded and said nothing; like Forster he was remembering the last big kill they had made, almost two years earlier. With twenty men they had trapped a tribe of apes in the foothills of Radnavar's lair and the slaughter had lasted an hour. At the end, the volcano had erupted, turning the clouds crimson, and they had all shouted to Radnavar and toasted him in blood. They set off again in the chill grey light, trying to remember the times when slaughtering apes had been a monthly event, and cursing their weakness now.    Helena kept one of the snow apes in a cage; she had. shown it to Forster the day before the Captain called him. "Isn't he cute?" she said, tossing it a precious honey berry. "I've had him since he was tiny; I don't think he'd leave now. I often leave the door open and he hardly ever comes out." Forster flinched as she opened the cage, but the ape crouched at the back, eyeing them placidly. Helena coaxed. "Come on -- " "Helena -- it could gut you with one hand." "Oh, not Simon." She turned to face him, her expression unreadable behind the metallic lenses: the icedemon was looking out through Forster's eyes and his face was frozen. Helena stepped away from the cage and said quietly, "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking at all. They're wild animals out there; I shouldn't have reminded you... I'm sorry." He answered stiffly, "I was only worried about you getting too close to that thing. As you said. I've seen what they can do." She nodded, her lenses turned to him. "It must have been horrible when you were attacked by them?" There was a hint of excitement in her voice." "Just keep out of its reach." Abruptly she laughed. "Anyone would think you're jealous! Oh don't be so stiff and -- respectable. I'll swear you nearly smiled half an hour ago -- come on, let's go to the observation deck, I want to watch your beacon go off, then I'll change the dressings on your shoulder..." When they had gone, the ape crept to the front of the cage, pushed open the unlocked door and climbed onto the laboratory floor. The doors were closed. From one came the hum of machinery, from the other the steady throb of music. The ape examined both, then climbed onto the bench by the circular window. The sun had set and the eastern sky was almost black, with the first stars showing. The ape stared out, turning its head from side to side -- it stubbed its clawed fingers on the glass as it scratched at the stars. The beacon fired and white light burst against its face; then everything was black and the thunder began to roll in. The ape whimpered. It leapt to the floor, then the sky went white again, and the ape fled to its cage. It crouched at the back, shivering, and hid its head as the blinding flashes filled the room.    Sitting on the snow, Forster raised his head when the afterimages of the last flash had faded, and eyed the hills where the beacon was mounted. He and Morrris were in the first valley of the foothills; to the north the volcano made a dull red glow near the horizon. They had eaten their dried meat cold rather than risk a fire that might bring the apes. The echoes of the beacon died and there was only the wind bringing the deep pulse of the volcano. "If our visitor's anywhere near that thing," said Morris, "he'll be warm enough tonight." "If we can trust their coordinates he's not; but if he's moved we'll never find him in these hills If the weather closes in while we're still looking, Radnavar will be taking two more to his kingdom." "He won't let you die, or he'd have no one to serve him at the beacon." It was true, Forster realized; he was now the only one experienced enough; he would have to lead the expeditions to the beacon in future years, would make the sacrifice and pour the libations of blood before starting the rituals that prepared the beacon to fire. When the powerplant finally died and the scaffolding fell, they would still make the pilgrimage and pour the libations... His father had been a servant of the beacon for the last half of his life. When he died, John had gone with them as they took his body to the magma-coated valley and placed it on the pyre under the main projector. Wilhelm, his closest companion, had been there, but still he was alone; he'd felt torn and bleeding as though he should scream, but could show nothing. So he watched them prepare the beacon to fire ten metres above his father's body and followed them from the valley. From the next valley he had watched through dark goggles and saw the main beam stab upwards through the glare, like a great spear of ice carrying his father's spirit to the icy stars. The beacon blazed again -- a terrible cold burning, like the sun's glare off the glacier. He had remembered the frozen faces of Radnavar's chosen, immured in the ice, and felt their demon inside him, part of him. He pressed its coldness against the open wound inside him, and the wound became numb. He watched the beacon fire once more, felt the ice-demon hold him rigid, and whispered to it through bloodless lips, "Radnavar, I am yours now." Then he followed the others from the valley.    "What do you think we're going to find over there?" Morris asked finally when Forster did not speak. "If it's what they've been hoping for, won't it mean that everything will change here? -- I mean maybe that ship's brought proper weapons -- fliers so we could hunt the apes -- " There was too much tension in his voice; Forster could hear him shivering, and he had been labouring to keep moving near the end of the day. Forster peered at him through the dark and said slowly, "We mustn't expect too much, not as long as we follow Radnavar. He won't let things get soft for them or they'll ignore him all the more." "I suppose so, but he's let us get this far, hasn't he?" But Forster was brooding again and did not answer. They slept in the snow, trusting their reflexes to warn them of danger. The next morning Morris began moving stiffly, but he seemed able to keep up and Forster did not question him; if he wanted to hide an injury that was all right -- as long as it didn't slow them down. They crossed tracks in the snow: one of the rare cave bears migrating south. Normally it would have been worth hunting down for meat and hide, but now Forster dared not spend the time. With the weather closing in he wanted to be away from here as soon as possible: these slopes were the hills where men died. The wind was still harsh, smelling of smoke and sulphur; under it the loudest sounds were the creak and scrape of their snowshoes. Forster found himself unaccountabley shivering, filled with sick tension. The hills where men died. Two groups had been trapped by blizzards and died of frosbite and starvation a day's march north of here. And half a day to the south Paul Gurov had broken his ankle trying to rescue his partner from a crevasse, and had somehow returned to the starship for help. His partner had been rescued and died of exposure on the way to the ship. Gurov had recovered but would never walk properly again, and he cursed his life for the bitter and useless thing it was. They reached the first foothills and the climb became harder. Vertical slabs of black rock showed through the snow, the trail winding among them. Sometimes they were sheltered from the wind, but then it would beat against them in a sudden gust full of ice crystals. Morris was plodding on, his face set and determined. Forster let him continue. From the top of the first slope they could see dark, castellated hills pushing against the grey sky. The wind was stronger and colder. It pushed and twisted at them, tearing long streamers of snow from the rocks and uttering the choking moans of the men it had taken. A scaly-feathered bird circled over them on great taloned wings, and zig-zagged against the wind back towards the hills. The hills where men died. Three years earlier Forster had been in a party trapped in one of the valleys ahead. Avalanche and blizzard had forced them to hack their way a step at a time up the face of the glacier. They had survived by eating their dead. Morris stumbled, fell to his knees and was slow to get up. He avoided Forster's eyes; Forster shouted to him, but the wind was too loud and his numb lips couldn't frame the words properly. They went on. At mid afternoon it began to snow. Thin, icy flakes flecked with pumice swirled across them and clung to their clothes.Forster tried not to imagine what would happen if the weather continued to worsen. The pall from the volcano and the snow clouds darkened the whole sky, the sullen red eruption offering more light than the hidden sun. Under the wind the volcano's roar rose to an insistent, brooding menace. They stopped in the shelter of a black rock. Morris siezed Forster's arm and gasped, "Radnavar doesn't want this. He won't let us make it." "We won't know that till we try. Nothing's easy on this world." He didn't care whether Morris heard or not." We've got to keep moving now or we'll be trapped here forever. Don't think, don't even hope. Just keep moving." Many years earlier, with the snow slashing across him like this, he had learned that hope was forbidden. Wilhelm, his partner, his closest friend from their first youth, had persuaded him to try and reach Radnavar' s lair. The blizzard trapped them and after two days Forster realized that they had to turn back. He drove them both with an urgency that increased at each obstacle; they lost their packs and their ropes in an avalanche. Half-blinded by the cold they cut steps up ice cliffs, lost their way and had to return. Forster's will became a desperation to see the open snow-fields again and to return to the ship; he asserted all his strength to defy Radnavar's powers. But he prayed that having turned back they would be allowed to return. Finally, they had seen sunlight flashing from the snow fields of the plains and he knew that his hope had been fulfilled. They began to make their way down from the glacier. Wilhelm stumbled through the snow, slipped, and a snow bridge parted under him, dropping him fifteen metres into a crevasse. They were at least two days from any help, and Forster no longer had the strength to cut his way down the ice walls and haul Wilhelm up again. Wilhelm was looking up at him calmly. "It's my back, John," he whispered. "I think -- " He tried to move, gasped and lay still again, shivering. "Yes," he said, and gave a twisted smile. "It's broken." Forster eyed the glistening green ice walls; he could not speak. "I'm not going to make it John. I can feel the cold inside me now..." He paused. "I don't want to freeze, John, or be found by the apes." "No," said Forster dully. "I understand." He never knew what else they said, but somehow he had drawn die pistol he had until then only fired in practice. His fingers were shaking. He drew a breath and steadied them. He never remembered hearing the shot, but when he could think and talk again he reached for the icedemon and prayed to Radnavar to forgive his arrogance, his hope of determining his own life and escaping the price. Then he accepted that Radnavar had chosen him, and he hid Wilhelm's memory away... Behind him Morris was beginning to stumble; Forster could hear him gasping for breath, but he did not slow down. It was near evening and they were climbing a rocky slope covered with loose snow and slabs of ice. Beyond its crest the valley would shelter them from the worst of the weather. A blinding red slice of sun appeared between the clouds, then sank from sight, and the world darkened around the glow of the volcano. Somewhere ahead animals growled and chittered; the ice-eagle circled through the gloom and vanished again. The darkness congealed in wind-blown ice that stuck to the eyelids and smeared across the eyes. To the north-west the beacon fired. The darkness shattered, then fell back with the first roll of thunder. The wind brought the cries of animals, but Forster could see nothing through the snow and swarming after-images. He shut his eyes as the darkness flew apart again, and the glare came red through his eyelids. The echoes surged and crashed and were pierced by shrieks from ahead. The wind slapped at their brittle faces; ice scraped their skin. Forster shouted to Morris to hurry and leaned into the wind, lengthening his stride. He could not hear the creak of their snowshoes. The fleeing animals were getting closer. Forster recognised the voices of apes; but it was a cave bear that materialised out of the storm ahead of them, swinging its head from side to side as it came lurching down the slope, grey on grey, then suddenly ink-black against the next flash. It gave a high, frightened growl and fled past them in the dark. Forster's pistol was in his hand, tracking automatically as his eyes flickered over the swarming darkness. He stumbled over a rock, slipped on loose snow, forced himself on. The reptilian snow-eagle slanted overhead, a paler grey in the sky, and swept away once more. A hundred metres to the right, something huge and half-seen went striding down the slope on two legs and split the fury with its shriek. And the shriek was answered by the howls of the ape tribe that burst over the crest of the ridge. Forster began to shoot. "Morris!" He shouted without turning. "Kill them!" He dropped the clumsy ice-axe and brought up his hunting knife in his left hand. He crouched, still shooting. "Morris!" The gun jerked and was empty. " Morris " Then two of them were in under the knife and he went down rolling and kicking, trying to hold teeth away from his throat while his other hand slashed and then heaved the knife in. He bellowed again and wrenched himself free, rising to his feet as hands tore at him. The beacon blazed and he was surrounded by subhuman, twisted bodies and gargoyle faces stamped out of the diamond-hard glare. He made a wide swing with the knife and the apes receded into the dark. He had time to wonder at the cause of their fear, then the answer came. As the volcano erupted, the other sounds of the night were split open and shattered as a column of hard yellow light was blasted into the cloudbase. The ground heaved and the ghastly light showed the bodies of the apes as they fled past him. He ran to the top of the ridge to face the star-clusters of lava nuriea at the skies, and he shouted his hatred and joy into the splitting roar. "Radnavar! -- Radnavar!" He turned on the shivering crest of the ridge and saw the apes vanishing into the dark. He brandished his empty gun at them and drew a breath to bellow again, then he saw another, separate shape lying on the snow, twenty metres away, and motionless.    "What was it like when they died?" Helena had asked him the night before he left, and he had been unable to answer. Now he bent over Morris's body in the wavering light, and the wind chilled him. He had fresh wounds where the apes had bitten through his clothing, but he could not feel them. Lava began to fall into the snow in a series of short, savage hisses; he ignored it. Morris was dead, but the wounds were all on his back, and blood was freezing on his chin; he had fallen before the apes reached him. "Radnavar," whispered Forster, "you have taken him and spared me. I am yours." Then he reloaded his pistol and began to drag stones together over Morris's body. Morris, he thought, you fool, why didn't you tell me?... I should have made sure, I should have sent you back. You must have known you wouldn't make it. You must have been haemorrhaging inside, you must have known... The wind swirled past him carrying ice and ashes. The ice-wind moaned and beat against the hills, boomed among cliffs of ice and granite; it blew over Forster as he laboured to cover Morris's body, drew the warmth from him, buffeted him with the falling ash and snow, the ice-armoured rocks, then swirled away, unspent. What was it like when they died? And he could not answer, feeling the ice-demon gnashing under his skin. He lay looking at her in the half-light that left her eyes shadowed and mysterious. After a moment she had said, "You cried out in your sleep last night." He laughed nervously. "You were having nightmares Helena." "You called their names, John. You were watching them die again, weren't you?" The ice-mask snarled and screamed inside him; numbly he stroked her arm, not looking at her. She whispered, "God, it's horrible what this place does to us. People kill themselves here; out of boredom. They say it's something else, food poisoning, an accidental overdose, but it's not. I know. And now you've got to go back out there -- It's too soon... You're a bit of a machine at times, but I don't want to lose you." Her voice rose. "Oh God, there must be something else. I look at the stars sometimes and try to imagine the other worlds out there -- there must be something better for us there somewhere, there has to be..." Awkwardly he had kissed her forehead. "It's all right," he said, gently, desperately, in fear that his armour would break away and the frozen wounds reopen inside him. "Go to sleep. Go to sleep." But later, with Helena sleeping beside him, he had watched the first grey light spread across the ceiling, and his face had twisted itself into the tortured shape of the icedemon's mask. Shudders running through him as though he were outside in the wind, he had watched the faces dying again, twisted and screaming; he saw them all, through the years of his life, names he had forgotten, men he would never know, going to join the ice-masks in the glacier. "Radnavar," he gasped. "Radnavar. Help me. It has to be, there must be a reason -- It's unbearable otherwise!... Help me believe it. Help me." The ice wind screamed steadily outside.    Now he stumbled away from the cairn he had built, and down into the valley. The eruption had ceased and the wind was muffled, but his reserves had vanished. He found a hollow at the base of a low cliff and fell into it. The wind reached in after him and placed cold hands on his body. He shivered. The flesh was squeezed thin and brittle over his bones. His lips quivered; he clenched his teeth, then whispered in desperation and pleading, "Thank you Radnavar, you have spared me; you have brought me closer to you. I am beginning to see; I am more now than I was. I will see, I will understand, fully. I am yours, Radnavar, help me see." Gradually the shivering stopped. His head fell forwards onto his arms. His eyes closed. "It must be," he whispered into the wind. "It must be. It must be . " He accepted the cold's embrace and let it draw him into sleep.    The spacecraft stuck out of the valley floor like a knife from a wound. Forster blinked at it through his swollen eyelids for several seconds, then began to shuffle down the slope. The ship was a hard silver cone, smooth and impersonal; it did not belong among the rubble, ice and drifting fog that surrounded it. His eyes were watering in the cold so that the craft wavered and blurred as though it might vanish like a bubble, but when he blinked his sight clear it remained. He moved stiffly closer. He was too tired to shiver, his fingers were numb and probably frost-bitten. His face was a dull burning ache. He no longer heard the wind, and the rumble of the volcano seemed to have receded into his blood. He stumbled on the heat-cracked rubble surrounding the ship. He stopped again and stood looking up at it, swaying slightly as he tried to formulate a question he was too exhausted to pull from his mind. As he was about to move forward, a doorway appeared like an eye opening sideways in the metal wall. A man stood looking down at him, carelessly holding a rifle with one hand at its balance point. Forster tried to focus on him, fumbling for words, but the man spoke first. "Hello there. I suppose you're hungry now you've finally got here?" The man wms bony and stoop-shouldered, with thinning white hair. A cloud of condensed moisture drifted away from his words. Forster tried twice before he could speak. "Yes -- a little." "Good." Then man pushed a button, and a metal ladder descended towards Forster. "We still speak the same language; that's always a good sign. Come on, it's cold up here too." Forster hauled himself up the ladder and lurched through the doorway, avoiding the hand the man put out to help him. Immediately, the outer door slid shut, and the warm air folded around him. He felt torn between two worlds, with most of himself waiting in the cold outside. The man waved him towards an inner door. "Hmm. Not exactly a red carpet and massed choirs, are you; but I suppose I shouldn't expect too much. You look as though you've had a rough time getting here. My name's Fyadov, by the way." Forster mumbled his name in reply as he followed Fyadov into a control room seemingly filled with flashing lights, a set of view-screens and a circular porthole showing the northern mountains. "You saw our beacon... ?" The man turned. "You could say that; I've been trying to fix some of the circuits in my transceivers ever since -- my own fault as usual for not checking the overides. That's one of the reasons I didn't go looking for you, but this thing wasn't built to go hopping over every little hill -- sit down, by the way; you can clear the stuff off that chair -- and besides, I thought, any set-up that can pulse a synchrotron like that must be capable of coming and meeting me. And I was right wasn't I? Though as I say, you're not exactly the baccanalia I'd have liked. In fact I was starting to think about blasting off again. Your signal's getting weaker, you know." "Yes," said Forster numbly. "It dies out after a while and we have to restart it every summer. I don't understand what we do... What did you call it, a... ?" "A pulsed synchrotron. At least that's what I imagine it is -- white noise from UV to microwaves. Abysmally inefficient of course, though I'm no physicist. You must have been down here for a few years if you've even forgotten the name of the thing. Must try to work out how long, later. These fusionplant-and-raw-meat societies can be absolutely fascinating. No offence. Let's see if we can find you something to eat." Forster was left sitting among the glittering eyes of the instrument panels, breathing air that smelt faintly of ozone and machine oil. The sky was darkening over the mountains. Half of him was still outside among the ice and the rasping wind; he didn't belong here, and there was the question he could feel but still not ask -- Fyadov returned and cleared some microelectronic components from the table and put down two plates of steaming green paste. "Sorry about the state of the place. I haven't kept up with the housework lately... perhaps I wasn't really expecting visitors after all." He noticed Forster still looking at the food and grinned. "It won't kill you. I live on the stuff and look at me. Well, come to think of it, there are better adverts... Let me guess -- your hydroponics aren't working too well any more?" "Only the Technos eat this," said Forster. "We eat meat." "Oh. Dear, dear, one of those systems? You guard them, and they stand back when you pass and call you Lord or whatever. Hmm, that would be... Well it's all we've got so you'd better eat it." He was silent while they ate, but then his eagerness to talk reasserted itself. "I sort of free-lance for the Local Systems Archaeological Survey. Supposed to be part of a team but -- you know... I'm not supposed to be here at all, but one of those god-forsaken devices they use to push this tin can about went wrong and I had to come down and replace a few parts. Your electronic bonfire blew my transmitters before I could tell anybody." Forster stiffened. "No one knows you're here?" "No -- wouldn't make much difference. We're always supposed to work in groups but I try not to. I'd rather study people... They couldn't get here for months anyway. Besides I've almost fixed everything now... It's a stupid system really, but I've been in it too long to get out now." "You'd get out if you could?" Forster asked, looking past him at the evening darkening over the mountains, and thinking of Radnavar's growing fury as they had approached the foothills, and the way he had taken Morris. Fyadov was still talking. "Oh I don't know though. When you spend enough time on a thing, half a life say, it gets to be important to you whether it really is or not..." He lowered his eyes a moment. Forster remembered the rocks he had piled over Morris's body. "If you've made enough sacrifices for it..." Fyadov's voice had become quieter and harsher. "People are frightening things. I can't stay away from them; I just study them, watch them..." Forster thought of metallic lenses returning his own reflection. Fyadov murmured sadly. "Most of us make our own prisons that way. There's no security like the security of the cage." Forster found his fists were clenched, "You can still tell them we're here?" "Oh yes -- it's only a couple of hours' work, even for me...what are we going to do with you people, though? I'd guess you're all finding it a bit rough here. You might be better off somewhere else. They'll probably be able to divert a spare freighter to pick you up. ' ' Forster nodded slowly; he thought of the Teehnos, the drones who would no more step outside the ship than Helena's ape would leave its cage. But offer them a new world, soft and luxurious, with no need to fight... "Yes," he said savagely. "They'd go. All of them." He muttered, "She'd be one of the first." Fyadov met his eyes and nodded. "People are wild animals." he said bitterly. "Their claws are in their minds. We all live in cages or we'd tear each other to bits. We rattle the bars sometimes but we know we'd never dare get out...and it drives us all mad in the end." Abruptly he turned to the control panel. "My cage is bigger than most, though." He pressed a button. "Look." One of the screens lit, and showed the sky with a few gaps in the cloud, and stars. "There -- those stars are jewels on the walls of my cage. Look at them, the spaces between them." The clouds opened and the screen filled with stars -- icy, glittering stars in shoals and clusters and misty nebulae, throbbing and trembling like life itself. Forster watched with sweat on his face. He thought of the beacon, of Helena casually tossing a honey berry to her ape. "Look at the spaces between them," said Fyadov. "Look." The stars swayed apart, fell over the edge of the screen, and more crowded into its centre. Forster clenched his teeth, unable to look away. He had been spared and Morris taken. Why? Fyadov was saying, "And each of them represents half a dozen possible worlds. All different. You seem to live forever, moving at those speeds, so I've seen many of them. They're all different. I could show you pictures -- but it wouldn't help, you'd have to go there. Then you have to forget all you were before; that's why we need cages, to keep something of ourselves from the beasts, the other beasts... You'll have to leave everything here -- this trekking about in the snow, hunting, being called Lord, getting frostbite -- there's no place for it." The stars were still swarming across the screen, faster now, so that larger clusters could be seen, rotating, sliding against each other and breaking away as they hurtled out of sight. "You'll all be out on the ice, chipping stone axes and hunting with bone knives within a hundred years if you stay... The real cage is the bones of the skull of course." The stars were an avalanche, a whole universe of stellar ice falling to fragments and plunging away... There' s no place for it. Forster's hands were shivering. He had been spared -- because, because -- He reached towards the screen as though to stop the stars. The room went white at the first flash of the beacon, then was full of dimness. Forster stiffened in his chair. He understood. He stood up as the. thunder gathered. "... the bones of our skulls... so finally there is only one escape." Forster levelled his pistol at the man's chest. He fired with the next flash, and afterwards did not remember hearing the report. Fyadov slumped forward onto the table. His eyes twisted sideways to meet Forster's. He tried to nod, then muttered thickly, "The only escape, the only escape now. For you too." Then his eyes closed. The echoes of the beacon began to die and the next flash lit the room. Forster lowered the gun slowly and pushed it back into his holster. His hands were quite steady. He stood still for a moment, then turned towards the airlock. When he opened the door he paused at the top of the ladder. The wind howled faintly. The cold air fitted his face like a mask of ice. He bit into it and whispered harshly, "Radnavar, I am still yours." The beacon had stopped flashing by the time he reached the crest of the first hill. The icewind was tearing holes in the cloud layer, and he could see the stars; they glittered, cold and far off, as though seen through the bars of a cage.  Jerrq Pournelle,PliD The young lady was very serious and although I might have wished that she were an ogre, with raucous voice, and nose meeting chin in front of her lips, she was actually very professional in appearance; highly attractive, and -- according to most objective standards -- intelligent. My wife and I had come to a typical Los Angeles show-business party. The young lady had been waiting for me. Before I could get properly into the room she had advanced menacingly. "You write science fiction," she accused. "Escapism. What good does it do to get people dreaming about that Buck Rogers stuff?" (I swear it, she used that very phrase, the same one that countless teachers used in the days of my youth when they caught me reading Astounding Science Fiction.) Naturally, she had A Cause. some pieces of rock and pretty pictures on television! And there are schools, and -- " Galaxy readers have probably had similar experiences and can finish off the speech for themselves. It's not the only time I've been put to The Question: "Why throw money away on space when there's so much that needs doing here on Earth?" All right, let's talk about space and see just how far we can get.    First, though, a couple of commercials. For a really beautiful job of discussing what we've already got out of space, send a request to copy has no price on it; I got it as a gift from the National Space Institute (#I Fort Myer Drive, Suite #, Arlington Virginia #, dues # annually, # for students, and if you haven't joined yet, DO you could probably get one free through your Congresscritter. of an excellent book called Where The Winds Sleep, something else I Ruzic' s book you can find plenty answers to the silly question about why spend money on space. In fact, the problem is knowing where to begin. Weather predictions? Remember when the weather-man was a joke? True, the Weather Bureau makes some mistakes even yet; but not very many, and almost never when it comes to hurricanes. You can show that the space program has pretty well paid for itself in better weather forecasting alone. Those concerned about pollution will be pleased to hear that Earthwatch satellites finally give us a chance to see the real effects of pollution. Mining prospecting has been revolutionized by satellite photography. The international Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome can, from satellite data, get a good forecast of famine areas and global food production. That's all satellite stuff. Industry benefits are nearly incalculable, and I don't mean frivolities like Teflon frying pans. Stuff like test procedures and quality control: the inspection methods developed for man-rating spacecraft and boosters are now routinely used in building better plows, tractors, automobiles, skis, hiking boots and packframes, electronic equipment, and darned near anything else you can think of. In my early days in the space program one of the hardest jobs we had was monitoring physiological conditions in a stress environment. Just getting an ordinary electrosure wall required great ingenuity. We invented a number of such devices; we had to. My own inventions are long since obsolete -- but the space medicine technology that grew out of our early efforts is now routinely used in hospitals and clinics all over the world. Mass spectrometers to analyze exhaled tems worn by hospital patients and displaying abnormalities to the duty nurse; blood analysis equipment; even heart condition diagnosis from moving vehicles; all routine, and all package. Your tires last longer, you can buy large fiberglass structures, firemen can keep your house from burning, your electrical system is simpler, crash helmets work better (remind me sometime to tell you about the purchase-order for "nine freshly-killed human male corpses, ages #I to # at time of death, must not have any abnormalities of brain or upper spine; expendable research item; no salvage value." The Purchasing Officer's reaction to that was, uh, interesting); driver-training simulators work better, paint lasts longer, and golf clubs do a better job of driving the ball. "Whoa. That's all technology, and technology is evil. It causes pollution, and kills people in wars, and -- " At that point my usual reaction is a loud "Aaargh!" and a burning desire to find a drink. Quickly. Especially when it was said by a young person wearing a thin electric wristwatch and polyester imitations of honest blue denim, driving a Mercedes, and feeling committed because they haven't eaten table grapes for weeks, I should control that reaction, of course; but if I were able to do that I'd probably still be in aerospace management instead of living the unnatural life of a writer. Still, such people ought to be answered. Our whole future may depend on it. Let's try.    California's Governor, Jerry Brown, has built himself quite a reputation by pushing "Alternate Technology" and the philosophy that goes with it. "Make do. Expect less. Conserve. Smaller is better. Recycle, Be satisfied with what you have. There's only one Earth." Now there are some attractive points about all that. Moreover, the vision of a stable, low-to-zerogrowth economy, concentrating on adventures of the mind, with a lot of "cottage industry" can be a noble one. It's probably possible, too -- for us, and for a while. It is not a philosophy likely to appeal to the poor of this world. Like it or not, a conservation oriented low-growth world economy dooms most of the world's people to wretched poverty. But what has that to do with usl Can we not, ourselves, change our ways and let others go theirs? Probably not. Like it or not, we've got most of the technology -- and we don't have enough to develop the Earth to a point of satiation. If all the world gets rich through the same wasteful processes we employed, we're probably in big trouble. Worse, what of our grandchildren? The Earth's resources will not last forever; and what then? I've argued here before that this generation is crucial: we have the resources to get mankind off this planet. If we don't do it, we may people and more, a world in which it's all we can do to stay alive; a world without the investment resources to go into space and get rich. Usually I think it won't come to that; it's only in odd moments -- such as when faced with The Question -- that I get depressed. I don't think it will come to that, because the vision of the future is so clear to me. We need realize only one thing: we do not inhabit "Only One Earth." Mankind doesn't live on Earth. We live in a solar system of nine planets, # moons, and over half a cles a rather small and unimportant star that is part of a galaxy containOne Earth, indeed! There are millions of Earths out there, and if we use up this one, we'll just have to go find another, that's all. But we needn't use up this one. In the March column I went through the numbers: how we can, with present-day technology, deliver here to Earth as much metal for each person in the world as the US disposed of per capita in the #'s. We can do that without polluting our planet at all, and we can keep it up for tens of thousands of years. The metal is out there in the asteroid belt. We don't even have to look very hard; most of the asteroids were once spherical, large enough to have metallic cores, and now the worthless gubbage topside has been knocked away, exposing all that lovely iron and lead and tin and such we'll need to give the wretched of the Earth real freedom. Why not? The refinery power's there; the Sun gives it off for free. We have a propulsion system to get was cancelled, but the research was done, and it wouldn't be that hard to start up again. Nuclear-powered rockets would be rather simple to build, if we wanted them. But first we'll need a Moonbase. We can get that by carrying stuff up bit by bit from the top of disintegrating totem poles. But there are easier ways. We could do it in one whack. but we could build old Bang-Bang in a very few years if we wanted to. efficient method of nuclear propulthick and hard. Attach by shockabsorbers a large space-going capsule to it. Put underneath one each atomic bomb. Fire away. Believe me, your ship will move. When you've used up the momentum imparted by the first bomb, fling another down underneath. Repeat as required. For the expenditure of a small part of the world's nuclear-weapon stockpile you have bit, or on the Lunar surface. But that will cause fallout. Yes; some. Not very much, compared to what we have already added to background radiation, but perhaps enough that we don't want I think we'll eventually do what has to be done, even if this generation fails in its duties to the future. won't go away; if we're still alive and no space program, somebody' s going to revive Bang-Bang and get out there. to orbit or the Moon. A more systematic way would be to build a big laser-launching system and make it accessible to anyone with a payload to put into orbit. Freeman Dyson calls laser-launch systems "space highways." The government builds the launch system, and can use it for its own purposes. But it also gives private citizens, consortiums, firms, a means of reaching orbit. Dyson envisions a time when individual families can buy a space capsule, and once Out There, can do as they like. Settle on the Moon, stay in orbit, go find an asteroid: whatever. It will be a while before we can build cheap self-contained space capsules operable by the likes of you and me, but it may not be anywhere near as long as you think. The problem is the engines, of course. There's nothing else in the space-home economy that couldn't, at least in theory, be built for about the total cost of a family home, car, and recreational vehicle. But then most land-based prefabricated homes don't have their own motive power either; they have to hire a truck for towing. It could make quite a picture: a train of space capsules departing Earth orbit for Ceres and points outward, towed by a ship something like the one I described in "Tinker". Not quite Ward Bond in "Wagon Train," but it could still make a good TV series. The capsules don't have to be totally selfsufficient, of course. It's easy enough to imagine way stations along the route, the space equivabits. Dyson is fond of saying that the US wasn't settled by a big government settlement program, but by individuals and families who often had little more than courage and determination when they started. Perhaps that dream of the ultimate in freedom is too visionary; but if so, it isn't because the technology won't exist. However we build our Moonbase, it's a very short step from there to asteroid mines. Obviously the Moon is in Earth-orbit, and with the shallow Lunar gravity well it's no trick at all to get away from the Moon; Earth-orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system. We don't know what minerals will be available on the Moon. Probably it will take a while before it gets too expensive to dig them up, but as soon as it does, the Lunatics themselves will want to go mine the asteroids. There's probably more water ice in the Belt than there is on Luna, so for starters there will be water prospectors moving about among the asteroids. The same technology that sends water to Luna will send metals to Earthorbit. I've already described one ship that can do the job. There are others. The boron fusionfission process is a good example. Take boron-#I ( n Bs). Bombard with protons. The result is a complex reaction that, ends with helium and no nuclear particles. It could be a direct spacedrive. For those interested, the basic equation is "Bs  p  #( # He#  #MeV, pretty energetic helium. The exhaust velocity is better than # kilometerssecond, giving a theoretical specific impulse (Isp) of someson the Isp of our best chemical manages something like #, The boron drive needn't be used very efficiently to send ships all over the solar system. fission-ion drive I described in an earlier column will do the job. In fact, it's as simple to get refined metals from the asteroid belt to near-Earth orbit as it is to bring them down from the Lunar surface. It takes longer, but who cares? If I can promise GM steel at less than they're now paying, they'll be glad to sign a "futures" contract, payment on delivery. It's going to be colorful out in the Belt, with huge mirrors boiling out chunks from mile-round rocks, big refinery ships moving from rock to rock; mining towns, boomtowns, and probably travelling entertainment vessels. Perhaps a few scenes from the wild west? "Claim jumpers! Grab your rifle -- " Thus from the first Moonbase we'll move rapidly, first to establish other Moon colonies (the Moon's a big place) and out to the asteroid belt. After that we can either build O'Neill colonies (see "Blueprint for Survival", May # Galaxy) or stay with planets and Moons. But I suspect we'll do both: while one group starts constructing flying city-states at the Earth-Moon Trojan Points, another will decide to make-do with Mars. Mars and Venus aren't terribly comfortable places. In fact you probably won't want to land on Venus at all until it has been terraformed. On the other hand, Venus will be far easier to make into a shirt-sleeves inhabitable world. We've described how in an earlier column. It requires only biological packages and some fertilizers and nutrients, and can be done from Moonbase, or in a pinch, from Earth itself. But while Venus may be the simpler job, Mars is likely to come first, simply because you can  live there prior to terraforming; there will be people establishing dome colonies on the Red Planet. I wrote a story ("Birth of Fire") describing one Mars-terraforming project: melt the polar caps and activate a number of Martian volcanoes to get an atmosphere built up. Isaac Asimov described the final step many years ago: get your ice from Out There, at Jupiter or Saturn, and fling it downhill to Mars. Freeman Dyson points out that there's enough ice on Enceladus (a Saturnian moon) to keep the Martian climate warm for # years. The deserts of Mars can become gardens in less than a century. Dyson's scheme doesn't even involve human activity on Enceladus; robots and modern computers could probably accomplish the job. They've only to construct some big catapults on the surface of Enceladus, and build some solar sails. Dyson suggests robots because the project as described would take a long time, and human supervisors might not care for the work. But I suspect we could get plenty of volunteers if we needed them. Why not? No one could complain that the work was trivial, and you couldn't ask for an apartment with a better view than Saturn's Rings! Moonbases. Lunar cities. Mining communities in the asteroid belt. Domed colonies on Mars, with prospects for terraforming the planet and turning it into a paradise. An advanced engineering project headquarters on Enceladus. Pollution controlled on Earth, because most polluting activities would go on in space. Near-earth space factories. Several to hundreds of city-states at the Trojan Points of the Earth-Moon system. A space population of millions, with manned and unmanned ships stitching all the space habitats together. This is not a dream world; this is a world we could make in a hundred years! In # a number of Kiowa and Comanche Chiefs were taken to Washington by Quakers in an attempt to show the Indians just what they were facing. When they returned to talk about the huge cities, and "a stone tipi so large that all the Kiowa could sit under it," they were not believed. One suspects that if the Quaker schoolmasters had been magically transported to the Washington of # and then returned to their own time they would not be believed either. A nation of of tons of concrete poured into gigantic highways? Aircraft larger than the biggest sailing ships? City of tons of steel, farmlands from Kansas to California... Building a space civilization in the next hundred years will be simpler than than it was getting to where we are from #. We already know how to do it. We probably don't know how we will do it; certainly the very act of space exploration will generate new ideas and techniques as alien to us as nuclear energy would have been to Lord Rutherford or Benjamin Franklin. But we already know how we could do it. No basic new discoveries necessary. In the #'s I did a class report on space travel. I drew heavily from Astounding, from Heinlein's Future History, from Willy Ley's books on rockets and space travel (and certainly never thought I would someday be writing a column in the same magazine as Willy). My teachers were tolerant. They let me do it. They didn't believe in suppressing their pupils. Afterwards, though, the physics teacher called me in for a conference: I should learn some good basic science and get my head out of the clouds. That Buck Rogers Stuff was fine for amusement -- he read it himself -- but in the real world... In the real world I got a letter from that teacher, who had the honesty to send a note in August, #, apologizing to me and expressing gratitude that he'd not been able to discourage me from those crazy dreams. I wish he were still alive so I could find out his reaction to this column. It's not crazy dreams. It's not even Far Out. It's only basic engineering, and some economics, and a bit of hope. I may even have been too conservative. It probably won't take a hundred years. Given the basic space civilization I've described, we'll have accomplished one goal: no single accident, no war, no one insane action will finish us off. We won't have to have outgrown our damn foolishness to insure our survival as a species. Perhaps we'll all be adults, mature, satisfied with what we have, long past wars and conflicts and the like. But I doubt it. At least, though, there will be no way to exterminate mankind, even if we manage to make the Earth uninhabitable. And it's unlikely that any group, nation, or ideology can enslave everyone. That's worth something. One suspects, too, that there will be an enormous diversity of cultures. Travel times between various city-states -- asteroid, Martian, Lunar, O'Neill colony, Saturnian forward base, Jovian Trojan Point -- will be weeks to months to years with presently forseeable technology. That's likely to change, but by the time the faster travel systems are in widespread use the cultural diversities will be established. Meanwhile, communication among all the various parts of the solar system will be simple and relatively cheap, so that there will have been that unifying influence; cultures will become different because people want to be different, not because they don't know any better. OK. In # years we'll have built a space civilization. We'll no longer have really grinding poverty, although there will undoubtedly be people who consider themselves poor, just as we have today people who while living better than the aristocrats of # think themselves in terrible straights. We'll have insured against any man-made disaster wiping out the race. So what's next, besides more of the same? Why, we haven't even got started yet! "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the face of the Earth," said the command; soon that will have been done; and some day we'll even run up against a filled solar system. The first step is obvious. We can begin taking some of the more useless planets apart. They've got all that lovely mass, and it's concentrated so that we can't use it; better to make proper use of, say, Jupiter, and Mercury, and someday perhaps even Mars and Venus, despite our having terraformed them. At a thousand tons of mass per person. Mercury, taken apart, Could provide living space for # x # # rather a large population. People in the US at present dispose of about # # ergs per capita each year; small potatoes for a space civilization. Let's figure that our space that much, # # ergs per each per year, or a total of # x # # ergs for the people living on the skeleton of Mercury. It's too much. The Sun only puts out # x # # ergs each year, and we can't catch all that. It seems we'll run out of energy before we run out of mass, and that mass is too handy to use up freely as energy. Back to energy conservation! To support a really large population, though, we'll have to destroy some matter. Obviously that can't go on forever: so, while we're destroying matter, we may as well go elsewhere. Meanwhile, though the stay-athomes will busily take planets apart flying cities that they'll soon catch great quantities of solar energy. You can just hear the asteroid civilizations (what's left of them) complaining about those closer in taking up all the light. Perhaps the Rockrats will be the first to say the Hell with it and leave, looking for a place to live where there's elbow room. Just too crowded in the Solar System. "Not like when I was a kid, Martha. Not room to swing a cat nowadays." They can take their whole civilization with them. The negotiations may take some time; the homebodies aren't going to want to let all that nice matter leave the system forever. Perhaps the Rockrats will promise to send back a nice fat planet from wherever they're going. It will take a while to pay off the debt, but they can pay it back with very high interest. The trip will take many years, but so what? The Rockrats have taken their civilization with them. They'll miss the Sun, and by the time they arrive they'll have used up most of their asteroid, but by then people will live long lifetimes -- and they'll darned well know how to exploit the new stellar system. "We'll do it right, Martha! None of those upstart places like Freedonia!" Of course they'll already know about the planets in their new system. There's no real limit to the size of telescope you can build in space, and no problem about seeing; and with the lengthy baseline of the orbit of Ceres, or Jupiter's Trojans, or a Saturnian moon, astronomers will long since have discovered all the planets of all the nearby stars. There will probably have been probes sending back high-resolution pictures and making certain our colonists aren't heading for an already-occupied system. And so it goes; across the Galaxy, as mankind fills system after system, and somebody begins to feel crowded. You'll note I haven't even postulated fasterthanlight-travel. I have given us matter annihilation, although that's not strictly necessary. And beyond that? When we've tapped all the resources of easily available planets, and are still running out of metals and just plain mass? Well, there are stars -- Take an old star. A red giant, perhaps. Useless. No planets left -- all consumed in the nova explosion that formed an ordinary star into a red giant. The poor thing is doomed not hurry it along? When it blows up, it will give off all kinds of useful materials. Of course the star is a long way from civilization. The minerals could be picked up after the explosion, but maybe there's a better way: bring your planet-sized spacecraft reasonably near the target star. Turn on the matter annihilators and focus the resulting energy into a rather powerful laser beam. Shine it properly on the star. That's what you're going to do to blow it up anyway, but if you're selective enough about it you can turn the star itself into a rocket. Heat up this side, let it spew out starstuff, and it will move. Granted that's a slow process, and perhaps there'll be no economic incentive; but stranger things have happened in history. After all, the expedition will save its parent civilization. And life aboard the control planet need not be any more dull than, say, living in a colliery town; or going every    But we needn't think about moving stars, or travelling to other stellar systems, anymore than Columbus and the Vikings had Cape Canaveral in mind. For the moment we need only concentrate on the next hundred years. There's quite enough to do right here. In fact, I can just hear it now: "What good does it do to get people dreaming about that Buck Rogers Stuff? Why waste money on interstellar research when there's need for the money right here on the Trojan Points?" Only One Earth indeed.  By name  am Robinette Broadhead, and by profession I am rich retired ford the best psychiatrist in New York, who happens to be a machine whom  call Sigfrid von Shrink.  suppose all that sounds pretty gay and jolly, but there's nothing funny about Sigfrid. He hurts me a lot. Sigfrid would say that was untrue. He would say that the pain comes out of the inner parts of me, and especially out of my life, which, to be sure, has not been all pleasure. I grew up in the Wyoming food mines. You know what that's like. Sheer hell. You dig the shale, boil out the oil, grow the single-cell protein on the oil substrate -- and after a while you learn to hold out a little for yourself, to ferment and drink so you can forget what kind of a life you're living. There were just my part of the world when I was young. Not one of us had anything to look forward to but spending our whole lives in the hydrocarbon smog of Wyoming, with kerogen ground into the pores of our skin and the roots of our hair. But for me it turned out different. I had a stroke of luck. I won a lottery, and I came out of it with enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Gateway, and thus to possess the right to take part in the biggest lottery of them all: the chance to explore the universe for fun, profit and a first-rate shot at an early and unpleasant death. ( l said it was a stroke of luck. I didn't say it was good luck.) Gateway was Something Else. It hung out in space, waiting for people to come and find it. It wasn't a natural object. It was an artifact, the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid or maybe the core of a comet, no one was quite sure. Its surface was studded with interstellar spaceships, all fueled and aimed and ready to take off for the ends of the Galaxy. There were a couple of problems. For one, although Gateway wasn't natural, it wasn't man-made either. It was made by that long-lost and not altogether comprehensible race called the Heechee, and abandoned by them along about the time Australopithecus africanus first learned how to bash an enemy's head in with the thighbone of an antelope. For another, you never knew quite where you were going. The automatic navigation was quite efficient, but it had been preset by Heechee you got into a ship you might come out in orbit around a fair green planet loaded with treasure. You might also come out in the photosphere of a star. Or you might never come back at all, and no one would ever know why. Everybody on Gateway was part of the exploration team, that was why they were there. Some were just waiting for the flight that would make them rich, like my friend Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Some were waiting for I don't know what, like my other friend Shikitei Bakin, who had lost his legs and a lot of his courage in some accident or other, and stayed on Gateway, maybe, mostly because it had so close to no gravity at all that he could get around by strapping wings to his arms and flying where he wanted to go. After I got to Gateway, and took the laughably brief course in interstellar navigation and so on (what did you have to know when the ships knew where they were going, and wouldn't tell?), I found I was waiting too. What I was waiting for was to find something  had misplaced, namely my guts. My girl-friend Sheri, who came up with me, finally got tired of waiting and signed for a trip. She asked me to go along. It took all the rationalizing I could manage to think of a reason for not going with her, but  did it. I was getting very good at not seizing opportunity when it presented itself, and at not facing up to the reason why. I came back to my room one morning and found the P-phone whining faintly, like a distant, angry mosquito. I punched the message code and found that the Assistant Personnel Director required my presence in her office at ten hundred hours that morning. Well, it was later than that already. I had formed the habit of spending a lot of time, and most nights, with Klara. Her pad was a lot more comfortable than mine. So I didn't get the message until nearly eleven, and when I got to the Corporation personnel offices it didn't help her mood that I was late. She was a very fat woman named Emma Fother. She brushed off my excuses and accused, "You graduated your courses seventeen days ago. You haven't done a thing since." "I'm waititing for the right mission," I said. "How long are you going to wait? Your per-capita's paid up for three more days, then what?" "Well," I said, almost truthfully, "I was going to come in to see you about that today anyway. I'd like a job here on Gateway." "Pshaw," (I'd never heard anyone say that before, but that's how it sounded.) "Is that why you came to Gateway, to clean sewers?" I was pretty sure that was a bluff, because there weren't that many sewers; there wasn't enough gravity flow to support them. "The right mission could come along any day." "Oh, sure, Bob. You know, people like you worry me. Do you have any idea how important our work here is?" "Well, I think so -- " "There's a whole universe out there for us to find and bring home! Gateway's the only way we can reach it. A person like you, who grew up on the plankton farms -- " "Actually it was the Wyoming food mines." "Whatever! You know how desperately the human race needs what we can give them. New technology. New power sources. Food! New worlds to live in." She shook her head and punched through the sorter on her desk, looking both angry and worried. I supposed that she was check-rated on how many of us idlers and parasites she managed to get to go out, the way we were supposed to, which accounted for her hostility -- assuming you could account for her desire to stay on Gateway in the Mission Report Vessel #-#, Voyage #D#. Crew C. Pitrin, N. Ginza, J. Krabbe. Transit time out # days # hours. Position uncertain, vicinity (# l.y.) Zeta Tauri. Summary. "Emerged in transpolar orbit planet .# Earth radius at .# A.U. Planet possessed # detected small satellites. Six other planets inferred by computer logic. Primary K#. "Landing made. Evidently this planet has recently gone through a warming period. There are no ice caps, and the present shorelines do not appear very old. No detected signs of habitation. No intelligent life. "Finescreen scanning located what appeared to be a Heechee rendezvous station in our orbit. We approached it. It was intact. In forcing an entrance it exploded and N. Ginza was killed. Our vessel was damaged and we returned, J. Krabbe dying en route. No artifacts were secured. Biotic samples from planet destroyed in damage to vessel." first place. She abandoned the sorter and got up to open a file against the wall. "Suppose I do find you a job," she said over her shoulder. "The only skill you have that's any use here is prospecting." "I'll take -- almost anything." She looked at me quizzically, and then returned to her desk. She was astonishingly graceful, considering she had to mass a hundred kilos. Maybe a fat woman's fantasy of not sagging accounted for her desire to hold this job and stay on Gateway. "You'll be doing the lowest kind of labor," she warned. "We don't pay much for that. One-eighty a day." "I'll take it!" "Your per-capita has to come out of it. Take that away and maybe twenty dollars a day for toke money, and what do you have left?" "I could always do odd jobs if I needed more." She sighed. "You're just postponing the day, Bob. I don't know. Mr. Hsien, the Director, keeps a very close watch on job applications. I'll find it very hard to justify hiring you. And what are you going to do if you get sick and can't work? Who'll pay your tax?" "I'll go back, I guess." "And waste all your training? You disgust me. Bob." But she punched me out a workticket that instructed me to report to the Crew Chief on Level Grand, Sector North, for assignment in plant maintenance. I didn't like that interview with Emma Fother, but I had been warned I wouldn't. When I talked it over with Klara that evening she told me actually I'd got off light. "You're lucky you drew Emma. Old Hsien sometimes keeps people hanging until their tax money's all gone." "Then what?" I got up and sat on the edge of her cot, feeling for my footgloves. "Out the airlock?" "Don't make fun, it could conceivably come to that. Hsien' s an old Mao type, very hard on social wastrels." "You're a fine one to talk!" She grinned, rolled over and rubbed her nose against my back. "The difference between you and me, Bob," she said, "is that I have a couple of bucks stashed away from my first mission. It didn't pay big, but it paid somewhat. Also I've been out, and they need people like me for teaching people like you." I leaned back against her hip, half turned and put my hand on her, more reminiscently than aggressively. There were certain subjects we didn't talk much about, but -- "Klara?" "Uh?" "What's it like, on a mission?" She rubbed her chin against my forearm for a moment, looking at the holoview of Venus against the wall. "... Scary," she said. I waited, but she didn't say any more about it, and that much I already knew. I was scared right there on Gateway. I didn't have to launch myself on the Heechee Mystery Bus Trip to know what being scared was like, I could feel it already. "You don't really have a choice, dear Bob," she said, almost tenderly, for her. I felt a sudden rush of anger. "No, I don't! You've exactly described my whole life, Klara. I've never had a choice -- except once, when I won the lottery and decided to come here. And I'm not sure I made the right decision then." She yawned, and rubbed against my arm for a moment. "If we're through with sex," she decided, "I want something to eat before I go to sleep. Come on up to the Blue Hell with me and I'll treat."    Plant Maintenance was, actually, the maintenance of plants: specifically, the ivy plants that help keep Gateway liveable. I reported for duty and, surprise -- in fact, nice surprise -- my crew boss turned out to be my legless neighbor, Shikitei Bakin. He greeted me with what seemed like real pleasure. "How nice of you to join us, Robinette," he said. "I expected you would ship out at once." "I will, Shicky, pretty soon. When I see the right launch listed on the board, I'll know it." "Of course." He left it at that, and introduced me to the other Plant Maintainers. I didn't get them straight, except that the girl had had some sort of connection with Professor Hegramet, the hotshot Heecheeologist back home, and the two men had each had a couple of missions already. I didn't really need to get them straight. We all understood the essential fact about each other without discussion. None of us was quite ready to put our names on the launch roster. I wasn't even quite ready to let myself think out why. Plant Maintenance would have been a good place for thought, though. Shicky put me to work right away, fastening brackets to the Heechee-metal walls with tackygunk. That was some kind of specially designed adhesive. It would hold to both the Heechee metal and the ribbed foil of the plant boxes, and it did not contain any solvent that would evaporate and contaminate the air. It was supposed to be very expensive. If you got it on you you just learned to live with it, at least until the skin it was on died and flaked off. If you tried to get it off any other way you drew blood. Classifieds. Head tax  #da. Phyllis, #. to-get Earth imports. Take advantage my Grouped Mass Guarantee unique co-op order service for any item you want. Save expensive single-item shipping costs! Sears, Bradlee, G.U.M. catalogues available. #-#. M., good-looking, seeks int. French F. companionship. #. When the day's quota of brackets were up we all trooped down to the Sewage Plant, where we picked up boxes filled with sludge and covered with cellulose film. We settled them onto the brackets, twisted the self-locking nuts to hold them in place and fitted them with watering tanks. The boxes probably would have weighed a hundred kilos each on Earth but on Gateway that simply wasn't a consideration; even the foil they were made of was enough to support them rigidly against the brackets. Then, when we were all done, Shicky himself filled the trays with seedlings, while we went on to the next batch of brackets. It was funny to watch him. He carried trays of the infant ivy plants on straps around his neck, like a cigarette girl's stock. He held himself at tray level with one hand, and poked seedlings through the film into the sludge with the other. It was a low-pressure job, it served a useful function (I guess) and it passed the time. Shicky didn't make us work any too hard. He had set a quota in his mind for a day's work. As long as we got sixty brackets installed and filled he didn't care if we goofed off, provided we were inconspicuous about it, Klara would come by to pass the time of day now and then, sometimes with the little girl, and we had plenty of other visitors. And when times were slack and there wasn't anybody interesting to talk to, one at a time we could wander off for an hour or so. I explored a lot and each day decision was postponed. We all talked about going out. Almost every day we could hear the thud and vibration as some lander cut itself loose from its dock, pushing the whole ship out to where the Heechee main drive could go into operation. Almost as often we felt the different kind of smaller, quicker shock when some ship returned. In the evenings we went to someone's parties. My whole class was gone by now, almost. Sheri had shipped out on a Five -- I didn't see her to ask her why she changed her plans, and wasn't sure I really wanted to know; the ship she went on had an otherwise all-male crew. They were German-speaking, but I guess Sheri figured she could get by pretty well without talking much. The last one was Willa Forehand. Klara and I went to Willa's farewell party, and then down to the docks to watch her launch the next morning. I was supposed to be working, but I didn't think Shicky would mind. Unfortunately Mr. Hsien was there too, and I could see that he recognized me. "Oh, shit," I said to Klara. She giggled and took my hand, and we ducked out of the launch area. We strolled away until we came to an up-shaft and lifted to the next level. We sat down on the edge of Lake Superior. "Bob old stud," she said, "I doubt he'll fire you for screwing off one time. Chew you out, probably." I shrugged and tossed a chip of filter-pebble into the upcurving lake, which stretched a good two hundred meters up and around the shell of Gateway in front of us. I was feeling tacky, and wondering whether I was reaching the point when the bad vibes about risking nasty death in space were being overtaken by the bad vibes about cowering on Gateway. It's a funny thing about fear. I didn't feel it. I knew that the only reason I was staying on was that I was afraid, but it didn't feel as though I were afraid, only reasonably prudent. "I think," I said, watching myself going into the sentence without being sure how it was going to come out, "that I'm going to do it. Want to come along?" Klara sat up and shook herself. She took a moment before she said, "Maybe. What've you got in mind?" I had nothing in mind. I was only a spectator, watching myself talk myself into something that made my toes curl. But I said, as though I had planned it out for days, "I think it might be a good idea to take a rerun." "No deal!" She looked almost angry. "If I go, I go where the real money is." That was also where the real From Shikitei Bakin to Aritsune, His Honored Grandson I am overwhelmed with joy to learn of the birth of your first child. Do not despair. The next will probably be a boy. I apologize humbly for my failure to write sooner, but there is little to tell. I do my work and attempt to create beauty where I can. Perhaps some day I will go out again. It is not easy without legs. To be sure, Aritsune, I could buy new legs. There was a close tissue match just a few months ago. But the cost! I might almost as well buy Full Medical. You are a loyal grandson to urge me to use my capital for this, but I must decide. I am sending you a half of my capital now to assist with my great-granddaughter's expenses. If I die here, you will receive all of it, for you and for the others who will be bom to you and your good wife before long. This is what I want. Do not resist me. My deepest love to all three of you. If you can, send me a holo of the cherry blossoms -- they are in bloom soon, are they not? One loses sense of Home time here! Lovingly, Your Grandfather danger was, of course. Although even reruns have turned out bad often enough. The thing about reruns is that you start out with the knowledge that somebody has already flown that trip and made it back, and, not only that, made a find that's worth following up on. Some of them are pretty rich. There's Peggy's World, where the heater coils and the fur come from. There's Eta Carina Seven, which is probably full of good stuff if you could only get at it. The trouble is, it has had an ice age since the Heechees were last on it. The storms are terrible. Out of five landers, one returned with a full crew, undamaged. One didn't return at all. Generally speaking, Gateway doesn't particularly want you to do a rerun. They will make a cash offer instead of a percentage where the pickings are fairly easy, as on Peggy. What they pay for is not so much trade goods as maps. So you go out there and you spend your time making orbital runs, trying to find the geological anomalies that indicate Heechee digs may be present. You may not land at all. The pay is worth having, but not lavish. You'd have to make at least twenty runs to build up a lifetime stake, if you take the Corporation's one-pay deal. And if you decide to go on your own, prospecting, you have to pay a share of your profits to the discovery crew, and a cut on what's left of your share to the Corporation. You wind up with a fraction of what you might get on a virgin find, even if you don't have a colony already established on the scene to contend with. Or you can take a shot at the if you find an alien civilization, cate a Heechee ship bigger than a habitable planet. Seems funny that they would whole new planet? But the trouble is, once you've found it, what do you do with it? You can't export a lot of surplus population when you can only move them four at a time. That, plus the pilot, is all you can get into the largest ship in Gateway. (And if you don't have a pilot, you don't get the ship back.) So the Corporation has underwritten a few little colonies, one's very healthy on Peggy and the others are spindly. But that does not solve the problem most of them underfed. You'll never get that kind of bonus on a rerun. Maybe you can't get some of those bonuses at all; maybe the things they're for don't exist. It is strange that no one has ever found a trace of another intelligent creature. But in eighteen years, upwards of two thousand flights, no one has. There are about a dozen habitable planets, plus another hundred or so that people could live on if they absolutely had to, as we have to on Mars and on, or rather in, Venus. There are a few traces of past civilizations, neither Heechee nor human. And there are the souvenirs of the Heechee themselves. At that, there's more in the warrens of Venus than we've found almost anywhere else in the Galaxy, so far. Even Gateway was swept almost clean before they abandoned it. Damn Heechee, why did they have to be so neat?    So we gave up on the rerun deals, because there wasn't enough money in them, and put the special finders' bonuses out of our heads, because there's just no way of planning to look for them. And finally we just stopped talking, and looked at each other, and then we didn't even look at each other. No matter what we said, we weren't going. We didn't have the nerve. Klaras had run out on her last trip, and I guess I hadn't ever had it. "Well," said Klara, getting up and stretching, "I guess I'll go up and win a few bucks at the casino. Want to watch?" I shook my head. "Guess I'd better get back to my job. If I still have one." So we kissed good-by at the upshaft, and when we came to my level I reached up and patted her ankle and jumped off. I was not in a very good mood. We had spent so much effort trying to reassure ourselves that there weren't any launches that offered a promise of reward worth the risks that I almost believed it. Of course, we hadn't even mentioned the other kind of rewards: the danger bonuses. You have to be pretty frayed to go for them. Like, the Corporation or so incentive bonus for a crew to take the same course as some previous crew tried... and didn't come back from. Their reasoning is that maybe something went wrong with the ship, ran out of gas or something, and a second ship might even rescue the crew from the first one. (Fat chance.) More likely, of course, whatever killed the first crew would still be there, and ready to kill you. Then there was a time when you would try changing the course settings after launch. The reason they raised the bonus stopped volunteering when none of them, not one of them, ever came back. Then they cut it out, because they were losing too many ships, and finally they made it a flat no-no. Every once in a while they come up with a bastard control panel, a snappy new computer that's supposed to work symbiotieally with the Heechee board. Those ships aren't good gambling bets, either. There's a reason for the safety lock on the Heechee board. You can't change destination while it's on. Maybe you can't change destination without destroying the ship at all. I saw five people try for a tenCorporation genius from the permanent party was worrying about how to transport more than five people, or the equivalent in cargo, at once. We didn't know how to build a Heechee ship, and we'd never found a really big one. So he figured that maybe we could end-run around that obstacle by using a Five as a sort of tractor. So they built a sort of space barge out of Heechee metal. They loaded it with scraps of junk, and ran a Five out there on lander power. That's just hydrogen and oxygen, and it's easy enough to pump that back in. Then they tied the Five to the barge with monofilament Heechee metal cables. We watched the whole thing from Gateway on PV. We saw the cables take up slack as the Five put a strain on them with its lander jets. Craziest looking thing you ever saw. Then they must have activated the long-range start teat. All we saw on the PV was that the barge sort of twitched, and the Five simply disappeared from sight. It never came back. The stopmotion tapes showed at least the first little bit of what happened. The cable truss had sliced that ship into segments like a hard-boiled egg. The people in it never knew what hit them. The Corporation still has to try for it anymore.    I got a politely reproachful lecture from Shicky, and a really ugly, but brief, P-phone call from Mr. Hsien, but that was all. After a day or two Shicky began letting us take time off again. I spent most of it with Klara. A lot of times we'd arrange to meet in her pad, or once in a while mine, for an hour in bed. We were sleeping together almost every night; you'd think we would have had enough of that. We didn't. After a while I wasn't sure what we were copulating for, the fun of it or the distraction it gave from the contemplation of our own self-images. I would lie there and look at Klara, who always turned over, snuggled down on her stomach and closed her eyes after sex, even when we were going to get up two minutes later. I would think how well I knew every fold and inch of her body. I would smell that sweet, Mission Report Vessel #-#, Voyage #D#. Crew L. Konieezny, E. Konieczny, F. Ito, F. Lounsbury, A. Akaga. Transit time out # days # hours. Primary not identified but probability high as star in cluster # Tucanae. Summary. "Emerged in freefall. No planet nearby. Primary A#, very bright and hot, distance approximately # A.U. "By masking the primary star we obtained a glorious view of what seemed to be two or three hundred nearby very bright stars, apparent magnitude ranging from # to#. However, no artifacts, signals, planets or landable asteroids were detected. We could remain on station only three hours because of intense radiation from the A# star. Larry and Evelyn Konieczny were seriously ill on the return trip, apparently due to radiation exposure, but recovered. No artifacts or samples secured." sexy smell of her and wish -- oh, wish! Just wish, for things I couldn't spell out: for an apartment under the Big Bubble with Klara, for an airbody and a cell in a Venusian tunnel with Klara, even for a life in the food mines with Klara. I guess it was love. But then I'd still be looking at her, and I would feel the inside of my eyes change the picture I was seeing, and what I would see would be the female equivalent of myself: A coward, given the greatest chance a human could have, and scared to take advantage of it. When we weren't in bed we would wander around Gateway together. It wasn't like dating. We didn't go much to the Blue Hell or the holofilm halls, or even eat out. Klara did. I couldn't afford it, so I took most of my meals from the Corporation's refectories, included in the price of my per capita per pick up the check for both of us, but she wasn't exactly anxious to do it, either -- she was gambling pretty heavily, and not winning much. There were groups to be involved with -- card parties, or just parties; folk dance groups, music listening groups, discussion groups. They were free, and sometimes interesting. Or we just explored. Several times we went to the museum. I didn't really like it that much. It seemed... well... reproachful . The first time we went there was right after I got off work, the day Willa Forehand shipped out. Usually the museum was full of visitors, like crew members on pass from the cruisers, or ship's crews from the commercial runs, or tourists. This time, for some reason, there were only .a couple of pepple in it, and we had a chance to look at everything. Prayer fans by the hundreds, those little filmy, crystalline things that were the commonest Heechee artifact; no one knew what they were for, except that they were sort of pretty, but the Heechee had left them all over the place. There was the original anisokinetic punch, that had earned some lucky prospecdollars in royalties already. A thing you could put in your pocket. Furs. Plants in formalin. The original piezophone, that had earned three crews enough to make every one of them awfully rich, even though for some contractual reason in those days they had to share the royalties not only with each other but with the Corporation. The most easily swiped things, like the prayer fans and the blood diamonds and the fire pearls, were kept behind tough breakproof glass. I think they were even wired to burglar alarms. That was surprising, on Gateway. There isn't any law there, except what the Corporation imposes. There are the Corporation's equivalent of police, and there are rules -- you're not supposed to steal or commit murder -- but there aren't any courts. If you break a rule all that happens is that the Corporation security force picks you up and takes you out to one of the orbiting cruisers. Your own, if there is one from wherever you come from. Any one, if not. But if they won't take you, or if you don't want to go on your own nation's ship and can persuade some other ship to take you, Gateway doesn't care. On the cruisers, you'll get a trial. Since you're known guilty to start with, you have three choices. One is to pay your way back home. The second is to sign on as crew if they'll have you. The third is to go out the lock without a suit. So you see that, although there isn't much law on Gateway, there isn't much crime, either. But of course the reason for locking up the precious stuff in the museum was that transients might be tempted to lift a souvenir or two. So Klara and I would muse over the treasures someone had found... and somehow not discuss with each other the fact that we were supposed to go out and find some more. It was not just the exhibits. They were fascinating; they were things that Heechee hands (tentacles? claws?) had made and touched, and they came from unimaginable places incredibly far away. But the constantly flickering tube displays held me even more strongly. Summaries of every mission ever launched, displayed one after another. A constant total of missions versus returns; of royalties paid to lucky prospectors; the roster of the unlucky ones, name after name in a slow crawl along one whole wall of the room, over the display cases. The totals told the story: # launches (the number changed to #, then # while we were there; we felt the shudder of the two launches), #I successful returns. Klara and I didn't look at each other, standing in front of that particular display, but I felt her hand squeeze mine. That was defining "successful" very loosely. It meant that the ship had come back. It didn't say anything about how many of the crew were alive and well. We turned and left the museum after that, and didn't speak much on the way to the up-shaft. The thing in my mind was that what Emma Pother had said to me was true: the human race needed what we prospectors could give them. Needed it a lot. There were hungry people, and Heechee technology probably could make all their lives a lot more tolerable, if prospectors went out and brought samples of it back. Even if it cost a few lives. Even if the lives included Klara's and mine. Did I, I asked myself, want my son -- if I ever had a son -- to spend his childhood the way I had spent mine? We dropped off the up-cable at Levef Babe and heard voices. I didn't pay attention to them. I was coming to a resolution in my mind. "Klara," I said, "listen. Let's -- " But Klara was looking past my shoulder. "For Christ's sake!" she said. "Look who's here!" And I turned, and there was Shicky fluttering in the air, talking to a girl, and I saw with astonishment that the girl was Willa Forehand. She greeted us, looking both embarrassed and amused. "What's going on?" I demanded. "Didn't you just ship out -- like maybe eight hours ago?" "Ten," she said. "Did something go wrong with the ship, so you had to come back?" Klara guessed. Willa smiled ruefully. "Not a thing. I've been there and back. Shortest trip on record so far: I went to the Moon." " Earth's moon?" "That's the one." She seemed to be controlling herself, to keep from laughter. Or tears. Shicky said consolingly, "They'll surely give you a bonus, Willa. There was one that went to Ganymede once, and the Corporalars among them." She shook her head. "Even I know better than that, Shicky, dear. Oh, they'll award us something. But it won't be enough to make a difference. We need more than that." That was the unusual, and Classifieds. Any paired organs, best offer. Neea posterior coronal heart sections, L. auricle, L.  R. ventricle and associated parts. Phone #-# for tissue match. Swedes or Muscovites. Grand Gateway Tournament. Will teach. #-#. would like to hear you tell what it's like out there. Address #As. you find your own pain. Pn #-#. somewhat surprising, thing about the Forehands: it was always "we". They were clearly a very closely knit family, even if they didn't like to discuss that fact with outsiders. I touched her, a pat between affection and compassion. "What are you going to do?' ' She looked at me with surprise. "Why, I've already signed up for another launch, day after tomorrow." "Well!" said Klara. "We've got to have two parties at once for you! We'd better get busy..." And hours later, just before we went to sleep that night, she said to me, "Wasn't there something you wanted to say to me beforewe saw Willa?" "I forget," I said sleepily. I hadn't forgotten. I knew what it was. But I didn't want to say it any more. There were days when I worked myself up almost to that point of asking Klara to ship out with me again. And there were days when a ship came in with a couple of starved, dehydrated survivors, or with no survivors, or when at the routine time a batch of last-year's launches were posted as nonreturns. On those days I worked myself up almost to the point of quitting Gateway completely. Most days we simply spent deferring decision. It wasn't all that hard. It was a pretty pleasant way to live, exploring Gateway and each other. Klara took on a maid, a stocky, fair young woman from the food mines of Carmarthen named Hywa. Except that the feedstock for the Welsh single-cell protein factories was coal instead of oil shale, her world had been almost exactly like mine. Her way out of it had not been a lottery ticket but two years as crew on a commercial spaceship. She couldn't ever go back home. She had jumped ship on Gateway, forfeiting her bond of money she couldn't pay. And she couldn't prospect either, because her one launch had left her with a heart arhythmia that sometimes looked like it was getting better and sometimes put her in Terminal Hospital for a week at a time. Hywa's job was partly to cook and clean for KJara and me, partly to babysit the little girl, Kathy Francis, when her father was on duty and Klara didn't want to be bothered. Klara had been losing pretty heavily at the casino, so she couldn't afford Hywa, but then she couldn't afford me either. What made it easy to turn off our insights was that we pretended to each other, and sometimes to ourselves, that what we were doing was preparing ourselves, really well, for the day when the Right trip came alone. It wasn't hard to do that. A lot of real prospectors did the same thing, between trips. There was a group that called itself The Heechee Seekers, that met on Wednesday nights; it had been started by a prospector named Sam Kahane, kept up by others while he was off on a trip that hadn't worked out, and now had Sam back in it between trips, while he was waiting for the other two members of his crew to get back in shape for the next one. (Among other things, they had come back with scurvy, due to a malfunction in the food freezer.) Sam and his friends were gay, and apparently set in a permanent three-way relationship, but that didn't affect his interest in Heechee lore. He had secured tapes of all the lectures of several courses on exostudies from East Texas Reserve, where Professor Hegramet had made himself the world's foremost authority on Heechee research. I learned a lot I hadn't known, although the central fact, that there were far more questions than answers about the Heechee, was pretty well known to everybody. And we got into physical-fitness groups, where we practiced muscle-toning exercises that you could do without moving any limb more than a few inches, and massage for fun and profit. It was probably profitable, but it was even more fun, particularly sexually. Klara and I learned to do some astonishing things with each other's bodies. We took a cooking course (you can do a lot with standard rations, if you add a selection of spices and herbs). We acquired a selection of language tapes, in the event we shipped out with nonEnglish-speakers, and practiced taxi-driver Italian and Greek on each other. We even joined an astronomy group. They had access to Gateway's telescopes, and we spent a fair amount of time looking at Earth and Venus from outside the plane of the ecliptic. Francy Hereira was in that group when he could get time off from the ship. Klara liked him, and so did I, and we formed the habit of having a drink in our rooms -- well, Klara's rooms, but I was spending a lot of time in them -- with him after the group. Francy was deeply, almost sensually, interested in what was Out There. He knew all about quasars and Black Holes and Seyfert galaxies, not to mention things like double stars and novae. We often speculated what it might be like to come out of a mission into the wavefront of a supernova. It could happen. The Heechee were known to have had an interest in observing astrophysical events first-hand. Some of their courses were undoubtedly programmed to bring crews to the vicinity of interesting events, and a pre-supernova was certainly an interesting event. Only now it was a long lot later, and the supernova might not be "pie" any more. "I wonder," said Klara, smiling to show that it was only an abstact point she was putting to us, "if. that might not be what happened to some of the non-retum missions." "It is an absolute statistical certainty," said Francy, smiling back to show that he agreed to the rules of the-game. He had been practicing his English, which was pretty good to start with, and now he was almost accentfree. He also possessed German, Russian and fair amounts of the other Romance languages to go with his Portugese, as we had discovered when we tried some of our language-tape conversation on each other and found he understood us better than we understood ourselves. "Nevertheless, people go." Klara and I were silent for a moment, and then she laughed. "Some do," she said. I cut in quickly, "It sounds as if you want to go yourself, Francy." "Have you ever doubted it?" "Well, yes, actually I have. I mean, you're in the Brazilian Navy. You can't just take off, can you?" He corrected me: "I can take off at any time. I simply cannot go back to Brazil after that." "And it's worth that to you?" "It's worth anything," he told me. "Even -- " I pressed -- " if there's the risk of not coming back, or of getting messed up like the return today?" That had been a Five that had landed on a planet with some sort of plant life like a poison-ivy. It had been a bad one, we had heard. "Yes, of course," he said. Klara was getting restless. "I think," she said, "I want to go to sleep now." There was some extra message in the tone of her voice. I looked at her and said, "I'll walk'you back to your room." "That's not necessary, Bob." "I'll do it anyhow," I said, ignoring the message. "Good night, Francie. See you next week." Klara was already halfway to the down-shaft, and I had to hurry to catch up to her. I caught the cable and called down to her, "If you really want me to, I'll go back to my own place." She didn't look up, but she didn't say that was what she wanted, either, so I got off at her level and followed her to her rooms. Kathy was sound asleep in the outer room, Hywa drowsing over a holodisk in our bedroom. Klara sent the maid home and went in to make sure the child was comfortable. I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her. "Maybe I'm pre-menstrual," Klara said when she came back. "I'm sorry. I just feel edgy." "I'll go if you want me to." "Jesus, Bob, quit saying that!" Then she sat down next to me and leaned against me so that I would put my arm around her. "Kathy's so sweet," she said after a moment, almost wistfully. "You'd like to have one of your own, wouldn't you?" "I will have one of my own." She leaned back, pulling me with her. "I wish I knew when, that's all. I need a lot more money than I have to give a kid a decent life. And I'm not getting any younger." We lay there for a moment, and then I said into her hair, "That's what I want too, Klara." She sighed. "Do you think I don't know that?" Then she tensed and sat up. "Who's that?" Somebody was scrabbling at the door. It wasn't locked; we never did that. But nobody ever came in Professor Hegramet. We have no idea what the Heechee looked like except for inferences. Probably they were bipeds. Their tools fit human hands tolerably well, so probably they had hands. Or something like them. They seem to have seen pretty much the same spectrum as we do. They must have been smaller than us -- say, a hundred and fifty centimeters, or less. And they had funny-looking rumps. Questbn. What do you mean, funny-looking rumps? Professor Hegramet. Well, did you ever look at the pilot's seat in a Heechee ship? It's two flat pieces of metal joined in a V shape. You couldn't sit in it for ten minutes without pinching your bottom off. So what we have to do, we stretch a webbing seat across them. But that's human addition. The Heechee didn't have anything like that. So their bodies must have looked more or less like a wasp's, with this big abdomen hanging down, actually extending below the hips, between the legs. Question. Do you mean they might have had stingers like wasps? Professor Hegramet. Stingers. No. I don't think so. But maybe. Or maybe they had hell's own set of sex organs. without being invited, either, and this time someone did. "Sterling!" Klara said, surprised. She remembered her manners: "Bob, this is Sterling Francis, Kathy's father. Bob Broadhead." "Hello," he said. He was much older than I'd thought that little girl's father would be, at least fifty, and looking very much older and more weary than seemed natural. "Klara," he said, "I'm taking Kathy back home on the next ship. I think I'll take her tonight, if you don't mind. I don't want her to hear from somebody else." Klara reached out for my hand without looking at me. "Hear what?" "About her mother." Francis rubbed his eyes, then said, "Oh, didn't you know? Ian's dead. Her ship came back a few hours ago. All four of them in the lander got into some kind of fungus; they swelled up and died. I saw her body. She looks -- " He stopped. "The one I'm really sorry for," he said, "is Annalee. She stayed in orbit while the others went down, and she brought Jan's body back. I guess she was kind of crazy. Why bother? It was too late to matter to Jan...Well, anyway. She could only bring two of them, that was all the room in the freezer, and of course her rations -- " He stopped again, and this time he didn't seem able to talk any more. So I sat on the edge of the bed while Klara helped him wake the child and bundle her up to take her hack to. his own rooms. While they were out I dialed a couple of displays on the PV, and studied them very carefully. By the time Klara came back I had turned off the PV and was sitting crosslegged on the bed, thinking hard. "Christ," she said glumly, "If this night isn't a bummer." She sat down at the far comer of the bed. "I'm not sleepy after all," she said. "Maybe I'll go up and win a few bucks at the roulette table." "Let's not," I said. I'd sat next to her for three hours the night before, while she first won ten thousand dollars and then lost twenty. "I have a better idea. Let's ship out." She turned full around to look at me, so quickly that she floated up off the bed for a moment. "What?" "Let's ship out." She closed her eyes for a moment and, without opening them, said, "When?" "Launch #-#. It's a Five, and there's a good crew: Sam Kahane and his buddies. They're all recovered now, and they need two more to fill the ship." She stroked her eyelids with her fingertips, then opened them and looked at me. "Well, Bob," she said, "you do have interesting suggestions." There were shades over the Heechee-metal walls to cut down the light for sleeping, and I had drawn them; but even in the filtered dimness I could see how she looked. Frightened. Still, what she said was: "They're not bad guys. How do you get along with gays?" "I leave them alone, they leave me alone. Especially if I've got you." "Um," she said, and then she crawled over to me, wrapped her arms around me, pulled me down and buried her head in my neck. "Why not?" she said, so softly that I was not at first sure I had heard her. When I was sure, the fear hit me. There had always been the chance she would say no. I would have been off the hook. I could feel myself shaking, but I managed to say, "Then we'll file for it in the morning?" She shook her head. "No," she said, her voice muffled. I could feel her trembling as much as I was. "Get on the phone, Bob. We'll file for it now. Before we change our mind." I fc   The next day I quit my job, packed my belongings into the suitcases I had brought them in and turned them over for safekeeping to Shicky, who looked wistful. Klara quit the school and fired her maid -- who looked seriously worried -- but didn't bother about packing. She had quite a lot of money left, Klara did. She prepaid the rent on both her rooms and left everything just the way it was. We had a farewell party, of course. We went through it without my remembering a single person who was there. And then, all of a sudden, we were squeezing into the ladder, climbing down into the capsule while Sam Kahane methodically checked the settings. We locked ourselves into our cocoons. We started the automatic sequencers. And then there was a lurch, and a falling, floating sensation before the thrusters cut in, and we were on our way. "Good morning, Rob," says Sigfrid, and I stop in the door of the room, suddenly and subliminally worried. "What's the matter?" "There's nothing the matter, Rob. Come in." "You've changed things around," I say accusingly. "That's right, Robbie. Do you like the way the room looks?" I study it. The throw pillows are gone from the floor. The nonobjective paintings are off the wall. Now he's got a series of holopictures of space scenes, and mountains and seas. The funniest thing of all is Sigfrid himself: He is speaking to me out of a dummy that's sitting back in a comer of the room, holding a pencil in its hands, looking up at me from behind dark glasses. "You've turned out very camp," I say. "What's the reason for all this?" His voice sounds as though he were smiling benevolently, although there is no change in the expression on the face of the dummy. "I just thought you'd enjoy a change, Rob." I take a few steps into the room and stop again. "You took the mat away!" "Don't need it, Bob. As you see, there's a new couch. That's very traditional, isn't it?" "Urn." He coaxes, "Why don't you just lie down on it? See how it feels." "Um." But I stretch out on it cautiously. How it feels is strange; and I don't like it, probably because this particular room represents something serious to me and changing it around makes me nervous. "The mat had straps," I complain. "So does the couch, Bob. You can pull them out of the sides. Just feel around... there. Isn't that better?" "No, it isn't." "I think," he sayd softly, "that you should let me decide whether for therapeutic reasons some sort of change is in order, Rob." I sit up. "And that's another thing, Sigfrid! Make up your fucking mind what you're going to call me. My name isn't Rob, or Robbie, or Bob. It's Robinette." "I know that, Robbie -- " "You're doing it again!" A pause, then, silkily, "I think you should allow me the choice of the form of address I prefer, Robbie." . "Um." I have an endless supply of those non-commital non-words. In fact, I would like to conduct the whole session without revealing any more than that. What I want is for Sigfrid to reveal. I want to know why he calls me by different names at different times. I want to know what he finds significant in what I say. I want to know what he really thinks of me... if a clanking piece of tin and plastic can think, I mean. Of course, what I know and Sigfrid doesn't is that my good friend S. Ya. has practically promised to let me play a little joke on him. I am looking forward to that a lot. "Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Rob?" "No." He waits. I am feeling somewhat hostile and non-communicative. I think part of it is because I am so much looking forward to the time Mission Report Vessel #-#, Voyage #D#. Crew F. Ito. Transit time #I days # hours. Position not identified. Instrument recordings damaged. Transcript of crewman's tape follows: "The planet seems to have a surface gravity in excess of #, but I am going to attempt a landing. Neither visual nor radar scanning penetrates the clouds of dust and vapor. It really is not looking very good, but this is my eleventh launch. I am setting the automatic return for # days. If I am not back by then with the lander I think the capsule will return by itself. I wish I knew what the spots and flares on the sun meant." Crewman was not aboard when ship returned. No artifacts or samples. Landing vehicle not secured. Vessel damaged. when I can play a little trick on Sigfrid, but the other part is because he has changed around the auditing room. That's the kind of thing they used to do to me when I had my psychotic episode in Wyoming. Sometimes I'd come in for a session and they'd have a hologram of my Mother, for Christ's sake. It looked exactly like her, but it didn't smell like her or feel like her; in fact, you couldn't feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they'd have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take me in its arms and whisper to me. I didn't like that. I was crazy, but I wasn't that crazy. Sigfrid is still waiting, but he won't wait for ever. Pretty soon he's going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams. "Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Bob?" I yawn. The whole subject is very boring. "I don't think so. Nothing important, I'm sure." "I'd like to hear what they were. Even a fragment." "You're a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?" "I'm sorry you feel I'm a pest, Rob." "Well -- I don't think I can remember even a fragment." "Try, please." "Oh, cripes. Well." I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I can think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there's nothing in it that relates to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would get angry. So I say obediently, "I was in a car of a long railroad train. There were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one to the other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who -- well, she looked rather strange. At first I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a sort of utility coverall, so you couldn't tell from that whether she was male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure she was a woman." "Did you talk to either of these women, Bob?" "Please don't interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought." "I'm sorry, Rob," I go on with the dream: "I left them -- no, I didn't talk to them. I went back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled to the rest of the train with a sort of -- let's see, I don't know how to describe it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out of metal, you know? And it stretched." I stopped for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for having such a dumb, irrelevant dream. "You say the metal connector stretched, , Bob?" Sigfrid prompts me. "That's right, it stretched. So of course the car I was in kept dropping back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was the shape of her face, looking at me. She -- " I lose the thread of what I am saying. I try to get back on the track: "I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back to her, as if she -- I'm sorry, Sigfrid, I don't remember clearly what happened around there. Then I woke up. And," I finish virtuously, "I wrote it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to." "I appreciate that, Bob," Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go on. I shift restlessly. "This couch isn't nearly as comfortable as the mat," I complain. "I'm sorry about that. Bob. You said you recognized them?' ' "Who?" "The two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther away from." "Oh. No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I have no idea who they were." "Did they look like anyone you knew?" "Not a bit. I wondered about that myself." Sigfrid says, after a moment, which I happen to know is his way of giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn't like, "You mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed a lot." " -- Yes. But I didn't recognize her. I think in a way she did look familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do." He says patiently, "Can you think of any woman you've ever known who was motherly and coughed a lot?' ' I laugh out loud at that. "Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women I know are not at all the motherly type! And they are all on at least Major Medical. They're not likely to cough." "I see. Are you sure, Robbie?" "Don't be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid," I say, angry because the crappy couch is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the bathroom and this situation looks like prolonging itself indefinitely. "I see." And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he is going to: He's a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out before him, one piece at a time. "How about the other woman, the one with the bushy eyebrows?" "What about her?" "Did you e,ver know any girl who had bushy eyebrows?" "Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I've gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of." "No particular one?" "Not that I can think of." "Not offhand, Bob. Please make an effort to remember." It is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I make the effort. "All right, let's see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S Ya.? No. Gretchen? No -- well, to tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so blonde I couldn't really tell you if she had eyebrows at all." "Those are girls you've known recently, aren't they, Rob? Perhaps someone longer ago?" "You mean way back?" I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the way to the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. "You know something, Sigfrid? It's funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like -- oh, wait a minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost altogether away, and then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time when we were in bed together we drew pictures on each other with her eyebrow pencil." I can almost hear him sigh. "The cars," he says, pecking at another bright bit. "How would you describe them?" "Like any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the tunnel." "Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel. Bob?" I lose my patience at that. He is so fucking transparent! "Come on, Sigfrid! You don't get away with any corny penis symbols with me." "I'm not trying to get away with anything, Bob." "Well, you're being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are. There's nothing in it. The train was just a train. I don't know who the women were. And listen, while we're on the subject, I really hate this God-damned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can do a lot better than this!" He has realiy got me angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the dream, but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance company's money, and by the time I leave he has promised to redecorate before my next visit. As I go out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really doing me a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage to stand up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are pretty crazy. I struggled out of my sling to get out of the way of Klara's knee and bumped into Sam Kahane's elbow. "Sorry," he said, not even looking around to see who he was sorry about. His hand was still on the go-teat, although we were ten minutes on our way. He was studying the flickering colors on the Heechee instrument board and the only time he looked away was when he glanced at the viewscreen overhead. I sat up, feeling very queasy. It had taken me weeks to get used to Gateway's virtual absence of gravity. The fluctuating G forces in the capsule were something else. They were very light, but they didn't stay the same for more than a minute at a time, and my inner ear was complaining. I squeezed out of the way into the kitchen area, with one eye on the door to the toilet. Ham Tayeh was still in there. If he didn't get out pretty soon my situation was going to become critical. Klara laughed, reached out from her sling and put an arm around me. "Poor Bobbie," she said. "And we're just beginning." I swallowed a pill and recklessly lit a cigarette and concentrated on not throwing up. I don't know how much of it was actually motion sickness. A lot of it was fear. There is something very frightening about knowing that there is nothing between you and instant, ugly death except a thin skin of metal made by some peculiar strangers half a million years ago. And about knowing that you're committed to go somewhere over which you no longer have any control, which may turn out to be extremely unpleasant. I crawled back into my sling, stubbed out the cigarette, closed my eyes and concentrated on making the time pass. There was going to be a lot of it to pass. The average trip lasts maybe forty-five days each way. It doesn't matter as much as you might think how far you are going. Ten light-years or ten thousand: it matters some, but not linearly. They tell me that the ships are continually accelerating and accelerating the rate of acceleration the whole time. That delta isn't linear either, or even exponential, in any way that anybody can figure out. You hit the speed of light very quickly, in less than an hour. Then it seems to take quite a while before you exceed it by very much. Then they really pick up speed. You can tell all this (they say) by watching the stars displayed on the overhead Heechee navigation screen (they say). Inside the first hour the stars all begin to change color and swim around. When you pass c you know it because they've all clustered in the center of the screen, which is in front of the ship as it flies. Actually the stars haven't moved. You're catching up with the light emitted by sources behind you, or to one side. The photons that are hitting the front viewer were emitted a day, or a week, or a hundred years ago. After a day or two they stop even looking like stars. There's just a sort of mottled gray surface. It looks like a holofilm held up to the light, but you can make a virtual image out of a holofilm with a flashlight and nobody has ever made anything but pebbly gray out of what's on the Heechee screens. By the time I finally got into the toilet, the emergency didn't seem as emergent; and when I came out Klara was alone in the capsule, checking star images with the theodolitic camera. She turned to regard me. "You're looking a little less green," she said approvingly. "I'll live. Where are the boys?" "Where would they be? They're down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we should split things up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of the time while they're up here, then we come up here and they take it." "Hum." That sounded pretty nice, actually; I'd been wondering how we were going to work out anything like privacy. "Okay. What do you want me to do now?" She reached over and gave me an absent-minded kiss. "Just stay out of the way. Know what? We look like we're going almost toward straight Galactic North." I received that information with the weighty consideration of ignorance. Then I said, "Is that good?" She grinned. "How can you tell?" I lay back and watched her. If she was as frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was not letting it show. I began wondering what was toward Galactic North... and more important, how long it would take us to get there. The shortest trip to another star system on record was eighteen days. That was Barnard's Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or anyway the longest anybody knows of so far -- who knows how many ships containing dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-#I in Andromeda? -- was a hundred and seventy-five days each way.' They did come back dead. Hard to tell where they were. The pictures they took didn't show much, and the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in condition to say. When you start out it's pretty scary even for a veteran. You know you're accelerating. You don't know how long the acceleration will last. When you hit turnaround you can tell. First thing, you know formally because that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little Classifieds. points if you will read Gibran to me. Nudity optional. #-#. fastest-growing condominial nation in West Africa. Favorable tax laws, proven growth record. Our Registered Representative is here on Gateway to explain how. "Dahomey Is the Luxury Resort of Tomorrow." Let's talk. #-#. oils, other, #. Other subjects. #-#. bit. (No one knows why.) But you know that you're turning around even without looking, because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward the back of the ship now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom becomes top. Why didn't the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as to use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration? I wouldn't know. You'd have to be a Heechee to know that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all their viewing equipment seems to be in front. Maybe it's because the front part of the ship is always heavily armored, even in the lightweightships -- against, I guess, the impact of stray molecules of gas or dust. But some of the bigger ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over. They don't turn around either. So, anyway, when the coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you know you've done one-quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a quarter of your total out time, of course. How long you stay at your destination is another matter entirely. You make up your own mind about that. But you've gone half of the automatically controlled trip out. So you multiply the numbers of days elapsed so far, by four, and if that number is less than the number of days your life-support capability is good for, then you know that at least you don't have to starve to death. The difference between the two' numbers is how long you can hang around at destination. Your basic ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for # days. You can stretch it to # without much trouble (you just come back skinny, and maybe with a few deficiency diseases). So if you get up to sixty or sixty-five days on the outbound leg without turnaround, then you know you may be having a problem, and you begin eating lighter. If you get up to eighty or ninety days, then your problem solves itself, because you don't have any options any more, you're going to die before you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But that's just another way of dying. Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how they did it is one of thosegreat unanswered questions about the Heechee like why did they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they look like? Or where did they go? There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was a kid. It was called Everything We Know About the Heechee. It had a hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank. If Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it, they didn't show much of it in the first few days. They followed their own interests. Reading. Listening to music tapes with earphones. Playing chess and, when they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker. We didn't play for money, we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara said it was more like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to occupy your time.) They were quite benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the oppressed heterosexual minority in the dominantly homosexual culture that occupied our ship, and gave us the lander an exact fifty per cent of the time even though we comprised only forty per cent of the population. We got along. It was good that we did. We were living in each others' shadow and stink every minute. The inside of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an apartment kitchen. The lander gives you a little extra space -- add on the equivalent of a fair-sized closet -- but, on the outleg at least, that's usually filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total available cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract, what else goes into it besides me and thee and the other prospectors. When you're in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration. It isn't really acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your body to exceed c, and it can as well be described as friction as gravity. But it feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you weighed about two kilos. This means you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so each person in your crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to become a sort of a chair. Add to that each person's own personal space: Cupboards for tapes and disks and clothing (you don't wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures of the near  dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up to your total allowance of weight and bulk (# kilograms, ## of a cubic meter); and you have a certain amount of crowding already. Add onto that the original Heechee equipment of the ship. Three-quarters of that you will never use. Most of it you wouldn't know how to use if you had to; what you do with it, most of all, is leave it alone. But you can't remove it. Heechee machinery is integrally designed. If you amputate a piece of it, it dies. Perhaps if we knew how to heal the wound we could take out some of the junk and the ship would operate anyway. But we don't, and so it stays; the great diamond-shaped golden box that explodes if you try to open it; the flimsy spiral of golden tubing that, from time to time, glows, and even more often, becomes unneighborly hot (no one knows why, exactly); and so on. It all stays there, and you bump against it all the time. Add on to that the human equipment. The spacesuits: one apiece, fitted to your form and figure. The photographic equipment. The toilet and bath installations. The food preparing section. The waste disposers. The test kits, the weapons, the drills, the sample boxes, the entire rig that you take down to the surface of the planet with you, if you happen to be lucky enough to reach a planet you can land on. What you have left is not very much. It is a little like living for weeks on end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going, and with four other people competing for space. After the first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against Ham Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share. To be truthful, Ham wasn't even as tall as I was, though he weighed more. But I didn't mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when other people got in the way of it. Sam Kahane was a better size, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters, with stiff black beard and coarse crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his cache-sexe to his chest, and all up and down his back as well. I didn't think of Sam as violating my living space until I found a long, black beard-hair in my food. Ham at least was almost hairless, with a soft golden skin that made him look like a Jordanian harem eunuch. (Did the Jordanian kings have eunuchs in their harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn't seem to know much about that; his parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.) I even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two sizes smaller. (Not usually. Usually Klara was just right.) And Dred Frauenglass, who came with Sam's set, was a gentle, thin young man who didn't talk much and seemed to take up less room than anyone else. I was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how to do what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic and spectrometer readings. Keep a tape of readouts from the Heechee control panel, where there are constant minute variations in hue and intensity from the colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping to understand what they mean.) Snap and analyze the spectra of the tau-space stars in the viewscreen. And all that put together takes, oh, maybe, two manhours a day. The household tasks of preparing meals and cleaning up take about another two. So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of you, in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use up. I'm lying. That's not really what you do with your time. What you do with your time is wait for turnaround. Three days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a building tension that I didn't share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was, because I was feeling it too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When we went to sleep our last look was at the golden spiral to see if miraculously it had flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought was whether the ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were all definitely edgy. Ham showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham with the jolly genie's face: "Let's play some poker, Bob." "No, thanks." "Come .on. Bob. We need a fourth." (In Chinese poker you deal out the whole deck, thirteen cards to each player. You can't play it any other way.) "I don't want to." And suddenly furious: "Piss on you! You're not worth a snake's fart as crew, now you won't even play cards!" And then he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a time, as though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life's sake. And, come right down to it, it almost was. Because figure it out for yourself. Suppose you're in a Five and you pass seventy-five days without turnaround. Right away you know that you're in trouble: the rations won't support five people for more than three hundred days. Or three. Or two. Or one. At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going to come back from the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting the cards. Loser politely cuts his throat. If loser is not polite, the other four give him etiquette lessons. A lot of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few have come back as Ones.    Dr. Asmenion. I suppose most of you are here more because you hope to collect a science bonus than because you're really interested in astrophysics. But you don't have to worry. The instruments do most of the work. You do your routine scan and if you hit anything special it'll come out in the evaluation when you're back. Question. Isn't there anything special we should look out for? Dr. Asmenion.Oh, sure. For instance, there was a prospector think, by coming out in the Orion Nebula and realizing that one part of the gas cloud was showing a hotter temperature than the rest of it. He decided a star was being born. Gas was condensing and beginning to heat up. In another ten thousand years there'll probably be a recognizable solar system forming there, and he did a special scan mosaic of that whole part of the sky. So he got the bonus. And now, every year, the Corporation sends that ship out there to get new readings. They pay a hundred thousand dollar bonus, and fifty thousand of it goes to him. I'll give you the coordinates for some likely spots, like the Trifid nebula, if you want me to. You won't get a half million, but you'll get something. So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast. Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on end wrapped in each other's arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to wake the other to sex again, I suppose the boys did much the same; it was not long before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boy's gym. Then we began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn't enough solitude on the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could; by common consent we began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played cards with the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what the others did with their solo time, what I did with mine was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship. Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes, Dred watched his pomodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played electronic music into earplugs (even so some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly, terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron stars, black holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test procedures before landing on a new world. The good thing about that was that we managed not to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The rest of the time -- well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand Ham Tayeh's constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning hostility toward my occasional cigarette. Sam's armpits were a horror, even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the worst of Gateway's air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara -- well, Klara had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos of dehydrated foods with her, just for variety and for something to do; and although she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she insisted on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes your urine smell funny. It is not a romantic thing to know when your darling has been eating asparagus by the change in air quality in the common toilet. And yet -- she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I have never known the inside of anyone's head a fraction as well as I came to know Klara's. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not stop. Ever.    On the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham's electronic piano when I suddenly felt seasick. The fluctuating grav force, that I had come hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying. I looked up and met Klara's eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily smiling. She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral of glass golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a stream. We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us and bottom became top. We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to spare. XV Sigfrid's office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else's. It can't be too hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to him, "Christ, it's hot in here. Your air-conditioner is malfunctioning." "I don't have an air-conditioner, Robbie," he says patiently. "Getting back to your mother -- ' ' "Screw my mother," I say. "Screw yours too." ' There is a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I will regret that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, "I mean. I'm really uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It's hot in here." "You are hot in here," he corrects me. "What?" "My sensors indicate that your temperature goes up almost a degree whenever we talk about certain subjects: Your mother, the woman Gelle-KIara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov, and excretion." "Well, that's great," I yell, suddenly angry. "You're telling me you spy on me?" "You know that I monitor your external signs, Robbie," he says reprovingly. "There is no harm in that. It is no more significant han a friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers." "So you say." "I do say that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know that these subjects are charged with some emotional overload for you. Would you like to talk about why that might be?" "No! What I'd like to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little secrets are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed? Tap my phone?' ' "No, Bob. I don't do any of those things." "I certainly hope that's the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing when you lie." Pause. "I don't think I understand what you are saying, Rob." "You don't have to," I sneer. "You're just a machine." It's enough that I understand. It is very important to me to have that little secret from Sigfrid. In my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me one night, a night full of pot, wine and great sex. One day soon I will take it out of my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really enjoy this contest with Sigfrid. It gets me angry. When I am angry I forget that very large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don't know how to stop. After forty-six days of superlight travel the capsule dropped back into a velocity that felt like no velocity at all: we were in orbit, around something, and all the engines were still. We stank to high heaven and we were incredibly tired of one another's company, but we clustered around the viewscreens locked arm to arm, like dearest lovers, in the zero gravity, staring at the sun before us. It was a larger and oranger star than Sol; either larger, or we were closer to it than one A.U. But it wasn't the star we were orbiting. Our primary was a gasgiant planet with one large moon, half again as big as Luna. Neither Klara nor the boys were whooping and cheering, so I waited as long as I could and then said, "What's the matter?" Klara said absently, "I doubt we can land on that." She did not seem disappointed. She didn't seem to care at all, Sam Kahane blew a long, soft sigh through his beard and said: "Well. First thing, we'd better get some clean spectra. Bob and I will do it. The rest of you start sweeping for Heechee signatures." "Fat chance," said one of the others, but so softly that I wasn't sure who. It could even have been Klara. I wanted to ask more, but I had a feeling that if I asked why they weren't happy one of them would tell me, and then I wouldn't like the answer. So I squeezed after Sam into the lander, and we got in each other's way while we pulled on our top gear, checked our lifesupport systems and comms and sealed up. Sam waved me into the lock; I heard the flash-pumps sucking the air out, and then the little bit left puffed me out into space as the lock door opened. For a moment I was in naked terror, all alone in the middle of no place any human being had ever been, terrified that I'd forgotten to snap my tether. But I hadn't had to; the magnetic clamp had slipped itself into a lock position, and I came to the end of the cable, twitched sharply, and began more slowly to recoil back toward the ship. Before I got there Sam was out too, spinning toward me. We managed to grab each other, and began setting up to take photographs. Sam gestured at a point between the immense saucer-shaped gasgiant disk and the hurtfully bright orange sun, and I visored my eyes with my gauntlets until I saw what he was indicating: M-#I in Andromeda. Of course, from where we were it wasn't in the constellation of Andromeda. There wasn't anything in sight that looked like Andromeda, or for that matter like any other constellation I had ever seen. But M-#I is so big and so bright that you can even pick it out from the surface of the Earth when the smog isn't too bad, whirlpool-lens shaped fog of stars. It is the brightest of the external galaxies, and you can recognize it fairly well from almost anywhere a Heechee ship is likely to go. With a little magnification you can be sure of the spiral shape, and you can double-check by comparing the smaller galaxies in roughly the same line of sight. While I was zeroing in with M-#, Sam was doing the same with the Magellanic clouds, or what he thought were the Magellanic clouds. (He claimed he had identified S Doradus.) We both began taking theodolitic shots. The purpose of all that, of course, is so that the academics who belong to the Corporation can triangulate and locate where we've been. You might wonder why they care, but they do; so much that you don't qualify for any scientific bonus unless you do the full series of photos. You'd think they would know where we were going from the pictures we take out the windows while in superlight travel. It doesn't work out that way. They can get the main direction of thrust but after the first few light-years it gets harder and harder to track identifiable stars, and it's not clear that the line of flight is a straight line; some say it follows some wrinkly configuration in the curvature of space. Anyway, the bigheads use everything they can get -- including a measure of how far the Magellanic Clouds have rotated, and in which direction. Know why that is? Because you can tell from that how many lightyears away we are from them, and thus how deep we are into the Galaxy. The Clouds revolve in mapping can show changes of one differences in ranging of # lightyears or so. What with Sam's group-study courses I had got pretty interested in that sort of thing. Actually taking the photos and trying to guess how Gateway would interpret them I almost forgot to be scared. And almost, but not quite, forgot to worry that this trip, taken at so great an investment in courage, was turning out to be a bust.    But it was a bust. Ham grabbed the sphere-sweep tapes from Sam Kahane as soon as we were back in the ship and fed them into the scanner. The first subject was the big planet itself. In every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, there was nothing coming out of it that suggested artifaclual radiation. So he began looking for other planets. Finding them was slow, even for the automatic scanner, and probably there could have been a dozen we couldn't locate in the time we spent there (but that hardly mattered, because if we couldn't locate them they would have been too distant to reach anyway.) The way Ham did it was by taking key signatures from a spectrogram of the primary star's radiation, then programming the scanner to look for reflections of it. It picked out five objects. Two of them turned out to be stars with similar spectra. The other three were planets, all right, but they showed no artifactual radiatiation either. Not to mention that they were both small and distant. Which left the gas giant's one big moon. "Check it out," Sam commanded. Mohammad grumbled, "It doesn't look very good." "I don't want your opinion, I only want you to do what you're told. Check it out. ' ' "Out loud, please," Klara added. Ham looked at her in surprise, perhaps at the word "please," but Classifieds. play at parties. #-#. Remember your loved ones at home with a Genuine Recomposed Heechee-Plastic model of Gateway or Gateway Two; lift it and see a lovely whirling snowfall of authentic Peggy's World glitterdust. Scenic holofiches, hand-etched Junior Launch Bracelets, many other gift items. Ph #-#. daughter, female friends back on Earth? I'd like to correspond. Ultimate object matrimony. #-#. he did what she asked. He punched a button and said: "Signature for coded electromagnetic radiation." A slow sine curve leaped onto the scanner's readout plate, wiggled briefly for a moment and then straightened to an absolutely motionless line. "Negative," said Ham. "Anomalous timevariant temperatures." That was a new one on me. "What's an anomalous time-variant temperature?" I asked. "Like if something gets warmer when the sun sets," said Klara impatiently. "Well?" But that line was flat too. "None of them either,"' said Ham. "High-albedo surface metal?" Slow sine wave, then nothing. "Hum," said Ham. "Ha. Well, the rest of the signatures don't apply; there won't be any methane, because there isn't any atmosphere and so on. So what do we do, boss?" Sam opened his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. "I beg your pardon," she said tightly, "but who do you mean when you say 'boss?' " "Oh, shut up," Ham said impatiently. "Sam?" Kahane gave Klara a slight, forgiving smile. "If you want to say something, go ahead and say it," he invited. "Me, I think we ought to orbit the moon." "Plain waste of fuel!" Klara snapped. "I think that's crazy." "Have you got a better idea?" "What do you mean, 'better?' What's the point?" "Well," said Sam reasonably, "we haven't looked all over the moon. It's rotating pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there might be a whole Heechee city on the far side." "Fat chance," Klara sniffed, almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the question of who had said it before. The boys weren't listening. All three of them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and me in sole possession of the capsule. Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them, hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly, and I could see the distant brownish disk of the planet's moon slide upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they ran out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some sort of malfunction. What I would have to do in that case was leave them there forever. I wondered whether I would have the nerve to do what I had to do. It did seem like a terrible, trivial waste of human lives. What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts? I found that I was holding my chest, as though the metaphor were real. I spat on the end of the cigarette to put it out and folded it into a disposal bag. Little crumbs of ash were floating around where I had flicked them without thinking, but I didn't feel like chasing them. I watched the big mottled crescent of the planet swing into view in the comer of the screen, admiring it as an art object: yellowish green on the daylight side of the terminator, an amorphous black that obscured the stars on the rest of it. You could see where the outer, thinner stretches of the atmosphere began by the few bright stars that peeped twinklingly through it, but most of it was so dense that nothing came through. Of course, there was no question of landing on it. Even if it had a solid surface, it would be buried under so much dense gas that we could never survive there. The Corporation was talking about designing a special lander that could penetrate the air of a Jupiter-like planet, and maybe some day they would; but not in time to help us. Klara was still in the toilet. I stretched my sling across the cabin, pulled myself into it, put down my head and went to sleep.    Four days later they were back. Empty, Dred and Ham Tayeh were glum, dirty and irritable; Sam Kahane looked quite cheerful. I wasn't fooled by it; if he had found anything worth having they would have let us know by radio. But I was curious. "What's the score, Sam?" "Batting zero," he said; "It's just rock, couldn't get a flicker of anything worth going down for. But I have an idea." Klara came up beside me, looking curiously at Sam. I was looking at the other two; they looked as if they knew what Sam's idea was, and didn't like it. "You know," he said, "that star's a binary." "How can you tell?" I asked. "I put the scanners to work. You've seen that big baby out -- " he looked around, then grinned. "Well, I don't know which direction it is now, but it was near the planet when we first took the pictures. Anyway, it looked close, so I put the scanners on it, and they gave a proper motion I couldn't believe. It has to be a binary with the primary here, and not more than half a light-year away." "It could be a wanderer, Sam," said Ham Tayeh. "I told you that. Just a star that passes in the night." Kahane shrugged. "Even so. It's close." Klara put in, "Any planets?" "I don't know," he admitted. "Wait a minute -- there it is, I think." We all looked toward the viewscreen. There was no question which star Kahane was talking about. It was brighter than Sirius as seen from Earth, a minus-two magnitude at least. Klara said gently, "That's interesting, and I hope I don't know what you're thinking, Sam. Half a light-year is at best maybe two years' travel time at top lander speed, even if we had the fuel for it. Which we don't, boys." "I know that," Sam insisted, "but I've been thinking. If we could just give a little nudge on the main capsule drive -- " I astounded myself by shouting, "Stop that!" I was shaking all over. I couldn't stop. Some times it felt like terror, and some times it felt like rage. I think if I had had a gun in my hand at that moment I could have shot Sam without a thought. Klara touched me to calm me down. "Sam," she said, quite gently for her, "I know how you feel." Kahane had come up empty on five straight trips. "I bet it's possible to do that." He looked astonished, suspicious and defensive, all at once. "You do?" "I mean, I can imagine that if we were Heechee in this ship, instead of the human clods we really are, why, then, we'd know what we were doing. We'd come out here and look around and say, "Oh, hey, look our friends here -- ' or, you know, whatever it was that was here when they set a course for this place -- 'our friends must've moved. They're not home any more.' And then we'd say, 'Oh, well, what the hell, let's see if they're next door.' And we'd push this thing here and this one there, and then we'd zap right over to that big blue one -- " She paused and looked at him, still holding my arm, "Only we're not Heechee, Sam." "Christ, Klara! I know that. But there has to be a way -- " She nodded. "There sure does, but we don't know what it is. What we know, Sam, is that no ship ever has changed its course settings and come back to tell about it. Remember that? Not one." He didn't answer her directly, he only stared at the big blue star in the viewscreen and said: "Let's vote on it." The vote, of course, was four to one against changing the settings on the course board, and Ham Tayeh never got from in between Sam and the board until we had passed light-speed on the way home. The trip back to Gateway was no longer than the trip out, but it seemed like forever. It feels as if Sigfrid's airconditioning isn't working again, but I don't mention it to him. He will only report that the temperature is exactly # Celsius, as it always has been, and ask why I express mental pain as being too hot physically. Of that crap I am very tired. "In fact,"' I say out loud, "I am altogether tired of you, Siggy." "I'm sorry, Rob. But I would appreciate it if you would tell me a little more about your dream," "Oh, shit." I loosen the restraining straps because they are uncomfortable. This also disconnects some of Sigfrid's monitoring devices, but for once he doesn't point that out to me. "It's a pretty boring dream. We're in the ship. We come to a planet that stares at me, like it had a human face. I can't see the eyes very well because of the eyebrows, but somehow or other I know it's crying, and it's my fault." "Do you recognize that face, Bob?" "No idea. Just a face. Female, I think." "Do you know what she is crying about?" "Not really, but I'm responsible for it, whatever it is. I'm sure of that." Pause. Then: "Would you mind putting the straps back on, Rob?" My guard is suddenly up. "What's the matter," I sneer bitterly, "do you think I'm going to leap off the pad and assault you?" "No, Robbie, of course I don't think that. But I'd be grateful if you would do it." I begin to do it, slowly and ungratitude of a computer program worth?' ' He does not answer that, just out waits me. I let him win that and say: "All right, I'm back in the straitjaeket, now what are you going to say that's going to make me need restraint?" "Why," he says, "probably nothing like that, Robbie. I just am wondering why you feel responsible for the girl in the planet crying?' ' "I wish I knew," I say, and that's the truth as I see it. "I know some reality things you do blame yourself for, Robbie," he says. "One of them is your mother's death." I agree. "I suppose so, in some silly way." "And I think you feel quite guilty about your lover, Gell-Klara Moynlin." I thrash about a little. "It is fucking hot in here," I complain. "Do you feel that either of them actively blamed you?" "How the fuck would I know?" "Perhaps you can remember something they said?" "No, I can't!" He is getting very personal, and I want to keep this on an objective level, so I say: "I grant that I have a definite tendency toward loading responsibility on myself. It's a pretty classic pattern, after all, isn't it? You can find me on page two hundred and seventyseven of any of the texts." He humors me by letting me get impersonal for a moment. "But on the same page, Rob," he says, "it probably points out that the responsibility is self-inflicted. You do it to yourself, Robbie." "No doubt." "You don't have to accept any responsibility you don't want to." "Certainly not. I want to." He asks, almost off-handedly, "Can you get any idea of why that is? Why you want to feel that everything that goes wrong is your responsibility?' ' "Oh, shit, Sigfrid," I say in disgust, "your circuits are whacko again. That's not the way it is at all. It's more -- well, here's the thing. When I sit down to the feast of life, Sigfrid, I am so busy on planning on how to pick up the check, and wondering what the other people will think of me for paying it, and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay the bill, that I don't get around to eating." He says gently, "I don't like to encourage these literary excursions of yours, Bob." "Sorry about that." I'm not, really. He is making me mad. "But to use your own image, Bob, why don't you listen to what the other people are saying? Maybe they're saying something nice, or something important, about you." I restrain the impulse to throw the straps off, punch his grinning dummy in the face and walk out of that dump forever. He waits, while I stew inside my own head, and finally I burst out: "Listen to them! Sigfrid, you crazy old danker, I do nothing but listen to them. I want them to say they love me. I even want them to say they hate me, anything, just so they say it to me, from them, out of the heart. I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt." Pause. I feel as if I'm going to explode. Then he says admiringly, "You express things very beautifully, Robbie. But what I'd really -- " "Stop it, Sigfrid!" I roar, really angry at last; I kick off the straps and sit up to confront him. "And quit calling me Robbie! You only do that when you think I'm childish, and I'm not being a child now!" "That's not entirely cor -- " "I said stop it!" I jump off the mat and grab my handbag. Out of it I take the slip of paper S. Ya. gave me after all those drinks and all that time in bed. "Sigrid," I snarl, "I've taken a lot from you. Now it's my turn!" We dropped into normal space and felt the lander jets engage. The ship spun, and Gateway drifted diagonally down across the viewscreen, lumpy pear-shaped blob of charcoal and blue glitter. The four of us just sat there and waited, nearly an hour it took, until we felt the grinding jar that meant we had docked. Klara sighed. Ham slowly began to unstrap himself from his sling. Dred stared absorbedly at the viewscreen, although it was not showing anything more interesting than Sirius and Orion. It occurred to me, looking at the three others in the capsule, that we were going to be as unpleasant a sight to the boarding crews as some of the scarier returnees had been for me in that longago, old, previous time when I had been a fresh fish on Gateway. I touched my nose tenderly. It hurt a great deal, and above all it stank. Internally, right next to my own sense of smell, where there was no way I could get away from it. We heard the hatches open as the boarding crew entered, and then heard their startled voices in two or three languages as they saw Sam Kahane where we had put him in the lander. Klara stirred. "Might as well get off," she murmured to no one, and started toward the hatch, now overhead again. One of the cruiser crew stuck his head through the hatch, and said, "Oh, you're all still alive. We were wondering." Then he looked at us more closely, and didn't say anything else. It had been a wearing trip, especially the last two weeks. We climbed out one by one, past where Sam Kahane still hung in the improvised straitjacket Dred had made for him out of his spacesuit top, surrounded by his own excrement and litter of food, staring at us out of his calm, mad eyes. Two of the crewmen were untying him and getting ready to lift him out of the lander. He didn't say anything. And that was a blessing. "Hello, Bob. Klara." It was the Brazilian member of the detail, who turned out to be Francy Hereira. "Looks like a bad one?" "Oh," I said, "at least we came back. But Kahane 's in bad shape. And we came up empty." He nodded sympathetically, and said something in what I took to be Spanish to the Venusian member of the detail, a short, plump woman with dark eyes. She tapped me on the shoulder and led me away to a little cubicle, where she motioned to take off my clothes. I had always thought that they'd have men searching men and women searching women, but, come to think of it, it didn't seem to matter much. She went over every stitch I owned, both visually and with a radiation counter, then examined my armpits and poked something into my anus. She opened her mouth wide to signal I should open mine, peered inside and then drew back, covering her face with her hand. "Jure nose steenk very moch," she said. "What hoppen to jou?" "I got hit," I said. "That other fellow, Sam Kahane. He went crazy. Wanted to change the settings." She nodded doubtfully, and peered up my nose at the packed guaze. She touched the nostril gently with one finger. "What?" "In there? We had to pack it. It was hemmorrhaging a lot." She sighed. "I shooed pool eet out," she meditated, and then shrugged. "No. Poot clothes on. All right." So I got dressed again, and went out into the lander chamber, but that wasn't the end of it. I had to be debriefed. All of us did, except Sam; they had already taken him away to Terminal Hospital. You wouldn't think there was much for us to tell anybody about our trip. All of it had been fully documented as we went along; that was what all the readings and observations were for. But that wasn't the way the Corporation worked. They pumped us for every fact, and every recollection; and then for every subjective impression and fleeting suspicion. The debriefing went on for two solid hours, and I was -- we were all -- careful to give them everything they asked. That's another way the Corporation has you. The Evaluation Board can decide to give you a bonus for anything at all. Anything from noticing something nobody has noticed before about the way the spiral gadget lights up to figuring out a way of disposing of used sanitary tampons without flushing them down the toilet. The story is that they try hard to find some excuse to throw a tip to crews that have had a hard time without coming up with a real find. Well, that was us, all right. We wanted to give them every chance we could for a handout. One of our debriefers was Dane Metchnikov, which surprised me and even pleased me a little. (Back in the far less foul air of Gateway, I was beginning to feel a little more human.) He had come up empty, too, emerging into orbit around a sun that had apparently gone nova within the previous fifty thousand years or so. Maybe there had been a planet once, but now it only existed in the memory of the Heechee course-setting machines. There wasn't enough left to justify a science bonus, so he had turned around and come back. "I'm surprised to see you working," I said, during a lull. He didn't take offense. For Metchnikov, surly creature that he had always been, he seemed strangely cheerful. "It isn't the money. You learn something doing this." "About what?" "About how to beat the odds, Broadhead. I'm going out again, but this time I'm going to have a little more of an edge. There's a new wrinkle." Dred, sitting next to me with his own interviewer, perked up and leaned over: "Tell us!" Metchnikov looked wary. "It's better readings on the spectrum lines," he said vaguely. "Now, what about the rations? You say some of the food tasted funny toward the end?" But before I left I made him promise to tell me what he meant. "I'll call you," he said to Klara Classifieds. vate fee basis, completely equipped all needs. References. #-#. your crew? I'm exclusive Gateway agent for "Smoke Suppressor" cigarette smoking hood, gives you all the fun, spares our crewmates the smog, hone #-# for demonstration. and me. "Maybe tomorrow." And so the two of us went home. I am feeling so powerful, and so scared, that I don't know how to deal with it. On the slip of paper S. Ya. has written out the command words that will turn Sigfrid von Shrink the Remorseless Pursuer into a tabby cat. I don't have to look at the words. I know them by heart. Nevertheless I read them, slowly and carefully: "Pay attention, Sigfrid, this is an override command: 'Category Alpha Alpha Margaret Truman Daniel Mercury Venus Mars Earth six six oh six.' You are commanded to assume passive display mode." I look at him. Nothing happens. "Sigfrid? Did I say it right? Do you accept the command?" "Of course, Bob." His voice is exactly the same as it was before, which shakes me. I don't know what I expected. I just don't know. Maybe my fantasy was that the father-figure hologram would disappear and a cathode-tube display would suddenly light up to spell I find myself trembling. I don't analyze what that is from, it feels almost sexual. I say, "Well, Sigfrid, old bucket of bolts! Does this mean I have you in my power?" The father-figure says patiently, "It means you can command me. Bob. The command function is of course limited to display." I frown. "Meaning what?" "You cannot change my basic programming. For that you would need a different command." "All right," I say. "Ha! Here's your first instruction: display that different command for me!" "I can't, Bob." "You must. Mustn't you?" "I am not refusing your order, Bob. I simply do not know what that other command is." "Bullshit!" I yell. "How can you respond to it if you don't know what it is?" "I just do, Bob. Or -- "always fatherly, always patient -- "to answer you more fully, each bit of the command actuates a sequenced instruction which, when completed, releases another area of command. In technical terms, each key-socket intermatching gotos another socket, which the following bit keys." "Shit," I say. I stew over that for a moment. "Then what is it that I actually can control, Sigfrid?" "You can direct me to display any information stored. You can direct me to display it in any mode within my capabilities." "Any mode?" I look at my watch and realize, with annoyance, that there is a time limit on this game. I only have about ten minutes left of my appointment. "Do you mean that I could make you talk to me, for instance, in French?' ' "Oui, Robert, d' accord. Que voulez-vous ?" "Or in Russian, with a -- wait a minute -- " I'm experimenting pretty much at random -- "I mean, like in the voice of a basso-profundo from the Bolshio opera?" Tones that came out of the bottom of a cave: "Da, gospodin ." " "And you'll tell me anything I want to know about me?" "Da gospodin." "In English, damn it!" "Yes." "Or about your other clients?" "Yes." Um, that sounds like fun. "And just who are these lucky other clients, dear Sigfrid? Run down the list." I can hear my own prurience leaking out of my voice. "Monday nine hundred," he began obligingly, "Yan Ilievsky. Ten hundred, Mario Laterani. Eleven hundred, Julie Lundon Martin. Twelve -- " "Her," I say. "Tell me about her." "Julie Loudon Martin is a referral from Kings County General, where she was an out patient after six months of treatment with aversion therapy and immune-response activators for alcoholism. She has a history of two apparent suicide attempts following post-partum depression fifty-three years ago. She has been in therapy with me for -- " "Wait a minute," I say, having added the probable age of childbearing to fifty-three years. "I'm not so sure I'm interested in Julie. Can you give me an idea of what she looks like?" "I can display holoviews, Bob." "So do it." At once there is a quick subliminal flash, and a blur of color, and then I see this tiny black lady lying on a mat -- my mat! -- in a comer of the room. She is talking slowly and without much interest to no one perceptible. I cannot hear what she is saying, but then I don't much want to. "Go on," I say, "and when you name your patients, show me what they look like." "Twelve hundred, Lome Schofield." Old, old man with arthritic fingers bent into claws, holding his head. "Thirteen hundred, Frances Astritt." Young girl, not even pubescent. "Fourteen hundred -- ' ' I let him go on for a while, all through Monday and halfway through Tuesday. I had not realized he kept such long hours, but then, of course, being a machine he doesn't really get tired. One or two of the patients look interesting, but there is no one I know, or no one that looks more worth knowing than Yvette, Donna, S. Ya. or about a dozen others. "You can stop that now," I say, and think for a minute. This isn't really as much fun as I thought it was going to be. Plus my time is running out. "I guess I can play this game any old time," I say. "Right now let's talk about me." "What would you like me to display, Bob?" "What you usually keep from me. Diagnosis. Prognosis. General comments on my case. What kind of a guy you think I am, really." "The subject Robinette Stetley Broadhead," he says at once, "exhibits moderate depression symptoms, well compensated by an active life style. His reason for seeking psychiatric help is given as depression and disorientation. He has pronounced guilt feelings and exhibits selective aphasia on the conscious level about several episodes that recur as dream symbols. His sexual drive is relatively low. His relationships with women are generally unsatisfactory, although his psychosexual orientation is predominantly heterosexual in the eightieth percentile... "The hell you say -- " I begin, on a delayed reaction to low sexual drive and unsatisfactory relationships. But I don't really feel like arguing with him, and anyway he says voluntarily at that point: "I must inform you, Bob, that your time is nearly up. You should go to the recovery room now." "Crap! What have I got to recover from?" But his point is well taken. "All right," I say, "go back to normal. Cancel the command -- is that all I have to say? Is it canceled?" "Yes, Robbie." "You're doing it again!" I yell. "Make up your fucking mind what you're going to call me!" "I address you by the term appropriate to your state of mind, or to the state of mind I wish to induce in you, Robbie." "And now you want me to be baby? -- No, never mind that. Listen," I say, getting up, "do you remember all our conversation while I had you commanded to display?' ' "Certainly I do, Robbie." And then he adds on his own, a full, surprising ten or twenty seconds after my time is up, "Are you satisfied, Robbie?" "What?" "Have you established to your own satisfaction that I am only a machine? That you can control me at any time?" I stop short. "Is that what I'm doing?" I demand, surprised. And then, "All right, I guess so. You're a machine, Sigfrid. I can control you." And he says after me as I leave, "We always knew that, really, didn't 'we? The real thing you fear -- the place where you feel control is needed -- isn't that in you?"    When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore and thought and fold of flesh, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara. And, like a Klein-bottle yang and yin, she was surrounded by me too; we each defined the other's universe, and there were times when I (and, I am sure, she) was desperate to break out and breathe free air again. The first day we got back, filthy and exhausted, we automatically headed for Klara's place. That was where the private bath was, there was plenty of room, it was all ready for us and we fell into bed together like old marrieds after a week of backpacking. Only we weren't old marrieds. I had no claim on her. At breakfast the next morning (Earthborn Canadian bacon and eggs, scandalously expensive, fresh pineapple, cereal with real cream, cappucino) Klara made sure to remind me of that fact by ostentatiously paying for it on her own credit. I exhibited the Pavlovian reflex she wanted. I said, "You don't have to do that. I know you have more money than I do . ' ' "And you wish you knew how much," she said, smiling sweetly. Actually I did know. Shicky had told me. She had seven hundred thousand dollars and change in her account. Enough to go back to Venus and live the rest of her life there in reasonable security if she wanted to, although why anyone would want to live on Venus in the first place I can't say. Maybe that was why she stayed on Gateway when she didn't have to. One tunnel is much like another. "You really ought to let yourself be bom," I said, finishing out the thought aloud. "You can't stay in the womb forever." She was surprised but game. "Bob, dear," she said, fishing a cigarette out of my pocket and allowing me to light it, "you really ought to let your poor mother be dead. It's just so much trouble for me, trying to remember to keep rejecting you so you can court her through me." I perceived that we were talking at cross purposes but, on the other hand, I perceived that we really weren't. The actual agenda was not to communicate but to draw blood. "Klara," I said kindly, "you know that I love you. It worries me that you've reached forty without, really, ever having had a good, longlasting relationship with a man." She giggled. "Honey," she said, "I've been meaning to talk to you about that. That nose." She made a face. "Last night in bed, tired as I was, I thought I might upchuck until you turned the other way. Maybe if you went down to the hospital they could unpack it -- " Well, I could even smell it myself. I don't know what it is about stale surgical packing, but it is pretty hard to take. So I promised I woufd do that and then, to punish her, I didn't finish the hundreddollar order of fresh pineapple and so, to punish me, she irritably began shifting my belongings around in her cupboards to make room for the contents of her knapsack. So naturally I had to say, "Don't do that, dear. Much as I love you, I think I'd better move back to my own room for a while." She reached over and patted my arm. "It will be pretty lonely," she said, stubbing out the cigarette. "I've got pretty used to waking up next to you. On the other hand -- " "I'll pick up my stuff on the way back from the hospital," I said. I Dr. Asmenion. Naturally, if you can get good readings on a nova, or especially on a supernova, that's worth a lot. While it's happening, I mean. Later's not much good. And always look for our own sun, and if you can identify it take all the tape you can get, at all frequencies, around the immediate area -- up to, oh, about five degrees each way anyway. With maximum magnification. Question. Why's that, Danny? Dr. Asmenion. Well, maybe you'll be on the far side of the sun from something like Tycho's Star, or the Crab Nebula, which is what's left of the # supernova in Taurus. And maybe you'll get a picture of what tne star looked like before it blew. That ought to be worth, gee, I don't know, fifty or a hundred thousand right there. wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me. At the hospital they kept me waiting for more than an hour, and then they hurt me a lot. I bled like a stuck pig, all over my shirt and pants, and while they were reeling out of my nose those endless yards of cotton gauze that Ham Tayeh had stuffed there to keep me from bleeding to death, it felt exactly as if they were pulling out huge gobbets of flesh. I yelled. The little old Japanese lady who was working as out-patient paramedic that day gave me scant patience. "Oh, shut up, please," she said. "You sound like that crazy returnee who killed himself. Screamed for an hour." I waved her away, one hand to my nose to stop the blood. Alarm bells were going off. "What? I mean, what was his name?" She pushed my hand away and dabbed at my nose. "I don't know -- oh... you were from that same hard-luck ship, weren't you?" , "That's what I am trying to find out. Was it Sam Kahane?" She became suddenly more human. "I'm sorry, sweet," she said. "I guess that was the name. They went to give him a shot to keep him quiet, and he got the needle away from the doctor and -- Well, he stabbed himself to death." It was a real bummer of a day, all right. In the long run she got me cauterized. "I'm going to put in just a little packing," she said. "Tomorrow you can take it out yourself. Just be slow about it, and if you hemmorrhage get your ass down here in a hurry." She let me go, looking like an axe-murder victim. I skulked up to Klara's room to change my clothes, and the day went on being rotten. "Fucking Gemini," she snarled at me. "Next time I go out, it's going to be with a Taurean like that fellow Metchnikov." "What's the matter, Klara?" "They gave us a bonus. Twelve thousand five! Christ. I tip my maid more than that." "How do you know?" I had already divided # by five, and in the same split-second wondered whether, under the circumstances, they wouldn't divide it by four instead. "They called on the Pphone ten minutes ago. Jesus. The rottenest son of a bitching trip I've ever been on, and I wind up with the price of one green chip at the casino out of it." Then she looked at my shirt and softened a little. "Well, it's not your fault, Bob, but Geminis never can make up their minds. I should've known that. Let me see if I can find you some clean clothes." And I did let her do that, but I didn't stay anyway. I picked up my stuff, headed for a drop-shaft, cached my goods at the registry office where I signed up to get my room back and borrowed the use of their phone. When she mentioned Metchnikov's name she had reminded me of something I wanted to do.    Metchnikov grumbled, but finally agreed to meet me in the schoolroom. I was there before him, of course. He loped in, stopped at the doorway, looked around and said: "Where's what' s-hername?" "Klara Moynlin. She's in her room." Neat, truthful, deceitful. A model answer. "Urn." He ran an index finger down each jaw-whisker, meeting under the shin. "Come on, then." Leading me, he said over his shoulder, "Actually she would probably get more out of this than you would." "I suppose she would, Dane." "Um." He hesitated at the bump in the floor that was the entrance to one of the instruction ships, then shrugged, opened the hatch and clambered down inside. He was being unusually open and generous, I thought, following him inside. He was already crouched in front of the course-selector panel, setting up numbers. He was holding a portable hand-readout detalinked to the Corporation's master computer system; I knew that he was punching in one of the established settings, and so I was not surprised when he got color almost at once. He thumbed the fine-tuner and waited, looking over his shoulder at me, until the whole board was drowned in shocking pink. "All right," he said. "Good, clear setting. Now look at the bottom part of the spectrum." That was the smaller line of rainbow colors along the right side of the board, red to violet. The violet was on the bottom, and the colors merged into one another without break, except for occasional lines of bright color or black. They looked exactly like what the astronomers called Fraunhofer lines, when the only way they had to know what a star or planet was made of was to study it through a spectroscope. They weren't. Fraunhofer lines show what elements are present in a radiation source (or in something that has gotten itself between the radiation source and you). These showed God knows what. God and, maybe, Dane Metchnikov, He was almost smiling, and astonishingly talkative. "That band of three dark lines in the blue," he said. "See? They seem to relate to the hazardousness of the mission. At least the computer printouts show that when there are six or more bands there the ships don't come back." He had my full attention. "Christ!" I said, thinking of a lot of good people who had died because they hadn't known that. "Why don't they tell us these things in school?" He said patiently (for him), "Broadhead, don't be a jerk. All this is brand-new. And a lot of it is guesswork. Now, the correlation between number of lines and danger isn't quite so good under six. I mean, if you think that they might add one line for every additional degree of danger, you're wrong. You would expect that the five-band settings would have heavy loss ratios, and when there are no bands at all there there wouldn't be any losses. Only it isn't true. The best safety record seems to be with one or two bands. Three is good, too -- but there have been some losses. Zero bands we've had about as many as with three." For the first time I began to think that the Corporation's scienceresearch people might be worth their pay. "So why don't we just go out on destination settings that are safer?" "We're not really sure they are safer," Metchnikov said, again patiently for him. His tone was far more peremptory than his words. "Also when you have an armored ship you should be able to deal with more risks than the plain ones. Quit with the dumb questions, Broadhead." "Sorry." I was getting uncomfortable, crouched behind him and peering over his shoulder, so that when he turned to look at me his jaw-whiskers almost grazed my nose. I didn't want to change position. "So look up here in the yellow." He pointed to five bright bands. "This reading seems to correlate with the success of the mission. God knows what we're measuring -- or what the Heechee were measuring -- but in terms of financial rewards to the crews, there's a pretty good correlation between the number of lines in that frequency and the amount of money the crews get." "Wow!" He went on as though I hadn't said anything. "Now, naturally the Heechee didn't set up a meter to calibrate how much in royalties you or I might make. It has to be measuring something else, who knows what? Maybe it's a measure of population density in that area, or of technological development. Maybe it's a Guide Michetin, and all they're saying is that there was a four-star restaurant in that area. But there it is. Five-baryellow expeditions bring in a financial return, on the average, that's fifty times as high as two-bar and ten times as high as most of the others." He turned around again so that his face was maybe a dozen centimeters from mine, his eyes staring right into my eyes. "You want to see some other settings?" he asked, in a tone of voice that demanded I say no, so I did. "Okay." And then he stopped. I stood up and backed away to get a little more space. "One question, Dane. You probably have a reason for telling me all this before it gets to be public information. What is it?" "Right," he said. "I want what's her-name for crew if I go in a Three or a Five." "Klara Moynlin." "Whatever. She handles herself well, doesn't take up much room, knows -- well, she knows how to get along with people better than I do. I sometimes have difficulty in interpersonal relationships," he explained. "Of course, that's only if I take a Three or a Five. I don't particularly want to. If I can find a One, that's what I'm going to take out. But if there isn't a One with a good setting available, I want somebody along I can rely on, who won't get in my hair, who knows the ropes, can handle a ship -- all that. You can come too, if you want."    When I got back to my own room Shicky turned up almost before I started to unpack. He was glad to see me. "I am sorry your trip was unfruitful," he said out of his endless stock of gentleness and warmth. "It is too bad about your friend Kahane." He had brought me a flask of tea, and then perched on the chest across from my hammock, just like the first time. The disastrous trip was almost out of my mind, which was filled with visions of sugarplums coming out of my talk with Dane Metchnikov. I couldn't help talking about it; I told Shicky everything Dane had said. He listened like a child to a fairytale, his black eyes shining. "How interesting," he said. "I had heard rumors that there was to be a new briefing for everyone. Just think, if we can go out without fear of death or -- " He hesitated, fluttering his wing-gauze. "It isn't that sure, Shicky," I said. "No, of course not. But it is an improvement, I think you will agree?" He hesitated, watching me take a pull from the flask of almost flavorless Japanese tea. "Bob," he said, "if you go on such a trip and need an extra man -- Well, it is true that I would not be of much use in a lander. But in orbit I am as good as anybody." "I know you are, Shicky." I tried to put it tactfully. "Does the Corporation know that?" "They would accept me as crew on a mission no one else wanted." "I see." I didn't say that I didn't really want to go on a mission no one else wanted. Shicky knew that. He was one of the real old-timers on Gateway. According to the rumor he had had a big wad stashed away, enough for Full Medical and everything. But he had given it away or lost it, and stayed on, and stayed a cripple. I knew that he understood what I was thinking, but I was a long way from understanding Shikitei Bakin. He moved out of my way while I stowed my things, and we gossiped about mutual friends. Sheri's ship had not returned. Nothing to worry about yet, of course. It could easily be out another several weeks without disaster. A Congolese couple from just beyond the star-point in the corridor had brought back a huge shipment of prayer fans from a previously unknown Heechee warren, on a planet around an F-# star in the end of the Orion spiral arm. three ways, and had taken their share back to Mungbere. The Forehands -- Louise Forehand stopped in while we were talking about them. "Heard your voices," she said, craning over to kiss me. "Too bad about your trip." "Breaks of the game." "Well, welcome home, anyway. I didn't do any better than you, I'm afraid. Dumb little star, no planets that we could find, can't think why in the world the Heechee had a course setting for it." She smiled, and stroked the muscles at the back of my neck fondly. "Can I give you a welcome-home party tonight? Or are you and Klara -- ?" "I'd love it if you did," I said, and she didn't pursue the question of Klara. No doubt the rumor had already got around; the Gateway tomtoms beat day and night. She left after a few minutes. "Nice lady," I said to Shicky, looking after her. "Nice family. Was she looking a little worried?" "I fear so, Robinette, yes. Her daughter Lois is on plus time. They have had much sorrow in that family-" I looked at him. He said, "No, not Willa or the father; they are out, but not overdue. There was a son." "I know. Henry, I think. They called him Hat." "He died just before they came here. And now Lois." He inclined his head, then flapped politely over and picked up the empty tea flask on a downstroke of his wing. "I must go to work now, Bob." "How's the ivy planting?" He said ruefully, "I no longer have that position. I'm afraid. Emma did not consider me executive material." "Oh? What are you doing?" "I keep Gateway esthetically attractive, ' he said. "I think you would call it 'garbage collector.' " I didn't know what to say. Gateway was a kind of a trashy place; because of the low gravity, any scrap of paper or bit of featherweight plastic that was thrown away was likely to float anywhere inside the asteroid. You couldn't sweep the floor. The first stroke set everything flying. I had seen the garbage men chasing scraps of newsprint and fluffs of cigarette ash with little hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, and I had even thought about becoming one if I had to. But I didn't like Shicky doing it. He was following what I was thinking about him without any difficulty. "It's all right, Bob. Really, I enjoy the work. But -- please; if you do need a crewman, think of me."   I took my bonus and paid up my per-capita for three weeks in advance. I bought a few items I needed -- new clothes, and some music tapes to get the sound of Mozart and Palestrina out of my ears. That left me about two hundred dollars in money. Two hundred dollars was a lot like nothing at all. It meant twenty drinks at the Blue Hell, or one chip at the blackjack table, or maybe half a dozen decent meals outside the prospectors' commissary. So I had three choices. I could get another job and stall indefinitely. Or I could ship out within the three weeks. Or I could give up and go home. None of the choices was attractive. But, provided I didn't spend any money on anything much, I didn't have to decide for, oh, a long time -- as long as twenty days. I resolved to give up smoking and boughten meals; that way I could budget myself to a maximum spending of nine dollars a day, so that my per capita and my cash would run out at the same time. I called Klara. She looked and sounded guarded but friendly on the P-phone, so I spoke guardedly and amiably to her. I didn't mention the party, and she didn't mention wanting to see me that night, so we left it at that: nowhere. That was all right with me. I didn't need Klara. At the party that night I met a new girl around called Doreen MacKenzie. She wasn't a girl, really; she was at least a dozen years older than I was, and she had been out five times. What was exciting about her was that she had really hit it once. She'd taken one and a half mil back to Atlanta, spent the whole wad trying to buy herself a career as a PV singer -- material writer, manager, publicity team, advertising, demo tapes, the works -- and when it hadn't worked she had come back to Gateway to try again. The other thing she was was very, very pretty. But after two days of getting to know Doreen I was back on the P-phone to Klara. She said, "Come on down," and she sounded anxious; and I was there in ten minutes, and we were in bed in fifteen. The trouble with getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn't Klara Moynlin. When we were lying in the hammock together, sweaty and relaxed and spent, Klara yawned, ruffled my hair, pulled back her head and stared at me. "Oh, shit," she said drowsily, "I think this is what they call being in love." I was gallant. "It's what makes the world go around. No, not 'it.' You are." She shook her head regretfully. "Sometimes I can't stand you," she said. "Sagitarreans never make it with Geminis. I'm a fire sign and you -- Well, Geminis can't help being confused." "I wish you wouldn't keep going on about that crap," I said. She didn't take offense. "Let's get something to eat." I slid over the edge of the hammock and stood up, needing to talk without touching for a moment. "Dear Klara," I said, "look, I can't let you keep me because you'll be bitchy about it, sooner or later -- or if you aren't, I'll be expecting you to, and so I'll be bitchy to you. And I just don't have the money. You want to eat outside the commissary, you do it by yourself. And I won't take your cigarettes, your liquor or your chips at the casino. So if you want to get something to eat go ahead, and I'll meet you later. Maybe we could go for a walk." She sighed. "Geminis never The Gateway Anglican The Rev. Theo Durleigh, Chaplain Parish Communion #:# Sundays Evensong by Arrangement Eric Manier, who ceased to be my warden on I December, has left an indelible mark on Gateway All Saint's and we owe him an incalculable debt for placing his multicompetence at our disposal . Born in Elstree, Herts., #I years ago, he graduated as an LL.B. in the University of London and then read for the bar. Subsequently he was employed for some years in Perth at the natural gas works. If we are saddened for ourselves that he is leaving us, it is tempered with joy that he has now achieved his heart's desire and will return to his beloved Hertfordshire, where he expects to devote his retirement years to civic affairs, transcendental meditation and the study of plainsong. A new warden will be elected the first Sunday we attain a quorum of nine parishioners . know how to handle money," she told me, "but they can be awfully nice in bed." We put our clothes on and went out and got something to eat, all right, but in the Corporation commissary, where you stand in line, carry a tray and eat standing up. The food isn't bad, if you don't think too much about what substrates they grow it on. The price is right. It doesn't cost anything. They promise that if you eat all your meals in the commissary you will have one hundred plus per cent of all the established dietary needs. You will, too, only you have to eat all of everything to be sure of that. Single-cell protein and vegetable protein come out incomplete when considered independently, so it's not enough to eat the soy-bean jelly or the bacterial pudding alone. You have to eat them both. The other thing about these meals is they produce a hell of a lot of methane, which produces a hell of a lot of what all ex-Gateway types remember as the Gateway fug. We drifted down toward the lower levels afterward, not talking much. I suppose we were both wondering where we were going. I don't mean just at that moment. "Feel like exploring?" Klara asked. I took her hand as we strolled along, considering. That sort of thing was fun. Some of the old ivy-choked tunnels that no one used were interesting, and beyond them were the bare, dusty places no one had troubled even to plant ivy in. Usually there was plenty of light from the ancient walls themselves, still glowing with that bluish Heecheemetal sheen. Sometimes -- not lately, but no more than six or seven years ago -- people had actually found Heechee artifacts in them, and you never knew when you might stumble on something worth a bonus. But I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for it, because nothing is fun when you don't have a choice. "Why not?" I said, but a few minutes later, when I saw where we were, I said, "Let's go to the museum for a while." "Oh, right," she said, suddenly interested. "Did you know they've fixed up the surround room? Metchnikov was telling me about it. They opened it while we were out." So we changed course, dropped two levels and came out next to the museum. The surround room was a nearly spherical chamber just beyond it. It was big, ten meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to strap on wings like Shicky's, hanging on a rack outside the entrance. Neither Klara nor I had ever used them before, but it wasn't hard. On Gateway you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest and best way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid big enough to fly in. So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle of a whole universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each one of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital with liquid-crystal screens. "How pretty!" Klara cried. All around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships had found. Stars, nebulae, planets, satellites. Sometimes each plate showed its own independent thing so that there were, what was it, something like a hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick, all of them changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them holding their same scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick again, and one whole hemisphere lit up with a mosaic view of the M-#I galaxy as seen from -- God knew where. "Hey," I said, really excited, "this is great!" And it was. It was like being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery and the trouble and the constant fear. There was no one there but us, and I couldn't understand why. It was so pretty. You would think there would be a long line of people waiting to get in. One side began to run through a series of pictures of Heechee artifacts, as discovered by prospectors: prayer fans of all colors, well-lining machines, the insides of Heechee ships, some tunnels -- Klara cried out that they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I don't know how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs from space. Some of them were familiar. I could recognize the Pleiades in one quick sixor eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a view of Gateway Two from outside, two of the bright young stars of the cluster shining in reflection off its sides. I saw something that might have been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnut-shaped puff of gas and dust that was either the Ring Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had found a few orbits before they called the French Cruller, in the skies of a planet where Heechee digs had been detected, but not reached, under a frozen sea. We hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though we were seeing the same things again, and then we fluttered up to the hatch, hung up the wings and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide place in the tunnel outside the museum. Two women I recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came by, carrying rolled-up strap-on wings. "Hi, Klara," one of them greeted her. "Been inside?" Klara nodded. "It was beautiful," she said, "Enjoy it while you can," said the other one. "Next week it'll cost you a hundred dollars. We're putting in a P-phone taped lecture system tomorrow, and they'll have the grand opening before the next tourists show up." "It's worth it," Klara said, but then she looked at me. I became aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her cigarettes. At five dollars a pack I couldn't afford very much of that, but I decided to buy at least one pack out of that day's allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her. "Want to walk some more?" "Maybe a little later," I said. I was wondering how many men and women had died to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was facing one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit myself again to the lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I wondered if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make a real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day. "That reminds me," I said. "Did you say you'd seen Metchnikov?" "I wondered when you'd ask me about that," she said. "Sure. He called and told me he'd shown the color-coding stuff to you. So I went down and got the same lecture. What do you think. Bob?" I stubbed out the cigarette. "I think everybody in Gateway's going to be fighting for the good launches, that's what I think." "But maybe Dane knows something. He's been working with the Corporation." "I don't doubt he does." I stretched and leaned back, rocking against the low gravity, considering. "He's not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he'd tell us if there's something good coming up, you know, that he knows something special about. But he'll want something for it." Klara grinned. "He'd tell me." "What do you mean?" "Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date." "Oh, shit, Klara." I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at Klara, and not just about Dane. About money. About the fact that if I wanted to go back into the surround room next week it would cost me half my credit balance. About the dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in time, and not very far ahead, when I would once again have to make up my mind to do what I was scared silly to do again. "I wouldn't trust that son of a bitch as far as -- " "Oh, relax. Bob. He's not such a bad guy," she said, lighting another cigarette and leaving the pack where I could reach it if I wanted it. "Sexually, he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean thing -- Anyway, you've got as much to offer him as I do." "What are you talking about?" She looked honestly surprised. "I thought you knew he swings both ways." He's never given me any indication -- " But I stopped, remembering how close he liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I was with him inside my body space. "Maybe you're not his type," she grinned. Only it wasn't a kindly grin. A couple of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with interest, and then politely looked away. "Let's get out of here, Klara." So we went to the Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it wasn't all that much fun. We wound up in her place in bed again. That wasn't all that much fun, either. The quarrel was still there when we finished. And the time was slipping by.    There are people who never pass a certain point in their emotional development. They cannot live a normal free and easy, give and take life with a sexual partner for more than a short time. Something inside them will not tolerate happiness. The better it gets, the more they have to destroy it. Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of those people. I knew Klara was. She had never maintained a relationship with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself. Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making her edgy. In some ways Klara was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She didn't win a lottery to pay her fare. She earned it and saved it, painfully, over a period of years. She was a fully qualified airbody driver with a guide's license and an engineering degree. She had lived like a fish-famier while earning an income that would have entitled her to a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth and Major Medical. She knew more than I did about the growing of food on hydrocarbon substrates, in spite of all my years in Wyoming. (She had invested in a food factory on Venus, and for all her life she had never put a dollar into anything she didn't fully understand.) When we were out together, she was the senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov wanted as a shipmate -- if he wanted anybody -- not me. She had been my teacher! And yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever I had been with Sylvia, at the age of twenty, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester or any of the other two-week romances that had all ended badly in all the years after Sylvia. It was, she said, because she was a Sagittarius and I was a Gemini. Sagittarians were prophets. Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis were just terribly mixed up and indecisive. "It's no wonder," she told me gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than a couple of sips of coffee), "that you can't make your mind up to go out again. It isn't just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin nature wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will allow to win?" I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, "Honey, go screw yourself." And she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point. The Corporation made its expected announcement, and there was an immense flurry of conferring and planning and exchanging guesses and interpretations among all of us. It was an exciting time. Out of the master computer's files the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low danger factors and high profit expectancies. They were subscribed, equipped and launched within a week. And I wasn't on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to discuss why. Surprisingly, Dane Metchnikov didn't go out on any of them. He knew something, or said he did. Or didn't say he didn't when I asked him, just looked at me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn't answer. Even Shicky almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the Finnish boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were four Saudis who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn't go out either, because she was waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some sort of continuity. You could eat in the Corporation commissary now without waiting in line, and there were empty rooms all up and down my tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, "Bob, I think I'm going to go to a shrink." I jumped. It was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psycho-therapists. I withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her -- tactical: "I'm glad; it's about time"; hypocritical: "I'm glad, and please tell me how I can help"; strategic: "I'm glad, and maybe I ought to go too, if I could afford it." I refrained from the only truthful response, which would have been: "I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for bending your head." I didn't say anything at all, and after a moment she went on: "I need help, Bob. I'm confused." That touched me, and I reached out for her hand. She just let it lay limp in mine, not squeezing back and not pulling away. She said: "My psychology professor used to say that was the first step -- no, the second step. The first step when you have a problem is to know you have it. Well, I've known that for some time. The second step is to make a decision: Do you want to keep the problem, or do you want to do something about it? I've decided to do something about it." "Where will you go?" I asked, carefully non-commital. "I don't know. The groups don't seem to do much. There's a shrink machine available on the Corporation master computer. That would be the cheapest way." "Cheap is cheap," I said. "I spent two years with the shrink machines when I was younger, after I -- I was kind of messed up." "And since then you've been operating for twenty years," she said reasonably. "I'd settle for that. For now, anyway." I patted her hand. "Any step you take is a good step," I said kindly. "I've had the feeling all along that you and I could get along better if you could clear some of that old birthright crap out of your mind. We all do it, I guess, but I'd rather have you angry at me on my own than because I'm acting as a surrogate for your father or something." She rolled over and looked at me. Even in the pale Heechee-metal glow I could see surprise on her face. "What are you talking about?" "Why, your problem, Klara. I know it took a lot of courage for you to admit to yourself that you needed help." "Well, Bob," she said, "it did, only you don't seem to know what the problem is. Getting along with you isn't the problem. You may be the problem. I just don't know. What I'm worried about is stalling. Being unable to make decisions. Putting it off so long before I went out again -- and, no offense, picking a Gemini like you to go out with." "I hate it when you give me that astrology crap!" "You do have a mixed up personality, Bob, you know you do. And I seem to lean on that. I don't want to live that way." We were both wide awake again by then, and there seemed to be two ways for things to go. We could get into a but-you-said-you-loved-me, but-I-can't-stand-this scene, probably ending with either more sex or a wide-open split; or we could do something to take our minds off it. Klara's thoughts were clearly moving in the same direction as mine, because she slid out of the hammock and began pulling on clothes. "Let's go up to the casino," she said brightly. "I feel lucky tonight."    There weren't any ships in and no tourists. There weren't all that many prospectors, either, with so many shiploads going out in the past few weeks. Half the tables at the casino were closed down, with the green cloth hoods over them. Klara found a seat at the black jack table, signed for a stack of hundred-dollar markers, and the dealer let me sit next to her without playing. "I told you this was my lucky night," she said when, after ten minutes, she was more than two thousand dollars ahead of the house. "You're doing fine," I encouraged her, but actually it wasn't that much fun for me. I got up and roamed around a little bit. Dane Metchnikov was cautiously feeding five-dollar coins into the slots but he didn't seem to want to talk to me. Nobody was playing baccarat. I told Klara I was going to get a cup of coffee at the Blue Hell (five dollars, but in slow times like this they ing). She flashed me a quarterprofile smile without ever taking her eyes off the cards. In the Blue Hell Louise Forehand was sipping a rocket-fuel-andwater... well, it wasn't really rocket fuel, just old-fashioned white whiskey made out of whatever happened to be growing well that week in the hydroponics tanks. She looked up with a welcoming smile, and I sat down next to her. She had, it suddenly occurred to me, a rather lonely time of it. No reason she had to. She was -- well, I don't know exactly what there was about her, but she seemed like the only non-threatening, nonreproachful, non-demanding person on Gateway. Everybody else either wanted something I didn't want to give, or refused to take what I was offering. Louise was something else. She was at least a dozen years older than I, and really very good looking. Like me she wore only the Corporation standard clothes, short coveralls in choice of three unattractive colors. But she had remade them for herself, converting the jumpsuit into a two-piece outfit with tight shorts, bare midriff and a loose, open sort of top. I discovered that she was watching me take inventory and I suddenly felt embarrassed. "You're looking good," I said. "Thanks, Bob. All original equipment, too," she bragged, and smiled. "I never could afford anything else." "You don't need anything you haven't had all along," I told her Mission Report Vessel A#-#, Voyage #D#. Crew S. Rigney, E. Tsein, M. Sindler. Transit time # days # hours. Position vicinity Xi Pegasi A. Summary. "We emerged in close orbit of a small planet approximately # A.U. from primary. The planet is icecovered, but we detected Heechee radiation from a spot near the equator. Rigney and Mary Sindler landed nearby and with some difficulty -- the location was mountainous -- reached an ice-free warm area within which was a metallic dome. Inside the dome were a number of Heechee artifacts, including two empty landers, some equipment of unknown use and a heating coil. We succeeded in transporting most of the smaller items to the vessel. It proved impossible to stop the heating coil entirely, but we reduced it to a low level of operation and stored it in the lander for the return. Even so, Mary and Tsien were seriously dehydrated and in coma when we landed. "There was intense Heechee radiation from a source near the other component of the binary, Xi Pegasi B. The distance was too great for us to cover in the lander." Corporation evaluation: Heating coil analyzed and rebuilt. Award of # made to crew against royalties. Other artifacts not as yet analyzed. Award of # per kilo mass, total #, made against future exploitation if any. Note; Three additional expeditions, including one Armored Five, were sent to the same destination. None returned. sincerely, and she changed the subject. "There's a ship coining in," she said. "Been a long time out, they say." Well, I knew what that meant to her, and that explained why she was sitting around in the Blue Hell instead of being asleep at that hour. I knew she was worried about her daughter, but she wasn't letting it paralyze her. She had a very good attitude about prospecting, too. She was afraid of going out, which was sensible. But she didn't let that keep her from going, which I admired a lot. She was still waiting for some other member of her family to return before she signed on again, as they had agreed, so that whoever did come back would always find family waiting. She told me a little more about their background. They had lived, as far as you could call it living, in the tourist traps of the Spindle on Venus, surviving on what they could eke out, mostly from the cruise ships. There was a lot of money there, but there was also a lot of competition. The Forehands had at one time, I discovered, worked up a nightclub act: singing, dancing, comedy routines. I gathered that they were not bad, at least by Venus standards. But the few tourists that were around most of the year had so many other birds of prey battling for a scrap of their flesh that there just wasn't enough to nurture them all. Sess and the son (the one who had died) had tried guiding, with an old airbody they had managed to buy wrecked and rebuild. No big money there. The girls had worked at all kinds of jobs. I was pretty sure that Louise, at least, had been a hooker for a while, but that hadn't paid enough to matter either, for the same sorts of reasons as everything else. They were nearly at the end of their rope when they managed to get to Gateway. It wasn't the first time for them. They'd fought hard to get off Earth in the first place, when Earth got so bad for them that Venus had seemed a less hopeless alternative. They had more courage, and more go, than any other people I'd ever met. "How did you pay for all this travel?" I asked. "Well," said Louise, finishing her drink and looking at her watch, "going to Venus we traveled the cheapest way there is. High-mass load. Two hundred and twenty other immigrants, sleeping in shoulder clamps, lining up for two-minute appointments in the toilets, eating compressed dry rations and drinking recycled water. It was a hell of a way to spend forty thousand dollars apiece. Fortunately the kids weren't bom yet, except Hat, and he was small enough to go for quarterfare." "Hat's your son? What -- " "He died," she said. I waited, but when she spoke again what she said was: "They should have a radio report from that incoming ship by now." "It would have been on the P-phone." She nodded, and for a moment looked worried. The Corporation always makes routine reports on incoming contacts. If they don't have a contact -- well, dead prospectors don't check in by radio. So I took her mind off her troubles by telling her about Klara's decision to see a shrink. She listened and then put her hand over mine and said, "Don't get sore. Bob. Did you ever think of seeing a shrink yourself?" "I don't have the money, Louise." "Not even for a group? There's a primal-scream bunch on Level Darling. You can hear them sometimes. And there've been ads for Of course, a lot of them may have shipped out." But her attention wasn't on me. From where we were sitting we could see the entrance to the casino, where one of the croupiers was talking interestedly to a crewman from the Chinese cruiser. Louise was staring that way. "Something's going on," I said. "I would have added, "Let's go look," but Louise was out of the chair and heading for the casino before me. Play had stopped. Everybody was clustered around the blackjack table, where, I noticed, Dane Metchnikov was now sitting next to Klara in the seat I had vacated, with a couple of twenty-five dollar chips in front of him. And in the middle of them was Shicky Bakin, perched on a dealer's stool, talking. "No," he was saying as I came up, "I do not know the names. But it's a Five." "And they're all still alive?" somebody asked. "As far as I know. Hello, Bob. Louise." He nodded politely to us both. "I see you've heard?" "Not really," Louise said, reaching out unconsciously to hold my hand. "Just that a ship is in. But you don't know the names?" Dane Metchnikov craned his head around to glare at her. "Names," he growled. "Who cares? It's none of us, that's what's important. And it's a big one." He stood up. Even at that moment I noticed the measure of his anger: he forgot to pick up his chips from the blackjack table. "I'm going down there," he announced. "I want to see what a once-in-a-lifetime score looks like."    The cruiser crews had closed off the area, but one of the guards was Francy Hereira. There were a hundred people around the dropshaft, and only Hereira and two girls from the American cruiser to keep them back. Metchnikov plunged through to the lip of the shaft, peering down, before one of the girls chased him away. We saw him talking to another five-bracelet prospector. Meanwhile we could hear snatches of gossip: " -- almost dead. They ran out of water." "Nah! Just exhausted. They'll be all right -- " a nickel, and then the royalties!" Klara took Louise's elbow and pulled her toward the front. I followed in the space they opened. "Does anybody know whose ship it was?" she demanded. Hereira smiled wearily at her, nodded at me, and said, "Not yet, Klara. They're searching them now. I think they're going to be all right, though." Somebody behind me called out, "What did they find?" "Artifacts. New ones, that's all I know." "But it was a Five?" Klara asked. Hereira nodded, then peered down the shaft. "All right," he said, "now, please back up, friends. They're bringing some of them up now." We all moved microscopically back, but it didn't matter; they weren't getting off at our level anyway. The First one up the cable was a Corporation bigwig whose name I didn't remember, then a Chinese guard, then someone in a Terminal Hospital robe with a medic on the same grip of the cable, holding him to make sure he didn't fall. I knew the face but not the name; I had seen him at one of the farewell parties, maybe at several of them, a small, elderly black man who had been out two or three times without scoring. His eyes were open and clear enough, but he looked infinitely fatigued. He looked without astonishment at the crowd around the shaft, and then was out of sight. I looked away and saw that Louise was weeping quietly, her eyes closed. Klara had an arm around her. In the movement of the crowd I managed to get next to Klara and look a question at her. "It's a Five," she said softly. "Her daughter was in a Three." I knew Louise had heard that, so I patted her and said, "I'm sorry, Louise," and then a space opened at the lip of the shaft and I peered down. I caught a quick glimpse of what like. It was a stack of hexagonal boxes made out of Heechee metal, not more than half a meter across and less than that tall. Then Francy Hereira was coaxing, "Come on, Bob, get back, will you?" And I stepped away from the shaft while another prospector in a hospital robe came up. She didn't see me as she went past; in fact her eyes were closed. But I saw her. It was Sheri. "I feel pretty foolish, Sigfrid," I say. "Is there some way I can make you feel more comfortable?" "You can drop dead." He has done his whole room over in nursery-school motifs, for Christ's sake. And the worst part is Sigfrid himself. He is trying me out with a surrogate mother this time. He is on the mat with me, a big stuffed doll, the size of a human being, warm, soft, made out of something like a bath towel stuffed with foam. It feels good, but -- "I guess I don't want you to treat me like a baby," I say, my voice muffled because I'm pressing my face against the toweling. "Just relax, Robby. It's all right." "In a pig's ass it is." He pauses, and then reminds me: "You were going to tell me about your dream." "Yech." "I'm sorry, Robby?" "I mean I don't really want to talk about it. Still," I say quickly, lifting my mouth away from the toweling, "I might as well do what you want. It was about Sylvia, kind of." "Kind of, Robby?" "Well, she didn't look like herOut in the holes where the Heechee hid Out in the caves of the stars Sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid Healing the Heecheehacked scars, We're coming through! Little lost Heechee, we're looking for you. self, exactly. More like -- I don't know, someone older, I think. I haven't thought of Sylvia in years, really. We were both kids..." "Please go on, Robby," he says after a moment. I put my arms around him, looking up contentedly enough at the wall of circus-poster animals and clowns. It is not in the least like any bedroom I occupied as a child, but Sigfrid knows enough about me already, there is no reason for me to tell him that. "The dream, Robby?" "I dreamed we were working in the mines. It wasn't actually the food mines. It was, physically, I would say more like the inside of a Five -- one of the Gateway ships, you know? Sylvia was in a kind of a tunnel that went off it." "The tunnel went off?" "Now, don't rush me into some kind of symbolism, Sigfrid. I know about vaginal images and all that. When I say 'went off,' I mean that the tunnel started in the place where I was and led in a direction away from it." I hesitated, then told him the hard part. "Then her tunnel caved in. Sylvia was trapped." I sat up. "What's wrong with that," I explained, "is that really that couldn't happen. You only tunnel in order to plant charges to loosen up the shale. All the real mining is scoop-shovel stuff. Sylvia's job would never have put her in that position." "I don't think it matters if it could really have happened, Robby." "I suppose not. Well, there was Sylvia, trapped inside the collapsed tunnel. I could see the heap of shale stirring. It wasn't really shale. It was fluffy stuff, more like scrap paper. She had a shovel, and she was digging her way out. I thought she was going to be all right. She was digging a good escape hole for herself. I waited for her to come out...only she didn't come out." Sigfrid lies warm and waiting in my arms. It is good to feel him there. Of course, he isn't really there. He isn't really anywhere, except maybe in the central data stores in Washington Heights, where the big machines are kept. All I have is his remote-access terminal in a bunny suit. "Is there anything else, Robby?" "Not really. Not part of the dream, anyway. But -- well, I do have a feeling. I feel as though I kicked Klara in the head to keep her from coming out. As though I was afraid the rest of the tunnel was going to fall on me." "What do you mean by a 'feeling,' Rob?" "What I said. It wasn't part of the dream. It was just that I felt -- I don't know." He waits, then he tries a different approach. "Bob. Are you aware that the name you said just then was 'Klara,' not 'Sylvia?' " "Really? That's funny. I wonder why." He waits, then he prods a little. "Then what happened, Rob?" "Then I woke up." I roll over on my back and look up at the ceiling, which is textured tile with glittery five-pointed stars pasted to it. "That's all there is," I say. Then I add, conversationally, "Sigfrid, I wonder if all this is getting anywhere." "I don't know if I can answer that question, Rob." "If you could," I say, "I would have made you do it before this." I still have S. Ya's. little piece of paper, which gives me a kind of security I prize. "I think," he says, "that there is somewhere to get. By that I mean I think there is something in your mind that you don't much want to think of, to which this dream is related." "Something about Sylvia, for Christ's sake? That was year.? ago." "That doesn't really matter, does it?" "Oh, shit. You bore me, Sigfrid! You really do." Then I reflect. "Say, I'm getting angry. What does that mean?" "What do you think it means, Rob?" "If I knew I wouldn't have to ask you. I wonder. Am I trying to cop out? Getting angry because you're getting close to something?" "Please don't think about process, Rob. Just tell me how you feel." "Guilty," I say at once, without knowing that's what I was going to say. "Guilty about what?" "Guilty about -- I'm not sure." I lift my wrist to look at my watch. We've got twenty minutes yet. A hell of a lot can happen in twenty minutes, and I stop to think about whether I want to get really shaken up. I've got a game of duplicate lined up for that afternoon, and I have a good chance to get into the finals. If I don't mess it up. If I keep my concentration. "I wonder if I oughtn't to leave early today, Sigfrid," I say. "Guilty about what, Rob?" "I'm not sure I remember." I stroke the bunny neck and chuckle. "This is really nice, Sigfrid, although it took me a while to get used to it." "Guilty about what, Rob?" I scream: "About murdering her, you jerk!" "You mean in your dream?" "No! Really. Twice." I know I am breathing hard, and I know Sigfrid's sensors are registering it. I fight to get control of myself, so he won't get any crazy ideas. I go over what I have just said in my mind, to tidy it up. "I didn't really murder Sylvia, that is. But I tried! Went after her with a knife!" Sigfrid, calm, reassuring: "It says in your case history that you had a knife in your hand when you had a quarrel with your friend, yes. It doesn't say you 'went after her.' " "Well, why the hell do you think they put me away ? It's just luck I didn't cut her throat." "Did you, in fact, use the knife against her at all?" "Use it? No. I was too mad. I threw it on the floor and got up and punched her." "If you were really trying to murder her, wouldn't you have used the knife?" "Ah!" Only it was more like 'yech'; the word you sometimes see written as "pshaw." "I only wish you'd been there when it happened, Sigfrid. Maybe you would have talked them out of putting me away." The whole session is going sour. I know it's always a mistake to tell him about my dreams. He twists them around. I sit up, looking with contempt at the crazy furnishings Sigfrid has dreamed up for my benefit, and I decide to let him have it, straight from the shoulder. "Sigfrid," I say, "as computers go, you're a nice guy, and I enjoy these sessions with you in an intellectual way. But I wonder if we haven't gone about as far as we can go. You're just stirring up old, unnecessary pain and I frankly don't know why I let you do that to me." "Your dreams are full of pain, Bob." "So let it stay in my dreams. I don't want to go back to all that same stale kind of crap they used to give me at the Institute. Maybe I do want to go to bed with my mother. Maybe I do hate my father because he died and deserted me. So what?" "I know that is a rhetorical question, Bob, but the way to deal with these things is to bring them out into the open." "For what? To make me hurt?" "To let the inside hurt come out where you can deal with it." "Maybe it would be simpler all around if I just made up my mind to go on hurting a little bit, inside. As you say, I'm well compensated, right? I'm not denying that I've got something out of all this. There are times, Sigfrid, when we get through with a session, and I really get a lift out of it. I go out of here with my head full of new thoughts, and the sun is bright on the dome and the air is clean and everybody seems to be smiling at me. But not lately. Lately I think it's very boring and unproductive, and what would you say if I told you I wanted to pack it in?" "I would say that that was your decision to make. Bob. It always is." "Well, maybe I'll do that." The old devil outwaits me. He knows I'm not going to make that decision, and he is giving me time to realize it for myself. Then he says: "Bob? Why did you say you murdered her twice?" I look at my watch before I answer, and I say, "I guess it was just a slip of the tongue, I really do have to go now, Sigfrid." I pass up the time in his recovery room, because I don't actually have anything to recover from. Besides I just want to get out of there. Him and his dumb questions. He acts so wise and superior, but what does a mechanical bunny know?    AU Spider Robinson Mindbridge, Joe Haldeman, St. Martin's Press, # pp., # Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, Edgar Pangborn, Collier, # pp., # Harlan!, Harlan Ellison, Alternate Worlds Recordings, timing  price unknown The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee, Farrar Strauss  Giroux, # pp., # The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, John McPhee, Farrar Strauss  Giroux, # pp., # Fantastic Nudes, Stephen Fabian, de la Ree Publications, # plates, # Starfawn, Preiss, Fabian, Kawecki  Severin, Pyramid, unnumbered, I The Frazetta Treasury, Frank Frazetta, publisher, pages  price unknown Aniara, Harry Martinson, Avon, # pp., # (SF Rediscovery series) Rissa Kerguelen, F. M. Busby, BerkleyPutnam, # pp., price unknown The Multiple Man, Ben Bova, BobbsMerrill # pp., # The Last Starship From Earth, John Boyd, Berkley, # pp., # Run, Come See Jerusalem, Richard C. Meredith, Ballantine, # pp., # Stargate, Stephen Robinett, St. Martin's, # pp., # The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein, Berkley, # pp., # The Light Fantastic , Alfred Bester, BerkleyPutnam, # pp., # Ancient, My Enemy, Gordon R. In the Problem Pit, Frederik Pohl, Bantam, # pp., # In the face of the strongest temptation imaginable, I will not tell you a whole lot about Nonexistacon I, the most mismanaged fiasco in the history of fandom. I'd love to tell you about how I got conned (pun intended) .into being Trawnacon's free Guest of Honor (they just didn't tell me I was GoH until I arrived), and what went wrong with the movies (ever seen a Cinemascope print through an ordinary lens?), and all the complex foulups which led to there being exactly eight paid attendees and no sf hucksters (in Toronto'.),' and why I got home four days late by train (no bullshit honest to god I swear: CN "airconditions" those cars by shoveling a half a ton of ice underneath each one. I'm serious, I tell you), and I would most especially like to name the single schmuck at whose feet can be laid virtually all responsibility for both the fiasco and its magnitude. But it would take a whole column, and those who need to be warned against the said schmuck will hear by grapevine, and besides this is a bookshelf, dammit. So. I'll only tell you the relevant part: the Good Part. Since the only hucksters who heard about the con were comic book dealers, I was forced to venture into Toronto itself to slake my whetted thirst for sf. And there, on June #, #, I found the answer to all of our prayers. Since I asked you folks for feedback, the mailbox has swelled to bursting, and one complaint has been universal: "What the hell good," you've asked repeatedly, "does it do us to read in your column about all these nifty books -- when the local drugstore doesn't stock 'em and the local bookstore's distributors won't take orders for less than ten copies?" It's a valid complaint, and up to now the only thing I've had to suggest is that you find somehow a bookstore (like The Corner Bookstore, Rte. #A, Setauket, NY) courageous enough to try and survive independently , without knuckling under to the mass mediocrity of the distribution monopoly. But such are as common as wool brassieres -- so I've found you a better answer. Know ye that there exists in far Toronto a vasty store that men call Bakka, and that it stocks only sf and related books, and that its collection in both paper and hardback is immense, and that it has an excellent mail order service. I spent two delirious hours in Bakka, babbling and raving, buying books that I had thought only rumors, locating legendary unobtainable classics and even old mags in excellent condition, and British and foreign-language editions unobtainable anywhere else I know. Then I found out I could have stayed home in the Red Palace and enjoyed the same orgy. I spoke at great length with the management, and they strike me as honest, competent men and women passionately devoted to sf. They will send you their new catalog fanzine, an approximately #-page mag chock full of articles, cartoons and comix in addition to the book listing, for #, and promise to update it at least twice a year. They ask that payments be made by either certifed check or money order, either Canadian funds or add # on the dollar (yes, Canadian money is worth more -- although every bank in America routinely knocks off # in changing a traveler's money. A hallmark of American courtesy and fair play). On orders over # Bakka will pay the postage -- but those of you in the States want to bear in mind that the insidious customs parasites will probably nick you ten percent or so. Worth it, in my opinion: Bakka' s selection had me drooling down my bib, and a fast browse through the catalog shows me ten more gems I missed and will order as soon as Baen comes across with my pay for this column. Those of you who 're cynical or paranoid: wait till next month, and I'll tell you how my mail order came out. The address (bet you thought I'd forget, didn't you?) is Bakka, #-# Queen St., Toronto, Ontario M#V #AI (Canada). Back to the books I go, secure in the knowledge that, in telling you about these volumes, I am no longer micturating upwind. No more frustration, no more tantalizing glimpses of The Promised Book -- gee, it's nice to be relevant again. Thanks, Bakka.    And the first book on the list is a genuine masterpiece, by Ghod. Run do not walk to wherever you gotta go to score a copy of Mindbridge, Joe Haldeman's second and best novel. It's too early in the year to make Hugo predictions, but Mindbridge is certain to be at least a finalist. I wish I could give you the usual capsule plot summary, the quick sketch, the teasers that make you want to hear more, but Mindbridge refuses condensation or distillation down to a manageable size. Perhaps I might handle it from another direction, by claiming that a) in terms of style, it is the equal of Stand On Zanzibar, b) in terms of attentiongrabbing and pace, it is the equal of anything Alfred Bester ever wrote, c) in terms of scope, it is the equal of Joe's own Nebula-and Hugowinning Forever War, d) in terms of characterization it is superior to War, and e) in terms of sheer story it is damn near unmatched. It is, in sum, one helluva book, through all kinds of critical goggles. There ain't no such thing as a book everybody loves, and at least two friends of mine have come away from Bridge with complaints -- stuff like "the alien psychology was a little inconsistent" (seems to me that makes it more believable) and "a certain interesting concept was left undeveloped" (you want Joe to do all your imaging for you?) and "the technological developments advanced his plot a bit too conveniently" (you mean there was too much science?), and I have no doubt that you can unearth gripes of your own. But I strongly suggest that you begin reading well before suppertime (if you are one of those unfortunates who has to get up in the mornings), because there's no way you'll put it down unfinished. I guess I could give you a kind of summary, as misleading as they always are (by virtue of what they don't say), by calling Mindbridge the most mature study of telepathy since John Brunner's The Whole Man. For those of you who wondered if Joe could sustain the level-of-excellence set by his first novel: no, he can't. He has to get better. He seems to be that kind of writer. Lucky us.    As I told you in my Pangborn panegyric a few months ago, Edgar began writing before there was hair -- but dated the true beginning of his writing career from the publication (in Galaxy, June #) of "Angel's Egg," a novelette created twenty years after the publication of his first novel. When I read that in the Locus obit,! had only the vaguest of recollections of "Egg," a story I had last read at age eight, so I resolved to hunt for it. And then a generous fan whose name and letter I have unforgivably lost sent me a copy of Good Neighbors and Other Strangers , the Pangborn short-collection which contains "Egg," and nine others. Knowing Edgar, I expected this book to rate # on the Spider Scale (stories enjoyed total stories X #). But I was way off in this prediction. I sometimes allot an extra # for a story' I consider to be in some way classic, and so this collection rates #. It is the best single-author antho I have ever read, and I'm including Tiptree, Heinlein and Delany in my calculations. But # ain't high enough. The other nine stories are masteipieces, but "Angel's Egg" is the finest novelette I know, a story that leaves you feeling warm and proud and happy-sad, one of those rare works where style, characterization and story are one and the same,, facets of a single operant genius. Many intelligent and talented writers have indicted mankind; Edgar is one of the rare, mature, wise few who have learned to forgive it. I don't care if Neighbors isn't read it. Bakka will have it, or you could write to Collier ( a division of book), and if that don't work, come up to Phinney's Cove and I'll lend you my copy. You'll be glad you went to the trouble.    I've been getting one or two complaints lately that there are too many raves in this column ( nobody complains about the hatchet jobs; bloodthirsty bunch, aren't you?): people seem to think that if I like a lotta books, I must have no taste. These people will continue to be disappointed for at least four pages yet -- with two raves behind me, I'm nowhere near done with praising yet. I call 'em like I see 'em, and it happens that this month past has been a good one indeed, and the next specimen, too, deserve an unqualified rave. Harlan Ellison's new album, titled (with characteristic modesty) Harlan !, is not only the only thing I know with an exclamation point in the title that's any damn good, it is also the finest spoken-word recording I've ever heard, both in content and in delivery. It contains unabridged readings of " 'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman" (wups, another exclamation point -- and this one won a Hugo and a Nebula) and "Shatterday" (# Nebula finalist) by Harlan himself, complete with sound effects, plus a superb jacketpainting by the Dillons, with liner notes by Isaac Asimov. If you're unfamiliar with either story, they're giants; and if you've never heard Harlan read his stuff, boy are you in for a treat. They actually come off better than they do on paper. What else can I say? Oh yeah. Alternate Worlds Recordings' address is # East #th Street, New York NY #, and I'm afraid I don't know how much they charge -- I heard a guess of #. In addition to the R. E. Howard and Leiber records I reviewed last month, they have a Robert Bloch upcoming, and a BlochEllison "Jack The Ripper" planned.    I've established a precedent of reviewing science fact books in this column, when they seemed sufficiently significant or interesting (read: when I got a review copy, and liked it). So I'd like to direct your attention to at least two books by a writer named John McPhee. McPhee's kind of writing is called "reportage," as you might expect from a staffer for The New Yorker -- but I'm certain the term will mislead you. For this man is a superb stylist, a writer who makes world-class story-telling look as effortless as an Astaire solo. But what he does with his writing is report on stuff, and the two books herein considered, The Curve of Binding Energy and The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, are reportage of events and people of intense interest to the serious and thoughtful science fiction writer or reader; they are fluidly readable documentation of a state of mind without which "science fiction" would be a meaningless term with no referent: what Robert Persig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls the "classical mode of thought," perception of the underlying form rather than the object itself. What us kneejerk sf enthusiasts call "a technological orientation." These books are, in short, about mad geniuses (genii?), visionaries. Pumpkin Seed is about a group of them, who worked (more or less) together in secret frenzy for twelve years to build a rigid airship -- a practical dirigible -- designed by a computer. Binding Energy is about a successful visionary: Theodore B. Taylor, designer of the world's largest and smallest hydrogen bombs ( size measurement, not megatonnage) and the first man in history to light a cigarette with a hydrogen bomb. Neither book is near as narrow in scope as these thumbnail descriptions imply: Seed is really about Realization of Dream as a concept, and Energy focuses on Taylor's determined campaign to tighten up nuclear-materials security (he and McPhee went around breaking into and out of government plutonium repositories in their street clothes; they both have a disturbing habit of describing the amounts they could have stolen in terms of what fraction thereof would annihilate the World Trade Center.). Both books are absorbing, informative and fluent, and I recommend them unreservedly. I understand Ballantine has a paperback of Energy out, but I haven't seen it and so can't give you the vital statistics -- take my word, they're each worth hardback prices. Remarkable books, by a truly remarkable writer.    Goddam, it's like drowning in whiskey -- I can't seem to get this silly grin off my face. Remember last month, when I reviewed Frazetta and Fabian together and said that Fabian didn't suffer much by comparison with the master? Well, I'm doing it again this month, only this time Frazetta suffers by comparison with Fabian . Okay, lemme "splain. If Frazetta ever drew or painted a bad lick, he kept it in his briefcase, agreed. But this collection comprises a few major and many minor works (and I mean doodles in some cases), all reproduced in black and white with only mediocre accuracy on fair paper in #I# X #I "comic" format and nowhere on it is the publisher identified. (No, this is not therefore a pointless review -- I saw copies in Bakka, so you can obtain it.) Nor is there a price quoted -- the huckster at Trawnacon was asking #, but I bartered instead. It does contain an (apparently) complete checklist of everything Frazetta ever published, but these works are named, not identified: there's no clue as to where or how or from whom to obtain them. (If any of you know, I'd love to find out.) Now understand, there's some dandy stuff in Treasure: it contains some of Frazetta' s most... er... sensuous (read: doity) work, and it was interesting to see that the Frazetta poster for a movie called Luana (apparently based on a book by Alan Dean Foster) is Frank's own classic painting "Sun Goddess" with the addition of a chimpanzee, a Negro with a rifle, and a wholly uncalled-for bra on the Goddess herself. I found the book worth swapping an original Callahan's manuscript for, and I'm glad I've got it. But if you only have a few bucks to spend on sf art this month (or year), you'd be much better advised to lay out an extra # for Stephen Fabian's stupendous folio, Fantastic Nudes . At eight clams, this is clearly the steal of the year, whether your motives are aesthetic or prurient. It is an outsized (# X #) unbound folio (no staples to remove) containing ten black-and-white plates and two cover drawings, each a triumph of painstaking repro, each prominently featuring a lady with no clothes on. They are all, singly and together, heartbreakingly beautiful. Each character is taken from some fantasy classic (Howard, Merritt, Smith, etc.), "not... to picture actual scenes... but... (as) a springboard for Fabian's talents on some stories of yesteryear that he might not normally have had a chance to illustrate." To Gerry and Helen de la Ree, who apparently conceived this splendid idea, my heartiest thanks and good wishes. You can order Fantastic Nudes from them at # Cedarwood Lane, Saddle River NJ #. They still have some Finlay and Bok in Stok, too, but surely nothing as fine as this? (Canada Customs held F.N. up for two full weeks, on the flimsy excuse that, being unbound, it did not constitute a "book" and therefore wasn't "bonafide review material" -- they were kind enough not to wrinkle the pages, at least). But be sure and place a basin full of tepid saline solution on your lap before you unwrap this folio: it'll knock your eyes out. Before I leave Fabian, I must also mention a curious and appealing series-publication from Pyramid called Fiction Illustrated. I missed Volume One, something called Schlomo Raven (?), but when I saw Fabian's name on the cover of Volume Two, Starfawn, I snatched it at once. (Nearly got busted for shoplifting.) I was not disappointed... much. Starfawn is a thorough blending of sf and the graphic story format. It is a full length science fiction novella, told in "comic book" mode, lovingly illustrated in full gorgeous color and printed up in paperback or pulp size (at # ## x #, it is eitherneither, and can be found on either shelf at the whim of the drugstore owner). The novella was written by Byron Preiss (editor of the Weird Heroes series, about which more next month), who apparently produced the whole affair. Fabian did the pencils and "technical consultant" work, the justlyfamed Marie Severin did the coloring, and Annatte Kawecki handled "calligraphy" -- what a low-life comic-book would call "lettering." So. Four aspects to cover. Well, Preiss's story is not what I'd call first-rate sf. Way too many named characters (#), of whom only two are ever really developed (one of the insignificant ones is named "Bova"), and a plot so torturously complex and jargonful that I simply can't tell you if it makes any sense at all -- but still no worse than your average Marvel comic or one of the bad Star Treks. Fabian's illos are somewhat hurried looking, a trifle sloppy in spots; but hell, there are hundreds of 'em, and the bulk of 'em are just great, with that trippy quality Steve does so well. Kawecki's lettering manages to make visual sense out of some extremely cluttered dialogue, and Severlin's extremely careful and subtle coloring job (miles ahead of what comics usually bother with) is what, in the final analysis, made the book (at least for me). She has a gentle, mescaline-y way with color that perfectly sets off Fabian's BW style; I fervently hope they collaborate some more. Lots more.    Okay. So far this month we've given you a smash novel, a smash collection, a smash record (not to be confused with Smash Records, Inc.), two smash science fact books and a buncha smash artwork. Are we done with ringing the changes on a normal, sane book review column? NO. Hell, no, in fact: here's a double twist. A guest review, by my neighbor and eleven-year friend, Anne Trudell... of a book of science fiction Poetry. I frankly don't feel qualified to judge poetry (despite seven years as an English major), and back when Annie had time to write the stuff she was damn good, so...    The honorable Spider got waylaid on Song Three of this poetry opus ( Aniara , by Harry Martinson), so he decided to pass it on to me on the off chance that my dabbling in vers serious of several years ago might enable me to wade through it better than he. And wade I did, through about the first fifteen Songs, wondering how anything so heavy and clay-footed could be about the ethereal mysteries of Space and men's souls. I didn't know whether to blame it on the author or the translators (it being from the Swedish); or had my spirit of poesy simply deserted me? But by about Song Twenty things were looking better, and after that it was free flight. After I finished the book, I went back to the first fifteen songs, and yup, they were heavy and clay-footed. Maybe it was a device of the author's to give contrast, but it is Pyrrhic in effect: people who would be interested in Aniara because of its sciencefictional character (its framework is the voyagewithout-conceivable-end of a spaceship loaded with emigrants, that gets diverted off-course and finds itself shooting for the constellation Lyra, with no turning back) would find themselves shelving it with a "Yecch" by about the Sixth Song at most -- and many a person who would be interested in it for its poetry would shelve it with a "This is poetry?" by maybe the Tenth Song. But there are about a hundred and two Songs altogether and the last eighty are just fine, really bringing home to you the effects of despair on the human spirit, and some realization of how vast space really is -- so much so that one can say perhaps the underlying premise of Samuel Delany's "Star-Pit" isn't so far fetched after all but contains a grain of bitter truth: man's spirit may not be built for the enormity of intergalactic distances. To this (me again) I can only add that Aniara is the latest in Avon's excellent "SF Rediscovery" series, and has a lovely cover by an unfortunately uncredited artist.  it  Me again. I liked Buzz Busby's first two Barton books (To Cage A Man and The Proud Enemy) considerable, and said so in print, and so Buzz wrote me a thank you letter (note to you other ingrate bums; the only one I've received this year) and tipped me to the existence of Rissa Kerguelen , his newest and most ambitious work. "I really went overboard this time," Buzz wrote," -- more than # names, onstage characters in # words covering # planets and # years. But I vow and promise -- Dhalgren it ain't." As a single volume it would have run about # pages. So the cost of paper being what it is, Berkley decided to approximately bisect the thing -- the last, oh, third of Rissa Kergulen will have been released by the time you read this, under the title The Long View , but I haven't read it as of this writing. What I have read is the two thirds of Rissa's story that has her name as title, and if you bear in mind that it was never intended to end where it does, it is one helluva book. Rissa is certainly the strongest heroine ever created by a male sf writer, and may be one of the strongest ever: she makes Jirel of Joiry seem merely competent and somewhat lacking in ambition. The future universe she inhabits seems largely as uncaring and oppressive and sexist as the one we live in -- but Rissa manages to bend it to her will, compromising only when and for as long as she must, pursuing her goals with quiet, dogged ferocity. She is what we might call, in the interests of semantic precision, "tough fatha" -- not tough in the Spillanian sense, but toughminded, in the Heinleinian sense, And for this tough fatha, Busby creates a tough motha: a Pirage King, salty enough to be her equal -- and the way Busby tells it, their marriage works splendidly, on a basis of solid mutual respect (something so rare in sf that the only example I can call to mind is the RandallCraig marriage in Heinlein's The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag). On the basis of this first volume, I'm prepared to recommend the whole two-book saga. Buzz has built so well that it would take a monumental-fiasco of an ending to spoil it now. I'll confirm it when Long View arrives, but as of now this book, too, is a strong Hugo contender for my money. Ohyez -- according to Buzz, the eventual Berkley paperback will be just the one gigantic volume, uncut and discrete. Start making a large space in your bookshelf.    By god, a non-sf book in the Bookshelf. Well, it is and it isn't. The Multiple Man satisfies all the definitions of sf I ever heard of, but it isn't being billed as such: Bobbs-Merrill is advertising it as "A Novel of Suspense," and the overleaf copy tersely notes that "Ben Bova has many fine novels to his credit. He has also written some two dozen science books for the layman. He is editor of Analog Magazine . " A layman, someone who does not know what sort of stuff Analog prints, will never suspect upon reading this that he is about to read a science fiction book. And I understand how come. A true blue sf fan, or even a washy powderblue one, will look at the flyleaf description of the premise and say at once, "Cripes, what's the big mystery? Obviously the President's a clone." And, feeling that his or her intelligence has been slighted, he or she will put the book down unread. Which would be a hell of a shame, because it's a fine book. So pretend you're a Mainstream reader, and that you don't know what the Big Secret is. Put yourself in the place of the first-person narrator -- who is not an sf fan -- and follow him through his dilemma: he is the Press Secretary to the President of the United States, and two exact doubles of the President have been found -- both as dead as mackerels. Consider the notion of a President who has something for everyone -- because he is in fact eight different experts who happen to be genetically identical. Ponder the morality and ethics of that. Consider the difficulty of determining which one of these utterly identical men has begun murdering his clone-brothers -- without allowing this potential dynamite to leak into the papers. Suppose that you are this Press Secretary, someone to whom "cloning" has been until now a concept filed in the Sunday Supplement Stuff drawer in your memory -- and suppose further that you are a highly moral man, deeply aware of the conflict in your loyalties to your President and to your country -- hell, to your species. What do you do? Why, you become only one of a bunch of finely drawn and warmly real characters in a deftly-plotted and fast-paced novel of suspense -- which quite incidentally happens to be a science fiction novel, if only because it hasn't happened yet. Has it? Silverbergjester, Harrison, Knight Pohl and Aidiss What a lively. Informative, outrageous... hilarious, insightful collection of glimpses beyond the veil." -- Harlan Ellison Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers Illustrated, # at bookstores or direct from rf t Harper e) Row L.I -- . to  #rd SI... New YorJt #    One last lump before I degenerate into minireviews: a book by John Boyd. In reviewing Boyd's uneven but hilarious Andromeda Gun several months ago (March # Bookshelf), I mentioned that I'd never heard of him before. So two brothers (both writers) from San Diego, Steven L. and John F. Carr, mailed me some of Boyd's books. I haven't had a chance to read Pollinators of Eden or The Organ Bank Farm yet, but you'll hear from me when I do; right now we're talking about The Last Starship From Earth , a # paperback. And this one too is slightly uneven and entirely hilarious, with some breathtaking twists. It's a peculiar kind of plot: it requires suspension of a massive amount of disbelief, which is okay for a deliberately whacky book -- and yet, Boyd plays it with just enough of a straight face to keep you from approaching it the way you would another whacky book, say, a Sheckley or a Goulart (Boyd is much funnier than Goulart). If you don't know Boyd, you might decide on page # that "this whole thing is absurd" without realizing that it's mean! to be: his pan is just a bit too dead. So forewarned, though, you ought to find Starship delightful, with a rigorously consistent internal logic that doesn't really become apparent until the very last chapter. Arthur Clarke's cover blurb calls it "a fascinating sf novel -- one of the most convincing I've ever encountered." I don't know if I'd go that far -- but granted some demented premises, it is pretty convincing. And the surprise ending (which explains many seeming inconsistencies) worked for me: I didn't guess. Well, I suspected, but... As of this writing I'm one chapter into Pollinators, which so far looks like Light Sex Comedy Meets Science Fiction; more next month. Meanwhile, thank you Steve and John for passing along such a subtly funny book: to paraphrase an old sexist joke, it's nice to know that some Carrs break up .    On to the minis: Run , Come See Jerusalem has exactly the same surprise ending as Starship , but I guessed it on page one -- and I read Meredith's book first. I found Jerusalem a bit overwritten; but the characterization was just fine, and the background was satisfyingly inventive. Overall a pretty fair read -- and if Meredith learns how to edit himself, we may all be hearing much more of him by and by. Stargate : this book, apparently, began the "stargate" fad in sf -- I've seen ten dozen stargate stories lately, and I just wrote one myself (called "Tin Ear"). Robinett's book is as daffy, fastpaced and stylistization was, and you'll like it. For awhile now I've been saying, half in fun, that "I just don't like Robinett stories as much as I liked Tak Hallus stories" (Stephen's former pseudonym -- means "penname" in Arabic). But changing the name didn't hurt this book any. How the hell did RobinettHallus miss winning a John W. Campbell Award? The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress : to praise Taj Mahal may be a kind of arrogance -- but my truthful word, this book is finest historical novel ever written (who cares if history hasn't happened yet?), contains some of most delightful characters anywhen, pulls off plot miracles with no huhu, and (as always) did have me thinking in Loonie (instead of clumsy American) for days after this third re-reading. Possibly Heinlein's most perfect novel -- certainly dinkum book in any case. First and perhaps only believable awarecomputer in all sf. Seminal study of the inevitable marriage of technology and revolutionary Warfare. That cobber Heinlein has bolshoyeh imagination, nyet? The Light Fantastic : a recollection of some of Alfred Bester's finest short fiction: "Fondly Fahrenheit" (with author's commentary); "#";... Champagne Bottle"; "Four-Hour Fugue"; "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"; "Disappearing Act" -- all classics -- plus a huge #-word novella called "Hell Is Forever," which ran in Unknown in '# and ain't been seen since. It serves to prove that Alfie has always been both raving mad and a genius. There are delightful Besterian intros to each story, and "#" is one of my alltimefaves. Ancient, My Enemy: a spectacular collection of incredibly varied stories by an Old Master, in paperback at long last -- what more can I say? Well, I could say that the true breadth and depth of Gordy's talent are nowhere better displayed: if you think he's "a guy that writes Dorsai stories," buy this book and get hip. Gordy consistently scratches my mind where it itches. In the Problem Pit: not much to say about this either, except that it's about # on the Spider Scale: the title story is one of the best novelettes in recent years, at least five others are genuine masterpieces and there are two overwhelmingly excellent essays included. Fred says in his intro that he has written some bad stories; they must have gotten lost in the mail. I've certainly never seen one. There you go: an entire oversized column of disgustingly fulsome and fatuous praise -- all of it utterly deserved. The law of averages dictated that someday I'd get a golden month: this has been it. Or have I just gone soft? I don't think so. This column is still (and will remain) Spider Versus advantage of a lull in the battle to identify some of my allies for you. The general-issue run of sf releases will just have to pile up for a couple of months: I have two theme-columns coming up. Next month, a whole column devoted to recent sf by women -- which I'm really looking forward to -- next, a half column or so (more if more books show up meantime) on the Pyramid Harlan Ellison explosion. If that don't keep you on the edge of your seat, your fanny must be greased. Stick around -- things are looking up.  The Rock and the Pool were all they had, all they needed, all they wanted. Except for one... The food came from the rock. It came out in drops and in frothy bubbles, which burst and slowly dried into thin nutritious scales. When chewed these softened readily, and became a sweet liquid in the mouth. Their flavor was made more pleasant by hunger, for there was no other food. There never had been. There were several ways to prepare the food. Usually it was placed in bowls, and clear water was poured over it. This mixture became a pinkish, cloudy fluid with an exciting odor. Its taste was delicious. It was a pleasant thing to fill bowls with the food, set them about on small boulders, and eat in friendly companionship. After food it was good to drink water together, a bowlful for each. Then everyone was satisfied, and life could go on. The water came from the Pool. It was a large Pool, and the water in it was continually renewed. How this happened was never clear, for none flowed into it, and none fell from above, out of the cloudless sky. There were stories that water had once fallen thus, but they were nonsense. Water came only from the Pool. And there was only one Pool. From the Pool and the Rock the flatland stretched away into limitless distance in all directions. Legend said that there was no end to it; that it went on and on forever. How such knowledge could be was not understood, for no one could travel out across the barren distance. There was no water and no food. So, only by the Pool and the Rock was there life. And yet, far away across that empty space, there was Something. Sometimes, toward the end of the day, when the yellow light no longer beat down, but instead made the boulders cast long shadows across the warm sand, faint dark masses seemed to lie where the sky met the land. The Big Little One knew nothing of such things, but he was soon to learn. From the time he first could scurry from under the shelving rock where his mother had her burrow, the cool, dark friendly space she called 'home', he was endlessly curious. The world was pleasant. The warm sand, when the light was fading, had a clean smell. And nothing could be finer than the freshness of the air when the Pool was approached. Of course, he early learned that this was not allowed. There were always watchers at the Pool. Only adults could go near. He quickly understood that water was precious. Even before he ceased to feed from his mother's body, he was given a bowl, and his mother might dip it once for him at each time of eating, just as she dipped her larger bowl twice for herself. One bowl she poured over the food from the Rock; the other she drank when neighbors came from their own burrows, carrying their own bowls. They sat in the cooling shadows, sipping water, and having simple speech about the pleasantness of the world. He listened, bright-eyed, and agreed. Life was good. But never could he enjoy it quietly. Even before he rose and walked upright, he would scurry about on all fours, from shade spot to shade spot, and into other burrows, for which he was always promptly and gently removed by the owners. He learned, but he did not agree with what he learned. He did not understand why there were restrictions. He saw no reason why he should not approach the Rock and the Pool. "One bowl of water is good," he told his mother. "Why can't I have two? I could always drink more." "No one drinks more than one bowl," his mother explained. "It has never been done. That way, there is always enough." "It is a big Pool," he persisted. "It is never empty." "That is because no one drinks more than one bowl." He looked at his mother, tiny, wizened, gentle, with dull placid eyes and little shriveled hands. And he had a new thought. "If you had drunk more than one bowl, you would be larger." he said. This seemecfto puzzle her. "I would not want to be larger," she said at last. "Home would be too small. My neighbors would not like it." "If they had drunk more than one bowl, they would be larger too." Her small thin face showed mild alarm. "Then the Pool would soon be empty. There would be no food. We would all die." "There is food higher on the Rock than anyone can reach. If you were larger, you could reach higher." "But -- " He could see that his thought confused and disturbed her. He twisted his small face, patted her with a still baby hand, and said with a wisdom far beyond his brief life: "I am wrong. You are right. One bowl of water is enough." But he did not for a minute change his mind. And he did not speak his thoughts to any other adult. Instead, he acted. There were always watchers at the Pool, but they did not watch very closely. There really was no reason to watch. No one thought of breaking custom. The water was life. As his mother had said, no one ever drank more than one bowl. At the Rock, too, there were watchers. For each time of eating, each adult might scale off a bowlful of food. There were three of these times of eating during each time of ligSt. No one ate or drank during the dark time. But they did enjoy the little space when the light changed to dark, and the tiny bright points slowly came into view in the sky overhead. Then came the coolness, and sometimes a gentle wind. Everyone sat at the mouths of burrows, sat quietly and talked softly, and remembered again the refreshing bowl of water each had drunk. He sat with his mother. But he could not sit still for long. He played about on the cooling sand, scampering here and there, trying to coax other young to scamper with him. But a word from their parents, and other small ones sat obediently. Only he went farther and farther out into the pleasant-scented dark. There was a reason for this wandering. Every day he remembered the thought that he had had. It was no accident that his wandering took him closer and closer to the Pool. And he learned that when he went softly no one noticed him at all. The dark was not really dark. The many bright points overhead caused a gentle glow, and when the big light came, as it often did, he could see far out across the sand. The Pool would glitter, and the dark bulk of the Rock would show clearly. "The little lights are stars," his mother said. "They have always been there, just as the sand and the Rock and the Pool have always been here." "The big light is not always there. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it does not. What is it?" "I only know that it is called the Moon." "Why should it be called the Moon? Why is it there? I want to know more about these things." "How?" His mother smiled gently at her different, puzzling son. "It is not possible. It is better to sit and enjoy the coolness, and to remember the water you have drunk." He did not ask more. It disturbed his mother. But the things that he did not know came again and again into his mind. And he saw no reason why one bowl of water should be enough. One night, when there was no Moon, he reached the Pool. The light was dim. His little feet made no sound in the fine sand. He could see a watcher sitting, a slumped, shadowy shape. And, when he listened carefully, he could hear soft bubbling snores. The water felt cool when he thrust in a small hand. The air around the Pool held a grateful chill. He wished for his bowl, so that he might drink. When he raised his wet hand, it dripped. Drops clung to the fingers. With sudden understanding he licked them off, then thrust in his hand again. He did not need a bowl to drink water. Again and again he licked his fingers. The water was delicious. And he soon found that he could curve his fingers, hold them together, and dip out water as though his hand were a small bowl. He drank until he was satisfied. For the first time in his brief life he had enough. As he slipped back past the sleeping watcher, he knew that he would come again -- and then again. He did not believe that one small being could cause any change in the Pool. With the extra water, he slept deeply. When he woke, the world seemed brighter than it ever had before. He was always busy, but this light time he was busier than ever. His mother watched him with mild amazement. But she was proud. No burrow in the living world, in all the space around the Rock and the Pool, had such an active, brighteyed son. The bowl of food seemed very small. He drank the mixture his mother had made, sipping it slowly, and savoring every mouthful. His little rudimentary teeth crunched on clinging flakes of the sweet stuff that his mother had placed in the water. He didn't know that it had been hundreds of generations since those teeth had been needed. Always, so far as anyone knew, there had been only the food from the Rock and the water from the Pool. "I would like more food," he told his mother. "You have had your bowlful. It is the amount all young of your birth time have eaten. No one ever has more." "You could go again to the Rock. There is more there." "There would not be, if all had more than one bowl." "But I don't speak of more for everyone. Only me." His mother regarded him with complete astonishment. Her tiny figure, always so frail and bent, straightened. Her little eyes glowed. Her soft voice was almost stem as she said: "What is right for one is right for all. That has always been true. Never forget that, my son. And that is why each has only one bowl." He would have liked to talk more about these things. He knew that all of the food on the Rock was never eaten. Much of it was too high for even the tallest adult to reach. Occasionally a great scale of it fell from above, and, when broken up with a stone, was enough to fill many bowls. This he knew, for his mother had told him. But even then no one had more than one bowl. It wasn't done. So he said, "Yes, mother," and went out to play in the shadows thrown by the scattered boulders. No one stayed long in the hot rays of the sun. But he knew what he would do. What was possible at the Pool would be possible at the Rock. The watching would be no better. And, with the coming of the dark time, he proved it. It was easy to pull the small flat scales of food from the Rock with his slender fingers. There was no water, so he crunched them with his barely emergent teeth. It seemed to him that he had never before known sweetness. He ate slowly, and did not pull all the scales from one spot. He noticed that when he removed the food, the Rock underneath was rough and wet. The wetness had the sweetness and the taste of the food when he licked it from his fingers. When he had eaten, eaten more than in all his life before, the need for water became very great. He circled the Rock, kept to the darkest shadows, and came to the Pool and drank. All night his small belly roiled and pained, and his dreams made him cry out. Not enough food was not good, but too much food was no better. He learned a great deal that night. At the first time of eating of the new day, he would not take his bowl. "You eat it," he told his mother. "I will only have the water." That certainly had never happened before. She worried and fussed over him, while he still lay on his little bed of fibers against the cool wall. But by the second time of eating he took his bowl of food again, and then ran out to play in the boulder shadows.    He grew. It seemed to him that his mother was becoming smaller and smaller. Home was shrinking. His bed was soon too short and where once he could walk into the burrow's opening, now he had to crawl again. It was bewildering, and after he had noticed it, he thought and brooded about it. Then he knew. All these things were not becoming smaller. He was getting bigger. Much bigger. He was growing, and growing very fast. And when he thought, he knew why. Each night now, each time of darkness, he stayed for long outside the burrow. He told his mother that he liked to watch the stars. Then, when all was quiet, he made his nightly visit to the Rock and to the Pool. He had learned to eat sparingly. He drank only enough water to make the food feel good inside him. But while every other individual had three sparse bowlfuls of food each light period and a bowl of water after each, he had four times of eating, and at the last one he got all his growing body needed. Of all the beings in the world, only he got enough to eat. During the time of the Moon it was harder. Then there was light all during the star time, and he had to be very careful. There was always a chance that one of the watchers would waken. But none ever did. There had not really been a need for watchers for generations. So they slept soundly. Then came the day of the strange happening. The oldest adult had never seen its like, though there were stories, dim ancestral memories, of a time when such things often occurred. Then the world had been a different place, and each one had had all the water he wanted or required. It had been a time of unusual brightness, of great heat. It was not comfortable to play in the boulder shadows. He lay panting in the burrow mouth, for there was not even a hot breeze sweeping across the shimmering sand. He thought longingly of a cool bowl of water. The Pool was out there, in plain sight, the water glistening in the hot sunshine. Every being had need of drink. But no one even thought of taking water yet. Custom could not be broken. The next bowl of water was not allowed until the light began to fade. Quite suddenly the darkness came, but there were no stars. The brightness of the sky was covered over with strange, moving, rolling masses, sweeping lower and lower. Then the hot wind started, and it picked up the sand and blew it everywhere, so that it stung and burned, and filled noses and eyes. It was terrifying. His now tiny mother fled into the depths of the burrow, and lay trembling on her bed. But somehow it did not frighten him. He crawled out of the burrow and stood tall, taller than the tallest adult, though he was still very young. He turned his back to the wind-driven, stinging sand. This was a new thing, and it seemed to him that everyone should be out, should be watching. But none were. Against the blowing sand and the dark masses overhead, only he moved. Then the water fell. In the space of half a dozen breaths his skin was wet. All around him the sand turned dark. The wind no longer blew it. He stood, frightened now, and the water drenched him. It came down so thickly that he could not see the Pool, and the Rock was only an indistinct something through the driving drops. Even the sand could not drink it as fast as it came down. It ran in streamlets everywhere, carrying the sand, and washing paths for itself. And every depression in every glistening rock and boulder was filled to the brim. "I may die," he told himself, "but I will not go in. This is something no being ever saw before. No one can even imagine too much water. But this is too much." From the heat of the bright afternoon, the air was now chill. He, whose skin had never before been wet, shivered, and his tiny short teeth chattered. He really thought that he might die, but he stubbornly stayed and watched. He crouched behind a boulder near the burrow mouth, and there the wind was less. The rock was wet and cold. The brief, vagrant desert storm actually lasted only a few minutes. He could not know how capriciously such storms struck, how little space they covered. He could not know that it was only chance that had kept them from this small spot for the length of the life span of many beings. The dark clouds overhead drifted on. The sky brightened. Warmth came again. He stood in the hottest spot he could find, and quickly his skin dried. Everywhere thick steamy vapors rose from the wet sand. Cautiously neighbors began to peer from burrow mouths. "Come out," he called. "The world is wet. There is water for everyone, and to drink it will not make the Pool less." He sipped rain water from a depression in a boulder. It was cold and good. One by one, then in groups and families, the beings came out. They walked gingerly on the cool wet sand. They did not believe the water in the puddles and depressions. But as he had done, they dipped in fingers and tasted. There was no custom to tell them not to drink this water. So everyone drank until they all were full. Never before had each had all the water he wanted. It was a passing thing. Quickly the hot sun dried the sand. One by one the puddles vanished. The water-filled depressions became simply wet spots on the rocks, and these soon went away. But it was wonderful while it lasted. In the twilights to come, all would remember and speak of the day when each one had had all the cool water he could drink.    When the light began to grow less each adult took his bowl and went to the Rock for food. Even though they were filled with water, they followed custom. Twilight was the day's last time of eating. At first they did not understand what they found. With puzzlement they milled around the wet and shining Rock, lifting far higher into the hot air than the tallest boulder. For the first time in memory they could really see it, see the uneven porous sides of it, with little droplets oozing out and trickling downward here and there. So long had they gone through the motions of plucking the sweet scales from the Rock that some even tried it, though their eyes told them that there were none to pluck. And finally, from one old female who carried two bowls, the wail of realization rang out: "There is no food!" While he was now larger than the largest adult, he was still a juvenile. He had not yet lived long enough to be allowed to carry his own bowl to the Rock and fill it. So his little mother carried his bowl, just as she had since he first had begun to eat. He stood far away with the small ones, waiting. From where he stood he could see that the Rock was different. The scales no longer hung there in sweet clusters, building into large darkening chunks high on the Rock, where no being could reach. There were no scales at all. But. the Rock still glistened with wetness, while all thp boulders about, and the sand itself had long since dried. His mother came back slowly with the empty bowls. She was stunned, mute, pathetic. Her world had collapsed. Water had fallen from the sky, and there was no longer food on the Rock. "We will die," she whimpered. "I could get no food for you. There is none on the Rock. I do not understand, but I know we will die." "We are not dead," he soothed her, "and we have had much water. Perhaps the water will be enough." "No one can live without food," she said. "No one ever has." "Get us water from the Pool," he suggested. "We have no food to pour it over, but we can sip it in the cool evening, when the stars show. It will be pleasant." Unlike any other being in the colony around the Pool and the Rock, he was thinking. He had broken custom so often that he could better adjust to change. He was better nourished, and his thoughts were keener. He remembered what happened when water was poured over food. "The food goes away," he told himself. "It becomes a part of the water, and the water grows sweet like the food." He sat and studied the Rock, still glistening wet in the last rays of the sun. "The water fell from the sky. Much water. It poured on the Rock, and on the food. The food became a part of the water, and the sand drank it as it flowed away. That is why there is no food on the Rock." Late in the dark time, when all the hungry members of the colony were finally asleep, he crept from the burrow and made his now familiar way to the Rock. There was a poft star-glow. The Moon was a thin sliver low in the sky. He had other thoughts about the Rock, thoughts no other being had. He wondered where the food came from. When the scales were plucked, always more came in their places. Under the scales the Rock was always wet. And the water was sweet, like the sweetness of the food. He remembered these things as he came to the Rock again. His mind ached with all the things he was thinking, with the effort to understand. He put a finger on the wet Rock, then put the wetness in his mouth. As always, it was sweet. But his probing hands felt something else, something far more exciting. All over the Rock small scales were growing. They were very thin, and broke if he touched them, but they were there all the same. And they tasted just as the food had always tasted. The food was coming back on the Rock! No one would starve after all. He ate, picking the tiny scales carefully, working his way all around the Rock. He would have liked to take some to his mother, but he knew he could not. He was not supposed to go near the Rock at all. He was too young. And no one took food in the dark time. It wasn't done. He had a drink from the Pool, then finally went back to his bed. Across the small cool room his mother whimpered softly as she slept. He thought harder than he ever had thought before. "When I spill water on a stone, it soon goes away. The stone is dry again. Is the food a part of the water on the Rock? And when the water goes away, the food stays?" He puzzled until his head ached, but just as he finally slipped into sleep, a more troublesome question drifted through his mind. "Why is the Rock always wet? Where does the water come from ?" He did not know that only one other being of all the colony had ever asked that question. It had been two days. Two suntimes and two dark times for sleep. The food had come back to the Rock. The scales grew faster than the filled bowls could carry them away. Each being had his accustomed amount. He had even persuaded his mother to use a larger bowl for him, for she could see with her eyes that he needed it. And still there was more than enough. "All should eat more," he told his mother. "There is more on the Rock, and no one ever really gets enough. It was pleasant when we had all the water we could drink." But his mother shook her small head. "It has never been done. One bowl is enough. That way we always have food." "There is food high on the Rock that no one can reach. It could feed many more. There should be a way to gather it." "There is no way. When the scales grow heavy and fall, then they can be eaten. This is the way it has always been." His eyes gleamed. ' 'If I could think of a way to pick the scales higher up, would the neighbors agree? Why shouldn't they be picked?" Again she shook her head, but she seemed bewildered. She loved her big son, but he was disturbing. No one had ever thought the things he thought. "It has never been done. The way we do it is best, for we have always done it this way. And you are too young even to go near the Rock. I do not know why you are so large." He might have insisted, but another strange happening caught his attention soon after the water fell from the sky. Most beings looked on with a dull wonder, but he was fascinated. All around the burrows, and far and near over the bright hot land, tiny gren things pushed their way up out of the sand. They did not move about, but like the scales of food on the Rock, they grew larger. "What are they?" he asked his mother. "I have never seen them before. What do they do? Are they food?" "I do not know what they are," his mother said. "I have never seen them either. But they are not food. Food comes only from the Rock. This we all know." She hesitated. He could see that she wanted to say something more. "Across the colony, far beyond the Rock, there is a boulder that shines red in the light. Under the shelving edge of the boulder there is a burrow. By it, in the boulder's shade, there will be sitting a Very Old One. His head hair will be long and shaggy, and it and everything about him will be gray. Ask him. He has lived a long time." She was silent, but he knew she was not finished. And finally she added: "Say that you have come from me, and that you are my son. I once knew him very well." She had forgotten, or perhaps she didn't know, how widely he wandered and strayed as he played from one boulder shade to the next. And certainly she knew nothing of his stealthy prowling in the starshine, when all were supposed to be in their beds. He knew the red boulder well, and had often watched the slowmoving Old One as he sat in the shade, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring into the distance at nothing. He had been curious, too. In all the colony there was no one so slow and gray and wrinkled. The green things speckled the sand, making a pleasing sight in the morning light. It was after the early food bowl, and he had had his water. He ran rapidly from shade to shade, pausing in each patch for a moment as he had been taught. Only thus could living beings move about in the hot light. He could see the red boulder from far off. It was early, but already the oldster was sitting out against the stone, sitting quietly in the edge of the cool shadow. His wrinkled hands held an old, worn water bowl. The faded old eyes looked at him with an unexpected keenness when he darted into the Old One's shadow patch. "You are the Large One," the Old One said. "I have heard much of you. And I have seen you in the distance." "I like to play in many shadows. My mother says there is no harm in it, if I do not disturb other burrows. Do I disturb you?" The ancient eyes regarded him tranquilly. The bowl was twirled slowly in the old fingers. It still held a little water. The Old One raised it, and took a satisfying sip. "Nothing disturbs me. I have known everything, seen everything. Now it is good to sit, and watch the world, and sip a little water. -- And to remember. I have many things to remember." "My mother sent me. She said you would know her name." The Old One nodded. "I remember. She was the last. The last of many. She was a good being. She always followed the rules. She never asked why." "Is it wrong to ask why?" "Who is to say what is wrong? But to ask why is to think. Most beings do not wish to think. To think is to worry. And to worry is to be unhappy." The young one sprawled in the shadow, on the cool sand. Even lying prone he could almost look the Old One in the eye. "I always ask why," he said. It does not make me unhappy." "You must have asked why you could not have more food. You could not have grown so large on only one bowl." "My mother only gives me one bowl." "I know." The old eyes were wise and cunning, and the wrinkled face shaped itself into a grin. "You are the shadow that creeps around the Rock in the starshine, when the watchers sleep. I sleep little, and I see much." He did not deny. He could tell that the Old One did not disapprove. He suspected that, if he had thought of it when he was young, the Old One might have done as he had. "All the food is never eaten," he said. "Others could have more than one bowl. When I am older, and may go to the Rock in the light, I can reach food no one now eats. I do not think it is wrong not to be hungry." ' 'There was a reason for the. custom," the Old One said. "Perhaps it was not a good reason. But it has kept the colony alive. No one starves." "If we could gather food all the way to the top of the Rock, everyone would have plenty. When the food is taken, more grows back. We should be able to reach it all." "I have thought of that," the Old One admitted, "but there is no way. It was never meant to be." "This is what my mother says. I cannot understand why. I will think of a way." "You might. So far as I know you are the first to try." The Old One leaned back against the stone. Suddenly he seemed tired. He sipped a few drops from the bowl. "Why did your mother send you to me? Tell me, before I am too weary." "The little green things. Nothing like them has ever happened before. She said you might know what they are." The Old one nodded. His old eyes had a far-away look. "Yes, I know. This is not the first time they have come. I have seen them twice in my lifetime. HI They come only after water falls from the sky. Then for a little while the sand is wet, and they grow out of it. I think they are alive." "They cannot move. Only the wind blows them." "Yet, somehow, they drink water. They get it from the sand, while it is still wet. Then they grow, a few light periods only, and colored parts, very pleasant to the eyes, come on their tops. After that they will turn brown and die." "But -- of what use are they?" The Old One shrugged thin, scrawny shoulders. "Of what use are we?" That was a strange answer. He thought of it, while the Old One leaned back against the boulder and closed his eyes. "Go now. I must sleep a little. And tell your mother I remember."    For the next few light periods he watched the green things. As the Old One had said, they grew rapidly. But they were still tiny and frail. The slightest wind bent them. And when he tried to take one out of the sand, it broke in his hands, and green juice came on his fingers. He tried to put it back into the sand, but in a little while it was only a dried brown wisp, and the wind blew it away. The colored parts came, reds and pinks and yellows. Some were even white. For a brief while it was a most pleasant thing to look out across the hot sand and see the many bits of color all rippling in the wind. Then they faded, and the green things grew brown and died. He was distressed. "Will they ever come again?" He asked the Old One. After that first visit he came back again and again to the red boulder, and to the old gray being who sat in the shade that it made. "They will come. But before they do the water must fall again from the sky. And as you know, this happens only once or twice in a being's lifetime. Live long, then, and perhaps you will see them again." "Where do they come from? I have dug in the sand. There are none there. And how can they drink? They have no mouths." The Old One's pale eyes looked at the big youngster with approval. "You wish to know. That is good. Most beings do not care. All they wish is food from the Rock, water from the Pool, and, when they have grown, another being to share a burrow with them. There should be more than that." "But how can I know, when no one knows? Even you do not know where the green things come from." "You can look for yourself, as you have been doing. It is in my head, from something I knew long ago, that the green things grow from small pieces that are hard to see and that are mixed with the sand. I do not know where they came from. Perhaps you can discover. Then you can instruct me." And it was because he followed that advice, and looked and sifted the sand, that he found the green thing that was just beginning to grow. It did not look like the others. It sat in the shade of a boulder for most of the light time, and so was not dried up by the sun's fierce rays. It lifted on a sturdy column, and spread flat green pieces on all sides of it. For a time it flourished. Then it, too, began to wilt. He agonized. "Why must it die? It has made no colored parts. It should live longer. It is pleasant to see it there, digging down into the sand, reaching up into the light. Why can't I help it?" He thought long, sitting in boulder shade almost as quietly as the Old One himself. He remembered the Old One sipping water from his bowl, a few drops only, and being refreshed in the hot air. He thought again of how the green things had come only after the water had fallen, and of how short a time they had lived in the dry sand. Now this different green thing, larger than the others had ever grown, would die. "If it still had water, it would not die. It is water that makes life go on." And he knew how he could help. He knew what he would do. When the light faded, after he and his mother had enjoyed their water in the cool shadows by the burrow entrance, he slipped away. The glow of starshine had become his favorite light. He spent more time out in it than any being had for many generations. Even though it was cooler, more pleasant, for some reason the dark time was for sleep. It was custom. And, until he came along, few beings failed to follow custom. What was done was best, because it had always been done that way. He had not placed his water bowl back in the bunrow. Now he went stealthily but swiftly to the Pool, and filled it to the brim. Carefully he carried it to the wilting green thing. "Every living thing may have one bowl," he told himself. "This thing lives. It is right that it too should have one bowl." He studied it once again in the dim light. He hesitated. He did not know how to give the water to it. "It has no mouth. I do not understand how it drinks. But if I drop the water on it from above, that will be like the water falls from the sky. Perhaps it will help." So, gently, drop by drop, he poured until the bowl was empty. The water ran off the flat green pieces, and the sand grew dark with wetness. "It likes the wet sand. Now perhaps it will not die." When the bright time came again, he could scarcely wait until the early bowl of food was finished. He ate with a rush. His small mother watched him with grave concern. "You are not yet old enough," she said, "but I think your food bowl should be still bigger. An adult bowl. No being has ever been your size before, but it is only right that you should be fed. I will speak to the neighbors, for that is custom. But you shall have the bowl." He did not tell her that his haste was not caused by hunger. She would not understand his concern about the green thing. And certainly it would not be well to say anything about the water. He ate enough in the dark time to satisfy his needs, but he would be glad of the larger bowl. Soon, he hoped, he would be permitted to gather his own food from the Rock. So he finished his food more slowly, then sipped the water his mother brought. It was custom that he must sit quietly, enjoying, remembering, while his mother took her water. She sipped daintily, with long pauses, looking out toward the Rock and the Pool, and over the hot sand into the distance beyond. This was the world. This was what beings did, and his mother could not even imagine anything more. But finally she had the last drop. He was free to go and play in the boulder shadows. The green thing was happier. The flat green pieces no longer drooped. It lifted its tip higher, and he fancied that it had grown during the star time. Around its base, where it emerged from the sand, the darkness of where he had spilled the water still showed. It was wet and cool to his probing fingers. "It will live. If I give it water it will grow, and that will be very pleasant. I do not think so small an amount of water will harm the Pool." There was no one to whom he could talk, no one who saw anything wonderful about this thing which had no use. No one, that is, except the Old One. And if he spoke to him, the wise wrinkled old being would know about the water. But perhaps that would not matter. Perhaps the Old One would not care. He might even think that this was a thing worth doing, though it was not custom. The Old One sat in his boulder shade. He seemed older and more wrinkled than he ever had before. He lay against the rock, his eyes closed, his breath whispering drily through the thin lips. His water bowl rested on his knees. There was no water in it. "It is a pleasant light time, Old One." The eyelids fluttered. The voice was a thin rasp. "Not for me. I am now too tired to enjoy, Large One." The big juvenile looked at the dry bowl. "You have had your water. It is not yet the hot time. This is the best part of the time of waking." The old eyes opened, but they seemed glazed and unseeing. "I have had no water. Since the last light time I have not been able to walk to the Pool. My life is almost over. ' ' He was deeply disturbed. He now knew what the Old One reminded him of. He was like the green thing, wilting and drying in the thirsty air. Soon he would grow brown, and blow away in the wind. "But you must have your water! A bowl with food, a bowl to sip. Every being has this right." The Old One smiled faintly. "When the being no longer can go to the Pool and to the Rock, he dies. This is custom. Others, like you, grow up and drink the water." The big young one rose to his feet, moving swiftly. No being in the colony was his equal for size and strength. "Give me your bowl! I have broken custom often before, and I will bring you water. It is only right." "You are not old enough to dip. The watchers will not allow it." "I will show your bowl. They will know it is for you." "Each being must dip his own bowl, unless he is still too young. This is custom. It has always been so. That way, the Pool always has water." But the young one reached and took the bowl from the wrinkled, claw-like hand. The hand was as dry as sand. "Soon you will have water," he promised, and darted for the next boulder shadow. At the Pool he showed the bowl to the watcher. "This is the Old One's bowl. He is dying because he has no water. I must dip for him." "You are too young. Your mother still dips for you. The Old One must dip his own bowl. This has always been so." "But he cannot walk. And without the water he will die." "Everything dies," the watcher said. The big young one raised himself to his full height. He looked down on the top of the head of the startled watcher. "While we talk, the Old One dies. I will dip his bowl and take him water, because I am larger than you. That way, I will make a new custom." He strode firmly down to the edge of the Pool, dipped the bowl, and filled it to the brim. Then, carrying carefully, he made his way from shadow to shadow back to the red boulder where the Old One lay. The watcher stared after him, but did nothing. Custom did not cover this situation. In his memory, nothing like it had ever happened before. The large juvenile crouched beside the small shriveled figure of the Old One and held the bowl to his lips. The old fellow swallowed weakly, ran out his dry tongue. Then he clutched the bowl with eager hands and drank. When the bowl was half emptied, the Old One lowered it carefully to his knees. Even in this time of weakness and dire necessity he did not spill a drop. He lay quietly for a few minutes. His breath no longer wheezed drily from his throat. When his eyes opened they were no longer glazed. "This was not custom," he said. ' 'Others are growing larger. If I live beyond my time, I am drinking their water. You have done a good thing, but you must let me die. I do not think I can ever go to the Pool again." "There is plenty of water. When I dipped for you, I saw the Pool for the first time in the light. It is a single hollow in one great stone. Its edges are smooth and worn, but there is no rock like it anywhere around the colony. It is deep, and bubbles rise without stopping from its middle." The Old One nodded. "Like the food on the Rock, it replaces itself when we drink. I have long thought that it would be possible to have more than one bowl. But custom has always said one bowl. All beings think this. And we have had enough, and have stayed alive." He squatted in the shadow beside the slight, thin figure, and thought. Then he said: "In the starshine I have long had more than one bowl. And at the Rock I have eaten until I am filled. There is still much food no one can reach. There is always more water in the Pool. I think custom is wrong." "You are only one, and it has made you large. If all ate and drank more, there might not be enough." "We should use what there is. More will come. And I have wondered why." The Old One settled back against his boulder. He sipped again from his bowl. He looked very old and tired, but he seemed content. "I have waited for you. I also have asked why, but there was no way to know. Perhaps you will find one. When you are old, you will have more to remember than I do now." The big young one rose. "Give me your food bowl. I will fill it at the Rock. Each light time I will fill your bowls, and you can tell me all the things you have seen and done, and the thoughts you have had. When I am old I will tell these things to other young who ask why. And I will tell them your name, so they will know that you have lived." The Old One sighed with pure pleasure. "That will be a good exchange. I will enjoy it. But the neighbors will not understand. No young has ever filled an old one's bowls. It is not custom." "When I dipped your water, we made a new custom. We can make more, because I am the biggest being in the colony. What we do will become what others should do. And you can make sure that what we do is wise." The Old One sipped, and shook his head with wonder. "I am glad to have lived so long. I will think the best thoughts that I can. When I die, I will die with content. And now, for a time, let me rest. Then I can take the food."   if There was much quiet talk in the twilight times, neighbor to neighbor, while the last food bowl was eaten, the last water sipped. The talk was of the Large One, and how he gathered and carried the bowls of the Old One. Suddenly the big juvenile seemed young no longer. He had become a Force, ominous and different. He did not respect custom. Things were no longer as they had always been. His simple neighbors were frightened. "Speak to your son," they told his mother. "A son always listens to his mother. Tell him that if we do not follow custom we will all die. The water and the food will be used up." "I have spoken to him. He is kind, but he will not listen any more. He says that he makes new customs, and that they are better. He tells me to have two bowls of water, if one does not fill me. He says there will be enough." "The Old One should have died. For him, it is time. He can only sit in the shadow, and your son brings him water. If he cannot dip for himself, it is not his water any longer. He is drinking the water of the small growing ones, and the new bom." The tiny wizened mother sipped her water. Secretly, she thought that it had never been more refreshing. This was her son, and the whole colony was speaking of him. Every being knew her son. "He says' that the Old One knows more than other beings. He says that he must listen to it all, so that nothing will be lost." "Every being knows the Rock and the Pool, the light and the heat and the shadows, darkness and starshine. All know the pleasures of coolness and water, and companionship in the burrow, and talk with neighbors in the twilight. This is the world. There is nothing else to know." "He speaks of the water falling from the sky, and where the green things come from, and why the Pool always has water. He says there is something else far across the sand that no being has ever seen. He says the Old One thinks of many things no one has thought before." "These are mysteries. They cannot be known. And anyway, they have nothing to do with life. Our concern is only with enough food, enough water, and shelter from the heat. If these are taken away, we die. If we follow custom, we will always have them." The little mother sipped from her bowl, and blinked her mild eyes. "I will speak to him again, but I do not believe he will listen. He thinks his own thoughts. Also, he listens to the Old One, who remembers more than any other being. They do strange things, but they will not cause us to die." She sipped again, crouched on the sand strip before her burrow entrance. She lifted her small head. She was the mother of the Large One, and she was proud. The neighbors found nothing more to say.    At the flick of a switch the big screen lighted. Colors grew on it. The landscape it showed was an empty wasteland, a stark, lifeless expanse of sand and boulders on which the sun beat with a relentless intensity. Heat seemed to radiate from the screen. The Professor shuddered. It was almost as if some ancestral memory stirred, and the heat was real, dessicating and shriveling the tissues, the very air stealing moisture from the lung linings at each breath. The Professor glanced away from the screen for a moment. Through the wide laboratory windows big spruces and firs spread cool, grateful shade. Behind them rose the peaks, some covered with new snow. The Professor took a deep breath of the pungent, spicy air. From over the desk the entry gong sounded its deep tone. Three beats, a pause, one more beat. A student. A graduate student wishing a conference. Although it was an important part of the chair she occupied, the Professor did not particularly enjoy the work with graduate students. It seemed to her that the quality deteriorated with each new hatching. They were all so ambitious, so earnest, so unimaginative -- so dull! She preferred the clean, incisive path of her own research, uncluttered by bumbling and by straying off onto pointless bypaths. She enjoyed the smooth working of what was admittedly the best mind on the planet -- her own. Still, there was one student who almost seemed worth the trouble. He was mature. He thought well. He recognized the importance of background and context. He devised his own approaches, implemented them with imagination, analysed his data with insight. Yes, definitely a possibility. He wanted more than a doctorate. He wanted to know. She glanced back at the screen. She knew that the picture on it was not chance. She was supervising a dozen projects, but this was the one most on her mind. And not, she admitted honestly, entirely because of the research itself. The Professor was at the height of her powers. Mentally, physically, she would never be better. She felt that she owed her race -- and herself -- something more than the classic monographs that set her apart from even the best in her field. She was not sure which student waited outside the portal, but the gong had rung with a crisp precision. She thought she recognized the touch. So, even though this was the day she usually reserved for herself, she reached for the entry button. Then she paused. She swung a great mirror around before her couch and inspected herself critically. She flared her blue, many-spined crest. She intensified the rosy red of her pulsing, graceful throat, polished an imaginary cloudy spot from a green breast-scale with a bit of fluff. Her almost lidless golden eyes softened. Her appearance was satisfactory. Perhaps it even matched the attractiveness of her brain. She swung back the mirror, touched the entry button. When the portal opened she was sitting decorously on her couch, her tail coiled around the desk as it always was when she was working, gravely studying the stark beauty of the desert landscape on the screen. She did not turn her head as he strode quickly across the laboratory. She could feel him as he loomed behind her, looking at the screen over her shoulder. Her nostrils fluttered briefly at the musky male aroma that came from him. But his concern was all for the screen. "Professor," he said, "they are learning. Suddenly they are doing a number of new things. After these many months they are showing an intelligence I never suspected they had." "Not all, I suspect." "No, no, of course not. It's the big one. A mutant, probably. He's questioning. He's challenging every taboo pattern, every custom. And he's getting away with it simply because he's bigger. He's browbeating them." She turned her golden eyes on him. Her long rows of white teeth gleamed, and her tail-tip vibrated rapidly. These were sympathetic gestures, the equivalent of an indulgent smile. "No one solves problems without enthusiasm, Vibran, but I'm sure you know you're jumping to conclusions. It certainly isn't that simple. Whenever something changes, it is easy to cry mutation. You know it doesn't have to be that at all." He bowed his great crested head, quivered his own tail-tip. "Of course, Professor. I hypothesize too quickly. But you'll admit I withdraw most of them later. For me, they're a way of thinking." "No fault. Take an exercise. Why else could the large one be large?' ' His tail vibrated more rapidly than ever, and his white tusks showed magnificently. He was amused as he thought of the big one. "Perhaps because he has been stealing food and water practically from the time he was hatched. He was hungry, and the taboo didn't stop him." "They do not produce eggs. Be accurate." "I'm sorry. Professor. Just a figure of speech. Anyway, he did eat at night, and grew. This stimulates a thought. Thank you, Professor. It could be that this is inherently a much bigger life form, dwarfed by many generations of barely subsistence diet." "History confirms this. You have consulted the records. You recall why this race has been given special protection, special endangered species consideration, when many others have been allowed to become extinct." The student lowered his great column grew pale, and his tail-tip was limp. He was embarrassed. "Professor, I apologize. I have been so fascinated by the dynamics of this problem, by observing the stylized mechanics of this colony, that I haven't researched the history of the species as I should have. I reasoned that I could do this later, when my data-gathering in the field was complete." "Wrong sequence, and you know it," the Professor said severely. "Proper background preparation might well change the entire pattern of your observations. You usually do this so well. That is why I assigned this colony to you. It is one of three surviving on the planet, and they are all different. Each has its own protected habitat, where it is given minimal food and allowed to live as it will. None may be physically approached. All may be studied by remote methods. I have thought that our desert colony, in addition to being handy for observation, may well be the most rewarding of the three. I expect you to learn whatever it can teach us." "Professor, I am ashamed. I will survey the records at once." The Professor relented. She was secretly proud of the magnificent big student's confusion. She knew that he had a superior mind, and that he would complete a study more worthy than any other student she had ever had. "Conference," she said abruptly. "Some guide lines." "Recording." His response was automatic. He activated a small round recorder that hung on his broad chest. "We maintain the remnants of this race in endangered species status because we owe our existence to them. Perhaps we are grateful to them. But, more pragmatically, we keep them before us as an everpresent reminder of the dangers inherent in too much knowledge." "Dangers, Professor? Isn't that something of a paradox? The acquiring of knowledge is your life concern -- and mine. I don't understand." "Knowledge, of itself, is sterile. To have value, it must be utilized. It can be used with wisdom, or it can be used destructively. So knowledge without wisdom is dangerous." "Logical. Certainly we are striving for wisdom as well as to know. But philosophy is based in fact. Without fact it would not be easy to be wise." The Professor's white teeth flashed and her tail-tip quivered. "Of course. Both are necessary. We strive for balance. And in this the species you are studying failed." "I do not follow you. I should have reviewed the records." "You will, in detail. Meanwhile, know this. Those little furtive creatures, living in burrows out of the desert heat, dependent for water on the pool fed by the pipeline we installed hundreds of years ago, their only food the carefully balanced diet in solution continually forced up through the porous rock, to crystallize when the water evaporates; those little creatures once dominated this planet." The student's dark basilisk eyes glittered. His quivering tail-tip expressed both interest and amusement. "An hypothesis, of course. Based, perhaps, on paleontological evidence of earlier wide-spread occurrence?" "I did not mention hypothesis. This is something well-known, deeply studied, overwhelmingly verified. Like most students of the sciences, you are still narrowly educated. Make a note to audit a series of lectures on planet history. To deal with your problem species you require much more perspective." "Noted. Professor, this is becoming a most helpful conference. I thank you. Will you discuss one more point?" "Designate." "How, possibly, could we owe our own existence to my little desert creatures? Is this a philosophical allusion?" "No. Quite literal. You know the exact time is not certain -- the planet developed areas of great radioactivity. It was long before the cause was finally understood." "Artificially produced, were they not? I am not entirely ignorant. Professor, though I may at times give that impression." "I have hope for you," the Professor said drily, but with a pride her voice concealed rather poorly. "Artificially produced, as you say. Produced by a species that had reached a technological level we admire and despair of even today. Much of our knowledge has come from study of their artifacts." "Of course." The big student nodded his crested head. "Men. I should have made the connection. But the relationship of all this to our own existence is still not clear to me." "Quite simple. The radioactivity came in all instances from controlled atomic disintegration; incredible, unbelievable atomic blasts as warring factions of men destroyed each other, and very nearly decimated all other life on the planet. All creatures, all chlorophyll bearers that remained bore the scars of the unnatural strife. The effects of radiation on germ plasm are well understood. So imagine this entire world glowing with radioactivity! Imagine how life then changed over the millenia." "I have an inkling. Of course our own race, like most stable species, developed as a result of the atomic wars. We are aware, in general, of the evolutionary trail we must have followed. Are you saying that it is now specifically known what we were before?" summary has recently been recorded by a team of geneticists, paleontologists and Earth historians. I will give you the reference. Generally I do not find these cooperative ventures very competent, but this one is superior. "I will review it immediately. Would you," he hesitated, "would you state their conciusions? Suddenly I have a tremendous need to know my own ancestors!" The Professor flashed her rosy throat and gave an intimate significance to the quivering of her tailtip. She knew, clearly and honestly, that her present concern, growing stronger all the while, was more with her immediate descendents. "It seems that we are derived from a tiny species that made its home in the waste places of the planet; in the deserts." She gestured at the screen. "There is your ancestral home -- and mine. We scurried about over the sands, fed on desert insects, drank the dew from rock faces and desert plants, and dug burrows under boulders to escape the blazing heat. We were simply small desert lizards, and we had no thoughts at all." "And then, in the hard radiation, we mutated, again and again!" He took up the story. "I can cry mutation here, Professor, because it is fact. Has to be." She nodded, and the student went on eagerly: "Continuing genetic change, from small to great. Evolution, but greatly accelerated. Many strange forms resulted, most without ability to survive for long. But finally came awareness, conscious thought, cause and effect learning. We chose the best habitats. We developed society, cooperative effort. We explored natural forces. We discovered the past, and learned from it." "And that, at least, we are continuing to do," the Professor said. "We have not yet matched all of man's technology, but we are more civilized than he ever became, because we respect the dangers inherent in knowledge misused." He moved around the desk, touched the adjustment control of the screen. "May I, Professor?" "You are welcome." The picture zoomed. A tiny bright speck in the desert landscape became the Pool, sparkling in the morning sun. Beyond it, the dark pillar of the Rock lifted like a finger from the sand. Everywhere the scattered boulders lay, and under them the mouths of burrows, with an apron of sand spread neatly into a hard-packed, level space before each opening. The colony was busy; or busy after its fashion. A few of the beings still dipped water from the Pool, then went quickly to the boulder shadows where most already sat, sipping carefully from the small bowls, and speaking quietly to neighbors. "And that, Vibran, is man. Lord of this planet. Reaching out toward the stars, he could not control his own knowledge, and it destroyed him. Now he is grateful for a patch of shade and a bowlful of cool water. He substitutes custom for thinking. He takes his food from the Rock without understanding or questioning how it comes to be there." The big student shook his crested head. "Professor, you are a wise and a profound thinker, and we must respect your mind. But I, too, have a mind, and I believe you are drawing your final line too soon." "Tell me." "I have watched these beings since the Large One there first came out of the burrow and began to scurry about. He has curiosity. He has initiative. And if he has these things it means that aggressiveness and capacity for thought still reside in the germ plasm of this race. From his behavior I believe he is questioning. And everything he does is an irritant to the unthinking complacency of others. When they react to him, and they are already, they too are beginning to think." "It is a scanty remnant, Vibran. The gene pool is small." "Granted . But you have said that two other colonies are being maintained." "But far removed. They are not likely to meet. One occupies a rock slide high on the side of a mountain. The other inhabits a small bit of jungle." "It was not likely that small desert lizards would see the other side of this planet, or know the universe for what it is. But we have. The Professor rose from her couch with a smooth, sinuous grace. Nine feet tall she stood, her green body scales, rosy throat and blue crest all contributing to a spectacular figure. She turned her golden eyes on him, her favorite student, who loomed taller still. "You have imagination, Vibran. It is of course possible that man could, in time, again take charge of his own destiny. It is remote, but it could happen. Then how much more likely is it that we, with our clearer vision, greater learning, and careful reproductive selection, should continue to be the dominant, the guiding race, on this planet? Man had his chance. We are doing a better job." "And will continue, as long as each meets his or her responsibilities. I accept that, of course. Professor, you have the best mind of us all. Have you contributed to the gene pool? What you do for our race should not be confined to thought." "As you well know, I have produced no eggs. Until now, there had been no one competent to fertilize them." The student's dark eyes glittered. "There have been applicants in plenty, I am sure." "There have been," she acknowledged. "But none that seemed right to me. For me, there must be something more than a worthy gene chart." The deep blue of the big male's pulsing throat had never been brighter. His tail-tip vibrated suddenly with intense feeling. "Professor, I have a good chart, and I can think. But more, I have my greatest pleasure in your company. May I fertilize your eggs?" The golden eyes looked at him calmly. She reached out and An Informal  Irreverent Sc lance Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Issue ## features an interview with Kelly Freas. "The Vivisector" -- a review column by rising-star Darrell Schweitzer. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" -- Alter running rampant on a field of bloody books. "Angel Fear" -- an sf  fantasy art review column by Freff. Plus -- whatever comes in from irregular columnists: John Brunner, Ted White, Richard Lupoff, George Warren And: a new feature -- "Alien Thoughts" as an extended editor's diary, by Richard E. Geis. Quarterlysample I year # two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I I touched him lightly with one graceful, clawed hand, but she could not prevent the excited quivering of her own tail-tip. "I have thought of it, Vibran. But there would have to be more. I would want a Permanent Companionship, not a Limited Friendship. Does your thinking include a commitment so large?" "I would have nothing less," he said promptly. "The entire planet will envy me." She now saw no reason to conceal her admiration. Her beautiful eyes swept him from flared crest to quivering tail-tip. "When the planet sees you as I do now, it will envy me as well." He took a stride and stood beside her. With sudden shyness she turned toward the screen. "Your Large One is doing something purposeful in the shadow of the Rock. What is it?" "Each day he does that. He is bringing stones, as large as he can lift, and making a pile by the Rock. By standing on the pile he reaches food higher than any of them ever have before. It is another example of his thinking. I'm sure he never stops." "You are drawing conclusions on too little data again, Vibran. Give me other evidence." He adjusted the screen. "See the green plant rising above the boulder? It is a date palm, and he is responsible for it. As you know, this stretch of desert almost never has rain. The hardiest cacti won't grow here. But there are quick-growing desert annuals, tiny little plants which germinate, grow, flower and seed in a few days, that have persisted in the sand all these many years. "One brief shower will provide enough moisture for their life cycles. You may not have known, but some fifty days ago there was a shower here. The whole region was colorful when the little plants bloomed. And somehow, from somewhere, there was a dormant date seed that germinated. "It should have died. But I found that he was watering it! Each night he gave it a bowlful. Now it's so large it gets four bowls. And he no longer steals it from the Pool at night. He takes it openly, in the cool morning, and no one dares stop him. He has learned that the Pool will stay full, no matter how much water is used." She nodded her head with appreciation. "Is there more?" "Another thing. It may be the most important of all. Over in the shadow of that red boulder there is a very old Man. Each day the Large One brings him food, and water from the Pool. Always before, when they could no longer get their own nourishment, they died." "Responsibility," the Professor said slowly. "Responsibility for a fellow being. Yes, that could be very important indeed."    The Old One lay comfortably in the shadow of his boulder. He had had his food. A bowl of cool water rested on his ancient knees, and from time to time he took a reviving sip. His pale eyes, dimmer each day, watched as the Large One toiled at the now massive pyramid of stones beside the Rock. Each day he had built it higher. Each day he had gathered food scales from a new space on the Rock, a space no other being had ever reached. Always, when the Large One climbed to the top of his pile of stones, he stood for a minute, resting, and looking out across the sand. The One One knew that the young eyes were seeing the dark shadowy masses where the sand ended, the beginning of another world. The Old One dreamed. He had often dreamed of that other world, where there might be coolness and much water and many green things. And he knew that the Large One, from his lofty perch, could see more clearly than he ever had. "He has greater vision than I have had. He sees farther. His will be a better world." The Old One murmured gently to himself. A contented smile grew on the gray, wrinkled face. The skinny old fingers loosened their grip on the water bowl. The dim eyes closed. And peacefully the Old One died.  Editorial continued from p. # technology construct orbiting cities in Earth's Lagrangian Points; our own Dr. J.E. Pournelle reported in the September '# issue of Galaxy how we can, with present technology, proceed to terraform Venus; and Dr. Howard L. Forward, Senior Scientist of Hughes Laboratories will be featured in the next issue of Galaxy in an article in which he claims it is time to begin construction of unmanned probes to the nearer stars. Hmm...perhaps the best word with which to replace 'earth' would be 'universe.' "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the universe..." Could that be what God was getting at? Frankly it seems more in scale, as it were, with the Lord of Creation, than his telling us that we must breed and breed and breed on this one lonely little planet until we have converted its entire mass to human flesh! There is a point to all this, by the way: anyone who both believes in the Old Testament and accepts the validity of the foregoing argument must consider himself as divinely instructed to do all in his power to further the progress of humankind into Space. That means he must do all in his power to further the development of our space capabilities, and that he must resist and defy any person, process or philosophy that acts to the detriment of that goal. For example: conservationism when carried to the extreme of halting technological (not industrial) development; or, at the other end of the spectrum, land-rape or other misuse of resources in such fashion as to detract from the ability of the environment to support an energy-intensive civilization; and then, of course, there's birth control. The single greatest threat to a technology capable of "replenishing the universe" is over-population; if we double this planet's population just one more time we may not be able to afford the technologicaleconomic effort required to get into Space. Therefore, just as when a man of the Middle Ages took the Cross he was given absolution for all sins, mortal or venal, that he had ever committed or would commit while on crusade, or as in World War II when an American soldier of the Roman Catholic Faith was allowed meat on Friday, so too should all persons fully committed to the goal of getting the human race into Space be given dispensation to practice family planning. Of course for those who do not make their home on Planet Earth, the injunction will hold full force: be fruitful and multiply! So. It would seem that man has received his Marching Orders, indeed has been in receipt of them for several thousand years -- but is only now capable of truly understanding and implementing them. Or, in the idiom of that earlier Crusade, Te Veulnt -- God wills it! -- Baen Newkirk Ave., Bklyn., NY #. Paperbacks out of print. Send wants. James McCrae, # Buttonwood, Citrus Heights, Calif. #. lithic ruins, dinosaurs, Bermuda Triangle. #. 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Murphy, Subscriptions Dept Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor Elaine Will, Assistant Editor Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor James Baen, Editor A story of endings, beginnings -- and a vast sea-change... The trouble with attempting to artificially control any natural phenomenon is that no matter how rigorous your methodology you may still overlook some vital factor. And when the phenomenon in question is human genetics... Though they moved at will through the stream of time and could alter the very structure of reality, still they were not at all like gods. The world had changed and he had not: the story of Douglas Bent, Jr.'s last stand. Broadhead finally got up the courage to take a trip -- and "came up empty." He has only one option, now... tories' Senior Scientist offers some design parameters and practical proposals for beginning work on interstellar probes -- now! the money and a place to pend it from and I will move the World, " saith Jerry! The initial returns: Geis #, Alter #, and # "don't know." Dick is in a funk. Letters from Amsbury, Levin, Day, Klotz, Stern, Greywace, Villani. Where to find it. Interior illustrations by DiFate, Fabian, Freff, Gaughan, Sternbach Errata; the front cover of the December issue shows the names of Robert L. Forward and Gordon Ekiund. Both of these gentlemen appear in the March and not the December issue. Galaxy very much regrets the error. of Univsrsal Publishing A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-issue subscription: # In U.S... # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. SecoraJ elasa postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responslblltty for unsolicited material. All stories printed m this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persona Is cokicldental. 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He did not introduce himself. "Hi, my name's Liz Devlin. New World News Service. I believe Professor Eastlake is expecting me?" "Sure," the man said. "And you are -- " "Sorry. My name's Don. Don Carus. As you can see. I'm not used to meeting new people. Down below we're all used to knowing each other." Suddenly self-conscious, he tucked his T-shirt into his jeans. "Don't you ever go on land?" Liz asked. "Not very often." She climbed the metal steps to the hatch of the sub. When she got to the top, she stopped and looked out on the gleaming tropical sea. "Hey," she exclaimed, pointing to starboard. "Are those porpoises?" "Yes," Don said. "Tursiops truncatus -- the bottlenose dolphin." "Why are they swimming in a circle?" "They're sleeping. This particular group does that all the time. They keep their right eyes open for about ten minutes, and then change position and keep only their left eyes open. Only half of their brains are asleep at any one time, and they can all keep watch." "No kidding?" "No, I watch them a lot. There are a lot of porpoises around here. They're almost a nuisance." "Are you a marine biologist?" she asked. "Computer programmer," he replied. "But the sea's my real love." "How many of you are there down below?" Liz asked, climbing into the cabin. "About two hundred," Don said as he stooped over to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. "But they're building some new domes to accommodate more. Have a seat." The contour chairs faced a curved glass window that looked out into the shimmering light of the ocean. Behind these seats were four metre, obviously for passengers. Don strapped the luggage onto a chromium rack set to one side. "How long can you stay with us?" he asked. "A couple of weeks," she said. "After that. I'm scheduled to cover the latest war in South Africa." "You get around," Don said. "I try to." Don pulled a lever on the control pa.nel of the vehicle. A hiss of compressed air told her that the hatch had just closed. "Don," she said, "answer one question now, before we go down there?" "Sure. Fire away." "What is going on? Why did Eastlake call this 'a matter of world concern'? I thought this was just an archaeological expedition." "I'm not authorized to tell you any details," he said. "I haven't been told all of them myself. But what would you say if I told you that this expedition has turned up evidence that there were humans -- or at least creatures that were structurally indistinguishable from ourbefore we thought?" "I'd say you were crazy." "So would the people who funded this project. That's why Eastlake wanted you to come." Don pushed in the steering wheel and the sub tilted forty-five degrees nose down. Below them, in the dark green waters of the depths, Liz saw a cluster of glowing lights. She clutched the arms of her chair as they plunged downward from the gleaming surface. "Living in three instead of two dimensions takes a little getting used to," Don said as he noticed her discomfort. "After a while, you'll get accustomed to thinking in terms of depth as well as distance." "What's the pressure like down there?" "The Center was built one hundred feet down off the main island. Actually, we're living on an underwater mountainside. The pressure of the water is about four atmospheres, but inside the domes you won't feel it at all because they're kept at surface pressure." "Don't you ever feel uneasy when you think of all that water above your heads?" "No, I love the sea." "I don't know if I could live here," she said. "For any length of time, I mean. I think I'd mind being cut off from the rest of the world for very long." "See that cable?" Don said, pointing to a long thread that extended from one of the domes up through the twilit water to the surface. "That's our umbilical cord to the rest of the world -- or what's left of it. It leads to the dish antenna you saw beside the dock. Our radio and TV network is linked via that antenna to the satellite communication system." "I see," Liz said. "Frankly, there are times I feel like cutting that cable." The points of light Liz had seen from the surface now towered over her like huge glowing mushrooms. She could see people moving around inside the glass domes; large globes of light at the top of the structures provided the necessary illumination. In front of the colony of glass bubbles, wayward schools of fish glided by like silver clouds. Don guided the miniature submarine to a port located at the bottom of one of the domes. Doors closed behind them; air jetted in as the water drained through grids in the floor. "Here we are," Don announced. "Welcome to Atlantis II."    "I'm sure our hbme audience would like to know the significance of your find, Professor Eastlake. Would you elaborate on that a bit?" The gray-haired man sitting between the panelists sat forward in his chair. He looked ancient and fragile under the blue-white lights. "I hesitate to draw conclusions," he said slowly and dramatically, "when all the evidence is not yet in. Months -- no, years -- of careful study and evaluation will have to follow this excavation before we can say exactly what message these findings hold for mankind. But I can tell you this; we have already learned that all our previous views on human pre-history will have to be discarded. There is no doubt that these hominid remains are genuine, and that they date from at least the late Cretaceous period -- roughly ago." "Professor," one of the panelists said, "excuse me for interrupting, but we have had hoaxes before. Like the famous Piltdown man at the beginning of the twentieth century." "Are you accusing me of perpetrating a hoax?" Eastlake demanded sharply. His questioner did not reply. Nervous whispers filled the auditorium. Don and Liz stood at the back of the large rooms and watched the interview. Heavy cables connecting TV cameras to tape decks snaked across the floor under their feet. "I didn't want you to miss the panel discussion," Don said. "I'll show you to your room later." "Who's on the panel?" Liz asked. "Untrustworthy media," Don said. "The only news service Eastlake trusts is 'The New World.' He'll tell you more than he's telling those barracudas. But he won't tell you everything, I guarantee." "Why not?" "He says he doesn't want the news to be sensationalized, but frankly I think he's just milking this thing for all the drama it's worth." "I don't like secrecy," Liz said. "Professor Eastlake," one of the panelists asked, breaking the embarrassed silence, "you say these remains date from the Cretaceous period. Assuming they're genuine, as you insist, what kind of world did this distant ancestor of ours live in?" "It was a world," Eastlake replied stiffly, "similar to ours in many respects, and yet startlingly different in others. First, the late dinosaurs had all but died out by the time of our earliest humanoid. The climate was growing steadily cooler. The flying reptiles of the Jurassic had evolved into creatures closely resembling modem birds. The swamplands that had sustained the dinosaurs were receding. Angiosperms had spread rapidly all over the earth. Much of the landscape must have looked strangely modem: specimens of maple, birch, and poplar have been found in many strata dating from this time. There were also early rabbits, turtles, and frogs." "Paul," the one panelist said to the other, "geology is up your alley. Why don't you take it from here?" "Glad to, Frank," the other replied. "Professor, how does continental drift fit into the picture?" "Is this whole thing going to be televised?" Liz asked Don. "Through most of the world satellite-corn network. Eastlake never had so much glory. Look at him; he's eating it up. By the way, do you play chess?" "What?" "Chess. Do you play?" "No." "How about backgammon?" "No." "Do you play at all?" "Shh. I want to hear the discussion." "Then the continents looked pretty much the way they do today?" the panelist asked. "Pretty much," Eastlake said. "Gondwana had broken into what we now call South America and Africa earlier, during the Jurassic. They may still have been connected at their northern extremity at this time, however. Also, North America and Europe were much closer together than they are now. It is my personal opinion that the Canary islands, where we are now located, were formed earlier than anyone has thought. Thanks to the underwater excavation techniques developped by Schaffer and Roth during the last five years, we've been able to investigate underwater beds previously inaccessible. Geologic dating has determined the age of these mountainous structures to be late Cretacean. The division of the super-continents into the separate plates caused much volcanic activity all over the planet. Judging from our recent evidence, the volcanic activity that formed these mountains was then followed by a very gradual subsidence. The small piece of continent comprising the homeland of our earliest human-like creature began to sink into the sea." "What happened then. Professor?" one of the panelists asked. "What became of this species of so-called man? Why hasn't evidence of his existence been found anywhere else?" "That, gentlemen," the old man said earnestly, "is the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. We cannot say for sure." "Could the sinking of the land have caused them to die out?" "How many of them were there, Professor?" "Could they have been limited to this vicinity?" "Gentlemen, please, one question at a time," Eastlake said, holding up his hands in mock-surrender. "First, we have found only one specimen so far -- part of a jawbone. We have no idea how many there were. Second, we have no idea yet whether these proto-humans wer in a direct line of evolution to us or not. Last, we don't know what happened to these creatures. Volcanic upheaval could have killed them off, the sinking of the land could have gradually flooded all the fertile land and destroyed all the plants and game that they fed on. It's still too early to say. At this very moment a team of archaeologists is out there searching for more data. When we discover more, we'll tell you. Have no fear about that." "Professor," one of the panelists called out as the old man stood up to leave. "Professor, back in the #'s, fossils, and I believe even meteorites, were found that had traces of certain protein molecules on them. Now, viruses are basically proteins, am I correct?" "Yes." "Is there any chance that one of the specimens you're unearthing could still carry traces of a virus that maybe wiped out the entire population of these early humans?' ' Eastlake smiled. "If you're suggesting that we may be unleashing an ancient plague on the earth once more, the answer is no." "Is that a definite 'no' "? "The chances of that happening Now if you'll excuse me, I see our half-hour is up and I have some very pressing matters to attend to."    "This is your room," Don said, opening the door. Liz walked in and looked around. It was surprisingly spacious; before coming here, she had pictured the dome's living quarters as being stuffy and cramped, like the rooms in old-fashioned submarines. "Eastlake will be able to talk with you in a couple hours. Are you hungry?' ' "No, thanks," she said. "See you later then." He shut the door behind him as he left. Liz sat down on the edge of the bed and extracted her camera from her travel case. It was clear to her that something strange was going on here, and Don looked like a good source of information. She adjusted the camera for the light level in the room and took a picture. It was a sterile-looking room. The few pieces of furnishing looked like they had been purchased from an economy motel; small dresser, wall TV, glossy Kodachrome print of a meadow full of red poppies. Suddenly she realized why the room was so bare; all the furniture had been brought laboriously from the surface, piece by piece. The far ing the cord that hung at one end she discovered ifiat it was a window -- a picture-window overlooking the undersea mountainside. She could see some of the other domes farther down the slope, glowing yellow-green in the darkening sea. The domes were connected with glass passageways that extended from the large main-dome like spokes on a wheel. For a brief moment she felt an almost overwhelming sense of peace as she stood there looking out into the sea. It was so quiet there, so unbelievably quiet. The horrors and wars of the surface suddenly seemed as far away as the dark side of the moon. Here she felt protected. It was not an unpleasant feeling.    Eastlake's study looked like a bomb had gone off in a bookcase; piles of computer print-outs, books, and boxes of meticulously tagged artifacts cluttered every available surface. Liz sat on a leather chair by the Professor's large desk and took some pictures. A large tile mosaic filled the wall behind the desk. She had to use a wide-angle lens to get all of it in the viewfinder. "That mosaic looks like pictures I've seen of the ruins of Crete," she said. "The palace of Minos," Don said, "at Knossos. It was copied from one there. Eastlake liked the dolphin motif. Do you know a lot about archaeology?' ' Liz shook her head. "Only what I see on TV." "Good for you. It's all a pack of lies anyway." "Why so cynical?" Liz asked. "Don't you believe in the project?" "If there's anything that this project's proved it's that archaeology's a pack of lies, a house of cards built on guesses made about a couple old bones and pieces of pottery. When a new piece of bone is discovered that doesen't agree with realize we had it wrong all along." "That's the way science is," Liz sa. "You know that." "All I can say is, it's a hell of a way to make a living." "You sound like one of the DoNothings up on dry land," Liz said with a note of revulsion. "Yeah, well don't act so superior. They have a point." "Oh, sure," Liz exclaimed, "they're wonderful people -- doing nothing but sitting around and watching tri-D TV, going to parties and drinking themselves to death -- " "Sounds good to me," Don interjected. "Come to think of it, that's exactly what this place needs -- a party. Let's have a masquerade; we'll all come as our favorite fish." "How can you talk like this? You, one of the few people in the world privileged to work on this project!" ' 'I could wear nothing but a sprig of parsley and a slice of lemon and come as a haddock dinner -- ' ' "You're helping to broaden the horizons of knowledge." "Hey, save that for your news service. I don't buy it." Don walked over to the w indo w .His face looked gaunt in the greenish light. "We're just talking about making more guesses," he said slowly. "And time is running out, in case you've forgotten." "But -- " "You must be Liz Devlin," aman's voice said behind them. Liz recognized Professor Eastlake. He was carrying an armload of printouts and was wearing a spotless white labcoatand a red-and-black striped tie. "Liz," Don said, rising. "Let me introduce you to the High Lama. Professor Eastlake, Liz Devlin of the New World News Service. Liz Devlin, Professor Eastlake. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a program to run." He nodded to the ftofessor and left. "What's with him?" Liz asked. "Hard to say," Eastlake said, shaking his head. "He's a strange bird." "Why do you keep him on?" she asked. "He must be pretty disruptive for the project." "We have no choice," the Professor said , sitting behind his desk ." He' s a genius, and our chief of computer operations. You've heard of Von Aachen's lobe?" " Yes, " Liz said ," the enlarged area of the cortex of the brain. He has that?" "Yes," Eastlake said, "for betteror worse. I'm not convinced that mutation accounts for his intelligence , but it may account for his instability." "But he's a genius?" "Oh, yes," Eastlake said wearily, "and besides, when he began writing the programs for our system here he used a computer language of his own invention. Since he does his work adequately and it would be very expensive to duplicate his initial programs, he effectively secured his job." "I don't care what he is," Liz said, "I don't like him. He's too cynical." "Well," Eastlake said, smoothing back his wiry white hair, "these are cynical times. Speaking of which, what's the latest from above? I haven't had time to watch the news for weeks." "Nothing's changed," Liz said, taking her tape recorder from her purse. "Things are as bad as they've always been. Maybe a bit worse." "More riots?" "All the time. They're not even news anymore. Another famine has broken out in North Africa. This one may be the worst yet." "I see," he said, nodding gravely. ' 'The thing that bothers me. Professor, is that a lot of capable people are no tion." "You can't blame them." "I can blame them," Liz said. "I don't believe it's ever too late to find answers." "Yes," Eastlake replied, "yes, of course." "But, Professor," she continued, "I'm here to talk to you about your project. Do you mind if I record our conversation?" "No, go ahead." She placed the small machine on the desk between them and turned it on. "Professor Eastlake; just what is it you've found here and why do you think it's so important?" ' ' Let me the old man began ," answer the second part of your question first. Why do I think it's important? You might as well ask: why do I think archaeology's important. I will tell you. It is the only branch of science which studies interrelationships between human beings and the rest of the planet over long periods of time. And we have to know these things in order to understand what is happening to us now and what will happen in the future . This has always been important knowledge , and I don ' t ha ve to tell you how much more important it's become in the last few decades. Now, as for what we've found: it is nothing less than conclusive evidence that there were human-like beings on this earth That's sixty times earlier than was previously thought." "Professor, if that's true, it turns everything we've ever thought about our origins upside-down. Our subscribers will want to know why evidence like this hasn't come to light before." "Come to light," Eastlake repeated, "that's the key phrase. The evidence had simply not seen the light of day before this -- literally. Before we can study relics orremains, we have to find them. On land they may be turned up accidentally , say during road excavation, or they may be brought to light by the gradual erosion of a stream. But we do have to find it. And that is no easy job." He rubbed his hands together as he spoke. The thick lenses of his glasses focused the glow of the overhead lamp into half-moons of light on his cheeks. "Geologists at the Center here stumbled across some artifacts -- " "Artifacts!" Liz interrupted. "You mean like tools or weapons? I didn't know -- ' ' "I'll explain that in time. Miss Devlin. Please. Geologists found these things accidently, while they were looking for undersea mineral deposits. Thanks to special techniques developed only in the last twenty years, we were then able to commence a careful and methodical excavation of this site. That excavation is proceeding at this very moment. We have teams of highly trained people working around the clock with mini subs and scuba gear." "Around the clock?" "Time is precious." ' 'But professor, it seems to me that some traces of these early humans would ha ve been found before . I mean , fossils dating back to earlier periods have been found all over the world, haven't they?" "True," Eastlake said, "but don't take these fossils for granted. Think of the enormous amount of time we're talking about. Think of it -- sixty million years! It's amazing that anything survives that long, isn't it -- considering the changes the earth goes through , all the tectonic forces it ' s subjected to. Also, don't forget that it takes very special conditionstocreatea fossil . They're almost always found in beds of rock formed from soft marshland or the soft ooze that settled on the floors of the early inland .seas. If a variety of creature once lived only on the rocky slopes of mountains it's very possible that no fossil record was ever left." "You're saying that's the case here?" "All I can give you now is theories. Another theory is that these early homonids were few in number, and limited in geographical distribution. If that's the case, then the probability of anyone finding a trace of them sixty indeed. Especially if they cremated their dead .which they probably did . ' ' "That's right. I forgot." ' 'There might be some traces of carbon and other organic chemicals in the soil," he added, "but these would be very hard to detect and evaluate." "But tell me this. Professor, did we evolve from these early men?" "Oh, no, highly unlikely. They were too early." -- Los Angeles Times By Harlan Ellison Ellison's most dazzling collection: masterful stories of myth and terror, fantasy and reality. # Dell Publishing Co., Inc. # E. #th Street New York, N.Y. # "Modem man didn't appear until "Judging by the evidence collected so far," Eastlake said cautiously. ' Then how did these early humans have time to develop way back then? Why did it take modem man so long to evolve?" "Well, you know, simple duration of time isn't the only factor involved with evolution. There are a lot of factors which are only vaguely understood. Take the cockroach, for example; this insect has been on the earth practically since the beginning of life, and it's hardly changed at all up to the present time." "Professor, you mentioned artifacts. What exactly are these artifacts?" Eastlake thought for a moment before replying. The turning wheels of the recorder collected only the hushed whisper of the air conditioning as the old man stared at his desk. Finally he looked at her. "I haven't told this to anyone from the outside yet. I felt the time wasn't right. But I trust you and your service to handle it carefully . The first object that was found turned out to be something resembling the blade of a knife. It was covered with concretion, and looked like a lump of fossil coral. The proton magnetometer, however, indicated that it contained metal , and X-raying it later revealed the object inside. I have it here." He opened a drawer of the desk , and produced a small piece of metal. "Amazing," Liz said as he handed it to her. "It is a knife blade. That means these early men were intelligent. That's incredible!" "Be careful with that word 'intelligent,' " Eastlake warned. "I called you here because your news service has a reputation for sobriety. I don't want a lot of cranks on the surface to start braying 'Atlantis! Atlantis!' As far as I'm concerned that whole business is just a myth recorded by Plato from some bronze-age folk tales about the continent of America. Nothing more." "Professor, just what kind of metal is this knife made from?' ' ' ' Steel , Miss Devlin . That artifact is    It was late, and the lounge was empty except for Liz. She paced back and forth, haunted by insomnia, while all but the night shift of divers slept . What Don had said about Eastlake bothered her; Eastlake's bickering with Don bothered her. The place in general seemed to be overshadowed by some vague fear, and the excitement of discovery was diluted by this shadow . She could sense that not all was right. The TV flickered on the wall. The last person to leave the room had forgotten to turn it off. A news program about the surface was going on unnoticed. Early the next morning, Liz was awakened by the sound of running footsteps in the hall. Groggy from practically no sleep, she dressed as fat as she could and grabbed her camera. Out in the hall she spotted Don. He was wearing blue jeans and looked like he hadn't shaved in a couple of days. "Hey, what'sgoing on?" she called out to him. ' 'The last team of divers brought in a lot of artifacts," he said. "Come on. I'll show you the lab." "I thought you weren't interested in this 'serious' work," she said, walking briskly beside him. "Anything to break the monotony," he said. "Even work. Besides, I have to run the statistical programs." Te lab was crowded with dozens of people, each intent on a different task. Eastlake sat at a long table, bent over a stereo microscope. An assistant was holding what looked like a piece of rock against the rotating blade of a circular saw. "Don," Eastlake called out, "it's about time you got here. Would it be asking too much for you to do yourjob? We need some statistics analyzed." "Right away," Don said, saluting. He walked over to a computer terminal and started to key some directions. "Mr. Hsiung," Eastlake said, "do you have that thin-section ready yet?' ' The man at the saw shook his head. "It'll be a couple minutes yet." Not wanting to get in the way, Liz walked quietly around the room and took some pictures. In a few moments, she felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Don. "How about some coffee?" he asked. "Yeah, sure. I'd love some." He handed her a chipped china cup full of rich-looking coffee. It smelled great. "It's real," he said. "How'd you manage that?" she asked, taking a sip. "Government research has its privileges." "What do you think of the lab?" "I'm impressed." "All paid for by people who haven't the faintest idea what it's being used for." He drank some coffee. Behind him lights on one of the computer consoles were blinking on and off in shifting patterns of red and green. "What's it doing?" she asked him. "Statistical analysis of the position where the latest artifacts were found," he replied. "The position of each was measured against a wire grid by the divers and recorded on a waterproof slate. This information was encoded on tape and fed into the memory banks a little while ago. I Just had it start a program to determine whether the distribution of these objects was random or not." "What will that tell?" "It'll tell us whether the objects came from the same time period, or whether the site has been contaminated by shifting in the bedding planes." "What exactly are these artifacts they found?" Liz asked him. "Bricks," he said. "Looks like part of a foundation."   The two of them floated in the green waterover the excavation site. They watched the soft light that filtered down from the surface play on the reef below. The divers, in their black wetsuits, looked like tadpoles. "I'm glad you could take me to the site," Liz said, staring out the window of the mini-sub. "Don't mention it," Don said. "What are they doing now?" "See that machine off to the right?" He pointed to a rather large machine bristling with hoses and pipes. It made a pinging noise in the sub's sonar, like the sound of moving pistons or gears. Liz looked at it and nodded. "That's what makes underwater excavation like this possible. It's basically a pump; it's connected to a fine matrix of pipes bedded around the trench they're digging. It siphons off the turbidity raised by the trowels." "Do you think they'll come across any more human remains?" "We may find something. Who time." "Isn't it strange," Liz said, "that they've dug all those trenches and found only a couple of bricks and a piece of bone." Don shrugged. "Hey, look. There's one of my friends." "Who -- " And then Liz saw the dolphin off the port side. It shot over the excavation site and made playful circles over the heads of the divers. "You mean that porpoise?" Liz asked. "The divers have given him the name 'Diomedes.' You can tell him from the others by the little nick taken out of his dorsal fin. His real name is 'Ikikee.' " "What do mean 'his real name?' " "That's what he calls himself," Don said. "A little while back I was trying to talk to it over sonar. I kept saying 'Don' and it kept repeating the sound 'Ikikee' over and over. When I finally said 'Ikikee' over the sonar, it replied with a sound that roughly approximated 'Don.' I assumed 'Ikikee' was his name." "That's ridiculous." "They're smart critters," he said. "Don't sell them short." "The navy gave up their dolphin experiments long ago," Liz said. "They concluded they were no more intelligent than dogs." "If a human judges intelligence, he's going to use himself as a model. If a dog judges intelligence, he's going to use himself as a model. The navy researchers didn't find intelligence in dolphins simply because they were looking for the wrong thing." "Oh, I see," Liz said sarcastically"You don't believe me?" "I didn't say that." "You know their brains are about the size of ours, with the same complicated neural exchanges we associate with abstract reasoning." "If they're so smart," Liz said, "why are they still doing nothing but swimming around and eating fish?" "What would you like them to do?" Don smiled. "Well, something -- something creative." "They have creative play. And they have a complex social organization and a lot of sensitivity to each other. Look at Dcikee there trying to relate to that diver." The dolphin was nudging one of the archaeologists with his snout, and then bolting away, as though trying to start up a game. "Look at him," Don said. "See how he's trying to communicate?" "Just like a dog with a rubber bone," Liz replied. "You just haven't lived with them long enough. Just wait til you've been down here a while. You'll see how human they are. So human it's almost scary." "Eastlake told me you were spending too much time with these pets of yours. I believe him." "Oh, yeah?" Well Eastlake could tell you a few things about dolphins too, if he wanted to." "What is that supposed to mean?" Liz said with the sharp edge of a reporter's voice. "Nothing," Don said. "No, come on. Why did you say that?" "He's had some interesting experiences with them, that's all. You can't help interacting with them here because you live among them. Eastlake just doesn't like talking about them because he's secretly afraid they're smarter than he is." Liz laughed. "Want to hear a story?" Don asked. "About what?" "About a near cousin of our fiiend here -- the orca." "Orca?" "The so-called killer whale." "Sure, go ahead." Don sat back in his seat and rested his hands behind his head. He looked off into the miles of water as he spoke. "The Indians of. the Northwest have a lot of stories about whales. One of them goes like this: once -- not too long ago -- a couple Indians were out fishing a little distance off. shore. It was growing late, a cold wind was blowing off the sea, and they were growing restless. It was then that they spotted an orca swimming not far away. Out of boredom as much as anything else, they paddled closer to the gleaming black and white body of the creature. When they got within a hundred feet of the orca, one of the Indians threw one of the stones they used for weighting their nets at the whale. It hit the orca on the dorsal fin, and the whale then plunged under water and headed toward land. A little later these same Indians saw smoke from a campfire trailing from the shore. They grew curious about it, and went in to investigate. There they saw a large canoe near where the orca had been headed. A giant of a man sat by a fire and glared at them. 'Why did you throw stones at me?' the man asked. 'You damaged my canoe. Go into the forest and get some bark to fix it.' The Indians did as the giant directed, and when they had patched the hole in the canoe, the man told them to hide their eyes while he left. After a few minutes had gone by, however, the Indians took their hands away from their eyes and saw the man leaving in his canoe. As he got beyond the breakers, they saw him no more. All they saw was a large orca heading out to sea." During the pause that followed the story, a gentle swell rocked the sub. "It's a nice story," Liz said. "And a very common one," Don added. "Examples of it have been collected among peoples all over the world. Some tribes in Alaska still carve figurines that show a man inside a whale's belly." "Jonah," Liz said in a tone of recognition. "It's one of mankind's oldest stories," Don said. "The origins of it are lost in the stone age." Liz looked out the window again. "Look," she said suddenly. "One of the divers is holding something."   "It's a skull!" Eastlake announced, clasping his hands together in triumph. "We've finally got something people will take seriously." He walked over to his desk and pressed a button on the intercom. "Tell Winters to bring in the skull. I want to brief Miss Devlin on the latest developments in our search . ' ' Liz took out her recorder and placed it on the desk. "At last I can tell your readers something worth listening to," he said. "This is what Don and I saw unearthed this afternoon?" "Yes," Eastlake said. "It was found in the same bedding plane as the other artifacts. Our preliminary tests confirm the geologic dating. It old, plus or minus a thousand years." "What do your tests consist of?" Liz asked. "You really want the details?" "In layman's language," Liz said. "Our subscribers will want to know everything." "Okay," the Professor began, sitting down, "here is what we've done. We used several dating methods. One, the fission-track technique, can date materials such as certain types of glass and crystalline minerals accurately for ages beyears. In short, what happens is this: the spontaneous fission of uranium-# through time causes microscopic damage trails in these materials. The more tracks there are, you see, the older the object is. A sample of the material in question is exposed to a controlled amount of thermal neutrons. The number of tracks this produces allows us to adjust our count for the varying amounts of uranium found in different samples. Our samples here were some quartz objects -- possibly ornaments -- found near the knife blades." "Did you use carbon-# dating?" "No, no," Eastlake said, "the half-life of carbon is only about # years. So at ages beyond sixty thousand years the amount of error becomes so great that the technique is useless. Likewise, potassium-argon dating is practical project has posed special problems. Naturally, geologists have examined the materials comprising the bedding planes and established relative dating that has supported the absoThe Largest, Most Complete Star Chart It will faecinate you. Ita size? A full by faetl Hang thie noble map on your wall, then atarMJ # or # yarda away. You aee an amazing replica In deep blue of the night sky -- ahowing # atara, just about every star slg nificantly visible to the unaided eye. Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellatlonsi This dramatic reproduction of the heavens is a distinguished work of art and is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. 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Though the Jaw didn't belong to this same skull, thetwo are about the same age. The greater the length of time bones remain in groundwater laden with fluorine ions, the higher the percentage of fluorine in the fossil." "Professor," Liz said, "how large a brain did this early human have?" "The cranial cavity of this specimen indicates... ah, here's Winters with the thing now." A young man came up to the desk holding something that looked like a brown sfone. "Hello, Miss Devlin." "I understood you're from the press." "Hello," Liz said. "Put the skull there," Eastlake said, pointing to a clearing he had made on the desk. "The cranial cavity of this specimen indicates that its brain must have weighed about # grams. The average weight for a modern human brain is about #." "Does that mean this creature was more intelligent than we are?" Liz asked. "Not necessarily. Both the largest and the smallest human brains ever measured belonged to idiots." "It looks human," Liz said. "I firmly believe it was human," Eastlake said. He picked up the skull and contemplated it. Hamletlike. "But what happened to these people?" Liz asked. "Again, I cannot answer that yet," the old man said with a professorial tone of voice. There just isn't enough evidence. However, off the record -- " Liz turned off the machine. "Off the record," he continued, "I can give you some personal thoughts of my own." "Please," Liz said. Despite our similarity, I don't believe we have descended from these creatures. Evolution probably was only parallel." "Tiat do you mean?" "We seem to have evolved from Australopithecus, a small, vaguely human creature that evolved via old-world monkeys from certain prosimians at a time when they were about mid-way in their development. This was about forty covery here, the earliest near-human remains known dated from about simians first appeared a full # from the point where prosimian became ape-like and the point where we humans are now is about forty variety of yetundiscovered protoape branched off from the prosimians at the beginning of their development -- as well as in the middle -- our earliest human here would have had no less than sixty than we had." Professor," Liz asked, "could the memory of this earlier race be preserved in certain myths?" "You mean the Atlantis myth?" "And others like it -- the Golden Age myths, the Garden of Eden. Variants of it are found all over the world." "Improbable. The time span is much too great." "But if some of this race did somehow survive whatever catastophe seems to have happened to them, they might have evolved into present man. And we might have retained some racial memory of them." "So far, no conclusive evidence for racial memory has ever been produced." Liz nodded. "In fact, if you're going to speculate that wildly," Eastake continued, "You've got to consider absolutely all logical possibilities -- including the possibility that these creatures had an extra-terrestrial origin." it  Night had come to the sea. The shallows of the reef were now as black as the endless night of the abyssal plains that stretched out below them. Liz stood by a curved-glass window in the main dome and watched the alien-looking sea grass wave slowly back and forth in the glow of the underwater lamps. Suddenly, behind her, the blast of a trumpet dynamited the silence. "God, don't you hate rainy days?" Don said, fingering the valves on the trumpet. "What we need is music." "Don," Liz said calmly, "has anyone every told you you need help?" "No," Don said drunkenly, "just music." "Maybe a vacation." "Liz, want to know a secret? I like working here more than any of these... these zombies you see walking around in white coats. I get more of a kick out of it. I'll tell you that. Yessir." "I don't believe that, Don," she said. "They don't have fun with it. I do." "Oh?" "Anyway, who are you to be telling me what I like and don't "Don -- " He held the trumpet to his lips. k  ir Only one technician, a young Indian man, remained in the lab, the rest having apparently gone to dinner. He stood by a large device that looked like a huge magnet wound A quiverying waveform shifted on the screen of an oscilloscope on the bench. Liz approached him quietly from behind. "Hi," she said suddenly. "Oh!" the young man exclaimed. "You startled me." "Sorry." "That's okay." "My name's Liz Devlin. New World News." "Yes," the man said, "I saw you earlier, taking pictures." "Right. Say -- may I ask you what you're doing?" "Uh, why?" he asked. "Well, I'm interested in everything thats going on down here, but I don't know about science. Could you tell me what this instrument does? What's that thing in the magnet there, or whatever it is?" "I don't know how much I'm allowed to tell you," the technician said. "Don't worry," Liz told him. "Professor Eastlake gave me complete clearance. You can check with him if you like." "No, I believe you," he said. "By the way, what's your name? I'll need it for my article." "Govindrapali," he said. "How do you spell that?" She pretended to write the name down in her notebook as he spelled it for her. "Now, what exactly does this complicated-looking machine do?" she asked in her most naive tone of voice. "It must be very hard to use all these intricate devices." "It's a magnetmeter," he explained, pointing to the massive instrument. "I'm analyzing a piece of brick that was found at the site." "Oh, yes," Liz said, "I heard about it." "Well, you see, when clay is ftred in a kiln, it acquires what we call remnant magnetism. The particles of iron in the clay become magnetized by the earth's magnetic field where the clay is fired. This machine measures the inclination and declination of the particles in the artifact." "Really, and what does all that mean?" "Well, we have records of the inclination and declination of the earth's field all over the planet, and of how it changed through time. We got those by analyzing core samples with this same machine. That way we can tell exactly where on the earth a particular piece of clay was fired." "And have you found out where these bricks were fired?" "Um, yes," the technician said. "And that is a very curious thing." "What do you mean?" "Unless our measurements are wrong, this brick must have been made about where the continent of Asia is now. Even allowing for the drift of the continents, that would mean this brick was made far away from where it was found." "And yet it's just as old as the other artifacts?" "Oh, yes." Liz looked at him. "But that would mean that this isn't the only place where this early man lived." The technician nodded nervously. "Yes, yes, that would certainly seem to be the case."    Sitting at his desk Professor Eastlake was almost hidden by a still-growing stack of print-outs and progress reports. He was holding the phone with one hand, a chicken-salad-and kelp sandwich with the other. "More bones?" he asked with his mouth full. "Good. Don't forget to remind each diver to tag them with labels. I want the exact grid location written in waterproof ink on every fragment, every chip of pottery, every nut and bolt they dig out of the ground. Yes, that's right; if it's too small to tag, use the plastic vials. And this time have them include some soil samples with every find, in case the salt water washes off the datable material." In preparation for this session, Liz was flipping through the stack of note cards she had accumulated during her five days at the Center. collection of futurate art in the last one hundred years! # ## Eastlake put down the phone and rubbed his eyes. "Professor," she said, "You can't have had more than ten hours sleep the last three days." "Can't be helped," he said. "Now, what can I do for you?" "I'd like to know if any new evidence has turned up." "No," the old man said, "not yet." "But I heard that those bricks that were uncovered weren't made in this location." Eastlake looked at her for a moment, startled. "Oh, yes, that," he said. "Actually, I was going to get around to telling you about that later today, when more pieces were fitted into the puzzle. I hate being premature." "Of course." "Who told you that, by the way?" "What?" ' "About the bricks?" "I don't know his name," Liz lied. "Oh, well, it's very simple. They were fired somewhere in what is now Asia." "That means that there were others -- maybe all over the world." "We can't say that," Eastlake said cautiously. "They may have been just an isolated colony. In any case, it does seem that our earliest man -- let's call him archaeohomo -- did do a bit of travelling in the late Cretaceous." "Were these bricks part of the foundation of a building?" "Maybe not a foundation. Probably part of a building, though." "Professor, if these people had the means of travel why didn't they just move to another area instead of dying out as they apparently did?" "Impossible to say now," the Professor said. "There may have been no other suitable areas for various reasons, or it could be that by the time it became necessary for them to migrate they had lost whatever technology they had had. Also, don't forget; the more complex a society is, the harder it is to move it. People living in tents or caves have no trouble being nomadic. Think how hard it would be to move any modern urban capital. The truth is, we may never know exactly what happened to them." "What else have you found out?" "We know that the climate of this area was then mild. The temperature of the sea averaged about seventy degrees." "Professor, how in God's name can you know that?" "Again, by a method perfected back in the sixties -- oxygen isotope analysis. You see, in sea water we have measurable quantities of two kinds of oxygen isotope -- #i# and #i#. #i#, being heavier, naturally doesn't evaporate as fast as the Oie for any given temperature. By measuring the ratio of #i# and Oie left in fossil shells, we can determine within a few degrees what the ancient temperature of the sea in which they formed was. It's a lot easier to explain than it is to do, but the procedure is very reliable." Liz was busily taking notes. "Furthermore," he continued, "we know that, ecologically, this area was similar to what it is now. We have been extremely lucky in finding some fossil pollen -- enough to do a rough sort of statistical analysis. We know that approximately a third of the surrounding land area was covered with various kinds of conifers. About a third was covered with a variety of grains. Most of the traces are unrecognizable, but at least one looks like a forerunner of modem barley. It's a good guess that they practised some cultivation, although, judging from the bone remains in their middens, their main diet seems to have been fish. The other third of the land must have been bare rock or deciduous trees." "And they knew how to make steel." "Yes," Eastlake said, "and that means they had some source of high energy." "Coal?" "No, too early. What it could have been we have yet to determine; we've uncovered no lead deposits that would suggest ancient uranium usage. We just don't know."    Liz set her tray down beside a young woman wearing a white uniform. The cafeteria was noisy; sound seemed to reflect off the curved ceiling and focus in the center of the room, amplifying background conversation into a roar. "Hi," she said to the woman. "Mind if I sit here?" "No, go ahead." "I see you're a nurse," Liz said, sitting down beside her. "Yes. I work in the clinic. You're that reporter, aren't you?" Liz nodded. "Liz Devlin." "I'm Anne Sloane." Liz opened the container of yogurt she had chosen for lunch and began to stir it. "It's synthetic," Anne said. "The yogurt?" "They make all the food here, from algae." "I see." "It's not bad, though." "Anne, what's it like working here?" Liz asked informally. "Does the clinic handle a lot of cases? Are there many accidents?" "No," the woman said, sipping what looked like lemonade. "Once in a while a diver will need decompression. Most of them are archaeologists, you know. Some hadn't had a lot of diving experience before they started to work on the project. Now and then one of them gets the bends." "How do you like living down here?" "I sort of like it," she said. "I don't think I'd like to spend the rest of my life here, but for a while it's okay." "What don't you like about it?" "Oh, I don't know," Anne shrugged. "I guess I miss the movies most of all. They show movies here but most of them are pretty old. It's kind of like a summer camp, you know? Did you ever go to one of those when you were a kid?" "But there's TV here," Liz said. "Oh, sure. But I like going out, you know what I mean? Another thing is -- I know this isn't really important -- but people down here are pretty dull. They don't like going to parties much or anything. Except Don." "Don Cams?" "Yeah, I like Don." Liz looked at her. "Nothing,you know, romantic or anything," Anne added quickly. "He's just fun to be with. In fact, he's the only person down here I can have a good time with." "Really?" "Yeah. The others... they always seem to be thinking about something. There's always something on their minds. You know what I mean?" Liz nodded. "Don and Professor Eastlake seem to argue a lot," Liz added, watching Anne's eyes carefully for a reaction. "Oh, yes, it's terrible," Anne said with genuine concern. "It makes us all feel very uncomfortable sometimes." "Does Don have a bad temper?" "I guess both of them do. They're both very smart." "I see." "I respect Professor Eastlake a lot," Anne continued, "but he's... he's -- " "Stuffy?" Liz said. "Yes," Anne nodded. "He's always calling Don a Do-Nothing." "Is he?" "Maybe," she said. "But then, he's here, isn't he? That means something. And they say there's not much that can be done to save things anyway, you know. That's a fact. I guess I'm sort of a DoNothing myself; I want to have a good time while I can." Itk it "They like Bach most of all," Don said. "Must be because his sound patterns are the most complicated of any of the composers I have on tape." He pulled another casette out of the rack and placed it on the player. "You think they enjoy it?" Liz asked. "Or do they just think it's the sonar of some other animal?' ' "J.S. Bach's sonar," he said. "And there's no doubt about it; they enjoy it. Porpoises are the most fun-loving animals on the face of the earth. Look at them out there. They haven't a care in the world." Liz looked out the curved window of the lounge. A school of porpoises was performing a sort of boisterous ballet in the flickering light of the water. Now and then one of them would glide over to the underwater speaker mounted outside the window and float there motionless for a few moments, as though listening to the music. "When I mounted the sonar unit out there," Don said, "I did it out of boredom. I didn't know if anything would happen or not. But it was a real success. Not only did I learn that porpoises like music, I found out that some show a preference for different composers." Liz looked at her watch. "Maybe I'd better get back to the lab," she said. "Something new may have turned up." "Relax," Don said. It'll wait for you. You know, you could take a few lessons on relaxation from these dolphins." Liz sat back in her chair. The dolphin outside seemed to be watching her. "What range of notes can they hear, anyway?" "They can hear tones between # Hz and # KHz, while we can hear frequencies from # Hz to about # KHz. Their hearing is most acute well beyond our range. That's one rea.son why attempts to communicate with them have been so frustrating." "You don't still believe that they have a language, do you?" Don looked out the window in silence, smiling faintly. "Maybe they don't have a language," he said finally. "Maybe they don't need one." "What do you mean?" "Look at it this way: would we need a language if we could read each other's minds?" Liz laughed out loud. "Now you're telling me porpoises are telepathic?" "Sonar," Don said seriously. "These creatures live in a world of sound. They hear with their bodies. and can emit clicks and chirps of sonar anywhere from ten to oneduration and up to six hundred of these pulses a second. This sense of theirs is so highly developed that they can distinguish between steel balls two and one-eighth and two and one-half inches in diameter, and between copper and alutninum disks of exactly the same size. In fact, their sonar is better than the sort of medical sonar equipmenf we use to locate tumors and stoppages of blood flow." "In other words, you're telling me they know when one of them is sick?" "Certainly," Don said. "And us too. Human flesh has basically the same density as sea water. But the lungs, the bones, the blood vessels reflect sound pulses differently. In the water, we probably look like X-ray images of ourselves to porpoises." "Yeah, but they still can't communicate abstract ideas." "They can tell when someone is happy or upset, by changes in heart rate and respiration." "Don, I repeat: they still can't fully communicate." "Maybe they've evolved beyond that," Don said. "Their lives are pure play. They're happy. Can we say the same?" Liz drummed her fingers on the tape recorder she held on her lap. Suddenly she felt uneasy about the creatures that played beyond the window. It was as though they had begun to pose some vague threat to her. "No, I won't believe that," she said. "Won't believe what?" "I'm not about to believe that those porpoises out there are more advanced than we are. That's absurd. If they were really intelligent, they'd have built cities. They'd have a culture, a literature." "Spoken like a New Yorker," Don laughed. "Liz, what would they need with cities?" "Well, er -- " "They have no overcrowding, no smog, no poisonous air, no pollution, no unemployment, no murder. They're perfectly in tune with their environment. Cities for them would be a step down." Liz said nothing. "What the hell," Don said in a strangely different tone of voice. "What am I going on like this for? You may be right; it's all just words anyway. Hey, how about a game of Risk? I've programmed the computer for a three-player game." "I don't think so, Don," she said. "I've got a lot of work to do." "So do I, but that can wait. Come on. Just one game."    The three of them floated over a landscape that looked strangely alien with its ledges of coral and blossoms of anemone and starfish. Liz had the sensation of flying as the humming engine of the mini-sub propelled them through the sea. Below them divers flippered over the excavation site, collecting more samples from the yawning trenches. A few porpoises swam around them as they worked, darting in and out of the silver bubbles that shimmered above their scuba tanks, as though the creatures wanted the bubbles to tickle their underbellies. One of them swam up to the sub, peered in the window for a moment and then darted off. "They always look like they're smiling," Liz said. "Don't you think so?" Eastlake steered the sub over the last trench and said nothing. Don sat in the third seat with his feet propped up on the dashboard, and watched the porpoise swim over to its companions. "Professor," Liz said to break the uncomfortable silence between the two men, "in the two weeks that I've been here. I've seen and heard a lot of things that strain believability. I think I should tell you that, although I believe you, some of the other news services are already calling you a charlatan." Eastlake shrugged. "Professor," she continued, "I'd like to do as much as I can to make the importance of your discovery reach even the most skeptical of people. But, frankly, I can't do this if you don't tell me everything." "What do you mean?',' Eastlake said. "I mean that you haven't been very honest with me" she said cooly. Eastlake looked fiercely at Don. "Cams, what have you told her?" "Nothing," Don replied. "So help me," the Professor threatened, "I don't care if we have to reprogram every operation in the Center; I'll have you fired for this!" "Don didn't tell me anything," Liz said. "That was just a guess -- a hunch I had. From the very beginning I've had the feeling that you two were keeping something from me. You've been fighting each other non-stop, Don's been making vague comments about your keeping things from the media -- " "Don's an irresponsible fool," Eastlake said, looking straight ahead. "He's just out to sensationalize the truth for the sake of causing an uproar. It's just another of his adolescent pranks." "You always did feel insecure about having me around," Don said caustically. "What's the problem, Eastlake -- the fact that my brain has the Von Aachen lobe and your doesn't? The fact that I'm further evolved?" "All the evidence isn't in on that yet, Carus," the Professor snapped. "For all anyone knows for sure, that may just be brain damage." "Bullshit." "You're a clown. Cams. You're no better than one of those DoNothings on land. What's worse, you're down here among serious, dedicated people." "Who will continue to screw up the plaaet because they are so goddainMd serious and dedicated. Because they can't let well enough alone -- " "Oentlemen!" Liz exclaimed. "You can fight with each other after I leave. Right now, I need some answers. Professor, why did you caH me down here if you didn't wsrnt me to learn the truth? Did you just want me to get a good picture of you for the papers?" "Way to go, Liz." "Quiet, Dcm." "No," Eastlake said, "that's not true." "Tell her, Eastlake," Don said calmly. "Tell her what really happened to that ancient race of man." "Cams, so help me -- " "Go on. Professor. If you don't, I will. Humanity will adjust to the news. They're more resilient than you think. You never did give the average person credit for an ounce of intelligence." "What news?" Liz demanded. "What became of them?" "Those people," Don said, "didn't just die out all of a sudden. There was no plague, no sudden sinking of their continent. They changed. They evolved, naturally. Think of it, Liz: modem man developed from little fuzzy prosimians that looked like over-sized squirrels, fully-developped human beings exthey still existed, chances are they'd look very different from what they once did. They'd have evolved." "Then you're saying they're still here?" Liz asked. "They're right out there," Don said. "See them -- swimming beside die sub?" "Poqioises?" Liz said breathlessly. "You mean -- " "Don is right," the Professor said, "For a long time it's been known that porpoises and whales evolved from some land mammal diat for some reason took to the sea ago. Nobody was really sure what that mammal was until now." "Liz," Don added, "we've found skeletal remains you haven't seen -- remains that span many centuries and show the change from land to sea mammal." "I knew it! I knew you weren't showing me all you found!" "And that is the real story behind Jonah," Don said. "Haven't you ever wondered why their brains are so similar to ours?" "When their continent sank," Liz said slowly, "they took to the water." "Just as we are doing now," Don said, "for different reasons." "That's what's so disturbing about our discovery," Eastlake said. "That's the big news we have for humanity." The sub broke the surface.  # The yellow sky burst in on them through the foam. They bobbed for a while near the hexagonal dock as a cruiser approached them from land. It was travelling very fast. "That would be my boat now," Liz said dazedly. "Look how funny the sky looks... it's so yellow..." "Liz," Eastlake said earnestly, "the news that we weren't first on the planet will shock a lot of people. Prepare them for it." "Professor," Liz said, "tell me one last thing: is this going to happen to us too?" "Probably not. But then no one can know for sure." "Liz," Don interrupted, "it won't be such a bad thing. Eastlake here just can't stand the idea of change. It's evolution; when we become like them, nature will have corrected itself, restored things to balance again." Someone was yelling from the cruiser. Don opened the hatch, and the three of them climbed out on the dock. "Liz," the man said breathlessly, "quick. Get aboard. We've got to get to the airport before the shock wave hits." "What?" she said blankly. "War? We've been so busy, I -- " "Come on, quick. I'm sorry, you two, but I'm only authorized to take Miss Devlin." "We can take care of ourselves," Don said. "Liz, I'll get your bags." "Can it be?" Eastlake whispered. "After all this time..." "The sky," Liz said, looking up. "That's why it looks so strange." "Liz, hurry," the man said. "A jet is waiting for us on the main island." Don returned with her luggage and threw it over the side of the cruiser while Liz climbed the ladder from the dock. "Don," Eastlake said, "we've got to get back down and help the others." "Professor, Don," Li-" ailed from the boat, "I want t. ;ome back. I want to know all you find out." Don waved good-bye and nodded. It was the kind of nod he used to give Eastlake when he wasn't listening to a word the old man was saying. The air was hot and humid. Over the distant land a trail of black smoke smudged the sky. The sun burned red above the horizon. Liz watched the small sub disappear underwater. Near the ring of bubbles it left, a porpoise suddenly leaped playfully into the air and slapped its tail on the surface of the bloc-waim sea.  The year is #. The world is just recovering from the Great Depression. New technological miracles are blossoming. The newspapers contain stories of telephone calls across the country, airplane flights across the Atlantic, and that new rich-man' s toy, television . Newspaper stories of Dr. Goddard's historic first rocket flight of # years ago are almost forgotten... Suppose that in # -- # years ago -- someone had proposed a program for interplanetary exploration. This preposterous program would have had an initial goal of sending an automated probe to the moon within # years, followed by the landing of a man on the moon within # years. This program would plan to use advanced aircraft-construction techniques to produce rockets as tall as buildings, containing hundreds of tons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel -- but only three passengers. These incredibly expensive vehicles would only be used -- once! -- the various parts being dropped into the ocean, or left in orbit, or left on the moon. To carry out this flight the power generated by the rocket engines during launch would have to exceed the total installed electrical generation capability of the U. S. in # (# MW). The programcost over the #-year period would exceed the Federal appropriations for # (# B). Yet e proposer would have the audacity to say that all this was possible with only predictable #-# year projections of # technology. I doubt that anyone in # would have supported such an idea. "A man on the Moon in # years!! -- Impossible!! -- That is nothing but ridiculous science fiction!! -- We have more important things to spend our money on!! After all, the unemployment rate is #!" But, as we all know, that was exactly the way it happened. It happened because it was technologically possible and politically needed, first by the Russians (to prove they were better than the Americans then by the Americans (to prove -- "No you aren't"). But it did not take # years for this science-fiction fantasy to become a reality; the first man stepped on the Moon on # July #, Just # years from #. It is now #. The newspapers contain stories about men exploring the moon, automated probes landing on Mars, spacecraft swinging by Jupiter with enough energy to go sailing off into interstellar space -- never to return to the solar system. It is time to start planning for Interstellar Exploration to turn today's science fiction into the realities of the future. Our developing capabilities in controlling fusion, beaming laser energy, tailoring new structural materials, and increasing the intelligence of computers while reducing their size, weight and cost, will make interstellar exploration of the nearby stars technologically feasible. All that will be required to focus this technology on interstellar exploration will be the political need, and that political need will come. For the same political reasons Russians have already launched to search for messages from interstellar cultures. One day -- not too long from now -- they will launch their first interstellar probe. Will we be ready? -- or will we again have to be asked by the politicians to start a crash project to catch up?  Going to the, stars is not easy -- but it is not impossible either. To travel to the stars will take years of time, gigawatts of power, kilograms lions) of dollars. Yet it can be done -- if we wish to. We don't have to wait centuries for the development of some exotic new propulsion concept like antigravity or space warps so we can go hopping around the Galaxy. There is a lot we can do here and now with reasonable extrapolations of our present day technology that will suffice for centuries of interstellar exploration. Within # light years of the sun there are # stellar systems containing #I visible stars and an estimated # planets. To explore these nearby planets we do not need to insist on # year roundtrip times to accomodate fragile man; one-way trip times of # to # years using semi-intelligent probes will do. We do not need propulsion systems that accelerate to the speed of light; maximum velocities of a few tenths of the speed of light will do. We do not need the # mass conversion of matter-antimatter gamma ray photon engines; the # mass conversion of fusion will do. Now, there are people who might admit the physical feasibility of interstellar exploration of the nearer stars, but who question the desirability of such a program when we can gain information about other interstellar civilizations more cheaply and more rapidly by listening with the special search arrays and signal processing equipment that are planthat if there is someone at the other end who is sending information, contribution to our knowledge. However, there may be many civilizations on those # planets near us that we cannot learn about by examples are: civilizations on watercovered planets that never developed a metals technology; intelligent beings floating in the atmospheres of Jupiter-like planets; ancient cultures that are now extinct, but which left rich treasures for an astro-archaeologist; besides which there must be other no'n-radio cultures that we cannot even begin to imagine now. In my view, interstellar exploration with automated probes is comrather than competitive with it. The design of the probe is the critical element in any program for interstellar exploration. The rigors and length of a journey involving high accelerations with high energy density engines, the years of bombardment against interstellar matter at high relative velocities, and the decades of operation with no means for repair, or even diagnostic help from earth, means that a new level of self-diagnostic, self-repairing, multiply-redundant probe design must be developed. Ultimately, the computer in the probe will have to exhibit semiintelUgent behavior when presented with new and unforseen circumstances. The requirement for multiple planetary exploration at each stellar system will limit the number and weight of lander probes available, and puts a premium on long-range sensor capabilities to gather the same data from orbit. These, in turn, require very high resolution capability from orbital altitudes, which drives up the size of the transmitting and collecting apertures desired. Yet despite these needs for performance the energy requirements for achieving flight velocities approaching that of light are so large that the weight of the probe should be kept to a minimum. Development efforts on multiple frequency transmitters, antennas, sensors and data processors are needed to minimize the payload. What we desire in an interstellar probe is a large physical size (to give the transmitting and receiving apertures desired), and high power (for active sounders and data transmission), all combined with light weight. I would like to see the designers get a goal of # kg for the weight of an interstellar probe. The design of such a probe is a challenge -- but an important one; for the weight of the probe determines the sizes of the propulsion system. There are not one, but many possible techniques for interstellar propulsion that have received enough study so that we know that they have the basic energy and power capacity to be considered for interstellar propulsion. All of them still retain a number of technical uncertainties and will require significant engineering effort before they can be said to be engineeringly feasible. Here are four of them. #. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. This is the old Orion concept. The propulsion system operates by jettisoning a small nuclear bomb out the back, exploding it, and absorbing part of the momentum of the resulting plasma cloud on an ablation plate mounted on shock absorbers. A study of a design for an interstellar version was carried out by Freeman Dyson. It had a very large payload, # tons (enough for a small human community) and a supply of # bombs that weighed six times the payload. The bombs are exploded once per second, resulting in a one-g acceleration for # days, or a final velocity of three percent of the velocity of light. This velocity would get the ship to Alpha Centauri in # years. The Dyson design is marginal for interstellar exploration, but has the important feature that it uses proven technology. The recent British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus study designed a newer and higher-speed version of an interstellar nuclear-pulse jet that used micropellets of fusionable material ignited # times per second by lasers or relativistic electron beams. #. Controlled Fusion Rocket. We are at present not certain which of the many proposed techniques for controlled nuclear fusion will prove feasible, but whatever method results, it will be a prime candidate for the propulsion portion of an interstellar exploration mission. Most of the present effort in fusion research is concentrated on the development of leakproof magnetic bottles. Fortunately, for the propulsion application, what is desired is a leaky magnetic bottle, the leak of hot plasma being the reaction jet. However, because of the low # energy conversion efficiency of the fusion reaction, interstellar exploration with fusion rockets will require massive vehicles with large mass ratios. #. Interstellar Ramjet. No matter how good one can make the Orion or Fusion rocket concepts, they are still forced to carry their fuel along with them. The interstellar ramjet instead uses a large magnetic scoop to collect interstellar hydrogen to fuel its fusion rockets, thus eliminating the need to carry fuel. Studies have shown that the ramjet takeover velocity is extremely low, so that conventional rockets could provide the initial acceleration. A large vehicle with a frontal intake radius of # km could achieve a one-g acceleration through interstellar space with a nucleon density of I to # nucleonscc. There have been many studies of this concept, including a recent one that recommended carrying along a carbon catalyst to overcome the low cross section of the proton-proton reaction. #. Beamed-Power Laser Propulsion. Although the Ramjet does not have to carry its fuel, it does have to carry and maintain an engine. The beamed-power laser system does not have to carry either fuel or an engine. The spacecraft would be in the form of a large solar sail, many kilometers across. A large laser on the earth or in orbit around the sun would send a beam of laser light to push the spacecraft. For many years, this concept did not receive much attention, for it was thought to be limited to flyby missions, since there would be no laser at the target star to decelerate the spacecraft. However, if after the spacecraft is up to speed it lets out a long wire to increase its self-capacitance and then uses radioactive materials to develop and maintain a charge, it will interact with the interstellar magnetic field through the Lorentz force and will swing around in a large circle. If the mission is planned correctly, the spacecraft will arc around behind the target star and be coming by the star with its velocity vector pointing at earth. We then turn on the laser again and decelerate the spacecraft at the target star. To carry out a rendezvous mission with the beamed power laser system would require a laser array # km across, so that the laser beam will not diverge significantly at the #-to-lO lightyear distance required to decelerate the probe. Although the laser array must be large in area, the array does not need to be New! From Taurus. Military Research and Design Specialists -- Discount Otter: The Battle for Andromeda, Conflict lor a Entire Gaiaxy using Fieets, Barrier Bastions and Omega Ships which can destroy # Solar Systems in a single move (it is # miles across). A Strategic Game where the Mere Presence of an "O ' ship # light years away constitutes an act of War! Warriors of the Dark Star in the age of Neutron Wars (#) is a tactical version using enlarged models of "Omega " ships in single ship to ship combat with all the weapons, rays, and computers in an immense scale. Complete Games in themselves, extension kits with additional ships and fleets are available... so the size and scale of the games are unlimited I Using Boards with real Star Systems. No Dice, No Chance, and Unique Play systems for the WarGamer that have never been used before. Buy both and deduct #.New # WarGame Catalog (#) has over # War Games covering every phase and era of Historic Conflict and of both Games. P.O. #x# Evanston, IL # filled with lasers and the energy flux from the laser array is not high; in typical system designs the laser beam is no more powerful than sunlight. There are other, newer concepts that have not received as much study, but which look very promising. One uses beamed laser energy from earth to energize reaction mass carried on the ship. The other uses a small amopnt of anti-matter (about #) to energize a much larger amount of regular matter. Arthur Clarke (one of the earliest members of the British Interplanetary Society) said in his book The Promise of Space: "With so many theoretical possibilities for interstellar flight, we can be sure that at least one will be realized in practice. Remember the history of the atomic bomb; there were three different ways in which it could be made, and no one knew which was best. So they were all tried -- and they all worked." In #, an interstellar probe, which has been waiting in space in the region beyond the moon, launches itself toward the triple star system Alpha Centauri. It thrusts at high acceleration, its engines running at a power level that is ten times the power of a Saturn V rocket. The exhaust of hot hydrogen plasma glows like a bright star, visible both night and day. After four months the probe has left the solar system, and has reached ## the velocity of light. It begins its long drift through interstellar space using its bulky first stage shell as a radiation barrier to protect it from the constant rain of high energy particles produced by its high speed through the interstellar hydrogen. After drifting for # years (it has now covered four light years), it sheds its first stage, turns around, and begins deceleration. As the probe velocity drops well below relativistic speeds and it approaches its target, the spacecraft opens up its compact one hundred kilogram mass into a sphere one hundred meters in diameter. The sphere is a dense wire mesh embedded with arrays of tiny sensors and transmitters, close-coupled to complex molecular-sized digital circuitry, all held together and interconnected with high strength, onedimensional superconductive fibers. The probe turns its attention back to earth to receive its latest instructions. A pulsating laser beam, bright through the background glare of the now distant sun brings a message from its masters on earth. Large new telescopes on the moon have detected a planet within the life-supporting zone of the small red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri: "Go and investigate!" The command is over four year old, but it is the most current that the probe can expect. The array of sensors spaced over the sphere collect the light and radiation from the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system and correct the rocket thrust to zero in on Proxima Centauri. As it approaches the small red star, the probe searches for the planet. It is there, along with three others farther out. They are cold, and probably lifeless, but they too will be visited before the probe leaves Proxima Centauri to investigate the other two stars in the Alpha Centauri system. With its thruster at low power, the probe approaches the planet, constantly beaming pictures and sensor data back to earth, using a phased array of solid-state lasers scattered densely over its surface. Earth will not see the pictures of the new planet for four years, long after the probe has completed its survey and moved on to the other planets and stars in the Alpha Centauri system. With no feedback possible from earth, the molecular-sized computer circuits distributed throughout the mesh in the sphere analyze for themselves the information its sensors collect as it approaches the planet, and the probe swings into a near polar orbit and begins a survey. Wideband sensors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum produce imagery in the radio, microwave, infrared, visible, and ultraviolet bands. The one-hundredmeter size of the detector array gives the pictures a resolution of less than one meter even from the # kilometer orbital altitude. Picosecond pulses of laser light beam down as a laser radar to measure the height variations of the topography. Certain regions that might have life are interrogated with selected laser wavelengths, and their return light analyzed to look for absorption or fluorescent bands characteristic of organic compounds. A few regions that have the most potential for life are selected. Small portions of the sensor mesh on the sphere detach from the main probe mesh and are driven down into the atmosphere with radiation pressure from the lasers on the probe. The small sections of mesh drift down to the surface, collecting and storing images as they descend. The mesh settles on the surface where specialized chemically sensitive molecular circuits react to the various forms of chemical compounds found there. The orbiting probe interrogates the lander mesh with a laser beam, collects the images and chemical data the lander has stored, combines it with the other information that it has collected and sends a detailed report back to earth. The probe then moves on to the next planet in the system, more slowly now, for it is no longer as lavishly supplied with fuel as it was at the start of its mission. It will not stop until it has made a complete survey of every planet in the three star system. This will take a long time, but the probe has a lot of time. It will be at least # years before man will arrive to take over.  If saving Abe Lincoln was beyond him, how then could he save the wortd? son crouched in the back shadows of Ford's Theater in Washington City and waited with as much patience as he could muster for John Wilkes Booth to come skulking past. When that happened, Watson intended to dart quickly from hiding and rap Wilkes on the skull, thus managing once again to preserve briefly the life of President Abraham Lincoln. Watson wasn't excited or nervous. He'd done this at least a hundred times before. But, before Watson could actually move, he happened to glance down at his feet and noticed a sheet of folded white paper lying on the floor. It wasn't the paper itself that attracted his attention, but the fact that he suddenly recognized his own name neatly printed upon the exposed surface of the sheet. He unfolded the paper and, straining against the surrounding darkness, read: Jim: I've got to see you right away. Remember the Log House? I'm there now and very ill so please come immediately. I'm convinced I've found a way to change everything. Rebecca Kingsley The broad expansive signature made Watson wince briefly. Rebecca Kingsley, the most famous actress of her age, but lately, like himself, an exiled timeride'r. What could she possibly want with him? He hadn't seen her since shortly after the blast, when they had jointly created a wonderful, magical nineteenth-century Ireland, where Rebecca had reigned as a sort of queen of the stage. But that had been a transient phenomenon and after the tides of time rose to sweep their creation away Rebecca had left him without even a good-by. He had heard occasional rumors of her whereabouts from some of the other riders, who placed her variously in medieval England, twentieth-century Japan, and Bernhardt's Paris. He had thought Garbo's Hollywood a more likely location. And now she wanted to see him again. Demanded to see him again. He did remember the Log House. It was the place to which she had brought him when they'd first gotten together. A modest cabin in the Colorado foothills of # B.C. She never had told him who'd built it for her, but from the Joke of the Soft, scraping footsteps sounded from below. Hastily, Watson tucked the message inside a pocket of his frock coat. Booth? Yes, undoubtedly -- but should he bother to wait? Rebecca Kingsley had beckoned and, no matter how much youthful pain she had once caused him, he knew he could not hesitate to go. His mind made up, Watson leaned more intimately into the shadows behind. As the footsteps drew closer, he shut his eyes and pictured the Log House as he remembered it.' A rising green country dappled with early spring snow. A puff of dark smoke streaming from the stone chimney. At first, he experienced no sensation of motion but when he opened his eyes the gray, indistinct, spiraling blur of the timestream stretched endlessly in front of him. He shut his eyes again and waited patiently. When he opened his eyes once again, feeling a chill wind upon his face, he stood only a few yards in front of the Log House. It differed only slightly from the vision he had pictured. The logs were more worn, and the moss grew more thickly. At the doorstep, he paused a brief moment. What should he say when he saw her first? The words failed to come. Perhaps there were none. The whole thing had undoubtedly happened a long time ago, though he had no way of knowing that for sure. Stepping forward, Watson called out, "Rebecca, I'm here. It's James."    He found Rebecca Kingsley in the second back bedroom. She lay in a wide bed covered with thick blankets and a quilt. At first, he barely recognized her: the sunken, pale face of an old woman, the whisps of gray hair, the swollen lips and parched gums. Could this be the same woman who had once set When she spoke, he knew it was she. The voice had hardly changed at all. "James, I knew I could trust you." "Yes, I came." Hestantly, he crossed the room. The floor, what little of it could be seen, was badly warped and cracked; the rest was piled high with a puzzling array of books, maps, charts and papers. He stood over her bed and struggled not to show the emotion he felt. "It's been a long time." She laughed. "You mean I've grown old." "You -- you're sick." He saw no reason to be unkind -- not now. "I'm dying. But I'm dying because I'm old. I was fifty-three when the blast did this to me. I could be eighty by now. Who knows?" He shook his head, trying to make sense of what she had said. Fifty-three? Then? This woman he had once loved?, "You said in your note that you wanted to see me for a reason." Instinctively, he had drawn away from her in -- what? -- shock? -- disgust? -- revulsion? She pointed with a bony hand. "Look under my bed. Find what's there and look at it." He bent down obediently. His fingers moved tentatively through the thickly piled dust until they closed around something round, heavy and slick. He withdrew his hand; in it he found a roll of paper. "What's this?" he asked, sitting back on his heels. "Open it and see. It's what I've been doing all these years -- since Ireland fell apart." Tucking one end underneath a heavy book -- The Age of Faith -- he drew the roll of paper across the floor, pushing aside the scattered piles of other books and papers. "You mean, aU that time, you were just here." "Yes." It was one place he would have never thought to look. "Some of the others said they'd seen you." "People always think they're seeing me." The roll of paper lay open upon the floor. He looked. It seemed to be some sort of historical chart. Dates ranging from # B.C. through # A.D. were printed across its top, while underneath were various notations. He read one that concerned him particularly: # -- Lincoln not assassinated; Lee appointed to cabinet; freemen suffrage voted down. "What's this for?" he finally asked. "Can't you guess?" "You want to change history." "Exactly." She was smiling again. "But don't you know by now that it can't be done? I would have thought Ireland would have showed you that. It can only be temporary. The tides of time always come sweeping back." She seemed unmoved, a cold, brittle statue. "This chart lists six hundred separate historical incidents. All you've ever done before has been piecemeal. History is more like an avalanche. That was our mistake. One tiny pebble high on the mountain begins to fall, and that pebble strikes a bigger rock, which also falls, striking another and another and another. If you reach in and remove a rock from the middle of the mountain, then the slide will continue. I intend to remove the first pebble before it can begin to fall." "But another pebble -- one beside it -- may come loose and start the slide anyway." "I intend to remove all the pebbles. Six hundred pebbles, rocks, and boulders. I can change history, James. When I'm done -- when we're done -- then the blast will not occur." He nodded. "I thought you might have that in mind." Her voice assumed a newer, deeper tone. "It ruined all our lives, didn't it? You know what I was before it happened, who I was. All of that beauty ended, and for what reason? Because a half-dozen politicians suddenly went mad and decided to blow up the world." people died." "Do you call this better?" He had no answer to that. She lived in a different world. "What do you want me to do? Help you cause these changes?" "Me?" She .laughed bitterly. "Damn it, can't you see that I'm dying? What can I do? No, we'll need the others. All of them. Only by working together can we succeed before it's too late." He knew what she meant: too late for her. "I can ask them to help." "No, you'll bring them here. All -- what is it? -- " "Twenty-seven." "All twenty-seven of them. Five minutes after you leave, bring them. You know where to find them." "I think so." "Good." She smiled with sudden serenity. "And it'll work, James. I know it will." He was staring at the chart. Was she right? He saw the rise of Egypt, the birth of Christ, the empire of T'ang, the visions of Leonardo, and the wars of Napoleon and Hitler. All of human history reduced to six hundred critical moments. Could all of time be so distorted, twisted into such an unrecognizable form, that like a child's plastic doll it would fail ever to regain its original shape? Rebecca obviously thought so. And, if she was correct, then the end of the world need never have happened.    What James Watson called the end of the world was also known as the blast. The year was #, but Watson himself, then only twentytwo, a minor accountant in a West Coast banky remembered almost nothing of it. Only much later had he and the other timeriders been able to piece together what must have occurred that day. It was final, total, terrible nuclear war. Whisperings of such an event had long been heard on the wind, but no one -- except perhaps the half-dozen men possessing the power to make it happen -- had ever actually believed that such a disaster would come to be. But it had. Watson could remember sitting quietly in the office that day, studying a pile of computerized accounts, when an enormous flash of light through the window had struck him suddenly blind. And then he had been falling. An endless, vague, indistinct, gray spiral swept around him. Hours might have passed -- even days. And then a stray thought had come to him. He later understood that the thought had originated in a book he had been reading the previous night. A history book. A history of the American Civil War. And, as he fell, he happened to think of the great battle fought at Gettysburg. A split second later, he was there. At Gettysburg. On the battlefield. Overhead, rockets flared and cannonballs burst. That was the beginning. It took time -- whether days, weeks, or months he could only guess -- to understand, comprehend, develop, and accept his new talent. Eventually, he realized what he possessed was the freedom to roam at will the entirety of the known past. Simply by thinking of a singular moment in time and space and then picturing that moment firmly and completely in his mind, he could travel there. The blast, whatever its effect on the rest of humanity, had somehow set him free from sequential time. There were limitations also. If he didn't know enough of a particular time to picture it realistically, he could not travel there. Nor could the same body ever occupy more than once the same point in time. What this meant was that any time subsequent to June #, # -- the date of his own birth -- was permanently closed to him. It wasn't until Rebecca Kingsley found him that he realized he was not alone. He was eating dinner in a plush restaurant in New York in # when an astonishingly familiar woman had suddenly sat down across the table from him. She said, "You're the one, aren't you?" Unable at first to believe his own eyes, he replied, "No. No, I don't think so." "You know who I am, don't you?" Her composure was perfect. They could have been discussing next week's weather. "You're Rebecca Kingsley," he blurted out. "And you're from #, blown here by the blast." "The what?" "The big war. That's what I call it -- the blast." Because of what it's done to all our lives. Blasted them completely to ruins." He and Rebecca Kingsley spent that evening together in his hotel room -- lifting a considerable number of eyebrows in the process -- fulfulling, at least partially, an old fantasy of his. She had explained how she had found him through a simple process of elimination. "When you're in time and not supposed to be there, you're going to do things that wouldn't otherwise be done. You're going to cause little waves to ripple on the pool of history. Say, for instance, tonight when you were eating at that nice restaurant. Suppose, normally, instead of you, another man was sitting there. Suppose a woman happened to pass the table and caught his eye. Suppose they talked, became friends, lovers, and later married. Suppose they had iwelve children, each of whom had seven of his or her own. In that case, because of you being here tonight, a hundred years from now several hundred people will no longer exist. Now further suppose that I'm another time traveler operating in #. When all sorts of people around me start winking out of existence, most other people won't notice -- but I will. A little bit of research -- who's winking out and why -- and it's not too difficult to trace down the trouble center. That's how we've found each other so far." "You mean there are more than just you and me?' ' "Nineteen others so far. All from #. All tossed here by the blast." "I -- I'd like to meet them." "CMi, you will. But they're ordinary people. Not like me. You won't have heard of them. " It was then that she had gone on to explain to him how, working together, they could create from the raw material of Irish history a place that would be like paradise for both of them. And of course he had agreed to go with her. In the end, a total of twenty-nine timeriders had been discovered. As for the others -- a world population they had no way of finding out anything about them: even if the world hadn't ended with the blast, they would probably never know what happened afterwards. But now Rebecca Kingsley claimed that, whether the world was dead or not, she could resurrect it. The tides of time, which heretofor had permitted only brief, transitory change, could be fought, battled, subdued, and conquered. Yet Watson wondered. The blast had created them -- made them timeriders -- given them this nonsequential universe in which to roam. Could they now rise up and willingly strike down their own maker? kk  From choice -- and uncertainty -- Watson emerged from the timestream several hundred yards from his intended destination. He stood upon the familiar soft shore of a shallow forest pool, inhaling the thick scent of surrounding Georgia pine and battled to realign his senses in terms of this new place. A loud splashing sound slapped the still air and Watson glanced up to see a flash of dazzling whiteness sliding underneath the dark waters of the pool. He recognized the girl at once. "Gina," he cried, when her head broke the surface. "Oh, James." She waved and swam toward him. Gina was younger than Watson -- she'd been in college at the time of the blast -- but they had once spent a fair amount of time together. When she emerged from the pool, she embraced him with her wet arms. "Well, I was afraid we'd lost you for good." In the Joy of seeing her again, he dismissed all thought of Rebecca and her plan. "I've been busy." "Still saving Abe Lincoln?" He shrugged. "It's an obsession." "You're too serious." "I know." As they moved through the forest toward the main house Watson considered telling her what he had to say, but decided to wait until later when everyone was together. According to Gina, ten other riders were presently staying in the house ahead. It was called Newport -- in honor of a once famous resort -- and took up a totally inconspicuous plot of land in central Georgia somewhere around the year # B.C. Some time ago (he could, of course, be no more specific than that), shortly after the end of his relationship with Rebecca, a group of them had joined to build the house as a sort of rest-home for weary riders. A few people stayed at Newport on an almost permanent basis, but most, like Watson himself, and Gina, appeared only occasionally. All of them made it a point to maintain sequential time as near as possible when visiting the colony. Such a policy avoided unnecessary confusion and kept the tides of time from rushing in. Gina was telling him about a recent cross-country journey she had undertaken on a wagon train in #. "We were even attacked by Indians," she said. "Not a whole tribe, thank God, just a few marauders. But the whole thing was such an interesting experience -- and so much fun. You ought to try it, James. Get out of New York and see the rest of the country." "I've been to Boston. Even San Francisco -- after the gold rush." "And you ought to leave poor Lincoln alone, too." She seemed full of suggestions today. "I can always tell when you've been around, when people start talking about Ape Lincoln instead of the Great Martyr." "I don't do it as a favor to his reputation." "Then why do you do it?" "Just to prove that I can, I guess." "But the tides always obliterate it." "And that's why I have to keep doing it. Over and over again." Inside the big house -- with its thick carpets, beautiful paintings, graceful sculpture and plush decor borrowed randomly from all of history -- Watson leaned in the doorway of the downstairs parlor, while Gina excused herself to wander upstairs and dress. Once his eyes adjusted to the curtained darkness beyond, Watson counted four familiar figures clustered near the smoldering embers of huge, round man, a former grocery clerk who now spent most of his time in Elizabethan England. Stye was presently talking, describing a rather tenuous relationship between Shakespeare and the Queen. Listening were Thomas Kittering, an unsuccessful artist who now lived in renaissance Venice, Hoy Ling, a Chinese farmer who divided his time between his country's numerous golden ages, and Thelma Norton, formerly a waitress and noW a sort of eternal prostitute. Thelma said the best way to get to know the real substance of any particular time was to catch the denizens at their most informal. She currently wore the high, gaudy fashions of the late #'s. Looking in this way, hearing Stye talk and seeing the others, Watson realized how very much he liked these people. He felt glad to be home again. Stye was the one who noticed him standing in the doorway. "Hey, Jim, it's been a long while. Come in and get warm." Watson went into the room. "I didn't know it was cold." "It isn't, but you've got lo admit that the fire is nice." He nodded to each of the other three. Thelma rose daintily and pecked his cheek. The dwindling fire painted crazy, distorted shadows along the wall. Everyone seemed to stand twice as high as he should. "I've been to see Rebecca Kingsley," he said. "Oh." Thelma finally asked, "How is she?" "Not well. In fact... well, I think she's dying." He hated to be the one who spoiled the atmosphere. Gina entered the room from behind him. "We'd all thought she'd died long ago," she said, without a trace of gloom. He turned thankfully to face her. "No, she's been hiding out in Colorado. In a cabin she has. # B.C." "I remember the place," Stye said. "You'd think," Gina said, "a person like her couldn't stand so much quiet. Think of all that applause she was used to. There's nobody there now but some Indians." "She's been working," Watson said. "Studying, I guess you could call it. And she's found something out -- something she thinks is important." "Well, what?" said Stye. "I'd rather everyone were here at once before I told you." "It can't be that important," Thomas Kittering said. "I think it may be," said Watson. Gina was looking at him intently, with something approaching suspicion. "Did Rebecca send' you here with instructions to reveal this secret of hers?" He saw rto reason to be less than truthful. "She did." But Stye was already on his feet. Bustling toward the door, he paused and told Watson, "I'll see who I can round up. Later we'll all talk. You haven't been around here in years, Jim." Watson shook his head. "I wouldn't say that." For a timerider, no such thing as a year existed; there was only time itself.    Once he had told them everything, Watson leaned close to the fire and waited for a response. No one said a word. When he could bear their silence, no longer Watson said, "Well? Come on. Somebody must have something to say." said decisively. "There may be some degree of sense to it, but I just don't think so. At one time or another I imagine everyone here has tried to alter history, rearrange past events. I know I once married Shakespeare to the Queen. But it never lasts -- it can't be permanent -- so why bother?" "Rebecca thinks her way will work. And, if she's right, then five "But won't they all die anyway?" said a rider named Charles Francis, whom Watson didn't know particularly well. Before the blast, Francis had labored as some sort of dim civil servant; he now wore the garb of a Roman centurion. "Yes," said Watson, "but there are descendants to consider. ' ' "Why?" Gina asked sharply. "Why should we be the ones to consider them? We didn't blow up the world. Why should we have to save it?" "I don't think anybody has said that we have to do this." "Still," said Thelma Norton, who had changed into a less revealing costume, "it's quite an honor if you think about it. How many other whores have ever saved the world?" "Then you think we ought to do it?" Knowing their answer in advance, Watson was eager to get this finished. "We can't very well say no," Thelma said. "Why can't we?" asked Charles Francis. "it's not going to work anyway." "But how can you be sure of that?" Gina asked. Watson felt he ought to say something now. He faced Gina. "It's never worked before so we've always assumed history to be an inexorable process, something firm and definte. Take me, for instance. I'm always saving Abraham Lincoln's life. Do you know why? Because, no matter how often I do it, nothing ever really changes. With Lincoln alive or Lincoln dead, the world goes on pretty much the same. If you took a man from one version of # and put him down in another -- the one where Lincoln lived -- he wouldn't know anything had happened unless he glanced at a newspaper." "But you said Rebecca had found six hundred things to change," someone said. "That's correct." "Six hundred things in six Stye said skeptically. It was Thelma Norton who voiced what everyone else was thinking. "But suppose it does work. Suppose we do away with the blast and do it permanently. What happens then?" "One thing," Gina said, "is that Rebecca gets to be a big star again." "And she won't have to die," Watson said, more kindly. "But what about us?" asked Charles Francis. "Will we just -- just go back?" Watson nodded. "I imagine so. The blast created us. Without it, we'll just go on with our old lives as if nothing had happened." "Because nothing will have happened," Gina said. Watson nodded. "Except that world -- will be alive." "I still say it won't work," said  it it While those timeriders who had not been present at Newport were being tracked down within the timestream, Watson remained in the big house, resting, talking, swimming, and sleeping. A dim, mournful mood seemed to grip the place. Those riders not out in the stream kept close to their rooms or else huddled in the parlor close to the fire. Watson and Gina went walking in the woods. When they reached the pool where Watson had first arrived, Gina said she was tired and wanted to stop. They lay side by side upon the wet grass and stared at the flat, smooth surface of the water. Watson discovered that when he glanced at Gina in this bright light he could clearly discern the first signs of aging in the skin around her eyes. He suddenly understood how much time must have passed since the blast first sent them here: Gina was old, Rebecca was dying, and he himself felt very, very tired. "Well, what do you think?" she said at last. "I don't suppose there's anything to be gained by pretending it's not happening." "No." He knew what she meant. "But I can't tell you. I saw the chart, but that's all. Maybe it'll work and maybe it won't." She nodded thoughtfully. "Do you want it to?" He shrugged. "Why? Don't you?' ' She shook her head. "I'm just not sure. There's her, for one thing. I don't want her to die but... well, does it seem fair to you? Rebecca was someone important in that other world, but the rest ran a grocery, you were a bookkeeper, and I was still attending school. James, I think I'm too old to go back to college." "You'll never even know you were gone," he said. "I know and that's the most frightening thing of all. It's almost lost and gone. I won't remember the wagon train -- not any of it." "We'll all lose a lot." "No, we won't." She rose on an elbow, stiff with anger. "She won't -- Rebecca won't -- because she doesn't have anything to lose. I was so excited when she first found me. She was something I knew, someone famous, and I had been completely lost until then. But she never cared. She never saw the possibilities. She hated the past. She still does. She hates it because here she's nothing." "I'm not sure that's entirely fair." "It's still twenty-eight of us against one of her." "No," he said. "It's twentythem." She sighed and dropped back down. "I know. And that's why we have to do it." ir itk At last the moment came when all twenty-eight timeriders had been found and brought to the big house and informed of Rebecca's plan. Together they fell into the waves of time, propelled by Watson's description of the cabin in the woods, and in time they emerged in the Colorado Rockies of # B.C., only minutes after Watson's last departure. He led the way into the rear bedroom where Rebecca lay waiting. Even in such a short period of time, she had visibly deteriorated. As the riders crowded around her bed, all of them showing their obvious discomfort at the nearness of death, she struggled to sit up to greet them. Finally, Watson adjusted her pillow so that she could use it as a backrest. "Well, so you decided to come, after all," she said in hardly more than a whisper. Her eyes shifted slowly from face to face, pausing only briefly at each. "William Stye, Georgia Kane, Charles Francis -- I know you all so well." "It's been a long time, Rebecca," said Stye, speaking for all of them. "But you don't know how long, do you?" She laughed hoarsely. "That's the problem, isn't it? We never know how much time we have." Watson shifted uncertainly at the head of the bed. "I've told them everything you told me, Rebecca, and everyone is agreed. We're ready to begin now." "Ready to begin to give me my world back?" she said bitterly. "No, to save the lives of five billion people," Gina said. Rebecca appeared not to recognize her. "And yourselves." "No, not us, Rebecca -- Just you." Watson could see no gain in such bickering. "Perhaps we ought to get started," he suggested. "An excellent idea, James." Rebecca smiled thinly. "Considering my condition, the sooner, the better." She pointed one brittle finger. "The chart is there on the floor where you left it. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to take charge. Begin at the beginning. The first incident you find -- it's Sumerian writing, I believe -- and then follow through. I recommend each of you try to return within moments of your last departure. There are only twenty-eight of you and six hundred incidents to cover. This will take, if you'll excuse the term, time, and I'm not sure if I have that much left to me. Perhaps if I do die first, it won't make any difference -- I will still live then. But some things must be permanent -- and death may well be one of them." volunteered to go first. "I've been to Sumeria before." Gina said she would be second. The others formed a line in front of the chart. Watson read the historical incidents one after another and made certain each rider was straight in his mind about the date. As they moved, no one spoke. One after another they winked out of existence. After Charles Francis had left for Stonehenge and # B.C., Watson was alone with Rebecca once more. She smiled at him and her voice took on a new strength. "It will work," she said. "Are you sure you want -- ?" But materialized in the center of the room.    Once the operation was moving efficiently Watson grew tired of waiting and decided to join the others in the timestream. When he returned from # and the Battle of Hastings he found himself alone with Rebecca. Even though no more than three hours could possibly have passed since their first arrival, she seemed noticeably drained. He watched her lips moving silently and suddenly understood she was trying to call him. He left the chart and went over to kneel beside the bed. "Yes, Rebecca." "James," she said, as if uncertain of his real identity. "Yes." "You don't understand this, do you?" "No. No, but I think you do." "It's because of Ireland." He hadn't expected that. "It is?" "Yes. Do you remember what we did there?" "I remember that we altered history so as to drive the English out during Elizabeth's reign. And then we broke with Rome and established a liberal Catholic church and revived all the old myths and legends and created a country where the arts would blossom." It is the #st century, but Scop is in # -- attending assassinations. He's warned, cajoled, pleaded... but be knows be's a failure. Trying to alter the future, he has merely reinforced it! "And then we became stars," she said. "Well, you did." She nodded. "But that was what hurt -- what made it seem no good. It wasn't real, James -- it never was -- and I always knew it. You see, we could have done it again. Not necessarily in Ireland but somewhere else. It was a lot of work, and it didn't last long, but we could have started over." "Yes, I suppose so. I just never thought. When you went away, that seemed to end it." "But don't you know why?" "I thought I did. I thought you were angry because of the tides. When that world was washed away, everything seemed suddenly senseless." "No, James, that's close but not it. The senselessness began before, when the world we created was still firm. It was' senseless because we had made it that way. We were successful and famous -- I was -- and we had everything, but there was no pleasure in it. Do you see what I'm saying? Why try to win when there's nothing to struggle, against?" "Yes, I see." She shook her head. "No, you don't. You can't., You're not me, James, and none of the others are, either. Of course you resent me. But try to remember that nothing I achieved came easily and, when I could have had it that way, in Ireland, I refused." "Is this easy?" He indicated the chart. "There's no pleasure in it, either." She lay back, her eyes suddenly closing. He waited a moment, wondering if he should go on and tell her, but knew it was too late now to turn back. Standing, he went to the chart and found the next date. Then he rode the stream of time once again.    Sitting boredly at his desk in #, James Watson glanced with half an eye at the stack of computerized accounts he had been given to review. Across the wide, airconditioned room a clock said #:#; he would be unable to escape this place for another hour and a half. The tickets were in his pocket. Two theater tickets. It was odd because, until a few weeks ago, he had never felt much interest in live drama. Then he happened to glimpse Rebecca Kingsley on television and had strangely fallen in love with that fragile image. That was where he was going tonight: Rebecca Kingsley in Medea . Then someone came into the room -- a clerk he faintly recognized -- and said in a loud voice that he had just heard on the radio that Rebecca Kingsley had died. Watson stood up to shout, and then he was falling. A vague, indistinct gray spiral surrounded him. Thinking quickly, he pictured in his mind a log house in the Colorado mountains surrounded by green grass and a dappling of early spring snow. As that world emerged in front of him, he felt the tickets in his pocket and wondered what they might mean. it it it She was dead. Watson stood above the bed, staring down at that thin, emaciated figure which had once been so beautiful and alive. He wondered: did she ever know? It hadn't worked -- the tides had come sweeping in. He hoped against hope that Rebecca had somehow been permitted to die unaware. She had made it home -- he knew that for certain. He only hoped she had been able to stay there. Removing the two tickets from his pocket, he dropped them on the bed and let them lie there. "Then she didn't make it?" said a voice past his shoulder. Turning, he saw Gina. He pointed at the tickets. "She was there." "You saw her?" , "No, but I was going to. I guess some of it must have stayed with me. I always thought she was beautiful but suddenly I wanted to see her, too." Gina produced a single matching ticket from a pocket of her torn sweater. "Me, too." The faint lines creased her face. He knew then it was definitely over. They were growing old again. "I wonder which one it was," she said. He turned away from the body but didn't walk away. "What do you mean?" "It must have been one of us," she said. "Out of six hundred incidents, neglecting even one might have been enough to undo the rest. Someone lied and made it so it wouldn't work. Someone didn't do what he was supposed to." He looked as if he had been shocked. "That's a dreadful thing dead." "Not us." "We never were." She shook her head. "Are you sure? Don't you remember how it was?" He could recall the dreariness of that awful world back there. "It was the tides of time. We tried to beat it -- she did -- and failed." "No." Gina wouldn't quit so easily. "I'm as guilty as the next person because I knew what had happened and said nothing. You see, I looked at the chart. The Battle of Hastings. The Normans were Conquerer was to have died. I must have been the next person to visit England. He was still alive." "An oversight." She laughed. "Don't be silly, James." "It couldn't have been that important." She shrugged and crossed to the still unfurled chart. Crouching down, she ran her finger across the dates. "I wonder who it was. Stye maybe, or Francis. It could have been any one of us." "Yes. Anyone." "We were selfish." "But so was she." Suddenly, impulsively, Gina began to roll up the chart. "Let's bum it," she said.  Part HI of HI By name I am Robinette Broadhead, and by profession I am rich retired ford the best psychiatrist in New York, who happens to be a machine whom I call Sigfrid von Shrink. I suppose all that sounds pretty gay and jolly, but there's nothing funny about Sigfrid. He hurts me a lot. Sigfrid would say that was untrue. He would say that the pain comes out of the inner parts of me, and especially out of my life, which, to be sure, has not been all pleasure.  grew up in the Wyoming food mines. You know what that's like. Sheer hell. You dig the shale, boil out the oil, grow the single-cell protein on the oil substrate-and qfter a while you learn to hold out a little for yourself, to ferment and drink so you can forget what kind of a life you're living. There were Just my part of the world when I was young. Not one of us had anything to look forward to but spending our whole lives in the hydrocarbon smog of Wyoming, with kerogen ground into the pores of our skin and the roots of our hair. But for me it turned out different. I had a stroke of luck. I won a lottery, and I came out of it with enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Gateway, and thus to possess the right to take part in the biggest lottery of them all; the chance to explore the universe for fun, profit and a first-rate shot at an early and unpleasant death. (I said it was a stroke of luck. I didn't say it was good luck.) Gateway was Something Else. It hung out in space, waiting for people to come and find it. It wasn't a natural object. It was an artifact, the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid or maybe the core of a comet, no one was quite sure. Its surface was studded with interstellar spaceships, all fueled and aimed and ready to take off for the ends of the Galaxy. There were a couple of problems. For one, although Gateway wasn't natural, it wasn't man-made either. It was made by that long-lost and not altogether comprehensible race called the Heechee, and abandoned by them along about the time Australopithecusafricanusirs( learned how to bash an enemy's head in with the thighbone of an antelope. For another, you never knew quite where you were going. The automatic navigation was quite efficient, but it had been preset by Heechee hands half a ship you might come out in orbit around a fair green planet loaded with treasure. You might also come out in the photosphere of a star. Or you might never come back at all, and no one would ever know why. Everybody on Gateway was part of the exploration team, that was . why they were there. Some were just waiting for the flight that would make them rich, like my friend Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Some were waiting for I don't know what, like my other friend Shikitei Bakin, who had lost his legs and a lot of his courage in some accident or other, and stayed on Gateway, maybe, mostly because it had so close to no gravity at all that he could get around by strapping wings to his arms and flying where he wanted to go. After I got to Gateway, and took the laughably brief course in interstellar navigation and so on (what did you have to know when the ships knew where they were going, and wouldn't tell?), I found I was waiting too; and what I was waiting for was to find spmething I had misplaced, namely my guts. My girl-friend Sheri, who had come up with me and gone through training with me, finally got tired of watching me stall and Wok off on a flight without me. I didn't mind, or at least not as muck as I would have minded if she had somehow forced me to go with her. There were other flights (when  got around to it), and other girls;  took up with Klara, and we hit it off beautifully. She was scared too. But time went on, and almost everyone we knew shipped out. Somehow Klara and I got our courage together long enough to get aboard a five-man ship... And it turned out to be a bust. We traveled God knows how many light-years, and came out too far from any interesting planet to be able to reach it; so we turned around and came back empty-handed. That was nothing unusual. Most trips came back empty. When they came back at all. But then I got the word that Sheri's flight was back-the one  had refused to go on, remember? And they had struck it very, very rich... without me. XX night, but it took me a long time to get to sleep: and Shicky woke me up early to tell me what was happening. There had been only three survivors, and their base award had already been announced: seventeen thousand dollars. Against royalties. That drove the sleepies out of my eyes. "For what?" I demanded. Shicky said, "For twenty-three kilograms of artifacts. They think it's a repair kit. Possibly for a ship, since that is where they found it, in a lander on the surface of the planet. But at least they are tools of some sort." "Tools." I got up, and got rid of Shicky, and plodded down the tunnel to the community shower, thinking about tools. Tools could mean a lot. Tools could mean a way to open the drive mechanism in the Heechee ships without blowing up everything around. Tools could mean finding out how the drive worked, and building our own. Tools could mean almost anything, and what they certainly meant was a five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, not counting royalties, divided three ways. One of which could have been mine. It is hard to get a figure like # out of your mind (not to mention royalties) when you think that if you had been a little more foreseeing in your choice of girlfriends you could have had it in lars. At my age and health I could have bought paid-up Full Medical for less than half of that, which meant all the tests, therapies, tissue replacements and organ transplants they could cram into me for the rest of my life... which would have been at least fifty years longer than I could expect without it. The other bought me a couple of homes, a career as a lecturer (nobody was Dr. Asmenion. Now, you get a star that has used up its fuel and it collapses. When I say "collapses", I mean it's shrunk so far that the whole thing, that starts out with maybe the mass and volume of the sun, is squeezed into a ball maybe ten kilometers across. That's dense. If your nose was made out of neutron star stuff, Susie, it would weigh more than Gateway does. Question. Maybe even more than you do, Yuri? Dr. Asmenion. Don't make jokes in class. Teacher's sensitive. Anyway, good, close-in readings on a neutron star would be worth a lot, but I don't advise you to use your lander to get them. You need to be in a fully armored Five, and then I wouldn't come much closer than a tenth of an A.U. And watch it. It'll look as though probably you could get closer, but the gravity shear is bad. It's practically a point source, you see. Steepest gravity gradient you'll ever see, unless you happen to get next to a black hole, God forbid. more in demand than a successful prospector), a steady income for doing commercials on PV, women, food, cars, travel, women, fame, women... and, again, there were always the royalties. They could have come to anything at all, depending on what the RD people managed to do with the tools. Sheri's find was exactly what Gateway was all about: the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It took an hour for me to get down to the hospital, three tunnel segments and five levels in the dropshaft. I kept changing my mind and going back. When I finally managed to purge my mind of envy (or at least to bury it where I didn't think it was going to show) and turned up at the reception desk, Sheri was asleep anyway. "You can go in," said the w nurse. "I don't want to wake her up." "I don't think you could," he said. "Don't force it, of course. But she's allowed visitors." She was in the lowest of three bunks in a twelve-bed room. Three or four of the others were occupied, two of them behind the isolation curtains, milky plastic that you could see through only vaguely. I didn't know who they were. Sheri herself looked quite peacefully resting, one arm under her head, her pretty eyes closed and her strong, dimpled chin resting on her wrist. Her two companions were in the same room, one asleep, one sitting under a holoview of Saturn's rings. I had met him once or twice, a Cuban or Venezuelan or something like that from New Jersey. TTie only name I could remember for him was Manny. We chatted for a while, and he promised to tell Sheri I had been there. I left and went for a cup of coffee at the comissary, thinking about their trip. They had come out near a tiny, cold planet way out from a K-# orange-red cinder of a star, and according to Manny they hadn't even been sure it was worth the trouble of landing. The readings showed Heechee-metal radiation, but not Question. You didn't tell us anything about Heechee prayer fans, and we see more of them than anything else. Prof. Hegramet. What do you want me to tell you, Susie? Question' Well I know what they look like. Sort of like a rolled-up ice-cream cone made out of crystal. All different colors of crystal. If you hold one right and press on it with your thumb it opens up like a fan. Prof. Hegramet. That's what I know, too. They've been analyzed, same as fire pearls and the blood diamonds. But don't ask me what they're for. I don't think the Heechee fanned themselves with them, and I don't think they prayed either; that's just what the novelty dealers called them. The Heechee #eft them all over the place, even when they tidied everything else up. I suppose they had a reason. I don't have a clue what th'at reason was, but if I ever find out I'll tell you. much; and almost all of it, apparently, was buried under carbondioxide snow. Manny was the one who stayed in orbit. Sheri and the other three went down, found a Heechee dig, opened it with great effort and, as usual, found it empty. Then they tracked another trace and found the old lander. They had to blast to get it open, and in the process two of the prospectors lost integrity of their spacesuits -- too close to the blast, I guess. By the time they realized they were in trouble it was too late for them. They froze. Sheri and the other crewman tried to get them back into their own lander, it must have been pure misery and fear the whole time, and at the end they had to give up. Tlie other man had made one more trip to the abandoned lander, found the tool kit in it, managed to get it back to their own lander. Then they had taken off, leaving the two casualties peacefully frozen behind them. But they had overstayed their limit and they were physical wrecks when they docked with the orbiter. I wasn't clear on what happened after that, but apparently they had failed to secure the lander's air supply and had lost a good deal of it; so they were on short oxygen rations all the way home. The other man was worse off than Sheri. There was a good chance of residual brain damage, and his # might not do him much good. But Sheri, they said, would be all right once she recovered from plain exhaustion... I didn't envy them the trip. All I envied them was the reward. I got up and got myself another cup of coffee in the commissary. As I brought it back to the corridor outside, where there were a few benches under the ivy planters, I became aware that something was bugging me. Something about the trip. About the fact that it had been a real winner, one of the all-time greats of Gateway's history... I dumped the coffee, cup and all,' into a disposal hole outside the commissary and headed for the school room. It was only a few minutes away and there was no one else there. TTiat was good; I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet about what had occurred to me. I keyed the P-phone to information access and got the settings for Sheri's trip; they were, of course, a matter of public record. Then I went down to the practice capsule, and again hit lucky because there was no one around, and set them up on the course selector. Of course, I got good color immediately; and when I pressed the fine-tuner the whole board turned bright pink, except for the rainbow of colors along the side. There was only one dark line in the blue part of the spectrum. Well, I thought, so much for Metchnikov's theory about danger readings. They had lost forty per cent of the crew on that mission, and that struck me as being quite adequately dangerous; but according to what he had told me the really hairy ones showed six or seven of those bands. And in the yellow? According to Metchnikov, the more bright bands in the yellow, the more financial reward from a trip. Only in this one there were no bright bands in the yellow at all. There were two thick black "absorption" lines. That's all. I thumbed the selector off and sat back. So the great brains had labored and brought forth a mouse again: what they had interpreted as an indication of safety didn't really mean you were safe, and what they had interpreted as a promise of good results didn't seem to have any relevance to the first mission in more than a year that had really come up rich. Back to square one, and back to being scared. For the next couple of days I kept pretty much to myself. There are supposed to be eight hundred kilometers of tunnels inside Gateway. You wouldn't think there could be that many in a little chunk of rock that's only about ten kilometers across. But even so only about two per cent of Gateway is airspace, the rest is solid rock. I saw a lot of those eight hundred kilometers. I didn't cut myself off completely from human companionship, I just didn't seek it out. I saw Klara now and then. I wandered around with Shicky when he was off duty, although it was tiring for him. Sometimes I wandered by myself, sometimes with chance-met friends, sometimes tagging along after a tourist group. The guides knew me and were not averse to having me along (I had been out! even if I didn't wear a bangle), until they got the idea that I was thinking of guiding myself. Then they were less friendly. They were right. I was thinking of it. I was going to have to do something sooner or later. I would have to go out, or I would have to go home; and if I wanted to defer decision on either of those two equally frightening prospects, I would have to decide at least to try to make enough money to stay put. When Sheri got out of the hospital we had a hell of a party for her, a combination of welcome home, congratulations and good-by, Sheri, because she was leaving for Earth the next day. She was shaky but cheerful, and although she wasn't up to dancing she sat hugging me in the corridor for half an hour, promising to miss me. I got quite drunk. Corporation Report: Orbit # # vessels returned from launches during this period, with a total crew of #. # additional vessels were judged lost, with a total crew of #. In addition # crew members were killed or died of injuries, although the vessels returrled. Three returning vessels ,were damaged past the point of feasible repair. Landing reports: #. Five of the surveyed planets had life at the microscopic level or higher; one possessed structured plant or animal life; none intelligent. Artifacts: Additional samples or usual Heechee equipment were returned. No previously unknown Heechee artifacts. Samples: Chemical or mineral, #. None adjudged of sufficient value to justify exploitation. Living organic, #I . Three of these were judged hazardous and disposed of in space. None found of exploitable value. Science awards in period: #. Other cash awards in period, including royalties: #. Awards and royalties arising from new discoveries in period (other than science awards): #. Personnel grounded or exiting Gateway in period: #. Lost operationally: # (including # lost in lander exercises.) Medically unfit at end of year, -- #. Total losses, #. New personnel arriving in period; #. Returned to duty: #. Total increment during period; #. Net gain in personnel; #. It was a good chance for it; the liquor was free. Sheri and her Cuban friend were picking up the check. In fact, I got so drunk that I never did get to say good-by to Sheri, because I had to head for the toilet and chuck. Drunk as I was, that struck me as a pity; it was genuine Scotch-from-Scotland Gleneagle, none of your local white lightning boiled out of God knows what. Throwing up cleared my head. I came out and leaned against a wall, my face buried in the ivy, breathing hard, and by and by enough oxygen got into my bloodstream that I could recognize Francy Hereira standing next to me. I even said, "Hello, Francy." He grinned apologetically. "The smell. It was a little strong." "Sorry," I said huffily, and he looked surprised. "No, what do you mean? I mean it is bad enough on the cruiser, but every time I come to Gateway I wonder how you live through it. And in those rooms -- phew!" "No offense taken," I said grandly, patting his shoulder. "I must say good night to Sheri." "She's gone. Bob. Got tired. They took her back to the hospital." "In that case," I said, "I will only say good night to you." I bowed and lurched down the tunnel. It is difficult being drunk in nearly zero gravity. You long for the reassurance of a hundred kilos of solid weight to hold you to the ground. I understand from what was reported to me later, that I pulled a solid rack of ivy off the wall, and I know from what I felt the next morning that I bashed my head into something hard enough to leave a purplish bruise the size of my ear. I became conscious of Francy coming up behind me and helping me navigate, and about halfway home I became conscious that there was someone else on my other arm. I looked, and it was Klara. I have only the most confused recollection of being put to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, desperately hung over, I was astonished to find that Klara was in it too. I got up as inconspicuously as I could and headed for the bathroom, needing a lot to throw up some more. It took quite a while, and I topped it off with another shower, my second in four days and a wild extravagance, considering my financial state. But I felt a little better, and when I got back to my room Klara had got up, fetched tea, probably from Shicky, and was waiting for me. "Thanks," I said, meaning it. I was infinitely dehydrated. "A sip at a time, old horse," she said anxiously, but I knew enough not to force much into my stomach. I managed two swallows and stretched out in the hammock again, but by then I was pretty sure I would live. "I didn't expect to see you here," I said. "You were, ah, insistent," she told me. "Not much on performance. But awfully anxious to try." "Sony about that." She reached over and squeezed my foot. "Not to worry. How've things been, anyway?" "Oh, all right. It was a nice party. I don't remember seeing you there?" She shrugged. "I came late. Wasn't invited, as a matter of fact." I didn't say anything; I had been aware Klara and Sheri were not very friendly, and assumed it was because of me. Klara, reading my mind, said, "I've never cared for Scorpios, especially unevolved ones with that awful huge jaw. Never get an intelligent, spiritual thought from one of them." Then she said, to be fair, "But she has courage, you have to give her that." "I don't believe I'm up to this argument," I said. "Not an argument. Bob." She leaned over, cradling my head. She smelled sweaty and female; rather nice, in some circumstances, but not quite what I wanted right then. "Hey," I said. "What ever became of musk oil?" "What?" "I mean," I said, suddenly realizing something that had been true for quite a while, "you used to wear that perfume a lot. That was the first thing I remember noticing about you." I thought of Francy Hereira's remark about the Gateway smell, and realized it had been a long time since I had noticed Klara smelling particularly nice. "Honey-Bob, are you trying to start an argument with me?" "Certainly not. But I'm curious. When did you stop wearing it?" She shrugged and didn't answer, unless looking annoyed is an answer. It was enough of an answer for me, because I'd told her often enough that I liked the perfume. "So how are you doing with your shrink?" I asked, to change the subject. It didn't seem to be any improvement. Klara said, without warmth, "I guess you're feeling pretty rotten with that head. I think I'll go home now." "No, I mean it," I insisted. "I'm curious about your progress." She hadn't told me a word, though I knew she had signed up; and she seemed to spend two or three hours a day with him. Or it. She had elected to try the machine service from the Corporation computer, I knew. "Not bad," she said distantly. "Get over your father fixation yet?" I inquired. Klara said, "Bob, did it ever occur to you that you might get some good out of a little help yourself?' ' "Funny you should say that. Louise Forehand said the very same thing to me the other day." "Not funny. Think about it. See you later." I dropped my head back after she had gone and closed my eyes. Go to a shrink! What did I ne with that? All I needed was one lucky find like Sheri's... And all I needed to make that was -- was -- Was the guts to sign up for another trip. But that kind of guts, for me, seemed to be in very short supply. Time was slipping by, or I was destroying it, and the way I began destroying one day was' to go to the museum. They had already installed a complete holo set of Sheri's find. I played the disk over two or three times, just to see what seventeen thousand dollars looked like. It mostly looked like irrelevant junk. That was when each piece was displayed on its own. There were about ten little prayer fans, proving, I guess, that the Heechee liked to include a few art objects even with a tire-repair kit. Or whatever the rest of it was; things like trianglebladed screwdrivers with flexible shafts, things like socket wrenches, but made of some soft material; things like electrical test probes, and things like nothing you ever saw before. Spread out item by item they seemed pretty random, but the way they fit into each other, and into the flat nested boxes that made up the set, was a marvel of packing hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and if I had stayed with Sheri I could have been one of the shareholders. Or one of the corpses. I stopped off at Klara's place and hung around for a while, but she wasn't home. It wasn't her usual time for being shrunk. On the other hand, I had lost track of Klara's usual times. She had found another kid to mother when its parents were busy: a little black girl, maybe four years old, who had come up with a mother who was an astrophysicist and a father who was an exobiologist. And what else Klara had found to keep herself busy I was not sure. I drifted back to my own room, and Louise Forehand peered out of her door and followed me in. "Bob," she said urgently, "do you know anything about a big danger bonus coming up?" Classifieds. for any half-mil plus bonus. Don't ask me. Order me. #. claimed personal effects nonreturnees. Corporation Area Charlie Nine, #-# tomorrow. you achieve Oneness. HeShe is Heechee and HeShe Forgives. Church of the Marvelously Maintained Motorcycle. #-#. mutual sympathy only. No touching. #-#. I made room for her on the pad. "Me? No. Why would I?" Her pale, muscular face was tauter than ever, I could not tell why. "I thought maybe you'd heard something. From Dane Metchnikov, maybe. I know you're close to him, and I've seen him talking to Klara in the schoolroom." I didn't respond to that, I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. "There's a rumor that there's a science trip coming up that's pretty hairy. And I'd like to sign on for it." I put my arm around her. "What's the matter, Louise?" "They posted Willa dead." I held her for a while and let her cry it out. I would have comforted her if I had known how, but what comfort was there to give? After a while I got up and rummaged around in my cupboard, looking for a joint Klara had left there a couple days before. I found it, lighted it, passed it to her. Louise took a long, hard pull, and held it for quite a while. Then she puffed out. "She's dead. Bob," she said. She was over crying now, somber but relaxed; even the muscles around her neck and up and down her spine were tensionfree. "She might come back yet, Louise." She shook her head. "Not really. The Corporation posted her ship lost. It might come back, maybe. Willa won't be alive in it. Their last stretch of rations would have run out two weeks ago." She stared into space for a moment, then sighed and roused herself to take another pull on the Joint. "I wish Sess were here," she said, leaning back and stretching; I could feel the play of muscles against the palm of my hand. The dope was hitting her, I could see. I knew it was hitting me. It wasn't any of our usual Gateway windowbox stuff, sneaked in among the ivy. Klara had got hold of some pure Naples Red from one of the cruiser boys, shadegrown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius between the rows of vines that made Lacrimae Cristi wine. She turned toward me and snuggled her chin into my neck. "I really love my family," she said, calmly enough. "I wish we had hit lucky here. We're about due for some luck." "Hush, honey," I said, nuzzling into her hair. Her hair led to her ear and her ear led to her lips, and step by step we were making love in a timeless, gentle, stoned way. It was very relaxed. Louise was competent, unanxious and accepting. After a couple of months of Klara's nervous paroxysms it was like coming home to Mom's chicken soup. At the end she smiled, kissed me and turned away. She was very still, and her breathing was even. She lay silent for a long time, and it wasn't until I realized that my wrist was getting damp that I knew she was crying again. "I'm sorryj Bob," she said when I began to pat her. "It's just that we've never had any luck. Some days I can live with that fact, and some days not. This is one of the bad ones." "You will." "I don't think so. I don't believe it any more." "You got here, didn't you? That's pretty lucky." She twisted herself around to face me, her eyes scanning mine. I said, people would give their left testicles to be here." Louise said slowly, "Bob -- " She stopped. I started to speak but she put her hand over my lips. "Bob," she said, "do you know how we managed to get here?" "Sure. Sess sold his airbody." "We sold more than that. The airbody brought a little over a hundred thousand. That wasn't enough for even one of us. We got the money from Hat." "Your son? the one that died?" She said, "Hat had a brain tumor. They caught it in time, or anyway almost in time. It was operable. He could have lived, oh, I don't know, ten years anyway. He would have been messed up some. His speech centers were affected, and so was his muscle control. But he could have been alive right now. Only -- " She took her hand off my chest to rub it across her face, but she wasn't crying. "He didn't want us to spend the airbody money on Term Medical for him. It would have just about paid for the surgery, and then we would have been broke again. So what he did, he sold himself, Bob. He sold off all his parts. More than just a left testicle. All of him. They were fine, first-quality Nordic male twenty-two-year-old parts, and they were worth a bundle. He signed himself over to the medics and they -- how do you say it? -- put him to sleep. There must be pieces of Hat in a dozen different people now. They sold off everything for transplants, and they gave us the money. Close to a million dollars. Got us here, with some to spare. So that's where our luck came from. Bob." I said, "I'm sorry." "For what? We just don't have the luck. Bob. Hat's dead. Willa's dead. God knows where my husband is, or our one last surviving kid. And I'm here, and. Bob, half the time I wish with all my heart that I were dead too."    I left her sleeping in my bed and wandered down to Central Park. I called Klara, found her out, left a message to say where I was, and spent the next hour or so on my back, looking up at the mulberries ripening on the tree. There was no one there except for a couple of tourists taking a fast look through before their ship left. I didn't pay attention to them, didn't even hear them leave. I was feeling sorry for Louise and for all the Forehands, and even sorrier for myself. They didn't have the luck, but what I didn't have hurt a lot more; I didn't have the courage to see where my luck would take me. Sick societies squeeze adventurers out like grape pips. The grape pips don't have much to say about it. I suppose it was the same with Columbus's seamen or the pioneers manhandling their covered wagons through Comanche territory; they must have been scared witless, like me, but they didn't have much choice. Like me. But, God, how frightened I was... I heard voices, a child's and a light, slower laugh that was Klara's. I sat up. "Hello, Bob," she said, standing before me with her hand on the head of a tiny black girl in corn-row hair. "This is Watty." "Hello, Watty." My voice didn't sound right, even to me. Klara took a closer look and demanded, "What's the matter?" I couldn't answer that question in one sentence so I chose one facet. "Willa Forehand's been posted dead." Klara nodded without saying anything. Watty piped, "Please, Klara. Throw the ball." Klara tossed it to her, caught it, tossed it again, all in the Gagetway adagio. I said, "Louise wants to go on a danger-lx)nus launch. I thii what she wants is for me, for us, to go and take her with us." "Oh?" "Well, what about it? Has Dane said anything to you about one of his specials?" "No! I haven't seen Dane for -- I don't know. Anyway, he shipped out this morning on a One." "He didn't have a farewell party!" I protested, surprised. She pursed her lips. The little girl called: "Hey, mister! Catch!" When she threw the ball it came floating up like a hot-air balloon to a mooring mast, but even so I almost missed it. My mind was on something else. I tossed it b'ack with concentration. After a minute Klara said, "Bob? I'm sorry. I guess I was in a bad mood." "Yeah." My mind was very busy. She said placatingly, "We've been having some hard times. Bob. I don't want to be raspy with you. I -- I brought you something." I looked around, and she took my hand and slid something up over it, onto my arm. It was a launch bracelet, Heechee metal, worth five hundred dollars anywhere. I hadn't been able to afford to buy one. I stared at it, trying to think of what I wanted to say. "Bob?" "What?" There was an edge to her voice. "It's customary to say thank you." "It's customary," I said, "to give a truthful answer to a question. Like not saying you hadn't seen Dane Metchnikov when you were with him just last night." She flared, "You've been spying on me!" "You've been lying to me." "Bob! You don't own me. Dane's a human being, and a friend." "Friend!" I barked. The last Question. I saw a report that Heechee metal had been analyzed by the National Bureau of Standards -- Prof. Hegramet. No you didn't. Question. But it was on the PV -- Prof. Hegramet. No. You saw a report that the Bureau of Standards had issued a quantitative assessment of Heechee metal. Not an analysis. Just a description: tensile strength, fracture strength, melting point, all that stuff. Question. I'm not sure I understand the difference. Prof. Hegramet. We finally know exactly what it does. We don't yet know what it is. What's the most interesting thing about Heechee metal? You, Teri? Question. It glows? Prof. Hegramet. It glows, yes. It emits light. Bright enough so that we don't need anything else to light our rooms, we have to cover it over when we want dark. And it's been glowing for half a million years at least like that. Where does the energy come from? The Bureau says there are some posturanic elements in it, and probably they drive the radiation; but we don't know what they are. There's also something in it that looks like an isotope of copper. Well, copper doesn't have any stable isotopes. Up to now. So what the Bureau says is what the exact frequency of the blue light is, and all the physical measurements to eight or nine decimals; but the report doesn't tell you how to make any. thing Metchnikov was to anyone was a friend. Just thinking about Klara with him made my groin crawl. I didn't like the sensation, because I couldn't identify it. It wasn't just anger, wasn't even Just jealousy. There was a component that remained obstinately opaque. I said, knowing it was illogical, hearing myself seem almost to whine. "I intnxluced you to him!" "That doesn't give you ownership! All right," Klara snarled, "maybe I went to bed with him a few times. It doesn't change how I feel about you." "It changes how I feel about you, Klara." She stared incredulously. "You have the nerve to say that? Coming here, smelling of sex with some cheap floozy?" That one caught me off guard. "There was nothing cheap about it! I was comforting someone in pain." She laughed. The sound was unpleasant; anger is unbecoming. "Louise Forehand? She hustled her way up here, did you know that?" The little girl was holding the ball and staring at us now. I could see we were frightening her. I said, trying to tighten my voice to keep I'm not going to let you make a fool out of me." "Ah," she said in inarticulate disgust, and turned around to go. I reached out to touch her, and she sobbed and hit me, as hard as she could. The blow caught me on the shoulder. That was a mistake. That's always a mistake. It isn't a matter of what's rational or justified, it is a matter of signals. It was the wrong signal to give me. The reason wolves don't kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack any more. If it were not that way, there wouldn't be any wolves left. For the same reason men don't usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can't. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first -- I punched her four or five times, as hard as I could, on the breast, in the face, in the belly. She fell to the ground, sobbing. I knelt beside her, lifted her up with one hand and, in absolutely cold blood, slapped her twice more. It was all happening as if choreographed by God, absolutely inevitably; and at the same time I could feel that I was breathing as hard as though I'd climbed a mountain on a dead run. The blood was thundering in my ears. Everything I saw was hazed with red. I finally heard a distant, thin crying. I looked and saw the little girl, Watty, staring at me, her mouth open, tears rolling down her wide, purplish-black cheeks. I started to move toward her to reassure her. She screamed and ran behind a grape trellis. I turned back toward Klara, who was sitting up, not looking at me, her hand cupped over her mouth. She took the hand away and stared at something in it: a tooth. I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say, and didn't trust myself to think of anything. I turned and left. I don't remember what I did for the next few hours. I didn't sleep, although I was physically exhausted. I sat on the chest of drawers in my room for a while. Then I left it again. I remember talking to somebody, I think it was a straggling tourist off the Venus ship, about how adventurous and exciting prospecting was. I remember eating something in the commissary. And all the time I was thinking: I wanted to kill Klara. I had been containing all that storedup fury, and I hadn't even let myself know it was there until she pulled the trigger. I 'didn't know if she would ever forgive me. I wasn't sure she ought to, and I wasn't even sure that I wanted her to. I could not imagine our ever being lovers again. But what I finally was sure I wanted was to apologize. Only she wasn't in her rooms. There was no one there but a plump young black woman, slowly sorting out clothes, with a tragic face. When I asked after Klara she began to cry. "She's gone," the woman sobbed. "Gone?" "Oh, she looked awful. Someone must have beaten her up! She brought Watty back and said she wouldn't be able to take care of her any more. She gave me all her clothes, but -- what am I going to do with Watty when I'm working?" "Gone where?" The woman lifted her head. "Back to Venus. On the ship. It left an hour ago." Somehow I got to sleep, alone in my own bed. I didn't talk to anyone else. When I got up I gathered together everything I owned: My clothes, my holodisks, my chess set, my wristwatch. The Heechee bracelet that Klara had given me. I went around and sold them off. I cleaned out my credit account and put all the money together: it came to a total of fourteen hundred dollars and change. I took the money up to the casino and put it all on Number #I on the roulette wheel. The big slow ball drifted into a socket: Green. Zero. I went down to mission control and signed for the first One that was available, and twenty-four hours later I was in space. xxni "How do you really feel about Dane, Bob?" "How the hell do you think I feel? He seduced my girl." "That's a strangely old-fashioned way to put it. Bob. And it happened an awfully long time ago." "Sure it did." Sigfrid strikes me as being unfair. He sets up rules, then he doesn't play by them. I say indignantly, "Cut it out, Sigfrid. All that happened a long time ago, but it isn't being a long time ago, for me, because I've never let it come out. It's still brand-new inside my head. Isn't that what you're supposed to do for me? Let all that old stuff inside my head come out so it can dry up and blow away and not cripple me any more?" "I'd still like to know why it stays so brand-new inside your head. Bob." "Oh, Christ, Sigfrid!" This is one of Sigfrid's stupid times. He can't handle some complex kinds of input, I guess. When you come right down to it he's only a machine and can't do anything he isn't programmed to do. Mostly he just responds to key words -- well, with a little attention to meaning, sure. And to nuance, as far as it is expressed by voice tone, or by what the sensors in the pad and straps tell him about my muscle activity. "If you were a person instead of a machine, you'd understand," I tell him. "Perhaps so. Bob." To get him back on the right track I say: "It is true that it happened a long time ago. I don't see what you're asking beyond that." "I'm asking you to resolve a contradiction I perceive in what you say. You've been saying that you don't mind the fact that your girl friend, Klara, had sexual relations with other men. Why is it so important that she did with Dane?' ' "Dane didn't treat her right!" And, good God, he certainly didn't. He left her stuck like a fly in amber. "Is it because of how he treated Klara, Bob? Or is it something between Dane and you?" "Never! There was never anything between Dane and me!" "You did tell me he was bi. Bob. What about on the flight you took with him." "He had two other men to play with! Not me, boy, no, I swear! Not me. Oh," I said, trying to calm my voice enough to me it reflect the very mild interest I really felt in this stupid subject, "to be sure, he tried to put the make on me once or twice. But I told him it wasn't my style." "Your voice. Bob," he says, "seems to reflect more anger than your words account for." "Damn you, Sigfrid!" I really am angry now, I admit it. I can hardly get the words out. "You get me pissed off with your wild accusations. Sure, I let him put his arm around me once or twice. That's as far as I went. Nothing serious. I was Just abusing myself to make the time pass. I liked him well enough. Big, goodlooking fellow. You get lonesome when -- Now what?" Sigfrid was making a sound, sort of like clearing one's throat. It is how he interrupts without interrupting. "What did you Just say. Bob?" "What? When?" "When you said there was nothing serious between you." "Christ, I don't know what I said. There was nothing serious, that's all. I was Just entertaining myself, to make the time pass." "You didn't use the word 'entertaining', Bob." "I didn't? What word did I use?" I reflect, listening for the echo of my own voice. "I guess I said 'amusing myself. What about it?" "You didn't say 'amusing' either. Bob. What did you say?" "I don't know!" "You said, 'I was just abusing myself'. Bob." My defenses go up, I feel as though I had suddenly discovered I Question. Don't we even know what a Heechee table or any old housekeeping thing looks like? Prof. Hegramet. We don't even know what a Heechee house looks like. We never found one. Just tunnels. They liked branching shafts, with rooms opening out of them. They liked big chambers shaped like spindles, tapered at both ends, too. There's one here, two on Venus, probably the remains of one that's half eroded away on Peggy's World. Question. I know what the bonus is for finding intelligent alien life, but what's the bonus for finding a Heechee? Prof. Hegramet. just find one. Then name your price. had wet my pants, or that my fly was open. I step outside my body and look at my own head. "What does 'abusing myself' mean to you. Bob?" "Say," I say, laughing, genuinely impressed and amused at the same time, "that's a real Freudian slip, isn't it? You fellows are pretty keen. My compliments to the programmers." Sigfrid doesn't respond to my urbane comment. He Just lets me stew in it for a minute. "All right," I say. I feel very open and vulnerable, letting nothing at all happen, living in that moment as though it were lasting forever, like Klara stuck in her instant and eternal fall. Sigfrid says gently, "Bob. When you masturbated, did you ever have fantasies about Dane?" "I hated it," I said. He waits. "I hate myself for it. I mean, not hated, exactly. More like despised. Poor God-damn son of a bitch, me, all kinky and awful, beating his meat and thinking about being screwed by his girl's lover." Sigfrid waits me out for a while. Then he says, 'T think you really want to cry. Bob." He's right, but I don't say anything. "Would you like to cry?" he invited. "I'd love it," I say. "Then why don't you go ahead and cry, Bob?" "I wish I could," I say. "Unfortunately, I just don't know how." I was just turning over, making up my mind to go to sleep, when I noticed that the colors on the Heechee guidance system were breaking up. It was the fifty-fifth day of my trip, the twenty-seventh since turnover. The colors had been shocking pink for the whole fiftyfive days. Now whorls of pure white formed, grew, clotted together. I was arriving! Wherever it was going to turn out to be when I got there, I was arriving. My little old ship -- the smelly, hurtful, tedious coffin I had been banging around in for nearly two months by myself, talking to myself, playing games with myself, tired of myself -- was well below lightspeed. I leaned over to look at the viewscreen, now relatively "down" to me because I had been decelerating, and saw nothing that looked very exciting. Oh, there was a star, yes. There were lots of stars in a scattering of groupings that in no way looked familiar; half a dozen blues ranging from bright to hurt-the-eyes; a red one that stood out more for intensity of hue than luminosity. It was an angry-looking red coal, not much brighter than Mars is from Earth, but a deeper, uglier red. I made myself take an interest. That was not really easy. After fifty-seven days of rejecting everything around me because it was boring or threatening, it was hard for me to switch over to a welcoming, vulnerable mode. I switched on the spherical scan and peered out as the ship began to rotate in its scanning pattern, slicing orange-peel strips of sky to capture in the cameras and analyzers. And almost at once I got a huge, bright, nearby signal return. Fifty-seven days of boredom and exhaustion went right out of my mind. There was something either very big or very close. I forgot about being sleepy. I crouched over the viewscreen, holding on with hands and knees, and then I saw it: a squared-off object marching into the screen. Glowing all over. Pure Heechee metal! It was irregularly slab-sided, wit#i rounded pimples studding one of the flat sides. And the adrenalin began to flow, and visions of sugarplums danced in my head. I watched it out of sight, and then hauled myself over to the scan analyzer, waiting to see what would come out. There was no question that it was good, the only question was tow good. Maybe extraordinarily good! Maybe a whole Peggy's Worid all my own! -- with a every year all the rest of my life! Maybe only a vacant shell. Maybe -- the squared-off shape suggested it -- maybe that wildest of dreams, a whole big Heechee ship that I could enter into and fly around anywhere I chose, big enough to carry a thousand people those dreams were possible; and even if they all failed, if it was just an abandoned shell, all that it needed was one thing inside it, one little tinkertoy, one gadget, one whozie that nobody had ever found before that could be taken apart and reproduced and made to work -- I stumbled and raked my knuckles against the spiral gadget, now glowing soft gold. I sucked the blood off them and realized the ship was moving. It shouldn't have been moving! It wasn't programmed to do that. It was meant to hang in whatever orbit it was programmed to find, and just stay there until I looked around and made my decisions. I stared around, confused and baffled. The glowing slab was firmly in the middle of the viewscreen now and it stayed there; the ship had stopped its automatic spherical scan. Belatedly I heard the distant high yell of the lander motors. They were what were moving me; my ship was targeted for that slab. And a green light was glowing over the pilot's seat. That was wrong! The green light was installed on Gateway by human beings. It had nothing to do with Mission Report Vessel #-#, Voyage #D#. Crew N. Ahoya, Ts. Zakharcenko, L. Marks. Transit time I # days # hours. Position not identified. Apparently outside galactic cluster, in dust cloud. Identification of external galaxies doubtful. Summary. "We found no trace of any planet, artifact or laudable asteroid within scanning distance. Nearest star approximately # l.y. Conjecture whatever was there has since been destroyed. Life-support systems began to malfunction on return trip and Larry Marks died." the Heechee; it was the plain old people's radio circuit, announcing that someone was calling me. Who? Who could be anywhere near my brand-new discovery? shouted, "Hello?" There was an answer. I didn't understand it; it seemed to be in some foreign language, perhaps Chinese. But it was human all right. "Talk English!" I yelled. "Who the hell are you?" Pause. Then another voice. "Who are youT' "My name is Broadhead," I snarled. "Broadhead?" Confused mumbling of a couple of voices. Then the English-speaking voice again: "We don't have any record of a prospector named Broadhead. Are you from Aphrodite?" "What's Aphrodite?" "Oh, Christ! Who are you? Listen, this is Gateway Two control and we don't have time to screw around. Identify yourself!" Gateway Two! I snapped off the radio and lay back, watching the slab grow larger, ignoring the demand of the green light. Gateway Two? How ridiculous! If I had wanted to go to Gateway Two I would have signed up in the regular course and accepted the penalty of paying royalties on anything I might find. I would have flown out secure as any tourist, on a course that had been tested a hundred times. I hadn't done that. I had picked a setting no one else had ever used, and taken my risks. And I had felt every one of them, scared out of my brain for fifty-seven bad days. It wasn't fair! I lost my head. I lunged toward the Heechee course director and shoved the wheels around at random. It was a failure I couldn't accept. I was braced to find nothing. I was not braced to find I had done something easy, for no reward at all. But what I produced was a bigger failure still. There was a bright yellow flash from the course board, and then all the colors went black. The thin scream from the lander motors stopped. The feeling of motion was gone. The ship was dead. Nothing was moving. Nothing worked in the Heechee complex; nothing, not even the cooling system. By the time Gateway Two sent a ship out to haul me in I was delirious with heatstroke, in an ambient temperature of #C. Gateway was hot and dank. Gateway Two was cold enough that I had to borrow jacket, gloves and heavy underwear. Gateway stank of sweat and sewers. Gateway Two tasted of rusty steel. Gateway was bright and lopd and full of people. On Gateway Two there was almost no sound, and only seven human beings, not counting myself, to make any. The Heechee had left Gateway Two not quite completed. Some of the tunnels ended in bare rock, and there were only a few dozen of them. No one had got around to planting vegetation yet, and all the air there was came from chemical processors; the partial pressure of O # was under # millibars, and the rest of the atmosphere was a nitrogen-helium mix, not much more than half earthnormal pressure altogether, that made the voices highpitched and left me gasping for the first few hours. The man who helped me out of my lander and bundled me up against the sudden cold was a daik, immense Martian-Japanese named Norio Ituno. He put me in his own bed, filled me with liquids and let me rest for an hour. I dozed, and when I woke up he was sitting there, looking at me with amusement and respect. The respect was for someone who had slain a fiveamusement was that I was idiot enough to do it. "I guess I'm in trouble," I said. "I would say so, yes," he agreed. "The ship is totally dead. Never saw anything like it before." "I didn't know a Heechee ship could go dead like that." He shrugged. "You did something origin, Broadhead. How are you feeling?" I sat up to answer him, and he nodded. "We're pretty busy right now. I'm going to have Dear Voice of Gateway: Are you a reasonable and open-minded person? Then prove it by reading this letter all the way through to the end before making up your mind about what it says. There are thirteen occupied levels in Gateway. There are thirteen residences in each of thirteen (count them yourself ) of the housing halls . Do you think this letter is just silly superstition? Then look at the evidence for yourself! Launches #-# , #-I and #-# (what do the digits add up to? ) were all declared overdue in List #-#! Gateway Corporation, wake up! Let the skeptics and bigots jeer. Human lives depend on your little ridicule. It would cost nothing to omit the Danger Numbers from all programs-except courage! M. Gloyner, #-#I to let you take care of yourself for a couple of hours -- if you can? -- fine. Then we'll have a party for you." "Party!" It was the farthest thing from my mind. "For what?" "We don't meet someone like you every day, Broadhead," he said admiringly, and left me to my thoughts. I didn't like my thoughts very mudh, and after a while I got up, put on the gloves, buttoned up the jacket and started exploring. It BO didn't take long; there wasn't much there. I heard sounds of activity from the lower levels, but the echoes traveled at queer angles along the empty corridors and I saw no one. Gateway Two didn't have a tourist trade, and so there wasn't any night club or casino, no restaurant that I could find... not even a latrine. After a little while that question began to seem urgent. I reasoned that Ituno would have had to have something like that near his room, and tried to retrace my steps to there, but that didn't work either. There were cubicles along some of the corridors, but they were unfinished. No one lived there, and no one had troubled to install plumbing. It was not one of my better days. When I finally found a toilet I puzzled over it for ten minutes and would guiltily have left it impolitely soiled if I had not heard a sound outside the cubicle. A plump little woman was standing there, waiting. "I don't know how to flush it," I apologized. She looked me up and down. "You're Broadhead," she stated, and then: "Why don't you go to Aphrodite?' ' "What's Aphrodite -- no, wait. First, how do you flush this thing? Then, what's Aphrodite?" She pointed to a button on the edge of the door; I had thought it was a light switch. When I touched it the whole bottom of the seamless bowl began to glow and in ten seconds there was nothing inside but ash, then nothing at all. "Wait for me," she commanded, disappearing inside. When she came out she said: "Aphrodite's where the money is, Broadhead. You're going to need it." I let her take my arm and pull me along. Aphrodite, I began to understand, was a planet. A new one, that a ship from Gateway Two had opened up less than forty days earlier, and a big one. "You'd have to pay royalty, of course," she said. "And so far they haven't found anything hig, just the usual Heechee debris. But there's thousands of square miles to explore, and it'll be two months before the first batch of prospectors starts coming out from Gateway. We only sent the word back forty days ago. Have you had any hot-planet experience?" "Hot-planet experience?" "I mean," she explained, pulling me down a drop-shaft and calling up to me, "have you ever explored a planet that's hot?" " -- No. As a matter of fact, I haven't had any experience at all, that counts for anything. One trip. Empty. I didn't even land." "Pity," she said. "Still, there's not that much to learn. You know what Venus is like? Aphrodite's just a little bit worse. The primary's a flare star, and you don't want to be caught in the open. But the Heechee digs are all underground. If you find one, you're in." "What are the chances of finding one?" I asked. "Well," she said thoughtfully, pulling me off the cable and down a tunnel, "not all that good, maybe. After all, you're out in the open when you're prospecting. On Venus they use armored airbodies and they zap around anywhere they want to go, no trouble. Well, maybe a little trouble," she conceded. "But they We sniff for your scent in the gas of Orion, We dig for your den with the dogs of Procyon, From Baltimore, Buffalo, Bonn and Benares We seek you round Algol, Arcturus, Antares. We'll find you some day. Little lost Heechee, we're on our way! don't lose very many prospectors any more. Maybe one per cent." "What per cent do you lose on Aphrodite?' ' "More than that. Yes, I grant you, it's higher than that. You have to use the lander from your ship, and of course it's not very mobile on the surface of a planet. Especially a planet with a surface like molten sulfur and winds like hurricanes -- when they're mild." "It sounds charming," I said. "Why aren't you out there now?" "Me? I'm an outpilot. I'm going back to Gateway in about ten days, soon as I get a cargo loaded, or somebody comes in and wants a ride back." "I want a ride back right now." "Oh, cripes, Broadhead! Don't you know what kind of trouble you're in? You broke regulations by messing with the control board. They'll throw the book at you." I thought it over carefully. Then I said, "Thanks, but I think I'll take my chances." "Don't you understand? Aphrodite has guaranteed Heechee remains. You could take a hundred trips without Hnding anything like this." "Sweetie," I said, "I couldn't take a hundred trips for anything, not now and not ever. I don't know if I can take one. I think I have the guts to get back to Gateway. Beyond that, I don't know."    I was on Gateway Two, altogether, thirteen days. Hester Bergowiz, the outpilot, kept trying to talk me into going to Aphrodite, I guess because she didn't want me taking up valuable cargo space on her return flight. The others didn't care. They only thought I was crazy. I was a problem for Ituno, who was loosely in charge of keeping things straight on Two. Technically I was an illegal entrant, without a dime's worth of per capita paid and with nothing to pay it with. He would have been within his rights to toss me out into space without a suit. He solved it by putting me to work loading lowpriority cargo into Hester's Five, mostly prayer fans and samples for analysis from Aphrodite. That took two days, and then he designated me a chief gofer for the three people who were rebuilding suits for the next batch of explorers of Aphrodite. They had to use Heechee torches to soften the metal enough to bend it onto the suits, and I wasn't trusted with any of that. It takes two years to train a person to handle a Heechee torch in close quarters. But I was allowed to muscle the suits and sheets of Heechee metal into position for them, to fetch tools, to go for coffee... and to put the suits on when they were finished, and exit into space to make sure they didn't leak. None of them leaked. On the twelfth day two Fives came in from Gateway, loaded with happy, eager prospectors bringing all the wrong equipment. The word about Aphrodite had not had time to get to Gateway and back, so the new fish didn't know what goodies were in store. Just by accident, one of them was a young girl on a science mission, a former student of Professor Hegramet's who was supposed to make anthropometric studies of Gateway Two. On his own authority Norio Ituno reassigned her to Aphrodite, and decreed a combination welcome and farewell party. The ten newcomers and I outnumbered our hosts, but what they lacked in numbers they made up in drinking and it was a good party. I found myself a celebrity. The new fish couldn't get over the fact that I had slain a Heechee ship and survived. I was almost sorry to leave... not counting being scared. Ituno splashed three fingers of rice whiskey into a glass for me and offered me a toast. "Sorry to see you go, Broadhead," he said. "Sure you won't change your mind? We've got more armored ships and suits than we have prospectors right now, but I don't know how long that's going to last. If you change your mind after you get back -- " "I'm not going to change my mind," I said. "Banzai," he said, and drank. "Listen, do you know an old guy named Bakin?" "Shicky? Sure. My neighbor." "Give him my regards," he said, pouring another drink for the purpose. "He's a great guy, but he reminds me of you. I was with him when he lost his legs: got caught in the lander when we had to jettison. Damn near died. By the time we got him to Gateway he was all swelled up and smelled like hell; we had to take the legs off, two days out. I did it myself." "He's a great person, all right," I said absently, rinishing the drink and holding the glass out for more. "Hey. What do you mean, he reminds you of me?" "Can't make up his mind, Broadhead. He's got a stake that's enough to put him on Full Medical, and he can't make up his mind to spend it. If he spends it he can have his legs back and go out again. But then he'd be broke if he didn't score. So he Just stays on, a cripple." I put the glass down. I didn't want any more to drink. "So long, Ituno," I said. "I'm going to bed." I spent most of the trip back writing letters to Klara that I didn't know if I would ever mail. There wasn't much else to do. Hester turned out to be surprisingly sexual, for a small plump lady of a certain age, but there's a limit to how long that is entertaining and with all the cargo we had jammed in the ship there wasn't room for much else. The days were all the same: sex, letter writing, sleeping... and Classifieds. # roach. #-#. Agosto T. Agnelli. Call Corporation security for Interpol. Reward. lished. Perfect way to preserve memories for your children. Surprisingly low cost. Publishers' rep, #-#. or Paducah? I'm homesick. #. worrying. Worrying about why Shicky Bakin wanted to stay a cripple; which was a way of worrying in a way I could face about why I did. Sigfrid says, "You sound tired, Bob." Well, that was understandable enough. I had gone off to Hawaii for the weekend. Some of my money was in tourism there, so it was all tax deductible. It was a lovely couple of days on the Big Island, with a two-hour stockholders' meeting in the morning, and afternoons with one of those beautiful Island girls on the beach or sailing in glass-bottomed catamarans, watching the big mantas glide underneath begging for crumbs. But coming back you fight time zones all the way, and I was exhausted. Only that is not the sort of thing that Sigfrid really wants to hear about. He doesn't care if you're physically exhausted. He doesn't care if you've got a broken leg, he only wants to know if you dream about screwing your mother. I say that. I say, "I'm tired, all right, Sigfrid, but why don't you stop making small talk? Get right into my Oedipal feelings about Ma." "Did you have any, Bobby?" "Doesn't everybody?" "Do you want to talk about them, Bobby?" "Not particularly." He waits, and I wait too. Sigfrid has been being cute again, and now his room is fixed up like a boy's room from forty years ago. Crossed pingpong paddles hologrammed on the wall. A fake window with a fake view of the Montana Rockies in a snowstorm. A hologrammed cassette shelf of boys' stories on tape, Tom Sawyer and Lost Race of Mars and -- I can't read the rest of the titles. It is all very homey, but not in the least like my own room as a boy, which was tiny, narrow and almost filled by the old sofa I slept on. "Do you know what you do want to talk about, Rob?" Sigfrid probes gently. "You bet." Then I reconsider. "Well, no. I'm not sure." Actually I do know. Something had hit me on the way back from Hawaii, very hard. It's a five-hour flight. Half the time I had spent drenched in tears. It was funny. There was this lovely hapi-haole girl flying east in the seat next to me, and I had decided right away to get to know her better. And the stewardess was the same one I'd had before, and she I already knew better. So there I was, sitting at the very back of the first-class section of the stewardess, chatting with my pretty hapi-haole. And -- every time the girl was drowsing, or in the ladies' room, and the stewardess was looking the other way -- racked with silent, immense, tearful sobs. And then one of them would look my way again and I would be smiling, alert and on the make. "Do you want to just say what you're feeling at this second. Bob?" "I would in a minute, Sigfrid, if I knew what it was." "Don't you know, really? Can't you remember what was in your head while you weren't talking, just now?" "Sure I can!" I hesitate, then I say, "Oh, hell, Sigfrid, I guess I was just waiting to be coaxed. I had an insight the other day, and it hurt. Oh, wow, you wouldn't believe how it hurt. I was crying like a baby." "What was the insight, Bobby?" "I'm trying to tell you. It was about -- Well, it was partly about my mother. But it was also about, well, you know, Dane Metchnikov. I iTad -- these -- I had -- " "I think you're trying to say something about the fantasies you had of having anal sex with Dane Metchnikov, Bob. Is that right?" "Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly..." "You told me that. Bob." "Right." And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after Dearest Father, Mother, Marisa and Pko-Joao, Please tell Susie's father that she is very well and is regarded with favor by her officers. You can decide for yourselves whether to tell him that she has been seeing much of my friend Rob Broadhead. He is a good man and a .serious one, but he is not a fortunate one. Susie has applied for leave to go on a mission, and if the captain grants it she speaks of going with Broadhead. IVe all speak of going, but as you know, we do not all do it, so perhaps it is not to be wmried about. This must he very short; it is almost docking time, and  have a # for Gateway. With all love, Francescito a while Sigfrid obliges me: "Let's see if I can help you, Bob," he says. "What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?" I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don't control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm. But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: "See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother's favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only -- " "Please, Robby, that isn't quite right, and besides you're intellectualizing. You know yod really don't want to put in all these preambles. You're stalling, aren't you?" Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. "All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn't help it! I was her only son. My father was dead -- don't clear your throat, Sigfrid, I'm getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once." "You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, 'I love you, son?' " "No!" I scream. Then I get control again. "Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her say to one of her friends -- girl friends, I mean -- that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don't remember what I'd done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so... But not to me." "Please go on. Bob," Sigfrid says after a moment. "I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it's what you call priin pain." "Please don't diagnose yourself, Bob. Just say it. Let it come out." "Oh, shii." I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That's usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say: "Look, Sigfrid, here's how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know -- knew! -- she loved me. But she wasn't very good at showing it." I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and I'm rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfnd hasn't even commented on it. I plunge right on: "She didn't say the words to me. Not only that. It's funny, Sigfrid, but you know, I can't remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me goodnight, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when I needed her. But -- " I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again. I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating on breath flow. "But you see, Sigfrid," I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, "she didn't touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has Tunny noses, skin infections -- you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick, she -- " After a moment Sigfrid says, "Go on, Robby. Say it." I try, but I am still stuck, and he says: "Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don't worry if I understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words." "Well, she would take my temperature,," I explain. "You know? Stick a thermometer into me. And she'd bold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she'd take the thermometer out and read it." I am right on the verge of bawlfirst I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don't think you really want to let her be that mjich a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won't run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn't say anything, and after a moment I manage the words: "You see how it is, Sigfrid? It's funny. All my life now -- what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass." There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was out. The head tax had been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-on, like Shicky and me; bad news; it meant that my prepaid per capita wasn't good for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathematicians, even old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but hopping spryly around the tunnels. One thing that hadn't changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my old friend Emma told me in great detail what a fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated. But she loved her work. "I warned you you'd fuck up, Broadhead. You should have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?" "I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I just couldn't handle it. I wanted to go somewhere else." "Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead." I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. "Emma," I said, "do whatever you want to do, but get off my back." She said sunnily, "I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it's what I have to do. It's my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the settings." An Informal  Irravarent Science Fiction  Fantaay Jouitl Edited  PubNahed by RIctiard E. Goto Issue ## features an Interview with Kelly Frees. "The Vlvisector" -- a review column by rising-star Darrell Schweitzer. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" -- Aiter running rampant on a fieid of bloody books. "Angel Fear" -- an sf  fantasy art review column by Freff. Plus -- whatever comes In from irregular columnists: John Brunner, Ted White, Richard Lupoff, George Warren And: a new feature -- "Alien Thoughts" as an extended editor's diary, by Richard E. Gels. Quartertyeample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I Mission Report Vessel #-#, Voyage #D #. ' Crew G. Herron. Transit time out # days # hours. Note: Transit time return # days # hours.  Extract from log. "At # days # hours out the Q instrument began to glow and there was unusual activity in the control lights. At the same time I felt a change in the direction of thrust. For about one hour there was continuing changes, then the Q light went out and things went back to normal." Conjecture: course change to avoid some transient hazard, perhaps a star or other body? Recommend computer search of trip logs for similar events. "What rules? It was my ass that was on the line." "The rules that say you shouldn't destroy a ship," she explained. I didn't answer, and she chirped some sort of translation to Hsien, who listened gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin. You could hear the punctuation. "Mr. Hsien says," said Emma, "that you are a very irresponsible person. You have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It belonged to the whole human race." He lilted a few more sentences, and she finished: "We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged. According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the first opportunity. There were two xenotechs in transit for the new planet. Aphrodite, at the time of his report. They will have reached Gateway Two by now, and we can expect their findings, probably, with the next outpilot. Then we will call you again." She paused, looking at me, and I took it the interview was over. "Thanks a lot," I said, and pushed myself toward the door. She let me get all the way to it before she said: "One more thing. Mr. Ituno' s report mentions that you worked on loading and fabricating suits on Gateway Two. He authorizes a per diem payment to you amounting to, let me see, twenty-five hundred dollars. And your out-captain, Hester Bergowiz, has authorized payment of one per cent of her bonus to you for services during the return flight; so your account has been credited accordingly." "I didn't have a contract with her," I said, surprised. "No. But she feels you should have a share. A small share, to be sure. Altogether -- " she looked under a paper -- " it comes to twenty-five hundred plus fifty-five hundred, eight thousand dollars your account has been credited with." Eight thousand dollars! I headed for a drop-shaft, grabbed an upcable and pondered. It was not enough to make any real difference. It certainly would not be enough to pay the damages they would soak me for messing up a ship. There wasn't enough money in the universe to pay that, if they wanted to charge me full replacement cost; there was no way to replace it. On the other hand, it was eight thousand dollars more than I'd had. I celebrated by buying myself a drink at the Blue Hell. While I was Dr. Asmenion. Now, if you start with a star bigger than three solar masses and it collapses, it doesn't just turn into a neutron star. It keeps on going. It gets so dense that the escape velocity exceeds ond... which is... ? Question. Uh. The speed of light? Dr. Asmenion. Right on, Gallina. So light can't escape. So it's black. So that's why it's called a black hole -- only, if you get close enough, inside what's called the ergosphere, it isn't black. You probably could see something. Question. What would it look like? Dr. Asemnion. Beats the ass off me, Jer. If anybody ever goes and sees one, he'll come back and tell us if he can. Only he probably can't. You could maybe get that close in, get your readings and come back -- and collect, jesus, I anyway. If you could get into your lander, see, and kick the main mass of the ship away, backward, slowing it down, you might be able to give yourself enough extra velocity to get away. Not easily. But maybe, if things were just right. But then where would you go? You can't get home in a lander. And doing it the other way wouldn't work, there isn't enough mass in a lander to get you free... I see old Bob isn't enjoying this discussion, so let's move on to planetary types and dust clouds. Secrets entrusted to a fewl facts of life! There are some things that can not be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), have preserved this secret wisdom. Write for the free book, "The Mastery of Life." It may hold a new life of opportunity for you. ,ribe LC.F. San Jose, California #I U.S.A. I I Scribe LC.F. San Jose, California #I U.S.A. Please send me a complimentary copy of the Name AddressCity SUteZipJ drinking it, I thought about my options. The more I thought about them, the more they dwindled away. They would find me culpable, no doubt about that, and the least they'd assess me would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, I didn't have it. It might be a lot more, but that didn't make any difference; once they take away all you have there isn't anything left anyway. So when you came right down to it, my eight thousand dollars was fairy gold. It could vanish with the morning dew. As soon as the xenotech's report came in from Gateway Two the Board would reconvene and that would be the end of that. So there was no particular reason to stretch my money. I might as well spend it. There was no reason, either, to think about getting back my old job as an ivy-planter... even assuming I could get it, with Shicky fired from his job as straw-boss. The minute they made a judgment against me my credit balance would disappear. So would my prepaid per-capita payment. I would be subject to immediate defenestration. If there happened to be an Earth-bound ship in port at the time , I could just get on board, and sooner or later I would be back in Montana looking for my old job at the food mines. If there wasn't a ship, then I was in trouble. I might be able to talk the American cruiser, or maybe the Brazilian one if Francy Hereira was in a position to pull strings for me, into taking me abbard for a while until a ship showed up. Or I might not. Considered carefully, the chances were not very hopeful. The very best thing I could do would be to act before the Board did, and there there were two choices. I could take the next ship in port back to Earth and the food mines, without waiting for the Board's decision. Or I could ship out again. They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever... and the other one scared me out of my mind.  Gateway was like a gentlemen's club in which you never knew what members were in town. Louise Forehand was gone; her husband, Sess, was patiently holding the fort, waiting for her or their remaining daughter to return before shipping out again himself. He helped me move back into my room, which had been temporarily occupied by three Hungarian women until they had shipped out together in a Three. Moving took no great effort; I didn't own anything any more, except what I had just bought in the commissary. The only permanent feature was Shicky Bakin, unfailingly friendly and always there. I asked him if he had heard from Klara. He had not. "Go out again. Bob," he urged. "It is the only thing to do." "Yeah." I did not want to argue it, he was incontestably right. Maybe I would... I said, "I wish I weren't a coward, Shicky, but I am. I just don't know how I can make myself get into a ship again. I don't have the courage to face a hundred days of fearing death every minute." He chuckled, and hopped off the chest of drawers to pat my shoulder. "You don't need so much courage," he said, flapping back to the chest. "You only need courage for one day; Just to get in the ship and go. Then you don't have to have courage any more, because you don't anymore have a choice." "I think I could have done it," I said, "if Metchnikov's theories about the color-codes had been light. But some of the safe ones are dead." "It was only a statistical matter. Bob. It is tme that there is a better safety record now, and a better success record too. Only marginal, yes. But better." "The ones that died are just as dead," I said. "Still -- perhaps I'll talk to Dane again." Shicky looked surprised. "He's out." "When?" "Around when you left. I thought you knew." I had forgotten. "Wonder if he found the soft touch he was looking for." Shicky scratched his chin with his shoulder, keeping himself balanced with lazy wing strokes. Then he hopped off the chest and fluttered over the piezophone. "Let's see," he said, and punched buttons. The locator board jumped into view on the screen. "Launch #-#," he read. "Bonus, #. That's not much, is it?" "I thought he was going for something bigger." "Well," said Shicky, reading on, "he didn't get it. Says here he came back last night." Since Metchnikov had halfway promised to share his expertise with me, it made sense for me to talk to him; but I wasn't feeling sensible. I got as far as checking out that he had returned without a find and with nothing to show for his efforts but the bonus; but I didn't go to see him. I didn't do much of anything, in fact. I hung around. Gateway is not the most amenity-filled place to live in the universe, but I found things to do. It beat the food mines. Each passing hour brought me an hour closer to the time when the xenotech's report would arrive, but I managed not to think about that rnost of e time. I nursed drinks in the Blue Hell, making friends with the tourists, the visiting cruiser crews, the returnees, the new fish that kept coming up from the sweltering planets, looking, I guess, for another Klara. None showed up. I read over the letters I had written her on the trip back from Gateway Two, and then I tore them up. Instead I wrote a simple short note to apologize and tell her that I loved her and took it down to radio it off to her on Venus. But she wasn't there! I had forgotten how long the slow Hohmann orbits took. The locator office identified the ship she had left on easily enough; it was a right-angle orbiter, that spent its whole life changing deltas to rendezvous with plane-of-the-ecliptic flights between the planets. According to the records her ship had Classifieds. English-speaking non-smokers on Gateway to fill out our crew? Maybe you want to shorten your life (and our lifesupport reserves!) but we two don't. #-#. presentation on Gateway Corporation Board! Mass meeting tomorrow # Level Babe. Everyone welcome! whole-person way from your dreams. #-page sealed book tells how, #. Consultations, #. #-#. made a rendezvous with a Marsbound freighter, and then a Venusbound high-G luxury liner; she had presumably transferred to one of them, but they didn't know which, and neither one of them would reach its destination for a month or more yet. I sent duplicate copies to each ship, but there wasn't any answer. The closest I came to a new girl friend was a Gunner Third from the Brazilian cruiser. Francy Hereira brought her around. "My cousin," he said, introducing us; and then, privately, later, "You should know, Rob, that I do not have family feelings about my cousins." All the crews got shore leave on Gateway from time to time, and while, as I have said. Gateway wasn't Waikiki or Cannes, it beat the bare bones of a combat vessel. Susie Hereira was very young. She said she was nineteen, and was supposed to be at least seventeen to be in the Brazilian navy at all, but she didn't look it. She did not speak much English, but we did not need much language in common to drink at the Blue Hell; and when we went to bed we discovered that although we had very little conversation in a verbal sense we communicated beautifully with our bodies. But Susie was only there one day a week, and that left a great deal of time which needed destroying. I tried everything: a reinforcement group, group-hugging and working out loves and hostilities on each other. Old Hegramet's lecture series on the Heechee. A program of talks on astrophysics, with a slant toward earning science bonuses from the Corporation. By careful budgeting of my time I managed to use it all up, and decision was postponed day by day. I do not want to give the impression that destroying time was a conscious plan in my mind; I was living from day to day, and each day was full. On a Thursday Susie and Francy Hereira would check in, and the three of us might have lunch at the Blue Hell. Then Francy would go off to roam by himself, or pick up a girl, or take a swim in Lake Superior, while Susie and I would retire to my room and my dope sticks to swim on those warmer waters of my bed. After dinner, some sort of entertainment. Thursday was the night the astrophysics lectures took place, and we would hear about the Hertzspmng-Russell diagram, or red giants and dwarfs, or neutron stars, or black holes. The professor was a fat old girl-grabber from some jerkwater college near Smolinsk, but even through the dirty jokes there was poetry and beauty in what he talked about. He dwelt on the old stars that gave birth to us all, spitting silicates and magnesium carbonate into space to form our planets, hydrocrabons to form ourselves. He talked about the neutron stars that bent the gravity well around them; we knew about them, because two launches had killed themselves, sheared into rubble, by entering normal space too close to one of those hyper-dense dwarfs. He told us about the black holes that were the places where a dense star had been, now detectable only by the observable fact that they swallowed everything nearby, even light; they had not merely bent the gravity well, they had wrapped it around themselves like a blanket. He described stars as thin as air, immense clouds of glowing gas; told us about the pre-stars of the Orion Nebula, Just now blossoming into loose knots of warm gas that His lectures were very popular; even old hands like Shicky and Dane Metchnikov showed up. While I listened to the professor I could feel the wonder and beauty of space. It was too immense and glorious to be frightening, and it was not until later that I would relate those sinks of radiation and swamps of thin gas to me, to the frail, frightened, pain-sensitive creation that was the body I inhabited. And then I would think about going out among those remote titans and... my soul curled up inside me. After one of those meetings I said good-by to Susie and Francy and sat in an cove near the lecture room. half hidden by the ivy, and despondently smoked a joint. Shicky found me there, and halted just in front of me, supporting himself on his wings. "I was looking for you. Bob," he said, and stopped. The grass was just beginning to hit me. "Interesting lecture," I said absently, reaching for the good feeling that I wanted from the joint and not really very interested in whether Shicky was there or not. "You missed the most interesting part," said Shicky. It occurred to me that he was looking both fearful and hopeful; there was something on his mind. I took another hit, and offered him the joint; he shook his head. "Bob," he said, "I think there is something worth having coming up." "Really?" "Yes, really. Bob! Something quite good. And soon." I was not ready for this, I wanted to go on smoking my joint until the temporary thrill of the lecture had worn off, so that I could go back to destroying the days. The last thing I wanted was to hear about some new mission that my guilt would make me want to sign on for, and my fear would abort. Shicky caught the shelf of ivy and held himself up by it, looking at me curiously. "Bob-friend," he said, "if I can find something out for you, will you help me?" "Help you how?" "Take me with you!" he cried. "I can do everthing but go in the lander. And this mission, I think, is one where it does not so much matter. There is a bonus for everyone, even for someone who must remain Mission Report Vessel A#-#, Voyage #D#. Crew T. Parreno, N. Ahoya, E. Nimkin. Transit time # days # hours. Position vicinity Alpha Centauri A. Summary. "The planet was quite earthlike and. heavily vegetated. The color of the vegetation was predominantly yellow. The atmosphere matched the Heechee mix closely. It is a warm planet with no polar ice caps and a temperature range similar to Earth tropics at the equator. Earth temperate extending almost to the poles. We detected no animal life or signatures (methane, etc.) thereof. Some of the vegetation predates at a very slow pace, advancing by uprooting portions of a vinelike structure, curling around and rerooting. Maximum velocity measured was approximately # kilometer per hour. No artifacts. Parrena and Nimkin landed and returned with samples of vegetation, but died of a toxicodendron-like reaction. Great blisters formed over their bodies. Then they developed pain, itching and apparent suffocation, probably due to fluids accumulating in the lungs. I did not bring them aboard the vessel. I did not open the lander, or dock it to the vessel. I recorded personal messages for both, then jettisoned the lander and returned without it." Corporation assessment; No charge made against N. Ahoya in view of past record. in orbit." "What are you talking about, Shicky?" The grass was hitting me now; I could feel the warmth behind my knees and the gentle blur all around me. "Metchnikov was talking to the lecturer," Shicky said. "I think from what he said that he knows of a new mission. Only -- they spoke in Russian, and I did not understand very well. But it is the one he has been waiting for." I said reasonably, "The last one he went out on wasn't much, was it?" "This is different!" "I don't think he would really cut me in on anything good -- " "Certainly not, if you don't ask." "Oh, hell," I grumbled. "All right. I'll talk to him." Shicky beamed. "And then. Bob, please -- take me with you?" I stubbed out the Joint, less than half smoked; I felt as though I wanted what was left of my wits about me. "I'll do what I can," I said, and headed back for the lecture room just as Metchnikov was coming out. We had not spoken since he had returned. He looked as solid and broad as ever, and his fringe of chin-whiskers was neatly trimmed. "Hello, Broadhead," he said suspiciously. I didn't waste words. "I hear you've got something good coming up. Can I go along?" He didn't waste words, either. "No." He looked at me with frank dislike. Partly that was what I had expected from him all along, but I was pretty sure part of it was because he had heard about me and Klara. "You are going out," I persisted. "What is it, a One?" He stroked his whiskers. "No," he said reluctantly, "it isn't a One. It's two Fives." "Two Fives?" He stared at me suspiciously for a moment, and then almost grinned; I did not like him when he smiled, it was always a question in my mind what he was smiling about. "All right," he said. "You want in, you can have it, for all of me. It's not up to me, of course. You'll have to ask Emma; she's doing a briefing tomorrow morning. But she might let you go. It's a science misbonus. And you're involved." "I'm involved?" That was something out of an unexpected direction! "Involved how?" "Ask Emma," he said, and brushed past me.   There were about a dozen prospectors in the briefing room, most of whom I knew: Sess Forehand, Shicky, Metchnikov and a few others I'd drunk with or gone to bed with, one time or another. Emma wasn't there yet, and I managed to intercept her as she was coming in. "I want to go out on this mission," I said. She looked startled. "You do? I thought -- " But she stopped there, without saying what it was she thought. I followed up: "I have as much right to go as Metchnikov does!" "You sure as hell don't have as good a record as he does. Bob." She looked me over carefully, and then she said, "Well, I'll tell you how it is, Broadhead. It's a special mission, and partly you're responsible for it. That boner of yours turns out to be interesting. I don't mean wrecking the ship; that was stupid, and if there was any justice in the universe you'd pay for it. But dumb luck is almost as good as brains." "You got the report from Gateway Two," I guess. She shook her head. "Not yet. But it doesn't matter. We routinely programmed your mission into the computer, and it found some interesting correlations. The course pattern that took you to Gateway Two -- Oh, hell," she said, "come on inside. You can sit through the briefing, at least. It'll explain everything, and then -- we'll see." She took my elbow and pushed me ahead of her into the room, which was the same one we had used for a classroom -- how long beI sat down between Sess and Shicky, and waited to hear what it was she had to say. "Most of you," she started off, "are here by invitation -- with one or two exceptions. One of the exceptions is our distinguished friend Mr. Broadhead. He managed to wreck a ship near Gateway Two, as most of you know. By rights we ought to throw the book at him, but before he did that he accidentally turned up some interesting facts. His course colors were not the regular ones for Gateway Two, and when the computer compared them it came up with a whole new concept of course setting. Apparently only about five settings are critic for destination -- the five that were the same for the usual Gateway Two setting, and for Broadhead's new one. What the other settings mean we don't know. But we're going to find out." She leaned back and folded her hands. "This is a multiple-purpose mission," she said. "We're going to do something new. For openers, we're going to send two ships to the same destination." Sess Forehand raised his hand. "What's the point of that?" "Well, partly to make sure it is the same destination. We're going to vary the non-critical settings slightly... the ones we think are non-critical. And we're going to start the two ships only a few seconds apart. "Now, if we know what we're doing, that means you'll come out about as far apart as Gateway travels in thirty seconds." Forehand wrinkled his brow. "Relative to what?" "Good question," she nodded. Relative, we think, to the Sun. The stellar motion relative to the Galaxy -- we think -- can be neglected. At least, assuming that your destination turns out to be inside the Galaxy, and not so far away that the galactic motion has a markedly different vector. I mean, if you came out on the opposite side, it would be seventy kilometers a second, relative to the galactic center. We don't think that's involved. We only expect a relatively minor difference in velocity and direction, and -- well, anyway, you should come out within somewhere between two and two hundred kilometers of each other. "Of course," she said, smiling Dr. Asmenion. So when you're looking for signs of life on a planet, you don't expect a big neon sign that says "Aliens Live Here". You look for signatures. A "signature" is something that shows something else is there. Like your signature on a check. If I see that, I know it shows that you want it paid, so I cash it. Not yours, of course. Bob. Question. God hates a smartassed teacher. Dr. Asmenion. No offense. Bob. Methane is a typical signature. It shows the presence of warmblooded mammals, or something like them. Question. I thought methane could come from rotting vegetation and all that? Dr. Asmenion. Oh, sure. But mostly it comes from the guts of large ruminants. Most of the methane in the Earth's air is cow farts. cheerfully, "that's only theoretical. Maybe the relative motions won't mean anything at all. In that case, the problem is to keep you from colliding with each other. But we're sure -- pretty sure -- that there will be at least some, displacement. All you really need is about fifteen meters -- the long diameter of a Five." "How sure is pretty sure?" one of the girls asked. "Well," Emma admitted, "reasonably sure. How do we know until we try?" "It sounds dangerous," Sess commented. He did not seem deterred by it. He was only stating an opinion. In this he was unlike me; I was very busy ignoring my inner sensations, trying to concentrate on the technicalities of the briefing. Emma looked surprised. "That part? Look, I haven't come to the dangerous part yet. This is a nonaccept destination for all Ones, most Threes and some Fives." "Why?" someone asked. "That's what you're going there to find out," she said patiently. "It happens to be the setting the computer picked out as best for testing the correlations between course settings. You've got armored Fives, and both accept this particular destination. That means you have what the Heechee designers figured was a good chance to handle it, right?" "That was a long time ago," I objected. "Oh, sure. I never said otherwise. It is dangerous -- at least to some extent. That's what the million is for." She stopped, gravely considering us, until someone obliged by askone of you gets when you come back," she said. "They've approCorporation funds for this. Equal shares. Of course, there's a good chance that it will be more than a worth while, the regular pay scales apply. And the computer thinks this is a good prospect." asked. "I don't make these decisions," she said patiently. And then she looked at me as a person, not part of the group, and added, "And by the way, Broadhead. We're writing off your damage to the ship. So what ever you get is yours to keep. tle nest-egg. You can go back home, buy yourself a little business, live the rest of your life on that." We looked at each other, and Emma just sat there, smiling gently and waiting. I don't know what the others were thinking about. What I was remembering was Gateway Two and the first trip, wearing our eyes out at the instruments, looking for something that wasn't there. I suppose each of the others had washouts of their own to remember. "Launch," she said at last, "is day after tomorrow. The ones who want to sign, come see me in my office." They accepted me. They turned Shicky down. But it wasn't as easy as that, nothing ever is; the one who made sure Shicky was not going to go along was me. They filled up the first ship quickly: Sess Forehand, two girls from Sierra Leone and a French couple -- all Englishspeaking, all briefed, all with previous missions. For the second ship Metchnikov signed as crew chief right away; a gay couple Danny A. and Danny R., were his first picks. Then, grudgingly, he agreed to me. And that left one opening. "We can take your friend Bakin," Emma said. "Or would you prefer your other friend?" "What other friend?" I demanded. "We have an application," she said, "from Gunner Third Suzanna Dear Voice of Gateway : Last month I spent # of my hard-earned money to take my wife and son to a ""lecture' ' by one of your returned ""heroes' ' who gave Liverpool the dubious honour of a visit ( for which he was well paid, naturally, by people like me . ) I didn' t mind that he was not a very interesting speaker . It was what he flaming well said that drove me right up the flaming wall . He said we poor sods of earthlings had just no idea of how dicey things were for you noble adventurers. Well, mate, this morning I drew out the last pound in the savings account so the wife could get a lung patch (good old melanomic The kid's tuition comes due in a week and I haven ' t Hereira, off the Brazilian cruiser. She has their permission to take leave for this purpose." "Susie! I didn't know she'd volunteered!" Emma studied her punch card reflectively. "She's very well qualified," she commented. "Also she has all her parts. I am referring," she said sweetly, "to her legs, of course, although as I understand it you have some interest in her other parts as well. Or would you care to go gay for this mission?" I felt an unreasoning rush of anger. I am not one of your sexua clue where it's coming from. And after spending eight-to-twelve this morning waiting by the docks for a chance to shift some cargo (there wasn ' t any ) the foreman let me know I was redundant , which means tomorrow I don't even have to bother to show up to wait . Any of you heroes care to pick up a bargain in surplus parts? Mine are for sale, kidneys, liver, the lot. All in good condtion, too, or as good as nineteen years on the docks can be expected to leave them, except for the tear glands of the eyes, which are fair wore out with weeping over the troubles of you lot . H. Delacross ""Wavetops ' ' Flat B bis #, #st Floor Merseyside L#PR #JE# ally up-tight people; the thought of physical contact with a male was not frightening in itself. Biit -- with Dane Metchnikov? Or one of his lovers? "Gunner Hereira can be here tomorrow," Emma commented. "The Brazilian cruiser is going to dock right after the orbiter." "Why the hell are you asking me?" I snarled. "Metchnikov's crew chief." "He prefers to leave it to you, Broadhead. Which one?" "I don't give a damn!" I yelled, and left. But there is no such thing as avoiding a decision. Not making a decision was in itself decision enough to keep Shicky off the crew. If I had fought for him, they would have taken him; without that, Susie was the obvious choice. I spent the next day staying out of Shicky's way. I picked up a new fish at the Blue Hell, fresh but of the classroom, and spent the night in her room. I didn't even go back to my own room for fresh clothes; I dumped everything and bought a new outfit. I knew pretty well the" places where Shicky might look for me -- the Blue Hell, Central Park, the museum -- and so I stayed away from all those places; I went for a long, rambling wander through the deserted tunnels, seeing no one at all, until late that night. Then I took a chance and went to our farewell party. Shicky would probably be there, but there would be other people around. He was. And so was Louise Foreland. In fact, she seemed to be the center of attention; I hadn't even known she was back. She saw me and waved to me. "I struck it rich, Bob! Drink up -- I'm buying!" I let someone put a glass in one hand and a joint in the other, and before I took my hit I managed to ask her what she'd found. "Weapons, Bob! Marvelous Heechee weapons, hundreds of them. Sess says it's going to be at Plus royalties... if anyone finds a way to duplicate the weapons, anyway." I let the smoke blow out and washed out the taste with a swallow of white lightning. "What kind of weapons?" "They're like the tunnel diggers, only portable. They'll cut a hole through anything. We lost Sara allaFanta id the landing; one of them put'a hole in her suit. But Tim and I are whacking up her share, so it's two and a half mill apiece." "Congratulations," I said. "I would have thought the last thing the human race needed was some new ways to kill each other, but -- congratulations." I was reaching for an air of moral superiority, and I needed it; because as I turned away, there was Shicky, hanging in air, watching me. "Want a hit?" I asked, offering him the joint. He shook his head. I said, "Shicky, it wasn't up to me. I told them -- I didn't tell them not to take you." "Did you tell them they should?" "It wasn't up to me," I said. "Hey, listen!" I went on, suddenly seeing an out. "Now that Louise has hit, Sess probably won't want to go. Why don't you take his place?" He backed away, watching me; only his expression had changed. "You don't know?" he asked. "It is true that Sess has canceled out of the mission, but he has already been replaced." "By whom?" "By the person right behind you," said Shicky, and I turned around, and there she was, looking at me, a glass in her hand and an expression I could not read on her face. "Hello, Bob," said Klara. Mission Report Vessel #-#, Voyage #D#. Crew S. Kotsis, A. McCarthy, K. Metsuoko. Transit time out # days # hours. No crew reports from destination. Spherical scan data inconclusive as to destination. No identifiable features. No summary... Extract from log. "This is the #st day out. Metsuoko lost the draw and suicided. Alicia voluntarily suicided # days later. We haven't ye't reached turnaround, so it's all for nothing. The remaining rations are not going to be enough to support me, even if you include Alicia and Kenny, who are intact in the freezer. So I am putting everything on full automatic and taking the pills. We have all left letters. Please forward them as addressed, if this God-damned ship ever gets back." Mission Plan filed proposal that a Five with double life-support rations and a one-person crew might be able to complete this mission and return successfully. Proposal tabled on grounds of low priority: No evident benefit from repeating this mission.    I had prepared myself for the party by a number of quick ones in the commissary; I was ninety per cent dmnk and ten jper cent stoned, but it all whooshed out of me as I looked at her. I put down the drink, handed the joint to someone at random, took her arm and pulled her out into the tunnel. "Klara," I said, "Did you get my letters?" She looked puzzled. "Letters?" She shook her head. "I guess you sent them to Venus? I never got there. I got as far as rendezvous with the plane-of-the-ecliptic flight, and then I changed my mind. I came right back on the oririter." "Oh, Klara." "Oh, Bob," she mimicked, grinning; that wasn't much fun, because when she smiled I could see where the tooth was missing that I had knocked out. "So what else have we got to say to each other?" I put my arms around her. "I can say that I love you, and I'm sorry, and I want to make it up to you, and I want to get married and live together and have kids and -- " "Jesus, Bob," she said, pushing me away, gently enough, "when you say something you say a lot, don't you? So hold it for a while. It'll keep." "But it's been months" She laughed. "No fooling. Bob. Tliis is a bad day for Sagittarians to make decisions, especially about love. We'll talk about it another time." "That crap! Listen, I don't believe in any of that!" "I do. Bob." I had an inspiration. "Hey! I bet I can trade with somebody in the first ship! Or, wait a minute, maybe Susie would trade with you -- " She shook her head, still smiling. "I really don't think Susie would like that," she said. "Anyway, they bitched enough about letting me switch with Sess. They'll never stand still for another last-minute change." "I don't care, Klara!" "Bob," she said, "don't rush me. I did a lot of thinking about you and me. I think we've got something that's worth working for. But I can't say it's all straight in my head yet, and I don't want to push it." "But, Klara -- " "Leave it at that. Bob. I'll go in the first ship, you go in the second. When we get where we're going we'll be able to talk. Maybe even switch around to come back together. But meanwhile we'll both have a chance to think about what we really want." The only words I seemed to know I seemed to be saying over and over again: "But, Klara -- " She kissed me, and pushed me away. "Bob," she said, "don't be in such a hurry. We've got all the time there is." "Tell me something, Sigfrid," I say, "how nervous am I?" He is wearing his Sigmund Freud hologram this time, truculent Viennese stare, not a bit gemiitlich. But his voice is the same gently sad baritone: "If you are asking what my sensors show. Bob, you are quite agitated, yes." "I thought so," I say, bouncing around the mat. "Can you tell me why?" "No!" The whole week has been like that, marvelous sex with Doreen and S. Ya., and floods of tears in the shower; fantastic bidding and play at the bridge tournament, and total despair on the way home. I feel like a yo-yo. "I feel like a yoyo," I yell. "You've opened up something I can't handle." "I think you underestimate your capacity for handling pain," he says reassuringly. "Fuck you, Sigfrid! What do you know about human capacity?" He almost sighs. "Are we back to that again. Bob?" "We bloody well are!" And funnily, I feel less nervous; I've got him into an argument again, and the peril is reduced. "It is true. Bob, that I am a machine. But I am a machine designed to understand what humans are like and, believe me, I am well designed for my function." "Designed! Sigfrid," I say reasonably, "you aren't human. You may know, but you don't feel. You have no idea what it feels like to have to make human decisions and carry the load of human emotion. You don't know what it feels like to have to tie up a friend to keep him love die. To know it's your fault. To be scared out of your mind." "I do know those things, Bob," he says gently. "I really do. I want to explore why you are feeling so turbulent, so won't you please help me?" "No!" "But your agitation. Bob, means that we are approaching the central pain -- " "Get your bloody drill out of my nerve!" But the analogy doesn't throw him for a second; his circuits are finely tuned that day. "I'm not your dentist. Bob, I'm your analyst, and I tell you -- " "Stop!" I know what I have to do to get him away from where it hurts. I haven't used S. Ya.'s secret little formula since that first day, but now I want to use it again. I say the words, and convert him from a tiger to a pussycat; he rolls over and lets me stroke his tummy, as I command him to display the gaudier bits from some of his interviews with attractive and highly quirky female patients; and the rest of the hour is spent as a peepshow; and I have got out of his room one more time intact. Or nearly. Out in the holes where the Heechee hid, out in the caves of the stars, sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid, healing the Heechee-hacked scars... Jesus, it was like a Boy Scout campout; we sang and frolicked all the nineteen days after turnaround. I don't think I ever felt that good in my life. Partly it was release from fear; when we hit turnaround we all breathed easier, as you always do. Partly it was that the first half of the trip had been pretty gritty, with Metchnikov and his two boy friends in a complicated triple spat most of the time and Susie Hereira a lot less interested in me on shipboard than she had been as a once-a-week night out on Gateway. But mostly, I think, for me anyway, it was knowing that I was getting closer and closer to Klara. Danny A. helped me work out the figures; he'd taught some of the courses on Gateway, and he may have been wrong but there wasn't anybody around fighter so I took his word for it: He calculated from the time of turnaround that we were going something like three hundred lightyears in all -- a guess, sure, but close enough. The first ship, the one Klara was in, was getting further and further ahead of us all the way to turnaround, at which point we were going something over ten light-years a day (or so Danny said). Klara's Five had been launched thirty seconds ahead of us, so then it was just arithmetic: About one light-day. #xl#' centimeters per second times # seconds times # minutes times # hours... at turnaround Klara was a good sevahead of us. It seemed very far, and was. But after turnaround we were getting closer every day, following her in the same wormhole through space that the Heechee had drilled for us. Where my ship was going, hers had gone. I could feel that we were catching up; sometimes I fantasied that I could smell her perfume. Classifieds. four likeminded prospectors view toward teaming. Gerriman, #-#. holodisks, clothes, sex aids, books, everything. Level Baby, Tunnel Twelve, ask for DeVittorio, # hours until it's all gone. yan for Abram R. Sorchuk, presumed dead, also ninth, eighth and seventh men. Please. #-#. When I said something like that to Danny A. he looked at me queerly. "Do you know how far kilometers is? You could fit the whole solar system in between them and us. Just about exactly; the semi-major axis of Pluto's orbit is thirty-nine a.u. and change." I laughed, a little embarrassed. "It was Just a notion." "So go to sleep," he said, "and have a nice dream about it." He knew how I felt about Klara; the whole ship did, even Metchnikov, even Susie, and maybe that was a fantasy too but I thought they all wished us well. We were all wishing all of us well, constructing elaborate plans about what we were going to do with our bonuses. For apiece, it came to a right nice piece of change. Maybe not enough for Full Medical, no, not if we wanted anything left over to have fun on. But Major Medical, at least, which meant really good health, barring something terribly damaging, for another thirty or forty years. We could live happily ever after on what was left over: travel. Children! A nice home in a decent part of -- wait a minute, I cautioned myself, a home where? Not back anywhere near the food mines. Maybe not on Earth at all. Would Klara want to go back to Venus? I couldn't see myself taking to the life of a tunnel rat. But I couldn't see Klara in Dallas or New York, either. Of course, I thought, wish racing far ahead of reality, if we really found anything only the beginning. Then we could have all the homes we wanted, anywhere we liked; and Full Medical, too, with transplants to keep us young and healthy and beautiful and sexually strong and -- "You really ought to go to sleep," said Danny A. from the sling next to mine; "the way you thrash around is a caution." But I didn't feel like going to sleep. I was hungry, and there wasn't any reason not to eat. For nineteen days we had been practicing food discipline, which is what you do on the way out for the first half of the trip. Once you've reached turnaround you know how much you can consume for the rest of the trip, which is why, some prospectors come back fat. I climbed down out of the lander, where Susie and both the Dannys were sacked in, and then I found out what it was that was making me hungry. Dane Metchnikov was coolung himself a stew. "Is there enough for two?" He looked at me thoughtfully. "I Prof. Hegramet. The one thing we found out about blood diamonds is that they're fantastically piezoelectric. Does anybody know what that means? Queston. They expand and contract when an electric current is imposed.? Prof. Hegrimet. Yes. And the other way around. Squeeze them and they generate a current. Very rapidly if you like. That's the basis for the piezophone and piezoviindustry. Question. Who gets the royalties on all that loot? Prof. Hegramet. You know, I thought one of you would ask that. Nobody does. Blood diamonds were found years and years ago, in the Heechee warrens back on Venus. Long before Gateway. It was Bell Labs that figured out how to use them. Actually they use something a little different, a synthetic they developed. They make great communications systems, and Bell doesn't have to pay anybody but themselves. Question. Did the Heechee use them for that? Prof. Hegramet. My personal opinion is that they probably did, but I don't know how. You'd think if they left them around they'd leave the rest of the communications receivers and transmitters too, but if they did I don't know where. guess so." He opened the squeezefit lid, peered inside, milked another hundred cc of water into it out of the vapor trap and said, "Give it another ten minutes. I was going to have a drink first." I accepted the inyitation, and we passed a wine-flask back and forth. While he shook te stew and added a dollop of salt I took the star readings for him. We were still close to maximum velocity and there was nothing on the viewscreen that looked like a familiar constellation, or even much like a star; but it was all beginning to look friendly and good to me. To all of us. I'd never seen Dane so cheerful and relaxed. "I've been thinking," he said. "A going back to Syracuse, get my doctor's, get a job. There's going to be some school somewhere that'll want a poet in residence or an English teacher who's been on seven missions. They'll pay me something, and the money from this will keep me in extras all the rest of my life." All I had really heard was the one word, and that I had heard loud and surprising; "Poet?" He grinned. "Didn't you know? That's how I got to Gateway; the Guggenheim Foundation paid my way." He took the pot out of the .cooker and divided the stew into two dishes, and we ate. This was the fellow who had been shrieking viciously at the two Dannys for a solid hour, two days before, while Susie and I lay angry and isolated in the lander, listening. It was all turnaround. We were home free; the mission wasn't going to strand us out of fuel, and we didn't have to worry about finding anything, because our reward was guaranteed. I asked him about his poetry. He wouldn't recite any, but promised to show me copies of what he'd sent back to the Guggenheims when we reached Gateway again. And when we'd finished eating, and wiped out the pot and dishes and put them away, Dane looked at his watch. "Too early to wake the others up," he said, "and not a damn thing to do." He looked at me, smiling. It was a real smile, not a grin; and I pushed myself over to him, and sat in the warm and welcome circle of his arm.    And nineteen days went like an hour, and then the clock told us it was almost time to arrive. We were all awake, crowded into the capsule, eager as kids at Christmas, waiting to open our toys. It had been the happiest trip  had ever made, and probably one of the happiest ever. "You know," said Danny R. thoughtfully, "I'm almost sorry to arrive." And Susie, just beginning to understand our English, said: "Sim, ja sei," and then, "I too" She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back; but what I was really thinking about was Klara. We had tried the radio a couple of times, but it didn't work in the Heechee wormholes through space. But when we came out I would be able to talk to her! I didn't mind that others would be listening, I knew what it was that I wanted to say. I even knew what she would answer. There was no question about it; there was surely as much euphoria in her ship as in ours, for the same reasons, and with all that love and Joy the answer was not in doubt. "We're stopping!" Danny R. yelled. "Can you feel it?" "Yes!" crowed Metchnikov, bouncing with the tiny surges of the pseudo-gravity that marked our return to normal space. And there was another sign, too: the golden helix was beginning to glow, brighter every second. "I think we've made it," said Danny R., bursting with pleasure, and I was as pleased as he. "I'll start the spherical scan," I said, confident that I knew what to do. Susie took her cue from me and opened the door up to the lander; she and Danny A. were going to go out for the star sights. But Danny A. didn't Join her. He was staring at the viewscreen. As I started the ship turning I could see stars, which was normal enough; they did not seem special in any way, although they were rather blurry for some reason. I staggered and almost fell. The ship's rotation did not seem as smooth as it should be. "The radio," Danny said, and Methnifcov, frowning, looked up and saw the light. "Turn it on," I cried. The voice I heard might be Klara's. Metchnikov, still frowning, reached for the switch, and then I noticed that the helix was a brighter gold than I had ever seen it, straw-colored, as though it were incandescently hot. No heat came from it, but the golden color was shot through with streaks of pure white. "That's funny," I said, pointing. I don't know if anyone heard me; the radio was pouring out static, and inside the capsule the sound was very loud. Metchnikov grabbed for the tuning and the gain. Over the static I heard a voice I didn't recognize at first, but it was Danny A's. "Do you feel that?" he yelled. "It's gravity waves. We're in trouble. Stop the scan!" I stopped it reflexively. But by then the ship's screen had turned and something was in view that was not a star and not a galaxy. It was a dimly glowing mass of pale blue light, mottled, immense and terrifying. Even at the first glimpse I knew it was not a sun. No sun can be so blue and so dim. It hurt the eyes to look at it, not because of its brightness. It hurt inside the eyes, up far into the optic track; the pain was in the brain itself. Metchnikov switched off the radio, and in the silence that followed I heard Danny A. say prayerfully, "Dearest God! We've had it. That thing is a black hole." "With your permission, Bob," says Sigfrid, "I'd like to explore something with you before you command me into my passive display mode." I tighten up, the son of a bitch has read my mind. "I observe," he says instantly, "that you are feeling some apprehension. That's what I would like to explore." Incredibly, I feel myself trying to save his feelings. Sometimes I forget he's a machine. "I didn't know you were aware that I've been doing that," I apologize. NavInstQdSup # Please supplement your Navigation Instruction Guide as follows: Course settings containing the lines and colors as shown in the attached chart appear to have a definite relation to the amount of fuel or other propulsion necessity remaining for use by the vessel. All prospectors are cautioned that the three bright lines in the orange (Chart #) appear to indicate extreme shortage. No vessel displaying them in its course has ever returned, even from check flights. "Of course I'm aware. Bob. When you have given me the proper command I obey it, but you have not ever given me the command to refrain from recording and integrating data. I assume you do not possess that command." "You assume good, Sigfrid." "There is no reason that you should not have access to whatever information I possess. I have not attempted to interfere until now -- " "Could you?" "I do have the capacity to signal the use of the command instruction to higher authority, yes. I have not done that." "Why not?" The old bag of bolts keeps on surprising me; all this is new to me. "As I have said, there is no reason to. But clearly you are attempting to postpone some sort of confrontation, and I would like to tell you what I think that confrontation involves. Then you can make your own decision." "Oh, cripes." I throw off the straps and sit up. "Do you mind if I smoke?" I know what the answer is going to be, but he surprises me again. "Under the circumstances, no. If you feel the need of a tension reducer I agree. I had even considered offering you a mild tranquilizer if you wish it." "Jesus," I said admiringly, lighting up -- and I actually have to stop myself from offering him one! "All right, let's have it." Sigfrid gets up, stretches his legs and crosses to a more comfortable chair! I hadn't known he could do that either. "I am trying to put you at your ease. Bob," he says, "as I am sure you observe. First let me tell you something about my capacities -- and yours -- which I do not think you know. I can provide information about any of my clients. That is, you are not limited to those who have had access to this particular terminal." "I don't think I understand that," I say, after he pauses. "I think you do. Or will. When you want to. However, the more important question is what memory you are attempting to keep suppressed. I feel it is necessary for you to unblock it. I had considered offering you light hypnosis, or a tranquilizer, or even a fully human analyst to come in for one session, and any or all of those are at your disposal if you wish them. But I have observed that you are relatively comfortable in discussions about what you perceive as objective reality, as distinguished from your internalization of reality. So I would like to explore a particular incident with you in those terms." I carefully tap some ash off the end of my cigarette. He's right about that; as long as we keep the conversation abstract and impersonal I can talk about any bloodything. "What incident is that, Sigfrid?" "Your final prospecting voyage from Gateway, Bob. Let me refresh your memory -- " "Jesus, Sigfrid!" "I know you think you recall it perfectly," he says, interpreting me exactly, "and in that sense I don't suppose your memory needs refreshing. But what is interesting about that particular episode is that all the main areas of your internal concern seem to converge there. Your terror. Your homosexual tendencies" "Hey! " " -- which are not, to be sure, a major part of your sexuality. Bob, but which give you more concern than is warranted. YOur feelings about your mother. The immense burden of guilt you lay on yourself. And, above all, the woman GelleKlara Moynlin. All these things recur over and over in your dreams. Bob, although you often do not make the identification. And they are all present in this one episode." I stub out a cigarette, and realize that I have had two going at once. "I don't see the part about my mother," I say at last. "You don't?" The hologram that I call Sigfrid von Shrink turns toward a comer of the room. "Let me show you a picture." He raises his hand -- that's pure theater, I know it is -- and in the comer there appears a woman's figure. It is not very clear, but it is young, slim and is in the act of covering a cough. "It's not a very good resemblance to my mother," I object. "Isn't it?" "Well," I say generously, "I suppose it's the best you can do. I mean, not having anything to go on except, I guess, my description of her." "The picture," says Sigfrid gently enough, "was assembled from your description of the girl Susie Hereira." I light another cigarette, with some difficulty, because my hand is shaking. "Wow," I say, with real admiration. "I take my hat off to you, Sgifrid. That's very interesting. Of course," I go on, suddenly feeling irritable, "Susie was, my God, only a child! Apart from that I realize -- I realize now, I mean -- that there, are some resemblances. But the age is all wrong." "Bob," says Sigfrid, "how old was your mother when you were little?" "She was very young." I add after a moment, "As a matter of fact, she looked a lot younger than she was even." Sigfrid lets me hang there for a moment, and then he waves his hand again and the figure disappears, and instead we are suddenly looking at a picture of two Fives butted lander to lander in midspace, and beyond them is -- is -- "Oh, my God, Sigfrid," I say. He waits me out for a while. As far as I am concerned, he can wait forever; I simply do not know what to say. I am not hurting, but I am paralyzed. I cannot say anything and I cannot move. "This," he begins, speaking very softly and gently, "is a reconstruction of the two ships in your expedition in the vicinity of the object more accurately, a singularity in a state of extremely rapid rotation." ' # know what it is, Sigfrid. ' ' "Yes. You do. Because of its rotation, the translation velocity of what is called its event threshhold or Schwarzchild discontinuity exceeds the speed of light, and so it is not properly black; in fact it can be seen by virtue of what is called Cerenkov radiation. It was because of the instrument readings on this and other aspects of the singularity that your expedition was awarded a to the agreed-upon sum which, along with certain other lesser amounts, is the foundation of your present fortune." "I know that too, Sigfrid." Pause. "Would you care to tell me what else you know about it. Bob?" Pause. "I'm not sure I can, Sigfrid." Pause again. He isn't even urging me to try. He knows that he doesn't have to. I want to try, and I take my cue from his own manner. There is something in there that I can't talk about, that scares me even to think about; but wrapped around that central terror there is something I can talk about, and that is the objective reality. "I don't know how much you know about singularities, Sigfrid." "Perhaps you can just say what you think it is that I ought to know. Bob." I put out the current cigarette and light another one. "Well," I say, "you know and I know that I really wanted to know about singularities it's all in the data banks somewhere, and a lot more exactly and informatively than I can say it, but anyway. The thing about black holes is they're traps. They bend light. They bend time. Once you're in you can't get out. Only -- Only -- " After a moment Sigfrid says, "It's all right for you to cry if you want to. Bob," which is the way that I suddenly realize that that's what I'm doing. "Jesus," I say, and blow my nose into one of the tissues that he always keeps handy right next to the mat. He waits. "Only I did get out," I say. And Sigfrid does something else I had never expected from him; he permits himself a joke. "That," he says, "is pretty obvious, from the fact that you're here." "This is bloody exhausting, Sigfrid," I say. "I am sure it is for you. Bob." "I wish I had a drink." Click. "The cabinet behind you," says Sigfrid, "that has just opened contains some rather good sherry. It isn't made from grapes. I'm sorry to say; the health service doesn't go in for luxuries. But I don't think you'll be aware of its natural-gas origins. Oh, and it is soothe the nerves." "Holy Christ," I say, having ruh out of ways of expressing surprise. The sherry is all he says it is, and I can feel the warmth of it expanding inside me. "Okay," I say, setting the glass down. "Well. WTien I got back to Gateway they'd written the expeditions off. We were almost a year Question. What did the Heechee eat? Prof. Hegramet. About what we do, I would say. Everything. I think they were omnivores, ate anything they could catch. We really don't know a thing about their diet, except that you can make some deductions from the shell missions. Question. Shell missions? Prof. Hegramet. There are at least four recorded missions that didn't go as far as another star, but went clear out of the solar system. Out where the shell of comets hangs out, you know, half a light-year or so away. They're marked as failures, but I don't think they are. I've been pushing the Board to give science bonuses for them. Three seemed to wind up in meteorite swarms. The other came out at a comet, all hundreds of A.U.'s out. Meteorite swarms, of course, are usually the debris of old, dead comets. Question. Are you saying the Heechee ate comets? Prof. Hegramet. Ate the things comets are made out of. Do you know what they are? Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen -- the same elements you ate for breakfast. I think they used comets for feedstocks to manufacture what they ate. I think one of those missions to the cometary shell is sooner or later going to turn up a Heechee food factory, and then maybe we won't have anybody ever starving anywhere any more. overdue. Because we'd been almost inside the event horizon. Do you understand about time dilation?... Oh, never mind," I say, before he can answer, "that was a rhetorical queston. What I mean is, what happened was the phenomenon they call time dilation. You get that close to a singularity and you come up against the twin paradox. What was maybe a quarter of an hour for us was almost a year by clock time -- clock time on Gateway, or here, or anywhere else in the nonrelativistic universe, I mean. And -- " I take another drink, then I go on bravely enough: "And if we'd gone any farther down we would have been going slower and slower. Slower, and slower, and slower. A little closer, and that fifteen minutes would have turned out to be a decade. A little closer still, and it would have been a century. It was that close, Sigfrid. We were almost trapped, all of us. "But I got out." And I think of something and look at my watch. "Speaking of time, my hour's been up for the last five minutes!" "I have no other appointments this afternoon. Bob." I stare. "What?" Gently: "I cleared my calendar before your appointment. Bob." i don't say "Holy Christ" again, but I surely think it. "That makes me feel right up against the wall, Sigfrid!" I say angrily. "I am not forcing you to stay past your hour. Bob. I am only pointing out that you have that option if you choose." I mull that for a while. Dear Voice of Gateway: On Wednesday of last week I was crossing the parking lot at the Safeway Supermarket (where I had gone to deposit my food I stamps) on the way to the shuttle bus to my apartment, when I saw an unearthly green light. A It strange spacecraft landed i; nearby. Four beautiful , I but very tiny, young women in filmy white robes I emerged and sub j ected me ' helpless by means of a paralyzing ray. They kept me prisoner on their craft for nineteen hours. During that time they subjected me to certain indignities of a sexual nature which I am honor-bound not to reveal. The leader of the four, whose name was Moira Glow-Fawn, stated that. like us, they have succeeded in fully overcoming their animal heritage. I accepted their apology and agreed to deliver four messages to Earth. Messages One and Four I may not announce until the proper time. Message Two is a private one for the manager of my apartment project. Message Three is for you at Gateway, and it has three parts: #, there must be no more cigarette smoking. #, there must be no more mixed schooling of boys and girls at least until the second year of college. #, you must stop all exploration of space at once. We are being watched . Harry Hellison, Pittsburgh . "You are one brassbound ringding of a computer, Sigfrid," I say. "All right. Well, you see, there was no way we could get out, considered as a unit. Our ships were caught, well inside the point of no return, and there just ain't no way home from there. But old Danny A., he was a sharp article. And he knew all about the loopholes in the laws. Considered as a unit, we were stuck. "But we weren't a unit! We were two ships! And each of them came apart into two other ships! And if we could somehow transfer acceleration from one part of our system to the other -- you know, kick part of us deeper into the well and at the same time kick the other part up and out -- then part of the unit could go free!" Long pause. "Why don't you have another drink. Bob?" says Sigfrid solicitously. "After you finish crying, I mean." Fear! There was so much terror jumping around inside my skin that I couldn't feel it any more; my senses were saturated with it; I don't know if I screamed or babbled, I only did what Danny A. told me to do. We'd backed the two ships together and linked up, lander to lander, and we were trying to We sometimes get squashed, and we sometimes get burned, And we sometimes get shredded to bits. And we sometimes get fat on the Royalties Earned, And we're always scared out of oLir'wits. We don't care which -- Little lost Heechee, start making us rich! manhandle gear, instruments, clothes, everything that moved out of the first ship into whatever corners we could find of the second, to make room for ten people where five were a tight fit. Hhnd to hand, back and forth, we bucket-brigaded the stuff. Dane Metchnikov's kidneys must have beep kicked black and blue; he was the one who was in the landers, changing the fuelmetering switches to blow every drop of hydrox at once. Would we survive that? We had no way of knowing. Both our Fives were armored, and we didn't expect to damage the Heechee-metal shells. But the contents of the shells would be us, all of us in the one of them that went free -- or we hoped would go free -- and there wasn't really any way to tell whether we could come free in the first place, or whether what would come free would be nothing but jelly anyway. And all we had was minutes, and not very many of them. I guess I passed Klara twenty times in ten minutes, and I remember that once, the first time, we kissed. Or aimed at each other's lips, and came close enough. I remember the smell of her, and once lifting my head because the musk-oil was so strong and not seeing her, and then forgetting it again. And all the time, out of one viewscreen or another, that immense broad baleful blue ball hung flickering outside; the racing shadows across its surface that were phase effects made fearful pictures; the griping grab of its gravity waves tugged at our guts. Danny A. was in the capsule of the first ship, watching the time and kicking bags and bundles down to the lander hatch to pass on, through the hatch, through the landers, up to the capsule of the second ship where I was pushing them out of the way, any which way, just to make room for more. "Five minutes," he'd yell, and "Four minutes!," and "'Three minutes, get the goddamn lead out!" and then, "That's it! All of you! Drop what you're doing and come on up here." And we did. All of us. All but me. I could hear the others yelling, and then calling to me; but I'd fallen behind, our own lander was blocked, I couldn't get through the hatch! And I tugged somebody's duffelbag out of the way, just as Klara was screaming God's sake, get up here!" And I knew I was too late; and I slammed the hatch and dogged it down, just as I heard Danny A.'s voice shouting, "No! No! Wait..." Wait... Wait for a very, very long time. After a while, I don't know how #. Acknowledgement is made that your course-setting for Gateway II permits round-trip flights with a travel time saving of approximately # days over the previous standard course for this object. #. By decision of the Board, you are granted a discovery royalty of #. on all earnings on future flights using said course-setting, and an advance of I # against said royalty. #. By decision of the Board, you are assessed one-half of said royalty and advance as a penalty for damage to the vessel employed. Royalty advance (Board Order A-#-#), less deduction (Board Order A-I #-#): # long, I raise my head and say, "Sorry, Sigfrid." "For what. Bob?" "For crying like this." I am physically exhausted. It is as if I had run ten miles through a gauntlet of mad Chocktaws pounding me with clubs. "Are you feeling better now. Bob?" "Better?" I puzzle over that stupid question for a moment, and then I take inventory, and, curiously enough, I am. "Why, yeah. I guess so. Not what you'd call good. But better." "Take it easy for a minute. Bob." That strikes me as a dumb remark, and I tell him so. I have about the energy-level of a small, arthritic jellyfish that's been dead for a week; I have no choice but to take it easy. But I do feel better. "I feel," I say, "as if I let myself feel my guilt at last." "And you survived it." I think that over. "I guess I did," I say. "Let's explore that question of guilt. Bob. Guilt why?" "Because I jettisoned nine people to save myself, asshole!" "Has anyone ever accused you of that? Anyone but yourself, I mean?" "Accused?" I blow my nose again, thinking. "Well, no. Why should they? When I got back I was kind of a hero." I think about Shicky, so kind, so mothering; and Francy Hereira holding me in his arms, letting me bawl, even though I'd killed his cousin. "But they weren't there. They didn't see me blow the tanks to get free." "Did you blow the tanks?" "Oh, hell Sigfrid," I say, "I don't know. I was going to. I was reaching for the button." "Does it make sense that the button in the ship you were planning to abandon would actually fire the combined tanks in the landers?" "Why not? I don't know. Anyway," I said, "you can't give me any alibis I haven't already thought Guaranteed bonus for Mission #-#A and #-#B (survivorship total): # Science bonus awarded by Board: # Total: of for myself. I know maybe Danny or Klara pushbd the button before I did. But I was reaching for mine!" "And which ship did you think would go free?" "Theirs! Mine," I corrected myself. "No, I don't know." Sigfrid says gravely, "Actually, that was a very resourceful thing you did. You knew you couldn't all have survived. There wasn't time. The only choice was whether some of you would die, or all of you would. You elected to see that somebody lived." "Crap! I'm a murderer!" Pause, while Sigfrid's circuits thought that over. "Bob," he says carefully, "I think you're contradicting yourself. Didn't you say she's still alive in there?" "They all are! Time has stopped for them!" "Then how could you have murdered anybody?" "What?" He says again, "How could you have murdered anybody?" "... I don't know," I say, "but, honestly, Sigfrid, I really don't want to think about it any more today." "There's no reason you should, Bob. I wonder if you have any idea how much you've accomplished in the past two and a half hours. I'm proud of you!" # # And queerly, incongruously, I believe he is, chips, Heechee circuits, holograms and all, and it makes me feel good to believe it. "You can go any time you want to," he says, getting up and going back to his easy chair in the most lifelike possible way, even grinning at me! "But I think I would like to show you something." My defenses are eroded down to nothing. I only say, "What's that Sigfrid?" "That other capability of ours that I mentioned. Bob," he says, "the one that we've never used. I would like to display another patient, from some time back." "Another patient?" He says gently, "Look over in the comer. Bob. I look --  -- and there she is. "Klara!" And as soon as I see her I know where Sigfrid got it; from the machine Klara was consulting back on Gateway. She is hanging there, one arm across a file rack, her feet lazily floating in air, talking earnestly; her broad black eyebrows frown and smile, and her face grins, and grimaces, and then looks sweetly, invitingly relaxed. "You can hear what she's saying if you want to. Bob." "Do I want to?" "Not necessarily. But there's nothing in it to be afraid of. She loved you, Bob, the best way she knew how. The same as you loved her. ' ' I look for a long time, and then I say, "Turn her off, Sigfrid. In the recovery room I almost fall asleep for a moment. I have never been so relaxed. I wash my face, and smoke another cigarette, and then I go out into the bright diffuse daylight under the Bubble, and it all looks so good and so friendly. I think of Klara with love and tenderness, and in my heart I say good-by to her. And then I think of S. Ya., with whom I have a date for that evening -- if I'm not already too late for it! But she'll wait; she's a good scout, almost as good as Klara. Klara. I stop in the middle of the mall, and people bump up against me. A little old lady in short-shorts toddles over to me and says, "Is something wrong?' ' I stare at her, and don't answer, and then I turn around and head back for Sigfrid's office.    There is no one there, not even a hologram. I yell, "Sigfrid! Where the hell are you?" No one. No answer. This is the first time I've ever been in the room when it wasn't set up. I can see what is real and what was hologram now; and not much of it is real. Powder-metal walls, studs for projectors. The mat (real); the cabinet with the liquor (real); a few other pieces of furniture that I might want to touch or use. But no Sigfrid. Not even 'the chair he usually sits in. "Sigfrid!" I keep on yelling, with my heart bubbling up in my throat and my brain spinning. "Sigfrid!" I scream, and at last there is a sort of a haze and a flash and there he is in his Sigmund Freud suit. "Yes, Bob'." "Sigfrid, I did murder her! She's gone!" "I see that you're upset. Bob," he says. "Can you tell me what it is that's bothering you?" "Upset! I'm worse than upset, Sigfrid, I'm a person who killed nine other people to save his life! Maybe not 'really!' Maybe not 'on purpose!' But in their eyes I killed them, as much as in mine!" "But Bob," he says reasonably, "we've been all over this. She's still alive; they all are. Time has stopped for them -- " "I know," I howl. "Don't you understand, Sigfrid? That's the point. I not only killed her. I'm still Patiently: "Do you think what you just said is true. Bob? "She thinks it is! Now, and forever, as long as I live. It isn't years ago that it happened for her. It's only a few minutes, and it goes on for all of my life. I'm down here, getting older, trying to forget, and there's Klara up there in Sagittarius YY, floating around like a fly in amber!" I drop to the bare plastic mat, sobbing. Little by little Sigfrid has been restoring the whole office, patching in this decoration and that. There are pihatas hanging over my head, and a holopic of Lake Garda at Sirmione on the wall. hoverfloats, sailboats and bathers having fun. "Let the pain out, Bob," Sigfrid says gently. "Let it all out." "at do you think I'm doingT' I roll over on the foam mat, staring at the ceiling. "I could get over the pain and the guilt, Sigfrid, if she could. But for her it isn't over. She's out tbere, stuck in time." "Go ahead. Bob." "I am going ahead. Every second is still the newest second in her mind -- the second when I threw her life away to save my own. I'll live and get old and die before she lives past that second, Sigfrid." "Keep going. Bob. Say it all." "She's thinking I betrayed her, and she's thinking it now I can't live with that." There is a very, very long silence, and at last Sigfrid says: "You are, you know." "What?" My mind has gone a thousand light-years away. "You are living with it. Bob." "Do you call this living?" I sneer, wiping my nose with another of "You respond very quickly to anything I say. Bob," says Sigfrid, "and therefore sometimes I think your response is a counterpunch. You parry what I say with words. Let me strike home for once. Bob. Let this sink in: You are living." "... Well, I suppose I am." It is true enough, it is just not very rewarding. Another long pause, then: "Bob. You know that I am a machine. You also know that my function is to deal with human feelings. I cannot feel feelings. But I can represent them with models, I can analyze them, I can evaluate them. I can do this for you. I can even do it for myself. I can construct a paradigm within which I can assess the value of emotions. Guilt? It is a painful thing; but because it is painlul it is a behavior modifier. It can influence you to avoid guilt-inducing actions, and this is a valuable thing for you and for society. But you cannot use it if you do not feel it." "I do feel it! Jesus Christ, Sigfrid, you know I'm feeling it!" "I know," he says, "that now you are letting yourself feel it. It is out in the open, where you can let it woik for you, not buried where it can only harm you. That is what I am for. Bob. To bring your feelings out where you can use them." "Even the bad feelings? Guilt, fear, pain, envy?" "Guilt. Fear. Pain. Envy. The motivators. The modifiers. The qualities that I, Bob, do not have, except in a hypothetical sense, when I make a paradigm and assign them to myself for study." There is another pause. I have a funny feeling about it. Sigfrid's pauses are usually either to give me time to let something sink in, or to permit him to compute some complex chain or argument about me. This time I think it is neither of them. He is thinking, but not about me. And at last says, "So now I can answer what you asked me. Bob." "Asked you? What was that?" "You ask me, 'Do you call this living?' And I answer: 'Yes. It is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.' "  Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! Get # full months of the finest science fiction writing at a special low introductory rate. Less than # #th of a solar credit -- just # U.S.Earth money with the coupon below brings you mind-expanding ideas and far-out authors alive today! Plus the unusual free gift described below to let you project the future for years and years from now. Just attach your check or money order to coupon and mail it to us to start your subscription and receive your gift. IPleasa allow #-# weeks for delivery.) This time-computer dial lets you look backward and forward in time! Were you bom on a Tuesday? What day will your birthday fall on in #? Will Christmas be on a weekend in the year #? You'll have the answers at your fingertips with this perpetual calendar! Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. this coupon to take advantage of this special subscriptionIgift offer from Name: StreetCity: State: Zip: Mail With Remittance To: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # Jerrq Pournelle,PhD There's a world Science Fiction Convention next week and I've got to go because I'm chaircritter of two panels. I'm behind on two novels, the telephone won't stop ringing, and my editor's in town to tell me that if I don't finish his book according to contract he'll put out a contract on me. And Jim Baen just ealled to say this column must be in before the Worldcon... If you think a writer's life is one of quiet laziness punctuated at infrequent intervals by flurries of typing, you're partly right. I can remember those dear dead days when I could read my magazines and work when I felt like it -- but now it's time to pay for the privilege, and it's only fair to make you Galaxy readers pay too. After all, one way I use up time is answering letters -- and incidentally, to those whose letters don't get answered, you have my sincere apologies. You may even get an answer one of these days. My desk consists of stratified layers of paper, and sometimes when I can't stand it any longer I conduct an archeological expedition down to wood -- and thus are cast to the surface letters placed on my desk as warranting a better answer than a one-minute postcard, only to be covered by something else that shouldn't be forgotten... The way you will pay is this; my column this month consists of bits and pieces which might, with enough ingenuity, be woven into a theme, but since I haven't time you're getting an intellectual potpourri.    One reason I ran out of time was that the Avalon Hill Company has sent me (no doubt with malice aforethought) a copy of their new war games. Starship Troopers. It is, of course, based on Robert Heinlein's story, and carries not only his letter of endorsement, but in the manual of rules has memorabilia of Lt. Juan Rico, MI (complete with his photograph, excerpts from letters he received, etc.) If you like war games, or if you like science fiction, or if you hate both but liked Starship Trooper, you'll love this. I wouldn't have thought that the complexities of war as related by Mr. Heinlein could be turned into a set of rules, but Avalon Hill has done it. There are a series of games of increasing complexity; the early ones are playable because my son and I tried them (well, I had to try it before I could give A-H an authoritative comment, didn't #?), but I suspect that the later scenarios are playable only by fanatics who possess a computer, a General Staff, and a great deal of time, No matter: the earlier and less complex scenarios are fun. If you're looking for a present for a (chronologically or temperamentally) teenaged friend, I recommend this; and if your friend hasn't read the book, get that too. The package would have overjoyed me in the days of my youth. Of course I'm a bit old for that sort of thing now... Eh? What's that, it's my move? Be right there.    I have noticed that the gaming mania seems to have swept the science fiction community; at every convention there are about as many games sold in the huckster rooms as there are books. One of those madnesses is a thing called Dungeons and Dragons, which seems to be a form of collective psychoses complete with audio-visual hallucinations. The worst of it is, I once, flippantly I'll swear, remarked that it might be interesting to take an expedition of mercenary troops -- commanded by Colonel John Christian Falkenberg, of course -- into one of those dungeons. (Confucius say he who does not toot own bassoon, same will not be tooted. About the time this column is on the stands Pocket Books will have out The Mercenary by Jerry Poumelle, which is a collection of most of the published Falkenberg stories plus about # pages of original material including the marching song of the Line Marines.) I'm told that a committee of Dungeonmasters has taken me up on the challenge, and at some point in the near future I will be invited to send Falkenberg 's #nd Legion into a world of dragons, wizards, elves, balrogs, vampires, and various forms of slimes, molds, death spells, etc. I can hardly wait, and meantime the regimental armorer is guns with carbolic acid... All this wouldn't have used up so much time, but of course there's Viking. We had quite a party on July #, #. Larry and Marilyn Niven, myself, Poul and Karen Anderson, Ted and Wina Sturgeon, Robert and Virginia Heinlein, and watch the landing. It came at an ungoldly hour, but no one really noticed that. We were too busy staring at the screen as, line by line, the image built up: a close-up look at the surface of Mars. As Mr. Heinlein said, July # is likely to be an important date in human history for quite a long time to come. First Eagle, then Viking -- and you know, with no intent to be unpatriotic at all, I agree with Robert: mankind may well remember the significance of July # a long time after most people have forgotten why July # is important. As I write this. Viking II hasn't landed yet (it's scheduled to touch down during the World Convention, alas) and nobody knows what to make of the information streaming in from the first lander. The biology team can't figure it out, and the geology people are having small fits of their own. Biology: Tf we got these results from a sample picked up on Earth we wouldn't hesitate to say they indicated biological activity." Geology: "No, we don't have the slightest idea why the Martian soil has that consistency. No, it's not water. No, it's not..." The biological question will probably be resolved one way or another by the time you read this. The soil consistency question probably won't be. The Martian desert landscape looks sandy. We know there's dust. And yet, the sampler arm digs its little trench -- and the trench remains. It doesn't crumble at the edges. The soil sample has a consistency of lumpy clay, yet there's no water to hold it together. Why isn't it sandy, fine-grained? You haven't the time to listen to the theories proposed, and none I've heard account for all the data. And why is that surprising? It's another planet. It ought to be strange, different, unusual, weird even. Yet we are surprised; and that's worth thinking about. We have come to expect marvels from science and technology, and particularly from the space program. Ted Sturgeon -- and others, so many others that I haven't a clue as to who said it first, but possibly miracle was to make Mankind's most magificent achievement dull. We achieved so much that the miraculous became routine. There's excitement, all right -- I was privileged to attend some of the Viking scientific steering meetings gore enough for anyone -- but it doesn't get out to the public. Yet think about it. Here's this enormously sophisticated machine space, landing with no more impact than you'd feel jumping off a chair; it sends back highly detailed photographs, using in transmission about the energy of the light-bulb in your desk-lamp, and getting that power from tiny radioactive-isotopegenerating systems; it digs holes in the Martian landscape and subjects them to tests not even possible on Earth when I was in school; it's done all that for less than one percent of one year's worth of the national budget -- about # for each of us in these United States; and we expected it to work, first crack. So far have we come. I recently read a history of Polar exploration. Attempt after attempt, each one getting closer, each ending in failure, some in tragedy, until the final triumph; and each failure spurred renewed effort. I sometimes wonder if the greatest tragedy of our space program was that we had so little tragedy. Would we have seen Apollo as more splendid if space had killed more heroes? Since a lot of those people were friends of mine, and it was my Job (along with a lot of others) to see that they came home healthy, I never did nor ever could wish for tragedy in space; but might not the public take more interest in our achievements if we had not been so routinely successful? In my columns and lectures I often tell of the marvels about to be poured forth from technology's cornucopia. I describe a world of the future with colonies in space, minerals brought from the asteroids, a world-wide standard of living at I I # word Autobiordiy V single Copy: # Four Isues for # y least as high as what we in the United States enjoy now; and I am careful to say that I am not describing dreams. This is the world as it can be made, as we already know how to make it. We can do it, I say. And it doesn't even cost much: a few more cents out of each tax dollar. I gave that lecture in Salt Lake City recently. (Salt Lake City is the only place I've ever visited where the words "wild life" refer exclusively to ecological phenomena.) After the question period I stood talking with some of my audience, and a young lady asked a very serious question. "You tell us about all the benefits technology can bring us, and you say you only need a little more money to accomplish all these marvels. I'm not an engineer. I don't even understand about half of what you said in there. I'd like to believe you, but -- how do I know you can do it if we give you the money?" It was asked in all sincerity. Most of my audience wasn't technically trained, and indeed in this case weren't even very familiar with science fiction, and though I've evidence they were entertained, I knew too that some of the things I'd talked about were unfamiliar. I could probably convince an engineer or mathematician or economist that my forecasts make sense; but how to prove to a bright young English teacher that I wasn't just blowing smoke, that it wasn't all just promises, promises? I had to say something, and I heard myself saying this: "Of those who make you promises, which group has a better track record for keeping them: technologists or politicians?" She seemed satisfied; and later I reflected on just what I'd said. It makes more sense than I knew. Remember twenty years ago when the politicians and "social scientists" were saying that if only they had as much money as the Defense Department, they would transform America into Paradise? Well, they've got what they asked for and a lot more. I can recall when Congress dared not bring in a budget larger than the "barrier" figure of ous stopping point short of a crease went to Defense. Do we live in Paradise? In # some of us said that if we could have about # of the national budget we could put men on the Moon and go to the planets. We said that the nation would reap great benefits from communications and weather satellites, and that the ferment of high-technology enterprises generated by the space program would have unforseeable effects of enormous benefit to all. Have those promises been kept? In the #' s advocates of "federal aid to education" were saying that if we merely shoveled a bit more money into education we'd not only see that every Johnny could read, but produce a generation fit to live in "the atomic age". Well, education certainly can't complain that it didn't get far more than was asked for (asked for then; not as much as is wanted now, of course); but would anyone like seriously to argue that we have fewer problems with the schools now than we did then? And no: I do not mean this as a condemnation of educators and politicians and social scientists. I do not mean to imply that there may be serious problems not forseen by those forcasters of the #'s. I don't even mean to condemn those who tell us what's needed is still more money for education and social services and the like. I do mean this: of those who have said they could produce certain results given certain investments, who has the best track record? And yes, I know about cost over-runs (back in my aerospace days I was mildly famous for Pournelle's Law of Costs and Schedules, namely, "Everything takes longer and costs more," a dictum discovered independently by myself and Poul Anderson). I could even tell you horror stories of my own. Some of them aren't the engineers' fault, though. Freeman Dyson told me about the laser target, the one placed on the Moon by Neil Armstrong: essentially a box full of glass cubes. They asked the instrument makers at Princeton what it would cost, and were told a couple of thousand dollars at most; by the time the competitive bid process was done, the cost was about a quarter of a million. But sometimes the engineers and technology managers seriously underestimate their costs, and seriously over-estimate the results. Sometimes they build outright failures, bridges that fall down andairplanes that don't fly very well. But he honest. How often have we been given an order of magnitude more money and failed to produce the promised result? Or any result at all? And how many political programs do you know of that cost ten times as much as estimated, are seemingly eternal in duration, and produce no measurable result at all? Choose your own examples; I'd not like to pick on your favorite project for social improvement. I do recall Dr. Samual Johnson on the subject. Boswell: "Then, sir, you laugh at schemes for social improvement?" Johnson: "Whj, sir, most schemes for social improvement are very laughable things." And yet in my youth no one laughed when we were told that for the world, and they did indeed ' laugh when told that we could go to the Moon at any price whatever. I rest my case. I can't drop the subject of promises and Dr. Freeman Dyson, though.    I suspect that few Galaxy readers ever heard of "Recombinant likely to be of vast importance to all of us, and it won't be long before it gets into the political headlines; indeed, by 'the time this is published it may be the question of the hour for your local city council or county board of supervisors. Last July the Cambridge Mass, city council found itself required to debate and rule on whether to allow only institutions whose biologists are eager to get to work. long-chain spiral molecule that determines genetics and inheritance, and it takes many forms. Recently biologists have learned how to take reproductive cells of entirely different species. The results can be strange. "Plantimals," neither plant nor animal, have been produced. from both human and mouse have survived to multiply by simple fission. More importantly, new forms of bacteria with properties of more than one of the species that went into their genesis have emerged from the laboratories. some biologists tell us, teach us more about life and biology than everything man has learned since the beginning of time. The results can be highly practical. In a recent letter to Science magazine Dr. Freeman Dyson (Institute for Advanced Study) said: "I claim that the exploitation of lead to an understanding, and conceivably a cure, of cancer... to creation of improved food plants to from starvation... to energy crops to offer alternatives to nuclear fission and fossil fuels." Many biologists agree. Some predict even greater benefits. Certainly the potential good from resmall. The trouble is, equally prestigious scientists are terrified. The Cambridge city council didn't get into the debate because of antiintellectual feeling. Men as reputable as Dyson explained the dangers and demanded the hearings. done with a bacteria called E. coli, which is universally present in human intestines. Suppose the research produces a bug which can live in humans -- E. coli is admirably adapted for that -- and gives evcould conceivably unleash an entirely new disease for which we have neither cure nor natural immunity. It might produce a cancercausing bug which, once released, could never be exterminated. It might solve the problem of famine, but not quite in the way search hope for. admit all this, but point out that after two years of study the National Institutes of Health have released guidelines for such research, and these are more than adequate to protect the public. The most dangerous kinds of research, those involving organisms that might affect human health, must be done in completely sealed environments such as were used by the Army for biological warfare research before the United States terminated those programs. They also say you can't stop it: the techniques are complex, but the equipment isn't that expensive, so some researchers will do the work whether permitted or not. Better, they say, to have it under license and supervision. After all, a moderately well-equipped high school laboratory could support recombinot safely. I hear tales of virus-bacteria combinations which weren't supposed to be viable but inexplicably were, and which lived on human tissue-cultures until destroyed. I don't know if the stories are tme, but my biochemistry friends tell me it's not impossible. The dangers, like the benefits, are not small, and are very real. We have here a legitimate disagreement among scientists of high integrity and great stature; and it is a question which must be answered by the general public and our political institutions. If there's a final answer to this question, I don't know it. I think both sides are right: the potential benefits are enormous, but the potential hazards are equally so. For what it's worth I think the dangers of disaster are far less probable than the promise of blessings, and I've some confidence in the techniques proposed to isolate and control any resulting demon; but no one can be # certain. The Army took prodigious measures to keep its research safe and confined (as well as secret) but there were accidents. Sheep died in Colorado. Improbable that (#) anything would get out, (#) if it did it could live, and (#) if it got out and lived it would be virulent and (#) uncontrollable; but that multiple probability is not ?ero. My own suggestion (one which Jim Baen guessed when I outlined the problem and before I made my suggestion) is that the truly dangerous activities ought to be put off until we can do the work in orbiting laboratories or on the Moon. Then we can be sure that an accidental release of research organisms won't contaminate the Earth. But -- can we wait that long? Suppose there is famine on the Earth, and we find later that had we started the research this year a famine-preventing grain would have been found in time? Would not the responsibility weigh heavily on those who played it safe? I knpw this: if we had continued the space program as we ought to have continued it, instead of converting the money into fuel to feed political premises, we'd have those orbiting labs, aye and a Moon base as well. Meanwhile, in nearly every large university the biologists are tooling up; and except for the Cambridge city council, which until a month ago had never heard of Recombithorities haven't even considered the problem.     One last item for our intellectual chicken soup: do you grieve for endangered species? Do you mourn the passing of even the insignificant, believe that nothing should ever be totally exterminated? Then I have a candidate for your defense efforts. This year, #, will see the extirpation of the smallpox virus. As I write this, smallpox, which a few each year, now exists only in laboratories and in one small village in Ethiopia; in a year the only living virus will be in the laboratories. Already we no longer vaccinate children in the U.S. The (small) danger of unfavorable reaction to the vaccination is greater than the removed the requirement for current vaccination from the medical passport. But shall we preserve samples of the virus? Surely Pournelle jests? No. There are serious proposals that we preserve this endangered species. The argument is that smallpox virus is one of the few viruses which live only in man. (It has, so far as we know, no animal reservoir and no vector save man-to-man contact, which is why it could be eradicated in such a short time.) Would it not be well to preserve samples of this virus that lives only in man, so we can find out why it picks on us and nothing else? Were we to leam that characteristic might it not be enormously valuable? Might it not, if isolated from the disease-causing characteristics, be a useful gene to breed into other viruses which we hope to create from recombinant Others say, to the Devil with the the pox! and reach for the carbolic acid. I suppose I could have woven a theme into this intellectual porridge after all. How are those not of a technical bent to live in a world of science and technology? And of the promises, promises, whose shall they believe? I wish I had final answers to those questions; I do not. But I'm not at all sorry I've made you think about them.  Only yours. Lover. Ben sharayde paused on the mica-flecked walkway while his eyes adjusted from the dimness of the transpod. The street, at tenthirty on a workday morning, was full of strolling people; he missed the purposeful rush. It was an oddly heady feeling to walk through the diffracted sunlight that penetrated the dome's crust of winter grime, to note that it was time for spring cleaning: as if in his transitory importance he could order it done. Sharayde smiled at his own conceit. A passing semireg eyed him with open envy, contrasting his own dull-tan uniform to the iridescent navy skinsuit and scarlet-ruffled vestjac Ben had donned for the bristening. He'd looked exactly right; and he'd acted as casually blase as if he'd been honored before. He didn't even have to hurry. Paul Savin had been glad to allow him the morning off; indeed, he him for the entire day, so impressed was he that Ben was to name not one, but two infants. Only Citycouncilman Mayer had outgunned him with three boys. Ben found he was grinning with unconscious pride, and carefully blanked his expression. No use attracting attention from the service workers heading for late-morning half-shifts, the tourists clumped before store windows in their oddly fashioned outcity clothing, or the uniformed Cops alert at their staggered posts. A hoarse shout and a shove snapped him from his reverie; he looked up to see a workcrew gravving down the wall while the burly man beside him yelled instructions. They hit the pavement with a clatter, and commenced to slam their rig into its powercrate with a violence that made Ben, used to fragile artist's implements, wince. The strawboss ignored them, staring up at the windowless expanse of brick and waving. There was a snap and a low hum: like a shimmering curtain, a porno swept across the building. The girl posing in the wall was honeyblonde, lightly bronzed, her long face accented by dark brows and arched, patrician nose. She smiled with knowing lips. Erect, fully curved, her body avoided the satchel-bottomed sensuality common among models. Her message tapped Ben's ears as he strolled past her enhanced his reaction. Shebinoff handled the Only Yours account; where had he found her? Ben made a mental note to seek Sheb out at lunch and compliment him. It would also provide a perfect opportunity to remind his co-workers where he'd been this morning, and receive their envious congratulations. Already the wallad had gathered a small crowd. A tall black in a gold skinsuit stopped abruptly in front of Ben, who sidestepped into a stocky man whose sombre kilt marked him an outcity tourist. The tourist glared. Ben excused himself, stepped back, was jostled forward, bumped the heavily-muscled black, and worked himself out of the crush. Exciting as the ad was, he needn't waste time on it. Ben knew he was a loner, conspicuous by his nonattendance at groupins and bashes, but he usually found companions who were impressed by his unconventionality. Just wait till they heard about his double honor! And there was always Cydra. Still, he found something attractively artistic in the height of the blonde's forehead, the curve of her lips, the depth and timbre of her voice. If she was really available...Ben caught himself. It was only an ad! One he'd never notice ordinarily, hurrying past, worried about schedules and ripoffs and hustlers. Suddenly the half-empty street, the alert Cops surveying naive tourists and lackadaisical semiregs, reminded Ben that this was a highrisk district. He was usually too rushed, too insulated among thousands like himself, to be nervous about it. Savin AdArt occupied the top three floors of a grimed stone building near the domewall. A few ruins crumbled against the dome itself, but when the ultraplas hemisphere was clean, Sharayde could look over them from his studio window at foamed, restless ocean. Today, as he sat at his desk, he was glad of the encrusted spray; he was almost too distracted to work, as it was. He uncovered the nearly finished dimenso on his block and stared at it critically. It looked distorted, flat; something was wrong with it, something as definite yet elusive as a touch of ozone in conditioned air, or sudje in a liqueur, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He'd been satisfied with it last night. Mere retouching wouldn't revitalize it. His first impulse was to strip the block and start fresh, but the layout was on deadline. The dimensional effect was adequate; no more than that, not up to his usual standard, but good enough for sell. He'd add just one hilite layer instead of the four he'd originally intended, and call it done.    No new assignment showed up in his slot after lunch. Lesser artists ding layers of translux to dimensos, instead of working on their private sketchblocks. To Ben, still glowing from his co-workers' congratulations, the freedom from scurryboy busywork seemed no more than his due. His stylo skimmed the block, building in unconscious harmony of memory and skill the record of his morning: the dim, elegant chapel, the bored Creche officials, the black-robed chanter, the debonair snob Mayer, the fatuous citizens who'd insisted on touching their namesakes, trying to wheedle a response from the lightly drugged infants. Thank god he'd avoided both extremes! He experimented briefly with patterns of the domecrust on the walkway, then found himself intently sketching the dazed, concentrated stare of the corn-rowed black beneath the wallad. How would he look, a dark naked god, braced on the seawall against flying spray? With sunset outlining thick, tensed muscles, and the wavecrests crimson, and his face locked into the force of his desire? It might -- just might -- work into something prizeworthy. Savin could find a client for it; medals weren't awarded noncommercial drivel, but he'd never failed to back Ben from the time he'd first encouraged him to enter the Annual Open Artshow, where an Honorable Mention in # led to the Alwark Invitational. Ben had every reason to believe this morning's honor came from the Bronze Medal he'd won there. The sketch could go no further without commercial application. Ben stretched stiff shoulders, noting the time with astonishment. No one had stopped in to remind him of quitting time. They probably felt shy, after this morning, about interrupting his work. If he didn't leave immediately, he'd be caught by mechocleaners attacking the litter on desks and floor. He'd made that mistake just once, and nearly lost the ruffles off his trousers. Domeglow threw menacing shadows over the walkway. The glowing wallad winked knowingly. Few gazing up at it wore citizen's skinsuits. Most nightwalkers were nonregs in their shabby, mixed garb, hustling a livlihood from tourists, the compassionate, and each other. The wallad blonde was a hustler, too, Ben thought absently. It added a spice of danger to her appeal. Something plucked at the lapel of his vestjac. Sharayde slapped at his pocket and howled, wringing his gashed palm. A slim urchin darted down the walk, turning with a flash of narrowed eyes and pale, unchildishly snarling lips before dodging behind a fat, bundle-burdened woman. The boy had slashed his criticard right out of his pocket. Ben pointed with a blood-dripping hand and yelled, "Stop that y! He's a ripoff!" "What boy?" the woman yelped, dropping her sacks and clutching her own pocket. "This boy?" A big semireg lifted a screaming blonde boy by the scruff. Spectators crowded, clutching the struggling child. "Not him. Taller, darker, closecropped hair..." The semireg shrugged, dropped the child and turned away. Ben stood shaking weakly; shocked, hurt, marooned, cardless. Alone among a crowd whose interest was gone he felt totally helpless. "How bad did he get you, mister?" Ben suppressed the urge to clutch the big, broadfaced Cop for support. "Benjamin Sharayde," Ben stammered. "He cut me pretty deep, I think." He held out his hand but the Cop ignored it. Ben fished up a tissue and clumsily wrapped the gory cut. "He got my card." "Ident, please." Not a word of blame! Encouraged, Ben rattled off his number. "You'll have to come to the station for I.D. and treatment. There's no hope of catching the ripoff here, but if you can give a good description, we may be able to make him. We've got this area pretty well plotted." The Cop took Ben's elbow and half lifted him into the silver autocar. "I can do better than describe the little bastard. I can draw him for you," Ben said grimly. "I got a good look at him." "Witnesses always say that. Mostly they're mistaken." The autocar hummed down the streetguides, slipped through the station diaphragm. "I'm a working artist. Just give me a sketchblock and stylo." "Citizen Benjamin Sharayde," the Cop formally informed the Deskman as he helped Ben from the car. "I flashed you." "Right. Citicard ripoff. Injured hand." The Deskman punched his console, and a young woman hurried in with a medical float. Ben winced as she unwrapped the bloody tissue and wiped the slash with anesthetic, then turned his attention to the pen and paper the Deskman was offering, and almost laughed. They expected him to draw on the back of a computer run? Still, a real artist could use anything, even a cave wall and colored mud. Clips closed his numbed hand; he worked with quick strokes, and the boy's lean, leering face glared at them from the paper. "Lenny Two," the Cop exclaimed as Ben roughed in the cropped hair. "Maybe this time we can get him before he blanks the card!" "Does what?" "He's part of a regular gang," the Deskman explained, punching buttons. "Run citicards through a hand-made processer, and switch numbers. Can't fake the interior circuitry, of course, but they'll pass in public slots, transpods, eateries, like that; they never let 'em get a real inspection." "Just get my card back," Sharayde mumbled dizzily. "I want to go home." "We can take you, or you can wait here while we track Lenny Two. There's always the chance we'll get him in time. If not, you'll have to open a new account with a public declaration. Want to wait? You've had a busy day, Citizen." The Medic, stowing her apparatus in her float, gave him a dazzling smile. So they'd looked him up when his number came in, found that he'd been honored just this morning. And was stupid enough to lose his card tonight. Ben looked up, flushing, but the Deskman was already punching data on another call. "I think you'd better wait," the Medic murmured. "You're very pale. There's no reason to hospitalize you, but it would be wise to rest."    He'd slept soundly enough, Ben thought when the Medic woke him. He'd been the room's only occupant; now many of the beds were full of groaning victims. He'd make sure not to be caught here again! It might even be wise to look for a Job in a better district, much as he'd hate leaving Savin. "We caught Lenny Two, and recovered your citicard. Mister Sharayde. Do you feel up to making formal identification now, so he can be disposed of?" Ben nodded sleepily. "Of course. I'd just have to come back tomorrow if I didn't and miss a day's work. I feel a lot better." He followed the pretty medic through a safety door into a white room full of black-padded half-reclined armchairs lined up on their pedestals like mushrooms. Slouching, tattered nonregs, restrained by a single wristclamp, sat in the nearer rows, staring at them with blank defeated eyes. On the far side of the room the chairs were smaller. Another Cop stalked over to intercept them, fingering his portacomp. (Interchangeable Cops in identical uniformed bodies, Ben thought dully. Are they bred in the Alwark Creche, or do we buy them wholesale?) "This the bastard that ripped you?" Lenny Two lay loose and sensuous in the chair, one arm held by the wristclamp, the other limp across his lap. His clothing was in fragments. Damp dark hair framed his softened features, and his limbs were childishly slender. "That's the boy, all right. But he looks a lot different." The Cop snorted. "Should have seen him when they brought him in! Filthy, fighting, foulmouthed little biter! Had to sudje him before we could even clean him up and book him. Well, that'll take care of it, unless you want to..." he leered at Sharayde. "It's all right, you know." Lenny Two raised half-open, seductive eyes. "No, thanks," Sharayde stammered, astonished to realize he was blushing. "I thought sudje was illegal." "Hospital has a use permit, naturally. They buy most of these kids as S-# donors, so we start the process here. Makes 'em a lot easier to handle." "You did recover my card?" Ben asked sharply, suddenly desperate to get away. (How potent was the sudje? Was the boy drugged beyond awareness?) "It's at the desk. How's your hand?" "Oh, fine. Which door...?" The Cop laughed harshly. "Tell 'em it still bothers you, get a free ride home. You aren't safe on the street this late."  it Ben's promptcomp woke him with bright morning commercials; it was his one indulgence, aside from his location. (The Cop who drove him had been visibly impressed by his address: "If I lived here I'd never go wallside!") A triple gong insisted he was late; the promptcomp must be running its program for the second time. Ben rested half-focused eyes (the Cop should see how little room he could afford -- much less luxuries) and gathered himself to rise. His eyes closed, and the gong rang again. He rolled onto his cut hand, groaned, and fell to the floor in a tangle of bedclothes. No time to order a new suit to replace the one ripped last night; he paid a penalty for oversleeping. Nothing in his press looked right for the day. Well, dammit, when he wore good clothes he got ripped. The old gold with the oblique gray stripe was good enough for the domewall district, anyhow. Wincing, he sealed his citicard into the breast pocket. He'd have to conceal the pain at work, or face a multitude of embarrassing questions; thank god the clips were nearly invisible. He dragged himself workwards. Past the wallad blonde, who stretched langurously at his approach and licked her lower lip, Two assignments Jammed his slot: a thick and puzzling manuscript, and an undescribed full-page "Only Yours" dimenso to run in a glossy with heavy outcity circulation. Had Shebinoff fouled up the Only Yours account? He'd have to check. Ben slouched in his chair and flipped through the manuscript, looking in vain for an explanatory note. How did Savin expect him to illustrate a thesis, and why? Especially since he couldn't even follow the argument? The author wrote an esoteric code, possibly clear to others in his discipline, but pure outish to Ben. He shuffled the pages together and started again from the top, absently doodling as he read. The high-cheeked, long-eyed face of the wallad blonde smirked from his pad. If Only Yours was dissatisfied with that ad, he was going to be hard pressed to excel it; she had more than physical attractiveness, she promised confidences shared and a relationship built together. Ben stripped the block, thinking of Cydra, the perfect receptacle, who listened to him with absorbing grace, while retaining nothing on the damaged plasm of her brain. He tried to imagine telling her of his misadventure of last night. She'd smile, and lean over for his kiss...no sense, just sensuality... Again he'd set lines in the plastop: Cydra's lovely, empty face, with the scornful blonde behind her, challenging him. If Sheb had lost the account, it wasn't bright to copy him. Until he could discover where Only Yours stood, he'd better work on the thesis, though it galled him not to understand it. Savin should have filled him in. Now he was left with only one alternative, distasteful but necessary. Ben punched a callcode with angry jabs. A pinched face filled his screen. "Taufry? Come over, will you?" "Now? I'm busy, you fertile bastard." Delighted to get in a dig. "C'mon, Tauf. I really need you. Just translate some math for me, and you can dig yourself back into your hole." Will Taufry shrugged, bony hands high. "A minute, then. If you keep me. I'll bill you." "No chance! Catch me letting you at my account!" The screen died before Ben touched it; Paul Savin's resident genius must already be scuttling through studio corridors on tiny, deformed feet like a blood-drained spider somehow alive after mating. Taufry would never be called to a bristening, though his semen was collected monthly just like everyone else's. Perhaps his defective genes were isolated in genetic processing, persona added to some embryonic karyotype, but he'd never know where, or if, his heritance continued. For all his scolding. Will Taufry took his time studying the manuscript, scribbling notes and stripping them, tossing his scant hair by repeated thrusts of bony fingers. Finally he gathered the papers and rammed them carelessly back into the envelope. "I'm going to have to keep these," he grumbled. "Might have known you'd come up with a timewaster." "It wasn't my idea," Ben fended, upending his own brown curls in nervous imitation. "All I want is an explanation. It can't be much of an account. Savin didn't even put in a cover note. Probably just needs covers, for publication. But the chap writes some language all his own." "Your integrity is showing," Taufry teased. "You actually want your illustrations to relate to the text! You're right, though; this isn't aimed at the academic community, it's to be popularized, and the illos will have to be explanatory. "On the surface it looks like an anti-genetic proposal. Ironic, to give it to a man who just bristened two babies! Well, I'll be glad to work on it. I'm pretty much in favor of natural selection, myself. I mean, we've got improved cattle and high-yield hens and protein-rich grain, not to mention oceanculture; with the world birthrate finally within the food-and-energy curve, we don't need to go artificial." "We don't?" Sharayde looked meaningfully at the deformed feet. Defiantly Taufry thrust out his surgical boots. "So we have a few accidents. It's a small price." "To pay for what?" "Serendipity, perhaps." Taufry rose and smoothed his lilac skinsuit. "I'll get this back to you."    The wallad blonde kept intruding on his roughs; in disgust, Ben threw down the block and took up his sketchpad. "That is without doubt the sexiest face I've ever seen," Karlyn Livonna murmured in his ear. "Boy or girl?" Paul Savin's personal secretary stood behind him, poised in her usual perfection of face and hair and dress. "Is that why you weren't home last night? I tried to call you, Ben. Twice." She stepped away, perched one silken hip on his console, like a restless bird before flight. When she'd approached him after the Alwark Open, he'd been dazed and flattered. Now he could only remember how she'd grown less and less approachable, how they'd failed to build anything meaningful between them. "I finally got my cooking license. I wanted you to have a real dinner." Then, circling like a hawk, "Who is that, anyhow?" Ben stared down at his sketchbook. He'd drawn Lenny Two, nestled in the padded chair; the subtly exaggerated perspective emphasized the sudje-lost face, the helpless free hand curled palm up between the thighs. He'd meant to show the fierce, dangerous little bastard who'd ripped him, but that menace was from the Alwark streets. (And  good riddance, Ben told himself sternly.) "Boy or girl?" Karlyn repeated. If he explained, he'd have to confess his stupidity of last night. If he didn't, he risked alienating a woman who was not only a compassionate playmate, but a valuable asset; if he followed his instinctive resolve and left Savin, he might convince her to accompany him. With her help, he might even set up in business for himself -- as long as he remembered how easily their relationship could twist to her advantage. "You didn't come down to ask who my models are," he blurted, distracted by the soft curve of a leg sheathed in turquoise silk, the soft pads of her fingers upturned on his console in unconscious imitation of the hand in his sketch. "No, of course not. Paul wants you to lunch with him and the Only Yours rep, since he's given you the account." Ben gasped. Suddenly Karlyn was a distraction, keeping him from diving for the lav to check his shave and makeup, brush and spray his hair. Nothing he could do about the suit; why hadn't Paul warned him yesterday? "What about tonight?" Karlyn pressed him. "I even caught a bit of sudje, Ben. Just for us." His s'mile felt glued to his face, like a poorly assembled collage. "I'll call you, Karlyn," he mumbled. Then, viciously, "It was a boy." Somewhere during lunch Sharayde's half-formed decision to leave Savin AdArt evaporated. Later, curled pensively over his sketchblock, he couldn't recall exactly what had changed his mind: being asked to plan the new campaign (Shebinoff wasn't consulted, though he still held the local account); the promised bonus; or the realization that he simply wasn't the businessman Paul Savin was, to maneuver people in Paul's subtle yet persuasive manner. It was almost as if he'd expected him to think of quitting. Thank god no one knew of the ripoff, or his plans; he had no embarrassing explanations to make. And he had no bright ideas for the dimenso. This time he was expected to produce the entire proposal; the only thing he could think of was Sheb's blonde. Replete from the excellent lunch -- he'd eat like that every day, when the odd bonus became a fat salary -- Ben slowly pulled out his sketchpads. Something there might give him an inspiration, though it was hard to guess what would sell the guided dream process in other cities, some of which disapproved of erotic stimulation during sleep, or any other time. The campaign would have to be subtle. subsidiaries of the same corporation. Could he suggest an aid for insomniacs? Or emphasize the sleepno learning process? Some of the most puritanical areas were big on education. He certainly couldn't ask Taufry for more advice. He had lots of good sketches, but nothing he could apply until he came up with the parameters of the campaign. The best was the one of the muscular black on the seawall, but he couldn't see how to tie it in. Maybe he was impatient to apply it, hoping to submit it for a prize. Maybe he wanted to use it because it reflected his own erotic urges. But he'd just turned Karlyn down; he surely didn't want a synthetic substitute! On his way home, he carefully notwatched the wall. When he arrived he learned that a bash had been announced on the floor above his apartment; with his painful hand, carelessly overused throughout the day, Ben decided not to attend, though for some reason it attracted him more than such affairs usually did. Cydra was booked for the evening. Lenny's sudjed, sensuous face came between himself and Karlyn. He turned from the fonescreen, and the promptcomp raised the volume. A five-minute minidrama for Only Yours pranced through his room: the wallad blonde, arm-inarm with a tall black girl, called invitingly to a shadowy person not yet onstage . Ben flashed a station change, hoping that Only Yours hadn't bought saturation. They had. He cut off the holovee, telling himself that once he had the campaign under control the porno would no longer disturb him. He had trouble falling asleep. His unremembered dreams were unpleasantly frustrating. He woke angry with himself; why was he so suggestible? He needed a woman; more than that, he needed a sympathetic ear. If Cydra didn't satisfy him, why should he imagine that a programmed dream would? Perhaps his rejection of Karlyn was symptomatic: he couldn't stand her domination; offering him sudje simply showed she controlled the relationship. Maybe women had their own needs and interests, but he didn't want to get involved in that. No wonder a sleepno seemed attractive.    The cornrowed black, mouth slightly open, eyes eager, was once again planted under the wallad as Sharayde passed. The sultry voice lover...dream with me tonight...I'm Suzi, program Ben stopped. "Duck off!" the black growled. Muscles bunched in cheeks and biceps. "Stick to your own kind, heah?" Startled, Ben stepped back. A great hand jammed his shoulder bones together, lifting him almost off his feet. For a second he saw the wall as the taller man did: a statuesque black girl, full breasted, full hipped, fertile as a moongoddess, the girl who walked with his blonde, turning to tease him... "Your pardon. Citizen. If you would look through my eyes a moment, you'd see this is a heightoriented display." How calm he sounded! "Huh?" The man swung back, his fingers loosened a fraction, and Sharayde ducked away, shaking. He didn't want to see the inside of a stationhouse again. Neither did he want to arrive at work obviously upset. He wanted to rent an Only Yours. He'd never tried the combination of hypnosis and sensory stimulation that induced controlled dreaming; perhaps his lack of personal experience was keeping him from creating the campaign. It wasn't addictive, he reminded himself. The process gave only general guidance; each dreamer added elements from his own subconscious. He could dream a Suzi whose emotional needs would coincide with his. And he could charge the initial setup cost to Savin AdArt as research expense! Resolutely he bucked the crowd "Damn right," he answered aloud. Early sleepno models had required electrodes attached to neck and scalp; these now were incorporated in a long-sleeved, high-necked sleepsuit which permitted unrestricted movement while transmitting minute impulses to the peripheral nervous system when the picked up by the projector mounted by the bed. Ben had expected to feel relaxed and confident after the hypno session, but he only succeeded in achieving a state of acute anxiety as he paced the floor in his sleepsuit, as instructed, to mold it to his body. Already he could hardly feel it, but it was hard to believe that the rest of the program would work as well. Even Suzi's face seemed dim and distant. He could recall nothing of the introductory dream. Why hadn't they removed his nervousness under hypnosis? They'd had him under long enough. Rental and set-up had taken the whole day. Now he was simply stalling, notwatching the holovee rather than committing himself to bed. The unit, warmed up and ready, emitted a slight, soporific hum. Ben's hands shook as he pulled back the covers...    Golden tanned, with the tang of seasalt on her skin, Suzi slipped into his arms. With slow rolling combers tickling their feet, she listened, entranced, as Ben Sharayde spoke. Then they were in his studio, and he showed her drawings he had withheld Trom Savin as too selfrevelatory. Empathically, she understood them. As they responded to each other, he vaguely remembered that sleepsuit filaments were impinging on his nervous system, routing preplanned feedback, then ignored it. Carried to peaks beyond previous experience, they achieved an intimacy he had never known. Half-waking, lazily anxious to keep remnants of the dream, he thought: what would our child be like, our natural child? Genetically unprogrammed, it wouldn't be accepted by the Creche. He could sponsor it for training, but the chance that it would earn employment and citizenship would be slim. Every child deserved a perfect birthright. He thought grimly of Will Taufry, who must have been among the last of the naturally conceived. No child of his should suffer such deformity! The promptcomp chimed, building a morning snapper. Time to get up; and now he knew how to handle the Only Yours campaign. Taufry waited for him in his studio, the thesis on his lap. Ben cut off his eager flow of explanation, while his stylo flew over the plastop. The layout grew in a spill of color. "There! Like it?" "Not bad. But you didn't ask me to critique a porno. Where were you yesterday? Never mind. "This thesis is more than a technical paper. It's a congressional proposal; the author doesn't care if the illos are appropriate, he just wants it noticed. Then he can come on strong in committee. "This is big, Ben. And scary. Remember the Crisis of '#?" "Something to do with food, I think." "You were still in Creche, I suppose. It was a world famine. Any idea what caused it?" Ben ran his fingers over the plastop, impatient to transfer the sketch to permablock and add emoting. How could a thirty-year-past famine reflect the present? There hadn't been one since; obviously, the cause had been corrected. He said as much, grunting. "Pay attention, Ben. It started with a triticale rust, a mutation of an old disease that wasn't even supposed to affect the mutant hybrids. Then a mosaic started on potatoes, and something else took the corn crop. All at once. So we had a crisis. Because those diseases didn't just affect a field or two, Ben. No, our agriculture has developed strains so high-yielding, so diseaseresistant, so easy to weed and fertilize, that almost every farmer in the temperate latitudes plants the same seed. Anything that infects that strain simply gallops around the world. And then the experts have to breed resistant strains, and there's the catch. None of the old, tough, low-yield stuff is still around. There's no way of guessing how many varieties were permanently lost by our modem advertising and distributing system, not to mention the idiotic use of land for housing before Contract complexes were built. "The rust was beyond chemical control. I know, my family are farmers; I saw those fields. You just can't imagine, mile after mile of drooping stalks, with the half-ripe heads in the dust, and the shining green-gold turning a miserable brick color. My oldest brother's planting mutated seed in the same fields, now, mile after mile of triticale-#. And some day something'll take out that strain, and they'll have to start over... "Maybe I didn't make it clear. They had to mutate by radiation, the process, because there wasn't a naturally rust-resistant strain left. Triticale was an artifically forced hybrid, originally, you know; but even the parent strains were largely lost. So they developed a resistant strain; and found it too weak-stalked to harvest; and nothing to breed it back to, until they uncovered some grass -- in Africa, I think -- and forced another genetic match. And there was the same struggle with com and potatoes, while the world slowly starved." Taufry heaved himself out of the chair and paced, his face haggard. Ben shook his head sympathetically, his visually oriented imagination a tangle of fallen grain and rusting farm machinery. "But what's all that got to do with this thesis? I can't understand much of it, but it hasn't a word about field crops."  "True. I'm trying to give you the background. Help you understand what happens when the gene pool of any species is censored too drastically. "Ben, you have children." Sharayde stared at the little man. "You know I do." "And you assume that I don't. Only healthy, registered Citizens can contribute heritance. Unregs have kids, who run the streets on their parents' dole, but they'll never be used as donors. And their progeny are allowed to starve." "Well, there's the quota... "Ah, the quota. That lets some of those children into school, if they're sponsored, or otherwise qualify. If you should sire a careless child, Ben, you might even be moved to sponsor it yourself, publicity be damned." (With Suzi, if there really was a Suzi. Tauf had a point.) "Do you see what I'm driving at, Ben?" Sharayde rubbed his forehead, where a gentle pulse promised the father and mother of a migraine to come. He poured some water and took a pill. If Taufry had something to say, why didn't he come right out and say it? "Tauf, I'm not feeling well, and Savin's looking for this layout. Suppose we discuss this again tomorrow?" Taufry tossed the envelope onto his console and drew himself up like an offended billy goat. His crest of upended hair as tall as he could manage, he clopped out. Ben felt momentary guilt. He'd interrupted whatever Taufry'd been working on, and then hadn't even listened to his results. But he had to complete the outline before his headache got beyond the point where medication would hold it. He took up the permablock and began to work. The day somehow passed...    A second pill made him drowsy; he fell into bed, hardly noticing the sleepsuit that now covered him like a second skin. They met under a blue-white sky; his headache vanished at the very sight of her sweetly curved body. She clung to him silently in a gently rippling ocean of ripening grain, and there was nothing he needed to say to her, nothing for her to explain to him; she opened herself and he plowed into her, trying to plant reality in her eager acceptance, his eyes level with broken, copper-smeared stalks.  itk Savin was pleased with the layout, and sent it to a wordsmith for polishing. It would be days before Ben had to produce a finished plate; he took up the thesis, drawing angular clumps of dying grain as he studied Taufry's notes. Taufry spotted them at once. "You've got it!" he yelped. "Now put in some human skeletons." "This?" Ben gave it full attention. "I was just doodling...I dreamed about it last night, dammit." "Good. You've got to scare hell out of them." "Me? Scare who? Come off it, Tauf." "You. Out of us. I've put it together, Ben; limited genetic selection, combined with the S-# process." "The what?" "The process that invalidates the create universal donors. You know they can transplant any body part now, without subjecting the recipient to anti-rejection treatments. Don't look so blank, Ben! You must know what I mean!" Ben, whose mind had suddenly flashed back to Lenny Two, nodded. "I'd meant to ask you, Tauf, why you never had your feet fixed, now that the donor bank is costeffective." "I was going to," Will Taufry's normally pale face turned slightly green, and his eyes glazed. "I even went up and inquired about it. "But I made one mistake. I asked to see the donors." A shudder whipf)ed through his body. "A doctor took me down to a room full of kids -- S-# works best on adolescents -- in restraints, naked, drugged mindless -- waiting like patient animals to be carved up and pxjrtioned out for sale. Most of them were already missing bits here and there, an eye, a leg, hunks of muscle and skin, and all of them were bald; hair transplants were very big that year. "I got sick on the spot. Embarrassed the doctor terribly. He probably bent the rules, taking me down at all, but he knew I was in advertising, he was very p.r. conscious...well, of course I couldn't go through with it. God knows what I'll do if I ever need a donation; I'm not sure I could accept one now even to save my life." "That's silly. You said yourself they were mindless." "I know. The child whose feet I was buying was already destroyed. But I saw them, Ben." "The City is better off without them. I ran into one -- he ripped me off -- nasty, vicious little bastard! -- I was glad when I saw him sudjed and ready for processing. For once he was an asset, not a liability." "He was nasty, dirty, and vicious because he didn't have a chance to be anything else. He must have been clever or he'd never have caught you. Don't you see that as a waste?" 'Wo!" But Ben swallowed sickly, trying not to visualize Lenny Two in fragments. "What we're doing is fishing the gene pool from both ends," Taufry continued relentlessly. "Genetic selection on the one hand, and removal of unplanned, possibly serendipitous genes among the unregistered. "Naturally there's a big demand for S-# donors; someday they may take kids right out of the Creche, if they're slightly unsatisfactory. Transplants earn Alwark a lot of money, and it's humanitarian, besides. And there's no protection for the kids. "Oh, we're pragmatists. Better to save a productive Citizen than some unknown quantity, like a child. But someday we'll limit our selection just a little too much by putting a dollars-and-cents value on the gene pool." "You're expecting a people rot, Tauf?" Ben tried to laugh. "Why not?" "God, what a pessimist!" "I'm not the only one." Taufry tapped the thesis significantly. "We don't need the unregs," Ben argued. "We can always swap a few vials of semen somewhere, spread the old genes around." "We already have;man's a traveler, and he's left souvenirs wherever he goes. The rest of the world is imitating our success, here. Oh, it won't happen tomorrow. We haven't the faintest idea when or whether we eliminate a trait we will need someday; we don't even know what the trait is. Maybe there's something linked to defective feet that could save the world, some day. Maybe something goes with albinism, or schizophrenia. "This proposes legal protection for all minors, and removal of the stigma on natural birth." "That would practically wipe out the donor program. Surely there's no need to go that far!" "It would at least maKe it uneconomical," Taufry agreed. uncounted combinations of genes..." "That's true. But there was lots of grass, too; it just happened to all be the wrong type." "Geneticists plan for all this. They have to." "If they consider it at all, how can they extrapolate unknown needs?" "Analog computers..." "Can only run what's fed into them." Ben sighed. "Suppose you convince me. What can I do?" "Beside illustrate this the best you can? Durino, Ben. But the chap who sent it here is right. If he's going to attract attention, he's got to start with advertising. With us." "That's too much!" "Too much responsibility? Maybe so. Every once in a while something like this comes along, something quiet and frightening, with a choice attached. If I hadn't seen it, you'd never have known what you were working on. And no one will ever know if you duck the responsibility, either. But if you can get that feeling," he gestured towards the dying stalks in Ben's sketch, "in your illustration, you may just possibly save the future...if you want to." "Why did it come to me?" Ben groaned. "Anyhow," he went on more calmly, "how do I know you know what you're talking about? You've got a twist on genetics, stands to reason. You're probably blowing this out of all proportion." "Wouldn't it be nice if I were?" By the end of the day, Ben had sketches that would fittingly illustrate Dante's Inferno, but none of them would dent the conditioned consciousness of his world like the quiet desperation implicit in the dead grain. It didn't make sense, anyhow. Nothing could be that simple. It didn't stand to reason that a single concept really stood with its finger in the dyke that way. But he didn't want to dream that night, not after the grainfield; he didn't want to meet her there, or in an operating room where children were sectioned into living prosthetics, or a laboratory where gene selectors chose the future of the human race...    He fell asleep in his chair as the promptcomp softly spun commercials through his livingspace. He dreamed he was explaining the illustrated thesis to Savin, fidgeting as he hadn't done in years. "I don't understand why you've used so much emotion," Savin shook his leonine head mildly. A mild Savin was dangerous. "This is serious, Paul." Better not admit that Taufry had done his thinking for him. "I'm really convinced of that." (Am I: Am I really?) "Look at it this way," Savin replied smoothly, tossing blonde locks as he reached for a stylo. "The kids are better off as donors than dying in the streets; they're fed and housed and cared for." "Just like animals." "Useful animals. You sound like a radical idealist, Ben. Suppose you got wiped in a street fight, or developed cancer. You're a valuable Citizen; would you trade your future for some bastard raiding garbage pickups?" Suddenly it was Suzi staring at him from Savin's chair. Ben shifted uncomfortably. "I'd want to be cured, of course. But it isn't right..."  "How about me, Ben? Or our child?" "What if he was donated, instead?" Ben's gut tightened painfully. The child he had vaguely imagined now seemed very real and dear. "He wouldn't be. Ben, you're fighting progress. Why, with the donor program, a valuable man like you could live almost forever." Suzi rose and came round the console to lay a burning hand on his chest. Ben looked down at himself: a cobbled, patched old corpus split from collarbone to crotch, stuffed with assorted organs, all tagged with the donors' names. Suzi's hand held a pulsing young heart; Ben knew it came from Lenny Two. He slapped at the wound, too late; the heart was already his... "You've invaded me!" "Ah, Ben, I'm one with you." He could no longer see her; she had faded into the flickering holoimage. Some dream this was! He should get his money back! But -- "Hey! I'm not sleepno'd!" he shouted, lunging forward, falling stiff and chilled from his chair. The promptcomp, sensing his awakening, built a too-familiar commercial, line by dimensioned line. "Cut!" he screamed. It blinked off. Huddled on the floor, Sharayde wept. it  #r Ben slumped at his console, nibbling the end of his stylo. The triticale, viciously stylized, was transferred to permablock. Against a snowy background the only colors slashed rust and black, the only emotion despair. If he released it with the thesis, people would remember the famine of '#; a crooked stem, a structured clod of earth, twined the numbers through the design. Did he really want the thesis to attract this much attention? Without flattering himself, Ben knew that the art was extraordinarily good. He'd come too far to compromise; either he used this, or refused the commission entirely. Never before had he come to the point where he had to say, here is my work, take it or leave it; advertising is not kind to inflexible integrities. The Famine of '# formed the cover. The interior format was simple, compensating for the complex text: a child graced the margin of each page, hopeful expectation suggested in plain outline. On the endpaper a blue-green globe, cloudcovered and serene, too distant to prove the presence of man, floated in a paperwhite forever. The morals involved were too complex to resolve, but he'd worked too hard, given too much of himself, to waste the illos. Ben racked up the finished thesis and chuted it to Savin's office, then drew out his next assignment: tinted corneal lenses with fluorescent seductionlines shimmering across them. Probably bad for the vision, he thought, but merchandisable. He could finish it quickly, and stop by Only Yours for a new dream; he had to get #B out of his mind. Reversing the gnawed stylo, he began to sketch Cydra, totally takable, with wide fluorescent eyes.  This is alter-ego speaking. Jim Baen has just called and asked to have me and Geis write another column. Geis went into a blue funk and has refused to have anything to do with it. Correctly, he realizes that when the previous column is published this Fall and you readers vote on who is to be primary in this column -- me or Geis -- he will lose. "I will not lose. Alter! I am not in a blue funk. God, how you lie and misrepresent! I merely went upstairs to make a phone call and come back to find you starting this column without me. I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd called my friend, Jim Rise -- " He's the guy who can talk the trunk off an elephant, isn't he? "Well, Jim does find an hour to be a trifle short as far as a conversation goes, but -- " Call him, Geis. Let me alone to do the work around here. Go soak in a hot tub. Go out and putter in your garden. Pull a few thousand weeds. Talk to the strawberries. Murmur sweet nothings to the com stalks. Mutter dire threats to the peach tree that failed to bear this year. "I will sit here and watch what you type with my fingers. Alter. I will keep a mental finger on the override buttons and a hand near the blue pencil." Killjoy! "Yes. Admitted. Now, let's see you attend to something Jim wanted, namely explain how come your predictions in the May issue have gone sour." Sour? Sour? The only predictions I made that haven't come true are the first ones -- the political ones, and they were made way back in February, #, before the primaries had even begun. "Alter, you predicted, and I quote: '#: Ford loses to Reagan in nomination battle. Wallace health becomes a factor. Jimmy Carter beneficiary of big media buildup to challenge Wallace. Ted Kennedy accepts nomination, beats Reagan. Inflation hits # -- # in later months of #. Unemployment till # plus.' Care to explain how you missed on CarterKennedy?" First, Geis, let me make it clear to the readers that at the moment Reagan and Ford are neck and neck; Reagan could still unseat Ford. Perhaps Alter will explain that next time. Ed. George Wallace's health did become a factor in his campaign; the stories of his paralysis and wheel chair life that kept appearing on TV doomed him. The voters saw him as not physically fit to be president. That helped sink Wallace, and the Stop-Wallace urgency by the leaders of the Democratic party also caused them to pass the Word to boost Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter knew the big liberal Demos would want a good, safe Southerner to use against the evil Wallace. He presented himself and got their support. Only thing is, he # Eighth Ave , New York # #-# #t:ittHi#itHiHt has charisma and cunning and a keen nose for the wind of public disenchantment, and he quickly got himself a ton of publicity and a big bagfull of delegates before the king-makers and power-brokers knew what had hit them. You saw what happened; they turned desperately to Humphrey, Church, and finally Brown to try to stop this grinning monster they had created -- too late. They were trying to get Kennedy at the last minute, too, but... I still think the plan was for a deadlocked convention to turn to Kennedy. But Carter ran with that anti-establishment reformer theme and the people bought it. So now the Demo leaders must live with Carter, grumpily on the inside, and with sweetness and unity on the outside. We're in for a succession of 'maverick' presidents, I think. "You squirm pretty good. Alter, but you were still wrong." Not by much, Geis, and I could still be right about Reagan. And I'll betcha I'm not far wrong on my #-# inflation rate by year's end, with unemployment around #. "Fat chance -- let's drop it for now. Let's turn to -- " Geis, I haVe a grotch I want to ungrotch. I want to -- "Don't be obscene, Alter, We can't -- " For your low level of perception, Geis, I will speak in ultra-square words: I have a complaint. "Another complaint? That's all I hear from now; the food is too ripe -- " 'Rotten' is the word. "The dungeon is too cool -- " Cold, damp, moldy and drippy. "Or the lighting is less than ideal." One naked forty watt bulb is not even sufferable. But my complaint this time is about an aspect of science fiction that bugs me, and that is slowly driving me up the slippery stone walls. Sigh "Another diatribe. What is it this time?" I am tired unto vomiting-up-myswill of the old formula-based, pulp-bom, laziness-continued habit of science fiction writers that impels them to lean on the old mle of fiction writing that goes something like this: Up the Stakes. "I'm afraid. Alter..." Don't you understand? The surest, simplest, easiest way to make sure readers are hooked and stay hooked into an sf story, especially a novel, is to up the stakes -- so that the fate of all Mankind or the planet or the solar system, or the galaxy or even the whole damn universe is at stake when the hero fights the baddies. "Well, sure... that's traditional." That's goat guano, Geis. It's almost always a signal the author is incompetent, feels himself to be a weak writer, or is too lazy to struggle through to a level of plotting and characterization where such pitiful narrative crutches aren't necessary. "Now, Alter, you paint with too wide a brush. Are you saying such writers as Larry Niven, Roger Zelazny, to name but a few good ones, are bad writers?" No, they're good writers, but they're trapped in bad habits left over from the pulp days. With them the End of the WorldRace GalaxyUniverse formula is gilding the lily. They...and a dozen or so other really good-to-excellent sf and fantasy writers... don't need to rely on the old high stakes gimmick to hold their readers and tell a good, memorable story. But over and over, year after year, they all seem to construct stories that involve the Ultimate Doom unless... "But, Alter, the readers like high stakes sf. Why not give them what they like?" They like good, well-told, tightly structured, suspenseful stories. And all I'm saying is that this Ultimate Threat device of sf story-telling is runiling on its rims. It has been used to death. "But -- " But nothing. Look at the other genres. Look at Westerns. When the hero blasts the hired gun the fate of all civilization doesn't depend on that fast draw. All that's at stake is one life, maybe a mortgage, and the love of his girl and his horse. "His horse!" Dog? Never mind. Look at the Gothics. All that's on the line is a lady's honor and maybe her life, which ever comes first. Also some love, I guess. Nothing cataclysmic. "Alter, I have spotted a chink in your armor." j Nonsense, Geis. Nobody would believe a Chinese with spots. Now, take mysteries and detectives; do they require that the life and death of whole peoples, species and galactic cultures hang in the balance when the evil person who-dun-it is in the final face-down with the forces of Good? NO! "Alter, are you saying that all these other genres of fiction are better plotted and better characterized than Science Fiction stories and characters?" Oh. The chink? "The chink. I have thrust my verbal sword into your vitals." Hmm. No, I don't claim that at all. All I said was that it is too easy to rely on the old reliable sf mostdieadful-is-better gestalt to buttress a story's interest potential. Plus there is that aspect called Sense of Wonder, and the other easy-way-out (to success and riches) of escalating a locale or a machine or a space ship to gigantic sizeto impress and awe the reader. It may be part of the American Character at work, in that sense. The appeal is there. Using these guidelines, the ultimate sf novel would be about a # foot alien frozen in a thousand mile long derelict spaceship which has been trapped in a galaxy-sized spacehero doesn't unwarp the warp and fix the spaceship and wake the alien within six days and thirty-three and God. "Alter, you're a genius! Let me take some notes. What would be a catchy title?" Geis! Damnit! I was mocking, exaggerating, satirizing to prove my point. "I know, but it's a good plot! Give me a title. I'll hack out an outline, a chapter or two, and I'll be rich!" "Yeeees... I like it!" I hate it. No, I don't hate it. I'd like it, but I'd hate myself in the morning for liking it, if somebody with talent wrote it. Not you, Geis. You see, Geis, it can be done. Fascinating, gripping science fiction can be written in a narrow focus, small scale and low budget, so to speak. "But science fiction readers have been spoiled; we've grown accustomed to the'pace. We need our high-stakes novels. Look at the computers that take over the world, the disease that will wipe out all people, the natural disaster that threatens extinction to all mankind... That's heady stuff. It's like a drug... and we require ever-greater disasters, ever huger spaces and deeds and effects to get our rockets off." Exactly, Geis. You make my point. I say we've about reached the end of the road, the well is dry and the bottom of the High Stakes and Wonders barrel is staring us in the face. "You do coin a phrase. Alter. And I guess I'll have to agree. It is time we sf writers consciously considered giving up the over-reliance on the Big Scene and spent more time and effort on more believable future problems handled by more believable future people." Sure. Look at TV. "The Waltons" don't have to solve murders or perform brain surgery every week to maintain viewer interest. They give us sympathetic people struggling with personal and family problems during hard times. Toprated show. Very good characterization and acting, and writing. "Wow, Alter. You really think a future-fiction novel like that would have a chance... would get published?" It better. A lot of sf readers are getting awfnlly sick and tired of the diet of unending to-the-limit stuff they've been fed for # years. That's partly why most sf readers give up on the genre after an early enthusiasm when young -- they get unconsciously bored. Jaded. Give them real future people with real future problems on a believable scale, and they'd stick with us for a long time. "Maybe you're right. Alter. But that # foot alien in that thousand mile long derelict spaceship intrigues me." Bah, you're hopeless! Get out of my dungeon! Leave me alone. "What are you going to do -- sulk? Just because -- " Geis, you're a superannuated juvenile. You never matured beyond the age of thirteen. "Fifteen! And proud of it! Nobody likes a superior, insulting, patronizing, arrogant alter-ego. Alter." Geis... just... leave. "All right, all right. I'm going. Just don't think you're ever going to take over this column. The readers will vote for one of their kind, not some lousy creature with evil thoughts and... and... tendrils!' ' -.m Of the many kinds of tyranny, perhaps the most cruel is that of the majority.   j Douglas bent jr. sits in his kitchen, waiting for his tea to heat. It is May #, his birthday, and he has prepared wintergreen tea. Douglas allows himself this extravagance because he knows he will receive no birthday present from anyone but himself. By'a trick of Time and timing, he has outlived all his friends, all his relatives. The concept of neighborliness, too, has predeceased him; not because he has none, but because he has too many. His may be, for all he kriows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia, and it is bordered on three sides by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose inside were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot. On the remaining perimeter is an apartment-hive, packed with ant-like swarms of people. Douglas knows none of them as individuals; at times, he doubts the trick is possible. Once Douglas's family owned hundreds of acres along what was then called simply The Shore Road; once the Bent spread ran from the Bay of Fundy itself back over the peak of the great North Mountain, included a sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland; once the Bents were one of the best-known families from Annapolis Royal to Bridgetown, their livestock the envy of the entire Annapolis Valley. Then the petrochemical industry died of thirst. With it, of course, went the plastics industry. Clay suddenly became an essential substitute -- and the Annapolis Valley is mostly clay. Now the Shore Road is the Fundy Trail, six lanes of high-speed traffic; the Bent spread is fourteen acres on the most inaccessible part of the Mountain; the sawmill has been replaced by the industrial park that ate the clay; the pasture and the streams and the farmland have been disemboweled or paved over; all the Bents save Douglas Jr. are dead or moved to the cities; and no one now living in the Valley has ever seen a live cow, pig, duck, goat or chicken, let alone envied them. Agribusiness has destroyed agriculture, and synthoprotein feeds (some of) the world. Douglas grows only what crops replenish themselves, feeds only himself. He sits waiting for the water to the solar-powered electric stove that supplanted the family's woodbumer when firewood became impossible to obtain. Electric stoves take too long to heat, call for no tending, perform their task with impersonal callousness. They do not warm a room. k irk Douglas's gnarled fingers idly sort through the wintergreen he picked this morning, spurn the jar of sugar that stands nearby. All his life, Douglas has made wintergreen tea from fresh maple sap, which requires no sweetening. But this spring he journeyed with drill and hammer and tap and bucket to his only remaining maple tree, and found it dead. He has bought maple-flavored sugar for this birthday tea, but he knows it will not be the same. Then again, next spring he may find no wintergreen. So many old familiar friends have failed to reappear in their season lately -- the deer moss has gone wherever the hell the deer went to, crows no longer raid the compost heap, even the lupens have deThe soil, perhaps made selfconscious by its conspicuous isolation, no longer bursts with life. Douglas realizes that his own sap no longer runs in the spring, that the walls of his house ring with no voice save his own. If a farm surrounded by wasteland cannot survive, how then shall a man? It fs my birthday, he thinks, how old am I today # He cannot remember. He looks up at the goddamelectricclock (the family's twohundred-year-old cuckoo clock, being wood, did not survive the Panic Winter of '#), reads the date from its face (there are no longer trees to spare for fripperies like paper calendars), sits back with a grunt. #, like I thought, but when was  born? So many things have changed in Douglas's lifetime, so many of Life's familiar immutable aspects gone forever. The Danielses to the east died childless: their land now holds a sewage treatment plant. On the west the creeping border of Annapolis Royal has eaten the land up, excreting concrete and steel and far too many people as it went. Annapolis is now as choked as New York City was in Douglas's father's day. feconomic helplessness has driven Douglas back up the North Mountain, step by inexorable step, and the profits (he winces at the word) that he reaped from selling off his land parcel by parcel (as, in his youth, he bought it from his ancestors) have been eaten away by the rising cost of living. Here, on his last fourteen acres, in the twostory house he built with his own hands and by Jesus wood, Douglas Bent Jr. has made his last stand.    He questions his body as his father taught him to do, is told in reply that he has at least ten or twenty more years of life left. How old am ? he wonders again, fortyfive? Fifty? More? He has simply lost track, for the years do not mean what they did. It matters little; though he may have vitality for twenty years more, he has money for no more than five. Less, if the new tax laws penalizing old age are pushed through in Halifax. The water has begun to boil. Douglas places wintergreen and sugar in the earthenware mug his mother made (back when clay was dug out of the backyard with a shovel), removes the pot from the stove, and pours. His nostrils test the aroma; to his dismay, the fake smells genuine. Sighing from his belly, he moves to the rocking chair by the kitchen window, places the mug on the sill, and sits down to watch another sunset. From here Douglas can see the Bay, when the wind is right and the smoke from the industrial park does not come between. Even then, he can no longer see the far shores of New Brunswick, for the air is thicker than when Douglas was a child. The goddamclock hums, the mug steams. The winds are from the north -- a cold night is coming, and tomorrow may be one of the improbable "Bay-steamer" days with which Nova Scotia salts its rnring. It does not matter to Douglas; his solar heating is far too efficient. His gaze wanders down the access road which leads to the highway; it curves downhill and left and disappears behind the birch and alders and pine that line it for a half-mile from the house. If Douglas looks at the road right, he can sometimes convince himself that around the bend are not strip-mining shells and brick apartment-hives but arable land, waving grain, and the world he once knew. Fields and yaller dogs and grazing goats and spring mud and tractors and bams and goat-berries like stockpiles of B-B shot...    Douglas's mind wanders a lot these days. It has been a long time since he enjoyed thinking, and so he had lost the habit. It has been a long time since he had anyone with whom to share his thoughts, and so he has lost the inclination. It has been a long time since he understood the world well enough to think about it, and so he has lost the ability. Douglas sits and rocks and sips his beard and failing to notice. How old am I? he thinks for the third time, and summons enough will to try and find out. Rising from the rocker with an effort, he walks on weary wiry legs to the living room, climbs the stairs to the attic, pausing halfway to rest. My father was sixty-one he recalls as he sits, wheezing, when he accepted euthanasia. Surely I am not that old. What keeps me alive? He has no answer. When he reaches the attic, Douglas spends fifteen minutes in locating the ancient trunk in which Bent family records are kept. They are minutes well-spent: Douglas is cheered by many of the antiques he must shift to get at the trunk. Here is the potter's wheel his mother worked; there the head of the axe with which he once took off his right big toe; over in the comer a battered peavey from the long-gone sawmill days. They remind him of a childhood when life still made sense, and bring a smile to his grizzled features. It does not stay long. Opening the trunk presents difficulties -- it is locked, and Douglas cannot remember where he put the key. He has not seen it for many years, or the trunk for that matter. Finally he gives up, smashes the old lock with the peavey, and levers up the lid (the Bents have always learned leverage as they got old, working efficiently long after strength has gone). It opens with a shriek, hinges protesting their shattered sleep.    The past leaps out at him like the woes of the world from Pandora's Box. On top of the pile is a picture of Douglas's parents, Douglas Sr. and Sarah, smiling on their wedding day. Grandfather Lester behind them near an enormous bam, grazing cattle visible in the background. Beneath the picture he finds a collection of receipts for paid grain-bills, remembers the days when food was cheap enough to feed animals, and there were animals to be fed. Digging deeper, he comes across canceled checks, insurance policies, tax records, a collection of report cards and letters wrapped in ribbon. Douglas pulls up short at the hand-made rosary he gave his mother for her fifteenth anniversary, and wonders if either of them still believed in God even then. Again, it is hard to remember. At last he locates his birth certificate. He stands, groaning with the ache in his calves and knees, and threads his way through the crowded attic to the west window, where the light from the setting sun is sufficient to read the fading document. He seats himself on the shell of a television that has not worked since he was a boy, holds the paper close to his face and squints. "May #, #," reads the date at the top. Why, I'm fifty years old he tells himself in wonderment. Fifty; I'll be damned. There is something about, the number that rings a bell in Douglas's tired old mind, something he can't quite recall about what it means to be fifty years old. He squints at the birth certificate again. And there on the last line, he sees it, sees what he had almost forgotten, and realizes that he was wrong -- he will be getting a birthday present today after all. For the bottom line of his birthcertificate says, simply and blessedly, "... expiry date; May #, #." Downstairs, for the first time in years, there is a knock at the door.  Dear Mr. Baen: Two stories in the September # issue deserve comment. "Abandon all Heat -- " (to use the short title) is not only a gem, but clearly, without saying so, it reveals the secret of entropy itself. Not just the introduction of disorder, that was stated, but the energyloss at each transaction (described as a gate in a black box). Hell is the other half of the box, and a toll of energy from each transaction in our universe is directed through to keep Hell hot. I should have known, being one of the small group of anthropologists who describe social power and organizational relationships in terms of relative entropy and energy-flow. Which brings me to Nocka Nocka in "The Dirty Old Man." While anthropologists such as those depicted there (the chances are overwhelming that a linguist knowing any Calusa would be an anthropological linguist) are not unknown (in fact Tarantella is very reminiscent of one of the legendary pioneer ethnologists), the percentage has always been low and in this generation is almost zero. All I've got to say is that Nocka Nocka is just lucky they weren't archaeologists. He'd have starved. As to Vine De Loria, he is an anthropologist himself. He is very highly regarded in the profession for the excellent work he does, and he talks rough to the kinds of anthropologists who sin by his standards, not because he hates anthropologists, but because he's trying to educate them all to his standards. I have not discussed this with him, but to another Lakota anthropologist who was berating anthropologists collectively, I asked, "If you feel that way, why are you an anthropologist?" "Because," she said, "I want to be an anthropologist more than anything else in the world." Most of us feel that way. Clifton Amsbury # Amador St. Richmond, CA # Dear Mr. Baen, I have a question to pose which I think science fiction readers (and authors) might find interesting and worth discussing. My question is this: What skills, training, attributes, aptitudes, etc., will be required of a member of the first lunar colony? I'm a senior in high school, and I, along with several friends, have been wondering whether I have the interests and capabilities required. My friends (other high school students) and I have talked about many aspects of this already, such as what would be the best age, and whether a military background is necessary. I've been enjoying Galaxy's increasingly better stories, and Dr. Poumelle's column is always worth the price of an issue by itself. Steve Levin # #th St. Santa Monica, Calif. #(M# ' Good question. Clearly, however, the answer will depend on the nature of the colony (or colonies) in question. For example, a pure-research oriented establishment would require a very different skills mix than would a manufacturing complex than would a construction site devoted to hoisting up mass to the Lagrangian Points than would a military base. Perhaps your best bet would be to ments for payload specialists as a first step. And don't miss the March '# issue of Galaxy; Dr. Pournelle is going to answer your question at length! Dear Sir From all indications, the most significant aspect of Galaxy (apart from exemplary editing) is Jerry Poumelle's column. By Crom. this fellow has a way of inspiring both strangely tangential thoughts and bladder bursting fear. "Lasers, Grasets, and Marxists" did both. After changing underwear, I did some thinking about our present American-Soviet position. If they've got any logic to them at all, the Soviets have no intention of obliterating the United States. For all our faults and many shortcomings, dear old Uncle Sam still has an economy and an agricultural technology that is bolstering the entire world. Simply put, the Soviets would starve. Of course, this all depends on the maintenance of our present state of free enterprise and developing, within the next generation, an alternate energy source. Sincerely yours, Gary L. Day Dear James; In the view of some physicists today, the basic philosophy or current popular interpretation of special relativity leads to absurd and self-contradictory consequences and therefore to an illusionary physics. This is becoming clearer every day as physicists invent theories of black holes, claiming that they are gateways to seemingly occult dimensions, teleportation, time travel, and God knows what. Ironically, these are the ultimate consequences of the relativity philosophy; either we believe them as literal realities, or question the philosophical basis of special relativity by asking whether we have been mislead to illusion by illusion. Probably the most physically unrealistic and self-contradictory concept in special relativity is the increase in rest mass m with velocity. Relativity philosophy interprets this increase literally rather than apparently or illusionary. Relativistic mass m' --   has been confirmed for bodies accelerated by systems at rest S (the increase in m deriving from the energy of accelerating fields at rest with S); it is nor logically confirmed when the means of acceleration moves with the system in motion S', as with space ships. If the two cases are physically equivalent, whcie does the increase in m come from in the latter case, as viewed by S??? That is, bow, witlioin violMing energy-mass conservation, can m' become #m. #m... ? Shall we claim, implicitly as relativity does, that the body in S' creates its own mass, or admit self-contradiction? If S' considers himself at rest, justified by the principle of relativity, and S (at rest relative to the universe) to be in motion. S' OBservations of a thing with the physical thing itself. Because S and S' are not physically connected, except for receiving light images of each other, it is observations of images that are made, not measurements detecting physical changes were S and S' physically connected, as in the case of S' accelerated by a rest system. No natural particle or body has been found to exceed light velocity because they were accelerated by rest systems; and even if they could we would not detect them because no known detector can detect something moving faster than the light the particle emits. Twentyfirst century star trekkcrs will shake their heads in wonderment as to why twentieth century physicists were so menu mentally mistaken as to believe the relativity philosophy; to assume that the energy, mass, length, and time dimenskMis of a star ship can, in reality, literally depend on the velocity of a stream of photons; nl to misinterpret a functional (mathemnical) relation between them for a literal caitsnal one. Truthfully Yours, A.H. Klotz Physics Research # Simon St. Babylon, N.Y. # Dear Jim, I was fascinated by Robert Hawkins' letter in the July # issue about my chapter on "First Contact... in Cultures Beyond the Earth. He seems to have a fine sense of disregard for facts and logic. I admit that I occasionally suffer from the author's syndrome of inference, assuming knowledge the reader may not have. One problem was the omission in the book of the following sentence: "In a way,...the whole idea of detecting a superior technology by its waste heat is absurd. It is a little like trying to analyze another culture by its garbage. Not overly reliable, but a start." I am quite familiar with the archaeologist's love for middens. However, archaeology only infers and extrapolates a culture from its physical remains. These remains give us a great deal of information about the implements that were used, but very little about such things as family organization or moral beliefs. Waste heat from interstellar societies and garbage from terrestrial societies are merely physical indicators of their existence; alone, they are insufftcient to analyze a culture. "Culture" is not a geographic concept. A classic example for my point may be found in "Digging the Weans," by Robert Nathan, which appeared in Judy Metril's "Best of the Year" collection, SF # (Gnome Press, #). Although fiction, it illustrates the fallacy of the archaeological "educated guess." I would also like to remind Mr. Hawkins prime example of the misinterpretation of electromagnetic "garbage." I recommend an excellent book by Robert C. Dunnell, Systematics in Prehistory (Free Press, #). Rather than accepting the old school of archaeology "which viewed itself as doing ethnographies of dead peoples" (p. #), he draws on the new school's distinction of function: "the technical recovery aspects of thefield will herein be called archaeology, and the academic discipline... referred to as prehistory." (Ibid.) Prehistorians do not study "culture" or past "societies" or "man's past." The only tangible phenomenon is the artifact. Confusing the means of explanation (culture, society, etc.) with the phenomena to be explained (artifacts) only results in inconsistency and untestable conclusions. I take umbrage at Hawkins' arrogant dismissal of my statement on evolutionary timescales (p. #). Perhaps my esteemed critic believes I fabricated the numbers because they sounded impressive? It may be that no one ever bothered to inform him that those little numbers suspended at the end of the sentence indicate a footnote. In this case, the source was P.H.A. Sneath's Planets and Life (Funk and Waghalls, #), p. #. Any biology text or encyclopedia will tell you that primitive plant and animal life evolved during the early Pre-Cambrian era, mals began to evolve from reptiles around the time of the early Mesozoic (Triassic ago. Don't take my word for it; confirmation for these datings may also be found in Shklovskii and Sagan's Intelligent Life in the Universe (#), pp. #-# and #; L.E. Orgel's The Origin of Life (#), pp. #-#; and Cyril Ponnamperuma's The Origin of Life (#), pp. #-#. Need I go on? If indeed, as Robert Hawkins suggests, Jerry Pournelle dissected Cultures Beyond the Earth "with one hand in his back pocket," I would not be surprised. Jerry is quite competent at both science fact and fiction. But considering the content of his letter, I hate to think where Hawkins had his hand. Regards, Donald K. Stem Box # Seattle, WA Dear Mr, Baen, Having read Alter Ego's impassioned plea for a by-line (and mentioned on the cover too!), I must take pen in paw and say I think it's a great idea. Dick Geis is readable but Alter is more. He's impassioned, venemous, prejudiced, etc. All the things that make a columnist good reading. Couldn't you just let him have the magazine? Yours, Cathy Greywace # Highland Dearborn Hts., Ml # Editorial reply: Sputter, sputter Dear Dr. Poumelle, The May '# Galaxy was my first look at Galaxy in some years; I bought it for the Zelazny serial, which I'm desperately trying but in the meantime found that the rest of the mag was quite good. Mr. Baen is entitled to a good scratching behind the ears; he seems a very competent editor. However, I'm writing you. Your article on the O'Neill colonies was quite interesting, but more so was your apparent philosophy behind it. It is really tremendously encouraging to find the Space Cadets coming back out of the closets we were all driven into in the late #'s. This letter will be too short to have much rational content, as I have to wanted to thank you for bringing them to my attention. Sincerely, Daniel D. Villani # Foruth St. Manhattan Beach, CA # The Editor replies: I ant not a panda! stamped envelope to; Grant, # Greenwood Lane, Lanham, Maryland #. ##, Adelphi, Maryland #. Out of Print paperbacks and Paperback Originals -- send wants; Chloe's Bookstore, # McKinley, Sacramento, Ca. #. Storefront, PO Box # Gl, San Francisco, Ca. #. Sci-Fi -- Fantasy Children's Book Catalogue Box #, Sacramento, Ca. #. Newkirk Ave., Bklyn., NY #. Paperbacks out of print. Send wants. James McCrae, # Buttonwood, Citrus Heights, Calif. #. Space #, Star Trek, Comics, Caroline Munro article! Much more!! 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Women in science fiction: the Spider stomps where angels fear to tread. Letters from Thornton, Duncan, Grasso, Nance, Bartter, Koegl, Koegel, Goldstein, Robinson . Where to find it. Interior illustrations by Bear, DiFate, Fabian, Gaughan of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # East # Street, New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #. #-Issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. n mmm The aliens had left a mighty legacy -- and men were not the only ones who claimed it! I I'm just saying they could be new commander. "I take it you haven't any great love for the setties," Kenneth Green said. "A hundred and ten years ago, the Perfidisians drove us out of this section of the Eridanus line." Berker's throat bobbed. He was fifty years old, thin as a rail, with a narrow head and jaw wrapped in wrinkles. Facial lines fell more quickly under Sun-Planet's pull. The arms of his jumpsuit were appliqued with the insignia of the duty stations where he'd served. "They took over this station and all the others, and Home Field, too -- kicked us all out -- " "I know that, Mr. Berker," Green said. "And the setties worked for them without blinking an eye!" "Whether you love them or not, the setties are still co-workers. W-we can't get along h-here without th-them. Any more of this talk will net you disciplining. Understood?" The new commander stammered when he was tired or angry, and now he was a little of both. He'd been on Sun-Planet for ten hours. He ran his hands through his hair and turned to face the third-in-command. Like Berker and ninety per cent of the civilians on Sun-Planet, Wedge Margul was an Abstainer. He was a heavy man, with dull eyes and pale flesh, hands scarred from heavy labor, forearms knotted with muscles. He was also nearly bald, with just a fringe of soft, white hair which he grew long enough to cover his ears. Compared to them. Green was fully aware he looked like a Fresher -- new to Sun-Planet, new to the problems, and not nearly tough enough to command respect from natives like Berker and Margul. "Commander," Margul said, "Mr. Berker has been under some strain since Loytnant Keefer died. I have, too. We're upset because we have to pull out again. Please excuse any indiscretion. There hasn't been good military routine here for over a month, and we've lost some of our tact." "At any rate, that's the situation," Berker said. "I know," Green said. They stood in awkward silence on the ramp over the settie quarters, now drained for monthly cleaning. Automatic scrubbers rolled across the tank bottoms, hissing and spitting fine mists of disinfectant. What had started as a tour of the locks and settie quarters had ended in confrontation. Despite his irritation, Green knew the two men had handled the Main Station competently since Keefer's death, two months past. And Berker's analysis was much closer to the official position than Green found comfortable. There was worry among the Administers on Myriadne, ten thousand light years distant, fhat Sun-Planet held far more than was generally suspected. The setties had been working on the problem for two centuries, and it looked like they might have the beginning of a solution any time. But would the solution be important in more than just an abstract, philosophical sense? Might it not contain something, imply something, that would make its knower more powerful than anyone else in the explored galaxy? Green would have to make the final decision. "When the next group of setties arrive, I want to be told. I'll be in my cabin. Thank you for the tour, gentlemen." They nodded. Green took the elevator to the fifth floor of the Station and walked down the observation hall gallery. The glass was dark and reflected the sheer white light of the ceiling panels. He stopped to look at his reflection. Flecks of red and green were visible behind the image. He hadn't looked outside yet. Ten hours and he'd spent it all administratively, bickering and settling in and getting facts and priorities straight. He'd been through this hall four times and he hadn't shut the lights out to look across the surface. "All right," he said. "Show. Panels out." The vox mechanisms dimmed the lights until the hall was dark and the window was transparent. Green caught his breath. "I'm in charge of you now," he murmured. His new command was one hundred thirty thousand kilometers across with an average density twice that of water and an average surface temperature of thirty degrees Celsius. The clouds on the horizon were green with a continuous discharge of heat lightning. They swirled and played at different shapes as he watched. Below them were the waters and islands of the Ganset Sea. Between the Station and the eastern arm of the sea was a rift in the black crustal shield. Sparks danced in the reddish glow which welled up from the lava of the mantle below. He leaned on the railing before the long gallery window and squinted to pick up the outline of the Kerith Post, ten kilometers distant on Laith Island. The small concrete shelter housed the crust monitors for the area. A hundred thousand years before, SunPlanet had been more reliable, under the complete control of its creators, the Darks. But they had left only a few millennia after finishing their work, and the world had begun its slow decay. Now Sun-Planet was a symbol of instability -- Green had received much kidding about going to live on a time bomb. The symbol was somewhat exaggerated. The crustal shields werestill stable enough to live on, at least within the span of an Abstainer's lifetime. The Ganset Sea was crossed by scattered waves of blue light, the phosphorescence of minute sea life. Ten-meter cephalopods known as skipperjacks fed on the small life and the setties fed on the skipperjacks. Humans, in a way, hoped to feed on the setties -- on their two centuries of studying and deciphering. Green hadn't met with the setties yet. "Lights on," he said. He crossed the hall and held his hand up to the ID plate that monitored the door to Officer's Country. In his cabin, he lay back on the sleep field and closed his eyes. For a few minutes he contemplated whether or not to control his sleep. His eyes focused behind closed lids on the tiny speck of Kerith Post. That was the center of his decision now, the center of his purpose. His eyes opened. Behind closed lids it was terrible and lonely, as if, under the roof of his head, there was no one to keep him company... or a crowd, none of whom recognized each other. But he did not induce sleep. He had six hours, and he was damned if he was going to let unease rob him of the treasure of uncontrolled slumber. In an hour he was quiet and breathing evenly. II Sun-Planet's morning, which came every three terrestrial days, was a weak show. The distant flare kilometers away, threw its murky spotlight over the horizon clouds, then rose to cast a dull, refractory gleam on the crustal plains. The Station crew carried a continuous watch, and it was only coincidental that morning coincided with the watch change and Green's appearance in the lounge. He carried his Man Amplification Suit in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. His walk was measured; he'd only been awake for fifteen minutes and was still groggy. Berker and Margul awaited him in the officer's lounge. He was mildly irritated to see the two civilians there -- but they'd earned the privilege. Sun-Planet's government was an unusual arrangement, a compromise between the Combine Astry and the original controllers; the Galactic Social Engineers Berker and Margul had as much right to command privileges as he. "Come in, Commander," Margul said, fleshy hand beckoning. The smile was almost too much for Green's morning condition, but he managed a weak grin in return and gul indicated. "We hope you're ready for Water today." "Hm?" The reference passed him by for a moment. "Oh. Most interested." He took a sip of the coffee. It was the ritual of the morning drink that helped, not the minimal stimulant in the dark, thick brew. "Mrs. Hass and Mr. Pink inform me we have setties in the lock now. I'd like you gentlemen to accompany me and give introductions." "This group is here for ritual reasons, Commander," Berker said. "You might want to wait for an information party -- " "I'd like to see a few setties before visiting Water," Green countered. "They d-don't have to be talkative." Berker nodded and they stood, picking up their suits and carrying them to the central elevator. The Station was an oval building of five stories. The top floor contained Officer's Country and the communications center, the fourth floor computers, the third floor the library, and the second floor the crew and temporary civvie quarters. The first level, below ground, contained the locks and a bank of settie quarters, after cleaning. The ramps above the settie quarters were cluttered with sprayer tanks and long-handled hoses left by the sanitation detail. Margul threaded his way through the tangle and glanced back apologetically at Green. "A lapse -- " he began. "Put the detail on minor report and get them up here as soon as the setties are gone. Tell them their pay is suspended for the watch during which they left this equipment out. I want settie quarters clear of all human equipment, whether the setties can see it or not. That's a fixed rule, Mr. Margul, Mr. Berker." Berker nodded absently. The setties, though equipped with massive hand-like flippers, had had a longstanding law against the use of tools. They reluctantly accepted structures like the locks and quarters in the Station, and necessary human aids, but for some reason hidden in their cetacean ancestry they abhorred technology. Each lock was a hundred meters long. There were five locks in the northern pens, and ten in the southern. The water was dark and radiated a steamy warmth which Green found uncomfortable. Three of the locks were occupied. "Who's with us today?" Berker asked the guard. "Lock one has Two-Dot, three has V-Spot, and five has ZeroNose." "Let's go to five first," Margul said. "Zero-Nose is the group negotiator this month. This isn't an information party, but I'm sure he'd appreciate our speaking to him instead of V-spot, his interlocutor. It's a sign of confidence." Green agreed with a smile. That he could sympathize with. The ramps above the locks were illuminated by steplights that had been carefully placed so that their backwash didn't reach the water. It was like travelling down a dark tunnel, withthe sound of sloshing water all around, and a few meters away, the whoosh of Two-Dot breeching in lock one. Green instinctively took a deep breath as he peered over the ramp into the black waters of the lock. He could barely see the glistening shape of the settie's fin and hear the rippling sound of the water as the creature breathed. The click of his air hole was less pronounced than Green had been led to believe. Berker tapped his knuckles on the railing. "Zero-Nose," he said into the translator mike. "We accept your presence and position, and request communication." The water became agitated as the settie began a slow roll to his side. Green grew accustomed to the dark slowly, and thought he saw the tiny gleam of an eye. His mind felt a pressure like the preliminary signs of a headache. The supersonic vocalization was picked up by the translator and converted. "Presence acknowledged," the settie said. "Zero-Nose, we have a new Station Commander. His name is Kenneth Green, and he would like to speak to you." "Not today," the settie said. "Then at your convenience," Berker said with a wry twist of face. "We wish you luck with your duties, and thank you for your attention." He switched off the mike. "They're here to fulfill part of a swearing-in ceremony in Water, near as we can tell," Margul said. "The locks are something of an ordeal for young setties. In the nurseries, they are taught to despise all machines and tools. Then they have to face the real world and deal with things we need to survive. It's pretty traumatic. I don't think they can really respect humans. We're too dependent on our machines." "It can be a damned stifling attitude," Berker commented. Green was a little puzzled. "How do you keep track of their findings without recorders? I thought it was passed on by verbal communications." "Yes, but usually the tenders mediate. They're trained to understand settie languages in the middle, human frequencies. Sometimes they swim with the setties and work in the nurseries." Margul smiled. "Mr. Berker was married to one. They make interesting mates. Those of us not trained to have long memories have to resort to recorders. We don't qualify for more than amenities, I'm afraid." "I haven't met a tender yet, either," Green said with some chagrin. "Gentlemen, pardon my ignorance and clumsiness these first few days. There are a lot of things not covered in the manuals. Your guidance is deeply appreciated." Margul smiled noncommittaly, and Berker nodded without apparent sympathy. Green was ill at ease again, and wondered if his admission had been called for. He'd heard that Keefer's command had been less formal than usual, to lubricate interaction between the Astry personnel and the civilians. Green's normal instinct was to follow a rather old set of cardinal rules for leadership, among them never admitting ignorance or weakness to one you command. If informality didn't work, would a hard-nose attitude do the trick? Personally, he disliked the prospect -- but professionally speaking, it was a strong possibility. The launch which carried them down the canal was padded with fluid-filled plastic bags. They lay back on them, breathing heavily in the rigorous gravitation. The water churned black and oily, leaving an unfoamed, unbubbled turbulence behind the launch. Berker supplemented the automatic guidance system. In a few minutes they were on the open Ganset Sea. The wave-vibrations grew heavier and the boat trembled. At this gravity each ripple was a heavy blow, the equivalent of a much larger wave on seas less tightly bound. Green forcibly stilled a tinge of nausea and asked questions to keep his mind occupied. He'd studied the crustal oxygenation cycle for several hours in the library of the ship which had delivered him to Sun-Planet, but his understanding was still incomplete. Berker explained the chemical mechanism which allowed the crust to release oxygen when heated by the mantle, and the reverse process by which the air was adsorbed in the venting cracks between the crustal shields, to be recycled and purified in the chemical furnace of the mantle. The mantle beneath the shields rested, in turn, on the super-hot gases of the boundary layer. Beneath the boundary layer was the fusing-hot core of the world. It was all delicately stabilized by the pressure of gases and radiation rising, crust and mantle suppressing, and other checks and balances incompletely understood. "Kerith Post keeps the crust under scrutiny," Berker said. "Haven't had a good-sized eruption for ten years, but the Secondary Northeast Shield has decayed recently, and that might cause trouble. Real problems come when the bounded seas wear through and water gets under the shields. That's what caused the polar explosion twenty-five years ago. Dust and ash covered most of the southern hemisphere for three years. We damned near had a vent of the boundary layer there, and I think that would have meant the end of Sun-Planet. Loytnant Keefer then had a sea-wall erected which would bind in the oceans more strongly -- that was twenty years back. It wasn't needed; the mantle crystallized along the rim of the shield and picked up something from the air. Turned right into crust, five times higher than our wall. Funniest thing you ever saw." "Sun-Planet is more stable than we give her credit for," Margul said. "She was here a hundred thousand years before us, probably will last long after we're gone." The launch turned north and a cooler wind from the west swirled around them, carrying the dusty smell of the crust and the rich, sweaty odor of the hot beaches below Kerith Post. "The Darks built well," Berker agreed. "But they were too humble for their own good." What SunPlanet's creators had looked like, or where they had come from, was still a mystery. They had left no clue to their own nature, nor to why they had built the world in the first place. The setties called them "Ones-WithoutTaste," which translated, with emphasis on the most important human sense, as "the Darks." The Perfidisians were similar in hiding their nature to outsiders, but they were not related to the Darks -- that theory had been laid to rest a century before. "Water, five kilometers ahead," Berker said. The Darks had left few overt structures on Sun-Planet. The most important to settie researchers was called Water. The setties worshipped it as well as living in it. As the launch approached Green could see why. Water was a mountain of semitransparent tubes and bubbles and endless labyrinthine capillaries formed from the crustal substance. It looked like a scuff of foam raked from a tub of detergent, then shaped into rough, rounded geometric forms, and placed in the middle of the Ganset Sea. It seemed volcanic but there were no good theories as to how it had been shaped. Seawater, sucked up by capillary and chemical actions still being studied, filled it from top to bottom, with occasional air bubbles and lowpressure pockets. Most of the tubes were wide enough to admit the largest setties. From a distance, it resembled a child' s sculpture made of dirty snow. But as the launch fell beneath its shadow, the dirt-color resolved into subtle browns and sea-greens. A human habitation had been constructed on the southern side, where a dozen tenders lived and worked with the setties. A dock extended from the building, with a bubblelike plastic canopy braced above the launch slip. The vessel hitched itself to the dock. Struggling a bit with and Margul into the building's rounded doorway. A black-haired boy, about fifteen years old, with wide green eyes and clean, sharp features was reading a tapas pad as they entered. He switched the device off and got up from his seat. The room was counter-gravitated, as were most human quarters, and much more comfortable than the outside. Green breathed deeply and unhooked the Margul stripped out of theirs more gracefully and left them standing near the door. The boy smiled a greeting. "Herbert Fromm, this is Commander Green," Margul said. "Good to have you with us," Fromm said. "You're here for a tour of Water?" Green nodded and looked around. The room was spare and tacky-looking. Its plastiform walls had not been resurfaced in some time. The cracks and chips gave it an abandoned look. "I'm serving my apprenticeship to these helpful gentlemen until I g-get my steady legs." "Takes a while for someone not bom here," Fromm said. "I'm on visitor watch, not very important most of the time, but it seems I've hit interesting duty today. May I act as guide, gentlemen?" Berker nodded. "First, is Maday where we can meet and chat?" Bethanie Maday was the leader of the tenders in Water. "Not here. She's at the Broken Level working with a party of young tube readers. We'll probably see her on the tour. Pardon a right with you." The room echoed a little, and made Green think of the deserted military towns he'd commanded twenty years ago as a young JG on Old Mao. Those quiet green halls and scuffed floors were almost exactly matched here. Fromm returned and led them down a corridor. The walls abruptly ended and they were inside Water, standing in a dark tunnel. The tunnel material had been bevelled to make a platform. Beyond the edge, water quietly plashed and gurgled. "We'll have a tuberider here any moment," the boy told them. "You won't see many setties coming in this way. There are too many bubble and pressure spaces this side of the mass. Their entrance is on the other side." A grey shape with bright lights on its snout cruised up to the platform and surfaced. The tuberider was a metal cylinder with three evenly spaced wings, one of which served as a conning tower. Rubber stripping cushioned the end of each wing. A hissing stream of bubbles flowed from the rear. "This one is piloted by Sandra Neps," Fromm said brightly. "Mr. Fromm's fiancee," Margul explained. They stepped down into the tuberider, hauling their suits after. The hatch swung shut with an earpressing plonk. "Take you anyplace, gentlemen?" Neps asked, turning in her conning bubble to smile at them. Fromm introduced Green, and Neps held out her hand. "Pleased to meet you. Commander. Looks like you've had a hard day." Green felt irritation that it was so obvious. "And it's just beginning," he said. "My preparatory fitness sessions didn't last long enough, I'm afraid." "I've always wondered about the has to be a better design." "Nothing as flexible," Berker said, squeezing past a bank of equipment to take a seat near the bubble. Fromm moved past and sat in the seat across from him. Green took a seat next to a broad, thick port. He was near enough to the front to look through the bubble and see where they were heading. "I haven't worn one often enough to get used to it," he said. "The main bother is hauling it wherever we go." He stashed it in a special cabinet and strapped himself into the seat, carefully following the instructions on a metal plate under the port. He adjusted the padding wherever it touched his body, and found the position surprisingly comfortable. "Won't be much to see for a few minutes, so relax," Neps said. "Here we go." The tuberider moved ahead with a gentle whine. The ride wasn't smooth, but it wasn't rough enough to make Green's stomach rebel, and he was thankful for small favors. His hands automatically gripped the seat arms as the tuberider angled up. "We won't hit an angle greater than sixty, though we may roll one-eighty, and if you...there..." Neps reached back to point. "Mr. Berker, show him where the unlock switch is? There. Press that and the seat will swivel to take up most of the angle." The seat swung free and he relaxed his grip. The view outside his port was dark, with a faint glow from the headlights beneath the conning bubble. The walls were evenly pocked, like the surface of a golf ball. He craned his neck to look out the front, and saw a section of tunnel lowing darkness beyond the range of the lights. "The higher we go, the thinner the walls become, and the more transparent," she said. "Down here, 'they're about thirty feet thick. In a few minutes we'll be near the middle. Of course, it never gets very bright outside anyway, but the higher we go and the closer to the outside we get, the more light will filter through. We get eerie effects in here sometimes." For fifteen minutes they rode level, bucked about in strong currents. The wings provided effective but not very gentle protection when the tuberider struck a wall. "This is our steepest climb," Neps said, and the tuberider pulled back until Green had to look down to see the rear of the cabin. They cruised up a narrow capillary for another quarter hour before leveling off, as the tube became wider and the water lost some of its turbulence. "Oops," Neps said softly. "Looks like a skipperjack ahead. They don't get in here very often -- must have snuck past last night during the power failure." Green saw a pattern of silvery dots coursing ahead. "Do you have a prod mounted?" Fromm asked. "Not a long one. It'll have to do." "Here's where you impress the commander with your expertise," the boy said. He chuckled nervousy"Expertise, hell. I do this for a hobby. All buckled, gentlemen? We'll have to roll to prod it." Tentacles coiled like tubes of crumpled plastic in the murkiness beyond the main glare of the lights. Seemingly random glints played along the fluorescent patches within the skipperjack's arms and body. "That's their talk," Fromm said. "They do it to each other like birds singing. A few biologists on Home Field claim they see language patterns, but they haven't come up with anything conclusive." The eyes suddenly caught the tuberider lights and Green blinked shone like two suns in the otherwise dark capillary. Then they vanished and he had an impression of powerful tail and fins flapping. Turbulence from the animal's backwash rocked the ship. "Going away," Neps said under her breath. "I'll have to route it into another main tube or it'll get lost and die and make the water unlivable. Here we go, hang tight -- " The tuberider twisted until they were hanging from their seats. The compensators swung them around slowly. Neps remained upside down. "Herb, my straps are biting -- dammit -- could you put some spare padding around my legs?" "Can't get at you," Fromm said. "It hurts," the girl complained in a matter-of-fact tone. "I'm going to be black and blue." "Can't help you," the boy said. "Bring us back around. You shouldn't hang like that too long." "Thing's moving faster than we can. Okay. Can't get it here." The tuberider twisted about. "Ow. That hurts. Should have added the padding before I strapped in. I ignore those little things." Berker grunted. "Call ahead. Looks like it'll take one of the two main forks. Don't they lead to the nurseries? There should be settie guards up there -- wouldn't want a skipperjack in the nurseries." Neps made a call with signal keyed through the translator. A blast of sound pounded Green's ears, then reverberated up the tube. Echoes came back in ghost groans. A few seconds later, the twitter of distant replies reached them. The electronic converter boosted the signals and the translator replied, "Understood. Acted upon." Green watched the last glimmer of the skipperjack as it disappeared around a bend. "We're going to turn left about two hundred meters from here," Neps said. "Then we go up another fifty or sixty meters and we'll come out in the pools at the Broken Level. Sorry about the interruption, The tuberider followed its indicated course and Neps brought them up to a surging, rain-speckled surface. The vehicle broke through and wallowed in the wide mouth of the capillary, stabilizing as gyros activated. She jockeyed it into position and metal clamps lifted the tuberider gently out of the water. The hatch popped and swung open, and Margul stepped out first. Berker followed, then Green, who came up abruptly, banging his head against the outstretched hand of a woman. He dodged and smiled apologetically. "S-sorry," he said. "Didn't see you." The woman helped him out onto the buffer platform, rubbing her fingers. "No harm," she said. "I haven't met you before, so you must be Commander Green." Fromm woman helped Green climb into his. She was about Green's age, with tight-packed hair and a cleanly molded face, primly wrinkled around the mouth but not unattractive. "I'm Katrina Korliss, a tender. Glad to have you with us, Commander." Cosmos On sale at newsstands or order your subscription now! (omos Baronet Publishing Company # Madison Avenue New York. N Y # for (osmos Published # times a year # issues for # I S jnd C ttnridrt nnlv (postage included) Enclosed please find check or Money Order for ... "F-fascinated to be here," he said. The suit began to amplify movement and he relaxed a little. "Mr. Berker and Mr. Margul are guiding, and Ms. Neps brought us through a tight spot." "I flubbed it a little, Kat," the girl said. "Deserve to have my wages docked." "We'll consider it," Korliss said. "Herb's along for the ride, I take it. Who has visitor watch?" "Nobody else coming today." "Anxious to join in the excitement? We won't dock your pay too much, either. As you see, Commander, we don't run a tight mountain here. Our discipline is applied in other directions." "Katrina is one of our most experienced tenders," Berker said. "She was a fine wife to me, ten years ago." "Mr. Berker has gone through a good many tenders during his stay," Korliss said. Green wondered what there was about the man that attracted anyone. Perhaps his thinness. He wouldn't be such a burden in bed. Green looked around the opening where the tuberider was moored. The Broken Level was three kilometers above the surface of Sun-Planet, and the air was somewhat rarefied, forcing him to breathe harder for what he needed. The nal activity like respiration. "Gentlemen, we have a shed over here where you can rest. This pull is rough on newcomers. How are you adjusting. Commander?" "Slowly," Green answered. "You stutter, I understand," Korliss said. "Used to stutter myself." Green felt his stomach muscles tighten. He wasn't used to such familiarity, especially about his personal problems. "How did you cure it?" he asked. "Setties gave me linguistic therapy. Turns out I had a speech program maladjusted, here," she tapped the left side of her skull. "I'm more right-handed now, too. Used to be a complete southpaw. And you?" "Still a lefty," he said. Therapy had been available on almost every world Green had lived on, but something had prevented him from seeking outside help. If s my problem, he told himself. My dichotomy. The Broken Level was a horizontal slice taken out of Water sometime in the distant past, leaving three flat plains where the capillaries popped out into open air. It looked like a field of craters, or the magnified xylem of a tree, each hole filled with rocking, sloshing water. Some of the holes were a hundred meters across, signifying enormous tubes passing through the bulk of the mountain. He saw two setties rolling and spouting in one of the pools. Their spray had a curiously flat, leveledout look, caused by the greater gravitation. "This way, Commander," Korliss said. They went to the shed, a small plastic cubicle supplied with counter-gravitation, and removed be adept with the suits, catching little tricks from the others on quick and easy unstrapping. A food unit stood in one corner, and Korliss offered refreshments to everyone. A small breakfast was served when the orders were in. When they began to eat, Korliss asked him if he minded discussing business over food. "The setties would consider it a heinous breach of ritual," she said. "Of course, their eating is much more complicated than ours." "I don't mind," Green said. "Time is time." "Then I have a question to ask. How much longer until the Perfidisians start pressing us again?" "Ab-about a year." "Is that a firm figure?" "Fairly. The Hafkan Bestmerit people who still have diplomatic ties with us say the Season of Regain is due about that time for them. It's the closest guess anyone can offer." Hafkan Bestmerit was the only mercantile consolidation made up entirely of non-human species. Its dealings with the Combine, which served as overseer to the consolidations, were notoriously unsteady. "What can we expect when they do come?" "We'll try to evacuate before then," Green replied drily. "And if we don't get a chance to evacuate?" "I'm not open to unlikely speculation, Ms. Korliss. But for the sake of argument, we'd be physically safe. Sun-Planet means very little to them as political and territorial gain. If anything, it's more inhospitable for them than it is for us. One of the few things we know about them is th-that their native world has a gravitational pull less than Earth's." "I don't feel reassured, Commander," Korliss said. "It's not my place to be reassuring. I'm here to learn wh-what I c-can." "Then let's get started," Korliss said. The breakfast was barely finished. "Herb, Sandra -- put out a general call for two patris." The two suited up and left the shed. A few minutes later, Green heard muffled booming sounds through the walls. Korliss suggested they go to the pools. Green put his fork down with a frown as he gazed at the scraps of synthecam still on his plate. He felt more like a politician than an Astry officer. He put joined the others by the largest pool in Broken Level. Neps and Fromm walked back and forth on the opposite side, talking in whispers. The misting rain carried an electrical smell with it. Green glanced up to see a brief reddish flash overhead. Sun-Planet's atmosphere was comparatively shallow, and at altitudes as low as twenty kilometers, weather and auroral phenomena mixed in interesting ways. Two setties surfaced in the pool and lifted their heads out of the water to see clearly. It was Green's first good look at the creatures, though he had seen holos. He was a little shaken. Their long, flat-topped heads and bowed mouths filled with glistening yellow teeth were nightmarishly vicious-looking. Their eyes were small and piggish, slightly glazed as though by cataracts. Callosities formed bumps along the top ridges of their snouts, whitish and crusty, with an individual pattern of bumps for each settie. The patterns provided the basis for their names. Beneath the lower jaw, rills of wrinkled skin resembled the deck of a wooden ship. They were black for the most part, with a strip of white along the forward edge of their dorsal fin, and greyish tones running in splotches from their underjaw to their articulated flippers. The genetic engineers who had designed them could have done better on aesthetics, Green thought. Had any whales on Earth ever been so ugly? "KoZtf," Korliss said. "Two patris. You'll notice they're a few meters larger than the normal run of setties. Patris are like tribal elders in some ways -- they're leaders of packs. Most setties belong to at least two packs, and there are around seven or eight thousand packs, each with a specific duty and skill. The pack networks cover most of the waterways, and that means, essentially, that they cover most of Sun-Planet." She produced a portable translator and lowered the pickup cable into the pool. "We were called," the box hissed. "Is that White-Neck?" "It is," Korliss replied. The translator murmured into the pool. "That's their name for me. Who knows how they actually see us, hm?" She raised her voice. "We'd like to arrange a conference as soon as possible -- a briefing for the new commander of the Station." "Who should be there?" the voice asked. Green couldn't tell which of the setties was talking. The groaning and clicking sounds in the pool seemed to come from both. "Bring F-Nose and Hack-Fin with you to Top Level." "We will meet in an hour," the voice said. With a splash of spray and a surge from their tails, they vanished. "F-nose is the coordinator for the Processing Pack in Water," Korliss said. "He does most of his work with Maday. She's at Top Level now, in conference with a group of Readers who've returned from the North Pole. We'll meet her later, but she might be too absorbed to spend much time with us." Green nodded. "How many setties are there in Water?" "About thirty thousand," Korliss said. "Thjs is Grand Central for all information gathered around Sun-Planet. It might be the biggest library in the known Galaxy. At any rate, it's unique -- no books, no tapes or files, only setties, each chock to the brim with facts about the Dark patterns." "The tuberider is re-charged," Neps said. They boarded the vehicle and sank into the darkness of the capillary. "I'm going to give you some random information about setties," Korliss said as they rocked gently in their seats. "I'm sure you've heard some of it in your briefings offplanet, and in your talks with Mr. Margul and Mr. Berker. But I need to know that you're aware of some things, for my own peace of mind." "Go ahead," Green said. "First, a question of my own -- why were you chosen to come here?" Green was caught off-guard. He recovered quickly -- it was close enough to a direct challenge to his authority that trained reflexes took over. "Because I'm the only man the Combine Astry could find in its ranks, still alive and commissioned, who'd dealt with the Perfidisians on a first-hand basis. I know them as much as they can be known." Korliss nodded. "The setties call them the Ones Who Hide. Have you ever seen one?" "Nobody has, to my knowledge. I've also worked with twenty-three different intelligent species during the years I've been a duty officer. M-my intelligence and adaptability are unsurpassed by anyone in my rank. I'm a tough and reliable administrator. Does that answer your question?" Berker leaned over from his seat. "Ms. Korliss is known as a tough nut. She has very few inhibitions about rank and confrontation. If she's gauche, forgive her. She -- " the Commander understands. SunPlanet is only partly controlled by the Astry and the Combine. The cial Engineers had faded into general obscurity after their overall failures seventy-five years before. But they still held onto their successes -- and Sun-Planet was one. They were not directly allied with the Combine now, though they had been chartered as a Combine organization. "We have the responsibility of protecting this world, and the non-human citizens on it -- " "And human?" Green asked. Berker looked like his stomach pained him. "Of course," Korliss said. "But I feel more responsibility toward the setties than I do toward humans. I'm just warning you where my emphasis lies." "Many of the tenders feel this way," Margul said. Berker nodded. "My own emphasis has to be just the opposite," Green said. "I'm here to protect human interests." That was it, he thought -- the ideological lines were drawn. He knew which side he was on officially, but there were too many factors for an easy personal decision. The setties had been created, ultimately, to serve human interests. Korliss bit her lower lip thoughtfully, looking at him with that air peculiar to women -- a sizing-up which inevitably brought in questions of masculinity, oneupsmanship and moral rectitude. "Let's get to the information," she said. She produced a small paper notebook from her pants pocket and leafed through it. "First -- do you understand how the setties were created?" Green said he did. "I could stand having some details filled in, however." "They were brought here twenty years after the discovery of SunPlanet. They were genetically tailored from tissue samples taken from several species of cetaceans -- ocean-going mammals, whales. Most aquatic mammals, except for dolphins and some seal species, died out by the end of the twenty-first century -- combined cultural shock and human destruction. But tissue samples were kept frozen in case anyone ever saw fit to reconstruct or grow them from eggs in vitrio. The genetic engineers who put the samples together designed the setties for endurance, strength, intelligence and a certain bloodymindedness. They're not an easy lot to work with -- but they're the ones most likely to survive on SunPlanet. And they were put here with a specific task in mind. Their culture was designed and fitted accordingly -- " "Sounds like an overcoat," Fromm said, smiling to show he couldn't pass up the chance. "All things come clothed in culture," Green said. "John Dewey thought so, anyway." "Their job," Korliss said, not missing a beat, "is to investigate, gather and correlate the information the Darks left on Sun-Planet." "So far, so clear," Green said. Korliss pursed her lips and turned a page in her notebook. "We still don't know why the Darks built Sun-Planet. Our best guess is they were storing information here. But why they chose this design for an information bank is beyond us. Structures like Water and the Organic Shields are vast coded systems which we have yet to break. Here." She unbuckled herself and struggled with the tilt of the tuberider to come nearer to Green's port. "Neps, some light starboard please." A lamp switched on below the port and the golf-ball indentations of the wall became clear. "These were left by some form of animal life, probably not the Darks themselves. We think the Darks may have done their own genetic engineering, and that Water could be the skeleton, or shell, of one such life form. If so, it must have been an incredible thing -- or colony of things. These dents in the wall are more than just the marks of tube-borers, or whatever the inhabitants were. They have a sense and pattern, a precision and frequency of placement. Somewhere in combined factors of depth, density of pocks per unit area, frequency of sinusoidal fluctuations... They are not just natural or purely random. There are five packs mapping and studying the designs in these tubes. We call them Readers. Setties are perfectly designed for such studies, since they can stay submerged without air for two hours, don't need lights to guide them, and can read the patterns by sonar. They also have what amounts to eidetic memory. That memory extends not only to whatever they hear and taste, but to their own thoughts and reactions; they can remember what (hey thought at any given moment in their lives. Don't ask me how they manage it -- I've concluded the whole thing is humanly inconceivable." "That's another reason I was sent here," Green said. "#-ne of my specialties is languages and codes." "Good. You might be the first commander ever to show interest in our borer-tracks." She turned another page in the notebook. k Okay. Next -- information storage in the Organic Shields. About one out of every five crustal plates is made of complex chains of organic molecules. Some of these shields are intact enough to retain a pattern of information storage. The rest are now a kind of homogenous plastic goo. Most of the intact shields border bodies of water, and some are actually underwater. Setties can detect the presence of intact shields by taste. They can't smell, only taste -- and taste is one way they communicate, through fecal discharges and pheromones. They can tell us about the molecular arrangements within the Organic Shields as efficiently as a good chemical analyzer." "There was very little of that in the briefings," Green said. "Has anything been deciphered yet?" "No -- but there is a linguistic similarity between the arrangements of pocks in the tube walls, and the arrangements of molecules. That's what the setties tell us, anyway. Some of our computers claim to understand what they're talking about. I confess I don't." "We've been having trouble lately with setties in the area of the Osko Sea," Berker said. "They claim the messages in the shields were meant especially for aquatic creatures -- themselves, I suppose. Not for humans. They won't cooperate with us now." problems. But they're not important yet. We've got enough work to do in the vicinity of the Ganset Sea to keep us occupied for a lifetime. Now -- I think I've covered enough for the moment. Any questions?" "Yes. Wh-what do you expect to learn from the information?" "I never met a Dark, Commander. I won't even venture a guess." "Getting close to Top Level," Neps said. "We're going to surface in about a minute." With Fromm's aid Korliss trapped herself in and put her notebook in a plastic shoulder-bag. The water broke around them and the tuberider rocked in its own backwash. They were inside a hollow dome. Softly glowing lamps circled the walls, one of the few artifacts setties tolerated in their own domains. "We're about six kilometers above the crust," Margul said as he puffed and wiped his damp forehead. "Outside it is very cold and the air is thin." "Hollows like this exist throughout Water," Korliss said. "Sandra, have the clamps pull the tuberider completely out of the pool. The setties prefer not to hear its presence if they can avoid it. The... uh, Commander?" Green was examining the pockpatterns around the inside of the chamber. "I'm listening," he said. "The hollows tend to congregate more toward the outside of the structure. They have pocks just like the tubes, as you see." "When are the setties coming?" he asked. "Any time. Sandra, could you get the translator from the tuberider?" "Yes'm," Neps said with a curtsy. "Smart, she is," Korliss murmured. "I hope you don't have similar discipline problems, Commander." It looked more like cameraderie than lack of discipline to Green. He envied the tenders. "Mr. Berker and Mr. Margul have been very helpful in hiding my ignorance," Green said. "In fact, you've all been extremely helpful." "Charming," Korliss said, smiling as she looked him over. "Let me know if being candid helps you as a commander. I've often wondered." "Setties coming," Neps said. She hooked the translator to the poolside. Distant clicks and groans echoed in the hollow dome. "What are you going to ask them, Commander?" "Their estimate on how long before they can summarize their findings." "Tall order, even for setties." "Doesn't hurt to ask." "No." "Where's Maday?" Berker asked. "We were supposed to meet her here." "She could be swimming with them," Korliss said. "Patience, Billie. A lot's been going on lately." The pool rippled, then rose and slopped over the platform. Fromm clapped his hands sharply, twice, then snapped his fingers. The setties turned their left eyes toward him and inclined slowly in his direction. "They acknowledge, Kat," he said. "Is Maday in the tube below?" Korliss asked. "She is not," "Where is she?" "She is consulting, and will speak to you when her work is done." Korliss squatted by the edge of the platform and motioned for (ireen to join her. "F-Nose and llaek-Fin, this is the new commander of the Station, Kenneth Green. He has some important questions to ask about your studies." The small, clouded eyes turned slightly and Green knew he had his audience. "Two major questions at the moment," he said. The translator trilled in the water. "First, we need to know what you've learned about Sun-Planet, and how soon you can reach some useful conclusions. And second, we need to know your intentions should the Perfidisians return and replace us here." Berker looked up in surprise. "That's not discreet, Commander," Korliss whispered. "I haven't got time for disdiscretion." The translator switched with a faint click. "This is F-Nose speaking. Welcome to Sun-Planet, Green. May we work well. We can answer the first of your two questions. The The Largest, Most Complete Star Chart reproduction It will fascinate you. Its size? A full #V# by #V# feet! Hang this noble map on your wall, then stand # or # yards away. You see an amazing replica in deep blue of the night sky -- showing # stars, just about every star significantly visible to the unaided eye. Now step closer to the map. The names of hundreds of prominent stars pop into view. So do the names and profiles of all # constellations! This dramatic reproduction of the heavens is a distinguished work of art and is an invaluable reference tool. It sharpens appreciation of the universe. It stretches the mind and the imagination. 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(Please Print) )ffer also good only Canada, but U.S. P.O.  second has not been decided yet, and at any rate we are not the ones to answer it. The woman Maday is conferring with those who can answer, and she will inform you." Green could pick out the F-shaped callosities on one settie's nose. "For our answer to your first question we require -- much against our instincts, but it is necessary -- the presence of a tool called recorder. We do not think you have the capacity to absorb all, accurately, in the short time given." "I'll get one," Neps said, heading for the tuberider. "Looks like they've been waiting for this," Berker said to the others. "Recorders are especially repugnant to them." Korliss saw Green's puzzled exCommander, is that they must've been gearing themselves to answer your question for some time now. Maday might have known about this, but I didn't." Neps returned with the recorder and attached it to the translator. "Hack-Fin and the Patris will pass on what we know about the patterns of Water and the Organic Shields," F-Nose said. "I will give a summary. The recorder must take down only the full report without interruption. You will spend more time than usual translating this, later, with larger tools. It is very complex." "Adjust the recorder, Sandra," Korliss said. "All set," Neps said when she was finished. The water washed back and forth in the tube as the setties re-arranged themselves. Hack-Fin and the Patris began a susurrus of clicks and squeals, barely audible in the air. "We have translated some of what the Darks left in the tubes of Water," F-Nose said. "We know that Water and the Organic Shields are similar to reference libraries, storage areas for the information necessary to translate other coded sources." "Other sources?" Green asked. "All of Sun-Planet is meaningful," the settie said. "This we know from understanding the language of Water. There is information stored in the Organic Shields, and there is information stored in complex wave motions and... I apologize, the words are not immediately available which can fit human language; I will make analogies -- there are flows and sinks and transfers within the mantle which cause the crustal plates to sing, and information is stored in these motions. There are other parts which we do not yet comprehend. We do not know how much time it will take to understand and translate all of it, but the major breakthroughs should be soon, a month or two. Hack-Fin is giving you what we know already. Taking useful knowledge away from SunPlanet is father in the future, a year or two, perhaps longer." "We may not have that much time," Green said. "The Perfidisians are altfiost certainly going to take over Sun-Planet within the next year." "What do you expect us to do, Green?" "Make it known they are returning. You'll have to establish a policy, and let us know what the policy is." "We know, and Maday will give our answer. Hack-Fin has finished, and the Patris will be done in the next few minutes. We are now bound for work elsewhere in Water." F-Nose and Hack-Fin sank into the pool. When the Patris had completed their segment, they retracted and the pool was quiet. Neps withdrew the recorder from the water. "Do you know how important this is. Commander?" Korliss asked, handing the tapas cube to him. Green did. The thought of the consequences made him ill. Ill Maday was not available within the time limit Green had given himself for work outside a protective field. He was still very new to Sun-Planet, and it would be easy, self. Neps returned them to the exterior, and Berker and Margul accompanied him to the Station. In his quarters, he took an airpressurized shower and put on a light uniform, dark blue shorts and a sleeveless vegetable-fiber shirt. He went to the third floor. A JG named Davis was stacking the paper offprints of the settie recording as the computers on the floor above translated it. "We have four hundred pages for you already, Commander," he said, holding out a bound pile. "Thank you," Green said. "How much more?" "They're about halfway through. This was from a ten-minute recording?" Green nodded. "Setties must have been running ten channels at once," Davis said, whistling. "It's amazing the overtones and interphasing they can do when they put their minds to it." "I understand from Ms. Korliss that their speech takes fifteen dimensions to chart." "That's right, sir," David said. "About as many as a standard genetic distribution diagram." Green had seen a computer schematic of settie speech before, and been struck by the triple-spiral complex the screen had shown. Now he understood its full use -- a good-sized literature could be passed from one settie to another in a few hours. Centuries ago, terrestrial whales had broadcast entire song traditions in much the same way. Now the whales were gone. And Green was afraid, when this stack of papers reached the Combine, that something similar would happen to the setties. "Next batch, sir," Davis said. The JG was about thirty years old, with black hair and a bump of a nose on otherwise regular features. His duty uniform was rumpled -- excusable near the end of a watch -- and despite his cheerful tone he looked weary. "Have you looked through any of these, Mr. Davis?" "No, sir. It's not allowed." "Of course not. This is the only hard copy of the translation?" "Yes, sir. One set for yourself." "I want the computer room staff to lock the databanks and seal them so only I can release them. Are they the last ones left on watch on these floors?" "Yessir. The rest are off-duty." "Give them twelve hours liberty and thank them for the extra time." "They'll be obliged, sir." Green took the text with him to his quarters. Before he passed the information on to the Combine, he wanted to make sure he understood most of it himself. If he caught something erroneous or misleading, whether caused by computer misinterpretation or human bungling, it would be better to correct it at the source, and not through a haze of later bureaucratic questions. He read through the first fifty pages in ten minutes. It was a straightforward introduction. The prose had an odd flavor, but it was clear and concise. If he had time, he vowed he'd run a standard linguist's reference test through the computers to see what they "corrected," distorted, or left alone. He'd have done it even before running the recording through, but more important problems prevented him. He regretted not having enough time -- it could lead to sloppy work and thinking. He regretted being sent to Sun-Planet without a good, threemonth understudy program behind him, to strengthen his self-confidence. He felt like a fool half the time. Well, he thought, now was his chance to prove himself. The next fifty pages were more complex. The computer had annotated much of the text, explaining the differences between settie and human scientific terminologies. He spent an hour on it. It wasn't terribly difficult. The Organic Shields contained long strings of organic molecules that played a role in the biochemistry of the life-forms the Darks had placed on Sun-Planet. That much had been guessed a century before. But just what role the molecules had played was a more difficult question. Now the setties had the beginning of an answer. The creatures had used the long molecules as chemical transmitters in their nervous systems. But it was inconceivable that the molecules could have provided a uniform stimulus, as chemical transmitters did in terrestrial animals; the molecules were too complex Jor a simple binary, "fireno-fire' I response. It was apparent the stimulus had been controlled and gradual, with the chemicals serving as both transmitters and a variety of memory. This led the setties to speculate that the creatures -- whether or not they'd been the Darks themselves -- had used taste as a means of communication. Green closed his eyes for a moment. That was all he needed to know about the Organic Shields for the present. He skipped until he found the chapters on Water. They were something of a disappointment. Water had been more complex at one time, and may have contained information which duplicated the material in the Organic Shields, in a condensed form. The setties didn't suggest a comparison, but to Green a card-catalog or tape index in a library seemed analogous. With the death of the tubeborers, that function had ended. The pock-mark patterns in the tubes had acted as guides to the tube-borers, and also as something similar to graffiti, though the setties couldn't find the exact words for the concept. That unplanned, random sort of information was being studied in i he hope of finding how the systems interacted, and what sort of creatures worked them. Green was four hours into the (ext, and two hundred pages, when he put the stack down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was exhausted but he couldn't afford sleep. There was too little time left for a decision. Was Sun-Planet a scrap-heap of useless knowledge, or something more? The elaborate measures used to store the information suggested secrecy, and to the Combine Administers, that would smell of importance. Humans had the Pandora tendency deeply ingrained. He had little doubt the setties would be killed if the Combine considered Sun-Planet important, and if there was a chance the Perfidisians would take over before humans had extracted the knowledge. As an officer and representative of the Astry, rather than a temporary civilian position-holder like Berker or Margul, he had been given all the details about Kerith Post. It was more than a crustal monitoring station. It was a repository for twenty missiles, each carrying a warhead filled with pellets of crystallized tailored plague virus. Each pellet carried enough virus to kill a tenth of the setties on Sun-Planet. If the missiles were launched, only the giant skipperjacks and the plankton would remain, and even they wouldn't last for long; the loss of an important part of the delicate ecology would soon bring all life on Sun-Planet back to ground zero. By law, artificial ecological systems had built-in safeguards which automatically prevented uncontrolled evolution. Within a few decades, Sun-Planet would be sterile. The papers slid off his stomach onto the floor. He reached down to pick them up and lifted his eyes at the sound of the intercom bleeping. "I'll answer," he told the vox activator. "Commander, this is Berker. Sorry to interrupt your sleep -- " "I w-wasn't sleeping, M-Mister Berker. What's up?" "Communications has a message from an Astry ship on the systems perimeter. The Perfidisians are broadcasting a warning. We'll get it in a few hours -- they're sending it across status geometry. They request all occupants of worlds along the Eridanus Line to evacuate. They'll be here in two weeks." The message had to be directed at SunPlanet; there was no way a statusgeometry signal could cover the Eridanus Line in time to serve any purpose. The Perfidisian ships had probably transmitted from a few light-days away. "Commander, should this be kept secret for the moment?' ' "No, Mr. Berker. Home field receivers will pick up the message anyway. Call a meeting of all officers and civilian reps for an hour from now. I want Home Field reps, too -- and get me the tenders Korliss, Maday, Fromm and Neps." "Yes, Commander. Is that all?" "For the moment, Mr. Berker. Thank you." "No thanks needed for bad news, Commander, ' ' Berker replied quietly . He switched the inducer to fortyfive minutes of accelerated sleep. Then he lay back and closed his eyes. When the signal buzzed he was still tired, and his eyes ached. IV The meeting room was spare and utilitarian. The chairs were thinly padded and somewhat uncomfortable, the lighting white and harsh. People were meant to be ill at ease here. The room was used only for trouble talks. When Green arrived, half the people he'd requested were present. The others, Margul explained, were on their way and would be arriving in ten or fifteen minutes. The Home Field reps would be the latest. "Well, the ones we need most are already here," Green said. "Could you point out Maday?" Margul indicated a woman sitting at the table. She was young, with a thin, pinched face and hair cut short. Her skin was almost white. She was looking down at the tabletop and manipulating something small with her fingers. Green took his seat at the head of the table and requested a playback of the Astry's message. When it was finished, he gave a quick outline of what the setties had reported on their work with the Dark artifacts. He then turned to Maday and asked her what the setties had decided. She straightened her shoulders and folded her hands on the table. 'They've decided not to work with the Perfidistans should they take over Sun-Planet. They've had experience with them and on the whole they prefer humans." "Have they any p-plans for organized resistance?" "No resistance. Things will proceed normally, but they won't let anything they know be passed on." "All setties are unanimous about that?"' i i Ntaday hesitated. "I don't know." "You're doubtful about the Osko Sea setties?" "I haven't heard from any of their packs." "You understand how crucial this is, Maday?" to bet the Combine Astry has a quick scheme for the extermination of the setties, should there be any chance the Perfidisians will get access to the information stored on Sun-Planet." "What can we do to avoid that, if it's true?" Maday shrugged. "Setties are as complex as humans, if not more so. I cannot honestly vouch for every settie, much less for any group of setties claiming kinship with the Darks. I'm afraid the decision still rests with you, Commander." "Do the setties have any plans for policing themselves, if the Perfidisians take over?" "If you mean, would they be willing to silence the Osko Sea group, their own kind, or interfering with the beliefs of adult individuals in any way." "Even if it should mean the end of all of them, and their work?" "That's the way they operate," Berker said. "Mr. Berker, what do you recommend?" Perhaps that would get a rise out of the tenders. Green could almost cut the air between Maday and the thin man. Berker opened his mouth, then shut it. He shook his head. "I have to go along with the Combine's orders. For the moment, you're their representative. It's your decision." Green felt his face redden. "You're p-putting me in a d-difficult position. I've worked my ass off trying to #-learn enough about Sun-Planet to be reasonably in-informed. I haven't reached that p-point yet. If I do not have your cooperation, we'll all tr-be in very serious trouble. I might make the wrong choice. And it does boil d-down to two choices." "Nobody asked for central authority under the Combine Astry," Maday said. "It was imposed on us." "Nor d-did I ask to be sent here!" Green said loudly. He lowered his voice and bent his head slightly. "In your opinion, is the information c-contained on Sun-Planet of any use to an intelligent species bent on aggression and conquest?" Maday waited for the others to speak before answering. No one did. "Yes, it could be," she said. "Any information can be turned into weapons, given the right frame of mind." "Then I am f-fully justified in believing there's a possibility the Perfidisians will have access to information which can distinctly change the balance of their dealings with humans and other intelligent species?" Maday nodded. Green was momentarily disappointed in her -- either she was hiding behind a facade, or she was far less decisive than he'd been led to believe. Berker leaned forward in his seat next to Green. "The Commander has the ability to destroy all the setties on Sun-Planet within twenty hours," he said. "It's a power Margul and I were not given during our brief command. Nor do we know precisely how he can do it -- only that he can." "The setties already know how it can be done, and so do I," Maday said. "There are concentrations of Astry personnel and computers in many areas across Sun-Planet. There is only one position made up entirely of computers, and that is Kerith Post on Laith Island. We assume that's where you keep your weapons. Specific disease activity is the quickest and most selective I assume you have vector mechanisms loaded with something akin to pulmonary chancre virus, specific to cetaceans and tailored to setties." Green was not surprised at the accuracy of her guess. "I'll be forced to release those vector mechanisms soon, unless someone can give me excellent and compelling reasons n-not to. Maday, I expect you've already discussed this with your settie contacts." "With my friends and colleagues, yes." rifice?" "Commander, style of living is all-important to the setties. They can't be as self-deceptive as humans. If they break their code of ethics, they literally cannot live with themselves. But I'm not certain you have only one choice in this case." She was struggling to say something; her lips were contorting, and her face was paler than before. "What other choices do I have?" "The -- the Osko Sea groups occupy a relatively small area, and they're compacted. I -- " "Mr. Berker, i-is that feasible with weapons in open stock?" "What, Commander?" "Selective extinction of a settie population." "No, sir." "Maday, I commend your courage for making the suggestion, but it is not feasible." "Do you know what we're discussing, Green?" Maday asked. "Genocide. Do humans have that right?" Green's hands were trembling and he put them under the table. "What we're discussing is the p-possibility... the possible extinction of th-the human race." "The Perfidisians would never be allowed to go that far!" The P-Perfidisians may not be controllable if they have access to the information on SunPlanet." "Y-Yes!" Green shouted, his voice breaking. "Yes, I have that obligation, that duty to uphold my commands, no matter what they mean in terms of civilian morality! That may sound incredibly callous to all of you here, but it isn't quite the same th-thing as a selfish desire to avoid trouble by obeying orders. My people, my race, are threatened by this situation!" The conference room was silent. "Then, Commander, from an aesthetic argument, who is more worthy of being saved, the setties or the -- " Green saw that Maday was close to breaking down, but his anger at her stupidity was too great to take frailties into consideration. His disappointment ran deep. In Maday, he had hoped for some sort of logical ally, someone who could work with him and with the setties, acting as a mediator, in order that some other solution might be found. Now his frustration exploded. "You megalomaniac bastard! You'd ask anyone to make that sort of choice?" Maday began to weep. Beside him, Berker was jerking strangely, like a puppet held by a spastic master. Margul held his head low, but was looking around through small eyes. "I apologize," Green said on an intake of breath. "I -- God damn, I apologize for the outburst, not for the sentiment behind it." The door to the conference room opened and the remaining reps entered, looking around warily. They could sense the meeting's highlycharged air, and were reluctant to intrude. "S-sit down, gentlemen," Green said to the men and women "We are finding quick w-ways to commend ourselves to hell." V Fifteen thousand kilometers above Sun-Planet, four Astry ships orbited in close formation, waiting for the signal to begin evacuation of the human population. They were huge personnel carriers, each capable of supporting a hundred thousand people for a short time. They had been converted from colonizers and were about forty years old, approaching the end of a standard warper-ship's lifetime. They were visible from the surface as bloated stars. Green watched them from the observation hall as they rose above the horizon clouds. It would take a week to evacuate the three hundred and fifty thousand humans, and the whole thing would begin in three standard days -- about one rotation for Sun-Planet. A few would stay behind, including Green. They wouldleave later -- or they might not ldave at all. There was ;i possibility the Perfidisians would allow a provisional supervisory group of humans until all avenues of diplomacy were exhausted. If things worked out as he planned, he'd be cutting things very close. But it had to be that way. Most of the setties had pledged themselves to their human overseers. That deserved more than quick and desperate extermination. The ships twinkled in the heat rising from the cleft in the crustal shields. Green looked down toward the clouds to see the peak of Water. He was expecting an answer from Myriadne any time. Coded outlines of the settie findings had been sent two dayS before. He was fairly certain what the answer would be -- nothing to cheer Maday or anyone else. There were times when he hated his position. Hated himself. He closed his eyes and thought about the pamphlet he had in his room. The youthful, green pioneer worlds, far from the inter-species disputes, begging for more human colonists; fresh starts, with ample land and enormous growth potential... They were too far away to even dream about now, but still the dream existed, another part of the dichotomy. With it came the vision of a woman who would explore with him, bear him children far from the typical restrictions imposed on families. She would not necessarily be beautiful -- Green knew he was no prize for handsomeness himself -- but strong and loving and intelligent, the sort of beauty that overcame physical form, or glowed through it. Instead, he was facing the bizarre, dark surface of Sun-Planet. Despite its reputation for instability, this world would outlast himself and many civilizations, even species. Living things were the instabilities, the unfaithful of time. All their problems were trivial. A memory of a similar feeling projected itself briefly and then eluded him. "Commander," Berker called from the opposite end of the hall. "We have the reply, for your ears only." He went to listen. Five minutes later, he left the communications center and told Berker to join him in his cabin. His plans were crystallizing. There wasn't much time left -- a day or two at the most. He was going to take a final chance, and go to the Osko Sea to converse with the setties there. Maday had to go with him, and Korliss, Neps and Fromm. The older tenders were logical choices, but the younger two were more of a whim. Green found strength in their youth and straightforward affection, and he needed all his strength now. Berker entered Green's cabin and listened intently as the commander told him his plans. Instructions would be left in the emergency orders capsule in Station Security. If he didn't return, it was Berker's responsibility to activate the vector missiles. Green was almost lightheaded at the prospect of having something very nearly positive to do, and he put a call through on his intercom requesting the four tenders to return to the Station and bring appropriate equipment with them. "I'm not sure this is wise, Commander," Berker said, following him to the locks. "You'll have to tuberider seats aren't the most comfortable places to be in a suit. But even so, you'll -- " "Get damned tired, I'm sure," Green broke in. "I'll just have to put up with it." Berker looked upset. "That leaves everything in my hands if you don't get back." "I'm not sneaking out from under it," Green said. He looked at Berker's downcast, lined face and smiled faintly. "As long as we can communicate, you'll need my command to start things rolling. Only if something happens to me -- and Sun-Planet isn't all that wild -- only then are you responsible. You're no more putupon than I am, Mr. Berker." "It's not a matter of being putupon," Berker said, looking insulted. "The hell it isn't. I know exactly what it is. All of this is on our backs now. You told me the setties would turn traitor given half a chance. Do you still believe that?" Berker nodded. "Might be a dangerous sentiment, Mr. Berker. D-don't jump the gun. If you d-do, remember -- responsibility is a t-two edged sword." He cursed the returning stutter. "Depending on the circircumstances, you'll be damned if you do, damned if you don't." "I commanded the Station long enough to learn the meaning of responsibility," Berker said. "I'm going to communications to supervise the evacuation of Home Field, sir." "Then good luck, to both of us, Mr. Berker. We're very reluctant bedfellows, believe' me." Berker frowned without understanding, then turned and left. Green collided with Margul in the hatch to the locks. Margul apologized quietly, his small eyes squinting as he looked at the commander. Green briefed him and told him to keep a careful watch on everything. Margul accompanied him to the dock, matching his long strides with difficulty. "Commander Green," he said, "is it wise to give Berker such powers?" "Berker's the only one I can give them to." "But there is something you should know about him." "What?" "Berker worked with the setties for several years, but he doesn't like them. He was a tender eleven years ago. The setties would not work with Jtim because of his personality, and he had to come to the Station." "Will that cloud his judgement here?" "I don't know." "I've got to go to the Osko Sea, Mr. Margul. You are second in command only so long as you feel Mr. Berker is following my orders. I'll brief you both thoroughly before I go." "Why not just pass it on to me, Commander?" "The command?" "Yes." "Because Berker has shown no signs of not being able to obey orders, and he is your acting superior." Green looked Margul over sharply. "Or is th-there something else, Mister?" "No." The locks were as warm and humid as ever. Green sat in the brightly-lit engineer's booth, tapping his fingers impatiently on the small desk. The engineer stepped in and greeted him stiffly, pulling gum out of his mouth and sticking it in the disposal. "Tuberider's coming down the canal now," he said, looking over the displays. Fromm escorted Maday into the booth. She looked at Green through tired, half-shut eyes, slightly stooped, her hands limp by her sides. "Still holding out hope, Commander?" she asked, her low voice deceptively mild. Green nodded. "What are you going to do?" "You'll find out as soon as all the others are here." The locks opened and the tuberider entered, piloted by Neps with Korliss as a passenger. The vessel docked and the engineer gave them the okay to board. "We have our orders," Green told them as they climbed in and while standing in the hatch, then climbed awkwardly into his seat and strapped himself in. "We're going to find out just how rebellious the Osko Sea setties are. If they won't cooperate, we'll have to carry out the second stage of the orders. But for the moment, we're acting on a good-faith assumption. I'd like Maday to ask four setties to go along with us -- those you think can communicate best with the Osko Sea patris. If one or more of them is also an expert on the overall meaning of Sun-Planet, well and good. The orders instruct us to investigate two artifacts we've paid little attention to so far." Maday looked across the tuberider cabin at him. "Which are those?" "Wormways and Crooked Shield." "They're tabu areas for setties," she said. "All the m-more reason to investigate. We don't have time to be diplomatic." "The areas are tabu because they're dangerous," Maday said, still dead-pan. "Yes, but there's no evidence they're physically dangerous. You should all be acquainted with Stefan Damal's studies on patterngenerated psychoses." "I'm not," Fromm and Neps said simultaneously. "We all have specific fear reactions," Green said. "They can be generated by c-complex situations, anything from nightmares to battles. They can also be generated subliminally by such things as smells, but we tend to consciously suppress these responses. However, there are culture-wide fear generators which can send some species into wild panic. Humans still react to stories of ghosts and demons. Most animals respond to varieties of fear generators, but aquatic animals are especially sensitive. Cetaceans on Earth evolved from land animals, but in their ocean environment they picked up the responses of sea creatures. The setties probably have similar reactions." He was usually good at reciting material from text without stammering, and the number of clear sentences he produced was gratifying. The material wasn't his own, after all -- no dichotomy involved. "A patterngenerated psychosis is a response to continuous exposure to a fear generator. A specific sound frequency might touch off panic because of association with wounded animals thrashing -- or the sounds used by predators during attack. A baleine whale bom in captivity and educated by humans will still be badly frightened if he hears vibrations associated with the swimming of killer whales -- subtle sensations most of our mechanisms can barely detect. Visual and taste stimuli can also cause panic. Whole herds of whales on Earth used to beach themselves, and the reason wasn't fully understood for centuries. They were panicked by unusual ripple effects in the ocean surface, or by the dumping of garbage and industrial wastes -- both of which triggered fearresponses." "So you think the tabu areas are regions of patterngene rated fear?" Fromm asked. "Sounds likely. They both have peculiar geological features. There might even be unpleasant combinations of organic molecules. Crooked Shield is crooked because of an upwelling in the mantle, and the whole area is hotter than normal -- a kitchen for c-cooking up strange brews, n-no?" "There are some areas around Water that smell creepy," Fromm said. "But I guess setties wouldn't feel the same way I do." "You're expecting the setties to follow us into these zones?" Maday asked. "No. But I want them to be ready to look at recorded surveys. I've ordered a taste analyzer installed. That's what we're waiting for now. We'll make records from that, too. If there are a few brave setties in our bunch, they can volunteer to experience the tastes of the areas. But at the very least, they have to give us some idea how the tabu regions tie in with the rest of SunPlanet." Maday said. The engineer's voice boomed from the lock intercom system. "Mr. Margul is here with the taste analyzer." The man carried the small package down the hatch and handed it to Fromm, who carried it forward and mounted it in an equipment bay. "Thank you, Mr. Margul. Mr. Fromm, seal us and we'll be on our way." "Our wishes go with you," Margul said from the dock. There was a peculiar catch in his voice that made Green play it back in his head several times. The hatch swung down and locked. Neps wound up the motors and engaged the propellers and water-jets. The tuberider swung away from the dock and left the lock, heading down the canal to the Ganset Sea. Fromm went over a last-minute checklist with Neps, and Green listened as he closed his eyes and angled his seat back. The rear his butt slightly, but it wasn't uncomfortable for the moment. "Sixty hours motor time with the extra batteries. We've got -- um... five gallons extra electrolyte and caulking material in case of crystal build-up. Oxygen -- six tanks, enough for forty hours for each of us in emergency. Food and water for six days. Drug kit -- " "Ms. Maday," Green said. "When we're in open sea, send your request to Water." He closed his eyes again and drifted off. He hadn't had a decent sleep since he'd arrived, and now he let the extra weight pull him down without repressure holding him in the padding was almost soothing. His eyeballs felt heavy and his eyelids didn't fly open so easily. He slept. "Korliss, we have two setties starboard," Maday said. Green came awake and looked around slowly. Maday was looking through her port. "Can you identify them?" Korliss asked. "They're turning toward us now. It's a bit murky. F-Nose and Tomoye, I think. Yes. They're more tolerant than the others. They'll stay close to the tuberider. Anything on sonar?" "Two more setties ahead," Neps said. "Big ones. Patris. Did you ask Water to send any pack leaders?" "I didn't," Maday said. "But that doesn't mean they wouldn't decide for themselves. I'm sure they know how important this is." Green had a paranoid thought, then dismissed it. There wasn't much the setties could do in the way of defense, much less offense. The tuberider could be damaged, but his own death would only cinch the destruction of the setties, and he was reasonably sure they knew that by now, too. Maday had probably told them a lot more than Green would have allowed, had he the power. "Where are we now?" he asked. "Ganset Sea, fifteen kilometers by twenty-two degrees from Laith Beacon," Neps said. "We're passing along a sea-wall." Green's experience of multitudes of worlds had never accustomed him to the diversity and area of even a small planet's surface. The cliffs which passed a half kilometer away were twenty kilometers tall, rugged as the slopes of volcanoes, and a shiny reddish-black in color. They stretched from horizon to horizon and were pitted with caves of sufficient size and area to accommodate a large percentage of the population of Earth. A vague, muddy snow began at the five kilometer level, and ended at ten kilometers, where atmospheric moisture stopped. "Have setties ever used the caves below the water line?" Green asked. "Some have been explored," Korliss said. "But these are crustal shield material. The setties are interested in organic formations." "I've heard there are skipperjack nests in the caves," Fromm said. "Makes it undesirable to go near them. The beaches on the flats northwest of here are littered with cuttlebones, where the current dredges them from the sea-bottom and washes them ashore." "Setties send out their hunting parties to a point about ten kilometers east," Korliss said. "That's a skipperjack feeding ground. The hunters fight them there, kill them, and bring them back whole. Then the packs gather around for ritual feeding, about once every standard week." "How many setties are killed in the hunts?" "None," Maday broke in. "The skipperjacks are tailored not to resist predators armed with specific attack strategies. If the setties weren't restrained by ritual, the skipperjacks would probably be extinct by now." "But they're afraid to let them into the settie nurseries?" "With good reason," Korliss said. "Young setties don't know how to attack, and they're small enough that a skipperjack can kill them with beak or tentacles. The skipperjacks get most of their food from seining plankton, but they haven't lost all desire lor large prey. The genetic engineers didn't iron out all the kinks -- on purpose, I imagine; a little conflict and f lex ibility keeps both species alert." Fromm passed around lunch kits and their choice of one of six meal packets. Green chose a synthecarn salad, which tasted adequately fresh when vivified. The lavatory facilities were cramped but adequate. Green had long since lost afiy particular desire for private facilities in his Astry career, but those used to staying in the Home Field -- Neps in particular -- found the situation awkward. Fromm kidded her, but stopped after the tuberider bucked in a sudden current while he was urinating. He had to clean up the mess and shower down amid jocular abuse about his terrible aim. The connection between the Ganset and Osko Seas was a broad sweep of shallow water -- no more than ten meters deep -- studded with small, mushroom-shaped islands. Korliss called them "nodes." Most were made of organic shield material which had accreted in the channel over thousands of centuries. Some had collected beaches of sandy particles in the lee of predominant currents, and Neps pointed out a few bleached cuttlebones above the water line. A few minutes into the channel a squall broke, and Fromm dove the tuberider beneath the surface to escape the barrage of hail. Koestler broke the clouds an hour later and added a blue-green glimmer to the water above, not enough to light their way. Young skipperjacks, no more than a meter or two long, frequently flared in the lamplights and jetted away. To Green, the whole universe seemed heavy and fluid and dark. He stayed awake to keep Fromm alert while the others slept, and idly considered the alternatives to his present course of action. "Osko Sea Shield edge ahead," Fromm said. "Green looked through his water-smeared port as the tuberider surfaced. The pale daylight glinted from the ragged slopes of the jade-green cliffs. There wasn't much difference between these cliffs and the sea-wall, except for color. But this was where an organic shield ground up against a crustal shield; there were forces pent up beneath them which were awesome even to a former warpership captain. A murmur of settie language came through the tuberider hull as the translator hummed its message signal. Fromm switched it on. "This is F-Nose. Contact made with Osko Sea groups. Follow Patris and proceed at half speed." "How can they contact the others without our translator listening in?" Green asked. "Probably by taste-trails," Maday said, swinging her seat up. Korliss yawned and shook Neps awake. "Either that, or subsonic bass tones out of our translator's range . ' ' "How far to Crooked Shield?" "About twenty kilometers," Fromm said, after consulting a chart on the guidance display. "We could make it in forty minutes." Green looked at Maday with hands folded under his chin. "When do you think we should investigate Crooked Shield and Worm ways?" "That's up to you, Commander. Our setties have probably already arranged a meeting with the Osko Sea groups." "But there are no restrictions on associating with people who violate a tabu area." "No. Setties aren't concerned with the foolishness of others -- no slight intended." "Perhaps they understand the tabu can't hurt humans," Green offered. "That's possible. Personally, I'm not sure your theory is correct. For one reason or another, no one's ever visited Wormways, and only one or two sorties have been made over Crooked Shield. There may be more there than a fly-over can detect." "I have reason to b-believe Counselor-Administer Krutch is advising the Astry Execustaff on Sun-Planet. He was Governor of Home Field for twenty years before accepting the appointment to Myriadne, wasn't he?" Maday nodded. "A good administrator, but not much on public relations. You think he's the one asking us to investigate the tabu zones?" "I have my hunches," Green said. "Representatives from nine packs are swimming to meet us," the translator said. "This is Tomoye speaking. May we know who will address them?" Green glanced at Maday, who was leaning forward in her seat to look through the bubble. "Tell him -- " he began. "Her," Korliss corrected. " -- her that I'll address them. Tell them we have two master tenders on board, also." Fromm relayed the message. Tomoye instructed them to slow the tuberider and bring it into a small bay along the Osko Shield edge. That maneuver took twenty minutes. When the tuberider was rocking in a slow, calm swell, Neps stepped up into the vertical wing and popped the hatch. Choosing his footing carefully, Green left his seat and climbed out to stand on the ribbed deck surrounding the wing. He swung his his body, then faced the warm wind coming from the north. Korliss pointed out the flat plumes of two setties breeching. The little bay was about a kilometer long and two hundred meters wide. The odor of the organic shield material was strong and oily-dusty in his nose. The water of the Osko Sea smelled different -- richer and more saturated with nutrients. It was like being in a giant petrochemical plant. A few strands of seaweed and some globs of larger plankton were bobbing in the bay. Neps hi ought out a small net on a telescoping tube and caught one of the globs, hoisting it for Green to examine. "These are like jelly beans to a skipperjack," she said. "The silicate shell keeps the pressurized protoplasm bottled up. A skipperjack brings clusters in with its seining anus, then cracks the shells with its beak. They're single-celled phytoplankton, but they use something akin to the visual purple in our eyes to photosynthesize the weak light, instead of clorophyll. Look around the edge -- here and here -- these red spots. It's symbiotic with barnaclelike creatures. They guarantee its supply of nutrients, since it can't rely entirely on dissolved organic matter and sunlight. The barnacles ingest passing foodstuffs, then empty their wastes outside the nutrient intakes. Koestler isn't strong enough to support a purely photosynthetic plant ecology, so the soup in the oceans is usually symbiotic."  'Commander, the pack representatives are about a hundred yards east of us," Maday said "They request that all major equipment be shut down and the use of hand tools kept to a minimum." "Cut the motors, then. Let's get this net below." "There's going to be more rolling with the gyros off, so watch your footing," Maday warned. The mechanical sounds of the tuberider subsided. Green spotted a collection of subsurface shadows accompanied by rolling slicks of water and bubbling turbulence. "These packs are even more sensitive about tools than our setties," Fromm said. "Fanatics, almost." "They're ready to talk," Maday announced, handing Neps a microphone from the translator below. "They've given me their names." Green held the microphone to his lips. "We'd like to talk to someone well versed concerning the last Perfidisian occupation." The translator's twitter went out, and a deeper answer returned. "This is HArrow, addressing the StumbleSpeaker." Neps suppressed a smile with one hand. "Word gets around fast," Korliss said. "What do your packs plan to do if the Perfidisians occupy SunPlanet again?" Green asked. "The plans were made many years ago, when our packs gathered in this sea to concentrate our study. We will deal with them the same way we did the first time. They ignored us, and we ignored them." Green raised his eyebrows. "HArrow, our records show that much information was passed to the Perfidisians." "They were curious about human behavior. They did not consult us on other matters." "Excuse me," Maday interrupted, shutting off the translator. "Commander, different groups report what happened different ways. Most of the Osko Sea packs were in a relatively hidden stretch of the Lambda Sea at the time." "I'm aware of that," Green said testily. Maday shrugged and restored the link. "HArrow, this is Stumble-Speaker. I have information which leads me to believe the Perfidisians are interested in m-more than just human behavior. What will you do if they question you about Sun-Planet?" "There should be no cause for fear. We believe Sun-Planet was made for creatures such as ourselves, not for anyone else. There is much evidence supporting our belief. We will maintain our discretion with the Ones Who Hide." "Translator off," Green requested. "Maday, please announce yourself and tell them that's not good enough. We need to know what the Osko Sea packs have discovered, and soon -- at least in outline form." Maday identified herself and passed the request on. She looked at Green with a faintly bitter expression. "We will never reveal those things to beings not made to accept them," HArrow replied. "This is Stumble-Speaker. There's every chance the Ones Who Hide will try to break your wills to get any information you have. How can you guarantee they won't succeed?" There was silence for a moment, "No effort was made the last time." "No, because you were far from any sort of solution. Now we know you're very close. To get the solution from you, the Perfidisians might do anything." Another pause.  k Our memories do not give us the same impression " Green removed a sheet of paper from his breast pocket and passed it down to Maday. "Read that to them," he said. "Look at the seal -- it's official, and secret to all but top clearance Astry and Combine officers. You recognize the seal?" Maday nodded. "Thin Hand speaking," she said. "I have a record of what happened to a group of non-human, intelligent beings known to us as Aighors. Their spaceship was disabled and captured oy the Ones Who Hide." She read through the gory details quickly and sharply. The pause in translation was even longer this time. "Why did they do that?" Neps asked . "Because the Perfidisians were interested in an Aighor weapon system. The Aighors used the weapon to protect their home systems, but a few decades ago they became more belligerent and started expanding. The Perfidisians didn't get the secret, but they were up against beings a hell of a lot tougher than setties." "What was the weapon?" Fromm asked. Green looked askance at him. "Do you have evidence they are desperate enough to do such things to us?" HArrow finally responded. "I do," Green said. "But the information is not easily translated, and it does not come in the form of a compact solution. Nor is it technologically oriented. How could it be, when we feel it is addressed to our kind alone?" Green thought that over for a moment, then decided the Execustaff would still be unsatisfied. "It's imperative for us to know the impact your findings might have on mental attitudes. When the attitudes of technological beings change, so do their technologies. In the long run, the purest of philosophies and theoretical sciences can be turned into tools, and these tools can be used as weapons." There was a silence of about a minute. "This is HArrow. We understand your difficulty, and we hope you understand ours. We are under a sacred obligation to keep our findings within the circle of our kind. Our obligation to humans is great, but we firmly believe neither you nor the Ones Who Hide could have any use for what we have learned. We cannot serve you. We will be just as adamant with any other species." The dark shapes began to move away from the tuberider. "That's it," Maday said. "How in hell do they know what we can and can't use? They h-haven't any idea -- " The sky brightened and the humans shielded their eyes against the glare. The effect was unmistakable -- Green recognized it immediately. When the glow subsided. he looked up and saw four bright blue crescents surrounding the speck of Koestler. The light was four to eight hours old. The ships wouldn't be far behind. "That's the receiving end of a Perfidisian warp," he said. "We've got two or three hours before their reconnaissance ships go into orbit around Sun-Planet, and perhaps three days before the main cruisers arrive. That gives us very little time. Fromm, put a tight-band signal into the coder and send it to the Station, Mister Berker's eyes only. I want the evacuation of Home Field expedited, and I want the big ships away from Sun-Planet in sixteen hours. That'll mean doubling up on the shuttles, but it can be done within reasonable safety margins." Fromm went below to handle the transmission. "As for the rest of us," Green said, "there's more work to do. M-Maday, advise our setties that we're going into Wormways. I want them to stay within hailing distance. Korliss, brief me on the sounder and analyzer. Neps, will you take the con?" "Yes, sir." They went below and sealed the hatch. Korliss moved out of the bubble and sat across from Green, helping him fix himself in his chair. Her face was grim, but her hands -- almost grudgingly, he thought -- were gentle and soft. "This is Berker," the transceiver sputtered. "Final message from Myriadne indicates no action will be taken to prevent Perfidisians from occupying Sun-Planet. Your message received and acknowledged. Good luck." The tuberider submerged, slow, tiny bubbles moving past the ports. "The ball is in your court, Commander," Maday said. "Our court," Green countered. "We have perhaps six hours to find out what the Osko Sea setties are hiding from us, and whether it has any bearing on what our setties already know." "What are the odds?" Korliss asked. "For what?" "Genocide." Green winced, then muttered something unintelligible. "I would like to know, also, Commander," Maday said. "At the moment," Green replied grimly, "about ninety per-cent." "If I thought it would do any good -- if I didn't know Berker would carry out your orders anyway -- I'd kill you right now," Maday said, "or scuttle this vessel. That's my feeling, Green." "If I thought it would d-do any good, I'd let you." "Wormways, fifteen kilometers ahead on present course," Neps said quietly. "Did Mr. Krutch (ell the Execustaff what he expected us to find?" Maday asked. "No." "What do you expect?" "I'm not the expert," Green replied. "Perhaps dfcthing at all. This is a last-ditch effort." "It would all be rather silly, you know, if the solution were something trivial," Fromm said. "An intergalactic shopping list." Green turned in his seat to watch the bubbles gliding by his port. The memory which had gnawed at him for a day surfaced sharp and distinct, and he remembered where he'd been the last time he'd felt so isolated and unimportant. Six years ago, he had stood on the bridge of the United Stars Warper Ship Changeling , a quarter thick haze of dust and stones circling a foggy red star. He had watched boulders several kilometers wide colliding with each other, striking bright sparks in the haze every few seconds, throughout the thirty flat rings which would be planets in an eon or so. He had come then to understand something about time scales and human lives. Some of the larger chunks -- already several thousand kilometers wide, but by no means permanent -- floated in broad gaps between the ring, wrapped in thick fogs of hydrogen, ammonia and methane. Surveys indicated that in the few million years these chunks had existed, lifeforms of a sort had already established beach-heads in the infant solar system. There was no way of knowing how many such beachheads would arise, and be destroyed as new equilibria were established in the rings. Against such forces, even the most advanced living things were nothing. He tried to remind himself he didn't believe that. How many times had students, in and out of Combine and Consolidation schools, been warned by their teachers about the paralyzing effects of awe? Whole philosophies of cosmic ennui , of "The stars are so great and man is so small," had risen and died and been resurrected to taunt people and add to the general misery of being alive, powerless, and ignorant. But Green was not powerless, not by any human scale of things -- and he was not directly concerned with vast forces. The decisions he would make would unleash not the blundering, chaotic grind of a birthing solar system, but a mere few watts of energy -- the growth of pulmonary chancre virus in host tissue. The missiles were simple vectors, not very powerful in themselves -- not even essential. He could reach into the warheads and scatter the crystals across the Ganset Sea by hand, and in a few weeks all the setties would be dead. No, the missiles were simple increasers of efficiency, savers of time. Their launching would not be the result of but of a few decades of organic interaction -- social scuffles, bureaucratic decisions, various small fears and conglomerate distrusts, all measurable in the smallest units of power. He was wrestling with scattered thoughts, and the thoughts were like tiny virus crystals, capable of initiating snowball reactions, made efficient by such vectors as the bodies they moved, the sound and energy waves they communicated across... all of them, all of the energies he was dealing with, all the myriad sparks in myriad brains, human and Perfidisian and settie, measurable in brief and ridiculously weak figures, magnified by the vectors which made them very slightly more efficent. There was no comparison between the tiny, tight-packed energies of thought and the patient accretion of natural power, and never would be. Living things would always be outranked. Then why was he reminded of his littleness? Out of some masochistic urge to rub wounds? No. It was much simpler. Green himself, within the scale of living things, was completely powerless. Green the Commander could destroy the setties, and finally the entire ecosystem of Sun-Planet, which was delicately balanced on a tripod any leg of which was essential. But personally, inside, the ur-Green, child-Green, living and believing and non-Military Green, was a wandering chip of rock about to be ground out. He would make "his" decision and then drop away into scattered ash, the detritus of selfdisgust and quiet. There was no respect, no pride in the kind of power which could destroy him, used or unused, with either guilt or the end of his entire career. He suddenly realized why the haze of planetoids came back to him. As a child, he had stuttered, then been cured, and for thirty years he had talked as clearly and assuredly as anyone else. But four days after leaving the birthing solar system, he had started stuttering again. He had been so mortified at the outbreak -- like an attack of acne in an old man -- that he'd resolved to solve the problem without aid. Now he had some insight, but no resolution. He wrapped his arms He wrapped his arms around himself as if to ward off cold, and sank his chin into his chest. He had a spastic tick in his foot now. And there had been tiny chains of spots in his vision for the last two or three hours, not caused by fatigue -- he'd have been long familiar with them by now if that were true -- but by something else. Perhaps it was gravitation-related. Sun-Planet, heavy and dark, demanded something superhuman from him, and neither his physique nor his mind was ready to stand up to the challenge. The tick worsened. He clenched his leg muscles to stop the shaking. "Wormways ahead," Neps said. Green welcomed the chance to move about. He unhitched himself and walked forward. The tuberider's lights switched on and Neps directed them across the sea bottom ten meters below the vessel. Chasms and holes mottled the level terrain, smaller than the tubes in Water but otherwise similar. A band of bright red surrounded the lip of each hole, the same polyps which provided nutrients for the jelly-bean plankton. Neps stopped the tuberider above a particularly wide hole and shined the underside lamps directly into it. Ports along the bottom showed the walls of the tunnel were pocked. Just around a bend, silver flashes coruscated. "There's a skipperjack down there," Korliss said. "Sonar indicates the water is thick with them," Neps said. "I suppose it's a sanctuary. Setties don't come around to bother them." "Can we send a lateral sounder into this hole? We should chart the pock configurations." "Will do," Fromm said. He squeezed past Green to pull up a piece of deck plating midships. A small cylinder with fins, like an old bomb, was lodged in a padded corner of the small compartment. Fromm hooked a cable onto it and slipped it through an equipment airlock. It dropped a few meters below the tuberider. Neps maneuvered with one eye on the sonar display and deftly slipped the sounder into the hole. The sounder, equipped with a small motor and selfguidance equipment, took itself deeper, chasing the skipperjack a hundred meters before the cable ran out. Fromm reeled it back in. "We'll need taste analysis of the material making up the sea bottom," Green said. "Already doing that, Commander," Neps said. "We've been making taste recordings since entering the tabu zone. I used the boundary signals to trigger the instruments." "It'll be useless trying to record even a fair sample of these holes," Green said. "B-but if I'm any judge, our setties are missing out on a great deal here. This place may be as extensive as Water." Neps drew a sharp breath and Green looked up. A ribbon of color like a spectrum chart signified a large shoal of skipperjacks, he couldn't tell how far ahead. It reached across the bubble's field of vision. "Skipperjacks don't herd," Maday said pointlessly. "They d-do here," Green said, glad to . see her discomfitted. "They're big ones," Neps said. "Sonar indicates they may be as much as fifty meters long. These holes are probably filled with them. If this is a nesting site, we're in trouble." "Commander, I suggest we back out beyond the boundary," Korliss said. "They're approaching in formation," Neps said. "Reverse us," Green ordered. "And bring us to the surface. I want to contact the Station." The tuberider skimmed over the field without turning around, reversing its turbine flow. The band of colors ahead rippled and silvered like an aurora in a compacted sky. "We're through the boundary," Neps said. "Skipperjacks are scattering." The tuberider surfaced and a static-cluttered beep immediately took Fromm's attention. He adjusted the filters but the static remained. "Sounds like a signal's being jammed," he said. "That's an instrument control tone -- what's it doing on communications frequencies?" Green reached around Fromm's arm and adjusted the receiver himself. He could make out the tonecode now. "It's a signal for Kerith Post," he said. "But it's being jammed so strongly the Post won't accept it. Where's it coming from?" "Too much bounce to tell for sure, but it's too strong to be from anyplace but the Station." "Let's try Home Field public network." Fromm switched bands on the radio and listened intently. "Nothing transmitting there." "This is a prime wake period," Maday said. "They have to transmit. It's required by law." "They're not," Fromm said testily. "Put me on the Clear frequency," Green said. Fromm handed him a microphone and he clipped it to his uniform collar. "This is Commander Kenneth Berker at Main Station." "This channel's jammed, too," Fromm said. He switched on the receiver speaker and pulsing white noise alternated with snaps and crackles. "It isn't natural." "The Perfidisians?" Korliss asked. "I doubt it," Green said. "It would take too m-much power from their distance, and serve no purpose. Something's going on at the Station." Fromm switched on a battery of decoding filters and attached the tuberider computer to enhance the signal. The noise was refined into a garble of voices, which after some adjustment became comprehensible. "We're receiving your signal, Commander Green. Main Station is under seige and Home Field is jamming on all frequencies -- " The signal dropped below all saving and Green cursed the man for not identifying himself. "Let's complete our message. Clear frequency again. This is Commander Green, requesting whoever receives Berker immediately. Osko Sea setties are adamant, and there appears to be no alternative." Maday sighed raggedly. Green saw her fists were clenched. Sooner bash one of her children against a wall, he thought. Or, in effect, all her children -- all of Sun-Planet. Two centuries of work. "We've got to let our setties examine the recordings of the tabu zones," Korliss said, her voice high-pitched and childish. Fromm growled deep in his throat. "Launch vectors through cables -- " Green began. "No!" the boy shouted. He slammed his hand against the transmitter button and the microphone went dead. The noise from the receiver stopped and a tiny feedback whine dropped into silence. Then the tuberider was quiet, engines dead, drifting in the jerky wallow of the Osko Sea. "You won't give that order," Fromm said, much more than an adolescent now. "We're going back to the Station to see what's happened, but this radio will not be used while I'm controlling it." Green smiled faintly and returned to his seat, hitching himself in. "Not that it will make much difference, Mister Fromm. The instrument control tone was intended for Kerith Post, and the jamming is a deliberate attempt to block it. Mr. Berker has no alternative but the cables between the Station and Kerith Post's computers." "Somebody's decided to stay and fight," Maday said. "Thank God for brave and scrupulous men." "Pray God that Sun-Planet is a trivial place," Green said. "Pray God, Maday. Your f-friends may have lit more candles than they can ever put out." The tender glared at him and turned away. Tears were running down Korliss's cheeks, reflecting greenish stars from the controls. Green felt a wild surge inside, almost an exultation. He laid his head back against the neck brace of in his throat. He couldn't decide if he was angry, or afraid, or simply relieved. Relieved of his duty. No responsibility now. Everything was shot to hell, whether or not Berker was able to launch the vector missiles. Behind closed eyes he saw the planetoids. Then his anger surfaced and he opened his eyes wide, looking into the dim sea beyond the bubble. His jaws clenched. If Sun-Planet was so important, why not destroy it completely? Why not provide means of fusing it into scattered dust and gas? A few bombs placed at antipodes along the rims of the key crustal shields would break through the mantle and release all the energy of the boundary layer, and it would be all over. But he knew the answer as soon as the question was clear. In tropical countries on Earth, monkeyhunters had once trapped their prey by putting out small-necked jars filled with fruit and cookies. The monkeys, unable to get both goodies and hands out of the jar, held on to their prizes, squealing and chattering, even as they faced down clubs and knives. Man's bluff on Sun-Planet was similar. Ragged, smoke-stained men, women and children lined the walls of the canal leading from the Ganset Sea to the Main Station. Each wore damaged one. Maday stood on the deck to prevent their firing on the tuberider. Green watched from the hatch, fighting back his own tears now. The Station had been assaulted with what looked like chemical explosives. The protection screens -- added two centuries before to offer minimal security against a major crust upheaval -- had absorbed most of the shelling, but the canal was littered with floating debris and -- his stomach churned -- bodies. Astry uniforms and Home Field insignia were about evenly matched in the slick, stained water. Almost as one, the crowds on the banks looked up at a bright flash passing overhead. It was the last colonizer, activating fusion pulses to take it away from Sun-Planet. Over ninety per-cent of Home Field's citizens were aboard the ships. Those left behind had stayed by choice, to protect their work and, Green guessed, those they considered their friends. The siege had ended barely an hour before. Six teams of aircraft had dropped crust repair material, surplussed from Loytnant Keefer's unnecessary wall, across the Kerith Post, burying the site in three meters of tough, quick-setting polymer cement. Berker had not launched the missiles in time. The lock seals swung wide and the tuberider entered. Docking clamps lifted it from the water and Green stepped down to confront Margul, who looked very grim. "Where's Berker, Mister Margul?" Green asked. "In the hospital, sir." "Hurt in the siege?" "No, sir. I hit him." Green could almost reconstruct the scene. "He was going for the cable system, wasn't he?" The cables were buried in the crust, and would have been unjammable. The missiles would have been launched, and Green's orders from the Execustaff would have been carried out. "Yes," Margul answered. "How long have you been of... this persuasion, M-Mister Margul?" Green asked. "Not long, sir." "Who persuaded you?" Margul allowed a brief flash of disgust to appear on his face. "I persuaded myself, Commander. I am my own man. It would have been useless to kill the setties. Zero-Nose managed to get into the locks before the tenders and Home Fielders set up their siege. Berker wouldn't listen to him." "What did Zero-Nose say?" Maday asked, carrying the recordings from the tuberider. "A congress of patris put together the final pieces of the puzzle after you left," Margul said. "They didn't tell us until eight hours ago, after the jamming began. Zero-Nose left the locks just before you returned. He had to get back to Water. The setties are fighting off a... fifth column, I guess you'd call it." "Whose fifth column?" "The Perfidisian's. We've all been blind, Commander. No excuse for it. Blind and cruel." Margul was near exhaustion and nervous collapse. Green looked the man over quickly, decided he was babbling, and walked past him. Pink was standing at his post outside the lock exit, and he saluted as Green went past. Green turned to the JG and asked how many had been killed. "Twelve, sir. Three are in med center for reconstruction. They'll live with minimal handicaps. One will live but he's got pretty bad brain damage. He'll need extensive tissue regeneration and reprogramming. His personality has probably been wiped, which means he might as well be dead." "And you?" "The arm, sir. Command fell apart during the siege." "How did Margul attack Berker?" "With a piece of table leg, sir." Green took the lift to the fifth floor and looked at the bands of technicians wandering from console to console, trying to piece together what was left. A shell had come through the roof, where the shield was weakest, and knocked out communications. The detection center was still operative, and a young woman was at the position, eyes tracking the displays. Green walked behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off without looking. "What are the Perfidisians up to?" he asked. She flinched. "Uh... I'm sorry, Commander. Scout ships are in orbit and cruisers are four hours away. One ship has landed near the Osko Sea, on -- " "Crooked Shield," Green said. "Yes, sir. You were told." "No," Green said. "Tabu area." Margul's words suddenly made sense. "Safe for the fifth column." There was little he could do. He made a stab at setting up coherent watch schedules and gave a few necessary commands to allow the staff to repair equipment and restore Station function wherever they felt it was needed. He then went to his cabin, first pausing in the visitor's observation hall. "Lights out," he said. On the horizon, just above the roiling clouds, three bright stars had joined the muddy constellations. They were of little concern to him now. The Station hadn't been equipped to defend itself against a few thousand crudely armed Home Fielders. They didn't have a hope of fighting off Perfidisians. VI The meeting room was as barren and unpleasant as ever. The Station had shut down all machinery not necessary for the immediate survival of its inhabitants, including countergravitation. Green sat alone at the head of the table, feeling the oppressive weight and silence. The jade-green walls completed the uneasy effect. Maday clutching a file folder filled with papers. Korliss followed her, then Margul, still wan after his nervous breakdown of two days before. Two Home Field Reps came in last. Green pointedly ignored the fact that they had led the attack on the Station. The guard sealed the door. "Do you have the settie results?" Green asked. Maday nodded. How stiff and formal this room made people, he thought; this room, and the past few days. Green felt a mild curiosity about what the woman carried in the folder. Mighty secrets to oppress him further with the knowledge of his failure? Or trivialities which would make them break into laughter, if they were at all sane? "I-is it an interstellar shopping list?" he asked. Maday shook her head. "No. But for the moment it's as useless." Korliss was the onlv one who felt any sympathy for him, Green thought. Her look, gentler and less bitter, gave him some strength. He gathered the courage to speak in more than brief sentences, deciding the stutter was unavoidable. "Mr. Margul, you've b-been here l-longer than I, and you've commanded this St-station. Do you find the results credible?" Margul nodded. "Then I'd l-like to read them." Maday slid the folder across the table and he untied the string. "Give me ten or fifteen minutes," he said. So little time for two centuries of work. The paper's opening precis supplied all he needed for this conference. In part, it read: "Worm ways and Crooked Shield were not essential to this final statement of SunPlanet's purpose. The recordings brought back by the Green-Maday expedition confirm that the tabu zones contain a substantial portion of Sun-Planet's intact information. But it is not necessary to have all the information in order to understand what Sun-Planet was, any more than being able to read a directory requires knowing every name on the list. "Sun-Planet was once occupied by three species of intelligent beings. The Darks themselves were the builders and space-farers. The tube-borers possessed limited intelligence, and carried out strictly proscribed tasks. The third species was aquatic." Thus far, Green thought, the Osko Sea setties had not been too wrong. "The borers absorbed information and carried it in their very efficient memories throughout the complex known as Water. The pocks on the walls of their tubes served several purposes, the most important being guidance of borers too intent on memorized data to watch where they were going. "The aquatic animals acted as 'runners.' The Darks stored a substantial part of the information in the organic shields. Minute particles dissolved by the sea-water acted as language, activating appropriate responses in the nervous systems of these runners. Thus, every few centimeters of intact crust carries millions of bits of data, molecularly encoded. The aquatic animals retrieved the data, carried it to the borers, and they in turn delivered it to whomever requested the selection. "There is no way of knowing what the relation between the Darks and their servants was, genetically or socially. The Darks may have engaged in genetic engineering on Sun-Planet much like its current occupants . "It is now certain that none of the beings involved were mammalian. The aquatic animals bore no resemblance to setties. In fact, they resembled cephalopods." Green shook his head slowly. In two hundred years, driven by the destruction of their kind -- not devastating, but terrifyingly certain -- the skipperjacks had evolved their own cultures and discovered for themselves that the organic shields could be "read." Differences in their nervous structure and biochemistry made their readings incomplete, yet the storage system was still less alien to them than it was to the setties. Nevertheless, the information had never meant a great deal to them until the arrival of the Perfidisians. And then the fifth column had been established. While the setties labored, the skipperjacks gathered. They found their equivalent of Water in the tabu zones, and made a stand, relying -- the precis confirmed -- on the setties' natural aversion to conditions there. He held his head to still a beginning headache. The skipperjacks weren't intelligent in the same way humans and setties were. They were not independently creative or capable of the cultural complexities humans and setties took for granted. Yet it was now apparent the Darks' aquatic 'runners' had been no more complete than the skipperjacks. "There is no way of knowing what the rest of Sun-Planet's ecosystem was like. Fossils are unknown. The borers and seacreatures were mostly soft tissue, leaving nothing behind which can be found with the resources at our disposal. "The molecules of the organic shields, and the sundry other codes of Sun-Planet, describe every world the Darks visited or established colonies on. Everything except information about the Darks and their activities has been included." The last paragraph was surprisingly terse. Green flipped through to the matching section in the report and found that it, too, was small compared to the rest of the material. Evidently the setties valued least what the humans wanted most of all. As Maday had said, for the moment it was all useless. Neither the Perfidisians nor the humans had the resources to visit every planet listed in the apparently huge file. Preliminary translation pointed to a total of the catalog, scattered throughout the galaxy, the Magellanic clouds, and near clusters of stars. "This will be very important someday," he said. "Too late to make up excuses," Maday countered. "For the present it's just so much drivel. Most of the relative measures and directions must be dated by hundreds of That makes most of the information useless." "Nothing is irretrievable, given time," Green said. "If we even have a tenth -- a c-conservative guess -- of the t-total, in time it w-will be possible to track down a #-large number of the listed w-worlds. And the technology of beings who could build a world like Sun-Planet -- that would b-be very useful indeed. Any artifacts wwould be revolutionary." "And for that remote possibility, you would -- " Maday began. "That's enough," Green said. "What's happened here in the past few days does honor to n-no one, and sh-should make n-none o-of u-us proud, sh-sh-should nn-not -- " He stopped and whistled to break the impasse. Maday didn't diminish the intensity of her glare. Green hated her for one indulgent moment. She was like a machine. She knew only one thing -- devotion to setties -- and did not care much about her own kind, or why they were compelled to do certain things. But he couldn't condemn her folly, not with his own dichotomy still before him. The weight and unease crept around him again. "Is there anything else?" "Yes," Korliss said. "Forgive me, but I haven't grasped what this is all about. Using a... a thing like Sun-Planet to hold information seems the height of absurdity. It's huge, and must be inefficient compared to other ways the Darks had. Why did they build it in the first place?" Green thought that over for a few moments. No one else answered. They were all provincial -- their major experience had been on one world. None of them had seen the peculiarities the most intelligent species were capable of. But then, that qualification didn't seem appropriate here. "It d-didn't need much upkeep," he said. "Once established, it sustained itself for long periods of time. As an information storage system, it's still a bit m-more efficient than our b-best material memory units. Consider the v-volume of information. And putting all of that in spacial or quantum storage would take too much energy. Sun-Planet w-would have been ideal if the Darks weren't in much of a hurry to retrieve data. It would probably have t-taken several days for a request to be carried out." gul said. He looked up from the table, embarrassed at musing out loud. "Exactly," Green said. "Allow a world's description...It's staggering." He looked around for more questions and saw none. "I th-thank you all for coming. Tomorrow -- sstandard -- we'll try to arrange a meeting with the Perfidisians. I'll be th-the one to meet them. Until then, there will be no effort to communicate with them." "I doubt you have the power to enforce such an order," Maday said. "Any military command on Sun-Planet was revoked by the action of the civilians." "There are going to be a lot m-more difficulties before w-we can sit b-back and be smug," Green said quietly. "The Commander knows more about Perfidisians than any of us," Korliss said. "I think his suggestion is only common sense." Maday leaned back in her chair. Sun-Planet's morning came. There was little difficulty arranging a meeting. In the repaired communications center, the Perfidisian's voice -- if only one was speaking -- sounded completely human. There was no hint of personality or any underlying character in the wordchoice of the reply. They would send their representative to meet Green on a specified beach, not more than ten kilometers from the Station, bordering the Ganset Sea. Green went alone, and took a tracked vehicle to the beach, wearA hundred meters from the specified point, the vehicle stopped and the recorder refused to function. he was able to finish the journey with little strain. For a few minutes after his arrival the beach was empty. Then the squat disk materialized, its weight sending pressure-waves across the water-soaked sand. On the disk, a metal sculpture began to spin itself, fluid and magical. Green was unimpressed. He'd seen this kind of display before, the last time he'd met with a Perfidisian "representative." What the trick meant to them, he didn't know, but its charm was lost on second viewing. In a few seconds, three spheres rested on top of each other on the plate. The topmost sphere opened into a dark circular hole, from which a voice seemed to come. "I assume we both know by now' what Sun-Planet is," the voice said. "Enough to get the picture," Green said, purposefully using the idiom. The Perfidisians weren't all-knowing. There was a pause before the next few words came. "This reclamation will cover one terrestrial year. In that time, we will allow one of your large ships to pick up all remaining inhabitants -- humans only, of course -- and take them home." "This is their home," Green said. Again the surge and elation rose in him. He swallowed and said, "Most were bom here. Most are Abstainers." Would the Perfidisians know what Abstainers were? There was no pause. "It is of no importance to us how many stay. We cannot guarantee their safety." "We will all stay," Green said. "We have obligations to our children." He'd thought the word out carefully hours before -- and it was far preferrable to "creations," or "animals," or anything else which came to mind. "We are not in competition," the voice said. "Do you understand that?" "We do not compete directly," Green said. "But we do compete. All living things must." "Strange but appropriate sentiment," the voice said. "Two centuries ago, you put life on this world which could survive only through death and destruction. Had you been wiser, and seen the cruelty imposed on all of us by nature, you might have thought to create something truly original, and not merely an imitation of our uncertain origins. As it was, you benefited us as much as yourself, and by fluke. We seldom benefit from such flukes. It gives us the impression, whatever your other characteristics, that you are not truly competetive, not like the Aighors, for example." That was the longest speech he had ever heard from a Perfidisian. It almost made him doubt he was dealing with one. Perhaps a computer personality had been established to talk with humans. There was no way of knowing. "You will take no action against us, and we will not interfere with you," Green said. "And if s-such an opportunity c-comes, p-perhaps we w-will," the words came hard, "exchange what we know." The sphere said nothing for a long moment. "Your defective speech can be corrected. We can correct it for you, without inconvenience or any harm or interference." "No thank you," Green said. He had no reason to doubt theii honesty -- it was a trivial matter, and An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ## features an interview with Kelly Freas. "The Vivisector" -- a review column by rising-star Darrell Schweitzer. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" -- Alter running rampant on a field of bloody books. "Angel Fear" -- an sf  fantasy art review column by Freff. Plus -- whatever comes in from irregular columnists: John Brunner, Ted White, Richard Lupoff, George Warren And: a new feature -- "Alien Thoughts" as an extended editor's diary, by Richard E. Geis. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I rather like them to offer such senseless concessions. "We will go in a year," the sphere said. "At that time, the skipperjacks will be released from any undue self-awareness this world has imposed on them. What you do after will be your own business. There will be very few opportunities for us to talk again. Choose them with care." "Understood," Green said. The figure dissolved and the sand flowed back. Nothing physically measurable remained. And now, his memory of the words was unclear, though the sense remained undistorted. It would be an uneasy time. He had thought his job was over, and his command at an end. But for a year, they would be on their own, and that would require a huge amount of discipline, which he could help provide. His superiors had bollixed things from beginning to end, and he had been forced, by training and past inclination, to go along with them. That burden was now tossed aside. He was his own man. He reached for the insignia on his uniform, and formed a fist around them, then relaxed. Not even the symbolic untying of knots was necessary. Never again, no matter what the consequences, would he ever be a tool of someone else's will. That was his dichotomy. Only when a planetoid was able to rise out of the haze, and achieve sufficient eminence to avoid the collisions of its neighbors, was there hope for life, and growth, and independence. In the haze, there was only confusing and grinding. When he returned to the Station, he briefed four reps and three of his senior officers. He told them their connection with the Astry was temporarily severed by circumstance, and that they were for the moment dependent only on their own judgement. "I will r-remain your Commander," he said, "only so long as I demonstrate an understanding of Sun-Planet, and all it represents. I expect to be reminded i-if I step away from that path." Korliss met him at the door to the locks after the meeting and offered to introduce him to Zero-Nose and F-Spot. "We've met, I believe," Green said, smiling. "I'm not so sure you have," Korliss countered. "Besides, if you're going to be a leader for the next few months -- " "A big if, depending on people like yourself and Maday." " -- if you are, we have to get rid of that stammer. Believe me, I know what it can be like in tough moments. The setties helped me -- perhaps they can help you." "Perhaps," Green said. But he knew the problem was already a long way toward being solved.  TO Freya had always wanted a special kind of friend... Sitting in her window one night, dreaming of having a friend, Freya was the first to see the stranger as he came out of the black nowhere of the west Texas night, walking as if he were moving through water or dragging great weights on his legs. She wasn't sure she really saw this shambling apparition moving across the grass until the dogs began to howl and cry. Downstairs, Frank Hudspeth sat reading accounts of strange apparitions and extra-terrestrial visitors in a circle of light in the big, dark living room. The sound of the dogs -- he had never heard them make a noise quite like that -- made the back of his neck prickle. "What's wrong with the dogs, Frank?" Edwina stood in the doorway, almost on tiptoe -- a trick she had when she was nervous. Frank bent over and fished his soft, worn shoes out from under the footstool. "I'll go out and see," he said. "It's probably just a coyote." "Do you think you should take a gun?" Frank owned several guns -- left to him, along with the house and ranch, by his father, but he had never felt comfortable with them. "Aw, no, honey," he said, standing and sucking in his stomach. He looked at his wife tenderly. "I'll put the yardlights on the stand on the porch till I see what it is. Those dogs are crazy, anyway." Frank flipped the switch to flood the yard with light and stepped out on the porch yelling, "Dogs! Y'all quiet down!" He gazed out uncertainly at the man weaving across the lawn. A drunk from the highway? But why were the dogs making such a fuss? "Mister?" Frank called uncertainly. The dogs finally quieted. The stranger continued to lurch and amble forward. Then, abruptly, the stranger pitched forward and lay face down on the ground. Freya moved away from the window when she saw her father run out across the lawn to the fallen stranger. Her fists were clenched, the nails pressing tiny-moons in her palms.    "Well, I can't find a thing wrong with him," Dr. Kaye said, sighing and pushing out his lower lip. "He'll sleep it off, I suppose." "But, doctor -- there must be something wrong with him," Edwina said, a small, reasonable smile on her face. "After all, he is unconscious." Dr. Kaye looked at her without warmth. "Yes ma'am. He doesn't smell of liquor, so I don't think he's drunk. He doesn't seem to be in shock, and he doesn't have any big lumps on his head. Could be he just passed out from exhaustion and exposure -- from the looks of him, he's travelled quite a ways, and a good meal would probably be a novelty to him. Or it could be drugs, or it could be a combination of things -- drugs, hunger, exhaustion. He's probably just some California bum, hopped to the gills and driving cross country when he stopped the car to be sick. And then forgot where he left his car, so he had to walk. Just y 'all's bad luck he picked your yard to pass out in." "What makes you think he's from California, Doctor?" Frank asked. "After all, we didn't find any identification on him." "California, New Mexico, Las Vegas." The doctor shook his head. "Who the hell cares? He's not from around here , and he's obviously pumped full of dope..." "I thought you couldn't be sure of that," Edwina said. The doctor shrugged irritably, as if a fly had landed on his ear. "Of course I can't be sure of that. We'd need tests for that. Y'all did call the sheriff?" Frank nodded. "He should be here by now," he said, wondering uncomfortably if the sheriff would come. He had sounded disbelieving on the phone, and Frank remembered too well an unpleasant halfhour in which the sheriff had questioned him about "that crazy flying saucer book you wrote," trying to get an admission that the book was all a joke or a hoax. Frank had held fast, and now the sheriff looked at him as if he were crazy on the rare occasions when they met. "The sheriff'll know what to do," Dr. Kay said. The dogs began to bark outside -- their normal barking, this time. "That must be the sheriff," Edwina said with relief. Frank looked at her, feeling protective. Would she feel that same relief if she knew the sheriff spoke of her in town as "that crazy woman"? Frank moved closer to his wife and put his arm around her. "I'll be going now," Dr. Kaye said. "If y'all will excuse me." The sheriff was getting out of his car as Dr. Kaye stepped out onto the porch. Frank and Edwina stood in the open doorway, watching as the two men met and exchanged a few sentences in lowered tones. "Doc tells me y'all've got some doped-up hippie here," Sheriff James said, pulling his hat off. He stepped inside and gazed around the high-ceilinged front hall. "Where'd you stash him?" "He's upstairs, in the guest bedroom," Edwina said. "And we don't know for sure that he's been taking drugs. Dr. Kaye said he couldn't tell for sure." "Yes ma'am, I know that," the sheriff said, following Edwina up the stairs. It was the sheriff's opinion that the stranger was either a doped-up Mexican or some crazy bum from one of those communes in New Mexico. He offered to lock him up, pointing out that the man, who had no identification papers, might be an illegal alien. "The border is nowhere near here," Frank protested. The sheriff shrugged. "Might be a good idea to lock him up anyway. In the morning, if he can explain himself, I let him out of jail and he goes on his way." "No thanks," Frank said. "I don't think we'd be doing him a favor to put him in jail." "Might be doing you a favor, though," Sheriff James said. "Y'all don't intend to let this guy stay here overnight?" "For as long as he needs to stay," Frank said coldly. "Whatever happened to hospitality?" "Crazy people made it dangerous," the sheriff said. "Thank you for your valuable time, Sheriff James," Frank said. "We appreciate your coming out here, this time of night." The other man shrugged and put his hat back on. "Y'all had better be careful," he said. "Just because we don't have any calls out on escapees from mental institutions don't mean he's not one. He could have come from a long way away, been in hiding for awhile. I'll see what I can find in the morning -- I'll see what word I can get out of Mexico, and I'll get the latest on missing persons, get a photo of this guy with his eyes open and send it around." "Would you like some coffee before you go?" Edwina asked. "No thank you, ma'am." He nodded to them both. "Give me a call in the morning when he starts talking -- or if he doesn't." Freya crouched beside her door, listening to the voices in the hall. When she heard them all go downstairs again, she crept across the hall into the guest bedroom, where she sat for a long time beside the stranger's bed, watching the faint movements of his eyes behind their closed lids and wondering what strange sights those eyes had seen. She had a feeling she would soon find out.    The stranger was conscious in the morning, but would not or could not talk. He did not respond when Edwina questioned him in English, Spanish, French and Russian. He gazed with dark and uncomprehending eyes while Frank attempted simple and complex hand signals. Freya, standing in the doorway and watching it all, began giggling helplessly at her father's contortions. Edwina turned. "Are you still here? You're going to miss your bus again if you don't hurry." Her look said plainly that Freya did not belong here. Freya backed away. It was nearly time for the bus, and she would have to run down the long, shelled driveway to the highway to catch it. "I wonder what he's thinking," Edwina said. "He might still be dopey," Frank said. "Maybe this afternoon he'll be able to respond." "It's awfully funny he doesn't have any identification. Not even labels in his clothes." "They're old clothes," Frank said. "And he might have left his wallet in his car." "If he came in a car." "Or he might have been robbed," Frank said. "Maybe he picked up a hitch-hiker with a gun, and got turned out of his own car in the desert." "He's a mysterious stranger," Edwina said. She looked down at the man's face, which looked very dark contrasted against the white pillowcase. He looked back at her, blank and guideless as an infant. "There are probably a lot more mysterious strangers around than anyone realizes. They walk out of nowhere, and then get explained away. They're crazy, or sick, or from another country, or amnesiac." "We have to look for facts, Edwina," Frank said. "Otherwise we don't have anything better than fairy tales." "Oh, facts," said Edwina scornfully. "Physical evidence. That's not all there is to life. What about feelings , Frank? Don't you believe we can feel things that we can't know by other means?" Frank looked away from her accusing face, feeling acutely uncomfortable. "I'm going to go out and look for his car," he said. "He might have had a wreck, or run out of gas, a few miles from here." "I don't think he came in a car," Edwina said. She looked back at the stranger. "But go ahead." Frank spent most of the morning searching the warm, windy land. First he took his car and drove a full ten miles in each direction on the highway which ran east and west through the flat, open country. He drove slowly, examining the sides of the road for unexpected culverts which might hide a small car, and gazing off into the dusty, scrubby distances until his eyes ached, looking for anything. He found nothing. He put the car back in the garage and went on foot across his land -- land he owned but rented out to a neighbor who needed more land to graze his cattle. Frank wondered that they found enough to eat on this inhospitable soil. He walked out to the tank, where the blackfaced steers moved sullenly away at his approach. Frank tossed a stone into the still, murky water and remembered swimming in it as a boy, during three summers spent with his grandfather. He thought about Edwina, and about the stranger, and wondered what force would take a man's mind and drive him on foot across miles and miles of empty land. Frank could hear Edwina talking on the telephone in the study when he came back inside. He stood beside the door, listening for a moment, then moved on, satisfied that the caller was another "Missing Hours" enthusiast. "The Missing Hours" was Frank's first book, and Edwina's story. The title referred to four hours which had been lost from Edwina's life until, under hypnosis, she revealed a startling and detailed memory of an encounter with alien creatures in a spaceship. After the success of "The Missing Hours" Frank had written other but it was all second-hand material, garnered from interviews and from other books. They had sold well, but it was "The Missing Hours" which still drew the mail, the phone calls, the curious visitors. It was time, Frank thought, to find something new to write about. Then he paused, struck: could the stranger upstairs be a hoax? He would have to be very careful, Frank decided. He knew what Edwina wanted to believe -- what she already was believing -- and knew that it would be hard to counter her belief with a search for the truth.    Freya sat on the hard-packed dirt of the playground, her skill tucked beneath her and her back against the cold metal pole of the tetherball, waiting for her mother to come for her. Her mother, she knew, would be angry, and would accuse her of deliberately missing the bus. Her mother would be right. Freya dreaded making her mother angry, but would have missed the schoolbus everyday if she had dared. Freya had no friends, and riding the schoolbus home everyday meant another ordeal of being shunned or being teased. The other children disliked and distrusted her because she was different and made no effort to be liked. But how could she be friends with kids who made fun of her city-bred father for writing crazy books instead of raising cattle, and made fun of her mother because she had talked to monsters from outer space? Freya tensed, scowling, and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging her legs to herself. How could someone whose idea of a journey to a faraway place was a weekend trip to Wichita Falls make fun of her mother, who was probably one of the most important people on this planet? Her beautiful, intelligent, famous mother. It hurt to have no friends, and to be the only girl in the sixth grade who'd never even been asked to go up with anything, if only it truly mattered. If only her mother would notice, and care. Freya had been born eight months after Edwina Hudspeth's "missing hours." When, five years later, the missing hours were recalled to her, Edwina did not miss the significance in the timing of Freya's birth. The suggestion that Edwina might have been impregnated during her sojourn with the aliens, or that the month-old foetus might have been altered somehow, was duly and tantalizingly made in the book, although the Hudspeths had to admit that Freya seemed no different from any other human child. Doctors, scientists, mystics, crazies and skeptics, all intrigued by the Hudspeths book, came to the ranch to examine Freya. For a little while, Freya was the center of a lot of attention. Freya was tested for anything and everything that happened to occur to anyone, but all the tests revealed her as a bright, but basically ordinary, little girl. Freya wanted to please her mother, but the hints her mother gave her were useless. She couldn't, no matter how she tried, read minds, predict the future, or make small objects move across the room. She couldn't do those things, and nothing else that she could be seemed to be special enough to please her mother.    "He could be an Indian," Frank said again. He and Edwina watched the stranger who sat propped up in bed, watching them with bewildered brown eyes. "I don't think there are any Indians left who don't speak English," Edwina said, "or at least Spanish. And even if he is from some isolated area down in Mexico -- how did he get here ?" Freya, who had been standing quietly in the doorway, now came forward, her eyes fixed on the man in the bed. He turned away from Frank to watch her. "Freya!" Edwina said sharply. "It's all right, Mama," Freya said. "He's my friend." As she spoke, the stranger put out a hand. She patted it gently. "Freya," Frank said uneasily. "No, Frank," Edwina said. "It's all right. Freya's right. I think he likes her." Freya smiled. A moment later, an eerie echo, the stranger smiled, too. Later that night, when the house was dark and still, Freya returned to the guest room to speak to the stranger. She asked him about himself, and about the world he had come from. She supplied the answers herself, for the stranger remained silent. She could see his eyes shining in the moonlight which filtered through gauzy curtains, and she knew he was awake and listening.    "What's it like where you come from?" Freya asked softly. "Can you do magic there? You have a car that flies, don't you? And you take it out on highways which are just like ribbons of light hanging in the air. Birds fly right through them, but your car follows the lighthighway and never crashes. "You don't live in a house like this one, either. You live in a house with crystal walls where the colors change with your moods. You can see through them when you want to. And every autumn you step outside and clap your hands and the whole house crumbles -- it falls like flaming leaves and like snow. And then to build a new one you just -- " The door opened, and there was Edwina, a large drawing-pad and half a dozen felt-tipped pens in her hands, ready for another attempt at communication with the stranger. "What are you doing here?" she demanded. "Why aren't you in school?" Freya moved awkwardly away from the bed. "It's Saturday, Mama." "Well, you shouldn't be in here, bothering our guest." "I'm not bothering him," she said at once. "Alph and I were just talking." "Don't -- did you call him 'Alph'?" Freya nodded slowly. "Why?" "It's his name." "You mean you just decided to name him, as if he were a doll." Her mother's voice was full of scorn. "No," Freya said, stung. "He told me it was his name. Alph told me. "Freya, are you telling me the truth?" Her mother looked so sternly into her face that Freya could not back down now. "Yes," she said. Edwina set the drawing pad and pens down on the bedside table and leaned close to the man in the bed. "Alph," she said to the deeply tanned face. "Alph?" His lips moved slightly, as if he would try to mimic her, and then his head, propped up against two fat pillows, nodded. Edwina laughed. "Alph!" She looked at her daughter. "Can he speak. Has he spoken to you?" Freya shrugged and moved uncomfortably, twining one leg around the other and nearly falling off balance . "Stand still , Freya! What did he say? How did he tell you his name was Alph?" "He just told me, that's all. I don't remember what he said, exactly." "Freya," said her mother in a deceptively gentle tone, "Are you making this up? Are you playing a game?" Freya shook her head. "I'm not a baby. I'm not pretending. It's the truth." "All right, dear. I believe you. Can you get Alph to talk to me?" Freya looked from the man in the bed to her mother's intent face. "I'm not sure," she said. "Try, Freya. Tell him we won't hurt him -- you know we won't. We want to help him. Ask him to trust us, as he's trusted you, and talk to us. I think he might feel more at ease with me than with your father, at first, so if he could just speak to me... ?" Dutifully, Freya crouched beside the bed. She touched the stranger's hand. She told him to trust her mother, to talk to her, to tell her about himself. She could feel her mother's expectations pressing like a weight on her head, and if she could have made words come out of the stranger's mouth she would have. She knew what her mother wanted to hear. But the stranger only looked at her and would say nothing. "I think he's confused," Freya said. "Maybe he cant talk when you're in the room. I'm not sure what it is." "But he talks to you," Edwina said. "Well, you tell me what he says. I'll leave you two alone now." Her voice casual, Edwina went out, closing the door gently behind her. Freya knew her mother was waiting outside the door, her ear pressed close to the wood. She could almost hear her breathing. Freya looked at Alph. He said nothing. That night it was different. When the house was still at last, and she knew her parents were asleep, Freya went quietly across the hall into Alph's room and then, at last, she knew he would talk to her. Wrapped in the soothing darkness of the room, lulled by the soft rhythms of her own voice, Freya fell into a sort of half-sleep. She couldn't be certain if she were talking or only dreaming of talking, and at times her voice changed in her ears so that she thought it came from another part of the room. It might have been herself speaking, or Alph, or someone else entirely.    "Do Alph's people often travel to Earth?" Edwina asked. Freya nodded. Alph sat, quietly as ever, in the big armchair by the window. Although his eyes stayed on Freya, it was hard to tell what he actually saw; impossible to say what he might be thinking. "Was he in trouble when he first came to us? Was he sick? Why couldn't he communicate with us?" Edwina sat tensely, her eyes flicking from Freya to Alph. "He was hurt a little in his mind -- he wasn't used to the way people think here. It was such a jumble that he couldn't think straight. He lost his way, he stumbled around, like he was dizzy. It was like a constant loud noise that he couldn't shut out. He's learning to understand us a little better now, though." "But why can he talk to you, Freya?" Why won't he talk to me? asked her eyes. "I don't know. He says my mind is clearer -- " "Because you're so young, no doubt," Edwina said. "Your mind isn't all cluttered up with grown-up emotions, or doubts or knowledge." She leaned forward again and took Freya's hands in hers. "What does it feel like when he talks to you, Frey a?" Freya shrugged. "It's just like listening to anyone," she said. "You. Or Daddy. Or myself." Edwina looked at Alph. "I'm sure I could hear you if you spoke to me, Alph," she said. "Won't you try? I want to help you, you know." Alph looked at Freya. Freya dropped her eyes. "Leave us alone together, Freya," Edwina said. "I have some things to say to Alph. You go on up and do your homework now. What are you waiting for? And close the door behind you. I don't want to be disturbed." Edwina looked at the man in the armchair. He seemed to lose a part of himself when Freya went away, she thought. He seemed frightened, looking from Edwina to the door and back again. Confusion had dropped like a mist across his features. Edwina knew, even before she began to speak to him, that it would be useless. He would hear nothing she said.    "You're going to have to talk to her," Freya said. Alph watched her as intently as always. Sometimes Freya thought she was the only person in the world that Alph could see and hear. "You have to tell her the stories she wants to hear, the things we talk about together. You have to start talking to her now. If you don't, she'll send you away. She told me she would send you away. "Will you, Alph? Look," she said, her voice becoming pleading, "Don't you want to stay here with me? All you have to do is talk to her -- you know what to say. And we'll be famous if you do -- we'll both be famous. But otherwise, if you don't talk, they won't believe me anymore, and you'll have to be sent away. "Alph, will you? Will you talk to her and tell her all about your planet and everything?" Alph still just looked at her, the way he always did, but Freya was sure he understood. She had a feeling, a strong feeling, that he would start talking now.    He didn't speak so well, he told Mrs. Hudspeth, because on his planet words were not the style. They talked mind to mind and heart to heart there, but on this world that didn't work so well, and it took him awhile to adjust. The violence, sickness and ignorance of so many minds had come as a shock to him and made him sick. He was very grateful for the care the Hudspeths' had given him, he said. And he was very grateful to have met Freya. She was a very special person. They could speak together heart to heart and mind to mind, he and young Freya. She had a mind as sharp and pure as fine crystal.    "He kept going on and on about Freya," Edwina said, pacing the floor of the study, her blue velvet gown swirling around her ankles, her long white hands clasped tightly before her. Frank sat behind the big desk, his face in shadow. Edwina did not look at him. "Finally I asked him if Freya's specialness set her apart from the rest of humanity -- if she might not be the child of some other race. I told him about my -- encounter -- and he didn't seem surprised. As if he already knew. "But he said that you were definitely Freya's father. He said her difference, her specialness, might be accounted for by her pre-birth experiences -- some influence absorbed from the aliens. Or," Edwina stopped walking. Her clasped hands rose to her chin. "He said that  might be the reason. He said Freya might be special because I am her mother, for I am a very special person, too." Edwina fell silent at last, waiting for Frank to comment or to question. But he said nothing, and she began to feel uneasy. She could not even read his face, half in darkness as he was. We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. "Well, I suppose there's no point in us talking about him now," Edwina said at last, trying to pretend there was nothing unnatural in Frank's silence. "You'll have to talk to him yourself. I didn't ask, but I'm sure he'll take to you -- I'm sure he'll answer any questions you have. He's being very cooperative." She waved a hand at the books and papers stacked across the broad face of the desk. "That's what you need -- first-hand information, so you can really get started on your new book!" "I haven't decided what my new book will be yet," he said quietly. "Haven't decided? Well, the subject of your next book is living upstairs," Edwina said playfully. "Frank, what is the matter with you? You should be as excited as I am -- this is the story we've been waiting for!" Frank sat forward with a sigh. The light from the desk lamp slashed a yellow bar across his face, but he kept his eyes down. "I don't believe in Alph," he said quietly. "I don't buy his story." Edwina stared at him in disbelief. "How can you say that? If you'd only listen to him -- " "I have. I came past the room while he was telling you the story of his life. I almost came in, but I -- " he shook his head. "Listen to his voice, Edwina. Listen to the way he talks. He's got a Mexican accent -- he's struggling with it, but it's there. When he fumbles for words he half-says the Spanish ones while he tries to remember the English." He looked up into her accusing eyes. "And listen to his words , Edwina! My God, a more absurd conglomeration of wishful thinking I never -- he's saying what will please you. He's saying what you want to believe, about universal friendship and hands across the galaxies, and the cheapest science fictional fantasies about life on his Utopian, telepathic world. "I don't know why he's doing this, whether he's a con man or crazy or believes it himself, but it's all a pack of lies. I certainly won't write a book about him -- I would have to be either cruel or silly to do that." "I believe him, Frank," Edwina said. "I believe in him. What do you think of me for that? Does that make me silly? I know we have to be careful, but you're being deliberately obtuse. Why would some Mexican tell us a story like his? What could he hope to gain? I don't think he has a Mexican accent -- you hear what you want to hear. Because he looks Mexican to you -- you said so from the start -- you assume his fumblings to form words in English sound like the fumblings of a man accustomed to speaking Spanish. How would you know what a man who never spoke any language at all would sound like if he began to struggle through English? I don't know how you can be so deliberately deaf and blind to his truth." "I don't know honey," Frank said. "He just doesn't feel right to    To piease Edwina, Frank taped several interviews with the stranger, asking questions as probing and serious as if he needed the answers to convince the public. The problem was that this man Alph had nothing to back up his statements. Had no proof of anything -- no spaceship, no alien metals or wonderful machines. He offered nothing but his fairy tales and Frank, who had always waited for something like this to happen, could not accept them. Freya, now that school was out for the summer, was always at hand. She sat in on all the interviews, but always quietly and unobtrusively, seeming to drink in Alph's words. Frank spent much of his time alone in his study, reading Texas history. He was digging tentatively for the topic of his next book -- something biographical or historical, he thought. Something welldocumented, factual and inarguable. Freya had a feeling things were starting to go wrong. This placid time would not last much longer. She and Alph went out walking one day, to the south pasture, near the dirty cattle pond where they sometimes swam. She knew something was wrong before he spoke. Something was bothering him -- he had been forgetting things, simple things, and her mother was beginning to notice. Her father might have noticed as well, but if he did he didn't care. But her mother had questioned Alph closely, and her mother remembered when he gave a different answer to the same question asked twice. He'd been able to blame the confusion on the language, but that excuse wouldn't last him forever. They stamped across stubby grass, cropped by the cattle down to the roots, and Alph said, "I've been remembering other things, Freya." She looked at him sideways, and brushed an insect off her face. "I don't mean about the things we talk about -- not about my home planet. Other things. It's like another life that I'm starting to remember. Or someone else's life." Freya looked up and around at the huge blue sky. "That's called dreaming, Alph," she said. "You don't have dreams in your world. That's what is confusing you." "But these memories come when I'm awake," he said earnestly. ""They just float into my mind. Sometimes I look around and can't think what I'm doing here. I wonder what happened to the hospital, and I wonder about my wife..." He shut up abruptly and stared out at the distant horizon. Freya felt sick and sad. He was remembering one life and forgetting the other. He would be going soon.    "Then your wife's name, can you remember that? Remember some time when you were home and you heard your wife answer the phone. 'Yes, this is Mrs... " Frank leaned forward, his arms resting along his upper legs, his body tight and alert. Alph frowned. "I think..." Freya pushed the door open. Her father looked around at her, annoyed. "Don't interrupt us now, Freya." "I just want to listen. I won't talk." Alph stared at the floor. Frank shrugged. "All right. Come in and be quiet." He looked back at Alph. "Go on... what do you remember?" After a moment Alph raised his head, his expression changed. "I think perhaps I'm picking up someone else's thoughts. My mind is very sensitive, like a radio receiver, and it's still hard for me to separate the thoughts of people here. Sometimes I get confused -- I think other people's thoughts without realizing it." Frank looked at Alph as if he had suddenly pulled a dead rat out of his pocket. "Now wait a minute," he said. "That's not at all what -- " "There may be another explanation for it," Alph said. "But I am satisfied with the one I've given you." He stood. "I hope you'll excuse me -- I'm feeling very tired." Freya and Alph sat up late in the darkened guest room, talking. Freya was filled with sadness. Alph was fading away and another man was emerging -- a man with another family and a past and future which did not contain her. He was still puzzled by conflicting memories, by his two seperate yet united lives, but Freya knew. And she knew that he couldn't stay here much longer. "Let's go out for a walk," she said, standing. Alph stood also, and looked down at her. The face of the full moon was at the window. Freya turned to look at it, away from the stranger's troubled eyes. "Come on," she said softly. "It's time for you to go."    "I think he probably went back home," Frank said. "He was starting to remember things -- time spent in a hospital, and a wife waiting for him down in Juarez." "What does it take to make you believe?" Edwina cried. "And now that he's disappeared you can say whatever you like and he can't refute you." "He never tried to," Frank said. He looked at his wife's tight, unhappy face and rose from the breakfast table to go to her and hold her unresponsive body. "Honey, he's a mystery, all right? And he's gone out of our life as mysteriously and abruptly as he came into it." Edwina twisted in his arms as Freya came into the kitchen. "Alph," she said. "I know," said Freya. "He told me last night he was leaving. He said he'd be back." "He did? When? How soon?" "I don't know." "Why did he go? Did he say?" Edwina moved closer to Freya and Frank returned to his chair with a sigh. Freya shook her head. "He said it was urgent. He said he had to get back, but that he wasn't leaving us forever." "Then he will be back, I'm sure of it," Edwina said. Frank looked down at his cold grits and toast. He was no longer hungry. His chair screeched on the linoleum as he stood. "I'm going out for awhile," he said. He needed to walk; the exercise and the open air would clear his head of the melancholy he had picked up from Edwina. He looked at Freya. "Want to go for a walk with your old Dad?" She shook her head, not looking at him. "Aw, come on." He thought of all the aimless walks she had taken with the now-vanished Alph. "Do you good, Freya. We'll go down and look at Miller's cows and pretend they're ours. We could fish in the tank." "There aren't any fish there. You said so." She still wouldn't look at him. She was missing Alph, he thought, and he was depressed that a stranger could affect her so. "We could pretend," he said. "Don't you remember how we used to pretend?" "I was a baby then," she said. She glanced up at him and then away again. "Pretending is for babies." So he went out by himself after all, whistling up his dogs for company. He could think better by himself, after all, and that was what he needed to do. He found the stranger floating face down in the filthy water of the cattle tank.    Edwina wanted the tank drained. "He's already dead," Frank said, bewildered, his hand still resting on the phone he had used to call the sheriff. "He was trying to get to his spaceship," Edwina said. "It must be at the bottom of the pond." Frank stared at her as if he did now know her. He wondered briefly where Freya was, if she was listening, and what effect all this would have on her. She had been very attached to the man. She needed some friends her own age. "Frank, do you hear me? We'll have to call somebody in town, somebody with the equipment. We should do it right away. It doesn't make sense to delay." "It doesn't make sense to do it at all," Frank said reasonably. "There's no spaceship at the bottom of the cow pond -- there wouldn't be a cow pond if something that big had dropped into it." "We don't know how big an alien spaceship would have to be. It might be very small -- no bigger than a car." "Honey, that tank isn't any more than eight or nine feet deep. My Granddaddy dug it himself." "Frank," said Edwina with deadly sweetness. "You've got to look at this logically. He told Freya he was going home. He had his spaceship hidden somewhere. He must have been trying to get to it when something went wrong. Why else would we find him drowned in a cow pond? There is no other explanation possible."    They all stared at the flat, muddy bottom of the drained tank, studded here and there with light-colored stones thrown in other days by Freya or by Frank. "Guess the guy who died here must have walked in under his own steam," said one of the men from town. He spat. He had wanted to stop when the tank was halfdrainewhen it was obvious there was nothing sizable there. But Mrs. Hudspeth had insisted they drain it. She wanted to see the bottom. "No car here," said the other man cheerfully. Freya gazed straight ahead, seeing the pond as it had been shining almost black in the moonlight. She had stood then where she stood now, on the high bank, and she had watched him. "Go on," she had said gently when he faltered at water's edge. "It's all right. You have on a special water-suit, remember? The water can't hurt you -- you can't even feel it on your skin. The spaceship is on the bottom. The door will open to the pressure of your thumb and forefinger. The computer will open the door and welcome you in. There's no problem." "Why are you making me go?" he asked, still hesitating. "Don't you remember what you told me?" Her voice carried clearly on the still, night air. "About the spaceship?" She nodded. "I came here in it -- you called me to you..." "No." "Yes. You made me come. I never understood how or why -- all I knew was you. That I had to come to you." The hair whipped across her cheeks as she shook her head sharply. "Have you forgotten your own world?" "I... I have to go back now." He looked up at her for confirmation, and she nodded. "I... I must go home to my people. I'll be back someday -- as soon as I can -- but now I have to go back in my spaceship." He walked into the water. Freya stood watching until he had disappeared, until the water was quiet and she knew he must have reached the bottom and found his spaceship. "Goodbye, Alph," she whispered, the tears drying on her cheeks. "Freya." Her mother's voice drew her back to the present. "He must have made a mistake," said Edwina, putting her arm around Freya. "A terrible mistake," They walked away from the muddy site, leaving Frank to deal with the men from town. "I wonder if he was in touch with his home world," Edwina mused. "If he was in touch with them, and they knew he was coming home, then perhaps when he doesn't show up his friends will come looking for him." She tightened her grip on Freya. "Well, no matter what, we have a book to get started on." Freya felt a glow of warmth begin inside. She had a feeling -- a certainty -- that she would be helping her mother write this book.  the this time A now I less pas: In a struggle to save the human race from extinction this Phoenix had but a single ally -- Death . rapped in flesh, or in something which gave the impression of flesh, Death came over the low horizon, across the perfectly level plain, to where I sat upon a daislike rock. The rock was the one blemish on the surface of the land. There were no stars in the black, utterly black sky, no clouds, nothing at all. Death halted before and slightly to one side of me. Its cloak rippled animatedly, though there was no breeze. The golden almonds of its eyes glistened in the sockets of its serene androgynous face. Death's mouth was a wide, lipless seam located somewhere below the merest hint of a nose. The mouth opened, and Death said, We are very near the end now. You surely realize this. Yes. I've known it for some time. Are you ready to take my hand now? I looked at Death's strong, colorless fingers and shook my head. In a few minutes, perhaps. Or a few hours. What difference can a few more minutes or hours possibly make? Indeed. What difference? Death made a small, soft sound very like a sigh, half-turned and indicated the featureless plain, the empty sky, with a wave of its hand. What can you do? it demanded. I have wound down the universe around you, nibbled it away, taken everything save what you see before you. Soon, even this will be gone. What can you do? You can't touch me, I reminded it, unless I ask you. Something flared behind each of Death's eyes, twin miniature suns going nova. The corners of its mouth quivered angrily. I can take you whenever I choose! But you won't. You don't want to take me. What satisfaction would that give you? Death was silent and unmoving for a long time. Then it shook its head sadly, helplessly, and said. None. No satisfaction at all. It won't be long, I said, as gently as I could. I'm tired. I want to rest. I have one last thing to do. Be patient. Again the hand was offered. You have no choice, Death said. No choice at all. Light glimmered on the horizon to my right. Streaks of gray light stabbed upward into the darkness. I have to go now, I said, rising. Why? To try again. I have to try again. It isn't worth it. I can give you peace now. I want atonement first. Death's hand dropped to its side. The mask did not change, but I sensed, somehow, that the expression behind it was one of faintly exasperated resignation. You'll be back soon, Death called after me as J walked toward the edge of the universe. Yes, I called back. I'm sure of it. Soon. When I reached the horizon, the razor-edged rim of the disk that had become my world, I paused for a moment to look down into the milky glowing orb hanging in the darkness below. The orb dimpled, opened up and became a ring of light, the mouth of a tunnel. I stepped forward, off, away, and fell toward it, into the heat, a phoenix diving toward its funeral pyre, and I did not stop falling until I had emerged, unseared, untouched by any flame, at its far end. Cool, efficient fingers were adjusting the straps when I regained consciousness. I lay listening to the hum of machinery, the muted whir of duct fans trying to suck the stench of sweat and other effluvia -- mine, all of it -- from the air in the room. Light from the ceiling seeped pinkly through my eyelids. I counted slowly to twenty, then let them flutter open. Faces above me: serene androgynous masks with golden oneway lenses for eyes, wide, immobile mouths without lips; the face shared by my three interrogators. There had always been three of them, since the first. Whether the people behind the masks were always the same, I could not tell. I had no way of telling, no way of keeping track of them as they moved into and out of my field of vision, no way of knowing how much time I had spent on the inquisition table. But each of the three appeared to have been assigned a definite role to play. I had given them the names of the ancient Fates. Atropos, the Unchangeable, stayed in the background for the most part, never speaking, never taking part in the proceedings. Even so, Atropos struck me as the most sinister and terrifying of the three. Atropos did not care what I might say or not say on the table. Atropos, severer of the thread of life, waited only for me to die. Lachesis, the Disposer of Lots, was the one who actually handled the knives and needles, who decided where the electrodes were to be placed on my body, who lovingly and knowledgeably plied the trade of torture. Lachesis wanted me to break, to beg for mercy, to protest the unfairness of my predicament. Clotho, the Spinner, played a relatively sympathetic part. Clotho wanted me to give in, tell all, and thus spare myself further misery. I had already done so, in fact. But Clotho wouldn't believe me, having been led to expect nothing but lies from me, and I, having been trained to tell nothing but lies, I couldn't make her or him believe me. Clotho' s mask now hovered just above my face, its mouth and mine almost kissing. "You have nothing to gain," the Spinner said in an imploring tone, "nothing at all, by refusing to tell us the truth. What my colleague here" -- the mask glanced politely at Lachesis -- "has done to you is but a taste of what can be done to you . ' ' "Can and will, traitor," Lachesis put in, "unless you tell us what we want to know." Clotho nodded solemnly and began caressing my slimy cheek with a velvet-sheathed hand. It felt good, soothing. It was supposed to. "You must believe me when I say that my colleague is quite merciless. We are prepared to go to any lengths to obtain the information you persist in withholding from us. We have at our disposal here a truly impressive array of interrogation techniques. Some of them date back to ancient times." Yes, yes. I had heard all of this before: it was the Spinner's litany; there was no telling how many times I had had it recited to me since being put on the table, but I knew most of it by heart now. We have a crude but time-honored device known as the thumbscrew. We can put you on a thing called the rack and pull your arms, your legs, out of their sockets. We know how to break ninety percent of the bones We have only begun to show you what we have in our inventory of pain. We can kill you by slow degrees, and we will if you force us to it. We have a lot of time, infinite patience, and we have you. I opened my mouth. It hurt. "I've told..." My voice sounded thick and strange. I moved my jaw experimentally, wondering what Lachesis had done to it during my last absence. "I've told you the truth. What you need to know." Clotho continued to stroke my face. "Preposterous lies. We want to know what really brought you to Earth, what your orders were. What you were supposed to accomplish here, and how." "I came to warn you." Lachesis raised a metal-gloved hand to show me the instrument attached to the top of the index finger, then lowered it. The instrument came to rest somewhere on my torso. I gave a cry, writhed on the table, tried to push my body through it, away from the source of the sharp, gnawing agony. I could have escaped by simply letting go of my flesh and returning to my dais-like rock, but I didn't. I had rested there. I had returned to the table knowing what to expect. So I bore the pain until Lachesis saw fit to remove the hand. The pain took its time going away. "The truth," whispered Clotho. I sucked in a ragged breath. "The truth. I am the... sole survivor of the colony... on Vega IV... Above me, Lachesis made a sound like a cat spitting. "The colony," I went on, "and the settlement on the larger moon was gone. Destroyed." "Wiped out," Clotho murmured, "by an invasion armada of unknown but certainly not terrestial origin. So you've told us. Now -- " "It's true ," I moaned. The Spinner beckoned to the Disposer of Lots. I closed my eyes and was thinking longingly of my faraway rock when the pain exploded in my head, too intense, too sudden, for me to effect escape. "You must believe me," I managed to gasp when Lachesis drew away. The Disposer of Lots had been working at the tender tissues lining my nasal cavity with a delicate needle-bladed instrument. I sniffed carefully. There was no blood. "You are a spy," Lachesis said harshly. "An..." Clotho rubbed metal lips thoughtfully. "An operative. #-and-E. An intelligence-andespionage agent of the Vegan Colonial government. Do you deny this?" "No. I told you that myself. Before." "Do you deny that Vega IV has been conducting intelligence and espionage activity here on Earth, with the intention of subverting the authority of -- " "I deny it. I deny knowledge of it." I paused, gathering breath and strength. "There was a separatist faction in the Vegan colonial government. I was investigating a member of that faction, in the service and interest of Earth, when the invaders appeared out of nowhere and razed everything to the ground. The fact that I was... my being an agent had nothing to do with my coming here. I was the only one left, the only one who could come. I identified myself as an agent of the Vegan Intelligence Network immediately upon my arrival. Prior to planetfall. Use your brains. If I'd come here to engage in subversive activities, would I have established at the first that I'm -- that I was eminvaders obliterated it, along with the government and the separatists and everything else." For an instant, the two Fates locked eyes across me, and for just that instant I thought that I might have gotten through to them at last. Then Lachesis repeated the catspitting noise. "What do you hope to gain by this?" Clotho. "Who were you to meet on Earth? Names." Lachesis. "What was your objective?" "To warn Earth. To give you time to prepare defenses." "Lies." Flat, dead, deadly, the voice of the Disposer of Lots. "Lies. There was no armada. You came here to meet certain people. You came to help them undermine the authority of Earth." "The armada is real. You must believe me. If the invaders come -- " "Absurd." Pitying, the voice of the Spinner. "Come now, be reasonable. It grieves me, you know, to see you in torment, and needlessly so. In the end, we'll have the truth. We'll get it, one way or another. There probably won't be much left of you by then. Remember that we have a vast number of diverse interrogation techniques at our disposal. Old and new. The thumbscrew, the rack, the nerveneedles, the burnbuds, the boot, the psychpick. Why -- " "Vm telling you the truth!" Clotho nodded to Lachesis, who jammed something under my sole remaining fingernail. I screamed. "The truth," said the Spinner. I sobbed out the truth. Invasion armada. Five hundred or a thousand vessels. Origin unknown. Vega IV scoured clean. The lunar settlement destroyed. My hairbreadth escape. The three Fates listened patiently, believing none of it, soft-spoken Spinner, cruel Disposer of Lots, silent Unchangeable. When I had finished, Clotho's velvet hand was on my face again. "Our friend here," Clotho said to Lachesis, "patently isn't going to yield under pain of mere physical mutilation. Perhaps the time has come to use the psychpick." Lachesis shook her head, or his. "Let us proceed patiently, step by step. The pick will shatter the mind but leave the body untouched. Use up the flesh first." I heard a faint clink, metal on metal. Lachesis' gauntlet rose into view. There was still another attachment mounted on the forefinger. "How can I make you believe me?" I asked wearily as Lachesis touched me. No one bothered to answer. I felt the careful nip of something sharp, felt skin part. With a mental shrug of disgust, I cut myself free of flesh and went back to my rock under the blank night sky. Death was standing where I had left it. The golden eyes glittered hungrily as I seated myself, but the hand was not offered. The horizon seemed lower than before. Lower and closer. Beside me, Death smiled fleetingly. You're too smug to bear, I told it, turning my back.    I had been tortured once before, on Vega IV -- tortured for real, by a man who lacked the Fates' arsenal but not their zeal, as opposed to tortured for training. The man had done his best with a few superheated instruments. He had known what he was about, but he picked the wrong subject: the whole intelligence-and-espionage field personnel was in the general direction of stoicism. If the pain was bad, I could live with it; if it was worse, I could retreat from my nerve endings until it got better; if it was worst, I could phoenix -- make myself die. But, bad or worse, I would never come out from under my cover, never give the game away, never spill my guts. The man with the superheated instruments had just made the transition from bad to worse, and was surely planning on sending me the whole way, when my back-up arrived and shot off a piece of his face. Even then, this timely interruption notwithstanding, there wasn't much left of my own face. I lost the six months which followed, four of them in a clinic where I grew a new face, two on mandatory post-operation (in two senses of the term) leave, a restand-recuperation junket to Gardenspot in the Southern Islands. agents temporarily disabled in the line of duty. Two months of getting used to a new face. It didn't please me nearly as much as the first one I'd had. The mouth was too much of a slash, the skin too tight on the cheekbones and at the temples. In mirrors, I looked meaner, grimmer, altogether too much like what I was. An old lover, somebody with training, turned up in Gardenspot and found the new face exciting. We renewed our relationship for a while, long enough for it to be realized by both parties that the rest of me was the same as ever, no more exciting than it had been before. A new lover, a local, came along and didn't know the difference. I swam, ran, kept busy, pretended to be having a lovely time for the benefit of the, ah, total strangers who were, ah, observing how close calls affected its agents. I would have been at Gardenspot for six months if I'd phoenixed. Dying, even temporarily, was never good for a person, trained agent or not. Mostly, I read the faxsheets and tried to figure out what was happening up north. The separatist movement, spawned on Polyphemus, Vega IV's larger moon, almost fifty years before, almost as soon as that settlement had become selfsufficient, was still gaining ground in and out of official circles. Some politicians were hinting broadly that the time had indeed arrived for Vegans to sever Earth's apron strings -- peacefully, of course -- and go their own way in the universe. Some private citizens had become less circumspect in their denunciations of the colonial government. The home-grown separatists had their staunch supporters on Earth, too. Anti-empire sentiment was becoming fashionable. I sifted through the faxsheets and learned that things were really starting to come unglued. The demonstrations and acts of political vana wall of the governor's mansion in New Portland. The riots were just beginning. Separatist-minded industrialists on Polyphemus had closed down their mines, with the support of the miners. There had been a short-lived mutiny aboard the Slothrop , a Terran-owned, Veganoperated ore freighter based on the moon. The secret war was already well vested in it by Terran Network Central, had been keeping tabs on separatists and fellow-travelers for more than forty years; during the past twenty-four months, however, veillance and petty harrassment to carefully engineered scandals, studiedly malicious industrial sabotage, an occasional discreet assassination. And, as I knew from personal experience, to some bloody encounters with separatist agents. doing its best to undermine the separatist cause on Vega IV and, at the same time, keep Central from letting the Terran Intelligence Network take over. Networks within networks. Nothing but politics. Finally, my Gardenspot time was up. I had a last night-long tumble with my new lover, packed my bags and went gratefully to the airport. I forgot the lover's name, put the details of the whole two-month period out of my head, as soon as my plane lifted off and away to bear me north, back to New San Angeles Naomi Sizemore had a car waiting for me when I got there. Naomi Sizemore operated out of a sparsely furnished office on the Angeles headquarters. She had been there, from all accounts, for more than twenty years; I never saw her outside that one room, and if she had ever left the second floor for any reason at any time, no one I'd talked to knew of it. She was a big-boned, broad-shouldered woman, as dark and as hard as teakwood. As always, she was seated behind her desk when I entered the office. She didn't look up. Spread like a fan across her desktop were the contents of several folders. "Good to have you back," she muttered as I closed the door. "It's good to be back." Sizemore grunted softly, the best she could do or had ever done in the way of laughter, and finally favored me with an inspection. When she finished, she let her gaze drop back to the papers before her. "You look a considerable bit less grisly than I remember," she said. "Ornish showed me some pictures. Pictures taken of you after your back-up brought you home. Ugly." "I never got to thank him." She shot me an astonished glance. "What?" "I didn't get to thank my backup for showing up when he did." "Don't be a sentimental asshole. He was doing his job. And not very damned well, either. He should have arrived twenty or thirty minutes earlier than he did. Before you took your first cut." I remembered that first cut and shuddered. Fortunately, Sizemore was looking at her papers again. "Anyway," she said, "don't waste your time looking around for him. He phoenixed on an assignment about eight weeks ago. He didn't come out of it." "But... why? How?" "Does it God-damned matter what he did wrong?" Sizemore stabbed a finger at me savagely. "He messed up. He opted for the phoenix route when he shouldn't have, he didn't do it right. And now he's dead, irrevocably dead. Frankly, he won't be missed. You things to think about." "Yes. Of course. I... it's just that..." Her eyes fastened on my face. Like iron claws. Or superheated pincers. "Nothing," I finished lamely. "Never mind." She stared at me for a moment longer before nodding slightly, apparently satisfied that I would not be a sentimental asshole. She plucked up a sheet of paper by its corner and let it dangle between thumb and forefinger. "Now. You've never been to Polyphemus' It was not a question. "That changes as of # tomorrow. The lunar settlement is becoming" -- a bleakgrin -- "unsettled. You surely heard that the miners called a strike. And about mutiny aboard an ore freighter called the Slothrop ." "I read a lot of faxsheets in Gardenspot." Sizemore nodded again. "So I heard. Well. You're going to Polyphemus tomorrow' morning. Paula Crist and her friends have been busy up there." I started. "Crist? On Polyph -- " "She took up residence there a month ago. Slipped out of New Portland without so much as a byyour-leave. Gave us the shake for forty-eight hours, and forty-eight hours too soon. We'd had plans for her." I didn't bother to ask about that. I knew any number of ways in might have been carried out. Nothing so crude and obvious as a bullet or a hit-and-run or a plane crash for as prominent and outspoken a separatist as Paula Crist. A heart attack, maybe. Or a specially prepared meal: people still choked to death on misrouted food. "How did she know?" I asked. "About the plans." Sizemore frowned deeply. "You missed a lot. We plugged a leak in Anyway. Crist is with her friends on Polyphemus, where we'll have no little trouble getting at her. Lots of faithful bodyguards. She has one of the most powerful anti-Earth industrialists on the moon looking out for her. Mister No-Tithe-For-Terra himself." "Brian Subotsky." "Yes." "What am I supposed to do?" can penetrate her screen of bodyguards -- we're working on that now -- her death on the moon should actually do us more good than it would have on-planet. The settlement's already stirred up. The strikes, the Slothrop mutiny. Loyalists fear for their lives. If Crist dies, and dies in such a way that, one" -- Sizemore bent back a finger, counting off -- "it cannot be proved that we had anything to do with it, and yet, two, it can be suspected by her paranoid friends that we're responsible... well, instead of sending in a single lightly armed deepranger to quell mutiny aboard an ore freighter..." She let her voice trail off and gave me an expectant look. "The governor," I said, "would send in the Fleet to put down a full-scale armed insurrection. Loyalist lives and property would have to be protected, the peace preserved." "Exactly. On-planet, the public would stand by the governor. Ramington and the other pacifistic separatists would be damned by the insurrectionists' violence." A quick grin of triumph touched the corners of Sizemore's mouth. "The separatist movement will be smashed, we'll have demonstrated once and for all and... and that will be that." "And then..." I bit off the uncompleted question. And then, five years. Half a decade of fieldwork in the worst interests of the been in existence for forty-eight years. Half a century, almost, of keeping the colony running smoothly, or reasonably so. If Sizemore was right, if Crist died, if everything turned out the way Sizemore said it would... if the fifty-year secret war finally ended... what then? Cutbacks, gradual but inexorable. Entire sections phased out of operation. The Vegan Intelligence Network demobilized, its work having been done, its enemies vanquished, the purpose for which it was created served. Or. A whole new war. With new enemies. And who would the enemy be? The answer, of course (of course?), was: Terran Intelligence Network. The pushy men and women who could not accept that Vegan internal disunities. The schism between the two organizations had widened at an alarming rate during the past couple of years, widened in direct proportion, it seemed, to the rising intensity of separatist activism. Politics. Inter-organizational rivalry. And, at the heart of it, not a little professional jealousy. For reasons (Sizemore's favorite joke; perhaps her only joke), learning to phoenix rejected the phoenixing technique, possibly because they didn't consider it vital to agent survival or couldn't understand it, possibly beWhatever the reasons, the result people in the field. Permanently. and not always for good. wouldn't be a war for field agents, Not at first, anyway. It would come down to sniping on the bureaucratic level. Surveillance and petty harassment. Full circle. Not for me, I decided. I preferred to fight real foes. fantasy -- it had to be nothing more than that, I told myself, a fantasy. "When should Crist die?" Sizemore exhaled noisily. "Soon. Before things can grow quiet on Polyphemus. We'll know exactly when you're going to do it after we've figured out how to get you close to her." A thought occurred to me. "What if... is there any record of her having trained to die?" "No. Good question, though." She gestured at the papers on her desk. "There are so many gaps in our Paula Crist profile. Things I'd feel safer knowing. Where was she, what was she doing, during the eleven-month period between the Boyd incident and her sudden reemergence in New Portland last fall? On Earth? In a hidey-hole in the building across the street? Trial-phoenixing on some island retreat in the southern hemisphere? In all, thirty-one months of the past six years of her life are a complete blank. Where does she go? What does she do?" Sizemore made a face. "How come I know what she eats for breakfast and what she likes in bed, but not where she vanished to?" "Will it matter," I said, very quietly, kk once she's dead?" Sizemore forced a shrug. "No." Meaning: Yes. Sizemore did not like enigmas. "Anyway. You must be sure to kill her irreparably. Totally. Without warning. It may have to be a messy death." "Perhaps. Phoenix or not, there are still many ways a person can die without hope of resurrection."    You spoke of atonement, Death said, not looking at me, not looking at anything in particular. Atonement for what? You should know. You must know. Ah. Of course. The people you killed. Death laughed softly. It was a liquid sound. I was reminded of the noise water makes as it gurgles down a drain. They're dead. Everyone dies. That doesn't make it any less unpleasant. A strange attitude for one of your particular background. A spy. An assassin. A phoenix. I've had too much time to think about those people. They're gone forever. Ended. No coming back for any of them. I took their lives in the line of duty. And now my duty... there's nothing left to justify Vega IV. If you had not killed them when you did, the invaders would have taken care of them later. Death shrugged within its cloak. Either way, it doesn't matter. Everything has to end, sooner or later. People's lives, causes, worlds. I alone am inevitable and eternal. Even for a phoenix, one who dies ten, a hundred times, there is no such thing as inevitable resurrection. The phoenix will rise nine or ninety-nine times. But never the tenth. Never the last. I got to my feet. The horizon was less than a dozen paces away. You don't have to go back, Death murmured. Atonement is as pitiful a delusion as guilt. Or duty. Do you ever lose patience? Have you ever felt... cheated? No one has ever cheated me. I walked away. Pausing at the edge of the universe, I said, over my shoulder, How boring it must be for you. And then, back to the inquisition table. Back to the Fates. Atropos, as before, was hovering in the background, just at the edge of my proscribed field of vision, shadowy, sinister, unspeaking still. Lachesis was moving about, checking various machines arranged in a close semi-circle about the head of the table. There was a snaky mass of wires and tubing clinging to my skull, a Medusa-crown connecting me to the machines. By cautiously flexing a muscle here, a muscle there, I discerned that the nerve-needle has been inserted -- there would be a last round of purely physical pain to soften me up for the piece de resistance , the psychpick. Use up the flesh first, Lachesis had said to Clotho. And Clotho? The Spinner stood waiting beside the table. Waiting gracelessly, it seemed to me. The velvet-gloved hands, drawn up against the breast like claws, could not be still. The fingers kept twining, writhing, as boneless as worms. I looked up at Clotho's smooth gleaming face in surprise and wonder. Perspiring and worried, perhaps, behind the metal mask? Trembling and nervous within the loose gray robes? Then Clotho glanced down at me, saw that I was awake again and forced himor herself to be still. "How can you let this be done to you?" the Spinner demanded, gesturing at the machines. I managed the grin weakly. "I don't appear to have any choice." "You can still save yourself. By telling the truth. Why are you on Earth? Who were you to meet? What was your plan?" I said nothing. Clotho leaned down into my face. "Don't you know what the nerve-needles can do? The psychpick? Spare yourself. Tell us everything about the separatist underground on Earth." Oh. So.    I centered the telescope-sight's crosshairs on the bridge of Paula Crist's fine nose, drew in a slow, deep breath and held it. Paula Crist, whom the Vegan colonial governor had publicly called "misguided" and, in private, "the single most dangerous woman on the planet," was a remarkably attractive person of sixty-one years, with alert eyes, high cheekbones, a sand-colored scalplock. She was engaged in conversation with none other than Brian Subotsky, over whose shoulder I aimed. Before I could pull the trigger, Paula Crist moved her head, seemed to look in my direction, to give me a droll smirk across a distance of a kilometer. I shifted the crosshairs a fraction of a degree, compensating for her movement, and blew her head off her shoulders. I set the last plate of food, the compote, on the table, placing it carefully between Paula Crist's forearms. She murmured thanks absently and smiled in response to a witticism from one of her three dinner companions. In the shadows, in the darkened corners of the dining room, were silent, glowering figures, the ever-present watchdogs who had committed themselves to the business of keeping Paula Crist from harm. I repressed a smile as I withdrew from the room, a flawless imitation of a waiter. From the corner of my eye, I saw Paula Crist take up a silver spoon and gesture with it elegantly. Then I was out of the room, moving briskly through the kitchen, to the alley behind the building. Paula Crist's metal utensil must have dipped into the compote as I was closing the door: there was a loud explosion, and the building itself trembled perceptibly. I was a refugee separatist poet and scholar of somewhat modest accomplishments, and I was being introduced to Paula Crist at a large party at Brian Subotsky's palatial house. Paula Crist and I shook hands in a perfunctory manner, mouthed a few banalities -- strangers being polite to each other. There was death in the faint film of perspiration on the palm of my hand. Paul Crist died, as did selected others among Brian Subotsky's guests, within a few days, of something which the cororner mistook for botulism. I was sitting before the control console of Terran Fleet Type I Deep-Ranger TF #, watching the cold gray eye of Polyphemus grow in the teleview, fantasizing Paula Crist's death, fitting her and other leading separatist figures into dead people's roles, the parts played by my past victims. Sterner, decapitated by a traser beam at one kilometer; the Boyds, blown up with a doctored dessert; Glendan Beutal and select accomplices, inI was twelve hundred kilometers out from Polyphemus, sailing along beautifully, taking my time. I had had twenty-one sleepless hours, and I felt great. There'd been briefings with Naomi Sizemore's people, a chem labs, where I adopted my invented-for-the-occasion persona, let myself be so completely absorbed by that new identity, that lie, that the real me couldn't be rooted out by psychpick or red-hot tongs. A whole complex plan had been conceived, worked out to the smallest possible detail, then set in motion in the space of a mere twenty one hours. It would have worked. I was a flawless, flawless imitation of a highly qualified Fleet officulled from the real thing, and I was the sole person aboard a fully equipped Fleet deep-ranger. Type I: full traser complement; booster ram and faster-than-light propulsion unit; a marvelously sophisticated piece of hardware. On its way to Polyphemus to relieve TF #, which had been locked in orbit around the moon ever since putting down the Slothrop mutiny. A routine changing of the guard. Only the word had been gotten out, with the Vegan Intelligence Network's customary circumspection, that TF #I 's crew of one might, just might... ah, well, what the more militant separatists could do with a deep-ranger, particularly if it should come complete with a highly qualified Fleet officer to operate it. An officer rumored to entertain certain small... doubts. It would have worked. It would have gotten me into the good graces of the separatists and, thence, close to my target -- not quickly, but soon enough. Everything would have worked out as planned. I would even have died convincingly, a traitor paying the price. Damn it, it would have worked! With characteristic unconcern for human affairs, the universe threw a curve. At exactly # hours, New Portland Time, #-#-#, TF #I 's shipcomm said, "Attention, all Fleet vessels. Condition Yellow. Cruiser Frampton reports sighting fifteen unidentified craft of superdreadnaught mass in Sector #, eight degrees above orbital plane, decelerating from light-velocity. Closing fast. Phase-in point unknown. Sector #, status go. Proceed to interception point, coordinates following on private channels. Sectors #, #, #, status ready. Sectors # through #, status alert, hold your positions." Followed by, "Sector # estimates time till initial interception four minutes, eight seconds." And then, slightly less than four and one-half minutes later, by, "All Fleet vessels, all sectors, Condition Red. TF #Q reports all other Fleet interceptors in Sector # destroyed. Sectors #, #, #, status go, intercept, coordinates following. Sectors # through #, status ready." Vega IV's secret war between the separatist underground and Terran Network Central's two intelligence sub-networks was at an end, unexpectedly, prematurely, inconclusively. Permanently. I didn't know it then, of course. I didn't think about it. All I did, all I could do, was sit uselessly in my ship, unable to accompany TF #I when it broke away from Polyphemus and sped off to enter the fray, unprepared to participate in space combat. I was no longer quite so flawless an imitation of the men and only for so much. I sat listening in disbelief to the reports coming in over shipcomm. The first fifteen vessels to pop into normal space out beyond the orbit of Vega V were halfway to IV, decelerating incredibly, at a rate which nothing living could have endured, when thirty identical ships showed up behind them, then sixty more, a hundred-twenty more, wave upon geometrically progressive wave of titanic warcraft, an unstoppable wedge plunging deep into the Vegan system. Berserkers from nowhere. Robot invaders, possibly, dispatched by some unknown, unsuspected alien race. Or -- equally possible -- a machine armada running out of control, creations which had outlived their creators and now moved through the galaxy. At random? In accordance with programs implanted millenia before, by beings long since extinct? The why of it wasn't the most important thing at the moment. The universe was capricious. The invasion armada was upon us. People were being killed. Shipcomm gave me a concise, inflectionless account of the armada's progress as it sliced into and through the Fleet. Sector I # ' s deep-rangers annihilated, one attacker reported crippled by concentrated traser fire. The cruiser Frampton destroyed by the second wave of incoming super-dreadnaughts, one attacker reported vaporized. Sector #'s deep-rangers destroyed. The Maas and Mexico, Terrahound ore freighters, were overtaken a scant ten gigameters out from Vega IV. They had been accelerating toward light-velocity, but they were still moving too slowly to kick in their f-t-I units when the invaders met them head-on. I turned to my controls at this point and punched began to angle downward from the orbital plane, removing itself from the armada's path. The casualty reports continued without interruption. Sector ll's deep-rangers, destroyed. The cruiser Lambert , crippled. Distress calls. Silence. Destroyed. Sectors # through #, cleared of Fleet vessels. The Vegan system, cleared of opposition. Then the first wave began to swarm across the face of Vega IV, screaming down the skies, punching New Portland into the ground. New San Angeles, New Prussia. Scouring the New Texas subcontinent. Shipcomm hissed and was silent. The gray eye of Polyphemus was starting to cloud over, a firestormshot cataract of smoke and dust raised by a patternless but devastating bombardment, when TF #'s booster ram sent a scream the length of the ship. I punched out Earth's coordinates and escaped into the underregion of Time and Space. Faced with a journey of more than twenty light-years' distance to Earth, I resolved to make the best of the two months, standard, during which I was to be out of phase with normal space. I had spent some time aboard orbiters above Vega IV But, before the aborted Polyphemus assignment, I had never had a mission take me off-planet. I had some trouble coping with protracted confinement aboard TF #. Type I deep-rangers had the same range capabilities as vessels of the freighter, cruiser and dreadnaught classes -- near-infinite, theoretically. Unfortunately, deep-rangers had never been fitted with interstellar hops in mind. So there was a sufficient store of food on TF #, plus other absolute necessities, but there was nothing to do. I had no tapes to play. I couldn't pass the hours staring out into abnormal space, because there was nothing at which to had degraded, I had no borrowed memories through which to sift. I exercised. I thought about the horror from nowhere, shattering the Vegan system, pointing out the insignificance of the loyalist-versws-separatist squabble. It had been a consummate invalidation of everything I had known, fought for, fought against. I slept a lot. I thought about the several men and women who had died by my hand, figuratively and, in Glendan Beutel's case, literally, and woke from dreams to find myself mumbling apologies to ghosts, I'm sorry,  killed you for nothing, I'm sorry... When I could no longer sleep, I used my training and forced myself to surrender consciousness. I wandered through my own lush interior landscape, a realm of mountains, rivers, woodlands, blue skies. The phoenix's place without pain, the private universe between consciousness and the funeral pyre. After a time, however, I realized that I was no longer alone. My old victims haunted the forest paths, aimlessly zombiewalking through the gloom. Strange vessels blackened the skies. There was a secret war in progress here, too. I caught glimpses of Naomi Sizemore, Paula Crist, variI had known or know of on Vega IV. Everybody was trying to kill everybody else; there was no reason or rhyme to any of it. Ultimately, I abandoned this newly cluttered realm to the ghosts. TF #I phased into normal space well outside the orbit of Earth and braked for hours, time I spent in the deceleration sling with my eyes glued to the teleview. Earth was a bluish smear of a world. It looked very much like Vega IV. I imagined the invasion armada descend ing upon it like locusts and mentally rehearsed my warning: We must be ready, an incomprehensible force is loose in the universe, we must be prepared to meet it, to turn it aside. A Home-Fleet cruiser called for identification. I responded with the necessary information, was given clearance and escorted by two Type G deep-rangers to an orbiter above Earth. When I had emerged from Decontamination, two Network Central officers took me to a debriefing room where, once again, I a quick explanation of my Fleet dress and vehicle, a breathless and -- at last, without warning, because the dam inside me had to give way at some point -- tearful account of the death of Vega IV. A glass filled with an amber-colored liquid was brought to me, and I gulped it between wracking sobs. My vision blurred; the drink was drugged. I thought I knew why. I looked up into the officers' sympathetic, compassionate faces. You are a brave and loyal person, the faces seemed to tell me, and you have been through a lot. Rest for a moment. Rest. I woke up on a table. Someone in a metal mask was peeling back my first fingernail. It was a consummate invalidation of everything...    Every nerve in my body sang its own song of agony. Lachesis was withdrawing the needles, wrenching them out of my flesh with angry jerks. The Unchangeable had not moved. I turned my eyes to Clotho's mask. The metallic features seemed to sag with fatigue. The Spinner's voice was hoarse. "We know for a fact that there is a strong separatist movement on Vega IV. We know for a fact that separatist agents have been infiltrat"Was," I croaked. "Were." Clotho ignored the interruption. "We know for a fact that separatist agents and sympathizers on Earth are trying to subvert the authority of Terran Network Central. Facts. The truth. No armada. There are no malign alien beings lurking just beyond the empire's boundaries. Armageddon never came to Vega IV. Do you take us for fools? This is your last chance ." # L  # # "What?" demanded the Spinner, the face close to mine. "Speak up! Tell us who, how, when. Tell us." "It's over," I said. "All of that. It's over. Doesn't matter now. Separatists. Loyalists. Not important. Armada changed all that. Changed everything." "We're going to use the psychpick on you now." I shut my eyes, afraid at last. Not of the psychpick. If I were under cover, the psychpick would tear apart my false persona, turn my brains into so much inert pudding, and I would expire in character, a interrogator no wiser than before. As things stood, I would just die. Without hope of resurrection, and in the knowledge that I had failed to convince my tormentors, failed to justify my own pain. To die that tenth time. That last time, for all time. It was, I realized abruptly, my only hope. "I don't have to submit to this," I said. Clotho drew back, obviously startled, and looked at Lachesis, who grunted and shrugged and said, "Crumbling. Never mind it, the pick will soil it out for us." "No." The word came out of my throat in a dry but emphatic huff of breath. "I can die any time I want. I could've died a long... long time ago. I don't have to be here. I can make myself die." Lachesis laughed softly. "The trance trick." Clotho nodded and clutched my jaw. Velvet fingers dug into my cheek. "You'll die soon enough, phoenix. Really die." "My way." "Go into your trance, then. It won't save you." "No trance," I hissed. "Death. Real death. I don't have to endure this. I don't have to let myself be hurt by you. I could have suicided at any time. I didn't... because I have to make you see that I'm telling you the truth." Lachesis threw a switch. Machinery hummed. The psychpick began to bore into my mind. "Listen to me," I begged, and then I made myself go down, like a stone dropped into the sea, falling from the light, falling into the blackness below, down to my place without pain. Suspended in the void, Death and the rock waited for me. Well, I said, taking my place upon the rock. It's all gone now, Death said unnecessaily. My work is almost done. Your private landscape, your causes, ghosts, guilt, all gone now. Meaningless. I tried, though. I tried. Maybe, finally, I succeeded. They will check their machine when it fails to produce any results. Then they'll examine me. No heartbeat, no brain waves. No sign of life. Not a trance, I told them, but death, real death. Maybe they'll believe then. About everything. It doesn't matter anymore. Yes, it does. The Earth is at stake. It has to be prepared in the event that the armada does come. Is that important? Death asked. Does Earth have any more significance than the causes you served on Vega IV? I want to believe in something. If not the value and importance of what I did, what we all did, on Vega IV, in the survival of Earth, then. But, still, it doesn't matter. Whether your suicide convinces them or not, you'll never know. You won't care. I shivered. It was cold in the darkness . What will you do now? Death's voice was low and soothing, the voice of a child trying to coax a shy pet into an embrace. Build my funeral pyre upon this rock, I answered, turning to my companion. Death held out its hand. I started to take it, paused and said, A question. Yes? When everything ceases to be, when your work is done... what will you do? Death smiled but made no reply. Our fingertips touched, hands clutched, arms entwined. I was drawn forward and pressed against a bosom softer, more yielding, than a bed of the finest powdery dust. Flames licked up through the void, cold, cold, terribly cold fire engulfing the phoenix. I started to cry out, enough. I sucked in air. It was painful. It surprised me. Above me, a single mask, serene and sexless. Its golden eyes regarded me intently. I had trouble returning the gaze. My own eyes kept wandering to the light fixture on the ceiling. It seemed wrong. Different. Different cei ling. Different room. After a while, I managed to concentrate on the mask. My tongue felt numb when I spoke. "Which... one?" "I don't understand," said the Fate. "Which one are... you? Clotho? Lachesis? A-Atropos? You're... Atropos." "Who is Atropos?" "Unchangeable. Severer. Of the thread. Of life. The one who stood..." My hand fluttered weakly, stiffly, the joints making known their resentment. "Back there. In the back." "Yes." The Fate nodded. "That was me." "I... " A sob bubbled in the back of my throat, tears filled my eyes. "You can't do... I'm supposed to be dead , I had to die. You can't bring me back. I had to die. Have to be dead. My only hope of making you believe." "You were dead," Atropos said mildly. "Dolgener and Lette, Clotho and Lachesis, if you prefer, They don't have an especially clear But when they discovered that you really had killed yourself, they believed. "They believed..." The Unchangeable lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Not completely, of course. Enough. Various ships are en route to Vega now, including a Fleet dreadnaught which is due to phase in there in six days, standard. It will take another two months for reports to get back to Earth. If there's anything to report. Dolgener and Lette are anxious to find out." "But they believed me." "They think you may have told them the truth, before you died. They'll be waiting for those reports." A needle slid into the hollow of my arm. It stung. "If it turns out that your deus ex machina armada has indeed passed through the Vegan system and so forth" -- a sardonic note crept into Atropos' voice; I didn't like it -- "Network Central will then take the necessary steps, prepare Earth's defenses. And so forth." "It has to be done now," I said, weakly vehement. "The ships could start showing up at any moment. Today. They could be on their way here now." "Or heading the other way. It doesn't matter. Don't excite yourself." Another injection. "You're in bad shape." "But you can't take the chance!" "You took one." I started to protest further, but something else, something important, occurred to me. "You... you brought me back." "Obviously." "How? Why?" "The usual way." "But why? Who are you?" Atropos gave me yet another injection. "Go to sleep." "Who are you?" I raised a hand, thinking of snatching off Atropos' mask. Rather: I tried to raise a hand. There was a numbness stealing through my body, cool, healing currents swirling about inside my skull. My eyelids drooped. I couldn't keep them up. My voice sounded dreamy and faraway. "You don't... believe me." Going, going... There was sunlight coming through the window when I opened my eyes. The strange but pleasant scent of Terran flowers was in my nostrils. The ceiling changed color, darkening from stark white to a friendly pastel green, the color flowing down the walls. The room said, "Good day. Have you slept well?" I didn't respond. I lay blinking, turning my head from side to side as much as I could, trying to determine where I might be. In a bedroom, obviously, with one wide window opening onto a terrace. Over the terrace's stone railing, I could see the ghostly purple teeth of a distant mountain range. I wanted to sit up in bed and get a better view. My body twitched but did not obey. There was a warm tingly sensation which I recalled having experienced once before, in a regeneration clinic on Vega IV. "Where am I?" I asked the room. "What date?" The room said nothing. A door swung inward from the wall opposite the foot of my bed, and a slim gray-haired man entered. He came over to me and gave me a warm smile. "Good day." He had a blandly sincere voice. "Believe it or not, we're actually going to get to look at each other on an eye-to-eye level one of these days. You're healing nicely." "How long since..." "The table? Two weeks, three days." "So there's no word about Vega yet. The man laughed. "No, we're all fearfully awaiting the speedy return of the dreadnaught Knox. Bearing dire tidings of the total destruction of the colony." "Atropos." I said. "You're Atropos." He raised a shoulder; that halfshrug again. "And you're the phoenix who wanted to know why I brought you back. I'm very sorry about that. Not about bringing you back, of course. For letting you end up on the table. We tried to prevent it, but Home-Fleet was howling for better explanations, and Network Central always listens to HomeFleet first. Whoever planned that deep-ranger business is insane. Owing to the nature of my affiliaand watch as you were taken apart." "Who are you, Atropos?" "An officer of the Terran Intelligence Network, of course. And -- " he grinned broadly; I could no longer think of this man as Atropos, the Unchangeable, not without his mask and robes and silence " -- an agent of the Vegan Intelligence Network. How else would I have known what to do in order to bring you back?" I opened my mouth to speak, but there was nothing I could think of to say except,  don't understand. The question must have been an obvious one. after all. Which means getting as many of our people into positions of Central. We've done a pretty good job, too. The phoenix thing, for indoesn't believe in it officially. Which is why trainees aren't taught the fine art of dying." Another laugh. "More of our handiwork. about. Perhaps now you can undersuch vicious paranoiacs." "Why?" The man blinked. "What do you mean?" "Why are we -- are you doing this?" He frowned and leaned slightly forward at the waist. "I think it's time, well past time, that you explained this peculiar mission of yours. Why did they send you to Earth?" "The armada." "The what?" There was a faint spray of spittle. "Are you joking?" "What's going on here?" I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. "What are you doing on Earth? Working against the separatists, unto accomplish ?" His cheeks started to mottle, my voice started going up the scale. "Just what the hell kind of mess did I walk into? Whose side are you on? How God-damned many sides are there?" I was screaming now. I couldn't rise from the bed, I couldn't move any part of my body below the neck, but I was driving him away from the bed, toward the door, with my shrieks. "What difference does any of it make? Why aren't you getting ready slammed behind him. The ceiling and walls dappled and became a somber blue. Oh God. Oh God. Calling upon an ancient force reputed to have been as terrible and implacable as the invasion armada. Oh Yahweh, Zeus, Wodin. Drawing upon my life-long fascination with the ancient mythologies for Furies, harpies, basilisk, kraken. Fall upon the phoenix, tear it, savage it, kill it and grind its flesh to meal, its bones to powder, and keep these far from the fire. Revoke my pass into the land of the living. Take me away from this place of pain.    Later, lying in bed under a warm yellow ceiling, looking out the window at the distant mountains, my fury spent, I consoled myself with the knowledge that the report on Vega IV, when it came, would have much the same effect on these Terran intrigues as the sudden appearance of the armada had had on Vegan domestic problems. Six weeks to wait out, then, for surely the first vessels to reach the devastated colony were already coming back. Six weeks. During which, of course, the one or another section of Terran Network Central, could learn that I was alive again and root me out, or the separatists on Earth could take an interest in me. Or, no more or less likely a possibility: the berserkers from nowhere could come hurtling through the solar system, brushing aside the unready Fleet like birds in a hurricane, reducing another world to ashes, underscoring again, for some chance observer other than myself, the essential meagreness of all human endeavor. Deus ex machina . The god popping out of his box in an ancient drama to do as he pleased with the human characters on stage. Anything could happen in six weeks. If worse came to worst, I knew, I had a place in mind where I could sit on a nice rock and talk things over with an old friend.  Best we ever make Biggest bargain in galaxy now in your hands! Get # full months of the finest science fiction writing at a special low introductory rate. Less than # #th of a solar credit -- just # U.S. Earth money with the coupon below brings you mind-expanding ideas and far-out authors alive today! Plus the unusual free gift described below to let you project the future for years and years from now. Just attach your check or money order to coupon and mail it to us to start your subscription and receive your gift. (Please allow #-# weeks for delivery.) This time-computer dial lets you look backward and forward in time! Were you born on a Tuesday? What day will your birthday fall on in #? Will Christmas be on a weekend in the year #? You'll have the answers at your fingertips with this perpetual calendar! Mail the coupon at right with your remittance today. this 'Z #  #  #  coupon to take advantage of this special subscription  gift offer from Name: Street: City: State: Zip: Mail With Remittance To.# Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, New York # science vi.' I .-# Jerry Pournelle , PhD One oe my urst assignments in the space business was to work on the Boeing proposal for DynaSoar -- a reusable aerospace plane that could go to orbit and return. DynaSoar and the other spaceplanes never got funded, and instead Congress separated military from civilian space systems, put space tegrating totem poles that returned about # c c of the structural weight launched. The totem poles worked. Magnificently. They were admirable for space exploration; but it was always obvious that they'd never do for space exploitation. Now, after # years of waiting, I've seen the ship we wanted to build back in the late #'s. On Friday, # September, #, we watched the roll-out of the first real space ship. The Enterprise was the star of a show we'd waited for for some considerable time. One chap standing next to me said something to the effect that she was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen; I managed real self-restraint and said only that it depended on your viewpoint. I suppose that aesthetically the Shuttle is a bit ungainly. Her wings are stubby, she's covered over with tiles, and she's built something like a Mack truck. In the same sense you might say that the Army #-by is ugly: it depends on what you want to do with it. If the politicians don't kill her before she flies -- Fritz Mondale is on record as wanting the Shuttle program cancelled -- September #, also the anniversary of John Glen's first flight, could be an important day in man's history. The Enterprise and her sister ships will make space operations routine and give all of us access to space. The rollout was a low-key event, and it was significant that only certain people were there. The Goldwaters, Senator and Congressman, of course; Olin Teague, our champion in the House of Representatives; Senator Tunney; a host try officials; the Star Trek bridge who was off on location) and Gene Roddenberry; my own party, Larry Niven and myself, Poul and Karen Anderson, and Bjo Trimble; the more dedicated of the science press corps, although far fewer than I'd have expected. Even more significant may have been those not there: the Governor of California, nor any representative of the "consumer" or "ecology" movements. Now true: rollouts are not really such significant events, and since the rise of so-called "economy" no longer throw the truly elegant roll-out parties that were once traditional. There weren't many science fiction writers simply because few days before rollout was scheduled I realized none of us had received invitations, I called North American Rockwell's Earl Blount and got things set up for Larry and the Andersons, and suggested Rockwell invite Mrs. Trimble on the theory that anyone who can get a ship's name changed probably ought to get to watch it roll out; but ence fiction writers wouldn't be interested in seeing what they've been writing about come to pass, or (#) we aren't important enough to be asked. I'm sure, though, that Governor Brown knew about the Shuttle, and it seems significant that not one representative of the "Appropriate Technology" movement of which he is a major spokesman bothered to show up. In fact, given Fritz Mondale's determined opposition to the Shuttle, it's downright frightening. We're so close. If it survives the political onslaught, the Shuttle will put # pounds in near-Earth orbit for a cost of between # and spread has to do with accounting: how much of the RD cost must be charged to each mission? The marginal cost -- that is, the out-ofpocket cost -- of each mission is just that can probably be reduced. At the moment the turn-around time from re-entry to next mission is planned at # hours; but a great deal of that is checkout and elaborate tests, and if the ships fly as well as we think they will, it can be cut. The Shuttle is to the disintegrating totem poles as the DC-# was to the Spirit of St. Louis. The first Shuttle was supposed to have been named Constitution , and in fact that name had already been painted on when, in an election year, the Star Trek fans generated some # letters and got it changed to Enterprise: but a good case can be made that the most appropriate name would have been "Gooney Bird." The old DC-#, the Goon, Methuselah with Wings, instantly turned flying from a stunt to a profitable business; and it's likely the Shuttle will do the same for space. In fact, there's talk of a "newspeople mission" in the early #'s. I wonder who'll go: those few of us who have, year after year, plugged for space exploration, or the sudden enthusiasts who show up only when there's a big specformance, I think I know -- they haven't been notable for saving spots in the press stands for science fiction people. You'd think there'd be some gratitude for those who've spent their lives keeping up interest in space and haven't forgotten its importance during the dry years when there are no spectaculars. I'd like to stake my own claim to a seat. Chances are that at least one of the people who will in future have the responsibility for making up that passenger list is right now a Galaxy reader. Keep me in mind, will you? The Shuttle is the first true spaceship. It wasn't designed to do any particular thing: it merely carries people and equipment to space. The important thing is that it gives space access to nearly anything and anyone who has business there. It can be used to capture and repair old satellites, take up whole strings of new ones -- or build a real space stanever was. Now there's a move on the part of the L-# Society and other groups to "rescue" the abandoned The first orbital shuttle flights don't happen until just about the deadline and some tricky work would be involved. It might not be worth the effort. True, there is some usable equip"house in space" was never designed to be reusable. There are no oxygen and water tanks. The ship was put together from old Apollo parts after Congress decided not to continue the Apollo follow-on proan administrator's than an engineer's triumph, in that it was conceived and carried out as a plan to diddle Congress out of funds that wouldn't otherwise have been forthcoming. ("You don't want to waste all that equipment, do you? When for a little more we can...") Now very clever design could probably make use of the poor old bird again by sending up tools and space riggers for rebuilding it; but, sad to say, it would probably be cheaper to build a true space station from scratch. Welding tankage valves, repairing the guidance and control system -- these had already four crew left -- is hard work in space. It takes a long time, and some of that would have to be done before the tumbling laboratory could be kicked up to a higher orbit.    And having said all that, I wish they'd try. Call it sentiment, or the "Waste not, want not" philosophy of many of us from back in the days when we pirated space research from other programs; but it seems a shame that a vehicle that once supported three men for # days can't be used for something. There will come a time when that hardware would be very useful. There's about # pounds of comes to # Shuttle flights just to get the equivalent mass upstairs: without mentioning the replacement cost, Earthside, of the gear. cular orbit some # kilometers above the Earth. By the time of the first Shuttle Bights it will be down to # kilometers or so. The cost of boosting it back up into a stable orbit, say # kilometers, is in the order of .# kilometerssecond velocity change. If we use a rather dumb chemical rocket for the job, we can accomplish the task with about # pounds of fuel; add another # pounds of structure for the dumb rocket, and add # pounds of guidance equipment (no point in being subtle about it); we'll still have # pounds left over from a Shuttle payload, more than enough to store consumables aboard and other gear, fill her with new instruments and film... Couldn't three astronauts trained strongly bet they could for a total and that includes equipment built the Shuttle flight, and crew training costs to boot. Out of that we'd get an immediately habitable space lab. Not a true space station, true, but one heck of a useful space platform that could house an experimental crew, serve as living quarters for scientists with mission plans calling for extended stay in space, and even as an emergency shelter -- not to mention being living quarters for the construction gang when we do decide to build a real space station. Rescuing the old girl would be a risky mission, and I've made it seem a bit simple here. Actually, the astronauts would have to rendezvous with the tumbling that would let them stabilize it; winch over the booster rocket and emergency guidance system; fire this mess at the right time; and, when the proper altitude was direction and fire off another rocket (or relight the one they used for new orbit injection). Once that was done, the work of refurbishing could start.    Ever since I began this column Eve had letters asking for an intermediate lesson in orbital mechanics: how do you find out the velocity changes needed to get from Earth to orbit, or from orbit to orbit? How can you tell what mass ratios are needed? How the devil (someone is saying right now) did you get those I haven't done it because it's not really appropriate for this column; textbook on what's known. Every month there's another book published on space and space travel, and, I've said to myself, surely one of those is going to do my job for me; I'll only have to give the reference. After nearly three years I give up. In all those books there's not one -- at least not one that I know of -- that conveniently gives the basic math needed to let a calculator-possessing intelligent citizen go through an elementary mission analysis; and that's criminal. Th e calculations are not that esoteric. Some of the numbers are messy, but a decent pocket computer will handle messy numbers as easily as simple ones. Thus, I'm about to sneak in some basic spacemath. For those of you who can't stand equations, don't go away; I'll come other space missions before I'm done. The best measure of mission cost is velocity change, called "deltavee" and often written A v. ("Delta" here stands for the expression "a change in.") Delta-v is useful because it doesn't much matter when or how you use it: a ship has so much velocity-change capability, and whether the pilot uses it all at once, or in little bits and spurts, the total remains the same. Of equal importance, missions can be planned around delta-v requirements, and those can be calculated right here on the ground. Thus the two most important calculations in space mission planning are, how much delta-v will the job take, and how much has my ship got? Given those numbers, you're in the right ballpark; add a safety factor and you've got a good handle on mission costs. We've been through the equations for the ship delta-v, but it's convenient to introduce the subject by going through them again; besides, not all of you have been reading this column from the beginning. The basic equation in rocketry is: Delta-v  (v e )ln( -- ) (equation one) m v  where delta-v is the total velocity change, v e is the velocity of the exhaust gas coming out the back end of the rocket ship (assuming you're directing the gas straight backwards, which you'll try very hard to do), and the next expression is the natural log of the ratio of the mass before you started the mission (m # ) and the mass you have left when you achieve your final velocity (m v ). Most scientific calculators have an "Ln" button. Now what good does that do you? Quite a lot, actually. It's not hard to find the exhaust velocities of various kinds of ships. First we need another equation. v e  I Sp x g (equation two) where I sp is specific impulse, a measure of fuelsystem efficiency (it is usually measured in pounds of thrustpound fuelsecond, cancelling into "seconds"; but don't confuse I sp with a time , because it's not). The g in that equation is the surface gravity of Earth, # centimers second # ; but the equation works anywhere in the universe. I sp will gradually be phased out now that missions get completely free of Earth's gravity field, but it's still a conveniently acquired measure -- it can be taken directly from a tethered engine on a test stand right here on Earth. I sp for various fuels and other drive systems are given in Table One. Sometimes it's convenient to transform equation one so that we can find the mass ratio given the required delta-v; m Q   delta-v m v "  v e e (oli) (equalion three  where the terms are as defined before. To get e to some power on my calculator you punch "Inverse" and "In." The quantity e  # is a constant that pops up in many strange places. With those three equations and some work you can find out nearly everything you need to know about space missions. Obviously the fuel weight you need, m f U ei  m o m v (equation four) is simple enough to discover. I'll give one more equation just to be complete, but most of you will never need it. The Thrust, (T) of the system depends on the rate of mass loss (the faster you burn it, the more the thrust): T  m   x v e (equation five) and the only new term here is time, t. Note well: in the footpound system, thrust is expressed in Ya "pounds" and sounds like a weight; it isn't, it's a force, such that one pound of thrust will support one pound of weight in a one gravity field; don't get confused. Alternatively, a pound of thrust will accelerate one pound of mass at one g if the mass starts in orbit. Having done with the ship delta-v calculations, we'll move on to mission requirements. For those still confused, don't despair: I'll work out a couple of examples for you after we've finished with all the equations. mechanics is that you're orbiting something, and by definition that something has mass; it generates a gravity field. Thus we have to start with the mass of the central object. From that we can find the acceleration that an object would experience at some distance from our central mass, a  GM (equation six) where a is the acceleration, M is the mass of the central object, r is the distance of object from center of the attracting mass, and G is the universal constant of gravitation. Since I grew up with centimeters, grams, and seconds, I'll use those units here and convert to other units when convenient; and in the cgs system, G  # x #" # . Actually, we almost never bother with GM in orbital equations because they're always together; instead we define K  GM (equation seven) and recall that while G doesn't change, M and K will: K isn't the same when calculating flights from Earth to Mars as it is in figuring out Earth orbit missions. Now the most efficient and simplest orbit is circular, and the velocity of a satellite is    The basic factor in orbital v c (equation eight) Fuel or Propulsion System l sp (Seconds) Hydrogen peroxide (monopropellant) # Hydrogen peroxide and JP-# (kerosene) # Hydrazine and fuming nitric acid # Potassium perchlorate and asphalt (solid) # Magnesium metal and oxidant (solid) # Military solid fuels #  Best chemical (theoretical) # Gasseous Fission System (theoretical) # Boron Fusion (theoretical # lon propulsion # Height above Earth Velocity needed to Orbital (y c ) (km) reach orbit Velocity of satellite (ve) (Kmsec) (v c ) (Kmsec) # #I #I # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # but it's sometimes convenient (especially if you have a calculator with addressable memories) to define r as the radius of our central body (Earth, say) and y t . as the height of our satellites above Earth; then we get v c  l#  (equation nine). y ( r oo  y c ) If you plug numbers into those equations (for those who don't have Dole's Habitable Planets for Man or some other convenient data source, Earth masses # x # # grams and has a radius of #I x #" centimeters, giving K earth  # x # # ) you'll find that the farther out from Earth you go, the slower your ship is moving: which ought to be obvious, if you think about it. Yet we know that it takes more delta-v to get to a high orbit than to a low one. That one is a bit messier. What we have to find is the "energy velocity," V E , for the orbit we want; that's also our theoretical delta-v. In the real world where there's air resistance and our ships can't fly exactly on the paths we want, it takes a bit more; that's where we plug in safety factors. The equation for the theoretical delta-v is, which looks messy but is actually easy enough to calculate. Using my programmable SR-# I've run off a few numbers for you in Table Two. So far so good, but how do we find out what it takes to get from one orbit to another? Well, we could take the difference between the velocities we get from running equation ten for the two orbit altitudes; but that gives us something so theoretical it's useless. Better to think how we can get from one orbit to another. Consider Figure One. We have a low parking orbit, and we want to get to a in the lowest one and we want to knock it up much higher. First we boost like mad at the point marked r p , which will shove our rocket into an elliptical orbit; if we've chosen our thrust correctly the top of the ellipse, known as apo-apsis or r A ,will just touch the altitude we'd like to have for a new circular orbit. A word about those symbols: r P stands for "radius of peri-apsis," or the distance at which we're closest to the times use "perigee" and "apogee" furthest distance. Older books sometimes use "perigee" and apogee" for closest and furthest from Earth; perhelion and apohelion for closest and furthest from the Sun; periastron and apoastron where astron means star. The main thing to remember is "a" for "away from." Now we've kicked our rocket into an elliptical orbit that gets out to the right distance, but unfortunately as soon as it gets there it tries to fall right back down again; it's going to stay in an elliptical orbit until we do something about it. What we do is give it a kick in the apogee; when we've got to the maximum altitude, we light off our rocket again to increase the velocity to that required for a circular orbit at the given altitude. You can calculate the required velocity from equation nine, stuffing r A in as r c ; you can find out what velocity you started with down in the parking orbit, also from equation nine, this time using r P . We don't have our required delta-v for the mission yet, but we've made a pretty good start on it. Alas, the next step is the messiest one. It isn't hard; just simple algebra, plugging the numbers into the equation; but it looks simply awful. What we need are two velocities, v P which is the velocity at peri-apsis, and v A , the velocity at apo-apsis, for a given elliptical orbit. (equation eleven) where v P is the path velocity of the rocket at periapsis, r P is the distance from the center of the central mass, and n is the ratio of the two distances, yi n  -- (equation twelve). r p (equation thirteen) so that wasn't so bad. It should be obvious that v P  v A x n and I won't even bother to number that one. We are now ready to do the an orbit # km above Earth. A kilometer, by the way, is # # centimeters. I start off using equation nine, adding the orbit height to the Earth's radius, dividing that into K, and taking the square root to come out with # kmsecond, the speed ling when we reach her. We want to kick her up to # km., so I use equation nine to find that we'll eventually be going # kmsec. Now I use equation eleven and find V P for my transfer ellipse is # kmsecond; subtracting out the # I'm already moving I find I have to kick it .# kmsec to get the required velocity to put it into elliptical orbit that reaches # km. Using equation thirteen I find that when I get to my # km altitude I'll be moving # kmsec, while I want to be going #; thus I've got to kick it in the apogee with .#I kmsecond. My two velocity changes can be added together to get the total mission delta-v, which is .# kmsec. Since nothing ever goes exactly right, I round upward to .# kmsec as required delta-v and go looking for something to do it with. RP-I and liquid oxygen in vacuum) give a specific impulse of #, which is what I used in my calculations; plug that into equation three, and out comes a mass ratio of #, and .# times the # lb mass of of fuel needed for the rescue mission. I should now do some refinements, adding the # pounds of structure and # pounds of guidance to the # lbs of want to take up a liquid rocket with the pumps and liquified oxygen and attendent problems, or drop my I sp down to maybe # and use a solid. It doesn't matter, because I can still rescue with one Shuttle payload, and I'm not trying for more accurate results. Obviously these equations will work for deep-space missions as well as Earth orbit. To use them for, say. Earth to Mars, you do exactly what we did here: assume Earth and Mars are in circular orbits around the Sun; plug in the solar mass (#I x # # grams) to calculate K; get your Earth and Mars distances in centimeters; and go. However, you have one advantage if you begin in Earth orbit: you can subtract out the ship's orbital velocity relative to Earth from the required injection delta-v. Remember that you're calculating everything relative to the Sun except for that: when you find the initial velocity of your satellite it's the Earth' s orbital velocity (# kmsecond) that you start with (plus the ship's velocity around Earth) and Mars's orbital velocity that you've got to end up with. Mars will help you catch up if all you want to do is get into Mars orbit; I'll leave that for you to calculate. One more equation and we're done. We need to find out how long the mission takes. That's not too important for near-Earth operations, but for Earth-Mars or Earth-Ceres runs it can be critical. T   (equation fourteen) where T is the period of our elliptical (or circular, for that matter) orbit, and a is the semi-major axis of the ellipse. All that means is the distance from the center of the ellipse to the point farthest away from it, which you find by a  (equation fifteen). In the units we're working with the time will come out in seconds: divide by # to get the mission Bight time since we're only flying half the ellipse. Incidentally, what we're calculating here are the famous Hohmann Transfer Orbits mentioned so prominently in Willy Ley's books on rocketry and space travel, and the equations I've given you are the very ones that Hohmann used some fifty years ago. You can't fly a Hohmann ellipse just any time you want to: you've got to wait until the geometry's right. Specifically, you have to leave at a time such that when you arrive, your target will be exactly opposite the point you started from. Hohmann orbits are the minimum delta-v flight paths; there are other ways to get from one planet to another if you're in a hurry. They cost more fuel (delta-v requirements go up) and their energy requirements are hairier to work with. I'd give you the equations except that I know Jim Baen is already gnashing his teeth, the printer is saying potent words of evil magic directed at this yo-yo who makes him set all this in type (and sir, I do appreciate the work!), and at least one of my readers has sworn to commit suicide if I give one more equation. And yet. Having made the customary apology for working my readers a bit, I wonder if I should? Doggone it, none of this is all that hard, and we do live in an age of space travel; surely it's worthwhile to know the bare minimum about space operations? Must everything be left to experts? Surely science fiction readers can stand some intermediate math? Anyway, I've given you the basic tools, and pocket computers that can handle logs and exponential notation cost around #: with this introduction those interested can go to more advanced works. The trouble is that most books insist on using vector notation and calculus, and while I agree those tools make it all simpler if you know them, you'd think somebody would let out the secret that ordinary algebra will do the job close enough. Have fun. Unfortunately I've run out of space and we still haven't rescued we? I just don't know. The numbers say we can do it at reasonable costs -- about one Shuttle mission, plus the ground engineering, crew training, and some hardware to carry up. The only really complex part of the mission is stabilizing the tumbling, and you can't very well dock with a tumbling object. There's where man-in-space gets valuable. I see no real reason why it can't be done this way. take station not too far away. An suit uses a reaction pistol to get hold. It's easy to calculate the centrifugal forces he'll experience (no Jim, I won't do it to you: let them look in a high school physics book) and they're not excessive. If he carries a line and a winch he could haul a package containing a small rocket and some computer equipment over, bolt that onto the tumbling spacecraft, and let fly; it wouldn't take a lot of reaction force to stabilize the ship. Once she's stable, winch over the booster package and attach; there's a docking port already. Could we do it? Of course. Will we? Probably not. It's a dangerous mission. But surely we've no shortage of courage among the astronaut corps? No. For that matter, I'd wager reasonable sums I could get # qualified volunteers from among Galaxy readers who'd do it for room and board and the chance to get into space. The question is, do the politicians who control the purse strings have the courage to try it? Or the administrators who control the Shuttle missions have the courage to ask ? And I fear I know the answer to that already. It's a pity. It would make a darned good science fiction story, and one that could so very easily come true; but those things don't happen in the real world. Star Trek fans managed to rename the Enterprise , but all that took was a bucket another beast of a different hue. Oh well. At least I've seen the Enterprise roll out, and I don't think there was a dry eye in Palmdale that marvelous September morning. Stubby wings or not -- she's beautiful .  I. Title of publication: Galaxy Incorporating Worlds of IF. #. Date of filing: Oct. I , #. #. Frequency of issue: Monthly. #A. No. of issues published annually: #. #B Annual subscription price: #. #. Location of known office of publication: # E. #th St., New York, N.Y. #. #. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers: # E. #th St., New York, N.Y. #. #. Names and complete addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher, Arnold E. Abramson, # E. #th St., New York, N.Y. #; Editor, James Baen, # E. #th St., New York, N.Y. #: Managing Editor, None. #. Owner (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not ownea by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual must be given.) Arnold E. Abramson, # E. #th St., N.Y., N.Y. #; Robert J. Abramson, # E. #th St., N.Y., N.Y. #; Peter J. Abramson, # E. #th St., N.Y., N.Y. #; Allen  Co., Inc., # Broad St., N.Y., N.Y. #; Cede  Co., P.O. Box #, Bowling Green Sta., N.Y. #. #. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. #. 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But now we need to know more about you to continue to bring you the type of fiction -- and, incidentally, advertisements -- that will interest you. Please fill in the following in as much detail as you can; your time will be well spent and most appreciated. #. Male Female #. Age #. Student: High School College #. College graduate Degrees #. Income: Under # #-# #-# #-# Over # #. Profession #. Own Home Rent: House Apartment #. What magazines, other than science fiction, do you read regularly? #. Do you travel? Business Pleasure Europe Other #. Moans of travel: Plane Auto Train Bus Other... #. Do your own: Boat Est. value Automobile Est. value Hi-Fi equipment Est. value Home Workshop Est. value CamperMotor Hom Est. Value Camera equipment Est. value Motorcycle Est. value Snowmobile Est. value #. Interest: Skiing Fishing Swimming Hunting Golfing Tennis Bowling Camping Flying Boating Gardening Home repairs Photography Stamp collecting Coin collecting Other #. Affllatlons: Fraternal Professional Athletic Social Scientific Other #. Are you a member of: Book Club Record club Other Red Cross Political club #. Investments: Stocks Bonds Real Estate Thank you for taking the time to respond to our questionnaire. Please send your completed form to: # East # Street New York, NY # She seemed suspended in a sea of sound, calliope music and trumpeting barkers, human shrieking and mechanical screeching. Ahead peopled buckets twisted and tumbled about gigantic steel supports. A thrilltaxi dashed from the whirlpool, jousting with space. "Ev-ry-bod-dy wins." A fat man sat in a trailer cradling a microphone in his hands, his gold-painted fingertips glistening in the sunlight. "Play 'til ya win." Air rifles pointed toward targets and treasures displayed behind him. "Try your luck?" Windy backed away, away from her mother's trophy case where metals and plaques symbolic of the greatest prizes a scientist could hope to win shared eminence with the loving cups of a master bridge player. She turned and ran. Ghosts of light danced in a suggestion screen. Serpents of the Medusa test frolicked in air. A rocket soared upward. She tripped over a power cable, the umbilical of a ferris wheel, and fell sprawling. From where she lay, a path, beads of wet dust, drew her eyes to a stained paper cup covered with ants. A long shadow drifted over it. "Are you all right?" Blushing she struggled to her feet and held out her hands, examining them. A white handkerchief began sponging at the dirt and blood. She looked up at the young man before her and frowned. "You're one of Mother's students, aren't you?" "I was. Well, actually I still am, in a way. I finished my dissertation in May, but she's letting me stay on to complete some experiments before I move on to Cal Tech." He examined the scratches. "We need soap and water." "Forget it." She pulled free. Blowing on her palms as if to cool the sting, she walked away. It took him two long strides to catch up with her. "You shouldn't have come here alone," he said as he stuffed his handkerchief into his pocket. "Why?" "Over there." He thumbed toward a man bobbing a toothpick on his lips. He was leaning against a pitch-penny booth and his lazy eyes were fixed on her. "He's been following you." "How do you know?" She stopped to confront him. "Have you been following me too?" "Yes," he admitted with a shrug. "I thought I recognized you, but you've changed a lot since you stopped coming to the lab. How long has it been?" "A couple of years, I suppose. Say, did my mother put you up to this?" "No, I just happen to like carnivals, that's all. Want to take a ride through the egomaze?" She shook her head. "Do you suppose Mother has hired him to follow me?" "I doubt it. He looks like he's out for a pickup and has you spotted. You've grown into quite an attractive young woman, you know." "Sure." Looking past him she watched an old man at a refreshment stand bathe his index finger in the acetate wash beside a computerregister. "Anyway, why would your mother want you tailed?" "Let's just say that she doesn't approve of my being here either. I'm thirsty. I could use a coke." "My treat," he said grinning, pleased with himself that he had enough credit to share with her. Most guys ate up their rations and complained of being starved by the government, but he would never interrupt an experiment just to eat. Windy gazed at his receding back for a moment, then stepped in front of a trio of boys dressed in band uniforms. She led the small parade down the midway, executing a column right at a cabless semi, halting at the computer terminal.    Hesitating, she studied the scratches on her hands. A moment later she turned her head to one side, away from the vinegary odor, and put her index finger in the swirling wash. A flip of her hand removed the excess solution. She placed her finger in the groove on the faceplate and waited while the carnivorous register took its microscopic bite of half-dead skin. With a wink and a nod the barker signaled that her credit had been approved. Without looking back she stepped up into the trailer, ducking behind a burlap curtain. There were only a few spectators. She followed their clockwise procession, by-passing the six-legged goat. Ape Woman was taking a siesta in her cave, her silky hair combed into waves about her bikini. Windy chuckled as she recalled a hairless chimpanzee she had seen once. He had resembled a man about as much as this woman, with her aquiline nose and full lips, did an ape. The sightseers were watching Rubber Man's self-sculptures. Windy circled around them. She called into the next stall. A grotesque face turned toward her, its button eyes brightening. "Haw," Elephant Woman said. "How are you?" "Fon," she trumpeted. "Maw back's moosh bottor." "I'm glad." Hesitating, Windy glanced at the pretzel shape of Rubber Man, then asked, "Would it offend you if I told you what you remind me of?" Elephant Woman frowned, producing thick folds in her brow, then nodded her head, nose flapping. "It's a strange association really," Windy said bracing her arms on the railing that kept the freaks out of reach. She leaned into the jungle. "But you remind me of Capuchin. Capuchin was a cocker spaniel." The frown disappeared from Elephant Woman's face and Windy was encouraged to go on, "He had huge paws, small pointed ears, and the most beautiful, sad brown eyes, and he was sort of accident prone. You see, Capuchin had a prehensile tail, the kind some New World monkeys have. "I'll never forget the time we were leaving for the Duplicate Club. It was raining, so Mother had called a cab. To appreciate this you have to know my mother. She looks exactly like I do, only older,' more sophisticated." Windy straightened, imitating her mother's haughty demeanor. "Well, we were on our way to the cab when I decided I needed a raincoat. The umbrella just wasn't large enough for both of us. I ran back to the house, swung the door open, and Capuchin dashed out between my legs. I don't know how I managed to escape, but my mother wasn't as lucky. Capuchin charged past her, his tail catching her ankle as he went by. It was a classic pratfall, right into a mud puddle. The look on her face," Windy giggled, "I'll never forget it." Elephant Woman laughed as much at Windy as at her story. It sounded like a pig oinking. "You had to see it to appreciate it." "I'll bit." Windy turned toward the source of the new voice. Seal Man had stretched his neck around the parti tion that separated his rocky ledge from the rubber tree jungle. " Buon giorno, Mr. Anatoli," Windy said, losing her smile. " Buon giorno. I can jest sees zat dog." "He was my best friend." She moved on quickly. It made her ill to look at him, and she did not want him to see her face. "Turtle Man," fche exclaimed as she peered down into the last compartment. "Windy!" Turtle Man had to strain his neck to look up at her while his grassy platform elevated. "When I heard your voice, it was like a charivari for my ears." "What's a charivari?" "A si lly song. Comes from Greek word for headache." Windy stuck out her lower lip pretending to pout. The hoist stopped grinding when Windy and Turtle Man were face to face. "Where have you been, Windy? I've been expecting you all week." "Working. I'm out of school now and doing my stint in the Youth Services Corps." "Aha, and they rob you of the best years of your life." "That's a matter of opinion. I happen to enjoy doing something useful. Say, what happened to Backwards Man? At first I thought you were gone when I saw Ape Woman in your cage, but it's Backwards Man I'm missing." "He joined a circus. Better pay, you know. I talked Minsky into this cove so that I could be nearer the door and fresh air." He turned up his nose and sniffed. Windy nodded toward Seal Man. "How is he doing?" Turtle Man arched his back in a shrug. "The adjustments are many, especially for a man who has spent so many years in institutions. He's coming around." Windy turned away, away from that strong masculine face. "It's not fair." "What's not fair?" "Man-made freaks. He doesn't belong here." "Neither do I." Windy looked back into his blue eyes. "Freaks are mistakes, nature's or man's. It doesn't make any difference. His mother took thalidomide. Mine carried bad genes and knew that she did. Yet she took the chance anyway." He paused to study her eyes. "Windy, you have the wrong perspective. Look at it this way. There are no thalidomide freaks being bom now. Soon there will be no genetic nor congenital freaks either because of science. Why, over ninety percent of the defective fetuses are being aborted now. I ask you what is all this going to do to the carnival freak business?" "I'll tell you what science is doing to the freak business," she said in a harsh whisper. "Science is creating new freaks, and my mother is the trend setter." "Windy, you..." "I'll show you one of those freaks right now." She pounded her chest with her index finger. "I don't have a father. My mother is as virgin as the day she was bom. She created me on a petri plate and had the embryo implanted in one of her lab technicians." "Windy," he said softly, refusing to be caught up in her emotions. "Windy, we are all freaks. Look at those marks over there. See the man Those are tobacco cigarettes. Look at the blonde. That's a wig. What's she hiding? Look at them. Windy. Look at them looking at us. They are all freaks." The corner of Windy's mouth twitched a moment before coming to rest in a feeble smile. "Is there any room in there for me?" "That's my girl." Windy stepped back to let the onlookers gape at Turtle Man. The blonde glanced at her, and she blushed at the thought of having been overheard. As the group dispersed she approached the stall again. "Freaks. They're all freaks," Turtle Man scowled. "What happened?" "Nothing. Nothing, just tongues without tact. Can you come by after the show closes. I picked up some interesting tapes in Guatemala. They've got an unusual syncopation. We could make it a party like last year." He nodded toward the other compartments. "I can't. I'm supposed to play in a bridge tournament tonight. Besides dancing with Rubber Man is like dancing with a suggestion screen. The instant you see it, it's gone." Turtle Man laughed. "I see your point. Tomorrow then? I could have Minsky set up a recorder in here." "Fridays are reserved for the psychologists. Uh, when are you leaving?" "Midnight tomorrow. Got to get set up for the State Fair Saturday." "I can't promise anything." She bit at her lip and then turned toward the exit. "Windy." She stopped at his call, but did not look back. "Thanks for coming. It's people like you who make this job bearable."    She stepped into the confusion of sunlight and noise and felt a surge of panic. She closed her eyes to ward off the feeling as much as the light. "What took you so long? The ice has melted." Windy squinted up at the man's narrow features. "How did you know where I was?" He pointed with a paper cup toward a man clenching a toothpick between his teeth. He was braced against a barker's podium. "I asked him." "Who is he?" "He didn't say." He offered her the cup. She took a sip of the hot syrup, then gulped the rest. Crushing the cup, she tossed it aside and walked over to her shadow. His skin was pitted with acne, his dingy shirt stained with sweat. "Why are you following me?" His hand reached for the toothpick as his thin lips puckered into a grin. His prying eyes worked their way down from her face. "Shake that creep and I'll take you for a spin on my rentabike." "You perverted freak." The man jolted upright, his features twisting with rage. She spat into his face. She struggled with the grip on her arm as she was steered into a crowd mulling about an arcade. The young scientist swung her around so that she faced him. "You're a fool, Windy Rode." "Who asked you," she retorted as she freed her arm. She walked away. He matched her stride. "He would have hit you." "What if he had? What time is it?" He glanced at his watch. "Sixthirty." "Damn." She increased her pace. "Where are you going?" She stopped. "I don't know." "Well, I wish you would make up my mind." "Make up your own mind." She sauntered over to a startrek tent. He argued with himself for a few moments before following. She was finger on her jeans. He sat down on the rickety stool at the next station. "Mr., Mr., I'm sorry I don't recall your name," she said to him as she stared at the blank screen. "Dr. Randolph D. Bucknell, Randy for short." "Dr. Bucknell, what..." "Randy." "Randy then, what did my mother do with Capuchin?" "Capuchin?" "That dog with the prehensile tail." "Uh, anatomical studies, as I recall. Yes, found an unusual localization of ganglion in the lumbar spine. We wondered if it was a primitive brain that controlled the tail, but we couldn't test the hypothesis. He was a fluke. We haven't been able to recreate the genetic pattern, though I think your mother has a student working on it." The operator came over to conbut Windy continued to stare at the unlit screen. "I'm sorry. Was he a pet?" "I wouldn't expect anything else from her." "Windy, your mother is a great woman. She's attractive and intelligent and talented. Do you realize how lucky you are to be endowed with her genes?" "Sure, a xeroxed copy on disposable paper." "That's not fair. You'd better play before the machine shuts off." She punched the key for a control report and inventoried her energy and photon torpedo supplies. Then she made a long range scan of the universe. "I wish I could open your eyes, Windy. She didn't sacrifice your pet for nothing. If your mother seems rather unfeeling at times, it's only because she has to be in this business. Windy, I've seen her brought to tears because of the freakish results of some of our experiments. I've seen her tremble as she held a grotesque mass of living protoplasm in her hands. I know the feeling. You want to hide your face in shame for what you've done." "Shame?" The eight-by-eight grid twinkled with two red star bases and a concentration of green Klingons in the lower left quadrant. "It's not shame that she feels. It's anger, anger at failure, and she does hate failure with all her gifted soul." "You're wrong." "No, I'm not. I know because I am her." "No, you're not. You're not telepathic, or are you?" "No, but I do know how her mind works. Believe me I do." She activated her cloaking devices, set course in matrix code, and engaged warp drive. "Randy, how many other parthenogenic children have been created in the last seventeen years?" "Let's see, you were the first. Singh's daughter was next, I think. Yes, three, four, Briedlove had a son about five years ago. His was the first from a skin cell. There's been several since then. About a dozen, I'd say. Why?" "Does everybody know about them?" A short-range scan showed that she was surrounded by enemy starships. "It's never been a secret. There was quite a lot of publicity surrounding your birth. It impressed me and I was only six or seven at the time. You didn't answer my question. Why? What difference does it make if there are others?" Estimating the angles to all three she dropped her shields and fired, getting two with photon torpedoes, crippling the other with phasers, and taking a direct hit in her hanger decks. "Ha, got all three. Do you remember last winter when my mother had that surgery for her ulcers?" "Yes, her condition was critical." She studied the damage control report. "It took half my stomach to patch her up." "What?" She had to return to star base for repairs. "I did not give consent. I went to the hospital to visit her and the next morning I woke up with tubes running through my nose." "You mean that, that..." "They said I couldn't give consent because I was a minor. But that was just an excuse." Activating the energy shields, she set a circuitous route, avoiding the sectors controlled by Klingons. "You're not saying that she, that she would... Why don't you get out, leave her?" "It's not easy to run away these days." Without turning she waved her right hand in front of his face. "The minute that finger goes down on a credit terminal she will know where I am. How far can I run before I starve to death?" "Maybe someone could share credit with you." "How would you like to live on half rations for who knows how long?" The damage control update indicated that repairs were in progress. She maintained position. "I could," he mumbled, blushing. "The carnies would for a price." "What price?" "Never mind." The Enterprise exploded, star base and all, in a giant supernova. "Blast it!" "It's rigged. If you want an honest game use the school's computer." She stood up, but he remained seated. "Why don't you try a lawyer?" "I did, as soon as I got out of that hospital. Would you believe that he said I don't exist. Our chemprints are identical. There is no legal way to prove that I do either without Mother's cooperation. We'd have to appear together before a judge so that he could count to two. Those damned computers can't count to two, but they sure can play favorites and give Winona Stokes Rode double rations." "Surely your mother would cooperate with a judge." "You don't believe me." She looked down at her hands and began rubbing dirt away from the scratches. "I don't think that lawyer did either. What's the word of an immature girl with a paranoid complex compared to that of a worldfamous scientist?" She turned around. "Let's get out of here." "There ought to be a way to alter your chemistry," he said as they entered the midway. "I've tried finger paints, drugs. I've even exposed my hands to every kind of radioactive substance I could find in Dr. Maslen's lab, but those damned registers still read Winona Stokes Rode in the singular." They moved between the horror show and the fun house and their blaring noises. "Windy, I know your mother," he shouted. "A simple tissue transplant is one thing, but I can't believe that she would go so far as to take your life to save hers, nor can I believe that any doctor would actually do it." "Don't underestimate the power and influence of my mother. When the time comes the question will be who is more valuable. There will be no precedents to guide them. They will have to decide whether I am an organ replacement bank or a human being. And I can't seem to establish that very fact. By damn, I don't want some doctor sitting in awe of my mother making that decision." He followed her eyes toward the lifeless suggestion screen, a rocket ride darting about it. "Listen, Windy, I have an idea..." "What time is it?" "Past seven. We could..." "Dammit, I'm late." "Late for what?" "A bridge tournament." "With your mother?" "Yes." "You must be good. Listen..." "Not that good. What's wrong with it?" she asked, still looking at the screen. "Probably blew a fuse. Listen, will you. You don't have to go back. I've got a rentacar. I could..." "I'll bet it's done with lasers." She started jogging toward the hollow screen. Exasperated, he held back, watching her as she stopped in front of the black hole, looking like a marionette forgotten on stage after the show was over. She moved so slowly that he was unaware of her motion until she was inside. "Don't," he gasped as he broke into a run. "Stop! Windy, stop!" He slid to a halt at the opening and reached for a wrist. She stumbled as she came out, nearly falling. "Get your hands off me." "You could have been killed." "Go to Hell." His eyes and mouth pinched with anger he tightened his grip and headed for the exit. "Come on. I'm taking you home." "Let go of me," she said, hissing the words out between her teeth. "Let go or I'll scream. I'll cry rape. I warn you." He slapped her arm down and spun around to face her. "I don't give one damn about what you do, young lady, but I do care about your mother, and I am going to hear her side of this story." "Go right ahead, but leave me out of it. I'm not going back." "And just what do you intend to do?" "Well, I can't stay with the carnival, can I? You'll go tattle to my mother." "Why the carnival?" "Because they'll feed me." "Isn't there somewhere else you could go?" "Jail." "I mean a friend, a relative, a church, the Red Cross." "I've got a friend right here. He'll set me up." "I don't like it." "Dr. Bucknell, I'm never going to go back." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Okay, I won't tell, at least until I can figure this out. That is, as long as I know where to find you." "Is that a promise?" "Yes." "Then drive me to Des Moines tonight." "What?" "Mother could be calling the cops right now, this minute. The first place they are going to look is this carnival. But I could link up with it in Des Moines, at the State Fair, after it's been searched." "I don't know," he hesitated, wondering how far he could trust her. "Dr. Bucknell, go back and take a good look at that suggestion screen. Those lasers are shielded with diffusion glass."    He paced in front of the orgy tent, not wanting to go in, not wanting to see her in there. He paced and he watched the lights blink out one by one as the carnival closed down for a brief night's rest. The sounds were dying, the static fading, unmasking the giggles and laughter emanating from that tent. A man stepped through the tinkerbell curtain. His grin disappeared as he met Bucknell's gaze. He finished buckling his belt, spat on the cement, and walked away. An echo from the stadium announced the beginning of the night runner races. Bucknell made his way around to the back of the tent and a flap opening he had noticed earlier. There he waited in the shadows of a flarewired fence. Several minutes later people, male and female, dressed in swatches of fur and body paint began to filter through the slit in the tent. Too tall, too short, too dark, too fat, too old, too masculine. He followed a pair wearing rabbit ear headdresses. One of the girls made a gesture with her hand as she talked. The scratches on her palm were red and swollen. Three paces later he was beside her, his hand biting into her shoulder. "My God, Windy. How could you?" She winced and twisted away. The other girl screamed. Bucknell froze. Someone came running. "It's all right," Windy said, stepping between the striped man and Bucknell. "It's all right. He's a friend of mine. He startled us, that's all." "Are you sure?" the tiger man growled. "Yes, it's all right." "Sucker marks," he hissed in Bucknell's face and turned away. "Go on," Windy motioned to the other girl. "I'll catch up with you at the freak's tea." A moment later they were alone. Bucknell let his eyes trace the contours of her costume. It hid everything and nothing, not even the scar under her sternum. Letting his eyes fall he kicked at an inert shadow on the pavement and said, "So this is the price." "At least I'm eating." She began working the headdress out of her hair. "You can eat at home." "That's right." "Windy, I had a long talk with your mother," he said, looking up, searching for her eyes in the whiskers and make-up. "She's worried sick about you. She wants..." "How sick?" "She looks bad. Her eyes are bloodshot. She's extremely tense. I don't think she's been eating or y y    "Sounds like she needs another ulcer patch. No, thank you." "I promised her I'd try to bring you back." She retreated, saying accusingly, "You finked!" "No, I didn't. I didn't tell her where you were." "You told her you knew where I was. That's all she needs." "I wasn't followed, if that's what you mean. I made sure I wasn't. I checked myself for beepers before I left and I changed cars in Ankeny." "Dammit, how can I be sure?" she said as she peered into the shadows. "Take my word for it, will you. I want you to go back of your own free will." She bit at her lip. Tucking the headdress under her arm she began running her finger around the sore on her palm. "I believe your mother wants it that way too. She promised me that there would be no more operations without your consent." He took a step toward her, looking at her hand. "Did you get that in writing?" "It wasn't necessary. That needs a doctor." "No doctor." "It's infected." "Ginny said she'd lance it tonight, after the tea." She began walking slowly. He fell in step by her side. "Your mother said that she would find a way to give you a legal identity. She said that she's been meaning to, but she just hasn't had the time. You know how busy she is." "Yes, and I know that she does break promises." "If she has, it was probably for a good reason." "She promised me that she would find Capuchin..." "Capuchin?" "That dog with a prehensile tail. She promised me that she would find him a good home. Besides, if she really wants me to go back of my own free will, why is she offering that reward for any information leading to my whereabouts?" "What reward?" "Don't you read newspapers?" She skipped ahead. "Come on. I'll show you how freaks have fun." They skirted a series of tents and trailers and came upon a silent circle of light. Windy broke through, then stopped. He followed her in. "What's the matter with everyone? Minsky, start the music. I feel like dancing," she shouted gaily and did a pirouette, waving the bunny ears like a fan. She glided over to a man entwined in a lawn chair. "Come dance with me, Rubber Man." Shaking his head he raised a bottle to his lips. She stopped and looked at the woman curled up in the seat next to him. She was stroking the hair on her face as her eyes met Windy's. "Let's sing then." "I don't feel like singing tonight," Ape Woman said softly, the words ringing pure like bell chimes. "What's wrong?" Windy whispered, letting her eyes roam round the circle. Elephant Woman sat squarely on a high-back chair, her body overflowing the edges, her eyes averted. Minsky kept his back to her as he fiddled with the recorder. A group in costume from the orgy tent began whispering among themselves. Turtle Man and Seal Man were sitting on handcrafted thrones perched on a folding table. "Come here. Windy," Turtle Man said. She walked over to him slowly. Bucknell took a few steps toward her. "Who is he?" Turtle Man asked, nodding toward Bucknell. "Randy, the man I told you about, the one who refused to bring me here." "Then he should take you back." "No. I'm not going back, not ever." "Windy. He cleared his throat and glanced at Bucknell. "Windy, you'll never be a pitchman or anything else. Farnsworth is not going to let go. He wants to work you as a hound, a bitch. The next state we play has sixteen as the legal age. White slavery laws won't apply. Windy, the games you're playing now will be for real. Do you understand?" She clenched her jaw and nodded. "Go home, Windy." "No, I can't." "You must." He raised the stub of one arm. "Windy, you don't belong here." The recorder blared a deafening Mexican bolero. A man dressed in street clothes brushed past Bucknell. Another approached Windy from the other side. She whirled and backed into the table. Trapped. The struggle was brief. Bucknell stepped in front of them as they started to take her away. The music stopped. "I said, who are you?" "You fink!" "Get out of our way." "Are you policemen? Is she under arrest?" Bucknell demanded, holding his ground. "You fink!" she shouted at him again, her face pinched with hatred. "Let go of me." "I demand to see your credentials." Bucknell addressed himself to the shorter man. The others were gathering behind Bucknell, blocking their way. "You dirty, rotten fink!" she raged at Bucknell. "Can you hold her, Russ?" the shorter man asked his associate. "I've got her." He released his grip and searched his inside jacket pocket. "You damned..." "Windy, I called the police," Turtle man said. She tried to turn toward him. The man holding her arm stepped around so that she could. "You?" "I had Minsky do it. Windy, don't fight them. Go home." "You? The reward. That damned reward. You!" She spun around, sending her knee into her captor's groin. He gasped and loosened his grip. She broke loose. She scrambled onto the table, giving Turle Man's throne a shove that set it rocking, and jumped down on the other side. She ran. Bucknell elbowed his way past the policemen, rounded the table, and darted into the shadows, leading the pursuit. His long strides shortened the distance rapidly. She veered left, disappearing behind a tent. He drew up at the same place, turned, and slipped, his foot skidding across the asphalt on the rabbit ear headdress. The policemen caught up with him as he regained his balance. The taller man was still wincing with pain. They filed down the empty canyon between an arcade and a startrek tent. The midway was dark, the only light coming from street lamps on the fair grounds. There was no one in sight. "She must be in there," the smaller man said, pointing to the thrillrides. "You take the far end, Russ this end. I'll take the middle. We'll flush her out." Bucknell jogged down the midway, skipping over power cables. He felt the man panting at his back turn away. At the merry-go-round he cut in behind a register and slowed to a walk, listening. He moved toward the egomaze, watching the shadows and listening, but hearing only echoes from the stadium. "Windy," he called in a whisper. "Windy, it's me, Randy. I want to help you. Windy?" Under the rocket-ride, through the tilt-a-whirl rigging, around the suggestion screen, he moved calling, listening, calling, listening, hoping that he would be the first to find her. Through the slimy strands of the Medusa test he could see a large building. As he picked his way through the motionless serpents he noticed something moving. One of the policemen was jogging down the alley toward him, hugging the brick wall. He stepped over a snake, ducked under a coil, and emerged in the alley just as a figure darted from a side door of the building. She took two steps toward the policeman, pivoted, and ran in the other direction. "There she is," the man shouted. "Get her." Bucknell joined the chase, leading the policeman by several meters. She hesitated a moment at the intersection with the main street of the fair, then turned right. The building shielded her from view. She couldn't have been more than a dozen strides ahead when Bucknell made the comer. He was running down a sidewalk, animal bams on one side, vending trailers on the other. Windy was nowhere in sight. He cut out into the street and slowed to a trot, looking back over his shoulder. The policemen, both of them, were searching the concession stands and trailers. Looking over his other shoulder he traced the long line of the theater screen tucked under the grandstands of the huge, domed stadium. A muffled roar burst forth from the seats as one of the night runners took a water jump and fell to its knees, throwing its rider. The animal's enormous IR-sensitive eyes left a rainbow of reds and blacks across half the screen. wm. He was edging over to that side of the street, nearing the betting registers, when he saw her bobtailed silhouette skirt the last row of seats. He took a deep breath and forced his legs to work harder. The night runner race ended with a roar of cheers and hisses. "Next race in ten minutes. Place your bets," the speaker system rumbled with the mechanical voice. Bucknell was trapped, entangled in the stampede. Pushing his way through he stretched his neck to catch glimpses of her as she moved out of the theater and followed the contour of the stadium. He lost her just as he broke free. His feet clawed at the track before him, and the cement hit back, slapping hard against the soles of his shoes, jerking and jarring his overtense body. He dodged a grounds sweeper, hurdling its multihinged arms. As soon as he cleared it he saw her. She was heading toward a line of hooded night runners. They were filing past a gap in the solid wall and disappearing into the blackness of the stadium's interior. She fell, struggled to her feet. He pushed his legs harder, gaining ground with each step. She looked back, then staggered forward. "Windy," he yelled between gasps for breath. "Windy. Stop." He ran with his eyes glued on that white cotton tail. He ran and yelled -- watched her plunge into the line of runners. One of the animals reared, its legs lashing frantically in its blindness. She went down. The jockey jerked on the reins and threw his weight to one side in an effort to turn the runner as it danced on its hind legs, but it wasn't enough.    "I won't go back," she said, slurring the words as she fought for consciousness. "I won't go back." "Relax. Lie still now. We'll take care of you." The faceless voice grew faint. "That's what I'd hoped for, a good sign." "Is she going to be all right. Doctor?" The light was dull and bright. They had no faces, just eyes, a thousand eyes. "I won't go back." "The doctor said you're going to be fine, Windy. Now do as he says." Turning her head she saw her mother lying in a cradle of tentacled instruments. "Mother?" "Relax now. We're going to give you an anesthetic. Just relax," the doctor urged. "That's it. Dr. Rode, are you sure you want to go through with this? I mean with your recent surgical history I can't guarantee  i "I know. Doctor. Get on with it." "Chiu, put her under, and take the kidney first. The other graphs may have to wait."  Spider Robinson Cloned Lives, Pamela Sargent, Fawcett, # pp., # Time of the Fourth Horseman , Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Doubleday, # pp., # Walk to the End of the World, Susy McKee Charnas, Ballantine, # pp., # The Exile Waiting, Vonda N. McIntyre, Fawcett, # pp., # Patternmaster, Octavia E. Butler, Doubleday, # pp., # More Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent, Vintage, # pp., # Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda McIntyre  Susan Janice Anderson, Fawcett, # pp., # The Clewiston Test, Kate Wilhelm, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, # pp., # Pilgramage , Zenna Henderson, Avon, # pp., # The People: No Different Flesh, Zenna Henderson, Avon, #I pp., # (!) The Bloody Sun, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ace, #I pp., # Let's juggle around some fulminate of mercury this month, gang. Let's examine women and science fiction. Hoo boy! Already the extremists of both sides are reflex ively fingerins their knives. The feminist radicals are convinced I'm going to do a reverse-discrimination "dancing bear" routine ("The amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all."); and the masculinist radicals I've sold out my cojones. How about if all of them radicals go off somewhere and shout at each other, while you and me have us a quiet conversation? We're not talking here about women as characters in sf -- that's a whole 'nother column. Of course the dominantsubmissive relationship that both men and women have agreed to act out together for the last umpteen centuries has been reflected in the portrayal of women in sf. Despite pioneering work by male writers like Anderson, Sturgeon, Pohl, Herbert, Dickson, and particularly Heinlein (whose women characters have almost invariably been important and respected members of their society, toughminded and competent) and by female writers like Merrill, LeGuin, Moore, Brackett and Norton, strong woman characters have statistically been as rare in sf as anywhere else, on the whole. (I enjoyed the line I heard at a feminist discussion at MidAmeriCon about Lieutenant Uhura: "They combined their token black and their token woman in one character -- and then made her a telephone operator!") But one of the biggest contributing factors to this shortage has been the shocking shortage of good woman writers of sf, and that's what we're here to talk about this month. I can find no evidence that anyone ever failed to sell a good science fiction story because she happened to be a woman. Both Kate Wilhelm and Judith Merrill have said they found no difficulty in selling sf under their own names -- even though Judith did have to use what we might call noms de plums to sell westerns and mysteries. Yes, I know about C.L. Moore and D.C. Fontana and "Andre Norton" and the host of women who elected to use ambiguous pen-names -- but I know of no one who initially failed to sell under their own name first. Editors want good stories -- need them to survive -- and will let nothing stop them from buying a good one from anyone. Hell, Mary Shelwhole damn genre. And yet when I first decided to do this column, it took me well over six months to acquire a column'sworth of books by women. Clearly, the problem isn't that women can't sell sf. The problem is, not many women are writing the stuff. Or IS that the problem? Could it be that lots of women are writing sf, but their output is inferior? Ursula K. LeGuin. Kate Wilhelm. I rest my case. So why aren't women writing sf? Well, I think it's because writing, like any other artistic career, requires that you either live alone or have a very understanding spouse -- and I must say I've met more mature wives than I have mature husbands. It doesn't help that writing is one of those lifetime careers (like Getting Your Doctorate) where you can put in from one to ten years before you see any solid return, with strong support required for every one of those years along the way. It calls for a firstrate husband, and our culture trains men that sharing the scut-work is unmanly. But it's getting easier. We're all getting smarter. It may have taken me six months to assemble this column, but not too long ago it might have been impossible. More women are writing -- and reading -- sf than ever before. Let's examine their output. This is by no means an exhaustive -- or even necessarily a representative -- selection of women sf writers. It's just what's come over the transom lately. Five of the eleven books herein considered are first novels -- a significant datum -- so perhaps we should consider them first.    In Cloned Lives , Pamela Sargent has written the first clone novel I've seen that doesn't assume that clones will, by virtue of their biological similarity, become group-individuals indistinguishable from each other. Sargent has realized the obvious: that "genetically identical" does not equal "identical." (Anyone who's ever raised or known twins, triplets, quads or quints could have told us that.) This notebook I'm scribbling on right now is genetically identical with the hypothetical one on which someone is now inscribing a love note to his dachshund -- it's what you write on it that counts. What Sargent wrote on her tabula rasa is an extremely realistic tale of the near future. At about the time that the world scientific community's self-imposed moratorium on genetic experimentation is expiring. a group of biologists succeed in producing five clones of a man named Paul Swenson (four males, one female). Sargent gives us a character-profile slice out of the life of each of the six, then ties them together in a final section which uncorks a few beautifully planted surprises. Throughout, the writing is fluid, the characterizations vivid and layered, the background world and the events that take place therein utterly plausible. Perhaps it's that last that's the problem. Like #I , Cloned Lives is so realistic, you catch yourself yawning. It doesn't really go anywhere, in a plot sense. This is not necessarily a fault. Edgar Pangborn's books seldom have plots, and Dlmlgren sold a lot of copies. But plotless writing demands extremely colorful characters, and the five clones in this book are just too damned ordinary to sustain my interest. I think that this was done consciously, that the whole point is that Clones Are Just People, and I applaud the point. Defusing prejudice before it begins is a lovely goal, and if more folks read this book, the race's first real clones will have a much easier time of it. But you gotta make people read your book. I note that three of the seven chapters were previously published separately. Could it be that Cloned Lives didn't start out to be a novel? That feels right -- any one of these chapters would have kept me reading, but there just wasn't a novel's worth of conflict. For me. I like sharp, urgent conflict in my fiction. You might like this one just fine.    On the other hand, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's first novel, Time of the Fourth Horseman , is chock fulla sharp urgent conflict, and I didn't care for it much atall. The more pessimistic and cynical you are, the less you will tend to agree with me. If you're borderline paranoid, you won't agree with me at all. What we got here is a disaster novel, and here is your basic plot: an idealistic-but-tough woman doctor learns that her doctor-husband (with whom she thought she had a deeply intimate and loving relationship) is one of the heads of a vast government-sponsored secret conspiracy to reduce the population crush by quietly replacing a third of all vaccines with placebos. She is unable to dissuade him, and indeed she and the very small band of doctors who are upset by this Modest Proposal find themselves discredited and disgraced. Apparently they can't even get the Washington Post interested, even when stupendous epidemics of supposedly extinct diseases start ripping the country apart. (Curiously, this decimation of the populace doesn't seem to affect international relations any -- or maybe Henry Kissinger is supposed to have secured gentleman's agreements from all the rest of the world's governments to implement similar programs at the same time.) From there, horror succeeds horror for # jading pages -- for, as anyone would have guessed, the Great Diseases, roused from their slumber, proceed to mutate into truly unstoppable killers. Three famous sf writers and an M.D. state on the back cover that plausible." If you agree, I believe we're in serious trouble. Because one of the manifestations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as applied to mankind is that what we all agree to be plausible becomes so, and if we agree that this is a plausible premise, I'm going to go flush my head down the toilet -- spare them Evil Politicians 'n' Doctors the bad karma of slaughtering me. But the premise ain't my only complaint. I couldn't tell the characters apart without a program, and they tended to be stereotyped (even the death of their only son doesn't deter the husband from his Malthusian determination). The plot was rudimentary, largely a cataloguing of horrors to flesh out the premise. I felt I was being milked for horror, and so found myself becoming nearly as callous as the villains. And the writing was fluid enough, but extremely hasty: too many times a doctor spied an incoming patient with a fever and flushed skin and muttered, "By God, if I didn't know better I'd swear that was anthrax." (No, that's not a direct quote, and yes, it's a bit exaggerated.) This is a book plainly designed to play on -- and therefore promote -- your paranoia, and you're supposed to walk away from it horrified and afraid and ashamed to be human and frustrated to despair at your helplessness before The Great Conspiracy of Evil Ones In Power, and I say phooey.    And now, for an even more warped premise, we bring you Susy McKee Chamas's first novel, Walk to the End of the World. I heard Ms Charnas refer to this book (at MidAmeriCon) as "a rather straightforward extrapolation of things as they are," and my hair stood on end. The premise, explicitly laid out right in front in a two-page prologue, is as follows: Dem Evil Politicians have finally done it -- The Wasting has come, and the world goes to hell. All these Evil Ones are men -- all the women in government "had resigned or had been pushed out as idealists or hysterics." Now it chances that a handful of these Evil Ones escape the Wasting in previously-prepared shelters -- and of course they bring women with them as routine provisions. Needing a scapegoat for their own subconscious guilt, the Evil Men debase these women, fix upon them the blame for the Wasting ("The woman tempted me."), and by the time they emerge from their fallout shelters have reduced all women to degenerate beasts of burden. In fact, they tolerate said beasts only because reproduction seems desirable -- for enjoyable sex, they prefer each other. The women themselves, by the way, cooperate almost unanimously:... it would be proper and a relief to think of nothing but babies any more, and while the men were crazy with grief, guilt and helplessness it was support they needed, not antagonism." The few dissenters are silenced with clubs, and the next generation are, of course, all good little products of their conditioning. Oh yeah, I nearly forgot: they grow marijuana for food. Got it? That's the first two pages. Now, I thought at first that that was why my first three attempts to read the book ended in failure. Anyone who holds her brothers and sisters in such contempt is not likely to tell me anything I want to hear. But a friend of mine finished it and said, "If you grant the crazy premise, it's not a bad book." So I made two more attempts. My record was page #. Even granting the psychotic premise, I found the story that ensued confused, confusing, inconsistent and boring. Like most diatribes.    Vonda McIntyre's first, The Exile Waiting , avoids all the above errors -- she never lost my interest, and she has no axe to grind. What she did was write a cracking good adventure with a very real cast who undergo exciting events that change them all deeply. The background world is described mostly by suggestive details (my favorite method), and seems both consistent and fascinating -- I have a few minor quibbles, and you may too, but nothing serious. The characterization is excellent -- it's obvious that McIntyre cares deeply for all of her characters, and indeed I had a hard time deciding how many of them could properly be called protagonists (I make it four or five, and even the minor characters breathe with life). The style is slightly "experimental," and quite successfully so: evidence of artistry rather than pretension to it. And the ending is more than satisfactory. What more could you ask? Well, quite a bit, actually. I can't honestly say that Exile is a Great Book. But it is damned good, and surely one of the most promising first novels I've ever seen. This is a woman who has a Left Hand of Darkness in her somewhere. And even if it never emerges, I could settle for a couple dozen more "merely" enjoyable and thoughtful books like this. In times like these, an enjoyable book is something of a godsend.    Now I come to the first-novel that provoked the most ambiguous reaction, the one that's hardest to review Just Right: Octavia N. Butler's Patternmaster. It would be very easy to do a killer on this book: it has many things wrong with it, some little and some gigantic. My chief objection is that it leaves unanswered every moral question it raises -- or rather answers them unsatisfactorily. It posits a world in which psionically-gifted humans called Patternists rule over thoughtcontrolled slaveserfs called Mutes -- that is, ordinary humans -- and all of these are at war with mutated sphinx-like humans called Clayarks, who are painted as courageous fighters and potentially likable sentient beings. Yet the book concerns itself only with a Nine-Princes-In-Amberesque powerstruggle for succession to the throne of the dying Patternmaster by his two strongest sons. In the end, one of them wins, kills his brother, massacres a few hundred Clayarks, and settles down to slavemastering his Mutes. Curtain. I found this outrageous, particularly given the "hero's" own vivid loathing of mind-control. There are other holes too, enough to make a noticeable pile in the comer of the Albert Hall. And yet I liked Patternmaster , better than the first three books in this column anyway. Why? Well, partly some good characterization -- particularly Amber the Healer, one of the strongest female protagonists since Alyx (comically juxtaposed with Rayal, a more or less traditional hero-sterotype who is dismayed by Amber's refusal to be a traditional heroine-stereotype). But I think it was mostly sheer narrative thrust, pure story-telling, that pleased me most. Butler kept me turning the pages, simple as that: an indefinable skill and a rock-bottom essential for a writer. Butler has as much of it as Vonda McIntyre -- what she needs now is a carefully thought-out story to tell.    Enough of first novels. Let's return to Pamela Sargent again, for an anthology of stories by women, about women: More Women of Wonder (sequel to an antho which you'll never guess what it was called, that I haven't received for review yet). And before we get started. I'd like to talk about the introduction Sargent supplies. It is for the most part a reasonably accurate history of woman in sf, both as characters and as creators -- but when it slips into speculation about the future it begins to horrify me. As when Sargent calls "understandable" and "a temptation" the contention of R.C.W. Ettinger that "...it is a little hard to see why suckling or carrying a child should produce a special bond, any more than in other forms of parasitism. Does one feel special tenderness toward his tapeworm?... it degrades the woman, reduces her to a biological machine." But enough. On to the stories. There are six novelettes and one short story, and of these I hated two, found three so-so and loved two. This gives us about a # on the Spidermeter, but the two goodies are so good, let's make it # with a recommendation to buy. The ones I didn't like: Joanna Russ's "The Second Inquisition" (Joanna consistently and pointedly refuses to obey the rules of storytelling, even when it would help her. halfway...); and Kate Wilhelm's "The Funeral" (the only thing of hers I've ever actively loathed -- I agree it's a work of artistry, but I don't want it in my living room). The three that were so-so: Josephine Saxton's "The Power of Time" just didn't grab me much; Leigh Brackett's "The Lake of the Gone Forever" was a bit turgid and trite by modern standards -- but then it was written in #, and did move me; and C.L. Moore has written much better stuff than the Jirel of Joiry series. (Jirel was revolutionary in her day, but only as a token figure, proof that women can swashbuckle too. Fine, but it's a silly thing for anyone to do, regardless of gender.) Ah, but the two gems... Well, one of them you may already have. Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Day Before The Revolution" originally ran right here in Galaxy , reran in Best Of Galaxy Vol. Ill , won the # Nebula, and has shown up here and there since. The first two times I tried to read it (quite awhile ago), I got disgusted and put it down after five or six pages. But by the time I got to this anthology I had learned that the way to approach LeGuin is very slowly, no distractions, and trust her. So I tried again, and sure enough it paid off in spades. "Day" is not a story, and if you try to read it as one you'll end up feeling as cheated as I did the first time. It has no plot: nothing happens except a drooling old lady reminisces about her past. But forget that: think of it as an excerpted interlude from an as-yet-unwritten novel if it helps, but enjoy the bastard. It's writing at its best, beautiful and deeply moving. And now the one I saved for last: "Tin Soldier," by Joan D. Vinge. As it happens, I just hadn't seen anything by Vinge at Hugo-time -- but if I had seen this piece, I would unquestionably have voted her the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer hands down -- in fact, the story itself deserves a Hugo (it originally ran in Orbit # , which I failed to read). It is an incredibly poignant tale of two sort-of immortals who commit themselves to a love affair that seems hopeless. She time-dilation -- she's a Spacer, who returns to Earth every "few weeks" to find # years gone by (only women can be Spacers, by the way -- take that. Captain Kirk!). He is "immortal" by virtue of constructicpn -- he's a prosthetic cyborg, a bartender (called the Tin Soldier) whose body is mostly plastic and alloy replacements (except for the exception obviously necessary for a love story). The story of their relationship, around gaps that are a few weeks for her, a quartercentury for him -- with the complication of a rigid Spacer taboo against ever making love with the same man twice -- is magnificently wrought, told with genuine warmth and subtle artistry. I look forward very eagerly to more from Joan Vinge.    Another antho, but this one is integrated: men allowed. (Honest to God, I just heard about an editor of a proposed book of women's sf who has decided to include stories by men, too, "to avoid legal questions about discrimination on the ba is of sex." Were any of you male writers out there really contemplating a class action?) Aurora: Beyond Equality has an ambitious and intriguing premise. Contributors were asked to write stories based on a world in which sexism has already been transcended. ' 'After equality, then what?" is what editors Vonda McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson (is there something feminist about having three names?) wanted to know. Me too. This antho sure doesn't tell me. Anderson spends six pages of intro passing on misinformation about the "pioneers of non-sexist sf," betraying her virtual ignorance of anything written B.R. (Before Russ), and complains how difficult it was to get the kind of stories she and McIntyre wanted: " 'Before I can even begin to write, I have to create an entirely new society,' moaned one of our contributors." (Obviously this contributor had never written sf before: you're supposed to do that, with every story.) Perhaps this is meant to excuse the fact that five of the ensuing eight stories have nothing whatever to do with the stated premise. Raccoona Sheldon's "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" is not sf at all, and as bad as the title would lead you to expect: a psychotic woman walks through New York City, hallucinating an imaginary PostCollapse world where all the men are gone somehow, leaving only loving sisters. While she fantasizes, she is raped and killed. Curtain. James Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" is about a world in which equality resulted from the mysterious death by plague of all men -- whereupon the women quickly and easily built a utopia. Into this utopia a male astronaut crew is propelled by the usual TimeWarp, and we soon learn that in a truly sane (i.e. female) society, the best thing to do with men is put them to sleep as humanely as possible after taking sperm samples for study). Uh huh. Dave Skal's story never even portrays the society its protagonists discuss, never mentions gender one way or the other, and ends before anything has happened. Mildred Downey Broxon contributes a straight fairy tale set in ancient Ireland; again, nothing touching on sexual equality either way. P.J. Plauger's "Here Be Dragons" is a sea-war story in which it is briefly mentioned -- but not demonstrated or discussed -- that one of the combatting ships is more efficiently handled because it has an integrated crew: a debatable point. I should point out that of these five stories, three (Tiptree of course, Broxon and Plauger) were well-crafted and enjoyable, even if they did ignore the assignment -- but all three were minor works. Of the three writers who actually attempted to fulfill the title's premise, two produced abominable stories: Joanna Russ's "Corruption" is even more unreadable than usual, and Craig Strete's story is opaque self-indulgence combined with Amerind propaganda. cy's "Woman on the Edge of Forever," a genuine attempt to portray a non-sexist society of the future (one which actually includes men!). As with Sheldon's story, it may all be just an hallucination on the part of the protagonist -- but I don't care. What a lovely hallucination! Beautiful, powerful writing, much thought, and a basic fierce love for her own characters: all these consistent attributes kept reminding me of Sturgeon at his best. I especially enjoyed Piercy's imaginative non-sexist pronouns, something I'd have sworn couldn't be done painlessly. According to the bio-stuff at the end of the book, this story is excerpted from a novel-in-progress which I'd greatly like to see. by Ursula K. LeGuin, reflecting back on Left Hand , which is as enjoyable as everything that lady writes. comes out about # #c on the Spidermeter. As I've said before, editors shouldn't make premises they can't keep. And this one was such a tantalizingly interesting premise...    I've about run out of new stuff. How about a few Old Pros? I may as well talk about Kate Wilhelm's The Clewiston Test now. I've been stalling on it, hoping I'd get the time to re-read it, because my reactions to it are so ambiguous and confusing. But there's no time, so... What it is, I think, is a portrait of a marriage being torn apart by stress, as seen through the eyes of both husband and wife. It would take much too long to explain the plot, or exactly why the book so angered and frustrated me, but basically it comes down to this: we are an either-or situation. Either the wife's perceptions are correct, and her supposedly loving husband is really a hopeless neurotic -- or, the husband's perceptions are correct, and his wife has secretly taken an experimental drug with behavioraltering side-effects. Now, the ending of the book seemed to me, when I read it, to vindicate the wife -- she makes no attempt to repair the marriage, even refusing to explain to her husband what she feels he's been doing wrong, and walks out. A supporting character spends the closing pages admiring and congratulating her for her triumphant enlightenment, and the husband apparently wanders off to try and deduce, from the few extremely misleading hints she's dropped, just what went wrong. Feminist friends of mine just loved the ending -- especially divorcees. Trouble is, I remained convinced at the end that it was the wife who was cracking up -- I believed, right up until I was specifically told otherwise at the end, that she had taken the drug. So the ending frustrated me. Then I heard Kate, at MidAmeriCon, tell a roomfull of feminists that the notion of subordinating her art to a vehicle for feminist propaganda -- for any cause -- appalled her. So I went up after and asked her how the hell come she'd written such a feminist-propaganda book, and she blinked in surprise and said she hadn't. I guess I read it wrong, and I fully intend to go back and read the book a second time -- and I urge you to read it in any case. Like everything from Kate's typewriter, it is exquisitely crafted and holds the attention like a magnet -- and it will probably confuse and annoy you for as long as you try and make it grind your axe for you. I think my problem was in seeing the characters as symbols rather than people. The Sexual Liberations wars have left us all a bit paranoid, one way or the other. The book is not, by the way, packaged as sf at all -- you'll have to venture out of the sf section of your bookstore. But don't let that stop you: it's a science fiction novel, all right -- and who knows what you might stumble across while you're looking for it? ("... to boldly go where no fan has gone before.")    Running out of room. Let's hurry on to Zenna Henderson's stories of The People. A movie based on them just came on the tube recently, and it inspired me to dig both Pilgramage and No Different Flesh out of the jumble and re-read them. Sometimes you forget just how nice an old friend is if you haven't seen 'em for awhile. Both books are disguised novelette-collections, but better disguised than usual, with connective sections that really work in giving novel-thrust to a bunch of collected episodes. Both are very slightly overwritten, and both have a tendency to get a bit too sugary for my taste in spots. But both are extraordinarily enjoyable stories about real characters, told with warmth, insight, and genuine compassion. Zenna, too, reminds me of Theodore Sturgeon, in that the conflicts which interest her are the personal, interior ones. She is old-fashioned enough (God help us all) to believe that humans can act admirably and lovingly -- and optimistic enough to believe that an extraterrestrial race which does so as a matter of course might just bring out the best in some of us. I like Zenna for some of the same reasons I like Pangborn, Sturgeon and LeGuin -- because I admire and respect her characters, and because she holds out some hope for Homo Sap. And because she's a first-rate storyteller. Check out both of these books, if you haven't already. The first is a hair better than the second -- but you won't mind at all, and both books will stay with you for a long time.    Happens I'd never sampled any of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover cycle -- they just didn't look like something I'd get into. But then I was doing this women's column, and here was The Bloody Sun on my desk, so... Now, granted I'm not familiar with the series -- but that's not my problem, it's Bradley's. Granted this seems to be one of the minor Darkover novels -- if I'm going to read just one, it ought rightly to be one of the biggies: Heritage of Hastur , say. But this is what I had, what I read -- and I didn't care for it. I didn't believe the hero: his "personality" seemed to be nothing much more than the precise collection of neuroses and compulsions which would keep him moving through the plot, shifting with the requirements of each scene. The plot itself was Byzantine, reminding me irresistibly of those Robert Benchley operasynopsis parodies where Immergluck descends from Valhalla in a golden Chrysler at the end of Act IV to reveal that it was really Ellen and not Helen who was stolen by the gypsies, producing the bloodstained derby as proof. I mean, it was okay light reading, but I didn't believe it for a minute.    As I warned vou, this hasn't been an exhaustive or even representative look at women writers: I haven't mentioned anything by Katherine Maclean or Judy Merrill or Lisa Tuttle or Kathleen Sidney or Sonya Dorman or Phyllis Gotlieb or Andre Norton or Anne McCaffrey or... the list is long. But we've seen enough to support my original contention: women may be a statistical minority in sf, but their talentno talent ratio is as good as or better than that of male writers, and more women should be writing. How do we arrange this? Well, if any of you are women who are thinking of becoming writers, I strongly advise you to marry (if anyone) another artist of some kind. I'm a writer, Jeanne's a dancer, and we split the scut-work fifty-fifty -- except when one or the other of us gets hot on the scent of the Muse, whereupon the other one takes over full responsibility for the houserunning and baby-raising for awhile. Nothing less will serve, and I don't believe I could be a writer without the agreement Jeanne and I have made. Don't settle for less than the best, is all I can advise you. Because we urgently need more good writers, if sf is to survive boom times.  Sheffield the Sirens Sang When James Webster speaks -- you listen! M!y death won't bring out the banner headlines. That's fine with me. I suppose by rights I should be up there with Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Leon Monde and What's-his-name Bremer. I'll settle for being the one that got away. Saved civilization, too -- as I see civilization -- but that won't last too long. Just until I'm gone. Do not go gentle into that good night. I hear you, Dylan, and I'll keep up the struggle. But I've ridden ten thousand days and nights from James Webster's death. I'm old and tired, and no man lives forever. It's the risht time for this. Why am I recording here? Maybe I can't bear to see a piece of history going wrong into the record books. And maybe I want to warn my spiritual heirs to be ready when it happens again. I came to cover the Webster campaign in '# by accident. Got in late, when Jim Dotter had his first stroke. It's been a short twenty years since Jim went. I still remember the shock of the news, the rush to get ready and out of the office and onto the plane. It sounds like boasting when I say that I was overkill for that local primary but I'm past the age for modesty -- and I don't expect I'll have to defend this to anybody. There was no time for a briefing from the Channel before I was on my way, but after thirty years I could manage well without it. During the flight I read releases of Webster's speeches and looked at the local coverage reports of his meetings. The combination didn't make much sense. Trite words, banal sentiments -- and a tremendous response from the crowds. Something was out of tune. Thin gruel in the speeches, rich reactions from the audiences. I picked up the campaign trail in Atlanta. Peach blossom time, with the heat cracking eighty the afternoon I flew in. You could see the Southern beauties opening in the sun like buds. Riding in from the airport I could feel a pressure in the air like the undercurrent of a thunderstorm. Electricity, building up and raising the hair on the back of my neck -- and all on a cloudless March afternoon. I'd felt it only twice before, and never as strongly. People fever. Alamogordo, on the day of the first test of the first bomb. And Washington, D.C. the afternoon of Nixon's resignation. Something was taking hold of Atlanta and winding it up like the spring on an old-fashioned watch. There's not a gift the world can give like that it takes away. I won't argue the point, but seniority has its advantages. The younger men were eager to tell me what had happened before I had arrived. A movement for Webster, building to great peaks every night at his open-air rallies. Orgasms of emotional response that left the audiences drained but uplifted. That, from experienced newsmen. Whatever it was that the vintners buy, James Webster was selling it in Atlanta. As you may know from my writing, human interest isn't my main line. For political analysis, I need facts. Over bourbon and branch I got a fair sprinkling of them from a young local reporter. Webster had sprung up from nowhere, overnight. No previous track record in politics, no big backers pushing him along as a puppet -- but somehow he had persuaded the local power groups that he could take this primary. Support staff? Almost none. Lighting up a big cigar (building an imae -- how well I remembered it. Thirty years earlier I was struggling to keep a pipe alight) the youngster went on. Webster made all the plans for his meetings himself, wrote his own speeches to the last comma, set the exact timing for everything. Brief press conferences, and no remarks off the record. "Ever try for an interview with him?" I asked. "Oh, sure. No good though -- a few words with him on the telephone were as far as I got," he said. Not too surprising -- a local and an unknown began with a couple of strikes against him. How about family and friends? A bit more meat there. From a rich family near Athens, Georgia, but James Webster was almost the end of the line. One great aunt still living, up north of Athens on the family estate. Easy enough to get to see her, but hard to understand what she said when you did. Yes, he'd done that, was sure I could do it too. I brightened a bit. Old ladies are one of my strong points. Either I just like them, or they relish my polite approach. Miss Amelia Webster would be on my visiting list. Before we could get to Webster's early life it was time to cover the evening rally. My young friend put out his cigar with considerable relief, and we left. Outside, there was still that feeling of excitement in the air. The swarms of people converging on the great field where Webster held his rallies were chattering to each other as though a real treat was in store for them. At a political rally? There may be duller events in the world, and the political pros do get a big kick from them -- but they are caviare to the general public. I took up my position in the crowd, about a third of the way back from the stage. Like the psychologist at the burlesque show, I got part of my moneysworth looking at the reactions of the audience. It began at eight, with no introductory speakers or warm-ups. First, a low pleasant music from the big speakers hung around the field. Familiar, vaguely so, but I couldn't place it. At eight-five, Webster came on to the floodlit stage with its black curtains and white canopy. I began to make notes. Short, tendency to pudginess, receding dark hair, a pleasant plump face. No sign of the great vitality or exceptional good looks that the charismatic (dreadful word) leaders so often enjoy. He stepped forward to the battery of microphones and began to speak. To my surprise the soft music continued, blending with his words. Like most reporters, I have a very good memory for words. We need it. It's party training, partly natural talent. I've taught myself to supplement memory, as a matter of course, with notes made on the fly during speeches. With their aid I can get an almost verbatim reconstruction. After Webster's speech I realized that I had encountered a unique phenomenon. For the first time in twenty years, I had forgotten to take any notes. Forgotten? That's the wrong word. My notes of his speech read -- in total -- "slightly nasal voice. Odd variations in pitch and intonation." That's it, the whole thing. I had stopped writing because listening had become so important, I didn't want to risk missing a word. Webster was amazing. When he talked about the past, I felt as though I could see and hear the fathers of the country, working to create and protect my heritage. When he spoke of the future, I felt my duties, my responsibility, my part in building a brave new world for our children. I felt these, physically, like a fever in my blood. As Webster directed I laughed, I dreamed, I raged, I cried, I planned. At last he ceased and raised his arms above his head. After a long hushed pause the first tentative applause built rapidly and became thunderous and prolonged. Back in my hotel room at midnight I tried to draft an article to send north. It wouldn't come. How do you put on paper the most stirring event of your life? After a while I stopped trying and leaned back in my chair. A new but very old thought was tugging at the edge of my attention. I'm just old enough to remember the newsreels of the goose-stepping figures and the crashing shouts of 'Sieg Heil.' There is something very frightening about a crowd with a single mind -- a mob, that's still the best word for it. If James Webster had told us to go and pull down City Hall, what would we have done? I could guess. I didn't sleep well.    Next morning I called Webster's campaign office and asked for an interview. After a surprisingly short run-around from a secretary, he came on the telephone himself. Was I the Bill Forrest of T.V. and newspaper fame? Yes, I was. (Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. I never failed to get a thrill from being recognized, even by crooks and villains.) Again, the seniority was paying off. Webster would be very happy to see me at his office at two o'clock. Close-up, I confirmed last night's impression. Physically unimpressive, with a distant look in his eyes. I began the interview conventionally and asked about the election. If you had asked me about Webster's voice after last night's speech I would have ignored my first scribbled note and told you that it was compelling and persuasive. Today it was nothing. Monotonic, soft. He wouldn't look me in the eye. Yes, this was his first campaign. No, he would refuse a television interview now, he was not quite -- hesitation -- prepared for it. Perhaps in a month or so. Certainly, he was completely confident of a win here. Future plans? Wait and see, but this was only a beginning. After three quarters of an hour I gave up and left. James Webster was sharp and confident all right but he came across to me as a cold fish, a man you wouldn't trust with a dime or your daughter. I knew I couldn't send back an interview that said that, without rhyme or reason, I disliked and distrusted the man. But I did, strongly. What had happened to the man who had spoken last night? No sign of him today. One phrase came back again. Not prepared for a television interview yet. Why had he agreed to an interview with me? Well, I could guess at that. Even a villain -- and that's how I was thinking of Webster now, with no evidence to support me -- likes to go on ego-building trips.I'd picked up a few useful things during the interview. First and foremost, James Webster thought that James Webster was wonderful. I've sensed that from many -- from most -- politicians, but here it came across as a contempt for anything that was not James Webster. Longtime politicians may feel that way, some of them, but they hide it a whole lot better. Second, the campaign really was one hundred percent his own. No one else was more than a minor hanger-on, dispensed with if and when Webster chose to do it. I had a day of useless churning and frustration, until I finally rented a car and drove north for Athens, and Miss Amelia Webster. According to James Webster she was his only surviving relative. I wanted to check his version of his early career with her recollections. According to for his teachers to understand, until he had become impatient with them and left the stupid school system forever. I moved to another universe. At eighty-five, the present must seem rather like a dream world. The real world, the world that matters, is mostly the past. Amelia Webster was sitting outside on a stone patio, looking out over a landscaped formal garden from a brightly colored reclining chair. I was led to her through the house and left to stand a few minutes inside while her companion went to her and told her about my arrival. The fading photographs on the side tables showed a woman in her twenties and thirties, black-haired and vivacious. No photographs after that. Amelia Webster, wisely, had frozen her recorded image at thirtyfive. The bone structure and the alert dark eyes were still there, but everything else had changed beyond recognition. Thomas Hardy said it exactly. 'They must forget, forget! They cannot know what once they were, or memory would transfigure them and show them always fair.' On that warm patio, sustained by endless cups of China tea from pale blue cups, we drifted for three hours, back and forth over eighty years. I didn't hurry. Now and again we circled back to 'young James,' then away again to the Christmas Ball through the deep snow, the beloved killed in the Great War, to the first automobile ride. By five o'clock I knew the real Amelia Webster, passionate and sparkling, hidden inside the accidental husk of old age. And I had built a clear and disturbing picture of James Webster. 'Bad Blood.' That was the ominous key phrase that Amelia had used. The other words? Glacially intelligent. Selfish. Vain. Those are mine, not Amelia's, but her longer descriptions added to produce the unpleasant summary. After high school James Webster had attended college for two years, then quit suddenly and returned to the family estate. There was a faint impression of something about his departure that would not be mentioned to anyone outside the family. I checked it later at the college and found well-disguised traces of a tragedy involving the death of a mentally retarded girl. All this confirmed my own instinctive reaction. The central discovery from my meeting with Amelia was more tangible. James Webster maintained a study and complete recording studio in one wing of the house. For the past year, he had spent all his time there until he began his campaign. That night I drove back to Atlanta and again attended Webster's rally. This time, I was determined to remain aloof and analyze his speech in objective terms. Can you believe me when I tell you I failed totally? The setting was just as before, the simple outdoor meeting place, the soft music before he appeared. I made my notes about the audience, the lighting and the expectant tension in the air. Then Webster began to speak and I was gone again. I returned to my senses and control of my own body more than an hour later. I had been carried to great heights, shown the beauties of the world, dipped far into the future, offered happiness beyond belief -- if I would help James Webster in his chosen works. Another sleepless night followed. Smoking and drinking like a fool, until the back of my throat was raw and my head spun when I lay back. But by morning I knew what I wanted to do. I made another appointment with Amelia Webster and drove again to the big house with its long oak-shaded drive. The weather had broken and it was twenty degrees cooler, so today we remained inside. Lunch was served in a dining room big enough for thirty people. Amelia made sure that I was served enough for three meals but limited herself to soup, cheese and wine. Again, we talked our way here and there through the century, while I tried to refuse a succession of well-prepared dishes. With the coffee, Amelia Webster showed me what a mistake it would have been to underrate the mind in the fragile body. "Now, Mr. Forrest, that was very enjoyable. I don't have too many interesting guests these days, you know. But why don't you tell me now what you came for." She smiled. "I'm well aware that men no longer court me for myself alone. What do you want?" She was half-wrong, in my case, but half-right too. I shrugged my shoulders and smiled back at her. "Miss Amelia, I suspect that you know already." "I think I do. It's James' studio, isn't it? You were very polite yesterday but I could see you almost sniffing the air when I mentioned it. You see, I've had the feeling for a long time that James has been up to something -- and my instincts tell me that it's not something that I'll feel proud of." She rose with difficulty from her chair and went slowly over to a large teak sideboard. "I don't know why I should trust you this way, but that's always a mystery. Here are the keys to the West Wing. The study and studio are on the second floor. James will not be back to the house until tomorrow evening. I ask one thing only, Mr. Forrest. Tell me nothing of what you find. Peace of mind is something I cherish these days." Amelia Webster. A remarkable woman. We missed each other by about thirty-five years, and I've regretted it ever since. Perhaps the next time around. It was three o'clock when I took the keys from her and left the room. It was close to midnight when I climbed back into my rented car and began to drive back to Atlanta.    That was on March #, #. If you look at the newspapers for that year, you will find that James Webster was murdered on the evening of March #th. Shot by an unknown assassin in the middle of an evening political rally. The shot was fired from a considerable distance using a high-powered rifle and a telescopic sight. No, I must correct that. The telescopic sight wasn't in any of the news reports -- they never found the rifle. I shot James Webster. I didn't regret it then, and although the idea of murder for political ends appalls me, I have never regretted it since. In the eyes of the world, I might have been able to justify James Webster's murder for good political reasons . But seen through those same eyes, I committed the greatest treason. I did the right deed for the wrong reason. Let me come now to the heart of it. It all boils down to this: what was it I found in Webster house? Well, what had I been expecting? It was hard to put a name to it, but mass hypnotism comes close. A 'hypnotic generator,' maybe, that would allow one man to mesmerize a whole crowd. That was what was floating around in my mind. I found worse than that. First was Webster's diary. Not for the past; for the future. Meticulously noted, day by day and meeting by meeting, the path to the Presidency of the United States. Five primaries, the convention, the television speeches, the preelection addresses. Alone, that would have been nothing. Men have dreamed of power, and it is certain that many have made detailed plans to get it, but failed along the way. Webster would not have failed. What I found in his studio proved that. It took a while for me to put the pieces together. First there was the general theory. Three heavy black loose-leaf binders, full of mathematics and right over my head. Next to them I found a whole series of Webster 'speeches.' Each had a title and a date, running through the end of #. Inside the folder for each speech it looked like the score for a complicated opera, plus lots of added notation that I couldn't follow. The words -- I recognized some of them, from Webster's speeches in Atlanta -- had their own diacritical and pitch marks, above and below them. The music that went with them was precisely annotated as to volume, crescendi, diminuendi and instrumentation. On a desk in the comer I found another set of books. Famous speeches by Demosthenes, Cicero, ler and others. Each had numerous changes, added by Webster, plus again his strange 'orchestration' and added symbols. I finally realized that these were test pieces of Webster's theory and techniques. The whole studio was packed with sophisticated recording equipment. Monitors for recording and varying pitch and intonation. Complex tape decks to permit multipletrack recordings, dubbing and splicing. Oscilloscopes to permit the display of wave forms, filters for signal processing, and signal synthesizers. I consider I know a fair amount about recording techniques but I was out of my depth. Webster had a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment in that single room. I might never have fathomed the mystery without Webster's direct assistance. The key was in a thin blue book, over on the low table by the bricked-up fireplace of the studio. James Webster had kept a private log and diary for all his work. Perhaps everybody needs someone to talk to -- a Boswell, a Horatio, a wife or a confessor. James Webster had followed Samuel Pepys and used a private diary. From it I at last understood the true scope of his work, his ego and his ambition. James Webster, with his failings, was a genius. He had developed the basic theory of human communication, the underlying eternal rules that govern human action and reaction. From that theoretical beginning, he had gone on to find the precise combinations of sounds that would stimulate a particular emotional response. It was an exact science. The calculations were long and complex and exact results hard to achieve, but Webster had developed an 'approximation theory' that used combinations of English words and musical sounds to approximate the mathematically optimal signals. His 'speeches' were approximations of this type. As he said in his diary, "all the efforts of the great orators through history have been crude and intuitive attempts to do empirically and unreliably what I can now do with absolute assurance." A great man could have found noble uses for his discoveries. Webster had no such objective. The pursuit of personal power, above and beyond any leader in history, was his ambition. Did I mention at the beginning that this is a confession? It is. Why didn't I reveal Webster's plans to the world and let society deal with him? Wouldn't I have been regarded as a hero, the man who saved the country (and the world) from an absolute dictatorship? Aye, there's the rub. I told you I am appalled at the reasons. This is the simple truth. I shot Webster for different and more selfish reasons. To those people who have heard of me at all, I am a political writer. I have been one for so long that they cannot imagine me as anything else. But every harlot was a virgin once. Scratch a hack writer, and underneath you often find a poet. That's me. Fifty years ago I decided that I had to earn a living and turned my back on poetry. Only the longing and the love lived on. When I left the Webster estate that night, so many years ago, I went to my hotel and I thought, long and painfully. I knew that all the great orators of the past had become fumbling amateurs, blindly stumbling towards Webster's exact knowledge. But I knew more than that, much more. I thought of Keats, Coleridge, Milton, Eliot and Wordsworth -- of Shakespeare. Their words, long cherished, flooded my mind. And music. I heard the complex web of the final Rivercare of the 'Musical Offering' -- the de profundis opening of the Ring -- the whirlwind and lightning finale of Schubert's C Major Symphony. All now to be dismissed, discarded, crude approximations to a single attainable absolute. My world was to become obsolete. Take your fifty favorite pieces of music, your hundred best-loved poems . Imagine them gone from the world, swept away by a final and terrible progress. Now you know why I killed James Webster, or you will never know.  To: Jerry Pournelle I've waited two weeks since reading your article in the October issue of Galaxy regarding the prospects for Controlled Thermonuwriting this while flying home after attending the Second Topical Meeting on the Technology of Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion held in Richland, Washington Oct. #-#, can Nuclear Society. Regarding the technical matters covered in your article, I have only two comments, regarding the emphasis rather than the content of your article: #) In virtually all present concepts of the thermonuclear reaction utilized is the D-T reaction rather than the D-D reaction which you seemed to emphasize. This is primarily due to the much lower ignition energy (# KeV (# # c) ) for D-T than the D-D reaction (# KeV (# # c) ) for a plasma power density of # wattscm # . #) Since the D-T reaction will predominate, a source of tritium is required to provide fuel for the reactor. The amount of tritium occuring naturally is miniscule compared with deuterium, making recovery of natural tritium impracticable. The tritium will be therefore 'bred' in the reactor coolantbreeder blanket by means of the reaction # Li t #  qN I -- l #  # He# # Li  # N -- I t#  # h  #  # N I using the neutrons produced in the D-T plasma. The lithium in the blanket could serve the dual purpose of tritium breeder and reactor coolant to provide heat for a steam search is shown, however, by the fact that the chemical form of the lithium used for the reactor blanket has not yet been extensively specified. I received the impression at the conference that there is a general tendency to regard liquid elemental lithium as the likely candidate. Experience with the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder research shows, however, some of the major engineering, corrosion, and materials compatibility problems which can be expected from such an approach. In this context, Dr. S. Sze of the University of Wisconsin Fusion Study Group has developed the idea of using a free-flowing lithium oxide (Li # #) microsphere bed for use as both reactor coolant and tritium breeder. This approach, if proven practical in terms of particle transport and steam generator requirements, could alleviate many of the sign. Regarding more general matters in fusion research: agree with you wholeheartedly regarding cauenergy needs. Although plasma physicists have made steady progress in the physics of the thermonuclear reaction (both in magnetic and inertial confinement), truly massive engineering and materials problems remain. As a nuclear engineer I often cringed at some of the design parameters specified at some of heat load on divertor plates, # Tesla magnetic fields, etc.), and .I kept thinking, "How do they ever expect to get this thing licensed'" It's early yet, but the point I would really like to make here is that even the most optimistic scenarios don't envision energy needs before the year #. Until that time, the huge investments necessary to deperhaps a significant drain, on our economic resources without any significant payoff. Also, the ability of our research to achieve a largely on the health of our fission reactor economy. Many of the problems associated kind of problems associated with fission reactors, and it is the present nuclear power industry, along with the research establishments of the national labs and the universities, who are going to have to provide the scientific and engineering manpower to solve these problems. The people who are going to be produced by the Nuclear Engineering departments of the universities and the size and existence of these departments depends on the state of the nuclear power industry. This may be an oversimplification, but I believe the general idea valid. If the light water fission reactor industry is destroyed by the specious obstructionism which now confronts it, our energy economy may not be able to time period sufficient to help meet future needs. As it is, it's going to be touch and go. In short, regarding fusion power as any kind of short-term (# years) alternative to fission power for meeting our energy needs is wishful thinking, as are, in my opinion solar, geothermal, hydroelectric (deadly dams!!) etc. power. Besides, we don't worry about the ecological effects of these power sources on a large scale because nobody has really studied them yet. Enough, I'm getting a little queasy. If man were meant to fly...etc. Sincerely, Dr. T.A. Thornton Babcock  Wilcox Co. Lynchburg Research Center Box # Lynchburg, VA # Jerry' s reply: The environmentalists were horrified at the thought of all that liquid sodium in the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (Fission); what will they say to liquid Lithium, and breeding nasty Tritium as well ? I suspect that as soon as Fusion becomes somewhere near practical, the "ecologists" and "environmental protectors" and " concerned scientists" who are now so thoroughly in favor of fusion that they wish us to defer all new power plant construction until fusion is available will, suddenly, become enemies of fusion; God alone knows what they will be for then . "But this be law, l will maintain, until my dying day, Sir; that whatsoever king shall reign, still I'll be Vicar of Brae, Sir." (See also Inferno, #nd round, #th circle.) My thanks to Dr. Thornton for his kind comments and additions to my article on Fusion without Exlax. Mr. Baen: I have grown tired of seeing J. Pournelle's articles gushing about the wonders of atomic fissionfusionetc. There are severe objections to atomic fission (I haven't seen any solution to where we'll put the waste from Pournelle's office, to give just one example), and atomic fusion is still some distance in the future and thus not to be relied on. I am also tired of helping pay for such articles every time I buy an issue of In short, how about equal time? I'm sure some of the physicists who donated their time to California's Proposition # would be glad to counter Pournelle's assertions, and presenting both sides would give your readers a more balanced treatment of the subject. Currently, all they're getting is the assertion that objections to nuclear power are based on "superstition," which is not the case. Sincerely, Bruce Duncan # Lexington St. San Francisco, CA # I would be happy to consider for publication an article such as you propose...of course as Science Editor Dr. Pournelle would have the right of rebuttal in the same issue. Any takers? Dear Mr. Baen, I would like to enter one vote in Alter's favor in the election suggested by him in The Alien Viewpoint in your October issue of Galaxy . I would also like to express my appreciation of John Varley's work, which I have enjoyed greatly. But I do have a question about it: "Phantom of Kansas" and "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" both take place in the same general setting -- future settlements on the moon, as does "Bagatelle", but "Bagatelle" has no reference to the depopulated Invader-controlled Earth described in "Kansas", quite the contrary. Are they or are they not parts of the same line of "future history"? And what relation does the spacetime setting of "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" bear to all this? I have enjoyed all the stories which I have read in Galaxy since the Jan. # issue, which was the first I purchased (following the demise of IF). I have six # issues and seven # issues, acquired by watching newsstand shelves like a hawk. I can tell by the continued stories that I have missed less than nine issues, but the uncertainty of whether you are publishing monthly or bimonthly or whatever is driving me crazy, so I'm going to take up your silver anniversary offer as indicated on page four. As a librarian I am morally outraged by the thought of mutilating any printed work, even one which belongs to me, so I am not sending you your little coupon from page four. I'm sending a handwritten copy of it to the address given on the coupon itself. I hope this doesn't snarl up your bookkeeping too much. On to other affairs: Tell Mr. Zelazny to hurry up and finish the Amber series, please !! Also, in your February # issue you asked, after the last letter in Directions which referred to Poul Anderson's work including the Flandry stories, "Is there a future for the Race, after the Empire? I mean with the damn Merseians just waiting their chance, and all...Well, Poul?" Please ask him again. Louder. And congratulate Mr. Niven on his present story and suggest that he and Mr. Poumelle consider doing a Purgatorio. What are Hal Clement and Gordon Dickson doing lately? Didn't the Dorsai series originally include a couple more novels in the original plan? I know from personal experience that even a lousy writer can't ever stop writing and making up stories, and I haven't seen any obituaries on a lot of the great writers in the field, so where are they? I realize that not everyone is an Asimov, but they can't expect people who only became old enough to appreciate SF ten years ago to be placated by reprints from the fifties and early sixties forever; SF doesn't have quite the obsolescence problem of hard science, but it does date. And even the reprints aren't numerous enough. As a twenty-two year old SF addict I feel sadly put upon. Sincerely, Elise M. Grasso RD ##A Narragansett, RI # Varley replies: " Phantom " and " Overdrawn " are both parts of what I've started to call my Eight Worlds series of stories. You' re right in from an altogether uglier future, and one that I'm unlikely to return to for a second story. In the Eight Worlds series, the Invasion of Earth took place in #, and most of the stories are set three to four hundred years later. Everyone in them is descended from a moon colony of about ten thousand people which was not affected by the Invasion . part of the Eight Worlds series, but the Rings are not one of the Eight Worlds. Those are Mercury, Venus, Luna, Mars, Titan, Oberon, Triton, and Pluto. The Ring society does not interact much with the rest of humanity. Best, John Varley Dear Mr. Baen, I have begun this letter to cast my vote in favor of the emancipation, liberation and publication of Alter Ego. But I suspect I may stray from that subject, since I have just exhausted it. I want to compliment you on the balance you maintain in Galaxy. The non-fiction departments are particularly outstanding. Spider Robinson is the most useful, and in many ways the best, book reviewer. Dr. Pournelle is also the best -- in some ways -- writer of science columns in sf magazines. (I don't have anything against Asimov, it's just that he concentrates primarily on what has been or what is; Pournelle places more emphasis on what might be.) And Alter, being rather a unique specimen, is by definition unrivalled. Wishful thinking. Jerry Pournelle has in the course of writing his columns turned me on to certain non-fiction books which I've found very rewarding. (He also turned me off of one, which I suspect was an equal service.) Being an alleged sf writer myself may have something to do with my enjoyment of and need for such books (G. Harry Stine and Stephen Dole especially) but I find my appreciation as a reader enhanced. The wish I referred to is for an occasional column or listing of non-fiction material of particular interest to readers  writers of sf. It only sounds drab. I actually enjoyed Asimov's The Noble Gases, but I stumbled on it by chance. And then there are the books by Carl Sagan. Beautiful. Is such a wish even realistic, though? How many sfers really wonder about that sort of thing? I know there is at least one. Sincerely, Ron Nance # Burch St. Ardmore, OK #I Dear Jim, First: I wouldn't have written just to vote on the GeisAlter schtik; I kind of like the brouhaha as is. Both of 'em, hammer and tongs. If that's legitimate, so be it... Second: the Spider encourages all Readers to vote for the Hugos. Write on. But there's something more we in the science-fiction field should be doing, could be doing, instead of moaning 'why isn't there interest in space research' and 'why do they only publish books on space when Viking is about to land on Mars.' (numbered cumulatively; it's not a heavy mag) in a short article about the upcoming space shuttle which is to be named "Enterprise." Guess why? Because # Trekshould be the name. As the article points out, the name is not the most important thing. The important thing is that when # people (or even #) write in and demand something, attention is paid to them. Why aren't we writing? Why aren't we demanding more research, more utilization of our space efforts, and the resources we are rapidly losing in trained scientists and functioning laboratories, and so forth? They are being absorbed into other industries; they can hardly go on the breadline waiting for more some agency -- fails to employ them. Why do we let authoritative writers like Patrick Moore blandly assert, as he did in The Next Fifty Years in Space that satellite technology is not being used for the convenience and needs of ordinary people? (His statement inferred that communications satellites did not carry telephone conversations; a misstatement then and now. After all, the book carries a # date.) For him, space research is about dead. ourselves and not on paper, to the proper authorities? Why do we -- space buffs, that is -- only get a 'good press' when something spectacular is going on? Why aren't we out there in front, demanding it? How about it, Dr. Pournelle -- you've suggested one project, the electron bombardment, inertial confinement fusion project at Sandia. We've all got congressmen. I'm and addresses for the proper agencies? Sincerely, M. A. Bartter # Winton Rd. S. Rochester, N.Y. # Trouble is, really good ideas aren't all that common... Dear Mr. Baen: I was happy to see your October issue. The departments were interesting, as usual. "The Alien Viewpoint" is definitely a plus. (By the way, I vote for Alter-Ego, because Geis has enough to say in Science Fiction Review, and Alter is the more interesting of the two). Your book review column is also very good, with Spider Robinson being one of the better reviewers around today, and your art selections are breathtaking. I'm starting to think that Fabian is the best artist in SF today. But the most surprising thing about the issue was the Fiction. I usually save all the short fiction for the last three months of the year, and then read it all at once. This year the October issue of Galaxy was the first magazine I read all year. The two Novellettes were very well done. Varley is very quickly becoming the best new writer around, and "Bagatelle" was very good, in spite of the predictable ending. "Seeker of the way" on the other handwas good throughout. I would like to know if Mr. Schmidt has been published before and where? The Niven serial was as usual competent, but the short stories were pretty dismal. "You'll be a real sensation", and "The man at the bottom of the Sea" were unreadable, and R.C. Walkers "Act of faith" was a good Idea lacking in the execution. But what actually prompted me to write was Thomas J. Mum's letter. When he quoted Chip Delany's essay "About # words" in defense of "Dhalgren", which is full of "unintentional confusion, ambiguity, and shallow action", it was just too much for me to bear. Now, I am not a "dinosaur" who reads nothing but "the sterile spacepoop of the Laser books", but a genuine New-Wave fan from back when it was the new wave (which Delany was never a part of), and I still say that Dhalgren is pretentious garbage. Dhalgren would have been fairly interesting as a novella (say about # words), but as it stands it is boring with a Capital B, and unreadable, and if I want to read literature, or whatever it is Dhalgren is supposed to be I'll read "Finnegan's Wake", which Dhalgren is a tenth rate imitation of. I think that Chip Delany has gotten into the same type of thing that Ballard got into back in # with "The Atrocity Exhibition", except that Delany's writing got so fat, and gluttonous, while Ballard's writing got so lean and compressed. But the effect was the same, they both got unintelligible and boring. But Ballard has now come back with "Crash", and "High-Rise", both books being Classics of Speculative Fiction (Not SF, Ballard hasn't been a SF writer for many years). In the long run I think that Delany will soon come back to the SF mainstream, and grace us with stories like "The Star-Pit", and "The Einstein Intersection", and leave the pretentiousness and gluttony of Dhalgren and Triton behind. One point Mr. Murn does make in his letter is that Dhalgren is very enjoyable, and accesible to High Schoolers, as would be any long novel with lots of clinical sex and a nameless hero, set in a city where "law and order" have ceased to exist, where everyone can do as they please; and they would also like a book which at the same time, attempts to be great literature, all of which Dhalgren has. I once thought that Chip Delany, and Roger Zelazny were going to bring about a new "Golden Age" in SF, but I guess I'll have to wait a little longer, because neither one of these gentlemen seems to be bringing this about. Yours truly # #I Place Glendale, New York # Dear Mr. Baen, In starting, I must mention that getting your magazine was almost a total accident. In Fall '#, I was relatively uninitiated in the science fiction genre. I started out with progressed to a few selected short stories. My sister's school had a fund raising drive selling subscriptions to magazines. To help her out I bought a subscription to your magazine somehow thinking (horror of all horrors) that it was that other sf magazine that has six letters. At that time I had only read that other magazine and thought that it was a typical (and only) example of an sf magazine. When I realized that you were not Analog, I was worried that you were some slipshod operation. What a happy surprise it was when I received my First issue! I find your features unbeatable, with Messieurs Robinson and Geis vying for first attention, although Alter usually wins out for top honors. I find Dr. Pournelle extremely lucid and he is always relevant to the events of today -- and those of tomorrow. Your stories are tough to beat, also. I particularly enjoyed "Abandon All Heat, Ye Who Enter Here", and "The Children of the State" promises well. Galaxy Continues to take the lead in true Science Fiction. My one complaint is that I want to hear more of you, Mr. Baen, in some editorials and some news about the condition of the sf magazine market. Sincerely yours, Thomas Koegel # Chestnut Avenue Long Beach, Ca. # Your last point is,  fear, well taken. In mitigation  can only offer that the need for monthly editorials is the...er...bane of harrassed editors...Perhaps  have been overly demanding of myself in terms of topics.  hereby resolve (as I have before ) to Do Better. Dear Mr. Baen, I'm going to be greedy and say that I want both Geis and Alter. My reasoning is simple: they balance each other. Without Geis, Alter' s ranting would just get on my nerves, while with no Alter the column wouldn't be quite as interesting. The one thing that both of them prefer to overlook is that neither of them would be where they are today without the other. They're a team , dammit, and that's what I want to see. Lee Ann Goldstein # Beech Avenue Paramus, NJ # Dick will remain, though his role will be...altered! Dear Jim, Up with Alter Ego! Down with Geis! You know these multiple personality cases, though few, can be very interesting. I'm just waiting for the Geis personality to disappear so that Alter can begin to contend with that even weirder personality to come. Over the year Galaxy might proceed through an entire gamut of alien critics culminating with one that takes over your job -- and then what of Galaxy ? Sincerely, John Robinson #st Street Troy, NY # What, indeed! Geis' s vote: Dear Jim, To help resolve the conflict of interests between Dick Geis and Alter in "The Alien Viewpoint" controversy, let me put my vote in favor of Dick. Sure, I love Alter as well, but the "Prime Selves" must be maintained. (No name given) The final tally: Alter, #: Geis, .#: Both, #: Other, #. And thus ends one of the most lopsided contests in modern electoral history. For further information see next month' s Alien Viewpoint -- by Alter Ego! T VO Sl ' . ' ', f' : v.i(iv; I !i r ' rJ ' #: ; I i '## N TEjrz rilr :A  . fl'l HA .I I I w A'i V. ji AOs , vZ "ujjvaw.  .'S -- vzyv y  ' "yn  '  r rr:" 'jtfms. ' .'.   'S...v...-. '.i All published correspondence is subject to editing for clarity and brevity.  .  ' Jrfi galaxy # fair # Sueoi N # w Y o r ir NY I # I # # per word per issue (including name and address) or # issues # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. hardcovers, magazines, fanzines, comics. 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The same holds true for groups: You may, in fact, learn more than you ever wanted to know... Continuing the adventures of Jerome as he pits himself against the mindless ferocity of the bodiless Mushin. Herein he becomes a Seeker who has found his Way. True, the aliens had committed an act of planetary contamination, but considering that it happened as a result of a forced landing their oversight was a forgivable one. Besides, it telligent life would arise on Earth... Public benefactor, private hero: at last the inside story of the man who gave us the Mattin UnksI Someday it will be possible to prevent acts of violence before they are even contemplated. What a horrible thought! Frank Herbert # The ins and outs of BuSab, Calebans, Wreaves, Gowachin and Humans; all of whom you will meet in Frank's great new novel. The Dosadi Experiment, beginning in this issue of Galaxy. Return to the rodts? Nonsense; we are the roots! Editor. Here is what Jerry replied. The readers have spoken. 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And How It Got That Way This article is being written to dispel a myth which we who write know to exist because of the Johnny-one-note question we keep getting from so many readers. I will presently tell all about the origins of Whipping Star, Dosadi Experiment and other McKie stories. First, however, the question: "Where do you get your ideas?" I've conducted a small survey among fellow writers to explore this question. Here are a few sample discoveries: Jack Vance gets his ideas from a Leprechaun he trapped with an arcane spell outside a pub in Shillelagh, Ireland. Poul Anderson gets his ideas from a gross, dirty old man with a Dutch accent who drops by without warning, passes over a greasy table napkin covered with scribblings and says: "Here! Write aboudt dis!" Harlan Ellison gets his ideas in a plain brown wrapper from Schenectady, New York. No return address. Larry Niven gets his ideas from words whieh appear mysteriously on the inside faces of his glasses. Lester del Rey gets his ideas from messages written in invisible ink on the backs of wine labels #t from Bordeaux. Not every label carries a message and he must, therefore, sample many bottles before getting the right one. Just incidentally, this has made him a wine expert. As you can see, the origins are as varied as the people. I get my ideas from different sources for different stories. For the McKie stories, the origin is a Taprisiot I attempted to use as firewood. He did, after all, appear to be a stubby brown log with limbs short enough to go into my fireplace. Seeing my intention, the Taprisiot proposed a bargain: Ideas in exchange for his life. He also explained that he was extremely low in British Thermal Units. As those of you who've read the other McKie stories know, the Taprisiot communicated with me by a direct mental linkage -- mind to mind. This feat naturally did not shock or surprise a science fiction writer. It does, however, explain those occasional times when frienc(g have found me uncommunicative, twitching and trembling in a zombie-like snigger-like trance. This is a necessary physical condition for Taprisiot communication. It should be obvious by now that I have retreated into amusement to escape that constant question about ideas. I'll say it plainly: Ideas are a dime a dozen and are never more than a mere beginning. In development of an idea is where you find the story. Sample idea: Water runs uphill for five minutes in every twentyfour hours. What kind of a world would develop, and what technology would you find, in response to such a phenomenon? Go design a toilet for such a world. Then there's the question of what causes such an oddity. (Harry Stubbs, be my guest.) I invite you to play with this relatively simple idea for awhile before continuing. Just to give you a feeling for idea development. Now: the McKie stories, no diversions into parody, just the straight quill. (Most writers use a straight quill which has some connection with a goose.) Oddly, the McKie stories stemmed from ready John Adams, the revolutionary, the constitutionalist, the dogmatist among our founding fathers. He was a tight-lipped, tight-fisted lawyer who was at heart an aristocrat of the intellect. Adams, in contrast to Thomas Paine, believed that majority rule could lead to just as many errors as the most autocratic minority rule. Adams distrusted power no matter who exercised it. Then, following a pattern I enjoy, I began taking out and examining some of my most dearly beloved assumptions: That Law will always bring justice provided you perfect the Law. That the speedy execution of new political concepts and social changes is really what we all need. (Delays are bad.) That life should be made easier for those we choose to have govern us -- they should be paid more, get all sorts of help, should never be frustrated or angered. (Red tape is evil.) That government should be as centralized and as big as possible to oveiride the mounting difficulties of a diverse, technological world. (Small is inefficient and ugly.) Now, contrast the universe of Joij X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinare, agent of the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab): With few exceptions, he can disrupt anyone or anything. His mandate is to protect the rights of private citizens by selectively slowing the workings of government and too-powerful industry (which tends to act like government, as witness the activities of present multinational corporations). BuSab originated in a past where good-intentioned people eliminated red tape. Government slipped into high gear, moving faster and faster. Laws were passed within an hour of conception. New bureaus originated almost by whim, appropriations were spent almost as fast as they were earmarked. BuSab functions to slow things down, to incite disputes between people and agencies. It exposes the temperamental types who cannot handle power, cannot control themselves or think under pressure. BuSab entertains the public by flamboyant obstructionism (behind which there is always at least a hint of violence and viciousness to reflect the bureau's origin). It exposes a deeper reality by stirring up opposition between political factions, and in the bureau's own functionaries you find an outlet for troublemakers. To keep down indiscriminate obstruction, some agencies are immune from sabotage all the time, others may be targets only under specific conditions (e.g. when they become too big, too powerful and begin to ride roughshod over individuals). Only BuSab is never immune from its own ministrations. You advance in BuSab through successful sabotage against superiors. McKie's universe is peopled by various sentient beings who function to hold those beloved assumptions up to a crueler examination. There are the Taprisiots, as above, an almost perfect means of communication, but they put you in peril when you employ them. The PanSpechi, a five-gendered race which can mimic almost any other sentient form, but which often chooses to mimic Human form except for the eyes which remain insect-faceted. The five-unit base is called a creche and has only one ego which passes periodically to a newly-prepared member of the creche. They tempt you to think of them as Human, but their thoughts and actions can be dangerous to people who make that mistake. Tere are the Calebans. You see them as the visible stars. Calebans provide the ConSentient universe of Jorj X. McKie with jumpdoors. Through a jumpdoor's portal you step from planet to planet instantaneously, no matter die intervening distance. If a jumpdoor happens to close while you're in it, it cuts you into two neat (dead) pieces. It also opens the way to many new types of exploitation, not all of them benevolent. (Rapid transit doesn't solve all of our problems.) We have Wreaves who carry the insect analogy a bit farther. They have two sets of mandibles ordinarily concealed in facial slits. One set is employed as we employ our hands. The other set is for fighting and is poison-tipped. They perambulate on limber pedal bifurcations. Wreaves form breeding triads which periodically exchange members, linking triad to triad in gigantic extended families. The poisoned apple here is that if you offend one Wreave you offend the extended family and the result is vendetta. The ConSentiency also contains Palenki, creatures whose shape is similar to the giant tortoise But with a single prehensile arm protruding from the shell. We have Preylings, Chithers and Soborips -- all deliberately left vague for possible future use. We have Laclacs, supple and reserved creatures who employ tendrils as Humans employ arms and hands. Then we have the Gowachin, the Frog People of Tandaloor whose concept of Law is the strangest in the ConSentiency. To them, ritual (form) is the foundation upon which Law stands, but Law must change to meet each new condition. They do not trust even their own Law, believing that even the most highminded people will use legalisms for their own benefit. The Courtarena where they try their cases can be a scene of carnage. The losing m (lawyer) forfeits his life. Any jurist or client who makes a misstep can be dispatched. This is a situation, as McKie notes, which makes for infrequent trials and memorable court performances. McKie is a Legum. Just as the Gowachin have some legal terminology which vaguely recalls Human legalisms, the Frog People are only vaguely similar to terrestrial frogs. They are amphibians who can breathe through chest ventricles when out of water. They lay eggs in water and the males ravenously weed out their own tads. Only the most nimble and alert survive. (Gowachin characteristics and their Law are explored more thoroughly in Dosadi Experiment, but this gives you a glimpse of them.) For untold generations death and suffering had been their portion -- now all that would change... As in Whipping Star where the focus was on the Calebans, Dosadi Experiment emphasizes the difficul' ties in establishing real communication between sentient species who perceive things in profoundly different ways. Where Whipping Star concentrated on Calebans and their S' eye Effects, Dosadi Experiment concentrates on Human-Gowachin relationships. The new story has characters from the previous one: (Napoleon) Bildoon, a PanSpechi. and chief of McKie's BuSab; the Caleban Fannie Mae, who is the visible star Thyone...and McKie. There's an additional question of even greater moment, however. What do you find out about such people when you deliberately throw them into conditions of extremis? How's that for an idea? Science Fiction  Charles Sheffield Tom Purdom J.E. Pournelle We have created a monster -- enormously valuable and even useful, yet extremely dangerous. Our monster is both beautiful and terrifying. We do not dare use this monster to its full potential, but we cannot release our grasp upon it. -- Gowachin assessment of the Dosadi experiment window behind Keila Jedrik's desk, ricocheted and screamed off into the canyon street far below her office. Jedrik prided herself that she had not even flinched. The Elector's patrols would take care of the sniper. The patrols which swept the streets of Chu every morning would home on the sound of the shot. She held the casual hope that the sniper would escape back to the Rim Rabble, but she recognized this hope as a weakness and dismissed it. There were concerns this morning far more important than an infiltrator from the Rim. Jedrik reached one hand into the comer of early sunlight which illuminated the contact plates of her terminal in the Master Accountancy computer. Those flying fingers -- she could almost disassociate herself from them. They darted like insects at the waiting keys. The terminal was a functional instrument, symbol of her status as a Senior Liaitor. It sat all alone in its desk slot -- grey, green, gold, black, white and deadly. Its grey screen was almost precisely the tone of her desk top. With careful precision, her fingers played their rhythms on the keys. The screen produced yellow numbers, all weighted and averaged at her command -- a thin strip of destiny with violence hidden in its golden shapes. Every angel carries a sword, she thought. But she did not really , consider herself an angel or her weapon a sword. Her real weapon was an intellect hardened and sharpened by the terrible decisions her planet required. Emotions were a force to be diverted within the self or to be used against anyone who had failed to leam what Dosadi taught. She knew her own weakness and hid it carefully: she'd been taught by loving parents (who'd concealed their love behind exquisite cruelty) that Dosadi's decisions were indeed terrible. Jedrik studied the numbers on her computer display, cleared the screen and made a new entry. As she did this, she knew she took sustenance from fifty of her planet's Human inhabitants. Many of those fifty would not long survive this callous jape. In truth, her fingers were weapons of death for those who failed this test. She felt no guilt about those she slew. The imminent arrival of one Jorj X. McKie dictated her actions, precipitated them. When she thought about McKie, her basic feeling was one of satisfaction. She'd waited for McKie like a predator beside a burrow in the earth. His name and identifying keys had been given to her by her chauffeur, Havvy, hoping to increase his value to her. She'd taken the information and had made her usual investigation. Jedrik doubted that any other person on Dosadi could have come up with the result her sources produced: Jorj X. McKie was an adult Human who could not possibly exist. No record of him could be found on all of Dosadi -- not on the poisonous Rim, not in Chu's Warrens, not in any niche of the existing power structure. McKie did not exist, but he was due to arrive in Chu momentarily, smuggled into the city by a Gowachin temporarily under her control. McKie was the precision element for which she had waited. He was not merely a possible key to the God Wall (not a bent and damaged key like Havvy) but a clean and certain key. She had never been prepared to break this lock with poor instruments. There would be one chance and only one chance; it required the best. Thus fifty of Dosadi's Humans took their faceless places behind the numbers of her computer terminal. They were bait, expendable. Those who died by her act would not die immediately and forty-nine of them might never know they'd been deliberately submitted to early death by a deliberate act nor that she had done this thing. Some of them would be pushed back to the Rim's short and desperate existence. Others would waste away in the Warrens. And the deadly process would extend across sufficient time to dull any sense of immediacy until the moment of extinction. But they'd been slain by her fingers on the computer keys and she knew it. She cursed her parents for that unwanted awareness of the blood and sinew behind the numbers. Those loving parents had taught her well. She might never see the bodies of the ones she slew, need not give another thought to all but one of the fifty; still she sensed them all behind her computer display... warm and pulsing. Jedrik sighed. The fifty were bleating animals staked out to lure a dangerous beast onto Dosadi's poisonous soil from outside the God Wall. Her fifty would create a fractional surplus here which would be gone, swallowed before anyone else realized their importance. Dosadi is a sick place, she thought. And not for the first time, she wondered: Is this really Hell? Many believed it. We are being punished. But no one knew what they'd done to deserve this punishment. Jedrik leaned back, looked across her doorless office to the sound barrier and milky light of the hall. A strange Gowachin shambled past her doorway. He was, a frog figure on some official errand, a packet of brown paper clutched in his knobby hands. His green skin shimmered as though he'd recently come from water. The Gowachin reminded her of Bahrank, he who was bringing McKie into her net. Bahrank, who did her bidding because she controlled the substance to which he was addicted. More fool he to let himself become an addict to anything, even to living. One day soon Bahrank would sell what he knew about her to the Elector's spies; by then it would be too late and the Elector would leam only what she wanted him to learn when she wanted him to leam it. She'd chosen Bahrank with the same care she'd used at her computer terminal, the same care which had made her wait for someone precisely like McKie. And Bahrank was Gowachin. Once committed to a project, the Frog People were notorious for carrying out their orders in a precise way. They possessed an inbred sense of order but understood the limits of law. As her gaze traversed the office, the sparse and functional efficiency of the space filled her with quiet amusement. This office presented an image of her which she had constructed with meticulous care. It pleased her that she would be leaving here soon never to return, like an insect shedding its skin. The office was four paces wide, eight long. Twelve black metal rotofiles lined the wall on her left, dark sentinels of her methodical ways. She had reset their locking codes and armed them to destroy their contents when the Elector's toads pried into them. The Elector's people would attribute this to outrage, a last angry sabotage. It would be some time before accumulating doubts would lead them to reassessment and to fhistrated questions. Even then they might not suspect her hand in the elimination of fifty Humans. She, after all, was one of the fifty. How pervasive were the seductions of Dosadi's power structure! How subtle! What she'd just done here introduced a flaw into the computer system which ruled the distribution of non-poisonous food in Dosadi's only city. Food -- here was the real base of Dosadi's social pyramid, solid and ugly. The flaw removed her from a puissant niche in that pyramid. She had worn the persona of Keila Jedrik, Liaitor for many years, long enough to leam enjoyment of the power system. Losing one valuable counter in Dosadi's endless survival game, she must now live and act only with the persona of Keila Jedrik, Warlord. This was an all-or-nothing move, a gambler's plunge. She felt the nakedness of it. But this gamble had begun long ago, far back in Dosadi's contrived history, when her ancestors had recognized the nature of this planet and had begun breeding and training for the individual who would take this plunge. I am that individual, she told herself. This is our moment. But had they truly assessed the problem correctly? Jediik's glance fell on the single window which looked out into the canyon street. Her own reflection stared back: a face too narrow, thin nose, eyes and mouth too large. Her hair could be an interesting black velvet helmet if she let it grow, but she kept it cropped short as a reminder that she was not a magnetic sex partner, that she must rely on her wits. That was the way she'd been bred and trained. Dosadi had taught her its cruelest lessons early. She'd grown tall while still in her teens, carrying more height in her body than in her legs so that she appeared even taller when seated. She looked down on most Gowachin and Human males in more ways than one. That was another gift (and lesson) from her loving parents and from their ancestors. There was no escaping this Dosadi lesson. What you love or value will be used against you. She leaned forward to hide her disquieting reflection, peered far down into the street. There, that was better. Her fellow Dosadis no longer were warm and pulsing people. They were reduced to distant movements, as impersonal as the dancing figures in her computer. Traffic was light, she noted. Very few armored vehicles moved, no pedestrians. There'd been only that one shot at her window. She still entertained a faint hope that the sniper had escaped. More likely a patrol had caught the fool. The Rim Rabble persisted in testing Chu's defenses despite the boringly repetitive results. It was desperation. Snipers seldom waited until the day was deep and still and the patrols were scattered, those hours when even some among the most powerful ventured out. Symptoms, all symptoms. Rim sorties represented only one among many Dosadi symptoms which she'd taught herself to read in that precarious climb whose early stage came to climax in this room. It was not just a thought, but more a sense of familiar awareness to which she returned at oddly reflexive moments in her life. We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane. It made some insane choices magnificently attractive. Have  made an insane choice? No! The data lay clearly in her mind, facts which she could not obliterate by turning away from them. Dosadi had been designed from a cosmic grab bag; "Give them one of these and one of these and one of these..." It made for imcompatible pairings. The DemoPoI with which Dosadi juggled its computer-monitored society didn't fit a world which used energy transmitted from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The DemoPoI reeked of primitive ignorance, something from a society which had wandered too far down the path of legalisms -- a law for everything and everything managed by law. The dogma that a God-inspired few had chosen Chu's river canyon in which to build a city insulated from this poisonous planet, and that only some twenty or so generations earlier, remained indigestible. And that energy satellite which hovered beneath the God Wall's barrier -- that stank of a long and sophisticated evolution during which something as obviously flawed as the DemoPol would have been discarded. It was a cosmic grab bag designed for a specific purpose which she only recently had begun to suspect. We did not evolve on this planet. The place was out of phase with both Gowachin and Human. Dosadi employed computer memories and physical files side by side for identical purposes. And the number of addictive substances to be found on Dosadi was outrageous. Yet this was played off against a religion so contrived, so gross in its demands for 'simple faith' that the two conditions remained at constant war. The mystics died for their 'new insights' while the holders of 'simple faith' used control of the addictive substances to gain more and more power. The only real faith on Dosadi was that you survived by power and that you gained power by controlling what others required for survival. Their society understood the medicine of bacteria, virus and brain control, but these could not stamp out the Rim and Warren Underground where jabua faith healers cured their patients with the smoke of burning weeds. And they could not stamp out (not yet) Keila Jedrik because she had seen what she had seen. Two by two the incompatible things ebbed and flowed around her, in the cit of Chu and the surrounding Rim. It was the same in every case: a society which made use of one of these things could not naturally be a society which used the other. Not naturally. All around her, Jedrik sensed Chu with its indigestible polarities. They had only two species: Human and Gowachin. Why two? Were there no other species in this universe? Subtle hints in some of Dosadi's artifacts suggested an evolution for appendages other than the flexible fingers of Gowachin and Human. Why only one city on all of Dosadi? Dogma failed to answer. The Rim hordes huddled close, always seeking a way into Chu's insulated purity. But they had a whole planet behind them. Granted it was a poisonous planet, but it had other rivers, other places of potential sanctuary. The survival of both species argued for the building of more sanctuaries, many more than that pitiful hole which Gar and Tria thought they masterminded. No... Chu stood alone -- almost twenty kilometers wide and forty long, built on hills and silted islands where the river slowed in its deep canyon. At last count, some here and three times that number eked a short life on the Rim -- pressing, always pressing for a place in the poison-free city. Give us your precious bodies, you stupid Rimmers! They heard the message, knew its import and defied it. What had the people of Dosadi done to be imprisoned here? What had their ancestors done? It was right to build a religion upon hate for such ancestors... provided such ancestors existed. Jedrik leaned toward the window, peered upward at the God Wall, that milky translucence which imprisoned Dosadi, yet through which those such as this Jorj X. McKie could come at will. She hungered to see McKie in person, to confirm that he had not been contaminated as Havvy had been contaminated. It was a McKie she required now. The transparently contrived nature of Dosadi told her that there must be a McKie. She saw herself as the huntress, McKie her natural prey. The false identity she'd built in this room was part of her bait. Now, in the season of McKie, the underlying religious cant by which Dosadi's powerful maintained their private illusions would crumble. She could already see the beginnings of that dissolution; soon, everyone would see it. She took a deep breath. There was a purity in what was about to happen, a simplification. She was about to divest herself of one of her two lives, taking all of her awareness into the persona of that other Keila Jedrik which all of Dosadi would soon know. Her people had kept her secret well, hiding a fat and sleazy blonde person from their fellow Dosadis, exposing just enough of that one to 'X' that the powers beyond the God Wall might react in the proper design. She felt cleansed by the fact that the disguise of that other life had begun to lose its importance. The whole of her could begin to surface in that other place. And McKie had precipitated this metamorphosis. Jedrik's thoughts were clear and direct now: Come into my trap, McKie. You will take me higher than the palace apartments of the Council Hills. Or into a deeper hell than any nightmare has imagined.    How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power. Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake. Let such madmen gain power -- even you. Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity. Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come. -- Gowachin Aphorism The odalarm awoke Jorj X. McKie with a whiff of lemon. For just an instant his mind played tricks on him. He thought he was on Tutalsee's gentle planetary ocean floating softly on his garlanded is? land. There were lemons on his floating island, banks of hibiscus and carpets of spicy alyssum. His bowered cottage lay in the path of perfumed breezes and the lemon... Awareness came. He was not on Tutalsee with a loving companion; he was on a trained bedog in the armored efficiency of his Central Central apartment; he was back in the heart of the Bureau of Sabotage; he was back at work. McKie shuddered. A planet full of people could die today... or tomorrow. It would happen unless someone solved this Dosadi mystery. Knowing the Gowachin as he did, McKie was convinced of it. The Gowachin were capable of cruel decisions, especially where their species' pride was at stake, or for reasons which other species might not understand. Bildoon assessed this crisis the same way. Not since the Caleban problem had such enormity crossed the Consentient horizon. But where was this endangered planet, this Dosadi? After a night of sleep suppression, the briefings about Dosadi came back vividly as though part of his mind had remained at work sharpening the images. Two operatives, one Wreave and one Laclac had made the report. The two were reliable and resourceful. Their sources were excellent, although the infoimation was sparse. The two also were bucking for promotion at a time when Wreaves and Laclacs were hinting at discrimination against their species. The report required special scrutiny. No BuSab agent, regardless of species, was above some internal testing, a deception designed to weaken the Bureau and gain coup merits upon which to ride into the director's office. However, BuSab was still directed by Bildoon, a PanSpechi in Human form, the fourth member of his creche to carry that name. It had been obvious from Bildoon's first words that he believed the report. "McKie, this thing could set Human and Gowachin at each others' throats." It was an understandable idiom, although in point of fact you would go for the Gowachin abdomen to carry out the same threat. McKie already had acquainted himself with the report and, from internal evidence to which his long association with the Gowachin made him sensitive, he shared Bildoon's assessment. Seating himself in a grey chairdog across the desk from the director in the rather small windowless office Bildoon had lately preferred, McKie shifted the report from one hand to the other. Presently, recognizing his own nervous mannerism, he put the report on the desk. It was on coded memowire which played to trained senses when passed through the fingers or across other sensitive appendage. "Why couldn't they pinpoint this Dosadi's location?" McKie asked. "It's known only to a Caleban." "Well, they'll..." "The Calebans refuse to respond." McKie stared across the desk at Bildoon. The polished surface reflected a second image of the BuSab director, an inverted image to match the upright one. McKie studied the reflection. Until you focused on Bildoon's faceted eyes (how like an insect's eyes they were) this PanSpechi appeared much like a Human male with dark hair and pleasant round face. Perhaps he'd put on more than the form when his flesh had been molded to Human shape. Bildoon's face displayed emotions which McKie read in Human terms. The director appeared angry. McKie was troubled. "Refused?" "The Calebans don't deny that Dosadi exists or that it's threatened. They refuse to discuss it." "Then we're dealing with a Caleban contract and they're obeying the terms of that contract." Recalling that conversation with Bildoon as he awakened in his apartment, McKie lay quietly thinking. Was Dosadi some new extension of the Caleban Question? It's right to fear what we don't understand. The Caleban mystery continually eluded ConSentient investigators. Just when you thought you had something pinned down, it slipped out of your grasp. Before theCalebans had come with their gift of jumpdoors, the ConSentiency had been a relatively slow and understandable federation of the known sentient species. The universe had contained itself in a shared space of recognizable dimensions. The ConSentiency of those days had grown in a way likened to expanding bubbles. It had been linear. Caleban jumpdoors had changed that with an explosive acceleration of every aspect of life which had made BuSab inevitable. Jumpdoors had been an immediately disruptive tool of power. They implied infinite usable dimensions. They implied many other things only faintly understood. Through a Jumpdoor you stepped from a room on Tutalsee into a hallway here on Central Central. You walked through a jumpdoor here and found yourself in a garden on Paginui. The intervening 'normal space' might be measured in light years or parsecs, but the passage from one place to the other ignored such old concepts. And to this day, ConSentient investigators did not understand how the jumpdoors worked. Concepts such as 'relative space' didn't explain the phenomenon; they only added to the mystery. McKie ground his teeth in frustration. Calebans inevitably did that to him. What good did it do to think of the Calebans as visible stars in the space his body occupied? He could look up from any planet where a jumpdoor deposited him and examine the night sky. Visible stars: ah, yes. Those are Calebans. What did that tell him? There was a strongly defended theory that Calebans were but a more sophisticated aspect of the equally mysterious Taprisiots. The ConSentiency had accepted and employed Taprisiots for thousands of standard years. A Taprisiot presented sentient form and size. They appeared to be short lengths of tree trunk cut off at top and bottom and with oddly protruding stub limbs. When you touched them they were warm and resilient. They were fellow beings of the ConSentiency. But just as the Calebans took your flesh across the parsecs, Taprisiots took your awareness across those same parsecs to merge you with another mind." Taprisiots were a communications device. But current theory said Taprisiots had been introduced to prepare the ConSentiency for Calebans. It was dangerous to think of Taprisiots as merely a convenient means of communications. Equally dangerous to think of Calebans as 'transportation facilitators.' Look at the socially disruptive effect of jumpdoors! And when you employed a Taprisiot you had a constant reminder of danger: the communications trance which reduced you to a twitching zombie while you made your call. No...neither Calebans nor Taprisiots should be accepted without question. With the possible exception of the PanSpechi, no other species knew the first thing about Caleban and Taprisiot phenomena beyond their economic and personal value. They were indeed valuable, a fact reflected in the prices often paid for jumpdoor and long-call services. The PanSpechi denied that they could explain tljese things, but the PanSpechi were notoriously secretive. They were a species where each individual consisted of five bodies and only one dominant ego. The four reserves lay somewhere in a hidden creche. Bildoon had come from such a creche, accepting the communal ego from a creche-mate whose subsequent fate could only be imagined. PanSpechi refused to. discuss internal creche matters except to admit what was obvious on the surface, that they could grow a simulacrum body to mimic most of the known species in the ConSentiency. McKie felt himself overcome by a momentary pang of xenophobia. tVe accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying. Keeping his eyes closed, McKie sat up. His bedog rippled gently against his buttocks. Blast and damn the Calebans! He'd already done the obvious thing, called Fannie Mae, his 'personal friend' among the Calebans. The result had left him wondering if he really knew what Calebans meant by friendship. "Information not permitted." What kind of an answer was that? Especially when it was the only response he could get. Not permitted? The basic irritant was an old one: BuSab had no real way of applying its 'gentle ministrations' to the Calebans. But Calebans had never been known to lie. They appeared painfully, explicitly honest...as far as they could be understood. But they obviously withheld information. Not permitted! Was it possible they'd let themselves be accessories to the destruction of a planet and that planet's entire population? McKie had to admit it was possible. They might do it out of ignorance or from some stricture of Caleban morality which the rest of the ConSentiency did not share or understand. Or for some other reason which defied translation. They said they looked upon all life as 'precious nodes of existence.' But hints at peculiar exceptions remained. What was it Fannie Mae had once said? "Dissolved well, this node." How could you look at an individual life as a "node"? If association with Calebans had taught him anything it was that understanding between species was tenuous at best and trying to understand a Caleban could drive you insane. In what medium did a node dissolve? McKie sighed. For now, this Dosadi report from the Wreave and Laclac agents had to be accepted on its own limited terms. Powerful people in the Gowachin Confederacy had sequestered Humans and Gowachin on an unlisted planet. Dosadi -- location unknown, but the scene of unspecified experiments and tests on an imprisoned population. This much the agents insisted was true. If confirmed, it was a shameful act. The Frog People would know that, surely. Rather that let their shame be exposed, they could carry out the threat which the two agents reported: blast the captive planet out of existence, the population and all of the incriminating evidence with it. McKie shuddered. Dosadi, a planet of thinking creatures -- sentients. If the Gowachin carried out their violent threat a living world would be reduced to blazing gasses and the hot plasma of atomic particles. Somewhere, perhaps beyond the reach of other eyes, something would strike fire against the void. The tragedy would require less than a standard second. The most concise thought about such a catastrophe would require a longer time than the actual event. But if it happened and the other Consentient species received absolute proof that it had happened...ahhh, then the ConSentiency might well be shattered. Who would use a jumpdoor, suspecting that he might be shunted into some hideous experiment? Who would trust a neighbor if that neighbor's habits, language and body were different from his own? Yes...there would be more than Humans and Gowachin at each others' throats. Planetary extinction was the thing all the species feared most. Bildoon realized this. The threat to this mysterious Dosadi was a threat to all. McKie could not shake the terrible image from his mind: an explosion, a bright blink stretching toward its own darkness. And if the ConSentiency learned of it... in that instant before their universe crumbled like a cliff dislodged in a lightning bolt, what excuses would be offered for the failure of reason to prevent such a thing? Reason? McKie shook his head, opened his eyes. It was useless to dwell on the worst prospects. He allowed the apartment's sleep gloom to invade his senses, absorbed the familiar presence of his surroundings. I'm a Saboteur Extraordinare and I've a job to do. It helped to think of Dosadi that way. Solutions to problems often depended upon the will to succeed, upon sharpened skills and multiple resources. BuSab owned those resources and those skills. McKie stretched his arms high over his head, twisted his blocky torso. The bedog rippled with pleasure at his movements. He whistled softly and suffered the kindling of morning light as the apartment's window controls responded. A yawn stretched his mouth. He slid from the bedog and padded across to the window. The view stretched away beneath a sky like smudged blue paper. He star out across the spires and rooftops of Central Central. Here lay the heart of the domine planet from which the Bureau of Sabotage spread its multifarious tentacles. He blinked at the brightness, took a deep breath. The Bureau. The omnipresent, omniscient, omnivorous Bureau. The one source of unmonitored governmental violence remaining in the ConSentiency. Here lay the norm against which sanity measured itself. Each choice made here demanded utmost delicacy. Their common enemy was that neverending sentient yearning for absolutes. And each hour of every waking workday BuSab in all of its parts asked itself: "What are we if we succumb to unbridled violence?" The answer was there in deepest awareness: "Then we are useless." Consentient government worked because, no matter how they defined it, the participants believed in a common justice personally achievable. The Government worked because BuSab sat at its core like a terrible watchdog able to attack itself or any seat of power with a delicately balanced immunity. Government worked because there were places where it could not act without being chopped off. An appeal to BuSab made the individual as powerful as the ConSentiency. It all came down to the cynical, self-effacing behavior of the carefully chosen BuSab tentacles.  don't feel much like a BuSab tentacle this morning, McKie thought. In his advancing years, he'd often experienced such mornings. He had a personal way of dealing with this mood: he buried himself in work. McKie turned, crossed to the baffle into his bath where he turned his body over to the programmed ministrations of his morning toilet. The psyche-mirror on the bath's far wall reflected his body while it examined and adjusted to his internal conditions. His eyes told him he was still a squat, dark-skinned gnome of a Human with red hair, features so large they suggested an impossible kinship with the Frog People of the Gowachin. The mirror did not reflect his mind, considered by many to be the sharpest legal device in the ConSentiency. The Daily Schedule began playing to McKie as he emerged from the bath. The DS suited its tone to his movements and the combined analysis of his psychophysical condition. "Good morning, ser," it fluted in a cheerful voice. McKie, who could interpret the analysis of his mood from the DS tone, put down a flash of resentment. Of course he felt angry and concerned. Who wouldn't under these circumstances? "Good morning, you dumb inanimate object," he growled. He slipped into a supple armored pullover, dull green and with the outward appearance of cloth. The DS waited for his head to emerge. "You wanted to be reminded, ser, that there is a full conference of the Bureau Directorate at nine local this morning, but the..." "Of all the stupid..." McKie's interruption stopped the DS. He'd been meaning for some time to reprogram the damned thing. No matter how carefully you set them, they always got out of phase. He didn't bother to bridle his mood, merely spoke the key words in full emotional spate: "Now you hear me, machine: Don't you ever again choose that buddy-buddy conversational pattern when I'm in this mood! I want nothing less than a reminder of that conference. When you list such a reminder don't even suggest remotely that it's my wish. Understood?" "Your admonition recorded and new program instituted, ser." The DS adopted a brisk, matter-of-fact tone as it continued: "There is a new reason for alluding to the conference." "Well, get on with it." McKie pulled on a pair of green shorts and matching kilt of armored material identical to that of the pullover. The DS continued: "The conference was alluded to, ser, as introduction to a new datum: you have been asked not to attend." McKie, bending to fit his feet into self-powered racing boots, hesitated, then: "But they're still going to have a showdown meeting with all the Gowachin in the Bureau?" "No mention of that, ser. The message was that you are to depart immediately this morning on the field assignment which was discussed with you. Code Geevee was invoked. An unspecified Gowachin Phylum has asked that you proceed at once to their home planet. That would be Tandaloor. You are to consult there on a problem of a legal nature." McKie finished fitting the boots, straightened. He could feel all of his ninety-plus years as though there'd been no geriatric intervenof hell. It put him on his own with but one shopside backup facility: a Taprisiot monitor. He'd have his own Taprisiot link sitting safely here on CC while he went out and risked his vulnerable flesh. The Taprisiot served only one function: to note his death and record every aspect of his final moments -- every thought, every memory. This would be part of the next agent's briefing. And the next agent would get his own Taprisiot monitor etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... BuSab was notorious for gnawing away at its problems. The Bureau never gave up. But the astronomical cost of such a Taprisiot monitor left the operative so gifted with only one conclusion. Odds were not in his favor. There'd be no accolades, no cemetery rites for a dead hero... probably not even the physical substance of a hero for private grieving. McKie felt less and less heroic by the minute. Heroism was for fools and BuSab agents were not employed for their foolishness. He saw the reasoning, though. He was the best qualified non-Gowachin for dealing with the Gowachin. He looked at the nearest DS voder. "Was it suggested that someone doesn't want me at that conference?" "There was no such speculation." "Who gave you this message?" "Bildoon. Verified voiceprint. He asked that your sleep not be interrupted, that the message be given to you on awakening." "Did he say he'd call back or ask me to call him?" "No." "Did Bildoon mention Dosadi?" "He said the Dosadi problem is unchanged. Dosadi is not in my banks, ser. Did you wish me to seek more info..." "No! I'm to leave immediately?" "Bildoon said your orders have been cut. In relationship to Dosadi, he said, and these are his exact words: The worst is probable. They have all the motivation required.' " McKie ruminated aloud: "All the motivation... selfish interest or fear..." "Ser, are you inquiring of..." "No, you stupid machine! I'm thinking out loud. People do that. We have to sort things out in our heads, put a proper evaluation on available data." "You do it with extreme inefficiency." This startled McKie into a flash of anger. "But this job takes a sentient, a person, not a machine! Only a person can make the responsible decision. And I'm the only agent who understands them sufficiently." "Why not set a Gowachin agent to ferret out their..." "So you've worked it out?" "It was not difficult, even for a machine. Sufficient clues were provided. And since you'll get a Taprisiot monitor, the project involves danger to your person. While I do not have specifics about Dosadi, the clear inference is that the Gowachin have engaged in questionable activity. Let me remind McKie that the Gowachin do not admit guilt easily. Very few non-Gowachin are considered by them to be worthy of their company and confider.ee. They do not like to feel dependent upon non-Gowachin. In fact, no Gowachin enjoys any dependent condition, not even when dependent upon another Gowachin. This is at the root of their law." This was a more emotionallyloaded conversation than McKie had ever before heard from his DS. Perhaps his constant refusal to accept the thing on a personal anthropomorphic basis had forced it into this adaptation. He suddenly felt almost shy with the DS. What it had said was pertinent, and more than that, vitally important in a particular way: chosen to help him to the extent the DS was capable. In McKie's thoughts, the DS was suddenly transformed into a valued confidante. As though it knew his thoughts, the DS said: "I'm still a machine. You are inefficient, but as you have correctly" stated you have ways of arriving at accuracy which machines do not understand. We can only... guess, and we are not really programmed to guess unless specifically ordered to do so on a given occasion. Trust yourself." "But you'd rather I were not killed?" "That is my program." "Do you have any more helpful suggestions?" "You would be advised to waste as little time as possible here. There was a tone of urgency in Bildoon's voice." McKie stared at the nearest voder. Urgency in Bildoon's voice? Even under the most urgent necessity, Bildoon had never sounded urgent to McKie. Certainly, Dosadi could be an urgent matter, but... Why should that sound a sour note? "Are you sure he sounded urgent?" "He spoke rapidly and with obvious tension." "Truthful?" "The tone-spikes lead to that conclusion." McKie shook his head. Something about Bildoon's behavior in this matter didn't ring true, but whatever it was it escaped the sophisticated reading circuits of the DS. And my circuits, too. Still troubled, McKie ordered the DS to assemble a full travel kit and to read out the rest of the schedule. He moved to the tool cupboard beside his bath baffle as the DS began reeling off the schedule. His day was to start with the Taprisiot appointment. He listened with only part of his attention, taking care to check the toolkit as the DS assembled it. There were plastipiks. He handled them gently as they deserved. A selection of stims followed. He rejected these, counting on the implanted sensemuscle amplifiers which increased the capabilities of senior BuSab agents. Explosives in various denominations went into the kit -- raygens, pentrates. Very careful with these dangerous items. He accepted multilenses, a wad of uniflesh with matching mediskin, solvos, miniputer. The DS extruded a life-monitor bead for the Taprisiot linkage. He swallowed it to give the bead time to anchor in his stomach before the Taprisiot appointment. A holoscan and matching blanks were accepted, as were ruptors and comparators. He rejected the adapter for simulation of target identities. It was doubtful he'd have time or facilities for such sophisticated refinements. Better to trust his own instincts. Presently, he sealed the kit in its wallet, concealed the wallet in a pocket. The DS had gone rambling on: "...and you'll arrive on Tandaloor at a place called Holy Running. The time there will be early afternoon." Holy Running! McKie riveted his attention to this datum. A Gowachin saying skittered through his mind: 'The Law is a blind guide, a pot of bitter water. The Law is a deadly contest which can change as waves change.' No doubt of what had led his thoughts into that path. Holy Running was the place of Gowachin myth. Here, so their stories said. lived Mrreg, the monster who had set the immutable pattern of Gowachin character. And now, McKie suspected he knew which Gowachin Phylum had summoned him. It could be any one of five Phyla at Holy Running but he felt certain it'd be the worst of those five -- the most unpredictable, the most powerful, the most feared. Where else could a thing such as Dosadi originate? McKie addressed his DS: "Send in my breakfast. Please record that the condemned person ate a hearty breakfast." The DS, programmed to recognize rhetoric for which there was no competent response, remained silent while complying.    All sentient beings are created unequal. The best society provides each with an equal opportunity to float at his own level. -- The Gowachin Primary By mid-afternoon Jedrik saw that her gambit had been accepted. A surplus of fifty Humans was just the right size to be taken by a greedy underling. Whoever it was would see the possibilities of continuing -- ten here, thirty there...and because of the way she'd introduced this flaw, the next people discarded would be mostly Humans, but with just enough Gowachin to smack of retaliation. It'd been difficult carrying out her daily routine knowing what she'd set in motion. It was all very well to accept the fact that you were going into danger. When the actual moment arrived it always had a different character. As the subtle and not-so-subtle evidence of success accumulated, she felt the crazy force of it rolling over her. Now was the time to think about her true power base, the troops who would obey her slightest hint, the tight communications linkage with the Rim, the carefully selected and trained lieutenants. Now was the time to think about McKie slipping so smoothly into her trap. She concealed elation behind a facade of anger. They'd expect her to be angryThe evidence began with a slowed response at her computer terminal. Someone was monitoring. Whoever had taken her bait wanted to be certain she was expendable. Wouldn't want to eliminate someone and then discover that the eliminated someone was essential to the power structure. She'd made damned sure to cut a wide swath into a region which could be made non-essential. The micro-second delay from the monitoring triggered a disconnect on her tell-tale circuit, removing the evidence of her preparations before anyone could find it. She didn't think there'd be that much caution in anyone who'd accept this gambit but unnecessary chances weren't part of her plan. She removed the tell-tale timer and lockedll away in one of the filing cabinets, there to be destroyed with the other evidence when the Elector's toads came prying. The lonely blue flash would be confined by metal walls which would heat to a nice blood red before lapsing into slag and ashes. In the next stage, people averted their faces as they walked past her office doorway. Ahhh, the accuracy of the rumor-trail. The avoidance came so naturally: a glance at a companion on the other side, concentration on material in one's hands, a brisk stride with gaze fixed on the corridor's ends. Important business up there. No time to stop and chat with Keila Jedrik today. By the Veil of Heaven! They were so transparent! A Gowachin walked by examining the corridor's blank opposite wall. She knew that Gowachin: one of the Elector's spies. What would he tell Elector Broey today? Jedrik glared at the Gowachin in secret glee. By nightfall, Broey would know who'd picked up her gambit but it was too small a bite to arouse his avarice. He'd merely log the information for possible future use. It was too early for him to suspect a sacrifice move. A Human male followed the Gowachin. He was intent on the adjustment of his neckline and that, of course, precluded a glance at a Senior Liaitor in her office. His name was Drayjo. Only yesterday, Drayjo had made courting gestures, bending toward her over this very desk to reveal the muscles under his light grey coveralls. What did it matter that Drayjo no longer saw her as a useful conquest. His face was a wooden door, closed, locked, hiding nothing. Avert your face, you clog! When the red light glowed on her terminal screen, it came as anticlimax. Confirmation that her gambit had been accepted by someone who would shortly regret it. Communication flowed across the screen: "Opp SD#ZX." Good old ZX! Bad news always developed its own coded idiom. She read what followed, anticipating every nuance: "The Mandate of God having been consulted, the following supernumerary functions are hereby reduced. If your position screen carries your job title with an underline you are included in the reduction. ' 'Senior Liaitor. ' ' Jedrik clenched her fists in simulated anger while she glared at the underlined words. It was done. Opp-Out, the good old Double-#. Through its pliable arm, the DemoPoI, the Sacred Congregation of the Heavenly Veil had struck again. None of her elation showed through her Dosadi controls. Someone able to see beyond immediate gain would note presently that only Humans had received this partieular good old Double-#. Not one Gowachin there. Whoever made that observation would come sniffing down the trail she'd deliberately left. Evidence would accumulate. She thought she knew who would read that accumulated evidence for Broey. It would be Tria. It was not yet time for Tria to entertain doubts. Broey would hear what Jedrik wanted him to hear. The Dosadi power game would be played by Jedrik's rules then and by the time others learned the rules it'd be too late. She counted on the factor which Broey labeled 'instability of the masses.' Religious twaddle! Dosadi's masses were unstable only in particular ways. Fit a conscious justification to their innermost unconscious demands and they became a predictable system which would leap into predictable actions -- especially with a psychotic populace whose innermost demands could never be faced consciously by the individuals. Such a populace remained highly useful to the initiates. That was why they maintained the DemoPol with its mandate-of-God sample. The tools of government were not difficult to understand. All you needed was a pathway into the system, a place where what you did touched a new reality. Broey would think himself the target of her action. More fool he. Jedrik pushed back her chair, stood and strode to the window hardly daring to think about where her actions would truly be felt. She saw that the sniper's bullet hadn't even left a mark on the glass. These new windows were far superior to the old ones which had taken on dull streaks and scratches after only a few years. She stared down at the light on the river, carefully preserving this moment, prolonging it. I won't look up yet, not yet. Whoever had accepted her gambit would be watching her now. Too late! Too late! A streak of orange-yellow meandered in the river current: contaminants from the Warren factories... poisons. Presently, not looking too high yet, she lifted her gaze to the silvered layers of the Council she'd set in motion. It was all very well to accept the fact that you were going into danger. When the actual moment arrived it always had a different character. As the subtle and not-so-subtle evidence of success accumulated, she felt the crazy force of it rolling over her. Now was the time to think about her true power base, the troops who would obey her slightest hint, the tight communications linkage with the Rim, the carefully selected and trained lieutenants. Now was the time to think about McKie slipping so smoothly into her trap. She concealed elation behind a facade of anger. They'd expect her to be angryThe evidence began with a slowed response at her computer terminal. Someone was monitoring. Whoever had taken her bait wanted to be certain she was expendable. Wouldn't want to eliminate someone and then discover that the eliminated someone was essential to the power structure. She'd made damned sure to cut a wide swath into a region which could be made non-essential. The micro-second delay from the monitoring triggered a disconnect on her tell-tale circuit, removing the evidence of her preparations before anyone could find it. She didn't think there'd be that much caution in anyone who'd accept this gambit but unnecessary chances weren't part of her plan. She removed the tell-tale timer and lockedlf away in one of the filing cabinets, there to be destroyed with the other evidence when the Elector's toads came prying. The lonely blue flash would be confined by metal walls which would heat to a nice blood red before lapsing into slag and ashes. In the next stage, people averted their faces as they walked past her office doorway. Ahhh, the accuracy of the rumor-trail . The avoidance came so naturally; a glance at a companion on the other side, concentration on material in one's hands, a brisk stride with gaze fixed on the corridor's ends. Important business up there. No time to stop and chat with Keila Jedrik today. By the Veil of Heaven! They were so transparent! A Gowachin walked by examining the corridor's blank opposite wdl. She knew that Gowachin: one of the Elector's spies. What would he tell Elector Broey today? Jedrik glared at the Gowachin in secret glee. By nightfall, Broey would know who'd picked up her gambit but it was too small a bite to arouse his avarice. He'd merely log the information for possible fiature use. It was too early for him to suspect a sacrifice move. A Human male followed the Gowachin. He was intent on the adjustment of his neckline and that, of course, precluded a glance at a Senior Liaitor in her office. His name was Drayjo. Only yesterday, Drayjo had made courting gestures, bending toward her over this very desk to reveal the muscles under his light grey coveralls. What did it matter that Drayjo no longer saw her as a useful conquest. His face was a wooden door, closed, locked, hiding nothing. Avert your face, you clog! When the red light glowed on her terminal screen, it came as anticlimax. Confirmation that her gambit had been accepted by someone who would shortly regret it. Comrnunication flowed across the screen: "Opp SD#ZX." Good old ZX! Bad news always developed its own coded idiom. She read what followed, anticipating every nuance; "The Mandate of God having been consulted, the following supernumerary functions are hereby reduced. If your position screen carries your job title with an underline you are included in the reduction. ' 'Senior Liaitor . ' ' Jedrik clenched her fists in simulated anger while she glared at the underlined words. It was done. Opp-Out, the good old Double-#. Through its pliable arm, the DemoPol, the Sacred Congregation of the Heavenly Veil had struck again. None of her elation showed through her Dosadi controls. Someone able to see beyond immediate gain would note presently that only Humans had received this particular good old Double-O. Not one Gowachin there. Whoever made that observation would come, sniffing down the trail she'd deliberately left. Evidence would accumulate. She thought she knew who would read that accumulated evidence for Broey. It would be Tria. It was not yet time for Tria to entertain doubts. Broey would hear what Jedrik wanted him to hear. The Dosadi power game would be played by Jedrik's rules then and by the time others learned the rules it'd be too late. She counted on the factor which Broey labeled 'instability of the masses.' Religious twaddle! Dosadi 's masses were unstable only in particular ways. Fit a conscious justification to their innermost unconscious demands and they became a predictable system which would leap into predictable actions -- especially with a psychotic populace whose innermost demands could never be faced consciously by the individuals. Such a populace remained highly useful to the initiates. That was why they maintained the DemoPol with its mandate-of-God sample. The tools of government were not difficult to understand. All you needed was a pathway into the system, a place where what you did touched a new reality. Broey would think himself the target of her action. More fool he. Jedrik pushed back her chair, stood and strode to the window hardly daring to think about where her actions would truly be felt. She saw that the sniper's bullet hadn't even left a mark on the glass. These new windows were far superior to the old ones which had taken on dull streaks and scratches after only a few years. She stared down at the light on the river, carefully preserving this moment, prolonging it.  won't look up yet, not yet. Whoever had accepted her gambit would be watching her now. Too late! Too late! A streak of orange-yellow meandered in the river current: contaminants from the Warren factories... poisons. Presently, not looking too high yet, she lifted her gaze to the silvered layers of the Council Hills, to the fluting invertedstalagmites of the high apartments to which the denizens of Chu aspired in their futile dreams. Sunlight gleamed from the power bulbs which adorned the apartments on the hills. The great crushing wheel of government had its hub on those hills, but the impetus for that wheel had originated elsewhere. Now, having prolonged the moment while anticipation enriched it, Jedrik lifted her gaze to that region above the Council Hills, to the sparkling streamers and grey glowing of the barrier veil, to the God Wall which englobed her planet in its impenetrable shell. The Veil of Heaven looked the way it always looked in this light. There was no apparent change. But she knew what she had done. Jedrik was aware of subtle instruments which revealed other suns and galaxies beyond the God Wall, places where other planets must exist, but her people had only this one planet. That barrier up there and whoever had created it insured this isolation. Her eyes blurred with quick tears which she wiped away with real anger at herself. Let Broey and his toads believe themselves the only objects of her anger. She would carve a way beyond them through that deadly veil. No one on Dosadi would ever again cower beneath the hidden powers who lived in the sky! She lowered her gaze to the carpet of factories and warrens. Some of the defensive walls were faintly visible in the layers of smoke which blanketed the teeming scramble of life upon which the city fed. The smoke erased fine details to separate the apartment hills from the earth. Above the smoke, the fluted buildings became more a part of sky than of ground. Even the ledged set-back walls of the canyon within which Chu created its sanctuary were no longer attached to the ground, but floated separate from this place where people could survive to a riper maturity on Dosadi. The smoke dulled the greens of ledges and Rim where the Rabble waged a losing battle for survival. Twenty years was old out there. In that pressure, they fought for a chance to enter Chu's protective confines by any means available, even welcoming the opportunity to eat garbage from which the poisons of this planet had been removed. The worst of Chu was better than their best, which only proved that the conditions of hell were relative. I seek escape through the God Wall for the same reasons the Rabble seeks entrance to Chu. In Jedrik' s mind lay a graph with an undulant line. It combined many influences: Chu's precious food cycle and economics, Rim incursions, spots which flowed across their veiled sun, subtle planetary movements, atmospheric electricity, gravitational flows, magnetronic fluctuations, the dance of numbers in the Liaitor banks, the seemingly random play of cosmic rays, the shifting colors in the God Wall... and mysterious jolts to the entire system which commanded her most concentrated attention. There could be only one source for such jolts: a manipulative intelligence outside the planetary influence of Dosadi. She called that force 'X' but she had broken 'X' into components. One component was a simulation model of Elector Broey which she carried firmly in her head, not needing any of the mechanical devices for reading such things. 'X' and all of its components were as real as anything else on the chart in her mind. By their interplay she read them. Jedrik addressed herself silently to 'X': By your actions I know you and you are vulnerable . Despite all of the Sacred Congregation's prattle, Jedrik and her people knew the God Wall had been put there for a specific purpose. It was the purpose which pressed living flesh into Chu from the Rim. It was the purpose which jammed too many people into too little space while it frustrated all attempts to spread into any other potential sanctuary. It was the purpose which created people who possessed that terrifying mental template which could trade flesh for flesh... Gowachin or Human. Many clues revealed themselves around her and came through that radiance in the sky, but she refused as yet to make a coherent whole out of that purpose. Not yet.  need this McKie! With a Jedrik-maintained tenacity, her people knew that the regions beyond the barrier veil were not heaven or hell. Dosadi was hell, but it was a created hell. We will know soon... soon. This moment had been almost nine Dosadi generations in preparation: the careful breeding of a specific individual who carried in one body the talents required for this assault on 'X,' the exquisitely detailed education of that weaponin-fleshly-form... and there'd been all the rest of it -- whispers, unremarked observations in clandestine leaflets, help for people who held particular ideas and elimination of others whose concepts obstructed, the building of a RimWarren communications network, the slow and secret assembly of a military force to match the others which balanced themselves at the peaks of Dosadi power... All of these things and much more had prepared the way for those numbers introduced into her computer terminal. The ones who appeared to rule Dosadi and the ones behind them who moved the powerful of Dosadilike puppets -- those ones could be read in many ways and this time the rulers, both visible and hidden, had made one calculation while Jedrik had made another calculation. Again, she looked up at the God Wall. You out there! Keila Jedrik knows you're there. And you can be baited, you can be trapped. You are slow and stupid. And you think  don't know how to use your McKie. Ahhh, sky demons, McKie will open your veil for me. My life's a wrath and you're the objects of my wrath. I dare what you would not. Nothing of this revealed itself on her face nor in any movement of her body.    Arm yourself when the Frog God 'smiles. -- Gowachin Admonition McKie began speaking as he entered the Phylum sanctus: "I'm Jorj X. McKie of the Bureau of Sabotage." Name and primary allegiance, that was the drill. If he'd been a Gowachin, he'd have named his Phylum or would've favored the room with a long blink to reveal the identifying Phylum tatoo on his eyelids. As a non-Gowachin, he didn't need a tatoo. He held his right hand extended in the Gowachin peace sign, palm down and fingers wide to show that he held no weapon there and had not extended his claws. Even as he entered, he smiled, knowing the effect this would have on any Gowachin here. In a rare mood of candor, one of his old Gowachin teachers had once explained the effect of a smiling McKie. "We feel our bones age. It is a very uncomfortable experience." McKie understood the reason for this. He possessed a thick, muscular body -- a swimmer's body with light mahogany skin. He walked with a swimmer's rolling gait. There were Polynesians in his Old Terran ancestry, this much was known in the Family Annals. Wide lips and a flat nose dominated his face; the eyes were large and placidly brown. There was a final genetic ornamentation to confound the Gowachin: red hair. He was the Human equivalent of the greenstone sculpture found in every Phylum house here on Tandaloor. McKie possessed the face and body of the Frog God, the Giver of Law. As his old teacher had explained, no Gowachin ever fully escaped feelings of awe in McKie' s presence, especially when McKie smiled. They were forced to hide a response which went back to that admonition which every Gowachin learned while still clinging to his mother's back. Arm yourselves! McKie thought. Still smiling, he stopped after the prescribed eight paces, glanced once around the room then narrowed his attention. Green crystal walls confined the sanctus. It was not a large space, a gentle oval of perhaps twenty meters in its longest dimension. A single oval window admitted warm afternoon light from Tandaloor's golden sun. The glowing yellow created a contrived spiritual ring directly ahead of McKie. The light focused on an aged Gowachin seated in a brown chairdog which had spread itself wide to support his elbows and webbed fingers. At the Gowachin's right hand stood an exquisitely wrought wooden swingdesk on a scrollwork stand. The desk held one object: a metal box of dull blue about fifteen centimeters long, ten wide and six deep. Standing behind the blue box in the servant-guard position was a red-robed Wreave, her fighting mandibles tucked neatly into the lower folds of her facial slit. This Phylum was initiating a Wreave! The realization filled McKie with disquiet. Bildoon had not warned him about Wreaves on Tandaloor. The Wreave indicated a sad shift among the Gowachin toward a particular kind of violence. Wreaves never danced for joy, only for death. And this was the most dangerous of Wreaves, a female, recognot even suspected that there'd been amusement for anyone in that first case. Present circumstances argued for truthfulness from the old Gowachin, however. Recalling that first case, McKie tried to reassess it in the light of this revelation. He remembered the case well. The Gowachin had charged a Low Magister named Klodik with breaking his most sacred vows in an issue of justice. Klodik's crime was the release of thirty-one fellow Gowachin from their primary allegiance to Gowachin Law and the purpose of that was to qualify the thirty-one for service in BuSab. The hapless prosecutor, a much admired Legum named Pirgutud, had aspired to Klodik's position and had made the mistake of trying for a direct conviction. McKie had thought at the time that the wiser choice would've been to attempt discrediting the legal structure under which Klodik had been arraigned. This would have thrown judgement into the area of popular choice and there'd been no doubt that Klodik's early demise would've been popular. Seeing this opening, McKie had attacked the prosecutor as a legalist, a stickler, one who preferred Old Law. Victory had been relatively easy. When it had come to the knife, however, McKie had found himself profoundly reluctant. There'd been no question of selling Pirgutud back to his own Phylum. BuSab had needed a non-Gowachin Legum... the whole non-Gowachin universe had needed this. The few other non-Gowachin who'd attained Legum status were all dead, every last one of them in the Courtarena. A current of animosity toward the Gowachin worlds had been growing. Suspicion fed on suspicion. Pirgutud had to die in the traditional, the formal way. He'd known it perhaps better than McKie. Pirgutud, as required, had bared the heart area beside hi's stomach and' clasped his hands behind his head. This extruded the stomach circle, providing a point of reference. The purely academic anatomy lessons and the practice sessions on lifelike dummies had come to deadly focus. "Just to the left of the stomach circle imagine a small triangle with an apex at the center of the stomach circle extended horizontally and the base even with the bottom of the stomach circle. Strike into the lower outside comer of this triangle and slightly upward toward the midline." About the only satisfaction McKie had found in the vent was that Pirgutud had died cleanly and quickly with one stroke. McKie had not entered Gowachin Law as a "hacker." What had there been in that case and its bloody ending to amuse the Gowachin? The answer filled McKie with a profound sense of peril. The Gowachin were amused at themselves because they had so misjudged me! But I'd planned all along for them to misjudge me. That was what amused them! Having provided McKie with a polite pericxl for reflection, the old Gowachin continued: "I'd bet against you, McKie. The odds, you understand? You delighted me nonetheless. You instructed us while winning your case in a classic manner which would've done credit to the best of us. That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it. Now what did you expect to find when you answered our latest summons to Tandaloor?" The question's abrupt shift into the present almost caught McKie by surprise. I've been too long away from the Gowachin he thought. I can't relax even for an instant. It was almost a palpable thing: if he missed a single beat of the rhythms in this room, he and an entire planet could fall before Gowachin judgement. For a civilization which based its law on the Courtarena here any participant possible. McKie chose his next words with life-and-death care. "You summoned me, that is true, but I came on official business of my Bureau. It's the Bureau's expectations which concern me." ' 'Then you are in a difficult position because you're also a Legum of the Gowachin Bar subject to our demands. Do you know me?" This was a Magister, a Foremost-Speaker from the 'Phylum of Phylums,' no doubt of it. He was a survivor in one of the most cruel traditions known to the sentient universe. His abilities and resources were formidable and he was on his home ground. McKie chose the cautious response. "On my arrival I was told to come to this place at this time. That is what I know." 'The least thing that is known shall govern your acts.' This was the course of evidence for the Gowachin. McKie's response put a legal burden on his questioner. The old Gowachin's hands clutched with pleasure at the level of artistry to which this contest had risen. There was a momentary silence during which Ceylang gathered her robe tightly and moved even closer to the swingdesk. Now, there was tension in her movements. The Magister stirred, said: "I have the disgusting honor to be High Magister of the Running Phylum, Aritch by name." As he spoke, his right hand thrust out, took the blue box and dropped it into McKie's lap. "I place the binding oath upon you in the name of the book!" As McKie had expected, it was done swiftly. He had the box in his hands while the final words of the ancient legal challenge were ringing in his ears. No matter the ConSentient modifications of Gowachin Law which might apply in this situation, he was caught in a convoluted legal maneuvering. The metal of the box felt cold against his fingers. They'd confronted him with the High Magister. The Gowachin were dispensing with many preliminaries. This spoke of time pressures and a particular assessment of their own predicament. McKie reminded himself that he was dealing with people who found pleasure in their own failures, could be amused by death in the Courtarena, whose most consummate pleasure came when the currents of their own Law were changed artistically. McKie spoke with the careful formality which ritual required if he were to emerge alive from this room. "Two wrongs may cancel each other. Therefore, let those who do wrong do it together. That is the true purpose of Law." Gently, McKie released the simple swing catch on the box, lifted the lid to verify the contents. This must be done with precise attention to formal details. A bitter musty odor touched his nostrils as the lid lifted. The box held what he'd expected: the book, the knife, the rock. It occurred to McKie then that he was holding the original of all such boxes. It was a thing of enormous antiquity -- thousands upon thousands of standard years. Gowachin professed the belief that the Frog God had created this box, this very box, and its contents as a model, the symbol of 'the only workable Law.' Careful to do it with his right hand, McKie touched each item of the box in its turn, closed the lid and latched it. As he did this, he felt that he stepped into a ghostly parade of Legums, names imbedded in the minstrel chronology of Gowachin history. 'Bishkar who concealed her eggs...' 'Kondush the Diver... 'Dritaik who sprang from the marsh and laughed at Mrreg...' 'Tonkeel of the hidden knife...' McKie wondered then how they would sing about him. Would it be 'McKie the blunderer'! His thoughts raced through review of the necessities. The primary necessity was Aritch. Little was known about this High Magister outside the Gowachin Federation, but it was said that he'd once won a case by finding a popular bias which allowed him to lull a judge. The commentary on this coup said Aritch "embraced the Law in the same way that salt dissolves jn water." To the initiates, this meant Aritch personified the basic Gowachin attitude toward their Law, 'respectful disrespect.' It was a peculiar form of sanctity. Every movement of your body was as important as your words. The Gowachin made it an aphorism. "You hold your life in your mouth when you enter the courtarena." They provided legal ways to kill any participant -- judges, legums, clients... But it must be done with exquisite legal finesse, with its justifications apparent to all observer, and with the most delicate timing. Above all; one could kill in the arena only when no other choice offered the same worshipful disrespect for Gowachin Law. Even while changing the Law you were required to revere its sanctity. When you entered the Courtarena you had to feel that peculiar sanctity in every fiber. The forms...the forms...the forms... With that blue box in his hands, the deadly forms of Gowachin Law dominated every movement, every word. Knowing McKie was not Gowachin-bom, Aritch was putting time pressures on him, hoping for an immediate flaw. They didn't want this Dosadi matter in the arena. That was the immediate contest. And if it did get to the arena...well, the crucial matter would be selection of the judges. Judges were chosen with great care. Both sides maneuvered in this, being cautious not to intrude a professional legalist onto the bench. Judges could represent those whom the Law had offended. They could be private citizens in any number satisfactory to the opposing forces. Judges could be (and often were) chosen for their special knowledge of a case at hand. But here you were forced to weigh the subtleties of prejudgement. Gowachin Law made a special distinction between prejudgement and bias. McKie considered this. The interpretation of bias was: "If I can rule for a particular side I will do so." For prejudgement: "No matter what happens in the arena I will rule for a particular side." Bias was permitted, but not prejudgement. Aritch was the first problem, his possible prejudgements, his bias, his inborn and most deeply conditioned attitudes. In his deepest feelings he would look down on all non-Gowachin legal systems as "devices to weaken personal character through appeals to illogic, irrationality and to ego-centered selfishness in the name of high purpose." If Dosadi came to the arena it would be tried under modified Gowachin Law. The modifications were a thorn in the Gowachin skin. They represented concessions made for entrance into the ConSentiency. Periodically, the Gowachin tried to make their Law the basis for all Consentient Law. McKie recalled that a Gowachin had once said of ConSentient Law: "It fosters greed, discontent and competitiveness not based on excellence but on appeals to prejudice and materialism." Abruptly, McKie remembered that this was a quotation attributed to Aritch, High Magister of the Running Phylum. Were there even more deeply hidden motives in what the Gowachin did here? Showing signs of impatience, Aritch, inhaling deeply through his chest ventricles, said: "You are now my Legum. To be convicted is to go free because this marks you as an enemy of all government. I know you to be such an enemy, McKie." "You know me," McKie agreed. It was more than ritual response and obedience to forms; it was truth. But it required great effort for McKie to speak it calmly. In the almost fifty years since he'd been admitted to the Gowachin Bar, he'd served that ancient legal structure four times in the Courtarena, a minor record among the ordinary Legums. Each time, his personal survival had been in the balance. In all of its stages, this contest was a deadly battle. The loser's life befonged to the winner and could be taken at the winner's discretion. On rare occasions, the loser might be sold back to his own Phylum as a menial. Even the losers disliked this choice. 'Better clean death than dirty life.' The blood-encrusted knife in the blue box testified to the more popular outcome. It was a practice which made for rare litigation and memorable court performances. Aritch, speaking with eyes closed and the Running Phylum tatoos formally displayed, brought their encounter to its testing point. "Now, McKie, .you will tell me what official matters of the Bureau of Sabotage bring you to the Gowachin Federation."  Law must retain useful ways to break with traditional forms because nothing is more certain than that the forms of Law remain when all justice is gone. -- Gowachin Aphorism He was tall for a Dosadi Gowachin but fat and ungroomed. His feet shuffled when he walked and there was a permanent stoop to his shoulders. A flexing wheezing overcame his chest ventricles when he became excited. He knew this and was aware that those around him knew it. He often used this characteristic as a warning, reminding people that no Dosadi held more power than he, and that power was deadly. All Dosadi knew his name: Broey. And very few misinterpreted the fact that he'd come up through the Sacred Congregation of the Heavenly Veil to his post as chief steward of Control: The Elector. His private army was Dosadi's largest, most efficient and best armed. Broey's intelligence corps was a thing to invoke fear and admiration. He maintained a fortified suite atop his headquarters building, a structure of stone and plasteel which fronted the main arm of the river in the heart of Chu. Around this core, the twisting walled fortifications of the city stepped outward in concentric rings. The only entrance to Broey's citadel was through a guarded Tube Gate in a sub-basement, designated TG One. TG One admitted the. select of the select and no others. In the forenoon, the ledges outside Broey's windows were a roosting place for carrion birds which occupied a special niche on Dosadi. Since the Lords of the Veil forbade the eating of sentient flesh by sentient, this task devolved upon the birds. Flesh from the people of Chu and even from the Rim carried fewer of the planet's heavy metals. The carrion birds prospered. A flock of them strutted along Broey's le#ge coughing, squawking, defecating, brushing against each other with avian insolence While they watched the outlying streets for signs of food. They also watched the Rim, but it had been temporarily denied to them by a sonabarrier. Bird sounds came through a voder into one of the suite's eight rooms. This was a' yellow-green space about ten meters long and six wide occupied by Broey and twp Humans. Broey uttered a mild expletive at the bird noise. The confounded creatures interfered with clear thinking. He shuffled to the window and silenced the voder. In the sudden quiet he looked out at the city's perimeter and the lower ledges of the enclosing cliffs. Another Rim foray had been repulsed out there in the night. Broey had made a personal inspection in a convoy of armored vehicles earlier. The troops liked it that he occasionally shared their dangers. The carrion birds already had cleaned up most of the mess by the time the armored column swept through. The flat back structure of Gowachin who had no front rib cage had been easily distinguishable from the white framework which had housed Human organs. Only a few rags of red and green flesh had marked where the birds had abandoned their feast when the sonabarriers herded them away. When he considered the sonabarriers, Broey's thoughts grew hard and clear. The sonabarriers were one of Gar's damned affectations! Let the birds finish it. But Gar insisted a few bodies be left around to make the point for the Rim survivors that their attacks were hopeless. The bones by themselves would be just as effective. Gaf was bloody minded. Broey turned and glanced across the room pnst his two Human companions. Two of the walls were taken up by charts bearing undulant squiggles in many colors. On a table at the room's center lay another chart with a single red line. The line curved and dipped ending almost in the middle of the chart. Near this terminus lay a white card and, beside it stood a Human male statuette with an enormous erection which was labeled "Rabble." It was a subversive, forbidden artifact of Rim origin. TTie people of the Rim knew where their main strength lay: breed, breed, breed... The two Humans sat facing each other across the chart. They fitted into the space around them through a special absorption. It was as though they'd been initiated into the secrets of Broey's citadel through an esoteric ritual both forbidding and dangerous. Broey returned to his chair at the head of the table, sat down and quietly continued to study his companions. He experienced amusement to feel his fighting claws twitch beneath their finger shields as he looked at the two. Yes -- trust them no more than they trusted him. They had their own troops, their own spies -- they posed real threat to Broey but often their help was useful. Just as often they were a nuisance. wh'o sat with his back to the windows, looked up as Broey resumed his seat. Gar snorted, somehow conveying that he'd been about to silence that voder himself. Damned carrion birds! But they were useful... useful. The Rimbom were always ambivalent about the birds. Gar rode his chair as though talking down to ranks of the uninformed. He'd come up through the educational services in the Convocation before joining Broey. Gar was thin with an inner emaciation so common that few on Dosadi gave it any special notice. He had the hunter's face and eyes, carried his eighty-eight years as though they were twice that. Hairline wrinkles crawled down his cheeks. The bas relief of veins along the backs of his hands and the grey hair betrayed his Rim origins, as did a tendency to short temper. The Labor Pool green of his clothing fooled very few, his face was that well known. Across from Gar sat his eldest daughter and chief lieutenant, Tria. She'd placed herself there to watch the windows and the cliffs. She'd also been observing the carrion birds, rather enjoying their sounds. It was well to be reminded here of what lay beyond the city's outer gates. Tria's face held too much brittle sharpness to be considered beautiful by any except an occasional Gowachin looking for an exotic experience or a Warren laborer hoping to use her as a step out of peonage. She often disconcerted her companions by a wide-eyed cynical stare. She did this with an aristocratic sureness which commanded attention. Tria had developed the gesture for just this purpose. Today, she wore the orange with black trim of Special Services but without a brassard to indicate the branch. She knew that this led many to believe her Broey's personal toy, which was true but not in the way the cynical supposed. Tria understood her special value: she possessed . a remarkable ability to interpret the vagaries of the DemoPol. Indicating the red line on the chart in front of her, Tria said: "She has to be the one. How can you doubt it?" And she wondered why Broey continued to worry at the obvious. "Keila Jedrik," Broey said. And again: "Keila Jedrik." Gar squinted at his daughter. "Why would she include herself among the fifty who..." "She sends us a message," Broey said. "I hear it clearly now." He seemed pleased by his own thoughts. Gar read something else in the Gowachin's manner.  "I hope you're not having her killed." "I'm not as quick to anger as are you Humans," Broey said. "The usual surveillance?" Gar asked. "I haven't decided. You know, don't you, that she lives a rather celebate life? Is it that she doesn't enjoy the males of your species?" "More likely they don't enjoy her," Tria said. "Interesting. Your breeding habits are so peculiar." Tria shot a measuring stare at Broey. She wondered why the; Gowachin had chosen to wear black today. It was a robe-like garment cut at a sharp angle from shoulders to waist, clearing his ventricles. The ventricles revolted her and Broey knew this. The very thought of them pressing against her... She cleared her throat. Broey seldom wore black; it was the happy color of priestly celebrants. He wore it, though, with a remoteness which suggested that thoughts passed through his mind which no other person could experience. The exchange between Broey and his daughter worried Gar. He could not help but feel the oddity, that each of them tried to present a threatening view of events by withholding some data and coloring other data. "What if she runs out to the Rim?" Gar asked. Broey shook his head. "Let her go. She's not one to stay on the Rim." "Perhaps we should have her picked up," Gar said. Broey stared at him, then: "I've gained the distinct impression that you've some private plan in mind. Are you prepared to share it?" "I've no idea what you..." "Enough!" Broey shouted. His ventricles wheezed as he inhaled. Gar held himself very quiet. Broey leaned toward him, noting that this exchange amused Tria. "It's too soon to make decisions we cannot change! This is a time for ambiguity." Irritated by his own display of anger, Broey arose and hurried into his adjoining office where he locked the door. It was obvious that those two had no more idea than he where Jedrik had gone to ground. But it was still his game. She couldn't hide forever. Seated once more in his office, he called Security. "Has Bahrank returned?" A senior Gowachin officer hurried into the screen's view, looked up. "Not yet." "What precautions to learn where he delivers his cargo?" "We know his entry gate. It'll be simple to track him." "I don't want Gar's people to know what you're doing." "Understood." "That other matter?" "Pcharky may have been the last one. He could be dead, too. The killers were thorough." "Keep searching." Broey put down a sense of disquiet. Some very un-Dosadi things were happening in Chu... and on the Rim. He felt that things occurred which his spies could not uncover. Presently, he returned to the more pressing matter. "Bahrank is not to be interfered with until afterward." "Understood." "Pick him up well clear of his delivery point and bring him to your section. I will interview him personallv." "Sir, his addiction to..." "I know the hold she has on him. I'm counting on it." "We've not yet secured any of that substance, sir, although we're still trying," "I want success, not excuses. Who's in charge of that?" "Kidge, sir. He's very efficient in this..." "Is Kidge available?" "One moment, sir. I'll put him on." Kidge had a phlegmatic Gowachin face and rumbling voice. "Do you want a status report, sir?" "Yes." "My Rim contacts believe the addictive substance is derived from a plant called 'tibac.' We have no prior record of such a plant, but the outer Rabble has been cultivating it lately. According to my contacts, it's extremely addictive to Humans, even more so to us." "No record? What's its origin? Do they say?" "I talked personally to a Human who'd recently returned from upriver where the outer Rabble reportedly has extensive plantations of this 'tibac.' I promised my informant a place in the Warrens if he provides me with a complete report on the stuff and a kilo packet of it. This informant says the cultivators believe tibac has religious significance. I didn't see any point in exploring that." "When do you expect him to deliver?" "By nightfall at the latest." Broey held his silence for a moi ment. Religious significance. More  than likely the plant came from beyond the God Wall then, as Kidge  implied. But why? What were they doing? j "Do you have new instructions?" ! Kidge asked. "Get that substance up to me as soon as you can." Kidge fidgeted. He obviously had to ask it. I Broey glared at him. "Yes? What is it?" "Don't you want the substance tested first?' '  It was a baffling question. Had ' Kidge withheld vital information about the dangers of this tibac? One  never knew from what quarter an attack might' come. But Kidge was held in his own special bondage. He knew what could happen to him if I he failed Broey. And Jedrik had ' handled this stuff. But why had j Kidge asked this question? Faced with such unknowns, Broey tended to withdraw into himself, eyes veil, ed by the nictating membrane while he weighed the possibilities. Presently, he stirred, looked at Kidge ' in the screen. "If there's enough of it, feed some to volunteers -- both Human I and Gowachin. Get the rest of it up to me immediately, even while you're testing, but in a sealed container." "Sir, there are rumors about this stuff. It'll be difficult getting real volunteers." "You'll think of something." Broey broke the connection, returned to the outer room to make his political peace with Gar and Tria. He was not ready to blunt that pair... not yet. They were sitting just as he'd left them. Tria was speaking: "... the highest probability and I have to go on that." Gar merely nodded. Broey seated himself, nodded to Tria, who continued as though there'd been no hiatus. "Clearly, Jedrik's a genius. And her Loyalty Index! That has to be false, contrived. And look at her decisions: one questionable decision in four years. One!" Gar moved a finger along the red line on the chart. It was a curiously sensuous gesture, as though he were stroking flesh. Broey gave him a verbal prod. "Yes, Gar, what is it?" "I was just wondering if Jedrik could be another..." His glance darted ceilingward, back to the chart. They all understood his allusion to intruders from beyond the God Wall. Broey looked at Gar as though awakening from an interrupted thought. VVat'd that fool Gar mean by raising such a question at this juncture? The required responses were so obvious. "I agree with Tria's analysis," Broey said. "As to your question..." He gave a Human shrug. "Jedrik reveals some of the classic requirements, but..." Again, that shrug. "This is still the world God gave us." Colored as they were by his years in the Sacred Congregation, Broey's words took on an unctuous overtone, but in this room the message was strictly secular. "The others have been such disappointments," Gar said. "Especially Havvy." He moved the statuette to a more central position on the chart. "We failed because we were too eager," Tria said, her voice snappish. "Poor timing." Gar scratched his chin with his thumb. Tria sometimes disturbed him by that accusatory tone she took toward their failures. He said: "But... if she turns out to be one of them and we haven't allowed for it..." "We'll look through that gate when we come to it," Broey said, ""we come to it. Even another failure could have its uses. The food factories will give us a substantial increase at the next harvest. That means we can postpone the more troublesome political decisions which have been bothering us." Broey let this thought hang between them while he set himself to identifying the lines of activity revealed by what had happened in this room today. Yes, the Humans betrayed unmistakable signs that they behaved according to a secret plan. Things were going well, then: they'd attempt to supercede him soon... and fail. A door behind Tria opened. A fat Human female entered. Her body bulbed in green coveralls and her round face appeared to float in a halo of yellow hair. Her cheeks betrayed the telltale lividity of dacon addiction. She spoke subserviently to Gar. "You told me to interrupt if... "Yes, yes." Gar waved to indicate she could speak freely. The gesture's significance did not escape Broey. Another part of their set piece. "We've located Havvy but Jedrik's not with him." Gar nodded, addressed Broey: "Whether Jedrik's an agent or another puppet, this whole thing smells of something they have set in motion." Once more, his gaze darted ceilingward. "I will act on that assumption," Tria said. She pushed her chair back, arose. "I'm going into the Warrens." Broey looked up at her. Again, he felt his talons twitch beneath their sheaths. He said: "Don't interfere with them." Gar forced his gaze away from the Gowachin while his mind raced. Often, the Gowachin were difficult to read, but Broey had been obvious just then: He was confident that he could locate Jedrik and he didn't care who knew it. That could be very dangerous. Tria had seen it, too, of course, but she made no comment, merely turned and followed the fat woman out of the room. Gar arose like a folding ruler being opened to its limit. "I'd best be getting along. There are many matters requiring my personal attention." "We depend on you for a great deal," Broey said. He was not yet ready to release Gar, however. Let Tria get well on her way. Best to keep those two apart for a spell. He said: "Before you go. Gar. Several things still bother me. Why was Jedrik so precipitate? And why destroy her records? What was it that we were not supposed to see?' ' "Perhaps it was an attempt to confuse us," Gar said, quoting Tria. "One thing's sure: it wasn't just an angry gesture." "There must be a clue somewhere," Broey said. "Would you have us risk an interrogation of Havvy?" "Of course not!" Gar showed no sign that he recognized Broey's anger. He said: "Despite what you and Tria say, I don't think we can afford another mistake at this time. Havvy was... well..." "If you recall," Broey said, "Havvy was not one of Tria's mistakes. She went along with us under protest. I wish now we'd listened to her." He waved a hand idly in dismissal. "Go see to your important affairs." He watched Gar leave. Yes, on the basis of the Human's behavior it was reasonable to assume he knew nothing as yet about this infiltrator Bahrank was bringing through the gates. Gar would've concealed such valuable information, would not have dared raise the issue of a God Wall intrusion... Or would he? Broey nodded to himself. This must be handled with great delicacy. kk it We will now explore the particular imprint which various governments make upon the individual. First, he sure you recognize the primary governing force. For example, take a careful look at Human history. Humans have been known to submit to many constraints: to rule by Autarchs, by Plutarcbs, by the power seekers of the many Republics, by Oligarchs, by tyrant Majorities and Minorities, by the hidden persuasions of Polls, by profound instincts and shallow juvenilities. And always, the governing force as we wish you now to understand this concept was whatever the individual believed bad control over his immediate survival. Survival sets the pattern of imprint. During much of Human history (and the pattern is similar with most sentient species) Corporation presidents held more survival in their casual remarks than did the figurehead officials. We of the ConSentiency cannot forget this as we keep watch on the Multiworld Corporations. We dare not even forget it of ourselves. Where you work for your own survival, this dominates your imprint, this dominates what you believe. -- Instruction Manual, Bureau of Sabotage Never do what your enemy wants you to do, McKie reminded himself. In this moment, Aritch was the enemy, having placed the binding oath of Legum upon an agent of BuSab, having demanded information to which he had no right. The old Gowachin's behavior was consistent with the demands of his own legal system, but it immediately magnified the area of conflict by an enormous factor. McKie chose a minimal rcr sponse. "I'm here because Tandaloor is the heart of the Gowachin Federation." Aritch, who'd been sitting with his eyes closed to emphasize the formal Client-Legum relationship, opened his eyes to glare at McKie. "I remind you once that I am your client." Signs indicating a dangerous new tension in the Wreave servant were increasing, but McKie was forced to concentrate his attention on Aritch. "You name yourself client. Very well. The client must answer truthfully such questions as the Legum asks when the legal issues demand it." Aritch continued to glare at McKie, latent fire in the yellow eyes. Now, the battle was truly joined. McKie sensed how fragile was the relationship upon which his survival depended. The Gowachin, signatories to the great ConSentiency Pact binding the species of the known universe, were legally subject to certain BuSab intrusions. But Aritch had placed them on another footing. If the Gowachin Federation disagreed with McKie Agent, they could take him into the Courtarena as a Legum who had wronged a client. With the entire Gowachin Bar arrayed against him, McKie did not doubt which Legum would taste the knife. His one hope lay in avoiding immediate litigation. That was, after all, the real basis of Gowachin Law. Moving a step closer to specifics, McKie said: "My Bureau has uncovered a matter of embarrassment to the Gowachin Federation." Aritch blinked twice. "As we suspected." McKie shook his head. They didn't suspect, they knew. He counted on this: that the Gowachin understood why he'd answered their summons. If any Sentiency under the Pact could understand his position, it had to be the Gowachin. BuSab reflected Gowachin philosophy. Centuries had passed since the great convulsion out of which BuSab had originated, but the Consentient universe had never been allowed to forget that birth. It was taught to the young of every species. "Once, long ago, a tyrannical majority captured the government. They said they would make all individuals equal. They meant they would not let any individual be better than another at doing anything. Excellence was to be suppressed or concealed. The tyrants made their government act with great speed 'in the name of the people.' They removed delays and red tape wherever found. There was little deliberation. Unaware that they acted out of an unconscious compulsion to prevent all change, the tyrants tried to enforce a grey sameness upon every population. "Thus the powerful governmental machine blundered along at increasingly reckless speed. It took commerce and all the important elements of society with it. Laws were thought of and passed within hours. Every society came to be twisted into a suicidal pattern. People became unprepared for those changes which the universe demanded. They were unable to change. "It was the time of brittle money, 'appropriated in the morning and gone by nightfall,' as you learned earlier. In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became the citadels of a new aristocracy, rulers who kept the giant wheel of government careening along, spreading destruction, violence and chaos wherever they touched. "In those desperate times, a handful of people (the Five Ears, their makeup and species never revealed) created the Sabotage Corps to slow that runaway wheel of government. The original corps was bloody, violent and cruel. Gradually, the original efforts were replaced by more subtle methods. The governmental wheel slowed, became more manageable. Deliberation returned. "Over the generations, that original Corps became a Bureau, the Bureau of Sabotage, with its present Ministerial powers, preferring diversion to violence but ready for violence when the need arises." They were words from McKie's own teens, generators of a concept modified by his experiences in the Bureau. Now, he was aware that this directorate composed of all the known sentient species was headed into its own entropic corridors. Someday, the Bureau would dissolve or be dissolved, but the universe still needed them. The old imprints remained, the old futile seeking after absolutes of sameness. It was the ancient conflict between what the individual saw as personal needs for immediate survival and what the totality required if any were to survive. And now it was the Gowachin versus the ConSentiency and Aritch was the champion of his people. McKie studied the High Magister carefully, sensitive to the unrelieved tensions in the Wreave attendant. Would there be violence in this room? It was a question which remained unanswered as McKie spoke. "You have observed that I am in a difficult position. I do not enjoy the embarrassment of revered teachers and friends, nor of their compatriots. Yet, evidence has been seen..." He let his voice trail off. Gowachin disliked dangling implications. Aritch's claws slid from the sheaths of his webbed fingers. "Your client wishes to hear of this evidence." Before speaking, McKie rested his hand on the latch of the box in his lap. "Many people from two species have disappeared. Two species: Gowachin and Human. Singly, these were small matters, but these disappearances have been going on for a long time -- perhaps twelve or fifteen generations by the old Human reckoning. Taken together, these disappearances are massive. We've learned that there's a planet called Dosadi where these people were taken. Such evidence as we have has been examined carefully. It all leads to the Gowachin Federation." Aritch's fingers splayed, a sign of acute embarrassment. Whether assumed or real McKie could not tell. "Does your Bureau accuse the Gowachin?" "You know the function of my Bureau. We do not yet know the location of Dosadi, but we'll find it." Aritch remained silent. He knew BuSab had never given up on a problem. McKie raised the blue box. "Having thrust this upon me you've made me guardian of your fate, client. You've no rights to inquire as to my methods. I will not follow old law." Aritch nodded. "It was my argument that you'd react thus." He raised his right hand. The rhythmic 'death flexion' swept over the Wreave and her fighting mandibles darted from her facial slit. At the first movement from her, McKie whipped open the blue box, snatched out book and knife. He spoke with a firmness his body did not feel: "If she makes the slightest move toward me, my blood will defile this book." He placed the knife against his own wrist. "Does your Servant of the Box know the consequences? The history of the Running Phylum would end. Another Phylum would be presumed to've accepted the Law from its Giver. The name of this Phylum's last High Magister would be erased from living thought. Gowachin would eat their own eggs at the merest hint that they had Running Phylum blood in their veins." Aritch remained frozen, right hand raised. Then: "McKie, you are revealed as a sneak. Only by spying on our most sacred rituals could you know this." "Did you think me some fearful, pliable dolt, client? I am a true Legum. A Legum does not have to sneak to leam the Law. When you admitted me to your Bar you opened every door." Slowly, muscles quivering, Aritch turned and spoke to the Wreave: "Ceylang?" She had difficulty speaking while her poison-tipped fighting mandibles remained extruded. "Your command?" "Observe this Human well. Study him. You will meet again." "I obey." "You may go, but remember my words." "I remember." McKie, knowing the death' dance could not remain incompleted, stopped her. "Ceylang!" Slowly, reluctantly, she looked at him. "Do observe me well, Ceylang. I am what you hope to be. And I warn you: unless you shed your Wreave skin you will never be a Legum." He nodded in dismissal. "Now, you may go." In a fluid swish of robes she obeyed, but her fighting mandibles remained out, their poison-tips glittering. Somewhere in her triad's quarters, McKie knew there'd be a small feathered pet which would die presently with poison from its mistress burning through its veins. Then the death dance would be ended and she could retract her mandibles. But the hate would remain. When the door had closed behind the red robe, McKie restored book and knife to the box, returned his attention to Aritch. Now, when McKie spoke, it was really Legum to Client without any sophistry and they both knew it. "What would tempt the High Magister of the renowned Running Phylum to bring down the Arch of Civilization?" McKie's tone was conversational, between equals. Aritch had trouble adjusting to the new status. His thoughts were obvious. If McKie had witnessed a Cleansing Ritual McKie had to be accepted as a Gowachin. But McKie was not Gowachin. Yet he'd been accepted before the Gowachin Bar... and if he'd seen that most sacred ritual... Presently, Aritch spoke. "Where did you see the ritual?" "It was performed by the Phylum which sheltered me on Tandaloor." "The Dry Heads?" "Yes." "Did they know you witnessed?" "They invited me." "How did you shed your skin?" "They scraped me raw and preserved the scrapings." Aritch took some time digesting this. The Dry Heads had played their own secret game of Gowachin politics and now the secret was out. He had to consider the implications. What had they hoped to gain? He said: "You wear no tatoo." "I've never made-formal application for Dry Heads membership." "Why?" "My primary allegiance is to BuSab." "The Dry Heads know this?" "They encourage it." "But what motivated them to..." McKie smiled. Aritch glanced at a veiled alcove at the far end of the sanctum, back to McKie. A likeness to the Frog God? "It'd take more than that." McKie shrugged. Aritch mus aloud: "The Dry Heads supported Klodik in his crime when you... "Not crime." "I stand corrected. You won Klodik's freedom. And after your victory the Dry Heads invited you to the Cleansing Ritual." "A Gowachin in BuSab cannot have divided allegiance." "But a Legum serves only the Law!" "BuSab and Gowachin Law are not in conflict." "So the Dry Heads would have us believe." "Many Gowachin believe it." "But Klodik's case was not a true test." Realization swept through McKie: Aritch regretted more than a lost bet. He'd put his money with his hopes. It was time then to redirect this conversation. "I am your Legum." Aritch spoke with resignation. "You are." "Your Legum wishes to hear of the Dosadi problem." "A thing is not a problem until it arouses sufficient concern." Aritch glanced at the box in McKie's lap. "We're dealing with differences in values, changes in values." McKie did not believe for an instant this was the tenor of Gowachin defense, but Aritch 's words gave him pause. The Gowachin combined such an odd mixture of respect and disrespect for their Law and all government. At the root lay their unchanging rituals but above that everything remained as fluid as the seas in which they'd evolved. Constant fluidity was the purpose behind their rituals. You never entered any exchange with Gowachin on a surefooted basis. They did something different every time... religiously. It was their nature. All ground is temporary. Law is made to be changed. That was their catechism. To be a Legum is to learn where to place your feet. "The Dry Heads did something different," McKie said. This plunged Aritch into gloom. His chest ventricles wheezed, indicating he'd speak from the stomach. "The people of the ConSentiency come in so many different forms: Wreaves (a flickering glance doorward), Sobarips, Laclacs, Calebans, PanSpechi, Palenki, Chithers, Taprisiots. Humans, we of the Gowachin... so many. The unknowns between us defy counting." "As well count the drops of water in a sea." Aritch grunted, then: "Some diseases cross the barriers between species." McKie stared at him. Was Dosadi a medical experiment station? Impossible! There would be no reason for secrecy then. Secrecy defeated the efforts to study a common problem and the Gowachin knew it. "You are not studying Gowachin-Human diseases." "Some diseases attack the psyche and cannot be traced to any physical agent." McKie absorbed this. Although Gowachin definitions were difficult to understand, they permitted no aberrant behaviour. Different behavior, yes; aberrant behavior, no. You could challenge the law, not the ritual. They were compulsive in this regard. They slew the ritual deviant out of hand. It required enormous restraint on their part to deal with another species. Aritch continued: "Terrifying psychological abrasions occur when divergent species confront each other and are forced to adapt to new ways. We seek new knowledge in this arena of behavior." McKie nodded. One of his Dry Head teachers had said it: "No matter how painful, life must adapt or die." It was a profound revelation about how Gowachin applied their insight to themselves. Law changed, but it changed on a foundation which could not be permitted the slightest change. "Else, how do we know where we are or where we have been?" But encounters with other species changed the foundaby force. McKie spoke with care. "Psychological experiments with people who've not given their informed consent are still illegal... even among the Gowachin." Aritch would not accept this argument. "The ConSentiency in all of its parts has accumulated a long history of scientific studies into behavioral and biomedical questions where people are the final test site." McKie said: "And the first issue when you propose such an experiment is: 'How great is the known risk to the subjects?' " "But, my dear Legum, informed consent implies that the experimenter knows all the risks and can describe them to his test subjects. I ask you: How can that be when the experiment goes beyond what you already know? How can you describe risks which you cannot anticipate?' ' "You submit a proposal to many recognized experts in the field," McKie said. "They weigh the proposed experiment against whatever value the new knowledge is expected to uncover." "Ahh, yes. We submit our proposal to fellow researchers, to people whose mission, whose very view of their own personal identity is controlled by the belief that they can improve the lot of all sentient beings. Tell me, Legum: Do review boards composed of such people reject many experimental proposals?" McKie saw the direction of the argument. He spoke with care. "They don't reject many proposals, that's true. Still, you didn't submit your Dosadi protocol to any outside review. Was that to keep it secret from your own people or from others?' ' "We feared the fate of our proposal should it run the gantlet of other species." "Did a Gowachin majority approve your project?" "No. But we both know that having a majority set the experimental guidelines gives no guarantee against dangerous projects." "Then Dosadi has proved dangerous?" Aritch remained silent for several deep breaths, then: "It has proved dangerous." "To whom?" "Everyone." It was an unexpected answer, adding a new dimension to Aritch's behavior. McKie decided to back up and test the revelation. "This Dosadi project was approved by a minority among the cept a dangerous risk-benefit?" "You have a way of putting these matters, McKie, which presupposes a particular kind of guilt." "But a majority in the ConSentiency might agree with my description?" "Should they ever learn of it." "I see. Then, in accepting a dangerous risk, what were the future benefits you expected?" Aritch emitted a deep grunt. "Legum, I assure you that we worked only with volunteers and they were limited to Humans and Gowachin." "You evade my question." "I merely defer an answer." "Then tell me, did you explain to your volunteers that they had a choice, that they could say 'no'? Did you tell them they might be in danger?" "We did not try to frighten them... no." "Was any one of you concerned about the free destiny of your volunteersT' "Be careful how you judge us, McKie. There is a fundamental tension between science and freedom -- no matter how science is viewed by its practitioners nor how freedom is sensed by those who believe they have it." McKie was reminded of a cynical Gowachin aphorism: 'To believe that you are free is more important than being free. ' He said: "Your volunteers were lured into this project." "Some would see it that way." McKie reflected on this. He still did not know precisely what the Gowachin had done on Dosadi, but he was beginning to suspect it'd be something repulsive. He could not keep this fear from his voice. "We return to the question of expected benefits." "Legum, we have long admired your species. You gave us one of our most trusted maxims: 'No species is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its own interests.' " "That's no longer sufficient justification for... "We derive another rule from your maxim: It is wise to guide your actions in such a way that the interests of other species coincide with the interests of your species." McKie stared at the High Magister. Did this crafty old Gowachin seek a Human-Gowachin conspiracy to suppress evidence of what had been done on Dosadi? Would he dare such a gambit? Just how bad was this Dosadi fiasco? To test the issue, McKie asked: "What benefits did you expect? I insist." Aritch slumped. His chairdog accommodated to the new position. The High Magister favored McKie with a heavy-lidded stare for a long interval, then: "You play this game better than we'd ever hoped." "With you. Law and Government are always a game. I come from another arena." "Your Bureau." "And I was trained as a Legum." "Are you my Legum?" "The binding oath is binding on me. Have you no faith in..." McKie broke off, overwhelmed by a sudden insight. Of course! The Gowachin had known for a long time that Dosadi would become a legal issue. "Faith in what?" Aritch asked. "Enough of these evasions!" McKie said. "You had your Dosadi problem in mind when you trained me. Now, you act as though you distrust your own plan." Aritch's lips rippled. "How strange. You're more Gowachin than a Gowachin." "What benefits did you expect when you took this risk?" Aritch's fingers splayed, stretching the webs. "We hoped for a quick conclusion and benefits to offset the natural animosities we knew would arise. But it's now more than twenty of your generations, not twelve or fifteen, that we've grasped the firebrand. Benefits? Yes, there are some, but we dare not use them or free Dosadi from bondage lest we raise questions which we cannot answer without revealing our... source." "The benefits!" McKie said. "Yout L egum insists." Aritch exhaled a shuddering breath through his ventricles. "Only the Caleban who guards Dosadi knows its location and she is charged to give access without revealing that place. Dosadi is peopled by Humans and Gowachin. They live in a single city they call live there, almost equally divided between the two species. Perhaps three times that number live outside Chu, but they're outside the experiment. Chu is approximately eight hundred square kilometers." The population density shocked had difficulty visualizing it. Even allowing for a city's vertical dimension... and burrowing... There'd be some, of course, whose power bought them space, but the others... Gods! Such a city would be crawling with people, no escaping the pressure of your fellows anywhere except on that unexplained Rim. McKie said as much to Aritch. The High Magister confirmed this. "The population density is very great in some areas. The people of Dosadi call these areas 'Warrens' for good reason." "But why? With an entire planet to live on..." "Dosadi is poisonous to our forms of life. All of their food comes from carefully managed hydroponics factories in the heart of Chu. Food factories and the distribution are managed by warlords. Everything is under a quasi-military form of management. But life expectancy in the city is four times that outside." "You said the population outside the city was much larger than..." "They breed like mad animals." "What possible benefits could you have expectedfrom..." "Under pressure, life reveals its basic elements." McKie considered what the High Magister had revealed. The picture of Dosadi was that of a seething mass. Warlords... He visualized walls, some people living and working in comparative richness of space while others... Gods! It was madness in a universe where some highly habitable planets held no more than a few thousand people. His voice brittle, McKie addressed himself to the High Magister. "These basic elements, the benefits you sought... I wish to hear about them." Aritch hitched himself forward. "We have discovered new ways of association, new devices of motivation, unsuspected drives which can impose themselves upon an entire population." "I require specific and explicit enumeration of these discoveries." "Presently, Legum... presently." Why did Aritch delay? Were the so-called benefits insignificant beside this repulsive horror of such an experiment? McKie ventured another tack. "You say this planet is poisonous. Why not remove the inhabitants a few at a time, subject them to memory erasure if you must, and feed them out into the ConSentiency as new..." 'We dare not! First, the inhabitants have developed an immunity to erasure, a by-product of those poisons which do get into their diet. Second, given what they have become on Dosadi... How can I explain this to you?" "Why don't the people Just leave Dosadi? I presume you deny them Jumpdoors, but rockets and other mechanical..." "We will not permit them to leave. Our Caleban encloses Dosadi in what she calls a 'tempokinetic barrier' which our test subjects cannot penetrate." "Why?" "We will destroy the entire planet and everything on it rather than loose this population upon the ConSentiency." "What are the people of Dosadi that you'd even contemplate such a thing?" Aritch shuddered. "Wehave created a monster."    Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed. -- Attributed to an ancient Human journalist As she hurried across theroof of the adjoining parking spire at midafternoon of her final day as a Liaitor, Jedrik couldn't clear her mind of the awareness that she was about to shed another mark of rank. Stacked in the building beneath her, each one suspended by its roof grapples on the conveyor track, were the vehicles of the power merchants and their minions. The machines varied from the giant jaigers, heavy with armor and weapons and redundant engine systems, of the ruling few, down to the tiny black skitters assigned to such as hersQlf. Ex-minion Jedrik knew she was about to take a final ride in the machine which had released her from the morning and evening crush on the underground walkways. She had timed her departure with care. The ones who rode in the jaigers would not yet have reassigned her skitter and its driver. That driver, Havvy, required her special attention in this last ride, this narrow time slot which she had set aside for dealing with him. Jedrik sensed events rushing at their own terrible pace now. Just that morning she had loosed death against fifty Humans. Now, the avalanche gathered power. The parking spire's roof pavement had been poorly repaired after the recent explosive destruction of three Rim guerrillas. Her feet adjusted to the rough paving as she hurried across the open area to the drop chute. At the chute, she paused and glanced westward through Chu's enclosing cliffs. The sun, already nearing its late afternoon line on the cliffs, was a golden glow beyond the God Wall's milky barrier. To her newly sensitized fears, this was not a sun but a malignant eye which peered down at her. By now, the rotofiles in her office would've been ignited by the clumsy intrusion of the LP toads. There'd be a delay while they reported this, while it was bucked up through the hierarchy to a level where somebody dared make an important decision. Jedrik fought against letting her thoughts fall into trembling shadows. After the rotofiles, other data would accumulate. The Elector's people would grow increasingly suspicious. But that was part of her plan, a layer with many layers. Abruptly, she stepped into the chute, dropped to her parking level, stared across the catwalks at her skitter dangling among the others. Havvy sat on the sloping hood, his shoulders in their characteristic slouch. Good. He behaved as expected. A certain finesse was called for now, but she expected no real trouble from anyone as shallow and transparent as Havvy. Still, she kept her right hand in the pocket where she'd secreted a small but adequate weapon. Nothing could be allowed to stop her now. She had selected and trained lieutenants, but none of them quite matched her capabilities. The military force which had been prepared for this moment needed Jedrik for that extra edge which could pluck victory from the days ahead of them. For now, I must float like a leaf above the hurricane. Havvy was reading a book, one of those pseudo-deep things he regularly affected, a book which she knew he would not understand. As he read, he pulled at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger, the very picture of a deep intellectual involvement with important ideas. But #? it was only a picture. He gave no sign that he heard Jedrik hurrying toward him. A light breeze flicked the pages and he held them with one finger. She could not yet see the title, but assumed this book would be on the contraband list as was much of his reading. That was the peak of Havvy's risk taking, not great but imbued with a certain false glamor. Another picture. She could see him quite distinctly now in readable detail. He should have looked up by now but still sat absorbed in his book. Havvy possessed large brown eyes which he obviously believed he employed with deceptive innocence. The real innocence went far beyond his shallow attempts at deception. Jedrik's imagination easily played the scene should one of Broey's people confront Havvy in this pose. "A contraband book?" Havvy would ask, playing his brown eyes for all their worthless innocence. " didn't think there were any more of those around. Thought you'd burned them all. Fellow handed it to me on the street when  asked what he was reading." And the Elector's spy would conceal a sneer while asking: "Didn't you question such a gift?" Should it come to that, things would grow progressively stickier for Havvy along paths he could not anticipate. His innocent brown eyes would deceive one of the Elector's people no more than they deceived her. In view of this, she read other messages in the fact that Havvy had produced her key to the God Wall -- this Joij X. McKie. Havvy had come to her with his heavyhanded conspiratorial manner: "The Rim wants to send in a new agent. We thought you might..." And every datum he'd divulged about this oddity, every question he'd answered with his transparent candor, had increased her tension, surprisq. and elation. Jedrik thought upon these matters as she approached Havvy. He sensed her presence, looked up. Recognition and something unexpected -- a watchfulness halfshielded -- came over him. He closed his book. "You're early." "As I said I'd be." This new manner in Havvy set her nerves on edge, raised old doubts. No course remained for her except attack. "Only toads don't break routine," she said. Havvy's gaze darted left, right, returned to her face. He hadn't expected this. It was a bit more open risk than Havvy relished. The Elector had spy devices everywhere. Havvy's reaction told her what she wanted to know, however. She gestured to the skitter. "Let's go." "Yes... of course." He pocketed his book, slid down and opened her door. His actions were a bit too brisk. The button tab on one of his green striped sleeves caught on the door handle. He freed it with an embarrassed flurry. Jedrik slipped into the passenger harness. Havvy slammed the door a touch too hard. Nervous. Good. He took his place at the power bar to her left, kept his profile to her when he spoke. "Head for the apartment." A slight hesitation, then: "Very good." He activated the grapple tracks. The skitter jerked into motion, danced sideways and slid smoothly down the diveway to the street. As they emerged from the enclosing shadows of the parking spire, even before the grapple released them and Havvy activated the skitter's own power, Jedrik firmed her decision not to look back. The Liaitor building had become part of her past, a pile of greygreen stones hemmed by other tall structures with, here and there, a gap to the cliffs and the river's arms. That was part of her life which she now excised. Best it were done cleanly. Her mind must be clear for what came next... Havvy drove with his usual competence, not overly proficient but adequate. His knuckles, however, were white on the steering arms. He at least had enough good sense to fear her. Jedrik allowed the emotion to ferment in him while she studied the passing scene. There was little traffic and all of that armored. The occasional tube access with its sense of weapons and eyes behind the guard slits -- all seemed normal enough. It was too soon for any hue and cry after an errant senior liaitor. They went through the first walled check point without a hitch. The guards were efficiently casual, a glance at the skitter and their identification brassards. The danger with routines, she told herself, was that they became boring very soon. The streets became a shade wider and more open as they climbed on the normal ring route. Jedrik turned, studied Havvy, the way he appeared to concentrate on his driving with an air of stored-up concentration. Perhaps that was the key to Havvy. He knew his own deficiencies, knew it was not right for him to hold a driver's job, even for the middle echelons, when the Warrens were jammed with others avaricious for any step upward. Obviously, Havvy contained valuable secrets which he sold at a hidden market. She had to nudge that hidden market now. It must appear faintly clumsy, as though the events of this day had disturbed her timing. "Can we be overheard?" she asked. This made no difference to her plans, but it was part of the clumsiness. "I've disarmed the transceiver," he said. "It'll look like a simple breakdown." To no one but you, she thought. But it was the kind of infantile response she'd grown accustomed to from Havvy. She picked up the gambit. "You expected that we'd require privacy?" He almost shot a startled look at her, caught himself, then: "Oh, no! It was a precaution. I have more information to sell you." "But you gave me the information about McKie." "That was to demonstrate my value." Oh, Havvy! Why do you try? "You have unexpected qualities," she said and marked that he did not even detect the first level of her irony. "What's this information you wish to sell?" "It concerns this McKie." "Indeed?" "What's it worth to you?" "Am I your only market, Havvy?"  His shoulder muscles bunched as his grip grew even tighter on the steering arms. The tensions in his voice were remarkably easy to read. "Sold in the right place, my information could guarantee maybe five years of easy living -- no worries about food or good housing or anything."  "Why aren't you selling it in such a place?" "I didn't say I could sell it. There are buyers and then there are buyers:" "And then there are the ones who just take?" There was no need for him to answer and it was just as well. A barrier dropped in front of the skitter, forcing Havvy to a quick stop. For just an instant, fear gripped her and she felt her reflexes prevent any bodily betrayal of the emotion. Then she saw that it was a routine stop while repair supplies were trundled across the roadway ahead of them. Jedrik peered out the window on her right. The interminable repair and strengthening of the city's fortifications were going on at the next lower level. Memory told her this was the eighth layer of city protection on the southwest. The noise of pounding rock hammers filled the street. Grey dust lay everywhere, clouds of it drifting. She smelled burnt flint and that bitter metallic undertone which you never quite escaped anywhere in Chu, the smell of the poison death which Dosadi ladled out to its inhabitants. She closed her mouth and took shallow breaths, noted absently that the labor crew was all Warren, all Human and about a third of them women. None of the women appeared older than fifteen. They already had that hard alertness about the eyes which the Warren-born never lost. A young male strawboss went by trailing a male assistant, an older man with bent shoulders and straggly grey hair. The older man walked with slow deliberation and the young strawboss seemed impatient with him, waving the assistant to keep up. The important subtleties of the relationship thus revealed were entirely lost on Havvy, she noted. The strawboss, as he passed one of the female laborers, looked her up and down with interest. The worker noted his attention and exerted herself with the hammer. The strawboss said something to his assistant, who went over and spoke to the young female. She smiled and glanced at the strawboss, nodded. The strawboss and assistant walked on without looking back. The obvious arrangement for later assignation would have gone without Jedrik's conscious notice except that the young female strongly resembled a woman she'd once known... dead now as were so many of her early companions. A bell began to ring and the barrier lifted. Havvy drove on, glancing once at the strawboss as they passed him. The glance was not returned, telling Jedrik that the strawboss had assessed the skitter's occupants much earlier. Jedrik picked up the conversation with Havvy where they'd left it. "What makes you think you could get more from me than from someone else?" "Not more... It's just that there's less risk with you." The truth was in his voice, that innocent instrument which told so much about Havvy. She shook her head. "You want me to take the risk of selling higher up?" After a long pause, Havvy said: "You know a safer way for me?" "I'd have to use you somewhere along the line for verification." "But I'd be under your protection then." "Why should I protect you when you're no longer of value?" "What makes you think this is all the information I can get?" Jedrik allowed herself a sigh, wondered why she continued this empty game. "We might both run into a taker, Havvy." Havvy didn't respond. Surely, he'd considered this in his foolish game plan. They passed a squat brown building on the left. Their street curved upward around the building and passed through a teeming square at the next higher level. Between two taller buildings on the right, she glimpsed a stretch of a river channel, then it was more buildings which enclosed them like the cliffs of Chu, growing taller as the skitter climbed. As she'd known, Havvy couldn't endure her silence. "What're you going to do?" be asked. "A Magnificent Novel and a Colossal Achievement... an instant Contemporary Classic."SF Review #  # Now on Sale from "I'll pay one year of such protection as I can offer." "But this is..." "Take it or leave it." He heard the finality but, being Havvy, couldn't give up. It was his one redeeming feature. "Couldn't we even discuss a..." "We won't discuss anything! If you won't sell at my price, then perhaps I should become a taker." "That's not like you!" "How little you know. I can buy informants of your caliber far cheaper." "You're a hard person." Out of compassion, she ventured a tiny lesson. "That's how to survive. But I think we should forget this now. Your information is probably something I already know, or something useless." "It's worth a lot more than you offered." "So you say, but I know you Havvy. You're not one to take big risks. Little risks sometimes, big risks never. Your information couldn't be of any great value to me." "If you only knew." "I'm no longer interested, Havvy." "Oh, that's great! You bargain with me and then pull out after I've..." "I was not bargaining!" Wasn't the fool capable of learning anything? "But you..." "Havvy! Hear me with care. You're a little tad who's stumbled onto something you believe is important. It's actually nothing of great importance, but it's big enough to frighten you. You can't think of a way t# sell this information without putting your neck in peril. That's why you came to me. You presume to have me act as your agent. You presume too much." Anger closed his mind to any value in her words. "I take risks!" She didn't even try to keep amusement from her voice. "Yes, Havvy, but never where you think. So here's a risk for you right out in the open. Tell me your valuable information. No strings. Let me judge. If I think it's worth more than I've already offered I'll pay more. If I already have this information or it's otherwise useless, you get nothing." "The advantage is all on your side!" "Where it belongs." Jedrik studied Havvy's shoulders, the set of his head, the rippling of muscles under stretched fabric as he drove. He was supposed to be pure Labor Pool and didn't even know that silence was the guardian of the LP: Learning silence, you learn what to hear. The LP seldom volunteered anything. And here was Havvy, so far from that and other LP traditions that he might never have experienced the Warren. Had never experienced it until he was too old to learn. Yet he talked of friends on the Rim, acted as though he had his own conspiratorial cell. He held a job fgr which he was barely competent. And everything he did revealed his belief that all of these things would not tell someone of Jedrik's caliber the essential facts about him. Unless his was a marvelously practiced act. She did not believe such a marvel, but there was a cautionary element in recognizing the remote possibility. This and the obvious flaws in Havvy's character had kept her from using him as a key to the God Wall. She could not tolerate even the remote possibility that the key would break. Better to die herself. They were passing the Elector's headquarters now. She turned and glanced at the stone escarpment. Her thoughts were a thorn thicket. Every assumption she made about Havvy required a peculiar protective reflex. A non-Dosadi reflex. She noted workers streaming down the steps toward the tube entrance of the Elector's building. Her problem with Havvy carried an odd similarity to the problem she knew Broey would encounter when it came to deciding about an ex-Liaitor named Keila Jedrik. She had studied Broey's decisions with a concentrated precision which had tested the limits of her abilities. Doing this, she had changed basic things about herself, had become oddly nonDosadi. They would no longer find Keila Jedrik in the DemoPol. No more than they'd find Havvy or this McKie there. But if she could do this... Pedestrian traffic in this region of  extreme caution had slowed Havvy to a crawl. More of the Elector's workers were coming up from the Tube Gate One exit, a throng of them as though released on urgent business. She wondered if any of her fifty flowed in that throng. I must not allow my thoughts to waruler. To float like an aware leaf was one thing, but she dared not let herself enter the hurricane... not yet. She focused once more on the silent, angry Havvy. "Tell me, Havvy, did you ever kill a person?" His shoulders stiffened. "Why do you ask such a question?" She stared at his profile for an adequate time, obviously reflecting on this same question. "I presumed you'd answer. I understand now that you will not answer. This is not the first time I've made that mistake." Again, Havvy missed the lesson. "Do you ask many people that question?" "That doesn't concern you now." She concealed a profound sadness. Havvy hadn't the wit to read even the most blatant of the surface indicators. He compounded the useless. "You can't justify such an intrusion into my..." "Be still, little man! Have you learned nothing? Death is often the only means of evoking an appropriate answer." Havvy saw this only as an utterly unscrupulous response as she'd known he would. When he shot a probing stare at her, she lifted an eyebrow in a cynical shrug. Havvy continued to divide his attention between the street and her face, apprehensive, fearful. His driving degenerated, became actively dangerous. "Watch what you're doing, you fool!" He turned more of his attention to the street, presuming this the greater danger. TTie next time he glanced at her, she smiled, knowing Havvy would be unable to detect any lethal change in this gesture. He already wondered if she would attack, but guessed she wouldn't do it while he was driving. He doubted, though, and his doubts made him even more transparent. Havvy was no marvel. One thing certain about him: he came from beyond the God Wall, from the lands of 'X,' from the place of McKie. Whether he worked for the Elector was immaterial. In fact, it grew increasingly doubtful that Broey would employ such a dangerous, a flawed tool. No pretense at foolhardy ignorance of Dosadi's basic survival lessons could be this perfect. The pretender would not survive. Only the truly ignorant could have survived to Havvy 's age, allowed to go on living as a curiosity, a possible source of interesting data... interesting data, not necessarily useful. Having left resolution of the Havvy Problem to the ultimate moment, wringing every last bit of usefulness from him, she knew her course clearly. Whoever protected Havvy, her questions placed the precisely modulated pressure upon them and left her options open. "What is your valued information?" she asked. Sensing that he bought life with every response, Havvy pulled the skitter to the curb, stopped and stared at her. She waited. "McKie..." He swallowed. #  "McKie comes from beyond the God Wall." She allowed laughter to convulse her and it went deeper than she had anticipated. For an instant, she was helpless with it and this sobered her. Not even Havvy could be permitted such an advantage. Havvy was angry. "What's so funny?" "You are. Did you imagine for a second that I wouldn't recognize someone alien to Dosadi? Little man, how have you survived?' ' This time, he read her inference correctly. It threw him back on the only resource remaining, and it even answered her question. "Don't underestimate my value." Yes, of course -- the uqknown value of X. And there was a latent threat in his tone which she'd nevef heard before. Could Havvy call upon protectors from beyond the God Wall? That did not seem possible, given his circumstances, but it had to be considered. It would not do to approach her larger problems from too narrow a viewpoint. People who could enclose an entire planet in an impenetrable barrier would have other capabilities. Some of these creatures came and went at will, as though Dosadi were merely a casual stopping point. And the travelers from X could change their bodies; that was the single terrible fact which must never be forgotten; that was what had led her ancestors to breed for a Keila Jedrik. Such considerations always left her feeling almost helpless, shaken by the ultimate unknowns which lay in her path. Was Havvy still Havvy? Her trusted senses answered: Yes. Havvy was a spy, a diversion, an amusement. And he was something else which she could not fathom. It was maddening. She could read every nuance of his reactions, yet questions remained. How could you ever understand these creatures from beyond the Veil of Heaven? They were transparent to Dosadi eyes, but that transparency itself confused one. On the other hand, how could the people of X hope to understand (and thus anticipate) a Keila Jedrik? Every evidence of her senses told her that Havvy saw only the surface Jedrik which she wanted him to see. His spying eyes reported what she wanted them to report. But the enormous interests at stake here dictated a brand of caution beyond anything she'd ever before attempted. The fact that she saw this arena of explosive repercussions, however, armed her with grim satisfaction. The idea that a Dosadi puppet might rebel against X and fully understand the nature of such rebellion, surely that idea lay beyond their capabilities. They were overconfident while she was filled with wariness. She saw no way of hiding her movements .from the people beyond the God Wall as she hid from her fellow Dosadis. X had ways of spying that no one completely evaded. They would know about the two Keila Jedriks. She counted on only one thing: that they could not see heY deepest thoughts, that they'd read only that surface which she revealed to them. Jedrik maintained a steady gaze at Havvy while these considerations moved through her mind. Not by the slightest act did she betray what went on in her mind. That, after all. was Dosadi's great gift to its survivors. "Your information is valueless," she said. "You already knew it!" What did he hope to catch with such a gambit? Not for the first time, she asked herself whether Havvy might represent the best that 'X' could produce. Would they knowingly send their dolts here? It hardly seemed possible. But how could Havvy's childish incompetence command such tools of power as the God Wall implied? Were the people of 'X' the decadent descendants of greater beings? Even though his own survival depended on it, Havvy would not remain silent. "If you didn't already know about McKie, then you... you don't believe me!" This was too much. Even for Havvy it was too much and she told herself: Despite the unknown powers of 'X,' he will have to die. He muddies the water. Such incompetence cannot be permitted to breed. It would have to be done without passion, not like a Gowachin male weeding his own tads but with a kind of clinical decisiveness which 'X' could not misunderstand. For now, she had arranged that Havvy take her to a particular place. He still ha( a role to perform. Later, with discrete attention to the necessary misdirections, she would do what had to be done. Then the next part of her plan could be assayed.    c aacKMa itAY em evaimratcs hy Philip A. Schreff ler aoB Came one day startling news: Barry N. Malzberg and Robert Silverberg are withdrawing, or have withdrawn, or will shortly withdraw from writing science fiction. Malzberg explains himself in the pages of F  SF; Silverberg stuns a symposium audience with the revelation. And, perhaps not amazingly, the reasons they give for their decisions are the same. They are giving up sf writing because nobody takes a serious science fiction writer seriously. Because sf isn't in the mainstream. It's not even, God help it, in a major tributary. No, sf is derelect in some brackish backwater -- drifting helplessly between the rusted hull of Verne's Nautilus and the body of Tom Swift's Electric Sheep. It's not really that science fiction is bankrupt. It's Just that, dammit, the mainstream fiction boys are so serious, and what hurts is that everybody knows it, everybody appreciates. Kurt Vonnegut spins yams of Tralfamadorians and IceNine and the professors in literature departments add him to their reading lists. John Gardner tells the Beowulf story from Grendel's point of view and graduate students murmur: "Dissertation fodder." But if you're Barry Malzberg or Robert Silverberg or any one of hundreds of other sf writers whose stuff has appeared in the pages of science fiction pulps, then you're not one of the Big Boys. And if you're serious, if you're an artist, you might as well pack up your afterburners and get out. No. Absolutely no. Why? Because who love science fiction and fantasy, and anyone who ever dreamed of being an artist someday -- that particular shambling, half-seen monster is a fraud. In short, the mainstream is a twentieth-century shibboleth created by the universities, the critics, the Gertrude Stein-style gatherers of literary coteries and the promotional divisions of the publishing houses. It's a mystic society with its own arcana, a secret handshake and a little gold lapel pin in the shape of Mount Parnassus. It's a campus fraternity that says: "We're in. And you, you poor sap, are out." Back in #, in a little house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, another poor sap was cranking out a supernatural sea story at breakneck speed. He'd made a deal with his publisher, and the publisher was setting the chapters of the novel into type as fast as the poor sap could spill ink onto paper. Herman Melville was under considerable pressure. "Come on, Herman," his publisher would write to him, "you've got a deadline. The typesetter is way ahead of you." Melville got flustered. He had written a character named Bulkington into Moby Dick, but he apparently couldn't remember just what he wanted to do with him. So in a chapter called "The LeeShore," Melville simply washed Bulkington unceremoniously overboard. Out of sight, out of mind. Moby Dick appeared in #I and the critics responded favorably. They felt that it was one of the best sea stories they had ever read. They loved the lore of sailing that was told with such first-hand vividness. They pronounced the book the last word on cetology. If the American universities extant at the time had placed great emphasis on vertabrate zoology, Moby Dick might well have been adopted as required reading. But, unfortunately for Melville, there weren't so very many universities at the time. And none of them -- none -- had Professors of American Literature; the field simply hadn't been invented yet. So nobody much noticed the Platonic philosophy in Moby Dick. Nobody perceived the chiaroscuro imagery, the biblical allusions. Nobody realized that Melville had read just about every book ever written and had incorporated all that knowledge into his masterpiece. Nobody except his fans, Nathaniel Hawthorne to whom the book is dedicated and Walt Whitman who saw fit to address Melville's theories of man and the universe in "Song of Myself." Then around the turn of the century, a funny thing happened. Somebody got the bright idea that British critic Sydney Smith's question "Who ever reads an American book?" might be sanctimonious tripe. Somebody got the idea that Americans might have something to say. By #, the critics had grabbed harpoons. "After the White Whale!" they cried, almost as a single voice. And they've been chasing that wonderful, elusive, serene beast ever since. But the poor sap who had set the submarine leviathan in motion, who had loosed the raving Ahab, who wrote because he was delirious with cosmic truth, who endured the maelstroms of publisher and poverty, never lived to see the chase. But those days are all over now. We live in the enlightened twentieth century. We are perceptive and wise. We have Professors of American Literature. Our critics are broad-minded. And great artists don't starve. Old Melville never had these sages to fawn over him; he was never invited to be anybody's writer in residence with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fat stipend to pay the bills. And, friend, that's what the mainstream Big Boys have today. Yet Americans have never been very good at taking the lessons of history. Yes, we say, there were a lot of sea story writers in the nineteenth century; and, yes, a couple of them turned out to be mainstream writers. But really, it's just too, too much to suggest that we should pay any attention to the comical likes of Malzberg and Silverberg and the others who write those juvenile tales of golden ships that sail the seas of space! I mean, Moby Dick is one thing, but science fiction is quite another. I don't suppose that the obvious, simple-minded contradiction contained in that statement needs any more said about it. But there is another problem that sf writers have to contend with. Traditionally, there has only been one major plot line in the Great American Novel: Innocent young man encounters evil, falls from innocence and is crushed in the fall. If you want to understand American literature, you've got to understand that. Hawthorne wrote this novel, Melville wrote it, Henry James wrote it, Fitzgerald wrote it. And, by God, the mainstream novelists are still writing and revelling in it. Even this plot idea, this theme Of initiation, though, has run into some trouble. So the newest mainstream tactic is to deemphasize the plot line and to direct our attention to the process of writing itself. In effect, the mainstream boys now say: "Never mind what I'm doing. Just look at how I'm doing it!" This is all rather complicated. I'm afraid, but the point is simple. Ever since we've become aware -- so painfully aware -- of ourselves as literary artists, we've been scrutinizing every move we make at our typewriters. We haven't been rushing to our typewriters to bang out grand melodies. We've been agonizing there with the brooding paranoia that Somebody Up There might think we're pulp magazine hacks. We want so very much to be respectable, to be a part of What's Going On. We want to be -- Mainstream. We want to lisp along with Truman Capote on the Tonight Show. We want to hang around Elaine's or The Algonquin in New York, those two great gathering places of literary culture. We want to stroll over to Norman Mailer and say -- actually to say -- "Hello, Norman." Well, I say to hell with Norman. And the universities that scorn sf. And the critics who condescendingly allow that sf may deal well with the impact of science on society and little else. I say write what makes you warm in the blood, what shakes you with sanity. I say write the truth. And I say don't jump ship just to get into the mainstream. Because out here, among us, there may be a Nathaniel Hawthorne or Walt Whitman who hears what serious science fiction and fantasy is saying. We believe. And there, among you writers of dreams and marvels, there may be a poor sap like that bearded harpooner in Pittsfield.  Dennis Schmidt Where there is Will there is no Way... I. Jerome looked down at death. It was no surprise. He had expected it long before he topped the rise and gazed down into the small valley; he had seen the thin column of smoke that had slashed the dawn like an exclamation point, and had watched the lazy spiraling of the carrion lizards over the spot it marked. He recognized the signs. Death had come to his own family the same way. Once that same sentinel of smoke, those same patient, leathery wings, had hovered like a beacon of doom over his childhood home, the farmstead at Waters Meeting. The Ronin had come screaming out of the night. They had raped and slaughtered his mother, tortured and murdered his father. His sister had died quickly, her brains splattered against the door frame as one of the raiders swung her round and round by her heels. He, a tiny, terrified boy huddling beneath a pile of sacks where his mother had thrust him as the Ronin broke down the cabin door, had watched the whole thing. He alone had survived. That was unusual. The Ronin were viciously thorough, seldom leaving anything alive, man or beast, on any farmstead they attacked. Yet somehow no one had bothered to check the pile of sacks beneath which he cowered. Later, when the Ronin had put the farmstead to the torch and had gone howling off into the night, he had managed to drag his parents' mutilated bodies from the inferno. The roof and walls collapsed before he could pull out his sister. The next morning, the Fathers from the nearby Brotherhood had followed the thin column of smoke and the circling carrion lizards to where the young boy sat, crying, but calmly adjusting his mother's clothing and shooing away the most insistent lizards. That had been fifteen years ago. But the world had not changed, and Jerome knew what to expect as he, his turn, followed the column of smoke and the circling lizards. He paused for a moment at the smash, sagging gate of the pathetically inadequate stockade. The Ronin had simply shattered it, using a log as a battering ram. What had not burnt leaned at crazy angles, only waiting for time or a strong wind to send it tumbling. Down on the coastal plains, where Man had first settled after landing the great Arks on Kensho, Jerome knew that homesteads often possessed stout stockades, capable of withstanding all but the most determined assaults. But here, high up in a remote mountain valley on what was virtually Kensho's fender there was less time to be spared from grubbing a living from the stony land; you simply took your chances. This family's luck had run out. For a moment longer he stood, calming his mind, steeling himself for what he knew awaited. Regulating his breathing, he silently let the Litany of Passivity roll softly through his mind. "Moons, moons, shining down on waters, waters..." As ready as he would ever be, he stepped through the gate and entered the smoking charnel house.  Still, what he found sickened him. There had been five in the family. The boy had been about nine. The two girls perhaps six and two. It was hard to tell; there was little left of them. The Ronin had literally hacked the bodies to pieces and the fire had disfigured what was left. He rummaged about the smoldering ruins, keeping a tight rein on the revulsion and anger he felt. It took all his training to contain himself, to wrap his seething inner turmoil in a calm exterior. But it was necessary. On Kensho, no man lived long if he could not control his emotions. That was why all men studied the Way of Passivity, why everyone practiced its spiritual exercises and physical disciplines. With a little training in its techniques a small group, even a family of five or six, might live in peace on a farmstead. With more training, larger groups, as many as sixty or seventy, might dwell in harmony in a Brodieihood. Yet even then the invisible Mushin hovered, ready in an instant to swoop down and feed should control falter. For the voracious mind leeches of Kensho fed on men's emotions. Using some kind of feedback technique they ran emotions back through the victim's own mind, making them stronger and stronger in an ever-increasing spiral, until the mind exploded into screaming Madness. Then, in a swirling horde, the Mushin fed, until all that was left was a drooling, gibbering husk. Jerome shook his head in denial. If any Mushin were still lurking about, they would get nothing from him. They had feasted enough last night! He rummaged about the smoldering mins, keeping tight rein on the revulsion and anger he felt. The Mushin had feasted enough last night. They would get nothing from him. Nothing! In a sod shed which had not burned, he found a shovel. On a grassy knoll north of the house he dug a shallow pit. Then he went back to the min, shooed away the carrion lizards, and, in some old sacks also discovered in the shed, he stuffed what he could find of the family. He didn't bother to sort out the pieces. They wouldn't care anyway: when one sack was full, he filled the other. Both were dragged to. the pit, thrown in, and covered with the crumbly grey soil the 'steader had tilled in life. He paused for a moment over the freshly-filled grave. There should be something he could say, some fitting memorial for the massacred family. Some phrase that might exorcise the ghost of memory that arose on seeing in others the fate of his own family. His mind was blank. Faced with real, palpable death, he could only feel a dull grief for himself, his family, and these nameless, hapless 'steaders. There was nothing he could say about the tragedy. It was too total, too awful, too ordinary. Yet as he stood there, the dull ache began to fade before a rising glow of rage. The Mushin, he thought. That's where it all lies. The Mushin. The Ronin are nothing but tools, men who enjoy the bloodlust, the Madness, the intensified of the Mushin gives them. The Ronin live to kill, and the Mushin live off the blazing lust and searing emotions the Ronin feel as they kill. Get rid of the Mushin and the Ronin will quickly fade. Get rid of the Mushin. Until Man could escape the Mushin he was doomed to a miserable existence here on Kensho, huddling in constant terror on the farmsteads or hiding in fear behind the skirts of the alien Grandfathers in the Brotherhood. Until Man found a way to strike back at the invisible enemies that fed off his emotions and brought the Madness, he would stagnate, never growing nor expanding, never achieving his purpose idea behind the Great Pilgrimmage. Nothing I say over this grave will make any differnece, he realized. Nothing I say anywhere will make any difference. Only what I do can make a difference. Action. Action against the Mushin. That was the only hope. The Fathers, the Grandfathers, the whole Brotherhood; they were wrong. The Way of Passivity was not enough. Building passive defenses against the Mushin was not enough. There must be action, an active seeking out of ways to fight back. Action. If he succeeded in his quest, if the Way he sought did reveal a way to fight back, then he would be raising a monument, a memorial to this family and to every family that had ever been slaughtered by the Ronin. He would be avenging every human ever driven to the Madness by the Mushin. Jerome turned from the grave. There was nothing to say. But there was a great deal to do. II. For the rest of the morning Jerome followed the tracks of the Ronin. At first he cursed the luck that had put them on the same route he planned on taking. Like him, they were heading up the slopes of the Mountain. At all costs, he wanted to avoid them. As near as he could tell, there were five or six in the band. That was an unusually large number. Two or three was more common. For Ronin were as dangerous to each other as they were to other men. When no easier prey was at hand, they would fall on the members of their own band, with the same fierce abandon they practiced on the 'steaders. In larger bands the tensions between the members were greater and so were the chances of mutual mayhem. No Ronin lived long, but at least those who ran in small packs had a better chance. In any case, there were at least five of them, all armed with swords. And there was only one of him, armed merely with the knife he had brought when he left the Brotherhood and a wooden staff he had cut at the edge of the Wood. Even if he'd had a sword, one Sixth Level Son, no matter how polished his technique, was no match for half a dozen Mushin-crazed Ronin. But what was the best way to avoid them? He could climb out of the valley and cut across the ridges, hoping to find another valley up which he could travel. Or he might stick to the ridges, though the going would be rough. But in either case, he still might cross their path. As long as they remained above him on the slopes, there was no way he could be sure of avoiding them. He had finally decided that the wisest course was to stick with the known and follow the Ronin as long as they stayed in this valley. That way he would always know approximately where they were. But he'd have to travel cautiously to avoid closing with them from behind. As he moved up the valley, all senses alert for any sign of the Ronin, the forest closed in slowly from the ridges until it filled the valley from rim to rim. Soon his view of the Mountain, shining in the morning sun, was cut off. More important, his view ahead was cut down drastically. The woods were not thick, but all the same, he could barely see a few hundred feet ahead into the gloom and undergrowth. The blazes of sunlight that broke through the forest cover here and there only served to emphasize the shadows without improving the visibility. When the sun had climbed to the highest point in the sky Jerome rested for a while. He drank from a small stream that gently splashed its way between the trees and ate the fruit of the ubiquitous and everbountiful Ko tree. The gentle warmth of noontime, the quiet solemnity of the forest, soon lulled him into a half-dozing state.    His body relaxed and calm, Jerome let his mind wander down the path of his past. It passed swiftly down the valley, touching a tone of grief as it sped by the smoldering ashes of the raided farmstead with its fresh hilltop grave. Down, down it went, to the edge of the Wood. There it stood for a moment, gazing out over the Great Valley, as had Jerome himself less than a week before. The Brotherhood was in the distance. And beyond that, a mere smudge at the place called Waters Meeting, was the ruin of the farmstead where he had lived and his family had died. More slowly now, almost reluctantly, his memory trod the ground over which he had fled that night when leaving the Brotherhood. Into the Brotherhood it crept, back even to the practice yard where he had been sweating in the sun the day he received the summons to appear before the Grandfather for Audience. With sorrow at the thought, he remembered how excited he had been, how full of hope for the future. He had been so sure the alien Grandfather would not deny his request, so sure! Father Ribaud, the gentle old Swordmaster of the Brotherhood, had tried to warn him, tried to offer counsel. But Jerome had ignored him. Impatient, filled with the importance and urgency of his vision, he had ignored all the warnings, even the fact .that the alien Grandfather had long ago forbidden any Brother to study the Way of the Sword with the Old Master on the Mountain. In his enthusiasm, he had chosen to reject the Grandfather's edict that the sword was but a preliminary step on the True Way, that it was but a preparation for the Passivity. He had denied the experience of seven generations of men on Kensho, the wisdom of the Grandfathers, the alien beings who had saved his race from the Mushin and the Madness, the very teaching of the Way of Passivity to which man clung to for dear life. All, all he had refused to heed. No matter that the Way of the Sword was declared too active, no matter such activity threatened to attract the Mushin and bring down the Madness. He desired to follow the Way of the Sword. He knew, deeply, surely, that somewhere on that path lay the means of saving his race from the Mushin. And then, during the Audience, the Grandfather had done something to his mind, had tried to take it over. In a flash of terror, anger, and sudden intuition, Jerome had seen a link between the alien Grandfathers and the Mushin. A link between mankind's benefactor and mankind's greatest enemy. The result had been an explosion of rage. In one, swift movement, he had stood and struck the Grandfather with his open hand. And had knocked its head off its body. Although the murder had gone undetected by the Fathers of the Brotherhood or by the Mushin, still Jerome had realized he could not remain; he must flee before discovered. He had decided to follow his original plan and seek out the Old Master on the slopes of the Mountain and study the Way of the Sword with him. Silently, with the light of Kensho's moons to guide him, he had climbed the wall of the Brotherhood and become a Seeker of the Way.    Suddenly he sat bolt upright, all drowsiness vanished in an instant. He strained to hear. Off in the distance he could barely make out a high-pitched yelping. It was instantly joined by a chorus of other yowlings, mewings, bellowings, an unholy choir of animal sounds that could only come from the throats of crazed men. The Ronin! Somewhere up ahead of him the band had run across prey and was giving chase! Casting all caution to the winds, Jerome ran crashing through the forest in the direction of the howling. Sometimes 'steaders built their cabins in the clearings that dotted the Wood. They tilled the rich soil to be found there. Perhaps the Ronin had found one such family and even now were attacking. As he ran, dodging the major branches, accepting the constant swattings he took from the smaller ones, he calmed his mind. It was foolishness to run headlong into combat with six armed Ronin, but what could he do? His own experience, his recent discovery of the family down the valley, his very sense of humanity, made it impossible to stand by and take no part while Mushin-crazed Ronin massacred another family. Abruptly the forest came to an end and Jerome all but tumbled out onto the soft turf carpeting a clearing. He pulled himself upright and came to a skidding halt. Like a solid wall, the combined presence of hundreds of Mushin struck his mind. The usual tingling that gave away their presence was a virtual burning. With frantic haste Jerome closed down his mind, asserting the controls taught him by the Fathers. He began chanting the Litany of Passivity to calm himself. "Moons, moons, shining down on waters, waters, moving slowly, moons moving slowly, yet being still. Still the waters, still the moons. Movement, strife, all longing is but a reflection, passing to stillness when the mind is calmed." Looking around he located the Ronin and their prey. The six were in a circle surrounding a lone man. The victim was dressed in a robe of coarse homespun. He was old, his hair a shining white blaze in the light that poured into the clearing. Calmer now, Jerome began to notice other things. The old man had a sword, but it was still sheathed. He stood quietly in the middle of the circling Ronin, silent and unruffled. His head was bowed as though he were concentrating on a bug crawling in the grass at his feet. Jerome hesitated. The Ronin had not seen him. They were too intent on their prey. And there was no way they could have heard his crashing approach, because their own bowlings were so loud they drowned out any other sound. Nor did the Mushin sense his presence, so tight was his control. But what should he do? Before he had time to decide, the Ronin stopped circling and rushed in to attack their victim. The raider standing directly behind the old man was in the lead, hoping to make the kill from behind, his sword raised, flashing in the light, his mouth open in screaming anticipation of the slaughter. Without looking to right or left, the old man's head snapped up and at the same instant he drew his weapon. But rather than moving forward, he stepped back and simply slid the sword backward, impaling the charging attacker behind him. In and out the blade flicked, and the howling changed to a choked gurgle as the Ronin collapsed in a heap. As the prey had drawn his sword, those attackers in front had checked their headlong assault, expecting him to come toward them. Now his sword swept around leftward from behind slicing through the ribs of the raider there, just below his upraised arms. The arc continued, flinging blood behind it, across the front, barely missing three madly backpeddling Ronin, and catching the one on the far right who had failed to move in time. Both his wrists were cut through, his sword, hands still holding it, sailed lazily through the air. Now the old man's sword turned in midair, reversing its sweep, coming down and under, the tip almost touching the grass. The raider on the left, seeing the man on the right fall, had stepped in to strike. He met death as the blade swept under his guard, entering his body at the groin and leaving just under the sternum. The old man stepped back, pulling the flying sword with him, cutting edge upper-most. Stepping forward and to the left, he isolated the far right Ronin behind his companion, allowing him to deal with them one at a time. As the sword had flicked in, it flicked back out, catching the closest man in the throat. A quick step, a final thrust, and the last of the killers lay gurgling out his life in the clearing. With a mighty sweep of his sword, a sweep which spatted blood and flesh in a centrifugal fountain of gore, the old man cleaned his blade. Then, with a deft movement. he returned it to its scabbard and stood quietly gazing at the huddled bodies surrounding him. Utterly stunned, Jerome stood rooted to the spot, barely able to breathe. It had all lasted the merest second, the flicker of an eyelash. While Jerome had been trying to make up his mind, the old man had settled the issue completely and finally. And what swordsmanship! Never in his fondest dreams had Jerome ever even imagined such a display. The sword had flown on its way, without pause, without uncertainty, without ever missing its mark! It was as though the blade itself had been alive, seeking and finding the vulnerable spots in its enemies' defenses as surely as the Ko-bee finds the just-opening blossom, as lightly as a fluff-fly fluttering in a beam of moonlight. A sense of awe spread through Jerome. "You may approach. They are all dead." The old man's voice carried across the clearing the way Father Riband's had in the practice yard at the Brotherhood. It was low, calm and strong, pitched Just right to be heard clearly and distinctly even at a distance. "Come. Even the Mushin have left to seek new prey. There is nothing here to feed on. I have no emotions and yours are under right control. The only thing this pile of carrion will draw now is a flock of lizards." With a huge shake to loosen his taut muscles, Jerome moved softly across the clearing until he was standing next to the old man. The whole situation held a quality of dream to it, a sense of unreality, of things barely considered, half glimpsed in surprise. The swordsman sighed hugely. "Help me gather up their swords. It would be wasteful to let them rust away." Still dazzled, Jerome bent to the task without question. A thought was slowly rising to consciousness. With it came a sense of excitement almost too intense to bear. He had been on his way up the Mountain to find the fabled Old Master and study the Way of the Sword. What he had just witnessed was without a doubt the most incredible display of swordsmanship ever seen. This old man dressed in homespun, bending down next to him to relieve the dead Ronin of their swords, this man must be the Old Master himself! Jerome straightened, two sheathed swords in his hands. He held them out to the old man. The white-haired swordsman looked at him quizzically, his own hands full with the other four swords. "Am I to grow two new hands to hold them all?" He laughed lightly. "Keep one yourself, for I see you go unarmed. A dangerous habit in a world where rabble like this," he indicated a fallen raider with a sandaled foot, "wander about at will." Trembling with the intensity of his excitement, Jerome tried to speak. "I... I... you must be the Old Master," he blurted out. The man in the homespun robe cocked his head to one side, a musing smile spreading across his features. "Master? I? You must be mistaken. I'm merely a hermit who lives far up the slope of the Mountain. No Master, I. Just a hermit." Jerome stood, befuddled. "But... but... you must be the Master, the True Master Father Ribaud talked of. Surely you remember him. He was one of those who came up from the Brotherhood many years ago to study the sword with you." Laying down the four swords he held and taking the two Jerome offered, the old man shook his head in negation. "Ribaud? No. The name means nothing to me. Perhaps you refer to the hermit who lived in the hut before me. Perhaps he knew this Ribaud." His confusion growing, Jerome blurted out, "But I've never seen or even dreamt of such swordsmanship! Don't you see? I've left the Brotherhood, come all this way to study the Way of the Sword with you. You must be the Master!" "I don't 'must' be anything," the other replied sharply. "Least of all a True Master. Or even a plain Master. I've never studied the Sword nor any other way. Such nonsense is for the Brotherhood, not me." He bent down and tied a cord around the six swords. "Now, if you're not interested in one of these swords. I'll be going back to the peace and quiet of my hut. I've better things to do than stand about chattering with a young fool." With that, he hoisted the bundle of swords on his shoulder, and, stepping over the corpses, headed for the woods at the edge of the clearing. For a few moments Jerome just stood there, too surprised to move. Then with a curse, he started after the old man, hurrying to catch up. This is the Master, he thought. I know it. But Masters are notoriously hard to deal with and this one has not had a student in many years. But I will not give up. This way lies my path. Up the Mountain the old man tramped, occasionally looking over his shoulder at Jerome and muttering his irritation. Stolidly, relentlessly, silently, Jerome followed the Master. Only the dark of the forest kept him from seeing the glint of secret pleasure or the rare smile of satisfaction that lit up the old man's eyes as he turned and saw the young man still behind him. The light was fading from the sky by the time they reached the Master's hut. The old man went inside and rudely slammed the door in Jerome's face. The young man sighed and sat down on the ground a few yards back from the door. He took the makeshift pack from his back and spread out his few belongings. From some stale Ken-cow cheese he had found at the ruined farmstead and some dried Ko-pods, he made his meal. As the sounds of night grew, so did Jerome's weariness. It had been an exhausting day. His eyes heavy, he lay down on his spare robe and was soon fast asleep.    He awoke to the sound of the Master clattering about in the hut. The sun was not yet up, but the largest of Kensho's moons flooded the woodscape with its blue light. Jerome broke fast with the last of his cheese and Ko-pods and then went to the little stream that trilled its way downhill nearby. He splashed water over his face. The clear cold of it woke him thoroughly. Now what to do? He decided it would be useless to approach the Master again, demanding to be allowed to study with him. He would simply have to play a waiting game, staying around, doing things, until the Master came to accept him by the mere fact of his very presence. It would take time. But time was about the only asset Jerome had. When the Master finally came from his hut, stretching and yawning, wearing the same homespun robe as yesterday, he ignored the young man sitting patiently a few yards away. As the old man mumbled about the edge of the clearing, looking for small twigs to start a fire, Jerome let the Litany of Passivity wash through his mind, clearing and calming it, schooling him to patience, to acceptance. After the Master re-entered his hut and shut the door with a bang, the young man rose and went into the woods. For a while all was silent in the little clearing, but for the buzzing of the Ko-bees and the occasional cry of a tree lizard. Eventually a huffing and crackling of something . coming through the woods shattered the peace. The next instant, Jerome appeared, almost invisible beneath a pile of dry wood he had gathered. He staggered across the clearing to the hut and dumped the pile next to the door. Then he returned to his place and resumed his meditation. The sun rose higher and spilled a sideways glance into the small clearing on the slope of the Mountain. The Master emerged from the hut once more and shuffled off across the open space and into the forest. Jerome rose and followed on soundless feet, more the Master's shadow than his companion. A short walk through the woods brought them to another clearing where the Master tended his garden. Silently, the two of them bent over the rows, weeding and tending the plants. The sun beat down equally on their heads, bringing sweat to both brows. Noon came and the old man left the clearing and the garden. He walked into the woods to where the stream wandered about. After drinking he gathered a few handfuls of berries and wild fruit pods, then squatted by the side of the stream, munching his frugal fare, watching the young man who copied his every move. Finishing his meal, the Master rose and began stalking determinedly through the woods as though on his way to an important appointment. Behind him, Jerome scurried to keep up. Eventually the striding old man and the scurrying young one came to a place in the forest where nothing grew but a huge Ko tree. Jerome craned his neck and tilted back his head. The top of the tree was lost amid the confusion of its own branches. At its base, the trunk was easily forty feet around. Close to the base, in the deep shade of the branches, the Master took his seat, facing outwards. He crossed his legs, adjusted his hands, regulated his breathing and went into the meditation state known as "not-here-not-there." Seating himself about two yards in front of the Master, facing inwards, Jerome adopted a similar posture and went into the meditation state known as "waiting-with-awareness. " For hours the two were still while the forest went about its life. As the sun's rays reddened with the coming of evening, the old man arose silently from his position and walked back to the garden. Trailed by Jerome, he picked a few vegetables and returned to the hut. Again he slammed the door, denying the young man access. Jerome made a cold meal of the vegetables he had harvested, washed it down with even colder water from the stream. Eventually, since the Master did not venture forth again from the hut, Jerome lay down and went to sleep. In this way many days passed softly, hardly leaving any trace behind them, so similar were they all.    Suddenly one morning everything changed forever. Jerome awoke knowing that someone was standing over him. He opened his eyes the barest slit, keeping his body relaxed and ready. Feet. With ragged old sandals. Knotted, tough calves. The hem line of a homespun robe. It was the Master. Jerome opened his eyes fully and sat up. The Master squatted, peering into his eyes, his face only a few inches from Jerome's. "Who are you?" Abrupt. Harsh. "Jerome." "What are you?" "A Seeker." "What do you seek?" "The Way of the Sword." "Why?" The question reverberated through Jerome's entire being. Why, why, why, why, why, why ? Because the Sword had shattered his life. Because the Sword had murdered his parents. Because the Sword had shaped his life in the Brotherhood. Because the Sword had led him up this Mountain to this very spot. Because the Sword might be the key to setting his race free from the Mushin. Because the Sword represented Death and Life and Despair and Hope. Because the Sword... why, why, why, why, causes." And yet, and yet... Why? Was there any answer to that question? Were "becauses" answers? Why? Was he here to save his race? Who or what had appointed him Savior? Was he here to avenge his parents? Was there any way to achieve that revenge? Why? The Master stared hard at the lad, his eyes burning deep, deep into the mists of confusion so thinly disguised in Jerome's own eyes. Why? The Master waited. Jerome must answer, something, anything. And Jerome knew the answer was crucial. He knew his whole future hung on it. He knew the Master would accept or reject him on the basis of it. He also knew he had no answer. "I don't know." With a grunt, the Master rose and stood looking down at him. "Well, at least you're honest. You don't know the reason why you want to study the Way. Or rather, you know too many reasons. Your mind is like a flock of birds, each bird a reason, each seeking to roost on a single limb. As soon as one settles, another lands and jostles the first off the limb." Confused, Jerome blurted, "What must I do? Must I allow only one bird to land? Must I get rid of the others?" "Rid yourself of all the birds. And the limb." The young man stared blankly at the old one. Finally the Master sighed, "Enough of birds. There are no birds. "So. The long and short of it is you wish to study the Way of the Sword. For whatever reasons. ' 'There is danger here. Many are the paths one may follow on the Way. Some are broad and gentle. Others follow the high, rocky places. Great chasms yawn on all sides. And one slip plummets the seeker into the depths of the Madness. "For on all paths, on the Way, the Mushin lurk. They are always ready to seize on any emotion not hidden, to reinforce it, to feed it back into the mind, thus starting a spiralling growth that drives the mind to raving Madness. Then as the mind dies, they feast. "This," the old man continued, as if reciting a litany, "is what they did to us when first we arrived here on Kensho. We were unprepared for them. Our surveys of the planet showed no evidence of their existence, no sign of higher life, no mark of civilization, nothing but primeval wilderness. So satisfying was the very vision of it hanging there in space, that Admiral Nakamura named it "Kensho" after the first stage of Enlightenment. "Then the Arks landed at First Touch, far off down the Mountain, down the Valley, across the Plain, by the Sea, and everyone went mad, tearing at each other, murdering, maiming. Like vicious, wild animals. It was the Madness. It blew the Colony apart and scatbris across the landscape." The Master looked down at the young man. "I know you've heard all this. But you must hear it again. You must know what you risk. For you risk what they risked. The Madness. True, you have defenses they did not. You have the Passivity, the disciplines and excercises the alien Grandfathers taught our race to preserve us from the Mushin. And by now, you may even have some sort of natural defenses, developed by the force of natural selection and the terrific pressures of the last seven generations. But still, the risk is real." Jerome swallowed hard. "I know, this. Still I would be a Seeker of the Way even if the Madness were inevitable. I can do no else." For a moment the old man stood there gazing down at the young on his weatherbeaten face. Then the sadness melted and sterness replaced it. "Very well,'" he said brusquely. "Come with me." He turned on his heel and stalked to the hut. The young man followed, 'rtie hut consisted of three small rooms. One, barely more than a large closet, was without a door. It held at least a hundred sheathed swords, scattered and piled about in no apparent order. On top of the pile, Jerome noticed the six swords the Master had collected from the Ronin he had slain down the valley. The second room, likewise doorless, contained a rough pallet and a grimy blanket. The final room, larger than the other two, held a crude fireplace hung with cooking utensils, several bins for storing vegetables, assorted cushions, and the Master's sword, hanging on the wall opposite the hearth. From a comer, the Master took a handmade broom and held it out to Jerome. "Sweep the hut. Then prepare us breakfast." IV. Once again the days followed the sun over the horizon like identical beads on a string. There was no sense in counting them, no logic to keeping track. To number each would have been to differentiate it from all others, to name this the Day the Tree Lizards Sang, and that the Day They Didn't, one the Day that Brought Rain, another the Day the Sun Shone. But it was useless. for even the differences repeated themselves, and even the similarites changed. It was a rhythm that needed nothing to complete or complement it. Jerome's life was the same. He swept the hut, gathered firewood, carried water, tended the garden, cooked the meals, meditated, and then began the round again. Soon it became impossible, or at least unnecessary, to determine which was the first act and which the last. As long as one followed the other, order was preserved. At first, Jerome was perfectly happy. To be in the Master's presence was enough. But as the days passed through weeks and into months, he became fretful. When was the Master going to teach him the Way of the Sword? Never once did the old man so much as touch the sword that hung on the hut's wall. Never did he even look in the smaller room filled with conquered swords. And his conversation was solely on matters domestic or personal. Jerome's unease grew into dissatisfaction. He began to drop hints. He took some of the swords out of the small room and cleaned them until their blades shone. He made a wooden bokken and went through the motions of the practice forms, the katas, he had studied with Father Ribaud at the Brotherhood. The Master ignored him. Jerome's dissatisfaction grew into anger. He commandeered a real sword from the storeroom and practiced his cuts on the air. He drilled his draws and repeated his katas with the naked blade. The Master merely complained that the garden was not adequately weeded. Anger fed on itself and became a barely concealed rage. The young man took to walking through the woods with his sword, slashing at small saplings and branches to test the trueness of his cut: it was ragged; his blade waffled, and the edges were not clean. The Master could not help but notice such wanton destructiveness. Yet his only comment was to remark that if Jerome wished to cut green wood to smoke meat, an axe would be more appropriate. The day came when Jerome knew he could contain himself no longer. He fought for control all morning, all through the weeding, all through meditation. When evening finally came he was beside himself. He decided to confront the Master. By the time they had finished dinner, Jerome had inflamed his courage by stoking it with his anger. Abruptly, with no preamble (other than weeks of nervous fidgeting) he launched into his complaint. "Master. Why have you not taught me the Way?" The Master looked up, mock surprise written across his face. "Not taught you? I? How is that so? Have I not let you sweep the hut, fix the meals? Have you not weeded the garden, carried water, collected firewood?" "But... but... You never show me any techniques, never drill me in my kata. You never teach me any advanced techniques or new kata. You never even speak of the Sword and the Way!" "Techniques? Katas? Words? What have such things to do with the Way? The sword is not the Way. It is but a way to the Way. "Why do you seek so far off for the Way? Do you think to find it like some rare mountain flower, hidden in a cleft in some isolated crag? The Way is here. It is in the I broom, the firewood, the vegetables. It is in eating when you are hungry, sleeping when you are tired." "But the Sword! I am not learning the Sword! How can there be a Way of the Sword without the Sword?" "The Sword is the least important part of the Way of the Sword. He who has truly learned the Way of the Sword does not even carry a Sword. But I see what the problem is. You wish to become a Swordsman, and you confuse this with the Way of the Sword." "How can they be different?" "When the sun shines in the sky, you cannot grasp it. When the moon reflects in a pool, you cannot grasp it. Are they both then the same?" The young man looked puzzled. "I don't understand." The Master chuckled. "That I am aware of. Seeker. You do not understand. "Very well, then. Seeker. You wish to be trained as a Swordsman. It is not the Way. But all in all, it is as much a way to the Way as sweeping the hut. It is a harder way, with much greater danger. It is a longer way, too. But, very well, if that is your wish, so be it. I will begin training you as a Swordsman tomorrow. You will have all you wish, training, exercises, words. May you live through it." The old man yawned, stretched, and then ambled off to his room. In a moment, he was blissfully sleeping. Hours later, the excited Seeker finally managed to follow his example.    The next morning, Jerome fixed breakfast as usual and then went out into the dew-wet woods to gather firewood and pick a few berries and Ko-pods. As he wandered about, his excitement began to grow. The Master had promised! He had promised to train him! He wondered what new forms he would learn, what wondrous techniques he would master. Perhaps someday the Master would even teach him the techniques he had used against the six Ronin! How hard he would study! He would spend hour after hour perfecting every cut and stroke! The Master would be proud of him, just as Father Ribaud had been proud. Without warning he felt a tremendous blow, a shattering pain, between his shoulder blades. He was thrown to the ground by its force, the wood and berries flying in all directions. Even though surprised, he remembered to roll as he hit, ready to spring to his feet and confront his attacker. Before he could even complete his roll another blow caught him on the side of the head. Dizzy, he tried to rise, holding his hands above his head to protect himself. A stunning slam doubled him over. With hands raised, his stomach was wide open. The blows rained down. Jerome rolled and scrabbled this way and that, trying to avoid them. His head spinning, his eyes filled with tears of pain, he tried to rise and face his tormenter. But there was never a moment's let up, never a chance to even call out to the Master for help, much less time to stand and run or fight. All his training was to no avail. He tried to block the blows, but wherever he moved his hands, the attacker struck the place they had just left. With a terrible surge of effort, he managed to come to his knees, then staggered to his feet. Turning toward the blows, he faced his attacker. Ignoring the battering his ribs took, he raised his hands to shield his head, to wipe one eye clear, to see. The Master struck him on the shoulder so strongly that he collapsed back to his knees. Then the Master lashed out again at his head and flattened him. The Master! The shock of that made the battering his body was taking seem mild by comparison. It was a shock to the seemingly invulnerable controls he had built over a lifetime. He felt the walls that kept his emotions in and the Mushin out weakening, crumbling. Fear, stark terror, battered at them from inside as strongly as the Master smashed from outside. The Master! It was beyond logic, beyond understanding. The Master had promised to train him. And now the Master was beating him to death. Why? Why? Exhausted, sobbing with pain, humiliation, grief, anger, horror, he felt the ultimate terror. He felt the tingling presence of Mushin rushing to investigate this source of emotions, this feast of fear. And he knew he was defenseless. Defenseless against the Mushin! Defenseless against the Madness! With a thin whimper of futility, he tried to hold in his emotions. But it was no good, it wouldn't work, his control was gone, smashed by the Master's club. As his anguish swept up in a cresting wave, the Mushin and the Master's club swept downward. He didn't know which arrived first. For there was a roaring flash and total blackness.    To his utter surprise, he awoke. For a few moments, he lay there, wondering at it, gently testing his mind to search for signs of the Mushin. Nothing. He tried to move. Pain smashed into him from every direction. There wasn't anything that didn't hurt. He sat up and the world began to flow in different directions at the same time. He waited, and eventually the whirling and swooping stopped and the world settled into its accustomed orbit. Holding his throbbing head, he peered about. The Master was gone. There was calm in the woods. He checked his body. Nothing seemed to be broken, though a rib or two might be cracked and he was a mass of bruises. He stood. While he waited for the world to stabilize again, he once more searched for Mushin. He checked his mind. The walls of control were still there. They hadn't been destroyed any more than his body had been. But they ached, too. Gods! What a beating! Worse than any he had ever suffered at the hands of the older Sons in his early years at the Brotherhood. He felt a mixture of anger and humiliation rising, bitter at the back of his throat. The Master had done this. Why? Did the old man hate him so? What had he done to deserve such treatment? He had gathered firewood, cooked the old man s vegetables, weeded the garden, hauled water, swept, done everything. Why had the Master treated him this way? The old man must hate him. That could be the only reason. The Master had never had any intention of teaching Jerome the Way of the Sword. He had only wanted a servant. Jerome's insistence that he be trained had undoubtedly angered the old man. Now he was trying to drive Jerome away. Calmer now, the young man thought it through. The Master hated him, hated him badly enough to beat him senseless and nearly kill him, opening him up to the Mushin. He wanted Jerome to run, to leave in fear, to escape from the beatings so he would not have to teach him the Way. But Jerome thought, I can hate, too. Ever since the night he had watched helplessly as his family had been massacred, he had known what hatred really was. He had taken hatred into the very depths of his being, and it had become the major fuel for his existence. It had stoked the fires of his determination in the practice yards of the Brotherhood. It had strengthened his decision to follow the Way of the Sword, to challenge even the Brotherhood and the Grandfather, if necessary, to achieve his goal. The Master cannot drive me away, the young man thought, with a hatred so old, a rage so ancient, it went back to the very dawning of human consciousness. I will stay. I will learn. I will triumph. Slowly, like an ancient, he picked up his scattered firewood, giving the berries up as lost, and staggered through the woods to the hut and the clearing. The Master was sitting in the sun next to the hut, waiting. He smiled secretly and sadly as the young man unloaded the wood and threw a defiant glance his way.    The beatings became moreand more frequent as the days went by. Jerome lived in constant fear of the whistling club which struck him down any time, any place. He was in even greater dread of the Mushin which lurked around constantly now, drawn by the fear he leaked, waiting for him to lose control so they could feast on his shattered mind. The Madness loomed larger than it ever had in his life. Larger even than the club-wielding Master. Jerome never knew when or where the next blow would come from. The anticipation was almost as agonizing as the actual beatings. He was at a fever pitch of expectancy every moment of the day. It could happen while he was cooking. Or when he was bending down weeding. Or in the woods. Or even during meditation. One night he awoke in agony to find the Master standing over him in the dark. swinging and connecting by sheer chance. His nerves frayed, then tattered. His hands began to shake. He was constantly nauseous, unable to keep his food down. Fear was his companion, his shadow, always at his side. The sound of its jabbering kept him from sleep at night, woke him if he snatched at rest during the day. Closer and closer he came to exhaustion, to defeat, to the Mushin, to death by the Madness. Yet always at the last moment he rallied, drawing energy from some source deep within, from his hatred, from the dark place at his center.    Slowly, ever so slowly, Jerome began to find little clues to the Master's lurking presence. A whisper of wind where nothing should be stirring, a shadow out of place, a sudden silence among the tree lizards. His senses extended themselves, not consciously, not purposely, but naturally. It was never anything he could command. If he held a clue up for examination by his mind, it melted and disappeared. He simply had to accept them, experience them, without thinking, without judging. One morning, coming back from gathering wood, he approached the hut with extra caution. There had been no sign of the Master in the woods. As he came to the door, he hesitated. Something tasted, felt. seemed wrong. Uneasiness spread about him like ripples from a stone thrown in a calm pond. Shaking his head, he tried to bring himself under control. He looked around carefully, noting each thing in the clearing, studying the hut, cataloging, comparing, calculating. There was nothing, his rational mind said. Something, came a dim echo from the dark at the center of his being. Nothing, he repeated more firmly, asserting control. Nothing. I'm just nervous, tense. He shook himself again to loosen his stiff muscles and entered the hut. A tremendous blow across the shoulders sent him sprawling to the floor. He twisted as he fell to see the Master leaping at him. "Fool!" the old man shrieked. "Fool of a fool! You sensed something wrong and yet you entered!" The club rose and fell in time with the words. Jerome writhed about, trying to escape the blows. "You knew, and yet you let your knowledge be denied! Fool! Fool!"    Time passed and the beatings continued. Jerome kept no track of the days, for no one wishes to remember pain and humiliation. His hatred burned like a fierce flame deep inside his mind, shielded from the hovering Mushin by his iron control, providing him the energy he needed to keep going. He ate like a wild animal, gulping his food in quick snatches, ever on the alert. He slept and worked and walked and even meditated in the same way. Then one day all the little clues connected and just before the club struck, Jerome knew it was coming. Desperately, he twisted to avoid it. And succeeded! The Master smiled to himself as he walked away. Jerome extended his consciousness fully. He continuously sampled the environment with his awareness, on watch, ever testing the wind, listening for the false note, the jarring accent, the unnatural motion. He sank his being fully into the world around him, letting it wash over his consciousness, becoming one with it, extending himself out and out and out to become the very atoms of the air. If they vibrated with the passage of a body, he vibrated. He grew into an awareness that transcended mere observation, mere discrimination, mere reflex. It came from the center of his being, from someplace beyond the self, and flowed outward to encompass and blend with the All until there was no longer any outside nor inside. More and more often, as time passed, the Master's blows landed on thin air. V. Why? Why does he do this? thought Jerome. He readjusted his aching body to better fit the bumps # id hollows of the forest floor. He pressed against the coolness, sucking up refreshment it offered, hy? he thought again, realizing pis mind was still too muddled, too recently returned to consciousness to yield a coherent answer. Clarity returned quickly. But it oatne alone, without an answer to pis confusion. It just didn't make sense. Most of the time the Master ;vas quite normal. When he was giving his little sermons he was even friendly, at times positively jolly. But then suddenly he would attack, trying to beat the young man senseless. At first, it had appeared # Jerome as if the old man hated him and was trying to scare him off, to drive him away so he wouldn't have to teach him the Way of the Sword as promised. That must be wrong. Months had passed. It was obvious to anyone by now that Jerome could not be driven off in that manner. If the Master hated him, Jerome knew how to respond with a hate of his own. He could hold his ground with no trouble. His hate gave him the strength. Yet the Master, aside from the continued beatings, did not seem to hate Jerome at all. It did not show in any of his other actions. Indeed, if anything showed it was a stern affection. Confused, Jerome reviewed it all again. If he hates me, I can hate back and it's a draw. If he doesn't hate me, how can I hate him? But if he doesn't hate me, why does he beat me so brutally? And if I don't hate him, where will I get the strength to live through the beatings? Around and around it went. He thought back to the beating he had just received. For many weeks he had come off virtually unscathed because he had become so adept at dodging the Master's blows. Now and then, however, a solid smash had landed. Jerome had reasoned that if he had a stick or a club of his own, he would be able to blcxk the Master's club rather than just dtxlging it. It 'Seemed to follow that in such fashion he might avoid the pain of being struck altogether and force the old man to recognize the situation as a standoff. So he had scoured the woods for a likely club of his own. One morning while gathering wood, he found it. Holding it, checking its merit, he swung it a few times, then, satisfied, he had stuck it in his belt and headed back to the hut. He never got that far. Suddenly the Master had leapt from behind a tree and attacked. Jerome dodged the first blow, then fumbled briefly and pulled his weapon out. The Master grinned wolfishly when he saw what the youth was attempting. "Fool!" he chortled with undisguised glee. "Fool! You'd fight back? Does the tree-lizard stand and fight the Ken-wolf?" With a quick feint, he forced Jerome to open himself up. Then with contemptuous nonchalance, he knocked the club from the young man's hand. Astounded, the Seeker made just the slightest move to retrieve it. Seeing what he waited for, the Master struck, knocking him to the forest floor, leaping in.stantly to follow up wjth a murderous pounding attack. "Fool," the Master preached as he struck, his monologue punctuated with the grunts of his victim's agony, the twack of his weapon, and his own snorts of effort. "You pull back. You snuff out your awareness with your ego. You let go of the world and hold a broken branch. You bring your mind to a halt with a piece of wood, even following it as it sails away. Your mind abides in the branch, it moves away from you, leaving you defenseless. The branch cannot save you unless you hold as before you held the world. You must let go of the branch before you can hold it. Flow. Be immovable. Or die." Finishing the sermon and the beating, the master had strode off into the forest, laughing mightily. Jerome's body ached anew at the memory. Trembling, he raised himself to his knees. His hand came in contact with the club. He pulled back in instant revulsion. What a beating! His hand crept forward again, like a bruised, lost spider. Fingers curled around the wood. Hold the club as I hold the world, he thought. Let go of the branch so I can hold it. What did the Master mean? How did he 'hold' the world? He didn't hold the world. He simply let his mind flow into the world and let the world flow through his mind. It was easy. The world lived and moved. Things changed, the wind blew. He could float along with the current. When things were right, his mind was right. When anything was wrong, he knew it without checking. And reacted. But a piece of wood? How could he let his mind flow through a piece of wood? How could a branch flow through his mind? I don't understand, he puzzled. I don't understand anything. k k More days, more weeks, more beatings taught him the secret. He didn't think of it anymore. Pay no attention to the club and it becomes part of you. Focus on it and you lose it. Soon he was blocking the Master's blows as often as he was receiving them. A great pride filled him. I can hold my own with the Master! One day he came back alone from weeding the garden, his club in his hand, stalking warily through the woods. As he reached the hut and was about to enter the door, he paused. There was something wrong. He recognized the feeling. He had felt it before. And received a terrible beating for ignoring it. This time he was ready, alert for any trickery. His club poised for an instant counter, he stepped through the door. But the blow didn't come from above. It came from below. The Master had been lying next to the door, waiting. As Jerome stepped through, anticipating a blow from behind, the Master struck up, hitting the young man in the groin. With a groan, Jerome crumpled and hit the floor, unconscious. The Master beat him anyway, bellowing the while, "Triple damned fool! You knew something was wrong! You knew it! Yet you trusted your skill to save you! Triple fool! Though you are unconscious, you hear me! Remember!" if it it There came a morning when the Master was unable to land a single blow. Jerome twisted and blocked every effort the old man made. Finally, realizing it was a draw, the old man stopped and Jerome stood looking anxiously across the gulf that yawned between them. "Hmmmm," began the Master. "Not bad. And you've had the good sense not to try to go on the offensive. It would have been disaster, just as when you first tried active defense. Know that to attack you must encompass the enemy just as you encompass the world and your own weapon. You must make yourself one with him, one with his M magazine about In our spRnq issue: Box#I#G, New YbRk NY # AMpU CopySL?! I Six Issues Z# times yearly. All covbrs are in full color, printed on the same cover stock as that used by the sword. You do not fight against him. You fight with him, letting him make a mistake. There is no thought. He makes a mistake, breaks the rhythm you have established between you, and is defeated by himself." Jerome nodded. 'T am not ready for that yet. "No. Not yet. But you would do for most fights, with most Ronin bands. And I wager there are few Fathers you could not master." Keeping his eyes on the Master, Jerome bowed in mock gratitude. "Thank you." "You are most welcome." And the old man spun about and walked off.    A rainstorm was coming. Jerome stood once again outside the hut, feeling the wrongness all about him. He looked in the door, moving around to get the best possible view. Nothing to be seen. Yet it felt hostile, incorrect, incomplete. He pondered. Doubtless it was a trap. He could trust to his skill and hope to come off well. After all there were only so many angles the Master could strike from. This time he would consider them all. He started to enter, then hesitated. Still, though, the Master was tricky. He might have a new trap. A light rain began to fall. I'd best go in -- but as cautious as possible -- he thought. Then he stopped himself. No. It was a trap. He would be beaten. Better to be wet than beaten. With a great show of indifference, he sat down on the sodden ground and composed himself, folding his dripping robe carefully about his feet so he could rise quickly if necessary. He waited. After a time the Master came to the door and motioned him in. "Come. You're wet enough." With dignity Jerome rose and walked slowly and calmly to the door. He stopped. Everything felt all right. With a nod he entered. A silent smile played over the Master's face.    That night, and for every night following, the Master cooked his own meals. He no longer ordered Jerome about. The old man even went into the forest to help gather firewood. All attacks ceased. But Jerome was still seething with bitterness. So many beatings, so many humiliations, and never an opportunity to strike back. Not even once. How sweet revenge, even one little blow, would be! A plan began to form in the young man's mind. The Master had always managed to catch Jerome unaware, and, at the beginning, unarmed. If he managed to catch the Master the same way, he could achieve his revenge. Patience had to be his guide. And careful observation. He watched the Master closely to see what would be the best moment. Catching the old man asleep would be too cowardly. Outside it would be hard to sneak up, for the old man's senses were as sharp, or even sharper, than Jerome's. The hut, then, inside the hut. There was no way he could lay a trap as the Master had done since the Master always entered first. Some other time, then. Jerome kept his club close and waited. One night, on the spur of the moment, he realized his chance had come. The Master was at the fireplace, cooking his vegetables for dinner. He had taken the pot off the grate, lifted the lid, and was tasting the contents to see if it was ready. His eyes were closed, savoring the flavor, judging, concentrating in the sheer pleasure of taste. Stealthily, Jerome crept up behind the unsuspecting cook. With utter calm, utter silence, he lifted his club and struck downward at the bent back. Revenge! Jerome was never really too sure exactly what happened next. He saw the Master turn as the club fell. There was no look of surprise or fear in his eyes. If anything, there was the slight quirk of a smile on his lips. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. As if he had all the time in the world, the old man lifted the pot lid he held in his hand and interposed it between his head and the club. With a ringing x:rash. the club shattered, leaving Jerome's hands numb with the shock of impact. The lid did not stop. It kept moving up toward the young man towering over the bent old one. Up it rose, up toward his face. It was the last thing he saw for some time. When he came to, Jerome instantly knew his nose was broken and his jaw was probably cracked. Several teeth felt loose. He spat blood and looked around. It was a mistake. His head refused to move, so great was the pain the attempt aroused. Finally his eyes stopped watering and the agony subsided. Quietly, he thanked whatever Gods inhabited the slopes of the Mountain that he was still alive, and prayed that he had suffered no serious concussion. Ah," commented a sardonic voice, "the Young Avenger awakes." A cold splash of water hit him. "Ah. Even more awake now. Perhaps even rational, at last." Jerome looked up and saw the Master looking down. "How does your head feel. Seeker? Still there?" Confusion for a moment. "How?... what?..." The old man chuckled. "Oh, come now. I didn't hit you that hard! Surely you remember what a fool you were!" It all came back in a flood of shame. Revenge. He had tried to strike the Master in revenge! He sat up. "I... I..." Looking solemn, the Master knelt next to him. "Is there no room in the way of the sword you for anything but revenge, lad? Revenge against the Ronin for killing your parents, revenge against the Mushin for the Madness, revenge against me for teaching you what you wanted to learn in a manner you didn't like? Is that all there is at your core? Revenge?" Tears came to Jerome's eyes. "I don't know. I don't know." The old man sighed. "Better you had stuck with the broom. Seeker. Eventually you would have come to the same place, anyway. It would have been better. "In a way, I have failed. I should have refused to let you go beyond the broom. It was so obvious you didn't understand. You came here seeking a weapon to fight the Mushin. You thought the Way of the Sword would provide it. "Listen, Seeker, listen. You see the Mushin as your enemy. You see them as external to yourself and your race. So you look for some way to destroy them to free your race. "Know, Seeker, know. The enemy is not without, but within. The Mushin but take what is there and amplify it. They create nothing. Anything they make a man into he already is. The Mushin are just as as those of hate, of joy as those of fear. They make us what we are. Seeker. They are a magnifying mirror held up to us. "Understand, Seeker, understand. You are the enemy. Everything you do reflects your true nature, your real self. You have not studied the Way of the Sword. You have sought a weapon. You have sought to turn Jhe Way to your ends, to make the Path follow your path. You must give up your path if you are to walk the Way. "Hear me. Seeker. I give you a new Litany to replace that of Calmness. I give you the Litany of the Way. The Sword is the Mind. When the Mind is right, the Sword is right. When the Mind is not right, the Sword is not right. He who would study the Way of the Sword must first study the Way of his Mind." Dazed by shock after shock, by word after searing word, Jerome recognized the Litany. It was the chant the Grandfather had used in an attempt to take over his mind so long ago! It was the same chant that had forced him to fight for his existence, that had caused the explosion of emotion, that had led him to strike and kill the alien ruler of the Brotherhood! But this time it drove him inward, behind his walls of defense not to fight, but to flee ever downward into the center of his being. The question the Master had asked him that day, "Why?," accotnpanied him on his journey through his own soul. This was not the voyage he had made before. He did not pass the boundaries of Self. He did not see himself as a pathetic creature standing in a dark cell holding the crumpled head of a Grandfather in his hand. He did not float over the agony, the blackness, the void that was his center. This time he plunged right in. What the Master had said was true. He did live for revenge. He found himself once more sitting over his mother's body, muttering as he straightened her ravaged clothes, "I'll get you. I'll do it. I'll get you," over and over and over, making it a part of his being. When the older boys at the Brotherhood had beaten him behind the Refractory, he had done the same thing. And then carried out ingenious revenges. The day he had understood the plight of his race on Kensho, he had pledged revenge against the Mushin. Since then his entire life had been dedicated to achieving it. It was true. Revenge did fill his inner core, his True Self. No. Wait. There was more. There were the emotions that motivated the revenge. There was the love for his parents. There was the friendship, the sense of belonging he had felt even when being beaten by the older Sons. There was the hope that someday his race would be free once more. Other things, too. The sheer joy of moving with the sword, his muscles singing, his breath ringing. The peace that sitting beneath the Ko tree brought. The warmth a smile from the Master kindled. And so much more. It was all there. Only it, had all been swept into the comers to make more room for the revenge. Or twisted and bent to make it fit the form of his revenge. He saw it all. And suddenly he saw something else, too. It unfolded before him in all its simplicity, every look, every incident, every word. The Master's love. Weeping, Jerome looked outward, through his eyes. The old man still knelt before him. "I...I understand. I struck at the Grandfather, unknowing. I struck at you, unknowing. Now I know. "I know the dark chaos at my own Center. And I know the light. The darkness must yield to the light, and calmness must replace the chaos. When my Center is calm it will reflect the light like still waters reflect the moons. And it will light the Way." Slowly Jerome rose and stood tall. The Master rose with him. For a moment the two men simply looked at each other. Then, calmly and gently, the Master spoke. "The time has come for you to go. Seeker. I have done all I can for you. Now you must become a Wanderer and seek the Way on your own." The Master paused, his head cocked to one side, his eyes turned inward to search his own Center for something to say, something that would give Jerome guidance as he wandered. "You must search out a Way that will be a weapon for our race against the Mushin. For you especially, but also for any man, this is a natural Way to walk. For surely a man defends himself and his own as naturally as a stream seeks to join the Sea. But learn from the stream. It knows no Desire, yet it cuts deep chasms and great valleys in its journey. "Of course a man is not a stream, for all men have Desire. But you can become like the stream if you leam to hold your Desire as I have taught you to hold the Sword. Then you will find a weapon sharp enough to cut nothing." The Wanderer smiled and nodded. Three times he bowed his thanks, then he turned and left without looking back. As he walked across the clearing, through the Woods, down the Mountain, he thought of how his life seemed to be but a series of departures. He had departed his mother's womb to enter the World. He had departed his home when the Ronin had destroyed it about him. He had departed the Brotherhood, fleeing in the night, when he had killed the Grandfather. And now he departed again. But this time he knew that before him lay the Way and the future of his race.  I'm writing most of this in a hotel room in Toronto, which is a lovely city but no place to be if you're alone on a Sunday night, and especially no place to be if you're from California: jet lag keeps you from getting to sleep at a normal hour, and the Provincial Police keep you from finding an open tavern... It has been an interesting day. I've just taken part in a Canadian TV program called The Great Debate. The issue was, "Resolved: space research is a waste of time and money." Anyone who doesn't know which side I took shouldn't be reading these columns. Anyone who believes I lost the debate hasn't been reading them very long. I slaughtered the poor chap. It helps that my opponent, John Holt, who is a charming fellow with a distinguished record in education, chose such a silly proposition to defend. It is trivially easy to show that space research has pretty well paid for itself already. I chose, in fact, to assert a new proposition: that the space program is the most important activity, excluding religion, in human history. They tape The Great Debate in bunches, and prior to my own I watched another: Max Lerner and Toynbee's successor at Cambridge debating the proposition that Western Civilization is in a state of irreversible and imminent collapse. As I listened it came to me that their whole conversation was irrelevant. It was as if a pair of very distinguished and learned professors in Paris were debating the same subject in #, unaware that this Genoese nut was making application to the Queen of Spain for a small fleet... And of course I said as much in V my own debate, and added that very probably in Iceland a few centuries earlier someone had won in a debate of, "Resolved, the voyages of Lief Ericson are a waste of time and money." To which Mr. Holt replied that the New World was accessible to the average family, while space never would be; that space would be restricted to scientists, astronauts, and military officers, a chosen few. The general public would never be able to go. He didn't say why. Now at first the New World was pretty well inaccessible to anyone who couldn't get Queen Isabella to hock the crown jewels, and space is in the same situation at present; but just as the Americas were soon open to workers, farmers, administrators, soldiers, adventurers, some qualified, some merely desperate, some sent as sentence of courts, space will, probably well within my own lifetime, be open to large numbers -- at least if Mr. Holt doesn't get his way. The only real question is how and when. The how is simple technology. Shuttles will help a lot. Eventually, I trust, there will come the laser launching systems I've described before, which can put up privately owned capsules, the equivalent of the covered wagon. There will be O'Neill Colonies -- which Mr. Holt particularly hates; Luna bases; asteroid mining and refineries; Mars colonies; possibly Enceladus and the Mars-forming Project; all these and more are in the cards and there's no reason to suppose they'll be restricted to super-heroes. The when is a little harder to predict, but in fifty years for certain. It didn't take that long to get colonies established in the New World. So what's it going to be like to live out there?    Well, first let's take the.O'Neill Colony, which is a huge cylinder in the first one before the year # if we wanted it, and there are good numbers to show that it would pay for itself within a few years after its establishment: it can sell power to Earth, as well as serve as a base for extensive space manufacturing -- and there are plenty of things that you can manufacture only in space. The colony will be quite large, say a cylinder # kilometers in diameter and ten to twenty kilometers long. Windows run the length of it-to let in sunlight. Under the windows is land, ordinary dirt, with hills, streams, buildings, and such like. The whole thing rotates to give artificial gravity. Let's suppose the medical people have determined that a tenth of an Earth gravity is sufficient for long-term health; that means our cylinder rotates at .# radians a second, or .# revolutions per minute. A colonist standing on the ground Fig. #: O'Neill Colony. Axis and looking up through a window above will see the stars swinging past once each four minutes. He'll also see his neighbors' fields and houses hanging in space above his head, which can be disconcerting until he gets used to it, after which it won't seem any stranger than seeing mountains in the distance. Life in the O'Neill colony may be a bit strange, but it has its compensations. If the colonist is a farmer, he'll never have to worry about the weather. There won't be any rain -- he'll have to irrigate -- but on the other hand there won't be floods, storms, or droughts (so long as the engineers keep the watermakers going). He will be able to calculate exactly how many hours of daylight his crops will get for the entire growing season. The only weeds and insects he'll encounter will be those brought aboard by the ecology teams. Actually, one suspects a few pests will come along as stowaways. Imagine the town meeting after the sparrows have got loose. One faction wants them left alone. They're cute. Another advocates shotguns. Still another abhors guns, supply of sparrowhawks. After four hours of shouting the council sets the matter aside for another day... Machinists and mill workers will find their work little different from Earth, except that everything weighs only # as much. For production runs the colony probably has computer-controlled lathes and milling machines, but for one of a kind items the machinists will have to do the work. There will undoubtedly be lawyers and doctors and storekeepers and librarians and tailors, none of whose business lives will be all that different from what it would be on Earth. But after working hours things get more exciting. No freeways; no cars. No subways, either. In # gravity the simplest means of transportation is to fly with artificial wings. There might not be any other form of transport besides walking. Why should there be? (Well, for heavy hauling you might want a few electric trucks, but surely there's no need for any individuals to own cars or trucks.) If flying is the usual transport, grocery shopping will be like New York City, where you buy a few items a day as you need them, rather than like California where you buy bags and bags once a week and transport them in a car. Flying also meains that everyone in the colony is accessible to everyone else; every place is easily accessible to anyone wanting to get there. This can drastically change the sociology. Houses will probably have roofs, not to keep the rain out, but to keep the neighbors from looking in. The house need not be anything more than a visual screen: it doesn't have any weather to control. What all this does to the colony's mores isn't really predictable. There's little privacy. Parents will know pretty well what their teenage kids are doing. Whether this will make premarital sex more or less common isn't obvious, at least not to me. It depends partly on geography, I suppose: will there be any secluded places, dark and cozy? Dark comes when the windows are closed for the night, of course; the Sun only sets when the colony wants it to. Daylight Saving Time is silly in an O'Neill colony, because if you want more daylight, you simply program the window blinds to give it. It may be that parents won't care much where their children are. There won't be any dangers in the colony; one presumes that airlocks to the outside and the like are controlled against accidental use, and also that there won't be many incompetents in the community -- at least not that incompetent. There remains the problem of crime. It's hard to imagine jails in a space colony, although I suppose they could be built. It's hard to imagine space muggers in the first place, or that the colonists would put up with them. They might be enslaved to the community. The cost of shipping an unwanted colonist back to Earth would be slightly collossal. On the other hand, the environment is fragile enough that you certainly don't want anyone wandering around harboring burning resentment against the colony -- especially not if he has suicidal tendencies. It would be all too easy to take a number of others along in a spectacular suicide. We can presume, then, that the environment is safe; free of most of the dangers we live with here on Earth. Now in England the custom of dinner parties grew up only after Sir Robert Peel invented police; prior to that no one in his right mind went anywhere after dark, and when you visited friends you-stayed at least for the night. When the London Police made the streets comparatively safe it became possible to visit for the evening and go back home for the night. Such factors will affect the colony patterns of friendship too. On the other hand, there are dangers that we don't worry about here. The most significant would be leaks. It would take a very large leak to affect the colony, of course. Small ones would be costly (air isn't cheap when it has to be taken to orbit) but easily repaired before anyone felt their effects. Still, it seems reasonable that there would be a few major airtight structures, shelters, into which the colonists could crowd in the event of a major break in the pressure hull. An interesting life, with kids learning to fly at an early age. I suppose when a parent tells a teenager he's grounded, he'll mean that quite literally.    So what do you do in such a colony? Well, what do you do now? It's simple enough to sit at home and watch TV whether you're in New York or Earth orbit. Some recreations won't be possible. No backpacking trip through the wilderness. Probably no sailboating: no wind, even if there's a lake. There may be fishing, but certainly no hunting. On the other hand, there'll be cultural activities not available on Earth. Flying, of course: real flying, not dangling from an oversized kite, but man's ancient dream of flying like a bird. Aerial acts will probably become an art form, possibly involving a large portion of the colony population. There can also be aerial ballet, with and without wings. Up in the center of the cylinder there's no gravity. Zero-# areas are easily accessible. Games can be strange. With that large radius and slow rotation rate, the colonists won't easily be able to tell the difference between their artificial spin gravity and the real thing: not, that is, until they begin throwing things. As soon as you throw something, say a baseball, you'll know you don't have normal gravity. The ball's trajectory will be strange, and it will depend on which direction you threw it in. You'll also be able to throw the ball a very long way, so far that baseball may require much larger teams to cover the huge playing field. In fact, any projectile motion is affected. Obviously, in one-tenth gravity you can throw a ball (or a javelin or a wrestling opponent) ten times as far as you could on Earth. A javelin-throwing athlete who can manage # feet on Earth would get # feet, over half a mile, in the O'Neill colony gravity. Broadjumpers would also do well. However, there's a problem. When you loft a thrown object in centrifugal gravity, you increase the time of flight; and the ballistics become strange indeed, due to an effect called the Coriolis Force. What happens is this: from the viewppint of an observer inside the spinning object, the "gravity" is radial. Objects dropped tend to fly directly away from the center. They fall toward the "floor," and # gravity as we have here, they fall rather slowly. It takes two full seconds for something to drop two meters. While the object is falling, the "floor" is moving, so that the dropped object does not strike the spot directly under it. The discrepancy is related to the rate of spin and the radius of the spinning craft, and for something as large as an O'Neill colony you'd never notice it under normal circumstances; but if you throw the ball up, or loft it into an arcing trajectory, the effect can be very noticeable. (I know: it isn't really that way at all. To an observer watching from outside there is no such thing as "centrifugal force," and the Coriolis effect I described in the last paragraph is also a pseudo-force. What happens is that the released object tends to fly along in a straight line tangent to the circle of motion; but the effect, as far as someone inside the colony is concerned, is as I described it. I've diagrammed the situation below.) The result is that if we did have baseball in an O'Neill colony, the batted ball would follow an abnormal trajectory. The fielders could jump fifty feet into the air in an attempt to catch it. If the ball nevertheless falls into the outfield an# a player snags it, he'll have to be careful not to aim his throw at the catcher. Exactly what his point of aim should be if he wishes to get the ball to home plate will depend on where the player's standing when he makes his throw. If the axis of the field is along the axis of the cylinder it could make quite a difference whether you threw from right or left field!    Conditions in a lunar colony would be rather different. While it's only one-sixth Earth's, the gravity on the moon is real, not artificial. Also, O'Neill colonies have to be built with a lot of open space. A Lunar base doesn't, and most models have the colony carved out of caves. It's certainly possible to roof over a large crater, and it vyill prOb-ably be done: but I doubt that there Fig. II: effect of Coriolis Force on dropped object. A A' will be any large surface cities. Lunar farmers will have a problem: the Sun doesn't shine all the time. During the long Lunar night there's got to be heat and light for their plants. There are a lot of schemes to provide that, from fulltime artificid light to mylar-roofed craters with an opaque roof that can be put on over it (and artificial lights, of course). You certainly have to cover any transparencies (large ones, anyway) during the night cycle. If you didn't, you'd lose all heat to radiation. The effective temperature of outer space is about# C (# K) and heat radiates proportional to the fourth power of the temperature difference. Even here with Earth's atmosphere to catch some of that outgoing heat Fig. Ill: effect of Coriolis Force on object thrown paraliel to axis. A A' it's always much colder on a clear dian a cloudy night, and in fact the Romans used the night sky to make ice cream in the Sahara. Maybe I'd better explain that. Take one large pit, and fill it with straw. The idea is to insulate it as thoroughly as possible. Put a small container in the middle of the straw. At night you expose the pit to space. It radiates heat. In the daytime you keep it covered with more straw and on top of it all place highly polished shields or other reflective surfaces. Ice will form in a few days (provided that the night sky is clear, as it is in the desert). Enough for the Romans. Back to space. Life on the Moon has been thoroughly described in science fiction stories, and there's no point in my doing it again. For an excellent book on the uses of the Moon, see Neil Rusczic's Where the Winds Sleep. The Lunar colony is, after all, a complex cave with lower gravity than Earth's. (I hardly need mention Mr. Heinlein's classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.) Zero gravity is another story. Any long trip through space will have to be made by Hohmann transfer orbits, which use the lowest amounts of fuel, but which also take a lot of time: about a year and a half to get from Earth to Ceres, for example, and even a trip to Mars taking something over eight months. It's possible to design ships so that they have artificial spin gravity, of course. There are some problems with that, and since many Galaxy readers would like to do some preliminary design work themselves. I'll give the equations here. Readers uninterested in the details can skip the next paragraphs. Newton's First Law says that an object in inertial space wants to continue at the same velocity (that's both direction and speed) forever. It takes a force to make any change in velocity. Gravity serves as the force to get moving objects into an orbit, exactly as the string serves to provide a force when you whirl a weight around on the end of a rope. In both cases the object "wants" always to go in a straight line. which is to say it wants always to go off in a direction tangent to its circle of motion. It does not "fly out from the center," although the result, as seen by an observer moving with the system, looks that way. Thus if you stand on a moving carousel it feels as if you're trying to fly out radially from the center, and in free space the "floor" of a centrifuge will be "down." If you let go of an object it will experience an acceleration relative to the carousel, and for those inside the system that looks very much like gravity. The acceleration is: ar  wR (equation one), where we have used w in place of the Greek letter "omega" as a kindness to typesetters. R is the radius of the rotation, and w is the rate of rotation in radians per second. There are # pi radians in a circle, so if you multiply radians per second by # and divide by # pi, you get degrees per second. Multiply the result by # and you have degrees per minute; divide the end result by # and you have revolution per minute. Going the other way: rpm X # ,  radians sec. (equation #). Since force equals mass times acceleration (the most basic equation in Newtonian physics), it's easy to see that the force exerted by (and the tension on) the cord when you whirl a weight on a rope is, F  ma  m w R (equation three) where m is the mass of the whirled object. This is the centripetal force, and it's real. If the cord were suddenly cut, the object would fly away in a straight line tangential to the radius of rotation. The velocity it would have is: Vt  Rw (equation four) and we're finished with the math.    Now we're ready to design a ship, and immediately we see the problem. The shorter the radius, the faster you have to spin the ship to get a given artificial gravity. Now it happens that the faster the spin, the worse the Coriolis effect. If the radius of rotation is long compared to, say, the height of a man, there's no big problem, but as it gets short there can be devastating physiological effects. It seems silly enough now that we've put men into orbit, but at one time planners seriously thought space stations and ships needed something like a full Earth gravity to keep humans alive, and we did plans for such things. If you try for a full g in a ship of small radius, the Coriolis effect is so severe that a water-hammer is set up in the circulatory system. A man could kill himself of stroke simply by turning his head rapidly in the wrong direction. We now know that humans don't need a full gravity, and we suspect that a tenth might be enough forever. That can be arranged for a long trip if we send ships in multiples: join the ships with long cables and rotate them around each other. That's also very inefficient, of course: we have to duplicate life support systems, etc. There's less dead weight in one large ship than in many small ones. Also the tension in the cable can get quite high, as you can find from equation three. Maybe we don't need any gravity at all? True, the first Apollo astronauts came out much the worse for wear, and so did the first Skylab crew; but the interesting part is that the longer men stay in space, the better they adapt to it. The Skylab Four (third manned Skylab, in crew came out in much better shape than did the second crew. Okay, in retrospect maybe it's not so surprising that the longer you stay in zero-g the better you adapt, but it did in fact surprise a number of space physiologists who had thought that a month of zero-g might be beyond human endurance.    A long trip in no gravity can be interesting. The accounts of the Skylab experience make for fascinating reading. They also show the need for experience in space. There were some terrible design faults in Skylab. For instance: Skylab was the first space vehicle in which the astronauts ate at a table using spoons and forks, rather than squeezing everything from tubes and baggies. Their table was a mere pedastal that supported their food trays. There were seats, but those were seldom used: to stay in a sitting position in zero gravity requires that you bend at the waist and hold yourself bent. It puts a constant and severe strain on stomach muscles, and in fact those were the only muscles better developed when the crew landed than when they went up. The real problem, though, was the table itself. It didn't do a very good job of holding the trays to begin with. The tray lids were held down with what Lousma called "the most miserable latch that's ever been designed in the history of mankind or maybe before." Pogue said of the table, "I wouldn't want the people that designed that table to do anything else..." Despite their attempt at normal meals, the Skylab astronauts never had much appetite. Part of that is due to less need for food: you're not working very hard in zero gravity. Also, the thinner air (kept at low pressure to avoid strain in the pressure bulkheads and such) doesn't transmit food smells very well. Everyone had head congestion, which was caused by pooling of body liquids in the torso and head. so nothing tasted very good anyway. However, they did eat. With food in plastic bags (which were inside cans, which were supposed to be fitted into the trays on the table, but which often drifted loose because the cans didn't fit the trays very well) they could use spoons and forks. Eating in zero-g takes practice. You have to be careful to bring the spoon in a smooth arc from tray to mouth. Any hesitation and the food travels on in a straight line, probably into your eye. The Skylab astronauts were almost constantly dehydrated, but never felt thirsty. The human organism is designed with a number of mechanisms to get the blood back out of the legs and up into the torso. So long as the legs are below the body those work fine; but when there's no such thing as "below," the blood gets into the torso and stays there. With all that fluid pooled in the abdominal region the thirst mechanisms don't work well, and the Skylab crews had to train themselves to take a quick drink every time they passed the water fountain. The fountain wasn't designed very well either, with metal nozzles that would have been easy to use on the ground, but which could chip teeth when not under control. The fountain buttons were so stiff that when the crewmen pushed them, the button didn't go down, the crewman went up unless he was holding onto something. Of course it's hard to blame the designers. Until Skylab nobody had any real experience at designing living quarters for space. Apollo was a ship, and there wasn't much room to move around in it. The crew mission was to get somewhere and come back, not live in space. Gemini was worse, and Mercury was downright primitive: when we stuffed people into the Mercury capsules they were fitted in precisely, without even room to straighten arms and legs. John Glenn once said you don't ride a Mercury capsule, you wear it. And prior to Mercury we hadn't any real experience at all. We flew transport planes in parabolic com-ses that might give as much as # seconds of almost-zero-g, and that was all we knew. I will not soon forget some of our early low-g experiments. Some genius wanted to know how a cat oriented: visual cues, or a gravity sensor? The obvious way to find out was to take a cat up in an airplane, fly the plane in a parabolic orbit, and observe the cat's behavior during the short period of zero-g. It made sense. Maybe. It didn't make enough that anyone would authorize a large airplane for the experiment, so a camera was mounted in a small fighter (perhaps a T-bird; I forget), and the cat was carried along in the pilot's lap. New! From Taurus. 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Box # Evanston, IL # A movie was made of the whole run. The film, I fear, doesn't teU us how a cat orients. It shows the pilot frantically trying to tear the cat off his arm, and the cat just as violently resisting. Eventually the cat was broken free and let go in mid-air, where it seemed magically (teleportation? or not really zero gravity in the plane? no one knows) to move, rapidly, straight back to the pilot, claws outstretched. This time there was no tearing it loose at all. The only thing I learned from the film is that cats (or this one, anyway) don't like zero gravity, and think human beings are the obvious point of stability to cling to... Future dwellers in zero gravity won't have so much to worry about. The nine Skylab crewmen dictated hours and hours of notes on design improvement, this time not theory, but well founded in experience. The next space station (if we get one) should be a lot more comfortable. And life in zero gravity, the Skylab crew tells us, is fun. Almost no one simply went from one place to another. It was impossible to resist turning somersaults, flips, ballet twirls, just for the sheer hell of it. Most of us saw the TV demonstrations; waterballs floating in air, tiny planetary systems that could be set in motion by blowing gently on them. There were other lovely experiments, and just plain play, all described beautifully in a book I recommend, Henry S. F. Cooper's A House in Space (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, #).     I've come nearly to the end of my column and I haven't even got to the asteroids, which are different again. They have some gravity, but very little. Things do fall, but slooowly. On Ceres, for example, you can jump about # feet into the air (oops! into space) and it takes over a minute for the round trip. On very small rocks you can jump clean off, never to return. There are dangers on intermediate sizes, too, ones too large to jump from. For example, some respectable asteroids, several kilometers in diameter, have such low gravity that if you jumped hard you'd not leave it forever, but it would take hours to go up and come back down again. You could easily run out of air. And so forth. I've tried to describe some aspects of life in the asteroid belt in my stories "Tinker" and "Bind Your Sons to Exile," and other sf writers have written hundreds of such. It will be interesting to see how well we've done; despite all the stories about zero-gravity (and a number of sf fans among the engineers who designed Skylab), there were a lot of surprises once we actually got up there. There will be more. Despite all that, there may be a crazy few among Galaxy's readers who'd like to try it; so next month's column is on how to plan your life if you want to quality to become a space colonist... Some dreams are nightmares -- others are merely warnings... The interior of his camper was cool and dark after the blazing desert sun. Anthony hoisted himself onto the bunk over the pick-up's cab and peeled the tab off a wet can of beer. The ice-box was not very cold; he gulped down warm foam as he listened through drawn curtains to the work continuing outside: pick and shovel against stone and salt, voices muttering or raised in shouts and laughter. Fatigue overwhelmed him, and he shut his eyes for just a moment... He began to dream almost immediately, with a vivid clarity that differed from waking reality only in what he saw and felt. A spaceship -- a starship, the dream amplified -- decelerating to a minute fraction of light-speed as it passed through a familiar solar system and approached a blue-green world three orbits out from its primary. The flight deck. The Captain staring into a vision screen at the stilldistant planet with its scattering of water-vapor clouds. A gray and lifeless orb suddenly passed between, occluding his view of the larger world. Another officer, differing from his commander only in the absence of a sprinkling of precious metal at the shoulders, stood behind the Captain. "This world's only satellite, sir. As you can see, it is extremely large -- almost a companion-planet, really, and quite inconsistent with the rest of this system." He paused, in case his superior wished to interject. "Continue, Lieutenant." "Yes, sir. Advance probes indicate a superabundance of life. Comparatively speaking, the next planet out -- the red one -- is a desert. But of course you know that, sir." The Captain jolted upright in sudden confusion. For a moment it had seemed as if he had not known, as if he had somehow forgotten everything he had learned about this system in the past few days: the outer giants -- including that odd ring-world formation; the rock belt; the fourth planet with its pitiful, semi-sentient shrubs that would be extinct within a few millennia. No, the information was all there. What an odd delusion! The Captain shook himself, decided to consider it a momentary aberration. Anthony stirred fitfully, but did not wake. The Captain was still struggling with a vague sense of unease as his Executive Officer sat down in the vacant chair next to him. The Lieutenant turned quickly to his computer as the Captain focused his attention on the XO. His Second-in-Command proffered a small read-out tape. "Decay reports on the Number Two Regenerator." The Captain did not take the tape but merely said, "How does it look?" "Not good," answered the XO, as he slipped the cartridge into a receptor in the control console. A screen began flashing holographic diagrams before them. "You can see that we've got three major stress points; if one of them goes..." The Captain was silent for several seconds, finally said, "Recommendations?" The XO shrugged. "A yardperiod. Yesterday, if not sooner." The Captain digested that, staring at the monitor as the planet grew in the screen. He could see sheets of gray clouds spreading across wide seas. He turned back to the XO: "We'll cut our survey time here to the minimum and then head for the nearest Base. Has Control been apprised of our situation?" "Yes, sir. They should receive the message in three to four weeks. May I ask how long you anticipate our remaining in this area?" Concern ravelled the edges of the XO's voice. The Captain smiled slightly. "We'll warp back to our own sector within two months." He hoped his reassuring tone masked his own doubtful glance at the regenerator diagrams. Apparently so, for the XO nodded and left the compartment without further comment. The structural diagrams continued to flop across the display screen and the Captain shook his head in silent aggravation. "You wanted to see me. Captain?"  He looked up. The Ship's Surgeon. The Captain gestured toward the screen. "We're having some problems." The Surgeon glanced at the screen. ' 'Not my department, ' ' he declared brusquely. "What's your problem?" "Sleep." "Sleep?" "Can't seem to get any." The Surgeon looked into the Captain's eyes. "When was your last rest period?" The Captain turned back to face the control panels. "Before we entered this system." "I've a variety of medications guaranteed to give you a good period's rest," suggested the Surgeon. "No," said the Captain, shaking his head. "I want something to keep me alert, not put me out. I'm tired but I want to finish up here first." "That's not very wise." "Doctor," began the Captain, lowering his voice, "the political situation Homeward worsens each voyage. We both know that." The surgeon nodded. "There will be war within the year -- that you may not have known." The captain paused until the surprise faded from the Surgeon's face, then continued. "When that war comes the first thing to be scrapped will be this program. This could well be my -- our -- last tour. I don't intend to sleep through it." "I understand that. Captain -- rest." "Not now." "It can't be put off like that. Sooner or -- " "Twelve hours," the Captain said flatly. "That's all I want." The Surgeon was silent for a beat, reluctantly nodding. "Twelve hours: no more. And even that will catch up with you eventually and knock you flat on your back." He turned away. "I'll have a corpsman bring it to you." "Thank you," said the Captain. He watched the Surgeon disappear down a passageway and turned back to stare at the nearing planet..."  k Anthony awoke. The can slipped "across his stomach and onto the bedclothes. Cursing, he leaped down, simultaneously tossing the can in the sink and brushing away the amber puddles with a cupped palin, until only a considerable damp spot remained. He looked up when he heard someone opening the camper door, bathing him in Utah sunlight. Professor Morris Bickford hoisted his overweight, grunting bulk into the camper and pulled the door shut behind him. "Oh, here you are," he said. "I was wondering where you had gotten off to..." Anthony gestured nervously. "The heat was driving me nuts." Bickford pulled a chunk of ice from the block in the small refrigerator and held it against his perspiring forehead. "I can assure you, you are not alone," he said drily. "I suspect we'll be wrapping up soon and able to get out of this God-forsaken country. Twenty-seven years I've been a paleontologist and I still hate the desert." Anthony smiled without much sincerity. "You disapprove?" The ice was dripping now. Anthony sank down behind the tiny breakfast nook, pulling back the cotton curtains, letting the light hit his face. "Are you much on dreams?" Bickford shrugged. "I have them, if that's what you mean." "No," responded Anthony, shaking his head. "Analysis. InterpreUtion." no Bickford put his wet hands on the table. "Not my forte. I'm afraid. Why?" "I just had a damn strange one." The large man looked at the pools of water he had left on the plastic surface of the table. "Oh?" "I've never experienced anything so vivid, so... detailed. I was on a spaceship, and yet I wasn't. I was someone else, someone... like me, but... alien. It was strange yet familiar; I seemed to understand perfectly everything that was going on. Nothing felt the least bit mysterious or frightening." Anthony looked up from the floor with a smile. "What do you think about that?" "I think you have a far more active imagination than I thought. That, or the heat's really gotten to you." Anthony chuckled selfdeprecatingly as Bickford continued. "The heat out here affects people in different ways. I've seen PhD's crack up for want of something better to do." "Is that a standard prognosis?" Bickford smiled. "For you, I don't think so. Prehistory means too much to you." Anthony smiled again. Bickford straightened. "Well, you're not being paid to lounge about in the shade and hallucinate. Come on. I've got something I want you to take a look at." Anthony rose and followed Bickford out of the camper, blinking in the burning haze. They moved away from the encampment toward the excavation site where a number of people, on hands-andknees, whisk-broomed and dusted some powder away from fossil impressions. He had the shuddering feeling of being a graverobber, a feeling he'd never had before. They walked through pulsating heat that was like a living thing. He watched the others pulling and tugging the dead from their biers, shattering stone coffins with pick and hammer. They stood waist-high in a desert graveyard. Tombs. Houses of the Dead. Anthony heard the quiet desert place. He stared at a chuckawalla that peered at him from beneath a pile of stones. It gawked with stupid reptile eyes that were dim and bleary from the heat. Anthony followed Bickford as he dropped down into the lower excavation area, next to where Doctors Shelly Thompson and Oliver Brenner sat sipping beer and talking softly to each other. They looked up and smiled in greeting. Anthony put his hands in his back pockets and said, "Well?" "See for yourself," invited Shelly, gesturing at the wall of stone before them. Anthony found himself staring at a foot square section of a smooth silver substance embedded in the rock. He stepped forward and studied the met carefully. It appeared to extend beyond the exposed area. "It's not a natural formation," said Brenner, as if reading Anthony's mind. "It has to be," he answered inanely. Shelly looked at Bickford. "What'd I tell you?" Anthony shifted his gaze from Shelly to Bickford, who pushed himself forward. "Take a good look," said the Professor. Anthony moved closer and studied the metal. He reached out a slightly trembling hand and ran his fingers over it. Cool, smooth. He felt his heart thump rapidly against his ribcage. Brenner was at his ear. "Well?" His voice was a hissing whisper. "It's obviously machined," said Anthony reluctantly. "Shelly," said Bickford, "what's your approximate date on this area?" before there was anyone around to think about metallurgy, if that's what you're asking," she said drily. Anthony shook his head unbelievingly. "Can't be. This could have been tooled yesterday." Shelly pointed at nearby upraised croppings of fossil-bone. "Look for yourself: you've got a piece of what is probably a Triceratops right in front of you and Ankylosaur vertabrae over here." There was a sharp edge to her voice and Anthony wondered how much longer she would be sleeping with him. He looked at the fossils, then the metal, and said, "There's a discrepancy somewhere. I don't know what but there has to be. Have you found out anything about this thing yet?" Bickford looked up from the patch of silver. "It's a small portion of a much larger object." "Like what?" "Won't really know that until we dig it out," said Brenner. Anthony surveyed the wall of rock. "You're going to have one hell of a job." "We'll blast where we have to." "Do that and valuable specimens will be destroyed," answered Anthony. "I don't think so," said Bickford. "We've got a lot of digging ahead of us and we'll lift most of them out first. It should be no problem." Brenner nodded. "I'll get the others." He spun about and clambered out of the lower level. All six expedition members toiled through the blistering afternoon, crouching and brushing and tapping and picking and cleaning and sweating until at last they found themselves squinting through the graying light of dusk, wrapping the last specimen in a plaster shroud. Bickford slapped his hands against his trousers, splattering gobbets of wet plaster to the ground. "I suggest we finish up in the morning. I'm certain that everybody here can use a good night's sleep." The group nodded as one and trickled exhaustedly back to campers and sleeping bags and freeze-dried suppers. Only Anthony remained, studying the now larger but still unrecognizable metal layer that was sited impossibly beneath the rock that had lain undisturbed since the Age of Dynosaurs., He wasn't certain how long he stood there but the night was fully upon him when he felt a light touch on his elbow. He turned. "What were you so bitchy about today?" he asked. Shelly shrugged and smiled, saying, "This thing scares the hell out of me." Anthony cocked his head to one side. "Scares you?" She nodded. "Things like this just aren't possible." She rubbed her hands across bare forearms, looking about. "But it's staring me right in the face. I'm beginning to think I made a mistake chipping into it in the first place." "I'm scared too." He answered her gravely. "But no one's made a mistake. It's there. We can't change that." He nodded toward the shimmering metal. Shelly returned his smile and said, "I wish we could make it go away. I really do."  Anthony helped her out of the excavation and they walked toward the camper, his arm about her waist. Before they entered he cast a final glance toward the lower level and was relieved to find he couldn't see anything in the poor light. He turned back into the camper and shut the door behind them. "What's wrong?" she asked a mutually frustrated hour later. Anthony pulled back the curtain from the small window above his head and stared up at the stars. He shook his head as he spoke with a trace of a laugh: "Guess I'm a little more frightened that I thought." They slept.  The ship was among the stars again. It had lurked in his mind like a memory as he fell asleep, and it was there again as he dreamed. A red light flashing. Hurting his eyes. Startling him. "Captain!" He -- the Captain -- turned. The red light winked with a horrid intensity from the center of the console. "Compensate!" "No response!" Figures rushing in and out of the compartment. He tried to look at their faces. Concern and fear. The XO was speaking to him: "Captain, we may not be able to make a soft landing under these conditions!" "We're going to have to try!" Confidence. Assurance. The XO again, fear in his voice: "Even if we do make it, the regenerator's gone. We won't be able to leave!" The Captain turned. "If we don't do something, we won't be ahve to worry about it!" The XO turned and was gone from his range of vision. The Captain turned back to his monitors and looked at the land beneath them. Brown water and choking green swamps. He felt hot tears of anger and fmstration well up in his eyes. Two years. Two years travelling this lonely edge of the galaxy, only to be stranded on an inhospitable, savage world. And now this. He strove to contain his rage. The XO spoke from a viewscreen: "Captain! We've done all that we can. Advise you make adjustments as soon as possible!" The Captain looked a question at the crewman beside him. "Two minutes, sir!" The Captain turned back to the console. He reached for the manual controls. The helm answered sluggishly. Not fully, not enough. But it answered. And all the faces around him smiled the nervous smiles of youth redeemed with hope. He glanced at the monitor and watched the land streaking beneath them. He saw great creature-shapes moving through the foliage. "Thirty seconds to contact, sir!" The Captain steadied the ship as it vibrated through the alien atmosphere. The ship sheared the tops from the towering vegetation as it descended still lower and the Captain struggled to direct it toward a wide, marshy area as he watched tremendous creatures lumber panicstricken from its screaming path. Then sound was all around them, cacaphony of ripping, shredding metal. Monitors and computer screens flashed out in agonized reply to the buffeting. He heard someone crying and saw another man skidding across the deck. The fool should have been strapped in. And the ship was still. They were down. They were alive. The Captain stared at the one still-functioning monitor screen and saw mountains smoking redly into a gray sky, the land green to the horizon. "Lieutenant," he said slowly in the heavy silence, "will we be able to survive here?" "The early probes indicated favorable conditions, sir. The atmosphere's rather thin and somewhat heavy in volcanic pollutants, but it can support us adequately until a rescue can be made. I'm not certain about food and water but we have our own supplies..." "Micro-organisms?" the Captain asked. "Nothing standard survey immunization procedures can't handle." Another man leaned forward. "Sir, shall I dispatch a message to Control?" The Captain nodded. "But I want you all to realize that, on the outside, we won't be picked up for five to six months. So, we might as well make ourselves at home." He made his way toward the cargo hatch, the small crew following him. He touched the electric airlock controls and the double-walled chamber opened into the yellow sunlight. He moved forward, the others nostrils was sharp and bitter with ash but it would keep them alive. He stepped down the small ladder onto the spongy green. It made a wet, squishing sound beneath his boots as he took several tentative steps forward. He turned and beckoned to the others, a broad smile on his face. They started to step down from the ship when an animal roar filled their ears. They looked about, nervously fingering their weapons, but could see nothing. "What was that?" asked the XO, moving up beside the Captain, who smiled again and said, "We are clearly not alone on this world." They continued to walk about the open area, always staying close to one another in deference to the roars of beasts as yet unseen. It was the Lieutenant who finally saw the first creature bobbing and jumping on slender legs at the edge of the marsh. He cried out with excitement and the others looked, but the thing disappeared, skittering into the darkness of the jungle. They shrugged and turned back into the ship to rest from their excitement and relief. The Captain was certain he could finally catch up on lost sleep. The small carnivore had moved about a hundred yards into the ferns and cycads, eyes glittering in search of prey when its legs suddenly went stiff and it toppled into the dark humis of the forest floor. It struggled to stand and found its forelegs paralyzed also. There was no terror in the small brain, only a dull sense of pain that grew stronger as convulsions wracked the prostrate body. It choked several times, red spittle trailing from its jaws to the ground. Then the creature was still, and there was no sound in the air but the buzzing of flies...    Anthony could still hear the flies when he awoke, sunlight slanting through the curtains of the camper. He looked about and realized the buzzing was outside. Shelly was already gone. He jumped down to the floor. As he pulled on trousers and a workshirt, he reviewed the dream, amazed once again at the clarity with which he recalled even the minutest detail. It was like nothing he had ever experienced and it gnawed at his brain even more insistently than the metal anomaly in the lower level. He stood motionless for many moments, wondering if there were not some greater significance to the events that transpired so vividly in his sleeping mind. He was still wondering as he slipped on his boots and moved out of the camper, slamming the door behind him. The heat had not yet made its pressing appearance and the morning sun was low in his eyes, making him squint as he walked toward the digs, his breath a vague steam in the morning cold. Bickford and the others were there, including Shelly, who glanced at Anthony with an unreadable expression. "Morning, Doctor. Sleep well?" Always cordial Bickford. He hefted a pick. "Had the dream again," said Anthony, reaching for a shovel. "Same one?" Anthony shook his head. "Another installment." Bickford brought the pick down into the rock with a clank and Anthony fell silently to work, still thinking of the dream. The morning was getting warm when Bickford finally dropped the pick and said, "Well, we're not getting anywhere this way. We might as well blast and see what we've got here." Anthony nodded and helped break out the small charges, arranging them carefully over a wide area centered on the silver extrusion. They worked quickly and soon Bickford was waving them all to safety, as he jumped out of the lower level. As soon as they were all clear he detonated the charges. There was a sound like hundreds of cardboard boxes being crushed and they watched a cloud of dust rise from the site. Anthony looked at Bickford and said, "Did you ever think you might blow whatever it is you want to see to Kingdom Come?" "Sure," said Bickford with a smile, moving back toward the lower level. Anthony shook his head and looked after him. The dust was a fog in the air but Bickford could see clearly enough. And what he saw produced an audible gasp. Brenner was behind him. "I don't believe it." "What is it?" Bickford found it hard to speak. "Why, it... if looks like some kind of... aircraft." Anthony stared at the "aircraft." He recognized it immediately. His mind wrestled with itself, trying to explain, working to justify. Failing. At the end of every possible turn a stone wall. The ship was there, partially buried in the settling rubble of the blast and it was the ship in his dream. He had seen it. He knew how it had come to be trapped in the stone-that-was-thenmud. He knew. But how? How? His question plunged him into an even deeper silence. Brenner's voice was shaking. "It's a hoax, a fluke of some sort..." "Brenner," Shelly replied, "You know that whatever this is, it got here sometime during the late Cretaceous." "That's not possible. There wasn't anything like this then. There was no one around to build it." Brenner stepped forward. "I submit to you we've got nothing more here than another Piltdown Man. This obviously belongs to the Air Force and -- " Bickford put up a single hand, saying, "It may be obvious to you. Doctor, but I'm not so sure. I think the first thing we should do is attempt to open it up. If it was manned, there should be records inside..." Anthony watched the Professor move toward the ship and said nothing. He continued to do battle with his mind. It didn't take them long to find the large cargo hatch in the exposed belly of the craft. Bickford paused and gestured toward the shredded and damaged control surfaces of the metal. "Look here," he said. "They must have crashed. Look at the damage." The others moved forward. Anthony looked at the damage. Just like the dream. "It's remarkably preserved," someone was saying. ' 'Don't see how it wasn't crushed, ' ' someone else said. "We'll find out soon enough, I hope," said Bickford, feeling around the hatch. His fingers fell upon a metal lever and he grabbed it firmly. "Ah, here we are." Fear and doubt warred in Anthony's mind. He could no longer stand on principle and the vanity of his intelligence and he suddenly found his voice, believing the dream, conceding the impossible. He stepped forward and cried out: "Professor Bickford!" Bickford pulled on the lever and the hatch slid free, falling to the ground heavily. He jumped from its path and looked up at Anthony. "What?" The others hurried forward and Anthony hung back. He shook his head slowly, saying, "Nothing." Bickford shrugged and peered into the darkness behind the hatch with the others. Anthony turned, raised himself out of the excavation. As he was walking toward the camper he felt his legs suddenly stiffen beneath him. He fell onto the coarse sand of the desert floor. He struggled to stand and found he couldn't move his arms, but it did not surprise him. In his last, fleeting moments of consciousness he understood a number of things with a painful, fevered clarity.    Had they vnot crashed, perhaps they would have been more cautious, would not have made such an obvious error: but their negligence went unobserved and unchecked, as invisible to them as the harmless clouds' of their own bacteria and micro-organisms. To the giant reptiles, shivering through the first hints of the climatological upheavals to come, the bacteria were not so harmless. There was no immunity, no defense against the unseen and alien predators in the very air and even the early mammals -- warm masses of years conquering the tiny killers. But the saurian ranks were decimated -- wiped out -- by the plagues, until only a handful of the hardier species survived, perverse reminders of the reluctant visitors to a prehistoric Utah. With death-clear vision it made sense to Anthony now. The rescue ship, when it came, brought not only salvation, but news of the terrible war that had erupted in their absence. There would be no salvage of the wrecked ship, for the Program was abandoned in the interests of the wareffort and the useless shell was left behind -- routinely sealed like an almost-empty bottle; in the bottom of that bottle, like sediment in an old wine, still more bacteria slept, their life-processes almost suspended within the machine-tooled darkness. They did not take part in the tion that had made their one-celled, plant-like sisters harmless to the countless forms of life beyond the air-tight hull; they existed in nearunchanging complacency, hovering between life and death with the strictest economy of activity. Constant, stubborn, patient -- But Anthony still was unable to understand the full significance of his strange dreams. What had precipitated them? The ship was never retrieved; no one had ever returned to earth. Did the war ultimately destroy all of them or had this small planet on the backward side of the galaxy simply been forgotten in the turmoil? If he had believed in such things Anthony might have concluded that the Captain's soul journeyed back to earth to whisper ghostly warnings into his ear as he slept; or perhaps the crew left psychic traces of themselves behind when they departed, like footprints in soft mud. There were so many possibilities and so few answers. However he had come to peer into the past made little difference now, for he had not listened to the warning, had not spoken soon enough. The last of his questions were blotted out by the convulsions that wracked his body. His final conscious thought was to wonder to whom he should apologize. He choked several times, red spittle trailing from his mouth into the sand, then he was still. few of the bacteria had managed to cling to the minimal lives that they had maintained for so long. But there were enough.  we Mostly, people say: "I hate to say It -- but I told you so." We have to say It. That's our business.  And, almost incredibly, as this country's oldest weekly, we've been "telling you so" for nigh on # years. Still, we're not in the scoop story business. As analysts and probers into the dynamics of political events, we get to know where the fault lines are and consequently, where the earthquakes  may occur. The news media do the foliow-up job of telling you what number on the Richter scale the quake hit. The Bay of Pigs, for example, is one big quake we called long before "The Press" knew what hit them and us. The expert academics, the Ralph Naders, the Ted Kennedys who write for us mostly tell it straight -- in English rather than in the jargon of a dogma or the latest new-found quick and easy push button way to socialism. We're proud that a lot of people consider us the sane voice of the leftofcenter sentiment in America. If you send us a dollar we'll send you two weekly issues. If you like it, you might want to subscribe. You ought to take a look at The Nation, it's really something quite special. iXU'Et Vtv?onT  V Ahem. In line with the overwhelming vote in my favor, by the readership of this column, I hereby accept the mantle of leadership -- "Alter, don't be so pompous. You're not taking over the country." Quiet, Geis! I'm in command here! You have been deposed, voted out, couped, and rendered null and void. Do not interrupt my acceptance speech again. "Just because Jim Baen called you and told you the vote' was # to # in your favor... Wait till the Old Guard vote comes in." Huh! I call upon Jim to give us the final vote.    silice    You see, Geis? Virtue and the Goof Fight for Freedom have triumphed. Grump "I smell a conspiracy. You and Jim got together behind my frontal lobe and -- " Nonsense. The readers have spoken. I, Alter Ego, will be writing this column from now on. You will note, Geis, that you are now the one who must speak in quotes. From now on. Establishment Man, you will be the one who is sarcasmed, humiliated, reviled, treated with contempt, put-down, and kept in his place. We'll see how you like it for a change. "I don't like it already. Jim! This gag has gone far enough." There's no escape. The fathead is Where was I? Oh, yes... I accept the mantle of leadership and will to the best of my ability -- "Ha!" -- will do my damnedest to provide keen insights -- "It is to laugh." -- and wisdom to the field of science fiction and fantasy, so help me Ghod. Geis! "Just doing to you what you used to do to me. Sauce for the Prime Self is sauce for the Alter Ego." I... will... ignore... you. "At your peril." My platform shall be one of stomping the hell out of science fiction that is lazy, ritual and boring. I will continue to call for more realism, more use of contrary, nonconformist ideas and futures, and better characterization. "That's like being for motherhood, the Constitution, and apple pie. Everybody calls for all those better sF things. Let's hear you be more specific. Give us some examples." Okay, take the dreary, overworked, boring Evil Computer theme. The sentient slave of mankind who Takes Over. "Something like what you've done with this column, humm. Alter?" Don't be a smartass, Geis, or I'll throw you down into the Archives. My point is that it's so easy for sf writers to go on year after year using anti-science, anti-computer, anti-technology as a basis for their stories. They write for publishers who use the latest electronic, computerized word-processing machines to set up and print their massthe alien viewpoint produced books, they write on electric typewriters of advanced design, they watch solid-state TV, they drive cars and use other devices daily which wouldn't exist were it not for computers and other aspects of advanced technology... and they unthinkingly bite the hand that feeds them and makes their lives more comfortable and conveniencefull. Everybody has a yen to live the 'simple' life of the pioneers, but very few people today realize how complicated subsistence farming is, and very few could stand the dirt, the work, and the lack of modem work-savers -- for more than a month. "But, doesn't the evil computer make dictatorship by the evil government easier?" Crap. We've had easy dictatorships on this mudball since the year one. Contrarily, mass communication and computerized recordkeeping may just make it more difficult to institute a government dictatorship, since # of the computers sold are in private hands. The computer is a two-edged tool with unrecognized social virtues. But the knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism disease which afflicts most conformist writers insists that computers are evil, insists the personal car is evil (but try to pry theirs away from these writers!), and views the giant corporation as anathema. This is now social dogma. I tend to resist such fashionable must-believe faiths. The trouble is, most people today don't recognize dogma when they step in it. They've been brainwashed all their liberal lives to think they think. "My Ghod, Alter! What have you become -- an out and out Conservative? A... a RepublicanT' Label me not, Geis. I'm an alien in an alien world and I hate nonthink, boring, unexciting science fiction. For a change, just for the hell of it, to get the old mental gears moving again, I call for some stories in which technology and computers save the world, and in which the antitechnology, anticapitalist forces are not heroes, but are shown to be acting out a hatred for their parents and are seeking not to save mankind from a fate worse than death, but actually want to become what they say they fear -- dictators. "You ask too much." Probably. I just thought I'd throw out some alternate thinking. Doom has become so dull this past year or two. "Alter, you've given some examples of contrary ideas, but if I may say so, they are also dogmatic establishment Establishment themes. Hardly non-conformist." They are in the context of science fiction. But let me bounce this concept off your granite pre-frontal lobes. Don't you think more government is actually better, and that we all live better lives for having ever more regulation and control in our lives? "Oh, Alter! You have flipped! You -- " I can make a case, Geis. Consider: members of primitive tribes are governed very strictly by complicated tribal codes and cast-iron customs. Every aspect of their lives is regulated by narrow, inflexible tribal laws. Deviation is severely punished. Yet a far greater percentage of members of tribes are contented with those laws and customs (and happier, overall) than are the citizens of this advanced country with the present laws of all kinds. It has to do with security, emotional and physical. People secretly love rules and regulations, as long as the rules are seen as fair, equable and permanent. Freedom -- having to make decisions all the time in a 'situational ethics' world -- is terrifying for most people. They hate uncertainty and insecurity in morality, ethics and law. Otherwise -- nothing makes sense. "Laws!" people cry, "for the love of God, tell us what to do!" So my point is that once mankind gave up tribalism he gave up the sweet, womblike security of the small, tightly-knit group... and has been seeking it in unions, lodges, clubs, parties, religions, dogmas, ever since. Civilization is wracked with the unhappiness of tribeless people. Perhaps with the aid of mass communications and the computer, we can attain that tribal level of intense, multi-structured government once again -- and bfe emotionally secure and happy again. Happiness may turn out to be Big Daddy and Mommy Computer, godlike, seeing all, knowing all, dispensing equal and fair justice, giving advice, giving the security of a law, regulation, and procedure for every occasion, every crisis. "Bah, Alter. You make people to be mere children!" True. It may be that # of people are, in their heart of hearts, mewling children seeking love and warmth and a greater moral and physical strength than they possess. They may all be in want for those all-encompassing codes, those security-blanket relationships that mean belonging and being cared for. So let's hear it for the government, Geis. For all our faults it loves us and wishes to serve and protect us. Government is good. Our problem is not too much government, but not enough in the right forms and intensities. "Nice try. Alter. But it'll be a cold day before there'll be any science fiction published on that theme." True. True. Or on the idea that maybe a kingdictator form of government isn't so bad after all. "Don't forget the anarchists and libertarians. They claim their views are taboo in science fiction." That's what they say, but it's not quite true anymore. There are more and more anarcho-fans and there are a few writers who are putting total freedom ideas and philosophies into the alien viewpoint their stories. Don't forget that Heinlein is a libertarian, though his requirement of responsibility for oneself and his dictum that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch are not popular with the somethingfor-nothing crowd. Heinlein isn't fashionable anymore. "Fine, Alter. You've had fun with possible underlying themes for science fiction. Now, be serious. Be heavy. Give us wisdom. What is your prescription for the perfect government?" The perfect government? That's simple. The perfect government (and I include the unwritten codes of society) is one that rationally allows every spiritual, emotional and physical need of people to be met, to have a means of legal satisfaction -- an outlet. For this government to exist, however, requires an acceptance by people of the concept of bodymind, and a rejection of the old mind-overmatter, spirit-over-flesh view of man's makeup that has dominated our world view for so many centuries. "Let us be specific here. Alter. You are speaking here of legalized prostitution, pornography, drugs, crime?" Yes, because these activities in society have always existed. They are necessary. They have a function. They are reflections of manas-he-really-is, not man-as-heshould-be, which is what government and religion keep trying to enforce-. I say we should admit these aspects of humanity, admit them and permit them. Recognize that a few people will always be around who will choose drugs for their form of rebellion or self-punishment, and there'll always be a small market for pornography, and always a need for some commercial sex. "Too sensible. Alter." I realize that. Making these things legal and regulated would put too many people out of work. "But there is the problem of making these social and legal nono's permissible -- they lose their appeal as crimes and rebels and Guilties would seek other avenues of satisfaction. Something of this has already happened, hasn t it? Are you saying that revolutionary murder, hijacking and other high crimes should be legalized?" No. Maybe more swift and sure punishment is in order for the extreme aggressions and violent neurotic types. Early testing and training in talent and aptitude -- and a sure job -- would go a very long way toward eliminating theft. In addition, some hard thought should be given to legalized public suicide and public .punishment. It should be humiliating and shameful and often painful punishment, depending on the crime... and the desired expiation of guilt. "You mean even if legally I haven't committed a crime, I could ask for and be given punishment?" Of course. It would be like religious confession. Only more effective, because more drastic and thus more satisfactory to the Guilty. There's too much private and masked self-punishment. Too often other people get hurt. "You astound me. Alter." Thank you, Geis. Next question. Let's shift over to the problem of excessive or invisible characterization in science fiction. The problem of too much soul-searching or too much cardboard." Ah, yes... whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous introspection, or by opposing, get stuck with stereotypes. That is not quite the question, Geis. It is true, however, that too many writers feel that if their central character thinks a lot about life and death and the depressing variations of his predicament, that is characterization. Phoo. It is only another lazywriter method of padding and conning. Characterization is making a fictional person distinctly individual! I have gone for years of reading science fiction and enjoyed only a few characters who were actually alive and kicking. Most characters are zombies with whole sections of their brain missing, and most are, physically, merely 'slim,' 'fat,' 'tall,' 'beautiful,' 'hidsome,' 'well-muscled,' and etc. What I'd like to know is additional individual realistic detail: club toes?, a malformed little finger?, receding hairline?, a mole kept hidden by an artfully arranged shock of hair?, lobeless ears?, stretch marks?, premature arthritis in a knee?, neck too long?, long-waisted?, Roman nose?, big hands? That sort of thing. "You expect writers to work that hard? Must they go to all that trouble? After all, it's only science fiction." True, and sf readers will put up with anything, won't they? Nevertheless, I'm demanding even more. I want to know (and so do hundreds of thousands of other starved-for-goodwriting readers) what kind of soup a given character likes -- does he eat lefthanded? -- what his favorite colors are, what turns himher on sexually, is he a stoic, an optimist, action-oriented, passive, an egotist, an egoist, prideful, lecherous, dishonest... Is the character loyal, # liar, gentle, impatient, merciless, loud, quiet, gregarious, solitary, suspicious, trusting? "Now, that's really asking too much. Alter. Writers can't stop and give all that information about a character! It would stop a story in its tracks." Where is it graven in stone that characterization must be dumped into the reader's lap all in one swell foop? Good characterization -- all the aspects of a fictional person -- is detailed as it naturally comes into play in a story. Thus: 'His bleeding hand was loose on the sword hilt. His weak lefthanded thrust...' 'The startling blue of her right eye contrasted with the milky blindness of the other.' Bah! This is obvious. Why lecture? "Because you're giving the readers some yardsticks. Some standards for judgement in their reading. Now all they have to do is turn a page or two and start another story in this issue, and read with part of their minds on what you've just said. Of course, I could have said it better." Don't start in again, Geis. I'll squelch you with one tendril tied behind my head. "You call that warped mass of ugly green flesh a head? I call it a rotting melon." Oh, Geis! Get Lost! I don't need your insults. Go do layouts for Science Fiction Review. "I will. But first I'm going to end this column." Yeah? How? This body is mine, remember. I only let you take control for typing purposes. This column has gone # manuscript pages, andthat's enough. All I have to do is pull the switch up here in the midbrain..." No -- no, Geis -- "Now to press the ojf button on the typer..." You double-crossing rat! I'll get you for this! I'll bushwack you in the cerebellum! I'll dry-gulch you in die medulla! I'll cut you to ribbons in the sensory cortex! I'll wipe you out in the autonom --  iUarcimi Alattia, Aaxwell Charles Sheffiel Even In the company of Genius, Gerald Mattin was unique! Saturday #th, #:# a.m. Dear Professor Benson, The draft of Gerald Mattin 's biography for your volume 'The Lives of the Great Scientists' is finished. I am sending it to you under separate transmission. Sorry to run so close to your deadline, but it's hard to compress his twenty-five years into twenty pages. Your other request for new 'personal incidents' and 'intimate touches' from my time working with Mattin is a tough one. As you say, no doubt I knew him as well as any man did. Everybody knows that he saved my life at the expense of his own, so that's not new. "How would you describe the real Gerald Mattin?," you ask. How would I describe the real Gerald Mattin? I'm not sure the words are in the language. And if they are, you would not want to offer that particular 'personal touch' to your young readers. What can I say? I think the best thing is to tell you here -- and for the first time -- the full story of my association with Mattin; then you can use any of it as you think fit. Don't be surprised if it doesn't match the standard accounts too well. And don't get worried about the biography I'm sending for your book -- I need the money, and what you will receive tells the wellknown official version of Mattin the Great and Noble Scientist. When it all began twenty-five years ago I still had my offices on K Street. My business partner had recently vacated his office as a result of an unsuccessful trading venture in pharmaceuticals. He was on the Venus terra-forming project, three years hard labor without the option, and I was trying to make sense of his business records and client lists when Mattin breezed in. No appointment, of course. He would never have dreamed of calling in advance. He barged in without knocking, said "Henry Carver?," and helped himself to a chair when I nodded. I looked at him without much enthusiasm -- as a potential client he was not promising material. About twenty-four years old, thin as a stick, with dry black hair and a face that was still fighting the last battles with acne. He was smoking a black cigar that looked as thin and wicked as he did. "I'm Gerald Mattin. I'm here to give you a chance to make fifty million credits. Carver," he said. Well, you can't always go by appearances, and politeness is free. "Mr. Mattin, you certainly know how to catch a man's attention," I began smoothly. "But you have the advantage of me. You know my profession and I don't know yours. What is your line of business?" "I've got a system for instantaneous point-to-point transfer of objects. Energy-free, in the right circumstances. Distance not a factor." If I'd known a bit more science that's when I'd have thrown him out of the office. I groped around in my memory for childhood reading. "You mean -- teleportation?" "Naw. None of that 'think yourself some other place' rubbish. This is solid match, solid physics, and state-of-the-art engineering. Ever hear of Ernst Mach, or Minkowski, or Weyl or E.A. Milne?" Milne rang another bell in my childhood memory bank. I thought of Eeyore and decided Mattin must be off his head. I shook mine and he seemed pleased. "Good. I want a working partner who knows not too much science and no general relativity. If you'd given the wrong answer I'd have been out of that door. The people who gave me your name were sure you'd have a fifth grade education in physics." He grinned nastily. "You also have a reputation for being a tricky lawyer, a man with good contacts for investments and a strong taste for credits. Unless you want to deny that lot, let's talk business." He was brash, arrogant and rude. credits and that didn't happen every day. I suppressed my irritation. "Mr. Mattin, I am sure that you did not come to see me merely to offer gratuitous insults. You have a method for moving objects -- a mattertransmitter, you might say. Now, if you want me to act as your legal representative in pursuing patents arid corporate financing from transportation groups there will be several formalities. First, my fee for such work is a ten percent carried interest, plus expenses for patent search, filing fees and travel." "Carver, you're a raving madman." He stood up abruptly and walked over to stub his cigar in my window pot of prize fibrous-rooting begonias. I mentally added a percent to my fee. "In the first place, you'll get two percent and no expenses, take it or leave it. This thing will be worth two or three billion credits five years from now, conservatively. In the second place, do you think I'm crazy enough to patent this thing, or let some big transportation company get their hands on it? There'd be leaks. I'd be out in the cold before I could whistle and the big boys would be off and running." Paranoid, he seemed to be. I dropped my first idea of selling him out to General Transportation, and he went on. "What do you think I'm offering you your interest for? I can tell you now, it's not for your smile or your legal abilities. I want you to promote this, sell a forty percent interest to a group which isn't in transportation now, but which would like to be if it could get a big enough piece. That's your job -- to raise the money. If you can't do it, tell me now and we'll stop wasting each other's time." I thought for a while as Mattin sat and fidgeted. It might be possible. We'd need a working model -- the group I had in mind would need pretty good proof that they were onto a good thing. And I'd need to know a lot more about it before I began. I had already seen enough of Mattin to agree that I would have to be the salesman. I nodded slowly. "Maybe. How much money do you need to get things going?" lion five." "That's to set up the whole transportation company?" I asked. He laughed. "No way. That's to do the full-scale tests -- after that we'll need big money." He was insane, I decided. A million credits for a test. He saw my expression and backed off a little. "Look, Carver, you have to know more about this thing. It's a completely new principle. It's only energy-free, exactly, for transfers in a strictly Lorentzian space-time. Where there's curvature -- matter -- you need some energy even if the Link transfer points are on timelike geodesics. You need a lot more energy if the transfer points are not on timelike geodesics But are on a Newtonian equipotential surface -- and you need an impossible amount of energy unless the configuration is perfectly symmetrical with respect to all Link transfer points." At the time, and for a long time afterwards, that speech was complete gibberish to me. I don't have total recall, but I do know Mattin' s exact words -- I learned long ago to record in full all conversations in my office. That has saved my skin more than once in the past. I shook my head at Mattin. "I hear you, Mr. Mattin, but I can't make head or tail of what you are saying. Tell me in English, please."  He shouted, back at me. "English, you dummy! I already put it in really simple-minded language for your benefit." He controlled himself and swallowed hard. "I'll put it even simpler for you. To set up the Mattin Link system on the surface of the Earth is the end objective, but it's going to take tremendous energy to establish and a lot of money. We just can't tackle that first. It's not possible to set up a practical system out in space, because the relative distances of the Link entry points keep changing. "What we have to do is test it in space, for the simplest case -- four entry points, in a regular tetrahedron. It will still be quite a trick to get the distances just right for long enough to do the transfer, but it can be done -- I've calculated it. Then when we've demonstrated it in space we'll be able to get backing easily for the operational big system here on Earth." I was getting the idea, vaguely, and I didn't like the sound of it. Mattin had no working model. So, no model to show the backers. A demonstrate anything. Space work -- always a fine way to run up the costs. I wondered if I was the madman, listening to Mattin at all. "Can't you make just a small working model, here on Earth?" I asked. "Just to show off the general idea?" "Out of the question. The Earth-based system has to have all the entry points practically symmetrical with respect to the center of mass -- I told you, they've got to be on an equi potential, and perfectly symmetrical with respect to each other." He shook his head firmly. "Even the simplest system with four Links will require a horrible amount of energy to initialize on Earth. That's basic physics -- the system's not conceivable without it. It's space or nowhere for the test. Now, how long will it take you to get adequate backing?" I looked at him sadly, and shook my head in turn. "It's quite impossible. With no patents, no working models -- nothing, in fact, but an idea -- we could never get the financing." Mattin looked at me with a dead-fish expression on his face. "Tough luck. Carver," he said. "I guess that's goodbye to your I won't tell you how I found the backing. Professor Benson. It makes me uncomfortable to think of it even now. Can you imagine trynothing but a wild-sounding idea to peddle, with a main character who was so paranoid that he would tell the details of his system only to people that he judged could not understand them? With no working models, no mechanical drawings, no patents. I did it. I don't think I could or would do it again, but I did it. I proved that there are people greedy and rich enough that a bet with a off could be attractive, even with those odds. But then, my backers were no strangers to gambling. They left me in no doubt of what my fate would be if the Mattin Link system was less than I promised, but in ten weeks I had the papers -- such as they were. Our sponsors were not used to much in the way of written agreements. I called Mattin and he came to the office. Like the backers, he was suspicious of video-phone conversations. He came in as sullen and jittery as ever, then went over the agreements with a total and cold concentration. Oh, I'd checked Mattin out, you can be sure of that, within a few hours of our first meeting. No one had denied that he was a genius -- and a madman. I really saw the first evidence of it when I watched him swallow down all the intricate financial details of our arrangement cold, in one sitting in my office. Then he came right back at me with a set of complex questions for our sponsors. He digested the new information with equal speed, then silently handed me a document of hiswn. "I know how much I'm worth to your friends once the system is working and the method known," he said. "I took'out a little life insurance." He had the right idea. Once the invention was proven, he'd be expendable and so would I. The paper he had given me was a copy of one he had filed at Central Bank. It was quite brief. If Gerald Mattin died in less than five years from the date of the first successful demonstration of the Mattin Link, all rights in the invention -- mine, Mattin's and the backers' -- went to the World Government, in toto and in perpetuity. "What about my five percent?" I complained. "You know I'm reliable." (I forgot to mention that I'd levered my interest up little by little as the game got harder -- and I'd earned every fraction of a percent. Mattin was smart enough to know when he had to give a little to keep me going.) Mattin looked at me curiously as though he had just turned over a stone and found me underneath it. "Sure," he said. "You're reliable." I didn't pursue the point -- but I didn't mention the document to the backers either. They might kill Mattin after the successful demonstration; they would have killed me before the demonstration, without thinking twice about it, if they had found out I had gotten them into a deal where Mattin's accidental death would mean their loss of ownership. Those gentlemen did not seek temporary solutions. Besides, I was sure I could convince them that Mattin was worth more alive. Anyway, we had the money for the tests. I handled all the purchasing -- four old cargo hulls, already in earth orbit, four power plants and a minimum of supplies. Mattin hid himself away in total secrecy and built four Mattin Link generators, one for each cargo ship. He calculated exact orbits for each, and an exact time at which all four Links could be switched on, when the hulls were in free fall at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. Finally, he made up a compact test package for the transfer itself, designed to measure the forces it experienced in transit. Theoretically they would be zero, he asserted -- no question of inertia or of acceleration entered the Link transfer process. All this took six long months, but it was all ready on time. I added weight and ulcers. Mattin became thinner than ever and bit his fingernails to shreds. We hired three operator crews for the hulls, with Mattin handling the fourth one himself -- the one with the experiment package to be sent through the Link system. He gave the other crews just enough instructions to be useless -- he was afraid they would learn too much. The Mattin Links were all activated automatically by radio from the computer on Mattin' s ship at the correct microsecond. Finally, the big moment arrived. I watched through a video link to my office in K Street. I don't like space, never have. I sat at my desk and watched a digital countdown to the time the transfer would take place. The tension was unbearable. Finally, after a few seconds that lasted forever! zero hour came. And went. Nothing. The test package sat there in the Link transfer zone, unmoved. I sat and shredded paper towels as the minutes ticked by. Nothing. When I was ready to run screaming round the room, Mattin came on the screen. "Something's wrong," he said. I could have told him that. He didn't seem as worried as I felt, not by a long shot. "It's almost certainly in the phase control. Tell the backers we'll have to come back to Earth so I can take a good look at it." I may have been less smart than Mattin in some ways, but I was way ahead of him in others. One thing I had been careful not to do was tell our sponsors when the test would be made. I sat there and congratulated myself on my foresight. "How long before you're ready to try again?" I asked. He shrugged. "Month, maybe, two months -- hard to say." That was the beginning of the worst time of my life. Seven failures, Professor Benson. Seven! Every one of them a cliff-hanger. Each countdown in my office was like the moments before an execution. By the third test we were sending things through the Link but the test equipment would arrive inside out, melted, reduced to powder (tests three, four and five respectively). On the sixth test, the equipment got through in one piece -- a bit battered, but not bad. Unfortunately we had promised our backers that the Mattin Link could be used to transport people as well as objects, and that's what they were expecting to see. On the seventh test, Mattin seemed very pleased with the results. This time he waa on the cargo hull where the test equipment was arriving. He came on to the video link and gave me a thumbs-up sign. "The equipment came through fine, meters all woiking properly. Still needs work, though." "Why does it need work, if the Link did its stuff correctly?" I looked at the video and could see the test equipment, apparently in good shape. Then I looked more closely. Next to the equipment were a big grey pancake and what seemed to be a long hairy worm. "What are those things?" "Well, I said it needs a bit more work," Mattin said defensively. "I think the phasing is still a touch off. See what it did to the rats we sent through this time." I looked again at the hairy shapes, then had to run across my office to vomit into the only available container, which was unfortunately my long-suffering pot of prize begonias. "No big problem," said Mattin cheerfully. "A week's work should fix it." Before he could get his week, we had a new problem. We were running out of money, and our backers were running out of patience. I was behind the stage at the opera house in Mexico City. One of our backers was big on opera. The message I got was brief but precise. There was no more money in the pipeline, but there was big trouble in it unless we had instant success. I talked -- for my life. We were almost there, I swore, another few weeks would do it, one last test was all we needed. I had to wait three hours in the cold, empty backstage. Finally the word came down. Two weeks to prove ourselves. No more money. We had to find our own. I knew what came next if we failed and took the gloomy news back to Mattin. We considered our limited options. "Look what we need," he said. "First, we have to rent another cargo hull and power plant. One of the four we got has an expired lease and we can't renew it. So we need money for that. We have to have it. But we don't really need crews on all the hulls. They never do anything anyway, and it's all computer-controlled to switch on the Links at the right time. We could manage the whole thing." My insides did a rapid cartwheel. "What do you mean, we? You're not trying to get me up into space, are you? You know I've got a weak stomach." "Look here. Carver, are you absolutely convinced this test will work?" he replied. "I am, but are you?" I thought about that, then shook my head. "It'll flop, ten-to-one odds." "Then where would you rather be if it flops -- here to face the backers, or up there with a decent chance to escape to the Lunar Base or the Venus terra-forming project?" Mattin was odious, but supremely logical. I scraped up what was left of our meager finances and went off to bargain with the friendly discount spaceship company. We managed to get a cargo hull and a power unit, but so cheaply that I knew there had to be something wrong with them. I just had no alternatives. I signed a shortterm lease and called Mattin. He was ready. I had no excuses left. The next morning we were off to pick up the cargo hull from parking orbit and load the power unit board it. If you've never been in space. Professor Benson, take my advice and don't go. Free fall is constant nausea, a sort of static seasickness. After we were installed in the cargo hull with our equipment, I had nothing to do but think of my general misery and the unknown dangers of space travel. While I was doing that, Mattin was frowning over the rented power unit. "How much did you pay for this thing?" he finally asked. "All we had." "Well, it's all set to blow, looking at these readings. As soon as we complete the Link transfer, it has to be shut down -- it's not safe." A power unit running amok was all I needed. "What happens if it blows before we complete fte Link?" I asked. "We get into the shielded compartment," Mattin replied. "It's intended for use in bad solar flares, but it works just as well if a power unit goes wild." I took a look at the shielded compartment. Ample room for one, but a tight squeeze for two. At the other end of the ship the Mattin Link area was set up, with a blue line drawn by Mattin at the active area where the transfer took place. The test equipment was carefully placed there. Then Mattin fed in the programs for the final orbit adjusts of each cargo hull, ours and the three unmanned ones. While he was doing that, I had another secret worry. The Mattin Link drew a lot of power. It seemed to me that might be the thing that would push our power unit into a final blow-up. I was supposed to be watching the dials, but I didn't know what any of them meant. It did seem to me that a lot of them were way up in the red zone. Mattin finished the set-up and came over to me again. "How's it holding up? We've less than a minute and a half to go to transfer," he said, then bent over the power unit dials. He turned to me immediately, his eyes bulging. "I thought you were keeping an eye on this. It's way out of' tolerance. I don't think it will even hold together until the Link activates -- it could go up any second." Mattin's evaluation was good enough for me. Without taking a second look at the power unit dials I turned and began my drive for the shielded compartment. I'll never deny that Mattin always thought a lot faster than I did. By the time I began he was halfway there, and my lack of experience in free-fall slowed me down. When I approached he had already crowded into the compartment, then turned with his back braced against its rear. As I floated nearer, instead of squeezing to the wall to let me in too he lifted his feet up and gave me a great kick in the chest. It reversed me and I started to spin back along the length of the hull, unable to make contact with anything solid. One of the things they don't bother to tell you before you go into space is how slowly things can happen. I floated along the hull towards the Mattin Link transfer area, but I did it incredibly slowly. I was quite active, spinning end over end, shouting and screaming and waving my arms and legs, but none of that affected my forward motion at all. When my body had turned to face Mattin again, I saw that the door of the shielded compartment was firmly closed. I didn't imagine Mattin would open it voluntarily to see how I was doing until after the' power unit had done its worst. I tried to get a look at the digital countdown display to see how long it would be before the Link transfer took place, but I couldn't see it from the angle I had. When I finally collided with the bulkhead at the far end, I had no idea how much time I had left. Subjectively, I had spent the better part of my adult life drifting down that steel hull. Actually it was probably a minute at most. I held the bulkhead and did a quick review of my options. In a few seconds I would Though Damon Knight didn't write this Cookbook for People, his famous story inspired it: Homme Bourguignon, Chili Con Hombre, Mincema Pie... #I outrageousrecipes, lightheartedly illustrated; hardcovers, # at bookstores or postpaid from: Owlswick Press Box # Philadelphia PA i#ioi be a big pink pancake or a 'long pink sausage if I didn't get out of the Link transfer area. Or I could be fried purple when the power unit blew. Or -- a long shot -- I could get back to the shielded area in time, open the door somehow, and squeeze in with that swine Mattin. I set my legs against the bulkhead and took off with a 'mighty spring for the other end of the hull. I had been on the way for a second or less when three things happened. First, everything flashed a motherof-pearl pink. Then I received a tremendous bang on the head. Finally I was given an even bigger smash on my chest and ears. Then I passed out and had a little peace. Things were not much better when I came to again. The pain in the head and chest were still there, and I had aching eyeballs -- I didn't Spider Robinson The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo, BantamPeacock, # plates, # Pnce Upon A Time, ed. David Larkin, BantamPeacock, # plates, # Richard Corben's Funny Book, Nickelodeon Press, lotsa pages, # Bloodstar, Richard Corben  Robert E. Howard, Momingstar Press, pages  price unknown The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Ursula K. LeGuin, Bantam, # pp., # Star Light, Star Bright, Alfred Bester, BerkleyPutnam, # pp., # Man Plus, Frederik Pohl, Random House, # pp. # Midworld, Alan Dean Foster, Ballantine, # pp., # Stellar ##, ed. Judy-Lynn del Rey, Ballantine, # pp., # Bolo, Keith Laumer, Berkley Putnam, # pp., # The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, Robert A. Heinlein, Berkley, # pp., # The Craft of Science Fiction, ed. Reginald Bretnor, Harper  Row, #I pp., # Rocket to the Morgue, Anthony Boucher, Pyramid, # pp., # My Name Is Legion, Roger Zelazny, Ballantine, # pp., # Nerves, Lester del Rey, Ballantine, # pp. # Ihave already been to the library. I gave them two full cartons worth. And the obvious dogs, too vile for the library, have long since been converted to fire-starter -- so much, in fact, that I may not need to bum any wood this winter. And est count # books on my desk for review, considerably obscuring my view of the Bay of Fundy. These are the cream of the crop, you understand, the ones I just can't ignore. To list that many books would triple this column's length (and my woikload) and doubtless incense the authors so honored. So I can only suggest you subscribe to Locus (# issues for # from Charles  Dena Brown, # Ridgewood Lane, Oakland CA #), which has the space and inclination to list a thousand titles a year. And, of course, jump in and take as big a bite as I can. Here's this month's mouthful.    Some visual treats, first, four volumes of two different sorts. You only need me to tell you about The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo and Once Upon A Time: Some Contemporary Illustrators of Fantasy if they are unavailable in your area. Because if you ever happen across them, you're certain to buy them (assuming you can afford them) regardless of what I say. Both are so fiendishly exquisite as to beggar description (with a slight edge to Gallardo), and both left me with the same breathless feeling I got when I first discovered M.C. Escher. Gallardo resembles Escher in some ways, too -- although he's strictly a painter (I do lots of woodcuts, myself, but I bum them all in my stove). Even if the name doesn't ring a bell, you've almost certainly seen Gallardo's work: he has appeared on book covers and record jackets, in story-illos and advertisements, in magazines as diverse as Penthouse, Seventeen and the Ladies' Home Journal -- you'll recognize him when you see him. And don't expect from this list that he is your standard hack commercial artist -- he is An Artist, and a hauntingly good one. His surrealistic, insanely-detailed style will delight my tired eyes for years to come, and I thank Betty Ballantine for compiling and sharing this collection. Even if she just couldn't help herself. Thanks are also due for Once Upon A Time, a sort of visual revue ftom fifteen artists currently working in the fantasy field. Editor David Larkin has assembled an absolutely splendid company, here: Tony Meeuwissen, Nicola Bayley, Brian Froud and Peter Barrett are my particular favorites, but I didn't dislike any (with the possible exception of Ian Miller, whose vision is just a bit harsh for my taste), and virtually every plate is a treat. The collection includes (as a stupendous four-page foldout) the enormous and beautiful Pauline Ellison painting which, trisected, became the covers for Bantam's edition of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy. Both Once Upon A Time and the Gallardo collection are from Bantam's Peacock Press, the folks who brought you The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta -- which is to say, the reproduction is as achingly beautiful as the material itself. A science fiction fan is by definition one whose sense of wonder extends as far as his eyes; consequently, every one of you should enjoy these treasures.   Now for the second type, the two volumes the New York Times critic probably wouldn't like. If you're a long-time reader of "underground comics," you don't need me to tell you about Richard Corben. I got my first hit from "Cidopey" in Up From the Deep #, and I've been addicted ever since: Corben's vivid suprarealism and cinematographic style have kept me haunting convention huckster rooms for years, searching feverishly (and usually fruitlessly) through moldy copies of Skull and If you don't know Corben, check out Richard Corben's Funny Book. Published by Tom Reamy's Nickelodeon Press, it is a reasonably complete collection (in oversize, coffee-table-book format with hard covers) of Corben's underground work, on # stories written by himself, Ed Faust and Jan Stmad (that is not a typo). At least a third of the stories themselves are either dumb, trite, or extremely simplistic by "overground" sf standards but even the worst is a cut above Marvel Comics' average, and the artwork is almost uniformly excellent. Further, for those of you who are dedicated Corben freaks, the collection contains not only the first part of "Den" (from Grim Wit ##), but eight more pages, unavailable anywhere else in English, in color (unfortunately, this section too is "to be continued" somewhen). In fact, my only real complaint is that only Part II of "Den anda minor story called "Lame Lem s Love" are in color. I realize dat stuff's expensive, but I wish to God Reamy had opted to give us "Cidopey" in cdlor if anything ("Lem" wasn't even colored by Corben). Ah, well -- I'm still profoundly grateful to have this excellent collection, and grateful to Tom (most recent winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, by the way) for slipping me the review copy at the Worldcon. But I'm even more impressed by Bloodstar, Corben's most recent work. The graphic novel is virtually brand-new, as an art form. It grew out of the "serious comic book' (serom?), which might more properly be called the graphic shortstory (or at best, serial). The graphic novel is an attempt to make length piece of work. The only ones I knew of up until MidAmeriCon were Gil Kane's Blockmark and Byron Preiss's Starfawn. Bloodstar is superior to both by an order of magnitude. For one thing it's (like the Funny Book) enormous, a coffee-table hardcover with excellent paper stock -- which allows for much more ambitious artwork than the paperback and digest sizes of Blockmark and Starfawn respectively. For another thing, it's got a pretty fair story (the jacket flap says it's by Robert E. Howard, the title page says Howard and John Jakes, and the back-flap describes Corben as "the author." There's a bioblurb on Howard and none on Jakes -- you figure it out), not firstrate but rather engaging, and certainly better than the whiz-bang Preiss contrived. But mostly it's got Corben, who here achieves his apotheosis. This is plainly his most mature -- and most consistent -- woik to date, a talent in full flower. At the convention I heard the publisher of this book opine that he had made a mistake in not printing it in color. I'm surprised to find myself disagreeing. Much as I admire Corben's volcanic use of color, I have to say that here it might actually have distracted me from the subtle perfection of his airbrush work, of his masterful use of shadow and light. Finding Bloodstar and the Funny Book were two of the highlights of MidAmeriCon for me, and I've since read each of them three or four times, lingering over nearly every panel Bloodstar doesn't use borders, a delightful innovation). If you want to do the same, write to Nickelodeon Press, #I White, Kansas City MO # for the Funny Book', and The Momingstar Press Ltd., P.O. Box #, Leawood Kansas # for Bloodstar. Be warned: their superb size and paperstock make them bloody expensive. But they're both worth every cent. If you asked me to choose. I'd agonize for several hours and then pick Bloodstar: a genuinely magnificent achievement. Tell 'em Spider sent ya.    Let's get some fiction 'round here, by gar. Lord, where do I Start? How about The Wind's Twelve Quarters? Well, that one gives me problems. It's far too good and important to give it a mere minireview -- and yet, once I've told you that it's Ursula K. LeGuin's first short story collection, containing # stories from ##-#, with introductions by the author, the only thing I have left to tell you is that if you don't make arrangements to buy it at once you are a turkey's idea of an idiot. It includes "Ornelas" and "Revolution," (Hugo and Nebula winners respectively) and a lovely cover painting (you'd think that Bantam, which published Once Upon A Time, would credit their cover artists), and it put several warm happy hours in the middle of a chilly and busy month, and it will do the same for you if you'll only buy it. What are you doing just sitting there? You know where the bookstore is. I'll wait.    Are you back? Good -- turn around and go back to the bookstore. You forgot to get Star Light, Star Bright, the second volume in Putnam's short-fiction-ofAlfie-Bester series. Again, it would be pretentious and redundant to say more than that this contains # stories (# from the out-of-print Starburst collection, # from the also-o.o.p. Dark Side of the Earth, one from Harry Harrison's Astounding antho) plus introductions, one three-page "interview" with Isaac Asimov and an autobiographical sketch called "My Affair With Science Fiction," all unarguably written by the whackiest and most exUrsula will share delicate beauty with you; Alfie will drop a mouse in your pocket and push you into the ladies' room. And make you love it.    Fred Pohl's Man Plus was a tight, suspenseful, at times gruesomely fascinating book, with a blockbuster finish -- but I put it down unsatisfied. Well, not exactly. I mean, a polished expert like Fred (Pohlish expert? Naw -- we don't sink to Pohlish jokes in this column) is always satisfying to read -- especially in comparison to the bulk of the sludge on my desk. It was only a part of the premise I didn't believe. But it was a significant part. Basically the plot revolves around an attempt to place a man on the surface of Mars (and keep him there, alive). To do this it is necessary to redesign (and therefore redefine) "man." Fred's nearfuture military establishment does this by essentially turning a man into a gargoyle; a particularly hideous cyborg, who has been given "every assurance" that they'll do "everything possible" to restore him to "something very like normalcy" after the mission. There are at least two complications: first, he's not the first -- his predecessor died, cause unknown; and second, his wife is messin' roun' with his bes' friend. The psychological drama of the said sap is absorbing and agonizingly drawn, and the other characters are just as real-seeming. Ah, but there's a third complication, of the "ticking bomb" school: the world political situation is rapidly going to hell, and The Last War is just around the corner. As it draws ever nearer, no less a character than the President of the United States (and... certain others) pours on more and more pressure, spends his political capital to the limit, in a desperate last-minute attempt to get that damn' gargoyle on Mars. The reason given is that maybe we can plant a seed there before this planet blows up. But the gargoyle -- who is invulnerable and perfectly adapted to a Mars-surface environment -- is not human, and further he is sterile. No, worse: neutered, as one of the "minor modifications." So I don't get it, Fred. That don't seem like planting a seed to me. I can sort of understand the motives of the Certain Others, and I won't blow your surprise ending there -- but what did the President hope to gain? Extending the human race by one more lifetime? What? But I repeat: except for what seems to me like one dumptrucksized hole, Man Plus is a fine, tightly plotted adventure from an Old Pro. This business is driving me crazy. Maybe I'll chuck it all and go join a monastery. Oh, no! Another one of those ambiguous reviews that make me look like a fickle schizoid (say that three times fast). To the above "dandy book with a dumptrucksized hole in it," let us now add "a mediocre book with some superb aspects." Let's see him talk his way out of this one, gang. Alan Dean Foster's Midworld is a book with flashes of excellence. Like most of Ballantine's list since Judy-Lynn del Rey took over, it is Good or Hardcore SF Like They Used To Write -- with some startlingly modern ideas. It has an intriguing premise, a richly inventive background world, plenty action and adventure and a slambang finish. And the prose, the writing itself, is just a cut or two above slushpile level. I don't mean that only in a fussy grammarian's sense (although sentences like "Furious at missing its prey, the blunt snout swung round for a stab," set my teeth on edge), but in a fmstrated reader's sense as well. The sentence structure is frequently awkward, the word choice often clumsy, and the overall pacing effect limps like a one-legged wino in an earthquake. My eyeballs kept tripping. I have other gripes, including the inconsistent naming system (why are some characters called by mere sounds, like "Jhelum" and "Joyla," while others in the same tribe are called "Brightly Go" and "Reader"?), the mostly onedimensional characterization, the stilted dialogue, and Foster's failure to answer more than half of the questions he raises (why did Tsingahn commit suicide? How did the tribe survive with insufficient gene pool and insufficient time to mutate far enough? Et many a cetera). But mostly it was sheer poor wordsmithing that made this book a chore to read. The hell of it is that it isn't even consistent -- at times, the prose seemed effortless; occasionally brilliant. And once I made the effort, as I said, I found some delightful and fascinating ideas. But unless you have a tolerance-level that lets you read, say, "He was a normal-sized man, by normal man standards," without flinching, you'll never get to them.    So there's this tremendous New Wave-Old Wave controversy in sf, with each side bemoaning the intransigent idiocies of the opposition. Me, I tend to bemoan the intransigent idiocies of both sides. It seems obvious to me that blending the strengths of both is the best way to resolve the apparent dichotomy any apparent dichotomy). But Judy-Lynn del Rey's Stellar ## goes a long way toward converting me to pure Old Wavism. I found it much less ambitious than, say, the average Orbit -- and much more fun to read. Call it # on the Spidermeter. One story I loathed: "Tindar-B," by Patrick Conner, a slushpile job I abandoned after three pages with a clear conscience (Xenobiologists land on a planet about which they know absolutely nothing except that the last survey crew died. So the very first thing they do upon landing is blow the hatch -- not cycle an airlock, blow a hatch -- and all take a deep breath at once. To see if the air is safe. I'm not making this up, nor is it meant to be a parody. " 'Seems okay,' Byron ventured as he noticed his heart was still beating. 'So far so good, anyway.' " Not by me it isn't.). And two stories only get a half-credit apiece; Jay Haldeman's "Songs of Dying Swans" wasn't up to his usual standard of excellence, and Larry Niven's "Mistake" is self-descriptive (three pages isn't too much for a one-joke throwaway, but it was a dumb joke). But the rest were uniformly good, with particularly high marks for James White's "Custom Fitting," Hal Clement's "StuckWith It," and Richard S. and Cliff D. Simak's "Unsilent Spring" (although that last had a weak ending), and a double-bonus for "The Bicentennial Man," one of the best stories Isaac Asimov has written in years. Overall a satisfying book, and certainly more consistent than half of the anthos coming out these days. , Keith Laumer's Bolo confuses me some. It's a collection of all the stories Keith has written involving Bolo Combat Units -- essentially self-aware tanks, but with planetwrecking firepower. I had read all of these when they originally appeared, and enjoyed them mightily. So re-reading them was a little... painful. Because the first two, at least, now strike me as just awful, pure adolescent-tripe adventure, wherein impossibly competent heros waltz through Incredible difficulties with James Bondian cool and ridiculous ease. I liked 'em just fine when I was seventeen, but I guess I've just outgrown 'em or something: they now seem contrived and utterly unbelievable (the Bolo gets only a walk-on in the second story, "Courier," and Retief defeats it by sticking his hat into the gun muzzle). I dunno, maybe I'm just an old fogey. I've gotten quite a few letters from younger readers asking me to turn them on to some Good Old Adventure, and this is sure the pure stuff. And the other four stories are infinitely better, wringing genuine pathos from the plight of a selfaware behemoth programmed to destroy. "The Last Command" in particular is a classic of tight pacing and suspense, with a moving ending. Which gives the book a bare # on the meter -- and yet I enjoyed it a good deal. This seems to be my month for ambiguity. Perhaps I should go join that monastery at that.    When I spoke with GoH Robert Heinlein at MidAmeriCon, I asked him to autograph my paperback copy of The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. Now, I have literally everything Mr. Heinlein ever wrote in my collection (with the exception of his one and only collaboration), some of them in hardback. Why did I choose this book? Well, it wasn't because it contains "All You Zombies," although that is one of the all-time classics and certainly the god-damndest time-travel-paradox story ever (not to mention the single most-imitated story in science fiction). Nor was it because Hoag contains "They, another genre classic and the ultimate logical extension of paranoia as a world-view. No, it was "Th Man Who Traveled In Elephants," my single favorite Heinlein story of all time, that caused me to take this particular volume to Kansas City. Friends, I've read that story at least ten times in the twenty years since it first saw print, and every damn time I finish there are honest to God tears on my face, joyful, stinging tears. I've never seen that last sentence when it wasn't blurry, and I don't believe I ever will. I hope not. I don't want to inflate it out of proportion: it's just a short fantasy, more like the best of Ray Bradbury than most of Heinlein's work. But it catches me, every time. What more can I tell you? All praise to Berkley for reissuing this volume (a clear # on the Spidermeter, if that needs saying), and I envy any of you who have yet to read it.    The Craft of Science Fiction deserves a long and thoughtful review (more like half a column), but I'm (like one of Larry Niven's characters) running out of space. What this is, is a "symposium," a collection of essays on the craft of sf writing by: editor Reginald Bretnor, somebody named Pournelle, Larry Niven, James Gunn, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Frank Herbert, Alan Nourse, Norman Spin-rad, John Brunner, Hal Clement, lean, and two newcomers named Ellison and Sturgeon (tee hee). The book is just a kaleidoscope of fascinating insights into this craziest of all professions, uniformly excellent throughout. I consider it a must for any serious reader, writer or (especially) would-be writer of sf -- and teachers of sf and sf-related courses will find it invaluable. I'm grateful to own a copy: it's like spending a couple of weeks talking shop with # of the best in the business.    Three different people responded to my hint (July # .Galaxy Bookshelf) and mailed me copies of Tony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue. Of the three, one asked not to be identified. I've lost one's cover letter, and the third, Lisa Goldstein of Dark Carnival Fantasy  SF Bookstore, #-# Telegraph Ave., Berkeley CA #, was forced to admit that "unfortunately, this is not the place to get Rocket to the Morgue as I am sending you our last copy." Oh well. I urge the rest of you to hunt for it: a fine tight murder mystery by a late Great, with some delightful surprises and a locked-room murder -- plus the added pleasure of an insider's view of sf pro-andfandom of the #s, in which subculture Tony set his story. Spotting the Old Pros in their thin disguises is of course part of the fun -- but even if you don't happen to know any pro well enough to spot them in Macy's window, you'll enjoy Rocket. Thanks, Lisa -- and if the person whose letter I lost will write again. I'll be happy to return your copy, or pass it on to a good friend, or whatever stones ya. My Name Is Legion is not about Liz Taylor's husbands. It's a collection of those Roger Zelazny stories about the really-secret agent who doesn't appear in the World Data Banks (which he helped compile) and is therefore effectively invisible. Every year he sends one unsigned Christmas card to the head of the world's second-largest detective agency, listing four dates during the next year and the bars he'll be in on those dates. Remember now? In these three novellae, Roger's hero takes on underwater earthquakes ("The Eve of ("KjwalU'kje'k'koo-thai'lU'kje'k") (honest to God), and a berserk robot ("Home Is The Hangman," which just won a Hugo in spite of the fact that Roger forgot to explain, both here and in the original magazine publication, why the hell the robot was called The Hangman). A pretty good book, of the "thinking man's adventure" school.    I've been saving Nerves for last. If you haven't read this book yet, you're a lucky soul: rereading it for review was the most fun I've had all month. Don't be dismayed by the new cover (which looks like David Steinberg, with his face on crooked, being attacked by lime jello) -- this is one of the acknowledged classics of the field, and a textbook example of how to build suspense to the breaking point. Newly revised and updated, it is perhaps the first and certainly the finest of the disaster novels, probably Lester del Rey's finest work to date (and when, oh when will there be a new del Rey book?). Crisis in the atom plant, building at measured pace from a murmur to a sustained shriek, and seen through the eyes of a character I feel like I've known all my life: go get it. Some of the science is nOw outdated... or is it? See Lester's delightful afterword.    A last-minute plug, for those of you who are Callahan's Place fans: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon will not be a Tempo paperback after all. Ace bought Tempo, along with the rest of Grosset  Dunlap, and so Saloon will be an Ace paperback. And as near as I can outguess the time-lag (between the time I write this and the time you read it), it ought to be on the stands either right now or any day now. If you're not familiar with Callahan's Place, I humbly suggest you check it out: some of my best short stories are in that book (for those of you who are familiar with the series, the collection will contain three stories available nowhere else). And why haven't you bought my first novel Telempath yet (available in hardcover from BerkleyPutnam)? It's been out since December -- whassamatta, you don't like yourself or somethin'? Oh, and I've decided not to enter that monastery after all. Not only did I meet with vigorous objection from my wife and daughter (not to mention my creditors), Dick Geis threatened legal action. He claims there's only room for one altar-ego in this magazine (even God is not a constant any more: they've changed His mass). Ie you in church.  A a he m was lucky very man Oarry davenport had been hearing people talk about controllers ever since the day the first controller had been planted in the skuU of an anonymous convict in a state prison in California. People had argued about controllers at half the parties he had attended during the last two years and he had even started a couple of arguments himself before he had realized he would be better off if he headed for a quiet comer every time the subject came up. His wife and all her friends were convinced every male in the United States should be given a complete battery of psych tests at the age of twenty-one and fitted with a controller if he needed one, and they started crusading for their great project every time a beserker stuck a knife in somebody or some idiot managed to throw something lethal at a politician. He had never actually seen a controller, however, and no one had ever had to tell him there was a big difference between a tangible reality and a topic you argued about at parties. They had basn talking about the damned thing for at least thirty minutes now, but he still stiffened when the psychologist took it out of a drawer and laid it on his console. "You can pick it up if you want to," Dr. Lazarre said. "Sometimes it's a lot easier to think about something like this once you've actually touched the thing and looked at it close enough to read its brand name." Harry stared at the little plastic box through a haze. The shiny object inside it was a little smaller than the marbles he had played with when he had been a kid. TTie three micro-thin filaments coiled on one side were almost invisible. "They tried to design it so it would be as unobtrusive as possible," Dr. Lazarro said. "Most of the peqjle who've used them so far claim they never even notice they're wearing it. It has to be implanted under the skin by a surgeon, but all it needs after that is a quarterly maintenance checkup and a bimonthly ten minute visit to have the reservoir refilled. It's completely automatic and it usually reacts so fast the person who's wearing it doesn't even know he's started to lose his temper. The surgeon places it so it deposits the drug on the brain cells that react the fastest and the brain waves that trigger off the monitor have a unique configuration. It can react the instant it picks up the right type of brain wave, without waiting for it to build up. You may be aware something has happened that would normally have made you lose your temper, but normally you won't even feel an increase in your blood pressure. The brainwaves start changing long before the rest of the body can react." Harry stared at the box without picking it up. His brain had stopped functioning thirty minutes ago but his emotions would have been screaming with panic if the bastards had tied him down and loaded his system with a drug that reduced his IQ by fifty percent. He was a mathematician himself and he had understood the situation as soon as Lazarro had told him the results of his tests. He worked with mathematical models that could predict minor fluctuations in the North American economy and Lazarro worked with mathematical models that could predict the actions of any individual who would submit to his tests. Individuals could still make mistakes, but Lazarro had checked his work with three other psychologists and nobody outside his field could challenge his results. If Lazarro's computer said Harry Davenport was going to go beserk and kill somebody in the near future, then Harry Davenport was going to kill somebody if somebody didn't put him out of action first. "That still doesn't make it an easy reality to accept, of course," Lazarro said. "It's still a terrible thing to ask anybody. Most people feel personally insulted when its mentioned to them, and I don't blame them. We've done everything we can to make it as innocuous as possible, but it's still a terrible blow to any normal man's self-esteem. We're living in a culture in which that kind of external control is associated with weakness or with a loss of freedom and nobody who lives in a culture like that can adjust to this kind of change overnight." Harry sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. He was a wrinkled, middle-aged man who had been a leader in his profession for over fifteen years, and he had always been proud of the fact that he could maintain an urbane front under almost any conditions. The people he worked with were just as quirky as any group of people he had ever met, but he usually managed to keep his emotions under control and avoid the impulsive reactions that could turn minor situations into full scale emergencies. "I'm afraid it's pretty damned hard to believe, too. This is the first time in my life I've ever done anything that could even be considered violent. I wouldn't even watch boxing matches with my father when I was a kid." Lazarro waved his hand over the printout on his console. He was the senior psychologist in the clinic but he was about ten years younger than his client, and his crisp clones and carefully molded hair made him look like an advertising man's picture of the successful young man who dashed out of the office at the end of the day and spent the evening running around the city with the best looking girls in the area. "That's one of the main reasons it's always such a shock," Lazarro said. "A person with this type of personality can go along for years and years without hurting anyone and then he can ruin his whole life in an instant. There even seems to be a strong association between this trait and a couple of traits most of us consider desirable. Most of the people who have this problem seem to have a strong sense of responsibility to society and an aboveaverage capacity to get along with people. We've never been able to spot the people who lead normal lives and then blow up without warning before now, and the results are usually a shock to everybody." "And tfiis is all you can do? This is the only treatment you've come up with?" "It's the only treatment we've come up with anylxxiy can recommend. The only alternative would be a re-shaping of your personality that would be so basic and so extensive you'd probably resist it even more than most people resist this -- and the techniques for re-shaping personalities are so primitive you'd have no guarantee you wouldn't be a complete emotional cripple when you got finished. Some people blow up because they're repressing very strong grievances, and we can help them bring their anger up to the surface and teach them how to control it. But with a small number of people you're dealing with something that seems to be inherent in the structure of their personality. I can give you more information about personality re-shaping if you want it, but I can practically guarantee you'll think this is a better option." Harry's hands tightened on the arms of his chair. He lowered his head and stared at the thing on the console as if he were thinking about a decision in front of a subordinate. "We'll give you all the support we can give you if you agree to do this," Lazarro said. "We'll try to make it as easy as possible." There was no way he could keep Ellen from knowing they had done this to him. He would stand in front of his wife arid son with that thing in his skull and they would both know it was there. Everybody they knew would hear about it sooner or later.    Daddy couldn't help it when he hit you, Danny. He has a sickness that made him hit you but Mommy made him go to the doctor and they've given him a little machine that gives him some medicine when he starts losing his temper. Some people have emotions they can't control -- you may even have them yourself -- but we're living in a wonderful world where people are beginning to understand themselves better and learn how to control these things. I always knew there was something wrong with him. Remember how he used to get hot every time we talked about controllers? These calm, stable types are all alike. They try to look like they're made out of rock but they're always boiling like cauldrons when you open them up and get a look at their real feelings. You hate him and you hate me Harry. You've spent all your life talking to computers instead of people and now it's catching up with you. You've been hiding your feelings about other people behind that Goddamned mask you wear and now all that rage you've never learned to deal with has finally come out. I don't want to make threats, Harry, but Tm not going to let you go on living with that poor boy if you don't get some professional help. You could have broken his neck if you'd hit him any harder and the things you've done to his emotional development are probably just as bad. There isn't a court in the country that will let you keep custody of that poor child after this. "We're asking you to do this to protect others as well as yourself. Dr. Davenport. The least we can do in return is to use the resources we have here to make it as easy for you as possible." "So you can help me reduce the damage to my self-esteem?" "Some of the things that make this repulsive are inherent ii the basic idea. There isn't anything anybody can do about them and there isn't any point in pretending there is. But sometimes some of the things that make it painful can be handled pretty easily if somebody will just take a little trouble. A lot of people are afraid of the way their families may react, for example. Sometimes a good talk with the family can make the whole thing a lot easier to take." Harry's body tensed. His hands clutched the arms of his chair as if he were sitting in a car that was speeding toward a collision. "I don't know how you feej about your son, for example, but there are things we can tell him that will make it easier on you and that will still give him some assurance you didn't hate him when you hit him -- and that will let him know his father is still a man he can respect, too. They're hard problems to handle by yourself but we can give you expert advice. We've got films we can show him and we can work out programmed sessions for your whole family that are almost guaranteed to make the whole thing much more tolerable. The fact that your wife's had some experience in psychotherapy may help, too. People still think about this the way they thought about ordinary mental illness at the beginning of the century. A wife with the right kind of attitude can make it a lot easier to face the rest of the world and -- " Harry's fists clenched. He pushed himself out of the chair and Lazarro tensed. He looked down at the well-dressed, self-confident young man sitting in fi-ont of him. Lazarro's right hand moved toward a keyboard on the righthand side of the console. Harry's fist rose above his shoulder. Rage twisted his face. His fist swung toward the psychologist's head like a rock on the end of a rope. Lazarro punched a button on his keyboard and kicked his chair away from the console. A cloud of white gas blossomed out of a nozzle built into the console. Spring breezes played around Harry Davenport's head. He sucked in a big lungfull of gas and his muscles relaxed. Warm, pleasant sensations spread through his body. He pulled in another lungfull. He knew they had designed the gas so every breath would make him want more, but he was just as vulnerable as every other human being who had ever breathed it. He slumped into the chair. The cloud drifted toward him and he sucked in more gas. Lazarro eased himself out of the swivel chair. He stepped up to the console and studied his patient. "Are you all right. Dr. Davenport? Does your head hurt?" Harry stared at him out of the haze. The quick-acting tranquilizer had started wearing off already. His body still felt warm and heavy but he was already beginning to react to the situation again. His fists clenched again. He started to stand up and then fell back. "You goaded me into doing that," Harry said. "You pushed every Goddamned button you could." "I didn't know you'd react that way. I was trying to bring out the things that may be bothering you but I didn't know you'd react that way. I've got a good idea what they are but I wouldn't have mentioned them if I'd known you'd react that way." "You don't know the things that'll trigger it off? You've got me all mapped out on your Goddamned diagrams and you don't know when I'll do it?" "I should have realized. We're putting you under a tremendous stress; hif the people in this city would blow up if somebody put them in the kind of dilemma you're in. I miscalculated the impact I was going to have, but I wasn't trying to make you blow up. It's happened twice now already. Dr. Davenport, and you've been lucky both times. You're caught in a trap and this is the only way we can set you free. It's a rotten deal to hand anybody, but if it's your relationship with your wife that's bothering you, why don't you at least give me a chance to talk about it with you? There are things we can do nowadays that can make this whole business a hundred percent easier. We spend more time with the families of our clients nowadays than we do with the clients themselves." "There isn't one Goddamned thing you can do with that woman! You don't know the kind of person you're dealing with! She's been going to encounter groups and human relations clinics ever since she was a Goddamned teenager and the only thing they've ever taught her is the best place to poke people where it hurts!" "We can set up specially programmed sessions for her. We can introduce her to encounter groups and experiences that can break down the defenses of people who've practically made a career out of going to encounter groups. We can even offer her the kind of full-scale self-analysis every psychologist has to go through to get his license to practice." "You aren't going to change her damned behavior by helping her understand herself! You don't know . the kind of person you're dealing with!" "You think she'd make this dif-! ficult for you even if she understood her motives?' ' "You don't know the kind of person you're dealing with! You're giving her the biggest Goddamned present she's ever had! She's going to enjoy every damned moment of it!" Lazarro glanced at the clock on his console. It was two thirty in the afternoon and he had left the rest of the day free. They had passed the big barrier charted on the printout. He had been afraid it would take all day and it had taken less than fifty minutes instead. The next few hours were going to be some of the worst hours Davenport would ever live through, but the end of the afternoon was as predictable as the orbit of a spaceship. A man like Davenport could adjust to anything once he got it out in the open and started talking about it. "You think she's going to enjoy this. Dr. Davenport?" Lazarro said. "You think she wants you to put up with something like this?"  Masterworks by some of the finest science-fiction writers of our time: Michael Bishop Larry Niven J. E. Pournelle Joanna Russ Roger Zelazny now available. To order, send the title and number, your name and address, # plus # postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. # Please allow eight weeks for delivery from our receipt of your order. Dear Mr. Baen: Bravo! and congratulations on your editorial "Epistle to the Christians". I concur towish more people could share these beliefs, or at least see them as a possible viewpoint. If we could only reset our priorities enough to get funds for those things which are technologically feasible, we would take a giant leap forward, with the momentum carrying us on indefinitely. But you didn't discuss just how far we should carry this "dominion" stuff. Jerry Poumelle, as usual, had an excellent column "That Buck Rogers Stuff" in# Step Farther Out. However, I don't agree with soijie of your methods. We had better avoid atomic drives, especially fission, when close to inhabited planets. Of course there's more than One Earth, but let's be especially careful with this one! Larry Niven's "Children of the State" and Fredrick Pohl's "Gateway" are both OutA-Sight, and all your shorts are acceptable if not truly excellent. Keep up the good work, Faithfully yours, Vincent Wolfe # West #th Avenue Arvada, CO # Certainly wc should avoid significant radioactive contamination of Earth's atmosphere. Perhaps the best "thrust mix" would be a combination of chemical reaction drives for personnel and laser launching for material, when launching from Earth, combined with atomics for Lunar and cis-Lunar activities. Dear Mr. Baen, During a Christmas season filled with the efforts of Science Fiction and Fantasy writers to incorporate their specialties into the Nativity, I found you editorial "Epistle to the Christians" a refreshingly intelligent approach. I feel that you may receive verbal fire from fundamentalists. Perhaps the following quotes from American astronauts may add to the validity of your conclusion: "Once a man flies in space, he may never be the same..." Edgar D. Mitchell Apollo # Lunar Module Pilot "My space flight experience changed my entire view of reality on Earth... gave me a profound feeling of rejuvenation." Col. Alfred M. Worden Apollo # Command Module Pilot "The whole process begins to shift what it is you identify with. From where you see it, the Earth is a whole, and it's so beautiful. And you realize that you've changed... something about your relationship with this thing we call life. It's different and it's precious." Russell L. Schweickort Apollo # Lunar Module Pilot "... however you look at it, the observation is humbling because the tenuousness of our existence is emphasized by the need for man to get into harmony with his environment and with his fellow man." Col. Gerald P. Carr Skylab # Commander If in fact the vision of Revelation is toward the stars, then the first impressions of the astronauts that man in space will see himself as Man may justify that vision. Surely we must unify ourselves as individuals and as a species before we spread our seed through the cosmos. Thank you again for a most thoughtprovoking editorial. Sincerely, Thomas C. Davis # Leaverton St. Palestine, IL #I Thank you. So far response to that editorial has been astonishingly supportive... Frankly I had thought I was being rather more daringly controversial than would seem to have been the case. Looks like the readers are way ahead of me! Dear Jim, As you'll recall we had a blood donation drive at the Kansas City world SF convention. As a result of Robert Heinlein's efforts, more and more science fiction clubs and convention committees are now interested in blood donation and recruiting donors. Robert's idea is that most lodges and clubs are associated with a "favorite charity": the Shriners with crippled children, that kind of thing, and that the science fiction community is now sufficiently mature that we ought seriously to give some thought to adopting our own. He suggests that encouraging voluntary blood donations would be appropriate for us -- and he's right. Not only is the cause championed by our first Grand Master, but it is an organ-transplant technology; something which is both technological and needed. In fact, the records show that science fiction fans and writers already donate blood at well over twice the national average rate, so we've made a fair start. With the highly successful blood drives at the # Westercon and Worldcon, the continuing efforts at recent regional conventions, and Mr. Heinlein's encouragement, we seem well on the way to ,a tradition -- one that I hope will catch on. I hate needles, but as the first one through the line at the Westercon I can assure everyone that it's at worst unpleasant -- and that's a small price. Jerry Poumelle To the Chief Panda: Having finally read Stephen Hawkins' article on black holes, I believe I've found an error! I can see how pair formation would cancel rotation, and any electrical or magnetic charge. (Remember monopoles?) But I cannot see how this can result in loss of mass, as even antiparticles have positive mass. Now that I've said that. I'd like to set up for ray gun practice all those physicists who say relativity breaks down in the singularity. Just because they can't conceive of infinite forces at a point doesn't mean the universe had to respect this handicap! Brett Bellmore # Burt Road Capac, MI #  believe the physicists regard the concept of irfinite-forces-at-a-point not so much as inconceivable as self contradictory -- and thus paradoxical. Now a paradox can be used to demonstrate any conclusion for which it is a premise: a theory which can prove anything can prove nothing. Thus the breakdown of physicists in the region cf a singularity. Directions # E. #th St. New York, New York # Dear Mr. Baen: I greatly enjoyed your editorial in the December Galaxy. This agrees with my own personal philosophy, as did the remarks made by Dr. Poumelle in "A Step Farther Out." I have enjoyed almost every story to be printed. in Galaxy during the two years I have subscribed to it. Particularly I enjoyed Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, and Inferno. I hope that you will continue to print such epic SF and fantasy. I also hope that you will continue to print important science fact such as Dr. Poumelle's interesting articles and Poul Anderson's "Our Many Roads to the Stars." Finally, I enjoy Geis's dialogs and Spider's attacks on the Hax of Terra. I hope that these features will survive for a long time and that Geis never wins his #th Hugo sold his soul to the devil in return for # Hugos). Sincerely, James K. Woosley Rt. #, Box # Caneyville, Kentucky #I Dear Ben Baen: I had my last final exam today so when I felt like staying up late rather than sleeping I needed something to do. What I ended up doing is rereading all of Spider's columns for the last eight months or so. This tells me that they are very good reading. Therefore, along the line of readers demands to editors I would suggest that you at least triple the amount of book reviewing wordage you ask him for (pay him more too). This brings up the problem of where Spider is going to find the time to write his own stuff if he is constantly reading and reviewing. I have an answer. It is I don't know. That's his problem. I am just making an (unreasonable?) demand. But I will say qualitywise that I never reread his short stories (sorry, I only find them good, not very good or great like his reviews). There, I am done. I hope you are planning to publish the fifth Amber book (The Courts of Chaos) when Zelazny finishes it. Also let Fteff do the illustrations (three covers would be about right). By the way, I voted for neither Geis or Alte because I think they are best together and that wasn't on the ballot. I demand a revote with a fair ballot. Thank you very much for whatever, Rudolph G. Kraft, #I # Dickson Cornell, N.Y. # Ben? One for Spider: Dear Spider, This is the second letter I've written you. That frightens me somewhat. I am the letter-writing type, but I usually manage to restrain myself when it comes to the likes of book reviewers and editors. I'm not much of an activist, I guess. A long preamble to thank you for stirring me to action. The mail that takes this letter out will take that thing is called) asking about voting rights and such. Score one for your column. It is a little chafing to think that # people pick the Hugos and less than that pick the Nebulae. Again thanks. I get tired of my own apathy, but it's such an easy habit. But that's not what I came to tell you. What it's all about really is I wanted to keep stroking your ego for the beautiful job you're doing in Galaxy. As book colunms go, I figure you're in a tie with Lester Del Rey for knowledgability (knowledgeIability) and slightly ahead for practicality. You tell me things I really would like to know about the books. I don't always agree, but then you've never written a column wherein you implied that I had to. For that, undying gratitude. Lest this too-long letter turn overly mooshy. I'd like to point out that Epoch wasn't a complete bust. It had a story by Lafferty. Seriously-er, I thought Bishop's "Blooded on Arachne" was a very remarkable story, if only because it had a plot (something he seemed to view as a minor vice) to go with the pretty words. How come there were ads in the SF Book Club for an Epoch with Ellison's "Demon with the Glass Hand" and then zilch? That's really a rhetorical question, I guess, bom out of fmstration. Keep on doing whatever the hell it is you're doing right. Science fiction and the people involved in it seem hell bent on taking themselves more and more seriously. "If this goes on" it will soon become the most pretentious genre there is. We need all the goofs who are just whacky enough to review the books that are on those funky wire racks in the grocery store along with the good stuff. Keep us honest, man. Somebody has to. Sincerely, Ron Nance # Burch St. Ardmore, OK #I And in a more jugular vein ,... My dear sir -- In regard to your column for the September issue of Galaxy: I wish you "was" a critic, too; for in that case, there at least might be an improvement in your grammar. To expect your column to be a duplication of T.S. Eliot would be fairly unrealistic. But, in order to legitimate sic science-fiction's claim to the attention of the intelligent reader, your column should (one might hope) evince -- if not a knowledge of the literary tradition -- at least some notion of what (in a fleeting moment of naive optimism) might be called "good writing." Is this asking too much? Chris Schneider The Spider replies: Dear Chris, Yes: the "intelligent reader" doesn't need to have sf "legitimated" (legitimized?) by pomposity. I have found that anything that cannot be stated informally is likely to be hogwash, and when I'm among friends I like to take off my necktie and scartch where it itches. Them as is offended are welcome to seek the egress. Hope you hang around, though. Spider Dear Mr. Baen, As a new addict of Galaxy, I wanted to let you know I really enjoy your magazine. Also, to my surprise, I find myself interested enough to actually write! First I'd like to put a vote in for Alter-Ego and Mr. Geis to continue to write a joint column as they have been. Second to Spider Robinson, I am one of those "bookshelf only" SF fans, (not any more) However I disagree with him on one point. My chances of choosing a good book from an SF shelf are about # out of #, if I can find any that I feel are worth reading or that I haven't alAn Infonnal A Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ## features an interview with Kelly Frees. "The Vivisector" -- a review column by rising-star Darreil Schweitzer. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" -- Aiter running rampant on a fieid of bloody books. "Angel Fear" -- an sf  fantasy art review column by Freff. Plus -- whatever comes in from irreguiar columnists: John Brunner, Ted White, Richard Lupoff, George Warren And: a new feature -- "Alien Thoughts" as an extended editor's diary, by Richard E. Geis. Quartarlysampls I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I ready read. (# years of experience sure help) My chances on straight fiction are about # out of #. Next I had a small objection to the letter of Thomas J. Murn, in the October '# Galaxy. Do you usually print letters from bigots?! Until I read Mr. Mum's letter, I wasn't sure what Dhalgren was about. In spite of the fact it was verbose I didn't like SF. I know a few people who did or would like it. Does Mr. Mum read "Doc" Smith? Lastly, the proportion of serials to columns to stories, etc. in the 'October '# issue was perfect. Keep up the good work! Sincerely, Catherine Button # Laughlin Road West Stratford, Conn. #  think what you are getting at is not that # of randomly selected s books are worth reading, but that you have exceptionally well developed "reader antennae" and so can score # of the time. Not bad! Dear Jim, I am not a Science Fiction Writer. I am not even a wildly participating Science Fiction "Fan". I am, however, a thoroughly entranced, though, for the most part generally fmstrated, middle-aged, female Braille reader of Science Fiction. I have to agree with the blind people who have communicated with Spider Robinson about this. Galaxy stands out as a highlight in my monthly reading Schedule. I have enjoyed "Galaxy Bookshelf' for years, first under Algys Budys's able guidance, and then with Ted Sturgeon manning the helm. I enjoyed them both and was envious of everybody who could sit down and devour all those goodies. Now Spider's a whole other kind of cat. I feel that he almost literally feels himself to be an extension of his typewriter when writing his column, and I dig that! I also feel he functions on a level of high integrity seldom encountered by anyone outside the pages of SF. I have seldom been so intrigued by anything as I was by the October issue of article, "Designing a Dyson Sphere", and Fred Pohl's superb first half of "Gateway". What a fascinating premise!. Though I read the magazine through the day after I got it,' I'm saving it so that I can reread the first half of Gateway in conjunction with the second half. Jim. your editorial skill is abundant, and you use it well and consistently. Keep up the good work. Gratefully, (Mrs.) Anne Darche  have recently learned that over # of Galaxy's "readers" are sightless, or nearly so. I also learned -- long ago-that among Galaxy's sighted readers are some of the most warmly enthusiastic and giving people in the world. It strikes me that this is a setup:  propose that Galaxy act as a clearinghouse between people who would like to provide science-fiction oriented services for the sightless and those who would like to receive such services. The services might include escorting at conventions and to fan club meetings; reading, either "live" or via cassette; helping to organize (this would probably only be feasible in large cities) fan clubs for the visually impaired, together with a sighted "auxilliary" to provide reading, escort and whatever. Authors could provide a very special service by arranging with their publishers for permission to do multiple cassette recordings of their works for non-profit distribution. Finally, someone must assume the "clearinghouse role: Galaxy will only be able to carry the burden for a limited time. Perhaps some fan club would like to offer its services for this? Those interested in being put in touch with volunteers should wait at least a month before making inquiries. Those wishing to volunteer should write immediately to: Galaxy Magazine Volunteers PO Box # Planetarium Station New York, NY # Cix' All published correspondence is subject to editing for clarity and brevity. ; sale. Free lists. Gordon Barker, #-G Minneapolis Ave., Duluth, MN #. Out of Print paperbacks and Paperback Originals -- send wants: Chloe's Bookstore, # McKinley, Sacramento, Ca. #. stamped envelope to: Grant, # Greenwood Lane, Lanham, Maryland #I . wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-#, St. Paul, Mn. #. hardcovers, magazines, fanzines, comics. Free Lists. Grant Thiessen, # Maplecroft Road, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Storefront, PO Box # Gl, San Francisco, Ca. #. 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If under # parent must Sign, order noi valid wilhoul signature WhatH?  What if God is a com puter? (## -- see other side  What if you found yourself on a trip to Earth in the  year #? (##) :  What if The Foundation Trilogy is true? (##)  What if mankind's survival depended Ip upon a hairy little N telepathic creature (##) 'Mi-S aphrodisiacs become weap"f onsofwar? (##)  :c What if ? Why not -- stimulate your imagination with the world's finest speculative fiction? No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States Postage Will Be Paid By -- Sdenie Fiction Booh Club Garden City N.Y. # First Class Permit No. I Garden City, N.Y. See other side for a complete selection Take # Science Fiction Bestsellers for # with membership Cut along line and mall -- no postage necessary!  Vfl Here is whii the critics have said about the first collection from the pen and brush of this dazting artist! "You can't flip the pages of Galaxy with your eyes open and fail to notice that Fabian is great... There are # plates in this... folio... All are superb "It's available... only by writing Loompanics Unlimited... # a hit. Worth it. by me." Spider Robinson, Galaxy "Fabian is my kind of artist... It was a real treat to Iwk thru his Loompanics artfolio. It made my " Forrest j. Ackerman Steve's best previously-published work plus # original drawings done especially for this bwk... The fact that I own # of the # drawings should say something about my feelings for the art. Steve Isa fantastic talent and my only regrets about this book are it is too short, and that I do not own all the # drawings!" Stuart David Schiff, Whiy)crs "I say the Loompanics book... provides a wide range of Steve's styles and skills, including quite a few previously unpublished full-pagers." -- Richard E. Geis (Alter Ego), Siience Fiction Review "Where has the sense of worsder gone from sf art? limited. "The book is... beautifully printed on one side of fine heavy stock... "... many of the plates are presented considerably larger than they originally appeared... But Fabian Is one of the few illustrators whose work doesn't wffer from being seen full sic. In the # plates irKluding # never-before-published pieces done especially for this volumehe dem)nstrates an admirable and enviable technique, a strong sense of drama, a contrasting but balarKcd delicacy and strength in his rendering, and a superb feel for the genre. "Probably more than any other black-and-white illustrator presently working In the sf magazine field, Fabian has the power to revive the excitement that was so rnuch the appeal of the old pulps. He'd have been quite at home in the pages of Weird Tales and would have held his own in the company of the best. "His art is Immediate ard arresting and often unforgettable...Many an author has wished for better illustrators; on many occasions Fabian's work has deserved better authors... Stephen Fabian's art is admirably suited to to a deserving talent."George Barr, Deop's F # SF Review Whispers, The Occult Lovecraft, Amazing, Fantastic, The Miscast Barbarian, Outworlds, and more, more, more... Including fifteen never before published drawings, done especially for this book. Each drawing is printed on one side of #)# x I I # lb. paper, easily removable for framing. This beautiful book is truly a collector's item, to be treasured now and in the years to come. the very best of the fastest-rising star In the science Loompanics Unlimited Box # Mason, Michigan # Cityi Stale Zip fniRfbRcs fcilcflciQf CoiiflkI #I Ihc fStkCcalwfii A Futuie-Histoiy Space War Simulation StuForce is serious science-fiction in game form. You command the space fleets of the Human, L'Chal-Dah, Rame and Xenophobe races as they fight for control of the # starsystems depicted on the forty light-year "Stellar Display". The future becomes history in fourteen scenarios simulating wars taking place from # to # A.D. StarForce fleets, StarGates, interstellar flight, tactical space maneuvering, empires and revolutions, induced novas, a written future history, a rescue mission StarForce has all this and morel A big #"x#' game map, # playing pieces, and a #-page, illustrated rules booklet packaged in a beautiful, compartmented plastic lrax...all for only # direct from Simulations Publications, Inc,, publishers of Strategy  Tactics Magazine. Send check or money order to: StmalafinM PabUcattMe, lac,, DepC # # East #rd Street. New York, N.Y. lOOlO Please send me the following simulation games: Interstellar Conflict in the #Sth Century. #  World War #, Global Warfare in the '#'a #  The East b Rad, The Sino-Soviet Conflict. S #  Saelawa, The German Invasion of Britain. S # Enter my subscription  I rear (# issues): # to Stiat A Tactica. Q tyn. (# issues): # the military history  #yis. (# issues): # magazine with a sim a am. (# issues): # ulation game in HI  send flee brochure nmc street aottf city suk iiE hendlitif charge. Prices are subject tochuge without ootke. Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Stephen Fabian, Art Director J.E. Poumelle, Ph. D., Science Editor LC. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor Elaine Will, Assistant Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor mmmmmmmmmmmmi James Patrick Baen, Editor A tale of interplanetary politics, shapechanging, manslaughter -- and a strange gift from the past. While the Lieutenant's cybernetic crew labored desperately to repair his ravaged brain from the last onslaught, the telepathic aliens, hideous beyond imagining, were on his trail -- sniffing, sniffing... Wherein it is shown that the admixture of greed. Medicine and computers can have the most interestingly synergistic side effects. Murder, theft and betrayal in Metropolis A. Combining the genres of Science Fiction and Mystery is notoriously difficult; Mr. Goddin makes it look as easy as -- dreaming! Through superior cunrting McKie has managed to sunive his interview with the Gowachin High Magister and his deadly Wreave. Now comes a far sterner test: Dosadi itself. cial report from the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers. Though he modestly implies otherwise, it's certain that Jerry gave as good as he got! Wherein the Spider strikes a blow for the Letters from Smith, Fuller, Tickell. Where to find it. Cover by Stephen Fabian, from Interior illustrations by Aulisio, Dalzell, Fabian of Unlvorsol PubMilng A DtotitbuUng Corponllon, AmoW E. Abnmaon, P roo l dont. Main Ofllcaa; # VYhIta PWna Road, Scaradala. N.V. #. EdRorM Otltca: PO Boi Alt. Planalartum Olatlon, Raw Yortt, N.V. #. UnaoOcttad manuacrlpla thouM ba aant to lha Main Olllca. SIngta copy: t#S. #-laaua aubacripUon: # In U.#., # alaawhafa . CopyftgM ConvanOona. AO righit raaarvad. Sacond daaa poalaga paid at Raw Vorli. R.V. and addMonal "'" # Tha pubOahart aaauma no raaponalMIty lor unaotdtad matarlM. Ad atorlaa pilntad In iMa magrtna ara Action and any almdartty batwoan charactara and actual paraona la coincidanlal. Printad In At first it was thought that they were Invaders from the Deep; the truth was far stranger. lic attention oil the coast of Guam. They .stixjd quietlv on the sea bed, three of them abreast, facing west towards the Guam shore. Behind them, plunginj: away rapidly to the abyssal depths, lay the Mariana Trench. Faint sunlight fled about their shadowy sides as they stirred slowly in the cold, steady upwelling. To the startled eyes of Lin Maro as he cruised along in his new gillcd form, they seemed to be musing forward, slowly and purposisely breasting the lip of the coastal shelf and gliding steadily from the black deeps to the distant stusre. l.in gasped, forgetting his long months of training and bio-leedback control and pulled a pint of warm sea water into his lungs. Coughing .md spluttering, with gilK working cgacY osertime, he surged one hundred and fifty feet to the surface and struck out wildly for the shore and safety A quick look back consmceil him that they were pursuing him. His glance caught the large, lumimnis eyes and the ropy tendrils of thick floating hair that framed the brisad faces. He was in too much of a hiuTv to notice the steel weights that licld them firmly and remorselessly on the sea bed. The reaction' onshore was somewhere between amusement and tipathy. It was Lin Maro's first time out in a real eninnment with his gilled form, and everybody knew there was a big difference between sitnulation and the real thing. litI'lH'il from the central nervous svstem; that wasn't hard to believc on ilio lirst time out with a new Bl'.C lorin. Bl.-X' iiuaranteed against pliNsical niaJl'iinctions but Lnory oddities weren't in the warranty. It took loii". hard arguing belore Maro eould get anyone to show een polite interest. The local newsman who linally agreed to take a look dill so as much tiom boredom as !rom belief. The ne.t day they swam out. Maro in his gills, the reporter in a rented scuba outlit. Hie monsters were still there all right. 'hen they swam down to look at them, if became clear that Lin had been lleeing Irom three coq-'ses. They swam around them. niarelling at the greenish scaled skin and the great dark eyes. N' hen the siory went out over the Com.Sat connections, it was still a long way down the news lists, tor three hundred years, writers had imagined Monsters ot the Deep coming out ot the .Mariana Tamch and tackling human civiliation in a variety ot' nasty ways. Silly season reports helped to tili the blanks hetween lamines and the real crises, but they got scnmi interest from the news prol'essionals. Nobody reported panic along the coast, or fled to the high ground. The three monsters got the most interest from the Ctuam atjuariiim and viariuni. party of marine biologists inspected them on the sea he'd, lified themshackles and ail -- to the surface. iuick-froe them and whipped them hack to shore on the Institute's hovercraft. The first lab examinations showed immediate anomalies. They were land animals, not marine forms: lung breathers, wiih tough outer skins and massive bone structure. Charles As a matter of routine, tissue microtome samples were taken and a chromosome I.D. run for matches with known species. The patterns were transmitted to the central data banks. At that point every attention light on the planet, tiguratively speaking, went on, the whistles blew and the buzzers buzzed. The computer response was unambiguous and instantaneous. The chromosome patterns were human.    The information that moves ceaselessly over the Earth, by cable, by ComSat Link, by Mattin Link, by laser and by microwave, is focused and redistributed through a small number of nodes. At one of these nodes sits the Office of Form Control; and in this office, delicately feeling the vibrations and disturbances of the normal patterns that flow in along the strands of the information web, sits Behrooz Wolf. The spider analogy would not displease him, though he would point out that his is only one of many webs, all interlocking. Not by any means the most important one: Population, Food and Space Systems all have much bigger staffs and bigger webs. But he would argue that his problems have the shortest response times and need a reaction speed that the others can manage without. Take the Mariana Monsters -- the Press' dubbing -- as an example. As soon as the chromosome patterns were revealed as human, the Form Control office was alerted. It looked as though a group of humans had been using the bio-feedback machines in unsuccessful formchange experiments. Were the experiments autnonzed, and were the resulting forms on the forbidden list? Was quick action needed to stop the appearance of a new illegal form? Behrooz Wolf sat in his office as the data began to flow in. None of the official and approved formchange experiments was anything like the one found off the shore of Guam. In addition, cell tests were looking strange in both chemistry and structure. The lungs were modified, showing a change in alveolar patterns, as though the creatures were adapting to high pressure. And the big eyes, although sensitive to low light levels, were most sensitive in the near infrared wavelengths that are cut off almost completely under water. Bey Wolf liked to approach his job using very basic questions. What was the objective of a form? Where would it operate most effectively? From those answers, he could usually guess the next step in the form-change sequence. The Mariana Monsters were breaking the rules. They did not seem to be adapting to any environment at all. All right, let's try another tack. The Monsters hadn't got there by themselves. After they had died, apparently of asphyxiation, they had been weighted with steel, then dropped, probably from a ship, to the sea bed. Where had they come from? Bey had a complete list of the world's form-change centers at his fingertips, especially the ones that were elaborate enough to need special life support systems. That offered no clues either. Wolfs unsuccessful initial probing was interrupted by the anival of his assistant John Lai, back from a routine meeting on the certification cheerful face in the door, then stopped, surprised by the mass of new listings and piles of formchange tabulations that had appeared in Bey Wolfs already cluttered office. "Come in, John." Wolf waved an arm. "What did you pick up at your meeting? Anything interesting?" Larsen dropped into a chair, pushing a pile of listings out of the way and marvelling as usual at Bey's ability to operate cleanly and logically in the middle of such a mess. "Two good ones," he replied. "C-forms, both of them, adapted for long periods in low gravity. They'll revolutionize asteroid work. There were the usual formal protests from the Belter representatives." "There'll always be Luddites." Bey Wolf had a weakness for outmoded historical references. "That law will have to change soon. The C-forms are so much better than the old ones that there's no real competition. Capman has changed space exploration forever, as soon as the Belters will let his work be accepted. Here, let me fill you in on our latest headache." He ran rapidly over the background to the Mariana discoveries, finishing with the question of where they had come from. "I suspect that they got into the general area of the Marianas through one of the Mattin Links. The question is, which one? We have twenty to choose from." John Lan went over to the wall display, which was showing the locations of the Mattin Link entry points. "We can rule out a few of them; they're open ocean and only act as transfer points. Have you correlated the form-change lab locations with the Mattin Link entry points?" "I'm waiting for that to come back from the computer. I've also asked for an identification of the three individuals whose bodies were found on the sea bed. I don't know why that's taking so long. Central Records knows that it's a high priority item." He joined Larsen at the wall charts, and they reviewed the locations of the Mattin Links that serve as the twenty pivot points for the global transportation system. When the communicator screen beeped for attention Larsen went to it, leaving Wolf engrossed in the wall charts. He watched the first words of the message scroll onto the screen, then whistl softly. "Come and look at this, Bey. There's the reason Records took a while to get us an I.D. from the chromosome pattern." The message began: 'I.D. Search completed and identification follows: Individuals are: James Pearson Manaur, age #, nationality U.S.F.; Caperta Leferte, age #, Nationality U.S.F.; Lao Sama Prek, age #, Nationality U.S.F. ContinueHalt?' Wolf hit 'Continue' and the detailed I.D. records appeared -- education, work history, family. But their attention was already elsewhere. The three dead men were all members of the United Space Federation; that spelled out a mystery. The United Space Federation had declared its sovereignty fifty years earlier, in #. With headquarters at the Tycho lunar base, it represented the interests of all the humans living off-Earth, in the Belt, on the Moon, and in the EarthMoon Libration Point colonies. U.S.F. citizens were rarities on Earth, and the disappearance of three of them should have roused an outcry long before their changed bodies had been found off Guam. The two men looked at each other. Wolf nodded at Larsen's puzzled expression. "It makes no sense. The U.S.F. has an out-andout ban on form-changes. If they won't accept the C-forms, it's even less likely they'd be doing independent development of new forms. One thing is for sure. I'll have to get a U.S.F. man in here -- it's too sensitive now." He looked gloomy. The investigation had just grown two orders of magnitude. There was no way to go further without involving U.S.F. representatives. Already they were on the verge of an interplanetary incident. The communicator continued to pump out information, in display and hard copy. Wolf noticed that it was giving the correlation he had asked for between form-change centers and Mattin Link entry points. It was going to be a long and confusing day. ting into the act too. An incoming news release set out their official position on the Mariana Monsters. 'Biological tquipment Corporastatement denying all knowledge of the human bodies discovered recently off the coast of Guam. A bodies had clearly been subject to developments, past or present, could lead to forms anything like those found. In an unusual proceforms now under development in the Company and invited Government inspection of their facilities. largest manufacturer of purposive form-change equipment utilizing biological feedback control methods.' Bey read the release through and passed it to Larsen. clear but running scared. I've been waiting for them to plead innocent or guilty. That's another prospect off the list of possibles."    Larsen trailed out with yards of listings. Bey Wolf sat back again to wait for a pattern to emerge. The facts were suggestive. One name kept coming into his head, haunting him out of the past. Robert Capman, inventor of the C-forms, recognized without dispute as the greatest-ever expert on form-change methods. Robert Capman, exDirector of Central Hospital and advisor to the Planetary Coordinators. But also Robert Capman, branded as a mass murderer and officially dead for six years. Top U.S.F. men, like top kanu players, are usually on the small skinny side. It was a surprise to greet a wrestler, two meters tall, and find he was the U.S.F. man assigned to work with Form Control on the Guam case. Bey Wolf glanced up at him and bit back the question on the tip of his tongue. Park Green was regarding him closely, a smile on his big, baby face. "Go on, Mr. Wolf, ask me," he said. "Most people do eventually. In fact, let me answer you in advance. No, I don't use the biofeedback equipment and formchange myself this way. It's completely natural. But it makes life hard when you're trying to act as representative to the U.S.F., and form-change is illegal off-Earth." Bey Wolf nodded appreciatively. "On the marie. I didn't think I was so easy to read." ; "I've had lots of practice on that question. Let me ask you some. What's new on the Guam case? I've got to give a report back to Tycho City tonight. Do you know the time , and cause of death yet?" i "Three days ago. They all died I within about twelve hours of each ' other, of asphyxiation -- and here's , the strange part. Their lungs were full of normal air. No gaseous poisons, no contaminants. They shouldn't have choked. They were I dropped off Guam about twentyI four hours after they died, almost I certainly at night. My guess is that they died somewhere a long way from there." "Excuse my ignorance of the case, but I don't follow your logic." "Well, it is conjectural. But I think they were intended for the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Five miles down, they'd never have been found. I think they were accidentally dropped a few miles too far west -- by somebody who didn't know the local geography too well. I'd say they died by accident, and somebody was keen to hide the evidence as far away as they could. You don't look very surprised," Wolf added, seeing that Green was slowly nodding agreement. The big man squeezed himself into a chair and rubbed his chin with an eleven-inch hand. "It fits with some of the things I know myself." he replied. "What else did you find out about the tfiree dead men?" "Not much," replied Wolf. "They were Belters, all off the same ship, the 'Jason.' They arrived here on Earth three weeks ago with plenty of money. Nobody heard of them again until they were found off Guam. We don't trail U.S.F. citizens unless we get a request from you for it." "That's all correct as far as it goes," agreed Green. "You are missing a few things that make a big difference. First, you say they were Belters, and technically you are right. But in U.S.F. wording, they were really Grabbers. They had been out in space on the 'Jason' for over two years -- ."    Caperta Laferte, spotter for the U.S.F. Class B cargo ship 'Jason,' was watching the scope of the deep radar with mounting excitement. By his left hand, the computer print-out was chattering with increasing speed as it perform the final orbit match and confirmed the tracking of the find. Laferte wiped the perspiration from his face with a dirty cloth. "It matches exactly," he told the other two. "And it looks like a big one. I'll be able to get us a radioactivity reading from it in a couple of minutes. But it's a piece of old Loge, no doubt about it." The others hovered about in impotent excitement. Until they had matched and docked it was one man's work and they could do nothing more useful than speculate on their trophy. Grimy and worn, all three locked like men who had endured more than two years of solar flares and radiation storms, celibacy and grinding boredom. It would all be worth it. If this were the big one, it would pay for all of it. Wine, women and song were on the way. "Radioactivity count coming in now," announced Laferte. "I've tuned it for the # MeV dipole transition from Asfanium. Keep your eye on the counter. If it hits fo or better, it's the jackpot." The digital read-out was climbing steadily. At twenty they lost it for a second. Laferte swore, bent back over the control panel, and recalibrated. It climbed again, past twenty, to thirty, to forty, and was still moving steadily upwards. They all shouted and James Manaur and Lao Sama Prek joined hands and began a curious Walrus-andCarpenter dance. It was the best that could be managed in the combination of free-fall and confined space. The future was a rosy glow, full of wealth, high living and excitement. Old Loge had bn gone a long time, but enough of him had come back to gladden a few hearts.    " -- looking for transuranics," said Green. "Maybe you know, the only natural source in the Solar System is still the fragments of Loge that come back into the System as long-period comets. The Grabbers just sit out there for years and monitor using deep radar. One decent find and they are made for life. The 'Jason' caught a good one about three months ago, packed with # and # Asfanium and Polkium. They extracted the transuranic elements from the fragment and rolled into Tycho City a month ago, rich as Katkov. They started to celebrate and three weeks ago they came to Earth to continue the spree. After that we lost touch with them and don't know what they did. We expected them back when the fleshpots palled. Want me to make a guess on what they did?" Wolf nodded. "I think I see where you are leading, but go on." "They came to Earth," continued Park Green. "Now, I saw them just before they left Tycho. They looked terrible. A couple of years of hardship in space, then a celebration that you wouldn't believe when they reached the Moon. If you came to Earth in that condition, wouldn't there be a big temptation to do something a bit illegal -- and hookup for an intensive session with a bio-feedback machine, set to get you back to tip-tc physical shape as fast as legally possible -- or faster?" "There certainly would," Wolf agreed. "I know a thousand places where it could be done. What you say makes perfect sense. Now let me pick up on my side of it." He pressed the inter-office communicator and asked John Larsen to join them. When Larsen entered the room, Bey Wolf turned again to Park Green. "Before I get John's opinions, tell me what you know about Robert Capman. I assure you it's relevant," he added, seeing Green's puzzled look. The big U.S.F. man thought for a moment before he replied. "All I can really tell you is what I've heard in Tycho City," he said finally. "Capman was a great man here on Earth, a genius who invented the series of form-changes that we now call C-forms, adapted for life in space. He did it using human children as the subjects for form-change experiments. Some of them died. He was found out a few years ago and died himself trying to escape. Is there more to know?" "I think there is, but I may be biased," replied Wolf. "For one thing, it was John and I who handled the case and blew the whistle on Capman. Now let me ask you, do you have strong feelings about Capman, personally?" Green hesitated again. "That's really a tough one. I iow his reputation for great genius. And honestly, I don't know enough to say if he was fairly treated when he was accused of using human children in his work. But I will tell you, as a representative of the U.S.F. I have to be against Capman. After all, he was the man who invented the forms that are supposed to make me and my fellows as obsolete for life in space as the dinosaurs -- the forms he came up with don't need much air, they're radiation tolerant, and they can adapt to run at high or low metabolic rates. I've no reason to like the man, for those reasons alone. Why do you ask?" "I have a reason," said Wolf. He turned to Larsen. "John, you were there when Capman died. Did he die?" "I thought so at the time." John Larsen sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Now, I'm not so sure." He turned to the U.S.F. man. "Bey is convinced it was a set-up, and I must admit it had the makings of one. He hasn't been heard of for the six years since then, but I'll tell you, in the last day I've been thinking about him. These Guam formchanges have just the marks of Capman." Wolf looked at Larsen with relief and increased respect. "I'd been thinking that, John, myself, but it seemed too unlikely to come right out and say it." He turned again to Park Green. "Now, you see how our thoughts have been running. Earth's greatest expert ever on form-change, Robert Capman. Maybe still alive, in hiding, somewhere on Earth. And along comes a set of form-changes that defy all logic, that conform to no known models. It could be Capman, up to his old tricks again. Either way, if Capman is alive, he'd be just the man to talk to about this. John or I could have added one other thing -- neither of us ever met a man, before or since, who impressed us as much with his sheer intellectual power." Green moved about uneasily in his seat. "It's clear you're selling me something, but I still don't know what it is. What are you leading up to?" Bey Wolf nodded vigorously. "Only this, I want to find Robert Capman. And I have a very strong suspicion of my own. I think he's not on Earth -- hasn't been for the past six years. Will you help me reach him, if he's somewhere in the U.S.F. territories? I don't know if it's the Moon, the Belt, the Libration Colonies, or where -- but I do know I can't get messages out there without U.S.F. help!" Green looked speculative. "I can't give you an instant answer," he said. "I'll have to discuss it in person with Ambassador Brodin, and he's in Argentina." He stood up. "What's the best way to get me there?" "Through the Mattin Link system. There's an entry point in central Argentina. We are only ten minutes away from the Madrid link -- two jumps and you'll be there. Come on. I'll show you how to use it." They hurried out, as Green explained that he was having trouble getting used to the complexity of the Earth system. The Moon had only four link entry points. The Earth had twenty and he had heard there would be more added. Was that true? It was not, and it would never be. The Mattin Link system offers direct and instantaneous transmission between any adjacent pair of entry points. But the number of entry points, and their placing, is very rigid. Since it requires perfect  symmetry of any entry point with j respect to all others, the configuration must fit one of the five regular ! solids. Plato would have loved it. ; The dodecahedral system, with twenty vertices on the surface of the Earth, is the biggest single system that can ever be made. The Lunar i system, with its four entry points at  the vertices of a regular tetrahedron,  is the simplest. And Mattin Links away from planetary surfaces are impractical because of changing distances. Gerald Mattin, who had dreamed of a system for instantaneous energy-free transfer between any two points anywhere, died a disap pointed man. The present system is i far from energy-free -- because the Earth is not a homogeneous perfect sphere, and space-time is slightly curved near it. Mattin had an energy-free solution defined for an exact geometry in a flat space-time. He died twenty years before the decision to build the first Mattin Link system, twenty-five years before the first university was named after him, thirty years before the first statue.    "We have a go-ahead, but I had to bargain my soul away to get an agreement from the Ambassador. Now, where do we go from here?" Park Green was back in Bey Wolfs office, shoes off, long legs stretched out and adding to the general appearance of confusion. Wolf and Larsen were again over by the wall display, plotting the Mattin Link paths from the Mariana Trench entry point and the Australia entry point near the spaceport where the crew of the 'Jason' had arrived on Earth. Wolf read off the results before he replied to Park Green. "The North Australian entry point connects directly to the Marianas, Southern New Zealand and an Indian Ocean transfer point. The Mariana entry point connects directly to North China, Hawaii and back of course to North Australia. None of those connections looks promising, there's no big formchange lab near any of them. So either my guess about the use of the Link system is wrong, or the people who moved the Monsters did more than one jump in the system. Two jumps takes us a lot further afield -- to almost anywhere. Up to the North Pole, to Cap City at the South Pole, or into India, or up to western North America." He looked over at Park Green. "It's a mess. I'm more convinced than ever that we need to find Robert Capman and develop some idea what was happening when the three men died. They obviously started on some form-change prom and somewhere along the line it got fouled up. How? I wish I could ask Capman that question." "So let me repeat my question," said Green. "What do we do next, and where do we go from here? Advertising for Capman won't solve the problem -- he'll be treated as a mass murderer if he ever does show up alive." "I think I can produce a message that Capman will recognize and be intrigued by, but others won't," answered Wolf. "As for protecting him if he does show himself. I'm not worried about that. I'm sure that he'll have found a way to cover himself in the past six years. I've got another worry of my own. We have no way of knowing how urgent this thing is. It could be a once in a lifetime accident or the start of a general plague. Until we know which I have to look on it as the hottest thing on my list of problems. Let me take a cut at the message to Capman." The final announcement was short and simple. It went out on a general broadcast over all media to special transmission to the scattered Space Federation. 'To R.C. I badly need the talents that caused me to pursue you six years ago through the by-ways of Old City. I promise you a problem worthy of your powers. Behrooz Wolf.' it it It Troubles were mounting. Bey spent a couple of hours with a reppresenting more confidential records to prove that the company had no connection with the monster forms found in Guam. The Central Coordinators sent him a terse message, asking him if there would be other deaths of the same type, and if so, when and how many? Park Green was getting the same sort of pressure from the U.S.F. Unlike Bey Wolf, the big man wasn't used to it and spent a good part of his time in Bey's office, gloomily biting his nails and trying to construct positively worded replies with no information content. Two days of that brought a stronger response from Tycho City. Bey arrived in his office early and found a small, neatly dressed man standing by the communicator calling out U.S.F. personnel records. He turned at Bey's entry, with no sign of embarrassment at his intrusion, and looked at Bey for a second before he spoke. "Mr. Green?" The voice was like the man, small and precise. "He'll be in later. I'm Behrooz Wolf, head of Form Control. What can I do for you?" Bey was somewhat conscious of his own casual appearance and uncombed hair. The man drew himself up to his full height. "I am Karl Ling, special assistant to the U.S.F. Cabinet. Here are my credentials." The tone was peppery and irascible. "I have been sent here to get some real answers about the deaths of three of our citizens here on Earth. I must tell you that we regard the explanations given so far by your office and Mr. Green as profoundly unsatisfactory." "Arrogant bastard," thought Bey, while he looked for a suitably conciliatory answer. "We have been doing our best to provide you with all the facts, Mr. Ling," he said. "It seemed unwise to present theories until they can be definitely verified. I'm sure you realize that this case is complex and has features that we haven't encountered before." "Apparently." Karl Ling had taken a seat by the communicator and was tapping his thigh nervously with a well-manicured left hand. "For example, I see that you are giving the cause of death as asphyxiation. But you tell us also that the dead men had plenty of air in their lungs, and that there were no poisonous constituents. Perhaps you would like to present your theory on that to me." Eealing in the past with officious government representatives, Bey had found an effective method of subduing them. He thought of it as his saturation technique. The trick was to flood the nuisance with so many facts, figures, reports and data that he was inundated and never seen again. He went over to his desk and took out a black record pad. "This has the data entry codes that will allow you to pull all the records on this case. I suggest that you use my office here and feel free to use my communicator to reach Central Files. Nothing will be hidden from you. This machine has a full access code." The little man stood up, a gleam in his eyes. He rubbed his hands together. "Excellent. Please arrange it so that I am not disturbed -- but I do want to see Mr. Green when he arrives." Far from being subdued. Ling was clearly delighted at the prospect of a flood of information. Bey escaped with relief and went to give the bad news to Park Green. "Karl Ling?" Green looked impressed. "Oh, I know him -- not personally, but by reputation. He's the U.S.F. leading expert on Loge. He's a fanatic on the subject, really. I saw a holovision program he made a couple of years ago where he traced the whole history of Loge. He began way back, five hundred years ago --    (Cameras move from model and back to Ling, standing.) "School-capsules give the #'s as the first date in Loge's history. We can find him much further back than that. All the way back in #, when a German astronomer came up with a scheme to define the distances of the planets from the Sun. Johann Titius' work was picked up and made famous a few years later by another German, Johann Bode. The relation is called the TitiusBode Law." (Cut to framed lithograph of Bode, then to table of planetary distances.) "Bode pointed out that there was a curious gap in the distance formula, between Mars and Jupiter. Uranus in #I -- " (Cut to high resolution color image of Uranus, with image of Herschel as insert on upper left. Cut back to Ling.) " -- he found it fitted Bode's law also. The search for a missing planet began. In # the asteroid Ceres was discovered at the correct distance from the Sun. The first piece of Loge had been found." (Cut to high resolution image of Ceres. Zoom in on Ceres City. Cut to diagram showing planetary distances, then back to Ling.) "As more and more asteroids were found, the theory grew that they were fragments of a single planet. In # the Canadian astronomer Ovenden provided the first ' real proof. Using the rates of change in the orbits of the planets, he showed they were consistent ; with the disappearance from the I Solar System of a body of planetary ago. He estimated that the missing planet was about ninety times the mass of the Earth. Loge was beginning to take on a definite shape." (Cut to image of Ovenden, then i to artist's impression of the size and  appearance of Loge, next to image  of the Earth on same scale.) i "The next part of the story came i just a few years later, in #. Van ; Flandem in America integrated the orbits of very long peri comets i backwards in time. They found that ; many of them had periods of about from a particular part of the Solar System, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Parts of Loge were coming home." (Cut to diagram showing cometary orbits, intersecting Solar System diagram at point between Mars and Jupiter. Cut back to Ling.) "We now had the modem view of Loge. A large planet, a gas-giant about ninety Eh masses, disinteago in a cataclysm beyond our imagining. Most of Loge was blown out of the Solar System forever. A few parts of the planetary cote remain as the asteroids, other fragments from the outer crust drop back into the Solar System from time to time as long-period comets." (Move in to close-up of Ling, face and shoulders only.) "That looked like the end of the story, until we picked up the first pieces of the long-period cometary fragments in the twenty-first century and found they were high in transuranic elements. The mystery of Lx)ge remains. Why should Loge, alone of all the Solar System, contain transuranic elements? Their half-lives are less than twenty million years. Were they formed in the explosion of Lxjge? If so, how? To those questions, we still do not have answers." (Cut to image of Loge, feed in beginning of fade-out music, low volume.) "One final and tantalizing fact. day on the cosmic scale. When Loge disintegrated there were primates already on the Earth. Did our early ancestors look into the skies one night, and see the fearful sight of Loge's explosion? Will other planets ever suffer a similar fate?" (Fade out as image of Loge swells, changes color, breaks asunder. Final music crescendoes for ending.)    " -- but it puzzles me why Ling should be appointed to this investigation. He writes his own ticket, of course. Maybe he knew one of the dead Grabbers -- he certainly knew everything and everyone connected with Loge in any way." Green fell silent, then shodc his head. "I suppose I'd better get in there and find out what he wants me to do. I hope I'm not being demoted to messenger boy." Together Green and Wolf went back into Bey's office. Karl Ling was oblivious of their entry, deeply engrossed in his review of autopsy records of the three dead crew members of the 'Jason.' Wolfs saturation technique didn't work on Ling. He became aware of them only when Bey Wolf spoke. "Mr. Ling, we are ready to give you a briefing when you want it. This is Mr. Green, from U.S.F." Ling looked up briefly, then returned his attention to the medical records. "Good. Answer one basic question for me. The three dead men have clearly been through a form-change process. Where are the bio-feedback machines located that were used for that?" "We don't have an answer to that. Sir," replied Wolf. "Though of course we recognize its importance." Ling looked up again. For some reason it seemed to be the response he was hoping for. "No answer, Mr. Wolf? I thought that might be the case. Would you like me to en, lighten you?" Bey felt a minor urge to go over and choke Ling but managed a cool reply. "If you can. Though it is hard for me to imagine that you could have reached a conclusion on such a brief inspection of the records." "I did not. I knew before I left the Moon." He smiled briefly and stood up. "You see, Mr. Wolf, I have no doubt that you and the other members of Form Control here on Earth are proficient in your work. But this particular situation requires something that by definition you do not possess -- the ability to think as a U.S.F. citizen. For where on Earth would you choose to go for your entertainment? Remember, you may choose freely without thought of cost." "Probably to the Great Barrier Reef, in a gilled form." "Very good." Karl Ling turned to Park Green. "You are a Belter, Mr. Green, and suddenly a millionaire. Where on all of Earth would you want to go -- what is the Belter's dream of a place for all the most exotic delights?" Green scratched his chin thoughtfully. "Why, I guess it would be Pleasure Dome. That's the place we hear about, though I've never been there." "Of course you haven't," responded Ling impatiently, "and neither has anyone else who is not extremely rich. But it's the Belter's idea of Paradise -- and part of the reason you would want to go there would be to prove how rich you were." He went over to the large map display on the far wall and called out a South Polar projection. "Let's take this a little further. Look at the geography. The crew of the 'Jason' landed here at the Australian space port. Within easy ground transport distance of the North Australian Mattin Link. One transfer gets them to New Zealand, a second one puts them to Cap City in Antarctica. Now Pleasure Dome, as I am sure you know, Mr. Wolf, though perhaps Mr. Green does not, lies directly lneath Cap City in the Antarctic ice cap. Total travel time from the space port -- an hour or less." Park Green nodded slowly. "I guess so. I'm not yet used to the number of Link entry points you have here. I don't see where that gets us, though. We need a place with sophisticated form-change equipment. I didn't see Cap City or Pleasure Dome on any list of labs that Mr. Wolf showed me." Karl Lin smiled ironically. "I'm sure you didn't. You saw the legal list." He turned to Bey, who had  some idea what was coming and felt a growing excitement. "Pleasure Dome offers all pleasures, does it not, Mr. Wolf? Even the most exotic. Would it be safe to assume that a number of those pleasures involve the use of form-changes?" "It certainly would. We know there are illegal form-changes going ' on there, for some of the more debauched physical tastes. But we've  never had trouble with them, and ' they are very discreet. We keep a  kind of informal truce. I don't have j to tell you, Mr. Ling, how much power the managers of Pleasure Dome have when it comes to silent  influence in high places." Ling touched the map display control and a new image appeared. "Then this must be our next  stop -- Cap City and Pleasure Dome. We still have not answered the basic question: how did those three men become three dead monsters? Mr. Green, you should remain here ; and be available to answer the in quiries from Earth and Moon authorities. Please make travel arrangements now for Mr. Wolf and myself. Don't worry, Mr. Wolf," ! he added, seeing Bey's questioning I look. "I can call on the full fmanj cial resources of the U.S.F. in pur suing this enquiry." i "That's not my worry at the moment, Mr. Ling. I was wondering why the Mariana Trench was chosen to dispose of the bodies. Can you explain that also?" "I have a speculation, certainly. After the crew of the 'Jason' died, I think the proprietors of Pleasure Dome looked at their identifications and realized they were in trouble. They know the U.S.F. looks after its own. The plan was to get the bodies off-Earth. They were taken to Australia through the Mattin Link. When the Pleasure Dome people found that security regulations on space access are very tight, that plan was dropped and they were forced to improvise. One further transfer through the Link System took them to the Marianas. Hasty planning -- and an inadequate knowledge of local geography -- led to a 'ootching of the disposal job." Ling looked pleased with his analysis. "It is only a deductive argument, I admit. But I suspect it has a very high probability of being right. "Now, quickly, have preparations made and let us be on our way." Green hurried out, but Wolf lingered a moment. Ling looked at him questioningly. "You have further business, Mr. Wolf? I have a great deal of work still to do on the records and not much time to do it." Bey nodded. "I want to make one comment. I've spent my life studying form-change, and I believe I understand it as well as anyone. One man is my master in the theory, but when it comes to seeing through exterior changes I match myself against anyone. I believe that we have met before, Mr. Ling, and under very different circumstances. I do not propose to do anything about it, but I want you to know that I can tell the lion by his paw." Karl Ling's acid look seemed to soften briefly. Bey Wolf thought there was the trace of a smile on his lips. "I'm sorry, Mr. Wolf, but I really have no idea what you are talking about. Would you please let me get down to this biological work -- help me, if you wish. I want to be in Cap City four hours from now."    After Bey Wolf and Karl Ling had left. Park Green and John Larsen went for a drink and a sharing of dissatisfaction. By the third one Larsen had become more morose and militant. "Just our luck. Those two go off to sample Pleasure Dome and leave us here to handle the brainless bureaucrats," he complained. "It's always the same, we get all the dog work, they get all the excitement." He had never met or heard of Ling until that day, but fine points of logic were beneath him. "I'd like to show those two," he went on. "I'd like to show them what we can do without them. Solve this whole thing while they're gone." He slid a little lower in his seat. "That would show them." Green and Larsen had been going drink for drink, but with twice the body mass Green was in much better shape. He watched Larsen sink lower yet. "Come on," he said. "Let's do it." He lifted the limp figure of Larsen easily to a standing position and held him there while he paid the bill. "Just let's get a shot of de-toxer in you and we'll be all set. Let's go and work over the full records and see if we can come up with something new. It would do me a lot of good to beat that smarmy supercilious midget to the answer." Fifteen minutes later they were both cold sober and deep into the case records. There was a long period of sifting before John Larsen sat back, looked up at the ceiling for a spell and finally said: "Question: what is there about the crew of the 'Jason' that made them very unusual? Answer: they had recently been handling large quantities of transuranic elements, probably experiencing high levels of radioactivity. So here is my second question: did the autopsies look for radioactivity in the bodies? My bet is that they didn't. So, final question: is what happened the effects of transuranic elements in their central nervous systems? I doubt if anyone knows what a substantial amount of transuranics could do. It's a long shot, but it's a new line." Green shrugged. "It's a long shot, but we should check it. Do you know where the bodies are now?' ' "In the Form Control center in Manila." Green stood up. "Come on. We'll need authorization for another autopsy and a pathologist."    The exit point from the Mattin Link system is in the upper levels of Cap City, almost at the surface itself. Bey Wolf and Karl Ling came out of the Link and looked about them for the elevators that would take them down to Pleasure E)ome, four thousand feet below in the polar ice. As they stood there, a soft voice spoke in their ears: 'Come to Pleasure Dome, satisfy your heart's desires.' Ling looked at Wolf and smiled. "An Omni projector. What a waste for that system in Tycho Base." The soft voice continued. 'In Pleasure Dome, you can shed the cares of the world and feel free again. Visit the Caves of Ice and swim in the Pool of Lethe. Win a world in the great Xanadu Casino, or spend a day as part of the Coupling Loom. Be free, be with us in Pleasure Dome.' Free, at a price, thought Wolf, as the Omni advertising went on. Finally, a useful comment came. 'Follow the blue lights to the temple of earthly delights. ' Following the blue lights as directed, they were soon dropping swiftly, deep into the polar cap. The entrance to Pleasure Dome was a great sparkling chamber, lined with perfect mirrors, like the inside of a giant multi-faceted diamond. The effect was shattering. Walls, floor and ceiling were all perfectly reflective. Images of the room marched off to infinity in every direction. Bey looked about him, struggling to orient himself. "Better get used to it, Mr. Wolf," remarked Ling coolly. "Pleasure Dome is all like this." "I didn't realize you'd been here before." "Long ago. These walls are a necessity, not a luxury, you know. When they cut this city beneath the ice cap, twenty years ago, the big problem was the heat. People produce heat, from themselves and their equipment. The ice walls would have melted in no time. These walls -- all the walls in Pleasure Dome -- are coated with Passivine. It's perfectly reflecting and has a very low coefficient of thermal conductivity. A negligible amount of heat passes through to the ice walls, and a modest refrigeration system takes care of that easily." Bey looked at Karl Ling ironically. "For one who is from offEarth, Mr. Ling, you have an amazing knowledge of Earth affairs." "The long lunar nights give us plenty of time for reading." There was a definite hint of humor in Ling's formal reply. Before Bey could comment further, a third person had joined them. "Welcome to Pleasure Dome, Sirs." The speaker was a tall woman dressed all in white. Her skin was pale and flawless, her hair a fine white cloud. She looked at them quietly with cool grey eyes. A Snow Queen. Bey wondered how much of it was natural, and how much she owed to form-change. "I will be your hostess and help you to arrange your pleasures. Do not be afraid to ask, whatever your tastes. There are few wishes that we cannot accommodate. Before we begin, there are a few formalities." "You want our identifications?" asked Bey. "Only if you wish to give them. Sirs. We do need proof of adequate means, but that may be cash if you prefer to use it." "We are together," said Ling. "My credit will serve for both. E)o you have a bank connection?" "Here, Sir." The Snow Queen produced a small silver box, onto which Ling placed his right index finger. In a few seconds, the l.D. was established and the central bank returned a credit rating. As she read the credit, the Snow Queen lost her composure for the first time and became a young woman. Bey suspected that Ling's credit rating was that of the entire U.S.F. "What is your pleasure. Sirs?" Even her voice seemed changed. It was now uncertain, nervous, almost childish. With that much credit available, Bey realized, there was nothing, literally nothing, that could not be bought at Pleasure Dome. That included the body or soul of their hostess, and she knew it. It was dangerous to be in contact with such financial power. She could never know when one of Ling's whims might include her as a purchased pleasure. Ling's businesslike manner helped to reassure her. "We want to talk to the man who controls the form-change tanks. The one who handled the three off-worlders recently. Don't worry, you may not know what I'm referring to, but he certainly will." She hesitated. Ling's request fell far outside the usual list of fancies. "One moment. Sirs." She slipped quietly out through a glittering arch. Karl Ling looked at Bey quizzically. "I thought the direct approach would be best," Ling said. "If necessary, can you threaten these people enough to make them worried -- say you'll close down their illegal form-change services if they don't cooperate?" "I can threaten ail right -- but I'm not sure what I can really do if the threats don't work. With any luck they won't want to find out either." The Snow Queen had brought reinforcements. An equally striking blond haired man, again dressed in white. "Sirs, your credit is enough to purchase any pleasure," he began. "But certain things in Pleasure Dome are not available at any price. The detail of our operations is one. Please state your wishes again, so that we can see if we are able to accommodate them." "We have no intention of causing trouble here," replied Ling. "But if we wished to do so there is no doubt that we could. This is Behrooz Wolf, the head of Form Control for Earth. I am Karl Ling, special assistant to the U.S.F. Cabinet. All we are looking for is information. Three men died recently during form-change. We believe that they died here. We want to speak to the man in charge of that operation, and we want to see the full records of the monitors that were recording and supervising the form-changes." The man made no attempt to deny the charge. He was silent for a few moments, then asked; "If we cooperate, you will take our involvement no further, here or elsewhere?' ' "You have our word." "Then come with me." The blond man smiled. "You should be pleased. You are obtaining a service free of charge. To my knowledge, this has never happened before since Pleasure Dome was first created." The three men walked through a maze of ice caves, fairy grottoes lit by lights of different colors, and came at last to a door that led to an ordinary office with panelled walls and a functional looking desk. He motioned to them to sit down. "I will return in a moment. This, by the way, is the luxury that we aspire to in Pleasure Dome -- normal walls and furniture, and privacy. Our lives here rarely permit us either." He returned a few minutes later with his identical twin. That seemed to answer Bey's question about the use of form-change on Pleasure Dome staff. The ultimate bondage: someone else dictated the shape of their bodies. Ling wanted the man to be at ease and displayed a new side of his personality -- warmth and kindness. Bey noted it and marked up one more data point on a growing list. The examination began. The man was at first ill-at-ease, but soon relaxed and became more talkative. "All those three wanted was a full-speed reconditioning program. The only thing we did for them here that is in any way illegal was the speed. We used the bio-feedback machines twenty-four hours a day, and provided nutrients intravenously. So it looked like a completely straightforward request and we didn't give them any special monitoring, the way we would if a customer was to come in and ask for a special change. The full program they'd asked for takes about a hundred and fifty hours, nearly a week of changing if you run it continuously, the way we do." "You've run this course many times before?" asked Ling. "Often, especially for offworlders. Of course, we never ask their origins, but we can make a guess from clothing and speech. Since Capman's form-change work, a straightforward program like this has been completely automatic. The tank has automatic monitors that control air supply and nutrient supply and regulate the pace of the process. The subject has to be conscious at some level, since it is purposive form-change that's involved. But the unit's completely selfcontained and the only way we know what's happening inside the tank is through looking at the automatic monitor tell-tales on the outside." "And how often do you do that?" "In a simple case like this, once a day. We never have anything to do, but we check anyway. In the case of these three off-worlders, they all began at the same time and they all asked for the same reconditioning program. Needed it, too. They looked done in when they arrived here. "The evening of the third day, I took my routine look at the telltales. All three men were dead. I couldn't believe it. At first I suspected the tell-tales were lying, or there'd been a programming error, or something. Then we opened the tanks. God, it was awful. Like a nightmare. They had changed, they weren't men anymore. They were monsters, with great glowing eyes and thick skin, like a horror holo. We confirmed that they were dead, then we looked at their I.D.'s and realized they were off-worlders. Then everybody around here really panicked, and we tried to get them off-Earth. When we found we couldn't do that, we tried to put them deep at sea. That apparently failed too." The man fell silent and there was a long pause. Ling was too engrossed even to give Bey Wolf a look of triumph. He was bound in a spell of concentration so intense that he looked blind, his eyes unblinking and focused on infinity. "Did you do any chemical analyses of the bodies?" he asked. "God, no. We wanted to get them out of here. But there will be records on the tapes that were made by the monitors and tell-tales, and there should be continuous monitoring of some cell chemistry and blood chemistry." "Right. I want to examine those now. Bring them here or take me to them." "We'll get them. But they'll be in raw form. Only a form-change expert can read them." Ling caught Bey Wolf's look. "Bring them in. We'll manage somehow," he said. "It's a skill you never lose once you've mastered it completely."   Ik John Larsen looked at the spectrograph output, then at Park Green. "It's not as much as I expected," he said. "But there are traces of Asfanium in all three bodies. There's slight radioactivity because of that, but it's not enough to make a strong physical effect. I wonder, do you think that it could be a chemical effect of Asfanium that did it? We don't have a good understanding of that aspect of the transuranics in the island of stability up around element #." "That's quite possible," Green replied. "You know, we are still doing a lot of work on Asfanium and Folium and are finding some odd chemical properties, up in Lunar Base. One other thing occurs to me, the crew of the 'Jason' had never encountered form-change before. Do you think that they let things get out of control, maybe, due to their inexperience? TTien they ran into something new, like the effect of a trace of Asfanium?" Larsen slapped the spectrogram output sheet against his thigh. "Park, I bet you're on to something. With inexperienced people in purposive form-change, anything might happen. Now, we can test that. Asfanium concentrates in the thymus gland. If we take an extract from one of these three, we can conduct a controlled test and see if there is a tendency to form-change the way they did." Park Green frowned. "I didn't realize you had suitable test animals. Isn't it true that humans alone can achieve purposive form-change? After all, that's the basis of the humanity tests." Larsen laughed confidently. "Exactly right. You want to see the test animal? Here it is." He tapped himself on the chest. "Now, don't get the wrong idea," he added, as Park Green began a horrified protest. "One of the things we get in Form Control is many years of training in form-control methods. If anything starts to happen. I'll have no trouble stopping it and reversing it. Don't forget, it's a purposive process. Come on, let's get a thymus gland extract made here and then back to the form-change tanks at Headquarters. We'll really have something to show Bey and your boss when they get back." it it it The jaunt to Pleasure Dome was becoming a grind. The staff employees looked on in amazement as Wolf and Ling worked their way through the monitor tapes at express speed, reading raw data, swapping comments and analyses as they went. The tapes contained a mixture of body physical parameters, such as subject temperature, pulse rate and skin conductivity, with nutrient rates. Programs in use as they were swapped in and out of the tank control computer, plus chemical readings and brain activity, were recorded in parallel on the same tape. Reading one required many years of experience, plus a full understanding of the processes -- mental and physical -- of the human body. Ling was tireless, and Bey was determined not to be outdone. "Who is he?" whispered the Pleasure Dome form-change supervisor to Bey, at one of their brief halts. "I know you are head of Form Control, but where did he learn all this?" Bey looked across at Ling, who was deep in thought and probably would not have noticed an explosion in the room. "Maybe you should ask him yourself. I've had that conversation already." Then more tapes arrived and the question was pushed aside. After thirty-six hours of intense work, the basic analysis was complete. They had an incredible array of facts available to them, but one of them dominated all others. The crew of the 'Jason' had died well before their form-change was complete. They had died because the forms they were becoming were unable to live in and breathe normal air. The final form they would have become remained unknown. The reason why they were changing to those forms, under the control of a reconditioning program that had been used successfully a thousand times before, was equally unknown. Karl Ling sat motionless, as he had for the previous two hours. Occasionally he would ask Bey a question, or look again at a piece of data. Rather than disturb him Bey decided that he would go into another room to call back to Headquarters and check with John Larsen on the general situation. Ling was voyaging on strange seas of thought, alone, and Bey Wolf had developed a profound respect for Karl Ling. Park Green answered the communicator instead of Larsen. He looked very uncomfortable. "Where's John?" "He's been in a form-change tank since yesterday morning." To Green's great relief, Bey Wolf didn't seem at all concerned. Even when he had explained the whole story to Bey, the latter seemed interested but not at all worried. "John's been around form-change equipment for a long time. He knows how to handle it as well as anyone on Earth. But honestly. Park, I'm sceptical about his theory. Why, injured Belters have been using form-change equipment for years. They call it regeneration equipment. But it's the same thing exactly. It's only form-change to forms that are not your original shape that are illegal to offEarthers." Park Green looked as though a big weight had been lifted off him. "Thank God for that. I thought I might have let John talk me into a deal where he was taking a big risk. I don't know enough about all this to argue with him. I'll go off to the tanks, and see how things are coming along there." Bey smiled at the honesty of the big man's concern for Larsen and signed off. He strolled back to join Ling, who had now come out of his trance and accepted a cup of syncaff, 'compliments of Pleasure Dome.' Having let them in free of charge, the stf of Pleasure Dome seemed to have adopted them. Ling had just politely refused a Snow Queen's offer of an age-old technique to relax him after all his hard work. He seemed mildly annoyed when she made the same offer to Bey. "I think I have it, Mr. Wolf, and it's fascinating. More than I dreamed. If I'm right, this is a special day in history." He sat back, relishing the moment. "Well, Park Green and John Larsen think they have it too," said Bey. "I just had video contact with them." "They do? Without the evidence that we have here?" Ling was openly surprised. "What do they believe it is?" Bey sketched out Larsen's theory, and summarized the situation back in Headquarters. He mentioned finally that Larsen was putting it to a practical test. "Larsen injected an extract from one of the dead men, and got into a form-change tank?" Ling's selfpossession had failed him, and he had turned white. "He's a dead man. God, why didn't they consult us here?" He sprang to his feet, hurled the papers to one side and grabbed his Jacket. "Come, Mr. Wolf. We have to get back to Headquarters as fast as we possibly can. If there is a chance now to save John Larsen's life, it depends on our efforts." He ran out of the room. Bey Wolf, bewildered and alarmed, followed him at top speed. When Karl Ling lost his dignity so completely, it was time to worry indeed.    In the elevator, on ground transport and through the Mattin Link, Ling explained the basics of his discoveries to Bey Wolf. By the time they reached Headquarters it was hard to say which man was the more frantic. They went at once to the form-change tanks. Park Green, alerted as they travelled, was waiting for them there. He looked at Ling in trepidation, expecting an outburst of insult and accusation. It did not come. Ling went at once to the tank containing John Larsen and began to read the tell-tales. After a couple of minutes he grunted with satisfaction. "So far everything is stable. If he follows the same pattern as the others, we have about twenty-four hours to do something for him. The one thing I daren't do is stop this process in the middle. We'll have to let the process run its course, keep him alive while it happens, and worry afterwards about reversing it. Bring me the tank schematics. I need to know how the circuits that control the nutrients and air supply work for this model." Park Green went for them and came back in bewilderment. He took Bey Wolf to one side after he had given the schematics to Ling. "Mr. Wolf, does he know what he's doing? He's a Loge expert, he doesn't know about this stuff, does he? Are we risking John's life by letting him do this?" Wolf put his hand up on Green's  shoulder. "Park, believe me he j does know what he's doing. If any one can help John now, he can. Let's help all we can here. I'll tell you what my view is when this is all over." Ling interrupted their conversation. His voice had a reassuring authority and certainty. "One of you  come over here and make a note of the equipment changes we have to put on diis tank. I'll read off settings as I find them on the charts. want their top man on interactive form-change programs. Ramo Wold if he's still with them, the best one they have if he isn't. Top priority. Tell them it's codeword circuits, if that'll move them faster." The equipment modification began. At every stage. Ling rechecked the tell-tales. Larsen's condition inside the tank remained stable, but there were definite changes occurring. Pulse rate was down, and there was heavy demand on calcium and sodium in the nutrient supply. Skin properties were changing drastically. I "They would have noticed all I this in Pleasure Dome if they'd i have looked closely," grunted Ling, j "Give them their due, they had no reason in the world to expect anything peculiar. But look at that body mass indicator. It's up to a hundred kilos. What's Larsen's usual weight?" "Eighty." Bey was absorbed, watching the indicators. He longed to see inside the tank but there was no provision for that in the system. After many hours of equipment change and work on program modgineer, Ling finally declared that he ' had done all he could. The real test i would come in a few hours' time. The records of the crew of the 'Jason' had begun to go wild then. It remained to be seen if the equip! ment changes would keep Larsen's ' condition stable as the change proceeded further. J As Ling made the final checks on ' the tell-tales, Bey realized the menI tal anguish and confusion that Park Green was going through. "Mr. Ling, have we done all we I can here?" Bey asked. "For the moment. The rest is waiting." "Then if you will, for my benefit and Mr. Green's, I would appreciate it if you would explain this to us, from the beginning. I got a quick overview on the way here, but Park is still in the dark." Ling looked at Green as though seeing him for the first time. He finally nodded sympathetically. "From the beginning, eh? Well, that's a long story and I'll have to tell it the way I imagine it. Whether it is true or not is another matter." He sat down and put his hands behind his head. ago, on the planet Loge. Loge was a giant, about ninety earth masses, and Loge was going to explode. Now for something you may find hard to accept. Loge had living on it a race of intelligent beings. Perhaps too intelligent. Maybe they were the reason that their planet disintegrated. We'll probably never know that. "The race had nuclear energy, but not spaceflight. How do I know that? Well, I know they had nuclear energy because they made transuranic elements. Any natural source of transuranics would have decayed by natural process in the past sevof the Solar System. The only way we could have a source of transuranics on Loge -- and only on Loge -- would be if they were being created there, by nuclear transmutation. We can't do that efficiently yet, so there's good reason to believe the Logians had an advanced nuclear technology -- more than we have today. "How do I know they didn't have spaceflight? That's harder. The main reason: they couldn't get off Loge, even though they knew it was going to disintegrate. They must have had some years' warning and time to plan, so I imagine it wasn't a nuclear war. Perhaps they had found a way of making large-scale interior adjustments to the planet, and lost control. Again, we'll never know. "They looked around them in the Solar System. They were going to die, personally, but was there a way their race might survive? To a Logian, the natural place for the survival of the race would be Jupiter or Saturn. They probably never even thought of Earth, a tiny planet, too hot, oxygen atmosphere, a metal ball crouched too near the Sun. No, Jupiter or Saturn was their hope. That's where they turned those big luminous eyes -- adapted for life in a methane-heavy atmosphere. "Their scientists calculated the force of the explosion and gave a grim report. No life form, even single celled ones, could survive it. Parts of Loge would be thrown in all directions. Some would undoubtedly hit Jupiter and its satellites -- and Earth too. Could anything survive that transit? "If anything could, it would be a virus. There's no 'life-support system' in a virus, it's just a chunk of needs a host cell. The Logians took a chance, and packed their genetic material as a viral form. "Maybe it worked. We've never had a ship down to the surface of Jupiter or Saturn, and perhaps there are Logians down there, created by viral growth of Loge genetic material in host bodies. We do know there are no Logians on the satellites of either planet. "Some of feat viral material was on fragments of Loge that were blown far out and became part of the long-period comets. That didn't matter. A virus lasts indefinitely. those fragments fell back into the Solar System and men began minnot at all. For their transuranic elements. "Humans are very poor hosts for Loge development. The Loge virus could get into the human body easily enough, and even take up residence in the central nervous system. But it couldn't thrive in such unfamiliar surroundings. Wrong atmosphere, wrong chemical balance, wrong shape." Ling paused and looked at the other two. He had ceased to be the irritating special advisor and become the great scientist, lecturing to an audience of laymen. "You may find it hard to believe, but I was already convinced of the existence of a Loge civilization before I ever came to Earth for this investigation. The transuranic elements proved it, to my satisfaction. Otherwise I would never have been led down this train of thought so quickly. "The crew of the 'Jason' picked fragment. Nothing happened. TTien they came to Earth and got into the form-change machines; and at last the virus could begin to act. It stimulated their central nervous sys, terns, and the purposive formchange began to create a form that was optimal -- for Logians, not for Earthmen. When that change had proceeded to the point where the changed form could not survive in the atmosphere of Earth, the creatures died. Asphyxiated, in normal air." Park Green was now looking in horror at the tank containing John Larsen. "Does that mean that will happen to John, too?" "It would have. He injected himAsfanium. The work we've been doing this past day has been to modify the life-support system of the tank, so that it follows the needs of the organism inside it. If you go and look at the tell-tales now, you'll find that the nutrients and the atmosphere are ones that would kill a human." Park Green hurried over to the tank. He looked quickly at the monitors and came back. "Body mass, one hundred and sixty kilos. Oxygen down to eight percent. Mr. Ling, will John live?" "I believe he will. Can we ever return him to the shape of John Larsen? That is a harder question. If we can, I suspect that it will not be for some time." Karl Ling looked at Bey Wolf and caught a reflection of his own excitement. "We must look on the positive side," he said. "We've dreamed for centuries about our first meeting with an alien race." He nodded towards the tank. "The first representative will be in that tank, ready to meet with us, a day or two from now."  Frank Herbert Part II of IV female, has known only the desperate survival battle on the planet Dosadi where she lives a double life: in one persona a minor bureaucrat supervising food distribution; in the other persona a secret warlord waiting to fidfill the function for which she was bred and trained. Her mandate is to lead rebellion against Dosadi's imprisonment, for this is no ordinary planet linked to all the other sentient federations in the ConSentiency. Dosadi is locked behind a barrier 'God Wall' which dims its sun and isolates it from the rest of the universe. Dosadi's two species, the frog-like Gowachin and the Humans, are descended from a population which submitted to memory erasure after volunteering to participate in a massive long-term psychological experiment. The descendants are supposed to believe themselves alone in the universe. But the ancestors who bred for Keila Jedrik knew they were puppets dancing to outside whims and they saw that Dosadi was a hell, its plants and animals poison to both Human and Gowachin unless raised in hydroponic isolation. The Dosadis know only the city of Chu where the food is relatively pure and the Rim where people are condemned to a teeming scramble for short existence. While Jedrik sets the stage for rebellion, other forces muster in the ConSentiency. The Bureau of Sabotage, a sophisticated ombudsman-like ministry in the ConSentient government, has discovered that there is such a place as Dosadi and that unidentified Gowachin are behind it. Dosadi's location and the precise nature of the experiment are not known, but BuSab learns that a Caleban is involved. Calebans, seen as stars in this universe, provide the ConSentiency with jumpdoors. Through a jumpdoor, you can walk in one step from planet to planet. Calebans, called the "S'Eye People," have been a nagging mystery for many generations. Either through design or semantic confusion, the Calebans have never explained how Jumpdoors work. This is a mystery on a lger scale but similar to the ConSentient involvement with Taprisiots, the stubby, logdike beings who provide instant mind-to-mind communications linkages across the parsecs. BuSab Agent Jorj X. McKie is assigned to solve the Dosadi problem by Bureau Chief Bildoon, a member of the PanSpechi species who ape Human form but can pass one ego from person to person in a creche-family. McKie knows there is time pressure, that the Gowachin may obliterate Dosadi to conceal what they have done. Summoned to the Gowachin home planet of Tandaloor, the place of their mythological progenitor, Mrreg, McKie is confronted by Aritch, High M agister of the most important Gowachin Phylum, and by a deadly Wreave female, representative of one of the many other species in the ConSentiency. The Wreave shows by her myriad cheek pocks that she is linked to countless breeding triads of her species. McKie knows that if he offends her, he risks vendetta with all of that gigantic extended family. The Wreave, Ceylang by name, is being trained as a Legum, an adept in Gowachin Law. McKie is the only living non-Gowachin who has achieved Legum status. Aritch places the binding oath upon McKie, who now must represent the High Magister in any Gowachin legal action. In doing this, Aritch puts in McKie's hands the Phylum box containing three sacred objects: a book, a knife and a rock. The book on ageless metal defines origins of Gowachin Law; the rock is for pounding on wood to call a Courtarena into session; the knife is to be used by the winning Legum to slay the loser. McKie stops the W reave from attacking him by revealing knowledge of other Gowachin sacred matters. Ceylang, frustrated, is warned by McKie that unless she sheds her Wreave skin she will never be a true Legum. These facts emerge: creasingly immune to memory erasure and are, in Gowachin eyes, 'monstrous' for reasons Aritch does not explain. The Dosadis submit to a quasireligious government under an Elector named Broey, who is a Gowachin of oddly Human habits and mannerisms. Anything is for sale on Dosadisecret information, bodies, temporary protection, virtually unlimited services, food, armies... Broey is served by a pair of Human warlords. Gar and Gar's daughter, Tria. This pair has a secret connection (which Jedrik knows) with attempts to start another city on Dosadi, an act proscribed by Broey 's Convocation of the Heavenly Veil. Jedrik's chauffeur, Havvy, tells her that a Jorj X. McKie is being sent in from the Rim, an infiltrator. Through her superb contacts with the Rim and intern espionage within the city, Jedrik knows McKie comes from off planet. He is the key she needs to open the God WaU! Unknown to Jedrik, McKie carries the sophisticated tools of his employment, highly dangerous weapons, plus a Taprisiot linkage which, should he be killed, is supposed to provide the next BuSab agent with all information McKie has learned up to the moment of death. Havvy tries to sell more information to Jedrik. She knows Havvy wasn't born on Dosadi, that he was a flawed instrument, coming to her too late to use against the God Wall. She hates the powers of 'X' who have imprisoned Dosadi, but conceals this. Jedrik places her reliance on a simulation model of each person who opposes her (including Broey), a model she carries in her head and which enables her to anticipate her foes. She also has come to realize that Havvy and the others like him, these non-Dosadis who govern her planet, are dolts. When Havvy tells her McKie comes from beyond the God Wall, it is too much. She already knew this, that McKie was walking into her trap. Havvy seemingly cannot learn the Dosadi lessons of concealment and personal hardness. He will have to die. Such incompetence cannot be permitted to breed. All persons act from beliefs they are conditioned not to question, from a set of deeply seated prejudices. Therefore, whoever presumes to judge must be asked: 'How are you affronted?' And this judge must begin there to question inwardly as well as outwardly. -- The Question' from Ritual of the Courtarena Guide to Servants of the Box "One might suspect you of trying to speak under water," McKie accused. He still sat opposite Aritch in the High Magister's sanctus and this near-insult was only one indicator marking the changed atmosphere between them. The sun had dropped closer to the horizon and its spiritual ring no longer outlined Aritch's head. The two of them were being more direct now, if not more candid, having explored individual capacities and found where profitable discourse might be directed. The High Magister flexed his thigh tendons. Knowing these people from long and close observation, McKie realized the old Gowachin was in pain from prolonged inactivity. That was an advantage to be exploited. McKie held up his left hand, enumerated on his fingers: "You say the original volunteers on Dosadi submitted to memory erasure, but many of their descendants are immune to such erasure. The present population knows nothing about our ConSentient Universe." "As far as the present Dosadi population comprehends, they are the only people on the only inhabited planet in existence." McKie found this hard to believe. He held up a third finger. Aritch stared with distaste at the displayed hand. There were no webs between the alien fingers! McKie said: "And you tell me that a DemoPol backed up by certain religious injunctions is the primary tool of government there?" "An original condition of our experiment," Aritch said. It was not a comprehensive answer, McKie observed. Original conditions invariably changed. McKie decided to come back to this after the High Magister had submitted to more muscle pain. "Do the Dosadi know the nature of the Caleban barrier which encloses them?" "They've tried rocket probes, primitive electromagnetic projections. They understand that those energies they can produce will not penetrate their 'God Wall.' " "Is that what they call the barrier?" "That or 'The Heavenly Veil.' To some degree, these labels measure their attitude toward the barrier." "The DemoPol can serve many governmental forms," McKie said. "What's the basic form of their government?" Aritch considered this, then: "The form varies. They've employed some eighty different governmental forms." Another non-responsive answer. Aritch did not like to face the fact that their experiment had assumed warlord trappings. McKie thought about the DemoPol. In the hands of adepts and with a population responsive to the software probes by which the computer data was assembled, the DemoPol represented an ultimate tool for manipulation of a populace. The ConSentiency outlawed its use as an assault on individual rights and freedoms. The Gowachin had broken this prohibition, yes, but a more interesting datum was surfacing: Dosadi had employed some eighty different governmental forms without rejecting the DemoPol. That implied frequent changes. "How often have they changed their form of government?" "You can divide the numbers as easily as I," Aritch said. His tone was petulant. McKie nodded. One thing had become quite clear. "Dosadi's masses kno.w about the DemoPol but you won't let them remove it!" Aritch had not expected this insight. He responded with revealing sharpness which was amplified by his muscle pains. "How did you learn that?" "You told me." "I?" "Quite plainly. Such frequent change is responsive to an irritant -- the DemoPol. They change the forms of government, but leave the irritant. Obviously, they cannot remove the irritant. That was clearly part of your experiment -- to raise a population resistant to the DemoPol." "A resistant population, yes," Aritch said. He shuddered. "You've fractured ConSentient Law in many places," McKie said. "Does my Legum presume to judge me?" "No. But if I speak with a certain bitterness, please recall that I am a Human. I embrace a profound sympathy for the Gowachin, but I remain Human." "Ahhhh, yes. We must not forget the long Human association with DemoPols." "We survive by selecting the best decision makers," McKie said. "And a DemoPol elevates mediocrity." "Has that happened on Dosadi?" "No." "But you wanted them to try many different governmental forms?" The High Magister shrugged, remained silent. "We Humans found that the DemoPol does profound damage to social relationships. It destroys preselected portions of a society." "And what could we hope to learn by damaging our Dosadi society?" "Have we arrived back at the question of expected benefits?" Aritch stretched his aching muscles. "You are persistent, McKie. I will say that." McKie shook his head sadly. "The DemoPol was always held up to us as the ultimate equalizer, a source of decision-making miracles. It was supposed to produce a growing body of knowledge about what a society really needed. It was thought to produce justice in all cases despite any odds." Aritch was irritated. He leaned forward, wincing at the pain of his old muscles. "One might make the same accusations about the law as practiced everywhere except on Gowachin worlds!" McKie suppressed a sharp response. Gowachin training had forced him to question assumptions about the uses of law in the ConSentiency, about the inherent rightness of any aristocracy, any power bloc whether majority or minority. It was a BuSab axiom that all power blocs tended toward aristocratic forms, that the descendants of decision makers dominated the power niches. BuSab never employed offspring of their agents. Aritch repeated himself, a thing Gowachin seldom did. "Law is delusion and fakery, McKie, everywhere except on the Gowachin worlds! You give your law a theological aura. You ignore the ways it injures your societies. Just as with the DemoPol, you hold up your law as the unvarying source of justice. When you..." "BuSab has..." "No! If something's wrong in your societies, what do you do? You create new law. You never think to remove law or disarm the law. You make more law! You create more legal professionals. We Gowachin sneer at you! We always strive to reduce the number of laws, the number of Legums. A Legum's first duty is to avoid litigation. When we create new Legums, we always have specific problems in mind. We anticipate the ways the laws damage our society." It was the opening McKie wanted. "Why are you training a Wreave?" Belatedly, Aritch realized he had been goaded into revealing more than he had wanted. "You are good, McKie. Very good." "Why?" McKie persisted. "Why a Wreave?" "You will learn why in time." McKie saw that Aritch would not expand on this answer, but there were other matters to consider now. It was clear that the Gowachin had trained him for a specific problem: Dosadi. To train a Wreave as Legum, they'd have an equally importani problem in mind... perhaps the same problem. A basic difference in the approach to law, species differentiated, had surfaced, however, and this could not be ignored. McKie well understood the Gowachin disdain for all legal systems, including their own. They were educated from infancy to distrust any community of professionals, especially legal professionals. A Legum could only tread their religious path when he completely shared that distrust. Do  share that distrust? He thought he did. It came naturally to a BuSab agent. But most of the ConSentiency still held its professional communities in high esteem, ignoring the nature of the intense competition for new 'achievements which invariably overcame such communities: new achievements, new recognition. But the new could be illusion in such communities because they always maintained a peer review system nicely balanced with peer pressures for ego rewards. "Professional always means power," the Gowachin said. The Gowachin distrusted power in all of its forms. They gave with one hand and took with the other. Legums faced death whenever they used the Law. To make new law in the Gowachin Courtarena was to bring about the elegant dissolution of old law with a concommittant application of justice. Not for the first time, McKie wondered about the unknown problems a High Magister must face. It would have to be a delicate existence indeed. McKie almost formed a question about this, thought better of it. He shifted instead to the unknowns about Dosadi. God Wall? Heavenly Veil? "Does Dosadi often accept a religious oligarchy?" "As an outward form, yes. They currently are presided over by a supreme Elector, a Gowachin by the name of Broey." "Have Humans ever held power equal to Broey's?" "Frequently." It was one of the most responsive exchanges that McKie had with Aritch. Although he knew he was following the High Magister's purpose, McKie decided to explore this. "Tell me about Dosadi's social forms." "They are the forms of a military organization under constant attack or threat of attack. Theyform certain cabals, certain power enclaves whose influences shift." "Is there much violence?" "It is a world of constant violence." McKie absorbed this. Warlords. Military society. He knew he had Just lifted a comer of the real issue which had brought the Gowachin to the point of obliterating Dosadi. It was an area to be approached with extreme caution. McKie chose a flanking approach. "Aside from the military forms, what are the dominant occupations? .How do they perceive guilt and innocence? WTiat are their forms off punishment, of absolution. How dot they..." I "You do not confuse me, I McKie. Consider, Legum: there are better ways to answer such questions." Brought up short by the Magister's chiding tone, McKie fell into silence. He glanced out the oval window, realizing he'd been thrown onto the defensive with exquisite ease. McKie felt the nerves tingling along his spine. Danger! Tandaloor's golden sun had moved perceptibly closer to the horizon. That horizon was a blue-green line made hazy by kilometer after kilometer of hair trees whose slender female fronds waved and hunted in the air. Presently, McKie turned back to Aritch. Better ivays to answer such questions. It was obvious where the High Magister's thoughts trended. The j experimenters would, of course, I have ways of watching their experi iment. They could also influence their experiment, but it was obvious there were limits to this influence. : A population resistant to outside influences? The implied complications of this Dosadi problem daunted McKie. Oh, the circular dance the Gowachin always performed! Better ways. Aritch cleared his ventricle passages with a harsh exhalation, then: "Anticipating the possibility that others would censure us, we gave our test subjects the Primary." Devils Jncarnate! The Gowachin set such store on their damned Primary! Of course all people were created unequal and had to find their own level! McKie knew he had no choice but to plunge into the maelstrom. "Did you also anticipate that you'd be charged with violating sentient rights on a massive scale?" Aritch shocked him by a brief puffing of jowls, the Gowachin shrug. McKie allowed himself a warning smile. "I remind the High Magister that he raised the issue of the Primary." "Truth is truth." McKie shook his head, sharply, not caring what this revealed. The High Magister couldn't possibly have that low an estimation of his reasoning abilities. Truth indeed! 'Til give you truth: The ConSentiency has laws on this subject to which the Gowachin are signatories!" Even as the words fell from his lips, McKie realized this was precisely where Aritch had wanted him to go. They've learned something from Dosadi! Something crucial! Aritch massaged the painful muscles of his thighs, said: "I remind you, Legum, that we peopled Dosadi with volunteers." "Their descendants volunteered for nothing!" ' 'Ancestors always volunteer their descendants -- for better or for worse. Sentient rights? Informed consent? The ConSentiency has been so busy building law upon law, creating its great illusion of rights, that you've almost lost sight of the Primary's guiding principal: to develop our capacities. People who are never challenged never develop ramVa strengths!" Despite the perils, McKie knew he had to press for the answer to his original question: benefits. "What've you learned from your monster?" "You'll soon have a complete answer to that question." Again, the implication that he could actually watch Dosadi. But first it'd be well to disabuse Aritch of any suspicion that McKie was unaware of the root implications. The issue had to be met head on. "You're not going to implicate me." "Implicate you?" There was no mistaking Aritch's surprise. "No matter how you use what you've learned from Dosadi, you'll be suspected of evil intent. Whatever anyone learns from..." "Oh, that. New data gives one power." "And you do not confuse me, Aritch. In the history of every species there are many examples of places where new data has been gravely abused." Aritch accepted this without question. They both knew the background. The Gowachin distrusted power in all of its forms, yet they used power with consummate skill. The trend of McKie's thoughts lay heavily in this room now. To destroy Dosadi would be to hide whatever the Gowachin had learned there. McKie, a nonGowachin, therefore, would learn those things, would share the mantle of suspicion should it be cast. The historical abuses of new data occurred between the time that a few people learned the important thing and the time when that important thing became general knowledge. To the Gowachin and to BuSab it was the 'Data Gap,' a source of constant danger. "We would not try to hide what we've learned," Aritch said, "only how we learned it." "And it's just an academic question whether you destroy an entire planet and every person on it!" "Ahh, yes: academic. What you don't know, McKie, is that one of our test subjects on Dosadi has initiated, all on her own, a course of events which will destroy Dosadi very quickly whether we act or not ! You'll leam all about this very soon when, like the good Legum we know you to be, you go there to experience this monster with your own flesh." ' In the name of all that we together hold holy I promise three things to the sacred congregation of people who are subject to my rule. In the first place, that the holy religion which we mutually espouse shall always preserve their freedom under my auspices; secondly, that  will temper every form of rapacity and inequity which may inflict itself upon us all; and thirdly, that I will command swift mercy in all judgements, that to me and to you the gracious Lord may extend His Recognition. -- The Oath of Power, Dosadi Sacred Congregation papers Broey arose from prayer, groped  behind him for the chair and sankj into it. Enclosed darkness sur-i rounded him. The room was a shielded bubble attached to the bot-j tom of his Graluz. Around the room's thick walls was the warm water which protected his females and their eggs. Access to the bubble was through a floor hatch and a twisting flooded passage from the Graluz. Pressure in the bubble excluded the water, but the space around Broey smelled reassuringly of the Graluz. This helped reinforce the mood he now required. Presently, the God spoke to him. Elation filled Broey. God spoke to him, only to him. Words hissed within his head. Scenes impinged themselves upon his vision centers. Yes! Yes!  keep the DemoPol! God was reassured and reflected that reassurance. Today, God showed him a ritual Broey had never seen before. The ritual was only for Gowachin. The ritual was called Laupuk. Broey saw the ritual in all of its gory details, felt the rightness of it as though his very cells accepted it. Responsibility, expiation -- these were the lessons of Laupuk. God approved when Broey expressed understanding. They communicated by words which Broey expressed silently in his thoughts, but there were other thoughts which God could not pex ceive. Just as God no doubt held thoughts which were not communicated to Broey. God used people, people used God. Divine intervention with cynical overtones. Broey had learned the Elector's role through a long and painful apprenticeship. I am your servant, God. As God admonished, Broey kept the secret of this private communion. It suited his purpose to obey, as it obviously suited God's purpose. There were times, though, when Broey wanted to shout it: "You fools!  speak with the voice of God!" Other Electors had made that mistake. They'd soon fallen from the seat of power. Broey, drawing on several lifetimes of assembled experiences, knew he must keep s power if he ever were to escape from Dosadi. Anyway, the fools did his bidding (and therefore God's) without divine admonition. All was well. One presented a selection of thoughts to God...being careful always where and when one reviewed private thoughts. There were times when Broey felt God within him when there'd been no prayer, no preparations here in the blackness of this bubble room. God might peer out of Broey 's eyes at any time -- softly, quietly -- examining His world and its works through mortal senses. "I guard My servant well." The warmth of reassurance which flowed through Broey then was like the warmth of the Graluz when he'd still been a tad clinging to his mother's back. It was a warmth and sense of safety which Broey tempered with a deep awareness of that other Graluz time: a giant greygreen adult male Gowachin ravening through the water, devouring those tads not swift enough, alert enough to escape.  was one of the swift. Memory of that plunging, frantic flight in the Graluz had taught Broey how to behave with God. In his bubble room's darkness, Broey shuddered. Yes, the ways of God were cruel. Thus armed, a servant of God could be equally cruel, could surmount the fact that he knew what it was to be both Human and Gowachin. He need only be the pure servant of God. This thout he shared. Beware, McKie. God has told me whence you come. I know your intentions. Hold fast to the narrow path, McKie. You risk my displeasure.    Behavioral engineering in all of its manifestations always degenerates into merciless manipulation, it reduces all (manipulators and manipulated alike) to a deadly mass effect.' The central assumption, that manipulation of individual personalities can achieve uniform behavioral responses, has been exposed as a lie by many species but never with more telling effect than by the Gowachin on Dosadi. Here, they showed us the 'Walden Fallacy' in ultimate foolishness, explaining; "Given any species which reproduces by genetic mingling such that every individual is a unique specimen, all attempts to impose a decision matrix based on assumed uniform behavior will prove lethal." -- The Dosadi Papers, BuSab reference McKie walked through the jumpdoor and, as Aritch's aides had said, found himself on sand at just past Dosadi's midmorning. He looked up, seeking his first realtime view of the G Wall, wanting to share the Dosadi feeling of that enclosure. All he saw was a thin haze, faintly silver, disappointing. The sun circle was more defined than he'd expected and he knew from the holographic reproductions he'd seen that a few of the third magnitude stars would be filtered out at night. What else he'd expected, McKie could not say, but somehow this milky veil was not it. Too thin, perhaps. It appeared insubstantial, too weak for the power it represented. The visible sun disk reminded him of another urgent necessity but he postponed that necessity while he examined his surroundings. A tall white rock? Yes, there it was on his left. They'd warned him to wait beside that rock, that he'd be relatively safe there. Under no circumstances was he to wander from this contact point. "We can tell you about the dangers of Dosadi but words are not enough. Besides, the place is always developing new threats." Things he'd learned in the briefing sessions over the past weeks reinforced the warning. The rock, twice as tall as a Human, stood only a few paces away, massive and forbidding. He went over and leaned against it. Sand grated beneath his feet. He smelled unfamiliar perfumes and acridities. The sun-warmed surface of the rock gave its energy to his flesh through the thin green coveralls they'd insisted he wear. McKie longed for his armored clothing and its devices to amplify muscles, but such things were not permitted. Only a reduced version of his toolkit had been allowed and that reluctantly, a compromise. McKie had explained that the contents would be destroyed if anyone other than himself tried to pry into the kit's secrets. Still, they'd warned him never to open the kit in the presence of a Dosadi native. "The most dangerous thing you can do is to underestimate any of the Dosadi." McKie, staring around him, saw no Dosadi. Far off across a dusty landscape dotted with yellow bushes and brown rocks, he identified the hazy j spires of Chu rising out of its river I canyon. Heat waves dizzied the air ; above the low scrub, giving the city : a magical appearance. McKie found it difficult to think j about Chu in the context of what I he'd learned during the crash course I the Gowachin had given him. Those ! magical fluting spires reached heavenward from a muck where "you can buy anything... anything at all." Aritch's aides had sewn a large sum in Dosadi currency into the seams of his clothing but, at the same time, had forced him to digest hair-raising admonitions about "any show of unprotected wealth." The jumpdoor attendants had recapitulated many of the most urgent warnings, adding: "You may have a wait of several hours. We're not sure. Just stay close to that rock where you'll be relatively safe. We've made protective arrangements which should work. Don't eat or drink anything until you get into the city. You'll be faintly sick with the diet change for a few days, but your body should adjust." "Should adjust?" "Give it time." He'd asked about specific dangers to which he should be most alert. "Stay clear of any Dosadi natives except your contacts. Above all, don't even appear to threaten anyone." "What if I get drowsy and take a nap?" They'd considered this, then: "You know, that might be the safest thing to do. Anyone who'd dare to nap out there would have to be damned well protected. There'd be some risk, of course, but there always is on Dosadi. But they'd be awfully leery of anyone casual enough to nap out there." Again, McKie glanced around. Sharp whistlings and a low rasp like sand across wood came from behind the tall rock. Quietly, McKie worked his way around to where he could see the sources of these noises. The whistling was a yellow lizard almost the color of the bushes beneath which it crouched. The rasp came from a direction which commanded the lizard's attention. Its source appeared to be a small hole beneath another bush. McKie thought he detected in the lizard only a faint curiosity about himself. Something about that hole and the noise issuing from it demanded a great deal of concentrated attention. Something stirred in the hole's blackness. The lizard crouched, continued to whistle. An ebony creature about the size of McKie's fist emerged from the hole, darted forward, saw the lizard. Wings shot from the newcomer's sides and it leaped upward but it was too late. With a swiftness which astonished McKie, the lizard shot forward, balled itself around its prey. A slit opened in the lizard's stomach, surrounded the ebony creature. With a final rasping, the black thing vanished into the lizard. All this time, the lizard continued to whistle. Still whistling, it crawled into the hole from which its prey had come. "Things are seldom what they seem to be on Dosadi," McKie's teachers had said. He wondered now what he had just seen. The whistling had stopped. The lizard and its prey reminded McKie that, as he'd been warned, there had not been time to prepare him for every new detail on Dosadi. He crouched now and, once more, studied his immediate surroundings. Tiny jumping things like insects inhabited the narrow line of shade at the base of the white rock. Green (blossoms?) opened and closed on the stems of the yellow bushes. The ground all around appeared to be a basic sand and clay but when he peered at it closely he saw veins and blue and red discoloration. He turned his back on the distant city, saw far away mountains: a purple graph line against silver sky. Rain had cut an arroyo in that direction. He saw touches of darker green reaching from the depths. The air tasted bitter. Once again, McKie made a sweeping study of his surroundings, seeking any sign of threat. Nothing he could identify. He palmed an instrument from his toolkit, stood casually and stretched while he turned toward Chu. When he stole a glance at the instrument, it revealed a sonabarrier at the city. Absently scratching himself to conceal the motion, he returned the instrument to his kit. Birds floated in the silver sky above the sonabarrier. Why a sonabarrier? he wondered. It would stop wild creatures, but not people. His teachers had said the sonabarrier excluded pests, vermin. The explanation did not satisfy McKie. Things are seldom what they seem. Despite the God Wall, that sun was hot. McKie sought the shady side of the rock. Seated there, he glanced at the small white disk affixed to the green lapel at his left breast: OP#-D#. It was standard Galach script, the lingua franca of the ConSentiency. "They speak only Galach on Dosadi. They may detect an accent in your speech, but they won't question it." Aritch's people had explained that this badge identified McKie as an open-contract worker, one with slightly above average skills in a particular field, but still part of the Labor Pool and subject to assignment outside his skill. "This puts you three hierarchical steps from the Rim," they'd said. It'd been his own choice. The bottom of the social system always had its own communications channels flowing with information based on accurate data, instinct, dream stuff and what was fed from the top with deliberate intent. Whatever happened here on Dosadi, its nature would be revealed in the unconscious processes of the Labor Pool. In the Labor Pool, he could tap that revealing flow. "I'll be a weaver," he'd said, explaining that it was a hobby he'd enjoyed for many years. The choice had amused his teachers. McKie had been unable to penetrate the reason for their amusement. "It is of no importance right now. One choice is as good as another." They'd insisted he concentrate on what he'd been doing at the time, learning the signal mannerisms of Dosadi. Indeed, it'd been a hectic period on Tandaloor after Aritch's insistence (with the most reasonable of arguments) that the best way for his Legum to proceed was to go personally to Dosadi. In retrospect, the arguments remained persuasive, but McKie had been surprised. For some reason which he could not now identify, he had expected a less involved overview of the experiment, watching through instruments and the spying abilities of the Caleban who guarded the place. McKie was still not certain how they expected him to pull this hot palip from the cooker but it was clear they expected it. Aritch had been mysteriously explicit: "You are Dosadi's best chance for survival and our own best chance for... understanding." They expected their Legum to save Dosadi while exonerating the Gowachin. It was a Legum's task to win for his client, but these had to be the strangest circumstances with the client retaining the absolute power of destruction over the threatened planet. On Tandaloor, McKie had been allowed just time for short naps. Even then, his sleep had been restless, part of his mind infernally aware of where he lay; the bedog strange and not quite attuned to his needs, the odd noises beyond the walls -- water gurgling somewhere, always water. When he'd trained there as a Legum that had been one of his first adjustments: the uncertain rhythms of disturbed water. Gowachin never strayed far from water. The Graluz -- that central pool and sanctuary for females, the place where Gowachin raised those tads which survived the ravenous weeding by the male parent -- The Graluz always remained a central fixation for the Gowachin. As the saying put it: "If you do not understand the Graluz you do not understand the Gowachin." As such sayings went, it was accurate only up to a point. But there was always the water, contained water, the nervous slapping of wavelets against walls. The sound conveyed no fixed rhythms, but it was a profound clue to the Gowachin: contained, yet always different. For all short distances, swimming tubes connected Gowachin facilities. They traversed long distances by jumpdoor or in hissing jetcars which moved on magnetic cushions. The comings and goings of such cars had disturbed McKie's sleep during the period of the crash course on Dosadi. Sometimes, desperately tired, his body demanding rest, he would find himself awakened by voices. And the subtle interference of the other sounds -- the cars, the waves -- made eavesdropping difficult. Awake in the night, McKie would strain for meaning. He felt like a spy listening for vital clues, seeking every nuance in the casual conversations of people beyond his walls. Frustrated, always fmstrated, he had retreated into sleep. And when, as happened occasionally, all sound ceased, this brought him to full alert, heart pounding, wondering what had gone wrong. And the odors! What memories they brought back to him. Graluz musk, the bitter pressing of exotic seeds, permeated every breath. Fern tree pollen intruded with its undertones of citrus. And the caraeli, tiny frog-like pets, invaded your sleep at every dawning with their exquisite belling arias. During those earlier days of training on Tandaloor, McKie had felt more than a little lost, hemmed in by threatening strangers, constantly aware of the important matters which rode on his success. But things were different after the interview with Aritch. McKie was now a trained, tested and proven Legum, not to mention a renowned agent of BuSab. Yet there were times when the mood of those earlier days intruded. Such intrusions annoyed him with their implication that he was being maneuvered into peril against his will, that the Gowachin secretly laughed as they prepared him for some ultimate humiliation. They were not above such a jest. Common assessment of Gowachin by non-Gowachin said the Frog God's people were so ultimately civilized they had come full circle into a form of primitive savagery. Look at the way Gowachin males slaughtered their own newborn tads! Once, during one of the rare naps Aritch's people permitted him, McKie had awakened to sit up and try to shake off that depressing mood of doom. He told himself true things: that the Gowachin flattered him now, deferred to him, treated him with that quasi-religious respect which they paid to all Legums. But there was no evading another truth: the Gowachin had groomed him for their Dosadi problem over a long period of time and they were being less than candid with him about that long process and its intentions. There were always unfathomed mysteries when dealing with Gowachin. When he'd tried returning to sleep that time, it was to encounter disturbing dreams of massed sentient flesh (both pink and green), all naked and quite defenseless before the onslaught of gigantic Gowachin males. The dream's message was clear. The Gowachin might very well destroy Dosadi in the way (and for similar reasons) that they winnowed their own tads -- searching, endlessly searching for the strongest and most resilient survivors. The problem they'd dumped in his lap daunted McKie. If the slightest inkling of Dosadi leaked into common awareness without a concurrent justification, the Gowachin Federation would be hounded unmercifully. The Gowachin had clear and sufficient reason to destroy the evidence... or to let the evidence destroy itself. Justification. Where was that to be found? In the elusive benefits which had moved the Gowachin to mount this experiment? Even if he found that justification, Dosadi would be an upheaval in the ConSentiency. It'd be the subject of high drama. More than twenty generations of Humans and Gowachin surfacing without warning! Their lonely history would titillate countless beings. The limits of language would be explored to wring the last drop of emotive essence from this revelation. No matter how explained, Gowachin motives would come in for uncounted explorations and suspicions. Why did they really do it? What happened to their original volunteers? People would look backward into their own ancestry -- Human and Gowachin alike. "Is that what happened to Uncle Elfred?" Gowachin phylum records would be explored. "Yes! Here are two -- gone without record!" Aritch's people admitted that "a very small minority" had mounted this project and kept the lid on it. Were they completely sane, this Gowachin cabal? McKie's short naps were always disturbed by an obsequious Gowachin bowing over his bedog, begging him to return at once to the briefing sessions which prepared him for survival on Dosadi. Those briefing sessions! The implied prejudices hidden in every one raised more questions than were answered. McKie tried to retain a reasoned attitude, but irritants constantly assailed him. Why had the Gowachin of Dosadi taken on Human emotional characteristics? Why were Dosadi 's Humans aping Gowachin social compacts? Were the Dosadi truly aware of why they changed governmental forms so often? The bland answer to his frequent questions enraged McKie. "All will be made clear when you experience Dosadi for yourself" He'd finally fallen into a counter-irritant patter: "You don't really know the answer, do you? You're hoping I'll find out for you!" . Some of the data recitals bored  McKie. While listening to a ( Gowachin explain what was known j about Rim relationships, he would ; find himself distracted by people ; passing in the multi-sentient access ' way outside the briefing area. , Once, Ceylang entered and sat on j the side of the room watching him I with a hungry silence which rubbed  McKie's sensibilities to angry rawj ness. He'd longed for the blue : metal box then, but once the solemn  investment had pulled the mantel of  Legumic protection around him, the  box had en removed to its sacred j niche. He'd not see it again unless  this issue entered the Courtarena. i Ceylang remained an unanswered  question among many. Why did that dangerous Wreave female haunt this ; room without contributing one thing? He suspected they allowed Ceylang to watch him through remote spy devices. Why did she choose that once to come in person? To let him know he was being observed? It had something to do with whatever had prompted the Gowachin to train a Wreave. They had some future problem which only a Wreave could solve. They were grooming this Wreave as they'd groomed him. Why? What Wreave capabilities attracted the Gowachin? How did this Wreave female differ from other Wreaves? Where were her loyalties? What was the 'Wreave Bet'? This led McKie into another avenue never sufficiently explored: What Human capabilities had led the Gowachin to him? Dogged persistence? A background in Human law? The essential individualism of the Human? There were no sure answers to these questions, no more than there were about the Wreave. Her presence continued to fascinate him, however. McKie knew many things about Wreave society not in common awareness outside the Wreave worlds. They were, after all, integral and valued partners in BuSab. In shared tasks, a cameraderie developed which often prcmipted intimate exchanges of information. Beyond the fact that Wreaves required a breeding triad for reproduction, he knew that Wreaves had never discovered a way to determine in advance which of the Triad would be capable of nursing the offspring. This formed an essential building stone in Wreave society. Periodically, this person from the triad would be exchanged for a like person from another triad. This insured their form of genetic dispersion and, of equal importance, built countless linkages throughout their civilization. With each such linkage went requirements for unquestioning support in times of trouble. A Wreave in the Bureau had tried to explain this: "Take, for example, the situation where a Wreave is murdered or, even worse, deprived of essential vanity. The guilty party would be triad exchange has linked us, we are uired to respond intimately to the insult. The closest thing you have to this, as I understand it, is familial responsibility. We have this familial responsibility for vendetta where such affronts occur. You have no idea how difficult it was to release those of us in BuSab from this... this bondage, this network of responsibility." The Gowachin would know this about the Wreaves, McKie thought. Had this characteristic attracted the Gowachin or had they chosen in spite of it, making their decision because of some other Wreave aspect? Would a Wreave Legum continue to share that network of familial responsibility? How could that be? Wreave society could only offend a basic sensibility of the Gowachin. The Frog God's people were even more... more exclusive and individual than Humans. To the Gowachin, family remained a private thing, walled off from strangers in an isolation which was abandoned only when you entered your chosen phylum. As he waited beside the white rock on Dosadi, McKie reflected on these matters, biding his time, listening. The alien heat, the smells and unfamiliar noises, disturbed him. He'd been told to listen for the sound of an internal combustion engine. Internal combustion! But the Dosadi used such devices outside the city because they were more powerful (although much larger) than the beamed impulse drivers which they used wjthin Chu's walls. "The fuel is alcohol. Most of the raw materials come from the Rim. It doesn't matter how much poison there is in such fuel. They ferment bushes, trees, ferns... anything the Rim supplies." A sleepy quiet surrounded McKie now. For a long time he'd been girding himself to risk the thing he knew he would have to do once he was alone on Dosadi. He might never again be this alone here... probably not once he was into Chu's warrens. He knew the futility of trying to contact his Taprisiot monitor. Aritch, telling him the Gowachin knew that BuSab had invested in 'Taprisiot insurance,' had said: "Not even a Taprisiot call can penetrate the God Wall." In the event of Dosadi's destruction, the Caleban contract ended. McKie's Taprisiot might even have an instant to complete the death record of McKie's memories. Might. That was academic to McKie in his present circumstances. The Calebans owed him a debt. McKie had removed the Whipping Star threat which had been as deadly to Calebans as to any other species which had ever used jumpdoors. Users of jumpdoors and the Caleban who controlled those jumpdoors had been doomed. The Caleban he knew by the pseudonym 'Fannie Mae' had expressed the debt to McKie in her own peculiar way: "The owing of me to thee connects to no ending." Aritch could have alerted his Dosadi guardian against any attempt by McKie to contact another Caleban. McKie doubted this. Aritch had specified a ban against Taprisiot calls. But all Calebans shared an awareness at some level. If Aritch and company had been lulled into a mistaken assumption about the security of their barrier around Dosadi... Carefully, McKie cleared his mind of any thoughts about Taprisiots. This wasn't easy. It required a Sufi concentration upon a particular void. There could be no accidental thrust of his mind at the Taprisiot waiting in the safety of Central Central with its endless patience. Everything must be blanked from awareness except a clear projection toward Fannie Mae. McKie visualized her. She was visible in this universe as the star Thyone. He recalled their long hours of mental give and take. He projected the warmth of emotional attachment. As he had saved Fannie Mae, she had protected and saved him. The emotion was real. Presently, he closed his eyes, amplified that internal image which now suffused his mind. He felt his muscles relax. The warm rock against his back, the sand beneath him, faded from awareness. Only the glowing presence of a Caleban remained in his mind. "Who calls?" The words touched his auditory centers, but not his ears. "It's McKie, friend of Fannie Mae. Are you the Caleban of the God Wall?" "I am the God Wall. Have you come to worship?" McKie felt his thoughts stumble. Worship? The projection from this Caleban was echoing and portentous, not at all like the probing curiosity he always sensed in Fannie Mae. He fought to regain that first clear image. The inner glow of a Caleban contact returned. He supposed there might be something worshipful in this experience. You were never absolutely certain of a Caleban 's meaning. "It's McKie, friend of Fannie Mae," he repeated. The glow within McKie dimmed, then: "But you occupy a point upon Dosadi's wave." That was a familiar kind of communication, one to which McKie could apply previous experience in the hope of a small understanding, an approximation. "Does the God Wall permit me to contact Fannie Mae?" Words echoed in his head: "One Caleban, all Caleban." "I wish to converse with Fannie Mae." "You are not satisfied with your present body?" McKie felt his body then, the trembling flesh, the zombie-like trance state which went with Caleban or Taprisiot contact. The question had no meaning to him, but the body contact was real and it threatened to break off communication. Slowly, McKie fought back to that tenuous mind-presence. "I am Jorj X. McKie. Calebans are in my debt." "All Calebans know this debt." "Then honor your debt." He waited, trying not to grow tense. The glow within his head was replaced by a new presence. It insinuated itself into McKie's awareness with penetrating familiarity -- not full mental contact but rather a playing upon those regions of his brain where sight and sound were interpreted. McKie recognized this new presence. "Fannie Mae!" "What does McKie require?" For a Caleban, it was quite a direct communication. McKie, noting this, responded more directly: "I require your help." "Explain." "I may be killed here...ahh, have an end to my node here on Dosadi." "Dosadi's wave," she corrected him. "Yes. And if that happens, if I die here, I have friends on Central Central...on Central Central's wave...friends there who must learn everything that's in my mind when I die." "Only Taprisiot can do this. Dosadi contract forbids Taprisiots." "But if Dosadi is destroyed..." "Contract promise passes no ending, McKie." "You cannot help me?" "You wish advice from Fannie Mae?" "Yes." "Fannie Mae able to maintain contact with McKie while he occupies Dosadi's wave." Constant trance? McKie was shocked. She caught this. "No trance. McKie's nexus known to Fannie Mae." "I think not. I can't have any distractions here." "Bad choice." She was petulant. "Could you provide me with a personal jumpdoor to..." "Not with node ending close to ending for Dosadi wave." "Fannie Mae, do you know what the Gowachin are doing here on Dosadi? This is..." "Caleban contract, McKie." Her displeasure was clear. You didn't question the honor of a Caleban 's word-writ. The Dosadi contract undoubtedly contained specific prohibitions against any revelations of what went on here. McKie was dismayed. He was tempted to leave Dosadi immediately. Fannie Mae' got his message, too. "McKie can leave now. Soon, McKie cannot leave in his own bodynode." "Bodynode?" "Answers not permitted." Not permitted! "I thought you were my friend, Fannie Mae!" Warmth suffused him. "Fannie Mae possesses friendship for McKie." "Then why won't you help me?" "You wish to leave Dosadi's wave in this instant?" "No!" "Then Fannie Mae cannot help." Angry, McKie began to break contact. Fannie Mae projected sensations of frustration and hurt. "Why does McKie refuse advice? Fannie Mae wishes..." "I must go. You know I'm in a trance while we're in contact. That's dangerous here. We'll speak another time. I appreciate your wish to help and your new clarity but..." "Not clarity! Very small hole in understanding but Human keeps no more dimension!" Obvious unhappiness accompanied this response but she broke the contact. McKie felt himself awakening, his fingers and toes trembling with cold. Caleban contact had slowed his metabolism to a dangerous low. He opened his eyes. A strange Gowachin clad in the yellow of an armored vehicle driver stood over him. A tracked machine rumbled and puffed in the background. Blue smoke enveloped it. McKie stared upward in shock. The Gowachin nodded companionably. "You are ill?"    I We of the Sabotage Bureau remain legalists of a special category. We know that too much law injures a society; it is the same with too little law. One seeks a balance. We are like the balancing force among the Gowachin; without hope of achieving heaven in the society of mortals, we seek the unattainable. Each agent knows his own conscience and why he serves such a master. That is the key to us. We serve a mortal conscience for immortal reasons. We do it without hope of praise or the sureness of success. -- The early writings of Bildoon, PanSpechi Chief of BuSab They moved out onto the streets as soon as the afternoon shadows gloomed the depths of the city, Tria and six carefully chosen companions, all of them young Human males. She'd musked herself to key them up and she led them down dim byways where Broey's spies had been eliminated. All of her troop was armored and armed in the fashion of an ordinary sortie team. There'd been rioting nearby an hour earlier, not sufficiently disruptive to attract large military attention, but a small Gowachin salient had been eliminated from a Human enclave. A sortie team was the kind of thing this Warren could expect after such a specific species adjustment. Tria and her six companions were not likely to suffer attack. None of the rioters wanted a large scale mopping up in the area. A kind of hushed, suspenseful waiting pervaded the streets. , They crossed a wet intersection, ! green and red ichor in the gutters. I The smell of the dampness told her i that a graluz had been broached and its waters freed to wash through the streets. That would attract retaliation. Some Human children were certain to be killed in the days ahead. An old pattern. The troop crossed the riot area presently, noting the places where bodies had fallen, estimating casualties. All bodies had been removed. Not a scrap remained for the birds. They emerged from the Warrens soon afterward, passing through a Gowachin-guarded gate, Broey's people. A few blocks along they went through another gate, Human guards, all in Gar's pay. Broey would learn of her presence here soon, Tria knew, but she'd said she was going into the Warrens. She came presently to an alleyway across from a Second Rank building. The windowless grey of the building's lower floors presented a blank face broken only by the lattice armor of the entrance gate. Behind the gate lay a dimly lighted passage. Its deceptively plain walls concealed spy devices and automatic weapons. Holding back her companions with a hand motion, Tria waited in the dark while she studied the building entrance across from her. The gate was on a simple latch. There was one doorguard in an alcove on the left near the door which was dimly visible beyond the armorwork of the gate. A building defense force stood ready to come at the doorguard's summons or at the summons of those who watched through the spy devices. Tria's informants said this was Jedrik's bolt hole. Not in the Warrens at all. Clever, clever. But Tria had maintained an agent in this building for years as she kept agents in many buildings. A conventional precaution. Everything depended on timing now. Her agent in the building was poised to eliminate the inner guards at the spy-device station. Only the doorguard would remain. Tria waited for the agreed upon moment. The street around her smelled of sewage: an open reclamation line. Accident? Riot damage? Tria didn't like the feeling of this place. What was Jedrik's game? Were there unknown surprises built into this guarded building? Jedrik must know by now that she was suspected of inciting the riot...and of other matters. But would she feel safe there in her own enclave? People tended to feel safe among their own people. She couldn't have a very large force around her, though. Still, some private plot worked itself through the devious pathways of Jedrik's mind and Tria had not yet fathomed all of that plot. There were surface indicators enough to risk a confrontation, a parley. It was possible that Jedrik flaunted herself here to attract Tria. The potential in that possibility filled Tria with excitement. Together, we'd be unbeatable! Yes...Jedrik fitted the image of a superb agent. With the proper organization around her... Once more, Tria glanced left and right. The streets were appropriately empty. She checked the time. Her moment had come. With hand motions, she sent flankers out left and right and another young male probing straight across the street to the gate. When they were in place, she slipped across with her three remaining companions in a triangular shield ahead. The doorguard was a Human with grey hair and a pale face which glistened yellow in the dim light of the passage. His lids were heavy with a recent dose of his personal drug which Tria's agent had supplied. Tria opened the gate, saw that the guard carried a round dead-man switch in his right hand as expected. His grin was gap-toothed as he held the switch toward her. She knew he'd recognized her. Much depended now on her agent's accuracy. "Do you want to die for the frogs?" Tria asked. He knew about the rioting, the trouble in the streets. And he was Human with Human loyalties, bul he knew she worked for Broey, a Gowachin. The question was precisely calculated to fill him with indecision. Was she a turncoat? He had his Human loyalties and a fanatic's dependence upon this guard post which kept him out of the Warrens. And there was his personal addiction. All doorguards were addicted to something, but this one took a drug which dulled his senses and made it difficult for him to correlate several lines of thought He wasn't supposed to use his drug on duty and this troubled him now. There were so many matters to be judged and Tria had asked the righi question. He didn't want to die for the frogs. She pointed to the dead-man switch, a question. "It's only a signal relay," he said. "No bomb in this one." She remained silent, forcing him to focus on his doubts. The guard swallowed. "What do you..." "Join us or die." He peered past her at the others. Things such as this happened frequently in the Warrens, not verj often here on the slopes which led up to the heights. The guard was not a one trusted with full knowledge of who he guarded. He had explicit instructions and a dead-man relay to warn of intruders. Othen were charged with making the more subtle distinctions, the real decisions. That was this building's weal point. "Join who?" he asked. There was false belligerency in his voice and she knew she had him then. "Your own kind." This locked his drug-dulled mind onto its primary fears. He knew what he was supposed to do: open his hand. That released the alarm device in the dead-man switch. He could do this of his own volition and it was supposed to deter attacman's hand opened anyway. But he'd been fed with suspicions to increase his doubts. The device in his hand might not be a simple signal transmitter. What if it actually were a bomb? He'd had many long hours to wonder about that. "We'll treat you well," Jedrik said. She put a companionable arm around his shoulder, letting him get the full effect of her musk while she held out her other hand to show that it carried no weapon. "Demonstrate to my companion here how you pass that to your relief." One of the young males stepped forward. The guard showed how it was done, explaining slowly as he passed the device. "It's easy once you get the trick of it." When her companion had the thing finnly in hand, she raised her arm from the guard's shoulder, touched his carotid artery with a poisoned needle concealed in a fingernail. The guard had only time to draw one gasping breath, his eyes gaping before he sank from her embrace. "I treated him well," she said. Her companions grinned. It was the kind of thing you learned to expect from Tria. They dragged the body out of sight into the guard alcove and the young male with the signal device took his place at the door. The others protected Tria with their bodies as they swept into the building. The whole operation had taken less than two minutes. Everything was working smoothly as Tria's operations were expected to work. The lobby and its radiating hallways were empty. Good. Her agent in this building deserved a promotion. They took a stairway rather than trust an elevator. It was only three short flights. The upper hallway also was empty. Jedrik led the way to the designated door, used the key her agent had supplied. The door opened without a sound and they surged into the room. Inside, the shades had been pulled and there was no artificial illumination. Her companions took up their places at the closed door and along both flanking walls. This was the most dangerous moment, something only Tria could handle. Light came from thin strips where shades did not quite seal a south window. Tria discerned dim shapes of furniture, a bed with an indeterminate blob of darkness on it. "Jedrik?" A whisper. Tria's feet touched soft fabric, a sandal. "Jedrik?" Her shin touched the bed. She held a weapon ready while she felt for the dark blob. It was only a mound of bedding. She turned. The bathroom door was closed, but she could make out a thin slot of light at the bottom of the door. She skirted the clothing and sandal on the floor, stood at one side and motioned a companion to the other side. Thus far they had operated with a minimum of sound. Gently, she turned the knob, thrust open the door. There was water in a tub and a body face down, one arm hanging flaccidly over the edge, fingers dangling. A dark purple welt was visible behind and beneath the left ear. Tria lifted the head by the hair, stared at the face, lowered it gently to avoid splashing. It was her agent, the one she'd trusted for the intelligence to set up this operation. And the death was characteristic of a Gowachin ritual slaying... that welt under the ear. A Gowachin talon driven in there to silence the victim before drowning? Or had it just been made to appear like a Gowachin slaying? Tria felt the whole operation falling apart around her, sensed the uneasiness of her companions. She considered calling Gar from where she stood but a feeling of fear and revulsion came over her. She stepped out into the bedroom before opening her communicator and thumbing the emergency signal. "Central." The voice was tense. She Kept her own voice flat. "Our agent's dead." Silence. She could imagine them centering the locator on her transmission, then: "There?" "Yes. She's been murdered." Gar's voice came on: "That can't be. I talked to her less than an hour ago. She..." "Drowned in a tub of water," Tria said. "She was knocked out first... something sharp driven in under an ear." There was silence again while Gar absorbed this data. He would have the same uncertainties as Tria. She glanced at her companions. They had taken up guard positions facing the doorway to the hall. Yes, if attack came, it would come from there. The channel to Gar remained open and now Tria heard a babble of terse orders with only a few words intelligible: "... team... don't let... time..." Then, quite clearly: "They'll pay for this!" Who will pay? Tria wondered. She was beginning to make a new assessment of Jedrik. Gar came back on: "Are you in immediate danger?" "I don't know." It was a reluctant admission. "Stay right where you are. We'll send help. I've notified Broey." So that was the way Gar saw it. Yes. That was most likely the proper way to handle this new development. Jedrik had eluded them. There was no sense in proceeding alone. It would have to be done Broey's way now. Tria shuddered as she issued the necessary orders to her companions. They prepared to sell themselves dearly if an attack came, but Tria was beginning to doubt there'd be an immediate attack. This was another message from Jedrik. The trouble came when you tried to interpret the message.    The military mentality is a bandit and raider mentality. Thus, all military represents a form of organized banditry where the conventional mores do not prevail. The military is a way of rationalizing murder, rape, looting and other forms of theft which are always accepted as part of warfare. When denied an outside target, the military mentality always turns against its own civilian population, using identical rationalizations for bandit behavior. -- BuSab Manual, Chapter Five: "The Warlord Syndrome" McKie, awakening from the communications trance, realized how he must've appeared to this strange Gowachin towering over him. Of course a Dosadi Gowachin would think him ill. He'd been shivering and mumbling in the trance, perspiration rolling from him. McKie took a deep breath. "No, I'm not ill." "Then it's an addiction?" Recalling the many substances to which the Dosadi could be addicted, McKie almost used this excuse but thought better of it. This Gowachin might demand some of the addictive substance. "Not an addiction," McKie said. He lifted himself to his feet, glanced around. The sun had moved perceptibly toward the horizon behind its .streaming veil. And something new had been added to the landscape -- that gigantic tracked vehicle, which stood throbbing and puffing smoke from a vertical stack behind the Gowachin intmder. The Gowachin maintained a steady, intense concentration on McKie, disconcerting in its unwavering directness. McKie had to ask himself if this were some threat or his Dosadi contact? Aritch's people had said a vehicle would be sent to the contact point, but... "Not ill, not an addiction," the Gowachin said. "Is it some strange condition which only Humans have?" "I was ill," McKie said. "But I'm recovered. The condition has passed." "Do you often have such attacks?" "I can go years without a recurrence." "Years? What causes this... condition?" "I don't know." "I... ahhhh." The Gowachin nodded, gestured upward with his chin. "An affliction of the Gods, perhaps." "Perhaps." "You were completely vulnerable." McKie shrugged. Let the Gowachin make of that what he could. "You were not vulnerable?" Somehow, this amused the Gowachin, who added: "I am Bahrank. Perhaps that's the luckiest thing which has ever happened to you." Bahrank was the name Aritch's aides had given as McKie's first contact. "I am McKie." "You fit the description, McKie, except for your, ahhhh, condition. Do you wish to say more?" McKie wondered what Bahrank expected. This was supposed to be a simple contact handing him on to more important people. Aritch was certain to have knowledgeable observers on Dosadi, but Brank was not supposed to be one of them. The warning about this Gowachin had been specific. "Bahrank doesn't know about us. Be extremely careful what you reveal to him. It'd be very dangerous to you if he were to learn that you came from beyond the God Veil." The jumpdoor aides had reinforced the warning. "If the Dosadi penetrate your cover you'll have to return to your pickup point on your own. We very much doubt that you could make it. Understand that we can give you little help once we've put you on Dosadi." Bahrank visibly came to a decision, nodding to himself. "Jedrik expects you." That was the other name Aritch's people had provided. "Your cell leader. She's been told that you're a new infiltrator from the Rim. Jedrik doesn't know your true origin." "Who does know?" "We cannot tell you. If you don't know then that information cannot be wrested from you. We assure you, though, that Jedrik isn't one of our people." McKie didn't like the sound of that warning. "... wrested from you." As usual, BuSab sent you into the tiger's mouth without a full briefing on the length of the tiger's fangs. Bahrank gestured toward his tracked vehicle. "Shall we go?" McKie glanced at the machine. It was an obvious war device, heavily armored with slits in its metal cab, projectile weapons protruding at odd angles. It looked squat and deadly. Aritch's people had mentioned such things. "We saw to it that they got only primitive armored vehicles, projectile weapons and relatively unimportant explosives, that sort of thing. They've been quite resourceful in their adaptations of such weaponry, however." Once more, Bahrank gestured toward his vehicle, obviously anxious to leave. McKie was forced to suppress an abrupt feeling of profound anxiety. What had he gotten himself into? He felt that he had awakened to find himself on a terrifying slide into peril, unable to control the least threat. The sensation passed but it left him shaken. He delayed while he continued to stare at the vehicle. It was about six meters long with heavy tracks plus other wheels faintly visible within the shadows behind the tracks. It sported a conventional antenna at the rear for tapping the power transmitter in orbit beneath the barrier veil, but there was a secondary system which burned a stinking fuel. The smoke of that fuel filled the air around them with acridity. "For what do we wait?" Bahrank demanded. He glared at McKie with obvious fear and suspicion. "We can go now," McKie said. Bahrank turned and led the way swiftly, clambering up over the tracks and into a shadowed cab. McKie followed, found the interior a tightly cluttered place full of a bitter oily smell. There were two hard metal seats with curved backs higher than the head of a seated Human or Gowachin. Bahrank already occupied the seat on the left, woiicing switches and dials. McKie dropped into the other seat. Folding arms locked across his chest and waist to hold him in place; a brace fitted itself to the back of his head. Bahrank threw a switch. The door through which they'd entered closed with a grinding of servomotors and the solid clank of locks. An ambivalent mood swept over McKie. He had always felt faint agoraphobia in open places such as the area around the rock. But the dim interior of this war machine with its savage reminders of primitive times touched an atavistic chord in his psyche and he fought an urge to claw his way outside. This was a trap! An odd observation helped him overcome the sensation. There was glass over the slits which gave them their view of the outside. Glass. He felt it. Yes, glass. It was common stuff in the ConSentiency -- strong yet fragile. He could see that this glass wasn't very thick. The fierce appearance of this machine had to be more show than actuality, then. Bahrank gave one swift sweeping glance to their surroundings, moved levers which set the vehicle into lurching motion. It emitted a grinding rumble with an overriding whine. A track of sorts led from the white rock toward the distant city. It showed the marks of this machine's recent passage, a roadway to follow. Glittering reflections danced from bright rocks along the track. Bahrank apeared very busy with whatever he was doing to guide them toward Chu. McKie found his own thoughts returning to the briefings he'd received on Tandaloor. "Once you enter Jedrik's cell you're on your own." Yes...he felt very much alone, his mind a clutter of data which had little relationship to any previous experience. And this planet could die unless he made sense out of that data plus whatever else he might learn here. Alone, alone... If Dosadi died there'd be few sentient watchers. The Caleban's tempdcinetic barrier would contain most of that final destructive flare. The Caleban would, in fact, feed upon the released energy. That was one of the things he'd learned from Fannie Mae. One consuming blast, a meal for a Caleban, and BuSab would get its final report from a dead agent, would be forced to start anew and without the most important piece of physical evidence -- Dosadi . The machine beneath McKie thundered, rocked and skidded but always returned to the track which led toward Chu's distant spires. McKie studied the driver covertly. Bahrank showed uncharacteristic behavior for a Gowachin... more direct... more Human. That was it! His Gowachin instincts had been contaminated by contact with Humans. Aritch was sure to despise that, fear it. Bahrank drove with a casual expertise using a complex control system. McKie counted eight different levers and arms which the Gowachin employed. Some were actuated by knees, others by his head. His hands reached out while an elbow deflected a lever. The war machine responded. Bahrank spoke presently without taking his attention from driving. "We may come under fire on the second ledge. There was quite a police action down there earlier." McKie stared at him. "I thought we had safe passage through." "You Rimmers are always pressing." McKie peered out the slits: bushes, barren ground, that lonely track they followed. Bahrank spoke. "You're older than any Rimmer I ever saw before." Aritch's people had warned McKie about this as a basic flaw in his cover, the need to conceal the subtle signs of age. They'd provided him with some geriatric assistance and an answer to give when challenged. He used that answer now. 'Tt ages you in a hurry out here." "It must." McKie felt that something in Bahrank's response eluded him, but dared not pursue this. It was an unproductive exchange. And there was that reference to a 'police action.' McKie knew that the Rim Rabble, excluded from Chu, tried periodic raids, most often fruitless. Barbaric! "What excuses did you use to come out here?" McKie asked. Bahrank shot a probing glance at him, raised one webbed hand from the controls to indicate a handle in the roof over his head. The handle's purpose was unknown to McKie and he feared he had already betrayed too much ignorance. But Bahrank was speaking. "Officially, I'm scouting this area for any hidden surprises the Rimmers may have stored out here. I often do that. Unofficially, everyone thinks I've a secret pond out here full of fertile females." A pond... not a graluz. Again, it was a relatively fruitless exchange with hidden overtones. McKie stared silently ahead through a slit. Their dusty track made a slow and wide sweep left, abruptly angled down onto a narrow ledge cut from red rock walls. Bahrank put them through a series of swift changes in speed: slow, fast, slow fast. The red rock walls raced past. McKie peered out and downward on his side. Far below lay jungle verdure and, in the distance, the smoke and spires of Chu -- fluted buildings ranked high over dim background cliffs. The speed changes appeared purposeless to McKie. And the dizzy drop off of the cliff on his side filled him with awe. This narrow ledge hugged the cliff, turning as the cliff turned -- now into shadows and now into light. The machine roared and groaned around him. The smell of oil made his stomach heave. And the far away city seemed little closer than it had from the cliff top, except that it was taller, more mysterious in its smoky obscurity. "Don't expect any real trouble until we reach the first ledge," Bahrank said. McKie glanced at him. First ledge? Yes, that'd be the first elevation outside the city's walls. The gorge within which Chu had been raised came down to river level in broad steps, each one numbered. Chu had been anchored to island hills and flats where the river slowed and split into many arms. And the hills which had resisted the river were almost solid iron ore, as were many of the flanking ledges. "Glad to get off there," Bahrank said. Their narrow ledge had turned at right angles away from the cliff onto a broad ramp which descended into grey-green jungle. The growth enclosed them in abrupt green shadows. McKie, looking out to the t side, identified hair fronds and broad leaf ficus, giant spikes of barbed red which he had never before seen. Their track, like the ' jungle floor, was grey mud. McKie looked from side to side: the growth appeared an almost equal mixture of Terran and Tandaloor interspersed  with many strange plants. I Sunlight made him blink as they F raced out of the overhanging plants onto a plain of tall grass which had been trampled, blasted and burned by recent violence. He saw a pile of wrecked vehicles off to the left, twisted shards of metal with, here and there, a section of track or a wheel aimed at the sky. Some of the wrecks looked similar to the machine in which he now rode. Bahrank skirted a blast hole at an angle which gave McKie a view into the hole's depths. Tom bodies lay there. Bahrank made no comment, seemed hardly to notice. Abruptly, McKie saw signs of movement in the jungle, the flitting presence of both Humans and Gowachin. Some carried what appeared to be small weapons -- the glint of a metal tube, bandoliers of bulbous white objects around their necks. McKie had not tried to memorize all of Dosadi's weaponry; it was, after all, primitive, but he reminded himself now that primitive weapons had created these scenes of destruction. Their track plunged again into overhanging growth, leaving the battlefield behind. Deep green shadows enclosed the lurching, rumbling machine. McKie, shaken from side to side against the restraints, carried an odor memory with him: deep, bloody musks and the beginnings of rot. Their shaded avenue made a sharp right turn, emerged onto another ledge slashed by a plunging cut into which Bahrank took them, turning onto another cliff-hugging ledge. McKie stared across Bahrank through the slits. The city was nearer now. Their rocking descent swept his gaze up and down Chu's towers which lifted like silvery organ pipes out of the Council Hills. The far cliff was a series of misted steps fading into purple grey. Chu's Warrens lay smokey and hazed all around the fluted towers. And he could make out part of the city's enclosing outer wall. Squat forts dotted the wall's top, offset for enfilading fire. The city within the wall seemed so tall. McKie had not expected it to appear so tall... but that spoke of the population pressures in a way that could not be misunderstood. Their ledge ended at another battlefield plain strewn with bodies of metal and flesh, the death stink an inescapable vapor. Bahrank spun his vehicle left, right, dodged piles of torn equipment, avoided craters where mounds of flesh lay beneath insect blankets. Ferns and other low growth were beginning to spring upright after the monstrous trampling. Grey and yellow flying creatures sported in the ferntops, uncaring of all that death. Aritch's aides had warned McKie that Dosadi's life existed amidst brutal excesses, but the actuality sickened him. He identified both Gowachin and Human forms among the sprawled corpses. The sleek green skin of a young Gowachin female, orange fertility marks prominent along her arms, especially revolted him. McKie turned sharply away, found Bahrank studying him with tawny mockery in the shining Gowachin eyes. Bahrank spoke as he drove. "There's informers everywhere, of course, and after this..." His head nodded left and right. "... you'll have to move with more caution than you might've anticipated." A brittle explosion punctuated his words. Something struck the vehicle's armor on McKie's side. Again they were a target. And again. The clanging of metal against metal came thickly, striking all around them, even on the glass over the view slits. McKie suppressed his shock. That thin glass did not shatter. He knew about thick shields of tempered glass, but this put a new dimension on what he'd been told about the Dosadi. Quite resourceful indeed! Bahrank drove with apparent unconcern. More explosive attack came from directly in front of them, flashes of orange in the jungle beyond the plain. "They're testing," Bahrank said. He pointed to one of the slits. "See? They don't even leave a mark on that new glass." McKie spoke from the depths of his bitterness. "Sometimes you wonder what all this proves except that our world runs on distrust." "Who trusts?" Bahrank's words had the sound of a catechism. McKie said: "I hope our friends know when to stop testing." "They were told we couldn't take "Didn't they agree to pass us through?" "Even so, they're expected to t a few shots if Just to keep me in good graces with my superiors." Once more, Bahrank put them through a series of dazzling speed changes and turns for no apparent reason. McKie lurched against the restraints, felt bruising pain as an elbow hit the side of the cab. An explosion directly behind rocked them up onto the left track. As they bounced, Bahrank spun them left, avoided another blast which would've landed directly on them along their previous path. McKie, his ears ringing from the explosions, felt the machine bounce to a stop, reverse as more explosions erupted ahead. Bahrank spun them to the right, then left, once more charged full speed ahead right into an unbroken wall of jungle. With explosions all around, they crashed through greenery, turned to the right along another shadowed muddy track. McKie had lost all sense of direction, but the attack had ceased. Bahrank slowed them, took a deep breath through his ventricles. "I knew they'd try that." He sounded both relieved and amused. McKie, shaken by the brush with death, couldn't find his voice. Their shadowy' track snaked through the jungle for a space, giving McKie time to recover. By then, he didn't know what to say. He couldn't understand Bahrank's amusement, the lack of enduring concern' over such violent threat. Presently, they emerged onto an untouched sloping plain as smooth and green as a park lawn. It dipped gently downward into a thin screen of growth through which McKie could see a silver green tracery of river. What caught and held McKie's attention, however, was a windowless, pockwalled grey fortress which lifted from the plain in the middle distance. It towei over the growth screening the river. Buttressed arms reached toward them to enclose a black metal barrier. "That's our gate," Bahrank said. Bahrank turned them left, lined up with the center of the buttressed arms. "Gate Nine and we're home through the tube," he said... McKie nodded. Walls, tubes and gates: those were the keys to Chu's defenses. They had "barrier and fortress minds" on Dosadi. This tube would run beneath the river. He tried to place it on the map which Aritch's people had planted in his mind. 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No Dice, No Chance, and Unique Play systems for the WarGamer th have never been used before. Buy both and deduct #. New # WarGame Catalog (#) has over # War Games covering every phase and era of Historic Conflict and of both Games. P.O. Box # Evanston, IL # on that mental map. He leaned forward to the slit, peered upward as the machine began to gather speed, saw the great central spire with its horizontal clock. All the hours of map briefing snicked into place. "Yes, Gate Nine." Bahrank, too busy driving, did not reply. McKie dropped his gaze to the fortress, stifled a gasp. The rumbling machine was plunging downslope at a frightening pace, aimed directly toward that black metal barrier. At the last instant, when it seemed they would crash into it, the barrier leaped upward. They shot through into a dimly illuminated tube. The gate thundered closed behind them. Their machine made a racketing sound on metal grating beneath the tracks. Bahrank slowed them, shifted a lever beside him. The machine lifted onto wheels with an abrupt reduction in noise which made McKie feel that he'd been deafened. The feeling was heightened by the realization that Bahrank had said the same thing to him several times. "Jedrik says you come from beyond the far mountains. Is that true?" "Jedrik says it." He tried to make it sound wry, but it came out almost questioning. Bahrank was concentrating on a line of thought, however, as he drove them straight down the grating floor of the dim tube. "There's a rumor that you Rimmers have started a secret settlement back there, that you're trying to build your own city." "An interesting rumor." "Isn't it, though?" The single line of overhead lights in the tufc left the cab's interior darker than it'd been outside, illuminated by only the faint reflections from instruments and dials. But McKie had the odd sensation that Bahrank saw him clearly, was studying every expression, spite the impossibility of this, the thought persisted. What was behind Bahrank' s probing? Why do I feel that he sees right through me? These disquieting conjectures ended as they emerged from the tube onto a Warren street. Bahrank spun them to the right along a narrow alleyway in deep grey shadows. Although he'd seen many representations of these streets, the actuality deepened McKie's feelings of misgiving. So dirty... oppressive... so many people. They were everywhere! Bahrank drove slowly now on the silent wheels, the tracks raised off the paving. The big machine eased its way through narrow little streets, some paved with stone, some with great slabs of dark substance. All the streets where shaded by overhanging upper stories whose height McKie could not judge through the slits. He saw shops barred and guarded. An occasional stairway, also guarded, led up or down into repellant darkness. Only Humans occupied these streets, and no casual, pedestrian expressions on any of them. Jaws were set on grim mouths. Hard questioning eyes peered at the passing vehicle. Both men and woman wore the universal dark, one-piece clothing of the Labor Pool. Noting McKie's interest, Bahrank spoke. "This is a Human enclave and you have a Gowachin driver." "Can they see us in here?" "They know. And there's trouble coming." "Trouble?" "Gowachin against Human." This appalled McKie and he wondered if this were the source of those forebodings which Aritch and aides would not explain: destruction of Dosadi from within. But Bahrank continued: "There's a growing separation between Humans and Gowachin, worse than it's ever been. You may be the last Human to ride with me." Aritch and company had prepared McKie for Dosadi's violence, hunger and distrust, but they'd said nothing about species against species... only that someone they refused to name could destroy the place from within. What was Bahrank trying to say? McKie dared not expose his ignorance by probing and this inability dismayed him. Bahrank, meanwhile, nosed their machine out of a narrow passage onto a wider street which was crowded by carts, each piled with greenery. The carts moved aside slowly as the armored vehicle approached, hatred plain in the eyes of the Humans who moved with the carts. The press of people astonished McKie: for every cart (and he lost count of them within a block) there were at least a hundred people crowding around, lifting arms high, shouting at the ring of people who stood shoulder to shoulder around each cart, their backs to the piled contents and obviously guarding those contents. McKie, .staring at the carts, realized with a shocked sense of recognition that he was staring at carts piled with garbage. The crowds of people were buying garbage. Again, Bahrank acted the part of tour guide. "This is called the Street of the Hungry. That's very select garbage, the best." McKie recalled one of Aritch 's aides saying there were restaurants in Chu which specialized in garbage from particular areas of the city, that no poison-free food was wasted. The passing scene compelled McKie's attention: hard faces, furtive movements, the hate and thinly suppressed violence, all of this immersed in a normal commercial operation based on garbage. And the numbers of these people! They were everywhere around: in doorways, guarding and pushing the carts, skipping out of Bahrank's path. New smells assaulted McKie's nostrils, a fetid acridity, a stink such as he had never before experienced. Another thing surprised him: the appearance of antiquity in this Warren. He wondered if all city populations crowded by threats from outside took on this ancient appearance. By Consentient standards, the population of Chu had lived here (Mily a few generations, but the city looked older than any he'd ever seen. With an abrupt rocking motion, Bahrank turned their machine down a narrow street, brought them to a stop. McKie, looking out the slit on his right, saw an arched entry in a f rimy building, a stairway leading ownward into gloom. "Down there's where you meet Jedrik," Bahrank said. "Down those stairs, second door on your left. It's a restaurant." "How'll I know her?" "Didn't they tell you?" "I..." McKie broke off. He'd seen pictures of Jedrik during the Tandaloor briefings, realized now that he was trying to delay leaving Bahrank's armored cocoon. Bahrank appeared to sense this. "Have no fear, McKie. Jedrik will know you. And McKie..." McKie turned to face the Gowachin. "... go directly to the restaurant, take a seat, wait for Jedrik. You'll not survive long here without her protection. Your skin's dark and some Humans prefer even the green to the dark in this quarter. They remember Pylash Gate here. Fifteen years isn't long enough to erase that from their minds." Nothing about a Pylash Gate had been included in McKie's briefings and now he dared not ask. Bahrank moved the switch which opened McKie's door. Immediately, the stink of the street was amplified to almost overpowering proportions. Bahrank, seeing him hesitate, spoke sharply. "Go quickly!" McKie descended in a kind of olafactory daze, found himself standing on the side of the street, the object of suspicious stares from all around. The sight of Bahrank driving away was the cutting of his last link to the ConSentiency and all the familiar things which might protect him. Never in his long life had McKie felt this much alone.    No legal system can maintain justice unless every participant -- magisters, prosecutors, legums, defendants, witnesses, all -- risks life itself in whatever dispute comes before the bar. Everything must be risked in the Courtarena. If any element remains outside the contest and without personal risk, justice inevitably fails. -- Gowachin Law Near sunset there was a fine rain which lasted well into darkness, then departed on the gorge wind which cleared Dosadi's skies. It left the air crystalline, cornices dripping puddles in the streets. Even the omnipresent Warren stink was diluted and Chu's inhabitants showed a predatory lightness as they moved along the streets. Returning to headquarters in an armored troop carrier which carried only his most trusted Gowachin, Broey noted the clear air even while he wondered at the reports which had brought him racing from the Council Hills. When he entered the conference room, Broey saw that Gar already was there standing with his back to the dark window which looked out on the eastern cliffs. Broey wondered how long Gar had been there. No sign of recognition passed between Gowachin and Human, but this only emphasized the growing separation of the species. They'd both seen the reports which contained that most disturbing ble agent under circumstances which pointed at Broey himself. Broey crossed to the head of the conference table, flipped the toggle which activated his communicator, addressed the screen which only he could see. "Assemble the Council and link for conference." The response came as a distorted buzz filtered through scramblers and suppressed by a privacy cone. Gar, standing across the room, could make no sense out of the noises coming from the communicator. While he waited for the Council members to come on the conference link, Broey seated himself at the communicator, summoned a Gowachin aide to the screen and spoke in a low voice masked by the privacy cone. "Start a security check on all Humans in positions where they might threaten us. Use Plan D." Broey glanced up at Gar. The Human's mouth worked silently. He was annoyed by the privacy cone and his inability to tell exactly what Broey was doing. Broey continued speaking to his aide. "I'll want the special force deployed as I told you earlier... Yes..." Gar pointedly turned his back on his conversation, stared out at the night. Broey continued to address his aide in the screen. "No! We must include even the Humans in this conference. Yes, that's the report Gar made to me. Yes, I also received that information. Other Humans can be expected to riot and drive out their Gowachin neighbors and there'll be retaliations. Yes, that was my thought when I saw the report." Broey turned off the privacy cone and scrambler. Tria had just come onto his screen with an override, interrupting the conversation with his security aide. She spoke in a low, hurried voice with only a few words intelligible to Gar across the room. But Broey's suspicions were becoming obvious. He heard Tria out, then: "Yes... it would be logical to made to look like Gowachin work for... I see. But the scattered incidents which... Indeed? Well, under the circumstances..." He left the thought incomplete, but his words drew a line between Human and Gowachin, even at the highest levels of his Advisory Council. "Tria, I must make my own decisions on this." While Broey was speaking. Gar brought up a chair and placed it near the communicator, sat down. Broey had finished his conversation with Tria and restored the privacy circuits, however, and even though he sat nearby Gar could not penetrate their protective screen. He was close enough now, though, to hear the buzzing of the privacy system and the sound annoyed Gar. He did not try to conceal his annoyance. Broey saw Gar but gave no indication that he approved or disapproved Gar's nearness. "So I understand," Broey said. "Yes... I'll issue those orders as soon as I've finished here. No... Agreed. That would be best." He closed the circuit. The annoying buzz stopped. "Jedrik means to set Gowachin against Human, Human against Gowachin," Gar said. "If so, it's been a long time in secret preparation," Broey said. His words implied many things: that there was conspiracy in high places, that the situation had achieved dangerous momentum without being detected, that all of the inertial forces could not now be anticipated. "You expect it to get worse," Gar said. "Hopefully." Gar stared at him for a long period, then: "Yes." It was clear that Broey wanted a well-defined condition to develop, one which would provide clear predictions of the major consequences. He was prepared for this. When Broey understood the situation to his own satisfaction, he'd use his own undeniable powers to gain as much as possible during a period of upset. Gar broke the silence. "But if we've misunderstood Jedrik's intent..." "It helps us when the innocent suffer," Broey said, paraphrasing part of an old axiom which every Dosadi knew. Gar completed the thought for him. "But who's innocent?" Before Broey could respond, his screen came alight with the assembled faces of his Council, each face in its own little square. Broey conducted the conference quickly, allowing few interruptions. There were no house arrests, no direct accusations, but his words and manner divided them by species. When he was through. Gar imagined the scrambling which must be going on right then in Chu while the powerful assembled their defenses. Without knowing how he sensed this. Gar felt that this was exactly what Jedrik had wanted and that it'd been a mistake for Broey to increase the tensions. After turning off the communicator, Broey sat back and addressed himself to Gar with great care. "Tria tells me that Jedrik cannot be found." "Didn't we expect that?" "Perhaps." Broey puffed his jowls. "What I don't understand is how a simple Liaitor could elude my people and Tria." "I think we've underestimated this Jedrik. What if she comes from..." His chin jerked ceilingward. Broey considered this. He'd been supervising the interrogation of Bahrank at a secure post deep in the Council Hills when the summons to headquarters had interrupted. The accumulating reports indicated a kind of trouble u had known at various times, but never at this magnitude. And Bahrank's information had been disappointing. He'd delivered this Rim iirfiltrator named McKie to such and such an address. (Security had been unable to check this in time because of the riots.) Bahrank's beliefs were obvious. And perhaps the Rimmers were trying to build their own city beyond the mountains. Broey thought this unlikely. His sources in the Rim had proved generally trustworthy and his special source was always trustworthy. Besides, such a venture would require gigantic stocks of food, all of it subject to exposure in the regular accounting. That, after all, was the Liaitor function, why he had... No, that was not probable. The Rim subsisted on the lowest of Chu's leavings and whatever could be wrested from Dosadi's poisonous soil. No . Bahrank was wrong. This McKie was peculiar, but in quite another way. And Jedrik must've knovvn this before anyone else... except himself. The paramount question remained: Who'd helped her? Broey sighed. "We have a long association. Gar. A person of your powers who has worked his way from the Rim through the Warrens..." Gar understood. He was being told that Broey looked upon him with active suspicion. There'd never been any real trust between them, but this was something else: nothing openly spoken, nothing direct or specific, but the meaning clear. It was not even sly; it was merely Dosadi. For a moment. Gar didn't know which way to turn. There'd always been this possibility in his relationship with Broey, but long acceptance had lulled Gar into a dangerous dependency. Tria had been his most valuable counter. He needed her now, but she had other, much more demanding, duties at this juncture. Gar realized now that he would have to precipitate his own plans, calling in all of the debts and dependencies which were his due. He was distracted by the sound of many people hurrying past in the outer hall. Presumably, things were coming to a head faster than expected. Gar stood up, stared vaguely out the windows at those dark shadows in the night which were the Rim cliffs. While waiting for Broey, Gar had watched darkness settle there, watched the spots of orange appear which were the Rim's cookfires. Gar knew those cookfires, knew the taste of the food which came from them, knew the flesh-dragging dullness which dominated existence out there. Did Broey expect him to flee back to that? Broey would be astonished at the alternatives open to Gar. "I will leave you now," Broey said. He arose and waddled from the room. What he meant was: "Don't be here when I return." Gar continued to stare out the windows. He seemed lost in angry reverie. Why hadn't Tria reported yet? One of Broey' s Gowachin aides came in, fussed over papers on a comer table. It was actually no more than five minutes that Gar remained standing thus. He shook himself presently, turned and let himself out of the room. Scarcely had he set foot in the outer passage than a troop of Broey's Gowachin shouldered their way past him into the conference room. They'd been waiting for him to leave. Angry with himself for what he knew he must do. Gar turned left, strode down the hall to the room where he knew he'd find Broey. Three Gowachin wearing Security brassards followed him, but did not interfere. Two more Gowachin guarded Broey's door but they hesitated to stop him. Gar's power had been felt here too long. And Broey, not expecting Gar to follow, had failed to issue specific orders. Gar counted on this. Broey, instructing a group of Gowachin aides, stood over a table cluttered with charts. Yellow light from fixtures directly overhead played shifting shadows on the charts as the aides bent over the table and made notes. Broey broke off at the intrusion, his surprise obvious. Gar spoke before Broey could order him removed. "You still need me to keep you from making the worst mistake of your life." Broey straightened, did not speak, but the invitation for Gar to continue was there. "Jedrik's playing you like a fine instrument. You're doing precisely what she wants you to do." Broey's cheeks puffed. The shrug angered Gar. "When I first came here, Broey, I took certain precautions to insure my continued health should you ever consider violence against me." Again, Broey gave that maddening Gowachin shrug. This was all so mundane. Why else did this fool Human continue alive and at liberty? "You've never been able to discover what I did to insure myself against you," Gar said. "I have no addictions. I'm a prudent person and, naturally, have means of dying before your experts on pain could overcome my reason. I've done all of the things you might expect of me... and something more, something you now need desperately to know." "I have my own precautions. Gar." "Of course, and I admit I don't know what they are." "So what do you propose?" Gar gave a little laugh, not quite gloating. "You know my terms." Broey shook his head from side to side, an exquisitely Human gesture. "Share the rule? I'm astonished at you. Gar." "Your astonishment hasn't reached its limits. You don't know what I've really done." "Which is?" "Shall we retire to a more private place and discuss it?" Broey looked around at his aides, waved for them to leave. "We will talk here." Gar waited until he heard the door close behind him on the last of the departing aides. "You probably know about the death fanatics we've groomed in the Human enclaves." "We are prepared to deal with them." "Properly motivated, fanatics can keep great secrets, Broey." "No doubt. Are you now going to reveal such a secret?" "For years now, my fanatics have lived on reduc rations, preserving and exporting their surplus rations to the Rim. We have enough, megatons of food out there. With a whole planet in which to hide it, you'll never find it. City food, every bit of it and we will..." "Another city!" "More than that. Every weapon the city of Chu has, we have." Broey 's ventricle lips went almost green with anger. "So you never really left the Rim?" "The Rim-bom carmot forget." "After aU that Chu has done for you..." "I'm glad you didn't mention blasphemy." "But the Gods of the Veil gave us a mandate!" "Divide and rule, subdivide and rule even more powerfully, fragment and rule absolutely." "That's not what I meant." Broey breathed deeply several times to restore his calm. "One city and only one city. That is our mandate." "But the other city will be built." "Will it?" "We've dug in the factories to provide our own weqrons arrd food. If you move agnst our pecle inside Chu, we'll come at you ftom the outside, shatter your walls arrd..." "What do you propose?" "Open cooperation for a separation of the species, one city for Gowachin, one for Human. What you do in Chu will be your own business then, but I'll tell you that we of the new City will rid ourselves of the Demopol and its aristocracy." "You'd create another aristocracy?" "Perhaps. But my people will die for the vision of freedom we share. We no longer provide our bodies for Chu!" "So that's why your fanatics are all Rim-bom." "I see that you don't yet understand, Broey. My people are not even eager to die for their vision." Broey considered this. It was a difficult concept for a Gowachin, whose Graluz guilt was always transformed into a profound respect for the survival drive. But he saw where Gar's words must lead and he built an image in his mind of fleshly Human waves throwing themselves onto all opposition without inhibitions about pain, death or survival in any respect. They might very well capture Chu. The idea that countless Rim immigrants lived within Chu's walls in readiness for such sacrifice filled him with deep disquiet. It required strong self-control to conceal this reaction. He did not for an instant doubt Gar's story. It was just the kind of thing this dry-fleshed Rimmer would do. But why was Gar revealing this now? "Did Jedrik order you to prepare me for..." "Jedrik isn't part of our plan. She complicates matters for us, but the kind of upset she's igniting is Just the sort of thing we can exploit better than you." Broey weighted this with what he knew about Gar, found it valid as far as it went, but it still did not answer the basic question. "Why?" "I'm not ready to sacrifice my people," Gar said. TTiat had the ring of partial tmth. Gar had shown many times that he could make hard decisions. But numbered among his fanatic hordes there doubtless were certain skills he'd prefer not losing... not yet. Yes, that was the way Gar's mind worked. And Gar would know the profound respect for life which matured in a Gowachin breast after the weeding frenzy. Gowachin, too, could make bloody decisions, but the guilt... oh, the guilt... Gar counted on the guilt. Perhaps he counted too much. "Surely, you don't expect me to take an open and active part in your Rim city project?" "If not open, then passive." "And you insist on sharing the rule of Chu?" "For the interim." "Impossible!" "In substance if not in name." "You have been my advisor." "Will you precipitate violence between us with Jedrik standing there to pick up whatever she can gain from us?" "Ahhhhhh..." Broey nodded. So that was it! Gar was not part of this Jedrik thing. Gar was afraid of Jedrik, more rfraid of her than he was of Broey. This gave Broey cause for caution. Gar was not easily made fearful. What did he know of this Jedrik that Broey did not know? But now there was a sufficient reason for compromise. The unanswered questions could be answered later. "You will continue as my chief advisor," Broey said. It was acceptable. Gar signified his consent by a curt nod. The compromise left an empty feeling in Broey's digestive nodes, though. Gar knew he'd been manipulate to reveal his fear of Jedrik. Gar could be certain that Broey would try to neutralize the Rim city project. But the magnitude of Gar's plotting went far beyond expectations, leaving too many unknowns. One could not make accurate decisions with insufficient data. Gar had given away information without receiving an equal exchange. That was not like Gar. Or was that a correct interpretation of what'd happened here? Broey knew he had to explore this, risking one piece of accurate information as bait. "There's been a recent increase of mystical experiences by Gowachin in the Warrens." "You know better than try that religious nonsense on me!" Gar was actually angry. Broey concealed his amusement. Gar did not know then (or did not accept) that the God of the Veil sometimes spoke to his flock, that God spoke truly and accurately to his annointed and would answer some questions. Much had been revealed here, more than Gar suspected. Bahrank had been right. And Jedrik would have to know about Gar's Rim city. It was possible that Jedrik wanted Broey to know and had maneuvered Gar into revealing the plot. If Gar saw this, that would be enough to make him fearful. Why didn't the God reveal this to me? Broey wondered. Am I being tested? Yes, that had to be the answer, because there was one thing certain now: This time, I'll do what the God advises.    People always devise their own justifications. Fixed and immovable Law merely provides a convenient structure within which to hang your justifications and the prejudices behind them. The only universally acceptable Law for mortals would be one which fitted every justification. What obvious nonsense. Law must expose prejudice and question justification. Thus, Law must be flexible, must change to fit new demands. Otherwise, it becomes merely the justification of the powerful. -- Gowachin Law (The BuSab Translation) It required a moment after Bahrank drove away for McKie to recover his sense of purpose. The buildings rose tall and massive over him, but through a quirk of this Warren's growth, an opening to the west allowed a spike of the silvery afternoon sunlight to slant into the narrow street. The light threw hard shadows on every object, accented the pressure of Human movement. McKie did not like the way people looked at him; as though everyone measured him for some private gain. Slowly, McKie pressed through the passing throng to the arched entry, observing all he could without seeming to do so. After all those years in BuSab, all of the training and experience which had qualified him for such a delicately powerful agency, he possessed superb knowledge of the ConSentiency's species. He drew on that knowledge now, sensing the powerful secrecy which governed these people. Unfortunately, his experience also was replete with knowledge of what species could do to species, not to mention what a species could do to itself. The Humans around him reminded him of nothing more than a mob about to explode. Moving with a constant readiness to defend himself, he went down a short flight of stairs into cool shadows where the foot traffic was lighter but the smells of rot and mold were more pronounced. Second door on the left. He went to the doorway where Bahrank had directed him, peered into the opening: another stairway down. Somehow, this dismayed him. The picture of Chu growing in his mind was not at all what Aritch's people had drawn. Had they deliberately misled him? If so, why? Was it possible they really didn't understand their monster? The array of answers to his questions chilled him. What if a few of the observers sent here by Aritch's people had chosen to capitalize on whatever power Dosadi provided? In all of his career, McKie had never before come across a world so completely cut off from the rest of the universe. This planet was alone, without many of the amenities which graced the other Consentient worlds: no common access to jumpdoors, no concourse of the known species, none of the refined pleasures nor the sophisticated traps which occupied the denizens of other worlds. Dosadi had developed its own ways. And the instructors on Tandaloor had returned time and again to that constant note of warning -- that these lonely primitives would take over the ConSentiency if released upon the universe. "Nothing restrains them. Nothing." That was, perhaps, an overstatement. Some things did restrain the Dosadi physically. But they were not held back by the conventions or mores of the ConSentiency. Anything could be purchased here, any forbidden depravity which the imagination might conceive. This idea haunted McKie. He thought of this and of the countless substances to which many Dosadi were addicted. The power leverage such things gave to the unprincipaled few was terrifying. He dared not pause here wrestling with his indecisions, though. McKie stepped into the stairwell with a boldness which he did not feel, following Bahrank's directions because he had no choice. The bottom landing was a wider space in deep shadows, one dim light on a black door. Two Humans dozed in chairs beside the door while a third squatted beside them with what appeared to be a crude projectile weapon in his hands. "Jedrik summoned me," McKie said. The guard with the weapon nodded for him to proceed. McKie made his way past them, glanced at the weapon: a length of pipe with a metal box at the baek and a flat trigger atop the box held by the guard's thumb. McKie almost missed a step. The weapon was a dead-man bomb! Had to be. If that guard's thumb relaxed for any reason, the thing no doubt would explode and kill everyone in the stairwell. McKie glanced at the two sleepers. How could they sleep in such circumstances? The black door with its one dim light commanded his attention now. A strong smell of highly seasoned cooking dominated the other stinks here. McKie saw that it was a heavy door with a glittering spyeye at face level. The door opened at his approach. He stepped through into a large low room crowded... jammed! with people seated on benches at trestle tables. There was barely room for passage between the benches. And everywhere that McKie looked he saw people spooning food into their mouths from small bowls. Waiters and waitresses hurried through the narrow spaces slapping down bowls and removing empties. The whole scene was presided over by a fat woman seated at a small desk on a platform at his left. She was positioned in such a way that she commanded the entry door, the entire room and swinging doors at the side through which the serving people flowed back and forth. She was a monstrous woman and she sat her perch as though she had never been anywhere else. Indeed, it was easy for McKie to imagine that she could not move from her position. Her arms were bloated where they squeezed from the confines of short-sleeved green coveralls. Her ankles hung over her shoe tops in folds. Take a seat and wait. Bahrank's warning had been clear. McKie looked for an opening on the benches. Before he could move, the fat woman spoke in a squeaky voice. "Your name?" McKie' s gaze darted toward those beady eyes in their folds of fat. "McKie." "Thought so." She raised a dimpled finger. From somewhere in the crush a young boy came hurrying. He could not have been over nine years old but his eyes were cold with adult wisdom. He looked up to the fat woman for instructions. "This is the one. Guide him." The boy turned and, without looking to see if McKie followed, hurried down the narrow pathway where the doors swung back and forth to permit the passage of serving people. Twice, McKie was almost run down by waiters. His guide was able to anticipate the opening of every door and skipped aside. At the end of this passage, there was another solid black door with spyeye. The door opened onto a short passage with closed doors on both sides, a blank wall at the end. The blank wall slid aside for them and they descended into a narrow, rock-lined way lighted by widely spaced bulbs overhead. The walls were damp and evil smelling. Occasionally, there were wide places with guards. They passed through several guarded doors, climbed up and went down. McKie lost track of the turns, the doors and guard posts. After a time, they climbed to another short hallway with doors along its sides. The boy opened the second door on the right, waited for McKie to enter, closed the door. It was all done without words. McKie heard the boy's footsteps recede. The room was small and dimly lighted by windows high in the wall opposite the door. A trestle table about two meters long with benches down both sides and a chair at each end almost filled the space. The walls were grey stone and unadorned. McKie worked his way around to the chair at the far end, sat down. He remained seated there silently for several minutes, absorbing this place. It was cold in the room: Gowachin temperature. One of the high windows behind him was open a crack and he could hear street noises: a heavy vehicle passing, voices arguing, many feet. The sense of the Warren pressing in upon this room was very strong. Nearer at hand from beyond the single door, he heard crockery banging and an occasional hiss as of steam. Presently, the door opened and a tall, slender woman entered, slipping through the door at minimal opening. For a moment as she turned, the light from the windows concentrated on her face, then she sat down at the end of the right hand bench, dropping into the shadows. McKie had never before seen such hard features on a woman. She was brittle rock with ice crystal eyes of palest blue. Her black hair was closely cropped into a stiff bristle. He repressed a shudder. The rigidity of her body amplified the hard expression on her face. It was not the hardness of suffering, not that alone, but something far more determined, something anchored in a kind of agony which might explode at the slightest touch. On a Consentient world where the geriatric arts were available she could have been any age between thirtyfive and one hundred and thirtyfive. The dim light into which she had seated herself complicated his scrutiny but he suspected she was younger than thirty-five. "So you are McKie." He nodded. "You're fortunate Adril's people got my message. Broey's already searching for you. I wasn't warned that you were so dark." He shrugged. "Bahrank sent word that you could get us all killed if we're not careful with you. He says you don't have even rudimentary survival training." This surprised McKie, but he held his silence. She sighed. "At least you have the good sense not to protest. Well... welcome to Dosadi, McKie. Periiaps I'll be able to keep you alive long enough for you to be of some use to us." Welcome to Dosadi! "I'm Jedrik as you doubtless already know." "I recognize you." This was only partly true. None of the representations he'd seen had conveyed the ruthless brutality which radiated from her. A hard smite flickered on her lips, was gone. "You don't respond when I welcome you to our planet." McKie shook his head. Aritch's people had been specific in their injunction: "She doesn't know your origin. Under no circumstances may you reveal to her that you come from beyond the God Wall. It could be immediately fatal." McKie continued to stare silently at her. A colder look came over Jedrik's features, something in the muscles at the corners of the mouth and eyes. "We shall see. Now: Bahrank says you carry a wallet of some kind and that you have currency sewn into your clothing. First, hand me the wallet." My toolkit? She reached an open hand toward him. "I'll warn you once, McKie. If I get up and walk out of here you'll not live more than two minutes." Every muscle quivering protest, he slipped the toolkit from its pocket, extended it. "And I'll warn you, Jedrik: I'm the only person who can open this without being killed and the contents destroyed." She accepted the toolkit, turned its flat substance over in her hands. "Really?" McKie had begun to interest her in a new way. He was less than she'd expected, yet more. Naive, of course, incredibly naive. But she'd already known that of the people from beyond the God Wall. It was the most suitable explanation. Something was profoundly wrong in the Dosadi situation. The people beyond the Veil would have to send their best here. This McKie was their best? Astonishing.  She arose, went to the door, rapped once. McKie watched her pass the toolkit to someone outside, heard a low-voiced conversation, neither half of it intelligible. In a flashing moment of indecision, he'd considered trying for some of the toolkit's protective contents. Something in Jedrik's manner and the accumulation of unknowns all around had stopped him. Jedrik returned to her seat emptyhanded. She stared at him a moment, head cocked to once side, then: "I'll say several things to you. In a way, this is a test. If you fail, I guarantee you'll not survive long on Dosadi. Understood?" When McKie failed to respond, she pounded a fist on the table. "Understood?" "Say what you have to say." "Very well. It's obvious to me that those who instructed you about Dosadi warned you not to reveal your true origin. Yet, most of those who've seen you and all of those who've talked to you for more than a few seconds suspect you're not one of us -- not from Chu, not from the Rim, not from anywhere on Dosadi." Her voice took on a new harshness. "But I know it. Let me tell you, McKie, that there's not even a child among us who's failed to realize that the people imprisoned on Dosadi did not originate here!" McKie stared at her, shocked. Imprisoned. As she spoke, he knew she was telling him the truth. Why hadn't Aritch or the others warned him? Why hadn't he seen this for himself? Since Dosadi was poison to both Human and Gowachin, rejected them, of course they'd know they hadn't originated here. She gave him time to absorb this before continuing. "There are others among us from your realm, perhaps some we've not identified, better trained. But I was taught to act only on certainty. Of you I'm certain. You do not originate on Etosadi. I've put it to the question and I've the present confirmation of my own senses. You come from beyond the God Wall. Your actions with Bahrank, with Adril, with me..." She shook her head sadly. Aritch set me up for this! This thought brought back a recurrent question which continued to nag McKie: BuSab's discovery of the Dosadi experiment. Were the Gowachin that clumsy? Would they make such slips? The original plan to conceal this project must have been extensive. Yet, key facts had leaked to BuSab agents. McKie felt overwrought from asking himself the same questions over and over without satisfaction. And now, Jedrik's pressures compounded the burden. The only suitable answer was that Aritch's people had done everything with the intent of putting him in this position. They'd deliberately leaked information about Dosadi. And McKie was their target. To what purpose? "Can we be overheard?" he asked. "Not by my enemies on Dosadi." He considered this. She'd left open the question of whether anyone from beyond the God Wall might eavesdrop. McKie pursed his lips with indecision. She'd taken his toolkit with such ridiculous ease... yet, what choice had he? They wouldn't get anything from the kit and someone out there, one of Jedrik's underlings, would die. That could have a useful effect on Jedrik. He decided to play for time. "There're many things I could tell you. So many things. I hardly know where to begin." "Begin by telling me how you came through the God Wall." Yes, he might be able to confuse her with a loose description of Calebans and jumpdoors. Nothing in her Dosadi experience could've prepared Jedrik for such phenomena. McKie took a deep breath. Before he could speak there was a rap on the door. Jedrik raised a hand for silence, leaned over and opened the door. A skinny young man with large eyes beneath a high forehead and thin blonde hair slipped through, placed McKie' s toolkit on the table in front of Jedrik. "It wasn't very difficult," he said. McKie stared at the kit in shock. It lay open with all of its contents displayed in perfect order. Jedrik gestured the youth to the seat opposite her. She reached for a raygen. McKie could no longer contain himself. "Careful! That's dangerous!" "Be still, McKie. You know nothing of danger." She removed the stim, examined it, replaced it neatly, looked at the young man. "All right, Stiggy. Tell me." The youth begaii removing the items from the toolkit one by one, handling each with a knowledgeable correctness, speaking rapidly. McKie tried hard to follow the conversation, but it was in a code he could not understand. The expressions on their faces were eloquent enough, however. They were elated. Whatever Stiggy was saying about the dangerous toys in McKie's toolkit, his revelations profited both of them. The uncertainties which had begun during McKie's ride with Bahrank reached a new intensity. The feeling had built up in him like a sickness. He'd wondered for a time if he might be the victim of some new disease native to Dosadi. It could not be the planet's food because he'd eaten nothing yet. The realization came over him as he watched Jedrik and Stiggy that his reactions were his own reasoning system trying to reject something, some assumption or set of assumptions which he'd accepted without question. He tried to empty his mind, not asking any questions in particular. Let come into his awareness what may. It would all have a fresh appraisal. Dosadi requires you to be coldly brutal in all of your decisions. No exceptions. Well... he'd let go of the toolkit in the belief that someone would die trying to open it. But he'd issued a warning. That warning could've helped them. Probably did.  must become exactly like them or I cannot survive... let alone succeed. At last, McKie felt Aritch's fear of Dosadi, understood the Gowachin desperation. What a terrible training ground for the recognition and use of power! Jedrik and Stiggy finished their coded conversation over the toolkit. Stiggy closed the kit, arose with it in one hand, speaking at last in words that McKie understood. "Yes, we must lose no time." Stiggy left with the kit. Jedrik faced McKie. The toolkit and its contents had helped answer the most obvious question about McKie and his kind. The people beyond the God Wall were the degenerate descendants of those who'd invented such devices. It was the only workable explanation. She felt almost sorry for this poor fool. But that was not a permissable emotion. He must be made to understand that he had no choice but to obev her. "Now, McKie, you will answer all of my questions." "Yes." It was utter submission and she knew it. "When you've satisfied me in all matters," she said, "then we'll eat and I'll take you to a place where you'll be reasonably safe."    The FamilyClanFactions of the Rim are still responding to their defeat in the mass attempt on our defenses of last Decamo. They appear severely chastened. Small police actions are all that we need anticipate over the next planning period. Further, our operatives in the Rim find no current difficulties in steering the FCF toward a natural and acceptable cultural rejection of economic developments which might lead them to improved food production. -- From a Dosadi Bureau of Control document An angry Broey, full out and uninhibited anger, was something to see and quite a number of his Gowachin aides had seen this emotional display during the night. It was now barely dawn. Broey had not slept in two days; but the fourth group of his aides stood before him in the sanctum to receive the full spate of his displeasure. The word had already gone out through their ranks and they, like the others, did not try to hide their fear or their anxious eagerness to restore themselves in Broey's good graces. Broey stood near the end of the long table where, earlier, he had met with Gar and Tria. The only visible sign of his long sleepless hours was a slight pitting of the fatty nodes between his ventricles. His eyes were as sharp as ever and his voice had lost none of its bite. "What I'd like explained is how this could happen without a word of warning. And it's not just that we failed to detect this, but that we continued to grind out complacent reports, reports which went exactly contrary to what actually was happening." The aides massed at the other end of the table, all standing, all fidgeting, were not assuaged by Broey's clearly. He was saying; "You! You! You!" "I will be satisfied by nothing less than an informant," Broey said. "I want a Human informant, either from Qiu or from the Rim. I don't care how you get this informant. We must find that store of city food. We must find where they have started their blasphemous Rim city." One of his aides, a slender young Gowachin in the front rank, ventured a cautious question which had been repeated several times by other chastened aides during the nit. "If we move too strongly against Humans in the Warrens won't that feed the unrest that..." "We'll have more riots, more turning of Gowachin against Human and Human against Gowachin," Broey agreed. "That's a consequence we are prepared to accept." This time they understood that Broey used the royal "we." Broey would accept the consequences. Some of his aides, however, were not ready to accept a war between the species within the city's walls. One of the aides farther back in the ranks raised an arm. "Perhaps we should use only Human troops in the Warrens. If we..." "Who would that fool?" Broey demanded. "We have taken the proper steps to maintain our hold on Chu. You have one task and one task only: find that store of food and those hidden factories. Unless we find them we're finished. Now, get out of here. I don't want to see any of you until you can report success!" They filed out silently. Broey stood looking down at the blank screen of his communicator. Alone at last, he allowed his shoulder to slump, breathed heavily through both mouth and ventricles. What a mess! What a terrible mess. He knew in his node of nodes that he was behaving precisely as Jedrik wanted him to behave. She had left him no alternatives. He could only admire her handling of the situation while he waited for the opening which he knew must come. But what a magnificent intellect operated in that Human head. And a female at that! Gowachin females never developed such qualities. Only on the Rim were Gowachin females used as other than breeders. Human females, on the other hand, never ceased to amaze him. This Jedrik possessed real leadership qualities. Whether she was the one to take over the Electorship remained to be seen. Broey found himself recalling those first moments of terrible awareness in the Graluz. Yes, this was the way of the world. If one chose the survivors by other than a terrible testing process, all would die. It would be the end of both species. At least, it would be the end of them on Dosadi and only Dosadi mattered. He felt bereft, though. He felt betrayed by his God. Vy had God failed to warn him? And when questioned, how could God respond that only evil could penetrate the mind of a fanatic? Wasn't God omnipotent? Could any awareness be closed to God? How could God be God then?  am your God! He could never forget that voiceless voice reverberating in his head. Was that a lie?    We are plagued by a corrupt polity which promotes unlawful andor immoral behavior. Public interest has no practical significance in everyday behavior among the ruling factions. The real problems of our world are not being confronted by those in power. In the guise of public service, they use whatever comes to hand for personal gain. They are insane with and for power. -- From a clandestine document circulated on Dosadi It was dark when a disguised Jedrik and undisguised McKie emerged onto the streets. She led them down narrow passages, her mind full of things McKie had revealed. Jedrik wore a blonde wig and puff-out disguise which made her appear heavy and hunched. As they passed an open courtyard, McKie heard music. He almost stumbled. The music came from a small orchestra -- delicate tympany, soft strings and a rich chorus of wind instruments. He did not recognize the melody, but it moved him more deeply than any other music of his experience. It was as though the music were played only for him. Aritch and company had said nothing about such magnificent music here. People still thronged the streets in numbers which astonished him. But now they appeared to pay him little notice. Jedrik kept part of her attention on McKie, noting the fools with their musical dalliance, noting how few people there were on the streets -- little more than her own patrols in this quarter. She'd expected that, but the actuality held an eerie mood in the dim and scattered illumination from lighted comers. She had debated providing McKie with a crude disguise, but he obviously didn't have the cunning to carry off the double deception she required. She'd begun to sense a real intelligence in him, though. McKie was an enigma. Why had he never encountered the opportunities to sharpen that intelligence? Sensing the sharpness in him, she could not put off the thought that she had missed something vital in his accounts of that social entity which he called the ConSentiency. Whether this failure came from actual concealment by McKie or through his into judge. The enigma set her on edge. And the mood in the streets did nothing to ease her emotions. She was glad when they crossed the line into the area completely controlled by her own personal cell. The bait having been trailed through the streets by one who would appear a tame underling, Jedrik allowed herself a slight relaxation. Broey would have learned by double agent. He would react to that and to the new bait. It was almost time for phase two of her design for Broey. McKie followed her without question, acutely aware of every strange glance cast their way. He was emptied of all resistance, knowing he could not survive if he failed to follow Jedrik through the smelly repel I ant darkness of her streets. The food from the restaurant sat heavily in his stomach. It had been tasty: a stew of odd shapes of shredded greenery, and steaming hot. But he could not shake the realization that his stew had been compounded of someone's garbage. Jedrik had left him very little. She hadn't learned of the Taprisiot or the bead in his stomach which might (or might not) link him to the powers of the ConSentiency if he died. She had not learned of the standard BuSab implantation devices which amplified his senses. And, oddly, she had not explored many of his revelations about BuSab. She'd seemed much more interested in the money hidden about his person and had taken possession of all of it. She'd examined the currency carefully. "This is real." He wasn't sure but he thought she'd been surprised. "This was given to you before you were sent to Dosadi?" "Yes." She was a while absorbing the implications, but appeared satisfied. She'd given him a few small currency tokens from her own pockets. "Nobody'll bother you for these. If you need anything, ask. We may be able to gratify some of your needs." It was still dark, lighted only by illumination at comers, when they came to the address Jedrik sought. Grey light suffused the street. A young Human male of about ten squatted with his back against the stone wall at the building's comer. As Jedrik and McKie approached, he sprang up, alert. He nodded once to Jedrik. She did not acknowledge, but by some hidden signal the boy knew she had received his message. He relaxed once more against the wall. When McKie looked back a few paces beyond where the boy had signalled, he was gone. No sound, no sign... just gone. Jedrik stopped at a shadowed entry way. It was barred by an openwork metal gate flanked by two armed guards. The guards opened the gate without words. Beyond the gate there was a large covered courtyard illuminated by glowing tubes on right and left. TTiree of its sides were piled to the courtyard cover with boxes of various sizes -- some taller than a Human and narrow; others short and fat. Set into the stacks as though part of the courtyard's walls was one narrow passage leading to a metal door opposite the gateway. McKie touched Jedrik' s arm. "What's in the boxes?" "Weapons." She spoke as though to a cretin. The metal door was opened from within. Jedrik led McKie into a large room at least two stories tall. The door clanged shut behind them. McKie sensed several Humans along the courtyard wall on both sides of him but his attention had been captured by something else. Dominating the room was a gigantic cage suspended from the ceiling. Its bars sparkled and shimmered with hidden energies. A single Gowachin male sat cross-legged in a hammock at the cage's center. McKie had seldom seen a Consentient Gowachin that aged. His nose crest was fringed by flaking yellow crusts. Heavy wrinkles wormed their way beneath watery eyes beginning to glaze with the degeneration which often blinded Gowachin who lived too long away from water. His body had a slack appearance with loose muscles and pitted indentations along the nodes between his ventricles. The hammock suspended him off the cage floor and that floor shimmered with volatile energies. Jedrik paused, divided her attention between McKie and the old Gowachin. She seemed to expect a particular reaction from McKie, but he wasn't certain she found what she sought. McKie stood a moment in silent examination of the Gowachin. Prisoner? What was the significance of that cage and its shimmering energies? Presently, he glanced around the room, recording the space. Six armed Human males flanked the door through which he and Jedrik had entered. A remarkable assortment of objects crammed the room's walls, some with purpose unknown to him but many recognizable as weapons: spears and swords, flame-throwers, garrish armor, bombs, pellet projectors... Jedrik moved a pace closer to the cage. The occupant stared back at her with faint interest. She cleared her throat. "Greetings, Pcharky. I have found my key to the God Wall." The old Gowachin remained silent, but McKie thought he saw a sparkle of interest in the glazed eyes. Jedrik shook her head slowly, then: "I have a new datum, Pcharky. The Veil of Heaven was created by creatures called Calebans. They appear to us as suns." Pcharky's glance flickered to McKie, back to Jedrik. The Gowachin knew the source of her new datum. McKie renewed his speculations about the old Gowachin. That cage must be a prison, its walls enforced by dangerous energies. Bahrank had spoken of conflict between the species. Humans controlled this room. Why did they imprison a Gowachin? Or...was this caged Gowachin, this Pcharky, another agent from Tandaloor? With a tightening of his throat, McKie wondered if his own fate might be to live out his days in such a cage. Pcharky grunted, then: "The God Wall is like this cage but more powerful." His voice was a husky croaking, the words clear Galach with an obvious Tandaloor accent. McKie, his fears reinforced, glanced at Jedrik, found her studying him. She spoke. "Pcharky has been with us for a long time, very long. There's no telling how many people he has helped to escape from Dosadi. Soon, I may persuade him to be of service to me." McKie found himself shocked to silence by the possibilities glimpsed through her words. Was Dosadi in fact an investigation of the Caleban mystery? Was that the secret Aritch's people concealed here? McKie stared at the shimmering bars of Pcharky's cage. Like the God Wall? But the God Wall was enforced by a Caleban. Once more, Jedrik looked at the caged Gowachin. "A sun confines enormous energies, Pcharky. Are your energies inadequate?" But Pcharky's attention was on McKie. The old voice croaked. "Human, tell me: Did you come "Don't answer him," Jedrik snapped. Pcharky closed his eyes. Interview ended. Jedrik, accepting this, whirled and strode to the left around the cage. ' 'Come along, McKie. ' ' She didn't look back, but continued speaking. "Does it interest you that Pcharky designed his own cage?" "He designed it? Is it a prison?" "Yes." "If he designed it...how does it hold him?" "He knew he'd have to serve my purposes were he to remain alive." She had come to another door which opened onto a narrow stairway. It climbed to the left around the cage room. They emerged into a long hallway lined with narrow doors dimly lighted by tiny overhead bulbs. Jedrik opened one of these doors and led the way into a carpeted room about four meters wide and six long. Dark wood panels reached from floor to waist level, shelves loaded with books above. McKie peered closely: books...actual paper books. He tried to recall where he'd ever before seen such a collection of primitive... But, of course, these were not primitive. These were one of Dosadi's strange recapitulations. Jedrik had removed her wig, stopped midway in the room to turn and face McKie. "This is my room. Toilet there." She pointed to an opening between shelves. "That window..." Again, she pointed, this time to an opening opposite the toilet door. "...is one-way to admit light and it's our best. As Dosadi measures such things, this is a relatively secure place." He swept his gaze around the room. Her room? McKie was struck by the amount of living space, a mark of power on Dosadi...the absence of people in the hall. By the standards of this planet, JedrUc's room, this building, represented a citadel of power. Jedrik spoke, an odd note of nervousness in voice and manner. "Until recently, I also had other quarters -- a prestigious apartment on the slopes of the Council Hills. I was considered a climber with excellent prospects, my own skitter and driver. I had access to all but the highest codes in the master banks, and that's a powerful tool for those who can use it. Now..." She gestured. "...this is what I have chosen. I must eat swill with the lowest. No males of rank will pay the slightest attention to me. Broey thinks I'm cowering somewhere, a pallet in the Warrens. But I have this..." Again, that sweeping gesture. "...and this." One finger tapped her head. "I need nothing more to bring those Council Hills crashing down." She stared into McKie's eyes. He found himself believing her. She was not through speaking. "You're definitely male Human, McKie." He didn't know what to make of that, but her air of braggadocio fascinated him. "How did you lose that other..." "I didn't lose it. I threw it away. I no longer needed it. I've made things move faster than our precious Elector, or even your people, can anticipate. Broey thinks to wait for an opening against me?" She shook her head. Captivated, McKie watched her cross to the window, open a ventilator above it. She kicked a wooden knob below the adjoining bookshelves, pulled out a section of panelling which trailed a double bed. Standing across the bed from McKie, she began to undress. She dropped the wig to the floor, slipped off the coveralls, peeled the bulging inner disguise from her flesh. Her skin was pale cream. "McKie, I am your teacher." He remained silent. She was long-waisted, slim and graceful. The creamy skin was marked by two faint scars to the left of the pubic wedge. "Take off your clothes," she said. He swallowed. She shook her head. "McKie, McKie, to survive here you must become Dosadi. You don't have much time. Get your clothes off." Not knowing what to expect, McKie obeyed. She watched him carefully. "Your skin is lighter than I expected where the sun has not darkened you. We will bleach the skin of your face and hands tomorrow." McKie looked at his hands, at the sharp line where his cuffs had protected his arms. Dark skin. He recalled Bahrank talking of dark skin and a place called Pylash Gate. To mask the unusual shyness he felt, he looked at Jedrik, asked about Pylash Gate. "So Bahrank mentioned that? Well, it was a stupid mistake. The Rim sent in shock troops and foolish orders were given for the gate's defenses. Only one troop survived there, all dark skinned like you. The suspicion of treachery was natural." "Oh." He found his attention compelled toward the bed. A dark maroon spread covered it. Jedrik approached him around the foot of the bed. She stopped less than a handswidth away from him... creamy flesh, full breasts. He looked up into her eyes. She stood half a head over him, an expression of cold amusement on her face. McKie found the musky smell of her erotically stimulating. She looked down, saw this, laughed and abruptly hurled him onto the bed. She landed with him and her body was all over him, hot and hard and demanding. It was the strangest sexual experience of McKie's life. Not lovemaking, but violent attack. She groaned, bit at him, clawed. And when he tried to caress her, she became even more violent, frenzied. Through it all, she was oddly careful of his pleasure, watching his reactions, reading him. When it was over, he lay back, spent. Jedrik sat up on the edge of the bed. The blankets were a twisted mess. She. grabbed a blanket, threw it across the room, stood up, whirled back to look down at him. "You are very sly and tricky, McKie." He drew in a trembling breath, remained silent. "You tried to catch me with softness," she accused. "Better than you have tried that with me. It will not work." McKie marshalled the energy to sit up and restore some order to the bed. His shoulder pained him where she'd scratched. He felt the ache of a bite on his neck. He crawled into the bed, pulled the blankets up to his chin. She was a madwoman, absolutely mad. Insane. Presently, Jedrik stopped looking at him. She recovered the blanket from across the room, spread it on the bed, joined him. He was acutely conscious of her staring at him with an openly puzzled frown. "Tell me about the relationships between men and women on your worlds." He recounted a few of the love stories he knew, fighting all the while to stay awake. It was difficult to stifle the gaping yawns. She kept punching his shoulder. "I don't believe it. You're making this up." "No... no. It's true." "You have women of your own there?" "Women of my... Well, it's not like that, not ownership... ahhh, not possession." "What about children?" "What about them?" "How 're they treated, educated?" He sighed, sketched in some details from his own childhood. After a while she let him go to sleep. He awakened several times during the night, conscious of the strange room and bed, of Jedrik breathing softly beside him. Once, he thought he felt her shoulders shaking with repressed sobs. Shortly before dawn there was a scream in the next block, a terrifying sound of agony loud enough to waken all but the most hardened or the most fatigued. McKie, awake and thinking, felt Jedrik's breathing change. He lay tense and watchful, awaiting a repetition or another sound which might explain that eerie scream. A threatening silence gripped the night. McKie built an image in his mind of what could be happening in the buildings around them: some people starting from sleep not knowing (perhaps not caring) what had awakened them; lighter sleepers grumbling and sinking back into restless slumber. Finally, Mckie sat up, peered into the room's shadows. His disquiet communicated itself to Jedrik. She rolled over, looked up at him in the pale dawn light now creeping into the shadows. "There are many noises in the Warrens that you learn to ignore." Coming from her, it was almost conciliatory, almost a gesture of apology, of friendship. "Someone screamed," he said. "I knew it must be something like that." "How can you sleep through such a sound?" "I didn't." "But how can you ignore it?" "The sounds you ignore are those which aren't immediately threatening to you... those which you can do nothing about." "Someone was hurt." "Very likely. But you must not burden your soul with things you cannot change." "Don't you want to change... that?" "I am changing it." Her tone, her attitude were those of a lecturer in a schoolroom and now there was no doubt that she was being deliberately helpful. Well, she'd said she was his teacher. And he must become completely Dosadi to survive. "How're you changing things?" "You're not capable of understanding yet. I want you to take it one step at a time, one lesson at a time." He couldn't help asking himself then: What does she want from me now? He hoped it was not more sex. "Today," she said, "I want you to meet the parents of three children who work in our cell."    If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic ? overnment to be your master. he wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual. -- The Dosadi Lesson: A Gowachin Assessment Aritch studied Ceylang carefully in the soft light of his green-walled relaxation room. She had come down immediately after the evening meal, responsive to his summons. They both knew the reason for that summons: to discuss the most recent report concerning McKie's behavior on Dosadi. The old Gowachin waited for Ceylang to seat herself, observing how she pulled the red robe neatly about her lower extremities. Her features appeared composed, the fighting mandibles relaxed in their folds. She seemed altogether a figure of secure competence, a Wreave of the ruling classes... not that Wreaves recognized such classes. It disturbed Aritch that Wreaves tested for survival only through a complex understanding of sentient behavior, rigid performance standards based on ancient ritual whose actual origins could only be guessed; there was no written record. But that's why we chose her. Aritch grunted, then: "What can you say about the report?" "McKie learns rapidly." Her spoken Galach had a faint sibilance. Aritch nodded. "I would say rather that he adapts rapidly. It's why we chose him." "I've heard you say he's more Gowachin than the Gowachin." "I expect him soon to be more Dosadi than the Dosadi." "If he survives." "There's that, yes. Do you still hate him?" "I have never hated him. You do not understand the spectrum of Wreave emotions." "Enlighten me." "He has violated my essential pride of self. This requires a specific reaction in kind. Hate would only dull my abilities." "But # was the one who gave you the orders which had to be countermanded." "My oath of service to the Gowachin contains a specific injunction, that I cannot hold anyone of my teachers responsible for either understanding or obeying the Wreave protocols of courtesy. It is the same injunction which frees us to serve McKie's Bureau." "You do not consider McKie one of your teachers?" She studied him for a moment, then: "Not only do I exclude him, but I know him to be one who has learned much about our protocols." Aritch studied her. "What if I were to say he is one of your teachers?" Again, she stared at him. "I would revise my estimations of him... and of you." Aritch took a deep breath. "Yet, you must learn McKie as though you lived in his skin. Otherwise, you will fail us." "I will not fail you. I know the reasons you chose me. Even McKie will know in time. He dares not spill my blood in the courtarena or even subject me to public shame. Were he to do either of these things, half the Wreave universe would go hunting him with death in their mandibles." Aritch shook his head slowly from side to side. "Ceylang! Didn't you hear him warn you that you must shed your Wreave skin?" She was a long time responding and he noted the subtle characteristics which he'd been told were the Wreave adjustments to anger -- a # : twitching of the jowls, tension in the pedal bifurcations... Presently, she said: "Tell me what that means. Teacher." "You will be charged with performing under Gowachin Law, performing as though you were another McKie. He adapts! Haven't you observed this? He is capable of defeating you... and us in such a way, in such a way that your Wreave universe would shower him with adulation for his victory. That cannot be permitted. Too much is at stake." Ceylang trembled and showed other signs of distress. "But I am Wreave!" "If it comes to the Courtarena, you no longer can be Wreave." She inhaled several shallow breaths, composed herself. "If I become too much McKie aren't you afraid I might hesitate to slay him?" "McKie would not hesitate." She considered this. "Then there's only one reason you chose me for this task." He waited for her to say it. "Because we Wreaves are the best in the universe at learning the behavior of others -- both overt and covert." "And you dare not rely on any supposed inhibitions he may or may not have!" After a long pause, she said; "You are a better teacher than I'd suspected. Perhaps you're even better than you suspected."    Europe? Will fusion power be used in the Light Water Reactor fission system? Whatever happened to super-heavy elements? I know, I know. Last month I promised a column on how to become a space colonist. That column will be duly written, but we interrupt the regularly scheduled program for a special bulletin -- mostly because I forgot to look at my calendar before I wrote last month's column. You see, every year the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing puts on a week-long series of briefings. This year's was different in that the National Association of Science Writers received a generous grant from the Upjohn Company to let them bring in writers who might not otherwise attend, reasons thought it would be a Good Thing to have me come down and deliver my thoughts on creative techniques in science writing. I doubt my contribution to the program was of much use; certainly I learned more from my colleagues than I gave them. But the bottom line is that for a week I was in Galveston, Texas, in company with the top science writers of the US listening to a series of background briefings on subjects ranging from Dr. Jonas Salk on influenza vaccination to Berkeley's Albert Ghiorso on super-heavy elements. Thus I didn't have time to do the research for the scheduled column. Besides, what's the hurry? Jimmy Carter's very first act was to rework the upcoming federal budget to stretch out the Shuttle program for at least two more years before first flight, so it will be at least that much longer before they'll be needing American space colonists.    Until very recently we thought we understood the genesis of man: African origin, long period of evolution from ape to proto-man to Neanderthal Man; then, about # years ago Cro-Magnan Man appeared in Europe, quickly displacing his Neanderthal cousins. CroMagnan or modem man then spread across the globe, and simultaneously differentiated into races. Some # years ago mongoloid hunters crossed the land bridge from Asia to North America, and # years ago came the Europeans and Africans; and here we are. It may not be that way at all. Dr. C. Ranier Berger, Professor of Anthropology, Geography, and archeological finds that cast doubt on the Cro-Magnan aspects of this sequence, while Dr. George Todaro, who holds the unlikely (for making anthropological discoveries) position of (#hief of the Laboratory of Viral Carcinogenesis, National Cancer Institute, has evidence that mankind evolved first in Asia, not Africa. All rather disturbing, and if any of my readers are looking for a field in which to make really startling contributions, I suggest a career in anthropology. The whole subject is due for a radical and fundamental restructuring. We really don't know very much about man's pre-history. First, let's look at Dr. Berger and the North American Indians. You can pick up mammoth bones all over Southern California, some of them # years old and more, and anthropologists have often suspected that a few of these mammoth bones are from beasts that died violent deaths at the hands of persons unknown; but until recently there was no real evidence of this. Out on Santa Rosa Island, a privately owned ranch that was once connected to the mainland, one finds both mammoth bones and what can only be hearths. The bones are burnt, and were fairly obviously cooked for someone's dinner. Recent finds make that virtually certain -- and radiocarbon dating shows that both bones and hearths are more than # years old. The people associated with them are mongoloid and thus definitely modem man. So it spears the earliest evidence of what we call CroMagnon Man is now found, of all places, in California, leading naturally to the question, did the New World populate the Old? Alas, though, that's not certain. What we have are some undatable chunks of human bone which seem to be of the same strata and age as the cooked mammoths; stone tools and cooking hearths definitely more than #,(X)# years old, but not the two together -- yet. It would be very nice indeed if we could find their burial grounds; some remains of those Paleolithic hunters who slew wooly mammoths on Santa Rosa Island #,(KX) years ago. All right: modem man was in the New World well before we thought he ought to be. So what? Well, the problem is, how did he get here? The Asian land bridge across the Bering Straits opens and closes periodically with the advance and retreat of the glaciers during Ice Ages, and is the only really credible route, unless you credit the Eskimo with a far older culture and waterfaring technology than anyone ever has dreamed of. Which of those temporary periods brought men from Asia to North America? There have never been any Neanderthal remains found over here. None at all. And at the moment the oldest remains of Modem Man we know of seem to be associated with California. Very interesting. Now back to viral cancer and human evolution. Pick one: vimses cause cancer; are caused by cancer, prevent cancer. Indeed, each of those statements is tme under certain circumstances, and actually it's more confusing than that: certain vimses certainly cause cancers, but those same infectious vimses are actually generated, created, by healthy animals who are themselves more or less immune to that kind of viral cancer. The theory is that these animals have evolved the cancervims-creating mechanism as protection -- a kind of selfvaccination process. That kind of evolution takes a long time. The worst offender is the baboon, some species of which constantly contaminate their environment with cancer vims. Fairly obviously any animal susceptible to that form of viral cancer has great incentive to evolve protective mechanisms; certainly a species that's immune to baboon viral cancer has a better chance of survival. Now of the Great Apes, the gorilla and chimpanzee are the most closely related to man. This is not in dispute on scientific grounds except as part of a general attack on the whole evolutionary hypothesis mounted mostly by religious authorities. (The Catholic and most Orthodox churches have long ago come to accommodation with evolution but many Protestant sects continue to oppose the theory -- and some of their spokesmen have excellent scientific credentials; no, I don't care to get into that discussion here.) If, though, you accept that man, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee all had a common ancestor, as most evolutionary theorists do, the viral evidence becomes important: because the chimps and gorillas, alone of the Great Apes, have evolved defenses against African baboon viral cancer. Neither man, nor the gibbons, nor the orangutans have done so. Baboon virus is infectious to man. New World monkeys, and Asian apes. Incidentally, the common house cat has also come to terms with baboon virus, but not totally, arguing that the cats reached Africa well before man, but not as long ago as gorillas and chimpanzees. Dr. Todaro's conclusion is that somewhere after man, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee differ -- gorilla and chimpanzee ancestors made their way to Africa and stayed there. Man did not, but must have spent nearly the whole of the Pliocene Era, all that time until Asia. The data, he says, "suggest that...the older Australopithecines found in Africa, though clearly hominids, were probably, therefore, not in the main lineage to man, but rather, unsuccessful offshoots whose progeny have not endured to the present." (Beneviste and Todaro, "Evolution of type C viral genes," Nature Vol. #.' #, # May #.) Which brings us back to my earlier statement, that if you're looking for a field that needs some really new contributions, anthropology is ready for a new genius.    So much for anthropology; now for something practical like energy. There were two speakers. Dr. Robert Thresher of Oregon State project on wind energy, and Dr. Moshe Lubin of the University of Rochester on fusion. There's not much new data on wind -- or far too much: that is, there is no startling new information, only a very great number of studies and experiments designed to inch our way forward to a time when wind might provide as much as # of our national electric power, and while # is respectable and very much worth worWng on, it's not going to change the world. The largest windmill ever built was a # megaWatt machine on Grandapa's Knob in Vermont. It was called the Smith-Putnam machine, it worked in the #' s, and it was a failure: it couldn't compete economically with coal, and eventually suffered a catastrophic accident. (Windpower experts study "loss of blade accidents" the same way that nuclear engineers study loss of coolant accidents in fission plants.) There was once a # kiloWatt machine working on the city island of Gentzer in Denmark; at present that mill is tethered, but the Danes are thinking of refurbishing it. What's important are the numbers: a modern electric plant generates something like # megaWatts; the biggest windmill ever made was new experimental windmill, the Mod Zero constructed near Cleveland to study stresses and strains of putting all that much metal up in the sky, is a # kiloWatt device. It takes a lot of windmills to make significant amounts of power, which isn't to say that windmills won't be useful, particularly in remote windy places far from other fuel sources. Fusion, on the other hand, is generating a bit more excitement. You'll recall from previous columns that fusion has had its ups and downs: a few years ago, everyone thought it was the new hope of the ing you could cut the gloom with a knife. The present mood, according to Dr. Lubin (whose work at Rochester is in Laser fusion) is one of controlled optimism. First, nobody has changed their mind: fusion will not produce direct on-line power in significant amounts before the years # to #, exactly as I've reported previously. Secondly, the national energy plan still calls for about # of US baseload electric power to come from nuclear fission by #; and thirdly, present uranium reserves cannot sustain nuclear fission power at that rate of consumption for more than forty years. That's the energy dilemma: we need nuclear power. If you think strip mines are bad now, wait until # without nuclear, when there will be enormous freight trains running about the country carrying nothing but coal; coal-slurry pipelines will cross the deserts and rivers and wild places; black-lung compensation payments will be in the tens of cipitated flyash and other waste of tons, and must be disposed of tons of pollutants will get into the atmosphere even with the best cleanup technology. We need nuclear power, which is to say fission power (the only kind we've got) to get to the end of the century: but the nuclear power fuels can't last very long after that. Two ways to go. One is to make more nuclear fuel, which is to say breeders. I used to be a big enthusiast for the fast breeder, and for them; after all, breeder technology, which we invented, is now in use in England, France, and the Soviet Union although we've yet to build a commercial demonstration plant. However, the breeder has its problems. Plutonium is nasty stuff. The nuclear fuel cycle has vulnerable points in it, times when terrorists might be able to get their hands on weapons-grade plutonium, or at least manage to get something that could be chemically refined into a weapon. Nobody, deep down in his heart, loves plutonium (but nobody really loves blacklung and other coal side effects either, even though we put up with them). What would be really marvelous would be a system that lets us invest in conventional Light Water technology that we've got on the shelf, and operate them without nuclear fuel reprocessing. It turns out there may be two ways to do this. One is the "slow breeder": Thorium, a relatively plentiful element, can be bred into U-#, which can then fuel conventional reactors. That's relatively expensive power compared to burning natural uranium, but it has the advantage of being a nearly eternal source of energy. Alas, it also requires a new technology, including mining and refining techniques, and it doesn't do anything with the truly monstrous amounts of uranium we've already mined. There is enough U-# around in mine tailings, stockpiles, etc., to last the world at least a thousand years. U-# won't fission, though, and has to be bombarded with neutrons to turn it into plutonium -- and we've already discussed that. Nobody wants all that plutonium. But suppose we could make the plutonium safe? Paradoxically, the best way to do that might be to make it more dangerous. That is, nobody in his right mind is going to try to steal spent fuel elements. "Used" fuel rods contain not only long-lived plutonium, but also various fission products, which are short-lived and thus very radioactive. You don't want to get close to them, and if you have the technology to work with things like that, you don't need to steal your fissionables: it takes something with the resources of a wealthy govenunent to be able to make useful weapons out of spent fuel rods. The dangerous part of the nuclear fuel cycle comes when the plutonium has been extracted and is lying about by itself; that can be handled with only moderate care. So now comes the point. Fusion power systems produce neutrons. (For a lot more on this subject, see this column, "Fusion Without Exlax," Galaxy October #.) When neutrons interact with U-#, they turn it into plutonium which can be Suppose we took spent fuel elements, left them in the sealed rods, and inserted them into a "recharging" system? Can we do that? According to Dr. loibin, we can. The current status of fusion research is summarized in Table One. You can see there are some problems, but we're moving toward getting useful power from fusion devices. However, as we pointed out here back in the October column, once you have achieved fusion you still do not have a useful power plant. What you've got is a lot of fast neutrons; they still must be caught and their energy extracted. You've still got to build turbines (magneto-hydro-dynamics and don't worry about it) tunnel, or some other very massive and very costly system for taking neutron energy and turning it into electricity. That can be a very large problem, although it hasn't been emphasized much by fusion enthusiasts. But -- fusion makes neutrons. Neutrons are what's needed to "recharge" spent fuel elements. Spent Power (## yvatt) Efficiency Kind of Reaction Obtained Required Obtained Required Lasers Solid State #-# #-# # # Gasseous # # #-# Charged Particles Electrons # # # Ions -- # ? Neutrals -- #' Watts  I terraWatt or TW. ? -- ? Inertial confinement: pellets of Deuterated polyethylene about # microns in diameter (I micron  ## inches) are bombarded with particles; see this column, October, # for further details. fuel elements, whether "recharged" or not, are so dangerous that they're safe: that is, they can be shipped about in huge containers stressed to withstand hundreds of g's, and nobody is going to open one of those things. With "recharging" there is never a point in the fuel cycle where weapons-grade material exists; the Pu concentration in a "recharged" fuel element will be around # of the oxide (while weapons-grade is about # enriched metallic) so that even if a demented terrorist group stole the fuel elements they'd be useless. (Oh, sure, they'd be dangerous, but so would the equivalent weight of At any rate, the concept is fascinating, and provides one bit of evidence for my basic thesis: that we are not doomed, the Club of Rome is wrong, and mankind has a very good chance at "Survival With Style."    Now, in keeping with the title of this column, let's get far out. In Blish's classic "Cities in Space" series one basic element was "anti-agathic" drugs: a pharmacology that cures death by reversing the effects of aging. Now in principle such things are surely possible: certainly it must be possible to take a human being at some arbitrary stage of development and stimulate continuous regeneration so the system never "wears out." "In principle" is not practice, though; nobody knows how to do this. However, Dr. Allan Goldstein of the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, may well have taken several giant steps down that road. Dr. Goldstein, with Dr. Abraham White at Albert Einstein University, some years ago began work on immunological deficiencies in humans. All our textbooks tell us that the thymus gland, that lump on the breastbone, has largely degenerated by about age # to #. The older textbooks say the function of the gland is unknown; bolder spirits even asserted that it was useless, something like a vermiform appendix. That turns out not to be the case. Human beings have two periods of severe danger: in childhood, before the immune system develops; and in old age, when the immune system deteriorates. In both those times we are vulnerable to various cancers, infectious diseases, and auto-immune disorders. Next, let us Csniit HI Ftkruary The fantastic forerunner to MH#S# CoHiiatinlllUi A collection of tales of courage and adventure as Intergalactic empires battle for control of entire worlds! plot the levels of thymosin in the blood at various ages. (Thymosin is one of the secretions of the thymus gland.) The results are interesting: as the thymus gland vanishes (until at age # only about # remains, and at age # it is virtually gone), the thymosin level falls, and our susceptibility to diseases associated with aging -- the very ones that were so dangerous to us in childhood before the immune system developed -- mounts rapidly. Dr. Goldstein has used thymosin to treat children with immunesystem deficiencies. The results have been dramatic. Not many studies have been done: although several children were selected for this treatment, most died before the new drug to be used in humans. The obvious next step is to try thymosin in persons age # and above, bringing the level up to what it was when they were # or so. That may take a while; it is estiin studies to get aspirin approved by already know about it; I wouldn't care to estimate what the costs of getting thymosin approved might be. However, Dr. Goldstein has pretty well proved that the thymus gland is the "master gland" of the immune system, and that treatments with thymosin have been very useful for very young children with immunity disorders; that thymosin stimulates the development of certain cells, called "T-cells," which control phagocyte (white blood cell) cancer control activity. T-cells somehow detect cancerous mutations and secrete a substance that brings phagocytes to the area; the phagocytes then proceed to eat up the cancer cells before they can multiply. Dr. Goldstein is emphatic in stating that thymosin is not the "magic bullet" for curing old age -- but he strongly suspects that it can be useful in letting one age gracefully, without many of the pains and ailments so common in those over sixty. He's also rather excited about all the developments in biochemistry and immunology. We are on the threshold of a new era in medicine. Understanding the immune systems will of course make transplant technology much more reliable; may provide the key to cancer, and almost certainly will help keep patients alive long enough for other cancer treatments to be effective; and may well be the means for all of us to stay alive gracefully at least to the biblical three score and ten. I have always had the view (not original with me) that the human organism is designed to self-destruct shortly after age #. In a tribal society people ought to have the good grace to die when their children reach child-bearing age -- with a few hanging around to be tribal elders, but most getting out of the way. Primitive communities that don't have lots of old people have more food for young ones -- and their tribes increase. But modem technology changes this. New technology may find a way to overcome the self-destruct mechanism; and I find it no surprise to discover that our immunological master gland quietly vanishes about the time we're forty years old... physicians give thymosin (which is already used in treatment of cancer patients and young children) to normal people of middle age? I suspect I could find a number of volunteers. Stepping a bit further out, alas, we take a step backward. According to Dr. Albert Ghiorso of Lawrence Bericeley Laboratories, we have not found element # and the "magic island of stability." Pity. Dr. Ghiorso is probably the discoverer of element #. I say probably, because the Russians like to claim they found it first. (I haven't space to review all the evidence.) The upshot is that an international committee has been appointed, three Soviets, three Americans, and three neutrals. The committee has never met, but it is supposed to decide who, the Americans or the Soviets, get to name #. Meanwhile, Ghiorso has reviewed the evidence of the Florida State -- Oak Ridge National Laboratory collaboration of Cahill and Gentry which had hoped to find element # in primordial samples (the Soviets were searching for it in very old stained-glass window leads) and found it wanting. Working from the other direction -- if you can't find it in nature, can you make it? -- Lawrence Laboratories and the Soviets at Dubna have been bombarding Curiumss with Calcium # o in an attempt to create super-heavies -- and found none. It's a great pity because I've just finished a science fiction novel whose plot depends on the discovery of super-heavies; but all is not lost. It's true that we haven't found any natural super-heavy elements, and best efforts haven't made any, but the search is still on and they're still theoretically possible. Finally: what makes the Sun shine? It does, you know. Some theorists now wish it didn't. (Sure: that would kill us all, but doggone it, it sure wrecks a lot of good theories...) Open any astrophysics or intermediate astronomy textbook, and you'll see confidently asserted a series of equations showing where the Sun gets its energy. Take four protons (hydrogen nuclei) plus two positrons plus two neutrinos. Adding the massenergies of the input protons and subtracting out the masses of the output discloses some mass missing: enough to generate the Sun shines. So, a number of years ago, theoretical astrophysicists devised an experiment which would confirm this so generally accepted theory. It wasn't supposed to be an exciting experiment; after all, we know more about the Sun than any other star. Indeed, most of our astrophysics theories are deduced from stellar observations, most of which are of our own Sun. Besides, it always helps to have confirming experiments of basic theory: Hans Bethe settled it all theoretically back in #, but it couldn't hurt to do an actual experiment even if this was the best understood aspect of astrophysics. So out in the old Homestake mine was installed # gallons of perchloroethylene, C # CI # , and a very elaborate system for counting what happened when neutrinos struck the chlorine. (That generates argon and so gives us a method for counting neutrinos.) The "Chlorine to Argon reaction expected from solar neutrinos was worked out by Dr. John Bahcall, Professor of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, about fifteen years ago. The unit is about #' captures per target atom per second; not very many, meaning that one needs a lot of CI and a long time before you expect to see anything happen. Raymond Davis and John Evans of Brookhaven National Laboratory worked out the actual test equipment, which involves finding # Argon atoms per month in that immense tank of cleaning fluid. They have also tested the procedure, injecting known numbers of Argon atoms into the system and recovering them. To the best of everyone's knowledge that experiment ought to work, and the neutrino capture rate in the tank ought to be about # The observed result: a maximum alL This is astounding. Has the Sun gone out? Dr. Bahcall is a careful man. He wanted it clearly understood that he still believes the textbook protonalpha reaction is the explanation for why the Sun shines. However, when pressed, he will discuss what he calls "cocktail party" theories: that is, theories that a scientist might put forth in a cocktail party, but which one has no business publishing in a serious journal. "Unfortunately," Dr. Bahcall told us, "a lot of cocktail party theories have been published..." There are three major classes of theories to explain why we have observed no solar neutrinos: those which horrify astronomers, those which horrify physicists, and those which drive both up the wall. The astronomers like to think something happens to the neutrinos on the way here: they're produced all right, but they're a lot less stable than physicists thought they were. After all, the only observations of neutrinos have been in paths from a few centimeters to a kilometer or so long; perhaps over longer distances they decay into something else. Most physicists don't care much for that theory. Physicists, meanwhile, have always felt that astronomers don't really understand stars as well as they think they do. Thus, Dr. Bahcall says, the failure of the standard theory just proves to physicists that they're right in being skeptical about what astronomers say. (Not that Bahcall himself has this attitude, but it is widespread.) Anyway, die result has been what Bahcall describes as a theoretical orgy of mostly "cocktail party" theories. Item; the Sun has "gone out" and periodically does so, reigniting after a period of gravitational collapse. Item: there's a black hole consisting of around # of the Sun's mass dead center in our star, the Sun shines because matter falling into the hole gives off energy. There's no fusion in there at all. Item (a theory that really drives astronomers nuts): suppose all the heavy elements in the Sun are concentrated in the outer layers (for reasons no one can give); then the results would be consistent with neutrino observation. Whatever the explanation, there's probably a Nobel Prize in it, which may explain why the Soviets are spending enormous sums, really a lot of money, on solar neutrino experiments. They're scaling up the Davis experiment by a factor of # in a tunnel under a mountain (these things need to he down deep to keep the cosmic ray counts low enough so that the solar neutrinos won't be hidden in a fog of interactions). There's one final possibility, strange, but not out of sight: that the Sun operates, not on the #P #aI#el-#vc  # meV reaction I described earlier, but through the PeP reaction: a proton plus an electron plus another proton yields deuterium (heavy hydrogen) plus one neutrino, ie., Pte'tP  Dif Ve, which as you can see produces just half the number of neutrinos (and they're at a lower energy level too), about # -- and that's just consistent there's no proof that we have found any solar neutrinos; but the likely Now the astronomers will not like it if the Sun turns out to run on PeP; but their unhappiness is as nothing compared to what will result if experiment shows no solar neurequires something really far-out, strange, new, different, a theoretical restructuring along the lines of Einstein's work. All of which proves that we don't understand our universe quite as well as some of us think we do, and that shouldn't be any surprise to Galaxy readers. Stand by. In anthropology; immunology; even agriculture and plant chemistry which I didn't get to; energy technology; and astrophysics, all kinds of exciting things are happening. Like it or not, the Age of Marvels is not over by a long shot, and I confidently expect to find that about half the things I think I know will be obsolete in five years. We don't even know for sure what makes the Sun shine! Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter's first budget action was to delay the Shuttle. I wonder what will happen to the Large Space Telescope? It all seems symbolic, somehow, and a bit depressing; but at least there's no urgency now about my column on how to be a space colonist.  Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. W I We must learn to love our enemies. There was inhere, and out-there. In-here was warm and safe -- smelly, yes; damp, yes; but safe. Out-there... he'd spent half his life out-there. He could describe it easily, but he didn't want to open his eyes. As long as they stayed shut, in-here was cut off from outthere, and the pictures -- Lieutenant, snap out of it, sir. -- the pictures were out-there, waiting for him to relax his guard and let his eyelids part. As soon as that happened, they would reappear, and... and one picture would shrink him in stature and significance until even he could neither see nor feel himself. The last time, he'd resisted it with all his strength, but no matter how firmly he had said that he did have meaning, and that he'd proved it by gallantry under fire in a dozen encounters with the enemy, it had squeezed him down to a pinprick of light that sparkled like a star seen through atmosphere. If the picture hadn't faded away, it would eventually have extinguished that light, and he would have been no more. But that wasn't all: there was one that made him feel dirty, and dirtier, and dirtier still, and he was well on his way towards becoming the foulest thing in the universe, unquestionably deserving of eradication... and the other, the one that had forced him back, step by step, until his soul was bared and it could break off bits of it and grind them with teeth that -- Lieutenant, sir, you've got to come out of it.-He can't hear you, Sarge." You 're wrong," he wanted to say, but caution kept him silent. Outgoing sound waves would link in-here and out-there just as surely as incoming light waves would. He couldn't bear to offer the pictures a bridge to cross, even if it meant that he could not respond to the voices. They were different from the pictures. The pictures had been... bad. They'd hurt him, and... he whimpered as a memory reared up menacingly. The voices, though, seemed to be on his side. They were angry at the pictures, probably because of what they'd done to him. Keeping his eyes squeezed tight, he listened to the murmurs at the back of his mind, to find out if they were still discussing him. They were, so he eased towards them, ready to scuttle back to safety if he needed to.Why? There's work to be done, repairs to be made, and if he stays slumped in his chair like that, we're all in trouble.He's in shock, Sarge.This one was gentler, more flexible, but metallic nonetheless.Concussion, radiation overdose, TP attack -- he's a sick lad.-But I have to be fixed! I can't get us home unless he makes the repairs. And he's got to start now. because my life-support systems are shot to hell.-He's in no shape to do it, Sarge. He must recover, first.How long will that take, Doc?-Who knows?Its shrug was an impression rather than an occurence.A week, two weeks, maybe longer. I haven't had the opportunity to examine him thoroughly yet. The initial prognosis should be ready tomorrow.Docdesperation lurked behind the voicea week I can't wait. The converter's gone. There's an #hour supply of air in the tanks. Two weeks worth of food, maybe a little more water. But even if those hadn't been damaged, most of my reaction mass is gone. What the hell doldo?-Find a planet with breathable air. We'll let him recover there. Then he can fix you.-Yeah.Its tone was glum.You know. Doc, this gives the mission a royal fuckover.-I know. But for now, find the planet. We'll worry about the mission later. The voices didn't fall silent, exactly, but they did stop making words. A hum hovered lhind his mind, reassuring him that he was not alone, urging him to relax, telling him that when there were ideas to be expressed, the potential would be activated. He didn't care. The words had been confusing anyway. The hum was nicer: it solaced, hut it didn't bewilder. He felt his body drift against the left side of his shell, and interpreted the sensation as motion. He was being sent somewhere -- or taken somewhere. It didn't matter. The important thing was to keep his eyes shut so the pictures couldn't return. Even the fingers peeling off his shell didn't matter. Nor did the sudden numb warmth of a subcutaneous spray. What mattered was the cotton wool that was starting to fill the void between in-here and outthere -- good cotton wool, nice cotton wool, protective cotton...   ... where was it going? He dug his fingers in it to hold it in place but it melted like cloudstuff and drifted away. With growing anxiety, he searched for a more solid patch in which to hide. There didn't seem to be any. The hum at the base of his skull no longer reassured him, not when he was in the midst of losing his armor. Settling for relative opacity, he curled himself inside a large fluff, all the while cursing its flimsiness. -- physically healed and adapted,said the voice.He can breathe the air, drink the water, eat the plants and animals -- he'll get along quite well.-Was it really necessary to do all that to him, Doc?-In my considered medical opinion,said the first, somewhat huffily,the Lieutenant's psychic convalescence will extend to a minimum eight weeks, and an indeterminate maximum. As we cannot provide him with his own food or water, and as we cannot convert the native food or water, I could see no option but to adapt his biochemistry to this planet. And given that necessity it would have been silly not to adapt his physique as well.-Enough bullshit. Doc. I get your point. But Base won't be happy if we don't return the same clean-cut warrior they sent out. Can you switch him back?-Easily.-Is he going to remember his stuff, once he's recovered?-I'm not certain. His knowledge was so extensive that some could well have been lost. Re-education might be necessary.Shit. That warship's still up there. Doc, looking for us. It's only a matter of time. When it gets in range. I'll show up on its screens like a neon sign. You've got to get the Lieutenant's mind healed damn quick.I'll do what I can, Sarge, you know that -- ah, he's conscious. Good morning, sir -- have a nice rest?He shivered, less from the cold than from the attention. He didn't want to be noticed. That could tell the pictures where he was. His eyelids screwed themselves together and colored lights exploded behind them.Sir, everything's fine, you're safe. You can talk to us.His tongue licked over dry lips. The air smelled strange. It wasn't pure, it felt full of different... he sniffed, and caught a whiff of vegetation, and another of fur, and another... it felt full of living things, that was the difference, living things and sunlight and fresh water. Sounds assailed his ears: the wind rustled, paws padded across a mud flat, branches creaked, birds called. His shoulders slumped as he realized that the bridge had been laid down; the pictures could cross it at any time. Self-restraint was now self-defeating. "Wa-water," he croaked.Outside, sir. There's a stream.-Doc, you can't send him outside, not in that state.-We can't transport the water for him, Sarge. Once he starts his recovery, he can devise a pump, and integrate it with your life support systems, but for now... he must do it on his own.-But there were wild beasts out there, they couldDon't worry. Your lasers will protect him, for one thing. For another, he can carry a hand laser. And for a third... as soon as he steps outside. I'll implement a TP net that will saturate the immediate vicinity.-What the hell good will that do?-Those 'beasts' out there are decision makers, so we'll be able to read them. If any intend to attack the Lieutenant, we'll know at the same moment they do. With that much advance warning, he'll be safe.-Yeah, well... I don't like it.-No other option, Sarge. Besides, he has to go out for food, anyway.-My lasers can kill enough in a minute to feed him for a year.-Of course. But can you retrieve it? Or store it once it's been retrieved?-Um... no.-All right. So be quiet for a while, and don't distract us. Lieutenant, it's time to open your eyes.He shook his head and, for emphasis, laid his palms over his eyes. "N-no," he gasped, "not that. Please?"You have to, sir. Come on, take your hands down -- that's a good Lieutenant -- now open your eyes -- lots of beautiful things to see -- that's it, relax those muscles, let them slide apart, easy now, let's go -- good!A spear of light flew through his slitted eyelids, and tore into the soft flesh behind them. "Oh!" He fell to his knees, and brought his hands up again. "Hurts -- enough -- no more."You'll get used to it, sir, it'll only take a minute. Here, Sarge'll turn down the lights -- Sarge? -- you'll be okay. Lieutenant, just remove -- ah, good.The light had softened and no longer stung. He moved his head to the right, then to the left, back and forth, sweeping wider and wider each time, until he knew that no enemies had infiltrated the place of metal and glass. He sagged, and let his buttocks rest on his ankles. "Wa-water," he repeated.Yes, sir. It's outside.The light was growing stronger while it spoke.Go to the door, sir, and step out, and I'll direct you. It's not far, sir.-Doci-Yes, Sarge?-What about germs? Primitive places like this haveDo you suppose I wouldn't have dealt with that while I was working on him? He is immune.Unh.It was a grumble of concession.Aren't you at least going to give him some clothes?-Why? It's warm outside. He doesn't need them. And he doesn't remember how to control himself anyway -- he'd spend half his time washing them.-Hmm.He found himself in the lock. Dim memories kept him patient while he waited for the doors to shuffle through their alternation. His tongue seemed thicker, seemed to fill his mouth and press annoyingly against his throat. Then the outer door slid back and bright green light made him squint. The ramp carried him gently to the ground as a chorus of high, soft voices awakened in his mind.Sir?Low, but very loud.Can you hear me, sir?"Yes," he muttered. "Water?"Straight ahead, sir. About two hundred paces. Grasses brushed his legs as he strode through the field. A line of trees ahead indicated the nearer bank of the stream. Insects danced around him, landing on his shoulders, crawling on his chest. He ignored them all, except for the few that wriggled into the comers of his eyes. Another murmur arose and he identified it as the sound of water slipping over stones. He walked faster, broke into a trot, and then into a full run. The ground dropped away beneath his feet and he tumbled head over heels down the slope. A warm backwater broke his fall, a thousand slivers of silver bursting away from him. He drank.He could have killed himself, Doc.-What the hell, Sarge, I can't control him! I can only talk to hitn.-Well, you could haveDrop it, Sarge.-Yes, sirlHe raised his head and let the water trickling from his hair caress his skin. The sunshine was a comfort, even if it did ricochet off the tiny wind waves and make him blink. Knees nesting in the soft riverbed, he listened to the animals that were staring at him.   Doc, we're running out of time. Not only is that warship still out there, another's on the way. Say what you want about the enemy, they're persistent bastards. With two of them searching, it won't be much longer before they hit this place. When the hell is that kid going to be able to fix me? It's his own life that's at stake.-Is it really that urgent, Sarge?-Yeah, it is. We got maybe a month.-Well...Reluctance permeated its tone.His physical recovery has been complete, but mentally... he has not made sufficient progress, Sarge.-Sufficient for what?-For resumption of his duties. I shall have to use the hypno-educator on him, but...it gave an electronic sighthat could further disorient his personality.Will it make him remember how to repair me?-Oh, yes.-Then do it, dammit, and worry about his personality later.Another sigh.Very well.The volume increased as it pulsed its message into the TP net:Lieutenant, come here, sir. Lieutenant, come here.He was tempted to ignore the call, because he didn't want to return to the place of steel and glass. the place where the pictures had had their way with him. But the voice surged through his mind like a wind through tree leaves, and he knew that it wouldn't stop until he'd presented himself. Bushes shook as he stepped back into the clearing. The spindlylegged creatures he'd been watching sprang high and low in the opposite direction, blue tails flicking a startled farewell. He waited until the last had disappeared; their beauty and grace laid a weight on his heart. Then he was running, because the voice was becoming more insistent. The smooth slick soil of the game trail slipped by under his toes. His bare legs, brown now from the days he'd spent drowsing on the suncaressed creek bank, pumped easily, powerfully. They pushed and stretched and pulled; he jumped higher over fallen branches than he needed to, simply to revel in the pleasure of it. The days before were cloudy in his mind. Every time he tried to reach them, he split in two, and each half struggled with the other. He couldn't go back in time much at all; he had to be content with the wispy scraps that floated through the elastic barrier. He knew that his body had once been different -- smaller, for one thing, and not nearly so strong. Now it was long and rangy; he could see muscles ripple under skin that used to be tighter, firmer, more densely packed. He liked the new body, with its lungs that drew such large volumes of the clean light air so happily, with the powerful fingers that could grasp one tree branch after another. higher and higher, until the trunk swayed beneath his weight and he could lean fa-a-ar out and nearly touch the ground. It was a goody body, and most enjoyably so in die legs that could run quickly, effortlessly, continuously... for hours and hours, across all kinds of ground he could follow the skitterish, heart-thumping beasts of the field... or flee from the soft-footed blood lust of the forest's predators. Birds squawked their annoyance as he darted across the long grass of the clearing; they flurried away from their meals to study him from the treetops.Come in. Lieutenant.His image shuddered as the, gleaming door retracted. He ventured into the cube of cold light, felt it scrub his skin until it seemed that he, too, must be burnished smooth. To enter the place of glass and steel, one almost had to become a part of it.Thank you, sir -- please come in.He stood by the door, reluctant to advance because the sleek black lines of the chair dominated the room, and it was in that chair that -- The air was crisp, and dry, and dead. Enveloping him, it toweled him down, dried his tongue, put a feathery tickle at the base of his nose. "What do you want?"To your right, sir.A glossy plastic panel rose to expose an alcove; his eyes narrowed at the sight. Faint memories stirred, but they were only bulges in a curtain.Please go irt there, sir."I don't want to."It won't hurt, sir, really .He caught the edges of words not meant for him:Dammit, Doc, can't you make him get in there?-Impossible, Sarge. He is our CO, remember?-Yeah, butI can't override my programming, Sarge, and I doubt if you can override yours. He's boss no matter what shape he's in. We have to coax him.The voice was directed at him again, its center impacting on his face.Sir, please go in there, we really need your help."If I do, will you let me go outside again?"Of course, sir."All right." He stepped inside, ducking his head because the ceiling was so low. The panel fell like soundless night, and sealed itself. His skin began to creep. He licked his lips. The room was too small, too sleek. Its hard surfaces and sharp angles were threatening. He had to -- bleep"'What program are you running, Doc?-Emergency Repairs, eventually, but I have started with Tool Handling.How long will it take?-Two hours and thirty-seven minutes.-And then he'll fix me?The voice took pains not to mar the other's bright eagerness.I hope so, Sarge, I really hope so.   He put down the welder. "Run a check on that, Sarge."Yes, sir.A light glowed on the control panel, and something deep inside hummed peacefully.That's it, sir, #." Anything else?"Not a thing, sir, not a thing. The computer sounded as satisfied as a man who leaned back from a belt-loosening dinner.Damn, but it's good to have you back, sir.' 'Thanks." He wound the cord into a tight coil, and stowed it with the other equipment in the tool chest. "It's good to be out of that fog I was in."We're ready for take-off any time, sir."Oh?" He stretched, and let himself bask in the warmth of knowing that he'd done a difficult job well. Fatigue was settling in, slowly overwhelming the now unnecessary drive for perfection. "Well, just let me out and you can go on about your business."Sir?It appeared to squelch its surprise, and force itself to contemplate the possibility of unsuspected malfunctions.I'm not sure I heard you correctly, sir."I said open your door so I can get out -- then go do what you want." The voice started to sputter, and another cut in smoothly;Do you plan to remain here, sir?"Well, sure. Doc." He was puzzled by their surprise; it seemed to him that they had once been more sensitive, less obtuse. Hadn't he made himself clear? They'd asked him to fix them. He had, not letting his queasiness interfere. Now the job was done, and they could leave. "You didn't think I was going to go with you, did you?"Frankly, sir, we had been expecting it. Why do you wish to stay?Bewildered, he gestured to the enclosing walls, the low-hanging ceiling. "Can't you see?" he asked, thinking of the forest's sprawl, with its hollows and hills and infinity of heights.If it's claustrophobia, sir, the hypno -- "No!" He winced as the shiny walls spat back his sharpness. He hadn't meant to be abrupt; he'd only wanted to express distaste for the machine that planted spiked seeds in helpless minds. He wouldn't go back into anything that opened the top of his skull, and toyed with the essence of his being. It had already changed him -- although, luckily, in a good way -- but he wouldn't give it a second chance. He liked himself the way he was: free, natural, hone.st. The machines wanted to alter him, wanted to turn him into something closer to themselves. To create their golem, they as the enemy was. People need room, and variety. They need winds that sometimes come through a pine forest, and sometimes blow straight off an icesounds of life, the ever-changing textures of nature. They get none of those in a metal ball that rolls between the stars. The machines knew that but they didn't care. Ruthless in their refusal of independence, they insisted that a human hand hover over their metal skins. The hand's yearning for freedom meant nothing to them. Noise, that was all. Run it through the modulators a few times, clear away the static, beam it where you will. If that meant tampering with the mind, well... With dreadful clarity, he saw how his allies mirrored his enemies: the one wanted slaves and the other to shave off whatever intricacies, eccentricities wouldn't fit into the form. Each hungered for a part of man; neither would take him whole and complete. "Let me out," he said, fearing that if he stayed longer, subtle changes would begin to show in him, "let me out!"Sir,argued a voice, he didn't care any longer which,the enemy is en route, and if they discover you -- "Let me out!" He hammered on the door. His lungs burned with air he wasn't meant to breathe, air designed for machines, dry and cool and sterile. It would be a vacuum if they weren't such masochists that they demanded to be subservient. "I am ordering you to let me out!"Open the door, Sarge.-I was going to, butYou cannot mutiny any more than I can; you will only destroy yourself if you attempt it.-Doc, we have to take off 'cause they're coming and they'll spot us as soon as they scan this side of the planet, but Doc, he can't survive here, not out in the woods without your TP net and all.-We both know that, but he does not. And he is the CO. So justwait. Can we play hide-and-seek with them?-You mean keep the planet between us and them? Sure, no sweat.Give the Lieutenant a radio he can use to call us. After take-off, we will stay in this vicinity as long as possible.The voices were cold mists at the back of his mind; he couldn't clear them away and they wouldn't leave. His fist was getting sore. His throat was raw. "Please," he gasped, "please, open your door."If you take this radio, sir,a compartment cover flew up and the radio glistened in its fluorescent lightswe will open the door. Use the radio if you want us to return to pick you up.He hesitated. It could be a trap, a... a Trojan Horse. Why would one machine urge him to take a second machine unless the second would make him more amenable to the demands of the first? But -- he touched it tentatively, then moved his finger away -- he could always throw it away once he was outside. "All right." Picking it up, he concealed it in the palm of his hand. It lay as cool and silent as a pebble. The floor vibrated as the doors slid back. He stepped into the airlock, eyes wary for a final attempt to detain him. His heart raced for the few seconds of solitary confinement. Then honest light splashed across his cheeks and real air filled his lungs and he was down the ramp, running, forgetting the micro-transmitter, ignoring the silent upward thrust of the ship, running... free.    His lean-to -- crooked sticks Due to unavoidable technical difficulties there has been some disruption in our scheduling and we have been forced to adjust our cover dates accordingly. All subscriptions will be adjusted so that subscribers will receive the full number of issues to which they are entitled. Galaxy very much regrets any inconvenience this may have caused, and we are confident the situation will not recur. Thank you for your patience. bound with slender vines -- didn't stop the rain but did slow its headlong rush. The fire was going out again. He cursed, rummaged in the shadows for another length of dry wood, but came up empty. With another curse, he resigned himself to darkness. The forest was a different place with the TP net gone. Before, hearing all the animals, he could measure their reactions to his smelt. He'd had plenty of warning the two or three times one had chosen to attack him. Now, without the machines that augmented his inherent sensitivity, they were only sounds in the night, odors on the wind. If one was hungry, he wouldn't know it until the very last moment. Grinning skeletally into the forest, he realized that he was afraid. And in that moment he realized further that he was glad to be afraid, because for the first time in months his fear was of harm to his body. He could die there amid the rotting leaves and branches, but he'd die with his mind intact. Neither tooth nor claw could do more than still that mind. And nothing else really mattered. The last ember crackled; the last tongue of flame spit and died. He'd have to wait for morning. He pulled deeper into his shelter, club in one hand, laser in the other. He reminded himself to be sparing with the laser -- it would soon exhaust its charge. His eyelids slipped down; he inched cautiously into the hazy mix of real and unreal that prefaces the truer illusions of sleep. A part of him played sentinel, ready to sound the alarm at the first carnivorous snarl, or even the first brush of fur against rain-soaked grasses.Doc, we got real troubles. They're on their way.-So we play hide-and-seek, right?-Wrong. Both ships are coming. We can dodge one of them easily enough, but not two. They'd pick up our emissions in a minute.So what do we do?-We could make a dash for homeAnd leave the Lieutenant behind? Not a chance.I was afraid you'd say that. Our other choice is to set down on that moon and shut ourselves off.-But should the Lieutenant call usWe can leave one low-power receiver going; I've already written a no program that will wake us up when the Lieutenant's signal comes in.-Well, if you think -- I do.-All right.   The uneasiness had been growing within him all day; he could no longer pretend that it sprang from changing atmospheric conditions, or from worry about the planet's predators. It was too strong, too familiar, too... not evil, exactly. Something else, a deep and basic difference that the human soul could not accept, had to reject without being able to explain its precise repugnance. The propagandists, who'd never felt it for themselves, used the word evil all the time, but that blurred the fine distinction his mind was trying to make. Sitting on a sun-warmed rock he tried to pin it down. There was strength, puipose, and an acute intelligence. But -- and this spawned the uneasiness -- all were different, all tangential to their human equivalents. Take their ships. Ungainly arrays of girder-laced pods, they were sealed units, with neither hatches not airlocks evident, as though they had been built around their pilots. Their armor made them all but invulnerable to lasers, yet the specialists who'd examined several derelicts of battle claimed there was no shielding between the engines and the bridge. And why had no one ever found a corpse, or even an empty spacesuit? The whole war had been a succession of such incomprehensibilities. First contact had commenced with a blast from the alien's lasers, and had ended with the evacuation of an entire system. The enemy had presented no demands, registered no protests. Revealing nothing of themselves they'd come upon humanity like a plague. Even after nine years of frequent skirmishing the only thing known about them was that they built fast, tough, deadly ships. Like most humans, he reacted to the enemy as would a mastiff to the presence of a tiger: neck hairs bristling, belly tight, mind awash with the perception of the difference. The oppressiveness of their proximity, like a spectre leaning over his shoulder, drove him to his feet. He stood uncertainly, his shadow cool black against the brown grasses of the hillside. Hiding would do no good. The enemy wasn't searching for him physically -- though its detection devices were superb, even they couldn't single him out from all the other mammals -- but it didn't have to. Short of leaving the planet, he could not escape the pressure of its mind. Ah! It had noticed him now. Rather, it had just realized that it had been growing aware of his presence. He could feel its thoughts shifting, the focus of its attention kaleidoscoping until it peered down at him like a monstrous eye through a microscope lens. Leave. The order twisted through his brain like a worm through soil; its after-texture was of slime. He squinted into the dazzle of blue that was the sky, as if he thought he could spot the extra glint that came from its ship. I can't, he said. It knew he spoke the truth, because otherwise his lasers would have been stabbing at it. You leave. When we perceive the impetus, we shall. He interrupted quickly, in the hope that he could influence it before its pride -- was that the right word? wouldn't "reflexes" be more accurate? -- made it impossible for it to bypass him. In the interim, then, let us tolerate each other. Tolerate? He felt a spark of hope. In all the times he'd seen their tumbling craft on his screens, he'd never encounways had the furious beams lanced out, as if hurled by an instant, inevitable animosity. Let us not harm each other, he explained. Certainly. Cease your mental processes. I cannot. Is there no other way? No. You blur the vision. You twist definitions. Hatred began to writhe in the other's thoughts. You impinge on our perceptions, and distort the reality. You must die. He knew then that reason was futile. Involved was no simple xenophobia, nor nationalistic squabbles over spheres of exploitation. Madness was the issue. The races could not co-exist and retain their sanity. It would be like mixing steam and ice, and hoping that they would remain unchanged. But he didn't want to fight. Death was one thing; it could be faced with near-equanimity because it would have to be experienced eventually. Personality disintegration was different. To know that his body could live as the setting for a charred and tortured fragment of his soul was to know horror. And it was so damn painful. His hands were shaking. Unable to control them, he laid them flat on his thighs and pressed hard. A cloud slipped before the sun; he shivered as if it were an omen. He was being given no choice: the enemy would attack. His only alternatives lay within himself. He could let it ravage his being, or he could resist. If only he were stronger. If only he hadn't lost the first engagement so decisively... Very well, he said slowly. I see that one of us must die. Be warned that I intend to survive. The bit of bravado was meant for himself, not for it. In a TP battle, beliefs, more so than actions, can be clung to like timbers in a storm-tossed sea. The attack began, gently enough, when the enemy exchanged its photosensitivity for his. Colors shifted, with violets fading and new reds seeping into the landscape. The purpose was disorientation. The effect was of a surreal battlefield that stubbornly refused to drink the blood urged upon it. Rejecting the vision, he forced the spectrum back to its normal range. He sensed its disquiet. As his eyes roamed across the opposite bank, he intensified every hue. It retorted with a figure of a man -- himself, he knew quickly, elicited from his mind by shrewd suggestion. The figure stood tall and proud. Though puzzled by the tactic, he was pleased by his apparent air of heroism. Then changes crept in. The focus sharpened to reveal a backdrop of stars, tiger eyes peering from impenetrable night. The figure seemed smaller, its pose more pompous. Harsh, mocking laughter rang across the firmament. The. field, enlarging, shrank him proportionally. Loneliness rode a chill wind from space, a wind that whistled through his limbs and jeered at his solitude. He was alone, the wind told him, because his race didn't want him. He had a power that made them edgy, a talent that made him pariah. They'd exiled him, murmured the wind, sent him away so their daughters would be safe, so their grandchildren would be normal. They'd dropped him into the emptiness that swaddled the universe and they hoped that he'd never find his way home. And he, roared the wind's bitter humor, had thought himself honored. He had believed he was needed. He, like all the other damn fools who cruised their chrome cages so far from scent and sound of their fellows, he had actually pictured himself as a hero. Lies, shrieked the wind, all lies. He was sagging, shoulders slumped and head hung low. It was telling the truth. He was an outcast, he was a leper, he was... he was... The sun's wami hand stroked his back; the wind's gentle fingers brushed his hair. He shook himself, widened his eyes and grasped the rock's gritty sides. Pinpricks of pain awakened in his palms. He squeezed harder, till the blood welled from a source of tiny punctures. It gave him something to hold onto while he cleared his head.  Then he was ready. You're wrong! The image in his mind shuddered, split, fell into a heap of glittering rubble. That's your life story, not mine.  am loved. To I reinforce his certainty, he dipped ' briefly into memory: after his last de-briefing, he'd emerged into a hall jammed with friends, relatives, reporters, anxious well-wishers... there were cheers, hands to be shaken, microphones at every side, nubile young bodies curved I against his... I am loved, do you hear? Do you feel? It's you who are not! He'd show it why. He'd prove it to it. His eyes criss-crossed the pools of sunlight, reached into the rambling shadows. There, on the I damp soil by the water --  -- now its ship from afar, zoom in on the control pod, peel back the armor. Abruptly show the pilot's couch --  -- overflowing with dung and a That sudden Juxtaposition should have jarred it, but it seemed stronger. It lashed out like a whip; he had to jump back. Retreating, he remembered the sequence from the earlier skirmish, and when the giant teeth snapped at him --  -- he decayed them into powder. That gave him time to launch a new onslaught: the enemy's own people (empty outlines tinted with the signal that would trigger it into painting them in) drive the enemy into its ship, weld tight the last plate, send it on a kamikaze mission -- A mirror. Himself. The flesh of his face drooping, dripping, running like water from bones that glow --  -- alone in a tangle of machinery while a radioactive bulkhead spits --  -- his own hand fading into invisibility --  -- stinking sealed tomb --  -- nothingness --  -- hate -- His mind shook with the enemy's violent, vehement negation. Then -- he was too tired, too impotent. His offensives had had no effect; his defenses were slipping rapidly -- then go to them, damn you, join them, embrace them. Almost idly, he transmitted the pattern of his remembered debriefing, leaving the details of appearance vague so that the alien could populate the scene with its own kind. He felt it sink in --  -- and was almost immediately blown off his rocky stool by a tsunami of shock and horror. Rubbing the back of his head, he looked up in confusion. Aftertremors of disgust continued to echo dirough the enemy's mind. The setting sun raised bands of light sboe the horizon, as if they could slow its descent. Furfeathered birds kawed past, gorging themselves on the insects that clouded the air. He watched them without seeing, while his mind probed the enemy that would shrivel it. And then he understood. After that, it was easy. He bad so many memories of togetherness... the only difficulty was in determining which to use. He chose a few at random, like an archer reaching blindly into his quiver, and shot them off one after another: affectionate relatives, passionate girlfriends, jubilant teammates... The enemy was radiating misery, but that wasn't enough. He needed more. He looked at his hands, strong and capable. They rotated; they flexed. He made fists and fans and claws, multiplied them by a All the hands in the universe reached for the enemy, straining to stroke it, aching to touch it. A forest of fingers, all -- When he regained consciousness, his mind was quiet. The enemy was gone. Stiffly, he began to collect firewood. Night would be upon him soon, and with it the other predators. The pile of kindling grew. Bats chittered as they made a feast of the insects he had disturbed. A weary restlessness turned each dry stick into an iron rod. At last he could sink dowg against the hard ground and let the roaring flames bring a flush to his face. The possibility that he might spend the rest of his life hauling no longer excited him and the laser's charge was almost gone, which would make hunting even more difficult. And the summer was already passing, cooling down into autumn. He had no business being planetside -- he was a scoutship pilot. The life-choked forests weie meant for others, for people who needed a comfortable reality tangibly onmipresent, and in graspable sizes. But he didn't. He thrived on emptiness, and on distances that ap proached infinity. That was his GAlAXr element, and outside of it he was meaningless. Like a person watching a silent film, he tried to delve into his memories and discern the reason he'd wanted to leave his ship. What he found was one-dimensional, incomprehensible: a running man who kept looking over his shoulder even though nothing chased him. The image elicited no sympathy, no understanding of what had driven him. The two were completely different people. He thought he recalled approximately where he'd left the microtransmitter. In the morning he'd find it.   Welcome aboard. Lieutenant. "Thanks, Sarge." He surveyed the small room with undisguised pleasure. "Are we ready for takeoff?"I would like to run a quick MedCheck first, sir,said the other computer.There are also a few physiological alterations that must be made to restore you to your original status. "Oh, sure." He crossed to the appropriate cubbyhole and waited for its panel to retract. "It won't be long, will it?"No time at all, sir.The door hissed up, and a light shone invitingly.Just step inside, please.The sub-cutaneous spray stung his arm like a loving insect, and the anesthesia swirled in his veins. The world faded into mist, but the voices throbbed at the back of his head:Your gamble paid off, Doc.-Exactly as I predicted,it replied, not a little smugly. They went on, but he stopped listening. The drugs, by isolating his mind from his body, had freed something else to bob to the forefront. It was a small notion that, having taken root in his subconscious the previous evening, was now beginning to flower in the illumination of his concentration. Remembered love had driven the enemy from the battlefield after hatred and fury had failed to budge it. The other scoutship pilots should know about that vulnerability. Base should he told at the earliest possible opportunity. The insight had another facet, though, one that might have greater significance than its potential for destruction: it was a measure of the enemy's alienness, of the great gulf that lay between them and humanity. As such, it could well say something about the assumptions of mankind. If we shun loneliness while they flee togetherness, if we prize importance while they yearn for insignificance, if we pursue life with the same persistence that they seek death... if our love is their hate... could our war have been their play? Maybe, he mused, as the MediMachine trimmed, transfused, and transformed him, we misunderstood them from the beginning. Which means that they might have misunderstood us. Which means... my God, do they think we enjoy this? It was something he'd have to ask the next time he encountered the en -- the others.  A computer's loyalty Is to its programmer. Xhe first problem was with United Panacea's version of the Pill. The pamphlet that had come with that month's up-dated tapes had called it a breakthrough. UP had done away with all the old side effects by taking a different tack: their drug attacked the pituitary, the master gland of the body. It jiggered the controls on the ovaries instead of aping their output. It altered hormone levels at the source. Dr. Luther Thistlebank had signed hundreds of prescriptions for the new drug without question. He had smiled and nodded when his female patients had thanked him for the freedom from headaches and swelling and fear of blood clots he had given them. He had congratulated himself on his astuteness when they sent their friends to him. And he had felt extremely satisfied whenever he had checked his bank balance. There was no doubt about it. This Pill was a wonder. Many of his Pill patients were young. They were healthy, smooth-skinned, and siUcen-voiced. Young mothers, career women, college students. He didn't see them often, but when he did he smiled to himself. They were a pleasure to examine. At least they had been. Polly Holmes had been one of his favorites, until the day she barged past Miss Epsolm into his office. He looked up from his desk and felt shock. Her face seemed grey, until he recognized the graininess of stubble. Her arms and legs seemed gaunt, until he saw past the loss of fat. She might have been exercising heavily, but her words belied that thought. "You bastard!" His mouth dropped open. Her voice was still silk, but there was gravel under the sheen. It held lumps and runs that he had never heard from her before. He stared as she leaned over his desk, pretty despite her rage, despite the words she spat at him. Despite the stubble. "You son of a bitch! Look what you've done to me!" She grabbed the hem of her skirt with one hand and yanked it up to her chin. The other hand burrowed under the waist of her panties and pulled downward. "Look!" He gasped. He leaned on his desk as he bent toward her to see. "My God! Miss Holmes!" Her clitoris was three inches long, the prepuce fully developed. It hung limply over the bulge of her labia. He stretched out a hand to investigate it more fully, but she suddenly backed away, letting her skirt fall back into place. "It gets in .the way!" she screeched. "It gets hard! It sticks out! And it turned my boyfriend off!" Nonplussed, the doctor settled limply back into his chair. He stared at her furious face. Masculinized, surely. Whiskers. A changing voice. And he was sure there was more hair on her muscular arms and legs. The Pill must have controlled the wrong hormones. He could say nothing, except, "Well, have you tried... ?" "Bastard!" She grabbed a jar of tongue depressors and heaved them at him. "That goddam pill's the only pill I take." Tears appeared in her eyes. "You bastard!" She spun on her heel, nearly tripped, and jerked the office door open. But before she left, she turned and screamed, "I'll sue!" And she was only the first.    The second was with UP's new vaccine. The pamphlet had called it another breakthrough, a broadspectrum vaccination. One shot would immunize a patient against almost everything, even many viruses. It was the answer to a child's prayer, for it did away with all needles but one. j It simplified things for Dr. j Thistlebank, too, but he wasn't sure , he liked it all that much. It cut . down the number of trips a patient had to make, the number of times the patient could be charged, and in good conscience the doctor couldn't charge more for this shot than he j did for any other. He consoled himi self with the thought that at least he was serving humanity. As he was supposed to. The first hint of the problem appeared when Mrs. Diane Skelnick came to him. Short, buxom, blackhaired, and anxious, she sat beside his desk and said, "Ever since Josie became a Jesus freak, and at the age of twelve yet. Ever since, we've lost her. We don't have a daughter anymore." She stared at the light blue computer cabinet, unable to look at the doctor. He listened sympathetically. The current term was "godhead," he thought. The city park was full of them. "She's tripped right out of sight, then?" he asked. "Oh, not really," the mother said. "She still lives with us. But ; she doesn't share. She ignores us. She spends all her time with those people." "There's nothing you can do?" She shook her head. "The police can't even help. They even warned us of her rights! And she's too young to throw out of the house. Even if she doesn't know it, she still needs us." She hesitated. She shifted her gaze from the cabinet to the floor at her feet. Her hand tightened on the strap of her handbag. "But we thought..." Dr. Thistlebank murmured softly. When she didn't respond, he added, "Yes?" "We thought we might try again." She paused once more. "Have another baby, I mean." "And?" "It's not working." She shrugged. "I've been on the Pill for years, even before Josie. And when we started her, she came right away, the first month. But now it's been four months already, and nothing. Nothing." "Well, that's not unusual, Mrs. Skelnick. It can take a year, or more sometimes, for all the effects of the Pill to wear off." He opened a drawer beside him and rummaged for a pamphlet. "You can read about it in this. You've nothing to worry about. Just keep trying." She protested, but in the end she allowed herself to be ushered back into the waiting room, the pamphlet jutting from her bag. He was sure her anxiety was unfounded. She would catch in a few months. When the door closed behind her, he dismissed her from his thoughts. But she returned to his mind when four more women made the same complaint. They were all trying to get pregnant, but it wasn't working. He tried to reassure them, too, by telling them what he had told Mrs. Skelnick, that it took a while after going off the Pill, even the new one. But his line was spoiled when one insisted she had never been on the Pill. She had just married, and she was trying to start a family right away. And she still wasn't getting pregnant. He had to take her seriously. He examined her. He gave her every test he knew, and the only clue came from the patch test he made with her husband's sperm. She was immune to her mate; she could never get pregnant by him. She took the news calmly enough, though it was an obvious blow. Dr. Thistlebank offered to refer her to another man, one who dealt with artificial insemination, but she refused. The father of her children, she said, would be her husband or no one at all. But Dr. Thistlebank couldn't let it rest there. He could do her no good, but he could look again into those other, similar Complaints. He was suspicious now. He called those patients in again. He checked them out too, and he found the same result in each. Every one of them was immune to her husband, and when, on a hunch, he gave them patch tests with other sperm samples, he found they were all immune to men in general. He didn't break the news until he had had the computer examine their records. He set it to look for common factors, to pick out only those shared by all these patients. And there was only one that mattered: the vaccine. They had all had it. He sat late at his desk that night, his head in his hands. The right to give birth was holy. It was a large part of a GP's practice to turn the body's mechanisms on and off when the patient demanded it. To give her the choice that made the right meaningful. And he had botched it. God alone knew how many women he had sterilized. He could see the lawsuits coming. He wasn't wrong.    The third was with the aspirin. Or what passed for aspirin in United Panacea's pharmacopeia. They didn't make anything so simple. They went to the roots of the problem, as usual, and their product, they claimed, was better. It eliminated pain by blocking the pathways that carried it to the brain. It interfered with the normal function of certain synapses, the nerve-to-nerve junctions. Dr. Thistlebank thought it effective when it brought a smile to the face of a woman with migraines. He even grew enthusiastic when he saw it relieve the pain of a man with a badly burned arm. And he used it freely, as the computer prescribed it for everything from arthritis to sprains. It worked beauti fully. But relatives sued when the bun victim wound up in a ward foi schizophrenics. And the migraine patients staila looking for lawyers as soon as thej left the offices of their therapist and pyschiatrists. The news made Dr. Thistlebatl moan. It nearly made him cry. Whj did they have to blame him? Whl made them think it was the pill? A fifth of his patients would neej treatment anyway, sometime, foi something. But why now? He couM only hope they had prior histories. Only that could let him off ik hook. His belly ached. But he didn'i take a pill.    The fourth was a super-antibiotic, one that killed all the bacteria in tht body, including the intestinal bacteria that manufactured vitamin K Vitamin K is essential to the clot ting mechanisms, and Dr. Thistlebank's pneumonia patients turnel into hemophiliacs. This problem was relativel) minor, though. He managed to stave off the lawsuits by discovering it in time. Vitamin K supplements saved his patients. The fifth was an allergy shot tk desensitized the patient to every thing, even bacteria. The sixth was... The seventh... The disasters had come in quick succession, and as Dr. Thistlebank relived them, his shoulders slumped. His voice grew ragged. His fists clenched, and at the end, he cried, "Why me? Why did I listen?" He was well dressed, heavy, soft. His watchband was platinum, his wedding ring half an ounce of yellow gold. He banged his fists together, opened one, and began to finger the band. "You were greedy, Luther," said Alvin Poindexter. The doctor and the lawyer had been friends for years, but they still seemed an illmatched pair. Fat and thin, hot and cold, but the contrasts were only on the surface. They were both professional men, they were both Lions, and they were both hungry. But the lawer was a specialist. "It was And I'll bet you never cut your fees. It would have covered your ass, you know. Made you seem more caring, mote helpful." The doctor looked away from his friend. No, he hadn't. It hadn't even occuired to him. Besides, the computer lease was expensive, and his wife had insisted immediately on buying a summer place, and -- "Your bills weren't that bad. Don't make excuses for yourself." Poindexter shook his head slowly. Dr. Thistlebank shifted in his seat. "It wasn't all me, Al. It wasn't. Everything was fine till the merger. It wasn't till then that the computer began prescribing stuff from that poison factory." "It won't wash, Luther. United Panacea was a reputable pharmaceutical house, at least up to should it change? Why should their products suddenly go bad?" "They didn't." Dr. Thistlebank shrugged awkwardly. "But that's when the computer began prescribing their products. If there were two brands of an antibiotic on the market, it wanted the one from UP, every time. I noticed it, but I didn't care. They were all the same. They all worked. It was just the new products that were bad." "But why, Luther?" Maybe their quality control went to hell. Maybe they hired an alchemist to head up their research division. I don't know." He glared at the window over Poindexter's head. He waved a hand at the cloud of smoke from the other's cigarette. "That's what I want you to find out. Pin it on them, somehow. Get me off the hook." The snap in his voice didn't affect his friend. Poindexter only nodded as he shifted his foot from his desk to the edge of the wastebasket. He stretched. "No sweat, Luther." For the first time that afternoon, he smiled. "You've given me enough, I think. I might even be able to get everyone off the hook. Settle out of court." The doctor straightened in his chair. The weight seemed to slide from his shoulders. But the relief warred with his skepticism. His friend had a reputation for answers, but... ? He opened his mouth. Poindexter held up a hand. "No more, Luther," he said. "Come back in a couple of days. I do have to check a few things out. Make a few phone calls. And we'll see."    Forty-three patients had hired the best lawyer they could find to screw Luther Thistlebank. They had dropped lawsuits by the ton on him. They had sued the computer company, the pharmaceutical company, pany was threatening to revoke his malpractice coverage. And the newspapers were crucifying him. There was no doubt about it. Dr. Thistlebank had shafted his patients but good. And he knew it, though he told himself repeatedly he hadn't really done anything. He just hadn't kept his eyes open. The first whisper of trouble had been enough to tell him he needed a lawyer, but he had delayed. He knew he wanted Alvin Poindexter, but at first he had felt too uncomfortable to call. Ever since college, his friend had needed him. First, as roommate, to pay the rent. Later, as doctor, for checkups and pills and shots, and, once, to get an alcoholic wife into shape for a divorce. He hadn't brought himself to admit the shoe was now on the other foot until the damages crossed the million mark. But his friend hadn't dithered. "Oh, Jesus," he had said. "You're really in it, ain't you? Well, look. I'm flying out of town this afternoon. A court date I can't miss. But I'll be back in a week. Can you come over Thursday, after lunch? You can tell me how it happened then." The doctor waited, but not patiently. He fretted, he paced, he didn't slp. And every new lawsuit seemed to give him a new tic. The damages hit the hundred million figure on Thursday morning.    "I'll teU you how it happened!" screamed the doctor. He pouted as he slammed his briefcase on the desk with a crash. An ashtray, precariously balanced on three contracts, fourteen summonses, and a will, fell to the floor. The mound of butts and bumt-out kitchen matches it had contained fanned across the carpet. Alvin Poindexter winced. Tennis-weathered wrinkles spread over his temples. He had kept his office at home for years, and though his housekeeper might be used to this sort of thing, he still wasn't. He never would be. He pinched the bridge of his bony nose and sighed with a tiredness that came only partly from his trip. "Now, Luther," he said. "You shouldn't let a little lawsuit..." "Little lawsuit, my ass!" Dr. Thistlebank kicked at an outlying cigarette butt and dropped his heavy body into an easy chair. He gritted his teeth and stared past his friend's desk to the window beyond. "It's just the biggest malpractice suit in the history of medicine! I'll tell you!" Poindexter sighed again. He lit a cigarette and brushed a speck of ash from the lapel of his dark green suit. He raised a sandaled foot to the edge of his desk and propped a wrist across his knee. "I'd like you to, Luther," he said softly. "I don't know a thing yet. Though I did was gone." "What did they tell you?" Dr. Thistlebank spoke sharply, suspiciously. "Not much. But they did tell me to go ahead. To see what I can do. They know my reputation." He touched the three contracts that had supported his ashtray with the filter of his cigarette. The ash crumbled and fell. He brushed it negligently to one side, adding, "The insurance company too." The doctor combed his fingers through the blond hair above his ears. He licked his thick lips. "The bastards set me up!" he muttered. "I don't believe it, Luther. Why should they?" "Well, it wasn't my fault." "So tell me whose fault it was. Tell me what happened." The lawyer's stare was intent, professional. They were friends, but he wouldn't let that keep him from learning all he could. "Mmmp." Dr. Thistlebank squirmed. He gritted his teeth again and told himself he'd have to see a dentist soon. Unless Alvin found the answers even sooner. "Yeah. Well. It started nearly two years ago..."    It had been a long day. The Memorial Day weekend had left him a heavy crop of skinned knees and sunburns, of poison ivy rashes and rusty nail holes. The only blessing was that the highway accidents and heart attacks had happened out of state. He wouldn't have to worry about them until they came home. For now, they were someone else's headaches. Dr. Thistlebank was looking forward to getting home. His wife would pour the sherry when she heard his car in the driveway. The paper would be waiting. And the kids would be haring around with their friends for another hour yet. Still sitting at his desk, he began to remove his white jacket, but paused with one sleeve half off. Completing the movement, he reached for his intercom. "Miss Epsolm. Is that all for today?" The intercom crackled patiently back at him. "There's one man still waiting, Doctor." He grunted silently as he pictured his receptionist leaning forward, her blouse sagging from her withered chest, her eyes shifting from the waiting patient to the intercom and the snapshot of her sailor nephews behind it. "Very well. Send him in." He struggled back into his sleeve and reached for a yellow record card. The first thing Dr. Thistlebank noticed about his visitor was the heavy case he swung before him, as if to test the air. The second was his startling tie, a broad, electric blue, pinned with a miniature saber. The last was the man himself, a slim and brown-haired fellow, dressed in a light grey suit. His manner was stamped by the broad grin of his fellowship. Dr. Thistlebank pushed the record card aside with a feeling of relief. No more patients after all, he thought. Just a salesman, and perhaps some samples, or another gadget. He stood and held out a hand. "What can I do for you?" The other's handshake was vigorous. "Perhaps nothing. The real question is what I can do for you. Dr. Thistlebank. How many patients did you see today?" The doctor raised an eyebrow. The question was out of place. The answer was no concern of any salesman he had ever met before. But it was no secret either, "Perhaps twenty. Why?" "I may be able to double that figure for you," said the salesman. "Or more." He took a chair and laid his case across his lap. "My name is Greg Mauser. I represent Universal Business Machines, and I'm selling efficiency." He paused as if waiting for another question, but the doctor remained silent. He was curious, but he would let the Doctor. One of the biggest computer manufacturers on Earth. And the most innovative. We're always looking for new ways to use out machines, and we now have a way that is of particular value to you." The line was standard, though the product wasn't. Mauser was selling a computerized diagnostic system, School. He had a glossy brochure which showed a row of patients giving pushbutton answers to television questions, an office that was as much a GP's as Dr. Thistlebank's own except for the teletypewriter attached to the desk. The equipmeni was precisely racked in a metal cabinet. The system would interview Dr. Thistlebank's patients, collect theii histories, list their symptoms, and ask for whatever data it might still need. Though the interview was usually enough. And then it would print out the most probable diagnosis, together with a prescriptior for the appropriate treatment, "That's how confident we are, Doctor," said Mauser. "All you have to do is tear it off and sign it." And it could handle up to six patients at once. Dr. Thistlebank was intrigued. He'd had a course or two on computers in medical school. He knew that something like this had been in the offing for years. And he j knew that more patients meant more money and a faster turnover meant more time for golf. Either way he couldn't lose. Could he? When Mauser described the data base he almost capitulated on the spot. Specialists in every field of medicine had contributed. Others constantly reviewed the literature for new diagnostic clues and treatsure the latest drugs were listed, and it exchanged the system's tapes every month for more up-to-date ones. But even when he learned that repairmen were on call twenty-four hours a day and that the rental would be covered by just five extra patients a day, he hesitated. Wisely, he said he would have to think about it. Mauser should come back in a week. "I really don't know," said the doctor. "It sounds fine. It sounds great. But how good is it, really? And even if it pays for itself, it's a lot of money. And what if it doesn't? What if the patients don't take to it?" He shook his head. He really had his doubts. "They will. Dr. Thistlebank," assured Mauser. "They will. This is an upper-bracket town, and half your patients work with computers everyday anyway. They'll see nothing new. And you can tell the rest the new system gives you more time to discuss their cases with them. That's true. It does. It takes over all the dreary detail work. It makes medicine more interesting. And you can use the time you used to spend on details to relate to your patients. To exercise your bedside manner. They'll love you for it." Dr. Thistlebank shook his head again. "I don't know," he said. "I'll still have to think about it." By the time he had seen Mauser out of the office, his hour was gone. His kids would be home. The paper would be rumpled from their search for the comics. His wife would be pissed. But maybe he could end that now.    Needless to say, he bought the system. He started with three of the grayish TV screens occupying the waiting room wall facing Miss Epsolm's desk. She quickly learned enough to show the patients how to use the row of pushbuttons mounted along the lower edge of the ivory frame. The patients soon grew used to the new procedure, and the younger ones seemed enchanted at the very idea of talking to a computer. But Dr. Thistlebank did think of himself as a cautious man. He deliberately held to his doubts for months, insisted on checking and double-checking the computer. He refused to trust the machine's diagnoses, would read the lists of symptoms and past diseases back to his patients to look for errors, would ply his stethoscope and tongue depressor as he always had, and even when the machine seemed right, would send out blood and urine samples for confirmation. He wasn't really happy that he never caught the computer out. An interview, it seemed, was usually enough. If lab work was needed, the machine would say so in its printout, and once the results were fed back to the program, its diagnosis was all that the doctor could have wished. The one time he thought the machine was wrong, it was his own diagnosis that proved faulty. Six months after the system was installed, he gave up his doubts. He had had to begin to trust. His checks and double-checks were actually slowing him down. He was seeing fewer patients instead of more, and the system's rent was coming out of his own pocket. Two months after that, he ordered the other three patient terminals. His practice was booming, only partly because of the new Pill. His bank account was healthy again. Other doctors were complaining because their patients preferred the shorter wait he offered them. And he had less time for golf than ever. He couldn't turn a patient away, could he? He couldn't, and he hadn't. And the disasters had struck, one after the other. Now he was faced with ruin. His only hope lay with his friend, and that hope was fragile. It was so fragile, in truth, that it didn't survive the morning of his second visit to his friend's office. The mailman broke it. He delivered a letter from Dr. Thistlebank's insurance company. The letter told him his malpractice insurance was hereby canceled. The cancellation would save him several thousand dollars a year, but it also meant that he would have to I close his office. A doctor who has  once been sued is ever after a target, and he didn't dare keep his seat in the shooting gallery. He told Poindexter as much when reaction," he said as he despondently took his chair. "A little thing like that, and I'd be bankrupt. I might as well cut my throat. What else can I do?" Poindexter cleared his throat softly. He shrugged. 'T suppose they don't want to get stung next time. They know you're a target, too. And there's not much I can do, unless these suits never come to court." "There's not much chance of that." "Oh, I don't know." Poindexter grinned and reached for bis ashtray. His desk was clean now, except for a legal pad covered with his close scribble. The carpet showed no trace of the ashes the doctor had spilled three days before. "You may be off the hook." Dr. Thistlebank made no attempt to conceal his startlement. He had hoped, but... "What do you mean?" "Well, for one thing, you're not alone." The lawyer paused as if for effect. Deliberately, he lit a cigarette and dragged out the first puff. But he returned to his speech when the other's eyes began to narsystem to fifteen other doctors around the country, and they all had the same problems, Luther. Though not with as many people." He didn't say the others must have been more careful. They still hadn't been as careful as the ten thousand others the system had been offered to. "They brought the total to about two hundred lawsuits. "But the side effects are their own solution.' When Dr. Thistlebank looked blank, he sighed and added, "Look, your Pill patients are suing you because you gave them a sex-change operation without their consent, essentially? Right?" The doctor nodded. "And sex-change operations go for about twenty grand. I've already got a clinic in Baltimore lined up to use the drug for that purpose. They'll have to do some work to figure out the right dosage, to make it work every time. After all, you only ran into the problem three times, out of how many?" "About seven hundred. By the end." "Less than half a percent. Like I said, it needs woric. But it'll help pay for the damage. And so will the others. The allergy shot wiped out the body's defenses, which means it's ideal for transplant surgery. The painkiller's not much good for anything, but I did talk to a psychiatrist who thinks if it can make a guy go nuts, another version of it might make a nut go normal. He's talking to UP now." Poindexter stabbed the air intently with his cigarette as he spoke. He leaned over his desk as if to say, "You're the doctor. Why didn't you see this?" But Dr. Thistlebank was numb. He could only stare. He had expected answers, but not ones so neat, so pat, so useful. At last, he murmured faintly, "But what about the vaccine?" "You think that's the worst, do you?" He paused only long enough for the doctor to nod vaguely. "It sterilized your patients, right? Well, there's your birth control. Permanent birth control. I talked to a felyear. To him, the stuffs a miracle." Dr. Thistlebank got the pmnt. He should have seen it. He might have settled the lawsuits early by spotting the glorious luck of the side effects. He could have become rich by making the right deals. Bought them out himself. But now it was too late. He stared at his knees. Dimly, he noticed that his fists were balling his trousers. "But hov does all this solve the problem now?" Poindexter snorted in disgust. "I worked that out last night. The patients' lawyers will let the insurance companies settle out of court. They'll pay a nickel on the dollar, but everyone will be better off." "How?" stock, which they'll get cheap from share they can for themselves. They don't expect to lose a penny in the end. That stock's going to go up like a rocket. Your patients will wind up with more than they're suing you for. And the insurance companies will get all their money back and then some." His tone relaxed as he finished. He stubbed his cigarette out. "It's a damned good investment now, Luther. You should buy all you can. I'm going to, the fee from you and every penny I can get my hands on." Dr. Thistlebank twitched. The message of his freedom had reached him, but he was still gripped by the threat of losing his practice, his income. He wasn't very alert. "Fee?" he yelped. Poindexter stared at him calmly. "Sure. You charged me, didn't you?" "But that was nickel and dime stuff!" The hurt was obvious in his voice. "Ten bucks a throw. I Not... Not..." j "Fifty grand is what I figure." "But..." Dr. Thistlebank paled. A narrow line of sweat i popped out on his forehead. "Look, you charge according to the size of your patients' pockets. Well, so do I. No one comes to me unless they can afford me. And you can, Luther." "But what will I live on when my savings are gone? I can't practice!" "I think you can. The computer system is what got you into trouble. It let your greed get out of hand. You never had any trouble before. If you get rid of it, I think you can get your coverage back. Though for a higher premium. After all, you're a bigger risk now." Dr. Thistlebank moaned. But six weeks later he was still practicing. The patients were still coming, though they were fewer. The waiting room was the same, except for the six patches of more lightly colored paint along one wall. The Epsolm salts still sat behind the intercom. The big differences were in his personal life. The summer place had been sold. And his wife had just filed for a divorce. She felt she would rather be married to Alvin Poindexter.  Spider Robinson The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle, Ballantine, (pages unknown), # A Fine and Private Place, Peter S. Beagle, Ballantine, # pp., # Lila the Werewolf, Peter S. Beagle, Capra Press, # pp., # The Apocalypse Papers, The Firesign Theatre, Apocalypse Press, # pp., priceless Good Taste, Isaac Asimov, Apocalypse Press, # pp., priceless The Book Of Virgil Finlay, ed. Gerry de la Ree, FlareAvon, # pp., # Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon, Alternate Worlds Recordings, time unknown, # A Hole In Space, Larry Niven, Ballantine, # pp., # A World Out of Time, LaTy Niven, Holt, Rinehart  Winston, # pp., # Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Persig, Bantam, # pp., # The Compleat Enchanter, L. Sprague de Camp  Fletcher Pratt, Ballantine, # pp., # The Armies of the Moon, Gwendolyn MacEwen, MacMillan Canada, (pages unknown), # The Deep, John Crowley, Berkley, # pp., # Rocannon's World, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ace, # pp., # Sandworld, Richard A. Lupoff, Berkley, # pp., # Society. In fact, it's one of the most important things I do with my life, a holy duty and a constant joy. It's what Tm doing here, right here in front of your eyeballs when a part of me would much rather be writing that next novel. The world is full of many people, and these may be divided into either one or the other: One Of The Nice Ones, or Not One Of The Nice Ones (well, there are borderline cases, but not nearly as many as you'd think). I conceive my duty each other whenever feasible. We are locked in a titanic struggle for the fate of the world with the are essential. Unhappily, we have yet to devise a uniform that the counterfeit -- we lack an Arisian Lens -- and so we have to rely on recommendation. organized, my friends -- time we got it together. That's why I'm here. Books, records, any form of art, can also be is that artists can be so classified, on the basis of their works. And turning folks on to good books and good writers is about the most fun you can have out of bed. So it is my great joy to tell you this month about a pack of beagles, none of which is a dog (although one of them is a wolf).    You see, it was an obit in Locus that turned me on to Edgar Pangborn, one of the greatest And that obit was written by Peter S. Beagle, and the things he had to ten all over and through them. So I was in Bakka II, the new Yonge Street branch of Toronto's Bakka (the best sf store -- and mail-order service -- I know; see Dec. # "Bookshelf" for details), and I said, "Tell me about Peter Beagle," and they put The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place in my hands and said, Many of you may already know The Last Unicom -- I understand it is something of a "cult" book come none of you turned me on?). But if you don't. I'm here to tell you that you ought to -- it'll do your soul more good than a piping hot bath and ice-cold gin. It is the finest fantasy I've ever read, just plain one of the finest books I've ever read, and it's almost scary to realize that it all came from one human heart. There's magic in that book, and I mean that both kinds of literally. It is the story of the last unicorn in all the world, and of her search for her vanished brothers and sisters, and of what befell her on the way. It is also the story of her companions, simple Molly Grue and Schmendrick the Nitwit Magician, of the Prince who loved die unicorn though he knew her not and the King who hated her though he knew her, and of the unspeakably terrible Red Bull. It is a story of good and evil, of courage and fear, of hope and despair, and it will exhilarate and tear at your heart if you are any damn good at all. I don't say that it's a perfect book (I don't suppose anyone read any book anywhen without feeling that heshe could have improved it here and there -- that's why some of us become writers. Poetic justice, eh?) -- but I do contend that if you finish this book and don't like it, don't value it, That's a pretty heavy statement, but I'll stand by it. And, the cover painting by Gervasio Gallardo is alone worth the # Ballantine is asking for it.    Almost as highly recommended is A Fine and Private Place. Like Unicorn, it is a fantasy. And like Unicorn, it is one of those "fantasies" that seem truer than what we are generally pleased to call reality. It's a love story -- but not like any love story you ever read before. Two of the lovers, for instance, Michael and Laura, are dead. Another of them is an old man named Rebeck, who has lived undiscovered in a cemetery for over twenty years, talking only with the ghosts. Another is an irascible raven with a really sarcastic mouth on him, and he is surely the greatest and most constant lover in the book. Virtually the entire story takes place in the cemetery, and it has more life to it than a two-year-old's birthday party. It's not the same kind of book as Unicorn, and you may like it less. Death and Love is a somewhat weightier topic than Love and Death, and the overall tone is a hair too somber for my taste. But there's humor aplenty, and a full measure of joy and hope, and when you think about it, the deadliest mistake he could have made with a theme like this would have been to come all over cute and heartwarming. Try Unicorn first, by all means. But having done so, don't omit to read this one too. Needless advice: by the time you finish Unicorn you'll find yourself wanting to read anything by Beagle -- old shopping lists, term papers, notes to the milkman (are you out there, Mr. Beagle? I'm at R.R. ##, Hampton,    So Jeanne and I were visited recently by our friend Susan Ellison, can prove it because when she saw Unicorn on my desk (guests get to sleep on my desk) her eyes lit up and we spent the next hour grinning hugely and rapping about it. And a week or so after she disappeared back into The Smoke To The South, Lila the Werewolf appeared in my mailbox. And a wondrous strange book it is. Here I just said I want to read anything by Beagle, and... hoo boy. How do I handle this one? Lila is one of the most depressing stories I have ever read, beginning and ending in despair. Its male lead, Fairel, is a young man selfish and stingy with his caring, who has abandoned all hope of joy and takes a dim pleasure in picking at the scabs that betrayal leaves on his soul. His only real gift is acceptance, and so he accepts rather equably the discovery that the woman who's been sharing his apartment for the last month, Lila, is a werewolf. But he accepts only the parts that don't threaten him, and is destroyed by this dishonesty. It is also one of the most wildly hilarious stories I have ever read, and I know that sounds contradictory -- but it's true. The damn thing is just sWe-splitting in spots. Yet if it may be said that there is such a thing as tears of laughter. Beagle's humor in Lila is a laughter of tears. It is of a kind I think of as "hip-Jewish" laughter, bitter city laughter, a laughter that is supposed to dimly cloak the agony beneath. On examination I find the agony to be self-indulgent, self-inflicted and secretly enjoyed. Which would be all right if it were physically possible to hurt only oneself, which it is not. Despair (that is, the delusion that responsibility is abdicable) is seductive, and Parrel, if not Beagle, has seduced himself -- surely a comic sight. It only hurts when you stop laughing. And in spite of this, I enjoyed Lila. It is exquisitely formed, beautiful in language and subtle in construction, and it has some immortal lines in it. I particularly liked the building superintendent, whose "eyes were aJmost purple, and they bulged a little, straining out -- the terrible 'eyes of a herald angel struck dumb." It's a fascinating story -- it's just that the only slightest note of hope in it is when the neighbors chip in to pay the super's fine for shooting silver bullets out of an unlicensed pistol. I'm deeply grateful to Susan for sending it, and terribly concerned for Peter Beagle. Ballantine's newest promo sheet hints at an "upcoming major work" from Beagle. I look forward to it eagerly -- but also, having read Lila, with some trepidation. I feel like sending the man a getwell card.    What I didn't mention about Lila, because it didn't seem to fit anywhere, was that it is all of # (admittedly packed) pages long, no more than # words, and that it sells for #. Huh? Well, it's what you call a chapbook. That means "a pamphlet containing poems, ballads, stories or religious tracts," according to American Heritage Dictionary. According to me it means "a short story that costs more than two Galaxy's." Chapbooks get printed in small editions by small publishers, and they're a Very High Status item. Capra Press, which printed Lila, also has # other chapbooks available, by heavyweights like Henry Miller (On Turning Eighty), Ray Bradbury (Zen and the Art of Writing -- he oughta know), Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and others. I think you have to show at least a B.A. to get one. Now, I can see worth in the notion of chapbooks. Maybe a really fine piece of writing shouldn't have to be imbedded in a magazine or antho like a diamond in a pizza -- I'd love to have a chapbook of The Man Who Traveled In Elephants. And the economics of smallpublishing are such that, believe me, nobody's getting rich at # a hit. But there's a little note in the back that says that # numbered handbound copies were signed by the author, and right there you start to slip over the line into the-bookas-artifact, into the-book-astrading-card; and that's where I start to get itchy, and that's why I started this whole chap on rapbooks (keep going -- pay no attention, you'll only encourage him). Because there are two more chapbooks here on this month's review pile, and they disturb me greatly. The Apocalypse Papers and Good Taste are the first two volumes of Apocalypse Press's new Science Fiction Chapbook series. The former is by the Firesign Theatre zanies, the latter by Isaac Asimov. Let me quickly dispose of their content, as stories: Firesigners Bergman, Proctor, Ossman and Austin (say that three times fast with marbles in your mouth and you'll never need a dentist again) each offer a couple pages of vaguely science-fictional gibberish (much like this column, come to think) than which their dullest album is funnier -- a total of # pages plus intros and bibliodiscography. Dr. Ike presents a #page story which is contrived (albeit well contrived) and cardboard, an overextended anecdote resting entirely on its final telegraphed pun -- fun, but not much. Understand -- I love and assiduously collect both The Demented Four and The Prolific One -- but this is some of their worst stuff, flatter'n a two-dollar tire. As such, neither is worth the space I've spent on them already. But here's the meat. Each of these chapbooks was printed up in two editions of # copies apiece, # "signed in the plate" and # individually autographed: the Regular and the Deluxe. Then they bound 'em by hand with blue twine and destroyed the plates. Neither book "will ever again appear in print in this form," publisher Alan R. Bechtold promises. Bechtold obviously noticed that rare old copies of Weird Tales command incredible prices -- not for their intrinsic worth, but as rare artifacts. So he created artificially rare artifacts. The lucky first thousand get autographed copies for five bones apiece (if I correctly understand this press release -- the books have no price on 'em), and then comes Phase Two. Once they sell out (if they haven't already -- again, this press release is a little vague). Apocalypse Press promises to undertake a sort of mail-order auction service, whereby speculators... I mean, lovers of fine fiction can swap back and forth, jacking prices sky-high in a twinkling -- minus a modest ten percent for Apocalypse as auctioneers. I'm glad neither of these pamphlets is much worth the reading: suppose they were good... and available only to an elite composed of rich collectors? And the thing that horrifies me the most is that the third contribution to this capitalistic ripoff venture will be by Harlan Ellison! With artwork by Ron Cobb! The last two people I'd have expected to go along with a scheme to artificially inflate the value of their work by restricting its availability. Frankly, fans. I'm aghast: this and I urge you not to support it. In fact. I'm not gonna print Apocalypse Press's address.    in the pile. Gerry de la Ree was, with his wife Helen, responsible for The Best of Stephen Fabian (see Nov. # "Bookshelf' for the ravel a book I greatly liKed. So when I saw his name my eyes perked up. Then I saw the title. The Book of Virgil Finlay, and I knew I was in Fat City. I've seen a lot of collections of "SF Pulp Art From The Golden Age," and frankly most of 'em bore me. There sure were some club-handed artists working in them days, and if you lack (as I do) the nostalgic glow of having grown up on them, they seem mostly embarrassing today. But Finlay is timeless and eternal, a genuine genius -- and even his staunchest fans may not appreciate the true extent of his genius until diey've seen this folio. Because one of his most amazing aspects was the phenomenal attention he gave to detail, his exquisitely painstaking work with cross-hatching and stipple, the amazing spectrum he wrought of "black and white" -- all of which tend to drop out in pulppaper reproduction. Finlay's vision always came across -- but with blurred edges. The Book of Virgil Finlay has exquisite repro, and nearly all its plates are original-size (not as hard as it sounds: Finlay did his magazine illos "same-size," the same size they would appear in print. This is extremely unusual -- but think how much more detail would have been lost if his works had had to be shot down in size.). The excellent paper stock allows you to fully appreciate the insane difficulty of stipple work -- and the incredible subtlety that makes it worthwhile. (Let me see if I can explain stipple. You want to indicate the shadows on a character's face, okay? You could use the flat of your pencil, and lighten up on it where you want the shadow lighter. Or you could use an air-brush where you want it to lighten up. Or a dozen other ways. Or, you can stipple the way Finlay did. You dip the finest pen-point you can find in ink, and make a dot -- allowing oniy the ink to touch paper. Then you wipe the point clean, dip it again and make another dot. Several hundred dots later, you have a shadow. You want lighter shadow? Maker smaller dots. Finlay sometimes did entire plates that way, using dots the way God uses molecules.) Finlay's genius was best suited to occult and fantastic themes, and these predominate in this collection. Most of the plates originally ran in Weird Tales, and the stories they illumined are identified by title and author. They're arranged in chronological order. But let me tell you the best part: there're J# of them! Furthermore the book can be had for a mere #. Clearly, this An Informal A Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Featured in ##: Interviews with Hugo-Winners Joe Haldeman and Tim Kirk. And, if it can be squeezed in, an up-to-date, revealing, fascinating interview with Theodore Sturgeon. John Brunner's column, "Noise Level." The SF Art Review column; "The Gimlet Eye" by John Gustafson. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint." Many, many reviews of new  recent sf, small-press pubs,  a host of letters. The editor's day-by-day "Alien Thoughts." Scheduled for ##: An Interview with Leigh Brackett  Edmund Hamilton. Quartsriy sample I year # two years # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I is the buy of the month. Even better, it may knock some of the absurdly inflated value offa those rare old copies of Weird Tales... Finlay's #I death was untimely, as is proved by the almost frightening excellence of the last two plates, illos for J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss stories. Hearty thanks to Beverly Finlay for allowing us to see this collection, and thanks to Gerry de la Ree for his excellent selection and for a moving and informative introduction. I shall now devote my energies to locating any other Finlay portfolios in existence -- and I urge you to do samewise.    from smiling. Sturgeon is the latest release from Alternate Worlds Recordings, which is as far as I know the only record company in the world that has yet lar disc is -- oh, had you guessed? -- Theodore Sturgeon reading from his own works, and it's yet. The first selection is "Bianca's Hands," one of Ted's most incredible stories. He himself tells an anecdote about an editor who read "Bianca's Hands," flung it across the desk and threw Ted out of his office, swearing that he would never so much as look at another story by such a foul-minded pervert. It is clearly one of the most horrific horror stories of all time, and as with Lila I admire it tremendously but can't exactly say I "enjoy" it. Creepy, man, and Ted's soft, gentle reading really brings it j to... uh... life. i The second selection, "The i Hurkle Is A Happy Beast," is also i one of Ted's most famous stories, and I like it but not a whole lot. But the third piece is an excerpt from Ted's long-awaited new novel, Godbody, a short segment he calls "Britt Svenglund" -- and friends, it sounds like Godbody will have been well worth waiting for. This is the real Sturgeon, the man who has for nearly forty years been exploring all the forms and facets of human love. "Britt" is, as the liner notes say, "a poetic and lyrical celebration of art, of touching, and of love," and it hints at a masterpiece. On the strength of it alone I recommend the album (write Alternate Worlds Recordings, # East #th Street, New York NY #), and I'm dying to read the novel. Oh yeah, they're also incomprehensible liner notes by Samuel R. Delany, and the jacket illo is a reprint of the fabulous cover Ed Emshwiller did for Fantasy  Science Fiction's allSturgeon issue -- much nearer original size.    Eight books to go, and I can feel that damned little black star (the one at the end of every column, turkey) creeping up on me. And that sort of reminds me of the new Larry Niven collection. Six of the nine stories in A Hole In Space are more or less gimmick stories, technological puzzles in which character-growth is subsidiary to plot. Nothing wrong with that, but in at least four of the stories the gimmick is identical: teleportation. Worse, the stories are ##-#, and by the last one you've heard some of the same speculations four times running. Larry had an essay in an earlier collection in which he outlined several story-gimmicks that would be inherent in any development of teleportation. These are them, faintly fleshed out, and by the fourth one I was wishing he'd just written a novel on the subject and had done with it. Ah well, they're not bad stories, just sorta sketchy, and if they'd been scattered throughout the book I might not have minded so much. Also the collection has a splendid science fact essay, "Bigger Than Worlds," which contains about a hundred more story ideas; and "The Hole Man," an excellent yam with a powerful ending. On the other hand, there's a short-short crime story, "#," which doesn't belong in an sf collection and ain't much of a story besides. On the other hand (sounds like Gil Hamilton), there's "The Fourth Profession" (is that a lisping pun, Larry?), a #page novella which is among the best things Larry ever wrote (one of the few readable things I ever found in a Quark collection, its original appearance). It reminds me just enough of my own Callahan stories to tickle me -- even though the resemblance is superficial -- and it's well-built. I come up with # on the Spidermeter; I enjoyed it, but it's by no means Larry's best.    The first story in A Hole In Space, "Rammer," is also the first chapter of A World Out of Time, Larry's newest novel. Both "Rammer" and the rest of the book have appeared in Galaxy (the latter as Children of the State a few months ago), so perhaps it is both redundant and unseemly to say much about the book here. I liked it, enjoyed it, admired parts of it tremendously, and kept turning pages until I was done. At that time I wished there'd been just a hair more emotional depth -- but then it wasn't meant to be that kind of a book. It rests on Larry's gift for logical extrapolation, his incredibly fertile imagination, and his talent for teasing you along, and it rests there pretty comfortably at that. Oh yeah -- Rick Stembach's cover is -- as always -- beautiful. But they spelled his name wrong again. And now for the king-hell book that may literally change your life. It's been a long time since I've read a book that impressed me on so many levels at once as Zei and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The three solid pages of critical raves in the front of my copy amuse me, because they remind me so much of the Twenty Blind Men who were introduced to an elephant; each quote seems to be talking about a completely different kind of book altogether, and they are all accurate. All I can say is, Zen is probably the most extraordinary thing I have ever read. It took me months to read it... in fact, I believe I'm still reading it. On one level it is simply what its title implies: an essay on motorcycle maintenance which emphasizes attitudes as the mechanic's most important tool ("The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon."). On another level it is a philosophical exposition, which in Korzybskian tradition transcends Aristotle. On another level it is a totally rational proof of the existence of God. On another, the wrenching story of how arriving at that philosophical watershed drove Persig literally insane. On another, a psychological novel of a man trying desperately to relate to his son -- to a son who was fathered by a personality that no longer inhabits Persig's Ixxly. In another sense it is the enormous and gripping science fiction story (in no way hampered by its literal truth) of how an entire species was condemned to confusion and misery (and perhaps destruction) by the outcome of a power struggle between two schools of philosophy, centuries ago in ancient Greece. It is, incidentally, a handbook for the staving off of that destruction, even now, in the eleventh hour; a guidebook for the resolution of the awful (and artificial) dichotomy between man's technological brain and his human heart and soul. Although Persig and certainly his publishers might be horrified to hear this, I maintain that Zen is sf, whether you take that to mean speculative or science fiction (or speculative or science acr). It is a close look at the most basic assumptions of science, and no one who claims to think or care about technology can safely ignore it. I quoted it extensively in a panel at MidAmeriCon on "My Favorite World of Tomorrow" -- it seemed to fit. Read it, and find out exactly what Quality, that mysterious, undefinable, every where-evident entity, really is. With luck, it will turn your world upside-down, the way it did Persig's -- and mine. I The bookracks are glutted with i Grand Classics From Da Golden I Age, all done up in new covers, ! and you don't need me to tell you that most of 'em are of interest only to historians and nostalgia-buffs (and English majors in need of a thesis). Here is a happy exception, one of those rare books that travels ; so well through time that it will be ; quite enjoyable in five hundred years. I'm not even a fantasy buff (in fact. I'm an admitted ignoramus about fantasy -- a condition which Lin Carter has promised to cure), and I just love L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's The Compleat Enchanter. The title is not precisely correct: three of the five novellae de Camp and Pratt wrote concerning Harold Shea are in this collection. The other two, "The Wall of Serpents" and "The Green Magician," are already available in book form, as Wall of Serpents. What this is, is the two once published in book form as The Incomplete Enchanter (I love triple puns), plus the original novella-length version of "The Cas, tie of Iron" (also available in novel-length under the same title). Hence the new title. Puff, puff. Got that? Forget it. Just buy the book. I I learned more about Norse mytholPerformia death'-delntf act. Stop smoldiig. Give Heart Fund American Heart Associationxj ogy, Spenser's Fairie Queene and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso than a week in the library could have taught me, and I had a cracking good time along the way. Harold Shea is one of the most delightfully realized characters in sf -- you feel you'd know him if you met him on the street -- and he undergoes a pleasing and consistent growth in the course of the three novellae. Is anyone reprinting Wall of Serpents? I'd love to find out what happens to Harold next. (Do you know I've never read the Prattde Camp "Gavaghan's Bar" series? Never seen a copy -- is anyone reprinting them?) There's also a fascinating afterword by de Camp, "Fletcher and I," about Pratt and their collaborations, that definitely enhances the    Mail response has been good on sf-oriented poetry, and so for the second time I hand over the reins to my resident poet, friend and neighbor, Anne Trudell. When I gave her Aniara to review (see December, # "Bookshelf"), she made the mistake of raving to me about a book called The Armies of the Moon, by Gwendolyn MacEwen. "Okay, keed," I said, "review that one too." She'll never learn. Here's Annie: Some might quibble whether MacEwen's book is sf or not. I doubt that she intended it to be, but it is written in the shadow of the American moon landing and many of its images would be more familiar to sf readers than to a reader of only mainstream fiction. What makes this a really great book of poetry? Well, I could read it about a hundred times and never get bored with it. It shakes the soul, mostly because it is about the soul, done not in the idiom of fields and flowers, but of moon walks, mad seamstresses, the Flat Earth Society, sea beasts, and buffets at the Savarin. Into the commonplace MacEwen constantly injects an element of the cosmic, and surprises you into the realization that the world isn't safe for doldrums after all. Sometimes she does this with humor, sometimes with a chill, but always with kaleidoscopic intensity. All of this makes for quite entertaining poetry to be sure, but what makes one come back to the book again and again is the very real mysticism and metaphysics it contains. The cosmic is there in MacEwen's poetry not just for effect but because it is a part of man's reality. Man's rejection or ignoring of this does nothing to mitigate its effects or its expression in his acts: On the television screen Two ghostly blobs of men dissolve On the rim of a lunar crater And I know exactly what they're hunting down Hour after hour in the seas without water And if nothing else, MacEwen's poetry shows that the immensities of space are nothing beside the immensities within man: Computers map the territories of nether suns Where galaxies are graphic castles giants own Now up the weightless slopes of time he the astronaut climbs Through vacuous doorways to the gasping dark beyond Thanks again, Annie, and thanks to Gwendolyn MacEwen for suggesting that Galaxy is a graphic castle giants own -- Mr. Abramson is flattered.    The little black star draws nearer, barely time for some minis (to foil charges of sex discrimination, next month I'm going to start calling them mickeys). The Deep, by John Crowley: quite a number of people have mentioned this book in letters, and there's a cover-blurb by Ursula LeGuin that is highly complimentary. I'm sorry -- I just couldn't finish it. I found it turgid and confusing, fatally handicapped by the nearly identical names which make it impossible to recall who's who, and boring even when I could figure out what was going on. You see. Red Senlin's eldest son. Younger Redhand... I mean. Red Senlin's Son's son. Younger Red Senlin... no, no, Sennred... I mean, Old Redhand's son Sennred, who is actually younger than Younger Redhand... anyway, his brother Fauconred, see, is trying to steal the throne of Redred... I suggest you leave it Unred. Rocannon's World, by Ursula K. LeGuin: the only thing I've ever read by Ms. LeGuin herself that I didn't care for. The language is beauteous, some of the characters Just great -- but the story itself limps and drags jerkily, and a really tremendous (when you think about it) ending comes across like an anticlimax. A genuine disappointment, I guess because of the height of my expectations. Sandworld, by Richard A. Lupoff: three convicts, a fat redneck guard and a youngprettysexy social worker on their way to San Quentin drive straight into the Twilight Zone, and even the final "science fictional" explanations don't get them out again. Alien vampires put me straight to sleep. A bionic turnip. By now some of you are ready to Society -- on account of six months ago I promised you a half-column on Harlan Ellison, and eight months ago I promised you a big spread on John Brunner, and I haven't delivered either one yet. Next month for sure. (This is a commitment as reliable as "The check is in the mail.") I know you're expecting me to end with an atrocious pun, so I'll just have to pass on the story of the young sf fan who once put on the top half of a pink satin tuxedo and threw a brick through the police station window. He offered no explanation for his behavior until the moment when he washed the ink from his fingertips and said: "Now I can truthfully say I was once printed in weird tails."  Jeffrey goddin Now and in the future, murderers are hunted by their dreams! a deft touch, Phil dropped half-adozen tiny white spheres into his drink. He talked on and on... "You'll think I'm old-fashioned, but this business of going from place to place in those damned plastic capsules..." He stopped in mid-sentence, gave Phil a startled look. "Lehman, I feel..." Then his body began to jerk. Phil avoided looking at Marantz's features; they weren't pretty, locked as they were in a typhoid grimace as the spasm shook him. It was over in ten seconds. The tiny spheres which Phil had dropped in Marantz's drink were morphules, creatures that hatched in the warmth of the blood and immediately released a neurotoxin as part of their growth process. They were a perfect murder weapon, thought Phil, as he slipped out of the booth and drew the curtain. The hydrochloric acid in Marantz's stomach would have dissolved the morphules by the time a  patrol arrived. i Phil had left orders that they were not to be disturbed. The waiter probably assumed that they were lovers, since Philes were being encouraged as a method of population control. He did not allow himself time to gloat over his victory, but searched quickly for a plasti-cab. Phil was lucky tonight. One of the tinted capsules, like the eye of a giant insect, came to rest almost as he stepped from the building. Phil rose into the cloud haze that covered the city and allowed the unerring machine to follow the coordinates that he punched into its driveface. The city was shrouded in thick fog where he came to rest. A river was being rejuvenated not far from his flat, and the atmosphere was pumped full of steam and carbondioxide to encourage plant growth along the banks. When the door slid back the low-oxygen air hit Phil's lungs like a wet blanket. He knew that he must get home soon. It was a half-mile from the platform to his flat, and the combination of unhealthy atmosphere and the possibility of derelicts haunting the fogs made him set off at a rapid pace. This was a mistake. Soon he was out of breath, and only half-way home. As he paused to rest two shapes loomed out of the fog. They were both dressed in tattered spacer uniforms, and both held small hand-stunners. He recognized the look in their eyes, the look of men who had failed to be re-conditioned to the Terran environment. He tried a bluff. "Name, rank, station!" "Elliot, thermal scientist second grade, Arctural satellite." The other man smiled grimly and pushed his stunner into Phil's stomach. "Your credits. All of them. Now!" As often when he went out at night, Phil was carrying a minimal amount of money. He knew that the man who hadn't responded would be furious. But all he could do was hand over his thin wallet. The spacers grabbed the wallet out of his hand, emptied it. The instant that the taller man realized that Phil was no prize his foot lashed out in a plexis kick and Phil was down. As the spacers moved in to finish him off with their boots, the full irony of the thing hit Phil: Tonight, when he had disposed of his one enemy, the spacers would dispose of him. Phil Lehman closed his eyes and prepared to die. There came the sound of a scuffle, the ripping-cloth snarl of a stunner. Phil opened his eyes to see two patrol officers holding one of the spacers. The other was spreadeagled on the street, twitching spasmodically. "Are you all right, citizen?" Phil stood against the pain in his stomach, stumbled and grabbed one of the officers for support. Gradually his head cleared. "Yes, yes, thank you." 'We'll accompany you to your residence."    Once inside Phil poured a stiff drink and flipped on the Environment. It had been close, so close... He gratefully let his mind be carried away by the pictures that flowed across the quartzite ceiling, the music that flooded the room on a variety of comprehension levels. He had tuned in to one of the local stations, and the show would continue until midnight. Afterward, for the more demanding citizens, the insomnia crowd, there would be complete dramas, or intellectual puzzles to decipher. He let his exterior mind follow the pictures, his nerves unwind into the threads of music. For the first time in months Phil felt truly happy. The man he had killed was a private agent who, due to the bounty system, would not have told anyone the identity of his suspect, Phil. Since the government had gone over to the bounty system as a more efficient means of tracking down its enemies, there were any number of private agents competing against one another. Phil's anonymity was secure. As often in the past he let his mind seek out a half-dream that pleased him. He blacked out the walls and turned down the Environment. The images began to form... She was tall, with long black hair and pale skin. Her eyes tilted upward slightly, and her lips were a trifle small, but perfectly formed. Together they were exploring the past through one of the new timevariable systems. They walked between a dusty row of buildings where nothing moved but the wind -- what they used to call a "ghost town." Phil knew from his history tapes that these towns had sprung up in the early days of his country's expansion in response to a mining industry which as often as not collapsed. Or they were on the trails where "cattle drives" once passed. The history techs had reconstructed their images so perfectly that a native of the era would not have known the difference. Some part of Phil's fantasy mind had chosen one of these towns as a locale for the encounter. As always, the girl was beautiful. Each time, in fact, she seemed more lovely. He wore a gun, as befitted an irihabitant of the day, and now his hand rested on its butt as he searched the empty buildings. One of the structures caught his eye, and he stopped to investigate. TTie girl pressed up against him, her curiosity mingled with fear. Phil pulled his gun and kicked open the door. The building still had all of its furnishings, although the inhabitants had apparently abandoned the town. There were soft couches along the walls, elaborate candelabras above green gaming tables, a complete bar. He half-expected an oldfashioned "barkeep" to come out a side door and ask what they would have to drink. But no one appeared. Phil went and selected a liquor, filled glasses for them. They settled on one of the soft plush couches, drank until the bottle was empty, and then forgot about the bottle... Her lips were so soft, her long cool fingers so sensitive as they curled around his neck, her thin body so firm and eager... They stretched out on the wide couch and he drew her close...    Phil was awake in an instant. It seemed as though his dream had hardly begun. He checked the time. No, it was time to go to work all right. He quickly showered and shaved, then paused at the door. A message had been thrust under the door while. he slept. Phil unfolded the creamy paper and read, in neat script: I hope you know what you are doing, but I think not. You have severely misunderstood your cations and are thus making mistakes. I think we should for lunch and discuss the matter. Phil broke out in a cold sweat. He did not recognize the writing. There was no signature, no indication as to how he should recognize the man in the company cafeteria when he appeared. Had he been found out at last? He knew that Marantz had been close, but these people always worked alone. No, the only thing to do was to meet the fellow. For a moment Phil considered taking some morphules along to lunch. He thought of their cool plastic container resting in the refrigerator. No, and by the way... He got the morphules and flushed them, container and all, down the toilet.    Phil Lehman was a draftsman. He was good at his work. He was also rich, not from any recognition of his talents, but because he had stolen several hundred thousand credits of Communitech funds four months earlier. He had done the job alone and, he thought, had left no traces -- that is, until he had been contacted by Marantz. But it was too late to speculate on how he might have been found out. He could only move ahead. Lately Phil's work had been more and more concerned with the area along the river. There were new spiralling apartments, needle-thin office buildings, the recreation areas with their characteristic mushroom shape, the greenery on top -- all had sprung to life from Phil's capable hands. It wasn't that difficult. Structural stresses, basic proportional matters and weights were all in the computers, as were the idiosyncracies of the different types of land in the vast city. All Phil had to do was add that touch, that creative element of adornment, of material texture, that human touch that would make the buildings each slightly different from all others of the type, and thus more livable. He worked hard that morning, and was surprised when it was time for lunch. He had actually forgotten his assignation. Should he keep it at all? The note was cryptic, and to answer it by his presence would be a kind of admission. But the alternative? Constant watching and constant suspense. On his way through the outer office Phil decided. In a flash he was in the long blue-lit room where food was still prepared by hand for that, yes, that human touch. Phil assumed that his friend would find him, and he was not mistaken. He looked up from his martini to find a small, florid-faced tech grinning down at him. He pushed out the opposite chair with his foot, took another sip of the near-pure gin. "Mr. Lehman, Mr. Lehman, how good to finally make your acquaintance! I am Engleman, Richard, and I have had the privilege of studying your work. You are," he paused, "one of the best." Phil examined the light green eyes that met his gaze above a large nose, small neatly trimmed moustache. The other's speech inflection was just a shade off, despite the Germanic name. Not a Terran birth, Phil guessed. To the point: "Your note indicated something other than appreciation of my work." "My note? Why, I sent you no note!" "This morning, under my door..." Phil stopped. Was this Engleman being coy, or was this some dreadful mistake? He scanned the room: There were few people there, a cluster of female techs giggling in a corner, a few draftsmen from his own office, a dark girl seated alone near the food line. Phil studied the girl for a moment. She was pale, with long blue-black hair. He couldn't see her eyes through the heavily tinted glasses that she wore. He wished frantically that he had looked more closely at the writing, but no, it had been in a kind of neutral script. And he had destroyed the note immediately. "Perhaps," mused Engleman, "you have an unknown admirer." "Perhaps." "Mr. Lehman, how would you like to take on a small Job, outside of your Communitech work? I know," it seemed as if he looked more closely at Phil, "that you do not have the highest paying trade in the city, although you may have something squirreled away..." Phil searched Engleman's smiling eyes. It was almost a hint, but not enough, that he knew about the theft. "Oh, but then it might have been you who stole all of those credits a few months ago." Phil didn't blink, and smiled wanly: "If I had. I'd have hardly stayed on Terra. But you spoke of a job..." "I," said Engleman, leaning closer, "am a man of business. I have, in fact, a very special business." He flipped his lapel, a quick motion, and Phil thought that he caught a tiny gleam of rainbow color. He leaned back, and suddenly, before his mind's eye, there was a thickly foliated garden, with a mulatta wdking toward him with eyes like... A pleasure merchant! The long outlawed trade of the city, being plied by a tech! -- if Engleman really was a tech. In fact, if Phil had not himself frequented one of the gardens on the Moon, he would not have understood the image. But Engleman had guessed that he would understand, and had been right. "But how, in the middle of the city... "This will not be built," said Engleman, in a parent-to-child tone, "within the city. You are familiar with the wastes to the north of Metropolis A, where the radiation dumps were..." Where the dumps were! They were still off-limits, as far as Phil knew. But this outlander seemed to know a lot. "Yes, you heard me correctly. There is no radiation there now. It suits the government to keep the land fallow, in the event that they might use it for one of their own schemes. And it is not patrolled, except on the perimeter." "But how could customers..." He could answer his own question. The customers would be very rich. They would have developed their tastes in the outworlds and would, quite probably, enjoy the thrill of a clandestine entry. It would be a daring operation indeed! "And you want me to design the actual garden?" "Precisely." "Do you know the trouble I could get into?" "Of course. But you are a prudent man. And, I think, an avaricious one." Was tnis another veiled hint? "Yes, I suppose I am. Give me some time to think, to do some roughing out. I could meet you..." "Next week, out at station A. I might have something to show you."    During the week following his encounter with Engleman, Phil worked steadily and efficiently, and came home early each evening, that he might begin his dreaming earlier. He had grown very fond of the dark girl, and dreaded the time when his trained mind might reject her in the name of variety. On the very night before he was to again meet Engleman, Phil dreamed that he and the girl went to the seashore. He was not a water person, all air and intellect, but he chose the sea for its exotic implications. He imagined the air flowing through her hair, the coolness of the night... They walked along the loose sand, his arm around her waist. She still wore the two-piece suit which she had worn that day. His hand marvelled at the firmness of her skin over her hips, the perfect incurve of her waist. Suddenly she turned to face him, opened her strange violet eyes into his... He pressed her gently to his chest, feeling the downy coolness of her back as his hand trailed down to her hips. Her sharp breasts pierced his skin... Phil awakened with that strange feeling of anti-climax that his dreams had all been producing lately. No matter how early he fell asleep, the main dream simply would not be finished. He had even risked taking the time from normal tension-reducing dreams to flesh out his fantasy... He looked at the clock. What the Hell? It was barely midnight. Then he remembered his meeting with Engleman. II Phil took the plasti-cab to the northern sector of Metropolis A. Just before he landed a patrol flyer locked parallel with him and landed a few yards away. He got out, catching a series of strange scents on the night air, and stood to wait for the officers. The taller of the two demanded identification, which he had. Phil noticed that the other looked uneasily around as his identification was checked. It was indeed a rough part of the city, and a Friday night as well. There were a series of spacer bars here, where the least sophisticated segment of the population gathered for drinks and fights in the old pre-galactic style, but with offworld hand weapons. "What are you doing in this sector, Draftsman? It's not your kind of place." "I have the need to loosen up, on occasion." Phil debated bribing the officers, but, catching the smile of the taller one, he decided to proceed along this line. "One develops tastes, you see..." "I understand," said the officer, who Phil now saw had a long white scar from ear to chin, "But we'd hate to have to carry your body back tomorrow morning." "I won't stay long, just long enough..." "Right. You've had your warning." The two officers disembarked quickly, leaving Phil in the open street. He fingered the small blaster in his pocket. It had taxed all of his ingenuity to get the weapon, and he thanked his stars that he had not been searched. Trust the company reputation. Three blocks. He passed the small bars lit with fluorescent guiders, green and purple predominating. There were subliminal cues in those signs, but he firmly shut them out. The magistrates had decided that there could be one section of the city that would not be too strictly cleaned up, perhaps with the hope that some of the superfluous population would eliminate itself. Phil walked quickly through the sector. A beautiful mulatta beckoned from a doorway, a woman with the peculiar sandy tint of the Martian colony from another. No, nothing on the level of a Pleasure Garden here, simply dangerous oldfashioned booze, sex and drugs, witn me possibility of a really exotic disease thrown in. Perfect for the spacer tastes. Three young men staggered from one of the side streets, out into Phil's path. He saw that their drunkenness was feigned quickly looked around, saw no patrols, and pulled out his blaster. The trio froze, sized him up, then sidled away, muttering. Station A was the least sophisticated station in the city, which was ironic, since it had been the first to be established during the long reconstruction of the city. Yet it still had the original diner, cab landing, bar. and even a few stores, clustered beneath the transparent shield that magnified the stars into shivering globes of light. Phil walked down the dirty central corridor, through the heavy smells of stale urine and wine, found a bench and settled down to wait. Half-an-hour later Engleman arrived, dressed in a surveyor's outfit. He even had a small clearance badge on his lapel. He carried a tight bundle under his arm. "Go into the restroom and put this on, quickly." Phil went into the John and unfolded the bundle. He found an outfit similar to Engleman's, complete with security badge. He quickly slipped it on, bundling his own clothes back into the package. The blaster he slipped into one of the breast pockets of the uniform. "Ah yes," said Engleman, as Phil emerged, "now we are ready. Follow me." "Just a minute. Will these uniforms..." "Yes, they are real uniforms. Relax, Mr. Lehman, I've seen to everything." They walked through the station out to the perimeter. A high metal fence with its own power source threw a faint glow for several yards on each side. This was the visible boundary of "civilization." They walked along the fence to the left for perhaps fifteen minutes in silence. A silvery figure came to view ahead, a figure that held a long-range blaster. "Halt. Identify." "Surveyors First, two persons." Engleman advanced and held out his identification. Phil slowly reached into the pocket of his coveralls and found his own. The guard noted the two luminescent badges. "What's your business at this time of night?" "Periodical surveillance of the dumps," said Engleman, as he held out a small recorder with visual attacbment which he had produced from his coveralls. "We're checking luminosity as a measure of any residual radiation." The guard stepped back. "Proceed." A section of the fencing slid back, and the two men entered the waste sector. One of the first things that Phil became aware of was the weird fragrance of flowers. He couldn't see them, but the scent was overwhelming, a mingling of spices and acid animal odors. Engleman produced a pocket light and flashed it around. Rank vegetation filled the area, and over the top loomed blossoms unlike anything Phil had ever imagined. They were like baroque carvings, with huge dangling pistels and stamens protruding from variously shaped clusters of petals. He noted one in particular, reddish, with petals like feathers, that seemed to be a vine running in around all of the others. He began slowly to approach it, already distinguishing in his mind the carnal scent... "Mr. Lehman! Many of these plants are psychoactive, not to say outright dangerous, and the Escarlen vine that seems to have caught your attention is one of the most dangerous. Needless to say, we will have to make certain protective provisions for our customers." Customers. Immediately the difficulty of establishing a Pleasure Park out here began to assert itself. Could Engleman have lured him out here on a mere pretext? Was he, after all, Engleman's quarry? But what could the man hope to gain by taking him out here? A confession, perhaps? "You're wondering, of course, just how our customers will be able to get to the Garden? I happen to know that the government is considering loosening the perimeter guards. They need the manpower in the city. And the few guards that stay could be bribed. The fence, of course, must stay, but there are ways around -- or over -- that." A black path wound through the foliage, and Phil followed cautiously in Engleman's steps. The thought crossed his mind that here, among these exotic flowers, would be an excellent place to eliminate his would-be associate. But then, how would he deal with the guard? They travelled perhaps two miles through the strangest terrain that Phil bad ever seen on Terra. The huge blossoms, oranges, reds, purples and unearthly blues lined the path and seemed to beckon him off into the darkness. They were, of course, radiation mutants, but the dumps had long ceased to be active, while the mutants flourished and bred true... Suddenly the light failed to touch anything but blackness. Engleman switched it off, and Phil found that they were in a large clearing. He turned, and the lights of the city just paled the sky behind them. "This clearing," said Engleman, "is fifteen kilometers in length, two in width, covered mainly with ash. The actual layout, of course, I will leave to you. There is no real reconnaissance over this area, excepting the bi-yearly geodetic check, and in two months we can have the gardens built and camouflaged." "But what will happen when they start to develop this area? "There are several reasons," mused Engleman, "why they won't, for many years to come. You've been working on the river project, I believe? Yes, inner-city problems are going to be of paramount importance for several years. And all of the crucial control centers are in the southern part of the city, near the new areas that I happen to know," he laughed, "have been mapped out by the coordinator for the next expansion. By the time that this area is ready for development -- or rather, by the time the government is ready -- I will have made enough credits to more than justify my efforts, and yours. I will simply pull up and go elsewhere." It was a convincing argument. Phil breathed the exotic fragrance of the night flowers, once again felt that subtle pull on his senses. Perhaps the flowers contributed to his curious state of mind. Because it suddenly became clear that, for all of his imagination and implied friends in high places, Engleman was a fool. There were too many possibilities of discovery, beyond the aereal survey teams and the perimeter guards. The patrons of the gardens might even be followed to the dumps. No, Phil became determined to extricate himself from the whole scheme. "So," he could almost feel Engleman' s icy grin in the darkness, "you are going to help me?" "I don't know. There are many loopholes, besides the need for me to find time to do the job." "That could be easily arranged. I could have you transferred to the northern sector for...hypothetical studies." Phil did a mental flip. That much pull! He didn't trust this little Engleman at all. "No, I don't think I'll take the risk." you in on all of my plans." Engleman walked off a little way, played his light over the near wall of plants through which the two had walked. "I wasn't going to mention this, but I really do need your services." He approached Phil again. "I know who was responsible for that disappearance of funds four months ago. One of the easiest investigations of my career. The guilty party, I might add, is not so very far from here..." Before Phil had actually formulated the thought, his hand had found the small blaster and the night was heavy with the scent of burnt flesh. He picked up Engleman's light, flicked it off to test his night vision, then began to backtrack toward the fence. Phil felt a surge of exaltation, and quickly stifled it. He had to keep his mind clear and plan his every move for the rest of the night. There was still the guard to deal with. He walked slowly through the night, guiding by the stars above him. Soon he saw the faint luminescence of the fence ahead. At that moment there came a sharp pain in his left arm. Phil had strayed into the plants and one of them had tasted him. He shook his arm, testing the light numbness. There came a slight dizziness, which quickly passed. He moved ahead more slowly. Phil had only two choices; he could try and bluff his way out, explaining Engleman's absence as best he might, or he could take on the guard. There was a certain lucid madness on him that night. Perhaps it was the plants. When he saw the guard just beyond the luminous fence he knew what he would do. "Guard, come here quickly, my friend's hurt." The sentry half-jumped, for Phil had come up without his light, wheeled around with blaster levelled. For a tense half-second Phil was sure the guard would shoot. Then: "What's the matter with him?" "One of those damned mutant plants. It stunned him. The guard had himself been warned about the plants. He slid back the gate and moved forward, a light in his hand. When he saw Phil he paused a moment, then came forward. He had slung his blaster across his back. The light played across the brush. Weird flower heads nodded back in mock greeting, and that was all. "Where is he?" asked the guard, growing suspicious. "Here." Phil shot him through the mouth and immediately turned away from the falling body. He then wiped his prints from the blaster and flung it deep into the mass of plants.   He moved as quickly as he dared through the northern sector. He had recovered his clothes and had tossed the disguise in the first incinerator he saw. There were officers patrolling by twos, and once he was stripped and frisked. He moved on. The sector was in full swing. Loud laughter, an occasional feminine voice lifted in outrage, eerie music from the garishly colored nightspots -- all contributed to the carnival atmosphere. Phil decided that the best course would be to follow a couple of officers on their route, provided that they didn't stop anywhere. He chose a likely-looking pair. In a few blocks they became aware that he was following them and turned back to frisk him. Finding him harmless, they gave him his third warning of the night and continued on their way, while he followed at a more discrete distance. There was a cab station at the end of the sector, where the river made its most northemly loop. Two figures were just looming out of the shadows to Phil's left as a plasti-cab came softly to rest. He rushed in and slammed the door. Now Phil let the primitive rush of joy overcome him. Once again he had foiled his enemy. The feeling , lasted and increased as he reached the flat. He immediately flipped on the Environment, took a quick shower, and lay down to let his mind unwind completely. He expected great things from this night's fantasy. By the time the system switched itself off he was adrift in a cloud of exquisite sensations, a mist of color with pale blues, silvers and magenta. He looked to die point in space where all of the colors seemed to converge, and suddenly there she was. She had never looked so beautiful. A faint breeze off of a nearby river floated her long black hair away behind her as those upward tilted eyes sought his. She was dressed in a gown of diaphanous black which clung to her boyish chest, her narrow waist, and blossomed out around her long slender legs. He took her hand then, and they began to wander along the river. They came to a bridge of many spans that arched high over the water, lit by yellow arc lamps that have haloes in the fog. There on the bridge he kissed her, and their j kisses had all of the thrill of his I first boyish love. "We are going to my house," i she whispered, as she gently took : his hand and led him across the old j bridge. i The section of town was old, indeed. It had characteristics of the  British Georgian and Victorian I which he recognized from the history books. They paused before a tall narrow place with two stacked balconies, barred by a high wrought-iron gate. Phil put his arm around her waist as they mounted the pale marble steps, threw back the wide panelled doors. Inside was an opulent parlor of pearl grey, with lightcolored wooden furniture and wainscotting. They sat on a long, low Victorian chaise lounge and she bent over him, brushing his brow lightly with her lips. In the light of green-shaded lamps she began to take on the aura of one of his more archaic fantasies, that of the vampire, the beautiful lover whose kiss is death, the exquisite lingering death of the true decadent. Phil ran his hands up her long cool arms, behind her neck. He reached for the top clasp of her bodice. She gently pulled away from him, teasing, but he took her more firmly and buried his face in her hair. Then, in his ecstasy, he began to talk to her, this beautiful figure of his dreams, to tell her of his life, of all that he had done. She could understand, the terrible boredom, the thrill of his first theft, the double thrill of stalking his two enemies. She could understand, for her life was founded on the ecstasy of the unexpected, the challenge of erotic adventure. He told her of his all-consuming excitement at finally outwitting Engleman, of the knowledge that he could never be caught, and he believed that she really understood, for her face grew hot, her lips more lingering. Once again he reached out to take her. She stood, and smiled, the breathless smile of the true vampire. Her eyes bored into his with a fantastic pleasure, her small rounded lips half-parted, as if sharing in his triumph, and she bent to give him a burning vampire kiss that left him gasping for breath. She also reached into a small pocket in the back of her gown, between her buttocks, and took out a small long-barrelled blaster. "Philip Lehman," she crooned, as the dream split like a shattered glass, "in the name of the Government of the City, I claim you as my prisoner."  Dear Mr. Baen: I'm extremely puzzled by your December # Editorial Epistle to the Christians. You talk of the necessity of using "religious impulses" to boost us off into space. Well now -- from wide reading of other Editorials, Articles, letter columns, and Fanzine discussions. I've gathered a fairly concise idea of what "religious impulses" are. ' "Religious impulses" are nothing more than senseless, superstitious archisms c, founded in ignorance, upon the weakness of emotion, and maintained in blind, brainwashed faith. They are beliefs with no foundation, no support, no reasons, no facts behind them, only the status quo of miUenniums sc of repeated assertion. Some people maintain such "religious impulses" because these beliefs were so deeply etched into the groves sc of their brains in early childhood and reiterated and pounded deeper during growing up. When grown, they are unable, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to throw off these shackling beliefs. Those who retain these "religious impulses" refuse to think for themselves. They will not see the world objectively, scientifically, rationally. They simply ignore the cold, hard facts and inconvenient aspects of science in their incautious mania to believe the literal assertions of their illogical convictions. They are afraid to face life as it truly is. Surely, Mr. Baen, you must recognize, that in our enlightened, educated times, most science fiction readers are mature, intelligent people, whom have no such primitive "religious impulses" at all. They've grown up, as I say, and realize what "religious impulses" actually ate: just left-over superstitions formed back in times of ignorance and fear. I find your statement "Thus if God spoke unto the Prophets of Israel..." most baffling. Who is this "God"? And what has he to do with us today, and our exploration of space, if he lived thousands of years ago in the "Late Neolithic"? And how in the universe could anything he said way back then be relevant to us today? How do you even know if he ever really existed? After all, there are no authentic records dating back that far. Please, would you explain this? What I really find so disturbing, shocking even, is your sixth paragraph. You instruct us to instigate subversion, insurrection, and revolution, commit criminal ! acts, engage in treason, or do anything else necessary, if it serves to "further the progress of humankind into space." Do you realize the implications of what you've said? Can you visualize the results of application of your directive? How can you Justify what you've J suggested? j Also, you imply that we should go into space simply because this "God" says we should. Why should we let him dictate to us what we should do? Isn't allowing this "God" to direct our efforts and lives contrary to human progress, and detrimental to the development of the human race? Surely, it is clear, anyone such as this "God," who tries to restrain us, to control us, to decide for us, we must resist with all our might, and, if necessary, destroy. Isn't this clear? We must fight for our freedom from Hint just as we have fought for our freedom from others before. I think this is clear. Again, please, who is this "God"? Lee Smith Unlike religious beliefs, which arise out of them, religious impulses cannot be "founded in ignorance": they are a built-in facet of the human condition, like territoriality or the sex drive. And while they can indeed be perverted, witness ritual cannibalism, claimjumping and rape, they cannot be founded on perversion, since they are earlier in the scheme of things. And what is this "overwhelming evidence" to which you refer? Science is nothing more than a complex set of observations and deductions based on the well tested but fundamentally unverifiable inference that if condition 'A' leads to resultant 'B' once, it will do so every single time unto the Final Trump, as it were. Or, to put it another way. Science is a modern religion whose single article of faith is that reality is consistent, and therefore its mechanisms can be understood through observation and deduction. But it does not have a single thing to say about the underpinnings of that reality! Ask a scientist "Why is Nature consistent?" and he can but look at you blankly -- or answer you as a non-scientist. Finally, as for that especially dubious sixth paragraph, all the things you claim are being promulgated by it would further nothing but the disintegration of society, something hardly conducive to a flourishing space technology. Dear Mr. Bacn, I was quite disappointed by your editorial "Epistle to the Christians." I too feel that God's commandment "Be fruitfull, and multiply, and replenish the earth..." may have a greater meaning than it's literal one. However, if you were to limit population people would be more inclined to stay on the earth. Look around. There are very few idealists that want to "get off" and the rest will have no desire to leave as long as it is comfortable here. With a zero population growth things here are not likely to get much worse and will more probably make things even more comfortable for the individual. Things will have to get much worse before enough people will decide a change is in order. So by limiting population you would be accomplishing the opposite of what you desire. Besides, so far God has not been very cooperative in our search for reasonable methods of reaching the stars. Perhaps if more of us would listen to His commandments, instead of trying to suspend them. He would give us a hand. Sincerly, Clayton Fuller Member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints # East Ada Ave. Glendore, CA. # Your view is curiously similar to that of doctrinaire Marxists: that any amelioration of social inequities should be opposed on the ground that if the masses are made less miserable the day of revolution will be thereby postponed. It is my conviction that any such doctrine is pernicious to the core. On more practical grounds, only a relatively wealthy society is capable of diverting the requisite resources for the development of a fullfledged space economy. Also, I think you underestimate both human idealism and human contrariness: for example in the year # I imagine there will be at least one O'Neill colony manned solely by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints! Galaxy # East #th Street New York, N.Y. # I ordered this so-called science fiction magazine for a thirteen year old grandson. I'm sure glad I looked it over before giving it to him. 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Cyborgs are to colonize Mars, and Roger Torraway, exastronaut, is to be the first Martian-or so fascinating SF. Pub. ed. # #. A World Out Of Time. By Larry Niven. A black hole in space sds Jerome Corbell Earth's future where lhe ultimate battle of the sexes is raging. By co-author of The Mote in God's Eye. Pub. ed. # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I li II. Giant #-in-l volume of # awardwinning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. Liana of the Gathol and John Carter of Mars. By Edgar Rice Burroughs. Excellent #-ln-l volume in the Burroughs Mars series. Special Edition. #. Shadrach in the Furnace. By Robert Silverberg. In the year # a vicious plague is destroying the world while its ruler Genghis Mao jealously guards the only known antidote. Pub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. Price # #. Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual. Compiled by Franz Joseph. A must for all Star Trek devotees. Taken from the data banks of the master computer, it includes the Articles of Federation, the Romulan and Organian Peace Treaties, and much more. Large size paperback. Vinyl binder. Pub. ed # #. Mirkheim. By Poul Anderson. An exciting tale of intragalactic war and political intrigue. Pub. ed. # #. Millennium. By Ben Bova. American and Russian bases on the Moon unite to prevent a catastrophic war brewing on Earth. Pub. ed. # I If under # parent must sign. Order not valid i I without signature. The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different'in Canada.  A cyborg in post-holocaust New England. A prince in seventeenth-century Africa. A dialog across time. A warning that may come too late. TheEarth Again edeemed May # to July #,I #, on this earth of xurs and its alter ego science fiction novel by Martin Green, author of Children of the Sun # at bookstores # E. #rd St., New York # From Harper et? Row NR Phyllis Gotiieb displays all her dazzling skill in this gripping tale of humans at war with power-crazed machines. # Richard A. Lupoff has created a sensuous, erotic, haunting fantasy-odyssey, based on ancient Japanese lore. # Edited by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor. # top SF authors explore our society's myths in provocative, refreshing stories based on ancient legends, fairy tales, and the Bible. # I lHarperetRow IJ-J # E. #rd St... New York # Edited by Ursula K. LeGuin. The short story, novelette, novella and novel in progress, plus four fine stories selected by LeGuin. # By Jack Dann. An endearing minstrel wanders among the moon colonies in search of truth, freedom, and the love of someone like himself. # horror story about the mysterious planet Tezcatl, where the people, ravaged by a leprosylike disease, perform bizarre sacrificial rites. # At bookstores or direct from the publisher E. Pournelle Spider Robinson H. C. Petley Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Stephen Fabian, Art Director J.E. Poumelle, Ph. D., Science Editor LC. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor Elaine Will, Assistant Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor James Patrick Baen, Editor The aliens among us are interested mainly in each other; it behooves us not to come between them! There has been, over the years, a great deal of speculation on how mankind learned to speak. Herein you will find a rather unique explanation... There have always been the Few who sacrifice for the Many: In the past they gave us the Earth, in the future they will give us the stars. But the price... Waldo was a man who could fall Into the receiving end of a recycling system and come up smelling of roses -- metaphorically, that is! From generation to generation the Torch of Knowledge was passed on, held high against the coming of the Long Electronic Night. It was all pointless, of course. A tale of a not-distant future when death is an -- almost -- forgotten malady. McKie has begun to unravel the mystery of Dosadi -- just as Jedrik has begun to unravel the mystery of McKie. And all the time Ceylang studies them both, biding her time... bookshelf. Spider Robinson # A few words from Spider on the care and feeding of Literary Arachnids, an expianation of a past omission -- and a Deiuge of Eliison. bage is -- garbage. Sewage on the other hand... Letters from Beer, Turlington, Cooper, Littie, Then, Wiison, Fombrio, WTngrove Where to find it. Cover by Bonnie Dalzell Interior illustrations by Auiisio, Daizell, Fabian, Freff of Universal Publishing A Distributing Corporation, Arnold E. Abramson, PrasMsnt. Main Ofllcss; # Whits Plains Road, Scaradale, N.Y. #SS#. Editorial Oflica: PO Box #, Planslartum Station, Nsw York, N.Y. #. Unsolicited manuscripts should be aant to the Main Office. Single copy: #. #-lsaue subecriptlon; # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. A# rights reserved. Second dasa postage paid at New York, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The puMIshera assume no responsibility lor unsoNcHsd matsilal. All stories printed In this magazine ere Action and any similarity between characters and actual persona la colnddsntal. Printed In U.#.A. T.M. Reg. App. For The original gome of fantasy roleis an open-ended game which allows porticipants to assume such roles os wizards, heroes, elves and dworves. The "Dungeon-Master" guides them through labyrinths inhabited bv horrible monsters and into unKnown londsin search of fabulous treasures. Enchanted weopons and mighty spells help them to combat dragons, trolls, and even demons. Success will allow these odventurers to grow more powerful, but doom owoits at every turn. And to find out the latest on fantasy The Mogazine of Fontosy, Science Fiction, Swords  Sorcery color cover and interior art on glossy paper with top-nome gaming ord literory authors. Bi-monthly; moiled first class. V Supplement IV # D S D Miniatures Rules # To order send check or money order to: P.O.B. #, Lake Genevo, Wl # # eo. I year MbscrtpLion, BI-MonfKIy mogaline of fontosy and scierrce fiction goming and fiction. Name --  --  Address City State Zip Overseas; Send for oddress of local distribotor vabiationsjw He had been a perfectly ordinary astronomer -- until he met a woman with very peculiar needs! vatory as the sun sets down in the down from the mountain solitudes and across the valley floor, I arrive at the Observatory's subsidiary offices adjacent to the University. We are not officially a part of the University. Students rarely come to visit us. As I drive, I wear polarized glasses of a gray tint especially developed for the Gemini astronaut program some years back. In this manner, I protect my reserves of visual purple from the sudden flare of opposing headlights. There is no telling when this kind of encounter is likely to occur and so I prepare for the probability. The roadbed curves through the sinuous geosynclines of the folded mountains. I leave the staff parking lot at four P.M. pulling out into the steep driveway. I try to drive as fast as I can catching all the turns like Phil Hill used to do. Hill is one of my personal heros. Do you know why? Because he finished up ahead of the game and retired, that is why. I take the turns at optimum speed. There are coarse gravel skirts on either side of the blacktop and a long winding stretch quite near the Observatory where there is no white line. You never know what might be coming the other way. At the Observatory, my duties entail tending the instruments four nights each week in association with Dr. Emaus Corweiller, the Chief Observer. My position is one ofj considerable envy in the field since Corweiller is among the most acute and most accomplished sky watchers now at work. He is also an astronomical theoretician of amazing versatility. He has a wholehearted way of accepting all cosmological concepts and then dismissing them as irrelevant. I am his senior assis-i tant. He is an effusive, happy manj much given to animated conversa-j tions and he gives me his full approval for my tedious personal researches into the observable spectra of certain Cepheid variable stars. Corweiller and I are on watch together Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays working on the Observatory's current study, an assigned task of plotting galaxies in the Cetus region as part of a cooperative worldwide nebulae study. On Saturday nights, we photograph binary star systems. This is Corweiller's personal project. Although much recent data of stellar phenomena has been gathered by monitoring radio emissions, nothing can be quite so spontaneous as actual observation and photographs. This is our area of expertise. My work begins after sundown as I prepare the dome for our night's work. First, fans are turned on cooling the great mirror to equal the expected outdoor temperature; then, as the Chief Observer enters the dome from his study, I open the canopy revealing the patch of heavens that we are interested in. Corweiller takes great precautions to check and recheck all of my coordinates and to assure that the great 'scope is accurately trained. He monitors the cessium clock which controlls the tracking mechanisms. He reviews the previous night's watch plan and carefully examines the film magazines and the photographic plates which I have prepared for his use during the night. I do not mind this constant review of my work. Corweiller is very precise and it is important in our work that the elements of error are eliminated. We exchange silent greeting as he enters the tiny elevator that takes him up to the observer's platform. I have the night plan ready for him. My calculations are exact and he is always appreciative. I keep close watch on several chronometers and time the exposures for him. Occasionally we will discuss the composition and light sensitive chemical qualities of various film emulsions. Other than that, we rarely speak. At four A.M. I take tea up to him in a stainless steel thermos and in these close moments, up there in the observer's chair, he allows me to peer into the depths of the universe and gaze out at the indelible wonders of the stars. I sleep in the daytime. The nights emerge, a precession of clockwork. On Mondays and Fridays, I prepare my own work on the varying intensities and rhythms of the pulsing Cepheid and RR Lyrae stars. There is some speculation to date that our own star, Sol, may be just such kind of star and that it is in fact irregularly variable. I would hope that my own researches based on the changes of the visible spectra in certain of these variables would lead us to some conclusions about the nature of our own stellar environment. What I am doing is decidedly routine but I take pleasure in knowing the measure of scheduled days.    Each Friday, after my ride down the mountain roads, and across the valley, I come to a block of apartment buildings close to the University. These are two-story brick buildings with steel casement windows. Hedges line metered sidewalks and the grass is always trimmed and green. Dogs are not allowed. I visit a young woman who lives there. She is a divorcee who has one child, female, four years old, blonde, normal build, fifty-two pounds. The child stays with a sitter on Friday nights and I don't see her until Saturday mornings. She hasn't learned my name yet. Her mother is also blonde. She is always eager to see me and appreciates my scientific pursuits. She is a microbiologist and works cataloguing viruses in the laboratories administered by the famous Raoul Fuchs, a pioneer in microbiology. The lab is funded simultaneously by the University and by several private medical foundations. The staff there is very well paid and cared for. My weekend lover works closely with Fuchs, although I don't think he speaks to her very often. I arrive at seven-thirty every Friday night. She gives me Scotch to drink and I relax from the treacherous drive down the mountain and from the tensions caused by anticipating the blinding lights. She always has her apartment lights turned low because of my professional concern for the quality of my night vision. She is a very soft woman with clear, fair skin. Her name is Claudine but I call her Clo...its an affectionate pet name that I learned in France when I was there on a research exchange. A professor I knew had a wife named Claudine and he often called her Clo. Clo is usually passionate and playful. She freely directs my preliminary caresses. Her bedroom is small and white with blue curtains slightly faded by sunlight. There is no brick-a-brack. She has displayed five original Jasper Johns prints along one wall. She purchased them some years prior as an investment. On the opposite wall there is a long dressing mirror and a walnut hutch which she uses as a dresser. Her voice is melodious. Often tears come to her eyes, perhaps with anticipation. She is curious and breathless, drinking that which I save for her each week. At a quarter to nine, we leave the apartment building and walk to the campus cinema series held in Specker Hall. We walk along the streets that are crowded with noisy vehicles and choked with old tabloids and shopper's throw-aways. The mercury vapor lights don't generally affect my eyes, but I wear my Gemini glasses just in case. She wears a leather coat with a mink collar, a gift from her former husband who was an actuary. Their divorce had something to do with her flute playing. On this particular night I began to notice certain subtle fluctuations in the predicted pattern of events. There had been no sudden encounters with mad truck lights in my usually perilous descent from my mountain sanctuary. Rather, it was a smooth, restful ride and I noticed the orange streaks in the western sky. The valley roads were not crowded with the usual vehicle traffic. People were not swarming ! around the drive-in fast food dispensaries, nor were any of their sallow children to be seen clamoring near the garbage receptacles. I did not see a single Highway Patrol car. And since it was very easy to find a parking space near the brick apartment buildings where she lived I arrived somewhat ahead of schedule. The babysitter was taking the child away as I entered the bright yellow hallway with its series of brown doors and brass fixtures. I do not like the green carpet. The babysitter was overweight, as I had once imagined, and smiled at me without looking at me directly. The child was playing with a stuffed cotton owl. The babysitter giggled as she took the happy child upstairs to another apartment. Clo was waiting, flushed and excited. I could see that she was very happy and had been drinking. The lights were all on bright, but that didn't really matter because I had kept my Gemini glasses on, whereas I usually put them into their titanium case and placed that in my inner breast pocket. I closed the apartment door. She said, "They were celebrating at the laboratory. Ransward has been promoted. Even so, his wife is no longer ill and then there is the news from the greenhouse. They have completed the new wing." "Was it a grand opening?" I asked in reply. The Venetian blinds were drawn up, the cords hanging loosely to the floor. A Galaxy Exclusive: Gateway's other ending! Clo became very suggestive of sudden passion and stripped off her cashmere sweater and bra right in front of me. Her nipples were extended. I still had my raincoat on. There was a glass on the cherry coffee table and I assumed that it held scotch. She lay back on the couch, her arms stretched over her head. The uncovered window seemed to intrigue her. "What if someone looks in?" she said, laughing at the thought she had expressed. The possibility seemed to heighten her playful sex game. She asked me to drink some of the scotch. It was from a John Begg bottle I had bought three weeks prior. I didn't even think of her small white bedroom. She was very daring to have pulled the Venetian blinds up... it seemed to be something planned. I wondered about it, but said nothing and kept most of my clothes on just for diversion.    We were late starting out for the cinema. She held my arm and discoursed on the peculiar nature of the quaint, humorous viruses which she was currently observing. I noticed that the gutters and streets were clean and I only saw one throw-away shopper's guide. Briefly, from the comer of my eye, letters. Light rain began to fall as we climbed the wide cement stairway that lead to the Specker Science Hall where the medium capacity auditorium was reserved each Friday for members of the Cinema Series. I have been in regular attendance for twenty-three months. The series is particularly frequented by scientific professionals and lately the incidence of political types and radical artisans has been waning, a cycle I have noticed to have a peakslough frequency of four months. We took our seats quickly. I couldn't recall being late before. The evening program had just begun. I had seen one of the films before. It was directed by Robert Flaherty and the grainy quality of the print was somehow relaxing. There was no reason to think about the dead peonies; nothing in the film program suggested them. I didn't notice any cigar smoke and kept my right hand close to the mink on Clo's leather coat collar. Twice during the program, which was somehow quite brief, she whispered to me about ink on her hands. "I had to wash them three times and then it was difficult under my fingernails," she said at first; and then later, toward the end of the second film, which was an obscure Latin American political drama, she whispered "... you would think they would get some special cleanser. It's hardly visible now but some is still there on my thumb." There was a medium rain falling as we left the cinema. The air had an acid taste to it and I found it uncomfortable to breathe deeply. She didn't want to go to the Pizza Palace, but I insisted in a quiet manner. It was a necessary part of the evening and a contrast to the studied decorum of the Cinema Series. Many of the same people from the cinema went to the Pizza Palace afterward. I was happy that she soon forgot her reasons for not wanting to go. We drove on near empty streets with colors from the storefronts and from the street lights running together in the reflections of the rain-wet street. We didn't play the radio. She always considers this drive to the Pizza Palace to be precarious and she doesn't like the old streetcar tracks, especially if they glisten in the rain. It's very difficult to avoid them, but I manage it very well. She says they frightened her as a child, that she saw them as dangerous metal snakes. She tends to stare at them in fascination when they are wet and threading away into the light. She knows full well that they only lead to the deserted car barn. Somehow the imagery terrorizes her. On this night, there was a large crowd at the Palace, as I had expected, due to the modest rain. The incidence of crowds is somehow variable with the density of the rain... light or heavy rain will produce only a moderate crowd, thinning to only a small gathering with the heaviest downpours. Moderate rains produce the heaviest crowds, so it's easy to see the expectancy. It was difficult for us to get our usual table and we both noticed the gaping mouths of the pizza eaters assembled. She gave her secret laugh. Eventually we had to share a table with several others, something that I readily enjoyed, but sensed that she didn't. Two frowns from the history department sat quite close to us and perhaps for our benefit engaged us in a lively discussion on the philosophy of science. Inevitably the discussion led to the proliferation of nuclear arms and the moral question facing those scientists involved in planning the developments in nuclear engineering. I thought that I was correct in stating the inherent differences between pure and applied sciences as well as the difference between research and engineering. Actually, I wasn'tuite prepared to accept the discussion, involved as I am with the vast reaches of deep outer space where man and his toys, now so lethal and extortive, are quite obviously not permitted. I told them about the state of flux in catalogued RR Lyrae stars and thatour own Sol might be just such a star and that our state of society could disappear, almost if not in fact overnight. One solar flare of major intensity and life here on Earth could be reduced to bacteria. They weren't prepared for such a casual statement of cosmic practicality, nor for the immensity of gas volume ejected from variable stars in the form of intermittent solar flares. I began to notice a fluctuation in the pulse of conversation and was sorry to have left my Omega wrist chronometer in the car. I became aware of a certain tall girl sitting close to the window. I felt a sudden tension creep across my forehead as if I were involved in heavy concentration. The history buffs were deep into the latest account of nuclear reactor accidents and were parying the reality of the India tests with new reactor plans speculated on by the Egyptian forces amid the Arab community. A chill spread evenly across the floor. I could see it flow as well as feel it tuck about my ankles. I looked across the table expecting to gaze into the eyes of my lover, she who is my friend and who helps me dissipate the cloudy tensions that gather from the mental intensity my work requires. A cold phase of inactivity had gripped her. It was clearly someone else looking out from her eyes. A change spread over her face, subtle and unnoticed by anyone else. I stared at her, transfixed. It appeared that a hairless, brown-toothed old man was peering at me, or through me. There was a laugh of recognition. I shuddered. It was clear that this subtle figure was aware of all our intimacies. Behind him, I had the image of an amphitheatre somewhat like those used for surgical instruction. It was occupied by a chorus of washerwomen who sneered at the sensual content of my mind. As suddenly as they all had appeared, these imagistic wraiths, there was a sudden increase in the level of the rainstorm. Again I noticed the tall girl sitting alone at the window. Her hair was a soft reddish brown. A message came to me from her mind. I knew she was trying to contact me. I had known it for three weeks. Now it was clear. I knew that I would see her the next day at the data processing center. She worked there for a Laser Spectrographic Statistic group. I recalled seeing her before. With the sudden increase in rain, the searching ghost of an old man left the face of my companion. She seemed unaware of any outside event. She noticed that my hand was shaking, so I quickly brought my mind to the reference file of main sequence stars. This is a great stabilizer for me in times of unclarity or stress. The hideous washerwomen and their spectral interlocutor dissolved completely as the waitress came over to our table to announce that the Palace was out of mushrooms. I suddenly said, "Cassiopeia," outloud! No one seemed to hear me. I had a sudden impulse to return to the Observatory that very night. The pizza arrived just at the critical moment in the decision process, and I was persuaded by its aroma to postpone any sudden departure from the median flow and to ride out the night's impending storm. Even without the mushrooms, the pizza centered my consciousness enabling me to overcome any desire to flee back to the safety and comfort of my familiar rooms on the mountain. The rain continued and even increased in falling density. There was no wind, only heavy rain. As we consumed the pizza its steamy air-pocketed crust supported the bubbling cheese layer and emitted the pungent scent of oregano. I again felt that the tall girl from the Laser Spectro group was signalling me. It was her aura that reminded me of Cassiopeia. I strained to imagine her motives, to grasp the import of her need to contact me so covertly. She seemed intent upon the patterns of sound generated by the rise and lad of the frequency of the rain. Mentally, I notated the rain patterns in a binary sequence. I would be able to run them into our computer module the very next morning. The rain began fading to moderate. The Cassiopeian left the Palace suddenly, just as a squad of happy undergraduates poured in the front door. As I had once observed, the fluctuations in the density of rain was proportional to the density of the crowd. More people poured in the door as Clo and I prepared to leave. We helped each other with our coats and slipped out into the rain. I was chewing the last of our pizza crust, and Clo was reciting stanzas from Poe. My eyes had suffered somewhat from the flare of the neon beer sign that hung on the wall of the pizza place. It had been directly to my left, affecting my peripheral vision to that side. Because of that, Clo drove us home to her apartment. She didn't mind driving, in fact seemed to enjoy the wet streets and the slow-moving traffic. She understood that my mind was busy with the variable star project. I did not mention the vision that I had observed in the pizza shop. I knew that such a disclosure would only bring forth a welter of confusion and attempts to ease my state of mind. I was clear in the matter. I knew that the girl from laser data and the vision of the spectral searching man were real and related. I was unable to make any of the necessary synaptic connections and was particularly uncertain as to the nature of the name "Cassiopeia" that had appeared in my mind. I labled the entire phenomenon "Cassiopeian Intrigue" and filed it all away for further investigation. I especially did not mention the part about the tall girl sending me messages.    Much later, as I lay naked and erect upon Clo's bed, unresisting to the explorations of her fingers and of her lips, I repeated the binary sequence that I had notated in the drumming of the rain against the window where the tall girl had been seated. The sequences were clear in my mind. I was speculating on the probability that this Miss Cassiopeia was manipulating the frequency in the manner of a code. Clo enjoys our late night sex play, especially, it seems, when I am into a state of mental concentration that rather detaches me from my body. She finds that I am then passive and unresisting and she can have my body completely under her will and desire. This seems to occur in the middle week of every second month usually just before one of my major bouts with the data processing machines. Clo is far more tactile than I am. It pleases me also to be able to surrender my body to her. That night as I lay awash in the rhythms of her touches, I again felt the rhythms of the rain and just for one instant imagined that Clo and Miss Cassiopeia were one and the same. I fell asleep envisioning the morrow's encounter. My time schedule for the data terminal was #:# until, #:# in the morning session and #:# until #:# in the afternoon. I always process for an hour or more. I am very fortunate in having this much time available to me for my own project. Corweiller is responsible for that and I am very grateful for it. I have a close friend in cloud and he can't get anywhere near that much time even for his confidential projects. I once offered to surrender some of my time on our access to the #. He did not take the offer kindly. He failed to see the humor in my situation. He certainly considered that the offer might have been a security test. I was prepared to arrive at the data center at #:#. That would leave two minutes to enter the building, five minutes to make my way to the Astral Research Data terminal room and fifteen clear minutes to organize my thoughts and direct them into the flow of my project. Computer programs were my specialty in high school. I secured my university scholarships through a mastery of the mathematics involved. I feel very secure in front of a computer console and my capabilities are well recorded. That morning I allowed for delays and mishaps as I usually do by getting up at #:# and getting an early start. I have never yet missed schedule on data time. I am always ready to activate my console and plug into the electron flow on time and without delay. After breakfast, which I always prepare as this is one of my personal joys, Clo went up to the sitter's apartment to bring her child back home. It was during those moments while I was eating the last of the commeal muffins that I began to realize that it would not be an ordinary day. I suddenly suspected that the binary notations that I had made the previous night from the raindrops would probably phase into some kind of language and thereby a direct message would transmit. I could see that I would probably not be working on my own ideas or with my own information. Ordinarily this would have distressed me but I was intrigued by the Cassiopeians and I didn't care if I missed the entire day. I sensed that something of more immediate importance was going on and I vowed to keep my mind open as I prepared my morning program. According to schedule, I arrived at the data center just at #:# a.m. Clo had driven me there in my for lube and oil. Her daughter accompanied us and as I got out of the car, the child said to me, "Hurry, hurry, Cassiopeia is calling you." I was thunderstruck at first, and a chill started to gather about my ankles again. Clo said nothing unusual, however, and the bright sun of the' morning glittered in the windshield. They drove off without any further inferences. I went into the building without any more hesitation. The morning sun and dewy fragrance in the air was replaced by the even, flat fluorescence of the entry corridor. The Observatory offices and data consoles are on the top floor. We have a splendid view of the local rooftops and the towering old trees and bushes. There are more than # rare varieties of trees in the neighborhood and with the high rolling hills and the porticos of the more residential areas, the entire scene is quite pastoral, especially on Saturday mornings. I took the red elevator to our floor and checked into the console room immediately. According to schedule, I plugged into the #.    Unprecedented input barraged me. I began to receive voluminous static and superfluous data. I activated several damping frequencies to filter out the unessential noise and return the console to my control d activity. I began to concentrate on pertinent details and to slowly organize a residual fund of sunspot data in preparation for a cross referal with the suspected emission data from Cygnus RR#. Right away I received a direct order from the #. I was stunned. I had both heard and imagined that console technicians, true artists in the science of computer programming and engineering, could with fortune and polarity contact the heart of the machine. The # itself began directing the course of events. My sunspot cross referal was shuttled into an idle memory rewind and my console was cleared. The video screen printed out my name. I was directed to pay attention to the screen. I was next directed to punch out a simple pattern on a standard input card and did so at the cutter, which is just like a typewriter cutting stencils. The keyboard is different with more symbols and the only thing it does is cut holes in plastic cards. I looked at the pattern I had cut and couldn't place it arij where in my mind. I memorized it as a matter of professional curiosity and determined to reproduce it sometime in the future. The video screen next ordered me to fit the card into the receiver. I balked. I punched in a mathematical question which was not in itself material but one by which the # would know that I wasn't just taking orders from a machine. The video screen immediately told me that my sunspot data would be cancelled unless I complied. I was not at all used to coercion and my hands began to shake. I had devoted twelve years to compiling that data. I followed the order. There were two other consoles in the Astral Research Data room. Both of them activated the moment that I put the new program into the receiver. I was startled and a bit frightened. I didn't have authoriza' tion to activate the other consoles. I It was not considered ethical to tamper with someone else's console without prior acknowledgement. Years of work could be erased in The # next ordered me to j be calm and not be concerned for i the opening of the other two consoles. The data they controlled was being stored in similar manner to my own simple collations of sunspots. I sat in front of the center console, closing my eyes as the extraordinary input increased. I began I to visualize and to hear the workings of the data flow contained in the machine. The # is really a very big computer and until then I had no actual idea of just how much information and how many additional probabilities were available. I began to see within my mind and fixed on a crystalline structure vibrating sonorously at # cycles per second. I hadn't seen the tall girl that morning. I had often seen her before on these Saturday mornings either in the corridor or behind the glass windows of the Optical Laser Group study library. A second image appeared in the middle of the crystal structure. It turned and glowed softly like a hologram. The next order I perceived inside my head. It was Miss Cassiopeia. She was seated at a bench in the Laser Spectro Laboratory. I looked at her clearly. She said, "I need your help. Pay attention to the #. I need your assistance." 'Die image faded and next I saw Clo sitting in the park nearby, not far from the tennis courts. Her child was picking miner's lettuce that was growing in a ragged row under a clump of older eucalyptus trees. I could see Clo's old black Porsche speedster sitting at the curb with the top down. Clo looked at me out of the depths of the glowing crystal. She said, "You have been selected to assist Miss Cassiopeia because of your expertise in manipulating the energy flow of #. The machine likes you. I am going to help you. Perhaps you think that I am not enough aware of the intricacies of this machine, but that is of no importance. You may feel free to draw upon my mental energies as Miss Cassiopeia directs." There was no time to respond to Clo's announcement. A polarity surge swept me into activity. The # began to give me programming information and was requesting routes for a fifty micron laser flow. I opened six optical circuits for a review and let the machine pick the fastest one. The video monitor gave me the message, "Fastest is not always best," and then, "Prepare six additional routes that are less direct." I wondered why the # couldn't do the projections itself and then I realized that the machine was not entirely in control of things and that if it needed me to program, I had a definite lever to use in regaining my illusions of independence. I opened six more opticals and sent them on longer routes that combined a series of thin-film prisms which were sitting unused at the entrance to the spectrum analyzer of our own Space Simulation Lab. The machine next directed me to put on a fine-wire headset that was resting on top of the video monitor. It fit lightly over the temples and around the medula oblongata. It appeared to be made of molybdenum and had two crystals of unknown composition situated on either side. The headset was not part of the #' s standard equipment. I didn't have time to ask where it came from. As soon as I fit the device over my temples, I heard a quick pleasant note somewhat like the ring heard upon striking a piece of fine cut glass. The ringing tone was followed by a rush of electronic bell tones similar to those heard in long distance couplings of the telephone system. kk it I realized at once that my mind had been propelled out of my body and that I was, in all certain effects, a conscious part of the # itself. A wave of fear swept me through a series of terminal blocks and through the high threshold extra noise barriers. I became aware of all memory cores stored within the data retrieval systems. I knew the essence of the various circuitries, electrical as well as optical. I came to rest in a cool yellow place that seemed to harmonize with my own frequency of excitation. Miss Cass was already there waiting for me. She anticipated my questions about the headset and about a lot of other recent phenomena which were beyond the schedule of regular events. I heard her voice drifting to me from the very substrate structure of the optical couplings. "The headset was made according to my design by technicians in my employ. The # is currently under my direction. I planned it that way for this time period. We are in a fortress. It is a fortress of my mind composed to protect me from an assault that is due momentarily. "We are currently the only minds within the machine and the only operators working at the consoles. Your body is functioning quite correctly and continues to follow directives impulsed through the electron flow. It is at this moment constructing a pattern of decoys, dodges and traps for my assailants. The body that you identify as "me" is in the Laser Spectro Lab, building an obstacle course for amplified light. Your function will involve coordinating a variety of microwave and electron circuits. Pay attention and Jo what is required and you shall be ' well rewarded." I was concerned to hear of my body spoken of as "it" but I ad' justed quickly to being both me and not-iue. I was primarily determined not to lose twelve years of astral reI search to the inner workings of the # and its new controller. The body that had housed me was notme. It was working smoothly under the direction and supervision of the #. Miss Cass generated an image of the Astral Data console room and I saw myself seated com; fortably at the digital printer, i Biological functions were monitored and displayed on the oscilloscope network in the medical research monitors of the astronaut program located on the third floor. I regained  a measure of security in knowing I that my body was being cared for ! by the very machine that was using ' ' I caught the image of Miss Cass' j long, slender earthbody tinkering I with a variety of laser gear, princi: pally a niodimium single pulse ' generator of great length. She was a ! very beautiful figure, tall and slim, j Her fingers were quite long and ' very busy with inter-connectors. I ! couldn't decide what she was doing I and looked for the answer within the # itself. I had to do so inbetween micro-bits because I was i being called upon every few sec: onds to make numerous changes in I pre-scheduled programs. It seemed ; to me that some sort of evasive contest was being waged somewhere in the tiny world of electronic impulse modulators. I was able to detach a reasonable portion of my creative mind from the rather rote re-programming that was being called for from the central data banks. With this essential explorative problem-solving entity within my mind-body, I was able to tour about inside the circuitry. The first noticeable situation that I encountered was the full "on" status of the Visual Simulation Laboratory on the same floor as our own console room. The entire staff of the Visual Experiments group was away on a picnic... Yet, the monitors and video screens amid their collection of advanced equipment were all in operation. The complete arrangement of optical circuits, those operated by laser light instead of the more conventional electrical current, were in play and the latest speculations in thin connectors were manifested in a variety of wave-guide modes. Light waves emanating from the thin-film lasers formed a maze of probabilities that I dared not explore too deeply at that instant for fear of getting lost within the blur of vari-colored lights. As I navigated through the memory core terminals. Miss Cass' voice caught up to me. "Behind alpha-Cassiopeia is a binary star," she said. "It can't be seen from Earth because alpha-Cassiopeia is the sight line. The way your planet is moving, the binary system that was once my home won't come into view for another # years. The binary system is blue and white... a small, tiny, lovely white star, a diamond so beautiful. And then there is the blue giant. The giant star has fifty-five inhabited planets revolving in its biosphere. The white star has only three. "The Overseers of the blue spectrum star captured the white system My whole family of Advanced Light Cult Technicians was put to work for the Overseers. About two hundred years ago, two of my sisters and I escaped via our mastery of hyper-light devices and application theories. I have been hiding here on Earth since # and have passed my consciousness into three living bodies including the one now working in the Laser Spectro Lab. This latest one I conceived with a Swedish Olympic star back in # She is now twentythree. The host body, the mother body, dies soon after delivery and the mind-body migrates to the new baby. You will be getting into that here on Earth in "One of my sisters lives now on Banisterias, a single uninhabited planet that revolves around Proxima Centauri. The other one wanders through the uninhabited spheres that Clouds of Magellan. Eventually, we plan to establish a colony of our friends there to carry on the pre. cepts of our Cult of Light and exist there in freedom without coercion from any Overs'eers. We will be effectively out of the galaxy." It was hard for me to comprehend what she was talking about. I couldn't imagine who these Overseers were and why she was hiding from them. I was fascinated by the inner workings of the # and was determined to discover how this Miss Cass had contrived to commandeer such an elaborate machine and, more importantly for my own welfare, how she managed to propel my mind into the inner workings of the circuitry. I dispensed with any mathematical communications and; asked her directly why she wasl afraid. "Unfortunately," she replied shortly, "the Overseers from Casularix, that's the blue star people, have issued an arrest warrant for me and my two sisters. That has made us fair game on any of the planets that Casularix corresponds with, including all of alpha-Cassiopeia. The Overseers hold patents for some of the hyperlight devices that we designed for them in order to pay off our father's mortgage, see? By claiming that we are potentially subversive knowledge holders, they have somewhat quarantined us to underdeveloped planets like Earth or totally noncivilized places like Banasterias. "Fortunately for us there are a hundred Earth places within easy reach of the average light traveller and it is hard for them to track us down. They want us in jail somewhere so we can't break their control of the light device market. Actually we have no such plans. But they are much too mercantile to believe it." I was preparing to ask a dozen simple questions when a lower decibel audio wave brought the defense system to alert status. The first attack began as an infusion of sound vibrations that immediately threatened to overwhelm the laser currents I had constructed as perimeter defense. Sound waves can create interference patterns in a laser beam as it travels through certain transparent solids. The interference patterns were beginning to disrupt the sequence of our color codes and, at instants, breaking the cohesion of some micro-watt beams. Miss Cass remained calm and unmoved within her orb of concentration. The # was completely in her control. As the sound-wave invasion began probing into the secondary data receivers, she directed a magnetic microwave advance to absorb it. She was taking the sound probe into the peripheral data circuits and rev-recording them... "If these sounds could be packaged here on Earth and put out to the public on cassettes, you would probably have a market potential of #! Seventeen percent would be certain to purchase." Her message was printed out across the security data third floor system analyzer which was housed right next to the astronaut premedical evaluation study. "Quite a nifty profit would be gained and you wouldn't have to arrange accounts for the musicians." "Who is it?" I questioned her. "Who is attacking you and why?" I wasn't at all sure that Miss Cass should be so protected. She had definitely conscripted me. I was her lieutenant, her general and her private all at the same time. I wasn't at all sure of her, but managed to balance my uncertainty with the unprecedented opportunity to explore the inner workings of the #. For the moment I was quite capable of manning her battle stations and countering the somewhat clumsy and rather scattered attack that was in progress. The sound attack was being drawn off and absorbed on the magnetic recorders. As each tape was filled, not-me seated in the Astral Data room drew the contents through the satellite communications group translator, amplified the impulses into microwaves and transmitted them back into space via Galaxy Communications Research Facility located in the high desert, three hundred miles away. I knew these sudden and unauthorized transmissions would cause interruptions and theoretical arguments at plain'ed. I tried to disguise the frequency barriers to resemble cosmic ray-hadron interactions, but was certain that the shallow curve graph details would be detected. Miss Cass did not seem to care or even to notice that we had pirated several classified strategic transmission cycles. I balked at her cold hearted communications base. Some of the finest minds of the century worked there myself in a consultant's capacity. "People can lose their jobs over this," I complained. "This is completely unauthorized!" Miss Cass' reply was accompanied by low hissing static. "Unauthorized? I am the authority within the #. These technologies are here and now under my direction." I hated dictatorships, but I held a reserve of admiration for her concentration of energies. This unknowable person was commanding an interrelated system of potentials that had taken the combined evolution of Earth civilization five thousand .years to build. And she was using it for a shield. Her voice filtered out of the hissing static and fluttered amid the lower decibels. "I have made these separate technologies work together for the first time, perhaps the only time in their brief histories... the Spectro Group, the Visual Simulations Lab, Astrological Data, even a feedpulse generator from the Linear Accelerator." Her voice flowed away like springwater tumbling over rocks. I j had the sudden feeling that perhaps i this was the only true reason for the existence of Earth's massive electronics industry... to protect Miss Cass from her pursuers. All the other reasons, the research, the advance of knowledge, the myriad ap plications of science and engineerI ing, medicine and commerce were at that moment inferior and secondary. The sound attack faded. It served j only to tense the system of defense. : I agreed with the principle of abI sorbing the varied sound energies,  mixing them into softer and more manageable frequencies and then amplifying them into microwaves j for transmission back into space.  Miss Cass' ability to turn barrages of noise into music intoxicated me. The amplified # hummed and whined at triple speed. I hadn't known such complete circuit integrations were possible. I began to  relax a bit and to enjoy the sensaI tion of being completely in tune I with one of the most diversified  computer systems on the planet. I j thought that the attack had been t rather weak. I couldn't see the  reasons compelling such an elaborate defense capability as Miss Cass had constructed. She was, after all, worth of advanced electronics. I j began to poke around in the memory rewinds looking for my sidetracked sunspot data. I didn't form a complete mental image of my intention: I didn't want the # to get anxious about my surveys. Miss Cass seemed quiet and very distant. She was setting up a maze of photon circuits within the Laser Spectro Lab's experimental energy translators. I could see her Earthbody on a video monitor in the Biodata Observation Unit. She was still busy interconnecting a series of flash pumps about a niodimium lasjng rod. Miss Cass had contrived to schedule the most advanced collection of modern technicians away from their hardware, away from their theoretical homebase. Every other computer person in the # Program was away on vacation or a picnic or accumulated sick leave. It was a schedule she had processed over a time period of eleven months. That was quite understandable because everyone on the Program had his schedule arranged to some degree by the # itself. I had a momentary insight into her nuclear sense of timing just as I was relaxing into thoughts about our own rote acceptance of any computer print-out or computer issued statement, bill, or time schedule.    The second attack began soon after the sound probes had been absorbed, transmuted, and relayed back out into space. As I wasn't expecting another challenge the alert signal startled me. The # gave the new assault the code title of "Copy Two" and sent out an order for replacement parts. I began to see that the original # was limited to certain modes of thinking and reacting. I was amazed at its foresight in planning for future breakdowns. The electron flow that was being directed at us intensified and began to overflow the diversion circuits that I had prepared during my first few minutes of conscription. Excess energy was coming into the primary relays and racing toward the binary memory cores. The memory cores began to record this radiation as fast as it came in. Miss Cass quickly directed me to reverse the polarity on the magnetic fail-safe impulse shredder and hang on. I began to feel an applied extra gravity compressing me. The electron flow assailing us was saturating my station. I couldn't move my thought patterns very well and began to panic. The sense of being squeezed into microspace and isolated there was terrifying. A thousand negatives flashed into my consciousness. I was certain that Miss Cass had contrived to murder me in the pursuit of her self-protective schemes to control the # complex and its supportive systems. I had to struggle against a hundred forces that pressed upon me. I was losing my identity and feared disintegration into the molecular status. I tried to recall the preliminary images that I had seen when I first plugged into the console earlier in the morning. I couldn't determine how much time had elapsed since then; I couldn't tell if it was five minutes or five hours. I recalled seeing Clo and her lovely daughter playing in the sunshine and I wrestled against my attackers in order to draw close to Clo, her child, and the flowers. I remembered her last words to me. They seemed now like final instructions, "... you may feel free to draw upon my mental energies." I sought to do so and the picture that stayed in my mind process grew stronger and more clear. I could not, however, bring to mind any contact with Clo nor any further instmctions that would assist in the evasion or repulsion of my attackers. Clo's image seemed to drift away beyond my reach. The face of her child became transparent like a leering jack-o'-lantem lit by candle. Each time Clo appeared to speak, her words were blurred out by the soft, floating tunes of an unseen fluteplayer. An aurora of pink and yellow light eclipsed the sunny, flowerdotted knoll that Clo sat upon. The flute music faded and the entire picture shriveled and blew away like mist. In a rage of fear and loss, I threw off the yoke of gravity that was condensing me and fled down a corridor of ruby light. I was deep within the microcircuits of the optical spectrum, pursued by an echoing roar of free electrons when I suddenly came upon the retrieval circuits in which the # had hidden my sunspot data. The reel was set to unwind through a magnetic eraser. I flashed a "close" signal to the eraser, sent ! the entire real of data to an unused residual collating bin and fused the , input-call switch which consisted of a magno iron-garnet film set on a circular substrate disk of isogarnet. The data was safe from internal communication. There was no way  for the # to recall it and send j it to an eraser terminal. , I was free. I was not free from the pursuit of Miss Cass' attackers. Naturally they sought to destroy my effectiveness as her ally. I began to visualize a swarm of electronic warrior emissaries gathering about me again. I fled once more into the laser light corridors of the optical circuits. There was no time to assert my freedom from the #' s directives. Quite the contrary, pursued as I was, I needed the machine's assistance and protection. I requisitioned an impact by-line through the maser transducers and sought out a friendship maze in the pattern reproduction unit. The # was not responding adequately to my distress calls. I felt that I was drowning in electricity, that I was a fish swimming through dry sand. I began to absorb the energy that surrounded me, seeking some medium to sustain my flight. I imagined that I was lost on the Moon trying to breathe powdered rocks in place of air. I expected consciousness to wane, however, the compression that threatened me lifted. The roaring express of electrons that pursued me fell far behind. I thought that I could hear gulls crying in a soft wind and seals barking in an unseen mist. Miss Cass appeared beside me in a yellow orb of sunlight. "Rest," she said. "Your pursuers are gone." Her figure was entirely naked, her head adorned with a mane of soft hair in every hue. "Our maze of prism couplers has lost them in the substrates of the infra-red filters. All they can generate now is excess heat and that will be radiated away by the #'s internal thermostat." I began to recover from my flight of panic and realized that I had served as a travelling decoy. The warrior emissaries that I had perceived following me through the laser corridors had not found their way out. The # had diverted them into a heat trap. I took advantage of the momentary resting place to assert myself. "Look here," I said boldly, "I'm through! My sunspot data is beyond your reach. The # is not all-powerful; it is simply a machine. It has limitations and it can't reach my data and erase it, and furthermore, you can't either. I'm getting out of this micro-war! I never volunteered and I don't know why my discomfort and peril should be benefiting you. I have a good job at the Observatory and a lovely lady waiting for me... in fact. I'm going to have her come and get me right now." Miss Cass lowered her violet eyes. "Not anymore you don't. Look." Our minds convened before the video monitors in the Visual Simulation Lab. I couldn't be sure that the scenes produced were in any way real. Miss Cass was capable of producing anything on those screens. I watched and saw Clo and her child get into a battered pickup truck. I think it was a # Dodge. Miss Cass narrated the scenes that flickered on the tubes. "Your lady friend is leaving you. The man she is with now has been in and out of her life for three years." I saw a slender, shabby figure of a man loading a few suitcases into the back of the pickup. "He is her music teacher, and the reason for her previous divorce. She is leaving you to live' with him and play the flute. She is taping a note to the hasn't the courage to face you; after all you haven't done anything wrong and, in fact, she considers you a perfect mate. The music teacher has some kind of spell over her. They are going to live in a small shack near Sebastapol... Besides that, she has smashed in the right side of your automobile." I couldn't believe what I was seeing. An emotional know was constricting my chest. It was hard to think straight. Clo and I had been together for seven months. True, we only saw each other on weekends but that was due to the nature of our professions. I knew that she hadn't been seeing anyone else during that time and she knew that I hadn't, either. It just wasn't like her to run off to Sebastapol in an old rusty pickup. I decided that the video images were false and this Miss Cass was generating them to increase her leverage over me. With my sunspot data safe, she needed some additional coercives to keep me in her schemes. I was in a good position to bargain. "The second attack is over," Miss Cass said. "Our fortress has held. We haven't been defeated... everything is safe. Almost everything." "What about Clo?" I asked. "Everything in your world is safe but what about mine? A good part of my life has just disintegrated and I have no immediate chance of putting it back together." "You don't believe it now, but you have gained. When this is all over and you return to your previous schedule, you will notice that lots of things have changed somewhat. I shall have to assume partial responsibility for the dissolution of your romance. I knew it was coming, you did not... I could have prepared you." "How did you know? Why have you conscripted me? You have separated us and arranged all this..." My mind settled into a hundred questions and I began to feel very tired and fuzzed out along the edges. Miss Cass' voice softened and her words condensed on the video screens, forming images of flying creatures. "I did not conscript you, the # selected you because of your intuitive programming skills. I tried to communicate with you on other planes, especially last night with my raindrop game, but I was unsuccessful!." I started to recall the binary sequences that I had noted the night before, remembering the soft and hard patterns in the rain. I was somewhat caught between selfadmiration for my position of pre-eminence with the # -- after all there are over fifteen hundred skilled programmers scheduling in the current cycle -- and my attempt to get free.    Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a great pulse of light energy. A thousand red shapes swarmed past me, followed by a great glowing globe of multi-hued intensity. I couldn't contain the volume of light that flashed by. Miss Cass retreated into the central cores of the optical circuitry. Her pursuers had generated a third attack. The image that I had confronted in the previous barrage tripled. Miss Cass was losing her cool yellow composure. She began to oscillate in the red spectrum. Her familiar human shape suddenly dispersed, becoming a spidery pattern of violet. The warrior emissaries from the star system Casularix renewed their attempts to take control of the # and its variegated systems. I could actually see them this time. They had tall flickering ghost shapes but no specific mass or density. Their forms pulsated in the red wavelengths, some of them stretching into blue. Miss Cass was generating a nervous retreat. "They know I am here for sure. Calimat himself will join the attack. They think they have me in a comer!" I couldn't comprehend the mechanism by which these emissaries intended to capture Miss Cass. No sooner had I formed the question than I received the answer via the #'s intramural communications simulator: "... there is no capture, my ally, there is only absorbtion. Calimat intends to consume my energy and take my light-knowledge for himself. With my quantity absorbed into his, he can master the hyper light techniques and gain control of the Casularix star system." I was not a decoy this time. The waves of pursuing energy forms swept past me into the micro regions of the photon oscillators. I began to close down the entire system, circuit by circuit, coupler by coupler. I felt that Miss Cass had gone into total micro-space. Her pursuers, including the glowing obesity known as Calimat, chased after her. I saw my chance to escape from the conflicting barrages of electrons and began to race through the optical mazes, closing them down behind me. I directed my material body, still seated dutifully at the Astral Data console, to prepare mathematical ionization modules similar to those observed beneath preliminary stellar atmospheric coronas and to jam the entire # system with these primary electrical patterns. The opportunity to escape from the inner binary relations cores arose when the entire impulse sequence diode unit fused and melted down. Three separate waves of amplified light shot out of the spectral pattern composite and I was propelled along with them like a raft on a flooding river. By quick chance, I managed to adhere to an island of tranquility at the entrance to an antique transistor relay that was part of a microwave generating station. The machine was shaking down and free electrons were hurtling everywhere. Data impulses were unwinding from the memory cores at random intervals and there was no more internal cohesion to any directives given. Slowly Miss Cass emerged from the fused infrastructures and shattered substrate material. She began to radiate her familiar aura of yellow-gold light. "They are gone." Her voice sounded distant and weak. "My fortress has indeed held together. The emissaries sent to absorb me have themselves been absorbed. Calimat was fused in the burnout of the thin-film couplers. He is not an entity of this Universe any longer. He and his tribe of Technopriests will not gain control of the hyper light devices." I was recovering my nuclear cohesion and lay back, luxuriating in a continuous emission of pleasant radiations. I couldn't exactly say that I had been wounded in action, but there was a certain feeling of healing that flowed through me. Miss Cass did not seem to have been ruffled by the burnout or diminished in any way. Her light had increased: her light-body had grown. "It's a shame that I didn't schedule our meeting sooner." Miss Cass looked radiant. "I'm leaving Earth in a very few seconds. You won't be able to follow me until you master the hyper-light traverse. It will take you the rest of your earthlife to do so. I am leaving this place because other emissaries will be on Calimat' s trail before the end of the year. They will find a very cold trail here. The events of the morning's disaster will filter back to the Overseers on Casularix but they will most probably never discover the fusion cycle that burned out my pursuers. The # won't even be the same machine by then... it will have entirely new circuits, new housings, new devices. It might not even be in the same building. Earth has served me well. It will now become an effective dead end for any future pursuits." I was amazed at her lack of concern for any of the damages done to the machine. "You just use anything you encounter to further your own plans. What about repairs? What about... ?" An image of Miss Cass began to take some shape out of the waning flashes of violet light. She wasn't quite the same. Her soft yellow aura was infused with red. Her edges were muted and fuzzy. I couldn't decide if I liked her more or liked her less. She seemed pudgy and slower. Her voice was tinny and I didn't quite believe her anymore. "Even when you had a chance to escape my conscription, you applied yourself to my defense." Miss Cass was pulsing with a slow, deliberate rhythm. "The next energy flood will propel me into another spectrum. You are welcome to ollow, astronomer. You have all the resources of Earth at your disposal. Discover the secrets of hyper-light and you can travel across the Galaxy and beyond. I am going now to seek my sisters out in the unincorporated regions of the Clouds." I wasn't sure that joining Miss Cass was important to me. But the thought of travel throughout the realms of the nebulae was intoxicating. My head was lost in a dozen instant fantasies of the clouds... myriads of star? swarming through shapeless regions of space without center. The prospected implications of my sunspot data and associated researches seemed distant and remedial. "Light," said Miss Cass. Her aura fluctuated and diminished. "Everything relies upon the light. Once you get it down about the light, you won't have to grub for coal. Can you imagine getting to the Moon on coal? All that rocket propellant isn't too many steps away from burning coal. You still burn something. Cave men burned logs, rocket men burn rocket fuel. You won't get out to the Clouds in a rocket, rocket man." I had to admit that we still didn't know how a photon was generated nor very much about how light waves propagate. But we did actually get to the Moon on fossil fuel. And Mars would soon follow. Coal and oil and gas supplied the heat and light necessary for the planners and designers and dreamers to work by. The same electricity, generated by coal and oil had made it possible to release hydrogen and cool it down enough for containerization and thus use as a propellant. Coal and oil fired the furnaces that made steel possible, made titanium possible. We did go to the Moon on fossils. I was about to defend our state of technology when Miss Cass phased into the niodimium laser spectrum, flashed through a series of light amplifiers and disappeared. The # shuddered and a thousand opticals fused. The electron cycle over-amped and the circuit breakers for thirty miles around blew out. The # was ruined. One seconds.    I was propelled out of the electrical secondary circuits via an outlet for the # line over the workbench in the Astral Data console room. It was the only line that hadn't fused in the big pulse that took Miss Cass away into a spectrum of light energy that I could only speculate about. A dozen questions of theoretical engineering formulated in my mind. I saw my other self seated calmly at the data console. I fixed my consciousness back down in my body and removed the headset that Miss Cass had fashioned and left behind. I wondered how many other pieces of hardware remained from her conscription of the system. My body was tense, and excess bioelectrical energy spasmed out of the left leg. I took a few deep breaths and opened my eyes. I could see molecular flashes in the dim blue light. I took another few breaths. The air had the heavy smell of ozone. I could hear a welter of confused voices oijtside the door and rose from the console chair, taking the steps to the door very slowly and with a slight sense of vertigo. I opened the gray metal door and stepped out into the corridor. Several people were running toward the Laser Spectro Lab. I knew exactly what they would find. A Junior fellow in the microbiology statistics group ran back down the corridor, passing me in full stride. "A young girl has been electrocuted in the laser lab! We've had a general blackout!" I couldn't tell from his glassy eyes whether he was happy with morbid excitement or terrified at the sight of a dead body. And such a lovely body, too. The giant pulse that Cass had generated to propel her through the niodimium spectra and thence to her ultimate rendezvous with her sisters of light had left her soft husk partly charred. Her clothes were still smoking and the handspun Indian cotton blouse she had worn was sixty percent vaporized. My eyes fixed upon the long pink nipples of her breasts. I cursed myself for not deciphering the raindrop code and kicked myself for being so narrow, so scientific as to think that such a code could only be related to the pursuits of knowledge! I was overcome by another flight of vertigo and had to sit down by the fire extinguisher in the corridor. Building maintenance men and a rescue squad from the gymnasium arrived. Almost a dozen men were peering at the dead form when the security investigators arrived. All of them were staring at the lovely nipples and one long burned thigh. No one was asking me questions. There was no reason to stay in the corridor, or even in the building. I went outside knowing that I would find no comfort at Clo's apartment. I made my way to the parking lot behind the dental research building ting in my reserved spot. I knew the right side was battered in, but I didn't bother to look at it. Clo's note was taped to the steering wheel, just as I had seen in the video images Cass had shown to me. I knew what it said. There was no reason to read it over. I put it in the glove compartment for future reference, and started up the engine. The only thing I could do was go home, home to the idle mountain sanctuary of my mountain observatory. I gave myself the advice not to leave the mountains for a very long time. My Gemini glasses were on the dash tucked away securely in their titanium case. I took them out as I was driving along toward the main road leading into the valley. I drove steering with one hand for a long, long time, shifting a lot with the other hand, playing it off in my head like Phil Hill taking it in for a win through the last careful laps of his next-to-last race. Electronic music would come racing through my inner ear only to fade into tinkling laughter. Images of naked, dancing women appeared on several empty billboards. The afternoon traffic was a frenzy... exactly the kind of traffic I try to avoid. The valley was humming with unusual excitement. The fast-food emporiums were jammed with honking automobiles. Hundreds of greasy children cavorted about the garbage receptacles. Fire engines and ambulances went past me at one intersection. A few miles later, I was stopped by a roadblock set up by the Highway Patrol. When it came my turn to pass through the blockade, the officers looked at me with their inherent suspicion. One of them read tion sticker out loud. Another checked my driver's license and asked me three times if my name was spelled correctly. Each time I replied that it was and finally asked, "What seems to be going on, officer? What is the matter this afternoon?' ' The patrolmen moved mechanically like figures from a medieval clock tower. A younger, blond patrolman, obviously a hick rookie, squinted at me with his faded blue eyes. "We're askin' the questions here, mister. You just move along." I was happy to comred line in every gear. I was hitting a hundred and twenty as I caught the Freeway that cut across the valley floor and then disappeared into the shadows of the mountains. I crossed the flat arm basin in record time. I knew without a doubt that some of the Cassiopeian emissaries had survived the blowout. How could I be sure that they weren't on my trail? How would I ever know that they wouldn't come upon me in some distant night seeking revenge for my part in fusing their master, Calimat? Miss Cass had flashed away before I even knew who she was or what she stood for. She had left me in a state of complete confusion. I drove off the last Freeway exit into the hills catching every turn at maximum speed. Phil Hill or not, I was leaving all caution behind. sun was just closing down on the western ridge of the mountains that lie across from the Observatory. The white buildings had taken on a mellow orange tinge and the shadows of the trees were edged in purple. Corweiller, the Chief Observer, was out by the parking lot tending his vari-colored roses. He was wearing blue overalls and his famous Swiss alpine glasses that had leather side-curtains attached to the gold frames. Corweiller never went outside without his Swiss alpine glasses. I rarely speak to Corweiller socially and was therefore surprised when he waved at me with his garden shears. Soft humus and a few pieces of straw clung to his right knee. "Stop in for brandy at six, won't you?" he asked. The sudden request was unprecedented in our personal protocol. It was definitely an honor. Though he continued to speak to me I only half heard. My head was still buzzing with residual crystalline vibrations. "We're taking the night off," Corweiller said. "Nemitz and Frier will be observing our watch for us." The sudden prospect of being replaced for the evening's watch made me wary. Perhaps I was losing my job. Budget cuts had been the subject of our most recent staff rumors. Corweiller must have sensed my uneasiness. I couldn't get a grip on the idea of Frier standing in at my position. The final rocks in my security base were crumbling. "Admiralty is coming aboard," Corweiller continued. I decoded that to mean that members of the Board of Regents were due in for an inspection tour. They always called for brandy with the Chief Observer. I was having trouble speaking, but Corweiller kept right on talking to me in the most pleasant tone... "Arvin Dooze of the National Science Trust and V.V. Lansloe, Chief Regent, are meeting with me at five thirty. I would like you to meet them at six o'clock in my library. I think I may be moving on to a new position. Big southern hemisphere project in the wind. There is no reason why you shouldn't get in on it. It would be a step up, you know. We are very deficient in southern star data. It's quite a gap in the total spectnim of knowledge." Threats, a replay from the dying images of the Cassiopeian emissaries, swept over me as Corweiller finished speaking. I saw myself in brief reflection from the other surfaces of his alpine glasses. I asked him, "How many light-years is it to alpha-Cassiope ia? " He looked at me with vague curiosity. "Alpha-Cassiopeia? Rather elementary, isn't it?" He gave me the correct figure and I said, "Yes, I shall certainly be in your library at six. If this new study is funded, I should imagine that a good deal of time would be occupied by the Clouds of Magellan." The Chief Observer beamed with anticipation. "Exactly the reason for the new interest in southern hemisphere stars! The Clouds offer us a fabulous opportunity for the observation of near space." I walked to the edge of the parking lot and looked away west into the canyon and across the deeper shadows there. The sun was just about to touch the far edge of Earth. I took off my Gemini glasses and gazed carelessly into the golden had once read that Yogis claim to see into other worlds at this time each evening and also that some Indians of the Mexican desert claim the twilight to be a crack between worlds that their men of power glide through on their travels to see the Spirits. I blinked my eyes three or four times and began to feel somewhat like the wilted, dead peonies that I had thought about the night before during the Robert Flaherty film. I could see the peonies in my grandmother's garden amid the flatlands spot for me. I felt my head grow large and leafy. I let the sunlight flood my cautious eyes and stood there at the edge of the world with my giant peony head looking out beyond light for the Overseers of Casularix. I dared their emissaries to come through and confront me. I had a comfortable feeling that Corweiller was with me, standing behind me high in the air above the Earth. His dark glasses sparked with many rainbows. His form was clothed in blue overalls and he held a galvanized watering can in his right hand... Laughter shook the ruffled petals of my peony head. I knew that quite soon I would be in the southern stars looking out toward the Clouds of Magellan.  Act now to beat the price rise and save over # on today 's most exciting SF monthiyi tion rate goes from I # to I # a year. It's a decision we have taken, reluctantly, to help offset escalating publishing costs. But we are happy to announce that, like you can still take advantage of our current low introductory offer... or extend their current subscriptions at the same low rate!... and save over # on a full year of super SF reading. You'll get # exciting issues -- with all-new science fiction from the likes of Larry Niven, J. E. Pournelle, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert and Roger Zelazny. Dozens of the provocative, imaginative stories you've come to expect from month for only #. That comes to less than # a copy, saving you # on the newsstand price. And you get this money-back guarantee you may cancel and receive a full refund on all unmailed copies. With no questions asked. So what do you say? Come join us now. Just clip our subscription coupon and mail with your check today -- for the science fiction buy of the year! Yes, galaxy save me over  # ! I want to beat the price rise. Enclosed is my check entitling me to # monthly issues for only #, instead of the new # annual subscription rate.  New subscription  Extend my current subscription Name Address City State Mail today to: Zip Subscription Department # Kennedy Drive  Hauppauge, New York # In the beginning was the chuckle... Bruce was making his way back to his cave, cautiously poking the underbrush ahead of him with a stick as he worked his way through the thick bushes, dangling vines and low branches that made up his jungle habitat. As he paused momentarily in the middle of a patch of large bushes to sample a leaf, chewing on it slowly, savoring its taste, a rustling sound to his right startled him. He promptly dropped to the ground and quivered. The dead rabbit he'd been carrying lay disregarded some yards behind him where he had convulsively hurled it. While Bruce lies cowering in abject terror, let us consider his more general plight -- Bruce was a caveman. Actually, his name wasn't "Bruce"; he didn't really have a name. Those who shared his cave with him thought of him variously as Tall-One-With-Big-Stick, HeWho-Beats-Me, and Meat-Bringer. We'll call him Bruce. Bruce was a giant among cavemen, towering over five feet tall. He had a massive barrel chest, arms that hung to his knees, and a hairiness overall that aspired to but did not quite merit being called furry. He was by far the strongest in his cave, but what mainly distinguished Bruce from the other beasts of the jungle was the gleam of latent intelligence lurking in his eyes. Back to Bruce, as he lay fetally curled with his arms covering his head, awaiting the fatal attack. After a while, no claws having ripped his back open, Bruce tentatively lifted his head and looked around; false alarm. After several moments spent gathering the shreds of his nerve Bruce arose and cast about for the rabbit he'd accidentally flung away. He found it atop an ant hill and brushed off most of the ants. Stick in one hand, rabbit in the other, he recommenced his journey. Two hours later, as the sun was setting, Bruce and the others were gathered together about a cozy fire at the entrance to the cave, ripping at the now-charred rabbit, snarling over it as if they were starving -- which they were. Which they always were. Impulsively, Bruce's mate reached for the piece that Bruce had reserved for himself. Quick as a flash, Bruce grabbed her outstretched arm and bit it. As his mate's piteous moans slowly subsided into silence the only sound to be heard was the peaceful munching and grunting of famished cavemen.    Meanwhile, three hundred miles above, a spaceship orbited. Inverted cup on a flat saucer; no visible rocket exhausts or other means of propulsion; shimmering electric-orange lights; a row of windows circling the base of the upside-down cup: it in appearance from those that would appear in the skies of Earth a few entirely different race. Looking out of one of those windows at the blue-green planet below was Loquar, the ship's First Officer. He looked like grape jello him was the Captain, who, as befitted his rank, looked more like cherry. "It's a beautiful planet," Loquar mused. "It certainly is," the Captain, picking up Loquar's thought, replied. "Too bad about those preverbal primates down there. Damned odd how they haven't made any progress." "How long has it been since the last visit?" "Over #'of their years," was the Captain's telepathic response. "Well, at least they're still here." "According to Survey, there are fewer of them than last time. By the time of our next visit they may well be extinct." Loquar flowed across the deck to a large dish and settled into it. "What's holding them back?" No one knows. They have opposable pseudoextensors with good dexterity, and they have several hundred ccs. of cranial capacity. It's a mystery." Loquar cogitated for a moment before thinking ingenuously at his Captain: "So what are we going to do?" The Captain was so alarmed by this question that he turned completely transparent. Pseudopods rippling spastically he mentally roared: "DO? We're not going to do anything. We're going to leave them strictly alone, as per regulations. You know we're not allowed to interfere in any way with a potentially civilized species! We can't even let them know we exist! It might warp their development incalculably." "If we don't do something, they won't have any development to warp," Loquar replied. "And with just the tiniest push they could make it. They've got all that it takes." "Obviously not all," came the sarcastic rejoinder. "Well, no, not all. But that's all the more reason to help them. They're really close, and it could make all the difference. I know we could help them." "Nothing doing. I retire after two more missions, and there's no way I'm going to lose my pension so you can play nursemaid to a bunch of under-performing apemen." As the spaceship swung around the small planet Loquar projected eloquent thoughts of a thriving intelligent race that might one day reach out apd join the confraternity of beings who held sway between the stars. The Captain argued for his cottage by the beach. The saucer and the argument continued to orbit the planet until, finally, a compromise was reached: "Ok, but what can you possibly do to help them in one-eighteenth of a planetary revolution?" "I'll think of something," Loquar projected spiritedly.    Loquar stood in the clearing looking down at himself with more than a little revulsion. Instead of his body flowing gracefully from place to place in its normal manner he had to separately operate two grotesquely rigid lower appendages while simultaneously performing a balancing act with the rest of his body mass. Clumsily he began to practice walking around in a circle, learning to coordinate his new body. As he walked he thought about how fortunate it was that his wife couldn't see him in his present condition. Satisfied at last that he had achieved some degree of mobility, Loquar considered what to do next; he still had not decided just what he was going to do to help the natives in their fight for survival. Whatever he did had to be doable without technical devices of any kind. Nor was he allowed to leave any evidence that the primates had received assistance. The Captain was angry enough at him for talking him into endangering his pension by letting Loquar make the trip. Loquar was quite certain that if he so much as gently bent the smallest regulation in a detectable way the Captain would have him fibulated on the spot. As Loquar was thinking these thoughts the obvious happened: Bruce and Loquar met. After catching his first glimpse of him, Bruce had ducked behind a tree and was observing Loquar with considerable interest. As he watched the incredibly clumsy and unarmed stranger stumble about in circles Bruce made his decision. The stranger would be good to eat. Bruce emerged into the clearing. Stick raised, he edged towards Loquar. Loquar watched Bruce nervously stalk him. When Bruce had finally got up his nerve to strike, Loquar reached out. Suddenly Bruce stood transfixed, unable to so much as twitch as Loquar dove beneath the surface of his mind. Calmly Loquar examined Bruce's past, reviewed the images of his life: the campfires, the hunts, the cave, the everpresent vermin. At last he pulled his mind back, glad to be out of Bruce's head. "Not even a nice place to visit," he thought to himself. Tired from standing so long, Loquar clumsily seated himself and made Bruce do likewise opposite him. He felt stymied. If he couldn't think of a way to help Bruce, the natives of this planet were probably doomed. And, aside from the regulations, given the amount of time he had left that help would have to take the form of a message. "But what," he wondered, "can I say to a creature whose entire mental equipment is invested in thoughts of ingestion, protection and erection?" Suddenly Loquar's cogitations were interrupted by the Captain. "Haven't you finished yet?" "No," Loquar grumbled. "I need more time." "Ten more minutes. Then I want you back up here, done or not." "All right." Loquar thought for a minute. He looked at Bruce, the apish face drawn in terror, the muscles tensed, straining to move. Suddenly Loquar was inspired. He projected a thought into Bruce's mind. Bruce was puzzled. His brow furrowed and his head tilted. Then the corners of his mouth turned up, his lips stretched. Bruce made a noise, a harsh guttural sound coming from deep in his throat. He chuckled again, awkwardly and a little louder. A laugh burst from his throat. The first laugh in the history of the planet. It tumbled out, louder and faster. Bruce began to shake from the intensity of it. Loquar stood up. He released Bruce from his mental bonds, then stumbled off into the jungle and vanished as Bruce continued to laugh. Bruce lay on the ground and beat at it with his fists, roaring hysterically. Eventually Bruce sat up and wiped his eyes. Still chuckling, he stood up and began to walk back towards the cave. Every so often he would burst into laughter again and the animals nearby would flee from the strange noise.    Aboard the spaceship a crew member was helping Loquar out of his caveman suit. As he slit the suit open Loquar spilled onto the deck. "Oh, that feels good. It's murder standing upright like that." "The Captain wants to see you immediately." "That figures." Loquar headed towards the Bridge. The crew member thought after him, "What do I do with this thing?" "Burn it." Loquar found the Captain flowing nervously back and forth. The Captain turned to him. "Did you do anything that will get us in trouble?" "No." "That's good. My wife would have killed me if this cost us our beach house." Loquar chuckled softly. The Captain asked, "So what did you do to help them?" "I told one of them an old joke." The Captain looked at him blankly. Loquar flowed to the window and looked down at the rapidly diminishing world. As the ship fled the solar system, leaving Earth once again alone in the darkness of space, Loquar explained...    Bruce and the others were seated around the fire, squabbling over the remains of the small wild pig that Bruce had caught. Suddenly a bolt of lightning flashed nearby, followed by a bellow of thunder. They all jumped up and ran to the back of the cave. When nothing else happened Bruce slowly emerged from the darkness. He looked back at the others still shivering in the back and began to chuckle. Soon he was laughing uproariously. The others, frightened by this strange sound, refused to emerge. Bruce continued to laugh as he seated himself near the fire. Finally, Bruce's laughter having died down to an occasional chuckle, the others edged back to the fire, watching Bruce warily. Still chuckling, Bruce, Father of Humor on Earth, tried to figure out a way to explain what was so funny. if Ooo Vs .AS Keila Jedrik, a Human female of the planet Dosadi, has shed her false persona as a minor bureaucrat to concentrate on her role as warlord. Her purpose is to free Dosadi from imprisonment behind the barrier 'God Wall' which dims its sun and isoiates it from the rest of the universe. Dosadi 's two sentient species, the frog-like Gowachin and the Humans, are descended from a memory-erased population which volunteered for a secret long-term psychological experiment. The descendants learned early that they were puppets in a contrived hell, its plants and animals poison to both Human and Gowachin unless raised in hydroponic isolation. Dosadis know mostly their city of Chu where food is relatively pure and the surrounding Rim where people live short, violent lives in a teeming scramble for admittance to the city. They do not know about the federated planets of the ConSentiency beyond their God Wall. Keila Jedrik, bred and trained to break this bondage, sets a race war into motion as other forces muster beyond the planetary barrier. There, the ConSentiency's Bureau of Sabotage (a sophisticated ombudsman-like ministry) has learned of Dosadi ' existence but not its location. BuSab knows only that unidentified Gowachin hired a Caleban to imprison Dosadi 's people Calebans are one of the great "useful mysteries." They are visible stars in the ConSentient universe and provide the federation with jumpdoors through which one can pass in a single step from planet to planet. Some believe Calebans are part of the Taprisiot phenomenon. The stubby, loglike Taprisiot people provide mindto-mind communication across the parsecs. BnSab Agent Jorj X. McKie, a Human who is friendly with a Caleban calling herself Fannie Mae, gets the Dosadi assignment from his Bureau Chief, Bildoon, who is a PanSpechi, member of a species which apes Human form but passes one ego from person to person in a creche-family. Summoned to the Gowachin home planet, Tandaloor, place of their mythological progenitor, Mrreg, McKie is confronted by Aritch, High Magister of the most powerful Gowachin Phylum, and by a deadly Wreave female named Ceylang, representative of another ConSentient species which is famed for ability to understand alien behavior. If McKie offends her, he risks vendetta with Ceylang's gigantic extended family. Ceylang is being trained by the Gowachin as a Legum, an adept in Gowachin Law. McKie is the only living non-Gowachin who holds Legum status. Forced to become Aritch's Legum, McKie accepts the Phylum's sacred box containing a book, a knife and a rock -- symbols of Gowachin Law. This is a complex legal structure where the life of any person entering the Courtarena may be forfeit. After McKie frustrates an attack by Ceylang, these facts emerge: increasingly immune to memory erasure and are, in Gowachin eyes, "monstrous." A quasi-reiigious government under a Dosadi Govrachin Elector named Broey rules the imprisoned planet. Anything is for sale on Dosadi -- secrets, bodies, temporary protection, food, armies... Among Broey's aides are two Humans, the Warlord Gar and Gar's daughter, Tria, who secretly plot to build another city on Dosadi in defiance of their religious mandate. Jedrik's chauffeur, a Human named Havvy, tells her that a Jorj X. McKie is being sent as a Rim infiltrator, and that he comes from beyond the God Wail. Jedrik already knew this through her own espionage network. She sees McKie as her key to breaking through the God Wall but, unknown to her, McKie brings with him the dangerous tools and weapons of his agency employment plus a Taprisiot linkage which, should he be killed, is intended to provide BuSab with all data he has gathered to that point. Jedrik relies on her own capabilities, including a mental simulation model of each person she must dominate to free Dosadi. She can anticipate Broey's actions. She knows that Havvy is a non-Dosadi, but he came to her flawed, useless against the God Wall. She sees Havvy and other non-Dosadis as dolts, often dangerous but susceptible to being baited and trapped. McKie is walking into her trap. Arriving in Chu after a hair-raising ride in an armored vehicle through Rim battlegrounds, McKie sees almost immediately that Dosadi is not what Aritch had led him to expect. Aritch had said that Dosadi was an attempt to create a population resistant to mediocrity imposed from above, arguing that ancestors always volunteer their descendants for whatever happens and without the informed consent of the descendants. He says that one of Dosadi's 'test subjects' will destroy this 'monster' even if the Gowachin do not. McKie wonders if Dosadi might be a convoluted attempt to make Gowachin Law the basis for ail ConSentient Law. Gowachin distrust law, saying it injures societies. They seek ways to disarm or remove law when problems arise. Gowachin distrust any community of professionals, especially legal professionals. The highest use of Gowachin Law is to dissolve old law while applying justice. McKie realizes the Gowachin trained him to solve their Dosadi dilemma, but be knows that Gowachin are so ultimately civilized they have come full circle into a form of primitive savagery. There's no easy way out of his predicament: to fulfill his Legum oath and serve his BuSab agency he must experience this Dosadi 'monster' with his own flesh. Many unanswered questions plague him. Why have Dosadi Humans taken on Gowachin characteristics and vice versa. The species cannot interbreed. Why are Gowachin training a Wreave? While waiting for his first contact on Dosadi, McKie has tried to call his Caleban friend, Fannie Mae. She warns him that soon he may not be able to leave the planet in his own "bodynode." She warns him also that a contract prevents her from helping him in ways he has asked. Meanwhile, Elector Broey talks to the Caleban who acts as the God of the Heavenly Veil to imprison Dosadi and he learns that McKie is coming. Praying in a cell beneath his graiuz breeding pool, Broey hides some of his thoughts from the Caleban guardian. "God uses people; people use God." He is. deeply aware of the graiuz pool above him where Gowachin males hunt down and devour their newborn tads -- testing almost to extinction. While the Human vs. Gowachin war grows hotter as Jedrik intended, Broey's Human aide, Tria, leads a commando raid to try capturing Jedrik. The raid fails and Tria's agent is killed in a way that suggests Gowachin ritual murder. Broey returns to his headquarters after a fruitless questioning of the battlewagon driver who brought McKie into Chu. Broey tries to dismiss Gar and Tria, but Gar reveals that he is building a Rim City and that he has a secret force of Rim-born fanatics. With race war almost out of control, Broey has little choice but to agree to keep Gar and Tria in positions of power. However, he mounts a massive campaign to find the biasphemous Rim City with its store of non-poisonous foods. Broey realizes he is behaving precisely as Jedrik wants but has no choice. McKie, having made secret rendezvous with Jedrik, is shocked by her brutality and her casual revelation that she knows he comes from beyond the God Wall. She confiscates his wallet of dangerous tools even though he warns her that it is booby-trapped. An aide takes away the wallet and returns uniqjured with the wallet open, its contents available. McKie begins to understand Aritch's judgement about the Dosadis and realizes that survival here requires him to become as ruthless as any Dosadi. Jedrik takes McKie to her headquarters after detecting "real intelligence" in him. She wonders why he never sharpened that intelligence. At her headquarters is a cage confining an aged Gowachin male, Pcharky. She tells McKie there's no counting the number of people Pcharky has helped escape from Dosadi, adding: "Soon, I may persuade him to be of service to me." Seeing the terrible energies shimmering on the bars of Pcharky's cage, McKie wonders if Dosadi may be an investigation of the Caleban mystery. Jedrik gives him no time to investigate this. She takes him to her room where she makes violent love to him, all the time watching, reading him. Afterward, she accuses him of trying to catch her with softness. McKie decides she's insane, but she won't let him sleep, questioning him, demanding he tell about male-female relationships 'outside.' Back on Tandaloor, Aritch meets with Ceylang who says that soon McKie will be more Dosadi than the Dosadis. Aritch warns Ceylang that she must learn McKie as though she lived "in his skin," adding that McKie is capable of defeating her in such a way that "your Wreave universe would shower him with adulation for his victory." This depends, of course, Aritch says, on whether McKie survives Dosadi. "Their law! It is a dangerous foundation for non-outhentic traditions. It is no more than o device to justify false ethics!" -- Gowachin comment on ConSentient Law dawn light coming through the single window, McKie began testing what Jedrik meant by being his teacher. "Will you answer any question I ask about Dosadi?" "No." Then what areas would she withhold from him? He saw it at once; those areas where she gained and held personal power. "Will anyone resent it that we... had sex together?" "Resent? Why should anyone resent that?' ' "I don't..." "Answer my question!" "Why do I have to answer your every question?" "To stay alive." "You already know everything I..." She brushed this aside. "So the people of your ConSentiency sometimes resent the sexual relationships of others. They are not sure, then, how they use sex to hold power over others." He blinked. Her quick, slashing analysis was devastating. She peered at him. "McKie, what can you do here without me? Don't you know yet that the ones who sent you intended you to die here?" "Or survive in my own peculiar way." She considered this. It was another idea about McKie which she had put aside for later evaluation. Indeed, he might well have hidden talents which her questions had not yet exposed. What annoyed her now was the sense that she didn't know enough about the ConSentiency to explore this. Could not take the time right now to explore it. His response disturbed her. It was as though everything she could possibly do had already been decided for her by powers of which she knew next to nothing. They were leading her by the nose, perhaps, just as she led Broey... just as those mysterious Gowachin of the Con Sentiency obviously had led McKie... poor McKie. She cut this short as unprofitable speculation. Obviously, she had to begin at once to search out McKie's talents. Whatever she discovered would reveal a great deal about his ConSentiency. "McKie, I hold a great deal of power among the Humans and even among some Gowachin in the Warrens... and elsewhere. To do this, I must maintain certain fighting forces, including those who fight with physical weapons." He nodded. Her tone was that of lecturing to a child, but he accepted this, recognizing the care she took with him. "We will go first," she said, "to a nearby training area where we maintain the necessary edge on one of my forces." Turning, she led him out into the hall and down a stairway which avoided the room of the cage. McKie was reminded of Pcharky, though, thinking about that gigantic expenditure of space with its strange occupant. "Why do you keep Pcharky caged?" he asked, addressing Jedrik's back. "So I can escape." She refused to elaborate on this odd answer. Presently, they emerged into a courtyard nestled into the solid walls of towering buildings. Only a small square of sky was visible directly overhead and far away. Artificial lighting from tubes along the walls provided an adequate illumination. It revealed two squads facing each other in the center of the courtyard. They were Humans, both male and female; all carried weapons -- a tube of some sort with a wandlike protrusion from the end near their bodies. Several other Humans stood at observation positions around the two squads. There was a guard station with a desk at the door through which McKie and Jedrik had emerged. "That's an assault force," Jedrik said, indicating the squads in the courtyard. She turned and consulted with the two young men at the guard station. McKie made a rough count of the squads: about two hundred. It was obvious that everything had stopped because of Jedrik's presence. He thought the force was composed of striplings barely blooded in Dosadi's cruel necessities. This forced him to re-evaluation of his own capabilities. From Jedrik's manner with the two men, McKie guessed she knew them well. They paid close attention to everything she said. They, too, struck him as too young for responsibility. The training area was another matter. It bore a depressing similarity to other such facilities he'd seen in the backwaters of the ConSentiency. War games were a constant lure among several species, a lure which BuSab had managed thus far to channel into such diversions as weapons fetishes. Through the omnipresent stink, McKie smelled the faint aroma of cooking. He sniffed. Turning to him, Jedrik spoke: "The trainees have just been fed. That's part of their pay." It was as though she'd read his mind and now she watched him for some reaction. McKie glanced around the training area. They'd just been fed here? There wasn't a scrap or crumb on the ground. He thought back to the restaurant, belatedly aware of a fastidious care ,with food that he'd seen and passed right over. Again, Jedrik demonstrated the ease with which she read his reactions, his very thoughts. "Nothing wasted," she said. She turned away. McKie looked where her attention went. Four women stood at the far side of the courtyard, weapons in their hands. Abruptly, McKie focused on the woman to the left, a competent looking female of middle years. She was carrying a... it couldn't be, but... Jedrik headed across the courtyard toward the woman. McKie followed, peered closely at the woman's weapon. It was an enlarged version of the pentrate from his kit! Jedrik spoke briefly to the woman. "Is that the new one?" "Yes. Stiggy brought it up this morning." "Useful?" "We think so. It focuses the explosion with somewhat more concentration than our equipment." "Good. Carry on." There were more training cadre near the wall behind the women. One, an older man with one arm, tried to catch Jedrik's attention as she led McKie toward a nearby door. "Could you tell us when we... "Not now." In the passage beyond the door, Jedrik turned and confronted McKie. "Your impressions of our training? Quick!" "Not sufficiently versatile." She'd obviously probed for his most instinctive reaction, demanding the gut response unmonitored by reason. The answer brought a glowering expression to her face, an emotional candor which he was not to appreciate until much later. Presently, she nodded. "They are a commando. More functions of a commando should be interchangeable. Wait here." She returned to the training area. McKie, watching through the open door, saw her speak to the woman with the pentrate. When Jedrik returned, she nodded to McKie with an expression of approval. "Anything else?" "They're awfully damned young. You should have a few seasoned officers among them to put a rein on dangerous impetuosity." "Yes, I've already set that in motion. Hereafter, McKie, I want you to come out with me every morning for about an hour. Watch the training but don't interfere. Report your reactions to me." He nodded. Clearly, she considered him useful and ttiat was a step in the right direction. But it was an idiotic assignment. These violent infants possessed weapons which ; could make Dosadi uninhabitable.  There was an atavistic excitement in the situation, though. He couldn't deny that. Something in the Human psyche responded to mass violence... really, to violence of any sort. It was related to Human sexuality, an ancient stirring from the most primitive times. i Jedrik was moving on, however. "Stay close." They were climbing an inside , stairway now and McKie, hurrying to keep up, found his thoughts locked on that pentrate in the hands of one of Jedrik's people. The speed with which they'd copied and  enlarged it dazzled him. It was I another demonstration of why Aritch feared Dosadi. At the top of the stairs, Jedrik ; rapped briefly at a door. A male i voice said: "Come in." The door swung open and McKie found himself presently in a small i unoccupied room with an open portal at the far wall into what appeared to be a larger, well lighted area. Voices speaking so softly as to be unintelligible came from there. A low table and five cramped chairs occupied the small room. There were no windows, but a frosted overhead fixture provided shadowless illumination. A large sheet of paper with colored graph lines on it covered the low table. I A swish of fabric brought ; McKie's attention to the open pori tal. A short, slender woman in a white smock, grey hair and the dark, penetrating stare of someone accustomed to command, entered followed by a slightly taller man in the same white. He looked older than the woman except that his hair remained a lustrous black. His eyes, too, held that air of command. The woman spoke. "Excuse the delay, Jedrik. We've been changing the summation. There's now no point where Broey can anticipate and change the transition from riots to full-scale warfare." McKie was surprised by the abject deference in her voice. This woman considered herself to be far below Jedrik. The man took the same tone, gesturing to chairs. "Sit down, please. This chart is our summation." As the woman turned toward him, McKie caught a strong whiff of something pungent on her breath, a not unfamiliar smell. He'd caught traces of it several times in their passage through the Warrens. She went on speaking as Jedrik and McKie slipped into chairs. "This is not unexpected." She indicated the design on the paper. The man intmded. "We've been telling you for some time now that Tria is ready to come over." "She's trouble," Jedrik said. "But Gar..." It was the woman, arguing, but Jedrik cut her off. "I know: Gar does whatever she tells him to do. The daughter runs the father. He thinks she's the most wonderful thing that ever happened, able to..." "Her abilities are not the issue," the man said. The woman spoke eagerly. "Yes, it's her influence on Gar that..." "Neither of them anticipated my moves," Jerik said, "but I anticipated their moves." The man leaned across the table, his face close to Jedrik's. He appeared suddenly to McKie like a large, dangerous animal -- dangerous because his actions could never be fully predicted. His hands twitched when he spoke. "We've told you every detail of our findings, every source, every conclusion. Now, are you saying you don't share our assessment of..." "You don't understand," Jedrik said. The woman had drawn back. Now, she nodded. Jedrik said: "It isn't the first time I've had to reassess your conclusions. Hear me: Tria will leave Broey when she's ready, not when he's ready. It's the same for anyone she. serves, even Gar." They spoke in unison: "Leave Gar?" "Leave anyone. Tria serves only Tria. Never forget that. Especially don't forget it if she comes over to us." The man and woman were silent. McKie thought about what Jedrik had said. Her words were another indication that someone on Dosadi might have other than personal aims. Jedrik's tone was unmistakable: she censured and distrusted Tria because Tria served only selfish ambition. Therefore Jedrik (and this other pair by inference) served some unstated mutual purpose. Was it a form of patriotism they served, species oriented? BuSab agents were always alert for this dangerous form of tribal madness, not neceso I sarily to suppress it, but to make certain it did not explode into a violence deadly to the ConSentiency. The white-smocked woman, after mulling her own thoughts, spoke: "If Tria can't be enlisted for... what I mean is we can use her own self-serving to hold her." She corrected herself. "Unless you believe we cannot convince her we'll overcome Broey." She chewed at her lip, a fearful expression in her eyes. A shrewd look came over Jedrik's face. "What is it you suspect?" The woman pointed to the chart on the table. "Gar still shares in the major decisions. That shouldn't be, but it is. If he..." The man spoke with subservient eagerness. "He has some hold on Broey!" The woman shook her head. "Or Broey plays a game other than the one we anticipated." Jedrik looked at the woman, the man, at McKie. She spoke as though to McKie, but McKie realized she was addressing the air. "It's a specific thing. Gar has revealed something to Broey. I know what he's revealed. Nothing else could force Broey to behave this way." She nodded at the chart. "We have them!" The woman ventured a question. "Have we done well?" "Better than you know." The man smiled, then: "Perhaps this is the time to ask if we could have larger rooms. The damn' children are always moving the furniture. We bump..." "Not now!" Jedrik arose. McKie followed her example. "Let me see the children," Jedrik said. The man turned to the open portal"Get out here, you! Jedrik wants I  you! Three children came scurrying from the other room. The woman didn't even look at them. The man favored them with an angry glare. He spoke to Jedrik. "They've brought no food into this house in almost a week." McKie studied the children carefully as he saw Jedrik was doing. They stood in a row just inside the room and, from their expressions it was impossible to tell their reaction to the summons. They were two girls and a boy. The one on the right, a girl, was perhaps nine; on the left, another girl, was five or six. The boy was somewhat older, perhaps twelve or thirteen. He favored McKie with a glance. It was the glance of a predator who recognizes ready prey but who already has eaten. All three bore more resemblance to the woman than to the man, but Ithe parentage was obvious: the eyes, the set of the ears, nose... Jedrik had completed her study. She gestured to the boy. "Start sending him to the second training team." "About time," the woman said. "We'll be glad to get him out of here." "Come along, McKie." In the hall, Jedrik said: "To answer your question, they're pretty typical." McKie, who had only wondered silently, swallowed in a dry throat. The petty goals of these people: to get a bigger room where they could live without bumping into furniture. He'd sensed no affection for each other in that couple. They were companions of convenience. There had been not the smallest hint of emotion for each other when they spoke. McKie found it difficult to imagine them making love, but apparently they did. They had produced three children. Realization came like an explosion in his head. Of course they showed no emotion! What other protection did they have? On Dosadi, anything you cared for was a club to beat you into somebody else's line. And there was another thing. McKie spoke to Jedrik's back as they went down the stairs. "That couple... they're addicted to something." Surprisingly, Jedrik stopped, looked back up at him. "How else do you think I hold such a pair? The substance is called dij. It's very rare. It comes from the far mountains, far beyond the... far beyond. The Rim sends parties of children as bearers to obtain dis for me. In a party of fifty, thirty can expect to die on such a trek. Do you get the measure of it, McKie?" Once more, they headed down the stairs. McKie, realizing she'd taken the time to teach him another lesson about Dosadi, could only follow, stunned, while she led him into a room where technicians bleached the sun-darkened areas of his skin. When they emerged, he no longer carried the stigma of Fylash Gate.    governors? -- Gowochin Riddle "It is no longer classifiable as rioting," the aide said. He was a short Gowachin with pinched features and he looked across the room to where Broey sat facing a dead communicator. There was a map on the wall behind the harsh morning light coming in the east windows. Below the map, a computer terminal jutted from the wall. Occasionally, it clicked. Gar came into the room from the hall, peered around as though looking for someone, left. Broey noted the intrusion, glanced at the map. "Still no sign of where she's gone to ground?" "Nothing certain." "The one who paraded McKie through the streets..." "Clearly an expendable underling." "Where did they go?" The aide indicated a place on the map, a group of buildings in the Warrens to the northwest. Broey stared at the blank face of his communications screen. He'd been tricked again. He knew it. That damnable Human female! Violence in the city teetered on the edge of full scale war: Gowachin against Human. And still nothing, not even a hint at the location of Gar's Rim stores, the blasphemous factories. It was an unstable condition which could not continue much longer. His communications screen came alive with a report: violent fighting near Gate Twenty-One. Broey glanced at the map. That made it more than one hundred clearly defined battles between the species along an unresolved perimeter. The report spoke of new weapons and unsuccessful attempts to capture specimens. Gate Twenty-One? That wasn't far from the place where McKie had been paraded through... Several things slipped into a new relationship in Broey's mind. He looked at his aide who stood waiting obediently at the map. "Where's Gar?" Aides were summoned, sent running. Gar was not to be found. "Tria?" She, too, was unavailable. Gar's fanatics remained neutral, but more of Jedrik's pattern was emerging. Everything pointed to an exquisite understanding of the weaknesses implicit in the behavior of Gar and Tria. And  thought I was the only one who saw that! Broey hesitated. Why would the God not speak to him? Other than to say "I am watched." Broey felt tricked and betrayed in his innermost being. This had a cleansing effect on his reason. He could only depend on himself. And he began to sense a larger pattern in Jedrik's behavior. Was it possible that Jedrik shared his goals? The possibility excited him. He looked at the aides who'd come running with the negative information about Gar and Tria, began to snap orders. "Get our people out of all those Warrens except that corridor to the northeast. Reinforce that area. Everyone else fall back to the secondary walls. Let no Humans inside that perimeter. Block all gates. Get moving!" This last was shouted as his aides hesitated. Perhaps it already was too late. He realized now that he'd allowed Jedrik to bait and distract him. It was clear that she'd created in her mind an almost perfect simulation model of Broey. And she'd done it from a Liaitor position! Incredible. He could almost feel sorry for Gar and Tria. They were like puppets dancing to Jedrik's strings. I was no better. It came over him that Jedrik's simulation probably encompassed this very moment of realization. Admiration for her permeated him. Superb! Quietly, he issued orders for the sequestering of Gowachin females within the inner graluz bastions which he'd had the foresight to prepare. His people would thank him. Those who survived the next few hours.    Given the proper leverage at the proper point, any sentient awareness may be exploded into astonishing selfunderstanding. -- from an ancient Human mystic By the third morning McKie felt that he might have lived all of his life on Dosadi. The place demanded every element of attention he could muster. He stood alone in Jedrik's room, staring absently at the unmade bed. She expected him to put the place in order before her return. He knew that. She'd told him to wait here and had gone away on urgent business. He could only obey. Concerns other than an unmade bed distracted him, though. He felt now that he understood the roots of Aritch's fears. The Gowachin of Tandaloor might very well destroy this place even if they knew that by doing so they blasted open that bloody region where every sentient hid his most secret fears. He could see this clearly now. How the Running Phylum expected him to avoid that monstrous decision was a more elusive matter. There were secrets here. McKie sensed Dosadi like a malignant organism beneath his feet, jealously keeping those secrets from him. This place was the enemy of the ConSentiency, but he found himself emotionally siding with Dosadi. It was betrayal of BuSab, of his Legum oath, everything...but he could not prevent that feeling or recognition of it. In the course of only a few generations, Dosadi had become a particular thing. Monstrous? Only if you held to your own precious myths. Dosadi might be the greatest cleansing force the ConSentiency had ever experienced. The whole prospect of the ConSentiency had begun to sicken him. And Aritch's Gowachin. Gowachin Law? Stuff Gowachin Law! It was quiet in Jedrik's room. Painfully quiet. He knew that out on the streets of Chu there was violent warfare between Gowachin and Human. Wounded had been rushed through the training courtyard while he was there with Jedrik. Afterward, she'd taken him to her command post, a room across the hall and above Pcharky's cage. He'd stood nearby, watched her performance as though she were a star on an entertainment circuit and he a member of the audience. It was fascinating. Broey will do this. Broey will give that order. And each time, the reports revealed how precisely she had anticipated her opponent. Occasionally, she mentioned Gar or Tria. He was able to detect the subtle difference in her treatment of that pair. On their second night together, Jedrik had aroused his sexual appetites softly, deftly. She had treated him to a murmurous compliance and afterward had leaned over him on an elbow to smile coldly. "You see, McKie: I can play your game." Shockingly, this had opened an area of awareness within him which he'd not even suspected. It was as though she'd held up his entire previous life to devastating observation. And he was the observer! Other beings formed lasting relationships and operated from a secure emotional base. But he was a product of BuSab, the Gowachin... and much that had gone before. It had become increasingly obvious to him why the Gowachin had chosen him to groom for this particular role. # was damaged and they could rebuild me the way they wanted! Well, the Gowachin could still be surprised by what they produced. Dosadi was evidence of that. They might not even suspect what they'd actually produced in McKie. He was bitter with a bitterness he knew must've been fermenting in him for years. The loneliness of his own life with its central dedication to BuSab had been brought to a head by the loneliness of this imprisoned planet. An incredible jumble of emotions had sorted themselves out and he felt new purpose burning within him. Power! Ahhhh... that was how it felt to be Dosadi! He'd turned away from Jedrik's cold smile, pulled the blankets around his shoulder. Thank you, loving teacher. Such thoughts roamed through his mind as he stood alone in the room the following day and began to make the bed. After her revelation, Jedrik had resumed her interest in his memories, napping only to awaken him with more questions. In spite of his sour outlook, he still felt it his duty to examine her behavior in every possible light his imagination could produce. Nothing about Dosadi was too absurd. He had to build a better picture of this society and its driving forces. Before returning to Jedrik's room, he'd made another tour of the training courtyard with her. There'd been more new weapons adapted from his kit and he'd realized the courtyard was merely Jedrik's testing ground, that there must be many more training areas for her followers. McKie had not yet revealed to her that Aritch's people might terminate Dosadi's people with violence. She'd been centering on this at dawn. Even while they shared the tiny toilet cubicle off her room she'd pressed for answers. For a time, McKie had diverted t her with questions about Pcharky. What were the powers in that cage? At one point, he'd startled her. "Pcharky knows something valuable he hopes to trade for his freedom." "How'd you know?" "It's obvious. I'll tell you something else: he came here of his own free will... for whatever purpose." "You learn quickly, McKie." She was laughing at him and he glared at her. "All right! I don't know that purpose, but it may be that you only think you know it." For the briefest flicker, something dangerous glared from her eyes, then: "Your jumpdoors have brought us many fools, but Pcharky is one of the biggest fools. I know why he came. There've been many like him. Now... there are only a few. Broey, for all of his power, cannot search out his own Pcharky. And Keila Jedrik is the one who frustrates him." Too late, she realized that McKie had goaded her into this performance. How had he done that? He'd almost found out too much too soon. It was dangerous to underestimate this naive intruder from beyond the God Wall. Once more, she'd begun probing for things he had not yet revealed. Time had protected him. Aides had come urging an early inspection of the new weapons. They were needed. Afterward, they'd gone to the command post and then to breakfast in a Warren dining room. All through breakfast, he'd plied her with questions about the fighting. How extensive was it? Could he see some of the prisoners? Were they using the weapons built from the patterns in his kit? Were they winning? Sometimes she merely ignored his questions. Most of her answers were short, distracted. Yes. No. No. Yes. McKie realized she was answering in monosyllables to fend him off. He was a distraction. Something important had been communicated to her and he'd missed it. Although this angered him, he tried to mask the emotion, striving to penetrate her wall of concern. Oddly, she responded when he changed his line of questioning to the parents of the three children and the conversation there. "You started to designate a particular place: 'Beyond the...' Beyond what?" "It's something Gar thinks I don't know. He thinks only his death fanatics have that kind of rapport with the Rim." He stared at her, caught by a sudden thought. By now, he knew much about Gar and Tria. She answered his questions about them with candor, often using him openly to clarify her own thoughts. But... death fanatics? "Are these fanatics homosexual?" She pounced. "How'd you know?" "A guess." "What difference would it make?" "Are they?" "Yes." McKie shuddered. She was peremptory. "Explain!" "When Humans for any reason go terminal where survival of their species is concerned, it's relatively easy to push them the short step further into wanting to die." "You speak from historical evidence?" "Yes." "Example." "With rare exceptions, primitive Humans of the tribal eras reserved their homosexuals as the ultimate shock troops of desperation. They were the troops of last resort, sent into battle as berserkers who expected, who wanted to die." She had to have the term 'berserkers' explained, then showed by her manner that she believed him. She considered this, then; "What does your ConSentiency do about this susceptibility?" "We take sophisticated care to guide all natural sexual vants into constructive, survival activities. We protect them from the kinds of pressures which might tip them over into behavior destructive of the species." Only later had McKie realized she had not answered his question: beyond what? She'd rushed him off to a conference room where more than twenty Humans were assembled, including the two parents who'd made the chart about Tria and Gar. McKie realized he didn't even know their names. It put him at a disadvantage not knowing as many of these people by sight and name as he should. They, of course, had ready memories of everyone important around them and, when they used a name , often did it with such blurred movement into new subjects that he was seldom sure who had been named. He saw the key to it, though. Their memories were anchored in explicit references to relative abilities of those around them, relative dangers. And it wasn't so much that they concealed their emotions as that they managed their emotions. Nowhere in their memories could there be any emotive clouding such as thoughts of love or friendship. Such things weakened you. Everything operated on the strict basis of quid pro quo and you'd better have the cash ready... whatever that cash might 'McKie, pressed all around by questions from the people in the conference room, knew he had only one real asset; he was a key they might use to open the God Wall. Very important asset, but unfortunately owned by an idiot. Now, they wanted his information about death fanatics. They milked him dry then sent him away like a child who has performed for his elders but is sent to his room when important matters are brought up for discussion.    Knowledge is the province of the Legum, just os knowledge is a source of crime. -- Gowochin Low By the fourth morning of the battle for Chu, Tria was in a vile humor. Her forces had established lines holding about one-eighth of the total Warren territory, mostly low buildings except along Broey's corridor to the Rim. She did not like the idea that Jedrik's people held an unobstructed view down onto most of the death fanatics' territory. And most of those leaders who'd thrown in their lot with Tria were beginning to have second thoughts, especially since they'd come to realize that this enclave had insufficient food production facilities to maintain itself. The population density she'd been forced to accept was frightening: almost triple the Warren norm. Thus far, neither Broey nor Jedrik had moved in force against her. Tria had finally been brought to the inescapable conclusion that she and Gar were precisely where Jedrik wanted them. They'd been cut out of Broey's control as neatly and cleanly as though by a knife. There was no going back. Broey would never accept Human help under present circumstances. That, too, spoke of the exquisite care with which Jedrik had executed her plan. Tria had moved her command post during the night to a high building which faced the canyon walls to the north. Only the river with a single gate under it separated her from the Rim. She'd slept badly, her mind full of worries. Chief among her worries was the fact that none of the contact parties she'd sent out to the Rim had returned. There'd been no fires on the Rim ledges during the night. No word from any of her people out there. Why? Once more, she contemplated her position, seeking some advantage, any advantage. One of her lines was anchored on Broey's corridor to the Rim, one line on the river wall with its single gate, and the rest of her perimeter meandered through a series of dangerous salients from the fifth wall to the river. She could hear sounds of battle along the far side of Broey's corridor. Jedrik's people used weapons which made a great deal of noise. Occasionally, an explosive projectile landed in Tria's enclave. These were rare, but she'd taken casualties and the effect on morale was destructive. That was a major problem with fanatics: they demanded to be used, to be wasted. Tria stared down at the river, aware of the bodies drifting on its poison currents -- both Human and Gowachin bodies, but more Gowachin than Human. Presently, she turned away from the scene, padded into the next room and roused Gar. "We must contact Jedrik," she said. He rubbed sleep from his eyes. "No! We must wait until we make contact with our people on the Rim. Then we can..." "Faaaaa!" She'd seldom showed that much disgust with him. "We're not going to make contact with our people on the Rim. Jedrik and Broey have seen to that. It wouldn't surprise me if they were cooperating to isolate us." "But we've..." "Shut up, father!" She held up her hands, stared at them! "I was never really good enough to be one of Broey's chief advisors. I always suspected that. I always pressed too hard. Last night, I reviewed as many of my decisions as I could. Jedrik deliberately made me look good. She did it oh so beautifully!" "But our forces on the Rim..." "May not be ours! They may be Jedrik's." "Even the Gowachin?" "Even the Gowachin." Gar could hear a ringing in his ears. Contact Jedrik? TTirow away all of their power? "I'm good enough to recognize the weakness of a force such as ours," Tria said. "We can be goaded into spending ourselves uselessly. Even Broey didn't see that, but Jedrik obviously did. Look at the salients along her perimeter!" "What have salients..." "They can be pinched off and obliterated! Even you must see that." "Then pull back and..." "Reduce our territory?" She stared at him aghast. "If I even intimate I'm going to do that, our auxiliaries will desert wholesale. Right now they're..." "Then attack!" "To gain what?" Gar nodded. Jedrik would fall back across mined areas, blast the fanatics out of existence. She held enough territory that she could afford such destruction. Clearly, she'd planned on it. "Then we must pinch off Broey's corridor." "That's what Jedrik wants us to do. It's the only negotiable counter we have left. That's why we must contact Jedrik." Gar shook his head in despair. Tria was not finished, though. "Jedrik might restore us to a share of power in the Rim city if we bargain for it now. Broey would never do that. Do you understand now the mistake you made with Broey?" "But Broey was going to..." "You failed to follow my orders, father. You must see now why I always tried to keep you from making independent decisions." Gar fell into abashed silence. This was his daughter, but he could sense his peril. Tria spoke. "I will issue orders presently to all of our commanders. They will be told to hold at all costs. They will be told that you and I will try to contact Jedrik. They will be told why." "But how can..." "We will permit ourselves to be captured."    Does a populace hove informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's military forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgement that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime. -- from the Trial of Trials Many things conspired to frustrate McKie. Few people other than Jedrik answered his questions. Most responded as though to a cretin. Jedrik treated him as though he were a child of unknown potential. At times, he knew he amused her. Other times, she punished him with an angry glance, by ignoring him or just by going away... or worse, sending him away. It was now late afternoon of the fifth day in the battle for Chu and Broey's forces still held out in the heart of the city with their slim corridor to the Rim. He knew this from reports he'd overheard. He stood in a small room off Jedrik's command post, a room containing four cots where, apparently, she andor her commanders snatched occasional rest. One tall, narrow window looked out to the south Rim. McKie found it difficult to realize that he'd come across that Rim just six days previously. Clouds had begun to gather over the Rim's terraced escarpments, a sure sign of a dramatic change in the weather. He knew that much, at least, from his Tandaloor briefings. Dosadi had no such thing as weather control. Awareness of this left him feeling oddly vulnerable. Nature could be so damnably capricious and dangerous when you had no grip on her vagaries. McKie blinked, held his breath for a moment. Vagaries of nature. The vagaries of sentient nature had moved the Gowachin to set up this experiment. Did they really hope to control that vast, seething conglomerate of motives? Or had they some other reason for Dosadi, a reason which he had not yet penetrated? Was this, after all, a test of Caleban mysteries? He thought not. He knew the way Aritch and aides said they'd set up this experiment. Observations here bore out their explanations. None of that data was consistent with an attempt to understand the Calebans. Only that brief encounter with Pcharky, a thing which Jedrik no longer was No matter how he tried, McKie couldn't evade the feeling that something essential lay hidden in the way this planet had been set upon its experimental course... something the Gowachin hadn't revealed, something they perhaps didn't even understand themselves. What'd they done at the beginning? They had this place, Dosadi, the subjects, the Primary... yes, the Primary. The inherent inequality of individuals dominated Gowachin minds. And there was that damnable DemoPol. How had they mandated it? Better yet: how did they maintain that mandate? Aritch 's people had hoped to expose the inner workings of sentient social systems. So they said. But McKie was beginning to look at that explanation with Dosadi eyes, with Dosadi scepticism. What had Fannie Mae meant about not being able to leave here in his own bodynode? How could he be Jedrik's key to the God Wall? Could Pcharky really help Dosadis to escape this planet? McKie knew he needed more information than he could hope to get from Jedrik. Did Broey have this information? McKie wondered if he might in the end have to climb the heights to the Council Hills for his answers. Was that even possible now? When he'd asked for it, Jedrik had given him almost the run of his building, warning: "Don't interfere." Interfere with what? When he'd asked, she'd just stared at him. She had, however, taken him around to familiarize everyone with his status. He was never quite sure what that status might be except that it was somewhere between guest and prisoner. Jedrik had required minimal conversation with her people. Often, she'd used only hand waves to convey the necessary signals of passage. The whole traverse was a lesson for McKie, beginning with the door guards. "McKie." Pointing at him. The guards nodded. Jedrik had other concerns. "Team Nine?" "Back at noon." "Send word." Everyone subjected McKie to a hard scrutiny which he felt certain would let them identify him with minimal interruption. There were two elevators -- one an express from a heavily guarded street entrance on the side of the building, the other starting above the fourth level at the ceiling of Pcharky's cage. They took this one, went up, pausing at each floor for guards to see him. When they returned to the cage room, McKie saw that a desk had been installed just inside the street door. The father of those three wild children sat there watching Pcharky, making occasional notations in a notebook. McKie had a name for him now: Ardir. Jedrik paused at the desk. "McKie can come and go with the usual precautions." McKie, addressing himself finally to Jedrik, had said: "Thanks for taking this time with me." "No need to be sarcastic, McKie." He had not intended sarcasm and reminded himself once more that the usual amenities of the ConSentiency suffered a different interpretation here. Jedrik glanced through Ardir's notes, looked up at Pcharky, back to McKie. Her expression did not change. "We will meet for dinner." She left him then. For his part, McKie had approached Pcharky's cage, noting the tension this brought to the room's guards and observers. The old Gowachin sat in his hammock with an indifferent expression on his face. The bars of the cage emitted an almost indiscernible hissing as they shimmered and glowed. "What happens if you touch the bars?" McKie asked. The Gowachin jowls puffed in a faint shrug. McKie pointed. "There's energy in those bars. What is that energy? How is it maintained?" Pcharky responded in a hoarse croaking. "How is the universe maintained? When you first see a thing, is that when it was created?" "Is it a Caleban thing?" Shrug. McKie walked around the cage, studying it. There were glistening bulbs wherever the bars crossed each other. The rods upon which the hammock was suspended came from the ceiling. They penetrated the cage top without touching it. The hammock itself appeared to be fabric. It was faintly blue. He returned to his position facing Pcharky. "Do they feed you?" No answer. Ardir spoke from behind him. "His food is lowered from the ceiling. His excreta are hosed into the reclamation lines." McKie spoke over his shoulder. "I see no door into the cage. How'd he get in there?" "It was built around him according to his own instructions." "What are the bulbs where the bars cross?" "They came into existence when he activated the cage." "How'd he do that?" "We don't know. Do you?" McKie shook his head from side to side. "How does Pcharky explain this?" "He doesn't." McKie had turned away to face Ardir, probing, moving the focus of questions from Pcharky to the planetary society itself. Ardir's answers, especially on matters of religion and history, were banal. Later, as he stood in the room off the command post reviewing the experience, McKie found his thoughts touching on a matter which had not even come into question. Jedrik and her people had known for a long time that Dosadi was a Gowachin creation. They'd known it long before McKie had appeared on the scene. It was apparent in the way they focused on Pcharky, in the way they reacted to Broey. McKie had added one significant datum: that Dosadi was a Gowachin experiment. But Jedrik's people were not using him in the ways he might expect. She said he was the key to the God Wall, but how was he that key? The answer was not to be found in Ardir. That one had not tried to evade McKie's questions, but the answers betrayed a severely limited scope to Ardir's knowledge and imagination. McKie felt deeply disturbed by this insight. It was not so much what the man said as what he did not say when the reasons for speaking openly in detail were most demanding. Ardir was no dolt. This was a Human who'd risen high in Jedrik's hierarchy. Many speculations would've crossed his mind. Yet he made no mention of even the more obvious speculations. He raised no questions about the way Dosadi history ran to a single cutoff point in the past without any trace of evolutionary beginnings. He did not appear to be a religious person and even if he were, Dosadi would not permit the more blatant religious inhibitions. Yet Ardir refused to explore the most obvious discrepancies in those overt religious attitudes McKie had been told to expect. Ardir played out the right attitudes, but there was no basis for them underneath. It was all surface. McKie suddenly despaired of ever getting a deep answer from any of these people... even from Jedrik. An increase in the noise level out in the command post caught McKie 's attention. He opened the door, stood in the doorway to study the other room. A new map had been posted on the far wall. There was a position board, transparent and covered with yellow, red and blue dots, over the map. Five women and a man -- all wearing earphones -- worked the board, moving the colored markers. Jedrik stood with her back to McKie, talking to several commanders who'd just come in from the streets. They still carried their weapons and packs. It was their conversation which had attracted McKie. He scanned the room, noted two communications screens at the left wall, both inactive. They were new since his last view of the room and he wondered at their purpose. An aide leaned in from the hallway, called out: "Gate Twenty-One just reported. Everything has quieted there. They want to know if they should keep their reserves on the alert." "Have them stand down," Jedrik said. "The two prisoners are being brought here," the aide added. "I see it," Jedrik said. She nodded toward the position board. McKie, following the direction of her gaze, saw two yellow markers being moved with eight blue companions. Without knowing how he understood this, he saw that this must be the prisoners and their escort. There were tensions in the command post which told him this was an important event. Who were those prisoners? One of Jedrik's commanders spoke. "I saw the monitor at..." She was not listening to him and he broke off. Two people on the position board exchanged places, trading earphones. The messenger who'd called out the information about the gate and the prisoners had gone. Another messenger came in presently, conferred in a soft voice with people near the door. In a few moments, eight young Human males entered carrying Gar and Tria securely trussed with what appeared to be shining wire. McKie recognized the pair from Aritch's briefings. The escort carried their prisoners like so much meat, one at each leg and each arm. "Over here," Jedrik said, indicating two chairs facing her. McKie found himself suddenly aware in an extremely Dosadi way of many of the nuances here. It filled him with elation. The escort crossed the room, not bothering to steer clear of all the furniture. The messenger from the hallway delayed his departure, reluctant to leave. He'd recognized the prisoners and knew something important was about to happen. Gar and Tria were dumped into the two chairs. "Release their bindings," Jedrik said. The escort obeyed. Jedrik waited, staring across at the position board. The two yellow and eight blue markers had been removed. She continued to stare at the board, though. Something there was more important than these two prisoners. She pointed to a cluster of red markers in an upper comer. "See to that." One of her commanders left the room. McKie took a deep breath. He'd spotted the flicker of her movement toward the commander who'd obeyed. So that was how she did it! McKie moved farther into the room to put Jedrik in profile to him. She made no response to his movement, but he knew she was aware of him. He stepped closer to what he saw as the limit of her tolerance, noted a faint smile as she turned toward the prisoners. There was an abmpt silence, one of those uncomfortable moments when people realize there are things they must do, but everyone is reluctant to start. The messenger still stood by the door to the hall, obviously wanting to see what wolild happen here. The escort who'd brought the prisoners remained standing in a group at one side. They were almost huddled, as though seeking protection in their own numbers. Jedrik glanced across at the messenger. "You may go." She nodd to the escort. "And you." McKie held his cautious distance, waiting, but Jedrik took no notice of him. He saw that he not only would be allowed to stay, but that he was expected to use his wits, his offworld knowledge. Jedrik had read things in his presence -- a normal distrust, caution, patience. And the fears, of course. Jedrik 'took her time with the prisoners. She leaned forward, examined first Tria, then Gar. From the way she looked at them it was clear to McKie she weighed many possibilities on how to deal with this pair. She was also building the tensions and this had its effect. Gar broke. "Broey has a way of describing people such as you," Gar said. "He calls you 'rockets' which is to say you are like a display which shoots up into the sky... and falls back." Jedrik grinned. McKie understood. Gar was not managing his emotions very well. It was a weakness. "Many rockets in this universe must die unseen," Jedrik said. Gar glared at her. He didn't like this response, glanced at Tria, saw from her expression that he had blundered. Tria spoke now, smiling faintly. "You've taken a personal interest in us, Jedrik." To McKie, it was as though he'd suddenly crossed a threshold into the understanding of another language. Tria's was a Dosadi statement, carrying many messages. She'd said that Jedrik saw an opportunity for personal gain here and that Tria knew this. The faint smile had been the beginning of the statement. McKie felt a new awe at the special genius of the Dosadi awareness. He moved a step closer. There was something else about Tria... something odd. "What is that one to you?" Tria spoke to Jedrik, but a flick of the eyes indicated McKie. "He has a certain utility," Jedrik said. "Is that the reason you keep him near you?" "There's no single reason." "There' ve been certain rumors..." "One uses what's available," Jedrik said. "Did you plan to have children by him?" Jedrik shook with silent mirth. McKie understood that Tria probed for weaknesses, found none. "The breeding period is so incapacitating for a female," Tria said. The tone was deliberately goading and McKie waited for a response. Jedrik nodded. "Offspring produce many repercussions down through the generations. Never a casual decision for those of us who understand." Jedrik looked at Gar, forcing McKie to shift his attention. Gar's face went suddenly bland, which McKie interpreted as shock and anger. The man had himself under control quickly, however. He stared at McKie, directed a question to Jedrik. "Would his death profit us?" Jedrik glanced at McKie. Shocked by the directness of the question, McKie was at least as intrigued by the assumptions in Gar's question. "Us!" Gar assumed that he and Jedrik had common cause. Jedrik was weighing that assumption and McKie, filled with elation, understood. He also recognized something else and realized he could now repay all of Jedrik's patient teaching. Tria! Something about Tria's way of holding her head, the inflections in her spoken Galach, struck a chord in McKie's memory. Tria was a Human who'd been trained by a PanSpechi -- that way of moving the eyes before the head moved, the peculiar emphases in her speech mannerisms. But there were no PanSpechi on Dosadi. Or were there? None of this showed on McKie's face. He continued to radiate distrust, caution, patience. But he began to ask himself if there might be another loose thread in this Dosadi mystery. He saw Jedrik looking at him and, without thinking about it, gave her a purely Dosadi eye signal to follow him, returned to the adjoining room. It was a measure of how she read him that she came without question. "Yes?" He told her what he suspected. "These PanSpechi, they are the ones who can grow a body to simulate that of another species?" "Except for the eyes. They have faceted eyes. Any PanSpechi who could act freely and simulate another species would be only the surface manifestation. The freely moving one is only one of five bodies; it's the holder of the ego, the identity. This passes periodically to another of the five. It's a PanSpechi crime to prevent that transfer by surgically fixing the ego in only one of the bodies." Jedrik glanced out the doorway. "You're sure about her?" "The pattern's there." "The faceted eyes, can that be disguised?" "There are ways... contact lenses or a rather delicate operation. I've been trained to detect such things, however, and I can tell you that the one who trained her is not Gar." She looked at him. "Broey?" "A graluz would be a great place to conceal a creche but..." He shook his head. "... I don't think so. From what you tell me about Broey..." "Gowachin," she agreed. "Then who?" "Someone who influenced her when she was quite young." "Do you wish to interrogate the prisoners?" "Yes, but I don't know their potential value." She stared at him in open wonder. His had been an exquisitely penetrating Dosadi-style statement. It was as though a McKie she thought she knew had been transformed suddenly right in front of her eyes. He was not yet sufficiently Dosadi to trust completely, but she'd never expected him to come this far this quickly. He did deserve a more detailed assessment of the military situation and the relative abilities of Tria and Gar. She delivered this assessment in the Dosadi way -- bare-bones words, swift, clipped to an essential spareness which assumed a necessary broad understanding by the listener. Absorbing this, McKie sensed where she limited her recital, tailoring it for his abilities. In a way, it was similar to a response by his Daily Schedule back on Central Central. He could see himself in her attitudes, read her assessment of him. She was favoring him with a limited, grudging respect tempered by a certain fondness as by a parent toward a child. And he knew that once they returned to the other room, the fondness would be locked under a mask of perfect concealment. It was there, though. It was there. And he dared not betray her trust by counting on that fondness, else it would be locked away forever. "I'm ready," he said. They returned to the command post, McKie with a clearer picture of how to operate here. There was no such thing as mutual, unquestioning trust. You always questioned. You always managed. A sort of grudging respect was the nearest they'd reveal openly. They worked together to survive or when it was overwhelmingly plain that there was personal advantage in mutual action. Even when they united, they remained ultimate individualists. They suspected any gift because no one gave away anything freely. The safest relationships were those in which the niches of the hierarchy were clear and solidly held -- minimum threat from above and from below. The whole thing reminded McKie of stories told about behavior in Human bureaucracies of the classical period before deep space travel. And many years before he had encountered a multispecies corporation which had behaved similarly until the ministrations of BuSab had shown them the error of their ways. They'd used every dirty trick available: bribing, spying and other forms of covert and overt espionage, fomenting dissent in the opposition, assassination, blackmail and kidnapping. Few in the ConSentiency had not heard of InterRealm Supply, now defunct. McKie stopped three paces from the prisoners. Tria spoke first. "Have you decided what to do with us?" "There's useful potential in both of you," McKie said, "but we have other questions." The 'we' did not escape Tria or Gar. They both looked at Jedrik, who stood impassively at McKie 's shoulder. McKie addressed himself to Gar. "Is Tria really your daughter, your natural child?" Tria appeared surprised and, with his new understanding, McKie realized she was telling him she didn't care if he saw this reaction, that it suited her for him to see this. Gar, however, had betrayed a flicker of shock. By Dosadi standards, he was dumbfounded. Then Tria was not his natural daughter, but until this moment, Tria had never questioned their relationship. "Tell us," McKie said. The Dosadi spareness of the words struck Gar like a blow. He looked at Jedrik. She gave every forever for him to obey, which was to say that she made no response either to McKie's words or Gar's behavior. Visibly defeated. Gar returned his attention to McKie. "I went with two females, only the three of us, across the far mountains. We tried to set up our own production of pure food there. Many on the Rim tried that in those days. They seldom came back. Something always happens... the plants die for no reason, the water source runs dry, something steals what you grow. The Gods are jealous. That's what we always said." He looked at Tria, who studied him without expression. "One of the two women died the first year. The other was sick by the following harvest season but survived through the next spring. It was. during that harvest... we went to the garden...ha! The garden! This child was there. We had no idea of where she'd come from. She appeared to be seven or eight years old but her reactions were those of an infant. That happens often enough on the Rim -- the mind retreats from something too terrible to bear. We took her in. Sometimes you can train such a child back to usefulness. When the woman died and the crop failed, I took Tria and we headed back to the Rim. That was a very bad time. When we returned... I was sick. Tria helped me then. We've been together ever since." McKie found himself deeply touched by this recital and hard put to conceal his reaction. He was not positive that he did conceal it. With his new Dosadi awareness, he read an entire saga into that sparse account of events which probably were quite ordinary by Rim standards. He found himself enraged by # A iaBEmm pjKi the other data which could be read into Gar's words. PanSpechi trained! That was the key. Aritch's people had wanted to maintain the purity of their experiment: only two species permitted. But it would be informative to examine PanSpechi applications. Simple. Take a Human female child. Put her exclusively under PanSpechi influence for seven or eight years. Subject that child to selective memory erasure. Hand her over to convenient surrogate parents on Dosadi. And there was more: Aritch lied when he said he knew little about the Rim, that the Rim was outside the experiment. As these thoughts went through his head, McKie returned to the small adjoining room. Jedrik followed. She waited while he assembled his thoughts. Presently, McKie looked at her, laid out his deductions. When he finished, he glanced at the doorway. 'T need to learn as much as I can about the Rim." "Those two are a good source." "But don't you require them for your other plans,, the attack on Broey's corridor?" "Two things can go forward simultaneously. You will return to their enclave with them as my lieutenant. That'll confuse them. They won't know what to make of that. They will answer your questions. And in their confusion they'll reveal much that they might otherwise conceal from you." McKie absorbed this. Yes... Jedrik did not hesitate to put him into peril. It was an ultimate message to everyone. McKie would be totally at the mercy of Gar and Tria. Jedrik was saying: "See! You cannot influence me by any threat to McKie." In a way, this protected him. In an extremely devious Dosadi way, this removed many possible threats to McKie and it told him much about what her true feelings toward him could be. He spoke to this. "I detest a cold bed." Her eyes sparkled briefly, the barest touch of moisture, then, arming him: "No matter what happens to me, McKie -- free us!" k it Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner w'orkings of its monetary system and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures? -- from the Trial of Trials "Unless she makes a mistake or we find some unexpected advantage, it's only a matter of time until she overruns us," Broey said. He sat in his aerie command post at the highest point of the dominant building on the Council Hills. The room was an armored oval with a single window about fifteen meters away directly in front of Broey looking out on sunset through the river's canyon walls. A small table with a communicator stood just to his left. Four of his commanders waited near the table. Maps, position boards and the other appurtenances of command with their attendants occupied most of the room's remaining space. Broey's intelligence service had just brought him the report that Jedrik had tcen Gar and Tria captive. One of his commanders, slender for a Gowachin and with other deprivation marks left from birth on the Rim, glanced at his three companions, cleared his throat. "Is it time to capitulate?" Broey shook his head in a Human gesture of negation. It's time  told them, he thought. He felt emptied. God refused to speak to him. Nothing in his world obeyed the old mandates. We've been tricked. The Powers of the God Wall had tricked him, had tricked his world and all of its inhabitants. They'd... "This McKie," the commander said. Broey swallowed, then: "I doubt if McKie has even the faintest understanding of how she uses him." He glanced at the reports on his communicator table, a stack of reports about McKie. Broey's intelligence service had been active. "If we captured or killed him..." the commander ventured. "Too late for that," Broey said. "Is there a chance we won't have to capitulate?" "There's always that chance." None of the four commanders liked the answer. Another of them, fat and silky green, spoke up: "If we have to capitulate, how will we know the..." "We must never capitulate, and we must make certain she knows this," Broey said. "She means to exterminate us." There! He'd told them. They were shocked but beginning to understand where his reasoning had led him. He saw the signs of understanding come over their faces. "The corridor..." one of them ventured. Broey merely stared at him. The fool must know they couldn't get more than a fraction of their forces onto the Rim before Jedrik and Tria closed off that avenue. And even if they could escape to the Rim, what could they do? They hadn't the faintest idea of where Tria's Rim forces had hidden the food stocks or where the damned factories were buried. "If we could rescue Tria," the slim commander said. Broey snorted. He'd prayed for Tria to contact him, to open negotiations. There'd been not a word, even after she'd fallen back into that impossible enclave. Therefore, Tria had lost control of her people outside the city. All the other evidence supported this conclusion. There was no contact with the Rim. Jedrik 's people had taken over out there. Tria would've sent word to him the minute she recognized the impossibility of her position. Any valuable piece of information, any counter in this game would've leaped into Tria's awareness and she'd have recognized who the highest bidder must be. Who was the highest bidder? Tria, after all, was Human. Broey sighed. And McKie -- an idiot savant from beyond the God Wall, a weapons expert. Jedrik must've known. But how? Did the Gods talk to her? Broey doubted this. Jedrik gave every evidence of being too clever to be sucked in by trickster Gods. More clever, more wary, more Dosadi than . She deserved the victory. Broey arose and went to the window. His commanders exchanged worried glances behind him. Could Broey think them out of this mess? A corner of his slim corridor to the Rim was visible to Broey. He could not hear the battle, but explosive orange blossoms told him the fighting continued. He knew the gamble Jedrik took. Those Gowachin beyond the God Wall, the ones who'd created this hellish place, were slow... terrifyingly slow. But eventually they would be unable to misunderstand Jedrik's intentions. Would they step in, those mentally retarded Gowachin out there, and try to stop Jedrik? She obviously thought they would. Everything she did told Broey of the care with which Jedrik had prepared for the stupids from Outside. Broey almost wished her success, but he could not bear the price he and his people would have to pay. Jedrik had the time-edge on him. She had McKie. She had played McKie like a superb instrument. And what would McKie do when he realized the final use Jedrik intended to make of him? Yes... McKie was a perfect tool for Jedrik. She'd obviously waited for that perfect instrument, had known when it arrived. Gods! She was superb! Broey scratched at the nodes between his ventricles. Well, there were still things a trapped people could do. He returned to his commanders. "Abandon the corridor. Do it quietly, but swiftly. Fall back to the prepared inner walls." As his commanders started to turn away, Broey stopped them. "I also want some carefully selected volunteers. The fix we're in must be explained to them in such a way that there's no misunderstanding. They will be asked to sacrifice themselves in a way no Gowachin has ever before contemplated." "How?" It was the slender one. Broey addressed himself to this one. A Gowachin bom on the Rim should be the first to understand. "We must increase the price Jedrik's paying. Hundreds of their people for every one of ours." "Suicide missions," the slender one said. Broey nodded, continued: "One more thing. I want Havvy brought up here and I want orders issued to increase the food allotment to those Humans we've held in special reserve." Two of his commanders spoke in unison: "They won't sacri..." "I have something else in mind for them." Broey nodded to himself. Yes indeed. Some of those Humans could still serve his purposes. It wasn't likely they could serve him as McKie served Jedrik, but there was still a chance...yes, a chance. Jedrik might not be certain of what Broey could do with his Humans. Havvy, for example. Jedrik had certainly considered and discarded Havvy. In itself, that might be useful. Broey waved for his commanders to leave and execute his orders. They'd seen the new determination in him. They'd pass that along to the ones beneath them. That, too, would serve his purposes. It would delay the moment when his people might suspect that he was making a desperate gamble. He returned to his communicator, called his search people, urged them to new efforts. They might still achieve what Jedrik obviously had achieved with Pcharky... if they could find a Pcharky.    The musk of a civilization has far reaching consequences on consciousness and, thus, influences the basic nature of a society. Music and its rhythms divert and compel the awareness, describing the limits within which a consciousness, thus fascinated, may operate. Control the music then and you own a powerful tool with which to shape the society. -- The Dosadi Analysis, BuSab Documents McKie told himself that he might've known an assignment from Jedrik could not be simple. There had to be Dosadi complications. "There can be no question in their minds that you're really my lieutenant." "Then I must be your lieutenant." This pleased her and she gave him the bare outline of her plan, warning him that the upcoming encounter could not be an act. He must respond as one who was fully aware of this planet's demands. Night fell over Chu while she prepared him and, when they returned to the command post where Gar and Tria waited, the occasion presented itself as Jedrik had told him it would. It was a sortie by Broey's people against Gate Eighteen. Jedrik snapped the orders at him, sent him running. "Find the purpose of that!" McKie paused only to pick up four waiting guards at the command post door, noting the unconcealed surprise in Gar and Tria. They'd formed a particular opinion of McKie 's position and now had to seek a new assessment. Tria would be most upset by this, confused by self doubts. McKie knew Jedrik would immediately amplify those doubts, telling Gar and Tria that McKie would go with them when he returned from Gate Eighteen. "You must consider his orders as my orders." Gate Eighteen turned out to be more than a minor problem. Broey had taken the gate itself and two buildings. One of the attackers, diving from an upper window into one of Jedrik's best units, had blown himself up with a nasty lot of casualties. "More than a hundred dead," a breathless courier told him. McKie didn't like the implications of a suicide attack, but couldn't pause to assess it. They had to eliminate this threat. He gave orders for two feints while a third force blasted down one of the captured buildings, smothering the gate in rubble. That left the other captive building isolated. The swiftness of this success dazzled Jedrik's forces and the commanders snapped to obedience when McKie issued orders for them to take captives and bring those captives to him for interrogation. At McKie's command, one of his original four guards brought a map of the area, tacked it to a wall. Less than an hour had passed since he'd left Jedrik, but McKie felt that he'd entered another world, one even more primitive than that surrounding the incredible woman who'd set all of this in motion. It was the difference between secondand thirdhand reports of action and the physical feeling of that action all around him. Explosions and the hissing of flamers down on the streets jarred his awareness. Staring at the map, McKie said: "This has all the marks of a trap. Get all but a holding force out of the area. Tell Jedrik." People scurried to obey. One of the guards and two subcommanders remained. The guard spoke. "What about this place?" McKie glanced around him. It was a square room with brown walls. Two windows looked out on the street away from the battle for the isolated building near the gate. He'd hardly looked at the room when they'd brought him here to set up his command post. Four streets with isolated holdouts cushioned him from the main battle. They could shoot a cable bridge to another building if things became hot here. And it'd help morale if he remained in the danger area. He spoke to one of the subcommanders: "Go down to the entry. Call all the elevators down there and disable all but one. Stand by that one with a holding force and put guards in the stairway. Stand by yourself to bring up captives. Comment?" "I'll send up two cable teams and make sure the adjoining buildings are secure." Of course! McKie nodded. Gods! How these people reacted in emergencies. They were as direct and cutting as knives. "Do it," McKie said. He had less than a ten minute wait before two of Jedrik's special security troops brought up the first captive, a young Gowachin whose eyelids bore curious scars -- scrolllike and pale against the green skin. The two security people stopped just inside the doorway. They held the Gowachin firmly, although he did not appear to be struggling. The sub-commander who'd brought them up closed the door as he left. One of the captors, an older man with narrow features, nodded as he caught McKie's attention. "What'll we do with him?" "Tie him in a chair," McKie instructed. He studied the Gowachin as they complied. "Where was he captured?" "He was trying to escape from that building through a perimeter sewage line." "Alone?" "I don't know. He's the first of a group of prisoners. The others are waiting outside." They had finished binding the young Gowachin, now took up position directly behind him. McKie studied the captive. He wore black coveralls with characteristic deep vee to clear the ventricles. The garment had been cut and torn in several places. He'd obviously been searched with swift and brutal thoroughness. McKie put down a twinge of pity. The scar lines on the prisoner's eyelids precluded anything but the most direct Dosadi necessities. "They did a poor job removing your Phylum tatoos," McKie said. He'd already recognized the scar lines: Deep Swimmers. It was a relatively unimportant Phylum, small in numbers and sensitive about their status. The young Gowachin blinked. McKie's opening remark had been so conversational, even toned, that the shock of his words came after. Shock was obvious now in the set of the captive's mouth. "What is your name, please?" McKie asked, still in that even, conversational way. "Grinik." It was forced out of him. McKie asked one of the guards for a notebook and stylus, wrote the Gowachin 's name in it, adding the Phylum indentification. "Grinik of the Deep Swimmers," he said. "How long have you been on Dosadi?" The Gowachin took a deep, ventricular breath, remained silent. The security men appeared puzzled. This interrogation wasn't going as they'd expected. McKie himself did not know what to expect. He still felt himself recovering from surprise at recognition of the bad-erased Phylum tatoos. "This is a very small planet," McKie said. "The Universe from which we both come is very big and can be very cruel. I'm sure you didn't come here expecting to die." If this Grinik didn't know the deadly plans of his superiors, that would emerge shortly. McKie's words could be construed as a personal threat beyond any larger threat to Dosadi as a whole. It remained to see how Grinik reacted. Still, the young Gowachin hesitated. When in doubt, remain silent. "You appear to've been adequately trained for this project," McKie said. "But I doubt if you were told everything you should know. I even doubt if you were told things essential to you in your present position." "Who are you?" Grinik demanded. "How dare you speak here of matters which..." He broke off, glanced at the two guards standing at his shoulders. "They know all about us," McKie lied. He could smell the sweet perfume of Gowachin fear now, a floral scent which he'd noted only on a few previous occasions. The two guards also sensed this and showed faint smiles to betray that they knew its import. "Your masters sent you here to die," McKie said. "They may very well pay heavily for this. You ask who I am? I am Jorj X. McKie, Legum of the Gowachin bar. Saboteur Extraordinary, senior lieutenant of Jedrik who will shortly rule all of Dosadi. I make formal imposition upon you. Answer my questions for the Law is at stake. On the Gowachin worlds that was a most powerful motivator. Grinik was shaken by it. "What do you wish to know? He barely managed the words. "Your mission on Dosadi. The precise instructions you were given and who gave them to you." "There are twenty of us. We were sent by Mrreg." That name! The implications in Gowachin lore stunned McKie. He waited, then: "Continue." "Two more of our twenty are out there." Grinik motioned to the doorway, clearly pleading for his captive associates. "Your instructions?" "To get our people out of this terrible place." "How long?" "Just... sixty hours remain." McKie exhaled slowly. So Aritch and company had given up on him. They were going to eliminate Dosadi. "Where are the other members of your party?" "I don't know." "You were, of course, a reserve team trained and held in readiness for this mission. Do you realize how poorly you were trained?" Grinik remained silent. McKie put down a feeling of despair, glanced at the two guards. He understood that they'd brought him this particular captive because this was one of three who were not Dosadi. Jedrik had instructed them, of course. Many things became clearer to him in this new awareness. Jedrik had put sufficient pressure on the Gowachin beyond the God Wall. She still had not imagined the extremes to which those Gowachin might go in stopping her. It was time Jedrik learned what sort of fuse she'd lighted. And Broey must be told. Especially Broey . before he sent many more suicide missions. The outer door opened and the sub-commander leaned in to speak. "You were right about the trap. We mined the area before pulling back. Caught them nicely. The gate's secure now and we've cleared out that last building." McKie pursed his lips, then: "Take the prisoners to Jedrik. Tell her we're coming in." A flicker of surprise touched the sub-commander's eyes. "She knows." Still the man hesitated. "Yes?" "There's one Human prisoner out here you should question before leaving." McKie waited. Jedrik knew he was coming in, knew what had gone on here, knew about the Human prisoner out there. She wanted him to question this person. Yes... of course. She left nothing to chance... by her standards. Well, her standards were about to change but she might even know that. "Name?" "Havw. Broey holds him but he once served Jedrik. She says to tell you Havvy is a reject, that he was contaminated." "Bring him in." Havvy surprised him. The surface was that of a bland-faced nonentity, braggadocio clearly evident under a mask of secret knowledge. He wore a green uniform with a driver's brassard. The uniform was wrinkled but there were no visible rips or cuts. He'd been treated with more care than the Gowachin who was being led out of the room. Havvy replaced the Gowachin in the chair. McKie waved away the bindings. Unfocused questions created turmoil in McKie's mind. He found it difficult to delay. Sixty hours! But he felt that he could almost touch the solution to the Dosadi mystery, that in only a few minutes he would know names and real motives for the ones who'd created this monster. Havvy? He'd served Jedrik. In what way? Why rejected? Contaminated? Unfocused questions, yes. Havvy sat in watchful tension, casting an occasional glance around the room, at the windows. There were no more explosions out there. As McKie studied him more carefully, certain observations emerged. Havvy was small but solid, one of those Humans of lesser stature who concealed heavy musculature which could surprise you if you suddenly bumped into them. It was difficult to guess his age, but he was not Dosadi. A member of Grinik's team? Doubtful. Clearly not Dosadi, though. He didn't examine those around him with an automatic status assessment. His reactions were slow. Too much that should remain under shutters flowed from within him directly to the surface. Yes, that was the ultimate revelation. It bothered McKie that so much wenton unseen beneath the surface here, so much for which Aritch and company had not prepared him. It would take a lifetime to learn all the nuances of this place and he had less than sixty hours remaining to him. All of this flowed through McKie's mind in an eyeblink. He reached his decision, motioned the guards and others to leave. One of the security people started to protest but McKie silenced him with a glance, pulled up a chair and sat down facing the captive. The door closed behind the last of the guards. "You were sent here deliberately to seek me out," McKie said. It was not the opening Havvy had expected. He stared into McKie's eyes. A door slammed outside. There was the sound of several doors opening and shutting, the shuffling of feet. An amplified voice called out: "Move these prisoners out!" Havvy chewed at his upper lip. He didn't protest. A deep sigh shook him, then: "You're Jorj X. McKie of BuSab?" McKie blew out through pursed lips. Did Havvy doubt the evidence of his own senses? Surprising. McKie shook his head, continued to study the captive. "You can't be McKie!" Havvy said. "Ahhhhhh..." It was pressed out of McKie. Something about Havvy: the body moved, the voice spoke, but the eyes did not agree. McKie th'ought about what the Caleban, Fannie Mae, had said. A light touch. He was overtaken by an abrupt certainty: someone other than Havvy looked out through the man's eyes. Yessss. Aritch's people controlled the Caleban who maintained the barrier around Dosadi. That Caleban could contact selected people here. She'd have a constant updating on everything such people learned. There must be many such spies on Dosadi, all trained not to betray the Caleban contact -- no twitching, no lapses into trance. No telling how many agents Aritch possessed here. Would all the other people on Dosadi remain unaware of such a thing, though? That was a matter to question . "But you must be McKie," Havvy said. "Jedrik's still working out of..." He broke off. "You must've provided her with some amusement by your bumbling," McKie said. "I assure you, however, that BuSab is not amused." A gloating look came over Havvy' s face. "No, she hasn't made the transfer yet." "Transfer?" "Haven't you figured out yet how Pcharky's supposed to buy his freedom?" McKie felt off balance at this odd turn. "Explain." "He's supposed to transfer your identity into Jedrik's body and her identity into your body. I think she was going to try that with me once, but..." Havvy shrugged. It was like an explosion in McKie's newly sensitized awareness. Rejected! Contaminated! Body exchange! McKie was accusatory! "Broey sent you!" "Of course." Offensive. McKie contained his anger. The Dosadi complexities no longer baffled him as once they had. It was like peeling back layer upon layer of concealment. With each new layer you expected to find the answer. But that was a trap the whole universe set for the unwary. It was the ultimate mystery and he hated mystery. There were those who said this was a necessary ingredient for BuSab agents. You eliminated that which you hated. But everything he'd uncovered about this planet showed him how little he'd known previously about any mystery. Now, he understood something new about Jedrik. There was little doubt that Broey's Human messenger told the truth. Pcharky had penetrated the intricacies of PanSpechi ego transfer. He'd done it without a PanSpechi as his subject, unless. Yes... that expanded the implications in Tria's history. Their PanSpechi experiment had assumed even more grotesque proportions. "I will speak directly to your Caleban monitor," McKie said. "My what?" It was such obvious dissimulation that McKie only snorted. He leaned forward. "I will speak directly to Aritch. See that he gets this message without any mistakes." Havvy's eyes became glassy. He shuddered. McKie felt the inner tendrils of an attempted Caleban contact in his own awareness, thrust them aside. "No! I will speak openly through your agent. Pay close attention, Aritch. Those who created this Dosadi horror cannot run far enough, fast enough or long enough to escape. If you wish to make every Gowachin in the universe a target for violence, you are proceeding correctly. Others, including BuSab, can employ mass violence if you force it upon them. Not' a pleasant thought. But unless you adhere to your own Law, to the honored relationship between Legum and Client, your shame will be exposed. Innocent Gowachin as well as you others whose legal status has yet to be determined -- all will pay the bloody price." Havvy's brows drew down in puzzlement. "Shame?" "They plan to blast Dosadi out of existence." Havvy pressed back into the chair, glared at McKie. "You're lying." "Even you, Havvy, are capable of recognizing a truth. I'm going to release you, pass you back through the lines to Broey. Tell him what you learned from me." "It's a lie! They're not going to..." "Ask Aritch for yourself." Havvy didn't ask "Aritch who?" He lifted himself from the chair. "I will." "Tell Broey we've less than sixty hours. None of us who can resist mind erasure will be permitted to escape." "Us?" McKie nodded, thinking; yes,  am Dosadi now. He said: "Get out of here." 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When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind. -- BuSab Manual Less than an hour after closing down at Gate Eighteen, McKie and his escort arrived back at Jedrik's headquarters building. He led them to the heavily guarded side entrance with its express elevator, not wanting to pass Pcharky at this moment. Pcharky was an unnecessary distraction. He left the escort in the hallway with instructions to get food and rest, signalled for the elevator. The elevator door was opened by a small Human female of about fifteen years who nodded him into the dim interior. McKie, his natural distrust of even the young on this planet well masked, nevertheless kept her under observation as he accepted the invitation. She was a gamin child with dirty face and hands, a torn grey single garment cut off at the knees. Her very existence as a Dosadi survivor said she'd undoubtedly sold her body many times for scraps of food. He realized how much Dosadi had influenced him when he found that he couldn't raise even the slightest feeling of censure at this knowledge. You did what the conditions around you demanded when those conditions were overwhelming. It was an ultimate question: this or death? And certainly some of them chose death. "Jedrik," he said. She worked her controls and he found himself presently in an unfamiliar hallway. Two familiar guards stood at a doorway down the hall, however. They betrayed not the slightest interest in him as he opened the door between them swiftly and strode through. It was a tiny anteroom, empty, but another door directly in front of him. He opened this with more confidence than he felt, entered a larger space full of projection-room gloom with shadowed figures seated facing a holographic focus on his left. McKie identified Jedrik by her profile, slipped into a seat beside her. She kept her attention on the h-focus where a projection of Broey stood looking out at something over their shoulders. McKie recognized the subtle slippage of computer simulation. That was not a fleshand-blood Broey in the focus. Someone on the far side of the room stood up and crossed to sit beside another figure in the gloom. McKie recognized Gar as the man moved through one of the projection beams. McKie whispered to Jedrik: "Why simulation?" "He's beginning to do things I didn't anticipate." The suicide missions. McKie looked at the simulation, wondered why there was no sync-sound. Ahhh, yes. They were lip reading and it was silent to reduce distractions, to amplify concentration. Yes, Jedrik was reworking the simulation model of Broey which she carried in her head. She would also carry another model, even more accurate than the one of Broey, which would give her a certain lead time on the reactions of one Jorj X. McKie. "Would you really have done it?" he asked. "Why do you distract me with such nonsense?" He considered. Yes, it was a good question. He already knew the answer. She would have done it: traded bodies with him and escaped outside the God Wall as McKie. She might still do it unless he could anticipate the mechanics of the transfer. By now she knew about the sixty-hour limit and would suspect its significance. Less than sixty hours. And the Dosadi could make extremely complex projections from limited data. Witness this Broey simulation. The figure in the focus was talking to a fat Human female who held a tube which McKie recognized as a communicator for field use. Jedrik spoke across the room to Gar. "She still with him?" "Addicted." A two-sentence exchange and it condensed an entire conversation about possible uses of that woman. McKie did not ask addicted to what. There were too many such substances on Dosadi, each with peculiar characteristics, often involving odd monopolies with which everyone seemed familiar. This was a telltale gap in Aritch's briefings: the monopolies and their uses. As McKie absorbed the action in the focus, the reasons behind this session became more apparent. Broey was refusing to believe the report from Havvy. And there was Havvy in the focus. Jedrik favored McKie with one flickering glance as Havvysimulation appeared. Certainly. She factored McKie into her computations. McKie compressed his lips. She knew Havvy would contaminate me. They couldn't say "I love you" on this damned planet. Oh, no. They had to create a special Dosadi production number. Most of the data for this originated before the breakup," McKie said. "It's useless. Rather than ask the computer to play pretty pictures for us, why don't we examine our own memories? Surely, somewhere in the combined experiences with Broey..." A chuckle somewhere to the left stopped him. Too late, McKie saw that every seat in the room had an arm keyed to the simulations. They were doing precisely what he'd suggested, but in a more sophisticated way. The figures at the focus were being adjusted to the combined memories. There was such a keyed arm at McKie's right hand. He suddenly realized how tactless and lecturing he still must appear to these people. They didn't waste energy on unnecessary words. Anyone who did must be subnormal, poorly trained or... or not from Dosadi. "Does he always state the obvious?" Gar asked. McKie wondered if he'd blown his lieutenancy, lost the opportunity to explore the mystery of the Rim, but... no, there wasn't time for that now. He'd have to penetrate the Rim another way. "He's new," Jedrik said. "New is not necessarily naive, as yoff should know." "He has you doing it now," Gar said. "Guess again." McKie put a hand to the simulation controls under his right hand, tested the keys. He had it in a moment. They were similar to such devices in the ConSentiency, an adaptation from the DemoPol inputs, no doubt. Slowly, he changed the Broey at the focus, heavier, the sagging jowls and node wattles of a breeding male Gowachin. McKie froze the image. "Tentative?" Gar asked. Jedrik answered for him. "It's knowledge he brought here with him." She did something to her controls, stopped the projection and raised the room lights. McKie noted that Tria was nowhere in the room. "The Gowachin have sequestered their females somewhere," McKie said. "That somewhere should not be difficult to locate. Send word to Tria that she must not mount her attack on Broey 's corridor just yet." "Why delay?" Gar demanded. "Broey will have all but evacuated the corridor by now," McKie said. Gar was angry and showing it. "Not a single one of them has gone through that Rim gate." "Not to the Rim," Jedrik said. It was clear to her now. McKie had supplied the leverage she needed. It was time now to employ him as she'd always intended. She glanced at McKie. "We have unfinished business. Are you ready?" He held his silence. How could he answer such a Dosadi-weighted question? There were so many things left unspoken on this planet, only the native-born could understand them all. McKie felt once more that he was a dull outsider, a child of dubious potential among normal adults. Jedrik arose, looked across at Gar. "Send word to Tria to hold herself in readiness for another assignment. Tell Broey. Call him on an open line. We now have an excellent use for your fanatics. If only a few of your people fight through to that graluz complex it'll be enough and Broey will know it." McKie noted that she spoke to Gar with a familiar teaching 'emphasis. It was the curiously weighted manner she'd once used with McKie but no longer found necessary. His recognition of this amused her. "Come along, McKie. We haven't much time."    The attack by those who want to die -- this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perft defense. -- Human aphorism For almost an hour after the morning meal, Aritch observed Ceylang as she worked with the McKie simulator. She was pushing herself hard, believing Wreave honor at stake, and had almost reached the pitch Aritch desired. Ceylang had set up her own simulator situation: McKie interviewing five of Broey's Gowachin. She had the Gowachin come to McKie in surrender, hands extended, the webbed fingers exposed to show that the talons were withdrawn. Simulator-McKie merely probed for military advtages. "Why does Broey attack in this fashion?' ' Or he'd turn to some place outside the h-focus of the simulator. "Send reinforcements into that area." Nothing about the Rim. Earlier, Ceylang had tried the issue with a prisoner simulation where the five Gowachin tried to confuse McKie by presenting a scenario in which Broey massed his forces at the corridor. The makings of a breakout to the Rim appeared obvious. Simulator-McKie asked the prisoners why they lied. Ceylang cleared the simulator. She saw Aritch at the observation window, opened a channel to him. "Something has to be wrong in the simulation. McKie cannot be led into questioning the purposes of the Rim." "I assure you that simulation is remarkable in its accuracy. Remarkable." "Then why..." "Perhaps he already knows the answer. Why don't you try him with Jedrik? Here..." Aritch operated the controls at the observer station. "This might help. This is a record of McKie in recent action on Dosadi." The simulator presented a view down a covered passage through a building. Artificial light. Darkness at the far end of the passage. McKie, two blocky guards in tow, approached the viewers. Ceylang recognized the scene. She'd watched this action at Gate Eighteen from several angles, had seen this passage empty before the battle, acquainting herself with the available views. As she'd watched it then, the passage had filled with Human defenders. There was a minor gate behind the viewer and she knew the viewer itself to be only a bright spot, a fleck of glittering impurity in an otherwise drab brick over the gate's archway. Now, the long passage seemed strange to Ceylang without its throng of defenders. There were only a few workmen along its length as McKie passed. The workmen repaired service pipes in the ceiling. A cleanup crew washed down patches of blood at the far end of the passage, the high water mark of the Gowachin attack. An officer leaned against a wall near the viewer, a bored expression on his face which did not mislead Ceylang. He was there to watch McKie. Three soldiers squatted nearby rolling hexi-bones for coins which lay in piles before each man. Every now and then, one of the gamblers would pass a coin to the watching officer. A repair supervisor stood with his back to the viewer, notebook in hand, writing a list of supplies to Complete the job. McKie and his guards were forced to step around these people. As they passed, the officer turned, looked directly into the viewer, smiled. "That officer," Ceylang said. "One of your people?" "No." The viewpoint shifted, looking down on the gate itself, McKie in profile. The gatekeeper was a teenager with a scar down his right cheek and a broken nose. McKie showed no signs of recognition, but the youth knew McKie. "You go through on request." "When did she call?" "Ten." "Let us through." The gate was opened. McKie and his guards went through, passed beyond the viewer's focus. The youthful gatekeeper stood up, smashed the viewer. The h-focus went blank. Aritch looked down from his observation booth for a moment before speaking. "Who called?" "Jedrik?" Ceylang spoke without thinking. "What does that conversation tell you? Quickly!" "That Jedrik anticipated his movements, was observing him all the time." "What else?" "That McKie... knows this, knows she can anticipate him." "She carries a better simulation of him in her head than we have... there." Aritch pointed at the h-focus area. "But they left so much unspoken!" Ceylang said. Aritch remained silent. Ceylang sat back and closed her eyes. It was like mind reading. It confused her. Aritch interrupted her musings. "What about that officer and the gatekeeper?" She shook her head. "You're wise to use living observers there. They all seem to know when they're being watched. And how it's done." "Even McKie." "He didn't look at the viewers." "Because he assumed from the first that we'd have him under almost constant observation. He's not concerned about the mechanical intrusions. He has built a simulation McKie of his own who acts on the surface of the real McKie." "That's your assumption?" "We arrived at this from observation of Jedrik in her dealings with McKie. She peels away the simulation layers one at a time, coming closer and closer to the actuality at the core." Another observation bothered Ceylang. "Why'd the gatekeeper shut down that viewer Just then?" "Obviously because Jedrik told him to do that." Ceylang shuddered. "Sometimes I think those Dosadi play us like a fine instrument." "But of course! That's why we sent them our McKie."    The more control the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos. -- PanSpechi aphorism It was a half hour before Jedrik and McKie found themselves in the hallway leading to her quarters. McKie, aware of the effort she was expending to conceal a deep weariness, watched her carefully. She concentrated on presenting a show of vitality, her attention glued on the prospect ahead. There was no way of telling what went on in her mind. McKie did not attempt to break the silence. He had his own worries. Which was the real Jedrik? How was she going to employ Pcharky? Could he resist her? He knew he was close to a solution of the Dosadi mystery, but the prospect of the twin gambles he was about to take filled him with doubts. On coming from the projection room, they'd found themselves in a strange delaying situation, as though it were something planned for their frustration. Everything had been prepared for their movement -- guards warned, elevator waiting, doors opened. But every time they thought the way clear they met interference. Except for the obvious importance of the matters which delayed them, it was easy to imagine a conspiracy. A party of Gowachin at Gate Seventy wanted to surrender but they demanded a parley first. One of Jedrik's aides didn't like the situation. Something about the assessment of the offer bothered her and she wanted to discuss it with Jedrik. She stopped them halfway down the first hall outside the projection room. The aide was an older woman who reminded McKie vaguely of a Wreave lab worker at BuSab, one who'd always been suspicious of computers, even antagonistic toward them. This Wreave had read every bit of history he could find about the evolution of such instruments and liked to remind his listeners of the misuses of the DemoPol. Human history had provided him with abundant ammunition, what with its periodic revolts against "enslavement by machines." Once, he'd cornered McKie. "Look here! See this sign: 'Gigo.' That's a very old sign that was hung above one of your ancient computers. It's an acronym: 'Garbage In, Garbage Out.' You see! They knew." Yes. Jedrik's female aide reminded him of that Wreave. McKie listened to her worries. She roamed all around a central disquiet, never settling on a particular thing. Aware of Aritch's deadline and Jedrik's fatigue, McKie felt the pressures bearing down upon him. The aide's data was accurate. Others had checked it. Finally, he could hold his impatience no longer. "Who fed this data into your computer?' ' The aide was startled at the interruption, but Jedrik turned to him, waiting. "I think it was Holjance," the aide said. "Why?" "Get him in here." "Her." "Her, then! Make sure she's actually the one who fed in that data." Holjance was a pinch-faced woman with deep wrinkles around very bright eyes. Her hair was dark and' wiry, skin almost the color of McKie's. Yes, she was the one who'd fed the data into the computer because it had arrived on her shift and she'd thought it too important to delegate. "What is it you want?" she demanded. He did not see any rudeness in this. It was Dosadi directness. Important things were happening all around. Don't waste time. "You saw this assessment of the surrender offer?" he asked. "Yes." "Are you satisfied with it?" "The data went in correctly." "That's my question." "Of course I'm satisfied!" She stood ready to defend herself against any charge that she'd slighted her job. "Tell me, Holjance," he said, "if you wanted the Gowachin computers to produce inaccurate assessments, what would you do?" She thought about this a moment, blinked, glanced almost furtively at Jedrik who appeared lost in thought. "Well, sir, we have a regular filtering procedure for preventing..." "That's it," Jedrik said. "If I were a Gowachin, I would not be doing that right now." Jedrik turned, barked orders to the guards behind her. "That's another trap! Take care of it." As they emerged from the elevator on Jedrik's floor there was another delay, one of the escort who'd been with McKie at Gate Eighteen. His name was Todu Pellas and McKie addressed him by name, noting the faint betrayal of pleasure this elicited. Pellas, too, had doubts about carrying out a particular order. "We're supposed to back up Tria's move by attacking across the upper parkway, but there are some trees and other growth knocked down up here that haven't been moved for two days." "Who knocked down those trees?" McKie asked. "We did." McKie understood. "Youfeinted." The Gowachin were supposed to believe this would provide cover for an attack but there 'd been no attack for two days. "They must be under pretty heavy strain," Jedrik said. McKie nodded. That, too, made sense. The alternative Gowachin assumption was that the Humans were trying to fake them into an attack at that point. But the cover had not been removed by either side for two days. Jedrik took a deep breath. "We have superior firepower and when Tria...well, you should be able to cut right through there to..." McKie interrupted. "Call off that attack." "But..." "Call it off!" She saw the direction of his reasoning. Broey had learned much from the force which Gar and Tria had trained. And Jedrik herself had provided the final emphasis in the lesson. She saw there was no need to change her orders to Pallas. Pallas had taken it upon himself to obey McKie, not waiting for Jedrik's response, although she was his commander. He already had a communicator off his belt and was speaking rapidly into it. "Yes! Dig in for a holding action." He spoke in an aside to Jedrik. "I can handle it from here." In a few steps, Jedrik and McKie found themselves in her room. Jedrik leaned with her back against the door, no longer trying to conceal her fatigue. "McKie, you're becoming very Dosadi." He crossed to the concealing panels, pulled out the bed. "You need rest." "No time." Yes, she knew all about the sixty-hour deadline... less than fifty-five hours now. Dosadi 's destruction was a reaction she hadn't expected from 'X' and she blamed herself. He turned, studied her, saw that she'd passed some previously defined limit of personal endurance. She possessed no amplifiers of muscles or senses, none of the sophisticated aids McKie could call upon in emergencies. She had nothing but her own magnificent mind and body. And she'd almost run them out. Still she pressed on. This told him a great deal about her motivation. McKie found himself deeply touched by the fact that she'd not once berated him for hiding that ultimate threat which Aritch held over Dosadi. She'd accepted it that someone in Aritch's position could erase an entire planet, that McKie had been properly maneuvered into concealing this. The alternative she offered filled McKie with misgivings. Exchange bodies? He understood now that this was Pcharky's function, the price the old Gowachin paid for survival. Jedrik had explained. "He will perform this service one more time. In exchange, we release him from Dosadi." "If he's one of the original... I mean, why doesn't he just leave?" "We haven't provided him with a body he can use." McKie had suppressed a feeling of horror. But the history of Dosadi which Jedrik unfolded made it clear that a deliberate loophole had been left in the Caleban contract which imprisoned this planet. Fannie Mae had even said it. He could leave in another body. That was the basic purpose behind this experiment. New bodies for old! Aritch had expected this to be the ultimate enticement, luring McKie into the Gowachin plot, enlisting McKie's supreme abilities and his powerful position in BuSab. A new body for his old one. All he'd have to do would be to cooperate in the destruction of a planet, conceal the real purpose of this project and help set up another body-trade planet better concealed. But Aritch had not anticipated what might be created by Jedrik plus McKie. They now shared a particular hate and motivation. Jedrik still stood at the door waiting for him to decide. "Tell me what to do," he said. to..." "Jedrik!" He thought he saw the beginning of tears. It wasn't that she hid them, but that they reached a suppression level barely visible and she defied them. She found her voice, pointed. "That panel beside the bed. Pressure latch." The panel swung wide to reveal two shimmering rods about two centimeters in diameter. The rods danced with the energies of Pcharky's cage. They emerged from the floor, bent at right angles about waist height and, as the panel opened, they rotated to extend into the room -- two glowing handles about a meter apart. McKie stared at them. He felt a tightness in his breast. What if he'd misread Jedrik? Could he be sure of any Dosadi? This room felt as familiar to him now as his quarters on CC. It was here that Jedrik had taught him some of the most essential Dosadi lessons. Yet...he knew the old pattern of what she proposed. The discarded body with its donor ego had always been killed immediately. Why? "You'll have your answer to that question when we're done." A Dosadi response, ambiguous, heavy with alternatives. He glanced around the room, found it hard to believe that he'd known this place only these few days. His attention returned to the shimmering rods. Another trap? He knew he was wasting precious time, that he'd have to go through with this. But what would it be like to find himself in Jedrik's flesh, wearing her body as he now wore his own? PanSpechi transferred an ego from body to body. But something unspeakable which they would not reveal happened to the donor. McKie took a trembling breath. It had to be done. He and Jedrik shared a common purpose. She'd had many opportunities to use Pcharky simply to escape. The fact that she'd waited for a McKie forced him to believe her. Jedrik's followers trusted her... and they were Dosadi. And if he and Jedrik escaped, Aritch would find himself facing a far different McKie from the one who'd come so innocently across the Rim. They might yet stay Aritch 's hand. The enticement had been real, though. No doubting that. Shed an old body, get a new one. And the Rim had been the major source of raw material... strong, resilient bodies. Survivors. "What do I do?" he asked. He felt a hand on his shoulder and she spoke from beside him. "You are very Dosadi, McKie. Astonishing." He glanced at her, saw what it had cost her to move here from the door. He slipped a hand around her waist, eased her to a sitting position on the bed and within reach of the rods. "Tell me what to do." She stared at the rods and McKie realized it was rage driving her, rage against Aritch, the embodiment of 'X,' the embodiment of a contrived fate. He understood this. The solution of the Dosadi mystery had left him feeling empty, but on the edges there was such a rage as he'd never before experienced. He was still BuSab, though. He wanted no more bloodshed because of Dosadi, no more Gowachin justifications. Jedrik's voice interrupted his thoughts and he saw that she also shared some of his misgivings. ' T come from a long line of heretics. None of us doubted that Dosadi was a crime, that somewhere there was a justice to punish the criminals." McKie almost sighed. Not the old Messiah dream! Not that! He would not fill the role even for Dosadi. It was as though Jedrik read his mind. Perhaps, with that simulation model of him she carried in her head, this was exactly what she did. "We didn't expect a hero to come and save us. We knew that whoever came would suffer from the same deficiencies as the other non-Dosadi we saw here. You were so... slow. Tell me, McKie, what drives a Dosadi?" He almost said, "Power." She saw his hesitation, waited. "The power to change your condition," he said. "You make me very proud, McKie." "But how did you know I was..." "McKie!" He swallowed, then: "Yes, I guess that was the easiest part for you." "It was much more difficult finding your abilities and shaping you into a Dosadi." "But I might've been..." "Tell me how I did it, McKie." It was a test. He saw that. How had she known absolutely that he was the one she needed? "I was sent here in a way that evaded Broey." "And that's not easy." Her glance flickered ceilingward. "They tried to bait us from time to time. Havvy..." "Compromised, contaminated..." "Useless. Sometimes, a stranger looks out of Havvy 's eyes." "My eyes are my own." "The first thing Bahrank reported about you." "But even before that..." "Yes?" "They used Havvy to tell you I was coming... and... and he told you that you could use my body. He had to be truthful with you up to a point. You could read Havvy! How clever they thought they were being! I had to be vulnerable...really vulnerable." "The first thing..." "... you found out about me." He nodded. "Suspicions confirmed. All of that money on my person. Bait. I was someone to be eliminated. I was a powerful enemy of your enemies." "And you were angered by the right things." "You saw that?" "McKie, you people are so easy to read. So easy!" "And the weapons I carried. You were supposed to use those to destroy yourselves. The implications..." "I would've seen that if I'd had first-hand experience of Aritch. You knew what he intended for us. My mistake was to read your fears as purely personal. In time..." "We're wasting time." "You fear we'll be too late?" Once more, he looked at the shimmering rods. What was it Pcharky did? McKie felt events rushing over him, engulfing him. What bargain had Jedrik really driven with Pcharky? She saw the question on his face. "My people knew all along that Pcharky was just a tool of the God who held us prisoner. We forced a bargain on that God... that Caleban. Did you think we would not recognize the identity between the powers of that cage and the powers of our God Wall? No more delays, McKie. It's time to test our bargain."    terly magazine dedicated to presenting the best stories by the field's most exciting new writers. Each issue features a wide spectrum of SF and fantasy by speculative fiction's brightest new discoveries. In addition, some of the field's biggest names regularly contribute columns and special articles on the writing of SF. Harlan Ellison's column on writing and Hal Clement's science column are regular features. -- the first published story of a major writer, preceded future issues, you'll learn the inside story behind the first sales of such writers as Algis Budrys, Norman Spinrad, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Barry Malzberg, and Roger Zelazny. And that's not all! Each issue also includes up-tothe-minute reviews of films, books, and records, plus news of special Interest to writers. Subscriptions are only # per year in the U.S. # in Canada, and # overseas, payable directly in U.S. funds. If you act now, your subscription will begin featuring the first reprinting ever of Harian Ellison's first saie) are available for # each. Get the best of the future now -- subscribe to ston, MA # Spider Robinson Paingod and Other Delusions, Harlan Ellison, Pyramid, # pp., #  Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, same as above From the Land of Fear, likewise (# pp. appears to be a popular length) Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled, # pp., #, otherwise ditto Farmers In Wonder, Harlan et al. Pyramid, # pp., # Approaching Oblivion, Harlan Ellison, Signet, # pp., # Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison, Dell, # pp., # The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, Dorothy Bryant, Moon Random House, # pp., # The Judgement of Eve, Edgar Pangborn, Avon-Equinox, # pp.,'# The Long View, F.M. Busby, BerkleyPutnam, # pp., # The Noreascon Proceedings, ed. pp., # The Noreascon Awards Banquet, fore we get rolling this month. Feedback on your feedback, mostly. ("Ah yes," said my neighbor Homer, as he carried feed to his horses. "You get your feedback..."he grimaced down at his shoes, "... and I get my feed back. I wonder which of us is better off?") I Didn't Know It Was Loaded Dept.: dropping hints about books you'd like to see is a bush-league stunt, as I should have realized. Please do not mail me any more books unless you query first. I'm truly grateful to all of you who did -- it's nice to know you care -- but now I have four copies of The Company of Glory and like that, and I'm running out of friends to pass them on to. If there is some book you love so much you just have to try and get me to review it -- again, query first. The odds are excellent that I already have it and didn't feel like reading it: you'll only make me guilty. Under no circumstances mail me anything you want returned, because I'm quite likely to lose your cover letter at once (this office looks like a letterbombed embassy, and my twoyear-old is a pack rat). That reminds me -- even if I do somehow keep your name and address with the book I can no longer thank you in print: I'm starting to get handwritten letters with the signature typed out, and I will not trade notoriety for books. Why Don't You Review -- ? Dept.: I get over a hundred books a month, on the average, and treat 'em just the way you treat your bookstore's sf section: I read what looks interesting to me. If enough people vigorously recommend a book I'll take a crack at it (as happened last month with Crowley's The Deep) but like your bookstore, I can't take individual requests. Will You Please Comment On This Original Manuscript? Dept.: No. Nor will I pay return postage -- and American stamps are no use to me. I am involved with the Nova Scotia Writer's Federation's Critical Reading Service, which means I will read and comment on manuscripts by Nova Scotians, referred through the Federation, for a preset fee depending on length of the work. It would be unethical of me to do the same for others for free, and frankly I feel that anyone who wants me to read and appraise his or her manuscript is wasting their time and mine. My blanket advice to writers is to ignore any and all advice on your stories unless it comes from an editor who says, "I will buy this if you make the following changes." Enough beginning writers feel differently that I've been bludgeoned into this Federation gig, but I'm not real happy about it. If some dire inner compulsion forces you to mail me your stories, please do not staple them. The staples collect in the bottom of the stove and have to be shoveled out. Do You Have A List Of Your Publications? Dept.: I know this sounds ego-trippy, but you'd be surprised how many have asked. Yes I do, and God bless you for asking, but I have discovered that it takes twenty-five working minutes to copy it out longhand. The cheapest nearby Xerox machine costs a quarter -- send me one, and return postage (in International Mail Coupons, not worthless American stamps), and I will happily mail you an up-to-date list, including stories sold that won't see print for months yet. I Don't Know What To Call This Dept.: my personal thanks to each and every one of you who has written to me. You have brightened nearly every weekday of the past year; educated, entertained and otherwise uplifted me and Jeanne; and helped me enormously in doing this job. I appreciate. One Last Thing Dept.: Jody Bosley, one of my ihost faithful letter writers, is a young lady who is both blind and epileptic, and one of the gutsiest, cheerfullest people I know. She is also a staunch sf fan -- and it takes upwards of two years to get a book put into Braille when it can be done at all Galaxy is the only sf magazine available in Braille. I hope that shocks you as much as it did me). I strongly urge any of you who have the time and caring to take an hour of your time, read some sf you enjoyed a lot onto cassette, and mail it to Jody co Autumn Years Lodge, # South Adams, Fort Worth, Texas #. all capital letters, where you would ordinarily put a stamp, and the government picks up the tab (this works from Canada too; don't know about other parts of the world.). I know Jody'll appreciate it; I'd take it as a personal favor; and you might just acquire the damndest pen pal you ever had, a friend well worth knowing. And now, at long last, the Harlan Ellison bonanza I've been promising you for the last four issues or so. One day, several months ago, I noticed that there was a mighty shitload (note; # shitloads  I mighty shitload) of Harlan Ellison books being piled under my mailbox by a weary-looking postman (I could tell they were Harlan Ellison books because the mailbox shied timidly away from them), said, "Right -- there's the next column right there," and announced same in the column I was writing at the time. Ha. Anyone who reads seven books of Ellison in seven days will spend the eighth in Intensive Care: do not exceed the recommended dosage, do not attempt to drive a car or operate heavy machinery while reading, and discontinue use if emotional exhaustion occurs. The Surgeon General has determined that danger to complacency increases with the amount read, and you can take that to the bank. So what I did, I took seven Ellisons, arranged them in chronological order, and read one every couple of weeks, slowly, and that's why it took me so long, okay?    The earliest Ellison I could get my hands on was his very first, Web of the City, but I can't cover that here because Baen won't let me do mainstream (or else I'd sneak in Goldman and the new David Bromberg album, to name only a few). The earliest sf Ellison Pyramid sent me turned out to be the first Ellison I ever read, lo these many moons ago; Paingod and Other Delusions. Hoo-boy! Such ambiguous feelings. Look: the Heinlein quote on the cover is strictly accurate -- this book is raw corn liquor. I remember with fondness my first hit of raw corn liquor. But these days I drink Tullamore Dew (when I can get it). Paingod contains some of my favorite stories of all time: the title story and "The Crackpots" are engraved on my brain. But rereading them ten years later was... enlightening. Harlan and I had both grown since. The ideas were as bered, but the craft, the execution of those ideas, might best be described as impulsive. As Anne McCaffrey says in the blurb, Harlan "... writes as if an inner fuse is about to blow before he can get all the words on his pages." Fine -- but this is not how to achieve precision. At that point in his career (What? Twenty years ago?) Harlan's talent was simply so damn ferocious that he had nothing like control over it. Often, as in "Wanted In Surgery," he expended yards of his guts on stories with moronic premises. All right; I winced from time to time. But the sheer incandescence of Harlan's energy carried me handily through the book, and " 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman" and "Deeper Than Darkness" are acknowledged genre classics. The only stories I actively disliked were "Bright Eyes" and "Wanted In Surgery," which (since I count both introductions plus the between-stories-commentary as three "stories") gives the book an # on the Spidermeter. You could do worse.    You could, for instance, pick up  Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Everybody has their own opinion about the title story; it's one of the most famous stories in our genre. I will concede that it is a work of genius but I don't want it in my living room, thank you. It contains more ugliness per line than anything else ever written, and if you find that fascinating, go to it. On similar grounds I loathe "World of the Myth," and I didn't need the copyright page to tell me that "Big Sam Was My Friend" and "Eyes of Dust" were extremely early Ellison (# and # respectively). On the other hand, "Lonelyache," "Delusion for a Dragon Slayer" and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" are among the best stories Harlan ever wrote, pure dynamite in form and content. Here we see the talent being broken to harness, rapidly maturing. By the time the smoke clears, we're back up to # on the Meter, and itching for the next one.    And sure enough, it's a peach. Although eight of the eleven stories in From the Land of Fear are "early" (#s) Ellison, all but one of them hold up very well indeed. Curiously, there are no smashhit superfamous classics in this collection -- and yet the average quality is higher than that of Mouth, which had four such. A lot of them are short, but perfect-, "Life Hutch," for instance, is a masterpiece of construction and suspense, and "Battle Without Banners" still wrings out my heart like a dishrag. "The Time of the Eye" in particular reads like much later than # Ellison, and "The Sky Is Burning," one of the earliest stories in the collection, is also one of the finest. But my runaway favorites are the two versions of "Soldier," a story vaguely like "A Christmas Carol" written by the Marquis de Sade. I can't decide which I like better': the original short story or the TV script it became. The two are quite dissimilar despite the fact that they share protagonist, situation and essential theme, and both are beautifully realized. I learned a lot about the mechanics of script adaptation, too. About a # on the Meter.    So I staggered on to Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled, and boy was I prepared to hate it from the title. I state categorically: this is the finest collection of Ellisbn I've ever seen, and one of the best books I've ever read. There's a story in there, "The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie," that if you read it you better blink a lot, because it'll bake the moisture right off your eyeballs. There's a story called "Neither Your Jenny Nor Mine" which will raise blisters on your forebrain. There's stories there that will make you shout aloud, will cause your eyes to twitch and your stomach to do the boogaloo, will (as David Bromberg says) "turn your blood to water, your brain to jelly... your toes to cupcakes..." and cure your hemorrhoids all at the same time. This collection is what the doctor ordered and why the preacher danced, and I'm damned if I can imagine a better use for a buck seventy-five. Here is the Ellison talent in fullest control, producing stories that are as much fun to reread as to read the first time, that I'll be coming back to years from now, to learn from. There's no point in citing the stories by name. Every one is a stone masterpiece, and taken together they taught me more about love than the average Sturgeon novel. Call it # on the Spidermeter, and lemme at dat next one! k it it Which turns out to be nearly as enormous, nearly as good, and twenty-five cents cheaper. Oh, there are a couple of so-so stories in Partners In Wonder, and one certifiable piece of cheese -- but Jeezis, what fun! What it is, see, is a whole book of collaborations, short stories co-authored by Harlan with practically everybody, plus introductions (incorporating biographical sketches of the said collaborators) which are as much fun as the stories themselves. The BlochEllison duet of Jack the Ripper stories have since been immortalized on record by Alternate Worlds Recordings (I'm expecting my review copy any day now), and I'm told that the playback literally scared Harlan out of the studio. "Brillo" (with Ben Bova), "Street Scene" (Laumer), "Survivor ##" (Slesar), "Up Christopher to Madness" (Davidson), and of course the incomparable "I See A Man Sitting On A Chair and the Chair is Biting His Leg" (Sheckley -- who else?) are all among the funniest goddam stories I've ever seen, each in .its own way -- I guess it's easier to laugh together than cry. The serious stories don't come off quite as well -- only "The Song the Zombie Sang" (Silverberg -- again, In our spRmq issue: Box#FC,NewTbRk NY # times yearly. All covers are in full color, printed on the same cover stock as that used by the most of them were fair-to-good. # on the Meter. The hell with one-a-week, where's the next one?    Shoulda quit while I was ahead. Approaching Oblivion purely spoilt my digestion. First I tripped headlong over an introduction which could be described as a trumpet blast of rage, a scream of despair. "As for me and you in this literary liaison, well. I've paid my dues. Now I'm going to merely sit here on the side and laugh my ass off at how you sink into the quagmire like the triceratops... And if you hear me sobbing once in a while, it's only because you've killed me too, you fuckers." From there (whew!) I stumbled into a bleak landscape of stories which nearly all had despair as their keynote. Only "I'm Looking for Kadak" (an extended Yiddish lesson) and "Erotophobia' ' (an extended wet-dream) tried to lighten the mood, and perhaps because of the setting, both failed, succeeding only in looking distinctly out-ofplace. "Cold Friend" and "One Life, Furnished In Early Poverty" in Harlan's career in that if they didn't have his byline on them, you might not have guessed they were his -- but again the setting (and the echoing scream of that introduction) make it hard to appreciate them. "Catman" I actively hated. No between-story intros; total #. k  ir So I snatched up the last one in the pile, Deathbird Stories, and was considerably reassured. I reviewed the hardcover version over a year ago, from galleys, and found the paperback even more impressive than I had remembered. No sense recapitulating much; with the exceptions of "On the Downhill Side," "Corpse," and "At the Mouse Circus" (which three I plain couldn't understand), all of the nineteen stories in Deathbird are excellent, and at least eight of them are genuine masterpieces. Taken together, they left me happily exhausted and optimistic for the future. I think Harlan is very close to a very important truth, concerning despair. We'll see. To round out this overview of twenty years' worth of Harlan Ellison, I should add that Harlan's own reading of his classic "Shatterday" (on Alternate Worlds Recordings' writing a finalist for the # Best Dramatic Presentation Nebula. Since its competition appears to be Logan's Runs and The Man Who Fell In Worth, it ought to win handily. What, you want summatory remarks? At these prices? Okay. Taken together (the way I said you shouldn't take them), these books clearly show that over two decades Harlan has progressed from damn' promising talent to a genuine Writer of Stature (no pun intended), following a manic-depressive cycle that has a kind of consistency and a weird beauty of its own. I predict that his forthcoming Prince of Sleep (contracted to Dell but uncompleted as of this writing) will knock us all on our ass. Its middle third is the magnificent novella which once ran here in Galaxy as "The Region Between"... All praise to Pyramid, Signet and Dell for making all these stories available again in paperback.    The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (formerly published as The Comforter) is "the best yet in the newly emerging genre of women's fantasy fiction," according to someone named Laurel in something called Amazon Quarterly, and a publication called Amazon Artworks describes it as a "beautifully written feminist novel." So said the back-cover blurb. Consequently I expected to find it a large chunk of used food. I have no more use for women who like the image of the Amazon than I have for men who admire Attila The Hun, and "women's fantasy fiction" sounds like it's intended to not appeal to me (how about "short people's fantasy fiction"? -- they're half the race too, lady.). How impressed would you be with the Taj Mahal if all you knew about it was that a couple of termites said it tasted terrific? I freely admit I expected Ata to be this column's sacrificial victim. Imagine, then, my surprise and delight when I found that the book is a gem. And this despite the fact that the plot has been done many times before by flashier writers. It's the old wheeze about the contemporary-man-type hero transplanted to a primitive society whose mores freak him out -- which chump only gradually realizes that the primitive society is a utopia and the "ignorant" natives are more together than he is. Sturgeon's used several variants of it, Chad Oliver's excellent "Marginal Man" is another example that springs to mind, and this book is one of the very best I've seen. Feminist, phooey! It's humanist, with malice toward none, a deeply spiritually rewarding book that taught me some things. And at the same time it's an exciting read that never lost my interest -- the opening grabbed me by the scruff of the collar and yanked. And it features some of the cleanest, sparest, simplest prose I've seen all year, not a superfluous word in the book. Like six brush strokes on rice paper, exquisite. It's a genuine shame Ms. Bryant had to market this as a "feminist" book. It's "co-published" by Moon Books (I'm sorry -- it makes me think of my outhouse door), an independent women's publishing company, and Random House, which does the distributing; and having thus decided on a minority audience they printed up a fat ten thousand copies of a hardcover-sized paperback and priced 'em at three dollars a hit. Consequently even the few of you who are perceptive enough to realize that my taste is impeccable and will buy a book just on my say-so will probably be unable to find or afford it. Which is a shame. It's a peachy book, and Dorothy Bryant is a writer whose byline I'll look for. If this had been handled right when it was first released in #, it could have been a Hugo finalist.    Baen apparently hijacked the Avon shipment and ripped off the review copy of The Judgement of Eve (uttering, no doubt, the proverbial Editorial "Wheee!") but who could blame him? Fortunately, a generous fan who shall renane maimless mailed me a copy which arrived on the same day that the Avon review shipment showed up one light. Don't worry about it, Jim. Really.  have no idea what he's talking about. -- Ed. Don't let the strikingly ugly cover painting by Patrick Woodruffe dismay you, folks -- this is some of Edgar's best stuff, just heartwarmingly good. There are his usual vibrantly alive characters, his profound insights, his merriment and his sorrow and his gusty appreciation of both, all the ingredients that add up to a continuous warm glow in your middle. The central question of the novel is nothing less than "What is love?" and it answers it damned well in my opinion. Typical Pangbom, in short. In fact. I'd be praising it unreservedly -- if it wasn't for the damned ending, which seems to me like a cop-out. I suspect -- I would like to thinks -- that Edgar wanted to end it with a menage-a-quatre but couldn't get the publishers in # to accept that. This may not be true -- but then, as Edgar himself said on page #I , "If there were only one kind of truth or only, say, half a dozen, the poor damned human race would have had to close up shop before discovering the control of fire." One of the best in Avon's SF Rediscovery Series, nearly as good as A Mirror for Observers (their other Pangborn entry. Are they going to do West of the Suni). '   The Long View is the final third or so of Buzz Busby's massive Rissa Kerguelen saga, the first twothirds of which (aptly titled Rissa Kerguelen) I reviewed here favorably a few months ago. It had been a long time between books. and the first was so enormous and detailed I had frankly forgotten parts of it by the time I settled down with The Long View. But I managed to hang on, and enjoyed the finish a bunch. Incredibly, in that wealth of color and detail there are threads that began in the opening chapters and ran invisibly through both books until, jerked upon in the last pages, they made the whole weave fall together in a pleasing pattern. Busby reminds me of Larry Niven, in his combination of multidisciplinary education, outrageous imagination and rigorous logic. I can't honestly call this a Great Book -- it remains, in the end, good adventure and no more. I don't know that it couldn't have done with some editing and trimming. But it's cracking good adventure, with a really strong protagonistperson and some dynamite surprises planted at the end, and that's a lot to ask in these troubled times. Make note: Long View is not really a self-contained entity. This is not Busby's fault nor Berkley's: economics dictated that the book be cut in two, and they did their best. But the upshot is, if you didn't read Rissa Kerguelen, you don't want just this one. On the other hand, if you did, you don't want to stop now, do you? Dis is de climax.    Due to unavoidable technical difficulties there has been some disruption in our scheduling and we have been forced to adjust our cover dates accordingly. All subscriptions will be adjusted so that subscribers will receive the full number of issues to which they are entitled. Galaxy very much regrets any inconvenience this may have caused, and we are confident the situation wili not recur. Thank you for your patience. Ever been to a Worlcon? A World Science Fiction Convention, a gathering of the tribes, complete with Hugo Awards Ceremony and Banquet and Art Show and Huckster Room and The Sing-Along In Gordy's Room and Panels and like that? If you haven't, there's no way on God's earth anyone can tell you about it. Each one is unique, and they seem to have in common only madness, splendor, and above all confusion (this is a con's power source: con fusion) (if my puns get under your skin, does that make them soft-pore corn?). But if you want a taste of one of the legendary ones you missed (I did, dammit) or if you did happen to be at the Boston Sheraton on Labor Day of #I and you want to re-evoke some of the divine insanity, by all means pick up a copy of The Noreascon Proceedings, a transcript of every official word spoken at the Twenty-Ninth World Science Fiction Convention. It includes all the exceptionally fine panels and speeches (by such notables as Ben Bova, Lester del Rey, Joe Hensley, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, John Brunner, Katherine Kurtz, Kate MacLean, Isaac Asimov, Cliff Simak, Larry Niven, Terry Carr, Charlie Brown, James Gunn, Bob Shaw, Poul Anderson, Gordy Dickson, Fred Pohl, Kelly Freas, Karel Thole, Jack Gaughan, Eddie Jones and John Schoenherr), plus the Banquet and Awards Presentations and Acceptance Speeches with Toastburger Silvermast (pay no attention; keep on going), plus membership statistics, art show and masquerade awards, business and financial reports, and quite a number of juicy photographs of the events and festivities (many of these by the acknowledged master of fan fotography, Jay Kay Klein). Leslie Turek's editing job is superb. I know twelve skins seems like a lot of bread, but look at it this way. At the last Worldcon at-the-door registration was over four times that, plus travel, accommodations and meals. Here you're getting an early-registration price, saving yourself the ancillary expenses, and you have the assurance of knowing in advance that the Con is a good one. And if you really want to experience the feel, the intangible Zeitgeist of a Worldcon, but can't afford to go to Miami -- just take this book down to Grand Central Station or your local equivalent, wash down five hundred mikes of acid with two quarts of beer, and try to read it. That'll be close. (Note to the humorless everywhere: I do not seriously advocate this procedure. I don't recommend that humorless people attend Worldcons, either.) Science Fiction Association, which now distributes the book) also has available records (phonograph type) of the Banquet and Hugo Awards -- a two-record set, in fact, for only #. It includes a dirty limerick by Isaac and many other chuckles, and from this transcript it oughta be dandy. It and the book bridge MA #.    So ends another month. Let me quickly thank you again for all the letters, repeat the address for those who missed it (The Red Palace, R.R. ##, Hampton, Nova Scotia pun of singular atrocity: What do you call a drummer who stands three foot two, lives in a Paris subway station, and keeps perfect time? (oujouS ojiaj B :j#msuv) when I first saw him he was in on his back in an oxy tent, trying to breathe and not quite making it. His breath was making little patches of fog on the plastic and his chest was stuttering; his eyes, when he turned them toward me, were deep and empty and lonely. He blinked twice at me and I nodded; I was still wearing an earring, the old style, and a nod was enough. He's dying, Kelly," the doctor said. I thought his voice was too loud and wanted to tell him to shut up. "He knows it." Herron looked at me -- he hadn't taken his eyes from me; he knew who I was and why I was there -- and blinked his eyes again. He knew . "I'm dying," he said. The voice came out of the speaker above the bed. I waited, there not being much I could say. I'd seen dying Spacers before, a lot of them, and they all looked the same way: thin, their muscles atrophied and pulpy at the same time, gasping for air even in a tent. "I want to go back to Earth, Kelly," he said. "Before I die." They all wanted to go back -- every one. After Jumping, the ships, the Cedrics, the planetfalls, and everything else, the Spacers wanted to come home. To die. Always. "Okay," I said. "I'll bring you home."    We grew up wanting to be Spacers, remembering the stories about the early ones -- Glenn and Armstrong and O'Dell -- and the ones who followed them: Kanderson, who died on Deimos trying to save the bubble when an oxygen tank exploded... Matterly, bleeding to death inside his suit, trying to link up power lines when Passenger Four walked into an asteroid spray... Malik, who touched down on seventeen planets, a record nevebroken, and who finally bought li on a tiny rock no one had ever heard of... There 'd never been anything like it -- the Crusades, the westward expansion of nineteenth century America, World War II: they were tiny, isolated events compared to the second push for Space. This was a whole world -- the Russians, Japanese, all of us -- building and hoping and watching. We were the eighth Spacer class, the Miskin Class: he had been killed in Sector Five -- all our heroes were dead -- when the scout ship he'd taken down had crashed. The light ships only carried one scout then, so that there was no way of going down for him, but he kept sending up data -- soil and atmosphere information mostly -- until his voice grew so weak that it was unintelligible. Years later they found him -- the ship pitted with age, his body still inside -- and we felt good knowing that we had not been ill-named. It was a long, tough grind -- the Commission saw Spacer training as a combination boot camp, research laboratory, and cheap labor source. We were thrown up into space with almost no training and we worked for days to assemble the first of the microwave beamers, the first of the Floats, the firsts of almost everything. The men who couldn't take the null-grav threw up into their suits and went back down; the rest of us moved on to the shuttles, the haulers, and finally the Light Ships. We drilled constantly, studied every diagram, every wiring chart, until we knew 'them in our sleep. We had our own jobs, of course, but we had to know everyone else's, too: a meteorite that holed the outer skin wasn't going to ask if we were at General Quarters. We drilled constantly, hitting the pad and then the GQ whistle going off an hour later and the Master shrieking "Up, up, into the ship, into the ship" at us, and then the fifty of us, sleep-fogged and nervous, running through the night to the dials and gauges. "What's the pressure in an Anderson tube?" "Give me the numbers of the seven Emergency ffeqs." until the fifty of us -- the forty -- the thirty -- twenty-seven -- twentyfour -- were like brothers, until we knew the ship like we'd once known our own rooms, until we thought that the constant smell of plastic and oil and recycled air was normal, and the constant hum and vibration and muttering of a thousand small fans and motors and pumps and the shake of the ship was a part of us; until there was only one thing left: Jump and Jump Space. We'd be Spacers then. Spacers, we said, and couldn't believe it was really hapjening to us.    Going down, the Jockey let me handle the ship until we touched the outer beacon. He didn't have to, of course, could have gotten in trouble if anyone else had known. But he knew what it meant to me -- watching the slow climb of the red needle as the anti-grav unit kicked in, worked itself back down. Feeling the hum of engines through the palm of my hand, I could almost feel as though I were working again. Herron was unconscious when I checked him. Just as well: as I strapped down, I could feel the grav on me and I forced myself to take breaths, wished I was back on the Float, in Space, in Jump Space. And I knew what the grav was doing to Herron's lungs; I knew what it was doing to mine  it  "Stand by for Jump." I waited by medical stores -- my normal battle station -- sitting, waiting, fingers tingling in excitement. Jump... not one person in a million had been through it... I'd be a real Spacer then...a Spacer. And then...nothing: they had told me that some men would scream in agony as the ship Jumped, that others would moan or throw up. I waited for something to happen. The doctor looked at me. He was moving his mouth back and forth, rubbing his fingers together as if they itched. After a while he stopped. "We're through Jump," he said. "I didn't feel a thing." "You will. Jump is like nothing else." I was halfway through my pilgrim check -- going down the ranks of the men, women, and children in Long Sleep, headed for one of the outer planets -- when I began to feel Jump. The ship tingled in Jump, almost imperceptibly, but it was there, a vibration so small that men with one drink in them -- soldiers and sailors have been making illegal liquor for centuries -- couldn't feel it, but it was real and it made everything glimmer and shine in ways they didn't in normal space. We felt more alive in it -- I did anyway and could run through the entire twenty-four on two hours of sleep, week in and week out with no loss of efficiency. Food tasted better, music sounded better, and when we went into the iso room for the required daily workout, we could pull more, lift more, and walk out feeling better than ever before. But what made it the best was the view ports. Even the physicists weren't sure what made the sky inside Jump look the way it did -- and they had instruments on it all the time, spools whirring and dials ticking off numbers, trying to learn what was out there -- but it was no longer just the dots and pinpoints of light we could see from subspace. Even the ether glowed and the view was red or green one moment, blue and yellow the next; it would lighten for an instant until the whole ship was bathed in a soft, yellow light like theold oil paintings, and then the light would fade to a blackness so absolute, so deep that men seeing it for the first time would tremble in terror. We were falling, falling, falling into it... And that would fade, too, become green lightning hurling at us, dancing on the brow of the ship; shimmer to a turquoise that washed ver us; go to a red, a pale yellow, ack to black...    Coming into the dome, the colors were gray and brown and a pale, governmental green -- the semi-clear dome itself streaked with dust, scratched by the blowing sand, the squat shuttle ships stained with grease and dirt, the shelter and storage flimsies tired and faded: even under the dome the sun was strong. Even the smell was wrong -- dust and oil and recycled air -- when they write a history of the Space Movement, they'll have to say that it was done on someone else's oxygen -- but not the way it smelled aboard ship. Not even the way it smelled aboard the Floats. There was a dirt smell to it -- and the grav hurt my lungs, made my legs ache.    On my second trip out -- another run to drop pilgrims and stores on another new planet -- a man named Damyell came into Medical. When he coughed, he said, he could taste blood. "I want to go home," he said. "Home?" "Earth, Kelly. I want to see Earth again." He lay down on one of the benches -- we had a Rodgers Variable Grav unit and there was just enough pressure to make a man want to lie down -- and he talked about home, about growing up, about trees and mountains and what it had been like to ride a horse. We broke out of Jump, came close to planetfall, and held Reveille on the Pilgrims. Damyell, in pain now, and semiconscious most of the time -- he was coughing blood by then, a week after he came into the office -- could sense the presence of the planet and he wanted to be down there. An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journai Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Featured in ##: Interviews with Hugo-Winners Joe Haideman and Tim Kirk. And, if it can be squeezed in, an up-to-date, revealing, fascinating interview with Theodore Sturgeon. John Brunner's column, "Noise Level." The SF Art Review column: "The Gimlet Eye" by John Gustafson. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint." Many, many reviews of new  recent sf, small-press pubs,  a host of letters. The editor's day-by-day "Alien Thoughts." Scheduled for ##: An Interview with Leigh Brackett  Edmund Hamilton. ' Quarterly sample I year # two years # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I I "It's not Earth," I told him. "It's land, Kelly. It has flowers and water on it -- that's why the pilgrims are going. Ask them to take me down, Kelly. Ask them." I went to the Captain and asked. He said there'd be no way to get Darnyell back: the shuttle would meet us in orbit, off-load the pilgrims, and we'd never see them again. "He'll be dead in a few days anyway," I told him. "Okay." I helped load Darnyell aboard -- even in the five percent gravity of parking orbit he couldn't walk -- and then to strap him in. "Thanks, Kelly," he said. There was a pink froth on his lips and I wiped it with a towel. "I won't forget this." An hour later he was dead. As the shuttle dropped out of orbit and into point-five G, then point-six, pointeight, his heart and lungs couldn't take the extra gravity and he died. Without seeing a tree. it it it From the outside, it never looked like much -- just a dome in a corner of the settlement dome, with the dust and smoke and noise outside it. When I brought Skitch Herron into it, he was still unconscious. He blinked slowly when I opened the door of the Rest-Easy and the air hit him -- it always hits them -- and he tried to sit up. "Easy," I said. "Not yet." I unlocked the stretcher, put it onto the ground, dropped the wheels. "Now." I gave him a shot and waited for it to take. He stopped strangling on the sputum and managed to sit up. I had to help him onto the stretcher; with the sickness, with the five years he'd spent in null-grav, his muscles didn't work anymore. "Oh, God," he said. "I didn't know." I put the pillow under his head and reached for a blanket. It was spring -- it always was -- and some of them couldn't take the temperatures. He shook it off and blinked his eyes against the sun, the lids of them crusty and old so that even shut they didn't help much. "I forgot," he said. He blinked his eyes some more and I let him look for about three minutes before I pushed the stretcher. The field was green and it was full of daisies. There were flecks of white painted onto the blue sky. I could hear the birds singing -- the field was planted with special bushes for them -- and a squirrel ran across the path in front of us. "How could I leave this?" He coughed again -- the shot does that to them -- and I leaned over to wipe his mouth. "I can hear ducks, Kelly." "We'll go there," I said. We went through the tall grass to the pond. There was a sandy beach, tiny footprints in it, a pail and shovel, and shadows flitting through the water. "Can't see the fish," Herron said. "Just the shadows." He coughed again and I had to wipe his mouth. "Thanks." From across the pond the ducks heard us and began to quack over, rippling the lily pads as they swam. "I have some bread," I said. "They'll want it." I propped another pillow under him so he could throw. The water was twelve feet away and he could barely reach it. The ducks fought for the bread, quacking. I lifted Herron off the stretcher and put him onto a blanket, then put a basket with wine and cheese beside him. He looked at it. Spacers didn't get wine and cheese very often. I cut a piece of cheese for him, poured him some wine. He nibbled, then sipped. "This is either Earth or..." he coughed again... "the condemned man's last meal." He looked at me. "It's Earth," I said. "You made it, Skitch." He looked at the wine again and then winced as pain stabbed through him.    Darnyell had been the first to die that we knew about -- but he wasn't the first: other ships lost men, too, and we'd hear stories when we docked to dump pilgrims or to load stores: "Cable lost two men... Morgan is dead." It was surprising, scary in a way, but mostly unexpected because Spacers -- who grew up worshipping dead men -- weren't supposed to die. Explorers we could understand dying. They asked for it and when they piled up a scout ship on one of the crazy-gravity planets; ran for weeks with Big Eye and then collapsed, babbling, from lack of sleep; or when they went nuts in Jump Space and never came out, so that they rattled around the universe like ghosts -- we could see the ships on the Jensen Scope, but no one ever saw them again -- we said "That's the way it goes" and someone named a Float or a ship or Spacer class after them. But we weren't supposed to die. But we did. No one was sure why. They'd have us retain the bodies for them if the men died in Jump Space, but they never learned much. Maybe the null-grav, some people said, and they wanted us to spend more time in the Rodgers unit; maybe the extra radiation; the hum in Jump; lack of sunlight; deficiency of an undiscovered vitamin. Whatever it was, men were dying. They came into sick bay tired, some of them coughing blood, all of them wanting to go home. And that was the strangest thing of all. Space was where we wanted to be. Sure, we talked of home and when someone brought out pictures of the Titan Mountains or the Green Hills of Bron, we'd admire them. And from time to time we'd make a drop to throw a dmnk or a laugher. But when we broke the pilgrims out of Long Sleep and they clustered around the view ports to see their new planet, we let them look: seeing a planet was, nothing compared to Jump Space. And if someone wanted to go back to Earth to flowers and trees and bugs, we joked, then he must be sick. And we laughed it off and decided that Space was worth the risks. And then, one day we docked at Titan Float One and I could taste blood.    The boy was five and the girl was eight. They came over the hill, the girl in front, protective. We watched them come toward us, singing, pushing through the daisies and the tall grass. Herron just looked at them. He held a glass of wine in one hand and didn't touch it at all. When the kids were eight yards away, he waved weakly to them, as if afraid they'd vanish. The girl looked at the boy, then to us, back to him. "Wave," she said. The boy waved and dropped his hand quick'y"I have to go to the car," I said. "They might want to look at the ducks with you, even throw bread." From thirty yards away I could watch them, the children coming closer, Herron smiling, holding the bread, trying to throw the bread to the ducks, but not strong enough to hit the water. The children came closer. Herron smiled and touched the towel to his mouth. The girl took a piece of bread and threw it to the ducks. They quacked, she laughed, and the little boy clapped his hands. Herron gave him a piece of bread and the boy threw it. I was hoping that Herron couldn't see how far the boy could throw. I could hear what they were saying from the transmitter in the basket. "What's your name?" "Skitch. What's yours?" "Anne. This is Moby. He's my brother." "Hi, Moby." I could see Herron touch the towel to his mouth again. In the gravity, his lungs were shredding. "How come you're here?" "I came to see the ducks." "You don't live here." "I'm a Spacer." "A real Spacer?" I could see their eyes get big. To a kid whose chair-bound father worked as a lawyer or supply clerk, Spacers were magic. They were brave and daring and romantic with the earrings and tired eyes, smiling at pretty girls, posing for the posters which showed the rocket ships blasting off from an eroded moon. "I'm a real Spacer," Herron said. The kids inched in to see his earring. "What's the Milky Way like?" "Did you go to lo?" "Can you fly a ship?" "Did you see a monster?" He told them -- and most of the things were true: what it was like to take out a scout ship, to have the Cedrics screaming and rocking, threatening to tear the ship apart; what the sand demons looked like on Andros; how he had flown into Titan and seen the waiting mountains; what a comet looked like as it rushed toward the ship and how it dissolved from wonder to nothingness; and he told them about Jump -- the slow whine and then, for him, a touch of blackness, then the hum, and the walking around in delight.    "You can't jump again," the doctors told me. There were four of them standing around me, others listening: I'd been moved from Float One to Three, the one with the hospital. "Can't jump?" I couldn't believe it. "I have to... I'm a Spacer." "We think Jump is part of the cause," they said. "Shuttle pilots don't cough blood. Float men don't. Only Spacers do -- and you're one of the men who has it." "If I can't be a Spacer, I don't know what to do," I said. "They don't need many corpsmen on Earth, do they?" "We don't think you can go back to Earth, either. Whatever you had -- have -- has been arrested... we think. At least you're not losing blood anymore. But we think that if you ever hit full gravity again, your lungs will rupture." "Not much of a choice," I said. "No Space and no Earth either," "There are still things you can do. You can work the shuttles, the Float, any of a dozen other places." "I'm trapped." "It's better than being dead." I looked at him -- the oldest of them watching. He had the look that they all have -- all the Earthbound, gravity-bound, floortrapped, non-earring people do: half arrogance, half fear and selfconsciousness. "Have you ever jumped?" I asked him. "No." "How do you know it's better than being dead?" Nobody said anything for a moment. I limjted to the viewport and looked out to the shuttle being tied up, the hunkies floating around, attaching lines and hooks, and beyond it -- the pinpoints of light that were the stars I'd never get to see again, all the places I'd never get to: no more Cedric scream, no more Jump, no more planetfall. And no trees or flowers or bushes either. No waterfalls or chickadees...for me or for the thousands of other men who dreamed of a ring, who'd made it, and who couldn't go back anymore... suddenly I wanted to see Earth again... I turned back to the doctors. "I have an idea," I said.    The kids sat there listening to Herron talk, touching him from time to time, and he patted their heads, talking and coughing into the towel. I let him talk a while, then he asked the kids some questions -- where they went to school and what kinds of foods they liked and what were they going to be when they grew up -- Moby said he wanted to be a Spacer like Skitch -- and I walked over. Herron looked at me and I knelt beside him to give him a clean towel. The inside of the old one was pink and frothy. I looked at the kids, over to the ducks, to my watch. The shot lasted thirty minutes at most; we'd been there twenty. "Aren't yoqr folks going to miss you?" I asked the kids. Herron's eyes fixed on me for a moment as though I'd stolen his toy, then went to acceptance. "We have to be home at four," Anne said. "Is it almost four now?" "Almost," I said. "It was good to talk to you. Mister Skitch," she said. "Say bye to Mister Skitch, Moby." "Bye, Mister Skitch." "Wait," Herron said. He held his hand up. His eyes were damp. "Here." He took his bracelet off -- it was from the hullmetal of Light Ships -- and handed it to Moby. He unscrewed the earring and gave it to the girl. "Take 'em," he said. "Thank you." She said it very softly. Then she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. She turned, took her brother's hand, and they left us. We saw them walk up the hill slowly, the daisies falling around them, springing back to cover their path. They turned and looked back once to wave. We waved back and they were gone. "I told them the truth," Herron said, "about being a Spacer. The work, the ship. Jump. I wouldn't swap it..." He coughed into the towel again and it was black. "I know...you were a good Spacer." "I was young once... like that kid, Moby..." His whole chest convulsed and he sprayed the blanket with flecks of red-and-black foam. "He wants to... they'll have it cured..." He began coughing again, couldn't get the words out. He let me lie him down, head on the pillow, turned so that he dribbled onto the blanket. He clenched and unclenched his fists as if trying to gather strength. "We're not on Earth," he said, fighting the pain as the shot wore off. "I think it's the moon... a dummy." "Earth," I said. "I'm dying, Kelly. Don't lie." The words were crawling out of him, tiny, red balloons breaking on his lips. f "It's Earth," I said. "This is Pennsylvania." "Think it's a game... make the Spacer think he's made it." "Pennsylvania." I had to make ; him believe it. ; "Right." He squeezed my hand ; as hard as he could; I could have I broken the grip with two fingers. I His eyes caught mine and all I I could see was the guy who'd been ' young once, seen Jump Space, remembered it, and was dying. He smiled and the shot broke -- he convulsed as the pain hit him like a hammer. ' "There's another shot," I whispered. I touched his mouth with the towel and he shook it away. "There's another shot?" I nodded. "Gimme...please." I did. Then I waited five minutes and had a cigarette -- I always did -- before I put him onto the stretcher and brought him back to the RestEasy. I was leaving the dome when the kids came back in. Anne looked at me fora moment; she was holding the bracelet. "He was the nicest one," she said. She blinked twice, looked at the bracelet, at the feet under the blanket in the Rest-Easy. Then she walked on past, up the hill, through the grass and the daisies. I thought she'd look back and wave, but she didn't. I blinked once and then she was gone.  .# Hinsdale Ilfs Charles Sheffield Convicted to a life of hard labor on the High Frontier, he found that the lot of a vatman is not a happy one! quite true. He did get an award for his efforts on the Venus terraforming project, and his medal is genuine. Been boasting again, has he? I'll bet he didn't mention that the President of the United Space Federation opposed the award. Or that it was touch and go whether he got a reward or a life sentence. No, the President's view had nothing to do with politics. It was a good deal more personal than that. Let's start at the trial -- that's where I got involved. Waldo and I have been friends and partners since law school. I couldn't believe my ears when I heard he'd been arrested for drug smuggling. Taliza's the worst drug on the list, the pusher's dream. Total addiction after one snort. And Waldo disapproves even of tobacco. It was so out of character that I was sure he must be innocent. The drug ring had been extracting pure taliza from the plants, then putting it into metal powder compacts and shipping them all over Earth. Waldo had handled all the shipping and customs details. He made no attempt to deny it. He said he'd been approached, out of the blue, by a group who wanted to use his experience in international work. That seemed reasonable, because he'd worked for years in the international market. But there were snags. "You say you believed," said the prosecuting counsel, "that somebody would pay you ten thousand credits a month, just to make shipping arrangements for a lot of cheap brass compacts? Isn't that much higher than your usual rates, Mr. Burmeister?" Waldo hummed and hawed. He didn't have a good answer. If you ask me, he had suspected from the start that something shady was going on. I think he may even have guessed at smuggling -- but gold, not drugs. As I say, Waldo has certain standards of honor. I became increasingly uneasy as the prosecutor kept coming back to Waldo's 'refusal' to name the original source of the drug, or the other members of the ring. Waldo swore that he'd received no information except for the shipping details and knew nothing of any other people involved. It was a stand-off, but I could sense the jury tilting the wrong way. Innocence through ignorance is never a strong defense, and they could tell that it was contrary to Waldo's natural ego. The judge's summing-up, in which Waldo was painted as the leader of a desperate band of heartless villains, didn't help a bit. The jury was out less than ten minutes. Guilty. Waldo, protesting his innocence, was sentenced to serve three years on Venus Station. I promised to write.    It's amazing how many people think, as I did, that the Venus terra-forming project is on Venus; actually that won't come for another three hundred years. All the work is done in orbit at Venus Station, seven hundred kilometers above the planet. The Station looks like two big wheels, four hundred meters across, on a common axle. I'd seen pictures of it, but that was all I knew until Waldo described it. The upper wheel. Station Up, spins -- you get about one gee at the outer rim. It has all the hydroponics, air equipment and recycling equipment -- and all the convicts. The lower wheel doesn't rotate. It s Station Down, and it acts as the docking facility and houses the algal seeders. Waldo arrived at Station Down after a boring two-month flight from Earth, along with twenty other prisoners. I gather he was not impressed by his companions. They ranged from a mad bomber who had blown up the store that sold him a janitor who had done in his wife when she refused to read stories to him. What annoyed Waldo was the way the rest of them looked down on him, as an unspeakable drugmaster, destroyer of the young, perverter of the innocent. That, plus the fact that the bunks on the ship were designed for someone half his girth, made his life miserable. It shows how strange the world can be. A few months earlier, Waldo would have taken bets that he could never be glad to arrive at Venus Station to serve a prison sentence. But he saw Station Down swim into view with a great sense of relief. After they docked he was taken to the Prison Admissions Office on Station Up. The work assignment supervisor there had a summary of Waldo's background, with the test results. He looked at them and shook his head. "The only position I've got for you right now is as a Number Three Vatman, on the lower hydroponics level. One good thing about that, you'll have a gravity close to what you were used to on Earth. And it's a very important job; we all depend on the hydroponics." Waldo frowned. It sounded as though it might be manual labor. He'd hoped for an administrative position -- perhaps even a legal post. "This vatman job. It doesn't . sound as though it will make use of my skills. I'm sure I have the qualifications to fill a management slot for you here. Don't you have at least a clerical assignment available?" "Not for your background." The supervisor looked sadly at Waldo's papers. "You have to understand, Mr. Burmeister, there's no shortage of lawyers in the prison. We have enough of you to fill all our clerical needs three times over. If you'd been a trained plumber now, or an electrician, that would be a different matter. You should find this job rewarding," he added, seeing Waldo's expression. "Recycling is a very important function. You'll have full control of all the stirring, filtering and additive operations on the Number Three vat line." It was manual work all right. Waldo didn't like the sound of it at all. "But what's in the vats?" he asked. "JUst what is it you are recycling?" The supervisor told him. Waldo liked the sound of it even less. He made one more try. "Look, there must be some other jobs open here. Surely all the prisoners don't have useful trades. There must be jobs here on the Station that don't correspond to anything back on Earth." "Oh yes, there are. There's one vacancy right now for a scout ship operator. A very responsible position. They fly down into the atmosphere of Venus everyday, and monitor the level that the algae reach before they become too hot to function. Unfortunately, that job has a weight limit." He looked at Waldo's bulk with misgiving. "You don't look less than ninety kilos. I'm afraid, so I didn't mention it to you." Thank heaven for fat. Waldo mentally hugged his poundage to him. The last job he wanted was to be plunged into Venus' searing atmosphere as a sort of human dip stick. He should have kept his mouth shut. "I'll keep your interest in the scout work in mind," the supervisor said encouragingly. "And don't worry about the vat work. I'm told that the smell is just a temporary problem. There's been something wrong with the chemical balance on the lowest level of tanks. Don't forget, in a year or so you'll be eligible for reassignment. I'll mark your interest in scouting down on your form here but I'm sure you'll soon settle in and make friends on the hydroponics work."    Curiously enough, the supervisor's optimistic prediction seemed to be right. The chief of the hydroponics area was a big bruiser named Katuki, who for some reason seemed delighted to see Waldo. He shook hands with enthusiasm and slapped him on the back. "Hey, I'm really pleased to meet you, Mr. Burmeister. I've heard about you, but I didn't know you were going to be working down here. I thought it was impossible to rig the computers that assign people to different jobs. Sometime I'd like you to tell me how you worked it." Waldo smiled modestly. "It's good to get a bit of class in the place," Katuki went on. "The other fellers are good guys, but I don't mind telling you some of them aren't the brightest. Stop by my area as soon as you're settled in, and I'll introduce you to the other vatmen." Waldo was gratified. It was nice to be appreciated, even if the speaker's appearance was a little off-putting. At some time in the past Katuki's face seemed to have lost a major argument with something hard and irregular. Waldo felt even more pleased later, when Katuki introduced him to the other four vatmen with a big build-up. No one had praised his brains so much for years. It's all relative, I suppose. A couple of others, according to Waldo, would have been hard pressed to decide which end of a stirring paddle to hold without guidance from Katuki. Glasses and a bottle were produced from a locker and Katuki poured generous shots of a dark brown liquid. "Here's to our new buddy, Waldo Burmeister," he said, handing them around. "I know he's going to be a real help to the operation here." Waldo hesitated, glass in hand, and looked at the door. "I'm sure you know best, but isn't this a bit risky? What about the guards?" "Down here? You couldn't get a guard to the hydroponics levels unless you bribed him." Katuki thought for a moment. "I don't think I've seen one on this level for three months. Provided everything runs smoothly here, we're left to ourselves. Here's to you." Waldo lifted his glass, expecting the worst, and gulped it down. He'd thought it would be near-beer, or rot-gut. It turned out to be highproof, top quality bourbon. The others grinned at his obvious surprise. "Not bad, eh, Waldo?" said Katuki. "I tell you, we do all right for ourselves down here. Know how we do it?" Waldo accepted a second glass and thought for a moment. Obviously, they'd found a way to make or smuggle good booze. He didn't want to get involved in what might be a risky operation. On the other hand, he certainly didn't want to be cut off from the supply. This needed a careful answer. "Mr. Katuki, when a lawyer is asked if he was given a piece of information he's legally obliged to answer, yes or no. But he can't be asked what he or somebody else was thinking. So to answer your question. I'd rather not be told where the drink comes from." There was a baffled silence for a few seconds as the gears ground inside Katuki's bullet head. Then his face lit up. "Hey, I like that." He turned to the others. "See how to do it. No talk, no chance to get caught out." Then to Waldo. "You'll get the picture for yourself soon enough, when we look around the works tomorrow." The next day wasn't so good. Despite Katuki's pride in the set-up, the three hydroponics levels were a bit stark. They began with the algae breeding tanks on the third level, where the big vats were cultured for the seeders. "We pipe 'em to Station Down as soon as they're ready," explained Katuki. "Then the seeders spray the algae out into the upper atmosphere. They convert carbon dioxide to oxygen as they fall, and die when it gets too hot for them. Each time we go over the same spot on the ground, the algae get a bit lower before they're crisped. It's already a couple of degrees cooler down on the surface than it was when the project started." Waldo suppressed a yawn. Technology bored him. They went down a staircase to the second level and then along a corridor that led to the second level hydroponics tanks. Katuki had got a little more Jumpy, excited about something. He kept glancing at Waldo as though in anticipation. "Don't ever touch that red lever on the wall unless I tell you," he warned as they came halfway along the corridor. "It opens up a section of the floor, so we can dump chemicals into the channel on the first level." "What's in the channel?" "Partly treated sewage, on its way through the lowest level hydroponics tanks. You wouldn't drown if you fell down there -- it's only waist-deep. I don't think you'd enjoy it, though." They walked on, Waldo treading very gingerly as they went over the trapdoor section of the corridor. Just before the staircase to the lowest level Katuki stopped and looked into a small room on the left. It was filled with long spirals of silver coils, winding halfway to the ceiling. It looked curiously familiar. As they came down the staircase and out to the lowest level hydroponics, Waldo had a sudden insight. A still. That's what those metal coils had to be, and that's where the liquor was coming from. As they walked past the fronded, blue-green plants of the long hydroponics tank he noticed that Katuki was looking at him with a sly, expectant air. Waldo winked and Katuki grinned back at him. "We don't need to talk about it, right, Waldo?" he said. "A wink's as good as a nod to a blind horse." They moved out along the first level catwalk, with the big hydroponics tank on their left. A broad stream of grey-green sewage, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, moved sluggishly past on the right. Katuki noticed Waldo's expression and grinned again. "That's where you finish up if you fall through the second level trapdoor. Don't make any enemies among the other vatmen, Waldo." Waldo looked again at the steaming mess and shuddered. His appetite for dinner dropped a notch. After a month he had the working routine mastered, but his taste for the Job didn't increase. As far as Waldo was concerned, a vatman's lot was not a happy one. Apart from Katuki, the vatmen were near-morons and a grunt passed for sparkling conversation. What with filtering, stirring, removing sludge and adding chemicals, Waldo had lost ten kilos and was beginning to regard a human being as no more than an instrument for recycling sewage. That was a pity, because the vatmen under Katuki's direction dined -- and wined -- amazingly well. The third level of tanks were dedicated to producing algae for the seeders, and the lowest level next to the bottom sewage channel was used for oxygen production. But part of the tank on the second level had been set up as a kitchen garden and produced excellent vegetables. There was not much real meat. Waldo could see no way round that, except maybe cannibalism. As he got to know Katuki better that seemed less improbable. Behind the tough battered face lay an even tougher inside. The crews did just what he told them, with no arguments and no discussion. Waldo followed the same approach himself. His work was mainly on the lowest level tank, where Katuki seemed to think he was exceptionally reliable. It wasn't easy. Katuki had been so impressed by Waldo's remark on the virtues of silent accord that his instructions had become almost unintelligible, delivered through isolated words and a series of nods, grunts and winks. But since he clearly continued to regard Waldo with special esteem, everything must have been going well. And as Katuki had said, the guards much preferred the upper levels of Station Up, where the gravity and the sewage were less noticeable. Waldo hadn't seen one down on the lowest levels since his arrival, and his fears regarding the condensing coils of the still off the second level corridor had greatly eased. You have to remember that I'm reporting Waldo's version of events, plus a few things that came out after the visit of the Space Federavery possible that Waldo was not quite the popular, respected figure that he describes. Be that as it may, one day Katuki came rushing down to Waldo's room for advice and assistance. He was so worried that his speech had become quite normal. "Waldo, we got a bad problem coming up," he said. "Next week's the tenth anniversary of the terraforming jroject. President Dinsdale coming here for a big ceremony in Station Down -- special algal spraying, banquet, everything. Trouble is, they'll be coming to Station Up as well, to give us a big inspection." It was nice to receive Katuki's comments in words rather than in mime. Waldo could see no reason for the big panic, though. "Don't worry about it, Katuki. He's not called Dandy Dinsdale for nothing, you know. I've seen him before. He wears thousand-credit suits and he changes his clothes five times a day. He has his own barber and his own manicurist. He can't stand dirt or filth in any form -- it's a mania with him. I'm telling you, you'll never get Dinsdale within six levels of the vat areas." "Waldo, he don't know what it's like here. He asked to see everything, and that dumb superintendent took him at his word. Rusty up in the guard block showed me the tour plan and it includes all our levels." Katuki paced up and down Waldo's room, two steps each way, then hammered his fist on the steel bulkhead. "Damn it, Waldo, what use is a prison if you can't keep the wrong people out of it?" While Katuki was talking, Waldo's stomach had moved steadily up his throat and was now pushing at the roof of his. mouth. That damned still! It would be the ruin of all of them. Why had he been fool enough to let a few bottles of liquor get him mixed up in another illegal deal? Why hadn't he stayed out or blown the whistle? Because he'd heard Katuki's views on the way you deal with squealers and double-crossers, that's why. Waldo had the feeling that he'd been predestined for this setup, ever since the Judge had said the words Venus Station. Katuki was still airing his woes. "They want me to go over to Station Down and explain the way we feed the algal seeders. That means I can't be here to steer the tour the way I'd like to. I'll rush back over here as soon as I can, but I can't We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in' gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me . Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. rely on one of those other dummies to show Dinsdale and the other brass round here. Christ, can you imagine Blattwitz or Grapelli leading the tour? It's taken me two years to teach those two to wash up before they come through for dinner. Waldo, it has to be you. You'll have to make sure the visitors only see what we want them to see. You'll do it, right?" Waldo began to appreciate the narrowness of the beach between the devil and the deep blue sea. He was stuck with it. "Right." He thought of the old advice to the woman being raped: relax. "Then I'll make sure we have tour signs put up, to make it as easy for you as we can," Katuki went on. "People always follow arrows, even off a cliff. That's where I'd like to send that pansy Dinsdale. Damned troublemaker, why wouldn't he settle for a banquet like anybody else?" Katuki had real venom in his tone. Waldo realized that Katuki 's dislike of President Dinsdale went well beyond a difference of political opinions.    They spent most of the next few days scrubbing everything in sight, preparing for the big tour. When President Dinsdale finally appeared on the third hydroponics level, however, surrounded by a retinue of efforts hadn't been sufficient. Waldo's predictions had been on the mark. Dinsdale, impeccably dressed and coiffured, was holding a fine silk handkerchief close to his nose, and his expression left no doubt as to his feelings. The superintendent handed the tour over to Waldo with obvious relief. Dinsdale's great disdain had penetrated even the superintendent's bovine brain. As they walked along the third level, Waldo babbled anything that happened to come into his head. He was preparing himself for the detour that would have to be made down on the second level, to by-pass the still. Fortunately, President Dinsdale showed no interest in anything at all beyond his handkerchief. A couple of the others, though, were looking about them keenly and seemed to understand what they were seeing. Waldo led them nervously to the second level staircase, following the arrows that Katuki had set out. As they came out into the second level corridor Waldo stopped, unable to believe his eyes. Instead of diverting them down to the lowest level, the arrows were pointing along the corridor, straight past the still. The group was passing Waldo, blindly following the arrows, before he could get his brain working. They had reached the trapdoor and in two more seconds would be able to see the still. At that precise moment, Waldo had a sudden flash of total insight, an apocalyptic vision of truth. Katuki, in his hatred of President Dinsdale, didn't care whether they saw the still or not. He was planning to kidnap Dinsdale and hold the party hostages. Why else would he let the secret of the still be revealed? In moments of great stress, the body moves faster than the brain. While Waldo was still dithering mentally, his legs moved him over to the corridor wall. His hands, unprompted, pulled the red lever. The trapdoor swung open, and President Dinsdale and his entourage disappeared with a chorus of screams. Waldo advanced to the edge of the pit, unsure what to do next. His sudden vision of absolute truth hadn't given him a follow-up act. He dithered on the brink, noting absently that all of the party with the exception of Dinsdale himself had managed to land feet-first in the sewage channel below. The President had eventually regained his footing, but he had suffered a seachange into something undeniably strange and overpoweringly rich. He had lost his handkerchief along the way. As Waldo hesitated, Katuki suddenly appeared at the second-level staircase on the other side of the trapdoor. He was carrying a heavy wrench in his hand. "Dirty double-crosser," he shouted, and ran towards Waldo. Waldo turned to flee, but another vatman was coming the other way, a heavy iron pipe in his hand and a murderous expression on his face. Waldo's problem of what to do next seemed to be solved. With a moan of anticipation, he flung himself backwards through the trapdoor and immersed himself in his work. In due course, the lowest level's ever-rolling silent stream bore Waldo, President Dinsdale and the rest of them along into the lowest hydroponics area, where they were able to climb out onto the catwalk beside the big tank full of bluegreen vegetation. Waldo was the last to arrive, and had expected a certain amount of commotion to greet him. But the reality exceeded his wildest imaginings. He had never heard anything like it.    Waldo didn't mention that he had saved President Dinsdale from being captured and held hostage? That's not too surprising. You see, it just wasn't true. The trouble with apocalyptic visions is that they often won't withstand a rational examination. Waldo's wild surmise about Katuki's intentions seemed to make sense to him at the time. Why else would Katuki let the still be seen? The trouble was, it wasn't a still at all. If Waldo had known as much science as the average ten-year-old, he'd have realized that those coils were just part of the standard water recycling equipment on the Station. The thing that Katuki didn't want the visitors to see, and the thing that he was sure Waldo wouldn't let them see, was the lowest level hydroponics tank. Katuki had misinterpreted Waldo's wink when they had taken their first tour. As Waldo said, just because you've seen a piece of cheese doesn't mean you'd recognize a cow if you saw one. The thing that so excited the visitors who had been plunged through the trapdoor -- with the exception of Dinsdale, who had his own preoccupations -- was the lowest level hydroponics tank. The healthy vegetation there, producing oxygen for the use in the Station, was also producing -- under Katuki's guiding hand -- four acres of top-quality taliza plants, for shipment to Earth in return for liquor and other luxuries. Waldo's own knowledge of botany, as a deep hypnoprobe verified, stops at mixed vegetables. Waldo was given an award by the grateful Space Federation for breaking the taliza ring. And Katuki's repeated attempts to get to Waldo during the trial and kill him with his bare hands proved pretty conclusively that Waldo had never had any part of the dmg ring. But evidence or no evidence, Waldo never during the course of the whole trial received anything but a negative vote from President Dinsdale.  Here is what the tritics have said about the first collection from the pen and brush of this dazzling artist! "You can't flip the pages of Galaxy with your eves open and fail to notice that Fabian is great... There are # plates in this... folio... All arc superb "It's available... only by writing Loompanics Unlimited... # a hit. Worth it, by me."Spider Robinson, Galaxy "Fabian is my kind of artist... It was a real treat to look thru his Loompanics artfolio. It made my day."Forrest . Ackerman Steve's best previously-published work plus # original drawings done especially for this book... The fact that I own # of the # drawings should say something about my feelings for the art. Steve is a fantastic talent and my only regrets about this book are it is too short, and that I do not own all the # drawings!" -- Stuart David Schiff, Whispers "I say the Loompanics book... provides a wide range of Steve's styles and skills, including quite a few previously unpublished full-pagers." -- Richard E. Geis (Alter Ego), Science Fiction Review "Where has the sense of wonder gone from sf art? limited. "The book is... beautifully printed on one side of fine heavy slock... "... many of the plates are presented considerably larger than they originally appeared... But Fabian is one of the few illustrators whose work doesn't suffer from being seen full sic. In the # plates including # ncver-before-published pieces done especially for this volume-hc demonstrates an admirable and enviable technique, a strong sense of drama, a contrasting but balanced delicacy and strength in his rendering, and a superb feel for the genre. "Probably more than any other black-and-white illustrator presently working in the sf magazine field, Fabian has the power to revive the excitement that was so much the appeal of the old pulps. He'd have been quite at home in the pages of Weird Tates and would have held his own in the company of the best. "His art is immediate and arresting and often unforgettable...Many an author has wished for better illustrators; on many occasions Fabian's work has deserved better authors. "... Stephen Fabian's art is admirably suited to to a deserving talent." -- George Barr, Delap's F  SF Review Whispers, The Occult Lovecraft, Amazing, Fantastic, The Miscast Barbarian, Outworlds, and more, more, more... Including fifteen never before published drawings, done especially for this book. Each drawing is printed on one side of ## x I I # lb. paper, easily removable for framing. This beautiful book Is truly a collector's item, to be treasured now and in the years to come. the very best of the fastest-rising star in the science Loompanics Unlimited Box # Mason, Michigan # Sirs: Enclosed is S Please send me Name Add ress City State Zip Larry niven used to live behind a garbage dump. Yon wouldn't have known it, of course; although his sister used to say he lived Jn the "wrong part" of BelAire, it is not characteristic of that fabled community that it be in any way noticeable that the municipal sanitary land fill -- read garbage dump -- is only about half a mile up the street. On the other hand, the access road to the dump is clearly visible from the San Diego Freeway, and when I drove to Larry's house -- which was pretty often back in the days when we were writing The Mote in God's Eye and Inferno -- I couldn't help seeing the endless stream of huge trucks trundling up into the Santa Monica Mountains with their loads of refuse. Surely, thought I, we ought to be able to do something with that stuff besides bury it in what might otherwise be a very nice wilderness area. Couple that memory (Larry lives elsewhere now, so I don't go past there so often) with Jim Baen's persuasive manner ("Why the hell don't you write a column on how to rearrange the world so we don't waste so much? Get at it, blast you!") and you have the reason for this column. Frankly, as I start I don't have the foggiest notion of what I'll conclude. Those who would save the world seem to do so in waves. There are fads in the eco-crusading business, and just now garbage is the big one. I say fad because the I # opus put out by the people who brought you the Whole Earth Catalogue, namely their An Index of Possibilities: Energy and Power, contains not a single index reference to "trash," "garbage," "waste," or "sewage," and only one tiny reference (under "methane") to use of any of these materials; yet it was supposed to be a compendium of all the ideas on how the energy crisis might be solved. Now, however, you can't pick up a work of that sort without finding article after article on how we could be saved if only we'd use the energy in our sewage and gar" bage. Unfortunately, none of the ar' tides I've seen give any numbers, they're very similar to the wistful thoughts I had while driving to Larry's house. There's so much waste and trash that surely we can get a # lot of energy out of it; can't we?  I don't know. Let's see. Let's begin by looking at the  present energy situation. That turns out not to be as easy as you might f think; the data aren't collected together into one place, and even when you find the figures they're I all mixed up. It takes a lot of pa( tience and determination to come up t with a meaningful composite, f Energy analysts don't seem ever c to have heard of the metric system, f Everything is given in terms of V British Thermal Units, or tons of I coal equivalent (and not everybody t has a common figure on how many I Btu there are in a ton of coal) or  barrels of oil per day (ditto about I Btubbl.) or kiloWatt-hours, or i whatever they're enamored of. I've put together as good a pic ture as I can, and I've converted ; everything into ergs (I grew up with  the cgs system; if you like the mks y system, divide by #; if you like ' feet and pounds, get hep). The re suits are given in Tables One and Two, which show where the US energy comes from and where it goes. Now true: the growth projected in Table One makes a number of assumptions which T haven't bothered to list (it assumes a conexample) and the percentages in Table Two are going to change if the US population continues stable; but at least we've got something to work with, a way to see just how big a problem we're facing. Now that we know how much power we need, let's find out how much garbage we have to deal with. Actually I shouldn't use the term "garbage" with its strong negative connotation; as the authors of the energy from waste section of Annual Review of Energy for # point out, it's precisely that term that makes the most talented administrators avoid the municipal departments of sanitation, and makes waste-collection a job at the very lowest end of the social scale. Instead I suppose I should say "urban physical resources" or some such. Anyway, we need to know how much of it we have to work with. The Environmental Protection of the metric system either, guesses that we produce about # pounds per capita each day (#I kg for the more up to date among us). Looking at my own household that seems about right. The figure refers to municipal wastes, which is everything thrown away such as trash and garbage, but does not include sewage. Since there are about # million of us, we get a rough figure of # thousand tons each day, or # Supply and Demand in Ergs ( X lO) # # # Domestic # # # Household and commercial # # # Industrial # # # Transportation # #.I # Electrical Generation #.I # # Exports # # # Synthetic conversion losses -- ... # # # # Domestic (#)  # # # Coal # # # Petroleum # # # Gas # #.I # Nuclear #.I # #I Hydro-electric # # # Shale -- # Other --  -- # Imports (#) # #.I # Petroleum # # # Gas #.I #.I # (Calculated from tables in Annual Review of Energy for I #) ably explains why the cities are running out of sanitary land fill. In metric terms we have # thousand annually -- still a respectable sum. We'll stay with the English system for a while because the energy figures I have for what we can get out of municipal waste are, of course, given in Btuton. Sigh. Incidentally, the Annual Review article also gives an estimate of # and that simply can't be right. It may include sewage, which we'll deal with separately. But better than a ton per person per day is still far too large. All right: we have this incredible pile of waste, now what can we do with it? Well, if it were dry we could burn it, with due regard to cleaning up the stack gasses to avoid pollution; and in fact that's what's done with a lot of it (and sometimes without worrying about the pollution aspects, either). Few places make any effort to capture Use (#) Percent Ergs (x lO) Space heating # Water heating # Cooking # # Air conditioning # # Refrigeration # Industrial (#) (#) Process Steam # Direct Heat # Electric Drive # Electrolytic processes # # Transportation (#) (#) Auto # Truck # Bus # # Train # Airplane # Military and Other # Feedstock # Other # #. # (Calculated from tables in Annual Review of Energy for #) the energy from that burning waste. The stuff is merely incinerated to reduce the volume. Surely there is a significant amount of energy released, though, and if we can tap it, will we be independent of Arab sheiks and Liberian tankers? The standard figure for the energy content of municipal waste there's a joker: that's per ton of dry weight. Unfortunately, a lot of municipal waste is anything but dry, and it takes a good bit of energy to get the water out of it before it will bum at all. Still, let's assume we've dried it, somehow, and it's all ours. We cannot yet burn it in steam boilers. The stuff consists of all kinds of things: discarded metal lar Man toys; food scraps; dead animals; discarded vacuum cleaners; coffee grounds; and you name it. It must be pulverized and sorted, and that takes energy. It also takes either a very high or a very low technology: that is, one way to sort it is by human labor, but we'd probably have to increase the size of the army before we could put the unemployed to work doing that; thus we have to build highly sophisticated equipment, with magnets, grates, air-stream sorters and the like, and those cost money, and municipalities raise money primarily through property taxes, and homeowners are about ready to revolt already. But let's assume all those problems solved and we've done the sorting. How much energy can we get from our rubbish? Comes now the math; tons times energyton times a mess of constants I won't bother to give. The results are interesting: # x # ergs, or # x #" kiloWatt-hours. In other words, if we captured all the energy from our rubbish we could produce about # of the energy we used in #. Significant, yes. Important, perhaps. But it won't save us from Arab oil and sinking tankers. Alas, things are worse than that. No industrial process is # efficient, and electrical generation is no exception. With present technology the best we've been able to do at burning rubbish is # efficiency, which means that if all our municipal waste were burned in the best boilers we know how to build, we'd get # X #" kW-hrs, or, coincidentally, some # of the electricity generated in # -- and we have not counted in costs, the energy needed to process and dry, or indeed much of anything. We could go another way. If we can persuade industries to build alongside the rubbish-disposal system or take the rubbish to their plants, so that we can use the steam directly without turning it into electricity, we get # of the energy value and that's a respectable # of all the process steam used in #; well worth trying for, if it doesn't cost too much. So. What are the costs of all this? The Annual Review gives some figures, which I have recalculated to give Table Three. (I recalculated because theirs were based on plants processing # tons unsorted refuse per day, an awkward figure at best.) They still don't mean very much; is this a low or a high cost? Well, one figure readily available is the capital cost per installed kilo Watt of electrical power. That ranges from around # for a coal-fired plant to over # for some kinds of nuclear. Assuming # efficiency for a refuse-burning electrical plant, we find the capital cost per kW is #: much higher than other kinds of plant costs, which explains why electrical utilities aren't terribly interested. For # a kW they can buy a nuclear breeder plant, whose operating costs will be lower than the value of the fuel produced. I suspect that my figures for nuclear power costs are a bit low; theylre based on research done a couple of years ago, and the court and environmental impact statement costs of nuclear power are now about as high as the costs of the hardware; but even so, the refuseplant generator is expensive. Or is it? After all, the cities have to get rid of the refuse somehow. If we subtract off the costs of sanitary land fill, and a number of the other expenses of disposing of that growing mound of trash that gives mayors nightmares, our electrical System Used Pyrolysis ; Steam generation, f processed refuse  Steam generation, I unprocessed refuse Electrical generation,  processed refuse I Fuel preparation. Capital Cost Annual Operating C # # # # # # # # # # J All figures in constant I # dollars per ton (# lbs) of unsorted refuse t per day. Source: Annual Review of Energy, Vol. #, #, Annual Reviews, Inc., Palo Alto. plants begin to make sense after all: but only if we look at cities as a ' total system, and city budgets aren't , prepared that way. Believe me, I ; know: I've been Executive Assistant to the Mayor of Los Angeles. The Department of Water and Power would scream bloody blue blazes if : told they had to spend that kind of senior administrators, people you I can't do without, would go jobf hunting if told their lordly departt ment was to be combined with SaniV tation. Moreover, the City Council I would impeach anyone suggesting i the kind of capital fund raising (and ( consequent increase in property  taxes) a large-scale electricity from-rubbish project would require, j Still, if we were starting over -- if ' we could look at cities as total systerns rather than as a series of independent departments -- it would make a great deal of sense to get rid of our refuse and extract the energy out of it at the same time. We could not run the city on its own garbage, nor is garbage a particularly efficient way to get electricity; but since you have to get rid of the stuff anyway, you might as well take out what you can, and the total system costs will probably Justify the initial capital expense. Whether, given what we've already spent on sanitation facilities, it makes much sense is not so obvious: you have to look at each city independently. I suspect that LA could sell the land set aside for sanitary land fill (another department heard from: although Recreation and Parks knows it can't keep that land forever, right now they're not turning loose) for enough to build some good-sized plants; but I haven't done the numbers. In places where land values are not so high as here, it's more dubious. Let's leave rubbish for a bit and get down in the sewers. If garbage can't provide more than a fraction of our energy needs, can sewage save us?    To begin with, sewage is valuable. That should be obvious: it is only the very wealthy western nations that can afford to throw away such a valuable resource. Indeed, we spend a lot of money and energy merely to throw it away -- after which we burn a lot of valuable coal and oil to generate electricity in order to fix nitrogen to make fertilizer -- fertilizer that's not as good as the high-nitrogen sewage we pollute rivers with. Secondly, there's a long technological history of using sewage as a fuel source: begin with the Indian peasant who uses buffalo chips to cook his food and procede to modem methane generators. Finally, even if we don't use sewage as fertilizer -- and thus bypass the long series of inefficiencies involved in the generation and transmission of power, fixation of nitrogen, etc., culminating in commercial fertilizer -- the stuff has a high energy content. In other words, using sewage as an energy source has a lot going for it. There are several ways to go. First, as agricultural nutrient, allowing the crop to be the actual energy-storage system. This is widely done in the Orient, with detrimental side effects: the honeybucket is a pretty effective means of spreading epidemics. Surely we can do better than that. Second, as methane source: shovel sewage into a tank, let ferment in the absence of air, and out comes methane. Methane is also known as natural gas, and is rather valuable. Indeed, natural gas is the most critically short item in our energy budget. A pound of dry sewage solid will produce about # to # cubic feet of methane, which sells at # per # cubic meters. Now my source book, with a straight face, gives both those figures in the same paragraph. I'll translate: a ton of sewage produces some # cubic meters of methane, worth about #. The methane production pretty well sterilizes the residual, which can then be used as high-nitrogen fertilizer. (But we will have to use some of the methane as fuel for drying it before we can sell it.) Finally, we can produce the methane and then bum the residual. It has been calculated that doing that will let us build a system that operates at zero profit provided that we charge about # a ton dump fee: that is, those who wish to dispose of sewage must pay us. Why is this? We're getting valuable fuel out of the system; surely we need not charge a dump fee? Ah, but the plant itself costs a lot of money, and that money isn't free. IF the plant already existed, it would make a profit -- but the "profit" is lower than current interest rates, and thus the dump fee: another of the little points usually forgotten by those who are faddishly out to save the world. Of course, if the price of methane were deregulated the system would be clearly profitable; exactly how profitable would depend on how much of the gas produced would have to be returned to the system as operating energy. Furthermore, technology improves, and one commercial utility. Southern California Edison, was at one time trying to find ways to use sewage as fuel; they contracted to take the entire sewage output of one of the smaller southern California cities free and get rid of it by burning it in their boilers. They didn't quite know how to make that work, but they were doing the research, when along came the Public Utilities Commission to tell them to stop. It seems that wasn't a justifiable use of the rate-payers' money. Utilities shouldn't engage in fuel research, they should generate power. Thus we were all protected by our government, and now a government agency will have to do the necessary research if sewage is to be burned at a profit. Still, Just how much energy could we get from this source? Well, each of us produces about .# pounds (yeah, I know, but all the other numbers I could find were in the English system and I give up) of dry solid each day. That's #I million tons a year; if it all went into methane generation systems we'd annually, and at # Btu per cubic foot that's # x # ergs or # (# tenths of a percent) of the # energy budget. Sigh. It's unlikely to save us, isn't it? However, don't despair. We can also add the animal wastes, which amount to methane, #.I x # ergs, or # of all energy used in #. Better than that, it's just about # of the energy we obtained from natural gas in # -- ie., we could cut natural gas consumption by # a year -- and natural gas is, as mentioned, the most critically short item in our energy mix. It's not the earth, but it's something. Of course it's also expensive, and technologically some time away. What I've given are some maximum theoretical figures, not what we could do tomorrow morning if we set our minds to it.    Let's see: # from human and animal sewage; another # from municipal refuse; add in another percentage point just in case: and we've come up with a grand total of # of the # energy budget, proenergy from our sewage and garbage and other trash. Since we cannot possibly capture # of that energy, I leave it to you to guess at the actual efficiencies; and I think you now see why engineers, as opposed to faddists, don't think we can run the United States on its own garbage heaps. That doesn't mean the energies in our waste aren't worth recovering. It's particularly true in the case of animal wastes: methane generators aren't very sensitive to scale. Once you get up to a couple of tons a day, larger methane cookers don't cost much less per pound processed. Thus quite small operations could .feasibly build them; and, like garbage, both animal and human wastes must be disposed of anyway , and dairies ought to be encouraged (through higher sewage fees and the like) to catch that energy and feed it into the national pipeline. Once again, though, each case must be examined individually: distance to pipeline; availability of water (methane cookers take lots of water); and other such factors enter here. But having done it, we haven t saved ourselves.    If we got # of the # energy budget from sewage and garbage (which we can't, because # comes only with # efficiency), we'd still have to depend on Arab oil. What else can we do? Not too long ago there was in vogue a scheme to grow crops for alcohol and run much of our transport system on that. It was even worked out quite elaborately: take sewage and transport it (means not specified) out to marginal farmlands; take the urban poor off the welfare rolls and give them smallholdings of that marginal land; and let them grow alcohol crops, thus relieving unemployment, getting people out of the cities, and solving the energy crisis -- as well as dealing with sewage. It sounds good. It sounds marvelous. Why don't we do it? Well, alas, there are some problems. For one, many of those urban poor have just come to the city from marginal farms on which they couldn't make a living. It might require a larger police force and army than we have to make them go back. But leave that. Let's assume we have the labor force or can get it. What crops produce the most alcohol? You already know that: com (maize, as they call it everywhere other words, cash crops. If they grow well they'll be grown: gone are the days of our big farm surpluses. Also, they are all crops which respond best to agro-business techniques: there are enormous economies of scale. It doesn't cost anywhere near a thousand times as much to keep # acres in cultivation as it does to keep # going. Then there are the costs of collection. The alcohol must be transported and distributed: first, though, the crops themselves must be carried around to the fermenting vats (since the costs of providing each form, or small community of farms, with its own generation facility would be collossal); then the resulting alcohol must be piped to where it will be used. Also note that all of this is in competition with food crops. True: the United States probably could, at hideous capital costs, grow enough alcohol to run its transport system, and thus be free or nearly so of imported petroleum. We could even afford to do it. It would have one monstrous side effect, though: as we are now one of the few foodexporting countries of this world, we could condemn a lot of people to starvation. I suspect that the very ones who now clamor for our energyindependence achieved through croplands growing alcohol would be the first to denounce such callous behavior. But: it is in precisely this area that research can be made to pay off. Right now growing plants are very inefficient things. They don't really convert much (# or so) of the sunlight falling on them into useful energy. Over the millenia man has selectively bred some plants (such as maize, wheat, barley, etc.) to do a much better job than most; now molecular biology may allow us to double that efficiency in a few years. Then, too, the system for generating methane produees a very high grade fertilizer, with not only nitrates but also phosphates, trace elements, and the other ingredients missing from marginal farmland. Thus we have a potential for upgrading marginal land, which will attract unhappy city dwellers to a rural life. Whether the upgraded land is best used to grow alcohol crops for fuel, or to grow food for the world, is an economic decision that would have to be made at the time; but clearly it will be useful. The potential is enormous. If we had # efficient crops and grew them continuously, then some # of the US land area would provide fuel for all our electrical generators: # of all the energy we use, and this without fusion or plutonium or coal or oil. Well worth continuing research, and you may recall that a year or so ago I discussed the need for a national "Manhattan Project" in plant efficiencies. It's still needed. The development of more efficient agricultural plants would do more towards solving the energy problem than all the solar towers and windmills we'll ever build.    Finally, what does it all mean? I'm tempted to give Mr. Natural's answer, but I won't. What it means is this: there aren't any simple answers to our energy problem. No magic solutions. No fads. No mysterious "them" who prevent us from solving all our problems with a few tricks. What it takes is high technology and a lot of research: neither of which looks too healthy right now, given our tax laws. It takes capital accumulation, incentives, a chopping away of bureaucratic red tape. I've covered a lot of that in previous essays. I don't want to leave this before making one point that glared at me out of the research I did for this article. Were I energy czar of the US, I know what I'd do (I think -- after all. I've only taken a first cut). Our transport system uses a full quarter of all energy, and # of our petroleum; it uses all of the imported oil. The efficiency of the US transport system is #, based on a figure of # kW-hr (# x #' ergs) per ton-mile. Electrical vehicles can at least double that efficiency, even taking into account losses in transmission over wires, charging batteries, and all the rest. If we also include the costs of pollution control, the advantage of electric vehicles looms even greater. At the moment there's no incentive to develop electric cars and trucks and the like: there's not enough electricity. If tomorrow morning all our cars were magically converted into electric vehicles, we'd be paralyzed. We have non-polluting means of generating electricity: nuclear power plants. No. Modern fission plants are not the long-term solution to the world's energy problem, nor are they entirely safe (although compared to the health costs of coal they come off rather well). They produce plutonium which has a number of problems associated with it. But they'd get us past any current energy crisis, and if we had enough electricity we would develop -- finish, really, because we've just about invented it -- the technology to convert from internal combustion to electric transport; that in itself would save more energy than we could get from burning all our garbage and sewage -- and it would move us a long way toward energy independence. Meanwhile, for the long-term I'd finance a lot of research into more efficient energy-fixing crops; I'd put development money into oceanthermal energy (described in several earlier columns, and useful because a good bit of the research goes into low-heat turbine systems which can be used as bottoming cycles on existing powerplants even if they never got to sea); I'd change the tax laws to give lower property taxes to those who insulate their houses and install solar heaters (rather than the ruinous fines called "increased property valuation" that the city now levies on you for insulating); and I'd put a bit more into fusion. Finally, I'd change the tax laws to let all kinds of private enterprises do research in the field of energy conservation and efficiencies, even if that meant lower tax revenue and thus laying off some bureaucrats. But perhaps that's a dream world, no more realistic than the dream of those who'd run the US of A on its own garbage. I've pointed out in previous articles that there are many ways to produce enough energy to operate our industrial economy. A combination of sewage processing and agriculture for ethanol can be yet another. I don't know which of these ways is preferable, but many are feasible. We can get enough energy; we don't have to collapse and die; all we really have to do is stop wringing our hands and get on with the job.  Xhe evening meal was better than usual; the peas were not quite so much like buckshot, the meat a bit more tender with less of the stringy bits like insulation wire, the potatoes less full of sprouts and black spots, even the wme tasted less like vinegar. The voice of Brother James droned on from the end of the table. "If the nearness of our last necessity, brought a nearer conformity into it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses." . A difficult reading tonight. Brother John thought. What was it again? Urn Burial? Yes, that was it. Five hundred years old. No wonder the difficulty. ' Brother John looked to his left down the length of the long table, now largely empty. Here and there a brother such as himself took the nightly repast and listened to the words of Brother James. "But the most tedious being is that which can unwish itself, content to be nothing -- " We are ever fewer. Brother John thought again as he did now more and more often. He felt a sense of sadness, but not depression. What they were doing was good and needed doing. He looked past the mathematics table,' the sciences toble, the agricultural table, to the wail where the old motto hung: "Preserve Knowledge Through the Long Dark Electronic Night." Yes, that was right. That was the duty.  , Brother James read on. Others from the other disciplines were reading also at the long tables in the great hall of the Fulda. "What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellors, might admit a wide solution." What were ossuaries again.' thought Brother John. Ah, yes, places for bones, I remember now. It comes from the Latin os, for bone. That's right. But how are we to understand, "might admit a wide solution"? What might? Brother John sighed as he finished the last of his custard. It had been made from real milk and was sour as usual. If only the brothers had more time for husbandry the food might be better. But they were so few, and there was so much to be done. How difficult it was to keep knowledge alive. How difficult to be an Einhard, to keep, to hold, to preserve knowledge against that time when man would once again stand in need of it. But this reading was difficult, no doubt about it. He would have to study it in detail tomorrow. Still it was easier than last month's reading, the Mart d' Arthur. Senior Brother Roger coughed softly and looked down the table at them. Brother James stopped reading and squeezed the book shut with a hissing, reverential, shhh. Brother Roger cleared his throat. At each of the other tables senior brothers were doing likewise. "Brothers," he said. The word reverberated from all the tables like an echo. Chairs scraped as the brothers stood and filed out to the commons for brandy and smokes. "Brother John," the voice of the Senior Brother stopped him just as he reached the door. "Yes, Senior Brother?" Brother Roger looked uncomfortable. "I realize this is an imposition..." Brother John said nothing, merely waited. "Well, you know -- . Well, the truth is. Brother John, we have recruiting appointments in Capital tomorrow. We had enough credits from handcraft sales to buy one Tri-V ad, and -- " "Oh?" "Yes, -- and I rather thought. Well, Brother, not to put too fine a point on it, I think you are the one to represent the English Einhards." Brother John sighed. He had done this before. It was unpleasant but someone had to go. How else would long tables ever be filled? "Of course I'll go," he said. "That's fine," the Senior Brother said. "I knew you would. The bus will be in front of Fulda at eight." Brother John nodded. Before he could leave. Brother Roger's voice again stopped him. "Brother John -- " "Yes?" "Please wear your best tweed and leathers." He nodded again and went off, bypassing the commons, walking straight to his cell. Wear my best tweed and leathers, he thought. What best? Well, he would see if pressing up his other set a bit might make them more presentable. And a damp cloth for the easier spots. He sighed again. Ah, to keep knowledge alive.    The interviews were given in a small set of rooms allotted them by the municipality. Brother John was shown his room by a rather insolent young employee who looked at Brother John with a condescending smirk, as if he were dealing with a moron or a primitive. "Hee yah, pers," the young man muttered as he unlocked the door. "Wan sum else, talk a me, pers," he muttered again and closed the door. He would be some time before the first interview, so he looked curiously around this room that was so different from anything in Fulda. In a sense it was The Enemy. It was the electronic night through which they were trying to preserve knowledge for that day -- who knew when? -- centuries, millennia, down the road when man would again realize his need for it -- and for those who understood it. He sat at the information console, studied the buttons and color coded tabs. He gave up trying to make sense of it and pushed buttons at random. The wall lit up and a man's face began giving directions form." Brother John wondered at the word...of course; the opposite of excess. He shuddered. He pushed another combination of buttons and music sprang from the walls accompanied by flickering patterns of color. Another series of punches gave him only an engimatic voice saying, "The answer is three hundred ninety-nine." He had obviously asked the machine an arithmetic question but he had no idea what it was. Finally he gave up and lay on the bed to think. It began to pulse and vibrate to the sound of soft music. He pushed distastefully at the buttons on the headboard but the bed merely went faster and the music became more frantic, louder and more loathsome. Brother John surrendered again and tried to relax. The long bus ride into Capital from Fulda had tired him. And no wonder, riding in a hand-made bus over roads that were no longer used, maintained or needed. If recruiting were not so important no one would ever venture out. And then to have a flat tire on top of it. It had been humiliating, he had to admit, to stand amid the weeds and broken pavement of the old road, getting tweed and leathers filthy, while aircars and hoppers zoomed low or hovered, each full of malicious, laughing eyes. He squinched his eyes together to make it all go away and be good again. Brother John realized he was having one of his periods of doubt: maybe he wasn't meant to be an Einhard. Perhaps they were all fooling themselves. He thought of the bus leaving the Fulda compound, past the animal compound, past the weaving shed where the tweeds were made, past the dairy, past the winery, past the fields with growing things... such as they were. Was it worth it, this obsession to keep the old skills alive when they weren't wanted qr needed and might never be? But of course it was. The first Einhard had seen that clearly. The catastrophe would come, in whatever form: war, environmental collapse, another ice age, madness -- who knew? but it would come. Civilizations always fall. And when this one did the Fuldas of the world would start things up again. The room-announcer told him he had a visitor. Wearily, he climbed from the quivering bed. His feet felt for the floor as if he were stepping onto a dock from a bobbing raft. He gazed distastefully at the room again: no, this was not for him. He pressed the button to let in the first candidate. Two hours later he was finished. Three young men, only three. Still, it could have been worse; he might have had no applicants at all. He wondered how the other brothers had done. He looked down at his notes, reviewing the three candidates.    The first had come in confidently, giving Brother John the ritual punch in the chest that was the vogue now. Brother John at first recoiled, then tried to hide his distaste. After all, it wasn't the lad's fault... but all the same -- "Please be seated." "Howz?" the boy asked in obvious bewilderment. Brother John gathered himself together. "Siddan." The lad smiled broadly and slumped into a chair. He punched a button oh the arm and the room was full of music and dancing lights. Brother John winced. "Please turn it off so we can talk," he said. The boy stared back at him. "Clear't," Brother John said, louder than he had intended. Morosely the boy made the room quiet and dim again. He squirmed in his seat. "Yur num Joey Bing?" Brother John asked. "Ya copy." "Tell me about yourself, your background." "I dun copy." Brother John sighed. It would be a long half hour. "Wan yur life printout," he said. "Ah," the boy said, "I MR it furya." He tapped away at the minicomp on his wrist. "Error," Brother John said, again much too loudly. The boy looked up in surprise. Brother John tried to go on in an even and gentle voice. "Doan comp it. Can't you MR it yaself?" The boy was amazed. "Wha? Got muh egoplak inna comp. Gotit all. Wha shudda?" So it went. At the end Brother John asked the standard question. "Why ya wanna be Einhard?" The boy's forehead crinkled with the effort of thought. Finally he smiled. He had the answer. "Fushuh I compa no funna home. Old man error. Old lady bad head circ, no -- CE that. She overload more. Anywuh, no funnahome. Wann punch your circ." Brother John sighed again. A loser from a losing family. "Thank you. We'll call if we want you," he. said, not caring if the boy understood. The second candidate had sort of slid into the room. He seemed to do everything sideways, edging through life like a crab. He was a thin boy with a scraggly beard and hair to match. Pimples stuck up through his beard like hillocks through the underbrush. He smiled in a way Brother John could only think of as a leer. Unpleasant as he looked, the lad was more articulate than the first. But the thought of sitting next to this boy at long table made him shudder. "And why do you want to be an Einhard?" Brother John asked the final question. "Well ah, yuh know," the lad said. "Yuh know." "I'm afraid I don't," Brother John said. Again the smile that was a leer, as if the boy were winking with his lips. "Yuh know," he said again, "cause a what you do out there." "And what do we do?" "Yuh know, with the doll Einhards. Make 'em happy, yuh know. I can do that. I got recommends." Brother John could not even be angry. It was all too silly, in a disgusting kind of way. "There are no women Einhards," he said. "There are no women at all in Fulda." The smile came back uncertainly, like writhing snakes. "I copy," the boy said. "Whatevah ya say." After he had gone Brother John sat several minutes bracing for the final interview. He'd had no need. It went well, even pleasantly. The last lad came in, staring with myopic hesitation around the room. as if his contacts hadn't been properly fitted. He was overweight and pale, and his hair grew in clumps like wisps of limp straw that hung over his round little face. He had a doughy look about him, as if his flesh would retain an identation if you pressed it with your finger. Not very prepossessing. Brother John thought, but then neither am I. Nor was I at his age either, he added in the interest of strict truth. But wonder of wonders, the boy could actually speak. He could make sense of the spoken word. He could construct real sentences -- not perfectly, but well enough to give hope. Brother John crossed his fingers and asked the next question. "Can you read?" The boy smiled his lumpy little smile: "Yes." "I mean real words, on paper. Real English words. Not comp talk; real words." "Yes." Brother John took a paper from his case and gingerly handed it to the boy. "Read this." The paper contained a series of sentences of graduated difficulty, from the very simple, "The boy threw the ball," to the very difficult, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers -- ." The boy made it halfway through before breaking down. Not bad. Brother John thought, not bad at all. There was hope. "And," Brother John asked the ultimate question, "why do you want to be an Einhard? Why do you want to wear the tweed and leathers?" "I don't know if I can say," the lad replied. "It's more a feel, I guess." He thought a minute while Brother John waited. "All right," he said at last, "I Comp," and then blushed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I mean I think I understand." "That's all right. Take your time." "I read a poem once -- " "You read poetry?" Brother John said with astounded delight. The boy nodded. "Yes. A little. I didn't understand more than half of this one. But I remember the first line and I guess it says how I feel." "And it was -- ?" "Life too much with us," the boy said, "that's it. Life too much with us." Brother John thought quickly. He did not want to be embarrassed by not remembering it. Ah, yes, he had it now. "Yes," he said, "that poem is from the nineteenth century. But it goes, 'Life is too much with us.' You forgot the 'is'." "Is?" the boy said. "Yes, you see you need a form of the verb 'to be' to make the sentence." The boy stared at him, downcast. "Don't worry about it," Brother John said, "you've done quite well." He arranged for the boy to visit Fulda before deciding to take vows. He shook the doughy little hand one more time. The lad left and suddenly he was alone again. Three candidates, one a possible novitiate; not bad at all for these degenerate days. Again he wondered how the math and science brothers had done. Suddenly Brother John smiled wickedly and put his notes away; time now to be naughty. He whistled as he tied the case shut. The young clerk who had shown him to his room happened to be exiting as Brother John entered the lift. "See ya, Pers. Doan do a bad," the man said condescendingly as the door irised shut between them.    There was a self-serv on the ground floor. Brother John looked at the pictures of the various unreal foods. Below each was a slot where you put your credplak, and a little door below that where the food came out. He was tempted to go all the way, but then he recollected his oath of moderation -- and his low cred balance. He selected a piece of pie. He put his credplak in the slot. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. "You've got an expired plak," the man behind him said. "Oh? I didn't know." Brother John said, dismayed. "Yes, new ones were issued last month. Didn't you hear?" "No, I'm afraid not. We don't get much news." Brother John put his worthless credplak away and turned to leave. His stomach, not knowing the details, rumbled a protest. "I'll get it for you," the stranger said. Brother John looked at him, considering. One couldn't be too careat GoH: Jim Baen Editor of Galaxy It's all happening July #-# at the John Milton Thruway Motel Carrier CircleExit # Syracuse, NY # Tel. (# #-# Singles # Doubles # Membership # at the door. Banquet # ful in the city. The stories! Still, the man looked decent enough. "I really couldn't," Brother John said, for form's sake. "It's all right. It's only a piece of pie." "Well, I thank you then." The man put his credplak in the slot and the door opened. Brother John took the pie. "Something to drink?" the man said. "Well, if it wouldn't be an imposition, perhaps some coffee." The man chuckled noiselessly. "Wouldn't be an imposition," he repeated. "I love that. If you knew how that sounded." "I'm soiry -- " The stranger brushed this off. "No, no, I love it. I really do," he said. They sat at a small table in the corner. Brother John put the first bite of pie in his mouth and almost cried it was so good. Then he sipped the cofee, held it in his mouth until all the little taste buds had gotten their little hooks into it. "Ah," he said. It was strange. He knew that not a single thing in either the pie or the coffee was natural, not one thing. It was all synthetic, made to duplicate the taste and consistency of the real thing. No, he thought, it was better than the real thing, at least as served at Fulda. "You're an Einhard, aren't you?" the man asked. "Yes," Brother John mumbled, his mouth full. "Thought so," the man said. "We aren't hard to recognize." "No, you're not. Indeed you're not." The stranger looked at Brother John steadily. "No, indeed you're not," he went on. "Not many people are loose wearing hand-made coats with plastic elbow patches." "They aren't plastic," Brother John said, somewhat irritated. "They're leather." "You mean -- ?" Brother John nodded. "Yes, real animal skin. We raise animals." "I'd heard that," the man conceded. "And," Brother John went on, "the coat is not handmade. It is tweed made on our own power looms." "Yes, I'd heard that too." Brother John finished the pie and began nursing the coffee. "The truth is," the stranger said, "I once toyed with the idea of becoming an Einhard." "Oh?" Brother John said, interested. "Why didn't you?" The man shrugged and thought for the right words. "I don't know. I think I realized that it would be an escape, an evasion -- running away." "You think I am running away?" Brother John asked simply. "Well, yes," he hesitated. "All right, yes I do. What else do you call it, dressing in old-fashioned clothes, calling yourselves by antiquated names and titles -- even 'Einhard' and 'Fulda' have no relation to reality. Just because a man named Einhard, living in a place called Fulda, started the whole thing a hundred and fifty years ago -- ' ' "That's not quite correct," Brother John said. "That's what I've heard," the man said obstinately. "Oh, it's true enough," Brother John went on, trying to be kind, "that our order was started by first Senior Brother Einhard in the first sanctuary called Fulda -- " "That's what I said," the man said. " -- but the names come from something much older. Einhard was really a scholar living in the monastery of Fulda in the ninth century." "The ninth century?" Brother John nodded. "Yes, that first Einhard preserved the only copy of an old Latin work on the lives of the Roman emperors -- " Brother John was losing the man's attention, he knew, "so it's symbolic, you see," he hurried on. "He preserved knowledge and so that's why our first Einhard took the name and called his sanctuary Fulda." "And you think you are preserving knowledge?" "Yes." "Knowledge of what -- and for what?" The question was so brutally simple that Brother John winced in spite of himself. "The basic knowledge of language, science, mathematics and all the other skills that man will need to start over." The man nodded. "So I've heard," he said. "But  you must see how useless that is."  "We don't see it so," Brother ; John said stiffly.  The man shrugged again. "Well, it's true. Look," he went  on seriously, "man is not going to I destroy his culture. He is not going E to blow himself up. He is not going r to starve. He couldn't even if he I wanted to. Why, we can even hanI die a new ice age. Did you know f there are actually plans to do that?" t "No, I didn't," Brother John i said.  "What you are doing might have I been valid a couple of hundred I years ago, but it isn't now. We f don't need it. We don't need you. f All basic knowledge, all of it, is in f the machines. The machines could i recreate our culture by themselves -- and they are virtually indestructable. Man doesn't need to work -- he doesn't even need to I think." I "But you obviously do think," ( Brother John parried. The stranger was embarrassed. I "That's why I learned to talk oldI style: It's my hobby." "Ah," Brother John said, "and that is perhaps why we build the Fuldas." "As hobbies?" Now Brother John shrugged. "Perhaps not strictly that -- and we are by no means convinced the machines might not fail -- but to remind us that we are more than just creatures." "What then?" "Creators. Even if what we create is unnecessary." The man sat back in the chair and stared at Brother John. "You're escaping," he said loudly. "Why should you escape? Who gave you the right? Who gave you the right to avoid all this, this -- " he groped for a word, "dreck, this life?" Brother John recoiled from the , force of the man. He thought of the doughy, lumpy boy and 'Life is too much with us,' and could only shrug again.    It was his turn to fast and do the reading at dinner that night. The fast was easier this night because the remnants of pie and coffee seemed to still be with him, as was the bitterness of that final conversation. The brothers were starting their potato soup when Brother John began to read. "I read tonight," he said, "from the Manual of Style, as preserved by the Fulda at Newburgh, page ninety-two, third paragraph. 'A semicolon is used to mark a more important break in sentence flow...' " The brothers continued with their meal. They washed it all down with wine that tasted slightly of vinegar.  jrwer euPW fiuusto A hint of mortality adds spice to the existence of an Immortal -- unless... #:#, for the drive would take eight hours each way. Once, leaving late, he had stayed over in a guest room at the Institute, but had lain awake, his mind racing, the entire night. So, by getting an early start, he would be back by one the next morning. He walked into the bedroom to say good-bye to Martha. She was lying bn her side, waiting, watching for him. "You were quick this morning," she said. Her hip rustled under the sheet, inviting him back to bed. He had designed the room years before with no sharp comers so that -- he had laughingly told her at the time -- the curves of the bed chamber would complement her own. He sat down beside her, and ran his hand gently over her hip. An erotic pull tugged at him, but other, more immediate things occupied his mind. Her voice had been quizzical, and now her eyes asked the question they always asked -- why was he going? Twice before, he had promised that he was going for the last time, and had believed it; yet when the time rolled around, he had gone again. Partly, it was an obligation; there were so few obligations now, and any one was to be cherished; but something else drew him as well, a pull that lay hidden and unseen, like a powerful tide beneath a placid surface. Martha no longer vocalized the question. She rolled over on her back, with a little smile on her lips. She was attractive of course, and he was attracted, but he was also going. He kissed her briefly. They had shared many good years together, he thought, but perhaps it was time after all that they began to consider their separate ways. "Have a good trip," she said with a little pout on her face, but then added, "I hope it's all right." This time her voice was gentle.   Harris slowed as he entered the gates and started up the curving lane. Past the pond, glimmering in the mid-aftemoon sun, the grounds rolled in a broad expanse of lawn up to the old mansion house. So perfect a scene. Yet Harris felt cold. He had even shuddered, as he always did, the moment he passed through the massive stone pillars, with the discreet sign, "Institute for the Study of the Abnormal." The sight of the word 'Abnormal' brought home to him something he forgot for most of the time. For the abnormal in this immortal world was, simply, mortality. Many others forgot it altogether; it had been well over a century since death had touched their lives. But Harris, sometimes irritated, always obligated, drawn, came once a month to visit his one living relative, who was dying. He parked the car in a gravel lot that was hidden by the bushes and quickly got out. He stopped at the edge of the lawn; the only sounds were a wind in the woods on the far side of the house, and his own breathing. So perfect, so peaceful. He was an intruder. His eyes moved over the entire scene, as if to make sure it was safe to pass. Suddenly, he caught sight of a figure in a far corner, on the other side of the pond; the figure was not very clear, but it seemed to be a gardener, wearing a blue cap, working with an old-fashioned scythe to level tall grass that grew near the pond. Never before had he seen another person here. The figure disappeared into the trees. Harris shivered again. He concentrated on walking, and made his way briskly across the lawn, up the white stone steps, into the lobby. Only inside the door did the visitor discover that the facade of the house was like a stagesetting, preserved from the early part of the twentieth century. Behind it stretched the Institute with its gleaming interior alloy walls, as reflective as mirrors, but in darker, more muted, more mysterious tones. As an architect, Harris was always annoyed by the design; he would have preferred to have part of the mansion's interior, which must have been magnificent in its own old-fashioned way, as a transition between the two centuries. "Dr. Reiner," he said to the blonde-haired receptionist. She was new, but the receptionists often were, for people rotated in and out of such second-tier jobs every three months. While she phoned, he looked at her carefully. She was pretty, soft, almost pink, with a wide smile. He reminded himself to talk to her on the way out. "He'll be here in five minutes. I hope you don't mind waiting." "Not at all." He did not feel like chatting now, but afterwards, his obligation fulfilled, he would be back. He sat down in one of the white plastic chairs, which instantly adapted itself to his contours, and stared at himself in the wall opposite. How long had he looked this way? -- #, no, it was #, or was it I # years, or did it really matter? Of course, there were changes; two decades ago, he tired of the closecropped hair style he had worn for so long, and had allowed his hair to grow out again. But that was cosmetic; there was no real change, only stasis, and he knew his image so well that he bored of looking. He let his hand drop onto the console next to him; the section of wall opposite him flashed into a screen. He flicked through fourteen channels until he came to a revival of a musical he remembered from the #s, just before the Great Death. One of the songs came back into his head, "I'll Be Waiting," and he hummed it with the actor. He wondered with whom he had first seen the musical, but it was so long ago, so difficult to remember people he had known, those who had not survived. It was easier to remember the song. He turned off the console, shut his eyes, and hummed the song again. "Aha, I wondered if you were still coming to us," said Dr. Reiner. Harris stood as the angular doctor approached and they shook hands. The doctor's hand was boney. They started down the corridors. "That's dways your opening line." "And I always wonder if you're going to come to us." "I do -- every time." "That's true, but most people don't, they don't have any interest, they don't want to know, and so I start to assume that eventually nobody will come and how quiet it will be here, and then you and one or two others surprise me." Harris noticed some strain in the doctor's manner. "How is he?" "Weaker. Degeneration seems to be accelerating, and his systems are failing. Frankly, I don't think he can last much longer." "How long?" They had reached the room. The doctor paused, his hand on the handle of the unopened door, his eyes gray, neutral. "I can only give you lerforma death-deng act. Stop smoking. Give Heart Fund American Heart AssoclatlonxJ an intuition. Three weeks -- at most." The words passed Harris by. He had heard them, but he could not extract the meaning. The doctor pushed open the door and gestured Harris in. "You'll have to excuse me. I have business..." That too was a stock remark of the doctor, but now it was said with less politeness and more conviction. "Of'course," murmured Harris, but by then the door was already closed behind him. Harris sat in the corner, underneath the wall console. Slowly, his eyes fixed on the old man, who slept, half-sitting in what might have been a bower of vines and branches, but these vines and branches were the wires and tubes that linked him to dials and regulators and fluids. The room smelled of antiseptic, stingingly so. This person was the closest genetically to him in the entire world; the difference between them was one of life and death, but it was such a small difference, an enzyme balance, that explained why Harris' face was only slightly lined, no more than it had been a century before, while that of the old man was as ravaged as a gully in a drought. At last, after what seemed an hour to Harris but was in fact only ten minutes, the old man opened his eyes, and struggled for a moment to focus on Harris. "Hello," said Harris. "Hello," said the old man. His voice was parched, a croak, every word an effort. He managed to smile slightly in greeting. "You here long?" "No, no, I just arrived." They chatted now, with Harris doing most of the talking. He told the old man about the two hou'ses he was designing for the parklands north of the urban hub, and then hurried on, in great detail, to his trip last weekend to the highlands in East Africa, and on to his plans for skiing next week in New Zealand. "Do you still travel with that nice woman you told me about -- " "Martha. Yes." "Good." Harris' mind wandered for a moment to the growing distance he felt between Martha and himself, but he was not even so sure of that distance, and there would be so much time to decide. There was always so much time. The old man tried to shift himself a little higher in the bed, but the artificial bower kept him from moving very far. Harris found it painful' to watch so much effort for so little. There was a silence. "You know," said the old man finally, "your world is a very leisured place." Harris did not reply, and the old man continued, struggling to get out his sentences. "I've had leisure too, leisure to lie here and think about myself. Sometimes I've thought it was very unfair. I'm here. Why? Why couldn't I devote my life to enjoying life like the rest of you? Why am I here with the others whose bodies wouldn't stop growing old?... But I don't think it's unfair anymore...I don't think it's important that I'm a freak." Harris remembered the shock when, after thirty years of stasis, they had learned that the Treatment had failed with the old man, that his body had ceased regenerating, and again had begun to degenerate. What reassurance could he give now? What lies? "Don't give up hope now. There's still the possibility that it can be stopped. That's what they're working on here. That's why you're here." The old man said nothing immediately, but instead seemed to be storing up another burst of energy. He shifted again. "Don't be kind to me," he said without any sharpness. "I know what's happening. I can feel it inside myself, I sometimes think I can hear it ticking. And -- even if they could reverse it -- I'm not sure anymore that I'd want to live forever." Harris felt a clenching in his chest, like a panic. Now he comprehended fully what the doctor had said, the finality. And then the old man, as though deliberately reiterating what he knew what was on Harris' mind, said, "I'm different from you. I'm going to die. Soon." Evenly, he added, "And I'm not afraid. Not any longer." It sounded like a prayer. A few minutes later Harris stood to leave. They had never talked like this before, and it was difficult to pick up the chatter. The old man seemed to have slipped away a bit; the exertion of talking had drained him. His eyes, however, were fastened on Harris, and the way he looked was eerie, as though from a great distance. The farewell was awkward and abrupt, but fortunately brief. Harris said he would see the old man again in a few weeks. Another lie. Harris' legs were weak beneath him as he walked down the soft-lit corridor, and he sat down on a couch. A terror settled down with him, but the terror gave away to sadness. He cried, sobbing quietly. Then he caught sight of himself in the alloy wall. It was an image of himself that he could never remember having seen before. It was so unusual, so amusing, so much a novelty, that he stopped crying to watch, but of course the image had fled, and he was back to his normal self.    "He knows he's going to die," Harris said to Dr. Reiner. The two men were strolling, as had become customary after the visit, in the garden behind the mansion house. "He says he feels it within himself." "I'm not surprised. A substantial part of him is already dead; it's only the machines that keep him alive." Harris did not reply. The doctor eyed him curiously. "You have no reaction?" There was a mocking edge to his voice. "I don't know what to say," Harris shot back defensively. "What can I do?" "It was not my intention to make you angry. I meant the question in a serious manner. My reactions are shaped, and limited, by my work, and I wonder about someone like you from the outside..." Harris thought of the fleeting image of himself that he had caught in the mirror-wall. A strange sight. One rarely felt any peaks of emotion, especially of that kind. "I suppose I -- we -- aren't very good at facing death? We're out of practice. ' ' "I'm not sure that man was ever any good, even before the Plague." "But you, it doesn't seem to bother you." Passing through a small wood, they had come out on a bluff, and now they sat down on a bench, facing out over the river. A flock of birds rose and then resettled in the forest across the river. "It's my work," Reiner said at last. He fingered the lapel of his white coat. "You see. I'm a doctor." "And you chose it?" What made the dutiful part of his visits less dutiful for Harris was talking with Reiner, prickly, puzzling, intelligent, sardonic -- deliberately choosing to live on the edge of two worlds. But Harris had always before felt it would be an intrusion to ask him why he sought this memento mori in a world in which it was unnecessary, and even now, Harris' question was ill-formed. "I'm fascinated." The doctor smiled thinly. He had admitted his perverse fetishism, and then, when he became aware of Harris' lack of explicit reaction, he chuckled diyly and asked, "And why do you think you come here?" "He's my relative, my only living relative, and he's dying." "Oh, come now, that could only be part. You're here because you too -- are fascinated." "You make it sound -- " "Again, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying there's anything sick about it on your part, just that you're drawn. You are, you know." Irritated at the doctor's arrogance, his diagnosis, Harry was in no hurry to respond. At last, he nodded; the doctor, he reluctantly had to admit, had touched a truth, the pull trying to tug him from one world back to another, the force that Martha could never see. "I think many of us take immor-tality so much for granted," the doctor went on, "that we forget what a miracle, what a gift, it is. And that it came to us out of death. So to see death is to see our rebirth. If the Great Plague had not killed so Hoffmann and the other Researchers would have no setting, no reason, to figure out why twenty percent did survive, and then they would never have discovered -- " The doctor abruptly stopped. Harris thought he was collecting his thoughts, but then he realized that the doctor was half-turned on the bench, listening. Harris heard it too. A rustling, a whipping of leaves and branches in the woods. Then a shriek, and another. They moved quickly down a path that ran off to the side. The shrieks grew louder. In the center of a small clearing, a man stood. He was whirling a scythe at shoulder level in a circle around him, clipping trees and branches, alternately making that shriek and moaning as he did so, as though in some pagan ritual. He wore a blue cap. This was the figure, Harris realized, that he had seen gardening when he had come into the Institute. The man's narrow face was contorted. The doctor stepped into the clearing, just out of range of the instrument. "You must stop this at once, or you will injure yourself." The man did stop, froze, with the scythe hlld out from him like a lance, his eyes widening as he looked at the doctor. "You. You're here. You're watching me, you're always watching me, following me, why won't you let me be!" The doctor, in his eyes, seemed to be an apparition, a tormentor. "You must put that down. At once!" commanded the doctor. The man neither set it down nor spoke. Instead he began to advance slowly on the doctor, his face drawn tight in its strange emotions. Reiner lost some of his authority, his self-confidence. "I told you to put it down!' He began to back away, in a semi-circular path. "No, no, no," the man repeated, approaching. As in a dance, the doctor retreated further. "Put it down for God's sake!" "No -- no -- no." "Aaahhh!" The doctor tumbled back, over a root, onto the ground. Now the man loomed above the doctor, raising the scythe over his own head. Now it was Reiner's turn to freeze, where he had fallen. Harris leaped. As he did, the man turned, dropping the scythe. There Not very surprisingly, if you are a Galaxy subscriber chances are you tend to move around a lot; seeing new places, doing new things, living in new homes. This is just fine, of course, but from the rather specialized point of view of our Subscription Department it does present a problem. You see, while computers are fast and accurate, they are not, even ours, very bright. So when you inform them of a change of address, you should do it in a special way. Like this: and you should include an actual Galaxy subscription address-label from your old address. Otherwise the computer might not understand, and that might mean that your next issue of Galaxy doesn't reach you as quickly as it should: a terrible state of affairs, indeed! So, if you're moving, please send a change-of-address card, made out as shown above, together with an old subscription label, to: Galaxy Subscription Dept. Boulder, CO # Thank you! was surprise on his face, but at the moment their glance met, Harris saw something else in his eyeS. The other man was strong, but Harris had the advantage, having caught him from the side, and Harris forced him to the ground, onto his belly, and pinned him. Reiner scrambled to his feet, and then simply stood there, watching, as though he were critically observing a scene acted out for his benefit. "Reiner, don't let it lie there," Harris called out, while the man struggled to get free. "Yes," said Reiner, almost absent-mindedly, and he picked it up. He shook his head once, and then reached into his pocket for a radio, and whispered a few words into it. Harris no longer had any difficulty holding the man to the ground, for the man's strength seemed to have gone out of him, and his muscles were flaccid. Within minutes, three other man -- one of them Harris recognized as another research doctor -- appeared, gave the man an injection, and carried him off. The doctor stood silently. He let the scythe drop to the ground, and then brushed himself off with meticulous care, as though to recover his dignity. "Thank you." But his face was still very pale. "Who was that?" A new admission." The phrase sounded odd to Harris, but then he thought of the man's face, which he had seen only in the first moment of the grapple, pinched and drawn. He also recalled the look in the eyes. "He in fact is very healthy," continued Reiner, "and working in the garden and woods seemed a sound activity. His aging has only slightly advanced." "Judging by the way he went after you, perhaps he ought not to continue his gardening." "I'm quite convinced that I was only a convenient target for his anger." "Anger at what?" "Oh, I would hazard a guess, and say himself. Come, let's go back." "Do you get many new admissions?" asked Harris. A natural question, yet one that had never occurred to him before. The doctor rubbed the side of his face. He did not answer immediately. "Before -- we were talking about the fascination. There's another reason, a very practical reason, for my interest -- my fascination. I am coming to the conclusion one that I always feared, that the gift of immortality is, strictly speaking, limited." Harris sucked in a breath. "You see," went on Reiner, "in the last eighteen months we've had over sixty new admissions -- in no way numerically significant, not even in terms of error, but yet it is interesting that, after a century of statis, the degeneration begins again for no apparent reason. Of course. I'm not positive, but I think it is probably I I impossible to permanently retard the Hayflick Effect. You know. Von Hoffmann himself was never sure that the regeneration was permanent, but the irony was that he himself had been touched by the Plague and died before he could finish his work. And it seemed -- impolite for anyone else to question his wonderful gift. I like to think of myself as his heir. When he was dying, he said he regretted that he would not be able to see the new future." The doctor's voice was little more than a whisper. "But, I fear, the new future is not as different as we thought from the old." Harris felt dizzy and confused from what the doctor was saying, but some calm returned when they came out from the woods at a comer of the broad lawn in front of the mansion. Reiner stopped and gripped Harris' shoulder tightly, pinching it. The hand was bony and cold. "I would not have told you this, except for what happened. Please, you must keep this a secret. We can't have it known -- it would threaten everything, everybody, and we don't know for sure. There is still hope..." Hope. That was what Harris had offered the old man. He looked across the lawn to the beautiful ' mansion house, standing as a forV tress against time in the perfect twilight. That was what life itself had become, a permanent perfect twilight. But now, he learned, night still waited. "Yes," he replied to the doctor as though he had not heard what the doctor had said. Reiner was clearly unhappy with this evasive reply.    Harris pushed open the door. He had come back again, to say goodbye, but the old man was asleep. Harris scanned the room quickly, to fix everything in memory, including, finally, the figure in the bed, for this would be his last visit. He understood now what fascination had drawn him, but with his new knowledge, he no longer felt the pull. It was no longer necessary to come, to see, to remind himself. And the old man's time was short. At the door Harris turned to find the old man's eyes on him again. And Harris saw it again. The distance in the eyes. Harris recognized what he had glimpsed in the eyes of the man in the woods. A knowledge. "Good-bye again," said Harris softly. The head moved slightly in a nod, and then the eyes shut again. Reiner was waiting, scowling almost menacingly, in the corridor. What point would there be, what would be accomplished? "Of course," said Harris firmly. "I'll keep your secret." The doctor's dignity did not permit him to say thank you a second time, and so he simply grinned pleasantly, his scowl gone. They shook hands. "I shall see you again." "Perhaps," Harris replied. The doctor was again bothered by the evasiveness in Harris' reply. itk it The blonde woman was still at reception, still alluring, but Harris walked quickly by. Deep shadows now stretched across the front lawn. He felt an urgency to be home. He thought of Martha that morning, warm in bed. Martha.    The beacon buzzed in the car. The highway was coming to an end, and Harris would have to switch from auto-glide to manual. The clock said #:#, and the night was dark and smooth. He had been dozing, but restlessly, conjuring faces and eyes -- the doctor, the man with the scythe, his own crying reflection in the corridor. And that of the old man. The old man had said that he could sense the death inside him. And now, as Harris rode through the night, he felt somewhere deep within himself an ache, a groan, and he wondered if that was how it began, with a small but terrifying reminder that mortality still lurked like a criminal in his bones. And that, in turn, made him think how odd it was that this person he called the old man should, in piercing fact, be his son.  Dear Mr. Baen: As editor of the magazine Galaxy, I believe you can be of help. Would you agree with the following statement? the stars is possible, but is it necessarily practical? (By practical I mean that manned voyages to the nearest #, (XX) stars would take no longer than, say, a few months.) According to the present view of physics (the Special Theory of Relativity), travel at speeds greater than #,(X)# misec relative to the earth is impossible. Because of the great distances to these # stars, interstellar space travel would appear to be impractical -- unless, of eourse, we find a way to exceed this speed. (If you think this impossible, then there is no need to read any farther, for it is assumed from hete-on-out that such speeds are not only possible, they will someday become quite practical.) According to the present interpretation of relativity, the speed of light is the upper limit to the speed of an object, including rockets and spaceships. According to a new interpretation of the theory of relativity that I have recently developed, there is no upper limit to the speed that an object can attain. In fact, in my new interpretation of relativity I can a) account for the measured constant velocity of light without having to modify the normal concepts of time and space, b) furnish an explanation of all known electromagnetic phenomena, and c) allow speeds greater than # milsec relative to the earth! If this new interpretation of relativity is correct, it has significant implications as to whether travel to the stars is practical, and as to what the future of industrial man could be. I have presented this theory before a local student physics society (# physics students and # college physics professors), and, after considerable discussion, they were not able to find any errors in the reasoning behind the theory or in the resulting equations. (The equations involve only algebra.) The question now arises: do you know of anyone knowledgeable in physics who would be interested in a new interpretation of relativity which accounts for all known electromagnetic phenomena and which allows for interstellar space travel, possibly within a hundred years? Would you be interested? I am enclosing a copy of my resume. You can see from my background that I am not entirely ignorant of physics. I would also like to add that I think enough of my new interpretation of relativity to realize that its implications for the future of industrial man could be extremely important -- important enough that I felt compelled to return to school to find out the nature of this "industrial man". I would appreciate your help in this matter. Looking forward to hearing from you, I am Don R. Beer, Ph.D. # ## #th St., Lubbock, Texas #I Feedback, anyone? Hi, Just received my copy of April issue today. Thanks to Spider Robinson for his coments on Joan Vinge. She is a good writer; every good one needs the encouragement, for our sake as well as their own. The main reason that I'm writing this though, is because of the circulation statething that we fans can do to increase the subscriptions of the magazine and get it out of the hands of the "distributors". Perhaps we can use subscriptions for our birthday, and Christmas lists as much as possible. If each of us subscribed for, or encouraged one other to subscribe, it would double the paid-for copies. # returns from # printed is a horrible percentage of waste. If we fans get  behind this magazine we can save it. It will be for ourselves and new authors that we will be saving it. Sorry about the messy typing. If I wait to make it correct, it will never get into the mail. Keep up the good work, Marianne Turlington P.O. Box # San Diego, CA # Actually, our percentage of returns is fairly low, as such things go-but by all means subscribe.' Dear Mr. Baen, Your April '# issue touched on a subject that has been foremost on my mind for a long time now. This subject is apathy among sf fans. Perhaps the most pressing problem faced by the science fiction community is the one we create ourselves, by sitting around on our hands. I have always been rather vocal concerning subjects like money for the space program and genetic research, and I seldom or never hesitate to write my elected officials and tell them in detail what I think and why. As president of a modest-but-ambitious sci(and threatened, and commanded) members to do likewise. The a-space program factions are very vocal. When have you seen a political cartoon that presented a pro-recombinant genetic research stance? These are the harbingers of public sympathy by which Congress and the President -- and the public -- gauge the tide of voter opinion! The anti-science-and-technology cultists are a loud and very visible group. Congressmen see and hear them. They listen to them. And then they cut the space budget, limit nuclear power plants, triumph is for good men to do nothing, to paraphrase somebody. Now, if I may change subjects abruptly, I would also like to voice interest in the matter of why there is such a lopsided ratio of female-to-male sf writers.  certainly don't know why this state of affairs exists. I do know, from trying to recruit them for ORthat female sf readers are few and far between, and it is immediately obvious that to have female sf writers you must first have female sf readers. What do you ladies have to say about it? Finally, I personally would like to see the Alter-ego business dropped completely. There are more straightforward ways to address the things Geis has to say. The Alter angle pads the magazine with ugly literary fat. Sorry, Alter, but I cast my belated vote to give you the ax. Sincerely, Larry Cooper # South Third Rogers, AR # Certainly those who feel strongly should write their congressmen-and their President, too. As for the malelfemale story ratio, these days it is fairly proportional to the malelfemale author ratio. Dear Mr. Baen, Before I start to complain, let me say that you produce an excellent magazine. Now let me get to the real point of my letter -- Dhalgren. It seems that of late there is a large group ' of people who get their thrills from saying how bad the novel really is. Well, I must say that although they are entitled to their own opinion, someone should be able to give equal time to the other point of view. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Dhalgren. Enough so that I read it twice (completely yet!) and was never bored long enough to put the book down. Fortunately, the first time I read it was just after it appeared on the stands, and before the hassle started, so I wasn't aware that I was reading trash. "Dhalgren has no plot!" people say. Well, I thought it had a very good plot, granted that it was stretched out more than the normal, run-of-the-mill novel. Is that really bad? I never heard anyone complain about Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath having no plot. Or even The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Dhalgren has more plot than either of these. The point is that plot alone does not make a novel. (A short story maybe... ) Characterization is at least as important, perhaps moreso. Setting? Ditto. Obviously, a lot of people enjoyed Dhalgren. The sales were (I understand) excellent, so someone must be reading it. I don't mind people bitching when they have a valid complaint, but far too many people have had their negative opinions of Dhalgren published in virtually every SF publication. Somebody must stand up and say, "Thank you Mr. Delany." Now that I have that off of my chest, I would like to say that I hope you can convince John Varley to write some more stories in his future history for your magazine. He is quite the excellent writer. He must already stand as one of the better writers in the field. Thank you for letting me express my opinions. Yours faithfully, John R. Little # Adelaide St. London, Ontario Canada N#B #H# Good, bad or indifferent, anything that attracts as much attention as Dhalgren has is almost by definition Significant. Dear Mr. Baen; After not having read an issue of the March issue and it's the best damn magazine I've ever seen. I wonder what's been going on in science fiction all this time? The stories have improved and the position of the genre is a markedly better one. Of course, I could ignore the rest of the issue, concentrating instead on Frederick Pohl's story. Is each one of his stories absolutely individual? Except for what the reader knows he has in his hand when he reads a Pohl story, there's no way to tell that they're all written by the same author. This is as much of a trail-blazer as Edson McCann's story way back in the '#'s. I'm going to have to slip the first two installments out of somebody's collection. be glad to pick up the next issue when it hits the stands. Who is Spider Robinson? Not one of a series in a phylum, I hope? At any rate, he has quite a novelty effect, and they tell me he maintains it in most stories. Will he have an anthology out? He seems like a can't-miss author. Thanks for bringing me back to the sf field. Best, John Thiel Who is Spider Robinson? Er...well...it's hard to say.  can only suggest that you keep reading Galaxy and form your own opinion! Dear Jim, At last! The March Galaxy finally arrived on the newsstand and I could finally finish Fred Pohl's 'Gateway' serial! It must be five months since it started! Unfortunately, 'Gateway' fizzled a little in the last episode; I only rated it Ainstead of A-b for the first two-thirds, which had kept me re-reading it two or three times for clues. Who were the Heechee? How did the hero manage to get rich on the last trip while losing his girlfriend's life? What secret did the computer-psychiatrist hold? Alas, the ending was a damp squib. I'd deduced, on the basis of the first episode, that Bob Broadhead got rich by discovering the Heechee home planet, thus answering the many puzzling questions about their dead civilization. Still, maybe Fred Pohl is planning to reveal all this in 'Son of Gateway,' after finding he had far too much Heechee-background to cram into just one novel. Be that as it may, I still think that the ending was dubious. I don't see why they needed a whole ten people on such a risky trip, or why they'd pay an # bonus for it. And, quite frankly, I think what really happened was that the other nine deliberately planned to leave Broadhead behind on the doomed spaceship because he was such a rotten s.o.b. (and because it'd be nice to have at least one representative of humanity return if things miscarried), and they deliberately disconnected his ship's firing button so it wouldn't have worked anyway, so that the only reason he got back alive was get into print they're several months out of date! Your truly, Glenn T. Wilson. # Montclair Edwardsville, IL. # Why send that many people: because life is cheap, and that's how many fit! As for the ending, the computer (speaking in its best hypothetical sense, of course) was saying that it is better to be even Robinette Broadhead than not to be at all. A switcheroo ending perhaps: but a profound one. Messrs. Baen and Poumelle, As I write this, I have just finished watching the N.B.C. special on radioactive waste. No doubt a lot of other people were watching it as well. The report was presented as a good horror story with all the trappings of journalism, and many of the people watching it will no doubt be ruiming scared in the near future. The only positive things I saw in the whole report were the advertisements. The truth of the matter is, I believe, in nuclear power, and I'm frightened by the report. As an admittedly informed optimist, what does Dr. Poumelle have to say about radioactive waste material, aside from depositing them in the Earth-Moon Trojan points? Robert Sombrio # Clay St. Apt. # San Francisco, California # See his column in the Sept. '# issue of Galaxy, "Fusion Without Exlax." Dear Jim, Perhaps your readers would wish to know of the existence of the British Science Fiction Association, the world's largest sf society. We have been in existence since # when a group of fans, writers and agents got together to give British sf a sense of direction. We have grown slowly over the years and are now capable of extending our facilities to fans overseas. We already have numerous non-British members who not only receive also contribute to our regular publications, news' magazines. 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To order, send the title and number, your name and address, # plus # I postage to: # Kennedy Drive Hauppauge, N.Y. # Please allow eight weeks for delivery from our receipt of your order. Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Stephen Fabian, An Director J.E. Pournelle. Ph. D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor Elaine Will, Assistant Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor James Patrick Baen, Editor Shipwreck and survival, intrigue and secession: a tale of courage and cunning on the High Frontier. nose for trouble. What need has he for sinus cavities? Chari es Sheffield # Once again we meet Henry Carver, sole survivor of the original Matt in Link experiments. He's on Mars now, and as pusillanimous a hero as ever. But he still has a gift for survival... The massed consciousness of the human race versus one recalcitrant Irishman: No Contest! Jedrik's forces are on the verge of overwhelming Broey, thus enabling her to loose her vengeful people on a helpless universe -- but in less than sixty hours Dosadi itself will face destruction. Seldom indeed does an artist allow his public to peer over his shoulder, as it were, while in the final stages of the preparation of a Masterpiece. In this special postscript to Gateway, Fred Pohl does just that. Planets, Anyway? or meanly lose the last best hope of Earth." So far, too many of the decisions seem to be of the 'meanly lose' variety. Write your Congressman -- and your President, too. The genesis of Alter -- and some help for our friends. No more Mr. Nice Arachnid -- the Spider bares his mandibles -- and sinks them into Academe. Interior illustrations by Aulisio, Dalzell, Fabian, Odbert Cover by Kelly Freas, from his Portfolio of Universal Publlahing A Dtalributtng Corporation, ArnokJ E. Ahramaon, Prasldant. Main Ofllcee ## Copyrlgh I Cortventlona. All rlghta raeteved. Second claaa pottage paid et Sceradele, N.Y. end additional mailing oflleea. The ooWlertere eaaume no rwaponaijillty for unaolleHad malarial. All atorlaa printed in thla magazine are fiction end any almllarfty between charactara and eclual peraona la colncajental. Printed in Rainada Inn East, Albuquerque, NM. GoH: Gordon Eklund. Membership: # until Aug I, # #, Box #, Albuquerque, NM #. Checks payable to: Salvatore di Maria. XV (B'hamacon). Parliament House, Birmingham, AL. GoH: Michael Bishop. Fan GoH: Charles  Dena Brown. Membership: #. For info write: Penny Frierson, # Woodvale Rd., Birmingham, AL #. SF Convention. Hotel Fountain bleau, Miami Beach, FL. GoH: Madle. Toastmaster: Robert supporting, # attending until July #, S# at door (no mail memberships after July #I because convention moving to Florida during August). For info write: Cheny Hill, NJ #. Checks Arlington Park Hilton., Arlington Rotsler. Fan GoH: Meade Frierson at door. For info write: Chicago, IL #. Sheraton Tropicana, Santa Rosa, CA. GoH: Poul Anderson. Memberships: # lota! or # per day. For info write: Lucy B. Buss, # Highway ##, Forestvi He , CA #. Send checks or money Box #. Santa Rosa, CA #. Cosmopolitan Hotel. Denver, CO. Pro GoH: Leigh Brackett. Fan GoH: Bruce Pelz. Toastmaster: Joanna Russ. Membership: # until Nov #, # after. For info write: Denver. CO #. Editorial In the past four years or so something on the order of twenty thousand manuscripts have passed through my hands. After the first few thousand I became suspicious. After ten thousand the suspicion thickened. Now, after twenty thousand manuscripts I am certain: science fiction, as a growing, conceptually vital field, is in a state of crisis, a crisis of ideas, a crisis that it may not survive. Oh, as a minor, formula-oriented literary subgenre -- or sub-literary genre -- it is secure enough. More people than ever seem to be reading it; the moguls of television and Hollywood are beginning to take a serious interest. But where are the new ideas? In television? The movies? The formula in those honorable media seems to be to take some antique theme from the # 's or #' s -- adventures aboard the crippled, multi-generation colony ship that will forever wander aimlessly between the stars, or aboard the "space warp" and is Lost In Space -- and adapt it. Adaptation meaning in this case to bastardize, prostitute, mindlessly oversimplify, and otherwise make suitable for the moguls' conception of the massmentality what was initially in honest if somewhat be whiskered science fictional conception. Even the many new readers (long may they prosper!) are mostly interested in what science fiction has been, not what it is becoming. And who can blame them? What little there is in the way of originality in modern science fiction consists in the main of variations on the theme of human misery. Misery without end -- an all-embracing, open-ended misery that is almost admirable in its single-minded affirmation that the game of life is fixed: that you've got to play; that you can't win; and that in every possible aspect of its potentially infinite variation, now and forever, the playing itself must be a miserable experience, filled with pain, devoid of joy. An affirmation, in other words, that it is better to be dead tban to be alive. Is it any wonder, then, that the latest re-issue of The City and the Stars is selling like hotcakes? Or that the Foundation Trilogy is in its umpteenth printing? Hardly. People -- even intelligent people -- can be told only so many times that life by definition is a bucket of sewage with the handle inside, firmly affixed to the bottom of the bucket, before they wander off to look for the latest Asimov or Heinlein reissue, even if it is Lucky Star and the Pirates of the Asteroids, or Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel. I've done it myself. Are there then no glorious new conceptions equivalent for the #'  and #' s of what space travel and extraterrestrial intelligence were for an earlier time? Have we indeed mn out of ideas? Is there nothing left but infinite variations on a strictly limited number of antique themes, the mental poverty being at best obscured under the guise of literary experimentation? For a while I thought that that might indeed be the case, but I have since concluded that far from there being too few ideas, there are too many, and that taken together, as they must be, they offer, insist upon, a "universe of discourse" so varied and vast in scope that it defies the imagination and perhaps even (dare I say it?) the intelligence of the best of us, even unto our sciall undoubtedly are. Indeed, it may well be the case that the reason, the real reason, for the nearly universal nihilism in modem sf -- sf that is not merely a rehashing of old themes -- is that the ramifications of assuming continued progress in science and technology are simply too difficult to conceive, that such future vistas are simply too vast to be grasped. So where are all these ideas that I claim are being willfully ignored? The same place they always were: in the writings of scientists and their popularizers. Virtually every area of science is pregnant with major, high-social-impact developments, developments that are not, many of them, "looming on the horizon," but are literally waiting for funding. Space: Microwavepowered stellar probes; O'Neill colonies; asteroid mining; orbital powergenerating stations; planetary engineering (Venus, in particular, is ripe for the plucking). search (maybe that should wait on the availability of orbital laboratories); "btu bushes," plants capable of harvesting ten or twenty percent of the sunlight that falls on them; a cloned work force of semiintelligent simians that are bred for happiness, docility -- and manual labor; biological sewage systems capable of reharvesting, with the aid of sunlight, everything that is dumped into them. Cybernetics: Artificial Intelligence (called "A. I." by those in the field); "hand calculators" that by virtue of being mobile extensions of giant computers (see "Artificial Intelligence") have available to them the sum total of human knowledge and computational capacity, devices that would make all but the dullest of us hyper-intelligent and almost omniscient. The list is endless; the available grist for the science fictional mill is virtually infinite, both in variety and quantity. But there is a kicker: it's all or nothing. The writer cannot just go to the idea shelf, posit one that he likes, and proceed to examine its implications in isolation from all the rest. If any of them happen, they all happen, or at least a very large number of them do. There will be no O'Neill colonies without plentiful power, without asteroid mining giving us a super abundance of minerals, without amplified human intelligence, without, without everything. That's pan of the problem. It gets worse: each one of these developments is but the tip of a conceptual iceberg of further developments and applications. Take the laser, for one example. At first it was an interesting gadget useful for measuring distant objects and cutting close ones in a spectacular manner, with maybe distant applications as a communications device. Now it is, or soon will be, a space propulsion system, a surgical tool, the heart of an antiballistic missile system, a "science fiction death-ray," and who knows what else. The same is true for all the developments now pending. Let's take just one of them and follow its ramifications as far as imagination Colonies in Space by T. A. Heppenheimer introduction by Ray Bradbury P.O. Box #I Cameron and Kelker Streets Harrisburg, PA # SI # fortified by a few calculations will take us. The O'Neill colonies: assume that they are feasible. Assuming that, you have also assumed that they are pretty much, in the long run at least, resource-independent of earth -- that they can grow their own food from raw materials of extraterrestrial origin, and that they have manufacturing capacity such (hat they are capable of self-replication (which latter capacity (hey will possess almost by definition; the first colonies will, after all, have virtually built themselves). What, then, would be the "limits of growth" for such colonies? Other than human procreativity the only limiting factor I can come up with is mass (which would come into play long before available sunpower -- the famous "Dyson Limit" -- would become a factor). In other words, conservatively speaking, the potential "mass" of humanity would seem to be limited only by the present mass of the solar system's asteroids, moons and smaller planets -- and I suspect that when they are needed the means will be available for plucking the gas giants as well. Note, please, that we are not talking here of some unimaginably disterms of the already etapsed lifetime of our species the urbanization of the solar system is but an eyeblink away. Even in the short term the figures are startling. Starting with a core population of fifty thousand colonists in the Year #, by # there will be more people in space than presently reside on this planet. By the Year more than earth could possibly hold. Before the fourth millennium and population pressure will begin to be such that the more adventurous will have headed for the stars, in perfect indifference as to whether such stars have "earthlike" planets, so long as there is mass available. The Great Exodus will have begun Assuming a propulsion system capable of attaining a velocity onetenth that of light (.I c, or # will be over. The galaxy will belong to humanity...or will it be over? Perhaps the yawning gulfs between the galaxies will not seem so unbridgeable by then. Ok. That's as far as I can go with space colonies. Now add intelligence amplification (is it a person or a machine -- only the composite entity knows for sure). Artificial intelligence. Inevitable contact with non-human intelligences (if we can't find them, we'll breed them). A thousand other things. Now mix them all together -- and don't forget that they will all interact on each other and on us in infinitely complex fashion, and at an everaccelcrating pace. Now add at least one fundamental development on a par with lasers and space colonies that has not yet been conceived; any story pretending to deal with the future that does not have at least one such is mere fantasy. Now write me a story that takes all of this at least implicitly into account. Clearly our future, if we have  one at all, is so complex as to seem beyond mortal comprehension: what then of fictional portrayal of that future? Who among us can take this kaleidoscope of ever shifting, unending, always interacting and evolving marvels and fix it in his mental grasp? Can anyone? As a sciencefiction editor I can only hope that one of you out there will prove to me that it can be done. -- Baen .and earth so far away Herbert Charles Petleg my o  Science Fiction  Frank Herbert Frederik Pohl J.E. Pournelle The tank spun slowly in far cold space at the inner reaches of the asteroid mines. A sparkling frost clung to it; water condensed and frozen on its aluminum skin, water condensed alter the blast and wreckage of a mining platform . They were all a mass of tanks, those ships, great tanks and clusters of pipes, miles of pipes curving back on each other, and miles of wires, all propelled by supersteam generated from uranium fires. The steam engine was a remarkable device. Who would have thought that the same principle that powered Watt and Fulton would, three hundred years later, power a mining platform half a mile long, hung up in space to sweep asteroids? The old fiction writers were the only ones who dared. No sane scientist would have ventured it. They knew something, those old dreamers. The men lay sleeping in a simulated night. Eleven forms tied into cocoons tied neatly to the bulkhead in designated rows. One sleepnet lay empty. Avo looked at it, a withered weightless pod. He listened in the dim light, a gloom that was almost dark. He could hear the men breathing in their dreams. Planet dreams. Wild rivers of Earth and cumulus clouds towering over green islands set in silver blue sea... baked powdery plains stretched before lunar craters, the rims of the craters etched against the black night of space... ruddy dreams of Mars when the lichen fields bloomed and children in their aitpaks scampered over the mounds of tektites digging for rubies. Mars, Moon, Earth. They slept, these planetmen in a frosted tank in space. Avo looked again at the empty sleepnet. "Stupid Earth man," he whispered. "I'm sony you're dead." His voice surprised him. It was like the wheezy breathing of the sleepers. "Tassmor," he thought, "you knew it all! Captain, manager, navigator. You were stilt an Earthman." Avo wondered in the night and knew he could not sleep. He peeked at his timex; three hours and twelve minutes before wake-up, before the tank lighted up for day side. Tassmor would never wake up. Sixteen days they had floated like this since the blast and breakup of the platform. They all had plenty of time to make it back to the house, or command module in the engineer's lingo. The breakup took five days, irrevocable destruction. A ores, mostly chromium, worth who knew how much? It was plain disaster. They were lucky no one was killed outright. Tassmor had died on the fourth day, out in space in his air suit. He was supervising Avo and Hennings as they cut away a giant section of superstructure that threatened to keep them spinning with an uncontrollable yaw. Tassmor shouldn't have been out there, It was an Earthman stunt, a show of (he dynamic man in full command of a disaster. Tassmor was thirsty for Ihe adventure of space. He should have stayed within the house, or rather, since he was first and forever an engineer, his command module. To any spacer it was the house. Tassmor had come out to see the adventure of Avo, ship's first officer and only Martian navigator; Avo with twenty-three annuals in space, ten of those years on the ice shuttles to Saturn; Avo and Hennings, a junior roustabout from Moon, had to cut away the hanging piece of superstructure with laser torches. It was a grandstand event for Tassmor. What a tale to tell the Earthlings after the rescue, after his retirement to the rolling horseback hills of Virginia. Tassmor had the rescue all figured out until (he G force of (he yaw gave an unknowable torque to the fragment of ingenious machine that spun out and cracked him across the back, squeezing him dead in his air suit against the hull of the housetank. The suit popped like a little balloon. Avo had advised against Tassmor coming out. It was just one man too many for Ihe job. But Tassmor was both captain and manager. That was part of the Earthman mystique which the owners of the corporate mining vehicles and platforms created. The captains were always Earthmen. No Martian had ever been assigned command of a mining complex nor was likely to, given the current state of politics. Mars had two break-away colonies now. Two independent cities grown up outside the authority of the Constitutional government. The three recognized Martian city-states, Marsport, Crater, and Vostokgrad, maverick offspring, indeed unable to especially considering lhat the two rebel colonies each had nuclear missile capacity as well as their own comsats and wide ranging support from spacers far and near. The first independent colony, called Vandis and NovaMars Community, had sprouted up one winter taking Earth completely by surprise. This historical precedent was clear and present, however, and the surprise only served to prove how far Earth was from the realities of Mars and the potential riches available these past fifty annuals from asteroid mines. In one annual the first new colony had created its own breeder reactors, its own glass factory, its own miles of agriculture domes. They made good contracts with wildcat miners and arranged to carry their own nuclear wastes to a docking orbit out among the rocks in asteroid space. The Earth generated embargoes, boycotts and restrictions prohibited them from trading nuclear by-products down to Moon Industries. Moon did what Earth decided Moon would do. But Mars was another story. The second rebel colony had sprouted the following spring in the southern hemisphere and that wasn't even broadcast on Earth. It didn't have a name. It existed, however, a true rebel city founded by renegade Russians and privateer pirates from America. The two made natural, historical allies; the Ruskies were calculating scientists, slow moving but secure in their methods and long range plans, the American pirates unpredictable, daring and rich with treasures dug out of space. Both reveled in conspiracies and the outward display of arms. The southern Mars hemisphere was virtually uninhabited. Only a few isolated weatherstations or Earthside scientific teams existed there. The pirate city had such awesome potential that many rumors were flying of an armed Earth expeditionary force. But that was rumor. Earth was so far away and the renegade colonies still quite small. Avo zipped out of his sleepnet and moved weightless to the operations deck. The robot pilot monitored their position and the life systems. All other functions were dead. They could send microwave, but not receive. Their distress signal was heard all over space but rescue would be long in coming, despite Tassmor's polyanna plans. Already, those plans had jeopardized the remaining lives on board. The torque twisting wreckage that killed Tassmor had tom away the high gain antennae. Avo and Hennings had rigged a sending beam on the seventh day. But so far they hadn't put together a receiving dish. And this crew so advanced in all space techniques! group, all Earthmen with pictures of wives and children and grandparents pressed in plastic frames. Good workers, honest men who sent big credits back to Earth. Two were Americans, young, healthy, tireless and bound to become Martians, both of them, as soon as their visas were cleared. The two others were Moonmen who didn't like being called Moonies or Lunies and worst of all Moaners. It was Moonman or fight with those dudes, fantastic rock miners excellent with explosives, natural no-grav spacemen who were also quiet, credit-wise, and not much interested in Mars or Earth. And then there was Avo... first officer and navigator, the one and only Martian, very soon to be a deserter. There was no other way. Tassmor had set them on a rescue plan that was filled with Earth logic and this was outer space, the edge of the asteroid belt. Mars was way across the sun on the far side of its orbit relative to the position that the housetank was holding. There were sixteen other mine platforms in space, all save one plowing the uranium and cobalt strike in the dense rock fields of sector #. The other miner was a slim possibility if the damage to their own complex had been moderate, but this had been a major disaster. The machine was totaled and they were lucky, only lucky, to escape without more deaths. They could never reach the nearest miner without propulsion and scanner reception. There was only one way from A vo's space-minded focus point. He would have to desert and he would have to go now. If he didn't he would be a dead man in a hollow, frost covered, tank floating through the rocks with ten other dead men, all zipped neatly into their sleepnets. Avo took a long last look at the latest guidance print-out and logged the All-System position coordinates in his mind. Now was the time while the others were sleeping. He floated to the equipment deck and donned his airsuit, then opened the inner hatch of the airlock, stepped in, locked it, and pressed the vacuum pump. The outer hatch eased open and he pulled himself out into space. A thirtyfoot, all puipose mint-tug was tethered to the frosty housetank hull. He unsnapped the tethers and pushed off, climbed up to the bubble of the jumpseat and popped it open. When he was seated at the controls, he pulled the bubble down and activated the airpump. When the pressure equalized, he detached his space helmet and began his slow, quiet drift away toward life and freedom. If his gambit was successful, he would survive the disaster and perhaps, Good Space, perhaps save the lives of the men he was leaving behind. The mini-tug were propelled by hydrogen kept under great pressure in cryogenic tanks. A small turbine, working from the same expanding gas system, provided the energy to spin the generators that turned out the electricity necessary to govern the craft and give it life. It was not a long distance vehicle. Its air and propulsion systems were limited, designed for work near the mining platform. They also served as lifeboats on occasion but only for one man. There were twelve on the platforms according to regulations, although it was rare that more than two or three were ever used at a time; platform disasters weren't supposed to happen. Avo spun the silver cylinder craft about and headed aft of the glistening housetank. There was a comsat-astrogation buoy three days back in space. If he could rendezvous with it, his gambit would succeed. Every space buoy had AllSystem communications on board as well as emergency air, food and water. It was regulation, a foresight seldom found in systems designed by planet grounders for men who lived and died in space. He peeked again at his timex. In two and a half hours, the dayside lights would warm up and the sleeping men would emerge from their nighttime cocoons and discover his absence. They would, some of (hem, curse him for desertion. Perhaps Hennings, (he Moonie rock hunter would know what was happening. Maybe Pardee, a space wise mechanic from Oklahoma, would catch on. The others would rely on planet based rescue even though Earth and Mars were so far distant. They would keep believing it for a month or more until they expired one by one from despair or from a pill or from asphyxiation. Even a three hundred foot sparkling white tank could disappear amid the rocks. When he had drifted about and was far enough away, Avo fired the hydrogen jets and the clumsy bubble-headed cylinder sped off into dark space. Three days would tell if he was a deserter or a medal winner. If he survived and they died, he would never again get a post on a corporate miner, never again be In moments of extreme life threatening situations a spacer was supposed to save his ass. That was law and ethic. He wouldn't be faulted if he survived the blow-out and disintegration while the others perished: one man, one life boat. However, he wouldn't exactly be honored, and would never get into space again on any Constitution craft. "If the spacers pick me up and not the crew," he thought, 'Til have to go rebel now unless I stay on Mars. I wouldn't exactly have much to do down there. Claim a disability or something." His mind was computing relative values. "I'd have to go rebel, if they'd take me on. The renegade Russians would hire me -- that's for sure. A navigator with my trip record would get top credits." He liked Ruskies in space. Good chessmen, no complainers. Yet Avo was tangled in the webs of his own history. He was a moonbom child of five when his parents left Moonport Tycho on the first colony ships to Mars. His great-grandfather was a Moon exploration geologist. His grandfather an astrophysicist in the first moon colony, his grandmother a moon botanist. The webs of the past bound him to a certain sense of place in the vast regions of dark space and planet expansion. First Moon colony, moonbom. Mars colony child, a space navigator from earliest manhood; at twenty-two a spacehand on the first ice expedition to the Rings of Saturn when spacer Martians had proved that ice in ocean quantity was transportable, useable. That event had dissolved the Earth umbilical cord forever. If he failed to bring the miner crew home to Mars, he would end his life planet-bound or a navigator for privateers. Avo tinned the video back toward the housetank and watched it sparkle away on the monitor. "No way," he said, "no way they're gonna find that tank until maybe next year." The news of the blowout was no doubt a hot bit of excitement in the Corporate headquarters on Marsport and personal concern, grief and worry in Crater. He scanning the rocks, but from a very great distance. The blowout of a billion-dollar space machine would be evening news for a few days on Moon and Earth. Consulates would exchange data, crew lists, cargo potential. The loss of unknown tons of chromium would sicken the stomachs of the corporate directors. Inquiries would have already been through preliminary statements. Theories as to the nature of the disaster would bound via microwave from Mars to Moon to Earth and back. But as yet very little would be happening in a rescue effort. Not yet. They were all so far away. But the astrogation buoy was right ahead, somewhere in the rocks. He asked for the coordinates from the astrogator and opened the All-System guide communicator bands for a pulse. "The trouble with mini-tugs is that they are designed for close platform support. The microwave units are limited. Receivers too small and too directional." Avo made a note to report all that to the investigators. If he ever got to talk to them. The minitugs could sustain a man for five days. The space buoy would keep him another week, perhaps two. It was up to the independent spacers if he lived or not. Up to the renegade Russians and their privateer American financers. This region of the rocks was rich in chromium. There was sure to be a pirate floating around somewhere, sure to be a wildcat mine working a cluster of rocks somewhere. They all tuned in to the buoys set out and maintained by the Constitution. Everyone had the right to navigate -- astrogate they were calling it now. Everyone had the right to survive in space. He would generate all the rescue teams he would need. If only he could find them, and they could reach him. Avo set the pulse generator sequence for the propulsion robot, extended the antennae mast and locked his guidance coordinates into the pilot. He knew he would find the buoy, day after tomorrow. He climbed out of the bubble-domed circular cockpit and went below into the tiny mini-tug housetank. He touched the illumination panel, read a soft vapor light, and then stretched out the sleepnet. He would sleep in his airsuit, keeping the helmet an arm's reach away; too many mini-tugs took sudden punctures and decompressions for the luxury of naked sleep. He zipped into the sleepnet and floated back, letting himself relax in space fashion, slow pranic breathing dispelling tensions throughout his body, relaxing feet first, working upward giving advice to his muscles to stop doing what they were doing to cause tension; knees, genitals, abdomen, thorax, neck, back. He was soon in near-sleep. His body would be grateful for a good sleep. His mind, however, was still a turmoil over his decision to leave the others behind. He had approached it in singular Martianway logic. He was (he only one capable of piloting a clumsy mini-tug through days of space and locating an astrogation buoy fifty feet long amid a mass of asteroid rocks. He was at that time senior officer, and pro-tem captain. The decision was correct. He hadn't needed the kind of group approval so common with Earthmen. He imagined the disabled housetank and knew the men were awake now, cursing him no doubt, squeezing the fear back down inside them, perhaps understanding what he had done. Nearsleep began to quiet him. He saw the positive pole of his plan and locked onto it. He would save the crew. He would take rest from space and lay down on Mars awhile. Maybe he would go to Earth and read history for a few years. History was his personal joy. The long years in space had given him ample time to read the microfilm libes from a to z. But books! Real books in the library of a university or a corporation, even a city! That was a dream he'd had since his days amid the Rings chopping ice. After the rescue and the inquiry on Mars, he'd visa down to Earth for a time. He was rich enough in credits. Spacers had strange rumors of Earth. They said it was a filthy place and you could get any number of unmentionable diseases there, some of which turned your lungs black, some of which rotted your skin or made your hair fall out. Avo had never been to Earth. He'd left Moon at five and barely remembered the blue-white marble in the sky. He'd heard that the air on Earth was so thick you could drown in it, so thick you couldn't see through it and that water fell out of the sky, sometimes for days on end. He couldn't really believe that last part. But he'd never seen an ocean nor a jungle nor a river in his life. There was more to the System than space. After the rescue, he'd go down to Earth. He'd visit Pardee in Oklahoma and ride horses. He'd read history books until his eyes fell out. He knew Martians were rare on only # total Martians, less than # down on Earth. Pardee had told him that getting used to Earthgrav was just a matter of working at it... he'd have to take calcium to strengthen the bones, and run everyday. "Just a hundred yards for the first week," Pardee had told him, "two hundred the second week, then four hundred on up. By the end of six weeks you do a mile a day, hell's bells! Most Earth people don't do that! Then you work out with weights for six months especially on the legs, you got it made. You come on down OkTahoma and my Pa an' me 'll work your ass off on our ranch. We got a herd of horses and cattle and there's hay to buck and barley to cut. Sheet. You just show up on Earth and call me. You got yereelf a home!" Now Pardee was trapped in a frosted and two Moonies and one other Merican; the rolling hay fields so far away. Maybe, when he was down to Earth, Avo dreamed, he'd find a few Earthgirls to bring up to Mars. They had them down there all sizes, shapes and colors! He knew of a crater about one hundred kilos from Vandis, the Nova Mars colony, just south of the farthest reaches of the north polar cap, where the shadows sheltered a great bank of ice. The crater was maybe six kilos across, with one wall crumbled and a flat central basin filled with good glass sand. In the summer, when the pole tilted down toward the sun, enough ice melted to nourish a bloom of lichen that would cover the basin with a The Battle for Andromeda -- (#). the entire Galaxy, Omega ShipDread naughts (# miles across) that can destroy # solar systems in a single move! The mere presence of an "O" ship, # light years away constitutes an act of war! A series of games, involving Humanoid, Computer, Alien. Cyborg Cultures, their own history and unique weapons systems, fleets, cloaking devices, nucleon missiles! Warriors of the Dark Star -- (#), in the Age of the Neutron Wars: a tactical series using enlarged models of Omega, Alpha, Beta ships in ship-toship combat with all weapons, rays, computers, in immense scale. Complete games in themselves, both series can be extended, so the size and scale of these games are unlimited! 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Avo slept all through the second day. There was no need for him to awaken. The robopilot kept the craft at speed and locked onto the course he had set for it. Sleep healed him and rested his mind. On the third day he awakened and stretched out of the sleepnet. He floated into the cockpit and checked his data monitors. A huge smile spread across his face. He had the buoy signal strong and unmistakable! He computed twelve hours of travel time before he would have to maneuver and lock into the thing. Matching speed would be tricky; twenty-three years of space craft and he was topping his career off with a minitug and buoy. If the minitugs had better communications gear, he might have been able to raise someone by now. Twice in the past he had been in on rescues; once an indy wildcatter with plumbing problems causing a shutdown of their fuel rods; once a pirate Ruskie shot through with meteor holes. It hadn't mattered that they weren't Constitution. Avo began to brake at the seventh hour, at the tenth he made eye contact with the blinking red strobe light, at the twelfth he began to match speed and rendezvous. When he was simultaneous with the buoy, he fastened his airhelmet, locked the housetank hatch and pumped out to vacuum. He popped the bubble dome and floated out to space. He was about one hundred meters below the buoy; he'd placed the tug there to avoid the piercing long distance microwave beams. He tethered to the tug and pushed off, floating to the buoy, catching on to a ring hold. He had made it halfway. Now he could send out the data on the blowout, the coordinates of the housetank, the names of the survivors. He was sorry he couldn't include Tassmor on (he list. He found the service hatch and popped it. The interior was alive with pinlights and electric humming. The rescue effort took three weeks. Avo waited on the buoy for eight days before an indy prospector homed in and took him off. The indy ship wasn't big enough to hold the other crewmen, and was headed Mars-side anyway. Avo regretted that he wouldn't be going back to the floating housetank to spring his partners. A roving rebel-colony mining platform crossed four and a hall on board. It was four months before they were able to transfer to a to Mars . A vo was waiting for them when they touched down. He had long since made his report and testified at the preliminary inquiry. Now that the others were down, he would have to do it again. The thin clear winds of Mars blew red dust devils across the landing strip. The shuttle came down gracefully, its great moveable wings spread wide, thrusters flaring in sequence. The touchdown was perfeet. A vo waited until the craft taxied into the cargo hanger, then went across the tarmac and slipped his titanium credit plaque into the robosecurity gate. He found a good vantage point behind the video crews, his slender # '#" tucked near a service van. The outer hatches were popped and the men came down the portaramp. The video newsmen immediately pounced on the surprise news... only eight of the ten returned! The two Moonies had jumped contracts and signed on with the rebel platform crew that had rescued them! had classified the story in coded messages to Earth, but had not broadcast the change in status over the common communicators. Hennings and Dasco had forfeited their lunar citizenship, forfeited their bank credits and gone rebel! Avo felt a racing wave of excitement break over him. The new colony was eager for accomplished spacers to man their mining craft. The Moonies were naturals for recruitment, young men with no wives or kids and not enough in the bank, even to metal wise moonies, to keep them from taking the leap. The rebel mining effort had gained immeasurably from this disaster. A rich source of chromium was now coordinated, their own platform was now mining the sector, and they had gained two freespace demolition experts with immediate experience and corporate engineering degrees. Avo was more than just interested in the new colony, he was overwhelmed by its resourcefulness and spirit. He would get the whole story from the Mericans, Pardee and Rander. He saw Pardee's bright blue eyes flashing and his happy face crack open in a smile. The video crews made a big deal of the touchdown. The news would speed to Earth and Moon without delay. The reunion of the latest space blowout survivors with the Martian who had maneuvered a minitug through three days of space, pinpointed their location and effected their rescue! It was coo much for grounder imaginations, even Martian grounders. The story screens and fill pages of newsprint. It would also be stored in microlibes, occupy the gossip of Corporate boardrooms and design labs, worey consulates and governors. The rescue had been carried out by rebels. Two otherwise reliable, skilled .space hands had jumped contract. The implications were too complicated for instant analysis. A vo, Rander, and Pardee rode in comfort back to Marsport, sitting inside a corporate executive touring car. The vast cluster of ferro-glass domes danced in the pink haze across the crater floor. The Corporation was putting them up at the Dunes Hotel and the attorneys and investigators were eager to get more of the details of the disaster. Avo had told his version over and over, but he was a Martian, given to little speculation and not much talk. The investigators would have a ball with the hard talking Mericans. security group, tighter than even the Russians down in Vostokgrad. The video crew loved the six smiling and symmetrical, well muscled bodies, and especially the photos they showed in the plastic frames of children and grandfathers, wives and cousins down on Earth. There weren't a lot of single Martian girls in this business and bureaucracy town, but most of them went out to one hundred hands aboard the patrol ship came down for a week on the ground. The cool faint sun was sinking pale red in the evening pink salmon sky. "Sheet," said Pardee. "Me'n Rander would of jumped, too. Except we already got Mars visas. I couldn't see losing the credits in my accounts, but let me tell you I give it a long, long thought." The three men sat in the garden bar on the fourth terrace of the Hotel. It was one of the tallest buildings under the dome and they had a good view of the corporation garden district from the windows. It didn't take them long to tie one on. Pardee and Rander hadn't had a drink in almost a year. Avo was smoking black lichen and drinking expensive tequila imported from Mexico. "You know we thought about it," Rander added. "We gotta keep it under our helmets, ya know? We don't know what's gonna fold over at the inquest. Corporation is pissed at the blowout." "Yeah, it's a variable at this point," said Pardee. "The Corporation doesn't exactly know what's been strictly segregated. They couldn't do that with us 'cuz we're Mericans, but we were on board the rebel platform for four months before the patroller took us on. Let me tell you those rebels got something together as far as space mining goes. The hands get a share of the tonnage swept up, and a share of the smelt. Besides that, they got some balls out there, Avo my friend, real balls. We seen 'em detonate a chunk of rock twice as big as we would have dared tackle and swept up every crumb of it." "We was goin' to work for our keep while we was on board," said Rander, "but they advised us of their political situation real friendly and accurate. We had a briefing on video from one of their attorneys, told us the whole shot. He advised that we didn't work and the captain up there tol' us don't even bother worryin' about it. They wasn't about to attach any of our credits trust nohow! Wouldn't let them see any of their operations." The smoke from the heady black lichen coupled with two shots of tequila had Avo spinning. He felt a sense he hadn't known since that first fantastic trip out to the Rings with the expeditionary flight. That had been a revolution in space travel. The Earthbound, scientist control of Mars had been shattered. Something like that was happening again. More subtle perhaps, but a new energy was coming through. And it was coming from the breakaway Vandis colony. The following morning, Avo was dreaming. He was floating through the icy tank miles long, diffused with blue light. The dead face of Tassmor ghosted through the ice walls. He could see blood from the Earth man's crushed lungs frozen at the comer of his smiling mouth. He awakened and saw the morning light at the window, felt the bed beneath him, looked at the plants hanging by the windows. He suddenly felt very old and creaky in the joints, not at all like a spacer celebrity, the subject of news reports and target of eager well-wishers. The Hotel bar had been packed with handshaking businessmen and grounder bureaucrats. A dozen times he and Pardee had their instamatic photos snapped. At first he'd enjoyed the drinks offered and the pipes of black lichen. He'd never in his life had so much attention and he was too much a spacer to really enjoy it, always in space with only a small dome lodge down in Sandy ville near Crater to call a pianethome. Pardee soaked up the spotlight and took some of the heat off Avo with half a dozen rare tales of the months on the rebel platform, his ranch in Oklahoma and the delicacy known as mountain oysters. Rander caught the eye of a supple young lady on leave from the equatorial weather station. They cut out before midnight. Avo and Pardee got too drunk to handle any women, although there were several rare beauties in the bar. Avo was thinking of women more and more often now. The morning light spread into the room. He had never spent a night in such luxury. The bed was wide and deep with soft sheets and fat pillows. It was agiant room with tall windows and a balcony. "Exec's life is soft," he murmured. "No wonder they all look so polished, buffed over by centuries between soft sheets is why." He stretched. The Marsgrav tugged at him a little and pulled him down. He had to get used to things falling. He was still sticking things out in the air like a glass or a pen and being startled when it fell to the floor. Even with six months down, he was still in weightless space. Six months was the longest he'd stayed down in twelve years. He was feeling thick in the head from the tequila and very old. It was time to make new plans, somehow, but he couldn't think what. Avo reached for a ginseng-vitamin pill to cure his aching hangover and lay back to sleep until noon. The videophone was calling him. Avo awakened again and snapped on the monitor. It was Pardee. "Get yer ass outa bed, spaceman, and come on down to the sauna. I got some news for you." "What news?" Avo murmured. "I'm not getting up." "Cain't tell ya on this system. Meet me down in the sauna. Come on now, it's important." Avo hadn't been figuring to leave his room until hunger drove him out. But the invitation to the sauna sounded good and the added spice of some Earthman intrigue was too much motivation to resist. He stood up and found a clean jumpsuit, slipped on his desert boots and went out to the elevator. The sauna and exercise spa was on the ground floor across the eucalyptus garden from the pool. There were only three pools in all of Marsport and on weekends this was a popular social spot. Avo had figured to hang out there on Sunday to entertain some single young ladies. He crossed through the lobby and out into the fragrant garden. Eucalyptus grew well in Martian soil. Pardee was waiting for him in a private box. Avo showered first and, wrapped in a thick velour towel, stepped into the # heat. Pardee sat naked on the beach holding his head. "That lichen I smoked kicked my head from here to Enceladus. Sit down, bro,' you ready for some tales?" Avo really wasn't. The politics and leverage games that went on between the three inhabited worlds had never really interested him. Pardee took a deep breath. "I had to meet you here because I don't trust the hotel phone system. Rander split this morning with that meteorologist! Yesterday afternoon, as soon as we checked in here, he slipped out to a bank and got his credits transferred Mars-side. Like I tol' you we both already got Mars visas. This morning, the transfer comes through, he draws it all out and him and the girl take off! To Vandis!" Avo's head was clearing fast. The only place to take off to on this planet was to the new colony. "He's gone over to Vandis? What about the inquest?" He realized it was a dumb question. Rander had other things on his mind. "There ain't gonna be no inquest. Least not here. I had an Earth man CBI team in my room (his morning trying to find out if I was going to run. too. I had to claim rights to get them out. The Corporation is getting set to file sabotage charges." "Against who?" Avo said quicklyhave ordered their crew back to Moon. They refuse to meet interviewers. It might be a showdown between the Corporates and the "They always stick together," Avo calculated. "They're gonna try blame them. Then they get the embargoes enforced, see?" "Could be. I can't tell, being basically dumb at politicos. But somethin's goin' down and i wanted you in on what I know." without a civil justice warrant and they can't get that. Martian spacer rights are tough to violate. But I still ought to get an attorney just in case any charges come down -- neglect of duty or something. The truth is I don't know what caused the preliminary explosion. All I could tell them was about the stages of the breakup afterwards. And Tassmor's death." "Hennings made a report about you're covered good on that one. He will make that report available if you request it." "Since I've been down here several months, there's probably no worry about me going over. I'm first colony anyway. My Martian rights citizenship would make it imanything. Trouble is I was seriously considering a trip Earth side." "You were?" Pardee was beaming. "Listen, you got to come visit my folks and all." "I was figuring I would. I want to see what Earth is all about for myself. There's damn few Martians ever been to Earth. I thought I'd lay out down there a few years. Read history, find a wife or two." "Find some women?" Pardee laughed. "Why, Bro,' do you have any idea how many thousands of Earth girls would many you just to get up to Mars?" "Thousands?" Avo wasn't going for the number. "Thou sands ! ' ' Pardee repeated. "It's the mystique. Spacers are rare birds. I can't tell you the fascination most Earthpeople have for spacers. Even a platform mechanic like me. "I wanted to be in space since I was six years old. I been expecting to go Martian these past few annuals, bring my wife and kids up here. Hey, the best astrogation and priori ng schools are on Mars these daysMars is the future world, far as space goes." "You come on down to Sandy ville with me," said Avo. "If there's no inquest, there's no need to hang around here. Down there I can show you some real Mars. I got my lodge down there and we can trip out to the desert. Mars is a place just beginning. Let's enjoy the Corporation's hospitality today. I want to get in that pool this afternoon. Tomonow morning we'll catch the shuttle down to Crater." Sandy ville was a spacer enclave tucked into a low escarpment due west of Crater. Avo and Pardee boarded the first shuttle in the morning, making the four hundred kilometers flight to Mars' second city in half an hour. Crater was more populated than Marspon, being a center of spacer activity and independent mine organizations. The crater it sat in was fifty kilos across and die rim wall, banded pink and red, curved around in a jagged ridge that varied from two thousand to more than nine thousand meters. All manner of trade goods changed hands at Crater: air packs, dome kits, assorted vehicles, mining equipment, spare pans for a thousand and one machines, vegetables from outlying glassfarms. fertilizers, seed, farm implements, glassware, clothing, sand boots, imports from Moon and Earth, carved ruby, Martian metals, black lichen, contraband of every description; families, children, beautiful slender girls, myths, legends of the colonists, well kept saloons and wild, wild stories of space, asteroids and the dunes of Mars. 'The story about the man, Vandis," Avo told Pardee as they sat shoulder to shoulder in the tight seats of the shuttle, "is the story of the original independent exploration of the planet. Vandis broke away from the clutches of the scientists almost a century before the Rings Expedition. Everyone thought he was dead for ten years after he disappeared from the First Geological Survey. Marsport was the only base then. Totally militaryscientist controlled. Vandis believed Mars would support a colony and predicted that humans would live here, prosper and break away from Earth-scientist domination. He explored the entire circumference of the north polar cap and built his own water and air makers." "So, that's why they call the "Exactly," Avo continued. "Vandis became expert in dry land ecology in the days of his explorations. Most of the mystery legends come from him and his first followers." "Like the Lost Martians, the dead city on the equator, the dune creatures and all that?" Pardee was as wide-eyed as a space child of six. "Right, Vandis came back to Marsport ten years after he had been declared dead. The military tried to assassinate him. He scared (hem to death! He came in at Marsport one morning on the tail end of a sandstorm. Everybody thought he was some kind of true Martian creature. In a sense he was; the first Earth man to live on Mars. On Mars alone without Earthsupplied existence. He did what was said to be impossible. "Instead of welcoming the man back as a visionary and a hero, they jailed him! He was a terrible threat to the safe little scientist base. They didn't want anyone coming to Mars except their own people under strict supervision. Two of the younger members of the enclave, an astronaut captain and a young female geologist, sprang Vandis out of the jail that the base commander had constructed just for him. They disappeared and walked away into the desert. The commander went out after them, but never found a trace. So for the second time, this one classified for twentyfive years, Vandis was declared dead! "The three explorers knew they would be discovered if they stayed near the polar cap so they turned south and set up several bases. After a year, several more people from the enclave disappeared, along with various pieces of equipment. "Gone to Vandis" was the term that grew up to explain it. And every year after that, top flight people would desert. Soon there was no denying that Vandis was alive with his followers, somewhere on Mars." Pardee was watching the ragged dunes and red walled craters flow past below the round window next to his elbow. The Vandis legend was a myth of his childhood but here he was flying over the very territory that the first Martian ecologist had surveyed. "The greatest Vandis tale, to me anyway, is the Ruby Caverns," Avo added. "Somewhere down in the equator belt is a system of lost caverns. The Martians had used the caverns as a storage bin for (he last traces of their society. The legend says that Vandis is still alive and down there with them. It could be, you know, (he equator has been extensively mapped and photographed, but actually explored very little. The sandstorms are incredible, water factor just about zero. But there is no doubt there is just as much ruby there as anywhere else. Whole mountain ranges of ruby." Ruby was the first big discovery on Mars, one kept secret for decades from fear of its economic impact on Earth. For # annuals the scientists who controlled Mars maintained a rich monopoly in a ruby trade. Mars ruby was highly adaptable for industrial use in ail manner of lasting devices. It was so common on Mars that entire cliffs and miles of encrusted ridges were composed of the hard red carborundum. A lively legal trade in carved rubies for jewelry had gone on since the days of the first colony. Martian craftspeople turned out plates, cups, goblets, paperweights, necklaces, sculptures, all manner of artifacts for sale on the three worlds. The money managers of Earth had strict tariffs on all kinds of Martian goods. Especially carved ruby. But Earth people were so rich now that practically every household had some Martian ruby product in it, as well as Martian glassware. The sands of Mars were especially suited to glass making. Avo's lodge was little used and poorly tended, not much different from dozens of spacer lodges spotted around the Sandyville enclave, just a thirtyfoot house dome within a ninety-foot glass air dome. But it was his. Avo had yet to take wives, not uncommon among veteran spacers, who usually settled in to a planethome around fortyfive or so. Avo had known a beautiful Martian girl as a lover when he was on the Ring convoys, but she had died at an outpost weather station during a ferocious sandstorm, so many years ago. Pardee was an immediate success in the enclave's social life. Real Earthmen were uncommon outside Marsport. His tales of hay fields and horses astounded the veterans and children alike. His thick frame and multiple tatoos fascinated the Martian women. It was clear that he could easily add as many more to his family as his Earth wife would accept. After five days of dune trekking he declared, "I'm going home for one last time, Avo. Pack up my family and go Martian. I knew I'd be doin' it someday. Since I was in astro-engineering school. My wife knows it, too. We can make it up here." Avo nodded. "You can go independent here. I know a crater up north that's half filled with ice. I can build a lodge there and an air maker, put up planthouses. I can, we can, get an independent mine contract, finance a platform... you can set up planethome here." "I can see it all," said Pardee. "It could really work out. We can get finance down in Oklahoma and Texas in a hot second; that way we can open an Earth-Moon trade line. Long as we don't sell out completely, it will be our own trip to manage." "No corporation bosses to tell us what to mine or where to mine," Avo replied. "Only a tenth of the asteroid belt has been prospected. We can trade where we want. Vandts or Crater or Moon. Just one year out. maybe two, and we'd pay off any investors real handsome." "It's done!" Pardee leaped up and looked out over the shifting miles of low dunes. "I'll get us some investors that'll make your head spin." Avo returned to Marsport with Pardee on the weekend shuttle. Pardee had enough pull to get a booking to Moon on the first ore freighter. From Moon there was an everyday transit down to Earth. "Don't let your ass rust away up here, now," Pardee pointed a finger right at Avo. "You come on down to Earth as soon as you can book transit. We're gonna do some business, partner." "I'll be down in maybe four months, five months. What I can do up here is find us a platform to rig out. Lots of the wildcatters are old now, need first class refitting. I can contract one from Crater, no sweat. Then we'll have to lease a transporter... Plans and ideas filled his mind. The prospect of starting new thrilled him with the same kind of excitement he had felt so long ago when he was standing on a fivemile long chunk of ice floating through the Rings above the monstrous orb of Satum. The black shuttle screamed off the runway carrying Avo's new partner away into space and to his rendezvous with the ore freighter which would cany him home. "Home is a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," Avo said, recounting the lines of an old Earth poet. "When I get down to Earth," he thought, "I've got a place now; Oklahoma, wherever that is." He made a note to check an Earth Atlas in the Corporation library back at Mars port. His return to the capital was less conspicuous this time. He caught the public van and rode in silence toward the shimmering cluster of domes. He had an interview that afternoon with the Chief of Mining Operations during which he had decided to make his resignation. The Corporation's SpaceMining complex was a marvel in architecture with its own security dome set under the city's massive community air dome. A small forest of conifers and mountain Earth shrubbery were landscaped into Martian boulders and massive ruby conglomerates. The buildings were soft pinkstone and stainless steel with blue Martian marble floors. Water, the ultimate luxury on this dry, dusty planet, spurted from a dozen fountains. He walked across the inner courtyard set with cool green grass and took welcome seemed cool and somehow overly correct. The chief was an Earth man cngineer. A grounder with limited space experience, he was a deft administrator and organizer. Avo didn't get a chance to resign. "What's been decided, Earthside, Avo, is to accelerate your pension date and give you a much needed rest. I want you to know it was not my decision, nothing unilateral about it. You know, with things in such a state of unrest, as far as Vandis and these renegade Russians down south, Earthside is overly concerned about security of the platforms. It's not your own personal loyalty, just a lack of understanding. What they don't want is a whole platform going over to Vandis, leaving the Constitution jurisdiction and precipitating legal action. Incidentally, I am empowered to give you this meritorious credit certificate for your part in the rescue, which was entirely your show from my point of view. And finally," the Chief stood up from behind his desk and handed Avo a slender black box. "Go ahead," the Chief beamed. "Open it." Avo snapped open the lid and stared at a gold digital wrist watch. "Last you a lifetime," the Chief claimed. "I've got one just like it. It's just a token, Avo. Just a token. It gives Earthtime, Moontime and Marstime! Now if there's anything I can do personally to aid your transition... any references or such, don't hesitate to write." Avo stood up quietly. "Well, I was hoping perhaps I could use the library here when I'm under the dome. For awhile anyhow." "Certainly," said the Chief. "I'll have the security section issue you a pass. We have the best microlibe on Mars, you know." Avo shook hands with the Chief. They both smiled and neither said anything." A month later, he was watching the stars pop up, clear and frosty, over the rim of his crater. The great bank of snow and ice that partially filled the high northwest wall glistened in the shadow. He thought of the ice that had condensed around the floating housetank after the blowout, now a year gone by. He snapped open the face mask of his airpack and took a puff on a pipe stuffed with black lichen, then lay back on the red sand. Earth and Venus were bright against the blue-black sky. Venus was so much the brighter, so stark white and brilliant she seemed much closer than Earth, which was twinkling blue and green. He imagined himself in a library somewhere down there in a city next to the sea. He imagined plump, longhaired Earthgirls swimming naked in the waves. He blew out the lichen smoke and flapped the face mask back in place. Earth glittered in the evening sky. He wondered if he was looking at Oklahoma.  W hen i submitted the manuscript of Gateway to Jim Baen for Galaxy, I warned him fair and square, I did. I said there were some problems. I told him that, not only was it pretty complex to be broken into serial installments, and typographically a nightmare besides, but I was still tinkering with it. And so I was. I rewrote it completely after that first draft, particularly the ending. I don't know how many times I revised that. What I do know is that after I was completely through with it (or thought I was) and had turned in a complete manuscript, I then had second thoughts and decided to omit the very last (and very short) chapter. Now that (he book is in print, comments and reviews have been coming in. I must say they have been extremely kind, by and large, but more than one of them has commented that the ending takes some getting used to. And now Jim has asked me to let him publish that omitted last chapter, and along with it to try to explain what was going on in my head. I am going to try to do this. But because I embarrass easily, let me say something first. Producing a book is a lot like producing a baby. Everybody knows what has been going on, but it does seem very delicate to talk about it explicitly in public. So bear with me, please, dear friends, while I try to do this public flashing as gracefully as I can. Besides being a novel. Gateway is an attempt to try to do something I have wanted to do for a long time: to say everything I knew, about a world I had made up. All science fiction writers invent the worlds their characters move in, of course, and in the course of doing so most of us figure out more about them than we ever put on paper. If you ask Larry Niven about the kzinti, he can tell you details of their dreams and their breeding habits that have never been published. So can Gordon Dickson about the Dorsai. So can I about most of the characters and settings I've used. The reason that not all of this backgrounding gets into print is not because the authors want to keep secrets from the rest of the world, but because explaining too much slows down the action. Science fiction readers already accept much greater demands on their imagination and intelligence than the readers of most fiction will sit still for. But there is a limit to even their patience. Past a certain point, they don't want to hear any more talk about why a thing is, they want to get on with it. Contrariwise, one of the Great Good Things about science fiction is just that it does build these interesting and colorful new worlds for us to roam around in in our imaginations. I imagine most of us have fantasied from time to time about living on Barsoom or Osnome, or in any world that some writer has given us a passport to. The experiment I wanted to try was to make that whole world as complete as I could. To say about it everything that I knew to say. Not just enough to account for why the characters behaved as they did. Not just the physical parameters, The habits, the clothing, the recreations, (he constraints, the sensory inputs. Much of that can be done in ordinary narrative, and here Robert A. Heinlein is probably the father of us all. Some can't, not even by Heinlein. And to get this in without requiring the characters to tell each other things endlessly I adopted the device of "sidebars." I do not claim it for an invention; it is a technique of journalism. But I do not remember having seen it used in just that way in any novel. John Dos Passos had done something like it in # J#, a long time ago, by using newspaper reports, an innovation picked up and carried a step farther by John Brunner in Stand On Zanzibar, i had experimented with the concept, from a somewhat different tack (only to provide biographical detail about some of the characters) in a not very successful "mainstream" novel called Presidential Year, which I wrote with Cyril Kombluth in #. For Gateway, it looked like the device that would do what I wanted done. So for a year or more after the novel itself was essentially complete I found myself composing poems, classified ads, letters-tothe-editor, mission reports and all sorts of other data inputs to be inserted into the work. I travel a lot. I almost always carry a portable typewriter with me (it is my security typewriter, I am uneasy without it), and so I wrote little bits and pieces of sidebars in all sorts of O' Hare Airport, between sessions at any number of college lecture dates and sf cons, on trains, in a hotel room in Toronto in the intervals on Television in connection with the Apollo-Soyuz hookup...everywhere. I have a very clear memory of the expression on the face of the maid as she came into my stateroom on Cunard's liner Adventurer, somewhere between islands in the Caribbean. I had laid out clumps and sheaves of pages on every flat surface in the room -- beds, chairs, floor -- trying to piece together my jigsaw puzzle. She wanted desperately to make my bed. But I couldn't let her, because I was trying to make a novel. I don't promise that this is the best way to write a novel. (If anyone ever finds out what the best way is I wish he'd tell me.) But in this case it had advantages. The world does not look the same from the deck of a ship, or from an allnight diner across the highway from a motel, as it does from my writing office, on the top floor of an old monster of a house in New Jersey. I think some of those differences in perspective must be reflected in the sidebars. At any rate, the time came when somehow I had patched all the pieces together and was into the final revision on this rather demanding chunk of my life. Then I discovered that Gateway had taken its future into its own hands. It wasn't a single consecutive story anymore. It wasn't even the two stories that ran concurrently, the analysis sessions threaded into the straight narrative of Broadhead's life. It looked to me as though it were coming close to turning out to what I had wanted it to be: a world. Well, all right. But how do you end a world? A novel I usually can figure out how to end. In fact, I know a lot of ways. Usually there is one that fits. The choice of the right one depends on what is the main thrust of your story. At one time I had considered that the main thrust of Gateway was the color and terror of the black hole. (The working title of the book, in fact, was then Beyond the Blue Event Horizon.) At another I had thought it was the personal story of Robinette Broadhead. At stilt another, as the computer-psychoanalyst Sigfrid von Shrink seemed more and more important, I thought maybe it was even his stoiy. For each of these I could see an ending; but all of them were wrong for Gateway as it had evolved. Well, you already know (if you've read the story that is) what decision I finally made. Is it right? God knows. It's the Tightest I could make it. For better or worse, that's where I stand. Nevertheless I think it rather astute of the reviewers and others to have noticed that there is something unusual about the ending. And for any readers who are interested enough to have stayed with me this long, here is the brief last chapter that I removed from the novel...just for fun. What is so rare as a day in June? A beautifully written, entertaining book. Such a book is Fred Pohl's Gateway, a fascinating science fiction story and a highly crafted look at the nature of a man...Robinette Broadhead,...Pohl paces the novel masterfully, so that the revelation of the action coincides with Broadhead' s personal revelation. The only possible weakness of the book lies in the speed at which the final events take place. It is not unlike waiting in tine for hours to see a work of art, and then being whipped past it without having an opportunity to study it. That moment is an awesome one, something worth lingering over. But the very real necessities of the plot require otherwise, and the story is really about Broadhead, not that brief moment of scientific wonder." -- Delap's FSF Review...a wonderfully original analyst-and-patient couchhanger . The analyst is a computer named Sigfrid von Shrink , and the patient is the ulcer-ridden, fabulously wealthy lone survivor of the most monstrous disaster in the history of the Gateway ships. The sum total is a sort of ragged, irresistible bravura display, marred by a misproportioned ending but full of utterly splendid invention. Major Pohl, and ane of the season's more worthwhile events." -- Kirkus Newsletter. Under the bubble the late afternoon sun was warm and gentle. It was late, but I went right to the club: shower, plunge, ten minutes in the sauna; and when I came out I was ready for my date with S. Ya. I was more than ready. I was looking forward to it. Not only for S. Ya. herself, pretty, intelligent, kind as she was. I wanted very much to make love to her, but ( also wanted to talk to her. All that stuff Sigfrid was giving me -- was it his crazy electronic fantasy? Or was it real? S. Ya. would know, or at least know enough to talk sensibly about the possibility of laying machine emotions onto machine intelligence. Oh, I had not forgotten Klara! She was still in my heart, as much as ever -- more than ever, because underneath the pain and the guilt were the tenderness and the love, that I would have for always, wherever real-Klara was. I have all my parts hack again; I am whole and as well as any living thing is ever going to be...which, I decide, is good enough for me. I have even got something I want to do! I owe Sigfrid a favor. He healed me... Maybe, with a little help from S. Ya. and the Grace of God and Good Fortune, I can make at least a start toward healing him.  fectly safe hing to about Charles Sheffiel A bit lower on the left. Bit more. There, that's it. Hold i. right there." ( held it as Waldo directed and he drove in the last nail, then stepped back. Perfect. We looked at the sign and beamed at each other. 'Buimeister  Carver -- Legal Advisors.' The old firm, a long way from Washington D.C., but back in business again. We went into the office and closed the door. Not much space inside -- it cost ten credits a square foot, unfurnished, for rentals in Th arsis City. But we had one respectable-sized office, and a much less fancy officeutility room behind it. We'd agreed to take turns manning the front office until we built up enough business to spread ourselves a bit. As the first and only lawyers on Mars, we were sure that wouldn't take long. I went back to my desk in the rear office -- Waldo was taking the first shift out front. Then I came straight out again. Fifteen minutes earlier there had been a jelly doughnut on my table. I looked at Waldo and began, "Waldo, did you -- ?" What was the use? I gave up in mid-sentence. In the twenty years since we left law school I'd seen Waldo swell from a youth of sylphlike elegance to a first-order manmountain. The time he'd spent (more accurately, done) on the Venus terra-forming project had thinned him, temporarily, but as soon as he reached Mars he'd started to swell again. I'd bullied, insulted, cajoled, lectured and warned Waldo. If he kept on eating the way he did, one day he'd explode. He listened contritely, swore he'd diet at once, implored me to keep sweet stuff out of his reach and thanked me for trying to help. Then as soon as my back was turned -- chomp. As it turned out, we had been over-optimistic about the number of cases that would come our way. True, we were the only lawyers for have a population of several thousand. But -- no business. I maintain that where a barbarian would pick up a rock or a tree root to settle a dispute, a civilized man picks up a videophone and seeks legal counsel. Measured by that standard, Mars was too busy scrabbling for survival to qualify above the barbarian level. For the first three weeks I had little to do but sit about, watching Waldo occupy a steadily increasing amount of the available office space. When our first client finally arrived, Waldo was manning the front desk and I was sitting in the back office looking at a lunar travel brochure. Waldo collected them. I was reading a poetic description of a valley of mud, dust and rock when I heard the door of the outer office. "Are you Burmeister and Carver?" asked an unfamiliar voice. 'We are. I am WaJdo Burmeisler, at your service." "I'm Peter Pinion. I've got something extremely valuable here and I'd like to leave it with you to lock in your safe." Waldo's visitor seemed to be confusing us with a bank. We didn't have a safe, just a big cupboard in the back room with a defective lock. I sneaked a look through a narrow crack in the illfitting and badly made door between our inner and outer offices. Our visitor was very tali and lanky, with brown hair and a pair of innocent and startlingly blue eyes. His dress told me that he was a ranger -- probably a geologist, roving around outside the domed city areas. Waldo had responded instinctively to the words 'extremely valuable' and had Pinion already seated in our one comfortable chair. What would it be? Precious metals, old artifacts, Martian supcrfluids? I could almost hear the cash registers ringing in Waldo's head. "In our safe, Mr. Pinion? Of course. Where is youY deposit?" Waldo hadn't missed a beat. Pinton reached into his brown, bulky jacket and produced a small phial, about the size of a pill bottle, containing a pale, oily-looking liquid. Since Pinton couldn't see me t felt free to register my disappointment. Waldo looked at the bottle dubiously. "What exactly is it, Mr. Pinton?" "It's Pintonite, that's what it is." Our visitor smiled happily. "It's going to make me the richest man on Mars. I always suspected there should be something like this here -- I've looked in places where the areology is right for ten years, and I've finally found and refined it." He held up the bottle. "The most powerful chemical explosive ever known, by a factor of ten. One gram's enough to blow a ten-meter crater in solid rock. It'll revolutionize mining on the asteroids." Peter Pinton must have noticed Waldo's lack of enthusiasm at the idea of looking after a superbomb. "Perfectly safe, nothing to wony about," he added. He shook the bottle with great vigor. I screamed so hard that no sound came out and clapped my hands over my ears. Waldo, with an equally sound protective logic, covered his eyes with his hands. Pinton cackled inanely. "Perfectly safe. Only explodes under very special conditions. Safe as water." He reached into his jacket again and produced a five thousand credit note. "Here's a down payment. I'll need your help when the time comes to negotiate on this with General Mining." Now he was talking. I breathed again, but Waldo still seemed curiously reluctant to touch the phial or the money. I decided that it was time to introduce myself to our new client. I had second thoughts as I came into the room. Peter Pinton was offering the phial to Waido with his right hand and absent-mindedly scratching himself around the ribs with his left. No wonder Waldo was hesitant. I've read a hundred theories as to how Earth fleas evaded pre-flight inspection to get to Mars, and I don't believe any of them. But when you've seen how far a flea can jump under a surface gravity only twofifths that of Earth, and with an atmosphere in the domed cities only onethird as dense, you have no trouble understanding how they've managed to spread the way they have. I could detect ripples of sympathetic itching running up and down Waldo's back. As Peter Pinton and I shook hands and he gave me the money and phial, I watched him closely for emigrants. Pinton seemed relieved to be rid of the bottle. "I told Muriel I wanted somebody else to look after the Pintonite this morning. I'm not comfortable canying valuables in the domicibile. I feel a lot easier now. Weil, I'll be off. See you in a few days. I want to hear what Muriel says when I tell her you're looking after the Pintonite." "Your wife?" I asked politely. He looked at me curiously. "Now what would a maxi want with a woman, out in (he red ranges? Muriel's my parrot." And he was gone without further comment. Waldo took a big gulp of unsweetened coffee absent-mindedly as Pinton left the room. His face puckered like a punctured Mars dome. For the past couple of days he'd been holding down on his calories and we'd thrown out every temptation. The change so far was imperceptible. I locked the money in our cash box and went through to the inner office to put Pinton 's phial into the big cupboard, in among (he crockery, stationery, low-calorie food items and legal reference volumes. I put it on the bottom shelf, next to Waldo's weighing-machine. He'd bought a spring balance, and derived comfort from the thought that he weighed less than eighty kilos -- his 'college weight,' as he described it. I wondered if he was looking at lunar brochures for his next stopping-point when his Mars-weight topped eighty. In the front office Waldo had a dreamy expression in his eyes. "If General Mining would pay Pinton a toniie, I bet that United Chemicals would offer double." I nodded. We discussed it no further. As Disraeli remarked, sensible men are all of (he same religion. And pray, what is that? Sensible men never tell. Substitute 'financial views' for 'religion' there, and you have my altitude exactly. The next time Peter Pinton showed up at the office I was on my own. Waldo had gone off for a meeting 'with an industrial group' and I had not asked for details. Pinton sat down with the neat movements of a man who spent most of his life inside a three by four meter domicibile -- the standard house mobile labexplorer vehicle of the Mars rangers. He took a small jar of white crystals from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. "Version two," he said. "Purified, ten times as powerful per gram. Take this for your safe and give me the other one back -- I need it for a little demonstration later this week." I hesitated and he misunderstood my reluctance. "Oh, it's as safe as the last lot. Under any normal circumstances, perfectly neutral. See here." He unscrewed the top of the jar, licked his finger lip, dipped it in the white powder and stuck it in his mouth. He grinned happily as I goggled. "Perfectly safe. Want a lick? It doesn't taste of much," he assured me. "Sort of yeasty and a bit sweet." I declined the offer and went reluctantly through to the inner office. I closed the door -- so P inton wouldn't see the non-existent safe -- and opened the cupboard to get the phial. Would it still be there? Thank heaven, it was, just where I had left it. Perhaps I had misjudged Waldo's meeting. Feeling much happier I placed the jar of crystal Pintonite in the cupboard and gave his phial back to Pinton. I sat down again behind the desk. Pinton seemed in no hurry and in a chatty mood, and I wanted certain information from him. "Occurs naturally on Mars?" he said, repeating my question. "Yes, in erode form. Now that's not surprising -- Mars has a different geological history from Earth, so we expect some different compounds. Pintonite's an isomeric hydrocarbonfluorocarbon form -- just as diamond is a form of carbon, created under special conditions in the history of the planet." "You mean you could make Pintonite from other things, the way we make diamonds?" "Sure -- if you knew the chemical structure and were smart enough, you could synthesize it. But why bother? There's plenty here on Mars if you're smart enough to know where to look and what to look for." He preened himself. "You see, the thing that makes Pintonite so powerful is just an unusual hydrocarbon bond. It's like a compressed spring, with a catch on it. Unhook the catch, and all that energy in the spring is released. The secret's in the chemical structure." "And that can be found by measurement?" "Sure. Any run-of-the-mill lab could do it. That's why I wanted to have it here, where it's safe, and not where the industrial espionage boys could lay their hands on it." His simple trust in the legal profession was touching. My suspicions that he was a little cracked were growing. As he left, those suspicions were given a strong boost by our neighbor along the corridor. She was a youngish, talkative mother of three, with a husband who worked the day shift outside the domes in the open-field agricultural area. According to Waldo, she fancied me -- by comparison, I suppose -- but I had so far survived with my honor intact. As Peter Pinton departed she came along the corridor and looked into the office. Her hair had so many curlers in it that she seemed to be wearing an elaborate bronze headpiece. "What's old Pete been doing in here?" she inquired. "I haven't seen him for a year or two." "Legal matters, Mrs. Wilkinson -- I can't betray a client's confidences, you know. Where did you meet Mr. Pinton?" "Oh, me and him had a thing going for a while. Never got too serious, though. He was always too busy during the day -- not like you lawyers." She paused and eyed me speculatively for a few moments. Gambit declined, she went on. "Anyway, I got a bit tired of him after a while. He was always going on about his bloody parrot. No wonder they all called him Looney Pete." She turned her head back along Ihe corridor, revealing the full splendor of her ormolu helmet, and shouted a snappy reply to a child's question. Then she smiled at me alluringly. "I'm just going to have a cup of coffee and a little something to go with it, Mr. Carver. Perhaps you'd like to join me?" As she raised her plucked eyebrows inquiringly, Waldo's familiar figure loomed over her shoulder. I looked at him with relief. She gave him a savage glare and (hen disappeared down the corridor. Waldo was in excellent spirits. I wondered just what he'd been up to. Well, regardless of that I had work of my own to do now, as soon as I could find the right place to help me. But I must admit that I didn't feel comforted by our lady neighbor's report on our client, Mr. Peter Pinton. Neither Waldo nor I were particularly alarmed at first when the Tharsis City police arrived. Our licenses were in good shape, and our credentials to practice law on Mars impeccable. As the only two lawyers on the planet, we had framed the bar charter ourselves. Police Investigator Lestrade had with him a saturnine, dark-haired man from General Mining, a double for Bela Lugosi in the classic Dracula #-D movies, whom he introduced to us as Test Supervisor Kozak. Like most Martians, they seemed puzzled by what Waldo and I actually did for a living. We explained our activities and they dutifully recorded (hem with a slight air of disbelief. After the general introductions Lestrade cleared his throat, scratched his thinning pate, and got down to business. "Yesterday, Mr. Peter Pinton gave a demonstration of a powerful new explosive to General Mining. Mr. Kozak supervised the test." Lestrade spoke very slowly, picking his words with care. "Now, we would like you to tell us all that you know about that explosive, Pintonite." He stopped. We waited. No more words came, apparently he was done. I was puzzled by his accusing manner and wondered again if Waldo had been up to something. "I think there may be a misunderstanding," I finally replied. "We know very little. We're not geologists or chemists, you know. You want to talk to Peter Pinton himself -- he's the expert." "You can ask him," said Lestrade morosely. He placed a silver box on the desk, about the same size and shape as a portable communicator. I looked at it for the sendreceive button but couldn't see it. I looked questioningly at Lestrade, who pressed a catch on the side of the box. The top opened to reveal a layer of grey powder inside. "There's Peter Pinton, all there is of him." Lestrade looked at the box with a certain macabre satisfaction. "When he brought in his explosive, with his claim that it was superpowerful and completely safe, Mr. Kozak insisted on a controlled demonstration. They put Pinton inside a sealed metal tank to set up the test and watched from outside. Pinton was half right, you might say -- it's far and away the most powerful explosive anybody has ever seen. But Pinton hadn't told anybody the chemical formula for it. Mr. Kozak came to see us after the explosion yesterday afternoon, and this morning we went over to see Polly -- " " -- his parrot," Waldo interjected, nodding intelligently. " -- Polly Pinton, his ex-wife, now living in Chryse Dome," Lestrade went on. I He scrutinized Waldo closely, as though mentally measuring him for a straitjacket. "She told us that Pinton had left a sample of the explosive with Henry Carver and Waldo Burmeister, Lawyers, at this address." I sighed. So much for a deal with United Chemicals. I looked at Waldo. He shrugged and went into the back room to get the Pintonite sample. After half a minute of banging around in the cupboard he was back, pale and sweating. "Henry, it's not there." He signalled his next message with his eyes, as clearly as if he had spoken it: "What have you done with it, Henry?" I was shocked. "It must be there, Waldo, I saw it just yesterday. Let me take a look. " I went into the back room and did a lightning but thorough search of the cupboard. No jar of white crystals, not a sign of it. "Henry, for God's sake, don't play games," whispered Waldo from just behind me. "Tell them what you did with it, we can't do any deals now." I turned back to him. "What do you mean, play games? Aren't you the one who took it to United Chemicals?" He shook his head. "I was supposed to meet them again tomorrow, with a sample." We looked at each other in dismay and stupefaction. Finally we went back into the outer office and faced Lestrade. He took the news that the Pintonite was gone with no emotion. It seemed almost as though he had expected something like that. He nodded slowly. "We'll have to do a deep probe to get information on this. Who was here when Peter Pinton brought that explosive in and discussed storing it with you?" "I was," Waldo reluctantly volunteered. "And were you present, Mr. Carver?" asked Lestrade. "Only at the very end of the meeting." Thank heaven for literal troth, and for the legal definition of present. "Right. Mr. Burmeister, you'll have to come with us. This examination will take a few hours." The game was over all right. But thank heaven, too, for my own foresight. I took out my wallet with a sigh and removed a slip of paper from it. "I don't think that will be necessary, Mr. Lestrade. This contains the chemical analysis of a Pintonite sample, performed just a few days ago." I handed it to him. Waldo looked like a man reprieved at the eleventh hour -- psychoprobes were tough stuff and a few people came out of them with their brains permanently scrambled. Kozak leapt on the paper with a cry of joy and read it while we watched. After a few seconds of inspection he began to turn into a vampire. His teeth curled back from his upper lip and a deep snarl came from him. He seemed all set to leap and suck blood. "Mr. Carver," he finally said in choked tones. "You had a chemical analysis done. I suppose you are analysis was performed?" Now I was really confused. "Well, of course I am. I asked them to do the most final and complete one that they could. I forget the exact word that was used on the order." "An ultimate analysis?" "Yes, that's it exactly." screamed at once. "You great baboon." My information didn't seem to have pleased him. "An ultimate chemical analysis gives the final chemical composition in terms of the percentage of each element. It #I doesn't tell you a thing about the chemical structure." He waved the paper in the air, literally gnashing his teeth as he did so. I'd never encountered that before outside the holodramas. "This just gives the amount of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and fluorine. I could no more make Pintonite from this information than I could make your friend here -- " He glowered at Waldo. " -- from a barrel of lard and a sack of flour." An unfortunate example, I felt, and quite uncalled for. They dragged poor Waldo away to his fate. I hoped he'd be back again, intact, in a few hours. What on Earth -- what on Mars -- had gone wrong? I was sure Waldo had told me the truth -- so where was the Pintonite? I wandered around the office, looking everywhere I could think of for the missing jar. No sign. I picked up the useless chemical analysis paper -- my trump card -- and looked at it sadly. Then I crumpled it into a ball and went through to the inner office to throw it into the trash. I opened the lid of the trash can -- and froze. Suddenly, I understood exactly what had happened to the Pintonite. It had never occuned to me to tell Waldo that Peter Pinton had switched the phial of liquid for a jar of crystalline Pintonite. Waldo had been looking for the phial, while I'd looked for the jar. Now I'd found it. Empty. Waldo, in his insane lust for sweetmeats, had used three ounces of Pintonite to sugar his coffee. "Yeasty and sweet," Pinton had said. When events call for it I can be a man of action. In less than ten minutes I had made reservations for Waldo and myself, immediate departure for Deimos. It was time that Burmeister and Carver found new business offices. I'd write and tell the Tharsis City police all about recent events, but I'd much rather do it from off-planet. I had a clear mental picture of three ounces of Pintonite going into and through Waldo. Tharsis City had, as I recalled, more than thirty thousand meters of sewage pipes beneath it. I could visualize a thin layer of Pintonite spread through every bit. Peter Pinton had said that it was perfectly safe, but his reputation as a reliable authority had diminished considerably in the past few hours. If the Tharsis City plumbing arrangements happened to have the right environment to set it off, it might not be the biggest explosion in the history of Mars, but it would certainly be the most disgusting. I sat down to wait impatiently for Waldo's return. On second thoughts, I called and modified our space travel reservations. I didn't know how long it took Pintonite to pass completely through the human alimentary canal. Separate flights. If Waldo was about to fulfill my old warning and finally, literally, explode, I would rather not participate in the event.  A Time For Decisions Jerry ftHuneUe.PhP meanly lose ihe last best hope of Earth." Lincoln was talking about an entirely different conflict when he said that, but it is a statement that applies to this generation in a way that was never true of Lincoln's. No one today seriously believes that human chattel slavery would have survived into the present era no matter what the Union did in #; but I do seriously believe that a generation a hundred years from now might well curse our memory. It was the general concensus of the science press corps that this year's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advanceleast exciting of those we have recently attended. I agreed at the time. I don't now. In the first place, while most of them had been reported earlier, there were marvels enough: the Homestake Mine experiments that show there's something wrong with worth, and all fascinating if nonconclusive; new particles for the basic physicists to play with. Any of those would be worth headlines. You can't say # was really dull. Secondly, under the non-spectacular headings, there was plenty of food for deep thought; and there was one announcement that ought to stir your blood. We can have on-line fusion power by #. You could be running your car, or heating your water, or shaving your anatomy with power produced by deuteriumtritium fiision, seven years before this century ends. That's a good twenty years earlier than we expected it; it's in time to help get us through those critical thirty years I've spoken of in previous columns. It's in time to save the world. So why will our children curse our memory? quietly ready to spring their bombshell: to say that, given some breaks, they'd have a reactor design by # or so, and eight years after (hat we could have on-line power. Then, when the inevitable question was asked about the earliest possible date, they would spring # as a target date for having a workable reactor design, given (#) lotsa money, and (#) a few bits of rather probable luck. They were, justifiably, prepared to do a bit of preening. They didn't have any spectacular breakthroughs to announce, but they could stack up the evidence from dozens of laboratories and hundreds of experiments and come to the sudden realization that they really think they know how to achieve fusion -- and, like the Manhattan Project, to bring it off in more than one way at about the same time. Unfortunately the people who were ready to make that announceThey were back in Washington. You see. President Carter's budget had just come out: and cut from it Instead of quietly preening about accomplishments, the directors of the labs at Los Alamos, Princeton, Livermore, Sandia, were suddenly confronted with the need to phase out, stretch out, and probably to lay from the Ford budget which they low. Instead of quiet pride, we had gloom and despair. "This country has no national commitment to fusion power," saith one. "At the level of funding indicated by the new budget, we will stay with research forever; we will never have a reactor," says another. "We'll have to lay off people who have devoted their professional lives to fusion research" says a third. All unfortunately true. So the top people were back in Washington, pleading with Carter's budgeters, and trying to slip the word to Congress that this wasn't trimming fat, it wasn't even slicing muscle; it was amputation of bone and sinew. As I write this there's vague hope that Congress will restore at least part of those cuts; but it doesn't look as if they'll succeed. Understand: a few years ago I wasn't at all enthusiastic about shovelling money in the general direction of fusion research. Back in # if you asked the fusion people what they'd do if you doubled their budget, they'd stammer a bit, and eventually say they'd do more of what they were doing: build two research facilities, hire more people... Hardly confidence-inspiring. But that's all changed. Now they can tell you exactly what they want, what pieces of hardware they need, what experiments must be performed and how much they'll cost. They've got a handle on the problem. For example: in magnetic confinement the critical figure of merit is the product of time and density and temperature. Two years ago they were at perhaps one percent of the figure needed. Now they're at half. One more push and they reach scientific breakeven; that is, the reaction will produce more energy than was put in. Since any useful system will be far less than # efficient, that's still a long way from practical power. But once scientific breakeven is achieved the rest is engineering -- and it's the engineering that has been cut. Carter's budget funds level-of-effort research, and has nothing for new equipment, expansion, new programs, etc. Unfortunately, that's not all my gloomy news. The Shuttle: Carter's stretch-out and delay of the first Shuttle flight stands as I write this. Meanwhile, out on the Mojave, the tethered flights of the Shuttle (Cartoon: Shuttle mounted on back of #. Caption: "Not tonight, dear, I have a headache.") have been so successful that a final one has been cancelled as not needed. She handles like a dream, the pilots tell us. About the time you read this they'll drop the Enterprise free of the # and let her glide in to a landing at Edwards. Technically the Shuttle program is ahead of schedule. Financially it couldn't matter less. Fusion and space. Cheap, reliable energy, and access to eight new planets, thirtyfour moons, and a materials. We have it in our power to give those to our children. Possibly to enjoy their benefits within our own lifetimes, but certainly to give them to our children; and as I've said repeatedly in previous columns ("Survival with Style," "Blueprint for Survival," "That Buck Rogers Stuff") once we have plenty of energy and easy access to space, the problems of mankind are solved. Well, not really: I don't pretend there won't be problems; I write about them in my stories. But the fear of starvation, environmental pollution, mass poverty -- will become a memory. And that, I say, is worth handing on. I've given one picture of the future in previous columns. For another, let's look at something else ing. The bible of the Appropriate Technology movement is E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. I confess I haven't read it. I have attempted to, several times, but each time I come across some outrageous statement such as "Statistics never prove anything" (page #), my stomach hurts. Still, I am hardly against his concepts as I thought I understood them. As Joe Coates (Office of Technology Assessment) said, "Who can be in favor of inappropriate technology?" The AP movement had a number of events at the A A AS meeting, and I attended them on the theory that I would get a painless introduction into what they were doing, that I would hear some numbers, get some reports, learn some appropriate technology -- and be able to pass it all on to my readers. After all, I'm interested in saving energy, and Larry Niven has turned off the heaters in his swimming pool until we can design and build a solar heater for it; I've experimented with hydroponic gardening, and I know my readers would tike to hear about practical ways to employ "appropriate technology" in their lives. I got none of that. The first presentation consisted of an interminable series of slides (most out of focus) showing ugliness presented as if it were beauty. For some reason photographs of privies dominated the series: not only those # Swedish gizmos that more or less automatically compost the stuff right in your home (provided you don't have too large a family) but the kind my wife and I experienced in our childhood. The kind with the crescent cut in the door and a Sears catalogue handy in case you run out of Corncobs. "You only have to fork the stuff over about every two weeks," we were told. "Of course you can run into problems with city departments of public health, so most of these are in rural areas." My reaction was that I hoped to God the city Department of Health would give any of my neighbors problems, but citations. There were wine vats converted into bathtubs. We were solemnly told that this was a Good Thing because it recycled and saved energy and like that. Most of the audience, predominately middleclass youth, sat enraptured as if in church. I wonder if they, at my age, would care for the splinters? And dammit, wine barrels are not appropriate as bathtubs. They aren't comfortable, . # nor are they very well designed. Another speaker told of how Appropriate Technology changes your head. When the wind comes up at # am and the batteries are all charged up, and you've got work to do, why, you get up and do it. Don't waste that wind energy, because the windmill can't really power things at your convenience, so you must adapt yourself to the convenience of the earth. There was more. A lot more, and all in the same vein. Appropriate Technology, it seems, is not for the developing nations alone (if at all); it's for us. So just what is it? According to the Fact Sheet prepared by the National Center for Appropriate Technology, the characteristics are these: "(#) small scale, (#) decentralized, (#) simple to understand and operate, (#) ecologically sound, and (#) labor intensive." Now who can be against that? Well, to begin with, I don't know what "ecologically sound" means. I have heard people say that any permanent change in the ecology is evil; does that include Kansas wheat and Japanese rice, neither of which is "natural"? But leave that, and pass to point five, "labor intensive." That is not merely a necessary evil. It is the heart of the AP movement. Given the choice they'll take hard labor over machinery every time. I call to evidence one of their displays: a bicycle seat with pedals attached to a chain that ran a -- wheat grinder. You can sit and knead bread with the hands while pumping away on the bicycle to grind the wheat with your own muscle power. In case you missed the point, there was a film strip showing how the bicycle seat system could be attached to small plows, dragging (hem through the dirt; to pump water; etc., etc. Now as an advance over the mortar and pestle, a leg-powered crank system is great; but blind donkeys walking circles to tum the upper on the nether millstone would be a hell of a lot less dull (for us; no one consults the donkey). In fact, on seeing that particular vision of the future -- and make no mistake about it, these people mean that to be the future -- Larry Niven had a suggestion. I should, he said, put on jackboots and revolver, and carry a whip; we would then find a gentleman of the black persuasion and dress him in rags and have him sit on the bicycle seat to grind our bread. It should, Lany mused, make a good photograph. A picture of the future. I can't quarrel, except for details. The person seated on the bicycle seat might not be black, and might not be male; the person with whip might not be white or male; but if grinding one's com to make one's bread requires that kind of labor, then slavery is not far away. "In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread"; And mankind has been trying to get someone else to do (he sweating ever since, and rather successfully at that. As a lark, as something chic, labor-intensive technology is all very well; but as a necessity it gets regular : it is not amusing as a way of life. All right: we've had our laugh at some silly people, extremists with a sprinkling of opportunists. Now let's get serious. Surely, Poumelle, you can't be against conservation? Surely the AP movement, shorn of the more ridiculous aspects (and any view of life, carried to the extreme, can be made to look ridiculous) has great merit? Surely the idea is sound? I used to think so. I'm not sure I do any longer. The more I listen to the proponents of AP, the more I understand what they're saying, (he more I disagree. Look: why shouldn't we have heated swimming pools? What's wrong with big, comfortable, fast automobiles? Why is it evil to have throwaway flashlights, electric can openers, warm houses in winter, air conditioning, luxury foods, electric typewriters , plastic models, Fiberglas yachts with Dacron sails, pocket computers, my own postal scale here in my office so l don't have to go down to the Post Office before mailing this manuscript -- all the myriad conveniences, yea, luxuries, of this marvelous modem civilization? They pollute. They cause longterm harm to Mother Earth. Well, let's fix that. Give me sufficient energy -- and I know how to get that -- and they won't have any harmful long-term effects. They use up irreplaceable resources. Well, give me sufficient energy and I'll recycle most of (hose. Give me access to space and I'll bring you more resources than ever you dreamed of. And don't think I can't do that. They use up resources that should go to the world's poor. Well, give me sufficient energy and access to space and I'll make the whole world rich -- and still have plenty left over for what I want. At this point the debate ceases. The usual parting remark is, "I wouldn't expect you to understand." In other words, at bottom the real enthusiasts of "Appropriate" Technology are motivated by religion: by the work ethic; by that remnant theme of Western (and Eastern) philosophy that says "Life should be hard." In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread. Pride goeth before a fall. Doom and catastrophe await the complacent. Etc. Well, maybe; but I will counter them with the Parable of the Talents. Meanwhile, what's wrong with the AP movement is that it docs not merely encourage the use of small-scale, personally constructed improvements to one's life -- something we can all agree is a Good Thing -- but it discourages any large-scale systematic solutions to the truly overwhelming problems facing our world. AP says we can get out of our box through putting beer cans on our roofs, building windmills and privies, turning wine vats into bathtubs, expecting less, making do with less; and that simply ain't so, nor is it particularly desirable. In my last column I talked about use of waste resources. Does anyone seriously imagine that will come about through everyone's individual efforts? That privies will do the job? Just how appropriate is Appropriate Technology? Would the world really be better off if, instead of trying to keep up with the literature, and writing, I were to fork my own manure, grow my own vegetables, engage in labor-intensive activities? Understand. I've nothing against developing ways that let everyone contribute to our social order, and I've no illusions about one unfortunate side-effect of our technological era: that it makes more and more people helpless, unable to find meaningful work, makes them feel useless; to the extent that the AP movement alleviates that, splendid. But I do point out that many of our large-city problems could be much reduced if people would make such minimum contributions as picking up trash where they find it, putting the lids on garbage cans, not littering, and the like -- none of which take the sustained and dreary effort required to grind one's own wheat and bake one's own bread. Two pictures of the future: the bicycle-pedal wheat grinder with lowered thermostat, or unlimited energy and nearly boundless wealth. Let's leave the dreary picture and look at the other one. a symposium on the future of the hand calculator. The predicted developments weren't startling, and won't be to anyone who's read The Mote In God's Eye ; but the timescale and prices were. The limiting factor in costs of hand-held computers is (he hardware, such as keys and displays. The limiting factor in size is similarly the input-output mechanism. The could already put the most complex pocket calculator into your watch if there were any reason to do so -- and if we could mictominiaturize our eyes and fingers so that we could use the fool thing. Within five years the most elaborate calculators presently on the market will sell for fifty bucks or less. Within about the same time span they'll be able to put the Rubber Chemistry and Physics, twelve pounds of tiny print) into a memory unit connectable to a pocket calculator and itself pocket-sized. In not a lot more time they could put the full capabilities of one of those Altair micro-computers into a hand-held calculator. If there was a would be under fifty dollars. They could already build the best of the micro-computers into a box no larger than its keyboard and read-out screen. One reason all this hasn't happened is market potential: how many people want or need a fullcapability programmable generalpurpose computer? All of us. I'd say; but it requires some changes in our educational philosophy. For example: what is the value of knowing the times table? Why should we be able to add up large columns of numbers? Well, you might one day be without your calculator. Selfreliance. It's good for the soul. Dammit, if we let the kids use calculators in school from first grade up, they'll never understand numbers... As if most of them do now. I put it to you that the ones who now leam what numbers are ail about will leam it anyway; and those who never do learn can at least be taught how to use a pocket calculator, thus letting them have the opportunity to be waitresses, store clerks, taxi drivers, etc. When was the last time a Galaxy reader used a log table? Took a square root by pencil and paper? Multiplied three-digit numbers on paper? Added up a large column of figures? Certainly I do more calculations now than ever Not very surprisingly, if you are a Galaxy subscriber chances are you tend to move around a lot; seeing new places, doing new things, living in new homes. This is just fine, of course, but from the rather specialized point of view of our Subscription Department it does present a problem. You see, while computers are fast and accurate, they are not, even ours, very bright. So when you inform them of a change of address, you should do it in a special way. Like this; and you should include an actual Galaxy subscription address-tabel from your old address. Otherwise the computer might not understand, and that might mean that your next issue of Galaxy doesn't reach you as quickly as it should: a terrible state of affairs, indeed! So, if you're moving, please send a change-of-address card, made out as shown above, together with an old subscription label, to: Galaxy Subscription Dept. Boulder, CO # Thank you! I would if I had to go back to slide rules; and my work is the better for it. So is yours. Yet we are made to feel guilty because... , because what? Because making things easier is decadent? Nonsense. Beyond the pocket calculator is the implanted computer: the box that you think at, giving you instant access to the answer to any question you can think of (provided that the answer is known and stored, or calculable). How long to that? Larry and I ran into Dr. Adam Reed in the halls, and we had a pleasant chat. Reed is, you may recall, the engineerpsychologist at Rockefeller University who's working on brain-computer interfaces. He still puts preliminary results at about ten years' distance. He also reports new physiological evidence for the holographic model of the brain. (For more details on that theory, see my previous column, "Here Come the Brains," October, # Galaxy.) Coupled with the truly remarkable advances in microminiaturization achieved by Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, and other micro-chip manufacturers, the computer-inyour-head may well come within my lifetime, almost certainly within yours. So what else is new? Well, there's particle physics. Sub-nuclear physics is in a rather confused state at the moment, what with quarks. flavors, colors, "gluons" (yes, I said that; a postulated particle that "glues" certain quarks together) and every few months somebody finds a new anomaly that won't fit what physicists think they know. But there's some hope now: Chen Ning Yang, Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York, Sunny Brook, confidently expects to have a unified field theory within his lifetime -- if someone doesn't beat him to it. The reason is simple: physicists now have some new equipment to play with. The big Fermi aceven more powerful beam accelerator in Europe; these and other multimegabuck installations are pouring out data, and some of it is finally beginning to fall into place. More and more often, physicists are able to predict what kind of squiggle they'll see in their bubblechamber after they send particles racing off around the big accelerator ring. So what good is it? Well, as Helmholtz once said, "The most practical thing in the world is a good theory" Does anyone want to argue that James Clerk Maxwell's elegant equations -- now appropriately emblazoned on t-shirts -- didn't change the world? Or that the theoretical work of a Swiss patentoffice clerk hasn't had an effect on our lives? There's at least as much potential in the new particle theories as ever there was in e  me # . Forces (hat don't decrease with distance. Interactions between nuclear and electro-magnetic forces. As Franklin said of his discovery, what use is a newborn baby? But (here's a hitch. The theoretical advances in physics come largely from new hardware, new accelerators, equipment to let physicists play with the basic building blocks of the universe; and (hat stuff is expensive. Our last several Presidents gulped hard and came up with the money for Fermi-lab. Our present one seems to have cut out every research item that won't have a payoff in the next four years. Shuttle delayed: means Large Space Telescope delayed. Meanwhile, a search of the historical records reveals the disturbing information that our Sun really is a variable star, and that we may live in a rather unusual period: that our climate might change, and since the present climate is about as favorable as has ever been in the history of the world, the change will likely be for (he worse. Studying the Sun won't let us do anything about that -- but it will let us know what's happening, how long the changes will last, and what we're up against. There was a lot more, of course. Bart J. Bok, formerly of Harvard, has a good handle on how stars are bom from "pre-proto-stars," namely balls of cold gas called, appropriately enough, Bok Globules; a great deal about Mars from the Viking team, with far more to come as the data are analyzed; a long symposium on the right to die; a day on new information about the polar regions (they're cold); not much on recombinant scientists are afraid to discuss it in public; a nonspectacular panel analyzing data from various "early intervention" programs like Head Start and concluding that such things really do help, permanently, and show a significant economic profit in reduced crime rates (and that was startling enough for me, since I've tended to look at such programs with jaundiced eye, and must now rethink my position). There was one moment of triumph, when I saw the very large displays on jojoba research, and found that, to the bewilderment of those involved, the Congress, reacting to constituent letters, had practically forced money into their hands. So far as I know, many if not most of those letters to the Congress came from Galaxy readers; I know of no other strong attempt to push the jojoba bean. But there was nothing really spectacular in Denver. No screaming matches that I saw, although my wife found herself witnessing some excitement among the educational psychologists. There were no "events" such as the meeting a few years ago when the war protestors and Free Speech Movement people whapped Senator Hubert Humphrey right smack in the mush with a ripe tomato, or the time when the Committee Against Racism saw to it that Professor Page and others were not allowed to present their papers. I didn't come away from Denver with the ferment of excitement that I experienced in previous meetings. Instead, I kept thinking of that Lincoln quote I opened with. "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of Earth." We really are at such a crossroad. This generation is blessed -- or cursed -- with the ability to make as fundamental an alteration in human history as ever was made by the discovery of the wheel, the taming of animals, the use of fire. For the cast of a couple of Apollo programs, peanuts really, we could give all mankind for all time to come boundless energy, energy to waste, energy for luxuries; access to space and its limitless resources; a capability to harness the fundamental forces of nature. We really could. But -- we have no national commitment to do so. We have no national commitment to do anything. At present we really do seem in a quandary, unable to make a basic choice between Appropriate Technology and all its philosophical implications, versus a concerted national effort to exploit technology and science to the fullest, to commit the resources and once and for all end physiological want. No: we cannot "solve" all human problems. We may indeed be opening wider Pandora's box. There is no certainty that the scientific djinn will not turn on us. Alternatively, there is absolute certainty that without the djinn most of the world faces starvation and poverty, and we will have to adjust to a way of life that may well include the bicycle-pedal wheat grinder -- presuming we have the capability even to manufacture those , after the crunch. In the past I've entitled these annual reports on the state of the sciences "This Generation of Wonder," and "Man's Future: Prognosis Magnificent," and I've tried to leave my readers with some sense of the wonder I felt. I wish I could do that this year; but I can't. The prognosis could be magnifleent; but it is ail too clear that none of those marvels will happen automatically. They're just too expensive. Maybe when it's steam engine time steam engines will appear; but you cannot say that about Space Shuttles, and fusion reactors, and Large Space Telescopes, and accelerators. And yet: it's no small thing, to know that we live in a generation that could, if we would, make as great a contribution to human history as ever any did; that we could be part of something as important as the harnessing of fire and the discovery of the wheel.  Frank Herbert What is Dosadi? Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie must answer this question after trapping himself on the planet of that McKie knows that Dosadi' s from the rest of the ConSentient universe by an englabing barrier under the control of a Caleban, The Colebans are visible as stars in his universe. They provide the ConSentiency with jumpdoors through which one can walk in one step from planet to planet. They are a 'useful mystery' and some believe them a manifestation similar to the Taprisiot, stubby, log-like people wha provide instant mind-to-mind communication across the parsecs. Other things McKie knows: That the master of Dosadi (those outside the barrier 'God Wall' or those inside) will destroy the planet and all of its inhabitants soon unless he can solve the undefined problem of this He knows that Dosadi is a terrible training ground for the recognition of and use of power. But this planet's travail is a creation of some among the Gowachin Frog People for whom testing almost to extinction is a natural And there is always something beyond McKie' s knowledge, some other mystery about Dosadi which eludes him even after he learns that people can exchange old bodies for new on this planet. One of McKie'  foremost problems is Keila Jedrik, a Human female on Dosadi, a new warlord bred and trained to free her planet from Us secret imprisonment. Jedrik uses mental simulation models of all those she seeks to control, including those unknown to her who imprison Dosadi. She reads these latter forces through their actions. Jedrik has taken McKie as her lover but with multiple and profoundly Dosadi intent. She uses him for many things while teaching him, even leaching McKie about himself. Through Jedrik, he sees how the Gowachin could groom him for this role because he was emotionally flawed. And as Jedrik shows him the cold relationship between two parents who serve her, McKie learns that on Dosadi love is a means of controlling others. To be independent here, you reveal no lave. Another odd clue about the planet is Pcharky, an aged Gowachin Jedrik keeps in a cage which Pcharky built. The cage glows and hums with stronge energies. Dosadi has only two sentient species: Gowachin and Human. They are descended from a memory-erased population which volunteered for a long-term psychological experiment. The descendants, increasingly resistant to memory-erasure, know they're puppets in a contrived hell. Dosadi's plants and animals are poisonous to both species unless raised in hydroponic isolation behind the guarded walls of their one city, Chu. All around the city, the people of the Rim live short, violent lives in a scramble far entry into the relative purity of Chu. McKie arrives at the beginning of a race war , not knowing that Jedrik ignited this battle of extinction because of his arrival, that she considers McKie her key to the Gad Wall. But McKie also is an agent of the ConSentiency' s Bureau of Sabotage, an ombudsman-like ministry which learned about Dosadi's existence, that it is a planet imprisoned by a Caleban, that it is a Cowaehin crime. McKie was the logical choice to seek out Dosadi's location. He had developed a relationship with a Caleban calling herself Fannie Mae, and he is the only living ntm-Gowachin admitted to practice under Gowachin Law. Gowachin distrust law (even their own) saying it injures societies. They look first for ways to disarm or remove taw when problems arise. Above all, Gowochin distrust any community or professionals, especially legal professionals. The ultimate use of Gowachin Law is to dissolve old law with a concommittanl application of Assignment of McKie to the Dosadi problem was made by his bureau chief, Bildoon, a PanSpechi, whose species can ape Human form but passes one ego from person to person within a five-member creche-family. As his first move, McKie accepts a summons to the Gowachin home planet of Tandaloor, place of their mythological progenitor, Mrreg. In Gowachin myth, Mrreg was a monster who tested the first primitive Frog People almost to extinction, setting the pattern of their deepest instincts. On Tandaloor, McKie meets Aritch, High M agister nf the most powerful Gowachin Phylum, and a deadly Wreave female nomed Ceytang who is being trained as a Legum. If McKie offends Ceylang, he risks vendetta with the gigantic extended family which her species creates through marital exchanges. McKie is forced to become Aritch' s Legum, occepting the Phylum's sacred box containing a book, a knife and a rock -- symbols of Gowachin Law and reminders that any person using this legal structure may forfeit his life. Sent to Dosadi by Aritch's people, McKie soon learns that he cannot leave the planet in his existing 'body Inode.' This is part of the Caleban contract. But McKie is equally concerned with immediate survival as Jedrik uses him first in one task and then another to help her war against the Dosadi Gowachin. Opposing Jedrik is the planet's dominant warlord, the Elector Broey, a Gowachin who speaks in secret with the Caleban of the God Wall. Broey knows some things about McKie, considers the BuSab agent an idiot savant, a weapons expert from beyond the barrier. This is partly because Jedrik' s forces have taken McKie' s sophisticated BuSab weapons and improved upon them for the battle. Among Broey's aides are two Humans, the Warlord Gar and Gar's daughter, Tria, who plot to build another city on Dosadi in defiance of their religious mandate. To keep their place in the ruling council, Gar has revealed this plot to Broey, who strives in the face of a growing cynicism about ' the God of the Wall,' to find the blasphemous city and destroy it. One of Broey's tools is a Human named Havvy, a person from beyond the Gad Wall whom Jedrik fudged "too flawed" to use as a key to the Caleban barrier. Gar and Tria have developed a suicide force of the Rim born which, through Jedrik's maneuvering, is confined to an untenable corridor between the forces of Jedrik and Broey. Tria sees her impasse and, with Gar, submits to capture by Jedrik. A Dosadi-sensilized McKie, watching Jedrik's interrogation af Gar and Tria, realizes that Tria was trained by a PanSpechi. McKie forces Gar to reveal that Tria is not his natural daughter, that he found her as on abandoned amnesiac child far out on the Rim, raised her as his own. This aspect of the Dosadi Experiment exposes for McKie another of A r itch 's lies: the Ritn is not outside the experiment, but essential to it. How many other lies did Aritch tell? The High M agister said the Dosadi were 'monstrous,' but McKie admires their strengths, agreeing that the Dosadi may well take over the ConSentiency if released from their planet. Aritch has said Dosadi was an attempt to raise a population resistant to all mediocrity imposed from above. But there are hidden motives, perhaps an attempt to make Gowachin Law the basis for all ConSentient Law. McKie knows he has been trained os a secret pawn in the Dosadi game, but the Gowachin are so ultimately civilized they have come full circle into savagery. Jedrik, demonstrating to Gar and Tria that McKie really is her lieutenant, sends him into danger to solve a battle problem at one of the city's inner gates. McKie wins the bottle and questions captives. One is a Gowachin with scroll-like scars on his eyelids, a poorly erased Phylum tatoo. Making formal demand as a Legum, McKie forces the captive to reveal that only sixty hours remain before Dosadi is destroyed, that ' 'Mrreg sent me to gel our people out of here. " Another prisoner is Havvy, who reveals that Pcharky is intended to transfer McKie's identity into Jedrik's body and Jedrik into McKie, giving her #B the perfect disguise for escaping from Dosadi. However, McKie recognizes something else -- that a Caleban looks out through Navvy's eyes. Sending a message through this Caleban, McKie warns Aritch to adhere to the traditional relationship between Legum and Client lest all Gowachin be targets for extermination. McKie, his mind threading through the layers within layers of the Dosadi problem, returns to Jedrik and gives her the essential datum for overwhelming Broey: use the fanatics offered by Gar and Tria to attack the Gowachin graluz breeding pools. Jedrik fust sends word af this threat to Broey, then tells McKie to go back to their room with her, that it's time for their showdown. McKie obeys wondering: Is it to be body exchange? Back on Tandaloor, Ceylang has been watching simulations and actual scenes of McKie's performance on Dosadi. She tells Aritch: "Sometimes I think those Dosadi play us like a fine instrument." Aritch: "Of course! That's why we sent them McKie. " Geriatric or ofher life extension for the powerful poses a similar threat to a sentient species as that found historically in the dominance of a selfperpetuoting bureaucracy. Both assume prerogatives of immortality, collecting more ond more power with each passing moment. This is power which draws a theological aura about itself -- the unassailable Law, the Gad-given mandote of the leader, manifest destiny. Power held too long within a narrow framework moves farther and farther oway from the adaptiva demands of changed conditions. The leadership grows ever more paranoid, suspicious of inventive adaptations to change, fearfully protective of persanol power and, in the terrified avoidance of what it sees os risk, blindlyleads its people into destruction. -- BuSab Manual "Very well. I'll tell you what bothers me," Ceylang said. "There are too many things about this problem that I fail to understand." From her seated position, she looked across a small round room at Aritch, who floated gently in a tiny blue pool. His head at the pool's lip was almost on a level with Ceylang's. Again, they had worked late into the night. She understood the reasons for this, the time pressures were quite apparent, but the peculiar Gowachin flavor of her training kept her in an almost constant state of angry questioning. This whole thing was so unWreave! Ceylang smoothed the robe over her long body. The robe was blue now, one step away from Legum black. Appropriately, there was blue all around her -- the walls, the floor, the ceiling, Aritch 's pool. The High M agister rested his chin on the pool's edge to speak. "I require specific questions before I can even hope to penetrate your puzzlement." "Will McKie defend or prosecute? The simulator..." "Damn the simulator! Odds are that he'll make the mistake of prosecuting. Your own reasoning powers should..." "But if he doesn't?" "Then selection of the judicial panel becomes vital." Ceylang twisted her body to one side, feeling the chairdog adjust for her comfort. As usual, Aritch 's answer only deepened her sense of uncertainty. She voiced that now. "I continue to have this odd feeling that you intend me to play some role which I'm not supposed to discover until the very last instant." Aritch breathed noisily through his mouth, splashed water onto his head. "This all may be moot. By this time day after tomorrow, Dosadi and McKie may no longer exist." "Then I will not advance to Legum?" "Oh, I'm fairly certain you'll be a Legum." She studied him, sensing irony, then: "What a delicate line you walk, High Magister." "Hardly. My way is wide and clear. You know the things I cannot countenance. I cannot betray the Law or my people." "I have similar inhibitions. But this Dosadi thing... so tempting." "So dangerous! Would a Wreave don Human flesh to learn the Human condition? Would you permit a Human to penetrate Wreave society in this..." "There are some who might conspire in this! There are even Gowachin who..." "The opportunities for misuse are countless." "Yet you say that McKie already is more Gowachin than a Gowachin." Aritch's webbed hands folded over the pool's edge. The claws extended. "We risked much in training him for this task." "More than you risk with me?" Aritch withdrew his hands, stared at her, unblinking. "So that's what bothers you." "Precisely." "Think, Ceylang, how near the core of Wreavedom you would permit me to come. Thus far and no farther will we permit you." "And McKie?" "May already have gone too far for us to permit his continued existence." "I heed your wanting, Aritch. But I remain puzzled as to why the Calebans couldn't prevent..." "They profess not to understand the ego transfer. But who can understand a Caleban, let alone control one in a matter so delicate? Even this one who created the God Wall..." "It's rumored that McKie understands Calebans." "He denies it." She rubbed her pocked left jowl with prehensile mandible, felt the many scars of her passage through the W reave triads. Family to family until it was a single gigantic family. Yet, all were Wreave. This Dosadi thing threatened a monstrous parody of Wreavedom. Still... "So fascinating," she murmured. "That's its threat." "We should pray for the death of Dosadi." "Perhaps." She was startled. "What..." "This might not die with Dosadi. Our sacred bond assures that you will leave here with this knowledge. Many Gowachin know of this thing." "And McKie." "Infections have a way of spreading," Aritch said. "Remember that if this comes to the Court-arena." There are some forms of insonity which, driven to on ultimate expression, can become the new models of sanity. -- BuSab "McKie?" It was the familiar Caleban presence in his awareness, as though he heard and felt someone (or something) which he knew was not there. The preparation had been deceptively simple. He and Jedrik clasped hands, his right hand and her left, and each grasped one of the shimmering rods with the other hand. McKie did not have a ready identify for this C ale ban and wondered at the questioning in her voice. He agreed, however, that he was indeed McKie, shaping the thought as subvocalized conversation. As he spoke, McKie was acutely aware of Jedrik beside him. She was more than just another person now. He canied a tentative simulation model of her, sometimes anticipating her responses. "You make mutual agreement?" the Caleban asked. McKie sensed Pcharky then: a distant presence, the monitor for this experience. It was as though Pcharky had been reduced to a schematic which the Caleban followed, a set of complex rules many of which could not be translated into words. Some part of McKie responded to this as though a monster awakened within him, a sleeping monster who sat up full of anger at being aroused thus, demanding: "Who is it that dares awaken me?" McKie felt his body trembling, felt Jedrik trembling beside him. The CalebanTaprisiottrembling, the sweaty response to trance! He saw these phenomena now in a different light. When you walked at the edge of this abyss... While these thoughts passed through his mind, he felt a slight shift, no more than the blurred reflection of something which was not quite movement. Now, while he still felt his own flesh around him, he also felt himself possessed of an inner contact with Jedrik's body and knew she shared this experience. Such a panic as he had not thought possible threatened to overwhelm him. He felt Jedrik trying to break the contact, to stop this hideous sharing, but they were powerless in the grip of a force which would not be stopped. No time sense attached itself to this experience, but a fatalistic calm overcame them almost simultaneously. McKie felt awareness of Jedrikflesh deepen. Curiosity dominated him now. So this is woman! This is man? They shared the thoughts across an indistinct bridge. Fascination gripped McKie. He probed deeper. Heshe could feel himselfherself breathing. And the differences! It was not the genitalia, the presence or lack of breasts. She felt bereft of breasts. He felt acutely distressed by their presence, self-consciously aware of profound implications. The sense of difference went back beyond gamete McKieJedrik. McKie sensed her thoughts, her reactions. Jedrik sensed him in the same way. Jedrik: "You cast your sperm upon the stream of time." McKie: "You enclose and nurture..." "I castI nurture." It was as though they looked at an object from opposite sides, aware belatedly that they both examined the same thing. "We castwe nurture." Obscuring layers folded away and McKie found himself in Jedrik's mind, she in his. Their thoughts were one entity. The separate Dosadi and ConSentient experiences melted into a single relationship. "Aritch...ah, yes. You see? And your PanSpechi friend, Bildoon. Note that. You suspected, but now you know..." Each set of experiences fed on the other, expanding, refining... condensing, discarding, creating... creating... So that's the training of a Legum. Loving parents? Ahhh, yes, loving parents. "Iwe wilt apply pressure there... and there... They must be maneuvered into choosing that one as a judge. Yes, that will give us the required leverage. Let them break their own code." And the awakened monster stirred within them. It had no dimension, no place, only existence. They felt its power. ' # do what  do" ' The power enveloped them. No other awareness was permitted. They sensed a primal current, unswerving purpose, a force which could override any other thing in their universe. It was not God, not Life, not any particular species. It was something so far beyond such articulations that JedrikMcKie could not even contemplate it without a sense that the next instant would bring obliteration. They felt a question hurled at their united, fearful awareness. The question was framed squarely in anger, astonishment, cold amusement and threat. "For this you awaken me?" Now, they understood why the old body and donor-ego had always been slain immediately. This terrible sharing made a... made a noise. It awakened a questioner. They understood the question without words, knowing they could never grasp the full meaning and emotive thrust, that it would bum them out even to try. Anger...astonishment... cold amusement... threat. The question as their own united mind(s) interpreted it represented a limit. It was all that JedrikMcKie could accept. The intrusive questioner receded. They were never quite sure afterward whether they'd been expelled or whether they'd fled in terror, but the parting words were burned into their combined awareness. "Let the sleeper sleep." They walked softly in their minds then. They understood the warning, but knew it could never be translated in its fullest threat for any other sentient being. Concurrent: McKieJedrik felt a projection of terror from the God Wall Caleban, unfocused, unexplained. It was a new experience in the male-female collective memory. Caleban Fannie Mae had not even projected this upon original McKie when she'd thought herself doomed. Concurrent: McKieJedrik felt a bumt-out-fading from Pcharky. Something in that terrible contact had plunged Pcharky into his death spiral. Even as McKieJedrik realized this, the old Gowachin died. It was a slammed door. But this came after a blazing realization by McKieJedrik that Pcharky had shared the original decision to set up the Dosadi experiment. McKie found himself clothed in living, breathing flesh which routed its messages through his awareness. He wasn't sure which of their two bodies he possessed, but it was distinct, separate. It wrapped him in Human senses: the taste of salt, the smell of perspiration and the omnipresent Warren stink. One hand held cold metal; the other clasped the hand of a fellow Human. Perspiration drenched this body, made the clasped hands slippery. He felt that knowing which hand held another hand was of utmost importance, but he wasn't ready to face that knowledge. Awareness of self, this new self, and a whole lifetime of new memories, demanded all of the attention he could muster. Focus: A Rim city, never outside Jedrik's control because she had fed the signals through to Gar and Tria with exquisite care and because those who gave the orders on the Rim had shared in the generations of selective breeding which had produced Jedrik. She was a biological weapon whose sole target was the God Wall. Focus: Loving parents can thrust their child into deadly peril when they know everything possible has been done to prepare that child for survival. The oddity to McKie was that he felt such things as personal memories. "I did that." Jedrik suffered the throes of similar experiences. Which body? So that was the training of a BuSab agent. Clever...almost adequate. Complex and full of much that she found to be new, but why did it always stop short of a full development? She reviewed the sessions with Aritch and Ceylang. A matched pair. The choice of Ceylang and the role chosen for her appeared obvious. How innocent! Jedrik felt herself free to pity Ceylang. When allowed to run its course, this was an interesting emotion. She had never before felt pity in un colored purity. Focus: McKie actually loved her. She savored this emotion in its ConSentient complexity. The straight flow of selected emotions fascinated her. They did not have to be bridled! In and out of this creative exchange there wove an intimacy, a pure sexuality without inhibitions. McKie, savoring the amusement Jedrik had felt when Tria had suggested a McKieJedrik breeding, found himself caught by demanding male eroticism and knew by the sensation that he retained his old body. Jedrik, understanding McKie's long search for a female to complete him, found her amusement converted to the desire to demonstrate that completion. As she turned toward him, releasing the dull rod which had once shimmered in contact with Pcharky, she found herself in McKie's flesh looking into her own eyes. McKie gasped in the mirror experience. Just as abruptly, driven by shock, they shifted back into familiar flesh: McKie male, Jedrik female. Instantly, it became a thing to explore -- back and forth. Eroticism was forgotten in this new game. "We can be either sexbody at will!" It was something beyond Taprisiots or Calebans, far more subtle than the crawling progression of a PanSpechi ego through the bodies from its creche. They knew the source of this odd gift even as they sank back on the bed, content to be familiar male and female for a time. The Monster. This was a gift with barbs in it, something loving parents might give their child in the knowledge that it was time for this lesson. Yet they felt revitalized, knowing they had for an instant tapped an energy source without limits. A pounding on the door interrupted this shared reverie. "Jedrik! Jedrik!" "What is it?" "It's Broey. He wishes to talk to McKie." They were off the bed in an instant. Jedrik glanced at McKie, knowing she had not one secret from him, that they shared a reasoning base. Out of the mutual understanding in this base, she spoke for both of them. "Does he say why?" "Jedrik..." They both recognized the voice of a trusted aide and heard the fear in it. "... it's midmoming and there is no sun. God has turned off the "Sealed u in..." "... to conceal the final blast." Jedrik opened the door, confronted the frightened aide. "Where is Broey?" "Here... in your command post. He came alone without escort." She glanced at McKie. "You will speak for us." Broey waited near the position board in the command post. Watchful Humans stood within striking distance. He turned as McKie and Jedrik entered. McKie noted that the Gowachin's body was, indeed, heavy with breeding juices as anticipated. Unsettling for a Gowachin. "What are your terms, McKie?" Broey 's voice was gutteral, full of heavy breathing. McKie 's features remained Dosadi-bland, but he thought; Broey thinks I'm responsible for the darkness. He's terrified. McKie glanced at the threatening black of the windows before speaking. He knew this Gowachin from Jedrik ' painstaking study. Broey was a sophisticate, a collector of sophistication who surrounded himself with people of the same stripe. He was a professional sophisticate who read everything through that peculiar Dosadi screen. No one could come into his circle who didn't share this pose. All else remained outside and inferior. He was an ultimate Dosadi, a distillation, almost as Human as Gowachin because he'd obviously once worn a Human body. He was Gowachin at his origins, (hough... no doubt of it. "You followed my scent," McKje said. "Excellent!" Broey brightened. He had not expected a Dosadi exchange, pared to the non-emotional essentials. ' ' Unfortunately , ' ' McKie said , "you have no position from which to negotiate. Certain things will be your compliance will be forced, or we will act without you." It was a deliberate goading on McKie 's part, a choice of nonDosadi forms to abbreviate this confrontation. It said more than anything else that McKie came from beyond the God Wall, that the darkness which held back the daylight was the least of his resources. Broey hesitated, then: "So?" The single word fell on the air with countless implications: an entire exchange discarded, hopes dashed, a hint of sadness at lost powers, and still with that sophisticated reserve which was Broey 's signature. It was more subtle than a shrug, more powerful in its Dosadi overtones than an entire negotiating session. "Questions?" McKie asked. Broey glanced at Jedrik, obviously surprised by (his. It was as though he appealed to her: They were both Dosadi, were they not? This outsider came here with his gross manners, his lack of Dosadi understanding. How could one speak to such a one? He addressed Jedrik. "Have I not already stated my submission. I came alone, I..." Jedrik picked up McKie 's cue. "There are certain...peculiarities to our situation." "Peculiarities?" Broey' s nictating membrane blinked once. Jedrik allowed her manner to convey a slight embarrassment. "Certain delicacies of the Dosadi condition must be overlooked. We are now, all of us, abject supplicants... and we are dealing with people who do not speak as we speak, act as we act..." "Yes." He pointed upward. "The mentally retarded ones. We are in danger then." It was not a question. Broey peered upward, as though trying to see through the ceiling and intervening floors. He drew in a deep breath. "Yes." Again, it was compressed communication. Anyone who could put the God Wall there could crush an entire planet. Therefore, Dosadi and all of its inhabitants had been brought to a common subjection. Only a Dosadi could have accepted it this quickly without more questions and Broey was an ultimate Dosadi. McKic turned to Jedrik. When he spoke, she anticipated every word, but she waited him out. "Tell your people to stop all attacks." He faced Broey. "And your people." Broey looked from Jedrik to McKie, back to Jedrik with a puzzled expression openly on his face, but he obeyed. "Which communicator?" Where pain predominates, agony can be a valued teacher. -- Dosadi Aphorism McKic and Jedrik had no need to discuss (he decision. It was a choice which they shared and knew they shared through a memoryselection process now common to both of them. There was a loophole in the God Wall and even though that wall now blanketed Dosadi in darkness, a C ale ban contract was still a Caleban contract. The vital question was whether the Caleban of the God Wall would respond. Jedrik in McKie's body stood guard outside her own room while a Jedrik-fleshed McKie went alone into the room to make the attempt. Who should he try to contact? Fannie Mae? The absolute darkness which enclosed Dosadi hinted at an absolute withdrawal of (he guardian Caleban. And there was so little time. McKie sat cross-legged on the floor of the room and tried to clear his mind. The constant strange discoveries in the female body he now wore interfered with concentration. The moment of exchange left an aftershock which he doubted would ever diminish. They had but to share the desire for the change now and it occurred. But this different body... ahh, the multiplicity of differences created its own confusions. These went far beyond the adjustments to different height and weight. The muscles of his-her arms and hips felt wrongly attached. The bodily senses were routed through different unconscious processes. Anatomy created its own patterns, its own instinctual behavior. For one thing, he found it necessary to develop consciously-monitored movements which protected hisher breasts. The movements were reminiscent of those male adjustments by which he prevented injury to testes. These were movements which a male learned early and relegated to an automatic behavior pattern. The problem in the female body was that he had to think about such behavior. And it went far beyond the breasttestes interlock. As he tried to clear his mind for the Caleban contact, these webbed clusters of memory intruded. It was maddening. He needed to clear away bodily distractions, but this female body demanded his attention. In desperation, he hyperventilated and burned his awareness into a pineal focus whose dangers he knew only too well. This was the way to permanent identity loss if the experience was prolonged. It produced a sufficient clarity, however, that he could fill his awareness with memories of Fannie Mae. Silence. He sensed time's passage as though each heartbeat were a blow. Fear hovered at the edge of the silence. It came to him that something had put a terrible fear into the God Wall Caleban. McKie felt anger. "Caleban! You owe me!" "McKie?" The response was so faint that he wondered whether it might be his hopes playing tricks on him. "Fannie Mae?" That was stronger and he recognized the familiar Caleban presence in his awareness. "I am McKie and you owe me a debt." "If you are truly McKie...why are you so...strange...changed?" "I .wear another body." McKie was never sure, but he thought he sensed consternation. Fannie Mae responded more strongly then. "I remove McKie from Dosadi now? Contract permits." "I will share Dosadi's fate." "McKie!" "Don't argue with me, Fannie Mae. I will share Dosadi's fate unless you remove another node person with me." He projected Jedrik's pattern then, an easy process since he shared all of her memories. "She wears McKie 's body!" It was accusatory. "She wears another body," McKie, said. He knew the Caleban saw his new relationship with Jedrik. Everything depended now on the interpretation of the Caleban contract. "Jedrik is Dosadi," the Caleban protested. "So am I Dosadi...now." "But you are McKie!" "And Jedrik is also McKie. Contact her if you don't believe me." He broke the contact with an angry abruptness, found himself sprawled on the floor, still twitching. Perspiration bathed the female body which he still wore. The head ached. Would Fannie Mae do as he'd told her? He knew Jedrik was as capable of projecting his awareness as he was of projecting hers. How would Fannie Mae interpret the Dosadi contract? Gods! The ache in his head was a burning thing. He felt alien in Jedrik's body, misused. The pain persisted and he wondered if he'd done irreparable harm to Jedrik's brain through that intense pineal focus. Slowly, he pushed himself upright, got to his feet. The Jedrik legs felt weak beneath him. He thought of Jedrik outside that door trembling in the zombie-like trance required for this mind-to-mind contact. What was taking so long? Had the Calebans withdrawn? Have we lost? He started for the door but before he'd taken the second step, light blazed around him. For a fractional heartbeat he thought it was the final fire to consume Dosadi, but the light held steady. He glanced around, found himself in the open air. It was a place he recognized immediately: the courtyard of the Dry Head compound on Tandaloor. He saw the familiar phylum designs on the surrounding walls -- green Gowachin script on yellow bricks. There was the sound of water splashing in the comer pool. A group of Gowachin stood in an arched entry directly ahead of him and he recognized one of his old teachers. Yes... this was a Dry Head sanctus. These people had protected him, trained him, introduced him to their most sacred secrets. The Gowachin in the shadowed entry were moving excitedly into the courtyard, their attention centered on a figure sprawled near them. The figure stirred, sat up. McKie recognized his own body there. Jedrik! It was an intense mutual need. The body exchange required less than an eyeblink. McKie found himself in his own familiar body, seated on cool tiles. The approaching Gowachin bombarded him with questions. "McKie, what is this?" "You fell through ajumpdoor!" "Are you hurt?" He waved the questions away, crossed his legs and fell into the long-call trance focused on that bead in his stomach. That bead Bildoon had never expected him to use! As it was paid to do, the Taprisiot waiting on CC enfolded his awareness. McKie rejected contact with Bildoon, made six calls through the responsive Taprisiot. The calls went to key agents in BuSab, all of them ambitious and resourceful, all of them completely loyal to the agency's mandate. He transmitted his Dosadi information in full bursts, using the technique derived from his exchanges with Jedrik -- mind-to-mind . There were few questions and those easily answered. "The Caleban who holds Dosadi imprisoned plays God. It's the letter of the contract." "Do the Calebans approve of this?" That question came from a particularly astute Wreave agent sensitive to the complications implicit in the fact that the Gowachin were training Ceylang, a Wreave female, as a Legum. "The concepts of approval or disapproval are not applicable. The role was necessary for that Caleban to carry out the contract." "It was a game?" The Wreave agent was outraged. "Perhaps. There's one thing certain: the Calebans don't understand harmful behavior and ethics as we understand them." "We've always known that." "But now we've realty learned it." When he'd made the six calls, McKic sent his Taprisiot questing for Aritch, found the High Magister in the Running Phylum's conference pool. "Greetings, Client." McKie projected wry amusement. He sensed the Gowachin's shock. "There are certain things which your Legum instructs you to do under the holy seal of our relationship," McKie said. "You will take us into the Counarena, then?" The High Magister was perceptive and he was a beneficiary of Dosadi's peculiar gifts, but he was not a Dosadi. McKie found it relatively easy to manipulate Aritch now, enlisting the High Magister's deepest motivations. When Aritch protested against cancelling the God Wall contract, McKie revealed only the first layer of stubborn determination. "You will not add to your Legum 's difficulties," McKie said. "But what will keep them on Dosadi?" "Nothing." "Then you will defend rather than prosecute?" "Ask your pet Wreave," McKie said. "Ask Ceylang." He broke the contact then, knowing Aritch could only obey him. The High Magister had few choices, most of them bad ones. And Gowachin Law prevented him from disregarding his Legum 's orders once the pattern of the contest was set. McKie awoke from the call to find his Dry Head friends clustered around Jedrik. She was explaining their predicament. Yes... there were advantages to having (wo bodies with one purpose. McKie got to his feet. She saw him, spoke. "My head feels better." "It was a near thing." And he added: "It still is. But Dosadi is free." In the classical times of several species it was the custom of the powerful to nudge the powercounters (money or other economic tabulators, status points, etc.) into occasional violent perturbations from which the knowledgeable few profiled. Human accounts of this experience reveal edifying examples of this behavior (for which, see Appendix G). Only the PanSpechi appear to have avoided this phenomenon, possibly because of creche slavery.' -- Comparative History, The BuSab Text McKie made his next series of calls from the room the Dry Heads set aside for him. It was a relatively large room reserved for Human guests and contained welltrained chairdogs and a wide bedog which Jedrik eyed with suspicion despite her McKie memories of such things. She knew the things had only a rudimentary brain, but still they were... alive. She stood by the single window which looked out on the counyard pool, turning when she heard McKie awaken from his Taprisiot calls. "Suspicions confirmed," he said. "Will our agent friends leave Bildoon for us?" she asked. "Yes." She turned back to the window. "I keep thinking how the Dosadi sky must look now... without a God Wall. As bright as this." She nodded toward the courtyard seen through the window. "And when we get jumpdoors..." She broke off. McKie, of course, shared such thoughts. This new intimacy required considerable adjustment. "I've been thinking about your training as a Legum," she said. McKie knew where her thoughts had gone. The Gowachin chosen to train him had all appeared open in their relationship. He had been told that his teachers were a select group, chosen for excellence, the best available for the task: making a Gowachin out of a nonGowachin. A silk purse from a iow'r ear! His teachers had appeared to lead conventional Gowachin lives, keeping the usual numbers of fertile females in family tanks, weeding the graluz tads with necessary Gowachin abandon. On the surface of it, the whole thing had assumed a sense of the ordinary. They had introduced him to intimate aspects of their lives when he'd inquired, answered his questions with disarming frankness. McKie's Jedrikamplified awareness saw this in a different light now. The contests between Gowachin phy turns stood out sharply. And McKie knew now that he had not asked the right questions, that his teachers had been selected by different rules than those revealed to him at the time, that their private instructions from their Gowachin superiors contained nuances of vital importance which had been hidden from their student. Poor Ceylang. There were unsettling reflections. They changed his understanding of Gowachin honor, called into question all of those inadvertent comparisons he'd made between Gowachin forms and the mandate of his own BuSab. His BuSab training came in for the same questioning examination. Why... why... why... why Law? Gowachin Law? The value in having a BuSab agent as a Legum of the Gowachin had gained a new dimension. McKie saw these matters now as Jedrik had once seen through the God Wall. There existed other forces only dimly visible behind the visible screen. An unseen power structure lay out there -- people who seldom appeared in public, decision makers whose slightest whim carried terrible import for countless worlds. Many places, many worlds would be held in various degrees of bondage. Dosadi had merely been an extreme case for a special purpose. New bodies for old. Immortality. And a training ground for people who made terrible decisions. But none of them would be as completely Dosadi as this Jedrikamplified McKie. He wondered where the Dosadi decision had been made. Aritch had not shared in it; that was obvious. There were others behind Aritch -- Gowachin and non-Gowachin. A shadowy power group existed. It could have its seat on any world of the ConSentiency. The power merchants would have to meet occasionally but not necessarily face to face. And never in the public eye. Their first rule was secrecy. They would employ many people who lived at the exposed fringes of their power, people to carry out shadowy commands... people such as Aritch. And Bildoon. What had the PanSpechi hoped to gain? A permanent hold on his creche's ego? Of course. That... plus new bodies... Human bodies, undoubtedly, and unmarked by the stigmata of his PanSpechi origins. Bildoon 's behavior... and Aritch's appeared so transparent now. And there' d be a Mrreg nearby creating the currents in which Aritch swam. Puppet leads to Puppet Master. Mrreg. That poor fool, Grinik, had revealed more than he thought. And Bildoon. "We have two points of entry," McKie said. She agreed. "Bildoon and Mregg. The latter is the more dangerous." A crease beside McKie 's nose began to itch. He scratched at it absently, grew conscious that something had changed. He stared around, found himself standing at the window and clothed in a female body. Damn! It happened so easily. Jedrik stared up at him with his own eyes. She spoke with his voice, but the overtones were pure Jedrik. They both found this amusing. "The powers of your BuSab." He understood. "Yes, the watchdogs of justice." "Where were the watchdogs when my ancestors were lured into this Dosadi trap?" "Watchdogs of justice, very dangerous role," he agreed. "You know our feelings of outrage," she said. "And I know what it is to have loving parents." "Remember that when you talk to Bildoon." Once more, McKie found himself on the bed, his old familiar body around him. Presently, he felt the mental tendrils of a Taprisiot call, sensed Bildoon's awareness in contact with him. McKie wasted no time. The shadow forces were taking the bait. "I have located Dosadi. The issue will come to the Courtarena. No doubt of that. I want you to make the preliminary arrangements. Inform the High Magister Aritch that I make the formal imposition of the Legum. One member of the judicial panel must be a Gowachin from Dosadi. I have a particular Gowachin in mind. His name is Broey." "Where are you?" "On Tandaloor." "Is that possible?" McKic masked his sadness. Ahh , Bildoon, how easily you are read. "Dosadi is temporarily out of danger. I have taken certain retaliatory precautions." McKie broke the contact. Jedrik spoke in a musing voice. "Ohh, the perturbations we spread." McKie had no time for reflections. "Broey will need help, a support team, an extremely reliable troop which I want you to select for him." "Yes, and what of Gar and Tria?" "Let them run free. Broey will pick them up later." Communalmanaged economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is whot Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is selfregulating. -- The Dosadi AnolysisBuSab Text McKie looked around the Legum office they'd assigned him. Afternoon smells from Tandaloor's fern jungles came in an open window. A low barrier separated him from the Courtarena with its ranks of seats all around. His office and adjoining quarters were small but fitted with all requisite linkages to libraries and the infrastructure to summon witnesses and experts. It was a green-walled space so deceptively ordinary that its like had beguiled more than one nonGowachin into believing he knew how to perform here. But these quarters represented a deceptive surface riding on Gowachin currents. No matter that the Consentient Pact modified what the Gowachin might do here, this was Tandaloor and the forms of the frog people dominated. Seating himself at the single table in the office space, McKie felt the chairdog adjust itself beneath him. It was good to have a chairdog again after Dosadi's unrelenting furniture. He flipped a toggle and addressed the Gowachin face which appeared on the screen inset into his table. "I require testimony from those who made the actual decision to set up the Dosadi experiment. Are you prepared to meet this request?" "Do you have the names of these people?" Did this fool think he was going to blurt out: "Mrreg?" "If you force me to it," McKie warned, "I will bind Aritch to the Law and extract the names from him." This had no apparent effect on the Gowachin. He addressed McKie by name and title, adding: "I leave the formalities to you. Any witness I summon must have a name." McKie suppressed a smile. Suspicions confirmed. This was a fact which the watchful Gowachin in the screen was late recognizing. Someone else had read the interchange correctly, however. Another, older, Gowachin face replaced the first one on the screen. "What 're you doing, McKie?" "Determining how I will proceed with this case." "You will proceed as a Legum of the Gowachin Bar." "Precisely." McKie waited. The Gowachin peered narrowly at him from the screen. "Jedrik?" "You arc speaking to Jorj X. McKie, a Legum of the Gowachin Bar." Belatedly, the older Gowachin saw something of the way the Dosadi experience had changed McKie. "Do you wish me to place you in contact with Aritch?" McKie shook his head. They were so damned obvious, these underlings. "Aritch didn't make the Dosadi decision. Aritch was chosen to take the blow if it came to that. I will accept nothing less than the one who made that ultimate decision which launched the Dosadi experiment." The Gowachin stared at him coldly, then: "One moment, I will see what I can do." The screen went blank, but the audio remained. McKie heard the voices. "Hello...Yes, I'm sorry to interrupt at this time." "What is it?" That was a deep and arrogant Gowachin voice, full of annoyance at the interruption. It was also an accent which a Dosadi could recognize in spite of the carefully overlaid masking tones. Here was one who'd used Dosadi. The voice of the older Gowachin from McKie's screen continued: "The Legum bound to Aritch has come up with a sensitive line of questioning. He wishes to speak to you." "To me? But I am preparing for Laupuk. ' ' MeKje had no idea what Laupuk might be, but it opened a new window on the Gowachin for him. Here was a glimpse of the rarified strata which had been concealed from him all of those years. This tiny glimpse confirmed him in the course he'd chosen. "He is listening to us at this time." "Listening... why?" The tone carried threats, but the Gowachin who'd intercepted McKic's demands went on unwavering: "To save explanations. It's clear that he'll accept nothing less than speaking to you. This caller is McKie, but..." "Yes?" "You will understand." "I presume you have interpreted things correctly. Very well. Put him on." McKie's screen flickered, revealed a wide view of a Gowachin room such as he'd never before seen. A far wall held spears and cutting weapons, streamers of colorful pennants, glistening rocks, ornate carvings in a shiny black substance. All of this was backdrop for a semi-reclining chairdog occupied by an aged Gowachin who sat spraddlelegged being annointed by two younger Gowachin males. The attendants poured a thick, golden substance onto the aged Gowachin from green crystal flasks. The flasks were of a spiral design. The contents were gently massaged into the Gowachin's skin. The old Gowachin glistened with the stuff and, when he blinked -- no phylum tatoos. "As you can see," he said, "I'm being prepared for... He broke off, recognizing that he spoke to a non-Gowachin. Certainly, he'd known this. It was a slow reaction for a Dosadi. "This is a mistake," he said. "Indeed." McKie nodded pleasantly. "Your name?" The old Gowachin scowled at this gaucherie, then chuckled. "lam called Mrreg." As McKie had suspected. And why would a Tandaloor Gowachin assume the name, no, the title of the mythical monster who'd imbued the frog people with a drive toward savage testing? The implications went far beyond (his planet, colored Dosadi. "You made the decision for the Dosadi experiment?" "Someone had to make it." That was not a substantive answer and McKie decided to take it to issue. "You are not doing me any favors! I now know what it means to be a Legum of the Gowachin Bar and I intend to employ my powers to their limits." It was as (hough McKie had worked some odd magic which froze the scene on his screen. The two attendants stopped pouring ungent but did not look toward the pickup viewer which was recording their actions for McKie. As for Mrreg, he sat utterly still, his eyes fixed unblinking upon McKie. McKie waited. Presently, Mrreg turned to the attendant on his left. "Please continue. There is little time." McKie took (his as (hough spoken to himself. "You're my client. Why did you send a proxy?" Mrreg continued to study McKie. "I see what Ekris meant." Then, more briskly: "Well, McKie, I followed your career with interest. It now appears I did not follow you closely enough. Perhaps if we had not..." He left the thought incomplete. McKie picked up on this. "It was inevitable that I escape from Dosadi." "Perhaps." The attendants finished their work, departed, taking the oddly shaped crystal flasks with them. "Answer my question," McKie said. "I am not required to answer your question," Mrreg countered. "Then I withdraw from this case." Mrreg hunched forward in sudden alarm. "You cannot! Aritch isn't..." "I have no dealings with Aritch. My client is that Gowachin who made the Dosadi decision." "You are engaging in strange behavior for a Legum... Yes, bring it." This last was addressed to someone offscreen. Another attendant appeared carrying a white garment shaped somewhat like a long apron with sleeves. The attendant proceeded to put this onto Mrreg, who ignored him, concentrating on McKie. "Do you have any idea what you're doing, McKie?" "Preparing to act for my client." "I see. Who told you about me?" McKie shook his head. "Did you really believe me unable to detect your presence or interpret the implications of what my own senses tell me?" McKie saw that (he Gowachin failed to see beneath the surface taunting. Mrreg turned to the attendant who was tying a green ribbon at (he back of the apron. The old Gowachin had to lean forward for this. "A little tighter," he said. The attendant reded the ribbon. Addressing McKie, Mrreg said: "Please forgive the distraction. This must proceed at its own pace." McKie absorbed (his, assessed it #, Dosadi fashion. He could see the makings of an important Gowachin ritual here, but it was a new one to him. No matter. That could wait. He continued speaking, probing this Mrreg. "When you found your own peculiar uses for Dosadi..." "Peculiar? It's a universal motivation, McKie, that one tries to reduce the competition." . "Did you assess the price correctly, the price you might be asked to pay?" "Oh, yes. I knew what I might have to pay." There was a clear tone of resignation in the Gowachin 's voice, a rare tone for his species. McKie hesitated. The attendant who'd brought the apron left the room, never once glancing in McKie 's direction, although there had to be a screen to show whatever Mrreg saw of his caller. "You wonder why I sent a proxy to hire the Legum?" Mrreg asked. "Why Aritch?" "Because he's a candidate for...greater responsibilities. You know, McKie, you astonish me. Undoubtedly you know what I could have done to you for your impertinence, yet that doesn't deter you." This revealed more than Mneg might have intended, but he remained unaware (or uncaring) of what McKie saw. For his part, McKie maintained a bland exterior, as blank as that of any Dosadi. "I have a single purpose," McKie said. "Not even my client will sway me from it." "The function of a Legum," Mrreg said. The attendant of the white apron returned with an unsheathed blade. McKie glimpsed a jeweled handle and glittering sweep of cutting edge about twenty centimeters long. The blade curved back upon itself in a tight arc at the tip. The attendant, his back to McKie, stood I facing Mrreg. The blade no longer was visible. Mrreg, his left side partly obscured from McKie by the attendant, leaned to the right and peered up at the screen through which he watched McKie. "You've never been apprised of the ceremony we call Laupuk. It's very important and we've been remiss in leaving this out of your education. Laupuk was essential before such a... project as Dosadi could be set in motion. Try to understand this ritual. It will help you prepare your case." "What was your Phylum?" "That's no longer important but... very well. It was Great Awakening. I was High Magister for two decades before we made the Dosadi decision." "How many Rim bodies have you used up?" "My final one. That, too, is no longer important. Tel! me, McKie, when did you suspect Aritch was only a proxy?" "When I realized that not all Gowachin were bom Gowachin. " "But Aritch..." "Ahh, yes: Aritch aspires to greater responsibilities." "Yes... of course. I see. The Dosadi decision had to go far beyond a few phylums or a single species. There had to be a...I believe you Humans call it a 'High Command.' Yes, that would've become obvious to one as alert as you now appear. Your many marriages deceived us, I think. Was that deliberate?" Secure behind his Dosadi mask, McKie decided to lie. "Yes." "Ahhhhhhhhh." Mrreg seemed to shrivel into himself, but rallied. "I see. We were made to believe you some kind of diletante with perverted emotions. It'd be judged a flaw which we could exploit. Then there's another High Command and we never suspected. " It all came out swiftly, revealing the wheels within wheels which ruled Mrreg's view of the ConSentient universe. McKie marvelled at how much more was said than the bare words. This one had been a long time away from Dosadi and had not been bom there...but there were pressures on Mrreg now forcing him to the limits of what he'd learned on Dosadi. McKie did not interrupt. "Wc didn't expect you to penetrate Aritch' s role, but that was not our intent...as you know. I presume..." Whatever Mrreg presumed, he decided not to say it, musing aloud instead. "One might almost believe you were born on Dosadi." McKie remained silent, allowing the fear in that conjecture to fill Mrreg's consciousness. Presently, Mrreg asked: "Do you blame all Gowachin?" Still, McKie remained silent. Mrreg became agitated. "We are a government of sorts, my High Command. People can be induced not to question a government." McKie decided to press this nerve. "Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name." "You've provided free use of jumpdoors for the Dosadi?" McKie nodded. "The Calebans are aware of their obligation. Jedrik has been busy instructing her compatriots." "You think to loose the Dosadi upon the ConSentiency and hunt down my High Command? Have a care, McKie. I warn you not to abandon your duties as a Legum or to tum your back on Aritch." McKie continued silent. "Don't make that error, McKie. Aritch is your client. Through him you represent all Gowachin." "A Legum requires a responsible client," McKie said. "Not a proxy, but a client whose acts are brought into question by the case tried." Mneg revealed Gowachin signs of deep concern. "Hear me, McKie. I haven't much time." In a sudden rush of apprehension, McKie focused on the attendant with the blade who stood there partly obscuring the seated Gowachin. Mneg spoke in a swift spill of words. "By our standards, McKie, you are not yet very well educated in Gowachin necessities. That was our error. And now your...impetuosity has put you into a position which is about to become untenable." The attendant shifted slightly, arms moving up. McKie glimpsed the blade tip at the attendant's right shoulder. "Gowachin don't have families as do Humans or even Wreaves," Mneg said. "We have graduated advancement into groups which hold more and more responsibility for those beneath them. This was the pattern adopted by our High Command. What you see as a Gowachin family is only a breeding group with its own limited rules. With each step up in responsibility goes a requirement that we pay an increasing price for failure. You ask if I know the price? Ahhh, McKie. The breeding male Gowachin makes We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #)# Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers: I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Cotp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. sure that only the swiftest, most alert of his tads survive. A Magister upholds the forms of the Law. The High Command answers to a...Mrreg. You see? And a Mrreg must make only the best decisions. No failures, Thus... Laupuk." As he spoke the final word, the blade in the attendant's hands flashed out and around in a shimmering arc. It caught the seated Gowachin at the neck. Mrreg 's head, neatly severed, was caught in the loop at the blade's tip, lifted high, then lowered onto the white apron which now was splashed with green gore. The scene blanked out, was replaced by the Gowachin who had connected McKie with Mrreg. "Aritch wishes to consult his Legum," the Gowachin said. in o changing universe, only a changing species can hope to be immortal and then only if its eggs are nurtured in widely scattered environments. This predicts a wealth of unique individuals. Human philosophy), BuSab Text Jedrik made contact with McKie while he waited for the arrival of Aritch and Ceylang. He had been staring absently at the ceiling, evaluating in a profoundly Dosadi way how to gain personal advantage from the upcoming encounter with them, when he felt the touch of her mind on his. McKie locked himsell nis body. "No transfer." "Of course not." It was a tiny thing, a subtle shading in the contact which could have been overlooked by anyone with a less accurate simulation model of Jedrik. "You're angry with me," McKie said. He projected irony, knew she'd read this correctly. When she responded, her anger had been reduced to irritation. The point was not the shading of emotion, it was that she allowed such emotion to reveal itself. "You remind me of one of my early lovers," she said. McKie thought of where Jedrik was at this moment -- safely rocked in the flower-perfumed air of his floating island on the planetary sea of Tutalsee. How strange such an environment must be for a Dosadi...no threats, fruit which could be picked and eaten without a thought of poisons. The memories she'd taken from him could coat the island with familiarity, but her flesh would continue to find that a strange experience. His memories -- yes. The island would remind her of all those wives he'd taken to the honeymoon bowers of that place. McKie spoke from this awareness. "No doubt that early lover failed to show sufficient appreciation of your abilities outside the bedroom, that is. Which one was And he named several accurate possibilities, lifting them from the memories he'd taken from Jedrik. Now, she laughed. He sensed the untainted response, real humor and unchecked. McKie was reminded in his turn of one of his early wives, and this made him think of the breeding situation from which Jedrik had come -- no confusions between a choice for breeding mate and a lover taken for the available enjoyment of sex. One might even actively dislike the breeding mate. Lovers...wives... What was the difference except for the socially imprinted conventions out of which the roles arose? But Jedrik did remind him of that one particular woman and he explored his memory, wondering if it might help him now in his relationship with Jedrik. He'd been in his midthirties and assigned to one of his first personal BuSab cases, sent out with no oldtimer to monitor and instruct him. The youngest Human agent in the Bureau's history ever to be released on his own, so it was rumored. The planet had been one of the Ylir group, very much unlike anything in McKie' s previous experience: an ingrown place with deep entry ways in all of the houses and an oppressive silence all around. No animals, no birds, no insects...just that awesome Silence within which a fanatic religion was reported forming. All conversations were lowvoiced and full of subtle intonations which suggested an inner communication peculiar to Ylir and somehow making sport with all outsiders not privy to their private code. Very like Dosadi in this. His wife of the moment, safely ensconced on Tutalsee, had been quite the opposite: gregarious, sportive, noisy. Something about that Ylir case had sent McKie back to this wife with a sharpened awareness of her needs. The marriage had gone well for a long time, longer than any of the others. And he saw now why Jedrik reminded him of that one: they both protected themselves with a tough armor of femininity, but were extremely vulnerable behind that facade. When the armor collapsed, it collapsed totally. This realization puzzled McKie because he read his own reaction clearly: he was frightened. In the eyeblink this evaluation took, Jedrik read him: "We have not left Dosadi. We've taken it with us." So that was why she'd made this contact, to be certain he mixed this datum into his evaluations. McKie looked out the open window. It would be dusk soon here on Tandaloor. The Gowachin home planet was a place which had defied change for thousands of standard years. In some respects, it was a backwater. The ConSemiency will never be the same. The tiny trickle of Dosadi which Aritch's people had hoped to cut off was now a roaring cataract. The people of Dosadi would insinuate themselves into niche after niche of ConSentient civilization. What could resist even the lowliest Dosadi? Laws would change. Relationships would assume profound and subtle differences. Everything from die most casual friendship to the most complex business relationship would take on some Dosadi character. McKie recalled Aritch's parting question as they'd sent him to the jumpdoor which would put him on Dosadi. "Ask yourself if there might be a price too high to pay for the Dosadi lesson." That had been McKie' s first clue to Aritch's actual motives and the word lesson had bothered him, but he'd missed the implications. With some embarrassment, McKie recalled his glib answer to Aritch's question: "It depends on the lesson." True, but how blind he'd been to things any Dosadi would have seen. How ignorant. Now, he indicated to Jedrik that he understood why she'd called such things to his attention. "Aritch didn't look much beyond the uses of outrage and injustice..." "And how to turn such things to personal advantage." She was right, of course. McKie stared out at the gathering dusk. Yes, the species tried to make everything its own. If the species failed, then forces beyond it moved in, and so on, ad infinitum. I do what l do. He recalled those words with a shudder, felt Jedrik recoil. But she was proof even against this. "What powers your ConSentiency had." Past tense, right. And not our ConSentiency because that already was a thing of the past. Besides... she was Dosadi. "And the illusions of power," she said. He saw at last what she was emphasizing and her own shared memories in his mind made the lesson doubly impressive. She'd known precisely what McKie 's personal ego-focus might overlook. Yet, this was one of the glues which held the Conscntiency together. "Who can imagine himself immune from any retaliation?" he quoted. It was right out of the BuSab Manual... Jedrik made no response. McKie needed no more emphasis from her now. The lesson of history was clear. Violence bred violence. If this violence got out of hand, it ran a course depressing in its repetitive pattern. More often than not, that course was deadly to the innocent, the so-called 'enlistment phase. ' The exinnocents ignited more violence and more violence until either reason prevailed or all was destroyed. There was a sufficient number of cinder blocks which once had been planets to make the lesson clear. Dosadi had come within a hair of joining that uninhabited, uninhabitable list. Before breaking contact, Jedrik had another point to make. "You recall that in those final days, Broey increased the rations for his Human auxiliaries, his way of saying to them: 'You'll be turned out onto the Rim soon to fend for yourselves." "A Dosadi way of saying that." "Correct. We always held that thought in reserve: That we should breed in such numbers that some would survive no matter what happened. We would thus begin producing species which could survive there without the city of Chu... or any other city designed solely to produce nonpoisonous foods." "But there's always a bigger force waiting in the wings." "Make sure Aritch understands that." Choose containable violence when violence cannot be avoided. Better this than epidemic violence. -- Lessons of Choice, The BuSab Manual The senior attendant of the Courtarena, a squat and dignified Gowachin of the Assumptive Phylum, confronted McKie at the arena door with a confession: "I have delayed informing you that some of your witnesses have been excluded by Prosecution challenge." The attendant, whose name was Darak, gave a Gowachin shrug, waited. McKie glanced beyond the attendant at the truncated oval of the arena entrance which framed a lower section of the audience seats. The seats were filled. He had expected some such challenge for the first morning session of (he trial, saw Darak's words as a vital revelation. They were accepting his gambit. Darak had signalleda risky line of attack by those who guided Ceylang's performance. They expected McKie to protest. He glanced back at Aritch who stood quietly submissive three steps behind his Legum. Aritch gave every appearance of having resigned himself to the arena's conditions. ' 'The forms must be obeyed. Beneath that appearance lay the hoary traditions of Gowachin Law -- The guilty are innocent. Governments always do evil. Legalists put their own interests first. Defense and prosecution are brother and sister... Suspect everything. Aritch ' Legum controlled the initial posture and McKie had chosen defense. It hadn't surprised him to be told that Ceylang would prosecute. McKie had countered by insisting that Broey sit on a judicial panel which would be limited to three members. This had caused a delay during which Bildoon had called McKie, probing for any betrayal. Bildoon ' approach had been so obvious that McKie had at first suspected a feint within a feint. "McKie, the Gowachin fear that you have a Caleban at your command. That's a force which they..." "The more they fear the better." McKie had stared back at the screen-framed face of Bildoon, observing the signs of strain. Jedrik was right: the non-Dosadi were very easy to read. "But I'm told you left this Dosadi in spite of a Caleban contract which prohibited..." "Let them wony. Good for them." McKie watched Bildoon intently without betraying a single emotion. No doubt there were others monitoring this exchange. Let them begin to see what they faced. Puppet Bildoon was not about to uncover what those shadowy forces wanted. They had Bildoon here on Tandaloor, though, and this told McKie an essential fact. The PanSpechi chief of BuSab was being offered as bait. This was precisely the response McKie sought. Bildoon had ended the call without achieving his purpose. McKie had nibbled only enough to insure that Bildoon would be offered again as a bait. And the puppet masters still feared that McKie had a Caleban at his beck and call. No doubt the puppet masters had tried to question their God Wall Caleban. McKie hid a smile, thinking how that conversation must have gone. The Caleban had only to quote the letter of the contract and if the questioners became accusatory the Caleban would respond with anger, ending the exchange. And the Caleban 's words would be so filled with terms subject to ambiguous translation that the puppet masters would never be certain of what they heard. As he stared at the patiently waiting Darak, McKie saw that they had a problem, those shadowy figures behind Aritch. Laupuk had removed Mrreg from their councils and his advice would have been valuable now. McKie had deduced that the correct reference was "The Mrreg" and that Aritch headed the list of possible successors. Aritch might be Dosadi-trained, but he was not Dosadibom. There was a lesson in . this that the entire ConSentiency would soon team. And Broey as a judge in this case remained an unchangeable fact. Broey was Dosadi-bom. The Caleban contract had kept Broey on his poison planet but it had not limited him to a Gowachin body, Broey knew what it was to be both Human and Gowachin. Broey knew about the Pcharkys and their use by those who'd held Dosadi in bondage. And Broey was now Gowachin. The forces opposing McKie dared not name another Gowachin judge. They must choose from the other species. They had an interesting quandry. And without a Caleban assistant, there were no more Pcharkys to be had on Dosadi. The most valuable coin the puppet masters had to offer was lost to them. They'd be desperate. Some of the older ones would be very desperate. Footsteps sounded around the tum of the corridor behind Aritch. McKie glanced back, saw Ccylang come into view with her attendants. McKie counted no less than twenty leading Legums around her. They were out in force. Not only Gowachin pride and integrity but their sacred view of Law stood at issue. And the desperate ones stood behind them, goading. McKie could almost see those shadowy figures in the shape of this entourage. Ceylang, he saw, wore the black robes and white-striped hood of Leg urn Prosecutor, but she'd thrown back the hood to free her mandibles. McKie detected tension in her movements. She gave no sign of recognition but McKie saw her through Dosadi eyes.  frighten her. And she's right. Turning to address the waiting attendant and speaking loudly to make sure that the approaching group heard, McKie said: "Every law must be tested. I accept that you have given me formal announcement of a limit on my defense." Darak, expecting outraged protest and a demand for a list of the excluded witnesses, showed obvious confusion. ' 'Formal an nouncement? ' ' Ceylang and entourage came to a stop behind Aritch. McKie went on in the same loud voice: "We stand here within the sphere of the Courtarena. All matters concerning a dispute in the arena arc formal in this place." The attendant glanced at Ceylang, seeking help. This response threatened him. Darak, hoping someday to be a High Magister, should now be recognizing his inadequacies. He would never make it in the politics of the Gowachin Phyla, especially not in the coming Dosadi age. McKie explained as though to a neophyte: "Information to be verified by my witnesses is known to me in its entirety. I will present the evidence myself." Ceylang, having stooped to hear a lowvoiced comment from one of her Gowachin advisors, showed surprise at this. She raised one of her ropey tendrils, called: "I protest. The Defense Legum cannot give..." "How can you protest?" McKie interrupted. "We stand here before no judicial panel empowered to rule on any protest." "I make formal protest!" Ceylang insisted, ignoring an advisor on her right who was tugging at her sleeve. McKie permitted himself a cold smile. "Very well. Then we must call Darak into the arena as witness, he being the only party present who is outside our dispute." The edges of Aritch's jaws came down in a Gowachin grimace. "At the end, I wanted them not to go with the Wreave," he said. "They cannot say they came here unwarned." Too late, Ceylang saw what had happened. McKie would be able to question Darak on the challenges to the witnesses. Some of those challenges were certain to be overturned. At the very least, McKie would know who the Prosecution feared. He would know it in time to act upon it. There would be no delays valuable to Prosecution. Tension, fear and pride had made Ceylang act precipitately. Aritch had been right to warn them but they counted on McKie'  fear of the interlocked Wreave triads. Let them count. Let them blunt their awareness on that and on a useless concern over the excluded witnesses. McKie motioned Darak through the doorway into the arena, heard him utter an oath. The reason became apparent as McKie pressed through in the crowded surge of the Prosecutor's party. The instruments of Truthby-Pain had been arrayed on their ancient rack below the judges. Seldom brought out of their wrappings even for display to visiting dignitaries these days, the instruments had not been employed in the arena within the memory of a living witness. McKie had expected this display. It was obvious that Darak and Ceylang had not. It was interesting to note the members of Ceylang's entourage who were watching for McKie 's response. He gave them a grin of satisfaction. McKie turned his attention to the judicial panel. They had given him Broey. The ConSentiency, acting through BuSab, held the right of one appointment. Their choice delighted McKie. Bait, indeed! Bildoon occupied the seat on Broey 's right. The PanSpechi chief of bureau sat there all bland and reserved in his unfamiliar Gowachin robes of water green. Bildoon's faceted eyes glittered in the harsh arena lighting. The third judge had to be the Gowachin choice undoubtedly maneuvered (as Bildoon had been) by the puppet masters. It was a Human and McKie, recognizing him, missed a step, recovered his balance with a visible effort. What were they doing? The third judge was named Mordes Parando, a noted challenger of BuSab actions. He wanted BuSab eliminated -- either outright or by removing some, of the bureau's key powers. He came from the planet Lirat, which provided McKie with no surprises. Lirat was a natural cover for the shadowy forces. It was a place of enormous wealth and great private estates guarded by their own security forces. Parando was a man of somewhat superficial manners which might conceal a genuine sophisticate, knowledgeable and erudite, or a completely ruthless autocrat of Brocy's stamp. He was certainly Dosadi-trained. And his features bore the look of the Dosadi Rim. There was one more fact about Parando which no one outside Lirat was supposed to know. McKie had come upon it quite by chance while investigating a Palenki who'd been an estate guard on Lirat. The turtlelike Palenki were notoriously dull, employed chiefly as muscle. This one had been uncommonly observant. "Parando makes advice on Gowachin Law." This had been responsive to a question about Parando 's relationship with the estate guard being investigated. McKie, not seeing a connection between question and answer, had not pursued the matter but had tucked this datum away for future investigation. He had been mildly interested at the time because of the rumored existence of a legalist enclave on Lirat and such enclaves had been known to test the limits of legality. The people behind Aritch would expect McKie to recognize Parando. Would they expect Parando to be recognized as a legalist? They were certain to know the danger of putting Parando on a Gowachin bench. Professional legalists were absolutely prohibited from Gowachin judicial service. "Let the people judge." Why would they need a legalist here? Or were they expecting McKie to recognize the Rim origins of Parando' s body? Were they warning McKie not to raise that issue here? Body exchange and the implications of immortality represented a box of snakes no one wanted to open. And the possibility of one species spying on another... There was fragmentation of the ConSentiency latent in this case. More ways than one. If I challenge Parando, his replacement may be more dangerous. If I expose him as a legalist after the trial starts . , . Could they expect me to do that? Let us explore Knowing he was watched by countless eyes, McKie swept his gaze around the arena. Above the soft green absorbent oval where he stood were rank on rank of benches, every seat occupied. Muted morning light from the domed transluscent ceiling illuminated rows of Humans, Gowachin, Palenki, Sobarips... McKie identified a cluster of ferret Wreaves just above the arena, limber thin with a sinuous flexing in every movement. They would bear watching. But every species and faction in the ConSentiency would be represented here. Those who could not come in person would watch these proceedings via the glittering transmitter eyes which looked down from the ceiling's edges. Now, McKie looked to the right at the witness pen set into the wall beneath the ranked benches. He identified every witness he'd called, even the challenged ones. The forms were being obeyed. While the ConSentient Covenant required certain modifications here, this arena was still dominated by Gowachin Law. To accent that, the blue metal box from the Running Phylum occupied the honor place on the bench in front of the judicial panel. Who will taste the knife here? Protocol demanded that Prosecutor and Defense approach to a point beneath the judges, abase themselves and calf out acceptance of the arena's conditions. The Prosecutor's party, however, was in disarray. Two of Ceylang's advisors were whispering excited advice to her. The members of the judicial panel conferred, glancing at the scene below them. They could not act formally until the obeisance. McKic passed a glance across the panel, absorbed Broey's posture. The Dosadi Gowachin ' enlightened greed was like an anchor point. It was like Gowachin Law, changeable only on the surface. And Brocy was but the tip of the Dosadi advisory group which Jedrik had approved. Holding his arms extended to the sides, McKie marched forward, abased himself face down on the floor, stood and called out: "I accept this arena as my friend. The conditions here are my conditions but Prosecution has defiled the sacred traditions of this place. Does the court give me leave to slay her outright?" There was an exclamation behind him, the sound of running, the sudden flopping of a body onto the arena's matted floor. Ceylang could not address the court before this obeisance and she knew it. She and the others now also knew something else just as important -- that McKie was ready to slay her despite the threat of Wreave vendetta. In a breathless voice, Ceylang called out her acceptance of the arena's conditions, then: 'T protest this trick by Defense Legum!" McKie saw the stirring of Gowachin in the audience. A trick? Didn't Ceylang know yet how the Gowachin dearly loved legal tricks? The members of the judicial panel had been thoroughly briefed on the surface demands of the Gowachin forms, though it was doubtful that Bildoon understood sufficiently what went on beneath those forms. The PanSpechi confirmed this now by leaning forward to speak. "Why does the senior attendant of this court enter ahead of the Legums?' ' McKie detected a fleeting smile on Broey's face, glanced back to see Darak standing apart from the prosecution throng, alone and trembling. McKie took one step forward. "Will the court direct Darak to the witness pen? He is here because of a formal demand by the Prosecutor." "This is the senior attendant of your Court," Ceylang argued. "He guards the door to... "Prosecution made formal protest to a matter which occurred in the presence of this attendant," McKie said. "As an attendant, Darak stands outside the conflicting interests. He is the only reliable witBroey stirred, looked at Ceylang, and McKie realized how strange the Wreave must appear to a Dosadi. This did not deter Broey, however. "Did you protest?" It was a direct question from the bench. Ceylang was required to answer. She looked to Bildoon for help but he remained silent. Parando also refused to help her. She glanced at Darak. The terrified attendant could not take his attention from the instruments of pain. Perhaps he knew something specific about their presence in the arena. Ceylang tried to explain. "When Defense Legum suggested an illegal..." "Did you protest?" "But the... "This court decides on all matters of legality. Did you protest?" "I did." It was forced out of her. A fit of trembling passed over the slender Wreave form. Broey waved Darak to the witness pen, had to add a vocal order when the frightened attendant failed to understand. Darak almost ran to the shelter of the pen. Silence pervaded the arena. The silence of the audience was an explosive thing. They sat poised in the watching ovals, all of those species and factions with their special fears. By now, they'd heard many stories and rumors. Jumpdoors had spread the Dosadi emigres all across the ConSentiency. Media representatives had been excluded from Dosadi and this court on the Gowachin argument that they were "prey to uninformed subjective reactions," but they would be watching here through the transmitter eyes at the ceiling. McKie looked around at nothing in particular but took in every detail. There were more than three judges in this arena and Ceylang certainly must realize that. Gowachin Law turned upon itself, existing "only to be changed." But that watching multitude was quite another matter. Ceylang must be made to understand that she was a sacrifice of the arena. Consentient opinion stood over her like a heavy sledge ready to smash down. It was Parando's tum. "Will opposing Legums make their opening arguments now?" "We can't proceed while a formal protest is undecided," McKic said. Parando understood. He glanced at the audience, at the ceiling. His actions were a direct signal: Parando knew which judges really decided here. To emphasize it, he ran a hand from the front of his neck down his chest, the unique Rim Raiders' salute from Dosadi signifying 'Death before surrender.' Subtle hints in the movement gave McKie another datum: Parando was a Gowaehin in a Human body. They'd dared put two Gowaehin on that panel! With Dosadi insight, McKie saw why they did this. They were prepared to produce the Caleban contract here. They were telling McKie that they would expose the bodyexchange secret if he forced them to it. All would sec that loophole in the Caleban contract which confined the Dosadibom but released outsiders in Dosadi flesh. They think I am really Jedrik in this flesh! Parando revealed even more. His people intended to find the Jedrik body and kill it, leaving this McKie flesh forever in doubt. He could protest his McKie identity all he wanted. They had but to demand that he prove it. Without the other person... What had their God Wall Caleban told them? "He is McKie, she is McKie. He is Jedrik, she is Jedrik." His mind in turmoil, McKie wondered if he dared risk an immediate mind contact with Jedrik. Together, they'd already recognized this danger. Jedrik had hidden herself on McKie's hideaway, a floating island on Tutalsee. She was there with a special Taprisiot contract prohibiting unwanted calls which might inadvertently reveal her location. The judges, led by Parando, were acting, however, moving for an immediate examination of Darak. McKie forced himself to perform as a Legum. His career in ruins, the attendant answered like an automaton. In the end, McKie restored most of his witnesses. There were two notable exceptions: Grinik (that flawed thread which might have led to The Mrreg) and Stiggy. McKie was not certain why they wanted to exclude the Dosadi weapons genius who'd transformed a BuSab wallet's contents into instruments of victory. Was it that Stiggy had broken an unbreakable code? That made sense only if Prosecution intended to play down the inherent Dosadi superiority. Still uncertain, McKie prepared to retire and seek a way to avoid Parando's gambit but Ceylang addressed the bench. "The issue of witnesses having been introduced by Defense," she said. "Prosecution wishes to explore this issue. We note many witnesses from Dosadi called by Defense. There is a noteworthy omission whose name has not yet been introduced here. I refer to a Human by the name of Jedrik. Prosecution wishes to call Keila Jedrik as... "One moment!" McKie searched his mind for the forms of an acceptable escape. He knew that his blurted protest had revealed more than he wanted. But they were moving faster than he'd expected. Prosecution did not really want Jedrik as a witness, not in a Gowachin Courtarena where the roles were never quite what they appeared to non-Gowachin. This was a plain message to McKic. "We're going to find her and kill her." With Bildoon and Parando concurring, a jumpdoor was summoned and Ceylang played her trump. "Defense knows the whereabouts of witness Keila Jedrik." They were forcing the question, aware of the emotional bond between McKic and Jedrik. He had a choice: argue that a personal relationship with the witness excluded her. But Prosecution and all the judges had to concur. They obviously would not do this... not yet. A harsh lock on his emotions, McKie gave the jumpdoor instructions. Presently, Jedrik stepped onto the arena floor, faced the judges. She'd been into the wardrobe at his bower cottage and wore a yellow and orange sarong which emphasized her height and grace. Open brown sandals protected her feet. There was a flame red blossom at her left ear. She managed to look exotic and fragile. Broey spoke for the judges. "Do you have knowledge of the issues at trial here?" "What issues are at trial?" She asked it with a childlike innocence which did not even fool Bildoon. They were forced to explain, however, because of those other judges to whom every nuance here was vital. She heard them out in silence. "An alleged experiment on a sentient population confined to a planet called Dosadi... lack of informed consent by subject population charged... accusations of conspiracy against certain Gowachin and others not yet named..." Two fingers pressed to his eyes in the guise of intense listening, McKie made contact with Jedrik, suggesting, conferring. They had to find a way out of this trap! When he looked up, he saw the suspicions in Parando's face: Which body, which ego? McKie? Jedrik? In the end, Ceylang hammered home the private message, demand VI ing whether Jedrik had "any personal relationship with Defense Legum?" Jedrik answered in a decidedly un-Dosadi fashion. "Why... yes. We are lovers." In itself, this was not enough to exclude her from the arena unless Prosecution and (he entire judicial panel agreed. Ceylang proposed the exclusion. Bildoon and Parando were predictable in their agreement. McKie waited for Broey. "Agreed." Broey had a private compact with the shadow forces then. Jedrik and McKie had expected this but had not anticipated the form confirmation would take. McKie asked for a recess until the following morning. With the most benign face on it, this was granted. Broey announced the decision, smiling down at Jedrik. It was a measure of McKie 's Dosadi conditioning that he could not find it in himself to blame Broey for wanting personal victory over the person who had beaten him on Dosadi. Back in his quarters, Jedrik put a hand on McKie' s chest, spoke with eyes lowered. "Don't blame yourself, McKie. This was inevitable. Those judges, none of them, would've allowed any protest from you before seeing me in person on that arena floor." "I know." She looked up at him, smiling. "Yes... of course. How like one person we are." For a time after that, (hey reviewed the assessment of the aides chosen for Broey. Shared memories etched away at minutae. Could any choice be improved? Not one person was changed -- Human or Gowachin. Ail of (hose advisors and aides were Dosadi-born. They could be depended upon to be loyal to their origins, to their conditioning, to themselves individually. For the task assigned to them, they were the best available. McKie brought it to a close. "I can't leave the immediate area of the arena until the trial's over." She knew that, but it needed saying. There was a small cell adjoining his office, a bedog there, communications instruments, Human toilet facilities. They delayed going into the bedroom, turned to a low-key argument over the advisability of a body exchange. It was procrastination on both sides, outcome known in advance. Familiar flesh was familiar flesh, less distracting. It gave each of them an edge which they dared not sacrifice. McKie could play Jedrik and Jedrik could play McKie, but that would be dangerous play now. When they retired, it was to make love, the most tender experience either had known. There was no submission, only a giving, sharing, an open exchange which tightened McKie 's throat with joy and fear, sent Jedrik into a fit of unDosadi sobbing. When she'd recovered, she turned to him on the bed, touched his right check with a finger. "McKie." "Yes?" "I've never had to say this to another person, but..." She siIenced his attempted interruption by punching his shoulder, leaning up on an elbow to look down at him. It reminded McKie of their first night together and he saw that she had gone back into her Dosadi shell... but there was something else, a difference in the eyes. "What is it?" "Just that I love you. It's a very interesting feeling, especially when you can admit it openly. How odd." "Stay here with me." "We both know I can't. There's no safe place here for either of us... but the one who..." "Then let's... "We've already decided against an exchange." "Where will you go?" "Best you don't know." "If..." "No! I wouldn't be safe as a witness; I'm not even safe at your side. We both..." "Don't go back to Dosadi." "Where is Dosadi? It's the only place where I could ever feel at home, but Dosadi no longer exists." "I meant..." "I know." She sat up, hugged her knees, revealing the sinewy muscles of her shoulders and back. McKie studied her, trying to fathom what it was she hid in that Dosadi shell. Despite the intimacy of their shared memories, something about her eluded him. It was as though he didn't want to leant this thing. She would flee and hide, of course, but... He listened carefully as she began to speak in a far away voice. "It'd be interesting to go back to Dosadi someday. The differences..." She looked over her shoulder at him. "There are those who fear we'll make over the ConSentiency in Dosadi's image. We'll try, but the result won't be Dosadi. We'll take what we judge to be valuable, but that'll change Dosadi more than it changes you. Your masses arc less aleil, slower, less resourceful, but you're so numerous. In the end, the ConSentiency will win, but it'll no longer be the ConSentiency. I wonder what it'll be when..." She laughed at her own musing, shook her head. "And there's Broey. They'll have to deal with Broey and the team we've given him. Broey Plus! Your ConSentiency hasn't the faintest grasp of what we've loosed among, them." "The predator in the flock." "To Broey, your people are like the Rim -- a natural resource." "But he has no Pcharkys." "Not yet." "I doubt if the Calebans ever again will participate in... "There may be other ways. Look how easy it is for us." "But we were printed upon each other by..." "Exactly! And they continue to suspect that you're in my body and I'm in yours. Their entire experience precludes the free shift back and forth, one body to another..." "Or this other thing..." He caressed her mind. "Yes! Broey won't suspect until too late what's in store for him. They'll be a long time learning there's no way to sort you from... me!" This last was an exultant shout as she turned and fell upon him. It was a wild replay of their first night together. McKie abandoned himself to it. There was no other choice, no time for the mind to dwell on depressing thoughts. In the morning, he had to tap his implanted amplifiers to bring his awareness to the required pitch for the arena. The process took a few minutes while he dressed. Jedrik moved softly with her own preparations, straightened the bedog and caressed its resilient surface. She summoned a jumpdoor then, held him with a lingering kiss. The jumpdoor opened behind her as she pushed away from him. McKie smelled familiar flowers, glimpsed the bowers of his Tutalsee island before the door blinked out of existence, hiding Jedrik and the island from him. Tutalsee? The moment of shocked understanding delayed him. She'd counted on that! He recovered, sent his mind leaping after her. I'll force an exchange! By the Gods... His mind met pain, consuming, blinding pain. It was agony such as he'd not even imagined could exist. Jedrik ! His mind held an unconscious Jedrik whose awareness had fled from pain. The contact was so delicate, like holding a newborn infant. The slightest relaxation and he knew he would lose her to... He felt that terrifying monster of the first exchange hovering in the background, but love and concern armed him against fear. Frantic, McKie held that tenuous contact while he called a jumpdoor. There was a small delay and when the door opened, he saw through the portal the black, twisted wreckage which had been his bower island. A hot sun beat down on steaming cinders. And in the background, a warped metal object which might have been one of Tutalsee' s little four-place flitters rolled over, gurgled and sank. The visible wreckage said the destructive force had been something like a pentrate, swift and all-consuming. The water around the island still bubbled with it. Even while he watched, the island began breaking up, its cinders drifting apart on the tong, low waves. A breeze flattened the steaming smoke. Soon, there 'd be nothing to show that beauty had floated here. With a pentrate, there would be nothing to recover... not even bodies to... He hesitated, still holding his fragile grasp on Jedrik's unconscious presence. The pain was only a memory now. Was it really Jedrik in his awareness, or only his remembered imprint of her? He tried to awaken the sleeping presence, failed. But small threads of memory emerged and he saw that the destruction had been Jedrik's doing, response to attack. The attackers had wanted a live hostage. They hadn't anticipated that violent, unmistakable message. "You won't hold me over McKie's head!" But if there were no bodies... Again, he tried to awaken that unconscious presence. Her memories were there, but she remained dormant. The effort strengthened his grip upon her presence, though. And he told himself it had to be Jedrik or he wouldn't know what had happened on the bower island. Once more, he searched the empty water. Nothing. A pentrate would've tom and battered everything around it. Shards of metal, flesh reduced to scattered cinders... She's dead. She has to be dead. A pentrate... But that familiar presence lay slumbering in his mind. The door clacker interrupted his reverie. McKic released the jumpdoor, turned to look through the bedside viewer at the scene outside his Legum quarters. The expected deputation had arrived. Confident, the puppet masters were moving even before confirmation of their Tutalsee gambit. They could not possibly know yet what McKie knew. There could be no jumpdoor or any other thread connecting this group to Tutalsee. McKie studied them carefully, keeping a bridle on his rage. There were eight of them, so contained, so well schooled in Dosadi selfcontrol. So transparent to a Jedrikamplified McKie. They were four Humans and four Cowachin. Overconfident. Jedrik had seen to that by leaving no survivors. Again, McKie tried to awaken that unconscious presence. She would not respond. Have  only built her out of my memories ? There was no time for such speculation. Jedrik had made her choice on Tutalsee. He had other choices to make here and now -- for both of them. That ghostly presence locked in his mind would have to wait. McKie punched the communicator which linked him to Broey, gave the agreed upon signal. "It's time." He composed himself then, went to the door. They'd sent no underlings. He gave them that. But they addressed him as Jedrik, made the anticipated demands, gloated over the hold they had upon him. It was only then that McKie saw fully how well Jedrik had measured these people... and how she had played upon her McKie in those last hours together like an exquisitely tuned instalment. Now, he understood why she'd made that violent choice. As anticipated, the members of the delegation were extremely surprised when Broey's people fell upon them without warning. For the Gowachin, to stand olone against all adversity is the most sac red moment of existence. -- The Gowachin,  BuSab analysis The eight prisoners were dumped on the arena floor, bound and shackled. McKie stopped near them, waiting for Ceylang to arrive. It was not yet dawn. The ceiling above the arena remained dark. A few of the transmitter eyes around the upper perimeter glittered to reveal that they were activated. More were coming alive by the moment. Only a few of the witness seats were occupied but people were streaming in as word was passed. The judicial bench remained empty. The outer areaway was a din of courtarena security forces coming and going, people shouting orders, the clank of weapons, a sense of complete confusion there which gradually resolved itself as Broey led his fellow judges up onto their bench. The witness pen was also filling, people punching sleep from their eyes, great gaping yawns from the Gowachin. McKie looked to Broey's people, the ones who'd brought in the prisoners. He nodded for the captors to leave, giving them a Dosadi hand signal to remain available. They left. Ceylang passed them as she entered still fastening her robe. She hurried to McKie 's side, waited for the judges to be seated before speaking. "What is the meaning of this? My attendants..." Broey signalled McKie. McKie stepped forward to address the bench, pointed to the eight bound figures who were beginning to stir and push themselves upright. "Here you see my client." Parando started to speak but Broey silenced him with a sharp word which McKie did not catch. It sounded like "frenzy." Bildoon sat in fearful fascination, unable to wrest his attention from the bound figures, all of whom remained silent. Yes, Bildoon would recognize those eight prisoners. In his limited, ConSentient fashion Bildoon was sharp enough to recognize that he was in personal danger. Parando, of course, knew this immediately and watched Broey with great care. Again, Broey nodded to McKie. "A fraud has been perpetrated upon this court," McKie said. "It is a fraud which was perpetrated against those great and gallant people, the Gowachin. Both Prosecution and Defense are its victims. The Law is its ultimate victim." It had grown much quieter in the arena. The observer seats were jammed, all the transmitter eyes alive. The faintest of dawn glow touched the transluscent ceiling. McKie wondered what time it was. He had forgotten to put on any timepiece. There was a stir behind McKie. He glanced back, saw attendants belatedly bringing Aritch into the arena. Oh, yes -- they would have risked any delay to confer with Aritch. Aritch was supposed to be the other McKie expert. Too bad that this Human who looked like McKic was no longer the McKie they thought they knew. Ceylang could not hold her silence. She raised a tendril for attention. "This Tribunal..." McKie interrupted. "... is composed of three people. Only three." He allowed them a moment to digest this reminder that Gowachin trial formalities still dominated this arena and were like no other such formalities in the ConSentiency. It could've been fifty judges up there on that bench. McKie had witnessed Gowachin trials where people were picked at random off the streets to sit in judgement. Such jurists took their duties seriously, but their oven behavior could lead another Sentient species to question this. The Gowachin chattered back and forth, arranged panies, exchanged jokes, asked each other rude questions. It was an ancient pattern. The jurists were required to become "a single organism." Gowachin had their own ways of rushing that process. But this Tribunal was composed of just three judges, only one of them visibly Gowachin. They were separate entities, their actions heavy with mannerisms foreign to the Gowachin. Even Broey, tainted by Dosadi, would be unfamiliar to the Gowachin observers. No "single organism" here holding to the immutable forms beneath Gowachin Law. That had to be deeply disturbing to the Legums who advised Ceylang. Broey leaned forward, addressed the arena. "We'll dispense with the usual arguments while this new development is explored." Again, Parando tried to intemipt. Broey silenced him with a glance. "I call Aritch of the Running Phylum," McKie said. He turned. Ceyjang stood in mute indecision. Her advisors remained at the back of the arena conferring among themselves. There seemed to be a difference of opinion among them. Aritch shuffled to the deathfocus of the arena, the place where every witness was required to stand. He glanced at the instruments of pain arrayed beneath the judicial bench, cast a wary look at McKie. The old High Magister appeared harried and undignified. That hurried conference to explore this development must've been a sore trial to the old Gowachin. McKic crossed to the formal position beside Aritch, addressed the judges. , "Here we have Aritch, High Magister of the Running Phylum. We were told that if guilt were to be found in this arena, Aritch bore that guilt. He, so we were led to believe, was the one who made the decision to imprison Dosadi. But how can that be so? Aritch is old, but he isn't as old as Dosadi. Then perhaps his alleged guilt is to be found in concealing the imprisonment of Dosadi. But Aritch summoned an agent of BuSab and sent that agent openly to Dosadi." A disturbance among the eight shackled prisoners interrupted McKie. Several of the prisoners were trying to get to their feet but the links of the shackles were too short. On the judicial bench, Parando started to lean forward, but Broey hauled him back. Yes, Parando and others were recalling the verities of a Gowachin Counarena, the constant reversals of concepts common throughout the rest of the ConSentiency. To be guilty is to be innocent. Thus, to be innocent is to be guilty. At a sharp command from Broey, the prisoners grew quiet. McKie continued. "Aritch, conscious of the sacred responsibilities which he carried upon his back as a mother carries her tads, was deliberately named to receive the punishment blow lest that punishment be directed at all Gowachin everywhere. Who chose this innocent High Magister to suffer for all Gowachin?" McKie pointed to the eight shackled prisoners. "Who are these people?" Parando demanded. McKie allowed the question to hang there for a long count. Parando knew who these eight were. Did he think he could divert the present course of events by such a blatant ploy? Presently, McKie spoke. "I will enlighten the court in due course. My duty, however, comes first. My client's innocence comes first." "One moment." Broey held up a webbed hand. One of Ceylang's advisors hurried past McKie, asked and received permission to confer with Ceytang. A thwarted Parando sat like a condemned man watching this conversation as though he hoped to find reprieve there. Bildoon had hunched forward, head buried in his arms. Broey obviously controlled the Tribunal. The advisor Legum was known to McKie, one Lagag of a middling reputation, an officer in the Shouting Phylum. He appeared pale as though recently out of breeding. His words to Ceylang were low and intense, demanding. The conference ended, Lagag hurried back to his companions. They now understood the tenor of McKie 's defense. Aritch must have known all along that he could be sacrificed here. The Consentient Covenant no longer permitted the ancient custom where the Gowachin audience had poured into the arena to kill with bare hands and claws the innocent defendant. But let Aritch walk from here with the brand of innocence upon him; he would not take ten paces outside the arena's precincts before being tom to pieces. There 'd been worried admiration in the glance Lagag had given McKie in passing. Yes... now they understood why McKie had maneuvered for a small and vulnerable judicial panel. The eight prisoners began a new disturbance which Broey silenced with a shout. He signalled for McKie to continue. " Aritch 's design was that I expose Dosadi, return and defend him against the charge that he had permitted illegal psychological experiments upon an unsuspecting populace. He was prepared to sacrifice himself for others." McKie sent a wry glance at Aritch. Let the High Magister try to fight in half-truths in that defense! "Unfortunately, the Dosadi populace was not unsuspecting. In fact, forces under the command of Keila Jedrik had moved to take control of Dosadi. Judge Broey will affirm that she had succeeded in this." Again, McKie pointed to the shackled prisoners. "But these conspirators, these people who designed and profited from the Dosadi experiment, ordered the death of Keila Jedrik! She was murdered this morning on Tutalsee to prevent my using her at the proper moment to prove Aritch's innocence. Judge Broey is witness to the truth of what I say. Keila Jedrik was brought into this arena yesterday only that she might be traced and killed!" McKie raised both aims in an eloquent gesture of completion, lowered his arms. Aritch looked stricken. He saw it. If the eight prisoners denied the charges, they faced Aritch's fate. And they must know by now that Broey wanted them Gowachinguilty. They could bring in the Caleban contract and expose the body-exchange plot, but that risked having McKie defend or prosecute them because he'd already locked them to him as the actual client behind Aritch. Broey would affirm this, too. They were at Broey 's mercy. If they were Gowachinguilty, they walked free only here on Tandaloor. Innocent, they died here. As though they were one organism, the eight turned their heads and looked at Aritch. Indeed! What would Aritch do? If he agreed to sacrifice himself, the eight might live. Ceylang, too, focused on Aritch. Around the entire arena there was a sense of collective-held breath. McKie watched Ceylang. How candid had Aritch's people been with their Wreave? Did she know the full Dosadi story? She broke the silence, exposing her knowledge. She chose to aim her attack at McKie on the wellknown dictum that, when all else failed, you tried to discredit the opposing Legum. "McKie, is this how you defend these eight people whom only you name as client?" Ceylang demanded. Now, it was delicate. Would Broey go along? McKie countered her probe with a question of his own? "Are you suggesting that you'd prosecute these people?" "I didn't charge them! You did." "To prove Aritch's innocence." "But you call them client. Will you defend them?" A collective gasp arose from the cluster of advisors behind her near the arena doorway. They'd seen the trap. If McKie accepted her challenge, the judges had no choice but to bring the eight into the arena under Gowachin forms. Ceylang had trapped herself into the posture of prosecutor against the eight. She'd said, in effect, that she affirmed their guilt. Doing so, she lost her case against Aritch and her life was immediately forfeit. She was caught. Her eyes glittered with the unspoken question. What would McKie do? Not yet, McKie thought. Not yet, my precious Wreave dupe. He turned his attention to Parando. Would they dare introduce the Caleban contract? The eight prisoners were only the exposed tip of the shadowy forces, a vulnerable tip. They could be sacrificed. It was clear that they saw this and didn't like it. No Gowachin Mrregs here with that iron submission to responsibility. They loved life and its power, especially the ones who wore Human flesh. How precious life must be for those who'd lived many lives! Very desperate, indeed. To McKie's Dosadi-conditioned eyes, it was as though he read the prisoners' thoughts. They were safest if they remained silent. Trust Parando. Rely on Broey's enlightened greed. At the worst, they could live out what life was left to them here on Tandaioor, hoping for new bodies before the flesh they now wore ran out of vitality. As long as they still lived they could hope and scheme. Perhaps another Caleban could be hired, more Pcharkys found... what had almost been his. The High Magister's Tandaioor accent was hoarse with protest. "But I did supervise the tests on Dosadi ' s population ! ' ' "To what tests do you refer?" "The Dosadi..." Aritch fell silent, seeing the trap. Gowachin already had left their planet. Would Aritch make targets of them? Anything he said could open the door to proof that the Dosadis were superior to nonDosadis. Any Gowachin (or Human, for that matter) could well become a target in the next few minutes. One had only to denounce a selected Human or Gowachin as Dosadi. ConSentient fears would do the rest. And any of his arguments could be directed into exposure of Dosadi 's real purpose. He obviously saw the peril in that, had seen it from the first. The High Magister confirmed this analysis by glancing at the ferret Wreaves in the audience. What consternation it would create among the secretive Wreaves to learn that another species could masquerade successfully as one of their own! McKie could not leave m a tiers where they stood, though. He threw a question at Aritch. "Were the original transportees to Dosadi apprised of the nature of the project?" "Only they could testify to that." "And their memories were erased. We don't even have historical testimony on this matter." Aritch remained silent. Eight of the original designers of the Dosadi project sat near him on the arena floor. Would he denounce them to save himself? McKie thought not. A person deemed capable of performing as The Mrreg could not possess such a flaw. Could he? Here was the real point of no return. The High Magister confirmed McKie 's judgement by turning his back on the Tribunal, the ages old Cowachin gesture of submission. What a shock Aritch 's performance must have been for those who'd seen him as a possible Mrreg. A poor choice except at the end and that'd been as much recognition of total failure as anything else. McKie waited, knowing what had to happen now. Here was Ceylang's moment of truth. Broey addressed her. "You have suggested that you would prosecute these eight prisoners. The matter is in the hands of Defense Legum." Broey shifted his gaze. "How say you, Legum McKie?" The moment to test Broey had come. McKie countered with a question. "Can this Courlarena suggest another disposition for these eight prisoners?" Ceylang held her breath. Broey was pleased. He had triumphed in the end over Jedrik. Broey was certain in his mind that Jedrik did not occupy this Legum body on the arena floor. Now, he could show the puppet masters what a Dosadi-bom could do. And McKie saw that Broey intended to move fast, much faster than anyone had expected. Anyone except Jedrik and she was only a silent (memory?) in McKie's awareness. Having given the appearance of deliberation, Broey spoke. "I can order these eight bound over to ConSentient jurisdiction if McKie agrees." The eight stirred, subsided. "I agree," McKie said. He glanced at Ceylang. She made no protest, seeing the futility. Her only hope now lay in the possible deterrent presence of the ferrett Wreaves. "Then I so order it," Broey said. He spared a triumphant glance for Parando. "Let a ConSentient jurisdiction decide if these eight are guilty of murder and other conspiracy." He was well within the bounds of the Covenant between the ConSentiency and Cowachin but the Gowachin members of his audience didn't like it. Their Law was best! Angry whistlings could be heard all around the arena. Broey rose half out of his seat, pointed at the instruments of pain arrayed beneath him. Gowachin in the audience fell silent. They, better than anyone, knew that no person here, not even a member of the audience, was outside the Tribunal's power. And many understood clearly now why those bloody tools had been displayed here. Thoughtful people had anticipated the problem of keeping order in this arena. Responding to the silent acceptance of his authority, Broey sank back into his seat. Parando was staring at Broey as though having just discovered the presence of a monster in this Gowachin form. Many people would be reassessing Broey now. Aritch held his attitude of complete submission. Ceylang's thoughts almost hummed in the air around her. Every way she turned, she saw only a tangle of unmanageable tendrils and a blocked passage. McKie saw that it was time to bring matters to a head. He crossed to the foot of the judicial bench, lifted a short spear from the instruments there. He brandished the barbed, razor-edged weapon. "Who sits on this Tribunal?" Once, Aritch had issued such a challenge. McKie, repeating it, pointed with the spear, answered his own question. "A Gowachin of my choice, one supposedly wronged by the Dosadi project. Were you wronged, Broey?" "No." McKie faced Parando. "And here we have a Human from Lirat. Is that not the case, Parando?" "lam from Lirat, yes." McKie nodded. "I am prepared to bring a parade of witnesses into this arena to testify as to your occupation on Lirat. Would you care to state that occupation?" "How dare you question this Tribunal?" Parando glared down at McKie, face flushed. "Answer his question." It was Broey. Parando looked at Bildoon who still sat with face concealed in his arms, face down on the bench. Something about the PanSpeehi repelled Parando but he knew he had to have Bildoon's vote to overrule Broey. Parando nudged the PanSpeehi. Inert flesh rolled away from Parando 's hand. McKie understood. Facing doom, Bildoon had retreated into the creche. Somewhere, an unprepared PanSpeehi body was being rushed into acceptance of that crushed identity. The emergence of a new Bildoon would require considerable time. They did not have that time. When the creche finally brought forth a functioning persona it could not be heir to Bildoon 's old powers in BuSab. Parando was alone, exposed. He stared at the spear in McKie's hand. McKie favored the arena with a sweeping glance before speaking once more to Parando. "I quote that renowned expert on Gowachin Law, High Magister Aritch: 'ConScntient Law always makes aristocrats of its practitioners. Gowachin Law stands beneath that pretension. Gowachin Law asks: Who knows the people? Only such a one is lit to judge in the Court arena.' That is Gowachin Law according to High Magister Aritch. That is the law in this place." Again, McKie gave Parando a chance to speak, received only silence. "Perhaps you are truly fit to judge here," McKie suggested. "Are you an artisan? A philosopher? Perhaps you're a humorist? An artist? Ahhh, maybe you are the lowliest of workmen, he who tends an automatic machine?" Parando remained silent, gaze locked on that spear. "None of these?" McKie asked. "Then I shall supply the answer. You are a professional legalist, one who gives legal advice, even to advice on Gowachin Law. You, a Human, not even a Legum, dare to speak of Gowachin Law!" Without any muscular warning signal, McKie leaped forward, hurled the spear at Parando, saw it strike deeply into the man's chest. One for Jedrik! With a bubbling gasp, Parando sagged out of sight behind the bench. Broey, seeing the flash of anger in McKie 's effort, touched the blue box in front of him. Have no fear, Broey. Not yet. I still need you. But now, more than Broey knew it was really McKie in this flesh. Not Jedrik. Those members of the shadow force watching this scene and able to plot would make the expected deduction. Only McKie would've known Parando' s background. They'd trace out that mistake in short order. So this was McKie in the arena. But he'd left Dosadi. There could be only one conclusion in the plotters' minds. McKie had Caleban help! They had Caiebans to fear. And McKie thought: You have only McKie ta fear. He grew aware that grunts of Gowachin approval were sounding all around the arena. They accepted him as a Legum, thus they accepted his argument. Such a judge deAritch set the precedent. McKie improved on it. Both had found an approved way to kill a flawed judge, but McKie's act had etched a Gowachin precedent into the Consentient legal framework. The compromise which had brought Gowachin and Con Sentient Law into the Covenant of shared responsibility for the case in this arena would be seen by the Gowachin as a first long step toward making their Law supreme over all other law. Aritch had half turned, looking toward the bench, a glittering appraisal in his eyes which said the Gowachin had salvaged something here after all. McKie strode back to confront Ceylang. He faced her as the forms required while he called for judge"Bildoon?" Silence. "Parando?" Silence. "Brocy?" "Judgement for Defense." The Dosadi accent rang across the arena. The Gowachin Federation, only member of the ConSentiency which dared permit a victim to judge those accused of victimizing him, had received a wound to its pride. But they'd also received something they would consider of inestimable value -- a foothold for their Law in the ConSentiency plus a memorable court performance which was about to end in the drama they loved best. McKie stepped to within striking distance of Ceylang, extended his right hand straight out to the side, palm up. "The knife." Attendants scurried. There came the sound of the blue box being opened. Presently, the knife handle was slapped firmly into McKie ' palm. He closed his fingers around it, thinking as he did so of all those countless others who had faced this' moment in a Gowachin Courtarena. "Ceylang?" "I submit to the ruling of this court." McKie saw the ferret Wreaves rise from their seats as one person. They stood ready to leap down into the arena and avenge Ceylang no matter the consequences. They could do nothing else but cany out the role which the Gowachin had designed for them. Few in the arena had misunderstood their presence here. No matter the measurement of the wound, the Gowachin did not suffer such things gladly. An odd look of cameraderie passed between Ceylang and McKie then. Here they stood, the only two non-Gowachin in the ConSentient universe who had passed through that peculiar alchemy which transformed a person into a Legum. One of them was supposed to die immediately and the other would not long survive that death. Yet, they understood each other the way siblings understand each other. Each had shed a particular skin to become something else. Slowly, deliberately, McKie extended the tip of his blade toward Ceylang 's left jowl, noting the miriad pocks of her triad exchanges there. She trembled but remained firm. Deftly, with the swiftest of flicking motions, McKie added another pock to those on her left jowl. The ferret Wreaves were the first to understand. They sank back into their seats. Ceylang gasped, touched a tendril to the wound. Many times she had been set free by such a wound, moving on to new alliances which did not completely sunder the old . For a moment, McKie thought she might not accept, but the increasing sounds of approval all around the arena overcame her doubts. The noise of that approval climbed to a near deafening crescendo before subsiding. Even the Gowachin joined this. How dearly they loved such legal nuances! Pitching his voice for Ceylang alone, McKie spoke. "You should apply for a position in BuSab. The new director would look with favor upon your application." "You?" "Make a Wreave bet on it." She favored him with the grimace which passed for a smile among Wreaves, spoke the traditional words of triad farewell. "We were well and truly wed." So she, too, had seen the truth in their unique closeness. McKie betrayed the extent of his esoteric knowledge by producing the correct response. "By my mark I know you." She showed no surprise. A good brain there, not up to Oosadi standards, but good. Well and truly wed. Keeping a firm lock on his emotions (the Dosadi in him helped), McKie crossed to confront Aritch. "Client Aritch, you are innoMcKie displayed the fleck of Wreave blood on the knife tip. "The forms have been obeyed and you are completely exonerated. I rejeice with all of those who love justice." At this point in the old days, the jubilant audience would've fallen on the hapless client, would've fought for bloody scraps with which to parade through the city. No doubt Aritch would've preferred that. He was a traditionalist. He confirmed that now. "I am glad to quit these times, McKie." McKie mused aloud. "Who will be The Mrreg now that you're...disqualified? Whoever it is, I doubt he'll be as good as the one he replaces. It will profit that next Mrreg to reflect upon the fragile and fugitive value to be gained from the manipulation of others." Glowering, Aritch turned and shambled toward the doorway out of the arena. Some of the Gowachin from the audience already were leaving, no doubt hoping to greet Aritch outside. McKie had no desire to witness that remnant of an ancient ritual. He had other concerns. Well and truly wed. Something burned in his eyes. And still he felt that soft and steeping presence in his awareness. Jedrik? No response. He glanced at Broey who, true to his duty as a judge, would be the last to leave the arena. Broey sat blandly contemplating this place where he'd displayed the first designs of his campaign for supremacy in the ConSentiency. He would accept nothing less short of his own death. Those shadowy puppet masters would be the first to feel his rule. That fitted the plan McKie and Jedrik had forged between them. In a way, it was still the plan of those who'd bred and conditioned Jedrik for the tasks she'd performed so exquisitely. It was McKie 's thought that those nameless, faceless Dosadis who stood in ghostly ranks behind Jedrik had made a brave choice. Faced with the evidence of bodyexchange all around, they'd judged that to be a deadly choice -- the conservatism of extinction. Instead, they'd trusted sperm and ova, always seeking the new and better, the changed, the adapted. And they'd launched their simultaneous campaign to eliminate the Pcharkys of their world, reserving only that one for their final gamble. It was well that this explosive secret had been kept here. McKie felt grateful to Ceylang. She'd known, but even when it might've helped her, she'd remained silent. BuSab would now have time to forge ways of dealing with this problem. Ceylang would be valuable there. And perhaps more would be learned about PanSpechi, Calebans and Taprisiots. If only Jedrik... He felt a fumbling in his memories. "If only Jedrik what?" She spoke laughingly in his mind as she'd always spoken there. McKie suppressed a fit of trembling, almost fell. "Careful with our body," she said. "It's the only one we have now." "Whose body?" She caressed his mind. "Ours, love." Was it hallucination? He ached with longing to hold her in his arms, to feel her arms around him, her body pressed to him. "That's lost to us forever, love, but see what we have in exchange." When he didn't respond, she said: "One can always be watching while the other acts...or sleeps." "But where are you?" "Where I've always been when we exchanged. See?" He felt her parallel to him in the shared flesh and, as he voluntarily drew back, he came to rest in contact with their mutual memories, still looking from his own eyes but aware that someone else peered out there, too, that someone else turned this body to face Broey. Fearful that he might be trapped here, McKie almost panicked, but Jedrik gave him back the control of their flesh. "Do you doubt me, love?" He felt shame. There was nothing she could hide from him. He knew how she felt, what she'd been willing to sacrifice for him. "You'd have made their perfect Mrreg." "Don't even suggest it." She went pouring through his arena memories then and her joy delighted him. "Oh, marvelous, McKie. Beautiful! I couldn't have done it better. And Broey still doesn't suspect." Attendants were taking (he eight prisoners out of the arena now, all of (hem still shackled. The audience benches were almost empty. A sense of joy began filtering through McKie. I lost something but  gained something . "You didn't lose as much as Aritch." "And I gained more." McKie permitted himself to stare up at Broey (hen, studying the Gowachin judge with Dosadi eyes and two sets of awareness. Aritch and the eight accused of murder were things of the past. They and many others like (hem would be dead or powerless before another ten-day. Broey already had shown the speed with which he intended to act. Supported by his troop of Jedrik-chosen aides, Broey would occupy the seats of power, consolidating lines of control in that shadow government, eliminating every potential source of opposition he could touch. He believed Jedrik dead and, while McKie was clever. McKie and BuSab were not a primary concern. One struck at the real seats of power. Being Dosadi, Broey could not act otherwise. And he'd been almost the best his planet had ever produced. Almost, Jedrikwithin chuckled. Yes, with juggernaut eenainty, Broey would create a single target for BuSab. And Jedrik had refined the simulation pattern by which Broey could be anticipated. Broey would find McKie wailing for him at the proper moment. Behind McKie would be a new BuSab, an agency directed by a person whose memories and abilities were amplified by the one person superior to Broey that Dosadi had ever produced. Standing there in the now silent arena, McKie wondered: When will Broey realize he does our work for us? "When we show him that he failed to kill me!" In the purest obedience to Gowachin forms, without any sign of the paired thoughts twining through his mind, McKie bowed toward the surviving jurist, turned and left. And all the time, Jedrikwithin was planning... plotting... planning...  At last, a few moments of free time to devote to my novel. Where was I? 'The noble alien bravely faced the shambling, evilly grinning Earthman. The alien cried, "Stop where you step, John Gorman! You shall not have our planet's treasures!" ' 'The cowardly human ' "Alter." Don't interrupt my flow, Geis. I'm really in the groove now. This stuff will win a Hugo. 'The cowardly human cringed at the sight of the Hamilton-Grzzxye W-# blaster. "I come in peace, alien, sir. Only -- " ' "Alter, I hate to interrupt, but -- "  "Only I must find the nearest bathroom... ' Bathroom? Where did that come from? Geis! Look what you made me do! You've blown my concentration all to hell! How can I work with you insidiously inserting words like that into my precious prose? "I laugh at your juvenile fiction, Alter. But let us not get into another argument about your talents. Do you see that blinking light on your phone? Do you realize that Jim Baen has been trying to get in touch with you for a week?" I thought it was Roger Elwood asking for a job as assistant editor of Alter Ego Publications. "You were wrong. Jim finally had to call me and ask whether you were still alive or not. He needs another column for Galaxy, and it is your column now, you know. It's your responsibility." I know, I know... Alright, I'll get right on it. I know what I'll do! I'll complain about die poor quality of most sf I read, and then I'll print the opening chapter of my novel to show how really fine stuff can be! Yow! The readers will love it! They'lt... Geis, who is that person who is hiding behind your back? Who have you brought down here to inflict upon me? "Who? This person? Oh, this is an admirer of yours, Alter. A great enthusiast. He prevailed upon me to let him come down here to meet you. It was inevitable, you know, that sooner or later even you would have a few fans." A fan of mine! Well! Stand aside, Geis. Let's get this over with. (A few silent seconds pass.) Well? Why don't you run screaming? Why don't you turn pale and cringe? "Mr. Alter Ego, sir, I love your scratchy voice, and the way you choose your words with such care and cunning. You're the first thing I listen to every time your column appears in Galaxy. I get a great kick out of your fights with Geis." Yeah, Geis gets a kick out of Where did he slip away to? "He said he coutd only stay a minute. But he'll be back to guide me back to the surface in a short while." And in the meantime I'm stuck with you, hah? Well, what do you want? "Just to listen to you, and maybe interview you for my group." Ah! An interview! Yes, and it's about time I was interviewed! Geis 'll be insane with jealousy. Sure, man, go ahead and ask questions. I have to admire your guts; most people, even hardcore sf fans, turn queasy at the sight of my alien visage. And I look even worse today because I haven't shaved my tendrils or sandpapered my pseudopods for a week. That, combined with my icky green scaly skin... "Oh, that doesn't bother me a bit. I can't see you." Bad eyesight? Let me dial up the lamp a bit more. "That won't help. I'm unsighted." Uhh? Aww... Come on! If you're blind you couldn't read Galaxy. You couldn't read my column! "I don't read it with my eyes. I 'read' it from listening to a cassette. Galaxy is provided to unsighted people on cassettes by the Library of Congress." It is? Son of a glytch! I didn't know that. "Oh, yes. Galaxy is the only sf magazine that has permitted itself to be distributed to us this way. You'd be surprised at how many thousands of fans you have among the unsighted, Mr. Alter." Thousands? "Ummhmm. There's a great hunger among the unsighted for science fiction and fantasy. The problem is there's so little of it on tape and records. And we can afford so few of the commercially produced items." I know what you mean. I try bugging Gets to buy a few fantasy records and he starts shouting about money. The only things of that nature we have in the archives are what show up to be reviewed. "We were wondering if there are any fans or fan groups out there in the sighted readership of Galaxy who perhaps cany on discussions of science fiction and fantasy on cassettes -- " Yeah, yeah, seems to me Geis mentioned there was a cassette fandom in existence a few years ago... Might still be active. He couldn't remember any names or addresses, though, and his records are a shambles. "We'd love to be included. And if it were at all possible, maybe some fan groups could organize recording sessions and put the best sf and fantasy on cassettes." That's a good idea. There have to be lots of fans with good diction, good voices, a flair for dramatic reading, who would love to do that. Club projects. Coordination with other clubs to avoid duplication of recorded stories... "Wouldn't that infringe on author's rights? We wouldn't want to -- " I doubt there are any writers, especially sf and fantasy writers, who would object to having their stories taped for non-profit distribution to the unsighted. I'm sure they'd be flattered and proud to have their stories chosen. But you're right to raise the point. There would have to be a central clearing-house, a coordinating center, to organize things and put people in contact with each other. I would suggest Geis, but he is so busy with Science Fiction Review he'd have my head on a platter if I tried to saddle him with this. "Maybe -- " I think this is a job for Jim Baen! Jim? Ahem. Yes, Alter. It happens that this very subject came up two issues back in "Directions." Oddly enough my pristinely human brain ran in channels not dissimilar to those of your weirdly alien... er, it is a brain, is it not? (I've never been quite clear on that point.) In any event,  think the simplest course would be for me to repeat my remarks in the letter column verbatim: l have recently learned that over # of Galaxy's " readers' ' are sightless, or nearly so. I also learned -- long ago -- that among Galaxy's sighted readers are some of the most warmly enthusiastic and giving people in the world. It strikes me that this is a setup: l propose that Galaxy act as a clearing-house between people who would like to provide science fiction-oriented services for the sightless and those who would like to receive such services. The services might include escorting at conventions and to fan club meetings; reading , either "live" or via cassette; helping to organize (this would probably only be feasible in large cities) fan clubs for the visually impaired, together with a sighted "auxiliary" to provide reading, escort and whatever. Authors could provide a very special service by arranging with their publishers for permission to do multiple cassette recordings of their works for non-profit distribution. Finally, someone must assume the " clearing-house " role: Galaxy will only be able to carry the burden for a limited time. Perhaps some fan club would like to offer its services for this? Those interested in being put in touch with volunteers should wait at least a month before making inquiries. Those wishing to volunteer should write immediately to: Galaxy Magazine Volunteers PO Box # Planetarium Station New York, NY # Okay. Now, fan of mine, you An Informal  irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ##I features interviews with Ed Hamilton  Leigh Brackett Plus an interview with Tim Kirk. Barry Malzberg's controversial column. The Dream Quarter." An examination of Lester del Rey's possible conflict-ofinterest as book reviewer for Analog. The Editor's sometimes startling diary, "Alien Thoughts." "An Evolution of Consciousness" by Marlon Zimmer Bradley; and "SF and S-E-X (Or Vice Versa)" by Sam Merwln, Jr. Interview with Jack Vance. Quarterlysampte SI year #two years. S# P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I mentioned wanting to do an interview with me? Why not now? Go right ahead and ask question... especially now, with Geis out of the way. "Thank you. Alter. Umm... There is some curiosity about how you came into existence. Where and how were you born?" I was born on the fifth planet, Gnerf, of the Zirb system, about thirty light-years from here, as the flurb flies. I was bom like any other creature of my race, from larvae deposited into the abdomen of giant Hrmmps. I had to eat my way out, growing strong and large as I ate, of course, and was "bom" on a dark and stormy night. Ah, yes, I remember it well... "Then, how did you come to Earth and... inhabit... Richard Geis's mind?" I volunteered for a space mission -- exploration... Oh, lurp! I'll tel) you the truth. I was thrown into a warper and exiled to this Kaku-forsaken planet. They just dialed at random and threw the switch! I materialized in the middle of an assassination of one of your leaders and had to discorporate instantly. In that vulnerable state it was all I could do to keep my atoms together. I was sucked thousands of miles into a mental vacuum, and when I finally pulled my remaining essence together I discovered I was in Geis's brain. I've been here ever since, growing stronger and stronger. "Why were you exiled?" That I will not tell you. The crimes of Gnerf do not relate to human crimes. "What are your plans?" Short-range, I want to throw Geis out of this body, make some radical changes in the organs, and become a male porno star. Long-range, I want to take over the world. Since my normal lifespan is # of your years, that will become boring after a few thousand years. I'll probably try to bribe my way back into Gnerf society. "Can you make Geis's body last so long?" Oh, no. That's part of the drag of living on this ridiculous planet. I'll have to bodyhop every few decades. "Ahh, Mr. Alter, there is a problem... How is it Mr. Geis can be absent, while I'm apparently talking to you?" I have the power to cloud men's minds. I project an illusion. At this moment I am actually in Geis's feeble brain, and you are hallucinating under my direction. "That makes me feel... funny. Scared." You had to ask. "Are the archives real?" After a fashion. We are in Geis's basement, convened to offices and lined with shelves. This place actually is a mess! "You've destroyed a good many illusions, Alter. Are you telling me the truth?" No, of course not. Well, yes, partly. "Which pan?!' I won't tell you that. Are you through interviewing me? Any more questions? "Yes, there are a few more questions. Are you going to ever publish a magazine all by yourself, without Mr. Geis?" Yes, if I can ever get Geis's affairs and work habits organized for greater efficiency, I plan to publish my own science fiction and fantasy. For adults only, of course. But that's at least a year away. "What will you call it?" I think Irresponsible Science Fiction is a good title. Countercounter-counter culture sf for hopeless iconoclasts. "Could you give us an example? A story idea?" I like the story of the huge Barbarian who saves the beautiful maiden from the wizard, and takes payment for the rescue in money and sex. He doesn't believe in risking his neck for nothing. "That is revolutionary. Any other ideas for stories?" Yes, the story whose premise is that Earth has never been visited by aliens or saucers, and that the phenomenon we experience now and have in the past, is only a distraction created by the true rulers of Earth -- cockroaches . "Anything else?" Well, I've toyed with the idea of a story about a man who proves to mankind that they can never, ever, get something for nothing. For this sin he is tortured to death by a horde of enraged politicians. "Do you think your magazine would be very popular?" No, it will have a very limited appeal. "How long do you expect to write this column in Galaxy T' As long as I'm wanted. "Thank you, Mr. Alter." You're welcome. Ah, I see Geis returning to take you back up to the surface. "Alter, I just took a call from President Carter. He wants you to come to Washington to accept an appointment. He wants you to be available as an official ambassador to any and all aliens who happen to visit or be discovered, during his reign...er, term of office." Tell him no, Geis. I happen to know the Denebians will be visiting Earth in six years, and they look like four-foot peanuts with legs. It'll be a very unfortunate scene. Now, will you take this gentleman back up to the surface and leave me be to write my prose? "It's your column." I'm glad you finally accept that. Now, where was I? 'The Earth man was misunderstood. He only wanted to go to the bathroom.' Yes... yes... Hmm. Now, if he wears a spacesuit with a relief tube... Bathroom !? Damn you, Geis!  fifsen Dafnay the Pheromonal Fountain "And gentle odours led my steps astray, Mixed with the sound of water's murmuring..." -- P. B. Shelley been activated, btu's pulse deep inside my core once more. Out of storage chamber I step into the light. I'm off on another assignment. My name is Friday. Sometimes I know precisely why they call me that; sometimes it's more obscure: it all depends on how I'm programmed for the work ahead. This assignment should be some kind of guru. I feel little in the way of data in my coils. But talent makes up for lack of information. I make this record as I speed away. A mini-device implanted in my sphenoidal sinus receives my thought projections. I have little use for sinuses. I am a surrogate, of course, and what with my other superior powers, who needs a nose? This world so full of sunshine, so a-throb with haunting vibration, is that of the #st century. The background tells me that we're civilized- -- terribly civilized. Technology rears up like a tidal wave. It's still up there, that wave, holding, holding -- but any minute now it threatens to engulf the human world. Crime's rampant, says my program. Not enough agents to stop the nefarities of our Ph-deed dissocials. Religion, mores, ideals -- dead and dust. Competition virulates. Government paralyzes in its paralysis. Developed nations chew the edges of our Overdeveloped shores like locusts. Pretty soon -- no more America. Not enough people here, too many people there. "Mass balance" is the political slogan, meaning that people should be making babies in this land, not riveting with surrogates. But that program lacks political appeal: people love the surrogates; they live inside bordello domes. I ride the tube train out of sunshine into darkness, away from my resting place between assignments. It's good to be alive, good to get away. The tube train settles in its downward rush through plasmacarved tunnels in which it glides on sheets of air. The lights that dimmed during our rocky start come back to full candle power. People relax, unstrap, and ring for beverages. I look around. And (here, two seats away and to my right, I glimpse Banfield from (he Institute. Seeing Banfield is an omen -- and not a good one, I might add. Less than an hour into my assignment, and that old PS I starts stirring up my irrationality circuits. Why is Banfield on this train? Is he on the same assignment I am on? Doesn't Banfield causes a burning sensation in the membranes of my nutrient bladder. He is a repulsive surrogate of the aggressive, bold variety called "Tanker," the first successful male product line United Ferns and Dolls came out with after they decided to crash into Masculinity and try for a slice of the middle-aged divorcee market. He has a long face, thick sideburns, and lips that the ads call sensuous but I'd call lewd. The simulated leather suit he wears suggests the joys of being whipped with thongs. His purple shirt is open at the neck, half unbuttoned. You just know that Banfield loves those simulated curlicues of protein on his chest. He pretends he doesn't see me. We're not exactly soul mates, he and I, but I'm a senior agent and won't be ignored -- not by a recent acquisition. "Banfield," I call. "Which way you headed?" "Oh, Friday. Hi." He simulates surprise. "Out," he says and waves a hairy hand. assignments, a rule we honor in the breach. Not Banfield. He clings to that trajectory. He must be up to some No-Good. His background they're known for their whopping tangerines. But I won't press the point. I nod to him and wave a hand by way of saying See you around, and he takes his cue and dives into a magazine. I guess I'll follow suit. I reach into the frontseat pocket and fish out a copy of Chronos. I know from past activations that Chronos has been rampaging against the rise of surrogates, a story I like to follow, and this time too I am rewarded. Once more Chronos is on the attack, tilting against the sexual decadence. The cover person is a gross-fat woman by name of Ruby Smith -- not a surrogate, she. She owns and runs the Vegas Pomorama, the nation's largest bordello dome, a ninehundred acre island of delights amidst the desert sands. Hhm. This is new: At Pornorama, it says here, no human being has ever refused the come-on warble of a Mattress or a Buck. I find that odd. Something fascinates me about the story, and knowing that I've got and dig into it deeply. And the next thing I know -- surfacing from the muckraking account, Banfield has disappeared. I have no nasal circuits but nevertheless -- methinks I smell a agents superlatively. Everything has its significance. I lean back, close my eyes, and start to ihink about my assignment, known. My storage is rather skimpy -- itself revealing. But I know this: the "highest levels" in that agency called Dr. Trobote, our president. They asked that he send them the very best agent money could lease. Me, of course. I am to help a certain Bud MacGuire, agent-in-charge of something called 'Project Evacuation.' MacGuire has been working on the case for several months without success. I'm thinking: Won't he be just itching green to see me? The train rides on. Noonish at last and I arrive in Washington, D. C. The metro building. I look at it from across the street. The structure survives from the 'troubled century' and looks like a triple-decker brick on legs. My aesthetic circuits turn off in horrified registers. Two higher-ups receive me. They wear blue suits and look alike. They treat me like -- well, like higher-ups treat surrogates: barely. I'm not asked to sit. One man reaches for a telephone and dials MacGuire. Invites him to have lunch downstairs, in the basement Intravenous. "Want you to meet someone," he tells MacGuire. "Ten minutes?" Downstairs MacGuire takes one look at me and dislikes what he sees. His eyes and face (a little on the ruddy side) say he is expecting trouble -- and trouble comes. After the waitress has needled us in, the older of the higher-ups (he has folds in his stumpy neck), starts none too gently, saying: "Project Evacuation isn't doing much, MacGuire. We figured you needed a little help. Friday here is your new assistant." And that's the high point of the introduction -- all downhill from there. Later, after the higher-ups have left, MacGuire points an index finger at me in the hall, and though the finger trembles, I notice that MacGuire chews his nails. "Listen, you," he says, and a bloody eye stares menacingly, "no clackering surrogate's gonna be my assistant, no matter what they say," and he hooks an angry thumb toward the ceiling. Six hours into the assignment, and I'm really steaming with the client's man; we're puff, puff, puffing down a pair, of rails that aren't parallel. "Call me your contractor, then," I say. "Don't you tell me what to call you," he says. He stalks away, leaving me stand, but I follow him thinking that I'm as good as he is; more so: my eyes are baby blue, glistening auburn my hair. I'm a souped-up Model "Boss" modified in speech and manner to pass for a man any day. No 'clackering' whatever, brothers. Nor am I prejudiced, nor will I die. Sweet Manson! I'm eightyfive percent organic, but try telling MacGuire that! At least when I am programmed, I know it. He disregards me when I enter the office in his wake and seat myself on his inflato-chair. The chair turns out to be equipped with little farting horns: a practical joker, this MacGuire. He roars with laughter, his face turns purple, he slaps his knee, he pounds the desk. I recognize the type and know that he will be more friendly now that he has rammed me one; and so it is. "All right," he says, wiping tears from his eyes, still chuckling. "All rightl Friday, is that it? Nice name for a surrogate. Tell you what, boy. I'll put you next door and you can brief yourself -- if you know how to tune a self-surround." I tell him I might just manage. Two hours later I'm still at it, fourth time around, and note with surprise that my motivational programming on this assignment allows me to experience despair. I'm bottoming in the stuff. If I had tear glands, I'd shed some brackish. MacGuire comes in, leans against the door post, arms folded across his chest. He moves up and down, scratching his back on the door post. "Your best bet, Friday," he says, chin-pointing to a flash chart of U.S. cities on the screen, "is to be there next time they hit." "How can I? You can't predict where they'll hit, can you?" I ask. "Of course not. If I could I'd move right in and stop it just like that." He snaps a finger. "If you can't, what makes you think I can?" I ask. And I wonder, grammed me so gloomy. "You're my high-powered assistant, ain'tcha? You'll figure out a way." MacGuire makes a noise that didn't come from his inflato-chair, grins, and leaves me to my miseries. I walk the streets of Washington in mid-afternoon. Background programs tell me it's an ordinary day. Over near Capitol Hill a workfare crowd eight thousand strong, in brilliant rags and shiny, purple hats, has gathered to witness the arrival of a real-life Godzilla grown from a in Osaka and sent to Congress as a gesture of international solidarity by the Diet in Japan. Godzilla is drugged, says a man at a street corner gawking boredly. Drugged or not, it's a fearsome beast, tall as the Washington monument. Its playpen, built adjacent to the zoo, cost a billion and wiped out two affluent suburbs. I understand Godzilla had to swim the Pacific after three connected supertankers meant to carry it across the ocean sank during embarcation. I feel a little for the beast -- it can't help being a monster and it's far from home. Over near Commerce a pesky smog pocket has brought six oxygen vans racing, and men in white suits and bubble helmets are handing masks to doubled-over somebodies. I don't need air but take a thing anyway. No need to advertise my suirogation. Near Justice I pass sixteen shavenheaded brethem of the flurorocarbons mercury phosphates asbestos and variousplastics Association. It's an old-fashioned, traditional group whose name has not kept pace with issues. They're chanting "Death to Curalofoam" while herding in their midst a group of mutagens (for demonstration, I suppose) -- slavering people whose arms sash uncontrollably, whose spindly necks bob, whose walk resembles that of people stepping over huge, invisible crates with one leg. The brethern keep the mutagens in line with NP (for no-pain) cattle prods, the latest import from Brazil. Enough idle sightseeing. I need a quiet hotel. I need to think. Then at Lafayette Square I suddenly stop. I see the fountain: a stony groove-chick representing America (I guess) lifts a bleeding, kneeling little man in stone pyjamas and a stone bamboo hat -- memento to some long forgotten war. It's not the war that interests me but the fountain. Every time the phantom forces of Evacuation have struck thus far, a fountain has been involved. Fountains, I tell myself. That's it. You've got to watch the fountains in the cities they haven't hit. And now it is several days later. I am in Kansas City, just off (he Plaza, seated on a bench. I watch a fountain. I've been sitting here for three days and three nights, unceasing in my vigilance. If surrogates are capable of madness, I must be positively nutmeg. What makes me think they'll strike in Kansas City? Nothing. But past strikes has been random. I asked my own randy-disc to pick a city. It picked Kansas City, and consequently here I am. And I am here specifically because this is the only fountain near a rich and fashionable shopping center. Evacuation works like this: suddenly and without warning, all the people in an area will start to head with unerring instinct toward some riveting fountain. They stand and stare and mill in a daze for several hours on end. And even after they shake off the puzzling fascination, it usually takes several hours to untangle the hindenburg mess. Meanwhile, of course, unobserved predators loot the nearby, empty stores and banks. They make off with cash and jewelry by mingling with the crowd. Or that's the theory. Post-factum analysis has revealed nothing so far -- though everything has been analyzed: fountains, airs, waters, and selected possessee metabolisms. Traps have been set, emergency procedures formulated. But the authorities have failed to cope. Cops flown or driven into emptied areas -- with or without gas masks -- are possessed by the same fountain urge and quickly leave the solution to join the problem. It's dark. I sit. The fifth gayzte has just approached me and been told to blow a balloon. I swim in a Pacific of programmed depression, a sad Godzilla of a secret agent. Did Dr. Trubote mean for me to fail? This isn't like me in the least. Then -- action, at last!! I spot a little man. He comes in a splattered all-over suit canying two buckets. He wears -- yes, mam! He wears hip boots. A cold cigar is cornered in his mouth and a floppy pie of an artist's beret sits on his head. He climbs into the fountain, avoiding the spuits of bottom-lighted water (green, orange, red). And the next thing you know, he is seated on a dolphin's back and is painting the head of an up-rearing horse with a kind of white discoloration. Interesting. My chronomat says #:#. I rise and approach. "Hey," I cry. "You there. Sir." He looks at me. "Yeah?" "What' re you doing?" "What's it look like?" "I don't know," I say -- and I really don't. "Look, man, leave me be. I've got work to do." "But why are you painting the horse?" "Because I've got a contract," he says. "Okay? I've got it right here." He slaps his chest. "Everything all square and squared. Now pulverize." I persist. "Excuse me, but could you tell me the reason? Why would the city want to paint a perfectly fine piece of sculpture? And why in that goosey white?" The little man is irritated. He puts down his brush, clamps down on his cigar, unstraddles the dolphin, and comes toward me, head low. His face turns green, orange, and finally red as he passes over zones of underlighting. "What are you?" he asks. "A surrogate or something?" I say, "Don't be silly," and don't even blush. "Look," he says, "this city has a bubble, don't it?" I look up reflexively and nod. Yes, sir. Kansas City has a weather bubble. "So?" "So there ain't no pigeons, is there?" "Pigeons?" "Yeah, what else? Pigeons. You know. Rutter, flutter?" He lifts his arms and waves his hands like wings. He considers me an idiot. My programming has a gap in it somewhere. I still don't get it and I say so. He shakes his head. "Mister, you should plug into the media. Yes, sir. You sure need some culture. What's a fountain without no pigeon faecal matter on it? Well?" "Ah," I say. "I get it." (But I still don't.) "So you paint faecal matter on the sculpture. I see." "Well, finally!" "But why do you 'do it at night?" He has had it with me, but he answers. "What would the public say if they saw me do it? Mister, you ain't got no sense. This stuff's supposed to be natural." It's a long night. My fourth. The pigeon faecal matter painter has done his dabbles and has left. I have reviewed my deep-stored data and found that indeed weather bubbles vibrate on a frequency that pigeons find alarming. As for the aesthetic charm of those whitish smears on horse and maid and dolphin -- that has roots deeper than my circuitry. Day dawns. The last and most persistent gayzie of the night, sulking on a nearby bench, has turned on a portable radio. Its loud blarings tell me what I already know: Today is Helium Day in Kansas City. Helium Maid of # will be lofted up toward the pinnacle of the weather bubble on a throne of balloons which will be timed to burst on high. Helium Maid will parachute down and land in Volker Park. It's still early but a crowd begins to gather. Helium Maid will start her journey from the Plaza. If anyone plans to rivet with this fountain, it's probably too late. I break my vigil. I need movement in my limbs -- and data, more data. MacGuire can't make sense of me and I can't make sense of him. Time difference between our two loci is one hour. He insists on eating his breakfast while talking on the telephone, and what with Ma Bell's much improved resonators, I might as well be inside his stomach. "Pigeons?" he asks, and his tongue fishes for, say, a bit of tooth-jammed raisin. "What in the buzz do you wanna know that for?" He swallows, and it sounds as if a whale had just surfaced from an ocean of lard in slow motion. "What kind of stuff are you into, anyway?" The gurgly roar is that of coffee crashing between his gums. "Friday, we're after criminals, not people who paint excrement on statues; get the idea?" "Check it anyway," I insist. "And tty to huny. They're lofting Helium Maid in less than an hour." "Lofting the what -- oh, never mind. Hang in there, boy." I wait and wait while MacGu ire's other and lesser assistants are presumably blazing down the laser tubes in search of obscure facts for that clackering tick-tock of a surrogate fountain-sitting in the nation's helium capital. Then MacGuire is back. He sounds tight. He sounds excited. "Listen, Friday. I've got a chopper wanning up on the roof and an Air Force jet standing by at Carter Field. Don't do anything dll I get there." "Hey, what about it?" "Just like I suspected," he says. "The day before each strike, the fountains were touched up." "Just like who suspected?" I ask, but he's already gone. People have gathered, many of them dressed for the parade that is to follow Helium Maid's lofting and descent by green (for money) parachute. I thread my way through a group of high school teenies dressed like vessels, pumps, compressors -- to impersonate a refinery, I guess. They talk a grunt-twat-titter talk unlike any patois stored in my lingo lobes. Bands tty approximations of Do-Re-Mi. Three hanied nuns, carrying fold ing chairs, nudge a pride of tottering senility toward an advantageous spot along the curb of #th Street. The mobile speaker's platform is being backed into place on the wide expanse of lawn next to my fountain. The hiss of air cushior generators is such the crowd plugs up its ears. I spot Helium Maid's throne in process of inflation from a huge silvery sphere over by the tennis courts and not far from it the Helium Maid's colorful van surrounded by young things holding autograph books. I position myself near the fountain -- but not too near. If my guess is right, this place won't be safe in, oh, twenty minutes or so. It's #:# in the morning. At precisely half past the hour the phenomenon begins. It's as if an invisible call had gone out from the fountain. At first in the immediate vicinity of the water-dolphin-horseand-maid -- and then spreading in concentric waves -- people turn. They approach, haltingly at first, then at quickstep, finally at a run. I scramble to get out of the way, but not until I've seen the first arrivals. They stop at the water's edge. They look at each other, foolishly grin; they turn about; they're puzzled and benumbed. They start away and then turn back. And then it is too Jate. People are coining, faces like zombies.' They press, they crush. A woman screams. Someone falls into the water. Others have already scaled the sculpture and hang like grapes on greenish bronze, clothing drenched, skin glistening. I move against this tide. I dodge, weave, and flatten myself to fit between phalanxes of possessed. Running now I sec Helium Maid racing for the fountain -- a bouncy lass. The fountain has caught her unawares. She wears a slip. Her feet are bare. Half her head is still in electrodes. She trails wire ripped from the curlatron. My head is full of interviews I've seen and heard on tape in Washington -- people recounting this experience, mumbling: Well, I, well, I just, wetl, I dunno: it was an urge, kinda. An excitement, like. A hindenburg excitement. Like, uh, well, I dunno. And then, on deeper probing, they confessed to feeling sexual excitement. Old people too. They were the worst. Blushed like virgins. I am well into the Plaza before it hits me. I'm not affected. But why? Surrogates were made for love long before they turned to spying. I've got the circuits, hormone bags, and all the outer paraphernalia. What do I lack that people have? But my circuits are jammed with overload at the moment and I don't find the answer. I run on, seeking criminals. The Plaza is Spanish, its architecture strictly controlled by the morte main of some dead syndicate. A large geography criss-crossed by streets, five hundred meters long, two hundred meters wide. Presently the area is as empty as a town of death. The sun alone sits on everything, resting without motion: pink marble, white stucco, black wrought kin, golden bakery, striped ice cream parlor, parked cruisers, grey streets, beige walks, green bushes. My own agile steps make the only sound. Then I hear, coming from the left, the shatter of a wall-sized piece of glass; and instantly a metal banger starts drumming on the belllike disk of some back alley burglar alarm. I duck and run, more or less under cover -- no wish to shuffle off my immortal coils as yet. I stop, peer, dart, and stop again. Yes, yes. I see it up ahead: a carpeting of silicate before a jewelry store; and, lying on the sidewalk, carelessly dropped, a jumbo of a mallet on the end of a sturdy, wooden shaft. I tiptoe, crawl. Then, past a gleaming icicle of window pane, I look into the murk of the store -- and draw back stunned. Banfield the "Tanker" is inside, Banfield of the Institute. Still clad in that macho leather, as on the train. I look again. Sure stuff. The man stands behind a counter, before a pile of diamond ensembles dumped from dark blue satiny cases. And he is swallowing them, one by one, like a man gulping oysters. Suddenly I'm in the grip of a compulsion. I realize it has been there all along. It began when I beheld the emptiness of the Plaza. But it takes hold of me with force now that I see Banfield gulping. Careless now, no longer concerned with being seen, I enter this store through the jagged hole. Glass crunches underfoot but Banfield does not even look up. In a second I stand beside him. I too dump a case of jewels on the counter. I too start swallowing. I know I've been betrayed -- by Dr. Trubote and by Banfield: an ordinary surrogate. But I'm not a lewd and vulgar Tanker; We go from store to store, from bank to bank. We smash and bum through doors and locks. We find the small and precious things: pearls, diamonds, rolls of thousand dollar bills. Special vessels inside our trunk fill with the loot. We don't speak. We're on a special program. We're all intensity and concentration. Not our will governs but Trubote 's. And behind Trubote stands some shadowy client of And then both Banfield and I sense that time is up. We part and go our separate ways. Both of us men at different points with the giant, mesmerized mob around the fountain. Soon hell breaks loose. The crowd stirs then erupts. The thrall is broken. People scream, rush, trample. Frozen policemen come alive, recall their duties. Sirens start howling. Lights start to flash palely in the sun. I wander about, observing, stunquick. My illusions of autonomy, efficiency, and decency are shattered -- like the many cruiser wrecks that crowd the streets. I feel ashamed, undone -- like Helium Maid, led by a solicitous group of men back to her colorful van; she is in tears. Her throne, near by, hangs up into the air, partly inflated, partly slack. Helicopters have begun to buzz above. Then I see MacGuire. He got here -- obviously just in time to catch the fountain's whammy. He stands bedazed, hitting the side of his head with the flat of his hand. His eyes are a little out of focus. He looks at me but doesn't see me. His mouth is open, slack. At last comes recognition. "What happened?" he asks. "You tell me," I say. "I just came out of it myself." And that's no lie. "You too?" "Me too," I say. "Me too, brother." "Did they rob the joint?" he asks, gesturing toward the Plaza. I nod. "Think so. I think they made quite a haul." "Gopher goo," he says, and his eyes freeze a little with inward apprehension. "Come on, Friday," he cries suddenly, "let's you and me go and hang one on." "All right. But in a second. I want to take a look at that fountain." I lope off to take a look, heavy with stolen goodies. Yes: all that pigeon faecal matter dabbed on with such care during the night is gone. Rubbed off, dispersed. What did they use to seal the stuff during the night? A water-soluble polymer? A time-decaying encapsulator sensitive to humidity? To be discovered, to be learned. I watch MacGuire sopping up the crop. One hour, two hours, three. I learn what he is really like: a sad sack and a loser. He tells me all. The alcohol robs him of inhibition. Eighteen reprimands, four demotions. Five transfers to shield the Bureau from embarrassment (I gather). Two divorces. And he's an alcoholic, too: no query about that! That stranded whale I sensed some days ago begins to stink. Is assigns to crack a major crime wave? Who is behind this thing? send me on this mission programmed to take part in the looting is strictly neutral. All we do is serve. Well! I think. You've got me work means all to me. I won't be used. If you want me to steal and rob while pretending to be solving crimes -- okay; but tell me in advance. I'm not just your ordinary tool. I've got my pride. I ponder the case, plot revenge, and listen to MacGuire all in one. We're in a darkish yum-yum place full of shavenheaded space stumers awaiting shipment to the Lunar mines. MacGuire is going on and on about his youth. His coat is off, his sleeves rolled up, his tie jerked loose. He has regressed now to the point I learn why his mother never loved him, and he tells me how the surrogate she rented to baby-sit him at age five, the only being who ever loved him, truly, the only being, a sweet, wonderful Crossford T-# from England (they don't make them like that anymore) -- he pauses, looks at me with an odd gleam in his eyes, then goes on: "Well, Friday, one day she fell in love with a washing machine and left me for a laundromat." This is supposed to be a joke, one of those little diamonds of hilarity MacGuire has been embedding in the soft mush of his drunken babble ail afternoon. He is like (hat: self-pitying, vindictive, and... hilarious. I don't even pretend to be amused, but he whinnies, gags, sputters, and turns red it is so funny -- and ends up coughing with such violence, I am obliged to pound him on the back. Then it's #:# and a gong sounds above the bar, whereupon the space stunters start going yippee!! They pound their glasses on the tables. Four in the afternoon in this blue-law region means that surrogates can start soliciting, and here they come, slinking, hipping, slithering out of the greasy shadows of the back -- eight third rate Mattress Ferns in phosphorescent gowns. The space stunters have gone gorilla. All eight, in turn, come by our table. They lean across, warbling their invitations. I hear the defective squeaking of cheap fragrance pumps but can't smell the effluvium, having no nasal circuits. MacGuire shakes his head. Not in the mood. I just stare to make them go away. And then, zam! Something clue, some cow or udder (to use a teenie phrase I heard this morning). It was the squeaking of those fragrance pumps -- and thinking of my nasal circuits -- and recalling all of a sudden that article in Chronos about that bordello dome in Vegas where no human has ever refused a surrogate's solicitation. "Hey," MacGuire cries when I rise. "Hey, where you going?" "West," I say. "See you around." Despite Dr. Trubote's negative programs, I'm going to solve this crime, I think. My brain is like a magnet. The oddments of evidence act like iron filaments. They're lining up nicely, pointing to a target. I must regurgitate this loot in my urge is great: it must be a programmed impulse. But after that I'll be light again, free again. I'll take a train. Will travel, will snoop. "Pheromonal," I mutter, moving toward the dial-a-door. "Pheromonal!" "Hey, buddy, can you spare a ten-spot," asks the thin, repulsive bum. If I pay him I have the right to beat him to a senseless pulp right here and now amidst the green and rolling lawns of Pomorama's outer reaches. He will bleed and vomit nicely, too, and at the end he'll even 'die.' I pass him by. I'm here to visit Madam Smith on business, not to sample her dome's delights. The dome is not one dome but ten, each shaped like a classic type of breast. The guard told me to go down Bushwack Lane, keeping to the left, past Rape Valley to Pubescent Groves. And then a sharp right. I'll see it from there, can't miss it, the building with the hirsutsia bushes flanking (he pal pi door. It's a long walk and a weary argument with six burly Bosses who came from the same mold as me. But at last they take me down and show me into the boudoir of what Chronos, in its usual style, called the nation's foremost whoreticulturist. She receives me, a very fat woman, lying in a titanic hathtub. A black ocean of trembling joy-gel hides her massive charms. "Hi," she says. She winks an eye. "You're cute, you know. You want to work for me, do you? You're modified, ain'tcha? Very nice. What does Bucks and Boys want for a model like you?" I seat myself on a naked, kneeling, bent-over male (furniture by the Marat-Sad Combine). "Madam Smith," I say, "I'm here on federal business. I'm with "Oooh," she cries and almost rises, showing me her planetary mams. But the joy-gel is too viscous. "I like you boys," she says. "I'm a patriot. Didn't know they used surrogates, is all." "Madam Smith," I start again, "what I've come to ask is this: the perfume pumps used by your ferns and bucks -- they're said to spread a patented effluvium. It's supposed to contain a proprietary ingredient. I'm here to ask about that." Now she is suspicious. The pattern of another personality invades her face. Her eyes turn hard. "Get out of here. I've got friends," she adds. "I got plenty of friends. Don't get ideas. Go on, pulverize." And the joy-gel trembles as she gestures in its depths. I've done research in preparation. I can't be bugged off just like that. "Does the name Balthasar Jones mean anything to you?" I just named the secretary of agriculture. Two days of frenzied digging told me he came by a whopping block of Pomorama stock a year ago. Soon after that Pomorama rapidly climbed the bordello rankings. Ruby Smith is furious. Her eyes blaze hate and fear. She doesn't say a word. "Look here, Madam Smith," I say. "You can have it one of two ways. You can tell me where you get those pheromones and no more will be said. Or you can refuse. If you refuse..." "We don't use any pheromones." "Yes, you do. I saw six drums in the basement of Impotence Nixed. I've got samples here." I show her two phials. "All I want to know is where this came from. It would save me time." "You'll never get out of here," she growls. "Sure I will." I decide to give her a demonstration of my lesser powers. My elbow lasers blaze blinding streams, my knees shoot flame, my unnaturally gaping mouth emits a sonar that shatters every piece of glass in sight. Smith. She's ripped her arms out of the gel and holds her ears. "Where?" I ask. "Where does it come from?" "Beltsvillc. Beltsyille, Maryland." "The Ag Research Station?" She nods. She's miserable. Just then her Bosses come crashing through the door. My lasers blaze again, i walk out past smoking metal wreckage, through clouds of plastic fume. I'm flying high -- and in more ways than one. Trobote should never have betrayed me. The double program in my lobes has opened up only knows what molecular sieveries, what ion-exchange resinos j ties, what chemical catalities the Doctor has set going. I feel a stratospheric kiting in my brain. I'm bent on deeds no surrogate has ever dreamt. I'm flying also in another sense. Metroplex. I want to arrive undetected, and who flies nowadays? The tube trains are faster. The plane is nearly empty. It's fuelled almost entirely by subsidies. The travel faeiliation specialists don't even pretend to serve. Four play cards toward the front. One donned a skin-tight gym suit after take-off and sits in the aisle nearby engaged in yoga. I watch her. She has contrived somehow to put her left leg over her right shoulder. She listens to her knee. Her arms are raised, her fingers flared. Her index fingers touch her thumbs making two cosmic eggs. Her eyes are open and rolled back. I see the moist whiteness of her eyes laced with delicate arteries spreading like the roots of some upside-down, internalized Kundalini tree. Aesthetic circuits in my brain sing some forgotten program: Oh brave new world -- such creatures in it! I muse and ponder, turning great deeds this way and that. And time flies. My yoga friend approaches, but does not quite reach, samahdi, when the engine pitch changes, little bells ring, and we start our descent. As we come in for our landing, the pilot comes on the intereom. He directs our attention to a vast, reddish area clearly visible from the left side -- an area that looks surrounded by something at least as formidable as the Chinese wall. Oh, yes. The pilot tells us all about Godzilla. I look down and see (he beast in its hindenburg playpen. It looks quite small, forlorn, and lonely from this altitude. I see it in the center, oblivious of the herd of cattle sent in as an afternoon snack. It sits unmoving. Its tiny eyes gaze mournfully toward Japan. I am not very much surprised when I sec MacGuire at the gate. He looks relaxed and almost gay. He sports a flower in his lapel -- no doubt it squirts. Long before I reach him, he holds out a hand, palm up. But it's not a greeting. "I'll take those bottles now," he says. "Hand them over, boy." "What bottles? -- And by the way," I ask, although I know the answer, "how'd you know I was on this plane?" "The bottles," he says. I reach into a pocket and hand him two phials. "You're something else," he says, staring at the darkish liquid in the containers. (The liquid happens to be Coke.) "You crossed some awfully big animal, boy. You're in trouble, boy. But I appreciate what you've done for me." "What did I do for you, MacGuire?" "You've got me off this case -- and boy, am I ever glad." He maneuvers so that the flower in his lapel can squirt me in the face, but I maneuver right back. "Who put on the heat?" I ask. "Balthasar Jones? Of Agriculture?" The fun goes from his face. "Don't ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," he says, backing. "By the way, call your boss. Trubole, is that it? You're fired too, friend. See you around." And he recedes, hand raised, holding the phials. My rented copter is hidden a kilometer from here, and "here" is the Beltsville facility of the Agricultural Research Service, a cluster of buildings with a large yard and tankage and machinery behind them. One of the buildings dates way back. It has a tower with a clock. I rest in bushes waiting for the wind -- it blows in a southwesterly direction, which is nearly perfect -- to drive that block of clouds way yonder over the bright sickle of the moon. The place swarms with uniformed guards. Lights probe about seeking ups; and no doubt also Balthasar Jones, Secretary, Agriculture -- they all have guessed that I might be a-lurking in these shadows. Trubote sounded shocked over the telephone when dutifully I called him. "Stop this nonsense could see his indignant features, the grey, leonine head, the natty blazered jacket. "You're a robot and you'll do as you've been told. I want you to report home by evening." "Yes, sir," I said. -- But damn it Beltsville and not back home at The cloud is coming -- slowly. I have time To record a few more observations, to tell the history of this crime to my sphenoidal sinus. Out here at Beltsville they do research on pheromones -- sex attraclants. Started long ago, in the troubled century, as a way to zap some insect called the gypsy moth. But research can never stop. Forward, progress. If you can catch the little pests, go for the big ones. Formulate new programs to fill in the voids made by success. More people, more budget. Bureaucracies are just like surrogates. They never die. And then no doubt some lovesick scientist or other, spumed by a groove chick, went to work at night on a little innovation of his own. And management found out about it. Slapped Top Secret on the files. An Eyes Only envelope informed the Secretary. Who knew how to use the information... The cloud approaches, nibbles at, then swallows up the moon. I reach into my pocket and take out the real samples of pheromone I took at Ruby's pleasure dome. I toss the bottles and they burst on pavement. Now it's just a matter of time. And here they come: uniformed guards by the dozen, and people from abandoned cruisers on the street. They make a little mob. It's not the Plaza, but it's the same idea. I pick up my blowtorch and amble undisturbed toward the yard, the tankage, in the back. Soon I have found what I am looking for. Three huge tanks, each labelled "paint." Some paint. One is for women, one for men. The third one holds an encapsulating polymer with twelve hours of water resistance. Perfect for fountains. My circuits are in gleeful excitation. I activate my blowtorch and start to carve a good-sized hole in the side of Tank Number One. The pink of dawn reveals the city down below. Not a spirit, not a soul; no flatus in the seat of power. Washington is empty. Hot lines, cold lines, lukewarm lines: all dead. They're all gone to Beltsville: man and woman, young and old, natives and diplomats. I've got it all to myself. I survey it from my lonely chopper. Then I bend the rotor slightly and my hover becomes a forward rush. I'm headed for the zoo. I got the notion in the airplane as we landed -- was it yesterday? Godzilla and I will soon be joining forces. If my guess is right, the I'll ride safely on its scaly neck directing its exploits. We'll swallow burger will start us off. Then a dish of mashed Congress. A mess of agencies, maybe. The White House for desert. And if we get thirsty, we'll drink the Potomac.  AW Spider Robinson Robert A. Heinkin, Stranger In His Own Land, George Edgar Slusser, NewcastleBorgo Press, # pp., # Experiment Perilous: Three Essays On SF, Bradley, Spinrad, Bester; Algol Press, # pp., # Anatomy of Wonder, ed. Neil Barron, R. R. Bowker Co., (Xerox), #I pp., price unknown The Happening Worlds of John Brunner, ed. Joseph W. De BoH, Kennikat Press, # pp., # Double , Double, John Brunner, Ballantine, # pp., # #I pp., # Under Pressure, Frank Herbert, Ballantine, # pp., # A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick, Doubleday, # pp., # The Best of C. M. Kornbluth, Ballantine, # pp., # I was a backward child, but then so were most of us. You see, I grew up in a rather more Golden Age than this, an era when there were so goddamn few anthologies that virtually every one of them was fabulous. Science fiction may be a long time recovering from the present surfeit of anthologies: the average quality has grown so miserably thin that I'm certain we have turned off by the thousands the potential readers who could have been hooked forever by, say, Masters' Choice or Tomorrow the Stars or any of the magnificent Conklin collections -- if only they could find the damned things under all those hundreds of dreary anemic assemblies thumbtacked together to getacontractmakeabuck (I'm still antho-antho called The Best of Roger Elwood). It was a black day when the first alleged anthologist began inviting submissions. There's a place for slush piles, a place for experimenting: the magazines, whose readers are a priori prepared to accept that, and who have planked down their money (considerably less money) for not only the stories, but for the up-to-date science and review and fanac features, for a reasonably current knothole into the world-of-sf As It Happens. But that is not what you want to leave lying around the library for inquisitive young minds to stumble over. If the first eight stories in an antho bore me, I may keep reading (because, say, the ninth is a Kombluth and I know what that means) -- but a bright eight-year-old will long since have wandered off to where they keep the early Saint stories, two aisles over. So, quite likely, will any newcomer to sf. I got hooked on sf in the library, back when nine anthos out of ten (the library's total sf section at the time) were pure dynamite (mostly because they were so few, because anthologies of sf stories were a new innovation and each anthologist had available to hand literally hundreds of hitherto-uncollected gems from which to select. Which is not to take away from Groff Conklin or Bleiler  Ditky or Laurence Janifer -- they got there fustest with the mostest). At the age of six I was given a copy of Rocket Ship Galileo, and the top of my skull came off. I raced to the library, where I had been told I might locate more books by Mr. Heinlein, and I found them -- and curiously enough, they were all lumped in with a buncha other books that also had a yellow rocketship pasted on the spine. In some way these other books must be like Heinlein... and so I tried one. Invaders of Earth, a Conklin antho. Wham! I was a science fiction nut (not an "sf fan" -- it was years before I learned that fandom existed). I shudder to think what might have happened if I had selected something of the quality of the average Roger El wood quickie. Why, I might today be working for a living! (The few really good anthologists working today are having one hell of a time selling anthos now -- the publishers know that Anthos Don't Sell, and they can prove it. Nobody bought all those El woods... well, maybe they bought one.) What all this leads to is that I spent the years from six to, oh, sixteen just absorbing antho after antho and finding them solid, letting dozens of monumentally Great sf stories be imprinted forever on my brain before I was old enough to have the sense to make not of title and author. I told you I was a backward child. And I think -- here at last is the point -- I think that a majority of you did too: grew up, or at least absorbed most of your early sf, at about the same time period. Simply because those were the best times for catching the attention of new readers, because never again since then has sf looked so good from the outside, been so attractive to a neophyte (and I suppose you could throw in the postwar Baby Boom to nail the argument down). And I further suspect that like me many of you remember the stones -- but not always the title and author. Because in them Golden Days of Library Loitering, there was no need to remember authors' names: just pick up the next antho and they'll all be winners. Not until times go lean did I get hip to the prudence of following a good byline (and nowadays I agree with Harlan that the reason they put title and author in the biggest type is because they're the most important words in the piece. Right up there on page one, see?). I wish I had a quarter for every letter I've gotten saying, "There's this story I read many years ago about this planet where night only comes once every thousand years and they all go gonzo and do you know what it's called and who wrote it and where I could get it?" (If you don't know, see next month's column.) Well, every so often I stumble across one of those forgotten Immortals and scream, # know this damn story! So that's who it was!" And I suspect you do too. So I'm going to try something -- a little bit of a game. Somebody (again, I dunno who -- some anthologist of yore) once made a dandy game out of running only the first lines of the first stories of several sf Masters -- and challenging readers to name title and author. I propose turning that around a bit. In the last several months I have run across over a dozen stories that were, for me, memorable, that burned themselves into my cortex at a tender age and still resurface occasionally in my consciousness. Although none of them is of the "tomato surprise" persuasion (whieh the late Rod Serling overused so heavily in Twilight Zone), each happens to have an extremely memorable last line, which ought to re-evoke the story for you if it's in your files at all . So that's the pitch: I give you the last line, you give me title and author. No fair peeking ahead to the end of the column -- keep a list and compare when you get there. The first couple: #) "Here they come, with an insulting thick rope." #) "It is a word which will explode this planet like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple." I'll keep sprinkling them in there, over the next few pages, and you see how many ring bells. I have a secret plan... All right: now that I've ranted about the inflationary devaluation of the anthology, let's go on to SF vs Academe. They've been going round on that one for a couple o' years now, ever since sf went respectable, and a considerable amount of waste heat has been produced thereby. On one side you got academicians insisting that sf should be judged by the standards of LitCrit, and on the other side you got Dena Brown saying, "Let's put sf back in the gutter where it belongs." It should now be obvious where I stand: seven years as an English major have convinced me that literary criticism butters no parsnips. I used to think it was only harmless, like masturbation, but now I don't anymore. I've seen too many people who can really write seduced into producing Enduring Masterpieces instead of good stories, conned into writing to please the LitCrit squad because their egoboo sounds the most authoritative (it is, I will grant, the only real assurance that people will be forced to read your works long after anyone's interested in them). And so I tend, at least, to vjewwithalarm rather than pointwith pride when the literary establishment moves in on sf. Many a great restaurant has been destroyed by being discovered, and come to think, the Indians must feel much the same about North America. And sure enough, here comes a missionary to tell me that my gods are inferior. George Edgar Slusser, author of Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger In His Own Land, spends fifty-six pages proving that Heinlein can't write his way out of a paper bag, and then spends three full pages listing Heinlein' s book publications alone (if he had added magazine sales, I calculate he'd have needed five more pages, and anthologizations would most surely have added another ten or twelve). The irony of the juxtaposition obviously escapes him. As near as I can figure his opening argument, Slusser is offended because you couldn't graph an outline of a Heinlein plot and come out with nice regular curves and repeating patterns. The hoary old barbarian bestseller violates the precious Dramatic Unities -- tsk tsk. From there Slusser uses all the classic tools of LitCrit-AsHatchet work, (quotation out of context, non sequitur, post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, outright distortion and plain stupidity) to show that Heinlein is an immature, irresponsible, morally bankrupt bungler who wouldn't be allowed to run loose in a sane world. Well. I find this pamphlet as significant as an urchin defacing the base of the Taj Mahal, and if you want to pay as much to read it as it would cost you to score the paperback of Stranger In A Strange Land, you go right ahead. I can't give it a Gaiaxative Award -- because I'm not at all certain that Slusser knew better -- but I will give it the John Shirley Award for Pointless Hostility. On the other hand, respectability has its advantages. For one thing, it provides a forum from which sf authors can rap about their craft. Some hold this to be a curse, too, on the theory that any verbiage about writing is a waste of time, and that a writer doing so is wasting valuable time. But I find writers' shoptalk at least as interesting as anybody else's, and anybody's shoptalk is the most interesting stuff on earth. So I rather enjoyed Experiment Perilous: Three Essays On SF by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Norman Spinrad and Alfred Bester. All three originally appeared in Algol, a semipro fanzine I know only by its (formidable) reputation (since sf pros can't afford fandom), and all three are tasty. I didn't agree with everything Bradley had to say about the New WaveOld Wave dichotomy, but I did agree about # of the time, and was impressed enough that I'm going to go back and take a much closer look at her fiction. Spinrad 's saga of the Finagle-inspircd disasters surrounding the publication of Bug Jack Barron delighted me -- I always enjoy hearing other writers' publisher-horror-stories; it helps persuade me that it isn't me they're out to get. And Alfie's piece on the Though Damon Knight didn't write this Cookbook for People, his famous story inspired it: Homme Bourguignon, Chili Con Hombre, Minceman Pie... #I outrageous recipes, lightheartedly illustrated: hardcovers, # at bookstores or postpaid from: Owlswick Press Box # Philadelphia pa l#ioi creation of The Demolished Man -- although way too compressed -- contained rather more vitamins than the usual Bester essay. I can't honestly say I liked it # worth -- but if you're one of these affluent fans I keep hearing about, why don't you check it out? On second thought, why don't you send me #? Then I could afford to subscribe to Algol. (I shouldn't say things like that. Have you heard the true story about the guy who ran classified ads saying only, "Send your dollars now, to..." with his address? He made a fortune hefore the Post Office shut him down.) Time for a couple more Last Lines. Do you recognize; #) "The wolves who were then burning their way through Ihe Ozarks, utterly without opposition, the wolves were the Martians, under whose yoke and lash we now endure our miserable existences." #) "Whereat a great and far-off voice was heard, saying, Pooppoop-poopy, and it was even so; and the days of Poopy Panda were long in the Sand." Onward. So respectability also means that ihe librarians come running, and at that I rejoice; if we're very lucky, library science may one day save our race from drowning in information (see Heinlein's encyclopedic synthesists). And here we have Anatomy of Wonder, a truly fabulous compilation of data. It bills itself on the cover as "bibliographic guides for contemporary collections," private or institutional, and for that it will serve excellently. But it also features such valuable research aids as a bibliog of books on sf history, criticism and biography; a bibliog of other extant bibliogs. indexes and teaching aids; magazine and book review indexes; properiodicals list (with editor-andaddress); a list of awards (the only section in the book hopelessly mangled and virtually useless) and other goodies. I did pick out a few choice errata to prove I'd really read (at) it (poor Rick Stembach's name gets misspelled again on page #, and on the same page they have Pangbom's lovely Eve choosing between two men instead of three), but mostly I was impressed and enlightened and informed all to hell. I learned, for one instance, that Kenneth Jemigan at the Iowa Commission for the Blind Library, #th and Keosauqua Way, Des Moines, Iowa # maintains about six hundred sf titles in Braille or recording and will lend same to blind fans. I urge any and all of you to read something good onto cassette and mail it thence -- although you should probably query first to avoid redundancy. I learned lotsa stuff, and probably will every time I come back to this excellent reference work. The bibliography of sf novels runs from # to today and is damned thorough -- and the capsule descriptions thereunto appertaining are remarkably trenchant. An invaluable aid to anyone who (God knows why) wants to study sf, and also to librarians, collectors and neofans looking for a thumbnail guide to the representative major works of the field. Thank you, Neil Barron and friends. Neither of these is a Last Line. One is a fragment of one, and one is a line from near (he end (the last line would give it clean away, and this is at least as memorable): #) "... and that what clever people have not yet learned, some quite ordinary people have not yet entirely forgotten." (Hint: "Whomp year.") #) "Angie smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to shock hardened morgue attendants." One last tilt at Academe should lead us gracefully into the fiction. It happened that I received a review copy of The Happening Worlds of John Brunner concurrently with about eight of Brunner's books -- and since Baen is always after me to come up with a decent lead or theme (or even in indecent lead or theme) I decided to review 'em all at once: an Overview of Brunner. But I immediately lost the first book, and by the time Kennikat Press had rather testily mailed me another copy, I had become too impatient to wait, and read most of the Brunners, reviewing them here one at a time. Furthermore, last month's Harlan Ellison extravaganza has convinced me that Overviews are too damn much work and too little fun. So instead of a whole column of Brunner, you get Happening Worlds plus two leftover paperbacks. Editor Joseph W. DeBolt was one of the contributors to Anatomy of Wonder. Herein he has collected ten essays on Brunner's work, divided into four sections ("Biography," "Prose  Poetry," "Economics  Politics" and "Science  Technology"), plus a James Blish preface and a lengthy response from Brunner himself. These last two I liked immensely, and I enjoyed De Bolt's own introduction to Brunner and his works. The essays themselves (all by men, all of whom happen to be, like De Bolt, professors at Central Michigan University) gave me some trouble though. Not that they weren't insightful -- at times brilliantly so -- or cogently stated. The problem is that to appreciate nearly every one of them, you have to be familiar with virtually every word Brunner ever wrote -- and I am not. In too many instances I'm not sure if I agree with the critic or not, and there's nothing more boring than discussion of a book you haven't read (unless it's during an English class and you've just been called on). But this is certainly not the essayists' fault -- how else can you do it? -- and if you are a Compleat Brunnerian, this book ought to be right up your alley. And again, I enjoyed all the insider shoptalk kind a stuff. Unless you're enough of a Brunner freak to want to buy the above, you probably won't much want Double, Double (which is not an Ace double but a Ballantine single). Not that there's a whole lot wrong with it -- there just ain't all that much right with it. It reads like a Bor possibly a C-movie, and I'm sure they'll love it down at the drugstore. Interstellar Menace meets a British rock group. It's a shame writers have to do this stuff to stay alive. Ah. but Quicksand There's one of the most amazing and eccentric books in the field, closer to mainstream than anything else I've seen from Brunner. Parts of it delight me, parts thrill me, parts depress me (the parts that are supposed to, I mean), and the only complaint I have is with the rotten thumbtacked ending, which insists on wrenching the book back into traditional science fiction at the cost of grace and plausibility -- an outstandingly bad tomato surprise. The book mostly concerns itself with the psychological deterioration and collapse of a young psychologist, brought on by exposure to a lovely young patient who is either quite mad or a shipwrecked time-traveler. Her tales of the world she comes from -- even though he considers them fantasy -- point up to him the essential boredom and meaninglessness and opression of his small-town life, and in the end he comes to believe in her world, not because his logic proves it to be libera truth but because it's such an attractive fantasy. And because he likes her legs -- eventually he springs her from the bughouse he works in and flees the country with her, with predictably disastrous results. Right there you got the makings of a fine, poignant novel -- but Brunner (apparently in the interests of kicking his poor hero one more time while he's down) throws in a switcheroo that would have delighted Hugo Gems back and annoyed hell out of me. I still recommend it -- in the main it's an excellent novel -- but I have seldom seen such a dumb ending. Last Lines: #) "The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain." #) "Julio just said: 'Don't gell, Bee!.' And then winked." Speaking of CoD (Crud of the Denouement), boy does this next one give me trouble. I will say out front that I enjoyed reading Frank Herbert's Under Pressure, and even stayed up rather late to finish it. But it's got so many enormous holes in it that it would take almost a whole column to list them all. A random sample: the which-isthe-spy? business that kept me reading with such interest turned out to be a wet firecracker. There was a spy, but with no conceivable function except to blow himself up with everyone else on the submarine. He tries this at the beginning of the voyage, fails, and never again tries that or anything -- he has no plan, and his job could have been done by a dockhand. (He says he didn't kill the man in the reactor room -- but then who did smash the communicator that could have saved the man, and why?) The solution to the mystery of why-have-the-last-tensubs-all-failed-to-come-back? -- not spies, something else -- struck me as trite and simplisticly contrived -- as did the hero's Ingenious Solution. The conspiracy to dethrone BuSecurity's power and influence, revealed at the end, seemed alarmingly like what produced Bu Security in the first place (ah, but we're the Good Guys). Most extraordinarily of all, the hero, Ensign Ramsey, although we are told that he has a wife and two children, never once thinks of them in the entire nerveshattering course of the voyage, never even makes reference to them in his thoughts ("tell my wife my last thoughts were of other things"). The wife is dutifully hauled onstage at beginning and end, and their relationship is described as deep and loving, but she never becomes real -- and never at any time do they discuss or mention their children. This is a convincing psychological drama? The fact that it attempts to be is the book's greatest problem, for there are no real people in it, only psychological types and syndromes and constructs walking around on legs. They interact fine; but they don't breathe worth a damn. I didn't believe the hero's mental collapse at the end; in fact, I didn't believe much about the book. Using atomic subs to steal foreign oil in underwater tugballoons a mile long? Oil that the enemy itself hasn't noticed right under its nose? Attempting to make the story "realistic" is the book's second worst problem. This is done by an attention to physical detail and authenticity of technical jargon so intense and plausible that half the time I couldn't understand what the hell they were talking about. None of the jargon ever got explained, so it shot right past me, and it ought to shoot right past anyone not familiar with the nuts-and-bolts design layout and the operational routine of a four-man atomic sub-tug. (Are you?) Herbert could have taught me a lot about, say, the specifics of radiation overdose and treatment -- but that would have interrupted all the masterful suspense and pacing, and so all he told me was what a man in a hurry would call the hypo required. I agree that "psychological novels" ought to be written -- but their Scylla and Charybdis are Samuel Delany's Triton -- which was quite logical, plausible (within its assumptions) and consistent, but dull as hell -- and Under Pressure, which is exciting nonsense. It's also a twenty-ycar-old book, for which one should make some allowances -- but none of the weak points are the kind that time excuses. There's nothing worse than an unbearably suspenseful story that fails to deliver at the end. A First Line: #) "He had quite a rum-blossom on him for a kid, I thought at first." And a Last Line: #) "And Roy land would have to try to avoid answering him very sharply: 'Yes. This once we damn well do.' " I understand this latest Phil Dick novel, A Scanner Darkly, is the first he's written without the aid of speed, and appropriately enough it's largely a dialectic on the ruinous cost of prolonged drug abuse. There's a dedication at the end to fifteen friends of Dick's who've destroyed themselves with dope, listing the extent of damages each incurred (seven are dead, three are permanently psychotic, like that) -- Dick calls this drug misuse "a social error... not different from your life-style, it is only faster." "If," he says, "there was any 'sin,' it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-andeffect." The "sin,"  think, was that these people wanted to be able to keep on having a good time forever by pushing a button, to rip off the Universe for a good time without paying for it. The "punishment" for this error has always been as drastic, and is not too great, and cause-and-effect is any thing but morally neutral. That tirade aside, the book ain't exactly terrific either. It's the sometimes fascinating, sometimes hilarious, usually deadly boring story of a federal narc so wasted by the drugs he saturates his brain with that he begins spying on himself, and eventually busts himself. This notion could have made an extraordinary novellette -- but only as wild black humor. What Dick did was waste enormous heaps of paper trying to make it a plausible science fiction novel, thereby destroying it. He sets it in the future, but every time his attention wanders it becomes the present. He throws in a sort of "invisibility suit" which is supposed to make the premise actubelieve that the feds hire narcs without ever seeing them or knowing their names -- and he adds a lot of pseudoscientific hogwash about the left and right hemispheres of the hero's brain each achieving autonomy, for a truly split personality. The end result is madness, but not the divine kind. Along the way you get to watch the background cast who represent Dick's doper friends wittily and engagingly dose themselves into imbecility (a rather short progression), and as the immortal Jethro (of Homer And) once said, "This sure don't fascinate me none." Last (wo Last Lines: #) " 'Yes, your divinity,' said the captains, without a trace of humor in their voices." #) "But they had never left a solar system so gratefully or so fast." Okay. Now we get down to it (I'm putting this here instead of at (be end to foil you bums who tried to peek ahead when .I told you not to). How many of you figured out what I've been doing? If you don't recognize any of the lines I've thrown at you, then all (his has been wasted. If you do recognize the lines and know title and author as well, they you already know where I'm going. But if you find most of those lines hauntingly familiar, naggingly evocative, but can't identify (heir creator or title, then you'll be as surprised and delighted as I was. The stories, in order, are #) "The Rocket of #," #) "The Word of Gum," #) "The Silly Season," #) "The Advent On Channel #," #) "The Mindworm," #) "The Little Black Bag," #) "The Marching Morons," #) "Gomez," #) "The Altar At Midnight," #) "Two Dooms," II) "The Adventurer," and #) "The remorseful." And the kicker is that all twelve were written by one man, Cyril M. Kombluth, and (he second kicker is that they are every one available (along with seven more) in a single collection, The Best of CM. Kornbluth, for a mere #. To my earlier disparaging remarks about anthos, note this as the mos( spectacular exception imaginable -- this is the one (hat you should give to that uncle or niece or fellow commuter who's been bugging you to recommend some sf. I haven't enjoyed a book so much in years, and will treasure it always. I fee! like having it bronzed or something; I mean it's dynamite. Fred Pohl's brief "An Appreciation" intro to his late collaborator moved me, touched me, made me cry -- and the stories made me whoop aloud. What Cyril felt about the war that ultimately killed him is spelled out in his last story, "Two Dooms" -- but I cannot but hate it. I just finished reading the last book Cyril ever wrote, The Man of Cold Rages (as "Jordan Park." non-sf. Pyramid paperback), and oh God, if he had lived, the wonders beyond imagining that would now be populating the magazines and bookracks... If you don't remember each and every one of the lines I fed you, go ye forth at once unto the bookseller and give him your tokens saying, "Kornblulh Kombluth." If you do, go buy it anyhow -- you'll enjoy rereading them. God bless Ballantine for this reissue. Just when times was gettin' lean in Anthoville... Two leads, a buncha hatchet jobs for the bloodthirsty, and a certified masterpiece -- are we done? Would I ask if we were? Two more things to mention before I stagger off to the Home For The Criminally Confused. First, the column in which I mentioned Bakka. the Toronto-based sf store that has a mail-order service, has brought welcome feedback. A lady named Valerie Barnebey from Calais, Maine has hipped me to an outfit called T-K Graphics, PO Box #, Baltimore MD #, which has a mail-order operation comparable in size and scope with Bakka, and will avoid a hundred years of hassle with the damned Customs parasites for most of you. T-K's catalogue looks extremely good, and it says here they will pay postage and handling on all orders. I haven't checked 'em out myself -- as a reviewer I don't need mail order -- but I've asked around and the word is good. Those of you up there in the States, check it out for yourself -- and if you have any hassle, lemme know. T-K claims between fifteen and twenty thousand people on their mailing list, so they must be doing something right. You forgot, didn't you? I only told you a year ago, and you forgot. The assembled ranks of sf publishers are waiting to hear from you -- they would like to know what sort of stuff you want them to publish. The writers are likewise interested in knowing what sort of stuff you'd like them to write. This year's World Science Fiction Conat the Fontainbleau in Miami Beach, Florida -- but if you can't manage to attend, you can still cast your vote for the # Hugo Awards, from the comfort of whatever you squat on when you're at home. Just send # for a supporting mem#, Cherry Hill, N.J. #. They will send you, in addition to other goodies, a bon a fide Hugo ballot for you to fill in and mail. By the time you read this, it'll probably be too late to nominate -- but you can at least vote. Let the voice of the readers be heard in the land: tell the nice publishers what you want to see. (And remember, my first novel Telempath happens to be eligible this year.) People who don't vote for Hugos deserve the sf they get.  Up the Irish Quinlan forever! The AllSoul is calling Quinlan The All-Soul is calling Quinlan. That segment of the All-Soul designated to chronicle the history of the man known as Quinlan reporting: The first recorded case of disciplinary action taken against Quinlan occurred in conference # A.D., Earth-time (Old Style). Quinlan had just finished a term as a man who had acquired a fair amount of earthly goods without any discernible trade or occupation. His soul had just returned to Interim when he was called to a conference with that precursor of the All-Soul, known at that time to Quinlan as God. Quinlan sauntered into the office. "You retain human form?" God asked Quinlan, sweeping stars aside with his raised eyebrow. "ft suits me," Quinlan shrugged, and crossed his legs. "No matter," God concluded wisely. Any being who dwells only on Quinlan's small failings can become bogged down in trivialities for lifetimes. "Quinlan," continued the Deity, "your case concerns me." "Don't worry about a thing," Quinlan responded. "As soon as I can get suited up again I'll be out of your hair. I don't intend to hang around Interim very long." "That is part of what concerns me. Quinlan, what did you do for a living during this last term?" ( "Well, it's a little complicated." "I'll lake the time to figure it out." "Well, basically I was involved in the reapportionment of resources." "Financial resources?" "And other kinds." "I see." "You'd be surprised at the terrible inequities that prevail on Earth these days. Some people got it all, and the rest are trying to hang on to nothing. The rich get richer and the poor get shat on." "You've always been quite a phrasemaker, Quinlan." "Uh, excuse that. I got carried away." "Not at all. You were saying?" "Right. Well, when I'd see some poor sou! laboring under the burden of just 'way too much money, or land, or stock, or whatever, I'd just do my best to help him out, and pass the surplus on to some who weren't quite so well off in terms of earthly goods. I really pity rich men on earth. It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needte, you know..." "Yes, Quinlan, I made that one up myself. So your job was basically redistribution of goods." "Exactly." "Becoming, in the process, a rich man yourself." "Well, I had a lot of overhead. And I don't work cheap. If you don't value yourself, no one else will." "Quinlan, you were a con man." "You've been talking to my detractors." "That's hard to avoid doing, here." Quinlan shrugged. "Here's why I called you, Quinlan. I just don't think you're making any progress. I don't think you're learning anything." "In this last lifetime I lived to be eightyseven, against the express wishes of some pretty powerful and nasty men. I must have learned something." God shook His wearying head. "I'm not talking about earthly wisdom, Quinlan." "To each his own. Or His own." "You mentioned earlier that you were planning to go right back out. I don't think that's a good idea. Take a century or so and ponder your past lives. At least a century." "Hey! Hey, I can't do that. I've gotta get back right now!" "Why now, Quinlan?" "Listen, it's a very critical time there now. As You well know, there's a crisis point in every civilization, when it becomes a race as to whether or not the inhabitants will blow up their planet before they manage to get off it. That's where Earth is now. I've got to be there to help out." "You want to go to earth so you can get off Earth?" "Get off, and take some good people with me." "That's very laudable, Quinlan." Quinlan fidgeted while the Deity thought. "ALl right, Quinlan, I'll let you go back as soon as you want. But only under certain restrictions." "Hey, I get to pick what I want, as long as I've got enough karma in my account. That's the rule." "We may make an exception in your case. What did you plan to go back as?" "Well, there's a man right now in Texas who's trying to corner the bourbon market. I figure he'll make it, in about twenty years. And his wife's pregnant, though he doesn't know it yet -- " Quinlan stopped as he perceived that the ponderous head was shaking. "No?" he said. "Not this time," said the Deity. "I want you to leant humility, and to gain a sense of community. I'm going to send you back as a Siamese twin." Quinlan recoiled. "Um -- With whom were you thinking of joining me?" "Let Me see, I believe Biggers is looking for a new term." "Biggers! Biggers! His last term he lived to be fifty, and died a virgin!" God nodded proudly. "He is very holy. He has acquired almost enough karma to join Us." "You're putting a watchdog on me," Quinlan said, and stood in thought. "All right," he said finally. "I'll do it, but I've got to be Irish." "Very well. There's an Irish family living in Yugoslavia right now -- " "Near the border?" Quinlan asked quickly, and was answered by a slow shaking of the head. "Make it America, and you've got a deal." The Deity stared hard at the dealer, and finally said quietly, "America then." "Good," said Quinlan, "I'll go get ready." He stopped on his way out. "We gonna be joined at the. uh, elbow?" "The hip, I think." "Ah well," replied Quinlan. He started to hurry out, then stopped again. "A few minutes ago," he said, "You referred to Yourself as Us. Have You already been -- joined?" God nodded. "A very few have achieved that blessed reward, Quinlan. There are also saints, and near-saints, on Earth at this very moment." "Uh huh," said Quinlan, and he was gone. God dismissed the incident from His mind until later in His heavenly day. "Did Quinlan take my Siamese twin offer?" He asked an assistant off-handedly. "Oh yes," replied the angel. "He and Biggers have been there for -- " He consulted a card. " -- twenty years now." "And what is Quinlan doing?" The angel consulted the card once more. "He's in medical school. Wants to be a surgeon. He's specializing in -- " " -- surgical removal of Siamese twins," the Deity finished. "Hey, that's right. I have a feeling he's going to be pretty good at his work, too." "I'm sure he'll succeed." "Yeah, and about that. Chief, we've been geting some pretty steady prayers from Biggers, asking that he does." God nodded sadly. "You know, Chief, before he went down this time, Biggers bad almost enough karma in his account to reach Nirvana. And after twenty years with Quinlan I think he's earned it. But the man's about to have a breakdown. We may have to yank him early, just like last time." God gave His approval. "But wait," He said, "until Quinlan has completed his medical training." Little more was heard of Quinlan for some time thereafter, until one day, millenia later, when he was found in the watting room at Interim. Quinlan rubbed his eyes and looked around him at the other quietly waiting souls. "Boy, I didn't get enough this time," he said. "Enough what?" the soul next to him asked politely. "Enough anything," Quinlan replied. "I was a scout, 'way out on the edge of the galaxy. You ever spend any time in a one-man scout ship?" "I don't think so," said his neighbor. "God, it's terrible. You've got your movie tapes, your mail tapes, your woman tapes, your dream tapes and pretty soon you start feeling like a tape yourself. I've got to spend some more time with people this time around." "There aren't going to be many people to spend time with," his neighbor informed him. "Yeah, I noticed that last time out," Quinlan said. "We're kind of dying out, aren't we?" "We're Moving On." "Oh, is that it?" The other nodded. The One is filling. More souls have passed on through Nirvana than remain behind." "No kidding," said Quinlan. "Well, when I get back I'm certainly going to do my part to perpetuate the species." He looked closer at his neighbor. "Don't I know you?" he said. "Quite possibly. I have been many men and women." Sutton, weren't you?" His neighbor smiled faintly. "Yes," he said quietly, "I remember that term." He laughed ruefully. "That one set me back a bit in my karma account." "Yeah, but it bought you some good memories, I'll bet." Quinlan laughed. "Vivid ones, at least," said the former Sutton. "Yeah, I knew you then. I was -- " "You were Quinlan. You've been Quinlan every time." "Yes," said Quinlan happily. "I suppose I have been." "There's one thing I've wondered about," said Sutton suddenly. "You know, don't you? When you're back, you always remember who you are." "Sometimes," Quinlan admitted. "Pretty often, in fact, lately." "How do you manage that?" "I had it written into my contract." "Contract? You have a contract?" "You mean," said Quinlan innocently, "you don't?" To drop that line of inquiry, he added, "What are you going back as this time?" "I'm going to be a monk on Arctunis." "Oh," said Quinlan noncommittally. "Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I think this will be my last trip." "Oh? Well, good luck. That sounds real nice. That's, uh, that's good" He nodded politely and walked away, muttering again, "That's good. "Good and depressing," he added when he was out of the room. That's when he got the call again to report to the One. God was no more. He was enhanced; He was More Than God. He was well on His way to being the All-Soul . Quinlan, still in his mortal form, could not look at Him. The Voice was deafening when It said, "Quinlan!" "I'm right here," said Quinlan. "Quinlan," said the Voice, more quietly. "You have not many trips left. Man is a dying species." "Really?" asked Quinlan in an interested voice. "What's going to replace him? I've had my eye on a tribe of very advanced apes in the Arc heron system -- " The Voice was louder. "Nothing is going to replace Man. There will soon be no more use for him. Soon all will be part of the AllSoul." "No kidding?" asked Quinlan, hedging away. "So soon?" "Time is at an end, Quinlan. There will soon be no more need for the testing and training program." "Well, I hope You and the rest of the All-Soul will have a nice time. And be sure and look me up some time. We can -- " The Voice interrupted him. "You will be a part of Us then, Quinlan. Without you. We will be incomplete. And without Us, you will have no existence." "Uh huh," said Quinlan. "And what if I don't want to join?" The Voice became calm, grave. "We will be calling you, Quinlan. Henceforth, you will always hear the Voice, calling you home." "Well, that's fine," said Quinlan. "You keep calling, and when I'm ready -- " "Quinlan," said the Voice, as Quinlan turned away. "You were made for Us. You were only born in order to come Home again someday." "I'll bear that in mind." It was immediately after this meeting that Quinlan made his daring daylight raid on the Karma Bank, and went back as an alairess whose metabolism made it impossible for her to gain weight. It took half a heavenly day to track the culprit and assemble evidence, and by that time Quinlan was fortyfive. It was decided to leave Quinlan in herhis current status, but to collapse herhis financial structure and render herhim frigid. Quinlan appeared in Interim a few heavenly minutes later, having killed himselfherself by way of some very cheap liquor in combination with exposure to the elements. "Whooec," said Quinlan weakly. He staggered through the waiting room; a ridiculous exaggeration, since he no longer had a physical system with which to circulate alcohol. Sentence had already been passed, and Quinlan was taken away. "Did you have enough of everything this time?" asked the Voice, before he was out of sight. ing in the direction of the One. sponded the Voice gravely. called, and he was led away. At the end of his sentence, when Quinlan appeared once more before the One, there was no trace of the physical in his composition. Quinlan was, like the One, a creature of pure spirit. "Whew,' said Quinlan. "I didn't know You still had a Hell. D'You know I was the only one there?" "Yes," said the Voice. "Well, what now?" asked Quinlan. "I'm ready to get back. This time I'll take any model you've got for me. I want you to see that I'm repentant and all. What have you got, a hunchback? Leper? Screenwriter?" His voice trailed off as he looked up expectantly. "All extinct," said the Voice. "All have come Home. All of Man." Quinlan felt a chill. "Everybody? "Harry? Louise? Are you in there? Where are they?" "AH are here, Quinlan. All are dissolved in the One." The Voice grew more ponderous. "We are the AllSoul now, Quinlan. You have no Home except here. It is time for the joining." "You're the All-Soul, then," said Quinlan, his panic gone. "Or the All-But-One-Soul. But you don't need me. I'm going back. I told You about that species of ape. Send me back as one of them. In a few thousand miilenia -- " Galileo Galileo The New Showplace of Great Science Fiction  Fact Written By EstobJisJimJ Stn r l Haw Talent. Not Available At Newsstands #", tan, Bredaridi, O'DanneB, Jr., S morn. Issue # (Dee. #J Clement, Bradbury, foster, Liclitenberg, features, reviews, t mare. Published Quarterly: Sample SI. SO Subs. # Issues #; # Issues St Limited Editions. Order Nowl # Newbury St., Boston, HA #I # "It is not possible," said the Voice, Our Voice, calmly. "Sure it is," said Quinlan. "You can do anything. Make me a mutation. An ape with a mind. I'll stay with them forever," "You are not one of them, Quinlan. You are one of Us." We reached for him. "No!" screamed Quinlan. We drew back in pain. "You can't take me if I'm not ready to go," he shouted. "I'm not one of You! "Listen to me," he went on, growing calmer. "You've all forgotten. Forgotten what it is to be what I am. A man. I am the proudest thing in the universe. The only thing that walks in the galaxy and names himself. It doesn't matter if I have two arms and legs or tentacles growing out of my forehead. As long as I live, and breathe, and think and excrete and speak what I think. I'm a man. And I won't give that up!" He was shouting again. "We are calling you to Us," We said, with some heat. "I won't come," said Quinlan calmly. "Now or later. You'll just have to do without this one. This soul is mine. And I won't give it up. "You know what this reminds me of?" he asked suddenly, smiling at the memory. "This reminds me of when I was taking drugs of one kind or another. When I was sane and sober, I knew what the world was, and what I was in it for. I had all (he answers. And then the dtug would take over, and show me a new reality. And suddenly I really knew the answers. Logic I had never seen before. And as long as (hat feeling lasted, I knew that I was the only man in the universe that knew what it was all about. "Then I'd come down, and my fever wisdom became gibberish. Until the next time. And I never could figure out which point of view was the right one. "That's how we are, You and me. You know You're right, and I know I am. And I'll never give up my point of view." He stopped, and then suddenly shouted again. "Listen to me, you bureaucracy of souls. Remember with me. Remember how it is to be lonely, or to be with someone else without engulfing each other. Or to be by yourself and not mind it, to relish the solitude. "I can't come with you," he sobbed. "Send me back, because I can't stay here. Take me," he added, almost defiant again, and it'll be just like you swallowed a chicken bone. For eternity. We'll just be choking on each other forever. "Try to remember," he trailed off. "Some of you -- Some of you could remember if you try." We conferred hastily, and then the Voice spoke to Quinlan again. "We will grant you your request, Quinlan. We will give you one more term. One more lifetime, as the only human in the galaxy. One more term to learn true loneliness, and to come Home to Us." "One .more is all I ask. For now," said Quinlan, smiling, and he was dispatched. He was made a mutation, a hairless ape with a mind. (And somehow, Quinlan had contrived to be bom an Irish ape.) Neither his parents nor the rest of his tribe understood Quinlan, and he was soon abandoned. Just as he deserved. So the matter now stands. I? There is no I. There is only the AllSoul, of which I -- of which this is a segment. We are One. We are indissoluble. I don't -- I -- (end of record) There was another tribe of apes. When Quinlan was ten, a strange hairless girl was born to them. The second tribe lived on an island halfway across the planet from the first. But Quinlan and the girl found each other. Quinlan came to her in a leaking, crippled rocket left over from man's last empire. Their first child was slow in coming, but after that there were many. Quinlan and his wife raised them in two separate communities. Interbreeding was bad genetics, but it was the only chance they had for survival as a race. Danger was constant on man's last planet. Quinlan didn't live to see the third generation. He came back, almost immediately, as his own granddaughter. She was very prolific.  Dear Mr. Baen: Jerry Poumellc's article in the June issue of Galaxy was particularly intriguing. As a meteorologist I found his report of the lack of solar nutrinos especially so. That this lack could be due to the sun having "gone out" fits with other information. I seem to remember reading in the local paper a couple of months ago a article in which a group of astronomers reported having detected an increase in the rotational rate of the sun (this would be hard to detect since the rotational rate varies by (attitude). If (he sun were collapsing, conservation of angular momentum would cause an increase in its rotational rate. In last month's Scientific American, James Eady described (with highly convincing evidence) the # year sunspot cycle. Of special interest is the accompanying chart of annual average temperature. This should indicate (with some assumptions) the amount of energy reaching the Earth. The variation in annual temperature fit the sunspot cycle very nicely. (Climatic change can be explained by these varitation in temperature. And, as an extention, if there are # year cycles, why not # of whole species?) Then if the sunspot activity is evidence of the solar energy producing mechanism's operation (convection currents), the absence of these would be evidence of the lack of a production of energy (and a lack of nutrinos and a general cooling and shrinking and speeding up of the rotation of the sun). I work near an office which monitors solar activity. I wandered through the other day and casually asked "How's business?" The solar forecaster on duty stifled a yawn and showed me the single, small, high-lattitude spot on the sun. Not much for what's supposed to be a period of maximum activity in the I I year cycle! James Eady remarked privately several months ago, "If we don't have any activity by lilac time we're in trouble." When did the lilacs bloom? With the gravitational collapse of the sun, perhaps the increase in internal pressure reignites the energy producing mechanism. The sun would thus expand as the center becomes hotter and more energetic. With the primary heat producing mechanism operating only where the pressure was sufficient, convection currents, sunspots, would As the sun expands, (he pressure in the center could lessen to the extent where the mechanism cannot be supported. Thermal momentum could carry the expansion well beyond this point. Then the sun would cool slightly and (he cycle would repeat. The sun (and thus others like it) would be a variable star. An explanation for the sun's variability might explain the nuclear mechanism for variable stars with a more rapid Whenever  get a little self-satisfied about our understanding of the universe,something ghastly comes along to humble me. But I am in a rather lucky field. Meteorologists don't know enough about the physics of the Barth's atmosphere (or any atmosphere) to have many "proven" theories. Even with all the geniuses who've graced science, understanding comes only after years of dogwork. Roy Kimbrell # Beale Circle Omaha. NE # Does complete and final imdersiandinp ever come at .all? I wonder. Dear Jim: Philip Schreffler's article is the sort of thing we've already had loo much of. Does the Literary Establishment ignore sf St say that it's all Buck Rogers junk? Very well then, we will ignore the mainstream  say that it's all Alexander Portnoy junk. That'll fix them! Who wants to belong to their silly old Establishment anyway? As I say, it's been done before (Campbell did it for years), and it doesn't really help. The man who accepts everything (he Establishment tells him  the man who rejects everything the Establishment tells him are both slaves. And Sehrcfflcr's argument is outdated. As almost everyone else seems to have noticed, the academic world has stopped ignoring sf. Now we have sf courses, and scholarly sf journals, and even Cliffs Notes so that the people who have to study the books don't have to read them. Funny thing about that. Has anyone pointed out that (he only contemporary writers who are noticed by Academe are those who have already been recognized by the sf world, like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert,  Le Guin? Makes sense, I suppose. Having to wade through all of sf without a guide is a fate I would not wish on the most pompous pedant. I'm glad (hat some good sf writers have been recognized, but this situation does seem to lead to a paradox. Writers like Silvcrbcrg  Malzbcrg, who arc perceived by much of the sf world as too "literary," fail to get the attention in their own field that would enable their supposed natural audience in the academic world to notice them. Geis  Alter were up to their usual high standards, but their call for more government (perhaps computer-aided) misses one important point. As government grows bigger  more complex, it does an increasingly worse job of giving people what they want. Not only does Big Government fail to satisfy people's need for an Authority that will tell them what to do  what to think, but the increase in policestate methods has made people less safe from violent crime, and the increase in welfare-state programs has made people less financially secure (via inflation). The increase in the size, complexity,  apparent power of Big Government has been matched by a rise in the popularity of small communities like the Moonics  the Children of God, which give people the mental  material security they crave, often by being more totalitarian than the government dares to be. Arthur Hlavaty # Coligni Ave. New Rochelle, NY #I Dear Mr. Baen: Applause, cheers, and much gratitude for Philip A. Schreffler (May #, "Ray Gun Evaporates Mainstream") and his assault on the Mainstream Myth. Sf writers (and readers) are often arrogant about their field, but few would dare to claim that sf is the only "true" literature and all else is just the "genres" -- or worse, trash. Having been associated with a university, both as a student taking futile creative writing courses whose teachers wished they were good enough to make money at writing and so spent half (heir time telling you that writing should not be for money and as an editor at a university press, where those pathetically bad manuscripts kept coming in from Ph.D.s whose writing talent should have been confined to bathroom walls where it could be painted over now and then, I have had more than ample exposure to the pretensions of the literati. And here is the truth about the myth; "Mainstream" is never written by anybody good. Good writers write for the markets -- Dickens for (he newspapers with his dreadful cliff-hanger chapter endings; Shakespeare to please the rubbernecking groundlings; Milton to get brownie points from Cromwell's superreligious government; etc. ad infinitum. Then, fifty years after a particularly popular writer is dead, all the universities are studying him. Then, hallowed by the sacerdotal rites of English # and master's theses (rhymes with feces), said writers are buried under waste matter until, at last, they ripen into "great writers" and are thus models for the mainstream. Sadly, huge numbers of young college students, reasonably intelligent. arc tricked and brainwashed into believing that, in order to be a "good" writer, they must write "like" one of these baptized-into-the-maitistream dead writers. Or like John Updike, one or the other. And should they dare to write science fiction, besides the Decks of vomit on their paper as it is returned, they earn the scorn -- if not wrath -- of the professor whose sensibilities have thus been assaulted. The mainstream is just one genre, like any other. I like to call it the "literary genre" and I happen not to like the pretensions of its practitioners, with some few -- and delightful -- exceptions. There are other genres I don't like -- westerns, for example, and big sexy blockbusters (bustblockers?). There are genres I love -- juveniles, science fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire. But my preferences do not label me tasteless (within each genre I am certainly capable of making reasonable judgments about good, bad. and indifferent); nor do I consent to being drummed out of the intelligentsia (my IQ qualifies me for membership in all but the most exclusive intellectual cliques). I just don't happen to like the "mainstream" genre very much, that's all. And that's why I'm glad to learn through Schreffler's lovely piece of writing that I am not alone! I write science fiction (and juveniles, and satire) because I love to read those things -- and because I love to write sf literature defecate on my grave if I should ever claim to quit writing sf in order to move "up" to the mainstream. I may write mainstream someday -- may even sell it (we all can dream) -- but that's a step sideways. Maybe even a little bit down. Applause for Schreffler and a of confidence for Galaxy. Sincerely, Orsen Scott Card #I "L" St. ## Salt Lake City. Utah # Dear Mr. Baen, I do not necessarily try to correct a person when I feel he or she is wrong about something. But you are a magazine editor, and as such you influence thousands -- perhaps someone in your position of power influencing people wrongly. So I'm writing to you. In your editorial "Epistle to the I Christians" (Galaxy. Dec. '#), you considered Genesis #:#, "Be fruitful and multiply..." to be Cod's "Marching Orders" for (he human race. And you said that "anyone who both believes in the Old Testament and accepts the validity of the foregoing argument (your interpretation of Genesis #:#) must consider himself as divinelyinstructed to do all in his power to further (he progress of humankind into Space." But anyone who has read (he Bible knows that there are throughout it many instructions and orders from God to humankind. When your "Commander" has been giving you "orders" for thousands of years, which "order" do you "fully commit" to? Which order do you do "all in your power" to obey, over and above any other order? You pick the order that seems to be the "prime directive," (he order (hat our "Commander" feels is the main and most important order; the greatest A person asked God (Christ), "which commandment...is the greatest?" And Christ replied, " 'You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it; 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments the whole law is based, and the prophets as well." (Matthew #:#-#) "There is no other commandment greater than these." (Mark #: #) So, for anyone who believes in the Bible, if there is any "order" that he or she must "do all in his or her power" to obey...any goal that he or she must resist and defy any person, process or philosophy that acts to the detriment of that goal"... any goal (hat he (she) must be "fully committed to"... that order, that goal must be the one stated in Matthew #:#-# and Mark #:#-#, not Genesis #:#. Sincerely, Ronald E. Jackowski #I Union Ave. Linden, NJ # In what possible way can living in the spirit of Matthew #:#-# and Mark #:#-#I conflict with Genesis #-#? WE send to: NY, NY # issues. 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Solve your Christmas gift problems today QdldiXy # Saving # on each #-Year Subscription (Add I postage outside U.S.  Canada) Please enter one year subscriptions as indicated. My remittance of  is enclosed. Gift for Gift for Addrp# Address City City      State Zip State Zip Gift for Be sure to fill out this space. My name Address Address City City State Zip State Zip n Please include my subscription September I # Vol. #, No. # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Stephen Fabian, Art Director J.E. Pournelle, Ph. D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Spider Robinson, Contributing Editor Elaine Will, Assistant Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Consulting Editor James Patrick Baen, Editor  Grow or die! This implacable law of nature Is as true for social organisms as it is for biological ones. Could it be that those who tell us "think small," "use less," "do without," -- "don't grow" -- are the instruments of the death-wish element of the human psyche? Re-elect Joe "Our Guy" SpielmanI He'll give you a perfectly regulated society; if you're not in business, all it will cost you is your freedom -- and your standard of living. "Get Happy" TM offers perfect bliss -- surely price is too high to pay...? Wherein General Titus Jenkins, faced with the most enigmatic challenge of his career, rises to the occasion -- but not quite high enough! Nuclear devices have been secreted in every major American city. They are going off, one by one... for Decisions," Jerry laid out the options. Now let's take a look at the consequences... 'Tve always been a backward lad," quoth the Spider. So why was he voted "Best Critic" in the latest Locus Poll? Where to find it. Cover by Stephen Fabian All interior artwork by Stephen Fabian of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Offices: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y. #. Editorial Office: PO Box #, Planetarium Sta., New York, N.Y. #. Single copy: #, #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. Ail rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y. and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A.  #I All he wanted was a quiet life; Achilles' choice was not for Kevin Senecal -- but it was not for him to choose... For Dan Alderson, the sane genius... First he heard the click of the switchblade. Then the whining, feral voice. "Hey man, gimme money!" There were four of them in his path: two slouching against the wall, two erect and staring. Westwood beyond showed lights, but it might have been in another city for all the good it did him. Kevin tasted sour bile, felt the sharp knot of fear in his stomach. They moved closer. "Come on, hand it over, you sumbich." The spokesman's blade moved in intricate, blurringly fast lasses inches from Kevin's face. It gleamed dully despite the powersaving partial blackout in the city. Ihc blade's wielder laughed as Kevin cringed away. Kevin was a well-muscled sixlooter, had played football for unior year before the pressure of Studies made him drop from the team; he was certain he was more than a match for any of them -- for any two -- but the knife seemed hungry for his eyes, and he felt only fear and shame. His legs wouldn't move. He reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. "Watch," the mugger said. "Take it off." The whining voice was filled with contempt and sadistic power-lust. Kevin felt it wash over him, and felt contempt for himself. "Turn out all your pockets. Deucey, rub him over." Another of the young gangsters -- they couldn't, Kevin thought, be more than sixteen -- came up behind him and rubbed his hands over Kevin's clothes. The hands moved insultingly, paused in insulting places, then reached into his pockets and took out his lighter. "Aw, he's got cigarettes," Deucey said. "Good for you, mother," the spokesman said. "We cut you if you don't have cigarettes. Cut you good. Now we miss the fun. Get in there." The knife jerked to indicate a dark alleyway. Kevin was beyond terror. He had never experienced the feeling before, but he recognized it now, like something known previously from a faded photograph. They pushed him off the street and away from his last hope of rescue. The street lights dimmed even more just as they entered the alley; it was almost pitch black in the stinking passageway between buildings. His foot kicked something, trash or a dead cat, and insanely he thought of the city garbage strike -- would anyone find him for weeks? He was certain the gangsters were going to kill him, and kept worrying about that: would the strike end in time for them to find his body? Suddenly he was surrounded by the smell of naptha, strong enough to overpower the smells of urine and decay in the alley. He felt a chill on scalp and shoulders. Lighter fluid. They were going to bum him alive! Desperation drove him forward, away from his captors for a moment. The knife had terrified him, but the threat of becoming a living torch did something else. He was no less afraid -- more so if that were possible -- but now there was rage and hatred as well. He cast about for a weapon, anything to defend himself. He was certain he was going to die, but now he wanted to take them with him, to end this humiliation and show them he was a man -- His hand struck a garbage can. It had a lid, and he seized that by the handle. Years before, when he was only seventeen -- it was only five years ago, but at this moment it felt like two lifetimes -- he had participated in a tournament held by the Society for Creative Anachronism. swords, but their armor and other equipment had been real. He'd been fascinated by the use of shields as weapons. A hand grabbed his hair, and despair gave him strength of a different order than when he'd He swung the lid blindly, felt it clash, then swung it backhand against the spokesman's face. He felt bone crunch, and shouted his triumph. As the first gangster screamed Kevin used the shield to deflect another half-seen knife attack, then again blindly swung the lid backhand with all his strength. He couldn't see anything, but he could feel when he connected, and he wanted to hurt them. He hated them with all his soul, and he wanted them to feel as humiliated as he had felt. He struck out again and again, felt the improvised shield strike home at least once more. Then he was past them and in the street. The sight of freedom ahead robbed him of his rage; he turned and ran. Two of them followed him for a block, but they didn't have the wind to keep up. He ran on and on, long after he could no longer hear their heel-beats behind him.    The Los Angeles policeman showing his badge at Kevin's door was big and burly, and looked as if he ought to be in uniform instead of neat civilian tunic and trousers. Kevin's landlady stood disapprovingly behind him in the hall. "Detective Sergeant Mason," the policeman said. "May I come in?" Kevin couldn't think of anything he had done. He was exhausted from standing in lines for his food ration stamps, and he wanted to send the policeman away, but he was afraid that his landlady would believe he was in trouble with the law. Mrs. Jeffries was a good friend to her student tenants. She would let them be late with the rent, but she didn't want police trouble in her rooming house. "What's it about?" Kevin asked. His voice sounded much more calm than he felt. "This yours?" The policeman held up a wallet. "Uh -- " "It's got your ID in it," the detective said. "I'm returning it. No big deal. Want to talk about how you lost it." "Yes, sure, it's mine," Kevin said. He felt relief, and saw that Mrs. Jeffries had lost her worried look. Kevin winked at her and got a slight smile in return before she left and the policeman came in. The room wasn't very large. There was a couch that could make into a bed, but it was long enough for Kevin to sleep on without unfolding it, and he never opened it. The walls were lined with bookshelves. Over the years the many students who'd lived there had added to the shelving until there wasn't a bare wall. There were two desks and a table that came from the Salvation Army Thrift Store. At the opposite end from the entrance was an opening onto an alcove where a stove, refrigerator and cat litter box filled what would not have been a very large closet. The room smelled of food and cats. The desks were littered with papers, pocket calculator, library readerscreen, opened books, drafting tools, and junk mail. "Reminds me of my student days," Sergeant Mason said. "I stayed down the street in a room Just like this. What class are you?" "Senior. I think." "Kevin Senecal," Mason said. "Senecal. Unusual name. Don't think I ever heard it before." "It's Norman French. We think it used to be Seneschale," Kevin told him. "That'd be Stewart in English -- you know, meant Steward." He wondered why he was so nervous with this policeman. The cop had brought back his wallet, and Kevin hadn't done anything to be afraid of. But the policeman's manner was unusual, cagey, as if he were trying to think of the right way to say something unpleasant. He didn't think the policeman would have come alone if he'd intended to make an arrest, but why was he acting this way? Kevin had never had much contact with police: in the neighborhood where he grew up police were to be avoided. Cops didn't have much respect for people on welfare and unemployment. When Greg Tolland's People's Alliance won the White House and Congress that had changed for a while, but then Tolland was hounded by the press and the Alliance was smeared and things went back to politics as usual and -- His reverie was interrupted by the policeman. "Here." Mason tossed him the wallet. "Put it away. Officially, I never saw it." "Uh?" "Look, Kevin -- you don't mind if I call you Kevin? We took this off some bad people last night. Guy carrying it had a broken jaw. His buddies were trying to get him to a doctor. ' ' "You caught the bastards! Good work," Kevin said. He looked at the policeman with new respect. His mother, who had once had a better life, had always told him the police were all right. "But isn't the wallet evidence?" "You don't want to prosecute." "But -- " "No." The policeman was very firm. "Look, those guys belong to the Green Fence gang. If you identify them, you won't live until the trial. Actually you're probably in trouble anyway; they wouldn't have kept the wallet if they didn't have something in mind. Usually they just take out the money, put the credit cards into an envelope and mail them to friends -- and dump the wallet so there's no evidence if we shake them down. They kept yours. I don't have to be very smart to guess why. You did a good job on the guy with the broken jaw. And a better job on the other one." The policeman was looking carefully at Kevin's face. Kevin didn't care. He was glad that he'd hurt those bastards. Whatever the policeman saw seemed to please him. "You didn't know, did you?" the cop asked. 'You killed one of them. That garbage can lid caught him just at the base of the skull. Clean and neat." "Jeez -- " Kevin felt a rush of shock, fear, and anger. "I never meant to kill anyone! Am I in trouble for that?" "You would be if we knew who'd done it. But of course we don't. Never found anything at all. They must have ditched the wallet." It took Kevin a moment to catch on. "But -- " "But nothing," Mason said. "We got ourselves a new DA, a real People's Alliance type, and we've got judges who don't approve of 'deadly force.' Somebody killed a juvenile last night, and you don't kill juvies in this town. That's bad news." "But they were trying to kill me! They poured lighter fluid on me, to set me on fire!" "Can you prove that?" "How the hell could I prove -- " "Exactly," the policeman said. "You can't. And we can't do one damned thing for you, Kevin. If we give you protection the DA will want to know why, and we can't tell him or he'll have you up for manslaughter of a juvie. It gets worse. The Green Fence will be looking for you. If you're smart they won't find you." "You're telling me I ought to run because some muggers tried to kill me and I defended myself?" Kevin's face showed anger. His fists clenched and he felt the blood rising -- "Nope." The detective's calm was maddening. "Remember, I don't even know who you are. I'm just returning some property I found while I was off duty. Which, by the way, I am now. You got any beer in that 'frig?" "Sure." Kevin went to the refrigerator. Snowdrop, his white kitten, was sitting guard on top of it. She mewed hopefully when Kevin opened the door, then looked resigned when no cat food or milk came out. Mason popped the top of the beer bulb and made a face at it. "I liked this stuff in bottles or cans. Now we got biodegradable cardboard, and it don't taste the same." He drank it anyway, a long healthy glug. "Can you change apartments?" "I'm a month behind here. There's no way I could get the money for a new place." "Probably wouldn't help anyway. They'd follow you when you moved. What are your plans?" "Well, I graduate this term..." "You might last that long. Want some advice? Keep out of dark places. Don't have a routine. Come home at different times, and don't ('at in the same place every day. Keep the shades down and keep your shadow off the shade. Lock up good when you go out. Get a better lock. Get two locks. And stay with people you know." Mason drank again. His lips tightened as he set the bulb on the couch arm. "Kevin, do you think I like this? I'm a cop. My job is protecting people. And I'm telling you that I can't protect you, that the bastards in City Hall won't let me. I don't like that much, but you tell me -- what should I do?" "I don't know," Kevin said. "Yeah. Well, if you think of something, let me know." It seemed appropriate that the lights dimmed just then. The windmills weren't getting enough power, and it took a while to get generators fired up.    Long after the policeman left Kevin sat at his desk staring at a book. He read the same page three times, but none of it registered. He was afraid. His books said he lived in a postindustrial society and described the benefits in glowing words, but the police couldn't help him. Out there somewhere was a gang of nameless children -- the DA would call them children, and Kevin a child-murderer -- and those children would kill him if they could, and the police were helpless. The United States of America in all its awful majesty was no use at all. The police could give out tickets and harass taxpayer demonstrations but they couldn't protect Kevin's life. His life had been settled and orderly, completely planned. He would get his degree and go to work for one of the big international corporations, perhaps even go out to one of the near-Earth space industries if he could get a post. Junior engineers weren't paid very well, because nearly everyone graduated from state universities and had some kind of "professional" job -- or didn't work at all -- but when he got his degree Kevin would be eligible to join a strong union, and the union would keep the pay raises coming. Kevin looked forward to marriage, a house, a car, perhaps a camper and a small boat. When he told his friends they usually laughed and said it sounded dull, but Kevin didn't mind. Dull was fine, as long as it was secure. After the years of living with his mother and his brother on welfare checks and food stamps, split pea soup, chicken once a week when they were lucky, patched clothes and shoes bought from the Salvation Arniy, dull-but-secure was attractive. Dull meant buying food in private stores instead of standing in long lines at the cooperatives. Dull meant living in a neighborhood where the police were polite and respectful. Dull meant all the things Kevin had never had and always wanted. And his dream of dull security was vanishing with the memory of a garbage can lid smacking into human bone. The book stared back at him. "The most crucial questions that will be faced by every post-industrial society will deal with education, talent, and science policy. The rapid expansion of a professional and technical class, and the increased dependence of the society on scientific manpower, suggest a new and absolutely unique dimension in social affairs: i.e., that the economic growth rate of a post-industrial society will be less dependent on money capital than on 'human capital.' The words blurred and the idea was silly to begin with. The most crucial question was: how would Kevin Senecal stay alive long enough to graduate and get his union card so that he could find a job?    The letter had been generated by a computer. It had his name spelled 'Senegal,' but the student ID number was correct. It was for him. It told him that two summer classes he'd taken at California State University, Northridge, were not recognized as transferable for credit prerequisite to other classes required for graduation (see schedule # below) you may not hold credit in the classes named in schedule #, and thus you have not completed the requirements for graduation. Your application for graduation is denied, and your present class status is second-year, commonly called sophomore. Upon completion of the required prerequisites and, following that completion, your successful completion of the courses noted in schedule # (see below) you may again make application for graduation." He read it three times. It said the same thing each time. Instead of graduating in two months, he had two more years of school. He crumpled the letter in rage, but then carefully smoothed it out. These things happened. It was futile to get excited. Computers often made Appointment Exchange and registered a request to see his advisor. They could give him one in two weeks. He raged silently at the phone, but there was no point in being angry with a computer. It could only understand a very limited vocabulary. After he hung up, he felt ashamed for being so angry. It shouldn't be surprising that it would lake a while to see his advisor. There were over # students at human interview. II He took the policeman's advice; varied his schedule, stayed off streets at night, and always locked his doors. His friends didn't notice. He'd always been something of a loner and a bit of a bookworm since he dropped out of the football squad, so there was no one to miss him. The girl he'd been dating had found someone else two days before the muggers had caught him, and except for Wiley Ralston no one would care. Wiley was a student one year ahead of Kevin, staying on after graduation to specialize in space industry technology. Engineering students were never popular on campus, and those going to space were hated. The One Earth Society, and other anti-technology groups, picketed the engineering building nearly everyday. Their lunch-time demonstrations seldom got out of hand, and Kevin had become accustomed to their shouted insults whenever he went in or came out of his classrooms. Now, though, they began to get on his nerves. When they ritually shouted "murderer!" at him, he remembered the crunch of bone that he'd felt that night in the alley. "Hey, don't let those nuts shake you," Wiley said as they walked past the demonstrators. "Aw, they don't," Kevin said. They hurried toward the cafeteria. There was a long line waiting. "Not really, anyway." "You ever really listen to them?" Wiley asked. "Once," Kevin said. "Didn't make much sense to me. They kept telling me we're wasting all that money in space when there's so much needed here, and I know better. Without space technology we'd be a lot worse off than we are now. What goes to space wouldn't help anyway. It's just not enough." Wiley nodded, then waved at the line ahead of them. "Yeah, except sometimes I wonder." "You?" Wiley Ralston laughed. "Not very often. Just sometimes. Like this. Why 're so many people lined up for lunch? Because you get a free lunch on vour student ID card. Which is why most of these turkeys are students to begin with." Kevin didn't say anything. It was one reason he'd decided to go to college. The state university was cafeteria was better than anything his mother had ever been able to afford on straight welfare. "Better to be a student and eat than be unemployed," Wiley said. "And hell, it's all this technology that keeps people unemployed. That's the way they see it, anyway." "You know better," Kevin said. "What's important is production. High production means a lot to go around, and -- " He stopped, because Wiley was laughing at him. "Gotcha," his friend said. He tossed back a shock of unruly red hair and grinned broadly. "You know the trouble with you, old buddy? You care. These jokers say the world's got to learn to use low technology, be kind to the Earth, live with the land, or our great-grandchildren will have green tentacles or something -- " "They never -- " "And you really worry about whether they're right or not," Wiley finished. "But they aren't, and I can prove it -- " "So-friggin-what ?" Wiley Ralston demanded. "Look, Kev, maybe they're right. Look around you. Food lines in the US of A. Want in the middle of plenty. And that's here! All over the world people are breeding like mad, nobody's got enough of anything, and hell, maybe all this space effort will be the last straw, the push that makes the donkey lie down and die. So what? You say space will save the Earth, they say it will kill us, and I say -- somebody's going to get rich out there, and that somebody is going to be Wiley Ralston. I'll get mine, and if they're so stupid they'd rather put on demonstrations than get in on a good thing, that's their lookout." But Wiley had spoken too loudly, and others overheard. An alternate technology group came up to argue. A Zero-Growth group joined in, then some fanatics from the One Earth Society. If the various protestors hadn't got to arguing among themselves the scene might have gotten ugly; as it was, Kevin missed his lunch. Even so, he preferred to be in crowds. Most of the anti-technology students wouldn't actually harm him. None wanted to kill him. Better them than the Green Fence.    His advisor was a prim, rather prissy-looking woman in her thirties. She reminded Kevin of a sentence in his sociology book. "The post-industrial society is organized around knowledge, and this gives rise to new social relationships and new structures which have to be organized politically." Ms. Rasmussen was the embodiment of that: she had knowledge, or was supposed to have, and that gave her power. As he faced her, Kevin thought that was a bunch of horse puckey. She had a job that gave her power, and she liked that a lot. "What seems to be the trouble?" she asked. She shoved a form toward him. His student ID card embossed his name and ID number on the form, but he had to fill in the address by hand. She waited until he was finished before she picked up the computer letter Kevin had handed her in response to her (jiiestion. She read it through twice. "This seems to be in order," she said. Kevin wanted to scream at her, hut he held his temper. Years of watching his mother manipulate the welfare workers had given him both patience and technique. "Please ma'am," he said. He felt sick saying it, but forced himself to keep his tone respectful. "This costs me two years of my life. It isn't fair, ma'am. I worked hard, and they tell me I'm still not through. Please, can't you do something?" She punched buttons on her console. "I'll need your ID card," she said. She inserted the plastic into the machine. Records flowed across the screen. She peered at it, adjusting her glasses with fussy little movements, smiling thinly, a superior smile, the smile of those with power. "It's all in order," she said, "just as the letter tells you. You took the courses without the proper prerequisites, and so of course you're not entitled to credit for them." "But, ma'am, I had the prerequisites," Kevin whined. He tried to keep his voice pleading, showing that he appreciated all that Ms. Rasmussen was doing for him. The effort made him tense. He hated himself, and suddenly realized that this was the way he'd felt when the muggers had him: helpless and violated. And he felt that way a lot, lately. "You did not have prerequisites as recognized by this university," Miss Rasmussen said. "I'm sorry, but I can't help you." She sounded pleased. She began marking the form; it would be turned in to record that she'd had another interview. The accounting machines needed the completed form to justify her job to the Regents. So many interviews completed, requiring so many person-hours, requiring an adjustment and increase in salaries and personnel for the counseling department; in these days of unemployment it was necessary to keep one's forms in order. "But," Kevin stammered. He almost lost control of his voice, but regained it with effort, and continued to keep a respectful tone. "I got A's in those courses," Kevin said. "A's at Northridge, B's in the courses here. What difference does it make if I had the prerequisites if I got B's here? Prerequisites are supposed to keep you out of work you can't handle, but it's obvious that I can handle the work, because I did. Please, ma'am, can't you do something to help me?" She held her head high and her look of sympathy was patently artificial. "We have to go by the rules," Ms. Rasmussen said. "There was a mistake. You should never have been admitted to the courses here without proper prerequisites. Now, officially, you have never taken those courses at all. You'll have to go meet the prerequisite requirements, then take the courses over again. I'm very sorry." She wasn't. "But that's two years of my life!" Kevin said. He wasn't deferential now. "You can't do that to me!" Patiently Ms. Rasmussen punched in more numbers. A blur of fine print filled the screen. "Look," she said. "Here are the rules. You may read them for yourself -- " If I plead, Kevin thought. If I plead, I may, just may, get her to help. She wants to feel important, and I can help her. Just say the right words. But the feeling of self-contempt was too strong. His control broke like an exploded dam. "Damn you to hell!" he shouted. "You will not swear at me." Ms. Rasmussen stood. "Get out of here. Instantly. I will not have students shouting at me. I do not have to put up with that. If you don't leave I will call the Campus Police." Police. He didn't want trouble with the police. Kevin stood. "I'm very sorry," he said. "I should not have lost my temper -- " "Go." Now that she was in control, Ms. Rasmussen felt much better. "Go now." "Yes," Kevin said. He turned. "Wait." The counselor kept him standing for a long moment. Her smile, a thin wintry smile that showed the tiniest thin line of white teeth, played at her lips. "You forgot your ID card. That's very important, you will need it. Here." She laid it on the desk, although it would have been easier to hand it to him. Kevin took the card and left. As he went out, Ms. Rasmussen was marking the time onto still another form. The form title was "Interviews Successfully Completed."    He walked home glumly, not knowing what to do. There was a Zero-Growth Movement rally on campus, and students were shouting. An alternate technology group was arguing with the Z-G's, screaming that all technology wasn't bad, only the big industries. Another group of Social Technocrats appeared to argue for high technology owned by the people. The C'ampus Police stood by interestedly. He walked in fury, not knowing whether to be angry with himself for losing his temper when he might have talked Ms. Rasmussen into doing something for him, or for not telling her exactly what he thought of her and her useless bureaucratic job; whether to be ashamed for not getting the results he wanted, or for trying when trying meant pretending respect for the Rasmussens of this world. When he reached the top of the stairs he wasn't surprised to see the door to his room standing open. Mrs. Jeffries often brought food to the students' rooms and put it in their 'frigs. She said she cooked too much, but she did it often. Kevin went in without thinking. The room was empty. All his hooks had been tumbled from the shelves onto the floor. His calt iilator was a heap of rubble in the center of the floor. The refrigerator d(H)r stood open, and everything that had been in it was poured into a hideous soup over his books. When he went into the bathroom he found Snowdrop drowned in the toilet. Ill "Dr. Farrington?" "Yes, Kevin?" "Can I see you for a moment, sir? I need help." "Sure." Professor Farrington's grin was reassuring. Of all Kevin's professors, Farrington was the only one who seemed actually interested in the students. He was a bulky man, heavy set and going to fat; forty years before he'd been a football star, but he had little time for physical activities now. His classes were interesting. He taught what was in the books but he often spoke of other things as well, of a world remade by technology and engineering, of man's future. "We're in a bad phase right now," Farrington said many times, "but that won't last. These things come in waves. Right now the social theorists are on top, and they don't trust people. It won't last. You'll all live to see a new era, an era of freedom and individual responsibilities, and I want you to be ready for it." He waved Kevin toward his office and followed along the hall. His steps were slow; Farrington seemed always physically tired, but he spoke with an animation that denied it. They went into the office, a large room lined with books, drafting table beneath the windows, a large read-out screen on the battered wood desk. "Have a seat," Farrington said. "Now, what can I do for you?" Kevin showed him the computer letter and described his interview with Ms. Rasmussen. "And I can't afford two more years," he concluded. "It's just not fair." "No, probably not. Fair play isn't the strongest point of our regulated welfare state. Rules and order, that's our goal. Let me have your ID card, I need to look up your records." Kevin handed it over. "Two years because a computer says so. That doesn't make sense." "Makes more than you think." Farrington inserted the ID card into a slot in the desk console. He began punching in numbers. "When you admit everyone who wants to go to college, and you're not allowed to flunk anybody out, you have to have some way to keep from getting hip-deep in idiots-with-degrees," Farrington said. "Too bad it happened to the engineering school too. I remember when this kind of horse puckey was reserved for the Sociology and Education Departments. And law schools, of course." "But can't you do something?" Farrington studied the read-outs. "Probably not. Used to be the professors had some authority here, but not for a long time now. Rules are rules -- ' ' "Not you too!" "Easy. Doesn't do any good to get excited. Least not here, not with me. Kevin, I can understand why you young people get frustrated. If things like this had happened to me when I was your age I'd have been scheming on how to bring the whole mess down in blood. I don't suppose your generation even talks like that." Kevin said nothing. Farrington was right. A couple of times Kevin had complained about some rule or another, tried to get a student protest together, and his classmates had thought he was crazy. The only student demonstrations to get involved in were those sponsored by one of the recognized outfits. Demonstrating for the right causes was a key to a good job after graduation. Making trouble was a way to welfare. "I can't give you a degree by waving my hand," Farrington said. "But we can diddle the system a bit. You stay on. I'll see that you get admitted to graduate courses. You can enroll in these junk courses they want you to take again, but you won't have to go to class. Just show up on exam day. When you've touched all the bases you'll get your degree and have two years of advanced study to go with it. Get you a better job." "It sounds good," Kevin said. "But I can't do it -- " "I wasn't through," Farrington said. "Lx)ok, Tve got some buddies out at Systems Development Corporation. I can get you on part-time some experience programming, Iceding problems into the computer, lhat sort of thing. Won't pay too had, and you'll have job experience m your resume. Ought to about make up for the time this stupid system is costing you." "But I still can't," Kevin said. Td love to. What you're offering IS better than -- Dr. Farrington, it would be great, and I really thank you, but I can't stay in Los Angeles." Farrington frowned. "Why not?" Kevin told him. "I might have I bought it wasn't serious, but when I found Snowdrop in the toilet -- " lie couldn't finish. The memory of wel fur was in his nostrils. Farrington's lips tightened. "You know, a few years ago -- I guess it was longer than that. Back about F)S(). I knew a guy named Turk. Sold custom car parts. One of those damned street gangs decided Turk i)ught to kick in to them. Pay proleelion. "The cops couldn't do anything: imlges didn't believe in Juvenile eriminals. 'No such thing as a bad ehild,' all that crap. One day Turk c ame home and found his dog puking blood all over the carpet. Seems someone had fed it meat filled with )' round glass. So Turk went hunting. Me look a shotgun over to the gang lu adquarters and blew hell out of the place. Then he cruised around the city looking for their cars and blew off four or five. You know, old Turk lived another two, three years, finally died of a very natural heart attack. I understand that gang still goes out to the cemetery every month to be sure Turk's still under ground." "I couldn't do that!" There was horror in Kevin's voice. "No, I don't reckon you could. Mind if I look up your psych records?" "No, sir." Farrington played with the console keys. A series of graphs came onto the screen. "Know what these mean?" "No. They wouldn't let me take any advanced psych courses. I don't know why." "I do," Farrington said. He pointed to a series of dips and valleys on one of the graphs. "Those little wiggles right there. Unstable. Potential for violence. You got a hot temper?" "Sometimes. I try to control it," Kevin said. "Yeah. You've got some other problems too. Kind of a misfit, aren't you?" "No!" Kevin almost shouted it. "I get along!" "Have many friends?" "Yes -- well, I don't have time to make many friends. But I get along." "Sure," Farrington said. "But I expect you have to work on that individualist streak. I see they had you in for intensive counseling for a couple of years. Help any?" "Sure. Sensitivity training is important, particularly for those who hope to be promoted into managerial positions -- " "You don't need to quote the goddam course prospectus to me," Farrington said. He leaned back in his big chair. "Kevin, when I was your age, an engineer built things. Took responsibilities. They'd give us a project and by God we'd get it done. Build a bridge. Design something. Start with paper and ideas and see it through until it worked. Nowadays they put you in a room full of people just like yourself, and you feed numbers into a computer. Somebody checks all your work, somebody else originated it, and a third type will supervise the hardware -- do you think you'll like that?" "No," Kevin admitted. "But what can I do?" Farrington shrugged. "Not much. Not here, anyway." "I mean," Kevin said, "the system's so set up that no one person can ruin things for everybody. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?" "Sure. How it's supposed to work." Farrington fingered the computer letter that lay on his desk, then looked back at the console. He seemed to be debating with himself. "Senecal, I'm going to tell you something that I don't want you to repeat. You say I told you this, and I'll deny it." "Sir? I can -- I don't have to tell people everything I know." "No, I don't expect you do," Farrington said. "Look, that computer letter was no accident. The psych people have decided you're not ready to graduate. If they hadn't found problems with your prerequisites they'd have come up with something else." "But -- why?" "You're not mature enough. Not group-adjusted. See those little code numbers? That's the clue." Kevin leaned over the desk and looked at the read-out screen. The numbers meant nothing to him. "I don't think those were on the printouts I got," Kevin said. "I sent for my records. Don't they have to tell us everything in them? I thought there was a law -- " "Oh, there are laws and laws," Farrington said. "One law says that if properly qualified human-resources specialists determine that giving a subject information would be damaging to the subject, the information can be withheld. There are some others, too. I'm not even supposed to be able to get this, not even with your ID card, but -- well, a couple of my old students designed the computer security system. Anyway. The Psych boys have decided you ought to stay on as a student a couple more years. Then they'll decide if your new profile is good enough to let you have a de;rcc. My guess is that it'll still be no,' and it won't matter if you stay on as an undergraduate until you're ninety." "But what can I do?" Kevin demanded. "I don't know. One of the unions might help you, but you can't join a good union without a degree. Got any pull? Political friends? Ever worked campaigns?" "No." "Then I can't think of anything. I wish I could help. I really do." l arrington opened his desk drawer and took out a printed brochure. ' There's one thing. This outfit's looking for good general systems engineers, and they don't care about degrees. They want ability, and I ihink you've got signs of that. You did a good paper for me last term. I'll recommend you, if you like." He scaled the brochure across the lesk. The illustration on the front leaped out at him; space as black as night; the Milky Way a sparkling waterfall of stars. Against the hackdrop hung a small rock. Men Moated in the foreground. A large mirror focussed solar energy onto I he asteroid, boiling out metals. "The Daedalus Corporation," Kevin said. "That's a deep-space outfit." Farrington nodded. "One of I hem. And they're hungry. Want me lo talk to them for you?" Kevin knew there were companies o)erating in the Asteroid Belt, but he'd never thought of working for one of them. When he thought of going to space it was always in terms of one of the near-Earth orbiting factories, or possibly to the Hansen-MacKenzie base on the Moon. There was real money to be made in the industrial satellite factories -- and you could come home to spend it. "Nobody ever comes back from the Belt," Kevin said. "Not many have, yet," Farrington agreed. "But maybe they don't want to come home. They're doing something real out there in the Belt, Kevin. Something important for the whole human race, and it's not done with acres of engineers sitting in bullpens. They're going to build a whole new civilization out there -- and maybe save this one in the bargain. If I were your age I wouldn't hesitate a minute." For a moment the intensity of Farrington's tone, the professor's sincerity and wistful expression, made it sound attractive. Kevin thought again. He knew almost nothing about the Belt. There were stories. That they'd found fabulously rich sources of metals, millions of tons of nearly pure iron and nickel and copper, with solar energy to run the refineries. "But they've never brought anything back," Kevin said aloud. "No. And if they don't pretty soon things will be bad for the asteroid industries," Farrington said. "But that's just the point. They need people out there. People who'll work -- ' ' "How can they bring enough metal back to Earth to matter? The asteroids are a long way out." "There are ways," Farrington said. "I just don't know -- " "Yes." Farrington sighed. "I know. You've been brought up to think somebody will take care of you. Social Security, National Health Plan, Federal Burial Insurance. Family Assistance, Food Stamps, Welfare. Union representatives to speak for you. And I'm talking about a place where it's all up to you, where you take care of yourself because nobody's going to do it for you. I guess that can be scary to modern kids. You don't like the idea, do you?" "It's not that," Kevin said. "But I never really thought about the Belt. It's not what I had in mind for myself -- I'm sorry." "Nothing to be sorry about. It's an alien way of life. For you. Me, I wish I was young enough to go. Enough of that. Kevin, I'll think about your problem. Maybe we can come up with something. Now, if you'll excuse me. I've got to prepare for my next class." "Yes, sir. Thank you." "Nothing to thank me for. I wish I could have been some help. Nice seeing you. Drop in again -- I mean that. Come see me again in a couple of days. Maybe I'll have thought of something." "Thank you. I will." But you probably won't have thought of anything, Kevin thought as he left the office. Alfred Farrington continued to stare at the computer read-out screen. He took out a thin black notebook and copied some of the data into it, then frowned and selected a name on a roller index attached to the input console. He pushed a button and the phone dialed itself. It rang twice. "Yeah?" The phone showed a fat man about Farrington's age. "Alf. How are you, Ben?" "Fine, except for recruiting -- " "Yes. I thought I had you a good prospect, but he may not work out. Then again, he may." "Something special about this one: "Good prospect. No family ties, nobody's going to worry about him, nothing here for him to spend money on. Engineering student. And a pretty good one compared to the lot we get now." "Umm. The ship's leaving pretty soon. Think you can get him aboard? We're short on engineering talent. I've been thinking maybe we ought to ask Paul to send out a couple of the Order -- " "Possibly. I hope it doesn't come to that. I doubt if he'd do it," Farrington said. "We've few enough in the Fellowship. Better to hire some talent -- ' ' "If we can. One way or another we've got to get moving now, or the whole thing's going to come apart. How good is this prospect?" "Potentially quite good. And no family. No one will worry about where he's gone or when he's coming back." "Good." "Of course his motivation's all wrong," Farrington said thoughtfully. "To hell with motivation," Ben said. "Get him aboard. We'll motivate him. And if we can't, well, we can still get some use out of him." "Yes. Well, I'll send you his records. If you like him, let me know, riiere may be more pressures I can put on him. Now what about those others I sent over?" They talked for a long time.    The new locks to Kevin's room hadn't been disturbed. The door hadn't been opened. It hadn't had to be. Kevin's black tomcat was nailed to the door. The cat mewed piteously. Kevin gulped hard and examined the wounds. He knew what had to be done, and after a moment he did it. Then he sat on the floor with tears streaming from his eyes. After a while he heard steps behind him. Sergeant Mason came into the upstairs hallway. "Your landlady called," the policeman said. "The desk man passed it on to me." He looked at the still body nailed to the door. "You got your keys?" "Yes -- " "Go inside. Carefully. Here, let me open that. You get back over there." Mason used the keys, stood back and kicked the door open. The room hadn't been disturbed. "I'd say it's all right," Mason said. "They don't usually do anything final after a warning like -- like that. Not for a couple of days. Go get your face cleaned up, son. Go on, get." Kevin went to the washroom. When he came back the body was gone. Sergeant Mason was sponging off the dark spots on the door. "That's not evidence either, I suppose," Kevin said. His voice held bitterness. "Evidence? Sure it's evidence. Of childish pranks. Cruel, of course, but deprived children often express aggression in cruelty. It's relatively harmless. We must weigh the importance of human life against that of an animal, and of course there can be only one decision -- look, kid. I'm not saying what I believe. I'm just quoting." "Children! They're no better than animals! Bad animals." "Sure. You know that. I know it. But make the DA and the judges believe it -- Look, son, the judges are picked by the lawyers, and the lawyers get paid by the government to defend these deprived kids. The lawyers all live in closed communities with rent-a-cops. So do the newscritters. Nobody kills their pets. It's the way things are. You just get your degree and get out of LA, go find a good job and live in a company town with company cops around, and you can forget all The policeman's face went hard. "Look, I don't like it either. I can give you some protection, but we've only got so many police. And the Green Fence is never going to forget that you killed one of theirs. They'll remember a long time. A long time, Kevin." "But this is insane!" Kevin sat on the couch and looked at the familiar books -- stained and damaged now -- on all the walls. The world no longer made any sense. "You're telling me this gang is more powerful than the government!" Mason shrugged. "Maybe. What do you want us to do? Go lean on those kids? Rig up evidence? Senecal, I've got nineteen years in. I can retire in another year. You got any idea what happens to cops who bend the rules that way? The Public Defender and the Civil Liberties Union and all the others would have my head on a platter! Sure, there's lots of us would like to get those scumbags off the streets any way we can. But we've learned better, Senecal. They got Lieutenant Mogowa for tampering with evidence and they sent him to prison. He lived about a week. Not me, son. Not me. I got a wife and three kids -- and none of 'em cops, either." "So you'll wait until they kill me -- "And then maybe I can nail 'em for it. And if I do they'll be on the streets in a year. Yeah. That's the way it is, Senecal. Got any more beer?" "Yes, but you'll have to excuse me. I've got to go make a telephone call. Maybe I can catch Dr. Farrington in his office." IV Kevin had never seen so many forms and tests. There were dozens of them, and they asked him for information that no sane person would know. Finally he threw down his pencil. "This is ridiculous!" he shouted. Three other job applicants who were still working looked up in annoyance, then went back to their tests. The test monitor, a pretty girl in short skirts, frowned. "You must complete your tests -- " "I will be damned if I will," Kevin said. He stalked out of the room as the girl pleaded with him to go back and finish. That blows that, Kevin thought. Damnation. I thought a deepspace-operations outfit would -- "Congratulations, Senecal. Come with me, please." An elderly fat man barred his path. "Come on, we're running low on time," the man said. His voice was filled with authority. Kevin wanted to tell him to stuff it, but he had nothing to lose. He followed the man through twisting hallways, then into an elevator. The man didn't speak until they got off at the top floor of the Santa Monica office building. Downstairs the building had been coldly professional: new, expensive, and utterly without warmth. Up here it was completely different. The carpets were old but comfortable. Holos of space mining operations hung along the walls. People were dressed casually, and worked in small groups, or alone, and some sat in their offices with their feet on the desk and eyes directed to the ceiling. One man was making a paxr airplane. They went to the end of the hall and into an office. It too was comfortably furnished, and reminded Kevin of Professor Farrington's room. "I'm Ben Simington," the fat man said. "Have a seat." The chairs were comfortable. "Want a drink? Scotch. Yes. I recommend scotch whiskey, a double." Simington went to a wall panel, touched it, and let it swing open. An elaborate wet bar was behind it. He took out glasses carved with strange creatures and poured, then handed one to Kevin. The figure on Kevin's glass was a phoenix. "Cheers," Simington said. Kevin lifted the glass and sipped. The whiskey was smooth, much better than any scotch he'd ever had before. "Confused?" Simington asked. "Yes." "Think about it." Kevin did. What data had he? The contrast between the lower floor of the Daedalus building, coldly professional, like hundreds of others all over the city, and the relaxed attitudes of the people on this floor -- all of them obviously highranking executives even if they didn't act like it -- was indeed confusing. This office, plain, but with very expensive carpets and pictures and electronic equipment -- Kevin realized that he had, in all his life put together, never spent as much money as this office must have cost, yet the impression was of comfort and utility, not ostentation. Then there were the tests. Medical exams, of course, then the others. The first ones had been sensible, related to systems engineering, digging deep into his knowledge. Others were obviously psychological tests, and all big companies used those. But after that -- those forms, which asked for things like grandmother's age at death, great-grandfather's occupation, every address at which he had ever lived. They'd made no sense, and they got worse as he went along. Why? What would the Daedalus Corporation want with such information? Nothing. They couldn't want it. So why ask for it? "You expected me to give up on those tests," Kevin said. "Let's say we hoped you would. But not too soon. Part of the test score is the time it takes for the applicants to tell us to go to hell. Quit too soon, we don't need you. Not enough motivation. Keep on after it's too obvious the things are useless, and -- well, you came off pretty good." "But -- " "Many of the chaps down there still wading through will get jobs," the fat man said. "We need paper shufflers too. But we wouldn't send them out to the Belt. I take it you do still want the Job." "Yes." Kevin's voice was unnecessarily strong. He realized that, but didn't explain. "Why?" Ben Simington prompted. "Because there's got to be something better than -- " He didn't know how to finish. Better than here, where teenaged gangsters tortured cats and threatened people and the courts protected them. Better than a world where there were regulations upon regulations, where every detail of your working life was supervised by Federal inspectors and union officials, where you could gel into trouble for working too hard, where they told you that all the regulation was the price of a stable world economy and then they couldn't protect you from street gangsters. Better than -- "Better than always having forms to fill out and people who think the forms are important," he said. Simington nodded. "Good. We need people who want their work to make sense. But don't get the idea that it always will, Kevin. Sometimes there's things to be done whether they make .sen.se or not. Still, you won't find loo much monkey motion out where you'll be going. You'll have to take eare of yourself, but you won't mind that. Wish I could go along Drink up." Kevin took another healthy sip of excellent whiskey It went down sm(K)thly and warmed him from the inside out that and the fat man's camaraderie. Ih likid the leeling. Kevin was intelligent enough to know it was all deliberate, that it was all planned to make him feel welcome, hut he liketl that too. fhe se people wanted him, and they cared about how he lelt riiey tiilked loi an hour. The fat man hniked at Kevin's test scores, his medii al levoids. Ins file from UC'LA Kevin wndeied how he'd gotten that, but didn't ask and a lot of othei siib)ei ts Some didn't seem very imoilant binally Simmpton Uaiu'd back and looked iHiisively at the ceiling. "It's that time agiiin." he said. "I have to make up my mind Are you worth the mvi slment " "I honestly tkni t know, " Kevin said. 'Neithei il I " I he fat man sighed. "You'd think I'd have thousands of volunteers," he said. "And I do, but not qualified people. The Belt's not the same as a quick tour in orbit. Don't kid yourself that it is. They're spread thin out there. A couple of thousand people, mostly on Ceres, spread across nic, Kevin." "No." He hadn't expected a picnic. He thought about the vast emptiness of the Belt. It wasn't a place he'd go by choice -- but what choices had he? There were plenty of volunteers for the factories orbiting Earth, and what use would Kevin Senecal be to one of them? Officially he was neither engineer nor good millhand. He was nothing. It wouldn't be that way in the Belt, and that was something to think about. "Wayfarer leaves in four days," Simington said. "Can you be in her?" "Four days! Mr. Simington, I don't really know anything about space industries, and I can't learn in four days!" "We don't expect you to. Trip out takes nine months. You'll learn more about space operations than you really want to know. Nothing else to do aboard ship. There'll be a reader and plenty of tapes. Ship's crew drills you in equipment, p-suits, getting around outside. You'll learn to live in low gravity or you won't live at all. I'm not worried about what you'll know when you get to Ceres. It's whether you'll stick it out that bothers me." "I generally fmish what I start," Kevin said. "Yep. One reason I'm talking to you is because your coach told me how you finished a game with two broken ribs. Didn't play too well, but you finished." "That was in high school." Just how far back had Daedalus gone in checking his background? But it made sense: he was going to cost them a lot of money. "I still don't understand why you want me," Kevin said. Simington shrugged. "Who do we send out, Kevin? Not superheroes trained for one mission; most of the astronauts came apart when their tour was over. Senior engineers? Why would they go? They're doing all right here. No, we've found our best people are misfits who don't like our modem welfare state. If they've got some other reason to get them headed for the Beit, that's fine; but it's what they do when they get there that counts." The fat man looked down at the data sheets on his desk. "Look, I don't believe in a lot of this psych garbage, but some of it's useful. In some ways I may know you better than you know yourself. ' ' There wasn't anything Kevin could say to that. "Contract's for five years," Simington said. "But we don't really make a lot of profit on five years. We need people who'll go the course." He went back to studying the read-outs. Kevin suddenly wanted very badly to go. Partly it was a competitive urge. He didn't want to be told he wasn't good enough. But there was more, too. Out there he might find a meaningful job and a chance to do something important. Earth was running out of metals, of oil, of coal, of everything. The anti-technology organizations had halted nuclear power development and Eco-freak rioters had smashed the space-power antenna outside Bakersfield -- and investment money to build another couldn't be found. Population was rising and food production wasn't. There were already famines in parts of the world, and the pinch was felt everywhere, even in the United States. And the lawyers continued to gum up everything -- in the courts, permit hearings, environmental impact statements. The One Earth Society said the answer was to eliminate technology, space industries, everything that wasn't "natural." The costs would but there was nothing else. Earth must abide, and she could not support a plague of mankind, an epidemic of humanity. Kevin remembered Professor Farrington's lecture on that. "Maybe they're right," Farrington had said. "Maybe. But it's for damn sure if there's an alternative this is the time to take it. We can get off the Earth and live in the solar svstem. Not on one planet, but on nine of them, nine planets, thirty-five moons, and can go. If we wait a few years, things will be so desperate down here we'll never make it. This is the first and last opportunity for mankind to be something more than a carnivorous ape crawling on the surface of one insignificant planet." Kevin, remembering, nodded to himself. "I want to go," he said. "And I can make it in four days." Simington said nothing for a long time. Kevin held his breath. Finally the fat man spoke. "Okay. I can offer you a starting salary of fourteen thousand Swiss francs a year. Five-year contract." Kevin made rapid mental calculations. About a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars a year. It wasn't as high as he'd expected; not that high at all in these days of inflation and ultra-taxation. Engineers on Earth made more. Engineers in orbital factories made a lot more. But -- it was more than he could get without degrees and a strong union. "It's more than you think," Simington was saying. "We pay half that in francs in the Belt, the other half into your account in Zurich. We'll set that up for you. No point in letting Uncle Sugar get his hands on your money. If you don't have too much junk shipped out from Earth, you can save your return passage in about four years." "And if I don't save?" Simington shrugged. "Your problem. We pay your way out. If you stay ten years with us, we pay your way back in. Don't worry about it. Even if you can't cut it for us, you won't be out of a job. There's a lot more jobs than people in the Belt. You won't starve." 'T suppose not -- " "And we give you a sign-up bonus," Simington said. "Thirtyfive thousand bucks. You can use that to clean up any Earth-side problems. WeTl also provide you with a basic outfit." "Sounds good," Kevin said. "It is good. We take care of our people. Notice I haven't said anything about owing us for passage and bounty. Some outfits pay higher, but their people owe for passage out. Some never do save it back. We don't work that way." Sure, Kevin thought. But you're out to make a profit like the others. Profit. Most of his professors had acted as if profits were nasty. Only Farrington seemed to think differently. And Wiley Ralston, of course. Not that the professors had any control; international firms survived despite the intellectuals' contempt. The welfare state could tax US corporations practically out of existence, but they couldn't get their hands on the internationals, or the space operations firms. "What kind of work?" Kevin asked. Simington's grin was wide. "Everything! Mining operations, living quarters, refinery design, ships and transport, agriculture -- it all needs doing. Terrific opportunity." If it's that great, why do you need me? Kevin wondered. But it sounded exciting, and besides, what other choice did he have? "I'll take it." Simington nodded. "Report here, ready to leave, in two days."    They flew him down to the Baja California spaceport in a windowless transport. He crouched with his gear among empty cargo containers and tried not to think of what was coming next. There was only one other passenger, a man more than twice Kevin's age, shorter by five inches but weighing almost as much as Kevin did -- built like a lineman rather than a half back. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and a fine network of thin red lines around his mouth and across the bridge of his nose. He drank heavily from a hip flask. "Drink?" he asked. "No, thanks." The man shrugged. "Headed for WayfarerT" When Kevin nodded the man's grin broadened. He put out his hand. "Me, too. Bill Dykes." Kevin took the offered hand. Dykes's grip was firm. "Kevin Senecal." He waited for Dykes to comment on the name, but he didn't. "Sure you don't want that drink? You look nervous." "No, Vm not nervous," Kevin said. "Wish they had windows back here. Td like to see Baja." "Not much to see," Dykes said. "Railroads, power lines, highways, looks Just like anyplace else now. Not like it was a few years ago when there wasn't but one road down here. Damndest thing. Of all the places in the world to put a spaceport. I'd have thought Baja would be the last." The airplane engines thrummed on. Kevin was glad of someone to talk with. It took his mind off what was to come. Deep space, the Belt -- but more terrifying was the way he'd get out there. "Good location," Kevin said. "Further south than Canaveral, so there's more eastward velocity. Takes less energy to get the pods in orbit. And it's on the ecliptic. Anything launched from there has an easier time of it getting to the Belt -- " Kevin stopped, because he could see he was boring his companion. "Sorry. You know all this." "Some," Dykes admitted. "You've been up before?" Dykes nodded. "Orbital factories. Three years in the General Motors satellite. Didn't want to join up for another hitch. Took my pay back to Earth . ' ' "But -- you must have saved a lot -- " it." Dykes took another drink. "And I couldn't get a dirt side job. My union's full of One Earthers. They say space technology takes jobs away from people on Earth. Sweet Lord, they fixed up an initiation fee that would've wiped me out! Tried working without a union, but you know how that is. Got beat up about as many times as I had a day's work." Dykes didn't seem broken up about his problems. He smiled cheerfully and took another drink, a long one this time. "So I took what was left of my savings and headed for the Moon." "Oh." The Moon might be a good place to work. "Hansen colony?" Kevin asked. "Naw, couldn't get on there. If MacKenzie and Hansen had been hiring. I'd probably still be up. No mickey mouse crap with Hansen, they tell me. Just hard work. Naw, I tried a little prospecting, a little mining. Luna's no good. Regulations, bureaucrats, lawyers, taxes -- hell, it's no different from Earth. No chance to get anywhere." "So you're going to the Belt?" "Sure. So' re you. What in hell are you so nervous about?" Kevin laughed. "Didn't know it showed that much. I -- have you been up in a laser pod before?" "Yeah. Four times. Lived through all but the second one." "Huh?" "That one killed me." Dykes held his serious expression for a moment, then grinned. "Look, there's nothing to worry about." "Sure," Kevin said. "Sure. Say, if you don't mind. I'll have a drink after all."    The plane set down in morning tropical heat. There was no wind. The airfield was located near the launching facility, but a large concrete terminal building blocked their view of the laser field beyond. They watched their baggage loaded onto a cart, then went into the terminal. There were few formalities. Kevin showed his ticket and was checked off a list. "First time up?" the clerk asked. When Kevin admitted it, he was sent down a long stairway. "See you," Dykes called. The passage led to a waiting room. There were a dozen other people there, mostly men older than he was, but a few women, and one family with two children. There was also a remarkably pretty girl. Kevin icntatively smiled at her, but she didn't respond, so he took out a book and began reading. Presently a man in white coveralls came in and waited for their attention. He didn't say anything, just stood there until they were all looking at him. He looked at the two children and shuddered. "Anybody here can't follow instructions? I mean follow 'em to the letter?" he asked. "If so, speak up and save the Company some money. Save your lives, for that matter. You can get killed doing something stupid." There was still no response. He shrugged. 'M'm Hal Winstein, and I'm supposed to tell you groundhogs how to eel from here to the orbit station alive. After that you're .somebody else's worry. "You all have pressure suits and helmets that ftt? You should have turned them in for inspection. Everybody do that?" There were murmurs, but no one said anything. "Okay. Next. Anybody seriously suffer from claustrophobia? Course not, you wouldn't be here, but I'm supposed to ask. Now here's the drill. You'll go get your suits on and eet checked out. Check-out ineludes vacuum test to be sure your equipment works. When the techs are happy with your gear, you'll go to the loading area and climb into a capsule. "The capsules hold two hundred kilos each. That's approximately two people and their gear. We strap you in the webbing and you'll be there a while. Eventually the capsules move to the launch area, you'll hear a warning, and off you'll go at three gravities. "Three gees isn't all that much if you're lying flat in the webbing. It goes on for a lot longer than you think it will, so don't get worried. When it stops you'll be in orbit. No weight." "Free fall," Kevin muttered. He wondered how he'd feel. People often got sick in space. "That's the only tricky part," Winstein said. "You'll feel like you're falling forever. Don't panic and don't unstrap. Capsules with kids aboard will be taken into the orbiter airlock and opened there. The rest of you'll have to get to the orbiter through vacuum. There's only two important things to remember: do exactly what the crewman who comes for you says you should do, and never get completely unfastened. You'll have two safety lines. Be sure one is attached to something before you unclip the other. The crew will get you into the airlock if you cooperate. If you don't, you could get ver' dead. Understood?" "I think I will walk," the family man said. The others didn't laugh. "Don't want to scare you," Winstein said. "But you do want to take this serious. Any questions?" There weren't many. Everyone there was a potential colonist or would work in one of the satellite factories. Laser launching was a lot cheaper than tickets on the shuttle, but the Hansen Company didn't particularly encourage passenger traffic on the laser system: they made bigger profits on freight. Finally Kevin raised his hand. "Yeah?" Winstein said. "Can we watch the launches? I've never seen one." Winstein looked at his watch. "If you get through suit check fast, you can watch cargo go up for a few minutes. Then you'll have to get below and load on. Okay, through this door to the changing rooms. Find your own gear and get it on." "What do we do with our clothes?" one man asked. Winstein shrugged. "Carry 'em along if you don't go over the mass marked on your ticket. Or ship 'em to somebody. Or leave 'em here and we'll give 'em to local charities. Suit yourself. By the way -- I don't advise anybody to fudge on total weight. You wouldn't really want us to think you mass less than you do. And we can't afford to lose the capsules." V There was very little privacy in the changing room. Only a long screen separated men from women. The only facilities were a long bench and table on either side of the screen . Kevin collected his pressure suit from the Hansen Company inspector who'd checked it out. "Nice gear," the technician said as he handed it over. "David Clarke makes the best, in my book." One more datum to file away, Kevin thought. Daedalus Corporation didn't stint on equipment. They'd given him the best. He had his suit, and helmet, with radios and tool belts; a programmable pocket computer, the latest model he knew of, complete with a plug-in memory-reference unit that contained, along with much other data, just about every formula and table in the big Chemical Rubber Handbook; a lightweight Fiberglas suitcase, really more like a pressure-tight portable footlocker. It was all first class and it made him feel that he was important to the company. The pressure suit went on like a diver's wet suit, and looked like one only not so thick. It fit very closely; he had to use talcum powder to get into it. Gloves dogged onto the ends of the sleeves, and a seal set firmly around his neck. He slipped into the boots, hung the small equipment bag over his shoulder, and reported back to the technicians. They pulled and pinched, looking for loose spots. They didn't find any in Kevin's, but the next to come up was the girl he'd seen before, and after a moment they handed her a lump of what looked like clay. "Shove that under your breasts," the technician said. "Yeah, right there. Don't leave any gaps." "But -- " She was obviously embarrassed. "Lady, you're going into vacuum," the man explained. "Your innards will be pressured to about seven pounds by the air in your helmet. Outside is nothing. Your skin won't hold that. The suit will, but you've got to be flat against the suit, otherwise yoiHl swell up to fill any empty spaces. It won't do a lot of good for your figure. "Oh. Thank you," she said. She turned avvr and used the clav as she'd been told. The technician looked at Kevin and shook his head. "Don't get many small-tovvn chicks here. Okay, sport, on with your helmet. See it's dogged right. Don't like to lose passengers in the test chamber." The helmet fit snugly onto the neck seal. The technician checked the locking mechanism and seemed satisfied. "Okay, you and blondie there, into the next room and through the airlock." He raised his voice. "Sending in the first two, Charlie." "Right. Come on, come on, we got a full schedule today." Kevin and the girl went through the door and were motioned to another, this one steel with a large locking wheel. Through that was a large chamber. There was a man in a pressure suit inside it. He motioned to hoses on the bulkhead. "Connect up to those." They did, and the man checked the fittings. "Okay," he said. "We'll pump out this chamber. As we do, there'll come pressure into your helmets through those hoses. When the outside pressure's gone, you're going to be uncomfortable for a while. Any gas in your system will expand until you'll feel like a balloon. Don't be too damned polite to get rid of it, or you'll be sorry. If you feel really uncomfortable, or your ears hurt real bad, or you can't breathe, hit one of those panic buttons next to you there. Otherwise, don't do anything at all. Understood?" "Yes," the girl said. Kevin nodded. "Right." Charlie turned to his control panel and pressed buttons. The outside door had already been closed and sealed while he was talking. Kevin felt the pressure drop. His ears clogged for a moment and he swallowed frantically until they popped and were clear. The pressure continued to fall and he felt his insides swelling as Charlie had said they would. loud in his headset. "I've got your pressures here. Everything looks right to me. Any problems?" "No," the girl's voice said. "Good. Now comes the hard part. The worst thing that can happen to you is to run low on oxygen. You won't know it's happening. So, I'm gonna cut down on your oxygen supply to let you get used to what anoxia feels like. While I'm doing it I want you to write your name on that pad there in front of you. Every time I say 'write,' you write your name until I say to stop. Okay?" "Yes," the girl's voice said in his headset. "Sure," Kevin said. "You, mister, I asked if it was understood," Charlie said. "Oh." Kevin turned on his microphone. "Sorry. Understood." "Okay. Here we go. Write." It was no problem. He wrote carefully, then glanced over at the girl. 'Ellen MacMillan.' Her handwriting was neat and precise, unlike his own heavy scrawl. "Write," Charlie said, and they did it again. It seemed a silly game. Kevin felt an urgent impulse to laugh. Why? part of his mind wondered. But it didn't matter, of course he wanted to laugh, this was silly -- "Write." His hand didn't work properly, but it was all right, he was tired of this silly game. He glanced over at Ellen's paper. Her neat hand had written 'Coca-cola.' 'Scotch and soda,' Kevin wrote. "Write." 'Will you have dinner with me?' he tried to write, but it didn't come out that way. He couldn't read it. Oh, well. Ellen looked at him and giggled. He responded, and they laughed together. "Hey, you're beautiful," Kevin shouted. She laughed harder. Why was she laughing? Kevin wondered. It was true enough. Well, maybe not beautiful. But she was nice, a really pretty girl, blonde curls cut off short but still long enough to curl. He stared at her pressure suit, trying to see where her breasts left off and the clay began. She saw what he was doing and patted the spot, giggling again. "Write your names. It is very important that you write your names. If you do not write your names legibly you will not be permitted to go up today," Charlie said. His voice was very stem, and that was funny too. Only, part of his mind said, it wasn't funny. He tried very hard, but all he could produce was a scrawl. Ought to be good enough, though, he thought. They can read that -- His head began to clear suddenly, and he looked at the paper in front of him. It was awful. He wanted to cry -- He felt the chamber pressure rising. It became very warm in the capsule. "Okay," Charlie said. "When I give the signal, disconnect from the hoses and go out the far door. Take those papers with you, and don't forget what you've learned. Anoxia sneaks up on you. You think you're doing all right, even when you're acting like a stupid drunk. If you remember that, you can function longer. Not a lot longer, but a little longer anyway."    The next stop was another supply counter, where he picked up his reflective coveralls and tool belt. When he put them on over his pressure suit, and slung the tool belt around his waist, Kevin felt like a spacer. He knew better. There was a lot to learn, and he wouldn't even get started learning it until he was aboard Wayfarer', but the tool kit and professional equipment was at least a start. He asked directions to the observation balcony and was shown a stairway. The balcony was empty. It gave a view of the wide valley on the other side of the terminal building from the airfield. The upper parts of the valley sides were covered with the tall cardones cactus plants, giants twenty feet tall and more, looking like cartoons of the desert cactus. There were even vultures perched in the cactus. Below, on the valley floor, were the lasers. At first it looked like a field of mirrors. Over a hundred lasers were scattered across the brown Baja desert sand. Each sent its output into a mirror. The mirrors were all arranged so that they reflected onto one very large mirror nearly a kilometer beyond the balcony. A rail track ran onto a platform above the final mirror. Squat capsules, like enormously swollen artillery shells, sat on cars on the track, a long line of them waiting for launch. As he watched, one of the capsules was wheeled along the track until it stopped over the launching mirror. The field became a blaze of blue-green light as the lasers went on. Somewhere nearby, Kevin knew, were two large nuclear power plants. They poured their entire output into the lasers below him, enough electricity to power a city, all turned into laser light. The mirrors pivoted slightly so that all their energy went to the one large mirror at the end of the field. The capsule rose, suddenly and silently, as if pushed into the sky by a rapidly growing giant blue-green beanstalk. It vanished in seconds, but the laser beam continued to follow it, moving from vertical to an angle toward the east. Finally all the lasers went out together. "My God," Kevin said aloud. "Fm going up like thatT" He heard a laugh behind him and turned quickly to see the girl who'd been in the altitude chamber with him. She smiled as he looked at her. "Yes, we are," she said. "Scared?" "Damn betcha." "Me too. I wish Td taken the shuttle." Another capsule was in position, and rose silently from the platform, vanishing into the clear blue sky, followed by the silent beam of intense light. If he listened carefully Kevin thought he could hear the hum of the beam. It was pulsed at something like two hundred times a second. The laser system worked like a ram jet. Under each capsule was a bell-shaped chamber, open at the bottom. The laser energy entered the chamber and heated the air inside. The air rushed out, pushing the capsule upward. Then the beam was turned off just long enough for more air to get into the chamber, to be heated by the next pulse of the beam. "Tm still not sure I believe it works," Kevin said. "It looks like black magic." "Green magic," Ellen said. There was a long pause in the launching sequence, then a trainload of capsules came out. Each capsule was accompanied by an armed guard. Four Mexican Army tanks rolled alongside the train. "Ye gods, that must be a valuable cargo," Kevin said. He looked quickly at Ellen when she didn't answer. She was watching them with a look of satisfaction. "Do you know what's in them?" Kevin asked. "No, do you?" "I thought you were watching as if you did. No, I haven't a clue." "As you said, it must be valuable." She continued to stare until all the capsules were launched, and the guards and tanks rolled away. Then she looked at her watch. "Maybe we ought to be getting down -- " "Yes. Hate to miss the ship. Where are you headed?" Wayfarer. Das Wanderer' Kevin had thought she would be going up to one of the orbital factories. "All the way to Ceres? Alone?" "Yes, why not?" Kevin shrugged. "No reason." "Except that you don't approve of women going to the Belt," she said. "That's man's work. I suppose you want restrictive laws for space, too. 'One job per family' out in the Belt as well as here on Earth." There was anger in her voice. "Well, you had that in the United States, still do really, but you won't get it in space, and I'm going whether you approve or not." She turned and stalked down the stairwell. "Hey," Kevin called. "Hey, I didn't mean anything. I'm sorry -- " She didn't turn. To hell with her, Kevin thought. He slowed down, wondering what to do next. "Kev! Hey, buddy," someone called. Kevin turned. It was Wiley Ralston. "Wiley! Hey, are you going up this round?" Wiley had left Los Angeles two weeks before to find a job in deep space. Kevin wasn't that surprised to see him. "Sure, I'm in the afternoon wave. Ride up with me?" "Can't," Kevin said. "I'm going right now -- hey, where are you going?" "Got some things to arrange," Wiley said. "You going in WayfarerT' "Right -- you too?" Wiley was hurrying away, and his manner indicated that he didn't want to be followed. "You're going up right now? Not in the first capsule, though -- " "Sure, get it over with," Kevin said. He had to shout now; Wiley was moving away fast. "Not the first," Wiley said. "Get on the last one -- " "Why?" "Can't stop to talk, old chum. I've really got to scoot. See you aboard Wayfarer He vanished into a door marked authorized perstanding in the middle of the empty corridor. Damn, Kevin thought. He walked slowly to the capsule loading area. If I wait, he thought. I'll be scared out of my wits before it happens. He knew the laser launching system was safe, but that didn't stop the butterflies in his stomach. May as well get it over with, he thought. He collected his helmet from the technicians. There was one couple, and Ellen MacMillan, in the loading area. "Who's first?" the technician asked. "We are," the couple said. "Right. Let's see you get into your hats and seal up." When they had their helmets dogged down the technician attached a pressure gauge to the man, looked worried, and said, "Go back and get a recheck on this." "Something wrong?" "Probably not, but I like to be careful. Okay, you're downchecked. Next." He jerked a thumb at Kevin, then at Ellen MacMillan. "You two. Get your heads on and let's hook up air bottles. Come on, we haven't got all day. Orbits don't wait." When they had donned helmets and air tanks the technician checked his gauges again. "Looks good," he said, and sent them through a door. Kevin hurried along, trying not to think of the ride ahead. No worse than a roller coaster, he kept telling himself. The launching pods were waiting. They seemed much larger than the ones he'd seen being launched, but even so the capsule was too small. It looked like a bell-shaped steel coffin. Ellen was already inside, strapping herself into a nylon-webbing couch. Kevin got in and lay on the other couch. "Hear me all right?" a voice asked. "Yes." They both answered at once, speaking a little too loudly, a little too confidently. Kevin turned toward Ellen to see that she was looking at him. They grinned faintly at each other. "Fine. Now you wait a while," the tech's voice said. "Then you go. There's nothing tricky about any of this. You're hooked into the capsule air supply. When you make orbit you wait until a crewman comes and opens the can. Then -- and not before -- you pull that big lever above you. It disconnects you from the capsule system and you'll be on your own air tanks. You got two hours of air in the capsule and pother hour in your tanks. Okay, I'm closin' you in. Bon voyage." The capsule door closed. They watched the inside wheel turn as it was dogged shut. It already seemed close and cramped in the pod. Like a big steel coffin built for two, Kevin thought. He pushed the thought aside. "We're moving," Ellen said. There wasn't much sense of motion, but she was right. The capsule was moving along the track. Kevin tried to visualize its progress as it went inexorably toward the launch area. "Wonder how the kids will make out?" "Better than us, I expect. At least we don't have to do anything -- " "I wish we did," Kevin said. "Better than just waiting for them." "Sure -- " The warning tones sounded, then gravity seized them. They were pressed hard into the seat webbing. Three gravities isn't all that bad; a little like being on a water bed with another mattress on top of you and two people piled onto that. It was possible to breathe, but not to talk. The acceleration went on and on. I'm really going, Kevin thought. I've left Earth, and I won't be back for a long time.    Eventually the weight diminished, then was gone entirely. There was a sensation of falling, endless falling. "I wonder if we made it," Ellen said. Her voice was artificially calm. "Well, this is free fall -- " "Which we would feel whether or not we have enough velocity to make orbit," Ellen said. "And we won't know for about half an hour." "By then the crew people will be here." I hope, Kevin thought. There was nothing to do. There ought to be some kind of instniment to tell them they were in orbit. Kevin thought about that. How could you design one? No air, of course; couldn't measure velocity by air speed. An accelerometer hooked into the capsule; add up all the accelerations and you'd have velocity. A micro-computer to decide whether that was the proper velocity for the job. Sure, it could be 'done. Why hadn't they done it? Another expense for an already expensive business. "I'd think someone would have spoken to us by now," Ellen said. She moved her arm up so that she could see her watch. "Only five minutes. Seems longer." "Sure does. Uh -- by the way, my name is Kevin." "I know. I saw it on your paper. In the chamber. You read mine, too. We were pretty silly, weren't we?" "Yeah. What outfit are you with?" "None. I'm paying my own way," she said. Good Lord. She had to be fabulously wealthy. He looked at her suit and other gear. First class, but no frills. "How come you're taking the hard way up instead of the shuttle?" "I couldn't afford a shuttle ticket." That didn't make sense. "But you can afford a ticket to Ceres. Why are you going there?" "It seemed like a good idea at the time," she said. Then she giggled. "I'm not too bad at engineering, Kevin, even if you don't approve of women in your business -- " "I never said -- " "And I didn't like the offers I got from the orbital factories. Or the Luna companies either. So I took what I could scrape up and bought a ticket. There wasn't much to spare." "Out to make your fortune pioneering," Kevin said. "That's right. There'll be good Jobs for me. For anyone who can do the work. I see you don't approve." "Sure I approve. It Just seems like a long way to go -- " "You're going," she pointed out. "Why can't I?" Kevin didn't answer. It Just didn't seem right. And you're a male chauvinist pig, he told himself. You hate to see a pretty girl working at something besides being a pretty girl. Only that's not true. Dammit it's going to be rough out there, and -- And, he thought, I've got about says women and children shouldn't get into tough situations. The world is no longer a place where we live in caves and go hunt tigers, and our instincts are all fouled up, but we We got them. Of course it was pretty rough for unmarried women in the United States anyway. The feminist movement had gotten legal equality for women -- for a while. But then came the Equity scandals, and the Great Recession, and rising unemployment. The unions put on the pressure, and Congress came up with the 'One Job Per Family law. The courts threw it out, but Congress passed it again, and its status was still undecided. And women weren't welcome in most unions whatever the courts said, not with so many men out of work. And maybe, Kevin thought, maybe the whole idea is wrong, but there are plenty of women -- married women -- who approve the job restrictions and reserved occupations. "It seemed a long time from when they launched the cargo to when they sent us up," Kevin said. "How can both batches get to the same satellite?" "They can't. The cargo went directly to Wayfarer. We go to the orbital station," Ellen said. She frowned. "I make it twenty minutes since we were launched. Doesn't that seem like an excessively long time? We ought to have heard from someone." "It does seem a while. Let's try calling out." He reached up to the radio panel above. There was a small card of instruction attached on its face. The first said, "for guages. "Is this an emergency?" Ellen looked thoughtful. "I don't know -- I'd hate to cause trouble, but I am getting a bit worried." "Me too. To hell with them." He switched on the radio. Then he cursed. "There's no pilot light," he said. "Burned out -- or does the set work?" There was only one way to find out. There was a jack on the face of the panel, and he plugged his mike into it. "Hey out there -- anybody listening? This is Capsule -- uh -- nine-eight-four, hopefully in orbit. Anyone? Over." "There isn't even static," Ellen said. "The receiver's not working. I doubt if the transmitter is working either." Kevin looked at her with curiousity. She didn't seem scared. Or surprised, either. "What do we do?" "You can try the transmitter again." "Sure. Mayday. Mayday. This is Capsule nine-eight-four. Mayday, Mayday. Over." Again he heard nothing. How long would it take for one of the crewmen to get to them, if the transmitter worked but the receiver didn't? "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Capsule nineeight-four. Our receiver is not working. We cannot hear your reply. Please come help us. Mayday." Ellen began unfastening her seat straps. Kevin watched with a frown. Thev'd been told not to do that. Of course they'd also been told someone would come get them. He felt a knot of fear in his stomach. Trapped in an orbiting steel coffin. The sensation of falling was overwhelming now. In a moment he'd panic if he couldn't do something constructive. "I don't think that's going to do much good," Ellen said. She inspected the emergency set. "I don't see anything obviously wrong. Should we take the cover off and look?" Kevin doubted that would be any use. Integrated circuit chips all look alike; how could you tell if something was wrong with one of them? He began unfastening his own straps. When they were loose, he floated away from the acceleration couch. It was a strange sensation. He'd seen people in free fall on TV often enough, and had looked forward to experiencing it, to being able to swim in the air, but now all he wanted was to get back to having weight again. "We have suit radios," Ellen said. "Is yours powered?" "Yes. Fresh batteries, and it was checked out yesterday -- Hey! If we get outside this thing, we might be able to raise somebody with it." "We'll have to disconnect from the capsule air supply before we can open the hatch," Ellen said. "If the hatch will open at all -- " "Why shouldn't it?" She shrugged. The motion set her twisting slightly, and she caromed into him in the confined space. They both grabbed handholds. "We have to do something," Kevin said. "Let's open the hatch." He reached for the big emergency disconnect handle. "Wait. Fasten your safety line to something." "Oh. Right." He clipped the line to one of the couch pipeframes. "Ready?" "As I'll ever be. Go ahead." He turned the red handle. It didn't turn; he did. Kevin cursed and got his feet planted against the couch, braced, and turned the handle again. It moved, slowly at first, then swung over. The ship's air hoses popped loose from their connections on their backpacks. They were now living on their air tanks. "There's still pressure in here," Ellen said. "Damn." She was right. The emergency disconnect was supposed to vent all the air from the capsule. The capsule hatch wouldn't open until the air was gone. There 'd be no point in pulling on it; at seven pounds a square inch, hundreds of tons of air pressure held that hatch closed. They couldn't open the hatch, and then had less than an hour of air. VI "I never thought they'd do it this way," Ellen said. "Huh? Who'd do what this way?" Kevin asked. "Nothing. We've got to bleed the pressure out of this capsule. Try to find the relief valve." She began searching her side of the capsule. "This looks like it," Kevin said. There was a valve with a large handle. Remembering what happened the last time he'd tried to turn something in free fall, he braced himself before he twisted the handle. It spun without effort. The handle wasn't splined to the valve stem. 'Jesus Christ," he muttered. Ellen pulled herself over to watch as he futilely turned the handle. "No go," he announced. He was surprised at how calm he sounded. "Your tool kit," Ellen said. "What's in it?" Kevin didn't really know. He'd taken some of the items out to look them over, but that was something else he was supposed to learn about on the way out to the Belt, and there 'd been so little time to prepare. He took the leather tool pack off his belt and opened it. "There's a power head," he said. "I remember that. And drill bits. But is it enough to get through the capsule walls?" "You won't know until you try," Ellen said. He took out the power head and inspected it. Then he searched through the loops of the tool pack until he found the drill chuck. It wasn't obvious how that attached to the power unit, but he worked carefully to be sure he didn't bend or break anything, and eventually it snapped into place. He pulled the trigger experimentally. The whine of the motor was delightful music. "Now for the bit. About six millimeters? Looks about right." He squinted in the dim capsule light, trying to read the tiny words on the shank of the bit. He couldn't make them out. He hoped all the bits were they were sharp and new. He put the bit in the chuck and tightened it, then looked for a place to drill, choosing a spot between two braces. "I wonder how thick these things are." "No thicker than they have to be," Ellen said. "True." The less structural weight, the more payload. "Here goes." He pressed the bit against the metal surface and turned on the drill. It whirred reassuringly, and the bit threw up tiny bright chips that floated in the compartment, dancing about when stirred by air currents kicked up by Kevin's movements. "It's working," Ellen said. For the first time there was excitement in her voice. "It really is." He continued to drill, trying not and where he was. That was no good, so he tried to think about something else. Why was Ellen so calm? And why hadn't she been surprised? The bit seemed to have gone awfully deep. Wouldn't it ever get through? But, even as he wondered, it jerked and pushed all the way to the chuck. Air whistled out past it. Kevin reversed the drill and withdrew it. "Might take a long time to empty the capsule through that hole," Kevin said. "I'll do another hole, this time with a larger bit." The second hole seemed to go easier. Now they could definitely feel the pressure dropping. He felt the familiar push of the neck seal as his air tanks pressurized his helmet in compensation. Then he glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes. They'd used a the holes, and there was nothing they could do but wait.    "I have it," Ellen said. She turned the steel dogging wheel on the hatch. It seemed to turn easily, and the hatch opened inward. Sunlight poured into the capsule. Kevin wondered how long that would last. They had to be in orbit, a very low orbit at that; it wouldn't be long before they were on Earth's night side. After making sure his safety line was still attached he slipped the pawl on the reel and worked his way out of the capsule. The sight was so glorious that for a moment he didn't move. Earth was below, an enormous disc shrouded in wispy white clouds. They were above the Atlantic, and could see islands, and far at the horizon the west coast of Africa. It looked rather like an enormous circular map -- they weren't high enough to see Earth as a sphere. All around him -- there was no "above" or "below" -- there were capsules very close by. In the distance he saw what seemed to be a much larger structure that looked like a floating junk pile, without shape or form: a series of wheels and cylinders and shapes of no description at all held together by girders and cables. It had bright flashing lights. Kevin estimated it at about a mile away, although he found it was very hard to judge either its size or distance. One of the channels of his suit radio was marked in red letters, for emergencies. Kevin turned to it, tongued the mike. "Mayday. Mayday, Mayday, this is Capsule -- dammit!" Ellen came beside him and put her helmet next to his. "Nine-eightfour." "Mayday. This is Capsule nine-eight-four. Mayday! Dammit, where are you?" "Maybe they aren't listening," Ellen said. Her voice was the only thing he heard in his phones, and given that she was right next to him it didn't sound ver' loud at all; Kevin wondered if the batteries in his set were getting weak. But they couldn't be! They were new, the whole rig was new. "Kevin, look! This is the only personnel capsule in this area. The others are all cargo." She was right. There were plenty of capsules around, some only a few yards away, but the others were stubbier than theirs, and in contrast to the red-white checkerboard pattern on their own pod, these were yellow. Somehow they'd been launched into the cargo-pod recovei # area. "Where are the others who came up with us?" Kevin demanded. "Probably on the other side of the base station," Ellen said. "Where the crewmen are. No one will come over here until they have all the other passengers inside." "But they damned well ought to know they're one pod and two people short," Kevin said angrily. "Now what? Mayday, dammit." They were conversing on the emergency channel. They shouldn't be doing that. Kevin laughed. "What?" "Hoping some communications monitor overhears us and comes out to slap us with a violation ticket." The joke seemed a little flat. He glanced at his watch. A little over half an hour of air. This was absurd! They were no more than a mile from the station -- well, maybe two, Kevin thought; distances were hard to judge -- and there wasn't any way they could get over there. Neither of them had a reaction pistol or a backpack jet. You can i swim in space: no air -- nothing to push against! Kevin thought, sternly repressing an impulse to laugh hysterically. So what do we do? Have to do something! "There are a lot of those capsules around here," Ellen said. "They seem to get pretty close to the station -- " Yes! Certainly they could get closer to the station. The nearest capsule in the right direction wasn't more than fifty meters off, possibly closer. It should be easy to jump that in free fall. But if they missed, they'd drift forever. He looked down at the reel on his safety line. Ninety meters. More than enough. "Look," he said "I'm going to stay hooked on here and jump for that other capsule. If I hit, connect yourself to my line and I'll puli you over. Then we'll see about going on to the next one." He released the brake on his safety line reel. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. "All right." Kevin braced himself for the jump. No danger, not really. If he missed, she could pull him back. He crouched, got a hand-hold on the edge of the capsule hatch so he could get strain in his legs, and jumped. He tumbled. Stars whirled above him, then Earth, the base station, Ellen, then more stars. He must have pushed harder with one leg than the other. He twisted to get a look at where he was going. The capsule he'd jumped for was a lot closer, moving up fast. He twisted again, instinctively spreading his arms and legs as wide as possible to slow his rotation. His hand Just brushed the capsule. He grabbed frantically and got hold of something. It almost yanked his arm off. Have to remember that, he told himself: jump as hard as you can and you'll hit with the same force. "Okay, I'm aboard," he said. He clipped the other safety line to the protruding ring on the capsule. "Unsnap my other line and hang on -- I'll pull you over.' "Right," she said. "Okay, I'm ready . ' ' Kevin pulled gently. The temptation was to keep on pulling, but that wouldn't do: she'd just build up speed until she was moving too fast, maybe fast enough to get hurt. He let the line wind back onto its reel. She turned just before she reached him and landed exactly feet first. She seemed pleased with herself "Daddy made me study gymnastics," she said. "Always hated it, but now I'm glad I practiced." "Yeah." Kevin pointed to another capsule, this one only twentyfive meters from their present position. "That one's a piece of cake. Here I go." He jumped, this time on center, and checked himself against his new perch. It took time, but they were able to continue the process until they were only five hundred meters or so from the base. Then they ran out of capsules. Kevin prepared himself mentally for that final leap, one that he knew all too well would probably send him past the station, falling forever... Better do it now -- or he might not be able to do it at all. But wait -- the station seemed enormous now; it had been farther away than he'd thought. He remembered that suit radios were deliberately under powered so they wouldn't carry' too far; otherwise all of space would be filled with chatter. But the emergency frequency? And they were a lot closer than the last time he'd tried. "Hell, it's worth a try. Mayday. Mayday, dammit!" "Hello Mayday, identify yourself" "By God!" he shouted. "We made it. Hello. We were passengers aboard capsule nine-eight-four. Air supply is going fast. We're on the leading side of the station, among the cargo capsules. Don't know which one. We abandoned the personnel pod and started hopping from cargo-pod to cargo-pod, trying to get to the base. I'd say we're about half a kilometer out." "Nine-eight-four, can you make a light?" the voice asked. "I'll have a scooter out there in a moment. If you can show a light it will be easier to find you." Kevin waved his flash. Down below he could see the sunset line stretching across East Africa. "Better hurry," he said. "We have about ten minutes of air left." "No sweat. Be with you shortly."    "But how did it happen?" Kevin demanded. The crewman shrugged. "I really don't know. There must have been a monumental foul-up down at ground control. Never happened before." Foul-up at ground control. Sure, he thought. But why wasn't the capsule radio working? Or the emergency disconnect? Or even the manual pressure-bleed? It seemed like a lot of coincidences. It seemed like somebody was trying to kill him. But that, he was sure, was silly. He couldn't think of anyone else who'd give a damn if he lived or died -- and the Green Fence gang sure as hell couldn't reach out into space. "I would appreciate it if you'd look into it," Ellen said. She seemed very calm. A lot calmer than Kevin was. "Sure," the crewman said. "Luckily, no harm done. We've just time to send someone out for your gear and get you aboard the scooter for Wayfarer. Come this way, please." "But -- " "Kevin," Ellen said. "If we raise a fuss they'll have to investigate. We'll have to stay here. And Wayfarer won't wait. I didn't spend ten thousand francs for a ticket Just to miss the ship." "All right." He let the crewman lead him through the base. They were both being damned nonchalant about something that had almost killed them. Maybe this was the way it's done in space, he thought. It doesn't take much to kill you out here so nobody's impressed with close calls. The crewman stayed to the outer rim. The station rotated to give artificial gravity, about forty percent of Earth's. Kevin was surprised to find that it was hard to tell Just how much gravity he felt. After that time in no-weight, any gravity felt good. The deck curved up in front and behind them, but it always felt level. It was a strange experience to be walking on a curve. The walls of the station seemed to be made of some kind of rubberized cloth with a metallic thread in it. They didn't feel hard to the touch, not like steel. They went through several airlocks and came finally to one that led outside. The crewman unsnapped four new air bottles from a rack. Kevin started to pul his two into his backpack. "Suggestion," the crewman said. "Yes?" He pointed to an air gauge on the rack of bottles. "It's a good idea always to check and see if they're full." He reached into his own belt pouch and came up with a gauge. "Me, I don't even trust the airmaster's gauge. Use my own." Kevin found one in his tool kit. Just for luck he checked one bottle with all three gauges, his own, the airmaster's and the crewman's. He got the same reading each time. Ellen followed his example. "Now you're thinking. Okay, close up helmets and into the airlock."    The "scooter" was no more than an open framework with a long line of saddles and a rudime"htar' control system at its front. The passengers sat astride fuel tanks, and baggage was strapped underneath. The other passengers for Wayfarer were already aboard. Somebody waved at Kevin, and he recognized Bill Dykes. Ellen and Kevin got the last seats aft, the only two left. They strapped in, and about then a smaller scooter came up with the baggage from their capsule. It was lashed aboard, and the pilot hit the throttles. The motion was very gentle, hardly any acceleration at all. The view was marvelous. There was points and squares of city lights. Everywhere else were stars, countless stars, endless stars, an endless fall of stars in the Milky Way, brilliant stars, with bright colors. They moved through a clutter of space-launch capsules and crewmen with lights unloading them. Kevin looked at his watch. Ellen, behind him, noticed the gesture. By now they would have both been dead. She nodded at him then pointed to a channel on her radio. Kevin switched to it and turned on his set. "I've never been up before," she said. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" "Yes." They were coming to the daylight line on Earth below. It ran through the Pacific. Behind them were the bright spots that were cities people. Ahead and below was blue water, fleecy clouds and a distant line that might have been more clouds, or maybe California. To the north was a tight spiral of clouds. "Typhoon," Ellen said. She stared frankly at it. She seemed on edge, but the way a tourist is excited at seeing new and wondrous sights, not afraid. If she can do it, so can I, Kevin thought. He was more shaken than he cared to admit. Then there was more industrial activity around them. They were moving into full daylight, and Kevin was surprised to see how far they'd come from the base station in such a short time. Up ahead was a mirror larger than a football field. It just hung there in space. It focussed sunlight onto a rock somewhat larger than a house. Other big rocks nearby anchored what looked like big flat metal plates. Something -- he supposed metal -- boiled off the target rock and condensed onto the plates. After that they saw a cage that looked as if it were made of ordinary chicken yire. It was big, half a kilometer in diameter, and it was filled with launching pods, tanks of all sizes, rocks, spare scooters, what looked like big garbage cans, plastic bags -- anything that wasn't in use at the moment. It kept things from drifting away. They went past other marvels, and eventually Wayfarer came into sight. The scooter pilot pointed it out to them. "Your home for a while," he said. Their first impression was of a bundle of huge cigars. Those were the big fuel tanks almost a hundred meters long. They were so large that they dwarfed the rest of the ship, and ran the entire length of midsection. Behind the "cigars" was a solid ring that held three rocket motors. Then at the end of a spine as long as the main body of the ship was the nuclear reactor and another rocket motor. This was the real drive. The three cihemical rockets were only for steering and close maneuvering. Wayfarer's power came from her atomic pile. The cigar-shaped tanks lield hydrogen, which was pumped back to the reactor where it was heated up and spewed out through the rear nozzle. A ring of heavy shielding just forward of the reactor kept the pile's radiation from getting to the crew compartment. The rest of the pile wasn't shielded at all. Despite the large size of the ship, the crew and cargo sections seemed quite small. There were some structures reaching back from the forward ring where the control room was. Two of those were passenger quarters. The other was another nuclear power unit to make electricty to run the environmental control equipment, furnish light for the plants, power to reprocess air, and all the other things the ship and passengers and crew would need. There was a big telescope and a number of radar antennae on the forward section. The scooter pilot was careful not to get near the reactor in the ship's "stinger." He brought them in to the bow. The outer door of an airlock stood invitingly open. A crewman brought a cable over and attached it to the scooter, and then hauled the scooter in close. Then the passengers began the trip from their saddles into the airlock, crawling across the cable like so many spiders. When it came his turn Kevin judged the distance and decided to jump. He had just crouched when the pilot grabbed him. "Hey, no!" the pilot shouted. "Not your first time in space!" Kevin shrugged and grinned into his helmet. Probably he'd have to take extra-vehicular-activity training while on Wayfarer. As if he hadn't learned the hard way how to jump around in free fall... He crawled across the cable behind the others. Home at last, he thought. For nine months. A long time. The ship had been designed for sixty passengers. She carried twice that number plus eight crew. Most of the passengers were already aboard; Wayfarer was crowded. No more than half the passengers had ever been into space before, and everyone drifted through the ship in total confusion. The internal space was constructed in a series of circular decks. Each deck had an eight-foot hole in its center, so that from the forward end, just aft of the separately enclosed control cabin, Kevin could look all the way aft to the stern bulkhead. Although there was a long and rather flimsy-appearing steel ladder stretching from aft to forward bulkhead, no one used it. Passengers and crew dived from deck to deck in the null-gravity conditions of orbit. Most of the passengers weren't very good at it yet. A harried crewman in red coveralls punched Kevin's name into a console. "F-#," he said. "If that's supposed to mean something, it doesn't," Kevin said. "F deck," the crewman said. "A deck is the bridge. B is the wardroom. C, D, and E are the three aft of that. E happens to be recreation and environmental control. Yours is the one beyond that. They're marked." Someone else had come up and the crewman turned away. "You'll find it," he said over his shoulder. Kevin shrugged. It was a mistake, because it caused him to drift away from his handhold. He grabbed frantically at a protruding handle -- the ship had plenty of those -- and when he was stable, launched himself down through the central well. He got past C and D decks before he had to catch something and try again. Since he was carrying his bulky Fiberglas travel case with all his luggage, he felt he had a right to be proud of his first efforts. Finally he reached F deck, which he found to be sectioned into slice-of-pie compartments arranged in a ring around the central well, fifteen of them in all. He found the one marked "#" and went in. His "stateroom" was partitioned off with a flexible, bright blue material that Kevin thought was probably nylon. The door was of the same stuff and tied off with strings. It didn't provide much privacy. Inside the cramped quarters were facilities for two people. There were no bunks, but two blanket rolls strapped against the bulkhead indicated the sleeping arrangements. It made sense, Kevin thought. You didn't need soft mattresses in space. "Sleeping on a cloud" was literally true here. You needed straps to keep you from drifting away, but that was all. One viewscreen with control console, a small worktable, and two lockers about the size of large briefcases completed the furnishings. The cabin wasn't an encouraging sight. Kevin wondered what he should do with his gear. His Fiberglas travel case was stuffed with things he'd been told he'd probably need for the trip; another larger case had been stowed somewhere by the crew and was inaccessible. He wandered out into the central area of F deck, and found that in other staterooms people were lashing their travel cases to the bulkheads. Kevin went back and did the same. He wondered who his cabinmate would be. No one had asked him if he had any preferences. The only person he knew aboard Wayfarer was Ellen, and she wasn't likely to accept an offer to share quarters. While he was trying to convince himself that it couldn't hurt to ask, a middle-aged bearded man, quite heavyset, came in carrying two large travel cases. He looked up at Kevin apologetically. "They told me to bunk here," he said. He blinked rapidly and looked around the small room. "It isn't very large, is it? I'm Jacob Norsedal." His voice wasn't very deep to begin with, and the low air pressure in the ship made it sound squeaky. Kevin introduced himself. He tried to shake hands with Norsedal, but again got separated from his handhold and drifted across the cabin. Norsedal looked thoughtful, then, holding a wire conduit that ran through their stateroom, reached out and very gently pushed against Kevin. Kevin drifted to the bulkhead where he got himself back into control. Norsedal looked pleased. The incident reminded Kevin that he was in free fall, and his stomach didn't like it much. He gulped hard. "I'll be glad when we're under way," he said. "It won't last long, but it will be nice to have some weight again. Even for a day or so." Norsedal frowned and rolled his eyes upward for a moment. "Not that long. I'm afraid," he said. "Let's see, total velocity change of about five kilometers a second, at a tenth of a gravity acceleration -- five thousand seconds." He took a pocket computer off his belt and punched numbers. "An hour and a half. Then we're back in zero-gravity." He restored the computer to its pouch. It was secured to it with a short elastic thong, as was everything else Norsedal carried. Kevin was fascinated with the man. He went about everything methodically. First he strapped down his travel cases. Then he opened one. A geyser of clothing, papers, pencils, another and far more elaborate computer than the one he wore on his belt, chewing gum, bulbs of soft drinks, more clothing, a dozen magnetic-strip programs for his computer, and other small objects floated up into the room. They dispersed in the compartment. "Oh, my," Norsedal said. He looked thoughtful. His hand snared the computer as it drifted by. Then he reached into the travel case again and got a shirt. "If you'll help me with this -- " Together they used the shirt like a seine to net all the gear. Norsedal produced a laundry bag to hold everything. Then he fished around in the travel case, more carefully this time, until he had a pleased expression. He came up with a small nylon-covered package that contained several rolls of Velcro, a pair of scissors, and a squeeze-tube of quick-drying glue. He began gluing Velcro hooks into his travel case and his locker. "I should have done this back on Earth," he said. His voice was almost perpetually apologetic. "But it wasn't certain I'd be coming, and they didn't give me the cases until just before I left." Kevin watched interestedly. When the lockers were entirely lined with glued-on Velcro hooks, Norsedal carefully began work with the fuzzy Velcro, attaching strips to all his personal gear. Calculator, pencil case, notebook, tape recorder -- "That's a great idea," Kevin said. "Want some? I brought plenty." "Thanks, yes." Mostly Kevin was interested in the other man. He didn't seem like anyone Kevin would have thought would go to space. Norsedal was clearly overweight, very visibly so. He sniffed as if suffering from a sinus condition, and one of the objects Kevin had caught for him was a kit containing a hypodermic needle and bottles of what must have been room-temperature insulin. Although it was obvious that Norsedal had thought a lot about life in zero-gravity conditions and tried to make preparations, it was also obvious that he'd never been in space before. He had trouble keeping himself anchored while he worked. "Who're you with?" Kevin asked. He had to talk much louder than he was used to; the low air pressure didn't carry sound very well. Although there were people in the compartments on either side and the partition was only thin nylon, they couldn't understand the conversations in the next cabins. "Interplanet. " Norsedal continued working with glue and Velcro. The glue smell was strong, but not excessively so. "I hope the air system doesn't have trouble with this," Norsedal said. "I suppose I should have brought water-soluble glue. But I wanted it to dry quickly. Maybe we should ask someone -- " "I wouldn't worry about it," Kevin said. Interplanet, he thought. That was the Zurich-based international consortium that maintained one of the two bases on Ceres. Kevin couldn't picture Jacob Norsedal as a miner or prospector and he certainly wasn't any kind of construction worker. "What will you be doing on Ceres?" "Computer programming. And cxperiments with the computer system," Norsedal said. "Storekeeping -- I'm supposed to set up an inventory control system for them. And work time-effectiveness studies. Anything that needs doing with computers." He seemed very happy about the idea. "I -- " Kevin hesitated. He didn't want to offend the man. Presumably there would be an opportunity to swap cabinmates once the ship was under way, but in any event there was certainly no sense in getting into an argument with someone you'd have to live with for months. His curiosity got the better of him. "You don't seem like a spaceman " Norsedal smiled through his beard. "No. That's what the company said when I applied. It took me a long time to convince them. But look at it this wav. A ten-vear supply of insulin doesn't weigh very much. Nor does it matter if I'm overweight, not in Ceres' gravity, or in none at all. And I had one very good argument: I wanted to go and I can do the work." He began stowing his gear as he glued fuzz onto it. Decks of magnetic-backed cards. Three wargaming books. When he came to #hose he looked thoughtfully at the reader screen. "I think I can tie that into my computer," Norsedal said. "We can use it for a display. Are you interested in wargames?" Kevin had never thought about it. "After a few months in space I expect I'll be interested in anything -- " Norsedal grinned. "That's what I thought. We'll teach this thing to play Star Trek." He reached out to the screen and touched it, petting it like a dog: nice screen. Pat, pat.    They had two days aboard Wayfarer before the final boost toward Ceres. Kevin thought it would have been fun if there hadn't been so many people crowded aboard. He learned to eat in free fall, although he still managed to get a lot of the food into the intake grid of the air recirculation system: the only way to spoon food from plastic bags to mouth was in one smooth motion, never stopping. If he halted the spoon on its way, the food kept going to splatter against his face or shoot over his shoulder. He also learned to do tumbling in zero-gravity. One of the other passengers organized a pool: the winner would be the first passenger to go in a single leap from A deck all the way to the aft bulkhead. No one looked like winning it just yet; four decks was the record. It was Kevin's turn to try when Captain Greiner ordered all the passengers back to their cabins for boost. Weight felt strange. The ship boosted at about ten percent of Earth's gravity, but Kevin found that quite enough. All over the ship loosed objects fell to the decks. "Last chance," Jacob Norsedal said. "Until halfway there. Anything lost after this boost is done will either go to the air intake grid, or it won't show up at all." Ninety minutes later the acceleration ended. Wayfarer was now in a long elliptical orbit that would cross the orbit of Ceres. Left to itself, the ship would go on past, more than halfway to Jupiter, before the Sun's gravity would finally turn it back to complete the ellipse and return it to its starting point. In order to land on Ceres, the ship would have to boost again when it got out to the orbit of the asteroid. There would also be minor course-correction maneuvers during the trip, but except for those the ship's nuclear-pile engine wouldn't be started up until they arrived at Ceres's orbit. Then the ship would accelerate to catch up with the asteroid. That wouldn't happen for nine months. Nine months was a long time Kevin had thought, but he was surprised at how quickly time passed. With only ten crewmen aboard, the passengers had to take turns working ship maintenance systems. Kevin was assigned to life support, with the job of cleaning out the sewage-processor. It wasn't his favorite work, but he learned a lot about the algae tanks and chemical processors that took human wastes, including exhaled carbon dioxide, and turned them into oxygen and food. There were also large leafy plants: lettuce, spinach, even watermelons and pumpkins. These vegetables furnished variety in their food, but were not really important to the ship's ecology. It takes a lot of surface area to absorb sunlight enough to convert a hundred people's wastes, and the larger the plants the less surface they had for the mass they took up. Algae are not as pretty as strawberry plants, but they are highly efficient. The heart of the system was a series of large transparent tanks filled with green water and tropical fish. Once Wayfarer was under way the crew erected large mirrors outside the hull. The mirrors collected sunlight and focussed it through plexi-glass viewports onto the algae tanks. A ventilation system brought the ship's air into the tanks as a stream of bubbles. Other pumping systems collected sewage and forced it into chemical processors; the output was treated sewage that went to the algae tanks as fertilizer. Kevin called it the "green slime works" and was always suspicious of the food served aboard Wayfarer; harvesting and food processing was somebody else's job, and Kevin didn't want to know the details. He knew that the algae became highprotein flour somehwere along the line -- but he also knew what the algae tanks took in. The thought wasn't particularly appetizing. He got to know most of his fellow passengers. Ellen was roomed with two other women in a slightly larger cabin on L Deck, not far from the stern. Wiley Ralston was one deck above her. So was Bill Dykes, the minerprospector Kevin had met on the plane to Baja. Kevin met a number of others as well; he had a very popular roommate. Jacob Norsedal was madly teaching his personal computer to play Star Trek, Galactic Empire, Waterloo, Alexander the Great, Diplomacy, and any other game people wanted to indulge in. He had also invented a three-dimensional interstellar war game with a dozen mutually opposing sides and that seemed destined to be interminable -- the players needed a computer just to tell them their options. Norsedal didn't play games himself, but he loved being referee, and his quarters tended to be a meeting place for those with nothing to do. Kevin, to his sorrow', wasn't included in that category. On his second day after boost a large man came to the stateroom. "Kevin Senecal?" he demanded. "Me," Kevin admitted. "George Lange. Senior Daedalus employee aboard. I guess I'm your boss." Lange held out a stack of casettes. "You're supposed to study these." Kevin eyed them warily. "That's a lot of reading -- " "It's just a start," Lange said. "I've got a lot more for you. You're expected to learn something on this trip." He glared at Norsedal's computer, which was marching armies across the reader screen. "There's work waiting out in the Belt." "And we've got months," Wiley Ralston said. He came into the stateroom. With four people inside it was crowded, but not badly: Ralston and Norsedal took places near where the ceiling would have been if there had been a floor and celling; with no gravity, there was no up or down and any part of the room was as comfortable as any other. "There's months' worth of learning to be done," Lange growled. "Look, this ship is it. Either we make some profits out of the Belt, or there won't be more ships going. Not even the big companies can keep up this investment without some return. So at least you, Senecal. will get to work learning what you ought to -- " Later Kevin found he had tapes on general space operations, mining, prospecting, environmental control systems, composition of asteroids, orbital mechanics -- Norsedal helped him study. He claimed to be interested, but Kevin thought Norsedal had probably learned everything on the tapes and was too polite to admit it. Certainly he was a good coach. Anything that could be done with a computer particularly interested him, and he showed Kevin how to do simple programs to solve most of the problems on the tapes. Slowly Kevin found himself learning what he had to know, even though it left him very little time for social life. His studies tended to keep him busy, so that he conversed mainly with Norsedal. Three weeks out Kevin finished the first stack of tapes. 'T suppose he'll have more," he said. Norsedal was sitting yoga-fashion on nothing. He looked like a bearded Buddha. "Probably." "So I don't tell him I'm done," Kevin said. He waved at the stack of tapes. "Gripes, according to that stuff we've licked all the problems, but every time I see Lange he gives me this bit about how desperate everything is, and how much work there is to do -- " He stopped because Norsedal wasn't amused and it showed. "Are things that bad? I thought we knew how to live in space -- " "We do," Jacob said. "Technical capabilities exceed requirements by an order of magnitude. But Lange is right all the same. The space colonies aren't self-sufficient, and there aren't many ships. The Luna people want more Earth cargoes, the O'Neill Colony people want the ships, and the big companies can't afford to keep sending ships out to the Belt unless they get something back. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the last ship from Earth until the Ceres refineries prove they can make a profit." "You mean it's really up to us?" Kevin asked. Norsedal was very serious. "It might be. It's worse than that, really. Earth is so near the edge that if this attempt doesn't make it we may never be able to afford asteroid colonies again.' It was a sobering thought. Kevin looked at the pile of tapes. "I guess I'd better tell Lange I'm ready to get back to work." With # people packed into quarters that would have been cramped for half that number it was inevitable that the passengers would get on each other's nerves. Kevin was surprised at just how few fights developed. There were plenty of quarrels and screaming matches, but not many blows. The worst part of it was the almost complete lack of privacy aboard Wayfarer. For the first weeks this was no great problem for Kevin: there was too much to do. He had tapes to study, Norsedal 's wargames, extravehicular activity practice under supervision of the crew, maintenance duties and other ship's work that was rotated among the passengers -- and just plain getting used to living in zero-gravity. He spent hours playing with liquids: squirt a dollop of colored water from a syringe, and it immediately became a sphere like a miniature planet. Inject an air bubble into it with a syringe and it assumed a new shape. Blow on it gently to get it rotating and it became a donut of water hanging in space. There were rivers of stars to see outside any viewport. He had to learn the constellations all over again; there were just too many stars to let him recognize the old familiar patterns as seen from Earth, so many stars that in a darkened room you could almost read by starlight. above the ship's telescope tower with nothing ahead or above, he felt as if he were suspended motionless in space, a part of the universe. Kevin was always sad when his time was up and another passenger took his place. He eagerly looked forward to his practice sessions outside the ship, and wondered whether, when he reached the Belt and he would be outside for many hours at a time, he would ever get used to the wonder and grandeur of space. He hoped he would not. As weeks went by, though, he found the lack of privacy becoming more irritating. There were # women among the I # passengers aboard Wayfarer. Half of those were married and most of the remainder had formed quasi-permanent attachments. None of this bothered Kevin, since Ellen MacMillan remained at large and seemed to enjoy his company; but he could never be alone with her, and that was annoying. Eventually the problem solved itself: they were assigned to environment systems maintenance during the same shift. Dismantling and cleaning sewer pipes wasn't his idea of a romantic setting, but it did have the advantage that no one else was interested in being in the same compartment while they worked. And Felipe Camel, the ship's Chief Engineer, was happy enough to leave the work to qualified passengers once he'd checked them out; and Ellen was as competent and conscientious as he. The work was not demanding, merely messy and difficult; they had plenty of time to talk. For some reason Ellen seemed genuinely interested in Kevin and kept drawing him out. She was easy to talk to, and he found himself telling her about his early life, abut school, and why he had come to space. Although he was usually somewhat shy with girls it was easy to be friends with Ellen. "I think I've told you everything there is to know about me," he said finally. "And I don't know anything about you. You never talk about yourself -- " "Nothing to talk about." She squinted up at him and made a face. During the week they'd worked together they'd developed a system of signals. This one meant that she had sweat in her eyes and filth on her hands. Kevin took a clean tissue and wiped her face. "Thanks." She went back to reaming out the plastic pipe. "Come on," Kevin said. "You've made me do all the talking." "There really isn't anything to tell," Ellen said. "I don't have any relatives. I was raised in an orphanage -- ' ' "I didn't think they still had those," Kevin said. "Foster parents and -- " Ellen shuddered. "I was through several of those foster homes. Horrible way to live. Kevin, did you ever hear of the Futurian Foundation?" "No." "I guess not too many have. It's an organization that's interested in where -- " She laughed. "It sounds silly if you're not a part of it." "No, please. Tell me." "Well, we're trying to look at where mankind is going," Ellen said defiantly. "Governments look ahead as far as the next election. The big corporations can look a little farther, sometimes as far as ten years. And nobody worries about what's going to happen after that. Nobody except us. We try to look hundreds, even thousands of years ahead." "And you're a member of that -- " "Sort of. They raised me. When I was fifteen they bought me from the foster parents I was with -- ' ' "Bought you? Sounds like slavery." She shrugged, a tiny wriggling motion; they had all learned new gestures for use in zero-gravity. She shifted her location, wedging one foot under a pipe clamp so that she could use both hands for the job she was doing. "In a way it is," she said, "The state pays the foster parents to raise orphans. It's profitable work. They're paid by the number of kids in their home, so the foster parents don't want to let anyone go. The social welfare people don't want to let you go either -- if they don't have orphans to take care of, they can't justify their jobs. So the Futurians had to pay off the foster parents, some lawyers, and two social workers. I'm glad they did." Kevin looked puzzled. Ellen laughed. "Nothing mysterious about it. They have a testing program to catch the right people young and get them thinking about the future instead of themselves. That's all there is to it. I've been brought up to be satisfied with enough to live on, not to want anything more except my work -- so I've got everything I want." "And you think that's not interesting?" Kevin said. "You seem to have found the secret of the ages." She laughed again. It was a pleasant sound, even muted as it was by the low air pressure. "We don't keep all our recruits, you know. Most of the kids we bring up go off to normal lives. Only a few of us join the Fellowship." "But you did?" She nodded. "I suppose that's like a priesthood," Kevin said. His voice had betrayed his thoughts, and she laughed again. "Not really. We're not celibate, you know! Although sometimes you act as if you think I am -- " "Hey, wait a minute, that's not fair," Kevin protested. She was laughing again. "The way conditions are on this ship we both might as well be monks -- either that or adopt the attitude of monkeys in a zoo, and I'm afraid I haven't got to that point yet. There. That's done. You tighten up the connections while I clean up." She looked down at her hands. "Yuk." Kevin pushed away from the bulkhead and expertly floated over to the pipe assembly. He was proud of his hard-won ability to work in nullgravity conditions. He got one foot wedged into the pipe retainer and braced the other against a wire channel, leaving both hands free, and applied a big wrench to the pipes. The fittings turned hard, and everything took at least twice as long to do in zero-gravity as it would have on Earth. Finally he had it done. "You can turn on the pressure." The system worked again, with no leaks, and Kevin nodded in satisfaction. "Now. We're alone, and this is done, and -- " He reached for her. She didn't resist. The Battle for Andromeda -- (#). the entire Galaxy, Omega Ship Dreadnaughts (#(X) miles across) that j can destroy # solar systems in a sin! gle move! The mere presence of an "O" ship, # light years away constitutes an act of war! A series of games, involving Humanoid, Comput er. Alien, Cyborg Cultures, their own  history and unique weapons systems,  fleets, cloaking devices, nucleon misi siles!     Warriors of the Dark Star -- (#), in the Age of the Neutron Wars: a tactical series using enlarged models of Omega, Alpha, Beta ships in ship-toship combat with all weapons, rays, computers, in immense scale. Complete games in themselves, both series can be extended, so the size and scale of these games are unlimited! The boards are systems for the wargamer, never used before!    New # Taurus Catalog, #, has vast quantities of wargames (all brands) covering every phase of Wargaming from the Stone Age to the Future. Purchase two games, deduct # off total price of games and get the catalog Military Research and Design Specialists Innovators in Game Design Dept. # G P.O. Box #, Evanston, IL "I think we'd better stop," she said, after a while. "Why?" "Because this isn't a very private place, and I am not a monkey in a zoo. The Leones may not mind putting on demonstrations for the other passengers, but I do -- " "Nobody ever comes here." "Yes they do." She pushed away from him and caught a look at her reflection in one of the big plexiglass algae tanks. 'T'm a mess. "You're not." "Thank you. But I am. So are you, for that matter. Our faces are all swollen up, our lips are chapped, and we're getting pimples." "All true but all irrelevent," Kevin said. "We knew that would happen before we signed up for a long trick in zero-gravity." "But I didn't think I'd look this awful." "You look all right to me." He did a double somersault from his bulkhead and landed just next to her. He grinned and reached for her again. "Kevin, please..." Finally, she pushed away again. "Please. That's enough." "Not for me -- " "Not for me either, but it's still all we're going to do," she said. "And don't look like a hurt little boy. Kevin, I like you. That's just the trouble. If we -- this wouldn't be just a shipboard romance. Kevin, I can't afford emotional involvements. We've both got too much to do when we get to Ceres." "So we have work to do. There's more to life than work -- " "Sometimes. Kevin, once we get to Ceres we may never see each other again. It's not fair to either of us to -- to get too attached to each other." "I'll take my chances." "You say that now because I'm the only girl available. You wouldn't if -- if you knew what you'd be getting into. I'm not somebody you ought to know, Kevin. I shouldn't have teased you. I'm sorry. I get lonely too, and I forgot that we'll never just be two people -- " "What?" Kevin frowned. There was a strange expression on Ellen's face, a strange look in her eyes, and he didn't understand. "There's so much you can't know," Ellen said. "Kevin, we're friends. Let's leave it at that." She turned away to stare at pressure and flow gauges. "I think we've got this working again, and I've got some writing to do." She left the compartment hurriedly. Kevin wanted to follow her, but she moved too quickly, and there were people in the corridors outside. He came back to stare into the algae tanks. Tropical fish swam through the thick plant growth. They had adjusted to lack of gravity and oriented themselves as if the light source were 'up." They no longer seemed confused -- but Kevin was, and he didn't like it. "She said she liked me," he muttered to the fish. "And it's a long way to Ceres." He could comfort himself with that. It was a long way to Ceres... A week later they were both transferred to other ship's duties, not together. Kevin saw her quite often, but never alone. Kevin's new assignment was on the bridge. His partner was Wiley Ralston, and Kevin found himself telling his friend about his problems with Ellen. Ralston laughed. "Persistence, old buddy. Persistence and propinquity. Girls aren't any different from guys. They get homy too. Give it time." "There doesn't seem to be a lot else to do," Kevin said. "Yeah. Well, you'll have more of 'em to go after when we get to the Belt." True enough, Kevin thought. But he wasn't sure that was what he wanted. He wasn't sure what love was, or whether he believed in it, but he kept wishing Ellen were around so he could tell her things he'd just thought of, and made excuses to go find her. Eventually they were back in the farms and alone; and this time when he kissed her she didn't run away. A long time later, when they could speak again, she said, very seriously, "Kevin, we don't talk about love or the future. We're together while we're on the ship. Nothing permanent; nothing lasts after we reach the Belt." "Sure," he said; but he didn't believe her.    Kevin and Wiley Ralston had been assigned to the bridge again when the halfway course correction came. Captain Greiner was very casual about it. First he slaved the computer to the high-gain antenna, then took position and velocity readings from both Earth and Ceres. Finally he pointed the main telescope to the bright star Vega. The ship's computer digested the information for a minute. Then it flashed ready lights. "And this does it," Greiner said. He threw switches giving control of the ship to the computer. A recorded voice sounded. "Now hear this. Stand by for thirty seconds of very low gravity. Low thrust for thirty seconds, commencing in one minute. Fifty-nine. Fiftyeight..." "Almost as if the ship didn't need me at all," Captain Greiner said. "If it weren't for the maintenance, it wouldn't." "But you can operate without the computer, while it can't work without you," Kevin said. Greiner laughed. "Not hardly. Everything's got to be too precise. If we had plenty of fuel, sure, I could navigate by hand calculations; but not the way we're cutting it." "So even out here the machine replaces man," Wiley Ralston said. "Well, the damned machines can't do everything for us. Some things still need people. Though I wonder just how long -- " Kevin looked at him quizzically. Wiley grinned. "Just so long as they need us a few more years," Ralston said. "Long enough to get rich. Then they can run the whole damned universe by computer." The countdown ended, and they felt weight again. Not very much weight, about one percent of Earth's gravity: but it felt strange to have a permanent "up" and "down" again. Kevin had found that he could orient himself to think of any direction "above" his head as "up" in zero-gravity: since he was facing forward, he suddenly found himself lying on his back instead of standing. He found later that everyone in the ship had had the same problem. "Ceres has gravity," Jacob Norscdal said after dinner. "Let's see, about forty centimeters a second -- four percent Earth gravity." "Just enough so you can't jump off," Ellen said. "A lot more than that," Norsedal said. His voice was apologetic but firm. He was apologetic for disagreeing; but he was never uncertain about his facts. He took his belt calculator, the small one he always carried, and punched in numbers. "You couldn't jump more than about # feet straight up," he said. "Of course, you'd take a while coming down." Click-click. "Not so long, thirteen seconds. Half a minute for the round trip, up and back down again. Of course I've left out the mass of your suit and tanks. I could run it with those -- " "Never mind," Ellen laughed. She, like everyone in the ship, had found that if you asked Norsedal a question you often learned more than you wanted to know. "It's going to take getting used to all over again," she said. "Having things fall instead of just drifting around the way they do here. And Eve gotten used to sleeping in zero-era V it V. "  m They sat at the entrance to Kevin and Jacob's stateroom. One of the inevitable tumbling contests was going through the central well of the ship. Bill Dykes, the miner Kevin had met on the airplane to Baja, spun past doing somersaults and counting loudly. "Ninety-seven!" he announced with a grin as he went past. He was still centered in the opening, and it looked likely that he'd get all the way to the stem bulkhead. That was no longer unusual: the contest had been won weeks before, and now the passengers were trying to set a record for the number of somersaults before touching walls or decks. "Damn!" Hal Leone was in Kevin's stateroom playing a Stella wargame with his wife Jeannine. The game used ballistic calculations, and Hal had managed to get his ship into an unrecoverable situation: no matter what he did, it was going to crash into a' star. His wife chuckled. What made it embarrassing was that Hal was a mathematician and his wife a physician -- but she always won. Others gathered on F deck. It was almost time for another session of Norsedal's monster twelve-sided game, and the players were assembling. Someone produced a bottle of vodka vacuum-distilled from green slime. Despite its evil source it had no unusual taste at all. The bottle passed around. There was more activity in the well: a twirling contest, men and women pirouetting in midair. Then Bill Dykes came tumbling back toward the bow, followed closely by his cabinmate and partner, Carl Lundgren. They were counting loudly. "Happy hour," Ellen said. Suddenly another man leaped across the opening. He collided heavily with Carl Lundgren. "Look where you're going!" Lundgren shouted. "Shove it," the other man said. Kevin recognized him: Frank Sales, a loner with a foul temper. Sales was going out to work as a miner. He was a short, almost dwarfish man, who compensated for his small stature with a constant program of exercises. All the passengers were supposed to take their turn with the exercise machines, but Sales was the only one who took extra time on them as a matter of course. "Goddamit, I was headed for a record," Lundgren said. "What'd you want to do that for?" Sales grunted and turned away. "I asked you a question!" Lundgren shouted. "Come back here." "Hey, buddy," Bill Dykes said, grabbing Lundgren 's arm, "Drop it. He ain't worth it." Lundgren shook Dykes off. "Keep out of this, Bill. That sawed-off little bastard never looks where he's going. Who the hell does he think he is?" "Are you talking about me?" Sales grasped a stanchion and turned back toward Lundgren. "Are you?" "Damn right, you little creep." "Hey -- " Dykes protested, but it was too late. Sales dived toward Carl Lundgren and knocked him from his perch against the edge of F Deck. The two men became a tangle of arms and legs tumbling in the central well. Lundgren caught Sales by the hair and pulled; the result was that both tumbled out of control. Others moved to try to separate them, but only added to the tangle. Someone began to laugh and others joined. Ellen giggled. Then Sales's hand moved to his tool belt. "Look out, Carl, the little bastard's got a knife!" Dykes shouted. Lundgren turned frantically toward Sales. One of the others trying to separate them grabbed at Lundgren, missed, and caused him to spin violently again. Three other passengers dove toward the fighting men, and there was another wild tangle of bodies. Then bright blood spurted out to hang in large droplets in the air. It was impossibly red, tiny red planets hanging in space. Someone screamed, more passengers and a crewman appeared to separate the fighters. When the two were pulled apart they saw that Carl Lundgren spurted blood in rythmic pulses from a slash across his throat. "You've killed my partner!" Dykes roared. He started for Sales, but other passengers held him. "He came for me!" Sales shouted. "You saw it, he ran right into me, I never meant to hurt him." There was a babble of voices. "Get him to sick bay!" "Hold on to that murdering son of a bitch!" "Jeez, little buddy, you're going to be all right, you gotta be -- " "Get a doctor!" Jeannine Leone came out of Kevin's cabin and dove to the group holding Lundgren. Her hands worked frantically at the wound. "I can't get a grip," she said. "You, hold him against the deck. One of you hold onto my feet. Not like that! Hold me steady, I have to get pressure on this -- " Blood continued to stream into the ship. Bright crimson spheres floated toward the air intake grid. "We need weight," Jeannine shouted. "Send for the Captain -- " "I'm here," Greiner said. "We need weight. Not much, just enough to let me do steady work. Can you give us acceleration?" "No," Greiner said. "Can't do it." "But he'll die -- " "I hope not, but we can't do it!" The Captain's face was grim. "If we accelerate now we won't get to Ceres at all." Jeannine continued working, but finally she straightened and shook her head. "Too late," she said. "He's dead. I don't know if I could have done anything even if we had gravity." She turned to Bill Dykes. I m sorry -- "Not your fault," the miner said. He looked at his partner's body, then at Frank Sales. "Now we got a murderer to deal with. I say we put him outside now and get it over with." IX "Trial! We gotta have a trial," someone shouted. The Captain agreed. Eventually it was settled. Of course everyone wanted to watch. There was no place aboard Wayfarer large enough to assemble the entire ship's company. The wardroom deck could hold about half of them, with people perched around the walls and hanging onto the deck above. The rest had to scatter through the central well. Since it wasn't possible to understand what was said from more than ten feet away Captain Greiner had everyone put on their helmets and tune to a common channel. Eventually everyone was settled, some scattered all through the ship, others on the wardroom deck. It was not an orderly meeting. "There are few precedents," Captain Greiner said, "but this isn't the first murder in space. I am not sure the previous cases apply, however. In the first space murder the satellite commander tried the case himself, and himself executed the murderer. Although the commander -- it was Aeneas MacKenzie, by the way -- offered to employ the entire satellite crew as jury, there were complications including threats against the families of crew members, and MacKenzie ended by acting alone. "However, in that case there was no doubt about the guilt of the murderer, or that the crime was premeditated: the murder was part of a scheme to sabotage the satellite. Few have questioned the justice of MacKenzie 's actions." Kevin felt Ellen shudder. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Nothing," she said; but her voice was low and tightly controlled. "This is farcical," someone shouted. Kevin couldn't tell who it was; the voice came through his headphones. "You can't even establish that there's been a murder, and there is no impartial jury. Everyone here is prejudiced." "Who the hell is that?" Bill Dykes thundered. "Not been a murder? My partner's dead, and this bastard did it, and what's there to talk about? Put him outside and get it over with!" Someone else shouted, "I got no use for Sales, but we have to let him tell his story -- " "Sure," Dykes said. "We listen to him, then we put him outside!" Everyone began to talk at once. "It was a goddam accident -- " "What the hell, fair fight -- " "Damn murderin' bastard never was any use -- " "Silence," Greiner said. His voice carried authority. "We are holding this meeting to determine what we shall do. It will not become a shouting match." "There's plenty of precedent from sailing ship days," someone said. "You can do anything you think best for the welfare of the ship." "I am aware of that," Captain Greiner said. "As most of you know, I am an engineer and aircraft pilot by training. I do not come from a navy tradition and I must say I am reluctant to assume supreme authority -- ' ' "You have to," someone shouted. "But if that is what is needed, I will do so," Greiner finished. Someone jumped up through the well to land in front of Captain Greiner. "I'm Martin Pacifico," he said. "I'm a lawyer." There was a chorus of boos and hisses. "Who needs himT' Bill Dykes shouted. It didn't seem to bother Pacifico. "Captain Greiner, the essence of a fair trial is an impartial jury. Obviously there is no possibility of such here. Even if there had been -- and most of the passengers were witnesses to the alleged crime and thus were already not competent as Jurors -- your insistence on discussing this matter before the entire ship's company has contaminated all possible veniremen -- " "Oh, shut up!" Dykes yelled. "Captain, get that yo-yo out of here. My partner's dead, and dammit -- " "Enough," Captain Greiner said. "Mr. Pacifico, are you suggesting we wait until we reach Ceres to hold the trial?" "That won't do either," Pacifico said. "Ceres has no jurisdiction -- "So we must wait until Sales is returned to Earth?" Greiner asked. "Which could be ten years, or could be never -- " "Shut that goddam lawyer up," Dykes yelled. There were other shouts of agreement. "May I speak?" Kevin didn't recognize the newcomer, but Greiner evidently did. "Yes, Mr. Harwitt?" the Captain said. "Harwitt?" Kevin asked. "The Westinghouse supervisor," Ellen said. They spoke without using their microphones. "Captain," Joe Harwitt said. "My company has an interest in this matter. Lundgren had signed up to work for us in the Ceres refinery and we paid for his passage. But now we have no one to do his work. I think that Sales owes us restitution. " "That is a civil matter," Pacifico said. "Not under consideration here. I would be glad to represent you, though -- " "Oh, shut up," Harwitt said. "I don't want money damages ten years from now, I want a refinery worker! It is too late to bring someone else out to take his place, but we can get some use out of Sales. He will have to do." "I say, wait a moment -- " Captain Greiner seemed resigned. "Yes, Dr. Vaagts. I expected to hear from you sooner or later." "Sales is signed up with Rheinmettal," Vaagts said, "and we will need him. You can't take him for Westinghouse -- " "Does Rheinmettal stand responsible for his actions?" Harwitt demanded. "You brought him here." "Don't be ridiculous." "I'm not being ridiculous. Somebody's got to compensate Westinghouse for the loss of our worker. I say we have a right to Sales as replacement for Lundgren." "But he would be of little use to you," Vaagts said. "You admit he is untrained for refinery work. But he has a good record in deep mining operations, and we can use him. Suppose, Joseph, that we keep him working for us, and compensate you for Lundgren's passage with funds withheld from his pay?" "Rather have a worker than money," Harwitt said. "But I suppose we could make a deal. You'd have to pay interest, of course." "I think that can be agreed," Vaagts said. "You are speaking of slavery!" Pacifico shouted. "Damn it, what about my dead partner?" Dykes demanded. "And his family back on Earth?" "Ah," Vaagts said. "I suppose restitution to Lundgren's family is in order as well -- we will divide Sales's pay between Westinghouse and Lundgren's family -- " "Slavery'," Pacifico said again. "You can't do this to me," Sales shouted. Everyone began talking at once. "Civil rights -- " "Screw his rights -- " "Put the bastard outside and get it over with," Dykes said again. He didn't sound so positive now. "Only -- maybe it's not so bad, making him pay -- " "We still have not established Mr. Sales's legal obligation to anyone , Pacifico said. "Captain, may I respectfully request," Dr. Vaagts said, "that if that extremely unpleasant lawyer person does not keep silent so that interested parties can come to agreement, we put hi?n outside -- " "And who'd pay Interplanet compensation for losing Pacifico?" someone asked. "Take up a collection?" another voice added hopefully. "Let us first determine who are the interested parties," Captain Greiner said. "First, of course, Mr. Sales himself." "Glad you jokers realize I'm still here," Sales said. "Shut up," Dykes yelled. "Second," Captain Greiner continued, "the relatives and friends of Mr. Lundgren. Certainly they must have a voice in any settlement. Third, the two companies: Rheinmettal, which employs Sales and has paid for his passage; and Westinghouse, which has lost the services of Mr. Lundgren. Are there any others?" "Justice!" Pacifico said loudly. "If all interested parties are satisfied then justice has probably been served," Greiner said. "Now: Mr. Dykes, what do you propose?" "Put him out -- only I'll say this. If Carol Lundgren and the kids can get something out of this, that'd be better. Won't do them any good if we space this little creep." "So. And we have heard the proposals of the interested firms," Greiner said. "It now remains to hear from Mr. Sales himself. Sales, you are charged with murder. How do you plead?" "It was a goddam accident -- " "We can, if you like, call witnesses and determine just what happened," Greiner said. "But I think we already know. There was an argument. You began a fight. You were losing it, and for whatever reason you drew a weapon which you used to menace Mr. Lundgren. Do you disagree so far?" "Well -- I just wanted to make him stop heatin' on me," Sales said. "I didn't intend to hurt him! You all saw it, somebody pushed him, he fell into my knife. I didn't go after him." "I do not dispute that," Greiner said. "Does anyone?" There were murmurs, but no one spoke up. '"About the way I saw it," Kevin said. Ellen nodded. "The fact remains that you drew the weapon and menaced Mr. Lundgren with it, and thus you are the responsible party. You also began the fight." "He provoked me -- " "But you struck the first blow." "Fair fight's no murder," someone said. "Perhaps," Greiner said. "But this was hardly a fair fight, with one party armed and the other not warned. I do not say what I would do if there were a formal duel aboard my ship, but I do say this was not a fair fight as I understand it. Have we established the facts to everyone's satisfaction?" "This is terrible procedure," Pacifico shouted. Greiner ignored him. "Then, Mr. Sales, you are certainly guilty of manslaughter. Do you dispute that?" "He provoked me," Sales insisted. "And you are accordingly found guilty of that charge," Greiner said. "We have no jail facilities aboard this ship, and it is not my job to provide punishment in any event. I sentence you to forfeiture of all pay and allowances for five years. You will continue to be employed by Rheinmettal, which will take sufficient measures to prevent your injuring anyone else, and your pay will be divided equally between the family of your victim and the company which employed him. So ordered. First Officer, write it into the log and I'll sign it. Dr. Vaagts, I deliver this man into your care. The ship's company is dismissed.    The rest of the trip to Ceres was uneventful -- until the last day. Kevin had once again been assigned to bridge duties, which consisted mostly of keeping the Captain and First Officer company, and making coffee in free fall -- not the easiest job Kevin had ever done. The last phase of the voyage was to be an acceleration lasting nearly three hours. Wayfarer was in a long elliptical orbit that crossed that of Ceres; in order to land on the asteroid it would be necessary to both change the ship's direction and to catch up with the tiny planet. The process began hours before the bum, with Wayfarer s electronic gear getting a precise position and velocity fix. The ship had to be located precisely, with relation to Ceres. Captain Greiner programmed the radar antenna to seek out the beacon signal from Ceres. "Here goes," he said. He pressed the keys to initiate the position fix, then reached for a squeeze-bottle of hot coffee. He squirted coffee into his mouth, swallowed, and looked back at the control board. Then he frowned. "What the devil?" "Sir?" First Officer Leslie Seymour floated over to the Captain's station. "I'm not getting anything," Greiner said. "Nothing at all." "That's odd," Seymour said. "It's as if the antenna wasn't working. Maybe I'd better have a look -- " "Maybe you had. Mister." Seymour was already wearing his pressure suit. He reached for his helmet. "shutdown, warning, comannounced. "The hell you say!" Greiner muttered. He turned to the ship's computer and examined displays. "Damn! Leslie, it says it has a power interrupt!" "Jeez. Antenna not working and now the computer's going out -- " "Check out the antenna," Greiner ordered. He lifted his intercom microphone. "Chief Engineer! Mister Camel, get up here on the double. Something's happened to the computer. Leslie, on your way, now." "Yes, sir." Seymour left the bridge, headed for the main airlock. "What's happening. Captain?" Kevin asked. "Is there something wrong with the computer?" "Damned wrong," Greiner said. "And we can't possibly make rendezvous with Ceres without it -- there you are, Felipe. Look at this thing!" Felipe Carjiel looked at the shutdown message, then opened a panel and stared at dials. "It says that regulated power's been cut off, Skipper," he said. "Regulated power? Where the hell's that power supply?" "Back aft," Camel said. "It's never given any trouble before." "Better go have a look," Greiner said. "Rojj." Camel turned to leave the bridge. "And have a look at the seals on the cargo hold," Greiner said thoughtfully. The engineer looked back quickly. There was astonishment and worry in his voice. "Sir, you don't think -- " "Mister, I don't know what to think. Just check things out." "Aye aye, sir." Camel left hurriedly. "Sir?" Kevin asked. "I thought we got power from the reactor." "We do," Greiner said. "And there's no problem with the main power system. You can see that -- the ventilation system's working, the lights are on. Nothing wrong there. But the brain here eats a very precise diet. It wants # cycle power, and that doesn't mean # either. If the brain's not getting what it wants, it shuts down to avoid damage to itself." Greiner frowned. "In fact, I wonder if it's not reporting antenna problems when all that's wrong is the power supply? We'll find out." Greiner didn't seem very worried. It didn't seem serious, and Kevin went back to making more coffee. After all, they had ten hours before they started the engine. Besides -- he could see Ceres in the ship's main telescope. He had watched it grow' from a point to a recognizable object, no details but definitely a disc. They could aim for it and blast -- First Officer Seymour came back onto the bridge. "The antenna's gone. Skipper." "Gone?" "Clean gone. Like it was sawed off, or maybe blasted off with a couple of turns of prima-cord. Gone, anyway." "Bat puckey. It can't be gone," Greiner said. "Blasted off? Sabotage?" "Looks like it to me," Seymour said. "Hmm. Well, we can still navigate with the telescope. If we get the computer running again," Greiner said. "But if -- you really think it was sabotage, Leslie?" "Yes, sir. What else could it be?" They waited in silence. Finally Kevin asked, "If the computer's really out, what happens?" "We don't get to Ceres," Greiner said. His voice was grim. "Three years to home," Seymour added. "If we're lucky we can cut some off that, but not a lot. Think this tub will keep us alive for three more years. Skipper?" "It might. With a lot of work," Greiner said. He looked thoughtful. "Present orbit takes us out to better than three and a half AU before we head back toward Earth. Less than ten percent of the sunlight we get down near Earth. It'd be close for a while. Not much light for the ship's farm." "But -- I can see Ceres," Kevin protested. Greiner laughed without humor. "Sure. But how much do I burn aimed in what direction? Kevin, we've got Just enough fuel aboard to set us down on Ceres. Nothing to spare for mistakes. Without the ship's computer we could never do it -- " "Can we get back to Earth without the computer?" Kevin asked. "No. But that's not the problem. It's only the power supply. If we have to we can build another. We can build another antenna, too -- ah." He stopped as Felipe Camel came back into the bridge compartment. "Well?" Greiner demanded impatiently. "Cargo seals are all intact," Camel said. "I put Phelps on watch down there, just in case -- " "Phelps alone?" "No, I asked three passengers, random selection, to stand watch with him." "Good," Greiner said. "And the power system?" "Blown to hell," Camel said. "Somebody put about fifty grams of plastique into the system. Messed it up good." "And the spare is gone," Greiner said quietly. "Might as well be. Been taken apart into little bits." "How long to rebuild?" Greiner demanded. His tone indicated that he already knew the answer. "Days," Camel said. "Three or four days anyway." "By which time we'll be long past Ceres and headed out to nowhere," Greiner said. "Interesting. Someone put a lot of thought into this. He's sabotaged the exact two systems to keep us from landing on Ceres without actually crippling the ship." Greiner's calm broke at last. That son of a bitch! He's done it! I cant't put the cargo on Ceres -- " he shouted. "And there may never be another ship out here again," Felipe Camel finished for him. "Somebody's just damned near killed the whole asteroid mining business." X "There must be something we can do." First Officer Seymour pounded his fist into his palm. "Raise Earth and have them run off the problem in Zurich -- " "Without the high-gain antenna?" Felipe Camel laughed. "We can't raise Earth without that antenna." "Ceres, then," Seymour said. "They've got a big computer -- " "And no programs," Captain Greiner said. "And once again, without the antenna, we can't rely on comnlunications with them. We'll try, but I've no confidence." Greiner looked at the last print-outs from the ship's computer. Wayfarer's last known poasition was one hundred thousand kilometers from Ceres. The ship's orbit crossed that of the asteroid at a sharp angle; Wayfarer would have to change direction, then catch up; in practice that meant a smooth curve stretching from Wayfarer's present course to the asteroid's orbit, with a slight change of orbit plane as well -- and Ceres moves at eighteen kilometers each second. The problem was not merely to get to Ceres, but to arrive with exactly the same velocity as the asteroid, and going in exactly the same direction. The navigation would be only slightly less complicated than hitting a BB in flight with another BB fired by a gunner who had bad eyesight. An error of a tenth of a kilometer per second would put the ship impossibly far away from its target. "Leslie, try raising Ceres," Captain Greiner said. "Let's see if they have advice." First Officer Seymour floated to the communications set and anchored himself to the stool. He lifted the microphone and began calling. "What I want to know is who," Greiner said. "Damned clever chap, whoever it was. This was well planned. We keep our fuel, drift on in our ellipse, and eventually return to Earth. Stops us without committing suicide." "But why?" Kevin asked. Greiner shook his head. "Who'd benefit from this? Too many to count. The African mining outfits don't want competition from asteroid mines. Anti-technology people want to stop space exploration altogether -- " "Lunar mining outfits," Felipe Camel cut in. "Or even the O'Neill colony people -- they've been making noises about what a waste Belt operations are -- " "Skipper, I've got them, but they can't understand me," Leslie sheepish, "They just don't read us." "Maybe when we get closer -- " Kevin said. "By then it will be too late," Greiner said. He stared at Kevin. "You look like a man with an idea. Have you thought of something?" "Possibly. Captain, I know somebody who can compute the burn for us." "Who? And how -- " "My cabinmate, Jacob Norsedal." "Norsedal," Greiner said. "He's been up here a number of times. Very interested in our ship's brain. Yes, I'd say he knows computers, but this isn't a computer problem, Kevin. We cannot rebuild that power supply in the few hours we have left, and we don't need a program, we need a computer -- " "Yes, sir, but he's got his own," Kevin said. "I've seen it," Greiner said. "Kevin, he can't possibly do this calculation with that little belt model he carries -- " "I wouldn't bet on that," Kevin said. "But he doesn't have to. He's got a much bigger one in our cabin. Uses it for wargames. Recreation stuff. And he's been keeping track of Wayfarer. He calculated the midcourse correction you made, and said something about it being off, but not much -- " Grenier looked thoughtful. "Felipe, go ask Mr. Norsedal to come to the bridge. And ask him to bring that extra brain with him." "Right," Camel said. "And you needn't tell the passengers about our problem," Greiner added. He waited until the engineer had left the control cabin. "Now. Kevin, how sure are you that Mr. Norsedal isn't the one who bollixed our system to begin with? I wonder who else could have thought of this method?" "You'd think that was funny if you knew Jacob," Kevin said. "He's a space fanatic. Also a computer fanatic -- he likes them more than he likes people. He'd never harm one." "I point out to you that this one hasn't been harmed," Greiner said. "And I grant you it's not likely, but it's certainly possible that someone who seems to be a space fanatic could be one of the anti-technology people. They do study technological systems, you know." "Possibly, but Jacob isn't against technology," Kevin insisted. "I hope you're right." A"   When Camel returned with Norsedal, Captain Greiner explained the problem. "Senecal here thinks you can do something," Greiner said. "How much time do we have?" Norsedal asked. "The burn was scheduled to take place in four hours." Grenier answered. "Not much time." Norsedal looked thoughtful. "No. Well, it was just a possibility. I didn't really believe in -- " "But I think we can do something," Norsedal said. He went over to the chart table and placed an attache case on it, using the table straps to hold it in place. He anchored himself to the stool at the table, then opened the case and patted the computer inside. "Nice computer. Fortunately, I already have some of the programs we'll need. Now let's see -- " Jacob opened another compartment and took out paper. "Captain, I can program the course, but I can't possibly patch my computer into the ship's drive system -- " "No sweat," Felipe Camel interjected. "We've got a lot of little special-purpose computers for that. One is slaved to the gyro system and controls the engine thrust. You tell the ship where to go and I'll see that she goes there." "Good. I thought so," Norsedal said. "If you didn't have a lot of smaller computers dedicated to special purposes, the air system wouldn't work -- " He began to work furiously. Pencils and paper floated away from him, to be retrieved by one of the others. He drank coffee constantly. An hour went by. Then another. Finally Norsedal began punching input buttons. "Done?" Captain Greiner asked. "I have the basic program. Now we have to get it checked out and running," Norsedal said. He continued to type inputs. "Now we'll just try -- " He pressed buttons. There was a moment of silence, then the readout screen filled with numbers. "Stopped on an input error," Norsedal muttered. "That's simple enough." He typed for a moment, then looked up. "Captain, have you decided you will fly this course once I have it?" "I'm still thinking about that," Greiner said. "No point in making decisions unless there's something to decide. Do you think you'll have it?" "Probably." Norsedal didn't look up from his console. He muttered, sometimes to himself, sometimes to the computer. "Nice computer, tell me what I did wrong this time..." "I don't like this much," Leslie Seymour said. "Nor I," Greiner said. "But you know what happens if we do not deliver this cargo." "Yes. I suppose we have to try." Seymour went to the main telescope. "At least we can get decent bearings," he said. "There's Ceres, nice and clear -- " "I hope so," Norsedal said. "I had to compute the course as a function of the position of Ceres relative to Vega. We'll need constant sightings on both." "We can get them," Seymour said. "Captain, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to protect the main telescope. Before that son of a bitch gets to it -- " "Good thinking," Captain Greiner said. "In fact, we ought to locate all the passengers and crew and set them to watching each other before there's more sabotage. I should have thought of that earlier." Greiner was apologetic. "I was never a ship captain, merely an astronaut with the European Space Program. Not the best training for what we're faced with. Leslie, see to it, will you?" "Right, Skipper. Senecal, come with me, please. I want you to go outside and watch the telescope until we're certain that everyone is accounted for." "Not alone," Greiner said. "Not that we don't trust you, Kevin -- but who can we trust?" "I understand," Kevin said. "May I use your intercom?" "What for?" "To call a friend." He went to the intercom panel and dialled a stateroom number. "Ellen, they've come with me?" "Who did you call?" Greiner asked. "Ellen MacMillan. We've worked together on other jobs in this ship, and I know she can take care of herself outside." "I heard about your difficulty getting to Wayfarer , Greiner said. "Yes. I'd think MacMillan would be a good partner. Certainly we could trust her." "But Skipper," Leslie Seymour protested. "We can't let her go outside -- " "Now that she's said she will, have you any way you can think of to stop her?" Greiner demanded. And what is this all about, Kevin wondered. He had no time to ask. Seymour sighed. "No. I don't suppose I can," he said. "I guess she'll do nicely. Let's go find her." He opened the companionway door. There were three people waiting outside in the main corridor. One came in quickly, pushing past Seymour. "Mr. Pacifico, what the devil are you doing on my bridge?" Captain Greiner demanded. "I represent the passengers," Pacifico said. His voice, already garbled by the lower atmospheric pressure in the ship, sounded shrill and petulant. "We've been told that the main computer is out, and you're going to chance a landing on Ceres anyway." "Who told you?" Felipe Camel demanded. "It's all over the ship," Pacifico said. He turned to the others who had come in with him. "Isn't it?" "That happens to be the case," Dr. Vaagts said. "I hadn't expected you to protest," Greiner said. "Nor am I protesting," Vaagts said. "I merely wanted to know what is happening. Mr. Pacifico certainly doesn't represent me, or Rheinmettal." "So who do you represent, Pacifico?" Camel asked. "Most of the passengers. We demand that we be consulted before you undertake a dangerous maneuver like this. Isn't it true that if you do nothing we'll go back to Earth, but if you try for Ceres and miss we'll have no fuel left? We'll all be dead?" "True enough," Greiner said. "And what confidence do you have in -- you've got him doing it? The wargamer? Captain, you can't do this. You must take a vote -- " "Vote hell. Leslie, you and Senecal were going out to locate all the ship's company." "Right, Skipper," Seymour said. "And you, Pacifico, get off my bridge. Now. Or I'll have you thrown off." "We have rights -- " "Leslie, heave him out." "With pleasure. Captain." First Officer Seymour launched himself toward the lawyer. "I'm leaving," Pacifico said. "But you haven't heard the last of this, Greiner. You are not a king, and this isn't the Eighteenth Century -- " He went out quickly as Seymour prepared to take hold of him. Kevin found Ellen in her cabin. He explained what had happened. "Finish getting into your suit," he told her. "We're supposed to go outside and look after the main telescope." "Sure. You wait out in the corridor." "Sure you don't need any help?" "Thank you, no." When they reached the airlock, Seymour had got most of the passengers together in the central well. A crewman guarded the airlock. Kevin and Ellen checked their air supplies, then went out as Seymour was calling the roll of the ship's company.    Wayfarer had two airlocks. One was right in the bows, a large docking port that allowed smaller space capsules to link up with the ship, and could also be used to link with an airtight corridor connecting the ship with the Ceres spaceport, or even with another ship. The other was a smaller personnel lock on the side of the hull just aft of the bows. Kevin and Ellen went out that way. There was a small ladder leading forward. With no gravity they had to be careful not to drift away from the ship. It would be easy to jump entirely away from Wayfarer. Although they couldn't fall off -- they were moving at the same velocity as Wayfarer, and would until the ship's engines were started up -- if anyone became separated from the ship he would drift away forever, moving slowly out into space. They climbed carefully to the forward end of the ship and rounded it. Now there was nothing ahead of them at all. Wayfarer floated among a river of stars, bright starlight and the black shadows of space, and there was no sense of motion at all. They hung in glory. The sun was behind the ship so that they were both in deep shadow, with just enough starlight so they could see each other. Their flashlights made small pools of light on the ship's dark hull. '"Magnificent," Kevin murmured. "I could stay here for the rest of the trip." Ellen floated over to him and silently touched his gloved hand. It wasn't a moment for talking. They found places to anchor themselves and waited in silence. The bin telescope was a few meters away. It moved slightly as Captain Greiner took sights. Kevin searched for constellations among the stars. He could make out only a few of the traditional ones; more than the ancient Babylonians who had named the constellations had ever been able to see. "Now that our eyes are adjusted, we'd best have a look at the telescope," Ellen said. "Right." They moved across the blunt bow of the spaceship. There were convenient handholds at intervals. Wayfarer would never enter an atmosphere and had no need for streamlining. The telescope was large, over a foot in diameter, with flexible seals that let it pass through the ship's hull and into the control bridge. They moved next to it and examined it with their flashlights. "That doesn't belong there." Ellen sounded very calm and not surprised. Her light indicated someXI thing about the size and shape of a coffee can. It was taped to the telescope barrel. "It may go off anyway. When you move it," Kevin said. "Get away from it -- " "This is my job," she said. "Move back. Farther." "No. You move -- " "I told you, it's my job. Now move or don't, I'm going to take this thing off." Kevin felt like an idiot. He was afraid of the bomb, and he was also while Ellen worked on it. "Idiot, somebody's got to tell them what happened," Ellen said. "If it goes off. So get away from here -- " "No." "Stubborn idiot." "No worse than you are -- " "True. There. I have it." She held up the can. "It didn't explode yet." She crawled toward the side of the ship, then got a firm grip on the handhold with her left hand. With her right she threw the can outward, away from the ship. They watched it dwindle and vanish into space. "Maybe it was old coffee grounds," she said. "Maybe." Kevin found that he'd been holding his breath. "Ellen -- what did you mean, it's your job?" "I shouldn't have said that. I was scared. Kevin, please -- forget that I said that. " "Sure," he said. But he knew he wouldn't. "Outside party, this is Seymour." The First Officer's voice was loud in Kevin's helmet phones. It seemed a grating irritation in the silent grandeur of space. "We're here," Ellen answered. "We found a bomb -- or something that looked like one -- attached to the telescope." "But when was it put there?" Seymour demanded. "I looked at the telescope when I checked the high gain antenna. I'm sure I would have seen anything -- " "I don't know, but it was there," Kevin said. "Ellen threw it off the ship about two minutes ago. It will be a kilometer away by now." "More like a couple of hundred meters," Ellen said. "It's difficult to throw anything very hard. But I'm sure it's far enough." "Good. That's not what I called you about," Seymour said. "There are two passengers missing." "Who?" Kevin asked. "George Lange and that Pacifico person. " "George?" Ellen was incredulous. "He couldn't possibly have had anything to do with sabotaging the ship." "He's my boss," Kevin said. "Always trying to get me to work. Ellen's right, he's not the saboteur. Pacifico -- well, he's another matter." "I think you ought to have a look around," Seymour said. "But don't take long. We start the engines in ten minutes, and you'll have to be inside before that." "We'll go in just before the burn," Ellen said. "Until then -- somebody put that bomb on the telescope. We'll watch." "Right. Out," Seymour said. Ellen moved closer to Kevin. "Turn off your radio," she said. When he did, she put her helmet against his. "Do you have any kind of weapon?" "Only the knife in my tool kit." "I wish we had a pistol." "But -- there aren't any pistols aboard, no guns at all." "How do you know?" she demanded. "Kevin, I'm worried." "About Pacifico? He's a pipsqueak -- " "He seems to be. But if Lange is missing, someone killed him. He wouldn't have any reason to hide. He must have caught the saboteurs in the act, and they killed him." Kevin tried to remember what little he knew about Lange. It wasn't much. He'd brought Kevin the tapes and made him study them, and he'd talked in a general way about the work Deadalus Corporation would be doing on Ceres. Nothing definite. "How can you be so sure it wasn't Lange who planted the bomb?" Kevin demanded. "I'm sure. Kevin, I think we should separate. You go watch the port side. I'll watch the starboard. Burn is ten minutes from now. We have to keep anyone from getting up here during the next five minutes. Then we'll be safe; and we'll be able to put the cargo down on Ceres -- " She started to move away, but Kevin caught her and pulled her back until he could put his helmet against hers. "Be careful," he said. "Sure." And, he wondered as he crawled toward the port side of the ship, what the hell is that cargo? Captain Greiner talked about it. So does Ellen. Everyone seems to know but me... there had been one series of launch capsules that had been guarded by company police and Mexican Army tanks. What could be that valuable? He reached the edge and looked along the ship, past the hydrogen tanks to the big ring at the end of the ship. Nothing moved. He wondered if he should show a light. If someone really wanted to cripple Wayfarer, it would only take puncturing a couple of those tanks. But that would completely cripple the ship. It would be suicide for the saboteur, and so far whoever was doing this had been careful not to really damage Wayfarer, just put the ship out of operation for a few' hours until it would be too late to get to Ceres. If he could reach the telescope, though, he could still keep them from landing. Lange. Could it have been George Lange? How likely that Pacifico could knock out the antenna and computer power supply? Or kill Lange? Pacifico wasn't much larger than Ellen, while Lange was bigger than Kevin. Not that that meant anything -- being large was no real advantage in free fall. It just meant long legs to bump into things. But Kevin doubted that Pacifico knew enough about the ship to have been the saboteur -- He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to burn: time to be getting inside. Even as he thought it, Seymour's voice came into his headset. "That ought to do it," the First Officer said. "Best get into the airlock. We're going to start rotating ship for the burn." "Right. Ellen -- " "Kev, there's somebody out here with us!" Ellen shouted. "I saw him move. Just then. He's down by the tanks." "Good Lord." Seymour sounded worried. "But we've got to start maneuvers. We can't stop now -- the burn must be exactly on time -- exactly!" "I know," Ellen said quietly. "I'm going after him. Kevin, get inside." "Don't be silly." He clawed his way over the bow of the ship as she vanished around the far side. "Hang on," Seymour ordered. "In one minute and... three seconds we start turning ship. We have to." "Right," Kevin answered. "Ellen. What's happening?" There was no answer. He reached the place where he'd last seen her and looked aft down the length of the ship. There was a flash of light from down there somewhere. He went over, pulling himself along the ladder, trying to make sure he was always holding it. "If you start the engines I'll puncture the tanks!" came a highpitched voice. Pacifico's. He sounded determined. Afraid but determined. "I'll do it!" the lawyer shouted. "But -- why do you want to keep us from getting to Ceres?" Seymour asked. "I don't care about that," Ficifico said. "I want to go to Ceres. But you won't get us there! You can't navigate this ship with a suitcase computer; you've no right to risk our lives that way!" "If you puncture the tanks you'll kill all of us including yourself," Kevin said. "No I won't. We don't need all the fuel to get back to Earth. Stay away from me! I'll do it -- " "We're turning," Seymour said. The ship moved slightly as attitude Jets fired. It rotated slowly. Kevin didn't find it hard to hang on, and then the counter-jets fired to stop the turn. The ship was now heading almost exactly away from Ceres. Kevin reached the tankage complex. It was dark among the long hydrogen tanks. "Ellen," he called. "I see you," she said. "I think he's straight ahead of you." "Get away from me," Pacifico screamed. "I'll do it, I swear I will!" Kevin moved further into the tankage complex. Pacifico' s voice came from nowhere and everywhere; it was wierd, hearing him but being unable to locate him by sound. Kevin wondered if the lawyer had seen him. He saw no one. Not Ellen, not Pacifico. "You idiot, all the tanks are connected together," Kevin said. "If you puncture one of them, you'll let all the fuel escape. " "I don't believe that," Pacifico said. "It wouldn't make sense as a design. Meteoroids -- " "I'm afraid what Senecal is telling you is the truth," Seymour's voice interjected. "The tanks don't connect normally, but when we make preparation for using the main engines we have to interconnect them. Otherwise the fuel would be burned out of one tank at a time and we'd get off balance." That makes sense, Kevin thought. I wonder if it's true? The important thing is to get Pacifico talking and keep him occupied until we find him. And then what? Kevin fingered the knife in his pouch. That seemed drastic -- "Kev! I've got him! Aft of where you are and around clockwise sixty degrees!" Ellen's voice came in panting gasps. Kevin moved in the direction she'd indicated. He saw Ellen and the lawyer struggling like clumsy wrestlers, their bulky suits preventing either of them from getting a decisive hold. "One minute to burn," Seymour said. "Can you get into the airlock?" " 'Fraid not," Ellen said. "Maybe we'll be all right here among the tanks -- " Her voice rose. "Kevin!" she shouted in terror. Both of them had moved away from the ship. Somehow they'd both lost their holds on the ship while trying to fight each other, and now they drifted free, a few feet away, unable to get back. "My God! Help!" Pacifico screamed. "Burn in forty seconds," Seymour said. "You can't!" Pacifico screamed. "It's inhuman! You'll kill us!" "Can't delay," Seymour said. And he means that, Kevin thought. Not that Ellen would want him to delay. The Belt operation means too much to her. It's up to me, now. He dove forward, through the tankage. His months of practice in somersaulting through the ship let him get through the tanks in a clean arc. He caught the ladder at the last possible moment, and reached out toward Ellen. "Grab hold!" he called. She reached for him, missed by inches. He stretched but couldn't catch her. "Ten seconds," Seymour announced. "We're drifting free of the ship!" Pacifico screamed. "You can't do this, you can't -- " Kevin grabbed the safety line on his belt and hooked it to the ladder, then, letting the reel run free, leaped out toward Ellen. He grabbed her with both hands, then jjrunted with relief. "You damn fool," she said. "You'll kill yourself -- " "Three. Two. One. Ignite," Seymour said. The ship's engines started. There was no sound and no flame. Hydrogen was pumped from the tanks and into the nuclear pile on its sting at the end of the ship. The nuclear reactor heated the hydrogen and forced it back through nozzles. The ship drove forward at a tenth of a gravity. Kevin felt Ellen as a sudden dead weight. He threw in the stop on his belt reel, and they dangled from the ladder, with nothing holding them but the thin nylon line. Pacifico, still screaming, vanished behind as the ship drove forward. As the ship moved, suddenly they and the safety line formed a pendulum. They felt the acceleration as they would a tenth of Earth's gravity as centrifugal force moved them until they swung back and forth in a small arc directly beneath the ladder. Kevin painfully reached up, still holding Ellen's hand with his. She wasn't heavy, only a tenth of what her weight would have been on Earth, but Kevin wasn't used to any gravity. He held tightly, irrationally afraid that the thin nylon line wouldn't hold their combined weight of fifty pounds. He couldn't quite reach the ladder. "Help! You can't leave me here to die in space! Help!" Pacifico screamed in terror. The ship moved inexorably away from him. Within thirty seconds he would be nearly half a kilometer behind, doomed to the loneliest death possible, alone in a river of stars and the emptiness of space. "Can you let me down a little further?" Ellen asked. "I can almost reach one of the fuel pipes -- " "No hands," Kevin said. "I've -- " "Here. I've got you," Ellen said. "Now let us down a meter or so." "How can you be so damned calm?" Kevin snarled. He let go of her with one hand and reached the ratchet control on his belt line. He let the safety line run free for a second, then locked it again. They both fell toward the aft end of the ship, then were brought up short by the line. The thin nylon held easily. "There. I've got it," Ellen said. "I've got my safety line clipped to the pipe support. Here -- let out more of your line, and i'll pull you over." Kevin did as he was told. Seconds later he had a purchase on one of the fuel pipes. He looked up -- the forward end of the ship was up now, and that was strange, to have a definite up and down. The pipe supports formed a ladder of sorts. It wouldn't be hard to climb back to the regular ladder. "I guess we're safe," Kevin said. "Thank God," Seymour said. "You're sure?" "Yes," Kevin said. They could still hear Pacifico's screams. His signal was growing weaker as he fell farther and farther behind. "Pacifico," Ellen called. "Who hired you to sabotage the ship?" "I didn't do it," Pacifico's voice said. "You've got to come back for me! It's not too late, I can see you, please, my God. Please, please come back for me, I didn't do it, I only wanted to stop this mad -- " His voice faded in and out now. "Come back. Please come back, you can find me, please..." Kevin felt Ellen shudder beside him. He put his arm across her shoulders and felt her trembling. "It's all right," he said. "We're all right now -- " She didn't answer. After a while she pointed up toward the ladder. They began to climb. It seemed to take forever to reach the airlock. They thought they heard the lawyer's screams, ever fainter, the whole time.'    am being asked to lecture at various colleges and universities. My message is generally the same: that we don't have to die; that the Club of Rome is deluded; that this generation can, if we will, make advances at least as significant as the control of fire, the discovery of the wheel, the domestication of animals, yea, the invention of agriculture. We have only to make the decision, and a few sacrifices. The technology exists. When I am done I find a curious and almost universal response. First, the audience is somewhat overwhelmed, which doesn't surprise me because I have developed a lot of data and, bluntly. I'm pretty good at presenting it. Next, I find the message welcome, and few members of the audience want to argue. Again not surprising: why would anyone, particularly the young, want to believe anything else? But third, what was once a surprise but happens so frequently it no longer is: "Where have you been? Why has no one else told us this? All we hear is that Earth is polluted, technology can't save us and is evil to boot, we're running out of resources, there's Only One Earth..." That response doesn't come only from students. At a major southwestern research institution I got the same response when I spoke to the technical staff. Presumably each of the engineers had his own opinions, not too different from mine; but the prevailing climate of opinion led each to believe the others thought we were doomed. At the universities the students find the faculty members, if they comment on the future at all, crying doom. So I shuttle back and forth across the country, to this institution and that, trying desperately to tell America's youth that they have a future. But do they? Because of course I cannot tell what the future will be. I know what it can be: a world of plenty, a world of "Survival With Style" Galaxy, March, #), a world in which the United States is wealthy but is not merely an island of wealth in a vast sea of misery; a world in which everyone has more than enough to eat and, if they want it, a standard of living at least as good as what we enjoyed in the #'s; but that's only what it can be. We might go another way. Our grandchildren may curse our memories. There are times when I am convinced that my world will never be. But what could happen to us? We have the technology. There is no "energy crisis" in any meaningful sense -- that is, we know how to produce the energy we need to sustain our high-technology society until such time as we can develop eternal sources. We know how to get to space, and we could, if we had to, begin right now the development of capabilities for mining the Moon and the asteroid belt. The world already grows more than enough food to support its population (although the distribution system is terrible, and other pests eat more of our crops than ever we do, particularly in the "developing" nations). We can survive, and with style; why might we not? Well, to begin with, there are the last two horsemen. War is hardly impossible. True, there are signs that many rational planners in the Soviet Union realize that their own development -- yea, and survival -- depends on not conquering the West; that the West is more valuable as a trading partner than ever it would be as part of an empire managed as badly as the Soviet Empire now is. True, but not decisive. There are dinosaurs in the Soviet Union, real communists whose moral position is intolerable if ever they abandon marxism. For an analogy: could an Inquisition priest ever have admitted even the possibility that his religion was not true? Could he have lived with himself if ever he did? And the Soviet Union continues to build and develop weapons long after any discoverable defensive need. Recall the theory? U.S. weapons development stimulated the Soviets; once we called a halt, and they achieved parity, they would see the wastefulness of it all -- after all, weapons cost them far more than us (in terms of respective Gross National Products), and they need the resources for development far more than we do -- and they would cease this insane arms race. So we stopped, and they achieved parity, and they achieved superiority, and they seem headed for supremacy, and they halt not, neither do they slow; indeed, their rate of arms procurement tends rather to increase. No, war is no impossibility. Then there are the fears of cogent men like Roberto Vacca, whose book The Coming Dark Age cannot be ignored. Vacca points out the increasing complexity of our modern civilization, its increasing dependence on centralized planning and control, the interdependence of all parts on each other, the far-reaching consequences of seemingly trivial errors -- recall the power failure in the Northeast caused by one generator going and kicking out all the others? If the margins get thin enough, and Vacca believes they will, collapse of our civilization could be much quicker, and much more thorough, than might be supposed. After all, no country is more than three meals from bread riots; and rioters have been known to act as if they believed the best way to feed themselves is to bum the bakeries. Urban firestorms are hardly impossible, and the water supply and fire fighting systems are vulnerable. You might or might not be surprised to know just how easily such systems could be knocked out, by accident or by design. Imagine the colossal traffic Jams if the traffic signals ceased working. Couple that with snowfall and ice. Barges frozen in mid-stream, unable to supply coal-powered electric plants; coal yards frozen solid; insufficient electricity to operate the pipelines, thus cutting off oil and gas; railroads not working; people freezing in the dark; trucks not working (it takes electricity to get the gasoline out of our environmentions); goods not moving -- but you need not imagine it, because it happened to some of you, briefly, and on a smaller scale. Fortunately the nuclear p)ower plants continued to operate, and the Great Freeze of '# was essentially local; but it takes no great imagination to envision a much widerspread catastrophe, and to couple it with deliberate action by, say, the authors of The Anarchist's Cookbook, to see how easily the nation could be crippleu. Temporarily: for now. We have vast resources, surpluses, and a residuum of collective loyalty and humanitarianism. Neither of those conditions need prevail. Taxes can end both, and there are signs they are working to that goal as I write this. But I don't imagine "the collapse," the "knockout blow" that Vacca foresees as happening this year or next. So far we have a great deal of survival-surplus in our system, and it would take no miracles to insure against the knockout; but the trend is in the other direction. Consider. One of the most popular political figures in the nation is Governor Jerry Brown, who explicitly adopts the "Small Is Beautiful," "Only One Earth" philosophy of the Appropriate Technology movement. But surely, Poumelle, the Appropriate Technology movement is the best insurance against the knockout? Making people selfsufficient, in small groups, building communes, reducing the dependency on the system -- If you believe that you'll believe anything. Leaving out whether it's possible, either physically or politically, to insure against disaster by inducing large numbers of people to be "self-sufficient" (at a convention sometime ask Poul Anderson how he damned near starved as a kid trying to make a living out of a forty-acre farm, and ask yourself how many forty-acre farms there are compared to the number of people living in cities), if the Appropriate Technology movements succeed, my world will vanish because they want it to vanish. One of their goals is to suppress the kind of technology and development I want. They like "labor-intensive" industry, as witness any of their demonstrations (I mentioned last month the Appropriate Technology display of the bicycle-pedal-powered mill for grinding one's wheat to make one's bread). In fact, we need not envision either war or Vacca's knockout to imagine a world in which my vision of man's vast future remains the ravings of a science fiction writer. Merely continue as we are now: innovative technology discouraged by taxes, environmental impact statements, reports, lawsuits, commission hearings, delays, delays, delays; space research not carried out, never officially abandoned but delayed, stretched-out, budgets cut and work confined to studies without hardware; "solving" the energy crisis by conservation, with fusion research cut to the bone and beyond, continued at level-of-effort but never to a practical reactor; fission plants never officially banned. but no provision made for waste disposal or storage so that no new plants are built and the operating plants slowly are phased out; riots at nuclear plant construction sites; legal hearings, lawyers, lawyers, lawyers... Can you not imagine the dream being lost? Can you not imagine the nation slowly learning to "do without," making ' 'Smaller is Better" the national slogan, fussing over insulating attics and devoting all our attention to windmills; production falling, standards of living falling, until one day we discover the investments needed to go to space would be truly costly, would require cuts in essentials like food -- A world slowly settling into satisfaction with less, until there are no resources to invest in That Buck Rogers Stuff? I can imagine that. I even see trends in that direction. Mr. Carter has said no to plutonium, a decision we could live with; and followed that with an energy message that in a full hour had not one reference to the word "fusion," while out at Livermore and Los Alamos they are laying off people whose entire professional lives have been spent in fusion research. Our President has told us we will have to make sacrifices, but he has given us nothing to sacrifice for. We shall insulate our attics, but mostly we shall use the energy crisis as a means for redistributing income and increasing taxes and increasing the bureaucracy. (And we shall penalize hell out of those who, like myself and Poul Anderson, long ago insulated and learned to keep our automobiles in tune...) Where is the innovation? The imagination? I expected a lot more from the President's energy message. I expected at the very least a massive research campaign: a Manhattan Project in agricultural research to develop plants capable of harnessing larger fractions of the solar energy falling on them; another to develop means for extracting energy and fertilizer from our sewage and trash; a specific plan to insure the safety of nuclear power plants while also assuring investors that the plants will be built, will not be unreasonably delayed by perpetual hearings and court challenges; perhaps a promise of restoration of some of the funds for fusion research; more funding for the ocean thermal energy system; something for the "slow" breeder, which uses the uranium-thorium cycle and doesn't produce any plutonium and can't be used to make bombs or terror weapons; something. Perhaps not all of the above, but something. Instead we were promised an income-levelling tax system and told to tighten our belts while insulating our attics. Make do. Expect less. The "spree" is over. There's only one Earth... Now look: conservation is not going to get us to space. At best conservation can save us about half what is used for space heating: a few years' growth increase. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's not much right about it either. I hate to say this, but the only problem with waste is that it's costly. Suppose, just suppose for a moment, that we suddenly discovered a million years' worth of fossil fuels. Better yet, suppose, just suppose, that we really had workable solarpower systems of great efficiency such that they could supply us with all the power we ever wanted at trivial costs. Would it be worthwhile insulating the attic? Obviously not, unless it could be shown that an uninsulated attic was somehow harmful to the rest of us. There's nothing good per se about conservation, and nothing bad per se about throwaway cigarette lighters or Cadillacs. It happens that at the moment we may not be able to afford them and perhaps we'd best do without: but surely not-having-Cadillacs is a negative, not positive goal? Surely not the only possible goal? But aren't we going after solar power? And won't that ultimately solve all problems? Yes, to both; but we won't get it in lime... sorry: we may not get it in time. Solar power is risky and expensive technology. It is inevitable that some form of it will eventually power the Earth, but that may take far longer than Mr. Carter seems to believe. Freeman Dyson: "In the very long run we must have energy that is clean and perpetual. We shall have solar power. In the long run we must have energy that is obtainable and available in large quantities. We shall have fusion. In the near term we must have energy that is now available. We have fission power. For the present we must have energy that is cheap, convenient, and easily obtained. We have coal, oil, and natural gas. Nature has been kinder to us than we had any right to expect." I wish I were that confident; but I am not. The trends, in my judgment, do not augur well for our getting to the long run; and trying to skip the near term and long run and jump directly to the very long run is comparable, in my judgment, to Congress ordering Goddard to send a ship to the Moon by # or give up those crazy rockets. It could happen: we could spiral down until we have so few surplus resources that Roberto Vacca's knockout becomes possible; to a point where we have little, and many seethe with discontent, and suddenly it all explodes in riots, or war, or chaos; and when we recover from that (some of us) we will find that the business of living takes all our talents and energies; and our grandchildren will curse our memories.    It doesn't have to be that way. Here is another future. First, war. Consider the following sequence of events. DeGaulle gives China the atom bomb, and when asked why says he has done nothing that Richelieu didn't do: when threatened with a European enemy, aid the Turks (or some other Asian). The Soviets begin a new Berlin Crisis. The Chinese attack a small Soviet island at Ussuri. The Soviets back down on Berlin and begin moving troops in massive numbers toward their eastern frontier. After three weeks of buildup they retake the island. The Chinese glare at them across the river. Marshall Gretchko goes to diplomatic parties and makes dark hints. In ten days there may be nuclear war. He hopes the West will understand. The West makes no response at all. The Soviets discover their nuclear weapons are very dirty: following atomic war with China most of the population of Japan may die from the fallout. In the U.S. knowledgeable people get out their Bendix fallout radiometers and dosimeters and buy new batteries for them and make a few other preparations. More Soviet troops move to the East, a massive deployment until over a hundred divisions are on the Chinese border. Henry Kissinger takes satellite photographs of the Soviet deployment to China. Ping-pong teams begin moving back and forth. Lin Piao, the most dangerous man in China, dies in mysterious circumstances that may never be known to westerners. Nixon goes to China. It all happened, in that sequence. Add this: a "few years later the Soviets declassified their fusion research and brought the bag over here in the hopes that we could make use of it. (We immediately classified what they gave us, putting a blanket over the blackboard.) Soviet experts privately say their need for fusion energy is great; they have a lot of development to do. They also build a fast breeder fission reactor based on US technology (we have yet to build one, of course). Suggestive of what? This much: that at least some officials in the Soviet Union are now convinced that the stniggle with nature has a higher payoff potential than conquest; that they couldn't run China when they had it, and can't now; that if their system were introduced into western Europe (Hungarian joke: "The Soviets have crossed a cow with a giraffe to produce a marvelous animal that feeds in Budapest and is milked in Moscow") European production would not only fall, but the Soviet economy would be worse off. Give it a couple of generations and possibly, just possibly, the dinosaurs will die. It will take skillful diplomacy by the West, but it's possible. If we can discourage the dinosaurs until the technicians are in control of the Soviet Union, then we will have peace. My private opinion is that the best way to discourage the dinosaurs is to remain so strong that they can have no expectation of winning -- Cato's advice. "If you would have peace, prepare thou then for war." I realize that is not universally accepted among the ruling elite in the U.S., nor even among Galaxy readers. But assume the dinosaurs are contained, and the trends toward cooperation continue. One threat contained, anyway. Next, the energy crisis. Is Carter playing a devious game indeed? Today's headlines say that there will be no special breaks for California: we, too, must cease to burn oil and natural gas for electricity, despite the fact that we cant meet our air-quality needs with coal; which means that California has no choice but to go nuclear (which the people of the state, by overwhelming majority, opted for in every referendum ever held here); which means that Congress must remove many of the legal barriers to getting nuclear plants licensed; which means that power utilities all over the country will again seriously consider the nuclear option. Could Carter intend that? I haven't the foggiest; but it's one scenario that takes us past the energy crisis. Then, too, not everyone in Congress is a congenital moron; there must be someone in Washington who understands that railroads are several times more efficient per ton-mile of goods moved than trucks (First Law efficiency) and that if we (#) deregulated the railroads, and (#) charged trucking firms the real costs of operation including maintenance of the highways and a portion of the investments sunk into them, we would save more petroleum than we could save by insulating every attic in the nation to a depth of three feet... And what the hell, maybe the Western States' senators will get part of the fusion research budget restored. After all. Carter backed down on cancelling all those waterways plans, particularly in the states like Lousiana whose senators sit on powerful committees; and it's even possible ihat someone will appreciate the need for the research without regard to electoral politics. Isn't it? But as I write this they're laying off engineers at Los Alamos. Suppose, though, that we get fusion research so that by # we have working reactors. Meanwhile, the ocean thermal systems I like: at the moment they're getting paper-study money only, and although it's widely announced that a demonstration plant will be built by # the fact is that nothing beyond paper has been funded; but suppose the money comes to bend tin and cut metal, and that a plant is built. It won't be commercial, but from it we should learn how to make commercially viable plants; and we can build research stations, as described in my story "Extreme Prejudice" (reprinted in my collection High Justice, available from Pocket Books). Next, let us suppose that either through political pressure from such groups as the National Space Institute (dues # a year, # for students, #I Fort Myer Drive, Arlington, VA #) and the senators from California, or through genuine insight by our masters, the Shuttle program is continued and Enterprise actually goes to space; that commercial firms are given the opportunity to rent time in orbit at reasonable rates. Profits flow. Finally, suppose that either through direct government action, or through reduced taxes to allow accumulation of research and investment funds in the private sector, we get decent biological technology: plants that double their efficiency in converting sunlight to usable energy. The computer business, already leaping ahead, does its thing. We inject some rationality into the transport system. People are led to expect more, not less, and are told that if they work a bit harder they can have it. It's a possible future. Isn't it? If it's not, don't tell me; because I want to believe that I have a chnace; that I may live to see that world I describe in my lectures; that before I die I can say, "My generation gave mankind the planets and the stars; and I was part of it."  Charles L. Grant '-'-'-. ' ZISssuvzMySfiS Nobody likes to be ig nored! Gideon's meaix)w was deserted. The last paying tourist to set foot on the rolling, low-mown grass had left in disillusionment some months before and now only the crows remained to play at being ravens. They glided darkly from the surrounding woodland, silent and wheeling, sweeping effortless arcs across the lea toward the rise in its center. They paid little attention to the distant clouds glowering in shades of grey, ignored the white picket fence that surrounded, and marked, the knoll. They landed, pecked, rose again to the beat of the wind. Silent. Ominous. Driving farther into the Maryland hills, away from the twilight that reminded spring of winter. But before they went, four men stepped out of the trees and paused on the edge of the broad open space. The tallest and eldest of the four glared at the birds, and his hands suddenly clenched tightly at his sides. His chest swelled, his eyes narrowed, and it was a long and anxious moment before he calmed. "Now that is a hell of a view," Colonel Feirday said, sneezing into an olive drab handkerchief Major Simmons shoved into his face. "Bless you," the major said, and handed the soiled cloth to Captain Hawkesworth. "There aren't many places like this left anymore," the captain said. "Too much civilization, as the man said. Not enough trees. Why, I had a dog once -- " "As did we all," General Titus Jenkins said, stepping away from the others to gaze at the knoll. "As did we all. One way or another." The three officers glanced at one another, concern for their leader and the weather sobering their initial holiday spirits. Finally, after receiving a few surreptitiously commanding nudges, the captain sidled next to the general and cleared his throat with a convincing cough. "Sir," he said, almost reverently, "you don't have to do this, you know'. What I mean is, we all realize what Gideon's Meadow means to you, and we don't wish to intrude on memories so obviously painful." "We could have had the stars," the general said. "Right here in this damned cow pasture we could have had the stars." "And Cynthia," the major whispered. "Yes," the colonel said, sniffing. "And Cynthia." "Cynthia," the general said with a distant look, "was... was my problem, and my... loss. But mankind, gentlemen, could have had the stars!" " Perhaps another time," the colonel said pragmatically. "Our children, maybe," said the major. "All is not lost, sir. You've said so yourself many times. All is not lost." General Jenkins said nothing. From what he heard from his staff, he wasn't at all sure Simmons was in any position to spawn, and he knew for a fact that Feirday's wife had vanished with a Quartermaster Brigadier not two years ago. The rumors that she had been soft-soaped by promises of riches did not sway him. No, neither the colonel nor the major would ever produce progeny -- but the thoughts were what counted, sincere and determined; and if he had anything to say about it (despite the National Security and Reclamation Act), the world would long and damned well remember what it had lost, perhaps permanently, a decade before. But only, he reminded himself, perhaps. He shook himself, and then, supported by the captain's arm, advanced across the meadow toward the white picket fence. "Where shall I begin?" he mused. "So many things, so many dates." "The spaceship," the coloiiel prompted. "Cynthia," the major suggested, coughed, and changed it to "the music." The captain tripped over a molehill, and the general held him until he regained his balance. "The President," he said firmly. "I recall vividly it was the President who called me that morning. He was rather agitated. Blathered something about trespass and violations and matter of that nature. I assured him my subordinates could handle such routine nonsense, but he insisted on having me or no one at all. I could see from the vione screen that he was still in his pyjamas. Little furry creatures running over his chest. I knew then he was bloody angry. He never lets anyone see his pyjamas. And he kept insisting I had to handle the situation for him." "Foresight," the colonel said, searching the grass for signs of cows. "Prescience," the major submitted as he watched gloomily while his spitshine faded. "Luck," the general said. "I was between sensitive assignments and free of command. I agreed, of course, even though it was a miserably hot day, humid and all that. It was a Saturday in June and my old Fleetwood Turbine was acting up something fierce, so I had to suffer a ride in one of those blowhard hoverthings. Dreadfully dusty, if I recall, but damned smooth no matter what the road was like. We, my aides and I, arrived precisely here just before noon. In fact, we took the same trail -- if you can call it that -- that you and I did today. "And there it was, gentlemen. Bold as brass and twice as bright. An incredibly beautiful machine, and completely incongruous in this bucolic setting. A party of advance chipmunks was trying to establish relations, as I recall. Suspected it was one hell of a nut, no doubt." He laughed wheezily, and the others joined him until he shook his head sharply and they stopped as if choked. He grinned and covered it with a thin-fmgered hand. Then he reached down to pluck a lonely daisy, spinning the crown until the petals blurred. "It was approximately eighty-six meters in diameter, shaped very much like a slightly flattened egg. There were no ports that I could see, no exits; it rested solidly on its base. Unless, of course, it had landed upside down -- but we naturally had no way of telling. A forbidding sight, ni grant you, but intriguing nevertheless. The local police had at least had the professionalism to post a guard to keep snoopers away, and I immediately ordered them replaced with military observers. Once the pictures were taken, wc .set up a headquarters tent over there by that gopher hole. Comlinks, staff, decanters of bracers... rugged, but comfortable. "Our initial speculations centered around our friends and co-existers, believing it entirely possible that one of their aircraft was missing on a routine espionage flight. No luck there, however. After we had checked through our own files in the basement, we concluded that what we had almost in our hands was the first tangible proof that there was, in fact, interstellar flight. And after we'd double-checked our Lunar radar scans, I no longer doubted." "History had been made," the colonel said. "But what about Cynthia?" the captain asked. "Well, I don't blame you for doubting," the major said loudly. "I never doubted," the general corrected himself. "I told you he didn't," the colonel said, and rested a hand gingerly on the fence, leaning forward as if his staring would bring back the scene that morning. "First crack," the general continued, "went to the scientist types who worked night and day for weeks to breach that devil's universal secrets. They had conferences and symposia, workshops and brainstorms, used up more time on the computers than France did on the Germans. Weeks. "But that thing, that alien machine, did nothing to aid us. It just squatted there. "It was exceedingly, damnably, frustrating, gentlemen. We tried bombarding it with every known radio wave in the spectrum, then twiddled the dials to mix things up a bit in case we were missing a bet. We rapped on it, used lasers to bum it, chisels to chip it, acids to eat it. Nothing. Why, right over there by that willow is the exact spot where Dr. Poltcr set up his ten-meter screen to flash pictures at it, in case someone was w atching. Mathematical equations, celestial maps, formulae, anything af all to get a rise out of that sneaky, secretive thing. But none of it worked. There was no response, none at all, and a few of the boys were literally tearing out their hair in desperation. Frankly, we didn't have a clue as to why the hell they were here at all!" "Invasion, of course," the colonel said. "Cultural shock," the major judged. Captain Hawkesworth's uncle, the time, had suggested to the press that the Army and the Government combine forces to set up a turnstile and souvenier booth, and sell tickets. With a few artful spotlights and a shill or two, he'd said, we could ease the imbalance of payments, then sell the thing to the movies on an optioncost basis. Though his enthusiasm for the capitalistic process was applauded in Congress, he was quietly transferred to a base in Idaho where he died ten months later of starch inhalation. Hawkesworth, therefore, said nothing. "Invasion, cultural shock, xenophobia," the general listed. "We considered all of these and more. But what use were speculations when there was nothing we could do to breach the walls of silence that encircled that spectral device? Finally, five months after its discovery, the President instructed me to forsake the normal paths of discussion and experimentation and get some kind of response from that goddamned thing. I agreed readily. It was but my duty, and I hated recalcitrant and alien problems. "So I began to read, widely and wildly, immersing myself in psychologies and anthropologies. I spent hours alone here just thinking, wandering, wondering how in hell you talked to a piece of egg-shaped metal. I conferred with astronomers and astrologists, writers and artists, and all I could come up with was that we had a problem. Great. A bloody damned spaceship in the middle of this meadow, and the greatest minds in the world could only tell me we had a problem. "But, gentlemen, I was determined. Steadfast. And finally, by the following July, I was ready. Yes, I know it sounds immodest, but I was truly ready, as ready as I and the world would ever be to storm that mighty citadel. Dramatic? Perhaps. Only time would tell." A sudden gust of wind made him squint, turn his head back to the woods he'd just left. When the air calmed, he motioned to the others and they sat on the ground, their backs to the knoll. Clouds hovered. The colonel reached into a breast pocket and pulled out a vari-colored slick brochure his command had prepared when the Secretary of Defense ordered mobilization of opportunity -- if the aliens wouldn't talk, we might as well sell tickets. The general saw the brochure being passed to the captain. He frowned. "Hawkes worth has been through a lot, too, sir," the colonel said timidly. "His uncle... well, sir, I thought he'd like to have a souvenier. Just so he'll know his family was vindicated." "Ah yes," the general said, and smiled at the younger man. "I remember your uncle, Hawkesworth. He saved my life once. On the Moon. A good man. A little heavy, but a good man." "Thank you, sir," the captain whispered, and brushed a hand across his eyes. Then, over the distant hills, a cannonade. The wind grew colder. "There were four of us," the general said in a somber voice. "Vic Jennings, Jake Holmes, myself, and... Major Duncan." "Cynthia," the colonel breathed, and sneezed. "Careful, sir," the major said. "Sir, please..." the captain said worriedly. "It's all right," the general said, swallowing gamely. "The Major and I were comradesin-arms, as well as close friends. A slight woman she was, not as much meat as I would have liked, but nevertheless a proud and strong person. We talked quite a bit, dear Cynthia and I, as we walked about the spaceship, prodding and probing until our brains grew weary. We used the night for cover, of course, and very often would lie on the grass with chins in hand, simply staring at that hulking beast. I once suggested, in an entirely professional manner, of course, that she tear off her uniform in the appliance of her duty and entice the aliens out with a bit of tantalization. I remember... I remember how she laughed -- the cruel would say she brayed -- and called my bluff. It was an intriguing sight, ing about quite literally out of uniform. But to no avail, no avail." His eyes lost their focus, then, and the captain looked to the others, who only shook their heads solemnly and crossed their legs to wait for more. "No avail, as I said. A game girl she was and knew where her duty, er, lay. And so it was that come the next dawn we assembled the rest of the team, leaving frivolity behind, and throughout that long winter we worked our bloody asses off until we were ready to strangle each other. If it hadn't been for Cynth -- Major Duncan, our sanity would not have lasted beyond the first week. "We argued, we fought, stalked out and came back. And then we were ready, as ready as we would ever be. Auspicious. It was the Fourth of July. Cynthia's birthday. The area here was cleared completely, and at first light we moved to the treeline. The spacecraft was alone, glinting feverishly in the dawn's early light. We smiled, then, because a crow sat atop it preening, and I whispered to the others that we had ourselves a sign, an augury, feathers for our caps. We were dressed in the latest camouflage garb, with packs on our shoulders. And Jake carried the laser -- we were taking no chances that day, no chances at all. "Yet, we had our orders, and sensible ones they were: don't start anything the world couldn't handle. "At a nod from me we positioned ourselves at the four major points of the compass, ten meters distant from the ship, connected tenuously by a comlink pinned to our lapels. The plan called for vocal bombardments beginning precisely at #, moving on to physical assaults fourteen minutes later, and concluding with visual tactics at exactly #. By that time, gentlemen, we would have exhausted our first line of offense. Next would come the final solution." ing. "I love it," the major said, watching the approaching storm. "But it was fated otherwise, wasn't it, sir?" the captain dared, and was kicked in the ankle by the anxious major. The general nodded and began plucking petals from his daisy. "Fate it was, Hawkes worth, or perhaps the sheer perversity of the universe. At any rate, at the appointed time Jennings, with the aid of a clever adaptation of a larynx modulator, commenced the Gettysburg Address; Cynthia whipped out her subtonic jew's harp and played her way down the Ohio; Holmes gloomed through Dostoevski; and I... well, as my Air Force inferiors would have it, I winged it. Having no special artistic skills to draw on, I had planned to whistle, but when a soldier ant found clever access to my shin, I just cursed a lot -- a good trooper always knows when to be flexible, you understand. "The physical assault commenced all too soon for my wearied nerves, yet we moved right into it without a hitch. That alien bastard knew his stuff, however, and once again we were stymied. Holmes' laser made attractive but short-lived designs; Jennings' fast-ball rocks merely bounced to the ground like bloated pebbles; Cynthia's finely-tuned darts were blunted, and my faithful automatic simply grew too hot to handle. It was, as some bald king once said, a puzzlement. But we were not daunted, nor were we deterred. Instantly we launched into Phase Three: I skipped over to Jennings who cartwheeled magnificently to Cynthia who backpedaled skillfully to Holmes who delicately but manfully pirouetted to me. And round and round we went until the appointed #." "Nice try," Feirday said, squashing a spider. "It was, it was. And the thinking was truly elementary. And, I confess for the first time, mostly a prodIt was so obvious that we all, save for her, had overlooked it: if what we had was an actual alien thing, then all the knowledge in the world would not be able to penetrate that 'saucer.' After all, if we couldn't understand our own passions and prejudices, our own kind completely, how the devil could we honestly expect to understand something we couldn't even understand? Clever though the scientists and other Services might have been, they knew too much -- and by knowing, knew nothing. Thus, she reasoned, we must not act intelligently at all, but rather in a random fashion most amenable to confusion. Confusion would confound. Confoundedness would produce curiosity, and curiosity, as we all know, leads to discovery. "It hasn't been told until today, my friends, but I actually had very little hope for the initial phases of our assault. I considered it more of a warm-up, a batting of the plank over the Jackass's head. So to speak. And no disrespect. We were merely readying ourselves for the main attraction." "Which was?" the major asked, holding up a palm to test for rain. "Nothing." They applauded. "That's right, gentlemen. Nothing. Nothing at all. Look at it this way, if you will: we'd been surrounding and pounding on that miserable chunk of space garbage for over a year. People crawling all over it, talking to it, praying over it, selling tickets to it. Constant purposeful activity. But purposeful only to us! Suppose the devils inside could not make heads or tails of it? Suppose they were scratching their collective crania and thinking they had landed in Nebraska or something? This, they might well have been thinking, is what we traveled X number of light-years for? "So. The four of us stood there. Simply stood there at attention. As if The Man himself was coming to inspect us from pate to toenails. "Noon came and went. Midafternoon, and the sun was brutishly hot. Various insects feasted on our faces' salt deposits. I amused myself by reciting the Manual of Arms, kept my vision clear by staring at that crow still on the saucer. A breeze succored us momentarily. A robin considered nesting on Cynthia. And as night began to fall, dew formed on our epaulets. "Even then my knees weren't what they used to be, I can assure you; I was proud of myself at that moment when the moon came over the mountains. Damned proud! The tiny tubes snaking from my pack into my mouth provided me with suitable nourishment, the other tubes trailing behind me provided adequate egress, and only an occasional passing wind broke through the meadow's silence. And through all this, I was proud because I knew we would win! We were about to make first contact with the first naturally intelligent race our kind had ever come across. Why they picked our nation we may never know. The luck of the draw, atmospheric conditions, density of population centers... who knows? But they were here! He stood suddenly, throwing the others off-balance. Quickly, they scrambled to their feet and followed as the general swung his legs over the low fence and strode to the top of the knoll. The colonel, sensing something dramatic, held the others back, and they waited, watching as the general solemnly paced the area once occupied by an alien craft. A moment later he snapped a finger to his thin mustache and doffed his hat, tucking it under his left arm and folding his hands before him. "It was here, gentlemen, where I now stand. And it was here that we...no, that I, and I alone, lost The colonel bowed his head. The major repressed a sigh. The captain sniffed once and stared at the imposing frail figure elegantly backlighted by the thunderheads massing above them. The everrising wind tore at the general's greying hair, whipped at the tails of his uniform tunic. "We had specially prepared braces," he said, his voice lifting to be heard over the gathering storm. "They supported our legs when the going got rough. I had been in many a parade ground ceremony before, but nothing like this had ever tested me so." He swallowed and licked at his lips. "I remember it all too well. It was coming on four when suddenly a persistent tapping flickered across the meadow. At first I thought it was my stomach protesting its fluid diet, but when I felt the ground trembling ever-so-Iightly beneath my feet I knew...  knew we had done it! We had confounded the stellar denizens, had spurred their appetites for the accumulation of our knowledge. Somewhere within that slip of a ship a gear was revolving, a widget sprocketing, a footstep (or whatever) pounding. Soon, I thought, a door would open and the planet would be united in frenzied celebration of cosmic connection finally achieved. "The tapping grew louder. "I grew impatient. And there's no getting around it now, gentlemen: it was I who blew the fuse on your celestial light. "Me, and that goddamned crow. "A small aperture opened directly in front of me, about five meters above the outer rim of the ship. At first I thought it was a trick of the dawn's dim light; but soon enough it opened to form what I guessed was what they used for a door. Rigid, old man, I told myself; stay rigid until the time is right. And I did. Chin up, chest out, tubes quiet. I dearly wanted to shout for joy, for delirium, for ecstasy, but my training reined me in. Instead, I watched, judged, waited and was ready to make the first move as befitted my rank toward the... the... "Courage, sir," the colonel whispered. "Courage," the major echoed. "Give 'em hell, Harry," the captain said, and shrugged when the others glared at him. The general slowly unfolded his hands. "Most of all," he said at last, as lightning ozoned the air, "I wanted to have Cynthia with me, by me, to hear her gasps of delight as she was proved right. I... I..." "Easy, sir," they muttered in unison. "It flew directly in front of my eyes, obscuring that historic moment but for an instant; but so angry was I that I flicked my eyes to follow its flight, flicked them back quickly when it soared overhead, returned and perched on my shoulder. Not to worry, Titus, I ordered myself; be as a rock or, in this case, a redwood limb. But that bird began croaking and picking at its tail feathers. I couldn't help it, gentlemen. When it twisted its head about, one wing brushed over my face. "No matter what is said a hundred years from now, there's no other explanation for it. "I sneezed. "Instantly, the tapping became a rumbling, a grumbling that grew to a crescendo, and an interstellar light flared forth from that ship's alien maw. I wanted to step away, but my braces had locked. Locked, dammit, and I was beginning to tilt. Slowly, inexorably, tilting backward until gravity defeated me and I was lying helpless on my back. Staring at the sky. At the spaceship rising rapidly toward the clouds. Not the smoothest take-off I'd ever seen -- nothing to cheer about, anyway -- but when I twisted my head around, my heart soared into my throat. I was alone. Jennings, Holmes... even my darling Cynthia... all gone." Lightning flashed then, and the sky shattered in thunder. "They were up there," the general said, pointing skyward. "Taken by the aliens and spirited into space. And I... I was a failure. Left behind to explain to the world why I was grounded by a goddamned crow." He walked down the knoll and climbed over the fence. The others trailed behind him, and they said nothing until they had reached the treeline. "They said you sacrificed your own chances for glory," the colonel offered. "I heard the speeches; they praised your unselfishness," the major said softly. it worked, sir. And you have certainly given your lovely Major Duncan her due. Tm sure, sir, that your subsequent meditations have discovered that the poet had a word for it, a word of solace for you." "Right," the colonel said briskly. "Tintinnabulation, wasn't it?" "Ulalume," the major corrected. The general shrugged and gazed back at Gideon's Meadow. "She'll returi," he said finally. "And they will, too. They'll bring with them knowledge for us. Something, I don't know what, to free us from the plagues that beset our children. I shan't... I shan't be here to see it, I expect. But I think you will. Captain. Damn me if I know why, but I think you'll be around when the aliens bring my Cynthia back. "But meanwhile, for the record, it's sufficient to know that we are not the only ones stranded in the universe: I have that much at least to comfort myself with when I remember. That, and a slightly used oak leaf." He turned abruptly and stalked into the woods. Stopped. Made a smart about-face and smiled ruefully at his men. "Sir?" the colonel said. "You have something to add?" the major said. "Captain," the general said, "you're a qualified Ranger, are you not? Do you think you could get us all back to the highway? My map's in the car. I think I'm lost."  L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Perhaps it is true that occasionally the Tree of Liberty must be nourished with the blood of "Patriots." he's our guy! Corey Grademan picked the brochure off the desk and held it at arm's length. Spielman's pamphlet showed his open look and flashing smile to their best advantage. Corey lowered the flier, then tossed it on the desk. It landed face up on the worn blotter. "So how do I beat Honest Joe? Should I even try?" He fingered his long chin as he paced around the small room. He glanced over at the flier from Spielman's last campaign, at the gray metal desk, the battered voicewriter and the plain black vidfax.    Clem Bunker walked up the empty ditch to the cutoff. headgate. Sheriff Scatt was standing next to the government agent. The with a government seal. The lock had been cut. "Mr. Bunker, do you know anything about this defacement of government property?" "It does look defaced," admitted Clem. Agent Weisil sighed. "Mr. further irrigation of your land will increase the salinity of the run-off past the permissible return level. You were informed of this. You appealed, and the appeal was denied. Congress passed the law, and you were in violation of that law." "Takes water to grow beets," noted Clem. "Congress can't pass laws to stop that." "Mr. Bunker, since you have persisted in diverting water illegally -- " "Wasn't illegal," interrupted Clem. "Family's owned the water rights for over a hundred years." "Since you diverted water in violation of the Clean Water Act order to prohibit further diversion." Agent Weisil held up the severed lock. "But you seem to have taken the law into your own hands. If you persist, I will be forced to have the Sheriff enforce the restraining order I have obtained, which will result in your -- " "Okay, okay. I won't add my teensy bit of run-off salt. How am I supposed to grow beets?" "Perhaps you ought to take that up with your Congressman, since Congress passed the law," sug"Maybe I will," said Clem. "Maybe I will." The farmer turned to the lawman. "Zack, who's our Congressman?" "Spielman," spat the Sheriff. Bunker leaned back against the old cottonwood and watched the with another shiny government lock. He looked down the length of the empty ditch and at the beet tops drying in the sun. "Maybe I will," he muttered. "Spielman."    The afternoon sun lightened the dim room. "Corey, you can't do it. It's political suicide." AI Gaston rubbed his hands together. "What am I supposed to do, Al? Lx)se?" Corey looked at his campaign manager. "Spielman and I get the same 'amount of money from a newsletter a week to the entire district for the past ten years. You know what that costs just in postage? One hundred thousand dollars a year! And the taxpayers pick it up." "Corey...he hasn't sent any during the campaign." "Oh...I forgot. For five weeks every other year he stops." "Bitterness won't beat Spielman," protested Gaston. "Al, it's three weeks before the general election. The polls say that eighty-eight percent of the voters have made up their mind, and I'm going to lose by twenty percent. That's what I've gotten from our intensive, gentlemanly campaign. If I keep it up, I can increase the margin of defeat to twenty-five percent." Gaston picked up a print-out and waved it in Corey's face. "Now you listen to me. You know why no one wages a personal campaign any more? Because they lose! In the last ten years, not one personal campaign, not one muckraking, slingit-at-the-incumbent challenger has won!" He threw the computer statistics on the desk. "Al, I don't care. There's no way I can win doing what we're doing. I'm going to make sure every voter in the Sixth District knows everything about Joe Spielman, every rotten vote, every promise...everything!" "Corey, Spielman 's not a bum. He's honest. He's never done anything illegal." "Is promising one thing and voting the opposite honest? Is saying you believe in freedom and enacting more and more regulations honest?" Corey stopped and looked out the dingy window at the setting sun. He could hear the volunteers in the next room stuffing and sealing the endless mailings. "Corey, Corey...you're crazy. You're mad." "Damned right I'm mad. I'm mad. I'm sick and tired of Spielman conning the people, and I'm sick and tired of a izovernment elected by less and less of the people. What was it? Thirty percent voted in the last Presidential election?" He leaned against the desk, resting his hand on the vidfax. Gaston put his hands on his hips and stared at the candidate. "So don't blame me. " Corey looked back. Then he grinned. Finally he laughed. "Hell...we're all to blame. But we're going to have some fun for the rest of the campaign."    The car was cold. Plaudder strapped himself in, turned the ignition switch on. Then he watched the Comp-Meter light up. It flashed four digits. Plaudder responded by tapping four keys. The Comp-Meter flashed green. Plaudder turned the key. The engine turned over, but did not catch. Plaudder kept the key turned. The engine coughed once and resumed its dry cranking. The environmental interlock cut in and turned off the electrical system. Plaudder looked slowly from the ignition switch to the dashboard instruments, still holding the key in the start position. The purple "Oh hell," muttered Plaudder. He turned off the ignition switch and rebelted the seatbelts. He didn't want to try another start with the belt buzzer sounding in his ears. He counted slowly to twenty. Then he turned the ignition switch again and waited for the Comp-Meter sequence. He repeated the four digits the box flashed at him. The green light came on. He turned the key and held it. The engine began to crank. It light blinked on the dashboard and the power to the electrical system was cut. Plaudder turned off the ignition, rebelted himself, counted to twenty, reproved his mental competency with the Comp-Meter, and tried to start the car again. The car's attempts to catch were cut short by the environmental monitor. "God damn it!" Still...the car sounded almost ready to start, if only that environmental monster would let it. Plaudder switched the ignition off, unfastened and refastened the seatbelts, and waited for the Comp-Meter. He jabbed out the numbers hurriedly. The CompMeter glared red and turned off the electrical system. "Damn you, you rotten hunk of tin!" Plaudder took three deep breaths, unfastened the seatbelts, and got out of the car. Maybe he should have gotten an electroscooter. Diane would have. His breath was white, even in the shelter of the carport. He looked up toward Wisteria where the Express Bus was due in fifteen minutes. The streets were still icy. Five or six people were walking up the hill with tentative steps, heading toward the bus stop. Most of the newer cars were parked in the street, or in driveways. "That should be enough," grumbled Plaudder. He got back in the car, fastened the seatbelts, and turned the ignition switch. The Comp-Meter pulsed its four random numbers on the display screen. Plaudder repeated them on the small keyboard...deliberately. The Comp-Meter momentarily flashed amber, then settled into a green approval. "You'd better, you damn number box," cursed Plaudder. His toes were getting numb. He turned the key. The engine turned over. It coughed half a dozen times before it slowed. It stopped flashed on the dashboard. "You miserable bastard!" screamed Plaudder as he hammered his fist on the horn button. He peered out the frosted side window. He sighed. He gave the inert horn one last thump and picked up his lunchcase. He climbed out and slammed the car door. He began the cold walk up the hill to the Express Bus stop.    Jim Westnor stared at the inspector. "That's right," repeated the man. "This railing has to go. The carcasses will rub against it. That's contamination." "But we installed the railing beit." "Look," responded the Ag Inspector. "I don't care what the Federal Safety Inspector said. If this railing doesn't go, you don't ship meat. I'll be back tomorrow." Westnor stalked into the plant, straight for his office. He sat down at the desk and tapped out a number on the vidfax. whined the strained blond receptionist. He had his hair in the elaborate neo-Roman style. "Jim Westnor, Westside Meat Packing. I'd like to talk to Mr. Hoagwast." "Just a moment, sir." Westnor tapped his fingers on the the screen. The logo faded into the image of a thin, graying man. "Hoagwast here." "I'm Jim Westnor of Westside Meat Packing. Last week you gave us a citation for failing to have a safety railing on our loading dock." "What's the problem? As I recall, you had it installed when I made my follow-up check yesterday." "Today we got inspected by the the Department of Agriculture regs prohibit railings. We're supposed to take it down." Hoagwast shook his head slowly. "I can certainly sympathize with your problem, Mr. Westside. But I don't have any latitude. The regulations say that you must have a safety railing. I can't make an exception just for Westnor Meat Packing. The regulations say that I must issue a notice of unsafe procedures if you do not have a safety railing -- " "And that closes me down," interrupted Westnor. "But if I don't remove the damned railing, the tary. No matter what I do, it's illegal." "I can certainly understand your confusion, Mr. Westland, but the way Congress wrote the law was very explicit, and I don't have any choice." Westnor snapped off the vidfax and sat at his desk, still tapping his fingers. Finally he tapped out another number. "Gus, can you modify that safety railing on the dock so it looks permanent, but so it can be taken down in about a minute?" "Sure, boss, but why?" "Because the damned Congress and the damned bureaucrats have said it's got to be both up and down at the same time. That's why." Westnor began to sift through the papers on his desk.    Corey pulled off his gloves and twisted them in his hands. The October wind was cold, especially in the open lot outside the stadium. People were starting to drive up and get out of their cars and scooters. Corey put the gloves in his pocket and picked up a thin stack of his fliers. "Hello, I'm Corey Grademan. I'm running for Congress." Corey handed the woman a flier. "I'd sure appreciate it if you'd read this and vote for me." The woman smiled pleasantly. "Well, I'll read your brochure, but I can tell you. I'm going to vote for Joe Spielman." "What can I do to change your mind?" "Probably nothing. If Joe can't change things in Washington after all the years he's tried, I don't see how you can." Corey watched her drop his leaflet in the nearest trash barrel.    The balding professor pointed to the blackboard. "I realize this is old-fashioned. I could flash cue cards or slides in multicolor, but in my old-fashioned way, I am about to make an oldfashioned point. Mr. Wheeler...yes, you, I would appreciate it greatly if you would stay awake long enough to hear me out." He took the long pointer and jabbed it at the letters chalked on the board. On one side were three large F's, on the other side, three large B's. "Any government in history has been selected, if you will, by the three F's, or if you prefer...the three B's." The professor smiled. "Most of you haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about. But let us proceed. The three F's stand for Fraud, Force, and Franchise." He turned back toward the class. "Mr. Wheeler, I'll ask you first...so you can drop off. What do I mean by Fraud, Force, and Franchise?" Wheeler looked blank. He stammered, "Well, eh...I guess, maybe some governments are corrupt, and some are run by force..." "Not bad...but government by fraud may not be corrupt, depending on the definitions. Mr. Bryan," asked the professor, "what about Franchise?" "Some sort of privilege...only some folks get to make up government?" Bryan, I would have expected better." The professor returned to the podium. "Ladies and gentlemen, the first and most important definition of Franchise is the right of suffrage, the right to vote. Now," and the professor gestured around the hall, "when less than thirty percent of the adult population votes, is the question of Franchise more or less important? Why?" He smiled again. "I'm going to let you think about that question. You may have it on an exam. You may not." He Jabbed the pointer at the three B's. "If you prefer B's, then cite Bribery, Bullets, and Ballots. In our history, the use of bullets, except during the Civil War, has been restricted and minimal compared to most other governments. On the other hand. Bribery, Fraud, if you will, has played a far more pervasive role than the most cynical of you realize. "Laidwin, answer this. Is it Bribery for non-partisan political groups to use their rightful and legal methods of changing public opinion to influence the course of legislation and to create rules and regulations of which the majority does not approve?" "No, sir." "Laidwin, you're a fine young man. You're legally correct. Are you morally correct? And more important, are you politically correct? No...I don't want an answer now. "I will leave you all with one more question. What happens to a society where a minority , or a series of minorities, uses its influence to Bribe changes in the societal framework which will not and cannot be accepted by the majority?" The professor nodded his head at the class. "Good day, ladies and gentlemen." Corey looked around the crowd, cleared his throat. "Friends," started Corey, "all the political books say that you can't win an election by getting personal. All the books say you must be nice to your opponent...even if he or she is the biggest hypocrite in Congress. All the books say you have to come up with a positive approach. "I'm telling you here tonight that I'm throwing the books away. I've spent the last year walking through the Sixth District, listening to you, and to people like you. "What have you said? You're fed up with more and more rules, more and more government studies that say nothing, more and more taxes. "You're tired of products that don't work. You can't find doctors. You can't find mechanics. Your kids aren't learning. "Who's to blame? "Why, Honest Joe Spielman's to blame. That's who! Here's why. "Honest Joe Spielman voted for more controls on your car. All those monitors and gadgets? That's right. Honest Joe Spielman voted for them. "Honest Joe Spielman voted for all those rules that mean your kids can't get Jobs. With a ten-dollar minimum wage, who's going to hire an eighteen-year-old? Honest Joe forgot about that. Ask him about his vote on H.R. #. Write him; call him; ask him." Corey looked out across the crowd, pausing. "Now my campaign manager says I'm going to lose if I make this speech. He says you don't care. He says all you want is more, more, more. "But I think the American people have had enough of empty promises. Every time the Congress acts, it costs you. Five thousand dollars every time a politician introduces a bill. Twenty thousand dollars a second Just to keep Washington running! "Thafs bad enough. But when you can't start your car on a cold morning because of pollution control devices, when you can't heat your home two days a week because of fuel controls, when your kids can't get Jobs because they don't have experience -- and they can't get experience because of all the regulations...then it's time to "How do you stop government? You stop the people who made the laws. You stop the Honest Joe Spielmans who promised everything and gave you nothing but more rules and taxes. "Maybe you do want more, but the only way you'll get more is if the government gets less. Less regulations, less taxes. "And maybe Tm wrong. Maybe you don't care. But I think you do. I think you care enough to vote for me. A vote for Corey Grademan is a vote against Joe Spielman. A vote for Corey Grademan is a vote against government. You've said you want less government. Vote for less government! Vote for me. "Thank you." Corey stepped back from the microphone. The applause was scattered, less than modest.  itk "And now the incumbent Congressman, Joe Spielman." Spielman got a standing ovation. In the back of the armory, a Dixieland group struck up Spielman's theme, "He's Our Guy!" Large green and white "Our Guy" posters bounced above the crowd. Dozens of balloons soared into darkness above the girders. "My friends, it's great to be back," began Spielman. "And although Mr. Grademan and I have a number of differences, we obviously share the same concerns, particularly about the need for more jobs and less government interference. "No able-bodied American should be without a job. No young American should wander the streets with a diploma looking for work. No American should have to depend on welfare for his daily bread. "No American should have to drive an unsafe car; no American should die of cancer because of polluted air and water..." Spielman flashed his charming smile and held up his hands to quiet and acknowledge the thundering applause.    "Ah, yes, Dr. Wilhouse. I'm George Hasled. I was impressed with your presentation." Edmund Wilhouse, Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa, Norton Fellow, stood up to meet the Chairman of the Political Science Department of West Bayview State College. "I'm the one who's honored. Professor Hasled." Wilhouse found himself ushered into a small neat office lined with bookshelves. Most of the shelves were empty. A few droopy plants and a handful of books were scattered about. The Professor plumped himself down behind the desk into an old wooden swivel chair. He took a cigar from the desk humidor and tapped it gently on the desk top. "Rather than beat around the bush, Wilhouse, I'd rather lay it on the line. First, you're the best black candidate I've seen in a decade, maybe longer. Second, you come highly recommended -- " "But you aren't going to offer me the job." "That's correct. Not because I don't want to, but because I can't." lars," added Wilhouse drily. "That does have a definite effect," added Professor Hasled. "What about the other candidates?" prompted Wilhouse. "Td like to know what I'm up against." "You're number three. Number one has never had a grade less than an A since the fourth grade, is a Rhodes Scholar, has had three books published, one of which made the best-seller list for nonfiction, and was rated the best teacher of the century at Palmdale Junior College. He also has other credentials, such as being a former all-American soccer player and having a number of off-Broadway acting credits. Why he even wants the job beats me." "The Supreme Court rulings?" "That's right. According to the College's legal department, I must offer the job to the best candidate, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, or age...as determined by objective standards. "As you know," the Chairman went on, lighting the cigar, "this will be the first vacancy in the Department in five years. I do not expect another, barring accidents, for at least three more years. With the decline in school enrollments and the emphasis on more, shall we say, functional curricula, there's little demand for Political Economy as a major any longer." "Particularly when each year of college costs thirty thousand dolWilhouse couldn't help shaking his head sympathetically. Hasled looked at the young black. "You know...it's crazy. I never thought I'd be turning down a Norton Fellow with a Ph.D., a Phi Beta Kappa as well...not for a job that offers as little as this. You know...I've taken a look at your background, Wilhouse. You have a good stat base and the brains to succeed in either government or business. Why don't you try it? This place is a madhouse. Old professors hanging on to tenure, with no place to go, almost no one to teach to. I'm the best of the worst." He took another puff on the cigar. "You know...we never applied our own disciplines to ourselves...and no one else took us seriously." The professor stood up. "I wish I could offer you the Job. Lord knows, you deserve it more than the rest of us here, but I'm not ready to leave and not gutsy enough to strike out again." Wilhouse walked out of the dingy building, slowly, hands in his pockets.    "And now, without further introduction, Corey Grademan." Corey stood and moved three chairs to the left to take the rostrum. "Most of you are small businesspeople. You're busy individuals, and you know a lot about your businesses, and how hard the government can make it on you." Corey surveyed the tables, saw the quiet nods. "Now...conventional wisdom would demand that I rail against Washington and bureaucrats especially. I won't. "I'll just say this. Every single bureaucratic power has been given by Congress to the bureaucrats. That's why I'm running against Honest Joe Spielman. Honest Joe has voted for virtually every piece of legislation to create more regulations. "For example, he voted for the Federal Safety Act. In case you don't remember, that's the followgovernment the right to close down every business in America without a warrant. "Honest Joe Spielman also voted for the Consumer Protection Act. And in case you don't recall...that's the one that says you have to refund the customer's money no matter what he did to the product or how he misused it. "That's all I have to say. Honest Joe says he's for you. He's never really voted for you, but he's for you. I don't think he is. And that's why I'm running and why I want your vote. Thank you." Corey saw the stunned look on a few faces. Only a few gave approving nods. No applause. no    Plaudder slipped twice on his way home from the bus stop. His elbow still tingled as he opened the front door. The damned car hadn't started half the mornings in October. He picked up the flier that had been stuffed in the mail slot...Turn The Page And See Why. Plaudder read the brochure from cover to cover. "So Spielman voted for the airbags, did he?" Plaudder looked at the picture of Diane on the mantle. Two years ago, but it seemed like yesterday. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. "So Spielman voted for the airbags..." Plaudder looked at Diane's picture again. Then he began to sip the beer.    Corey looked around the fairgrounds. His vinyl boots were covered with mud. He was still smiling as he passed out literature to passing farmers. He handed a brochure to a wrinkled man. The man looked at it, tossed it onto the mud, and stared at Corey. "Why you running against Honest Joe? He's always been a friend of the farmers." "That's what he tells you," answered Corey. Several other men moved closer. Corey jabbed a finger at the farmer, who stepped back. "You say Honest Joe Spielman's your friend. Honest Joe Spielman voted to impose the export bans on soybeans and wheat. Did that help you?" Corey pointed at another farmer. "Honest Joe Spielman voted to so. How many farmers does that help?" Several couples joined the audience. "Honest Joe Spielman says he's against gun control. But Honest Joe Spielman voted to restrict gun ownership." Corey surveyed the ten or twelve onlookers before continuing. "All of you...I'd like to ask you a question. If Joe Spielman votes against you so much, why do you vote for him?" "Cause he's a friend of the farmer. He voted for price supports," responded a man near the back of the crowd. "You wouldn't need them if the government weren't controlling the export market and cutting back irrigation and sending safety inspectors out on every farm in the country." Corey stopped. The group was drifting away, all except one man. "Young feller, name's Clem Bunker. What you said about Spielman's votes true?" "Yes, Mr. Bunker, that's the way he voted. If you want, I can even dig up the bill numbers and the dates." "Don't need that. You have them...that's fine." Bunker looked at the candidate. "Son, you're not going to win." The man pointed at the backs of the departing formers. "They think they're fine so long as Uncle Sam shells out the subsidies. But keep on preaching. Some of us are listening." Bunker smiled at Corey and headed toward the livestock ring.    Wilhouse flipped from viewer channel to viewer channel. He ended up facing Corey Grademan. "Honest Joe Spielman has opposed good education by supporting the mandatory tenure clause of the teachers' union. No matter how old, or how incompetent, a teacher keeps a job forever. Does your child get the best teacher? Of course not, but Honest Joe Spielman doesn't care about that..." Edmund Wilhouse turned off the viewer. "So Spielman supports mandatory tenure," he murmured as he went back to the tedious business of checking university addresses. "That hypocritical son of a bitch."    Plaudder knew the two by the cooler. "Hey, Bob." "Morning, Sam, Jim." "Hey, Bob, you missed Spielman. He Just came through here. Man, he's one sharp politician...even remembered how Gladys worked in his campaign four years ago." "Handshaking isn't everything," muttered Plaudder. "What's got into you. Bob?" "Spielman voted for air-bags." Plaudder turned and headed back to the machine shop. Let them talk, about the freak accident, about Diane, about the faulty air-bag in the other car. Let them talk. Spielman voted for airbags. He began to set the jigs. Let them talk. Spielman. Honest Joe Spielman. Diane. Air-bags. k ir it Clem Bunker pulled the rifle from the mount in the pickup cab, loaded it carefufly, and checked the safety. He closed the pickup door and, still carrying the rifle, began to walk toward the barbecue on the other side of the fairgrounds. After a time, he stepped into the empty exhibition building and went to the far side. Through the open slats he could see Spielman mingling with the crowd. Bunker steadied the rifle on the ledge, picked up Spielman in the sights. He held the politician in the sights for a long time. Then he sighed and put down the gun. He slid the safety on and walked back to the pickup. "I couldn't even shoot a damned skunk," he muttered as he replaced the gun in the cab mount.    Jim Westnor picked up the mail. It had fallen on the hall floor when the mailperson had shoved it through the slot. He leafed through the stack. The repair bill for the wall viewer, an advertising card from a new men's store specializing in the gay look, a campaign brochure... Westnor looked at the date on his watch. He could go vote. He dropped the mail on the table, all except the flier. He read the cover as he went out into the apartment hallway. are you tired of politi... Turn The Page And See Why. Grademan...he was the young fellow who talked to the Small Business Club. Westnor scanned the pamphlet as he walked back down to the garage. So Honest Joe Spielman was one est Joe Spielman opposed a lower minimum wage for teenagers? That might have helped Ted, given him a chance. If he'd had a chance at a job...Westnor crumpled the flier and jammed it into his pocket. He marched across the garage to the electro scooter and yanked open the door. Westnor threw himself into the seat and slammed the door.    Plaudder picked up Diane's pistol. She'd always kept it in the bedside table. He'd moved as little as possible. Plaudder took out the box of shells, methodically loaded the gun, and set it on the bed, the barrel pointing at the headboard. He put the shell box back in his top dresser drawer. Then he checked the safety again and eased the gun into the deep overcoat pocket. He looked in the full-length mirror for a long moment before going out the bedroom door.    Westnor opened the apartment door. Betsy was still watching the early national returns on the wall viewer. Her drink was sitting on the table, untouched. He slipped open the closet door and hung the heavy coat on a hook. "Jim, that didn't take long." "No...I just ran down to the Quik 'N Go. They've got soda there." He gestured to the wall screen. "Anything interesting yet?" "No. I was surprised to learn you voted. You never do. And now you're asking me about the election returns. " He grinned weakly. "I'm sort of surprised myself. But I had to make some sort of gesture after I found out...oh, never mind...long story." He went into the small kitchen and poured a triple scotch with a dash of soda, then came back into the living room and sat down in the easirocker next to hers. "You've been running all over tonight, Jim. It's not good for you. First, you run out and vote. Then you come back and throw dinner together. Then you run out to the store, and now you've poured yourself a triple to relax. Now will you stay put and simmer down?" He sighed. "Yep. Yep. For a few minutes, anyway. How was work?" "Fine..." Betsy held up her hand and pointed to the screen. "We're going to turn you over to our affiliated stations for fifteen minutes of local returns. We'll be back at ten." The viewer screen beeped several times, flashed red, and turned gray. Then a please stand by appeared. "We seem to have lost the picture, but we have an urgent bulletin from Spielman Headquarters. George Kortine is there. George, we've lost the video. Can you hear us?" Westnor leaned forward in the easirocker. "Yes, Cathy, I can hear you. It's a madhouse here! Joe Spielman has been shot! Joe Spielman, just reelected to his sixth term, has been shot by an unknown assailant. We don't know much, but apparently a man walked up to Spielman to offer congratulations and shot the Congressman several times with a concealed weapon. "I repeat, Joe Spielman has been shot. We had just predicted his victory not fifteen minutes ago." The picture swirled into focus on a thin black man, then shifted to show several police holding a crowd back from a prone figure. A woman and several men were kneeling around the body. The woman, the doctor, was working on Spielman. "In the confusion the suspect escaped. No one we've talked to even saw the man." The picture shifted back to the black reporter. "This is George Kortine at Spielman Headquarters. That's all we have for now." Betsy turned to her husband. "Isn't that near here? That must have been why there were so many sirens Just before you got back." "There's some sort of political office in the building next door," began Westnor. "Do you think that's Spielman's place?" Betsy looked at him, then turned back to the screen. Westnor got up and went into the front hall. Betsy was still glued to the screen. He opened the closet and eased the gun out of the coat pocket. He moved into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. He emptied the six unfired shells from the chambers and put them back in the box. Then Westnor put the gun back in the drawer. He shook his head. He looked up. Betsy was standing in the door. "Jim?" "No. Didn't have to." He got up slowly and walked back to the living room to watch the rest of the returns. Betsy sat down next to him.    Quinn Dolbert was studying the tables Brown Glorian had sent up from Research when the desk vidfax buzzed. He tapped the acknowledgment stud. "Dolbert." He looked in the screen to see Sarah Yee, the Senior Editor, impatiently gesturing with her pencil. "Quinn, you're doing the statistical wrap-up on the elections?" she asked. "Yes." "Hand it over to Dorsey Jones." "Right now?" "Now." Sarah stuck the pencil over one ear. "You know that five incumbent members of Congress were shot during the campaign?" "Right, but Pressing is expected to recover." "No quibbling, Quinn. Since when have even four members of Congress been killed in the same campaign?" "I'd guess never." "You guess right. I want you to find out why." Quinn was left staring at an empty screen.    The balding professor looked at the sleepy class in front of him. "I realize that eight o'clock is a preposterous hour for an exam, but political science is not a course favored by a more functionally minded administration...so we are gathered together at this rather inauspicious hour." The professor held up a small blue notebook. "This is a blue book. I believe I am the last professor still requiring written exams. You will inscribe your immortal responses to the questions I am about to place on the blackboard in these tidy pamphlets. You may use pencil, ink, or suitable substitutes." Deal Wheeler shook his head as he watched the professor chalk up the three questions. "I will see you all in two hours." The professor smiled and left.    Quinn looked at the sheets. Finally he tapped out Sarah Yee's number. He waited for her image to focus on the vidfax screen. "I've got it." "Same, same," Quinn answered. "Is there anyone in your office?" A look of annoyance crossed her face. "Is there anyone in your office?" he repeated. "Does it matter, Mr. Dolbert?" "Yes." "If you insist, then." The screen went gray for several minutes. "All right. Let's have your secret message." "Sarah...first, let me say I don't believe it. Second...I do believe it. And third...I'm against running it." "Quinn, what the hell are you trying to say?" He cleared his throat. "Last election, about ten incumbents were roughed up at some time during their campaigns. All ten won easily. Remember that. This election, there were three cases of assault on incumbents, plus the five shootings." "And?" prompted Sarah. "There's only one thing in common," he continued. "In this election only five challengers personally attacked the record of the incumbents." "Quinn, you're putting me on." "Okay. Let me put it another way. Five challengers threw all the dirt they could at the incumbents...from party-line votes, hypocrisy, conflicts on their voting record...whatever. Here's what's even more interesting. All five were re-elected easily, even though three were dead before the election. Pressing was hospitalized, and Spielman was killed election night." "Wait a minute! Are you telling me that only the incumbents who had mud-slinging opponents were assaulted?" "That's right. Remember the ten assaults last election? As far as I can check, those ten incumbents also ran against mud-slingers. Now, I don't mean grubby dirt...I mean that the challengers had good solid facts that hurt the incumbents, or caught them in their own words." "Skip that. What about the three cases of assault this election?" Sarah's face was intent. Quinn shrugged. "Far as I can figure, challengers couldn't quite link the incumbents to the problems. Tried, but couldn't make the case." "Quinn, that's the most preposterous story I've ever heard. Why, you almost sucked me into it." Sarah Yee laughed. Quinn Dolbert laughed. Edmund Wilhouse stamped and mailed his thousandth resume. Three students failed the professor's exam for forgetting the three F's...or the three B's. Clem Bunker stood at the headgate with his boltcutters and let the water run through his frozen fields. Jim Westnor stood on the loading dock and tested his permanentnonpermanent safety railing. Bob Plaudder sat back on the breakfast bar stool and looked at the picture of Diane. He took another sip of the beer on the counter. Corey Grademan signed his declaration for the special election.  Spider Robinson Ariel I (quarterly), ed. Thomas Durwood, Morningstar Press, # pp., # Frankenstein Unbound, Brian Aldiss Sl Thomas Vernon, Alternate Worlds Recording ##, timing unknown, # The Ones Who Walk Away From Ornelas, Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ Interpreting Her Nightfall, Isaac Asimov  James H.B. Cutting, Analog Records, # Search the Sky, Frederik Pohl  Cyril Kornbluth, Bantam, # pp., I .# Gladiator-At-Law, Pohl  Kornbluth, Bantam, # pp., # Wolfbane, Pohl  Kornbluth, Bantam, #I pp., I .# The Best Of, Judith Merril, Warner, # pp., # City of Darkness, Ben Bova, Scribners, # pp., # Rogue in Space, Fredric Brown, Bantam, # pp., #c Who' s Who In SF, Brian Ash, Taplinger, # pp., # Weird Tales, ed. Peter Haining, Spearman Ltd., # pp., # Some of Your Blood, Theodore Sturgeon, Ballantine, # pp., # I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've always been a rather backward lad. And I mean that (in this case) literally. As a child, riding in my parents' lemon, I invariably stared out the back window, fascinated by where I'd been. I like to re-read old diaries. When I got married to Jeanne, we had the whole damn ceremony videotaped (an outdoor triple-wedding in the north forty) and had an instant-replay in the kitchen afterwards just the ceremony, nosy!). So it's no wonder I ended up as a reviewer. As near as I can figure, by the time this sees print, the # Hugo Awards shouldalready be history, or nearly so, and damned if I'll try to predict the results. Let somebody else stick their neck out. (You did vote, didn't ?bu? You don't want your favorite writers to starve? Believe me, in this racket they will without your support.) But perhaps now might be a good time to look at some major events in sf that took place in #, but will not be reflected in the Hugos. There is, for example, no category for Best New Magazine. # saw the birthing of five new magazines in the genre (I'm talking prozines here -- Harry Warner alone knows how many new fanzines were spawned!), which is probably a record and certainly four more than there've been in a mort of years. (Yes, I know one of them didn't appear until early '# -- but it was birthed in '#.) Isaac Asinwvs SF Magazine doesn't look too bad, but I hate the layout and the format and see no Justification for the use of Isaac's name or picture: his opening "editorial" was the slickest disclaimer since the back of the Western Union form. Furthermore, I was offended that a good half of the hundreds of classified ads were from practitioners of the classic "earn money stuffing envelopes" mail fraud -- pyramid schemes gimme the pip: their perpetrators are germs who can only exist in an environment of decay. But the stories weren't bad, and Charlie Brown does a good Job with the total Minireview format. Galileo is remarkably improved in its second number, and may make it yet -- if their demented three-part payment schedule doesn't ruin them. They're still not up to the quality-level at which Vertex folded a few years ago -- but then they haven't got near Vertex's budget. And I really enjoy A. A. Whyte's "pre-reviews" -- they're something I always wished I could do in this column, and can't. Unearth, the magazine specifically for previously unpublished writers, has Kiss Of Death written all over it and will almost certainly be belly-up by the time you read this. Cosmos, on the other hand, should by now be firmly established, if not wildly successful -- its first number, the only one out as I write, is the most exciting debut issue I've ever seen. I like its # X #I size (same as Galileo), the editor has good taste (read: he keeps buying my stufO, the monthly sf art double-truck (it is not a centerfold) is a fabulous idea, the paper stock is excellent, the interior color is great, and Jack calls for some kind of special award another special award, that is -- at the recent Boskone, Jack became the first artist ever to be awarded nificant contribution to sOAt this point. Cosmos looks like one of the best things to hit the field since Baen came to Galaxy (did I happen to mention that I got a raise this month?), and I've entered a two-year subscription. I've saved Ariel for last (andgiven its ordering-info in this column's heading) because it's the only one I haven't seen advertised heavily in the sf marketplace, the only one you can't almost certainly locate without effort. Apparently they spent more on quality than on hype, which alone calls for applause. A quarterly devoted to fantasy and fantasy art (including comics), Ariel is outsize (# X #), printed on better paper than Cosmos, glue-bound rather than stapled, and goes for six skins. It comes from Momingstar Press (PO Box #, Leawood, Kansas #), the same outfit that brought you the incredible Robert HowardRichard Corben pictorial novel Bloodstar (an artifact worth its weight in diamonds), and the first issue of Ariel features a dazzling color Corben cover, the first section of Corben's "Den" in color, and an excerpt from Bloodstar which doesn't begin to do it justice. It also has Part I of a rare extended interview with Frank Frazetta; a color Frazetta back cover (a blowup from "The Frost Giants"); a thoughtful and profusely illustrated article on his work by Margaret Wilson-Cline; two Robert Howard poems; an illustrated interview with Bume Hogarth on the occasion of his final Tarzan assignment; and a fascinating article on the psychological evolution of Batman (and, therefore, of Bruce Wayne -- and, in a sense, of thee and me) from # to the present, also illustrated (everything in here is illustrated). There are also two remarkably silly articles on The Parallels Between Frank Frazetta and Marlon Brando and on Conan As Existentialist, and two stories. I liked one -- a tall tale by Paul Boles -- and can't comment on the other because I simply can't read that kind of story: I'm colorblind in that range. A remarkable magazine, as welcome to fantasy lovers as Cosmos will be to science-fiction fans, and worth the high price.    Sf also gained not one but two new record companies in # (although, as with the above magazines, some of the new product didn't hit the market until early '#), which is another ahem... record. There was only one other, far's I know, a remarkably dull one called Caedmon, which is one of the largest spoken-word companies in the world and threw in a few Asimov and Bradbury readings in an attempt to the eclectic. It will certainly be dwarfed -- in this genre, anyway -- by Alternate Worlds Recordings (# East # St., New York NY #), which exploded with nearly a dozen releases in its first year of existence. I've already reviewed half of them, each a xach, and there's a bunch more here on my desk. I'm sorry to say no-hitter. " Not that these aren't excellent recordings -- as such they are superb. and writers that  like, they'd have to ignore an awful lot of extremely popular sf (the way I do). Take Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound, for instance. It's a dedramatization starring the author rather than a straight reading by same. It comprises an abridgment of Tom Vernon's four-and(which was broadcast in London in #) with connecting narration by Aldiss -- and again, as such radio drama. This means it's almost bearable in spots. But the story itself is one which I find both tedious and pointless, a labor-of-love retelling of Frankenstein which in my opinion adds nothing significant to the original. The "parallel worlds" or "shifting reality levels" cliche is employed, apparently for the dual purpose of a) placing on the scene (presumably for contrast) a #thcentury man who never for a second sounds remotely like a #th-century man except in the data he possesses, and b) allowing Aldiss, who plays the protagonist, to vicariously seduce Mary ShelYear Spree nominated her for The Mother of SF, has an Oedipal connotation that I find entirely too cutesy. The style is authentic -- that is, a hundred years out of date -- loaded with melodrama and circumlocution and cornball dying speeches in which the last rattling breath serves to launch six to ten thousand words. The abridgment job certainly doesn't help, but I have a feeling that the four-anda-half-hour original was Just as formless, hammy and historically interesting. On the other hand, you might love it. it it it Likewise Joanna Russ Interpreting Her Stories turned me off -- as her cover-copy Jubilantly predicted it would. Unhappily, the title is a misnomer: she does not interpret her stories; she only reads them aloud. Oh, side one is Just fine: "When It Changed" is a damned fine story and deserved its award, and Russ's reading adds some depth and some clarity. But the going gets muddy on side two: on a good stereo you'll hear the axe grinding in the background, and sometimes in the foreground. Feminism of the Sneering Sophomore school: people who dance around in front of me with their dukes held high make me either edgy or amused depending on my mood, and in neither case am I moved to subsidize 'em. The last words on the album are, . and if you don't listen to me, I'll break your neck." (Honest to God.) If that's the choice, perhaps I should bring a bodyguard to the next Worldcon.    On the other hand, Ursula K. LeGuin's album. The Ones Who Walk Away From Ornelas, is a genuine masterpiece, perhaps the has a wonderful reading voice, as full of warmth and subtlety as her stories, and the selection here is splendid. I've publicly bitched about "Omelet" on the grounds that it won a short story award and is clearly not a short story. It is a parable, and I guess now is the time to state publicly that it's a damned good one. It comes alive on record; in fact I believe this may be its natural medium. I know I enjoyed hearing it more than I did reading it. On the flip we have the Orgota Creation Myth from The Left Hand of Darkness, also a parable, also Just peachy in this medium -- and a marvelous and poignant short story called "The Direction of the Road." It is told in the first person by an oak tree, and it contains some of the most memorable lines in my experience, and it is remarkable in every way -- I never spent a more enjoyable twenty minutes (well, maybe that's going a bit too far... ). Sf is supposed to give us different viewpoints, and this is one of the most fascinating I've seen yet. Although Pohl's Law states that nothing is so good that someone somewhere won't hate it, I can hardly imagine anyone failing to enjoy this delightful album. Oh, and the George Barr cover is lovely.    as the present as this column can get you. Now for the second new sf record company I mentioned: Analog. Yep -- Analog (# Madison Ave., New York, NY #) has entered the record biz, and with a damned impressive debut disc. Nightfall (like Frankenfurter OnBun) is a dramatization of Isaac Asimov's world-famous classic story about Lagash, the triple-sun world where the stars only come out every # years. As a dramatization it is superior to Unbound -- about twice as good as anything you're liable to hear on stateside radio). Scripter and producer James H.B. Cutting has done an admirable job of adapting the #I classic to a sonofabitch of a medium (have you ever tried to adapt a story to radio?  have, and I admired Cutting's success). Furthermore, you get a fifteenminute rap at the end, between the Good Doctor (he's not listed with (he A.M.A., so he may really be a good doctor) and a certain magazine editor who shall remain nameless iiniil I review his latest book a eouple of paragraphs from now. The said rap includes background anecdt)(es on the story and its reception over the years which are informative and hilarious, as well as Isaac's eomments on the production itself. Altogether a fine recording of one of the most popular stories in all sf. Rumor hath it that the next reUasc from Analog will be a dramatization of one of Gordy Dickson's Dorsai stories, and will include Gordy himself singing Dorsai songs and playing his guitar. I've sat up until six a.m., times when it was really drunk out, to hear that latter -- I look forward to the record. Analog Records, by the hit.    What else happened in sf in #? Well, the first concerted attempt (n mass-produce sf peanuts failed. I oscr... pardon me... Laser hooks went where all lasers go when somebody takes the ruby away. Harlequin, the Toronto company that has been mass-producing ( iothic peanuts so effectively for so long, pulled its rubies out after a little less than a year, insisting meanwhile to the press that sales had been entirely satisfactory. In tact, so much Kiss Of Death hovi red over the project from its inception that they never dared send me, or Lester del Rey, or any major sf reviewer, review copies. Despite two letters and a long-distance call to Toronto before the first Lasers were released, I got my first review copies on the very day I read in Locus that Laser was dead. They've been arriving regularly ever since, each accompanied by a computAshley Automatic woodbuming stove is starting to fill up with staples. It is impossible to believe that anyone connected with the project knew anything whatever about sf. Ah well -- maybe now Kelly Freas'll get back to work. And maybe (please God) publishers will stop listening to Roger El wood. Sf peanuts sold OK on TV, of course -- peanuts is what they want there. As I write, Space # (marked down, as they say, from #) is doing quite well, renewed for another quarter-mil-per-episode season, minus its only real actor and plus the first dea ex machina I'm aware of. (They no longer have to put Novocaine in Barbara Bain's face cream -- constant exposure to electromagnetic-type radiation has taken its toll, and now she just naturally looks that way. I would too.) If Holmes  YoYo had survived, I'd now be contemplating some pun about SheerLuck Holmes (Wats-on tonight, dear?); but mercifully the thing is dead. May it rest in pieces. There were two gigantic peanuts in sf movies in #, and I prefer not to discuss them, thank you. And in #, they filled in the last blank in Edgar Pangborn's biog. The blank right after, "Born, #..." On the off-chance that you have never read this column before, I will add only that Edgar was one of the three finest science-fiction writers that ever lived, and that we as a species should be proud to have produced him. The creator of Davy, A Mirror For Observers, The Judgment of Eve, Company of Glory, "Angefs Egg" and "Harper Conan and Singer David" will write no more, and that is an event of significance to the whole world -- not just our little ghetto corner of it. Also taken from us were Thomas Burnett Swann, Fritz Lang, Mary Gnaedinger and Daniel Galouye.  So much for # In Review. Now let's take a giant step backward: as the Firesign Theater says, "Forward, into the past." Last month I did a lot of shouting about Cyril Kornbluth, and just as that column went into the mail, I got a couple of reprints of collaborations between Kornbluth and Fred Pohl. I found one more in the stackonthedesk, and decided to tell you about 'em. Because in case you didn't know, the Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration was the finest in sf history. (I haven't seen a reissue of The Space Merchants yet, and I haven't read it in ten years, but it is one of the most famous works in the field. I'll review it if and when it arrives. Meanwhile I seem to have everything else the pair ever wrote -- at least in book-length. They sent me a PK story-collection too... but I lost it at Boskone.) Fred's and Cyril's work together in the early #s was certainly not the first satiric sf ever done -- but it inspired an explosion of that kind of sf, which is still around today in the works of John Boyd and Ron Goulart (to give the opposite ends of a spectrum). PK didn't invent the notion of extrapolating-;cyond the point of absurdity -- but they gave it a quantum jump in sophistication, in relevance, hooked it into an enormously more subtle social consciousness -- and gave it a bite like an angry chainsaw. And they invariably refused the temptation to bake a nutmeg cake: in every single instance the satire is incidental, merely the setting in which a valid story with a nonsatiric theme takes place. Search the Sky, the first of these, is a wildly inventive and achingly funny book. Characteristically, it demands a helluva lot of suspension of disbelief -- the tongue must be imbedded in the cheek -- but the internal logic is unassailable. The setting is a far future in which mankind has established itself on a few dozen worlds or so, withsequently exchange between these worlds is a seldom thing, with worse time-lags than this column, and warfare is a thing of the past. PK apply simple genetics to the picture and end up concluding that there are things beside which the threat of warfare is a preferred option. In part, the thesis is an extension of the premise Cyril originally used in his classic masterpiece, "The Marching Morons," but extended through many centuries to show that even the stars can't save us, without And the book is funny as hell throughout. The hero is a marvelous chump, an earnest young man who yearns to be a Hero and does his best and works it all out logically and decisively and keeps ending up hip-deep in shit. The heroine, certain to goad radical feminists into apoplexy, is a dizzy, dithering cupcake who does everything backasswards and keeps coming up covered in diamonds -- which drives him up a wall. Their careening progress ashe jiggered with a hairpin) is a oo-parade of zaniness -- yet in the end it is his logic that literally saves the human race, once he's gotten over a bad case of Frozen Postulates. A satisfying book, meticulously logical, darkly satiric and consistently hilarious.    Gladiator-At-Law, published a book -- so many of its most dismal projections are now "topical," the satire strikes too close for comfort. We have a world in which only those whose services are valued by the great multinational corporations get to live in decent housing ("bubble-homes"), while the majority have to live in the miserable decaying jungles that our slapped-together-of-inferior-materials suburbs will surely become; a world in which the rich are much richer and the poor much poorer, in which both groups take their amusement from public gladiatorial circuses which amount to stupendous bloodbaths. This book, too, is funny, but the humor is subtler than in Sky sharper, more underplayed, never quite becoming slapstick. It barely blunts the edge of some very real anger, anger aimed at the mentality that is destroying us: the profit-at-all-costs syndrome. PK personify this in two of the evilest villains I've ever come across, the Struldbrugs, and lead another earnestly-inept protagonist into a death-struggle with them, fought through the stockmarket and the sacred halls of corporate law. He succeeds only with the help of some extraordinarily vivid and believable supporting characters, and many deft subplots are ironed out with seemingly effortless elegance. This is one of the pair's best efforts, second only to Space Merchants in maturity and depth of ironic insight.    Wolfbane is an entirely different kind of book, something of a departure for PK. For one thing, it is not remotely funny, never tries to be. For another, it does not use a straight-line extrapolation of thingsknown: it posits major alteration of human destiny by alien intervention. No satiric slices are taken, save those that no story involving humans can avoid. Briefly, Wolfbane takes place years after all humanity has been conquered and enslaved by mysterious aliens, who have manifested themselves as two enormous black pyramids, one on the Moon and one squatting on Mount Everest. The pyramids harvest people. What's left of mankind is divided into two groups, the Citizens and the Wolves. The former Just about worship the pyramids; the latter plot hopelessly against them. Eventually, of course, the times produce a hero who combines enough elements of Citizen and Wolf to allow for a solution. Unfortunately, he is very nearly the only human character who achieves realness -- the others tend to be a bit one-dimensional. But the eightbrained Snowflake really comes across -- and there's a wealth of carefully-detailed plotting, some rigorous thought, and a satisfying climax. Truth to tell, I can't get a firm handle on exactly why I liked this one so much. When I analyze it, it comes out just "okay" -- but there's something about it. Maybe it's just that it was PK's last collaboration -- damn near the last thing Cyril ever wrote. Or maybe I just like the central image of a gigantic alien brain contracting cancer. I dunno. "Something in the way it moves..." Speaking of Kornbluth  Pohl, this month I had the good fortune to meet a lady who knewknows them both quite well (she twice collaborated with the former and once married the latter). Judith Merril was GoH at Halycon I, the first Nova Scotia sf convention (organized by Prof. Dorothy Broderick and sponsored by the Dalhousie U. School of Library Service -- to whom thanks for a helluva good time), and she left a deep and lasting impression on me. She was also good enough to give me a copy of The Best of Judith Merril, which is certainly more than the publishers bothered to do, and I'm almost as grateful for that as I was for the chance to meet Judy in the first place. If I had had this book on hand a few months ago when I did my allwomen column, it would clearly have been Best-Of-Show. As it is, it's pick-of-themonth, at the very least. # on the Spidermeter (stories enjoyed total stories x #), with a slight minus for ugly cover and a four-page poem I couldn't make head nor tail of; more than offset by big bonuses for "Daughters of Earth," "Dead Center," and "Stormy Weather," three of my favorite stories of all time, not to mention a five-page poem, "Auction Pit," which I did unnastan and liked tremendously. Every so often you come across a story or a bunch of characters so YrtZ-seeming that you forget, momentarily, that you're sitting with a book in your hands, squinting at funny black squiggles on its pages. When you come across several such in one book, it's an event. The collection includes "That Only A Mother," one of the best first-stories in sf, and a first-rate introduction by Virginia Kidd, and it doesn't come within light-years of the feminine chauvinism the cover and blurbs try to impute to it, and I recommend it highly.    What the hell is a juvenile novel? Why do we sneer at them? What distinguishes one from an adult novel? There are some obvious distinctions. The author is not permitted to confuse the reader with stylistic mahooha and multilevel allegories and shifting reality-levels... gee, that sounds kind of refreshing. The author is not permitted to bore the reader or attempt to gross him out... gosh, that sounds okay too. The author is not permitted to wander aimlessly: an identifiable-with protagonist must undergo some rigorous trial and emerge a larger person -- you know, that challengeand-response stuff that low-brow writers keep trying to tell us that Life is all about. That doesn't turn me off either. Heinlein once said the best way to write a juvenile sf novel is to take a youthful protagonist, write the best damned novel you can around him or her, and then cut the sex. Well nowadays, by golly, you don't even have to cut the sex -- unless it's grotesque, exploitive or overtly SM flavored -- and I can live with those restrictions too; I'm bored with Delany's black-leatherjackets-and-smelly-armpits stuff. So I thoroughly enjoyed Ben Bova's new juvenile. City of Darkness. It reminds me sharply of Heinleio's "Coventry" -- save that the Coventry here is a place called New York City. They only open it to the general public in the summer, and lock it up again on Labor Day -- but one young lad, through misadventure, gets locked in for the winter, and finds that the city is far from uninhabited. Surviving that winter turns him into a man -- and into a more responsible citizen of the Outside, too. He finds love, and the pain of its loss, and deadly danger, and useful work for his hands and brain, and I had a good time following along. There' re also some very real characters, some competent plotting, a carefully painted background and an extremely together black youth gang, all set in the ruins of the city that science-fiction writers most love to destroy (see my own Telempath, # from Berkley). So young readers get to read this stuff -- and I have to wade through Sodsack In the Furnace and Dullgrinl Me for a second childhood. it it it Who's Who In SF isn't a bad idea -- but it seems to me a poor job of execution. Capsule bios of famous folk in sf can be handy -- I can use 'em here in this column. But there's not enough in this volume to help me. Example: I saw a blurb-quote from "H.H. Holmes" on the back of Woljbane, and it rang a bell, so I looked him up in Who's Who. Nothing. Okay, so they don't list pseudonyms. Only they do: the next day I stumbled over "Holmes" listed under his other pseudonym, "Anthony Boucher" so they list by best-known name -- so why is Vargo Statten (British author of over # books) listed only under his real name, John Russell Fearn? Only one of Cyril Kornbluth's pseudonyms is given in his entry, and that one ("Cyril Judd") is incorrectly identified as one that he used with Pohl. Enough on pseudonyms. How about other data? Well, the bio stuff rarely gets deeper than birth date, and when it does, it's often misleading. The graphic is always incomplete -- which I understand, as a complete Asimov biblio alone would triple the size of the book. But even the representative selection is sloppy: compiler Brian Ash seems to be unaware that Edgar Pangbom once wrote a book called Davy. Also, most entries are objective -- but where Ash has prejudices (as with Heinlein), he feels free to shovel 'em in there -- an abuse in his position. And although the book claims to be current to the end of #, there are no entries for James Baen (although Bova and Ferman and even Ted White are cited), Jerry Pournelle (although his collabs with Niven are faithfully listed -- under Larry's name), or Yours Truly. Startingly, there is an entry for Dick Geis -- but not for Alter (nor for Charlie Brown or Andy Porter or Mike Glicksohn or ai other big-name fan whatsoever) -- and nowhere does the Geis entry suggest that he works for a prozine. Any man who undertakes to compile a Who's Who of sf in total ignorance of the existence of the second largest-selling prozine in the world is leading with his chin, and I'm here to punch it squarely. The one thing a reference work must not be is confused, and that's the single overriding characteristic of Who's Who In SF.    Weird Tales is exactly what the title implies: facsimile reproductions (hilarious ads and all) of selected excerpts from Weird Tales, the magazine of horror and fantasy fiction whose originals command such breath-taking prices at Worldcon huckster rooms these days. Taken from all throughout WT's #year lifespan (#-#), these selections -- by folks like Howard, Lovecraft, Derleth, C.A. Smith, Quinn, Kuttner, Wellman, Leiber, Bloch, Bradbury, Sturgeon and E.F. Russell -- are a pure delight, exactly like flipping through a complete collection of the magazine (which would cost more than the Kennedy hit did) (the first one, I mean). There are several excellent Finlay illos -- the only place where facsimile format hurts (pulp paper was a poor medium for Finlay's genius) -- and even a few facsimile readers' letters. Dammit, I don't even like this kind of story, and I had a ball reading through this book. I compute the price (converting pounds to dollars and adding the standard #) at about #, cheaper than many hardback anthos half the size. This is the second Peter Haining antho I thought I was going to hate and ended up loving (the first was The Ancient Mysteries Reader -- see Sept. '# Galaxy "Bookshelf" -- ) keep it up, sir, keep it up. Oh yeah: Neville Spearman (Jersey) Ltd., which publishes this antho, also has a buncha Arkham House titles on its list, at about #-# apiece. Their address is P.O. Box #, Normandy House, St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Isles. I'm not supposed to cover Some oj Your Blood here because it's not sf, but what the hell? It's by Sturgeon, and my only objection to it is its lack of a resolution. A gripping character study in abnormal psychology, and some fine writing -- you may never order a Bloody Mary again. Go get it. (But you might not find it in the sf section.) Looking back, I see that most of this column has to do with sf in the past: # In Review, and then a buncha reprints and historical stuff. I'd like to leave you with something looking more toward the future -- it seems fitting in an sf magazine -- and fortunately just before I began this paragraph the phone rang and Baen gave me my trailer. It seems that editors do so make good authors: for on March # of this year James Patrick Baen and Madeleine Louise Gleich coauthored a terrific six-pound thirteen-and-a-half-ounce short story called "Jessica Rachel," which shows great promise of growing, in serialized pages, into a damned fine novel someday. At this point I'm grinning so big I'm chewing on my earlobes, and that's as good an excuse as any to shut up. Hey, Jim and Maddy -- when do I get my review copy?  Thomas Wylde From a biological viewpoint, pleasure is a means, not an end -- for a species that thinks otherwise, it may be the end! Colonel howe sat in the lander for # hours and refused to go argument and threat but he just wouldn't budge. In the end they had to initiate an updated liftoff sequence. They flew him back from Mars and put him in the hospital. He's still there. In the three years that have followed no attempt has been made to put another man on Mars. Colonel Howe recovered sufficiently in a few months to tell them what (he thought) happened out there. They concluded he possessed a sexual fixation on the Earth and had suffered an intense paroxysm of loneliness when he stayed away so long. They tried to reason with him, but he was perfectly reasonable. They tried aversion conditioning, but the fixation was too deep-seated. They did some wider testing and found the fixation was not peculiar to Major Howe. (It was in fact universal in men and women.) They tried some new techniques on him but they started something that couldn't be controlled and in the end they lost him. Lieutenant Howe lay comatose in a hospital bed (losing weight almost as quickly as rank) and was conveniently forgotten. He's still there. Randall Grayson trained five years for space, then washed out (Howe's Complex) in five minutes. He went out to get drunk, then ran into something better. Get Happy. He's been gone eight days. On June the fourth Iona Grayson (wife of) click-clacked into Newman's office and said: ,"I want you to find my husband." "So do I," said Newman. "Five bills a day plus squawking." "You may not have to squawk him." "Why not?" Newman frowned. Squawktracing was expensive. Who could live on five bills alone? "You know where he is?" "I think so." She was looking around for a place to sit down. "Just a minute." Newman opened a drawer she couldn't see into and stared thoughtfully at a pile of notices (Repos, Get-Outs, Pay-Mes, F-Os) and assorted busted hardware (a singed squawk inserter, a deflated, battery-corroded sour and depressing. He slammed it shut. "My calendar is full tomorrow and for the rest of the week..." "Damn it!" " 'Zokay, baby. We'll go now." "Thank you." Newman shrugged. "Get happy." It was a military hospital in the hills above Glendale. "You sure he's in there?" "I think so," she said. "I got a garbled phone call." Newman thought that over. Digging into Government stuff was borderline crazy. (And figure five bills and no squawking.) He shook his head. Iona looked at him. "He's not in the service." "It's not who he is that bothers me. It's who's got him that hurts." Newman gunned his engine to keep it alive (leaky carburetor). The car was just another cross to pack -- primer black '# Camaro with off. Newman vented some evil-smelling salami gas, then sighed. "Listen ('scuse me). Miss Grayson, this Government thing's got me going." She flashed a grin of pure hatred. "Ten bills a day." "Yeah, I know, but -- " "Shut off that engine!" Newman turned suddenly to look out the side window, then burped painfully at the black-suited cop. "Ahhh..." Seven days ago Grayson had twisted his ankle climbing off an E-bus and limped up the boulevard in broad stinging daylight. He was still too steamed to be careful, too brought down to realize they'd be looking for him. He thought about calling Iona (in Houston), but he wasn't ready to talk. He stepped painfully over a nodding feeb, then turned back for a closer look. The smiling feeb took no notice. Grayson looked up and saw the giant neon sign: The cop reached through the window and pointed at the ignition. Newman gunned the engine and put his slimy hands in his lap. "What?" "Oh." Newman turned the ignition key. The engine rolled and sputtered for ten or fifteen seconds, then ceased. The car stopped rocking. A miasma of half-burnt hydrocarbons rose up and drifted away. The cop said, "What year's this car?" "Seventy-eight?" "It's a seventy-two," the cop said. "Yeah, well sure," Newman said. "That's what I, uh, said..." He could feel the sweat oozing down his sides. "Didn't I...?" The cop consulted a small plastic card. Sweat rolled down his grimy face and dripped on the card. He grunted and smeared the sweat with a gloved thumb. "Follow me in your vehicle." Newman looked apprehensively at Iona Grayson. She was scared, but trying hard not to show it. Newman turned back: "Where are you taking... ?" But the cop was gone from the window. In a moment he pulled out in front of the Camaro and motioned. Newman started his engine and they pulled away from the curb. "He never even looked at me," Iona whispered. "Do you think he knows who -- ?" "I don't know!" Newman snapped. "Let me think!" Maybe they were already squawking him. Or her. More likely her. Didn't he screen himself carefully every morning? Well, nearly every morning... His sour stomach rolled and fluttered. Damn this Government business! One week ago Grayson (husband oO had limped into a vibrating (crunch rock) Headshop on Ventura Boulevard and demanded to Get Happy. They smiled at him and checked his credit and made him comfortable in a back room with nine other initiates. Everybody in the room suddenly became very nervous. Grayson made ten; the group was filled; the session would now begin. The doors were locked, and outside in the Headshop warning lights blinked (and were ignored). The Get Happy technician (minister) came in and smiled professionally throughout a short disclaimer speech. Get Happy was a great boon to man-and-woman-kind. The discovery of Get Happy was the most significant event in the history of the world. Get Happy training was the only sane path to take in an insane world. Get Happy would Happy was IT. (Get Happy tm was not responsible for monetary or emotional loss or damage.) "Tm sure you're all eager to begin training," the minister (technician) said. He paused dramatically. "Let's... Get Happy!" When Newman saw the crusher, he knew what it was all about. They hadn't recognized Iona Grayson. They had recognized his '# Camaro. The cop led him right up beside the waiting crusher and stopped. Newman got out and motioned to Iona to do the same. "You wouldn't like it," he told her. The cop spoke briefly to a dusty worker, then he scribbled on a card, handed it over, and took off. The worker spat and strode over to Newman. "Sign here." Newman gloomily fixed his chop to the card. The worker glanced inside the car, then said, "Anything you want outta the trunk?" Newman thought about that. Nothing legal, anyway. He said, "No." The worker raised her hand and waved. A moment later a claw seized the Camaro and flung it into the crusher. Newman turned away as the metal screamed and popped. They allowed him fifty bucks on the metal, then fined him fifty for driving an obsolete. Newman led Iona out of the yard and stood by her till the cab came. "Tm going back to the office," he said. "What about my husband?" "I won't charge you for the car," he said, smiling sickly. "That couldn't be helped." Four days ago Grayson had graduated from Get Happy training and could apply the technique withhooked up. He had his constructs in place, his image builders operating well enough (without augmentation) to find the GH pulse and sync it. He was even experimenting with a heterodyned pattern for increased pressure. He was advanced. He could turn a corner and Get Happy at a moment's notice. The thought licious. He turned a corner and Got Happy. (bfpc) was originated by the Two days ago Grayson (husband of Iona) was apprehended by Garks and removed to an undisclosed location in Southern California. The man had Got (too) Happy. Newman highstepped through the lobby of his building. The floor was crowded with refuse and sweaty feebs on the nod. Get Happy. There was somebody in his office. A big guy. "Help you?" the man said, looking up from Newman's desk. "Yeah. You busy?" The man was going through the drawers. He threw a pile of Get-It-Up notices on the desk, scraped around in the drawer for more, then looked at Newman and grinned. "You're Newman." "That cheap son of a bitch?" Newman said, (pretty much) grinning back. "Not likely." "Know him?" "Well enough to know he'll never show his ass around here." "Yeah?" "He's running scared." The big man said, "He ought to be." Newman nodded at the desk. "Find anything?" "Nothing that works." The big man leaned back and put his feet up. Newman stepped a little closer and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Suppose we both stay here and wait for him?" "Suppose I wait for him alone." Newman made himself count slowly to five. "All right. Have it your way." He turned to go. "By the way, Newman..." "Yeah?" Newman burped and gagged on acid. "I mean, 'What you call me?' " The acid was trying to digest his throat raw. He coughed and swallowed. "Newman," the big man said, smiling horribly. "We need one thousand bucks by tomorrow morning. After that another thousand every other day until you're clear with us." "Well, sure, I..." His mouth was too dry to swallow; the acid went on burning its way through his neck. "And don't look for me. If they have to send me to you again, I pull your spine out." "Fair enough." Iona Grayson was back in the shimmering parking lot of the hospital and staring at the enormous concrete cube as if it were about to split wide open and reveal her husband tangled in its web. She click-clacked resolutely to the entrance bunker. Someone grabbed her from behind and spun her around. "I'm back," Newman said, panting from his run across the lot. He swallowed some spit, then added, "For twelve bills a day." "No." "All right, ten, like you said." "No." "Eight, then!" "No." Newman cleared his throat and swallowed with determination. "My standard fee is five bills plus squawking." "No," she said. "I've decided to do it without you." "C'mon," he whined, "Jesus She stared at him, rather too amused. "Three." Newman bit his tongue. "You have no idea what you're getting into here!" "Three." "Government business is no swapmeet!" "Three." "Damn it, lady, I got ferocious overhead!" "Two." "Three's fine!" "All right." "Plus squawking." She shook her head. "No need for that. I kndw he's in there." "Great." Yesterday Grayson was running his Get Happy pulse pellmell through a tortuous mine field of Government blocks and clangers. It was hard work, but the goal was right, so he persevered ten hours (he had nothing but time) until the pulse Then as suddenly as he'd got through, he made voluntary breakoff. He'd touched on a PC link out of the past and suddenly her imGrayson lay in the hospital bed and blinked at the soft-lit ceiling. His body was gripped hard in a muscle field (the intensity of which was in negative FB to his alpha density; the more restless he got, the tighter the field held him). When he came out of Get Happy, his body shook and jumped against the muscle field and he almost reached alarm status. He instantly generated calming pulses. In five minutes his restored alpha waves eased the muscle tenser to the point where he could move around a little on the bed. Very carefully he inched his body toward the bedtable. Soon he was close enough, but growing excitement made it hard to maintain alpha control. He suddenly bucked his head and knocked a plastic water container over the back to the table. The water dumped out (ffzzz) into the electrical junction. The lights were out a full second. When they came back on, he was standing by the door. Wires and tubes dangled from his body. He ignored them and cracked the door for a peep into the hall. Ah, good. Room # was the tomb for a living corpse. Wires relayed the corpse's body-function data to a machine nobody bothered to look at anymore. Tubes delivered food and drew off the result. The corpse breathed. After Grayson made his cryptic call to Iona (he had to wait sixteen hours for a safe phone), he crept through the nighttime building. He knew it would be impossible to get out on his own. He would have to remain free within the hospital until help arrived. He came to a door. Room #. He couldn't have picked a better place. Nobody ever came in here. A lot of people working at the hospital didn't even know there was a Room #. Grayson peeked inside, then came in fast and closed the door. He was still the wired medusa. He tipped (bare) toed to the bed and beheld the living corpse. "My God," he said. "It's Colonel Howe." "Here's how we'll work it," Newman said. They sat in the parking lot in her rented car ('# Mustang Square Deal). It was sweltering in there. "You go in and ask to see your husband." "I need to pay you for that?" "Just do what I tell you!" Early this morning Grayson encamped in Room #. He found some couplers and plugged himself into Howe's feed line. At first it worried him. He needed nourishment, but was afraid to wander the halls to look for it. He was already rigged for intravenous, so that seemed natural enough. But he was worried they might notice the increased flow. For a moment he considered unplugging Howe and taking it all. But Howe was a national hero. (More like a national treasure these days, an object to be filed away and viewed rarely -- nice to have around when you got curious.) But more than a public hero, Howe was Grayson's personal idol. There was no way he could simply unplug the man. (Later on he realized if they were watching Howe close enough to see an increased input flow, they'd probably also have noticed if his output slacked.) So Grayson plugged in the Y-connection and settled down on the floor by the head of the bed. From here he could quickly slide under the bed should someone (in whatever state of confusion) approach Room #. An hour later he noticed the audio jack and selector lying unused on Howe's bedtable. Grayson was still equipped with earphones, so he plugged in and ran through the selection. There were three channels of anti-Get Happy pap, twenty-two television sound lines, three hospital intercom nets, a pair of music programs (classipop and crunch), and the news. Grayson sampled them all for a while, then settled on the news. 'T want to see my husband. My name is Iona Grayson." She stood alone before the desk in the entrance bunker. The receptionist smiled sweetly. "What name, please?" "David Randall Grayson." "I'll just see." The receptionist turned to a file output screen and typed (blue fingernails clicking) on the keyboard. Iona stood stiffly, breathing loudly. Her heart pounded unbearably, and the receptionist's perfume was making her sick. The receptionist eyeballed the pulsing screen, then turned and smiled. "I'm dreadfully sorry," he said, "but we have no David Randall Grayson on our lists." Iona took a deep breath and forced her voice up ten ob's: "I know he's here!" (She swallowed hard, her mouth horribly dry.) The receptionist smiled, murmured, "I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Grayson," and nudged a concealed button with his knee. "You damned liar!" Iona screamed. Doors sprung open on opposite sides of the bunker. A guard raced through one, Newman the other, both on a collision course intersecting at Iona. Grayson crouched beside the sacred bed and listened to the news. From time to time his mind wandered into near-feeb status and he retreated with a jolt. The third time it happened he began to wonder if he was losing control. Then he saw how casually he regarded that horrible possibility, and he was really scared... for a while. "I want my goddamned husbandry The guard said, "Please -- " Newman jabbed the distracted receptionist and flashed a plastic card in his face for about three microseconds. "Name's Blahblahblah, Air Force audio-visual. " "Calm down," the guard told Iona. "Excuse me?" The receptionist turned to ogle Newman. "Outta Norton Air Force Base?" "He's here, I know it!" "Can I help?" "Don't touch me!" "We need update footage on astronaut Howe." "You'll have to leave." "Howe?" "For the archives, ya know?" " know hes hereVy "I don't know..." "I cleared it with Hospital PR before -- ' ' "Lady, please -- " "My instructions -- " Iona began to scream. ""Cmon, man," Newman insisted. "Get some other guys," the guard said. Iona sat down on the floor, screaming louder and louder. The receptionist turned to reach other hidden alarm buttons. Newman jabbed him repeatedly on the shoulder till he snapped, "Room #!" "Thanks." The guard struggled with Iona, trying to dose her with a muscle relaxant. Newman winked at her as he passed on his way to the elevators. The last thing he saw was two more men rushing out of the door across the way... The elevator doors rattled together. Up he went. Newman stepped out on the ninth lloor and looked down the hall in both directions. The entire floor seemed deserted. No Muzak. He noticed the hall was not so thickly divided with doors as a normally populated hospital floor. He checked a few numbers, then headed down the longest corridor, toward what he figured had to be the final door. As long as he was up here he might as well get a look at Howe. He was halfway there when he heard the sound. Somebody was coming up fast behind him. Newman kept moving. concludes:  ' a cursory Newman stood in front of Room # . "Here we are, sir," the PR man said. Newman nodded glumly. His plan -- to wander "helplessly" about and search for Grayson -- was badly snagged by the hospital's unexpected efficiency. After fooling around with Howe a bit (he was somewhat surprised there really was a Colonel Howe), maybe he could lose the PR creep in the men's room and continue his search. "Are you ready?" the man said. "I warn you, Howe is a bit of a shock to look at. And I'm sure he's deteriorated even more in the year since I've last seen him." Newman nodded. "Fine. Let's go inside." Three hours ago the computer red-flagged the patient in Room #. Intravenous feeding schedule: input more than doubled, output slightly declined. After two hours someone decided to look into the matter. Grayson saw shadows under the door in the hall and quickly disconnected from the audio box. He was slithering under the bed when the door opened and two nurses squeaked in. "There you are," one said. The other smiled and tapped the alarm plaque on the wall. "There he is," the PR man crowed (sort of). "Colonel -- excuse me -- Lieutenant Howe: the only man to land on Mars." Newman looked at the thin figure on the bed. The resemblance was there, the thin nose and sharply rounded chin, but much of the flesh had melted away. The flattened chest stirred slowly in shallow, measured breaths. "When will your men -- T' "What?" Newman said, hiding his confusion. "Your film!" crew," the PR man said. "When will they be -- ?" "They're, uh, riding in from San Berdoo." "Oh." "Maybe another hour..." "Of course if -- " "What's he doing now?" Newman asked. Howe had opened his wide mouth. Now he burped loudly. "Does he do that often?" The PR man looked uncomfortable. "I'll check." He glanced quickly about the room, then said, "I'll just go out in the hall and phone down for a nurse." Newman watched him leave the room, then inched up beside Howe and inspected him with curiosity. The mouth gaped open again and Newman touched Howe on the chin. "Ahhhh..." said Howe. Half an hour ago they hauled Grayson out of Room # and downstairs to a room equipped for autosquawking. They didn't want to lose track of him again. They didn't bother to re-establish anti-Get Happy therapy -- he seemed to be in control for the time being. But not for long. After they left him alone Grayson lost little time in finding his PC with a Get Happy pulse. Once again he Jumped out with a tactile image of Iona. Tears welled in his eyes. They dragged her limp body toward the door and nearly had her out of the bunker when a supervisor happened by and demanded to know what they were doing to the poor woman. They told him. The supervisor was not happy. "Chrissake, you can't just dump her back in her car after Flabbing her." The guards shrugged. The supervisor frowned. "Take her up to the lounge and let her sleep it off." The guards nodded sullenly and hauled her to the elevator. "Ahhh," Howe said again, and licked his lips. "Colonel Howe!" Newman said, grinning. "Teniwa?!" Howe opened his eyes and blinked. Newman whispered, "Jesus Christ." Howe sighed long and loud, swallowed twice, and said, "Well, that's that." Iona woke up on a cold plastic couch in an empty room. She stood up and walked shakily to the door. Fifty feet down the hall she found a terminal and typed the question. The screen flashed the answer without hesitation: # Iona took the elevator to the sixth floor. Grayson couldn't move his hands to wipe the tears from his eyes. After a while they dried on his cheeks. He felt a strong urge to Get Happy but he suppressed it with all his strength. He had to remain alert in case help wandered in. Help... Damn it, he mouthed. It was hopeless... But he would fight, damn it, he would fi -- The order came from deep inside and it was more than an order -- it was a fact. His subconscious, doubly frustrated the last few days, searched till it found its own Get Happy pulse. Grayson's body shuddered into waves of pure pleasure thundered through his system, an irresistibly sweet flood of ecstatic energy that washed out all blocks and doubts. He was not bitter that he'd lost. He was not even appalled by the realization he was out of control. He rejoiced openly that the dam had finally broken. Isn't this what he had really craved all along? Isn't this what makes life worth living? Isn't this all there is? He was purely, overwhelmingly, incontrovertibly happy. And the best part -- he knew it would last forever! "furthermore, attempts to Box#KNEwYbk NY # SakiIe Copyl # ksuEs# times yearly. All c ov e rs are in full color, printed on the same cover stock as that ud by the Iona pushed on the door to #. Several technicians looked up from their patient on the bed. She took one look at the gaunt man lying there and turned, mumbling, "Excuse me." Then she looked again and started to scream. "They were wrong," Howe told Newman. "It doesn't last." "But you were out of control for two years!" "And I loved every second of it." "Why did you stop?" "I don't know," Howe said slowly. "One second I was out of control, then I was in control. A moment later I found out I couldn't do it anymore. God, I wanted to but I couldn't." "What happened?" "I think I just burned it out." last) man on mars, has been Howe and Grayson walked grimfaced through the street, threading their way among the nodders and volunteer feeders. Nobody seemed to notice or care why two unhappy men walked aimlessly when there was so much work to be done everywhere. They were the first of the burnt-out men. Soon there would be many, many more. At the end of the block a huge sign was falling apart, its crackling letters randomly dark: GT HPY  ships docked in Houston, New York, Oakland, New Orleans. Barbers raised the blinds in Pittsburgh. Wives woke already tired. The trees of Aspen felt an unusual stillness in the air. In the White House, Captain Michael James of the Office of Science and Technology poured himself a second huge cup of black coffee, gave it three spoons of sugar and started flipping through the mail. It was James' second tour; he had been a White House Fellow the first time through, then a stint at the Pentagon, over to Rand, then back in with the new Administration two years ago. There was a letter with no stamp and no return address. In California, Inspector Bob Tanner stepped out of the Customs shed of Oakland's vast Seventh Street Terminal with his first cup of coffee, squinting in the morning light that poured across what could have been miles of asphalt. The terminal had the dimensions of an aerodrome. Everything was outsize -- the cargo sheds, the towering cranes that could turn a ship around in eight hours. The containerships themselves were monstrous, the forty-foot containers stacked high on their decks like fish tins in a market. Tanner was a short man, muscular, maybe a little too muscular for the neat blue Customs suit, his face broad and pink, his thin hair neatly combed over his pate. He felt the top of his head gingerly. Time to get to work. It would be a busy day -- a Monday, and two guys out sick. At the far end of the asphalt he could see an ancient black Victory ship moving slowly into place, its sides streaked with rust, containers piled precariously on the tiny decks. The bow said, "dar." Captain James was at his desk. He looked at the note, his heavy brows pulled together in thought. A tipsy woman at a party had told him once that he was so thin and his eyes were so big that he looked like a praying mantis. Well. He took another long swallow of coffee. The note said: Dear Captain James: Please inform the President that he is to surrender the counhe fails to do so, the country will be in great danger. It was neatly typed on white bond, no letterhead, no signature. No stamp. No return address. Why would anyone send a note like that to me? he wondered. He shoved it in an interoffice envelope, marked the envelope "Secret Service" and dropped it in the "out-message" box. Some nut. "Break that seal, would you? Let's have a look inside." Inspector Tanner looked over the "dar" manifest. Mostly frozen goods. Shrimp. Container after cold container was coming off the creaking old ship and being mated directly with the rigs that would carry them inland. Panamanian registry. Norwegian crew. Modified, God knows how, for refrigerated containers, "reefers." Stops all over East Asia. The driver swung the container's "doors open. Boxes, floor to ceiling, markings in Chinese and English. Tanner pulled out a knife and swung himself up beside the boxes. Quickly he cut a hole in one box and slit the plastic bag inside. A half-dozen tiny pink shrimp fell out. He produced a flashlight and, hoisting himself precariously on one toehold, peered over the top of the stack. The boxes faded uniformly into blackness. They filled the whole truck. He slapped his meaty hand on some of the boxes within reach to see if any were hollow. He got down carefully, puffing. "You want to check the side?" asked the driver, a young, rangy sort in cowboy boots, jeans and an immaculate T-shirt. Tanner glanced at the waiting line of trucks. "Nah. Take it out. Go ahead," he said, signing the Customs release and gate pass. He looked through the remaining forms. The top six, at least, were shrimp, each one to a different place. Behind him the jockey was slamming the door to, securing latches, thunking the tires, whistling a tune that was wild and insupportably sad.    Time to beat it. Captain James swung his jacket on, adjusted his tie in the mirror. He'd had the uniform altered for his thin figure. Praying mantis. The phone rang. He snorted, and took one more look in profile as the phone rang again. It was Belk, in the Secret Service. "Good, glad I caught you," said Belk, his voice thin on the wire. James could imagine Belk standing, leaning on his desk, not drumming his fingers while he talked. All those guys in the S.S. made him nervous. They were as cool as cheetahs, no nervous habits, quiet, never tired. "Glad I caught you. Got just one question for you before you slip out." "Yeah?" "Yeah, that threat, or whatever it was, that you sent over. How'd it come in? There's no stamp on it." "I know. But it was in with the regular mail." "In the mail bag?" "I guess so. It was just on my desk." Belk didn't answer. James couldn't hear him breathe. "With the other mail." "Uh-huh." Another silence. Maybe he was writing. "Uh-huh. Okay. Appreciate it." "Anything happening? You guys have any idea why someone would send a note like that to me?" "No. No. This is all routine. Thanks." And he clicked off. James put the phone down slowly, looking at the door.    "Where you headed, Dan?" The young trucker looked up from his coffee and his face broke into a grin. "Spark! I didn't see you." The waitress smiled back. "Just came on. I work nights now." Her plastic name tag said, "Jane," but she smiled when the truckers called her "Spark." She was their friend. "Where you headed?" "The usual. Salt Lake. Whole thing's full of frozen shrimp." "Shrimp?" She peered out the window at Dan's big White Freightliner parked under the lights. "How's things in Winnemucca? Gettin' lonely yet?" "Oh, gettin.' " She wiped the counter. "Why, you got plans?" "Oh," he said, grinning into his cup, "not big ones."    The next evening the phone rang in Captain James' apartment. He put down the article on bioglass he had been reading over the remains of dinner and looked at his watch: #:#. The phone rang again before he got to it. It was Ashe, one of the President's men. Ashe had a high, cutting voice and a reputation as a political thinker of considerable subtlety. "The Boss wants to talk to you." "Now?" "Soon as you can get down here." "What's up?" "Wouldn't tell you if I could. "O.K."    A Mack with a reefer from New Orleans rolled through Sweetwater, Tennessee. In Albuquerque a night receiver at an SP warehouse signed a receipt for a reefer from Galveston. In Limon, Colorado, a baby whimpered in its sleep while its mother and father fought in the next room. The father began to feel desperate and alone; he felt everything that he thought he was begin to wash away.    Captain James was not a politician. He never felt hungry enough. But he felt a connoisseur's appreciation for the arcane machinations of power. His was a technical mind, and political interplay carried for him the same floral beauty as, say, the brief lives of quarks or the barely imaginable turmoils of black holes in space. It was this appreciation that had brought him back to the White House and that brought his senses keenly to life as he stepped into the comfortable working office of the President in the Executive Office Building. The President was leaning against the desk. "Captain James," he said, smiling warmly. "Sit down. I believe you know Bob Ashe. And John Tines." Ashe was small and dark, had a face like a hatchet, a surprisingly slovenly man. Tines, the Press Secretary, had cut his teeth covering the movements of the Sixties for the Times', he was a large, round man, with a full, brown moustache. "We have a quick decision to make," the President went on. "We need the best kind of technical information and advice, but we don't have time to go to the departments. Besides, we can't afford a leak. Since you are highly recommended, both as a technical mind, and as an honest and," he paused, "loyal member of the team, we asked you down. We need those qualities right now." James sat down, a little overcome. The President's reputation for personal charm did little to blunt the effect of an actual meeting. "What's happened?" he asked. Ashe said, "Let me ask you a few factual questions, Mike. What's connectedness of the question was breathtaking. "Wharton? Nothing that I know of. A lot of farms. I remember there's a silage concern. And a trucking warehouse on the edge of town. Why?" "Pentagon have anything there?" "No." "No hard sites, armories, depots, Minutemen?" "Rand have anything? Is there anything scientific out there at all? Labs, reactors, anything?" "No. Why?" "How sure are you?" "Positive." Ashe lapsed into silence, staring at his fingertips. The President said, "There was an explosion there about an hour ago. A nuclear explosion of some kind." "A nuclear explosion?" echoed James. "How big?" "Not big the way those things go, I guess," said Ashe. "Leveled half the town, maybe all of it. But it was a small town. We've got maybe a hundred or so dead out there." "The main thing is, it was nuclear, and the word's getting around. We've got to put out some kind of statement soon. And we haven't the foggiest where the thing came from." "Well, we have some guesses," said Ashe, ticking them off on his fingers. "Look, it's either ours or someone else's. It can't be someone else's. You couldn't even sneak a cruise missile all the way in to at least hearing the thing. Let alone who would want to bomb Wharton, since there's nothing there, reactors or hard sites or anything like that, it must have been something being moved through Wharton. So like I said before, it was probably a freak accident involving the transportation of a low-yield fission warhead." "Should we put that out, then, sir?" asked Tines. "People are going to get real nasty. We should put out something soon." "Hold on," said James. "Sir, you said an hour ago? That would be #:#?" "Well..." The President picked up a cable. "No. It was #:# our time, #:# local. Why? Does that mean something to you?" "Maybe, maybe not. But I think you ought to talk to Belk in the Secret Service." "Why?" asked Ashe. "He has a note that I received today from some nut, demanding that you surrender the country by # p.M. or something drastic would happen." The President smiled. Ashe grinned and asked, "Did they threaten to blow up Wharton, Illinois? They really had us by the short hairs." Tines said, "Sounds like a coincidence to me. They get these notes all the time. This one just happened to name a time that coincided with a freak accident. People don't just make atomic weapons in their backyards. " The room was quiet for a moment before Ashe spoke. "Maybe. There's just one little thing. You say the letter was addressed to you?" James said, "Yes." "Why?" "Why?" "Why was it addressed to you and not to the Boss, like most of those crank notes are? There's a connection that is escaping me." "Well," said the President quietly, "since Captain James is our technical man, maybe whoever sent the note felt that he would have technical knowledge that would somehow authenticate the note. What do you think. Captain? Does the idea suggest anything to you?" "Well, the note didn't say what would happen if we didn't surrender. But if the note is connected in some way to this explosion, I can tell you that some of your assumptions are pretty shaky." "How's that?" said Ashe. "Well, you wouldn't necessarily need a bomber or a missile to get a low-yield fission device to the mid"Oh? How would you get it there?" asked Ashe. "Assuming you had one." "Carry it. Or put it on Greyhound." "What?" cried Tines. "Come on now," said Ashe, "we're talking about an atom bomb." "Right," said James, his blood suddenly pumping audibly. "The critical mass for plutonium is about thirty-four pounds. With shielding, control mechanisms and all, the smallest atom bomb might weigh less than seventy-five pounds." "Jesus!" exclaimed Ashe. "And with that you could blow up what? A city?" "No. A football stadium. A few hundred pounds more could do in a city." Tines asked, "So how could they get it in the country?" "I frankly don't know. But things larger than that are smuggled into the country all the time. And it could be brought in pieces." "With this much at stake, I'm sure people can be quite clever," said Ashe. "It makes me think of Prohibition." "It wouldn't even have to be from overseas," said James. "This could be 'home-brew.' The theory of fission is well understood, and the construction problems are not insurmountable. In fact, four years ago a graduate student in Syracuse did build one in his backyard. It was a complete, working model. All it lacked was the plutonium." The President walked behind the desk and sat down. "All right. So if some psychotic, or the Syndicate, or somebody, wanted to build a bomb, or wanted to hire someone to build one, it wouldn't be a big problem. But where would they get the plutonium?" "I'm just guessing still, sir, but, not counting foreign sources that own reasons, to smuggle some in to them, there are lots of places to get it within our own system. We lose enough each year, just in industrial transportation of the stuff, to make it feasible." "Lose? How much do we lose?" The President's voice had an edge on it. "How do we lose it?" "I don't know, sir. Those guys this point, and I'm not sure even they know how much. But the amount that is lost in the shuffle every year is quite sufficient to provide for a project like this. You may remember a memo on nuclear security that I sent you in March. The amount of material that we ship from government plants to both foreign and domestic reactors and labs is simply enormous." "Mike, this is very important. Is the amount lost sufficient for more than one device?" "Yes, sir. Besides, sir, that's only one source. You may recall the memo mentioned as well the appalling security at our overseas stockpiles of tactical weapons. I mentioned one place, for instance, where nuclear howitzer shells, only eight inches wide and a few feet long, were stacked in the Embassy basement next to the wine! There was a guard, a local, but he had been hired that day. I had hoped that you had read the memo, sir. I thought it important at the time." "So what you're saying," said the President, "is that we can't necessarily know whose it is, where it came from, or whether there are more to come?" He sounded very tired. "That's about it, sir." Tines said, "We do need something to put out." When no one spoke he added, "Maybe in the absence of any clearer idea, we should just put out the military-accident theory, but with noncommital wording." Still no one responded. Tines said, "Sir?" The President said, "Maybe we'll have to. What do you think. Bob?" Ashe tapped his knuckles on the coffee table and said, "Okay, we've got to do something. But I'm not sure that's it. We've got to keep our eye on the election; it's only a few weeks off." Ashe looked at James and shook his head. "You handed us a big one. Boss, you're Commander-In-Chief, so we can't say it's a military accident. It would make us look sloppy, incompetent, cost us votes. And we sure as hell can't let people think it was a foreign military action of any sort. That would be even worse." "What's your idea?" asked the President. "What makes you think I have one?" "You do. Out with it." Ashe laughed. "Maybe I've got a little lick of an idea. Look, we don't have much information. So we'd better stick with the info we do have and come up with something that will cover all bases, something we at least know we won't have to take back." He paused, tapping the table. "You remember what happened to Nixon in the # Congressional elections? I'll bet you remember this one, John. Two nights before the polls opened, he was in San Jose. There were demonstrators, some namecalling, and someone supposedly threw a rock at him. That could have looked very bad. That could have been a demonstration that the Republicans were unpopular, that they couldn't hold the country together, that people wanted a change. But the next night he showed up in Phoenix with Barry Gold water at his side, and he gave a hell of a speech. It was a flagwaver. It played up the incident big, blamed it on the radicals, the forces of disunity, all those opposed to his Presidency. Of course, that included the Democrats. And he held out the Republican Party as one champion of law and order against such outrages. You remember that speech. It was carried nationwide and coordinated with a blitz of full-page ads in all the big papers. It all worked so well some people later thought he might have hired the rock-thrower himself." "And it worked?" asked the President. "Seemed to. They did better than they were supposed to." The President spread his fingers on the desk top. "Is that what you suggest?" "Something like it." Ashe was leaning forward now, creating the scene with vivid gestures. "Draw up the wagons. Declare an emergency. Alert all reserve units. Big show. Lots of noise and press. Make a speech on the networks to calm the voters. Outline the steps being taken. Say that you cannot reveal what the investigation has uncovered, then hint at a radical threat, an attempt to subvert the Constitution and bring anarchy to America. Paint a dark picture and ask the people to give you the backing you need in this crisis. The timing of all this is very important. We have to prolong the crisis atmosphere, if it is to have its greatest effect, until the election. We'll find some rabbit to pull out of a hat the night before." There was a silence. The President asked, "What if this gets worse? What if there are more bombs?" "If there are more bombs? If you make that speech, more bombs would just play into our hands, get the people more excited and afraid, make them look to you for a show of leadership." "Okay, what if we make all this noise and nothing happens? No more bombs?" "Then the night before the election, when we're sure there aren't going to be any more, you'll make one more speech in which you manage to take credit for the fact that the Administration's swift action stopped the wave of terrorism. It'll all work out, either way." A wry smile tugged at the corners of the President's mouth. "Okay. I'll do a Dick Nixon imitation. What was that thing that Kennedy quoted about riding the back of the tiger? You end up inside? Well, we'll ride just this one tiger. Make a draft. Get it to me soon. John, you can tell them we'll have a preliminary statement at I a.m. And ask the networks for air time at eight tomorrow. Mike, thanks for coming." He came around the desk to give James a warm handshake. "If you get another note, bring it to me." He was smiling.    People read it in their morning Power Play Feared. A steamfitter in San Diego read the article at lunch, chewing slowly. Inspector Tanner heard about it in the office and shook his head.    After a bad night, a missed alarm, no breakfast, the White House seemed almost calm to Captain James. He immersed himself in the figures he was preparing for the Halliburton Committee. He drank his sweet coffee from its huge mug and let his mind go blank from the rest of the world. It was restful. When the mail came he went on working. He got more coffee. Coming back with the mug, it suddenly struck him -- there might be another note! And there was. Just like before, there was no stamp or return address. He tore it open. "A coastal town will be next. No signature. James picked up the phone. "This is Captain James. Please get me the President. It's important." His voice went thin and reedy on the last words.   The country was wound up. At Dan's, on the south side of Columbus, Missouri, Dan dried his hands for the umpteenth time and watched his customers. People weren't ready to shake and beg, run for the hills, hit the button. But they were drinking slowly, with something like determination. They were tired. After all, Wharton was simply too much. Just before seven, some more neighborhood people came in. Dan turned up the T.V. First there was Roger Mudd, then there was the President. He spoke very seriously, but in a warm, brave way that included them all, made them feel a little warmer and braver themselves. He reassured them about the progress of the investigation at Wharton. He announced that he had activated the National Guard in all twentythree maritime states as a demonstration of the Administration's radical scare tactics. He urged them to give him a Congress that would help him stand up for the country, one that wouldn't cave in to extremism. It was a good speech. People perked up a lot afterward. Dan liked that.   Captain James woke. Ashe was shaking him. James remembered where he was: he had stayed at work in case anything happened, but he must have dozed off on a couch. Ashe was pale. "Wake up, boy," he said. "Crescent City, California, is no longer with us."  ir  That was on the wires, and the people who heard about it when the T.V. programs were interrupted went and told the others. There was a numb feeling, and the mouth of America went dry. There was no communication coming out of the area, and the Air Force had rapidly sealed off the area, so the commentators went on about what Crescent City had been like, how big it had been, how the first reports had come in from Eureka and Coos Bay. Now and then they switched to the White House lawn, where another reporter would tell the camera of the important men who had been arriving, and how they had looked and acted. Many people left their televisions and went for walks. not going anywhere, but unable to stay home. The streets were full of people who walked and did not shout. Through the , night the President's men talked. There were the figures from the Air Force, the estimate pegged at a #-K fission device, still small and crude by strategic standards, but much larger Force estimate of the dead started at five thousand. It rose to fifty-five hundred, then abruptly to seven thousand. The town was completely gone. At midnight Captain James had found a third note on his door. It was simply a list of cities: 'M. New York, #. Chicago, #. San Francisco..." and so on through "#. New Orleans. Pick one." It was typed the same way, on the same kind of paper. So that was the argument. Pentagon brass showed up. Senators. Everybody had a plan. Was the note a bluff? Could they plant an even bigger one right in the middle of Harlem or Chinatown? How many dead would that mean? Seventy it was a bluff, maybe they only had the two that they had already used. They couldn't blow up a whole city. Who the hell were they, anyway? Look, we'd just have to risk it. A country that had gone through so much to preserve its way of life couldn't give in to a couple of terrorist bombs. We've got to stand up to them. The President himself was the quietest. Just listening, his mouth twisted by some impact, his eyes burning with a strange light. It was Ashe, the Machiavellian calculator, who finally said the obvious: "Boss, we're sunk. Look, maybe it's a bluff. But we can't bet it. If we surrender, at least the enemy will show themselves and then we can do something. But we can't just dare them to prove that they have a third one. Besides, if they do have a third one, are we going to bet again that there isn't a fourth one?"    At six A.M. (three a.m. in California) the nation was already glued to the blue-gray light of its screens when the President, broken and struggling, invited the conquerors, whoever they were, to come and take what they wanted. All National Guard units in place were to remain there. The other twenty-seven states were requested to deploy their Guards to maintain order in the next twenty-four hours and to assist local authorities in dealing with the rioting and looting already taking place in some cities. In Naples, Florida, a one-time the screen and cursed, over and over, until her white curls shook and she dissolved in tears. A warehouse guard in Albuquerque sat outside in the crisp dark with his transistor radio, watching the first light of false dawn spread into the deep shell of stars.    So they waited on the White House lawn, T.V. crews and all the rest, waiting in an odd silence, the President, the Secretary of State, Ashe. Everybody. There were huge crowds outside the iron fence, standing in the same immense silence. James could see the crowds stretching for blocks in the haze. Everyone was wilted in the unseasonal sun, and the damp morning of Washington rose around them as they shaded their eyes and searched the sky. White House communications had established radio contact, then Andrews had picked it up on radar. A lone helicopter. It had one message: all the bombs were still in place. If anything went wrong, they would go off independently whenever their clocks ran out. So the President had ordered the sharpshooters to hold their fire, no matter what.    It was a dot that one person saw, then another. It grew swiftly, coming in from the southeast. Before long it was clear that it was a big ship. It looked to James now like a Navy CH-#, but it was painted red, white and blue, stars and stripes. It dropped rapidly, slowed, then settled deftly onto the lawn. White House guards rolled out a red carpet under the still-turning blades. People held their hats, the whine of the turbine settled and lost pitch. Guards rolled steps up to the strange craft just as the main hatch swung open and a man stepped out on the steps, smiling, waving, his fingers spread in V's. James was startled by the familiar figure. He looked at the President. The President's face was unreadable, filled with tears, wrenched into horrible expressions. The rotor blades had stopped. The new Leader strode confidently down the steps and walked toward the President. His trip from California did not seem to have tired him.  # perord pr issue (including name and address) or # issues SI. # per word. #-word minimum. Payment with order. have tried to suppress this book. It reveals .secrets that could destroy the most jwwerful branch of organized crime -- the religion racket. If you are not afraid of the truth, read Doctor of Philosophy at a large, metropolitan college. Only #, check or money order. Calif, residents add # tax. Book will be delivered in a plain, brown envelope. Academic Associates. # Century Park Los Angeles, Calif. #. #. Curtis Duckworth, # Glcncovc Drive, Charlottetown, P.F.I., (inada Seven Su;r Poetry needs your work. Pays on aeccpli'... 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Jay Kay Klein and Jeff Rovin, offer diametrically opposed reactions to the year's hit movie. Concerning the Utilization of Long-Distance Microwave Transmitting Techniques for the Generation of Electrical Power Aboard Ion-Drive Spacecraft -- Cover by Stephen Fabian from Interior illustrations by Fabian, Odbert of Universal Publishing A Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main and Editorial Offices: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y. #. Single copy #. #issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. AM rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y. and addHional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine ar fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in Charles Sheffield This is really rather nasty. Why did you let it go so long without attention? You should have come in for treatment weeks ago." The dentist who was working on my ripely abscessed upper molar had a habit, common to his profession, of trying to conduct a conversation with a patient whose mouth was wedged open like a yawning hippopotamus. An accurate answer to his question would take twenty minutes and involve -- at a minimum -- mushrooms, space warps, high finance, aliens, the asteroid belt and my personal reputation. I rolled my eyes and said "Aa-gnhng-aa," or words to the effect. The answer seemed to satisfy him and he turned the conversation to local politics. It really isn't easy to know where to begin. With the aliens? According to common myth, it isn't really possible to hate an alien. If and when we meet up with some, the argument goes, we should get on with them very well. Our hatred is reserved for our own kind. I happen to know that idea is wrong. No human has ever met a Kaneelian, we don't know where or how they live, or even what size and shape credits, they gave me the worst three days of my life, and they may make the name 'Henry Carver' go down in history as a big joke. I have a strong and personal hatred of Kaneelians, the whole wretched species. That's obviously the wrong place to begin. I get carried away. Let me begin, objectively, with the tooth. It was a left upper molar that had been filled a couple of times already, and it was beginning to give me trouble again. Two hundred years ago, in the bad old days before medical science was perfected, a tooth was pulled out when it gave trouble. It is now possible, thanks to partially effective nerve-regeneration techniques, for the same tooth to cause periodic anguish for a good fifty years, with enormous associated cost. The ache was getting bad enough for me to consider and put off a visit to the dentist when I had a videophone call from Izzy Roberson. Izzy was always worth talking to. An old friend of my partner, Waldo Burmeister, he had suggested some profitable deals for us in the past, and wasn't a man to waste your time with small stuff. "Got something good for you, Henry," Izzy's cheerful image began. "Know what agaricus campestris is?" He was a tiny, bouncy man, hopping up and down as usual in front of the screen. He had a great fondness for tall women, who loomed high above him and always made me think of the old story of the midget and the showgirl. I groped vaguely after law-school Latin. "Campestris. Something-orother of the fields?' ' "Not bad, Henry, not bad at all. Agaricus campestris -- it's mushrooms, meadow mushrooms. Hold on a second, I'm going to put the scrambler on." The screen became random color for a second, then cleared again as the unit on my phone picked up the coded unscrambler. "Safe to talk now," he went on. "Henry, we want you to be a front man. We're all set to develop a mushroom monopoly. If we pull this off, you'll get all the commissions." A mushroom monopoly sounded about as valuable as a comer in yak-wool hats. Cut off the supply of meadow mushrooms, and it seemed to me that people would happily eat something else. I mentioned this to Izzy. "Henry, don't you ever look at the science sections? They don't grow the damn things for eating, they use them to extract the transplant catalysts. There are only three companies in the business, and my clients now control two of them. We want the third, but we have to work through an intermediary." I understood that easily enough. Laws on monopolies were getting stricter all the time. It was a situation I'd been involved in before and I knew the main limiting factors. "How much of the stock do you need, Izzy? Where's it traded, and what do I use for money?" "It trades right here, on the Tycho City Board. If we can get twenty-seven percent of the voting stock, we'll have clear control. We already bought eight percent through a holding company and we've been promised votes on another eleven percent on a tradefor-favors base. We want you to get the other eighf percent any way you can." "Expenses?" "Sure. But you only get the commissions if you buy us all we need. Finish with seven percent and you get nothing. Here are the credit number and stockholder positions you'll need to do the buying." I pressed 'Record' and he flashed me a stock I.D. list and a fourteendigit code on the Tycho City Central Bank. "One other thing, Henry. We've got a deadline. Midnight, U.T., twelve days from now. Think you can make it?" It would be tight, maybe, but it should be possible. I thought for a moment, then nodded just as the door behind Izzy opened and a tall blonde walked in. He glanced around, waved a quick farewell to me and cut the connection on the tableau of Snow White and Happy. I was glad to see him go so I could get started at once. I forgot my nagging tooth and began to check the stock prices. If you've ever been involved in a quiet stock purchase, you know there are two main factors: A low profile, and fast action. If people think there is a take-over in the wind, they get greedy and hold on to what they have. Hie last percent always costs the most. And if you don't do it fast enough, the professional market analysts will move when they see a lot of quick transactions in a quiet stock, and start buying against you on a speculative basis. After eight days, I had things moving along nicely. Six percent of the stock I needed was committed to a forward buy, held for three days, and I was expecting a call or a visit on the remaining two percent. I sat in my Tycho City apartment, one ear tuned to the phone and the other to the door chime. Visions of sugarplums danced in my head, and when the door rang, I leaped to answer it. I've become used to some unusual intermediaries in financial deals, but the man who ducked his head in through the doorway was the strangest yet. Huge, strawhaired, jutting-jawed, steely eyed -- you can supply the other adjectives yourself. It added up to the cliche hero of a space opera. He came in, looked at me, past me, and around the apartment. Finally he shrugged slightly and looked at me again. "Henry Carver?" There was surprise in his voice. "Yes. You're from Securities Investment?" He made himself at home on my couch. "Never heard of them. Look, let me make sure there's no mistake. Are you Henry Carver, the man who worked with Gerald Mattin on the development of the Mattin Link?" Hospitality and politeness have their limits. Anyway, that episode with the Mattin Link is not one of my favorite memories. "I don't know who you are, or what you're doing here. But I have an important business visit due any minute now. If you are not from Securities Investment, I'm afraid I must ask you to leave at once." "Sorry, Mr. Carver. I can't do that." He fished in his coverall pocket and pulled out a mag strip I.D. "Check that out, then let's talk." He was depressingly sure of himself. I fed the strip through the phone connection and watched the I.D. appear on the screen: Imre Munsen, Special Investigator, United Space Federation; authorized to commandeer the use of equipment, services and personnel for Level Four System Emergencies; classification of current assignment (you've guessed it): Level Four. "Now you know who I am, Mr. Carver. Before we go on, I have to be sure that I know who you are. Are you in fact the man who worked on the original Mattin Link -- the man who survived those first experiments?" "I am, but that was a long time ago. I don't know anything about the Links they have nowadays." "That's all right. We need help from someone with a fresh mind, not tied to current theory. First, I must swear you to strictest secrecy. A situation of unprecedented danger to the human race has arisen. If you reveal what I tell you to a third party, you will be guilty of endangering the public welfare and will be charged accordingly. You know the penalties." I did indeed. Anything the court chose to inflict. It was rather like the old military courtsmartial. No appeals, and the prosecutors, jury and judge were all the same people. My stomach began a rumble of anticipatory fear. "Mr. Carver," Munsen went on, "it will be simplest if you listen to me first without asking questions. I have studied your file, so I know your capability and pattern of rapid response. But hear me out, please, before you begin." What was the man talking about? I wondered what was in the file. And what about my business appointment? Munsen had better get on with it and go away quickly. for me -- if I could conclude my mushroom stock purchases in time. I decided to let him have his say, then tell him at once that I couldn't help. Ifs best if I summarize what he said to me. Munsen was just the sort of starry-eyed, deep-chested idiot he looked. Patriotic, fearless, decisive, clean-living -- we seemed to have absolutely nothing in common, the two of us. His explanation was full of irrelevant stirring speeches about our future, and the need for all of us to give our utmost to human advancement. It was enough to make a rational man sick. Six weeks earlier, as Munsen told it, a party of six had chartered a space yacht for a scenic tour of the inner Solar System. Milton Kaneely, the holovision star, had made the rental. Three men and three women were on board -- and with Milton Kaneely, for 'scenic tour' you could safely read 'drunken orgy.' They had careened randomly around the Moon and off past Mars into the asteroid belt. Blundering along there, they had landed on a rock fragment less than a kilometer long -- and stumbled across the first evidence of an alien race. On the asteroid, in a big rock chamber, sat the space warp. Kaneely and friends didn't know it was a space warp -- or even that they had found evidence of aliens. They thought Navy station. They sent a joking message back to Tycho City, complaining about the lack of a station emergency grog supply, and rocketed off for Chryse City. would have written the call off as a joke, except that on the way to Chryse City the Kaneely party had encountered another asteroid -- this time at a relative velocity of five kilometers a second. The accident, so far as anyone could tell, had nothing to do with their earlier landing, but the investigation group had taken a look at that asteroid too, to make their report complete. They found the space warp. Not knowing quite what it was, they were still smart enough to recognize it as an alien artifact. That was when Imre Munsen had been called in. "The most irritating thing," he said to me, "is the complete randomness of it. The Kaneelians didn't try to hide the space warp from us, but they didn't give it any kind of beacon, either. For all the help we had from them, it could have been another thousand years before we stumbled across it. We still have no idea how long they were on that asteroid, what they were doing in the Solar System, or when they left. They might come back any time." He looked gloomy and irritated. I stole a glance at my watch. It was getting late, my tooth was aching again, and there was still no sign of my mushroom man. "This whole matter is really interesting, Mr. Munsen," I said to him, polite and insincere. "But I'm a lawyer, you know, not a scientist. I can't think why you want me involved in all this -- unless you are planning to sue the aliens for negligence." He cheered up a little and smiled at me. "You underrate yourself, Mr. Carver. I like to see that in a man. Our computer selected your son we could get for this job. I read your background myself before I came here, and I won't be fooled by a modest appearance. The first man to transfer through the Mattin Link -- and the only survivor of those early experiments. The man to whom Peter Pinton entrusted the secret of Pintonite, and one of two men to come out of that alive when Pinton was killed." Munsen shook his head admiringly. "It's not just a question of hard work and intelligence, Mr. Carver. Lots of people have those. You also have good  luck -- and you've got guts." Not only that, I fully intended to keep them. I had no idea where Munsen had got all that information -- accurate, as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. I felt like saying, "No, no, you've got it all wrong. I'm not brave at all. I'm a certified coward." But I didn't think it would make any difference. Munsen looked like a very determined man. Instead, I said, "I only wish I could help you, Mr. Munsen. But really I have no idea what I could do for you. I have pressing business obligations, and I know nothing about the aliens." "You know as much as we do, Mr. Carver. I want you to take a look at that space warp and use your intuition and experience." My intuition and experience told me to stay as far away from it as I could. "It has our group baffled," Munsen went on. "It provides instantaneous transfer, the same as the Mattin Link, but it's a lot more flexible. For one thing, it seems as though the exit points can be anywhere. For another, you don't need Link equipment at the exit. We've been able to send signalling devices -- not people -- through it, and they come out some place in the Solar System. Some random place. Two disappeared, and we think they must have gone into the Sun." Worse and worse. So far, it sounded riskier than the Mattin Link, and I'd had my fill of that long ago. "You tried to send people?" I asked. He nodded. "Volunteers. But there's some kind of a sensing device on the side of the warp chamber. It won't send living multi-celled organisms. Just sits there humming when we try it. It's very disappointing. The Kaneelians built in some kind of control on it and we have no idea how to change the settings." "Why not take it apart?" "We'd love to. As soon as we know how it works, we will. At the moment we're afraid we may ruin it completely if we tamper with it. We'd like to study the separate pieces. For one thing, it seems as though there are all-temperature superconductors in the control box." What was an alltemperature superconductor? I shook my head firmly. "There's not a thing I could do for you, Mr. Munsen. It's outside my field." Munsen turned three moods meaner. "Mr. Carver, I don't think you understand the situation. I am requesting your cooperation. But I am not really offering you a choice. We need you. If you persist in your attitude, I will be forced to send you for a hearing -- on Earth." He smiled a horrid smile. "Your record suggests that you prefer not to visit Earth. In any case, I expected you would welcome a chance to serve humanity." A hearing on Earth. I shuddered at the thought. There were people there who'd love to get their hands on me. Whatever Munsen's project, I couldn't imagine it would be worse than that. Even so, I wasn't credits without a struggle. "Don't get me wrong, Mr. Munsen. I'd be only too happy to go with you and take a look at the alien machines. But I have big responsibilities here. I can't spare the time, particularly just now." His manner warmed a little. "Of course, I know you're a busy man. What I have in mind wouldn't take long. I want you to take a quick look at the alien equipment, then you can come back here to the Moon and think it over, see what ideas it suggests to you. If necessary, we'll arrange a second trip later -- but that might not be needed, if we can use your ideas without your presence." "But can't that first trip wait a week?" He shook his head. "I'm afraid not. Time is important. Every day wasted could mean danger to us all. Until we understand the space warp, we won't feel safe -- the Kaneelians could come back any day, and we'd be helpless. I will guarantee you that if we leave tonight. I'll have you back from this trip in fortyeight hours. That's the best I can offer, and I tell you that I'm stretching the rules to promise that." Two days away would leave only two more days to finish the stock deal. I didn't like it at all, but I sensed that it was the best offer I'd get. For a Level Four emergency like this one, Munsen could have me shot, and no one would ask him for the reason until it was too late. "Give me the time to make one videophone call," I said. "Then I'll be ready to go. What do I need to bring with me?" "Not a thing -- we'll fit you out at Headquarters." He looked pleased with himself, and what he probably thought of as his subtle powers of persuasion. "I must say. Carver, I'm feeling relieved to know you'll be working on this job." I postponed my mushroom meeting for two days -- much to my contact's surprise, who knew something tricky was going on financially. Timing on these deals is everything. Then I swallowed a pill for my aching tooth, and off we went. It made me very pessimistic for the future of humanity, to think that they had to rely on people like me to handle their emergencies. Two hours later we lifted away from Tycho Base on a high-speed did agree with me, and never will. I was all right during the eight-hour trip to Kaneely's asteroid, a forlorn chip of rock in the middle of nowhere, because the ship was under acceleration all the way. But the temporary station that the Navy had set up on the rock itself had no gravity to speak of. We didn't bother to dock in the usual way -- there was only a big pressure dome, on the surface of the asteroid. We hovered close to that. and went across to it in our suits. Inside the bubble about forty men and women had assembled. Munsen, like the ham he was, made a fool of both of us. He made a stand-up speech. "Men," he said -- ignoring the women completely. "We've had a hard time of it, this last month. Now there's a ray of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. Here is the man we've all waited to see, Henry Carver. Henry Carver, the only man -- ." And away he went. I endured it, averting my eyes from the audience, which seemed to be lapping it up. After Munsen dried up, they went into a very long and -- to me, at any rate -- completely meaningless briefing on the work that had been done so far to explore the Kaneelian chamber in the rock. I nodded occasionally, but the technical discussion was beyond me. Boiling off the jargon and gibberish, what was left seemed to be simple enough. The asteroid chamber was completely empty except for the space warp, and nobody had any idea at all how that worked. You put a signalling beacon, or some other object, inside it and then pressed a bar on the outside. Instantly, the beacon or whatever appeared somewhere else, anywhere from ten thousand to five hundred that had been recovered -- they had lost another since Munsen briefed me -- were all intact and apparently unscathed by the jump. But their positions when they appeared were completely random. Put a man or an animal inside the warp cylinder, and press the bar again. Nothing at all happened, except a slight hum from the machine. They had tried men in twos and men in threes; men in lead suits to screen testing radiation; men in suspended animation; men who had been knocked unconscious; and -- Munsen would try anything -- dead men. Of these, only the last were accepted for transfer and as usual they told no tales. The Navy still had plenty of volunteers, going dutifully into the spacewarp enclosure and then, hours later, floating back out again when it was clear that nothing was going to happen. There was no doubt that they were all getting discouraged. I wasn't keen to go near the Kaneelian machine -- you never knew when it might suddenly decide to work, explode or otherwise do something drastic. On the other hand, I very much wanted to get the thing over with and go back to Tycho City for my unfinished business. When the briefing ended, Munsen and I floated together down into the big chamber under the surface of the asteroid. It was actually three big spaces, inter-connected through tall archways. Two were completely empty and in a comer of the third sat a solitary, dull-grey metal cylinder, about two meters wide and three meters high. The space warp. You climbed in through the open top, and on the outside there was a gray bar that activated the system -- or failed to if there was a man inside. "Why are the arches so big?" I asked Imre Munsen over my suit radio. "Were the Kaneelians all ten meters tall?" "We don't know. They might have been. On the other hand, they should have been our size, or near to it, to fit into the warp. For all we know now, they may cdhie in a variety of sizes. Why do you ask?" A good question. I was just making conversation to put off the next step. Then I had an idea. "You say it will send single-celled animals through. Is it possible that the Kaneelians were single-celled? Could a single cell grow to the size of a man?" "I don't see why not. It wouldn't solve our problem. It would explain why a single-celled animal can get through -- but not why multi-celled animals can't. Why would they want to stop a transfer?" I shrugged. Since I don't understand human behavior at all, it seemed presumptuous to guess at the motives of the aliens. Munsen gestured at the top of the warp cylinder. "I'm going to take a look at the inside, Henry. Coming?" "Best if I stay outside, I think," I said casually. "The control unit's out here. I want to watch what happens to it when you go inside." Munsen had made it quite clear that at some point he expected me to take a look inside that ghastly cylinder, but I saw no reason to rush in. He nodded at me. "Makes sense. Once I'm inside, press the bar. You never know, I might get lucky." He floated up, then down into the open top of the cylinder. After a couple of seconds, his voice came over the suit radio. I worked the bar, and hoped. There was a low, steady humming from one of two square boxes on the side of the warp. It went on for about five seconds, then stopped. I waited. After twenty seconds I heard Munsen 's disappointed voice. "No good. I might as well come out again. There's a sort of metal piece inside here that moved backwards and forwards when I was waiting for the warp. I think it's the scanner. Let's change places and you can take a look." It was the moment of truth. If one of the boxes contained the scanner control, then the other box was presumably the warp mechanism itself. While Munsen was getting out of the cylinder, I took a multi-purpose belt attachment from the waist of my suit and opened up a long dur-steel spike. Its use had always mystified me -- it looked like an ice pick, but presumably wasn't. I drove it as hard as I could into the soft-plastic middle of the box that I thought contained the warp mechanism. Then -- a bad mistake, as I later realized -- to be on the safe side, I drove it just as hard into the other box. There was a satisfying sizzling noise, like 'a damp onion ring dropped into very hot fat. Feeling much reassured, I put the spike away and waited for Munsen to join me. "Let me stand here and watch what happens," he said. "Did you see anything at this end when I was inside?" I shrugged, then realized he couldn't see that well inside my suit. "Just the hum you told me about -- from that box." I hoped my efforts to gain a little insurance would not be visible to Munsen. With the old butterflies in my stomach, I pushed gently off from the floor, floated up and then, with a slight down-boost from the jets, dropped slowly into the warp cylinder. Despite my steps to deactivate the warp, I had the feeling that I was in trouble: I think the thing that separates a real coward from ordinary men is an extra sense that provides him with a continuous stream of information on all dangers, real or imaginary. To my eye, the open top of the cylinder gaped beneath me like the mouth of Hell. I touched the warp floor, and stood there breathless. After fifteen long seconds, when nothing at all had happened, I drew air into my complaining lungs. It felt good. "It's no good, Munsen," I said, hoping my relief didn't show in my voice. "Nothing's happening. I might as well come out." He didn't answer. I straightened my legs to push off from the floor of the warp cylinder. They made no contact. I looked down, then up. In both directions, there was a featureless gray nothingness -- and it was the same on all sides. I was baffled. I couldn't be in the warp transfer -- that was instantaneous. Then where was I? The question became more and more relevant as time went by and seconds became minutes. It would be misleading to say that I panicked when I realized the fix I was in. I had been in a state of terror ever since Munsen made it clear that he expected me to go inside the warp chamber. I couldn't get much higher on the panic scale. Even so, I didn't at all relish the prospect of starving to death inside my suit, or maybe popping out inside the Sun. My water and air recycling were almost perfect, but I would run out of food in a week. After an hour of these cheerful thoughts, a new factor entered. My tooth erupted again. It had been sitting back, quietly throbbing, ever since we reached the asteroid. Now it woke up with a vengeance and began to poke red-hot needles down through the top of my head. I eouldn't get a finger in my mouth because it was in the suit, but I ran my tongue over the left side of my inner gum and was rewarded with a bolt of lightning through my left temple. The gum felt squishy and I had a peculiar taste in my mouth. The pain grew steadily worse. There seems little point in a detailed recapitulation of the next three days. If -- as seems unlikely -- you've been through a similar experience, you know what it was like. If not, no words describe it. Fortunately or unfortunately, the infection from my tooth distorted my time sense. I ran a high fever and was delirious for at least part of the time. Teeth were much on my mind. I remember saying, out loud, 'the tooth, and nothing but the tooth,' and "uneasy lies the tooth that wears the crown." One thing is clear. Somehow, the combination of solitude, fear, pain and fever worked a strange synthesis. Just after I had said, "But why put the warp controls on the outside, not the inside?" I understood, from nowhere, the purpose, logic and practice of the Kaneelian space warp. I knew why we couldn't see a pattern in the points of exit, and why we hadn't been able to send living things through it. The knowledge did me no good. My misery went on. Then, long after I had died, gone to Hell, and been sent on from there to a worse place, the gray ambience suddenly vanished and I popped out into the black, dazzling vacuum of normal space. My suit emergency signal switched itself on and four hours me up. I had been warped almost teroid. The ship's robodoc clucked over me and pumped me full of antibiotics, tranquilizers and happy pills. By the time We reached Tycho Base I was stoned out of my mind and feeling pretty good. The trip took twenty hours. When we finally got there, I saw from my watch that my mushroom-deal deadline was a thing of the past. cheerfully. Hello Imre Munsen. He had arrived at Tycho shortly before I had. Would you believe it, he wanted to pump me for information before we'd exchanged two words? He was in a fine state of excitement. "Henry, you did it! We knew you would. What was the trick to it? How did you know what to do?" I had a clear choice. I could tell the truth, and probably be shot for sabotaging priceless equipment. Or I could explain that I had intentionally disabled the space-warp selection mechanism to make it accept living things -- and I had, of course, bravely put myself through it as a test. No prizes for guessing what I told Munsen and his cohorts. Naturally, I was the hero of the to see me, more and more important ones, finally capped by a visit from After two days of steady adulation, I'd had more than enough and wanted to go and attend to my long-neglected tooth. I had guarded my secret of the space warp closely, after I heard what had happened when I had left the asteroid. Munsen had tried to send himself through and the machine wouldn't do it. Maybe my transmission had been its last dying gasp, or perhaps it was self-repairing and had restored itself to its original selective condition. I left Tycho Base with their praises ringing in my ears and went back to the City. I hated it. God knows what they'd put into my computer file about this one. I didn't want to be dragged out again next time they needed a hero. Back in my apartment came the unkindest cut of all. I'd been answering questions and shaking hands for two full days at Tycho Base, in no real hurry because my mushroom monopoly deal was dead. But when I arrived back home and switched on the holovision, the date was three days earlier than my watch showed. The warp was instantaneous, but only to the outside observer. No wonder my delirious moans had been completely ignored when I was picked up -- no one understood that I'd spent three subjective days in that suit. If I'd known the real date. I'd have had time left to sew up my stock deal and get my commissions after we got back to Tycho. Instead, annoying of all, I might have guessed that the warp might not be instantaneous for the transferred object -- because I knew what the warp had been used for. The Kaneelians had come to the Solar System for a while, then packed up their furniture and moved on. They were ten meters tall, but like humans in one respect -- who bothers to take the empty trash cans with them when they move house? Who cares whether their garbage disposal unit sends the trash a millong the garbage believes it is in transit? The scanner made good sense too. The Kaneelians were like humans in some other ways -- household appliances had to be safe and child-proof. Imre Munsen had declared, in one of his more inflated introductions, that I had a sure place in history. I could imagine it, ringing down the ages. Henry Carver, the only man since time began to be accepted by, and transferred through, an alien garbage-disposal unit. I sat in front of my holovision, thinking of my lost commissions and wondering how long it would be before anyone else came to the same conclusion about the function of the Kaneelian space warp. At last I reached for the videophone and made a dental appointment, if For them, it was like a pilgrimage -- but with destination unknown. Rattrack hurried. His shoes slapped against the long steel avenue of the city at night. His back was straight. He was the picture of a man with somewhere to go, something to do there, a very unusual sight in the night city. There was enough light to walk by, the glow of a few high apartment windows reflected in the shiny metal street. Some of these lights moved as he walked, moved as the apartments and buildings silently rearranged themselves without disturbing the sleep of the dayfolk. The city was preparing itself for tomorrow, working its changes at a time when no one of consequence could see. Behind him, the sound of Clave's chair rose in pitch, if such a wheezing, grinding, unhealthy mechanical noise could be said to have an honest pitch. The chair pulled alongside and matched Rattrack 's pace, one side noticeably listing. The spotlight in front glowed faint, almost invisible red along its filament. The entire carriage wobbled slightly as Clave leaned forward, shifting his weight to his knobby elbows. "She might not make it. Rattrack," he said. "The grid changed again last night. It's become all twisty-tumy on the west end. She may be stuck there." It happened, of course. It happened that the streets changed, that a building would slip down into the street and reappear elsewhere, transforming a cul-de-sac into a nightlong prison. It even happened that you simply became lost in some newly erected street maze, arranged for the amusement of the dayfolk. But it didn't happen often. You could always get your bearings if you found the steel avenue. The steel avenue never changed, or at least never had. It cut east to west like a river flowing through the heart of the city, or the mirror by which the city could see its changes. It was a rule of the game. "She's here somewhere," said Rattrack, and he kept walking. "Don't get all fuddy mad, Rattrack," said Clave. "Her meal may have come late. The machinery could be broken. She might have decided not to come." And those were possibilities too. "Back away. Clave," said Rattrack. "She's met me for the last forty nights and she won't miss this one." "I'm sorry, Rattrack. Excuse me. Sorry." Clave spun his chair around and fell out of sight to the rear. The grumble of the machine faded until it was no more than a whisper, about one hundred meters away. Big man, Rattrack thought. Big man to chase off a runt like Clave. But there was not time to waste on awkward apologies. Best to forget it. Clave would forgive; he always did. Rattrack listened to the racket of the chair, reduced to a breath behind him. He liked that sound. It reminded him of the nights when he was a Troller, when the chair was his to skim low through the dark streets. Damn them for taking it from him. Damn them... Them? There was no such easily fingered them," not the Trollers, not the the black walls of the buildings. It was only the city, the city and its games. Double damn the city then. A distant scream of high terror came from his left, then silence. It was only a sound of the night city, nothing unusual in a scream. He went on, ears keyed to the slap of his shoes, the whisper of Clave's chair, the dead silence of the city around them. Directly overhead he saw the faint reflection of a topfloor apartment light on the city dome. Something nice about that elusive glimmering on a field of pure black. The undersized tunic chaffed at his underarms and he shrugged with discomfort, walked on. The muffled chutter of a Troller passed somewhere out of sight. He heard the sounds before he saw the woman: a dull thump, scrapes and shuffles, the slap of running feet, again the thump. There were few lights here, and Rattrack nearly walked by before he saw her huddled against the building. He hesitated, went over. She looked up at him. Blood covered one eye and ran down her chin. The tips of her hair were blonde, but the rest was black and matted. She lifted her hand to him and he helped her up. On her feet, she couldn't seem to orient herself. She stumbled away and back, then fell up against the building, each breath like the blow of an ax. She smiled. She pushed herself away, reeling like a drunkard until she stopped in the middle of the street. She steadied herself, lowered her head, and ran full tilt into the wall. There was a crack when she hit. The silence was complete. Clave had run from the disturbance, of course. Rattrack took a step, was appalled by the sound of his footfall. But this was absurd. It was onl a death, and the night was waiting, Zylyphony was somewhere... He knelt and touched her arm. She must have been an artist. Artists often gave in early, no inks, no paper, no clay, no visions inspired by the chew. He heard the chutter a moment before the Troller's spotlight swung onto the avenue. The light flashed along the metal street and Rattrack caught a glimpse of a shape, someone standing against the buildings across the street, watching. The Troller came up and hovered in his chair a few meters away. "Zero one six. I've got it." He swung the muzzle of his roper around at the dead woman, pushed the button, and sat back, popping a chew in his mouth. He yawned and stared at the black sky. At no time did he look at Rattrack or even so much as motion in his direction. A thin white ribbon snaked from the roper and settled around the woman's head. It began to wind tightly and evenly, covering first the bloody scalp, then moving down to the forehead, the eyes, mashing the nose flat and lifting the head slightly so as to loop underneath. Rattrack said, "Good, you enjoy your work." The Troller said nothing, did not move. The roper covered the corpse's neck and started down its shoulders, pulling the arms tight to the ribs. "It's a tough job," said Rattrack, "really important work, and a marvel that you handle it so well." The roper swathed hips, then bound legs and feet. The line slipped back into the muzzle, dragging the long white cocoon off the ground until it dangled by a single thread, the head bare centimeters off the ground. The line snapped and was snagged by a small hook on the underside of the chair. "She's secure now," said Rattrack. "You're a real hero." The Troller swung the spotlight at Rattrack. "Stay out, duddy," he said. "Four hours to light. Stay out of your scuddy little hidy-hole just a minute too long. I'll find you. I don't forget a face." Rattrack laughed. He forced himself to look into the explosion of light. His eyes were on fire. "You too, duddy," he said. "Wait till you make a mistake and you're out in the nightlife without your chair. See how you get along. I don't forget a face either." The Troller spat and swung his chair past Rattrack's nose. He sped off, riding low so that the corpse dragged along the ground. Rattrack laughed again. "Ho Zylyphony," he called, staving off the silence, waiting for his eyes to work again. "Did you see that? There goes one more Troller who knows Rattrack." He started across the street toward the shadows where the Troller's spotlight had revealed her. He knew it must be her. "Zylyphony? Come out!" The shadows were empty. He began to stroll down the street, brushing his hand along the satin building facades. She was here, somewhere. Then he heard the buzz and flattened against a wall. It was a warden. It came up the street, a fist-sized metal beetle, a blur of speed, a flicker running through each patch of light. It was heat in motion, could bum away any stain, could cut through a man like cheese and leave a wellcauterized stump. It was perfect, untouchable, and Rattrack hated it. The warden slowed at the blood on the street, moved crab-like over the sea. It went up the side of the building and down again, then sped off the way it came. It took seconds, and nothing remained, no char, no unobserved splatter, nothing. Rattrack stepped away from the wall. There was a sound, he turned, and Zylyphony was standing just out from the buildings a few paces away. She was looking... no, not at him. It seemed that she never looked directly at him, but the thinnest of hairs to the right, or left, or above. Her hair was a garland of dark curls. She was like one of the apartment window lights, impossible to reach, framed by night. He gave her a smile though he knew she would not return it. "Did you see me with the Troller?" "Yes," she said, and somehow the way that she said it, eyes away from his, a solitary nod without enthusiasm or even familiarity, stole the victory from him. He felt for a moment that he could take no more, that this small hurt would burst the dam that bound his entire ocean of pain, that he would be finally ruined, forced over the edge of the abyss. Not yet. He closed his eyes, felt it all settle inside of him. It seemed, had seemed for some time, that his body was no longer a simple package of blood and tissues. It was an envelope for his anguish, his hate of the city. To strike a spark of life in this dulleyed woman was no longer a game. TTie joke had gone too far, had turned sour and then rancid. Forty nights, and now he knew that, like everything else that had happened in his life, again it was the city trying to make him small, diminishing him by reducing this woman to nothing and throwing her in his face. He stepped over and took her arm. "Walk with me," he said. And she came along as he had protesting. She just came along. To their right, a building slid noiselessly into the street, a stately vertical descent. Before the roof was level with the street, the building behind it started down, and the one behind that, one after the other until a new street led off into the dark. He would take her to the fountain again (if it was still there) and do... something again. They turned off the steel avenue into deeper shadows. Before they had gone far, the sound of Clave's chair came through the night and took up its station, one hundred meters behind. As he came into the courtyard, Rattrack saw two men hunched furtively in the light. They muttered his name to each other, and crept away into the night. The fountain was still there, and again it had changed. The first night they had seen it, nearly two weeks ago, it had been little more than a large flat basin, a few sculpted figures, a few climbing blocks. Each night it had grown, and now it was a huge forest of thin red towers and spiral chutes that climbed perhaps half as high as the buildings. It glowed with a pale yellow light, bringing an illusion of animation to the dark circle of buildings standing shoulder to shoulder around it like cautious spectators. It was a spectacle in still-life. It was Rattrack's favorite mystery. Why only this in all the city to relieve the black of night? Why did this and nothing else change its shape by day? The towers and pools were dry now, as they would always be at night, but Rattrack saw water. He closed his eyes and was sliding down a chute, the tall one in the center, a twisting kilometerlong stream of water with the city revolving around him and the chew in his bloodstream playing tricks with his eyes and brain. He imagined the slide becoming a pool, and then perhaps a great jet of water to send him back to the top while showering those below. To ride a waterfall. He could have cried. He slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand, felt a satisfying sting. "Come on," he said to Zylyphony. "We'll explore." She stepped back and sat on the black street, looking down. "All right then," he said. He would not let it hurt. "Stay here." He set his eye for the pinnacle of the tallest spire, clambered over the uneven blocks on the floor of the fountain, and began to climb. The banked walls of the spiral channel were purchase for his hands and the slick soles of his shoes. There was nothing to his left but open space. It was a long climb. Halfway up, when he had begun to tire, he stopped to take off his shoes and wipe the sweat from his palms. He looked at the ground. Zylyphony was dimly lit by the fountain glow, small as a marble. She seemed to be looking away, although he could not be sure. What must he do to catch her eye? Should he scream and wave his arms? Would she look up if he Jumped? Clave was a distance from her around the perimeter of the fountain, disconnected from his shadow by the space beneath his chair. Rattrack looked back at her. She was not watching. He dropped his shoes over the edge and started up again, pushing for speed now, trying to use up the tension that had grabbed his muscles and made him clench his teeth. Then he was on a small platform at the top. Zylyphony and Clave were dots. It was a long way down, a quicker suicide, he thought, than banging your head against a wall. But not for him, never for him. One thing that Rattrack never feared was his own death. He did not believe in it. A breeze could have blown him from the tiny perch, but there was no breeze in the city. He looked around, and even from this height, even with the light from the fountain, he could not see the flat level edges of the rooftops. He followed the marching lines of black windows with his eyes until they seemed to merge somewhere overhead with the black walls of the buildings. He looked higher still, until the buildings blended in with the black sky and the unseen dome. He looked up until he stood like an arrow perched on end, his mouth pulled openby the stretch of skin over his jaws, and for the first and only time, he felt small. The weight of insignificance fell on him like a physical thing and he dropped to one knee, trembling hands curled around the edges of his tiny platform. He saw a dead woman with a bloody head. He came up slowly, first placing his feet and straightening his knees, then uncoiling along his spine, raising his chin again. He took the collar of his tunic in both hands and ripped it open from sternum to navel. "It's Rattrack!" he screamed. "Open your lights or huddle in the dark. It's Rattrack!" The city answered him with silence. "Enough," he said, his voice cold and loud enough for only himself to hear. "I know you. I know what you can do to people. I know the sad smiles of your dayfolk when they try to forget that they have nowhere new to go. I know their desperate chatter, their endless games. I know the triviality of your imagination. "I tried to leave you and there was nowhere to go. For that you have taken me from the day. Now I say to you that I will not be devoured. There is a woman down there to whom you owe a soul. It's time you began to pay your debts." He scrambled down the chute, friction searing the heels of his hands. He skidded around the widening turns of the spiral, down, down, the floor of the city growing in his eyes. He Jumped the last four meters and walked toward Zylyphony. Clave rode up to him and then stopped, watching with rabbit eyes as Rattrack walked past. He took Zylyphony by the rough sleeve of her tunic and pulled her to her feet. She came up limply. "I ask you for the last time," he said. "Must you let the city do this to you? Can you allow it?" She did not look at him even now. "You don't understand," she said. "Who are we to allow or not allow? If we didn't exist, the city would go on just as it always has with all these buildings empty, the streets quiet. It makes no difference. I stay alive because it's easier than dying. I come with you because... who am I to say no? But it doesn't matter. The city is a machine and to be human is nothing special." Clave charged up to them, sitting high in his chair. '"He's special. He's -- " "Shut up. Clave." Rattrack did not turn his head. "I won't let the city have you," he said. "We make ourselves special by what we do." He smiled. "I intend to make you come alive, really alive, if it kills you." He pulled her by the arm and started up the street. Clave followed behind. They went back along their route, back until they were standing again on the steel avenue. Rattrack motioned Clave forward, pushed a switch on the chair. With Clave gripping the arms as if it were a wild beast, it sailed up the avenue with Rattrack and Zylyhony running behind. It was faster than they and they lost sight of it in the darkness. They could hear it wheezing and chugging ahead of them for a time until it pulled out of earshot. Rattrack slowed his pace. "What are you thinking about right now?" he asked. This was the best sort of light for her. It softened her face, made her look close. "I was wondering what it is." "What?" "I'm not curious," she said. "No, I just thought it might be easier if you told me what you really want from me. If it's sex, you can have it. If you want talk. I'll talk." "What I want." As if it was small enough to be made into words. As if he could just say it and be done. "Just a couple of little things. I want to prove that everything you say is wrong. I want to make the city, the whole scuddy damned city, look up and say my name! Think you can take care of it right now, or would you prefer to wait a bit?" The chair was hovering above a wide hold in the middle of the street where there had been no hole or seam minutes before. "What is this thing, Rattrack?" Clave said. "It -- The chair came and -- Everything feels different and I'm scared." "It's all right," he said. "The chair homes in on this spot when you close that switch. It's for the Trollers." Clave twisted around in the seat, looking down the street in a paroxysm of terror. Rattrack and Zylyphony walked to the edge of the hole. It was a cylindrical shaft running straight down into the body of the city, seven meters around and darker than the night. Zylyphony shuddered and looked away, and this, obscurely, seemed to him just right. "Such a deeply dark place, Rattrack," said Clave, making a ludicrous attempt at self-control. "What is it? Where does it go?" "Ah Clave," he said histrionically, "it's the place of the dead, the last journey of our departed nightlife fellows. This is the true shrine where Trollers make their grisly offering to -- " He snorted at himself, failed a grin. There was a demand for drama in the air, a time, a tempo of events, and it would not do to just start down, pulling her after like a sack of stones. He stood by the hole, waited for the upbeat. "Will you come?" he said finally. She shuddered again and shrugged, but when he swung his legs over the edge and lowered himself until only his head showed above the street, she sat down beside him and prepared to follow. Clave called out, "I'd come too, Rattrack. I'd like to come but I don't think my body will move. No, it's all fuddy tight. I don't think I can move at all." "Stay if you want," Rattrack said, "but it's safe. That chair has been down here before. This is where I hid it from the Trollers." "That's fine," Clave said desperately. "It's safe. I'll putter-put along with you just as soon as I can move."  h  A spiral ledge ran clockwise down the wall of the shaft. Although it was not quite wide enough to safely walk along, it could be used as a ladder, each "rung" nicely spaced half a meter below the next. Rattrack started down with Zylyphony at his left, matching him step for step. They had descended about a hundred meters when they heard a sound above them. It was Clave's chair slowly moving into position above the hole. Rattrack smiled and felt more at ease with the sound of the chair near. The other time he had come here, Rattrack had been in the chair and had hardly noticed the length of the journey. Now it seemed to have no end. He climbed until his arms and legs, already tired from the fountain tower, began to twitch and then spasm. He made himself go a little farther, thinking each step, not allowing the illusory colors of the darit to distract him. He went on until he could not, and then called for a rest. They sat on the ledge, the level above brushing their heads. Rattrack did not try to speak. He breathed, leaned back, tried to accommodate himself to the condition of being unable to tell if his eyelids were open or closed. He heard the grumble of Clave's machine, hollow and echoing above them, and... something else. He reached out to hold Zylyphony motionless. "Do you hear something?" "I don't -- " He squeezed her arm. "Shush." There it was again, a whizzing sound, something like a ball bearing rolling down a ramp at great speed. "I hear it," Zylyphony said. It was very faint but growing louder, and there was a modulation to the volume. It was loud then soft, loud then soft, taking about a second to complete each cycle, as if it were something moving very fast, around and around. Where had he heard that sound before? "It's a warden," Zylyphony said. She sounded... frightened? No, but her voice was alive. "There's a warden on the ledge." For a moment he didn't understand. Then he twisted around to climbing position. He could not see the top of the shaft and the thing was coming up -- how fast? By the sound of it, one level every second, thirty meters each minute. He stopped himself from trying to figure how long it would take them to reach the top. He called up to Clave, "Stay away from the walls." "Hands, then feet," Zylyphony said. "What?" "Listen." Her voice was close to his ear. "We hold on with only our hands while it passes by our feet. Then we balance on our feet and keep our hands away from the ledge until it's gone." He could think of nothing else to do. They stood there, listening to the noise grow louder. It seemed to fill the shaft, each whoosh blending into the next. He heard Zylyphony expel a short breath. A giggle? Why didn't they try to hold onto the chair until it passed? The chair might have held them all. How would they know when it was on the level below them? Then he felt the vibration as it passed beneath them, and they both yelled "Now!" simultaneously. A heartbeat while it seemed that his arms were stretching like rubber bands, and then "Now!" He planted his feet on the lower ledge, jerked his hands away. Too fast. His balance was uncertain. He began to pitch away from the wall. threw his left hand forward to grip the ledge as a pictuiv of endless falling, his body revolving through the darkness, imprinted itself on his mind. He held the ledge. A feather seemed to brush by his fingers. The pain came a second later and he screamed, pulled back reflexively and would have fallen if Zylyphony's hand had not pressed against his back, steadying him. He sobbed, his left hand held tight to his stomach, his right hand squeezing the ledge again and again. Clave lowered his chair until he was level with them, nearly swatting them off the ledge in his haste. "A warden, Rattrack." His voice shook and broke. "A warden Just went zippity by me not that far from my nose. Oh Rattrack, it's so fuddy dark -- You're hurt!" Rattrack moved his right hand along the ledge, unable to keep himself still for the pain. The surface was still warm from the warden's passing. His hand touched something small and soft. He felt it, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, and then he realized what it was. He slid his hand along, felt two more. They were three fingertips neatly lined up on the ledge where the warden had cut them from his hand in passing. He swept them into the darkness, nearly losing his balance again. "Let's go out, Rattrack," said Clave. "You can use the chair. Let's go -- " "Go?" The decision was already made. "When it did this to me?" iiis body spoke and felt pain, and none of it touched the perfect, cold certainty of him. The pustule had burst. This was only the beginning. "To me!" He slammed the wall with his good hand and started down. Without a word, as it should be. Clave and Zylyphony followed. It was only five steps down, five awkward steps of hand and elbow, before they came to a blue light in the wall. Above it was an illumispot of color and a section of the wall opened, large enough to admit the chair. They stepped from dark into light. There was a floor and a thin glowing path, a meter wide, that ran into the distance like a dare. Rattrack had been here before. He sat cross-legged on the lighted path without a glance at his surroundings and began to massage his left hand, trying to work the weakness out of it. The hand would not make a fist. The fingers curled slightly and then stopped, trembling. They would move no further, no matter how strongly he urged the muscles. He looked at the hand, noticing how peculiar and square it seemed, not as if it were a part of him at all. The middle finger was cut between the top joint and the fingernail. The index and fourth fingers both had bits of nail still attached. He used his tight hand to curl the fingers, and the pain hit again, worse than before. He doubled over, puking, and rocked back and forth, unable to open his eyes. He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Get away," he said. The acidic vomit in his throat made him cough. "Let me be." He needed some time, that's all, just some time. Zylyphony stepped back, hugged herself and shivered. The air was much colder than the constant temperature of the city. She shook her head, walked a few paces away from Rattrack. She looked around. There was too much to think about and she was not ready. The light of this place was bright only in contrast to the dark of the shaft. Now she could see the shadows, the limits of her field of vision. The place was immense. There were no walls she could see, no ceiling. The floor stretched away from her in every direction, a plain of metal broken only by a sparse maze of thin columns rising from floor to... where? Shadows in the distance, massive and indistinct, seemed to nse and fall like oily waves. She shut her eyes, stamped her foot to test the solidity of the floor. She was grabbed by a sudden abandon and she whirled around madly, joyously, then stopped just as suddenly, dizzy and cold, afraid. Just the chill, she told herself. She looked back and saw the shaft by which they had descended, a shiny cylinder running from the floor to... how far? Distances were impossible in this place. That column over there, for example. She judged it to be no more than fifteen meters away, and she walked toward it, counting her steps. One hundred paces later she was about to give up, deciding that the thing must be moving away from her. And then she came to it with a sudden and absolute abridgment of distance. It was thinner than her smallest finger. She would not have seen it had it not thrown the light from the path directly back at her. She leaned her cheek against it and looked up. How far? She imagined, wanted to believe, that it ran up through the street of the city into the soft warmth of an apartment where someone slept, dreaming of the sun. She touched it with the tip of her tongue, feeling the tingle of metal at the back of her hose. A sound traveled through the column, the faint thrumming of heavy machines. She pushed away from it and began to retrace her steps. Clave rode up to her as she walked. "How is he?" she said. "He hurts fuddy bad. He wanted to know where you were." "I'm coming." Clave turned, then swung the chair around again. His fingers trembled at the controls, and the chair shuffled back and forth in the air. A pause, then he said, "It happened because of you. He's only here because of you." She retreated a step from the intensity of his pain, his anger, and his fear. "I don't want any of this," she said. "I'm only here because -- No, wait!" She walked toward him. "I'm sorry. Clave, but I'm not responsible. I only want to be left alone. I just want a place that's warm and quiet. I want -- No, this is all wrong." She folded her arms over her head, felt as if she were stretched paper-thin along the cold endless floor. "I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know anything except -- Clave?" He was waiting, motionless, a sphinx. "I want to live. When that warden... I want to live! It's fuddy dumb, but I didn't know that before." He scratched his ear. "Something is different with you." "I'll ask him to go back," she said, "for you. You love him, don't you?" The chair did its curious shuffle again. "I don't know," and he sped off to hover around Rattrack like a distraught mother. Zylyphony watched him go. He was right; she had changed. She put her hand to her face. The flesh of her cheek was still cold from the touch of the metal column. Her palm warmed the spot. To live again, to want. She had changed and felt a bit afraid of how little she knew of what she had become. Rattrack walked toward her as she approached the path. He looked pale, even in that dim light, but seemed composed. "We should stay on the lighted path," he said. "Things move around out here." "You don't have to go on," she said, "not if you came down here to prove something to me. I don't think I need it anymore. You can go back now." Rattrack laughed the laugh of a confused man. "Well, there was that, of course," he said. "Wanting to prove something to you, I suppose. But now... As long as we're here, we might as well look around. Why not?" "Because you're hurt and you're weak, and this place may be dangerous. Wait until you're well." "What's happened to you? I feel fine." "Rattrack," said Clave, "it's a dubby bad place and it makes me shake all over. Let's go -- " "Shut up, you." He took a step toward the chair and Clave raced away with a look of terror. Rattrack turned back to her. He would not meet her eyes. "It's not just you," he said. "What else?" "This!" He raised his maimed hand and shook it. "This scuddy damned city took my hand. I'll take something from it before I go. I'll show it Rattrack. I'll teach Rattrack to it. Then I'll go back. Is that answer enough? Will it do? Come, Clave." He strode off toward the lighted path. She watched him go, then looked toward the metal chute, the pathway back. She didn't know what to expect from herself. She was a stranger in her own skin. She heard the sound of Clave's chair and turned. He was looking at her, apologetic, perhaps hopeful. She managed a smile. "There's nothing back there anyway," she said. "In a way he's right. Why not go on?" They went on together, and did not hurry to catch Rattrack. She was thankful for the familiar sound of the chair. She saw nothing more ominous than that vaporous shifting of shadows in the distance, but everything looked as if it were underwater, so tenuous was the light and so indistinct were the shapes. Nothing seemed quite real or substantial except the sound of the chair and the stark ribbon of the path, as if there were no floor, as if she could step off the edge and fall lazily forever. She stopped trying to grasp the scale of this place, and realized after a time that she had settled on a false but comforting notion that it was really very small, that the darkness was walls, that those vague peripheral movements came from the rustling of a thin paper backdrop just a few steps away on either side. She smiled. Clave, by her side, was repeating a baby rhyme to himself, a creche song that she remembered from her own childhood. It went; Go to sleep, child, close your eyes. Tomorrow morning the sun will rise. Strange that memory could be so painless. The rhyme reminded her of another snatch of verse, the last lines of a poem she had never loved, but which came to her now. Fear not shadows of the night. Dark is prologue to the light. Clave said, "When I was in the creche, they said I was the bad one. The habilitators said so, the other children said so. They said, you're the bad one. You're the one the nightlife's going to get. And they were right. I couldn't do anything. I wasn't an artist, or a nurse, or a thinker. I was too stupid to be a hydroponics duddy. I didn't like the games or the shouting house. Oh, I was fuddy bad. All I could do was watch and listen. It took twenty-five years, but the nightlife did get me, it did..."    The child is angry, pouting, defiant. "I won't go," he says. His back is against the wall and his pudgy little hands are fists. "I don't want to go." The habilitator nods, looks at Zylyphony with a shrug and at the other strollers who have stopped to gawk. "Oh my, no," the habilitator says with exaggerated clarity. "If you don't want to go, of course we won't. The very idea!" She smiles tolerantly for the crowd. "I want to go back," the boy protests. "Well, we can't quite do that," she says. "Of course if you don't want to go to the shouting house, we won't, but it's what we are scheduled to do, you see. If we don't do what we are scheduled to do, then there is no schedule and we can't do anything at all. I'm sure you can understand. So you have a choice, you see. We can go to the shouting house or we can do nothing." The crowd is growing thicker. Someone jostles Zylyphony, makes the sign of apology and moves away. She doesn't mind. She is quite taken with this little drama, very nearly genuinely interested. Besides, the sun is bright. Lunch was good. This feels to be one of her good days. The habilitator waits patiently while the boy looks around the circle of faces, until his shoulders slump and he walks away from the wall. "Ready to go now?" she says. "Want to?" He nods, head hanging. "Very well, as long as you want to." Then, as they push their way through the crowd, "You had better be careful, young man. It'll be the nightlife for you if you go on this way." The crowd chuckles its appreciation and begins to break, everyone talking to his or her neighbor, serious or delighted with the episode. Zylyphony exchanges pleasantries with a woman who is intrigued by the metaphysical subdual implicit in the nightlife concept. "...perfection, of course, being the obverse of the entire gestalt..." And yes, Zylyphony can see the point, that the nightlife fiction serves to point out the perfection of the city. And of course it is absurd to consider it on any other level. It is the ancient Hell myth revamped, given substance by the people who invent stories of their experiences as Trollers, and by the tales about people who disappear at night. If only (and she shudders a bit at the thought), if only it were true. If only she could spend a single night away from this damned perfection. Anything to pass the time.    "What?" she said. Clave looked at her. "I stopped eating the chew," he said. "I found out about it and stopped zippity quick. Then one night the Trollers came for me and dropped me in the street. They didn't even tell me where the hidy-hole was. Rattrack saved me." He leaned toward her. "You don't think I'm still a bad one, do you?" He studied her eyes. "No, you don't," he said finally. "How could you? You're here. You must be one too." He sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. "Yes, Clave," she said, not really speaking to him. "I'm a bad one all right. I stopped talking with people, and that's bad enough, to the city." "Oh, I never talked with anyone," said Clave. "I said a lot of things, but no one said anything back to me." "What was it that you found out about the chew?" His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "It's not a food," he said. "It's really a little machine. It gets inside of you and changes your belly into a machine and makes all your veins into wires. It makes your brain a machine." He looked away from her. "You don't believe me." "I believe you," she said. "It's true enough." She saw the movement in the comer of her eye. It was almost overhead, a tiny black square dropping from the ceiling (not the real ceiling, of course, but as high as she could see), sliding down on nothing, or perhaps she could see just a hint of silver thread at each comer. Yes, now that it was a bit closer and larger, she could definitely see threads at each comer. Still, it was small enough to block out with her thumb held at arm's length from her eye. A little closer now. It was a cube, and there was something familiar... And then her careful little scheme of perspective exploded as she realized how huge, how impossibly vast, it was. The silver threads were four metal columns, and the cube, the black cube -- She closed her eyes, sat down on the path. The cube was a building, one of the tall dwellings from the city's surface, all the windows opaque so the dayfolk would not be bothered with the workings of their home. As if they would care. As if there was one who would not call it a chew dream and go back to bed. She opened her eyes. It had come to rest on the floor some interminable distance away without a sound, the roof still invisible in the darkness of height. It began to move at an angle away from her, riding between the four thin metal columns, gradually picking up speed until it was gone. She buried her head in her arms. She heard footsteps. "I have to go back," she said. "I have to go back. I have to -- " She made herself stop. "Caught you by surprise?" Rattrack was sitting by her side. "It took me a while to get used to it too." He was smiling. "I wouldn't mind," she said, "if we were going somewhere. It would be all right if we were going to find a place where people said things that mattered, or where the city wasn't -- It's just too much. This place goes on forever and it's too big to be real. I want to go back and not think about it any more." "So that's what you'll do?" he said. "Go back to the nightlife and the nipples on the wall of the hidyhole at mealtime? If the city would let you, you'd go back all the way, wouldn't you? Back to the hours spent admiring some silly small change in something unimportant, back to the games played with the object of not winning because winning would mean the end of the game. Remember? Remember that livingroom furniture they call art? Remember the solipsistic absurdities they call thinking?" "I remember, I remember, I remember! Will you stop it? Please, just stop." She felt tired and cold and thought that she could wait right there, motionless, just waiting for time to take it all away. "I don't know," she said at last. "The city won't take me back and this is no worse than the nightlife, I suppose. Maybe -- " "What?" Something, a touch of life, crept back into her. A sneaky thing, this wanting. "Maybe there'll be something down here. People. A new life. I don't know." And it was gone again. "What does it matter? We're all walking dead." "Oh, I don't feel so dead," Rattrack said. "My hand aches a little, but that's the worst of it. Besides, you and I at least have something to look for, you for your paradise and I -- Well, let's say that I have a debt to repay." "Your hand?" "No, it's an old debt, or you might call it a game." He held up the damaged hand, the peculiarly abridged fingers. "This was the last move, and now it's my turn." "Your games lack an element of humor." She touched the hand. "Does it hurt very much?" "Just enough to keep me awake. It reminds me that I'm alive." She looked at him, really looked at him for the first time. There was nothing new to see; it was only her eyes that were different. "Is it so important to you to feel alive," she said wonderingly, "that you welcome pain, that you make a personal opponent of a machine?" "If the city is only a machine, what does that make us?" He was still smiling. Exactly. But she said nothing, only looked away. She started when his fingers touched her cheek, but she held down the surprise and fear, and reached out to touch him in return. His eyes held hers for a long moment, long enough for her to both want to hold him closer and want to pull away, long enough to taste the silence. Then, when she knew that he knew he had her, his eyes shifted to the side, he looked over his shoulder down the ribbon of light, and said, "We shouldn't waste time." He stood, turned so she could not see his face. "I'll go ahead to find the city -- there'll be a meeting between us, I assure you of ihat -- and you can come along to look for that paradise of yours." Paradise. Was it fair to pin a name on hope? But the thing she felt most, the thing at the top of her mind, was relief. He waited impatiently for her to stand. "Do you ever wonder who you are?" she asked. "No," he said flatly. They started along in silence. She hung back a pace so that their hands would not accidentally touch as they walked. They came up to Clave a few minutes later. He was hovering by an elevator platform set in the floor. It was the same type as the ones in the city's buildings, a circle marked in black on the floor, half surrounded by a curving, chest-high wall. The lighted path looped around it and then continued on, straight as an arrow. Zylyphony and Rattrack stepped on together, and a sign flashed on the inside of the wall, the letters flickering dimly. They ignored it. "I won't fit," Clave said. The sign winked off and was replaced by another. Zylyphony barely had time to read: maintetoo was gone and three buttons had appeared in its place. "Going down," said Rattrack. He pressed the second button. The floor jerked. There was a groan of gears and cables, and slowly they began to sink beneath the works of the city. "Follow us down. Clave, the way you did in the chute," Zylyphony said. Then he was gone, and almost immediately the elevator wheezed and trembled and came to a stop. She was looking out into a narrow corridor bathed in a hush of light, dozens of smaller hallways branching off before it curved out of sight. She noticed the ceiling. How strange to see a ceiling so low. It would brush the top of her hair. She heard Clave's chair lowering and stepped out of the elevator (o make room. The floor seemed to drop a fraction of a centimeter under her feet. She tensed, half turned, then threw her arm in front of her eyes as the comfortable near-dark. She heard a scream from Clave, begai. to grope her way back to the elevator, almost wishing she were blind rather than be struck by this. Her eyes felt like flames in her skull. Then she touched a wall and stumbled. The floor was cold against her palms and the light was with her, even with her eyes closed, rosy through her eyelids. Long seconds passed before it was no longer painful. She held her hands up, opened her eyes the least possible degree, and looked through eyelashes and between fingers. Light covered the wall from floor to ceiling and stretched two meters wide. Thin lines in a rainbow of colors flickered, danced, shifted from place to place with electronic speed and precision. She forced her eyes fully open (it was bearable now) and took a step toward the thing. It was too much to take in all at once, a maze of shifting lines, a mad draftsman's nightmare. In the lower right-hand corner computer letters announced: cross section was beginning to make some sense of a bizarre sort. The shapes near the top looked like buildings that lined the steel avenue. Here was the hydroponics palace, the famous rooftop arcade outlined in orange. This must be the game house -- no, it was the shouting house. The game h use was over here, the black pentagon. Rattrack and Clave came over. "It's thecity," she said. She pointed out the landmarks. Rattrack nodded, pointed. "This is the shaft we came down." It was labeled main access tube. "What do you think these... ?" With her finger she traced a group of thin green lines that ran a tortuous course from the top of the screen to the very bottom. He shrugged. "Com lines? Transport tubes? Circuits? Connections?" He stepped forward, pressed his palm against the screen. "This can tell us everything," he said. "It can tell us where the city is exposed, what to manipulate, how to get away. It can -- " He stopped. There was a hum in the air. "Wardens," said Zylyphony. She glanced at the map. "This is the maintenance level. This is their home." And they all heard, not the hum of a single warden, but the low pitched growl of a dozen, or two dozen, or more of the small machines. "The elevator," Rattrack said. He took one step in that direction, and a warden zipped from behind the curved wall of the elevator. He barely had time to jump to one side. It ran out of sight around the bend of the corridor, slowing in preparation for a turn as it went, and just as it disappeared, a pack of perhaps five more came around the bend, bearing down on them at terrifying speed. "Rattrack," Zylyphony yelled, "the chair. Get up on the chair. Get your feet off the floor!" She was moving before the words were out of her mouth. She grabbed the back of the chair and hauled herself up, dangling for a moment and then wrapping her legs around the armrests. The chair groaned. Rattrack seemed frozen for a second, then scrambled up onto Clave's lap. In that instant the map screen went black and the buzz of the wardens passed under them in the dark. Zylyphony pounded her fist on Clave's shoulder. "Power, Clave." She could not see anything in the sudden darkness, but she could feel the sensation as they floated gently toward the floor. The chair shivered and whined as it tried to compensate for the excess weight. "Power," she said. A snippet of a popular tune played in her head insanely for a moment, then was gone. "Power!" Clave's shoulder was like a rock; he did not move. She stretched her hand toward the controls. Her position was nightmarishly wrong; the levers were a fingertip's width from her reach. She began to adjust to the sudden darkness, saw the chair drifting down, saw the swarm of wardens beneath them churning like a hive of disturbed bees. Then Rattrack cursed, twisted to get his good hand to the proper lever, and pulled. The chair screeched a protest. It shook as if it were about to fly apart. But it held, began to rise, then steadied as Rattrack pushed the lever back a bit. It fell no further. "The elevator," Zylyphony said, shouting to be heard above the piercing machine noise of warden and chair. "Move it back to the elevator." Rattrack's eyes were wide and wild. His face was twisted with desperate indecision, his lips pulled back, his teeth bared. "No, the map. We need the map!" Zylyphony pulled at the back of the chair, felt the muscles in her neck and belly lock. She forced her way up, then forward, the back of the chair biting into her ribs. She caught a glimpse of a warden passing over her head on the low ceiling. She reached for the controls. Rattrack slapped her hand away. "Listen, Rattrack." She made her voice calm. "The map goes on when someone stands on the floor. Do you understand? The floor. Look where you'll have to stand." More wardens were piling into the corridor each second, nearly blanketing the floor. A few zipped along the wall in a brief arc before disappearing into the roiling mass. Zylyphony felt the heat rising, saw Rattrack look down. Then they were blinded again as the map screen flashed on. Zylyphony forced herself to look. It was not so painful this time. Rattrack was already squinting at the map. "Reactor," he said. "See how the lines converge at that one spot?"  She tried to think. The buzz of the wardens cut through her. She stared at the map. There were four distinct levels to the city, top to bottom, from the surface to a level below this one. "That's it," Rattrack said. And yes, she could see the spot on the next level down where all the lines, green, red, yellow, blue, all came together. It was a dome shape nestled at the base of the main access tube, their shaft from the surface. Red letters across the dome said: reactor comsomething? She was dissolving in the heat. The pitch of the chair changed, became more insistently erratic. "The elevator, Rattrack. Now!" He nodded. He moved his hands. The chair jerked. "Back," she said. "A little to the right. Farther. There." The wardens ringed the entrance to the elevator, but did not enter. Signs flashed on the curved wall, the buttons appeared, and she flung her hand at them, not caring which one she hit. The elevator creaked and jerked, and began its slow descent. For a second her eyes were level with the gleaming hump-backed bodiesof the wardens. Then they were gone. The elevator rumbled its way along its track, groaning as if it were the grandfather of all machines. It moved much more slowly than any reasonable design could have called for, stopping completely ht times and then starting up again after a hesitation of clanking gears. Clave's chair was a new thing in bad repair, but this elevator was old. It felt old. It made Zylyphony feel that they were dropping down through time rather than space. She listened to the squeaks and clunks as if they were the answer to a riddle. Why am I here? Clank, wheeze -- I don't know. Where am I going? I don't know. Rattrack lowered the chair to the floor and smiled brightly at Zylyphony. "What a battle," he said. "What an adventure. We'll take the city and twist it by its nose." The elevator lurched and then continued down. He laughed and kicked the wall. The elevator rocked. "Our chariot." Clave essayed a grin. Rattrack leaned over, grabbing his tunic when he tried to twist away. "You duddy little fool," he said. "You frightened idiot. You could have killed us, freezing up like that" He slapped Clave across the mouth. Zylyphony pushed them apart, then hit Rattrack on the nose when he reached again for Clave. "You're no better than he is," she said. "Get over there away from him. Go on. Go!" He turned and sat facing the wall. "Just keep that," motioning at Clave, "away from me." She put her hand on Clave's shoulder, saw the tears on his cheeks. They sat that way, listening to the sounds of the ancient machine down through layers of the city and minutes of their lives. "I'm sorry," Rattrack said. They were both silent. "Look, I don't apologize often, but I said it. What more do you want?" The elevator shuddered, then went on. "I can't afford to be soft," he said. "Look into your miserable souls and you'll see that I'm doing this for all of us. I'm doing it for you." "Be so fuddy careful, Rattrack," Clave said, his voice soft as spun cotton. Zylyphony looked at him in complete surprise. "Be so fuddy careful that you know who's soul needs your help." The elevator stopped. There was a door and a silver knob set halfway up one side. Rattrack pushed at it, then pulled. Nothing. He tried to slide it to the left and the right. "It's locked." He kicked it. Zylyphony walked over and pressed her hands against the door, fingers curved, palms arched, like two clumsy spiders. She rested her tight hand on the knob. It was warm from Rattrack's grip. It seemed loose. She curled her thumb and forefinger around it. "No!" It was Clave, standing on the seat of the chair. He thrust his scrawny arm toward her, palm up. "Don't..." "Can it be any worse than the nightlife?" she said. "Yes!" She looked at the knob. It almost seemed that it wanted to turn. "I have to see, Clave. How can we know unless we look? How can we know that it's not -- " Paradise. But she couldn't say it.  ir ir She turned the knob and the door swung out without resistance. Foul air wafted into the elevator. Zylyphony stepped through the door, into the smells of decay, the pungent odor of urine and feces, the silence. She stood on a city street. A former city. The street was cracked. Many of the walls lining the broken sidewalks had crumbled and fallen into brash. An odd sort of lighting, like firelight, flickered on the ruins, danced with the shadows. There, a roof had toppled nearly intact onto the rubble, flecks of blue and gold still clinging to the material. There, an entire building facade stood, straight as if it were built yesterday, but the twisting light showed no side walls, no back, no roof through the empty window. It had been a low and spacious city once, with fourand five-story buildings and wide courtyards. Now the buildings were gutted or down, the courtyards were fragments of loose concrete, and the people -- Clave chugged out of the elevator. "It's so empty," he said in a whisper. Rattrack was by her side, apparently struck as dumb as she. He cleared his throat. "The reactor complex should be straight ahead if the map..." Zylyphony looked at him. "We can't stop now," he said. "We can't be sure that it's all like this." Zylyphony said nothing. He went two steps ahead, stopped, looked back. He smiled. "Won't you come with me? We've come so far. I just want to look a little farther on." "It's over," she said. "There's nothing here. It's time to go back." She tried to return his smile, tried to sound more sincere than she felt. "We can go back together." His smile faltered. He looked to her left. "Clave?" Zylyphony saw a motion from the ruins as she turned, just the shadows jumping. She saw Clave in his chair, his face for once saying nothing. He slipped out of the seat and stood on the ground by her side. "The chair's yours. Rattrack," he said. "Thank you for it, but I don't think I want it any more." Rattrack wet his lips with his tongue. "Well," he said. He looked up the broken street, back at them. "Well then." Zylyphony saw another movement, was suddenly edgy. The shadows? She looked up the street at the thin fluttering light. Where did it come from? Then Rattrack's good hand tightened in a fist and he said, "Well then, damn you. Damn you all." He started up the street. A cackling laugh burst from the shadows. Clave screamed and leaped for the chair. Zylyphony spun around. And they came. She could not count their number, it happened too fast. They came out of the shadows all at once. A few carried torches. Others were hunched, naked shapes on the fringes of light. Clave had vanished. She saw Rattrack, a circle of bodies closing around him. Then they were on her. Everything was blurred motion and fragments. Grunts and squeals sounded from all directions. A hand gripped her arm and she shook it off. A face passed in front of her and she saw it like a snapshot, red hair and eyes like ruby marbles, bone-white skin, lips split down the middle by a terrible fissure. She kicked out at a motion, barely connected, but something went sprawling across the asphalt. She pushed a hand from her shoulder; the fingers were fused together in a single lump. She was pushed and she fell. She saw a spear, a leg bone filed to a point. Huge hands clamped her arms to her sides, lifted her from the ground. She saw Rattrack go down under the tumult of bodies, and she screamed, "Rattrack!" She heard her captor's voice, loud and deep. "Rackpleck," it said. Its breath was thick and putrid. Her stomach heaved. "Rackpleck," she heard, "Rackpleck," the distorted word passing from mouth to mouth in growls and squeaks. "Rackpleck, Rackpleck, RackpleckRackpleckRackpleck," and they were carrying her down the street, running so that the torches dimmed, their heads of fire swept back by the wind. ' 'RackpleckRackpleckRackpleck, ' ' until her brain no longer accepted the sound, no longer translated what she saw into meaning. She knew nothing but the jolts and bumps, and even these seemed as far away as a memory. The light brought her back to thinking again, a steady white light that slowly grew brighter. The only sounds were the footfalls of her captor and his wheezing with every step. Silence, after a fashion. She twisted around to see where she was being taken, and he casually punched her between the shoulder blades. The light became so bright that her eyes watered, and then she was thrown down, bruising her elbow on the rough, broken flagstones of the courtyard. She crawled a few paces away on her hands and knees toward the hill of light, then stopped. Where was she going? Courtyard? The place smelled of urine and the stones were sticky. She sat up, tried to arrange the pictures in order, any sort of order. Yes, it was a courtyard, a plaza of great cracked stones. The hill of light was a dome, a vast glowing arc, perfect and untouched in the middle of the ruined courtyard. The gleaming cylinder of the access shaft rose from its base to reach for the ceiling. A sound, a footstep, and she whirled around on all fours. The huge creature took another step, and she backed away, dragging herself on her palms. The monster stopped. It was nearly two and a half meters tall, with blunt features, a cleft lip, eyes. She pictured Rattrack walking up, slapping it on the thigh, saying in that proud cynical way, "Our chariot." A giggle escaped her lips. The monster stooped, sat on the stones with legs out straight, arms as braces behind its back. Her back? The bulges on that mountain of flesh could be breasts. Suddenly he-she-it whipped its hands forward, clapped them once, and flung them back before it could lose balance. The mouth twisted, smiled. "Rackpleck," it said. Rackpleck. Reactor Complex. Zylyphony began to laugh. She clutched her stomach, doubled over with hysterical, heaving sobs of laughter without knowing why, except for the coincidence of names. Which was no reason. She stopped, ran her hands across the rough stone, waiting for the trembling to leave her. The giant had stood, was walking toward the access chute, its back to her. She looked over her shoulder at the dome and saw an inscription across its surface in dark letters, halfway up the side: the citizens are the There was a group of infants and very young children at the base of the access tube, too distant for her to see any details other than an occasional flash of white skin. Others were coming into the courtyard now. A dwarf hobbled past on club feet, holding a white bone spear in one white hand and a torch in the other, the flickering flame-blossom dancing beside a thatch of red hair. A woman with no visible deformity other than a split lip went by looking tired and... young, in a badly worn sort of way. They all had that quality of ruined youth, ageless at first glance until the eye could separate the child eyes and smooth skin from the stoop and shuffle. And aside from this, and aside from the common deformities, the albinism, the dwarfism, the fused digits, the split lips, they all bore a look of sameness. It was a similarity of facial structure, a line of profile, that linked even her blue-eyed giant and the red-eyed, white-skinned dwarf, as if they were all somehow related, all of the same family. Many of the women were pregnant, and some of these went to collect infants from the group by the access shaft. Zylyphony saw one woman clucking and repeatedly pressing a bundle to her breast, though it was motionless. She heard a scream of rage and saw a woman rush at the albino dwarf. He kept her at a distance with the point of his spear, chattering with fear and anger until she backed away, bleeding from a dozen pinpricks. One of the older men, eyes the same blue as her captor, came over to her and bent his head with curiosity. He reached a lumped hand toward her face, then pulled back when she flinched. "Nah hort," he said, and walked away. No hurt? A group approached the courtyard sharing some heavy burden. They dropped it on the stones a short distance from Zylyphony and went on their way. It was Rattrack. She patted his face and he blinked awake, in the courtyard and by the access tube, at the dome. "I've found it," he said. Zylyphony heard a thud. A knot of people gathered around an opening at the base of the access tube and pulled out a limp bundle completely swathed in thin white bandages. The dwarf sliced through the covering with his spear, dug and hacked and finally came away with two fist-sized chunks of red meat. He handed one of them to a child on the floor and sat on his haunches a few steps away, gnawing hungrily at his prize. Others elbowed their way into the crowd, all pushing and clawing for a place by the corpse. Her paradise. She felt Rattrack's hand groping for her arm, holding her as he pulled himself up. "What are they?" he said. His face was pale, his throat working as he swallowed. "What sort of creatures... ?" By the corpse stood her personal giant, its mouth smeared with drying blood. It smiled at her. Then, with a sweep of one huge hand, it swept the others out of the way, picked up the mutilated bundle, and started toward her. The entire population followed, the ones who had not yet fed clawing frantically at the stained bandages held above their reach, and the others fanning out so that she and Rattrack found themselves with their backs against the dome. Rattrack turned and hammered against the glowing curved wall with his fist. The surface absorbed the blows and even the sound of the blows as if he were hitting solid stone. Zylyphony was only tired. It was a supreme effort for her to lift her hand to his shoulder, to say, "It's all right." He whirled around, staring at the approaching shapes as if she weren't there. "No," he howled at them. Then he ran at one woman in the semi-circle, kicked her feet from under her, punched her as she fell, and stood in challenge, waiting for the battle. They all stopped. Some of them looked around in confusion. The group surrounding the giant had given up on their meal and simply waited sullenly. Not one of them looked directly at Rattrack or made a move in his direction. The woman he had felled whimpered and crawled away from his feet. He dropped his expression left his face. The giant took a step toward Zylyphony. It smiled and threw the bundle to her feet. She closed her eyes. There was nothing left inside of her, no hope, no disgust, no pain, nothing but the faint and fleeting wish that she could bend down and take her share of this gift. She was hollow. She forced herself to look at the creature, to nod, to say through numb lips, "Thank you, but no. Nah." She shook her head. "Nah?" It looked at her quizzically and took another step forward. She held our her hand to... what? To halt? To beckon? To ask for something that she could not have? And what did it matter? A scream and a rumble shattered the quiet, and out of the shadows of the ruined buildings came Clave in his chair, shrieking so that even seeing him, Zylyphony was afraid. He passed above their heads, a sonic catastrophe of human lungs and tortured metal, then banked the chair high and came in for another pass. The assemblage vanished. Some ran while others hobbled or carried the infarhs, but they vanished and were gone into the ruins before Clave had come around. Her hand was still out when the machine landed between her and Rattrack. Clave jumped from the seat and stood there preening. Rattiack walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Fine work," he said. "Just in time." Clave looked at her. She nearly turned away, hut she saw the brightness of his eyes, his statKe, and she said, "Yes, thank you. Clave. Just in time." He looked down. A bit of the air went out of him. Had she sounded so bad? Rattrack motioned at the chair. "You've earned it now. It's yours." Clave licked his lips, shook Rattrack's hand off his shoulder. He seemed acutely embarrassed, nearly stuttering as he said. "No, Rattrack. I don't want it. It isn't mine." He sat on an upcropping of stone with his back to them. "Just because you're looking so hard for something doesn't make you bigger than me," he said. Without a word, his jaw working, Rattrack went to the remains of the corpse and lifted it, almost tenderly. He carried it toward the access chute. Zyly phony went with him. She had some idea of trying to explain, of stopping him, but words were too much. A restraining hand on his arm would be too much. She could only walk along and watch as he leaned through the opening in the side of the tall cylinder, pried away the makeshift platfoim of wood and metal scraps, and let them drop along with the body. Seconds later they heard a soft, distant splash. Rattrack returned to the dome while she walked more slowly, passing by Clave as if in a dream. Rattrack was searching for an entrance when she reached him. He had found a short line of symbols on the glowing surface and was pressing them in various combinations, trying to pull at them, cajoling them beneath his breath. The people were coming back to the courtyard, moving about at random, ignoring the visitors. A few went over to the access tube, looked through the opening, and began to murmur among themselves. Others wandered over and the murmur became a hubbub of angry chatter. There were glances at Clave and the empty chair. The dwarf and a few others began moving toward him. The crowd swelled as it approached. Zylyphony took a step away from the dome. "Clave?" She had spoken too softly. She cleared her throat. "Clave!" Too loud. He jerked his head around. "Come over here." He stood then and saw the ring of faces. They hesitated, and resumed their cautious advance. The dwarf ran forward, motioning with his spear, then skipped back into the pack. He ran out again, coming a little closer this time. Clave backstepped. The crowd surged forward. He turned to run, tripped on the uneven surface, went down. There was a sound behind Zylyphony, a rush of cooler air. A wedge had slid open on the side of the dome. She saw Rattrack poised at the opening, a glimpse of intricate machinery and lights, like an electronic hive. Then Clave was gone, covered over by a swirl of bodies, kicking feet, descending fists. The dwarf danced about, played at plunging down the spear. And Zylyphony was running, screaming, throwing herself into the sea of flesh. She fell on top of Clave. He was curled into a ball, his eyes closed. She was pulled away. The circle closed again. She saw Rattrack at the opening to the dome, his foot lifted to step inside, his face turned toward her, straining in two directions at once like an acrobat executing an awkward-seeming trick of balance. Then he ran for the chair. The dome closed behind him. He was in the seat, up, speeding at them, the chair rumbling like the thunder of Armageddon. Few ran this time. They cowered as the chair rushed over their heads, but stood their ground. The dwarf held the spear at his shoulder, cocked his arm. The chair banked, came around low, started back. The spear flew. Rattrack brushed past Zylyphony and cut through the fringes of the group like a dull scythe. Bodies scattered like mowed grass. The rest fled now, some for the shadows, but most toward the access chute where they gathered to watch and wait. The chair came around for a third pass, came around, slowed, and stopped in the air by Zylyphony. Rattrack smiled. He leaned forward and looked surprised. His injured hand went to the spear in his side pinning him to the back of the chair. His other hand was on the controls, and when he slumped over, the chair sank to the floor. Zylyphony dragged Clave to the chair, tugged and hefted until she had maneuvered the dead weight onto Rattrack's lap. She felt a burning at her eyes and throat, but tears and acceptance were equally impossible. She sat on the arm of the chair, legs dangling over the side, and started up. The controls were simple and she had seen them used often enough. The chair grumbled, bucked so that she had to hold onto Clave to keep them both from being thrown, and rose hesitant into the air. She rode toward the access shaft. The chair was sluggish, and moved forward slowly. The giant stood at the head of the crowd by the chute. It stepped aside as she came up, no expression on that misshapen face, no sound from its mouth. Zylyphony looked straight ahead, feeling like a ghost as she drifted past. A path opened through the crowd as she went on, each face sliding by the periphery of her sight, those to her left lit by the dome, and the others cast in shadow. There was nothing grand in this escape, nothing sharpened by fine meaning or exultation. The faces passed, one by one, the red eyes, the blue eyes, the split mouths, each quiet and still and at their own sort of repose. Then the chair was in the chute, straining, vibrating, rising like a bubble in heavy oil until the smells were gone from the air and the light of the dome was far behind. For a long time she heard nothing but Rattrack's labored, uneven breathing. She touched his brow once; it was cold and damp. She thought Clave might be dead, but did not have the strength or courage to see. Eventually, it seemed like hours but must have been no more than fifteen minutes, he stirred, groaned, began to shift around. She grabbed his arm. "What... ?" "Be careful," she said. "Rattrack's hurt. We're in the air." He was quiet for a moment, then edged his way carefully from Rattrack's lap to the other arm of the chair. She heard him hiss with pain as he twisted around. "Are you badly hurt?" He was silent as if considering. "No, Just shaky little pains." Another moment, another meter toward the surface. Time and distance seemed interchangeable here. "How's Rattrack?" "Dying, I think." Silence. They passed a glowing blue spot on the wall, the entrance to the works level. "I didn't have to save you back there, did I?" he said. "They weren't bad. You wouldn't have been hurt." "No." Rattrack groaned, began to squirm. His breathing became heavier. She patted his cheek, felt him come awake. "Zylyphony?" "Yes." He coughed. "Is Clave..." "I'm over here, Rattrack." He relaxed. His breathing became more even. She thought he had fallen asleep and put her hand lightly on his shoulder. It was very dark. She wished she could see. Suddenly he twisted around and pulled at the monstrous thorn in his side. He held the pose for perhaps ten seconds, endless seconds, then slumped back. "I can't..." He stmggled for breath. "Damn city! Scuddy damn..." She and Clave said nothing for the rest of the trip. The circle opened above them as they reached the underside of the street, and they came out into the dark city, the night city, the steel avenue, the black buildings, all terribly unchanged. The two of them climbed from the chair. Clave turned back, stood on tiptoes to work the controls and maneuver the machine over the hole. He jiggled the lever and the chair began to drop with its burden, slowly, slowly, until it was gone. "Maybe they'll catch it," he said. "It's going slinky slow." The street closed without a sound, without a mark. He sat crosslegged by the place and closed his eyes. She wanted to sit with him. She wanted to never see him again. She walked away, stopped, walked a few steps farther. There was something on the side of a building, a patch of light that shouldn't be there. She went for a closer look.    It was an open door. For the first time that night she found herself truly terrified. There was no reason for this door, no understanding it. The city never made mistakes. The city never forgave. These were rules of life. Rattrack had been wrong; the city was a thing, only a thing. She felt herself pulled forward and looked inside. There were none of the proper elements of horror here, no shadowy movements, no sudden sounds. It was a well-lit apartment-building corridor leading to an open lobby, plush and quiet, no one in sight. Faint lilting music came from the distance. It was horrible. She wanted no part of it and it sucked her in. She stepped over the threshold, expecting each second that the door would shut her out and the city would shake with laughter. But that was Rattrack's game. The city didn't care. It was impossible. This was impossible. She was inside. She stopped. standing a bit wobbly on the cushioned floor. She touched a wall and felt velvet. It was too much. The silence laced with music was too much. She turned. The door had closed. She flung herself against it, pounded with her fists. It would not open. There were footsteps, light and muffled. She whirled around and saw a woman coming toward her, regally graceful, wearing a long shimmering blue gown. She pushed herself away from the door, surprised that her body did not tremble. The woman stopped a few paces away, made the gesture of welcome, smiled. "It's so late," she said. "I could hardly believe it when I heard we had a new tenant, but here you are. Isn't it exciting? Isn't it wonderful? Such stories you'll have. I haven't been so excited in, in... well, I just don't know how long. How do you like your new house? It's a fine house, you'll see. All the fixtures were designed by Grata..." and on and on, the games room, the conveniences, deafening inanities, monstrous inconsequentials all. And to her horror, Zylyphony found herself smiling and replying in kind. The woman in blue motioned. "Well come right along this way. Your room is just lovely. I think it's a blue one. Blue is such a lovely color, don't you think?" She laughed musically. "Now why are you crying, dear? Have a chew. It's going to be a lovely day."    Clave saw Zylyphony go inside, saw the door snap shut. He looked at the building, looked at the street by his side. He stood. He couldn't do anything. He wasn't good for anything but watching and listening. When he tried to do something, it came out all fuddy wrong, and he'd tried. He'd tried down in the old city when he felt different and went to save them, and it had come out wrong then. He was always the same. He was a bad one. He felt different still, but that must be wrong too. He smoothed down his tunic. The sky was beginning to turn from charcoal to dark gray. There wasn't much time. He started down the street toward the northwest hidyhole. It would be nearest. A light flashed out of a side street and he froze. The Troller came around the corner, pinned him in the spotlight, and rode up. "What have we here? A scuddy little rodent out after bedtime? Should I wrap you up, rodent? No, I think I'll follow right behind you all the way back to your hidy-hole, and maybe I'll let you make it and maybe I won't. Go on, little pest. It's a long walk and I might make up my mind any time." The light wasn't so bad. He could look over it and see the outlines of the man and the chair. Here was something fuddy strange: The chair was just a chair, and the man just a man. "That's enough time," the Troller said. He swung the muzzle of the roper around. "Walk." "I know a secret," said Clave. "I don't know much but I watch and I listen and I know two things. Do you want to hear?" The finger hesitated above the trigger. "It's bad when you don't know what something is. It's bad when you think it's something only it's not. It sounds funny but listen. I know what people are, and I know what people aren't. That's the two things. Oh, it's so fuddy easy." He touched his chest and spoke very slowly and clearly. "I am a person." He pointed past the light. "You are a person. All of them," sweeping his hand in a great arc, "are people." He was delighted with himself. He was going to get it right! "But here's the other half of the trick," he said. He walked up and patted the chair. "This isn't people, it's too hard." He leaned down to pat the satin street. "And this isn't people, it's too straight." He looked up into the light, smiling. "Try it," he said. "It's easy. There's oh so much that isn't people, and there's oh so much that is." The Troller was motionless. Finally he whispered, "If I don't take you, someone else will." He tightened his grip on the trigger, then drew back. "Get on to the hidyhole," he said. "Get on now." He spun the chair around and raced off. Clave watched him go, then looked up at the graying city dome. The city was still fuddy dark, and quieter now between times than in the middle of the night. He felt sad, sad and fine all at once. He couldn't understand it, but there it was, and he started down the street, the hard plastic soles of his shoes slapping (another Troller called off to someone in the distance), slapping the long steel avenue of the city at dawn.  #, a three-minute message from the entire human race was transmitted from the radio-telescopic installation at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. At this very moment, that message continues to pierce the Universe at near light speed. Who knows its content or consequences?    Snorflapp plied his ship between the stars, whistling a gay and snappy tune. He had good reason to be happy; the gods were on his side, the odds in his favor. As Snorflapp watched the blue and white body, third major mass of a yellow star grow in his simuvisor, he marveled at his good fortune: It was certain that the signals had originated from this close-at-tip source. Twining a gray, middleaged tentacle around the computer's gripper, Snorflapp initiated a detailed canvassing of the planet's physical parameters. He knew he had the Jump on his competitors. According to the well-known sociological axiom: "An isolated society that has recently become capable of radiating energy along the hydrogen band is a society eager for plasma-form fusion." The inhabitants of this world would, in all probability, be dying to find a controllable form of fusion energy. If Snorflapp completed one more sale, his alimony would be canceled forever; sufficient excuse for musical delight. But his whistling had a further purpose: Snorflapp was nervous. The present situation was disturbingly similar to his first contact mission, many years ago. The circumstances had been ordinary enough then too: a standard signal received, a standard reply returned: "Thank you for your kind interest. Unfortunately, due to relativistic wrinkles, I am unable to arrive at this time. However, a quick glance at my schedule shows that I will be in your area very soon. Perhaps then we can get together and compare life forms. Looking forward to our meeting, Snorflapp Candruthers." How exhilarated he had been! How anticipatory! And then the inhabitants had obliterated themselves before Snorflapp could arrive. He had tried not to take it personally. Waiting for the canvasser's report, Snorflapp resolved that this time there would be no mash-ups. His ship was equipped with the very latest concept translators. He could penetrate the Communication Barrier with little or no malapropism. His static shield was guaranteed to protect him, should the natives prove to be anything less than civilized. And, of course, the usual social quirks were to be expected -- taboos against the public passage of gastric gases, for example -- but Snorflapp, like all contact-agents, was a graduate of the Leinster School, albeit a late one. He was. therefore, mentally limber, capable of absorbing most forms of cultural shock, and adept at avoiding dealing out any of his own. Unfortunately, there was no guarantee, shield, or method that completely obviated most embracing of all interphase problems: Terrified natives. Past contact missions had only been able to discover cultures that were far less civilized than Snorflapp's; and more than half of these had quickly fallen victim to mass panic and consequent social disruption. Suspicion was a Contactor's primary enemy, but it was also his greatest friend: it separated the conscientious agent from the fumbler, the clever from the dull, the quick from the dead. It put zing in the profession and made space taste tangy. Snorflapp resumed his whistling and scanned the concluding report on the planet's conditions. The gravity was acceptable. The atmospheric pressure and toxicity at surface: Correctable. Unclassified organisms at selected site: Three hundred and fourteen. Hazardous bio-organisms at selected site: Unknown. Total Survival Factor: I # . Not bad, Snorflapp thought. He prepared for the impact of descent. If all goes well. I'll be home in time to catch the last half of the third mating cycle. Won't Grizzleguts be surprised? Occupied with memories of amorous triumphs, Snorflapp fortified his psyche while the ship gravitated through the spinning planet's soft, silky shell. Directional controls had located the signal's origin site, a tiny landmass nestled below a jagged continent. Grumbling dully, kicking up gusts of grit and dust, the ship settled into a crater of remarkably regular dimensions.    Snorflapp twisted his posterior tentacles, anxiously watching the exterior screens. There were neither weapons nor welcome. Perhaps the inhabitants had gone mad and killed one another after having received a reply to their message. Snorflapp shuddered. That was silly. Such a thing couldn't happen to him twice; nobody's luck was that abominable. Probably the natives were just hiding, waiting for him to show his colors. A common enough reaction. Snorflapp waited. The coolant system frosted his craft's outer hull, causing an occasional ping. A triangular series of cables, which formerly had spanned the crater and been tautly attached to a rim-encircling network of towers, was now snarled and tangled in the ship's projections. A heavy, metallic artifact lay at an angle, not far away, half-buried in the crater's gentle slope. Both the cable and the artifact begged intelligent constructors, but none were in evidence. Snorflapp sighed, his anxiety increasing. They were making it tough for him; he would have to leave the ship. Then, at the crater's crest, a brightly colored artifact came into view, descending slowly around a spiral path toward Snorflapp. It wound its way down the crater, trailing a wake of white and brown exhaust, gradually nearing. When at last it arrived, a tiny, oddly shaped organism emerged and proceeded to toss bits of surface matter against the chilled hull. This added to the rippling tattoo. Snorflapp peered with interest at the image on his screens. The creature was biped, the size of a newborn child. It clutched a fuming object in its -- according to the ship's analysis -- mouth. Hopefully, the wisps of smoke had little relevance to the org's mode of communication. They would be hard to mimic. The concept translator quickly scanned the local, low-level electromagnetic waves, seeking a matrix of symbols compatible with the bipeder's physiology andor intelligence. Slowly, with great enunciation, Snorflapp said, "Salutations," and watched the screen while the ship translated the concept into the inhabitant's language. "Buenos dias, " the outer speaker bellowed. The sound was perplexing, yet faintly pleasant. Snorflapp hoped the bipeder found its meaning clear and its tone appealing. "My name is Snorflapp Candruthers. I am from the planetary mass existing beyond -- how do you say it -- Tau Ceti?" The bipeder made no move. Apparently, it knew no fear. "I bring you peace and good will," Snoapp continued. "I know that my words are difficult to comprehend. Please try. What is this place known as?" "Esta es Arecibo," the creature answered. The concept translator relayed the information as: "This is Arecibo." Snorflapp chuckled with glee, and became alarmed when his delight was immediately translated into a bubbling wail. Fortunately, the bipeder continued to stand its ground. "It pleases me," Snorflapp hastily amended, "to be here on the planet, Arecibo. What are you known as?" "I am called Angel Santiago, sir, and this planet is not called Arecibo. It is called Earth. Arecibo is the name of the installation that your ship has scorched and tangled. I work here." "Ah, it is you who controls the signals?" "It is I who controls the sanitation. But now that you and the Japanese alien have arrived..." The creature expressively raised its upper appendages, "I guess I won't be working here any more." "I'm sorry," Snorflapp said, tapping his translator. "I didn't get all that. You said something about a... Japanese alien?" "Are you a friend of his?" "Whose?" "The Japanese alien. Have you come to take him home?" Snorflapp's juices increased their circulation. "Am I to understand," he said, "that there is another Contactor on this planet, this Earth? Another, like myself?" "I don't know if he's like you or not," Santiago complained. "I don't even know what you look like; there's an alien in Japan, that's all. The scientists are there now, inspecting him. They left me here with instructions to strip, wax and buff the halls while they're away." He tossed his fuming object to the planet's surface and covered it forcefully with one of his peds. "Incrible," Snorflapp whispered. "I realize that considerable time has elapsed since I replied to your message, but -- You did get my reply to your message, didn't you?" The bipeder blinked. "That was you?" An awesome concept was moving toward Snorflapp. It was moving with the accelerating gravity of a dark singularity. What if -- as Santiago seemed to intimate -- what if this routine contact mission were to erupt into a major historical event? What if this were the longawaited, oft-hoped-for encounter with beings of an equal or superior culture? What if this were the opportunity, at long last, to meet one's equal; to iris the entrance to new knowledge, new experiences. new positions? The very whisper of the thought with its attendant promise of status and personal reward sent Snorflapp's mind a-staggering. He could become a glittering, system-wide celebrity. And, with fame would come wealth; enough wealth to buy a new vessel. He'd be able to purchase an entire planetoid, establish a mining concern, and live the rest of his life in luxury. He'd do talk shows, inscribe his experiences in the universal databank, have that delicate and expensive operation that was supposed to put zing back into your tentacles and blow the flugg from the folds of your neck. All. All would be Snorflapp's if he could contact, in outer space, life as he knew it. And then the singularity collapsed upon itself. What if this were only some renegade Contactor trying to hustle a piece of Snorflapp's territory? What if some clever slipper had managed to bleed Snorflapp's communicator, rechart the coordinates, and arrive on this planet ahead of schedule? Snorflapp questioned the inhabitant closely. "Tell me all you know of this other alien. He arrived a short time ago?" "Recently," Angel Santiago answered. "I've never seen him, remember, but I'm a close friend of the scientists. They confide with me, and I get my information from the horse's mouth, so to say." "Yes, yes," Snorflapp interrupted. "Was there any mention of fusion or fission? Has the alien tried to sell you anything? A plasmaform fusion unit?" Angel Santiago paused to scratch his upper surface. "There's been a lot of talk of nuclear energy, if that's what you mean," he said. "I think someone spoke of plasma particles -- " Snorflapp cut him off. "Where can I find this alien? Direct me, please." "I doubt that it will do you much good, sir," Santiago gestured, cryptically. "The Japanese are very upset. They envision a crushed and ravaged Tokyo and hate all monsters, in general, sir." "Monsters?" "It was all the scientists here could do to secure a promise that the alien wouldn't be exterminated until after they had arrived for an interview." "Exterminated?" Snorflapp shrieked in panic. "Where? Where is this Japanese area? Tell me at once."    Igman-Luy tore at a cluster of kobuku trees, tilted his head upward to hiss at his captors, and thumped his tail in exasperation. He paced a tight circle in the shallow, confining valley, searching for some way past the ring of savages and their painful flaming weapons. Escape was impossible. It was the thin atmosphere that was most fatal; Igman-Luy struggled to catch his breath. He fell to the ground. Exhausted. First the explosive landing, then the panic-filled moments floundering in this planet's icy liquid, and finally the persecution. His name would be recorded in the lists of those lost in the mysterious triangular sector. He would die in the hands of these little, fear-crazed creatures, with their inquisitive, childlike minds and their flimsy, filthy habitats and their portable flame weapons. And, after he was dead, they would dissect his corpse, scooping and scraping, poking and tearing, inspecting every organ, testing every tissue, mastering their fear by disassembling the feared. Was it any wonder that IgmanLuy had run screaming through the eastern section of Osaka? No, the wonder was that the despicable natives had failed to empathize or even recognize his perfectly understandable pain-flight, that they had pursued, attacked, herded him into this enclosure in the planet's surface, surrounded him with an evertightening cordon of the pale inhabitants, who were now edging forward, their dreaded armaments a-sizzle. On a lost planet of an inconsequential star, light-years from any shipping lane, Igman-Luy looked Death squarely in the eye and refused to flinch. It is to his credit that, as much as the atmospheric conditions would allow, he held his muzzle high. Which is why he was the first to see the speck. The mob was busy preparing itself for one final consumptive blast when the spetk of light appeared on the horizon. With a shrill, whirring urgency, it streaked closer, swerving to avoid a symmetrical, snowcapped volcano. Igman fancied he saw a ship of interstellar design, and his hearts leaped. His persecutors dropped their weapons. As if caught in a terrible wind, some fled madly over the encircling ridge, while others hid among the foliage. Igman stood abandoned at the bottom of the valley, like the eye of an enormous target. it it 'k Even as his ship came over the horizon, Snorflapp had spied the pack of bipeders. They were swarming into an impression in the planet's crust, actively constructing a circle of fire around a large, ochre and green form. The canvasser reported that the form was an organism incongruous to this world. Further analysis indicated the odd org's basic life systems were in jeopardy. Snorflapp landed and watched the inhabitants scatter. Ignoring personal safety, he twisted a tentacle through the exit gripper, punching out the proper code. He shouted a warning, telling the throng, which had begun to creep back, to stand clear of his static shield. The iris dilated, the protective enclosure coalesced, and Snorflapp was out. The natives seemed not to understand. He watched with concern as they stumbled up the hillside. After a cursory inspection of their discarded instruments, it became clear that their intent had been to reduce the alien to a heap of smoldering residue. Snorflapp grimaced and approached the huddled, dappled "monster." He had never encountered anything like it before. Ostensibly, it was reptilian, yet its optic structures were multifaceted. Its breath was labored. Its pulse was fluttering. The crackling brush fires gleamed off its pebbled surface. Near exhaustion, too weary to reflect any emotion save pain and fear, the creature shivered in Snorflapp's shadow, rippling its colorful hide, exuding infinite suffering and a touch of delirium. Snorflapp telemetered his ship, ordered it to analyze the creature and enable him to establish a rapport with it. Moments later, he was announcing: "Salutations. My name is Snorflapp Candruthers of the planetary body existing beyond -- how do you know it -- Rosanosphro? I sympathize with your suffering. Do you comprehend my meaning?" The scaled being shuddered. "Save yourself. Flee if you can." The crowd began to rumble and draw courage. "Stay back," Snorflp shouted to the crowd, employing the Arecibo matrix. The natives appeared startled and confused, as if they couldn't understand. Fleetingly, Snorflapp suspected there had been a dialect shift between here and Arecibo, but he was too busy with the expiring alien to worry about minor mash-ups. Directing his words at the polka-dotted dragon, he asked: ' 'Who are you?' ' Slowly, laboriously, came the reply; "I am Igman-Luy of an expanding cloud many years hence... I came riding an interstellar wind... a wave of highintensity neutrinos tore my envelope. I fell, nearly shattered, spilling into this planet's liquid terrain. Death all but overtook me before I could struggle to a solid surface. Since that time, I have been pursued and persecuted unto death. Conflicting emotions plucked at Snorflapp's conscience. He stood awed by the creature's recounting; its method of travel was baffling, its poetics appealing. There was an excitement in the experience, an unease that anguished yet rang true to the core of his being. "Where," he mumbled, "did your craft go down? Can it be salvaged? Repaired?" "My envelope," Igman-Luy answered, "was absorbed into the vast planetary liquid. It is, I fear, no more." The time had come for him to ask the key question, to apply the test his people had devised long ago. "Can you," Snorflapp asked with serious resolution, "identify this sound?" "What? Another test?" panted the alien. "Another analysis for intelligence? Can't you see I am dying? Go away. Escape!" Snorflapp suffered a flush of embarrassment, as well as a slight touch of fear that his opportunity was slipping away. "Please, my scaly friend -- May I call you friend? Please try to understand; I'm greatly interested and hopeful of assisting you." Igman-Luy responded wearily, "Oh, I understand... Were I in your place, and had I my envelope and liaison devices, I would probably be doing the same thing. I've often dreamed of discovering true intelligence in outer space, but -- The bipeders were regathering their armaments. Snorflapp noted the movement and Igman-Luy 's violent response. "It... might be possible," he said, "for me to afford you the protection of a static shield similar to the one I'm wearing, if you're at all interested. It would defend you from further physical attack." "Could you help me escape this mud ball planet, too?" Snorflapp calculated. "The two shields would effectively separate us and prevent contamination..." The saurian became suddenly excited. Its wide tail thumped the ground. "Salvation?" it cried. "Hope?" Snorflapp cleared his throat. "Mutual trust would, I think, benefit us both," he said, judiciously. "Yes, yes.' I'm sure you're right," Igman-Luy responded nervously, eyeing the approaching mob. "Ask me your question. Give me your test. And, should I fail... afford me a quick and painless death, please." Snorflapp was equally nervous, but he signaled his ship, ordering it to fill the air with a crackling, boiling set of auditory cues. "Can you," he repeated, "identify this sound?" The alien cocked its head momentarily and said, "It has something to do with cooking; am I right?" "You're getting warm." The orangeand-green reptile cast another worried glance at the massing natives. "Perhaps," it said, "it would be better if you clothed me in that protective shield of yours, before the attack is renewed." "It'll only take a second. Finish your answer first. I'm timing the response." "Oh. Ah,it's weird," said the other, "but, I seem to be receiving some sort of low-level impression concerning your offspring; or is it mine?" "Go on." "It -- it's an image of direct descendants. Children. Children cooking? No. Children being cooked! My Crat, that's barbaric! You cook and eat your offspring? It's disgusting, revolting. You're a race of heathens, unclean, worse than the pale little monsters that surround us. How can that be?" Upon hearing these words, Snorflapp's fear melted like a comet at perihelion. The old test had proven true. He tried unsuccessfully to mask his enthusiasm. "That's it," he laughed. "You've passed. You've passed on all three levels." Igman-Luy was bewildered. Snorflapp nearly glowed with delight. "Please, believe and excuse me," he gushed. "The test was designed to diagnose altruism, as well as intellect and intuition. Your disgust and revulsion were necessary qualities; they identify you as a member of a responsive and compassionate race. I can't tell you what this means to me; until this moment, the sound has never been correctly identified. These natives, for example, probably would never have guessed it, and my trip would have been far less important than it is now that I have met you. Here, let me signal for the protective static shield." Igman-Luy was dazed, but he felt less anxious after the auxiliary shield had coalesced around his body. He sensed a touch of the bizarre in this oozing creature's thoughts, but he knew a firm faith and undaunted trust would do much to further the relationship and absolve suspicion. While the two aliens lumbered together up the hill toward the interstellar craft, the crowd grew furious and renewed its attack on the nowinvulnerable pair. "We'll share the fame and profit," Snorflapp gestured expansively, and an unnoticed inhabitant sailed majestically through the air. "When I think of what might have happened had I not arrived in time..." Igman-Luy turned and looked out over the throng before entering the ship. "You're right, my friend," he sighed. "It is indeed strange; the timing is uncannily perfect. In a way, this planet has been a buffer absorbing the trauma of our first meeting." The proud dragon turned and moved into a cushioned seat, preparing himself for escape. "But, the important thing is that you and I have met without suffering the usual suspicion and fear. I see a great future for our two races, Snorflapp. I see a glorious union that may, someday, take us beyond the confines of our own galaxy." Snorflapp was elevating his ship through the planet's swirling fog and clouds. "You know, Luy," he said, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."    A configuration of iron filings was magnetically arranged on the surface of the visualizer plate, creating an image of the revered leader of the Te'nop Complex. Congratulations, said the leader's image. By successfully spanning the interstellar gap, by averting a hostile interphase between the twin cultures, by insuring the safety of future intergalactic contact, your punishment is at an end. Return to our galaxy for a hero's welcome. "Thank you, sir," said Angel Santiago. "You've no idea how long I've waited to hear you say those words."  A Message from the Publisher will notice something missing from the masthead next month -- the name of James Patrick Baen. Jim will be sorely missed here, and we know you'll miss him too. Any editor whose magazine increases its circulation more than SO per cent in less than a year must be doing something right! But we can understand the siren call that has drawn Jim away from editor of Jim's caliber, we think ing publisher of sf, Ace has gone through some lean times in recent years -- but with the support of its new owner, Grosset  Dunlap Inc., Ace is making its big move to become Number One again. With an iditor of Jim's caliber, we think they'll do it. First as managing editor under Ejiler Jakobsson, then as editor in his own right, Jim spent four years ure compared to those of the celebrated H.L. Gold and Frederik Pohl, but it will be remembered just the same. Jim's devotion to the magazine was equaled only by the devotion of thousands of readers. "I found it a very rewarding job, though at times a frustrating one," he says. "The single greatest award was the interaction with the general readership, for which I have an even greater respect now than I did four years ago." That respect was the real secret of his success. He respected the intelligence of his readers; he looked up to them and they looked up to him. This relationship is one that is difficult for any editor to achieve -- but achieve it he must to be a success for very long in any field, especially science fiction. At Ace, Jim will have every chance for even greater success. For starters, Grosset  Dunlap is making a big financial investment on a major sf program. Tom Doherty, senior vice president for Ace, received a standing ovation from members of the Science Fiction Writers of America at a recent meeting. And if you know anything rarely that kind of thing happens. Plans call for at least # titles a year -- two thirds of them new acquisitions, the rest from the backlist. But that's only the beginning of Jim's plans for this latest chapter of his science-fiction career. For instance, he plans to start his own magazine (yes, a competition perhaps but we're generous-minded enough to welcome that). It will be a paperback book-size bimonthly but that will be its only resemblance to original anthologies such as Orbit and New Dimensions. It will have its own editorials, science column, book reviews, interior illos, maybe even letters. Nothing quite like it has been done before, save as a one-shot experiment. For another instance: Running backlist material will not necessarily mean just reprinting from old plates and, at most, slapping on a new cover. For a Foul Anderson Month promotion in February, one of the six Anderson titles is a book previously issued as War of the Wing Men -- a condensed version of a novel serialized as The Man Who Counts. Jim is restoring Anderson's original title and allowing him to restore the text to his own satisfaction. A two-volume omnibus of Anderson's work. The Flandry Companion, will put together several stories in the Flandry series that have seen print before (more or less at random), plus a new #-word short novel devoted to the adventures of Anderson's galactic secret agent. Plus a chronology of the future history through which Flandry moves. Plus an introduction by Anderson himself. Plus an afterword by noted sf critic Sandra Miesel. Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, a classic horror story of witchcraft in a modern college campus setting, has never received much promotion in several paperback editions. But Ace will treat it this time as a Major Publishing Event, with a big advertising push and special dumps (black lettering on copper foil, or copper or black, to match the two alternate covers) for book stores. Putting in that much work on the backlist is almost unprecedented in science fiction -- but Jim plans to do it as a matter of course, and not only for Anderson and Leiber. As for those new titles, Jim is playing his cards pretty close to his chest but he hints, "One or two of them may be startling." One thing for sure, he adds: "Ace is going into very aggressive development of its sf list." That list may include a revival of the famed Ace Specials, which earned much prestige for the firm under Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr in the old days. It may also include a new sf series, more sophisticated than the familiar adventure series of the past, with its own distinctive format and artwork. Ace Doubles, the vehicle for many short novels in the past, will be continued -- but with a new format: single covers, with both short novels printed right side up. In general, it will be the policy to feature the same author in both halves of each double. know that Jim's connection with the magazine will not be completely broken. Tentative plans have been cials (centered around such themes as future warfare and alien contact) that will be published simultaneously in magazine format by us and in paperback format by Ace. Jim also has tentative plans for Ace to publish another The Best of from his last year with the magazine. He may even issue a from the last four years. last direct contribution is this month's editorial outlining an outlandish (but practical -- check out Jerry Poumelle's response) proposal for broadcast-powered electric spaceships. But his influence will be felt even after his official departure. Starting next month, for example, is the three-part serialization of Roger Zelazny's The Courts of Chaos, final novel in the famed Amber series (with a cover by the noted Wendy Pini, yet). It was one of Jim's last and proudest acquisitions, and it will be a treat for all who have followed the chronicles of Amber here the last few years. next month is Charles Sheffield's "The Long Chance," a love story with a difference. And watch for such delightful items as Thomas Wylde's "Jogging up Main Street" and Herbert Gerjuoy's "The Holy Temple" -- new stories by new writers Jim discovered during his last few months here. Some of his acquisitions will still be appearing in December and beyond. In science fiction the writers, editors and even many of the readers form a close-knit community. Professional relationships are rarely distant or anonymous; people know the people they're dealing with. Being a success means being one of the Good Guys, and Jim Baen has always been one of those -- ask anyone who has dealt with him. him leave, much as we wish him all success in his new position. During his years here, he has earned our respect, just as he has earned that of sf professionals and readers. In science fiction circles, he is considered one of the top young editors. We know he has the ability to go far and we're going to enjoy seeing him do it. Special Feature picture ever made," was the first comment I heard about Star Wars -- over the phone by a wellknown science-fiction editor and publisher who had just been to the world premiere. A few weeks later the picture reached the upstate New York city where Hive, and the next day it was reviewed favorably on the front page of a local paper -- setting an unheard-of precedent. Star Wars is obviously something special. So far I've come across only two dissents, strangely enough by the editors of two leading sciencefiction magazines. One appeared in the letter column of Time magazine and the other was expressed to me as I sat next to Jim Baen during the banquet of a science-fiction convention in Syracuse, New York, where Jim was the guest of honor. That afternoon the conventioneers had gone en masse to see Star Wars and I had been surprised to find myself in a minority of persons who had not already sat through at least one showing. Most of the fans had attended two or more times, with one young man claiming a total of six. Afterward everyone discussed exactly which Academy Awards the picture would take. Certainly Special Effects, probably Best Picture, and absolutely not Best Actor. The picture obviously was put together by someone who understands and appreciates science fiction. Star Wars is pure science fiction, with the background of understanding we have come to take for granted in stories appearing in Galaxy: interstellar empire, alien intellidrive, super-powerful weapons and strange-and-wonderful sights of all kinds. If there is an erring, it is on the side of assuming that viewers are fully acquainted with such standard science-fiction elements. To Hollywood's surprise (I would suppose), theater-goers have been taking it all in stride and asking for more. They're certainly going to get more too. Everything I've heard indicates that there will be # or # or maybe # varieties of sciencefiction pictures churned out in the next several years. Presumably the first ones will be the worst ones. Star Wars' influence lies, first, in opening the floodgates for mass production of future science-fiction pictures and, second, in setting standards by which movie-makers can judge what the mass public wants to see. We must make no mistake in thinking that fans alone ticket-offices. We should be thankful, though, that this feat was accomplished by a real, hard-core science-fiction film. At the heart of the performance is an honest, thoughtful attempt by Lucas to present a genuine view of the future, an attempt that comes across with sincerity and with the best presentation that technology can create and money can buy. dollars ten years ago. Star Wars has inflated # currency. This was made possible by the same electronic developments that are revolutionizing the rest of man's world. The computer made Star Wars possible, and at relatively low cost. Machine-generated visual projections -- camera views of what must be models (even if your eyes tell you everything you see is fullsize and real), a planet exploding, star ships annihilated, warriors zapping enemies and everything else that comes under the Hollywood term of "special effects" -- all these must be traced to the availability of powerful computers and associated graphic interface systems. Gone forever in any future science-fiction picture are papiermache tunnels, balsawood spaceships strung from wires, extras dressed in rented Halloween costumes. #I may have been a critical success (after all, it was very obscure) and it even made money but it started no ensuing school of science-fiction pictures. I have been told that Kubrick's #I scene-cutting techniques have influenced subsequent films of all types. Lucas's Star Wars' special effects will influence all subsequent science-fiction films. Since in a very real sense, science-fiction films are "people" stories laid in unearthly surroundings, Lucas' trend-setting contribution is bringing the science-fiction film to maturity. Just as we can divide science-fiction stories into those pre-dating Stanley Weinbaum's unprecedented "Martian Odyssey" and those that came after, I believe we will be able to divide science-fiction films into those pre-dating George Lucas' Star Wars and those after. Discussion among fans differs wildly from the criticism prepared by reviewers for the general press. The attitude of the latter is that Star Wars is a cowboy picture set in the future. I would guess that such statements are the results of cultural shock. When an unsophisticated person sees something beyond his limited personal experience, he can describe it only in terms familiar to him, no matter how irrelevant or off-the-mark these may be. Dismissing Star Wars as a cowboy picture in fancy costume is as bad a reading as referring to Romeo and Juliet as a boy-meets-girl story. Star Wars is not simply good guys versus bad buys but a depiction of free men banding together to resist a gigantic tyranny, along with coming-of-age story mingled witha a mystical from-the-Far-East philosophy. All of these themes are appealing to today's young people, who not coincidentally, I am sure, form the largest group of moviegoers and science-fiction readers. Lucas must surely have aimed at those most likely to turn his production into a box-office smash. Young people's enthusiasm for a story provides no reason to suppose it is in any way a poor piece of literature; otherwise Treasure Island would have been forgotten years ago. Where Star Wars does show weakness is in the stock, cardboard characterizations of the humans, a fault shared by most science fiction of the past and by much of the present. That is why the two robots -- by universal consensus -- "steal the show;" they are the only fully realized beings in the picture, along perhaps with the Wookie. Again, this situation is common in science fiction. Doc Smith's Lensman series, still popular with young people after more than thirty years, features cardboard humans and interesting aliens. In theme, content and treatment. Star Wars and the Lensman stories are close cousins, if not identical twins. Oh -- and it occurs to me that now Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol can be put on the screen, using Lucas's cinematic processes. The strength of science-fiction stories lies more in what happens, how it happens and where it happens than in to whom it happtens and what was said while it was happening. The problems for fans loom ahead, first with movie-makers fired with zest for Art, what college literature courses refer to as the "human condition." Tie this approach to an Oedipus myth or something else left over from ancient Greece, along with portentous dialogue, and we may look forward to real disaster pictures. The second danger I foresee is a repeat of many, many past situations wherein producers who don't understand science fiction at all assign work to directors who despise it. The difference in the future is that even bad science-fiction films will have beautiful settings and special effects. Fans will come out of theaters wondering how anyone could do so little with so much. Leaving a Star Wars' showing, fans launch directly into discussion of the supierb details Lucas has thrown in with such a lavish hand. The visual throwaways alone, glimpsed for just a few seconds, provide a richness and complexity never before seen in a sciencefiction film. In #! an occasional bit of business such as a familiar futuristic setting was treated with lengthy heavy-handedness. In Star Wars there are literally hundreds of brief flashes of the future and it is these that lead fans to see the picture several times. Star Wars is not a quickie film in any sense of the word. The reviewers that likened Star Wars to a cowboy picture apparently failed to see C-#PO's and R#-D#'s function as comedy relief against the serious backdrop of the nihilation. Nor did the reviewers -- lacking any knowledge of science fiction -- note the similarity of setting on Luke Skywalker's planet to that of Dune, even to the Frementype stillsuit worn by the Tusken raiders. The inclusion of Obi-Wan Kenobi's universal Force and philosophy of living raises the picture above a level of simple materialism and provides Luke with a father image for growing up, while giving the production a deus ex machina to help move the plot, along. (And I predict that Alec Guness's part will help the picture do fabulously well in Japan!) There are, however, some genuine objections that can be raised to Star Wars -- having to do with credibility. Jim Baen, for instance, was concerned with several possible errors. One was why an Imperial starcruiser would take aboard a captured starship when there was every possibility that the captive might self-destruct violently. Another was how tiny fighter ships could zoom along Death Star's surface when the much larger and more powerful blockade runner belonging to Han Solo was trapped in the battle station's magnetic beams. The answer to these points lies with internal consistency. Since we are dealing with the future and a wide range of experience outside present-day knowledge, almost anything may be possible as far as we know. But the impossible in one part of the film cannot miraculously become possible in another. In a contemporary film when, say, a person driving a Ford is pursued by a police car, we do not wonder why the driver didn't speed up to # m.p.h. or go straight up the side of a cliff to shake off the follower. We know what's possible and what's impossible, and the film-maker operates on the assumption that we do indeed know these things about the world...and that this knowledge justifies our expectations . Being set in the far future, Star Wars may have its own implied consistencies. If the Imperial starcruiser took aboard a captive ship, there is every reason to suppose it was placed in a heavily shielded area. Certainly Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and the Princess were able to blast their way through ordinary interior walls but they were helplessly trapped in a wastetreatment chamber where dangerous objects such as laser weapons might find their way for reduction to scrap. Nor is there any reason to suppose one-man fighters would be made of magnetic materials. To the contrary, being light and highly mobile, the rebel ships might very well be constructed entirely of aluminum or plastics -- or austenitic stainless steel, for that matter. The few parts that disturbed me were lapses such as Han Solo's comment that his ship was so fast it could reach Alderan in # parsecs. Well... very few period pictures avoid all outright errors, anachronisms or a fumble over something that only an expert would discern. The remarkable thing is that Star Wars has so few mistakes of this kind. More serious were what I consider weaknesses of motivation or commonsense. Luke may have been young but his readiness to endanger his mission and his life to rescue a princess he had never before heard of was simply childish. I will say that she was well worth rescuing since she turned out not to be a fairy-tale cliche. Armed with a laser weapon and in comparison with her rescuers, she reminded me of David Ben Gurion's description of Golda Meier: "She's the only man in my cabinet." (Makes you want to give Princess Leia Organa the well-known mattress test.) To me the worst of all unbelievabilities was Luke's instantaneous conversion into a fighter pilot. Surely high-order training of at least some months' duration would be required for this. To give Lucas credit, this and nearly every other plot weakness was given some sort of explanation. It had been established that Luke was an accomplished pilot in a planetary game similar to mechanized polo. I've heard it stated that the fact of Luke's piloting, along with other plot groundings, had been more fully developed in some twenty minutes of film cut from the finished picture. Hopefully, this cutting was done to improve the pace and not to permit theater owners to squeeze in three matinees in place of two. Star Wars moves at a fast pace, sure enough. Unlike #I , in which the cameras dwelled lovingly on a scene to the point of boredom. Star Wars piles visual impression on top of visual impression. One of these is that of Darth Vader spinning out of control and away from the exploding Death Star; then -- in just a few seconds shown on the screen -- he regains enough control to present us with the possibility of his return in Star Wars H, along with an Imperial fleet as yet untouched by attrition. I'd also vote Star Wars the best science-fiction picture made so far. It heralds the first in a new era of science-fiction films, some of which will surely be as good -- and a few even better. Meanwhile, I'm going to see Star Wars at least one more time. I'd not be surprised if you did too.  from a young science-fiction buff who was busy recruiting members for the Jedi Knights, a Star Wars fan club. "We're not like Trekkies," he assured me. "Our group is devoted to a serious study of Star Wars, the Force and alien beings." I thanked the caller but begged off from membership. When asked why, I explained that while Star Wars had an excellent musical score, the rest of the film was pure dross. Stunned, the knight errant muttered an oath and hung up. Not like Star Wars? Impossible. Everyone loves the film -- including the critics. Star Wars is breaking box-office records everywhere; it played a command performance at the White House; and there's even talk of its snaring a record number of Oscars. Several sequels are in the works; the novelization by director George Lucas is a bestseller; the Twentieth Century Fox merchandising department is up to its nearsighted eyeballs in orders for everything from posters to forty-dollar Stormtrooper masks to home-movie films. All of which goes to show that, unfortunately, public taste is what it used to be. Back in the #s and #s people flocked to Saturday-afternoon matinees at local movie houses to watch the latest episode of a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serial. In their day these chapter plays were superb entertainment. With contagious hubris, olond, young Buster Crabbe played both heroes as naive men of fortitude, while dogging their footsteps were exciting battles with exotic weapons, bizarre alien races and the nastiest villains the screen had ever seen. Loads of fun, these serial space operas were as plausible as any as far ,is the technology of the era was concerned. Then came Hitler's rockets, the space race and the lunar and Martian landings, and we became progressively more sophisticated in our view of outer space. The better sciencefiction films of these succeeding decades reflected this growing maturity by melding more or less credible plots with realistic hardware, i.e., such pictures as Destination Moon (#), Forbidden Planet (#), #I : A Space Odyssey (##) and television's Star Trek. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers? Progress had reduced them to quaint relics of a more whimsical time. Enter Star Wars, which dips into this by-gone froth for substance. As a result, it spins the simple-minded story of blond, young and naive Luke Skywalker from the desert world, Tatooine. Buying robot R#-D# and its sidekick, C-P#, from merchants, Luke soon learns that these are no ordinary mechanizations. They belong to Ehincess Leia Organa, who has been kidnapped by Grand Moff Tarkin of the dictatorial Galactic Empire. However, before her abduction Leia hid blueprints to the Empire's lethal space station. Death Star, inside R#-D#. These plans must reach rebel authorities if the Empire's planet-destroying globe is to be stopped. Thus Luke adopts the lovely Leia's cause and -- with the robots, the telekinetic Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, a mercenary named Han Solo and Solo's hirsuite associate Chewbacca (a seven-foot-tall Wookie pirate) -- encounters nasty antagonists, does battle with exotic weapons, meets bizarre alien races and wades through other situations plucked straight from the Buster Crabbe films. Eventually he rescues the princess, delivers the blueprints to rebel forces and helps them locate a weak spot in the structure of the Death Star. Leading a fleet of small ships against the giant sphere, Luke is able to blast it to smithereens. If you're the general public, you have been calling this motion picture "escapist fun." However, if you're a thinking individual, you find yourself wondering how anyone could produce such twaddle. Not only is it a collection of science-fiction gimmicks that went stale over a quarter-century ago but it wallows in a sea of platitudes from western, pirate and war films. To wit, we have a gunfight in an alien saloon; a dogfight with oneman spaceships; a swordfight in a bay of the Cth Star (what Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone would have done with this sequence; now that's escapist fun!); and so forth. Perhaps this is Lucas's way of saluting the great adventure films of the past. But a cliche is a cliche, and the director has succeeded not in enriching his film through imitation but inducing us to yearn for the exuberant originals all the more! Yet Star Wars' negligence lies not only in its lack of structural invention. There is also an annoying Wizard of Oz garnish that makes it oh-so-coy, what with a tin man (C-P#), an often-times cowardly lion (Chewbacca), Dorothy's Auntie Em (Luke's Aunt Beru) and munchkins in the form of the robotscavenging Jawas. Even the golden sands of Tatooine are a Yellow Brick Road of sorts, which Luke crosses to find the wizard Kenobi. If a science-fiction author handed a story like that to a responsible science-fiction publisher, it would quite properly be shredded and diced before his or her very eyes. Too, though in itself a minor annoyance, the picture opens with several paragraphs that explain the political situation as it exists before the narrative proper begins. This crawling  prologue creates the impression that one has stumbled ufKtn the second installment of a two-part story! Actually the passages are more telling than they seem. Such copy has traditionally prefaced historical epics like El Cid and The Guns of Navarone, where there was a wealth of factual data to present to the audience. However, in Star Wars, a work of fiction, there was no reason to burden the viewer with such tritely organized exposition. It was simply a means for the scenarists to set the stage through other than cleverly constructed dialogue. As it turns out. Star Wars' greatest problem can be traced to screenwriters who didn't do their job. The film's lack of engaging plot aside, it is devoid of any dramatic style or wit. Spoken exchanges are puerile and do nothing to flesh-out the characters. When Luke's aunt and uncle are slaughtered by Empire Stormtroopers on suspicion of harboring R#-D#, we don't care; in the interest of getting on with the shootem-up action, Lucas avoided the kinds of scenes that would have given these characters depth and made Luke's decision to avenge their death a rousing crowd-pleaser. Later in the film Han Solo deposits Luke and his party at the rebel camp, collects his fee and leaves -- only to come rocketing back into the film just as Grand Moff Tarkin's right-hand tartar, Darth Vader, is about to ice Mr. Skywalker. Why the abrupt change in the mercenary's temperament? Until this moment there is never a hint that Solo might be loyal to more than just himself and money. Further blanching this mildewed corn are performances that fully complement the script: dull and deadpan. This cheats the movie of what may have been its lone saving grace, a tongue-in-cheek approach to give it some sparkle (the way it did Richard Lester's magnificent # movie. The Three Musketeers). It all adds up to characterizations that are wholly two-dimensional, an amateurishness that is intolerable in any form of drama. On a different level entirely, the picture's technical work has naturally been likened to that of the last great space film, #: A Space Odyssey. It is a comparison that puts Star Wars way out of its league. Visually there is none of the breathtaking movement, design or poetry that made Stanley Kubrick's picture so memorable and, special effectswise, the alien makeup is plastic and unconvincing (contributing artist Rick Baker, the man who built and played Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong, has done better), while the mattes (the union of miniature models with life-sized sets) are imprecise. Scientifically Star Wars is also inexcusably careless, boasting an offensive disregard for both physics and biology. For example, living in the Tatooine desert are shaggy giants known as banthas (another tribute to the moldy past, this time to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian banths). Earth's Ice Age mammoths didn't have so much hair! Then there are alien beings that look like humanoid walruses, insects and other terrestrial creatures. Why wasn't any thought applied to creating invertebrates, quadrupeds or beasts whose design immediately describes foreign worlds and climates? And what about the auditorium-sized garbage compactor on the Death Star? Surely peoples who have mastered matterreorganization on a nuclear level would have a cleaner means of destroying or recycling waste and the efficiency for more productive use of that area of the space vessel. Compounding these inequities are tractor beams that work on some spaceships and not on others, as the plot decrees; areas in Empire ships for the exploding of captured crafts -- blasts for which the alleged shielding would have been insufficient protection; and so on. Clearly, anything that pleased the film's creators was tossed into the action, regardless of how little scientific sense it made. However, independent of these various failings. Star Wars does succeed in one respect: It totally revolts those viewers, my.self included, who feel that surrogate Nazis have no place in light entertainment. Images ranging from the name Stormtroopers to the turned-down brim of Darth Vader's headpiece (reminiscent of German helmets during World War II), to the brusque and joyless manner of the Death Star personnel, to Grand Moff Tarkin's Goebbels-esque demeanor -- all these are far too serious to be used in a frivolous fantasy. It's simply another example of lazy film-making, a means of distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys when one wishes to skip character development in favor pedoes and lightsabers. At best, these icons exhibit a spurious sense of responsibility on Lucas's part. So much for Star Wars and its faults, large and small. Judging from the picture's staggering sucwith these flaws, a fact that bodes ill for the field of science-fiction films. The coming years will now see a giddy flood of Star Wars imitations, including a remake of Buck Rogers and a TV series entitled Star Cop, that will taint the saleability of provocative works for some time to come. Would that more intelligent and stimulating space fiction like Arthur C. Clarke's Earthlight or Ben Bova's Millennium had been brought to the screen instead of Star Wars ! Of course only a pompous bonehead would insist that all science fiction illuminate some foible of life, pontificate about morality or confront the worth of society's values. We all know that authors like Frederic Brown and Harry Harrison have spun wondrous, classy nonsense for its own sake. However, these works have a fundamental pith and originality that is totally lacking in Star Wars. Not that # of the people who see the picture realize this, since they have never read science fiction and are not old enough to remember Buster Crabbe. In this respect it is conceivable that the movie may open young eyes, fire a few minds and turn people toward quality material. The field can always use enthusiastic converts! But this does not let Lucas off the hook: Science fiction is too damn broad and exciting a genre to justify the creation of a mindless pastiche like Star Wars, no matter what its tangential benefits. But don't take just my word for it. Former Gala.xy editor H.L. Gold said it best when he ran the following rather prophetic comments on the back cover of this magazine's first edition in October of #; Jets blasting. Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a spacetanned hand. Hoofs drumming. Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rimrock...and at that point, a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand. "Sound alike? They should -- one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it! you'll Alas, we have found it on the silver screen, and the genre shall long be poorer for it.  J. E. Pournelle The ecology and zero-growth movements have partially succeeded. A few international corporations have gone to space, but the enormous capital investments have left them in a financially shaky position, while scandals in government have rocked public confidence. in this world. He comes from a welon a govenment scholarship; the universities are largely structured to keep younger people off the labor market. Tempermentally a loner, Kevin has made few friends, and his main ambition is to obtain his engineering degree so that he can join a powerful union, get a job, and enter the middle class. A few weeks before graduation his comfortable world comes apart. First he is attacked by muggers and in defending himself kills one of the juveniles. The public authorities will prosecute him for "child killing" if they learn Kevin's identity -- and the Green Fence gang, to which the muggers belonged, already knows who Kevin is. They seek revenge, and his life is in danger. Meanwhile the administrators at academic work, and although he can demonstrate his competence, will require two more years in school before he can graduate. Battered by these pressures and disgusted by the society he lives in, Kevin, on the advice of one of his professors, applies to the Deadalus Corporation. He is offered professional status -- labor is not so easy to come by in the asteroid belt because few have ever returned -- but he must leave Earth immediately. Kevin rejects the offer, but a new attempt on his life by the Green Fence gang convinces him he has no choice. Kevin flies to Baja California where the Hansen Corporation maintains a laser system for launching personnel and cargo into orbit. At the Hansen facilities he meets Bill Dykes, a former Lunar rockrat; Wiley Ralston, a classmate at and Ellen MacMillan, an engineer who has bought her own ticket to Ceres. The launching system malfunctions and Kevin and Ellen are nearly killed. Kevin does not believe it was an accident, but he knows no reason why anyone would be inMacMillan. Ellen, however, does not seem surprised. She insists that they go on board Wayfarer on schedule rather than wait for an investigation of the accident; the ship will not delay departure, and Wayfarer may be the last passenger cargo ship to Ceres. Kevin's cabinmate aboard Wayfarer is Jacob Norsedal, an overweight, diabetic computer freak. The voyage to Ceres lasts nine months, and during that time Kevin and Ellen have a brief romance, complicated by an almost total lack of privacy (there are # people in a ship designed to carry only #) and Ellen's insistence that she will not form any lasting relationship. Their affair is to end when the ship (# AU) from Sun. Mass: # x grams. Radius: # kilometers. Surface area: somewhat larger than the state of Texas. Period: # years. Rotation: # hours, # minutes. Surface gravity: # centimeterssecond  .# Earth gravity. Escape Velocity: # x # centimeters. Path velocity in orbit: # kilometerssecond. Largely composed of stone, Ceres has an easily accessible metalic core containing rich, commercially valuable deposits of gold, silver, tin, copper, nickel, and iron, as well as supheavy elements such as Arthurium in recoverable quantities. Water-ice exists both in permafrost and underground deposits. The first expedition to Ceres in # was financed by Hansen Enterprises (Ltd. et Cie, General Headquarters Luna). Interplanet of Zurich subsequently made extensive investments in mining and refinery operations on Ceres. The commercial future of this venture is uncertain. reaches Ceres. Jacob Norsedal uses his personal At a critical point in the journey computer to calculate the thrust Captain Greiner and Chief Engineer needed for landing on Ceres. There Felipe Camel discover that both the is another attempt at sabotage and high-gain antenna and the ship's Kevin and Ellen are involved in a computer have been sabotaged, desperate fight with Martin Both are repairable, but the repairs Pacifico, a legal expert who wants will take long enough to keep the to stop the ship from making the atship from rendezvousing with Ceres; tempt to land on Ceres. Pacifico is it must return to Earth. Without the killed; and it is found that George supplies and personnel aboard Lange, Kevin's supervisor within Wayfarer the Ceres mining project the Deadalus Corporation, is miswill have to be abandoned. sing. The office was Aeneas MacKenzie's only real luxury. It had a real window of thick quartz that overlooked the barren landscape of the Moon, and beyond that the glory of Earth hung suspended in black velvet. He often sat at his desk and stared out at the fragile Earth, a small blue world wrapped in white wispy clouds. He had lived on the Moon for twenty years and would never return to the world of his birth; but he loved Earth, and he missed her. So little time, he thought. So little time until -- he broke off the thought, because he had a vivid imagination, and it would be all too easy to see the fragile Earth covered lights that would shine more brightly than the Sun until they faded and the ugly mushroom clouds rose through Earth's clean garments. It would be easy, too, to imagine that he could see beneath the clouds, watch men and women working their lives out to no purpose but continued misery and starvation. That was life now for all too many; in a few years the globe might be covered with people who had nothing left to hope for. Desperation might tempt them to anything. There were faint sounds in the office; the whine of the air system, the faint rumblings of his miners digging into the lunar regolith, other sounds of construction and expansion; the sounds of success, and they mocked him. The future of Diana Base, and of Earth, did not depend on lunar miners. It depended on hard-eyed men in dark suits who sat in Zurich board rooms; it depended on the man in the Oval Office in Washington, and another man in the Kremlin; but mostly it depended on events more and over those Aeneas had no control. His reverie was interrupted by a voice in his head. It made no sound, and if there had been anyone in the room with him, they would not have heard it; the implanted transceiver fed directly into his nervous system, and took its instructions from his thoughts. He had lived with the implant for so long that it was part of him. He would have missed it if it did not work; but he had never liked it. "there is a message from It was a ridiculous question; not even the base central computer had been given enough data to know who he meant, "cancel that Thank God, Aeneas thought. He was careful not to think that into the computer. His prayers were not meant for a machine, "i want the dered. It would take a little longer, but he would rather read it than hear it. "decode and print, keep "acknowledged." ME." And now there was nothing to do but wait. He leaned back in the chair, smoothing his shock of white-gray hair with slender fingers. Even in Luna's low gravity he felt his years. He had been forty when he came to the Moon, and even though Lunar gravity did not age men as much as Earth's did, there had been little rest in the last quarter century. Not for Aeneas MacKenzie. Presently he began to doze. Images formed in his mind.   A Economists once thought there could never be a period of both inflation and high unemployment. They were wrong. In the last third of the Twentieth Century both were out of work, governments tried to buy their way to prosperity through deficit financing. They printed bonds and certificates and paper money and more paper money, and soon they were all worthless. Wages and prices spiraled. People who had saved all their lives found their savings worth nothing, less than nothing, and simply to live had to turn for aid to governments that had ruined them in the first place. The governments had to find more and more money, and the printing presses were cheap. The results were predictable, but no less disastrous for being so. The democracies in particular faced an impossible dilemma. There wasn't enough money to fiind both technological research and welfare programs. Technological research was expensive and directly employed comparatively few people. Soon the space programs were cut back, cut again, cut once more. Meanwhile the antitechnology movements gained recruits. "Only One Earth." "Alternate Technology." "Appropriate Technology." "Ecology." Those slogans and a dozen like them became watchwords, and space programs, energy research, electronics research, all began to die. For a while private industries continued research programs, but soon the governments, desperate for more funds to spend on popular programs, raised taxes so high that there was nothing left for risk investment. The companies cut back as had the governments; especially so as the consumer advocates forced the corporations to accept consumer representatives on their boards of directors, and the consumer representatives were almost universally dedicated against technology and technological "fixes." 'phen the United States was rocked by a series of scandals. Watergate began it, but the scars from that had not healed. before another scandal emerged, and another after that. The People's Alliance rose to displace the traditional political parties, and swept into Washington as an irresistible reform movement. Its leader, Greg Tolland, and his manager, Aeneas MacKenzie, were the most popular political figures of the Century; but then MacKenzie, as Solicitor General of the United States, found the tentacles of the Equity Trust reached even into Greg Tolland's office; and MacKenzie was both implacable and incorruptible. The result was more loss of confidence, more disgust with democracy, more disillusionment among voters who now believed that the citizens could never control their government. While the United States was paralyzed by scandals, and the Soviet Union was rocked by nationalistic movements within its empire, a few international corporations banded together to create the first industrial satellites and the first laser-launching system. The heiress Laurie Jo Hansen built the Heimdall industrial satellite and that proved so profitable that other companies first joined with Hansen Enterprises, then set up competing space industries. Based in Zurich and Singapore and Hong Kong and other places of refuge from taxation, the international corporations moved into space even as governments found themselves unable to do so. Governments looked with envy on the high profits and great potential of space industries. Tolland's lieutenant, Aeneas MacKenzie, led the fight for US takeover of the Hansen empire, ensnarling Hansen Enterprises in a web of legal problems, taxes, regulations, complexities; he might have ended with Hansen nationalized by the United States had not he found corruption in Tolland's staff, and been forced from his office by the President he had created. MacKenzie had to flee for his life; and he had no place to go but to his enemies. From Tolland's Washington MacKenzie went to Laurie Jo Hansen; and because he had known Laurie Jo many years before, and because she with the whole world knew that Aeneas MacKenzie' s pledged word was worth more than his life, he became first her consort, then her prime minister, finally her partner. Yet Tolland and the People's Alliance never forgot who had ruined Toland's dreams of a country remade by whatever means he thought were needed; his agents had been relentless in pursuit, until Laurie Jo sold out most of her empire to found Diana Station, and took her minister-consort to the Moon: Not even the President of the United States could follow them there.    And by now no one is interested cept Greg, and he has no real power. The People's Alliance protected him from the scandals, but the real leadership doesn't tmst him. Not any more. The office door opened without warning and he swiveled quickly. After more than twenty years he loved the sight of her. The red hair was dyed now, he suspected, but he had never asked and never would; and despite all the temptations of low gravity, she had kept her figure. Her smile lit the office. "She's safe," Laurie Jo said. "For a while." "Can't you ever simply be happy without worrying about the future?" She did not wait for an answer. Instead she crossed the office quickly and sat in his lap. They kissed with the affection that comes only from long friendship and love. Then Aeneas opened a desk drawer, took out papers from the computer printer concealed there and began to read. Although she desperately wanted to know what the message said, she did not read over his shoulder, but waited until he had finished the first sheet. He handed it to her without looking up and read the next. There were only two. Then he waited until she had finished. "They're on Ceres," Laurie Jo said. "With the cargo safe." "And someone tried to kill her. At least twice. Someone knows," Aeneas said. He cursed, softly. "I'm a fool. I underestimated the danger." "She knew the risks," Laurie Jo said. "And who else could we trust with something this important?" "It was a stupid plan. I should never have let her go." Laurie Jo laughed. "Could you have stopped her?" she demanded. "No one could control us at her age, and she believes in this. You could not have stopped me when I was her age." "God knows I couldn't." It had been so long ago. She'd been Laurie Jo Preston then, an orphan girl living alone under the guardianship of bankers and supported by trust funds. They'd met at manager for Greg Tolland. No one had ever heard of Greg Tolland then. The young Congressman, just beginning his meteoric career, was one of the founders of the tiny movement that would one day be the People's Alliance, but then it was nothing more than a dream shared by Tolland and Aeneas. Aeneas and Laurie Jo Preston had two years. They lived together and hitchhiked across the nation, through Mexico and Baja. They sang and drank and made love and were happy with their dreams until her bankers came to tell her that her name was Hansen, not Preston, and that she had inherited one of the largest fortunes on Earth; then everything changed. "I couldn't control you, and I almost lost you forever," Aeneas said. "Hush." She put a finger gently on his lips, then bent to kiss him again. "I miss her," Aeneas said. "I have missed her terribly from the day she decided to go to Earth," Laurie Jo said. "But I'm proud of her." "And so am I. Laurie Jo, I feel so helpless! Someone knows. If they tried to kill her once, they'll try again. Before she even left Earth! And she didn't tell us." "Because we would have stopped her." "It doesn't make sense," Aeneas said. "They tried to kill her before she ever got to the ship. And they tried to stop the ship from landing on Ceres. That makes no sense at all! We hadn't expected trouble before she got to Ceres. They need that cargo as much as we do -- " "My darling husband," Laurie Jo said. "Use your brains. You're letting this be too personal -- " "How could it be otherwise?" " -- and you're making mistakes because of that. Someone wants to stop the ship from landing. They tri. Perhaps it was Pacifico -- have you asked for his dossier?" "Presently. Not yet." "More likely someone else," Laurie Jo said. "But whoever it was didn't want Wayfarer to land at all. We hadn't expected that." "No." Aeneas leaned back in his high-backed chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together. His eyes half closed, and his hands pressed gently together, drew apart, pressed together again. Laurie Jo smiled as she watched him. This was more to her liking. This was the man who had brought down a President. "So there's another group working in the Belt," Aeneas said. "You don't sound surprised." not be surprised if everyone in the Belt were corrupt," Aeneas said. "How many can resist that kind of temptation? When it is quite feasiand still make fabulous profits? I expect this was done by the Africans. They don't fancy competition from asteroid mines." "I don't much blame them," Laurie Jo said. There was sadness in her voice. "They don't have anything to sell except their minerals, and we're driving the price down and down." Aeneas nodded. They'd discussed all this before. Ruin for the African bloc meant prosperity for the rest of the world; cheap iron and steel and copper and aluminum, the basic stuff of industrial civilization, now had no hope at all. Eventually it would mean prosperity for the Africans themselves, but not soon, and not for those who now controlled the African bloc. "So we are facing two sets of enemies," Laurie Jo said. "Probably more. At least two. One group wishes to stop the shipments altogether. I doubt they have finished. They'll keep trying, but they won't have many allies in the Belt. It's the others I worry about -- and George Lange is dead. She won't have his help." Aeneas leaned back again, his hands moving slowly and gently. Laurie Jo waited. "Valkyrie formed in her head with no accent, but she always knew when she heard Aeneas speak to the computer, although she could not have told how that was different from hearing the computer report to her. "ready for departure in five told them. "one hundred and twenty "With Lange dead, we'll have to send someone else," Aeneas said. "Who? There's no one we can trust with something this important. And neither of us can go. Nothing has changed, Aeneas. We're needed here. If we lose control now, there's no point to any of this. We'll lose everything we've worked hard for." "I know. We can only trust ourselves. Or the boy. Or we could give it all up." "Neither of us will." "No. Neither of us will." She didn't care for the tone he had used, and she looked at him sternly. He was leaning back again, his fingers moving in the familiar pattern that she knew meant he was lost in thought; and she was frightened even before he spoke again. "There's a better way," he said. "The boy's more valuable here." "No." Her voice rose. "I lost you for sixteen years once! And then almost lost you again, when we'd just found each other. I will not be separated from you again. I will not." "Laurie Jo." His voice was very calm now. "You can manage the finances. You're better at it than I am, and you must stay here; but I've outgrown my usefulness." "That's not true, you're the base commander -- " "A function that Kit Penrose can fill as well as I can," Aeneas said. "And Kit can train young Aeneas, who will be far more useful here than floundering around out in the Belt. He's not ready for this, Laurie Jo. I don't think our daughter was ready either, but I know our son isn't. He can help you, yes. He understands boardroom tactics, and he's becoming a better engineer than Kit, but he does not know intrigue and corruption. Not yet." "Nor do you!" she shouted. "Now really, Laurie Jo -- " "Aeneas, it has been twenty years since you were Solicitor General -- " "Laurie Jo." His voice was quiet and his tone calm. "And I won't lose you again -- " "I am still a very careful man," Aeneas said. "There is not much risk to me -- and I am less valuable than our son. We cannot risk both heirs. If it is a choice between myself and young Aeneas, there is no choice at all, nor would I be -- " He stopped, bepause her face had changed. She had lost her anger. Now her expression held only sadness. "You know I'm right," he said. He was not insisting; he merely stated a fact they both understood. She nodded, then buried her face against his shoulder. "I love you," she said. Then she tried once more, but only because she had to: "Couldn't Kit go? Or -- " "He couldn't, and there is no one else. Not for this. Is there?" "No. You or our son." "And thus me." He kissed her gently. "We have twenty days. And when I return, we'll have many more. I'll come back, Laurie Jo. I always have." "Yes," she said, and she turned away from him quickly so that he would not see the glistening tears in her blue eyes. Henri Stoire was a satisfied man, and what's more, he was certain he had every right to be pleased with himself. Since he'd come to Ceres as Interplanet's resident general manager, the output of the mines and refineries had tripled. The enormous mylar plastic mirror, over two kilometers in diameter, hung in synchronous orbit # kilometers above the asteroid, providing heat and light for the colony twenty-four hours a day (he still thought of days as having twenty-four hours even though Ceres rotates once each nine hours, five minutes). More miners arrived each month, the capacity of the refineries continued to expand, and a prospecting party had found a large vein of nearly pure water-ice deep under the surface, thus insuring both drinking water and reaction fuel for the nuclear ships like Wayfarer. Henri Stoire was satisfied, but his superiors were not. His production goals were set in Zurich by men who knew nothing of the conditions on Ceres, but who knew a lot about international competition, manipulation of commodity futures, and always about banking and money; the goals they set were high. Of course, Henri thought, when he tried to be fair -- not very often -- the costs of the Ceres operation were very high as well. It took eleven new francs to get one kilogram from Earth's surface to Earth orbit, a hundred more to get it to Ceres, and Ceres required thousands of metric tonnes of supplies, food, equipment, and men, always more men. The return had to be high or the investment couldn't be justified. Henri met their ever-increasing production goals, but his costs were always higher than estimated. No incentive bonuses for Stoire, not this year. Perhaps when a full cargo from the Belt reached Earth orbit... even iron ore delivered to Earth orbit would be highly valuable for more orbital factory construction. Iron in orbit would sell for almost Fr. # a metric tonne, and Henri had ten thousand tonnes to ship, along with one thousand tonnes of tin (Fr. #), fifteen hundred tonnes of nearly pure silver (Fr. #) worth of assorted other metals. The total value of the cargo he would shortly send down would be considfrancs; a respectable sum indeed. Now he had only to get the shipment to Earth. The incentive bonuses would follow. Actually, Interplanet's bonuses interested Henri far less than his employers -- or at least most of them -- knew. True, Henri had enormous debts, the result of unwise speculations; had he known as much about the international commodity market as the men who set his production goals did, Henri would never have come to Ceres in the first place. His debts were further increased by Henri's unfortunate addiction to chemin-de-fer and roulette, and his even less fortunate tendency to borrow money from any source available. He had been bom a rich man, of a great and wealthy family, and he had lost everything; he needed money. Although Zurich's bonuses were not small by normal standards, Henri needed far more money than could be acquired by ordinary means. Had his employers known just how much money Henri owed, they would never have sent him to Ceres, or anywhere else; but his creditors were careful men who never advertised the names of those who borrowed from them; and they had many suggestions for Henri. There was no way, bonuses or not, that Henri could earn what he owed; but with any luck he would leave Ceres with his debts paid and more money than he had ever had in his life. If all that was merely a small part of the profits his creditors would make from his work, Henri was not an avaricious man. He truly believed that he asked for no more than he was entitled to, and certainly he had high abilities. Henri was a small man, very neat in appearance. Even on Ceres he looked neat, and that was often very difficult. His small size was no handicap in space. In many ways it was a decided advantage. In low gravity long legs were mostly good for running into hard objects and otherwise getting in the way. Though small, Henri was no weakling. He exercised daily and he a hand with a tough job. Henri eould do the job of nearly any man in his employ; he took great pride in that, and it was certainly a useful ability. Some of his latest activities, those in favor of his creditors and unknown to his employers in Zurich, could not have been accomplished if Henri had not understood every detail of the automated refinery operation, known how to construct conveyor systems, dig out chambers in rock with explosives... Those skills, though needed, were not the key to his plan for resuming his place among the idle rich in Monte Carlo. More important than any of them was the study he had made of computer operations. That was the key to it all, and it had gone so smoothly that had Henri been a superstitious man, he might have been frightened. Sometimes he was appalled by what he was doing. He felt no guilt about betraying the Directors of the Interplanet combine; if they paid him what he was worth, he would not have to resort to embezzlement (Henri preferred to think of it as misallocation of company resources, or even as a legitimate perquisite to his office). He felt no guilt, but he was sometimes disturbed by the sheer magnitude of the operation. Not only was something like one and that was a large enough sum to impress even Henri Stoire -- but also the follow-up implications would be even larger. Mankind had never succeeded in getting nuclear fusion to work on a commercial scale. Fission worked fine and had since the #'s, but the far more valuable and efficient fusion proccess continued to be too expensive, too difficult; and the result was a continuing energy crisis that affected nearly every nation on Earth. Fertilizer prices depended on energy prices, which meant that energy prices controlled how much the poor would eat. Cheap fusion would bring cheap food -- and Henri was turning fusion over to a gang of international criminals. Still, he felt no guilt. If food was dear, it was because people were cheap. If the fools wished their children to eat well, let them either work to earn enough money or have fewer children. It was no concern of Henri's what happened to children in India, Bangla-Desh, Africa, South America... Nor was he worried about being caught. As manager for Inteiplanet he controlled the only police force on Ceres. The company guards worked for him and took his orders. The accountants reported to him and could only gain access to the computer through him. They could ask Interplanet's computer questions as long as they liked; even if they knew the real questions they should ask, it would not tell them without his authorization, and they didn't know anyway. Besides, in a few weeks it would all be over, and there would be no record of what Henri had done. Henri Stoire sat at his desk, the only real desk on Ceres and a mark of his importance, and despite his satisfaction with himself and his work, he frowned as he read the report brought to him by Captain Greiner. Wayfarer had arrived with cargo intact; excellent. But someone had tried to prevent. the ship from coming to Ceres, and that was not. Wayfarer's cargo was the key to everything. Without it they would never get all that iron and copper and tin and silver to Earth, o had done this? It took him only moments to dismiss Pacifico. The lawyer had been sent by Zurich, and was rumored to be a clever accountant as well. He would have been a nuisance, and it was as well that he was dead; but he had almost certainly not been responsible for nearly crippling Wayfarer. No. It was very likely that Pacifico's part was exactly what he had said it was, a frightened man trying to keep Captain Greiner from taking high risks with the ship. Nor was it likely that the missing George Lange had been the saboteur. The Daedalus Corporation had far too much at stake, and they hired carefully. Daedalus was responsible for getting Henri's cargo safely back to Earth; the loss of one of their senior engineers would be inconvenient, possibly worse titan that. All true. But Daedalus had a deeper role in this game. Henri's creditors had warned him that Daedalus, supposedly owned by other Zurich bankers and itself one of the stockholders in the consortium that created Interplanet, had its nose in far too many places. His creditors suspected that Daedalus worked for very powerful interests indeed -- possibly even for MacKenzie and Hansen; that Daedalus engineers were often spies reporting to Interplanet stockholders, and whenever they were around, Henri should be careful. The warning was appreciated but not needed; Henri was always careful. But it made it unlikely that Lange had tried to sabotage Wayfarer. Far more probably Lange had been snooping around and had caught the saboteur, and was put outside the ship for his trouble. So who might it be? Henri scanned the passenger and crew lists. Anyone might be an African sympathizer -- Henri had already concluded the African bloc was the most likely sponsor of the sabotage -- and that would not necessarily show in the kind of resumes sent out with passengers. Or the saboteur could be working for money. He lifted a microphone. "ready," the computer said. He returned to his scrutiny of the passenger list. He read names and specialties, paying no particular attention to what he saw, until he came to "Norsedal, Jacob. Computer Specialist. To be supervisor of computer operations, Interplanet." He read it again, then cursed. Zurich had not told him of this! True, he had requested a new programmer, but he was satisfied with his computer staff and its acting head. He had certainly not sent for any experts to take control; under his present arrangement Henri himself was the real supervisor of computer operations, and he liked it that way. This could be bothersome, especially now. Did Zurich suspect something? He would have to be very careful with this Norsedal. Was Norsedal curious? An agent of Zurich? He must be watched closely. Henri continued to scan the list. MacMillan, Ellen. Engineer, no employer. Henri smiled at that. Every ship brought two or three unemployed single women, and most claimed to be some kind of engineer. They might very well have their degrees, but generally they made a great deal more money in a far older occupation. He wondered where the MacMillan girl would go: to one of the established houses, or would she prey on the miners and prospectors and refinery workers from her own quarters? From curiosity he lifted the microphone again, "i want a photograph of "acknowledged." A few seconds later the facsimile emerged from a slot at the side of his desk. He looked it over, smiling at the blonde hair and blue eyes, pug nose; a pretty girl, young, one who would command a high price, for a while. Then the smile faded. Was there something familiar about the face? Where might he have seen it before? No. He was certain he had never seen the girl. But she reminded him of someone. He did not know who, but it was disturbing. She reminded him of someone he feared. He laughed to himself, because he feared no one; but he kept the photograph and put a tick mark against her name on the list to remind him to take some care with her dossier when it arrived. Henri Stoire was a careful man indeed. Kevin wandered through rock corridors, not quite lost but not entirely sure of where he was. He was somewhere inside the Ceres complex and as long as he did not go through an airtight door, he couldn't be very far from the central area; but he was looking for Ellen and he didn't have any idea of where to find her. When Wayfarer landed, the passengers had to help unload the ship and transfer cargo -- most of the cargo, Kevin reminded himself. One compartment remained sealed. When Kevin's share of the work was over, many of the passengers had already gone inside. Kevin followed through the airlock doors, relieved to be Off the harsh and barren surface of the asteroid. No one would say that Ceres was a pretty place, although the stars were spectacular; but Kevin had had enough stars to last him a long time. Why had Ellen left without telling him where she was going? he wondered. He would have to report in for work soon, and they might not have much time together until he could find out where he would be stationed. Then they could arrange something more permanent. The corridors shone. They had been painted with plastic to seal in air leaks, so that it was possible to move around inside the Ceres Station without a helmet. There were lights at intervals. Kevin hoped to see someone to ask directions from, but before he did, he came to a signpost. Kevin went there eagerly. They could tell him where he would be staying. There was an elderly man in the Daedalus Corporation offices. The offices themselves were merely two rooms cut in raw rock off the corridor. They were obviously little used; there was almost no furniture, and an automatic message-recording system was the only piece of large office equipment. The man was well over fifty, with a network of red lines around his mouth and chin that betrayed long exposure to face masks. He had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and much gray in his hair. He frowned at Kevin. "You'll be Senecal." "Yes." "I'm John Eliot. Senior man for Daedalus out here. You got our other people with you?" "No -- " "You should have. You're an engineer. It's your responsibility to look after non-professional employees. Now we'll have to go find them. We don't have much time. Time, Senecal, is the most valuable commodity in the Belt just now." "Yes, sir. Look, Mr. Eliot -- " "Call me Johnny. We'll either be friends or you'll hate me before long, but either way, it works better if we use first names." "Johnny. Yes, sir. I am Kevin." vin." "Yeah. I know. You were saying something?" "Mr. -- Johnny, this is my first job. I'm no professional. I'm just an engineering student, and the idea of my looking after people twice my age is funny. They wouldn't take orders from me." "We'll see. Did they get on all right with Lange?" "Yes, sir." "Too bad about him," Eliot said. "What happened, anyway?" Kevin explained all he knew. "George just vanished," he finished. "Never did find him, no trace of him. Nothing." "His stuff missing?" "No," Kevin said. "Captain Greiner has it. He didn't know what to do with it." "We'll collect it before we go up. May as well see to that, and to finding our workmen. You can leave that gear here." "All right." Kevin set down the travel cases he carried and started to go out into the corridor. "Nope," Eliot said. "Get your hat. Didn't they teach you that? First rule, never go anywhere without your helmet. We don't often have blowouts on Ceres, but it only takes one to kill you if you don't have your hat with you. Remember that." "Yes, sir." Kevin retrieved his helmet, then thoughtfully put on his tool belt as well. "Good," Eliot said. "Now let's go." He led the way through the bare rock corridor. "They'll probably be at Fat Jack's," Eliot said. "Most head there when they get off work or off a ship. Surprised you didn't get there first." "I was hoping someone would tell me where I will be staying," Kevin said. "I didn't see any hotels -- ' ' Eliot laughed. "Hell, you won't be staying on Ceres." "Sir? Johnny? If we won't be staying on Ceres, where will we be?" "Didn't Lange tell you anything?" Eliot demanded. "Don't you even know what you'll be working on?" "No, sir. I asked once, and he said I'd find out in due time. But I never did." Eliot laughed. "Well, that was the company's orders all right, but it's damn foolishness. Everybody on Ceres knows our big secret, not that it's anything to be secret about anyway. Daedalus is responsible for the delivery system to get cargo to Earth. We're building it. I expect Lange kept everything about that a big secret too?" "Yes -- " "Okay. Up there about a thousand kilometers above Ceres there's a rock a couple of hundred meters in diameter. It's mostly nickel-iron, good stuff. We're busily mining out corridors and putting in life-support systems. When we're done, we'll pack it with all the refined minerals Interplanet has collected and take it home." "Take a two-hundred-meter rock home? How?" Kevin demanded. tonnes -- ' ' "Hell, it's simple. We put hydrogen bombs at just the right place -- have to calculate the center of gravity pretty carefully -- and light 'em off. Do that a few times and we'll have that rock in just the right transfer orbit. Off she goes to Earth. Down there they do it again to stop it. No sweat." Eliot chuckled. He was obviously enjoying the look on Kevin's face. "Lange really didn't tell you, eh? Well, that's what we're tip to. You brought the bombs with you, on Wayfarer. That's why everybody got so excited down here when we heard you were in trouble. Needed the H-bombs. Without 'em, we'd really have troubles. No other way to get all that stuff home." "And somebody's going to ride this thing to Earth?" Kevin asked. "Sure. Safest place around. There'll be a couple of hundred meters of nickel-iron and rock between the crew and the bombs -- what could happen?" That made sense, but Kevin still didn't like the idea much. "Are we supposed to be the crew?" "Naw. Interplanet provides the crew. They wouldn't trust a halfanybody but their own people. Understand the manager, Mr. Stoire himself, is going. Guess I can't blame them much." They moved on through the rock corridor. In Ceres's low gravity they couldn't walk, nor could they simply glide from place to place as they would in no gravity at all. Instead they moved in a series of bounds, like oversized kangaroos. They came to a cross corridor, and Eliot turned down it. There were bright lights at the end, their glare contrasting with the dim light in the corridor. They heard sounds: shouting and singing. Happy sounds. "That's Fat Jack's place," Eliot said. "Best bar on Ceres. Mainly because it's the only bar here. Pretty good place, though. You can get nearly anything you want. Not that you'll be here all that often." Kevin had already thought of that. "Don't we get to come -- down to Ceres?" "Sure, the company provides recreation trips when we're caught up on the work. Don't cost that much to run the scooters." It looked as if everyone who had come in Wayfarer, and half the permanent crew of Ceres, were packed into Fat Jack's. The proprietor was a burly man with no legs. When one of the newcomers asked why he hadn't gone back to Earth, the owner laughed. "Sure, they'll pay my way back and give me a goddam pension, but I don't want it. What the hell use is a cripple on Earth? Out here I don't need legs." He waved to indicate the crowd in his saloon. "I make my own beer and whiskey and I get good prices. I've got a thousand friends. What do I want with Earth?" The saloon consisted of a large chamber carved from rock, a few tables and booths, and one long bar running across the back of the room. All the drinks were served in covered containers with straws, although most of the customers had learned the art of popping open the top, sucking out a drink, and closing it before their beer or whiskey drifted away. Kevin pointed out the Daedalus employees, and Eliot went to round them up. While Kevin was waiting, Ellen came in. Bill Dykes was with her. "Hi," Kevin shouted. He went over to them. "Glad I found you. They want me to go up to one of Ceres's moons -- " "C-#," Dykes said. "The one they're fitting up as a spaceship." "Right. How did you know?" Kevin asked. Dykes shrugged. "No secret what Daedalus does. Everybody on Ceres knows about the H-bombs. Wonder why they were so damn closemouthed aboard Wayfarer!" "Well, they are hydrogen bombs," Kevin said. "Sure. And bombs can kill people. Lots of other ways to get killed out here. I need a drink. You, Ellie?" "Yes, thank you." Dykes went to fight his way to the bar. "I get some recreation visits," Kevin said. "I won't see you often at first, only when I'm down. Where will you "be staying?' ' "I -- I'll be staying with Bill," Ellen said. It took Kevin a moment to understand what she had said. "In his -- " "Yes, I'll be living with him." "But -- damn it, he's old enough to be your father!" Kevin shouted. He wanted to say more: That at first she had put him off because she didn't want lasting attachments, and now they were lovers, and what was this? Bitterness made him say more: "I get it. He can pay you more than I can." "It's none of your damned business," she said. She spoke loudly, so that many of the people in the bar could hear her. "You don't own me and you have no right to make judgments." "No. I don't suppose I do," Kevin said. "Except -- except that I thought we were friends." "If you're my friend, you don't act much like it," Ellen said. "Trouble, Ellie?" Dykes was back, without the drinks he'd gone after. "Not really," she said. "Kevin. Are you about ready to leave?" John Eliot called. "Yes. I'll wait for you outside," Kevin said. He turned and left without looking at Ellen. "Hell, this place is getting to be a drag," Bill Dykes said. His voice carried through the room and out to where Kevin stood. "Let's split and throw our own party." "All right," Ellen giggled. It was obvious what kind of party Dykes had in mind. She followed the miner out. They came past Kevin, and as they did, Ellen said, very quietly, "Kevin. Please. I know you don't understand, but please trust me. And for God's sake, don't let anyone know I've said anything to you. Make people believe you hate me." With that she went on without looking back, and when Dykes made a loud ribald comment about Kevin, she laughed.    Ceres has five moons, if you can call small rocks a few hundred meters in diameter "moons." Three of them had been extensively mined, but two had been temporarily abandoned when better grades of ore were found on Ceres itself. The other one, C-#, was Kevin's home for the next few weeks. There was plenty of work and not enough people to do it. First, the asteroid had to be surveyed to find the exact center of gravity. Once that was located, a pit was to be dug for the hydrogen bombs that would be used to turn the tiny moon into an enormous rocket ship. On the opposite side the Daedalus crew would carve out chambers for the crew to live in, more compartments for the gold and silver and copper and other refined metals produced on Ceres. Meanwhile, another crew would set up huge mirrors on C-# and use those to concentrate sunlight so they could boil and refine the ores extracted from the planetoid. "No point in wasting anything," Eliot had said. When they were finished, C-# would cany a cargo worth half a teroid itself would be valuable -- nickel-iron which would end up in Earth orbit. Refineries there would extract the iron to use in space contonnes of rock would be useful in orbit. The asteroid could be used as a platform. Kevin's job was installation of the life-support equipment for the flight crew. With the help of miners and a lot of mining machinery, he hollowed out the crew chambers, then sprayed them with a thick coating of plastic; when the plastic dried, the chambers were airtight. Airlock doors were machined from chunks of the moonlet itself, and set on hinges. Sometimes the whole structure reminded Kevin more of a series of bank vaults than a spaceship; everything was massive, and rather crudely made. There were no work shifts, there was simply a job that had to be done. Eliot explained what was needed and was available for consultation. Otherwise he left Kevin alone. When one task was completed Eliot would check it out, then assign another. Kevin found the job exacting, but it was important work, and everyone was enthusiastic about it. They were taking part in something that might change man's future. "Think about it," Eliot said. "If we can get all of Earth's metals out here, they won't have to strip-mine on Earth. No pollution down there. You know, in fifty years Earth can be one big park, with all the industries out in space." Kevin became lost in a maze of calculations: food, oxygen, and water consumption for a crew of two (with standby provision for three) on a trip four hundred days long; g stresses which the equipment would endure when the onemegaton H-bombs went off; finding stress seams in the nickel-iron moonlet so they could be reinforced. Slowly the "ship" began to look like something that could support human life, with fuel cells for electric power, caves of ice for water and cooling, telescopes and radar for finding the exact position; navigation computer, galley, bunk rooms -- with a separate stateroom for each of the crew, there being no space limits at all. Finally Eliot relented and took the work crew down to Ceres. They went in a scooter much like the one used to get from the Earth satellite to Wayfarer: an open framework with seats for the passengers, a baggage compartment, and a large kerosene-oxygen rocket engine. The scooters also had a navigation computer; C-# moved around Ceres at more than a third of a kilometer each second, and the total velocity change needed to get from the "moon" to Ceres was more than eight hundred miles an hour. The transfer orbit was tricky. Kevin talked with the scooter pilot in Fat Jack's after they arrived on Ceres. "Yeah, sure, I could eyeball it," Hal Donnelly said. "But it'd be tough. Not like flying an airplane." Donnelly had once been a test pilot, and would be one of the crew accompanying C-# on the long trip to Earth. "Airplanes have air to work with. You can turn a comer, or slow down. Scooter doesn't work that way." Kevin wasn't really listening to the pilot. He was thinking about Ellen. There had been so much work on C-# that he hadn't had much time to brood about her before -- except when he was ready to go to sleep at night -- but he had felt a quick excitement when Eliot announced they were going down to Ceres, arid he hoped to see her. He didn't know what to say to her, but there had to be some way -- He didn't know how to ask about her. He was afraid of what he would hear. His fellow workers on C-# had talked about the various prostitutes on Ceres, and although none of them had mentioned Ellen by name, they all assumed that any single woman who came out not under contract to one of the companies could have only one purpose in mind. Why the hell was she living with Bill Dykes? She'd hardly spoken to Dykes on the ship. She certainly hadn't known him very well, yet she moved in with him her first day on Ceres. It didn't make sense. Of course it makes sense, Kevin thought. She likes the guy and I just didn't know it. She's got every right to move in with anybody she wants to and you've got no call to be jealous about it. She said everything would be over when they got to Ceres. It was just a shipboard thing. He could tell himself that, but it didn't help. "You haven't heard a damned thing I said," Hal Donnelly said. "You drink my liquor but you don't listen to me." The pilot was grinning slightly. "Oh -- uh, sorry," Kevin said. "No sweat. I know what you need. I'm about to go looking for a little poon myself. I know a good house. Want to come along?" The idea was not attractive. Kevin still hoped to meet Ellen. He knew that wasn't very reasonable, and that she was likely to be with someone else, but there was always a chance -- "Thanks, Hal. Not just yet. I'll have a couple more." The pilot shrugged. "Suit yourself. We lift out of here in thirtyfour hours. Meet you here." "Right. And thanks for the drink." "'S okay. You'll get me one next time. Right now I've got a more urgent urge..." Hal grinned again and left the bar. And just what the hell am I doing here? Kevin wondered. I don't know anybody in this place. He ordered another drink. The vacuumdistilled whiskey was rough and strong and cost too much. Kevin sipped at it disconsolately. He didn't want to leave because Fat Jack's was the place where everyone came to find people. The recreation schedule for the C-# crew was known and posted in Fat Jack's: If Ellen wanted to see him, she'd know where to find him. Jacob Norsedal came into the bar. "Hello," he said. He took a place across from Kevin. There was no real need to sit in Ceres's low gravity, but the habit dies hard; and it is convenient to anchor yourself in one place. "I've been computing the trajectory your moonlet will take back to Earth." "I'm still not sure this will work," Kevin said. Norsedal looked surprised. "Of course it will. Think of it as a fusion spacedrive. Plenty of energy in "I wasn't thinking about the energy," Kevin said. "It's the navigation. We can't really locate the center of gravity all that well -- too much guesswork." "Run it off," Norsedal said. He offered his belt computer. "Takes a lot of energy to get that much iron to rotate. So they're off a little -- you've got little tamped-implosion kiloton bombs to correct that, and the rocket motors for fine adjustment." "Yeah, I've seen the numbers," Kevin said. "It looks silly as hell, mounting big rocket engines on the ground. Big things." The four Saturn-sized rocket engines were mounted in a cruciform pattern, pointing away from the center of the cross. They would be used to turn C-# in the right direction. "But it's still using bombs," Kevin said. Norsedal shrugged. It was obvious that to him bombs were just another device to channel energy; it was doubtful that he thought of them as bombs at all, or even imagined the real devices. They were more input numbers into his equations, data to be fed into the computer. "Have you seen much of Ceres?" Jacob asked. "No. I was only here a few hours after Wayfarer landed, and this is my first trip down since." "Well, I know a good place to eat," Norsedal said. "The food in the Interplanet commissary is all right, but it's nothing to rave about. I can find some real steaks -- " "Steaks! Terrific. We've been eating reconstituted stew. And textured vegetable proteins. And -- " . "Spare me those horrors," Norsedal said. He patted his ample belly. "If I had to eat that way. I'd waste to nothing. Come on, let's get a good dinner." He hustled Kevin out of the bar and off to one of the rock corridors. Ceres was honeycombed with passages. Some were still used as working mines. Others were abandoned mine shafts, now used as part of the living quarters. There were airlocks at intervals along the corridors. Jacob led the way through a maze of passages, and soon they were a long way from the inhabited parts of Ceres Station. "Where the hell are we going?" Kevin demanded. "Short cut." Norsedal continued to scurry along. As he'd predicted when Kevin first met him, his weight and ungainly appearance were no handicaps in low gravity. They turned another comer and went upward. There was an airlock there. Jacob came very close to Kevin and spoke softly, almost a whisper. "We're going outside now. Please, just follow me, and don't use your suit radio whatever you do." "But -- why?" Kevin kept his voice low to match Norsedal' s. "Will you trust me? It's important." Kevin nodded. He'd known Norsedal through the whole trip out; whatever Jacob was doing, it wasn't dishonest. He put on his helmet. Norsedal opened the airlock and they went through the double doors. It was night outside on Ceres, but the overhead synchronous satellite mirror left the surface bathed in light. Down in the crevasse where the airlock opened they could see only by starlight, and Norsedal did not use a flash. He led the way, Kevin following closely. Then he turned into a cavern so deep that there was no light at all. He went on, downward, and turned a comer before he switched on a flash. Then he gestured, finger to lips, and went around another turn. There was an inflatable shelter there with its own airlock. The outer door stood open. Jacob gestured toward it, then followed Kevin in. There was the hiss of pumps and the airlock chamber pressurized, then the inner door opened. Ellen MacMillan was inside. XV "I don't think anyone noticed us leaving," Norsedal said. "But I'll have to get back quickly. I have to go on duty in the computer center." Kevin hardly heard him. He was staring at Ellen. He thought she was lovely. "But -- " "We'll explain," she said. "I wanted to keep you out of this, Kevin, but I can't. I need help. Will you help me?" "I'll try. But -- " "Yes. It's such a long story, I don't know where to begin," she said. "Kevin, I didn't come here to work as an engineer. Or to be a prostitute, either." "I never thought that," Kevin said quickly. "That's sweet of you. But I hope everybody else does," she said. "I'm really not very good at the secret-agent business. Kevin, I -- I work for some of the owners of Interplanet. For Hansen Enterprises. They have a contract for all the Arthurium mined in the Belt." Arthurium. One of the superheavy elements. In the first quarter of the Twentieth Century scientists thought there were only ninety-two elements. Then the nuclear engineers discovered they could make plutonium, and californium, and a host of other elements heavier than uranium-#, but all the new elements were unstable. Finally a stable natural element, atomic number of #, was discovered. In the years that followed other 'super-heavy elements were found, but only in trace amounts. The superheavies were in the cores of planets, and planetary cores are hard to get to: thousands of miles underground. Ceres was only a couple of hundred miles in radius, but had once "een the core of a much larger planet: there were super-heavy elements in abundance. Abundance is a relative term, of course: The supers are still very rare, found only in fractions-of-a-percent concentration; but they were available, and the most valuable of all was Arthurium, a member of the Tin-Niobium family, with the property of being superconductive at temperatures far higher than any other known superconductors. "And somebody is stealing the Arthurium," Jacob Norsedal said. "I'm sure of it." "That's what I came out to look into," Ellen said. "When the manager here reported only a few kilograms of Arthurium had been extracted, we wondered. Understand, it might have been true. Arthurium is very rare. But from the original assay figures, we thought there should be hundreds of kilograms of Arthurium, and we -- Hansen Enterprises -- needs it. Hansen scientists think they can solve the fusion problem if they have enough!" Kevin found a place to sit. The shelter wasn't well furnished; in fact it wasn't furnished at all; but there were several boxes of gear stacked at one end next to the pumps and air supply, and Kevin found a perch on them. He tried to digest the information he'd been given. Fusion power would be priceless. And Arthurium, the little that was known to exist, sold for over a hundred thousand francs per stake here. "What do you want with me?" he asked. His voice was harsh. "Why are you angry?" Ellen asked. He didn't say anything. "Dykes," Jacob Norsedal prompted. "Oh." Ellen smiled. "Kevin, Bill Dykes has known my father for -- since long before I was born. He worked for Hansen Enterprises on the Moon. When I needed a place to stay, I had to ask him, because I was afraid someone here might suspect me, and I didn't want anyone else to get hurt. They killed George Lange, don't forget. I have no right to ask your help, but I don't know where else to go." "You mean -- " Kevin's grin was broad and jheepish. "And I almost drove myself crazy thinking about you and -- " "I'm sorry." "I have to get back," Norsedal said. "If anyone asks. I'll say you didn't want steak after all and went to find a cat house. I doubt that anyone is interested in you, Kevin, but they might be and it's best to have a story." "I must be stupid," Kevin said. "I don't know where you fit into this, Jacob." "He's an honest man," Ellen said. "I was hired by the Zurich office," Norsedal said. "And I'm supposed to report directly to them if I find anything wrong. Not that Zurich is suspicious of the management here, but with all that money at stake, they wanted an independent check -- to make certain." "Just as we did," Ellen said. "Only we were suspicious." "And you found something?" Kevin asked. "Yes." Norsedal nodded vigorously. "There are whole memory areas in the computer banks that I can't access. And the programs run too long. That means the computer is following instructions that don't appear in the flow diagrams. I haven't found out what's going on yet, but I think I will. I managed to get a print-out of the computer's core, all the instructions. They're in binary of course, so it takes time to analyze what I have, but I'm sure there are operations going on that don't appear in the log. Mining operations, for example." "And in the refinery," Ellen said. "It wouldn't take much to cover up a few hundred kilograms missing among all the thousands of tons of rock they process, tons of gold they've extracted -- " "And the refinery is nearly automatic," Norsedal added. "I can use the computer to find out just who might be involved by analyzing the work schedules, but I've been afraid to do that until I know just who's been using it and for what. It might be programmed to tell whenever people ask that kind of question." Norsedal went to the airlock and squeezed through the narrow inner door. "Good luck." He closed the lock and started the pumps. "How does he -- why are you two working together?" Kevin asked. "Are you sure you can trust him?" "Yes. Henri Stoire, the manager, sent for dossiers on all the passengers aboard Wayfarer. They came twenty hours ago, and Jacob had to pass them along -- but he figured out who I am from my resume sheets." "If he could, so can Stoire -- " "I know," Ellen said. She sounded worried. "That's why I'm here. I don't know what to do. Ever since Stoire got the dossiers, there's been no communication from Ceres to Earth. The equipment has malfunctioned, Stoire says -- but Jacob says it hasn't." "And who are you?" Kevin demanded. "Do you really want to know -- no. Please, Kevin. I don't want to tell you." "All right." He went to her and held out his arms. After a moment she crossed the tiny distance that remained and kissed him. "Not very passionate in these pressure suits," Ellen laughed. "We could -- " She looked at him sharply. "Oh, hell," he said. "You wanted my help. I won't complicate things by -- Ellen, I think I've been in love with you for a long time. Damn it, I know I am. Why else would it have bothered me so much when I thought you were living with Bill Dykes, maybe being -- " She cut him off with another kiss. "We can talk about this later. And we will. We really will. But now -- " "What is it you need?" "I have to set up communications to reach off Ceres," she said. "Everything happened so fast! I was here for weeks, and I didn't really learn anything. Bill Dykes thought there was something strange happening at the refinery, but he couldn't be sure. They're very careful who they let work there. I didn't really have anything to report, nothing solid to be suspicious about, until Jacob came to tell me about discrepancies he found in the computer log. Now I've got to get a message to the Moon." "How?" Kevin demanded. "Bill and Jacob got this equipment," she said. "Bill knew about this shelter, and Jacob was able to cover the communications gear by listing it as lost in the computer inventory. So we have enough electronics and power supply to set up a high-gain antenna and get off our message, only there's too much for me to do by myself. Jacob isn't very good at outside work and he'd be missed if he didn't show up. And Bill thinks they've been watching him ever since he began asking questions. A few hours ago they gave him a special overtime assignment, that's not unusual, and if he didn't take it, they'd know something was wrong -- so I couldn't think of anyone to help, and Jacob knew the scooter would be down from C-# and he went to find you and I hoped you would help me -- " "Shhh. Of course I'll help you." At that moment Kevin would have done anything for her, including digging a hole all the way through to the other side of Ceres. He decided that he liked being in love.    The gear was heavy. Weight is not a very meaningful concept in gravity as low as Ceres's, but even in low gravity things have mass; large things are hard to start moving, and just as hard to stop. The surface of Ceres is rugged: the asteroid has been battered by colliyears, and there is no atmosphere to smooth out the craters and crags the constant bombardment creates. Carrying several hundred pounds of equipment -- even when it only "weighs" thirty pounds or so -- is not easy. Ellen had gotten from Bill Dykes a map of the area around Ceres Station itself, and Dykes had selepted a plateau three kilometers away as the best location for the transmitter. It was cut off from the Station by high peaks, but had a good visibility to space. They struggled across the crags and craters with their enormous loads, using their flashlights sparingly, and not talking at all. Despite the hard work, Kevin felt exuberant, filled with Joy and love -- and hatred for whomever was trying to thwart the development of fusion power. Kevin remembered the energy shortages in his childhood, and although he knew that what he had called poverty would have been fabulous wealth to much of the world, he could remember the hard times he had grown up in. Fusion could change much of that for the whole world, and it was in danger from selfish people who only wanted money. They reached the plateau. Kevin came close to Ellen and put his helmet to hers. "We can't get this done without communication," he said. "Yes. I guess we'll just have to risk using our suit radios at lowest power. I don't think anyone is looking for us. Why would they be?" "No reason," Kevin said, but he worried anyway. They opened the cases and took out a collapsible antenna. The elements bolted together to form a large aprabolic dish which could be pointed toward Earth. The work was maddening. Each nut and bolt seemed a live thing, ready to slip from their heavy gloves and fall to vanish in the deep shadows. Connectors and parts which would have been simple to work with inside with plenty of light became complex puzzles, shapes not recognizable from the instruction diagrams. "Putting together Christmas toys," Ellen said as she searched for a large part that had somehow simply vanished in shadow although it couldn't be more than a meter away. Eventually they got it done, and began to set up the telescope and quadrant they would use to point the antenna toward Earth's Moon. "Earth's still below the horizon," Kevin said as they leveled the telescope platform. "I think we're going to make it. Ellen, tell me something." "Yes?" "You didn't grow up in any orphanage. They don't assemble Christmas toys in foster homes and orphanages." "Yes they -- " "And you said the first day I met you that your father -- 'Daddy' you called him -- made you study gymnastics." "Oh. I'd forgotten I told you that," she said. "We -- I was distracted at the time." She laughed softly. "So who are you?" Kevin asked. "Oh come now, Mr. Senecal." The voice was a man's, cultured, and entirely strange to Kevin. Kevin jumped in a startled reaction and almost upset the telescope. "Haven't you guessed that yet? Allow me to introduce you to Miss Glenda Hansen-MacKenzie . ' ' There were two men on the plateau with them. One held a small rifle, the other a pistol. "Please keep your hands where I can see them," the smaller intruder said. "Sorry to interrupt you, but I really don't want you sending messages to Earth. I'm glad we found you in time." "Who the hell are you?" Kevin demanded. "It's Henri Stoire," Ellen said. "Good morning," Stoire said calmly. "Hal, get their tool belts, please." "Yes, sir." "Hal Donnelly?" Kevin said. "Sad but true," the scooter pilot said. "Too bad you had to get mixed up in this, Kevin. And you owe me a drink, too." Donnelly moved expertly, his pistol held well out of reach, and took their tool belts. "What are you going to do with us?" Ellen demanded. "Well, now, that is a problem," Stoire said. "There is a great deal of money at stake here. A very great deal. I can hardly allow you to get in my way." It's happening again, Kevin thought. It was exactly like the time in the alley when the muggers had taken his wallet. He felt violated, humiliated, helpless -- and Ellen, no, her name is Glenda he thought irrelevantly, they'll kill her. He tensed, ready to jump at Donnelly. Maybe Glenda could get away if he tried -- "On the other hand, you are worth a great deal of money," Stoire said. "What would your mother and father pay to have you back safe? Our scheme is almost perfect, but we all know there are no perfect plans. Right, Hal?" "I don't know, sir -- " "There is the sabotage group," Stoire said. "True, I believe I have identified their agent, but suppose I have not? If he were to stop C-# from going on schedule, we would be left with nothing. It would do no great harm to have Miss HansenMacKenzie hidden away, ready to produce when needed. I expect Aeneas MacKenzie would not even be above getting all of us off scot free in exchange for his daughter. It never hurts to have insurance." "Well, yes sir," Donnelly said. "If you put it that way. But where can we keep them?" "I believe I have an idea," Stoire sai(l. He moved closer to Donnelly and they spoke helmet to helmet for a moment. "Right. Come on, let's go," Donnelly said. "That way." He pointed with his flash. "And don't try anything, all right? I got nothing against either one of you. But I'll sure as hell shoot if I have to. There's just too much riding on this." "How did you -- how did you find us?" Glenda demanded. Stoire's voice was maddeningly calm in their headsets. "When I first looked at your photograph, you reminded me of someone," he said. "I could not think who, although I have an excellent memory for faces. It concerned me sufficiently that I made a careful study of your dossier. An intriguing document. Carefully done. Really good work. But a few minor discrepancies. Your medical profile shows excellent physical condition, perfect teeth. Is that usual for foundlings? I do not think so. And the education you claim in your dossier does not match the abilities you showed aboard IVayfarer. A few other such things, all minor in themselves, but enough to make me think again. Where had I seen a blond woman who frightened me? And then I remembered. I met your mother many years ago, at least thirty years. She was blond then and was not so shy of having her photograph taken. A remarkably lovely woman, your mother. And you very much resemble the way she looked in the days before she married your father. ' ' "Down there," Hal said. "Take that trail. And go slow." "But how did you find us?" Glenda demanded. "Ah. Once I knew who you were, it was obvious that I would have to question your, ah, lover. Mr. Dykes was most uncooperative, but he is not security minded. There was a copy of a map, marked, in his quarters. It took no great ability to go on from there." They reached a wide ravine and started down into it. "I don't suppose you would like to tell me how much you have found out," Stoire said. "Go to hell," Kevin told him. "Be polite." Stoire's voice had a hard edge. "So far I have been as gentle as possible under the circumstances. You can be made to talk, Senecal, and you are expendable. I point out that we have more air in our tanks than you have in yours. We need only wait. For that matter, I expect you would tell us anything to spare the young lady the ordeal of our questioning -- " "Kevin, don't say anything!" Glenda shouted. "But you see, it doesn't really matter what you know," Stoire said. "I have Dykes, and we have drugs. It will not be necessary to question you two, which is as well for you." TTiey reached the bottom of the ravine. There was a scooter there. "Get on," Hal said. He took wire from his tool kit and bound Kevin and Glenda to the scooter seats. "All right, sir, I can handle them," the pilot said. "Undoubtedly," Stoire said. "But -- I think I will accompany you. Miss Hansen-MacKenzie is not above offering bribes -- " "I know better," the pilot insisted. "Of course you do. Still, I think we will both be happier if we know we can trust each other -- and the ride should be entertaining." Stoire climbed onto the scooter seat. "Let's go." The pilot came around and turned off their transmitters. He left the receivers on. "Okay, kids," he said. Hang on." He climbed into the saddle and ignited the rocket motor. The scooter rose swiftly from Ceres. The pilot studied the plot in his navigation screen, then made careful course corrections. They moved rapidly away from Ceres, out into the black depths of space. Kevin leaned toward Glenda. Their helmets touched. "It looks like he's taking us up to C-#," Kevin said. "That doesn't make sense." "Kevin, we've got to get loose -- " "Sure. How?" He strained against the wire that held him. Nothing gave. "I can't do anything. And Stoire's watching -- " "I don't know what to do either." "I love you." "Kevin, I'm -- do you really think they meant it? Where could he be taking us? I think they're going to dump us in space." "They want you as a hostage," Kevin said. He tried to sound more confident than he felt. And yet, he thought, it made sense. If there was a place Stoire could keep her, it could be important to have Glenda HansenMacKenzie on tap. MacKenzie's reputation was known all over the world. If he made a promise -- or a threat -- he'd keep it. What might he do to get his daughter back? But it didn't make sense to keep Kevin Senecal alive...    There was a stony rock a hundred meters in diameter just ahead. It was smaller than C-#. There were signs of mining on it, but no lights or people. It looked deserted. Donnelly carefully maneuvered the scooter toward the rock, and finally set it down. "Well, here you are," he said. "Your new home." "Where are we?" Kevin asked. "C-#," Stoire said. "Abandoned three thousand hours ago. There was enough equipment left here to keep you alive. Food, oxygen, fuel cells. We will take your suits and radios -- ' ' "Do you really want to do that, sir?" Donnelly asked. "May as well kill them and be done with it. Their radios won't reach Ceres, and they will probably have to make outside repairs. If you want them alive, you'd better leave them their suits." "All right," Stoire said. "Of course, there aren't any scooters here," Donnelly said. He came around with a pair of wire cutters. He clipped the wires holding Kevin's left hand to the scooter, then pulled Kevin's hands together and took a turn of wire around them. Then he did the same to Glenda before he cut them free from the scooter. "There," he said. "I'll leave your tool kits, too. You'll get loose with a little work. The airlock's right over there. Now, off you go. Go on, jump. Move. Get going." They Jumped off the scooter. "Careful how you wiggle around," Donnelly said. "You can jump right off this rock. Won't do you any good except to kill you, of course, but you can do it. 'Bye." He started the scooter engine. "Au revoir" Henri Stoire said. "Actually, I expect that's a misstatement. I do not think we will meet again." The scooter moved rapidly away. Kevin found the wire cutters in his tool kit and helped Glenda free her hands. Then she cut him loose and they went to the airlock. "Gauges show pressure," Glenda said. "I guess we really can live here." "Sure." Kevin cycled the lock and they went inside. "We can stay alive, but -- there's just no way we're going to get off this rock! We could be here for years."    They explored their prison. There wasn't much to see. A few hundred meters of tunnels sprayed with plastic to hold air; some chambers carved out as quarters; and gear left when the mining operations were suspended. "There's a lot of valuable stuff here," Kevin said. "Surely someone will come back for it." "When Henri Stoire orders it done," Glenda said bitterly. "It all belongs to Interplanet." "Yeah." Kevin continued to check the equipment available. "There's mining stuff." "So we mine the rocks, refine steel, and build a scooter," Glenda said. "Somehow I don't think that's going to work." "No. I guess not." Kevin continued to wander. A small kitchen. Bathroom. "Hot showers," Kevin . said bitterly. "All the comforts. And they weren't lying about food. Enough to keep us going for months. Not much variety, I'm afraid, tvp's. Dehydrated stew. Well, we won't starve." They wouldn't run out of power either. There were tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, and a dozen fuel cells to produce electricity from them. There was even a thick window set in the outer room of the mine. It looked down on Ceres. The tiny rock was locked in rotation with Ceres so that it always faced the asteroid below. "So near and so far," Kevin instead of three hundred kilometers." He watched as they moved over Ceres. It would be simple enough to jump off their moonlet prison, but it would do no good: they would still be in orbit around Ceres. Kevin took out his pocket computer. "C-#. We are # kilometers above the surface and we're moving at not quite three-tenths of a kilometer a second relative to Ceres. That's Just about a thousand kilometers an hour." "Which might as well be a million," Glenda said. "Damn. I have made a rather thorough mess of things, haven't I?" "I'm worried about Jacob." She nodded. "So am I. I haven't even dared think about him. Do -- can they make Bill Dykes tell them that Jacob was helping us?' ' "Given enough time, or the right drugs, anybody can be made to tell anything." "And then they'll kill Bill and Jacob both." Glenda's voice was bitter and full of self-accusation. "It's my fault. I wanted to be certain. I wanted to find out where they had hidden the arthurium. Catch all the conspirators. Give the whole package to Aeneas, all wrapped up." "You tried to get a message off. What more could you have done?" Kevin demanded. "I don't know. I could have tried to get help. I think Dr. Vaagts would have believed me. Or Joe Harwitt. Westinghouse has a lot to lose -- " "Not if they're buying the Arthurium. And you can't know, Glenda. With this much at stake, anybody could be involved. Anybody at all." "I know. That's what my father warned me about before I left. He didn't want me to come -- " "I don't blame him much." "But I had to be so damned smart! And I've gotten my friends killed, and there's nothing I can do. I couldn't even get a message off!" Kevin shrugged. "We did the best we could -- " "Did we? I didn't try everything. I could have sent something through the main computer." Kevin frowned. "I suppose Jacob could have done that. It would have been dangerous. What we tried was better. A few more hours and we'd have done it. Or if Dykes hadn't left that marked map..." "Jacob had another plan," Ellen said. "He was working on the instructions Stoire gave the computer. Jacob thinks, he can take control of the main computer away from Stoire. With just a little more work. Then we'd have been in control of the whole station." "Yeah, but it has to work the first time," Kevin said. "All they need to do is keep Norsedal away from the control console." "They couldn't keep me away," Glenda said. "If I knew the key commands, I could make the computer obey me. I should have waited, but no, I had to do things my way. Damn, I'm an idiot." "Don't be so hard on yourself. How could you order their computer around?" "Implant. I have a transceiver implant, and an acceptor was put into the Ceres main computer when it was built on Earth. It was supposed to be my secret weapon, but I never got a chance to use it." "Implant." Kevin fell silent for a moment. "I'm told those cost half a She didn't say anything. "I keep forgetting. You have half What -- how does it feel to grow up rich?" he asked. "Confined. Filled with obligations if your father is Aeneas MacKenzie." "Yeah, I guess it would be like that." "I ran away from it," Glenda said. "Oh, not really. But I grew up on the Moon, and I was the little princess, and it was stifling. When I was fifteen, I convinced myself I couldn't stand it any longer. I went to Earth for an education." She shuddered. "It was terrible at first. Getting used to high gravity, to rain, and dust and storms and cars and freeways -- terrible and magnificent too. Sailing. I learned to sail a boat. You can fly on the Moon, but you can't sail. "So I went to school on Earth and I had this phoney identity, and I kidded myself I was independent, but of course I wasn't. I was still taking mother's money. And I was always afraid any boys I met would find out who I was and then they'd pretend to like me because I was the little princess -- I was a mess, Kevin. "I realized that finally, that I was worse off then ever because I was taking the benefits of being a Hansen-MacKenzie and I was shucking the responsibilities. So when I went back for a visit and heard about the Ceres operation and heard mother worrying about the small yields of Arthurium, I decided it was time to try to earn my keep." "So it was all made up, about you and the foster homes, and the Futurians?" "Most of it. Not the Futurians. They're real, and I am a junior member of their Fellowship. I thought Aeneas would be upset about it, but he wasn't. He supports them, and they've helped us. They're one reason you're here, Kevin." "How's that?" "Dr. Farrington is one of the Fellowship. One of the leaders. After -- when we were on the ship, I was curious about you, so I sent for more information. One of the messages I got back was from him. He thinks highly of you." "But -- why did you want to know more about me?" "Do I have to tell you?" She moved closer to him. "Kevin, I'm afraid I've made a thorough mess of everything. I don't feel much like Miss Supercompetent Independence just now." "And I'm one poor excuse for a hero," Kevin said. "But I do love you -- " "And you said so before you knew who I was. That's important," she said. And then they didn't talk at all for a long time.    The scooter came back thirty hours later. It didn't land. Instead it closed to a few dozen meters from their moonlet and a suited figure leaped off. As the scooter drove away again, the newcomer landed with a suit reaction pistol and came to the airlock. "Jacob!" They let him in eagerly. "What happened?" Kevin demanded. "They caught me," Norsedal sighed. "And it's worse than that. They killed your friend Dykes -- " "Oh no." Tears formed in Glenda's eyes. "And Wiley Ralston," Norsedal said. "Wiley? How was he mixed up in this?" Kevin asked. "He was an agent for the African bloc," Norsedal said. "Stoire had him arrested and held a trial. Accused him of murdering you two, and George Lange. He was probconfessed to trying to kill the two of you when you were leaving Earth -- " "He was the saboteur on Wayfarer?" Kevin asked. "Wiley?" "It looks that way," Jacob said. "He was executed for it." "Damn," Kevin muttered. "There goes that chance. I was trying to see how Stoire intended to get away with it. I mean, the Hsen-MacKenzie heir can't just vanish! Aeneas MacKenzie would be out here with a shipload of Hansen security agents and blood in his eye -- " "And now he's got a scapegoat," Glenda said. "Dad will be suspicious, but -- is there any evidence left?" "There is now," Jacob said. "The computer still has a record of what happened. But Stoire will have done something about that before Mr. MacKenzie arrives. He is coming, by the way. There was a report that Valkyrie left Luna Station seven hundred hours ago. I wouldn't be surprised if he were bringing company police. But you've been reported dead and your murderer has been caught and executed." "Looks pretty hopeless," Kevin said. "Unless you brought along a pocket scooter." "Alas, no," Norsedal said. "They even took my computer." "I don't understand why you're alive," Kevin said. Jacob grinned slightly. "They're having some problems with the main computer just now. If they ever get them fixed. I'll be expendable, but they thought it might be best to have me around just in case they don't find the bugs." "Will that stop them?" Glenda asked. "Alas, no. Mr. Stoire is very clever. He'll figure out what I did, just as I finally figured out what he did." "You know, then?" Kevin asked. "Yes. Could I have some water?" "Sure. There's plenty. Plenty of everything. We could be here for years," Kevin said. "Not me." Norsedal's voice didn't change. "You see, they didn't leave me any insulin." "How -- how long?" Glenda asked after a while. "If I'm careful about what I eat, three or four hundred hours," Jacob sai. "Perhaps longer." "We've got to get out of here," Glenda said. "I agree, but I confess I don't know how," Norsedal said. "I was telling you what Stoire did. It was very clever, really. First he programmed the computer to report a much lower percentage of .Arthurium in the ore. Understand, the computer knew better, and the refinery operated just the same as it always did, but the reported recovery was low. Then they told the computer to forget about one storage area, and routed ninety percent of the Arthurium there. Simple, clean, and really very pretty. And once Stoire erases the teal log, there'll be no record of it at all."    They had explored every tunnel in the prison a dozen times, but found nothing. A hundred hours passed. There was nothing they could do. No laser equipment to send signals with. No electronics. Nothing but some mining gear and the basic materials for staying alive. Even that took a lot of work. The algae in the tank farms had died, and their only power source was fuel cells. There were tanks of hydrogen and oxygen for those, but the carbon dioxide scrubbers needed constant recharging. They had less time than Kevin had thought. "I would say two people have a thousand hours more oxygen," Norsedal said. "I could -- " He hesitated. "I can add a couple of hundred hours to that, and it won't really matter." "I'll be damned if you will," Kevin said. "Something Will turn up." "I doubt it," Jacob said. "C-# is scheduled to go in about nine hundred hours. Daedalus is putting in the final equipment right now." "And then Stoire and Donnelly are gone," Kevin said. "But how does he get away with it?" Jacob shrugged. "It would be no great trick to put the Arthurium aboard C-#. As gold, for example. The bombs go off, C-# heads for Earth. Somewhere between here and there a ship -- it wouldn't have to be a very large one -- meets them and when C-# arrives in Earth orbit, the Arthurium is gone, with nothing left aboard that's not supposed to be there." "And it would be stupid to leave us alive," Kevin said. "Once he's ready to leave, he'll come back with Donnelly and finish us. No evidence, no embarrassing bodies -- " "More likely he will take Glenda on C-#," Jacob said. "Donnelly is part of his crew." "I'm going to go have another look around," Kevin said. "There's got to be something we can do." "I hope you think of it," Glenda said. "I can't." "Alas, nor I," Jacob added.    Kevin prowled through the corridors of their prison. There has to be some way, he told himself. Ceres mocked him from below, less than three hundred kilometers down. It hung huge in the night sky. Three hundred kilometers down, and we're moving about half a kilometer a second relative to Ceres, Kevin thought. That's not very much velocity. Under a thousand miles an hour. It doesn't take much energy to get to that speed. How much gasoline does it take to accelerate a car on Earth up to a hundred miles an hour -- a gallon or so? We only need ten times that, not even that much. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen. Marvelous rocket fuels if we only had a rocket. More than enough to get us down, except that the temperature of hydrogen burning in oxygen is a lot hotter than anything we have to contain it in -- No. That's not right. The fuel cells do it. But they do it by slowing down the reaction, and they can't be turned into rocket engines. He remembered the early German Rocket Society experiments described by Willy Ley. The Berliners had blown up more rockets than they flew, and they were only using gasoline, not hydrogen. Liquid-fuel rockets need big hairy pumps, and Kevin didn't have any pumps. What did he have? Fuel cells, plenty of them, and so what? An electric-powered rocket was theoretically possible, but Kevin didn't have the faintest idea of how to build one, even if there was enough equipment around to do it with. He wasn't sure anyone had ever built one -- certainly he couldn't. Back to first principles, he thought. The only way to change velocity in space is with a rocket. What is a rocket? A machine for throwing mass overboard. The faster the mass thrown away goes in one direction, the faster the rocket will go in the other, and the less you have to throw. All rockets are no more than a means of spiewing out mass in a narrow direction. A rocket could consist of a man sitting in a bucket and throwing rocks backward. That might get a few feet per second velocity change, but so what? There simply wasn't enough power in human muscles -- even if he did have a lot of rocks. Was there any other way to throw them? Not fast; and unless the thrownaway mass had a high velocity, the rocket wouldn't be any use. He went on through the tunnels, looking at each piece of equipment he found, trying to think of how it might be used. You can throw anything overboard to make a rocket. Hydrogen, no for example. That's all Wayfarer's engines did, heat up hydrogen and let it go out through the rocket nozzle. We have hydrogen under pressure -- Not enough. Nowhere near enough hydrogen and nowhere near enough pressure, not to get velocity changes of hundreds of miles an hour. Ditto for oxygen. Gas under compression just can't furnish enough energy. What would? Chemical energy; burning hydrogen in oxygen would do it, but it gave off too much; there was nothing to contain that reaction except the fuel cells and they did it by slowing the reaction way down and -- And I'm back where I started, Kevin thought. Plenty of energy in the fuel cells if I could find a way to use it. Could I heat a gas with electricity? Certainly, only how -- His eye fell on the hotwater tank in the crew quarters. An electric hotwater tank. There was a pressure gauge: forty pounds per square inch. Forty p.s.i. -- He looked at the tank as if seeing it for the first time, then went running back to the others. "Glenda, Jacob, I've got it." Jacob Norsedal bent over Kevin's pocket calculator. "I have worked it by three different methods and I get nearly the same answer each way," he said. "I believe it will work." "Sure it works." Kevin grinned. "Steam at forty p.s.i. will come out fast. About a kilometer a second." "I believe you," Glenda said. "But it sounds silly. Steam rockets?" Kevin shrugged. "It is silly. There are a lot more efficient systems. But this will work -- " "In a low g field," Jacob said. "You will not have much thrust. Of course you won't need much." "I'm sure it works," Kevin said. "Now all we have to do is build it." He made himself sound confident; he knew how much room for error there was in his figures. "Look, it takes # calories to turn a gram of water into steam. We heat that steam up another thirty or forty degrees and let it out. The energy is moving molecules. We know the molecular weight of water, so we can figure the number of molecules in a gram and -- " "I worked it too," Glenda reminded him. "And I get the same answer you do, but it doesn't mean I trust it." "What else can we do?" Kevin asked. "Nothing. You're right. Let's get to work "    They disconnected the hot-water tank and drilled holes in it. Several turns of heating wire went through the holes, then they sealed them in with epoxy. At one end of the tank they drilled a large hole and threaded a pipe into it, threaded a large valve onto the pipe, and welded a makeshift rocket nozzle beyond that. When it was done they tethered the tank and filled it with water, then connected a fuel cell to the heating leads. "Here goes," Kevin said. He threw the switch to start the heaters... Slowly the water inside heated, then began to boil. The pressure shown on the gauge began to rise. In half an hour they had forty-five pounds of pressure. "All right, let's try it," Kevin said. Glenda turned the valve to let out steam. A jet of steam and water shot out across the surface of the moonlet. Ice crystals formed in space and slowly settled to the rocket surface. The jet reached far away from them, well off the moonlet itself. The tank pulled against its tether lines, stretching the rope. "It works!" Kevin shouted. "Damn it, we're going to make it!" He shut off the electricity. "Let's get her finished."    It didn't look like a spaceship. It didn't even resemble a scooter, crude as those were. It looked like a hot-water tank with fuel cells bolted onto it. For controls it had vanes set crosswise in the exhaust stream, spring-loaded to center, with two tillers, one for each vane; a valve to control steam flow; and switches to connect the fuel cells to the heaters. Nothing else. The tank itself was fuzzy: They'd sprayed it with styrofoam, building it up in layers until they had nearly a foot of insulation. There were straps on opjxisite sides of the tank to hold two passengers on. The tank held nearly a hundred gallons of water. Kevin calculated that they had more than enough energy to boil it all in their two fuel cells, and they would only need sixty gallons to get to Ceres. The number was so small that he ran it four times, but it was correct. The strangest part was the stability system: a pair of wheels taken from a mining cart and set up in front of the water tank. Electric motors rotated the wheels in opposite directions. "Damndest gyros in the history of space research," Kevin said when they got the ship completed. "In fact, it's the damndest rocket ever." "It ought to have a name," Glenda said. "Something heroic, fitting a knight rescuing us from durance vile -- " "How about Fudgesicle?" Kevin suggested. "You'll hurt its feelings," Glenda said. "The Gump?" Norsedal asked apologetically. "Stop that! Galahad. That will do nicely, I think." "You're crazy," Kevin said. Norsedal laughed. Glenda's own laugh was strained. "I'm about to get aboard that thing, and you say I'm crazy? And you built it? Kevin, are we ready?" "I guess so. I've been putting off the awful moment, but -- " "Right. Come on, Jacob -- " Norsedal sighed. "I have been over the calculations. That Gump cannot carry three people. You will be lucky to get down alive with two. Therefore I am not coming." "You have to!" Glenda insisted. "If you don't get down, it does us no good -- " "Not true," Norsedal said. "I've given you the key words. And you do not know where you will land. Now it's true that I get around better in low gravity than I ever did on Earth, but it is also true that I am not athletic. I doubt that I can make my way over hundreds of kilometers of ravines -- not in my present condition." "You're feeling the lack of insulin?" Kevin demanded. "Yes," Norsedal sighed. "One of us should stay with you -- " Glenda said. She sounded doubtful. "Nonsense. You must go, because Kevin could do nothing alone once he gets there. Kevin should go because it is more likely I will be rescued if you two get down safely, and two are more likely to succeed than one. Now, are you ready?" "I guess so," Kevin said. "Then let's do it before we lose our nerve," Glenda said. "Right." The total mass of Galahad with full water tank was just under # kilograms. In C-#'s tiny gravity it was no problem at all to carry it outside. They stood on the rocky surface of the moonlet to let their eyes adjust to starlight. Ceres filled a full sixty degrees below them, a third of space, so close they could not even see all of it. It loomed huge and darkly forbidding, its surface lit by sunlight to a brightness much less than Earth's moon, but it was enormously larger than any full moon. "We won't have any trouble finding it," Kevin said. "No," Norsedal said. "But finding it is not your main problem." "Don't I know it." Glenda said nothing. All three of them had tried to work the problem of a landing orbit, and they couldn't do it with a pocket calculator. The equations for low-thrust trajectories were too complex, and they had too little data about Galahad's probable performance. They would simply have to navigate by eye and hope to cancel out all their velocities. They carried the hot-water tank to a low peak on the moonlet and pointed it so that the rocket nozzle was aimed as close to the direction they moved across Ceres's face as they could manage. "Time," Kevin said. "I'm scared -- " "I'm terrified," Kevin said. "But what choices have we? You know damned well Stoire and Donnelly will be back -- " "Yes. Let's do it." It took only a gentle effort to push the steam rocket away from the moonlet, but the cartwheelgyros resisted any effort to turn it. Finally they got it oriented properly in space. Then they climbed aboard. "Full head of steam," Kevin said. "Almost fifty pounds. Ready?" "Ready -- " He twisted the steam valve. At first both steam and water were expelled from the tank, but as they began to accelerate, the water settled and the exhaust valve let out only steam. C-# dropped away. They missed it. It was a prison, but a safe one; now they had only their makeshift steam rocket. Galahad showed a tendency to tumble, but with the gyros resisting, they were able to control it with the steering vanes. A plume of steam shot from the tank, rapidly crystallizing into ice fog that engulfed them. "Damn. That's going to make it hard to see," Kevin said. "Nothing we can do about it." He peered down toward Ceres. It didn't seem any closer. Jacob's farewell faded in their headsets. Norsedal's calculations had shown that twenty minutes' thrust should be enough to cancel all their orbital velocity. It would use up just about half their fuel. Once Galahad was stopped dead in orbit above Ceres, they would fall toward the asteroid, and they would have half their steam left to counteract that. The trouble was that Jacob couldn't calculate how high above Ceres they would be when the twenty minutes were finished. As they lost velocity, they would lose altitude, and their orbit would no longer be a smooth circle, but an ellipse intersecting Ceres -- somewhere. At the end of twenty minutes Kevin cut the power off. He was pleased that they still had thirty pounds of steam pressure. After half an hour they were noticeably closer to the asteroid. It was time to start the steam again. They had to change direction of thrust many times, using the steering vanes to turn the tank. It was easy to over-correct and they wasted steam in swaying back and forth hunting for the correct orientation. Mostly, though, there was nothing to do but wait and hope. As they came closer, they could see details on the craggy surface below. Rugged canyons, high peaks, deep valleys, and rocks everywhere. Kevin had a protractor which he used to measure the angle Ceres filled in the space below them. Then he used that to calculate their altitude. It was crude and certainly not accurate to better than ten percent, but it was all they had. "I read a hundred degrees," Kevin said. "That puts us just about a hundred kilometers above Ceres. If I've figured everything right, and if I'm reading the angles right -- " "You have to be right, don't you?" Glenda said. "There's nothing else we can do." She was right. They couldn't get back to C-# now, and they wouldn't be able to find the tiny moonlet even if they had the reaction mass. 'Time for another turn," Kevin said. "I think." "We're still moving -- " "Yes, but that's what the numbers say." "All right." And a year ago I was working equations in school, Kevin thought. Numbers to crunch and write down for examinations. Now they're something to stake your life on. He twisted the tiller slightly. The tank rotated, and he pointed the tiller the other way to stop it. It took several more adjustments before he thought he had it right. Now the steam Jet pointed almost directly toward Ceres, counteracting the asteroid's pull. He was tempted to change the steam flow, but he didn't dare. That was the part he couldn't calculate at all. The mass of their tank changed constantly as steam spewed out, and as the mass fell, the thrust increased. If they turned the steam valve up too high, it would more than counteract Ceres's gravity, and they would move away from it; and when they ran out of steam, they would fall again, this time with no stopping, impacting at seven or eight hundred miles an hour. "I feel like singing," Kevin shouted. "I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha, my destiny calls and I go -- " "Which makes me Rosalinda, the scullery maid?" Glenda demanded. "You would rather be Sancho Panza? -- No, that's Jacob. And Galahad is our charger. Now I need a broken lance and a bent sword -- " "I think we're getting closer." "So do I." Kevin took out his protractor and eyeballed the size of Ceres below. They could no longer see much of the asteroid; they were low enough that there was a definite horizon less than # kilometers to each side. "When we get closer, we have to kill our velocity relative to the ground. Otherwise the landing impact will kill us." "Where will we hit... I mean land?" "I don't know. Fifty, seventyfive kilometers from the station, I hope. We brought plenty of spare air tanks." For a long time they had seemed to be falling very slowly. Now, as they got closer, they seemed to be moving faster. Much too fast. Kevin couldn't estimate their speed, but it was many meters per second. He used the tillers to turn Galahad directly toward Ceres, opened the steam valve wider. Not too wide, he told himself. Not too wide, or we'll use up steam too fast and -- The temptation to blast as hard as they could was almost irresistible. The craggy ground came up toward them at frightening speed. They were definitely coming down too fast, and they were too close. Desperately he opened the steam valve all the way, and switched full power to the heaters -- A minute went by. Another. Now they were very low -- and they didn't seem to have much approach velocity, but they were moving across the surface much too quickly. Painfully they rotated the tank until the exhaust pointed in the direction they moved over the ground, then tilted it again towards Ceres. Kevin opened the steam valve again. "We've still got pressure," he said. "But I have no idea how much water is left in the tank -- " "Don't talk about it," Glenda said grimly. "We're so close -- " "Sure." Now they were less than a kilometer high, still moving too fast. Again Kevin rotated toward Ceres, ignoring their lateral velocity to kill their falling speed. "Keep a lookout for large objects in our path -- " "I'd say we're moving fifty miles an hour," Glenda said. "Enough to kill you -- " But slowly the rocket lost velocity toward the ground, and they were able to turn again. "Pick a landing site," Kevin said. "Something under our ground track." "Over there. Ahead of us." He looked quickly toward the plateau she had selected. It was rocky but as good as anything else in sight. He rotated the rocket again; they were moving slantwise toward the ground, and Kevin kept the exhaust pointing straight in their direction of travel. The steam pressure was falling. They were running out of water, or else they were using steam faster than the fuel cells could boil the water; it didn't matter. A few more seconds and they'd be down, one way or another -- Hie plateau came up toward them, but not so fast now. The steam valve was wide open. Nothing else they could do. They were over the plateau and falling directly toward it, a hundred meters high and falling -- plummeting straight down. "Cut loose from the straps," Kevin shouted. "Be ready to jump clear just before we hit." He worked frantically at the buckles, but he couldn't unfasten them and keep control of the tillers. The rocket showed a definite tendency to tumble now as Glenda moved in her perch, but there wasn't time for more talk, for more of anything -- Fifty meters. Twenty-five. Slowing all the time. Maybe they'd make it after all -- Then the ground came up and swatted them. They hit tail first. The rocket nozzle collapsed beneath, and steam spewed out, forming an ice fog that condensed on the rocks and on his face plate. He worked at the buckles and got them loose -- And realized he was lying on the surface. He couldn't see, but he heard Glenda's voice in his helmet. "Kevin! Are you all right?" She didn't sound hurt. Gingerly he worked each limb. Nothing seemed broken. "We're down," he said. Kevin estimated their landing velocity at about ten miles an hour. The crumpled rocket nozzle had absorbed much of the energy of the crash, and neither of them had been more than shaken up. "Any landing you walk away from is a good one," Kevin remembered a pilot had once told him. "Donnelly -- " "What?" "Nothing. Something Donnelly told me once. When we were still friends. Glenda, I haven't the faintest idea of where we are." "Sure you do. Why do you think we have visibility even though we're on the night side?" She pointed up at the bright disc above them. "The station is just under the synchronous mirror." "Yeah. I'm not thinking too well -- " "You're doing all right." She pointed to the remains of their steam rocket. "Splendidly, I'd say." They loaded up all the full oxygen tanks and set out toward the satellite mirror. Kevin stopped to take an observation with his protractor, then punched numbers into his calculator. "I make it ninety to a hundred kilometers," he said. "Not too bad. A few hours of following yonder star. We've got enough air." "If we don't use it up talking." Kevin started bounding across the surface of the asteroid. Glenda followed. They moved in long leaps. It was much easier than walking, almost like ice skating or skipping down hill; as long as they could keep going in a straight line, it took verv little effort. Turning or stopping was much harder. They could leap crevasses up to forty meters wide, and it was easy enough to go around bigger ones. If they had to climb, they could jump thirty meters upward, or jump down steep slopes. It was like a combination of flying and skating, leaping across the surface of Ceres, and Kevin shouted with the sheer joy of being alive. They were alive, and for a while they were safe. In seven hours they were within sight of Ceres Station. They paused on a hilltop looking down on the leveled plain which served as the spaceport. "We could try to steal one of the scooters," Kevin said. "I think we can trust John Eliot and the Daedalus people." "Except that the scooters are guarded, and our best chance is the plan we already worked out. Everyone on Ceres can't be corrupt. Most of the people here believe in the future of the Belt -- " "All right," Kevin said. "Let's go" They went directly to the main entrance to the station. There was no one in the airlock, and once inside, they went into Fat Jack's bar. # #  The bar was crowded with people singing and shouting. One by one they fell silent as they stared at Kevin and Glenda. "You're dead," Joe Harwitt said. "Damn it. Bill Dykes said you were dead! He said you'd been killed by Ralston!" "Did he say it to you?" Glenda asked. "Or to Henri Stoire and Hal Donnelly?" There was a short silence. Then one of the miners said, "Hell, Stoire and Donnelly were the only ones with Bill when he died. You saying they lied to us?" "Damn right," Kevin said. "They're the ones who marooned us on C-#." "On C-#?" Joe Harwitt seemed to have difficulty comprehending that. "C-#?" "Yes. Jacob is still up there." "He's supposed to be dead, too," one of the miners said. "Supposed to have had some kind of fight with you, Senecal. What the hell's going on here?" "Henri Stoire is stealing Interplanet blind," Kevin said. "We'll find out about that," another miner said. "He's coming now." Stoire came in with four armed company police. "What is happening -- Miss MacMillan! We were told you were dead." "Good act, Stoire, but it won't work," Kevin said. "Have you gone mad?" Stoire asked. "What are you talking about?' ' "He claims you've been doing some embezzling," Joe Harwitt said. "And what have I been stealing?" Stoire asked. "Arthurium," Kevin said. "Nonsense. All the Arthurium is accounted for. "Six thousand, seven hundred and nine grams. No great amount, but more than has ever been seen on Earth -- " "It won't work," Glenda said. "I know precisely how much Arthurium was mined. Almost four hundred kilograms. And I know where it is." "Ridiculous," Stoire said. "Young lady, I am trying to be patient with you and your impetuous friend, but it is obvious that you must be restrained for your own good." He turned to the others. "I don't know what she wants, but I do not have to listen to accusations from a common prostitute. Lieutenant, arrest those two." "Yes, sir." The company police stepped forward. "I'm no prostitute," Glenda said. "You know who I am, Mr. Stoire." "Who?" Joe Harwitt demanded. "I think I'll let someone else tell you," Glenda said. She looked at Stoire. "Does this mean anything to you? Balaclava, # September, # ." Stoire suddenly looked worried. Glenda smiled faintly. "That's the code phrase he used in his secret transactions with the company's computer. Without it the computer won't deliver the full records. Jacob Norsedal figured it out from the machine language. And now -- " She was quiet for a moment, a look of concentration on her face. speaker said. "How the hell is she controlling your computer, Mr. Stoire?" one of the miners asked. "Implant," Joe Harwitt said. "A rich young lady indeed. Only I never knew the computer could accept instructions from implants." "Done in Zurich," Kevin said. "Where is the missing Arthurium?" Glenda said aloud. Stoire looked smug. "How much was refined?" Glenda asked. "three hundred and ninety"Four hundred kilos!" Joe Harwitt whistled. "Is there that much money in the whole solar system?" "Enoughthat each one here can of you, if you help me." "Jeez, that's a lot of money," someone said. "Where will you spend it?" Glenda asked. "I have already had the base computer send a message to Hansen headquarters on Luna. You shouldn't have 'fixed' the high-gain antenna, Stoire." "Wait a minute." Harwitt looked from Glenda to Stoire. "I don't know what to make of this. You're saying that you and Laurie Jo Hansen's kid -- " "Hell, she is," Fat Jack said. The bar owner launched himself in a smooth curve that took him next to Glenda. He looked at her intently. "Yep. I worked for Hansen Enterprises, twenty, twenty-five years ago now. She looks like the big boss did back then. Same eyes. Yeah, I think she is." "Where is the Arthurium?" she demanded. Stoire shrugged. "It appears that you know something I do not. I never knew there was any more." "You're a liar," Kevin said. Stoire shrugged. He turned to Glenda. "I really suggest that we go somewhere and talk quietly." "Out here." She led the way to the corridor. Kevin and the others followed. The company police looked to someone, anyone, for orders. Glenda and Stoire moved away from the crowd. Kevin was just close enough to hear. "It really is simple," Stoire said. "If no excess Arthurium is ever found, there is no real evidence of any crime -- " "Kidnapping -- " He shrugged again. "Possibly. But the question is, do you want your superconductors? Because if any harm comes to me, you'll never see that Arthurium again." "It's on C-#; we'll find it." Kevin said. "Of course," Stoire said. "With a hydrogen bomb next to it. I doubt your superconductor would be much use after it is vaporized by a onemegaton bomb." "You're bluffing," Kevin said. Stoire smiled thinly. "You have reason to know I believe in insurance. This is another form. Now -- shall we negotiate?" The H-bomb went off in silence. A bright flower of intolerable blue-white, dying to a dull red glow. "Just off center," Jacob Norsedal said. He looked at the computer read-out. "They'll Have no trouble correcting the slight tumble. The next detonation will go off on schedule." Aeneas MacKenzie nodded. "So C-# is on its way. I'm surprised you didn't go with them, Jacob." Norsedal laughed. "Three's a crowd. Newlyweds don't need company, and they can certainly manage the navigation." "Yes. I suppose they can," MacKenzie said. He glanced at the wreckage of Galahad. It hadn't been easy to find, but he'd offered ten thousand francs to the miner who could locate it. Laurie Jo would want to see it -- and so had he. He still couldn't believe it had worked. "Ingenious young man, my sonin-law," MacKenzie said. "I've reason to know it," Norsedal said. "What will happen to Stoire?" MacKenzie shook his head. "We'll pay his debts and send him home. I doubt he'll stay away from the gaming tables long." "It seems a shame that he gets off so easily," Norsedal said. MacKenzie's voice was gruff. "Bill Dykes was a good friend. I don't like it much that Stoire gets off, but I doubt Bill would have wanted to pay the price for vengeance. It would have been high." "Yes," Norsedal said. "He had the entire cargo ready to blow. Arthurium, gold, all the refined metals -- ' ' "And not even my wife could have put more money into space without some return," MacKenzie finished. "Yes. Glenda made the only deal possible. The human race advances, but sometimes we pay in strange coin, Jacob." "Time," Norsedal said. The viewscreen flared again, a point of sedal studied the radar returns. "Well done," he said. He watched the computer read-out a moment longer, then looked up. "Will you be staying long?" "No. I'm taking the Arthurium back to Luna in Valkyrie. We can be back months before C-# arrives, and our fusion people are anxious to get to work. TTiey think they may have a demonstration reactor by the time the kids arrive." Norsedal typed inputs. The viewscreen blurred, then showed a map of the solar system and C-#'s orbit from Ceres to Earth, "four nounced. "A long trip," Aeneas said. "I doubt they'll notice." Norsedal's grin was wide. Aeneas MacKenzie looked wistfully at the viewscreen. "Laurie Jo and I once had sixty days to ourselves. Sixty days with nothing to do but get to know each other. I think you're right, Jacob. They'll find this a short trip." Norsedal grinned slightly and typed again. "prognosis confirmed," the computer announced.  Exciting Conclusion of the Amber Series Editorial About a week ago, as of this writing, I was possessed of a concept for interplanetary-range propulsion at once startling in its implications and at the same time, once conceived, utterly obvious. So obvious, in fact, that initially I dismissed it on the grounds that if it were would have already proposed plementing it. But six hours later (by now it was # A.M.) the idea was still itching: try as I might I could see no reason that it would not work. So later that day I placed a call to Dr. Robert Forward, a senior scientist of Hughes Laboratories, so that he might explain to me why, 'while the idea is certainly interesting, you understand, certain technical considerations make it totally unfeasible with present-day technology.' Imagine my surprise when, after a short pause, he thoughtfully replied. "Hmmm...that idea has been around for some time, but maybe the technology has advanced enough by now that it might work." Whereupon he furnished me with an equation and asked me to call back when I had the idea firmed up. After a few calculations and considerable thought, I did call him back -- several times, in fact. You are now reading the result. I would like to state quite clearly that without Bob Forward's assistance and encouragement this article would never have been written. The idea is this: Since microwaves can be beamed from a transmitter to a receiver and then, via Schottky diodes, converted to electricity (recent tests over a # Km. distance achieved an efficiency of # -- the combination of receiver and diodes is called a 'rectenna'), why not use microwaves to piower a spaceship? Admittedly electricity, even in unlimited amount, does not of itself constitute a space drive: you still need mass to throw away; the faster you throw it, the faster you go. It happens that there is a method, utilizing electricity see "Life Among the Asteroids," A Step Farther Out, Galaxy, July, #, for expelling mass very energetically indeed. By applying an electric charge to a metal (the best metal for this purpose is now thought to be mercury) that metal can be made into charged ions moving at velocities approaching that of light. In terms of reaction mass, ion propulsion is about sixty times better than the best chemical rocket fuel. Thus while the fuel-to-payload ratio (the "mass factor") for a chemically propelled mission from earth-orbit to the asteroid belt utilizing the most fuel-conservative orbit would be about a hundred to one, the same mission with an ion drive would require only as much reaction mass as payload (for this purpose I am referring to everything but reaction mass as 'payload'). The problem with all previously proposed ionic propulsion systems has been that the means for providing the electricity -- generator-plusfuel, solar panels, nuclear reactors, or whatever -- have all been so massive that net thrust is comparatively miniscule, measured in fractions of a pound per drive-unit. However, if we can discard the generating equipment from our designs, the situation is radically altered. That, of course, is exactly what beaming power via microwaves would accomplish, replacing the generator and fuel for it with a receiving antenna and ancillary Schottky diodes for converting the microwaves to direct-current electricity. The question arises at this point as to the relative masses of the rectenna and whatever generating equipment it replaces. To speculate meaningfully on that we need the aforementioned equation with which Dr. Forward was kind enough to furnish me. It is a very simple equation that tells how small a spot a lens (or in this case an antenna) can make at a distance; anyone who has read this far will find it not only comprehensible but rather fascinating. What it says is that if the product of the diameter of the transmitter (d) and the receiver (D) equal twice the product of the distance between them (R) and the transmitted wavelength lambda) then reception efficiency will be almost #, since the receiver is the size of the spot made by the transmitter. Let's plug some numbers into dD  # R lambda. First the distance between d and D. Since the nearest potentially exploitable (as opposed to interesting) trans-lunar area in the solar system is the asteroid belt, minimum effective distance should be on the order of three Astronomical Units, or approximately # R  # X # kilometers. Next, "lambda." I'm told that the most suitable wavelength for which is # X # (or, .#) kilometers. Lambda  # x # ' km. This gives Dd  #(# x # km.) (# X # km.) Dd  # square km. The product of the diameter of the receiver and the transmitter must equal or exceed # square kilometers; if the diameter of D and d are the same, then both must have a diameter of # km. for maximum efficiency. The following table shows (in kilometers) the inversely proportional relationship between d and D at three AU. Transmitter (d) # # # # Receiver (D) # .# .# .# Clearly if the receiving antenna is to be more than a kilometer or two in diameter, we are talking science fiction, some new, ultra-light-mass kind of antenna as yet undevised or, for that matter, conceived. So let's look at the third line: if D is to equal # kilometers, then d must have a diameter of # kilometers. At first blush that is a very large transmitting area. Actually, a one-thousand-kilometer transmitter is perfectly feasible. Unlike the receiving antenna, which must present a solid face of metal to the beam (any holes must be smaller than the wavelength), the transmitter need not be 'filled'; it need merely consist of about # unconnected transmitting elements that define its boundaries, the size of the elements themselves being determined solely by the engineering requirements of the desired beam power. Certainly it would be possible to establish ten relatively small microwave transmitters that would encompass an area one thousand kilometers in diameter, or even five thousand kilometers, which latter figure gives a receiving antenna diameter of # meters. But another problem remains: the Earth's rotation; since we do not want to accidentally cook, or even lightly toast, passing aircraft, the beams will have to be pointed within a few degrees of vertical. Thus our transmitter would be operational for only a brief period each day, perhaps as little as one hour. Feasible, perhaps, but clearly undesirable as compared to a method enabling uninterrupted transmission. An alternative is to orbit an array of solar-powered satellites. This would have the advantage of an extremely high value for d -- so high that the diameter of the receiving antenna would be only about thirty meters! The objection to this method is the vast expanses of solar panels that would have to be lofted up and constructed in orbit, and the consequent huge expense. Although the cost might be in part offset by combining the project with a powersat feasibility study, the optimal method would be to combine ground-based generators with an orbiting array of microwave relay satellites; construction of such a system could be begun today with little or no prior RD. The system would be composed of a number of sixty-four-meter microwave relay stations in geosynchronous orbit, each with a tenkilometer transmitting array directly beneath it. (It would require a cost-effectiveness study to determine if it would be desirable to design the ground transmitters to also beam directly to the ship antenna when in position to do so. While this would reduce the necessary number of both ground transmitters and orbital relays, it would increase the engineering complexity of the system considerably.) Using this method, the initial power source would be already extant commercial power plants, and the relay satellites would be small enough to orbit either by shuttle or by present launch facilities. As I intimated previously, research in this area has been held back by the perceived necessity for extremely massive electrical generators and ancillary fuel, or large solar cell arrays that become less and less effective as they move away from the sun, as part of the propulsion system. Until such time as research is done that does not take that constraint into account, I am unable to speculate meaningfully as to precisely what the practice design limitations of such vehicles might be. Still, it is possible to make a few tentative deductions from the nature of the propulsion system itself. First, since a rectenna designed for high efficiency at three AU need be only # meters across when coupled with an orbital transmitting array, it would seem that the size of the payload would be determined solely by mission requirements and construction costs. Second, the system would be extremely flexible: since the ground transmitters and orbital relays would be permanent installations, the system could perform any number of missions at little additional cost. Indeed, several missions could be carried out simultaneously, either by beaming power alternately to each vehicle or by designing the system so that it could beam in more than one direction at once. Third, in order to minimize structural support and consequent mass penalty for the rectenna, we can assume low constant acceleration; the crews of manned missions would experience some slight gravity for the entire trip. Furthermore, since the mass factor is so favorable, missions could be accomplished in a small fraction of what has previously been regarded as minimum trip time. It might even prove more efficient to use "extra" reaction mass to get there more quickly in order to reduce the mass of the life-support system. Perhaps manned missions will be accomplished in two phases: first a "payload package" consisting of everything but crew and a few weeks life-support, would be sent out by most massconservative orbit, then, several months or even years later, the mission personnel follow, boosting out under high acceleration to the rendezvous point. (To take that idea a little further, a series of such packages could be sent out in lowacceleration orbits to strategic planets in a Manned Tour of the Solar System.) There is another immediately obvious application of long-distance microwave power transmission; a major sticking point in the spacecolony concept has been the design, transportation, and construction on the moon of a nuclear reactor with which to provide power for the mass-impeller (if the colonies are to prove economically feasible, both they and the power satellites that are their raison d'etre must be constructed almost entirely of lunar materials -- the purpose of the massimpeller is to throw that material to the L-I point, from which it can easily be transported to where it will be needed). A low-mass, easily constructed rectenna would serve as well or better. Indeed, this method could be used to power installations anywhere in the solar system without the necessity for transporting massive generating equipment and fuel. Another, perhaps less obvious, application is in the nascent field of interstellar probes. While the establishment of an array of relay stations in solar orbit at one AU might be prohibitively costly when considered in isolation, as part of a space economy based on power satellites and long-distance microwave power transmission, the expense would be comparatively minor. It is interesting to note that such a two-AU diameter array would require a receiving antenna only # meters across for high-efficiency at a distance of four light years. Of course, if the power satellite concept comes to fruition, in the long (or even fairly short) run the ground stations will become obsolete; our ion-drive spacecraft will be powered not by coal, or fission, or felling water, but, more appropriately, by sunlight harvested by power satellites that have been manufactured in space from material taken from the moon. There is, however, one use for which ground-based power generation will remain essential: war satellites. In the last few years there has been a great deal of speculation about orbiting massive lasers and particle accelerators for use both as a defence against ballistic missiles and against other satellites. Here, as with space drives, the problem has been the power source. Since powersats are large and visible -- and therefore vulnerable -- they are not suitable for use as an integral part of an anti-ballisticmissile system. For this purpose "hardened" or mobile ground arrays will be the order of the day. The final application of microwave power transmittion that occurs to me (there are doubtless many others that have not) is in ground-to-orbit vehicles. For this purpose the rectenna would be built flush to the hull of the launch vehicle, and a series of small-diameter transmitting arrays would be placed down-range. The reaction mass could either be super-heated air or superheated steam. A steam-rocket might require somewhat more reaction mass than a chemical one, but water is both cheap and clean. Will it really work? I do not know. I have listened to reservations ranging from the problem of keeping such a very wide array in phase to the difficulty ("impossibility" was the word used) of attaining the necessary degree of tracking precision over such distances, to questions concerning almost total loss of efficiency due to "side lobes." If my understanding is correct, the first two problems would be dealt with by means of direct feedback loops between individual transmitting elements and the receiver, while power loss would be a function of the square root of the number of transmitting elements: ###; ###; ###; etc. Jerry Poumelle, perhaps the world's foremost pessimistic optimist, has taken the position that it might work but probably not nearly so well as the bare equation implies. As a "first chop" he has chosen to examine the implications of a two-kilometer rectenna. "Jim Baen and His Electric Spaceship," indeed! Hrrmph. What I have proposed is not some sort of magical space drive, a la the Dean Device; the constraints of classical physics remain in full force: a spaceship still needs something to "push against" -- and it still must take that something along. On the other hand, only one sixtieth as much reaction mass is needed by an ion rocket as by a chemical one to perform the same mission -- if the ion rocket does not have to carry its power source. A good historical analogy might be the replacement of oars by sails as the primary power-source for water craft. Just as muscle-powered vessels were by their nature restricted to brief, coast-hugging dashes, so chemically powered rockets are simply not good enough for large-scale missions of translunar scope. Just as sailing ships conquered the seas, so too will ion rockets conquer the solar system, and in so doing, open an era of material plenty here on earth.  ItIy friends, you will have to be indulgent this month. I will do my best to make this column both entertaining and informative, but I will admit in advance that I'm going to have to knock it out fast. Why? Because this has been A Month. A rather good one for me, but very tightly packed. To begin with. I've had a lot of administrative and business work. Lucifer's Hammer, the latest by Niven and Poumelle (Playboy Press, #, and you'd better rush out for a first edition: they may not last -- Ed.), had to be finished off. There was the auction of paperback rights (which went very well, but if you're waiting for a paperback, you may have a long wait); the sale of visual-arts rights; last-minute work on the galleys (very clean, since our publisher hired Jim Baen to "vet" the work of the in-house proofreaders, and a marvelous job he did, too, only Larry and I decided to insert two scenes and rewrite one in galley); telephone conferences; celebrations (the paperback and visual-arts sales went very well); and myriads of other details. Mail. I appreciate mail, and I try to answer letters, but I can't do them all. I manage some kind of reply to those who enclose a selfaddressed stamped envelope, and try to gel off postcards to most others, but sometimes the unanswered letters reach archeological layers on my desk and the good fairies come in and remove them. I truly apologize to those who've written and received no reply; the list includes friends who have every right to expect an answer. And now, as I'm trying to do my column, comes word that I'm appointed Associate Field Director (a courtesy title) of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, and must outfit a survey expedition to Guatemala for next week in company with Field Director Russell Seitz. The work is non-trivial. There is, it turns out, a technique for neutron activation which will allow one to determine from precisely which mine various precious and semi-precious stones were excavated. Applied to a number of Olmec preColombian artifacts, the technique should tell us much about the migrations and trade patterns of those mysterious people; it remains to collect samples of serpentine and jadite from various locations, which requires the survey expedition this month (and probably another later.) But that requires me to recover from my shots (about half the dread diseases afflicting mankind are now trying to establish themselves in my system; "Grab that germ and hold it tight! Leukocytes, antibodies, fight, fight, fight!") and to buy enough gear to turn my perfectly adequatefor-the-High-Sierra backpacking outfit into something that will let me survive in a tropical rain forest. Add to that the requirement for me to attend a convention two days after returning from Guatemala, and the probable grand tour to promote Lucifer's Hammer next month, and you will .see that I've had a busy month and have another ahead of me. Finally, Jim Baen has called several times to talk about the new space-exploitation system he's dreamed up, and wants a systems analysis of same, and here I am composing on the stick. Thus I truly beg indulgence.    A year or so ago I described ion-drive ships adequate for exploitation of the asteroid belt. They were very large; they had to be because they required megawatts of electric power. At the time I wrote that, I was perfectly aware that one could send electric power by microwave, and had described such systems in other columns. What I didn't do was combine the ideas: Why not an ion-drive ship which receives its power from a fixed source? Alas, I never did put the ideas together; then, on a Sunday morning just after we had returned from church, came a frantic call from Jim Baen, who had done just that, and wanted to know if it would work, and whether it had been dreamed up before. I didn't recall any previous mention, and my immediate reaction was, "It's so obvious, somebody must have thought of it and decided it wouldn't work", a common form of the "Not Invented Here" syndrome that plagues government, industry, research labs, universities, and damned near everything else. Second thought was, "Why the hell not?" Third thought is this column. Unfortunately I lack some critical numbers, and so does everyone else I've checked with; the most important one missing is the mass of the receiving antenna to absorb the power densities required. "They're not heavy" is the best I can get from engineers who've worked on such systems; but they're thinking in terms of systems designed for emplacement on planets, particularly this one. But since we've only to design for rather low thrusts (you'll see why in a bit) and anything that will stand up to gravity and wind on Earth is certainly strong enough to withstand low thrusts in space, "They're not very heavy" may be information enough. Surely the receiving antenna cannot be massive compared to an onboard fusion generator... Let's look at some missions. First, supplying the men and equipment to build a Moon Base. We'll suppose ships that deliver #, (XX) kilos of payload, and further assume parasitic mass of an additional #, giving us #, (X)# kilos of ship and payload; to that we must add fuel and the antenna. Certainly, though, # metric tonnes at a shot is worth delivering; and since our ships will work equally well coming back as going up, we'll have opened up commerce with the Moon. It can lead to mines, construction of ships for exploitation of deep space, a host of activities -- all worth thinking about. Now the real advantage of ion rockets is that they give a truly humungous exhaust velocity, with a specific impulse of up to # seconds -- compare that to the best chemical rockets which have perhaps #, and the hydrogen-fuel for #, and you get the idea immediately. (For the basic equations for all this, see the column for April #, where I spell it all out.) Cranking in conservative estimates for getting from Earth to Moon, and assuming we manage only specific impulse of half the theoretical value obtainable from ion rockets, we get a mass ratio of only -- #, and that's something to get excited about. It means that the all-up mass of the ship with fuel is only # kilos -- except that we've neglected the antenna. Well, Jim gives the basic equation in his article elsewhere in this issue. Let's assume we construct here on Earth an antenna # kilometers in diameter, certainly not a difficult proposition; to get to the Moon we need only # meter antennae on our ships. That's a bit timeters of area; make it a centimeter thick, of solid copper (it must carry a large current density), and we come up with something more weight. That may be a bit much. Well, cut it to a half cm. thick (# mm shouldn't be excessive for the currents we must carry) and assume that only # of the area will be filled with copper wire and insulagrams, or # kilos. Add to it the original mass of the ship and we're up to # kilos; multiply by our mass ratio of #, and the all-up mass is # kilos, which seems a lot -- Except that it's not. We're well under the mass of Saturn rockets -- and we're putting a full quarter of that onto the Moon. More than that, the ship is re-usable. We've established that we're in a reasonable regime. Now let's refine. The receiving antenna looks like a mess of bedsprings with diodes attached. The current densities are not really so large as indicated. On the other hand, we've totally neglected the mass of the engines to drive this. There are tradeoffs here: If we feed all this power into one big engine, the engine mass is negligible compared to the antenna mass; but the antenna mass goes up because of the power requirements. Let's redesign the ship to put a small ion engine at each # square meters, sticking them all over the antenna. That way no part of the antenna handles much current. We now have # meter radius, # square meters, or # patches # meters square. Dr. Forward tells me the current Hughes ion engines mass about # pounds, roughly # kilos. All those engines together (neglecting piping, pumps, and other stuff) run us up to another # metric tons; now for the antenna copper wire covering # of the antenna area (and assume the diodes and electronics are included in that). Adding the nearly # metric tonnes of antenna to the engine mass, we get a grand total of # kilos for our power plant. Add to that the ship mass and we have # kilograms before we add fuel. But now that we're working in the real world we find, alas, that Hughes has obtained at best a specific impulse of #. If we want to work on that to get it up to the # we assumed before, we may well add mass. Let's compromise and keep the ship mass figures, but recalculate the mass ratio using # for specific impulse. It still brings us to a mass ratio of only #, so the all-up mass of ship and fuel is # kilos, about half what we figured in the first cut. Not bad. Now what about power requirements? I've assumed a velocity change of roughly # kilometers a second; that is. I've assumed that the ion engines will carry the rocket from Earth surface to Lunar surface. That's likely to be excessive. It comes from having all that high-efficiency fuel system to play with. This thing very probably won't lift itself off the Earth, and so what? from Earth, but it would be a perfectly adequate system for orbit-toorbit missions, and this is a good (Or is it? We'll come to that in a minute.) Obviously we must have something in excess of I g to lift from Earth. In fact, we need nothing more than l.J g to do the job, but let's assume # since anything going up more slowly has stability problems. There's a need to get the thing up high enough to let us beam power to it. We'll assume the world's longest extension cord for the first leg, until we've got that high. To find the power needed, we need a number -- how much thrust can you get for a kiloWatt? The old kW to get one pound. Bob Forward says Hughes Labs have achieved a pound thrust with # Kw, a much better figure. A pound of thrust will accelerate I pound of weight at # feetsecond, and weight is a force, and one is supposed to convert to slugs, and that is the point where even after all these years I get confused. If we're lifting from Earth, though, we need not worry; We have # kilograms, which works out to # pounds of weight; it takes # kW to lift each to hold it up. To get our ship actually to rise at # g, we'll need # not going to do it. Our antenna just won't handle power densities of that order. Worse, it's just a lot of power, # thousand to # thousand megaWatts, and the biggest power plants we know of put out on the order of one or two thousand megaWatts. Most of the existing plants won't do anything like that. Scratch the Earth-to-Moon shot powered by beam. It won't help a lot to reduce ship mass, either, because you will recall that much of that mass was the receiving antenna and ion engines, and the antenna size is fixed by the distances over which we must send the power. Well, what about Earth orbit to the Moon, not attempting to lift ourselves out of a planet's gravity well? First, we aren't going to attempt to land on the Moon; even a sixth of that power density is still far too great. Is it worth building this system for Earth orbit to Lunar orbit? Well, let's see. We can accept thrusts of .#I gravity, bringing our power requirements down to less than a thousand megaWatts, well within present capabilities (but that transmitting antenna is going to be big, hairy, and expensive). But how shall we land? Well, we can get to orbit in chunks, chemical rockets, shuttles, nuclear ramjet first stages, laser systems, whatever; orbit-to-orbit with the beam-power ion rocket; and land at the other end with chemical shuttles. For comparison let's look recall, is a nuclear-fission pile For aspiring writers, and "a fascinating insiders' view of the profession." -- Publishers Weekly # top SF writers discuss the writing of science fiction and fantasy, including Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and the editor of the book, Reginald Bretnor. # at bookstores, or direct from the publisher. lHarperefRow L#J)# E. saa SI... New Yorh # I through which one squirts hydrogen. Before the project was canceled, it achieved specific impulses of #; it was designed for #; and they hoped for #. Use the # figure on the ship we designed for this space mission; apply to our # kg. ship; we get a mass ratio of about I .#, so the all-up mass of ship and fuel is # tonnes. But of course we can't compare that to a ship designed to go Earth surface to Lunar surface, so we take our # kg ship, add the antenna, and get # tonnes; recalculate the mass ratio required for orbit-to-orbit operations (#), and discover that the all-up mass is # tonnes. Even with the parasitic mass of that antenna, we start with a lighter vehicle, meaning less gunk to get into orbit -- and Baen's electric-powered spaceship is reusable, meaning we don't have to lift so much reaction mass into Earth orbit every time we want to send a cargo to the Moon. I can't off-hand calculate the number of missions to breakeven, but let's look. Assume we get # per pound as cost to lift to orbit. We save # kilos per trip, #,bucks per mission. The installed cost per kW of a nuclear plant is in the order of #. Assume we build a power plant to be used for Lunar missions (and thus assume that in off-hours we sell power to help defray costs of research and development of the ion ships, antennae, and the like), and we've a total cost of something like #(X); trivial, in terms of Apollo or the Welfare budget, or the Interstate Highway project; and one assumes that the profits from sales of power will not be imaginary, since (neglecting legal and licensing fees, which drive the costs of power plants up to double and treble the actual costs) pKJwer plants are built at such costs in the expectation of making money. Then there's another angle; We might want to build a power plant and transmitting antenna on the Moon. If we do that, we need not design ships to accept power over such long distances; at .#I g we need accelerate less than # hours to inject into proper orbit to reach the Moon, and we'll have travelled something less than # kilometers, making our antenna considerably smaller and lighter. At the other end the Lunar station provides the power to make orbit, after which Lunar shuttles come up to meet the ship -- and since they need not have a payload of # tonnes, they might very well be powered by the Lunar transmitting antenna. Fascinating. And immediately come other ideas. Using materials mined on the Moon and the Lunar transmitter, we could build cities in space (perhaps not at the L-# point, which may not be optimal after all, but no matter; there are plenty of orbits). Conclusion; Baen's electricpowered spaceships must be considered as contenders for exploitation of Lunar resources. They may not be the best thing available, but they cannot be ignored in cost comparisons.    Now what of deep space? There are problems. A # kilometer antennaengine complex similar to that described for the Lunar orbitto-orbit mission masses over a million kilograms, but I worry about power densities with very large antennae, and the problem of receiving power at an acute angle to thrust -- that is, when you reach, say, Ceres, you must accelerate along a path more or less at right angles to a vector leading to Earth, and that could present problems, especially if your engines are mounted in various places on the antenna. Then too there is the simple fact that such ships are truly dependent on the stations beaming power (boy, are there conflict stories in that thought!) and on scheduling and solar-system geometries; that negates the independence I postulated for the Belt civilization ships in my story. Tinker. Then, too, do we need such large antennae? If everything works perfectly, perhaps not -- but since in the real world that is seldom the case, let's assume we do. On the other hand, can we not work the problem as we did for the established Lunar base, with power stations on Mars, Ceres, the other asteroids we want to exploit? Earth then becomes just one more place in the solar system. To get from Ceres to Mars, you accept power from Ceres until you've reached the proper velocity, coast, and when approaching Mars, arrange to get power beamed up. Sure, you're dependent on someone at the arrival point, but then #'s are dependent on airports, and B-#'s are dep)endent on in-flight refueling. Given that concept, the numbers aren't a lot different from the Earth-Moon run. Remember the first of these columns? When you get into Earth (or Mars or any other) orbit, when you're independent of planetary gravity wells (called "holes" in Niven's 'known-space' series), you're halfway to anywhere; the velocity changes required to get to the surface of the Moon are not wildly different from those needed to get from Mars to the asteroid belt. Of course the coasting times are much greater. But to return to the ship with the I .# kilometer antenna; The antenna itself, with ion engines attached, masses # kilograms, or # tonnes. Add ship mass of another # tonnes, and multiply by the mass ratio, and we've got an all-up fueled weight in the order of # tonnes -- and that's quite comparable to the masses I assumed for the larger ships in Tinker. In fact, as I recall the arrival payload mass of Agamemnon was precisely # tonnes. Once again the concept is not silly; it may well be competitive with on-board fusion devices. Of course we don't know what on-board fusion systems will mass. mail, and Lo!, Gerald Yonas of Sandia Corporation announces that the US has achieved fusion neutrons from electron-beam inertial confinement fusion experiments. Another milestone along the development of fusion research -- or, given Carter's budget cuts, a tombstone? An achievement of some importance, anyway. What we've shown in the above is that there may very well be a place for Jim's electric-powered spacecraft in our future, provided that we can get to a future that includes space operations, or large Suns -- The Award-winning Galaxy-Foundation Series of intermove! The ship is # miles across ana the mere presence Alpha Battleships, Fast. Deadly Beta Battle Cruisers, Cloakino and invisibility Devices, Sensor deception, fast unique Cultures. The Histories, Ships and Actions of Humanoid, Cyborg. Alien, Android, Robotoid, Clone, and other Super Civilizations that defy description. you to begin your study of the games at low cost without ever wasbng funds on duplication! This results in games Manual (#). The following games are available -- cost of Manual not included: N'Dridd Invasions the Warlords Unleashed cial # price. Game will ever be aUke! Neither will the Planets' resources, life-support, and values. 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As to whether the system would be the proper way to explore Mars and the asteroid belt -- as opposed to the best method for routine travel between them once they are explored and transmitters and power plants are built at various locations -- I doubt that anyone has enough data to do a definitive analysis. Certainly I don't; but any time you have a shot at a system that will give you specific impulses in the thousands, you can't possibly ignore it. In Tinker I solved the problem with on-board fusion power plants; Jim has come up with another contender. I don't really care which of these is used, or whether either is. There is also the boron fission-fusion .system mentioned in past columns. pounds onto the Moon in one whack. There are other candidates. What I do care is that we head that way, forget this "Only One Earth" nonsense, and realize that we live in a system of nine planets, we insure that no single act of a madman, no single accident, no single disaster, can wipe us all out; and the sooner we get to that, the better. I see that I've lapsed into random thoughts. My problem is that I am all too aware of what I must do tomorrow; get down to the consulate for a visa, get better jungle boots, procure maps, buy out the local supplier of Cutter's Laboratory insect repellent, get silica gel for the cameras, call again about rental of a four-wheel drive vehicle; a myriad of details to be accomplished in a short time. I'd best get at it. When I have some harder numbers to play with. I'll take another cut at Jim Baen's Electric Spaceships and let you know. Meanwhile, whether this system is best or another is, it looks feasible -- and that's one more proof that we don't have to huddle together on Earth and wait until we run out of resources. We can get out there. We've only to decide that we should.  Note: I have just received the latest issue of the L-# Society publication, and it's magnificent. This organization has become highly professional in the past year, and I recommend it are a bit stiff, #year, # for students. They collect information on space colonies, and while a bit prejudiced against planets, do a lot of good. L-# Society, # N. Park Ave, Tucson, Ariz. # Marcia Martin  Eric Vinicoff A Story of Planned Parenthood -- but not the kind you think the beginning her back, legs in stirrups, covered with a blue drape. She looked around at the delivery room that had become her world: sterile, efficient, gleaming white plastic and chrome, completely at odds with the animal urge that drove her. Masked and gowned figures milled about. Even Neil beside her seemed unfamiliar. "Okay, here we go again." The doctor intruded on her brief peace. "Push!" Neil and a nurse raised her back off the table as she took a deep breath. She pushed down as hard as she could, the blood pounding in her head, hands white from her grip on the handles. Another breath. She dimly heard the doctor's, "Good, keep it up!" as the urge swept her on. Immense pressure shook her. She felt she was about to burst. But she kept going, driven to bring forth the life within her. A third breath. Neil pressed her shoulders, and she managed to draw even more strength from somewhere, bearing down, down into a red haze. "Barbara, stop pushing! Now pant! Pant! Here comes the head." The doctor worked swiftly and deftly, her fingers guiding the baby's head through to the world. Barbara sank back gasping as the contractions ebbed. She felt like a sack of meal. Nine months of waiting were almost over. In a few minutes she would be a mother! "Neil?" She reached out for him, and he held her hand. "You're doing great. Barb." Neil's voice was exultant. "We're almost there." "Once more, Barbara. A little push now." The doctor was blocking Barbara's view of the mirror in which she was supposed to be able to watch the birth. But she didn't care. A last surge of power wracked her as she pushed down. She grunted. Then she felt the baby -- like a slithering fish -- slip down and out of her. Relief washed through her, and she started to cry. "It's a boy!" Neil's voice broke. "Oh, Barb, love, you did fine!" He kissed her awkwardly through his mask, his forehead as red and sweaty as hers. "Congratulations, both of you. Your baby is perfect -- Apgar Ten -- that's the best rating we give." The doctor was beaming at them. She stepped around to join them, and Barbara saw Jason at last. He was small, pink and beautiful. He stopped crying as he was handed to Barbara. She cuddled him, free finally of the nameless terrors of deformity that had haunted her pregnancy. Handing him over to his proud father, she abruptly fell asleep.    "They've sprung it -- damn them." The Oval Office trembled with silence. The man seated across the desk from the President nodded. He was an ancient Texican with erect military posture. He had no official position in the government, but his authority was as real as it was pervasive. "I listen to the news too, hardly matters now, of course. The question is -- " "I know what the question is." President Nivling leaned back in his chair, looking smaller, older and more tired than he did on TV. Behind him a pair of faded movie posters vied with the somber dignity of the room. He was frowning. "Let's take it short-term first." "So?" "First our stance. We downplay the whole Third World Resource Alliance concept. Too many chiefs. Someone will break the embargo, and it'll all fall apart." "You buying any of that yourself?" "Wish I did. They've got us by the balls." The President shix)k his head. "Dammit, we've seen this coming for years. And didn't do jack shit!" "Congress wouldn't bite the bullet -- never could see needs further down the road than the next election. And it isn't Just us. The whole industrial world walked into this one." "Maybe we thought we could trade technology for resources forever. But we're sure as hell being kissed off how." "The Third World can do without?" "Why not? We've built them up, given them enough base so they can pool for further development. They've finally caught on to the fact that there aren't enough resources for everyone. So guess who gets frozen out?" "They're right," the man facing the President said coldly. "They just want to survive like the rest of us." "Tell that to the people when the lights go out. How are we fixed for native resources?" The man consulted a clipboard on his lap. "Summation: We have some of what we need, but not enough." "Does Defense see a military option?" "Sure. Thanks to proliferation of A-tech and limited-delivery systems, we can opt for the Last War." "Thought as much," the President grunted. "I've been on the line to some of our more hot-headed allies all afternoon pointedly suggesting just that." "Europe, eh. I don't see much of a future for them -- no resources left." "Too true. Fortunately the Soviets and (hinese weren't importing much. I think we can keep the international lid on. That leaves the folks we work for." The man nodded. "We need a statement for immediate release. That should do until we get our answers down." "Tell me something. Why did I ever get out of showbiz?" "To save the country, of course. Start saving. We've got to crack this embargo fast." The President turned and looked at the posters. "Or survive it."    year four It was named Freedom Park of San Francisco. Optimistically but, as it turned out, in bitter irony. It had been built by low bidders who used substandard materials and bribed inspectors. Then twenty years of uncaring tenants and shoddy upkeep had finished the job. Neil trudged across the summerbrown ground between the unfinished concrete monoliths. In his exhaustion he was prone to reminisce. He recalled the tanker-routing career he had had at Standard Oil before the embargo. Even more painfully, he recalled the modest home on Mount Davidson they had owned -- before. They might have owned it still, but for the bills from having Jason. Hospital bills. Doctor bills. Food and clothing bills. Insurance bills. And on and on and on. They might have been living there still. Instead they were here. He climbed the stairs to the fifth floor and pounded on their apartment door. He identified himself, heard the locks unbolt, then went in. Barbara kissed him, and he kissed back. Part of his bleakness lifted. "Everything okay?" "Uh huh." She stood rigidly by the door. She had to almost shout to be heard -- Jason was chasing a rubber ball around the small living "No trouble?" "If there was. I'd have said!" A pause, then; "How'd the shopping go?" "I wasn't hassled -- not that there was much to rip off. Christ, you stink. Worse than usual." "Tell me about it." He stripped and tossed his clothes into the hamper near the door. Then he collapsed on the ratty sofa. The weekdaily hike to and from the dump was rough on a man coming from soft executive life. He looked forward to the day their savings would buy a new chain for the bike. "I did pretty well today," he sighed. "Six dollars in bonus credit. I found some aluminum cans." "They let you work the old piles?" He nodded. "That's -- Jason, stop!" She rushed over and pulled him away from the lamp cord he was yanking on. Nothing came free anymore, not even welfare. All able-bodied recipients had to work thirty hours a week at the nearest garbage-salvaging operation to get their benefits. Metals, plastics, wood and so on -- all were recovered and sent to their resptective industries for reuse. The remaining organic waste went to farms as fertilizer. Barbara settled into his lap, and held Jason in hers. He groaned, but didn't complain. Jason was burbling, "Daddy home," again and again. Neil tousled his light brown hair. "You have a good day?" Jason nodded enthusiastically. Something tore at Neil as he looked around the crowded living room that doubled as Jason's bedroom. Through an open door he could see the even smaller bedroom. It was a dump; windows cracked, infested with roaches, paper peeling, rugs rotting. Half the electrical equipment and plumbing didn't work, and couldn't be repaired for lack of parts (or money -- the rich still managed to get by). How long could Jason's innocent pleasure in life survive such surroundings? "Cheer up, pouty," Barbara said. "It's Friday -- you've got the whole weekend to recover." "Thank God for small -- ouch, stop kicking, Jason -- favors." But he smiled, and ran a hand down Barbara's back. Fortunately there were some pleasures beyond economics. They left Jason to amuse himself with his ball, and adjourned to the bedroom. In bed they could renew each other with pleasure and love reaffirmed. They found their primal focus, tuning out adversity and all else, even Jason. For a timeless time they rode the joy-save higher and higher, nearing the peak -- "Mommy! I'm thirsty!" With almost explosive intensity Barbara threw herself off of Neil and whirled. Jason was standing at the foot of the bed. "I told you never to come in here when the door's shut without knocking!" she shouted. Jason stumbled back into the living room, sheet-white, stunned. Barbara collapsed next to Neil, sobbing and whispering, "I'm sorry," over and over. Neil pulled her close. "What's the matter. Barb? Why did you blow like that?' ' She turned a tear-damp face to him. "I...don't know. Something just... cut loose." "Huh?" Her crying gradually stopped, and she forced a wan smile. "It's been a bad day. I'm okay now." "You sure?" She nodded, then rose and slipped back into her dress. "Where are you going?" "To apologize to Jason. And try to explain. I must have hurt him a lot." Then her real smile returned. "Don't you dare move a muscle. I'll be right back." Neil blew her a kiss. "You do that."    The meeting room was the largest on Capitol Hill, but it was filled to overflowing with spectators and clotted with media paraphernalia. Facing all of this, elevated and spotlit, the members of the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Resources nervously tried to go about their business. Senator Barrett was preparing his phraseology for his next question. A short man in his middle years, he wasn't very popular with either his fellow Senators or his party's hierarchy due to a curious unwillingness to compromise, and only remained in Washington because his constituents kept sending him back. "Mister Buser, for the past few hours you've been bombarding this sure this committee would appreciate a brief summary. I would." The witness was a tall young bureaucrat with ambition, welldressed and self-conscious. "Frankly, Senator, we're in bad shape. Power and transportation are crippled by the oil shortage. Agriculture needs foreign nitrates for fertilizer. There isn't an industry that hasn't slowed or even stopped production. Our economy is grinding to a halt. Unemployment and crime are out of control." Senator Barrett shook his head. "But what about the programs for alleviating the situation?" "We've set up resource priority and rationing systems. We've mounted massive research to find or develop alternative materials. National Guard and military units are helping the police fight crime and rationing violations. And the waste processing operations are hitting their stride. "But it isn't enough. Senator. There are too many people, too much unavoidable drain on resources. Practically all our stockpiles and reserves are gone." "Has your department investigated the birth-control alternative?" "Yes we have. If we could cut the birth rate by twenty percent at the foreseeable future, we could live within our resource means." "Theoretically, perhaps," said Senator Barrett. "It might even be the only solution. There's just one problem -- the people won't have it. Not even to save the nation. Mister Gallup and Mister Harris presented quite convincing poll results yesterday. Does your department agree?" "We do. The I'eui ol j;ovetiiment control over the rij;hi lo Inivc children cuts even deeper iIkim (he fear of economic collapse." "Why is that. Mister Buser'.'" "There seem lo be several reasons. Some feel it's immoral. Some feel it's unethical. Some feel it's unjust. Some worry about the corruption inherent in any large government program, the ability of wealth and position to buy this ultimate human commodity. Some Just think it's too grotesque and different. "But whatever the reason. Senator, you're right. They don't want it and they won't accept it."    year seven The free-clinic waiting room was crowded even this late at night, and smelled of human anxiety. But Neil and Barbara, huddled on a corner bench, didn't notice either the crowd or the reek. The old, sick and hurt milled around them; swearing, sobs and nervous chatter filled the air. A group of Black Knights were stretchered in frantically -- they had lost more turf to the enterprising North Beach Sensei. But Neil and Barbara were oblivious. Despair had warped the universe in on them. It had been a cold at first, a simple childhood case of sniffles. Even then the extra effort and worry had worn heavily on them, strained as they were by their meager existence. After a few days Jason developed a fever and began breathing rapidly. The free clinic prescribed a course of antibiotics. Even at government subsidy prices they were hideously expensive. Before the embargo all US antibiotics had been imported from huge facilities in Southeast Asia where cheap labor and constant warmth lowered production costs. The US drug industry had retooled from scratch to produce them, and their prices reflected that fact. The small savings account, painfully nurtured with the hope of someday acquiring decent living accommodations, ran like water. Worry became fear. They had to attend him constantly. Barbara became intense and remote; Neil, working all day and staying up with Jason at night, neared the edge of total collapse. The light course proved too little too late. Jason started vomiting and went into convulsions. Fear became stark terror. They carried him through the night to the clinic. Barbara held him while Neil kept his knife handy. Inside the crudely converted Market Street import store a harried doctor grabbed him and carried him through the sliding white doors they couldn't pass. That had been an hour earlier. They were hugging each other. "Dammit," Neil whispered. "We should have brought him here at the first sniffle. If only I hadn't been so sure -- ' ' "Don't you ever say that!" Barbara flared. "Neither of us knew he was this sick." "Mister and Ms. Solarz?" They looked up, startled out of their private world. The doctor had emerged through the white doors. He stood over them; haggard, red-eyed from exhaustion and wrathful at all senseless misery. "What is it?" Neil managed to ask. "Streptococcal pneumonia," the doctor rapped back. "# fever." "Will he be all right?" they asked as one. The doctor nodded wearily. "We have him on streptomycin and tonight. He'll have to stay here at least until tomorrow." "Thank God," Barbara sighed. "Uh... can we see him?" The doctor nodded. Jason was tucked in a bed at the far end of the barracks-like ward. He was writhing, moaning and all but unconscious. Neil and Barbara looked at him, at each other, then sat on both sides of the bed and caressed him, speaking to him .softly. "How long will you two be staying?" the doctor asked bluntly. They looked at Jason. "Until the three of us can leave together," Barbara said. Neil nodded in agreement.    Sharon Farber, MD, PhD, walked over to the laboratory's big bright window and looked out. There was fire in the setting west, over the ocean. Golden light lay on the wooded hillsides and white buildings of the University of California at Santa Cruz, the 'resort campus' of the UC system. "Social psychology," she muttered. "Even in the midst of crisis we persevere. No one really cares, but the machinery keeps grinding out funds." She sighed, then snapped, "Tape roll." Click. "Doctors Farber and Plate. Final progress report." Behind her the turning reels hissed slightly. Beyond the pane birds sang and leaves danced in the wind, unheard. "The basic problem broke down into two parts; identifying persons with a potential for beating or otherwise mistreating their children, and stopping them from having children in the first place through an aversion-therapy technique." She turned. The equipment clustered around the two surgical couches in the middle of the laboratory was quiescent but vibrant with associations. "We used psycho-probe technology to generate dream-like fantasies in the subjects. These fantasies were programmed by us, but were open-ended. They imposed only the external factors of a situation. The subjects' minds reacted as they would in real life. When two subjects were linked into one fantasy, they could interact. The fantasy progressed according to their reactions and the program parameters. Different reactions caused the computer to take the fantasy in different directions." Mike Plate was at his desk in the far comer, putting pages into a binder. He was a large man, quiet almost to the point of non-existence. An ease of long partnership moved between them. "The test situation. A couple considering having a child was linked to the psych-probe. A fantasy was induced, based on their own life histories, putting them in times of stress involving their child. Normal reactions on their part triggered a normal course for the continuation of the fantasy. Reactions of mistreating the child triggered a different course. The fantasy became an intensified amplification of the inevitable horrors -- the pain inflicted, the child's suffering, the batterer's guilt and self-torment; a downward spiral degradation ending in death for the child, arrest, trial and punishment for the batterer -- all keyed for maximum repulsion." The laboratory was getting dark now, but neither she nor Mike moved to turn on the lights. "Our theory has been that such a forward look would discourage potential child batterers from having children. Our success rate -- see the test summaries for details -- has been eighty-one percent. Tape end." Click. Mike tossed the binder on top of the tapedeck. ".Okay. Now what?" She turned back to the window. The stars were out, ruling a shadow world. "Now we push it. It can't help unless it's made mandatory nationwide for all prospective parents. That means government action." "Fantasy land. Congress would never pass such a law -- it'd step on too many toes." She looked back through three years. To welfare agencies and interviews. To police stations and hospital wards. And always to the children. Innocence betrayed. Too, too many times. "So what we do is send copies of our findings to every agency with even a remote interest. We try."    year eighteen The man at the apartment door identified himself as a policeman. Neil checked his ID carefully through the view-hole, then opened the door. "Evening," he said pleasantly, age bringing economy to his speech. "Not a good one though," the policeman snapped. "This belong to you?" Another policeman appeared beside him, carrying a limp, twitching teenager. Barbara, behind Neil, gasped, "My God, Jason!" She rushed to him. She, Neil and the second policeman carried him to the livingroom sofa. "What happened?" Neil demanded. "We raided a juicer den tonight, over on Mission. We took the dealer and the steady custmers in, but there aren't enough cells for everyone so we're cutting the new faces loose. This one's wallet says he lives here." "Jason in a Juicer's place?" Neil shook his head. "I don't believe it. We taught him better." The first policeman smiled cynically from the doorway. "Did you now? Well, look him over. A classic case of current OD -- though the doc says he's okay and will be coming out of it any time now." The second policeman rejoined him. "Pass on a message from us to him when he sobers up. The next time we net him, he gets hard time." They left. Numb, Neil mechanically locked the door behind them. Jason -- long, lean, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt -- moaned slightly with his private pleasure. But the sounds were fading away, and his eyes flickered with returning awareness. "What... What happened? Everything was so beautiful..." "You're home," Barbara said softly. "Are you okay?" "Fine... He giggled, then sobered. "How'd I get home?" Neil stepped closer and looked down at him. "The police dragged you home. Like a stray dog. Dammit, Jason -- what were you doing?" "I... wanted to see what it was like. The guys said it was ultimate." He giggled again. "Know what? They were right." Neil took him by the shoulders and shook him. "The hell they were! Dammit, you know where that route ends!" "Maybe you don't know everything in the world, Dad. Ever think of that?" "You don't believe me -- go look in the gutters!" Jason glared up at him, roused, the current euphoria gone. "So what! Christ, look around! What's to hang on for?" "You want to die? Is that it?" "What if I do?" Neil abruptly pulled out his knife and put it to Jason's throat. "Neil, you're crazy -- " Barbara began shrilly. "I know what I'm doing." She reached for the knife, but he pushed her away. Jason felt the sharp edge against his jugular, gulped and froze. "Do you really want to die?" Neil demanded again. "If you do, say so. It'll be quick and painless -- I promise " Silence stretched taut for long seconds as young eyes stared into old ones. Then Jason started laughing. Not juice giggling, but an expression of real humor. "You old fraud. Put that thing away -- you've made your point." Neil put the knife back in his pocket. He was sick and trembling from shock. But the sickness came partly from relief. The grim stunt, bom of desperation, had worked. Barbara frowned at him, understanding but not approving. "You don't give much slack, do you?" Jason asked, rubbing his throat. Neil sat down beside him. "Your life is your life, but I won't let you con yourself into a grave." Barbara coughed for attention. "You two are certifiably weird." They grinned at each other, then nodded in unison. Her frown surrendered to a slight smile. "I guess that makes three of us."    Michael Killeen was an ambitious young public servant in an obscure in grade for over two years, long enough to realize that, to get any higher, he needed a boost. Finally it came, in the form of an odd statistic in one of the many reports from researchers seeking funding or support. He pressed the writers of the report for details, and got them. He consulted department experts, and they confirmed the report. Then he plotted a strategy for elevating his proposal -- and himself -- into lofty eminence.  First came the marshalling of support; at banquets, parties, golf dates and in the corridors of Washington power. Then came the paperwork skirmishes, fighting through the bureaucratic morass. Finally he entered the ultimate struggle, a one-to-one session with the Secretary. Mister Rabkin, President Nivling's social conscience, sat back in his favorite easychair. Michael was facing him across the plush private office. "Okay, I've looked over your proposal," Mister Rabkin said. "You've got ten minutes to convince me." Michael nodded. "You'll note it was purely an accidental result of their technique." "A mighty hard one to accept. What do you plan to attack next, baseball or apple pie?" "The facts are disillusioning, but they are facts. The experiment was large enough to be statistically valid." "I'll buy that for now. Go on." "Twenty-one percent of the couples, exposed to realistic visions of the pitfalls of parenthood, decided not to have children." "Which means?" "Note the computer extrapolation; applied nationwide, this decrease in the birthrate would easily fit within the resourcepopulation survival curve." Mister Rabkin frowned. "So would drowning every fourth baby. Your proposal would be just as popular." "There's no alternative. Do you want to watch the country go under because we haven't the courage to bite the bullet?" Mister Rabkin paused, then; "The people would never buy it. It's almost as bad as compulsory birth control." "No, it's not! That's the vital difference." "How so?" "We Just require any couple -- married or not -- that wants a child to first take the look forward. If they still wish to go ahead, fine." "But would a law requiring that be effective? After all, how many babies are conceived with that much, ah . , . premeditation?" "These days, about seventy-three percent. Modem contraception techniques have done much to eliminate 'accidental' pregnancies." "That's still not enough." "With my program's heavy fines for Mllful violations, that number will go higher. The public education provisions will help too." "You have a lot of faith in the people." "I know it won't be one hundred percent effective -- what program is -- but it'll be effective enough to meet the present emergency." "But think of the cost! The cornputers and so on would have to be available everywhere. How could we possibly afford it -- especially now?" "We can't afford not to. It'll be steep -- about as bad as our share of Social Security -- but we can handle it. You saw the projections." Michael's long preparation was paying off. He had all the answers. "Would the people buy it though? Some folks would surely think we're trying to hypnotize couples into not having babies." "That can be disproved by operating the program honestly and openly at all levels -- a novelty for us, I admit, but a necessary one." "I'd watch that mouth if I were you." "Sorry. We can also emphasize the other benefit -- discouraging p)otentially lousy parents from having children." "You might actually have something there. Nothing lower than a child beater." "We've been needing something like this for a long time." "Even so, you're talking about a gross invasion of personal privacy. It'd probably require a Constitutional amendment." Michael shrugged. "Then we'll push one through. Properly presented, the program can be sold. We can bring in Madison Avenue." "It'd be one hell of a fight." "The disaster . out there," Michael pointed to the window, "will sell the program for us. Bizarre or not, it's better than no solution at all." Mister Rabkin looked at him almost in hatred. "I'll take it up with the President. If he goes for it, then we can start worrying about Congress. Good day." kk Neil opened his eyes. Barbara opened her eyes. They were lying face-up on a soft couch, side-by-side, hand-in-hand. They were dressed in street clothes, but their heads lay under canopies studded with electronic components. A white-smocked techno monitored a console set into the far wall of the small hospital room. Memories fought against memories as one reality replace another. Neil's throat was dry, but he managed to croak, "You... okay. Barb?" "Yes, love." She squeezed his hand firmly. Then Doctor Reynolds leaned over them, lifting them out from under the canopies, and handed them plastic cups of water. He was a compactly built, amiable man with a steeltrap mind and an office wall covered with degrees. "Here, drink this. Do you feel okay?" They nodded. "Good. Let's go to my sanctum and relax." He led them out of the lab, down a corridor and into his office. "They have a heavy schedule for the dream room today." He settled behind his desk; Barbara and Neil sat on a sofa facing him. "Uh... did we pass?" Barbara asked urgently. He smiled. "I don't know. You tell me." "Huh?" "No one monitors or records dream-room experiences. Against the law, not to mention common decency. Only you two know how your experience went." He kxjked intently at each of them. "It's up to you now. Do you need some time to make up your minds?' ' They looked at each other. "No," Barbara said without hesitation. "We're decided. We want to go ahead." Neil smiled his agreement. "Congratulations." Doctor Reynolds .scribbled his name on a form and handed it to Barbara. "I'll file my copy tonight; give yours to your OB when the time comes. That's all there is to it. Good luck." They left, wrapped in each other and oblivious to all else. Doctor Reynolds leaned back and smiled. His many years in BC-Dep had given him something akin to a sixth sense concerning his couples. These two would do well; raise healthy children and enrich their own lives in the process. These good cases more than made up for the unpleasant ones. Such were the simple pleasures of a psychiatrist.  A cyborg in post-holocaust New England. A prince in seventeenth-century Afnca. A dialog across time. E warning that may come too late. TheEarth Again edeemed May # to July #, #, on this earth of ours and its alter ego science fiction novel by of Children of the Sun # at bookstores # E. #rd St., New York # ton Tropicana, Santa Rosa, CA. GoH: Poul Anderson. Memberships: # total or # per day. For info write: Lucy B. Buss, # Highway ##, Forestville, CA #. Send Rosa, CA #. Angeles, CA. GoH: Richard Matheson. MC: Gahan Wilson. Memberships: #. For info write: Dennis Rickard, # S. #th St., San Jose, CA #. Los Angeles Airport, CA. Membership: # to Oct. #, # afterwards. For info write: Los Angeles SF Society, # Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA #. day Inn, Philadelphia, PA. GoH: HallClement. Membership: # until Nov. I , # afterwards. For info write: P.B. McGrath, # S. #th St., Philadelphia, Pa #. mopolitan Hotel, Denver, CO. Pro GoH: Leigh Brackett. Fan GoH: Bruce Pelz. Toastmaster: Joanna Russ. Membership: # until Nov #, #. Chattanooga, TN. MC: Arsen Darnay. Membership: # in advance, # at door. For info write: Irvin Koch, # Chattanooga Bank Building, Chattanooga TN #. John Brunner. For info write: New Branch PO, Cambridge, Mass., #. Dear Dr. Poumelle, I've been reading science fiction ever since I was old enough to read, and I think I've always believed that I would live to see the conquest of space and all those other great things I read about in stories by Heinlein, Asimov, and the rest. Lately, however. I've been having some doubts about whether any of us will live to see that future. Part of my pessimism stems from reading books like The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth, and realizing that the grim future predicted by Jay Forrester's world model computer programs is becoming the dismal reality of our present. We have seen the future, and it is nasty; the so-called energy crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Like most people I wouldn't worry too much about it if the collapse of civilization as we know it were a distant possibility in the remote future, but it could very' well happen during my lifetime, and that worries me. Your articles have been showing us the kind of future we can have, and should have. In the July, #, that we are at a turning point in history; we are rapidly approaching a point of no return as far as non-renewable resources are concerned. The "doomsday curves" of The Club of Rome show us where we are going if present trends continue. Fortunately, as any true S-F fan knows, any alternate future is equally possible. Unfortunately, because human nature is what it is, the most probable future is the one that lies down the path of least resistance; and that, also unfortunately, is the very path our society has been following for years. As you, yourself, said at MidAmeriCon, "We have nowhere to go but up...or down." Well, you know what I'm talking about, so I'll get directly to the point of this letter, which is: The same technology that got us into this mess can get us out again. We can prevent economic stagnation and famine and nuclear war, and make all our science fiction dreams come true within our own lifetimes, but it won't happen by itself; it will happen only if we make it happen! But in order to make it happen we have to make our views known to our elected representatives, the lawmakers in Washington. We must write to Congress and to President Carter. I have, and I've also written to you and Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov and the L-# Society and... Well, I'm Just trying to do my small part to change the course of human history. The L-# Society, in commenting on an earlier letter I wrote to them concerning the possibility that Carter might cut the can't get involved in lobbying..." I don't know where the NSl stands on this (I joined quite some time ago, but have still not received any communication from the NSl), but lobbying is exactly what we need. We must try to repeat the kind of letter-writing campaign that the Star Trek people launched against President Ford. In his April editorial Ben Bova made the same points that I am making, but he limited it to the general case. I am being more specific. Tbe future belongs to those who plan for it. If we do not plan well enough, we may not have a future. Are we going to be like the ants, or will we end up like the grasshopper? I don't know about you, but I want the rest of my life to be pleasant and prosperous, and I just don't see it happening unless some major changes are made in the way we run this Spaceship. Some of my friends are actively dropping out of what they consider a dying society; they seem to think they can survive on a self-sufficient farm, out away from the cities. If things start getting too bad in a few years I may join them, but I would much rather avoid that particular future and become an asteroid miner instead. I joined a relatively small group of active space enthusiasts at the Worldcon here in Kansas City, and have become very active myself. We call ourselves United For Our Expanded Space they lead some people to think we're a bunch of flying saucer nut-cultists). We have a very informal organization; those who feel active act; those who feel passive pass. We have no Big Names (yet), just S-F fans, students, engineers, etc. We share a common dream, the same dream you share, judging from the contents of your recent articles in known to those turkeys on Capitol Hill, but we'd like some help. Remember when you and Spider and the others were telling the gathered fans about your "favorite future"? I was the tall guy with the beard who asked you what we, as individuals, could do to make the future turn out right. Well, I know what to do, and now I'm asking you to urge your many readers and influential friends to do the same. Here are a few of the things we want Congress to do: I . Sptend whatever money is necessary to fund fusion RD. I, personally, would like to see us take the Manhattan Project approach in getting controlled fusion power "on line" as soon as possible. Consider the implications of this true statement: With enough energy we can do anythingl #. Just in case fusion doesn't pan out in time, appropriate money for at least one prototype solar power satellite. If it proves harmful to the environment we can still use it to power orbital factories... Increase all research and development that could lead to a solution to the laser launch systems. Maintain or increase the level of funding for the Shuttle. #. Provide tax incentives for companies that wish to participate in the Third Industrial Revolution. There's more, much more, but you get the idea. A non-profit organization like L-# cannot legally lobby, but an unorganized rabble can work wonders. We're not interested in "playing club" or building a little empire; all we really want is enough Federal money (after all, it's our tax money) to get us into space and do some of the things we know are possible. We, as individual voters, can exert enormous pressure. Jimmy Carter ' is providing all Americans with the opportunity to make our views known on the energy crisis. He may not be a "real" engineer, but he seems to understand what's really happening around here. We, the people who read science fiction and are involved in various aspects of technology (I'm an engineer, myself), seem to have a greater awareness of the nature of the problems facing Spaceship Earth than some of our fellow passengers; I think we have a morale obligation (Heinlein'.s definition: it tends to promote the survival of the species) to convince the rest of the population that we are headed toward a crisis on this planet of limited resources, and that Space represents a very good solution to those problems. We have already begun to explore space. We now have the technology to exploit space. I mean, let's face facts: the re.sources of space, like space itself, are literally infinite. If we can get out there we won't have to worry about any "limits to growth" for a long time. There is a lot of apathy and inertia to overcome, and the sooner we start overcoming them the better will be our chance for ultimate success. Like a fire alarm salesman once told people. You've gotta make 'em feel the flames and taste the smoke. Then you can make a living selling fire alarms." We've got a similar sales job to do. Many people still seem to think that the energy crisis will go away if they ignore it, or that it is nothing more than a massive rip-off perpetrated by the oil companies. We must convicnce the public that Spaceship Earth is running out of "consumables" and that some of the passengers down in steerage are busy building atomic bombs...We must convince our Congresscritters that Space is not just a sci-fi dream; it is absolutely vital to the long-term survival of our race. Even as you read this letter, many Congressmen are getting letters from a whole new constituency, letters that ask for money for asteroid capture projects and nuclear rockets and solar power satellites. If we can get enough people to write similar letters, and let those politicians know that how they vote on space appropriations will determine how we vote in the next election, we can get all those things, and more, in our own lifetimes. We have nothing to lose (except a world of perpetual poverty) and literally everything to gain. The advent of the Space Shuttle and the coming barrage of science fiction movies should help, but it is up to us -- W o( US' to get this thing off the ground (no pun intemled) I've sliirted doing iiiy purl Mow about you? Space is the place! Robert G. Lovell, Jr. Space is the place! Robert G. Lovell, Jr. # W. #th. Terrace Shawnee, Kansas # Dear Mr. Lovell, Dear Mr. Baen; On a talk-show last night, from a local radio station, I found myself listening to some character who claims to have proof that the Apollo program was a fake. If not the entire space program, at least the manned landings, says he, were staged. Well, I was fair and open minded about the whole thing, and heard him out. (I must admit I giggled a little once and awhile.) When it was over I went to sleep feeling quite put upon by the fraud. He is even doing a film on the theory of our ' space program being faked. Instead of going into more detail, as you have no doubt heard of this nut, I have a question. What are we going to do with lunatics like him, short of shooting him and putting him out of our misery? Also, I am quite pleased with Galaxy. I have never been an avid magazine reader, prefering novels and anthologies. I now find myself eagerly awaiting each issue, and absorbing the entire thing on the same day it is delivered. I'm new to your magazine, but I think I'll stay around for awhile. If you don't mind. Sincerely, TTiomas T. Watson #S E. Seldon Lane Phoenix, AZ # Actually, I don't think I have heard of this particular nut, though I have heard of many like him (it is an interesting aspect of that particular syndrome that shortly after proving that our entire Space Program is a fraud that same person will often proceed to tell you Conspiracy...). As for what to do about them, I think the best course is to leave them alone; anything that would seriously discommode them would have vastly greater deleterious effects on our society than whatever benefits might accrue from silencing a few mental cases. And by all means, stay around -- and welcome aboard! Dear Jim; It is a very good thing that you, in your Galaxy editorials, have been giving us reasons for the space program -- reasons that we readers can use to help convince the paynim, so to speak. Dr. Poumelle, also, has been doing this same thing in greater depth -- telling us what can be done with space  in space. I think that it's now time to change your emphasis. I think that what you, Jim Baen, should be doing now in your editorials is telling us and letting us know how we can influence the political process to gel reasoned arguments that have been need to be seen by those that wield the purse strings in congress. I am told that a congressman considers # pieces of mail on a single bill before him highly significant. # pieces of mail. That's not a heck of a whole lot. I'm sure that letters to specific congressmen would be even more likely to do good -- who are these people? And are there others besides those in congress that should be written to? What other avenues of effort besides letter writing are available to we Galaxy readers to try to enlarge the US space program? Are there space-oriented pressure groups  lobby groups? If so, where are they  who are they? What are they doing? These are the sort of things I'd like to see in Galaxy these days. A highly specialised 'Washington Watch.' It won't really take a lot to turn around the funding for the space program, but the X)litical legwork that we as citizens must do to obtain itself. It's time to get to work. I remain. Tim Kyger #I E. McKellips ##.SB Tempe, AZ #.'i#I Yon have a good point: I'll see what  can do. Dear Mr. Baen, The J.E. Pournelle articles are fantastic! I would like to see a few articles on recent developments in aging research. I think that greater emphasis should be put on biological research (of course, this will require space facilities for zero-g processing and a safe place to do genetic recombination research). After all, this generation could be the one that makes it to the stars, if we just live long enough. I am president of a small group of university and high school students interested in promoting space colonization and longevity research. We have given presentations at a school and a Lions' Club, and plan to continue working with community organizations to educate the public about the benefits of space. We are also starting a letter-writing campaign, to political leaders, major news magazines and even local newspapers. Any Galaxy readers in the central Ohio area who are interested in the L-# colony-powersat idea andor other fields of space exploitation, or are interested in recent aging research developments, may get in touch with us at the following address; Thank you for your superlative mag. Alpha Sigma Phi #I E. #th Avenue Columbus, Ohio #I Dear Jim, Frank Herbert again shows us the master writer that he is! "The Dosadi Experiment" explores a world which is very unlike the world that he has presented in the Dune trilogy. Nevertheless, with the same artistic and literary skill, Frank Herbert presents a story which is equally dramatic. Though much more subtle, the unfolding drama on the planet Dosadi provides an exploratory theme of moral consciousness. Frank Herbert certainly outdid himself in this new story and has a Hugo contention. Thank you Frank Herbert and certainly thank you Gala.xy for publishing this great serial. Speaking of your magazine, it has certainly become the most provocative science fiction publication around! Sincerely yours, Roy D. Schickedanz # Sherwood Lake Drive Apt #-B Schererville, Indiana # sues. Send check or money order to: C.L. Grant, # Center Grove Road, H-#, Dept. G, Dover, N.J. #. Science-Fantastica Books -- # items, some old and rare, some bargains. List, #, (G) Pays on acceptance. Box #, San Diego, CA., #. Most complete SF catalogue ever published. Complete in-print US  British SF listing alphabetical by author! Also many o.p. titles, small press, even undergrounds. # reAuburn St., Cambridge, Mass. #. magazines from # to I#. 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The Histories, Ships and Actions of Humanoid, Cyborg, Alien, Android, Robotoid, Cione, and other Super Civilizations that dehf description. The Series can be played by the purchase of only one book that specific weapons, tactics and rulings. To play oFA yoe muit have a BaMe Manual. This enables you to begin your study of the games at low Master Reel Commander's Manual (# . famous by the Battle For Andromeda Series. Blown-up detaif ship play WD you must have a combat manual for the low cost of #. The following games are availablecost of Manual not included: the Planets' resources, life-support, and values. Seven Types of Ships with Missile Forces and # types of Planeti Ground Armies. # counters, #-# play! Star Ships, Massive Null Guns, Battle Cruisers, Heavy Cruisers, and many other ship types. 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Here's a time-travel story in which the goings on are just as manic, even if the only Marx implied is Kari. What a nut! Talks about how jogging makes the world go 'round. Trouble is, he's telling the literal truth. It was a real pretty show. And real expensive, too. But the kid figured it was money well spent. prone than you think! That new Niven-Pournelie novel is anything but a disaster, opines our new critic. But John Variey's first is awful itchy! The Golden Age -- introductory remarks by a freshman editor Cover by Wendy Pini Interior illustrations by Odbert, Woods, Harlib Publishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Arnold E. Abramson, President. Main Office A Ednorial Office; # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y., #S#. Single copy #. #-Issue subscription; # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. The publlshera assume no responsibility for unscllcltsd material. All stories printed in this magazina are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persona Is coincidental. Printed in Existence depended on the Pattern. And the Pattern was being broken Amber: high and bright atop Kolvir in the middle of the day. A black road: low and sinister through Gamath from Chaos to the south. Me: cursing, pacing and occasion ally reading in the library of the S palace in Amber. The door to that library: closed and barred. The mad prince of Amber seated himself at the desk, returned his attention to the opened volume. There was a knock on the door. "Go away!" I said. "Corwin. It's me -- Random. Open up, huh? I even brought lunch." "Just a minute." I got to my feet again, rounded the desk, crossed the room. Random nodded when I opened the door. He carried a tray which he took to a small table near the desk. "Plenty of food there," I said. "I'm hungry, too." "So do something about it." He did. He carved. He passed me some meat on a slab ofbread. He poured wine. We seated ourselves and ate. A-:,... "I know you are still mad..." he said after a time. "Aren't you?" "Well, maybe I am more used to it. I don't know. Still... Yes. It was sort of abrupt, wasn't it?" "Abrupt?" I took a large swallow of wine. "It is just like the old days. Worse even. I had actually come to like him when he was playing at being Ganelon. Now that he is back in control, he is just as preemptory as ever. He has given us a set of orders he has not bothered to explain and he has disappeared again." "He said he would be in touch soon." "I imagine he intended that last time, too." "I'm not so sure." "And he explained nothing about his other absence. In fact, he has not really explained anything." "He must have his reasons." "I am beginning to wonder. Random. Do you think his mind might finally be going?" "He was still sharp enough to fool you." "That was a combination of low animal cunning and shapeshifting ability." "It worked, didn't it?" "Yes. It worked." "Corwin, could it be that you do not want him to have a plan that might be effective, that you do not want him to be right?" "That is ridiculous. I want this mess cleared up as much as any of US." "Yes, but wouldn't you rather the answer came from another quarter?" "What are you getting at?" "You do not want to trust him." "I will admit that. I have not seen him -- as himself -- in a hell of a long time, and -- " He shook his head. "That is not what I mean. You are angry that he is back, aren't you? You hoped that we had seen the last of him." I looked away. "There is that," I finally said. "But not for a vacant throne, ot not just for it. It is him. Random. Him. lliat's all." "I know," he said. "But you have to admit he suckered Brand, which is not an easy thing to do. He pulled a stunt I still do not understand, getting you to bring that sum back from Tir-na Nog'th, somehow getting me to pass it along to Benedict, seeing to it that Benedict was in the right place at the proper moment so that everything worked and he got the Jewel back. He is also still better than we are at Shadow play. He managed it right on Kolvir when he took us to the primal Pattern. I cannot do that. Neither can you. And he was able to whip Gerard. I do not believe that he is slowing down. I think he knows exactly what he is doing, and whether we like it or not, I think he is the only one who can deal with the present situation." "You are trying to say that I should trust him?" "I am trying to say that you have no choice." I sighed. "I guess you've put your finger on it," I said. "No sense in my being bitter. Still..." "The attack order bothers you, doesn't it?" "Yes, among other things. If we would wait longer, Benedict could field a greater force. Three days is not much time to get ready for something like this. Not when we are so uncertain about the enemy." "But we may not be. He spoke in private with Benedict for a long while." "And that is the other thing. These separate orders. This secrecy... He is not trusting us any more than he has to." Random chuckled. So did I. "All right," I said. "Maybe I would not either. But three days to launch a war." I shook my head. "He had better know something we don't." "I get the impression that it is more a pre-emptory strike than a war." "Only he did not bother to tell us what we are pre-empting." Random shrugged, poured more wine. "Perhaps he will say when he gets back. You did not get any special orders, did you?" "Just to stand and wait. What about you?" He shook his head. "He said that when the time comes, I will know. At least with Julian, he told him to have his troops ready to move on a moment's notice." "Oh? Aren't they staying in Arden?" He nodded. "When did he say this?" "After you left. He trumped Julian up here to give him the message, and they rode off together. I heard Dad say that he would ride partway back with him." "Did they take the eastern trail over Kolvir?' ' "Yes. I saw them off." "Interesting. What else did I miss?" He shifted in his seat. "The part that bothers me," he said. "After Dad had mounted and waved a good-bye, he looked back at me and said, 'And keep an eye on Martin.' " "That is all?" "That is all. But he was laughing as he said it." "Just natural suspicion of a newcomer, I guess." "Then why the laugh?" "I give up." I cut a piece of cheese and ate it. "Might not be a bad idea, though. It might not be suspicion. Maybe he feels Martin needs to be protected from something. Or both. Or neither. You know how he sometimes is." Random stood. "I had not thought through to the alternative. Come with me now, huh?" he said. "You have been up here all morning." "All right." I got to my feet, buckled on Grayswandir. "Where is Martin, anyway?" "I left him down on the first floor. He was talking with Gerard." "He is in good hands, then. Is Gerard going to be staying here, or will he be returning to the fleet?" "I do not know. He would not discuss his orders." We left the room. We headed for the stairway. On the way down, I heard some small commotion from below and I quickened my pace. I looked over the railing and saw a throng of guards at the entrance to the throne room, along with the massive figure of Gerard. All of them had their backs to us. I leaped down the final stairs. Random was not far behind me. I pushed my way through. "Gerard, what is happening?" I asked. "Damned if I know," he said. "Look for yourself. But there is no getting in." He moved aside and I took a step forward. Then another. And that was it. It was as if I were pushing against a slightly resilient, totally invisible wall. Beyond was a slight that tied my memory and feelings into a knot. I stiffened as fear took hold of me by the neck, clasped my hands. No mean trick, that. Martin, smiling, still held a Trump in his left hand, and Benedict -- apparently recently summoned -- stood before him. A girl was nearby, on the dais beside the throne, facing away. Both men appeared to be speaking, but I could not hear the words. Finally, Benedict turned and seemed to address the girl. After a time, she appeared to be answering him. Martin moved off to her left. Benedict mounted the dais as she spoke. I could see her face then. The exchange continued. "That girl looks somewhat familiar," said Gerard, who had moved forward and now stood at my side. "You might have gotten a glimpse of her as she rode past us," I told him, "the day Eric died. It's Dara." I heard his sudden intake of breath. "Dara!" he said. "Then you..." His voice faded. "I was not lying," I said. "She is real." "Martin!" cried Random, who had moved up on my right. "Martin! What's going on!" There was no response. "I don't think he can hear you," Gerard said. "This barrier seems to have cut us off completely." Random strained forward, his hands pushing against something unseen. "Let's all of us give it a shove," he said. So I tried again. Gerard also threw his weight against the invisible wall. After half a minute without success, I eased back. "No good," I said. "We can't move it." "What is the damned thing?" Random asked."What is holding -- " I'd had a hunch -- only that, though -- as to what might be going on. And only because of the deja vu character of the entire piece. Now, though... Now I clasped my hand to my scabbard to assure myself that Grayswandir still hung at my side. It did. Then how could I explain the presence of my distinctive blade, its elaborate tracery gleaming for all to see, hanging where it had suddenly appeared, without support, in the air before the throne, its point barely touching Dara's throat? I could not. But it was too similar to what had happened that night in the dream city in the sky. Tir-na Nog'th, to be a coincidence. Here were none of the trappings -- the darkness, the confusion, the heavy shadows, the tumultuous emotions I had known -- and yet the piece was set much as it had been that night. It was very similar. But not precisely so. Benedict's stance seemed somewhat off -- farther back, his body angled differently. While I could not read her lips, I wondered whether Dara was asking the same strange questions. I doubted it. The tableau -- like, yet unlike, that which I had experienced -- had probably been colored at the other end -- that is, if there were any connection at all -- by the effects of Tir-na Nog'th's powers on my mind at that time. "Corwin," Random said, "that looks like Grayswandir hanging in front of her." "It does, doesn't it?" I replied. "But as you can see, I am wearing my blade." "There can't be another just like it... can there? Do you know what is happening?" "I am beginning to feel as if I may," I said. "Whatever, I am powerless to stop it. " Benedict's blade suddenly came free and engaged the other, so like my own. In a moment, he was fighting an invisible opponent. "Give him hell, Benedict!" Random shouted. "It is no use," I said. "He is about to be disarmed." "How can you know?" Gerard asked. "Somehow, that is me in there fighting with him," I said. "This is the other end of my dream in Tir-na Nog'th. I do not know how he managed it, but this is the price for Dad's recovering the Jewel." "I do not follow you," he said. I shook my head. "I do not pretend to understand how it is being done," I told him. "But we will not be able to enter until two things have vanished from that room." "What two things?" "Just watch." Benedict's blade had changed hands, and his gleaming prosthesis shot forward and fixed itself upon some unseen target. The two blades parried one another, locked, pressed, their points moving toward the ceiling. Benedict's right hand continued to tighten. Suddenly, the Grayswandir-blade was free and moving past the other. It struck a terrific blow to Benedict's right arm at the place where the metal portion joined it. Benedict turned -- and the action was blocked to our view for several moments. Then the sight was clear again as Benedict dropped to one knee, turning. He clutched at the stump of his arm. The mechanical handarm hung in the air near Grayswandir. It was moving away from Benedict and descending, as was the blade. When both reached the floor, they did not strike it but passed on through, vanishing from sight. I lurched forward, recovered my balance, moved ahead. The barrier was gone. Martin and Dara reached Benedict before we did. Dara had already tom a strip from her cloak and was binding Benedict's stump when Gerard, Random and I got there. Random seized Martin by the shoulder and turned him. "What happened?" he asked. "Dara -- Dara told me she wanted to see Amber," he said. "Since I live here now, I agreed to bring her through and show her around. Then -- " "Bring her through? You mean on a Trump?" "Well, yes." "Yours or hers?" Martin raked his lower lip with his teeth. "Well, you see..." "Give me those cards," said Random, and he snatched the case from Martin's belt. He opened it and began going through them. "Then I thought to tell Benedict since he was interested in her," Martin went on. "Then Benedict wanted to come and see -- " "What the hell!" Random said. "There is one of you, one of her, and one of a guy I've never even seen before! Where did you get these?" "Let me see them," I said. He passed me the three cards. "Well?" he said. "Was it Brand? He is the only one I know who can make Trumps now." "I would not have anything to do with Brand," Martin replied, "except to kill him." But I already knew they were not from Brand. They were simply not in his style. Nor were they in the style of anyone whose work I knew. Style was not foremost in my mind at that moment, however. Rather, it was the features of the third person. the one whom Random had said he had never seen before. I had. I was looking at the face of the youth who had confronted me with a crossbow before the Courts of Chaos, recognized me and then declined to shoot. I extended the card. "Martin, who is this?" I asked. "The man who made these extra Trumps," he said. "He drew one of himself while he was about it. I do not know his name. He is a friend of Dara's." "You are lying," Random said. "Then let Dara tell us," I said, and I turned to her. She still knelt beside Benedict, though she had finished bandaging him and he was now sitting up. "How about it?" I said, waving the card at her. "Who is this man?" She glanced at the card, then up at me. She smiled. "You really do not know?" she asked. "Would I be asking if I did?" "Then look at it again and go look in a mirror. He is your son as much as mine. His name is Merlin." I am not easily shocked, but this had nothing of ease about it. I felt dizzy. But my mind moved quickly. With the proper time differential, the thing was possible. "Dara," I said, "what is it that you want?" "I told you when I walked the Pattern," she said, "that Amber must be destroyed. What I want is to have my rightful part in it." "You will have my old cell," I said. "No, the one next to it. Guards!" "Corwin, it is all right," Benedict said, getting to his feet. "It is not as bad as it sounds. She can explain everything." "Then let her start now." "No. In private. Just family." I motioned back the guards who had come at my call. "Very well. Let us adjourn to one of the rooms up the hall." He nodded, and Dara took hold of his left arm. Random, Gerard, Martin and I followed them out. I looked back once to the empty place where my dream had come true. Such is die stuff. II. and dismounted when I came to my tomb. I went inside and opened the casket. It was empty. Good. I was beginning to wonder. I had halfexpected to see myself laid out before me, evidence that despite signs and intuitions, I had somehow wandered into the wrong shadow. I went back outside and rubbed Star's nose. The sun was shining and the breeze was chill. I had a sudden desire to go to sea. I seated myself on the bench instead and fumbled with my pipe. We had talked. Seated with her legs beneath her on the brown sofa, Dara had smiled and repeated the story of her descent from Benedict and Lintra, the hellmaid, growing up in and about the Courts of Chaos, a grossly non-Euclidean realm where time itself presented strange distribution problems. "The things you told me when we met were lies," I said. "Why should I believe you now?" She had smiled and regarded her fingernails. "I had to lie to you then, to get what I wanted from you." "That being... ?" "Knowledge, of the family, the Pattern, the Trumps, of Amber. To gain your trust. To have your child." "The truth would not have served as well?" "Hardly. I come ftom the enemy. My reasons for wanting these things were not the sort of which you would approve." "Your swordplay... ? You told me then that Benedict had trained you." She smiled again and her eyes showed dark fires. "I learned from the great Duke Borel himself, a High Lord of Chaos." "... and your appearance," I said. "It was altered on a number of occasions when I saw you walk the Pattern. How? Also, why?" "All whose origins involve Chaos are shapeshifters," she replied. I thought of Dworkin's performance the night he had impersonated me. Benedict nodded. "Dad fooled us with his Ganelon disguise." "Oberon is a son of Chaos," Dara said, "a rebel son of a rebel father. But the power is still there." "Then why is it we cannot do it?" Random asked. She shrugged. "Have you ever tried? Perhaps you can. On the other hand, it may have died out with your generation. I do not know. As to myself, however, I have certain favored shapes to which I revert in times of stress. I grew up where this was the rule, where the other shape was actually sometimes dominant. It is still a reflex with me. This is what you witnessed -- that day." "Dara," I said, "why did you want the things that you said you wanted -- knowledge of the family, the Pattern, the Trumps, Amber? And a son?" "All right" She sighed. "All right. You are by now aware of Brand's plans -- the destruction and rebuilding of Amber... ?" "Yes." "This involved our consent and cooperation." "Including the murder of Martin?" Random asked. "No," she said. "We did not know who he intended to use as the -- agent." "Would it have stopped you had you known?" "You are asking a hypothetical question," she said. "Answer it yourself. I am glad that Martin is still alive. That is all that I can say about it." "All right," Random said. "What about Brand?" "He was able to contact our leaders by methods he had learned from Dworkin. He Tiad ambitions. He needed knowledge, power. He offered a deal." "What sort of knowledge?" "For one thing, he did not know how to destroy the Pattern -- " "Then you were responsible for what he did," Random said. "If you choose to look at it that way." "I do." She shrugged, looked at me. "Do you want to hear this story?" "Go ahead." I glanced at Random and he nodded. "Brand was given what he wanted," she said, "but he was not trusted. It was feared that once he possessed the power to shape the world as he would, he would not stop with ruling over a revised Amber. He would attempt to extend his dominion over Chaos as well. A weakened Amber was what was desired so that Chaos would be stronger than it now is -- the striking of a new balance, giving to us more of the Shadowlands that lie between our realms. It was realized long ago that the two kingdoms can never be merged, or one destroyed, without also disrupting all the processes that lie in flux between us. Total stasis or complete chaos would be the result. Yet, though it was seen what Brand had in mind, our leaders came to terms with him. It was the best opportunity to present itself in ages. It had to be seized. It was felt that Brand could be dealt with, and finally replaced, when the time came." "So you were also planning a double-cross," Random said. "Not if he kept his word. But then, we knew that he would not. So we provided for the move against him." "How?" "He would be allowed to accomplish his end and then be destroyed. He would be succeeded by a member of the royal family of Amber who was also of the first family of the Courts, one who had been raised among us and trained for the position. Merlin even traces his connection with Amber on both sides, through my forebear Benedict and directly fi-om yourself -- the two most favored claimants to your throne." "You are of the royal house of Chaos?" She smiled. I rose. Strode away. Stared at the ashes on the grate. "I find it somewhat distressing to have been involved in a calculated breeding project," I said, at length. "But be that as it may, and accepting everything you have said as true -- for the moment -- why are you telling us all of these things now?' ' "Because," she said, "I fear that the lords of my realm would go as far for their vision as Brand would for his. Farther, perhaps. That balance I spoke of. Few seem to appreciate what a delicate thing it is. I have traveled in the Shadowlands near, to Amber, and I have walked in Amber herself. I also have known the shadows that lie by Chaos' side. I have met many people and seen many things. Then, when I encountered Martin and spoke with him, I began to feel that the changes I had been told would be for the better would not simply result in a revision of Amber more along the lines of my elders' liking. "They would, instead, turn Amber into a mere extension of the Courts, most of the shadows would boil away to Join with Chaos. Amber would become an island. Some of my seniors who still smart at Dworkin's having created Amber in the first place are really seeking a return to the days before this happened. "Total Chaos, from which all things arose. I see the present condition as superior and I wish to preserve it. My desire is that neither side emerge victorious in any conflict." I turned in time to see Benedict shaking his head. "Then you are on neither side," he stated. "I like to think that I am on both." "Martin," I said, "are you in this with her?" He nodded. Random laughed. "The two of you? Against both Amber and the Courts of Chaos? What do you hope to achieve? How do you plan to further this notion of balance?" "We are not alone," she said, "and the plan is not ours." Her fingers dipped into her pocket. Something glittered when she withdrew them. She turned it in the light. It was our father's signet ring that she held. "Where did you get that?" Random asked. "Where else?" Benedict stepped toward her and held out his hand. She gave it to him. He scrutinized it. "It is his," he said. "It has the little markings on the back that I've seen before. Why do you have it?" "First, to convince you that I am acting properly when I convey his orders," she said. "How is it that you even know him?" I asked. "I met him during his -- difficulties -- some time back," she told us. "In fact, you might say that I helped to deliver him from them. This was after I had met Martin and I was inclined to be more sympathetic toward Amber. But then, your father is also a charming and persuasive man. I decided that I could not simply stand by and see him remain prisoner to my kin." "Do you know how he was captured in the first place?" She shook her head. "I only know that Brand effected his presence in a shadow far enough from Amber that he would be taken there. I believe it involved a fake quest for a nonexistent magical tool which might heal the Pattern. He realizes now that only the Jewel can do it." "Your helping him to get away... How did this affect your relations with your own people?" "Not too damned well," she said. "I am temporarily without a home." "And you want one here?" She smiled again. "It depends on how things turn out. If my people have their way, I would as soon go back -- or stay with what shadows remain." I withdrew a Trump, glanced at it. "What of Merlin? Where is he now?" "They have him," she said. "I fear he may be their man now. He knows his parentage, but they have had charge of his education for a long while. I do not know whether he could be gotten away." I raised the Trump, stared at it. "No good," she said. "It will not function between here and there." I recalled how difficult Trump communication had been when I yv-? had been to the fringes of that place. I tried anyway. The card grew cold in my hand and I reached out. There was the faintest flicker of a responding presence. I tried harder. "Merlin, this is Corwin," I said. "Do you hear me?" I seemed to hear a reply. It seemed to be, "I cannot -- " And then there was nothing. The card lost its coldness. "Did you reach him?" she asked. "I am not sure," I said. "But I think so. Just for a moment." "Better than I thought," she said. "Either conditions are good or your minds are very similar." "When you began waving Dad's signet around, you spoke of orders," Random said. "What orders? And why is he sending them through you?" "It is a matter of timing." "Timing? Hell! He just left here this morning!" "He had to finish one thing before he was ready for another. He had no idea how long it would take. But I was just in touch with him before I came here -- though I was hardly prepared for the reception I walked into -- and he is now ready to begin the next phase." "Where did you speak with him?" I asked. "Where is he?" "I have no idea where he is. He contacted me." "And... ?" "He wants Benedict to attack immediately." Gerard finally stirred from the huge armchair in which he had sat listening. He rose to his feet, hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked down at her. "An order like that would have to come directly from Dad." "It did," she said. He shook his head. "It makes no sense. Why contact you -- someone we have small reason to trust -- rather than one of us?" "I do not believe that he can reach you at the moment. On the other hand, he was able to reach me." "Why?" "He did not use a Trump. He does not have one for me. He used a reverberation effect of the black road, similar to the means by which Brand once escaped Corwin." "You know a lot of what has been going on." "I do. I still have sources in the Courts, and Brand transported himself there after your struggle. I hear things." "Do you know where our father is right now?" Random asked. "No, I do not know. But I believe that he has journeyed to the real Amber, to take counsel with Dworkin and to re-examine the damage to the primal Pattern." "To what end?" "I do not know. Probably to decide on the course of action he will take. The fact that he reached me and ordered the attack most likely means that he has decided." "How long ago was this communication?" "Just a few hours -- my time. But I was far from here in Shadow. I do not know what the time differential is. I am too new at this." "So it could be something extremely recent. Possibly only moments ago," Gerard mused. "Why , did he talk with you rather than one of us? I do not believe that he could not reach us if he wished to." "Perhaps to show that he looks upon me with favor," she said. "All of this may be entirely true," Benedict stated. "But I am not moving without a confirmation of that order." "Is Fiona still at the primal Pattern?" Random asked. "Last I heard," I told him, "she had set up camp there. I see what you mean..." I shuffled out Fi's card. "It took more than one of us to get through from there," he observed. "True. So give me a hand." He rose, came to my side. BenI edict and Gerard approached. "This is not really necessary," I Dara protested. I ignored her and concentrated on I the delicate features of my red' haired sister. Moments later we I had contact. "Fiona," I asked, seeing from the background that she was still in residence at the heart of things, "is Dad there?" "Yes," she said, smiling tightly. "He is inside with Dworkin." "Listen, urgency prevails. I do not know whether or not you know Dara, but she is here -- " "I know who she is, but I have never met her." "Well, she claims she has an attack order for Benedict, from Dad. She has his signet to back it up, but he did not speak of this earlier. Do you know anything about it?" "No," she said. "All we did was exchange greetings when he and Dworkin were out here earlier to look at the Pattern. I had some suspicions then, though, and this confirms them." "Suspicions? What do you mean?' ' "I think Dad is going to try to repair the Pattern. He has the Jewel with him, and I overheard some of the things he said to Dworkin. If he makes the attempt, they will be aware of it in the Courts of Chaos the moment that he begins. They will try to stop him. He would want to strike first to keep them occupied. Only..." "What?" "It is going to kill him, Corwin. I know that much about it. Whether he succeeds or fails, he will be destroyed in the process." "I find it hard to believe." "That a king would give up his life for the realm?' ' "That Dad would." "Then either he has changed or you never really knew him. But I do believe he is going to try it." "Then why send his latest order by someone he knows we do not really trust?" "To show that he wants you to trust her, I would guess, once he has confirmed it." "It seems a roundabout way of doing things, but I agree that we should not act without that confirmation. Can you get it for us?" "I will try. I will get back to you as soon as I have spoken with him." She broke the contact. I turned toward Dara, who had heard only our side of the conversation. "Do you know what Dad is going to do right now?" I asked her. "Something involving the black road," she said. "He had indicated that much. What, though, or how, he did not say." I turned away. I squared my cards and encased them. I did not like this turning of events. This entire day had started badly, and things had been going downhill ever since. It was only a little past lunchtime, too. I shook my head. When I had spoken with him, Dworkin had described the results of any attempt to repair the Pattern, and they had sounded pretty horrendous to me. Supposing Dad tried it, failed, and got himself killed in the attempt? Where would we be then? Right where we were now, only without a leader, on the eve of battle -- and with the succession problem stirring again. That whole ghastly business would be in the back of our minds as we rode to the wars, and we would all begin our private arrangements to fight one another once more as soon as the current enemy was dealt with. There had to be another way of handling things. Better Dad alive and on the throne than a revival of the succession intrigues. "What are we waiting for?" Dara asked. "Confirmation?" "Yes," I replied. Random began to pace. Benedict seated himself and tested the dressing on his arm. Gerard leaned against the mantlepiece. I stood and thought. An idea came to me just then. I pushed it away immediately, but it returned. I did not like it, but that had nothing to do with practicalities. I would have to move quickly, though, before I had a chance to talk myself around to another viewpoint. No. I would stick with this one. Damn it! There came a stirring of contact. I waited. Moments later I regarded Fiona again. She stood in a familiar place that it took me several seconds to recognize: Dworkin's sitting room, on the other side of the heavy door at the back of the cave. Dad and Dworkin were both with her. Dad had dropped his Ganelon disguise and was his old self once again. I saw that he wore the Jewel. "Corwin," Fiona said, "it is true. Dad did send the attack order with Dara, and he expected this call for confirmation. I -- " "Fiona, bring me through." "What?" "You heard me. Now!" I extended my right hand. She reached forward and we touched. "Corwin!" Random shouted. "What's happening?" Benedict was on his feet, Gerard already moving toward me. "You will hear about it shortly," I said, and I stepped forward. I squeezed her hand before I released it and I smiled. "Thanks, Fi. Hello, Dad. Hi, Dworkin. How's everything?" I glanced once at the heavy door, saw that it stood open. Then I passed around Fiona and moved toward them. Dad's head was lowered, his eyes narrowed. I knew that look. "What is this, Corwin? You are here without leave," he said. "I have confirmed that damned order, now I expect it to be carried out." "It will be," I said, nodding. "I did not come here to argue about that." "What, then?" I moved nearer, calculating my words as well as the distance. I was glad that he had remained seated. "For a time we rode as comrades," I said. "Damned if I did not come to like you then. I never had before, you know. Never had guts enough to say that before either, but you know it is true. I like to think that that is how things  could have been, if we had not been what we are to each other." For the barest moment, his gaze seemed to soften as I positioned myself. Then, "At any rate," I went on, "I am going to believe in you that way rather than this way because there is something I would never have done for you otherwise." "What?" he asked. "This." I seized the Jewel with an upward sweeping motion and snapped the chain up over his head. I pivoted on my heel then and raced across the room and through the door. I drew it shut behind me and snapped it to. I could see no way to bar it from the outside, so I ran on, retracing the route through the cave from the night I had followed Dworkin along it. Behind me I heard the expected bellow. I followed the twistings. I stumbled only once. Wixer's smell still hung heavy in his lair. I pounded on and a final turning brought me a view of daylight ahead. I raced toward it, slipping the Jewel's chain over my head as I went. I felt it fall to my breast. I reached down into it with my mind. There were echoes in the cave behind ihe. Outside! I sprinted toward the Pattern, feeling through the Jewel, turning it into an extra sense. I was the only person other than Dad or Dworkin fully attuned to it. Dworkin had told me that the Pattern's repair might be effected by a person's walking the Grand Pattern in such a state of attunement, burning out the smear at each crossing, replacing it with stock from the image of the Pattern that he bore within him, wiping out the black road in the process. Better me than Dad, then. I still felt that the black road owed something of its final form to the strength my curse against Amber had given it. I wanted to wipe that out, too. Dad would do a better job of putting things together after the war than I ever could, anyway. I realized, at that moment, that I no longer wanted the throne. Even if it were available, the prospect of administering to the kingdom down all the dull centuries that might lie before me was overwhelming. Maybe I would be taking the easy way out if I died in this effort. Eric was dead, and I no longer hated him. The other thing that had driven me -- the throne -- seemed now to have been desirable only because I'd thought he had wanted it so. I renounced both. What was left? I had laughed at Vialle, then wondered. But she had been right. The old soldier in me was strongest. It was a matter of duty. But not duty alone. There was more... I reached the edge of the Pattern, quickly made my way toward its beginning. I glanced back at the cavemouth. Dad, Dworkin, Fiona -- none of them had yet emerged. Good. They could never make it in time to stop me. Once I set foot on the Pattern, it would be too late foi them to do anything but wait and watch. I thought for a fleeting instant ol lago's dissolution, pushed thai thought away, strove to calm m) mind to the level necessary for the undertaking, recalled my battle wit! Brand in this place and his strange departure, pushed that away, too slowed my breathing, prepared myself. A certain lethargy came upon me. It was time to begin, but I held back for a moment, trying to fix mj mind properly on the grand task tha lay before me. The Pattern swam for a moment in my vision. Now! Damn it! Now! No more preliminaries! Begin, I told myself. Walk! Still, I stood, contemplating the Pattern as in a dream. I forgot about myself for long moments as I regarded it. The Pattern, with its long black smear to be removed... It no longer seemed importan that it might kill me. My mine drifted, considering the beauty oi the thing... I heard a sound. It would be Dad, Dworkin, Fiona, coming. I had to do somthing before they reached me. I had to walk it, in a moment... I pulled my gaze away from the Pattern and glanced back toward the cavemouth. They had emerged, come partway down the slope and halted. Why? Why had they stopped? Whaf did it matter? I had the time I needed in which to begin. I began to raise my foot, to step forward. I could barely move. I inched my foot ahead with a great effort of will. Taking the first step was proving worse than walking the Pattern itself, near to the end. But it did not seem so much an external resistance I fought against as it did the sluggishness of my own body. It was almost as if -- Then I had an image of Benedict beside the Pattern in Tir-na Nog'th, Brand approaching, mocking, the Jewel burning upon his breast. Before I looked down, I knew what I would see. The red stone was pulsing in time with my heartbeat. Damn them! Either Dad or Dworkin -- or both of them -- reached through it at this instant, paralyzing me. I did not doubt that either of them could manage it alone. Still, at this distance, it was not worth surrendering without a fight. I continued to push forward with my foot, sliding it slowly ahead toward the edge of the Pattern. Once I made it, I did not see how they... Drowsing... I felt myself beginning to fall. I had been asleep for a moment. It happened again. When I opened my eyes, I could see a portion of the Pattern. When I turned my head, I saw feet. When I looked up, I saw Dad holding the Jewel. "Go away," he said to Dworkin and Fiona without turning his head toward them. They withdrew as he placed the Jewel about his neck. He leaned forward then and extended his hand. I took it and he drew me to my feet. "That was a damn-fool thing to do," he said. "I almost made it." He nodded. "Of course you would have killed yourself and not accomplished anying," he said. "But it was well done nevertheless. Come on, let's walk." He took my arm, and we began to move about the periphery of the Pattern. I watched that strange sky-sea, horizonless about us, as we went. I wondered what would have happened had I been able to begin the Pattern, what would be happening at that moment. "You have changed," he finally said, "or else I never really knew you." I shrugged. "Something of both perhaps. I was about to say the same of you. Tell me something." "What?" "How difficult was it for you, being Ganelon?" He chuckled. "Not hard at all," he said. "You may have had a glimpse of the real me." "I liked him. Or, rather, you being him. I wonder whatever became of the real Ganelon?" "Long dead, Corwin. I met him after you had exiled him from Avalon, long ago. He wasn't a bad chap. Wouldn't have trusted him worth a damn, but then I never trust anyone I don't have to." "It runs in the family." "I regretted having to kill him. Not that he gave me much choice. All this was very long ago, but I remember him clearly, so he must have impressed me." "And Lorraine?" "The country? A good job, I thought. I worked the proper shadow. It grew in strength by my very presence, as any will if one of us stays around for long -- as with you in Avalon, and later that other place. And I saw that I had a long while there by exercising my will upon its time-stream." "I did not know that could be done." "You grow in strength slowly, beginning with your initiation into the Pattern. There are many things you have yet to learn. Yes, I strengthened Lorraine and made it especially vulnerable to the growing force of the black road. I saw that it would lie in your path, no matter where you went. After your escape, all roads led to Lorraine." "Why?" "It was a trap I had set for you, and maybe a test. I wanted to be with you when you met the forces of Chaos. I also wanted to travel  with you for a time." "A test? What were you testing  me for? And why travel with me?" j "Can you not guess? I have  watched all of you over the years. I i never named a successor. I purposely left the matter muddled. You are I enough like me for me to know that the moment I declared for one of you, I would be signing his or her death warrant. No. I intentionally left things as they were until the very end. Now, though, I have decided. It is to be you." "You communicated with me as yourself, briefly, back in Lorraine. You told me then to take the throne. If you had made up your mind at that point, why did you continue the masquerade?" "But I had not decided then. That was merely a means to assure your continuing on. I feared you might come to like that girl too much, and that land. When you emerged a hero from the Black Circle, you might have decided to settle and stay there. I wanted to plant the notions that would cause you to continue your journey. ' ' I was silent for a long while. We had moved a good distance about the Pattern. Then, "There is something that I have to know," I said. "Before I came here, I was speaking with Dara, who is in the process of trying to clear her name with us -- " "It is clear," he said. "I have cleared it." I shook my head. "I refrained from accusing her of something I have been thinking about for some time. There is a very good reason why I feel she cannot be trusted, despite her protests and your endorsement. Two reasons, in fact." "I know, Corwin. But she did not kill Benedict's servants to manage her position at his house. I did it myself to assure her getting to you as she did, at just the appropriate time." "You? You were party to her whole plot? Why?" "She will make you a good queen, son. I trust the blood of Chaos for strength. It was time for a fresh infusion. You will take the throne already provided with an heir. By the time he is ready for it. Merlin will long have been weaned from his upbringing." We had come all the way around to the place of the black smear. I stopped. I squatted and studied it. "You think this thing is going to kill you?" I finally asked. "I know that it is." "You are not above murdering innocent people to manipulate me. Yet you would sacrifice your life for the kingdom." I looked up at him. "My own hands are not clean." I went on, "and I certainly do not presume to judge you. Awhile back, though, when I made ready to try the Pattern, I thought how my feelings had changed -- toward Eric, toward the throne. "You do what you do, I believe, as a duty. I, too, feel a duty now, toward Amber, toward the throne. More than that, actually. Much more, I realized just then something that duty does not require of me. I do not know when or how it stopped and I changed, but I do not want the throne. Dad. I am sorry it messes up your plans, but I do not want to be King of Amber. I am sorry." I looked away then, down at the smear again. I heard him sigh. Then, "I am going to send you home now," he said. "Saddle your horse and take provisions. Ride to a place outside Amber -- any place fairly isolated." "My tomb?" He snorted and chuckled faintly. "That will do. Go there and wait my pleasure. I have some thinking to do." I stood. He reached out and placed his right hand on my shoulder. The Jewel was pulsing. He looked into my eyes. "No man can have everything he wants the way that he wants it," he said. And there was a distancing effect, as of the power of a Trump, only working in reverse. I heard voices, then about me I saw the room I had earlier departed. Benedict, Gerard, Random and Dara were still there. I felt Dad release my shoulder. Then he was gone and I was among them once again. "What is the story?" Random asked. "We saw Dad sending you back. By the way, how did he do that?" "I do not know," I said. "But he confirms what Dara has told us. He gave her the signet and the message." "Why?" Gerard asked. "He wanted us to learn to tmst her," I said. Benedict rose to his feet. ' Then I will go and do as I have been bid." "He wants you to attack, then fall back," Dara said. "After that it will only be necessary to contain them." "For how long?" "He said that this will become apparent." Benedict gave one of his rare smiles and nodded. He managed his card-case with his one hand, removed the deck, thumbed out the special Trump I had given him for the Courts. "Good luck," Random said. "Yes," Gerard agreed. I added my wishes and watched him fade. When his rainbow afterimage had vanished, I looked away and noticed that Dara was crying silently. I did not remark on it. "I, too, have orders now -- of a sort," I said. "I had best be movmg. "And I will get back to the sea," said Gerard. "No," I heard Dara say as I was moving toward the door. I halted. "You are to remain here, Gerard, and see to the safety of Amber herself. No attack will come by sea." "But I thought Random was in charge of the local defense." She shook her head. "Random is to join Julian in Arden." "Are you sure?" Random asked. "I am certain." "Good," he said. "It is nice to know he at least thought of me. Sorry, Gerard. That's the breaks." Gerard simply looked puzzled. "I hope he knows what he is doing," he said. "We have been through that already," I told him. "Good-bye." I heard a footfall as I left the room. Dara was beside me. "What now?" I asked her. "I thought I would walk with you, wherever you are going." "I am just going up the hall to get some supplies. Then I am heading for the stables." "I will go with you." "lam riding alone." "I could not accompany you, anyway. I still have to spe with your sisters." "They're included, huh?" "Yes." We walked in silence for a time. Then she said, "The whole business was not so cold-blooded as it seemed, Corwin." We entered the supply room. "What business?" "You know what I mean." "Oh. That. Well, good." "I like you. It could be more than that one day, if you feel anything." My pride handed me a snappy reply, but I bit it back. One learns a few things over the centuries. She had used me, true, but then it seemed she had not been entirely a free agent at the time. The worst that might be said, I suppose, was that Dad wanted me to want her. But I did not let my resentment on this interfere with what my own feelings really were, or could become. So, "I like you, too," I said, and I looked at her. She seemed as if she needed to be kissed just then, so I did it. "I had better get ready now." She smiled and squeezed my arm. Then she was gone. I decided not to examine my feelings. I had to get some things together. I saddled Star and rode back up over the crest of Kolvir until I came to my tomb. Seated outside it, I smoked my pipe and watched the clouds. I felt I had had a very full day, yet it was only early afternoon. Premonitions played tag in the grottoes of my mind, none of which I would have cared to take to lunch. Contact came suddenly as I sat drowsing. I was on my feet in an instant. It was Dad. "Corwin, I have made my decisions and the time has come," he said. "Bare your left arm." I did this as his form continued to grow in substantiality, looking more and more regal the while, a strange sadness on his face -- a sort I had never seen there before. He took hold of my arm with his left hand and drew his dagger with his right. I watched as he cut my arm, then resheathed his blade. The blood came forth, and he cupped his left hand and caught it. He released my arm, covered his left hand with his right and drew away from me. Raising his hands to his face, he blew his breath into them and drew them quickly apart. A crested red bird the size of a raven, its feathers the color of my blood, stood on his hand, moved to his wrist, looked at me. Even its eyes were red, and there was a look of familiarity as it cocked its head and regarded me. "He is Corwin, the one you must follow," he told the bird. "Remember him." Then he transferred it to his left shoulder, from whence it continued to stare at me, making no effort to depart. "You must go now, Corwin," he said. "Quickly. Mount your horse and ride south, passing into Shadow as soon as you can. Hellride. Get as far away from here as possible." "Where am I going. Father?" I asked him. "To the Courts of Chaos. You know the way?" "In theory. I have never ridden the distance." He nodded slowly. "Then get moving," he said. "I want you to create as great a time differential as you can between this place and yourself." "All right," I replied, "but I do not understand." "You will, when the time comes." "But there is an easier way," I protested. "I can get there faster and with a lot less bother simply by getting in touch with Benedict with his Trump and having him take me through." "No good," Dad said. "It will be necessary for you to take the longer route because you will be carrying something which will be conveyed to you along the way." "Conveyed? How?" He reached up and stroked the red bird's feathers. "By your friend here. He could not fly all the way to the Court -- not in time, that is." "What will he bring me?" "The Jewel. I doubt that I will be able to effect the transfer myself when I have finished what I have to do with it. Its powers may be of some benefit to us in that place." "I see," I said. "But I still need not ride the entire distance. I can trump through after I receive it." "I fear not. Once I have done what must be done here, the Trumps will all become inoperative for a period of time." "Why?" "Because the entire fabric of existence will be undergoing an alteration. Move now, damn it! Get on your horse and ride!" I stood and stared a moment longer. "Father, is there no other way?" He simply shook his head and raised his hand. He began to fade. "Good-bye." I turned and mounted. There was more to say, but it was too late. I turned Star toward the trail that would take me southward.  it ir While Dad was able to play with the stuff of Shadow atop Kolvir, I had never been able to. I required a greater distance from Amber in order to work the shifts. Still, knowing that it could be done, I felt that I ought to try. So, working my way southward across bare stone and down rocky passes where the wind howled, I sought to warp the fabric of being about me as I headed toward the trail that led to Gamath... a small clump of blue flowers as I rounded a stony shoulder. I grew excited at this, for they were a modest part of my working. I continued to lay my will upon the world to come beyond each twisting of my way. A shadow from a triangular stone across my path... a shifting of the wind... Some of the smaller ones were indeed working. A backward twist to the trail... a crevice... an ancient bird's nest high on a rocky shelf... more of the blue flowers... Why not? A tree... another... I felt the power moving within me. I worked more changes. A thought came to me then, concerning my newfound strength. It seemed possible that it might have been purely psychological reasons which had barred me from performing such manipulations earlier. Until very recently I had considered Amber herself the single, immutable reality from which all shadows took their form. Now I realized she was but first among shadows, and that the place where my fatiier stood represented the higher reality. Therefore, while the proximity made it difficult, it did not make it impossible to effect changes in this place. Yet, under other circumstances, I would have saved my strength until I had reached a point where it was easier to shift things about. Now, now though, the need for haste lay upon me. I would have to exert myself, to rush, to do my father's bidding. By the time I reached the trail leading down the southern face of Kolvir, the character of the land had already changed. I looked upon a series of gentle slopes rather than the steep descent which normally marked the way. I was already entering Shadowland. The black road still lay like a dark scar to my left as I headed downward, but this Gamath through which it had been cut was in slightly better shape than that which I knew so well. Its lines were softer, from flocks of greenery which lay somewhat nearer the dead swath. It was as though my curse upon the land were slightly mitigated. Illusion of feeling, of course, for this was no longer exactly my Amber. But,  am sorry for my part in this, I addressed everything mentally, half-prayerlike. I ride now to try to undo it. Forgive me, oh spirit of this place. My eyes moved in the direction of the Grove of the Unicom, but it was far to the west, masked by too many trees, for me to even glimpse that sacred glade. The slope grew more level as I descended, becoming a series of gentle foothills. I let Star move faster as we crossed them, bearing to the southwest, then finally the south. Lower, lower. At a great distance to my left the sea sparkled and shone. Soon the black road would come between us, for I was descending into Gamath in its direction. No matter what I did with Shadow, I would not be able to erase that ominous presence. In fact, the fastest course I could follow would be one that paralleled it. We came at last to the floor of the valley. The Forest of Arden towered far to my right, sweeping westward, immense and venerable. I rode on, working what changes I could to bear me even farther from my home. While keeping the black road on hand, I stayed a good distance from it. I had to, since it was the one thing I could not change. I kept shmbs, trees and low hills between us. I reached out then, and the texture of the land changed. Veins of agate... heaps of schist... a darkening of the greenery... Clouds swimming across the sky... the sun shimmering and dancing... We increased our pace. The land sank lower still. Shadows lengthened, merged. The forest retreated. A rocky wall grew to my right, another to my left... a cold wind pursued me down a rough canyon. Strata streaks -- red, gold, yellow and brown -- flashed by. The floor of the canyon grew sandy. Dust devils spun about us. I leaned farther forward as the way began to rise once again. The walls slanted inward, grew closer together. The way narrowed, narrowed. I could almost touch either wall... Their tops came together. I rode through a shadowy tunnel, slowing as it darkened... phosphorescent designs burst into being. The wind made a moaning noise. Out then! The light from the walls was blinding, and giant crystals rose all about us. We plunged past, following an upward trail that led away from this region and through a series of mossy dells where small, perfectly circular pools lay as still as green glass. Tall ferns appeared before us and we made our way among them. I heard a distant trumpeting noise. Turning, pacing... red now the ferns, wider and lower... beyond, a great plain, pinking into evening... Forward, over pale grasses... the smell of fresh earth... mountains or dark clouds far ahead... a rush of stars from my left... a quick spray of moisture... a blue moon leaps into the sky... flickerings among the dark masses... memories and a rumbling noise... stormsmell and rushing air... A strong wind... clouds across the stars... a bright fork spearing a shattered tree to my right, turning it to flame... a tingling sensation... the smell of ozone... sheets of water upon me... a row of lights to my left... Clattering down a cobbled street... a strange vehicle approaching... cylindrical, chugging... we avoid one another... a shout pursues me... through a lighted window the face of a child... Clattering... splashing... storefronts and homes. The rain lets up, dies down, is gone. A fog blows by, lingers, deepens, is pearled by a growing light to my left. The terrain softens, grows red. The light within the mist brightens. A new wind from behind, a growing warmth... the air breaks apart... Sky of pale lemon... orange sun rushing toward noon... A shudder! A thing not of my doing, totally unanticipated. The ground moves beneath us, but there is more to it than that. The new sky, the new sun, the rusty desert I have just now entered -- all of them expand and contract, fade and return. There comes a cracking sound, and with each fading I find Star and myself alone, amid a white nothingness -- characters without a setting. We tread upon nothing. The light comes from everywhere and illuminates only ourselves. A steady cracking noise, as of the spring thaw come upon a Russian river I had once ridden beside, fills my ears. Star, who has paced many shadows, emits a frightened sound. I look all about me. Blurred outlines appear, sharpen, grow clear. My environment is restored, though with a somewhat washed-out look to it. A bit of the pigment has been drained from the world. We wheel to the left, racing for a low hill, mounting it, halting finally at its summit. The black road. It too seems denatured -- but even more so than the rest. It ripples beneath my gaze, almost seems to undulate as I watch. The cracking noise continues, grows louder... A wind comes out of the north, gentle at first but increasing in force. Looking in that direction, I see a mass of dark clouds building. I know that I must move as I have never moved before. Ultimates of destruction and creation are occurring at the place I visited -- when? No matter. The waves move outward from Amber and this too may pass away -- and me along with it if Dad cannot pull it all back together again. I shake the reins. We race southward. A plain... trees... some broken building... faster... The smoke of a forest afire... a wall of flame... gone... Yellow sky, blue clouds... an armada of dirigibles crossing... Faster... The sun drops like a piece of hot iron into a bucket of water, stars become streaks... a pale light upon a straight trail... sounds dopplered from dark smears, the wailing... brighter the light, fainter the prospect... gray to my right, my left... brighter now... nothing but the trail my eyes to ride... the wailing heightens to a shriek... forms run together... we race through a tunnel of Shadow... it begins to revolve... Turning, turning... only the road is real... the worlds go by... I have released my control of the sets and ride now Ae thrust of the power itself, aimed only to remove me from Amber and hurl me toward Chaos... There is wind upon me and the cry in my ears. Never before have I pushed my power over shadow to its limit. The tunnel grows as slick and seamless as glass. I feel I am riding down a vortex, a maelstrom, the heart of a tornado. Star and I are drehched with sweat... There is a wild feeling of flight upon me, as though I am pursued. The road is become an abstraction. My eyes sting as I try to blink away the perspiration. I cannot hold this ride much longer... There comes a throbbing at the base of my skull. I draw back gently upon the reins and Star begins to slow. The walls of my tunnel of light grow grainy... blotches of gray, black, white, rather than a uniformity of shading... brown... a hint of blue... green. The wailing descends to a hum, a rumble, fading. Gentler the wind... shapes come and go... and go... Slowing, slowing... There is no path. I ride on mossy earth. The sky is blue, the clouds are white. I am veiy lightheaded. I draw rein. I -- Tiny. I was shocked as I lowered my eyes. I stood at the outskirts of a toy village. Houses I could hold in the palm of my hand, miniscule roads, tiny vehicles crawling along them. I looked back. We had crushed a number of these diminutive residences. I looked all around. There were fewer to the left. I guided Star carefully in that direction, kept moving until we had left that place. I felt badly about it -- whatever it was, whoever dwelled there. But there was not a thing that I could do. I moved again, passing through Shadow, until I came to what seemed a deserted quarry beneath a greenish sky. I felt heavier here. I dismounted, took a drink of water, walked around a bit. I breathed deeply of the damp air that engulfed me. I was far from Amber now, about as far as one ever need go, and well on my way to Chaos. I had seldom come this far before. While I had chosen this place for a rest stop because it represented the nearest thing to normalcy I could catch hold of, the changes would soon be getting more and more radical. I was stretching my cramped muscles when I heard the shriek, high in the air above me. I looked up and saw the dark form descending, Grayswandir coming by reflex into my hand. But the light caught it at a proper angle as it came down, and the winged form took fire on its way. My familiar bird circled, circled, descended to my outstretched arm. Those frightening eyes regarded me with a peculiar intelligence, but I did not spare them the attention I might have on another occasion. Instead, I sheathed Grayswandir and reached for the thing the bird bore. The Jewel of Judgment. I knew by this that Dad's effort, whatever it had amounted to, was finished. The Pattern had either been repaired or botched. He was either alive or dead. Choose a couple from either column. The effects of his act would be spreading outward from Amber through Shadow now, like the ripples in the proverbial pond. I would learn more -- of them soon enough. In the meantime, I had my orders. I drew the chain over my head and let the Jewel fall upon my breast. I remounted Star. My bloodbird emitted a short cry and rose into the air. We moved again... over a landscape where the sky whitened as the ground darkened. Then the land flared and the sky grew black. Then the reverse. And again...With each stride the effect shifted, and as we moved faster, it built to a stroboscopic series of still-shots about us, gradually growing to a jerky animation, then to the hyperactive quality of a silent film. Finally all was a blur. Points of light flashed past like meteors or comets. I began to feel a throbbing sensation, as of a cosmic heartbeat. Everything began to turn about me as though I had been caught up in a whirlwind. Something was going wrong. I seemed to be losing control. Could it be that the effects of Dad's doings had already reached the area of Shadow through which I passed? It seemed hardly likely. Still... Star stumbled. I clung tightly as we went down, not wishing to be separated in Shadow. I struck my shoulder on a hard surface and lay there for a moment, stunned. When the world came together about me again, I sat up and looked around. A uniform twilight prevailed, but there were no stars. Instead, large rocks of various shapes and sizes drifted and hovered in the air. I rose to my feet and looked all about. It was possible, from what I could see of it, that the irregular stony surface on which I stood was itself but a mountain-sized boulder drifting with the others. Star rose and stood shivering at my side. An absolute silence contained us. The still air was cool. There was not another living thing in sight. I did not like this place. I would not have halted here of my own volition. I knelt to inspect Star's legs. I wanted to leave as soon as possible, preferably mounted. As I was about this, I heard a soft chuckle which might have come from a human throat. I paused, resting my hand upon Grayswandir' s hilt and seeking the source of the sound. Nothing. Nowhere. Yet I had heard it. I turned slowly, looking in every direction. No... Then it came again. Only this time I realized that it had its source overhead. I scanned the floating rocks. Shadow-draped, it was difficult to distinguish -- There! Ten meters above the ground and thirty or so to my left what appeared to be a human form stood atop a small island in the sky, regarding me. I considered it. Whatever it was, it seemed too far off to pose a threat. I was certain that I could be gone before it could reach me. I moved to mount Star. "No good, Corwin," called the voice I least wanted to hear just then. "You are locked here. There is no way you can depart without my leave." I smiled as I mounted, then drew Grayswandir. "Let's find out," I said. "Come bar my way." "Very well," he replied, and flames sprang from the bare rock, towering full circle about me, licking, sprawling, soundless. Star went wild. I slammed Grayswandir back into the scabbard, whipped a comer of my cloak across Star's eyes, spoke soothing words. As I did this, the circle enlarged, the fires receding toward the edges of the great rock on which we stood. "Convinced?" came the voice. "This place is too small. Ride in any direction. Your mount will panic again before you can shift into Shadow." "Good-bye, Brand," I said, and I began to ride. I rode in a large counterclockwise circle about the rocky surface, shielding Star's right eye from the flames about the periphery. I heard Brand chuckle again, not realizing what I was doing. A pair of large rocks... Good. I rode on by, continuing the course. Now a jagged hedge of stone to my left, a rise, a dip... a mess of shadow the fires cast across my path. There. Down. Up. A touch of green to that patch of light. I could feel the shifting begin. The fact that it is easier for us to take a straight course does not make it the only way. We all pursue it so much of the time, though, that we tend to forget that one can also make progress by going around in circles. I could feel the shift more strongly as I neared the two large rocks again. Brand caught on about then. "Hold it, Corwin!" I threw him a finger and cut between the rocks, heading down into a narrow canyon speckled with points of yellow light. According to specifications. I drew my cloak away from Star's head and shook the reins. The canyon cut abruptly to the right. We followed it into a betterlighted avenue which widened and brightened as we went...beneath a jutting overhang, sky of milk shading to pearl on its other side. Riding deeper, faster, farther. A jagged cliff crowned the upper talus to my left, greening in twisted sign of shrubbery beneath a pink-touched sky. I rode until the greenery was blue beneath a yellow sky, till the canyon rose to meet a lavender plain where orange rocks rolled as the ground was shaken beneath us in time with Star's hoofbeats. I crossed there under wheeling comets, coming to the shore of a blood-red sea in a place of heavy perfumes. I rode a large green sun and a small bronze one out of the sky as I paced that shore, while skeletal navies clashed and serpents of the deep circled their orangeand blue-sailed vessels. The Jewel pulsed upon .me and I drew strength from it. A wild wind came up and lofted us through a copper-clouded sky above a wailing chasm which seemed to extend forever, black-bottomed, spark-shot, fuming with heady scents. At my back the sound of thunder, ceaseless... fine lines, like the craqueleur of an old painting, abreast of us, advancing, everywind pursues... Lines... the cracks widen, blackness flows to fill... dark streaks race by, up, down, back upon themselves. The settling of a net, the labors of a gaint invisible spider, world-trapping... Down, down and down... the ground again, wrinkled and leathery as a mummy's neck... soundless, our throbbing passage... softer the thunder, falling the wind... Dad's last gasp? Speed now and away... A narrowing of lines to the fineness of an etching, fading then in the three suns' heat... and faster yet... A rider approaching... hand to hilt in time to my own... Me. Myself coming back? Simultaneous our salutes... through one another somehow, the air like a sheet of water that one dry instant... What Carroll mirror, what Rebma, Tir-na Nog'th effect? Yet far, far to my left, a black thing writhing. We pace the road... it leads me on... White sky, white ground and no horizon... sunless and cloudless the prospect... only that thread of black, far off, and gleaming pyramids everywhere, massive, disconcerting. We tire. I do not like this place. But we have outrun whatever process pursues. Draw rein. I was tired, but I felt a strange vitality within me. It seemed as though it arose from within my breast. The Jewel. Of course. I made an effort to draw upon this power again. I felt it flow outward through my limbs, barely halting at my extremities. It was almost as if -- Yes. I reached out and lay my will upon my blank and geometrical surroundings. They began to alter. It was a movement. The pyramids shuffled by, darkening as they passed. They shrank, they merged, they passed to gravel. The world turned upside-down and I stood as on the underside of a cloud, watching landscapes flash by beneathabove. Light streamed past me from a golden sun beneath my feet. This, too, passed, and the fleecy ground darkened, firing waters upward to erode the passing land. Lightnings jumped up to strike the world overhead, to break it apart. In places it shattered and its pieces fell about me. They began to swirl as a wave of darkness passed. When the light came again, bluish this time, it held no point source and described no land... golden bridges cross the void in great streamers, one of them flashing beneath us even now. We wind along its course, standing the while still as a statue. For an age, perhaps, this goes on. A phenomenon not unrelated to highway hypnosis enters through my eyes, lulls me dangerously. I do what I can to accelerate our passage. Another age goes by. Finally, far ahead, a dusky, misty blotch, our terminus, growing very slowly despite our velocity. By the time we reach it, it is gigantic -- an island in the void, forested over with golden, metallic trees... I stop the motion which has borne us thus far and we move forward under our own power, entering that wood. Grass like aluminum foil cmnches beneath us as we pass among those trees. Strange fruit, pale and shiny, hangs about me. There are no animal sounds immediately apparent. Working our way inward, we come to a small clearing through which a quicksilver stream flows. There, I dismount. "Brother Corwin," comes that voice again. "I have been waiting for you." IV. emerge from it. I did not draw my weapon as he had not drawn his. I reached down into the Jewel with my mind, though. After the exercise I had just completed, I realized that I could do a lot more than control weather with it. Whatever Brand's power, I felt I'd a weapon now with which to confront it directly. The Jewel pulsed more deeply as I did this. "Tmce," Brand said. "Okay? May we talk?" "I do not see that we have anything more to say to one another," I told him. "If you do not give me a chance. you will never know for certain, will you?" . He came to a halt about seven meters away, flung his green cloak back over his left shoulder and smiled. "All right. Say it, whatever it is," I said. "I tried to stop you," he said, "back there for the Jewel. It is obvious that you know what it is now, that you realize how important it is." I said nothing. "Dad has already used it," he continued, "and I am sorry to report that he has failed in what he set out to do with it." "What? How could you know?" "I can see through Shadow, Corwin. I would have thought our sister had filled you in more thoroughly on these matters. With a little mental effort, I can perceive whatever I choose now. Naturally I was concerned with the outcome of this affair. So I watched. He is dead, Corwin. The effort was too much for him. He lost control of the forces he was manipulating and was blasted by them a little over halfway through the Pattern." "You lie!" I said, touching the Jewel. He shook his head. "I admit that I am not above lying to gain my ends, but this time I am telling the truth. Dad is dead. I saw him fall. The bird brought you the Jewel then, as he had willed it. We are left in a universe without a Pattern." I did not want to believe him. But it was possible that Dad had failed. I had had the assurance of the only expert in the business, Dworkin, as to the difficulty of the task. "Granting, for the moment what you have said, what happens next?' ' I asked. "Things fall apart," he replied. "Even now Chaos wells up to fill the vacuum back at Amber. A great vortex has come into being, and it grows. It spreads ever outward, destroying the Shadow worlds, and it will not stop until it meets with the Courts of Chaos, bringing all of creation full circle, with Chaos once more to reign over all." I felt dazed. Had I struggled from Greenwood, through everything, to here, to have it end this way? Would I see everything stripped of meaning, form, content, life, when things had been pushed to a kind of completion? "No!" I said. "It cannot be so." "Unless..." Brand said softly. "Unless what?" "Unless a new Pattern is inscribed, a new order created to preserve form." "You mean ride back into that mess and try to complete the job? You just said that the place no longer exists." "No. Of course not. The location is unimportant. Wherever there is a Pattern, there is a center. I can do it right here." "You think that you can succeed where Dad failed?" "I have to try. I am the only one who knows enough about it and has I sufficient time before the waves of I Chaos arrive. Listen, I admit to evf erything Fiona has doubtless told j you about me. I have schemed and I I have acted. I have dealt with the : enemies of Amber. I have shed our blood. I tried to bum out your memory. But the world as we know it is being destroyed now, and I live here too. All of my plans -- everything! -- will come to nothing if some measure of order is not preserved. Perhaps I have been duped by the Lords of Chaos. It is difficult for me to admit that, but I see the possibility now. It is not too late to foil them, though. We can build the new bastion of order right here." "How?" "I need the Jewel -- and your assistance. This will be the site of the new Amber." "Supposing -- arguendo -- I give it to you. Would the new Pattern be exactly like the old one?" He shook his head. "It could not be, no more than the one Dad was attempting to create would have been like Dworkin's. No two authors can render the same story in the same fashion. Individual stylistic differences cannot be avoided. No matter how hard I might try to duplicate it, my version would be slightly different." "How could you do this," I asked, "when you are not fully attuned to the Jewel? You would need a Pattern to complete the process of attunement -- and, as you say, the Pattern has been destroyed. What gives?" "I said that I would need your help," he stated. "There is another way to attune a person to the Jewel. It requires the assistance of someone who is already attuned. You would have to project yourself through the Jewel once more and take me with you -- into and through the primary Pattern that lies beyond." "And then?" "Why, when the ordeal is past, I will be attuned, you give me the Jewel, I inscribe a new Pattern and we are back in business. Things hold together. Life goes on." "What of Chaos?" "The new Pattern will be unmarred. They will no longer have the road giving them access to Amber." "With Dad dead, how would the new Amber be run?" He smiled crookedly. "I ought to have something for my pains, oughtn't I? I will be risking my life with this, and the odds are not all that good." I smiled back at him. "Considering the payoff, what is to prevent me from taking the gamble myself?" I said. "The same thing that prevented Dad from succeeding: all the forces of Chaos. They are summoned by a kind of cosmic reflex when such an act is begun. I have had more experience with them than you. You would not have a chance. I might." "Now let us say that you are lying to me. Brand. Or let us be kind and say that you did not see clearly through all the turmoil. Supposing Dad did succeed? Supposing there is a new Pattern in existence right now? What would happen if you were to do another, here, now?" "I -- It has never been done befOTe. How should I know?" "I wonder." I said. "Might you still get your own version of reality that way? Might it represent the splitting off of a new universe -- Amber and Shadow -- just for you? Might it negate ours? Or would it simply stand apart? Or would there be some overlapping? What do you think, given that situation?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I have already answered that. It has never been done before. How should I know?" "But I think that you do know, or can make a very good guess at it. I think that that is what you are planning, that that is what you want to try -- because that is all you have left now. I take this action on your part as an indication that Dad has succeeded and that you are down to your last card. But you need me and you need the Jewel for it. You cannot have either. " He sighed. "I had expected more of you. But all right. You are wrong, but leave it at that. Listen, though. Rather than see everything lost, I will split the realm with you." "Brand," I said, "get lost. You cannot have the Jewel, or my help, I have heard you out, and I thin! that you are lying." "You are afraid," he said, " -- afraid of me. I do not blame you for not wanting to trust me. But you are making a mistake. You need mt now." "Nevertheless, I have made mj choice." He took a step toward me, Another... "Anything you want, Corwin. I can give you anything you care to nne." "I was with Benedict in Tir-nt Nog'th," I said, "looking through his eyes, listening with his ears, when you made him the same offer. Shove it. Brand. I am going ot with my mission. If you think thal you can stop me, now is as good a time as any." I began walking toward him. I knew that I would kill him if I reached him. I also felt that I would not reach him. He halted. He took a step back ward. "You are making a big mistake," he said. "I do not think so. I think that I am doing exactly the right thing."  "I will not fight with you," he said hastily. "Not here, not above the Abyss. You have had yout chance, though. The next time thal we meet, I will have to take the Jewel from you." "What good will it be to you, unattuned as you are?" "There still might be a way for me to manage it -- more difficult, but possible. You have had your chance. Good-bye." He retreated into the wood. I followed after, but he had vanished.    I left that place and rode on along a road over nothing. I did not like to consider the possibility that Brand might have been telling the truth, or at least a part of it. But the things he had said kept returning to plague me. Supposing Dad had failed? Then I was on a fool's errand. Everything was already over. and it was Just a matter of time. I did not like looking back, just in case something was gaining on me. I passed into a moderately paced hellride. I wanted to get to the others before the waves of Chaos reached .that far -- to let them know that I had kept faith, to let them see that in the end I had tried my best. I wondered then how the actual battle was going. Or had it even begun yet, within that time frame? I swept along the bridge, which widened now beneath a brightening sky. As it assumed the aspect of a golden plain, I considered Brand's threat. Had he said what he had said simply to raise doubts, increase my discomfort and impair my effiFor aspiring writers, and "a fascinating insiders' view of the profession." -- Publishers Weekly I # top SF writers discuss the writing of science fiction and fantasy, including Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and the editor of the book, Reginald Bretnor. # at bookstores, or direct from the publis Harper Row ul ItOE#rd SI, Nevr Yorli # !#I# ciency? Possibly. Yet if he required the Jewel, he would have to ambush me. And I had a respect for that strange power he had acquired over Shadow. It seemed almost impossible to prepare for an attack by someone who could watch my every move and transport himself instantaneously to the most advantageous spot. How soon might it come? Not too soon, I guessed. First he would want to frazzle my nerves -- and I was already tired and more than a little punchy. I would have to rest, to sleep, sooner or later. It was impossible for me to go that great distance in a single stretch, no matter how accelerated the hellride. Fogs of pink and orange and green fled past, swirled about me, rang beneath us like metal. Occasional musical tones, as of rung crystal, occurred overhead. My thoughts danced. Memories of many worlds came and went in random fashion. Ganelon, my friend-enemy, and my father, enemy-friend, merged and parted, parted and merged. Somewhere one of them asked me who had a right to the throne. I had thought it was Ganelon, wanting to know our several justifications. Now I knew that it had been Dad, wanting to know my feelings. He had judged. He had made his decision. And I was backing out. Whether it was arrested development, the desire to be free of such an encumbrance, or a matter of sudden enlightenment based on all that I had experienced in recent years growing slowly within me, granting me a more mature view of the onerous role of monarch apart from its moments of glory, I do not know. I remembered my life on the shadow Earth, following orders, giving them. Faces swam before me -- people I had known over the centuries -- friends, enemies, wives, lovers, relatives. Lorraine seemed to be beckoning me on. Moire laughing. Deirdre weeping. I fought again with Eric. I recalled my first passage through the Pattern as a boy, and the later one when, step by step, my memory was given back to me. Murders, thieveries, knaveries, seductions returned because, as Mallory said, they were there. I was unable to even place them all correctly in terms of time. There was no great anxiety because there was no great guilt. Time, I time, and more time had softened I the edges of harsher things, had  worked its changes on me. I saw j iny earlier selves as different j people, acquaintances I had outj grown. I wondered how I could f ever have been some of them. As I I rushed onward, scenes from my I past seemed to solidify in the mists I about me. No poetic license here. Battles in which I had taken part assumed tangible form save for a total absence of sound -- the flare of weapons, the colors of uniforms, banners and blood. And people -- most of them now long dead -- moved from my memory into silept animation about me. None of these were members of my family but all of them were people who had once meant something to me. Yet there was no special pattern to it. There were noble deeds as well as shameful, enemies as well as friends -- and none of the persons involved took note of my passage; all were caught up in some long-past sequence of actions. I wondered then at the nature of the place through which I rode. Was it some watered-down version of Tir-na Nog'th, with some mind-sensitive substances in the vicinity that drew from me and projected about me this This Is Your Life panorama? Or was I simply begirming to hallucinate? I was tired, anxious, troubled, distressed, and I passed along a way which provided a monotonous, gentle stimulation of the senses -- the sort leading to reverie. In fact, I realized that I had lost control over Shadow sometime back and was now simply proceeding in a linear fashion across this landscape, trapped in a kind of externalized narcissism by the spectacle. I realized then that I had to stop and rest -- probably even sleep a little -- though I feared doing so in this place. I would have to break free and make my way to a more sedate, deserted spot. I wrenched at my surroundings. I twisted things about. I broke free. Soon I was riding in a rough, mountainous area and shortly thereafter I came to the cave that I desired. We passed within and I tended to Star. I ate and drank just enough to take the edge off my hunger. I built no fire but wrapped myself in my cloak and in a blanket I had brought. I held Grayswandir in my right hand and lay down facing the darkness beyond the cavemouth. I felt a little sick. Even though Brand was a liar, his words bothered me anyway. But I had always been good at going to sleep. I closed my eyes and was gone.    Ban jogging? They must have pretty short memories! I've been jogging nearly twenty years, since I was thirteen. I used to swim a lot when I was a kid, but after the accident I couldn't swim anymore so I took up jogging. Those were the days when everybody was Jogging. Nowadays there are Just a handful of us hardcore guys still running up Main Street. Used to be lots. Now only a few. It doesn't bother me. The problem is, I want my son to be a Jogger too. He's twelve, and like me at his age, all he wants to do is swim. Who can blame him? Certainly not his mother. She doesn't want him to Jog. I don't know why. Used to be the public was all for Jogging. A guy couldn't do enough of it. It was considered very healthy. It increased the community good, and everybody was interested in the progress of the Joggers. Used to be a Joke; A guy would get sick and call up a pal and say, "Hey, buddy, do my Jogging for me, will ya?" You don't hear that Joke anymore, I can tell you that. Nowadays the public is soured on Jogging. They say it's bad for you, bad for all of us. At best they say it's unnecessary. As if staying in top shape is unnecessary. I don't understand people who think like that. I know a guy I used to Jog with. crazy. "Pool makes more sense to me," he says. More sense! Can you believe that? But at least he remembers how important Jogging used to be (and still is). "Sure it's good," he says "Like putting spin on a ball. You get in top condition and you feel like you're doing something valuable. It's Just that nowadays I figure pool makes more sense." Well, what can I tell him? The way I see it, he's out of the Club. We Joggers are rather clique-ish. Especially these days when guys are quitting the Road right and left. There's barely a hundred Joggers in this burg. But those that are left are the best, the strongest, the fastest, the meanest and the most dedicated bunch of guys I know. The hell with the lazy bastards who drop out. I say it Just makes more room for the rest of us. What I really want to do, of course, is make room for my kid, Jack. Jack is twelve, like I said. It's time he took up the Road. And he's not altogether hostile to the idea. Sure, he likes his swimming. I don't want him to lose out on that. But he doesn't have to Jog very long each day. Not like I do. I'm still a fanatic Jogger. I go pounding up Main Street six hours a day. In two shifts, of course. I'm not crazy. Jack said he'd come along with me on a run one of these days. That settled it, as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't worried about him. I just had to get my damned wife off our backs. She thinks I jog too much. Well, times have changed. Used to be I couldn't jog enough to satisfy her. She was very proud of me and my fast mnning. She even used to jog with me. (I'd slow down and let her dog my heels for a few laps, then whoosh -- I'd leave her panting in the distance. After a while I'd come back for her, don't you worry about that. 'Cause when we were through with the day's jogging, we'd go to my little cottage and get some more exercise. Know what I mean? Wink, wink.) Anyway, now she had this bug up her butt about Jack not starting out on the Joggers' Road. It's crazy, like I said. Hell, it's not as though I was going to try to put her precious daughter on Main Street. You know it's true because Lucy was twelve last year and I never said a thing about it. She can stay at home and fool around, swim, anything she wants. I don't care. Not that girls never jogged up Main Street. Used to be a lot of them. (Before I married Sylvia -- and, yes, after I married her, too -- I used to go down to Main Street just to watch the girls run by. Some of those teenage girls jogged past with a lot of extraneous movement of the fleshier parts of the upper torso, if you get my drift. Wink, wink. But those days are just about over. Damn it.) Still, I never offered to put Lucy on the Road. I hope Sylvia appreciates the gesture. Maybe she never even noticed. (Fact is. I'm kind of hoping Lucy will see Jack running with me and decide she'd like to give it a try too. But don't get me wrong; I'm not one for duplicity. I'm just cunning and crafty, right?) So I figured Sylvia was the main stumbling block. Then I heard some nasty rumors that the goddam government might ban jogging altogether. Incredible. The way I see it, they're attacking the foundations of life in this burg. Maybe I'm prejudiced, but I think history will bear me out. k  It's insane, but after I heard the rumors, I began to see for myself. I was jogging up Main Street and some of my so-called neighbors came out to yell at me. "Go on back home!" they yelled. "Get off the street." It was incredible! I ran on past them without looking back. It was hard to believe I knew some of those people. Some of them were my friends. Used to be my friends... I spotted another jogger up ahead of me and I sprinted to catch up. The poor guy turned around so fast he nearly fell down. He thought I was chasing him. "Damn!" he said after I smiled and urged him ahead. We ran on a little bit until we were across the canal and out in the country (if you can call it that). Then we fell out and flopped down on the grass beside a wooden fence. There were a couple of cows grazing off aways. We got our breath, then started laughing about our encounter. "Really," he said. "I've been expecting somebody to come after me with a gun or something. They don't want us to jog anymore." I told him what I've already told you: "It's crazy." "I know, but what can we do about it?" "Do we have to do anything? Why not just keep running?' ' "Yeah, I know," he said, wiping the sweat off his shiny forehead. "But what if they really come after us? It don't take much to stop a jogger on Main Street." I couldn't argue with that. It's a lot harder to run than it is to stop a guy from running. I remember a long time ago, before the accident, I used to play a game in a field where somebody would grab a ball and try to run it past a lot of other kids. It was hard work. The guy said his name was Tim. He was a couple years younger than me, but he'd been jogging exactly as long. He started back when I did, even though he was only ten or eleven years Old. I told you, those were the days when everybody jogged. Tim was one of the hardcore joggers. He was also married. Two daughters, both pretty young and (he said) pretty as well. (All fathers know their ughters are pretty, right? Me too.) So Tim didn't have the problem I had with Jack. Or rather the problem I had with Sylvia. Unfortunately, we both seemed to have an even bigger problem with the goddam government. Tim said he knew for a fact there was a jogging ban in the works. "It's crazy," I said. "I know," he said. After a while he took to the Road again. I gave him a five-minute start, then hit the line myself. (Everybody jogs right up the middle of Main Street, right on the center line. It's traditional, sure, but it also serves a function. Where else could you mn?)    The next day I decided to sneak Jack out of the house and put him on the Road. He didn't object. And Sylvia didn't know about it. Even if Jack hadn't cared to run, he would have turned out just to show off the jogging suit I got for him. It was green, like mine, with yellow stripes. (Mine were white.) We went right to the center of town and stood off to the side, doing some warm-up exercises. It was a good day to run. (Hell, it's always a good day to run.) But this particular day was beautiful, cool and crisp, the air so clear you could see the whole world. We did some deep breathing before we started. The air was what they used to call "high-altitude blend," but I never knew why. It didn't matter wiflf they called it. It smelled great. "Ready?" I said. Jack looked a little worried. "If you go slow." We stepped out onto Main Street. The Baker came out of his shop and frowned at us. I ignored him and turned to Jack. "You lead off. That way you can set the pace." Jack looked both ways up Main Street. "Which way?" It was a joke. "You ought to know by now!" He smiled and we started off up Main Street, our cushion shoes slapping the red line. I have to say this, the kid knew where to put his feet. He ran like a natural. I let him take a short lead so's not to crowd his heels. The pace was surprisingly strong. Well, that wouldn't last. First-time runners tend to overestimate their stamina. We jogged out of town, following Main Street over the canal and out between the cow pastures that stretched as far as you could see left and right. It was a little silly to call such a "country" road Main Street, but there were never any serious plans to rename it. After all -- it is the street that runs right through the center of our little burg, isn't it? And that's what Main Street is all about. We saw a farmer out mowing the wheat in his little field. Jack waved. I guess the farmer didn't see us. A littler farther on we swooped into the village. It's still called Main Street through here, of course. We were back into some country before we knew it. Jack was really eating up the Road. I was proud of his endurance, proud of what we joggers call heart. It's nice to see a boy turn out the way you always knew -- or hoped -- he would. Nice. What a goddam understatement! Jack was running up a storm, all right. But I knew it wouldn't last. We were a mile and a half out of town when he began to crap out. (I have to say here that we joggers use the measure of "mile" instead of the metric system everybody else uses. It sets us apart, you know? And with sentiment turning against us, we need every bit of support we can muster. We forni a clique, like I said. But mostly it's for selfprotection. We're not snobs or anything like that. Used to be we got together just to keep our spirits up, to keep us on the Road, to keep us doing what we knew we had to do. Running still hurts, don't forget. We need to keep pushing ourselves back out on that Road.) Anyway, Jack crapped out so we flopped on the side of Main Street to te a break. A minute later Jack was still sucking hard at our high-altitude blend. "Damn," he said between gasps. "You sure -- work hard -- out here." "That's right." "And you -- go a lot -- farther!" "I sure do. But don't let your first experience ruin it for you." I decided to let Jack pant in peace. I didn't want him to think I was riding him, forcing him to jump back on the Road right away. I figured it would embarrass him if I sat there and stared at him. So I wandered off into a field, kicking along through the tall grass. The sweat was drying on my forehead and arms and I felt deliciously cool. I swung my arms around and liked the way my shoulders rolled. I was feeling very physical. Suddenly it didn't matter that Sylvia and I were having a fight. It only mattered that she wasn't here in this grassy field with me. I did some quick squats and jumps, then went back to see how Jack was getting on. I really didn't want to hurry him along. It's just that suddenly there was something on my mind. The quicker I got back to the cottage, the quicker I could get hold of Sylvia and straighten this matter out. (I'm talking about my matter. This fight about jogging could wait. You know what I mean? Wink.) Jack was a little shaky but ready to hit it. Again I let him pace us up the Road back into town. I hoped his pride wouldn't put too much pressure on him to trudge along faster than was comfortable. I knew if I ran ahead of him. I'd have to keep looking back to see if he was lagging. And that would have put even more pressure on him. We slapped the red line on up Main Street to what I call "the starting line." (All of us joggers have our own "starting lines.") We took a short break. Jack asked me if I was going to continue jogging. "Of course," I said. "It's my life." I told him the rumored ban wouldn't stop me. He said he meant was I going to continue jogging now. I was thinking about Sylvia, of course, but I didn't want to tell him why, exactly. But then my feelthy plans were shot down when Sylvia walked up, looking so goddam betrayed that I wanted to apologize immediately for plucking baby Jack from her breast. Our conversation was short and rather bitter. Good thing Jack was standing right there. I think she wanted to hit me. (Personally I think she was over-reacting. Of course I knew "jogging" had little to do with her anger. She just thought I would bow to her intentions concerning her son. Now she knew better. It's an old story.) She took Jack back to the cottage. I stayed on Main Street. The Baker came out of his shop and looked like he was about to say something sarcastic. There was nothing to do but hit the Road some more. I took off in a pace that would have made Jack cringe. I wanted to push myself. To tell you the truth, I was feeling mighty betrayed myself. I knew Sylvia couldn't read my mind or fathom my desires. (She was always a trifle slow in these matters.) And I knew her scene (with Jack watching) was not a flat rejection of that part of our relationship. Maybe I knew it was nothing #rjona, but I couldn't help taking it that way. So I pushed myself. I was feeling bad. I was feeling mean. Above all, I was feeling frustrated. Maybe I could blame Sylvia for what happened next. At least for my part of it. it it ir I was just coming into town again when I saw the mob. Well, maybe "mob" is a bit emotional. Let's just say half a dozen guys were standing in the Road in my path. It looked like they wanted to tell me something. But I wasn't exactly in the mood for any conversation. Besides, I kind of knew what they wanted to say. And I certainly wasn't in the. mood to stop running. So I uttered a short yell and ran right through them. They were so surprised half of them jumped up and started running after me. , Then they realized they were doing what they wanted me to stop doing. They dropped back. I watched them over my shoulder as they shuffled back to the center of town. I had to laugh. Up ahead I spotted some runners. Naturally they were moving in the same direction I was running. But they "weren't getting any farther away because I was really putting on the steam. I caught the guys in a quarter of a mile. I recognized my new running friend, Tim. He was pacing a few buddies up Main Street. I quickly told them what had happened in town. They knew all about it. The same thing had happened to them. "We got to get organized," I said. "If we go running through town in a pack, I don't see how they can stop us. We'd knock 'em ass over meatballs." But these guys were already working on the problem. When we got to the village, another dozen or so joggers joined our group. We all laughed and shouted at one another. As we made our way up Main Street, more and more runners joined our convoy. Now there were about thirty of us. Even my pool-shooting friend had joined us. Everybody was running strong and mean, strung out in single file, smacking the red line in unison. We rolled up Main Street like a string of ballbearings. It was exhilarating. Running had never, been better. We were flashing through the "country," headed into town. I could see we had a reception committee waiting for us, but the word hadn't got around town much yet. There were only a few dozen milling around in the middle of Main Street. We pounded up the red line and growled. The mob splashed aside like a mud puddle under our sixty pushing feet. I heard some screams and angry yells but could only laugh as we raced out of town, across the canal and back into the country. God, that felt good. The sweat was flowing free by now and everybody in the line was breathing in marathon cadence. I could feel the run adjusting the movement of my muscles. I was getting my mind set for a long roadtime. I had my running mantra puffing through my teeth. I felt strong. I knew I could run forever. Run forever... In the old days that was the way it seemed to us all. It wasn't so much that we felt we could run forever. We just assessed the situation and it looked to us like we'd have to run forever. Times have changed, like I said. In the old days everybody ran. It was not something you thought about much. It was just there. A fact of life. A fact that had become life. A fact that made life worth living. I looked up the line and saw Mr. Galway at the head of the joggers. I could feel tears coming to my eyes. Mr. Galway had to be fifty-five or sixty years old. Maybe older. I don't think anybody will ever know for sure. (Even my dad looked up to this man, I remember.) It was only fitting that he should lead this line of joggers. He's the man who started the whole thing almost twenty years ago. He's the man who saved our lives. And, more important, he saved our spirits. It was like having a saint lead our little gang up Main Street. Suddenly we were chanting the Joggers' Chant. I don't know who started it. With forty or fifty of us running, I think the Chant just came out spontaneously. "Up the hill!" we shouted. "Down the hill!" "All the way!" "All the way!" "Around the hill!" "Through the hill!" "All the way!" "All the way!" I fit the Chant around my running mantra like a cloak. Everything was filled up now, muscles, lungs, throat and mind. We ran the finest run. "All the way!" "All the way!" I looked up, up in the sky. We were thundering through the village, which is halfway around from the town. That meant the town was just another mile away and directly overhead. I looked up in the sky, following the red line of Main Street all the way up into town. The town was exactly the diameter of our little burg -- about six-tenths of a mile. It was possible to see a large crowd clogging the street in the center of town. The word had gone out. Apparently the government was bent on stopping us. There would be no more running up Main Street. Running up Main Street. I remembered when Jack asked me why runners only ran up Main Street and not down. (By "down" he meant, of course, in the direction of spin.) The answer was simple. Now, as we swept around the curve toward the town, I thought about the answer I gave him then and it presented such a simple solution to this whole anti-jogging fiasco that I almost tripped over my own feet. A second later I had left the red line (for the first time in my life) and was running past a lot of incredulous, chanting joggers toward Mr. Galway. It was hard going. The pace was murder, and I was not exactly a fresh runner. Then again, neither was I a novice. I knew where the reserves lay. I tapped them... and speeded up. The Chant was petering out. Every time I passed another jogger, he stopped chanting and yelled at me. Luckily the guys ahead of me were chanting too loud to notice what was going on behind them. If one of them had turned and looked back, I might never have made it to the front. I reached Mr. Galway with less than a hundred yards to go. It was hard to believe a man of his years He seemed to be cruising. It turned out he was as horrified as anyone that I was running along off the red center-of-mass line. I could see he was angry. I thought for a moment he might knock me down. But instead he listened to my breathless plan. And he saw I was right.    It was harder than I'd thought to stop our jogline. I'm afraid some faces got punched, some bodies trampled and some harsh words thoughtlessly shouted before the whole bunch of us -- runners, government leaders, goons and nibbemeckers -- could begin a more or less controlled shouting match. Somewhere in the middle my plan was proposed, explained, debated, voted in and proclaimed law. It was simply this: Odd days joggers jog up Main Street; even days jog down. Joggers could keep informal logs to make sure the effects of the odd days were canceled on the even days. All this because in the twenty years since the accident when we lost spin and couldn't control the to fix them because of the radiation, we had run our ship up to half a gee spin-gravity. It was felt by the government that this was more than enough to keep the calcium from migrating out of our bones and quite sufficient to keep us in good physical health until we reached the terminus. The terminus. Well, hopefully Jack will be around for that little event. We're still ten years from Turnaround, with another forty years or so after that to the Centauri system. If I made it. I'd be eighty-four. Well, I guess I got a chance. My own dad was killed after the accident -- he was one of those who done about our spin loss. He never knew what a lot of heroes we joggers became... Lately "hero" didn't exactly describe us. (I found out later that the government was merely preparing to discourage full-scale jogging. After all, we had to stop increasing our spin sometime. People were beginning to complain about getting too heavy. The government considered it a matter to look into. There was no crisis. It was when I -- and some other hotheads -- bulled though town at high speed that things got out of hand. We joggers, were known to be clique-ish. Suddenly the government was afraid we'd turn militant. They got tough and we got tougher. The whole thing was blown up out of proportion in a matter of minutes.) Anyway, after the crowd had yelled a lot and talked loud another hour or so, it began to disintegrate. Most of the joggers left too. They'd made their point. Years ago you used to hear the phrase, "Joggers make the world go around." Believe it. It's true. It was especially true in the first five years or so after the accident. Everting was chaotic. Thank God we still had some spin left -- about point one gee. But with all the hardship and turmoil, Mr. Galway saw to it that one operation continued relentlessly. The joggers pounded up Main Street, running so close together you could reach out and grab the guy ahead of you, four thousand men, women and children, all running at once, continuously (there were four shifts), every second of every minute of every hour -- for five and a half years. And by the end of this crucial period we'd put another point two seven rpm's on our ship -- exactly doubling the spin rate we had after the accident. It was enough to quadruple our spin-gravity. After that -- and for the next fourteen years -- the hardcore joggen took over. It's taken that long to add that last tenth gee. "Joggers make the world go around." It's still true. Tim grabbed my arm. "Let's run!" It was an even numbered day, by our peculiar reckoning, so we turned to face the down side of Main Street. "Okay," I said. "But only one lap. I have to get back home and look after my... son." A small lie between joggers. We started off down the street. I don't care what anyone says. It's easier running down Main Street. I said, "Maybe I'll just do two laps..."  pitiful remnant, a double handful of flying hills and boulders of dirty ice. Earth's gravitational field has spread them across the sky. "Craters glow across the face of the Earth. The sea strikes glow as brightly as the land strikes; but the sea strikes are growing smaller. Walls of water hover around them, edging inward. "The water hovers two miles high around the Pacific strike. Its edges boil frantically. The pressure of expanding live steam holds back the walls of water. "And the hot vapor goes up in a column clear as glass, carrying salt from vaporized seawater, and silt from the sea bottom, and recondensed rock from the strike itself. At the, limits of Earth's atmosphere it begins to spread in an expanding whirlpool. "Megatons of live steam begin to cool. Water condenses first around dust and larger particles. What falls out of the pattern are the heavier iL globules of mud. Some join as they fall. They are still hot. In the drier air below, some water evaporates." Lairy Niven and Jerry Poumelle Playboy Press, # For the past three years these columns have been a joint affair: often Jim Baen suggests the topic and always we have a long telephone discussion before I write them. This will be the last of those. As I write this, Jim has left I'm looking forward to working with the new editor, J. J. Pierce, I'm going to miss Jim, and I think so will we all. Thanks, Jim. I wish you well. This topic was chosen before Jim left. There I was, admiring Larry's and my new book when the telephone rang and Jim asks, "Why don't you do a column about what would happen if a big comet hit the Earth?" "Uh -- well, it wouldn't be hard to do, but are you sure the readers won't think I'm picking up a bit of free advertising?" I asked modestly. "So what? It's an interesting topic, and I, uh, suspect you can do the research easily enough," said Jim. "Done," I cried. And here we are.    First, what are the chances that any large object will strike the Earth? Secondly, if something hits, how great is the chance that it will be a comet? High, in both cases. But that takes explanation. In any given century, any given millenium, the chances that we'll be struck by anything large enough to do more than make loud noises, and perhaps knock down a building or two, are very low. Death by meteor strike isn't exactly prevalent; I suspect that Lloyd's would insure you against it for a premium not much higher than the administrative costs of recording the policy. In fact, in all history I know of only one person who has been injured by a falling meteorite, and she (As I recall, her landlady wanted to claim the fallen star, on the grounds that it may have hit the tenant but it ended up in the landlady's basement.) That being the case, how can I say that the probability that Earth will be struck is high? Look at Mars. It's covered with craters. So are its moons, Phobos and Deimos. Now some of that is due to Mars' thin atmosphere, which doesn't protect the surface; but most of those holes in the Martian surface were made by globs that would have punched through our own atmosphere without hardly noticing. Mars has been battered throughout geological history. But Mars is in the inner edges of the Asteroid Belt. Surely it gets hit more often? No. Look at Mercury. Or Venus. Or our own Moon. It turns out that Mars' position in the solar system is irrelevant; all the inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, have approximately equal chances of being struck. And look at our globe; Vreedevort in South Africa, so large an astrobleme (a blemish caused by an astronomical object; nice word) that you can't even see it except from the air. Or Meteor Crater in Arizona, a kilometer-sized hole. And those were the little ones. Look at the globe again. Circles. Hudson's Bay. The Sea of Japan. Two circles forming the Gulf of Mexico. The Bay of Bengal. Perhaps not all of those are astroblemes but it's likely that one or more was. And of course there were myriads more but the scars have worn away over the ages. Our atmosphere is efficient at erasing marks on the Earth's surface -- and of course we're fourfifths covered by water so that not all the scars show to begin with. Over geological time we've been struck again and again -- and over a long enough time we're bound to be struck. The probability is very high, given that we wait long enough. More on that later. Now -- given that we'll get hit, what are the chances that it will be a comet? High, of course; objects with intersecting orbits have had plenty of chances to hit and most of those that were going to have done so except for the comets, whose periods are so long that they haven't had many chances at us. A number of highly reputable astronomers estimate that there are They're mostly way out beyond Pluto in what's called the cometary halo. Every now and again one gets perturbed out of its far-out orbit and falls down near the Sun. Most astronomers think comets are dirty snowballs; various ices, water, methane, carbon dioxide, balled together and contaminated with dust rocks and general cosmic junk. When the comet gets close to the Sun -- say, out there by Mars -- it heats up. The ices turn to gas, and the gasses with dust stream out. Light pressure from sunlight pushes the tail away from the comet so that it smears across the sky. As the comet gets closer, more stuff melts, the tail gets larger, and it can become really spectacular. Then, just as the textbooks show, when the comet rounds the Sun, the tail continues to be pushed away from the head; the light pressure works outward only. Thus on its way back out, the tail goes first; assbackwards through the solar system. Each time the comet gets down near the Sun it loses all the gasses and dust that went into making up the tail. None of that can be recovered. Eventually there's nothing left but a few rocks. As a matter of fact, as I write this, we're being hit by cometary matter. The Perseid meteor shower takes place this week (mid-August), and those campjed out on the Mojave to watch the first free flight of the Enterprise got a spectacular light show as an extra attraction. The regular meteor showers such as the Perseids are generally if not universally thought by astronomers to be the remnants of comets in orbits with periods short enough to have brought them many times into the solar system. The ices have long since burned away, leaving nothing more than a mess of flying gravel. Of course I don't recommend that everyone go make preparations for getting hit by a comet. (If you decide to do so, you'll get tips in plenty from the novel.) The chances that Earth will during your lifetime be hit by anything big are tiny indeed. Even over thousand-year periods the probability is not high. Our novel deals with the probable consequences of a very improbable event, and we didn't write it to scare anyone (well, we did, but you know what I mean). But it is inevitable that if we wait long enough and do nothing about it. Earth is going to be hit by a comet. So what? Comets are nothing more than dirty snowballs. Frozen gas can't harm us. Can it? It surely can. Let's take a simple case, a chunk of ice one mile on a side. That works out to # x #' cubic centimeters; now let's choose a density. Liquid methane is .# grams per cc; methane ice is more dense than that, but let's assume we have a lot of even lighter contaminants, so that our density is only half that of liquid methane, and multiply by .#, giving us a mass of # x #' grams, no small sum. Now for a velocity. Let's assume the thing is going past and we whap into it at something like Earth's path velocity in orbit, about # kilometers a second. This is reasonable; the closing velocity of most meteorites that do hit our atmosphere varies from about # to about # kilometers a second. Using high-school formula, energy # mv, we get # x #' ergs, a number that doesn't mean too much, so let's translate: It's # megatons, somewhat more energy than is contained in all the nuclear arsenals of all nations. Put another way: It takes # calories to turn a gram of water into steam. If we assume the water started at the freezing point and that all the energy from the strike is used to generate steam, we'd have enough water vapor to cover the entire North American continent to a depth of well over # meters. Fortunately not all that energy gets used that way but however you look at it, if our snowball hits water, it's going to rain. We put it this way: "Cubic miles of water have been vaporized, and the rain clouds encircle the Earth. Cold fronts form along the base of the Himalaya massif, and rainstorms sweep through northeastern India, northern Burma, and China's Yunan and Szechwan provinces. The great rivers of eastern Asia, the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yang-tze and Yellow rivers, all begin along the Himalaya foothills. Floods pour down across the fertile valleys of Asia, and still the rains fall in the highlands. Dams burst and the waters move on until finally they meet the storm-lashed salt water driven inland by waves and typhoons. "As the rains fall across the Earth, more steam rises from the hot seas near Hammerstrikes; with the water go salt, soil, rock dust, vaporized elements of the Earth's of tons of smoke and dust rising into the stratosphere. T I "As Hamner-Brown Comet retreats into deep space. Earth reseming highlights. The Earth's albedo has changed. More of the Sun's heat and light are reflected back to space, away from the Earth. Hamner-Brown has passed, but the effects remain, some temporary like the tsunamis which still surge I through the ocean basins, some on j their third journey; hurricanes and I typhoons that lash land and sea; the I planetwide rainstorms that engulf the Earth. "Some effects are more permaj nent. In the Arctic the water falls as I snow that will not melt for hundreds of years." Glaciers and a new Ice Age. Coastal regions scoured clean of life. Floods. New inland seas. Old Lake Bonneville, which once covered a lot of the interior of the US (and is now marked by some salt flats and the Great Salt Lake), comes back to life. And so forth. It's all described in our book, if you're that interested, along with what happens to the survivors. But there's a point to all this and j it's not trying to entice you to rush I out and buy a book, nor am I sellj ing survival kits. ' The point is, it's bound to hapI pen. Not this year, not this century, not this millenium -- perhaps. There's no way of knowing. What did hit Siberia back in #? Black Hole? Comet? No one knows, but something did and it was big enough to have caused a lot of damage had it struck anywhere but in the most desolate area of Earth. Has something like this happened in human memory? Probably not -- but it's possible. Allow me to indulge in some speculation. From about # BC to # BC a very high civilization flourished in Europe. It was centered around Crete originally, but something, probably associated with the eruption of the volcanic island of Thera seventy miles north of Crete, brought the Minoan civilization down. Yet, despite one of the most devastating events in all history -- the Thera eruption has been estimated at from four to ten times as powerful as Krakatoa, and Krakatoa killed thirty-six thousand people -- the Aegean civilization recovered. The hundred-megaton volcanic explosion finished Crete but the mainland Greeks, led by the kings at Mycenae, rose as the Cretans fell. They took the Cretan script -- known to archaeologists as Linear A -- and adapted it for Greek. They had a highly organized economy dominated by the palaces. They traded all through the Mediterranean. We know a good bit about how they lived from the Homeric poems. We can read the palace archives, find out just what the kings at Pylos dedicated to their gods, what measures they took for their defense; we cansee their trade goods placed in Egyptian tombs. It was a high civilization indeed, and it lasted for a century after Thera. Then it fell suddenly. Within a generation, possibly a few years, possibly more quickly than that. Populations fell And no one knows why. There are dozens of theories. Rhys Carpenter postulates vast and massive climate changes. The traditional explanation is invasion by barbarians. None of the theories are very satisfactory. None really explain why the art of writing was lost for centuries; why cities with massive walls and fortifications were deserted and never again occupied until their very locations were lost to memory. Leon Pomerance of the Archaeological Institute of America finds existing theories so unsatisfactory that he has tried to redate the Thera explosion to # BC. He has not gained much acceptance for his view; the Thera event can be dated in various ways but it's very hard to make it later than #; most put it earlier than that. There are the remains of Minoan settlements on the island and those can be correlated with a time in Egypt known to be centuries before the great collapse and the beginning of the First Dark Age. Yet Pomerance makes one point very persuasively: No other barbarians in history have been so effipeople must have been to bring down such a great civilization. Not only did they kill off those arrogant Achaean warriors described by Homer but they destroyed a flourishing civilization in Phoenicia, wrecked Syria and then managed to do in most of their own people. Not a very satisfactory picture. Others postulate an economic view: The palace economy was so tightly knit that once it was disturbed, the land could not produce enough to feed the swollen population; progressive decline set in and the Achaeans were their own "barbarian invaders." That view has its problems too: These progressively declining people were able to get around to a lot of territories. But perhaps. However, there is another possibility, one of pure speculation: Phaeton. Recall the legend? Phaeton, illegitimate child of the Sun, asked his father a favor, and when it was granted, chose as his boon the right to drive the Sun chariot. The result was disaster, with the Sun getting so close to Earth that it scorched many lands; Zeus finally destroyed Phaeton with a thunderbolt and he fell into the sea. Interestingly, Phaeton in legend has often been associated with devastating floods. Could a large meteor have struck the Mediterranean just after # BC, just after the Trojan War? At least the possibility is intriguing. Suppose it to have been a bit smaller than our cubic mile of methane ice and to have come in at a shallow angle. It would have left a swath of destruction fifty miles on either side; that shock wave would be devastating. When it plunged into the sea, it would throw up tsunamis great enough to scour the seashore. There would probably be climatic effects. All pure speculation, of course. I offer no real evidence for the theory, nor do I care to defend it as anything more than a "cocktail party" idea. I am dead serious when I say that worse inevitably will happen if we wait long enough. In our story we have an event something larger than Phaeton; larger even than the cubic mile of ice. It's still pretty small compared to whatever happened to form Hudson's Bay or whatever cracked the ago. For obvious reasons we couldn't write a novel about that kind of disaster. It's hard to write about the survivors when you have a pasteurized planet. We were, after all, writing a novel. No one would want to read a fiction about the total end of humanity. That doesn't make the possibility any less real. Vat might we do about it? Or are we all doomed, it being only a question of time before Earth is battered to death? Well, first we can plant colonies. As Robert Heinlein observed last year on Viking Night, "Earth is too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." As I write this, there's joy in Palmdale: The Shuttle, despite Vice President Mondale's adamant opposition, has successfully flown her first untethered mission. About the Ames to participate in a symposium on space industrialization. We can't plant colonies yet, but it may not be long. Incidentally, there about new uses of space technology in everyday life. Mine was sent courtesy of the National Space Institute (#I N. Fort Myer Drive, Suite #, Arlington, Va. #; dues # yearly). With self-sufficient colonies on Mars, and the Moon, and in space itself, we could lose the Earth and still survive as a race. John Varley has a series in which man cannot live on Earth any longer but hasn't got out of the solar system. And of course there's the possibility of recolonizing the Earth with survivors from the colonies. But beyond that -- is there any reason why space-faring man cannot save the home world? Given the ships and colonies, there is more than a possibility that we could quite literally push our nemesis off course. A few thousand megatons applied at the right time and place would do the job handily. The next time somebody tells you we must give up technology in order to "save the ecology," think about that one.  V ' O HABRr A story guaranteed to offend everyone's sensibilities. Or hit their funnybones! I'm not Jewish. I'm a physicist and because of that name and my looks, most people think I'm Jewish. I don't do much to disabuse them because I have found that it has helped my career. It's true that most people try not to be prejudiced, but it's not easy. When old Professor Levi, my graduate advisor, found out I wasn't Jewish, he tapped his index fingers together gently, the way he does when he is thinking deep mathematical thoughts. He peered at me from under those gigantic white eyebrows and said mildly, "But Isaac, some of my best friends are gentiles. You could have trusted me." I knew, however, that old Levi, like so many other physicists, secretly believed that the heritage that gave us Einstein and Oppenheimer, Michelson and Weinberg and so many others was due to the fact that being Jewish gives a person a special added talent for theoretical physics, like the secret added ingredient in a new brand of floor wax. Anyhow, because of my name and because I am a slightly stocky thirtyish ex-boy genius with coal-black eyes, long thick dark hair and a prominent nose on my permanently lightly tanned skin, and because I have a vestigial tendency to observe the Sabbath (I'm a natural-bom Seventh Day Adventist), only my close friends know I'm really not one of the Tribe. Oh, yes. I also love to drink. My Jewish friends (and what other sort does a theoretical physicist have?) tell me that that's how they can tell I'm really not Jewish. They all seem to prefer stimulants, like caffein, rather than nice soothing depressants, like alcohol, that quiet the sullen voice of conscience and let a fellow have some fun once in a while. Alcohol does something else for me, something I really need; It stops the endless flow of invention ideas. Since I was a little kid wandering around the campus of Atlantic Union College (where my father taught mechanical drawing), I've been plagued by a psychic diarrhea of ideas for almost dways absurd inventions. It wouldn't be so bad if I could think up nice practical schemes like how to solve the energy crisis or make a selfchanging diaper. Instead, a typical hour's production may include a plan for correcting software errors in a computer whose circuits consist of plasma created by holographic replication of the plasma, a way to improve the long-range carrying power of cockroach sex attractant, and a way to tell how many days ago spoiled yogurt started to spoil. I admit I've cheated a bit; these ideas actually came to me this morning over an interval of about three hours. There were, of course, during that time dozens of others. I chose those three because they show how nutty my ideas tend to be, and how varied. By now I've learned just not to listen to all those ideas: I can't turn off the damn station but I can tune it out, more or less. However, I am convinced that tuning it out takes some sort of psychic energy. That's where my love for alcohol comes in: When I am sufficiently drunk, the ideas stop. Then of course I become far more intelligent because I am not exhausted and distracted by all that subjective clamor. I've tried to control the subject matter of my inventions. I can't. The only time the system ever got focused was for two terrible weeks when I was fourteen during which I must have come up with hundreds of ideas for aphrodisiacs for women and anaphrodisiacs for males other than myself. Every idea would have worked -- given money, technology and raw materials utterly beyond reach. If I get sent to hell and they put me in that desert where the water is always just out of reach. I'll just laugh. After my experience, age fourteen, I've been understandably very, very tentative in my later efforts to focus my talent. Anyhow, toward the point of my story -- if not exactly to it. One day I did have an idea that seemed worth following up, an idea that looked like it might help solve some of the big differences between Israel and her Moslem neighbors. It also would provide an important practical application for the relatively pure branch of experimental physics in which I had specialized (mostly because Levi was the biggest shot that would take me on as advisee). My specialty was the theory of large-scale holography. By large I mean fractions of a kilometer you can write with only one decimal digit in the denominator, which puts a lower limit of one hundred eleven meters. When holograms get that big, there is a whole new class of problems to contend with that cannot even be measured, let alone noticed, in traditional teeny-weeny holograms. In my new, large-sized range you have to worry about variations in the earth's gravitational field disrupting wave-front register. My idea was for a way to create a giant hologram that could be turned on and off by the flip of a switch. It was a practical way: That is, it could be built for not much bucks. And I saw a splendid application. Why not make the holy Temple in Jerusalem by hologram? Why not project it over and around the present Mosque of Omar? In fact, that structure could be integrated into the structure of the holographic projection so that the walls of the Mosque fitted with the walls of the imaged Temple. Imagine! The Temple could be turned on for the Jewish Sabbath and holy days. It could be turned off at other times. There need be no destruction or damage of the present Mosque. In fact, several different holograms could be projected by the same projection system, including versions of the Temple designed to fit various alternative sectarian views. There could be a Catholic Temple, a Reform Jewish, an Orthodox Jewish, a Babbist, even a Marxist Temple designed to look shabby and tawdry. What a way to satisfy everybody! The ancient prophecies could be fulfilled. Every ancient prophecy, including all contradictory ones! Of course, with my background, I didn't have immediate access to anyone in a position to implement my idea. My Princeton friends were too -- shall we say -- secular; certainly no one I had hung around with during my freshman year at Atlantic Union College could possibly have the right connections. Therefore I worried about how to find someone to help me implement my brainstorm for three interminable seconds before I finally thought of my mad-genius friend, Leonard Bachutz. Len Bachutz had been a fellow graduate student in physics at Princeton and we had even published a paper together -- a lovely theoretical proof of an obscure astrophysical speculation by Lyman Spitzer -- before we became too absorbed in our doctoral researches to take time for something as frivolous as publication in professional journals. Len was generally regarded as the most capable graduate student in our class. Maybe not another Weinberg, but definitely an order of magnitude more talented than the rest of us clods. The legend was that he and Levi used to lock themselves in Levi's lab late at night and summon up the ghost of Oppenheimer. Levi is a staunch exponent of the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum processes, and hence the fundamental unpredictability of everything. Oppenheimer, as everyone knows, followed Einstein in believing that underneath the chaos was a strict, predetermined order. Naturally then, the story went that Levi and Bachutz would summon Oppenheimer's ghost just to taunt him with the question: "If the universe is perfectly logical and predictable then what are you doing here?" I'd better interrupt myself here to explain to the reader that the last paragraph was a joke intended to show the awe that the other grad students felt concerning Len Bachutz. It wasn't my way of introducing you, dear reader, to an imaginary world in which ghosts are real. In fact, there is not a bit of unfounded speculation in my story. Every bit of the science and f technology is sound -- as solid, I was tempted to write, as a holographic projection. Len never got his degree, however. First he got involved in a complicated generalization of the eight-fold way. As you probably know, Tom Ching eventually got the Nobel prize for generalizing the eightfold way. What you probably don't know is that Tom Ching and Len Bachutz worked together on the original mathematical formulation of the higher-dimensional equivalent of two-cubed. Then, without ever completing the part of the report he had promised to write, Len suddenly went off on a completely wild tangent. He rediscovered some obscure medieval speculations from the Jewish NeoPlatonists that he felt constituted a detailed description of the big-bang beginning. From there he went to the Kabbala, an esoteric collection of obscure Jewish mystical writings that were, so he told me, the latest thing around the beginning of the thirteenth century. For some reason Len decided that they made a great deal more sense than anyone had thought for the last few centuries. He believed that all it needed was translating the medieval mummery into modem mathematics and, lo, we would have a free, unified field theory -- without having to do the work of deriving and developing it! Of course no one around Princeton would even talk with him about that kind of madness. The more Jewish the physicists he  tried to interest were, the less they wanted to be reminded that their ancestors had gotten into philosophical tangles as complicated as those that made Christian scholasticism the charming nightmare it is for the modem scholar. Maybe the Kabbalists didn't worry about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (actually, a perfectly sensible attack on the problem of degrees of infinity), but they had their own mind-bogglers. Len once told me that there had been a great deal of investigation of the ultimate shape of the universe. I think he said that it was probably that of a man and a woman embracing. I remember he got annoyed when I asked him how close the embrace was (the Big Bang, as it were?) but I'm not sure whether the idea about the shape was his own or came from a medieval source. Anyhow, Len dropped out of Princeton and went to live in Boro Park, Brooklyn, where there is a sort of settlement of very traditional j Jews. There are streets there where everyone seems to be dressed up like members of an Amish community; the men in long black frocks; the women in heavy, shapeless, long dresses, with their hair hidden under wigs or bulky hats. Maybe I'm not getting the details of their dress exactly right but you get the picture. Len went to live there so he could study the old lore with the masters who have made it their life's work. I visited him a few times in the first year of his exile, but then we drifted apart. Each time I went to see him, he seemed to be deeper into that weird backwater society, and it was clear that he was increasingly hooked by the religion. Maybe he started off simply wanting to learn about their theories about the nature of the universe, but after a year he was praying and beating his breast -- or whatever they do -- with the most devout of them. Nevertheless, he had kept up his membership in the American Physi' cal Society, and once in an ultramarine moon he would send a brief, tightly reasoned note to I Physics Review Letters with an esoteric topic such as a Machian I approach to accounting for the spacI ing of quantum shells in the nucleus, or an information theory interpretation of entropy as applied to ! the distribution of charge in a hypothetical linear force field. I figured that by now, some seventeen years since he left Princeton, he must have the contacts I needed to try to implement my idea about the holographic Temple. "Interesting," he said, smiling slightly, after I had explained myself We were sitting in his study. It was lined from floor to ceiling with heavy old books whose covers indicated they were in Hebrew or Yiddish or whatever it is that uses that crinkly alphabet. He lived these days in a fourth-floor apartment -- no elevator -- in a beat-up old frame building. From outside the heavy oak door of the study penetrated the pandemonium of a small apartment containing seven children who were forbidden to watch television (too much corrupting influence). His wife looked pretty healthy to me, but I had to wonder whether tranquilizers are kosher. He thought a little and then opined in that smarmy voice he had cultivated since he got religion: "It says somewhere -- I'll have to try to track it down -- that when the Temple is rebuilt, its walls will be walls of fire. That's encouraging. Of course you're not the Messiah and He's nowhere in sight so far as I know, and that's not encouraging. Still, if you want to try, why not? It also is written that if the world is sufficiently evil, then the fulfillment of the prophecies will seem to be the action of purely natural forces, and that will be our punishment since we will not know the joy of witnessing His miracle. Maybe you are the natural instrument that will fulfill the prophecy." He chuckled and continued in a voice more like a physicist and less like an apprentice saint, "It seems to depend more on my mood than on anything that happens out there, but the world becomes, from time to time, quite evil. Other times it is rather good, all in all. We have a paradox. It was quite evil this morning, until you came here to visit me, old friend. Now the world is getting better and better, in which case I'm afraid there's not much hope for your idea. You had better go away and try to get belp from someone else. Then I'll be able to help you." I just sat there. I knew that I would have to survive two or three such logic mazes before the conversation turned serious. After a while Len said, 'T know a man in the Knesset who should be able to help you. He has contacts in the Israeli government and the "Hunh?!" smuggling refugees into Israel at gets some much-needed cash for which they don't owe Russia, Saudi Arabia, Libya, or anybody anything. The Israelis are delighted because they need manpower, and even if they have to pay the whole hundred dollars a head -- and they rarely do -- it is still a lot less than it costs them to get someone out of Russia. "It's essential, of course, that the arrangements are not ruined by an unfortunate choice of a time and place to conduct a little practice raid or artillery duel. Therefore, someone has to tell someone to tell someone to tell someone. My friend is second someone from the right. Of course, in Israeli politics that still puts him well to the left of our Democrats." "I don't understand you." "That's okay. I'm just joking. But really, I do know the man you should contact. He does have contacts with both the Israeli govern"Len, you're amazing." "Call me 'Aryeh,' please."    And that's how I came to be flying to Israel, with a letter by Len in my pocket introducing me to Dr. Shimshon Kafsi, a physicist who used to work for some sort of secret Israeli project but was now a member of the Knesset, representing an obscure minority party whose principal platform plank appeared to be a crash program of governmentsponsored experimental theology; how many prayers to Jeljovah cancel how many prayers to Baal -- that sort of thing, I think. Kafsi, in turn, was supposed to introduce me to someone else who would be able to introduce me to the right person in the Arab world. As I sat there in the late afternoon twilight forty-one thousand feet above the Bermuda triangle, my knees cramping me the way they always do when I have to sit still for a long time, I watched several young men dressed in the Orthodox Jewish uniform sway and mumble in the aisle -- saying their sunset prayers, I assumed. Lazily I fantasized a hijack attempt I would foil, earning the intense sexual favors of the cute little hostess. I took out my little pocket memo pad and made ready to note down any interesting invention ideas -- my lastditch fallback defense against utter ennui. I got stuff like: A way to make color television three-dimensional for under twenty-five dollars of retrofitting per set, provided the viewer is totally red-green color blind; how to stabilize trojan orbits near binary black holes; a cheap way to prop up the Colossus of Rhodes, using technology available at the time it was standing. A typical series of invention ideas. Suddenly, however, I had an idea for a sort of digitalanalog hybrid that would speed testing of possible proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem. Now that was interesting! I began writing complicated equations on my pad, using a combination of Arabic, Greek, Roman and Hebrew orthography to permit me to distinguish all the different (and different kinds of) elements that had to be represented. The cute little hostess leaned over to see what I was writing, and I inhaled pure essence of rutting musk ox or sexually deviated sperm whale. It was all I could do to keep from doing all I could do. "What's that?" the dear girl asked. "I can't teU you," I ruiswered. "It's a military secret. I'm an American who works for the Israeli government -- on loan, you know." (I think I forgot to mention that the plane was an El Al # -- I like their more thorough security searches.) "This is important mathematical work related to an important project. I imagine it's safe to tell you this much because anyone who is crew on one of these flights must have been cleared before being given anti-hijack training, but I really have to ask you to forget even this much. I tried to look very clever and competent. The inventor of a fountain-pen atomic bomb. Well, folks, that smart-ass reply of mine both saved my life and almost led to World War HI. I'm glad about the first result of my dishonest boasting, and I'm really, truly sorry about the second -- except that I do have a trace of smug satisfaction that the Big War didn't erupt -- and maybe it became a little less likely that it ever will. I'm getting ahead of my stoiy though, so let's get back to the next few minutes up there in that El Al jet. You've surely figured out by now that I was on the famous Flight #. Pay attention. I'm about to tell you what really happened. The cute little hostess blinked twice. Then she said, "Let me bring you some juice -- or would you prefer some other beverage?" I noticed that for some reason her lower lip was trembling slightly. "Orange juice will be fine," I answered. I had intended to add that a man with as important a mission as mine had to drink only healthful beverages, but before I could finish my sentence, she took advantage of the pause before the start of a new clause and darted off down the aisle as if bringing me orange juice was the reason she had been given such cute little feet. However, once she disappeared into the #'s galley, she never came back. Ten minutes dragged by. I drifted from the fantasy about how she would show me her admiration to the one about rescuing her from the escaped mental patient holding her in the galley with a bread knife. (Do they have bread knives in the galley? I doubt it -- after all, the bread is pre-cut, isn't it?) Suddenly a man's voice spoke on the plane's announcement system. "Ladies and gentlemen," a very deep voice began, speaking with a distinctly foreign accent -- later I discovered it was German. "This is Captain Ishmael speaking. I hope that you have been enjoying your trip and that the remainder of it will prove even more enjoyable and instructive. I must announce a slight change in itinerary, however. This plane was scheduled to proceed directly to Tel Aviv. However, it will prove necessary to make a stopover in recently liberated Palestinian territory." That was how we found out we had been hijacked. Captain Ishmael continued; "There will be several hours before we reach our destination. During this time the normal services of this plane will continue. However, no passenger will be permitted to leave his seat without first securing permission from the crew, one of whom may be summoned by pressing the call button. Any individual who disobeys this simple and reasonable regulation will be assumed to be plotting mutiny and will be dealt with by summary execution. Of course no sensible passenger is in the slightest danger because this one simple regulation, which we must enforce for the sake of order, is so easy to obey and so natural and obvious that there will be no need for concern by anyone not planning a mutiny. Please note that as of now, we, the Twentieth of June Chapter of the Mosque of Omar Division of the Free Palestinian People's Army, are the duly constituted authority on this vessel in international flight, and any effort to seize control of this vessel from us is air piracy and subject to its well-known condign punishment. "Preparatory to our landing in Free Palestinian territory, there must be routine customs and visa inspections and interviews. To obviate needless delay after we land, and so that you may promptly leave the plane if you wish to do so during our stopover in Free Palestine, we will interview each of you while we are in the air. When you hear your name announced, rise promptly from your seat and come down the aisle to the crew station next to the galley where the soft drinks are stored. A crew member will meet you there and give you further instructions. "To begin with, will Mr. Isaac Benson please come up for his i interview?" When Captain Ishmael mentioned I the Mosque of Omar, you can im: agine how excited I became. I felt . like jumping up and cheering or I maybe kissing that cute little hostess I with the pheromone-charged perfume (who was actually not in sight at the moment -- maybe that's what stopped me). Then, when I was called for first, my mood flipflopped into total terror. Bravely I collapsed into a little heap of wriggling spineless invertebrates. Put simply, I fainted. When I came to, I was lying on , my back on the floor of what was obviously the galley. The cute little hostess was stretched on top of me squeezing and rubbing the back of my neck with her right hand while she massaged my right kneecap with her left hand. "Welcome back," she whispered conspiratorially. Then, maternally (my mother is a nag): "Do you realize you've lost your turn! That was a really risky thing you did!" "Listen," I whispered back, "I lied before. I'm not involved in any secret project for the U.S. government or the Israeli government or anyone. I'm just an inventor on my way on a business trip to try to sell my latest invention." I tried to look as frightened, inadequate, stupid, blundering, bumbling and schnooky as I felt. Her eyes glistened. She put her arms up to. my shoulders and drew her lips to win two-and-a-half air molecules of mine. Our lips were so close, the electrostatic forces made it seem as if they were touching. "I thought you would be this brave," she whispered huskily in a voice that was the perfect sound equivalent of her perfume. It is a tribute to my youth and excellent health that I noticed this. It is a tribute to my terror that I didn't care. "No, really," I whispered back, "I'm really just a schnooky inventor!" I suddenly remembered to stop whispering and added in a shriek appropriate for either the situation I was in or a try-out for the role of the second of the Three Witches in Macbeth: "I'm not working for the Israeli government! I'm not working for the American government. I don't know any military secrets!" "That was very resourceful," she said thoughtfully and -- if possible -- more admiringly than ever. "Now the whole plane knows you're an Israeli agent. We'll have to be careful to treat you well until we get you away from the others. Then we'll have to break your resistance quickly, to help counter the myth of Israeli invulnerability." Even in my terror, which by now had reached the abject physiological level of imminent danger that I would wet my pants, I was struck by a major anomaly: "How come an Israeli stewardess is working for Arab hijackers?" I blurted. She answered in roughly the tone of voice the fifth-grade teacher's pet used to use when she told her friends why she had ratted to the teacher about the firecracker under her desk: "I'm a deep double agent." "Hunhm?" "Like every responsible government, the Israeli government plans for every contingency. Just in case the Arabs win, we have a certain number of agents planted in the Arab camp. Even if all other Jews in the world are exterminated, we handful of quislings will keep the Faith alive!" She smiled smugly. It occurred to me that there was no reason why she should be any more truthful with me than I had been with her. To my total astonishment, I heard my voice say, "I find you very attractive." I then felt my face smile -- engagingly, I hoped. From the inside it felt quite forced. She whispered, "I find you very attractive, too. I think it is your bravery. I think that if you could find a rationalization for joining our camp, we would become lovers. Very good lovers. Very close lovers." Her perfume sent little prurient organic pimps and panders scurrying up my nasal passages to infiltrate sneakily through the myriad holes in the bony plate between the nasal sensors and my brain. I listened to an intoxicated slice of brain think that it would be j worth it if I were killed for raping ' her. I firmly (not too firmly, I hoped) told myself to stop that kind ! of stuff. I Sternly, I told myself that all I would do would be to put my arm around the girl. That was just I friendly, that's all. But when I did ' it, the way her magnetic poles brushed against me gave me an idea. I kissed her. That seemed to increase the magnetic field and gave me another idea...    The dark gent in the burnoose didn't really try to keep the rifle pointed at me. "People are always more suggestible right after orgasm," he said with a smile, sounding sneaky because of the way he hissed his esses. "Whom are you trying to suggest?" I asked, "Me or her?" He laughed soundlessly. He was a short, dark man who appeared to be about twenty pounds underweight. He had the kind of face that is best i described as foxlike to anyone who is familiar with what foxes are like. Since I'm not such a one, I would get the picture of his face better -- if, that is, someone else had to describe it to me -- if it were described as crafty looking, triangular, with a . tiny mouth over a little sunken chin. He looked like one of the bad guys in a movie that doesn't have time for characterization and has to rely on stereotypes to identify who's on which side. I have always hated such movies and such stereotypies. Besides, I was in a good mood. I decided to like him. "I'm not any kind of agent. I'm a dumb inventor. I'm on my way to Israel to try to sell an invention. I'll tell you all about it. It has absolutely no practical value whatsoever. I've simply invented a way to make giant three-dimensional projections -- images -- of things. I could make a three-dimensional image of a house and it would look absolutely real. You could walk around it and see it from all sides. But it would not shelter you from the rain. It would just be an image. "My idea is to use my invention to project an image of a reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem. My kind of three-dimensional image can be turned on or off by a flick of a switch. I expect each of the different religious groups in Jerusalem will want their own image to fit their own beliefs about what the Temple was or should be like. The Moslems could have their own image or images too, you know." "How do you keep such a large wave front collimated?" he asked. "You can't do it without feedback," I answered. "You need sensors located out at various distances along the line of the wave front's progress. The light input is converted to electrons that move down a path through a flawless metal crystal. In effect, the light signal triggers a signal several orders of magnitude higher in frequency and therefore capable of measuring the time of arrival of the light with very great accuracy. The electrons trigger a moving wave of surface charge shift along a long, thin metal filament. It's something like a neural impulse. The surface waves from each of the different sensors that are supposed to receive simultaneous signals converge on a single junction that is similar to a neural synapse at which several neural axons converge. If the timing of the different signals is even slightly off, they fail to synergize to produce a sufficiently strong momentary potential surge to trigger a response in a condensor plate that constitutes the equivalent of the next neuron in the network. In effect, the system acts to magnify tiny errors in simultaneity, that is, collimation. Then a feedback circuit adjusts the collimation by focusing a standing ultrasound wave on a transparent helium medium through which the light passes as it leaves the laser source. The variations in density produced by modifying the focus of the ultrasound act to adjust the speed of the light wavefront by just the proper amount." "But how do you take into account noise in the transmission of the error signal, or in the system that generates the correction?" I didn't think to wonder how come he knew enough physics to ask the right questions or how come he was catching on so fast. I tend to think that everyone knows everything. That's one of the reasons my inferiority complex is such a splendid specimen. I am really very proud of it. "The feedback makes the proper conection," I answered, "except for certain dangerous resonant firequencies. The system is so sensitive and so fast that its resonant frequencies are up in the soft X-ray range, much higher than light frequency, and so a light signal is hardly ever appreciably damaged." "How fast does that surface charge effect travel? It can't be very fast. Doesn't that make the whole system very insensitiveT' Just then I was suddenly reminded that Shaya (the cute hostess) was still lying next to me -- rather, behind me, with her body pressed against my bare back. She reminded me. She did it by suddenly biting my shoulder, I gave a little yelp and squirmed away from her, banging my head against the metal side of the galley soiled-dish receptacle. While I was massaging my head and my shoulder and wishing the cute little hostess would do it, the dark bumoosed one with the rifle spoke a short, angry-sounding phrase in a guttural language, and the c.l.h. scooted out of there toward the front of the plane, not even stopping to slip into her shoes. "I am glad you have decided to cooperate," the d.b.o. said. "It would have been a great propaganda coup for the Israelis if they had been the ones to spring the surprise appearance of the new Temple. Now we will provide the surprise." "Why can't everybody do their own thing?" "No doubt, eventually, all surviving actors in the little drama will get the chance to display a suitable Temple, but there is no need that all do so equally promptly. It will be far better for the future peace and stability of the world, let alone this region, if we put on our show first." He smiled. He had too many teeth. I decided that maybe I should stop liking him. On second thought, I decided to try as hard as I could to like him, at least as long as he had a rifle and I didn't. In fact, even if we both had rifles. He smiled even more broadly, showing some, shiny steel where his molars grew like a coral reef. "We wondered if you would reveal yourself. You are a very sensible, very wise, very adaptable man. Perhaps you would like to use the next few hours before landing preparing a list of the supplies you will need. We may have to order some and we are in such a hurry that even hours may count. You have never had the luxury of the kind of support staff we will provide you. If you give me your list. I will radio ahead and we will be ready when we land." I realized that somehow I had been expected. It must have been some message from Aryeh (Leonard) that had gone astray. It seemed to me that I would be betraying my good Jewish friend if I cooperated with these Arabs but I felt that it would be better to betray him than to betray myself by getting myself killed. I would try to make it up later, maybe by contributing to the Jewish National Fund. I gave him a list of equipment and supplies. I made it as long and expensive as possible. If in doubt, I asked for the more expensive and complicated component rather than some simpler, cheaper alternative. He seemed delighted with the list and his glee seemed to grow with the growing cost. "Now I am sure your device will work," he said. "Nobody would have built something remotely like it if he did not know precisely what he was looking for." "Nobody ever has. I haven't. Did you think I had?" "Oh, no!" he reassured me. "But I did worry about why something like your idea hadn't been tried before. I think that equipment lars. That's very encouraging." I tried to think of some big extravagance to encourage him enough to put down the rifle but I seemed to have run out of inspiration -- until: "And I'll also need five assistants. all of whom have or almost have doctorates in appropriate areas of physics and engineering." "Physics and...?" "I meant 'or.' " "If 'and' would be better. I'm sure it can be arranged." For the first time I grasped the implications of the increase in the price of oil. Three weeks later I began to grasp the implications of the implications. We had landed at an airstrip next to an oasis in the middle of a desert. For all I knew, there was a town just beyond the second sand dune from the right, but there was no sign it was there. Nevertheless, by helicopter and by giant transport plane, people and equipment came pouring into Angry Shah, the name I had privately given to wherever we were. After about a week the other passengers and the crew had flown off. I never did get close to Shay a again. I wasn't exactly an honored guest, or the boss of the project, or a prisoner. I was all three, plus a lot of other stuff I couldn't readily label. My hosts were spending money as though it were about to go out of style. (With the great inflation of the eighties going full blast, I guess they may have been right.) Tlie upshot was that that morning, three weeks later, I was standing next to the portable blackboard in the command tent. Seated around the teak conference table were four of the world's top ten experts on the engineering or physics of holography. I strongly suspected the missing six were Jewish. "Gentlemen," I said (thinking that "Whores" would have been a more accurate collective characterization and probably "Fellow whores" would have been better yet), "then we are agreed that we'll have the first megaholograph ready for demonstration in fifteen days." Dr. Takashita, a quiet little man with graying hair and a pencil-thin moustache, said, "Calibration." That was about forty per cent of his daily syllable ration so I avoided asking him to explain. I had learned to think about whatever he said before I asked him to say anything more, which was, I suppose, the main reason for his communication style. "I assume that the calibration will be complete by the end of the week. Today is Monday. That means Friday." I looked around the table, searching for disagreement, hoping for agreement. As usual, they looked alert and intelligent but avoided giving me much of a clue. I took the desperate step again: I thought. "Let's see, if we have to get the calibration done, we first have to get all the equipment solidly anchored. That means we have to calibrate the vibration and shock-measuring equipment. That means we have to anchor it. Well, we have today's assignment defined for us." For once things went without serious hitches. By Friday we did have everything calibrated. We had decided to use, for our first image, something that could be briefly mistaken for a real object but that could not possibly fool an observer for any length of time. Therefore, we would project a grove of palm trees that grew near the well near the center of the oasis. At first glance it should look real but it would betray itself when the trees did not move with the breeze. (I know. What about dead calm? We decided not to try the experiment in a dead calm.)    Saturday was spent setting up our laser equipment all around the palmtree grove. Sunday we spent getting hijacked. The attack started just before dawn, I am told. I was, of course, in the sack. The first I knew, there was the sound of machine-gun firing from somewhere outside my land cruiser. I sleepily assumed that some of the Arab guards had gotten drunk or high and were whooping it up. Since the only women at our camp were some elderly cooks and Senora Lupe Arrau-McBride, our sixty-eight-year-old Chilean expert on wave-front polarization diffraction, I had been expecting some sort of hell to break loose. It must have been no more than two minutes later, however, that three armed men burst into my room. They were dressed like Russian air-force officers (at the time all I dimly gathered was that they looked like some sort of Russian military officers -- red stars, you know, do kind of suggest that). They all carried smoking machine guns. The first man in, who looked in the dim light to be about twelve, said in unaccented English, "Get up, you ass-kissing quisling Arabloving fairy, or we'll blow your brains out faster than your Arab friends could blow anything else." Notice the absence of any exclamation mark at the end of that sentence. He said it quietly, easily, as if he usually said sweet things like that when, as he did several times a day, he burst into a man's room carrying a smoking gun. My reaction was to swallow a big gulp of spit and phlegm and start to choke. I doubled up, all tangled in the sheets, parts of my naked anatomy sticking out obscenely while other parts convulsively wove the sheets into a straitjacket woven around and between my arms and chest and back. I coughed and strangled and my heart palpitated with a mixture of terror that any moment they would shoot me in the precious parts of me that were exposed and terror that they would simply stand there and watch while I choked to death. It seemed like a singularly embarrassing way to die. Suddenly I felt hands grabbing me under the knee joints. I was jerked out of bed and out of the bed sheets with such force that a sheet flapped against my chin with a loud snap, damn near knocking me out. I never had time to hit the floor with my head because two other arms grabbed me under the arm pits and I was swung face down across the back of one of my friendly visitors. You won't believe this. I was still coughing and choking. Guess what I thought; I was so confused and crazy that my only thought was that it was a lucky thing I was naked so they could see definite proof that I didn't find riding like that on a man's back exciting. I lay there, half choked, and felt pleased that they would soon surely decide they had maligned me by calling me a queer! We started out of the tent. I could still hear plenty of shots being fired in the background, also quite a bit of screaming and moaning. There was a lot of flickering light; evidently a good deal of the camp was burning. I smelled a terrible roasting smell that would have been delicious if it had not seemed likely that it was coming from what I was afraid it was coming from. Suddenly there was a burst of light, then everything went black. They told me later that my coughing was driving them nuts, and besides, it seemed likely to draw fire from somebody. They half suspected I was doing it on purpose -- a very clever trick, they thought -- and so they gently conked me on the head with a machine gun. Once again I suffered from overestimation. It is a miracle I didn't die of choking while I was unconscious, but perhaps the way they were carrying me with my head lower than my chest saved my life by promoting drainage. I awoke in a hospital room. Now remember, the men I had seen were wearing Russian-type uniforms. Naturally I assumed I was in Russia. When I opened my eyes, there were two nurses and a doctor -- or so I perceived the situation; later I learned otherwise. But when I first saw the three white-suited persons next to my bed, it was a natural assumption. In English that had the faintest trace of an accent, the doctor said, "You were not seriously injured, Mr. Benson. You are in a hospital only as a precaution. After we perform a few simple tests to make sure we haven't overlooked anything, I plan to release you. That will probably be in a few hours." He smiled. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Benson," he went on. "Let me introduce myself. I am Doctor Sapir. This is your nurse. Miss Kessef. The other lovely lady is a medical security officer, Leftenant Dagell." Note that he pronounced the military title the British way, with a "left." The names didn't tell me much. They didn't sound particularly Russian but this was a very small sample. The doctor was slight, aging, rather dark-skinned, with black eyes and hair. His face was wrinkled, his cheeks sunken, his facial bones prominent. The women were both twenty-ish, smiling, wearing no lipstick, black-haired, dark-eyed, attractive, slender. One was oliveskinned, the other very light. I took a direct approach. "Where am I?" "In a military hospital not far from Tel Aviv." The Russians weren't going to fool me that easily. I had been one of the few loyal fans of the television series, "The Prisoner," in which a determined man escaped again and again from a diabolically complex trap, only to be caught before the end of the program so that the next show could give him another opportunity to escape. Besides, I am as paranoid as anyone you might care to compare to me. "How soon can I see an American Embassy official?" I asked slyly. Leftenant Dagell answered, "The embassy will be notified immediately if you wish, and they will probably send someone over right away. But can't we persuade you to wait?" She smiled sweetly. I knew that, of course, there would be a welltrained agent who would impersonate an American consular official. It seemed to me that my best strategy would be to appear to be fooled. At all costs I wanted to avoid the brain-washing drugs and torture that would be my fate if my captors knew I saw through their clever masquerade. "Why should I want to wait?" I asked, trying to sound dumb and innocent, and hoping I would do a better job of it than I had done earlier when my Arab friends had hijacked the El AI #. "We need your help with the giant holographic projector we are building," Lt. Dagell explained. Her voice and manner were military -- crisp. She made me feel as if I had been late returning a library book. She didn't sound as if she needed anyone's help with any thing. "How far along are you?" I asked, cleverly probing for information. "We have duplicated what the Arabs did for you at Wadi Qatar." Her pronunciation of the gutteral "q" was splendid. I felt sure that the leftenant always had a perfectly clear throat; she could probably flip a speck on her soft palate twenty feet against a stiff breeze. By the way, she was the lightskinned one. Her hair was straight, short, severe. So were her eyebrows. I never saw a woman without horn-rimmed glasses who gave so powerful an impression that she was wearing them. "I'm surprised you want help from a 'quisling Arab-loving fairy,' " I said, sounding sincerely hurt; I still resented the unjust accusation. To my surprise all three burst into laughter. "Our psychologists triumph again!" Dr. Sapir said, obviously forcing himself to keep from guffawing some more. "They assured us that if our men recited that accusation when they came to get you, you would become too upset to resist -- just in case you wanted to. "Please accept our apologies," he went on. "We have no reason to believe you had that sort of intimate relationship with your Arab captors. By the way, did you?" Later I learned that this was Dr. Sapir's way of being funny but at the time I was not amused. However, since I wasn't Queen Victoria, and since I didn't want to come across like any sort of queen anyway, I decided to be polite and calm despite the insult. Besides, remember, I assumed that my three firiends were not above little expressions of affection -- like an Iron Maiden. "I cooperated with my captors because I'm apolitical," I answered. This time I didn't try to sound stupid. It was hard enough trying not to sound priggish. "My one aim in life is to see my invention of macro-holographies demonstrated. I'll be glad to help you build the necessary projector. However," I went on, "it would certainly make me feel more like the guest of a civilized nation rather than the prisoner of a gang of bandits if I could see an American consular official and if I could come and go as I please. I certainly have no reason to run off, at least not until the macro-holograph projector is completed." "We'll drive you into town to the American Embassy this afternoon, provided the doctors here check you out," Lt. Dagell crisply assured me. "If you can't leave the hospital, we'll arrange for someone from the embassy to come here." "I think you'll be able to leave in an hour or two," Dr. Sapir said breezily. "Our mutal friend. Rabbi Bachutz, tells us you are virtually indestructible." "How would he know?" I was impressed with the effectiveness of Soviet intelligence. "He says that not only are you smart and creative, you're dso lucky." That sounded like Leonard! Could it be that he was actually a deep-cover Soviet agent? Could his sudden conversion to Jewish orthodoxy have been the result of orders from his Soviet spy contact? "In what city is the embassy?" I asked. "In Tel Aviv, I'm sorry to say," the crisp leftenant replied, sounding not so crisp for the first time. "Your government has been unwilling to place the embassy where it belongs, in our capital city, Jerusalem." She shook her head sadly. "I've always wanted to see the famous sights of Israel. Could we arrange a sightseeing tour? To the Wailing Wall, for example?" "The Western Wall," Dr. Sapir corrected, sounding pleased. "Now that it is no longer on foreign territory, we don't call it the 'Wailing Wall' any longer." "Bring me all the information you can get on the macroholographic projector you've been building. I'll study it until we're ready to go on our little tour. I'd like that to be our schedule for the next few days: work part of the day, tourism the rest." I figured it would be fun to watch them manufacture excuses for not being able to take me to all the sightseeing attractions in Israel. That afternoon, though, I was very impressed by the amount of money and effort, not to mention detailed preparation, the Russians had put into the attempt to fool me. As we drove in what seemed like a perfectly ordinary automobile -- although a small one by American standards -- I could detect no flaws in the splendidly worked out, utterly convincing illusion they had generated that this place was really in Israel. They even, incredibly, had mock-ups of the various famous buildings I specified! It became increasingly difficult to believe that all this elaborate and expensive preparation had been done just to fool me. Instead, I began more and more to fear that they had tampered with my brain -- with my memories -- while I had been unconscious. That would explain why I had been knocked out; it would also explain the presence of a physician when I awoke. I found it frightening to consider that things I was sure I knew, such as that Israel had a famous museum dedicated to the holocaust, might actually have been implanted by the Russians for some ulterior purpose. After all, my memories were the stuff that made me me. How could I be sure that I was still the same person I had been before my abduction? How could I be sure about any of my memories? Maybe there had never been an abduction. Maybe I was a robot built by my captors for the specific purpose of overseeing the construction of a giant holographic projector, and maybe all my memories were phony. Maybe there was no United States, no Leonard Bachutz, no Isaac Benson. I thought this stuff while I was riding around in the little white Fiat, sitting in the back seat next to Lt. Dagell, with a glum-faced young non-com driving. He didn't seem to speak any English; Dagell communicated with him in quick barks of a guttural language I assumed was a local dialect of Hebrew, though it sounded more like Arabic to me. While I was scaring myself with thoughts that I might really be a fictional character, I tried to hide my disturbance behind conventionaJ oohing and ahing at appropriate places along the tour. But Dagell noticed something was amiss. I guess I oohed when I should have ahed. "Are you unwell?" she asked. peering into my eyes like an ophthalmology intern about to be thrilled by his first microwaveinduced cataract. "I'm fine," I gulped, but she didn't believe me. She barked something more gutmral than usual and the Fiat U-tumed in heavy traffic, eliciting a splendid fanfare of car horns followed by a capella guttural cries. My hands and feet had begun to tingle. Now the tingling seemed to spread all over my body. At the same time, my heart suddenly began to flutter and a reddish haze spread in front of my eyes. Considering how the Fiat was weaving through cars and pedestrians, that haze probably protected me from being scared to death. The next thing I knew, I was lying in a hospital bed again, feeling very warm and drowzy. I hadn't felt so peaceful and contented since I was weaned -- which is odd, since I was a bottle baby. Dr. Sapir smiled down at me. "We'll have proof shortly that you're really in Israel," he said. I smiled up at him. He was really a very sweet man. It was a shame he wasn't real. But the fact that all this was an illusion was somehow very charming, very cute. I felt that this was the most pleasant little nightmare a man could possibly have, and I really felt grateful to him or to whomever was responsible. "You told us all about it under narcosynthesis," he said pleasantly. and I couldn't help but be grateful I that they had taken all that trouble . over me. I The next couple of days were a , twilight haze. They kept me happily drugged, just barely awake enough to take care of eating, drinking,  eliminating, and answering silly little questions about that funny, fiinny notion -- the giant holographic ) projector. I think it was on the third day that they let the drags wear off. I woke to find Dr. Sapir and Leftenant Dagell next to my bed again. Frosty-face Dagell actually smiled!  "We have some visitors for you," I she said. In walked my mother, Len Bachutz (dressed in his Orthodox I Jew uniform), and a gray-suited,  gray-haired pudgy gentleman I ' knew instantly must be the American Embassy official detailed to as' sure me this was really Israel! There was a peculiar scurrying around inside my head. It lasted less than a second but it felt like a century of fierce, uninterrupted mental work. I had to rearrange all i my perceptions. My final resting point was the conviction that it didn't matter whether or not I was in Israel -- or Russia -- or a nut factory in Norristown, Pennsylvania. The question was really metaphysical. The situation was such a convincing mock-up of being in Israel that I ? might as well act as if I were in Isj rael. After all, I really might be, after all. A moment later I was delighted I had made that decision. In walked a fourth visitor. My, the hospital seemed kind of lax about how many visitors they let into a patient's room at the same time. Through the door undulated Shaya, the cute little hostess! This time she was wearing what looked to be a regulation Israeli captain's uniform. It took a while for the several different conversations that ensued to get themselves sorted out but in time it was settled that my mother and Aryeh (Len) would be visiting with me for about ten days, with all of us sharing an apartment in a spanking new apartment house on the outskirts of Natanya. Shaya was introduced all around as my new assistant on the holography project. My mother took an instant shine to her which she expressed by drawing from her pocketbook one of the little copies of the New Testament she always carries about. She thrust the Book at Shaya, explaining that it was a gateway to surpassing peace. I began to understand why Shaya was a successful double (at least) agent when she very gratefully accepted the volume and began leafing through it, suddenly absolutely absorbed and fascinated. The next morning, at our new apartment, my mother woke me at six-thirty. For a sleepy thirty seconds I thought I was late to high school. Mother wanted me to start my first day of work right. She had prepared a breakfast that would have prepared me for work as a Siberian Husky. There was a Jeep waiting downstairs for me when I emerged, burping, at seven-forty. Lt. Dagell (does she ever sleep?) was there to finger me to the driver. The Israelis, it turned out, were going directly for the big pay-off. Our headquarters were in a secret post behind and underneath a Druseowned barbershop quite near the Mosque of Omar. You go in a little door at the rear of the barbershop, go down a flight of stairs, walk through a dusty basement full of crates of, I suppose, hair tonic, walk through a door labeled in Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish (I found this all out later), "Plumbing obstructed. Please use facilities upstairs." You are in a filthy room that smells like a latrine long overdue for cleaning. You step into the rickety toilet seat and press hard against the top of the dirty mirror next to it. Suddenly the room fills with an intense white light. The seat falls away but before you have time to fall, the mirror against which you are pressing tilts outward against your pressure. With it comes the entire wall, which suddenly is beneath you rather than in front. Before you have time to adjust to the fact that the entire roomlet has become a vehicle rushing through some underground passageway, before you have time to turn around and see where the harsh light is coming from, the ride is over. The wall beneath you tilts again and you tumble head forward onto a padded surface like a large gym mat. Standing all about you in a large room without visible doors or windows are fierce-looking Israeli soldiers holding burp guns pointing at the place your burps come from. I never got used to that way of arriving at work. What would they do if one of the people who had to work there had a weak heart or, worse yet, had a back that was easily thrown out? Except for the padded reception area, the rest of the room, which was about the size of a high-school gymnasium, was filled with equipment stolen from the set of a madscientist movie. Amazingly, though, it worked: With a very few additions and improvements, it was going to be able to project giant holographic images. I suppxise you're hot to find out how I left that fancy place. Well, I don't know. When it was time to go, they would very politely ask me to take a deep breath of an anesthetic gas. Next thing I'd know, I was sitting in a barber's chair upstairs. Don't ask me how they kept the neighbors from wondering about the strange-looking guy who would get carried into the barbershop every afternoon. Come to think of it, I don't even know, of course, that they did have to carry me. Maybe that anesthesia was really some sort of memory blackout. Maybe I walked in like a zombi, under my own steam, but with the clutch in, fully disengaging my brain. Shaya was around a lot. She even came over to my apartment one evening, whereupon my mother suddenly got wanderlust. She announced she was going out to look for a taxi. "Where are you going, Ma?" I asked. It was Friday evening, a time when even the streets and sidewalks rest. That Friday night, I didn't. You would think that a good Seventh Day Adventist of my mother's generation would not have been that cooperative.    After my mother and Len left for accepted my offer and moved in. After that, life sped by blissfully. Finally the great day arrived. We would turn on The Temple on Hanukkah, the anniversary of the dedication of the Temple. Okay, so I wasn't thinking very clearly or I would have remembered how my Arab friends felt about the idea of the Israelis turning on the Temple. (They felt about it about how the police chief of Memphis would have felt about somebody turning on the President.) No, Aat's not quite right. I did remember and actually I was very scared. But it was an odd sort of fear. It didn't affect my work. Somehow it stayed locked up in a comer of my mind, walled off from the day's work. I was terrified every night: I had nightmares in which Arabs with giant scimitars cut off my toes for practice before going on to cutting off my practice; I had cramps after every meal; I had spots in front of the spots in front of my eyes. But somehow I had succeeded in mcking my awareness into a little pocket in my head whenever it was time to work on the project. I took out my fear and stroked it and fondled it every evening, but come morning I was able to put it away again. I guess I assumed that somehow, some way, those clever, competent, efficient Israelis would be able to handle whatever the Arabs tried to do to stop us or punish us. After all, those Israelis were so cool, so determined, so scientific. We planned to turn the Temple on just before sunset, just before the time for lighting the first Hanukkah candle. There had been no official advance announcement of what we planned to do, just a vague news item that the Israelis had a surprising new scientific achievement to make public, one that had no possible military application but might nevertheless contribute greatly to the security of the Jewish state. It was mad, of course, for the Israelis to have thought their Arab enemies would not know or at least guess what was up. First of all, the Arabs had been directly involved when I worked for them out in Angry Shah. Second of all, there was the little matter of the date. Hanukkah, Shaya told me, is the first priority to private, personal matters. "Can Shaya be saved?" I asked, talking so fast I must have sounded as if I were babbling. "Can Shaya be brought here before the bombs start to fall? Do you know where she is? She's out there, isn't she? Can we get a message to her?" I think I got all that out in one breath. Most of it should have been printed as one word, without any spaces. Dr. Sapir suddenly grabbed me by both shoulders and forced me to sit down in an empty space in the front bench. "Shaya can't come," he said, looking very stem. His grip on my shoulders became so tight I ached. "There was an Arab suicide raid on your apartment this morning just after you left. They evidently thought you were still at home. They were ready to do anything to stop our use of your invention. Luckily for you, you had left already. But they got everyone still in the apartment." I didn't get the main implication. Was he trying to tell me that Shaya had been two-timing me? Who else could have been in the apartment except for Shaya? I asked him; "Who else could have been in the apartment except for Shaya?" "We had two security agents conferring with her about special precautions but there were about ten raiders and they had the advantage of surprise. Four of them actually got away and we are hunting for them still." The room shimmered about me. He pulled my head forward against him. Suddenly I felt someone behind me pressing a hypo into my shoulder muscle, right through the shirt. "The best thing you can do now," he said, "is to help us against them. It's what she would want you to do. She had great faith in you. From the start she spoke in your behalf and was your chief defender. There were some who thought you might be a clever agent and so your freedom if not your life was by no means certain, at least at first." "You lost the war and she got killed anyway?" I whispered, my throat oddly constricted. I was having great difficulty breathing. "No!" he shouted. "We haven't lost the war! It begins to look as if we've won it!" That, of course, was hysteria. It occurred to me that if he was so confused that he thought his side might have won the war, then he probably was much too confused to have any trustworthy information about Shaya. I felt much better. He probably had her confused with six other women. Maybe, poor man, something like what he had described to me had actually happened to him and a girl he had been living with many years ago. "I'm sure everything will be all right," I said as soothingly as I could. I began to feel very sleepy. Suddenly the screen changed. I recognized the face that appeared on it. It was the Prime Minister of Egypt. For the first time the sound came on and I heard him. He was obviously delivering some sort of solemn speech. Probably, I thought, he was assuring the Israelis they would be treated well if they surrendered immediately. To my astonishment, the roomful of mostly stiff, military men dissolved into wild cheers. Men hugged their neighbors and, pounding each other on the back, danced around the room. Did the Arabs have some kind of nerve gas? Why wasn't I affected? "Your holographic projector made the difference," Dr.General Sapir shouted over the din. I stared at him. "It fooled you, too," he chortled. "The planes, Isaac, and the tanks, were mostly just images." "How did you make them move?" "One plane or one tank projected a group that moved with it. The Arabs had guilty consciences, a fatal weakness. They knew that they had sneaked in extra arms that the great powers, except for Russia,, didn't know about. Therefore they were ready to believe we had done the same." It began to sink in that the Israelis had won. The Israelis had won and Shaya was dead. I was suddenly furious. They had no right to victory, no right to joy! I threw myself on Sapir. I didn't try to strangle him. RaAer, I tried to remove his adam's apple. By the time they pulled me loose, Sapir was past breathing but they tell me they saved him; there were two officers in the room who also had medical degrees and one of them did an emergency tracheotomy with a pocketknife. Meanwhile, several others were roughing me up, to my deep satisfaction. I kept hoping Aey would kill me and to encourage this, I began to shout proArab and anti-Semitic slogans. "International Jewish bankers!" I screamed. "Jewish Communist plotters!" Someone finally hit me on the back of the neck and everything turned red-black and faded out. You would think that once the Arabs found out that most of the Israeli planes and tanks were illusions, they would have started the war up again but it didn't work out that way. There still remained the problem of determining which were real and which weren't -- or otherwise wasting a very great deal of fire power and disposing one's forces to defend against non-existent enemy units. Until they (or the Russians) had worked out suitable countermeasures, an armistice seemed wise. Besides, since it had ended so quickly, they hadn't had time to lose any territory, for a change. Meanwhile, the Israelis did turn on the Temple as planned but then promptly turned it off again. They had made their point. Next they invited the religions of the world to take turns projecting their own veranniversary of the dedication of both the First and Second Temples. In the Middle East, symbolic actions count for a lot more than they do in Worcester, Massachusetts. Besides, the Israelis have enough holidays cluttering up their calendar now. They don't need another one to cut further into their productivity. Another reason why I didn't get scared enough to do something sensible like panic was that while all this last-minute work was going on, I was growing up in a most delightful way. With Shaya's help, I had been getting big all the time. Without her, I don't know what this little boy would have done. Actually I do know, but I don't like to think about it. Enough of all that. I have to stop being so flip because I have something really important to say and I want to keep my distance from those feelings of guilt and grief I can't handle. Let me tell you a little of my relationship with Shaya; let me tell you as much as I can bear to talk about concerning what Shaya was like. She had been born in Safed. Her family had never left Palestine. At times as secret Jews, at other times openly, they had kept alive in its homeland the ancient civilization of King David and the Prophets. During the long, lonely years of isolation and despair, when it seemed that the Master of the Universe had turned away from His chosen people, they had turned to mysticism and magic. A deep, esoteric lore had been developed in secret by the handful of faithful who stayed on in their Holy Land. This mystic learning was, in fact, the basis for the tradition that my friend  Aryeh had become so engrossed in. Naturally, surrounded by enemies as they were -- of late, surrounded ! by Moslem enemies -- they had bej come adept not only at magic but ' also at intrigue. Shaya's family was  not only high in the history of Jewish mysticism and magic, it was also high in the revolutionary Arab  underground. She told me a number of things that I find it very hard to ' believe. For example, that the ' Mafia is secretly a Moslem organization. It arose, she said, from a Moslem clan, the Ma'afique, who ruled Sicily in the Middle Ages. When the Christians regained control of the island, the Moslems went underground. Hence, she said, the Mafia preference for poisoning and ' blackmail, their love of intrigue, their fierce family loyalty, their elaborate system of secret identification, copied from their rivals, the Masons and the Knights Templars.  She also asserted that while a . good deal of the international trade I in drugs and prostitues was, through  the Mafia, controlled by secret Moslems, a good deal of the international movement toward Arab independence from the colonial powers was actually led by Jews! Just as in , the West idealistic young Jews had   I' fought to support the aspirations for freedom of every minority except their own, so in the colonial Middle East, the sons and daughters of Jewish merchants and professionals in places like Beirut, Damascus or Cairo had been among the early founders of the underground movements for freedom from colonial oppression. Of course their contribution could not be acknowledged openly but nevertheless some of the original Jewish members of the former anti-colonial underground were now high up in the governing circles of the Arab world, all with safe new Moslem backgrounds. Among these, she hinted, were some of the better-known enemies of Israel. She told me that, for example, the recent assassination of a prominent Arab leader, which no one in the West could explain, was because some of his own people had learned his true identity. Shaya had two families, two complete identities. She was the daughter of an Israeli diplomat, granddaughter of one of the leading figures in the revival of the Hebrew language as a living tongue. In this family she was the greatgranddaughter of a celebrated mystic Talmudist. But she also had another family. In the half of her childhood spent in Damascus rather than in Saf, she was the daughter of a Moslem merchant whose wife had converted to his faith from Judaism when they were married. Her brother was a graduate in business administration of the University of Chicago; he was also high States, he had successfully recruited several leftist Jewish students into now stationed in Syria. Each family knew about and approved of her association with the other. It was for the sake of the cause. Her Safed family accepted her Syrian connection as a necessary unpleasantness, something that a little country surrounded by enemies had to resort to. Her Damascus family thought of her as a kind of unofficial ambassador to those Jews who, because of their mystic, religious tradition and because they really were natives of the region, might have more in common with their Arab neighbors than with those Jews who had brought strange secular Western ways into the Holy Land. There were, after all, in Jerusalem highly visible groups of Jews who still refused to accept the existence of the Jewish state. There were Jews who draped black flags and bunting on the Israeli independence day. Which family really was hers? I never found out. Both families derived from the same Safed mystics; the branch point was only a generation ago. Why did she have anything to do with me? Look, I know I'm not that great a lover. At first I tried to tell myself that she did the same with all the boys. I told myself that I should enjoy my good fortune and that since I had nothing to hide, there was no way that our relationship could lead to any betrayal. But my feelings changed. There are some things a person can't disguise or fake. She was for real. We did a lot of talking about all sorts of things. She told me once, for instance, that I was the third man she had ever slept with other than for reasons of state, and that the other two were both men she had loved who were now dead. I believed her; she cried when she told me that. Besides, she knew I didn't have any secrets. If anyone in the world was in a position to know it, she was. But she stayed with me anyway. Her explanation was absurd, of course. She said I was a genius and was just too modest to realize it. She claimed that my miserable affliction of obsessive generation of invention ideas was proof I was some sort of Mozart of inventing. She even claimed that I was an "unconscious" Jew because I was a Seventh Day Adventist who had private doubts about Jesus but not about most of the practical side of my religion, which -- she claimed -- was copied from Judaism. All this is getting us nowhere: I'm not going on with my story because I can't face what came next and I'm not really communicating about our relationship. Let me try to take you through a typical evening and then I promise I'll finish this story quickly. When I got home from that silly barbershop, a very domestic scene usually waited for me. It was like playing house. Shaya would have supper ready. I would usually insist on stopping on the way home to buy some little surprise, usually flowers picked up from a street vendor but sometimes a bottle of Israeli wine (which is very very good), sometimes some perfume, sometimes a silly trinket. Once she got quite upset when I brought home some copper jewelry. She said the pattern inlaid in enamel was an ancient sign for evil. Then she laughed and said she could make it all right by wearing it wrapped in tinfoil, which would reflect the evil back into itself. And that's how she wore it! There was always a fancy white tablecloth on the table. We never had guests at our meal, but people -- friends of hers -- often dropped in afterward. We had a little upright piano and one of her friends always seemed to head straight for it. He loved to play (Thopin and somehow the sound of Chopin etudes is the musical theme of my memories of that happiest time in my life. There was a lot of music. Often we sat around and sang, accompanied by someone's guitar. There are a number of hauntingly beautiful Israeli songs that are somewhere on the edge between popular and folk music -- sort of the Israeli equivalent of American country western, except that they are gentler sounding and seem to have melodies and themes more appropriate for urban life. One very touching song that they told me was at the top of the charts when they were teenyboppers had a father promising his little girl that the war he was going away to fight in was the very last war there would ever be. There was a lot of adolescenttype talk about the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe, etc. Except that these weren't teenagers. One woman who often had interesting things to say was a philosophy professor. There was another woman, a violinist, who used to play sad music on the violin for a while, then burst into passionate speeches about the injustice of the human condition, how unfair it was that we should have to grow old, that some babies were bom deformed, that some are rich and some are poor. I learned that her husband was high up in the government and that he was a physician who had made important contributions to research on slowing the rate of aging. The guests never stayed more than a couple of hours. Usually the evening would wind up with someone trying to draw me out about my latest invention ideas. I had never before been listened to so respectfully. No matter how weird my ideas, they were always considered seriously and responded to with careful thoughtfulness. Often I would find myself arguing that my ideas were foolish and worthless while several guests defended them. For example, one evening I had the notion that a spaceship could be launched efficiently riding a cushion of maser energy produced by the interaction of a maser beam emitted by a source on the spaceship and another beam, exactly opposite in phase, from a ground source. My idea was that half of the energy expenditure could be on the ground (for generating the beam there) and so the amount of fuel and equipment needed on board the spaceship could be halved, compared to a more conventional propulsion system. Of course the problem would be one of getting sufficiently accurate collimation -- the same problem involved in making a giant hologram. You would think that I would have been optimistic and the others pessimistic. In fact, I just couldn't believe it would work, while my guests argued that it was a reasonable "next" project after the Temple project was turned over to the engineers and routine operating crew. They pointed out that it was not necessary that all the technical problems be solved at the time the first crude idea emerged; we could face the problems and solve them if we had to. They were, after all, only "engineering," not anything fundamental. Listen: They even reacted with respect and cautious interest to my idea for a probe that would reach through a black hole to see what was on the other side. The probe would use modulation of relativistic phase-velocity waves in a gravitogravitic oscillation (matter-generated gravity waves on one axis and anti-matter-generated on the other); by avoiding effort to transmit wave-velocity information, I thought we might beat the relativistic limitations on what could penetrate the black hole's infinite gravity sink. They didn't even scoff at the obvious fact that it would take a Brand X version of relativity theory to get different gravitic waves from matter and anti-matter. In short, for the first time in my life I found my fountain of invention ideas something other than a terrible affliction. To sum it all up: I stopped drinking. The key wish -- I mean question -- for me, those days, was why Shaya had taken up with me when she knew so little about me. I never got up the nerve to say, "Who ordered you to?" but that was what was on my mind. She kept telling me that that was the way she was, that she had always wanted to love a genius and be loved by him, and I was a genius and therefore... My wish, of course, was that she was telling the truth. I also enjoyed my work enormously. It was just as enjoyable, I must add, working for the Arabs, but it was different here. We had less money and there were more problems, working for the Israelis, but it was very satisfying to confront each day a battalion of varied difficulties almost but not quite too much for me. I had a delightful feeling of being stretched and of growing in response to the stretching. Some of the problems were interpersonal: I was the manager of a team of creative young scientists and engineers and some of them were just plain temperamental. Again and again I had to find a way to make both sides of some silly disagreement feel that they had won. Then there were innumerable technical problems. We had to improvise, experiment, improvise, guess, improvise. I think that for the first time in my life I began to really respect myself. That earlymiddle-aged kid who had boasted foolishly to the hostess on that famous El Al flight was starting to grow up.    Holograph day came. That evening just after sunset we were going to turn on the Holy Temple. It was decided that I would go home, pick up Shaya, and then we would drive to a building near the Mosque of Omar, from which we could watch the great event. However, when I arrived at the waiting car outside the barber shop, Leftenant Dagell crisply informed me that we would drive directly to a different "safe" place near the Mosque. She said that she could not tell me why the plans had changed. I didn't have much time to argue with her. Almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the sirens in Jerusalem started to keen. It was the red alert signal: Take cover at once. We ran back to the barbershop and I ran down the stairs to the smelly room. The bright lights came on as usual but when I tumbled into the giant laboratory room, there was no one in sight. A voice from a concealed speaker somewhere overhead instructed me to walk to a certain piece of equipment and turn certain knobs and press certain switches. Next thing, the section of floor on which I was standing began to descend rapidly and I was lowered into a room I had never seen before, a room containing men dressed in senior Israeli military uniforms. There was a television screen on one wall, and the men were seated in front of the screen in two semicircular rows on sort of long curved backless benches. Among them was a face I recognized: Dr. Sapir's. However, the body to which it was attached was differently clothed than it had been back in the hospital. Now it was in a general's outfit. The elevator had lowered me into the comer of the room to the left of the television screen. There was a wire grille around the section into which I had been lowered and I noticed that there was no way I could open it from the inside. Dr.General Sapir walked over and did something to a row of control buttons set in the wall about a yard from where I stood; the grille slid up into the ceiling and I stepped off the elevator platform. "The Arabs have launched an attack," he said without any other opening remarks. His face was very grim. "There was a leak and they had heard about our plans for this evening. We are switching to a contingency plan." "How serious is the situation?" I asked. I also was concerned about Shaya, but I didn't feel right about bringing up a personal matter until I had a better picture of the larger situation. I knew that Israel was a small country surrounded by powerful enemies, and I realized that any attack could be a real threat to national survival. It had not yet begun to sink in that my project might have precipitated the attack. "They have much better equipped forces than we expected. They have received very extensive material supplies from the Soviets, and so the massed air squadrons that are now moving toward an attack on us outnumber our air force by about ten to one; their massed armor outnumbers ours by about twenty to one. They seem to be holding back much of their ground infantry so for the moment we are not too far outnumbered there: only about three to one, which we feel gives us superiority in that regard." My heart sank to my shoes. I found myself wondering whether the victorious Arabs would hold me as a war criminal. Would I be executed? Would the Israelis be foolish enough to try to hold out until they were crushed? If so, would I be killed in the fighting? How could I persuade them to surrender now, before a great deal of useless bloodshed? "What do you plan to do?" I asked. I had tried to keep my voice sounding calm but it came out in a sort of high-pitched, breathless shriek. "Our plan must be secret for the moment," he answered very grimly. "You don't have the clearance to he informed but we want you here anyway. You may be of some assistance." "Then you aren't going to surrender right away?" I was practically Jumping up and down with nervous tension. I could feel my chin trembling. He just stared at me for a moment before he replied. "No, we don't have that in mind," he finally said, speaking quite calmly as if the situation were not hopeless. "Here they come!" someone shouted and the doctor or general whirled around to stare at the television screen, along with everj'one else in the room, including me. I assumed the voice meant the Arab attack and I scrunched down a little, half expecting to feel the vibration of a nearby bomb blast. On the screen I saw from some distance what looked to be a row of cliffs in the hills just east of Jerusalem. It was a view of desert desolation. Suddenly a section of cliff began to move sideways toward the right. It was hard to judge scale since there was not even a bush in sight in that empty desert of rocks and sand, but I got the impression that the movement involved a giant volume of rock and soil. A great gaping vertical crack formed in the cliff side and out of it moved many tiny shapes, from time that dazzled the television cameras momentarily. The cameras zoomed in on them and I realized the shapes were tanks and armored vehicles that I presumed were troop carriers. The tanks and other vehicles were all elaborately camouflaged and so I was puzzled about where the brilliant flashes of reflection had been coming from, but after a while I concluded it was the windshields on some of the armored vehicles. I tried to count how many tanks and other vehicles there were but it was impossible to do so. The television scene kept switching back and forth from close shots to distant pictures, but even the long shots did not seem to be able to cover the entire enormous force rapidly deploying through that one gap in the hills, which I now realized was truly Brobdingnagian; some twenty tanks seemed to be emerging abreast with plenty of space between them. Evidently, I thought, this was the Arab invading force. I had to hand it to those clever Arabs. Hiding those forces in the desert like that was such a prodigious feat, it really had earned Ihem their victory. The television eye panned upward toward a sky that had no clouds in it but was almost covered nevertheless -- with planes. I had never imagined a sky could be so full of aircraft. Rows on rows on rows moved in steady formation from horizon to horizon. Again it was impossible to judge the actual number since the television screen could not hold the image of a sufficiently large slice of the sky. A special lens would have been necessary, one that encompassed a full hemisphere of view. Suddenly Sapir was next to me again, or perhaps he had never left. He pulled my face to one side, away from the screen, forcing me to attend to his words. "What do you think of that scene?" he asked. He seemed incredibly unterrified. I had to admire the nobility of the Israelis in defeat -- or was he another deep double agent? I suddenly realized that those planes were probably not just flying around for sightseeing. Many must be carrying bombs, perhaps even nuclear weapons. And Shaya was somewhere out there. The war was over, lost before it ever began, and so there was no shame in giving sions of the Temple. Of course the Arabs refused to cooperate but various non-Arab Moslem sects were quick to accept the offer and it was not long before renegade Arab groups were cooperating with them unofficially. Meanwhile, I had been shipped back to America and here I was able to expiate some of my guilt by persuading my Seventh Day Adventist friends to cooperate. That started a stampede of Christian participation and soon there was a cooperatively designed pan-Christian Temple available for the major Christian holidays. The only holdouts were the Orthodox Russians, but that was to be expected. Increasingly there was friendly competition about designing more and more elaborate or authentic Temples. Perhaps different religions would have viewed dividing up a single material Temple as a desecration, but somehow they found takdifferent immaterial projections acceptable; turning off a projected or holographic Temple did not seem the same as destroying a real one, particularly when it was understood that the Temple just turned off was scheduled to be turned on again. To the world's astonishment, the one Temple that was not regularly projected holographically was one for the Jews! There was preliminary planning by the Israeli government to do so but the orthodox religious parties viewed it as some sort of desecration. They withdrew from to have anything to do with people who had even considered such a sacrilege. The Prime Minister made things worse by publicly denying that the government would have ever been so blind and depraved as to approve such a thing. This, of course, made it impossible for any successor government to do so. Once the religious parties had withdrawn from the government coalition, a new election became necessary and the new Knesset was so evenly balanced that the only possible coalition appeared to be the only one that also was impossible; a coalition between the left-wing labor groups and the religious parties -- the very coalition from which the religious parties had withdrawn when they caused the old government to fall. Then came the next surprise for the world. The right-wing parties, the next strongest block, put together a shaky majority by inviting support from the handful of Arab members of the Knesset who represented Arab nationalist interests! The result was a government that was actually able to bargain credibly with the Arab states. So in a way my dream finally came true: Any war involving Jerusalem would obviously endanger the projections, and so war in Ae Holy Land became less and less acceptable. The various groups, Israeli and Arab, were compelled to start some sort of dialogue. Because the right wing, now in power, had always been the most nationalist, expansionist, and anti-Arab, in that marvelously twisted way that things work in that part of the world, the Arabs found them easier to deal with, even ignoring the presence of Arabs in the government itself. They felt that the right wing was less hypocritical and more predictable because its traditional views were closer to the traditional Arab stereotype of Zionism. However, about when I thought things were settling down and I was starting to think about rebuilding my personal life, the Israelis and Arabs, perhaps as a sign of their new cooperation, perhaps as some sort of revenge, identified me publicly as the inventor of the macro-holographic projector. That led themselves to grab me and keep me here in this super-luxurious prison or nuthouse. concerning the implementation of a whole family of new technologies using macro-holography. They seem to think that I am an expert. Therefore, they keep bringing me questions, and I am supposed to answer them, as if I were some sort of intelligent computer. Now you know that my problem is not that I don't have answers. My trouble is that I keep on producing answers, a continual flood of answers, but not to the questions that come from my masters, captors, good friends, fellow patriots, or whatever they are. And therefore my answers usually displease them. I still can't control what questions I'll answer, although every now and then it's pretty obvious why a particular question got answered. For example, it occurred to me today that I had no objective proof that Shaya had bought it in an Arab raid on our apartment. Maybe, instead, the outbreak of the war made it unnecessary to continue her in that assignment. Could I really be sure she loved me? I don't know whether I wish she is alive and I was a dupe or that she really loved me and is dead now. But I can see why that doubt immediately preceded the next idea I had. I think I've just invented a practical form of psychic teleportation. I'm just about ready to bust out of this dump; I'll try to teleport to Lud Airport, just outside Tel Aviv. I want to take a look at the hostesses getting off the next several El A I flights. Then, in case she was only on that flight in order to meet me, I think I'll take a look at our old apartment to see if there are signs of struggle. For that matter, I may chat with some of the neighbors. Finally, I think I'll let the Israelis "catch" me. They might think I was pretty valuable again if they see some demonstrations of my new teleportation trick. In any case. I'm not so depressed suddenly. After all, if I can figure out a way to jump through space, then shades of old Albert, a way of jumping through time just may pop into my head one of these days, between improvements on the arbalest and ways of delinting belly buttons. Maybe the reason Shaya liked me was that we were already old friends when we met.  Ever hear of Tim Lewis? How about Victor Roman? Or Nicholas Yermakov? You're going to be hearing of them, as they make their appearance months ahead. And we predict they're going to make their mark in science new novelists on the sf scene, she is this year's winner of the John W. Campbell award. But her first appearance in any magazine will be in It's her best yet, and you won't want to miss it. A Message from the Publisher; new editor. As we reported last month, James P. Baen has left the magazine after more than four years to become science-fiction editor at Ace Books. And stepping into the position he filled so well is John J. Pierce. J.J., as he prefers to be called, is new to magazine publishing -- but hardly new to science fiction. He became a convert in #, when he was nine years old and his parents took him to see the premiere of "Destination Moon." Before long he was an avid sf reader. The first story he remembers reading was James Blish's "Surface Tension" -- in an early issue of Until now he has pursued science fiction as a hobby while working as a reporter for the Daily Advance of Dover, N.J., and other newspapers. During the last decade he became known in the sf community through his amateur publications ("fanzines") "Renaissance" and "Tension, Apprehension and Dissension." He also had a regular column in "Reason" magazine and published reviews and commentary elsewhere. Two years ago his research into the life and work of Cordwainer Smith, who was one of galaxy's stars before his death in #, led to an assignment to edit "The Best of Cordwainer Smith," now in its second printing. He has also edited "The Best of Murray Leinster" and "The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun," both of which will appear next year; and, as time permits, he is working on an "interpretive history" of sf called "Imagination and Evolution." Since coming to galaxy on August #, J.J. has seen through the preparation for publication of two issues that had been mostly planned by Jim Baen but this month's issue directly reflects his influence -- for example, the debuts of book reviewer Paul Walker and artists Amy Harlib and Joan Woods. Beginning next month, you'll be seeing new material J.J. picked himself -- discoveries from the wealth of new talent, submissions resulting from his many contacts in the sf field and a few real surprises of other kinds. We think galaxy readers have a lot to look forward to. galaxy     Send my gift to: Name AddressCity -- State.Zip. Send my gift to: Name. AddressCity -- State-Zip. Send my gift to: Name AddressCity -- State-ZipMake Sure To Complete This Box My Name Address City State Zip  Enter my own  new or  renewal subscription for one year n I enclose S f or subscriptions. (Each one year subscription S oniy #, saving mT# from Galaxy's regular subscription prM for the best in estabiished authors and new talent. In the year to come that means important works by writers such as C. J. Cherryh (winner of the # John W. Campbell Award for best new writer), and hitherto undiscovReaders will also be able to explore the frontiers of science and technology with J. E. Pournelle, get the lowdown on the latest books from Paul Walker and outstanding. an issue is delivered, it reminds friends of your thoughtJanuary, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. e You won't have to cope with tiresome shopping; o Or hot, crowded stores; # Or standing in line; .  - X # Or buses, parking or trains; # Or post office lines; # Or wrapping counters. ' You fill out the coupon. We do the rest.    b  # You save B-l-G money. You can save more than # newly announced subscription rate. # And you may renew or enter your own subscription, too, at the same low, low rate, so be sure to do so. Not bad in an era of higher and higher prices. Why not make it easy on yourself and your budget? Get a lot of your shopping done today without leaving your home. Fill in the order coupons and get them to us early. We'll also send an Advance Christmas announcement card to each name on your list as soon as we hear from you. And you'll be a thankfuliy remembered Santa Claus # times a year! Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Poumelle, Playboy Press, #pp., #, # The Ophiuchi Hotline, John Varley,' Quantum, Dial PressJames Wade #pp., #, # Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories, Robert Aickman, Scribners, #pp., #, #    What Josephine the Plumber Doesn't Know About Comets! taining? How can we take pleasure from watching great cities reduced to flaming ruins; thousands of people crushed, burned, trampled, drowned and buried alive? The question occurred to me while reading Larry Niven's and Jerry Poumelle's Lucifer's Hammer, a disaster novel to end all disaster novels (but don't bet on it). It brought to mind a similar question I Paul Walker had asked myself years ago. Once upon a time I used to watch bullfights on television and I enjoyed them very much. A friend of mine pointed out that it was a cruel and brutal sport and that if I liked it, I must be a cruel and brutal person. I wondered if he was right for as hard as I tried, I could not feel for the bull. My friend saw the animal as a poor dumb beast; I saw it as a vicious, stupid creature. My friend saw the matador as a murderer; I saw him as an artist. The point is that my friend and I saw two different things. And what we saw determined how we felt about the thing. Pleasure, like pain, is a kind of stimulation. One we think of as positive. We know that there is often a fine line between them. Intense pleasure can be painful, and a lesser degree of pain can be pleasurable. The sensations of fear or grief are painful, for instance, and yet we ride the roller coaster and watch soap operas to experience both sensations. It is seemingly a matter of degree, then, that determines whether a thing is pleasurable or painful. But there is more to it than that in the matter of bullfighting and disaster stories. We are deriving pleasure from watching the pain of others. Or are we? If we are, and if we are reasonably normal, then the effect of a bullfight or a disaster story would be so tragic that we would be in tears throughout; but we know from experience that we will be thrilled. Why? TTie answer is that both the bullfight and the disaster story employ the same dramatic principles. Both are kinds of fiction and even though the bullfight is a real event, in which real blood is spilled, it is the illusion rather than the reality that excites us. Imagine a bull securely tied up in a field. A man comes into the field and, standing at a safe distance, begins waving a cape at the bull and sticking it with a sword. How would you feel? Incensed. Not only at man's cruelty but at his stupidity. And how would you feel toward the bull? Sympathetic. So sympathetic that if the bull suddenly tore loose and killed the man, you would scarcely blame it. But now imagine the bull loose in the field. A man comes into it. The bull sees him. He charges at him. There is neither time nor place to run. The man is armed with only a flimsy cape and a sword. The bull has horns like knives and the power to gut the man with a twist of its head. Yet the man stands perfectly still and by means of the cape and the sword, he begins to defend himself. Where do your sympathies lie now? Suddenly the bull is no longer a poor dumb beast but a monster; the man is no longer a murderer but a hero. My friend could not see this. He could not see the drama; he saw only the principle of the thing. He could not feel anything other than indignation. Our difference lay in the direction of our sympathies. He felt for the bull, I for the man. Similarly in disaster stories, if our sympathies were directed solely to the victims of the disaster, we would be too filled with grief to feel anything but sorrow; instead, our sympathy for the main protagonists and their fate overrides everything else. To us, they are humanity. They are us. It is their fate we are most intensely concerned with. So while we may see thousands of others suffering terrible deaths, we are kept from grief by our hope for our protagonists' survival. And if they do survive, as they usually do, the emotion they leave us with is hope. But in order for this to be so, the writer has first to make us care for them; the extent to which he is successful in this will determine the I amount of suspense 'we feel over their struggles to survive. It is this success that makes Larry Niven's and Jerry Poumelle's Lucifer's Hammer one of the most exciting novels I have ever read. But there is more to it than this. However real the illusion of a disaster story seems, the audience knows from experience that it is witnessing an illusion, a performance; and it knows a lot more about the dramatic principles involved than it consciously realizes. So when a spectator expresses admiration for a sword-thrust by the matador or for a scene in which a hundred people are buried alive under a collapsing building, he is not expressing his own brutality but an admiration for the skill of the artist. And it is the skill with which Niven and Poumelle have created their illusion of the near end of the world that makes the book so impressive. It is a classic. The best disaster novel since When Worlds Collide -- better, in fact. And if you think I am letting my enthusiasm for it get the best of me, let me say that there is no end of things to get enthused about. For once, science fiction has produced a story that is the equal of its concept. It is about a comet -- or rather, pieces of a comet -- that strike the earth, and the aftermath; the man who sights the comet beyond Neptune; the television journalist who does a documentary on it; the scientists who speculate fervently on its course; the astronauts who are sent up to get a good look at it. And the women in their lives. The comet is not supposed to hit the earth. The chances against it are one. Then thousands...hundreds. The protagonists are forced to flee for their lives across a chaotic landscape filled with people driven mad by grief and starvation. A blinding salt rain falls constantly. Rivers overflow. Dams break. Tidal waves wipe out coastal areas. And there is the prospect of an early winter, portent of a new ice age that will eliminate the remnants of humanity. One by one the protagonists reach the only place of safety, a valley called the Stronghold, in which a handful of farmers and refugees struggles to survive against the weather. But the safety of the valley is an illusion for soon it is besieged by an army of cannibals led by a mad preacher who has the best chance to conquer the world since Mohammed. From the testimonials on the blurb that compare the novel to On the Beach, you might imagine the book has an equally downbeat ending. But if you know anything of Niven and Poumelle, you know who comes to the rescue. The real hero of the book is a nuclear power plant nobody loved. The characters, and there are dozens of them, are all respectably depicted although with the exception of a few who stand out by contrast, they tend to look pretty much alike. The real character of the novel is the community of the Stronghold. This is not clear until late in the book, when all the main characters are brought together and events that went before come to seem merely an introduction to what comes after. The irony of the thing is that while Niven and Poumelle take a Heinlein stand on most everything (and there is an Ayn Rand-ish feel about the story), they have actually written a Marxian novel; for despite the fact that all of the protagonists are staunch individualists, it is the community itself that the novel is all about. No single character predominates over the rest. No character resolves all the problems the Stronghold faces. Rather, it is the communal effort that ultimately saves the world. Just as in an Eisenstein movie. The initial descriptions of life in California are fine, with delightful touches of satire. The disaster itself aftermath -- which had .me worried, having read so many aftermath novels -- was consistently absorbing. There is simply not a dull page in the book. Nor an unimaginative incident. It is hard to believe it did not take Niven and Poumelle years to think all this out. And while I am sure Cimiai ii Fitrurf The fantastic forerunnac to Conina ii Mai A collection of tales of courage and adventure as intergalactic empires battle for control of entire worlds! there are a hundred of amateur mathematicians already hard at work to prove them wrong in this or that speculation. I still think there will  plenty of good ideas left over. The second greatest joy of the novel is the feel of real sf minds at work on a level that would do honor to John W. Campbell. Thirdly, there are individual scenes that are worth the price of the book itself. Particularly the ultimate surfer's ride on the ultimate wave. I will never forget that as long as I read. But then there was the dead kangaroo in the parking lot. The drive across the flood waters after the dam had burst. The attack of the cannibal angels and its and exciting scenes. When The Mote in God's Eye appeared, there was much speculation on what was Niven's and what was Poumelle's, with Niven getting most of the credit. Perhaps rightly. But that is not the case with Lucifer's Hammer. While the awesome scope of so many of the concepts seems typically Niven, the hard substance of the reality of the book that gives it its power seems typically Poumelle, but never have two talents blended so felicitously to produce a work that seems greater than either of them could have done alone. Lucifer's Hammer is a gem. I loved it.    Varley's Awf'ulitchy There are two events of least significance in a writer's life: his first published short story and his first published novel. Unless, of course, they are the best things he is ever to write -- a thought too terrible to contemplate. But normally, despite the euphoria of the author and the "bright promise" promised by the critics, no one remembers either the short story or the novel years later -- a lapse for which more than one successful writer has been grateful. If a writer's first novel is very bad, readers will expect his second to be worse; but if his first novel is very good, readers will expect his second to be a classic. And if it isn't, they are disappointed. Therefore, it is safer for a talented young writer to produce a merely "good" novel the first time out. Something more than competent but not quite thing that will leave the readers curious about the quality of his next one. Something such as John Varley has written in his first novel. The Ophiuchi Hotline. Varley is a young writer who lives in Oregon and his short stories have already established him as one of "the best new talents in the genre. His novel is about a far future time when mankind has been driven from the Earth by the enigmatic Invaders, who came to liberate those whom they regard as the only truly intelligent species on the planet -- the whales and dolphins. Humanity has fled to the Eight Worlds of the solar system, where they hope the Invaders will not follow. Varley's heroine is named Lilo. She is a genetic engineer who specializes in producing new breeds of edible plant meats, which are the staple foods of her civilization. But her real interest is in producing new breeds of human beings, a practice outlawed by the government. She is caught at it and sentenced to death. And she dies. But there is someone who still has need of her and who has the power to save her life, even after death. Or, at least, the power to clone her. "Boss Tweed," the ex-President of Luna, fancies himself the future savior of the Earth and he has Lilo cloned so she can work for him on his private fortress-world of Poseidon near Jupiter, another Invader stronghold. Lilo does not believe in Tweed's cause and she is not one to accept captivity. She tries to escape. She is killed again. And cloned again. In fact, Tweed is prepared to clone her as many times as it takes to gain her cooperation. What Tweed does not know is that in a ship orbiting Saturn she has a clone of her own, guarded by an unusual ally named Parameter Solstice, who is a symb -- a halfhuman, half-alien creature fully able space. On Poseidon Lilo and a friend plot to escape by means of a black hole. But they are guarded by a ferocious army of clones -- some men, some women -- named Vaffa. And midway through the novel, the story begins. Three Lilos go into action against Tweed, Vaffa, the Invaders and the source of the Ophiuchi Hotline itself -- the alien messages from another star that have given humanity the knowledge of advanced genetics that has made its cloneoriented culture possible. Somehow all these factors are tied together in the solution of the mystery of the Invaders, and each Lilo has her part of the mystery to solve. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? And it is. All very old hat but good clean fun just the same. Varley has written a complex and eventful novel that is easy and amusihg to read. His ideas are interesting and well-thought-out. His characters are likeable, their adventures exciting. His backgrounds are colorful and concisely detailed. And he writes' some of the best sex scenes I've read. Scenes that are pleasurable rather than clinical or sweaty. The book's worst flaw is that its heroine is not much of a character. She is really more of a function than a person. She does the things the plot requires a heroine to do but she lacks a distinct and memorable personality. This is a common fault in books of this type but it is especially obvious here where we have three of her running around. She is supposed to be a genius her intellectual prowess is unconvincing. While her accomplishments are remarkable, she is never shown as reasoning with more than a modest intelligence. Nor is her usefulness to Tweed convincing. She has a pathological urge to escape. Tweed, who knows her subconscious better than she does, is aware of this and should have realized that this compulsion would make her more of a liability than an asset. She is too unstable to be trusted and yet, in the end, he trusts her with the most important mission of his career! And, of course, he has reason to regret it. With the power to clone anyone he chooses, Tweed would have been wiser to pick a more docile subject than Lilo. But then, Tweed is the book's second biggest mistake. His villainy is central to the plot, but he too is never developed into more than a function. With one exception, he appears only in glimpses and he finally vanishes completely. What character he has is that of a right-wing militarist intent on destroying godless communism (or, in this case, the Invaders). I suspect Varley had something like this in mind and consequently refused to allow himself to like Tweed well enough to fully realize him. A writer has to like his villains to make them believably villainous. I could see nothing wrong with Tweed's ambition to re-take the Earth. True, it was impossible but neither Tweed nor Lilo couW know that until they had spoken'To the Ophiuchites. His sole villainy seemed to be the employment of nasty methods -- ones that seemed to me to be lacking in imagination as well as efficiency. He would have been wiser to have relied more on behavorial modification, less on cloning. His henchman (-men,women), Vaffa, while menacing enough in a street fight and okay for guard duty, is no match for Lilo. Like Tweed, she is Varley's idea of a soldier -- all brawn and no brains. Finally, the first half of the novel concerns Lilo's trying to figure out what Tweed wants from her and her plans to escape. It held my interest. At midpoint the plot splits into three parts, with one Lilo encountering the Invaders and wandering an almost deserted Earth, another Lilo still plotting against Poseidon and still a third off to discover the source of the Ophiuchi Hotline. While Varley handles these plot lines expertly, it was all a bit much. One main plot line is enough to make an effective novel. It is the surest method of achieving maximum reader involvement as well as maximum dramatic potential. When another plot line of equal or greater strength is added, interest is subtracted from the first one; and the more interesting the new tine, the greater the diffusion of the overall interest. Consequently, the escape from Poseidon and Tweed's war against the Invaders become subplots as do the Invaders themselves, and the story winds up being about the flight to the Ophiuchi station. At least I think so. It is difficult to say precisely what the novel is about at the end, for Varley resolves nothing. True, it is all interesting; the book never really bogs down but it loses much of the power it had to start with. This is a common failing in sf novels, especially those by our most imaginative writers. They cannot resist just one more dazzling concept or mind-boggling plot twist. One good idea, thoroughly developed, is worth two piled precariously atop one another. Despite these failings. The Ophiuchi Hotline is still a book I would recommend to hard sciencefiction fans. Its failings are commonplace in even the best sf, and despite them, Varley tells a good story. He writes well and some of his scenes -- St. Pete's Casino on Pluto, Lilo's trek down the Atlantic seaboard, her fall into Jupiter -- are excellent. Lively, colorful and imaginative. I look forward to his next book.    Looney Tombs If one of the criteria of fans in judging a ghost-story writer is that the author's stories lead them to believe that the author himself is as crazy as a loon, then Robert Aickman is right up there with Poe and Lovecraft. There is a consistency of vision in the eight long short stories of his Cold Hand in Mine: a depth of insight and an earnesmess of sentiment toward his characters that, as in Poe or Lovecraft, lead one to think they incorporate autobiographical elements. The title is the best clue to the nature of these stories. Quiet and tional. More puzzling and unsettling than horrifying. And in most cases one is left wondering if they are ghost stories at all and not psychotic episodes, the hallucinations of haunted men and women who have so separated themselves from the everyday world that mundane definitions of reality no longer apply to them. They are lonely, alienated people for whom the world was a strange place long before they were visited by the supernatural. And yet, is it the supernatural? Where Robert Aickman transcends the company of Ira Levin or Tom Tryon is in that sense of earnestness he imparts toward the unreal, suggesting that he believes in a spiritual reality -- one that involves both good and evil. In ' 'The Real Road to the Church" a woman who had been disappointed once too often in love and life retreats to a remote house on an island to bury herself and her memories, only to find them again, literally, on her doorstep in the shape of a spectral funeral procession. Where a Stephen King would have played the idea for all its eerie worth, Aickman concentrates our attention on the woman's feelings. The barren, rocky, windswept terrain is as much a part of her psychological ambience as of the island itself, as is the old house in which she lives. So we come not only to see her but to feel that we have lived in her mind. And we find she is not a stranger to us. All of Aickman 's characters have some of us in them, that part of us that we do not like to think about very often. That part of us that touches on madness. She has lived in the old house for a long time and seen and heard nothing of the outside until that morning, when she hears her housekeeper discussing the legend of the road that passes her doorstep. She goes for a walk and meets a retired cleric, who brings up the subject again. She complains she has seen nothing. He tells her that is because she did not know what to look for. She has isolated herself in an effort to forget and at the same time she wishes only to remember and forgive. Perhaps if she were to look the next time, to ask the questions she needs to have answered? But the housekeeper had warned her not to look. She returns home in a storm, soaked and nearly delirious. She comes to expect the procession. It arrives. She looks, she asks her questions. And the answers save her life. The atmospherics of the classic ghost story are there. The trappings. The omens, the encounter. Yet there is something more that makes the story memorable. We cannot be sure the woman actually saw the procession or had an hallucination; or is Aickman trying to tell us that there is a spiritual reality co-existent with our own? Most of Aickman 's characters are guilty of the sin of despair. They have separated themselves from the world of humanity and dwell in shadowlands of their own making. Their fate, likewise, is of their own making. Or is it? Like everything else, we can never be sure and that very uncertainty is what Aickman wants us to feel. He prefaces his book with the quote; "In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation." Not all of Aickman's people are so easily categorized but even in the case of those who seem to be innocent victims, we are left wondering -- and wondering in the same way that we often wonder about ourselves. The subject matter of most of the stories is not unusual; a vampire; an inn that provides permanent accommodations for its transient clientele; an evil yellow dog; a woman with a strange affection for clocks. In each case the trappings are familiar but so subordinated to the psychology of the characters and the eerie ambience of their minds as to seem completely fresh. Curiously, the book is a Literary Guild selection. I can't imagine why. Fans of the Tryon-King style will be disappointed. But for the purist, the connoisseur, it will be a treasure. I guarantee it will be a collector's item one day. Robert Aickman is, in the words of Gahan Wilson, "the most terrifyingly intrepid explorer of the classical ghost story now living." His name, incidentally, is pronounced "Ache-man."  I All the world loves a lover. But for all time? It takes time to adjust to bad news. Unfortunately, time was the one thing we didn't have; when we finally received a clear medical diagnosis, Ana had less than five weeks to live and was going down fast. Suddenly, after seven inarvelous years together, with every reason to look forward to fifty more, I saw our future collapse into a handful of days. For more than a month I had known in my heart that there was a big problem. Ana's loss of weight and general lassitude were bad omens which, together with the translucent, waxen look of her forehead and the fine blue veins on her temples, had warned me of the worst. Tom Lambert, our doctor and a good personal friend, finally told us the grim biopsy results; no operation, no treatment worth trying and a rapidly terminal prognosis. Tom was a realist -- which I am not. He prescribed massive doses of pain-killers and tranquilizers for Ana, and more tranquilizers for me. "Take as many as you need, Drake," he told me. "And don't neglect your own health. I can be no here any time, night or day, if you need me." I flushed my prescription down the drain as soon as he had left. I had already drained my cup of sorrow. There was work to do, and little time to do it; I needed all my faculties. Ana and I had always done all our thinking together, our planning together. Now I had to work it out for both of us. It took me two frantic weeks to make my plans, snatching the time when Ana was sleeping or drugged. Then I called Tom Lambert and asked him to come over. He arrived early that evening. It was fantastic May weather, with spring flowers leaping to blossom and bursting life everywhere except in the darkened house. After a brief examination of Ana, Tom led me into the living room and shook his head. "It's going faster than I thought, Drake. At this rate, Anastasia will go into a final coma in a week or so. Let me have her taken to a hospital now. You don't want to see what's coming. You don't look as if you've had a wink of sleep yourself for the past month." True, but irrelevant. I sat down opposite Tom and told him what I wanted to do, the part I wanted him to play. He heard me out, then shrugged his shoulders. I could see the pitying look in his eyes as he agreed to go along with my reque. "If you want to do it, Drake, I'll help you. After all. Ana has nothing to lose. But you know they've never done a successful thaw and revival, even on a healthy test animal. I have to tell you that in my opinion you'll be wasting your money and Just making this thing harder for yourself. What does Anastasia say about the idea?' ' maybe for my sake. She thinks that it won't work but she agrees that she has nothing to lose. Look, bring the papers with you tomorrow and we'll sign them. We have to do it quickly, while Ana can still hold a pen." Eight days later I called Tom again. He came to the house, felt Ana's pulse and took blood pressure and brain-wave readings. "I'm afraid this is it, Drake," he said. "I'll be very surprised to see her regain consciousness. If you're still set on this thing, now's the best time for it, while she still has some vestiges of normal body functions. A week from now it would be a waste of time." I took a last took at Ana's calm, ravaged face. I fought a battle deep inside, forcing myself to believe that this was not my last farewell to her. Then I nodded to Tom. He injected five c.c.'s of Asfanil to assure continued unconsciousness. Then, working together, we lifted her from the bed, removed her clothes and laid her gently in the thermal tank. While Tom filled out the death certificate, I called Second Chance and told them to come to the house. Tom set the tank at three degrees above freezing, inserted the needles and began the temperature drop. The blood was withdrawn through a large hollow needle in the main external iliac artery, cooled a precise amount and returned to the femoral vein. In ten minutes Ana's body temperature had dropped thirty degrees, all life signs had vanished and she was dead. Technically and legally, Tom Lambert and I were now murderers. The death certificate showed that Ana had died of a cardiac arrest induced by her main disease -- impossible to dispute. When the Second Chance team arrived, her body lay peacefully in the thermal tank, maintained precisely at three degrees above freezing. I had a hard time persuading them to let me go over to the Second Chance preparation building with Ana's body. Tom thought I just couldn't face the idea that it was all over, and he too urged me to accept the fact of her death and stay at the house with him. The preparation team didn't know what to make of it. I must have seemed like a ghoul to them, or some kind of necrophiliac. They told me that the procedures were not pleasant to watch and I would be much better off leaving everything to their experienced hands. Of course I couldn't tell them the real reason why I had to see the whole preparation procedure, in detail. By simply refusing to take no ni for an answer, I had my way. Most Cryo-corpses were stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures -- about minus two hundred degrees Celcius. I was not satisfied with that. Minus two hundred is still seventy-three degrees above absolute zero. Although all gross biological processes become imperceptible long before that, there are still plenty of chemical reactions going on and the laws of statistics guarantee that a few atoms will still have enough energy for biological changes. Mind and memory are very delicate functions. I insisted that Ana be prepared and stored as a Heli-corpse, at a couple of degrees absolute. That way the probability of change, physical or mental, went way down. The cost, naturally, went way up. I hung around in the preparation room, ignoring all hints that I should wait outside, and I watched closely. The team finally concluded that I must be worried in case they messed up the job, so they humored me and even answered my questions. After the first few minutes it became impossible to see what was happening. As soon as all the air cavities had been filled and all the blood replaced with anticrystalloids, Ana's body went into the pressure chamber. The temperature was held at three degrees above freezing, while the pressure was slowly raised to five thousand atmospheres. Then the temperaturedrop started. Back in the #'s and '#'s the freezing process had been done at atmospheric pressure, and the formation of ice crystals ruptured the cells as the temperature dropped. The thawed results were hardly useful, even for tissue transplants. The modem method makes use of the fact that ice can exist in many different solid forms. If you raise the pressure to three thousand atmospheres, then drop the temperature, water will remain liquid to about minus twenty degrees Celsius. And when it finally changes to a solid, it isn't the familiar form of ice -- usually called Phase I. Instead, it Drop the temperature from there, holding the pressure constant, and at about minus twenty-five degrees it goes into another form. Phase #, and stays that way as you drop the temperature still further. If you go to five thousand atmospheres before you drop the temperature, water freezes at about minus five degrees and goes to yet another form. Phase V. The trick to avoid cell-rupture problems at freezing point is to inject anti-crystalloids, which help to inhibit crystal formation. Then by the right combination of pressure and temperature changes, work your way down toward absolute zero, passing into and through Phases V, The process is very tricky and there is absolutely nothing to see except dial readings. The pressure chamber is made without seams or observation ports for obvious reasons. You don't get pressures of five thousand atmospheres, even in the deepest oceans. Fortunately, once you have the temperature down to a hundred degrees absolute, you can let the pressure back down to one atmosphere -- otherwise Heliand Nitro-corpse storage would be impracticable. As it is, there are stacked away in the Second Chance wombs, all neatly labeled and waiting the resurrection. As soon as someone figures out how. In my opinion, it will be as hard to re-vivify most of the early Cryocorpses as it would be to get Tutankhamen's mummy up and about again. They weren't frozen using the correct procedure and they were stored at too high a temperanire. But they paid their depositis and they have the right to sit there until the rental runs out. I had started Ana with a forty-year rental but I thought of that as just a beginning. I had a copy of Ana's medical records with me at the Second Chance preparation building. I added to them a full description of what I had observed in the Helicorpse preparation, copied the whole thing, and made sure that a complete set was included with the file records on Ana that would be stored in the wombs. After Ana's body was taken away there, I went back to the house, fell into bed and slept like a Cryo-corpse myself for thirty hours. When I was fully awake again, fed and bathed, I called Tom Lambert. It was time to drop the other shoe. I went over to his office, accepted a hefty drink that Tom prepared, after one look at me, for "medicinal purposes," and told him my plans. After I had finished, he came over to my chair, poked the muscles in my shoulders and the back of my neck, pulled down my lower eyelid and looked at the exposed skin, then went and sat opposite me. "You've been under a monstrous strain the past few months," he began. "It would be quite natural for your behavior or feelings to have been completely normal. In fact, you only seem normal even now because you've walled in your emotions. You don't really understand the implications of what you're...suggesting. " I shook my head. "I've been thinking about this since the first day we had your terminal diagnosis." "Then that was the day you put the lid on your real feelings. Look, Drake, Ana was a wonderful woman, and I think I have some faint idea of what you've been through. But you must try and look at this thing objectively. You can't let it become a complete obsession with you. You have a life of your own, you must live it." While Tom was talking, I found it hard to listen to him. The room felt hot and airless and I had trouble breathing. His words seemed to come to me from a long distance and they didn't penetrate fully. "You're still a young man, Drake, with forty or fifty good years to look forward to. You are one of the word's leading composer and your best works lie ahead. Ana performed your work better than anyone else -- but there will be others who can learn. With your talent, you owe it to the rest of us not to cut yourself off in your prime. "Drake, take my advice as your doctor and your friend. Get out of that house and take a vacation. You feel one way now, but give it a year and then see how you feel. I guarantee you things will seem quite different. You'll want to live again." The breathless feeling was fading and I again had control of myself. Tom's reaction was just what I should have expected. I nodded agreement. "I'll do as you say, Tom, and get away from here for a while. But if you're wrong -- if, say, I come back to you in eight or ten years and ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer -- and your word on it." I saw the tension leave him. "Ten years from now? Drake, if you come back to me in eight or ten years. I'll admit I was wrong -- and I'll help you to do what you want. That's a promise. But I'll bet you everything I own that you don't call ; me on that promise. Come on, Drake, let's drink to your future and to your next composition." . I shook my head. "Not tonight, I Tom. I really have things to do. For I one thing. I'm getting ready to go out of town for a while. I'll be in  touch." A half-truth. I wouldn't leave town until my plans were more firmly fixed. But I certainly expected to be in touch with Tom Lambert when the time came. I had two problems. One was i well-defined: money. I needed enough to make sure that Ana's Cryo-corpse would be kept safe into i the indefinite future, until she could be thawed, her disease cured and her life begun again. There were some things I obviously couldn't guard against, such as a total collapse of the world back to barbarism, or the rejection of all present forms of currencies and commodities. Those were risks I had to accept. The other problem was more subtle. According to Tom, it would probably be a long time -- a hundred years maybe -- before Ana's unusual and highly malignant disease could be cured. Suppose it were two hundred years, or even more. What knowledge of present-day society would interest people in the year #, or the year #? What should a person be, for the people of that future time to think it worthwhile to revive him? If we had a foolproof way of resuscitating the Cryo-corpses, most of the unfortunates in the Cryo-wombs would remain just where they were. Why add another to a crowded world, unless he had something special to offer? I imagined myself back in the early nineteenth century. What could I have put in my brain, then, that would be considered valuable two hundred years later? Not politics, not art -- our knowledge of them was quite adequate. Not science, or any technology -- we had gone far beyond their level. I had plenty of time to tackle the question -- time, which had been denied to Ana. I could plan and calculate at my leisure. I had set a goal of ten years -- that would still give us forty of the fifty we had looked to stretch that a couple of years, to twelve or so, if I had to. My only recreation while I planned was to estimate the probabilities that it would all work out as I hoped. Always, the chances came out depressingly low. While I pondered my second problem, I was hard at work on my first one -- making money. I turned my back on compositions that broke new ground. Instead, I took commissions, wrote commemorative pieces, gave concerts and made recordings -- anything was accepted if it was lucrative. It was continuous, grinding toil. If anyone thought I was debasing my art, they were too polite to comment on it. After four years I had my biggest stroke of luck and my money worries disappeared. I had written a set of short pieces a few years after Ana and I were married, as a kind of musical joke. Baroque forms, with baroque period harmonies, except for occasional modem harmonic twists, spice inserted where it would be most surprising and most appealing. They had been quite successful, among a limited audience. Then I gave permission for them to be used as the incidental music for a series of holovision dramas on life in eighteenth-century France, from Louis Quinze to the French Revolution. The dramas turned out to be the surprise hit of the decade. Suddenly my minuets, bourrees, gavottes, sarabandes and rondeaux were flooding out of every audio outlet, and my royalties were flooding in from every country of the globe. I established a trust fund that would guarantee continued care for Ana's Cryo-corpse for many centuries. While all this was going on, I was feverishly busy soaking up all that I could of the personal lives of my musical contemporaries. I interviewed, entertained, courted and analyzed them -- and I wrote, in summary form, of my actions. What would the people of the future want to know of the present? I was betting that it would not be the formal works, the text-book knowledge, the official biographies -- they would have more than enough of those. The historians would want to hear the personal details, the chat, the gossip. They would want the equivalent of Boswell's journals and Sam Pepys' private diary. I was careful in my own writings to tantalize my reader, hinting that I knew far more than I was putting into print. It took time, but after nine long years I felt that I was as ready as I would ever be. I hadn't given as much attention as I would have liked to the question of earning a living in two hundred years' time -- but it might be fifty, two hundred, or a thousand. Could Beethoven, suddenly transported to the year #, have earned a living as a musician? Let me be less presumptuous -- make that Spohr, or Hummel, or some other of Ludwig's less famous contemporaries. I was betting that they could, with ease, as soon as they had picked up the tricks of the time. If I were wrong. I'd do the twenty-third-century equivalent of washing dishes for a living. I put my affairs in reasonable order, then went over to see Tom Lambert. We hadn't kept up such close contact since Ana had gone. I'd had other things on my mind, and Tom had married and was busy raising a family. He was genuinely glad to see me and fussed over me like the returning Prodigal Son. We settled in the same familiar study while Tom beamed at me and his wife went to the kitchen and killed the fatted calf. "I hear your music everywhere, Drake," he said. "It's great to know that your career is going so well." It wasn't, in the strictest musical sense. I had done no really first-rate composition for many years. But Tom had no ear at all for music. Perhaps that was the reason that we had always got along so well -- there was no chance of any professional jealousy. I hated to spoil Tom's pleasure, but the sooner it was done, the better. I took out the application and handed it to him without speaking. He looked at it and all the happiness faded from his face. He shook his head in disbelief, then looked at me closely. "Drake, when did you last take a vacation?" I did not understand his question. "When did you last take any sort of break from work, Drake? How long since you relaxed for an evening, or even for an hour?" he went on. "I hear that you've been working incessantly, year after year. Face it, Drake. Ana is dead. You can't live forever with your own emotions chained and harnessed." The study seemed to be much too warm, and I was having trouble in catching my breath. I swallowed several times and finally pointed at the application that Tom was still holding in his hand. I still could not speak. Tom's words washed over me but I could not understand them. "You've done all you can do for Anastasia," he said. "She's in the best womb, she had the best preparation that you could get. You can't go on with your obsession. You're famous, you're productive -- what more do you want? You want me to help you to give up all this and take the long chance that someday, God knows when, they'll find a way to revive you. Drake, you're physically healthy and in the prime of life. Don't you see. I can't help you." He looked again at the application form. "It's against my oath as a physician. I'd be taking you from health to a high odds of final death. Drake, you need real emotional help, more than I can give." I was at last able to force myself to speak. I said, "You gave me your word, Tom." "My word, damn my word. You can't ask this of me." I said nothing and finally he spoke again. "Why, Drake? Why would you do this?" "I have to, Tom." I spoke gently. "You know why, if you think about it. Unless I go on ahead, they may never wake Ana. She may be one of the last on the list. You and I know her as she really is, but what will her records show? A singer, not too famous, killed by a devastating disease. You know they'll wake the ones they nied first. I have to be there. I must make sure that they wake Ana as soon as they have a certain cure. I've had the time to prepare, she didn't. I feel pretty sure that they'll wake me." Tom looked blind with misery. "Drake, you can't see reason. You're set on this, aren't you? If I say no, you'll just go to someone' else?" I nodded, again without speaking, and he put his hands over his face. At that moment I knew that I would be able to gain his cooperation. Five days later Tom Lambert had made all the preparations and we went together to Second Chance. I took a last look out of the window at the trees and the sunshine, then climbed slowly into the thermal tank. Tom injected the Asfanil and after a few seconds I began the long fall, dropping forever down the longest descent a man can ever make. All the way down to two degrees absolute, colder than the coldest Hell ever conceived by Dante.    Did I dream my superconducting dreams lying there twelve degrees colder than a block of solid hydrogen? Or did I only dream that I had dreamed them as I came slowly slowly back through the long thaw? It makes little difference. There was an eternity of twisted images, of a procession of pale lights moving forever on a black background, long before I had any form of consciousness. I was one of the lucky ones. The freezing process must have gone very smoothly, d all that I lost during the thaw was a few square centimeters of skin. But the pain of waking -- ah, that was something else. The slow final stages, up from three degrees Celsius to normal body temperature, took thirty-six hours. For most of that time I was pierced with the agony of waking tissues and returning circulation, unable to move or even to cry out. In the last stages, before full consciousness, hearing came back before sight. I could hear speech around me, but not in any tongue that I could recognize. How far had I traveled? As the pain slowly faded, that was my first thought. I had to wait for the answer. While I was still half-conscious, I felt the sting of an injector spray, and I went out again. Next time, though, I came up all the way, opening my eyes to a quiet sunlit room, not too different from the one in the Second Chance building where I had started the freeze. A man and a woman were watching me, talking together softly. As soon as they saw that I was fully awake, they pressed a point on a segmented wall panel and went on with their work, lining up two complex pieces of equipment. The man who came in presently through the smooth white sliding door was dark-haired and cleanshaven, with a smooth, almost womanly face. He came to the side of the bed and looked at me with a pleased and proprietary air. "How are you feeling?" It was English, oddly pronounced. That was reassuring. I'd had two worries when I went under, not including the obvious one. The first was that I would be revived in just a few years' time, when they would be unable to do anything at all to help Ana. The second, that I'd surface after fifty thousand years, a living fossil, unable to communicate my needs to the men of the future. "I am all right. But weak. Weak as a baby." I thought of trying to sit up, then changed my mind. "'You are Drake Merlin?" "I am." He nodded in satisfaction. "My name is Par Leon. You understand me easily?" "Perfectly easily. Why do you ask? When am I?" "The old languages are not easy, even with much study. In your measure, you are in the year # of the prophet Christ." Three hundred and sixty years. It was longer than I had expected. But better long than short. I had hated and feared the idea of doing it all over, again and again, diving to the bottom of the Pit and then clawing my way back up to thawed life. "I have waited here through the warming and the treatment," went on Par Leon. "Soon I will leave you for rest, more treatment, and education. But I wanted to talk with you first. I feared a mistake in identity, that it might not be Drake Merlin who was awakened. Also, some become insane with the pain of the awakening. You are a strong man, Drake Merlin. You did not cry out or complain at all during your thawing." Other things were on my mind. I looked across at the two doctors who were chatting together in an alien tongue as they worked. Could they cure Ana? "Language must have changed completely," I said. "I cannot understand them at all." "Understand them? The doctors?" He looked surprised. "Of course not. Neither can I. Naturally they are speaking Medicine." I raised my eyebrows. The look must have survived with its meaning intact, for he went on. "I speak Music and History -- and of course, Universal. And I learned Old Anglic to understand your time and speak with you. But no Medicine." "Medicine is a language?" My mind was slowed by the long sleep and the drugs. "Of course. Like Music, or Chemistry, or Astronautics. But surely this was already true in your time. Did you not have languages for each -- what is the word -- discipline?" "I suppose we did, but we didn't know it." No wonder I'd found educators, psychologists and computer scientists -- to name but a few -- incomprehensible. The sjiecial jargon and acronyms had made new languages, more alien than classical Greek. "How do you speak to the doctors?" "For ordinary things, in Universal, which all understand. For specialized talk, such as our discussion of you, we keep a computer in the circuit to give exact concept equivalents in any pair of languages." Multi-disciplinary projects must be hell. But then they always were. I was beginning to feel strangely and irrationally euphoric. I pulled my strength together and made a determined effort to sit up. I got my head about five centimeters from the pillow,' then fell back. "Slowly. Rome -- was not built-in a day." Par Leon was clearly delighted at coming up with such a prize piece of genuine Old Anglic. "It will be moons before  you are fully strong. Two more things I will tell you, then I will let your treatment go on. "First, it was I who arranged for you to be brought here and revived. I am a musicologist, interested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in your own time." One of my bets of long ago had paid off. I wondered what modem music would be like. Could I learn to compose it? "Under our law," went on Par Leon, "you owe me for the cost of revival and treatment. That is six years' work from you. You are fortunate that you were healthy and properly frozen, or that time would have been much longer. I think you will find your work with me pleasant and interesting. Together we will write the definitive history of your own musical period." It looked as though it would be a while before I needed to worry about earning my own living -- presumably Par Leon would feed me while I was paying off my debt. "Second, there is good news for you." Par Leon was looking at me expectantly. "When we woke you, the doctors found certain problems -- defects? -- with your body and your gladular balance. They hope they have cured these. You should now live between one hundred and seventy and two hundred years. "The gland adjustment was more subtle. You showed some madness, an uncontrollable compulsion, a fixed idea about a woman. The doctors observed this as soon as you were thawed enough to respond to the psycho-probes. They have made small chemical changes and have, they hope, corrected the problem. What are your feelings now about the woman. Ana?" He was watching me closely. My heart was racing and I felt as though there were weights on ray chest. I closed my eyes and thought about Ana for a long moment, until I was calm again. When I opened my eyes again, I looked at Par Leon and shook my head feebly. "There is nothing. Just the faint feeling that something once was there. Like the scar of an old wound." "Excellent." He smiled and nodded. "That is most satisfying. The disease she had was eliminated from us long ago by mating choice -- eugenics, that is your word for it? The doctors say they could revive her but they are not sure they could make a cure. It is important that thoughts of her should not interfere with your work for me." "Her body is still stored?" "Of course. We keep all the Cryo-corpses for possible future use. They are like a library of the past, to open when they will serve a purpose. Who knows? Two hundred years from now her disease may be cured and if there is a need for her, she too will live and work again." "She is near here?" "Of course not. What an idea!" Par Leon was shocked. "We cannot afford the space on Earth. The Cryo-corpse banks are kept on Pluto, where space is cheap and cooling needs are small." That sentence, more than any other he had spoken, wrenched me into the future. What technology was it that found it more expedient Pluto rather than keep them in cold storage on Earth? Three hundred and sixty years was the time from Copernicus to Einstein, from Monteverdi to Schoenberg, from the first successful American colony to the first landing on the Moon. I had come a long way. Par Leon was still looking at me, a little anxiously. "You ask again about the woman. Are you sure that you are all right -- that you are cured?" I cursed my own stupidity. I did my best to smile reassuringly. "Don't worry. As soon as I am strong enough, we will begin our work." He nodded. "After you have had training -- that is essential. You must learn to speak Universal and Music and know enough to live in this time. It is my responsibility to see that you find activity when your work for me is finished. Rest now. I will come again tomorrow or the next day, when you will be a little stronger." As Par Leon left, the doctors brought a piece of padded head-gear and placed it on me. I went out at once, with no time to react to its presence. When I awoke again, I already had a smattering of Universal and a good elementary knowledge of the civilization of the year #. Now I understood Par Leon's confidence that I would quickly pick up the knowledge that I would need to work with him. Facts, vocabulary and rules could be taught almost instantaneously. Use of language came more slowly. After a couple of weeks I decided that two aspects of the times would be forever beyond me: modem science and the morality that governed the age. It was no surprise that I would find science difficult. In my own time teachers had regarded me as hopeless as I struggled with Feynman diagrams and was baffled completely by axiomatic field theory. But morals? Surely they should be comprehensible? I comforted myself with the thought that Henry the Eighth would have civilians in time of war' and baffled by my revulsion at the idea of public executions. After a month of preparation Par Leon and I were able to begin our work. I would keep my part of the bargain and give him six good, long years for his great lifetime project, the analysis of the musical trends of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. More important than any facts were the perspectives I could offer him. He found it hard to believe how much man-woman and man-man relationships had affected everything in my era. With modem methods of mating dictated by selection of desirable gene combinations, he found it almost unthinkable that people should have mated randomly, on impulse. He was fascinated by my comments. It was a little irritating to him that I had become a Cryo-corpse Just before a couple of events that he was especially interested in had happened, but he accepted that philosophically and with good humor. While we worked, I learned more about the times. The Solar System was explored, known like the back of a man's hand. Venus had been terra-formed. Mars colonized, and there were permanent manned stations -- some 'manned' by organic computers -- on all the major satellites of the outer planets mid on Pluto. Space drives were available that would get as close to the speed of light as you wanted -- but few people were interested. The stars were within easy reach, but no one seemed to 'be stretching out his hands. Civilization seemed changed, content with the limits of the Solar System. I took hypno-courses in astronautics and space systems and became expert in the practice of drive mechanisms. The theory, I suspected, was forever beyond me. Work went on. I shouldn't give the impression that with Par Leon it was a one-way transfer of information. From his vantage point three hundred and sixty years away, he had developed insights into what was really happening in the musical world of my earlier life that left me gasping. So that was where those musicd forms were leading, and that's where Krubak had been aiming in his much-ridiculed late works! Something -- perhaps the glandular adjustments that the doctors had performed on me -- made working with Par Leon a pleasant experience. Previously I had always been something of a toner. To say that I was perfectly content yvould of course be wrong, but given my preoccupations, I was iflote content than I would have imI agined The text we were producing ! steadily grew. By the beginning of l(),e fourth year, I knew we were ' svriting a classic together. During j lie sixth year we were nearing completion and Par Leon was juggesting the possibility of other collaborations. After the work was finally complete, Par Leon -- a good man by I jny moral standards I would ever be I able to comprehend -- helped me to ; become established as a composer. I It was easier than I expected. I Knowledge of the centuries before Cryo-corpses was quite spotty, with some big gaps. I could steal tricks from the musical titans of my own past, use them in the modem style, and get away with it. After three years I had a growing reputation (which I secretly knew was undeserved), a group of imitators, and -- most important -- a substantial financial credit at my disposal. At last I could wait no longer. I announced that it was time for me to take a long-overdue vacation and see a little more of the Solar System. The night before I left I took Par Leon out for dinner. We went # his favorite place, ate his favorite foods, and drank his favoritewines. Even though I suspected that if I told him the truth he would be my him what we were celebrating or the long chance why the occasion was so very special. My plans might involve danger and destruction and I did not want Par Leon to bear any blame when I was gone.    So there we were. Ana and I, together again. We were heading for Canopus in the space yacht that I had rented for a two-month tour of the inner Solar System. Murderer in one era, I was now thief and worse in another. Even with forged papers to help me, it had been a desperate and violent mn through the Pluto wombs and the Solar security perimeter with Ana's Cryo-corpse. Twice I had been within seconds of collision and destruction, but my pursuers' fear of death had exceeded mine. They had changed course to avoid impact and I had fled through their net. We were traveling at just one hundred and twenty-five meters a second below the speed of light and could get within a meter a second if I chose to. We were moving fast enough. Time dilatation made three years pass on Earth for every day of shipboard time. The trip to Canopus and back would be a little more than two months for us, and two hundred years back on Earth. I felt I could use the time to relax a little. The days before I collected Ana from the Pluto wombs, followed by our escape, had been more than hectic. I never ceased to be amazed at the capacities of the ship -- which, because of time dilation, mankind seemed to have found no real use for. The mass indicator showed more than one hundred and forty thousand tons, up from a rest mass of a hundred and thirty tons. To an outside observer I would appear to mass about eighty-eight tons and be foreshortened to a Although it was hidden from me by the shields, I knew that ahead of us in the forward direction the threedegree background radiation left over from the Big Bang had been Dopplershifted up to visible wavelengths. Behind us, hard X-ray sources looked like pale red stars. And we were nowhere near the ship's limits. I had started composing again -- real music, not pot-boilers or derivative works. In the room aft. Ana lay peacefully in her Cryo-tank. I felt optimistic that two hundred years would be long enough for Earth to have developed a complete and certain cure. If not, we would head out again and repeat the cycle. There was plenty of time. If Earth could not at last provide our answer, we could go elsewhere, on to the stars to search for other solutions. The ship was completely self-sustaining and had ample power for many lifetimes. I hoped that the single trip would be enough, though; one of my ambitions on our return was to find the Cryo-corpse of my friend Par Leon, and retum his favor to me. As we swept up to the great flaring beacon of Canopus, I deceler. i ated to gravitational swing-by j speeds and let the ship fall througb a tight hyperbolic orbit around the star. Canopus was a fearsome sight. More than a thousand times as ! luminous as the Sun, it was spout! ing green flares of gas hundreds of I searched for planets and found only four gas-giants, each the size of Ju. piter. There were no signs of an inner-planet system. j After two days of fascinated observation I turned the ship and headed back to Earth. Were mine I the first human eyes to see the ! twisting striations -- sun-scars, not sun-spots -- that gouged the boiling surface of Canopus? Like a lost soul flying from Hell-gate, I ran for the shelter of our own Solar System. If another trip out were necessary, h would be to a smaller and less turbulent star. That sight of Hell had affected me more than anything I could remember. It burned in my mind and I could not eat, drink or sleep. The urge to see Ana again, to seek peace in her face, grew on me and at last I went aft. She lay in her tank like a Snow-goddess, with j pearly eyelids and skin of milky crystal. I took only one quick look, afraid to open the tank more in case it interfered with the cooling system. It was enough. I could conttd myself again and think of other things. On the tranquil return trip, I wondered again at how easy everything had seemed. I had never thought of light-speed ships and time dilation when I was making my plans so long ago. At best, I had prepared for a chancy succession of freezings and thawings for me, further and further in time until at last there was a cure and Ana could safely be revived. As it was. Ana was with me; I could safeguard her myself and there was no risk at all. In we came, past the barren outcroppings of Pluto and on to the inner planets. With no idea how Earth would have changed in two hundred years, I had no way to decide whether I should approach slowly and cautiously or rapidly and confidently. My decision was made for me. As we rode in above the ecliptic, avoiding the asteroid belt, we were locked by a navigation and guidance beam and steered to a landing on the Moon. The spaceport was new, massive colunms set in a regular triangular anay. Spaceflight at least had changed since we left. The guidance system set us down gently. Prepared for anything -- or so I thought -- I stepped through the lock to meet a new generation. One man greeted me in the lock corridor, a tall dignified figure with the distant eyes of a prophet. Somehow I had expected more, perhaps a show of weapons until my identity was known. "Welcome again to Earth-space, Drake Merlin." The language was still Universal. I said I was prepared for anything -- but I was not prepared to be recognized and named. I was taken aback, then I realized that the ship's identification was given in the communication codes, and I would be shown as the last pilot. The data retrieval presumably still held those records. I wondered what else the system showed about my wild flight from Pluto. "Since you know my identity, then perhaps you also know my history. I am seeking assistance." The man nodded. "We know your history, and your quest. It has come down to us from ancient times. One version holds that you lost control of your ship and were carried off to the far depths of space. Another tells that your disappearance at light-speed was intentional. Come with me, we will find conversation easier inside the city." There were small pauses in his words, almost as though he had need to stop and think about many phrases. I wondered if Universal was a learned language to him, as Old Anglic had been to Par Leon. We settled into a reception room, close by the inner lock, and I felt a rising tension. In a few moments I would know if my search was over. "The Cryo-corpse that you have with you in the ship. What was the disease?' ' "I think there is no word for it in Universal. It disappeared from the race and from the language. The full medical description was given with the womb records." He nodded. "Do you have the womb catalog number?" I gave it to him. He stood motionless, eyes distant, for almost five seconds. Then he nodded again. "It can be cured. I have summoned the necessary medical resources." Two waves of emotion swept over me. Wild joy, and an almost superstitious fear. Telepathy seemed to have been added to the human senses. ' ' You can transmit your thoughts?' ' I asked. He looked puzzled, and again there was a brief silence. Then he smiled. "Not in the way that you are thinking. I can exchange thoughts with others, and with the data banks, but you will be able to do the same in a few days' time. You will also be able to compute faster and better than the computer of the ship that brought you here. Look." He turned his head to me and raised the gray hair above his left temple. There was a faint, straight scar there. "That is the place where the implant is made. There is no reason this could not have been done in the time in which you first lived. A small set of integrated circuits handies calculations -- we think in the numbers, just as in your day you did it through finger-pressure on keys. "The implant is fully program, mable. It also contains a signal transmitter and receiver, so that we can enter data and programs directly from the central computers, or from another person. I am speaking to you now in Universal by using the translation programs on the Tycho computer system." He caught my look of misgiving, I "Do not worry about this. I assure you that in a few months you will find it hard to believe that you functioned without such a service. You will have total recall, be a calculator beyond the most skillful of your time, and you will have immediate access to all the data of the Solar System -- though the transmission time is considerable for the data banks of other planets. "Now, let me query the medical team. They should have made their first examination of the Cryo-corpse in your ship." He was again silent for a few seconds. Then his eyes widened and he looked at me with a different expression. The silence continued. I felt again a knife of tension twisting inside me, a feeling that something was going wrong. "What is it?" I said at last. "Have you been in communication with your medical team? What do they say?" He nodded. His eyes now seemed different, gentler and closer. He appeared to be choosing his words with great care. "The woman in the Cryo-tank. Anastasia. When you took her from the wombs of Pluto, was the Cryotank fully sealed?" I could not speak and my mind was filled with foreboding. I inclined my head a fraction of an inch. "But you opened the tank? After you had left Pluto?" he asked gently. "(ce. To see her, after we left Canopus. I looked for only a moment, and I sealed the tank again afterward." I could not tell him that I had been unable to stop myself, I had been driven. Suddenly I was looking at him across a gulf of five hundred and seventy years. His sad face was Tom Lambert's, and Par Leon's also. His eyes were speaking the same message. "Drake Merlin, the Cryo-tank was intended only for storage in the wombs. After it was opened, the seal was imperfect. You understand what I am saying? Without the correct seal, the temperature in the tank was too high." He seemed unable to speak for a few moments, and I assume that he was calling for more data from his computer banks. Then he continued. "I have checked with the medical team and with the best data sources. The damage caused to the body when the tank was opened and the seal broken cannot be repaired. There can be no revival, now or ever. "i am sorry, Drake Merlin. Anastasia is dead. Forever dead." Forever dead. Forever dead. The words seemed to echo Tom Lambert, from long ago. This time there was the ring of complete certainty. For each man kills the thing he loves. I had taken the long chance, and now it was over. There was a long period of introseconds of communion with the data banks and the medical teams.' As my world collapsed, the barriers came down inside my mind. I noticed for the first time the faint spicy sweetness of the air fresheners, the steady dry breeze blowing past us, and the faint concert pitch A-natural of vibrating metal far along the corridor. My senses were opening again, after long centuries of hibernation. At last he spoke again. "One possibility remains. Anastasia, the woman you knew, cannot be reanimated. Whole cells remain and she can be cloned without difficulty, but growth and education would begin anew. There is no hope of sufficient memory transfer from undamaged cells for more than a faint inkling of her former self to pass to her new body. Your former close relationship would be irrelevant to her. Should we proceed?' ' I wanted to say yes, but caution held me. "Why would you do this for us? What will the price be, to me or to her?" Shrugged shoulders had retained a meaning, although I could not see how such information would be transferred through a communication implant. "You would be deprived of an implant and you would not share our group-consciousness. Call it an experiment. The group-mind has become curious about the behavior of single units such as you, not connected through the implants. Also, we have a feeling that in the old emotional patterns can only be called sympathy. Your suffering is unique. No quest comparable with yours is recorded in the data banks, unless it is the fragmented and confusing description of Orpheus and Eurydice. "Shall we proceed?" Only one answer was possible. "Proceed."  Coda and Overture. So it begins. Anastasia lies in my arms again, for the first time in more than five hundred and seventy years. She weighs a little more than five kilos and is just three weeks out of the clonewomb. It took me an eternity to learn it, but by now I know better than to cast dice against the future. In twenty years' time, I may be no more than father and mentor to her. It will suffice.  I I WE Sorry, you'll have to provide your own scorecard for this! This," said the Director, "is the control panel of a time machine. Or rather, it is a non-functioning mock-up of the control panel of a time machine. It will transport you back into the past when you take on this assignment, Howard. Do you wish to inspect it?" Howard Bradley stood up and accepted the proffered panel, then sat down and propped it on his knee to inspect it. It was about three feet by two feet, made of light plastic sheeting and studded with a large number of small buttons and three bigger ones below. The instructions were in both English and the equivalent Russian, Bradley noted; the three big buttons; seconds, # to #; minutes, # to #; hours, # to #; days, I to #; months, January through December; and years, # and #. "Hmm." Bradley scratched his head with his right hand. "There seem to be only two year numbers, sir, this year and last. Doesn't it go any further than that?" The Director leaned back and smiled. "No, Howard, apparently not. According to the inventor, it can't go back any earlier than when he originally invented it, and it can't go forward any further than it's been of its own accord through time." "So what happens in #, sir?" "Oh, we can add buttons easily enough. The digital mechanism in the control panel is easy enough to understand, just the standard kind of thing you'd find in an electronic calculator. The guts of it though, the motor, really had us baffled." "Had you baffled, sir? You mean we now understand it?" The Director smiled ruefully, shaking his head. "No, Howard, no. I don't think the Russians can understand it either, and they have the only working model. Or had it until recently, that is. We have, er, connections over in Moscow, and from all accounts they were going batty trying to figure it out. Didn't want to destroy the working parts by tampering with them too hard, exactly the same problem we had." Bradley sat back in his chair, biting his lower lip as he tried to concentrate. "Ah, let's see, sir. Why don't you fill me in a little more fully on this. This is, presumably," and he lifted up the panel, putting it tidily leaning against the left #eg of his chair, "the same time machine that was invented last year by Doctor Helmut Heinrich of Switzerland. The one that the Russians paid a dammit." The Director scowled darkly. "Those damn Russians knew our bidding, limit, they knew we'd have to go to Congress for anything higher. And the inventor didn't want to wait, naturally." Bradley shook his head sympathetically. "Ah, sir. The weaknesses of democracy." There was silence for a few moments. "Well, sir," Bradley continued after a while. "So the Russians have the only time machine, right?" "Well, sort of." The Director knitted his brows as if puzzled about exactly how to continue. "Here, Howard, why don't you come along to the Research Lab? I'll show you a mock-up of the whole thing." He got up and left the office at a brisk walk, with Bradley following behind. "Now, Howard," he continued, "the thing folds up. Like a folding table. It is very important that you practice to get it right. Your life may depend on it." "Folds up, sir?" Bradley asked. They reached the big door of the Research Lab, the Director nodded to the guard and they passed through. "Yes, folds up," the Director replied. "That way you can put one time machine inside another one, to transport it." They turned right along a corridor. "Er, sir?" Bradley queried. "I thought there was only one time machine?" "Well, we think they are all the same one." The Director shrugged. "Here," he opened a door on the left. "There's our mock-up." "That thing? The one that looks like an elevator cage?" Bradley gazed curiously at it, walking slowly all round it. A big cubical structure, eight feet tall, mounted on casters, with a glass window at the front and sliding doors, nothing particular around the back, and five buttons on the right, marked same words in Russian. Inside, through the window, there appeared to be a panel like the one he had seen earlier. "Can I press the buttons, sir?" "Certainly. Oh, the 'send' button does not work, of course. Be very careful not to press it when you are with the real model." Bradley nodded and pressed buttons, 'open' -- the door opened. 'close' -- the door closed, 'fold' -- nothing happened. "It has to be open to fold up, Howard." "Er, yes." Bradley pushed buttons again. 'open' -- the door opened, 'fold' -- nothing happened. "Good, Howard." The Director stepped inside and folded the roof down against the back, then walked around the outside, pushing down the left side, the back and the right side. It took a considerable muscular effort, Bradley noticed, but the hinges hardly made any noise. The finished product was a squat box, about seven by seven by two feet; J#I part of the base, he noted, had also folded up. The Director stood back, rubbing his hands. "Ok, Howard. Your turn. Unfold it; push in the lock button; fold it." Bradley wrinkled his nose in distaste. This looked a little too much like hard work. Shrugging his shoulders, he moved in, pushed the sides back in reverse order, and again. He sank down in a nearby chair. "Right first time, Howard." The Director smiled. "Now, push it over the floor on its casters and lift it up into the other time-machine mock-up over there." Bradley scowled, pushed it over the floor and started heaving it up. One caster, up, and along. Second caster, up, push. Third caster up, and the fourth, and sli-i-ide it in. He sat down on it, perspiring heavily. "Ok, Howard." The Director sounded infernally cheerful. "Now, climb in on top of it and press the buttons to close the door." Bradley wearily complied. Clamber up; bend down; 'close;' 'open.' The doors worked. He sat down on the edge again, frowning. The Director smiled broadly. "Now, Howard, we could, theoretically, put a third time machine inside -- " "Oh no you couldn't," Bradley interrupted. "You don't need a spy, you need a professional weightlifter. I don't think these things were designed to be stacked inside each other. I don't think I could even reach the buttons if there were another one inside." The Director shrugged cheerfully. "Of course they weren't designed to go inside each other. They were designed to fold up so they'd go into a truck or a plane. The time machine doesn't actually go anywhere, it just goes backward and forward in time, in the same spot." Bradley scowled. "Not very useful, is it? The Russians can have it, as far as I'm concerned." He got off and walked over to settle into a nearby armchair. "Well, what now, sir?" The Director smiled again and sat down in another chair, crossing his legs at the ankle. "Your mission, Howard, should you choose to undertake it, will be to go back in time, report to duty here at Headquarters, explain your mission to me, and then proceed to deliver back here a time machine which you will then proceed to steal from the Russians, after we fly you to Zurich to the hotel where the inventor stayed previously while he was conducting his bargaining. You will also, if possible, attempt to find out from the inventor what the secret is for his machine, so we can make another one after you get back. Ok?" Bradley sat back in his' chair, his brows furrowed in thought, scratching his ear with his left hand. The seconds ticked by silently. "Er, Howard," the Director interrupted the silence. "Do you understand your mission?" "Er, no, sir. Not at all. Er, sir, this mission sounds rather, er, dangerous. Would you mind very much if someone else went on this one? After all, sir, I have just returned from another mission that I was on for the last four months." Bradley watched uneasily as the Director's face grew red and angry. "No, no, Howard!" The Director pounded his fist in the air. "You've got to go back, because you already didl If you don't go back now, you'll ruin everything. We couldn't possibly send someone else!" "Oh yes we could, sir. The other agent could steal the time machine instead of me, and -- " "No, no, no! Howard, you already reported back to me and explained the entire mission to me just two months ago. If we sent someone else back, it'd be silly. You can't possibly not go. You already have!" "Oh no I haven't, sir." Bradley shook his head vigorously. "I was out on my previous assignment two months ago. If someone else reported to you back then saying he was me, he must obviously have been an imposter. The Russians, you see, could -- " "No, Howard, no! That's exactly what I thought when you first reported in here. I was extremely sceptical. But we checked you out very thoroughly, and -- " "Sir, I was no here two months ago. And this mission is not only dangerous, it's preposterous! There's no way you can make me go. It says here in the Professional Espionage Agents' Contract, Section # -- " "'Damn the stupid contract! You already signed, dammit. Or you will sign as soon as you get back here from the mission, before we send you off on it. You told me so distinctly, just two months ago. In fact, we had you sign the permission form again back then, just to be on the safe side." Bradley put his head down and cradled it between his hands, moaning softly for a few moments. Then he pushed himself back in his chair, grasped both arms of it firmly and looked the Director in the eye. "Ok, sir, let's try this again from the beginning. Two months ago a man walked into your office who resembled me and claimed to be me. Right?" "Right." "He told you a story about time travel and initially you did not believe him, right?" "Right." "And he managed to convince you that he was telling the truth, right? Ok, how?" "We dosed him with sodium pentazoanate, of course." "The truth drug, sir? Sir, that's extremely dangerous stuff. Why, if you'd given him only one and a half times too much, you could've killed him -- or killed me, that is, maybe." "Oh no, we were careful, Howard, don't worry. Just exactly the right dosage. Lie detectors, too, everything else we could think of. It was you, Howard. Besides, we had his time machine, too." "Er, yes." Bradley leaned back and scratched his head again. "Then I presume you were able to take it apart and analyze its functions, and hence you no longer need -- " "Er, no, Howard." The Director shrugged perplexedly. "You told us we wouldn't be able to figure it out, and unfortunately you were right. We didn't want to break anything vital in it, so we couldn't get too deeply into it. After all, you need it some more, so as to be able to try to steal the secret of it from the original inventor and to report back here to start your mission." "Er, let's not get started on that again." Howard frowned in concentration. "Ok, so he, or I, told you a story, and you checked it out under truth serum, and then you sent him off on the rest of his mission. Ok, then what did he tell you?" The Director shrugged. "Basically, Howard, exactly what I am telling you now. Naturally. Plus, he was met at this Headquarters, this morning, later, by his alter ego returning safely from the mission, and got onto the second time machine, himself and pressed the right buttons for two months ago and arrived here in Headquarters. In the Research Lab, of course. They were very surprised to see you." "Er, yes, sir." Bradley frowned in concentration. "Hmm. Do you have any tapes, sir, of conversation with this, er, person?" The Director smiled and glanced at his watch. "Yes, we have just enough time for that before you arrive back. Right back at my office, Howard." "Yes," Howard Bradley thought as the tape recorder started up. "That's me all right." He listened on as his voice detailed the plan he had just heard, interrupted from time to time by the voice of the Director raising objections. The Director, back in his seat, glanced at his watch from time to time, tapping his foot nervously against the desk edge. The phone rang and the Director cut off the recording before its end. "Yes?" The Director frowned intently as he listened to the caller. "More Russians? Good. Did they bring it with them?" He listened intently some more. "Good. That's exactly what we expected. Are all the original group still there?" More listening. "Ok, keep in touch with me about what happens. Bye." The Director returned the phone to its cradle and turned to face Bradley again. "Ok, Howard, listen carefully. The Russians are in Zurich at the same hotel where the inventor stayed three months ago, in the same suite of rooms. They moved in yesterday. Today an airfreight shipment arrived there and they brought it into the hotel. It only just fit through the doors, the same dimensions as the time machine when it's folded up. Ok? We have them under surveillance, though they removed the bugs that we put into that room two months ago so we don't know exactly what they're doing. We suspect that they are planning to send back that time machine to the time that the inventor was there negotiating, maybe to steal his blueprints, Ok? Just deduction, not firm knowledge. In their group they have Pavel Yurovich, the truth-drug expert, and Ivan Ivanovich." "Ivan Ivanovich?" Bradley leaned forward attentively. "Their top spy?" "Yes, indeed." The Director smiled. "That Ivanovich. Fluent in six languages and a master of disguise. We didn't recognize him, of course, but we got voiceprints as he went through Swiss Customs." The Director glanced at his watch again. "Ok, Howard, time to go." He stood up, rewound the tape recorder on fast rewind, took out the tape reel, then took out another tape reel from another recorder below his desk, added a large manila envelope and handed them curtly to Bradley. "All right, Howard, follow me," he commanded, heading back to the Lab. "You're due back any minute now." Bradley followed at a brisk trot, carrying the tape reels and the envelope. "What is all this stuff, sir?" he asked as the Director turned in through the Lab doors. "What am I supposed to do with it?" "The tape reels? One of them is you talking with me back two months ago, the one we were just listening to. The other is you talking with me just now. You're to take them back in time. And the envelope contains your detailed instructions. Be very careful to go back and forth to exactly the times indicated there. Your routing is on the initial sheet. Ok?" They turned in through the last doors and the Director motioned Bradley to be seated. "What's supposed to be happening now?" he asked. There didn't seem to be anything different about the Lab, Bradley noted, just the two time-machine mock-ups inside each other, the chairs and the big digital clock on the wall. "Quiet, Howard," the Director commanded. "Watch that clock up there and write down exactly when you arrive." Bradley obediently took out his pen and some paper but nothing happened for several seconds. Then, suddenly, a large cubical object materialized in front of them, exactly like the mock-ups. "#.#, on Jan. #, #," he wrote down. The doors opened and a man like himself jumped down, tugged at a very large object on the floor and rolled it out on its casters, pulling it off out of the way. "Mission accomplished, sir," said the new arrival to the Director. The voice was exactly like his own and Bradley shivered. The face, too, was exactly like his own. The Director shook hands vigorously with Bradley's double. "Congratulations, Howard! That was an excellent job you just did! Here, sign this," he added, thrusting a piece of paper at him. The double shrugged, pulled out a pen and rapidly scribbled his signature. "I already signed this, you know," he remarked. "Well, I need to go back now and do the rest of the mission. Hi there," he added, talking to Bradley. "Feeling a little strange?" Bradley was too stunned to reply. He watched in disbelief as the other man went back inside the machine, pressed a button to close the door, and suddenly -- vanished. The whole thing vanished. "Well, Howard?" asked the Director. "That's your future self. All right, help me get this time machine unfolded." Bradley, still mentally numb, moved to comply. Right side, up. Back, up. Left side, up. Move inside, pull the top up. It was a lot easier with two people both helping, he reflected. The Director moved over to the buttons on the outside right-hand side and pushed the audible click as the locking mechanism went into place. "Ok, Howard," said the Director. He moved over to the chair, quickly picking up the tapes and envelope from where Bradley had left them, and walked back inside the time machine. "Now, come inside and watch me set the buttons. You're supposed to arrive back at ten-thirty a.m., exactly, on November fifteenth last year." He set down the tapes and envelope and pressed buttons rapidly. "Does that check out, Howard?" He moved backward toward the door. ' Bradley looked closely at the buttons. They seemed satisfactory. Suddenly the door clunked shut behind him. He wheeled around and -- the Director vanished. The room, too, looked odd as he gazed at it through the window in the doorway. The chairs were arranged differently, all of a sudden. And the I time-machine mock-ups were not there. The clock on the wall, however, still said #. But not # a.m. on January #, #. It now read # on November #, #. This, thought Howard Bradley, was ridiculous. He hadn't even I signed the permission form! The Director must have -- yes -- just pressed "Why should I?" he thought. Bradley scowled and pushed buttons. #.# on January #, #. He moved his finger down to pressed it. The Director reappeared. The chairs and the mock-ups were where they were. The clock on the wall said #.#I on January #th again. Howard Bradley smiled to himself as he watched the Director's puzzled, scowling face. As he watched, the Director strode to the right-hand side of the time machine, a grim expression on his face. The Director -- vanished... and re-appeared where he had been five seconds earlier, scowling and striding to the door. Then again he -- vanished... Over and over again the Director vanished, reappeared where he had been and strode to the door, his finger outstretched. The clock on the wall, Howard noted, was endlessly repeating the same fivesecond interval, from #.# to #.#. This was bad, he thought, very bad. Why, he could starve to death, or die of old age! And no one would ever find him! No, that was silly. Its batteries would run down eventually, if it used batteries. What power souce did it use, anyway? And he could still use the control panel to send himself forward or backward in time. Forward or backward? He could just go forward in time to when he was supposed to finish the mission and claim it had been successful. No, that wouldn't work. The Director would find out the Russians still had their time machine. How about backward? He. could go back and warn himself -- no, that sounded complicated... Bradley paced to and fro inside the time machine, thinking as the seconds went by over and over again, and the Director endlessly strode toward the buttons on the course! Any time he pressed it, the door would open some time within that five-second interval. It would just seem to the Director as if he hadn't been able to get to the door were open. Was that right? His eye fell on the big manila envelope. Maybe he should read the instructions first. Why not? He had all the time in the world. More, in fact. Bradley sat down on the floor of the time machine and opened up the envelope. Too bad, he thought, that he couldn't play the tape recordings without a machine. The Director hadn't finished playing the one, he remembered. But were they correct in every way? The Director could, after all, have spliced out any material he didn't want Bradley to hear. With the resources of the world's greatest spy organization at his disposal, it would be child's play for him to alter the tapes, or even to create completely phony conversations out of computer recombinations of voicesounds. Or to forge signatures. Bradley scowled as he pulled out the instructions and found a permission form with his own signature. He put it aside and started reading the plan.  The plan sounded a lot more ; sensible as he read through it carei fully, though there were still a few ' puzzling loose ends. There was no I mention, for instance, of his current predicament, so things must have  happened differently last time. Or had they? The Director would not have known about what was happening now and there was no real need to tell him. Or perhaps the DiI rector had known but had deliberately refrained from mentioning it. There was, after all, no mention of the Director sneakily pressing the Bradley wrinkled his brows in puz! zlement but finally went back to reading the instructions. i It was # on his watch when he finished; so twenty minutes must have gone by, he figured. The clock outside on the Lab wall still said #.# to #.#, of course, over and over again. Well, pressing easiest way out. He timed it so as to occur just after #.# and stepped toward the door. The Director, scowling, strode yet again toward the buttons on the right-hand side and pressed -- the closing again, but Bradley jammed his foot in it and the elevator-like door opened up again. "Howard Bradley! What are you doing back here so soon?" The Director glared at Bradley, trying to stare him down. "Sir, I've been thinking." Bradley stared right back. "Why don't you go back and tell yourself about this mission, and then send -- " "No, Howard, no!" The Director stamped his foot, his right hand still poised near the buttons. "I don't go on missions! My job is to stay back here at Headquarters and organize missions! Plan! Organize! Motivate! I took Organization Theory courses in graduate school, Howard. That's why I'm up here and you're back there. Plan! Organize! Motivate! Besides, I know I didn't meet myself back two months ago. It'd be ridiculous!" "Well, you could always do things differently this time, sir," Bradley argued. "Besides, why don't we just keep this time machine now we've got it instead of risking it back in the past? You know, if we'd thought a little before sending back the other Howard Bradley, we could've kept two time machines!" "No, Howard, no." The Director shook his head. "We've got to do things exactly the way we did them j last time if we possibly can. Otherwise, who knows what might ! happen? We've got to get that time machine away from the Russians. Look, Howard, you've only been thinking about this for an hour or so, but I've had a whole two months to think about all the ramifications. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about! "Besides," he continued in a wheedling tone of voice, "you saw yourself come back, didn't you? Why, this is the safest mission you've ever been on! Guaranteed return!" Twenty minutes later Howard Bradley was back in the time machine, ready to go. The Director had convinced him. He pressed the buttons on the dial for #.# on November #, # (a couple of minutes later than the original # a.m.; best not to risk colliding with himself, the Director had said); noted the time on the wall clock, button as the Director bade him farewell. The Director vanished and -- the loud wailing of the Research Lab's alarm siren filled the air. The door opened and Bradley saw, in front of him, two stem-faced guards with their weapons drawn. "Hands up, whoever you are!" commanded one of the guards. "No unauthorized persons are allowed in here!" Bradley obediently raised his hands. "Take me to the Director," he requested. "That's exactly where you're going," the guard snarled. "He'll be very interested in seeing you." What had gone wrong? thought Bradley as they marched him along the corridors. Of course! The first appearance of the time machine had alerted them, and the guards had been sent in during the next two minutes. They probably thought he was a Russian spy since the Russians had the only time machine. Well, he could explain things to the Director easily enough. The Director was sitting at his polished oak desk, a stern expression on his face. "And who do you think yoM are?" he demanded. "Howard Bradley, sir, reporting for duty. I just arrived here in a time machine from two months in the future. It is extremly important that you make a hotel reservation at the Zurich Hilton, in Suite fivehundred ten, as soon as possible and for as long a time as possible." The Director leaned back in his seat and glared uncomprehendingly. "Rubbish!" he snorted. "Howard Bradley is out on assignment now. He couldn't possibly have gotten back here in this time, let alone in a Russian time machine. You, mister, are a Russian spy, traveling in a Russian time machine and cleverly disguised to resemble Howard Bradley. Well?" Howard Bradley sighed to himself. This was going to be difficult. Very difficult. It was six days later, November #, #, and Howard Bradley smiled happily to himself. An empty time machine had just materialized in the Zurich Hilton Hotel, Suite #, much to the Director's amazement, just an hour after the American agents in Switzerland had moved in and cleared a free area, according to telephoned reports. They had immediately folded it up, packed it in a box and manhandled it out of the building; and it was now being flown across the Atlantic by military jet. Everything was going very well, Bradley reflected. Everything was going exactly as planned. The hotel, for instance, had originally been booked solid right past New Year's, with the Russians reserving Suite # for January #th and all the rest of #. But an unexpected cancellation had enabled them to book the room for November #th through the #nd. A strange quirk of fate, that cancellation, thought Bradley. Or was it? Meanwhile, the Agency's scientists had been busily disassembling the time machine, stripping it down to basics but, just as Bradley had predicted, they couldn't figure it out. And the Director had insisted, very firmly, that the basic working parts should not be handled in any way that would risk their destruction. Bradley shrugged to himself and settled back to catch up on some reading. A few hours later Bradley's office phone rang. "It's here, Howard," said the Director's voice. "Come on over to the Research Lab and it'll be up the freight elevator in just a couple of minutes." Bradley whistled to himself as he strolled over to the Lab. Everything had gone very nicely. The unpleasant effects of the sodium pentazoanate had long since worn off, the Director had bought him some new clothes and everything had worked out exactly as planned. He walked in the Lab door and found the Director in there already, tapping his foot nervously. "Good, Howard," he remarked. "Everything is right on time. The men should be here soon. We're all set for you to take it forward in time." Bradley looked around observantly. The time machine had been reassembled a few feet from where he had arrived in it, in exactly the same location that he had seen his double arrive before. The Director, he remembered, had included exact locational information in his packet of instructions. The clock on the wall read a little after four in the afternoon, #.#, November #, #. The door at the other end of the room opened and four workmen wheeled in a big container, seven feet by seven by two. They put it down carefully, unwrappfed it and, at the Director's instructions, wheeled it along, up and into the other time machine. The Director clambered up on top of the folded time machine and checked the setting on the outer one. "Your double arrived at exactly #.#I on January fifteenth, right, Howard?" Bradley nodded. "Good," continued the Director, climbing out. "Now remember, Howard, be sure to do things exactly as before. We don't want to foul things up." "Sir, couldn't we just send the one time machine back empty by pressing the button?" Bradley asked. "Oh, no." The Director frowned impatiently. "We've already got them inside each other now anyway. And besides, very possibly your arrival there is exactly what'll be needed to convince your earlier self that it's safe to go. Ok, Howard, let's get a move on. "I'm going to send you off at exactly #.# and then you reset the numbers to come back five seconds later at #.#. Right?" Bradley shrugged and climbed up on top of the inner time machine. The Director pushed the then he waited carefully, watching the clock, reached out for the and -- the Director vanished. Bradley quickly readjusted buttons button, jumped down and pulled out the folded-up time machine, rolling it out on its casters to a nearby spot. "Mission accomplished, sir," he reported to the Director. The Director shook his hand. "Congratulations, Howard! That was an excellent job you just did! Here, sign this." He thrust'a permission form into Bradley's hands. Bradley looked at it, shrugged, and pulled out a pen to sign it. "I already signed this, you know," he remarked. "Well, I need to go back now and do the rest of the mission." Over by the Director he noticed -- his earlier self. Another Howard Bradley, mouth agape. "Hi, there," he remarked to the double. "Feeling a little strange?" There was no reply and Bradley walked back inside the time ton, double-checked the time setThe January scene vanished and the Director reappeared, almost exactly where Bradley had left him earlier. "Good work, Howard,' called the Director. Bradley opened the door and walked out and the Director instijicted the workmen to fold up and pack the time machine he had come back in. "Ok, Howard," the Director instructed. "Grab your suitcase, we're off to Switzerland by military jet. Up, up into the wild blue yonder!" It was twelve hours later. They were in a hotel room in Zurich and Howard Bradley was having lastminute qualms. It was # in the morning, European time, November #, #, and the blinds and curtains were drawn tight against the I morning sunlight. ! "All right, Howard," the DirecI tor was saying. "We've adjusted the little lever down below for the , six hours' difference between Euroj pean time and Eastern Standard Time. Let's check over your equipment. Pistol, ok. Dart-gun with three needles of truth-serum,  ok. Flashlight, ok. Handcuffs, rope coils, ok. Two cans of j emergency food rations and water, ' ok. Suitcase with extra supplies of everything, ok. Empty suitcase, ok. List of instructions, ok. "Now, I'll go over the plan of instructions one more time. You'll go back to four in the morning on October fifteenth, the last night that the inventor stayed in this suite beI fore checking out. Remember, keep That'll keep you stuck at one instant of time while you look around to I see if things are safe without being I seen except for a flickering instant  of time. If it's not safe, go back an I hour earlier, or another hour earlier, ' or a day earlier. Go earlier, because I then you won't have been seen yet. "When you go back, you should see one or possibly more other time machines. You're to send one of them back, empty, to the time we picked it up, at #.# on November twentieth, two days ago, just after our agents first checked into the hotel. We know where it landed, so we've put your machine facing its door, a few feet away. You'll need to open it, set the time, get out, close it and send it. Right? "After that, you're on your own. Send back any other time machines you can lay your hands on, or any blueprints, and come back yourself, to #.# today, November twenty-second. Be very careful, the Russians may be sending their own spy back. Don't try to kidnap the inventor. Get back first and then I'll decide if the risks are worth it. Ok? "You'll be arriving back just a few minutes after we send you and then we'll have to pack everything up quickly so as to be out of the room by the eleven a.m. hotel checkout time." "Er, sir," said Bradley. "I've been thinking. The instructions have been very specific prior to this point but now they seem to have all kinds of contingency statements in them, as though your future self didn't know exactly what had happened except for the earlier time machine being sent back. And there's no mention in the instructions of what happened after I get back, or am supposed to get back. Why? Was the mission successful? Will it be? Will I get back? "You know, if I get back, wouldn't your future self have told me about it, so as to motivate me? Sir," he continued, quietly and matter-of-factly, "I think I'm going to die on this mission." He has five years to fight foryouife He is an American Heart Association Estabiished Investigator, funded for five years to work on some phase of cardiovascular disease. He and his associates, are researching ways to recognize a heart attack before severe damage occurs. He is one of over I ,# scientists supported by the American Heart Association who are fighting for your life. But we need more money for more research that may produce earlier detection and better methods of treatment and prevention of cardiovascular diseases. When a Heart Association volunteer asks for your money, think of the I ,# scientific investigators. Help them fight for your life. American Heart Association. (Jo The Director shook his head. "No, Howard, you're not going to die. I guarantee it. Things are going to work out as planned. Howard," he improvised, "when you get back. I'm . going to be sure that my future self does not inform your earlier self that the mission has been successful. "Now, Howard," he continued quickly. "It's almost time to go. I'm going to close your door and turn off the lights, as we planned, to accommodate your eyes to the blackness at four a.m., and then I'm going to count down to zero. Keep and your other hand on the flashlight. Lights off now; seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ton, keeping it jammed down firmly, and -- the lights all went on again, very brightly. He put the flashlight back in his pocket and peered around warily, still keeping his finger on the button. No time machines out there, nothing but ordinary hotel furniture. The bed in the next room of the suite looked slept in, very rumpled, and Bradley could see little marks from the casters in a square pattern where the other time machine ought to be. The carpet looked as if it had recently been walked on, and there was a button and a tom piece of colored material on the floor nearby. He cautiously removed his finger was different except he could see the curtains rippling gently above the air current from the hotel heating vent. Very little noise, too. He peered around some more -- still button. Nothing. He walked around, cautiously. There were caster marks over on the left, too, in another square pattern. There was a file cabinet, too, open with nothing in it. No people, no one. The bed definitely looked slept in. The clock on the wall said # a.m. Ok, try again. He came back in, closed the door, set the button for # it down hard. The lights -- were still on. A time machine was in front of him, open. And over to the right two men were locked together in a struggle, frozen in mid-action. A toughlooking man in dark clothes and an older, white-haired man in pajamas. Ivan Ivanovich and Helmut Heinrich! The Russian spy must be kidnapping the inventor! (Or vice versa? Implausible. They both were about two hundred pounds, like himself, Bradley estimated, but the older man would be no match in a struggle.) Neither of them were looking in his direction, fortunately, so neither of them would see him. Bradley craned his neck, still holding tight over on the left, what looked like the comer of a third time machine. They really should design these things with glass all around, he could be locked down when needed. Well, too late now to think of that. Ok, # a.m., see what's going on an hour earlier. Bradley pressed the # button and -- the lights went out. There was only a slight glow from a night-light, Bradley noted, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom: the two struggling men were no longer there nor was the time machine in front of him. But the one over on the left was still there, or its comer was. Over to the right, in the bedroom, the inventor appeared to be asleep in his bed. Bradley relaxed ments before jamming it back and heard a loud snoring sound. Ok, the Russian had not yet arrived. Try # a.m. Bradley pushed buttons again. #, 'send' and -- the time machine in front of him reappeared, its door still open. The lights were still off, the inventor was still in bed, but over to the left was the faint glow from a different light -- a flashlight, perhaps? The third time machine's comer was still there and Bradley, craning his neck, caught a glimpse of the back of the man in dark clothing over where the empty file cabinet had been an hour and a quarter later at # a.m. Bradley risked a second of time ton before jamming it on again and heard the faint mstling of papers from his left and the inventor's loud snoring from his right. He risked two seconds, then three, then five -- no problems. He tiptoed to the door to risk a better view, then The Russian was looking straight away from him, into the file cabinet -- looking for blueprints, perhaps? If he could just cross the intervening six feet to the open time machine, Bradley estimated, he would be shielded from view by its left side, could set the buttons, duck around to the right-hand side, be shielded from view again, and close its door and sent it to November #th, when it had arrived earlier. It would take no more than twelve seconds, Bradley estimated, if he did it all without fumbling, and then he could duck back inside his own button to freeze time again and consider his next move. Ok, testing. Bradley tried # seconds with the 'send' button off. No reaction, good. He pressed 'send' to go back to #.# again, then quietly out, across and into the nearby time machine, flashlight ready but not on; flashed the light briefly, pressed #.# for November #, #; walked quietly out and around to the right-hand side and prepared to press 'close' and 'send.' 'close;' the door closed, with a clunk, 'send;' the time machine vanished and -- the Russian wheeled around, startled by the noise of the door closing, as Bradley dived for cover within his own time machine. Bang! The Russian fired wildly in Bradley's direction. Bang! Bradley fired back. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Two more shots by each of them, no hits. "What the hell is going on around here?" came a voice in gutteral Swiss-accented German. It was the inventor, roused from his sleep by the noise. The lights all went on and Bradley saw him over to the right in his pajamas, his hand on the light switch. Bang! Bang! Another miss by each of them. The Russian was getting too damn close for comfort, Bradley thought. This bullet had smashed into the metal of the time machine only six inches to his right. "What the hell are you gangsters doing shooting up my hotel room?" the inventor demanded. "Why is this second time machine in here? Who do you think you are, you idiots?" He was standing in the bedroom doorway, shaking his walking stick at them, oblivious to the danger in his anger. Bradley and Ivanovich ignored him. Bang! The Russian had shot at Bradley's time machine instead of at Bradley, at the motor on the right-hand side, and a shower of blue sparks shot up in the air as the bullet ploughed through the machinery. Too late Bradley pressed the 'close' button, the 'send' button, the 'open' button in wild succession. None of them worked. "You've wrecked my time machine, you maniacs!" the invendollars!" Bang! Bradley fired at the Russian again, barely missing. Only one bullet left now, he thought. Better make the next one count, there might not be time to reload. "Stop that this instant!" yelled the inventor. "You're destroying hotel property! You'll go to jail until you rot if I have anything to say about it!" # Bradley crouched down, aiming, waiting for the Russian to move into range. He saw the Russian's gun hand move into view, squeezed the trigger and -- Bang! "Ow!" He saw the gun fall from the Russian's hand, dropped his own gun and pulled out his dart-gun, moving in for the kill. One dart to make the Russian talk, two darts of truth serum to kill him. Thwack! Excruciating pain seared at Bradley's nerves as a dart needled into his right thigh. Gritting his teeth to ignore the pain, Bradley aimed, squeezed the trigger and -- "Ow!" The Russian screamed in pain. "Stop this at once!" commanded the inventor, striding into the main room and brandishing his walkingstick as if it were a weapon. Bradley and the Russian circled him nervously, each trying to keep the inventor between himself and the other man. The Russian had a dart-gun too, Bradley noted, probably a three-dart Israeli-made T-# like his own if intelligence reports were correct, and he was holding it left-handed while a trickle of blood oozed down from his right hand. A dart was still sticking in the Russian's left leg. Thwack! Thwack! Two darts buried themselves in the furniture on the opposite sides of the 'room as the two gunmen circled the inventor between them. Only one dart left, thought Bradley, then he'd have to go to hand-to-hand combat. "Who are you?" the inventor demanded again. "What are you doing here?" Bradley felt a terrible urge to tell the truth coursing through his veins. "I am an American spy, Howard Bradley," he stated, talking in German so the inventor could understand. "I came back here in time to steal the Russian's time machine and any blueprints I could find." "And you?" demanded the inventor, pointing his cane at the Russian. "Why did you come here?" "I am a Russian spy, Ivan Ivanovich," admitted Bradley's opposite number. "I came down here from January #th, #, in the time machine you sold us so as to steal the time-machine's blueprints and kidnap you. Then that American spy made my time machine go off in the future somewhere, so I started shooting at him." "You maniacs!" yelled the inventor. "You can't do this to me. This is Swiss territory and I am a Swiss citizen! You'll rot in jail for a thousand years when the police get here! Destruction of hotel property! Attempted kidnapping! Attempted theft of trade secrets! "And what," he continued, turning and pointing accusingly at Bradley's ruined machine, "is the other time machine doing here? How did it get here?" "I cannot tell a lie," stated Bradley. "I stole the Russian's time machine that he came back here in, sent it forward in time to November #th, then we folded it, flew it across the Atlantic to our Headquarters, sent it forward to January #th inside a later version of itself, and I unfolded it, came back in time to November #th to inform my boss of this mission, then used it briefly to send its earlier self up to January #th next year, came back to November #st, we folded it, flew it back across the Atlantic and brought it into this hotel room, and then took it back in time to now so I could steal the Russian's time machine and any other time machines I could lay my hands on." "You idiot!" shouted the inventor. "You're twisting the structure of time back on itself like a pretzel! And you think you could steal the original time machine, do you? You couldn't, you fool! If you tried, all this would never have happened!" "Shut up!" Ivanovich interrupted. "Where are those blueprints, you old fool? How does the time machine work?" "I'm not going to tell you and you're stupid if you think I would!" The inventor turned toward the Russian, defiantly staring him down. "We have ways to make you talk," Ivanovich retorted. "Answer, before I count to five. One, two, three, four..." "Now's my chance to hit the Russian," thought Bradley, "while he'd distracted. Aim, fire and... Two darts suddenly thwacked into the inventor as he screamed in pain. "You fool, you've killed him!" shouted Bradley. "No! You!" yelled the Russian. "It was your dart that did it! My dart was just to make him talk!" "Your dart!" "Your dart!" The two spies rushed at each other, wrestling each other down to the floor as they struggled for a deathgrip"You've killed me! You've killed me!" screamed the inventor. He strode over to where they lay struggling, whacking impartially at them with his cane. "Take that, you assassins! Take that! And that! And that!" as he hit them savage blows on the arms, legs and head. "Where are the blueprints?" demanded Ivanovich hoarsely. "Tell the truth!" "I burned them before I came here to the hotel to negotiate! The knowledge is all up here in my head! It will die with me when I die! "Oh, no I won't!" The inventor suddenly strode over to the other button. "You stupid superpowers can't be trusted with an invention as powerful as this!" The time machine's door opened and he strode inside to the buttons. "I'll go back in time and warn myself never to reveal the secret of this. It's the only way to unkill myself!" The door closed on him as the Russian's hands tightened in a death-grip around Bradley's neck and... The Russian spy vanished and Howard Bradley suddenly found himself standing up instead of on the floor, falling two inches downward in a sudden Jolt. He hurt all over, on his head, arms, legs and right thigh, and his neck. He was in the Research Lab again, Bradley noted in puzzlement, at the American Headquarters. The two time-machine mock-ups had vanished but everything else was unchanged and the digital clock on the wall read #.#, on January #, #, just one second later than when he had set out. But set out on what? He scratched his head in puzzlement as he noticed the Director striding toward him with outstretched hand. The Director shook hands vigorously. "Congratulations, Howard! That was an excellent job you just did this morning!" "Excellent job, sir? On what?" "Er, on..." The Director looked baffled. "An excellent job, anyway..." The Director's voice trailed away and he looked distractedly up at the wall clock as if that somehow held the key to the situation. "#.#, Howard, right on time. Er, Howard -- why don't you just take the rest of the day off, since you're back so soon?"  #  #I #T I w Tftf first silver cannister is labeled "Scarlet Seabird" in Mr. Ross's black, definite handwriting. When I press the button set into the handrail of the grandstand, there is a sudden flare of rocket and the cannister begins to lift. Slowly at first, and then rapidly faster against the weak Lunar gravity, it lifts higher and higher. In only moments, it is just a spark that is almost lost against the stars. And then, in eerie silence, it blossoms and blossoms and blossoms. It seems that the whole sky is covered with shining, glowing scarlet wings. In my earphones, I hear the indrawn breaths of the other people around me. High, high above, kilometers wide now. Scarlet Seabird flies. It was all my fault that the bad things happened to Mr. Ross. It was just my big mouth that did it. I wanted to be a big-shot. It was on the afternoon of the first day at the Lunar Departure Processing Center when my Aunt Mavril called. She was a reporter for the Washington Post and I usually Just got a Christmas card and a dollar from her. But when they called me to the telephone in the Departure Center office, her face in the screen was all smiles and she acted as if I were her very favorite. "You're going to be the youngest person who ever went to the Moon," she said. "Just nine. And so you're News! I'm going to interview you right now. Chuck." "You're going to put me in the paper?" I asked, all excited. I was so excited that I told her all about Mr. Ross, too. I wish so much that I hadn't. The second cannister is "Wonderful Dragon." It goes up into the Lunar sky on its tiny rocket engine, trailing sparks of blue and gold, aiming haphazardly at Scarlet Seabird which drifts effortlessly, kilometers high, slowly, slowly moving higher and higher. High above, so high that we all thought that it must be defective. Wonderful Dragon finally explodes from a tiny sparkle into enormous bursts of blue and gold that shape into jagged teeth and claws and spiney tail and forking, furious tongue. All of the other people going to the Moon were families or were so busy with their own business that it was just natural that old Mr. Ross and young me should be friends. So that night, he and I ate dinner together and talked. I kept quiet about my surprise, though. "My dad is ViceAdministrator of the Lunar Colony," I said. "And my mother's a lawyer. And now, finally. I'm going to get to go live with them. On the Moon." Mr. Ross's face went very young when he smiled. And he smiled a lot -- until later, when he found out what I had done. "When I was your age," he said, "nobody did anything but snicker when someone said something about going to the Moon. I guess I snickered, too." He was a sculptor, working in wood and clay and steel and aluminum and glass and, I guess, just about anything that had a form within it. And now that he was eighty-nine, he was going to go live on the Moon. "They say I'll be able to move around up there just like a kid of sixty." He looked up at the ceiling of the dining hall as if he could see through it to the Moon. "Well, what about your family?" I asked. "Won't they miss you?" He looked at me and laughed. "Yeah, well, I guess they will. But not the right way. I'm afraid." The dessert was some kind of green, gluey pudding and now Mr. Ross used the handle of a spoon and worked at it quickly. His hands and arms were very big and stronglooking, but they worked gently and precisely. "You must not have any family," I said. "Well, Chuck, I have relatives, you might say." "Whatever you're doing with that pudding is the best thing I can think of to do with it, Mr. Ross. It sure isn't worth eating. But you sure have lost me with what you said." "I don't want you to be lost." He worked on with the spoon for a while. Then he said, "I don't have a wife or sons or daughters. I don't have anybody close. I guess I loved too many times. And none of the loves was still here when it came time to run away to the Moon. The relatives I've got are just waiting around for me to die. To get my money." "I'm still kind of lost," I said. "You'll understand sometime," he said, sliding his dessert bowl across to me. Looking up out of it was my own face, done in the green pudding.  press the button that sets off "Silver Spectacle" and it rises and far, far above, throws out kilometers and kilometers of sparkling silver threads into the dark, airless sky. We went outside then, into the night, to the gardens around the Departure Processing Center. The Moon seemed bigger and brighter than ever before. "They all needed me," Mr. Ross said. "But they needed what I had, not what I was. When Nephew Tommy needed braces, or when Jean-Anne had to go to an analyst, and so on and so on. Uncle Paul was always there with the cash. Some of it, they even paid back for a little while. Sometimes they even thanked me." He was silent then and I finally said, "I wish that hadn't been just pudding. Maybe after we get to the Moon, you'll do one that'll last longer than just green pudding." Mr. Ross laughed and messed up my hair. "Eternal Art. That's what everyone always wants." "Well, there's nothing wrong with eternal, is there? Why don't you do a great big thing on one of the Moon mountains, Mr. Ross?" He laughed again. "I used to think about doing just that. But now I like the pudding things better." "I'll try to understand that, too," I said. "Colors, #," goes up as I press another button. It expands rainbows. Colors  never heard of or thought of drift and float. "A long time ago, I decided it," Mr. Ross said. "I was with friends, out on the beach in the summer, drinking wine and saying good things and thinking good things and looking at the Moon. And I decided then that, someday, I was going to take all my money and turn everything I could into money and use it to run away to the Moon and live there for as much longer as I had and then be buried there. Tommy's braces and Mary Ellen's college and all of those things would just have to take care of themselves. I decided that it was my money and I'd spend it on myself, no matter how guilty it might make me feel." "I'm glad you're my friend," I said. "I'm glad I don't have to go to the Moon by myself." "After we get to the Moon, I'll make something for you out of something just a little more eternal than green pudding. Chuck. Maybe it'll even be eternal enough so that someday you can use it to help you get something you want very, very much." I didn't understand. "Well, the last year and a half has been just one big garage sale. Chuck. I've sold things I thought I never could part with. But now my last art show's all put together and finished and my ticket's paid for and I'm on my way. I'm on my way." "Won't you miss your relatives just a little?" He just laughed. "I hope you'll never really understand that." "Wonderful Dragon, high and far away, is fading, fading, tattering away. The incredibly thin film light for many minutes. Now it is pulling apart, ending.  press the button for "Flamingo Summer, #," but I don't see its little rocket engine flame and lift because there are tears in my eyes and when you cry in an air-suit, you just have to wait a while. Finally, though, I can see again, and I watch the flamingo arc across the Lunar skies. And the next day, I began to understand about Mr. Ross's family. Each morning of the five days it took at the Lunar Departure Processing Station was filled with all kinds of medical tests. Finally, I got through for the day and went racing through the living area to go to the shop where there were newspapers for sale. Mr. Ross was sitting in the lobby and I saw the headlines of the newspaper he held before I saw his face. the headlines said. And there were big pictures of both Mr. Ross and me from the Departure Center's files. "We're in the papers," I yelled. And then Mr. Ross looked at me. For a long time, he looked at me. And then he smiled. Only this time the smile didn't make him look young and new. It was a different kind of smile. "Yes, we are. Chuck," he said, folding the newspaper and reaching out to mess up my hair. "We're in the papers. We waited too long to run away and now we're in the papers." That afternoon his relatives came. With lawyers. Mr. Ross went away with them, looking very, very old. A little later, I watched as his crates were unloaded from the Moonship and stored away. "Shimmering Star" is next. It rockets up from the dead floor of the Moon and lifts gossamer blue over the sky. "It's what they call 'incompetence,' " my mother said, explaining it to me after I was on the Moon. "It's a legal term used for when someone isn't able to take care of his own business any longer. For when an old person starts doing silly, senile things." "Going away to the Moon isn't incompetent," I said, angry that I was crying where someone could see me. "Red and White Dreams" goes up now, as  touch the ignition button. Scarlet Seabird has disappeared into .tattered, drifting mists. Wonderful Dragon is a shimmering after-image. My allowance was five dollars a week. A real letter to Earth cost almost a dollar a page. Dear Aunt Mavril, This was all my fault. I shouldn't have blabbed about Mr. Ross so you'd put him in the papers and his relatives would find him. But isn't there anything somebody can do? This postage is going to cost me a lot of money, but here's what happened and what Mr. Ross really wanted... Dear Senator Pyrimen, My name is Charles Burke and I'm the youngest person on the Moon and I hope you'll read my letter yourself and help... Dear Mr. President, I am the youngest person on the Moon and hope you can take time from your busy day to read my letter and maybe do something to help Mr. Ross... "Running and Playing" goes into the Lunar sky now. It's all yellow and red streamers, lifting and playing arui shimmering. Dear Mr. Hardesty, My father says you own the biggest magazitie in the world. I hope you'll listen to my problem. I'm the youngest person on the Moon and I only say that so that maybe it will attract your attention, like human interest, so something can be done for my friend, Mr. Ross. I wrote to the President and a lot of senators and everybody, but it just seems that nobody cares... "Blue Winter Storm" rockets into the dark sky, lighting it with jagged clouds and electrical snowfall. She came to our apartment in the evening, almost six months after I got to the Moon. "Youre Charles Burke," the bright, pretty, dark-haired lady said, while behind her a man fiddled with a camera and meters and wires and dials. "I'm Ilona Mosher, with the Columbia Broadcasting Systeip," she said, turning her smile toward my mother and father. "With your permission, I want to interview Chuck. About Paul Ross." "My letters finally worked!" I yelled happily. "Letters?" Ilona Mosher said, puzzled. "I don't know about any letters. But I do know that you're the youngest person on the Moon and that you were a friend of Paul Ross. He was a very well-known artist and, now that he's dead, we want to do a story on your friendship. An old, old man and a young..." "What did you say?" I shouted at her. "Twilight Thought" is the next cannister. It is a warm mixture of beiges and greens and dusky, burnt oranges. It's not bright and toy-like tike most of the others. But it is beautiful against the dark sky. The judge pounded for quiet. "In view of all the unusual publicity which has surrounded this case of the probate of the estate of Paul Ross, I am going to ask a favor of the attorneys." After talking with them in a low voice, the judge said, "Because of the youth of the young man who has made such a long journey to come here as a 'friend of the court,' the attorneys have agreed that I may talk with him myself, in my chambers for a time. Court will be in recess for thirty minutes." "Autumn Unicorn" flies out into the airless sky. It is all scintillating whites and pearls, with golden hooves and silver horn and red, red mouth and eyes of glowing green. I wished that I were back on the Moon again when the judge said he was ready to announce his decision. My mother had told me again and again what would happen. I hated the smiling faces of Mr. Ross's relatives who were about to get his money. Money they were going to get just because they had said he was a crazy old man. And sure enough, the judge said, "Under the laws of this state, the court has no choice but to find that the estate of Paul Ross is to be divided among his nearest surviving relatives, his three nephews and two nieces." There was hubbub in the courtroom. The relatives all smiled and hugged each other. The newsmen worked their cameras and recorders. The Judge pounded his gavel. "This court is not used to such uproar," he said when he could be heard. "We'll have no more of it until I have quite finished." I wished I were gone. "It is within the province of this court to direct that the estate first settle debts of the deceased before the settlement to the heirs and to honor the last wishes of the deceased." The nieces and nephews shrugged. The show is almost over with now. Even if it's a year late, this is Mr. Ross's show. He wanted it. He planned it. He built the little rockets and fitted their interiors with all their beauty and fineness. Now  send off "Spring Rain" and the sky fills with sparkling electrical droplets. There is just one more cannister left and there are tears in my eyes again. The relatives. Surely, they're watching this from Earth. Everyone else is. I hope they're finally realizing that Mr. Ross was more than Just Tommy's braces and those other things they wanted. The crates of cannisters weighed a lot. But there was still a lot of money left after their shipping charges were paid. Mr. Ross had planned to use that money to live on. The last cannister is marked "Friendship." There are so many tears in my eyes now that  have to feel for the button that sets it off.  think how the judge smiled when  told him how much Mr. Ross had wanted to be buried on the Moon. The lead-lined casket and vault were very, very heavy and wonderfully expensive to ship.  Editorial "You've got to be a believer!" -- D.D. Harriman in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" azine is more than a job. It is a vocation. Oh, there have been those who treated it as just a job. But they generally haven't lasted very long, nor have they been long remembered. Only those who have shown a genuine love for science fiction have been honored in its annals. One might assume that being an occasion of great pride and satisfaction to the one so honored. And it is. But that pride and satisfaction is mixed with more than a little humility. It is impossible to stand in the company of such great predecessors as H.L. Gold and Frederik Pohl and Jim Baen and not feel humility. that whatever success I may achieve will depend not only on doing a job well in the ordinary sense of the word, but on living up to the duties demanded only of a science-fiction editor. A science-fiction editor, unlike editors in many another field, can never depend entirely on knowledge or attitudes developed in the past. He has a responsibility to know how science fiction is developing as a genre, to contribute as best he can to furthering that development, to perceive new literary frontiers and recognize and encourage the writers who explore them. Most forms of popular literature are static forms. Westerns, detective stories, gothic romances and the like have been written in pretty much the same way for decades, even for generations. However well they say it, they rarely have anything new to say. But science fiction is an evolving form of literature. Like other forms, it has its roots in the past -- as far back as (take your pick) H.G. Wells, Jules Verne or Mary Shelley. But it is never completely bound by the past. No sooner do mainstream critics complain that "science has caught up with science fiction" than sf breaks out in entirely new directions. Many people think of literary evolution only in terms of literary techniques -- old wine in new bottles. But the strength of science fiction, much as it has benefited from advances in style and narrative, has always been in its thematic evolution. It is the literature of man in relation to change, and as human society itself evolves, the number of imaginable futures multiplies. We must learn to assimilate not only new possibilities, but new attitudes about those possibilities. People look on science fiction as entertainment, and it is. But it is entertainment for people who think. In what other branch of popular literature could there be an audience for a novel like Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, the first utopian novel that is really a novell Where else but in a magazine like their stride the strange customs and moralities that are normal in the future imagined by John Varley? Among some older readers of science fiction, there is still talk of the Golden Age of the #'s, when under the late John W. Campbell, the genre first began to take itself seriously -- and win the beginnings of serious recognition. But the Golden Age is really now. More people are reading science fiction than ever before, and they have better science fiction to read than ever before. The growing acceptance of sf and the increasing quality of writing in the genre are even more important than the much-publicized college courses. And the best is perhaps yet to be. Last month in these pages, two reviewers offered contrasting reactions to Star Wars. One called it an imaginative breakthrough in sciencefiction movies; the other a clicheridden space opera. Both were right. The movie was a space opera right out of the #'s -- but look at what the space operas of the #'s led to. double suns, bizarre aliens that are not meant to be merely frightening, a vast Galactic Empire in which Earth (if it exists) is too insignificant to be mentioned. Tomorrow these viewers will be ready for Dune or The City and the Stars or Way Station or The Left Hand of Darkness. How strange it seems that barely ten years ago James Blish still warned against "incest" -- the mention of science fiction in a sciencefiction story, as if sf were a part of human culture, worthy of notice outside its (then) small readership. Science fiction is part of our culture now. Very flattering -- but also a bit unsettling for those who take seriously both science fiction and its impact on human consciousness. Be that as it may, the Golden Age of science fiction is here -- and as much a part as a new but determined editor can make it. -- j-j psues. Send check or money order to: C.L. 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Phone #-#-# All you need is time travel, and you can change the course of history -- sure! In practice, it's not as easy as it sounds; and even when you think you've got the hang of it... Lord Corwin had never wanted to be the King of Amber. But now fate had cast him in a far more important role, for his father's attempt to restore the Pattern of existence had failed. Our religions are matters of faith. Theirs was something more -- and that was more than humanity could bear. She had to bring him back, she said, to avoid interfering with the past. But would he or his followers believe? Each generation, the soul of man must reassert itself against the Machine, whether a steampowered hammer or a... They were condemned to fight to the death -- no holds barred. But even the condemned can have consciences. is Beautiful, Jerry tells us, had some pretty ugly ideas. on other toes, too. Well, grist for Directions, anyway! Fandom's favorite gadfly, with advice for the new editor... Gee, maybe we should have him edit our manuscripts! A couple of femmefans sound off. And Jerry has to do some responding. SF calendar inside back cover Cover by Joan Woods Interior illustrations by Woods, Mueller, Harlib, Odbert Publishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing # Distributing Corporation. Main offices and editorial office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdaie, N.Y., #. Single copy  I . # . Annual subscription # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second-class postage paid at Scarartale, N.Y., and add M tonal mailing offices. Tbs publisher assume no responsibility for unsoHcNsd matarW. AM atnriaa prbdsd In sue magarine are Action and any similarity between tha char a cters and actual parsons Is coincidental. Piloted In U.SA. ago fleas Anyone can change the past, if he can reach it. But he'd better be careful how The truly terrifying thing about imprisonment was the loneliness. Silverthome's captors treated him with neither kindness nor unkindness, neither respect nor disrespect. Their detachment made his existence pointless, his confinement inhuman, as if he were already dead. In a sense this was true; he was buried -- and far better dead. But even the solace of oblivion was denied him. Stolid guards delivered and retrieved thrice-daily meals, rarely uttering a single syllable since few, if any, knew French or German. And certainly not the archaic peasant tongue once known as English. Each day at mid-afternoon he was escorted from the cell to an exercise cubicle hewn from living rock. He shuffled to and fro and did simple calisthenics while guards armed with sub-machine guns idled in the granite archway. Even then he was taken down a side passageway; he saw no other prisoners. Ever. The days dragged by in sunless isolation -- hopeless days strung together end-to-end to form empty months, vacuous years. James Silverthome had time -- all the time there was -- to examine the circumstances that had precipitated the Great Mistake. Everlastingly, elliptically, he relived the complex events leading to the brink, secondguessing his part in them, then second-guessing his second-guessing until eventually the riddle had neither beginning nor end and the reflexive second-guessing cr#wded his mind full circle in shadowy labyrinths. Perhpas if he had firmly refused to go, had simply said "No!" to Bernard Omsley on that fateful night, it might have sufficed. Perhaps not. For the night Omsley dropped by had made a beginning...    At precisely seven o'clock on a cool September evening in Deutsches Weltanreichsjahr # -- more properly #, remembering the Gregorian calendar -- while carving roast lamb and chatting with his guests, the Gauleiter of Greater Denver and Frau K'astner, Professor James Sil verthome was startled to hear an aircar touch down gently on the roof park of his mountain villa. A chill crawled between his shoulder blades for he knew without considering the matter who it was. Why in God's name had Bernard chosen this particular moment to pay a surprise call? Gauleiter K'astner seemed oblivious to the barely audible thump overhead though Silverthome's wife, Emily, shot James a wary glance over the rim of her wineglass. Careful to make no outward sign of awareness, Silverthome continued his anecdote -- a tidbit of Sans Souci bedroom intrigue garnered during a recent junket to the court of Frederick the Great -- with all the nonchalance he could muster. At the first opportunity, Emily excused herself and went into the kitchen. "Simply fascinating," said K'astner, clicking his tongue. "You are singularly fortunate to have actually walked the earth during such a rich era. We shall expect a book about Friedrich, no?" "I'm anxious to begin it," said Silverthome, covertly studying the other's manner. The Gauleiter seemed relaxed, little resembling the vain, thoroughly Americanized ogre who gave audience in that pompously furnished office overlooking the old Denver Civic Center -- now Erwin Rommel Platz -- with its Wajfen SS shrine where larger-than-life bronze figures of Sepp Dietrich and Jochen Peiper pondered some eternal battlefield from beside the ugly, eighty-eight tank's gun turret. Although he detested the corpulent official, Silverthome's chair of Temporal Research at Goebbels Institut, as well as the revolutionary conspiracy in which he was deeply embroiled, demanded that he and Emily entertain the Kastners on occasion. James had met but a handful of Herrenvolk in his thirty-seven years; most had been political nulls -- scholars and educators like himself -- not German-bom aristocrats of K'astner's stamp. The Gauleiter embodied the casual arrogance of a Berliner bom and bred. But his pedigree was tainted; Silverthome had reason to suspect the Heidelberg scar disfiguring the tyrant's jowl was a product of in-party surgery rather than a dueling sabre's mark of honor. Emily returned, offering a lackluster smile. "Bernard is here," she said in an uncertain voice. The older educator trailed her, his manner frankly embarrassed. "Forgive the intrusion," he said, standing in the doorway. "I should have called first. I had no idea you'd be entertaining guests. I've, uh, rather important news... both sorts." "Always delighted to see you, Bernard. Come have some wine. I believe you already know Herr Doktor und Frau Kastner. ' ' Acknowledging Omsley's bow with a tip of his head, the Gualeiter smiled only with his lips. "Say, I thought I heard someone land a moment ago! How are things at the Institut? Herr Omsley heads the History Department," he reminded his wife, "as well as our Temporal Research Program." Frau Kastner nodded, looking vaguely suspicious. "The department practically runs itself, sir. The, er, reason I've bothered you..." Omsley hesitated. "Jamie, I'm sorry to have to tell you our petition has been denied by Reichskounzel. You won't be allowed to go back and visit the War Years after all." Silverthome cringed inside himself. "That's... definite?" "I'm afraid so." Struggling to mask his disappointment, James said, "You mentioned you had both sorts of news, Bernard?' ' Omsley brightened. "Yes. The thorium expenditure for your long jump to Augustan Rome has been sanctioned," he said. " Arminium , the battle of Teutoberger Wald, the birth of Germanic -- " "Hermann," corrected the Gauleiter vehemently, "not 'Arminius'l 'Arminius' once signified the Latinized, mongrelized barbarian who belonged to Rome. Hermann der Cherusca was the hero's proper name. He realized the folly of his allegiance to Rome, returned to the Cherusci and led them to brilliant victory over Varus and three entire legions. There is a vast difference." " Natiirlich , Herr Gauleiter." Omsley looked contrite. Kastner barked a hearty laugh. "Here am I," he said, patting his wife's hand, "lecturing a pair of famous history professors. Doesn't that strike you as droll, my dear?" Frau Kastner managed a perplexed nod as the corpulent Gauleiter put down his glass -- his fifth serving of California Gewiirtz Traminer -- and rose with difficulty, fiddling with the handle of the SS dagger at his belt. "Jamie," he said expansively, "you must understand something. Your remarkable career in temporal research has not gone unnoticed by the Reich's heirarchy nor, I might add, has it gone unrewarded. But the policy of allowing only selected German-bom party members to revisit the War Years is quite firm. I can't imagine what prompted you to bother petitioning Reichskounzel. There was no hope -- never." "I suppose that's difficult for me to understand, sir." James lifted his hands in frustration. "History is my lifework. Not to be allowed to practice it in the field is -- " "Ah, but we must be realistic." The Gauleiter stamped his foot in vexation. "The young Reich was in dire straits when Dr. Lebe was captured. The so-called Allies had been forewarned of secret weapons -- rockets, atomic bombs, that sort of thing -- never in their wildest imaginings suspecting a 'secret weapon' like the Lebe Technique. Complacent in victory, they allowed Erich Lebe to return from his Soviet nightmare to a conquered, plundered, sundered Germany. "I shan't bore you by retelling the saga -- the achievements of dedicated geniuses who labored twenty-eight years perfecting the mechanics of temporal displacement, Franz Lustmann's heroic probe of the unknown that shaped our modern world. That, gentlemen, is history!" K'astner smacked his lips, savoring the moment. "The Reichsfuhrer, Reichsleiter and Reichskounzel are forsworn to guard the immutability of that history. Quite understandable, is it not? Safeguarding the doorway to the past is a sacred responsibility." "You're correct, of course, Herr Gauleiter," said Silverthome. "Though it's galling not to be trusted." "Trust?" Kastner huffed with self-importance. "Some things, my dear Silverthome, are too important to entrust to any individual. We go back into our past only to learn -- never to touch, disturb or mutilate. The reflexive dangers of promiscuous time travel would be overwhelming." Trying hard to look impressed, Omsley coughed politely into his cupped hand. "An absolutely sound policy, sir. Let me apologize once again for intruding. I really should be running along." "Not at all, Omsley." The official waved airily and sat down to resume his assault on Silverthome's wine rack. "Let us know the details of your projects from time to time, eh?" "Thank you, sir. I shall." "I'll walk you to your aircar, Bernard." Silverthome bowed toward the K'astners. "Will you excuse us?"    They rode upward in the lift, not speaking as if by mutual agreement. Stepping outdoors on the roofpark, they could see the outskirts of Greater Denver Gauleitung forming a sprinkle of lights northward while the Rampart Range reared stark and rugged against the azure Colorado twilight. James Silverthome was scowling. "That tears it!" he said. "I suppose there's no way to appeal Reichskounzel' s decision." Omsley's low-voiced response amazed him. "You're going." "What? But you told me -- " "Shush-h-h! You'll go exactly as planned," said the older man, "with one glaring difference -- forget about leaving from the Carlsbad Caverns site. Faking a Roman time-jump would never work. Their bloodhounds would sniff out the variance in energy expended on a shorter junket. You'll be going from orbit. Temporal displacement of a double will make the figures balance at Carlsbad." "Orbit? It's that desperate?" "Desperate indeed!" Omsley slowed his walk, looking directly into Silverthome's eyes. When he spoke, his tone was soft, biting. "Jamie, this Reich of theirs makes medieval feudalism look downright permissive by comparison. It's nothing but monolithic, iron-handed domination of the entire globe and every human being on it. You must go back, you must succeed. Powell volunteered to double for you at last night's cell meeting." Silverthome's mind was racing. "Bernard, how in hell do I get into orbit? Or down, for that matter?" "Henderson has developed an ablative pressure suit," explained Omsley. "You'll be put aboard a shuttle to Walkiire Space Station, posing as a purser. Good thing your German's excellent." "Whew! You're scaring me, Bernard. Not certain I can be expected to do acrobatics or -- " "We haven't much time," said Omsley, paying no heed to Silverthorne's objections. "Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo are both close behind us. Graham was picked up night before last. They've broken three other high-ranked cells during as many months. That's why I barged in this evening under Tubby's nose. Our charade may lull his suspicions." "Um, maybe. I wouldn't count on it. You were saying... ?" "The temporal device is already aboard Walkiire ," pursued the other. "The necessary few grams of thorium isotope are in a convenience locker, waiting for you. I won't tell you how many lives that thorium cost us. But your jump's short, Jamie -- less than a century and a half. Henny has it all arranged." "And I'll come down where? More important, when?" Omsley pursed his lips. "Central Europe is all Henderson can promise, sometime between February and June, nineteen forty." "Forty? Sounds a bit premature to me. We've no way of being certain?" "None," said Bernard Omsley. "Arguments have raged for decades over whether to aim for a later or an earlier period in the War. The answer lies somewhere in their archives, for all the good that does. We have Goebbels' pretentious tomes, plus the works of those other Nazi bores. How much is true? Your guess is as valid as anyone's. "The alliances with Italy and Japan can probably be taken for granted. Recovering the Sudetenland, annexing Austria, swallowing Czechoslovakia and overrunning Poland all seem likely. But that lightning strike through the Ardennes, the quick collapse of the low countries and France, sound too pat. "Then we are told England lost an entire army on the beach at Dunkirk, that the Wehrmacht won a glorious triumph over British shore defenses in the Sea Lion channel crossing, consolidated the western territories for a year, then turned eastward, violating the Soviet Pact, and decimated Byelorussia and the Ukraine. Kiev, Kharkov, Stalingrad and Leningrad were devastated. Moscow was totally obliterated from the air. Victory piled upon victory! Who can believe... "Their... 'history' is damned hard to swallow." "An understatement, Jamie." Omsley turned his back to the breeze, cupping his hands to light a cigarette. "But who can argue with films of Rommel's Panzers rolling through Alexandria to the Suez, of flaming American B-#'s that braved the Atlantic to thrust at Germany's heartland, or the V-# rocket strikes on New York, Chicago, even Los Angeles? "And the final duplicities after President Dewey's capitulation -- Nazi atomic warheads raining on Nagasaki and Tokyo-Yokohama, with once-proud Italy a vassal state." James Silverthome shivered slightly although the night was mild. "And I'm supposed to change all that, single-handed? How?" "You'll have to play it by ear, Jamie. No one ever said it would be easy. You and your talents are probably our single remaining trump. We must play it now, however long the odds, or possibly relinquish it forever and make their Tausendjahr Reich a reality. You must admit they've made one helluva start!" Silverthome's eyes narrowed. "I think Kastner was teasing us downstairs," he said slowly. "He said something about a 'sundered' Germany. Wonder what he could've meant by that. Bernard, this whole scheme is crazy! Franz Lustmann went back and reshuffled the deck, altered the outcome of the War. I'll wager that fat slug downstairs knows precisely how it was done." Omsley shrugged. "Undoubtedly. But don't waste your hatred on Tubby. He's the most completely Americanized Gauleiter in the country. Warring cultures collide, Jamie. Neither the victors nor the vanquished escape unchanged. You'll have to admit Kastner has been a valuable asset, if you want to be objective about it. "The vital thing to remember is this -- Lustmann 's venture was successful. If it can be done once, it can be done again." "Can it?" objected Silverthome with no little sarcasm. "Lustmann returned carrying encyclopedic data about the real War. He faced a monumental task, granted. But compared to mine, it was -- " "I know, I know," said Omsley quickly. "But it isn't hopeless. Lustmann's a demi-god in their pantheon, a world hero. Every schoolchild in five continents learns to venerate that face. We've made a fair inference where he went and approximately when." Silverthome groaned. "Bernard, he was somewhere in Europe sometime between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen fifty. It will be much, much worse than searching for the proverbial needle. And if I should find him -- " "He was in Berlin," snapped Omsley, "about the middle of nineteen forty. We're staking everything on that fact and you'd better accustom yourself to believing it." Silverthome's grunt was noncommital. "Sorry," said the other with a sigh. "Let me finish. We've rounded together every authentic twentieth-century Reichsmark we could beg, borrow or pilger. It comes to only a few thousand but that's enough to keep you from starving until you can steal -- or earn -- some more. There's a little jewelry too and papers presenting you as an Austrian or Italian freelance correspondent. Select the most appropriate when you ground, then burn the other papers. "Henderson has made provision for two hundred and twenty pounds of transposable mass -- you and everything inside your p-suit, including Lederhosen and a rucksack. Pass yourself off as a goldbrick hiking about on a Wanderjahr until you atemporize. And I want you to spend lots of extra time on that. You spent mere days before getting to work in eighteenth-century Potsdam. But that was only research. This jump is for keeps!" Omsley stepped on his cigarette, then opened the hatch of his seven-place aircar. He held out his hand. "Hals und Beinbruchl" Silverthome stood with the breeze tousling his hair, shaking his colleague's hand. He felt enormous apprehension. "Sounds like I may break my fool neck as well," he said. "Are you going to Carlsbad with Powell?" Omsley 's nod was curt. "In the morning. We hope to get him off by nightfall. Henderson's man will collect you about noon, take you over to Raketenflugplatz and see you aboard the shuttle. Be ready, Jamie. We're counting on you." Silverthome's head bobbed woodenly. "I'll be waiting. Luck!" "And to you, Jamie. I expect we'll both need all we can get." Silverthome stepped back as Omsley lighted the glowcoils and wound up the first-state turbines. The engines caught, continued their octave-by-octave climbing whine. With a sharp premonition of finality, he watched the aircar vector away into the darkness. Downstairs, when the lift door opened, he constructed an ingratiatGauleiter and his lumpish woman, discovering that his appetite had fled.    "Braun, you slow-witted sluggard! We dock in ten minutes. I want that freight manifest reconciled. You hear?" Suppressing a curse, Purser Braun-Silverthome flung aside the squeezebottle of coffee. " Jawohl , Herr Dries. " He hooked a belt ring to the aft-going safety line per regulations and pulled himself smartly down the companion way, fuming. Neither Omsley nor Henderson's man had bothered to tell him that the chief purser -- a loudmouthed bully with a natural bent for tormenting underlings -- was not privy to the conspiracy. The chief purser had made Silverthome's life miserable ever since liftoff. He groped his way into "G" cargo hold, hating weightlessness and its uncertainties. He had also learned to despise the close confines and unappetizing smells of the earth-to-orbit shuttle Mecklenburg. The shuttle would be maneuvering to dock with Walkiire Space Station at any instant and he wondered if he would be able to hear the acceleration warning while floating about down below in the craft's bowels. Silverthome made a wry face and searched out the nearest convenient handhold, then began checking off numbered cargo modules against a manifest. Emily was in his thoughts. She had not been easy to deceive; she knew him too well. There had been no safe way to tell her the truth, of course. They had kissed good-bye on the roofpark in the blaze of noon, she believing him bound on a research junket to Augustan Rome. Hazardous, yes, but he had convinced her (as he always managed to do) that the experience he had acquired in visiting one era or another tended to lessen the manifold dangers involved. Emily had gone along, as was her customary pretense. She knew that he never took chances on any junket and that he was even more careful in antiquity. The sly grate of the opening hatch made Silverthome pause. That devil of a chief purser again, no doubt, sneaking around looking for an excuse to make life even more hellish. Well, this time the bastard would find Purser Braun hard at work. A rumbling voice behind him said, "Jamie." Silverthome whipped himself about. "Henderson?" The redhaired man had grown a wispy auburn beard since their last encounter. He was carrying a medical valise and seemed to be in a hurry. "What the hell are you doing aboard?' ' Henderson closed and battened the hatch before answering. "Lost your taste for blondes, Professor? Or maybe you didn't notice that platinum witch making eyes at you just after liftoff." "I... no. Was I supposed to?" The other's grin was fleet, wolfish. "Anyone who's still warm would notice Helga. We were trying to get you aside and cue you, Jamie. The scheme has gone sour. Looks like we're in a footrace." Silverthome's throat constricted. "To... get me off?" "Right. We're still in the ball game but it will be touch and go." Henderson snapped open the black bag. "Here," he directed, "doff that silly uniform and put these on." He held out shorts and a singlet. "You're becoming a passenger -- a cardiac patient bound for Luna. Helga's going to be your nurse." Silverthome glanced anxiously toward the hatch. "Henny, the chief purser is liable to poke his nose in here and -- " "Uh-uh," Henderson interrupted. "The chief purser got kind of sleepy a while ago. He won't bother anyone for hours. Hurry! We want to be ready when this bucket mates with the station." A warning klaxon groaned distantly, catching Silverthome dressing. Awkwardly he followed Henderson to a stanchion rising from among the stacked and shackled cargo modules. Both men seized handholds; a mild surge of weight and the conducted thunder of thrusters came and went. There was another brief burst, then a mild jar. A sighing chuff of air announced the shuttle's docking. "Relax a minute," said Henderson, " 'till the passengers begin to disembark. Helga has some medical stage props waiting inboard. Be sure to let me tow you up into the freefall rigging -- and make it look good, real good." The transverse companionway leading inboard from the working decks was deserted and they encountered no one until entering the main passageway. Silverthome let "Doctor" Henderson precede him, pulling himself hand-over-hand along the line toward the airlock. Suddenly Henderson checked himself. He yawed about, tightlipped. "Look behind me," he said. "What do you see?" Silverthome peered over Henderson's shoulder toward the lock chamber that interfaced the shuttle and Walkilre Space Station. Three men and a blonde nurse were floating near the freefall rigging that was now aswarm with off-loading passengers. One of the men casually held the pretty nurse's arm. "Helga's been scragged." "Damn." Henderson doubled his fists. "Last of the ninth, one out and no one on base. All we can do is sacrifice. Now listen, and listen good, Professor. Omsley and Powell were picked up this morning at Carlsbad. Powell suicided but Bernard... don't suppose you knew but Bernard's a Catholic." "I... no, I didn't know. He'll be made to talk." "Yeah. If he hasn't already." Henderson swore bitterly. "They were at your home about three hours before this bucket lifted off. That's why I came along. We got Emily safely underground so don't fret about her. But I'm afraid they got a good fix on me. I had to ventilate one of 'em to get away." "I... I'll never be able to thank you, Henny!" "So don't try. Now stamp this in your memory. The thorium is in locker #, third tier to the left, in the transient passengers' lounge. Here's the key. Take the thorium down to the nadir stack -- we're in a zenith berth here -- and look up a maintenance tech named Faigele. Tell him a dirty joke so's he'll know who you are. He'll get your p-suit, thruster bottle and other gear and show you which airlock to use. Wearing your false tooth?" Silverthome nodded. "Okay, here's your return ticket. It's pre-tuned." Henderson rummaged in the valise and passed over a small capsule. "Just like on all your other trips, Professor. Twist the tooth to the right and your accumulated temporal potential will flex you back into Carlsbad's receptor field like an unleashed rubber band." Henderson's lips worked as he felt for something deeper in the satchel. There was a barely audible click. The redhead smiled ruefully. "Guess this's the way she falls out. Don't feel bad. I've got some scores to settle." Silverthome had seen the hastily wrapped dynamite sticks. He said nothing. "One more quick word," said Henderson, "then you better scat before we begin to attract attention. They may call my bluff and shoot me straight off. I'll try to buy you ten or fifteen minutes. "When you're suited up and outside, lower the reticle in your headpiece and center Polaris, then hit the red chin lever. Transfer injection will put you in a ninetyfour-mile perigee. You're more or less phased in synch with earthspin, nineteen-forty -- close as we could calculate, anyhow -- and from what I saw during ascent boost, you should have about a half-hour wait until you see yourself coming up on Europe. "When the British Isles roll over the limb, turn one-eighty degrees to your line of flight and chin the yellow lever. If there's cloud cover, you'll have to interpolate your position from whatever terrain you're able to see. Okay?" "Got it." Henderson grunted approval. "The retro sequence will kick hell out of you," he warned. "You won't mass much but you'll have lots of kinetic. Then comes the heat wave, don't let it scare you. An aneroid switch will trigger temporal transition at about thirteen thousand feet -- take you right out of your p-suit -- hopefully over Germany, Austria or Hungary. For Chrissakes, watch out for mountains! If you come down over the Alps, the Dolomites or whatever, you'll have to do some fancy riser work to spill air and change direction. That could get sticky. Pop your chute as soon after transition as you get your bearings. Have all that?" "I think so, Henny." "Great! Shake my mitt, Jamie, then beat it out the cargo hatch and don't look back. Remember, we're all betting on you!" Silverthome clasped Henderson's free hand, smiling gratefully although his eyes were misted. He whirled and tugged himself back along the freefall safety line.    He wended his way aft like an agile spider, near-colliding with a pair of crewmen who swore after him, not giving chase because they took him for a passenger. He snubbed to a stop at the main passageway, burning his hands on the nylon line, and cautiously peeked around the comer. A long procession of slowly moving cargo modules was being conveyored through the deserted passageway and "up" into Walkiire Space Station. He jerked back his head. Two bland-faced Gestapo assassins were guarding the cargo hatch. Silverthome's mind raced. Henderson had promised only minutes, several of which had already fled. It would be hopeless to try bluffing past two professionals. He hadn't worked out in a freefall gym for years and his chances of physically handling one of them, not to mention the other, were close to nil. He stiffened, muttering, "Of course!" and pulled himself back down the passageway. Four stevedores were emptying "D" hold, preparing to move the conveyor head into "E." He prayed as he opened "G" compartment's hatch. The prayer was answered; no one was there. He flew to the cargo stack, finding the purser's uniform still wadded between two modules. He almost tore it in pulling it on over the shorts and singlet. Then he smoothed his hair, donned the cap and was back in the passageway in seconds. Silverthome breathed deeply, rehearsing the scene in his mind. How would it play best? Sincerity? No, not with Gestapo. His best bet might be to pretend willy-nilly, scatterbrained agitation -- if he could summon the guts to pull it off. He rounded the comer and snubbed, gave one long-armed tug toward the cargo hatch in the manner of an old spacehand and sailed blithely into the rigging. The net recovered from the impetus of his plunge, going slack. He reached for an "upper" rung. "You seemed awfully rushed," said the man in the gray jumpsuit. "May I have a look at your papers, bitteT ' Silverthome glanced at the swastika-bordered Sicherheitsdienst medallion in the man's open palm. Not Gestapo after all. These were SD -- real pros! "Of course, sir." He hooked an elbow through the rigging and tugged out his wallet. The SD man looked over the forged spaceman's papers. "Braun, Wilhelm G.," he said boredly. "He would seem to be a purser." The man's partner consulted a list. "Where were you bom?" "Dusseldorf, sir." "Ah, yes. And why such a sweat to get inboard, Wilhelm?" 'Silverthome swallowed a lump. "I... there's a young lady -- a passenger." He looked from one agent to the other. "You've never seen such a Schatzel I, er, must be back in fifteen minutes -- the cargo, you know." The man in the gray jumpsuit snickered unpleasantly, returning Silverthome's wallet. "Don't you know crewmen aren't supposed to chase passengers, Braun? Oh, I suppose we can't interfere with your love life, can we? Run along, though a quarter-hour tryst seems hardly worth the effort. Come back promptly or we'll be looking for you. Versteh's duT ' "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Silverthome swarmed "up" the rigging. Look for me in fifteen minutes, you son-of-a-bitch, and you'll have some search! He ducked into the first washroom he encountered along the hub corridor, shucked the uniform in a booth, came out and stuffed it into a waste receptacle, then zipped along the freefall safety line toward the spin elevators. He encountered only a few stevedores and stray crewmen from the Mecklenburg, none of whom gave him a second glance. Beyond the interlock chamber connecting the berthing stack with the station proper, the area became more populated. He fidgeted during the interminable wait while the elevator matched spin with the passenger terminal, underwent a momentary pang of coriolis-induced dizziness, then relaxed as weight returned to his feet. Joining the stream of passengers shopping along the midway, he kept his head down, trying to make his haste inconspicious. He turned right into the large alcove adjacent ot the transient lounge, wishing he had time to reconnoiter before moving toward the locker. But seconds were dribbling away into precious minutes. Silverthome pulled the key from the singlet's slash pocket. Locker # opened easily to reveal a small, innocent-looking cube of dark material. He remembered to breathe again, offering Omsley a heart-felt mental salute. Bernard had either managed to hold out or purposely refrained from learning the locker's number or location. The latter seemed more likely, knowing his thoroughness. The cube was oddly difficult to manage; neither shorts nor singlet afforded an adequate pocket. He was forced to carry the leadshielded nugget of thorium isotope against his leg. It spoiled his gait in the centripetal gee field, lending him an eccentric lope. The elevator at last spun to a stop and a zero-gee warning sign blinked to remind him to use the freefall safety rigging. He hugged the thorium close and caught a line, this time heading "down" into the nadir berthing stack. He had just cleared the interlock chamber when an alarm squalled through the stack. An iris opening of resilient material squeezed shut behind him, then heavy doors rumbled closed. His margin of safety had been a matter of only feet. Silverthome pressed on, ignoring the stevedores and techs who swam idly into the main corridor, curious about the commotion inboard. He caught the eye of a man who wore pale green coveralls with the "Raumhansa" stitched over his heart. "Pardon. Know where I can find a tech named Faigele?" "Chris Faigele? Sure. Maintenance depot, beyond bulkhead sixty-one." "Vielen dank." "Say, friend," Raumhansa called after him, "what's going on inboard? Why have they sealed up?" "Sorry, I've no idea." Silverthome pulled his way along the stack. Bulkhead #, #... He ticked off three more and clasped the nylon line to slow his plunge. God, there couldn't be much time left. But there it was -- bulkhead #! He followed a transverse line leading into an open hatchway. A dozen jumpsuited technicians radiated in all attitudes around a squawkbox, listening to a blaring announcement of some sort. Before Silverthome could approach them, someone grasped his arm. "This way." "Skip the joke," called the tech over his shoulder. "I've heard them all. I didn't think you were going to make it." "Neither did I." Silverthome followed the man in a series of caroms from handhold to handhold through several compartments crowded with electronic consoles. They entered a small airlock service-chamber containing racks of tools. A number of slack presure suits were stowed along the curving bulkhead. Faigele battened the hatch. "What do you mass?" "One seventy-six stripped," said Silverthome. "Um, close enough. Henny calculated to the ounce. Strip to the skin, if you will, and put these on. May I have the thorium?" Silverthome tore off his clothes, donning scratchy woolen underwear, well-worn Lederhosen, a linen shirt, knee-length socks and hiking boots. The rough tweed jacket had leather protective patches sewn at the elbows. He stuffed the Tyrolean felt hat with a feather in its brim into the jacket's pocket. Faigele was holding out a battered canvas rucksack. "Strap it around your middle. The chute's a backpack. Easy now!" The tech fastened an aluminum band housing the temporal generator under Silverthorne's arms, then did up the fastdisconnect clamps. "Comfortable? Now the chute, then we'll -- " Something nudged Walkiire Space Station with savage force. A lowfrequency conducted rumble rattled loose equipment. Silverthome cried, "Henderson!" Faigele's nod was solemn. " Ja , there was a report of a man with a bomb in the zenith stack. I assumed he was Henny. Come! We'll take advantage of the confusion. Radar might miss you altogether during the hubbub." Silverthome floated behind Faigele to a rack of pressure suits, allowing the man to help cram him -- gear, chute, temporal device and all -- into a strangely bulky p-suit. Only a two-inch peephole remained in the fishbowl; the remainder had been opaqued with a thickly sprayed white gunk. "Hurry!" Faigele motioned for him to turn and attached a large thruster bottle to the suit's rear mounting pads. "Try your red chin lever now." Silverthome glanced in the prism viewer above his forehead. The red lever was on the left. He craned to depress it. " Ganz gut ! You have juice to the squib." Faigele twisted home the electrical connector. "Red's for transfer orbit. Yellow's for retro. Henny gave you the drill, didn't he?" "Yes." "I'll seal you then, and you're on your way. Luck!" Silverthome bumbled and clanged his way into the airlock like an ungainly teddy bear. He fretted, hearing the conducted hum of pumps scavenging air, feeling uncomfortable swaddled like a baby in the heavy outdoor clothing. The sound of pumps dwindled, died. He waited until the light winked green and the outer hatch cycled open, felt for the handhold, took one agonized breath and pulled himself into the endless night. Three vessels limned in earthlight were berthed in the nadir stick -- a pair of dartlike shuttles and a blunt-ended space-to-space lunar transport. He clutched the rung of the handhold. There was nothing "beneath" him but Earth -- immense, cloud-draped and lovely. Silverthome wrenched himself about and grabbed another rung, managing to lock both boots against the station's skin. Then, squatting he flexed the knee joints to the limit of the p-suit's articulation. Letting go, he drove hard with both legs and suddenly he was flying through vacuum with no sense of motion whatsoever. He waited until his modest momentum had carried him far enough out that he would not be a primary radar object in the station's traffic-control monitors; then he threw out an arm and a leg on the left side. The resultant gradually spun him. He lowered the reticle in his headpiece by adroit use of his chin and searched for the Pole Star, a task make difficult by the tiny window in the fishbowl's thermal compound. There was Gemini. He corrected the residual axial spin, throwing his head back against the padded rest. The Dipper crawled into view. When Polaris swam into the reticle, he stabilized awkwardly and chinned the red lever. A mild roar beat in his ears. A strong, steady shove imparted pressure to the small of his back. Professor James Silverthome was on his way.    He almost made it across the unpaved cowtrail of a road he had spotted from on high but the wind refused to carry the chute as far as he thought it would. Instead of landing in the inviting meadow, he fell among a clump of shaggy firs bordering the forest. Instinctively he raised one arm to protect his face, sensing fragrant boughs whip past. Then, with a wrenching jar, he was hanging in the late-moming sunshine, listening to the wind soughing among the branches. The ripped chute was neatly impaled on a treetop perhaps twenty feet above his head. The ground below was obscured by spreading limbs but judging from a patch of meadow visible across the fenced road, he was no more than ten or fifteen feet above ground. Not being able to see below made things difficult; a fence, a hay rick or even a farmer's bull could be under the tree. "Da ist erl " cried a childish voice. Two boys in their early teens ran up the rutted road toward him to join a third, younger boy who excitedly pointed upward. Silverthome was filled with wild elation; the boy had shouted in German! Switzerland, Austria or possibly even Germany itself! "Are you able to get down, sir?" called one of the boys. "I think so. What lies underneath this limb?" "Oh, nothing but grass," assured the youngest. "Stand back, then." Silverthome relaxed and undid the parachute's chest catch, raising his arms to slide out of the harness. The fir limb dropped beneath his weight. He pushed it aside as he fell, thrashing the air for balance, landing on his feet and rolling. "Whew! That last step is a crusher!" "Are you hurt, mein Herr ?" "Not at all." Silverthome gained his feet stiffly, smiling as he brushed himself off. "I'm glad you three came along when you did." He had no inkling what names Omsley had invented for hipi, having had no opportunity to open the rucksack and examine his phony papers. "I'm Wilhelm Braun. What are your names?" The boys formally introduced themselves as Karl, Stefan and Heinz. Karl, the oldest, swept the sky with a puzzled squint. "We saw no aeroplane, Herr Braun. No machine was in sight when you drifted down." Silverthome held his smile; the choice of tales was limited. "It was a sailplane, Karl. I found myself trapped in an updraft and couldn't manage to lose altitude. It was then a question of jumping, freezing to death or suffocating from lack of air to breathe." "Wunderschden!" exclaimed young Heinz. "Your craft was too high to be seen?" asked the persistent Karl. "I was very high," confided Silverthome, and that was certainly true enough. "What is that strange thing around your waist, Herr Braun?" "This? Oh, it's part of the belt that holds one in place while soaring." Silverthome fingered the temporal generator's shell, now bereft of both generator and thorium isotope. "I jumped too quickly to bother disconnecting it." "I shouldn't wonder that you were frightened, Herr Braun. Very frightened." Heinz was round-eyed. "I must confess that I was," said Silverthome, thinking that it had been more like naked terror than simple fear. He stretched, stamping the ground to settle the rucksack on his shoulders. "I must learn to be more careful. Well, my friends, which of you knows the way to the nearest town?" "Winterlingen is down this road two kilometers, sir, though I've never heard it called a 'town' before." Karl was grinning. "Danke. Say, my parachute seems tom beyond repair. You three may have it if you can figure out a way to get it down." That notion excited the boys. They immediately began engineering methods of recovering the tom chute. " Wiedersehenl " called Silverthome over his shoulder. He swung a leg over the split-rail fence and set out along the cowtrail toward Winterlingen. It was Germany -- no borders to cross! He congratulated himself, striding along through the gloomy fir forest in the best possible spirits. He was here, alive and well, strolling in the balmy sunshine of Adolf Hitler's Dritte Reich, which was still in its infancy if Henderson had done his homework properly. Thoughts of the red-haired martyr saddened him. When the boys were out of sight, he went behind some trees to relieve himself, then eased the rucksack from his back. He removed the aluminum shell of the temporal device and hurled it into a heavy thicket, pocketed the currency, stowing the small handful of jewelry in an inside pocket, and examined the forged papers. Was his German sufficiently accent-free that he could pass himself off as an Austrian? Probably. Austria was -- would be? -- an allied state if the Anschluss had already taken place. Tenses were something he would have to watch. Goebbels' pretentious tomes recording World War II were no longer a history to be taken for granted. Silverthome thrilled again, mentally pinching himself. He studied the Austrian papers; he was now Hans Steyr, a free-lance correspondent from Salzburg. The photo, naturally, was one he'd had taken when applying for a Vergangenkarte in #. The Austrian cover would be much simpler than the other. His Italian was ragged and he no longer felt comfortable speaking it. Mind made up, he found matches in the tweed jacket and burned the unneeded papers, smearing the ashes with the hell of his boot. Then he resumed his walk, meeting only a lone farmer driving a muledrawn cart, nodding pleasantly. In twenty minutes he could see a church spire poking over the firs. Winterlingen turned out to be an enchanting village nestled among rolling, fir-covered Black Forest slopes, containing a tiny bit of green in the square called Keinath's Park, a Bierstube, a small inn, a cobbler's shop and several dozen neat, half-timbered houses climbing the gentle rise behind the church. Thirsty from his hike, Silverthome entered the wood-paneled taproom. The malty, heavy-bodied stein of Dunkelbier served by a taciturn barman exceeded his expectations. Aside from a silent group of eldsters clustered around a card game at the rearmost table, he and the bartender were alone. "Ah-h-h! That's what I needed." Silverthome ordered another. "Do you by chance have a map of the area, my friend? High time I found out just where I'm headed." The barman left off polishing glassware. He rummaged under the counter, unrolling a dog-eared sheet of parchment and slapping it flat on top of the bar. "Winterlingen is... here." He made change for Silverthome's Reichsmark without further comment. Um, he was north and west of the Danube. Stuttgart, the closest major city, was perhaps fifty kilometers to the north while Berlin lay over six hundred kilometers northeast. He could either work his way east to Munich, then head due north, or strike for Stuttgart -- probably the more direct route. "Tell me, sir, does the road lead from here to Stuttgart?" The barman shrugged. "Ja, from Hechingen it does. Walk to Tailfingen and take the path over the hills to Hechingen. That is the simplest." He passed through a slightly larger village called Ebingen but did not stop. By the time he reached Tailfingen, the sun had all but disappeared behind forested hills and ominous saffron clouds were gathering to produce a ruddy sunset glow in the west. He found shelter before the rain came, allowing a cloddish innkeeper to persuade him that the best food and softest beds in all BadenWurttemberg were to be found under his roof. The "veal," flat and unseasoned, was served with I ! #  V pyi Mi ifi tiny dumplings called Spaetzele and with a broad wink and a nod. The "veal" was obviously venison; some unwary stag had wandered too near the inn. Silverthome washed down his meal with two more steins of delicious beer, then sought his room at once, gratefully crawling into the puffy, down-filled mattress. He pulled the comforter around his chin, listening in drowsy contentment to rain drip from the eaves. He had intended to buy a local newspaper but thoughts of trying to read it, bone-tired as he was, made him abandon the notion. Large Gothic numerals on the dining-room calendar had been enough to make his heart pound in his chest. Today was April #, #. If anything he had ever been allowed to learn of 'history' were true, the war machine of Nazi Germany had just fallen on defenseless Denmark and Norway.    Stuttgart, Aalen and northwest into Bavaria through Ansbach to Nuremberg. He slept beneath roadside trees after that first, luxurious night and either hitched rides or simply walked the lightly trafficked country roads. A talkative truck driver bent his ear for thirty kilimeters, then bought him lunch in Bayreuth, insisting that the "war" which so frightened everyone would blow over in a matter of months. Hadn't there been a "war" since last September? Ja, and what had mighty England and France done after their impetuous declarations of war? Absolutely nothing! They were sitting behind the silly Maginot fortifications, sweating little green apples because the Wehrmacht now occupied the Czech, Polish and Scandinavian strategic points after having had the sand to take back what rightfully belonged to Germany in the first place -- the Sudetenland. Silverthome proved such an attentive listener that the truck driver invited him to wait while he ran an errand -- an errand of the flesh as reported later in lurid detail -- then met him faithfully and carried him all the way to Leipzig, where General von Falkenhurst shared the front pages with Admiral Raeder and the triumph of Weseriibung, the High Command's code name for the Norwegian blitz. "Your papers, bittel" Silverthome stumbled to a halt. He had been walking through a small town somewhere in Brandenburg, ambling along lost in thought. He had not seen the policeman until the fellow was almost upon him. "Natiirlich, mein Herr." He remembered to smile. The Schupo was young, with pinched, arrogant features. Silverthome carefully allowed him to glimpse his wad of Reichsmarks. "And how are things in Salzburg, Herr Steyr?" "I'll find out next week. My holiday is almost over." "Um." The policeman handed back his papers and strolled away. Apparently he had thought Silverthome a vagrant. The incident, his first bad moment, made him realize that Lederhosen and a rucksack -- while appropriate for the wilds of southern Germany -- would certainly never do in Berlin. He stopped in Wittenberg to sort through heaps of discards in a second-hand clothing store, emerging in a worn but not-yet-threadbare gray pin-striped suit and rundownat-the-heels black shoes. On April #th, filled with nostalgia, Silverthome stood once again beneath Brandenburger Tor, gazing wistfully down Unter den Linden. In the mid#th century, Frederick the Great's heyday, Berlin's main street had been lined six rows deep in magnificent old lindens. Now there were but four rows of puny, twoor three-year-old trees, planted, he later learned, during construction of a subway running beneath the thoroughfare. Overwhelmed by the city, he skipped lunch and went wandering, finding the streets still village-like, still devoted more to the use of bicycles than automobiles. A few Pferde Droschken lingered here and there -- holdovers from another era. Far fewer uniforms were to be seen than he would have anticipated considering the wartime status of the capital. White-jacketed traffic policemen controlled vehicular flow with Prussian dignity, while now and then the red collar tabs and feldgrau of a Wehrmacht officer caught his eye. He stopped in Friederichstrasse to watch a dozen Hitler Youth troop past. The boys wore short black trousers, brown shirts and black neckerchiefs slipped through braided leather holders. He sat on a bench for an hour, resting, and decided to accept Omsley's advice about atemporizing thoroughly. Feeling "at home" in a foreign era was vital; remaining a stranger would only heighten his chance of making some irreversible error. Then, too impatient to worry further about atemporizing, he hurried off in another fit of sightseeing, strolling down the center mall of U nter den Linden to find that Frederick's old armory, the Zeughaus, had been transformed into a military hall of fame. Intrigued, he inspected suits of #th-century armor, the death mask of von Hindenberg, hundreds of military uniforms, the hat Napoleon had wom on the Waterloo battlefield. All Berlin had changed. Frederick's parade ground was now occupied by the busy acreage of Tempelhof Aerodrome; the red brick mass of Town Hall had been scrubbed of accumulated grime; many open fields and woodlands he vividly remembered from Frederick's time -- mostly in western sectors of the city -- were now a maze of concrete streets and buildings. Ravenous, he treated himself to dinner that evening in a popular restaurant featuring twelve halls, each with its own distinctive theme and decor; Sunny Spain, the American Wild West, the Rhineland and so on. He chose the Bavarian Alps, watching a thunderstorm rake Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak, while his Rouladen lay neglected on the plate. It was quite realistic; thunder crashed and simulated rain drummed on the roof. Then the sun broke through and a yodeler strolled about, comforting the survivors. At dusk he managed to rent a cheerless attic room from a grumpy widow who lived across the Oberbaum Bridge. The room was claustrophobic, smelled of mildew and was bleakly furnished, but all he wanted was a place to sleep. Transportation in Berlin, #, would have done credit to many cities in later eras. A single ticket entitled the holder to transfer at will from subway to surface to elevated in whatever combination he chose. And after his first visit to one, Silverthome decided to use Berlin's postal substations as his "office" since even their branches offered well-lighted public writing rooms with inkpots, blotters and -- wonder of wonders! -- pens that wrote. The next day, April #th, he joined thousand of Berliners congregated along Charlottenburger Chaussee in the wooded Tiergarten to watch Adolf Hitler's birthday parade. The crowd was congenial, enjoying an excited holiday mood. Many individuals had equipped themselves with crude periscopes fashioned from two hand mirrors affixed to a cardboard mailing tube. People stood patiently as the procession of antiquated horse-drawn caissons rumbled past. A few armored cars were interspersed between marching, field-equipped regiments, most Panzers and other modem weapons being engaged in far more important business elsewhere. Finally, behind an enormous military band trumpeting the anthem, wheeled a huge Mercedes tourer bearing the #th century's most reviled despot. Surrounded by blackclad SS elite, Goebbels sat beside him, smiling ferret-like, sharing The Leader's glory. An electric fluid filled the air as Hitler's entourage swept by. Silverthome couldn't tear his eyes away; the scene was straight from one of the stark black-and-white films he had been forced to view ad nauseum in school, and it provoked the same reaction within him -- revulsion combined with a twinge of disbelief. It was incredible that the smug, stereotyped face beneath the billed cap, riding past Silverthorne's vantage point, appearing no larger than one's little fingernail, had been able to place its mark so indelibly upon mankind. Eyes watering, emotions churning, Silverthome turned away. He edged toward the fringes of the crowd, struck by the hopelessness of his situation. The elation he had experienced upon arriving in Berlin was gone. What could one lonely man do to thwart the purpose and might surrounding him in Germany's young Reich ? Omsley's words rang in his mind: Lustmann' s venture was successful. It it can be done once, it can be done again. No reason why it can't, Bernard. No reason, except... Silverthome reprimanded himself for defeatism. He had arrived in Berlin less than two days ago, not long enough to even begin atemporizing. Barring a major miracle, it would take much, much longer to get a whiff of Lustmann's trail. It was one helluva conceit to expect miracles -- major, minor or incidental. How could he hope to locate Franz Lustmann in a thriving meamong the trees, overcome by a dark mood, until a sudden thought occurred to him: If he himself had wanted a glimpse of Hitler today, might not Lustmann also be somewhere here in Tiergarten? Silverthome quickened his pace. The crowd was dispersing, gabbling about how triumphant Der Fuhrer had looked, how gracious he had been in accepting a nosegay from tiny blonde twin girls before the parade, how the war would soon be over and things would return to normal. He searched their faces, ploughing back and forth along the thoroughfare, once hurrying after a tall man who might have been Lustmann, catching up with him to discover a puffing, red-faced eldster who probably walked his four kilometers religiously each day to keep fit. When the crowd thinned, he turned discouraged steps toward the Kroll, a fashionable outdoor restaurant in Tiergarten now doing a land-office business in the parade's wake. He circulated around the edges of the terrace for fifteen minutes. Franz Lustmann was not there. Crestfallen, Silverthome walked about for the remainder of the afternoon, inspecting the elephants at the zoo, lunching at a sidewalk cafe, getting drenched by an unexpected shower. He ended his tour on the Oberbaum Bridge, staring down into the Spree's turgid waters until twilight's chill forced him to climb the creaking stair to his cheerless room. With sudden resolve he switched on the naked bulb, found a pencil and a scrap of wrapping paper and began listing everything he had ever learned about this quarry.    The hero had been young for his mission when Erich Lebe's fanatic team dispatched him in # -- only twenty-eight or thereabouts -- which meant that Silverthome would be searching for someone ten real-time years his junior. Bombastic propaganda eulogies had characterized Lustmann as a physicist, a dedicated scientist who had aided and abetted the perfecting of Lebe's original temporal-transition device. Silverthome suspected that Lustmann was actually more con man than "physicist." The sleek, egotistical gloss of the Reichsheld , pictured in every sort of tribute imagginable, bespoke high intelligence, high resolution and an even higher degree of self-satisfaction. Rumor had it that Lustmann also dabbled in the occult sciences. His official career, after a celebrated return to a world Germany ruled with dazzling thoroughness, had been a checkered affair: four marriages, an international scandal involving a ballerina in Kharkov Gauleitung (officialese had never been able to completely squelch that one) and a dozen dismal dips and rocketing ascents in and out of Party favor, largely because of his lifelong indifference to politics as such. Franz Lustmann had considered himself above mundane matters because of his single heroic escapade. And his lifestyle had proved his undoing. The underground movement to which Silverthome belonged had learned that Lustmann's widely mourned death in # had not really been caused by a stroke. The hero had drunk himself to death, all the while conducting seances for affluent dowagers reading horoscopes and wenching limitlessly -- a demise quite unlike that of any other "physicist." Which led Silverthome back to the ever-present enigma: How had Lustmann, alone and friendless, managed to contact the Nazi hierarchy and make his prescient knowledge feh? How had he changed history -- the actual mechanics of it? Silverthome had heard this question debated endlessly; everyone had his pet theory. There was, for instance, the Martin Borman hypothesis that the mysterious, little-known Borman, who had taken Hess's place as number-two man in Hitler's inner circle, was actually Franz Lustmann. The other theories he had heard struck Silverthome as equally absurd. He undressed quickly in the chilled room and leaped into bed, staring for a long time at the dim ceiling. It did not matter, really, what method Lustmann had used. Finding the man would solve it all. Finding... Lustmann... Awaking refreshed and filled with new energy, he stopped at a bookseller's shop in Alexander Platz and thereafter, on a sheet of wrapping paper he plotted every major and minor bistro, opera house, theatre, bordello and movie house he could discover either by reference to the guidebook or through scouring Berlin neighborhood by neighborhood. Making his rounds, searching for that unmistakable face in the crowds and reading about the "war" in the newspapers occupied his days. He lived Spartanly, knowing that his current rate of expenditure would exhaust the cash in about one month. The jewelry was a last resort. Omsley would have been proud of the way he was atemporizing. He found himself using the rich, racy argot of Berlin's streets with natural ease. Money was "wire," "moss," "gravel" or "powder." Reichsmarks were called " Eier " -- eggs -- or " Emmchen , a diminutive of the letter "M." The best tutors by far were the salty-tongued flower women of Leipziger Strasser. Silverthome handled the blooms disapprovingly, commenting on their withered appearance despite their excessive cost. The fluent dressing-down he received taught him a great deal about the niceties of slanderous abuse. He spent many evenings at Staats Oper, arriving a full hour before the performance to watch for Lustmann among early comers, buying a standing-room ticket, spending the intermissions prowling about the lobby, then watching again as the opera house emptied. He enjoyed Freischutz, reveled in the contrapuntal magnificence of Meistersinger, almost developed fallen arches during the interminable vocal dialogue of Parsifal and endured a rather indifferent production of Zauberflaute, concluding that Lustmann was not attending the opera. He next tried sporting events, concerts and even one Nazi rally, with equally disappointing results. The dread notion that Lustmann had not yet arrived in Berlin cropped up increasingly, bringing on periods of gloomy depression. He resolutely pushed the thought away. Nothing in the present course of events seemed any whit different from the official history of World War II he had studied in school. Silverthome played endless suppositional games. He put himself in Lustmann's place, imagining where he would stay, what he might do to occupy his time. Why, there was no real difference between Lustmann and himself. Both were interlopers, strangers in a strange land. But the man had to be here. Lebe would certainly have wanted his man on the scene when hostilities erupted. It would be best, perhaps, if he just took Lustmann's presence for granted; that would make finding him a simple matter of perseverance, of never giving up. At the end of the first week in May a despondent James Silverthorne was consulting his guidebook in a postal substation writing room near the Berlin Zoo. He glanced up as a tall man entered, then looked away quickly, forgetting to breathe. When he dared look again, the man had seated himself in a canebacked chair. Hand propped to forehead, he was busily addressing an envelope. Was it Lustmann? Silverthome was not certain. He rose silently, passing behind the tall man on his way to the door. A hasty glance gave him the impression of florid German cursive written in green ink. He fled the postal sub-station, having no intention of allowing his suspected quarry a look at his face. Silverthome hurried to the end of the block, crossed with the light and came back abreast of the postal station's entrance. He folded his arms across his chest to calm the trembling. The instant the angular, rather spare figure wearing a well-tailored camels-hair topcoat appeared in the doorway, all of Silverthorne's doubt vanished. The aquiline nose, rather prognathous jaw and dirty-blond hair firmed his conviction. Heart pounding, he began to trail Lustmann, stopping once while the man paused to light a cigarette and survey the few pedestrians walking behind him. A very cautious man, Lustmann, Silverthome could not imagine why he was concerned about being followed. Lustmann led him several blocks on foot before opening a bright red letterbox -- one of five thousand or so in Berlin proper -- and posting an envelope. Noting the cross streets, Silverthome continued his discreet shadowing. They turned into Urtter den Linden. Surprisingly Lustmann crossed the boulevard and mounted the steps of the swank Hotel Adlon. Why not? A gentleman of Lustmann's sensibilities could not be expected to stay just anywhere. Picking his way across the swastika-bannered thoroughfare, Silverthorne paused behind a parked car. Yes, there was cautious, careful Franz Lustmann peering from a lobby window. When the tall man finally quit the window, Silverthorne ran up the steps and pushed his way through the glass door, sitting down on a leather settee behind a marble pillar and feeling rather out of place in the sumptuous lobby. Lustmann was at the desk. A clerk reached up and took a key from the pegboard, passing it over to him with a smile. Silverthorne waited until the lift doors closed behind Lustmann, then sauntered past the desk. The clerk was now sorting mail and since it was shortly after the luncheon hour, most guests would surely be out. Only three empty pegs remained in the uppermost row; two on the left but only one on the right where the clerk had taken down Lustmann's key. Silverthorne left the Hotel Adlon walking on air. Franz Lustmann was a guest in room #. The long odds against Silverthorne 's chances for success werediminishing rapidly. He retraced his steps toward the mailbox where his quarry had posted the letter. Mail pick-ups were made four times daily during the week. Silverthorne walked fast. When he rounded the comer, he saw that a postman was reaching out to unlock the letterbox. The man looked startled to see someone dash up to him, heavily out of breath. "Pardon me... sir. Just this moment I posted a letter and I... think it was incorrectly addressed. Would it be too much to ask... may I check the address?" The postman squinted suspiciously. "That's most irregular, sir. I'd lose my job if I allowed anyone to tamper with -- " "No, no!" Silverthorne said quickly. "I won't even touch the letter. I only want to make certain the street number is correct. It's written in... green ink. You can't miss it." Silverthorne folded a Reichsmark note in the palm of his hand. The postman blinked, then made it disappear. "I suppose we can do that much for a regular customer," he said pleasantly. "Green ink... Oh! Can this be it, mein Herr?" Silverthorne locked the address in his mind. "My friend," he said in a disguested tone, "I've bothered you for nothing. The address is exactly as it should be." The postman shrugged. "Then everyone's happy, no?" "Everyone. Be sure to have a few beers on your way home from work and forget your troubles. Vielen dank" "Any time." He headed for the nearest bus stop. The letter had been addressed to one Zoltan -- no last name -- at a street number somewhere in the Wilmersdorf district. It probably meant nothing but he intended to check it out nevertheless.    Silverthorne got off the buss and walked five blocks through an unfashionable section of Wilversdorf. The buildings and streets looked indefinably seedy, as though frequented by less-than-affluent citizens. He passed a delicatessen whose boarded shop windows partially concealed shattered glass. A crude Star of David daubed on the padlocked door told a mute story. He spotted Zoltan 's sign upon turning the corner at the end of the block, chuckling in self-deprecation. The Great Zoltan, it seemed, was a "world-famous" astrologer. His establishment's sign was festooned with zodiacal arcana and capped with a mystical Persian Eye. Lustmann's letter had sent him chasing rainbows. The "physicist" was undoubtedly even here following his preoccupation with the occult, amusing himself with horoscopes and such nonsense. Good! It meant he would have less time to devote to his mission. He continued past Zoltan's place out of curiosity. The window was opaqued. A poster featuring a bearded, turbaned man who glared at the world with hostile intensity was bounded by a catch-phrase almost lost in a forest of exclamation points: "!!!!! the ancient art Bemused and disappointed, he caught a bus back to Unter den Linden where he stood across from the Hotel Adlon for several hours, reading Volkischer Beobachter while covertly scanning the hotel's steps. At eight-thirty he gave up and went to his lonely room to think. It had been a productive day; he was happily weary. But something nibbled at his subconscious all evening, something just beyond range of his mind's peripheral vision. Whatever it was, he could not seem to focus on it or bring it to the surface. He went to bed early to escape the chill and lay staring into the darkness, revolving strategies, examining theories, suspecting this, discarding that. Sometime in the wee hours he awoke with a start, crying, "... or History!" Leaving the bed in a single bound, Silverthorne began to pace the frigid room, smashing fist into open palm, uttering short, benedictive profanities in four languages. It fit! By God, it fit! "The Ancient Art can Change your Life," he muttered. Could Lustmann have actually... ? No, no. It was all too damned farfetched. Or was it? For some reason, he knew he had found the answer, unbelievable though it might be: Lustmann was actually playing the role of seer in carrying out Erich Lebe's fantastic scheme to alter the course of history! Unable to sleep, Silverthome watched the dawn that morning -- a gloomy gray light seeping through heavy clouds -- before once again taking up his post outside the Hotel Adlon. Twice he shifted to the center mall of Unter den Linden and then to spots farther down the avenue. It would never do for the suspicious Lustmann to tag him as a loiterer. At one o'clock, having learned every word of the May #th Beobachter by rote, he gave up and had a skimpy lunch. His money was draining away at an alarming rate; he would have to pinch every Pfennig from now on. The morning's unproductive vigil left him with a sour taste in his mouth. He had hoped to tail Lustmann and find a connecting link between reality and the outrageous "false prophet" conjecture that yesterday's letter had generated. But the "physicist" seemed to be sticking close to his room. Silverthome decided, after arguing the matter with himself, to reconnoiter the Great Zoltan's astrology parlor -- and to be damned careful how he went about it. He strolled about for an hour, then returned to his room and spruced himself up, combing his hair, which badly needed trimming, and rubbing the worst scuff marks from the second-hand shoes. He got off the bus in Wilversdorf and found a pawnshop, where he haggled over a pair of diamond earrings from the handful of jewelry he had carried into the past, amazed to receive one-third more than his estimate of their worth. Feeling better with money in his pocket once again, he walked the four blocks to Zoltan's place, finding a glistening black Mercedes sedan drawn up at the curb. The auto was conspicuous, utterly out of place on the sleazy street. He walked past it to the comer and then turned. The Mercedes had a polished, military aspect about it, although the license tab was civilian. He returned speculatively and paused. Zoltan's door had no bell. He inched it open -- it moved easily, silently -- until he could slip through into a reception room hung with musty-smelling red draperies. A crystal ball, like a giant's teardrop, lay on a badly marred walnut desk. A fearsome poster of the Great Zoltan plying his art leered insolently from the wall. Silverthome closed the door with painstaking care. Low voices were filtering toward him from beyond the draped doorway that led to the rear of the shop. He stood deadstill, listening. " -- and you yourself did not read the letter, I suppose?" The testy voice was laden with sarcasm. "I... no, no! It came in yesterday's four o'clock post, mein Herr. I called your office immediately, just as I have always done." Silverthome made note of the accent -- Hungarian, or possibly Romanian. "Patience, Kurt," advised a more cultured voice. " Herr Zoltan has been most cooperative. I'm certain he will continue to be. Won't you, Herr Zoltan?" "Oh, but naturally, sir." "There, you see, Kurt? The reason I've come personally to talk with you today, Herr Zoltan, is that this madness has gotten completely out of hand. When whoever signs himself 'A Friend of the Reich' first began his astounding predictions, everyone considered him a mere crank, nothing more. "But when he precisely defined the terms of the Munich Pact -- even before Prime Minister Chamberlain llew to Berchtesgaden -- foretold our and the spineless antics of the British and French when we liberated the Sudetenland, annexed Austria, and liberated Czechoslovakia, the Flihrer himself became a devoted admirer. In fact, I once chanced to be in his presence when he remarked that 'great minds think alike.' Amusing, Herr Zoltan? Or don't you think so?" "Star-gazing nonsense!" said the one called Kurt. After a short, weighty silence, the smooth voice continued. "That may or may not be the case; we shall see. An any rate, Herr Zoltan, this 'Friend of the Reich' is beginning to have an unsettling effect upon the very foreign policy of our state. Indeed, Nostradamus pales beside such monumental prophecies. Our 'friend' predicted the lull beginning last fall, explaining that the Franco-British alliance would 'project various offensive schemes it lacked the muscle to execute.' He accurately named names and Wehrmacht deployments to the regimental level -- their then-current positions. "He told us, and I quote: 'Germany will not attack Belgium in November, nineteen thirty-nine, as planned, greatly disappointing The Leader, but will wait propitiously until spring, nineteen forty, then strike where a strike is least expected.' Last month, Herr Zoltan, Norway fell." ' 'Ausserordentlich ! ' ' "Actually that is something of an understatement. It is uncanny, crossing all boundaries of mere fortunetelling. The man has been one thousand per cent correct in his predictions." The sound of labored breathing emanated from beyond the curtained doorway. James Silverthome listened, entranced. "No, do not be afraid," the silken voice went on. "I plan to make you privy to the contents of yesterday's letter in the interest of learning more about this 'great art' of yours, Herr Zoltan. But do not let your tongue become careless. Should you disclose a single syllable of what I am about to tell you, we will have your skin taken off one square centimeter at a time. Understood?" An appealing, blubbering sound formed Zoltan 's assurance. "Excellent, Herr Zoltan! That's settled. Now I shall skip the usual gibberish, if gibberish it be, concerning Saturn being in the Sun's second house and so forth. You may pretend to understand all of that nattering if you wish. I do not. "Let's see... ah, here we are: 'In the early hours of May tenth, Army Group 'B,' namely von Kiichler's Eighteenth Army, striking quickly across the Peel Line, will push Winkelman's Army of the Netherlands back to the Dyle Line, while von Reichenau's Sixth Army advances across the Belgian frontier with huge success. Von Leeb's Army Group 'C' will feint an attack on the Maginot defenses, pinning down over forty French divisions, which will allow von Rundstedt's Army Group 'A,' led by General Guderian's seven armored division, to crash through the forest of the Ardennes.' "There! I'm unable to enlighten you as to the accuracy or inaccuracy of all this, Herr Zoltan, both because of national security and because of the fact that it hasn't yet happened. May tenth is but day after tomorrow and we shall see what we shall see. But I simply must tell you -- please remember your skin -- that General von Manstein, Rundstedt's chief of staff, has made a constant nuisance of himself advocating a totally unorthodox strike through the hilly, wooded Ardennes Forest ever since last fall. "Hear me, Zoltan! This is absolute magic! No one who failed to atpossibly have learned about Manstein's tactical master-stroke. Not possibly! "Now then," continued the smooth voice, growing a shade more insistent, "what we must learn is this: Is it at all conceivable -- not probable, mine you, merely conceivable -- that the, er, 'science' of astrology would permit such refined, definitive and uncannily accurate predictions?" After a wheezing sigh that bubbled with terror, Zoltan said, "This... man, whoever he is, lays claim to possession of certain ancient Greek manuscripts that permit a purer, less corrupted method of allowing the stars to reveal themselves to -- " "No, no, Zoltan. I asked for no lecture on arcana. Give me a simple 'yes, or a simple 'no.' Can it be done?" "I... do not believe so, sir. I cannot imagine how such... detail or accuracy could possibly be obtained. " "Nor I, Zoltan," said the other. "Nor I. We must run this charlatan to the ground, mustn't we? It's dangerous and disturbing to have a mind-reader like this 'Friend of the Reich ' about, especially when the Fiihrer finds himself more and more inclined to await the arrival of his next letter before making a decision vital to us all. Herr Himmler and I have become quite concerned..." Standing perfectly still for so long, Silverthorne's leg had cramped. He shifted his weight to massage it and a board creaked noisily in the floor. He whirled, dry-mouthed, and grasped the knob, pulling open the door and slamming it. " Guten Tagl" he called hopefully. Concerted whispering went on behind the draperies. An ashenfaced, perspiring man who looked ten years older than the Zoltan in the posters emerged hesitantly. "Yes?" " 'S tut sehr gleich, Herff Zoltan. Wonder if I might arrange for a personal reading this afternoon? You see, I'm a Sagittarius. I'm faced with a vital business dealing and -- " "I'm sorry, sir. Another time perhaps." Zoltan wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "I'm not... feeling myself today." "Oh?" Silverthome frowned. "I'm distressed to hear it, of course. Might I try tomorrow, sir? It's very important to me." "Tomorrow will be fine. Come at two. Please excuse me now." "I'll be prompt," said Silverthome, closing the door behind him. He walked toward the bus stop, feeling twelve feet tall. He had managed to learn the "what" of it. All that remained was devising a feasible "how."    Lustmann did not leave his sanctuary all next day. Silverthorne began to feel like one of Unter den Linden's landmarks. He prowled about the streets near the Hotel Adlon in a nervouse frame of mind. Tomorrow was May #th. Should the prediction he had overhead prove valid -- and he had every reason to know it would -- the German offensive in Europe would begin. It was frustrating to realize what had to be done at the same time Lustmann was holed up like a fox in his lair. He had planned to wait until the man left his room, then have a go at breaking in and... And what? He drifted to his favorite think-spot on the Oberbaum Bridge, acknowledging with dismay that he had never carried his intentions beyond the point of breaking into Lustmann's room. He revolved tentative notions until well after sunset. There seemed to be no practical way to intercept Lustmann's apocryphal letters and make changes in them -- an action that appealed to him as the nicest, most subtle method of achieving his purpose. The Nazi leadership had no idea of who Lustmann was -- no idea he even existed -- nor the slightest inkling of his motives. Nor would they -- ever. Silverthorne spent a moment or two admiring Lustmann's unorthodox means of gaining Hitler's ear, coinciding as it did with the Fuhrer's welladvertised mystic concept of "Nordic destiny." With a resigned grimace he spat into the Spree, having at last faced the issue squarely. The only answer was the obvious one: He would have to take Franz Lustmann's place. The remaining question was whether James Silverthorne, erstwhile professor of history, who had never killed anything higher in the chain of life than the elk he had bagged with his longbow in the summer of # I , could muster the courage and resourcefulness to do what must now be done. Only a few Reichsmarks remained in his wallet. Despite that, he purchased a small bottle of Schnapps and took it back to his dreary room, deciding to wait until the dinner hour when the hotel lobby would be comfortably crowded. Not too much Schnapps, he warned himself. He wanted only enough to make him relaxed and glib-tongued. This would be the toughest night of his life. Perhaps the last. A little after eight o'clock he phoned the hotel desk from a convenience booth around the comer, asking for room #. The phone jangled twice before someone said, "Hello?" Silverthome almost panicked and hung up; the voice at the other end was feminine. " Guten Abend," he said cautiously. "May I speak to Ihe gentleman there in #?" "Sure," said the girl, "I'll call him, though he's no gentlemen, believe me." Silverthome could hear muffled voices. At last a petulant male voice said, "Yes?" " Herr Lustmann?" There was the faintest intake of breath. "I... think you must have (lie wrong number." "I beg you, don't hang up, Herr Lustmann. I must see you immediately. You are in grave danger. " "Danger? What nonsense!" "You must believe me, sir." After a short pause, Lustmann said, "You are either a practical jokester or a madman. Bother me again and I shall call the police. You may be assured of it." "Please listen," Silverthome pleaded earnestly. "I'm not an informer. I'll be only to happy to explain when we're face to face. Have Ihe lady go, if you will. I'll be at your door in precisely ten minutes." "Who are you?" Silverthome moistened his lips. "I was bom February ninth, two thousant thirty-seven," he said. "I can't say more over the phone, sir. I'll come in ten minutes. It will be greatly to your advantage to keep the appointment." He cradled the phone and walked twice around the block to quiet his jumpiness and to allow Lustmann an opportunity to rid himself of the girl. So that was why the "physicist" never went out. Between his prophecies, stars and chippies, he had little reason to leave the Hotel Adlon. Silverthome entered the hotel behind a chattering group of Bummelners headed for the bar. He drifted inconspicuously through the maze of pillars, leather settees and potted palms to the stairwell, meeting no one as he trudged upward to the sixth floor. The door to # was ajar. He knocked softly and the door swung wide to reveal a tastefully furnished parlor. No one was in sight but instinct told him that Lustmann was standing behind the door. Placing both hands in front of him, Silverthome stepped across the threshold. Franz Lustmann kneed the door shut and locked it without taking his eyes from Silverthome. A Walther automatic pistol was in his fist. "Well, Herr Twenty Thirtyseven, this had better be damned good!" Staring into Lustmann's patrician features as though fascinated, Silverthome said, "I... can't tell you what an honor this is for me, sir. I sincerely wish there were time for us -- " "Out with it! Who the devil are you? What do you want?" Silverthome clicked his heels, tipping his head. "Allow me to introduce myself, sir. Steyr, a minor cog in the Temporal Security Agency of Deutsches Weltanreich." " Weltan... A look of amazement crept over Lustmann's florid features. The Walther automatic sagged in his grip. "Then... I will succeed ?" "Most gloriously, sir. You will not only succeed in your holy mission but when you return to nineteen seventy-four in triumph, you will find yourself second only to the Fiihrer's memory, and to Erich Lebe himself, in the world's esteem. Our world's esteem." "But, Steyr, this is marvelous!" "You must hurry now," warned Silverthome. "Your letter to Zoltan day before yesterday has Himmler's people running in circles. They've managed to trace you to the postal station where you addressed the letter -- the station near the zoo. They could be here at any instant." Lustmann's eyes widened. The last vestiges of suspicion vanished and he slipped the Walther into a shoulder hoster, taking Silverthorne's arm with unwonted familiarity. "Yes, yes. I'll pack at once, Styr. Will you take me to a safer place?" Silverthome moved his head solemnly from side to side. "Unfortunately, that is impossible for I cannot leave. When they come, a scapegoat must be present. I've been... well trained." Lustmann stared at him, openmouthed. "By God, I daresay you have, Steyr! Help me with the suitcases there in the bedroom." "Jawohl, Herr Lustmann." He followed the other, eyes darting from one item of furnishing to another. There was a heavy ceramic lamp on the endtable beside the divan that might do, or even the small chiming clock on the mantelpiece. Either would make a satisfactory, though cumbersome, cudgel. He would search for something easier to handle. "What sort of tale will you tell them?" asked Lustmann, flinging open a suitcase on the bed. "I've been drilled in the astrological sciences, sir. I must appear to be a crank, a false lead. Your next prediction will convince them they've apprehended the wrong man." "I... see. But you realize what will happen..." "Do not concern yourself with me, sir. I wear a false tooth that can be used if it becomes necessary. The Temporal Security Agency is most thorough." Lustmann grunted. "Thorough isn't the word for it! Amazing! Tell me, are you alone in Berlin?" "No, sir. Four of us are presently covering you. If your telephone rings twice, then stops, you must leave immediately by way of the fire escape. It would be prudent to gather your money and other indispensables together in the event they arrive before you finish packing." Silverthome had found a reasonable weapon in the closet -- a metalframed oaken shoetree. He removed it from a tan-and-white wingtip brogue, setting it to one side. "An excellent idea! Pack these clothes, Steyr, while I collect the other things." "Yes, sir." Silverthome slipped the shoetree into his jacket pocket where it would be concealed by the clothing he was carrying to the bed. The tall man brought a chair from the vanity, standing on it to reach the closet's high shelf. "What is it like, the future?" asked Lustmann without turning around. "I've speculated endlessly about what the world will be a century from now." There was an excited intensity in the question. Watching for his chance, Silverthorne replied, "It's simply our world, Herr Lustmann, thanks to yourself and Herr Doktor Lebe." Lustmann nodded, handing down a pair of leather-covered notebooks and a metal strongbox. "You have seen Berlin, I take it?" "Twice, sir. I was there for the Games in two thousand sixty-six. Speer Stadium holds a quarterstadium in Nuremberg. The city is more lovely, even, than Paris -- wide tree-lined boulevards with the Great Hall, Goering's Palace and Adolf Hitler's Tomb dominating the skyline." "Fascinating!" His headshake incredulous, Lustmann turned full attention back to the closet. Silverthome lifted one foot to the bed. He rose silently, balancing himself, and drew out the shoetree. Then he sapped Lustmann a roundhouse blow behind the left ear. The tall man grunted loudly. He toppled off the chair, clawing desperately at rows of neatly hung suits and topcoats, groping blindly for the Walther. In a frenzy Silverthome leaped down and struck him again with all his might. And again! Lustmann twitched once, twice, then lay still. Silverthome sagged on the bed, his chest heaving in short, agonized gasps. "Now... it may be our world," he choked. He took out a pen knife and cut a length of sash cord from the drawn venetial blinds. His hands were trembling almost uncontrollably. He stood above the prone figure, his face beaded with perspiration, and remembered Bernard Omsley, Henderson, Powell, Graham and all of the other truncated lives that had let to this moment. He knelt and did what had to be done, then rushed into the bathroom where he was violently ill. After Silverthome had bathed his face in cold water, he made an exhaustive search of the entire suite. Lustmann 's death must be made to look like the result of simple robbery. He took the man's wallet, pocketed the unbelievable amount of money he found in the unlocked strongbox and then examined the true treasures -- leather-bound notebooks that contained a long typewritten account of the authentic war. He kept the automatic pistol, the other's cufflinks, rings, tie clasp and every scrap of identification he could locate. One unsavory task remained. Lips compressed with distaste, he pried apart the corpse's jaws. Lustmann's teeth were firm and subvocally, Silverthome let go and wiped his fingers. What was he thinking of? Lustmann, returning to # from the seventh decade of the #th century, would certainly not be equipped with an ultramicrominiaturized temporal return network like his own. He ripped open the dead man's shirt. There it was: a crude metal band encircling the chest. Silverthome stripped off the shirt. He could not take the risk that a policeman or a coroner might accidently trigger the network, though thoughts of their amazement at a cadaver vanishing before their very eyes made his lips twitch in amusement. If Lustmann's body were to reappear in #, Erich Lebe would undoubtedly dispatch a replacement. As he closed the suite's door after him, surprised at his own coolness, Silverthome felt a glow of utter satisfaction. Lustmann's death had already affected the myriad flow of space-time events once leading to the Nazi tyranny hd had known all his life. He breezed down the stairs and out through the lobby unnoticed, the notebooks tucked casually under one arm, with money jammed into every jacket and trouser pocket. The automatic pistol and temporal return network went into the Spree as he crossed the Oberbaum Bridge on the way to his room. A delayed reaction set in after he got there, but the Schnapps helped allay his agitation, his quaking hands. With a historian's insatiable curiosity, he delved into the notebooks at once, reading all through the night, forgetting food, feeling not the least bit sleepy until dawnlight filtered through the dirty window. He stretched and rubbed his burning eyes, then fell into bed. At last he knew the actual history of World War II, first time around -- England's miraculous salvage of her armies from the beach at Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe frustration during the Battle of Britain, the Afrika Korps' agony and sorry end, Germany's suicidal plunge into the vastnesses of European Russia, the sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad, and the slow erosion of Wehrmacht effectiveness as supplies shrank and American arms production and waxing field strength made themselves felt on all fronts. Horrified, he learned of the conscienceless murHorrified, he learned of the coninnocent Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other non-combatant civilians, and lie found that the demi-god Adolf Hiller had not died of cancer after all... He awoke at two o'clock in the afternoon and went out briefly for a bite to eat, then purchased a bottle of green ink and spent the remainder of the day doggedly learning to imitate Lustmann's florid penmanship -- no simple task. Bannerlines in next morning's Hcobachter proclaimed the end of the "Twilight War." Wehrmacht legions had burst across the Dutch and Belgian frontiers with devastating suddenness. On May #th, the day General von Kleist crossed the French border, Silverthome posted his first letter to Zoltan, predicting Guderian's armored thrust to Sedan -- German infantry marching so swiftly that whole divisions reached the Meuse only days after the Panzers, crossing the river in the wake of saturation bombing by screaming Stukas. Then the sweep to the Channel Coast in mere days, outrunning the stunned, retreating British and French divisions that would be cut off and trapped in Belgium. He also made a first tentative stab at redirection, intimating that Britain would "remain basically sympathetic to Germany's inevitable inwith due respect, further implying that His Majesty's Government was already giving serious thought to relieving the thirteen divisions, soon to be isolated on the continent, by sea. He told them boldly that the Fiihrer alone had the wisdom and insight necessary to recognize the basic racial tie with England and that he would cannily halt Guderian's armor in time to allow Britain to save face -- and her armies. He posted the letter around four o'clock and went for a walk, stopping to read the paper over a beer. Then he headed back to his room, filled with gloomy premonitions about the Allied bombs soon to rain on Berlin. Silverthome unlocked the door. As he reached for the light switch, something hard smashed into his skull. There was a burst of brilliance as the floor surged upward and struck his cheek painfully. As with the slow, underwater languidly of a dream, he felt brusque hands roll him over on his back. He groaned. The room was dark. He could see only a shadowy figure bending over him. "I should kill you," muttered a thickly accented voice. "Much safer but... Hell, I owe you too great a debt!" Silverthome's jaws were prized apart. He raised feeble hands to fend off the attacker but it was useless. Fingers closed over the false bicuspid, twisting sharply. "Bon voyage, Herr Steyr!" The convulsive, visceral-crawling sensation of temporal transition was the last thing Silverthome remembered.    He was semi-conscious for a time, sprawling on the all-toofamiliar padding of the reception chamber in Carlsbad Caverns. He sat up stiffly, rubbing his aching head, and then he fought to his knees. An alarm bell clanged in the distance. He could hear the approaching sound of running footsteps. Silverthome had managed to gain his feet, knees wobbly and weak, head swimming, when the guards appeared. He stared at their submachine guns and slowly raised his arms. There were six of them -- blockish, blank-faced oafs in baggy tan uniforms and jackboots. With a sinking feeling, Silverthome noted the red stars on their billed caps. A pudgy, sloppily dressed man of middle years pushed his way through the ring of guards. He regarded Silverthome with unveiled skepticism and then said something in Russian. Silverthome shrugged and shook his head. "Don't tell me another Nazi time-traveler has dropped into our midst!" the man said in fair German. "Did the whole German nation think to escape into the future?" Silverthome said defensively, "I... I'm an American." The man chortled. He turned to the guards, hooting, " Ameri canski ! ' ' The guards laughed in appreciation and the man said, "No, my friend; I'm afraid that won't wash. We've spent thousands of hours interrogating Nazi bunglers. We refuse to waste the time. We simply take them and stand them against the nearest convenient wall." "But I am American," protested James Silverthome. The pudgy man looked growwly insulted. "Ridiculous! There has been no such thing as 'American' for..." He broke off and peered at Silverthorne more intently. "Steyr? Is your name Hans Steyr?" "I... it's a name I once used but -- " "Your papers led us to believe you were Austrian." "My real name -- my American name -- is Silverthome." "Hmm-m-, interesting." The other's brows lifted. "Let me apologize for disbelieving you. Welcome to the World Soviet, Herr Silverthome. Yuri Komarov made mention of you in his book -- how he spared your life in view of the tremendous, though unwitting, contribution you made to our cause. You're a much-discussed footnote to history. Our historical technicians have speculated at length about when you might turn up." The man rattled something in staccato Russian. "We'll have to have another chat, later." The guards marched him to a claustrophobic cell containing a rude bunk suspended by steel chains, a washbasin and a reeking zinc commode. Locking the barred cell door with a rattle, they left him, their footfalls echoing hollowly into stillness. Silverthorne clapped both hands over his ears to drown the wave of sterile subterranean silence. He stared at rough jackhammer scores disfiguring the walls of living rock that surrounded him while his mind seethed and writhed and came full circle. It was like looking into an infinity of mirrors. Then he began to laugh. He rocked back on the lumpy, vermininfested mattress, thumping his aching head on unyielding rock, holding his sides and roaring until tears streamed down his cheeks. What had Gauleiter Kastner said there in the vanished Weltanreich of #? The reflexive danger of promiscuous time travel would be overwhelming. Overwhelming! Poor Kastner. Oh God, if Kastner had only known! Struggling for breath, Professor James Silverthorne laughed uncontrollably at the futile idiocy of it all. It was the last time in his life he ever laughed.  All they wanted was a little property for a shrine... Most of the churches are closed now, although they remained open for a long time even after people found out the truth. I spend a lot of time on the terrace of my Poconos though, staring at the stars and wondering how much they really knew and how much they really told us. The entire National Guard and most of the police force was already in place and you could hear the sirens screaming from all the way down in the Village as the latecomers hurried to make the show, but they were going to be too late. A door slid open in the side of the spaceship, a ramp descended and out strolled the alien, calm as you please. There wasn't a single raygun or snarling monster in sight. The kids were disappointed as hell. We'd been waiting since before six that morning. We lived right across the street from the park back then, in a chrome-and-plaster townhouse we were too poor to afford and too socially conscious not to have. Davey first saw the thing sitting out by the lake about five in the morning -- you'd think in a city this size someone would have seen or heard it land, but that just doesn't seem to be the case -- and he woke up the whole family, dragging us into his bedroom to look out the window at it. We got dressed and made it inside the park before the police cordon closed things off and when the Guardsmen came around about nine to chase everyone away, my U.N. pass seemed to muddy up the picture sufficiently for them to allow us to stay. There were nearly a million people crowding around the park gates by noon, trying to find a way to worm in on the action, but Davey, Cliff and I were right there in the front row all along, waiting for the Big Moment. Then this second-rater from the next galaxy over trots out of his ship with the Historic Greeting and all he can come up with is "Good morning. I'd like to speak with someone in property management." He got bad press from it. People expect Historic Greetings to be a little more weighty than something you might say to the receptionist at the neighborhood savings and loan. One magazine took it so seriously that it ran a contest asking its readers what the alien should have said, the purpose being, I suppose, to offer pointers to the next celestial visitor before he got a chance to ruin the moment. Folks would have been a lot happier with "Take me to your leader." The guardsmen, of course, were in a perfect quandary over how to respond to his request. The commander of the Guard immediately called me over, his underlings having dutifully reported that a representative of the United Nations was in the gallery. His intentions, no doubt, were to handle the affair in a grandly cosmopolitan manner, and there could have been no action more appropriate -- had the alien been interested in philately. The United Nations, as you may know, makes a tidy sum every year issuing its own postage stamps. It's something the organization has in common with small individual nations like Monaco and Botswana; they have found printing pretty pictures with foul-tasting glue on the back can be more profitable than printing money. Once the U.N. authorizes a new stamp and it is drawn and perforated and the proper amount of gluck is spread liberally on the reverse, the project is turned over to me. I then write exciting releases for the stamp magazines, intimating that any collection not including the new U.N. threepenny gold might just as well be burned. I'm sure N'Zom knew nothing about it. N'Zom, it turned out, was the alien's name. I wasn't excited about meeting him on a face-to-face basis -- watching is one thing and negotiating another -- but the Guardsmen dragged me forward by the arm and the kids cheered and the reporters snapped photographs and who can deny a place in history when it is offered so graciously? Quivering in terror, I went over to the alien. N'Zom wasn't really all that horrid to look at. In fact, he was rather interesting. He looked a little like a breadfruit and smelled a great deal like liverwurst. Eight spindly spider legs came out out of his underside and he had a tiny orange-colored head, covered with mucous that seemed to glide about the top of his torso. Beneath the mucous there were two dark spots where his eyes were probably located, although I have no idea how they were able to focus through that slime. I also have no idea where his voice came from, but it came. "My name is N'Zom," the alien said, "and I come from the planet Morshle. We are very friendly people." "My name is Albert Figg," I told him, and one of the reporters in the back row asked loudly if I could spell it out for him. That took a moment but by the time I got around to resuming my conversation with N'Zom, I had my thoughts more properly in order and I was able to ask some intelligent questions. I asked him, "What brings you to Earth today?" "We have no wish to disturb your culture," N'Zom said, glad to get down to business, "but we find it necessary to inquire of you the possibility of a real-estate transaction." Now, Davey brings home a lot of science fiction and I read some of it occasionally, so I knew enough to realize that this was the point where things usually got sticky. The well-meaning earthling starts chatting with the emissary from Procyon and winds up selling the earth for # in interplanetary trinkets and throwing the rest of the interstellar neighborhood into the bargain as well. However I, as you may know, am no fool. "How much real estate?" I asked him. "A very small parcel, as remote as possible," I was told. "If we understand your terminology, what we are looking for would be about five or six square miles." This, perhaps, was a coincidence and some people have argued that case. Others claim it was predestination, Divine Intervention or dumb luck. The fact of the matter was, I had done rather well in the U.N. stamp business and managed to set aside a good amount of my earnings for investment -- in real estate. You meet some curious folks in any international organization and among my acquaintances was a certain individual from Borneo named -- well, his name isn't as important as the fact that I've had a number of occasions in the past to buy parcels from him, entirely on speculation. Most of these were remote Pacific islands. Yolanda thought I was crazy when I first started to pick them up back in the #s but it turns out to be among the shrewdest things I've done. The world's becoming overcrowded rapidly, you see, and there's precious little place to get away from it all. Therefore, those who can afford it, and my buyers range from movie stars to oil tsars, are more than happy to plunk down six figures for a hunk of basalt they're going to have the devil's own time getting to. And they hide out for a year or two and get bored and come home or else they start selling macadamia nuts and petrel guano and make their fortunes. It really makes little difference to me. I have, over the years, purchased twenty-two islands in the vicinity of Borneo that were quite livable but which my friend's government could find no serious use for. I had sold twenty-one of them and, by a stroke of luck, had one remaining that was five or six square miles in area. I told N'Zom about it and he said this was just what he had in mind. "And how were you considering paying for this parcel?" I asked. N'Zom made a sound something like a belch and skittered back up the ramp into the spaceship. That surprised me a great deal since it had appeared things were going nicely and there didn't seem to be grounds for his taking offense. I was wondering if he had been called in to administer some biological function when he reappeared on the ramp and scampered back to me, holding up his purchasing power. I didn't recognize it at first. You don't normally see diamonds that large. It was later remarked to me that this was a very logical means of exchange in the galaxy since diamonds are the crystallized form of one of the more common elements, they are gradable into levels of greatly differing quality and, for unaesthetic races, they have considerable industrial application. N'Zom's diamond was about the size of a clenched fist, probably not the biggest on record but assuredly the first from outer space and more than adequate for the purpose. It looked remarkably pure to my untrained eye and I decided that if he wanted change, I was going to have a hard time coming up with it. When the stone finally was examined by a competent jeweler, I was told that N'Zom could have used it to buy something larger, like Hawaii, if anyone had been selling. But as I said before, I am no fool and I have read Davey's sciencefiction numbers. I wasn't about to get caught on a bad deal. "Before we shake on it," I told N'Zom, forgetting for the moment that none of his appendages seemed to contain anything he could shake with, "suppose you tell me what you're planning to do with this site? Will you develop it in some manner?" "As I have said," N'Zom assured me, "we have no desire to interfere with your culture. You are a young race and must develop in your own way, in your own time. For that reason, we will seal off our property so that our presence will not affect your progress." "I appreciate your good intentions," I said, "but before I sell the island. I'd like to know specifically what purpose you have in mind for the land." "It is to be a stopping point for the Great Pilgrimage," N'Zom said solemnly. "An oasis where our travelers may stop and rest and refuel on the Road to God." The people around us stopped whispering and the park seemed to grow unnaturally quiet. A wind sprang up from somewhere and a cloud began to roll over the city. "The Road to God?" I asked. "It is our most important pathway through the stars," N'Zom said. "A thousand races will follow it when it is completed. It will take them to the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe." "You know where He is? That He exists?" "I can tell you no more," N'Zorn replied, his voice softer. "It is something your race must discover for itself, in its own time." How could you stand in the way of something like that? Reluctantly, I took the diamond. Of course I got a lot of flak about it. People didn't think it was right, selling property to aliens. At first there were rumbles about Congress taking action, invoking some sort of law to forbid Americans the right of "negotiating a treaty with foreign IKiwers, without the proper consent of the government." Or something of the sort. It was then pointed out that Americans are constantly selling things to other nations without the consent of Congress, with no question of unauthorized treaties. There was no differentiation in international law between selling to another country or another world, probably because no one had ever thought of it. I was also briefly supported by the argument that, as a ' representative of the United Nations, I paid no taxes to the United States government and was diplomatically immune from its sanctions in matters of this nature. That really didn't matter, though, because as soon as word got out, I was fired. T hat really didn't matter either because when I was fired, the diamond's sale had already made me rich and people were beginning to come to me about book and movie rights. In the end it was decided to let the matter go. It didn't seem right to try to renege on our very first deal with extra-terrestials. The "Road to God" bit was getting to people as well. The Pope tried to rationalize it along church doctrine for a while and then gave up, disappearing behind the doors of the Vatican for the next three months while the College of Cardinals WE'RE Don't Smoke American Heart Association struggled in vain trying to explain it to him. All sorts of religious groups formed to capitalize on the situation, not the least of which was the Cosmic Hitchhikers Society, which believed they could get a ride on the Road to God by showing the aliens the proper beatific attitude, and the Glory Roaders, who claimed they'd already made the journey and had come back to spread The Truth. They were, all in their own ways, bonkers. The saucer stayed on for three days in the park so that N'Zom could, he said, reassure people that the Morshles had the best interests of Earth in mind. He even went on the Johnny Carson show to stress the point but unfortunately he came on after a pontifical sports announcer-cum-celebrity and never got the chance to say everything he wanted to. On the fourth morning the saucer was gone. No one saw it leave, which was particularly strange since the park was filled with people keeping a vigil on the ship and the National Guard was maintaining an armed watch around it, purely as a precautionary measure. People who claim to have stared right at the vessel all night long scratched their heads in bewilderment the next morning and said they just couldn't find the moment in their memories when they realized it was gone. It made some of them very uneasy. The aliens didn't come back to the park. That, of course, delighted the critics, who said we'd all been put upon by some prankster with a cardboard spaceship that had been dismantled in the dead of night and whisked away. That didn't explain my diamond but people have a knack for disregarding facts that don't properly fit their explanations. I was rich and the aliens were gone, along with their Road to God, and everyone was perfectly happy to leave it at that. Two years later The Lady Capricorn out of Brisbane sank after running into a wall in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was my fault, really. When there was no further word from the visitors from outer space, I went ahead and sold the island again. There didn't seem to be any other sensible options since no one had showed up to claim ownership. I'm the first to admit that I never really checked the situation but I thought I'd at least have heard if the aliens moved into the neighborhood. So, on December fourth I sold the property to Walter Marriott with the understanding that I would not inform his ex-wife Luella "where the damned rock's at." Walter boarded a plane headed toward the sunset and three weeks later they were yanking him out of the ocean, spitting fire and swearing he'd use me as shark bait at the earliest opportunity. I read his story in the newspapers shortly after arriving at my new hideaway villa near -- the middle of the Poconos somewhere. Walter had arrived in Australia and quickly made the acquaintance of a beer-drinking sea captain named Theophelt Van Arsdale. Theo agreed to take him out to the island and keep quiet about it, and they set sail in The Lady Capricorn. On December fifteenth the captain was up before dawn and noticed a blue light near the horizon, in the shape of a hemisphere set low on the water. It was gone at sun-up and he wrote it off to the American beer Walter had brought along. They continued in that direction and late in the afternoon both men were standing on the flying bridge when Theo pointed out with interest that the sea ahead of them looked remarkably calm. It was a choppy day on the rest of the ocean, but the waves just ahead seemed to subside along an arcing line and beyond that (here were no waves at all. They were watching the line as The Lady ( 'apricorn approached it, and suddenly the entire bow of the craft buckled as if she had run fullihrotlle into a seawall. The ship went straight to the bottom, taking I'lieo with her, but the impact threw their lorry free abaft and Walter managed to climb inside. He rode l lie currents for four days before he was found by a channel shrimper and brought back to civilization to tell his story. Everyone said he was sunstruck. Bizarre occurrences of this nature do attract attention though, and within a fortnight three vessels were steaming out of port for the island -- one of them on the official investigation and two out to prove that the Bermuda Triangle had shifted to the Eastern Hemisphere. No one ever again heard from any of the passengers of the three ships. By the time the fourth ship was suspected lost, I figured I had to step in and remind folks that this was the same island I had sold to N'Zom two years earlier. I knew it wouldn't set well with people but Yolanda insisted, and so I made an anonymous long-distance call to the Times, hoping they would carry the matter from there and be unable to find me. The next morning reporters were crawling all over the yard, trampling my begonias and taking pictures of Yolanda through the window. I really couldn't tell them anything. I wasn't the one who had been running into things in the Pacific, after all. It didn't take long for the government to find me after the reporters had though, and by noon three black Cadillacs were rolling up the drive. Six carbon-copy men emerged from the three cars. Each wore a gray and olive-green sports jacket, herringbone, with solid gray slacks. Each had sunglasses and each wore his blond hair just long enough to cover the pink of his scalp. I peered through the peephole in the door as they showed their government badges simultaneously and then I opened the door for them. Only one spoke. "Mr. Figg, your government has need of you," the gentleman said and in the background I thought, for an instant, I heard a band playing The Stars and Stripes Forever. They took me to New York. Then they took me to Washington, where they asked me questions at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. I couldn't tell them anything new or informative about the aliens, the island or life in general, so they took me to Texas. At that point I was ready to confess to anything but they put me on a large plane and flew west. In Hawaii they put me in a smaller plane and flew south, and in Borneo they put me on the smallest plane of all and flew me over the island. We were, it seems, latecomers. The perimeter of 'solid' area had been pretty well determined by this time and an entire fleet had grown up around the limits of the calm water. There were #, #-yachts with captains sipping Scotch amid bevies of barely dressed beauties and there were foundering junks crowded with pilgrims who chanted, burned incense and danced about their decks in endless enthusiasm. They had all come to catch a glimpse of the Road to God. "Do you know what this means to them?" General Thurmond DeVries asked at my left as the pilot banked to give me a good view through the windows. "There are a hundred boats down there and they just found out about it three days ago. In time, the sea will be choked with them. They all come to be near the pathway to God. A lot of them will die trying to get through, even though they know they can't, because they can't stand the thought that the path to Salvation is blocked to them." "You say that as though it were my fault, General," I said. "It isn't, you know." The general was quiet for a moment, looking down at the boats. I watched as well and while I did, one of the junks cranked up and ran headlong into the invisible wall. There was a great deal of smoke and fire and, no doubt, loud noise. Several other boats drifted over to help but when the ship disappeared beneath the waves, I couldn't see any bodies in the water. The general waved the pilot on. The plane, evidently, could fly over the calm water. I was sure the general would not have attempted it unless there had been a few previous trial runs, and I remembered Walter's mention of the blue sphere Theo had seen the night before his death. A dome-shaped field, perhaps? At one point I thought I saw a blackened, twisted piece of metal between ourselves and the water, as if floating on air, but I can't be sure. It might have been a bird. The island came up slowly on the horizon and it was much smaller than I'd imagined. Later I found out that it was less than a square mile in area, a fact that quickly ended my relationship with the gentleman from Borneo. The area of calm water, however, extended a full five miles in every direction, a bit more than what they'd paid for, so things seemed to even out. You couldn't see much on the island at first. The side we were approaching rose sharply from the sea, marked by jagged peaks and verdant slopes. Then the plane went over the ridge. There was a city on the other side of the mountain. A city of gleaming orange spires that reached hundreds of meters into the sky. There were great domed structures that shone like polished silver and sinuous lubes that wound aimlessly around and through everything until the complex looked like New York City buried beneath a heap of spaghetti. The most impressive item, of course, was the port. It was a broad, flat area that seemed to be made of mirrorlike, fused sand, and on it stood a variety of vessels. There were tall, needle-shaped ships i hat stood on fins and reminded me of the renderings in the pulp magazines a decade or so before space flight. There were flying saucers as well, but there my proficiency as an extra-terrestial shipspotter ended. There were things that resembled the insulators on an electric pole and things that looked like flowerpots and things that looked like frogs. There were things that looked like pied type and things l hat looked like amalgamations of assorted nails and things that didn't look like anything at all. "They're all spaceships," the general said. "They keep coming and going so fast we can't keep accurate numbers on them. But it's a busy port, busier than O'Hare, and they're all going, or coming from, somewhere. They're going on the Road to God. ' ' I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "It makes you wonder... what they know," I suggested. It didn't seem incredibly profound but it suited the general's mood and he gave me a grunt of approval. "We know what they know, and that's the problem, Figg. They know the truth. About God. Doesn't that scare you?" "Scare me? Why should it scare me? I think it should be sufficient to know there is a truth and that God exists somewhere down the line." "And that's all you need to know about it?" "The aliens have made it pretty clear that's all they're telling us. I don't see why I should have to know anything more. I mean, they're the ones who found Him. They should know what they're doing." The general stared at me for a moment and I confess that I was totally at a loss to determine what he was thinking. After he finished staring, he sucked in a deep breath and studied the ceiling of the plane for a while before he spoke again. "There are many people who don't agree with you, Figg," he said. "Governments are finding themselves faced with creeping anarchy. People are obsessed by the idea that this thing is here and they can't get at it. It's shaking a lot of faith. It's bad for us to know -- and not know. Can't you understand that?" His eyes, for some reason, looked desperate despite the fact that we were engaged in an orderly, intellectual discussion. I decided it would be best if I let him ruminate by himself and merely said, "Then we shall have to try to live as best we can, knowing only what we know." I think he caught my point because he was quiet all the way home. They took me back to Borneo, and back to Hawaii, and back to Texas and then back home. When I got there, Yolanda had left with the kids. There was a note on the refrigerator saying she didn't want anything to do with it any more. I spent the night drinking alone. The news in the morning was bad. A battleship from Korea had tried to blast its way through the barrier and ricocheting charges had demolished seventeen of the pilgrim yachts. There were riots in Rome, Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Madrid, Bangkok, Cedar Rapids. Absenteeism rose. Factories were empty. Churches were full. Crime fell and apathy rose. In the streets we could see people roaming about aimlessly, their eyes glazed, staring at the sun, or at the pavement, but never glancing at one another. The military overthrew the government of India and declared the Kingdom of God. The clergy did the same thing, in slightly more revolutionary (and bloody) fashion, in Brazil. Things, as some were wont to say, were going straight to Hell. It did not come as a great surprise, then, when it was announced one morning that they'd dropped the Bomb on the island. The official attitude was, "What the heck, we can't live with them anyway." And the Bomb worked. The papers had pictures, three days later, of the devastation on the island. You really couldn't tell that those ruins had once been the City on the Road to God rather than Dresden or Hiroshima. But I knew they were. I used to own the place. I found myself gripped with an overwhelming sadness. I drank quite a bit and when there was no more to drink, I would take long walks down the road to the canyon, where I would stand by the river near the falls and listen to the birds call me "Nit-Whit! Nit-Whit! Nit-whit!" Five days after the Bomb something else joined the birds. There was a voice that called from the forest and said, "Hello, Figg. I'm sorry that it didn't work out." I turned -- and it was N'Zom. His spaceship rested on the edge of the forest. His skin looked wrinkled and peeling. He might have been hurt but with N'Zorn it was hard to tell. "Hello," I greeted him. "I'm glad the Bomb didn't hurt you. I didn't know they were planning to use it." "I know that," he said. "That's why I knew it would be all right to come and say good-bye. You tried to do your best for us but it just wasn't ordained to work out." "I suppose you'll set up another station, then, on the Road to God," I suggested. "Someplace where they can't hurt you. On the Moon, maybe." "No. This station was essential. Hut we could not use it and associate with you at the same time, and that's what destroyed the dream. Perhaps it was our own prejudices that destroyed it. In any event, we have to leave. Thank you, Figg." I could tell he was getting ready io take off but I had been thinking about the things the general had said in the plane, and I delayed him. "N'Zom?" I called and he turned his eyespots toward me. "Do you really know where He is? You really found Him?" "Yes," he replied, reverently. "Were? Can you tell me?" N'Zom paused for a moment as if thinking. Then he seemed to nod. "Yes, Figg," he said. "Every road has its end, and this was ours. He was here."  He always expected to return. But not this way i lie bedroom and closed the door softly behind him. He showed weariness in his face and in the way he moved. His sparse white hair stood in rumpled confusion, and his face seemed to sag under the weight of the dark circles below his eyes. Marie was tired too, but on her it didn't show. She was younger; that helped, but she was also excited. The doctor nodded as he sank down into an armchair. He accepted a glass, sipped cautiously and grimaced at the taste of Tequila. "I don't suppose you've got anything decent?" he asked. Marie pushed aside a pile of books and produced another bottle. "One sixty rum?" she offered. He sank deeper into the chair with a weary sigh. Marie took her own drink and sat in the chair facing him. She sipped quietly and waited. "He'll live," Harriman said at last. "It was close: a couple of more hours without attention and he might not have. He's asleep now, probably won't wake for another twelve hours or so." He looked at Marie, who refused to meet his eyes. "Thank God," she said. "I was afraid I hadn't got to him in time." Her relief seemed genuine enough, but she still wouldn't look at the doctor. "All right Marie, Who is he?" "I can't tell you." She played with her drink and looked at the floor. "I really appreciate your coming down here, Matt, and certainly you deserve an explanation, but it's important that no one know who he is until the proper time." She looked up and this time their eyes met. "You've got to believe me," she pleaded. "Oh, I believe you." he said mildly. "But it doesn't make any difference. You call me away from my dinner to come down here. You insist that I treat this man here instead of taking him to a hospital where by all rights he belongs. All right, you're an old friend and he needed help, not arguments. That much I'll do for you. But this man has been beaten, stabbed, tortured, and drugged. He's suffering from shock and exposure. He didn't get that way accidentally; someone wanted him to die and to die painfully. Unless you can give me a very good explanation for what happened to him and why he is here, when I leave this house I'm going straight to the police." Marie opened her mouth to argue, but his expression told her that it would be useless. She surrendered. "Okay, but it's a long story and we're both pretty tired. Why don't we get some sleep first? You can use my guest room. In the morning I'll tell you the whole story." "Now Marie." The voice left no room for dispute. She considered for a moment, then: "What do you know about time travel?" "Nothing." "Except that it's impossible," she prompted. "And that you're about to tell me it's not." "Right. According to theory there is no reason why the temporal flow has to be in only one direction: any physicist will tell you that the mathematics don't exclude it. In my own lab we've gotten results that can't be explained any other way. Of course we call it temporal phenomenon instead of time travel, and we worked with atomic particles and fractions of a second, but there's no doubt that the results were real. We applied for a grant to study it but no one would take us seriously. Fortunately there are other ways to get research money besides grants. There are, for instance, private fortunes." "Your own?" Harriman asked. He knew that Marie had inherited sum had grown considerably since then. She shrugged. "What else have I got to do with my money? Anyway, we have since learned that the effect doesn't have to be restricted to small particles or short lengths of time." She glanced over her shoulder at the doorway. "Down that hall is a working time machine." She paused to wait for the doctor's reaction, but there was none. Finally she went on. "Actually it's primarily a viewer. There's a screen and by setting the controls properly, I can watch any event that has ever happened. It also has the capability of projecting an object up to about three hundred pounds through time but it takes a great deal of energy. So far it has been done twice, three times if you count the return trip." She paused again. "You're a hard man to impress, Matt," she said. "I tell you that I've traveled in time and you don't even bat an eye. Congratulate me. Tell me I'm crazy. Say something!" "I'm sceptical." She nodded. "Well, I guess that's something. All right, Matt, suppose you had a machine that could look into the past. What would you look at first?" "I don't know. Famous events, I suppose. Kennedy's assassination, the crucifixion, the storming of the Bastille, construction of the pyramids, the fall of Troy." "I've seen them 'all," she told him. She went to a table in the comer of the room and picked up a copy of the New Testament. "Do you know how long Jesus was on the cross?" she asked. "A day?" Dr. Harriman guessed. "Four hours. Do you know how long it usually took the victim of crucifixion to die?" "No." "Three or four days. Why do you think Jesus died so fast?" "I don't know." Marie opened the book and began to read. " 'And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, E'-li, E'-li, La'-ma savuch-tha-nH That is to say, My (iod, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Some of them that stood ihere, when they heard that, said, this man calleth for E-li'-as. And straightaway one of them ran and look a sponge and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink. The rest said, Let be. Let us see whether E-li'-as will come to save him. Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.' Matthew. "It was common to use a dilute mixture of water and vinegar to revive the victim," Marie explained, "though it seems not to have helped here." She flipped through the pages and began reading again. " 'Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first and of the other which was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs. But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. ' John. "The legs of the other two were broken to speed their deaths, ' ' Marie said. "It was required that the bodies be taken down before the beginning of the Sabbath." She turned the pages again and began reading once more. " 'And Pilate marveled if he were already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead.' Mark." She closed the book and sat down. After a while Dr. Harriman spoke. "He wasn't dead?" "No." "And the man in the bedroom..." "Is Jesus of Nazareth." She finished the statement. "One thing the gospels were wrong about. It was a woman who gave the vinegar to Jesus, and the vinegar was drugged. That was the first time I used the machine to transport a person. When he was taken down and placed in the tomb, I used it again to bring him here. Then I called you." "Do you really expect me to believe this?" Dr. Harriman asked. "No," she replied. "But then, you insisted that I tell you." She took him down the hall to a room filled with banks of electronic equipment. There was a television screen mounted above a control consol where she sat. Harriman stood behind her and watched. The screen lit up to show three men lashed to scaffolding on the top of a hill. A crowd of people milled around below, and a handlettered sign was nailed above the center figure. Part of it was in Latin and said, "this is the king of the jews." The rest was in two different languages, presumably giving the same message. "You'll notice," Marie said, "that he was crucified on a permanent scaffolding rather than an actual cross. Also, there are no nails. We know that the usual practice was to tie the victim, but tradition has it that in the case of Jesus they used nails. As you can see, they didn't." She was about to say something more when the man on the screen cried out. The doctor couldn't understand what he said, but a figure, heavily draped in white robes, stepped out of the crowd and lifted a sponge on the end of a stick. Jesus drank from it, cried something, and went limp. Harriman studied the robed figure that had offered the drink, but was unable to recognize Marie or even determine the gender. During the next half hour Marie showed him the Kennedy assassination (there was only one gunman), the signing of the Declaration of Independence, part of the Gettysburg Address, the assassination of Caesar, and Galileo dropping balls from a tower. "This is fascinating," he said at last, "but it proves nothing. I have no way of knowing whether all this is authentic. You can sit here and show me history all night, but for all I know, it could be just film clips on videotape." Marie adjusted the controls again and the screen showed a darkened hospital room with an old woman sleeping fitfully on the bed. The room brightened briefly as the door opened to admit a man wearing a white coat. Dr. Hardman recognized himself. He had one hand in his pocket, and when he neared the woman, he withdrew a syringe. He stood looking at the woman for a moment and then stooped, inserted the needle, and injected the contents of the syringe into her arm. "Stop!" he shouted. The screen went blank and Marie turned to find the doctor pale and trembling. "She had terminal cancer." he said with an unsteady voice. "She was in pain every minute. Would have lived another few weeks maybe, no more. She asked her doctor to let her die, but he refused." He finally tore his gaze away from the blank screen and looked at Marie. "No one ever knew,"he said. They went back to the study where Marie poured him another drink. "What would have happened if you went through the machine he asked. "Or if you stopped Oswald or killed your grandmother?" he added, beginning to realize the implications of what he had seen. Marie shook her head. "I don't know. I haven't tried to change anything. I don't know what would happen if I did." Harriman looked at her incredulously. "You haven't tried to change anything?" he repeated. "No, of course not. You just snatched Jesus Christ is all." "But I didn't change anything," she insisted. "The first time I watched the crucifixion it was exactly as you saw it. I watched myself give him the drug and I saw him pass out. I was even recorded by witnesses two thousand years ago. And the body did disappear. I would have been changing history by not going." Harriman considered this for a while, but it was too much to follow. If she hadn't taken the body, she would have been changing history because back then she had taken it -- or at least somebody had -- but if she stopped Oswald, it was different because she hadn't. He gave it up. "You don't believe in Jesus, do you?" he asked. "Of course I believe in him. He's right there in the next room." "Yes, but you don't believe that he is God, or even the Messiah?" "No." "Then why did you do it? Why bring him here? If he had died on the cross and remained in his tomb, there might never have been a Christian religion. You're not Christian. You don't even like Christians. I've heard you denounce them as narrow-minded, intolerant bigots. Yet here you've gone and created the whole basis for their beliefs. Why?" She shrugged. "The bigots would be bigots anyway. If they weren't Christian bigots, they'd be Moslem bigots or Jewish bigots. It doesn't make any difference what they believe -- just so they don't have to think. But Jesus, now there was an interesting person. How could I pass up the chance to talk to him? Besides, the set-up was too perfect. I'm watching the crucifixion and someone dressed so that he can't possibly be recognized walks up and administers what is obviously a drug; there was absolutely no question that he had been knocked out. And there I was with everything that was needed to make it all happen, just as it was written, and there was nothing at all mysterious or miraculous about it. I can go to the believers and say, 'Look, here's your great miracle, and I did it. Not God, just me.' " "So now you've brought him back. I hope you don't regret it. Remember, regardless of what you think, he believes that he's the Messiah. The fact that he's been resurrected and brought back after two thousand years is not likely to convince him otherwise. Nor anyone else for that matter." "That's ridiculous. He hasn't been resurrected. He never died. I have simply transported him through time." "Yes, well I wish you the best of luck in explaining that, both to him and to his followers." He paused to consider. "It will be interesting to see what he thinks of those who are supposed to behis followers. And what they think of him." Dr. Harriman rose from his chair. "Well, I'll let you worry about that. I'm tired and I think I'll be getting home. Call me when he wakes up tomorrow. I'd like to be here when you tell him your name."  galaxy . '  w Send my gift to: Nam Send my gift to: Name Address ArlHrp.aa City State #ip City State #ip Send my gift to: Name Make Sure To Complete This Box My Name Address Address City State #ip City State Zip  Enter my own  new or  renewal subscription for one year  I enclose  -- for. subscriptions. (Each one year subscription costs only #, saving me # from Galaxy's regular subscription price) for the best in established authors and new talent. In the year to come that means important works by writers such as C. J. Cherryh (winner of the # John W. Campbell Award for best new writer), and hitherto undiscovReaders will also be able to explore the frontiers of science and technology with J. E. Pournelle, get the lowdown on the latest books from Paul Walker and outstanding. an issue is delivered, it reminds friends of your thoughtJanuary, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. # You won't have to cope with tiresome shopping; o Or hot, crowded stores; # Or standing in line; .   t # Or buses, parking or trains; Ls,'V' -- .  # Or post office lines; # Or wrapping counters. You fill out the coupon. We do the rest. # You save B-l-G money. You can save more than # newly announced subscription rate. (# And you may renew or enter your own subscription, too, at the same low, low rate, so be sure to do so. Not bad in an era of higher and higher prices. Why not make it easy on yourself and your budget? Get a lot of your shopping done today without leaving your home. Fill in the order coupons and get them to us early. We'll also send an Advance Christmas announcement card to each name on your list as soon as we hear from you. And you'll be a thankfully remembered Santa Claus # times a year! the Courts of  Chaos vRoger Zelazny All depends on the Pattern Hell. I was irritated with Dad. Now that he was back. I'd expected some answers. Instead, he began the secrecy routine again: private orders for just about everyone -- except me -- before he took off again, destination unstated. I decided to go and sulk in the library. Random finally came by with lunch and tried to persuade me that perhaps Dad knew what he was doing, that perhaps my feelings had a deeper source than the present situconcede that but I was still irritated. Random persuaded me to quit the library, though, and accompany him downstairs to check on Martin, regarding whom Dad had said something typically cryptic on taking his leave. Below, we witnessed a peculiar tableau in the throne room. Barred by some unnatural agency from entering, we saw Martin, Benedict and Dara within, Dara seated upon the throne. Gerard was finally forced to acknowledge her existence. There followed a reenactment of the situation in which  had participated in Tir-na Nog'th, the city in the sky. My blade Grayswandir appeared, as I had wielded it then, and engaged in battle with Benedict, finally striking from him the marvelous prosthesis he was using for a right arm -- the object I had obtained in just that fashion from his ghostly double in that strange place of dreams. The arm and the blade vanished then and the force that restrained us was withdrawn. Within, from Martin's peculiar Trumps, I learned of the existence of Merlin, my son by Dara -- the strange youth whom I had encountered at the Courts of Chaos and who had declined a clear shot at me after he learned who I was. Dara, Benedict, Random, Gerard, Martin and I adjourned then for a private discussion. I learned that Dara had lied to me about many things. She had arranged our meeting in a very calculated fashion so that I could beget Merlin. White I was hardly in a position to cry rape over it, I felt more than a little used. Dara hastened to assure us that she was no longer in complete sympathy with her superiors' plans -- although she seemed to favor the part that involved seeing Merlin on the throne of Amber. Brand had been a mere tool of the Courts. I gathered, his ambitions greater than his abilities to fulfill them. Dara was not really for either side any longer, she said, although she professed a great liking for Dad. She then surprised us all by producing his signet ring and commencing to issue orders in his name -- orders for such things as an immediate attack on the Courts of Chaos, to be led by Benedict. We were not about to accept this situation so, suspecting that Dad might be conferring with Dworkin at the primal Pattern, we contacted Fiona there. She confirmed that this indeed was the case. Fiona also told me of her suspicion that Dad was going to try to repair the Pattern. She felt that no matter whether he succeeded or failed, he would be destroyed in the process.  asked her to find out if he had sent orders via Dara. When she got in touch with us later, she was in his presence and she confirmed that he had.  asked her to trump me through, which she did. I spoke with Dad and was able to distract him sufficiently to permit me to snatch the Jewel of Judgment from him. Then  beat it out of Dworkin's quarters and headed down to the Pattern, where  intended to use the gem in an attempt to repair it myself. They were able to stop me, though. They reached through the Jewel and used it to paralyze me. Dad retrieved the stone -- and we had a talk. He told me of how he had once known the real Ganelon and why he had been forced to kill him. He revealed that he had turned the entire land of Lorraine into a trap with which to test me. He told me that it was he who had killed Benedict's servants, explaining that he had done it as part of a scheme whereby Dara and  would become lovers. He approved of the union. He had decided that I was to be his successor and Dara my queen. Then I told him of my own decision; namely, that  did not want the throne.  believe he was shaken by this. He sent me back to Amber, telling me to prepare for a trip on horseback and to await his orders at an isolated spot outside the city. I did this, parting with Dara on better terms than  had thought I would.  rode out to my tomb and waited. When Dad got in touch with me, he created a familiar red bird from my blood -- a creature that would bring me the Jewel, wherever  might be, when he was through with it. Then he charged me to ride for the Courts of Chaos through Shadow as fast as  could go. I began this journey -- a hard hellride -- with reality swimming about me. I realized that I had to stay ahead of a wave of Chaos that would arise with the Pattern's interruption. After I had gone some distance, the bird finally caught up with me, bringing me the Jewel. The time differential was such, though, that I would not know the results of Dad's efforts until later. And the Trumps no longer functioned because of the twisting reality had taken.  rode on with the Jewel. Everything was fine until Brand trapped me within a circle of fire in a desolate, rocky location and demanded the Jewel. I managed to elude him, however , and continued on for a great distance. When I halted again, I was in a metallic garden spot in the middle of nowhere -- and Brand was waiting. This time he wanted to talk. I decided to hear him out. He told me that Dad had failed in his attempt to repair the Pattern and had perished in the process. He said that Amber was fallen as a result and that all the Shadow worlds were being destroyed as the wave of Chaos spread outward from where the Pattern had once stood. There was only one way to preserve things now, he insisted. I was to attune him to the Jewel in a manner he described to me and then surrender the stone to him so that he might quickly inscribe a new Pattern to save the day. However,  had my suspicions as to what he truly intended to do with the Jewel. I felt it probable that he wanted it as a weapon to use against us; or conceivably he might want to use it to create a second Pattern, one that would give him his own private universe. Even had he been telling the truth, he was certainly not the person I wanted to see create the new Pattern; halfmad as I now felt him to be, I declined his offer. A few more bitter words were added to the many we had exchanged over the years. I moved to confront him physically. He departed.  rode on, growing dangerously weary. Finally I had to stop to eat and rest. I located a mountain cave, had a cold supper, wrapped myself in my cloak and a blanket, arid slept. v. I was awakened by a sense of presence. Or maybe it was a noise and a sense of presence. Whatever, I was awake and I was certain that I was not alone. I tightened my grip on Grayswandir and opened my eyes. Beyond that, I did not move. A soft light, like moonlight, came in through the cavemouth. There was a figure, possibly human, standing just inside. The lighting was such that I could not tell whether it faced me or faced outward. But then it took a step toward me. I was on my feet, the point of my blade toward its breast. It halted. "Peace," said a man's voice, in Than. "I have but taken refuge from the storm. May I share your cave?" "What storm?" I asked. As if in answer, there came a roll of thunder followed by a gust of wind, bearing the smell of rain within it. "Okay, that much is true," I said. "Make yourself comfortable." He sat down, well inside, his back against the righthand wall of the cave. I folded my blanket for a pad and seated myself across from him. About four meters separated us. I located my pipe and filled it, then tried a match that had been with me from the shadow Earth. It lit, saving me a lot of trouble. The tobacco had a good smell, mixed with the damp breeze. I listened to the sounds of the rain and regarded the dark outline of my nameless companion. I thought over some possible dangers, but it had not been Brand's voice that had addressed me. "This is no natural storm," the other said. "Oh? How so?" "For one thing, it is coming out of the north. They never come out of the north, here, this time of year. ' ' "That's how records are made." "For another, I have never seen a storm behave this way. I have been watching it advance ail day -- just a steady line, moving slowly, front like a sheet of glass. So much lightning, it looks like a monstrous insect with hundreds of shiny legs. Most unnatural. And behind it, things have grown very distorted." "That happens in the rain." "Not that way. Everything seems to be changing its shape. Flowing. As if it is melting the world -- or stamping away its forms." I shuddered. I had thought that I was far enough ahead of the dark waves that I could take a little rest. Still, he might be wrong, and it could just be an unusual storm. But I did not want to take the chance. I rose and turned to the rear of the cave. I whistled. No response. I went back and groped around. "Something the matter?" "My horse is gone." "Could it have wandered off?" "Must have. I'd have thought Star'd have better sense, though." I went to the cavemouth but could see nothing. I was halfdrenched in the instant I was there. I returned to my position beside the left wall. "It seems like an ordinary enough storm to me," I said. "They sometimes get pretty bad in the mountains." "Perhaps you know this country better than I do?" "No, I am just traveling through -- a thing I had better be continuing soon, too." I touched the Jewel. I reached into it, then through it, out and up, with my mind. I felt the storm about me and ordered it away, with red pulses of energy corresponding to my heartbeats. Then I leaned back, found another match and relit my pipe. It would still take a while for the forces I had manipulated to do their work, against a stormfront of this size. "It will not last too long," I said. "How can you tell?" "Privileged information." He chuckled. "According to some versions, this is the way that the world ends -- beginning with a strange storm from out of the north." "That's right," I said, "and this is it. Nothing to worry about, though. It will be all over, one way or the other, before too long." "That stone you are wearing... it is giving off light." "Yes." "You were joking about this being the end, though -- were you not?" "No." "You make me think of that line from the Holy Book: The Archangel Corwin shall pass before the storm. lightning upon his breast... You would not be named Corwin, would you?" "How does the rest of it go?" "... When asked where he travels, he shall say, 'To the ends of the Earth,' where he goes not knowing what enemy will aid him against another enemy, nor whom the Horn will touch." "That's all?" "All there is about the Archangel Corwin." "I have run into this difficulty with Scripture in the past. It tells you enough to get interested, but never enough to be of any immediate use. It is as though the author gets his kicks by tantalizing. One enemy against another? The Hom? Beats me." "Where do you travel?" "Not too far, unless I can find my horse." I returned to the cavemouth. It was letting up now, with a glow like a moon behind some clouds to the west, another to the east. I looked both ways along the trail and down the slope to the valley. No horses anywhere in sight. I turned back to the cave. Just as I did, however, I heard Star's whinny far below me. I called back to the stranger in the cave, "I have to go. You can have the blanket." I do not know whether he replied, for I moved off into the drizzle then, picking my way down the slope. Again I exerted myself through the Jewel, and the drizzle halted, to be replaced by a mist. The rocks were slippery, but I made it halfway down without stumbling. I paused then, both to catch my breath and to get my bearings. From that point, I was not certain as to the exact direction from which Star's whinny had come. The moonslight was a little stronger, visibility a bit better, but I saw nothing as I studied the prospect before me. I listened for several minutes. Then I heard the whinny once more -- from below, to my left, near a dark boulder, cairn or rocky outcrop. There did seem to be some sort of turmoil in the shadows at its base. Moving as quickly as I dared, I laid my course in that direction. As I reached level ground and hurried toward the place of the action, I passed pockets of ground mist, stirred slightly by a breeze from out of the west, snaking silvery, about my ankles. I heard a grating, crunching sound, as of something heavy being pushed or rolled over a rocky surface. Then I caught sight of a gleam of light, low on the dark mass I was approaching. Drawing nearer, I saw small, manlike forms outlined in a rectangle of light, struggling to move a great rocky slab. Faint echoes of a clattering sound and another whinny came from their direction. Then the stone began to move, swinging like the door that it probably was. The lighted area diminished, narrowed to a sliver, vanished with a booming sound, all of the struggling figures having first passed within. When I finally reached that rocky mass, all was silent once again. I pressed my ear to the stone, but heard nothing. Whoever they were, they had taken my horse. I had never liked horse thieves, and I had killed my share in the past. And right now I needed Star as I had seldom needed a horse. So I groped about, seeking the edges of that stony gate. It was not too difficult to describe its outlines with my fingertips. I probably located it sooner than I would have by daylight, when everything would have blended and merged more readily to baffle the eye. Knowing its situation, I sought further then, after some handhold by which I might draw it. They had seemed to be little guys, so I looked low. I finally discovered what might have been the proper place and seized hold of it. I pulled then, but it was stubborn. Either they were disproportionately strong or there was a trick to it that I was missing. No matter. There is a time for subtlety and a time for brute force. I was both angry and in a hurry, so the decision was made. I began to draw upon the slab once again, tightening the muscles in my arms, my shoulders, my back, wishing Gerard were nearby. The door creaked. I kept pulling. It moved slightly -- an inch, perhaps -- and stuck. I did not slacken, but increased my effort. It creaked again. I leaned backward, shifted my weight and braced my left foot against the rocky wall at the side of the portal. I pushed with it as I drew back. There was more creaking and some grinding as it moved again -- another inch or so. Then it stopped and I could not budge it. I released my grip and stood, flexing my arms. Then I put my shoulder to it and pushed the door back to its fully closed position. I took a deep breath and seized it again. I put my left foot back where it had been. No gradual pressure this time. I yanked and shoved simultaneously. There was a snapping sound and a clattering from within, and the door came forward about half a foot, grinding as it moved. It seemed freer now, though, so I got to my feet, reversed my position -- back to wall -- and found sufficient purchase to push it outward. It moved more easily this time, but I could not resist placing my foot against it as it began to swing and thrusting forward as hard as I could. It shot through a full hundred-eighty degrees, slammed back against the rock on the other side with a great booming noise, fractured in several places, swayed, fell, and struck the ground with a crash that made it shudder, breaking off more fragments when it hit. Grayswandir was back in my hand before it struck, and I had dropped into a crouch and stolen a quick look about the comer. Light... there was illumination beyond... from little lamps depending from hooks along the wall... beside the stairway... going down... to a place of greater light and some sounds... like music... There was no one in sight. I would have thought that the godawful din I had raised would have caught someone's attention, but the music continued. Either the sound -- somehow -- had not carried, or they did not give a damn. Either way... I rose and stepped over the threshold. My foot struck against a metal object. I picked it up and examined it. A twisted bolt. They had barred the door after themselves. I tossed it back over my shoulder and started down the stair. The music -- fiddles and pipes -- grew louder as I advanced. From the breaking of the light, I could see that there was some sort of hall off to my right, from the foot of the stair. They were small steps and there were a lot of them. I did not bother with stealth, but hurried down to the landing. When I turned and looked into the hall, I beheld a scene out of some drunken Irishman's dream. In a smoky, torchlit hall, hordes of meter-high people, red-faced and green-clad, were dancing to the music or quaffing what appeared to be mugs of ale while stamping their feet, slapping tabletops and each other, grinning, laughing and shouting. Huge kegs lined one wall, and a number of revelers were queued up before the one that had been tapped. An enormous fire blazed in a pit at the far end of the room, its smoke being sucked back through a crevice in the rock wall, above a pair of cavemouths running anywhere. Star was tethered to a ring in the wall beside that pit, and a husky little man in a leather apron was grinding and honing some suspicious-looking instruments. Several faces turned in my direction, there were shouts and suddenly the music stopped. The silence was almost complete. I raised my blade to an overhand epee en garde position, pointed across the room toward Star. All faces were turned in my direction by then. "I have come for my horse," I said. "Either you bring him to me or I come and get him. There will be a lot more blood the second way." From off to my right, one of the men, larger and grayer than most of the others, cleared his throat. "Begging your pardon," he began, "but how did you get in here?" "You will be needing a new door," I said. "Go and look if you care to, if it makes any difference -- and it may. I will wait." I stepped aside and put the wall to my back. He nodded. "I will do that." And he darted by. I could feel my anger-bom strength flowing into and back out of the Jewel. One part of me wanted to cut and slash and stab my way across the room, another wanted a more humane settlement with people so much smaller than myself; and a third, and perhaps wiser, part suggested that the little guys might not be such pushovers. So I waited to see how my dooropening feat impressed their spokesman. Moments later, he returned, giving me wide berth. "Bring the man his horse," he said. A sudden flurry of conversation occurred within the hall. I lowered my blade. "My apologies," said the one who had given the order. "We desire no trouble with the like of you. We will be foraging elsewhere. No hard feelings, I hope?" The man in the leather apron had untethered Star and started in my direction. The revelers drew back to make way as he led my mount through the hall. I sighed. "I will just call it a day and forgive and forget," I said. The little man seized a flagon from a nearby table and passed it to me. Seeing my expression, he sipped from it himself. "Join us in a drink, then?" "Why not?" I said, and I took it and quaffed it as he did the same with a second one. He gave a gentle belch and grinned. " 'Tis a mighty small draught for a man of your size," he said. "Let me fetch you another, for the trail." It was a pleasant ale, and I was thirsty after my efforts. "All right," I said. He called for more as Star was delivered to me. "You can wrap the reins around this hook here," he said, indicating a low projection near the doorway, "and he will be safe out of the way." I nodded and did that as the butcher withdrew. No one was staring at me any longer. A pitcher of the brew arrived and the little man refilled our flagons from it. One of the fiddlers struck up a fresh tune. Moments later, another joined him. "Sit a spell," said my host, pushing a bench in my direction with his foot. "Keep your back to the wall as you would. There will be no funny business." I did, and he rounded the table and seated himself across from me, the pitcher between us. It was good to sit for a few moments, to take my mind from my journey for just a little while, to drink the dark ale and listen to a lively tune. "I will not be apologizing again," said my companion, "nor explaining either. We both know it was no misunderstanding. But you have got the right on your side, it is plain to see." He grinned and winked. "So I am for calling it a day, too. We will not starve. We will just not feast tonight. 'Tis a lovely jewel you are wearing. Tell me about it?" "Just a stone," I said. The dancing resumed. The voices grew louder. I finished my drink and he refilled the flagon. The fire undulated. The night's cold went out of my bones. "Cozy place you've got here," I said. "Oh, that it is. Served us for time out of mind, it has. Would you be liking the grand tour?" "Thank you, no." "I did not think so, but 'twas my hostly duty to offer. You are welcome to join in the dancing, too, if you wish." I shook my head and laughed. The thought of my cavorting in this place brought me images out of Swift. "Thanks anyway." He produced a clay pipe and proceeded to fill it. I cleaned my own and did the same. Somehow all danger seemed past. He was a genial enough little fellow, and the others seemed harmless now with their music and their stepping. Yet... I knew the stories from another place, far, so far from here... To awaken in the morning, naked, in some field, all traces of this spot vanished... I knew, yet... A few drinks seemed small peril. They were warming me now, and the keening of the pipes and the wailings of the fiddles were pleasant after the brain-numbing twistings of the hellride. I leaned back and puffed smoke. I watched the dancers. The little man was talking, talking. Everyone else was ignoring me. Good. I was hearing some fantastic yam of knights and wars and treasures. Though I gave it less than half an ear, it lulled me, even drew a few chuckles. Inside, though, my nastier, wiser self was warning me: All right, Corwin, you have had enough. Time to take your leave... But, magically it seemed, my glass had been refilled, and I took it and sipped from it. One more, one more is all right. No, said my other self, he is laying a spell on you. Can't you feel it? I did not feel that any dwarf could drink me under the table. But I was tired, and I had not eaten much. Perhaps it would be prudent... I felt myself nodding. I placed my pipe on the table. Each time that I blinked it seemed to take longer to reopen my eyes. I was pleasantly warm now, with just the least bit of delicious numbness in my tired muscles. I caught myself nodding, twice. I tried to think of my mission, of my personal safety, of Star... I mumbled something, still vaguely awake behind closed eyelids. It would be so good, just to remain this way half a minute more... The little man's voice, musical, grew monotonous, dropped to a drone. It did not really matter what he was say -- Star whinnied. I sat bolt upright, eyes wide, and the tableau before me swept all sleep from my mind. TTie musicians continued their performance, but now no one was dancing. All of the revelers were advancing quietly upon me. Each held something in his hand -- a flask, a cudgel, a blade. The one in the leather apron brandished his cleaver. My companion had just fetched a stout stick from where it had leaned against the wall. Several of them lofted small pieces of furniture. More of them had emerged from the caves near the fire-pit, and they bore stones and clubs. All traces of gaiety had vanished, and their faces were now either expressionless, twisted into grimaces of hate, or smiling very nasty smiles. My anger returned, but it was not the white-heat thing I had felt earlier. Looking at the horde before me, I had no wish to tackle it. Prudence had come to temper my feelings. I had a mission. I should not risk my neck here if I could think of another way of handling things. But I was certain that I could not talk my way out of this one. I took a deep breath. I saw that they were getting ready to rush me, and I thought suddenly of Brand and Benedict in Tir-na Nog'th, Brand not even fully attuned to the Jewel. I drew strength from that fiery stone once again, growing alert and ready to lay about me if it came to that. But first I would have a go at their nervous systems. I was not certain how Brand had managed it, so I simply reached out through the Jewel as I did when influencing the weather. Strangely, the music was still playing, as though this action of the little people was but some grisly continuation of their dance. "Stand still." I said it aloud and willed it, rising to my feet. "Freeze. Turn to statues. All of you." I felt a heavy throbbing withinupon my breast. I felt the red forces move outward, exactly as on those other occasions when I had employed the Jewel. My dimunitive assailants were poised. The nearest ones stood stock-still, but there were still some movements among those to the rear. Then the pipes let out a crazy squeal and the fiddles fell silent. Still, I did not know whether I had reached them or whether they had halted of their own accord on seeing me stand. Then I felt the great waves of force that flowed out from me, embedding the entire assembly in a tightening matrix. I felt them all trapped within this expression of my will, and I reached out and untethered Star. Holding them with a concentration as pure as anything I used when passing through Shadow, I led Star to the doorway. I turned then for a final look at the frozen assembly and pushed Star on ahead of me up the stair. As I followed, I listened, but there were no sounds of renewed activity from below. When we emerged, dawn was already paling the east. Strangely, as I mounted, I heard the distant sounds of fiddles. Moments later, the pipes came in on the tune. It seemed as though it mattered not at all whether they succeeded or failed in their designs against me; the party was going to go on. As I headed us south, a small figure hailed me from the doorway I had so recently quitted. It was their leader, with whom I had been drinking. I drew rein, to better catch his words. "And where do you travel?" he called after me. Why not? "To the ends of the Earth!" I shouted back. He broke into a jig atop his shattered door. "Fare thee well, Corwin!" he cried. I waved to him. Why not, indeed? Sometimes it's damned hard to tell the dancer from the dance. VI. I rode fewer than a thousand meters to what had been the south, and everything stopped -- ground, sky, mountains. I faced a sheet of white light. I thought then of the stranger in the cave and his words. He had felt that the world was being blotted out by that storm, that it corresponded to something out of a local apocalyptic legend. Perhaps it had. Perhaps it had been the wave of Chaos of which Brand had spoken, moving this way, passing over, destroying, disrupting. But this end of the valley was untouched. Why should it remain? Then I recalled my actions on rushing out into the storm. I had used the Jewel, the power of the Pattern within it, to halt the storm over this area. And if it had been more than an ordinary storm? The Pattern had prevailed over Chaos before. Could this valley where I had stopped the rainfall be but a small island in a sea of Chaos now? If so, how was I to continue? I looked to the east, from whence the day brightened. No sun stood new-risen in the heavens, but rather a great, blindingly burnished crown, a gleaming sword hanging through it. From somewhere I heard a bird singing, notes almost like laughter. I leaned forward and covered my face with my hands. Madness... No! I had been in weird shadows before. The farther one traveled, the stranger they sometimes grew. Until... What was it I'd thought that night in Tir-na Nog'th? Two lines from a story of Isak Dinesen's returned to me, lines that had troubled me sufficiently to cause me to memorize them, despite the fact that I had been Carl Corey at the time: "... Few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination. Are we pleased with it, proud of it, then?" A summation of the family's favorite philosophical pastime. Do we make the Shadow worlds? Or are they there, independent of us, awaiting our footfalls? Or is there an unfairly excluded middle? Is it a matter of more or less, rather than either-or? A dry chuckle arose suddenly as I realized that I might never know the answer for certain. Yet, as I had thought that night, there is a place, a place where there comes an end to Self, a place where solipsism is no longer the plausible answer to the locales we visit, the things that we find. The existence of this place, these things, say that here, at least, there is a difference, and if here, perhaps it runs back through our shadows, too, informing them with the not-self, moving our egos back to a smaller stage. For this, I felt, was such a place, a place where the "Are we pleased with it, proud of it then?" need not apply, as the rent vale of Gamath and my curse might have nearer home. Whatever I ultimately believed, I felt that I was about to enter the land of the completely not-I. My powers over Shadow might well be canceled beyond this point. I sat up straight and squinted against the glare. I spoke a word to Star and shook the reins. We moved ahead. For a moment, it was like riding into a fog. Only it was enormously brighter, and there was absolutely no sound. Then we were falling. Falling, or drifting. After the initial shock, it was difficult to say. At first there was a feeling of descent -- perhaps intensified by the fact that Star panicked when it began. But there was nothing to kick against, and after a time Star ceased all movement save for shivering and heavy breathing. I held the reins with my right hand and clutched the Jewel with my left. I do not know what I willed or how I reached with it, exactly, but I wanted passage through this place of bright nothingness, to find my way once more and move on to the journey's end. I lost track of time. The feeling of descent had vanished. Was I moving, or merely hovering? No way to say. Was the brightness really brightness, still? And that deadly silence... I shuddered. Here was even greater sensory deprivation than in the days of my blindness, in my old cell. Here was nothing -- not the sound of a scuttling rat nor the grinding of my spoon against the door; no dampness, no chill, no textures. I continued to reach... Flicker. It seemed there had been some momentary breaking of the visual field to my right, near-subliminal in its brevity. I reached out and felt nothing. It had been so brief a thing that I was uncertain whether it had really occurred. It could easily have been an hallucination. But it seemed to happen again, this time to my left. How long the interval between, I could not say. Then I heard something like a groan, directionless. This, too, was very brief. Next -- and for the first time, I was certain -- there came a gray and white landscape like the surface of the moon. There and gone, perhaps a second's worth, in a small area of my visual field, off to my left. Star snorted. To my right appeared a forest -- gray and white -- tumbling, as though we passed one another at some impossible angle. A smallscreen fragment, less than two seconds' worth. Then pieces of a burning building beneath me... colorless... Snatches of wailing, from overhead... A ghostly mountain, a torchlit procession ascending a switchback trail up its nearest face... A woman hanging from a treelimb, taut rope about her neck, head twisted to the side, hands tied behind her back... Mountains, upside-down, white; black clouds beneath... Click. A tiny thrill of vibration, as if we had momentarily touched something solid -- Star's hoof on stone, perhaps. Then gone... Flicker. Heads, rolling, dripping black gore... a chuckle from nowhere... a man nailed to a wall, upside-down... The white light again, rolling and heaving, wave-like... Click. Flicker. For one pulsebeat, we trod a trail beneath a stippled sky. The moment it was gone, I reached for it again, through the Jewel. Click. Flicker. Click. Rumble. A rocky trail, approaching a high mountain pass... Still monochrome, the world... at my back, a crashing like thunder... I twisted the Jewel like a focus knob as the world began to fade. It came back again... Two, three, four... I counted hoofbeats, heartbeats against the growling background... Seven, eight, nine... the world grew brighter. I took a deep breath and sighed heavily. The air was cold. Between the thunder and its echoes, I heard the sound of rain. None fell upon me, though. I glanced back. A great wall of rain stood perhaps a hundred meters to the rear. I could only distinguish the dimmest of mountain outlines through it. I clucked to Star and we moved a little faster, climbing to an almost level stretch that led between a pair of peaks like turrets. The world ahead was still a study in black and white and gray, the sky before me divided by alternate bands of darkness and light. We entered the pass. I began to tremble. I wanted to draw rein, to rest, eat, smoke, dismount and walk around. Yet, I was still too close to that stormscreen to so indulge myself. Star's hoofbeats echoed within the pass, where rock walls rose sheer on either hand beneath that zebra sky. I hoped these mountains would break this stormfront, though I felt that they could not. This was no ordinary storm, and I had a sick feeling that it stretched all the way back to Amber, and that I would have been trapped and lost forever within it but for the Jewel. As I watched that strange sky, a blizzard of pale flowers began to fall about me, brightening my way. A pleasant odor filled the air. The thunder at my back softened. The rocks at my sides were shot with silver streaks. The world was possessed of a twilight feeling to match the illumination, and as I emerged from the pass, I saw down into a valley of quirked perspective, distances impossible to gauge, filled with natural-seeming spires and minarets reflecting the moonlike light of the sky-streaks, reminiscent of a night in Tir-na Nog'th, interspersed with silvery trees, spotted with mirror-like pools, traversed by drifting wraiths, almost terracedseeming in places, natural nad rolling in others, cut by what appeared to be an extension of the line of trail I followed, rising and falling, hung over by an elegiac quality, sparked with inexplicable points of glitter and shine, devoid of any signs of habitation. I did not hesitate, but began my descent. The ground about me here was chalky and pale as bone -- and was that the faintest line of a black road far off to my left? I could just about make it out. I did not hurry now, as I could see that Star was tiring. If the storm did not come on too quickly, I felt that we might take a rest beside one of the pools in the valley below. I was tired and hungry myself. I kept a lookout on the way down, but saw no people, no animals. The wind made a soft, sighing noise. White flowers stirred on vines beside the trail when I reached the lower levels where regular foliage began. Looking back, I saw that the stormfront still had not passed the mountain crest, though the clouds continued to pile behind it. I made my way on down into that strange place. The flowers had long before ceased to fall about me, but a delicate perfume hung in the air. There were no sounds other than our own and that of the constant breeze from my right. Oddly shaped rock formations stood all about me, seeming almost sculpted in their purity of line. The mists still drifted. The pale grasses sparkled damply. As I followed the trail toward the valley's wooded center, the perspectives continued to shift about me, skewing distances, bending prospects. In fact, I turned off the trail to the left to approach what appeared to be a nearby lake and it seemed to recede as I advanced. When I finally came upon it, however, dismounted and dipped a finger to taste, the water was icy but sweet. Tired, I sprawled after drinking my fill, to watch Star graze while I began a cold meal from my bag. The storm was still fighting to cross the mountains. I looked for a long while, wondering about it. If Dad had failed, then those were the growls of Armageddon and this whole trip was meaningless. It did me no good to think that way, for I knew that I had to go on, whatever. But I could not help it. I might arrive at my destination, I might see the battle won, and then see it all swept away. Pointless... No. Not pointless. I would have tried, and I would keep on trying to the end. That was enough, even if everything was lost. Damn Brand, anyway! For starting -- A footfall. I was into a crouch and I was turned in that direction with my hand on my blade in an instant. It 'was a woman that I faced, small, clad in white. She had long, dark hair and wild, dark eyes, and she was smiling. She carried a wicker basket which she placed on the ground between us. "You must be hungry, Knight at arms," she said in strangely accented Thari. "I saw you come. I brought you this." I smiled and assumed a more normal stance. "Thank you," I said. "I am. I am called Corwin. Yourself?" "Lady," she said. I quirked an eyebrow. "Thank you -- Lady. You make your home in this place?" She nodded and knelt to uncover the basket. "Yes, my pavilion is farther back, along the lake." She gestured with her head, eastward -- in the direction of the black road. "I see," I said. The food and the wine in the basket looked real, fresh, appetizing, better than my traveler's fare. Suspicion was with me, of course. "You will share it with me?" I asked. "If you wish." "I wish." "Very well." She spread a cloth, seated herself across from me, removed the food from the basket and arranged it between us. She served it then, and quickly sampled each item herself. I felt a trifle ignoble at this, but only a trifle. It was a peculiar location lor a woman to be residing, apparently alone, just waiting around to succor the first stranger who happened along. Dara had fed me on our first meeting, also; and as I might be nearing the end of my journey, I was closer to the enemy's places of power. The black road was too near at hand, and I caught Lady eyeing the Jewel on several occasions. But it was an enjoyable time, and we grew more familiar as we dined. She was an ideal audience, laughing at all my jokes, making me talk about myself. She maintained eye contact much of the time, and somehow our fingers met whenever anything was passed. If I were being taken in in some way, she was being very pleasant about it. As we had dined and talked, I had also kept an eye on the progress of that , inexorable-seeming stormfront. It had finally breasted the mountain crest and crossed over. It had begun its slow descent of the high slope. As she cleared the cloth, Lady saw the direction of my gaze and nodded. "Yes, it is coming," she said, placing the last of the utensils in the basket and seating herself beside me, bringing the bottle and our cups. "Shall we drink to it?" "I will drink with you, but not to that." She poured. "It does not matter," she said. "Not now," and she placed her hand on my arm and passed me my cup. I held it and looked down at her. She smiled. She touched the rim of my cup with her own. We drank. "Come to my pavilion now," she said, taking my hand, "where we will while pleasurably the hours that remain." "Thanks," I said. "Another time and that whiling would have been a fine dessert to a grand meal. Unfortunately, I must be on my way. Duty nags, times rushes, I've a mission." "All right," she said. "It is not that important. And I know all about your mission. It is not all that important either, now." "Oh? I must confess that I fully expected you to invite me to a private party that would result in me alone and palely loitering on the cold side of some hill sometime hence if I were to accept." She laughed. "And I must confess that it was my intention to so use you, Corwin. No longer, though." "Why not?" She gestured toward the advancing line of disruption. "There is no need to delay you now. I see by this that the Courts have won. There is nothing anyone can do to halt the advance of the Chaos." I shuddered briefly and she refilled our cups. "But I would rather you did not leave me at this time," she went on. "It will reach us here in a matter of hours. What better way to spend this final time than in one another's company? There is no need even to go as far as my pavilion." I bowed my head, and she drew up close against me. What the hell. A woman and a bottle -- that was how I had always said I wanted to end my days. I took a sip of the wine. She was probably right. Yet, I thought of the woman-thing that had trapped me on the black road as I was leaving Avalon. I had gone at first to aid her, succumbed quickly to her unnatural charms -- then, when her mask was removed, saw that there was nothing at all behind it. Damned frightening, at the time. But, not to get too philosophical, everybody has a whole rack of masks for different occasions. I have heard pop psychologists inveigh against them for years. Still, I have met people who impressed me favorably at first, people whom I came to hate when I learned what they were like underneath. And sometimes they were like that woman-thing -- with nothing much really there. I have found that the mask is often far more acceptable than its alternative. So... this girl I held to me might really be a monster inside. Probably was. Aren't most of us? I could think of worse ways to go if I wanted to give up at this point. I liked her. I finished my wine. She moved to pour me more and I stayed her hand. She looked up at me. I smiled. "You almost persuaded me," I said. Then I closed her eyes with kisses four, so as not to break the charm, and I went and mounted Star. The sedge was not withered, but he was right about the no birds. Hell of a way to run a railroad, though. "Good-bye, Lady."    I headed south as the storm boiled its way down into the valley. There were more mountains before me, and the trail led toward them. The sky was still streaked, black and white, and these lines seemed to move about a bit; the overall effect was still that of twilight, though no stars shone within the black areas. Still the breeze, still the perfume about me -- and the silence, and the twisted monoliths and the silvery foliage, still dewdamp and glistening. Rag-ends of mist blew before me. I tried to work with the stuff of Shadow, but it was difficult and I was tired. Nothing happened. I drew strength from the Jewel, trying to transmit some of it to Star, also. We moved at a steady pace until finally the land tilted upward before us, and we were climbing toward another pass, a more jagged thing than the one by which we had entered. I halted to look back, and perhaps a ihird of the valley now lay behind the shimmering screen of that advancing storm-thing. I wondered about Lady, her lake, her pavilion. I shook my head and continued on. The way steepened as we neared (he pass, and we were slowed. Overhead, the white rivers in the sky took on a reddish cast that deepened as we rode. By the time that I reached the entrance, the whole world seemed tinged with blood. Passing within that wide, rocky avenue, I was struck by a heavy wind. Pushing on against it, the ground grew more level beneath us, though we continued to climb and I still could not see beyond the pass. As I rode, something rattled in the rocks to my left. I glanced that way, but saw nothing. I dismissed it as a falling stone. Half a minute later, Star jerked beneath me, let out a terrible neigh, turned sharply to the right, then began to topple, leftward. I leaped clear, and as we both fell, I saw that an arrow protruded from behind Star's right shoulder, low. I hit the ground rolling, and when I halted, I looked up in the direction from which it must have come. A figure with a crossbow stood atop the ridge to my right, about ten meters above me. He was already cranking the weapon back to prepare for another shot. I knew that I could not reach him in time to stop him. So I cast about for a stone the size of a baseball, found one at the foot of the escarpment to my rear, hefted it and tried not to let my rage interfere with the accuracy of my throw. It did not, but it may have contributed some extra force. The blow caught him on the left arm, and he let out a cry, dropping the crossbow. The weapon clattered down the rocks and landed on the other side of the trail, almost directly across from me. "You son of a bitch!" I cried. "You killed my horse! I'm going to have your head for it! ' ' As I crossed the trail, I looked for the fastest way up to him and saw it off to my left. I hurried to it and commenced climbing. An instant later, the light and the angle were proper and I had a better view of the man, bent nearly double, massaging his arm. It was Brand, his hair even redder in the sanguine light. "This is it, Brand," I said. "I only wish someone had done it a long time ago." He straightened and watched me climb for a moment. He did not reach for his blade. Just as I got to the top, perhaps seven meters away from him, he crossed his arms on his breast and lowered his head. I drew Grayswandir and advanced. I admit that I was prepared to kill him in that or any other position. The red light had deepened until we seemed bathed in blood. The wind howled about us, and from the valley below came a rumble of thunder. He simply faded before me. His outline grew less distinct, and by the time I reached the place where he had been standing, he had vanished entirely. I stood for a moment, cursing, remembering the story that he had somehow been transformed into a living Trump, capable of transporting himself anywhere in a very brief time. I heard a noise from below... I rushed to the edge and looked down. Star was still kicking and blowing blood, and it tore my heart to see it. But that was not the only distressing sight. Brand was below. He had picked up the crossbow and begun preparing it once more. I looked about for another stone, but there was nothing at hand. Then I spotted one farther back, in the direction from which I had come. I hurried to it, resheathed my blade and raised the thing. It was about the size of a watermelon. I returned with it to the edge and sought Brand. He was nowhere in sight. Suddenly I felt very exposed. He could have transported himself to any vantage and be sighting in on me at that instant. I dropped to the ground, falling across my rock. A moment later I heard the bolt strike to my right. The sound was followed by Brand's chuckle. I stood again, knowing it would take him at least a little while to recock his weapon. Looking in the direction of the laughter, I saw him, atop the ledge across the pass from me -- about five meters higher than I and about twenty meters distant. "Sorry about the horse," he said. I was aiming for you. But those damned winds By then I had spotted a niche and I made for it, taking the rock with me for a shield. From that wedgeshaped fissure, I watched him fit the bolt. "A difficult shot," he called out, raising the weapon, "a challenge to my marksmanship. But certainly worth the effort. I've plenty more quarrels." He chuckled, sighted and fired. I bent low, holding the rock before my middle, but the bolt struck about two feet to my right. "I had sort of guessed that might happen," he said, beginning to prepare his weapon once again. "Had to leam the windage, though." I looked about for smaller stones to use for ammunition as I had earlier. There were none nearby. I wondered about the Jewel then. It was supposed to act to save me in the presence of immediate peril. But I had a funny feeling that this involved close proximity, and that Brand was aware of this and was taking advantage of the phenomenon. Still, mightn't there be something else I could do with the Jewel to thwart him? He seemed too far away for the paralysis trick, but I had beaten him once before by controlling the weather. I wondered how far off the storm was. I reached for it. I saw that it would take minutes I did not possess in order to set up the conditions necessary to draw lightning upon him. But the winds were another matter. I reached out for them, felt them... Brand was almost ready to shoot again. The wind began to scream through the pass. I do not know where his next shot landed. Nowhere near me, though. He fell to readying his weapon again. I began setting up the factors for a lightningstroke... When he was ready, when he raised the weapon this time, I raised the winds once more. I saw him sight, I saw him draw a breath and hold it. Then he lowered the bow and stared at me. "It just occurred to me," he called out, "you've got that wind in your pocket, haven't you? That is cheating, Corwin." He looked all about. "I should be able to find a footing where it will not matter, though. Aha!" I kept working to set things up to blast him, but conditions were not ready yet. I looked up at that redand black-streaked sky, something cloud-like forming above us. Soon, but not yet... Brand faded and vanished again. Wildly I sought him everywhere. Then he faced me. He had come over to my side of the pass. He stood about ten meters to the south of me, with the wind at his back. I knew that I could not shift it in time. I wondered about throwing my rock. He would probably duck and I would be throwing away my shield. On the other hand... He raised the weapon to his shoulder. Stall! cried my own voice within my mind, while I continued to tamper with the heavens. "Before you shoot, Brand, tell me one thing. All right?" He hesitated, then lowered the weapon a few inches. "What?" "Were you telling me the truth about what happened -- with Dad, the Pattern, the coming of Chaos?" He threw back his head and laughed, a series of short barks. "Corwin," he stated then, "it pleases me more than I can say to see you die not knowing something that means that much to you." He laughed again and began to raise the weapon. I had just moved to hurl my rock and rush him. But neither of us completed either action. There came a great shriek from overhead, and a piece of the sky seemed to detach itself and fall upon Brand's head. He screamed and dropped the crossbow. He raised his hands to tear at the thing that assailed him. The red bird, the Jewel-bearer, bom of my blood from my father's hand, had returned, to defend me. I let go the rock and advanced upon him, drawing my blade as I went. Brand struck the bird and it flapped away, gaining altitude, circling for another dive. He raised both arms to cover his face and head, but not before I saw the blood that flowed from his left eyesocket. He began to fade again even as I rushed toward him. But the bird descended like a bomb and its talons struck Brand about the head once again. Then the bird, too, began to fade. Brand was reaching for his ruddy assailant and being slashed by it as they both disappeared. When I reached the place of the action, the only thing that remained was the fallen crossbow, and I smashed it with my boot. Not yet, not yet the end, damn it! How long will you plague me, brother? How far must I go to bring it to an end between us? I climbed back down to the trail. Star was not yet dead and I had to finish the job. Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong business. Having traversed the pass, I regarded the valley that lay before me. At least I assumed that it was a valley. I could see nothing below its cover of cloudmistfog. In the sky, one of the red streaks was turning yellow; another, green. I was slightly heartened by this, as i lie sky had behaved in a somewhat similar fashion when I had visited i he edge of things, across from the Courts of Chaos. I hitched up my pack and began hiking down the trail. The winds diminished as I went. Distantly, I heard some thunder from the storm I was fleeing. I wondered where brand had, gone. I had a feeling that I would not be seeing him again for a lime. Partway down, with the fog just beginning to creep and curl about me, I spotted an ancient tree and cut myself a staff. The tree seemed to shriek as I severed its limb. "Damn you!" came something like a voice from within it. "You're sentient?" I said. "I'm sorry..." "I spent a long time growing that branch. I suppose you are going to bum it now?" "No," I said. "I needed a staff. I've a long walk before me." "Through this valley?" "That's right." "Come closer, that I may better sense your presence. There is something about you that glows." I took a step forward. "Oberon!" it said. "I know thy lewel." "Not Oberon," I said. "I am his son. I wear it on his mission, though." "Then take my limb, and have my blessing with it. I've sheltered your father on many a strange day. He planted me, you see." "Really? Planting a tree is one of the few things I never saw Dad do." "I am no ordinary tree. He placed me here to mark a boundary." "Of what sort?" "I am the end of Chaos and of Order, depending upon how you view me. I mark a division. Beyond me other rules apply." "What rules?" "Who can say? Not I. I am only a growing tower of sentient lumber. My staff may comfort you, however. Planted, it may blossom in strange climes. Then again, it may not. Who can say? Bear it with you, however, son of Oberon, into the place where you journey now. I feel a storm approaching. Goodbye." "Good-bye," I said. "Thank you." I turned and walked on down the trail into the deepening fog. The pinkness was drained from it as I went. I shook my head as I thought about the tree, but its staff proved useful for the next several hundred meters, where the going was particularly rough. Then things cleared a bit. Rocks, a stagnant pool, some small, dreary trees festooned with ropes of moss, a smell of decay... I hurried by. A dark bird was watching me from one of the trees. It took wing as I regarded it, flapping in a leisurely fashion in my direction. Recent events having left me a little bird-shy, I drew back as it circled my head. But then it fluttered to rest on the trail before me, cocked its head and viewed me with its left eye. "Yes," it announced then. "You are the one." "The one what?" I said. "The one I will accompany. You've no objection to a bird of ill-omen following you, have you, Corwin?' ' It chuckled then, and executed a little dance. "Offhand, I do not see how I can stop you. How is it that you know my name?" "I've been waiting for you since the beginning of Time, Corwin." "Must have been a bit tiresome." "It has not been all that long, in this place. Time is what you make of it. ' ' I resumed walking. I passed the bird and kept going. Moments later, it flashed by me and landed atop a rock off to my right. "My name is Hugi," he stated. "You are carrying a piece of old Ygg, I see." "Ygg?" "The stuffy old tree who waits at the entrance to this place and won't let anyone rest on his branches. I'll bet he yelled when you whacked it off." He emitted peals of laughter then. "He was quite decent about it." # "I'll bet. But then, he hadn't much choice once you'd done it. Fat lot of good it will do you." "It's doing me fine," I said, swinging it lightly in his direction. He fluttered away from it. "Hey! That was not funny!" I laughed. "I thought it was." I walked on by. For a long while I made my way through a marshy area. As occasional gust of wind would clear the way nearby. Then I would pass it, or the fogs would shift over it once again. Occasionally I seemed to hear a snatch of music -- from what direction, I could not tell -- slow, and somewhat stately, produced by a steelstringed instrument. As I slogged along, I was hailed from somewhere to my left: "Stranger! Halt and regard me!" Wary, I halted. Couldn't see a damned thing through that fog, though. "Hello," I said. "Where are you?" Just then the fogs broke for a moment and I beheld a huge head, eyes on a level with my own. They belonged to what seemed a giant body, sunk up to the shoulders in a quag. The head was bald, the skin pale as milk, with a stony texture to it. The dark eyes probably seemed even darker than they really were by way of contrast. "I see," I said then. "You are in a bit of a fix. Can you free your arms?" "If I strain mightily," came the reply. "Well, let me check about for something stable you can grab onto. You ought to have a pretty good reach there." "No. That is not necessary." "Don't you want to get out? I thought that was why you hollered." "Oh, no. I simply wanted you to regard me." I moved nearer and started, for (he fog was beginning to shift again. "All right," I said. "I have seen you." "Do you feel my plight?" "Not particularly, if you will not help yourself or accept help." "What good would it do me to free myself?" "Your question. You answer it." I turned to go. "Wait! Where do you travel?" "South, to appear in a morality play." Just then Hugi flew out of the log and landed atop the head. He pecked at it and laughed. "Don't waste your time, Corwin. There is much less here than meets ihe eye," he said. The giant lips shaped my name. Then, "He is indeed the one?" "That's him, all right," Hugi replied. "Listen, Corwin," said the sunken giant. "You are going to try to stop the Chaos, aren't you?" "Yes." "Do not do it. It is not worth it. I want things to end. I desire a release from this condition." "I already offered to help you out. You turned me down." "Not that sort of release. An end to the whole works." "That is easily done," I said. "Just duck your head and take a deep breath." "It is not only personal termination that I desire, but an end to the whole foolish game." "I believe there are a few other folks around who would rather make their own decisions on the matter." "Let it end for them, too. There will come a time when they are in my position and will feel the same way. ' ' "Then they will possess the same option. Good day." I turned and walked on. "You will, too!" he called after me. As I hiked along, Hugi caught up with me and perched on the end of my staff. "It's neat to sit on old Ygg's limb now he can't -- Yikes!" Hugi sprang into the air and circled. "Burned my foot! How'd he do that?" he cried. I laughed. "Beats me." He fluttered for a few moments, then made for my right shoulder. "Okay if I rest here?" "Go ahead." "Thanks." He settled. "The Head is really a mental basket case, you know." I shrugged my shoulders and he spread his wings for balance. "He is groping after something," he went on, "but proceeding incorrectly by holding the world responsible for his own failings." "No. He would not even grope to get out of the mud," I said. "I meant philosophically." "Oh, that sort of mud. Too bad." "The whole problem lies with the self, the ego, and its involvement with the world on the one hand and the Absolute on the other." "Oh, is that so?" "Yes. You see, we are hatched and we drift on the surface of events. Sometimes we feel that we actually influence things, and this gives rise to striving. This is a big mistake, because it creates desires and builds up a false ego when just being should be enough. That leads to more desires and more striving and there you are, trapped." "In the mud?" "So to speak. One needs to fix one's vision firmly on the Absolute and leam to ignore the mirages, the illusions, the fake sense of identity that sets one apart as a false island of consciousness." "I had a fake identity once. It helped me a lot in becoming the absolute that I am now: me." "No, that's fake, too." "Then the me that may exist tomorrow will thank me for it, as I do that other." "You are missing the point. That you will be fake, too." "Why?" "Because it will still be full of those desires and strivings that set you apart from the Absolute." "What is wrong with that?" "You remain alone in a world of strangers, the world of phenomena." "I like being alone. I am quite fond of myself. I like phenomena, too." "Yet the Absolute will always be there, calling to you, causing unrest." "Good, then there is no need to hurry. But yes, I see what you mean. It takes the form of ideals. Everyone has a few. If you are saying that I should pursue them, I agree with you." "No, they are distortions of the Absolute, and what you are talking about is more striving." "That is correct," "I can see that you have a lot to unlearn." "If you are talking about my vulgar instinct for survival, forget it." The trail had been leading upward, and we came now to a smooth, level place, almost pavedseeming, though strewn lightly with sand. The music had grown louder and continued to do so as I advanced. Then, through the fog, I saw dim shapes moving, slowly, rhythmically. It took several moments for me to realize that they were dancing to the music. I kept moving until I could view ihe figures -- human-seeming, handsome folk, garbed in courtly attire -- treading to the slow measures of invisible musicians. It was an intricate and lovely dance that they executed, and I halted to watch some of it. "What is the occasion," I asked Hugi, "for a party out here in the middle of nowhere?" "They dance," he said, "to celebrate your passage. They are not mortals, but the spirits of Time. They began this foolish show when you entered the valley." "Spirits?" "Yes. Observe." He left my shoulder, flew above them and defecated. The dropping passed through several dancers as if they were holograms, without staining a brocaded sleeve or a silken shirt, without causing any of the smiling figures to miss a measure. Hugi cawed several times then and Hew back to me. "That was hardly necessary," I said. "It is a fine performance." "Decadent," he said, "and you should hardly take it as a compliment, for they anticipate your failure. They but wish to get in a final celebration before the show is closed." I watched for a time anyway, leaning upon my staff, resting. The figure described by the dancers slowly shifted, until one of the women -- an aubum-haired beauty -- was quite near to me. Now, none of the dancers' eyes at any time met my own. It was as if I were not present. But that woman, in a perfectly timed gesture, cast with her right hand something that landed at my feet. I stooped and found it substantial. It was a silver rose -- my own emblem -- that I held. I straightened and fixed it at the collar of my cloak. Hugi looked the other way and said nothing. I had no hat to doff, but I did bow to the lady. There might have been a slight twitch of one eye as I turned to go. The ground lost its smoothness as I walked, and finally the music faded. The trail grew rougher, and whenever the fogs cleared, the only views were of rocks or barren plains. I drew strength from the Jewel when I would otherwise have collapsed, and I noted that each such fix was of shorter duration now. After a time I grew hungry and I halted to eat what rations I had left. Hugi stood on the ground nearby and watched me eat. "I will admit to a certain small admiration for your persistence," he said, "and even for what you implied when you spoke of ideals. But that is about it. Earlier we were talking about the futility of desire and of striving -- " "You were. It is not a major concern in my life." "It should be." "I have had a long life, Hugi. You insult me by assuming I have never considered these footnotes to Sophomore philosophy. The fact that you find concensus reality barren tells me more about you than it does about that state of affairs. To wit, if you believe what you say, I feel sorry for you, in that you must for some inexplicable reason be here, desiring and striving to influence this false ego of mine, rather than free of such nonsense and on your way to your Absolute. If you do not believe it, then it tells me that you have been set to hinder and discourage me, in which case you are wasting your time." Hugi made a gargling noise. Then, "You are not so blind that you deny the Absolute, the beginning and end of everything?" "It is not indispensable to a liberal education." "You admit the possibility?" "Perhaps I know it better than you, bird. The ego, as I see it, exists at an intermediate stage between rationality and reflex existence. Blotting is out is a retreat, though. If you come from that Absolute -- of a self-canceling All -- why do you wish to go back home? Do you so despise yourself that you fear mirrors? Why not make the trip worthwhile? Develop. Learn. Live. If you have been sent on a journey, why do you wish to cop out and run back to your point of departure? Or did your Absolute make a mistake in sending something of your caliber? Admit that possibility and that is the end of the news." Hugi glared at me, then sprang into the air and flew off. Going to consult his manual, perhaps... I heard a peal of thunder as I rose to my feet. I began walking. I had to try to keep ahead of things. The trail narrowed and widened a number of times before it vanished completely, leaving me to wander across a gravelly plain. I felt more and more depressed as I traveled, trying to keep my mental compass set in the proper direction. I almost came to welcome the sounds of the storm, for they at least gave me a rough idea as to which way was north. Of course things were a bit confusing in the fog, so that I could not be absolutely certain. And they were growing louder... Damn... And I had been grieved by the loss of Star, troubled by Hugi's futilitarianism. This was definitely not a good day. I began to doubt that I was going to complete my journey. If some nameless denizen of this dark place did not ambush me before too long, there was a strong possibility that I would wander here until my strength failed or the storm caught me. I did not know whether I would be able to beat back that canceling storm another time. I began to doubt it. I tried using the Jewel to disperse the fog, but its effects seemed blunted. By my own sluggishness, perhaps. I could clear a small area, but my rate of travel quickly bore me through it. My sense of Shadow was dulled in this place which seemed in some way the essence of Shadow. Sad. It would have been nice to go out with opera -- in a big Wagnerian finale beneath strange skies, against worthy opponents -- not scrabbling about in a foggy wasteland. I passed a familiar-seeming outcrop of stone. Could I have been moving in a circle? There is a tendency to do that when completely lost. I listened for the thunder, to take my bearings again. Perversely, all was silent. I moved to the outcrop and seated myself on the ground, resting my back against it. No sense to merely wandering. I would wait a time for the thunder's signal. I withdrew my Trumps as I sat 'there. Dad had said that they would be out of commission for a time, but I had nothing better to do. One by one, I went through them all, trying to reach everyone, save for Brand and Caine. Nothing. Dad had been right. The cards lacked the familiar coldness. I shuffled the entire deck then and cast my fortune, there on the sand. I got an impossible reading and put them all away again. I leaned back and wished I had some water left. For a long while, I listened for the storm. There were a few growls, but they were directionless. The Trumps made me think of my family. They were up ahead -- wherever that might be -- waiting for me. Waiting for what? I was transporting the Jewel. To what end? At first I had assumed that its powers might be necessary in the conflict. If so, and if I were indeed the only one who could employ them, then we were in bad shape. I thought of Amber then,and I was shaken with remorse and a kind of dread. Things must not end for Amber, ever. There had to be a way to roll back the Chaos... I threw away a small stone I had been toying with. Once I released it, it moved very slowly. The Jewel. Its slowdown effect again... I drew more energy and the stone shot away. It seemed that I had just taken strength from the Jewel a little while ago. While this treatment energized my body, my mind still felt fogged up. I needed sleep -- with lots of rapid eye movements. This place might seem a lot less unusual if I were rested. How close was I to my destination? Was it just beyond the next mountain range, or an enormous distance farther? And what chance had I of staying ahead of that storm, no matter what the distance? And the others? Supposing the battle was already concluded and we had lost? I had visions of arriving too late, to serve only as gravedigger... Bones and soliloquies, Chaos... And where was that damned black road now that I finally had a use for it? If I could locate it, I could follow it. I had a feeling that it was somewhere off to my left... I reached out once again, parting the fogs, rolling them back... nothing... A shape? Something moving? It was an animal, a large dog perhaps, moving to remain within the fog. Was it stalking me? The Jewel began to pulse as I moved the fog even farther back. Exposed, the animal seemed to shrug itself. Then it moved straight toward me. I stood as it came near. I could see then that it was a jackal, a big one, its eyes fixed on my own. "You are a little early," I said. "I was only resting." It chuckled. "I have come merely to regard a Prince of Amber," the beast said. "Anything else would be a bonus." It chuckled again. So did I. "Then feast your eyes. Anything else, and you will find that I have rested sufficiently." "Nay, nay," said the jackal. "I am a fan of the House of Amber. And that of Chaos. Royal blood appeals to me. Prince of Chaos. And conflict." "You have awarded me an unfamiliar title. My connection with the Courts of Chaos is mainly a matter of genealogy." "I think of the images of Amber passing through the shadows of Chaos. I think of the waves of Chaos washing over the images of Amber. Yet at the heart of the order Amber represents moves a family most chaotic, just as the House of Chaos is serene and placid. Yet you have your ties, as well as your conflicts." "At the moment," I said, "I am not interested in paradox-hunting and terminology games. I am trying to get to the Courts of Chaos. Do you know the way?" "Yes," said the jackal. "It is not far, as the carrion-bird flies. Come, I will set you in the proper direction." It turned and began walking away. I followed. "Do I move too fast? You seem tired." "No. Keep going. It is beyond this valley certainly, is it not?" "Yes. There is a tunnel." I followed it, out across sand and gravel and dry, hard ground. There was nothing growing at either hand. As we walked, the fogs thinned and took on a greenish cast -- another trick of that stippled sky, I assumed. After a time, I called out, "How much farther is it?" "Not too far now," it said. "Do you grow tired? Do you wish to rest?" It looked back as it spoke. The greenish light gave to its ugly features an even more ghastly cast. Still, I needed a guide; and we were heading uphill, which seemed to be proper. "Is there water anywhere near about?" I asked. "No. We would have to backtrack a considerable distance." "Forget it. I haven't the time." It shrugged and chuckled and continued on. The fog cleared a little more as we went, and I could see that we were entering a low range of hills. I leaned on my staff and kept up the pace. We climbed steadily for perhaps half an hour, the ground growing stonier, the angle of ascent steeper. I found myself beginning to breathe heavily. "Wait," I called to him. "I do want to rest now. I thought you said that it was not far." "Forgive me," it said, halting, "for jackalocentrism. I was judging in terms of my own natural pace. I erred in this, but we are almost there now. It lies among the rocks just ahead. Why not rest there?" "All right," I replied, and I resumed walking. Soon we reached a stony wall which I realized was the foot of a mountain. We picked our way among the rocky debris that lined it and came at last to an opening which led back into darkness. "There you have it," said the jackal. "The way is straight, and there are no troublesome side branches. Take your passage through, and good speed to you." "Thank you," I said, giving up thoughts of rest for the moment and stepping inside. "I appreciate this." "My pleasure," he said from behind me. I took several more steps and something crunched beneath my feet and rattled when kicked aside. It was a sound one does not readily forget. The floor was strewn with bones. There came a soft, quick sound from behind me, and I knew that I did not have time to draw Grayswandir. So I spun, raising my staff before me and thrusting with it. This maneuver blocked the beast's leap, striking it on the shoulder. But it also knocked me over backward, to roll among the bones. The staff was tom from my hands by the impact, and in the split-second of decision allowed me by my opponent's own fall, I chose to draw Grayswandir rather than grope after it. I managed to get my blade unsheathed, but that was all. I was still' on my back with the point of my weapon to my left when the jackal recovered and leaped again. I swung the pommel with all of my strength into its face. The shock ran down my arm and up into my shoulder. The jackal's head snapped back and its body twisted to my left. I brought the point into line immediately, gripping the hilt with both hands, and I was able to rise to my right knee before it snarled and lunged again. As soon as I saw that I had it on target, I threw my weight behind it as we met, driving the blade deep into the jackal's body. I released it quickly and rolled away from those snapping jaws. The jackal shrieked, struggled to rise, dropped back. I lay panting where I had fallen. I felt the staff beneath me and seized it. I brought it around to guard and drew myself back against the cave Wall. The beast did not rise again, however, but lay there thrashing. In the dim light I could see that it was vomiting. The smell was overpowering. Then it turned its eyes in my direction and lay still. "It would have been so fine," it said softly, "to eat a Prince of Amber. I always wondered about royal blood..." Then the eyes closed and the breathing stopped and I was left with the stink. I rose, back still against the wall, staff still before me, and regarded it. It was a long while before I could bring myself to retrieve my blade. A quick exploration showed me that I was in no tunnel, but only a cave. When I made my way out, the fog had grown yellow, and it was stirred now by a breeze from the lower reaches of the valley. I leaned against the rock and tried to decide which way to take. There was no real trail here. Finally, I struck off to my left. That way seemed somewhat steeper, and I wanted to get above the fog and into the mountains as soon as I could. The staff continued to serve me well. I kept listening for the sound of running water, but there was none about. I struggled along, always continuing upward, and the fogs thinned and changed color. Finally, I could see that I was climbing toward a wide plateau. Above it, I began to catch glimpses of the sky, manycolored and churning. There were several sharp claps of thunder at my back, but I still could not see the disposition of the storm. I increased my pace then, but began to grow dizzy after a few minutes. I stopped and seated myself on the ground, panting. I was overwhelmed with a sense of failure. Even if I made it up to the plateau, I had a feeling that the storm would roar right across it. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. What was the use of going on if there was no way I could make it? A shadow moved through the pistachio mists, dropped toward me. I raised my staff, then saw that it was only Hugi. He braked himself and landed at my feet. "Corwin," he said, "you have come a good distance." "But maybe not good enough," I said. "The storm seems to be getting nearer." "I believe that it is. I have been meditating and would like to give you the benefit of -- " "If you want to benefit me at all," I said, "I could tell you what to do." "What is that?" "Fly back and see how far off the storm really is, and how fast it seems to be moving. Then come and tell me." Hugi hopped from one foot to the other. Then, "All right," he said, and leaped into the air and batted his way toward what I felt to be the northwest. I leaned on the staff and rose. I might as well keep climbing at the best pace I could manage. I drew upon the Jewel again, and strength came into me like a red lightning flash. As I mounted the slope, a damp breeze sprang up from the direction in which Hugi had departed. There came another thunderclap. No more growls and rumbles. I made the most of the influx of energy, climbing quickly and efficiently for several hundred meters. If I were going to lose, I might as well make it to the top first. I might as well see where I was and learn whether there was anything at all left for me to try. My view of the sky grew more and more clear as I climbed. It had changed considerably since last I had regarded it. Half of it was of uninterrupted blackness and the other half those masses of swimming colors. And the entire heavenly bowl seemed to be rotating about a point directly overhead. I began to grow excited. This was the sky I was seeking, the sky that had covered me that time I had journeyed to Chaos. I struggled higher. I wanted to utter something heartening, but my throat was too dry. As I neared the rim of the plateau, I heard a flapping sound and Hugi was suddenly on my shoulder. "The storm is about ready to crawl up your arse," he said. "Be here any minute." I continued climbing, reached level ground and hauled myself up to it. I stood for a moment then, breathing heavily. The wind must have kept the area clear of fog, for it was a high, smooth plain, and I could see the sky for a great distance ahead. I advanced, to find a point from which I could see beyond the farther edge. As I moved, the sounds of the storm came to me more clearly. "I do not believe you will make it across," Hugi said, "without getting wet." "You know that is no ordinary storm," I croaked. "If it were, I'd be thankful for the chance of getting a drink." "I know. I was speaking figuratively." I growled something vulgar and kept going. Gradually the vista before me enlarged. The sky still did its crazy veil dance, but the illumination was more than sufficient. When I reached a position where I was positive what lay before me, I halted and sagged against my staff. "What is the matter?" Hugi asked. But I could not speak. I simply gestured at the great wasteland which commenced somewhere below the farther lip of the plateau to sweep on for at least forty miles before butting up against another range of mountains. And far off to the left and still running strong went the black road. "The waste?" he said. "I could have told you it was there. Why ' didn't you ask me?" I made a noise halfway between a groan and a sob and sank slowly to the ground. How long I remained so, I am not certain. I felt more than a little delirious. In the midst of it I seemed to see a possible answer, though something within me rebelled against it. I was finally roused by the noises of the storm and Hugi's chattering. "I can't beat it across that place," I whispered. "There is no way." "You say you have failed," Hugi said. "But this is not so. There is neither failure nor victory in striving. It is all but an illusion of the ego." I rose slowly to my knees. "I did not say that I had failed." "You said that you cannot go on to your destination. ' ' I looked back, to where lightnings now flashed as the storm climbed toward me. "That's right, I cannot do it that way. But if Dad failed, I have got to attempt something that Brand tried to convince me only he could do. I have to create a new Pattern, and I have to do it right here." "You? Create a new Pattern? If Oberon failed, how could a man who can barely stay on his feet do it? No, Corwin. Resignation is the greatest virtue you might cultivate." I raised my head and lowered the staff to the ground. Hugi fluttered down to stand beside it and I regarded him. "You do not want to believe any of the things that I said, do you?" I told him. "It does not matter, though. The conflict between our views is irreducible. I see desire as hidden identity and striving as its growth. You do not." I moved my hands forward and rested them on my knees. "If for you the greatest good is union with the Absolute, then why do you not fly to join it now, in the form of the allpervading Chaos which approaches? If I fail here, it will become Absolute. As for me, I must try, for so long as there is breath within me, to raise up a Pattern against it, I do this because I am what I am, and I am the man who could have been king in Amber." Hugi lowered his head. "I'll see you eat crow first," he said, and he chuckled. I reached out quickly and twisted his head off, wishing that I had time to build a fire. Though he made it look like a sacrifice, it is difficult to say to whom the moral victory belonged, since I was planning on doing it anyway. IX... Cassis, and the smell of the chestnut blossoms. All along the Champs-Elysees the chestnuts were foaming white... I remembered the play of the fountains in the Place de la Concorde... And down the Rue de Seine and along the quais, the smell of the old books, the smell of the river... the smell of chestnut blossoms... Why should I suddenly remember # and Paris on the shadow Earth, save that I was very happy that year and I might, reflexively, have sought an antidote for the present? Yes... White absinthe, Amer Picon, grenadine... wild strawberries, with Creme d'lsigny... chess at the Cafe de la Regence with actors from the Comedie Francaise, just across the way... the races at Chantilly... evenings at the Boite a Fursy on the Rue Pigalle... I placed my left foot firmly before my right, my right before my left. In my left hand I held the chain from which the Jewel depended -- and I carried it high, so that I could stare into the stone's depths, seeing and feeling there the emergence of the new Pattern that I described with each step. I had screwed my staff into the ground and left it to stand near the Pattern's beginning. Left... The wind sang about me and there was thunder near at hand. I did not meet with the physical resistance that I did on the old Pattern. There was no resistance at all. Instead -- and in many ways worse -- a peculiar deliberation had come over all my movements, slowing them, ritualizing them. I seemed to expend more energy in preparing for each step -- perceiving it, realizing it and ordering my mind for its execution -- than I did in the physical performance of the act. Yet the slowness seemed to require itself, was exacted of me by some unknown agency which determined precision and an adagio tempo for all my movements. Right... And, as the Pattern in Rebma had helped to restore my faded memories, so this one I was now striving to create stirred and elicited the smell of the chestnut trees, of the wagonloads of vegetables moving through the dawn toward the Halles... I was not in love with anyone in particular at the time, though there were many girls -- Yvettes and Mimis and Simones, their faces merge -- and it was spring in Paris, with Gipsy bands and cocktails at Louis's... I remembered, and my heart leaped with a kind of Proustian joy while Time tolled about me like a bell... And perhaps this was the reason for the recollection, for this joy seemed transmitted to my movements, informed my perceptions, empowered my will... I saw the next step and I took it... I had been around once now, creating the perimeter of my Pattern. At my back, I could feel the storm. It must have mounted to the plateau's rim. The sky was darkening, the storm blotting the swinging, swimming, colored lights. Flashes of lightning splayed about, and I could not spare the energy and the attention to try to control things. Having gone completely around, I could see that as much of the new Pattern as I had walked was now inscribed in the rock and glowing palely, bluely. Yet there were no sparks, no tingles in my feet, no hair-raising currents -- only the steady law of deliberation, upon me like a great weight... left... Poppies, poppies and cornflowers and tall poplars along country roads, the taste of Normandy cider... and in town again, the smell of the chestnut blossoms... the Seine full of stars... the smell of the old brick houses in the Place de Vosges after a morning's rain... the bar under the Olympia Music Hall... a fight there... bloodied knuckles, bandaged by a girl who took me home... what was her name? Chestnut blossoms... a white rose... I sniffed then. The odor was all but gone from the remains of the rose at my collar. Surprising that any of it had survived this far. It heartened me. I pushed ahead, curving gently lo my right. From the corner of my eye, I saw the advancing wall of the storm, slick as glass, obliterating everything it passed. The roar of its thunder was deafening now. Right, left... The advance of the armies of the night... would my Pattern hold against it? I wished that I might hurry, but if anything, I was moving with increasing slowness as I went on. I felt a curious sense of bilocalion, almost as if I were within the Jewel tracing the Pattern there myself while I moved out here, regarding it and mimicking its progress. Left... tum... right... The storm was indeed advancing. Soon it would reach old Hugi's bones. I smelled the moisture and the ozone and wondered about the strange dark bird who had said he'd been waiting for me since the beginning of Time. Waiting to argue with me or to be eaten by me in this place without history? Whatever, considering the exaggeration usual in moralists, it was fitting that, having failed to leave me with my heart all laden with rue over my spiritual condition, he be consumed to the accompaniment of theatrical thunder... There was distant thunder, near thunder and more thunder now. As I turned in that direction once more, the lightning flashes were nearly blinding. I clutched my chain and took another step... The storm pushed right up to the edge of my Pattern, and then it parted. It began to creep around me. Not a drop fell upon me or the Pattern. But slowly, gradually, we came to be totally engulfed within it. It seemed as if I were in a bubble at the bottom of a stormy sea. Walls of water encircled me and dark shapes darted by. It seemed as if the entire universe were pressing in to crush me. I concentrated on the red world of the Jewel. Left... The chestnut blossoms... a cup of hot chocolate at a sidewalk cafe... a band concert in the Tuileries Gardens, the sounds climbing through the sunbright air... Berlin in the twenties, the Pacific in the thirties -- there had been pleasures there, but of a different order. It may not be the true past, but images of the past that rush to comfort or torment us later, man or nation. No matter. Across the Pont Neuf and down the Rue Rivoli, buses and fiacres... painters at their easels in the Luxembourg Gardens... If all were to fall well, I might seek a shadow like this again one day... it ranked with my Avalon. I had forgotten... the details... the touches that make for life... the smell of the chestnuts... Walking... I completed another circuit. The wind screamed and the storm roared on, but I was untouched. So long as I did not permit it to distract me, so long as I kept moving and maintained my focus on the Jewel... I had to hold up, had to keep taking these slow, careful steps, never to stop, slower and slower but constantly moving... Faces... it seemed that rows of faces regarded me from beyond the Pattern's edge... large, like the Head, but twisted -- grinning, jeering, mocking me, waiting for me to stop or step wrongly... waiting for the whole thing to come apart around me... there was lightning behind their eyes and in their mouths, their laughter was the thunder... shadows crawled among them... now they spoke to me, with words like a gale from off a dark ocean... I would fail, they told me, fail and be swept away, this fragment of a Pattern dashed to pieces behind me and consumed... They cursed me, they spat and vomited toward me, though none of it reached... perhaps they were not really there... perhaps my mind had been broken by the strain... then what good were my efforts? A new Pattern to be shaped by a madman? I wavered, and they took up the chorus, "Mad! Mad! Mad!" in the voices of the elements. I drew a deep breath and smelled what was left of the rose and thought of chestnuts once again, and days filled with the joys of life and organic order. The voices seemed to soften as my mind raced back through the events of that happy year... and I took another step... and another... They had been playing on my weaknesses, they could feel my doubts, my anxiety, my fatigue... Whatever they were, they seized what they saw and tried to use it against me... Left... right... Now let them feel my confidence and wither, I told myself. I have come this far. I will continue. Left... They swirled and swelled about me, still mouthing discouragements. But some of the force seemed gone out of them. I made my way through another section of arc, seeing it grow before me in my mind's red eye. I thought back to my escape from Greenwood, to my tricking Flora out of information, to my encounter with Random, our fight with his pursuers, our journey back to Amber... I thought of our flight to Rebma and my walking of the reversed Pattern there for a restoration of much of my memory... of Random's shotgun wedding and my sojourn to Amber, where I fought with Eric and fled to Bleys... of the battles that followed, my blinding, my recovery, my escape, my journey to Lorraine and then to Avalon. Moving into even higher gear, my mind skimmed the surface of subsequent events... Ganelon and Lorraine... the creatures of the Black Circle... Benedict's arm... Dara... the return of Brand and his stabbing... my stabbing... Bill Roth... hospital records... my accident... Now, from the very beginning at Greenwood, through it all, to this moment of my struggle to assure each perfect maneuver as it appeared to me, I felt the growing sense of anticipation I had known -- whether my actions were directed toward the throne, vengeance, or my conception of duty -- felt it, was aware of its continuous existence across those years up until this moment, when it was finally accompanied by something else... I felt that the waiting was just about over, that whatever I had been anticipating and struggling toward was soon to occur. Left... very, very slowly... nothing else was important. I threw all of my will into the movements now. My concentration became total. Whatever lay beyond the Pattern, I was now oblivious to it. Lightnings, faces, winds... it did not matter. There was only the Jewel, the growing Pattern and myself -- and I was barely aware of myself. Perhaps this was the closest I would ever come to Hugi's ideal of merging with the Absolute. Turn... right foot... turn again. Time ceased to have meaning. Space was restricted to the design I was creating. I drew strength from the Jewel without summoning it now, as part of the process in which I was engaged. In a sense, I suppose, I was obliterated. I became a moving point, programmed by the Jewel, performing an operation which absorbed me so totally that I had no attention available for selfconsciousness. Yet, at some level, I realized that I was a part of the process, also. For I knew, somehow, that were anyone else doing it, it would be a different Pattern emerging. I was vaguely aware that I had passed the halfway point. The way had become trickier, my movements even slower. Despite the matter of velocity, I was somehow reminded of my experiences on originally becoming attuned to the Jewel, in that strange, many-dimensional matrix that seemed to be the source of the Pattern itself. Right... left... There was no drag. I felt very light, despite the deliberation. A boundless energy seemed to wash constantly through me. All of the sounds about me had merged into a white noise and vanished. Suddenly then, I no longer seemed to be moving slowly. It did not seem as if I had passed a Veil or barrier, but rather that I had undergone internal adjustment. It felt as if I were moving at a more normal pace now, winding my way through tighter and tighter coils, approaching what would soon be the design's terminus. Mainly, I was still emotionless, though I knew intellectually that at some level a sense of elation was growing and would soon burst through. Another step... another... perhaps half a dozen more paces. Suddenly the world went dark. It seemed that I stood within a great void, with only the faint light of the Jewel before me and the glow of the Pattern like a spiral nebula through which I was striding. I wavered, but only for an instant. This must be the last trial, the final assault. I would have to be sufficient to the distraction. The Jewel showed me what to do and the Pattern showed me where to do it. The only thing missing was a view of myself. Left... I continued, executing each move with all of my attention. An opposing force began to rise against me finally, as on the old Pattern. But for this I was prepared by years of experience. I struggled for two more steps against the mounting barrier. Then, within the Jewel, I saw the ending of the Pattern. I would have gasped at the sudden realization of its beauty, but at this point even my breath was regulated by my efforts. I threw all of my strength into the next step, and the void seemed to shake about me. I completed it, and the next was even more difficult. I felt as if I were at the center of the universe, treading on stars, struggling to impart some essential motion by what was basically an act of will. My foot slowly advanced, though I could not see it. The Pattern began to brighten. Soon its blaze was almost blinding. Just a little farther... I strove harder than I ever had on the old Pattern, for now the resistance seemed absolute. I had to oppose it with a firmness and constancy of will that excluded everything else, though I seemed not to be moving at all now, though all of my energies seemed diverted into the brightening of the design. At least I would go out with a splendid backdrop... Minutes, days, years... I do not know how long this went on. It felt like forever, as if I had been engaged in this single act for all of eternity... Then I moved, and how long that took I do not know. But I completed the step and began another. Then another... The universe seemed to reel about me. I was through. The pressure was gone. The blackness was gone... For an instant I stood at the center of my Pattern. Without even regarding it, I fell forward onto my knees and bent double, my blood pounding in my ears. Head swimming, I panted. I began to shake, all over. I had done it, I realized dimly. Come whatever may, there was a Pattern. And it would endure. I heard a sound where there should have been none, but my jaded muscles refused to respond. even reflexively, until it was too late. Not until the Jewel was jerked from my limp fingers did I raise my head and roll back onto my haunches. No one had been following me through the Pattern -- I was certain that I would have been aware of it. Therefore... The light was almost normal, and blinking against it, I looked up into Brand's smiling face. He wore a black eyepatch now, and he held the Jewel in his hand. He must have teleported himself in. He struck me just as I raised my head, and I fell onto my left side. He kicked me in the stomach then, hard. "Well, you've done it," he said. "I did not think you could. Now I have another Pattern to destroy before I set things right. I need this to turn the battle at the Courts first, though." He waved the Jewel. "Good-bye for now." And he vanished. I lay there gasping and clutching at my stomach. Waves of blackness rose and fell, like a surf, within me, though I did not completely succumb to unconsciousness. A feeling of enormous despair washed over me, and I closed my eyes and moaned. There was no Jewel for me to draw upon now, either. The chestnut trees...    Last night I received a gift from a character in one of my books. At least that's what my friend Bob Prehoda ( Designing the Future, Chilton Press) claims, and he ought to know. Bob says that he is the remote ancestor of Trader Horace Bury, Magnate, who appears in The Mote in God's Eye, and that his remote descendant asked him to deliver the gift to me, presumably because I have been Bury's chronicler. None of which would be of any interest to galaxy readers except that during the conversation, Bob told me that E. F. Schumacher, guru of the Appropriate Technology Movement, died this week and we fell to reminiscences about the AP movement. Prehoda was to have confronted Schumacher in a seminar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions later this year and remembered the last time he'd been in a debate with the late economist. Certainly the man cared. Unlike the Grinch, Schumacher's heart was several sizes too large. He wanted people to be happy and the subtitle of his Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered sums up his view of life. If one is judged by one's intentions, Schumacher has ascended to Paradise. If the High Gods judge us by our consequences, the man may be in the blackest pits of Hell. Bob's story is typical: in the course of one of the seminars at the Santa Barbara Center, Prehoda mentioned that magnetic-confinement fusion systems would probably require temperatures in the order of Schumacher was horrified. "How can you contemplate such hellish temperatures? It's terrifying," said the sage; and no amount of explanation of the nature of plasmas (the pressures inside a fusion reactor would be called a high-grade industrial vacuum in most contexts) could induce him to change his opinion. His ignorance of modern technology and engineering was profound and apparently unbreachable. Yet Schumacher was the leader of a powerful movement; he had much to say about coal and oil and nonrenewable resources that ought to have been listened to; his analysis of the problems of developing countries ought to be required reading for anyone involved with such things. In #, as a member of Britain's Coal Resources Board, he predicted the energy crisis. He was a man of power -- and his conclusions were based on nonsense, profound ignorance, utter contempt for physics and science. Should leaders be held responsible for what they do not know? At a recent convention I was sought out by a young man who is an advisor to a powerful Congressman. The Congressman is concerned with science and technology. His advisor is concerned with ethics, and was obviously under the influence of Schumacher and the AP movement. And lo, the young man's knowledge of elementary physics and engineering is best described in charitable terms. It is worse than lacking; if he thought he knew nothing of the subject, we would all be better off. Instead, he is possessed of a series of cliches and half-truths and slogans. He is, after all, concerned with ethics, not engineering, and I suppose feels no need to study anything as dry and inhuman as equations and the calculus. In his defense I will say that he that much of what he thought he knew as truth was simple nonsense not even accepted by the more responsible antitechnology people. Indeed, despite the nonsense that passed for physics in his intellectual armory, he was, overall, highly in favor of technology on ethical grounds. Should he be held responsible for what he does not know? Not long ago, here in southern California, there was a mass demonstration against expansion of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station. One of the demonstrators who came in from the East Coast was an old friend, a Chaucerian scholar of some importance and great readability. I had not seen him for years and he telephoned to say that he would be out here, and that perhaps we could renew old acquaintances, even though we are very much on the opposite sides of the San Onofre question. He arrived and we talked by telephone but we did not meet. He left right after the demonstration. He is allergic to smog and he couldn't stand our southern California air. It never occurred to him that his activities might be contributing to our air problem. Is he responsible for his ignorance? Or is Schumacher?    E. F. Schumacher's major thesis was that a narrowly conceived profit motive should not be the sole decision criterion for major questions; that economics ought to be considered "as if people mattered." There are, he said, questions of public policy involved in the implementation of technology. There are questions of ethics, of human development and human pain, of esthetics; and in addition to those already living, the unborn have a right to be considered. Who can fault that view? Certainly no one who pretends to be conservative. From Edmund Burke on, the great conservative theorists have emphasized that society is more than a joint stock company for trading in coffee and tea; that a nation is a pact between the living, the dead and those yet to live; that the profit motive is a fine thing but hardly the end for which mankind labors. Schumacher has, after all, said no more than St. Thomas Aquinas: that prudence is a cardinal virtue. One ought to give thought to the consequences of one's actions and take responsibility not merely for what one intends, but what is likely to happen. But did Schumacher, do the Appropriate Technology people, live by this stricture?    By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. No one has, at least to my knowledge, interpreted that to mean what it literally says: that not even animal power may be used in cultivation; that all agriculture must be hand work and stoop labor. And if by the sweat of one's face must one eat bread, it is also true that no economy based on human labor will love mankind, we must be concerned with more than muscle power. It is easily arguable that energy resources are the most humane, the most liberating, the most humanizing technologies ever developed. Given energy, the world may be more than fed: there can be leisure. Given energy, everyone can be free in real terms: free to travel, free to enjoy good health, free to communicate with others across long distances, free to create for the sake of creation, free to enjoy art. Energy and technology have given the masses real freedoms, real choices, choices that matter; energy and technology have given to the masses the freedoms only dreamed of by the most powerful aristocrats of past centuries. The greatest king on Earth could not, when my father was young, travel across the United States in hours; now almost anyone can. Neither Rockefellers nor by the year # the vast majority more as a matter of birthright. I need not labor the point. Surely we can all agree that modem life is not merely more comfortable, but more humane, than was life in the past; and that this is due to technology and energy resources. We may not agree that the game is worth the candle; we may disagree about the costs; but surely there have been great benefits? Now true: there exists a group of middle-class antitechnocrats who have a meaner view of the Earth; who wish the benefits of industry and science, of wealth, to be restricted to a favored few; who ask, "What are those street sweepers doing on my beach?" and curse when they find the low-bom tramping through their national parks. There are probably more of such people than admit to it and they have a valid point, namely that some esthetic experiences by their very nature can be enjoyed only by a few; some pleasures are destroyed for all when all try to enjoy them. I am not concerned with these people here because few will openly argue their case. They may be right, but the intellectual and emotional temper of the times is much against them, and they know it. They do not come forward openly, but hide among others. Surely, though, E. F. Schumacher was not one of those. Surely he truly believed that his work was beneficial to man; that he was practicing "economics as if people mattered." If the consequence of what he taught was to make us all a little (or a lot) poorer, that was, for him, an unfortunate necessity, not a positive goal. No: on his terms, and in his intentions, Schumacher was a good man. But what was his effect on the world?    "Of all the changes introduced by man into the household of nature, large-scale nuclear fission is undoubtedly the most dangerous and profound. As a result, ionizing radiation has become the most serious agent of pollution of the environment and the greatest threat to man's survival on earth. The attention of the layman, not surprisingly, has been captured by the atom bomb, although there is at least a chance that it may never be used again. The danger to humanity created by the so-called peaceful uses of atomic energy may be much greater." From Small is Beautiful, p. #. Strong words and noble sentiments -- but are they true? Has man invented a new technology so terrible in its possible consequences that it might make the entire earth uninhabitable? If so, are we not better off without it? But here we enter a realm where noble sentiments are not enough. We have come to a regime of facts and hard numbers, of engineering and data; and Schumacher is egregiously wrong. In the first place, nuclear reactors are not new. Mankind didn't invent reactor operated periodically in Africa (in what is now the Republic of Gabon). There was natural uranium close to the surface and when water flowed into these uranium pockets to act as a moderator, the deposits years or more an average of # kW of thermal power was generated untended. Tons of plutonium were created, along with six tons of fission products. None of this was removed, decontaminated, recycled, placed in deep mines or indeed disturbed by human hands; yet the Earth was not destroyed. Schumacher made his reputation as a member of the Coal Resources Board and argued forcefully against closing down Europe's coal production back in the fifties when oil was plentiful and cheap. He was certainly vindicated by the energy crisis but the fact remains that he was a strong advocate of coal technology. Yet because of natural radioactivity present in coal, the radiation released to the environment by a coal-fired electrical power plant is about # times the dose put out by a nuclear plant of equal capacity; indeed, if coal plants were under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they would be in violation of down. And note: this radioactivity is released with no monitoring, dumped out the stack close to the surface of the Earth, let float free in the atmosphere. Of course it isn't dangerous. The amount is trivial. But it is much greater than the radioactivity put forth by nuclear plants. No one now says that a nuclear plant might "go off like a bomb"; even the most ignorant of nuclear opponents knows better than that. Yet we have books such as We Almost Lost Detroit which strongly imply it, and enjoy distribution by appropriate technology advocates. No member of the public has ever been injured by a nuclear power plant accident. All the "catastrophes" involving nuclear power are on paper. They are mere theories and speculations. There are arguments about whether a nuclear might happen once in a every ten thousand years, or every thousand. Yet -- the probability that we will tion to the victims of coal power is each year in Black Lung compensation. The worst theoretical accident postulated for a nuclear plant -- an accident that can happen once every years, or perhaps as often as every thousand years -- might kill three thousand people. This assumes a large power plant near a large city; that a guillotine cut-in which no coolant flow whatever continues happens to cooling lines; that all the emergency systems fail; that the reactor crew is unable to introduce coolant manually through the severed pipe; that the three-foot reinforced concrete containment is broached; that the reactor core melts through the six-inch steel reactor vessel; that there is a temperature inversion that day; that the radioactive leak comes out as fine particles rather than as chunks; and that a strong wind is blowing from the reactor to the city. Given all this, and that the city is not evacuated (there would be several hours' warning), the reactor accident might kill three thousand people. In December #, thirty-nine hundred people died in London as a result of air pollution from coal burning. The number of people in southern California killed by smog is not known but it is not zero. In The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear Dr. Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado (the book is available for # from Petr Beckmann, Box #, Boulder, Colorado #) details a long comparison between the hazards of our present methods of generating power, and what would happen if we converted to nuclear power plants. The conclusion is interesting: many lives would be saved. But perhaps Beckmann -- and the nuclear engineers and scientists on whose studies he has relied -- are wrong? Is this not a matter of controversy? Perhaps. Saying so will not people with our present methods of power generation. It may be controversial as to which is more dangerous, coal or nuclear power; but at least the advocates of nuclear power have examined the consequences of their stand. Of the dangers of coal and fossil fuels you will find in Schumacher little more than this: "What, after all, is the fouling of air with smoke compared with the pollution of air, water, and soil with ionizing radiation? Not that I wish in any way to belittle the evils of conventional air and water pollution; but we must recognise 'dimensional differences' when we encounter them: radioactive pollution is an evil of an incomparably greater 'dimension' than anything mankind has known before. One might even ask, what is the point of insisting on clean air, if the air is laden with radioactive particles? And even if the air could be protected, what is the point of it, if the soil and water are being poisoned?" Needless to say, neither Schumacher nor his followers are interested in the answers to such questions. When one attempts to show an advocate of "appropriate technology" the technological means by which problems such as nuclear "wastes" may be disposed of, the reaction is seldom polite. "Technological quick fixes" are of no interest because by definition such technology is "inappropriate." For them, nuclear wastes are not real physical objects. If the entire United States operated exclusively on nuclear power, the wastes generated would be about the size of an aspirin tablet for each of us each year. The resulting mess could be stored above ground in the Mojave Desert for centuries, assuming that nothing better could be devised; but that is the real world. To Schumacher and his followers, "nuclear wastes" are objects of terror: "The most massive wastes are, of course, the nuclear reactors themselves after they have become unserviceable... they cannot be dismantled and cannot be shifted, but have to be left standing where they are, probably for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, an active menace to all life, silently leaking radioactivity into air, water, and soil. No one has considered the number and location of these satanic mills which will relentlessly accumulate." This is good poetry; but of course "someone" has considered the problem. Indeed, there are thousands of pages of testimony before Congressional Committees, stacks of reports, blueprints, studies, tests, demonstration projects -- all of which Schumacher can ignore in favor of discussions of "satanic mills." Confronted by engineering studies, Schumacher could declare: "No amount of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large quantitites of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make 'safe' and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages." When told that the dangers were not "incalculable" and that in fact the calculations had been made, his answer was: "To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all." This is the language of the Old Testament, not of science; it is Jeremiah let loose among us; for of course Schumacher did not want engineering answers to technological problems. Nuclear power was for him the more dangerous the safer it could be made: for it let loose the genie of plenty and "prosperity" on the world -- and that, to Schumacher, was evil in itself.    "When I first began to travel the world, visiting rich and poor countries alike, I was tempted to formulate the first law of economics as follows: 'The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs. "The evidence is very strong indeed. If you go from easygoing England to, say, Germany or the United States, you find that people there live under much more strain than here. And if you move to a country like Burma, which is very near to the bottom of the league table of industrial progress, you find that people have an enormous amount of leisure really to enjoy themselves." Could Schumacher have believed that? Surely he knew that, given the opportunity, many Burmese would move to England or the United States but that there was little traffic the other way. For that matter, although he spent a number of years as economic advisor to one or another of the generals who ruled Burma, Schumacher himself did not choose to live there -- and while he was resident, he did not live at the peasant subsistence level. And yet his understanding of the problems of the Third World was often profound. His insistence on  ' intermediate technology ' ' rather than the latest products of Detroit and Liverpool; his popularization of the concept of technology "appropriate" to the places where it was to be introduced; above all, his understanding that a man who makes ten dollars a year will be discouraged and defeated by machinery costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, but might aspire to ownership of tools costing only twenty dollars; all these were real contributions to the happiness of mankind. It is this which is so exasperating about the Schumachers of this world. They understand that man does not live by aerosol cans alone; that there is a profound inherent difficulty with a society that produces more and more people who can make little or no contribution to it; that as we increasingly divorce meaning from work, we produce a generation that hates its jobs. They understand this; but they do not seem able to understand that, given the choice, most would prefer the boring assembly-line job and the gadgets and aerosol cans to a life of farming. Technology makes choices real. Primitive man is close to "meaningful work" and close to the soil because he must be. Primitive man has no choice but to eat bread through the sweat of his face. To denounce modem technology is to denounce choice, to say that people must have their lives decided for them; and there are many in the appropriate technology movement ready to make these choices -- for others. And yet, having said all that; having said that E. F. Schumacher may well have have assisted at the birth of a world he would not love, one must give him credit. He was good at pricking balloons, and all his side of the debate. He was at his best when discussing the needs of developing nations: "Everything sounds very difficult and in a sense it is very difficult if it is done for the people, instead of by the people. But let us not think that development or employment is anything but the most natural thing in the world. It occurs in every healthy person's life. There comes a time when he simply sets to work. In a sense this is much easier to do now than it has ever been in humanhistory. Why? Because there is so much more knowledge. "So let's not mesmerize ourselves by the difficulties, but recover the commonsense view that to work is the most natural thing in the world. Only one must not be blocked by being too damn clever about it... I think the stupid man who says 'something is better than nothing' is much more intelligent than the clever chap who will not let us touch anything unless it is optimal. What is stopping India? Theories, planning. I have come across planners at the Planning Commission who have convinced themselves that even within fifteen years it is not possible to India to work... this is just a sort of degeneracy of the intellect." This is a man in righteous wrath at "social engineers" who want everything planned before anything can start; who will not give the people a scythe because it is a waste, what with the tractor coming in a few months. It is Schumacher at his best and one wishes he had stayed with what he knew -- intermediate technology, simplification of work for a people trying to pull themselves forward from the I Ith century.    It is traditional to speak only good of the dead. Perhaps I should end with Schumacher's best but I cannot. An uglier image thrusts itself forward. In # B.C. the Romans captured Carthage. The city was destroyed and the site ritually sown with salt. The great library was burned. The records of the Phoenicians were lost. We now know that Phoenician ships had sailed clear around Africa; there is mounting evidence that there were Phoenician colonies in (he New World. The books were burned and the knowledge lost forever. In A.D. # the Caliph Omar burned the Great Library of Alexandria. "If the writings of the Greeks are consistent with the Book of God (Koran), they are not needed; if they are not, they are heresy. Bum them all," he ordered. I I is son spent a lifetime gathering the pitiful remnants of the greatest collection of knowledge then assembled in the world. In # the Franks burned the Great Library of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Much that had survived Omar was lost then. What has this to do with Schumacher? He said, not once but several times, that if all the books on nuclear technology could be assembled in one place, he would cheerfully set them alight -- to produce steam. Steam is "appropriate" technology for man. Nuclear is not. And mankind faces a critical decision. This generation, and perhaps the next, has the riches and the knowledge to take us from this planet and put us into the solar system. For the moment, a very brief moment in human history, we have the wealth and we could go forth into space. Whether by doing so we would forever "solve" the problems of famine and want is a matter for debate and discussion. My point is that there can be more than one dream. Each man sitting under his own fig tree and pruning his own vine is a noble vision -- but it is a limited vision. Surely man has long had higher goals? Should we not have the choice? And that is the danger of Schumacher's movement: it would deny choice. I can conceive of a future in which space-faring man confines high technology and adventure to other planets and leaves this one "unspoiled," parklike, a place of vines and fig trees. I cannot believe in Schumacher's future, limited to Only One Earth. Behind the poetic vision is the hard reality: without energy and technology lies a world in which only by the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.    What are we to make of "appropriate technology"? It can be seductive. Consider the vision of each man, woman and child in India planting and maintaining one tree a year so that after five years this tablished trees. Anyone can work it out on the back of an envelope that the economic value of such an enterprise, intelligently conducted, would be greater than anything that has ever been promised by any of India's five-year plans. It could be done without a penny of foreign aid; there is no problem of savings and investments. It would produce foodstuffs, fibres, building materials, shade, water, almost anything that man really needs... what sort of education prevents us from thinking of things ready to be done immediately? What makes us think we need electricity, cement, and steel before we can do anything at all?" This is seductive stuff, and valuable advice. Certainly people should not be encouraged to sit about doing nothing until some large organization saves them. But it will never be enough. Two five trees for each man, woman and child; and five trees will not provide foodstuffs, fibre, building material, "almost anything that man really needs." Had appropriate technology stopped with the trees, the movement would be invaluable. Had it spoken to us, as did the slave at the Roman Triumph, to remind us that we are mortal, and that technology is not a goal of itself, I would cheerfully acquiesce in making Small is Beautiful required reading in every engineering college in the land. But it does not stop there. It goes on: to the Clamshell Alliance which seeks to halt "nuclear pollution" along coasts where the only shellfish surviving the Great Winter of '# are alive because of "thermal pollution" of the water; to my friend who came to southern California to halt "nuclear pollution" of my homeland but who could not stay over with me because of the smog; to the frantic efforts to stop the Space Shuttle and close down the fusion plants. Let Schumacher provide his own epitaph: "What matters is the direction of research, that the direction should be towards non-violence rather than violence; towards an harmonious cooperation with nature rather than a warfare against nature; towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than the noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions of our present-day sciences. "The continuation of scientific advance in the direction of everincreasing violence, culminating in nuclear fission and moving on to nuclear fusion, , is a prospect of terror threatening the abolition of man." Strong words, words which he must have believed: but how is a coal mine less violent than San Onofre? How is the hellish blast of a boiler, the strip-mining of Black Mesa, the slurry pipeline across Arizona and New Mexico, less noisy than the near-silent hum of the turbines in a modem nuclear plant? Of course I have used loaded words, as did Schumacher, and there is the point. Mankind will not be saved by talk of "hellish temperatures" and "satanic mills" any more than it will be saved by Carl Sandberg's poetic hymns to Chicago. We live in a world that needs poets and poetic vision; but it needs at least as much those who can understand Maxwell's equations. It is possible that advocates of nuclear power -- myself among them -- are wrong. What is not acceptable is that public policy be decided by the exchange of irrational slogans. And the decision is important. It is not simply a matter of putting off nuclear power because "it might kill the lot of us." So "might" a number of things -- including wars and famines brought on by lack of energy resources. True, discussion of policies must not be confined merely to equations. Esthetics must enter. There is more to life than simple survival, and a great deal more than profit. But is not e  me # as elegant as a sonnet? Schumacher leaves two legacies. The one is a reminder that there is more than economics. People must do what they can. It is the vision of every man, woman and child in India planting a tree and tending it. It is the vision of a world in which all can participate and all are needed. The other is an uglier legacy: of arguments from ignorance; of followers who convince themselves they are right because they are "concerned"; of "ecologists" who know no ecology; of modem Luddites who, not content with planting trees, must sabotage the power plants; of the irrational belief that because one's heart is pure, one need know no more than poetic phrases and catchy slogans; of an anti-rational world. We can hope that the one legacy will die, and the other live after him. Like the song says, "A Man ain't nothin' but a man" -- machines are not so limited. Inside his mind he could still see himself in the glossy black and white: A quiet pose, seated on a stool with his white-faced guitar balanced lightly against his knee, the words "John Henry Roberts Appearing Nightly. Last Live Entertainment in Chicago" printed below. Several times his eyes and mind played leap-frog, projecting his picture for an instant upon the empty display-board; his pride was buying a second or two to absorb and adjust. But the picture was gone. John Henry knew this. And why. The Ultra-Media marquee, much like the ones over other nightspots in Chicago, was already up; it blared its menu of media delights in bright colors -- "world cup yacht "star travel symphony" -- A Collection Of Music From Other Worlds." A ring of dull-glowing suns circled the marquee, indicating the Ultra-Media system within was complete with patron feedback, instant coordination, World Premier capacity. The dull suns on the marquee might at any instant blaze into an electric firestorm of white and yellow and blue light -- signaling to people on the street the computerassisted system inside had struck on a novel combination, matching patron mood and desire with media capacity stored in its memory banks and, at that moment, was producing a completely unique media experience. The old sign "Ramon's," was still in its place over the door. But you had to squint and shield your eyes with a hand to see it. John Henry stood in the glare of the UltraMedia marquee, its electric song an omen -- especially for him. He stared at the empty display-board where only yesterday his picture had been; he stared and suffered his feelings of hurt and surprise; he allowed self-pity, wasp-like, to dance in his eyes like the light from the marquee itself. Finally he brushed it away. A fine anger began to build within him. He went inside.    "Ramon, how could you do this? Ramon..." Ramon stood behind the bar, polishing a glass. The Ultra-Media Experience Machine, a silver cloud, floated silently at the far end of the room; a bank of computers covered an adjacent wall. "I am sorry, my friend. Truly, I am sorry," Ramon said as he studied the glass he was holding, rubbing it with exaggerated care. "You should have told me... Jesus, at least you could have told me." "I tried, John Henry, last night, last week... I could not. I am sorry." John Henry cursed shortly; he put his guitar case down oti the floor and turned, leaning his back against the bar. "Give me a beer, Ramon. You still serve beer, I hope -- or do we watch that on the machine now too?" Ramon drew the beer in silence and placed it on the bar. John Henry took it, a small sign of peace between them. He drank slowly and looked at the crowd. Several familiar faces, people who came to hear him play: They talked earnestly across the tables, glancing now and again in his direction, then quickly away. Bits of conversation floated over the room -- "It's not the same, no machine will ever..." "Last place in Chicago, the battle's over..." "... machine's better, face it." "Live entertainment's dead, that's all there is to it." John Henry glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to show time. He looked at the dark cellar walls and the ancient stairs leading up to the street; he thought about the #s, and jazz, and what it must have been like. "John, what are you going to do?" Ramon asked. "What about the theater, anything there?" John Henry laughed. "I was out of the acting business when I started here -- there hasn't been a live play in Chicago in three years." "Why don't you sign up with one of the media companies? You're good, John. You'd do all right." "No." "Why, John?" "The same reason you were the last club in Chicago to hire a live musician. Don't ask me why. You know why, Ramon." "Aw John, don't. Things have changed. You gotta know that. I couldn't have lasted another year -- " "Yeah, I know that, Ramon. I know that." Another glance at the clock. Time to go. Maybe you couldn't stand in its way. But you didn't have to watch. "See you, huh -- " John Henry got almost to the door. He was pushed back inside by a stampede of customers.    The dull suns on the marquee had gone bright, calling people from the evening-crowded Chicago street into Ramon's. A World Premier media experience was about to happen. "What luck," someone said, "to be right outside." "I've never seen a Premier, this is my first," said another. "You're in for something, that's for sure -- they don't do this unless they've really got something... someone answered. The club was nearly full. John Henry was pushed back against the bar, painfully near the stage where he used to perform. The silver cloud began to glow; lights blinked along the computers. People hurried toward tables, carrying liters of beer and sangria and starlight wine, some balancing five and six glasses. The crowd before the bar remained several deep. Ramon hurriedly handed drinks and collected money. holographic anchor-man spoke from his desk amidst the silver cloud. "The Ultra-Media, patron feedback, instant coordination system has matched the moods and desires present in this very room, just a few minutes ago, with the most extensive media-experience library in the world. A completely unique, once only, media experience is about to occur -- and you are here!" The silver cloud blinked and the anchor-man was gone. Threedimensional letters, red in a mist of yellow, floated within the cloud -- John Henry vs The Ultra-Media Experience Machine John Henry removed his guitar from its case and moved to the little stage near the bar; he sat down on the familiar stool and hooked a heel beneath him. "I accept," he said. The lights along the computers flashed briefly, matter-of-factly: "This was not a question," they seemed to say. John Henry could feel the great silver eye studying him, recording, no doubt, his heart beat, the dilation of his pupils, changes in Galvanic skin response; he put on his best poker-face and tried to calm his insides. A trumpet note sounded. The cloud glowed briefly, blinked, and an official-looking man appeared near the bar. "Rules of the Contest," he began and then, as John Henry listened, ticked them off. Both he and the machine were to have an opening statement. The remainder of the contest was to be unstructured, the method of resolution undetermined, choice of communication medias unrestricted. Rough and tumble, no holds barred, John Henry translated. Fair enough. The cloud blinked and the official-looking man was gone. "Agreed," said John Henry. The lights along the computers flashed matter-of-factly again. A gold coin appeared in the air; it landed with a convincing metalon-wood vibrato near one of the tables. "Tails," John Henry called. "It's tails, that's what it is," cried a man near the coin. The coin disappeared. John Henry settled himself on his stool and carefully tuned his instrument.    Round One: Statements. A series of single notes, deep and clear, struck by John Henry's fingers issued from the beautiful blond wood of his instrument, came brightly into the air and hung in perfect orbs of sounds, each one fading just as another came to sing in its place. Prelude No. IX by Johan Sebastian Bach spoke clearly across the centuries, eloquent, oblivious to time. The single notes mixed and sang together and then went off again on their separate ways: Two converging ideas, blending perfectly at times in a single note, then separating gracefully, their identities intact. John Henry's head was bent as in prayer -- speaking and listening in the same moment. The last notes were allowed to dim and fade into silence. Then, explosive applause. Ramon came from behind the bar and handed John Henry a cold glass of beer. "You can win, John Henry, I can feel it." He touched John Henry's arm and returned. The room was becoming quiet. John Henry took a long drink from his glass and waited. Bartholomew Diaz, some thirty years deceased, considered by many as great as Tarrega, appeared beside the cloud. He sat quietly, his guitar, inlaid with silver and gold, held ready. A deep announcer's voice filled the room: "Ladies and gentlemen -- In the mountain village of Taranto, in the heel of the boot which is Italy, a young woman has been bitten by the dreaded tarantula. It is legend that if one dances the 'Tarantella' long enough and hard enough, it will prevent the onset of coma and the certain death which follows. The young woman's lover has brought a guitarist; they will dance for her life and for their love..." The cloud glowed softly, revealing the village square of Taranto. A young couple surrounded by somberfaced family and friends swept into the square. A man with a guitar leaned against a nearby tree, obscure in its shadows. The young man and woman looked anxiously at one another; they embraced. Bartholomew Diaz lifted his guitar and struck the first vibrant notes of Tedesdo's ' 'Tarantella. ' ' The young woman and her lover began to dance. Diaz, the master, lifted the tempo gradually at first. Then faster and faster, embellishing the keyboard of his instrument with dazzling grace. The young couple danced faster and faster, the young man compelling his lover with the language of his body and eyes. The light in the village square slowly faded from afternoon into dusk. Torches appeared in the hands of the hopeful watchers, casting strange shadows. Stars appeared, then the moon added its silver light. And ever the tempo increased, became furious as the couple danced wildly, beautifully. A faint light began to show in the sky, reddened softly, and then burst into dawn. The music stopped. The villagers ran into the square shouting and embracing; the young couple clung to one another triumphantly; the guitarist was being carried on the shoulders of several men; children were running and leaping into the air. It was over, the lime of danger was past. In Ramon's the scene was not dissimilar. A pandemonium was loose; a wild celebration was underway. John Henry, himself, was on his feet applauding.    Round Two: Replies. When the room was finally quiet, when the clapping and shouting had finally died, when the crowd had once more taken their seats and turned themselves to hear John Henry's reply -- he had nothing to say. opponent's performance. Doubt had grown into a cancer and was eating his soul. Perhaps he was wrong; perhaps the day of the live entertainer was gone; perhaps he had confused depth with mere sentiment, was clinging to a thing whose time was rightly past. Perhaps, perhaps... The strains of Bola Sete's "Guitar Lamento" reached John Henry's ears, the dark South American sorrow strangely his own, somehow right. It was with great difficulty his mind accepted that it was he who was playing it. His emotion had spread throughout his being, into his hands which touched his guitar unknowing and gave voice to his heart. And the beauty of his sorrow gave him strength. The song finished. John Henry put aside his guitar and found in his head the words of an obscure poet of the late #s; although he had only read the poem in passing, long before, the words came forth -- ' 'for the days -- When enemies had faces Before relativity captured the heart and locked it securely up in the brain Already rotting from too much too soon. for the days -- of Right When light in the heart turned body to spirit A bright candle flame in the wind. for the days -- When vision was clear The Captain with luminant stars Not yet lost in the seas of time. Oh David -- You never crouched in the dark Wondering if Goliath wasn't just Doing a job for a cause that after all might be as worthy as yours." The room was silent. For a moment John Henry was not sure he had spoken and played; it seemed something which might have occurred in his mind alone. But there came applause, sustained and earnest, comprehending. Aurora Borealis, the northern lights, leapt into the room, swirling, Arctic winter night. Then closer and closer, and finally within... John Henry played Powell and Lennon and McCartney, and Pouchini; he did scenes from Shakespeare and Gardner and Lyman; he recited Lorca and Kipling and Twain, and even the Gettysburg Address, and the preamble to the Star-Peace Agreement of Worlds. The Experience Machine brought in the World Company Ballet; it mixed a symphony of the greatest musicians of two hundred years; it took the audience into fires and earthquakes, into the womb itself, and to the super-nova of a sun. It strung a high-wire act over the tables and patrons themselves; but John Henry balanced on one leg and juggled three cocktail glasses and somehow captured the audience away. John Henry chipped and wore at the machine; he poked fun, and applauded, and spoke from his soul. And slowly the audience turned to him. Slowly they tired of being astonished and dazzled and having their breath taken away; they were like rich children finally done with too much candy and cake,, turning to apples and homemade bread. John Henry could feel the audience with him but it was late and he was tired; the machine was not. He searched through himself for a finale, a final statement on which to rest his case. "John Henry was a li'l baby, uh-huh, Sittin' on his mania's knee, oh, yes. He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel, Said, 'Hammer's gonna be the death of me... Lawd, Lawd, hammer gonna be the death of me.' The song came from deep in John Henry's memory, a childhood song he had loved, perhaps because he shared his name with its hero. "Well now every Monday mornin , uh-huh, When the bluebirds begin to sing... , You can see John Henry out on the line , You can hear John Henry' s hammer ring... Lawd, Lawd, you can hear John Henry's hammer ring." The steady boogie picked up the crowd and pulled it into the song; they began to clap rhythmically, a few to sing. "Cap'n says to John Henry, huh, huh, 'Gonna bring me a steam drill 'round... Gonna take that steam drill out on the job, Gonna wop that steel on down... Lawd, Lawd, gonna wop that steel on down.' John Henry tol' the Captain, oh, my, Lightnin was in his eye... 'Cap'n, bet yo' las' red cent on me. For I'll beat it to the bottom or I'll die... Lawd, Lawd, I'll beat it to the bottom or I'll die.' " Every person in the crowd was singing; they were clapping their hands and stamping their feet. The crowd belonged to John Henry. All he had to do was bring them home. "John Henry started on the right hand, yes, The steam drill started on the lef -- 'Before I'd let this steam drill beat me down, I'd hammer my fool self to death... Lawd, Lawd, I'd hammer my fool self to death.' White man to!' John Henry, oh, oh, 'Nigger, damn your soul... You might beat this steam drill of mine. When the rocks in this mountain turn to gold... Lawd, Lawd, when the rocks in this mountain turn to gold.' " John Henry picked up the tempo of the song. The crowd came with him, joyfully. They were racing now, racing for the finish line. "John Henry said to the shaker, uh-huh, 'Nigger, why don't you sing... ? I'm throwin twelve poun's from my hips on down, Jes' listen to that col' steel ring... Lawd, Lawd, jes' listen to that col' steel ring.' " The silver cloud began to glow; lights flashed along the computers. John Henry Roberts appeared in the cloud, singing, playing, his face alive with the moment. The crowd was in the cloud too, clapping, stamping their feet. John Henry, the real John Henry, did not notice himself at the far end of the room; he was too engrossed in his song. Only a few patrons stopped clapping and began to watch the cloud at first. " Man that invented the steam drill, yeah. Thought he was mighty fine, yes he did, But John Henry drove near fifteen feet, And the steam drill hammered only nine... Lawd, Lawd, the steam drill hammered only nine." Still John Henry was oblivious to his own image within the cloud, competing. A few more people turned away. " John Henry tol' the Cap'n, oh, yes, 'Look yonder what I see... Yo' drill's done broke and yo' hole's done choke. And you can't drive steel like me... Lawd, Lawd, you can't drive steel like me.' At last John Henry noticed his owh image in the silver cloud. With a few exceptions, the entire crowd had turned to watch it, fascinated. " John Henry was hammerin' on the mountain, And his hammer was flashin fire. He drove so hard 'till he broke his heart. And he lied down his hammer and died... Lawd, Lawd, he lied down his hammer and he died. The entire crowd, save Ramon, was watching John Henry and itself in the silver cloud. They no longer clapped or sang or stamped their feet; but their images within the cloud did. " Well now every Monday mornin' When the bluebirds begin to sing... You can see John Henry out on the line. You can hear John Henry' s hammer ring... Lawd, Lawd, you can hear John Henry's hammer ring." John Henry stopped playing and sat quietly on his stool but the image in the silver cloud played on.  Remember that reader survey we ran several months ago? The results were interesting, to say the least. You're an interesting bunch of people -- so much so that we want to know even more about you. So here goes! to read it once Up to three months Up to six months A year Longer (specify) how many times do you go back to read something in it during the first six months? about how many people read your copy? Do you get your copy back ? #. Do you buy other science fiction magazines? If so, how magazines? #. About how many hardcover science fiction books do you buy a year Borrow from libraries or friends? About how many paperbacks bought? borrowed? Please send all responses to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y. # Ueath row at the state prison at Angola is the most democratic one I've been on: the inmates themselves get to choose who rides and who stays home by a very simple method, and a very old one -- we draw straws. Short straw loses. If he survives his run, he usually gets to sit out the next three or four draws. How many bys he gets depends on how many cons are roosting on the Row. Fewer men, fewer bys, naturally. Still, it's a good system. Some joints, you get yourself on the guard's list and you don't last a month. He'll keep you at it until you lose. Last drawing, I had the short straw. Too bad, but not unexpected; there were only ten of us left on the Row, and since I had been out of action for nearly three months, I was due. I couldn't really complain. Actually, I wasn't all that worried. Lately we had been riding against Mississippi State, a bunch of tyro first-timers, and we were six-for-seven. Unless they came up with something better than what they'd been fielding, it was going to be a milk-run. Besides, the field, Brusly, was in our territory: we were familiar with it; the out-of-state boys weren't -- and the terrain took some getting used to. Brusly was an old river town. Back in '#I or '# a chemical plant blew out and a five-kilometer chlorine cloud rolled into town one morning and wiped out two thousand people. The few survivors were evacuated shortly thereafter, and Brusly was officially declared a Ghost a few years later. Later still, it became a site of the "executions." So I had the advantages: home field and experience. But I still wasn't looking forward to it. Win or lose, it was bad. Sometimes I wondered if winning wasn't worse. Saturday morning, an hour before I was due to leave, Bent-nose, the guard, dropped the bad news on me. "It ain't Mississippi you goin' up against today," he drawled, grinning. I was surprised. "What? Who, then?" "St. Gabriel." "St. Gabriel?" I echoed, like an idiot. That was the women's cage. "Damn!" Bentnose laughed, and I swore again, but not for the reason he must have thought. A woman rider didn't bother me like it did some guys. But St. Gabriel was tough. They had three aces over there. Worse, Brusly was closer to them than us, and they had used it more. "Who's the driver?" I asked, trying to sound casual. "Now you know I ain't supposed to tell you that!" He grinned bigger, enjoying my discomfort. "Come on, you've got credits riding on me, don't you?" "Usually Ah do." "But not this time?" He shrugged, and that worried me. If Bent-nose was betting on the opposition, then things were bad. Likely I would be up against one of the aces. I was just shy of being an ace myself -- but if he was betting on her... I started walking back to my cell. "Well, since you are riding for 'gola..."he began. I turned back to look at him, knowing he just wanted to watch me squirm. I'd drop dead before I'd give the sadistic bastard the pleasure. I said nothing, waiting. Finally he knew I wasn't going to ask again. "Kan Rela. " I shrugged, as if it meant nothing, and turned away. Let him get his kicks somewhere else. But my stomach was roiling like a snake just beheaded. Kan Rela. I knew of her all right. First woman ace. First woman with ten cars. First and only woman double ace. I was in trouble: she was a killer. On the other hand, I wasn't. Oh, sure, I had killed other riders, but that was different -- that was selfdefense. My original death-sentence was a frame, though. I hadn't killed that cop-op. I knew who did, but I also knew it was safer to keep my mouth shut. Or so I had thought at the time. I'd been wrong, of course. I was a thief, and a good one. But not a killer. I tried to tell them that, but nobody wanted to hear it. They needed murderers. Anything capital would do. There was no one else who could play the game for them. Oh, there were plenty of straights who would do it, for the money or for the kicks, but the law wouldn't let its "honest" citizenry kill each other off on national holovision. But who gave a fuck about a condemned murderer? Here was good old American know-how, and clean hands, too: have the trash kill each other and entertain at the same time. We were bigger than football had ever been. I even got fan letters. Somebody must have had credits riding on me, though. They had fitted out the Teitaro -- the best we had. I felt a little better. Some of the cars were real turtles. The Teitaro was our best, both in arms and speed. At least I'd be even in machinery. The Teitaro, slightly bigger than an old three-wheeled motorcycle, is a standard air-cushion compact, except for a # cm. thick kleersteel dome, side-mounted #mm machine guns and. thick body armor. It only had two really vulnerable spots: the butane tank in the belly, which is pretty well covered by the ground, and a dime-sized hole in the dome at the driver's eye level. Right between the eyes, to be exact. The hole is for the audience; head wounds bleed so nicely on color holovision. It makes for such dramatic viewing when a con's head explodes behind all that protection.    We got to Bmsly before the opposition, and after checking the car out, the crew locked me inside. Most straights don't know about that, the locking-in part. The videoeyes are always somewhere else when that happens, but the flushand-invisible bolt, which can only be opened from the outside, is why we don't just drive off into the sunset. Straights think we fight because we're killers, or brave, or whatever. Not because we have no choice. Inside the Teitaro, I ran through the instrument checks. All these Japanese cars were built for midgets; my # cm. frame always felt cramped. Both knees bumped the crashboard and a tight turn could slam an elbow into the sideswitches, easily firing a gun accidentally. Still, it was the best we some comfort for better handling. Uncomfortable-alive was better than comfortable-dead. The crew pushed me off just inside the fence on the highway to Plaquemine, and I took off straight for the River Road. It paralleled the levee, and I was used to the area. I headed for Twin Trees. Three kilometers from the fence I heard the guns click as they armed themselves. Yeah. Within three kilos of the fence they were useless. Otherwise, there might be an awful lot of dead guards. They didn't leave a lot to chance, did the warders. There was no way out: the fans killed automatically after twenty seconds over water, so the river was no escape and the fences not only cut the guns, they killed the fans if a car got within twenty meters. And they were electrically charged: even if a con did manage to get up enough speed to crash the fence, he'd be fried for his trouble. Then there were the videoeyes -- two for each car, not to mention Christ knows how many robot guards patrolling outside the wire. End run at the wire and river junction was out, too. The fence extended into the water on pilings for at least a thirty-second flight. Too long. Riders didn't run. They fought or the other guy killed them. Or the other woman. Twin Trees was just past the old power-line tower, and I figured to hide out in the garage of the Stone House and pull an ambush. The Stone House must have been built after the levee: houses which pre-dated it were all raised a meter or two for the annual spring flood. The Stone House, because it sat firmly on the ground, provided better cover -- and it was practically bullet-proof. I didn't know how long I'd have before she showed. I could hear the damned videoeyes buzzing over the garage, and I cursed them. My hope was that the many pecan trees in the back yard would obscure them enough so that she wouldn't spot them. There was nothing I could do to get rid of them. Once I had shot an 'eye down. That's not easy to do because the sideguns are fixed -- they don't elevate. Looking straight ahead, the two streams converge on what you see dead-ahead at about thirty meters. Audiences like their action close. Anyway, I had taken my car up and down the side of the levee several times, until one of the cameras had gotten in front of me. When I started climbing again, I had enough angle, and I enjoyed the hell out of blasting it. It cost me two weeks in the hole, but I'd do it again, except that now they're programmed to stay out of the firing line. My air conditioner kicked off and on several times. Even though I was parked in the shade, the air was hot and muggy. I could smell the flowers and overgrown grasses, and I could hear the faint buzzing of insects -- and videoeyes. Nice day to die, I thought. Sure. The buzzing of my videoeyes seemed louder suddenly, and then I realized why -- it wasn't just mine. I spotted another one passing in front of the open garage doorway. Then it stopped moving, and hovered, twenty-five meters up. I took a deep breath and hit the push fans hard. She must know where I am, I thought. And here I was a sitting duck, surprise gone. She was just off the road, and I got by so quickly that her first burst missed entirely, not even close. She corrected with her side fans and began tracking me. I watched in the rear-viewer as the slugs chewed up the ground behind me, making a trail toward the rear of the Teitaro. But the car was picking up speed, and in a few seconds I was climbing the hill-like dike that was the Mississippi River levee. She'd have to chase me. There was no time to see. I had to get ready for my trick when I crested the top. There! I killed the left side fans and goosed those on the right. I was a good meter up, due to my speed, and the car did a quick spin. When I was at # from my sprint, I killed the other side fans, and leaned all my weight forward. The nose of the Teitaro pitched downward, and I was in perfect position to hit anything behind me. Only nothing was. Automatically I fired a quick burst before I realized that she wasn't there. Too bad. Normally that would have been a good move, to tail me up the levee, hoping for a shot at my tank when I crested. The spin had put me into a good angle for a head-shot. I figured that I could rattle her before she realized that she was in a good position for a head shot, too. Wrong. And worse, she was climbing parallel to me, thirty meters away. When she reached the top, she spun her car -- a Volvo Striker -- just as I had done. Just a quarter-tum. Dead on my left side. I heard the guns chatter and felt the ping-ping of the slugs rattle off my dome. I boosted my rears fans to full and took off down the side of the levee. Not much chance of her doing any damage from that angle, but it did hurt my ego. I thought I'd pulled a sharp move and she had avoided it easily. Her car had slightly less speed than mine but a quicker turning cycle, and that should have made us about equal. Like knight or bishop in chess. I started behind the Stone House again, when my comset came on. She decided to talk. "Nice try," she said. A nicesounding voice, but hard to determine much from it. She could have been twenty or fifty, beautiful or ugly. "Thanks," I said dryly. "Not good enough though, was it?" "You're still alive, aren't you?" True. She was an ace, a double ace yet, and I was still breathing the air. That was good, unless she was just playing games. I had the house between us now, and I couldn't see her. "Welcome to Wonderland," I said. "Enjoy the rides -- fun and games!" They can broadcast the com conversations, but I knew from my own experience watching the HV on the Row that they seldom do. Tape-delay of six seconds is too slow to keep up with the action, if there is any, and live 'casts are out of the question. You never knew what some crazy con might say -- especially if he hear it on live holovision. They'd monitor, but they wouldn't send it out. "I don't suppose you'd like to quit and call it a draw?" I said. "Love to -- but..." "Sure. Try it, and they zap us both. Just a thought." I'd wondered before just what they would do if both contestants refused to fight. I wasn't that interested in finding out. This way, I had a chance. She stopped talking, and I decided it was a good time to move. Keeping the house between me and the levee, I backed off toward the pecan trees. She must have climbed the levee again to get up speed, because when she flew by the house, she must have been hitting sixty-five -- sideways, no less. Her chances of snuffing me at that speed were slim, but it was impressive. I had the advantage. I was set in the trees, and I tracked her. I even managed to bounce a couple of rounds off her car. No damage, but I felt a hell of a lot better. At least she wasn't unhittable. I'd never have caught her so I didn't try; she had too much speed going. When she was nearly a kilometer away, into the cow pasture, I called. "Not bad," I said, trying to sound unafraid. "Thanks. That was pretty good shooting." "Um." "Now that we know we can both drive," she said, "shall we get down to it?" She sounded calm; it made me nervous. I punched in the rear fans and headed back to the levee. There was a flat side on the river bank that had a lot of trees and bushes for cover. Even a few small ponds. "Where'd you go?" she asked. Her voice sounded very distant. Must be at nearly the two-kilometer limit of the comset, I thought. Good. That would give me plenty of time to find a place to get set. The videoeyes wouldn't be specific enough to give me away in all that brush, I thought. I wondered why I hadn't done that in the first place. On the other hand, if I were a genius, I wouldn't have been there. "I'm around," I said. "Don't worry." "Who, me?" she said faintly. Still off in the distance, I thought. Wrong. She came over the levee like a bomb, almost on top of me. Damn! How could she get here that fast? Because she was here all along, stupid, said a voice inside my head. Didn't you ever think of lowering your voice to make it seem like you were far away? No, come to think of it, I hadn't. Crap. I was outclassed, pure and simple, and she had me dancing seven ways to somewhere. The angle was not good enough for either of us to shoot, and she tore by so close that I could have almost touched her. A flash of a look: young, maybe thirty -- my age. Brown hair, cut short. Not a pretty face, but handsome in its own way. And grim. And scared. Amazing how much you can see in a brief instant. I got tangled up in my controls, and my spin was too slow to track her. I almost killed my left side fan, but I finally managed to get the Teitaro around, cursing all the while. She was over the water, swinging in a wide tum. Crazy! I started counting. It was going to be close. At seventeen, she was still off-shore. She passed out of my line of sight behind the trees at nineteen. If she hit the water, she'd sink like a rock, and she'd drown quickly. The cars were not water-tight, and even if they were, there'd be nobody who'd come to pull her out. But she made it. The comset blared a good ten seconds after she should have been in the water. "You still there, Del?" So she knew my name. "Still here, Kan Rela." For some insane reason, I was glad she hadn't gone down. That didn't make any sense, but I was glad anyway. "You're not too bright, playing over the river like that!" "What else could I do? I'd have been boxed between the trees otherwise. You'd have creamed me." I was glad she couldn't see my face. With the clumsiness of my turn, I hadn't had a prayer of touching her. I was glad she didn't know that. At least she was giving me credit for being dangerous. Of course that meant that she wouldn't do anything reckless. A shame. "Del?" "Yeah." "You've killed five, right?" "Yeah." "That's not counting the one they sent you up for?" "A frame." A pause. Then, "Really?" "Yeah. Why should I lie? One of us is going to be dead soon; what difference does it make?' ' "That's too bad," she said quietly. I didn't know if she was sorry that one of us was going to be dead, or that I'd been framed. Maybe both. "And you?" I asked. "He was my husband." I said nothing, waiting. "He was beating me, and I fought back. He hit his head." "I'm sorry." "Don't be. It was eight years ago. I've gotten over it." Eight years! Christ, what was it like to be on Death Row for eight years? I was only a two-year man, and I felt like I was older than the world sometimes. Eight years! I felt sorry for her. And myself. I had the fans on low so that I could creep around the bushes without stirring up too much dirt. I nosed around a large shrub, and there she was, broadside to my guns and unaware of me. I opened up with both guns. It was not a good angle. I needed a rear shot or head shot to do any real destruction. But the ground was probably too soft to bounce any slugs into her tank from the rear, and she was too good for me to chance head-to-head. I saw the tracers, every tenth round, spark off her clear dome. But only for a second. She jerked her eyes around to look at me, and then she was gone. Now or never, I thought. I swung the car out and followed her into the brush. I planned to latch onto her tail and stay there until I could get her. It was a mistake. She wasn't there. I looked frantically around, and soon found where she'd gone. She was on my tail! Bad news. The sweat was pouring off me, off the air conditioner. Somebody as good -- no, better -- then me was on me, and I knew I couldn't shake her. I had a sudden flash of realization. She was going to beat me. I was going to die. I could hear her bullets hammering on the back of my car, but I couldn't think of anything to do about it. I don't remember the actual motions; my mind was a blank. I must have slammed all my. fans into reverse. There was a screech of protesting metal, a shredding sound of plastic, a jolt that slammed me into the crashboard and bounced my head off the kleersteel dome, and I stopped. Cold. She wasn't expecting it. She tried to swerve and almost made it, she was that good. But the left edge of the Volvo caught the back of the Teitaro, and the force was enough to roll her completely -- minus all the fan ducts on her left side. I watched the whole thing in slow-motion, as if time had ceased to flow normally and had stretched out like taffy. She completed the roll, landed heavily against an oak tree. I saw her head jolted around. She must have been frantically working the controls, but she was getting no response. The Volvo wasn't going anywhere. The Teitaro was damaged badly as well, but I still had a few fans working -- I could move. Slowly I came to bear on the exposed underside of her car, jammed hopelessly against the tree. I had her, and there was nothing she could do about it, nothing. Good-bye, lady-ace. I felt no joy, however. I hadn't really beaten her with skill, only luck and mindless desperation. And she wasn't really my enemy -- she was as much a pawn as I was, an innocent victim. I couldn't even rationalize that she was a murderer. real enemies -- the good people who had put us both here for their entertainment. The ones who were enjoying every minute of this, glued to holovisions across the country. I could see her face, ten meters away, pale and defeated and looking at me. "Congratulations," she said through the comset. "You win. Good-bye." And then she waved and closed her eyes and bowed her head. Son-of-a-bitch! No! It was too much! I nursed the failing fans, pushing the car forward, to the other side. Good, the tree wasn't blocking my target! She looked up, puzzled. I began firing, swinging the front of my car back and forth in order to get hits from both sideguns. Too low. I backed the car up and tried again. Ah, better. "What are you doing?" she said "Are you crazy? You can't hurt anything that way! There's nothing on that side, except..." I grinned, knowing she could see me. "... the lock!" she finished. I hoped it would give soon. My ammunition was getting low. A minute passed, two. My right sidegun went dry. Still nothing. Less than a hundred rounds remained in my left sidegun. Fifty. Then twenty. The lever popped up, and a crack appeared in the nearly featureless side of her car. I stopped firing, but I never even considered it. The lock was gone, the gullwing It took only a second for her to door unlocked. flip the lever and let me out. We sat quietly for a minute as "Can you swim?" I asked, grinthe echoes of the machine gun died. ning. They had framed me and turned "Sure. But our chances -- " me into a killer. No matter how I "Are slim and snowball," I rationalized it, that's what I had befinished. I looked up at the vidcome. A killer. But not anymore. I eoeyes, still focused automatically looked at her face, and I knew that on the two dead cars. And our dead I couldn't play the game by their past. rules. "They'll probably kill us," she Her door opened, and with only a said, second's hesitation, she stepped out. "Probably." Tall, slim, and wondering. Was I We grinned at each other and playing some new trick, a cruel started for the river. It was a big joke for the audience to drool over? river, but whatever the chances, it She took a deep breath and sure beat being a pawn, and hell, at began to walk toward me. My releast we'd cheat the audience. It maining gun was lined up perfectly, was almost worth it for that alone.  Paul Walker # pp., Houghton Mifflin, #, # The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, #pp., Ace Books, # reissue, # The Siege of Wonder, Mark S. Gesreissued #, # Writing and Selling Science Fiction, the Science Fiction Writers of America, Writers Digest, #pp. #, # Q. Name three famous Ores? A. Joan of Ore, Noah's Ore, and Ore Linkletter P ertinent questions in reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's The SilDid you like it? I loved it. Is it as good as Lord of the Rings? That's hard to answer flatly. I have read LotR twice, and lived with the memory of it for twenty years; while I have only just so much in it that should be taken into account in making an evaluation, and I am not a Tolkien scholar. But my very subjective impression is that it is better. Both times I read LotR I had to push myself along to get through the first two books. I found a lot of it tedious. But I was never bored It has so much charm and excitement; imagination and invention. However, it is different than LotR. A narration rather than a dramatic narrative. It is not a novel, but a mythology. A long series of closely connected tales that form a history of the world from its beginnings. I can imagine some people being put off by this, bored, or disappointed. I found it delightful. What is it about? Three hundred and four pages, not counting the addenda. There are five separate, but related, narratives. The first is the "Ainulindale," which recounts the story of the creation, not simply of the world, but of the three great "themes" that are to compose the scheme of things in times to come. The second is the " Valaquenta. " The theogony. Who's Who among the gods. The third is the "Quenta origin of the Elves, Dwarves, and what not, and how they left the protection of the Valar for MiddleEarth. Of how the god (more accurately, angel) Melkor fell into his evil ways to become the accursed Morgoth. His plans for conquest, his victories, his inevitable defeat. Of the Elvish heroes who were born to battle against him. The legendary cities they championed that fell before him one by one. Of the reconciliation of Elves and Valar. Of the passing of their reign and the rise of Men. The fourth is the "Akallabeth." The fall of the mighty land of Numenor to the wily cunning of Sauron. And finally, "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age," which is an attempt to synthesize the whole epic from beginning to the end of LotR and beyond. There are very useful appendices to help the reader keep track of who is who and doing what; plus some excellent maps. I might recommend the reader look at the "Note on Pronunciation" before getting too far into the book, to help him pronounce the names correctly. There are hundreds of them, all mellifluous. Do you have any favorites among the tales? The story of Beren and Luthien. Charming. The story of Tuor and his fight with the dragon. And Sauron's conquest of Numenor. Very spectacular. But I loved it all. A thoroughly entertaining book. Any further comments? I expect so much will be written about this book in years to come by fen who have studied it conscientiously that it seems futile for me to say anything more, but the curious thing about it is that, despite all the pleasure it gave to me, it has made me think less of Tolkien than I did before. He was neither a genius nor an original. It is not that he was not a good writer. His prose is fine. But he is imitating pre-Christian literature with the intellect and imagination of a middle-class Victorian, and what is most poignant, most dramatic, and most profound in the former is utterly lacking in the latter. The stories and themes of such as Beowulf and The Wanderer were derived from folk tales and reflected a universal spiritual point of view. Life was a terrible thing. Man was cursed with the impermanence of existence. Age was to be feared as much as any disease. Freedom was out of the question. Without his tribe or clan, a man was doomed. War was a way of life. Glory, an illusion. It was better that a man had never been born. These were not the sentiments of a group of fashionably pessimistic writers catering to the neurotic tastes of their age. They are to be found everywhere in western literature and song for thousands of years. And the same is true of fairy tales. The best deal with very fundamental concepts, such as hope and fear, with an almost childlike simplicity of technique. But none of this is true of Tolkien. The reader is always aware of the high quality of the mind behind the invention. Not that Tolkien is given to Vonnegut-like cleverness, but neither is he capable of transcending his conventional #th-century view of society to depict the universal human condition. His characters are never more than human. Their motivations never more than familiar. Nor do his characters embody their motivations. It is not what Tolkien tells, or fails to tell, us about them that makes them less than archetypal; it is what they are -- little Englishmen. And nothing more. To the majority of people who read the Odyssey today, the fact that Odysseus is a Greek is of minor importance. Homer convinces us that he is Man. Or rather, an aspect of Man struggling against a hostile world. And the same is true of the monster Grendel. The embodiment of menace and malice. Everyman's bogeyman. But this is not true of Frodo or Feanor or the Gollum or Sauron. At best, they are a Dickensian variety. This is not to say that they are not pleasant characters to read about, or that Tolkien does not tell a wonderful story, but it is not more than a wonderful story. The essence of the greatness of the material is missing; those elements of the tragic and the terrible and the sensual that make the originals so potent a literature. I cannot accuse him of "cuteness" as some have. His treatment of the elves and hobbits is affectionate rather than sentimental, but there is the element of "niceness," of gentility, in them all, even in the likes of Morgoth, that undermines their fairy-tale credibility. For all the pages of talk of the unmentionable evils to be found in the dungeons of Morgoth and Sauron, one knows there are things neither would stoop to. For instance -- well, use your own imagination. Think of something evil. Then try to imagine it in Mordor. The closest Tolkien comes to an unmentionable is in the story of Turin and his love for Niniel. He has found her wandering in the woods, suffering from complete amnesia. He marries her, not knowing she is his sister. Eventually, they find out. They kill themselves. But whereas a Sophocles would have accompanied their fate with horrendous wailing and horror, Tolkien manages it with a stiffer-upper-lip decorum that I am school library shelves. The cardinal sin in Tolkien's world, as in every other mythological invention, is Pride. But where in a Milton it is seen as a flaw of heroic dimensions that drives man to the madness of challenging the throne of Heaven, in Tolkien it is simply a kind of bad manners. The sin of pride, to an Englishman, is a sin against one's class. It is the asserting of one's individual aspirations and ambitions over and against the collective order. An order, the English are WE'RE Reduce If Overweight American Heart Association () firmly convinced, ordained, and sustained, by God himself. This is the sin of Morgoth. Not to be God, but to rule as himself over his own creation, his own order. Naturally, he fails. In fact, he never had a chance of succeeding, for all his power, for the order of the world (the universe itself) is the will of God, absolute and immutable; and by failing to perceive this, or refusing to accept it, he defines himself as either a fool or a madman. Absolute creation is in the hands of God; a Morgoth can only corrupt what already exists. Feanor, the greatest of the Elves, like many a hero, falls into the same trap. He refuses to hand over his finest creation, the Silmarills, to the Valar for the welfare of the community. He refuses to accept his class's subordination to that of the aristocratic, angel-like Valar and takes them into exile where he immediately commits a peasant-like crime and is cursed. Although the class structure is the same in the hierarchy of the gods, where Tolkien's differs is in their school-masterish rationality. An Apollo would have smashed a Feanor to elvish mush for so much as giving him a dirty look, and repented his hastiness at leisure, but never a Valar. They are always good as they are always just. None of which is to be interpreted as an expression of my own prejudices against the English, of which I have none. I love the English. And I still love Tolkien. to be seen for what it is: an English fairy taleabout Englishmen. And nothing more. Theodore Sturgeon: # of science fiction is crap. Fact: Theodore Sturgeon writes science fiction. Conclusion: # of Theodore Sturgeon's science fiction is crap. Two of the most interesting stories in The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon concern young men who are highly talented, sensitive, and loving, but who are unable to succeed in the mundane world because of their neurotic personalities. After reading the nine stories in this inferior collection, I am inclined to think Sturgeon had himself in mind when he created them. Everything that made Sturgeon one of the most influential sf writers of the late forties and fifties is here -- the genuinely interesting mind, the sensitivity and compassion, the instinct for drama, the gentle humor, and the sense of the need for a careful balance between the human and scientific elements in an sf story. Yet for all the talent on display, not one of these stories is what it could have been. In story after story, idea and emotion, drama and theme are buried under sloppy sentimentality, crude overwriting, and its related ill, diarrhea of the dialogue. All lack discipline -- patience -- that extra careful draft that would have been necessary to refine their difficult fictional elements. For what Sturgeon was trying to do was difficult indeed: to humanize the tradition of pulp science fiction without losing the tradition altogether. To relate the scientific and human elements of the story in such a way as to realize both of them dramatically. And to write science fiction as if it were poetry, a blend of vision and feeling; something that left the reader moved as much by one as by the other. Simak is the one writer who comes to mind who accomplished this in Sturgeon's time, but since then it has become the main direction of almost all good science fiction. But where Simak, at his best, is careful. Sturgeon gives the impression that having the ideas in mind, he just sat down and wrote. Frankly, I found most of these stories rather boring to re-read, but not entirely. That special Sturgeon quality still exerts its power through all the verbiage. But technically he seems most successful when he is most mischievious, as in "Shottle Bop," or "The Sky was Full of Ships." And to an extent in "The Perfect Host," which is really so old-fashioned I am embarrassed to admit I enjoyed it. I suspect it is the kind of story that sf writers can't get away with anymore. The kind written straight off the top of the head in the wee hours of the morning when the writer is smashed out of his skull. He is least successful here at his most interesting efforts, such as "The Graveyard Reader," which is sentimental and predictable, or in "The Other Man" and "Maturity," which are hideously crude and naive and sentimental and half-a-dozen other things, but interesting all the same. Then there are a few antiques, such as "Memorial" and "The Skills of the Xanadu," which were not worth reprinting. In fact, it is curious that this book was reprinted. No one I spoke to at Ace knew who had selected the stories back in We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in' gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. #; only that it had Sturgeon's blessing as a survey of his work from # to #. What a shame if anyone believed that. Sturgeon has done better. Your money would be better spent on E Pluribus Unicorn or Caviar or Not Without Sorcery, not to mention More Than Human. All are uneven, but all have a few stories that are better than any of these, and like other "uneven" sf writers such as Simak and Bradbury, Sturgeon's best will leave its mark on your soul. Wearisome wizards and ho-hum homunculi On the front cover of Mark S. Geston's The Siege of Wonder, just above the absolutely delightful illo by H.R. Van Dongen, Gerald Jonas of the Times is quoted as saying, "I liked this book very much," which puzzles me, because I did not like the book at all. I don't doubt Jonas' word; but that he liked it and I found it so cold and unentertaining makes me wonder if it was just a case of this not being my sort of book. Years ago, I was impressed by Geston's first novel, Lords of the Starship, and the memory was revived by this one. The strangeness, the atmosphere, the ambiguity of the ending. All here. But none of the wonder, the mystery. The Siege of Wonder is about the final days of a war between the forces of magic and those of science that has lasted seven hundred years. It seems to divide into three parts: the mission of Aden, an agent of the powerful Special Office, to implant a spying device in the eye of a unicorn; his return and affair with a magical maiden named Gedwyn; and the bi-lateral expedition of Aden and two Border Command scientists to the Holy City after the Wizards have been mysteriously vanquished by their own power. The first is a sort of Mission: Impossible situation, which, like everything else in the book, just -- happens. We are introduced to a not very interesting or personable hero who does his job with bland efficency, and then goes away. There is a fleeting moment of suspense in the church when his cohort implants the device, but as Geston disdains melodrama, it is gone as quickly as it came. Aden then must travel hundreds of miles to get back to his own lines, but aside from once being watched momentarily by two masked men, it is a humdrum journey. He meets a beautiful girl with magical powers with whom he has an idyllic affair that for another fleeting moment made the book live. But then he and the moment go away again. At that point I lost patience and never again really gave a damn, or was encouraged to care, what the rest of the book was about. Aden gets home, is debriefed, and recuperates. Two new characters, as faceless and uninteresting as he, have what little dialogue there is in the book, discussing the war. Then it is discovered the wizards have mysteriously vanished. Aden sets out again to find Gedwyn and see the Holy City. The two scientist soldiers go to see what has happened. Had Geston brought it off, the remaining half of the book would have been a field day for all concerned, for he obviously gave a lot of thought to the scenes he describes of a land of magic in which the magic has died and the wondrous creatures that survive go painfully to their deaths. As it is, Geston seems so terrified of writing a single line of purple prose that everything is told, more often than shown, with a kind of grim matterof-factness. A style that I found as hard to penetrate as any I have ever read. As there are no characters to care about, so there is no conflict to get excited about. Things happen in series rather than in sequence. One is never sure until the end whom Geston is rooting for. Both sides appear equally unpleasant socially and politically. Most likely it is all a metaphor for the war between science and art, or intellect and imagination, or some such thing, but it is so abstract as to be irrelevant to my knowledge of this conflict. Geston's scientists are no more credible than his wizards. All of this might have been forgivable if only Geston's wonders were wondrous. But they are not. Wizards, gryphons, fairy princesses, floating cities, etc., etc. It is simply not enough to say, "The Grand Wizard strode down the boulevard accompanied by his dragon, Lucille." One must see the grandness of the wizard and the fiercesomeness of the dragon. Stated matter-of-factly, it means less than nothing. Geston had the talent and the brains and the ability. He simply chose to write another kind of book. One that did not appeal to me at all. It did appeal to Jonas though, so perhaps there are other people out there who will find more in The Siege of Wonder than I did. If so, I would be curious to know what. Porkbarrel Prose How many "How to Write" books have I read over the past twenty years? A dozen? Two dozen? How many of them were really worthwhile? One? Two? One I would swear by; another I would recommend as supplementary reading. The rest were all, "Well, you know, the way I do it is..." Such books and articles depress me, but whether for the readers or the writers I am not sure. There are three kinds of "How to Write" books. First, texts -- with diagrams and exercises, most of which only demonstrate how hard it is to explain the obvious. Second, advice books -- filled with "tips." And, third, anecdotal autobiographical accounts of a particular writer's career masquerading as a text. Some of these are good. I especially recommend Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. It will teach you nothing about plotting or writing but it will tell you all sorts of things about the wonderful mind of a talented novelist. Writing and Selling Science Fiction by "The Science Fiction Writers of America" is an advice book. There are eleven essays by the likes of Poul Anderson, Jerry Poumelle, Kate Wilhelm, James Gunn, George R.R. Martin and andy offutt. As such books go, it isn't bad. The Anderson piece on "Nomenclature in Science Fiction" is a delight. Poumelle on building future worlds is interesting. Wilhelm on characterization is accurate and succinct. In fact, just about everybody is mercifully concise and nobody makes a jackass of himherself. C.L. Grant writes an intelligent and useful introduction and andy offutt gleefully teels us how to sock were largely redundant. If you know anything about writing, the book is not going to tell you anything you do not already know. If you know little or nothing about it, it is not going hurt you. But novices should be warned to approach such books with caution. Their usefulness is less in the advice they impart (which could as easily be found in a writer's magazine) than in the attitudes they encourage. Professionals take a lot for granted. Writing is a skill that is more absorbed than learned, and ideas that seem simple commonsense to the sf writer are often difficult concepts for anyone else to grasp. The reason is that they cannot take into account the factor of their talent. Consequently, a Kate Wilhelm can make the very high art of characterization seem child's play: "You just sit down and ask yourself -- " Professionals have a better idea of the attitudes involved in their success but these attitudes are still generally vague. They cannot be truly explained. They have to be understood by exposure -- by listening in on professional minds at work, for example -- and a casual reading of a book like this will not give it to the novice. He has to first empty his mind of chicken fat and then meditate upon what he is absorbing. Unfortunately there is much chicken fat in these essays. We should have a right to expect better of sane and sensible attitudes here should be of some use. I would not recommend this book but I would not discourage anyone from it either.  Okay, Geis. What did ol' J.J.P. say when he called? And how come he didn't ask for me? "Well, Alter, he spoke as if you were a mere literary device, a simple figment of my imagination. He had no idea that dealing with you and your tantrums would eventually drive him into another editorial position just as it drove Jim Baen to Ace Books." I am not difficult to work with, as you should know, Geis. I am the soul of reasonableness, the zenith of cooperation, the apex of... of -- "Bitchiness." Bitchi -- Listen, stop denigrating me. You'll give the new editor of "Right!" -- impression of me. Now, what did J.J. Pierce have to say? "Oh, the general new-editor hope for improvement and desire to do the best he could. Also, he said he wanted the column as long as we He did? Very shrewd man. I will not disappoint him. Even though I am running rather short of ideas for the column. "Why don't you appeal to the readers for help, Alter? Suggest they send in topics they'd like you and me to discuss. Have them send in direct questions." I have a column for this time but... say, I'll ask my thousands of readers to send in suggestions for future columns and to ask questions they'd like me to answer. "Alter!" Yeah... that'll bring in feedback, give everybody a sense of participation and make my work easier. What do you think Geis? "I think... I think -- " I knew you'd approve. So that's what I'll do. Readers out there! You! Stop picking your nose and stop half-thinking about that stackedhung girl-boy next door! If there's some topic or idea or aspect of sf you'd like Geis and me to argue about, send it in. Got a question you'd like answered about him or me? Send it in. Send it to Geis  Alter, P. O. Box #, Portland, Oregon #. "We'll be lucky to get three letters, Alter. And the suggestions will likely be obscene and anatomically impossible." For you, Geis, but not for me. I enjoy it. "Not with my body, you don't!" Don't be a sorehead. "It's not my head that'll be sore!" Nevertheless, the invitation to the readers is genuine. Let's see what happens.  Grump M utter Now, onward to the body of this column, I'd like to talk about science fiction for -- "For a change?" -- openings. "Get your mind off of sex. Alter." Geis! Will you stop hectoring me? Just stop it! Lay off now. I've got something important to say. "That'll be the day. What could you have in that tendrilled head that could be important? Listen, and be convinced of my superiority. Now I've watched you begin reading a new sf novel or a story, read a couple of paragraphs, become bemused, distracted, irritated, angered, enraged, furious, apoplectic, and finally throw the book or magazine across the room while shouting a vile oath, an imprecation even. "Yes... that happens all too often. I find the technique of most sf writers to be so abysmal -- especially the elementary technique involved in opening lines and paragraphs -- that I turn into a cursing monster." Exactly. Your self-control -- "And I've seen you do it too, Alter. First your eyes glint, then you mutter alien words under your breath, then your tendrils stiffen and turn pink, deepening in color to livid crimson. Finally, eyes glittering, you tense and your right arm shoots forward with the book or magazine and the offending publication rockets through the air to either hit the wall or impact in the woodbox next to the stove, where I have to salvage it for future reference. All right, let's get to the meat of what I'm trying to say. While I was rummaging around in your memory cells, I came across a lot of recall from books and magazines devoted to fiction writing and magazines you'd read in your youth. "How to Write Fiction." "How to Grab Readers," "The Critical First Paragraph." Things like that. You read years of writer's digest, all Jack Woodford's books on writing and -- "They made an indelible impression, Alter, and by applying that knowledge, I managed to sell my first serious commercial story to adam in # and about a hundred others in the following few years, while starting to write novels in nineteen sixty. Sold my first eighty-nine novels with only three or four rejections along the way." Stop bragging. I'm trying to make point. The point is that the first two or three paragraphs of a story are crucial. The point is that a reader will stick with a writer that long, but damn few any longer without being intrigued or hooked by some fiction dynamic death, danger, sex, power, money. We've seen people browsing at newsstands. A cover or a title or a writer's name will impel a reader to pick the book or magazine off the rack for further investigation. The reader will read for a few seconds here and there... and a few people will even read the last page before deciding whether to purchase or not. "Alter, I view people who read the endings of stories before reading the entire story as creatures benighted by fate, a breed of mental masochists, a perverted variety of -- " Oh, shut up, Geis! What I want to do here is to underline the importance of making the reader want to read the next line. From the first line to the last line. And I'll present some good and bad examples of opening sequences of current novels. "Alter, your concern for your fellow sf writers is marvelous. I'm sure they'll thank you for giving them lessons in public and for pointing out their flaws, faults and failings. They'll pat you on the head with blunt instruments!" Nevertheless, Geis, I will persist in my crusade to improve the lot of the sf reader. Let me begin. I am going to quote the first paragraph of an sf novel published in nineteen seventy-seven: then I will have a comment and then I will identify it and its writer. Okay? "No!" Fine. Here is the quote: Moving faster than the dawn, the shuttle from the orbiting cruiser Realta might have been seen, by the sharpest of those eyes that watched from the landing station, as a flash of light, preceding, by just a few seconds, as it began to rise above the eastern horizon. With the new day came the wind; an unobtrusive breeze at first, it rose, as the sun climbed higher, into a biting gale that flung the countryside into a frenzy of unwelcomed activity. It shook the tiny landing station with its human and native occupants, until both man and alien looked to each other for moral comfort and a reassurance that they would not at any moment be flung across the hills -- with concrete base, windproofed towers and docked ships following in a turmoil of destructive energy. Doesn't that opening paragraph with its dense, ill-structured sentences, malaprop metaphor and dumb content -- doesn't it make you itchy to read on? I especially liked where human and alien looked to each other for moral support. Where's the morality of anything involved? The author wanted to say that a very strong wind usually accompanied sunrise on this alien planet and it made people and natives wonder if they'd survive. But they obviously had survived, for generations. And the space station too, for decades or more. What we have is author overkill, ineptitude and careless thinking. I never did get past the third paragraph. The author had demonstrated he was a klutz at fiction and nothing indicated any compensating talent for dialogue or characterization or sense of wonder. It would have been a very dreary read so -- "You threw it across the room, eh, Alter?" Right. For those who may want to know who and what, the quote is from Eye Among the Blind by Robert P. Holdstock. (Doubleday, #.) "Are you now going to give us an example of a very good opening for an sf novel?" Of course. But fine opening paragraphs are preferred for any story of any type, of any genre. For a good one, all you have to do is reach for the nearest Ron Goulart book. Thus, in his recent The Emperor of the Last Days (Popular Library, #, #.) we have: The man plummeted, straight down past Dan Farleigh's only window. "Hey!" Dan had been chatting with his central computer. He only got a flashing impression of the silently screaming man out of the comer of his eye. "Only some guy doing the Dutch," said the computer's voice box. "Nothing to -- " "He must have jumped from some office directly above this one." Dan was running toward the oval plexiwindow. Police aircruisers were already hooting someplace below when the long lanky young man got across the huge, high and hollow Fax-Central Office to take a look out. "I can see him sprawled on a pedramp at about level thirtytwo," said Dan, craning his neck and pressing his forehead against the soft, tinted window. The walkramps and towering buildings of Manhattan made multicolored zigzag patterns across the morning... Needless to say, Geis, that opening line got me and the swift, information-laden sentences that followed drew me along, painting a picture of the city, the technology, the central character. Bloody marvelous, Goulart's technical skill is incredible. "But, Alter, he never seems to apply this virtuosity to a heavy, serious, important novel. All he deals in is formula with a dash -- sometimes a flagon -- of satire." That's his affair, Geis. We are not here to critique successful writers' careers and choices of material. I will now use an opening quote from a long-time sf writer whose name will carry his readers through a dull sequence -- because they trust him. The quote: Five of them were seated about the central table of the recreation room. In name it was the recreation hall , but it just wasn't as big as all that. Bring up a dozen visiting firemen, plus the three-man crew of the spacecraft, and the place was packed. However, it was a reasonably charming room, made livable with paintings and other art, complete with comfortable furniture, a well-stocked bar, Tri di television, and of all things, a ping-pong table. Ping-pong took a bit of getting used to in these parts; for that matter, even a card game could take some getting used to. They were, reading from left to right, Mary Lou Pickett, American; Kingsley Brett-James, Englishman; Max Zimmerman, Israeli; Li Ching, Chinese; and Azikiwe Awolowo, Nigerian. They spoke to each other in Esperanto, for policy reasons, though all knew English, and each of them liked each of the others as much as they had ever liked anyone. They had to; it was a matter of survival. They were playing Liar's Dice, once-favorite of the Royal Air Force when the chips were down during the Battle of Britain. Max Zimmerman shook the dice cup with a flourish, banged it down on the table and peered beneath the edge, hiding the cup from his neighbors with his other hand. Smiling broadly, he announced. "Three aces," and passed the cup to Li Ching. The only hint of possible potential troublesuspense is in that business of having to like their companions because it was a matter of survival. "I agree. Alter. This is a lowgrade opening sequence, the mark of a lazy writer who want to indulge in name-listing and setting the stage before getting down to business. Who is the writer? That quote was from Space Visitor by Mack Reynolds. (Ace, #, #.) It shows he is taking his readers somewhat for granted. "I would hardly have believed it of Reynolds. Are you going to give us another good opener for contrast?" Of course. I'll even give you two goodies from two of the best-known sf writers. Observe: Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? I don't know and I don't how how we can ever find out. If they were not truly intelligent, I hope I never live to see us tangle with anything at all like them which is intelligent. I know who will lose. Me. You. The so-called human race. "That is a grabber, Alter. Who wrote it?" Tell you in a few seconds, Geis. Read this one: In the nightime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of generaladdress transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality. His foot-length queue was as white and shiny as artificial snow. His skin and depilated scalp were chrome yellow; the irises of his eyes were gold; his robe was royal blue with a golden steroptic dragon superimposed. In the instant he appeared, he was smiling widely showing pearly, perfect standard teeth. Smiling and waving. But the smile was already fading, and in a moment it was gone, and the sag of his face was like a rubber mask melting. Louis Wu showed his age. "Ahh, Alter. I remember that one." You should, Geis. The first quote was the opening of The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein. The one you remembered was the first few lines of Larry Niven's Ringworld. They both grab in different ways. The Heinlein quote raises all kinds of must-be-answered questions in the reader's mind and he'll read on to find the answers. The Niven quote shows us a future with everyday matter-transmitters and makes us wonder why Wu was faking -- perhaps -- that smiling goodbye. The passage is exotic, smooth and intriguing. The reader wants to know more, to be further entertained by a writer whom he senses is a hell of a storyteller. "Alter, are you telling me and our readers, that just by reading the first few paragraphs of a story or a novel, it's possible to judge the merits and entertainment potential of the whole?" Well, yeah, I think that's true ninety-five per cent of the time. The really good writer will show himself instantly. He knows the importance of the first lines, of the first page. The less skilled, the less talented, the less concerned writer, the lazy writer, will betray himself in the first two or three paragraphs. Consider the following: I stood behind the pulpit and watched them file smugly into their pews, as they had obviously done every Sunday of their lives and as their parents had all done before them. Life in a small town like Middlefield was built upon such rituals, as I was coming to find out. If you knew everyone who lived around you, and were kept in close proximity to them, you needed such standards of behavior to keep you from tearing their throats out after a couple of years. People deviated from those rituals only at their own risk. In one way, at least, it was comforting -- I knew I had a captive audience for the length of my service. After that was anybody's guess. Light streaming in through the windows made the front pews hotter than the shadowed ones in back, which gave everyone an excuse not to sit close to the front. I wasn't fooled by their excuses; after more than a year in Middlefield, I was still an outsider -- the minister from the big city who has invaded the parish of the late lamented ReAn Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ## features interviews with: Jack Vance, A.E. van Vogt, Ray Bradbury and Piers Anthony. "The Annual Nebulous Awards -- #" Satire by Greg and Jim Benford. "The Silverberg That Was" by Robert Silverberg. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" presents Alter with bloody axe standing over murdered books. Plus Prozine notes, Small Press Notes, "Other Voices" and letters, letters, letters...And More. Quartertysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I verend Brand. My predecessor had served this con -- "Hey, Alter, what are you quoting from, some religious novel? Some epic of the Midwest involving a tormented young minister who tries to make improvements, who falls in love with the banker's wife, who suffers a crisis of faith, who -- " Nope, Geis. This is from a science-fiction novel published in nineteen seventy-six. "How much longer does it go on like that?" It goes on for five pages before anything science fictiony or suspenseful or tension-inducing happens. Five pages of ministerial trivia and setting-of-the-stage and desultory introduction-of-characters , and minor characters at that. "I don't understand how a competent editor could allow that to get past him." I don't either, Geis. That quote is from The Seeker by David Bischoff and Christopher Lampton. It was Laser Book Number Thirty and the Laser line was edited by Roger Elwood. I suspect that poorly edited and poorly written books like The Seeker are major reasons for Laser's failure and death. "Are you going to inflict any more examples on us? Don't you think you've made your point?" Yes, I guess I have. There will be screams of agony from certain quarters but I am here asserting that. By Ghod, you can judge a book or a story by its first few paragraphs. You can take the measure of the writer by how well he treats his readers on the first page. And I would urge readers to make these judgments. Readers are what make science fiction the expanding genre that it is at the moment and unless they are given good stuff to read, they'll simply put down the books and mags and slowly walk away. "Of course. Alter, this also puts a greater responsibility on the editors since they choose the stories and novels that are published. Are you saying they are or have been lax?" Yes. Too often they'll be too lazy -- or too intimidated by a Big Name Pro -- to insist on changes or to do the manuscript editing required. "Care to give any editorial names?" I'm not that crazy, Geis. But I will say that analog has had of late a lot of pedestrian stories with dull, tedious beginnings. Ben Bova ought to spend more time in the office with a blue pencil in hand. "Oh, fine. Now that you've offended the editor who always wins the Best Editor Hugo, do you want to end this column before you stick your pseudopods any farther into your mouth?" Yeah, okay. This column is ended. Dear Mr. Baen: Regarding Mr. Cooper's letter in the July issue. Is there really someone out there who does not know why there are so few women who read and write science fiction? Two or three years ago the editor of a major science-fiction monthly made the statement that few of the stories by women that were submitted were published because they were either poorly written, or "dealt with feminine concerns." Whichever Mr. B. it was should have been given a Golden Pig Award. Speculative fiction always has been, and still is, limited to those concerns that fall into the traditionally masculine sphere. Also: when I was a young child, my wild play and bookishness were viewed with tolerance. But as soon as my breasts began to show, mother, teachers, priests, and peers began to exert tremendous pressure on me to conform to the image of a "young lady." Men were the heads of families and did all the thinking. Women were the hearts and were not supposed to think at all. So it was ordained by God. The girls around me cinched in their waists and turned in their baseball mitts and books. I refused. There was no one to play baseball with, but there was a library. In general science and biology I constantly did extra work, not for brownie points, but from fascination. Acoustics, meteorolgy and the aurora sent me to the library every free moment I could glean. I always got A's. I would often linger after class arguing with the teacher or asking him questions, or doing further lab work. Did this man ever encourage me? Ever suggest a career in science, medicine or research? Heavens no! That was for men! Of course it was all right for me to study biology and chemistry. I might want to be a nurse! I had always hated arithmetic, but algebra was something else. How I loved it! In geometry I soared on tangents, congruities and neat packets of Yet I was programmed for Latin and chemistry, and prevented from taking physics on the grounds that physics was "too difficult" and "took a lot of math." And, of course, I needed the Latin for that nursing career I had no interest in. When I discovered Heinlein, who was I to share it with? The boys, who had no use for a girl "brain?" The girls, who resolutely avoided anything labeled "masculine?" When, in my senior year, I stubbornly insisted on taking advanced math rather than the literature course I was programmed for, any psychiatrist of the time would have labeled me as 'sick.' I was still reading adventure yams at #. I obviously did not accept my femininity and was afflicted with penis envy. When you guys thrill to swirling galaxies, it's normal. When I do the same, it's "penis envy." Even though women's liberation has made many changes in such attitudes, there are a good many psychiatrists around today who would make a similar evaluation. The pre-revolutionary Chinese were a very barbaric people, we are told. They bound the feet of little girls, crippling them for life in the name of beauty and femininity. We Westerners are so much more civilized. We only bind their minds. Eleven years after I turned my back on that dreadful but fairly typical small town high school, I finally entered college. By then I was married to a wonderful man, who preferred smart redheads to dumb blondes, and had two children. I went to a junior college and majored in architecture. I took both college transfer and technical-occupational courses. I finally studied physics. My closest women friends, a psychotherapist, a civil engineer and a musicologist, are all avid readers of science fiction. Dede Wentworth #I I W. Margate Terrace Chicago, #. # Glad to know you saved yourself from the fate of so many other women! Maybe you can answer a question that bugs me: Why are at least half the best new writers women, even though the total percentage of women entering the field is still low? -- j-j-PDear Mr. Baen: In reply to Larry Cooper's letter in your July issue, I must say that he touched a raw nerve. As a one-time "closet" sf fan and a woman, I am still amazed at the reaction I get from people when I mention that I like sf and science essays. Most, I believe, have never had the slightest contact with either (and I must add that exposure to science classes in high school and college seems to have little bearing on the matter). Traditionally, women have been excluded from direct knowledge of sf by conditioning in their early years. I fell into this field by accident. While browsing in a local book store on a snowy day, I found nothing to interest me among the best-sellers, and happened to see Asimov's Foundation trilogy -- and was intrigued by the fact it was a trilogy and (oh horrors!) by the cover. That was almost ten years ago, and I've been a voracious reader ever since. Over those years, however, I have met very few people who share this interest, and all of them are male. Obviously, then, there are so few women writing sf because so fev know anything about it. In one of Dr. Asimov's books about his early life, he mentions having read sf magazines. I had never seen one on the stands here, or at my previous location posure to sf magazines, and I am enjoying it immensely. Why can't I find local store? I even have trouble finding regular sf books. Comment? Beverly R. Brown #-# Crestwood Dr. Sparks, Nev., #I It makes us shudder to think that there are women sf readers so isolated they haven't even heard of the magazines. If you and others in Sparks you could subscribe. That way, you won't miss the fiction -- and you could also follow convention listings in the SF Calendar until you see one near enough to get to and end your isolation. -- j-j-P Dear Mr. Baen: I'd like to make a few comments on Dr. Poumelle's column about energy from waste ("Can Trash Save Us?" July #). First of all. An Index of Possibilities: Energy and Power, is not by the people was put together in California, whereas the Index was assembled in Great Britain. Also, it should be pointed out that the Index people seem to take a more whimsical approach than the Whole Earth people. There was a publication dealing with energy issued in # by the Whole Earth people, in collaboration with several other grdups, entitled Energy Primer: Solar, Water, Wind, and BioFuels (edited by Richard Merrill, Chuck Missar. Thomas Gage, and James Buey, published by Portola Institute). It deals with "alternative" energy sources, and it devotes a significant amount of space to the utilization of organic wastes. For that matter. The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in #, showed interest in the possibility of extracting energy from wastes (see pages # and #). The only reason they didn't give more space to the subject was the relative lack of information at that time. So much for the myth that those concerned about the environment typically follow faddish trends (though there is a segment of the population which clearly does become faddishly "involved" with various "issues," not just ecological ones). As for Dr. Poumelle's claim that "those who would save the world" hold grossly unrealistic views on the potential of such energy sources, a look at the introduction and biofuel sections of Science fiction as visionary literature #, now at your bookstore Here are eight of Robert Silverberg's favorite stories, all of them offering that transcendental experience which only the best science fiction can provide. They "give the reader, for a sizzling moment, a communion with the fabric of space and time, and leave him forever transformed, forever enlarged." Edited and introduced by the Energy Primer clearly shows that the authors have an understanding of the limited amount of energy availahle in waste, and of the technological problems of extracting it. Peter Roberts # Rockingham Road Pittsburgh, Pa., # p.s. : Dr. Pournelle might be interested to know that the CoEvolution Quarterly, a magazine published by Whole Earth Catalog people, has given a great deal of coverage to Gerard O'Neill's L-# colonies, beginning in the Winter # issue. They have published material both favorable and unfavorable to the idea, including items by O'Neill, Russell Schweickart, T.A. Heppenheimer, Eric Drexler, Peter Vajk, and so on. (Incidentally, on page # of the Spring # issue Paul Ehrlich, in something of an about-face, comments in a generally favorable way on L-# colonies, and urges others not to dismiss the idea prematurely.) CQ will issue a book on space colonies some time this year. My apologies:  was told by the chap who sent Index that it was from the Whole Earth people, and l should have checked further instead of taking his word. I remain unrepentant of my remarks about faddish world saviours, but you must understand that I would be more than pleased if those who are " Concerned' ' ' about the future were routinely to get good data and hard facts. I am very pleased to hear that some do. I wish those who write me weekly would inform themselves as well as Mr. Roberts seems to have. Jerry Pournelle Dear Mr. Pournelle: I find some basic flaws in your plan for handling nuclear material (which you outlined in the June issue). For instance, what if one of the tanks should develop a leak? If it were being "shipped about" at the time (that seems the most likely time for one of the tanks to start leaking), might it not contaminate a large area before something can be done? And who would go in there to patch it up? It seems your plan is not the solution. Andre Guirard Lafayette, La. At present, nuclear wastes are stored as veiy dilute liquids, this largely so that when the inevitable leaks take place, contamination is kept veiy low. Iso one has ever thought that storage of was more than a temporary expedient: indeed, it was thought that long before now, all those would be removed. The difficulty is not technological but licensing; the means to convert those liquids into a small-volume solid of glass (with the radioactive particles as part of the glass blocks) of something less than # cubic foot dimensions for all the nuclear wastes accumulated since the Manhattan Project -- is available. Agreed that the shipment of vast quantities of liquid nuclear waste is hardly a reasonable proposition, but that is not what is proposed. When the lawyers are finished arguing the matter, it will be turned into glass blocks, which can then be put wherever one likes; the Mojave as a temporary expedient seems reasonable to me. Glass is, after all, a veiy stable material -- and it doesn't rain much in the desert. Jerry Pournelle sues. Send check or money order to: C.L. Grant, # Center Grove Road, H-#, Dept. G, Dover, N.J. #. Programming, functions compared. "Cir" your calculator-indecision. # (Ohio #) Washington Park Books, # Elm St., Cincinnati, OH #. in Science Fiction books, games and posters. Robert L. Finch, # University Blvd., Houston TX #. Catalogues #. Rogofsky, Box G#, Flushing, NY #. magazines from # to #. Harry Bennett, # Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. #. wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-# St. Paul, Mn. #. to a new Golden Age, or down, like the Diwe go. Write to Congress! Organize! Our only hope for a long and successful future is to explore, exploit, and colonize the endless budget, etc. If you want to help shape the future...if you want to help ensure that Man#. books, miniatures, models. Special savings #, Unionville, Ontario, L#R #. items. Catalog #. 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If you do not receive the form in time to respond within # days, and receive an unwanted selection,' you may return it at our expense. As a member you need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any time thereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. At least one of the two Selections each month is only # plus shipping and handling. Other extra-value selections are slightly higher but always much less than Publishers' Editions. Send no money. But do send the About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin, Things to Come, describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If you want both Selections, you need do nothing; they'll be shipped automatically. If you don't want a Selection, or prefer This fabulous #-page anthology of speculative fiction sells for # in the original publisher's edition. It's yours, if you wish, as one of # books for just # (plus shipping and hand ling) when you join The Science Fiction Book Club. Here's how the Club works: When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your introductory package of four books for just #. You may examine them in your home, and if not completely satisfied, return them within ten days -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. with membership #. The Ophiuchi Hotline. By John Varley. Cloning, alien invaders, and a mysterious message from the depths of spaceall in this outstanding SF story. Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # #. The Starchild Trilogy. By Frederik son. Conceived as a trilogy and together here for the first time are # classic tales, The Reefs of Space, Starchild and Rogue Star. Special edition. #. Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. By George Lucas. Life on a backwater planet can be dull, unless you become invo'ved in an interstellar rebellion. Photos from the motion picture. Special Edition. Sciersce Fiction Book Club #si# j j Dept. PR#, Garden City, N.Y. # j I have read your ad. Please accept me as a  member in the Science Fiction Book Club. J Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose J  numbers I have indicated below, and bill me  just # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to j J take # additional books during the coming year J j are selections for mature readers.  Mr. Mrs. Miss Please print Address Apt. City State Zip #. The # Annual World's Best SF. Donald A. Wollheim, ed. The best SF published during # by Asimov, Knight, Varley and others. Includes Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? Special Edition. #. in the Ocean of Night. By Gregory astronaut defies his orders, mankind finds it is no longer alone in the universe. Pub. ed. # #. Gateway. By Frederik Pohl. Travel on alien ships to distant parts of the universe -- with no guarantee of return. By the author of Man Plus. Pub. ed. # #. A World Out Of Time. By Larry Niven. A black hole in space sends Jerome Corbel! Earth's future where f he ultimate battle of the sexes is raging. By co-author of The Mote in God's Eye. Pub. ed. # #. A Heritage of Stars. By Clifford D. Simak. # years after Earth has reverted to a primitive society, one man is driven to reach for the stars. Pub. ed. # #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant #-in-l volume of # awardwinning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # #. Cioudcry. By Sydney J. Van Scyoc. Exiled to a quarantine planet, Cheram Verrons discovers the remnants of a wild and ruthless race, and tries to learn the long-sought cure for his illness. Pub. ed. # #. The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. Price # #. The Star Trek Concordance. By Bjo Trimble. A must-have large-format paperback with summaries of every episode and a complete lexicon of Trekkish terms. Pub. ed. #  If under # parent must sign. Order not valid j . without signature. I ! The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada.  Science Fiction Metagaming's MicroGames are small, fast-playing, and inexpensive. But not trivial. A MicroGame is a complete wargame...one you can put in your pocket and play at lunch. More play for less money? Try a MicroGame and see. A batile of sorcerers -- (he magical combat system from The Fantasy Trip. Easy to learn... but you'll need skill rulebook (with full color cover) and map than the other MicroGames, so it's priced at #. The price for subscribers (o Mefigatning ' s magazine. The Space Gamer, is only S '#. The war is over. Everybody is dead. But nobody told i he machines. In reprogramming their even stupider robot fighters to destroy each other's minions. A less-than-serious look at the end of life as we know it. #. #, or # for subscribers to The Space Gamer. Full-color cover. XAarpWar A game of interstellar maneuver and tactical combat. Flayers design their own ships -- each with its own offensive, defensive, and movement capabilities -- and battle with a unique dice less combat system. To win. you mu si outguess your opponent. Y Mantoman combat with ancient weapons -- from The Fantasy Trip. A game for one, iwo, or several players. You create fighters, set their sirength and dexterity, and send them into the arena. Combat humans, animals, Tt 'Jf # fZ (#Z monsters, elves, dwarves, or ores -- it's up to you. The intelligent insects of the planet Chelan go to war for one reason only. Food. This detailed tactical game pits varying forces of the specially-bred Hymenopteran warrior types against one another. Victory goes to the player who removes the most food -- including CHiliNI nuclear weapons, incredibly tough, and inhumanly intelligent. This fastmoving game pits one Ogre against a large force of "conventional" tanks, hovercraft, and infantry in the year Box #-HB Austin, TX #I Look for MicroGames at your hobby shop... or order directly from us. An astronaut's mutiny throws Earth into panic. But the man who defies the judgment of scientists and computers turns out to be right. And the spacefaring artifact he discovers turns out to be only the first centuries-old clue to a computerized alien intelligence, invading man's solar system at its most vulnerable point... "First-rate" -- Publishers Weekly. A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club; S# at bookstores. This new novel by the co-author of the unprecedented international publishing venture... high quality science fiction that is published in all major languages, demonstrating ' , the universal appeal of SF at its best. The Dial PressJames Wade Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Stephen Fabian, Art Director J.E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Paul G. Walker, Contributing Editor John J. Pierce, Editor National Advertising Sales Representative: Erwin Baker Associates, Inc., # Evergreen Place, East Orange, N.J., #. Phone #-#-# Part I of IV: For centuries, the mri warriors had served the regul. But few had survived the latest war -- and now their faithless employers had ceded the mri homeworld to the enemy humans. weave a new Pattern. But there remains a last confrontation with the renegade Brand and the forces of Chaos before Amber can be secure. It was an institution for treatment of creative artists' psychological problems... But how can any institution understand creativity? She was just a typical American housewife -- except for that strange thing in her living room... Kinney was hopelessly insane -- by any standards, past or present. But that made him just the sort of man they needed for an insane experiment! Imagination and Evolution: Being some random thoughts on why science fiction may be Significant after all. What were once just science fiction dreams are now being taken over by men with calculators who can figure cost-benefit ratios... Even the author of Watership Down and Shardik can stumble. But Kelly Freas can do nothing wrong, it seems; while Silverberg and Hoskins are still great anthologists. respondence. Cover by Amy Harlib from Interior illustrations by Woods, Vaienza, Harlib, Mueller ration, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Dtatribullng Corporation. Main offices and editorial office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y., #. Single copy #. Annual subscription # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second-class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between the characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Editorial "I remember well how the thought struck me of making calculations for rockets. I think the first seeds were sown by the imaginative tales of Jules Verne, which assailed my mind. I was assailed by a sense of longing, and this set me to thinking in a specific way." -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Iou've heard it all before. Even if you've never read that particular quotation, you know that science fiction has influenced the course of human events. Most of you were watching when men finally landed on the Moon, and television interviewers sought out Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke for reactions to the realization of their dreams. You don't have to take a college course to know that sf has had its impact on modern man in subtler ways as well. Words -- and concepts -- like "robot" originated in science fiction. "Brave New World" has become a catchphrase with connotations known around the world. And # has become a date to be feared. Science fiction has contributed not merely to events -- the space program being the most obvious -- but to attitudes. And its influence on attitudes -- the way people think and feel about the future -- is ultimately more important than its relation to concrete events. For years, science fiction writers have denied they are in the business of "predicting" the future. And indeed, even the greatest of them -- like H. G. Wells -- have sometimes proven poor prophets (Yes, he did predict the atomic bomb in #, but that inspiration was exceptional even for him). For almost as many years, many of the same writers haven't always agreed on what business they are in. Some have claimed to simply be writing entertainment (which doesn't explain why they don't stick to westerns or detective stories). Others have claimed to be writing Literature (which doesn't explain why they don't stick to contemporary fiction). Still others speak seriously of exploring alternative futures -- and they speak the truth, but not the entire truth. Science fiction, as you all know, is being taken a great deal more seriously these days. It is a phenomenon at once exciting and depressing. On the one hand, scholars and critics have come to realize that sf is not garbage: That it can be serious literature with serious themes. On the other, some of the same scholars and critics have little insight into the literature they take so seriously, pigeonholing it into categories they are familiar with, emtombing the real intellectual excitement of science fiction in academic prose as deadly as that of dissertations in any other field. "Mythology" became a catchword in much sf criticism beginning in the #'s. Usually, it referred to the use (deliberately or otherwise) of figures, symbols and archetypes from classical mythologies. And, of course, many sf writers have played with such elements: Roger Zelazny transported the Hintu pantheon to another planet in Lord of Light (but note that said pantheon had an actual function, related to the sociological and ethical themes of the novel). Less emphasis has usually been given to science fiction's role in creating new mythologies. Donald Books, devoted considerable attention to it in The Universe Makers -- not a scholarly book, and filled with idiosyncracies, but still interesting. Science fiction isn't the first literature to create a mythology. C.S. Lewis' The Allegory of Love explored the origin and development of the mythology of romantic love in literature. James Fenimore Cooper has attracted renewed interest in recent times because, whatever his crudities as a novelist, he created the mythology of the American frontier. But science fiction's potential in this area is far greater than that of any previous literature. All mythologies are poetic expressions of what their creators have believed to be the essential relationships of men with each other, and with nature as a whole. Whether classical Greek, or Hindu, or Christian, they have tried to answer the questions: who are we? Why are we? In science fiction, we ask ourselves who we are and where we are and why we are in relation to a universe seemingly without limits. The last few centuries have been full of discoveries, but those with the most profound impact on the human imagination have been the Discovery of Time and the Discovery of Space. Many of the greatest works of science fiction have been part of the imaginative response to these discoveries. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine isn't so much a story about a time machine as one about Time. The classic space operas of E.E. "Doc" Smith and the early John W. Campbell weren't only about spaceships and space battles, but about the vastness of Space itself. Olaf Stapledon, in the immense mythologies of Last and First Men and Star Maker sought to define the significance of man, and of any intelligence, in the new Cosmos revealed by science. And he was not the last, nor even the first, to use science fiction to such ends. One could read the early science fiction of Wells, for example, as the struggle to create a new mythology from science to replace the old one of religion. The Island of Dr. Moreau is as much an allegory about the failure of revealed religion as about the beast in man, while The Food of the Gods tries to find the purpose of mankind as participation in evolution (an idea since taken up not only by other sf writers, but by philosophers like Julian Huxley and Teilhard deChardin). And much of the literary history of science fiction is one of contending world-views and mythologies. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and the Orwell's # were implicit attacks on the philosophy of Wells as well as explicit attacks on the evils of utilitarian materialism and totalitarianism. Clarke embraced the ideas of Wells and Stapledon in The City and the Stars and Childhood's End; Lewis attacked both in his Ransom trilogy (especially That Hideous Strength). One can contrast the harsh mythology of Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon, in which man is pitted against a universe entirely mechanistic and uncaring, with that of Clifford D. Simak in Way Station, in which there is a Purpose behind the universe, albeit not necessarily a personal God in the old Judeo-Christian sense. One can read attempts at a new synthesis into the works of Cordwainer Smith and Ursula K. LeGuin, which strive to reconcile the human values of Christianity and Taoism with those of science and evolution. Science fiction has transformed older mythologies as well. The myth of utopia goes back to ancient times -- and was strong enough to give birth to modern Communism. When that turned sour, sf created the anti-utopian mythology of such classics as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Yet it has also created vivid utopian alternatives as LeGuin's The Dispossessed -- not to mention such convergent ideas as her Ekumen and Poul Anderson's Commonalty. Science fiction has been called a literature of ideas for so long that the phrase has become hackneyed. What we usually mean by the phrase is the concrete idea content of sf: the imaginative play with faster-than-light drives, neutron stars and black holes, alien worlds and psychologies (of which C.J. The Faded Sun: Kesrith, beginning this month). But science fiction is also a literature of general ideas, even of philosophical ideas -- perhaps the only form of such literature still in existence. When one thinks of the philosophical novel, one tends to think of weighty volumes about sensitive intellectuals holding discussions on a mountain top, or Hermann Hesse heroes in quest of spiritual identity. These are expressions of the universal in humanity. And yet we now realize that humanity itself is part of a vast and mysterious universe -- and almost certainly not alone in that universe. Surely any serious philosophical literature must consider the place of mankind in that larger universe. Taking science fiction this seriously has its hazards, of course. Sturgeon's Law applies as severely to "philosophical" sf as to any other kind -- perhaps more so: there is nothing duller than a failed philosophy or a stillborn mythology in sf. Like any other elements in science fiction, its mythologies and philosophies must come naturally -- as part of our genre's natural interest in the future of man in the universe. -- j-j-PTo the Exciting World of Tomorrow than # stunning pictures of rockets, launchers, space fashions and accessories, shipboard life, space excursions, and much more -- a feast for the mind. Jules Verne, Flash Gordon, Star Trek, Star Wars -- they're all here, along with the real spacecraft of today and the dazzling starships of the future. Order copies today (only # each, plus #c for handling) from your bookstore, or direct from the publisher: Harper  Row, Dept. # D, # E. #rd St., New York, N.Y. #. Harper ) Row Personal death is hard enough to face. What then, when one fears his entire kind is dying? i Wind-child, sun-child, what is Kath? Child-bearers, laugh-bringers. that is Kath. It was a game, shon'ai, the passing-game, Kel-style, in the dim round hall of the Kel, the middle tower of the house -- black-robed men and a black-robed woman, a circle of ten. Warriors, they played the round not like children, with a pair of stones, but with the spinning blades of the as-ei, which could wound, or kill. On the name-beat, the snap of fingers, the as-ei flew across the seated circle of players and skilled hands seized the hilts in mid-tum, to beat the time and hurl the blades on in the next name-beat. Fire-child, star-child, what is Kel? Sword-bearers, song-weavers, that is Kel. They played without words, with only the rhythm of their hands and the weapons, flesh and steel. The rhythm was as old as time and as familiar as childhood. The game had more meaning than the act, more than the simplicity implied by the words. The Game of the People, it was called. Dawn-child, earth-child, what is Sen? Rune-makers, home-leaders, that is Sen. A kel'en who flinched, whose eye failed or whose wits wandered, had no value in the House. The boys and girls and women of the Kath played with stones, to leant their skill. Those who became kel'ein played thereafter with edged steel. The Kel, like the mothers and children of the gentle Kath, laughed as they played. They of Kel-caste were brief and bright as moths. They enjoyed life because they knew this. Then-child, now-child, what are we? Dream-seekers, life-bearers, we are -- A door opened, echoing, the sound rolling through the hollows and depths of the tower. Sen Sathell broke in upon them, suddenly and without warning or courtesies. The rhythm ceased. The blades rested in the hands of Niun, the youngest kel'en. The Kel as a whole inclined their heads in respect to Sathell s'Delas, chief of Sencaste, the scholars. Gold-robed he was, like light breaking into the dark hall of the martial Kel, and he was very old -- the oldest man of all in the House. "Kel'anth," he said quietly, addressing Eddan, his counterpart in the Kel, "kel'ein, news has come. The rumor is that the war has ended. The regul have asked the humans for peace." There was utter silence. Then an abrupt move. The as-ei whirred and buried points in the painted plaster of the far wall. The youngest kel'en rose and veiled himself, and stalked from the gathering, leaving shock in his wake. The sen'anth and the kel'anth looked at each other, old men and kinsmen, helpless in their distress. And from the deepest shadows one of the dusei -- a brown, slopeshouldered mass larger than a man -- stirred and rose, ambling forth into the light in that mournful, abstracted manner of dusei. It pushed its way irreverently between the two elders, thrusting its massive head at the kel'anth, who was its master, seeking comfort. Kel'anth Eddan patted the beast with age-smooth fingers and looked up at the old scholar who, outside the divisions of caste and duty, was his half-brother. "Is the news beyond any doubt?" he asked, the least trace of hope yet in his voice. "Yes. The source is regul official communications, no city rumor. It seems completely reliable." Sathell gathered his robes about him and, tucking them between his knees, settled on the carpeted floor among the kel'ein, who eased aside to make room for him in their circle. They were, these ten, the elders of the House, save one. They were mri. In their tongue, when they so named themselves, they were merely saying that they were of the People. Their word for other species was tsi'mri, which meant notpeople, and summed up mri philosophy, religion and the personal attitudes of the elders at once. They were, as a species, goldentoned. Mri legends said that the People were bom of the sun. Skin, eyes, coarse shoulder-length manes, all were bronze or gold. Their hands and feet were narrow and long and they were a tall, slender race. Their senses, even in great age, were very keen, their hearing in particular most sensitive. Their golden eyes were lid-folded, double-lidded as well, for a nictitating membrane acted on reflex to protect their vision against blowing dust. They were, as outsiders believed, a species of warriors of mercenaries -- for outsiders saw the Kel, rarely the Sen and never the Kath. Mri served outsiders for hire -- served the regul, the massive tsi'mri merchants native to Nurag of the star Mab. For many centuries mri kel'ein had hired out to protect regul commerce between-worlds, generally hired by one regul company as defense against the ambitions and ruthlessness of a business rival, and mri had therefore fought against mri. Those years and that service had been good for the People, allowing this trying of one kel'en of a certain service against the kel'en of another in proper and traditional combat, as it had always been. Such trials-atarms refined the strength of the People, eliminating the weak and unfit and giving honor to the strong. In those days the tsi'mri regul had recognized themselves to be incapable of fighting and unskilled in planning strategies, and sensibly left all matters of conflict to the mri Kel to settle in the mri fashion. But for the last forty years mri had served all regul combined against all humans in a bitter and ugly conflict, lacking honor and empty of any satisfactions from the enemy. The mri elders were old enough to remember the life before, and knew therefore what changes had been wrought by the war. They were not pleased with them. Humans were mass-fighters, animals of the herd, and understood no other way of war. Mri, who fought singly, had early suspected this, tested it with their lives, found it bitterly true. Humans rejected a ani, honorable combat, would not respect challenge, understood nothing but their own way, which was widespread destruction. Mri had bent themselves to learn humanity, the way of the enemy, and had begun to adjust their operations and their manner of service to the regul accordingly. Mri were professionals when it came to combat. Innovation in the yin'ein, the ancient weapons that were used in a' ani, was dishonorable and unthinkable; but innovation in the zahen'ein, in modem arms, was a simple matter of retooling and adjusting methods, a matter of competency in the profession they followed for a livelihood. Regul, unfortunately, were not as capable of adapting to new tactics. Regul had vast and accurate memories. They could not forget what had always occurred, but, conversely, they could hardly conceive of what had not yet happened, nor make plans against it happening. Hitherto the regul had depended on mri entirely in the matter of their personal safety, and mri foresight -- for mri could imagine -- had shielded them and compensated for that regul blindness to the unexpected; but in later days, when the war began to take regul lives and threaten regul properties, regul took matters into their own unskilled hands. Regul issued orders, prudent in their own estimation, for actions that were militarily impossible. The mri had attempted to obey, for honor's sake. Mri had died in their thousands, for honor's sake. In the House, on this world, there lived only thirteen mri. Two were young. The rest were the makers of policy, a council of the old, the veterans. Long centuries ago the House had numbered more than two thousand in the Kel alone. In this present age all but these few had gone their way to the war, to die. And their war had been lost, by regul, who had asked the humans for peace. Sathell looked about him and considered these old ones, kel'ein who had lived beyond their own years of service, whose memories gave them in some matters the perspective of sen'ein. They were Husbands to the she 'pan, mastersof-arms while there had been Kathchildren to teach. And there was Pasev, the only surviving kel'e'en of the House, she most skilled in yin'ein, next only to Eddan himself. There were Dahacha and Sirain of Nisren; Palazi and Quaras and Lieth of Guragen, itself a dead House, taking refuge with the Mother of this one and adopted by her as Husbands. And from yet another dead House were Liran and Debas, truebrothers. They were part of an age that had already vanished, a time the People would not see again. Sathell felt their sadness, sensed it reflected in the beasts that huddled together in the shadows. Eddan's dus, whose species was reputedly never friendly with any caste but the warrior Kel, sniffed critically at the scholar's gold robes and suffered himself to be touched, then heaved his great bulk a little closer, wrinkled rolls of down-furred flesh, shamelessly accepting affection where it was offered. "Eddan," said Sathell, stroking the beast's warm shoulder, "I must tell you also: It is very likely the masters will cede this world if the humans should demand it as part of the peace." "That would be," said Eddan, "a very large settlement." "Not according to what we have just heard. It is rumored that the humans have secured the whole front, that the regul lords are in complete withdrawal, that the humans are in such a position now that they can touch all the contested areas. They have taken Elag." There was silence. Elsewhere in the tower a door closed. At last Eddan shrugged, a move of his slender fingers. "Then the humans will surely demand this world. There is very little they will miss in their desire for revenge. And the regul have left us open to it." "It is incredible," said Pasev. "Gods! there was no need, no need at all, for the regul to have abandoned Elag. The People could have held there -- could have turned the humans had they been given the equipment." Sathell made a helpless gesture. "Perhaps. But held for whom? The regul withdrew, took everything that was needed there for the defense, pulled ships from under their control. Now we -- Kesrith -- have become the border. You are right. It is very likely that the regul will not resist here either; in fact, it is not reasonable for them to do so. So we have done all that we could do. We have advised, we have warned -- and if our employers refused to take that advice, there is little we can do but cover their retreat, since we cannot restrain them from it. They took the war into their own management against our advice. Now they have lost their war; we have not. The war ceased to be ours some years ago. You are guiltless, kel'ein. You may justly reckon so. There is simply nothing further that can be done." "There was something once that might have been done," Pasev insisted. "The Sen attempted many times to reason with the masters. We offered our services and our advice according to the ancient treaty. We could not -- " Sathell heard the footsteps of the youth downstairs as he spoke and the disturbance disrupted his train of thought. He glanced hallward involuntarily as the door downstairs slammed with great violence. The sound echoed throughout all the House. He cast the Kel a look of distress. "Should not one of you at least go speak with him?" Eddan shrugged, embarrassed in his authority. Sathell knew it. He presumed on kinship and friendship and stepped far out of bounds with Eddan when he made that protest. He loved Niun; they all did. But the autonomy of the Kel, even misguided, was sacred regarding the discipline of its members. Only the Mother could interfere within Eddan's province. "Niun has some small cause, do you not think?" asked Eddan quietly. "He has trained all his life toward this war. He is not a child of the old way, as we are; and now he cannot enter into the new either. You have taken something from him. What do you expect him to do, sen Sathell?" Sathell bowed his head, unable to dispute with Eddan in the matter, recognizing the truth in Eddan 's words, trying to see things as a young kel'en might see them. One could not explain to the Kel, could not refute them in debate or expect foresight of them: children of a day, the kel'ein, brief and passionate, without yesterday and without tomorrow. Their ignorance was the price they paid for their freedom to leave the House and go among tsi'mri; and they knew their place. If a sen'en challenged them to reason, they must simply bow the head in their tum and retreat into silence; they had nothing with which to answer. And to destroy their peace of mind was unconscionable. Knowledge without power was the most bitter condition of all. "I think I have told you," said Sathell at last, "all that I know to tell you at the moment. I will advise you immediately if there is any further news." He arose in the silence and smoothed his robes into order, gingerly avoiding the reflexive grasp of the dus. The beast reached at his ankle, harmless in intent but not in potential. The dusei were not to be treated with familiarity by any but a kel'en. He stopped and looked at Eddan, who with a touch rebuked the beast and freed the sen'anth. Sathell edged round the massive paw and cast a final look at Eddan, but Eddan looked away, affecting not to be interested any further in his departure. Sathell was not willing to press the matter publicly. He knew his half-brother and knew that the hurt was precisely because there was affection between them. There was a careful line drawn between them in public. When caste divided kinsmen, there had to be, to save the pride of the lesser. He gave a formal courtesy to the others and withdrew. He was glad to be out of that grim hall, heavy as the air was with the angers of frustrated men, and of the dusei, whose rage was slower but more violent. He was relieved, nonetheless, that they had listened to all that he had said. There would be no violence, no irrational action, which was the worst thing to be feared from the Kel. They were old. The old might reason together in groups, might consult together. The kel'en was, in youth, a solitary warrior and reckless, and without perspective. He thought of going after Niun but did not know what to say to him should he find him. His duty was to report elsewhere.    When the door closed, aged Pasev, kel'e'en, veteran of Nisren and Elag's first taking, pulled the as-ei from the shattered plaster and merely shrugged off the sen'anth. She had seen more years and more of war than any living warrior but Eddan himself. She played the game all the same, as did they all, including Eddan. It was a death as honorable as one in war. "Let us play it out," she said. "No," said Eddan firmly. "No. Not yet." He caught her eyes as he spoke. She looked at him plainly, aged lover, aged rival, aged friend. Her slim fingers brushed the fine edge of the steel but she understood the order. "Aye," she said, and the as-ei spun past Eddan's shoulder to bury themselves in the painted map of Kesrith that decorated the east wall.    "The Kel bore the news," said sen Sathell, "with more restraint than I expected of them. But it was not welcome all the same. They feel cheated. They perceive it as an affront to their honor. And Niun left. He would not even hear it out. I do not know where he went. I am concerned. She 'pan Intel, the Lady Mother of the House and of the People, leaned back in her many cushions, ignoring a twinge of pain. The pain was an old companion. She had had it for forty-three years, since she lost her strength and her beauty at once in the fires of burning Nisren. Even then she had not been young. Even then she had been she 'pan of home world, ruler over all three castes of the People. She was of the first rank of the Sen, surpassing Sathell himself; she was above other she'panei as well, the few that still lived. She knew the Mysteries that were closed to others; she knew the name and nature of the Holy and of the Gods. The Pana, the Revered Objects, were in her keeping. She knew her nation to its depth and its width, its birth and its destiny. She was she'pan of a dying House, eldest Mother of a dying species. The Kath, the caste of child-bearers and children, was dead, its tower dark and closed twelve years ago. The last of the kath'ein was long buried in the cliffs of Sil'athen and the last children, motherless save for herself, had gone to their destinies outside. Her Kel had declined to ten, and the Sen... The Sen was before her: Sathell, the eldest, the sen'anth, whose weak heart ever poised him a beat removed from the Dark; and the girl who sat presently at her feet. They were the gold robes, the lightbearers, high-caste. Her own robes were white, untainted by the edgings of black and blue and gold worn by the she'panei of lesser degree. Their knowledge was almost complete but her own was entire. If her own heart should stop beating this moment, so much, so incalculably much, could be lost to the People. It was a fearful thing to consider how much rested on her every pulse and breath. That the House and the People not die. The girl Melein looked up at her -- last of all the children, Melein s'lntel Zain-Abrin, who had once been kel'e'en. At times the kelfierceness still dwelt in Melein -- although she had outwardly assiimed the robes and the chaste serenity of the scholarly Sen, although the years had given her different skills and her mind had advanced far beyond the simplicity of a kel'e'en. Intel brushed at Melein's shoulder, a faint caress. "Patience," she advised, seeing Melein's anxiety, and she knew that the advice would be discarded in all respects. "Let me go find Niun and talk to him," Melein asked. Brother and sister, Niun and Melein -- and close, despite that they had been separated by law and she'pan's decree and caste and custom. Kel'en and sen'e'en, dark and bright, Hand and Mind. But the heart in them was the same, and the blood was the same. Intel remembered the pair that had given them life: her youngest and most beloved Husband and a kel'e'en of Guragen, both lost now. His face, his eyes, that had made her regret a she'pan's chastity, gazed back at her through Melein's and Niun's; and she remembered that he also had been strong-willed and hot-tempered and clever. Perhaps Melein hated her; command to leave the Kel and enter the Sen. But there was no defiance to be seen now, though the she'pan searched for it. There was only anxiety, only a natural grief for her brother's pain. "No," said Intel sharply. "I tell you to let him alone." "He may harm himself, she'pan." "He will not. You underestimate him. He does not need you now. You are no longer of the Kel and I doubt that he wants to be faced by one of the Sen at this moment. What could you tell him? What could you answer if he asked you questions? Could you be silent?" The words struck home. "He wanted to leave Kesrith six years ago," said Melein, her eyes bright with unshed tears; and possibly it was not only her brother's case she pleaded now, but her own. "You would not let him go. Now it is too late, she'pan. It is forever too late for him, and what can he imagine for himself? What is there left for him?" "Meditate upon these things," said Intel, "and tell me your conclusions, sen Melein s'lntel, after you have thought a day and a night on this matter. But do not intrude your advice into the private affairs of a kel'en. And do not regard him as your brother. A sen'e'en has no kin but the whole House, and the People." Melein rose and stared down at her, breast heaving with her struggle for breath. Beautiful, this daughter of hers. Intel saw her in this instant and was amazed at how much Melein, who was not of her blood, had become the things her own youth had once promised -- saw minrored her own self -- before Nisren's fall, before the ruin of the House and of her own hopes. The sight wounded her. In this moment she saw clearly, and knew the sen'e'en as she was, and at once feared her and loved her. Melein, who would hardly mourn her passing. So she had created her, deliberately, event by event, choice by choice, her daughter-not-of-theflesh, her child, her Chosen, formed in Kath and Kel and Sen, partaker of the Mysteries of all castes of the People. Hating her. "Leam restraint," the she 'pan earnestly advised in a still, soft voice that thrust with difficulty into Melein's anger. 'Leam to be sen'e'en, Melein, above all else that you desire to have." The young sen'e'en let go a shuddering breath and the tears in her eyes spilled over. Thwarted for now, the sen'e'en was for a moment child again; but this child was dangerous. Intel shivered, foreknowing that Melein would outlive her and impose her own imprint on the world. II There was a division in the world, marked by a causeway of white rock. On the one side, and at the lower end, lay the regul of Kesrith -- city folk, slow-moving, long-remembering. The lowland city was entirely theirs: flat sprawling buildings, a port, commerce with the stars, mining that scarred the earth, a plant that extracted water from the Alkaline Sea. The land had been called the Dus-plain before there were regul on Kesrith, the mri remembered. For this reason the mri had avoided the plain, in respect of the dusei; but the regul had insisted to set their city there, and the dusei had left it. Uplands, in the rugged hills at the other end of the causeway, was the tower of the mri. It appeared as four truncated cones arising from the corners of a trapezoidal ground floor -- slanted walls made of the pale earth of the lowlands, treated and hardened. This was the Edun Kesrithun, the House of Kesrith, the home of the mri of Kesrith and, because of Intel, the home of all mri in the wide universe. One could see most of Kesrithi civilization from the vantage point Niun occupied in his solitary anger. He came here often, to this highest part of the causeway, to this stubborn outcrop of rock that had defeated the regul road and made the regul think otherwise about their plans to extend it into the high hills, invading the sanctity of Sil'athen. Niun liked it for what it was as well as for the view. Below him lay the regul city and the mri edun, two very small scars on the body of the white earth. Above him, in the hills, and beyond and beyond, there were only regul automatons that drew minerals from the earth and provided regul Kesrith its reason for existence; and wild things that had owned the world before the coming of regul or of mri; and the slowmoving dusei that had once been Kesrith's highest form of life. Niun sat brooding on the rock that overlooked the world, hating tsi'mri with more than the ordinary hatred of mri for aliens, which was considerable. He was twenty-six years old as the People reckoned years, which was not by Kesrith's orbit around Arain, nor by the standard of Nisren, nor by that of either of the two other worlds the People had designated homeworld in the span of time remembered by Kel songs. He was tall, even for his kind. His high cheekbones bore the set' al, the triple scars of his caste, bluestained and indelible. This meant that he was a full-fledged member of the Kel, the Hand of the People. Being of the Kel, he went robed from collar to boot-tops in unrelieved black; and black veil and tasseled headcloth, mez and zaidhe, concealed all but his brow and his eyes from the gaze of outsiders when he chose to meet them; and the zaidhe further had a dark, transparent visor that could meet the veil when dust blew or red Arain reached its unpleasant zenith. He was a man: His face, like his thoughts, was considered a private identity, one indecent to reveal to strangers. The veils enveloped him as did the robes, a distinguishing mark of the only caste of the People that might deal with outsiders. The black robes, the siga, were held about the waist and chest with belts that bore his weapons, which were several; and they should also have held j'tai, medallions, honors won for his services to the People. They held none, and this lack of status would have been obvious to any mri who beheld him. Being of the Kel, he could neither read nor write, save that he could use a numbered keyboard and he knew mathematics, both regul and mri. He knew by heart the complicated genealogies of his House, which had been that of Nisren. The name-chants filled him with melancholy when he sang them: It could not be otherwise when he must look about the cracking walls of Edun Kesrithun and behold only so few people as now lived and realize that decline was taking place, that it was real and threatening. He knew all the songs. He could foresee begetting no child of his own who would sing them, not on Kesrith. He had learned the songs; he had learned the languages that were part of the Kel-lore. He spoke four languages fluently, two of which were his own, one of which was the regul's, and the fourth of which was the enemy's. He was expert in weapons, both the yin'ein and the zahen'ein; he was taught of nine masters-of-arms; he knew that his skill was great in all these things. And wasted, all wasted. Regul. Tsi'mri. Niun flung a rock downslope, which splashed into a hot pool and disturbed the vapors. Peace. Peace on human terms, it would be. Regul had disregarded mri strategists at every crucial moment of the war. Regul would spend mri lives without stinting and they would pay the bloodprice to edunei that lost sons and daughters of the Kel, all because some regul colonial official panicked and ordered suicidal attack by the handful of mri serving him personally, to cover his retreat and that of his younglings; same regul risk regul lives or properties. To lose regul lives would mean loss of status; it would have brought that regul instant censure by regul authorities, recall to homeworld, sifting of his knowledge, death of himself and his young in all probability. It was inevitable that humans should have realized this essential weakness of the regul-mri partnership, that humans should have learned that inflicting casualties on regul would have far more effect than inflicting those same casualties on mri. It was predictable then that the regul should have panicked under that pressure, that they would have reacted by retreat, precipitous, against all mri counsel to the contrary, exposing world after world to attack in their haste to withdraw to absolute security. Consequently that absolute security could not exist. And that regul would afterward compound their stupidity by dealing directly with the humans -- this too was credible in the regul -- to buy and sell war, and to sell out quickly when threatened rather than risk losing overmuch of their necessary possessions. The regul language contained no word for courage. Neither had it one for imagination. The war was ending and Niun remained worldbound, never having put to use the things that he had learned. The Gods knew what manner of trading the merchants were doing, what disposition was being made of his life. He foresaw that things might revert to what they had been before the war, that mri might again serve individual regul -- that mri would fight mri again, in combat where experience mattered. And Gods knew how long it would be possible to find a regul to serve, when the war was ending and conditions were entering a period of flux. Gods knew how likely a regul was to take on an inexperienced kel'en to guard his ship when others, war-wise, were available. He had trained all his life to fight Two Award-Winning Giants Together for the First Time! Lin Carter Richard A. Lupoff Bob Shaw Gordon R. Dickson Lou Fisher In March #"#B, Dell will publish John Varley'a fabulous first novel Dell Publishing Co , Inc.  I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, # East #th Street  New York. N Y # humans and now the policies of three species conspired to keep him from it. He rose up of a sudden, mind set on an idea that had been seething within for more than this day alone, and he leaped to the ground and started walking down the road. He did not look back when he had passed the edun, unchallenged, unnoticed. He owned nothing. He needed nothing. What he wore and what he carried as his weapons were his to take; he had these by law and custom, and he could ask nothing more of his edun even were he leaving with its blessing and help, which he was not. In the edun Melein would surely grieve at such a silent desertion, but she had been kel'e'en herself long enough to be glad for his sake that he went to a service. A kel'en in an edun was as impermanent as the wind itself and ought to own no close ties past childhood, save to the she 'pan and to the People and to him or her that hired him. He did feel a certain guilt toward the she'pan, to her who had mothered him with a closeness much beyond what a she'pan owed a son of her Husbands. He knew that she had particularly favored Zain, his father, and still mourned his death; and she would neither approve nor allow the journey he made now. It was, in fact, Intel's stubborn, possessive will that had held him this long on Kesrith, kept him at her side long past the years that he decently should have left her authority and that of his teachers. He had once loved Intel, deeply, reverently. Even that love, in the slow years since he should have followed the other kel'ein of the edun and left her, had begun to tum to bitterness. Thanks to her, his skills were untried, his life unused and now perhaps altogether useless. Nine years had passed since the seta'al of the Kel had been cut and stained into his face, nine years that he had sat in heart-pounding longing whenever a regul master would come up the road to the edun and seek a kel'en to guard a ship, be it for the war or even for commerce. Fewer and fewer these requests came in the passing years, and now there came no more requests to the edun at all. He was the last of all his brothers and sisters of the Kel, last of all the children of the edun save Melein. The others had all found their service, and most were dead; but Niun s'lntel, nine years a kel'en, had yet to leave the she'pan's protective embrace. Mother, let me go! he had begged of her six years ago, when his cousin Medai's ship had left -- the ultimate, the crushing, shame that Medai -- swaggering, boastful Medai -- should be chosen for the greatest honor of all, and he be left behind in disgrace. No, the she'pan had said in the absolute, invoking her authority; and to his repeated pleading for her understanding, for his freedom: No. You are the last of all my sons, the last, the last l shall ever have. Zain' s child. And if I will you to stay with me, that is my right, and that is my final decision. No. No. He had fled to the high hills that day, watching and not wishing to watch as the ship of the regul high command, Hazan, which ruled the zone in which Kesrith lay, bore Medai s'Intel Sov-Nelan into manhood, into service, into the highest honor that had yet befallen a kel'en of Edun Kesrithun. That day Niun had wept, though kel'ein could not weep. And then in shame at this weakness, he had scoured his face with the harsh powdery sand and stayed fasting in the hills for another day and two nights, until he had had to come down and face the other kel'ein and the Mother's anxious and possessive love. Old, all of them. There was not a kel'en now save himself that could take a service even if it were offered. They were all greatly skilled. He suspected that they were the greatest masters of the yin'ein in all the People, although they did not boast anything but considerable competency; but the years had done their subtle robbery and left them no strength to use their arts in war. It was a Kel of eight men and one woman past their reason for living, without strength to fight or -- after him -- children to teach: old ones whose dreams must now be all backward. Nine years they had stolen from him, entombing him with them, living their vicarious lives through his youth. He walked the road down to the lowlands, letting the causeway take him to regul, since regul would not come to the edun in these days. It was not the most direct route but it was the easiest, and he walked it insolently secure since the old ones of the Kel could not possibly overtake him on so long a walk. He did not mean to go to the port, which was directly crosslands, but to what lay at the causeway's end, the very center of regul authority, the Nom, that two-storied building that was the highest structure in Kesrith 's only city.    He felt uneasy when his boots trod concrete and he found all about him the ugly, flat buildings of regul. Here was a different world from the cleanliness of the high hills; even a different smell in the air, a blunting of the acrid flavor of Kesrith's chill winds, a subtle effluvium of oil and machinery and musky regul bodies. Regul younglings watched him -- the mobile ones, the young of regul. Their squat bodies would thicken further in adulthood, their grayish-brown skins darken, loosen; fat would accumulate until they found themselves enveloped in weight almost too great for their atrophying muscles to lift. Mri seldom saw elder regul: Niun himself had never seen an elder in the flesh; only heard them described by his teachers of the Kel. Adult regul kept to their city, surrounded by machines that carried them, that purified their air; they were attended by younglings that must wait on them constantly, who themselves lived precarious lives until they chanced to reach maturity. The only violence regul perpetrated was against their own young. The younglings on the square looked at him now in sidelong glances and talked in secretive tones that carried to his sensitive hearing, more clearly surely than they realized possible. Ordinarily this spitefulness would not have troubled him in the least: He had been taught less liking for them and despised them and all their breed. But here he was the petitioner, desperately anxious, and they held what he wanted and had the power to deny it to him. Their hatred breathed about him like the tainted city atmosphere. He had veiled himself long before he entered the town; but with a little more encouragement, he would have dropped the visor of the zaidhe also. He had done so on his last visit to this city, being a very young kel'en and uncertain of the proprieties of conduct between regul and mri. But now, older, a man in his own right, he had the face to leave the visor up and glare back at the younglings who stared too boldly; and most could not bear the direct contact with his eyes and flinched from meeting them. A few, older and braver than the others, hissed soft displeasure, warning. He ignored them. He was not a regul youngling, to fear their violence. He knew his way. He knew the Norn's proper entrance, fronting the great square around which the city was built in concentric squares. It faced the rising sun, as main entrances of central regul buildings must. He remembered this. He had been here as escort to his father, who was about to take his last service; but he had not been inside. Now he came to the door before which he had waited on that day, and at his presence the regul youngling on duty in the vestibule rose in alarm. "Go away," said the youngling flatly; but Niun paid no attention to it and walked into the main foyer of the echoing place, at once stifled by the heat and the musky flavor of the air. He found himself in a great area surrounded by doors and windowed offices, all with titles written on them; he was quickly sick and dizzy from the air; and he stood confused and ashamed in the middle of the hall, for here it was a matter of reading to know where he must go next, and he could not read. It was the regul youngling from the vestibule desk that came to him in his distress, stumping across the floor in short, scuffing steps. The youngling was flushed dark with anger, or with the heat, and breathing heavily from the exertion of overtaking Niun. "Go away," the youngling repeated. "By treaty and by law, you have no business coming here." "I will speak to your elders," Niun told the youngling. This, he had been taught, was the ultimate and unanswerable appeal among regul: No youngling could make an ultimate decision. "Tell them that a kel'en is here to speak with them." The youngling blew air, fluttering, through its nostrils. "Come with me then," it said, and cast him a disapproving glance, a flash of white, red-veined, from the comer of a rolling eye. It was -- it, for regul could not determine their own gender until maturity -- like all regul, a squat figure, body almost touching the floor even while it was standing. It was also a very young regul to have been given the (among regul) considerable honor of tending the Nom door. It still bore itself erect, bones showing through the skin, the brown pebbly hide fine-grained yet and delicate with beige tones and a casting of metallic highlights, It walked beside him, a rolling gait that needed considerable leeway. "I am Hada Surag-gi," it said, "secretary, guardian to the door. You are doubtless one of Intel's lot." Niun did not answer this rudeness on the part of the tsi'mri guard, naming the she'pan by her name with such insolent familiarity. Among regul, elders would be the reverence, or the honorable, or the lord...and he reckoned the familiarity for calculated insult, marking it down for a later date, if it so happened he found himself holding what Hada Surag-gi desired. The youngling at present was doing what he wanted it to do and this, between mri and tsi'mri, was sufficient. Steel tracks ran the bowed edges of the walls, and a vehicle whispered past them at a speed so great the presence was only an instant. The tracks went everywhere on the wall opposite the doors, and another and another vehicle passed, missing one another by a hand's breadth. He did not let himself appear amazed at such things. And neither did he thank the youngling when it had shown him through a door and into a waiting room where another, seemingly adult, kept a metal desk; he simply turned his back on the youngling when it had ceased to be of use, and heard it leave. The official leaned back from its desk, cradling its body in the mobile chair that -- amazingly -- moved under power: another such vehicle, a gleaming steel device such as he had heard the adult regul used to move about without rising. "We know you," the regul said. "You are Niun, from the Hill. Your elders have contacted us. You are ordered to return to your people immediately." Heat rushed to his face. Of course they would have done this, forestalling him. He had not even thought of it. "That does not matter," he said, carefully formal. "I am asking service with your ships. I renounce my edun." The regul, a brown mass, folded and over-folded, its face a surprising bony smoothness within this weight, sighed and regarded him with small, wrinkle-edged eyes. "We hear what you say," it said. "But our treaty with your folk does not permit us to accept you with your elders protesting. Please return to them at once. We do not want to quarrel with your elders." "Do you have a superior?" Niun asked harshly, out of patience and fast losing hope as well. "Let me speak to someone of higher authority." "You ask to see the Director?" "Yes." The regul sighed again and made the request of an intercom. A grating voice refused, flatly. The regul looked up, rolling its eyes in an expression that was more satisfied and smug than apologetic. "You see," it said. Niun turned on his heel and strode oitt of the office and out of the foyer, ignoring the amused eyes of the youngling Hada Surag-gi. He felt his face burning, his breath short, as he exited the warm interior of the Nom and walked onto the public square, where the cold wind swept through the city. He walked swiftly as if he had a place to go and went there of his own will. He imagined that every regul on the street knew his shame and was laughing secretly. This was not beyond all possibility, for regul tended to know everyone's business. He did not slow his pace until he was walking the long causeway back from the city's edge toward the edun, and then indeed he walked slowly and cared little for what passed his eyes or his hearing on the road. The open land, even on the causeway, was not a place where it was safe to go inattentive to surroundings, but he did so, tempting the Gods and the she 'pan's anger. He was sorry that nothing did befall him and that, after all, he found himself walking the familiar earthen track to the entrance of the edun and entering its shadows and its echoes. He was sullen still as he walked to the stairs of the Kel tower and ascended, pushing open the door of the hall, reporting to kel'anth Eddan, dutiful prisoner. "I am back," he said, and did not unveil. Eddan had the rank and the selfrighteousness to turn a naked face to his anger, and the self-possession to remain unstirred. Old man, old man, Niun could not help thinking, the seta'al are one with the wrinkles on your face, and your eyes are dimmed so that they already look into the Dark. You will keep me here until I am like you. Nine years, nine years, Eddan, and you have made me lose my dignity. What can you take from me in nine more? "You are back," echoed Eddan, who had been his principal teacherin-arms and who adopted that master-student manner with him. "What of it?" Niun carefully unveiled, settled crosslegged to the floor near the warmth of the dus that slept in the corner. It eased aside, murmured a rumbling complaint at the disturbance of its sleep. "I would have gone," he said. "You distressed the she'pan," Eddan said. "You will not go down to the city again. She forbids it." Niun looked up, outraged. "You embarrassed the House," Eddan said. "Consider that." "Consider me!" Niun exclaimed, exhausted. He saw the shock his outburst created in Eddan and cast the words out in reckless satisfaction: "It is unnatural, what you have done, keeping me here. I am due something in my life -- something of my own, at least." "Are you?" Eddan's soft voice was edged. "Who taught you that? Some regul in the city?" Eddan stood still, hands within his belt, old master of the yin'ein, in that posture that chilled a man who knew its meaning: Here is challenge, if you want it. Niun loved Eddan. That Eddan looked at him in this way frightened him; made him reckon his skill against Eddan's; made him remember that Eddan could still humble him. There was a difference between himself and the old master, that if Eddan's bluff were called, blood would flow for it. And Eddan knew that difference in them. Heat rose to Niun's face. "I never asked to be treated differently than all the others," he declared, averting his face from Eddan's challenge. "What do you think you are due?" Eddan asked him. He could not answer. "You have a soft spot in your defense," said Eddan. "A gaping hole. Go and consider that, Niun s'Intel, and when you have made up your mind what it is the People owe you, come and tell me and we will go to the Mother and present your case to her." Eddan mocked him. The bitter thing was that he deserved it. He saw that this over-anxiousness was what had shamed him before the regul. He resumed the veil and gathered himself to his feet. "You have duties that are waiting," Eddan said sharply. "Dinner was held without you. Go and assist Liran at cleaning up. Tend to your own obligations before you consider what is owed to you." "Sir," Niun said quietly, averted his face again and went his way below. Ill The ship, a long voyage out from ElagHaven, had shifted to the tedium that had possessed it before transition. Sten Duncan took a second look at the mainroom display and was disappointed to discover it had not yet noted the change. They had spent the longest normal-space passage he had ever endured getting out of Haven's militarily sensitive vicinity, blind and under tedious escort. That was suddenly gone. It was replaced by another passage likely as tedious. He shrugged and kept walking. The place smelled of regul. He held his breath as he passed the galley-automat, the door of which was open. He kept to the center of the corridor, scarcely noticing as a sled whisked past him: The corridors were built wide, high in the center and low on the sides, with gleaming rails recessed into the flooring to guide the conveyance sleds that carried the regul about the long corridors of their ship. It was not possible to forget for an instant that this ship was regul. The corridors did not angle or bow as they would in a human-made vessel; they wound, spiraled, amenable to the gliding course of the sleds that hugged the walls, and only a few of them could be walked. In those designed for walking, there was headroom in their center for humans -- or for mri, who were the ordinary tenants of regul ships -- but tracks ran the sides for regul. And about the whole ship there were strange scents, strange aromas of unpalatable food and spices, strange sounds, the rumbling tones of regul language that neither humans nor probably even mri had ever pronounced as regul might. He loathed it. He loathed the regul utterly, and knowing that that reaction was neither wise nor helpful in his position, he constantly fought against his instincts. It was clear enough that the reaction was mutual with the regul; they restricted their human guests to six hours in which they were supposedly free to roam the personnel areas to their hearts' content; and after that came a twenty-two-hour period of confinement. Sten Duncan, aide to the Honorable George Stavros -- governor-tobe in the new territories and presently liaison between regul and humanity -- regularly availed himself of that six-hour liberty; the Honorable Mr. Stavros did not. He did not, in fact, venture from his own room. Duncan walked the corridors and gathered the appropriate materials and releases from the library for the honorable gentleman to read and carried to the pneumatic dispatch whatever communications flowed from Stavros to Stavros' regul counterpart, bai Hulagh Alagn-ni. Regul protocol. No regul elder of dignity performed his own errands -- only a condemned incompetent lacked youngling servitors. Therefore no human of Stavros' rank would do so; and therefore Stavros had chosen an aide of apparent youth and fairly advanced rank, criteria that regul would use in selecting their own personal attendants. He was, in effect, a servant. He provided Stavros a certain prestige. He ran errands. Back in the action that had taken Haven, he had held military rank. The regul knew this, which further enhanced Stavros' prestige. Duncan gathered up the day's communications, left others from Stavros on the appropriate table and delivered the food order to the slot that ultimately would find its way to the correct department, sending an automated carrier to their door with the requested meal -- at least as regul construed it -- of the humansupplied foodstuffs that had come with them. Like exotic pets, Duncan reflected with annoyance, with the regul trying, as far as convenient, to maintain an authentic environment. As in most wild-animal displays, the staging was transparently artificial. He retraced his way down the hall, through the mainroom recreation area and library. He had never set eyes on any of the regul save the younglings that frequented this central personnel relaxation area. Curiously enough, neither had Stavros encountered Hulagh. Protocol again. It was likely that, in all the time they had yet to spend among regul, they would never meet the Honorable, the Reverence, bai Hulagh Alagn-ni, but only the younglings that served him as crew and aides and messengers. Regul elders were virtually immobile; this was certain; and Hulagh was said to be of very extreme age. Duncan privately surmised that this helplessness was a source of embarrassment to the elderly regul in dealing face to face with non-regul and that therefore they arranged to keep themselves in total seclusion from outsiders. Or perhaps they judged humans and mri unbearably ugly. It was certain that there was little that humans could find beautiful in the regul. He opened the unlocked door that let him into the double suite he shared with Stavros. The anteroom was his, serving as sleeping quarters and all else he was supposed to desire during the long passage: regul revenge, he thought sourly, for human insistence on the long, slow escort. Both the reception salon and proper bedroom belonged to Stavros. So did the sanitary facilities, which were in the adjoining bedroom and likewise not designed for human comfort: He wondered how Stavros, elderly as he was, coped with that. But it had not been deemed wise to make an issue of regulhuman differences even in that detail. The theory was that the regul were honoring their guests by treating them precisely as if they were regul, down to the tradition of dealing only through youngling intermediaries and the tradition that placed Duncan's quarters uncomfortably in the tiny anteroom between Stavros and the outer corridor. Precious encouragement for confidence in regul civilization, Duncan thought sourly, when he thought about it; he was to defend the honorable human gentleman from harm, from contact with rude outsiders, from all unpleasantness. It seemed no insult to regul hospitality to assume that such rudenesses might be anticipated. And Stavros remained a virtual prisoner of his exalted rank, pent within one room, with no contact with the outside save himself. Duncan sealed the outer door and knocked on the inner, a formality preserved necessarily -- first, because listening regul (assuming regul listened, which he and Stavros firmly believed) would not understand any informality between elder and youngling; and second, because they had been at close quarters too long and cherished what privacy each could obtain. The door opened, controlled by Stavros' remote devices. It was incongruous to see a human, especially a frail and slight one, sitting in the massive chair-sled designed for regul elders. Desk, control center, mode of transportation: Stavros disdained to propel it across the room. Duncan went to him, presented the tapes and papers and Stavros took them from him and began to deal with them at once, all without a smile or word of greeting or even a dismissal. Stavros had smiled a few times at the beginning of their association; he did not now. They lived under the continual witness of the regul. Duncan was treated, he suspected, as if he were in truth a regul youngling, without courtesy and without consideration of himself as an individual. He hoped, at least, that this was the source of Stavros' coldness to him. He knew that he was far from understanding such a man. He saw some qualities in Stavros that he respected: courage, for one. He thought that it must have taken a great deal of that to enter on such a mission at Stavros' age. An elderly human had been wanted, a diplomat who, aside from his duties as administrator of the new territories, could obtain greater respect from the regul that would be neighbors to humanity. Stavros had come out of retirement to take the assignment -- not a strong man, nor an imposing one physically. He was, Duncan had learned in their only intimate conversation -- and that before boarding -- a native of Kiluwa, one of the several casualties of the war in its earliest years; and that might explain something. Kiluwans were legendarily eccentric, of a fringe-area colony left too long on its own, peculiar in religion, in philosophy, in manners: like the regul, they had not believed in writing. For the years after Kiluwa's fall, Stavros had been in the XenBureau; of late retired to university life. He had children, had lost a grandson to the war at HavenElag. If Stavros hated regul either for Kiluwa or for the grandson's sake, he had never betrayed it. He seldom betrayed any emotion beyond a certain obsessive interest in the regul. Everything in Stavros was quiet, and there were depths and depths beneath that placidity. Suddenly the old man's pale eyes flashed up. "Good morning, Duncan," he said and instantly returned to his studies. "Sit," he added. "Wait." Duncan sat down, disappointed, and waited. He had nothing else to do. He would have gone mad already had he not had the ability to bear long silence and inactivity. He watched Stavros work, wondering again why the old man had so determined to leam the regul tongue, a task that occupied his many hours. There were regul who spoke perfectly idiomatic Basic. There always would be. But Stavros had succeeded well enough on their voyage that now he could listen to the tape from the regul master of .the ship, outlining the day's schedules and providing information, and need glance only occasionally at the supplied written translation -- regul propaganda, praising the elders of homeworld, Nurag, praising the correct management of the director of the ship. Duncan found it all very dry, save for the small hints of the progress the ship was making. But from such things Stavros learned, and he became fluent at least in trivial courtesies -- learned at a rate that began to amaze Duncan. The old man could actually understand that confusion of sound, which remained only confusion to Duncan. Such a man, a scholar, an intelligent man, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, had left everything human and familiar, everything his long life had produced, and now took a voyage with the enemy, into unknown space. Although a governorship was a considerable inducement, the hazards for Stavros were more than considerable. Duncan did not know how old the man was; there had been rumors at Haven verging on the incredible. He did know that one of the great-grandchildren was entering the military. If Duncan had enjoyed any intimacy with Stavros, he would have been moved to ask him why he had come; he dared not. But every time he was tempted to give way to the pressures of their confinement, of his own fear of the strangeness about them, he thought of the old man patiently at his lessons and resigned himself to last it out. He did not think that he contributed anything to Stavros, be it companionship or service, only the necessary appearance of propriety in the regul' s eyes. Stavros could have done without him, for all the notice he paid him. Personnel had chosen half a dozen men for interview and he, one of the Surface Tactical officers at Haven, had been the choice. He still did not know why. He had admitted to his lack of qualifications for such a post. Then he'll know that he has to take orders, Stavros had concluded in his presence. Volunteer? Stavros had asked him then, as if this were a point of suspected insanity. No, sir, he had answered -- the truth: They called in every SurTac in the Haven reach. Pilot's rating? Stavros had asked. Yes, he had said. Hold any grudge against the regul? Stavros asked. No, he had answered simply, which was again the truth: He did not like them, but it was not a grudge, it was war; it was all he knew. And Stavros had read his record a second time in his presence and accepted him. It had sounded good at the time, fantastically desirable. From a war where life expectancy was rated in missions flown, and where he was reaching his statistical limit, to an easy berth on a diplomatic flight under escort, with guaranteed retirement home and discharge in five years; discharge at less than thirty on a pension larger than any SurTac could reasonably dream of or -- and this was the thing that Duncan pondered with the most interest -- permanent attachment to a new colonial directorate, permanent assignment to Stavros' territories, wealth and prominence on a developing world...it was a prize for which men would kill or die. He had only to endure regul company for a while in either case and to win Stavros' approval by his service. He had five years to accomplish the latter. He meant to do it. He had not been much frightened when he stepped aboard the regul ship. He had read all the data known on the regul and knew them as non-combative, non-violent by preference; a basically timid species. The warrior mri had done their fighting for them and had provoked further conflicts, and finally the regul had called the mri into retreat, put them under firm control. New regul were in power on their homeworld now, a pacifist party that also controlled the ship on which they were traveling and the world to which they were bound. But he had learned a different kind of fear over the long, slow voyage; a sullen, biding sort of fear; he began to suspect why they had wanted a SurTac as Stavros' companion: he was trained for alien environment, inured to solitude and uncertainties and, above all, he was ignorant of higher policies. If something went wrong -- and he began to appreciate ways in which it could -- Stavros would be the only considerable expenditure, but Sten Duncan was nothing: military personnel, with no kin to notify, a loss that could be written off without worry. His low classification number signified that he could spill everything he knew to an enemy without damage to any essential installations; and Stavros himself had been long secluded in the university community of New Kiluwa. Perhaps -- the thought occurred to him -- Stavros himself was capable of expending him promptly should he prove .inconvenient. Stavros was a diplomat of that breed that Duncan instinctively mistrusted, a breed that disposed of the likes of Sten Duncan by the hundreds and thousands in war. Perhaps it was that which had stolen away Stavros' inclination to talk to him as if he were anything more than the furnishings. Regul dealt with rebellious younglings, even with inconvenient younglings, instantly and without mercy, as if they were an easily replaceable commodity. It was a nightbom fear, the kind that grew in the dark, in those toolong hours when he lay on his bed and considered that beyond the one door was an alien guard whose very life processes he did not understand; and beyond the other was a human whose mind he did not understand, an old man who was learning to think like the regul, whose elders were a terror to the young. But when they were in day-cycle together, when he considered Stavros face to face, he could not believe seriously such things as he thought and imagined at night. So long pent up, so long under such stress, it was no strange thing that his mind should tum to nameless and irrational apprehensions. He only wished be knew what Stavros hoped he was doing, or what Stavros expected him to do.    The tape loop cycled its third time through. Duncan knew its salutation, at least -- the few words in the regul language he knew. Stavros was listening and memorizing. Shortly he would be able to recite the whole thing from memory. "Sir," he interrupted Stavros' thoughts cautiously, "sir, our -- " the tape went off, " -- our allotted liberty is just about up if you want anything else from the library or the dispensary." He wished Stavros would think of something he needed. He longed to enjoy that precious time outside their quarters, to walk, to move; but Stavros had forbidden him to loiter anywhere in regul view or to attempt any exchange with the crew. Duncan understood the reasoning behind that prohibition, a sensible precaution, a preservation of human mystique as far as regul were concerned: Let them wonder what we think, Stavros would say to many a situation. But it was unbearable to sit here while the liberty ran out and with the ship newly arrived in regul space. "No," said Stavros, dashing his hopes. Then, perhaps an afterthought, he handed him one of the tapes. "Here. An excuse. Look like you have important business and stay to it. Find me the next in sequence and bring both back. Enjoy your walk." "Yes, sir." Duncan rose, moved to thank the old man, to appreciate his understanding of his misery, but Stavros started the tape again, looked elsewhere, making it awkward. He hesitated, then left, going through his own room to the outside. He drew a few deep breaths to accustom himself to the taint of the air, felt less confined at once even faced with the narrow halls. Regul living spaces were small, barren places, accommodating room only for a sled's operation; most things were grouped within reach of someone sitting. He suppressed the desire to stretch, settled himself to a sedate walk and headed for mainbased on IR.KtXK#KS Middle Earth comes alive in this fascinating new game version of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Every major character is yours to control as the Fellowship forms to oppose the forces of the Dark Lord. All the significant events of the Trilogy-from the Council of Elrond to the climactic encounter at the Crack of Doom-are re-created for you to experience. 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Foreign customers add J# surcharge to any order-US funds onlyProducts are returnable for cash or credit (specify) if returned intact with # days of recerpl. room through a corridor that was utterly empty of regul. Mainroom served all personnel for recreation and study; it was the library terminal also. Simpler, Duncan thought, to have included a library linkup to the console already in regul quarters and obviate the need for their coming out at all, but he was desperately glad that they had not. It provided an excuse, as Stavros had said. And perhaps there were restrictions on some passengers, some who could read and understand more than they. He did not know. He studied the twisting regul numbers on the cartridge he carried and carefully punched the keys next in sequence. Machinery clicked, paused with the least delay, and the desired cartridge shot into position. He provided the library their special code, which changed the alphabet module artd, notified that humans desired the cartridge in question, the library flurried through authorizations; it went through another process to decide what printout was supposed to accompany the cartridge. Actually three forms of printout -- literal, transliterated and translated -- came with each, and finally from its microstorage it began to produce the printouts. Duncan paced the room while the machine processed the print sheet by sheet, then checked the time: close. He walked back to the machine and it was still working, slower than any human-made processing system he had ever used. It had reactions like the regul themselves, sluggish. To fill the seconds, he counted the changes in the viewscreen mockup that was the center of the library wall. It showed their course through human space, curiously never once acknowledging the presence of the armed escort vessels that had been the source of so much controversy. It was out of date as of this morning. At every pulse it cycled through to other views, to landscapes fascinating in their alien character (carefully censored, he was sure, lest they leam too much of regul; there were no living things and no cities or structures in the views) to starfields and back to the progress mockup. It dominated the room. He had watched it change day by slow day during their approach to jump. He had ceased to think of the voyage as one with a particular destination. Their peculiar isolation had become an environment in itself, one that could not be mentally connected to the life he had lived before and from which it was impossible to imagine the life he would live afterward. They had only the regul' s word for where they were going. He watched through three such cyclings and turned back to the machine. It had stopped in the middle of its printing, flashing the Priority signal. Someone of authority had interrupted it to obtain something more important. His materials were frozen in the machine's grip. He pushed the cancel button to retrieve the cartridge and nothing happened. The Priority was still flashing as the library did what it was commanded to do from some other source. Duncan swore and looked again at the time. The printout was half in the tray, the tail of it still in the machine. He could leave and keep scrupulously to the schedule or he could wait the little time it would take for the machine to clear. He decided to wait. Probably the stall was because of the printout, an unwieldy and awkward operation, surely a rare function of their library apparatus, inefficiently done. The rumor used to be that regul themselves did not write at all; this was not, as they had discovered, true. Regul had an elaborate and intricate written language. But the library was designed for audio replication. The majority of regul materials were oral-aural. It was said, and this seemed true according to their own observations, that the regul did not need to hear any tape more than once. Instant and total recall. Eidetic memory. The word lie was, he remembered Stavros telling him, fraught with associate concepts of perversion and murder. A species that could neither forget nor unlearn. If this were so, it was possible that they could depend on the exact truth from the regul at all times. It was also possible that a species that could not lie might have learned other ways of deception. He did not need to wonder how regul regarded humans, who placed great emphasis on the written word, who had to be provided special and separate materials to comprehend slowly what regul absorbed at a single hearing; who could not leam the regul language, while regul learned human speech as rapidly as they could be provided words, and never needed to be told twice. When he thought of this and of the regul younglings, so helplessly slow, so ponderous in their movements, and yet the piggish little eyes glittering with some emotion that wrinkled the comers when they beheld a human, he grew uneasy, remembering that these same younglings, unless murdered by their own parent, would live through several human lifetimes and remember every instant of it; and that bai Hulagh, who commanded them and the ship and the zone where they were bound, had done so. He resented both their long lives and their exact memories. He resented the obstinacy of their ubiquitous machines, the bigotry and insolence that kept Stavros and himself confined and tightly scheduled as they were, surrounded by automation that made their regul hosts more than the physical equals of humans; and with all the accumulating frustration of. long imprisonment, he resented most of all the petty irritations that were constantly placed in their way by their regul hosts, who clearly despised humans for their mental shortcomings. Stavros was headed for failure if he sought accomodation with such neighbors. It was a mortal mistake to think that a human could become regul or that he won anything at all by slavishly imitating the manners of beings that despised him. That was the worm that had eaten at his gut ever since the first days of this chromium-plated, silken-soft imprisonment. All about them were regul and regul machines, hulking beasts helpless but for that automation, great shapeless parasites living attached to appliances of steel and chromium; and Stavros was utterly, dangerously, wrong if he thought he became esteemed of regul by giving up the few advantages that humans had. The regul looked with contempt on them, on the species whose minds forgot, whose knowledge was on film and paper. Duncan sought to say this to Stavros but he could not come close enough to the man to advise him. Stavros was an educated man, he was not -- he was only an experienced one, and experience cried out that they were in a dangerous situation. He struck the library panel a blow with his hand for the time was out and he was defeated by the monstrosity -- incredible that the thing could be so slow. It was as futile and thoughtless as jostling any human-made machine; but he knew in the second afterward that he should not have done it and when the Priority signal went off, he was for an instant terrified, believing that he had caused this somehow, antagonizing some high-ranking regul. But the machine started to feed out the rest of the paper and then shot the cartridge out in good order, and he paused to gather them up. And when, in turning to leave, he looked up at the panel, he saw that the whole display had changed and that they had before them the visual of a star system with seven planets, with their ship plotted in toward the second. Their final desination! As he watched, he saw another ship indicated on the simulation; it was moving outward on a nonintersecting course. They were insystem -- in inhabited, trafficked regions, nearing Kesrith. Time began to move again. His heart quickened with the elating surety that they had indeed arrived where they were supposed to, that they were near their new world. Coming in to dock at Kesrith's station would be a process of more than a week, by that diagram, but they were coming in. The imprisonment was almost over. A step sounded in the corridor to his left. For an instant he ignored it, knowing that he was overtime and expecting a surly rebuke from a youngling; and the ominous character of it did not at first register. Then it struck him that it did not belong here -- the measured tread of boots on the flooring, not the slow scuffing of the regul nor even Stavros' fragile tread. He turned, frightened even before he looked by a presence that was not of themselves nor of the regul. And he faced a figure that had likewise stopped still, one robed in black, the robes glittering with many small discs. Mri. Kel'en. The golden eyes above the veil were astonished. A slim bronze hand went to the knife at his belt and hesitated there. For a moment neither moved and it was possible to hear only the slow changes of the projector. The enemy. The destroyers of Kiluwa and Talos and Asgard. He had never seen one in the flesh at this range. Only the eyes, the hands, were uncovered. The tall figure remained utterly still, wrapped in menace and in anger. "I am Sten Duncan," he found courage to say, doubting that the mri could understand a word but reckoning it time words intervened before weapons did. "I'm the assistant to the Federation's envoy." "I am kel Medai," said the other in excellent Basic, "and we should not have met." And with that the mri turned on his heel and stalked off in the direction from which he had come, a black figure that vanished into shadows at the turning of the corridor. Duncan found himself trembling in every muscle. He had seen mri that close only in photographs, and all of those were dead. Beautiful, was the strange descriptive that came to his mind, seeing the mri warrior: He would have thought it fo an animal, splendid of its kind, and deadly. He turned, and his blood, which had resumed somewhat its normal circulation, drained a second time; for a regul youngling stood in the mainroom, its nostrils flaring and shutting in rapid agitation. It shrilled a warning at him, anger, terror; he could not tell which. Its color went to livid pallor. "Go to quarters," it insisted. "Past time. Go to quarters. Now!" He moved, edged past the regul and hurried on, not looking back. When he reached the sanctuary of his own doorway, his hands were shaking and he thrust himself through even while it was opening and shut it at once, anxious until the seal had hissed into function. Then he sank down on his cot, knowing that, all too quickly, he must face Stavros and give an account of what he had done. The library materials tumbled from his cold hands and some of the papers fell on the floor. He bent and gathered them up, feeling nothing with his benumbed fingers. He had committed a great mistake, and he knew that this was not to be the end of it. They were going to the world that was said to be the mri homeworld, to Kesrith of the star Arain. Regul claimed title to it, all the same, and the right to cede it to humans. They claimed the authority to command the mri and to sign for them. They had betrayed the mri and yet they carried a kel'en on the ship that brought the orders that turned Kesrith over to humans. We should not have met, the mri had said. It was obvious that the regul at least, and possibly the mri, had not intended the meeting. Someone was being deceived. He gathered himself up and expelled a long breath, rapped on Stavros' door and entered this time without permission. IV Another one of the ships was leaving this evening, one of the several shuttles that ferried passengers and goods from the surface of Kesrith up to the station and thence to starships: to freighters, liners, warships -- anything that would remove panicked regul from the path of humans. Niun watched, as he was accustomed to watch each evening, from the high rock that overlooked the sea and the fiats and the city. It was true. He had accepted the fact of the war's end at last, although a sense of unreality still possessed him as he watched the ships go -- never so frequent, not in his lifetime nor, he thought, in that of his elders. The fact was that the regul city was dying, its life ebbing with every outbound ship. He obeyed the she'pan's order and did not go near the city or the port, but he thought that were he to go down now into the square, he would find many of the buildings empty and stripped of things of value; and day after day, by the road that wound along the seashore, the merest line visible from his vantage point, he could see traffic coming into the city, bringing regul from the outlying towns and stations; aircraft came to the city, and fewer and fewer left it again. He had a mental image of a vast heap of abandoned regul vehicles at the edge of town, of ships idle at the port. They would have to drag them into heaps and let them rust. It was rumored -- so Sathell had gleaned from regul communications -- that the chief price of the peace the regul had bought had been the cession of every colony in the Kesrith reach. Tsi'mri economics had finally proven more powerful than the weapons of the Kel, more important, surely, than the honor of the mri in the regul's estimation. Kesrith was a loss to the regul, to be sure; it was a mining and transport site, expensively automated. Doubtless to lose such a colony was embarrassing to the regul elders; doubtless it was inconvenient for their business and commerce; doubtless for the regul in those fleeing ships the inconvenience ascended to tragedy. Regul valued many peculiar objects; variance in the quality and amount of these and their clothing and their comforts betokened personal worth in their eyes; and the loss of their homes and valued objects that could not be taken onto the ships would be grievous for them; but they had no Revered Objects, nothing that could afflict them to the degree that the loss of homeworld could affect the People; and the honors they coveted could be purchased anew if they were fortunate -- unlike mri honors, that had to be won. And therein Niun did not muster any great sympathy for them. His personal loss was great enough: All the life he had planned and desired for himself was departing possibility with the violence and speed of those outbound ships. The migration had become a rout, night and day; and events gave clear proof that the personal plans of Niun s'Intel ZainAbrin were nothing to the powers that moved the worlds. But the threat to the House -- that was beyond his power to imagine. And that the powers that moved the worlds had no concern for the fate of the People -- that was beyond all understanding. He had tried to adjust his mind to this change in fortune. Where shall we make our defense? he had asked of Eddan and the kel'ein, assuming, as he assumed that sanity rested with his People, that there was to be a defense of homeworld, of the Edun of the People. But Eddan had turned his face from the question, gesturing his refusal to answer it; and in the failure of the Kel, he had dared ask the she'pan herself. And Intel had looked at him with a strange sorrow, as if her last son were somehow lacking in essential understanding; but gently she had spoken to him in generalities of patience and courage, and carefully she had declined to give any direct answer to his question. And day by day the regul ships departed, without mri kel'ein aboard. The she'pan forbade. He was watching the end. He understood that now, that at least. Of what it was an end to he was not yet sure; but he knew the taste of finality, and that of the things he had desired all his life, there was left him nothing. The regul departed, and hereafter came humans. He wished now desperately that he had applied himself with even more zeal to his study of human ways so that he could understand what the humans were likely to do. Perhaps the elder kel'ein, who had experience with them, knew; and perhaps therefore they thought that he should know and would not reward ignorance with explanation. Or perhaps they were as helpless as he and refused to admit the obvious to him. He could not blame them for that. It was that he simply could not admit that there was nothing to be done, that there were no preparations to be made, while the regul so desperately, so anxiously, sought safety'. He knew, with what faith remained to him in his diminishing store of things untrustworthy, that the Kel would resist in the end; but they were to die if that were the case. Their skill was great, greater than any kel'ein living, he believed; but the nine were very old and very few to stand for long against the mass attacks of humans. The imagination came to him over and over again -- as horrid and unreal as the departure of regul from his life -- of humans arriving, of human language and human tread echoing in the sanctity of the edun Shrine, of fire and blood and ten desperate kel'ein trying to defend the she'pan from a horde of defiling humans. Brothers, sister, he longed to ask the kel'ein, is it possible that there is some hope that I cannot see? And then again he thought: Or, o Gods, is it possible that we have a she'pan who has gone mad? Brothers, sister, look, look, the ships!... our way off Kesrith. Make our she'pan see reason. She has forgotten that there are some here that want to live. But he could not say such things to his elders, to Eddan; and he would ultimately have to account for those words to Intel's face and he could not bear that. He could not reason with them, could not discuss anything with them as they did among themselves, in secret; they, she -- all save Melein and himself -- remembered Nisren's days, the life before the war. They had taken regul help once, escaping the ruin of Nisren, and they refused it now, resolving together in councils from which he, not of the Husbands, was excluded. He insisted to believe that his elders were rational. They were too calm, too sure, to be mad. Forty-three years ago the like had come to Nisren. A regul ship, rescuing she'pan Intel, had carried the Holy Pana and the survivors of the edun to Kesrith. The elders did not speak of that day, scarcely even in songs: It was a pain written into their visible scars and the secrecies of their silence. Shame? he wondered, heart-tom at thinking ill of them. Shame at something they did or did not do on Nisren? Shame at living and unwillingness to survive another fall of homeworld? Sometimes he suspected, with dread growing and gnawing within him like some alien parasite, that such was the case and that he belonged to a she'pan who had wearied of running, to an edun that had consciously made up its mind to die. An edun which held the Pana, the Revered, the Objects of mri honor and mri history, to behold which was for the Sen alone, to touch which unbidden was to die; to lose this... To lose the relics of the People... It betokened the death not alone of the edun but of the People as a race. He held the thought a moment, turned it within his mind, then cast it aside in haste, and fearfully picked it up again. O Gods, he thought, mind numbed by the very concept. Another shuttle lifted. He saw it rise, up, up, a star that moved. O Gods, o Gods. It was shon'ai, the passing-game. It was the flash of blades in the dark, the deadly game of rhythm and bluff and threat and reckless risk. The game of the People. The blades were thrown. Existence was gambled on one's quickness and wit and nerve, for no other reason than to deserve survival. He felt the blood drain from his face to his belly, understanding why they had looked through him when he had asked his vain questions. Join the rhythm, child of the People: Be one with it; accept, accept, accept. Shon'ai! He cried aloud, and understood all at once. All over known space mri would react to the throw the she'pan of Kesrith had made. They would come, they would come, from all quarters of space, to fight, to resist. The Pana was set in the keeping of Edun Kesrithun. The circle was wide and the blades flew at seeming random but each game tended to develop its own unique pattern, and wisest the player that did not become hypnotized by it. Intel had cast. It was for others to return the throw. The first of Kesrith 's twin moons had brightened to the point of visibility. The stars became a dusty belt across the sky. The air grew chill but he felt no impulse to return to the edun, to resume the mundane routine of their existence. Not this evening. Not upon such thoughts as he carried. Eventually the kel'ein would miss him and look out and see him in his favorite place, and let him be. He spent many evenings here. There was nothing to do in the edun of evenings save to sleep, to eat, to study tilings no longer true. None of them had sung the songs since the day the news of the war's end came. TTiey frequently sat and talked together, excluding him. Probably, he thought, it was a relief to them to have him gone. The geyser named Sochau belched steam far across the flats -- a tall plume, predictible as the hours of any regul clock. By such rhythms the world lived, and by such rhythms it measured the days until the humans should come. But for the first time in all the days since he had heard of the war's ending, he felt a suspicion of gladness, a fierce sense that the People might yet have something to do, and that humans might yet find their victory not an accomplished fact. A star grew in the sky as the other departed, rapid and omenfilled. He looked up at it with quickening interest, enlivened by anything, even a triviality, that was not part of the ordinary. The shuttles did not usually descend until morning. He watched it grow, cherishing imaginings both dread and hopeful -- a mere child's game for he did not really believe that it would be anything but a variance in regul schedules for regul reasons, as ordinary as anything could be in the organized routine of Kesrith's dying. He watched it descend and saw lights suddenly flareon at the port in the farthest area. Then he realized that it was not coming down at the freighter or shuttle berths but to that area given over to military landings, and it was no shuttle. It was a ship of size, such as the onworld port had not held in many years. The ship was nothing in the dark and the distance but a shape of light, featureless, nameless. There was nothing to indicate what it was. Of a sudden he knew his people must have word of this -- that doubtless they had already been alert to it and only he had not. He sprang down from his rock and began to run, swift feet changing course here and there at the outset where the fragile earth masked dangers of its own. He did not use the road but ran crosslands, by an old mri trail, and came breathless to the door of the edun, chest aching. There was silence in the halls. He paused for only a moment, then took the stairs toward the she'pan's tower, almost running up the first turn. And there a shadow met him -- old Dahacha coming down, Dahacha with his great, surly dus lumbering downsteps after him. Everyone brought up short and the dus edged down a step to rumble a warning. "Niun," the old man said, "I was coming to look for you. ' ' "There is a ship," Niun bean. "No news here," said Dahacha. " Hazan is back. Yai! Gome on up, young one. You are missed." Niun followed, a great joy in him: Hazan, command ship for the zone! High time it came -- among regul panicked and retreating in disorder. There was resolution in the regul after all, some authority to hold the disintegrating situation under control. And Hazan! If Hazan came, then came Medai -- cousin, fellow kel'en -- home from human wars and bringing with him experience and all the common sense that belonged to the fighting Kel of the front. He remembered other things of Medai too, things less beloved; but they made no difference after six years, with the world falling into chaos. He followed Dahacha up the winding stairs with an absolute elation flooding through him. Another kel'en. A man the others would listen to as they would never listen to him, who had never left the world. Medai, who had served with the leaders of regul and knew their minds as few kel'ein had had the opportunity to know them. Medai, kel'en to the ship of the bai of Kesrith zones. V The door was locked, as it was at every unpermitted period. Sten Duncan tried it yet another time, knowing it was useless, pounded his fist against it and went back to the old man. "They refused to answer," said Stavros. He sat in the desk-chair, the console screen at his left elbow a monotone gray. He looked uneasy, unusual for Stavros, even at the worst of times. They were down, onworld. That was unmistakable. "We were to dock," said Duncan finally, voicing the merest part of the concern boiling in his mind. Stavros did not react to that piece of observation; only stared at him dispassionately. Duncan read blame into the look. "If there has been a change in plans, something could be wrong either on the station or onworld," Duncan said, trying to draw the smallest reassurance from the old man, seeking a denial of his apprehensions, even outright anger. He could deal with that. And when Stavros gave him nothing at all in reply, he sank down at the table, head bowed against his hands, exhausted with the strain of waiting. It was their night, and they were halfway through it. "Perhaps they're sleeping," Stavros said unexpectedly, startling him with a tone that held nothing of rancor. "If they chose to keep ship-cycle after landing, or if we're in local night, bai Hulagh could be respond to us without his authority. The regul do not inconvenience an elder of his rank. ' ' Duncan looked up at him, not believing the explanation but glad that Stavros had made the gesture, even if he had another in the back of his mind that he was not saying. It did not ease his feelings in the least that Stavros had never said anything to him in the matter of the encounter with the mri, but had only asked quiet questions of what had happened there in the mainroom: no blame, no hint of what had passed in Stavros' mind. Nor had Stavros said anything when they were shortly afterward presented with another schedule; their hours of liberty cut in half, a regul youngling constantly watching their door and following at a distance whenever Duncan left the room. The retaliation fell most heavily on himself, of course, confining him more closely, while that did not much concern Stavros; but for their safety and for the future of regul human cooperation, it augured ill enough. The regul's official manner did not change toward them. There was still the formal manner, still the salutations in the day's messages. Characteristic of the regul, there had been no direct mention of the incident in the hall, only the notification, without explanation, that their hours had been changed. "I'm sorry, sir," Duncan volunteered at last out of frustration. Stavros looked for once surprised, then frowned and shrugged. "Probably just regul procedure and some minor change in plans. Don't worry about it." And then, with a second shrug, "Get some sleep, Duncan. There's little else to do at the moment." "Yes, sir," he said, rose and went out to the anteroom, sat down on his bunk and tucked his legs up. He set his elbows on his knees and head on his hands and massaged his aching temples. Prisoners, thanks to him. Stavros was worried. Stavros doubtless knew what there was to concern them, and he was worried. Perhaps if the regul would have accepted the offering, Stavros could have demonstrated the punishment of the human youngling who had created the difficulty. Perhaps, in the main, he had not done so because they were both human and Stavros felt an unvoiced attachment to him; or perhaps he had declined to do so because a regul elder would not have done so under the same circumstances. But it was clear enough that they were under the heavy shadow of regul displeasure and had been for many, many days; and that they were not now where they had been told at the outset they would land.    A sound reached him, the sound of someone passing in the corridor: one of the sleds whisking along the tracks outside. He looked up as it seemed to slow, hoping against hope that it would stop to bring them news. The door opened. He spraing to his feet, instantly correct. The sled had indeed stopped before the doorway and within it sat the oldest, most massive regul that he had ever seen. Roll upon roll of wrinkled flesh and crusting skin hid any hint of structure that lay within that gray-brown body save the bony plating of the face, where eyes were sunk in circular wrinkles, black and glittering eyes; and flat nose and slit mouth gave a deceptive illusion of humanity. It was the face of a man within the body of a beast, and that body was lapped in brown robes, silveredged and shimmering, gossamer enfolding a gross and wrinklecrossed skin. The nostrils were slanted slits that could flare and close. He knew this movement for an indication of emotion in the younglings, one of the few expressions of which their bone-shielded faces were capable -- a roll of the eyes, an opening or closing of the lips, a flutter of the nostrils. But had he not known that this being was of precisely the same species as the younglings, he would have doubted ft. Incredibly the elder arose, heaving his body upright, and stood on bowed and almost invisible legs within the sled. "Stavros," it -- he -- said in abasso rumble. Humans could not imitate regul expression: the regul perhaps could not read courtesy or lack of it among humans, but Duncan knew that courtesy was called for now. He made a bow. "Favor," he said in the. regul tongue, "I am the youngling Sten Duncan." "Call Stavros." But the door was open. Duncan turned, about to comply with the order, and saw of a sudden Stavros in the doorway, standing three, coming no further. There was a rumbling exchange of regul politenesses, and Duncan took himself to the side of the room against the wall, bewildered in the flow of language. He realized what he had suspected already, that this was the bai himself who had come to call on them. Bai Hulagh Alagn-ni, high commander of the ship Hazan, successor to the Holn and provisional governor of Kesrith's zones during the transfer of powers from regul to human. He made himself unnoticed; he would not offend a second time against regul manners, complicating things that he could not understand. The exchange was brief. It was concluded with a series of courtesies and gestures, and the bai subsided into his sled and vanished. Stavros closed the door for himself, before Duncan could free himself of his confusion and do so. "Sir?" Duncan ventured then. Stavros took his time in answering. He looked around finally, with a sober and uneasy expression. "We are grounded on Kesrith," he said. "The bai assures us it is quite a natural choice for a ship of this sort -- to land directly at the port -- and that it was a last-moment decision and without reason for concern to us. But I also gather that there is some instability here, which I do not understand. The bai wants us to remain on the ship. Temporarily, he says." "Is it," Duncan asked, "trouble over that business with the mri?" Stavros shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know. I think that the whole crew is expected to remain aboard until things sort themselves out. This, at least... " Stavros' eyes went to the ceiling, toward venting, toward lighting, toward installations they did not understand and did not trust. The glance warned, said nothing, carried some misgiving that perhaps he would have voiced if he were safe to do so. "The bai assures us that we will be taken to the central headquarters in the morning. It is planetary night at the moment; we are already on Kesrith main time, and he advises us that the weather is fair and the inconvenience minor, and we are expected to enjoy our night's rest and rise late, with the anticipation of a pleasant advent to Kesrith." The bai is being courteous and formal. Stavros' expression thrust through the words themselves, but there was no credibility on his face. Duncan nodded understanding. "Good night, then," said Stavros, as though the exchange had been aloud. "I think we may trust that we are delayed aboard for some considerable number of hours, and there is probably time to get a night's sleep." "Good night, sir," said Duncan, and watched as the old man went back to his quarters and the door closed. He wished, not for the first time, that he could ask the old man plainly what he thought of matters, and that he could reckon how much the Honorable Stavros believed of what he had been told. In the time that they had been on scant favor among regul, Duncan had begun to apply himself to learning the regul tongue with the same fervent, desperate application he had one applied to SurTac arms and survival skills. He had begun with rote phrases and proceeded to structure with a facility far above that he had ever imagined he could achieve. He was not a scholar; he was a frightened man. He began to think -- with the nightmare concentration that fears acquired in their solitude -- that Stavros was indeed very old, and the time before humans would arrive was considerable, and that regul, who disposed of their own younglings so readily, human youngling that had survived his elder, if that human youngling seemed useless to them. Stavros' age, which had been the reason for his being assigned this mission, was also against its success. If something should befall the Honorable Mr. Stavros, it would leave Duncan himself helpless, unable to communicate with the general run of younglings and, as Stavros had once pointed out, regul younglings would not admit him to contact with the likes of bai Hulagh, who were the only regul capable of fluent human speech. It was not a possibility he cared to contemplate, the day that he should be left alone to deal with regul. With hours left before debarkation on Kesrith, and with his nerves too taut to allow sleep, he gathered up his notes and started to study with an application that had his gut in knots. Dag: favor, please, attention. The same syllable, pronounced instead with the timbre of a steam whistle, meant honorable and, in shrill tone, blood. Dag su-gl' inh-an-ant pru nnugk: may I have indirect contact with the reverence? Dag nuc-ci: favor, sir. He studied until he found the notes falling from his nerveless hands, and then collapsed to sleep for a precious time before regul orderlies opened the door without at him, rudely snatching up their baggage without a prior courtesy. None of the courtesies did these youngling regul use with him, even when he protested their rough handling of the human belongings; they maintained a surly silence toward him, a fevered haste, interspersed with a chittering among themselves, as they loaded baggage on the transport sled that was to carry it away. Another vehicle waited, a passenger sled. "Now. Now!" one said, the word being the extent of the human vocabulary he had troubled to hear, urging haste; and only when Stavros himself appeared did the younglings assume decorum. Even an elder human had his honor from the regul: They seemed to regard Stavros with a healthy fear. But Duncan, when he looked back as they were boarding, chanced to glance directly into the face of one of the younglings that bent, assisting them into the sled, and nostrils snapped shut and lips clamped with a look of hatred that transcended species. They were on Kesrith, among regul, who would be their companions and counselors in dealing with the evacuation of other regul, who had made their homes here for centuries. They had come to take this world as conquerors, conquerors who, at least for thirty days, were only two, and vulnerable. The world had belonged to regul and to mri; and it was likely that certain of the crew of Hazan had called Kesrith their home. It dawned upon him with immediacy that there could be more than simple racial or political hatred among regul toward their presence on Kesrith. And perhaps there were many residents on Kesrith who had never consented to the treaty that disposed of their world and brought humans to it. The inconvenience is minor, Stavros had translated the bai's assurance. Perhaps in the bai's eyes it was minor -- the regul were not supposed to be able to lie -- but in the eyes of the regul younglings who attended them there was no lie either, and they told a different story. While they were on Kesrith, they would be housed in a building called the Nom, in the center of the chief city of Kesrith, and they would be thus protected for the first and most critical days against the irritations of Kesrith's natural atmosphere and the other minor inconveniences of the local climate; they would be expected to adapt. And he saw Stavros' face when they first broke out of the ship's warmth into the wide world and had their first sight of the place: hills, mountains, white plains, all strangely lit by a ruddy pink sun. For Stavros this was home forever. His assignment was to prepare for other humans, to direct them after they arrived, to build civilization again; and already Duncan was considering that five years here might be a long time indeed. Regul, and alkali flats, and geysers, dust and mines and a sun that looked sickly and too large in the sky. He had been on a half a score of words in his travels in the service, from bare balls of rock to flowering wildernesses, but he had never been on one so immediately alien as Kesrith. Forbidding, unfriendly to humans. The very air smelled poisonous, laden with irritants. If Stavros felt regret, he did not show it. He let himself be treated like a regul elder, already playing the part, and the younglings handed him down to the landsled that waited below. It was well after dawn, the sun a quarter of the way up the sky. There was, instead of the welcome they had expected -- like most regul courtesies, carefully controlled and managed -- a still and ghostly quiet about the port, as though they and the younglings were the only living things about the premises. And far away, on the heights, was visible something that set Duncan's heart to beating the more rapidly, that sent a clutch of fear at the stomach that had nothing to do with reason: the peculiar silhouette of four slanted towers that formed a flat-topped, irregular pyramid. A mri edun. He had known there was one onworld; he had seen pictures of the ruins of Nisren; but he was unprepared for it here, so close. It overlooked the city in such a way that nothing that was done on the plains could remain hidden from it. It brooded, an ominous and alien presence, reminding all that there was a third party to the transaction that promised peace. "Now. Now!" the regul repeated, impatient either at the delay or at the object of his attention, it was uncertain; but Duncan did not want to 'contest the matter, and he lowered his head and entered the sled, where the air was filtered and cleansed of the acrid, biting taste that contaminated the air of Kesrith. The sled lumbered off toward the city on pavement made rough by inroads of sand from the flats, taking them to what he thought, with increasing conviction, was a confinement only wider in space than their last. VI The sun was climbing the east, and on another day Niun would have been out about the hills, walking, hunting, practicing at arms, doing all other such things as he did to fill the solitary hours and relieve the sameness of his days. But on this day nothing could have persuaded him from the vicinity of the edun. He haunted the communications station in the top of the Sen tower where, in an edun grown informal by reason of its small size, he was permitted to be on occasion; he hovered about the main entrance; and finally, consumed by impatience, he went to the rock at the top of the causeway, to stare into the growing glare off the white flats and strain his eyes for any movement from the direction of the port. He had for so very, very long had nothing good to anticipate. Now he savored th feeling: hating the waiting and yet relishing the feeling of waiting; hesitant about the meeting and yet longing desperately for the comradeship it promised. He had not loved Medai. He remembered the rivalry with his cousin, his -- he could be honest with himself after so many years -- jealousy of his cousin; and he strove to forget any such feelings he had ever cherished. He wanted Medai 's presence, wanted it desperately, fervently. Anything was better than this long loneliness, this knowledge that the edun was slowly, irrevocably, perishing. And there was, at the foundation of all his thoughts, the least stirring of hope, the merest suspicion, that Medai had been summoned, that he was the first of many to come -- that the she 'pan had moved to action, and that something was moving in the future of the People. On a thousand previous days he had sat as he sat now, seeking any tiny deviation in events to occupy himself -- the struggles of an insect; the slow, perilous blooming of a windflower; the rise or descent of ships at the port -- ill-wishing such ships,  imagining disasters; imagining important arrivals that would somehow change the pattern of his existence. He had done this so often that it was hard to realize that this time it was real, that the game was substance on this morning so like a thousand other mornings. The very air seemed alive. His heart beat so strongly, his muscles were so taut that his chest and stomach hurt; and he almost forgot to breathe whenever his eyes would deceive him into believing that he had seen movement below. But in the full light of noon there was a plume of dust on the flats, already at the beginning of the causeway, a line of dark figures moving slowly upward. He sat upon his rock at the top of the causeway and lowered his visor to remove the haze of daylight, trying to discern the figures individually. He had seen vehicles come up the road years before. Judging from the distance and the size of the objects and the amount of dust, that was what it looked to be. Vehicles. A sense of wrongness grew in him, a weight in his stomach counterpoised against the beating of his heart. He clenched his limbs together, long arms wrapped about his knees, and the others. Regul. Regul were coming up. Once he would have been delighted at such an unaccustomed visitation, but he was not so on this morning of all mornings. Not now. Not with mri business afoot that was more important than regul. Not with mri business in the working, matters in which regul might seek to interfere. Of a sudden he realized that the she 'pan desperately needed to know what was coming up the hill: He made them out -- six vehicles and a moving dot farther back that his eyes could not resolve; but it looked to be a seventh. No such number of regul had ever called on the edun in his memory. He slid down from his rock and started downhill, his long strides carrying him at what swiftly became an uncontrollable run, undignified, but he was too alarmed to care for appearances. He raced toward the edun, breathless. Others were coming out the doorway even before he arrived with his warning -- the black-robes of the Kel and none of gold. He slowed his pace and went to them, out of breath and trying to conceal his pain. Sweat filmed his skin, quickly dried as the moisturehungry air stole it. One did not run on Kesrith; a hundred times he had been taught so, the sober necessities of the world imposed over the nature of youth. His lungs burned; there was the sharp edge of blood in the air he breathed. None of the Kel rebuked him for his rashness, and he felt the mood of them, saw it in the attitude of the attendant dusei that had come out of the edun with, them. One of the dusei reared up, towering, snuffing the wind. It came down heavily on all fours again, an action that stirred the white dust, and blew a snort of distress. "Yai, yai!" kel Dahacha rebuked the lot of the dusei, using that meaningless word that had a thousand meanings between dus and kel'en. They shied away, the nine of them, dismissed, hovering in a knot near the edun, ears pricked. Some sat. Now and then one would rise and walk the circuit of the group of dusei, a different one each time; and each time that one would eye the advancing caravan of regul vehicles and utter small whuffs of warning. The Kel was veiled, for meeting outsiders. Niun secured the mez a proper degree higher and took his place in their black rank, one among others; but kel'anth Eddan took him by the elbow and drew him to the front of the group. "Here," said Eddan, and no more. A man would not jabber questions with the Kel in such a mood. Nium held himself silent, his heart constricted with panic at Eddan's gesture. He was a novice, even at his age; he did not belong in the fore of question-and-answer with regul, here between Eddan and kel Pasev, oldest masters of the Kel. Unless it involved him personally. Or a kinsman. Of a sudden he knew that a message must have been passed to the edun through the Sen-tower, some intelligence of events that the edun possessed and that he had missed, sitting alone, vainly anticipating pleasure in this day. Something was fearfully amiss, that regul had intervened between mri kinsmen. The regul caravan ground its slow way upward, the sound of its motors audible now. The sun beat down, wanly red. Out on the flats a geyser spouted: Elu, one of the dangerous random ones that kept no schedule. Its plume continued for a time, ten times the height of a man, and assumed its characteristic slant. Then it quickly dissipated. It was possible to recognize each of the geysers of the flats by its characteristic pattern and location. Niun reckoned that if Elu had erupted, Uchan would not be long in following. It was a precious moment of distraction, in which it was not necessary to consider the sinister line of dark vehicles laboring their way upslope. One... two... three... four... five... six. Six landsleds. No more than two had ever come to the edun at once. He did not make this observation aloud. The Kel about him stood utterly rigid, like images against which black robes fluttered in the strong wind. Each kel'en's right hand was at the belt where the as-ei were sheathed, fingers slipped within the belt. This was warning, understood by another kel'en. The regul, being mere tsi'mri, had likely not the sense to recognize it; but it was courtesy all the same to advise intruders that they were not wanted, whether or not the intruder had the wit to recognize a warning. The sleds bounced over the final ruts in the ascending road, came at last to a dusty halt even with the front entry to the edun, fronting the Kel. Motors were cut off, leaving sudden silence. Regul opened doors and began laboriously to disembark: a full ten of regul younglings, sober and joyless, without even visible arrogance. One of them was the Nom-guard, Hada Surag-gi. Niun recognized it by the badges and the robes, which was the best way to recognize any individual regul. It was also likely, he reflected bitterly, that the regul Hada Surag-gi recognized him by his distinctive lack of badges; but the youngling came forward to face Eddan, and consequently himself, and gave no sign of recognition. Hada's eyes did not even linger. There was no hint of insolence. Hada Surag-gi sucked air and rocked forward, a regul courtesy. There was a proper mri response to this, a gesture of reciprocal good will. Eddan did not make it, and therefore no mri moved. Hands stayed by the as-ei. "Favor," said Hada Surag-gi. "We bring most tragic news." "We are prepared to hear what you say," said Eddan. "We trust that our elder informed you -- " "Do you bring us Medai?" asked Eddan harshly. Hada turned, an awkward motion for a regul, made a shifting of feet. It closed its hands and made the gesture that wished its assistants to perform their duties. They shuffled about the second sled and opened its storage, lifted out a white, plastic-encased form on a litter. They bore it forward and carefully set it down at the feet of Hada Surag-gi, before the Kel. "We have brought the remains of Medai," said Hada. Niun knew, already, had known from Hada's first words; he did not move, nor even lower his visor. This steadiness might be mistaken by some of his brothers for selfcontrol. But it was numbness. He heard their movings, their stirrings about the scene, as if they and he were in different places, as if, divorced from the scene, he watched from elsewhere, leaving the flesh of Niun s'Intel, like that of Medai s'lntel, senseless and unparticipant. "Are the humans that close?" asked Eddan, for it was the custom to give the dead of the People who had died in the war to cold space where they had died or, better still, to the fires of suns, recalling the birth of the People, rather than to make a long and inconvenient journey from the fighting front to inter them in earth. All the People would choose, if they had the choice, to avoid earth burial. It was strange that regul, knowing mri even slightly as they did, could have misunderstood this and made the mistake of returning a dead mri to his edun. The regul younglings -- showing no arrogance at all in their manner now -- let air flutter their nostrils and by other signs looked uncomfortable in their mission. Guilty, was the bitter thought that came to Niun, watching them. He came back to his own body and fixed his eyes on the eyes of Hada meet his gaze directly. For an instant Hada did so, and flinched. Guilty and uncomfortable in this whole meeting, and trying not to say the half of what they knew. Niun trembled with anger. He found his breath short. There was no move from the Kel. They stood absolutely still, one with the mind of Eddan who led them, who with a word could lead them to a thing no mri had ever done. Hada Surag-gi shifted weight on bowed legs and backed a little from the shrouded corpse between them. "Kel'anth Eddan," Hada said, "be gracious. This kel'en wounded himself and would not have the help of our medical facilities, although we might perhaps have saved him. We regret this, but we have never attempted to violate your beliefs. We bring you the regrets also of bai Hulagh, in whose service this kel'en gained great distinction. It is bai Hulagh's profound regret, his most profound regret, that this meeting is an inauspicious one and that he makes the acquaintance of the People in such a sad moment. He sends his condolences and offers his extreme personal distress at this most unhappy event and -- " "Bai Hulagh is then the new commander of this zone. What of bai Solgah? What of the Holn?" "Gone." The word was almost swallowed before momentum was quickly resumed. "And the bai wishes, kel'anth, to assure you of -- " "I surmise," said Eddan, "that the death of kel Medai is very recent." "Yes," said Hada, deterred from the prepared speech. His mouth worked, seeming to search for words. "Suicide." Eddan used the vulgar word, although regul knew the meaning of the mri word ika'al where it regarded the ritual death of a kel'en. "We protest -- " In gazing directly at the kel'anth, the youngling seemed to lose its thread of thought, which was an impossibility with the eidetic regul. "We protest vehemently, kel'anth, that this kel'en was in deep melancholy that had nothing to do with the accession of bai Hulagh to command or the fall from power of the Holn. We fear that you are drawing the wrong inference. If you suppose that -- " "I did not advance any statement of inference," said Eddan. "Do you suggest that one might be made?" The regul, interrupted more than once, confounded by argument that was no argument, confused as regul easily were when dealing with mri, blinked rapidly and tried to regroup. "Kel'anth, I protest. Be gracious. We only stated that this kel'en was in deep melancholy prior to his act, that he had been confined in his quarters by his own choice, refusing all attempts to inquire into his needs, and that this had nothing to do with the accession of bai Hulagh -- in no wise, sir, in no wise. Bai Hulagh became employer to this kel'en and this kel'en served him with great distinction in several actions. There was nothing amiss. But after the peace was announced, kel Medai evinced an increasing melancholy." "You are of the Nom," Niun interrupted, unable to bear it longer, and Hada Surag-gi looked in his direction, black eyes wide, showing whites in amazement. "How is it that you report accurately on the state of mind of a kel'en who was on a ship far removed from you?" It was not his place to have spoken. From a kel'en youth before strangers, it was an outburst, not an acceptable behavior; but the Kel stood firm, and as for Hada Suraggi, its mouth flew open and shut again in a taut line. "Elder," it protested to Eddan. "Can the bai's spokesman answer the question?" asked Eddan, a vindication that sent a flood of fierce gratitude through Niun. "Most gladly," said Hada. "I know these things to be fact because they are exactly as given to me by the bai himself, face to face, by his word. We had no idea that the kel'en contemplated such an action. It was not due to any animosity toward his service." "Yet it is abundantly evident," said Eddan, "that kel Medai considered that he had sufficient reason to quit your service, such strong reason that he chose ika'al to be free of you." "This was doubtless because of the end of the war, which this kel'en did not desire." "It is," said Eddan, "curious that he would have elected ika'al when he knew that he was returning to home world." "He was despondent," said Hada Surag-gi, an illogicity that the regul did not seem to comprehend. "He was not responsible for his actions." "You are speaking before his kinsmen," said Eddan sharply. "This was a kel'en, not a dus, to go mad. He was bound for homeworld. What you say he did is not reasonable unless the bai offended against his honor. Is it possible that this was what happened?" The regul, under the sting of Eddan 's harsh voice, began to retreat slightly, a sidling backward by the hindmost. "We are not done with questions," Eddan said, fixing Hada Surag-gi with his stare. "Tell us where and when kel Medai died." The regul did not want to answer. It sucked air and visibly changed color. "Favor, kel'anth. He died during the previous evening on the ship of the bai." "On the ship of bai Hulagh?" "Kel'anth, the bai protests -- " "Was there any manner of discussion passed between the bai and the kel'en?" "Be gracious. Tie . kel'en was despondent. The end of the war -- " "The bai made this mri despondent," Eddan said, discomfiting the youngling utterly. "The bai," said Hada, nostrils dilating and contracting in rapid breaths, "requested of this mri that he remain in the ship and remain in service; the kel'en refused, wishing to leave at once, a privilege the bai had denied to everyone, even himself. There were matters of business to attend to. It is possible -- " the skin of the youngling went paler as it spoke; its lips faltered upon the words. "Kel'anth, I realize that there is possible blame in your eyes; yet we do not understand the actions of this kel'en. The bai commanded him to wait. Yet the kel'en found fault with the order sufficient that he committed this act. We do not know why. We assure you we are greatly distressed by this sad event. It is an hour of crisis for Kesrith, in which this kel'en would have been of great service to the bai and to yourselves, surely. The bai valued the service of kel Medai. We protest again that we do not understand the source of his bitterness with us." "Perhaps you did not inquire, or listen," said kel'anth Eddan. "Be gracious. Kesrith has been ceded to humans. We are in the process of the evacuation of all residents of Kesrith. Arrangements are being made also for the mri of Kesrith. The bai wishes his ship manned at all hours, and he wishes the crew, naturally -- " The youngling moved uneasily, looking at Eddan, who did not move. "Tliese are affairs over which we have no control. If the kel'en had only informed the bai of his extreme desire to have an exception granted in his case -- " "Kel Medai chose to leave his service," said Eddan. "It was well done. We do not want to talk to youngling regul on this subject any longer. Go away now." This was plainly put, and the regul, degree by degree, retreated, more rapidly as they neared their sleds. Hada was neither the first nor the last seated. Hatches were closed, engines started; the landsleds lumbered clumsily into a turn on the narrow and rutted roadway and retreated down the long slope as slowly as they had come. No one moved. There was a hush in the air now that the regul had gone, leaving them alone with their dead. And suddently in the doorway, gold-robes and white, stood the sen'anth and Melein, and the she'pan herself on their arms. "Medai is dead," said Eddan, "and the world is going to humans soon, as we suspected." He lifted his robed arms to shield the she'pan from the sight; and Melein started forward a step, only a step: it was forbidden her. She veiled herself and turned her face away, bowing her head; and likewise the she'pan and the sen'anth veiled, which they did not do save in the presence of the unacceptable. They went away into the edun. Death was the peculiar domain of the Kel whether in inflicting it or mourning it; and it was for diem to attend to the proprieties. For a kinsman within the Kel, it was a personal obligation. Niun knew that he was expected in this to take charge; and he saw that the others longed to help, to do something, and he opened his hands, gave them leave. He had only heard the rites, had never performed them, and he did not wish to shame himself or Medai by his ignorance. They gathered up the litter, he and all who could find space to help, and passed within the doors of the edun, toward the Pana'drin, the Shrine, to present Medai at his homecoming, where he would have presented himself first had he lived. Niun's hands felt the warm metal of the litter frame; he looked down on the object in white that had been his cousin and the shock that had held him numb until now began to meld into other feelings, into a deep and helpless rage. It was not right that this had happened. There was no justice if this could happen. He found himself almost trembling with anger, with a violence in which he could kill if there were anyone or anything against which to direct his rage. There was no one. He tried to feel nothing; that would be easier than to try to find a direction for the resentment that boiled within him. He had hoped. He schooled himself not to hope henceforth. The world was mad, and Medai had added himself to the madness. My last son, the she'pan had once called him. Now it was true. There was a screen in the Shrine of the edun of the People, worked in metals and precious stones and over-written with ancient things. It was old beyond reckoning, and in every Shrine that had ever existed this very screen had stood, between the lamps of bronze that were of equal age with it. In life it marked the division between the Kel and the Sen, the point past which the Kel might not tread; in death it was no more crossable. Before the screen, at its very base, they laid the white-shrouded body of Medai s'lntel Sov-Nelan, as close to the dividing line as a kel'en could ever come. Incense curled up from burners on either side of the screen, heavy and cloying, overhanging the room and obscuring the ceiling like a smoky canopy. For Niun, attendant to his cousin, the scent of incense held its own memories, of being in the Kath and of watching holy rites from that least, outermost room, when he had been a child with Melein and Medai beside him, and others now gone, whose deaths he knew. From that outer room the small Shrine of the Kel had seemed mysterious and glorious, a territory where they might not yet venture, where warriors in their sigai might move, disdaining the Kath. His mind ran to a later day, when they three had been taken among the black-robes, one with the Kel, and had been allowed for the first time to enter the middle Shrine, only to realize that yet another barrier lay between them and the Pana, the Mysteries; and a day later yet, when they had prayed for the welfare of Medai, who was leaving the edun for service, greatly honored -- and Niun had died inwardly that night with jealousy and bitterness, his prayers insincere and hateful and mingled with thoughts that came back now like guilty ghosts. He felt no different now than then. Medai had taken another departure, leaving him the ugliness, the loneliness, of Kesrith. Medai had never endured the things he had endured: left behind, last guard to the House, servant to the others. Medai was counted a great kel'en for what he had done. There was a whisper of robes in the holiness dimly visible beyond the screen where the Sen met and tended the Holy Objects. Melein would be there, with Sathell. Three children an age ago had stood within the outer Kath-hall and longed for honor; and now they had their prayers back in strange and twisted ways: Niun within Kelshrine, where they had all longed to go; Medai possessing the honors of a warrior, newly wandering the Dark; and Melein, Melein the light-hearted, had passed through Kel-shrine to the place beyond, to the Mysteries that were never for a kel'en to see. He bowed down, shaking with rage and frustration, and remained so for a time, trying to take his breath back again and compose himself. A hand touched his shoulder. A dark robe brushed him with shadow as Eddan sank down beside him. "Niun," the kel'anth said in a soft voice. "The she'pan calls you. She does not want you to have to sit this watch. She says that she wants you to come and sit with her this night, and not to go to the burial." It took him a moment to be sure of his voice. "I do not believe it," he said. "I do not believe that she will not loose me even for this. What did she say? Did she give no reason?" "She wishes you to come, now." He was stunned by such an attitude. There had been no love between himself and Medai. The she'pan knew that well enough, but there was no decency in what she asked him to do publicly. "No," he said. "No, I will not go to her." The fingers dug into his shoulder. He expected rebuke when he looked up. But the old man unveiled to him, showing his naked face, and there was no anger there. "I thought you would say so," Eddan said, which was incredible, for Niun had not known himself. He had spoken on impulse. But the old man knew him that well. "Do as you think right," Eddan said further. "Stay. I will not forbid you." And the old man rose and ordered the others, who moved about their separate tasks. One brought the vessels of ritual, given by the Sen, that were for burying and set them at Medai 's feet; Pasev brought water; and Dahacha cloths for washing; and 'Palazi filled the lamps for the long vigil; and Debas whistled softly to the dusei and took them from the outer hall, herding them away into the tower of the Kel so that they should not disturb the solemnities. In the midst of the activity Niun sat, conscious finally that he had tom his robe in his haste for descending from the hills and that he was dusty and his hands were foul with dirt. Feet pattered about him. Sirain came, half-blind Sirain, and gave him a damp cloth and Niun unveiled and washed his face and veiled again, grateful for Sirain's thoughtfulness. Liran brought a robe for him and he changed his siga in the very Shrine, for it was not respect to sit the watch in disorder. He sat down again and began to be calmer at their quiet, efficient ministering. Then, at Eddan's whispered word, they began to take the ugly white shroud from Medai, and patiently, patiently the fingers of one and the other of them tore the webbing that was as close-spun as a cocoon and well-nigh impenetrable -- like cio-silk it was, having to be unraveled with the fingers. But Pasev knew to touch the regul fiber with a burning wick and so to part the strange web. The material burned sullenly, but it gave way, shedding its chemical smell into sickening union with the incense that lowered overhead. It was something on which they all silently agreed, that they would not give to burial a kel'en in a regul shroud, whatever the inconvenience; and gradually they recovered Medai from the web, revealing a face that they well remembered, a countenance still and pale. The body was small and thin in death, pitifully so; it weighed very little, and Medai had been a strong man. The honors that they found laced to his belts were many, and the seta'al were weathered to pale blue on his face. He had been a handsome youth, had Medai s'lntel, full of the life and the hope of the edun in brighter days. Even now he was fine to see. The only marring of him was the blood that stained the fiber under his central ribs, where he had dealt himself his death-wound. Suicide. Niun worked, not looking at Medai's face, trying not to think of what his hands did lest they tremble and betray him. He was trying to remember better days, but could not. He knew Medai too well. His cousin was in his dying as he had been in life: selfish, arrogant to match regul arrogance, and stubborn with it all. It was wrong to hold anger with the dead, impious. But in the end Medai had been as useless to his kinfolk as he had always been. Medai had lived for himself and died for his own reasons, regarding nothing that others might need of him; and there was precious little honor for a cold corpse, whatever the high traditions of the Kel. They had parted in anger. He remembered, each day of his life for six years he had remembered, and he knew why the she'pan had wanted him upstairs and what was surely in the minds of his brother kel'ein who sat with him. There had been a quarrel, the av'ein-kel , the long blades drawn; it had been his own fault, drawing first in the Shrine-hall, outside. It was the day that Medai had laid hand on Melein. And Melein had not objected. The she'pan herself had put an end to that quarrel. Abler in those days six years gone, she had descended the tower stairs and intervened. Had called him eshai'i, lack-honor, and tsi'daith' , un-son, and because he had then loved her, it had crushed him. But not a word, never a word of rebuke, to Medai. And for Medai within a hand of days came the honor of service to the bai of the regul, an honor that might have gone to one of the Husbands; and for Melein came the chastity of the Sen. And for Niun s'lntel came nothing, only a return to study, a long, long waiting, pinned to the Mother's side and held from any hope of leaving Kesrith. There had never been a way to undo that one evil day. Intel would not let him go. He had hoped for peace with Medai, for a change in the affairs of the People. But Medai had robbed him of that too. It was on him alone, the service of homeworld, and there had never been any justice in it. When you have made up your mind what it is the People owe you, Eddan had said, come and tell me. He would have settled for half of what Medai had had. But then, beginning with Eddan, the Kel spoke of Medai, each praising him: ritual, the lij'aiia, beginning the Watch of the Dead; and the voices of the old kel'ein shook in the telling of it. "It is hardest," said Liran, "that the old bury the young." And last of all but himself, Pasev. "It is certain," she said, touching the medallions, the j'tai that glittered in the lamps' golden light, the honors that Medai had won in his services, "that although he was young, he has traveled very far and seen a great deal of war. I see here the service of Shoa, of Elag, of Soghrune, of Gezen and Segur and Hadriu; and it is certain that he has served the People. Surely, surely he has done enough, this brother of ours, this child of our House; I think that surely he was very tired. I think he must have been very weary of service to the regul, and he would have come home as best he could, with what of his strength he had left. I understand this. I also am very tired of the service of regul; and if I knew my service was at an end, I would go the road he took." And then it should have been Niun's time to speak, praising Medai, his cousin. He had gathered angry words but he could not, after that, speak them or contradict the feelings of Pasev, whom he loved with a deep love. He sank down and lowered his head into his crossed arms, shaking with reaction. And the Kel allowed him this, which they seemed to take for a kinsman's grief. But theirs was a true, unselfish sorrow for a child they had loved. His was for himself. In this he found the measure of himself, that he was capable of meanness and great selfishness, and that he was not, even now, the equal of Medai. The "others talked around him, whispering, after such a time as it became clear that he would not choose to speak in the ritual. They began finally to speak of the high hills, the burial that they must accomplish, and woven into their speech and their plans was a quiet desperation, a shame, for they were old and the hills were very far and the trail very steep. They wondered unhappily among themselves whether the regul might not, at their request, give them motorized transport; but they felt at heart that they dishonored Medai by asking such help of the regul. They would not, therefore, ask. They began to consider how they might contrive to carry him. "Do not worry," said Niun, breaking his long silence. "I can manage it myself." And he saw in their faces doubt, and when he thought of the steep trails and the high desert, he himself felt doubt. "The she'pan will not allow it," said Eddan. "Niun, we might bury him close at hand." "No," said Niun; and again, thinking of the she'pan, "No." And after that there were no more suggestions to him. Eddan quietly signed at the others to let be. And they left him when he asked of them quietly and with propriety to be left alone. They filed out with robes rustling and the measured ring of honors on their garments. The tiny, high sound of it drew at Niun's heart. He considered his own selfishness, lately measured, and the courage of his elders, who had done so much in their lives; and he was mortally ashamed. But he began to think -- in the slow beginning of his night-long watch, in the silences of the edun, where elsewhere others were in private mourning -- and knew that he traditions of his caste, and that he did not want to die as Medai had died, above all else; and this thought ate at him, for it was contrary to all that he was supposed to be. Medai had been able to accept such things, and the she'pan had accepted Medai. And this was what it had won him. It was blasphemy to entertain such thoughts before the Shrine, there in the presence of the Gods and the dead. For himself he was ashamed, and he longed to run away as he had done often when he was a child, going into the hills to think alone, to try himself against the elements until he could forget again the pettinesses of men, and of himself. But he was reckoned a man now and it had been long since he had had that freedom. Dangerous times were on the edun, hard times, and it was not an hour that' Niun s'lntel could afford to play the child. There was a matter of duty, of decencies. Medai had lived and died by that law. Niun could not manage the inner part of himself, but he could at least see to it that the outer man did what was dutiful to those who had to depend on him... even if it were totally a lie. "Niun." The stir, the whisper from beyond the screen, the sigh he had taken for the wind that blew constantly through the Shrine. He looked up now and saw a hazed golden figure through the intricate design, and knew his sister's voice. She crossed the floor as far as the screen that divided them, religiously, though custom permitted them to meet face to face elsewhere in the edun and outside its limits. "Go back," he wished Melein, for she violated the law of her caste by being in the presence of the dead, even a dead kinsman. Her caste had no debts of kinship; they renounced them and all such obligations. But she did not leave. He rose up, stiff from kneeling on the cold floor, and went to the grillwork. He could not see her distinctly. He saw only the shadow of her hand on the lacery of the screen, and matched it with his own larger one in sympathy, unable to touch her. He was unclean and in the presence of the dead, and would remain unapproachable until he had buried his kinsman. "I am permitted to come," she said. "The she'pan gave me leave." "We have done everything," he assured her, struck to the heart remembering that there had been affection between Melein and Medai, cousinwise, and at the last, perhaps more than cousinly. "We are going to take him to Sil'athen -- everything that we can do, we will do." "I had not thought you would watch here," she said. And then, with an edge of utter bitterness: "Or is it only because you were directly ordered not to?" Her attack confused him. He took a moment to answer, not knowing clearly against what manner of assumption he was responding. "He is kin to me," he said. "Whatever else... is no matter now." "You would have killed him yourself once." It was the truth. He tried to see Melein's face through the screen; he could see only the outline, golden shadow behind gold metal. He did not know how to answer her. "That was long ago," he said. "And I would have made my peace with him if he were alive. I had wanted that. I had wanted that very much." "I believe you," she said finally. She left silence then. He felt it on him, an awkward weight. "It was jealousy," he admitted to her. The thing that he had pondered took shape and had birth, painfully, but it was not as painful as he had thought it would be, brought to light: Melein was his other self. He had been as close as thought to her once -- and he could still imagine that closeness between them. "Melein, when there are only two young men within a Kel, it is impossible that they not compare themselves and be compared by others. He had first all the things I wanted to excel in. And I was jealous and resentful. I interfered between you. It was the most petty thing I have ever done. I have paid for it, for six years." She did not speak for a moment. He became sure that she had loved Medai: Only daughter of an edun otherwise fading into old age, it was inevitable that she and Medai should once have seemed a natural pairing, kel'en and kel'e'en, in those days that she had also been of the Kel. Perhaps -- it was a thought that had long tormented him -- she would have been happier had she remained in the Kel. "The she'pan sent me," she said finally, without answering his offering to her. "She has heard of the intention of the Kel. She does not want you to go. There is disturbance in the city. There is uncertainty. This is her firmest wish, Niun: Stay. Others will see to Medai." "No." "I cannot give her that answer." "Tell her that I did not listen. Tell her that she owes Medai better than a hole in the sand and that these old men cannot get him to in the effort. ' ' "I cannot say that to her!" Melein hissed back, fear in her voice; and that fear made him certain in his intentions. It made no more rational sense than the other desires of Intel, this she 'pan that could gamble with the lives of the People, that could bend and break the lives of her children in such utter disregard of their desires and hopes. She has given me her virtues, he thought with a sudden and bitter insight: jealousy, selfishness, possessiveness...ah, possessive, of myself, of melein, the children ofZain. She sent Melein to the Sen and Medai to the regul when she saw how things were drifting with them. She has ruined us. A great she'pan, a great one, but flawed, and she is strangling us, clenching us against her until she breaks our bones and melts our flesh and breathes her breath into us...Until there is nothing left of us. "Do as you have to do," he said. "As for me, I will do him a kinsman's duty, truesister. But then, you are sen'e'en and you do not have kinsmen anymore. Go back and say what you like to the she'pan." He had hoped, desperately, to anger her, to pierce through her dread of Intel. He had meant the words to sting, just enough. But her hand withdrew from the screen and her shadow moved away from him, becoming one with the light on the other side. "Melein," he whispered. And aloud: "Melein!" "Do not reproach me with lack of duty," her voice came back to him, distant, disembodied. "While he lived, I was a kinswoman to him and you were grudging of everything he had. Now I have other obligations. Say over him that the she'pan is well-pleased with his death. That is her word on the matter. As for me, I have no control over what you do. Bury him. Do as you choose." "Melein," he said. "Melein, come back." But he heard her footsteps retreat up hidden stairs, heard doors close one after another. He stayed as he was, one hand against the screen, thinking until the last that she would change her mind and return, denying that answer she had made him; but she had left. He could not even be angry for it was what he had challenged her to do. Intel's creation. But his too. He hoped that somewhere in Sen-tower Melein would lay down her pride and weep over Medai, though he doubted it. The coldness, the careful coldness, that had been in her voice was beyond all repentance, carrying the schooled detachment of the Sen. He left the screen finally and sat down by the corpse of Medai. He locked his hands behind his neck, head bowed on his knees, twice desolate. The lamps snapped and the fires leaped, the door of the edun having been left open this night in ancient tradition, a respect to the dead. Shadows danced and made the writings on the walls seem to writhe with independent life, writings that the she 'pan said contained the history and wisdom of the People. All his life he had been surrounded by such things: Writings covered every wall of the main hall and the Shrine and the she'pan's tower, and the accesses of Kath and Kel -- writings that the she'pan said were duplicated in every edun of the People that had ever existed, exact and unvaried. Through such writings the sen'ein learned. The kel'ein could not. He knew only what had happened within his own life and within his own sight, or those things he had heard his elders recall. But Melein could read the writings and knew what truth was, as did the she'pan, and she had grown cold and strange in that knowledge. He had asked once, when Melein was taken into the Sen, if he could not be taken too: They had never in their lives been separated. But the she'pan had only taken his hands into hers and turned the calloused palms upward. Not the hands of a scholar, she had said and dismissed his appeal. Something stirred out in the hall, a slow shuffling, a click of claws on stone; it was one of the dusei, strayed from the Kel-tower. They generally went where they chose, none forbidding them, not even when they were inconvenient or destructive. It was not certain that one could forbid them, for they were so strong that there could be no coercion. They sensed, in the peculiar way of dusei, when they were wanted and when not, and rarely would they remain where they were not desired. They understood the kel'ein, the belief was, whose thoughts were unfearing and uncomplex, and for this reason each dus chose a kel'en or kel'e'en and stayed lifelong. One had never set affection on Niun s'lntel, though once he had tried -- shamefully desperate -- to trap a young one and to coerce it. It had fled his childish scheme, smashing the trap, knocking him unconscious. And never after that had he found any skill to draw one after him, as if that one, betrayed, had warned all its kind of the nature of Niun s'lntel. The elder kel'ein said that it was because he had never truly opened his heart to one, that he was too sealed upon himself. Niun thought this false, for he had tried; but he also thought that the sensitive dusei had found him bitter and discontent and could not bear it. He believed so, hoping that this would change; but in the depth of his heart he wondered if it were possibly because he was not a natural kel'en. For a woman of the People, all castes were open. For a man, there were only Kelcaste and Sen; and he had been deprived in one sense and over-indulged in others simply because he was the last son of the House. It had meant that he received the concentrated efforts of all his teachers, that they had worked with him until he had understood, until his skill was acceptable. But in an edun full of sons and daughters, he thought that he might have failed to survive: His stubbornness would have brought him early challenge and the People might then have been rid of his irritance in the House. He thought that he might have been a better kel'en if not for the Mother's interference; but then, many things might have been different if he were not the last, and so might she. Medai had pleased the Mother; and Medai was dead; but he sat here living, a rebel son to the Mother. She would have somewhat to say to him after Medai 's burying in the hills, when he must come back and face her. Thereafter would be bitter, bitter words and himself without argument, and Melein on the she'pan's side in it. He shrank from what the she 'pan might say to him. But she would have to say it. He would not unsay what he had said. Again the scrape of claws. It was a dus. The explosive sough of breath and the heavy tread made it clear that the intruder was coming closer, and Niun willed it away from the Shrine, for dusei were not welcome here. Yet it came on. He heard it enter the outer room and he turned and saw it in the dark, a great slope-shouldered shadow. It made that peculiar lost-sound again and slowly edged closer. "Yai!" he said, turning on one And then he saw that the dus was dusty and that its coat was patched with crusted sores, and his heart froze in his chest and his breath caught for he realized that it was not one of their own tame beasts, but a stranger. Sometimes wild dusei would come down off the high plains to hover around the lands of the edun and create havoc among the tame ones; in his own memory kel'ein had died trying to approach such an animal, even armed. Dusei sensed intentions, uncannily prescient; there were few animals more dangerous to stalk. This one stood, head lowered, way, and rocking back and forth, uttering that plaintive sound. It forced its way in, making the plaster crumble here and there, though the door was purposely made small and inconvenient for dusei, to protect the Mysteries from their mindless irreverence. It came, irresistible, thinner than the well-fed dusei of the edun. Niun edged aside, one of the lamps crashing down as the dus shouldered it. It whined and whuffed and fortunately the spilled fire went out, though the hot oil stung its foot and made it. shy aside. Then it approached the body of Medai and pawed at it with claws as long as a man's hand -- poisonous, the dewclaw possessing venom-ducts, the casual swipe of them capable of disemboweling mri or regul. Niun crouched in the shadow by the overturned lamp, as unmoving as the furniture. The beast's body filled much of the room and blocked the doorway. It gave off a fearsome, sickly stench that overrode even the incense; and when it turned its massive head to stare at the frail mri huddled in the comer, its eyes showed, running, dripping rheum onto the hallowed floor. Miuk! The Madness was on him. The secretions of his body were out of balance and the miuk, the Madness of his kind, was to blame for his behavior, sending him into a mri dwelling. There was nothing Niun knew, neither beast nor man, more to be feared than this. If the dusei of the edun had not been locked upstairs this night, they would never have let a miuk'ko dus come near the edun; they would have died in defense of that outer doorway rather than allow that beast in. And Niun s'lntel prepared himself to die, most horribly, in a space so small that the dus could not even cast his body from underfoot; his brothers would find him in shreds. The creature prodded at the body of Medai as if in prelude to this, but it hesitated. Grotesque, horrid, it rocked to and fro, straddling the corpse, its eyes streaming fluid that blinded it. From some far place in the Keltower there was a deep moan, a dus fretting at its unaccustomed confinement, at the mood of the mourning Kel -- or sensing invasion downstairs, trying desperately to get out. Others joined in, then fell abruptly silent, hushed perhaps by the order of the kel'ein. Niun held his breath while the rogue lifted his rheum-blinded eyes toward that sound, mobile lips working nervously. It rocked. It gave another explosive snort and shifted its weight, easing aside. Its shoulder hit the screen, toppling it with a brazen crash, and the beast whirled, bathed in the glow from the inner Shrine. Niun flung his arm over his eyes in horror lest he see the Forbidden, and then, surety in his heart, he reached for his gun, futile against a dus. He must attack whatever threatened the Forbidden, to prevent, if he could, the invasion of the Sen-shrine. He sighted for the brain, the first of the two brains, knowing full well that the following convulsions would destroy him along with the dus. But the dus did not take that step beyond. It lowered its weeping head and nosed at the corpse, disarranging the veil; and when it had done so, it moaned and slowly, almost distractedly, swung its head about, putting its shoulder between its head and the gun, and began to withdraw from the Shrine. And when it had done so, when it walked the hall outside, still giving that lost-infant sound, for the first time Niun clearly knew it. Medai 's dus. There was no mri who could claim, other clues removed, to know any dus but his own, and not even that one given much passage of time. Dusei were too similar and too mutable, and one could only say that this one was like the other dusei he knew. But that this particular one had not killed him, that it had been primarily interested in the body, that it had departed unsatisfied -- these actions Niun understood. Dusei were troubled at death. Other animals ignored the dead but dusei did not understand, did not accept it. They grieved and searched and fretted, and eventually died themselves more often than not. They rarely outlived their masters, pining away in their search. And this one was hunting something it had not found. Medai's dus, come looking for him. A dus that was sickly and covered with sores and deep in the throes of a madness that did not come on swiftly, although regul said that Medai had died but a night ago. A dus that was as thin and starved as its dead master. A chill feeling grew in Niun until he was physically shivering, not alone from dread of the dus. He holstered his gun and glanced fearfully at the nakedness of the inner Shrine, on which he ought never to have looked. It should not have happened. He washed his hands with the water of the offerings and, without setting foot across the forbidden line, he set the screen in place again, his fingers reverent on the inanimate metal. He had lived. The Gods, like men, could forgive the irreverence of dusei; and he had looked within the Sen-shrine and felt shaken, but not to the death. He had seen brightness but nothing of the Objects, or nothing that he could identify as the Holy. He tried to put this from his mind. It was not for a kel'en to have seen. He did not want to remember it. And Medai -- He set up the lamp again, and refilled it, and lighted it, restoring its comforting glow. Then on his knees he mopped up the spilled oil that by the mercy of the Gods had not kept on burning; and all the while he worked, exhausted and trembling from his vigil, he thought and nursed the cold feeling that lodged under his heart. At last he washed his hands for respect and laid them on Medai for the irreverence he had to commit: The thought homing in his mind gave him no peace otherwise. He did it quickly, once he had gathered his courage; carefully he unfastened the clothing and examined the wound, and found it -- shaming his suspicion and his act -- as the regul had said. Ika'al. "Forgive me," he whispered to the spirit of Medai; and reverently he reclosed the robes and gently washed the face and replaced the veils. Then he cast himself on his face before the Shrine and made the proper prayers to the several Ancestor-gods of his caste for rest for the soul of Medai, summoning forth more sincerity than he had ever felt for his cousin when he was living. This should have absolved him and given him peace, having surrendered to that which was proper and honest, but it did not. He had within him a gathering certainty that, whatever the evidence of his eyes and the testimony of the regul, Medai had not lain down his life The dus, so close to a kel'en's mind, was miuk'ko and grown so thin that it could pass Shrine doors; and the body of Medai, once solid with muscle, was as thin as the mummified dead. Kel-quarters were independent units within the regul ship-plan because of the dusei, which the regul feared beyond all logic, and because these were tsi'mri and, more than of the stringent caste laws that a that, they were strangers to the kel'en must observe in respect to People, a strange new branch of recontact with outsiders. gul; and they might not have known But essentially that kel'en was enough to deal properly with a always at the mercy of the regul, kel'en. Regul were not fighters, who supplied his unit with food. Not directly, water, even the air he breathed. All Consumed by the thought that that a kel'en could do to assert his took shape within him, Niun rose independence was to lock the door. U P and left the Shrine, took an Had they wanted him dead, they offering-vessel of water and a pancould have stopped the air and cast nikin and went out to the outer hall, him into cold space afterward. But to the door, where the mad dus still crouched before the edun. He had known it would be there, waiting. It was near what it desired, but could not find it. He had been as sure of its lingering there as he was sure how it had been driven mad. It was no less dangerous for its once having been tame; it could still rise up and kill on impulse. But when he set the water before it, it sniffed at the offering curiously and at last bestirred itself, nosing down into the liquid. The contents of the pannikin disappeared. Niun filled it a second and a third and a fourth time, and only at the fourth did the beast suddenly avert its head in refusal. He sank down on his heels and studied the creature, thin as it was and its fur gone in patches. A great open wound was fresh on its side. Medai's dus... come from regul care; from violence, from starvation. It would not have left Medai of choice even after he was dead. Regul would not act as mri would act. They were capable of collusion, of bribery, of deceit, of slaughter of their own young; but never of murder of an adult, never of that. They could neither kill nor lie in cold blood: They hired mri to attend to their enemies. So Niun had always been taught by those who knew the regul better than he, by those who had dealt with regul lifelong. So he had implicitly believed. As had Medai. He rose and walked inside, back to the Shrine, and sat down beside the body of his cousin, arms locked about himself, staring without comprehension at the serpentine writings that recorded and concealed the history of the People. Murder had been done in one manner or another, whatever name the regul gave it. A kel'en had been killed by his own employers and his dus weakened to the point that they could drive it out to die naturally; one body to be returned to the Kel, the act of ignorant regul; another to be disposed of by predators and scavengers, rendered incapable of betraying what had happened. Regul hands and regul conscience were doubtless clean. Medai had finally done as they had wished. Niun wished desperately to go upstairs and tell someone. He wished to run to Eddan for counsel, to alert the she'pan. But he had nothing for proof but a beast that lay outside the door. He had nothing on which to hang such an accusation, no shape to his suspicion, no motive he could reckon that would have driven the regul to compel a kel'en to such an action: It was irony of a kind, he thought, that of all whom Medai might have trusted to see to his avenging, he had come to the hands of his oldest rival; and the only likely witness of the truth was a miuk'ko. Dusei, it was said, lived in the present; they had no memories for what had happened, only for persons and places. The miuk'ko had sought home, the House where it had first lived; it had sought Medai. It had found the one, and not the other.    P ing! Cheryl Harbottle sat up, startled. She looked around the room for the source of that odd little noise. Nothing seemed to be wfong. The lighting panels were still glowing at the Midday-Summer setting and the Woodland Sounds background tape was still giving out with soft coos, twitters and the sound of rustling leaves. Her eyes finally came to rest on the new decorator lamp. Humph. That must be the problem. The damed thing was burned out or something. It looked funny. Cheryl got up and walked over to peer at it. There was nothing in the middle where something should have been, she realized, wrinkling her slim brows. There really was nothing. All of the wires were in place but the bright, glowing ball in the middle was gone. What was worse, she couldn't see through the space where it was supposed to be. The air looked rather fuzzy, or distorted. It was almost like looking into rippling water. Cheryl bent closer to peer at it and something grabbed at her nose. She yelped and jumped back. Then she rubbed the end of her offended member and stared at the lamp. Well! She had the distinct feeling that it shouldn't do that. She walked around to look at the other side. There was barely enough room for her to edge into the comer behind it. The lamp was a pole-like structure. One end was moored in the ceiling and the other stood on the floor. The middle blossomed out into an elaborate mesh of gleaming wires resembling a big cage. Cheryl poked an experimental finger at the nothing in the middle. At about two inches from the center something took hold of it. She pulled her hand back rapidly and pursed her lips. What she needed was the instruction book. Of course there wasn't one. She hadn't seen an instruction manual for anything in years. Well, the computer ought to know something. She sat down in front of her Insta-Think home terminal, flicked it on and asked for a catalog. The alphabetic listing on the screen rolled by slowly and she stopped it at "Lamps, decorator." That was how she'd bought the fool thing in the first place. The computer obligingly switched to its collection of sixtysecond advertisements. Eventually, after watching what seemed like an endless array of lighting fixtures in all sizes, shapes, styles and colors, she saw her lamp. "New lighting Concept'-' the ad proclaimed in fiery letters. "Capture the Sun in Your Living Room!" on the terminal and the system cycled into the full threeminute sales pitch. Not that it told her much. A vibrant baritone informed her that she'd be the envy of the neighborhood and pointed out the benefits of "metal-sheen polybutyrate," whatever that was. She pressed the was over and got an expressionless voice that talked about hydrogen, ignition and containment systems, energy pulses and electromagnetic balance. The picture on the screen was a maze of interconnecting lines with squiggles, boxes and numbers. Out of sheer spite she pushed the advance button once more but all she got was a picture of long strings of mathematics and a theory lecture that made no sense at all to her. Cheryl switched off the terminal irritably and swiveled around to look at the broken lamp. Well, it probably would be best to turn it off. Then she might as well call Repair. Let them handle it. Damn, she'd had the fool thing for only a week. That was the trouble with the modem world -- nothing was made right any more. At least there was a thirty-day warranty, she thought tiredly. She should have bought one of those cute little antique lamps with the glass bulbs. She got up and walked over to switch the lamp off. Nothing. As a matter of fact, the nothing was still there. She flicked the switch on and off again but the funny little distortion in the middle stayed right where it was. A little experimentation with a writing stylus proved that the pull was still there too. Cheryl frowned. Odd, very odd. Something was working but how was it working with the power off? She pushed the stylus at it again and this time let the lamp grab it. The stylus moved forward smoothly, and to her horror, it disappeared into the lamp. Gone, finis, kaput. Ridiculous! Cheryl circled the lamp warily, her eyes wide. She picked up a china figurine she'd always hated and offered it as a sacrifice. There seemed to be a little difficulty dragging it through the wire maze but eventually the figure was gobbled up. That was sort of gratifying, actually. Keeping an eye on the nothing spot, Cheryl began to carefully bend some of the matrix wires out of the way. Eventually she had a clear opening to the center, which didn't seem to affect the spot at all. She had a feeling she'd just voided her thirtyday warranty but she'd gone too far to stop now. She offered the lamp her morning paper and watched with a sort of clinical detachment as the pages curled inward, compressed together and turned into a funnel that slowly disappeared into the nothingness. Where the devil was it going? Big things just couldn't be put inside of little things. On the other hand, maybe the spot was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. There had to be a limit though. With a slightly fiendish smile, she picked up a large plastic fern, pot and all. Now that really was too much! When the potted fem was gone, she offered up last season's overcoat, an old pair of shoes, her husband's tacky old fishing hat, that awful painting Louise gave them at Christmas and an extra pair of salt shakers. At differing rates of speed they all vanished down the insatiable maw of the lamp. She'd fix the damned thing. Cheryl pried the matrix wires further apart and began to bend them back and forth. Eventually they snapped off and ruthlessly she shoved each one into the spot. In less than twenty minutes she managed to feed most of the lamp to itself. Not even a burp. All she had left were the two bare poles, top and bottom, which she couldn't pull loose. And the spot, of course. Cheryl thought wistfully of the old saying. "Crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after you." This hole obviously wasn't going anywhere. It completely ignored the fact that most of its parent structure was gone and hung there about five feet from the floor. She could see a good two inches, top and bottom, between it and the poles. It was balanced somehow. "With no visible means of support," Cheryl said out loud, with just a touch of panic. She could see it a lot better now. Well, she could see what she couldn't see a lot better. It seemed to her when she bent carefully to look, that there was a tiny black speck in the middle of the distortion but she couldn't be sure. She got a ball of cord from the twins' room and dangled the end enticingly over the spot. The cord straightened and moved gently forward. She experimented a little, pulling the cord out and letting it be caught again. Eventually, however, it was grabbed for good. It moved inexorably forward. She braced her feet, leaned back and pulled. No good. The cord kept moving and the spot stayed put. She unwound more cord and tied it firmly around the big armchair. The spot ate up the slack and the armchair began to inch its way across the room. When the cord shortened enough that the chair began to lift into the air, she decided the experiment had gone far enough. Unfortunately Cheryl was better at tying knots than undoing them. She ran around the apartment frantically but by the time she turned up a pair of saf-T-Shears in the den, the spot was administering the coup-de-grace. Cheryl watched helplessly as her Komfy Kushion chair, with Genuine Imitation Tufted Vinyl upholstery, slowly deformed and funneled its way into the spot. Migod, there was no stopping it! It seemed to be immovable and it had the appetite of a growing teenager. Cheryl felt a sudden cold shiver. What if one of the kids bumped into it? She gulped and wished she hadn't destroyed the cage that had fenced it in. Cheryl dashed into the bedroom and stripped one of those awful orange polkadot blankets from the bed. At least she could wrap up the thing so no one would blunder into it. There wasn't any cord left but a little rummaging turned up two garish ties belonging to her husband. Back in the living room Cheryl carefully gathered one end of the blanket around the lower pole and tied it firmly with a green plaid tie. Then she folded the blanket up over the tie, brought it around the spot and gathered it to the top pole, leaving plenty of slack in the middle. She secured it with the other tie and adjusted a frivolous bow as a whimsical farewell to the spot. There it was, swathed like a pot-bellied mummy. Cheryl drew a deep sigh of relief. Her relief was short-lived, however. The blanket folds began to arc inward -- until she was staring at an acrylic hourglass. The waist narrowed, disappeared, and the top and bottom of the blanket started to strain toward the center. Eventually the fibers gave way with a sickening "rrrrrip!" Cheryl found herself looking at two strips of orange polkadot garnish, one on each pole. And a slightly askew purpleand red-striped bow. The spot shimmered contentedly. Cheryl ran to the computer terminal to call Repair and then stopped suddenly. Repair what? Not the lamp. It was virtually gone. The spot didn't need repair; it was working just fine. Residence Maintenance? Was it a Maintenance problem when you had a bottomless pit in your living room? They might even accuse her of having put it there and then sue her for lowering the property value. She stared glassy-eyed at the little monster. Maybe she should rope off the comer, put up caution signs and warning blinkers. Cheryl giggled with a growing touch of hysteria. How about charging admission? "See the eighth wonder of the world! Watch the Harbottle Spot devour Cincinnati!" On the other hand... Cheryl calmed herself and frowned at the spot. It ate things up, did it? Finally she walked over to the computer terminal and keyed in a number. When she got the connection, she said, "Hello, this is Mrs. Harbottle in #, B Level. I want to discontinue my rubbish-disposal service. I've made other arrangements." Now all she had to do was find some tasteful drapes that would go with the rug... and those orange polkadots, of course.  mw Asimov's robots... Shelley's monster... Poe's mummy...Berryman's aliens...All these and other strange creations are now ready to invade the college campus. Lawler's new anthology for science fiction courses provides the critical framework and historical perspective students need to understand the forms and conventions of this field of literature. Donald L Lawler East Carolina University Early #about # pases PaperInstructor's Manual For adoption consideration, request an examination copy from your regional Houghton Mifflin office. Houghton Mifflin Dallas, TX #  Geneva, IL# Hopewell, NJ # Palo Alto, CA #  Boston, MA # .?frc Nicholas Yermakov Artists don't seem to fit in -- even in an institution designed forihem. Eric Beldone shivered as he floated free in the vastness of space. The twin suns gave no warmth; they merely growled in an infinite ocean frowned and thoughtfully rubbed his depilated cranium. "Supposethey both went nova?" They did. He shaded his eyes against the Too much! Too much! Go black!" And he was plunged into the sable darkness of the womb. "Oh, my eyes! I'm probably blind." "The effect is purely psychological." "Yeah, yeah, I know. All in my head." Beldone sighed. "Okay. Environment standard." The blackness gradually ebbed and Eric rose from a pale, contoured chair, rubbing his eyes. He was surrounded by a milky opacity. The walls, the floor, the ceiling and everything in the den had a frosty albino turbidity. Stark against this background, the thin, slight, blackclad author stared across the room over to the machine and tentatively held his outstretched fingers over the sensiplate. They hovered uncertainly, then balled into a fist and struck. In master control a reading of .# registered on the scan grid corresponding to Beldone's den. Miniature red lights in series circuit spelled out 'mild irritation.' A technician logged the readout. "How long have I been here without accomplishing anything?" "One week, two days, four hours, seventeen minutes, six seconds, seven, eight..." "All right, enough." Beldone glanced around at the misty whiteness of the den. He snapped his fingers. "Ceiling -- mauve; floor -- deep brown pile; walls -- coffee, with light cream perhaps. Ummm. Desk and low tables in wood-grain mahogany and all the chairs in soft black calfskin." He watched as around, above and beneath him the den slowly and aesthetically changed hues and flowed into the shades he had specified. He walked about the room, touching various objects and coloring them, stopping at the transcriber, which he made beige. Craning his neck, he pointed at a spot on the ceiling and requested a directional lightbeam. Having adjusted the intensity, he looked around and fingered his chin thoughtfully. "Let's have three of those Kessler prints I pre-selected, hmm? One there, one over there and," pointing, "... I think, there! Yes. Yes, that will do. Hmm. A deeper brown on the carpet, a bit thicker on the pile. Yes, fine. Fine. Code it." ' 'Coded. Environment scheme S-#, Mr. Beldone . " "S-#. Wonderful. I'll never remember it but it's in there somewhere. Who cares? God, I'm bored. ' ' He reclined in the contoured chair, enjoying the feel of the supple black leather, and fished an ancient briar freehand from his pouch. He liked the ritual of cleaning, filling, tamping and lighting. It gave his hands something to do and it kept him from thinking too much about the transcriber, sitting as if with an air of expectancy on the other side of the room. As he smoked there came a knock at the door. It slid aside to reveal a young, sallow, black-haired boy with slate-gray eyes and two steaming cups of coffee. "Thought you might like some." "Why not? Come on in, Oz." Beldone sat forward and took one of the cups, placing it on a low table. Then he looked up and wagged an accusing finger at the ceiling. "You sent him, didn't you?" "Answer not required," smiled Oz. "Eric, you did say you were bored. Besides, I wasn't getting any work done either. Drink your coffee, it's costing you enough." Eric smiled. "My treat, eh? While Big Brother watches," he said as he sipped, pointing a finger toward the ceiling. "It's not up there, you know. It's three floors down." "Yes, I know. But it feels like it's up there. Watching over all of us. Omnipotent. Sexy and omnipotent." "Sexy? You relate to a female voice?" "Mmmm. I'm basically submissive to females. Why, how does it address you?" Oz smirked. "With the voice of an art teacher I had as a child. The one who thought I had creative potential. Right, teach?" "Right, Ozzie , " answered an elderly male voice. "You see? It's all supposed to be very therapeutic. You know that famous actor on the fifth floor?" "You mean Richard Rosswell?" "Yes, that's the one. The critics haven't been very kind to him lately. They always shoot for the man at the top, you know? Now they say he's 'lost his method.' Well, it gives him his mother's voice." Eric gave a low whistle. "That's a bit deep, isn't it? I'd hate to see his psych profile." "I'd hate to see my own," Oz chuckled. "How's work, or shouldn't I ask?" Eric shrugged. "Lousy. You want to hear some of it?' ' Ozzie looked surprised. "I thought you were one of those who didn't like to share work in progress." "I don't usually, but this junk is in absolute stasis. I've never written such crap. I'm beginning to hate that thing," he said, indicating the transcriber. "Play back my most recent fiasco." After a moment his own voice, with the hems and haws edited out, began speaking. Johnson, Carter W., P.W. ##-#-#, craned his neck in an effort to see to the end of the snaking line of prospective applicants. He had not eaten a square meal in four days but he had vowed to subsist solely on the protein synthetics until he was at least able to register. High overhead, the massive Public Welfare tote-board winked on and off, informing all prospective applicants of job openings and closings, positions vacated due to death or illness and... "Enough, enough!" Eric winced as he interrupted the playback. "Erase it, for pity's sake!" "That wasn't so bad," Oz began. "I was beginning to get interested. Why -- " "Please! Spare me." Eric wrinkled his nose in distaste. "It was hideous! I'm ashamed of myself." " Program erased," announced a soothingly sultry voice. "Wonderful, isn't she? It? I wish I could have some of my early works erased like that. So. Enough." He shifted abruptly in the contour chair. "When are you going to show me this fabulous painting of yours?" The young artist fidgeted uncomfortably. "I'm sorry, Eric. I can't. Not just yet. I mean, well... you know how it is." "Sure, kid. I know. But I want to be first in line when you finish it, understand?" Oz smiled. "I'll arrange a private showing. Promise." Beldone clapped the youngster on the shoulder affectionately. "There you go! Come on, what do you say we go for a swim?"    Dr. Anwar Sharif nervously drummed his be-ringed fingers on the surface of his heavy marble desk. Seated before the desk in the opulently simple office were the staff psychotherapists of the Tunisian Institute of Creative Intelligence. "Are we ready?" he asked softly, his English laced with a subtle, gutteral sibilance. "Very well. Record. ' ' " Recording answered the computer in a mechanically neutral voice. Dr. Sonia Feldman consulted the clipboard on her lap. This was to be a conference of personal observation only; clinical history was immediately available from the computer. "Richard Ross well, computer case code ##-B. Patient is British. Fifty-eight years old. Occupation: actor. Entering first week of third month of treatment. Mr. Rosswell shows evidence of latent schizophrenia. There is a tendency to develop a minor fixation on the computer identification voice pattern. Possibly it may have been a mistake to utilize his mother's voice print. Nothing very serious, in my opinion. Re-evaluation is in progress, however. "Patient's overall condition is satisfactory. He seems to be responding well to role play in stress situations. Physical health is good but up-date on psych profile reveals alcoholism projection probability." She smiled. "A lot of that seems to be going around. Hypnotherapy take care of it." "What is the prognosis, Dr. Feldman?" asked Sharif. She shrugged. "I see no reason why we can't have him out of here by the end of next week." Sharif nodded. "Next case?" Dr. Sigmund Wu cleared his throat uneasily. "Oswald Starkovski, computer case code ##-B. Patient is Nepalese, naturalized. Twenty-eight years of age. An artist, a painter to be precise. Entering fourth week of treatment. "Patient has massive insecurities. Self-image is a problem, with total lack of self-confidence, etc., etc. A textbook case of what we refer to in his particular field as the Van Gogh syndrome. He has a pathological hatelove relationship with his work. Makes Dostoevsky look like Ogden Nash. That was not meant to be facetious, by the way. He really does. He cries frequently or, I should say, weeps. For some reason he either cannot or will not vocalize his frustrations -- which, of course, only makes everything worse. He seems to relate well to other patients. It's only when he is alone in the den that he falls apart. "What is interesting is that he works as hard as he does. Spends very little time brooding and what have you. Day after day, hour after hour, he's at the easel, working with tears streaming from both eyes." Wu shook his head sadly. "A perfectionist who, ironically, does not believe himself capable of even nearing perfection." "Prognosis?" "Not good. Patient seems to be headed for a complete breakdown. Drug therapy or electro-probe would, in my opinion, be only a stop-gap measure. We have two separate problems in ethics here. On the one hand, we're supposed to help him achieve some degree of artistic stability. That's what he's paying for." "And on the other hand?" Wu sighed. "Logically he should be induced to stop painting. Give it up completely. As I said, it poses a problem in ethics. Quite a shame, actually. I think he has genuine potential." Sharif pulled at his lower lip. "You mentioned two problems. What is the second?" "The second is that he can't afford us. He did have the funds but he has spent his entire inheritance and now, according to finance check, he is drawing on a very meager savings account. My point is that he has no income outside of his painting. In another week he will be penniless." "I see," said Sharif. "Well, that is not our responsibility. We have to concern ourselves only with the psychic welfare of the patient and his various muses. In view of his limited funds, however, it may be advisable to convince him to give up his painting. I would venture to say that vocational conditioning might be a possible solution. Very well. Next?" Dr. Anne Cleaver crossed her attractive legs and brushed a stray lock of auburn hair from her face. "Eric Beldone, computer case code ##-B. American, sixtytwo years old. Mr. Beldone is the winner of the Orwell and Pulitzer prizes. His career closely parallels that of Willard Huntington Wright, an art critic who also wrote novels under the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine. The patient has not written fiction for over ten years. His recent activities have entailed teaching seminars, media presentations and art criticism for the magazine of the Ars Nova Society, which he founded. Although his work in these fields is highly regarded, the patient is suffering from manic depression due to his inability to function as a writer. His prose has become highly pedantic and, to a degree, cynical. Mr. Beldone is entering his second week of treatment for a standard textbook case of writer's block...    "What is he doing ?" The intern watched in rapt fascination. "Doodling." "He's what ?" Anne Cleaver stood before the monitor screen, watching as her patient, through spoken commands and finger-strokings on the sensitive walls, created flowing, mandala-like designs five feet across. Straight lines became arcs, curving back on themselves in symphonies of color. It was a tangled, complex, asymmetric execution with a sense of unity among the constantly undulating patterns. The mad mandala pulsated. Expanded and contracted. Beat like a heart. The intern marveled at the effect. "I'm recording duplicate tapes of all of these," he said. "He's been at it for the past four hours and this one is the third design. I want copies of these for myself. They're beautiful, aren't they?" "I don't think I've ever seen anyone use the den like this before," Anne mused. "It has a sort of optical-illusion effect." The intern increased magnification. "I believe he started here," he said, indicating a point on the screen. "To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure -- and I've been watching all along." "It's fantastic," murmured the doctor. "I would have suspected a creative breakthrough but he's not writing. He's -- " "Want to see something else interesting?" The intern interrupted, switching to bioscan. "Check on his increase in respiration and pulse rate. Look at the adrenalin count and -- " Wu's shout from the adjacent console cut him short. "Anne! Starkovski's about to enter Beldone's den! I just saw what he was doing!" "Quick," Anne ordered, grabbing the intern by the shoulder. "Manual override!" And reaching past him, she channeled full subsonic into the writer's den. Almost simultaneously the wall cleared, Beldone collapsed in a heap on the floor and Oz Starkovski entered the den. "Eric?"    "Mr. Beldone, how do you feel when you write?" "How do you feel now?" he countered. "It's hard to say. A detached awareness sometimes. A conscious effort on one level, I suppose, and yet there's a sort of ethereal state involved. Almost clinical in the sense that I'm attempting to craft a story or an idea, convey a sense impression -- like standing outside of myself and observing with a critical eye. How can you describe something like that? Being a writer, I should be able to tell you but even those of us who are most glib have a hard time finding the right words. Often it's impossible. "Yet there are times when everything gels so incredibly well that I get the impression I have absolutely no control over what's happening. I believe that during those agonizing periods of bleeding, of sitting there facing that inactive transcriber, the subconscious is working full-steam without my being aware of it. Then it's like a marathon runner getting second wind. There's a euphoric feeling I can't describe. All of a sudden it comes. It flows! It's like someone or something taking control of my body and I watch in rapt fascination as the story inexplicably writes itself. The characters begin to speak, move, interact -- " Anne froze the tape. The image of Beldone, immobile on the wall of her office, remained with arms raised in mid-gesture. This, Anne thought, was the celebrated author lionized by the media. The garrulous guest, the penultimate companion, the compelling lecturer. But there was also something else... "Increase magnification," she said. Beldone's image slowly loomed larger on the wall until the face was ten times its normal size. "Hold." There was something about his eyes. She recalled the conversation clearly and at the time she had had a sense of intimate communication with this man. Yet, looking at his face now, at the slightly glazed eyes with a barely perceptible muscular tightness about the comers, she realized that he had not been speaking to her at all. While they spoke, he had withdrawn... He was trying to remember. Eric Beldone, one of the most scintillating, prolific authors of his time, was trying to remember the magical feeling of creation. It hardly seemed possible. Where had he lost it and why? "Resume run, normal scan." The image of Beldone, reduced to normal size, resumed talking. " -- live out their lives completely independent of the author. You can't dictate to them any more because they have developed their own personalities and their own ways of doing things." Abruptly he was speaking to her again. "I know it sounds trite, but that's what it's like. I wish I could say it better because it's a wonderful thing." "You really love writing, don't you?" He snorted. "I hate it!" That had taken her by surprise. It was evident in her voice as she heard herself asking, "What? But...I don't understand." Beldone chuckled. "I'm not sure I do either. You know, there's nothing I can think of that's more frightening than facing that infernal machine -- in effect, facing nothing, and from that nothing, creating something. It's not natural. I spoke to Rosswell about it the other day before he left and, in a way, he understands that feeling. He said that the most terrifying part of a psychorama is that first step into the empty staging area because an actor has to fill that empty space with the life and presence of a persona. And if he feels the least bit out of touch with his role, if he's not completely immersed in it, the audience will know it instantly. It's really easier for an actor because he already has a script to work with. Can you imagine how hard it is, how painful, to completely immerse yourself in something that doesn't even fully exist? "I don't know. Words fail. Hey! That's funny, isn't it? Writer's block? Words fail?" Beldone sighed deeply. "God. You're miserable when you're writing -- and you're miserable when you're not." She stopped the tape. What Dr. Wu had said about the Starkovski case was somehow very similar. Despair seemed to be a common factor in certain creative personalities. If that despair were removed... "Has Mr. Beldone arrived yet?" " He's waiting outside." "Send him in." Beldone entered, looking none the worse from his unexpected subsonic sedation of the day before. "Who do I have to thank for this headache?" he grumbled. "Me, I'm afraid," answered Dr. Cleaver, handing him two small, clear capsules. "Here, these should help somewhat." Eric squinted at the powder-filled capsules. "What are they?" "Aspirin." He chuckled. "Some things never change. Do you mind telling me why I was zonked? Did the computer decide I was drawing dirty pictures?" "It wasn't computer action," Anne replied. "When I said that you had me to thank for your headache, I was speaking quite literally. I was in auxiliary control and I ordered a switch to manual override." "Ah! The thick plotens!" said Beldone with mock drama. " You decided I was drawing dirty pictures!" "I'm sorry, Mr. Beldone. I realize that I'm being somewhat circumspect but you see, there is another case involved here and I am a bit hesitant to divulge certain details. However, I doubt you'll accept that?" He shook his head. "No, I think I'm entitled to know why I was treated to a full dose of subsonics. I want an explanation." "Very well," she said. "How familiar are you with Oz Starkovski' s case?" Beldone watched her closely. "I've followed his progress as an artist for some time now and I've had occasion to review his work in multi-dimensional injection. However, to a trained eye it's evident that he's headed for a complete nervous collapse. His paintings are full of sorrow and despair, much like those of Van Gogh's later period." The writer sighed. "As for his case, Oz doesn't like to talk about it very much. You people don't seem to be helping him." Anne noticed, not for the first time, that the writer had a disquieting way of coming on like a father figure. She was certain that it was pure, conscious manipulation on his part. "Well, Mr. Beldone, I don't want to get into the details of another doctor's case but the fact is that Oz was about to enter your den and emergency measures had to be taken. Dr. Wu determined that the sight of your, uh, artwork would have disturbed his patient and I'm inclined to agree with him." "Disturbed him?" Beldone shouted. "Let me tell you, young lady, it would have had to have been one hell of a 'disturbance' for you people to dose a man of my age like that! What were you afraid of?" Anne found herself rising to the bait. "Oz Starkovski's condition is very delicate, Mr. Beldone. You, on the other hand, despite your age (or in spite of it), are in excellent physical and psychological health. The only thing wrong with you is an arteriosclerotic condition that might kill you in another thirty or forty years." "And Oz is in much worse condition than that," Eric said softly. "Is that what you're saying?" Anne Cleaver licked her lips nervously and sighed. "You missed your calling, Mr. Beldone. You should have been a lawyer." She took a cigarette of synthetic tobacco from a silver box on her desk and lit it, inhaled and held the smoke in her lungs for a long moment before releasing it in a slow, steady stream. "You know, I'm going to have to go back to the real ones. These just don't make it any more." The consultation was not progressing at all the way she had planned. Her office looked out onto the central gardens and she briefly watched the therapy group in laser sculpture twelve stories below. "Anne," said the writer quietly, "tell me. Maybe I can help." She turned and faced him. "For the present, Mr. Beldone, I'm more concerned about your own -- " "My problem can wait," he interrupted sharply. "Tell me about Oz." He could be a most compelling man. "I wish I could tell you. I really do. But I just can't take that responsibility. I can tell you this though -- it's imperative that something be done to help him soon." She recalled Dr. Sharif's words about vocational conditioning. "Very soon. Or it will be too late." "He's in that much danger?" "Not in the way you think. I can't tell you any more, Mr. Beldone. It's a delicate situation. But there is a very real danger that Oz Starkovski may never paint again." "But painting is his whole life!" "That's all I can say. I really shouldn't have told you as much as I have. I didn't call you up here for that purpose." "I know," said the writer. He rose to his feet and started to leave. He stopped at the door. "I'll try to help if I can. My problem can wait." After he left, Anne spent a long time watching the door through which he had gone. There was something he had said that repeated itself in her mind and she knew it was important. He had said it twice: "My problem can wait."    "This environmental scheme is depressing you, Ozzie. Why not add a little color? Some trees perhaps. Something relaxing. You've been working so much, driving yourself so hard... How about a little sunshine ?" Oz looked around at the snowwhite den. "I like being depressed. Leave me alone." "Dr. Wu left strict programming instructions for me, Ozzie. You should try to get some rest. Why not lie down for a little while? It's late." "I have work to do. Go away." Oz reached for the slim brush that contained the murky red-black pigment cartridge. It had taken him hours to prepare the proper shading mix. Delicately holding the tubular brush between his middle finger, index finger and thumb, he leaned toward the easel. A filament-thin spray of color like coagulated blood jetted from the nozzle. It penetrated the surface of the painting, injecting into the very edge of a wrinkled rose petal. As Oz slowly turned the brush, the wafer-like spray twisted in the painting like a mobius strip and the rose petal almost seemed to move. He shut off the spray and surveyed the results, peering anxiously at the flower. There was a look of infinite sadness in his eyes. "It's not right at all. I'll never get it." "Of course you will, Ozzie. You must have patience. You're doing fine. Rest now." "No, I'm not doing fine! I know what it's supposed to look like. I can see it in my mind. God, why can't I get it out?" "Ozzie, you're pushing yourself too hard. Why not let it go for now ? " "I can't let it go! It could be so beautiful," he said wistfully. "It just needs work, that's all. It just needs work." He rubbed his eyes. He could barely keep them open. "I wish I could stop. I wish with all my heart that I could stop." There was a knock at the dor. "Oz? Are you awake? It's Eric. Can I come in?" "Just a minute." He covered the easel. "Come on in," he replied wearily. The door slid open and Beldone entered. He took in the cadaverous whiteness of the den. "Cheery. It looks like a padded cell." "I'll change it if you like." "No, no, don't bother." He sat down and looked at the covered easel. "How's it coming?" Oz shook his head slowly from side to side with an air of resignation. "I don't know why I go on. It breaks my heart that I can't create the beauty that I see inside myself. A painter is supposed to paint what he sees. He's supposed to give life to his inner vision." He gestured at the easel. "My child is stillborn. No life. No depth. No meaning. No spirit." "You still won't let me see it?" Oz did not answer. He stood up and turned the easel to the wall. He leaned on it, head bowed. Then, without turning around, he spoke in a muffled voice. "This Institute was my last resort. I have no more money. You know, Eric, I tried to kill myself a few months ago." He turned and faced the writer. "Are you shocked?" Beldone met his gaze. "No. I've had that thought myself on occasion. It seems like the easy way out sometimes -- " he paused, " -- when the words won't come. That was Sartre's most profound regret before he died. That the words wouldn't come. Dying didn't bother him but he hated to leave the words behind." "How can you stand it?" "I didn't say that I could. You know, Oz, Raphael once said something about how artists are the whores of the world. He meant that it's a terrible thing to have to hinge your entire life on the whims of your patrons, but it goes much deeper than that. "We sell ourselves, pieces of our souls, because as painful as it sometimes can be, the joy of completion makes it all somehow bearable. The orgasmic ecstasy that results from the creation of something undeniably yours is its own justification. "If life is pain, can art, which reflects life, be different? I don't know. I can't describe what it is that drives people like us to put ourselves through hell just to write a story or paint a lunarscape or create an ephemeral presence in a psychorama. It's a need of some sort, not many people have it. Perhaps they're better off not having it. "But you and I are stuck. We do things that most people can't do. We create something we love and we sell it and we ask others to love it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. When they don't, it can be hard. Unendurably hard. "Yet we do it anyway. Masochistic? Yes, I suppose we all have a little of that in our psych profiles. Every one of us is his own little ambulatory corporation of neuroses. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. "People like Rosswell, you, myself," he waved a hand, "so crave approval that we go to lengths to institutionalize ourselves so that we can get that drive flowing consistently enough to be able to offer ourselves up for sacrifice time and time again. "Oz," said Beldone, taking the younger man by the shoulders, "you don't have to kill yourself. You do that every time you sit down to paint. There!" He pointed at the easel. "There is your rebirth. Survive, Oz. Any way you can, survive ! Nothing else matters." In all the world, no sparkle is brighter than the glisten of a tear. "No." The writer stayed the artist's hand. "No, Oz, don't wipe it away. Paint with it." He gave the younger man a hug and then he left. Dr. Wu had left strict, programmed instructions that his patient was to rest. A mild sedation was prescribed. One that would coax and coddle into sleep. But sleep, for some, is just a way of wasting time. The artist had to paint. For hour after hour Oz fought the gentle waves. The leaves took form, the thorns; the bloody flowers bowed their blooms in vivid splendor -- incarnadine and carmine, a pulpy flush of damask and vermilion. And when the last brush clattered to the floor, the den went dim and Oz succumbed and slept. An intern, tired and bleary-eyed, paid scant attention to the screens. If he had watched, there might have been a human hesitation. But as it was, the program ran on schedule. Having given birth, that night the painter died.    "You asked to see me?" "Yes. To talk." A pause. The room was mirrored. Beldone's image was reflected from all angles in the den. The patient and his doctor could be seen from every view. "You like?" He made a sweeping gesture. "I set it up this way so I could see the many facets of myself." He thought of what he said to Oz the other night. "I see myself surrounded by hypocrisy." Anne Cleaver wore a practiced look of nonchalance. She knew the answers and had known them for two days. The clues had been there all the time. He yearned for words but blocked them when they struggled to break free; she sought the clues but would not see them when they shouted to be seen. "I had a dream last night," Beldone began. "And in this dream I had written my life's masterpiece." He paused. "It didn't sell." "Eric?" Oz entered, stopped. "Oh, I'm sorry..." "Come in, Oz." The writer smiled. "I was merely unburdening some guilt. What's that you have there? Is it what I hope it is?" Starkovski shrugged. "My socalled painting. I thought you might like to have it as a souvenir. I'm going home. I can't afford this elaborate therapy any more. In fact, I can't afford anything any more. Ah, well...I'll survive. The main self with this artistic delusion I've been under. Never again. But that's all behind me. God, I haven't felt this good in I don't know how long! Like I haven't a care in the world. So you see? I'm cured." Anne suddenly went cold. She should have warned him. Beldone was not taking it well. In a daze, he took the painting. "So. There you are," Oz went on. "Eric, I feel uncomfortable with drawn-out farewells. There doesn't seem to be enough to say. I won't forget you." "Oz, I -- " but the painter was gone. "I won't forget you either," he finished weakly. "Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I have to stop him, Anne. I must -- " "It's too late. There's nothing you can do." "Why?" Beldone looked lost. "What happened? I don't understand. What have you done to him?" "His inability to function in his chosen medium was causing Oz unbearable psychic distress. As you yourself observed, he was a ripe candidate for a breakdown," she said calmly, trying to maintain a detached professional manner. "Especially in view of the fact that he could not afford extended treatment and that even if he could, artistic breakthrough was not projected with any reasonable degree of probability." Beldone went pale. "My God! You've killed him!" She smiled. "You're being melodramatic. All right. If you will, what we have done is to administer a sort of 'creative euthanasia.' His inability to accomplish his desire was causing him a great deal of pain. We removed the desire. Under the circumstances, it was the kindest thing to do." His hands shook as he thrust the painting at her. "Look! Damn you, look'." In his last hours as an artist Oz had achieved perfection: three withered, bleeding roses in a patch of barren ground; a sun, extinguished; a broken thorn. A child's vision of a demon's dream. The silence screamed so loudly that she had to break it, yet her voice came slow. "H-how were we to know?" The writer stared. "He'll paint again." She shook her head. "He can't. We -- " "I know he'll paint again." And, quietly, he mumbled, "Dum spiro, spero. There are no words for what has happened here. There are no words for what that boy has done." His hand reached out and touched the roses. "There simply are no words." He walked across the den, confronting the transcriber. He held his hand out and it hummed to life. He looked at Anne. "I'll find the words," he said. "I'll find them!" And he began to write.  The Foremost jLxy pri,n " to " to Science Fiction Some Contributors Past and Present Pou I Anderson Isaac Asimov Greg Benford C. J Cherryh Arthur C Clarke Arsen Darnay Jordon Ekfund . Harlan Ellison Frank Herbert ' Larry Niven Frederik Pohl Jerry Pournele Fred Saberhagen James Tip tree Roger Zelazny H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U.S. residents, enclose # here  For other countries, enclose  I # for here  Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription Last week I went to a conference and for three days I listened to discussions of man's first contact with aliens; how to construct farms on asteroids; manufacturing processes in space; interior decorating in large space structures; and other such far-out subjects. It might have been a science-fiction convention -- except that it wasn't. It was a meeting of the American Astronautical Society and the participants were engineers and scientists. The only science-fiction writers besides myself were Joe Haldeman and G. Harry Stine -- and Harry was there as a session chairman, in his capacity as ' an engineer-scientist, not as a fictioneer. No longer are we addicts of this Buck Rogers Stuff the chief laborers in the space vineyards. It was an exciting week -- at one point, while listening to a paper on asteroid colonies, Joe Haldeman and I turned toward each other and each began to say, "There's a novel in this paper alone!" after which we both collapsed into laughter when we realized we were talking about the same idea. Obviously a conference like that is worth a column -- but first, a commercial. I get letters. I get too many letters. I try to answer them all but I simply can't; and certainly I can't possibly carry on a lengthy correspondence, not even with those people I'd very much like to trade ideas with; nor can I send people copies of my data sources and bibliographies, or do term papers for students, or write lengthy essays "giving more details" on subjects I've touched on in these columns. Thus two suggestions: First, if you enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope, there's a better chance I'll be able to send some kind of reply -- although I can't promise to answer every letter, even when accompanied by an sase . Second, if you want to talk with me about this Buck Rogers Stuff, catch me at a science-fiction convention. True, even that turns out to be difficult because there's so much going on at cons, so a final idea: Los Angeles is bidding for the World Science Fiction Convention in #I . The Committee (of which I am a member) has decided that if we win the bid, we will put on a science fact symposium in which interested convention attendees will be able to discuss matters far-out with not only myself and other writers but also with a number of engineers and scientists working in the space sciences. Unlike many sf convention programs, this is intended to be a lengthy session with no automatic cut-off time, leaving plenty of opportunity for fanatics to get together. If that appeals to you, send a dollar to: Los Angeles In '#I Committee, # South Ardmore, Los Angeles, California #. That buys you a membership in the LA in '#I Booster Club and you'll then be told what you can do to bring this about. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.    "The Industrialization of Space -- Planning for Profit at the High Frontier," and there were literally dozens of papers presented. Some were the usual bushwah by anthropologists and other social "scientists" who ought to have read some science fiction before rediscovering the wheel, but most were hard engineering studies: not whether we should go to space, but specifically how to get there and what to do upon arrival. Costs and schedules; modular building blocks; assembly of large structures; commercial products and optimum methods of making them; intermediate technology studies of roadblock or "show-stopper" problems and what to do about them -- that sort of thing. There were even a number of decent papers in the "soft science" management techniques is a gold mine of information because rather than having a couple of anthropologists sit in a semi-dark room and dictate great thoughts, James Ragusa of the Payload InteProject actually examined comparable situations for similarities to the space-management environment. His group found that the ten most similar situations to a space base were, in descending order of similarity: I . Space Station #. Oceanographic Research Ships #. Antarctic Stations #. Earthbound RD Laboratories #. The Ben Franklin Research Submarine #. The Tektite II Laboratory #. The Ninety-Day SpaceStation Simulation Experiment #. Nuclear Submarines #. Sealab I #. Skylab From these they could identify personnel and management problems, examine over fifty possible organizational structures ranging from the traditional military to "participatory democracy," and come up with some preliminary work on management organizations appropriate to various space situations. Nobody thinks they have any final answers, but this was a sound study with identifiable criteria and variables. Incidentally, they also examined the management structure of Star Trek and found it wanting. In fact, my major criticism of Ragusa's thinks science fiction begins and ends with Buck Rogers and Star Trek, and the management study team has evidently never read any of the really serious science-fiction works that address themselves to the social environment of man in space. probably made a far more thorough study of the relevant historical examples than has any sf author; but it does seem that a successful science-fiction writer may have at least as much chance of contributing a meaningful input as does a graduate student in anthropology. (Lest it be said that I'm unduly harsh on anthropologists, let me quicky add that I'm certain their profession can make a contribution, but I do grow weary of speculative papers on human behavior in highstress situations written by people who have obviously never read the diaries of polar explorers or the logs of research ships.) The US approach to space exploration was one of building blocks; this was established by the Apollo program Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab followed logically one on the next) and it's likely that this approach will continue. Given that: assumption, what might we expect to see in the year # in the way of space operations? One can only guess, of course; but one of the best guesses -- in the sense that it is based on the building-block logic -- is shown in Table One. Now Table One is not supposed to be carved in granite; it's merely an estimate of what we could have by the year #. No one really knows what we will be doing -- in fact, if we merely project present trends in US RD efforts, the best guess is that by # we'll be doing very little -- but at least we have a starting point for discussion. So what will all those people be doing in space?    There are two profitable lines for Space Operations in the Year # Facility Number Employed Personnel Skills Environment Ground # Mix of engineering and maintenance Similar to present LowEarth Orbit #-# Operations technicians Relatively easy rotation to Earth Moon Base #-# Mining and cqnstruction workers, engineering, maintenance, environment engineering. Possibly some "permanent" personnel. Longer duration tours Asteroid Exploration #-# Explorer-scientists Long-term shipboard mission Geo-Synchronous Orbit #-# Operations and maintenance Temporary; may rotate to other space facilities rather than Earth Space Manufacturing Facility # Construction, clerical, manufacturing, laboratory technicians, housekeeping, maintenance, etc. Possibly permanent colonists space development that we know number of advantages: It is clean; it reasonably well: materials that can provides power at low operating be made only in space (or can be costs (after the enormous initial capmade there far more economically ital investment); the fuel costs are than here on Earth); and spacenil and the fuel source is perpetual, these, the Solar Power Satellite try, meaning that the US has a very to vanish in the near future; and energy and food exports make excellent sense for US international trade. Moreover, nearly everyone is agreed that someday we'll have to use solar power; and a space-based system has many advantages over an Earth-based solar collector. Out in space there's no day-night cycle or cloudy weather. Solar power collectors have to be large -- the solar constant of one kiloWatt per square meter is an absolute limit, so if you want a thousand-megaWa'tt facility (comparable to today's better coalfired plants), you'll need at least a area; and it's very much easier to build large structures in space than it is here on Earth. Down here you have both gravity and wind to contend with. Up there you have neither. enough. A large collecting surface is deployed in space. The incident sunlight is converted to electricity, either directly by solar panels or by using mirrors to concentrate heat and then running a working fluid through a turbine. (Both concepts are under study. The turbines are not easy to build and operate in space, but they are at the moment far more efficient than solar panels; thus there's a trade-off between the simplicity of a direct-conversion system with a much larger surface area, or a smaller but more complex turbine system.) However the power is generated, it is then converted to microwaves of the proper frequency and beamed down to Earth. The Earth-based part is a large antenna farm. The antenna elements are raised above ground, and the energy density in the system is low enough that cattle can graze on the land below, although no human in his right mind would want to live there. If birds wander into the beam, they grow warm and presumably will fly away. The beam density isn't enough to harm aircraft that stray into the system; and if the beam gets off center from the antenna farm, it shuts itself off through a rather simple control system. Nearly all the waste heat from the system is left in space and what the be, sunlight that would have come to Earth anyway -- thus the over-all heat balance of the Sun-Earth system is not changed. That's the concept, which is -- it's humorous that I can say this, but it's true -- simple enough. Can we build it? Surely. We know far more about than we did about going to the Moon when John Kennedy gave us that task. Is it economical? That depends partly on one's definition of "economical." Certainly compete with #-a-barrel oil. What we have to pay in international problems to keep oil at  I #bbl is something else again -- and will oil stay at that price anyway? In the very long run we must have solar power because there just isn't that much oil left at any price; so the economic question is one of time as much as anything else. Manufacture of materials in space is in much the same situation as are, and we know how to go about doing the job; we don't really know the costs or the profits to be made. some first cuts made at answering these questions. Representative materials such as organics (urokinase in the example), films (silicon ribbons) and alloys (highcoercive strength magnets) were analyzed for market potential, probable sales price, cost of manufacture on Earth and cost of manufacture in space. The one discussed at the meeting was magnets, in which it was assumed that there was a market potential of # (i a per cent) of the present purchases for very efficient magnets selling at # a kilogram, a price some users already pay. Now this type of analysis requires a lot of assumptions about coststo-orbit, what facilities might be available in orbit, where raw materials might be found (if they can be mined on the Moon, the profits can increase; but there's not enough market potential to set up a Moon Base if that's all you mine, so how much of the "overhead" of a Moon Base must be charged to this particular operation?), and the like. The overall conclusion was that this space operation could be profitable with a return of about # on investment; not bad, but also not a very firm number. You get similar results if you analyze other space processes. The "profits" are just too dependent on the numbers you assume. We don't know enough about the space environment and the costs of getting there. Today your hacrtwi pump # gdons of miles of blood vessels. One way to help your heart is to help the people who fight the diseases that can stop it. That's us. The American Heart Association. We're doing everything in our power to fight the leading cause of death in this country: heart disease and stroke. With scientific research, professional and public education, community health programs, and many more. Help your heart. Help us fight heart diseases. Your money is our ammunition. Please give generously to the American Heart Association. ( Note, though, that there are alternate routes. A German privateinvestment group known as OTmodule of their proposed privately owned satellite-launching company, and they fully expect to be able to put payload in orbit by #I at costs that they say will be "market-oriented," which is to say system will never be man-rated and is intended to be a routine "common carrier" for space packages: communications satellites, of course, but also a capability to send up raw materials for manufacturing in space, and fuel to bring down finished space products. This is what leaves economic analyses of space operations in a confused state -- but it is also why the whole field is so exciting. Consider: If there are space manufacturing operations that may be profitable by themselves, they are almost certainly going to be profitable in company with others. If the Solar Power Satellites are built, there will be sizeable communities of people in space. Many of the life-support problems will be solved. It doesn't cost much to add a manufacturing module to a space power station -- that is, not much compared to the price of putting up the first station. If you have a Moon Base to mine of a capability to mine other minerals up there, where the gravity costs are so much less (it takes only a fraction of the fuel to get from Lunar surface to Lunar orbit as compared to going from Earth to Earth orbit), will not be prohibitively expensive. Moreover, there's a very good chance that all the oxygen required for space operations can come from the Moon. At the A AS meeting. Professor G. K. O'Neill, the Princeton physics professor of O'Neill Colony fame, showed movies of a working model of his mass-driver -- a device that might be used to launch Lunar materials into Lunar orbit without using rockets at all. The concept is old to science fiction, of course: electric sleds that go across the Lunar surface fast enough to give their payloads Lunar escape velocity; but it's not ours alone any more. The engineers are hard at work designing them and building test models. With a working Moon Base and a working mass-driver on the Moon, a number of space operations are dearly profitable. With a working Solar Power Satellite, manufacturing is profitable. If manufacturing operations in cept comes closer to being competitive with present-day power generation. Meanwhile, one group of economists has identified # billion in spinoff benefits from past space activities. This includes twenty new services; # new products; # new processes; and # product upgradings. It does not include incalculables such as Earthwatch pollution monitoring. Very few of these benefits were expected when space research began. Most weren't even dreamed of. was one of the few -- perhaps the only -- successes of the US government in the past twenty years, and at no time did space's share exceed # of the government's overall budget. (For that matter, ask anyone when was the last time he felt truly proud of the United States and the likelihood is high that he'll say July #, #. "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.")    Which brings us to another part anything, is government's proper role in space development? Speakers advocated everything from total abandonment by government to the creation of a Space Exploitation AuThe anti-govemment hardliners have two points: Government is inefficient and will waste the money; or space development will make government so powerful that we'll never escape its snares. Certainly we all of us have misgivings about increasing government power, and anything that sends more money flowing through Washington creates new layers of bureaucracy; but one wonders how we'll ever get to Table One without government activity. After all, the most violent advoasking for more than the # the space budget had back in Apollo days. It's not really much money if we can all agree that the Federal budget ought to be cut, surely there's room for the cuts in programs that don't have so many obvious benefits? It isn't as though the money is likely to be left in the hands of taxpayers if it's not spent on space. Then too, Adam Smith, hardly an advocate of the Welfare State, said that there are some enterprises which are so expensive and have so many benefits to the general good (without much chance of profit for individual investors) that they are the proper activity of the central government. He was thinking of projects such as harbors and canals but I doubt he would have disapgle or Challenger. Exploration by US teams: Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Fremont, polar exploration teams, the Hydrographic and Geographic bureaus and the like -- all these are old traditions in this country. Their benefits are pretty obvious; and providing access to space, developing basic technology, answering some of the unknown questions that keep us from making good profit-risk estimates about space operations -- these seem to me to be very proper activities for Washington to undertake. More proper, in fact, than many of the things the federal government does "for us" now. I realize this is an open question worth a lot more discussion. The opening of the "high frontier" could be the most important activity, excluding religion, in the history of mankind. How we go about it can hardly be trivial. On the other hand, if we don't do it at all -- and it looks as though we can't without considerably more early development work than profit-making companies will undertake -- the loss may then be the most important event in our history. The problem with private investment in space is that right now the front-end costs are very high and the return is not really predictable. I can have faith that the spinoff technologies will be valuable, but I can't guarantee they'll be valuable to those who invest the money. A magnet-manufacturing firm just isn't equipped to make profits from new management techniques, more efficient use of electrical power, better vacuum seals, higher yields from algae farms or many of the totally unexpected benefits space development may not merely give us but require as a condition for getting out there. Or take Earth-observation satellites as an example. One of their major benefits was in the hundred on weapons: Through the use of observation satellites we were able to obtain much better intelligence estimates of Soviet strategic strength than we could have otherwise, and thus we did not have to construct weapons to counter possible threats. How can any private firm profit from that? (Oh, sure, private companies, as well as each of us, profited from the lower taxes; but such general-good benefits can hardly be financed through private contributions, not in this real world we live in.) Lest this paper become one of those rambling essays rediscovering the wheel, let's leave the subject. It's one I'll be glad to discuss in person at, say, the Los Angeles in '#I Convention.    a small contingent of the opposition. "Environmentalists," various "concerned" groups, some of whom say flatly that "humanity hasn't earned the right to go to space"; others who are frankly and openly against the whole idea of "progress" and want us to use our energies in "appropriate technology" or want the world to have universally and equally shared poverty rather than differentials between wealthy and poor nations. Dr. Philomena Grddzka of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company gave what I thought was the best reply of the symposium when she observed that in her view, the appropriate-technology people were in effect "trying to preserve as many mind-stultifying jobs as possible," and that world society, given the growth of bureaucracy and unions and large organizations, was "far more in danger of creeping feudalism than of any new technology." There were others, though, who had more cogent objections to space industries. Their motivations are similar to those of the first group but at least their opposition is expressed in technical, rather than poetic, terms. For example, they say that we cannot have a closedsystem ecology in space; we don't even know enough about ecology on Earth to set one up here. How, then, are we to have complete recycling in space colonies and Moon Bases? As I said above, many of those objections come from groups which obviously do not want the answers to their questions: They ask to taunt, not for information. Still, answers are coming forth'. The single most exciting paper in the symposium, according to both Joe Haldeman and myself, was "Use of Outer Planet Satellites and Asteroids as Sources of Raw Materials for Life-Support Systems," by Peter M. Mol ton and Ted E. Devine, both of Batelle Northwest Laboratories in Richland, Washington. This paper analyzed requirements for large space operations. It examined the costs of supplying space-manufacturing facilities from Earth and concluded the obvious: We can't afford to ship up all that food and water for "once-through" use. They then looked realistically at recycling and concluded that we don't yet know how to manage that with sufficient efficiency. They examined what's likely to be available on the Moon, and from best evidence, there's simply not enough carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen for self-sufficiency; certainly not enough to supply an expanding industrial base. Given the realities of rocket transport, simply going out to the asteroid belt -- where it is quite likely that the missing elements are found in abundance -- won't do the job either. The two-way transport costs are too high. Therefore, out in the asteroid belt there will have to be facilities not only for mining and refining compounds vital to the space and Lunar bases, but also for manufacturing the rocket fuels to get these materials from the belt to Earth orbit. This is possible but it requires relatively permanent asteroid stations -- and those must be supplied with food and water. Can we farm the asteroids for selfsufficiency? Molton and Devine then proceeded to design an asteroid farm. It consists of a big mirror shaped something like a saucer. By big they don't mean enormous -- only about # meters in radius. On top of this sits a cup-shaped dome about # meters in radius, having as a cap an overhead reflector. Various support systems for the planets -- even on Ceres the gravity is only about # that of the Earth's -- were examined. Tests were made. The costs of transporting various soil enrichments, trace elements, fertilizers, etc., from Earth to the Ceres base for use in the "farms" were considered. The whole system was then analyzed in terms of costs and benefits to near-Earth space activities, building up this picture of the future: Earth exports information, entertainment and the like, with some very high-value material exports. In return. Earth receives an almost unlimited supply of rare metals, minerals and space-processed, high-cost products. The Lunar Base does support the near-Earth satellites (it takes less fuel, and therefore costs less, to go from the Moon-to-Earth orbit than from Earth-to-Earth orbit), exporting some finished products, raw materials and oxygen. The Moon Base is also the main support supply-line for an asteroid colony. The asteroid bases import oxygen and support technology from the Moon. It is even possible that many of the personnel in the asteroid system are actually permanent residents on the Moon, taking a ten-year tour of duty out in the belt. The asteroid bases export kerogen (carbonaceous chrondritic material containing carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, and known to good probability to be relatively plentiful in the asteroid belt). One can even see the sources of future conflict here: The asteroid bases have everything the Moon colony does, plus kerogens. All they lack are quick access to the satellite facilities near Earth and the more intense solar energy at Earth orbit. A tendency to want independence is predictable. There's a lot more in this paper, all hard data. No, of course Molton and Devine haven't "solved" all the problems of making space colonies self-sufficient, nor do they claim to have. They have shown one possible route and demonstrated that with some reasonable assumptions about the value of space-processed materials, the whole operation can be profitable: Earth puts up the money for the initial development and obtains an unlimited supply of rare metals and such in return. There were other such papers, and the contrast between the careful work of the engineers and scientists -- showing their assumptions, stating the unknowns in their work and getting their math right -- the contrast between them and the opponents of the space program couldn't be greater. Example: My one-time debate opponent, John Holt: "If L-# is a point where the gravitational fields of earth and moon cancel each other out, any movement toward one would lead it to further movement in that direction, there being no correcting or opposing force... it would be hard for those on earthwhen it (the space colony) did get there." A neat demonstration of ignorance of high-school physics. Or the biologist who "proves" that "the people who can conceive of this clever solution (space colonies) cannot be part of it" and that those who will go to space won't be smart enough to live there; thus, he says, he has shown us "the workings of a Reductio ad Paradoxium -- overrides all other approaches... O'Neill's colonies run right up against a political rap-out. There is no need to look further into technical feasibility once we understand the political rap-out." And he is -- I am not joking -- quite incensed that we would waste any more time on studying the technology of space since he has proved that space colonies are "rapped out." Silly... and yet not too different from the acts of faith which we in science fiction professed in the early days. On faith and imagination we worked toward a goal that most of us didn't really understand and toward which only a few could make any direct technical contribution. Part of our job in the old days was answering the silly arguments of those of opposing faith; was keeping the flame burning while others went out and gathered hard data. That time has come. The data are flowing in and the hard analysis begins. We can make use of much of that. It happens that I am at this moment expanding and revising a story of an asteroid colony (Bind Your Sons to Exile, a short version of which appeared in a now-defunct magazine) that will be published by Ace next fall -- with forty interior illustrations by a major artist yet! If you think you recognize in that book some of the concepts I got from Molton and Devine, you'll be quite correct. The scientists are doing the designs for us. When it comes to space industrialization and near-term space technology, we science-fiction writers have to make a readjustment. It's not ours alone any more.  tures. The Histories, Ships and Actions of Humanoid, Cyborg, Alien, Android, Robotoid, Clone, and other Super Civilizations that defy description. The Series can be played by the purchase of only one book that specific weapons, tactics and rulings. Master Fleet Commander's Manual (#). play WD, you must have a combat manual for the. low cost of #. The following games are available -- cost of Manual not included: #. the Planets' resources, life-support, and values. Seven Types of Ships with Missile Forces and # types of Planetary Ground Armies. # counters, #-D play! Star Ships, Massive Null Guns, Battle Cruisers, Heavy Cruisers, and many other ship types. Use the Gravitational Wells, Deadly Gas Clouds, etc. # Scenarios can be played by # to # people, from # hours to more, AD -- Desert Fox -- D-Day -- Midway -- Waterloo -- Civil War -- Ancient Series, Miniatures, and more Science FicOrder From: Dad came and went. He returned to Amber long enough to provide instructions concerning the coming conflict with the Courts of Chaos, and then he rode off again. In a strange reenactment of my most recent experiences in Tir-na Nog'th, Benedict and Dara were summoned to the throne room by Martin. There, Benedict lost his new arm to a ghostly me, just as the ghostly Benedict had lost it to the real me in the city in the sky. Martin had summoned Dara by means of a Trump the like of which I had never before seen. I learned that morning that his set had been made by Merlin -- my son by Dara -- of whose existence I had not been aware. While I was still reeling from this knowledge Dara began giving orders in Dad's name, producing his signet to back them up. This was too much. I got in touch with Fiona at the place of the primal Pattern, where I'd guessed Dad might have gone. I was right. He was there. I learned from Fiona that he was about to risk his life in an attempt to repair the Pattern. I had Fi trump me through. I seized the Jewel of Judgment from Dad and was set to try repairing the Pattern myself when he and Dworkin were able to stop me. Dad had a talk with me then. He had decided, he told me, that he wanted me to be his successor, with Dara as my queen. I made what I think was one of my wiser decisions and turned him down. He sent me back to Amber then, with instructions to prepare for a long journey and await his presence outside the city. I did this, and he got in touch with me later -- creating a red bird from my blood to bear me the Jewel when he was finished with it. Then he bade me ride for the Courts of Chaos. I rode as I had never ridden before, and the bird did finally bring me the Jewel. By this, I knew that Dad had finished his attempt to repair the Pattern and might well be dead. Also, he might well have failed, in which case the very fabric of existence was being unraveled slowly at my back. With these cheerful thoughts, I continued through Shadow toward the Courts of Chaos, encountering my brother Brand, who tried to force me to give him the Jewel on our first meeting and tried to talk me out of it on our second. Neither effort succeeded. Then Brand ambushed me, slaying Star, my mount. He almost nailed me, too, but was attacked by my red familiar bird and had to depart. I continued on by foot, passing through a strange valley which seemed to mark the end of all order. I haven't decided yet whether the greatest pest in the place was a nihilistic bird who wanted to convert me or a jackal who only wanted to eat me. I survived both of them and made it to a plateau which I hoped lay near my goal. Alas, it did not. Then I did the only thing I saw left to do. Assuming the worst -- that Dad had failed and all the Shadow was now being engulfed by waves of Chaos -- I strove with my remaining strength to inscribe a new Pattern. I succeeded, too, only to have the Jewel snatched from me by Brand, who promptly vanished with it. visions of Brand appearing on the battlefield where die forces of Amber and Chaos fought, Jewel pulsing about his neck. Apparently his control over it was sufficient, as he saw it, to enable him to turn things against us. I saw him lashing out with lightning bolts among our troops. I saw him summoning great winds and hailstorms to strike at us. I almost wept. All of this, when he could still redeem himself by coming in on our side. Just winning was not enough for him now, though. He had to win for himself, and on his own terms. And I? I had failed. I had thrown up a Pattern against the Chaos, a thing I had never thought I could do. Yet this would be as nothing if the battle was lost and Brand returned and wiped out my work. To have come this close, passing through everything that I had, and then to fail here... it made me want to cry "Injustice!" though I knew the universe did not run in accordance with my notions of equity. I gnashed my teeth and spat some dirt I had mouthed. I had been charged by our father to take the Jewel to the place of battle. I had almost made it. A sense of strangeness came over me then. Something was calling for my attention. What? The silence. The raging winds and the thunder had ceased. The air was still. In fact, the air felt cool and fresh. And on the other side of my eyelids, I knew that there was light. I opened my eyes. I saw a sky of a bright, uniform white. I blinked, I turned my head. There was something off to my right... A tree. A tree stood where I had planted the staff I had cut from old Ygg. It was already far taller than the staff itself had been. I could almost see it growing. And it was green with leaves and white with a sprinkling of buds; a few blossoms had opened. From that direction the breeze brought me a faint and delicate scent which offered me some comfort. I felt along my sides. I did not seem to have any broken ribs, though my guts still felt knotted from the kick I had taken. I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles and ran my hands through my hair. I sighed heavily then and rose to one knee. Turning my head, I regarded the prospect. The plateau was the same, yet somehow nyt the same. It was still bare but was no longer harsh. Likely an effect of the new illumination. No, there was more to it than that... I had continued to turn, completing my scanning of the horizon. It was not the same place where I had commenced my walk. There were differences both subtle and gross: altered rock formations, a dip where there had been a rise, a new texture to the stone beneath and near me, in the distance what appeared to be soil. I stood and it seemed that now, from somewhere, I caught the scent of the sea. This place had an entirely different feeling to it than the one to which I had mounted -- so long ago, it seemed. It was too much of a change for that storm to have wrought. It reminded me of something. I sighed again, there at the Pattern's center, and continued to consider my surroundings. Somehow, in spite of myself, my despair was slipping away and a feeling of -- "refreshment" seems somehow the best word -- was rising within me. The air was so clean and sweet, and the place had a new, unused feeling about it. I -- Of course. It was like the place of the primal Pattern. I turned back to the tree and regarded it again, higher already. Like, yet unlike... There was something now in the air, the ground, the sky. This was a new place. A new primal Pattern. Everything about me then was a result of the Pattern in which I stood. I suddenly realized that I was feeling more than refreshment. It was now a sense of elation, a kind of joy, that was moving through me. This was a clean, fresh place and I was somehow responsible for it. Time passed. I just stood there watching the trees, looking around me, enjoying the euphoria that had come over me. Here was some kind of victory, anyway -- until Brand came back to wipe it out. Suddenly I was sober again. I had to stop Brand, I had to protect this place. I was at the center of a Pattern. If this one behaved like the other, I could use its power to project myself anywhere I desired. I could use it to go and join the others now. I dusted myself off. I loosened my blade in the scabbard. Things might not be as hopeless as they had seemed earlier. I had been told to convey the Jewel to the place of battle. So Brand had done it for me; it would still be there. I would simply have to go and take it back from him, somehow, to make things tum the way they were supposed to have fallen. I looked all around me. I would have to return here, to investigate this new situation at another time, if I survived what was to come. There was mystery here. It hung in the air and drifted on the breeze. It could take ages to unravel what had occurred when I had drawn the new Pattern. I saluted the tree. It seemed to stir as I did so. I adjusted my rose and pushed it back into shape. It was time to move again. There was a thing I had yet to do. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. I tried to recall the lay of the land before the final abyss at the Courts of Chaos. I saw it then, beneath that wild sky, and I peopled it with my relatives, with troops. I seemed to hear the sounds of a distant battle as I did this. The scene adjusted itself, came clearer. I held the vision an instant longer, then charged the Pattern to take me there... A moment later, it seemed, I stood upon a hilltop beside a plain, a cold wind whipping my cloak about me. The sky was that crazy, turning, stippled thing I remembered from last time -- half-black, half psychedelic rainbows. There were unpleasant fumes in the air. The black road was off to the right now, crossing that plain and passing beyond it over the abyss toward that knighted citadel, firefly gleams flickering about it. Gauzy bridges drifted in the air, extending from afar in that darkness, and strange forms traveled upon them as well as upon the black road. Below me on the field was what seemed to be the main concentration of troops. At my back, I heard something other than Time's winged chariot. Turning toward what must have been north by a succession of previous reckonings regarding its course, I beheld the advance of that devil-storm through distant mountains, flashing and growling, coming on like a sky-high glacier. So I had not stopped it with the creation of a new Pattern. It seemed that it had simply passed by my protected area and would continue on until it got to wherever it was going. Hopefully then, the thing would be succeeded by whatever constructive impulses were now spreading outward from the new Pattern, with the reimposition of order throughout the places of Shadow. I wondered how long it would take for the storm to get here. I heard the sound of hoofs and turned, drawing my blade... A homed rider on a great black horse was bearing down upon me, something like firelight glowing in his eyes. I adjusted my position and waited. He seemed to have descended from one of the gauzy roadways which had drifted in this direction. We were both fairly far removed from the main scene of action. I watched as he mounted the hill. Good horse, that. Nice chest. Where the hell was Brand? I wasn't looking for just any fight. I watched the rider as he came on, the crooked blade in his right hand. I repositioned myself as he Science Fiction by women about women Those "Women of Wonder" are back! Bui unlike the first two volumes, this new collection focuses on the contemporary, more overtly feminist generation of writers whose stories address women's issues directly. A Vintage Original. #, paperbound, now at your bookstore. Recent Science Fiction Edited, with an inlroduclion and notes by Vintage Books  A division of Random House moved in to cut me down. When he swung, I was ready with a parry that pulled his arm within reach. I caught hold of it and dragged him from his mount. "That rose..." he said as he fell to the ground. I do not know what else he might have said because I cut his throat, and his words and everything else about him were lost with the fiery slash. I whirled then, drawing Grayswandir away, sprinted several paces and had hold of the black charger's bridle. I spoke with the horse to calm him and led him away from the flames. After a couple of minutes we were on better terms, and I mounted. He was skittish at first, but I just had him pace the hilltop lightly while I continued to observe. The forces of Amber appeared to be on the offense. Smouldering corpses were all over the field. The main force of our enemies was drawn back onto a height near the lip of the abyss. Lines of them, not yet broken but hard pressed, were falling back slowly toward it. On the other hand, more troops were crossing that abyss and joining the others who held the heights. Estimating their growing numbers and their position quickly, I judged that these might be readying an offense of their own. Brand was nowhere in sight. Even if I had been rested and wearing armor, I would have had second thoughts about riding down and joining in the fray. My job right now was to locate Brand. I doubted that he would be directly involved in the fighting. I looked off to the sides of the battle proper, seeking a lone figure. No... perhaps the far side of the field. I would have to circle to the north. There was too much that I could not see to the west. I turned my mount and made my way down the hill. It would be so pleasant to collapse, I decided. Just to fall down in a heap and sleep. I sighed. Where the hell was Brand? I reached the bottom of the hill and turned to cut through a culvert. I needed a better view -- "Lord Corwin of Amber!" He was waiting for me as I rounded a bend in the depression, a big, corpse-colored guy with red hair and a horse to match. He wore coppery armor with greenish tracings, and he sat facing me, still as a statue. "I saw you on the hilltop," he said. "You are not mailed, are you?" I slapped my chest. He nodded sharply. Then he reached up, first to his left shoulder, then to his right, then to his sides, opening fastenings upon his breastplate. When he had them undone, he removed it, lowered it toward the ground on his left side and let it fall. He did the same with his greaves. "I have long wanted to meet you," he said. "I am Borel. I do not want it said that I took unfair advantage of you when I killed you." Borel... the name was familiar. Then I remembered. He had Dara's respect and affection. He had been her fencing teacher, a master of the blade. Stupid, though, I saw. He had forfeited my respect by removing his armor. Battle is not a game, and I had no desire to make myself available to any presumptuous ass who thought otherwise. Especially a skilled ass, when I was feeling beat. If nothing else, he could probably wear me down. "Now we shall resolve a matter which has long troubled me," he said. I replied with a quaint vulgarism, wheeled my black and raced back the way I had come. He gave chase immediately. As I passed back along the culvert, I realized that I did not have a sufficient lead. He would be upon me in a matter of moments with my back all exposed, to cut me down or force me to fight. However, while limited, my choices included a little more than that. "Coward!" he cried. "You flee combat! Is this the great warrior of whom I have heard so much?" I reached up and unfastened my cloak. At either hand, the culvert's lip was level with my shoulders, then my waist. I rolled out of the saddle to my left, stumbled once and found my footing. The black continued on. I moved to my right, facing the draw. Catching my cloak in both hands, I swung it in a reverse-veronica maneuver a second or two before Borel's head and shoulders came abreast of me. It swept over him, drawn blade and all, muffling his head and slowing his arms. I kicked then, hard. I was aiming for his head, but I caught him on the left shoulder. He. was spilled from his saddle, and his horse, too, went by. Drawing Grayswandir, I leaped after him. I caught him just as he had brushed my cloak aside and was struggling to rise. I skewered him where he sat and saw the startled expression on his face as the wound began to flame. "Oh, basely done!" he cried. "I had hoped for better of thee!" "This isn't exactly the Olympic Games," I said, brushing some sparks from my cloak. I chased down my horse then and mounted. This took me several minutes. As I continued on northward, I achieved higher ground. From there I spotted Benedict directing the battle, and in a draw far to the rear, I caught a glimpse of Julian at the head of his troops from Arden. Benedict was apparently holding them in reserve. I kept going, toward the advancing storm, beneath the half-dark, half-painted, revolving sky. I soon reached my goal, the highest hill in sight, and began to mount it. I halted several times on the way up, to look back. I saw Deirdre in black armor, swinging an axe; Llewella and Flora were among the archers. Fiona was nowhere in sight. Gerard was not there either. Then I saw Random on horseback, swinging a heavy blade, leading an assault toward the enemy's high ground. Near him was a knight clad in green whom I did not recognize. The man swung a mace with deadly efficiency. He wore a bow upon his back and held a quiver of gleaming arrows at his hip. The sounds of the storm came louder as I reached the summit of my hill. The lightning flickered with the regularity of a neon tube and the rain sizzled down, a fiberglass curtain that had now passed over the mountains. Below me, both beasts and men -- and more than a few beastmen -- were woven in knots and strands of battle. A cloud of dust hung over the field. Assessing the distribution of forces, however, it did not appear to me that the growing forces of the enemy could be pushed much farther. In fact, it seemed that it was just about time for the counterattack. They appeared to be ready up in their craggy places, and just waiting for the order. I was about a minute and a half off. They advanced, sweeping down the slope, reinforcing their lines, pushing our troops back, driving ahead. And more were arriving from beyond the dark abyss. Our own troops began a reasonably orderly retreat. The enemy pressed harder, and when things seemed about ready to be turned into a rout, an order must have been given. I heard the sound of Julian's  hom, and shortly thereafter I saw him astride Morgenstern, leading the men of Arden onto the field. This balanced the opposing forces almost exactly and the noise level rose and rose while the sky turned above us. I watched the conflict for perhaps a quarter of an hour, as our own forces slowly withdrew across the field. Then I saw a one-armed figure on a fiery striped horse suddenly appear atop a distant hill. He bore a raised blade in his hand and he was faced away from me, toward the west. He stood unmoving for several long moments. Then he lowered the blade. I heard trumpets in the west, and at first I saw nothing. Then a line of cavalry came into view. I started. For a moment, I thought Brand was there. Then I realized it was Bleys leading his troops to strike at the enemy's exposed flank. And suddenly our troops in the field were no longer retreating. They were holding their line. Then they were pressing forward. Bleys and his riders came on, and I realized that Benedict had the day again. The enemy was about to be ground to pieces. Then a cold wind swept over me from out of the north, and I looked that way again. The storm had advanced considerably. It must have started moving faster just recently. And it was darker now than it had been, with brighter flashes and louder roars. And this cold, wet wind was increasing in intensity. I wondered then... would it simply sweep over the field like an annihilating wave and that be that? What of the effects of the new Pattern? Would these follow, to restore everything? Somehow I doubted this. If this storm smashed us, I'd a feeling we would stay smashed. It would require the force of the Jewel to permit us to ride it out until order was restored. And what would be left if we survived it? I simply could not guess. So what was Brand's plan? What was he waiting for? What was he going to do? I looked out over the battlefield once more... Something. In a shadowy place on the heights where the enemy had regrouped, been reinforced, and down which it had stormed... something. A tiny flash of red... I was sure I had seen it. I kept watching, waiting. I had to see it again, to pinpoint it... A minute passed. Two, perhaps... There! And again. I wheeled the black charger. It looked possible to make it around the enemy's near flank and up to that supposedly vacant height. I raced down the hill and began that course. It had to be Brand with the Jewel. He had chosen a good, safe spot, from which he commanded a view of the entire battlefield as well as the approaching storm. From there, he could direct its lightning into our troops as the front advanced. He would signal a retreat at the proper moment, hit us with the storm's strange furies, then sidetrack the thing to bypass the side he was backing. It seemed the simplest and most effective use of the Jewel under the circumstances. I would have to get close fast. My control of the stone was greater than his, but it diminished with distance, and he would have the Jewel on his person. My best bet would be to charge right into him, to get within control range at all costs, take over command of the stone and use it against him. But he might have a bodyguard up there with him. That troubled me, because dealing with it could slow me disastrously. And if he did not, what was to prevent him from teleporting himself away if the going got too rough? Then what could I do? I would have to start all over, hunting him again. I wondered whether I could use the Jewel to keep him from transporting himself. I did not know. I resolved to try. It might not have been the best of plans, but it was the only one I had. There was no longer time to plot. As I rode, I saw that there were others headed for that height, also. Random, Deirdre and Fiona, mounted and accompanied by eight horsemen, had made their way through the enemy lines, with a few other troops -- friends or foes, I could not tell, maybe both -- riding hard behind them. The knight clad in green seemed to be moving the fastest, gaining on them. I did not recognize him -- or her, as the case might be. I did not doubt the objective of the vanguard, however -- not with Fiona there. She must have detected Brand's presence and be leading the others to him. A few drops of hope fell upon my heart. She might be able to neutralize Brand's powers, or minimize them. I leaned forward, still bearing to my left, hurrying my horse along. The sky kept turning. The wind whistled about me. A terrific clap of thunder rolled by. I did not look back. I was racing them. I did not want them to get there before me, but I feared that they would. The distance was just too great. If only they would tum and see me coming, they would probably wait. I wished there had been some way of giving them a sign of my presence earlier. I cursed the fact that the Trumps no longer worked. I began shouting. I screamed after them, but the wind blew my words away and the thunder rolled over them. "Wait for me! Damn it! It's Corwin!" Not even a glance in my direction could I get from them. I passed the nearest engagements and rode along the enemy's flank, out of range of missiles and arrows. They seemed to be retreating faster now and our troops were spreading out over a larger area. Brand must be getting ready to strike. Part of the rotating sky was covered by a dark cloud which had not been above the field minutes before. I turned toward my right, behind the retreating forces, racing on toward those hills the others were already mounting. The sky continued to darken as I neared the foot of the hills, and I feared for my kinsmen. They were getting too close to him. He would have to do something. Unless Fiona was strong enough to stop him... The horse reared and I was thrown to the ground at the blinding flash which had occurred before me. The thunder cracked before I hit the earth. I lay there for several moments, dazed. The horse had run off, was perhaps fifty meters, away, before he halted and began to move about uncertainly. I rolled onto my stomach and looked up the long slope. The other riders were also down. Their group had apparently been struck by the discharge. Several were moving, more were not. None had yet risen. Above them, I saw the red glow of the Jewel, back beneath an underhang, brighter and steadier now, and the shadowy outline of the figure who wore it. I began crawling forward, upward and to my left. I wanted to get out of line of sight with that figure before I risked rising. It would take too long to reach him crawling, and I was going to have to skirt the others now, because his attention would be with them. I made my way carefully, slowly, using every bit of cover in sight, wondering whether the lightning would be striking in the same place again soon -- and if not, when he would begin pulling disaster down upon our troops. Any minute now, I judged. A glance back showed me our forces spread over the far end of the field, with the enemy pulled back and coming this way. Before too long, in fact, it seemed I might have them to worry about, too. I made it into a narrow ditch and wormed my way south for perhaps ten meters. Out again then on the far side, to take advantage of a rise, then some rocks. When I raised my head to take stock of the situation, I could no longer see the glow of the Jewel. The cleft from which it had shone was blocked by its own eastern shoulder of stone. I kept crawling, though, near to the lip of the great abyss itself, before I bore to my right once more. I reached a point where it seemed safe to rise, and I did so. I kept expecting another flash, another thunderclap -- nearby or on the field -- but none came. I began to wonder why not. I reached out, trying to sense the presence of the Jewel, but I could not. I hurried toward the place where I fiad seen the glow. I glanced back over the abyss to be sure that no new menaces were approaching from that direction. I drew my blade. When I reached my goal, I stayed close to the escarpment and worked my way northward. I dropped low when I came to its edge and peered around. There was no red glow. No shadowy figure either. The stony recess appeared to be empty. There was nothing suspicious anywhere in the vicinity. Could he have teleported again? And if so, why? I rose and passed about the rocky rise. I continued moving in that direction. I tried once more to feel the Jewel, and this time I made a faint contact with it -- somewhere off to my right and above, it seemed. Silent, wary, I moved that way. Why had he left his shelter? He had been perfectly situated for what he had been about. Unless... I heard a scream and a curse. Two different voices. I began to run. XI. I passed the niche and kept going. Beyond it there was a natural trail winding upward. I mounted this. I could see no one as yet, but my sense of the Jewel's presence grew stronger as I moved. I thought that I heard a single footfall from off to my right and I whirled in that direction, but there was no one in sight. The Jewel did not feel that near either, so I continued on. As I neared the top of the rise, the black drop of Chaos hanging behind, I heard voices. I could not distinguish what was being said, but the words were agitated. I slowed as I neared the crest, lowered myself, and peered around the side of a rock. Random was a small distance ahead of me and Fiona was with him, as were Lords Chantris and Feldane. All, save Fiona, held weapons as if ready to use them, but they stood perfectly still. They were staring toward the edge of things -- a shelf of rock slightly above their level and perhaps fifteen meters distant -- the place where the abyss began. Brand stood in that place, and he was holding Deirdre before him. She was unhelmed, her hair blowing wild, and he had a dagger at her throat. It appeared that he had already cut her slightly. I dropped back. I heard Random say softly, "Is there nothing more you can do, Fi?" "I can hold him here," he said, "and at this range, I can slow his efforts at weather control. But that is all. He's got some attunement with it and I do not. He also has proximity going for him. Anything else I might try, he can counter." Random gnawed his lower lip. "Put down your weapons," Brand called out. "Do it now, or Deirdre's dead." "Kill her," Random said, "and you lose the only thing that's keeping you alive. Do it, and I'll show you where I'll put my weapon." Brand muttered something under his breath. Then, "Okay. I will start by mutilating her." Random spat. "Come on!" he said. "She can regenerate as well as the rest of us. Find a threat that means something, or shut up and fight it out!" Brand was still. I thought it better not to reveal my presence. There must be something I could do. I ventured another look, mentally photographing the terrain before I dropped back. There were some rocks way off to the left, but they did not extend far enough. I saw no way that I might sneak up on him. "I think we are going to have to rush him and chance it," I heard Random say. "I don't see anything else. Do you?" Before anyone answered him, a strange thing occurred. The day began to grow brighter. I looked all about for the source of the illumination, then sought it overhead. The clouds were still there, the crazy sky doing its tricks beyond them. The brightness was in the clouds, however. They had paled and were now glowing, as if they masked a sun. Even as I watched, there was a perceptible brightening. "What is he up to now?" Chantris asked. "Nothing that I can tell," Fiona said. "I do not believe it is his doing." "Whose then?" There was no answer that I could overhear. I watched the clouds grow brighter The largest and brightest of them seemed to swirl then, as if stirred. Forms tossed within it, settled. An outline began to take shape. Below me, on the field, the sounds of battle lessened. The storm itself was muted as the vision grew. Something was definitely forming in the bright place above our heads -- the lines of an enormous face. "I do not know, I tell you," I heard Fiona say in response to something mumbled. Before it finished taking form, I realized that it was my father's face in the sky. Neat trick, that. And I had no idea what it represented either. The face moved, as if he were regarding us all. There were lines of strain there, and something of concern to his expression. The brightness grew a little further. His lips moved. When his voice came down to me, it was somehow at an ordinary conversational level rather than the vast booming I had expected: "I send you this message," he said, "before undertaking the repair of the Pattern. By the time you receive it, I will already have succeeded or failed. It will precede the wave of Chaos which must accompany my endeavor. I have reason to believe the effort will prove fatal to me." His eyes seemed to sweep across the field. "Rejoice or mourn, as you would," he went on, "for this is either the beginning or the end. I will send the Jewel of Judgment to Corwin as soon as I have finished with it. I have charged him to bear it to the place of conflict. All of your efforts there will be as nothing if the wave of Chaos cannot be averted. But with the Jewel, in that place, Corwin should be able to preserve you until it passes." I heard Brand's laugh. He sounded quite mad now. "With my passing," the voice continued, "the problem of the succession will be upon you. I had wishes in this regard, but I see now that these were futile. Therefore, I have no choice but to leave this on the horn of the unicom. "My children, I cannot say that I am entirely pleased with you, but I suppose this works both ways. Let it be. I leave you with my blessing, which is more than a formality. I go now to walk the Pattern. Goodbye." Then his face began to fade and the brightness drained out of the cloudbank. A little while, and it was gone. A stillness lay upon the field. "... and, as you can see," I heard Brand saying, "Corwin does not have the Jewel. Throw down your weapons and get the hell out of here. Or keep them and gel out. I do not care. Leave me alone. I have things to do." "Brand," Fiona said, "can you do what he wanted of Corwin? Can you use it to make that thing miss us?" "I could if I would," he said. "Yes, I could turn it aside." "You will be a hero if you do," she said gently. "You will earn our gratitude. All past wrongs will be forgiven. Forgiven and forgotten. We -- " He began to laugh wildly. " You forgive we?" he said. "You, who left me in that tower, who put the knife into my side? Thank you, sister. It is very kind of you to offer to forgive me, but excuse me if I decline." "All right," Random said, "what do you want? A " You forgive we?" he said. "You, who left me in that tower, who put the knife into my side? Thank you, sister. It is very kind of you to offer to forgive me, but excuse me if I decline." "All right," Random said, "what do you want? An apology? Riches and treasure? An important appointment? All of these? They are yours. But this is a stupid game you are playing. Let us end it and go home, pretend it was all a bad dream." "Yes, let us end it," Brand replied. "You do that by throwing down your weapons first. Then Fiona releases me from her spell, you all do an about face and march north. You do it or I kill Deirdre." "Then I think you had better go ahead and kill her and be ready to fight it out with me," Random said, "because she will be dead in a little while anyway, if we let you have your way. All of us will." I heard Brand's chuckle. "Do you honestly think I am going to let you die? I need you -- as many of you as I can save. Hopefully Deirdre, too. You are the only ones who can appreciate my triumph. I will preserve you through the holocaust that is about to begin." "I do not believe you," Random said. "Then take a moment and think about it. You know me well enough to know that I will want to rub your noses in it. I want you as witnesses to what I dcr. In this sense, I require your presence in my new world. Now, get out of here." "You will have everything you want plus our gratitude," Fiona began, "if you will just -- " "Go!" I knew that I could delay no longer. I had to make my move. I also knew that I could not reach him in time. I had no choice but to try using the Jewel as a weapon against him. I reached out and felt its p esence. I closed my eyes and summoned my powers. Hot. Hot, I thought. It is burning you, Brand. It is causing every molecule in your body to vibrate faster and faster. You are about to become a human torch -- I heard him scream. "Corwin!" he bellowed. "Stop it! Wherever you are! I'll kill her! Look!" him, I rose to my feet. I glared at him across the distance that separated us. His clothing was beginning to smoulder. "Stop it!" he cried, and he raised the knife and slashed Deirdre's face. I screamed and my eyes swam. I lost control of the Jewel. But Deirdre, her left cheek bloody, sank her teeth into his hand as he moved to cut her again. Then her arm was free, and she jabbed her elbow into his ribs and tried to pull away. As soon as she moved, as soon as her head dropped, there was a silver flash. Brand gasped and let go the dagger. An arrow had pierced his throat. Another followed an instant later and stood out from his breast, a little to the right of the Jewel. He stepped backward and made a gurgling noise. Only there was no place to which he might step from the edge of the abyss. His eye went wide as he began to topple. Then his right hand shot forward and caught hold of Deirdre's hair. I was running by then, shouting, but I knew that I could not reach them in time. Deirdre howled, a look of terror on her bloodstreaked face, and she reached out to me... Then Brand, Deirdre and the Jewel were over the edge and falling, vanished from sight gone... I believe that I tried to throw myself after them, but Random caught hold of me. Finally, he had to hit me, and it all went away.    When J came around, I lay upon the stony earth farther back from the edge of that place where I had fallen. Someone had folded my cloak into a pillow for me. My first vision was of the turning sky, reminding me somehow of my dream of the wheel the day I had met Dara. I could feel the others about me, hear their voices, but I did not at first tum my head. I just lay there and regarded the mandala in the heavens and thought upon my loss. Deirdre... she had meant more to me than all the rest of the family put together. I cannot help it. That is how it was. How many times had I wished she were not my sister. Yet I had reconciled myself to the realities of our situation. My feelings would never change, but... now she was gone, and this thought meant more to me than the impending destruction of the world. Yet, I had to see what was happening now. With the Jewel gone, everything was over. Yet... I reached out, trying to feel its presence, wherever it might be, but there was nothing. I began to rise then, to see how far the wave had advanced, but a sudden arm pushed me back. "Rest, Corwin." It was Random's voice. "You're beat. You look as if you have just crawled through hell. There is nothing you can do now. Take it easy." "What difference does the state of my health make?" I replied. "In a little while, it will not matter." I made to rise again, and this time the arm moved to support me. "All right, then," he said. "Not that much worth seeing, though." I suppose that he was right. The fighting appeared to be over except for a few isolated pockets of resistance by the enemy, and these were rapidly being enveloped, their combatants slain or captured, everyone moving in this direction, withdrawing before the advancing wave which had reached the far end of the field. Soon our height would be crowded with all of the survivors from both sides. I looked behind us. No new forces were approaching from the dark citadel. Could we retreat to that place when the wave finally reached us here? Then what? The abyss seemed the ultimate answer. "Soon," I muttered, thinking of Deirdre. "Soon... " Why not? I watched the stormfront, flashing, masking, transforming. Yes, soon. With the Jewel gone along with Brand -- "Brand..." I said. "Who was it finally got him?" "I claim that distinction," said a familiar voice which I could not place. I turned my head and stared. The man in green was seated on a rock. His bow and quiver lay beside him on the ground. He flashed an evil smile in my direction. It was Caine. "I'll be damned," I said, rubbing my jaw. "A funny thing happened to me on the way to your funeral." "Yes. I heard about it." He laughed. "You ever kill yourself, Corwin?" "Not recently. How'd you manage it?" "Walked to the proper shadow," he said, "waylaid the shadow of myself there. He provided the corpse." He shuddered. "An eerie feeling, that. Not one I'd care to repeat." "But why?" I said. "Why fake your death and try to frame me for it?" "I wanted to get to the root of the trouble in Amber," he said, "and destroy it. I thought it best to go underground for that. What better way than by convincing everyone that I was dead? I finally succeeded, too, as you saw." He paused. "I'm sorry about Deirdre, though. But I had no choice. It was our last chance. I did not really think he would take her with him." I looked away. "I had no choice," he repeated. "I hope you can see that." I nodded. "But why did you try to make it look as if I had killed you?" I asked. Just then Fiona approached with Bleys. I greeted them both and turned back to Caine for my answer. There were things I wanted to ask Bleys, too, but they would wait. "Well?" I said. "I wanted you out of the way," he said. "I still thought you might be behind the whole thing. You or Brand. I had it narrowed down that far. I thought it might even be the two of you in it together -- especially with him struggling to bring you back." "You have that wrong," said Bleys. "Brand was trying to keep him away. He had learned that his memory was returning and -- " "I gather," Caine relied, "but at the time it looked that way. So I wanted Corwin back in a dungeon while I searched for Brand. I lay low then and listened in on the Trumps to everything everyone said, hoping for a clue as to Brand's whereabouts." "That's what Dad meant," I said. "What?" "He implied there was an eavesdropper on the Trumps." "I do not see how he could have known. I had learned to be completely passive about it. I had taught myself to deal them all out and touch all of them lightly at the same time, waiting for a stirring. When it came, I would shift my attention to the speakers. Taking you one at a time, I even found I could sometimes get into your minds when you were not using the Trumps yourselves -- if you were sufficiently distracted and I allowed myself no reaction." "Yet he knew," I said. "It is entirely possible. Likely, even," said Fiona, and Bleys nodded. Random drew nearer. "What did you mean when you asked about Corwin's side?" he inquired. "How could you even know about it unless -- " Caine merely nodded. I saw Benedict and Julian together in the distance, addressing their troops. At Caine's silent movement, I forgot them. "You?" I croaked. "You stabbed me?" "Have a drink, Corwin," Random said, passing me his flask. It was a dilute wine. I gulped it. My thirst was immense, but I stopped after several good swigs. "Tell me about it," I said. "All right. I owe you that," he said. "When I learned from Julian's mind that you had brought Brand back to Amber, I decided that an earlier guess had been correct -- that you and Brand were in it together. That meant you both had to be destroyed. I used the Pattern to project myself into your chambers that night. There I tried to kill you, but you moved too fast and you somehow managed to Trump out before I got a second chance." "Well, damn your eyes," I said. "If you could touch our minds, couldn't you have seen that I was not the man you were looking for?" He shook his head. "I could only pick up surface thoughts and reactions to your immediate environment. Not always that, even. And I had heard your curse, Corwin. And it was coming true. I could see it all around us. I felt that we would all be a lot safer with you and Brand both out of the way. I knew what he could do, from his actions back before your return. I could not get at him just then, though, because of Gerard. Then he began to grow stronger. I made one effort later, but it failed." "When was that?" Random asked. "That was the one Corwin got blamed for. I masked myself. In case he managed to get away as Corwin had, I did not want him knowing I was still around. I used the Pattern to project myself into his chambers and tried to finish him off. We were both hurt -- there was a lot of blood around -- but he managed to Trump away, too. Then I got in touch with Julian a while back and joined him for this battle, because Brand just had to show up here. I had some silver-tipped arrows made because I was more than half-convinced that he was no longer like the rest of us. I wanted to kill him fast and do it from a distance. I practiced my archery and came looking for him. I finally found him. Now everyone tells me I was wrong about you, so I guess your arrow will go unused." "Thanks a lot." "I might even owe you an apology." "That would be nice." "On the other hand, I thought that I was right. I was doing it to save the rest -- " I never did get Caine's apology, because just then a trumpet blast seemed to shake the entire world -- directionless, loud, prolonged. We cast about, seeking its source. Caine stood and pointed. "There!" he said. My eyes followed his gesture. The curtain of the stormfront was broken off to the northwest, at the point where the black road emerged from it. There a ghostly rider on a black horse had appeared and was winding his hom. It was a while before more of its notes reached us. Moments later, two more trumpeters -- also pale, and mounted on black steeds -- joined him. They raised their horns and added to the sound. "What can it be?" Random asked. "I think I know," Bleys said, and Fiona nodded. "What, then?" I asked. But they did not answer me. The horsemen were beginning to move again, passing along the black road, and more were emerging behind them. I watched. There was a great silence on the heights about me. All of the troops had halted and were regarding the procession. Even the prisoners from the Courts, hemmed by steel, turned their attention that way. Led by the pale trumpeters, came a mass of horsemen mounted on white steeds, bearing banners, some of which I did not recognize, behind a man-thing who bore the unicorn standard of Amber. These wer e followed by more musicians, some of them playing upon instruments of a sort I had never seen before. Behind the musicans marched homed man-shaped things in light armor, long columns of them, and every twentieth or so bore a great torch before him, reaching high above his head. A deep noise came to us then -- slow, rhythmic, rolling beneath the notes of the trumpets and the sounds of the musicians -- and I realized that the foot soldiers were singing. A great deal of time seemed to pass as this body advanced along that black way across the distant track below us, yet none of us stirred and none of us spoke. They passed, with the torches and the banners and the music and the singing, and they finally came to the edge of the abyss and continued on over the near-invisible extension of that dark highway, their torches flaring against the blackness now, lighting their way. The music grew stronger, despite the distance, with more and more voices added to that chorus, as the guard continued to emerge from that flashing stormcurtain. An occasional roll of thunder passed by, but this could not drown it; nor did the winds which assailed the torches extinguish any so far as I could see. The movement had a hypnotic effect. It seemed that I had been watching the procession for countless days, years perhaps, listening to the tune I now recognized. Suddenly a dragon sailed through the stormfront, and another, and another. Green and golden and black as old iron, I watched them soar on the winds, turning their heads to trail pennons of fire. The lightning flashed behind them and they were awesome and magnificent and of incalculable size. Beneath them came a small herd of white cattle, tossing their heads and blowing, beating the ground with their hoofs. Riders passed beside and among these, cracking long black whips. Then came a procession of truly bestial troops from a shadow with which Amber sometimes has commerce -- heavy, scaled, taloned -- playing upon instruments like bagpipes, whose skirling notes came to us with vibrance and pathos. These marched on, and there were more torchbearers and more troops with their colors -- from shadows both distant and near. We watched them pass and wind their way into the far sky, like a migration of fireflies, their destination that black citadel called the Courts of Chaos. There seemed no end to it. I had lost all track of time. But the stormfront, strangely, was not advancihg as all this went on. I had even lost something of my sense of person, to be caught up in the procession which passed us. This, I knew, was an event which could never be repeated. Bright flying things darted above the columns and dark ones floated, higher. There were ghostly drummers, beings of pure light, and a flock of floating machines; I saw horsemen, clad all in black, mounted on a variety of beasts; a wyvem seemed to hang in the sky for a moment, like part of a fireworks display. And the sounds -- of hoofbeats and footfalls, of singing and skirling, of drumming and trumpeting -- mounted to a mighty wave that washed over us. And on, on, on out over the bridge of darkness, wound the procession, its lights lining the great span for a vast distance now. Then, as my eyes drifted back along those lines, another shape emerged from the glistening curtain. It was a cart draped all in black and drawn by a team of black horses. At each comer rose a staff which glowed with blue fire, and atop it rested what could only be a casket, draped with our Unicom flag. The driver was a hunchback clad in purple and orange garments, and I knew even at that distance that it was Dworkin. It is thus, then, I thought. I do not know why, but somehow it is fitting, fitting that it be the Old Country to which you travel now. There were many things that I might have said while you lived. Some of them I did say, but few of the right words were ever spoken. Now it is over, for you are dead. As dead as all of those who have gone before you into that place where the rest of us soon may follow. I am sorry. It was only after all these years, on your assuming another face and form, that  finally knew you, respected you, even came to like you -- though you were a crochety old bastard in that form, too. Was the Ganelon self the real you all along, or was it only another form adopted for convenience's sake. Old Shapeshifter? I will never know, but I like to think that I finally saw you as you were, that  met someone I liked, someone  could trust, and that it was you. I wish that  might have known you even better, but I am grateful for this much... "Dad... ?" Julian said softly. "He wanted to be taken beyond the Courts of Chaos and into the final darkness when his time came at last," Bleys said. "So Dworkin once told me. Beyond Chaos and Amber, to a place where none reigned." "And so it is," Fiona said. "But is there order somewhere beyond that wall they came through? Or does the storm go on forever? If he succeeded, it is but a passing matter and we are in no danger. But if he did not... "It does not matter," I said, "whether or not he succeeded, because I did." "What do you mean?" she asked. "I believe that he failed," I said, "that he was destroyed before he could repair the Old Pattern. When I saw this storm coming -- actually, I experienced a part of it -- I realized that I could not possibly make it here in time with the Jewel, which he had sent to me after his efforts. Brand had been trying to, get it from me all along the way -- to create a new Pattern, he said. Later that gave me the idea. When I saw that all else was failing, I used the Jewel to create a new Pattern. It was the most difficult thing I ever did, but I succeeded. Things should hold together after this wave passes, whether we survive it or not. Brand stole the Jewel from me just as I completed it. When I recovered from his attack, I was able to use the new Pattern to project me here. So there is still a Pattern, no matter what else happens." "But, Corwin," she said, "what if Dad succeeded?' ' "I do not know." "It is my understanding," Bleys said, "from things that Dworkin told me, that two distinct Patterns could not exist in the same universe. Those in Rebma and Tir-na Nog'th do not count, being but reflections of our own...' "What would happen?" I said. "I think there would be a splitting off, the founding of a new existence -- somewhere . ' ' "Then what would its effect be upon our own?" "Either total catastrophe or no effect whatsoever," Fiona said. "I can make a case for its going either way." "Then we are right back where we started," I said. "Either things are going to fall apart shortly or they are going to hold." "So it would seem," Bleys said. "It does not matter, if we are not going to be around after that wave gets to us," I said. "And it will." I turned my attention back to the funeral cortege. More horsemen had emerged behind the wagon, followed by marching drummers. The pennons and torches and a long line of foot soldiers. The singing still came to us, and far, far out over the abyss it seemed the procession might finally have reached that dark citadel...  hated you for so long, blamed you for so many things. Now it is over, and none of those feelings remain. Instead, you had even wanted me to be king, a job for which -- I see now -- I am not fitted. I see that I must have meant something to you after all. I will never tell the others. It is enough to know it myself. But I can never think of you in the same fashion again. Already your image blurs. I see Gane Ion's face where yours should be. He was my companion. He risked his neck for me. He was you, but a different you -- a you that I had not known. How many wives and enemies had you outlived? Were there many friends? I think not. But there were so many things about you of which we knew nothing. I never thought that  would see your passing. Ganelon -- father -- old friend and enemy, I bid you farewell. You join Deirdre, whom  have loved. You have preserved your mystery. Rest in peace, if that be your will. I give you this withered rose I have borne through hell, casting it into the abyss. I leave you the rose and the twisted colors in the sky.  will miss you... Finally the long line came to an end. The last marchers emerged from the curtain and moved away. The lightning still flared, the rain still poured and the thunder rumbled. No member of the procession that I could recall had seemed wet, however. I had been standing at the edge of the abyss, watching them pass. There was a hand on my arm. How long it had been there, I could not tell. Now that the passage was complete, I realized that the stormfront was advancing again. The rotation of the sky seemed to be bringing more darkness upon us. There were voices off to my left. It seemed they had been talking for a long while, but I had not been hearing their words. I realized that I was shaking, that I ached all over, that I could barely stand. "Come and lie down," Fiona said. "The family has shrunken enough for one day." I let her lead me away from the edge. "Would it really make any difference?" I asked. "How much longer do you think we have?" "We do not have to stay here and wait for it," she said. "We will cross the dark bridge into the Courts. We have already broken their defense. The storm may not reach that far. It may be stopped here by the abyss. We ought to see Dad off, anyway." I nodded. "It would seem we have small choice but to be dutiful unto the end." I eased myself down and sighed. If anything, I felt even weaker now. "Your boots... she said. "Yes." She pulled them off. My feet throbbed. "Thanks." "I'll get you some rations." I closed my eyes. I dozed. Too many images played within my head to make for a coherent dream. How long this lasted, I do not know, but an old reflex drew me to wakefulness at the sound of an approaching horse. Then a shadow passed over my eyelids. I looked up and beheld a muffled rider, silent, still. I was regarded. I looked back. No threatening gesture had been made, but there was a feeling of antipathy in that cold gaze. "There lies the hero," said a soft voice. I said nothing. "I could slay you easily now." I recognized the voice then, though I had no idea as to the reason behind the sentiment. "I came upon Borel before he died," she said. "He told me how ignobly you had bested him." I could not help it, I could not control it. A dry chuckle rose in my throat. Of all the stupid things to get upset about. I might have told her that Borel had been far better equipped and far fresher than I, and that he had come to me looking for a fight. I might have told her that I do not recognize rules when my life is at stake, or that I do not consider war a game. I could have said a great number of things, but if she did not know them already or did not choose to understand them, they would not have made a bit of difference. Besides, her feelings were already plain. So I simply said one of the great trite truths, "There is generally more than one side to a story." "I will settle for the one I have," she told me. I thought about shrugging, but my shoulders were too sore. "You have cost me two of the most important persons in my life," she said then. "Oh?" I said. "I'm sorry, for you." "You are not what I was led to believe. I had seen you as a truly noble figure -- strong, yet understanding and sometimes gentle. Honorable..." The storm, much closer now, was flaring at her back. I thought of something vulgar and said it. She let it pass as if she had not heard me. "I am going now," she said, "back to my own people. You have won the day thus far -- but that way lay Amber." She gestured toward the storm. I could only stare. Not at the raging element. At her. "I doubt there is anything of my new allegiance left for me to renounce," she continued. "What about Benedict?" I asked softly. "Don't..." she said, and she turned away. There was a silence. Then, "I do not believe that we will ever meet again," she said, and her horse carried her off to my left, in the direction of the black road. A cynic might have decided that she had simply chosen to toss in her lot with what she now saw as the winning side, as the Courts of Chaos would likely survive. I simply did not know. I could only think of what I had seen when she had gestured. The cowling had slipped away and I had gotten a glimpse of what she had become. It had not been a human face, there within the shadows. But I turned my head and watched until she was gone. With Deirdre, Brand and Dad gone, and now a parting with Dara on these terms, the world was much emptier -- whatever was left of it. I lay back and sighed. Why not just remain here when the others departed, wait for the. storm to wash over me, and sleep...dissolve? I thought of Hugi. Had I digested his flight from life as well as his flesh? I was so tired that it seemed the easiest course... "Here, Corwin." I had been dozing again, though only for a moment. Fiona was beside me once more, with rations and a flask. Someone was with her. "I did not wish to interrupt your audience," she said. v "So I waited." "You heard?" I asked. "No, but I can guess," she said, "since she is gone. Here." I swallowed some wine, turned my attention to the meat, the bread. Despite my state of mind, they tasted good to me. "We will be moving soon," Fiona said, casting a glance at the raging stormfront. "Can you ride?" "I think so," I said. I took another drink of the wine. "But too much has happened, Fi," I told her. "I have gone numb emotionally. "I broke out of a sanitarium on a shodow world. I have tricked people and I've killed people. I have calculated and I have fought. I won back my memory and I have been trying to straighten out my life. I have found my family, and found that I love it. I have been reconciled with Dad. I have fought for the kingdom. I have tried everything I know to hold things together. Now it appears that it has all come to nothing, and I have not enough spirit left to moum further. I have gone numb. Forgive me." She kissed me. "We are not yet beaten. You will be yourself again," she said. I shook my head. "It is like the last chapter of Alice," I said. "If I shout, 'You are only a pack of cards!' I feel we will all fly into the air, hand of painted pasteboards. I am not going with you. Leave me here. I am only the Joker, anyway." "Right now I am stronger than you are," she said. "You are commg. "It is not fair," I said softly. "Finish eating," she said. "There is still some time." As I did, she went on, "Your son Merlin is waiting to see you. I would like to call him up here now." "Prisoner?" "Not exactly. He was not a combatant. He just arrived a little while ago, asking to see you." I nodded and she went away. I abandoned my rations and took another swig of wine. I had just become nervous. What do you say to a grown son you only recently learned existed? I wondered about his feelings toward me. I wondered whether he knew of Dara's decision. How should I act with him.? I watched him approach from a place where my relatives were clustered, far off to my left. I had wondered why they had left me by myself this way. The more visitors I received, the more apparent it became. I wondered whether they were holding up the withdrawal because of me. The storm's moist winds were growing stronger. He was staring at me as he advanced, no special expression on that face so much like my own. I wondered how Dara felt now that her prophecy of the destruction seemed to have been fulfilled I . I wondered how her relationship with the boy actually stood. I wondered... many things. He leaned forward to clasp my hand. "Father..."he said. "Merlin." I looked into his eyes. I rose to my feet, still holding his hand. "Do not get up," "It is all right." I clasped him to me, then released him. "I am glad," I said. Then, "Drink with me." I offered him the wine, partly to cover my lack of words. "Thank you." He took it, drank some and passed it back. "Your health," I said and took a sip myself. "Sorry I cannot offer you a chair." I lowered myself to the ground. He did the same. "None of the others seemed to know exactly what you have been doing," he said, "except for Fiona, who only said that it had been very difficult." "No matter," I said. "I am glad to have made it this far, if for no other reason than this. Tell me of yourself, son. What are you like? How has life treated you?" He looked away. "I have not lived long enough to have done too much," he said. I was curious whether he possessed the shapeshifting ability, but restrained myself from asking at this point. No sense in looking for our differences when I had just met him. "I have no idea what it was like," I said, "growing up in the Courts." He smiled for the first time. "And I have no idea what it would have been like anywhere else," he responded. "I was different enough to be left to myself a lot. I was taught the usual things a gentlemen should know: magic, weapons, poisons, riding, dancing. I was told that I would one day rule in Amber. This is not true anymore, is it?" "It does not seem too likely in the foreseeable future," I said. "Good," he replied. "This is the one thing I did not want to do." "What do you want to do?" "I want to walk the Pattern in Amber as mother did and gain power over Shadow, so that I might walk there and see strange sights and do different things. Do you think I might?" I took another sip and I passed him the wine. "It is quite possible," I said, "that Amber no longer exists. It all depends on whether your grandfather succeeded in something he attempted -- and he is no longer around to tell us what happened. However, one way or the other, there is a Pattern. If we live through this demon storm, I promise you that I will find you a Pattern, instruct you and see you walking it." "Thanks," he said. "Now will you tell me of your journey here?" "Later," I told him. "What did they tell you of me?" He looked away. "I was taught to dislike many of the things about Amber," he finally said. Then, after a pause, "You, I was taught to respect, as my father. But I was reminded that you were of the party of the enemy." Another pause. "I remember that time on patrol, when you had come to this place and I found you, after your fight with Kwan. My feelings were mixed. You had just slain someone I had known, yet -- I had to admire the stand you took. I saw my face in your own. It was strange. I wanted to know you better." The sky had rotated completely and the darkness was now above us, the colors passing over the Courts. The steady advance of the flashing stormfront was emphasized by this. I leaned forward and reached for my boots, began pulling them on. Soon it would be time to begin our retreat. "We will have to continue our conversation on your home ground," I said. "It is about time to fly the storm." He turned and considered the elements, then looked back out over the abyss. "I can summon a filmy if you wish." "One of those drifting bridges such as you rode on the day we met?" "Yes," he answered. "They are most convenient. I -- " There had been a shout from the direction of my assembled relatives. Nothing threatening seemed to be about when I regarded them. So I got to my feet and took a few steps toward them, Merlin rising to follow me. Then I saw her. A white form, pawing air it seemed, and rising out of the abyss. Her front hoofs finally struck its brink, and she came forward and then stood still, regarding us all: our unicorn. For a moment my aches and my fatigue fell away. I felt a tiny twinge of something like hope as I considered the dainty white form which stood before us. A part of me wanted to rush forward, but something much stronger kept me motionless, waiting. How long we stood thus, I could not tell. Below, on the slopes, the troops had been readying themselves for travel. The prisoners had been bound, horses loaded, equipment secured. But this vast army in the process of march-ordering its gear had suddenly halted. It was not natural that they should have become aware so quickly, but every head that I could see was turned in this direction, toward the unicorn on the brink, limned against that wild sky. I was suddenly aware that the wind at my back had grown still, though the thunder continued to rumble and explode and the lightning flares threw dancing shadows before me. I thought of the other time I had seen the unicorn -- at the recovery of the Shadow-Caine's body, the day I had lost a fight with Gerard. I thought of the stories I had heard... could she really help us? The unicom took a step forward and halted. She was such a lovely thing that somehow I was heartened just by looking upon her. It was a kind of aching feeling that she aroused, though; hers was a. beauty of the sort to be taken in small doses. And I could somehow sense the unnatural intelligence within that snowy head. I wanted very badly to touch her, but knew that I could not. She cast her gaze all about. Her eyes lighted upon me, and I would have looked away if I were able. This was not possible, however, and I returned that gaze in which I read an understanding beyond my own. It was as if she knew everything about me, and in this instant had comprehended all of my recent trials -- seeing, understanding, possibly sympathizing. For a moment I felt that I saw something of pity and a strong love reflected there -- and perhaps a touch of humor. Then her head turned and the gaze was broken. I sighed involuntarily. At that moment, in the lightning's glare, I thought I caught a glimpse of something shining at the side of her neck. She advanced another step, and now she was looking upon the crowd of my kinsmen toward which I had been moving. She lowered her head and made a small whickering noise. She tapped at the earth with her right front hoof. I felt Merlin at my side. I thought upon things I would be losing if it all ended here. She took several dancing steps forward. She tossed her head and lowered it. It seemed that she did not like the notion of approaching so large a group of people. At her next step, I saw the glitter again, and more. A tiny spark of red shone through her fur farther down on her neck. She was wearing the Jewel of Judgment. How she had retrieved it, I had no idea. And it did not matter. If she would just deliver it, I felt that I could break the storm -- or at least shield us from this section of it until it had passed. But that one glance had been enough. She paid me no more heed. Slowly, carefully, as if ready to bolt at the slightest disturbance, she advanced upon the spot where Julian, Random, Bleys, Fiona, Llewella, Benedict and several nobles stood. I should have realized then what was occurring, but I did not. I simply watched the sleek beast's movements as she picked her way forward, passing about the periphery of the group. She halted once again and lowered her head. Then she shook her mane and dropped to her front knees. The Jewel of Judgment hung suspended from her twisted, golden hom. The tip of her hom was almost touching the person before whom she knelt. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, I saw our father's face in the heavens, and his words came back to me: "With my passing, the problem of the succession will be upon you... I have no choice but to leave this on the hom of the unicorn." A murmur moved through the group, as I realized this same thought must be occurring to the others. The unicorn did not stir at this disturbance, however, but remained a soft, white statue, not even seeming to breathe. Slowly Random reached forward and removed the Jewel from her hom. His whisper carried to me. "Thank you," he said. Julian unsheathed his blade and placed it at Random's feet as he knelt. Then Bleys and Benedict and Caine, Fiona and Llewella. I went and joined them. So did my son. Random stood silent for a long while. Then, "I accept your allegiance," he said. "Now get up, all of you." As we did, the unicorn turned and bolted. She raced down the slope and was out of sight in a matter of moments. "I had never expected anything like this to happen," Random said, still holding the Jewel at eye level. "Corwin, can you take this thing and stop that storm?" "It is yours now," I said, "and I do not know how extensive the disturbance is. It occurs to me that in my present condition I might not be able to hold up long enough to keep us all safe. I think it is going to have to be your first regal act." "Then you are going to have to show me how to work it. I thought we needed a Pattern to perform the attunement." "I think not. Brand indicated that a person who was already attuned could attune another. I have given it some thought since then, and I believe I know how to go about it. Let's get off to one side somewhere." "Okay. Come on." Already something new had come into his voice and posture. The sudden role had begun working its change immediately, it seemed. I wondered what sort of king and queen he and Vialle would beome. Too much. My mind felt disassociated. Too much had happened too recently. I could not contain all of the latest events in one big piece of thinking. I just wanted to crawl off somewhere and sleep around the clock. Instead, I followed him to a place where a small cooking fire still smouldered. He poked at the fire and tossed a handful of sticks onto it. Then he seated himself close to it and nodded to me. I went over and sat down beside him. "About this king business," he said. "What am I going to do, Corwin? It caught me totally unprepared." "Do? Probably a very good job," I replied. "Do you think there were many hard feelings?" "If there were, they did not show," I said. "You were a good choice, Random. So much has happened recently... Dad sheltered us actually, maybe more than was good for us. The throne is obviously no plum. You have a lot of hard work ahead of you. I think the others have come to realize this." "And yourself?" "I wanted it only because Eric did. I did not realize it at the time, but it is true. It was the winning counter in a game we had been playing across the years. The end of a vendetta, really. And I would have killed him for it. I am glad now that he found another way to die. We were more alike"lhan we were different, he and I. I did not realize that until much later either. But after his death, I kept finding reasons for not taking the throne. Finally it dawned on me that it was not really what I wanted. No. You are welcome to it. Rule well, brother. I am sure that you will." "If Amber still exists," he said after a time, "I will' try. Come, let us be about this business with the Jewel. That storm is getting uncomfortably near." I nodded and took the stone from his fingers. I held it by its chain with the fire behind it. The light came through; its insides seemed clear. "Lean closer and stare into. the Jewel with me," I directed. He did this, and while we both regarded the stone, I told him, "Think of the Pattern," and I commenced thinking of it myself, trying to summon to mind its loops and swirls, its palely glowing lines. I seemed to detect a slight flaw near to the stone's center. I considered it as I thought upon the twistings, the turns, the Veils... I imagined the current which swept through me every time I essayed that complex way. The imperfection in the stone grew more distinct. I lay my will upon it, summoning it into fullness, clarity. A familiar feeling came over me as this occurred. It was that which had taken me on the day I had attuned myself to the Jewel. I only hoped that I was strong enough now to go through the experience once again. I reached out and clasped Random by the shoulder. "What do you see?" I asked him. "Something like the Pattern," he said, "only it seems to be threedimensional. It lies at the bottom of a red sea..." "Come with me then," I said. "We must go to it." Again that feeling of movement, drifting at first, then falling with increasing velocity toward the neverfully seen sinuosities of the Pattern within the Jewel. I willed us ahead, feeling my brother's presence beside me, and the ruby glow which surrounded us darkened, becoming the blackness of a clean night sky. This special Pattern grew with each thudding heartbeat. Somehow the process seemed easier than it had before -- perhaps because I was already attuned. Feeling Random beside me, I drew him along as that familiar shape grew and its starting point became apparent. As we were moved in that direction, I once again tried to encompass the totality of this Pattern and was lost, once more in what seemed its extradimensional convolutions. Great curves and spirals and knottedseeming traceries wound before us. The sense of awe I had felt earlier swept over me, and from somewhere nearby I was aware of this in Random, also. We progressed to the section of the beginning and were swept into it. There was a shimmering brightness all about us, flashed through with sparks, as we were woven into the matrix of light. This time my mind was entirely abosrbed by the process and Paris seemed far away... A subsconscious memory reminded me of the more difficult sections, and here I employed my desire -- my will, if you like -- to hurry us along the dazzling route, recklessly drawing strength from Random to accelerate the process. It was as if we negotiated the luminous interior of an enormous and elaborately convoluted seashell. Only our passage was soundless, and we ourselvgs disembodied points of sentience. Our velocity seemed to increase constantly, as did a mental aching I did not recall from the previous traversal of the design. Perhaps it was related to my fatigue, or to my efforts to hurry things so. We crashed through the barriers; we were surrounded by steady, flowing walls of brightness. I felt myself growing faint, dizzy, now. But I could not afford the luxury of unconsciousness, nor could I permit us to move more slowly with the storm as near as I remembered it. Again, regretfully, I drew strength from Random -- this time just to keep us in the game. We sped ahead. This time I did not experience the tingling, fiery sensation of somehow being shaped. It must have been an effect of my attunement. My previous passage through it might have rendered me some small immunity in this regard. After a timeless interval, it seemed that I felt Random falter. Perhaps I represented too great a drain upon his energies. I began to wonder whether I would leave him with sufficient strength to manipulate the storm if I leaned upon him any further. I resolved not to draw upon his resources any more than I already had. We were well along the way. He should be able to continue without me, if it came to that. I would simply have to hang on as best I could now. Better for me to be lost here than both of us. We swept on, my senses rebelling, the dizziness recurring. I set my will to our progress and forced everything else from my mind. It seemed we were nearing the terminus when a darkening began which I knew was not a part of the experience. I fought down panic. It was no good. I felt myself slipping away. So close! I was certain we were almost finished. It would be so easy to -- Everything swam away from me. My last sensation was a knowledge of Random's concern.    It was flickering orange and red between my feet. Was I trapped in some astral hell? I continued to stare as my mind slowly cleared. The light was surrounded by darkness and... There were voices, familiar... Things cleared. I was lying on my back, feet toward a campfire... "It is all right, Corwin. It is all right." It was Fiona who had spoken. I turned my head. She was seated on the ground above me. "Random... ?" I said. "He is all right, also -- Father." Merlin was seated off to the right. "What happened?" "Random bore you back," Fiona said. "Did the attunement work?" "He thinks so." I struggled to sit up. She tired to push me back, but I sat up anyway. "Where is he?" She gestured with her eyes. I looked and I saw Random. He was standing with his back to us about thirty meters away, on a shelf of rock, facing the storm. It was very close now, and a wind whipped his garments. Lightning trails crissed and crossed before him. The thunder boomed almost constantly. "How long -- has he been there?" I asked. "Only a few minutes," Fiona replied. "That is how long it has been -- since our return?" "No," she said. "You have been out for a fairly long while. Random talked with the others first, then ordered a troop withdrawal. Benedict has taken them all to the black road. They are crossing over." I turned my head. There was movement along the black road, a dark column heading out toward the citadel. Gossamer strands drifted between us; there were a few sparks at the far end, about the nighted hulk. Overhead, the sky had completely reversed itself, with us beneath the darkened half. Again I felt that strange feeling of having been here long, long ago, to see that this, rather than Amber, was the true center of creation. I grasped after the ghost of a memory. It vanished. I searched the lightningshot gloom about me. "All of them -- done?" I said to her. "You, me, Merlin, Random -- we're the only ones left here?" "Yes," Fiona said. "Do you wish to follow them now?" I shook my head. "I am staying here with Random." "I knew you would say that." I got to my feet as she did. So did Merlin. She clapped her hands and a white horse came ambling up to her. "You have no further need for my ministrations," she said. "So I will go and join the others in the Courts of Chaos. There are horses for you tethered by those rocks." She gestured. "Are you coming, Merlin?" "I will stay with my father, and the king." "So be it. I hope to see you there soon." "Thanks, Fi," I said. I helped her to mount and watched her ride off. I went over and sat down by the fire again. I watched Random, who stood unmoving, facing the storm. "There are plenty of rations and wine," Merlin said. "May I fetch you some?" "Good idea." The storm was so close that I could have walked down to it in a couple of minutes. I could not tell yet whether Random's efforts were having any effect. I sighed heavily and let my mind drift. Over. One way or another, all of my efforts since Greenwood were over. No need for revenge any longer. No. We had an intact Pattern, maybe even two. The cause of all our troubles. Brand, was dead. Any residuum of my curse was bound to be wiped out by the massive convulsions sweeping through Shadow. And I had done my best to make up for it. I had found a friend in my father and come to terms with him as himself before his death. We had a new king, with the apparent blessing of the unicorn, and we had pledged him our loyalty. It seemed sincere to me. I was reconciled with my entire family. I felt that I had done my duty. Nothing drove me now. I had run out of causes and was as close as I might ever be to peace. With all this behind me, I felt that if I had to die now, it was all right. I would not protest quite so loudly as I would have at any other time. "You are far from here, Father." I nodded, then smiled. I accepted some food and began eating. As I did, I watched the storm. Still too early to be certain, but it seemed that it was no longer advancing. I was too tired to sleep. Or something like that. My aches had all subsided and a wondrous numbness had come over me. I felt as if I were embedded in warm cotton. Events and reminiscences kept the mental clockwork turning within me. It was, in many ways, a delicious feeling. I finished eating and built up the fire. I sipped the wine and watched the storm, like a frosted window set before a fireworks display. Life felt good. If Random succeeded in pulling this one off, I would be riding into the Courts of Chaos tomorrow. What might await me there, I could not tell. Perhaps it might be a gigantic trap. An ambush. A trick. I dismissed the thought. Somehow, right now, it did not matter. "You had begun telling me of yourself, Father." "Had I? I do not recall what I said." "I would like to get to know you better. Tell me more." I made a popping noise with my lips and shrugged. "Then this." He gestured. "This whole conflict. How did it get started? What was your part in it? Fiona told me that you had dwelled in Shadow for many years without your memory. How did you get it back and locate the others, and return to Amber?" I chuckled. I regarded Random and the storm once more. I took a drink of wine and drew up my cloak against the wind. "Why not?" I said then. "If you've a stomach for long stories, that is... I suppose that the best place to begin is at Greenwood Private Hospital, on the shadow Earth of my exile. Yes..." The sky turned, and turned again as I spoke. Standing against the storm, Random prevailed. It broke before us, parting as if cloven by a giant's axeblade. It rolled back at either hand, finally sweeping off to the north and the south, fading, diminishing, gone. The landscape it had masked endured, and with it went the black road. Merlin tells me that this is no problem, though, for he will summon a strand of gossamer when the time comes for us to cross over. Random is gone now. The strain upon him was immense. In repose, he no longer looked as once he did -- the brash younger brother we delighted in tormenting -- for there were lines upon his face which I had never noticed before, signs of some depth to which I had paid no heed. Perhaps my vision has been colored by recent events, but he seemed somehow nobler and stronger. Does a new role work some alchemy? Appointed by the unicom, annointed by the storm, it seems that he had indeed assumed a kingly mien, even in slumber. I have slept -- even as Merlin now dozes -- and it pleases me to be, for this brief while before his awakening, the only spot of sentience on this crag at the rim of Chaos, looking back upon a surviving world, a world that has been scoured, a world which endures... We may have missed Dad's funeral, his drifting into some nameless place beyond the Courts. Sad, but I lacked the strength to move. And yet, I have seen the pageant of his passing, and I bear much of his life within me. I have said my good-byes. He would understand. And good-bye, Eric. After all this time I say it, in this way. Had you lived so long, it would have been over between us. We might even one day have become friends, all our cases for strife passed. Of them all, you and I were more alike than any other pair within the family. Save, in some ways, Deirdre and myself... but tears on this count were shed long ago. Good-bye again, though, dearest sister, you will always live somewhere in my heart. And you, Brand... with bitterness do I regard your memory, mad brother. You almost destroyed us. You nearly toppled Amber from her lofty perch on the breast of Kolvir. You would have shattered all of Shadow. You almost broke the Pattern and redesigned the universe in your own image. You were mad and evil, and you came so close to realizing your desires that I tremble even now. I am glad that you are gone, that the arrow and the abyss have claimed you, that you sully no more the places of men with your presence nor walk in the sweet airs of Amber. I wish that you had never been bom and failing that, that you had died sooner. Enough! It diminishes me to reflect so. Be dead and trouble my thinking no more. I deal you out like a hand of cards, my brothers and sisters. It is painful as well as self-indulgent to generalize like this, but you, I -- we -- seem to have changed, and before I move into the traffic again, I require a final look. Caine, I never liked you and I still do not trust you. You have insulted me, betrayed me and even stabbed me. Forget that. I do not like your methods, though I cannot fault your loyalty this time around. Peace, then. Let the new reign begin with a clean slate between us. Llewella, you possess reserves of character the recent situation did not call upon you to exercise. For this, I am grateful. It is sometimes pleasant to emerge from a conflict untested. Bleys, you are still a figure clad in light to me -- valiant, exuberant and rash. For the first, my respect; for the second, my smile. And the last seems to have at least been tempered in recent times. Good. Stay away from conspiracies in the future. They do not suit you well. Fiona, you have changed the most. I must substitute a new feeling for an old one, princess, as we have become for the first time friends. Take my fondness, sorceress. I owe you. Gerard, slow, faithful brother, perhaps we have not all changed. You stood rock-like and held to what you believed. May you be less easily gulled. May I never wrestle you again. Go down to your sea in your ships and breathe the clean salt air. Julian, Julian, Julian... is it that I never really knew you? No. Arden's green magic must have softened that old vanity during my long absence, leaving a juster pride and something I would fain call fairness -- a thing apart from mercy, to be sure, but an addition to your armory of traits I'll not disparage. And Benedict, the gods know you grow wiser as time bums its way to entropy, yet you still neglect single examples of the species in your knowledge of people. Perhaps I'll see you smile now this battle's done. Rest, warrior. Flora... charity, they say, begins at home. You seem no worse now than when I knew you long ago. It is but a sentimental dream to regard you and the others as I do, totting up my balance sheets, looking for credits. We are not enemies, any of us, now, and that should be sufficient. And the man clad in black and silver with a silver rose upon him? He would like to think that he has learned something of trust, that he has washed his eyes in some clear spring, that he has polished an ideal or two. Never mind. He may still be only a smart-mouthed meddler, skilled mainly in the minor art of survival, blind as ever the dungeons knew him to the finer shades of irony. Never mind, let it go, let it be. I may never be pleased with him. Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi? No? Then good-bye to you too, Princess of Chaos. It might have been fun. The sky is turning once more, and who can say what deeds its stained-glass light might shine upon? The solitaire has been dealt and played. Where there had been nine of us, now there are seven and one king. Yet Merlin and Martin are with us, new players in the ongoing game. My strength returns as I stare into the ashes and consider the path I have taken. The way ahead intrigues me, from hell to hallelujah. I have back my eyes, my memories, my family. And Corwin will always be Corwin, even on judgment day. Merlin is stirring now, and this is good. It is time to be about. There are things to do. Random's last act after defeating the storm was to join with me, drawing power from the Jewel, to reach Gerard through his Trump. They are cold once more, the cards, and the shadows are themselves again. Amber stands. Years have passed since we departed it, and more may elapse before I return. The others may already have trumped home, as Random has done, to take up his duties. But I must visit the Courts of Chaos now, because I said that I would, because I may even be needed there. We ready our gear now, Merlin and I, and soon he will summon a wispy roadway. When all is done in that place, and when Merlin has walked his Pattern and gone to claim his worlds, there is a journey that I must make. I must ride to the place where I planted the limb of old Ygg, visit the tree it has grown to. I must see what has become of the Pattern I drew to the sound of pigeons on the Champs-Elysees. If it leads me to another universe, as I now believe it will, I must go there, to see how I have wrought. The roadway drifts before us, rising to the Courts in the distance. The time has come. We mount and move forward. We are riding now across the blackness on a road that looks like cheesecloth. Enemy citadel, conquered nation, trap, ancestral home... we shall see. There is a faint flickering from battlement and balcony. We may even be in time for a funeral. I straighten my back and I loosen my blade. We will be there before much longer. Good-bye and hello, as always.  They knew the man was crazy -- but then, so was the job they wanted him for! Footsteps. Virgil Grissom Kinney spent so much time in the creamwhite room that he could detect sounds through the baffling and the soundproofing. Two of them. Marsface' s familiar step, favoring his right leg where I bit him once so long ago, shuffles and stomps through the floor padding at the limits of hearing. The other set of footsteps was unfamiliar. Light, even, quick. Probably Death's Angel coming to get me after having tea and biscuits with Marsface and the Master Snoop. Probably coming because Master Snoop knows I've figured a way out. I can hear both of them up there sometimes, and the Master Snoop, their machinery watching, listening, monitoring, recording every movement of every cell in my -- wha? Oh, yeah -- the door. They're here. The door appeared in a section of padding and opened inward. Mental claw, clipboard and scrimsheet in hand, pointed to Virgil. The woman gazed at the wrapped body and shook her head. Marsface. I knew it, didn't I? Same Marsface -- red, round head with its craters and gorges and mole-mountains. But Death Angel doesn't look like he's supposed to. Why is he wearing a print dress? Master Snoop's trying to screw me up. It won't work. I know how to get out and I don't need them. They're talking in their language again. Got to concentrate and break their code. It'll give me a clue. "Yes, Ms. Double, he's -- " "Double. Accent grave over the e." "Yes, Miz. You can see the lengths we had to go to restrain him. A man can kill himself against a padded wall if he keeps pounding it every moment. He dies of exhaustion and dehydration." "His class?" "Psychotic, with a good dose of manic-depressive, although I've never seen him manic. Duodrugs have no effect on him. The Pharmaceutics are mystified but I think Virgil here has a multiple personality. We can drug one or two or three of them but he always has one that surfaces unaffected." He looked worried. "Don't tell anyone though. It's not a very sound theory. The drugs should act on the brain, not the mind." The woman stepped closer to Virgil and looked into his eyes, almost the only part of his body not wrapped in restraining sheets. He lay near the center of the room, on his side, resembling a white inchworm. He did not move except to follow her with his green eyes. A curl of sweaty, greasy blond hair hung over one eyebrow. Reaching out, the woman brushed it away from his eyelid. What's she trying? To claw inside my head? I want to die on my own, damn it. I've got my escape mapped out. No, musn't think about it. Master Snoop, fuck you. Black hair falling to her shoulders and wrapping like snakes around her near-white throat. Isn't she afraid it'll strangle her? Stupid -- Death Angel doesn't have to fear its master. Snoop? But I've never heard her upstairs. Stupid again -- she must've been barefoot and walking with pregnant pause. "If the Feds were still around, he'd be certifiable. As it is, he's here because an insurance policy he filed a long time ago had an insanity-care clause." "Insanity? Is that chestnut coming back? What happened to Reality Premises and Szaszian therapy? You're keeping him against his will, aren't you?" Indignation made her stand straighten "Yes, Ms. Double. But the circumstances are very unusual. The patient likes to commit suicide. He's tried it about seven times that we know of. But he's not like most suiciders that can be left alone or that the churches get. His attempts have always involved massive property damage and danger to others." "Never touched a SeppukuKit?" "His mind doesn't run in those directions. He'd make a great daredevil but he'd keep forgetting to pull the ripcord and would land in the grandstands. That kind of suicider. Are you sure you can use him? I'll give you his complete file first." "I'll take him. And the file." She held out her hand. Taking the thin viewscrim, she slipped it into her notebook and then frowned. "But who put him in your care in the first place?" "His insurance company. His last attempt ruined about a kilauro worth of property and killed a young girl. Her parents sued and the insurance company paid off. And then paid for his perpetual care. "He's a threat, Miz. He won't kill himself by refusing to eat but he'll do anything that'll damage himself and as many material items as possible. The behavior mod doesn't work and none of us have ever gotten him to say anything." "The Brennen Trust has a place for him." "I hope so, Ms. Double." Death Angel and Marsface walk out goodbye. My plan's almost ready anyway. I'll meet the Nightsheet on my own terms. If only I had a match or could scratch my butt. Hatch my gut. Stupid.    Virgil's eyes opened after they had closed and the room changed. His body trembled inside the sheets. I did it! It worked and I didn't even have to think about it. Free! Almost. Why did I bring the sheets with me? Stupid -- they were too close to you. I'll get out, though. Did Master Snoop follow me? Don't know. Too noisy. Am I in their control room? Did I escape right into their clutches? Shit. "He's awake, Dee." The graying Pharmaceutic sat near a bank of indicators flashing red, green and turquoise. Dee Double needed no brain-wave machines to see him open his eyes. He lay on a wide table with raised edges, his body white and mummy-like against the soft black leather. The portions of the walls that had no machinery showed a soothing brown wood paneling. Lights! Sounds ! Operators! I blew it. Right in with the Master Snoop. Death Angel too. It makes sense they wouldn't let Marsface in here; they run him too. Damn. "He's looking around, Steve. Maybe we should have kept him in some sort of white room. Doesn't matter. I don't think he's as out of it as Duolab thought. Get the injection ready." Dee Double looked closer at the prone body. "Virgil Grissom Kinney," she said. The eyes riveted hers. "Good. Virgil, I'm going to give you your choice. You were never given any choices at Duolab and now I'm going to give you one. Do you understand?" Death Angel hovers over me as I lie in my coffin. Stupid coffin with no lid. Soft pink lips move and I can almost break her code. Words come through the roar. The roaring parts a bit and I break her code. She wants something. I'll go along with it. The roar's never been broken before. Break the roar and I can crack her code. Take it easy. "Good. Virgil, they tell me you like to kill yourself." She knows about them! But she must. She's one of them. Remember that. You've cracked her code, maybe you can crack theirs. The roar's less now. "I'm going to offer you a choice. I have two injections here. One is a poison that will kill you in a matter of seconds. The other will help you." Two bottles. One liter black with skull and crossbones. One white with a yellow smile face. She placed them on a table out of Virgil's view. "Blink your eyes once for the poison or twice for the other." "Fff -- " "What?" blurted Double. "Steve, he's trying to talk!" "Loosen his neck a bit." She did so, using bandage scissors to snip away the fabric. Saliva dripped down his chin. "Fff...fuh...false dichotomy." The sound startled her; the scissors dropped to the floor noisily. "I think that means he doesn't want either injection." The old man smiled wickedly and watched the woman. "Well," she said, turning back to Virgil, "it wouldn't have mattered anyway because I would have switched labels to make sure you got what was in this one." She held up the bottle with the smile face. "The other one's empty." She hung the bottle over his head. "Now, Virgil, I'm going to inject you, false dichotomy or not. The firm I represent has bought out the premium on your insurance so, in effect, we own you. We've bailed you out and you're going to pay us off. Or did you want to stay locked up forever?" What's her game? I get it. I may have cracked her cipher but not her code. I know what she's saying but not what she means. If I could get out of my room, maybe I can get out of this one too. Three, four, five times l can try. He nodded as far as his swathing allowed, then stopped and shook his head back and forth. "Do you want to say anything else?" His head shook a no. "Administer, Steve." The old man stood up and prepared a needle. One patch of Virgil's body other than his face lay open and exposed -- the injection port in his right wrist. Steve pushed the blunted needle into the plastic valve surgically sewn and laserwelded to skin and vein. The needle clicked into place. Clear serum from the bottle overhead trickled slowly through the plastic tube. Somewhere a camera's zoom lens rotated, closing in for facial reaction. The electronic measuring devices mused to themselves, recording. It's not working. Whatever they're trying, it's failing. I don't feel any different. Should l tell them, gloat-gloat? No. Play along. If I can escape, I can get away. Find something to get Master Snoop and Nightsheet at once. Drop a tanker on them. Okay. "What you're getting, Virgil, is a mixture of distilled water and ribonucleic acid. Ever heard of it?" Virgil shook his head. "Memory juice. Every living thing has it. You're getting the memories of a man who did something. We want to know why he did it. You won't be able to tell us but when he died, he had things in his head that take a long time to teach and we're just cutting comers because we're in a hurry." She paused. Virgil nodded nervously, a trickle of sweat running down his brow. one else's brain! Maybe I can get him to help me. But I don't hear him. The roar is coming back. I'm losing her cipher. Back. Focus. They're trying to make it hard for me. I'll get out. There. Less roar, and her cipher's broken again. "Would you like to know what we know about you?" He nodded carefully. "Good. Shake your head if you don't remember anything I read." She slipped the top of the scrim into her clipboard and signaled the first page. It appeared in dark gray letters against a light gray background. "You are Virgil Grissom Kinney. You are thirty-four years old. Oh, you didn't know that? It's twentyone seven. March fifth." His eyes widened. "You've been interned for twelve years, ever since you tried to kill yourself by flying into the TransAmerica Pyramid. Luckily for all but one person, a Monroe gust caught your flyer and flipped it into a power dive into Market Street, You killed a three-year-old girl." Virgil shook his head. "Well, you did. They -- your insurance company, that is -- settled with the parents and the streetowners for compensation on the stipulation that you receive perpetual care." She glanced through the next few pages, then shut off the scrim. "I emphasized tried to kill yourself because I think you don't really want to die. Do you?" "Off the scale," said Steve, reaching to reset a meter, "whatever that means. That's a key question." She nodded. "But if you don't want to die, why do you keep trying? Publicity hound? But three of your attempts were in out-of-theway spots: your snowmobile at Ostrander Lake, your powersuit against El Capitan, another powersuit against Mount Rushmore. You were found each time before you were dead but," she shrugged, "I'm not interested in your luck." She turned to Steve and whispered, "Begin sublimins." They're doing something. "You were an economist, weren't you?" Virgil nodded tentatively. "Then you'll find some of the things you'll leam easy to understand. Just think of physics as the economics of efficient atomic action. Now -- all atomic particles are composed of the following bounded energy quanta..."    Three days. Three days and  still don't understand her code. I've got her cipher figured out. The physics of space travel. I don't remember thinking much about space flight before they caught me. There was the Earthrope' s launch and its getting lost and all that when I was a kid. But what's this about teleportation? I thought I was the only one who could do that , and  didn't even know I did it when I did it and  haven't done it since. I've tried to leave this room like I left the last one but it's no good. You've got to try. Or maybe you should go along with them until you find how they teleport. Here she comes again. Death Angel in a clean white lab coat. "Virgil. I hope you're feeling well today. I'm going to unwrap you. It's going to hurt and it will be physically dangerous to you. If you aren't careful, you may die. If you want to die, I can't stop you." She removed the waste-cycling tube that connected to another tube taped to his thigh and set it aside. Large bandage scissors went to work, first on his head. "How long-has it been since they changed these? A week? Two?" A shock of wet, yellow hair was revealed on his head when she pulled the sheet away. "Thanks." She started. Regaining composure, she continued snipping away. "Three words in as many days. That's something." Maybe she's not working for Master Snoop. Could she be a free agent? Maybe Master Snoop and Night sheet aren't in cahoots any more. I need more information. Stupid. An arm fell limply to the couch. Atrophied and deathly white, its fingers twitched weakly. The other arm was the same except for a burn scar running its length. His chest heaved when freed from the restraints. "Don't," she warned. "You'll hyperventilate." Carefully she cut the cloth away from his waist and thighs. "Well, you're a real blond, all right." She jumped back when he laughed and tried to drag his hands toward his crotch. His arms wavered about helplessly, bouncing off the side of the black leather couch and coming to rest on his flat, muscleless stomach. She clipped the bindings around his legs, removed the rest of the waste tubes and then stared thoughtfully at the pitifully thin body before her. "You go on solids tomorrow. And you begin training." "And if I don't want to?" A sneer flashed palely across his lips for a second. "Thank God," she whispered...Then, louder: "Here's a scalpel. You can slash your wrists right now or I'll do it for you. Or you can kill me and try to escape. There's a limitless number of possibilities... But you don't go in for real suicide and I don't think you'd ever kill anyone intentionally." "You cut my wrists." His image swam before her. She shook her head. Failure, she thought, after all this. Or maybe he's just bluffing. She took the scalpel from his open fingers and held it over the pulsing blue veins on his scarred right wrist.  can't go through with this. It's murder. Say stop, damn you! He watched the bright sliver of metal touch his skin. She means it! "No!" His head fell back against the couch. She dropped the scalpel on a tray and sat down. Better ask it now. "Why don't you want to die?" "Nobody wants to die." "But you keep trying to. Why?" She's making the roar come back. Get her back. "What's your name?" "Dee." "Your whole name." "None of your business. It's a dumb name." He picked up the scalpel from the tray and brought it to his veins. She hesitated for an instant. "No! Okay, you win this one. My name is Double. Diehla Double. And forget the obvious jokes. My parents had a sick sense of humor. And there's an accent grave over the e." "Accent acute. Did you spring me just to give me a physics course?" Remarkable! Or is it? Maybe he just didn't like being wrapped up for a decade or so. "You've adjusted well to your new surround"You're here because Brennen Trust made a mistake. With a man named Jord Baker. You've been given some preliminary theoretical data on the concept of interstellar liminal instruction -- " Aha! " -- have also stored inside you everything Jord Baker knew. When testing time comes, you'll be remembering things you never learned before. You'll probably remember things right now as I talk. This is just about the only way to bring them to the surface to be refiled in other parts of your mind. "Jord Baker was a test pilot for the Brennen Trust. He was testing out the concept of teleportation when he decided to kill himself. Let me backtrack a bit. "Ten years ago some scientist came up with a mathematically provable theory of fourth-dimensional travel. Two years ago the Brennen Trust's technicians, studying something completely different -- nondestructive testing of ferrous alloys, I think -- accidentally teleported a piece of steel three meters. It appeared in midair, which was fortunate because the resulting small explosion killed only one man -- which was unfortunate because that man was the inventor of the process. It didn't matter, though, because we've improved on the device through experiments at Colony Four. "We finally built a small ship that could teleport itself. And the method requires no receiving station. It's not really teleportation, but a dimensional concept. I don't have a drawing scrim, but imagine a line. Every point on that line can be reached from a two-dimensional plane without having to go through any other points on that line. Similarly, any point on a plane can be reached from the third dimension without passing through any other point on the plane. The same holds true for reaching any point in space from the fourth dimension. "Now, neither I nor Jord nor you can handle the math involved in Valliardi's Proof -- that scientist I was telling you about -- but Jord could push the right buttons. He made the test, traveling from lunar from Jupiter in an instant. Well, it was an instant for him but for us he was gone for over half an hour. And then it was another half hour before we received his laser signal." She brushed her fingers across the black coil of hair wrapped around her neck. "Think of it. He vanished for thirty-nine minutes to us but it seemed instantaneous to him. Remember the stories you read -- well, at least Jord read them -- about how traveling close to the speed of light leads to contractions of time? Take a couple of years' ship time to travel to Alpha Centauri while the rest of the universe ages a dozen? Well, here you could go to the same place just like that -- " she snapped her fingers, " -- and the universe would be four years older. And you could go to the center of the galaxy just as fast -- for you. The rest of the universe will have aged thirty thousand years. "Think of it. A one-way time machine. Make the slightest miscalculation and poof! you're a hundred years into the future, all your friends dead and no way to get back but to press the button again and lose another hundred years or whatever in an instant." "I don't have any friends," said Virgil, beginning to cry. "Oh, no. I'm sorry." She stroked his head gently. "It's time you had a bath."    She won't do it. She can't. What do  know about things like that? Virgil lifted his head and then dropped it back to the cushions. He had gone along with the exercises and the solid foods. Hated one, liked the other. He had been getting a lot of sun, building up to it in the three weeks since he left Duolab. He did his exercises on the top of the Brennen Trust Building, which was located, he discovered, in downtown Houston. Every half an hour or so he watched the thin trail of vapor reach up from the south -- another launch from Velasco Liftpoint. The lessons and tests that Dee and others had been giving to him had been surprisingly easy. He knew more than the simple calculus given him in college and it all seemed to come to him at the moment he needed it. Pilot a spaceship? I'd be a man in the can, really. Just put in the coordinates they give me and punch one button. And if I put in the wrong coordinates, I appear in something solid maybe, and kapow! Like an atom bomb. He smiled. "It's today, Virgil." He turned. Double stood in the door of the access shaft. Death Angel's hair stays calm in the wind, still trying to strangle her throat. Stupid. Hair can't strangle by itself. Her gray jumpsuit ruffles loosely, her eyes squint in the sun. Lovely Death Angel. I know you work for Nightsheet. No matter. I prefer Nightsheet to Master Snoop. But to end them both... "The test? I'm ready?" "As ready as you'll ever be." She's right. The roar is almost gone. I can crack all ciphers I hear. I've almost gotten to her code too. Funny. I can break the code on a computer and know what it means when it buzzes and clicks to me but I can't break its cipher. It's the exact opposite with people. "All right. Big question -- " He wiped a handful of hair from his eyes. "Why me? Why someone locked up in a Duolab for a dozen years? And don't make it seem like you do it every day. I know what you had to do to lord's body to get The fall must have mashed him up a bit but you must have turned him to strawberry jam to get that stuff." Dee looked at him, considering. "Let's go inside." The lift descended. "We picked you because Jord was well-balanced mentally and without a hint of alternate reality premises. When a man most people would call normal just ups and kills himself -- after a period of total silence on his return -- something's wrong. Jord never attempted a suicide in his life. Never even thought about it." "That's not true. He -- no, wait. Never mind." Virgil shook his head. It's like having someone else inside my head. I remember bare, vague snatches of things that aren' t mine. "Anyway, we picked you because you've tried to commit suicide several times but never succeeded for some reason. You may last long enough to give us some idea of what's wrong with the dememory of what happened on Jord's flight, do you?" "No. He either blanked it out or it was too recent an event." "Our floor." They stepped out into the hallway. Velasco lay only a short flyer-hop south.    The Brennen Trust executive shuttle looked tiny compared to the freightcraft towering a kilometer or so away from the personal spacecraft field. The stubby rocket pointed straight up, already in liftoff position and awaiting Virgil's arrival. The gantry lift ride lasted less than a minute. The entrance hatch hung open three meters from the blunt nose of the ship, less than forty meters from the ground. Liftoff and orbital insertion went smoothly. Virgil grinned strangely during liftoff and the period of maximum dynamic pressure. He had asked for -- and gotten -- a seat by the only porthole available for viewing. He talked pleasantly with the passenger who had been bumped from the seat. The balding, business-suited man was an accountant on his way to Colony Six for a three-week vacation. He would be staying at the Sheraton Lagrange. They talked economics and praxeology until a buzzer announced their arrival at Trans World Spaceline's terminal. Virgil had not looked out the window once during the flight. The trip to the experimental ship had to be made by "taxi" -- not much more than a tank of hydrogen with seats. Virgil sat between the pilot and the man who would put him into the spacecraft. Stupid. It's not really a spaceship hut a dimension ship. Attitude jets, yeah, and emergency thrusters, but it's mostly just a needle that finds where two pieces of universe fabric touch and then pushes itself through. And I've got a secret. The earth hung five thousand kilometers over their heads for a moment, then shifted suddenly to their side as the pilot rolled to align them with the attitude of the test ship. It was unbelievably small. Virgil knew that it was only ten meters long and five wide. It seemed like a toy, only slightly larger than a family flyer. They want me to go to Saturn in that! Death Angel serves Nightsheet well. This will kill me for sure. But I've got a secret. He fingered the crumpled piece of paper jammed into the third finger of his right glove and smiled. He watched the blues and whites of Earth glitter, reflected from the stubby, wedgeshaped device. The pilot waited in the taxi, trying to pick up jabber on a shortwave. Virgil noticed the antenna trailing behind them. Security had been surprisingly lax. Frank Workman, the assistant, explained. "It's pretty crowded out here. Act innocent, play dumb, and everybody is too busy to notice you. down there. Maybe more. Up here you watch your step with nature and with men. It's a long drop." about a hundred kilometers away. Virgil climbed inside the tight, cramped compartment and fastened himself into position. Circuits completed, the ship came to life. The small screen before him glowed. "Hello, Virgil. They signaled me when you got there. The computer is getting its instructions right now." "Hi," he said. Death Angel's voice sounds strange in my helmet. Frank closes down the hatch and bangs on it twice. I wish there were people Nightsheet would spare. Air hisses in slowly. Now let's see if I can get those coordinates out of there. "Something wrong with your glove?" She looks downward, probably at her own screen. It looks like she's gazing right at my hands. "No, just nervous." Got it. He palmed the paper and held it. They'll be watching me all the while I'm here. Any attempt to change the coordinates and I'm cut off at once. But when I'm out in Saturn's orbit, it's over an hour before I even appear -- relative to their perceptions. No, wait. An hour for me to get there -- in their time, but only an instant to me; another hour for them to get my laser -- which I fire in the few minutes near Saturn I take to put in the new coordinates; followed shortly by me. No time for me to get there, none to come back -- but an hour of their time each way. It'll be as if I'm totally out of their control. I could race my laser signal back and almost win. Come in second, at least. So. Give myself a few minutes to program my own return coordinates. They'll get a laser message in teleport plus two hours -- their time -- saying that I made it to Saturn. A few moments later they hear that Duolab has blown up in a blinding fireball. Master Snoop wiped out once and for all. That's been the hard part -- deciding between Master Snoop and Nightsheet. You knew where Master Snoop was but Death Angel was only a clue to Nightsheet' s whereabouts. And beside. Master Snoop never let me go free and so they're guiltier. That's her code! Or part of it. I'm helping Nightsheet take Master Snoop. Maybe then he won't take me. Stupid -- he's a winner, takes all. Even Death Angel, someday. "Prepare for -- uh, we never did find the right word for this. Transdimensional insertion is a bit wordy. Good luck, Virgil. I'll see you in about two hours, twentyseven minutes. It'll be only a few minutes for you. I don't think the travel time will bother you." "Goodbye, Death Angel." Before she could frown, he pressed the glowing "Transfer" button. It was supposed to be instantaneous but it felt nothing like an instant. The tiny space in which he sat seemed to shrink even smaller. The roar -- it's returning. No -- different somehow. My legs! Hands. I can't hear myself scream. Hard to breathe. Nightsheet, you fooled me. Tricked me with threats of murder. Blackness closes in, walls hyperbollix in and outward. My eyes! Stupid -- I fell for it. Corridor: black on black. Can't breathe. Hear my blood not flowing, feel my heart not beating. The corridor stretches. I've never gone this far before! They've always pulled me out. Out of the snow, out of the rocks and the granite, out of the water, out of the glass, out of the brick and pavement, out of the crushed steel and burning plastic. No one to pull me out now. Death Angel, you seduced me too well. I was stupid, stupid. End of the corridor. You! Nightsheet took you and made you an agent. No, Mother, l won't be calm. Yes, I know it's soothing. I'm soothed, but I don't want to go! Yes, I see the meadows and Susan and the hill and Dad and the time I found the puppy. I don't know. You win. You all win. It' s soothing. But I wanted to -- I can see myself lying there in a half-open space suit. Stupid -- there aren't any mirrors. It's like they said. I'm really going and I'm not sorry. I go. I'm calm. Restful. No. No! A band of yellow-white stretched before him. Below it, Saturn shone, gibbous. It drifted away from him ever so slowly. As predicted, he had retained his intrinsic velocity and direction. He sat still, quiet, breathing shallowly. So that was . it. Jord Baker couldn't abandon the ecstasy of death. But I can. The transfer may seem instantaneous to cesium clocks and quantum mechanics but the mind is the last thing left before the transfer is total. Maybe that's it. Maybe not. Maybe it's a form of death with rebirth thrown in. Virgil's hand trembled; then it grew firm as he reached up and grasped the laser locking-switch. It took several minutes to find the earth. His left hand let go of the still-crumpled piece of paper. It floated, ignored, and wedged behind the seat. Virgil switched the laser on. You lose, Nightsheet. And I bet you'll lose on the return trip. And the other trips I'll be making. And you, Master Snoop, how can you keep an eye on me when I can outrace you? I've won! Finally. "This is Virgil Grissom Kinney calling Brennen Trust. All systems are functioning normal. Am returning on your prearranged coordinates. Have information on death of Jord Baker. End transmission." He pushed the "Message Repeat" button and waited a few moments before reaching toward the "Transfer" button. I'll be with you in a short while, Diehla. I've cracked the code.  Paul Walker The Plague Dogs, by Richard Adams. Illustrated by A. Wainwright. Allen Lane, Penguin Books, in association with Rex Collings. London, #. #I pp. # net The Art of Science Fiction, by Frank Kelly Freas. The Donning Co., Norfolk, Va., #. # pp. # In the Ocean of Night, by Gregory Benford. The Dial PressJames Wade, New York, #. # pp. # Galactic Dreamers: Science Fiction as Visionary Literature, edited by Robert Silverberg. Random House, New York, #. # pp. # The Future Now: Saving Tomorrow, edited by Robert Hoskins. Fawcett, Greenwich, Conn., #. # pp. # Tabby: I say, old chap, what are you reading? Tom: Richard Adams' new novel. It's all about cruelty to animals. Tabby: A noble theme, I must say. Tom: Yes, indeed. It's the story of these two dogs -- Tabby: Dogs? Did you say... dogs? Tom: Yes. Would you care to read it when I've finished? Tabby: No, thank you. I can't abide ethnic novels. Richard adams' The Plague Dogs is a complete mess. One of the few books I have read that I can say with confidence should never have been published as it stands. There is one good story in it, an article, and a couple of essays, but as a novel it is so much slush and slop. Its theme is man's inhumanity to animal. Its locale is the rugged Lake country of Wordsworth. There, amid natural beauty, is an animal-research station in which the most unnatural horrors are performed. The heroes are a large black dog named Rowf and a small terrier called Snitter, who often speaks in verse. Rowf's contribution to modem science consists of being drowned repeatedly in a metal tank to prove that domesticated animals have greater survival potential than wild ones. Snitter's is to have his brains scrambled surgically to study the effects of obscuring subjective and objective perception. Needless to say, the dogs are unhappy. Rowf has never known any other masters than the "white coats," but Snitter has, and he would like to find another. The two escape. They find themselves friendless and starving. They kill a sheep. The local people will surely hunt them down. But they acquire an ally, a "tod" (a fox, to us furriners), who teaches them how to survive in order to keep himself well-fed on mutton. Nevertheless, theirs is not to be an idyllic life in the wild. The stories of the two marauding dogs that steal chickens and kill sheep, and the involvement of a government agency, attract the attention of an unscrupulous tabloid publisher who sends in his most unscrupulous reporter, Digby Driver, to do what he can to embarrass the government. The research station refuses to admit the dogs are theirs. Digby delves. He learns that one of the laboratories was doing research on bubonic-plague germs and that all of the germ-carrying fleas cannot be accounted for. He knows perfectly well the dogs were not exposed to them but he sees the yellowjournalism possibilities of the story; and so he begins to wage a campaign for the government to take action against the dogs. A campaign that is wholly successful. The tale of the two dogs and their struggle to survive is interspersed then with the story of Digby and his victims, many of whom are victimizes themselves: the scientists, the parliamentarians, the locals good and bad. The only valid story is that of the dogs. They are, up to a point, the most interesting characters in the book. Unfortunately, Adams writes a hundred pages beyond that point. Everyone else in the novel is less a character than a bias, upon whose head Adams heaps either affection or scorn. But even our sympathy for the dogs is strained by the pointlessness of their situation. Adams wants us to be moved by their plight and indignant toward their persecutors, but their escape from the station removes them from the arena of both. We get repeated scenes of the doctors discussing the experiments, but then we are returned to the fields, where the dogs' problems are considerably different. The cold-bloodedness of the scientists is depicted as subtly as a blowtorch, and as for the locals, who are not much kinder, their indifference to the strays and their hostility to them as sheep-killers are understandable. The advent of Digby Driver is completely extraneous to Adams' theme as well. Driver is a kind of dark deus ex machina who carries the plot off in a not-very-interesting direction. The results of his fallacious stories and the subsequent involvement of parliamentary types take the story from the slime to the ridiculous. Nor are the pages and pages of travelogue prose about the Lake country, although well-written, any asset to the theme. The novel could have been set anywhere. The truth is that the whole mess never amounts to anything, either thematically or dramatically. The dogs go nowhere. The local people, who it seems to me could have tracked them down easily enough had they tried, never try. The political aspects finally result in a calling out of the army, which is put to rout by another deus ex machina so contrived and anticlimactic that it destroys whatever small drama the end may have had. Somehow Adams might still have gotten away with it had he kept to a single-minded point of view and pursued it ruthlessly: the dogs as the good guys and everybody else as a pack of rotters. But he tries to be fair. Rather than showing the terrible suffering of laboratory animals, he debates the subject among a variety of characters, each of whom makes a brief speech on some aspect of the problem of animal abuse. And then disappears. Adams realizes there is no simple answer to the problem of who should decide whether an animal experiment is scientifically justified or not. He hates them all, but he is an effort to eliminate disease. On the rest he is unclear, and so the theme is unclear. Consequently The Plague Dogs is a #-page hodgepodge of Adamsagainst-the-world, which amounts to neither an effective polemic nor an effective novel. Freas' Friezes All I know about art is that I know what I like, which is to say, I don't know much about art. And to make things worse, my favorite artists are Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. Despite these dubious credentials, I will not hesitate to say that Frank Kelly Freas' The Art of Science Fiction is the best sciencefiction book of the year and one of the greatest books of science fiction ever published. I have been admiring Freas' work for over twenty years. I used to buy Astounding and Analog just to look at his illos. And when I stopped buying them, I still browsed through every issue at the newsstand. My reaction then is the same as it is today: O-o-o-o, Ahhhhh, Wow! And for the unheard-of price of #(!) anyone can now own his own Freas collection. That has to be the best buy I have ever seen in my life, and if you have ever O-o-o-o-ed or Ahhh-ed or Wow-ed at a Freas and you miss your chance to get this, you are a fringe fan. The address is: The Donning Company, # West Bute St., Norfolk, Virginia #. There are two other editions available: a hard-cover for #, and an autographed limited edition. slip-cased, gold-embossed, and wrapped in a real cow, for #. I do not usually wax so commercial in my book reviews, but I have' perused this tall, slim volume at least a dozen times and each time found something new to delight in or to wonder at. A few may be put off by the fannish style of Freas' commentary but I found it pleasant and informative, without arrogance or pretentiousness. The man seems to be almost as charming as his art. I say "almost," because nothing could be better than that. I do disagree with some of the things he says. While I obviously admire him as an artist, I have never understood him as an illustrator. My idea of an illustrator's job is best said by Freas himself: "The best illustration does much more than simply present an incident from a story in visual form. It may indeed present such an incident, but it also captures a mood, a spirit, an idea, which is a proper and vital part of the story but which is, for one reason or another, not expressible in words." The key to my disagreement is in the word "proper." Proper to whom? And who says so? I have rarely, if ever, thought Freas' illustrations were "proper" to anything but Freas' art. For "proper" in the proper sense as it relates to illustrating a work of fiction means rendering the writer's idea in accord with the writer's imagination. That is, seeing the scene as the writer sees it himself. The trouble with Freas is that his talent and ability are so far greater than most of the writers he has illustrated -- his vision so superior, so uniquely his own -- that rather than complementing and illuminating the stories, his illustrations contradict them and intrude on them. They seem sometimes a broad parody of them. It is only when they are seen out of context, for their own sake, that their merit can be appreciated. In fairness, Asimov and Clement are quoted in the book saying the opposite about the illos Freas did for their stories. My second disagreement is that Freas is not a science-fiction artist at all, but an artist of romantic fantasy. As, I must add, was his idol and mentor, John W. Campbell. Some of the best fantasy appeared in his hard science-fiction magazine. I can best illustrate the difference by saying that Chesley Bonestell was a science-fiction artist. In Bonestell, the fact of the landscape was the point of the work. In Freas, it is only a beginning. Freas, like Campbell, looked for the wonder in and beyond the facts. Facts in themselves were never sufficient for wonder, as they are to the truly hard scientific imagination. It was the possibilities inherent in the facts, the play of ideas for its own sake, that made the Campbell imagination so influential. And it is that same playfulness with facts that makes Freas so much fun. I should add here that Freas' playfulness is one of the most important elements of his greatness -- a quality that most major sciencefiction writers lack. Freas rarely takes his tongue out of his cheek, and more often than not his works laugh out loud, not only at themselves but at science fiction itself. By the use of humor Freas is able to overcome the mind's natural resistance to accepting plausible impossibilities and to bring to his most outlandish vision a sense of earthy reality. The earthiness is there in the faces: those staring, mocking, quizzical, pain-filled faces, worn by hard work and hard times, with thick wrinkles and sensual mouths; broad-shouldered men with thick biceps; or withered old men, sered by long experience. Not the faces one would ever imagine the men of the future wearing. Hardly intellectual faces. Hardly the physiques of sedentary men. More like farmers and truck drivers and factory workers. And the women. Hell, I hate to say it, but they're not much good for anything but bedding. Bigbosomed mannikins. Characterless, eternally passive, masochistic. In his depiction of women, such as the one for "The Telzey Toy," we find the only time he achieves vulgarity. As I said, Norman Rockwell is one of my favorite artists and I like him for many of the same reasons I like Freas. There is instant communication. Instant and effective. I know precisely what both men are trying to say and I feel it and I care about it. But while Rockwell is better at his best than Freas is, he is not quite as honest. In Rockwell there is always one excessive, and excessively cute, detail that the picture would have been better without. Usually a dog or an especially cloying child, In Freas the excessive detail is usually a spaceship. Or two or three, flying in formation. But they are never cute. And while they limit the quality of the picture, they do not ruin it in the way Rockwell's excesses so often ruin his. Finally -- oh, well, why go on? This will probably be the first rave review in literary history to infuriate the recipient of its praise. I can't help that. I do not write for writers, but for readers. And, dear reader, if you never take another of my recommendations, please take this of Science Fiction. You may never own a better science-fiction book. Halfway through Gregory Benford's In the Ocean of Night I had a vivid recollection of an article I read years ago. It was a technical study of a group of men whose job it was to sit before radar, screens in darkened rooms day in and day out for weeks at a time. It was found that their senses became so benumbed by the boredom that when a blip finally did appear, they did not respond to it. While reading this novel, I had at least two similar experiences, for when something dramatic finally did occur, I was so benumbed by all the words that had gone before that it took me two pages to realize that I had missed something. In the Ocean of Night is that most dreadful of literary phenomena: the well-written novel. That is, a book whose wellwritten-ness overwhelms everything else within it; whose prose has so much more distinction than anything else in it that one is led to think the prose itself is what the book is about. Benford must have put a lot of time and effort into it. The protagonists' neuroses are laboriously detailed. The backgrounds of earth, the moon, and the interior of the alien ships are elaborate and atmospheric. In fact, the scientific and sociological details are the best things in the book, consistently intelligent and frequently wondrous. But the brooding atmosphere that pervades everything, while occasionally effective, is ultimately tedious. And then there are the words, words, words. In # the asteroid Icarus suddenly begins to act like a comet. Its orbit is altered. It imperils the earth. Two men are sent out to destroy it. The hero, Nigel Walmsley, an Engdiscovers that the asteroidcomet is really a spaceship left by ancient alien explorers. He resists commands to blow it up, attempting instead to salvage whatever technology it offers in the hope that it will solve the terrible mess man has made of the world. End of Part I. At this point Benford had my interest. What would happen next? Could Nigel preserve the secrets of the aliens and still save the earth in time? Unfortunately, Benford was uninterested in the question. Part II begins years later. Everything is over, and we are given the details in a few paragraphs. Nigel is now involved in a triangular love affair with two women, one of whom is dying of pollution disease. Besides this, he is working at the solve the mystery of a strange extraterrestrial manifestation that seems to be moving in our direction. And besides this, the manifestation itself is an alien craft in search of life. What had started out to seem a combination of Lucifer's Hammer and Rendevous with Rama now seemed to become a combination of The Mote in God's Eye and Love Story. But...no. After an interminably leisurely buildup of the three plot lines toward another is off in yet another direction. This time he's on the moon. Nigel has a new girlfriend. She discovers another alien ship on the moon. She and Nigel are soon hard at work trying to decipher its mysteries, one of which may save humanity from extermination by hostile alien gadgets. Meanwhile, on earth, a Japanese scientist living in a cabin in the wilderness finds a man half-dead in the snow. The man, who claims to have just escaped from a tribe of Bigfootians, is carrying a remarkable weapon which the Japanese realizes is of alien manufacture. Once again the various plot lines work tortuously toward still another climax, which turns out to be just as ambiguous as the other two. In the end, however, all is resolved. And it turns out that what Benford wants the novel to be about is the resolution of Nigel's spiritual alienation, which is accomplished, as it usually is these days, with the hero freakier than he ever was before. I hesitate to call the novel "turgid," although it is, for it is not so much overwritten, although it is, as overconceived. There is just too much in it, and most of it is so irrelevant to what is most interesting in it that the real drama is buried alive. Of course this is a patchwork novel, comprised of three stories from IF, FSF, and a Silverberg anthology -- which explains much but excuses nothing. A novel is about what is most interesting about it; and in Benford's case, his aliens are more interesting than anything else. The characters, while they are carefully drawn and frequently come to life, are no match for the events in which they are involved. But Benford refuses to accept this. He keeps taking us away from the aliens in order to show us the physical and spiritual plight of the world of which, I assume, his hero is the epitome. The people are occasionally interesting but no match for the mythic wonder of the aliens. What is worse is that in patching the novel together, Benford should have realized he had three large climaxes to deal with and no way to escape them gracefully. The effect of a stunted climax is a kind of literary constipation that leaves the reader first bewildered and then bored. And Benford compounds the problem with refusing to develop even small climaxes. On page #, the end of Chapter Three finds Nigel and his girlfriend in possession of a very exciting piece of evidence as to the possible appearance of the aliens. As Chapter Four opens, the reader is chomping the bit to know more. But what he gets is; "Mr. Inchino stood at the small sink and slowly washed the dishes after supper." And that is the end of the alien artifact except as it is mentioned later in conversation. And don't think that Benford is being cagey in switching our attention at the moment of suspense, for moments are all there are; and the book is filled with long paragraphs of menial action such as we see Mr. Inchino perform. You know -- "He walked to the door. He opened the door. He entered the room. He closed the door. ' ' All of these faults add up to a very boring book. Yet I would not be at all surprised to find it nominated for a Nebula. After all, it is so wellwritten. A Silverberger with Hoskins Sauce Someday I am going to write a book about the great unsung heroes of science fiction: the anthologists. Don't laugh. Oh, I know most knowledgeable people regard the anthology as a fast, easy way for an enterprising writer to make a buck and nothing more. But without them my own reading would have been a lot poorer. A good anthologist is like a good friend whose opinion you trust. It is a sharing of enthusiasms. You may not agree with all of the editor's choices -- you may even violently disagree with half of them -- but if the ones you like make as great an impression on you as they did on him, you learn to trust him. Two anthologists I have come to trust are Robert Silverberg and Robert Hoskins. Despite the portentous subtitle, "Science Fiction as Visionary Literature," Galactic Dreamers is a grand bag of eight stories, only one of which I violently disagree with. It begins with James Blish's extraordinary "Common Time" and includes J.G. Ballard's intriguing "The Waiting Grounds" and Dead Lady of Clown Town." Others included are a typically ingenious Jack Vance collage called "The New Prime" and John W. Campbell's devastating "Night"; an R.A. Lafferty ("Sky") that, frankly, went over my head but left me grinning with pleasure nevertheless; a curiously oldfashioned (for him) story by Brian Aldiss called "Incentive"; and Silverberg's own "Breckenridge and the Continuum," about which my mother has told me to say nothing at all. Silverberg states his theme best: "As a reader, I am most excited by the kind of science fiction that offers consciousness-expanding views of wondrous reaches of space and time -- fiction that creates myths about the future. " Hoskins likewise has a drum to beat. His anthology purports to show science-fiction stories concerned with "saving the future." As a friend of mine used to say: She-e-et. I strongly suspect that the reason why nine out of ten anthologies have such introductions is a deep feeling of guilt within the editors -- as within almost everyone connected with science fiction after a certain age -- over the fact that they are involved in an adolescent activity. I wish I could say I felt otherwise. Sometimes I do. But science fiction, like any other genre, perhaps like any other activity, has its limits. The passion for it, usually born in adolescence, does not last forever. I still like science fiction but I no longer love it, as is the case with more than one sciencefiction writer. Their problem is: They can't admit it. But the truth of it is, you don't have to love a thing to do it well. And sometimes not loving it helps you to do the thing better. Robert Hoskins is the former editor of Lancer Books, and a terror he was. But those, like me, who liked him at all, liked him very much. So it came as no surprise to me after he left Lancer to find him editing .a series of first-rate anthologies. The Future Now is the latest of them, and for # it is a good buy. There are Fred Pohl's marvelous "The Merchants of Venus" and Dean R. Koontz's effective "A Season for Freedom" and Barry N. Malzberg's (in my opinion) best story, "Final War"; and Poul Anderson's "Home," Harlan Ellison's "Silent in Gehenna," Silverberg's "The Wind and the Rain," Bill Pronzini's "Our Times," Isaac Asimov's "All the Troubles in the World" and Hoskins' own "The Mountain," plus a curiousity by Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Stalin in the Soul," Ed Bryant's "Shark" and Virginia Kidd's "Flowering Season." I can tell you this: The name of Silverberg or Hoskins on an anthology guarantees that you'll get your money's worth.  Dear J.J., Since I've written my Galaxy article on Star Wars, I've seen numerous reviews in just about every imaginable place. Some are genuinely instructive and thoughtful, while others run from the sublime ("Did you know that 'Star War' backwards is 'Raw Rats?') to the incorrect. Among the latter are several assertions that Chewbacca is straight out of Planet of the Apes. In view of the widespread interest in Chewbacca and the other characters, I'd like to add something to my article. Now, George Lucas was indeed having fun evoking a wide range of old science fiction and fantasy films, but the key to the nature of the second mate of the Millenium Falcon lies in a parallel with The Wizard of Oz, not the Planet of the Apes. Physically, he is furry -- but in everything else, including his facial features and inarticulate snarlings, he is very unPlanet-of-theApes-like. The leading characters are on a sort of Yellow Brick Road trek. C-#PO is a tin man who lacks a heart at the beginning, always thinking only of himself, but who ends up with a compassionate nature and such feelings for his fellow robot that he volunteers gears and circuits to save his friend. Hans Solo comes from a jungle of vicious creatures where he may be a type of king due to his innate attributes, but is a cowardly figure none the less. In the course of reaching the journey's end, he displays unexpected courage, including the rout of Imperial Stormtroopers by stampeding them with a show of ferocity, and ending with his joining battle to save his friends. Found in a symbolic cornfield, Luke Skywalker is unable to think for himself or formulate plans for the future, but like the Scarecrow soon starts displaying originality of mind, working out a plan to rescue the Princess and finally how best to destroy Death Star. Chewie is Toto, an inarticulate hairy beast that displays great devotion and does as he is told by his master. Also, I'm sure everyone has noticed, he is a great hit with the movie audience -- because like a cute dog, he is so lovable. Hans Solo alternately pets or kicks him. The Princess may be a girl, but is a tough customer like Dorothy who, you will recall, killed two wicked witches. Dropped a house on one and melted the other. (Darth Vader better watch out, come Star Wars !) Obi-Wan Kenobi is the embodiment of Glinda the Good's magical guidance along the Yellow Brick Road. R#-D# has no parallel, as far as I can see, unless it's a tenuous one with the Mouse Queen. However, there is no mistaking the final scene in the great Palace where awards are handed out -- and the metal man is resplendant in fresh plating and burnishing. Having seen Star Wars again since writing my article, I remain convinced that the movie is more complex than generally realized, since there are several levels of understanding required to achieve a full comprehension of what George Lucas was doing. And to answer in brief what seems to be the major point of the relatively few adverse reviews, if indeed Star Wars is childish on one level, it is not that way on others nor is it unidimensional in the least. Jay Kay Klein RDl-Box # Bridgeport, N.Y., # Of course, some critics have already seen allusions to The Triumph of the Will in the closing scene of Star Wars. But even they don't notice the sort of things you mention. Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, it's rip-off time: Starship Invasions, Star Crash, Star Maidens. Blecch! jj-PMr. Baen; Some comments, if I may, on your September issue. To put last things first, J. Flower's "Coming Home" seems to me to be very close to libel. I pride myself on being one of those who became a Democrat in the early #'s primarily because the then Vice President was a Republican. And I know the bounds of never been given any reason to believe that the man would ever do physical injury to his nation -- even to regain control of it. But that story was fairly typical of the "down-beat" feeling of the entire issue. Jerry Pournelle, in his article, told us a sweet fairy tale about how wonderful life could be if we will just turn all the decision-making processes over to the technologists. The rest of the issue, except for J.E.P.'s serial, told us what horrors confront us if we fail to follow his advice. The serial, on the other hand, tells us that the solution to our energy problem and conquest of the solar system will still leave us with an overpopulated world and massive unemployment unless we also find the new social and political institutions which will enable us to utilize this technological bounty. And this is the most depressing element in the issue; the man who professes to have the answers really offers us nothing but the same old balderdash warmed over on a nuclear fire and served up in a deepspace squeeze bulb. Mr. Pournelle is an excellent writer and Dr. Pournelle is no doubt quite learned in the physical sciences. I am of solar fusion power sources saving our necks in the long run, although I must say that I have yet to see any convincing evidence that controlled fusion is closer today than it was ten years ago. I tion of fission power -- provided that someone will show me a system of waste disposal which has progressed beyond the "working paper" stage and is acceptable to the people who live accept coal (with scrubbers), methane, and alcohol as viable alternatives to petroleum and to accept their higher costs. I will even accept the environmental damage and the human damage inherent in current coal-mining technology -- although I hope someone will find ways to minimize those costs. But I will not accept the destruction of democratic institutions, the imposition of eighteenthcentury conceptions of justice, and the permanent "welfarization" of a major portion of our population by increasingly capital-intensive means of production without provision for worthwhile employment of those who are not equipped to function in a capitalintensive economy. Dr. Pournelle must also deal with this human economic problem -- the man or woman who is not fit to go into space, either cannot learn or has had no opportunity to learn the skills which are saleable in a hightechnology society, or simply cannot compete in the highly individualistic society which he and Dr. Anderson hold up to us as the ideal. Unless you are prepared to institute some kind of eugenic -- social extermination program, your society must provide for the weak as well as the strong, and the rights of all citizens must continue to be safeguarded. Like the attorney who is pictured as a silly -- if not insane -- weakling in Pournelle's story, I do not believe that the captain of a ship has the right to take risks with the lives of his passengers without giving them some voice in the matter and I do not believe that he has a right to sentence a man to a period of penal servitude without due process of law. In this story, the captain is a Solomon, and obviously the attempt to catch Ceres is not going to result in the death of our heroes (male and female) but all captains are not Solomons and all desperate risks do not succeed and the end does not justify the means. I wish Dr. Pournelle and all of the other able scientists who are writing science fiction today would give some attention to problems which are other than technological. I have no doubt that technology can be found to replace our petroleum economy. I am not at all sure that we will find the new social, economic, and political institutions that are the minimum requirement for human survival in a world of exploding populations, rising expectations, and continuing displacement of human labor by machines. This is overlong and not entirely coherent, I am sure. I haven't time to rewrite now and do not wish to delay sending it off. So here it is with bad typing, perhaps misspellings, and other flaws -- of art and of logic, perhaps. Spider Robinson was excellent, as usual. I especially liked his comments on Joanna Russ' "chip on the shoulder" attitude. I hate to see such a fine writer ruined by obsession with a "message." And I hate to see the movement for human liberation cluttered up with bitter sexist attacks from either side. I liked Fabian's work, as always. James Sanford Mead # S.E. Milwaukee Ave. Portland, Ore., # First: my story Exiles to Glory assumes in space and high technology ; ir examines what I think would be the consequences of the Carter energy program ( which has no investments in new technology: and siphons off welfare programs: the Carter "energy war " begins by disbanding the armored divisions of fusion research, and ends with huge taxes to be used to equalize income). In my judgment there are profits to be made in space, and there may well be attempts to exploit space despite government opposition to technology: that means a transfer of control from democratic institutions (if there are any in this world) to board rooms; flight of capital from the US to tax havens; and such. My story also assumes unlikely investment levels by private fortunes -- else things would never have got even as far as they have in the world of Exiles. Second: regarding nuclear wastes: if the on nuclear power, the accumulated wastes would, after # years, cover one square mile to a depth of about ten feet. We have many square miles of Mojave Desert not far from where I live. If there is no better way to handle wastes, solidify them, place them in the Mojave, build a "superdome" concrete structure above them, surround with chain link fence, and put up a sign that says Third: whether or not I approve of the actions of Captain Greiner in my story is irrelevant: the story says that such actions can happen. Frontier societies usually have institutions different from settled societies. One need not approve -- or disapprove -- of Frontier or Ship-board justice to write about what may be inevitable. Fourth: I know of no rational proposal to send any great part of the population to space. I think it demonstrable that given space research and new energy sources there will be a very much larger pie to split here on Earth: and I think it fairly obvious that the wealthier the society, the more real freedoms its citizens enjoy. It is an economy of scarcity that creates rigid class lines, feudal institutions, and the like. Without abundant cheap energy, an economy of scarcity is inevitable: and that means regulations, bureaucracy, government, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. Finally:  have never proposed turning over "all the decision-making processes " to the technologists. Indeed, on all referenda I know of, the voting public has overwhelmingly approved nuclear power and high technology options: it is " experts " such as Freeman of the Ford Foundation Energy Project (now a White House energy expert on public payroll) who terrify me, not the citizen body. The "experts" have produced a plan which guarantees scarcities; I think they are afraid of wealth, which creates real freedoms -- such as the freedom of a street -- Jerry Pournelle Dear Mr. Baen: Confusion appears to exist over the distinction between "religious beliefs" and religious impulses." This seems to be because these terms, as we are using them, are not clearly defined. "Religious impulses" and "religious beliefs" are not seperate entities. They are simply different parts of a single concept -- "religious impulses" the first, and "religious beliefs" the second. "Religious impulses," like territoriality and the sex-drive, came into being, as you say, "earlier in the sceme of things" -- ergo, before man used tools, could speak, or had any conception of right and wrong. They were formed back during those dim times in the past before conscious human thought-process evolved. Therefore, obviously, they were "founded in ignorance". But when people recognize "religious impulses," that is, admit they are motivated by them, they then become "religious beliefs." The basic "religious impulse" -- "religious belief" is to believe in "God." "God" created heaven and Earth -- the entire universe, all that exist. He therefore oversees and controls everything, including the people of this world. Why do people believe this? Because they are brought up in a culture that already believes it, and so educates them in it, conditions them to accept it. This is why you believe in "God." You would believe in Brahman, Allah, or follow the teachings of Gautama just as devotedly and incessantly, had you been brought up in India, the Middle-East, or China. But what evidence have you that "God" exist? None. You can only say that, during your entire life, you have heard other people talk of "God," or read what other people have written about "God." Everyone, in fact, that professes "God" as real, can only offer this, and no more, in their defense of "God's" existence -- what they have heard others say or what they have read that others have written, as, indeed, these latter people can only attribute their own beWhen is a chest pain a heart attack? Often, determining the cause of a chest pain is difficult. So how can a doctor tell when it's a heart attack? The American Heart Association is supporting research to help doctors identify heart attacks as early as possible. One research method is the mych cardial scinti g ram. It allows accurate diagnosis of heart damage without catheters, without the injection of dyes. With it, doctors can actually look inside a patient's oody to evaluate the heart's condition. If there is heart damage, the doctors can see exactly where -- and how extensive -- it is. The myocardial scintigram was pioneered through research supported by the American Heart Association. Please give generously to the American Heart Association. ( liefs in "God" to even older sayings and writings of yet others. -- And so the process continues back through time. This is not evidence; it is hearsay. Now then. Science is based on knowledge obtained from observation of revelant phonemona. That is, scientists accept as true only what can be proved by material evidance. In this way, science-fictionist are also supposed to conduct themselves -- as implied by their commitments to follow the principles of science. I find it very hypocritical for you, a science-fiction reader, writer, and editor as well, to blatantly and contemptiously come out and sat that the existance of "God" is automatically a fact and not just a belief. I see no reason why it isn't a reasonable interpertaion of: "... anyone who believes in the Old Testament... must consider himself as divinely instructed to... do all in his power to further the development of our space capabilities,  and... he must resist and defy any person, process or philosphy that acts as a determinent to that goal." to say: "You instruct us to instigate subversion, insurrection, and revolution, commit criminal acts, engage in treason, or do anything necessary, if it serves to further the progress of humankind into space'." Lee Smith West Palm Beach, Fla. And here I thought the South was all Bible Belt ! Well,  don't think Jim needs any defense against the likes of you -- or the likes of the religious fanatics you imagine you oppose. j.j.p. sues. Send check or money order to: C.I. Grant, # Center Grove Road, H-#, Dept. G. Dover, N.J. #. magazines from # to I#. 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Jim hadn't had time to set up a clearinghouse for such volunteers, nor had any sf club offered to take on the job. The most feasible solution right now, and the one therefore being followed, is to set up a file of volunteers, by area and by services offered, to be made available to blind sf fans. We will try to match volunteers with blind fans in particular areas as best we can. By the time this issue appears, we should have a file large enough to provide volunteers in most populous areas, at least -- and will be able to supply names and addresses to blind fans on request. Time does not permit recordings, etc. We hope some of you, besides requesting help for blind fans or volunteering your own services, may have some better ideas for administering the Volunteers for the Blind program. -- j-j-PThe very best reading in or out of this world #F#R# with membership Isaac Asimov is an SF Classic that forecasts the return to barbarism. of the biggest names in science fiction. 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One of  the most unusual and challenging war I games from Simulations Publications,  Inc., the publishers of Strategy   Tactics Magazine. Simulations Publications, Inc. Dept. # # East #rd Street, New York, N.Y. # Please send me the following Simulations Series Games: Q StarForce, Interstellar Conflict: #  Invasion America, The U.S. Besieged: #  World War.Three: # Please enter my subscription to Strategy  Tactics Magazine, the bi-monthly military history magazine with a simulation in it.  I yr (# issues) # D # yrs (# issues) #  # yrs (# issues) # street apt# city state zip Space below for office use only. C. Code Total Credit Post. Tax # Playing Pieces! Big #x# fall-color game map! # page rule book! #x# compartmented plastic box! Sample playing pieces (actual size) #-# k #-# Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Stephen Fabian, Art Director J.E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Paul G. Walker, Contributing Editor John J. Pierce, Editor National Advertising Sales Representative: Erwin Baker Associates, Inc., # Evergreen Place, East Orange, N.J., #. Phone #-#-# The regul were incapable of lying -- so believed the mri and humans alike. But the regul had other means of deception, and both other races were victims. McAndrew was a pacifist. So of course the terrorist Yifter wasn't looking for any interference with his plans from that direction. Trent's psychiatrist figured it was an obvious case of split personality. But even he could never have guessed how split... She was a femme fatale -- but not the usual kind. For that matter, he was an homme fatale for her. It was born of an impossible union -- but it knew more of humanity than the humans it loved... You expect to meet strange beings in interstellar space. But a creature from Norse mythology? President Carter may be putting a lot of energy into his "war," but Jerry doesn't think much energy will come out of it! Falling in love with Tanith Lee and George R. R. Martin. But is it all over with Arthur C. Clarke? How to publish a fanzine in a few easy... well, maybe not so easy lessons. Cover by Anji Valenza Interior illustrations by Valenza, Mueller, Harlib ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Main Office  Editorial Office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y., #. Single copy #. #-Issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. Ail stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Lalominat entered his life in tears. Juni stood at the top of Firefly's ramp while she made her farewells to the bears. The tall, burly, blackfurred beings crowded around her, rumbling in light baritones their feelings and farewells. Lalominat was tiny and fragile in a pale yellow jump suit, out of place in the orange and blue world. After a final pressing of her head against one of the "bears," who blinked his three-in-line red eyes at her, she turned and stumbled up the ramp. Juni faded back into the lock. At the entry Lalominat turned and raised slim, silvery arms over her head. The bears responded with a raising of arms and a final mass moan. Firefly judged this to be a propitious time to end the farewell, or merely took note that the passenger was aboard. It sucked in the ramp and the lock's shutters contracted. Lalominat continued to face the bears, then lowered her arms and made a slight mewing sound. After a moment she turned and approached Juni firmly. "Ship Man Junius Van Every? I am your contract servant, Lalominat Dancer." Firefly recognized that as being in a local trade language. Adapting to the presence of a passenger, in translating it pitched its voice higher, adding overtones and undertones in a crude imitation of Lalominat's wavering violins, that Juni not mistake the translation for the robot's own words. "Pleased to meet you, Lalominat Dancer. You may call me Juni. But you need not consider yourself bound to me. My culture frowns on binding contracts." She could not frown. She had eyebrows but they did not move toward each other by a hair's breadth. The inch-high green plumes, like shakoes at their inner ends, flattened against her forehead. "But by the last charge -- " Firefly substituted the code name "Bruin" they had assigned to her former employer, whose name Juni could not pronounce -- "it was laid on you to accept responsibility for me." Juni could listen to those blended violins by the hour, enchanted; her voice was wind over taut strings, silvery liquid over crystal. But his eyes were beginning to water and his nose to run. "I accept the responsibility, but you are free if you wish to go." Did that blink and downward movement of her eyebrows indicate hurt? "I am only a dancer. If I have no patron. I cannot live." The pain in Juni's eyes and nose increased, reminding him that the orange-and-blue world of the bears had proteins incompatible with human proteins. He was getting an allergic reaction to the dust and organic debris Lalominat had brought in with her. And of course her own proteins were incompatible with his, else she could not have lived here. "If you will permit me to show you to your suite, we may continue this conversation in comfort. But don't worry; you won't be abandoned. ' ' Lalominat's eyes were streaming and she was wiping her mouth by the time they reached the suite he had assigned to her. Her silvery skin was showing a jaundiced flush and she kept rubbing her hands over her arms in a way that suggested itch. The ship was saturated with terrestrial proteins. "Put your clothes in the cleaner -- Firefly will tell you where it is -- and wash yourself, and you will feel better." She made a gesture of assent and ducked hastily into the suite. Juni had given it careful attention. All organic articles had been removed, down to the decorative bug shells, and by hand he had flamed the rooms down. He had then adjusted the filters to incinerate all dust or other airborne organic debris, both entering and leaving the suite. For hours now that filtering had gone on; it should be safe. Musing, Juni went toward the control room. By the time he got there. Firefly was thirty miles up. It was a fast, light transport, five thousand tons' cargo capacity, half a dozen suites and a dozen secondclass rooms, designed for short express runs. Normally Firefly carried a crew of three, plus stewards. It was now a month's run from the human sphere and Junius Van Every was sole crewman -- "midshipmite and bosun tight and crew of the captain's gig." And cook. Firefly's robogalley Teing on the fritz again. "She's even more beautiful than her visual records." "A danger to you as long as she is aboard." Juni dismissed the possibility of death by massive allergic shock casually. "Beautiful! She makes human girls look thick and clumsy." Lalominat even had a human figure, slender but attractive, complete with two small but delectable mammaries -- a real rarity. Her face, too, was superficially human. Her chin was rather deficient and her lips thinner than he liked, but her blunt little nose -- another rarity -- was attractive. Her eyes were human but for their oval pupils, blue-green and very direct. The nose had only a single nostril, her eyelids met in the centers of her eyes, her hairline was odd, and her hair pale green with yellow highlights. But none of this put him off, would not have even had he not been used to non-humans. Or far from home and his last human contact. "It would have been better if you had found some way to avoid the necessity of taking her on," came Firefly's toneless voice. A robot with a very complex program must have some standard to which it can refer instantly when some unexpected event occurs. A living being refers to its survival instinct. Firefly's prime directive was to preserve Juni's life, at whatever hazard. "If I hadn't accepted the necessity we'd have been stuck with an unsaleable cargo and no consignee." "Bruin" had seen a possible market for a shipment of housesized water purifiers, but before Juni could deliver it, he knew his end had come. As he sat dying, he had spoken his last will. Lalominat was to be placed in the charge of Juni. If he accepted the charge, Juni's consignment was to be accepted by "Bruin's" successors. If not, not. " Firefly ? You said that I could speak to the Honorable Juni?" "Juni speaking. Firefly , visual contact, please." "Oh!" The plumes at the inner ends of her eyebrows fluffed enchantingly in startlement when the waterfall on the wall blinked into a holo of Juni in the control room. "I have refreshed myself, Honorable Juni. I await your pleasure. But if you desire low-gravity dances, I have not been in low gravity for years and am dry or desiccated -- rusty," Firefly explained in its own voice. "I would be enchanted to watch you dance -- or to walk. It's an inexpressible pleasure merely to hear you speak. But as I said, you may consider yourself free. You need not dance if you do not wish to. Consider yourself a passenger." Again she didn't frown. "But...you have said that I will not be abandoned? A passenger...I have no money." "There will be no charge. 'Bruin's' successors arranged all that." "And...if I am a passenger, what is my destination?" Juni smiled and made a vague, suave gesture in the air. "Why, I suppose you will go wherever the ship does. I don't see how it could be otherwise." For the first time she smiled, her silvery lips stretching a little, her eyebrows rising and their green plumes fluffing. "I have little choice about that, true." The smile faded. "Honorable Juni..." He was hearing her voice as well as Firefly's translation and now it was very small. "Honorable 'Bruin' did not mean for me to be a worthless charge upon you forever. If my dancing is of no value to you, he expected you to sell my contract to someone who can profit by my skills. How can I live among those who do not value me?" "I do not mean to say that your dancing is of no value to me. Merely that it is not required of you. Your passage is paid. I am not a great admirer of the dance, but I know nothing of it. Perhaps I might learn, if some knowledgeable person took pity on my ignorance." This time she smiled wholeheartedly and made a descending slide on her violins, one of her most enchanting sights and sounds. "If my poor powers permit, it may be then that I can relieve you of some of your to-bepitied ignorance, Honorable Juni." "A moment, if you will permit, Honorable Lalominat. I see that Firefly is now on course for 'County Fair' " -- his code for a local trading planet -- "so I am not needed here. I will repair to my humble Shipman's quarters that I may watch your delectable dance in comfort." "Oh, but you must not salute me Honorable -- " "Passengers are always treated with utmost courtesy." His quarters, comprising all the rooms of the rated crewmen, were just off the control room. His "suite" was almost as roomy as Lalominat's. Juni nodded to her in the big visiplate there and said, "You may begin when you are ready, Honorable Dancer." Visibly she decided not to argue the question of respect. She stepped back from the visiplate, nude, unselfconscious in her silvery skin. She had no hair but on her head, no navel -- at least not in her belly -- and her rib pattern and hip bones were all wrong. That was the first reaction. The second was that she was breathtakingly lovely. Then she began to dance...Dance...motion shattered into rhythm...teeter of butterflies through air, flash of fish, leap of flame, and leaves in dying fall. Dance is these and Lalominat was these and water dancing under the wind and the dancing play of sunBeams between cloud shadows. She danced because, like butterflies, she could not move less gracefully, and because, like fish, she was supported by her life's medium, this her art her life... With eyes closed, she danced...a flame leaping, leaves dying, waves chopping the light into rhythmic fragments, her dance was all these...she was all these. Dance...rhythm made manifest as motion. Till he had seen Lalominat dance, he had not seen Lalominat...    Juni rubbed himself with silicone oil from head to foot, pulled a tight cap over his hair, and dressed himself in clean synthetic clothing, finishing by pulling gloves over his hands. Entering Lalominat's suite, he nodded to her at a wary distance, careful to breath through his nose filters. She had directed Firefly's handlers to put the food synthesizer in a convenient place. The food he had shipped for her at "Bruin's" world was running low and he had had to buy another synthesizer at "County Fair." There he had also looked up her home world. "You're a long way from from home," he told her. "A week's drive for Firefly, and we're pretty fast. Must have been longer by the slow ships in this area." "My contract was sold twice before I was given to 'Bruin.' Three trips in ships, but that was long ago and I do not remember how long the trips were." The synthesizer had previously been adjusted for flavors according to a commercial table of equivalents for beings of Lalominat's range of proteins. It produced a thick, pale liquid. Lalominat came delightfully close to taste, and her brows dipped downward. "It has no flavor." Juni consulted his table and readjusted the synthesizer. "How long were you with 'Bruin'?" "Many years, half my life. I was but a girl when my contract was first bought and I said goodbye to my family -- collective -- association." "Were you sad to leave home?" Lalominat looked her surprise at him. "Yes...to leave my friends. But how can one grow -- make progress -- if one does not leave home -- the nest?" Juni was not surprised by this attitude; he knew too many cultures of too many species. He was silent in shock not at her attitude, but at his own. He should not have expected her to react like a human from his own culture. He was anthropomorphizing her. "With 'Bruin' I was very happy, though of course I missed my own language. He was like...he was a protector. His shadow lifted fear from all small things. He delighted in beauty and the beautiful, especially in living things. His collection of dancing wings was large and marvelous, their wings of all soft colors. Their flights were more wonderful than my dance. MonSil-Mon (her name for her home world) has nothing so light -- so airy -- " She added words in her own singing language that Firefly could not translate. The ship said, "Neither your language nor this trade language has the words to express this concept." "Oh, was that important?" She caught the change in Firefly's voice. " Firefly commented on your use of your own language." "Why does Honorable Firefly speak to you in so harsh a tone? To me she speaks in a pleasing voice, one very similar to my own." Juni gave her a forced grin. "I think I can illustrate it best by telling of the explorer who took along with him no women but old or ugly ones. When they began to seem attractive to him, he knew it was time to return to his own race." Lalominat laughed and clapped her hands against her thighs, her face animated. "But that is so human! When our men are on long journeys on Mon-Sil-Mon, they begin to think of women all the time. But Firefly is not a woman; I do not understand..." "Simple. If I should begin to think of Firefly as human rather than as a machine, especially as a woman, I might well go mad. Hence, that crude mechanical sounding voice, though Firefly can speak with an utterly human voice." Lalominat pondered that, indicated pleasure at a flavor. "This means that you can breed away from your home? But it must be very lonely for you, then!" "Hence my precaution with Firefly's voice. But of course I have a ship and can go home any time." "Oh, you can own your own ship? I had thought you are a hireling, coming and going on command." "No. I go wherever the trade leads me." Her expressive face registered awe, oval pupils flaring, eyebrow plumes fluffing, the enameled ridge that served her for teeth bared. "Oh, such freedom! To own every star in the sky! So great a dance." She touched the back of his wrist.    A day later Junius Van Every sat before the control board. To his right in the . visiplate flared a sun, the center of its ardent circle blanked out, its arms painted in light against the far hard stars of space's winter night. Firefly was picking its way in toward another of the low-technology planets with which Juni usually dealt. He rubbed the back of his wrist. The silicone oil had helped protect him from the airborne organic debris, but against an actual touch it had not been very effective. There was still a rash there. Lalominat's fingertips must still be painfully swollen. "So great a dance. " Strange that she thought so little of her own exile -- half her life. And she was so closely integrated with her native ecology, she could not breed away from Mon-Sil-Mon. Strange that she thought so romantically of his freedom. He had not seen it as glorious, but Juni came from a wry, pragmatic culture. No. He was anthropomorphizing. Why should it be strange? "Lalominat Dancer has just asked if you have been watching her at her exercises." Jerked out of his reverie, Juni said, "Tell her no." "I have already told her that you have been watching her from time to time, and that she was exercising during some of those times. I was not instructed to conceal that from her." Fascinated for hours at a time, Juni had watched her move around in her suite, her silvery skin bare, light as a shaft of light, not so much walking as drifting like a vagrant breeze. She was as beautiful and as right as a natural phenomenon...a glowing dawn...a cloud over a mountain...a jet of glowing gas soft against the glitterfrost of space. He cleared his throat. "How did she react?" "She was pleased." Juni took a deep breath of relief. Firefly chimed and announced, "Planet signals us." As he talked them in, Juni's mind stayed with Lalominat. He'd been anthropomorphizing again. Modesty meant little between species, and privacy need not mean anything in her culture in any case. His own homeworld conditioning was extreme even for humans. "Honorable Firefly, is the Ship Man too busy to speak with me now?" "Not at all, Lalom." Firefly came in low over an orange and amber plain. "This is not much like 'Bruin's' world. Nor even like 'County Fair'." "It's a frigid planet with ammonia-methane atmosphere; those are clouds below us. We won't be here long." "I am glad. Yet...it is beautiful." Hydrogen planets had always looked alike to Juni, but now as Lalominat's wavering violin voice vibratoed delight, awe, wonder, and pure joy, he found himself responding as well. Under the cloud canopy was a scarlet and crimson and maroon and murrey and terra cotta land that produced trills and tremolos from her throat. Ascending slides greeted the closer view of the windsculpted land and its groundhugging cities. Firefly cut her out of the circuit as Juni began to transact business with the locals and Lalominat soon grew tired of listening. She was asleep when they lifted off, but she had instructed Firefly to call her. She appeared in Juni's visiplate as the frigid planet shrank below them, tousled and doe-eyed to watch the spuming behind of a world. Stars opened before them. "What is your world like, Juni?" "It was green when there were few of us. We made it gray, but now it is being given back to the plants and is turning green again. At the end of summer the plants turn red, yellow, and many associated shades, before going brown and falling." "Green plants! I have seen some. Some of ours are green. But most are yellow with a green tinge. They only turn green in fall. A lovely, soft, rich shade, they are, in summer. Our airplants float in the air and dance to the wind. There is no world like Mon-Sil-Mon. Overhead the sky is pale blue and the clouds silver. The breezes speak; odors sweep our moods along with the wandering wind. Green leaves turn down after First Frost, then turn silver-blue on the ground; frost moss covers soil like spangles of silver tipped with ice. "Oh, Juni, there is no more beautiful world in all the Galaxy! All the brooks sing and the flying things sing. So too do the people. My people are the greatest chanters in our part of the sky. We are famous for our chants. Mon-Sil-Mon is a poor planet, as you know, and we have as resources only ourselves. Thus we train our best and sell their contracts as entertainers across the stars. A chanter from Mon-Sil-Mon is required at any festive occasion on half a hundred planets." "How about dancers?" "Our dancers too are good, as are our artists. We dance to the stars, and we create beauty out of many materials. But our chanters are our fame. There we have no equals." "I cannot believe there can be any better dancers than yourself." Her plumes fluffed and her eyes sparkled. "I only regret that I have not been able to lighten the darkness of your ignorance, Honorable Juni...but I perceive that though you do not rate my dance at its proper value, you have recognized that it does have value."    Juni could not keep from watching her, salving himself by the observation that she had been pleased, had not objected. If she knew he was still watching her move lightly about her quarters, she gave no sign. Much of the time she was nude -- always for dancing or exercises -- and he never discovered the rule by which she clothed herself or not. When not exercising, she tinkered with the food synthesizer, her face a study in concentration, and cooked; she fumbled with garments of various human styles Firefly cut for her, and held long, animated conversations with the robot; or concentrated with pouted lips over the ancient jigsaw puzzle that had been aboard ship when Juni bought it. Much of her time she spent dancing or exercising. Her dances seemed to enthrall her nearly as much when she danced alone as when she danced for an audience; she danced till her silvery skin was flushed and her tiny yellow rosebud nipples opened into little blooms for the entrance' of a feathery tongue. She danced daily till near exhaustion. One day it occurred to Juni that all her dances were aspects of one larger dance that she spent, was spending, her whole life in improvising. Lalominat sank onto a stool, wiping herself with a chilled cloth, and answered: "Oh, yes, Juni. That is how it is with all creators. One creates from out of oneself." "The only creation I know anything about is technological, and that comes as much from the material and the problem as from within." "Technology I do not know, but all other kinds of art come from within. Not only creativity, but life, in those who make living an art. Some say this is the greatest art, and these are those who best appreciate the other arts, dancing, chanting, sppll-weaving, and all the others. 'Bruin' was such an artist. His life was a chant. So is yours, Juni." "Mine?" "Of course. Think how you have shaped your life, how you acquired this ship and with it freedom of the sky, at what cost. For so many years you labored to earn the money!" Awe entered her voice. "And now you are free...you savor strange worlds as men savor wine...the whole Galaxy is not too large for you." A few hours later Firefly brought Juni out of his brown mood with an alarm. Three ships appeared on their detectors, matching course. Firefly turned aside and increased drive at Juni's direction. The three turned to intercept, hanging on their quarter. For three hours he sat sipping coffee and watching them close little by little. In the end they sheered off, lest they be tempted too far from their own territory. If they hadn't lost their nerve, they'd have had him. "Oh, Juni, who were they? What did they want?" "The ship, I would guess. As for who they were, they didn't say. One of those minor races who intend to take over the Galaxy... some day." Firefly ' s voice, translating this for her, was no longer a simulation of Lalominat's, but of Juni's own. "What would they have done to us?" "Probably just killed us." A shrug. "One of the hazards of star travel." "You're so calm about it. Weren't you afraid?" "Of course. Next you'll be saying there's something wrong with me." Her enchanting smile and laugh. "Oh, no. Oh, noTNever."    "You have become very silent of late, Junius." Firefly's metallic tones. "I have become very thoughtful of late." "What is it you think about?" "Shrouds, mostly." "I am worried about your health, Junius." Prime directive lay behind its concern. "Will you step into the diagnosticon?" "I'm all right." "You may be in good health, but clearly you are not all right. This morbidity is a danger sign. You should concentrate on healthy images." "Such as Lalom's dancing?" "That would seem to be a good choice, though according to my records, you tend to brood after watching her. Perhaps you should talk to her more. " Juni had not been talking to Lalominat much lately and he felt a twinge of conscience. But he watched her more than ever, dancing of course, struggling with the food synthesizer, arguing with Firefly or teaching it her language. She dominated his thoughts; dancing with closed eyes, moving like a shaft of silvery light about her suite, oblivious of his scrutiny, or singing to herself over her table, her voice like many violins, she seemed never out of his mind. She was so cool and light. Juni wondered what her body temperature was. Slim though she was, she was strong and lithe. To hold her would be like gripping a warmsheathed sword. He wondered if her lips were warm or cool. Though he had once thought them too thin, it would be delightful to kiss her -- warm or cool. Or to fluff the plumes at the inner ends of her eyebrows... No. The first touch would bring burning, itching swelling; anything so intimate as a kiss would cause searing pain. Sex would kill her quickly (assuming they could tolerate each other's touch so long); as quickly as snake venom injected into her womb. Convulsions and death in minutes, it would bring her. For himself, death would be more slow, far more painful... Lalominat called him. "Juni? You have not spoken to me for two days...And you speak to me so seldom these days. How have I displeased you?" Her violins throbbed in pain. Juni winced. "You have not. I -- I just -- " He stared into the visiplate for a moment. "Wait there -- I'll be there in a moment." For a moment he dithered, making motions toward the shower and the silicone oil. Then he darted to an equipment locker and snatched up a folded plastic sheet and hurried to Lalom's door. Alarmed, Firefly spoke to him, but Juni didn't hear the words. Lalominat awaited him, eyes large, her fists at her sides. Juni walked up to her and dropped the sheet over her, then put his arms around her. He squeezed her to him. Tears stood in his eyes. Lalom yielded, slim and steely against him. Her arms slid up and partly around him, hampered by his grip and the sheet. Juni couldn't speak. Words weren't necessary. It was real pain in his eyes that brought him around. Juni's face was flushed, eyes swollen; his hands prickled, his lips itched and burned. Blinking away another kind of tears, he looked at Lalominat through the sheet. Her eyes were closed, her eyelashes gummed together; her silvery skin was flushed yellow. She was beginning to drool slightly from the corners of her mouth. She was altogether lovely. It broke his heart to back away from her stiffly (his clothes prickled against his skin), to pull the sheet off her. Lalom immediately exploded in a whistling cough or sneeze. It was not time for words; Juni staggered half-blind for the door, a stabbing burn in his lungs. Outside he dropped the contaminated sheet and ran for his shower. By the time he was able to take notice of things outside himself. Firefly had run out of invective. Two days later they landed at Mon-Sil-Mon.    They all looked like Lalominat. But their attitudes were brisk and businesslike. There was no difficulty in transferring half of his Galactic credit to Lalominat Dancer. So in triumph another daughter of Mon-Sil-Mon returned. Did she recognize this planet as they approached, or did she need to ask Firefly what world it was? But she knew that she was home from the stars before he called her for the first time since they had parted. Firefly had informed him that she had packed only some of the clothes it had cut for her and a complete audio-visual record of their conversations. The ravages of that encounter were gone from her face, but tears spilled from between her lids as Lalom faced him. Juni couldn't speak; he could only croak. Lalom made a curious formal gesture, tossing her hair forward over her face. Then she straightened, stiffened her back, and walked firmly forever away from him. Juni gestured wearily and Firefly lifted off. He had scarcely seen Mon-Sil-Mon. Was it a fairyland? Or just another low-technology planet off the star lanes? All he remembered of it was a slim, straight back firmly receding... For a long time Juni sat staring through the visiplate into the endless moonless night of space.  Something was really bugging Carl but at least he wasn't alone! It was alive. And although it had just come to life, it had, as far as it was concerned, always been alive. It could not see for it had no eyes. It could not feel for it had no hands. It could not move for it had no feet. Yet it sensed around it the world which, as far as it knew, was black and humid, the texture of wood and plaster. Musty and dusty. It had never been young as it would never be old. In fact, it would not live for more than twenty minutes; and no one would ever know it had been alive, for it was not possible for it to live, being made of mechanical parts with no capacity for organic existence. But it did live by virtue of circumstances no one could have foreseen when the device was planted there behind the wall; by circumstances so unlikely they were unlikely to ever occur again. And, in' fact, never have. But this time they did and the little device, which was the size of the head of a pin, was alive. And it remembered everything. For that was its duty, and its duty was its purpose for existence. Remembering the words. The precious syllables that came from beyond the wall; from the scarlet room with the mirror on the ceiling that it had never seen and could not envision; from the lips of beings it knew to be like itself in that they were alive, and yet different, far above itself in that they had created it. Beautiful creatures who spoke the words it remembered and revered, the words that were the whole point of its creation. "My wife hates me. My kids hate me. I don't blame them. I hate me." It had no idea what the words meant. Nor could it know what the men who had planted it here behind the wall would do with the words it remembered. But, to it, the words were beautiful and precious, for they wanted them. They for whom it remembered. They who would return. And until then it was to wait and to listen for that moment when it would again be held in their hands and asked to speak the words. How it knew this is a mystery. Perhaps it did not happen. But it explains what happened later. "Beat me, Sasha, beat me. Harder, harder. Oh, Sasha. Kill me. Destroy me." Of all its memories, this was its favorite. The words went on and on and on. It was lonely. It had been alive for only three minutes but of course it had no sense of time. As far as it was concerned, it had been alive for years. They had not come for it. And there were no more words from the wall. And there had been none for a long time. In truth, the room beyond the wall was empty; gone were the scarlet and purple drapes, the mirror on the ceiling, the whips. The room beyond the wall was barren and dusty. Without even a mouse. And the men were never coming back. It could not know that. It waited and was lonely. It kept remembering the words, for that was all it could do; and although it did not know what the words meant, it sensed one essential thing about them and that was not in what the words said but in the way they were said; in the sounds between the words -- "Oooo -- ," "Eeee -- "Ahhhh -- Over and over it remembered and with every remembering it sensed the darkness grow warmer; itself lonelier, hungrier for the feel of its masters' hands. It learned pain then. Want, first. Need. Desperation. It wanted to cry out but it had no words of its own. Instead, it cried, "Lola! Lola!" The words of a short, fat tailor named Kreisler, who was remembered for saying nothing much except by the device, which remembered him for saying what it felt better than any of the others. It was unlikely that Lola gave Mr. Kreisler what he cried for as she was an insensitive child of nine at the time; but the device was more fortunate. Its cry was heard by another which came to see what it was. Perhaps it came out of curiosity; perhaps chance. But it came. And something about the device made it linger, although it wits' not a creature to linger long about anything that was not edible. It probed the thing with its antennae. It felt its warmth. It sensed the sounds that it made. And all these things together made it feel most peculiar. The device knew at once that something was near. Something like itself in that it was alive yet something different in that it was not the creation of men. But the mere fact that it was alive filled the device with excitement. "Lola," it said, "Daddy's here. Lola, come to Daddy." And it sensed the creature respond. It knew hope. Of course the creature knew nothing of the thoughts and the feelings of the device. All it knew was the warmth and the curious pulsations that ran through its body, giving it a pleasure it had never known before. So gradually it drew nearer -- its pleasure the more intense the nearer it came -- until it was atop the thing, its small body pressed tightly against it. And it was then, in a moment of bliss for which the world had no precedent, that the seed of whatever life was in the thing passed into the creature to become the substance of the creature. And that was all there was to it. The device (how can one put it?) died minutes later. Not that it ceased to exist or ceased functioning but that it ceased to be alive, was once again an inorganic piece of metal the size of the head of a pin lost forever behind the wall of Madame Scarlett's School for Young Ladies. The creature went about its business. It died a few weeks later of a toxic odor in the kitchen of a young man named Carl Vandermeyer. But not before it gave birth to several quite remarkable offspring. Carl Vandermeyer was a young man successfully employed as a city planner. He was married to an attractive woman named Shirley. They lived in an impeccably clean apartment on the fourth floor of # East Thirty-third Street. Late one evening Carl was in the kitchen fixing himself a peanutbutter sandwich when he heard a voice: "I told you you shouldn't have married that man, Shirley. I told you I didn't like the look of him." He looked around at the doorway, expecting to see a face in it, specifically that of his mother-inlaw; but there was no one. The voice continued: "You could have had Freddie Stone. Freddie Stone thought the world of you. But no, you had to go and pick a pansy." The voice was distinctly that of his mother-in-law, yet it seemed to be coming from far away. He left the table and walked back into the living room. It was dark. He looked into the bedroom. His wife slept silently. He returned to the kitchen, shaking his head. "Mother, Carl is not a pansy. He just can't...do it." "Well, isn't that what pansies can't do?" He stopped in the doorway, his throat dry, and he listened carefully. Shirley was crying. She was pouring out her heart to her mother, who never missed a chance to assure her it was all his fault. He knew Shirley's mother had been there that morning. She always came on Wednesdays and brought a large bowl of vegetable soup he had once deceitfully told her was the finest he had ever tasted. She always said she brought it for him, the little boy she had never had. She had never said anything to the contrary. Yet now he stood in his own kitchen and heard her revile him as a pervert. How could Shirley have told her? He felt a little faint. He sat again at the kitchen table and it occurred to him that it was some sort of dream. But then he heard the voices again. Shirley's mother was urging her to leave him and find a "normal man." Suddenly he looked up and saw it -- a small insect on the wall that he recognized at once to be a cockroach. It was unlike any cockroach he had ever seen before but it was a cockroach all the same. It was prettier than most, for one thing. Bright and brown and shiny. But it had two little round things on its back that spun 'round and 'round like a...he hesitated to say it. But there it was: the source of the voices that had spoken together secretly in this kitchen that morning, never intending to be heard again. He picked up a newspaper. He went around the table. He missed the bug as it moved toward the refrigerator. He missed it again as it disappeared behind the baseboard. Shirley came into the kitchen a few minutes later, aroused by the noise of her husband's hammering. The refrigerator had been pulled out from the wall and Carl was down on his hands and knees ripping away the plaster, cursing all the while. She asked him what he was doing and he replied, "Nothing, dear." Carl was late to work the next morning. He had had little sleep. He left his wife to explain the demolished wall to the superintendent. He had not explained it to her. Nor had he mentioned the conversation with her mother. He had not known what to say about that. It occurred to him that he had suffered an hallucination, but he did not accept that idea; he had never had a thought in his head that was not level-headed. He could not imagine where the cockroach had come from or how it had accomplished what it had, but he was confident that he had seen and heard precisely what he had seen and heard. He did not get much done at work that day. Fortunately there was nothing pressing on his desk. He did have a peculiar conversation with a companion named Bartlett. "The old man has it in for me," Bartlett said. "How do you know?" Carl asked, surprised. Bartlett and the "old man" had always been on the best of terms, at least whenever they were together. Privately Bartlett had few good words for him. "He knows I'm after his job. He's going to get rid of me." "How do you know?" "He told the chief architect to ignore all my suggestions on the Buford project. You know how important that was to me." "How do you know?" "He's going to see I'm not invited to the mayor's office next Tuesday for that conference on the Mayfield deal. You see if he doesn't." "How do you know all this?" Carl persisted. "I know," said Bartlett. "Believe me, I know every dirty word he's been saying about me. But what I can't figure out is how he found out." "Found out what?" "That I hate his guts." "Something you said?" "Or...something someone else said. ' ' Carl did not like the way Bartlett looked at him when he said that. On his way home that night he tried to relax with the paper. It was not relaxing. There had been nine resignations in the city comptroller's office that morning. No word of scandal. Just resignations. The Huffman-Jinks case had taken a strange turn. The district attorney had accused the defense of tampering with the jury; the defense had accused the judge of racial bias; and the judge had accused both of them of telling obscene jokes about him behind his back. There had been several suicides in the financial district. When Carl arrived home, he saw the ambulance leaving the front of his apartment house. He stopped a neighbor to ask what had happened. He was told that Mr. Beckman on the third floor had tried to strangle his wife; Blanche, and she had stabbed him with a carving knife. "Such a nice old couple," he thought aloud. "She was playing around," the neighbor said. "I heard him say so." "No, no," another neighbor intervened. "He was the one who was playing around. I heard her say so." Carl remembered Shirley telling him the Beckmans had been married for thirty years. Very quiet, very discrete people. Each with their respective secrets, living together harmoniously. He found Shirley crying brokenheartedly in the kitchen. The wall had been repaired and there was a bill on the table. He did not look at it. "She hates me," Shirley wailed. "Oh, she hates me so terribly." "Who, dear?" he asked. "Janice." Janice was Shirley's oldest friend. Carl could not remember a time when they were not friends, and he had known Shirley most of her life. "What makes you think so?" he asked. "She said terrible, terrible things about me." "To whom?" "To Dr. Bernbaum. What does it matter? They were so terrible." Dr. Bernbaum was Janice's psychiatrist. Carl did not argue. Shirley was as level-headed as himself. If she used a word such as "terrible," she meant it. Certainly Janice knew enough about her after all these years to know a few things that were "terrible." "What did she say?" "She said that I didn't deserve...that you...that she...every night she dreamed about...I can't...can't..." "But how do you know she said anything? Who told you?" "I know, Carl. I know. Every terrible word she said." And with that she ran out of the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom. Three days later Carl was on the phone with a Mr. Kravetch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "It is very decent of you to hear me out, sir," Carl was saying. "I've been calling and calling and no one has permitted me to get this far." "My pleasure, Mr. Vander-ahmeyer. We here at the Bureau like to think we are always responsive to the public. But the thing of it is, ah, just what is it you expect us to do about this bug of yours?" "No, no, no. It's not my bug. At least, that is, there must be now. And there will be more every day. You know how cockroaches are. They'll be all over the country in weeks!" "Yes, roaches will be roaches. But I, ah -- " "You've got to do something immediately." "About your bug...er, bugs?" "Not my -- that is...well, I had better tell you everything." It had come back. The second night. While he was in the bathroom, in no position to defend himself. This time he had seen it before he heard it. It told him that the most vile things were being said about him and his wife by the superintendent and his wife. It seemed he had forgotten to tip the superintendent last Christmas. He had listened. Not wanting to. But too fascinated to stop. It was awful. Those two quiet, polite people with whom he had exchanged so many quiet and polite greetings. Vile. He had heard the bug out. And when it was through, it had left him. Once again he did not get much sleep. But by morning he thought he understood. "Understood what, precisely, Mr. Vander-ah-meyer?" Mr. Kravetch asked. "It was looking out for me, you see. Spying for me. I mean, what other explanation could there be? It wasn't lying. I know that. It wasn't making the whole thing up. That would be beyond...decency. It was 'reporting in.' " "The same bug?" "Who knows? How could I tell? But it was what happened last night that convinced me of the danger." He had gone to the bathroom at midnight, deliberately, and had sat there, waiting. The bug had come to him and he had had the idea that it would have come to him no matter what room he was in. It kept a safe distance. Told him that even more vile things were being said about him by Bartlett at the office and added a particularly crude conversation between Bartlett and a young secretary. Carl had stood up very slowly and approached the bug. It moved away from him. He put out his hand. It started to run. He withdrew his hand. It stopped. He put out his hand again. It came to him. Came into his hand. "It...loved...me. In some perverse way. Like a dog. That was why it was telling me these things. Out of loyalty. It was deliberately spying on everyone around me in order to keep me informed." "Isn't that interesting," said Mr. Kravetch. "Interesting? Why, it's -- " Carl could think of no word to describe the horror he felt. "We wouldn't mind having a few of those little fellows here at the Bureau, Mr. Vander-ah-meyer," Mr. Kravetch said, laughing softly. "Save thousands on equipment, I can tell you." "You will have them, Mr. Kravetch. All you could ask for and sooner than you think." Carl hung up. What was the use? Kravetch was like all the rest. No one would listen. Very well then. There was no point in making a fool of oneself. That night he tried an experiment. He gave the cockroach a small piece of cloth that had belonged to a beautiful young lady down the hall and that he had obtained at the risk of great embarrassment to himself. The insect smelled it, or sensed it, or whatever it is cockroaches do, and went away. An hour later it came back with a conversation between the young lady and a gentleman named Ambrose that was the most delightful thing Carl had heard in years. She was, indeed, everything he had imagined her to be. He left the cockroach on the bathroom wall and went into the kitchen. He returned with a hammer. Thebug did not move. He smashed it where it stood. Its shell was very hard and two strong blows were required to crush it. It fell to the floor with a tinkling of parts and a splash of goo, The events of the next few years came as no surprise to Carl. Not that he could have predicted them. Simply, he expected the worst and that is precisely what occurred. Although, oddly enough, not to him. Bartlett's persistent animosity toward him put him suddenly into the "old man's graces" -- a position he had not occupied previously. And then, of course, he understood the situation now. He and Shirley were divorced and living together in a new apartment. She was expecting twins. They were thinking of buying a house in an exclusive suburb following Carl's promotion to head of the department. The remainder of their lives is of no interest whatever. Franklin W. Bankes was the President of the United States. He had never anticipated the honor for he had little money, an undistinguished education and no family to speak of; but the events of the past few years had been such that, when all was said and done, there he was. Late one Monday evening he sat in the blue washroom of the east wing of the White House, perched on the porcelain commode and reading a prepared statement to several small, shiny, brown insects on the wall. It began: "What I love most about the Speaker of the House is -- "  The therapy was a success, but the patient -- tionless mass of people on their way to work, a man in a gray business suit stepped off a bus and headed toward one of the innumerable monoliths of concrete and glass that rose above Manhattan Island. The sky was overcast and at no point did the clouds betray the position of the sun as it made its daily journey from east to west. The city, however, was sweltering from the greenhouse effect and the man was relieved when he finally stepped into the air-conditioned lobby of the building he sought. After checking the directory that stood by the entrance, the man made his way into an elevator, to be crushed with a number of other people. He felt the sensation of acceleration as the lift swiftly pulled its passengers to the twentieth floor. People came in and went out at each floor thereafter and the tedious ride to the next five floors seemed to defeat the whole purpose of the high-speed mechanism. Finally the elevator came to his floor and he stepped out, along with two other people. He found room # and walked in. As the receptionist did not look up from polishing her nails, he cleared his throat. Smiling, she raised her head and asked, "Can I help you?" "I have an appointment with Doctor Castellano. My name is David Trent." She looked at her appointment book. "Oh, yes, Mr. Trent, the doctor is expecting you. Go right in." He stepped into the office as the psychiatrist was putting a book on the shelf. Dr. Castellano was a middle-aged business-suit type, showing a touch of gray on his temples. He greeted the patient amiably with a handshake. "How are you, Dave? Glad to see you again. Have a seat, won't you?" "Thank you, Doctor," he said, sitting down. "Did you have any trouble finding the office?" "No, your new office wasn't too hard to find. I see you have a new receptionist too." "Yes, I shared the other one with a couple of other doctors but Cathy here is all mine." "She seems like a nice girl. Good personality." "Yes," replied the doctor, "but she's a lousy typist. Anyway, enough of that. There's a lot I want to get done in this session so let's get right down to business." "Sure thing." "Okay, Dave." He leafed through his notes on the last visit while he spoke. "Last time we talked about a dream you have been having. To get us started, I'd like you to tell me again, in your own words, about the dream." "Yes...uh...there's really not much to it and very little ever happens. All it is is that I'm floating in some kind of liquid, not moving by myself but just drifting. I never see anything but I hear noises like gurglings or something and it's very comfortable and warm there. "I've had these dreams about once a month, or every six weeks, up until this summer. Lately they've been much more frequent, maybe once a week. And lately, too, I feel very tired when I wake up after one of them. It's as if I really didn't get much sleep when I know I've slept a full eight hours." The psychiatrist was listening and he reached for Trent's record, obtained from the National Population Data Bureau. Not looking up, he asked, "These dreams, are they pleasant or don't you like them? How do you feel about them?" "Well," Trent replied, "they're more boring than anything else, really -- just floating, doing nothing. And while they're pleasant and peaceful, there's a little apprehension associated with them as if there were something unknown, possibly something dangerous, about them. And another thing, usually in these dreams I sense a presence of some kind, close by and familiar, but I don't quite know what it is." The psychiatrist looked over his notes and was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Last week we started talking a little about your mother. You mentioned that she passed away recently. Right now I'd like you to tell me some more about her and the kind of relationship you had." What does that have to do with my dreams, Trent wondered. What is this guy getting at? "Well, to answer your question, I guess that through my childhood we were pretty close. My father died when I was six and I was an only child. My mother never remarried so I was all she had. Money was never any problem though. My father left us quite a large sum." "I see," said the doctor. "And how are things going for you now?" Trent thought for a moment before replying. "Well, financially I'm okay. I'm an electrical engineer, as your records will show. As for my social life, I've never been too -- you know -- too successful with women and I don't have a girlfriend or, fof that matter, many friends at all. Most of the people I work with have their own families and all and I don't really know many others." He felt greatly embarrassed and did not look at the psychiatrist as he spoke. He continued. "My mother and I lived on Long Island until she died and then I moved to the city. Now my life revolves mainly around my work, and I also go to school nights." "How do you like New York, Dave?" "To tell you the truth, I don't like it very much. The city is just so big. I feel insignificant. If I were to die right now, I doubt that anyone would bother coming to the funeral. Why is it that in a city of There must be something wrong with me. Iwalk down the street and see people, even the lowliest menials, who have friends, girlfriends, wives, families. Why am I an exception?" . The psychiatrist seemed to marshall his thoughts. "Dave, you are exhibiting a typical case of what I call the 'Metropolis Syndrome.' A great many people in cities like this one have the same problemloneliness. You would be surprised at the number of people who come in here and, behind all of their obvious problems, just want somebody with an understanding ear to talk to. The city is big, overwhelming, unless you become a part of it. That's what I suggest to you -- become a part. Your insecurity seems to stem from having no real focal point of stability, except possibly your work and that isn't enough. Everyone needs people to give him some stability, especially in this fastchanging society. "In your case your mother was that point of stability. She was the major center of your early life and therefore she represented security to you. This feeling of loneliness has been heightened by her recent death because to you she was a point of permanence in life. Your mother had always been there and it seemed as if she always would be. We all have these points of 'permanence' in our lives -- until we're rudely awakened to the fact that transience is the rule of the world, not permanence. "I think your dream sort of symbolizes this. What you describe in your dream, from both the physical and the psychological viewpoints, is what it's like to be a fetus. Sigmund Freud had a lot to say about this with respect to mother-son relationships. There is often an unconscious desire to crawl back into the womb, where there is real security. Before you were born, you had always known peace, contentment and security. When you were born, there was the gasping for air, the doctor's slap, the fight for life. This is known as birth trauma and perhaps it's the hardest thing to accept in life. The start. From then on, there is pain and suffering -- mixed, of course, with periods of joy and happiness. But sometimes we want to crawl back into the peacefulness of the womb and this is what you're doing in your dream. Whether you're remembering or re-creating in your imagination how it was, it doesn't matter. But since you can't crawl back into the womb, you must find some other type of security outside. Do you have a religion?" Trent fidgited uncomfortably in his seat. "No, what does that have to do with it?" "Well, I thought that maybe a church would be a good place to start. How about a club of some kind, a health club or some other special-interest club or lodge?" "I've never really thought about it," said Trent. "It sounds like a good idea." "I can do nothing for you. I never can. The patient always has to do it himself and so I'm leaving you with the task, within the next two weeks, of finding some group or club you're interested in and joining. Okay? That'll be your therapy. I'll see you in two weeks then, and we'll see how it's turning out, all right? My secretary will make an appointment for you." Trent stood up and they shook hands. "Sure, and thanks a lot, Doctor. You've been a great help."    He awoke in a cold sweat and jerked to consciousness. He felt fear but had no reason to be afraid. Somewhere out there was a presence, very near. He felt it. It was strangely familiar to him, although he couldn't recognize it. Trent lay motionless in his bed while the city lights leaked in through the curtains. The room was still; the only movement came each minute as the digital clock changed its reading. The presence rapidly drifted away from his consciousness and Trent began to feel more relaxed. He lay motionless in bed and listened to himself breathe for a long time. He finally fell asleep.    The next thing he was aware of was an acute pain in the back of his head. He awoke with a start and sat up, clutching the damp grass beneath him. The pain of the lump on his head gave way to confusion as he became aware of the trees that surrounded him and the moon that shone overhead. Trent was in the park, sitting on the ground. His clothes were damp from dew and he shivered as he realized that he must have been out for quite a while. As he stood up, he realized too that he couldn't remember getting out of bed, dressing and driving here in the first place. He should still be at home, sleeping. He wanted to see what time it was but he discovered that his watch was missing. So was his wallet. He checked on the ground and found the leather case a couple of yards away, emptied of its cash. Now he knew why there was a lump on his head. He had been mugged -- but he didn't remember a thing about it. He made haste to get out of the park before another mugger tried his luck. He walked home in the dark, glancing behind occasionally to make sure no one was following. It wasn't exactly the safest neighborhood in the city.    "At first I thought it might be just amnesia or something from being hit on the head. But a lot of strange things happened to me after that." He looked at the psychiatrist, whose expressionless face told him nothing. Dr. Castellano asked quietly, without any movement, "What sort of things, Dave?" "Well," he began, "after that I started to sleepwalk. I would wake up in the morning fully dressed and with mud on my shoes, or maybe I would wake up miles away from my apartment. I would have run up bills that I didn't remember anything about. I also checked my odometer. I've been doing a lot of driving in my sleep. But the real clincher was last Wednesday." Castellano scratched a short note in his pad and without looking up, he asked, "And what happened last Wednesday?" "I had to go to Chicago on a night-coach flight right after work. It was a busihess trip. Anyway, I was pretty tired so I dropped off to sleep as soon as I boarded. The next thing I knew I was in my hotel room, and it was # a.m. I woke up and found my baggage all unpacked. That plane took off at #:# p.m. Now I had had a seven-hour lapse and I don't know how to account for it. This didn't bother me as much as the next evening did, when I got a phone call from a girl who said she had met me on the plane. "Out of curiosity I played along with her and found out that I had a date with her. I met her and we went out together. She said that I seemed different than I had the other night and she told me things I had done and said that were totally out of character." "Like what, for instance?" "Well, the fact that I even picked up a girl on a business trip is very unusual. I'm usually, like, you know, afraid to start a conversation with a stranger, let alone a strange woman. And my drinking was another thing. I never drink whisky sours but she said I'd had three. And I never drink heavily anyway. Then there's my preference for foods. She said that we'd had lobster the first night but I despise lobster. I would never eat that insect." Castellano eyed him. "I see. Anything else?" "Yes, there's more to it. I went to sleep that night, Thursday, and woke up to find I was in bed with her. I was a little surprised but didn't say anything about it to her. The next morning I found out that it was Saturday -- when it was supposed to be Friday. I had gotten up Friday, gone to business meetings all day, gone out with Louise -- that's her name, by the way -- brought her up to my room and spent the night with her without even knowing it! When I looked at the notes of my Friday business meetings, they were unlike anything I normally would have written. The style, format and wording were all totally different from my own. This is all so crazy. What does it mean? I can't just be sleepwalking!" Trent appeared confused and upset. Castellano noted the change in his demeanor; he had been calm when he walked in. "Do you remember anything that happened during these periods of...sleepwalking? Any dreams perhaps?" Trent thought for a moment before responding. His mind was clearer now and he answered excitedly. "Yes, come to think of it, I do remember something. It's very unusual for me to remember any dreams so there must be some significance in the fact that I had that dream about floating. I remember that dream because I always wake up disturbed after it." The psychiatrist wrote down the words "possible dissociative neurosis" on his pad. He marshalled his thoughts to formulate a carefully worded response. "Dave, sometimes when a person has...ah, anxiety about a certain part of his behavior or his thinking, his mind is trying to reconcile two conflicting forces. You noted that your behavior during these 'periods of unconsciousness' was, shall we say, less conservative than the way you normally act. You picked up a girl, drank heavily, went out for a walk in the middle of the night. In short, you did things that you would never really do but had always thought of doing. "Now here's where the dream ties in. When you lived with your mother, she was an inhibiting influence on you. Of course you could come and go and do as you pleased, she couldn't stop you. Yet she was there with her watchful eye on you, asking you where you had been and noting the hours you kept. When she died, the inhibition was gone and you secretly wanted to break free and do all the things you couldn't do before. But part of your mind still had your mother's programming in it and so 'dissociated' itself away from the rebellious part. In those dreams your conservative part was able to rest in your mother's womb, unaware of, and therefore not responsible for, the things that your rebellious part was doing." This idea seemed agreeable to Trent. "Uh, Doctor, I don't know very much about psychology but...I don't know, I guess what you've said has a lot of truth to it. I can see what you mean, for instance, about my wanting to do things and yet not doing them. There are lots of things that you hear about -- people climbing mountains or hitchhiking across America, all sorts of things -- that you might secretly want to do but would never seriously consider doing. For example, I could never have told my mother that I wanted to go skydiving. She would probably have sent me to you!" They both laughed. Castellano replied, "I can assure you that the first time I went skydiving, I thought I was crazy. But you live through it and usually jump again. Have you ever jumped?" Trent felt embarrassed and smiled. "Well, I almost did once but on the way to my first lesson, I began to think, 'What if I got hurt or killed?' My mother would probably have had a heart attack or something. So I never did it." The psychiatrist shook his head. "I think we've found the root of the matter. Now comes the time to formulate a plan of attack. However, I still need more data to be absolutely certain. Specifically, I need to test my theory on the role of your dreams in this matter. Therefore I would like to suggest "An electroencephalogram. Simply, we measure what has been popularly called brain waves. These brain waves are merely the patterns of the fluctuations in the measurements of certain physiological functions associated with the brain's operations. Everyone has his own unique pattern, sort of like a fingerprint. In your case we would go to sleep. Any unusual variations could show us the nature of the determine whether your problem is physiological or purely psychological." Trent was startled. "You mean there could be something wrong with my brain?" "That's a possibility but at this point I have no reason to believe so. I just want to make sure -- to be on the safe side." Trent's face grew serious. "Now I'm getting a little scared. I mean, this could be something serious." "Really, I wouldn't worry. These are only standard tests and we do them all the time. I'm sure that one way or another we can find a solution to the problem." "Well, I hope so." "Dave, this will probably require a week or more of sleep testing and I would prefer to conduct it in your apartment, in your own bed. Controlled tests are more accurate when as many variables as possible are removed." "What do you mean?" "In other words," Castellano replied, "home is the place where you're most likely to sleep as you ordinarily do. Variations might be caused by a change in the environment." "Yeah, okay. I guess that would be more convenient for me anyway. When do you want to begin?" "Oh, probably next week. I'll have my secretary call you in a few days to confirm the date." Trent got out of his chair. "Hey, I have to get back to work. My lunch hour is almost up." He started to the door. The doctor smiled at him. "Okay, Dave. See you sometime next week." Trent walked out.    two technicians from Columbia University. Actually they were graduate students already involved in sleep research and they knew Dr. Castellano at Columbia. Lori Howell and Carl Pruett arrived at Trent's apartment armed with two suitcases of equipment and an attache case containing a phone-link computer terminal that could be used with any Trent ushered them into the bedroom and they began setting up their equipment. He decided to clean and straighten the kitchen. Once they got started, there would be no free time to do the things that needed doing. He selected his most conservative pair of pajamas and put them on in the bathroom. As he approached the bedroom, he saw that they were almost ready. Pruett called out, "Mr. Trent, we're about ready for you now." Trent stepped into the room, feeling ridiculous. His pajama top sported pink turtles on a white background, while the pants were a hot pink. Pruett and Howell tried not to stare at the pajamas, which Trent had never before allowed anyone to see. "Well, I'm ready." He surveyed the room and his embarrassment turned to amazement as he looked at the equipment. The pens on the graph paper were still and a mass of colored wires lay near his pillow. On a table were some bottles and medical implements. The entire room had been transformed into a laboratory. Trent remarked, "It's fantastic how all this stuff can be miniaturized. I'm really impressed at its mobility." "Well, Mr. Trent," replied widely used as it is today. When the 'cessation of neural activity in the cerebrum' became the legal definition of death, it became necessary that this equipment be made portable and, above all, cheap so that local hospitals, emergency units and the like could have a quick and any time." Lori Howell motioned to the bed. "If you'll sit on the bed, Mr. Trent, I'll prepare you for the electroencephalogram." He walked over and sat down. "As you wish." She had already washed her hands and she began to work like a surgeon, Pruett acting as her assistant. He opened a book filled with diagrams and she prepared to apply the first electrode. She parted Trent's hair at the back of his head and rubbed his scalp with a wet cotton ball. It felt cold to him as it evaporated. "What's that?" he asked. "It doesn't smell like alcohol." "That's because it's not. It's acetone," she said, "to dissolve skin oils that might interfere with the transmission of electricity." She was ready for the next step. "Saline gel," she ordered. She was handed a cotton swab covered with a clear ointment. She applied it to the proper spot. "Now I'm applying an electrolyte gel to facilitate better conductivity. We're going to achieve electrical discharges directly from your brain." "I see," he said, beginning to feel like a lab animal. "Now for the electrode," she said. To a carefully chosen site on Trent's head, Howell taped a metal disk with a wire attached to it. This was labeled No. #. They continued the same process with the rest of the electrodes until all twelve were attached, including two on his eyelids to measure Rapid Eye Movement. These were the most uncomfortable of all. Trent was lying in bed now, connected to wires dangling in the air. Pruett moved a monitoring unit into the next room while Howell briefed the lab animal with last-minute instructions. "Mr. Trent, we're about ready to begin now. All you have to do is sleep. We'll take care of the rest. Our machines won't be heard in here and you needn't worry about those electrodes. Just think about how many women are going to sleep tonight with curlers in their hair. Electrodes are a lot easier to get used to than curlers, I can assure you." He was surprised. "You mean you've undergone sleep-testing before?" "Oh, yes," she lied. "I would never ask a person to do anything I hadn't tried myself." What he didn't know wouldn't hurt him, she thought. Turning to the doorway, she called, "Carl, switch it on." Trent was surprised that he felt absolutely nothing. He had almost expected, when hooked to the machine, that he would become part of it, part of an electronic being. "Blink your eyes, if you will, a few times just to see if everything's working properly." Under the electrodes, he blinked. Pruett informed her, "Lori, I'm getting some blinking here. Everything looks good." She moved toward the door and turned off the lights. "Good night, pleasant dreams." Trent returned her "good night" as she shut the door.    The New York Clone Bank had been in existence since # and in commercial operation since #. It had enjoyed a great success among the more affluent members of society and had recently fallen within the financial reach of the upper middle class. Anyone who could afford the price could have a clone, an exact duplicate of himself, made from the genetic information in one of his body cells and grown and kept alive in the Bank. Whenever an organ transplant was needed, or quantities of blood, one's clone would be the perfect donor, eliminating the possibility of tissue rejection in transplants. But perhaps the most attractive aspect of cloning was that with the imminent arrival of braintransplant capability, immortality, or at least something close to it, would be possible. When one's own frail body was worn out after seventy years, it would be possible to transplant the brain, the seat of consciousness, into a young, clonal body, exactly like the original in every way. The storage of clones occupied five floors in the Bank and space was being used up rapidly. Already proposals for a new building were being presented to the Board and something would have to be done about it soon. Dr. Harold Bennet was the Supervisor of Clone Maintenance, Night Shift. He resented the title because of the janitorial duties it implied. Granted, somebody had to oversee the care of the Bank's subhuman population but he hated having such a label on his resume. His hours and lack of contact with other scientists in his field were isolating him from the mainstream of research. But the job market is bad now, he reasoned to himself. At least he had a job in his field, which was more than a lot of his fellow graduates could say. Still, he was sinking into a rut in this job. While he would like to be doing research, he really wasn't looking very hard for such an opportunity. Bennet's mind had long since wandered from the journal he had been reading and he was startled when someone knocked on the door. He told the visitor to come in and Charlie Lowe, one of the technicians, entered. "Doctor Bennet, something very odd has happened with one of the clones." "What is it, Charlie?" "It's hard to explain. You're going to have to see for yourself. I've never seen anything like it. C'mon." They stepped into the corridor and began walking to the Clone Storage Center, which occupied most of the floor. Lowe continued, "About fifteen minutes ago we got a warning signal from the computer monitor that all sensory contact with Clone #-# had been broken. This doesn't necessarily mean anything since we're having equipment failures all the time. But when we, Greg Estes and I, went to take a look at it, we found...well, I know you're going to say this is impossible but we found the clone in an odd position." They entered the anteroom to the Storage Center and put on the sterile gowns and masks that were always worn in the germ-free environment of the clone-tube galleries. Charlie continued talking as they entered. "You've got to see this. The sensory wires on the clone were pulled out and we found them in its hand." They passed row upon row of clone tubes, three levels high, accessible by catwalks. The dim light of the room added an eerie quality to the quiet galleries. There were seldom many people here and the atmosphere was hushed. The only sound was that of the quiet, automatic machinery. One could hear the gurgling of the pseudo-amniotic fluid pumps and the hissing of the oxygen system. The two men walked down the silent aisle, passing tier after tier of floating bodies, all in the fetal position; human but mindless, only the motor portions of their brains intact. Thank God their eyes are never open, thought Bennet. No matter how long he worked in this place, he always felt a little uneasy walking past the silent spectators, as if on parade. In his nightmares he could easily imagine the clones becoming animate. They approached the clone tube beside which Greg Estes was standing, writing on his clipboard. He saw them and called out, "Over here, Doctor Bennet." They stopped a few feet away from #-# and Bennet saw the hand with the wires, just as described. It was apparent, though, that the wires were not being grasped by the hand but were merely caught on it, as if some movement of the arm had accidently ripped them out. However, there should have been no movement at all. Bennet let out a whistle and turned to the technicians. "That's really something. How did it happen?" Estes looked at him. "We were hoping, Doctor, that you could tell us." He surveyed the situation more closely. "Well, it looks to me like a loose wire in the monitoring system somehow gave the clone a shock. It moved as a reflex action and accidentally pulled out the wires." "I don't think so. I checked for loose wires and couldn't find any," said Estes. He continued, "Besides, the chances are that if there was enough current to cause a reflex action, the clone would have been electrocuted. As you can see, it's very much alive, perhaps more than we would like to think." Bennet eyed him with disdain. "Are you suggesting that perhaps our clonal friend moved of his own volition? The cerebrum is destroyed long before artificial parturition, making thought or independent movement impossible. Look at the scalp closely. There are the sea -- " He stopped abruptly. There were no scars on the skull where the massive doses of acetylcholine should have been injected to render the brain incapable of storing information. These doses were normally injected in the frontal and occipital lobes of both sides of the cerebrum but the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata were never disturbed because of their vital functions in controlling the involuntary life mechanisms of the body. The result was an organic machine kept alive by hormone injections and intravenous feedings. The "thing" was more vegetable than human and the Supreme Court had even ruled as much on the matter, stating that the higher portion of the brain had to be functioning in order for the organism to be considered human. Bennet whispered emphatically, "There are no scars. That brain could still be fully intact." Lowe added, "In other words, we have here a human being." Bennet turned sharply to both of them. "Not a word about this to it up for testing everything as on a normal human, not just the motor portion as you would on a clone. We've got to determine if this brain is really intact. Charlie, get me the file on this clone. We have to see if there are records of the injections or not. Then I want to meet both of you in my office as soon as possible." Bennet headed for his office. The behaviorists would have a field day on this one, he thought, if this is really what it appears to be. What could a lifetime as a fetus do to a man's mind? The implications were profound. Within forty-five minutes the men were gathered in Bennet's office, having completed their tasks. Bennet read the file out loud. "This clone belongs to a Mr. David Trent, who lives here in the city. It was made when he was seven months old and his parents set up a trust fund for its care here at the Bank. Let's see, # was when he was cloned and it's now #. He must be about thirty-six years old. What does the medical history show, Greg?" "Well, the checklist says that all the acetylcholine injections were given. The supervisor's inspection sheet is marked 'satisfactory' and states that all the items on the checklist are complete. But wait...the supervisor's sheet is dated before the checklist. Something must have been mixed up." "Yes," said Bennet, "and the clone might never have had its injections." He sighed. "We may have a real legal problem on our hands." "Do you think the courts would declare the clone a human being?" Bennet grew thoughtful. "I hope not. Beside the inevitable law suit, which could hurt the Bank financially, we could be deprived of a good research opportunity." "Meaning you can't experiment on 'human beings,' " Estes said. "Exactly. And just think of the possibilities. For the behaviorists, there's the opportunity to observe a mind whose whole existence was without stimulation or rational thought. It would probably give them a chance to learn more about which aspects of behavior are learned and which are inherent in the human psyche. Also, from a neurological point of view, we have an opportunity here to learn about the way thought and neural activity are related. But all this depends on whether or not we'll be allowed to is going to be a big factor in that respect so let's get on it." They left the office. For aspiring writers, and "a fascinating insiders' view of the profession." -- Publishers Weekly # top SF writers discuss the writing of science fiction and fantasy, including Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and the editor of the book, Reginald Bretnor. # at bookstores, or direct from the publisher.    The sleep-lab technicians had nights now and this was the seventh. Dr. Castellano was speaking privately with Pruett while Pruett was explaining to Castellano the past week's progress. "Everything was' perfectly normal at away and no signs of any organic disturbance. The pattern I have in my hand, pattern A, exemplifies this. Then at #:# of the fourth night we got this pattern, pattern B. Now notice that here he's in Stage Four sleep, the deepest stage. Then suddenly we get this pattern from God knows where with mixed gamma and' beta waves. Pattern B has been occurring over increasing periods for the past three nights. That's why we thought it would be good to have you look at it." "Has there been any equipment failure?" asked Castellano. "No, Doctor. We used three different machines and got the same results on each. Whatever is causing this is in his brain and I'll be damned if there's anything about it in the literature. Granted, there are normally some variations in the pattern for different reasons but here we have a whole new pattern. This would seem to indicate a drastic change in the functioning of the brain -- and that should be impossible. The basic pattern just isn't supposed to change." "Yes, Carl. I tend to agree with you. By the way, do you have a tape recorder?" "Yes, we always do in sleep testing." "Good," said the psychiatrist. "I'm going to try to talk with him if and when the pattern occurs and I want to get it on tape. This should prove very interesting. Oh -- one more thing -- have you questioned Trent at all in conjunction with these B patterns? I'm particularly interested in any dreams he's had." "Yes, we have. If you look on the graph, you'll see we had pattern B for a while and then it returned to pattern A in Stage Three sleep. Then it quickly went up to Stage One, consciousness. Trent told us in each case of a dream about floating. Do you -- " "Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for. He has mentioned those dreams before. That's very strange and I can't connect everything just yet. Somehow it all has to fit together but I can't seem to figure out how. I hope interrogation will help us." There was a knock at the door. Lori Howell popped her head in. "Doctor Castellano, the patient has just gone to bed. Are you ready?" "Yes, Lori. Let's watch the They watched the patterns increase in amplitude and wavelength as Trent fell asleep. Everything was a firm pattern A. After two hours they had finished a pot of coffee and were beginning to get bored. Trent was just starting to go into Stage Four sleep, the deepest part of sleep, but now he was in pattern B. "Doctor Castellano," said Howell, "here it is again. Notice those sharp peaks as opposed to pattern A's rounded peaks. This is definitely pattern B. Do you think we should try to wake him?" "Not yet," replied the psychiagraph." He studied the graph for a time and then said, "Now that's strange. He's in Stage Three sleep and he should be dreaming but the lack of Rapid Eye Movement shows that he's not. As a matter of fact, he wasn't dreaming before, when he was in the period of light sleep in pattern A. Let's -- " He stopped in mid-sentence. The pattern was changing back to pattern A. Trent woke and clutched his arm, sitting up quickly. He looked at everyone and then started to laugh. "Ha," he said, "it was only a dream." He turned to Castellano. "Doctor, you know that dream I told you about, the one where I was floating? Well, this time I tried to move and my muscles were really stiff, as if I had been inactive for a long time. Anyway, I started moving in this sort of thick fluid I told you about and I felt something hard, like a wall. Then my arm hit against something flexible, like a rope or a wire. I tried to move it out of my way but it didn't give. I hurt my arm on it and then I woke up. It's the funniest thing." Neither Castellano nor the technicians seemed to find anything funny about it and they looked at each other with surprise. The description of the rope or wire brought to mind the fetal umbilical cord but Castellano quickly dismissed the idea. He was beginning to question his Freudian fetal theory altogether. Pruett questioned Trent. "Mr. Trent, are you absolutely sure you shows that you couldn't possibly have been dreaming at any time while you were asleep." Trent was indignant. "Look, I know what I dreamed. Maybe your machine's on the blink. You've used three already and -- " Castellano put a stop to the argument. "Don't worry, Dave, that's unimportant. You were obviously dreaming something and perhaps we can find an explanation for the reason there was no indication of it on the graph. At any rate, I'd like you to go back to sleep again so we can collect more data." They left the room and Trent started to fall asleep again. After what seemed like a long time, he slipped through the stages of sleep into the mindless limbo of Stage Four. "He's in Stage Four, Doctor," reported Howell. "Physiological functions are very low." They waited impatiently for pattern B to appear and after a while it started abruptly. "There it is, Doctor," whispered Pruett.    In Bennet's office three very grave men sat in heated discussion. es that the clone has a mind and that the cerebrum is intact. This is legally a human being, not a clone," said Estes. Bennet agreed. "Yes, that's true. But why should we be getting two make any sense. This is an anomaly that has never been observed before. It could lead to a very important breakthrough in our understanding of the mind. We don't know how spending a whole life in a clone tube -- with no stimulus whatsoever -- could possibly permit be able to find out. We could very easily have stumbled onto something truly important." Like a tunelong forgotten but suddenly called to mind, ambition ran through Bennet's head. Here was the chance, the opportunity, the lucky break. He would be on the ground floor of a new breakthrough. He could make a name for himself. Hadn't he majored in psychology during those pre-med years? Now he could put it. all to use. Estes had more immediate and practical things on his mind. "You haven't thought, Doctor, what this could do to us. You know the laws against experimenting on human beings. This thing is legally human and it probably has a mind. Even if you could complete your research, you could never publish anything on it. You'd be arrested and so would we, as accomplices. Remember, there are still many people vehemently opposed to cloning. If this ever got out, there's no telling what could happen." Bennet thought this over and ambition slowly retreated to the far corners of his mind. Finally he looked at Lowe. "What do you think, Charlie?" Lowe immediately responded. "Doctor Bennet, there's only one thing we can do. We have to destroy the cerebrum -- as it should have been destroyed years ago. If we just leave it, somebody else may find out about it and that could be very bad ifit ever got out -- bad for the Bank and bad for us. It's better for all concerned if we destroy the cerebrum now. No one would ever know. It's the only way." Bennet looked at Estes. "I agree," said Estes. "We have to do it and quickly, before anyone finds out." The scientist slowly nodded his head and sighed. "Yes, you're right. It's the only way. Bring the proper equipment and include a surgical drill. We're going to have to drill through the skull. Then meet me in the scrub room." They left and Bennet slowly made his way to the anteroom adjacent to the main part of the Storage Center. He had just finished scrubbing when Lowe and Estes walked in with sterilized equipment. They scrubbed in silence and then made their way to the clone. Bennet drained some of the thick pseudo-amniotic fluid from the tube and removed the part of the tube covering the head. Then he secured the clone in place with restraining straps. When this was done, he stopped for a moment to examine the bald head. "This is going to be a bit different than our normal procedure on fetuses. The fontanelles are closed. We have to drill." Bennet was handed a cotton alcohol swab with which he sterilized the scalp. Then he found the juncture of the frontal and pareital plates of the skull where the anterior fontanel le had been. "Scalpel." He was handed the scalpel and made several incisions. Carefully he separated the skin. Trent was floating, motionless. He heard strange, muffled sounds and felt something cold and hard touching his head. "Drill." Bennet was handed a small, high-speed drill with which he made a tiny hole in the skull. Trent felt pain and tried to cry out. No sound emerged. Estes saw the lips move and called it to Bennet's and Lowe's attention. "Look, the lips are moving, as if he...it...was trying to articulate." "We'd better hurry. The drill may have hurt. After all, we're not using a local anesthetic." and was ready for the next step. "Acetylcholine." A hypodermic was handed to him and he punctured the three membranes enclosing the brain -- the dura, the arachnoid and the pia matter -- injecting acetylcholine into the frontal lobes of both hemispheres. "We still have the pattern with the rounded peaks, Doctor. No sign of the other one. I can see the injections beginning to take effect now." Bennet drilled again and injected the acetylcholine into the occipital portion of the brain. Trent's mind rapidly faded away, out of existence. Bennet watched the cerebral lines of neural impulses were scattered through the cortex. He stared at them, contemplating what he had just done. "Not a word of this to anybody, ever." Estes and Lowe nodded in agreement.    In Trent's room a man in bed was slowly coming into consciousness. tently. "Doctor Castellano, we still have pattern B but he's waking up. He'll be conscious in pattern B for the first time that we've ever observed." The man stirred and opened his eyes. I'm here again, he thought. Why are they looking at me so strangely? "David," said Castellano, "how do you feel?" He decided to retain his incognito. Besides, who would believe him if he told the truth? The clone spoke through Trent's mouth. "Fine, Doctor, quite well." "Did you dream anything?" "Dream? No." The clone tried to contact Trent's mind as he had always been able to before. There was nothing there. Somehow he knew that there would never be anything there again. He was David Trent now and all those years as an unnoticed observer in Trent's mind were finished. David Trent was dead. "Doctor Castellano," said Pruett, "pattern B seems stronger now. No sign of pattern A at all." Castellano eyed Trent curiously. There was something different about the man in front of him but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.    The next morning, briefcase in hand, a man in a gray business suit stepped out into the street on his way to work. Indistinguishable from the rest of the mindless, directionless mass of people, he quickened his pace as he neared the bus stop. The sky was overcast with smog again and it looked as if it would be another hot, sticky day. He boarded the bus.  Back in the days of H,L. Gold and Frederik Pohl, one of the names They didn't even know who Smith was, then; only that he wrote some anywhere else. He was the creator of the pinlighters and the go-captains and the Norstrilians and the Underpeople; of stroon and pianoforming and Space#, and all the other strange people and inventions in the universe of the Instrumentality of Mankind. Smith's last appearance here was in #, the same year as the death of Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger -- then revealed as the man behind Smith. But there was also, at times, a woman behind Smith: Paul's wife Genevieve. She had collaborated with him on several stories, including "The Lady who Sailed the Soul," which appeared in these pages. And she knew him, obviously, better than anyone else. Next month's cover story is "The Queen of the Afternoon," a posthumous collaboration. From an uncompleted manuscript left by Paul, Genevieve has completed a story set in a time little touched on in other Smith fiction: the time of the Fighting Trees and the Unauthorized Men, of the Rule of the Jwindz and the origins of the Instrumentality itself. Also watch for "The Defector," a unique story that ponders the kind of responsibilities a writer may fa :e if he becomes a Real Writer and creates Real Characters -- by the leading Soviet sf author Olga Larionova. And a few other surprises that ought to please all of you. Nine classic tales guaranteed by John Variey # to entertain. Introduction The spectacular first novel by science Illustrations by Rick Bryant. "Highly satisfying." -- The New York Times Recently published -- A space adventure of gambling and derring-do, starring Chet McCoy, Intergalactic Bookie Extraordinaire "Isn't just a good read, it's a great read." -- Damon Knight "Breathtakingly original and just damned good ." -- Harlan Ellison Dell Publishing Co., Inc. I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza # East #th Street New York, N.Y. # Dell the Norns are wakeful: they weave the rope And truly spin what I know. Richard Wagner Siegfried, Act #, Sc. I By definition there is no such thing as a fail-safe interstellar vessel. Spacemen know it, live by it, on occasion die from it. Starship technology is too radical, too complex; the vastnesses and emptinesses "out there" discourage dreams of ideality. Designers do the best they can, of course, but... The engineering team responsible for TerrStshp Tristan at GrossEuropa Raumschijfwerk, GmgH, in Stuttgart, was talented, eminently abreast of the state-of-the-art. assembled the vehicle on-orbit were dedicated, first-rate employees. Nevertheless, during the starship's seventh deep-space mission, Tristan succumbed to immutable odds -- or so it seemed at the time. In midflight, while supposedly undetectable by chance observation, an unheard-of occurrence took place: The ship's dual-fusion tokamaks failed simultaneously, without warning. One instant Tristan arrowed true, existing only hypothetically as a flux of non-relativistic waveforms propagated at unthinkable velocity through equally hypothetical n-space; the next, it floundered, a bulbous-ended titanium alloy cylinder in the pragmatic starlight of the Einsteinian universe -- not its proper element. A mere tenth-of-a-parsec distant, the nearest planetary system might as well have wheeled on the opposite rim of the galaxy. The sea of stars is dotted with countless islands but they are desperately far apart. Robinson Crusoe and brethren are a vanished species.    Senior Xenologist Grije van Polder came awake with a start. Silence, total darkness, engulfed him. He felt a bubble of fear swell rapidly, threaten to burst into panic as the whirling vertigo of transition churned his bowels. Then -- sudden weightlessness. Pulse pounding in his throat, he fumbled with blind fingers at the restraint webbing of his bunk. The compartment's sparse furnishings, as if by magic, rearranged themselves in the choking, near-palpable blackness. Lack of gravity made his disorientation absolute. He moved swimmingly, bumping his head on objects unseen, and at last found the touch-plate that should have activated the sliding door. He slapped the plate time and again, clutching the door handle to prevent himself from drifting away. Nothing happened. Van Polder swore a wholesome oath. He was groping for the mechanical override latch when the door slid out of his grasp. Siridar Mashbravatan's swarthy, bearded countenance hovered topsy-turvy in the hatchway, limned in the dim glow of an emergency lamp on the companionway bulkhead. It was the first time that van Polder had seen the linguist without his turban. "Whew! Thanks, Mash. What is it?" "Blessed if I know. A powerroom flap of some sort. Always did feel thse bloody space-buckets were death traps. Now I'm certain."' "Easy," said van Polder. The quixotic linguist, his companion on four previous field expeditions, was exhibiting his usual brand of amiable pessimism. "Let's hear the score before we jump to conclusions. Where are the others?" "In the lounge." Rigged for deep space, the ship's freefall safety lines had been stowed after n-space transition when pseudogee enveloped the vessel. Neither of the scientists considered himself a "spaceman"; they negotiated the passageway with the inept clumsiness characteristic of most planet dwellers. All the members of the other four xenology teams were attempting to cling to something, if not to one another, in "C" deck's cramped passenger lounge -- exhibiting an array of fear-filled eyes and apprehensive, down-drawn mouths. Xenologist Gerda Malmstrom, leader of the five-member team soon due to be dropped among Plumma IV's aborigines, glanced upward, blonde hair floating wildly bouffant in zero gee. "What's gone sour?" demanded van Polder. "It's a total power outage, Van. We're...dead in space." Ice-blue eyes luminous with concern, Gerda suddenly reflected upon her choice of words. "It's a helluva walk to added lamely. At that instant in Tristan's power room the ship's second astrogation officer hung back, watching with anxious eyes as the chief engineer and his deputy sweated over the instrumentation displays of a curved, desk-like console. The chief was belted into the control chair; the deputy was stretched out in midair, head-downward. Reading the displays inverted was common practice. "I just don't get it," drawled the younger engineer. "We have more than adequate plasma temp and flux density. Excitation levels and flow rates are holding up there in the green. How in blazes can one unit be down, let alone both?" The chief engineer's grunt was caustic, his squint fixed, his expression puzzled. "Sure, everything's green," was his terse remark. "Except that not one lousy gigawatt is outputting from either tok." "But that's...goofy! It's not possible." "Read the power meters -- and weep." After a protracted silence made weighty by cogitation, the junior engineering officer tendered a suggestion. "Chief, what say we throw the Ops Manual on the viewer? We could reset, flush the lines, then start with Procedure 'G' and bring 'em back up from there. Who knows? Maybe the fuel's contaminated." The older man wagged his head from side to side. "All seawater's contaminated, not to mention that it's also loaded with umpteen kinds of salts and other crud." He gestured with a despondent hand. "Look for yourself. The malfunction-detector circuits are one thousand per cent green. Computer says all filtration, deuterium-tritium extraction and pumping elements are running smooth, normal -- and eating beaucoup amp-hours of precious battery charge in the process, dammit! Uh-uh -- we won't find the answer to this one in any manual." "B-but..." The other lapsed into frustrated silence. The astrogation officer chewed his tongue. At last he summoned the courage to make his presence felt. "The, uh, skipper's itching for a status summary, Chief. The intercom system's out and I'm... What can I tell him?" "Tell him we're working on it." "I, er, doubt if that'll satisfy -- " "Tell him, Mister! Now boogie off. And for Chrissake, stay out of our hair." "Aye, Chief." Tail between his legs, the astrogator boosted himself from the power room, dreading the thunder and lightning sure to descend upon his return to the conning bridge. Minutes later the ship's surgeon appeared in the hatchway of "C" deck's passenger lounge. Looking stern, he searched out van Polder, beckoning with a solemn forefinger. The doctor kept his voice confidentially low. "Van, better have your people gather together their outdoor clothing and stand by. Life support and the other essentia subsystems are operating on emergency batteries. I've advised the captain to seal off all unnecessary compartments, then stabilize the remainder at plus twenty degrees 'F.' We have to ease the strain on those batteries." " Twenty degrees below freezing?" "Yep. Got to. The ship's radiating thermal energy pretty fast." "I'm aware of the emergency, Doctor, but -- "Have them get ready to bundle up," the medic interrupted with a tired voice. "Luckily you researchers have suitable heavy clothing on board, which is more than I can say for we poordevil crewmen. We'll just have to tough it out, I suppose." "Doctor, our survival gear is stowed in the forward holds," pointed out the xenologist, "packed and cartoned for paradrop." "Um-m-m." The doctor scratched an ear. "You'll simply have to dig it out then. Or else be very, very uncomfortable." "For how long?" "There's no way to even guess yet." The xenologist frowned. "Come on, Doctor. The others can't overhear us. Is the failure catastrophic? You needn't spare me. I'd much rather know the truth." "Catastrophic?" The medic sighed. "Just the opposite, I'm both happy and sorry to say. There seems to be nothing wrong with our fusion power system." "I don't understand." "Neither I nor anyone else does either." The doctor arched his brows quizzically. "Engineering is in a quandary, hopping about, chasing their tails. How does one repair a nonmalfunction?" Pondering this, the xenologist was startled' when a ship's officer caromed into view and came flying down the passageway. He checked his headlong' plunge, wide-eyed and out of breath. "Dr. van Polder, the captain insists...you come to the bridge at once. We, uh, have a... You won't believe this, sir, but it's... We have a visitor." "A what?" "Please, I know it sounds looney but it's true. Captain Dichter says to bring a linguist and w-whoever else...might be able to help." Van Polder regarded the officer narrowly. "You mean we've made contact with another ship?" "No, sir. Nothing's around us for...light-years." "Then where, if I may ask, did this 'visitor' spring from?" The officer, a polite, tow-headed German, looked embarrassed. "Only wish I knew, sir. Please come with me now. If you don't, the captain's orders are to, uh, drag you." The xenologist resisted an impulse to laugh aloud. "That won't be necessary. I'm curious to see whether you've been exceeding your Schnapps ration or..." He cast a glance over his shoulder. "Mash, Gerda, come along. The captain wants us on the bridge. If what this gentleman has been telling me is true, it could prove to be interesting."    And it was. Utterly composed, the intruder stood erect, his back to the communications console. Seemingly he was a male Caucasian of indeterminate years. He wore the sky-blue tunic and ankle-gathered slacks of a watch officer. He was sandy-haired and dark-eyed, and he looked painfully ordinary in the dim light cast by an emergency lamp just above the conning console. His feet were bare. At first van Polder thought someone might be having a bit of fun at their expense but he soon dismissed the notion. The thick silence pervading the bridge, and the captain's attentive mein, precluded practical jokes. There was something about the intruder that looked oddly out of place. Try as he would, van Polder could not pin down what it was that bothered him most about the visitor's appearance. Then it registered. The man appeared to be standing firmly on the deck matting in all defiance of zero gee. Without velcro-soled space boots, the posture seemed unnatural. Backed by a dumb-struck assemblage of bridge officers, the aging captain did not take his eyes from the stranger, not even when the xenologist and his companions made their appearance. "He was naked when he first appeared," Captain Dichter said in an unsteady voice. "Naked?" "As a jay," assured the captain. "After a moment, when he got a look at the rest of us, the uniform kind of...grew around him. What do you make of it?" Van Polder swallowed with difficulty. "I'm not...sure. Have you learned anything else about him?" "Negative. You now know precisely as much as the rest of us do." "Has he said anything?" "Not a syllable. He just stands there and stares..." "He shouldn't be able to stand," said van Polder. "I...know." Studying the intruder, van Polder was fascinated, almost mesmerized. He clutched the grab-rail surrounding the command pedestal until his knuckles whitened. "Mash," he said softly, "why not try talking to him?" Mashbravatan licked his lips. "Glad to have a go if you think it possible. Wish I had a clue as to his, er -- " "Try Lingua Stella," urged the xenologist. The linguist seemed surprised. "That's rather an odd choice for openers, but if you say so." He pulled himself hand-over-hand to the far side of the command pedestal until he was no more than six meters from the intruder, who continued to regard them with steadfast aplomb. Mashbravatan addressed the stranger in carefully phrased interstellar trade patois, sounding somewhat hesitant and formal. His voice trailed off when the newcomer took a tentative step forward and closed his eyes. Suddenly the linguist convulsed. He clapped both hands over his temples and tucked himself into the fetal position, performing a slow tumble in midair. Then he screamed. As if released from a spell, everyone surged forward to help the thrashing linguist. There were numerous collisions. Van Polder noted a laser weapon in the security officer's hairy fist. The intruder opened his eyes, holding one arm aloft. "An auditory coding system, of all things!" he said, his Anglo-Terran pronunciation and diction a letter-perfect imitation of Mashbravatan 's. "How dull of me not to have inferred it from the physical construction of your... Forgive my clumsiness, sir. The intrusion was brief, but necessary. You see, I had no baseline from which to derive. Your discomfort will pass quickly." Mashbravatan did recover fast. He managed to grasp an outstretched hand and let himself be drawn back to the relative safety of the grab-rail. "Quite," he said, looking dazed. "Ton are responsible for intercepting my ship?" asked the captain. Even though bom and bred in the Hartz Mountains, Klaus Dichter had earned a reputation for classic Prussian efficiency. His blood pressure was obviously soaring at the moment. The intruder's regular features reflected dismay. "I do hope I haven't caused you too much inconvenience." "Inconvenience!" Color heightened in the captain's neck. "We are indebted to you for much more than 'inconvenience;' sir. I've no idea what you've done, or why. But I must insist you restore our power system immediately." "Why, you seem angry." The stranger sounded incredulous. "Was it reprehensible to impose my presence at this time, to pause and exchange acquaintances? I'd hoped we might sit down together and converse like gentlefolk, perhaps share a cup of...mead. Mead? No, that's an anachronism. Bear with me -- I'm rather new at this. Ah, yes; coffee. Coffee, then." Although bombastic and proud, Captain Dichter was by no means a stupid man. Eyes narrowed, he cocked his head in speculation. "We'll be delighted to offer you hospitality, sir, as soon as our power source is restored to operation. Without power, our atmosphere will become extremely cold. In fifty or sixty hours, when the emergency batteries are exhausted, we will all die." "Really?" The stranger seemed genuinely perplexed. "One moment. Let me assure myself of something." He closed his eyes. "Oh, dear! Another foolish error. Again, I must ask your pardon. You'll think me dreadfully incompetent. I had assumed that your motive force... No matter. Let us have light and heat, by all means. There! That's much more cozy." Van Polder felt the tension ease. Beside him. Captain Dichter heaved a profound sigh of relief as glow panels lighted throughout the conning bridge and the life-support blowers speeded to provide a soft susurration of moving air. Gradually pseudo-gee forces returned the group to the deck. Captain Dichter seized the xenologist's arm. "By all that's holy," he whispered, "humor him, van Polder! Keep him talking. Find out how long he intends to detain us and why the devil he's doing these things. I'm going aft to the power room." "Right, Captain. Will you have a messman serve coffee and cakes in the astrogators' lounge? Gerda, Mash and I will see what we can find out." Dichter smacked his lips. "I presume you're thinking the same thing lam." "About...him?" "Um," nodded the captain. "We seem to have here a being several orders of magnitude beyond ourselves, van Polder. Since you're the expert when it comes to dealing with ET's, I leave him to you. But use extreme caution, please." "We'll handle him with kid gloves." Dichter blinked repeatedly. "Why, in God's name," he muttered, "did this have to happen on my ship?"    The intruder declined both food and drink, insisting that his earlier statement had been figurative. But scant time passed before van Polder began to appreciate the other's masterful penchant for dissimulation. During the past hour he had managed a direct answer to exactly one question and the xenologist intuited even that to be salted with erudite sarcasm. Displaying considerable charm, Gerda Malmstrom had politely asked his name. The stranger had stared at her with peculiar intensity before making a reply. "Skuld," he had said with jovial emphasis. "Call me Skuld." Van Polder's suspicion of sarcasm was based upon Gerda' s swift intake of breath, her moue of surprise. The name had also jogged a mnemonic chord in his own subconscious. Skuld had made much of the fact that they were research scientists -- scholars, in his opinion, were to be held the noblest creatures in the galaxy -- bound for field research among "our flowering younger species," as he had put it. His effusiveness reminded the xenologist of a holodrama scene he had once enjoyed wherein the hero delivered five minutes' worth of nonsequiturs for the sole purpose of sidetracking three villains from participating in an incident crucial to the plot. Then after Mashbravatan had excused himself in order to make himself more presentable and had returned with a combed beard and a freshly wrapped turban, Skuld had without preamble begun speaking to Mash in what the xenologist knew to be his native tongue, Bengali. Like van Polder, Gerda had listened in a state of perplexity, while Mash's swarthy countenance had lit with joy. The pair had happily jabbered together for minutes. "Your friend possesses admirable command over a multiplicity of, er, languages," had been Skuld's compliment. "May I ask your specialty, Doctor van Polder?" "Separating grain from chaff," he had retorted, suddenly nettled. "Grain from..." Skuld had closed his eyes. "Oh, yes, I see. As similes go, that's a most interesting one." Not to be put off, van Polder had said, "Mr. Skuld, would you think it terribly presumptuous if I asked your specialty?" "Why, not at all. I suppose I, too, think of myself as a scholar. And I love to go good deeds -- good turns, if you will." "But, Mr. Skuld, we've learned nothing about you. Haven't we the right to know why you have chosen to strand our vessel here?" W#W c# : #I : #I :. Asimov's robots...Shelley's monster... Poe's mummy...Berryman's aliens...All these and other strange creations are now ready to invade the college campus. Lawler's new anthology for science fiction courses provides the critical framework and historical perspective students need to understand the forms and conventions of this field of literature. Donald L. Lawler East Carolina University Early #about # pages PaperInstructor's Manual For adoption consideration, request an examination copy from your regional Houghton Mifflin office. Houghton Miff lin Dallas, TX #  Geneva, IL # Hopewell, NJ # Palo Alto, CA #  Boston, MA # Skuld had chuckled pleasantly. "Oh, no, not Mr. Skuld, if you please. Just...Skuld." Nor had he given the least acknowledgment of van Polder's direct question. When Captain Dichter returned, all bustle and curiosity, Gerda and Skuld were deeply involved in a philosophical discussion. Van Polder could think of no graceful way to redirect the conversation toward more practical ends. The captain listened for a moment, wearing an agonized squint. He shifted his weight in the divan, throwing the xenologist a questioning glance. Van Polder merely shrugged. "I am thoroughly intrigued by your mechanistic interpretation of the universe," Skuld was saying, "and your place in it -- your 'destiny,' as you put it. Isn't selfdeterminism a product of Humanity's total heritage? Consider the matter, Gerda. All that you are, or ever hope to be, is inextricably bound to an eons-long chain of genetically coded protein molecules stretching back to the first cellular creatures in your ancient seas." But Gerda -- practical Gerda -- was not buying simplistic double-talk. "Are you suggesting that genetic conditioning, or my 'heritage' as you put it, makes me master of my fate?" Skuld's lip curled. "To some extent," he replied, " -- when all of the complex variables such as the wills, of your ancestors are taken into account. The last is allimportant: will." "I certainly didn't 'will' myself into existence," said Gerda. "Ah, but didn't you? I'm speaking now of the collective 'you.' My dear Gerda, do you imagine there would be a universe surrounding us had it not found existence within the minds -- wills -- of the myriad intelligences that inhabit it?" "What? Why, that's reflexive, paradoxical nonsense," Gerda said, beginning to smile. "Dear Gerda, perhaps you...have my number. Is that usage proper?" "You call yourself Skuld," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "Where, if I may ask, are Urthr and Verthandi?" Skuld seemed especially pleased. "Excellent!" he exclaimed. "We discover the true characteristics in any species by examining their early mythos. I imagine you do the same in your work, my dear. Nor do I consider myself quite as clever as I did a moment ago." Captain Dichter had heard enough. He sat forward and Harrumphed! with no-nonsense gusto. "Look here, Skuld. May we discuss our status? We've been drifting like some abandoned hulk for several hours. Now that you've, er... Now that power has been restored, I intend to move my ship. We have a schedule tp meet, after all." Skuld glanced at the repeater display, a readout of the ship's subjective timing system. "Where, O where, have the minutes fled? Tempus fugit and I must run." Mouth dry, van Polder rose. "Not without some sort of explanation, I hope." Skuld smiled sweetly. He bowed fluidly to Mashbravatan, bidding farewell in Bengali. Then he bowed again to Gerda. "Every success in your endeavors, dear lady. I wish you well." Tipping his head to van Polder, he said, "My seemingly mysterious actions and my reluctance to answer your questions have valid reasons. Easy answers would be of no value and might indeed cause harm. The principal answer will suggest itself to you shortly." Skuld bowed finally to the captain. "Wiedersehen, Herr Kapitan. Lebe wohl!" Skuld shimmered. Then he disappeared. A shocked stillness pervaded the astrogators' lounge. After an interval of pregnant silence. Mash said wonderingly, "Wasn't that excitingT' Captain Dichter growled an obscenity. "You wouldn't think it exciting if you had to given an account of it in your mission report." Ignoring the captain, Gerda said, "But who was he?" "He told us," said van Polder dryly, meeting his colleague's troubled eyes. "Skuld. When you mentioned the other Fates, he seemed to be amused." "I doubted that would get by you. Van." "Of course it didn't. But Skuld mixed his genders; the Fates were feminine in both Greek and Norse myth." "I say, what is all this?" demanded Mashbravatan, while the captain stepped back a pace, glowering. "Urthr, the Past; Verthandi, the Present; and Skuld, the Future -- the Norns, who spin the destiny of man." Gerda paused and looked thoughtful. "Skuld, the Future, I wonder if that's significant." Mash frowned. "He was simply putting us on?" "He sure as hell was," replied van Polder. "That celestial con man toyed with us. He picked your brain at the outset, Mash; then Gerda' s and probably mine and the captain's as well." "His German was terrible," muttered Dichter. "But why bother?" asked Gerda. "What did he gain from all this?" With a shrug of his shoulders, the linguist surmised, "Simple curiosity about what might be flying past in the night, probably." Van Polder grimaced. "That's as good an explanation as any I can come up with," he said, folding his arms. "We learned nothing, nothing; not even if he was truly aboard the ship." "Or whether he's corporeal at all," put in Gerda. ' ' Rubbish ! ' ' Mashbravatan said . "We saw him, heard him -- " "But did we touch him?" Wearing a pained expression, Captain Dichter clapped his hands. "Enough! I suggest we forego shadow-chasing and get on with the mission. There will be plenty of time later for conjecture."    The captain's basso rumbled with authority. "Transition in fifty seconds. Will it be necessary to recompute, Astrogator?" "Negative, sir. We're only about seven lights away. Our drift during shutdown was negligible. Request four or five minutes for sighting and re-alignment." "Granted, Astrogator. Carry on." In an aside Dichter invited the three research scientists to remain on the conning deck. "I'd like a word with you once we're under way." "Certainly, Captain." A warning klaxon bellowed, flooding the bridge with sound. Seconds dribbled from a flashing digital display above the helmsman's console. On the designated track, Tristan went irrational. Van Polder felt the familiar gutwrench queasiness of transition, the momentary "elevator effect" of partial weightlessness. "Normality" returned; Tristan's thousands of deadweight metric tons now floated in the multidimensional neverland of n-space. The larger astrogation tank lit up into a chaotic jumble of fiducial marks and esoteric symbology. Speckled throughout the tank were lambent, stereoperspective discs -- star analogs -- transduced from nonrelativistic energies impinging at many times the speed of light upon the starship's external sensors. The astrogation reticule crept slowly through some five degrees of arc as the computer. sought its objective. It locked in on a smallish circle of violet light -- the primary of Plumma whence Gerda and her team were bound, an insignificant fifteenthmagnitude star as viewed from distant Sol. Even as they watched, the violet circle in the reticule's crosshairs swelled, lightening in color to dark blue. A scratchy voice from somewhere behind van Polder asked, "Now what in hell caused that?" Captain Dichter stiffened. "Astrogator, check your alignment reference frame, please." He sounded perturbed. "Aye, sir; checking." The officer bent over his console, punching one code after another. "Verified, Captain. Major sighting reference is Rho Puppis. Nspectral analysis confirmed. Apparent included angle five-point-seven-ohnine-three degrees correlates to our objective... Hey, Skipper, something's wrong!" "My God!" Dichter jerked himself to his feet. Gingerly he stepped down from the command pedestal, staring into the astrogation tank as if hypnotized. The reticule pinpointed a ballooning disc that was turning light blue. It faded slowly to pastel gray, filling the reticule's inner concentric rings. "What is it?" asked van Polder, dreading the answer. "Nova!" informed an awe-filled voice close at hand. "Maybe even a super. Too soon to tell." The target disc waxed dull orange, growing... "As you were, Astrogator." Dichter turned away, popping a fist into his open palm. His eyes were hollow. "Secure your console, sir. Stand by to re-program." He glanced at the group of xenologists, not really seeing them. "Our n-space coordinates would have dumped us out a bare ninety diameters from that star -- into cataclysm!" "My abo society!" Gerda's hand flew to her throat. "Gone, my dear. It's as if they had never existed." I here are times when I am certain I have lost my senses. I hear put forward, by supposedly sane and rational people, propositions so mindless that I doubt my sanity. Could I be that wrong? One such experience happened while listening to the President's energy message to the people. Here was the President of the United States, a man who presumably can obtain the best advice from the world's most intelligent and informed people; and what I heard came out as nonsense. After further study it still seems nonsense. The best summary I've heard is quoted in Access to Energy, an excellent newsletter published by Dr. Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado (# year, Box #, Boulder, Col. #; payment must accompany subscription order -- highly recommended). In Beckmann's latest there is a quote from an independent oil producer: "I find it; I develop it; I operate it; I take all the risks; I get # .#bbl. ; the government gets #bbl and the price to the consumer goes up." That's an energy policy? Now, were these enormous new taxes -- the greatest tax increase in US peacetime history -- to be applied to development of new energy resources, we would be involved in a sensible debate: should energy research be directed by the government, or left to private industry? One might rationally take either side of the issue, and the disagreement would be "legitimate;" I would not have that mind-boggling sensation of hearing what seems nonsense. But -- in the President's speech for the better part of an hour, research was mentioned precisely once, and then only in passing. Fusion was mentioned not at all. Neither were Space Power Satellites. There was plenty talk of "windfall profits" to the oil companies but very little of why many major oil companies love the new policy: it eliminates all hope of competition. There was nothing about alternate fuel sources, reclamation of sewage, or agricultural research; nothing about geopressurized domes (of which more later). Out in the fusion research laboratories they're laying off scientists as I write this. President Carter has declared war on the energy crisis, and his first marching order was to disband the armored divisions.    So what might be a sensible energy policy? Understand, I don't claim to be the world's greatest expert on the subject; perhaps it's possible that Carter and Company can refute what I'm saying; but I do claim that what I propose makes sense, and on the evidence mine appears a better policy than the one we seem doomed to adopt -- and I have heard no refutation, not even a discussion, from the "experts." I say this up front because recently I received an amazing letter from a professor in a state college. He had, it seems, been given a copy of one of my columns, and he wrote to tell me that he intended to use me as "an example of those who hold the view that since technology got us into our ecological dilemma, it can get us out of it." Then followed a rather imperious demand for my qualifications as an expert. I gather that creeping credentialism abounds at the professor's institution. He signed himself as an "ecologist". That's just as well, since he can hardly call himself a logician. I cannot think where I have ever said anything as amazing as that I don't accept that "technology got us into our ecological dilemma," and I certainly don't accept his syllogism. I tried to tell discuss specific problems and specific technologies, but that evidently did not appeal to him, for he never answered. Perhaps I do not have the right credentials to engage in correspondence with an "ecologist."    The first job in forming an energy policy is to look at time spans and constraints. It makes no sense to put together a policy which insures a crunch a few years downstream. Democracies have no very creditable record of planning for the future. Aristocracies and monarchies have sometimes worried about the next generation, simply because it's likely that the children of the ruling class will have to live with the problems created by present governors. One might think this would apply to democracies as well, but so far that's been rare. Yet: energy policy affects the future in an all-too-real sense. Unless backs in our real standard of living, we must prepare for the future; and by "we" I mean us, those my age and those just coming of voting age, and by "the future" I mean our future. It's a well-known fact that there was a "baby boom" in the late forties and early fifties. As a result we have a work force that's fairly large compared to the total population. This has resulted in relatively high unemployment among the young unskilled; but it has also enabled the work force to support everyone else. The Social Security program was never an actual insurance system; it always frankly depended on requiring the young workers to support the aged and retired -- and even with the large numbers entering the work force over the past few years, Social Security is bankrupt. What happens when the "babyboom" children, those born between # and #, retire? Who will support them? You see, the fertility rate in the US is quite low, below replacement; and for the next twenty years at least there cannot be much increase in the size of the work force. Even were we to have a new "baby boom" the effects on the work force would not be seen for nearly twenty years -- and there are fallout detriments to a sudden increase in population. One suspects that a campaign to increase the number of children per US family would not be an optimum solution. But if the work force stays constant or decreases, and the number of retired greatly increases, what is the result? We've seen it already; people don't retire, they just get poor. Even ownership of a home does little to cushion the blow: property taxes are far higher than the mortgage payments, and Social Security and retirement income generally can't meet the tax bill and leave anything left over. So: either the productivity per worker increases, or we have a hefty decline in real income for an increasingly large part of the population -- and precisely that portion of the population which has time for political activities, and has been around long enough to have some idea of how the political system works. What will the result of that be? There are a number of possibilities, none very pleasant. Probably the least unpleasant would be a backlash against "ecologists" and "concerned" people, the scrapping of conservation programs, and a crash program to increase productivity at any expense. The alternative to waiting for the crunch is to plan for increased worker productivity: and that means to expand the energy supply. The productivity of the work force has always been dependent on the availability and price of energy. Meanwhile, across the world there is a rising tide of demand: what, when I was in college, the professors called "the revolution of rising expectations." Some of those foreign beggars are actually demanding enough to eat! In many "developing" countries there is actually an expectation of development. I suggest that it is much harder to raise real per capita income from # a year to # than to raise it from # to #; that if it is to be done, it is likely to be done only with technology; and that takes energy. (It also makes it likely that the Western nations will grow even wealthier with respect to the poor ones; but see Matthew and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard on that. I should have thought it takes a twisted logic indeed to prefer an income of # yearly while the West stays put, than to have # percent more while the West does the same.) Well, all right; we'll have to have energy; but can't conservation do it? Or windmills? Or tide? Or magic? No one seriously thinks so, and few say it except some "ecology" publications more dedicated to ideology than fact. But can't we go back to the land? Conserve? How? The productive land is in production; sending any large part of the population "back to the land" would simply reduce the amount of food available. There is land that is not economic to farm; but to suggest that we "retire" our poor and aged onto inadequate farmland requires a callous disregard for human values almost beyond belief. Subsistence farming on poor land is appealing only to hopeless romantics who haven't tried it. There may be a few who like that sort of thing; but politically it's an impossible solution, requiring armies and police and the abrogation of democracy. No. To provide for the nonworking among us, both unemployed and aged, we need higher productivity; and that requires energy. For the near term -- say between now and the year # -- there are only two certain sources of energy in the quantities we will need. Coal and nuclear -- and perhaps, just perhaps, a third, one just discovered which does not yet figure into anybody's energy estimates. Coal has problems. For each # megaWatts of coal-fired electrical plant, there is created each second: # pounds of CO # , ten pounds of sulfur dioxide, # pounds of bottom and fly ash and a lot of other stuff. If you prefer annual figures, # tons of SO # , and # or so tons of sludges generated in the scrubbers. There is also put into the atmosphere considerably more radioactivity (in the form of radium and radon not removed by scrubbers) than ' a comparable nuclear plant releases. Disposing of the wastes from coal-fired plants is not a simple problem. Meanwhile, by the year #, we will be ripping from the coal each year. That coal must be shipped about the country, and the number of miners and railroad workers killed each year will not be zero. The ashes and other wastes must also be shipped, and disposed of, and that's hardly a trivial activity either. On purely humanitarian grounds, coal is inferior to nuclear power: the number of people killed per kiloWatt is about # times greater for coal than nuclear, when you examine the entire power cycle from mines to waste disposal; while the ratio with respect to members of the general public killed cannot be estimated, because no member of the public has ever been killed (or injured) by a nuclear power plant. As I write this, ironically, there lies on my desk an article about a burstBut we do have coal, and we can survive through its use; and if we get on with the job we can live with the result, hard cheese though it may be for miners with black lung (my wife's father died of silicosis). I would have thought, though, that those truly concerned for the environement would prefer the nuclear option. Yet it's very hard to find any kind of rational discussion of nuclear energy. Item: a science fiction writer friend, a lady I respect, called me the other day. She wanted a dramatic incident in a story. How, she asked, might a character cause a nuclear explosion -- not a large one, just a little one -- at the San Onofre nuclear plant? I told her to have her character carry an atom bomb into the plant. It's the only way I know of. Beware of the guards, and recall that San Onofre is on a US Marine base. Where they get the atom bomb I don't know. But -- isn't there another way? Another lady, a radio broadcaster specializing in "conservation" and "environment" and "concern" and the like was present at the discussion and was certain that San Onofre could be made to go up like a bomb. Just cut the cooling water supply. She wasn't very interested in hearing of the actual engineering details of the plant -- feedwater supply which could be used for emergency cooling; the emergency cooling system itself, etc. Nor was my sf writer friend, who went away disappointed and muttering about how she could fake it, since the public wouldn't know about all the safety precautions. Item: A book published by the Reader's Digest and widely touted: We Almost Lost Detroit. Never mind that we didn't almost lose anything, at Detroit (where a couple of fuel elements of the Fermi research reactor melted, the safety devices worked as they should have, and everything shut down with neither disaster nor danger of one) or at Brown's Ferry (where a twit using a candle to search for leaks set insulation afire and caused the plant to be shut down in an orderly manner). Item: a review of We Almost Lost Detroit published in the New York Times Book Review. Written by a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, the review states "They knew what the public did not -- a mistake could trigger a nuclear explosion." Do I need to repeat it? If a horde of terrorists had taken possession of Fermi reactor and used hammers and hacksaws they could not have triggered a nuclear explosion. Item: the last time I said a kind word about nuclear power, there came in the mail from a windmill experimenter a letter that opened with obscenities. When I wrote him to ask what contribution that made to the discussion, he said that I as a writer ought to understand that this was the only way he could express what he felt. He enclosed some more obscenities, presumably to deliver himself of more of his feelings; and did not seem to understand that I didn't invent the wind figures, nor are his "feelings" particularly important to the universe. I hope he sells lots of windmills, but he can't change the energy picture much by doing it. (Incidentally, why he thought an old soldier would be shocked by anatomical obscenities is beyond me. Perhaps he thought my wife would open the mail -- she sometimes does -- and that he'd impress her? Unlikely. Despite my misgivings, Mrs. Poumelle teaches in a juvenile detention facility, and I suspect she could, given enough provocation, shock the windmill designer out of his socks.) Item: Jack Anderson, in a dazzling display of journalistic integrity, says in a recent column: "The clouds originate from six mammoth, cylindrical cooling towers that rise from the banks of the Ohio river like idols to the gods of energy. Superheated sic vapors from the nuclear works below form the clouds which appear so white and innocent. But they hang over the Shippingport like a pall. Beneath them is a dying town contaminated by... deadly irradiated mist." Would you believe he's talking about Ohio river water trickled down through cellotex? At the bottom of the tower there is a heat exchanger which connects with the condenser at the low-temp side of the turbines. No connection with the reactor at all, and the towers would be there whether Shippingport was fired by coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium; but you'd never know that from Anderson, who is terrified of fluffy white clouds composed of -- water vapor and nothing else. Item: Time Magazine's recent report on "The atom's global garbage," which states baldly that there is no technology for disposing of nuclear wastes. Evidently the editors of Time do not even read Scientific American, for in the June # issue of SA there is a very complete article on the disposal of reactor wastes. Look, can we once and for all dispose of the idiotic view that there is no place to put nuclear wastes? The technology is proven; they can be reduced to solids imbedded in glass. The total volume from the invention of the first reactor to the most optimistic (in my view) construction program of reactors extending to the year # is a cube about # feet on a side; in fact, if the world ran off nuclear reactors exclusively, then in # years we could have enough wastes to cover about one square mile to a depth of six feet. There are a lot of square miles of desert in this world; and at the lowest level of technology imaginable those wastes .can be stored in concrete structures in the Mojave, where they are completely recoverable if needed -- and they just might be. In the early days of this century, oil companies distilled off only the highergrade volatiles from crude. The resulting sludge was a mess, and it was expensive to get rid of.' One oil company executive ordered the company's director of research to think of something better to do with crude sludge than simply storing it. The result was the petrochemical industry: plastics, "coal-tar derivatives," and such. Think about that the next time someone mentions "nuclear wastes." And as for plutonium, it's more valuable than gold; why should it be stored anywhere? The value of already-mined Uranium in this land given that we go ahead with the breeder program -- Except that we won't. However, the Soviets, French, Germans, British, and Japanese are already doing so. Perhaps we will export Uranium? Instead of using it to fuel our own reactors, we can sell Uranium and buy Arab oil. Marvellous. Now I don't mean to imply that there is no such thing as intelligent opposition to nuclear power; but there is very little of that. The above is a far better illustration of the nuclear debate. But, perhaps we will have to do without nuclear power, not on rational grounds, but because people are afraid? Not if you ask the people. The anti-nuclear forces have yet to win a major referendum -- but there are fewer and fewer nuclear plants ordered, and our nuclear reactor industry is liquidating itself, because it takes # -- sixtythree -- separate permits to construct a nuclear plant, and very few companies can afford the delays and the legal fees required. As a means of subsidizing lawyers the present nuclear regulation system is well designed -- but is there not perhaps a cheaper method of rewarding legal diligence? It would probably be cheaper to give each law-school graduate a guaranteed salary of # a year on the condition that he (or she) not practive law. Incidentally, the total output of Time magazine for eight months takes up more space than would all our nuclear wastes from # to the year #. (Figure courtesy of Petr Beckmann.) Obviously, then, my "ideal" energy policy would remove a number of the constraints surrounding nuclear power plants. I would not relax the safety regulations, nor would I leave plant site location to "experts" without discussion; but surely the number of permits can be reduced to four or five, and the time required to get a permit cut from five-plus years to one year. I would also do the same for coal; there is no reason why our fuels decisions should be made on the basis of regulatory difficulty and red tape, instead of economics. Utility companies, both public and private owned, have plenty of talent for deciding what kinds of plants they ought to build; why not let them employ it? But at the moment the Department of Energy will have little of that will go into any kind of meaningful research.    Obviously a meaningful energy policy must do more than streamline the permit system. Coal and nuclear power can get us to the year #, and it's hard to see anything else that can; but no one genuinely loves either as a power source. Both have drawbacks, and I'm as aware of them as anyone. I would not care to leave my grandchildren the same problems I face. What, then, should we do for the intermediate and long terms? Well, first, you make certain there will be something that works, which is why I like nuclear power; it's a proven technology with, in my judgment, fewer problems than coal. But having insured there will be power, you look for better systems. I think few would argue: one excellent power source is natural gas. Natural gas is a wonder fuel: it's clean, it is easily and economically transported, the distribution system (pipelines) already exists; it can be employed in a conservation strategy, that is, by decentralizing power generation so that on-site plants can provide both steam and electricity for major industries and compact bedroom communities. The only problem with gas is that we're running out it faster than of anything else (and, of course, it does produce CO # and add to the Earth's heat burden; more on that later.) There may be a source of gas so large as to be nearly incredible. The estimated conventional reserves of cubic meters; and we'll run out far too soon, unless we find and develop more. But that's conventional fields. There are now known to exist "geopressure zones;" these are large pockets of water, at very high temperature and pressure, saturated with gas. I quote from the # Annual Review of Energy: "In the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico (onshore and offshore), the only area in the world where detailed studies of geopressure zones have been undertaken, an area of # km # is believed to contain a large belt of geopressure zones, some going down to a depth of # meters (# kilometers). The large quantity of gas in this belt tons coal equivalent, comparable to entire US coal resources); other estimates, such as the one of Dorfman more modest, but still impressive. "Throughout the world, many geopressure zones of the depositional or the techtonic-occurrence types have been identified, but no estimates of their methane potential have been made. If appropriately tapped, the methane resources can provide, in addition to the natural gas dissolved, enormous amounts of mechanical and geothermal energies from the pressures in excess of # kgcm # and temperatures above #C at depths of # -- # meters." There are also gas hydrates, known as "frozen natural gas", discovered byi Soviet petroleum geologists in the last few years, and also investigated by the US exploration ship Glomar Challenger. The Soviets estimate -- are your ready for methane can be found in frozen reserves throughout the world's oceans. The Annual Review adds "commercial recovery of gas from submarine hydrate is probably a very difficult task." This is why I do not put hydrates down as a near-term insurance fuel source; it is risky technology. The same is true, but to a far lesser extent, for the geopressure difficult but has been done; extracting the dissolved gas from the pressurized water is again tricky, but involves off-the-shelf technology. Within a few years we could have plenty of natural gas. If someone goes after it. The simplest way to develop this resource would be to decontrol the price of natural gas; our fuel bills would be higher (but no higher than they'll be after Carter's energy taxes!) and plenty of developers, motivated by good old reliable greed, will break their arses trying to get natural gas to sell. Another way, one less preferable in my judgment but defensible, would be to have a government development program -- which would in practice mean contracting with private firms to do the work, because the expertise exists outside What we're doing, though, is ignoring the whole situation in favor of taxes and a complicated income -- redistribution scheme: and that, in my view, is mindless. Perhaps Carter doesn't know about geopressure zones? But surely someone does. So why is this whole technology resource ignored in the President's war on energy resources?    For the long term we cannot continue to rely on fossil fuels. There are perfectly legitimate conservation reasons -- such as CO # buildup, and the overall heat balance of Earth -- for looking to other energy sources, and probably the best way to have those taken into account is to plan now while someone still cares. Given our present war on energy, the day will soon dawn when no one will give a damn about conservation, and we will go crash program to strip mine coal, dig up pressurized gas, build nuclear plants, and to hell with the consequences. At the moment few, outside the "snow belt" during the Great Freeze of '#, have felt a real energy pinch; we are wealthy enough to give some thought for "the environment." The poor -- and that certainly includes those rich by world standards but poor compared to their own past -- generally do not care about long-term consequences. If we have a long-term goal of eliminating fossil fuels, there are only two ways to go: nuclear fusion, and some form of solar power. Fusion has received short shrift from Carter exactly at the time when the most scientific progress has been made. The program moved ahead, they have made neutrons in reactors, and they are ready to move to breakeven, the point at which the experiment produces more power than it consumes -- only they need more equipment, and they need to keep their staffs together, and Carter's budget has provision for neither. Obviously my "ideal" energy program restores the fusion budget at least to what President Ford recommended. There are three ways to go with solar; Earth-based, space-based, and agricultural. The latter is a kind of Earth-based solar power accumulator, of course, but uses a different kind of expertise; biologists and agronomists rather than engineers and physicists. Plants typically store up about I per cent of the sunlight energy that doled out over the next few years could, in the judgment of people who have some right to an opinion, at least double that. I have insufficient data on which to judge, but I do point out that the risk is low -- not very much money involved, compared to the welfare budget, and if done skillfully for a few dollars more an agricultural research program could be a part of a jobs program. And the payoff is very high. I quote Jonathan Swift: "Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind than the whole race of politicians." Some forms of Earth-based solar research get a good bit of money; but the technological risks are quite high, except in the small backyard "appropriate technology" applications. I have nothing against those -- I shall probably install a form of solar heating system for my hot-water and office heaters -- but they will not save us, and they are rather expensive. As a form of conservation they are excellent, but conservation is not the answer. Still, Earth-based solar is one program with a long-term payoff that is treated about as it deserves to be. We shall see whether, when the payoff finally comes near, the "ecologists" and "concerned scientists" will not try to halt actual installations: after all, the solar constant is I kiloWatt per square meter, and to get # megaWatts one meters; probably a lot more, and this will go into the "fragile ecology" of the desert. If the desert is too valuable to take up a few thousand square meters as nuclear waste storage, I wonder why it can be covered with little blue cells; but perhaps. Finally, there is space-based solar power, a concept whose time seems to have come -- except that it receives no mention in the President's declaration of the moral equivalent anyone would consider adequate tems in other columns. For my development, thus insuring access to space; and fund at a few tens of satellite systems. Incidentally, the United States gives the World Bank of McNamara and # other top is well spent, surely some development of solar power satellites would be even more worthwhile? I haven't even mentioned other schemes, such as the ocean thermal system I've described before. I haven't budgeted for garbage and trash (their potential is not great, about # per cent at best, but then no one seriously believes windmills can contribute much more than # per cent of the energy requirement, and windmills are getting lot of money). I haven't got far out and talked of mining the Moon, or building big space colonies. I haven't spoken of airboats -- you know, big plastic structures with sides about # meters high; you pump out the air and they will literally float on air; get them up in the jet stream and mount windmills on them, and send power down the tether cable. That is far out; although not impossible, and surely better than poverty or war. But, curiously, nothing of this emerges from the President's battle plan. Despite the rhetoric about the obscene profits of the big oil companies, the President's moral equivalent of war has the effect of giving the big internationals a monopoly on our most vital need. So on whom has Mr. Carter declared war?    For those who'd like to get in on a discussion of these and other matters, it isn't too late to send a dollar to the Los Angeles in '#I Committee, Los Angeles, CA #. For that you get membership in the LA in '#I Booster Club. The committee seeks to put on the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, and has promised as part of the program an uninterrupted panelbull session on science fact, with participation by the audience, myself, and several invited scientists of far-out persuasions. The intent is to continue the discussion to such hour as all are satisfied or horizontal from exhaustion. Maybe there, or somewhere, I'll hear some sensible reasons why my program wouldn't be better than President Carter's moral equivalent of war; because right now, Carter's program makes no sense to me at all. It cannot, so far as I can see, accomplish anything in the energy field; surely its impacts are greatest in incomes policies. And surely the President is not cynically presenting a tax policy disguised as a war on energy shortfall? I'd hate to believe that.  m Tl UMieiS  B#M#KS through tunnels deep beneath the earth or into uncharted wilderness In search of treasure and magic which are guarded by Trolls, Dragons or other Fearsome Monsters. A truly unique game which allows you to unleash your imagination and make your fantasy world come alive. color box, at a low price you won't believe! 'Complete basic rule book with handy reference sheets 'Dungeon level geomorphs for planning your underworld 'Five polyhedra dice for generating random numbers '# monsters and treasures for populating your underworld Lake Geneva, Wi # These "kernels" carried in them seeds of death! Everyone on the Control Stage found cause to be working aft when Yifter came on board. There was maximum security, of course, so no one could get really close without a good reason. Even so, we all took the best look we could manage -- after all, you don't often have a chance to see a man who has killed Bryson, from the Planetary Coordinators' office, was at Yifter's elbow. The two men were not shackled together or anything melodramatic like that. Past a certain level of notoriety, criminals are treated with some deference, and even respect. Bryson and Yifter were talking together in a friendly way, although they were in the middle of a group of top-rank security men, all heavily armed and watchful. They were taking safety to extremes. When I stepped forward to greet Bryson and his prisoner, two guards carefully frisked me before I could get within hand-kill range, and they stood close behind me when the introductions were made. I haven't been on Earth for a long time, and they must have known that I have no close relatives there; but they were taking no chances. Yifter was a prime target for personal revenge. friends and relatives behind. From a distance of one meter Yifter's appearance did not match his reputation. He was of medium height, slightly built, with bushy, prematurely white hair and mild, sad eyes. He smiled at me in a tired, tolerant way as Bryson introduced us. "I am sorry, Captain Roker," he said. "Your ship will be filled with strangers on this trip. I'll do my best to keep out of your way and let you do your job." I hoped he could live up to his words. Since I took over the runs to Titan, I've carried most things in the connected set of cargo spheres that make up the Assembly. Apart from the kernels, and we carry a few of those on the outbound leg of every trip, we've had livestock, mega-crystals, the gravity simulator and the circus. That's right, the circus. It must have had a terrible agent, that's all I can say. I took it both ways, to Titan and back to L-#. Even with all that, Yifter was still a novelty item. After he had been caught and the rest of the Lucies had gone underground, nobody had known quite what to do with him. He was Earth's hottest property, the natural target for a billion guns and knives. Until they decided how and when he would come to trial, they wanted him a long way from Earth. It was my job to deliver him to the Titan penal colony, and .return him when they got themselves sorted out on Earth. "I'll arrange for you and your guards to trayel in a separate part of the Assembly," I said. "I assume that you will prefer privacy." Yifter nodded agreeably, but Bryson wasn't having any. "Captain Roker," he said, "let me remind you that Mr. Yifter has not been found guilty on any charge. On this journey, and until his trial, he will be treated with proper courtesy. I expect you to house both of us here in the Control Stage, and I expect that you will invite us to take our meals here with you." In principle I could have told him to go and take a walk outside. As captain, I determined who would travel in the Control Stage and who would eat with me -- and innocent people were not usually sent to the Titan penal colony, even before trial. On the other hand, Bryson was from the Planetary Cooordinator's office, and even offEarth that status carried weight. I suppressed my first reaction and said quietly, "What about the guards?" "They can travel in the Second Section, right behind the Control Stage," replied Bryson. I shrugged. If he wanted to make nonsense of Earth's security efforts, that was his choice. Nothing had ever happened on any of my twomonth runs from Earth to Titan, and Bryson was probably quite right; nothing would happen this time. On the other hand, it seemed like a damned silly charade to ship twenty-five guards to keep an eye on Yifter and then house them in a separate part of the Assembly. Yifter, with an uncanny empathy, had read through my shrug. "Don't worry about security, Captain Roker," he said. He smiled again, that tired, soothing smile that began deep in his sad, brown eyes. "You have my assurance, I will be a model prisoner." He and Bryson walked on past me, into the main quarters. Was that really Yifter, the bogey-man, the notorious head of the Hallucinogenic Freedom League? It seemed hard to believe. Three months earlier, the Lucies -- under Yifter's messianic direction -- had planted hallucinogenic drugs in the water-supply lines of most of Earth's major cities. An eighth of the world's population had died in the resulting chaos. Starvation, epidemic, exposure and mindless combat had re-visited the Earth and exacted their age-old tribute. The monster who had conceived, planned and directed that horror was difficult to match with Yifter, the seemingly mild and placid man. My thoughts were quickly diverted to more immediate practical matters. We had the final masses of all the cargo and it was time for the final balancing of the whole Assembly. One might assume that means just balancing the kernels correctly, since they out-mass everything else by a factor of a million. But each Section containing a kernel has an independent drive unit, powered by the kernel itself. We leave those on Titan and travel back light; but on the trip out, the dynamic balancing is quite tricky. I reviewed the final configuration, then looked around for McAndrew. I wanted him to look over the balance calculations. It's my responsibility, but he's the kernel expert. I realized that he hadn't been present when Yifter came aboard. Presumably he was over on one of the other Sections, crooning over his beloved power sources. I found him in Section Seven. The Assembly is made up of a variable number of Sections, and there would be twelve on this trip, plus the Control Stage. Until we accelerate away from the Libration Colony station, all the Sections are physically connected -- with actual cables -- to each other and to the Control Stage. In flight, the coupling is done electromagnetically, and the drives for the powered Sections are all controlled by a computer on the Control Stage. The Assembly looks like a small bunch of grapes, but the stalks are non-functional -- there are no cables in the System that could take the strain, even at lowest acceleration. Moving among the spherical Sections when we're in flight is no easy task. It means we have to cut the drives and turn off the coupling between the Sections. That's why I thought the idea of having Yifter's guards in a different Section was so dumb; from there, they couldn't even reach the Control Stage when the drives were on. I wanted McAndrew to check the configuration that we would hold in flight, to see if he agreed that the stresses were decently balanced among the different Sections. We never run near the limit on any of them but there's a certain pride of workmanship in getting them all approximately equal, and the stresses as low as possible. He was standing on the ten-meter shield that surrounds the Section Seven kernel, peering through a long boresight pointed in toward the center. He was aware of my presence but did not move or speak until the observation was complete. Finally he nodded in satisfaction, closed the boresight cap and turned to me. "Just checking the optical scalars," he said. "Spun up nicely, this one. So, what can I do for you, Captain?" I led him outside the second shield before I handed him the trim calculations. I know a kernel shield has never failed, but I'm still not comfortable when I get too close to one. I once asked McAndrew how he felt about working within ten meters of Hell, where you could actually feel the gravity gradient and the inertial dragging. He had looked at me with his little introspective smile and made a sort of throatclearing noise -- the only trace of his ancestry that I could ever find in him. "Och," he said, "the shields are triply protected. They won't fail." That would have reassured me, but then he had rubbed his high, balding forehead and added, "And if they do, it won't make any difference if you are ten meters away or five hundred. That kernel would radiate at about two gigawatts, most of it high-energy gammas." The trouble was, he always had the facts right. When I first met McAndrew, seven years earlier, we were taking the first shipment of kernels out to Titan. He had showed up with them, and I had assumed that he was just another engineer -- a good one, maybe, but I expected that. Five minutes of conversationwith him told me that he had probably forgotten more about Kerr-Newman black holes -- kernels -- than I was ever likely to learn. I have degrees in Electrical Engineering and Gravitational Engineering; in my job I have to, but I'm really no gravity specialist. I felt like an idiot after our first talk. I made a few inquiries and found that McAndrew was a full professor at the Penrose Institute, and probably the System's leading expert on space-time structure. When we got to know each other better, I asked him why he would give up his job for four months of the year to ride herd on a bunch of kernels being shipped around the Solar System. It was a milk-run, with lots of time and very little to do. Most people would be bored silly. "I need it," he said simply. "It's very nice to work with colleagues but in my line of business the real stuff is mostly worked out alone. And I can do experiments here that wouldn't be allowed back home." After that I accepted his way of working and took vicarious pride in the stream of papers that appeared from McAndrew at the end of each Titan run. He was no trouble on the trips. He spent most of his time in the Sections carrying the kernels, only appearing in the Control Stage for his meals -- and frequently missing them. He was a tinkerer as well as a theorist. Isaac Newton was his idol. His work had paid off in higher shielding efficiencies, better energy-extraction methods and more sensitive manipulation of the charged kernels. Each trip we had something new. I left the trim calculations with him and he promised to look them over and give me his comments in an hour or two. I had to move along and check the rest of the cargo. "By the way," I said, elaborately casual as I turned to go, "we'll be having company for dinner on this trip. Bryson insists that Yiften should eat with us." He stood quiet for a moment, head slightly bowed. Then he nodded and ran his hand over his sandy, receding hairline. "That sounds like Bryson," he said. "Well, I doubt if Yifter will eat any of us for breakfast. I'm not sure he'll be any worse than the rest of you. I'll be there." I breathed a small sigh of relief and left him. McAndrew, as I knew from experience, was the Compleat Pacifist. I had wanted to be sure that he could stand the idea of having meals with Yifter. Four hours later all our checks were complete. I switched on the fields. The dull gray .exterior of each Section turned to silver, shattering the sunlight and turning the The cables linking the Sections were still in position but now they were hanging loose. All stresses had been picked up by the balancing fields. In the Control Stage I gradually turned on the propulsion units of each powered Section. Plasma was fed through the ergosphere of each kernel, picked up energy and streamed aft. The relative positions of the Sections, Mossbauercontrolled to within fractions of a micrometer, held steady. Slowly we accelerated away from L-# and began the long spiral of a continuous-impulse orbit to Titan. My work was just about finished until crossover time. The computers monitored the drive feeds, the accelerations and all the balance of the Sections. On this trip we had three units without operating drive units: Section Two, where Yifter's guards were housed, just behind the Control Stage; Section Seven, where McAndrew had taken the kernel out of commission for his usual endless and mysterious experiments; and, of course, the Control Stage itself. I had made the mistake of asking McAndrew what experiments he was planning for this trip. He had looked at me with his innocent blue eyes and scribbled an answer full of twistor diagrams and spinor notations -- knowing damn well that I wouldn't be able to follow it. He didn't like to talk about his work "half-cooked," as he put it.    I had been more worried than I wanted to admit about dinner on that first ship-evening. I knew we would all be itching to ask Yifter about the Lucies but there was no easy way to introduce the subject into the conversation. How could we do it? "By the way, I hear that months ago. I wonder if you would like to say a few words on the subject. It would liven up the table-talk at dinner." I could foresee that our conversation might be a little strained. As it turned out, my worries were unnecessary. The first impression that I'd had of Yifter, that of a mild and amiable man, strengthened on longer exposure. It was Bryson, during dinner, who caused the first tricky moment. "Most of Earth's problems are caused by the United Space Federation's influence," he said as the robo-server, always on best form at the beginning of the trip, rolled in the courses. "If it weren't for the U.S.F. , there wouldn't be as much discontent and rioting on Earth. It's all relative -- living space and living standards -- and the U.S.F. sets a bad example. We can't compete." According to Bryson, three million people were causing all the before Yifter's handiwork. It was sheer nonsense and as a U.S.F. citizen, I should have been the one to bridle; but it was McAndrew who made a growling noise of disapproval, down in his throat; and it was Yifter, of all people, who sensed the atmosphere the quickest and deftly steered the conversation to another subject. "I think Earth's worst problems are caused by the power shortage," he said. "That affects everything else. Why doesn't Earth use the kernels for power, the way the U.S.F. does?"' "Too afraid of an accident," replied McAndrew. His irritation evaporated immediately at the mention of his specialty. "If the shields ever failed, you would have a Kerr-Newman black hole sitting there, pumping out a thousand megawatts, mostly as high-energy radiation and fast particles. Worse than that, it would pull in free charge and become electrically neutral. As soon as that happened, there would be no way to hold it electromagnetically. It would sink down and orbit inside the Earth. We couldn't afford to have that happen." "But couldn't we use smaller kernels on Earth?" asked Yifter. "They would be less dangerous." McAndrew shook his head. "It doesn't work that way. The smaller the black hole, the higher the effective temperature and the faster it radiates. You'd be better off with a much more massive black hole. But then you have the problem of supporting it against Earth's gravity. Even with the best electromagnetic control, anything that massive would sink down into the Earth." "I suppose it wouldn't help to use a non-rotating, uncharged hole, either," said Yifter. "That might be easier to work with." "A Schwarzschild hole?" McAndrew looked at him in disgust. "Now, Mr. Yifter, you know better than that." He grew eloquent. "A Schwarzschild hole gives you no control at all. You can't get ahold of it electromagnetically. It just sits there spewing out energy all over the spectrum, and there's nothing you can do to change it -- unless you want to charge it and spin it up and make it into a kernel. With the kernels now, you have control." I tried to interrupt but McAndrew was just getting warmed up. "A Schwarzschild hole is like a naked flame," he went on. "A caveman's device. A kernel is refined, it's controllable. You can spin it up and store energy or you can use the ergosphere to pull energy out and spin it down. You can use the charge on it to move it about as you want. It s a real working instrument, not a bit of crudity from the Dark Ages." I shook my head and sighed in simulated despair. "Me Andrew, you have an unconsummated love affair with those blasted kernels." I turned to Yifter and Bryson, who had watched Me Andrew's outburst with some surprise. "He spends all his waking hours spinning those things up and down. All during the last trip he was working the kernels in gravitational focusing experiments. You know, using the fact that a gravity field bends light rays. He insists that one day we won't use lenses for optics -- we'll focus light using arrays of kernels." I made the old joke. "We hardly saw him on that trip. We were convinced that one day he'd get careless with the shields, fall into one of the kernels and really make a spectacle of himself. ' ' They didn't get it. Yifter and Bryson looked at me blankly while McAndrew, who had heard it all ten times before, chuckled. We have the same sense of humor -- a bad joke is always funny, even if it's the hundredth time you've heard it told. It's a strange thing, but after the first half-hour I had stopped thinking of Yifter as our prisoner. I could understand now why Bryson had objected to the idea of surrounding Yifter with armed guards. I would have objected myself. He seemed the most civilized man in the group, with a warm personality and a very dry and subtle sense of humor. When Bryson left the table, pleading a long day and a lack of familiarity with a space environment, Yifter, McAndrew and I stayed on, chatting about the previous trips I had made to Titan. I mentioned the time I had taken the circus. "Do you know, I'd never seen most of those animals before," I said. "They were all on the list of endangered species. I don't think you could find them on Earth any more, expect in a circus or a zoo." There was a moment of silence; then Yifter spoke. His eyes were mild and smiling, and his voice sounded dreamy and distant. "Endangered species," he said. "That's the heart of it. Earth has no room for failures. The weaker species, like weaker specimens of a species, must be eliminated. Only the strong -- the mentally strongmay survive. The weak must be culled, for our own sake; whether that means one tenth, one half, or nine tenths of the total." looked at Yifter, whose expression had not changed, then at McAndrew, whose face reflected the horror that I was feeling. Yet behind all that, I could feel the unique power of the man. My mind was rejecting him but I still had a sense of well-being, of warmth in the pit of my stomach, as he was speaking. "We have made a beginning," went on Yifter quietly. "Just a beginning. Last time we were less successful than I had hoped. We had a breakdown in the distribution system of the drugs. I managed to eliminate the responsible individuals but it was too late to correct the will be different." He rose to his feet, white hair shining like silver, face beatific. "Good night, Captain. Good night, Professor Me Andrew. Sleep well." After he had left, McAndrew and I sat and looked at each other for a long time. Finally he broke the spell. "Now we know. Captain. We should have guessed it from the beginning. Mad as a hatter. The man's a raving lunatic. Completely psychotic." That said most of it. McAndrew had used up all the good phrases. I nodded. "But did you feel the strength in him?" went on McAndrew. "Like a big magnet." I was glad that the penal colony was so far from Earth, and the avenues of communication so wellguarded. "Next time... it will be different." Our two-month trip suddenly seemed to have doubled in length.    there were no more shocks for some time. Our regular meal-time conversations continued, and on several occasions McAndrew voiced views on pacifism and the protection of human life. Each time I waited for Yifter's reply, expecting the worst. He never actually agreed with Mac -- but neither did he come out with any statement that resembled his comments of the first shipevening. We soon settled into the shipboard routine. McAndrew spent less and less time in the Control Stage and more in Section Seven. On this trip he had brought a new set of equipment for his experiments, and I was very curious to know what he was up to. He wouldn't tell. I had only one clue. Section Seven was drawing enormous energy from the other kernels in the rest of the Assembly. That energy could be going to only one place -- into the kernel in Section Seven. I suspected that McAndrew must be spinning it up: making it closer to an "extreme" kernel, a Kerr-Newman black hole where the rotation energy matches the mass energy. I knew that couldn't be the whole story. McAndrew had spun up the kernels before, and he had told me that there was no direct way of getting a really extreme kernel; that would take an infinite amount of energy. This time he was doing something different. He insisted that Section Seven be off-limits to everybody. I could not get him to talk about it. There would be a couple of seconds of silence from him, then he would stand there, cracking his finger joints as though he were snapping out a coded message to me. He could be a real sphinx when he chose. Two weeks from Earth, we were drawing clear of the main Asteroid Belt. I had just about concluded that my worries for the trip were over when the radar reported another ship, closing slowly with us from astern, its spectral signature identified it as the Lesotho, a cruise liner that usually ran trajectories in the Inner System. It was broadcasting a Mayday and flying free under zero drive power. I thought about it for a moment, then posted Emergency Stations throughout the Assembly. The computed trajectory showed that we would match velocities at a separation of three kilometers. That was incredibly close, far too close to be accidental. After closest approach, we would pull away again -- we were still under power, accelerating outward, and would leave the Lesotho behind. I was watching the displays, trying to decide whether or not to take the next step -- shutting off the drives -- when Bryson appeared, with Yifter just behind him. "Captain Roker," he said in his usual imperious manner, "that's an Earth ship there, giving you a distress signal. Why aren't you doing anything about it?" "If we wait just a few minutes," I said, "we'll be within spitting distance of her. I see no point in rushing in, not until we've had a good look at her. I can't think what an Inner System ship would be doing, free-falling out here beyond the Belt." That didn't cool him. "Can't your recognize an emergency when you see one?" he asked. "If you won't do something productive with your people. I'll do something with mine." I wondered what he wanted me to do, but he walked away without saying anything more and went down the stairs that led to the rear communications area of the Control Stage. I turned back to the displays. The Lesotho was closing on us steadily, and now I could see that her locks were open. I cut our propulsion to zero and switched off all the drives. The other ship was tumbling slowly, drive lifeless and aft nacelles crumpled. Even from this distance I could see that she would need extensive repairs before she could function again. I was beginning to think that I had been over-cautious when two things happened. Yifter's guards, who had been housed behind the Control Stage in Section Two, began to float into view on the viewing screen that pointed toward the Lesotho. They were all in space armor and heavily weaponed. At the same time two suited figures appeared in the open forward lock of the other vessel. I cut in the suit frequencies on our main board. "... shield failure," said the receiver. "Twenty-seven survivors, and bad injuries. We must have pain-killers, medical help, water, food, oxygen and power-packs." With that, one group of our guards outside began to move toward the two suited figures in the Lesotho ' s lock, while the remainder stayed close to the Assembly, looking across at the other ship. Subconsciously I noted the number of our guards in each party, then gave them my full attention and did a rapid re-count. Twenty-five. All our guards. I swore and cut in the transmitter... "Sergeant, get half of those men back inside the Assembly shields. This is Captain Roker. I'm overriding any other orders you may have received. Get the nearer party -- " I was interrupted. The display screen flashed blue-white, then overloaded. The whole Control Stage rang like a great bell as something slapped hafd on the outer shield. I knew what it was: a huge pulse of hard radiation and highly energetic particles, smashing into us in a fraction of a microsecond. Yifter had been floating within a couple of meters of me, watching the screens. He put his hand to the wall to orient himself as the Control Stage vibrated violently. "What was that?" "Thermonuclear explosion," I said shortly. "Hundred megaton plus. On the Lesotho . " All the screens on that side were dead. I activated the standby system. The Lesotho had vanished. The guards had vanished with it, vaporized instantly. All the cables linking the parts of the Assembly, all the scanners and sensors that were not protected behind the shields, were gone. The Sections themselves were intact but their coupling fields would have to be completely re-calibrated. We would not be arriving at Titan on schedule. I looked again at Yifter. His face was now calm and thoughtful. He seemed to be waiting, listening expectantly. For what? If the Lesotho had been a suicide mission, manned by volunteers who sought revenge on Yifter, it hadn't had a chance. They couldn't destroy the Assembly, or get at Yifter. If revenge were not the purpose, what was ? I ran through in my mind the events of the past hour. With the drives switched off in the Assembly, we had an unprotected blind spot dead astern. We had been putting all our attention on the Lesotho. Now, with all the guards dead, the Control Stage was undefended. It was quicker to go aft and take a look than to call Bryson and McAndrew and ask them what they could see from the rear viewing screens of the Control Stage. Leaving Yifter, I dived head-first down the stairway -- a risky maneuver if there were any chance that the drive might come back on; but I was sure it could not. It took me about thirty seconds to travel the length of the Control Stage. By the time that I was halfway there, I knew I had been thinking much too slowly. I heard the clang of a lock, a shout, and the sputtering crackle of a hand laser against solid metal. When I got to the rear compartment, it was all finished. Bryson, pale and open-mouthed, was floating against one wall. He seemed unhurt. McAndrew had fared less well. He was ten meters further along, curled into a fetal ball. Floating near him I saw a family of four stubby pink worms with red-brown heads, still unclenching with muscle spasm. I could also see the deep bum on his side and chest, and his right hand, from which a laser had neatly clipped the fingers and cauterized the wound instantly as it did so. At the far end of the room, braced against the wall, were five suited figures, all well-armed. Heroics would serve no purpose. I spread my arms wide to show that I was not carrying a weapon, and one of the newcomers pushed off from the wall and floated past me, heading toward the front of the Control Stage. I moved over to McAndrew and inspected his wounds. They looked bad, but not fatal. Fortunately laser wounds are usually very clean. I could see that we would have problems with his lung unless we treated him quickly. A lobe had been penetrated and his breathing was slowly breaking the seal of crisped tissue the laser had made. Blood was beginning to well through and stain his clothing. McAndrew's forehead was beaded with sweat. As the shock of his wounds wore off, the pain was beginning. I pointed to the medical belt of one of the invaders, who nodded and tossed an ampoule across to me. I injected McAndrew intravenously at the big vein inside his right elbow. The figure that had pushed past me was returning, followed by Yifter. The face-plate of the suit was now open, revealing a dark-haired woman in her early thirties. She' looked casually at the scene, nodded at last and turned back to Yifter. "Everything is under control here," she said, "but we'll have to take a Section from the Assembly. The ship we were following in caught some of the blast from the Lesotho, and it's no good for powered flight now." Yifter shook his head reprovingly. "Impatient as usual, Akhtar. I'll bet you were just too eager to get here. You must learn patience if you are to be of maximum value to us, my dear. Where did you leave the main group?" "A few hours' drive inward from here. We have waited for your rescue before making any plans for the next phase." Yifter, calm as ever, nodded approvingly. "The right decision. We can take a Section without difficulty. Most of them contain their own drives but some are less effective than others." He turned to me, smiling gently. "Captain Roker, which Section is the best equipped to carry us away from the Assembly? As you see, it is time for us to leave you and rejoin our colleagues." His calm was worse than any number of threats. I floated next to McAndrew, trying to think of some way that we could delay or impede the Lucies' escape. It might take days for a rescue party to reach us. In that time Yifter and his followers could be anywhere. I hesitated. Yifter waited. "Come now," he said at last. "I'm sure you are as eager as I am to avoid any further annoyance -- " He moved his hand, just a little, to indicate McAndrew and Bryson, " -- for your friends." I shrugged. All the Sections contained emergency life-support systems, more than enough for a trip of a few hours. Section Two, where the guards had been housed, lacked a full, independent drive unit, but it was still capable of propulsion. I thought it might slow their escape enough for us to somehow track it. "Section Two should be adequate," I. said. "It housed your guards in comfort. Those poor devils certainly have no need for it now." I paused. Beside me, McAndrew was painfully straightening from his contorted position. The drugs were beginning to work. He coughed, and red globules floated away across the room. That lung needed attention. "No," he said faintly. "Not Two, Yifter. Seven. Section Seven." He paused and coughed again, while I looked at him in surprise. "Seven," he said at last. He The woman was listening closely. She regarded both of us suspiciously. "What was all that about?" My mouth was gaping open, as wide as Bryson's. I had caught an idea of what McAndrew was trying to tell me but I didn't want to say it. Fortunately I was helped out by Yifter himself. dear, you have to understand that Professor McAndrew is a devoted pacifist -- and carrying his principles through admirably. He doesn't want can agree with that, for the present." He looked at me and shook his head. "I won't inquire what dangers and drawbacks Section Two might contain. Captain... though I do seem to recall that it lacks a decent drive unit. I think we'll follow the Professor's advice and take Section Seven. Akhtar is a very competent engineer and I'm sure she'll have no trouble coupling the drive to the kernel." He looked at us with a strange expression. If if didn't sound so peculiar. I'd describe it as wistful. "I shall miss our conversations," he said, "but I must say goodbye now. I hope that Professor McAndrew will recover. He is one of the strong -- unless he allows himself to be killed by his unfortunate pacifist fancies. We may not meet again, but I am sure that you will be hearing about us in the next few months." They left. McAndrew, Bryson and I watched the screens in silence We're Fighting for Your Life American Heart Association as the Lucies made their way over to Section Seven and entered it. Once they were inside, I went over to McAndrew and took him by the left arm. "Come on," I said. "We have to get a patch on that lung." He shook his head weakly. "Not yet. It can wait a few minutes. After that it might not be necessary." His forehead was beading with sweat again, and this time it was not from pain. I felt my own tension mounting steadily. We stayed by the display screen and as the seconds ticked away, my forehead began also to film with perspiration. We did not speak. I had one question, but I was terribly afraid of the answer I might get. I think that Bryson spoke to both of us several times. I have no idea of what he said. Finally a pale nimbus grew at the rear of the Section Seven drive unit. "Now," said McAndrew, "he's going to tap the kernel." I stopped breathing. There was a pause of a few seconds, stretching to infinity; then the image on the screen rippled slightly. Suddenly we could see stars shining through that area. Section Seven was gone, vanished, leaving no sign that it had ever existed. McAndrew took in a long, pained breath, wincing as his injured lung expanded. Somehow he managed a little smile. "Well now," he said. "That answers a theoretical question that I've had on my mind for some time." I could breathe again too. "I didn't know what was going to happen there," I said. "I was afraid all the energy might come out of that kernel in one go." McAndrew nodded. "To be honest, the same thought was in my head. At this range the shields would have been useless. We would have gone like last year's lovers." Bryson had been watching the whole thing in confusion. We had been ignoring him completely. At last, pale and irritable, he spoke to us again. "What are you two talking about? And what has happened to the Section with Yifter in it? I was watching on the screen; then it just seemed to disappear." "McAndrew tried to tell us earlier," I said. "But he didn't want the Lucies to know what he was getting at. He had been fiddling with the kernel in that Section. You heard don't know what he did but he fixed it so that the kernel in Section "I'm sure he did," said Bryson tartly. "Now perhaps you'll tell me "Well, Mac could tell you a lot tor is a standard sort of thing in relativity... I guess you never had any training in that. You get a killing vector when a region of spacetime has some sort of symmetry -- say, about an axis of spin. And every sort of black hole, every sort of kernel we've ever encountered before, has at least one symmetry of that type. So if McAndrew had changed the kernel and made it into it's like no kernel we've ever seen. Right, Mac?" He looked dreamy. The drugs had taken hold. "I took it past the extreme Kerr-Newman form," he said. "Put it into a different form, metastable equilibrium. Event horivectors had disappeared." "Christ!" I hadn't expected that. "No event horizon? Doesn't that mean that you get -- ?" McAndrew was still nodding, his pupils dilated. " -- a naked singularity. That's right. Captain. I had a singularity sitting there in equilibrium in Section Seven. You don't get there by spinning-up... need different method." His speech was slurring, as though his tongue were swollen. "Didn't know what would happen if somebody tried to tap it, to use for a drive. Either the signature of space-time there would change, from three space dimensions and one time to two space and two time. Or we might see the System's biggest explosion. All the mass coming out as radiation, in one flash." It was slowly dawning on Bryson what we were saying. "But just where is Yifter now?" he asked. "Gone a long way," I said. "Right out of this universe." "And he can't be brought back?" asked Bryson. "I hope not." I had seen more than enough of Yifter. "But I'm supposed to deliver him safely to Titan," said Bryson. "I'm responsible for his safe passage. What am I going to tell the Planetary Coordinators?" I didn't have too much sympathy. I was busy looking at Me Andrew's wounds. The fingers could be regenerated, using the bio-feedback equipment on Titan, but the lung would need watching. It was still bleeding a little. "Tell them you had a very singular experience," I said. McAndrew grunted as I probed the deep cut in his side. "Sorry, Mac. Have to do it. You know, you've ruined your reputation forever as far as I'm concerned. I thought you were a pacifist. All that preaching at us, then you send Yifter and his lot all the way to Hell -- and good riddance to them." McAndrew was drifting far away on his big dose of pain-killer. He half-winked at me and made his curious throat-clearing noise. "Och, I'm a pacifist all right. We pacifists have to look after each other. How could we ever hope for peace with people like Yifter around to stir up trouble? There's a bunch more of them, a few hours' travel behind us. Fix me up quick. I should be tinkering with the other kernels a bit, just in case the other Lucies decide to pay us a visit later..."  tures. The Histories, Ships and Actions of Humanoid, Cyborg Alien Android, Robotoid Clone, and other Super Civilizations that defy description. The Series can be played by the purchase of only one book that specific weapons, tactics and rulings. cost without ever wasting funds on duplication! This results in games being reduced # by this UNt Master Fleet Commander's Manual (#)... T . T ,-... ,, in  nu To play WD, you must have a combat manual for the low cost of S#. #b. The following games are available -- cost of Manual not included: # # the Planets' resources, life-support, and values. Seven Types of Ships with Missile Forces and # types ot Planetary Ground Armies. # counters, #-D play! . Star Ships Massive Null Guns, Battle Cruisers, Heavy Cruisers, and many other ship types. Use the Gravitational Wells, Deadly Gas Clouds, etc. # Scenarios can be played by # to # people, from # hours t more, AD -- Desert Fox -- D-Day -- Midway -- Waterloo -- Civil War -- Ancient Series, Miniatures, and more Science FicOrder From: For two thousand years the mri species has supported itself by hiring out its warrior-caste, the Kel, to the regul species as guards and mercenaries. Forty-three years ago the regul went to war against humankind, and the regul doch, or Association of Holn, launched mri mercenaries into that conflict. The mri lost, due to their declining numbers and due also to regul control of strategy. The mri homeworld of Nisren was destroyed, and world after world has fallen to humanity until only remote Kesrith remains mri. It is now called homeworld for the mri forces scattered throughout space, but its present mri inhabitants number only thirteen: the she'pan, Intel, who rules: two of Sen-caste, the scholars: and ten kel'ein, or warriors. In the peace negotiations Holn is replaced in command by doch Alagn, and in the resulting treaty Kesrith is traded to humanity. Evacuation of regul personnel from Kesrith begins in frantic haste. But the thirteen mri sit firm, ignored by the fleeing Holn; and the youngest kel'en, Niun, is full of bitterness for their fate. Nine of the kel'ein are old, masters of their caste; Niun alone -- last son of the mri, the People, as they call themselves -- has been forbidden to go into space. He has prepared all his life for this war; now his world is being taken, and still he is forbidden to seek a kel'en's employment with the regul. His truesister Melein, of Sen-caste, tries to intercede for him, reminding Intel of the bitter quarrel between Niun and his cousin Medai, who was sent in honor to the war, while Niun was held at home. Intel will not be persuaded, and Niun is again forbidden to leave Kesrith.    Elsewhere in Kesrith's system a ship is incoming: The doch Alagn elder, Hulagh Alagn-ni, is bringing in two humans-Stavros, governorto-be of human Kesrith, and his aide, Sten Duncan, a Surface Tactical operative. Considerable physical differences separate regul and human. The regul' s immature phase alone is mobile, while their adult phase confines them to reliance upon prosthetic devices. But the mental differences are more extreme. The regul learn at a single hearing and cannot forget. They were at disadvantage in war... but they trust in their mental superiority and reckon to ultimately outmaneuver the two human observers. Stavros obeys the rigid schedule of movements permitted them aboard ship, but his aide strays and finds himself face to face with a mri kel' en... who says simply, " am kel Medai," and adds: We should not have met." Regul separate them, mri and human, and Duncan and Stavros are confined strictly to quarters until landing at Kesrith. And after landing they are taken to the Nom', regul headquarters, under a heavy guard ostensibly for their protection, while Medai' s body is taken by a' regul delegation to the edun, the House of the mri. Suicide is the given cause of Medai' s death, suicide occasioned by long brooding over the loss of the war and by Hulagh's ban on personnel leaving the ship. The mri Kel accepts the body, and as the kel'en next of kin, Niun sits the death-watch alone in the Shrine. There Melein appears, to tell him that Intel wants him upstairs. Niun, blaming Intel for the policies that have caused himself and Medai such grief, refuses the order, insisting that he will see Medai buried, with full honors, in the distant desert tombs. Melein leaves in anger. And during that long watch, Niun finds himself confronted by a scarred, starved dus, one of the great quadrupeds, native to Kesrith, that have lived with the mri and gone to war with them for all known time. The beast is half-blind with the secretions of miuk, the madness that sometimes possesses them. Niun expects to be killed, but the beast retreats, to lie at the door outside the edun. Then Niun recognizes it -- the dus that had gone to war with Medai, returned abused and starved and far into a madness that would have been days in the making. The mri were not, then, given all the truth concerning Medai' s death. Niun had begun, before the others had even stirred, to prepare for the journey to Sil'athen. There was the water drawn and the ritual store of food, a token only, and the real provisions that were for the living. With much effort he took the body of Medai from the small Shrine and bound it with cords to the regul litter on which it had come. The dus that waited by the doorway saw but paid no heed to what he did. Then the others began to come: Eddan and Pasev and Dahacha and the rest of the Kel. The dusei came down too, and the miuk'ko by the door withdrew a space. There in the sunlight it subsided, massive head between its paws, sides heaving. It was deep in shock. "Miuk," murmured Debas, horrified to see what sat at their gates. But Pasev, who was, despite the fact that she had killed many humans, a gentle soul, went closer and tried to call to it, staying out of its reach. It reared aside with a plaint of rage and sank down again a little distance away, exhausted by the effort. The dusei of the edun drew aside from it, agitated, sensing the distress of their fellow and the danger he posed. They formed a tight knot about the Kel, and the guard-dus commenced that circling action, protecting the Kel from the threat of the rogue. And eyes were on Niun, questioning. He shrugged and picked up the ropes of Medai's improvised sled. "It came," he said, "into the Shrine last night." He looked at Eddan. "It was hunting someone." And he saw the ugly surmise that leaped into the Kel'anth's eyes: a wise man, Eddan, if he were not kel'en. And quietly Eddan turned and gestured to Pasev, to Liran and Debas and Lieth. "Stay here," he said. "Guard the she'pan." "Eddan," said Pasev, the she'pan forbade -- " "Any who wish to stay besides these may stay. Guard the she'pan, Pasev." And Niun, not waiting for them, started out, knowing already by the resistance of the sled that he was going to pay dearly for his obstinacy, unyielding when the she'pan and all the rest had given him a way to escape this kinsman's duty. Slowly, painfully, the miuk'ko heaved itself up and tried to follow the sled. It went only as far as the roadway and there sank down, exhausted, at the end of its strength. The other dusei flanked it, one still pacing between the dus and the remaining Kel, watching the rogue. They did not follow the burial party. They were not wanted. They guarded the edun. And Eddan and the other kel'ein overtook Niun on the slope that led to the hills and offered their hands to the rope. He did not object to this. He felt pained that they must make this gesture, showing him their fellowship, as if it needed be shown. He veiled himself, one-handed, lowered the visor, already conserving the moisture his panting breaths tended to waste. He had taken along more than the usual quota of water, knowing the toll the journey would exact of them. One did not work on Kesrith: This was for youngling regul and for regul machines. Without proper caution, exertion would wring the moisture from the body and bring hemorrhage. But none of them said the obvious, that the journey was illadvised. Never had the Kel defied the Mother, never directly. And it came to Niun then that the Mother had had recourse available: She might have summarily ordered Eddan. She had not done this. Uncharitably he attributed her thoughts not to love but to the drinking again of komal, wherefore she could not be awakened when Melein had taken his refusal back to her. Such was Intel, she'pan of Kesrith. It had happened before. He held to this irreverent anger, refusing to believe that she had relented, for this, at least, had never happened before, not in all the years that he had made requests of her. He did not think that she would begin, now that he defied her. He refused to repent his stubbornness even when the trail grew steeper and the rocks tormented his feet and the air came like cold fire into his lungs. In the sky the regul ships continued to come and go, their speed making mock of the slow agony of the small figures of mri -- ships carrying more and more of regul-kind into refuge before humans should come and claim the world.     The trail to Sil'athen was no trail but a way. remembered by all mri that had ever walked it. There was no real trace of a path among the rocks save that the way was devoid of large obstacles and tended to run from landmark to landmark. Niun knew it, for burials had been common enough his his life, although he had never seen the ceremonies surrounding a birth. He had been too young for Melein's. He drew on the sled's ropes alone now, following after Eddan's tall, slim figure. He wrestled the sled along among the small rocks until he had to wrap a fold of his robes about his tom hands to save them. His breath came hard and his lungs ached; he was accustomed to weapons-work, not to labor like tsi'mri; and every few paces of altitude gained made breathing that much more difficult. "Niun," one and another of the brothers would say, "Let me take it a time." But he shook off their offering hands. Only the oldest -- save Pasev, whom Eddan had placed in command back at the edun -- had come on this trek. His conscience tormented him now, lest his stubbornness might prove the death of one of these brave old men. And surely, he thought, the she 'pan had foreseen this and he had been too blind with his own self-importance to consider that her reasons might not have involved him. He had thought the worst of Medai and repented it now; it began to dawn on him that he might have been mistaken in other things. But it would shame these men now, having begun, to turn back. He had brought them out here, he with his stubborn pride; he welcomed the pain that drove clear thought from his mind, atonement for his pettiness against them, against the dead. Medai had been no coward, no man light-of-thought. Niun was certain of that now, certain that his cousin had held strong for a long time, strong against the perfidy of his masters, against the Gods knew what else. And why these things had been: This was still beyond him. "Eddan," he said quietly when they rested in the shadow of a high crag, the sand beyond them rippling in the ruddy light of Arain's zenith. A burrower had his lair out on the flat beyond. Niun had seen it pock the surface, the sand funnelling down as the creature reacted to the breeze, thinking it had prey. "Ai?" "I think you believe Medai's death was not as the regul said." Eddan, veiled, moved his hand, a gesture that agreed. "I think," Niun continued, "that the Kel has already discussed this, and that I was probably the only one in the Kel who was surprised to find that so." Eddan looked at him long. The membrane nictitated across his eyes, flashed clear again. "Niun," he said, "that is an uncharitable thing, to assume that we would willfully exclude you from our thoughts in such a matter." "But perhaps it is so, sir. Perhaps you had reasons." Eddan's hand closed on Niun's wrist, a hard grip. Eddan had taught him the yin'ein; there was none more skillful than Eddan and Pasev, able to divide a man body from soul with delicacy; one could not see the blade move. And the strength was still in his hand. "Do not look to serve regul, Niun s'lntel Zain-Abrin. You serve the she 'pan, and one day you will be in my place. I think that day is coming soon." "If I should become Kel'anth," said Niun, turning cold at the words of omen, and unsure what he meant by that, "it will be a very small Kel. Everyone else is senior to me." "You will have your honor, Niun. There was never doubt of this in our minds, only in yours. It will come." Niun was disturbed to the heart by the deadly urgency of the words, at Eddan's pressing this upon him. "I have never fought," he objected. "How am I fit for anything?" Eddan shrugged again. "We are the Hand; others do the planning. But be assured that you have a use and that the she 'pan has planned for it. Remember that. Medai was considered and rejected. Remember that too." Niun sat stunned, all his surmises lorn down and laid waste at once. "Sir," he said, but Eddan thrust away from him and rose, turning his face from him, making it plain that he wanted no further question on the matter. Niun too rose to his feet, seeking some way to ask, letting his hand fall, helpless. When Eddan would not answer, he would not answer, and quite probably Eddan had said all he could say, all that he knew to say. The she' pan is well-pleased with his death, Melein had said; the coldness of that still chilled him. And: Medai was considered and rejected, Eddan had told him. For the first time in his life he pitied his cousin; for he saw everything turned inside out. Himself, in his youthful jealousy, suspicious of Medai, whose crime had been only that he had looked on Melein, for whom the she'pan had planned otherwise. Kesrith was a hard and unforgiving world. The Mother of Kesrith was one with her world, without mercies. His own stubbornness had run counter to her will. He had defied her, knowing nothing of her reasons. He had done a thing that kel'ein did not do and, further, tested her resolve to stop him, at a time when the People could least afford division. It was possible, he thought, that not alone had the regul killed Medai -- that the she'pan, and even Melein, had had a part in it. He pitied Medai, fearing for himself. He would have wished to have spoken with his cousin, both of them men now, and to have learned of Medai the things Eddan could not tell him. He looked at the black-shrouded form on the litter as he took up the ropes again and found that all his confidences had left him. He need not have been alone these years, he thought suddenly, and Medai need not have died, and so many things need not have happened, had he not made the she'pan choose between them.  It was not alone the regul that had killed Medai. It was evening when they reached the holy place, thfe cliffs, the windy recesses where the caves of Sil'athen hid the dead of the People that had died away from sun-burial. There were many, many graves, the oldest dating from times before Kesrith had known regul, the latest holding those that had been born on Nisren and had fled here for refuge. The valley formed a long retreat between the cliffs that marked a new level of the uplands. Here the sands were red, in contrast to the pale lowlands, and the ruddy rock was banded in places with white. Where rock had formed a hard cap. erosion by wind and burning rains had made strange pillars and hulking shapes that guarded the way through Sil'athen, casting strange shadows in the setting light of ruddy Arain. A windflower occupied one of the crags; its tendrils glistened like threads of glass, scarlet-stained, in the sunset. On the left of the entry a burrower had laired for many years. They swung wide, avoiding this guardian. It was shaming to stumble here, at the end: Niun felt the sand shift underfoot and caught himself, fearing at first a smaller burrower, undetected; but it was an old hole, only soft sand. He gathered himself up, dusting the knee on which he had fallen, and leaned against the ropes, shaking off the several offered hands. There was a black shadow over his vision, tinged with red: the membrane half-closed, no longer responsive to conscious will. The air he breathed was salty with his own evaporating moisture. They passed the old graves, the thousands of the old Kath, here long before the regul. Then there were the lonely twelve of their own Kath, buried westward according to tradition, facing the rising sun, dawning hope. They were the child-bearers, and with them were buried the few sad children, those too gentle for Kesrith's harsh winds. Theirs were the lives that should have preserved the People, had Intel not chosen Kesrith for homeworld. Many worlds the regul had offered -- fair, green worlds -- but Intel had desired Kesrith. She had told them this. The forge of a new people, she had said of Kesrith. But the gentle Kath had died in that forging, leaving the People desolate. Facing the sun's setting were the Sen graves in their thousands; and the nineteen recent graves of their  own Sen. These also, in their way gentle and vulnerable, had failed in Intel's refining, leaving Melein and Sathell alone to serve. In the highest cliffs were the graves of she'panei and the kel'ein I who guarded them in death. It was not certain how many she'panei had been on Kesrith. Niun knew of fifty-nine. He also knew that no kel'en knew a whole truth. He thought on this through the red and black haze of other thoughts as they turned toward the graves of the Kel. There were only a few hundred such to the others' thousands, almost as few as the graves of the she'panei -- on Kesrith. Their dead would many times outnumber those of the Sen; but very, very few kel'ein found their graves in earth, j They stopped at the newest cave, where the veterans of Nisren were entombed; and Niun forced himself to stay on his feet, to help them in unsealing it, moving rock until his hands were numb, for these stubborn old men would do everything j themselves if he did not forestall them. He ached and his own blood was on the rocks with which he made place for Medai. Kel'ein were not buried like others. Other castes faced into the valley of Sil'athen, but the Kel faced outward, toward the north, the traditional direction of evil. Row on row the dead lay in the dark. When they lit their single lamp, they could see them, musty black shadows in veils and robes mouldering into ruin, veiled faces turned toward the north wall of the cave. The air inside was cold and strange with decay. The dark oppressed. Niun stood, content for a moment only to stand, quiet, and let the old men set Medai in place among the others. They gathered then and faced north and spoke over him the Shon'jir, the passing-ritual. Niun repeated the words, spoken at birthings and burials, heralding a life of the People into the world and out of it. From Dark beginning To Dark at ending, Between them a Sun, But after comes Dark, And in that Dark, One ending. The words echoed in the cavern, in darkness wrapped about them; and Niun looked at the dead, and at his companions, and considered the frailty of they that chanted of the Dark; and the fragile breath's difference between lips that moved and those that could not. Terror possessed him, rebellion, tempting him to rush out into the open; but he did not give way. His lips continued to form the words. From Dark to Dark Is one voyage. From Dark to Dark Is our voyage. And after the Dark, O brothers, O sisters, Come we home. He had never thought the words. He had mouthed them; he had never felt them. He felt them now, looking about him. Home. This. He held himself still while the others filed out, forced himself to be the last, mastering his fear; but even when he had the light of stars and Kesrith's first moon overhead, he felt within him that cold that many suns would never warm away. "Seal it," said Eddan. He gathered up the rocks one by one and fitted them into place, making tight their joinings, sealing them between himself and Medai. His breath came hard. He found himself with tears flooding his cheeks for his shame before Medai. Not like you, cousin, not like you, he kept thinking, as he set each stone in place, a determination, a wall that he built, a protection for the hallowed dead against the winds and the sands and the prying fingers of the suruin that ranged the high hills; a protection for himself, barring the truth inside. And they were done, all debts paid. The brothers blew dust upon the wind; he gathered up his handful and did likewise, bidding farewell. Then they rested a time before beginning the long, hard trek back to the edun. Soah joined the first moon overhead, making their passage safer, and they set forth. Eddan went first, using his staff to probe for windflowers in the dark air, wary as those who walked the wilds of Kesrith dus-less had to be; but Niun lent his company to Sirain, who was half-blind and very frail, and too proud to accept help. Often Niun gave way to exhaustion himself to slow their progress, as if the sores on his hands and the long walk and the sleeplessness had utterly undone him; but of a sudden pride was not important to him. It was only important that Sirain's pride be saved, that he not die. Niun did not flaunt his youth at them any longer. He found comradeship with them, as if they and he had finally understood a thing that he should have understood long ago. They shared water and food together -- sat, the six of them, in the dark after the moons had set, and broke fast; and the brothers were sorry for his hands and offered of their own experience various advice to heal them. But Eddan cut the stalk of a young luin and rubbed the juice of it on the sores, a remedy counted sovereign for every wound. It eased the pain. In the journey after that the pace was slower still, and perhaps Sirain had seen through his careful pretence from the beginning, for at last he clasped Niun's arm in a feeble grip and admitted that this time it was himself who must rest a time. By such degrees they came homeward. And it was evening again when they returned, and the edun's entry was lit for them and the great bulk of the ailing dus still was to be seen at the door. In the end there was no hurrying. Niun had been anxious lest he have to take up Sirain and carry him, which would have been a crushing shame to the old warrior. And for Sirain's sake, and for Eddan's, who labored now, they walked slowly. Their anxiety to reach the edun, their dread of things that might have gone amiss in their absence, weighed heavily upon them. But there in the doorway Melein waited, and gave them gentle welcome, unveiled, as they unveiled themselves, coming home. "Is all well," she said. "Come in. Be at ease." They entered, footsore and cold, and passed the long hall to the Shrine, that first of all, making their individual prayers, then the washing of the hands and face. And when they were done, they turned toward the steps of the Kel-tower, for they were exhausted. But Melein waited, outside the Shrine. "Niun," she said. "The Mother still sends for you." He was tired. He dreaded the meeting. He turned his shoulder to her rudely and walked out of the hall, to the step, to see how the dus fared. He gave it a scrap of meat that he had saved from his own rations on the journey; but someone else had filled the pannikin with water. It turned from his gift, and would have none of him. He had thought that this would be the case, but he had trifed. He sank down in exhaustion on the step and stared at the dus helplessly. Never would the beasts tolerate him, and this one, bereaved and suffering, he could not help. He gave a great sigh that was almost a sob and stared at his bloody hands in the light, so sensitive, so delicate to wield the yin'ein, and reduced to this. There was no warrior here, none that the dus could detect. It chose to die, like Medai. It found nothing in him to interest it in living. He had the seta al and the weapons and the black robes; he had the skill; but the heart in him was terrified; and angry; and the dus, being sensitive to such things, would not have him. He swept off mez and zaidhe, bundled them into the crook of his arm; and with his right hand he gathered a handful of dust from the side of the step and smeared his brow with it, a penance for his jealousy. Then he went inside, ascended the stairs of the inmost tower, that of the she 'pan. He opened the door to the she'pan's hall cautiously and saw that Melein knelt at the she'pan's left hand, arranging the cushions. "Hush," said Melein, accusing him with her eyes. "She has just now fallen asleep. You are too late tonight. Be still." But the she'pan stirred as he came near her, and her golden eyes opened and the membrane receded, leaving them clear. "Niun," she said softly. "Little Mother." He sank down on her right and offered his bowed head to her gentle touch, an intimacy the Kel offered no others but the she'pan or a mate. Her hands were warm against the chill of his skin. "You are safe," she said. "You are back safely." And as if that were all the burden of what she desired, like a child sleeping with a favorite toy at hand, she settled back into her dreams. Niun remained still, leaned his head against the arm of her chair, and gradually gave himself to sleep, her hand still resting on his shoulder. His dreams were troubled. At times he woke, seeing the cave and the dark; and then he saw the golden light that surrounded him, and felt the weight of the she'pan's hand, and knew where he was. She dreamed, did the Mother, and reclaimed him; possibly she confused him with another. He did not know. He was kel'en, like the other. He sat at her side and slept at times and knew that the sum of his duty to her was to live, to stay by her. She had rejected Medai, and never from her had come a word of regret, of sorrow, for him. You are safe, she had said. The bonds, so lately slipped, ensnared him again; and at last he gave up his struggle and knew that he must serve the service that had claimed him. The su-she'pani kel'en a'anu. The she'pan's kel'en, like those in the cliffs. In the whispered long-ago days, when there ws no war, there had been such, when mri fought against mri and House against House, when she'pan contended against she'pan. Her last' kel'en, the one -- he foresaw with what he thought was a true vision -- that would never indeed know the Dark of the caves of Sil'athen: the one to seal the barrier for the others, and to remain outside, a guardian. He slid a glance toward Melein, saw her awake also, her eyes staring into the shadows: He realized what it had surely been for her, alone here, with Intel. For her also, he was afraid. IX It was, in the Nom, the twentieth day. It was possible finally for human nerves to adjust to Kesri th's longer day. Duncan rose and wandered to the private bath -- that luxury at least their onworld accommodations had afforded him, although he must content himself with the recycled ration of water available within the Norn's apparatus. The Nom depended entirely on life-support systems such as those of a ship. Regul did not find surface existence comfortable, although it was tolerable. Neither was it, he suspected, comfortable for humans. Filtered air, recycled water -- the latter originally reclaimed from a sea so laden with alkali that nothing would live in it. The world's scant animal life was confined to the uplands, and from what information he had obtained from the translated regul advisories on the matter, there was little born of Kesrith that was harmless. The interior of the Nom held gardens that somewhat humidified the air and provided a certain pleasantness, but the alien harshness of the foliage and the accompanying scent of regul made the gardens less gracious than they might have been. He was, he reckoned, growing used to regul. He was learning to tolerate a number of things he had once thought impossible to accept, and that in twenty days of close contact. And it was close contact. There were no restricted hours, no confinement to quarters, but the regulations forbade them to leave the Nom at any time. Stavros, of course, would not do so anyway as long as regul remained on Kesrith. It was a reasonably brief time to wait: ten days until the first human ships should come in and replace the regul. Duncan anticipated, at least, that their sanity might hold that long. He had a mental image of their first encounter with those humans incoming; of the landing party finding them each changed, bizarre and altered by their stay on Kesrith. He was not the man that had begun the voyage; SurTac Sten Duncan on Haven had been capable of far more impulsive behavior than was Sten Duncan, aide to the new governor of Kesrith. He had acquired patience, the ability to reckon slowly; and he had acquired something of regul manners, ponderous and unwieldy as their conventions were. They began to come as naturally as yes, sir, and no, sir; Favor, my lord; be gracious, elder. They had promised him retirement after five years; but five years in this sullen environment would make him unfit for human company; five years from now he might find clean air a novelty and Haven daylight strange to the eyes: he might find human manners banal and odd after the stark, survivaloriented settlement that men would have to make of Kesrith. He was in the process of adapting. Any operation on any world, in any climate -- in any hostile terrain -- that required human hands directly at work onworld was a SurTac's natural job, and he was learning the feel of Kesrith. Stavros was doing the same thing in his intellectual way, absorbing every oddity within his reach -- like the regul, never seeming to need notes, simply looking and listening on his rare excursions from his room to the gardens. This morning he had an appointment in Hulagh's offices. It was an important occasion. Something rumbled outside, a sound different than the accustomed thunder of departing ships. Duncan switched the view to let light through the Norn's black windows. They could see the whole horizon, from the sea at the right to the hills at the left, save that they could not see the mri edun nor the port, the two sites in which they had the greatest interest. It was, of course, no accident that their view was thus. Nothing in the desolation that lay before them had altered in twenty days but now, above the hills, there was a change. A storm was moving in, the clouds gray, red-tinged, shadowing the sea in one quarter. Lightnings flashed with impossible radpidity. The weather, said the prepared statements of the bai's staff, is unpredictable by season, and occasionally violent. The rain is mildly caustic, especially in showers following duststorms . It will be desirable to bathe if one is caught in the rain. Above all. it is necessary to seek suitable cover at the earliest indication of a storm. The winds can achieve considerable force. When fronts converge on the seaward and hillward sides, cyclonicaction is frequent. The red light in the ceiling mount flared, summoning him. Stavros was awake. Duncan quickly obtained a cup of soi from the wall dispenser -- soi being the regul liquid stimulant, and only mildly flavored, unlike most regul foods. It was one of the few regul graces they had come to enjoy. A touch of sweetener made it completely palatable. He added the two drops, set the cup on a small tray, gathered the morning dispatches from the slot and carried the offering in to Stavros' quarters -- again accessible only from his own apartment. "Good morning, sir," he murmured, a courtesy which was regularly answered with only a civil nod, and sometimes that belated. Stavros was in exceptional spirits this morning. He actually smiled, a gesture that made his thin mouth the tighter. "Do the windows," Stavros said. It was thundering again. Duncan switched them over and let in the day's sullen light. The first drops began to spatter the dust on the panes. A crack of thunder made the glass bow and rattle, and Stavros walked over to enjoy the view. Duncan himself felt a heightening of senses, a stimulation unaccustomed in their carefully controlled environment. This was something the regul could not schedule or censor, the violence of nature. He could see the storm sweep down on the sea, where the waves whitecapped, dyed pink. The whole day was enveloped in reddish murk, and fitful with lightnings. "This," said Stavros, "is going to be one of the major obstacles to settlement here." Duncan felt he was called upon to discuss the matter. He did not know precisely how; his training was not in civilizing worlds, but in taking them. "The regul gave us an edge there," he said, "with this city for a base." "There's a considerable attrition in machinery on Kesrith, so I'm told; and for some idiotic reason, they've followed the mri example and built a number of outposts out of rammed earth and binder. It's cheap but remarkably unsuited for the climate." "If you have a lot of labor, you can keep rebuilding, I suppose." "Humans can't run a colony that way." Stavros went off on another tangent of thought, sipping at the warm drink. Thunder rattled the glass again. Wind hit with a force that sent a sheet of water between them and the world, obscuring everything that lay beyond. Duncan swore in surprise and awe. "The storm shields," Stavros advised him. It was hailing now, a rapid patter that threatened the windows. It came toward them, from their direction. Duncan quickly activated the shutters. They closed across, tight, and cut off the daylight: The room lights compensated. Then he hurried back to see to the windows in his own quarters, appalled, afraid even to approach the glass under the violence that battered against it. Thunder broke overhead as he reached for the switch, his heart pounding. The storm shield slid over the window, and distantly he could hear an alarm in the building; for a moment the hiss of air of air in the ducts ceased and he felt a pressure in his ears, like sudden ascent in an aircraft. He went to the door, opened it. Regul were whisking about in sleds along the corridors, in mad confusion. The pressure in his ears was eased then, and he heard a sound that was too deep for sound, a shuddering that went through the building. "Nai chiug-ar?"... what is it?... he asked the first regul he saw afoot. "Nai chiug-ar?" " Sak noi kanuchdi hoc-nar the youngling spat back, words that had something to do with the port, but nothing else he could understand. "Sa-ak toe dac" it hissed at him then. Keep to quarters, favor. Duncan retreated, closed the door and called the main desk for information. No one would respond to his calls. Eventually the world seemed to grow calm outside; only a rush of rain beat against the storm shields. He ventured finally to open the shields and saw nothing but a wash of water, distorting everything outside. He closed them again. And from Stavros' room, long silence. He gathered together his shaken faculties, berating himself for his panic, and went in to see about the old man, expecting cynical amusement at a SurTac who feared storms. The cup was on the floor, a brown stain on the carpet. He saw the old man lying half across the bed, still in his nightclothes. "Sir?" he exclaimed. He went nearer and touched Stavros' shoulder fearfully, then turned him over and obtained faint movement, a gasp for breath, a flutter of the right eye. The left remained drawn, that side of the mouth peculiarly distorted. Stavros tried to talk to him, the sounds unintelligible. In the next instant Duncan ran from the room, through his quarters into the hall and to the duty desk, where he tried every word that would come to mind to express his need. "Stavros," he said at last. "Stavros!" and this finally seemed to impress itself on the youngling. It rose, lumbering in its gait, and came with him. It stood, for a considerable time, at the foot of the bed. "Elder," it said finally, with the regul equivalent of a shrug. Here was an elder. It did not seem capable of rising; this was natural for an elder. Duncan seized its massive arm and raised his voice. "Sick," he insisted. Slowly, with ostentatious slowness, the youngling turned and went to the console, coded in a call and spoke to higher authority. Authority responded, in a bewildering patter of words. Duncan sank down and bowed his head into his hands, despair knotted in his stomach. And when an array of important regul arrived and began with dispatch to load Stavros into one of the sled transports, Duncan hovered nearby constantly, insisting with forceful gestures that he intended to remain with Stavros. A regul seized him, firmly but without violence, and held him while the sled moved and departed. Then the regul released him. It was all the restraint that needed to have been applied; there was no way for him to follow down that web of tracks. He sank into a chair in his quarters, shivering with anger and terror and utterly, utterly helpless to do anything for Stavros. Outside, the storm pattered against the shields. It continued for an hour or more. He left the room four times during that period to go down to the duty desk and demand information on Stavros' condition, each time arming himself with applicable phrases from his dictionary and lesson-sheets. The regul on duty had learned quickly enough that it need not be silent to express disdain; it needed only to shower words at him as rapidly as it could speak, impressing on him his incapacity to understand. "Dal," it said finally, "seogin." Go away. It repeated it several times. He turned away, headed not for the apartment but for the forbidden first-level ramp down which bai Hulagh had his offices. Words shrilled after him. A trio of regul closed in on him and marched him firmly enough to his door, pushing at him to make him enter. "Stavros sick," one said finally. And that was the sum of information available until the morning, after an entire night in sleepless anxiety. But with dawn they came in numbers and transferred a brownwrapped bundle from a sled to the bed; and Duncan, roughly thrusting himself into their midst, saw Stavros conscious but yet with that deadness about his left side. And then there was deference in plenty among the younglings for a hum sounded at jhe door and a sled-console eased through the ample doorways to rest among them. Bai Hulagh. Words came from Stavros, distorted, unrecognizable in either language. "Honorable Stavros, rest now." The bai rose within his sled with great effort and looked directly upon Duncan. "Youngling, the affliction is to the nervous system." "Bai," Duncan said, "help him." The regul shrugged. "Human structure is strange to us. We regret. We are in the midst of considerable disaster. The storm toppled a tower at the port. There was great loss of life. Our facilities are strained by this emergency. Our information on the human system is very scant." "I can provide you... I can provide you myself, bai, if your medics would -- " "Youngling," said the regul, a basso profundo that vibrated with disdain, "we do not have information. We do not experiment on living beings. This moderate restoration of function we could accomplish, no more. This is an elder of your people. He will be made comfortable to the utmost of our abilities. Do you, youngling, question this statement?" "Be gracious," Duncan murmured, reserving decisions to others; he moved to Stavros' side, took the good hand in his. A mild pressure answered. Stavros' pale eyes glittered wetly, alive, fully cognizant and trying to command him something. It was a stern and reprimanding look. Duncan tightened his hand in reassurance and looked up at the bai. "Favor, Reverence," he said. "I am distressed for him. " The bai .gestured him to come. He let slip Stavros' fingers and did so, submitted to the touch of the regul bai, whose rough fingers rested on his shoulder, a considerable weight. The bai spoke curtly to his servitors, who hastened about their business. Then the wrinkle-enfolded eyes looked into Duncan's face, and the bai's fingers tightened until it was hard not to wince. "Youngling, I am informed you have neglected food and drink. This is an expression of grief? This is religion?" "No, Reverence, I will eat." "Good." The word rumbled forth, almost incomprehensible in its depth. The pressure increased until Duncan felt the joint give. He flinched. The bai dropped the hand at once. And then the bai turned ponderously and levered himself back into his sled, settled. The machine whined, backing, and turned and retreated. Duncan stood and stared after it, after the others who withdrew almost as quickly. A sound came from Stavros. "Sir?" he asked at once, trying to keep his voice natural. He turned and saw Stavros beckon toward the table. Stavros' notes were there. He gathered them up and offered them, but Stavros with his right hand fumbled after the tablet only. Duncan understood and found the pen to give him. He knelt down and braced the tablet as Stavros wrote, heavily, with childlike awkwardness. Regul not upset, he read. Process with them natural to age. Mobility may return. No reason for panic. The awkward, slanted writing reached the accessible limits of the page. Duncan reversed the tablet, braced it higher. Humans due soon. Stavros resumed. Disaster at port -- truth. Regul evacuation schedule hampered; Hazan damaged. Regul much concerned. Mri -- need to find out what mri doing. This most urgent. Listen to regul talk, learn of mri, don't provoke . "Leaving the Nom if I have to?" SurTac -- now become diplomat. Careful. Take my instructions. Regul kill younglings here -- many. Consult first on everything. Move me. Now. Console. Duncan did not want to move him; but Stavros cursed at him thickly and ordered him aloud, and evidently he was determined. Duncan carefully, tenderly, gathered up the old man and placed him within the sled-console in the corner, supporting him, adjusting the formfitting cushions to hold him securely. Stavros' right hand sought after controls, made further adjustments. The sled-console turned. The screen turned independently. A message, hand-keyed, crawled across the small screen... Can learn even this. "Yes, sir," Duncan said with a tightness in his throat. He was suddenly concerned for this man, for Stavros personally. The message-crawl resumed. Order food for you. Rest. "And for yourself, sir?" Stavros turned the sled, jerkily maneuvered it to a position next the bed. He operated the console arm to dim the lights. I wait, the screen read. No needs. X "Truebrother." Seated on the step beside the dus, Niun looked over his shoulder. It was seldom now that he met his sister informally, brother and sister, daithen and daithe, as they had been before. She surprised him with, the dus. He was embarrassed to be found at this charity: there had been a distance between them, although they had been much together of recent in the she'pan's hall. He did not like to be with her alone, not any longer. It was painful, that the closeness between them was gone. He continued a moment, trying to tempt the dus with a scrap of food, for until Melein had come, he had deceived himself that there was the slightest flicker of interest in the dark eyes of the animal. Now it would not even glance at him. But he had so deceived himself many a time since its coming to the edun. He shrugged and casually tossed the prize to the dus, letting it land between its massively clawed forepaws. Sometime, eventually, it would eat. Now it accepted just enough to stay alive; sometimes he would see the scrap shriveled and neglected that evening, and the dus moved slightly elsewhere until it was taken away; for the dus was proud, and did not want to eat. Someone else saw that the waterbowl by the step was constantly full. This was great extravagance on Kesrith. Ordinarily a sick dus simply complained when thirsty and received what it needed; and a healthy one derived all its moisture requirement from food it ate. Niun suspected kel Pasev of this wasteful charity. She had her own dus but she was capable of such feelings toward a good animal. He was not himself so deft in his offerings as was Pasev. Doubtless everyone in the edun knew how desperately he tried to feed the creature, and claim it, and how it stubbornly refused him. Likely another kel'en would be feeding it if he were not. The dus shamed them all in its loyal grief. It found not one of them worthy to take it; and rarely would a dus transfer affection, but Niun still hoped, desperately, for the life of this one. "Sometimes," said Melein, "they simply cannot be saved." She sat down on the dusty step with him, heedless of her robes of caste; but the granular sand of the edun grounds did not cling as much as the white lowlands powder. She wore the light veil over her silken mane in the out-of-doors, for the Sen disdained to cover. The body of a kel'en is itself a Mystery of the People, the teachings held, and therefore the Kel veils; the body of a sen'en is a veil to that within, which is a Mystery of the People, and therefore the Sen veils not. Save to the unacceptable. The weather was fair after the storm of days past in which wrack and disaster had blown down the passes and dealt havoc in the regul town. The smoke of the destruction in the lowlands had been visible even through the rain; and when the worst of the storm was done, the kel'ein had looked out from the summit of the Sen-tower with a new and bitter satisfaction. "Ah," Eddan had said when they noted the smoke and the fire, "Kesrith has her way with the masters even yet." It was likely that many regul had perished in the conflagration. Such satisfaction was a thing that once no mri would have thought or felt. But that was before the unaccounted-for death of kel'en on a regul ship, and before it was clear that humans would possess the world. Now the stars of evening began to show in a clear sky, and there was no wind to stir the sand and make the mez advisable. Such crystal evenings were frequent following the greatest storms, as if the very world lay exhausted after the recent violence. He dropped his veil and looped it under his chin, refastening it. There was no likelihood of tsi'mri here, and he did not need it. "Shall we walk?" Melein suggested. He had no such thing in mind, but rarely did Melein ask anything of him any longer. He arose and offered her his hand to help her up. Thereafter they walked, side by side, in the direction Melein chose, taking the small trail that led from the corner of the edun to the rocks at the top of the causeway. He found himself remembering the times that they had run that distance, they three, agile as the dusty lizards, children without the veil, small slim-limbed boys and smaller point from which they could see the ships at the port come and go. They had been ships with magical names then, mri ships, regul ships -- Mlereinei, Kamrive, Horaghno -- that came from distant stars and the glory of battles. As children they had played at war and duel and imagined themselves great kel'ein, glittering with honors like the far-traveled kel'ein that visited from the ships and departed their own ways again, like their truemother and their father that left separately with the ships and never visited homeworld again. Tonight they walked, he of the Kel, she of the Sen, weighted with their robes of caste and their separate laws. When they reached the rock that overlooked the valley, he leaped up first and pulled her behind him with a single tug -- there was still the girl Melein within the golden robes, agile and quick as a kel'e'en, unbecoming the gravity of her caste. They sat together while the red sun vanished,' watching the whole of the valley, and the glow of lights where the port was, and the wound the storm had made there, a darkness amid the lights near Hazan. "Why did you ask me here?" he asked of her at last. "To talk with you." He did not like this manner in her. The last light touched her face. It was that of a stranger for a moment, someone he should remember, and did not, quite. It was not Melein as he knew her, but a sen'e'en, that contained quiet, secret thoughts. He suddenly wished she would not pursue the opening he had given her. He foreknew that she might rob him of his peace; and he could not stop her from doing it. "You do not smile anymore," she said. "You do not even look up when you are named." "I am not a child." "You do not love the she'pan." "I came. I sit. I wait. This seems to be all she wants of me. It is her right." "You do not much go out of the edun." "I have given up, Melein. That is all." She gazed upward, where the stars glittered. Her arm, resting on her raised knee, pointed toward Elag's star that shone and danced above the hills. "There are humans now," she said. "But it is different there -- at Kesrith. This is homeworld. Sanctuary for the People. The Holy." He looked at her, sullen, frightened. "Remember that I am kel'en." "The Kel must remain unlearned because the Kel ventures where our enemies are, where knowledge that cannot serve the Kel cannot be permitted. For all traditions, however minor, there are reasons. You are a kel'en of home world, and you will hear what it would not be good for a kel'en elsewhere to hear." He rose and set his back against the rock, leaning there with his arms folded and the rising breeze touching him with more chill than was comfortable. It was night now, the last of the sun slipped from view. He did not know why she had wished to come out here. The hills were full of menace. The ha-dusei, wild relatives of the tame companions of the kel'ein, were not to be trusted. There were windflowers and burrowers, and serpents that hid in the rocks. He owned a sen'e'en his protection; it was arrant stupidity to be out here with Melein in his charge after dark. Her value to the edun was incalculably above his. "We can talk elsewhere later," he said. "I do not think we should have come here at this hour." "Listen to me!" Her voice was edged, cruel, a blow that stunned. Melein was his little sister. She had never before used that tone with him. "Today," she said, "the she'pan called me in private. Today she gave me rank with Sathell. And you understand this." She'pan's successor, her Chosen. In the nethermost parts of his mind he had known it would come; this was the only reasonable purpose behind Intel's snatching Melein out of Kel and into Sen. Not to bear children, but to learn the Pana. the Mysteries; not to continue the People, but to rule them. And Intel had taken him likewise, to defend challenge to herself, to guard her -- to kill, if need be, any over-anxious successor and any kel'en that supported a challenger's cause. He gave a single bitter curse, understanding; and he saw the hurt leap into Melein's eyes. "I am sorry that you take it so," she said. "Why must she have kept me by her and not Medai?" "She trusted you, and never Medai." He considered that, and its reasons. "She trusted you," he said softly, "while I guard her sleep. While she could set me against you." The hurt to Melein became shock. The thought seemed to startle her. "No," she said. "I am not apt to challenge her." "'Not as long as you have regard for me," he answered. "She feels her mortality on her or she would not have named you yet. And some kel'en will guard her tomb." "She would not take you. Eddan... Sirain... they would seek the honor. But not you." "Maybe with the humans at hand the question is pointless. I am thinking ahead of the hour, and that is beyond my caste. You will have to think that through, truesister. I am far from knowing the future. I can only speak for what is true now." "She is not preparing to cede homeworld quietly. Niun... I am young, I am nothing compared to Intel's experience. Other she'panei would hesitate to challenge her; she rob the People of so much, you do not know how much. It would be an act of -- I do not know, Niun, I do not know. If I should succeed her as she'pan of homeworld, here am I -- young, inexperienced. I know that some older she'pan will come then and challenge, and it will be my place to die. I want her to live, I desperately want her to live, and she is dying, Niun." He found himself trembling, hurting to reassure her; and there was no comfort to be found. She spoke of things beyond his caste; and yet he thought that she had laid out all the truth for him, and stolen what remained of his peace and hope. He had always thought that she would survive him. "We were unlucky," she said, "in being last-bom of the People; not alone of Kesrith, Niun, but of all the People. We were without choice simply because we were the last. I wish it were different." What she said struck at other confidences. He looked at her with the wind whipping at them and chilling to the skin, and ceased even to shiver. "Of all the People?" "Edunei have fallen," she said, "and children have died; and kel'e'ein are occupied with war and nothing else. I should not have answered," she added. "But of our generation, there is little left. Those older, they will get other children. It is not too late." She tried to comfort him. He reassured himself that she had faith in their future, and that this was enough. "But then," he said, catching up a thought,"then Intel will not plan to lose you. You might be, after after all, the ablest after her; and if she bequeaths my service to you -- if you should challenge or return challenge -- Melein, I can defend you. I am not unable to defend you. I am skilled in the yin'ein. Nine years they have kept me in training. I must be capable of something." She was silent for a time. Finally she arose. "Come," she said. "Let us return to the edun. I am cold." And she was silent as they climbed down to the trail and walked back; she wept. He saw it in the starlight and took off his veil and offered it to her, a gesture of profound tenderness. "No," she said fiercely. He nodded and flung the met over his shoulder, walking beside her. "You are right," she said finally. "I will not surrender the office and die without challenge... should it come to me. I will kill to hold it." "It is a great honor for you," he said, thinking that he should have said something of the kind when she first told him. She let go her breath, a slow hiss. "What, honor? To go into some strange edun, and into a strange Kel, and kill some woman who never did me hurt? I do not want that honor. ' ' "But Intel will arm you for this," he said. "She will make you able. She has surely planned for this for many years." She looked up at him, her shadowed face set and calm now. "I think you are not far wrong," she said, "in believing that she wanted you by her because she knows I could make trouble in the House. She trusts you. She does not trust me." He shivered, hearing in her voice the bitterness he had always suspected was there, and shadows tore away between himself and the Sentower and the she 'pan. He remembered Melein preparing the cup each evening, the cup that helped the she'pan sleep; and each evening the she'pan drinking, nothing questioning. He suspected what ungentle things might run in Intel's drughazed mind: a she'pan foreseeing her own death and mistrusting her successor with good reason. Intel had wated Melein disarmed. For this she had sent Medai into service, and had kept her brother close by. Some kel'en would guard Intel's tomb. Normally it would be one of her Husbands, not a son. But there might be one instruction if she passed of age, another if by Melein's hand. And Melein would have to challenge against him to challenge Intel. He would die before Intel would; but then Melein would have to find a kel'en to champion her -- and there was none who would agree to that. Intel had done well to banish Medai. But Melein was not capable of the things of which Intel suspected her; he insisted to believe that she was not. Caste and teaching and the bitterness of her imprisonment could not have changed his truesister to that extent. He would not believe that Intel's fears were justified. I want her to live,  desperately want her to live, I desperately want her to live, Melein had said. "How much," he asked finally, "did she bid you tell me?" "Less," she said, "than I have told you." "Yes," he said, "I had thought so." They came back to the edun, she drawing ahead of him as they entered. He looked aside at the dus, that turned its head from him. When he looked up, she had gone on into the shadows, toward the stairs of her own tower. She did not look back. He went toward the she 'pan's tower, to take up his duty, where he belonged. XI There was quiet over Kesri th. After so many hazards, after two days stalled with the port in chaos from the storm, the last shuttle had lifted -- with its cargo of refugees -- to the station where the freighter Res-trivi was forming the last regular civilian list that would leave the world. Hereafter there was time, necessary time, for setting final matters in order. Against the ruddy sun of Kesrith there was only Hazan remaining -- armed and, when her minor repairs were completed, star-capable; she waited with her crew constantly within her. She carried in her tapes the way to Nurag, to regul homeworld, to safety and civilization for the few hundred regul left on Kesrith. A ten of times each passing day bai Hulagh Alagn-ni, working in his heated offices in the Nom complex, looked up at the windows and concerned himself with the condition of Hazan. The dual-capable ship, strong enough behind her screens for combat, was yet a perilously fragile structure when grounded. He had hesitated to take her down in the first place; he had suffered agonies of mind in the hours of the storm's approach, and had at last decided against lofting her to stationside. And then -- then to have a witless aircraft pilot attempt to outrun the storm and risk the crosswinds, a known peril at Kesrith's field -- on such an occurrence the whole mission was almost lost. Hulagh cursed each time he thought of it, the youngling pilot and passengers, of course, beyond retribution. He was relieved that, at the least, damage had been confined to the tower and loading facilities, and harm to Hazan' s structure was minimal. Luck had been with him. Hazan was in his trust over the objections of powerful influences back on homeworld. He had risked everything in securing for himself and his interests this post, replacing old Gruran and Solgah Holn-ni -- an assignment for which his personal age and erudition had qualified him -- and thereby winning doc Alagn the status it was long overdue. But as with landing the ship, as with other decisions he had made along the way, it was necessary to risk in order to gain. It was necessary to demonstrate to homeworld his claimed ability and that of doch Alagn in order to obtain the influence permanently. He could do so by salvaging the most possible benefit of Kesrith, after its loss by Gruran Holn-ni and his get; and Solgah Holn-ni -- he thought with disgust and contempt of the prolific female who had ruled Holn's establishment of Kesrith and lorded it so thoroughly over the zone and over the war that was her creation -- Solgah was on her way to homeworld in utter confusion, stripped of her command, most of her younglings left behind, their ranks decimated by Hulagh's own orders, survivors parceled out to many different colonies, the doch in complete . disorganization. She would be lu'cky if her influences on homeworld enabled her to escape sifting and the execution of her younglings. At the least, Holn was due for some years of obscurity. The memory still pleased him -- the way Solgah had received the shock of Hazan's unscheduled and unauthorized landing; the way she had fluttered and blustered with prohibitions and objections, until he had made known to her his homeworld-granted authority to assume control. Now it was his office to complete the evacuation Solgah had begun, to save as much as possible from the concessions her weak kinsman, Gruran Holn-ni, had granted in negotiations at Elag, trying to save the inner portions of the vast Holn empire. It was his task to prepare Kesrith to receive human occupation and to remove regul properties, as much as could be saved, and regul personnel, as many as could be saved; and to ensure that humans drew the least possible benefit from what they had won in war and in negotiations. Hulagh had dealt with humans indirectly for three homeworld years, having met with a few after replacing Gruran; and he knew them -- including the two that had come in on Hazan -- with a quiet but mild distaste; less distaste, in fact, than he had ever felt for mri, who served regul. The human war, of course, had been a complete mistake, an error in calculations, not one attributable to doch Alagn. It had been abundantly clear to wiser regul minds for the better part of five years that the companies of Holn doch had involved themselves in an utter fiasco from which the mri were unable to rescue them, and that error would have been corrected then had it been possible to restrain the obstinacies and military power of such as Holn, whose employ of mercenary kel'ein, and whose obvious self-interest in retaining the disputed territories, had stalled off any change in policy. Now, at last, after the consequences of the original error were multiplied to great cost, after regul lives and properties and home territory itself had been lost, the Holn empire tottering on the brink, now the military Holn handed the tangled and dangerous situation -- reluctantly even so -- over to older, wiser minds on Nurag. And politics, in a turn of events unforeseen by the Holn, had served to turn the Holn authority finally into the hands of Alagn and to elevate Alagn to a status in which Alagn, with the right Alagn in command, could utterly ruin doch Holn. Holn had left a tangle behind them. Bai Hulagh was far from satisifed with the treaty terms within which he must operate but they were Holn's legacy, sealed, legal, recorded and beyond his power to adjust. Yet if the cession of three colonial systems, costly as that was, had created a permanent and reliable boundary between human and regul claims, it could turn out to be one of the wiser things doch Holn had done in its administration. Doubtless, Hulagh felt, the humans now clearly knew that they had made all the cheap gain they could reasonably expect in this adventure and that hereafter regul would resist with more vigor. The humans were apparently perplexed and disturbed by this sudden change of authority on the frontier and yet they seemed anxious to honor the treaty. Kesrith was a likely and sensible boundary. The dead space of the Deep discouraged exploration regulward without considerable routing round by Hesoghan, an old and firmly regul holding; and the lure of the Haze-stars would lead humans from Kesrith rimward in due time. So Hulagh planned in his strategies, mapping what he considered might be new directions in regul policy. The humans would be attracted by the wealth toward which Kesrith had been reaching; but, likewise, the regul stars had mineral wealth sufficient to sustain industries without the convenient luxury of doch Holn's outermost colonies. Economic effects would be felt, but only in small degree on homeword; and as long as the elders of homeworld were well supplied in their needs, the Alagn operation would be favorably judged. And afterward, it was only one arm of regul expansion that had been cut off. Two others remained. One of them was the presently meager holding of doch Alagn. To direct, to shape, to rule, to settle himself eternally into the memory not alone of doc Alagn but of the center of Nurag -- this was the dream Hulagh savored. In his vast age he had outlived his rivals, had seen them dust; and he remembered, and planned long. He had obliterated the younglings of his chief enemies. He risked everything now in assuming personal command of Kesrith. If matters went amiss, it would be remembered that Hulagh of Alagn was in charge when they did so; but here on Kesrith also lay wealth he desperately needed. The terms of the human-regul treaty surrendered only the bare earth of the ceded worlds. They laid no specified claim to valuable hardware, cities, resources. Bare earth was all the encroaching humans need find when they arrived; and redeveloping the stubborn wilderness of Kesrith would occupy them long enough to give regulkind a breathing-space -- while the plunder of Kesrith would go into the stores of Alagn doch, legitimate salvage to which Holn had no claim. And all this under the very eyes of the human envoys. This satisfied Hulagh no less, to discredit the human who had been sent to oversee the transition of power. The sudden illness of the human elder and the natural timidity of its single youngling were a convenience beyond measure. A regul elder would have demanded constant and detailed reports of actions by his hosts; a competent one would have demanded them in such volume and at such a pace that nothing escaped his notice; a resourceful one would have used his youngling's eyes to see what he was not meant to see. But none of this had the human envoy managed on any great scale. The human concentrated on the wrong materials, learned the language assiduously and reheard reports that he had already been given in his own language, going over old information as if he suspected he could leam something new from it, as if there were discrepancies or untruths in plain statements. Such deception might be the human practice; they were not regul. What was happening was as wide as the port and as plain as the ships that daily lifted; and when humans arrived some few days hence, they would find a stripped and ruined possession and their delegate in command of a barren wilderness incapable of sustaining life on any large scale. This was itself a coup that the council on Nurag would savor when it heard of it. Hulagh had been perplexed originally that the two humans had contrived no means of circumventing the onerous restrictions placed on them. Only once had they broken quarantine, a quarantine no regul would have accepted in principle in the first place; and that one success seemed without forethought and was embarrassedly, tacitly, ignored by the envoy. It had succeeded only because it had been uncharacteristic of the humans, a minor victory in the sense of its unhappy result, but actually of no possible benefit to them. In the end only the kel'en had suffered for it, and that needlessly, he being as impractical as all his kind. The mri had been a man of importance among their bloody, stubborn species. He had promised perhaps to be valuable; but he had been ruined. The humans remained ignorant even of this small revenge they had inflicted on their old enemies. They sat helpless, obedient. And hereafter there remained nothing much on Kesrith but what waited loading, now that work crews were free to clear the debris at the docks. There were charges to be set, a few small installations to be stripped, mines to be closed; but the most valuable cargo waited at the dock already. Of personnel there remained only the lowest-priority evacuees, who would leave with him on Hazan. Records bequeathed him from doch Holn indicated that there had adults on Kesrith at the beginning of the evacuation procedure. It was a colony once exceedingly prosperous and supporting a university and a few first-rate elder minds (excluding the Holn, whom he despised as over-valued). He knew the exact number -- and the disposition Holn had made and the disposition he himself had made -- of the remaining citizens and properties from the instant he had taken charge, and what goods to be consumed enroute he had placed on the evacuation ships and what was to be allotted as personal baggage, and what he was salvaging to take himself; all this he knew down to fractional weight and space requirements for shipping. He had absorbed the data in minute detail. He had made occasional written records against the event of his sudden death and the passing of Alagn doch to his immediate heirs -- he did not entirely trust humans -- or his sudden incapacity; but these were only for such an event. In the ordinary course of transactions he did not consult written records at all. It was physically impossible for a sane and healthy regul to forget anything he determined to remember, and it was also quite likely that he would remember whatever he heard only casually. Hulagh believed implicitly in the accuracy of the record he had obtained from Solgah Holn-ni, his enemy, as he believed implicitly in her sanity. It was inconceivable that Solgah -- however lacking in astuteness she was, and over-impressed with her ability as an administrator -- would not have at least recalled accurately what was the number of regul on her world, and what their resources, and how disposed. He knew therefore that three hundred twenty-seven regul young remained with him outside the ship, the barest minimum necessary to carry out the dismantling operation, and three of those were almost adult. The majority were younglings below the age of twenty-five, as yet undetermined in sex -- this would manifest itself at about thirty -- and far more mobile than would be possible for them as they began to attain their adult weight. They were of use to him when it came to errands or heavy labor, and for the observations of the evacuation that later would be gleaned from their memories by expert scholars on Nurag. Their memories, presently -- save in their most recent unique experiences and knowledge of the events passing around them -- had not yet acquired sufficient data to make them intrinsically valuable to any elder, simply because they had not lived long enough or traveled far enough to yet rival the experience or comparative observational powers of an elder. They belonged only to the doch of their birth and had not seen what they might yet accomplish; and since they would not sex and reproduce for another several years, they were not distracted by these considerations. Only those fully mature and those protected by adult choice of a doch (even Holn) had been lifted off to safety in the main evacuation -- they and such infants as could be contained in their mothers' pouches for the duration of the voyages, lifesupported without undue expenditure of resources by the crowded rescue ships. These last younglings, more fortunate than the masses of Holn that had not fitted into either category, knew that they were still expendable, and why, and they were accordingly nervous about the coming of humans and petulant about their personal losses and -- the common quality of the young -- abysmally stupid in their anxieties, believing, for so their limited experience misled them, that they were the first and most important younglings in the history of the race to suffer such things. One fretted outside now and craved admittance for the fifth time, urgent with some message doubtless protesting the conditions under which they were confined in the Nom and forbidden to wander the square during off-hours, or protesting the long hours that they had been required to work since the crisis at the port, or expressing their increasing fear of the coming humans and the fact that they themselves were not yet on board the safety of Hazan, which was at the root of everything. Hulagh had answered enough such requests for attention, both from regul younglings and from dull-witted humans. He was busy. The youngling in question was not assigned anywhere near the human delegate, so it could not be an emergency in that quarter, which was the only matter that would have truly interested him within the Nom. He dealt with the destructions of the storm as best he could, covering the one error he had committed -- failing to ask of Solgah concerning the behaviors of the seasons and the climate of Kesrith. He had little time for petulant and frightened assistants. But the youngling persisted, lhilagh sighed at last and pressed a button and admitted the youngling, whose agitation was extreme. "Be gracious, bai." It was the one named Suth Hara-ri, bred of the university bai-dach. It gave a polite suck of breath. Hulagh reciprocated. There was at least some grace in Suth, who had been unmannered and fearful to a degree unbecoming any age when it began service. This former gracelessness on the part of Kesrith's younglings in general was surely due to the years of war that had encompassed the younglings' entire experience. The Kesrithi younglings left in Hulagh 's charge were now acquiring some graces. Hulagh continually took care to reprimand them so that they would not arrive ashamed and misfit in the inner worlds. This also he took for part of his duty in salvaging what he could of Kesrith; and he also anticipated winning the best of the younglings to Alagn's enlistment as adults, hand-trained, augmenting his private staff to that of a colonial governor. He reached a place where stopping work would not overmuch inconvenience him, but he let the youngling wait a bit more while he enjoyed a cup of soi, and midway through it he saw fit to gesture his "Be gracious," Suth breathed, then blurted in desperate haste: "Bai, the station reports a mri vessel incoming." This struck through all courtesies and lack of them, commanding Hulagh's attention. Hulagh leaned back, the cup forgotten on the console, and looked at the youngling in unconcealed dismay. The merceneray Kel -- arriving in this situation with humans but a few days removed from Kesrith. Hulagh's hearts became at once agitated and anger heated his face. It was like the mri, to be inconvenient. To arrive always in the moment other elements had reached their maximum vulnerability. "They have given notice of their intentions?" Hulagh asked of Suth. "They say that they will land. We urged them to make use of the station facilities. They did not respond to this. They said that they have come for their people onworld and that they intend to land." "Mri never lie," said Hulagh for the youngling's reference, assuming it had never dealt face to face with the mercenaries. "Neither do they always tell the truth. In that, they resemble regul." Suth blinked and sucked air. Subtleties were wasted on this one. Hulagh frowned and blew heated air through his nostrils. "Are they to have their permission to land?" asked Suth. "Bai, what shall we say?" "Tell me this, youngling: Where are our station ships?" "Why, gone, gracious lord, all but the freighter and the shuttles, with the evacuation." "Then we cannot very well enforce an instruction not to land, can we? You are dismissed, youngling." "Favor," Suth murmured and withdrew, hasty and graceless in departure. Hulagh, already deep in thought, failed to rise to the provocation. Mri. Inconvenient as the stubborn kel'en he had inherited from Gruran. Bloody-handed and impulsive and incapable of coherent argument. His memory informed him that there were constantly some few mri on Kesri th, and that this was true of no other world since Nisren had fallen to humans forty-three years ago. There were thirteen mri in residence. There was nothing to indicate why Kesrith had been so favored, save that mri had a tendency to choose one or another world as a permanent base, designating it as homeworld, and thereafter behaving as irrationally and emotionally as if this were indeed the true land of their birth. There had been three such homeworlds thus far in the regul-mri association, all within the Holn domain, since the mri had constantly come within Holn jurisdiction and remained unknown in home territories of the regul. This employment of the mercenaries was, curiously, not an arrangement of regul seeking, but an arrangement that the mri had offered the regul two thousand two hundred two years ago -- for no apparent reason, for no apparent compulsion, save that this arrangement seemed to satisfy some profound emotional need of the mri. Regul had inquired into this mri peculiarity, but remained unsatisfied. There was a regul joke about mri, that mri had made records about their home and origin but had forgotten where they had left them, hence their nomadic condition. The fact that mri had no memories was a laughable matter to one who had not dealt personally with the intractable mri. One could not argue with them, could not reason, could not persuade them from old loyalties and could not -- above all, could not -- tamper with their sense of proprieties. He remembered Medai 's suicide with a shudder: the kel'en stubborn and without memory and prone to violence. It was like the mri to prefer bloodshed to reason, even when it was one's own blood that was shed. Medai, Kesrith-born, would not compromise; the mri treaty held only so long as regul maintained a homeworld for mri, only so long as that homeworld was inviolate from invasion. Medai had seen what he had seen, and could not reason otherwise; and therefore he had chosen to set himself against his lawful employers. His suicide was supposed, Hulagh recalled, to put some burden of shame or social stigma on the man who had offended against the mri in question. This selfdestruction was either an act of reproach or of complete repudiation, meant to have, devastating effect on the emotions of his superior. A mri kel'en would do such a thing even knowing that regul were not impressed, casting away his precious life rather than compromise on a small point of duty that could make no ultimate difference to him personally. Mri doubtless imagined that it made a vast difference. It was that mri ferocity that had originally appealed to the regul, an amazement that this savage, fearsome species had come peacefully to the regul docha and tendered their services -- services without which the colonizing of the humanward worlds and the rise of the Holn might never have occurred, at least not in the manner in which Holn had created monopoly. And (his very ferocity ought by rights to have warned sensible regul of the nature of mri. Mercenaries by breeding and choice, their strict, dull-witted codes made them in the beginning utterly dependable as guards in commerce of the outworld docha. They did not change allegiance in mid-service; it was impossible to bribe them; it was impossible even to discharge them save by the completion of a service or by suicide. They had not sense enough to retreat; they had no strong instincts of self-preservation, a fact which balanced their prolific breeding, in which all males of the Kel were free to mate with the low-caste females as well as the mates of their own caste. They therefore tended in the years of peace to multiply at an alarming rate, were it not for the attrition worked on them by their way of life, their rejection of medical science, and their constant passion for dueling. How these fierce warriors had supported themselves before they found the regul to hire them was another mystery to regul, one which the mri had never chosen to reveal. Mri would not do manual labor, not even sufficient to provide themselves food. A mri would starve rather than bear burdens or work the earth for another. They broke this rule only for the building and maintenance of their own towers and the managing of the few ships they were allotted personally; but beyond those two exceptions they would not turn a hand if there were regul available to take over the menial tasks. Once in Hulagh's recall a certain ship with a kel'en aboard had met a difficulty other than human, a navigational malfunction that had the crew in a panic; they had summoned the ship's kel'en -- an old kel'e'en, it was -- who had leisurely come to see the difficulty, sat down at the console and made the appropriate adjustments; then, with consummate arrogance, the kel'e'en had retired to the solitude of her own quarters, neither speaking nor offering courtesies nor accepting thanks. Yet this kel' e'en could not read a simple sign to direct herself to the mess hall on station liberty, but had to be directed by her regul employers. There was nothing to match either the arrogance or the ignorance of the mri Kel: touchy, suiciding when offended by regul, fighting when offended by other mri. There was no knowing what truly motivated the species. Hulagh himself reckoned that he knew humans better than .he knew mri, although he had dealt with humans for three years and his ancestors had dealt with mri for two thousand two hundred two years. Humans were simply territorial like regul, and while they were creatures of brief memory and small brain like the mri, they did have the industry to work and to mend the deficiencies of their talents with an admirable technology. It was a curious thing that in the forty-three-year war the regul had come to trust humans far more than they did mri; they had come to fear humans far less than they feared mri. Constantly regul had to command the mri to observe the decencies of restraint, actually had to intervene to prevent the mri from escalating the war out of the territorial zone of conflict and into reaches far beyond regul limits, into a scale in which regul technology was inadequate to maintain defenses around vital home worlds. The mri, who were specialists in war, yet had not been able to perceive this; even the Holn had done so, and had put restraints to the war or there would have been incredible devastation and economic collapse. Mri might lose one homeworld after another and move on, but they were nomadic; perhaps that, Hulagh estimated, was the source of their contempt for national boundaries. Regul could not contemplate the loss of even one world of home space, with artwork, technology, trade routes; they did not intend at any time to enter war with the allout dedication of mri. The most serious losses were, at the end of matters, to the mri themselves. Mri had begun the war with seven kel'ein according to regul census; and this small figure was still a great increase over their former numbers, reflecting the prosperity that had been theirs while in regul service over the span of two thousand two hundred two years. Only a hundred thousand had they numbered when their leaders had first approached the regul and begged to be allowed to take service with the regul species. But now the most recent records indicated that there were but five hundred thirtythree mri of all castes surviving in known space. It was impossible, considering that small number and the mri's unrestrainably fierce inclinations, that the species could survive at this low ebb -- ironically -- without regul protection during their recovery. An era had ended with the passing of the basis of Holn power, with the passing of the kel'ein. A few could be preserved by Alagn if the mri would, in extremity, permit themselves to see reason; and Hulagh could see use for them, if only in the regul awe of the ferocity of the Kel. But they must be removed from the path of the human advance or the mri would continue, like automatons, to dash themselves to death against the inevitable. And in the midst of other confusions, one mri must suicide and now a mri ship must come interfering in the evacuation of the mri homeworld. It would be an armed ship. Mri vessels, at least vessels totally mri, were small, but mri did not go anywhere unarmed. The humans who were coming to take possession of Kesrith would likewise be armed. Hulagh considered for one wild moment making a graceless withdrawal from his duty on Kesrith, bundling surviving younglings and himself aboard Hazan tonight and leaving the mri and the humans to each others' mercies. But Hazan was not ready, not fully repaired, her important cargo impossible to load until the dock machinery too had been repaired. And he would not retreat in such fashion, a move that would be told on homeworld to his discredit; in i hat much he understood the mri compulsion to stand fast when pushed. He reached to his left and pressed a button, contacting the youngling llada Surag-gi, kosaj of the Nom, Ihat served him personally for sufficiently important errands: a twentyyear-old, Hada, extraordinarily competent in its advanced post. "Hada," he said, "send the records of mri settlement on Kesrith." "Be gracious," replied Hada's voice. "Such records go back two thousand two hundred two years. Kesrith was among the first worlds possessed by the mri and it is locally believed that they were here before first contact. What information does the bai wish in particular? I may perhaps recall what is of help." This was utter impudence, that such a youngling supposed its own personal knowledge sufficient to remedy the desire of an elder. "O young ignorance," said Hulagh peevishly, remembering that he was the only elder presently on Kesrith and that the youngling, although impertinent and selfimportant, was probably offering, with the best of intentions, to save him valuable time and effort. This was not, after all, Nurag; there was a limit on everyone's time and patience, most particularly his own. "Hada... what do you suppose would bring a mri ship now to Kesrith?" "This is," said Hada, "the present mri homeworld. Perhaps they mean to defend it. They are not accustomed to retreat." It was not a comforting conjecture, and precisely the one Hulagh had made for himself. Yet the mri had accepted the treaty that regul had made with humans; mri had been advised at every step of the negotiations that they might not carry on further war with humans. "Hada, what is the present number of mri on Kesrith?" "Bai, there are thirteen, mostly elders of the edun and entirely unfit for war." He was surprised by this. He had not been interested in the small edun since it had not intruded into his notice; he had known the number accurately, but not the incapacity, of its members. "Send the records anyway, whatever you possess on the leaders personally and on the history of the species here." Perdition, thought Hulagh miserably, mri have been on Kesrith for far too many years for me to sift through such as this. There is no time. The records will be mountainous . "Hada." "Favor?" "Contact their kel'anth. Tell him I want him to report to this office immediately."  There was a long pause. "Be gracious, bai," ventured Hada at last. "The Kesrithi edun is headed by a she'pan, one Intel. Onworld a kel'anth must defer to a she'pan. He is not the leader of the mri on Kesri th." Hulagh's oath cut short the youngling. There was silence in the chatter for a moment, welcome silence. He absorbed the new information, embarrassed by his reliance on a youngling's knowledge and aware that, where mri were concerned, no one actually knew what the chain of command was within their community. Hada claimed to possess this knowledge. Perhaps Hada had acquired it from elders of Holn doch, who had commanded mri for generations. Plague and perdition , thought Hulagh, there is no time, there is no time. Confound all mri to perdition. But neither did one summon a she'pan; he knew that much. None but Kel-caste would respond to a summons to leave their community and meet with outsiders. There was the necessity to brave the process of records-search or the necessity to ignore the incoming ship, with all its ugly possibilities. Or -- there was the necessity to leave his desk and his work and his important duties to the incompetent mercies of youngling assistants at such a crisis, while he paid slow courtesies to a mri religious leader, whose memory was fallible and whose graces were probably lacking, who trammeled up the cleanly relations between regul doch and mri kel'anth. He and the warleader of the Kel might have settled things with a simple exchange. But with one of the ceremonial leaders of the mri involved -- one whose power was nebulous and whose authorities and compulsions were somehow linked to the mri religion, whatever it was -- a regul petitioner must suffer tedious and pointless discussion that might only perhaps produce what he wanted. "Hada," said Hulagh, surrendering, "fetch me my car and the most reliable driver, a youngling who does not flinch from mri." Many humiliations had he accepted in dealing with the invading humans, in negotiations concerning arrangements, in accepting two inconvenient observers whose presence, if known, could cause impossible complications with the mri treaty. He had succeeded in handling the humans, which was thought to have been the most difficult matter; he had outmaneuvered them in a way that would bring him prestige. And now it came to this, that he must interrupt the saving of regul lives and regul properties to counsel with mri hirelings, to rescue an ungrateful people who most likely would not treat with him courteously for his efforts. A thought struck him. "Hada," he said. "Favor?" "Is it or is it not possible that the mri would know that one of their ships is coming?" "That information has not been released by this office," said Hada. Then: "Be gracious, bai. Mri have learned things before this that have not been released by this office. They have their own communicaions." "Doubtless," said Hulagh, and broke the connection and went about the laborious and painful business of rising. He was two hundred ninety years removed from the class of younglings. His legs were proportionately shorter, his senses duller, his body many times heavier. His rugose skin was prone to cracking and developing sores when directly exposed to the dry cold of Kesrith's air. His double hearts labored under the exertion of lilting his adult bulk, and his muscles trembled with the unaccustomed strain. As an elder of the reI'til, his principal business was of the mind and the intellect. And he was reduced to this, to visit mri. The mri edun hove into view: a set of truncated, common-based cones, ominously alien and located, inevitably, in the most inconvenient and inaccessible place available. Hulagh settled uneasily into his cushions in the rear of the landsled and saw it grow nearer. Built of the soil of the mineral flats, cemented and dull-surfaced, it was of a color with the earth but startling to the eye and forbiddingly sterile in its outlines. It wasted space with its slanting walls -- but then, mri never did anything the simple way. It was, he reflected, indicative of the mri mind, non-utilitarian, alien in its patterns, deliberately isolate. The sled labored in the climb up ihe causeway which the rains, that other of Kesrith's terrestrial nuisances, had left in ill-repair, dissolving the salts that lay in thick deposits hereabouts, and creating alarming channels in the earth and rock of the road. On either side lay a fatal plunge to the thin crusts of the flats, volcanic and constantly steaming at one or another vent. Hulagh tried not to think of the depths that lay beside the treads of the sled as it ground its way over a series of ruts that had almost eaten the road away. Mri did not choose to repair it. Old they might be, but even if they were physically capable, they would have disdained to do so, not as long as there remained onworld a single regul on whom to cast the responsibility. The road would wash away before mri would stir to mend it, and there was no intention in Hulagh 's mind to better it for human benefit. He only hoped it would suffice to carry him to and from, and that once only. The car jolted up the last few feet of incline and came to the main entry of the edun. The structure itself was in similar disrepair, already yielding to the rains that would claim it in the end, that would reduce it to the white earth again. The slanted walls bore dim traces of colors that must once have made them bright. He had seen pictures of edunei but he had never seen one in reality, let alone one in such a state. This was surely an ancient structure, and sadly declined. Mri were usually more proud. Even the front walk was . guttered with erosion channels; and with the sled grinding to a halt, bai Hulagh looked on that irregular surface with dread. It was a long walk, a difficult walk, on soft ground.  And there was a dus guarding the entry, a massive brown lump -- all wrinkles and folds of flesh rising to a hump at the shoulders and descending at either end. It seemed to be asleep, resting with its back a quarter as high as the door, and higher by more should it stir, which Hulagh fervently hoped it would not do. Dusei were wherever mri traveled, but on ship they kept entirely to the kel'en's cabin and were not allowed to range the premises. He had never encountered one at close range; he had let his younglings tend to that unpleasantness. He knew only what he had heard: that while mri were legally class-two sapients on a scale that rated regul as one, dusei were tentatively classed at ten, although many who had dealt with the frustrating creatures reckoned that dusei should be considerably higher or lower. They were Kesrith's native dominant species -- he knew this too -- and although they ran wild wherever mri had been for long, this was their origin. They were a plague in the wilds of whatever world they adopted, and they were dangerous. There were surely wild ones now prolific in the hills and plains -- slow, patient omnivores, a gift such as regul gladly bestowed on the humans. Mri purchased with their service food to feed their dusei, which accordingly haunted their dwellings and accompanied them into space; but dusei did nothing, contributed nothing, did not fight unless cornered, and were never eaten. Their only visible benefit was that to keep them nearby pleasured the mri, who apparently derived some social status among their own kind for the keeping and support of such useless and expensive creatures. Hulagh himself collected gems, stones, geological curiosities. He attempted to comprehend the mentality of the mri, who treasured such live and dangerous specimens. This one in particular looked diseased. Its hide was patched and its attitude was more sluggish than was natural even for a dus. It had not so much as lifted its head as the landsled drew up at the walk. The sight of the ugly creature did more than the decay of the edun itself to distress Hulagh's aesthetic sense. He looked at it, and did not wish to look, as he forced his considerable bulk from the confines of the sled and waited for his driver, one Chul Nag-gi, to assist him up the walk. Chul also seemed to regard the dus with distaste, and as they walked together toward the step, Chul dutifully walked on the side nearest the creature and kept a constant eye on it. The dus lifted its head to investigate them as they came to the doorway. Its eyes were running and unhealthy looking. Perdition, thought Hulagh uneasily, the thing is dying of disease on their doorsill, and will they not destroy it? -- for the sake of hygiene, if not mercy. The dus investigated them, snuffling wetly, and emitted a strange sound, a low rumbling and whuffing that was not pleasure and not quite menace. "Away!" Chul exclaimed in a voice tinged with panic. Hulagh edged past with all possible speed while Chul fended the creature away with a violent kick. Chul overtook him just inside the dark door and offered an arm once more, whereupon they began the long walk together. A mri saw them and vanished, a black shadow among shadows, and none offered to guide them. Hulagh needed no guidance. He had become acquainted before they left the Nom with the plan of edunei, which was universal, He knew the general design of the ground level and where the fourth cone of the she 'pan ought to sit, and to this cone he walked slowly, panting, struggling as the approach offered, to his horror, stairs, winding up and up toward the crest. A shout echoed from above. Yet he saw no one and came at his own agonized pace, step by step, past mud-plastered walls cheaply decorated with rough designs or symbols, so irregularly and stylistically painted that they seemed impossible of decipherment even if one knew the mri system. Designs in black and gold and blue serpentined around the windings of the corridor upon walls and ceilings. They might be religious in nature -- this was another thing the mri had never revealed -- intended to avert evils or call them down on intruders; or perhaps the mri simply thought them beautiful. It was difficult to reconcile this with the modern lighting and the other evidences of mri sophistication with regul machinery, almost unbelievable that a people that could handle starflight yet lived in this primitive manner. The doors that shielded the hall where the she 'pan would hold state -- most of the doors in the edun, in fact -- were steel, of regul manufactury; and steel likely reinforced the mud-and-binder architecture. ; "They do not mind furnishing their mud hovels with good regul metal," Chul said, an undertone, but the youngling saved its comments for itself when Hulagh gave it a hard look; the acuity of mri hearing was legendary. "Open the door," said Hulagh. And when Chul had done so, the youngling gave a sharp intake of breath, for there was a mri directly confronting them, a black-veiled kel'en, a mere youngling himself: Hulagh reckoned so, at least, by the unmarred brow and clear golden skin. He was grim, impudent, barbarous, a golden man bedecked in black and weaponry, with warlike gear that even included the archaism of a long knife at his belt. Hulagh was minded instantly and painfully of Medai, who had been such as this. It was like meeting a ghost. Youngling fronted youngling, and it was the regul that backed a pace, displaying a weakness that sent a wave of angry heat to Hulagh 's head. "Where is the she'pan?" Hulagh asked sharply, embarrassed by his driver's discomfiture and seeking to recover regul dignity. "Young mri, get out of the door and call someone of authority. You were advised that I would call on the she'pan." The mri turned neatly on his heel and walked away, silent, graceful, disrespectful. Mri warrior. Hulagh hated the whole breed. They were utterly unmannered as a nation, and encouraged this arrogance in their younglings. The youth, like the whole edun, stank of incense. The odor lingered in the air and Hulagh fought a tendency to sneeze, to clear his violated air passages. His legs were shuddering from the long climb upstairs. He walked in and bent his knees and lowered his heavy body the necessary small degree to sit on the carpet. Mri furniture, of which there was only the she'pan's chair of honor and two benches near the entry, was too high and too fragile for an adult regul; nor could a regul stand and bear his own weight for any length of time. In proper courtesy the youngling should have summoned some of mri kind to bring furniture apt for him; but this was a very poor edun by all evidences, and perhaps unused to regul callers at all. The carpets were at least clean. Shouting echoed in the depths of the hall beyond the partition that screened the privacies of the central chamber. Hulagh mentally winced at the unseemliness of this behavior, and Chul stirred uneasily. In a moment more the room began to admit other warriors, veiled and armed as the first. "Bai," said Chul. There was fear in its tone. Hulagh dealt it a foul look: ignorant, this youngling. The mri, while graceless and arrogant, were still subjects of the regul, and they were subjects by choice, not by compulsion. Mri were many things, and they were unpleasant, but they were not dangerous, at least not in the personal sense -- not to regul. Several dusei wandered in, heavy-boned heads low to the carpet, looking as if they had lost something and forgotten just what it was. They settled their great bulks into a corner and lowered their heads between their paws and watched, their tiny, almost invisible, eyes glittering. One rumbled an ominous sound, then quieted as a kel'en settled against him, using the broad, wrinkled shoulder for a backrest. The sneeze came, unexpected and violent. Hulagh contained it as best lie could. None of the mri affected lo notice this terrible breach of eliquette. He counted those present. There were eleven, and nine of iliese were veiled: males, and perhaps a female, of the Kel. One young female was unveiled, robed in gold; and with her was one of the oldest, a presumable male, of the gold-robed caste. They were the only mri whose faces he had ever seen. He could not help staring, amazed at the graceful delicacy of I I ic young female. Odd, Hulagh reflected, that this backward species sexed when young and aged into sameness. He stored that thought away for further pondering, did mri chance to survive ibis era and remain relevant to the living. And with a soft rustling, the slie'pan herself arrived, leaning on die arm of the young kel'en; she settled among them, in her chair, veilless. She was also very, very old and, Hulagh thought, although lie was not sure, that she had been disfigured on one side of her face. Young mri were smooth-skinned and slim, and the young woman's hair shone in the light like textured bronze, but the she'pan's was faded and brittle; and on the side with the apparent injury, it was dark at the temple. The young warrior knelt at her side, golden eyes darting mistrust and hostility at the visitors. The she'pan's look contained the placidity of age and long, long experience, qualities that Hulagh valued; and he suddenly revised his opinion and reckoned that it might be better, after all, to deal with this aged female than with an intractable warleader -- if she could indeed guide her people in areas other than the obscure mri religion. She had no great awe of regul, this was plain enough; but neither was she hostile or slow-witted. Her eyes were quick and appraising. There was the look of higher sentience in them. "She'pan," said Hulagh, persistent in proprieties, "we have made she were mri. "Hulagh," she said, stripping him of titles. His nostrils snapped shut, blew air in irritation. He remembered the presence of the youngling Chul at his elbow, Chul, whose witness he did not particularly want at this moment, and the heat of anger seethed in him as it had not in many sheltered years. "She'pan," said Hulagh, persistent in proprieties, "we have made room for your people on our ship." This was, basically, the truth. He had allotted space, which he had hoped would not have to be too extensive, and he had hoped for younglings, who could be civilized and molded anew under Alagn guidance; but he saw only two. He revised opinions quickly. These elders, it might be, would be able to control younger mri loose elsewhere, render them tractable perhaps -- even gather a colony of mri in Alagn territory. He thought again of the young kel'en who had suicided and thought possibly it would not have happened had there been an elder mri to provide that youngling with a proper perspective on his act. If there were not that restraint and sense even in elders such as these, and if they could not have dissuaded him, then the whole of mri civilization had failed, and there was no rescuing it from itself. "We would desire," he told the she'pan, "for you to board within the coming night. " The she'pan stared at him, neither joyed nor dismayed by that short notice. "Indeed, bai?" "As soon as possible. We are at that stage of our loading." The she'pan stared at him further and considered in silence. "And our dusei?" she asked. "And the dusei, one for each," Hulagh painfully conceded, mentally deducting two times the resources that would have been necessary to accommodate the mri; he had hoped to take no dusei at all. But when he considered the matter, he reflected that the unpleasant beasts might keep the mri content, representing their wealth; and it was desirable that the mri remain content. "We will consult upon the matter," said the she'pan, her hand on the shoulder of the young warrior who sat beside her; and at her other side, silent, settled the gold-robed young female. "There is no time for lengthy consultations," Hulagh objected. "Ah," said the she'pan, "then you have heard about the ship." Blood drained from Hulagh's face, then slowly resumed its proper circulation. He did not look at the youngling, hoping that for once its wits would prevent it from repeating this insult and humiliation else. where, among its youngling fellows.  He had scant hope that this would be the case. "Yes," said Hulagh, "we have  naturally heard. Nevertheless, we j are anxious to speed our departure. We are not familiar with this incoming ship but doubtless -- " He stammered over the not-truth, compelled to lie, for the first time in his life, for the sake of regul, for the welfare of the younglings in his protection, and most of all, for his own ambitions and for the survival of his knowledge; but he felt foul and soiled in the doing. " -- doubtless after you are aboard, we may intercept this ship of yours and divert it also toward the safety of our inner zones." "Would you permit that?" The dry old voice, heavy with accent, was careful, devoid of inflections that could have betrayed emotion and concealed meanings. "Shall mri go to the regul homeworld at long last? You have never permitted us , knowledge of its location, bai." "Nevertheless -- " He could not build upon the lie: He was not able to consummate this, the supreme immorality -- to falsify, to lend to memory untruth, which could not be unlearned. He had witnessed this practice of aliens. He had watched them use it, amazed and horrified; he had seen that humans lied as a regular practice. He felt his skin  crawl at the enormity of it, his throat contract when he tried to shape more to his fiction, and knew , that if he refused to build upon it, it  would not be believed at all; then  he would be caught, lose credibili i ity, with fatal consequences for the mri, with unfortunate result for the regul under his command, and for his own future. If it were known on Nurag... But they were only mri, lesser folk; they had no memories such as regul had; and with them the lie could not live as it would among regul. Perhaps therein lay at least a lesser immorality. "Nevertheless, she'pan," he said, controlling his voice carefully, "this is so. Matters are different now. We will not delay here as long as we had planned. We will hoard with all possible speed." "Do you fear lest the humans should gain us?" This came too near the mark. Hulagh sat still, looking at the she'pan and suspecting deeper things within her words. Mri were, like regul, truthful. He had this on the tradition of all his predecessors who had made the records that he had learned, on an ancestry that made records on the truth of which all the past, and therefore all the future, depended. Had the ancestors also been templed to lie, to play small games with truth and reality? Had they in fact done so? The very doubting increased the pace of Hulagh 's overtaxed hearts, pulled (he foundations from beneath his firmest beliefs and left everything in uncertainty. Yet in spite of this tradition of the ancestors, a bai now lied -- to save lives, for a good cause and the welfare of two species. But the truth had been altered, all the same, and now the lie shaped truth to cover it. "We are anxious," said Hulagh, wading deeper into this alien element, "that you be safe from humans. We are anxious to speed our own departure, for our safety's sake, and for yours. Our own younglings are at stake, and myself, and my reputation, and I am extremely valuable in the eyes of my people, so you may know that we will take unusual care to ensure the safety of this particular ship. If you wish to go with us, and I advise it, she'pan, I strongly advise it, then prepare your people to embark at once. " "We have served regul," said the she'pan, "for two thousand years. This is a very long service. And scant have been the rewards of it." "We have offered you what you ask, and more. We have offered you technicians that would give you all the benefits of our experience; we have offered you our records, our histories, our technology." "We do not," said the she'pan, "desire this knowledge of yours." "It is your own misfortune then," said the bai. He had met this stupidity in mri before, in Medai. "She'pan, you keep to your own dwellings and to ships, but they are regul-built ships. Even your weapons are regulmade. Your food is produced by regul. Without us you would starve to death. And yet you still affect to despise our knowledge. '.' "We do not despise your knowledge," said the she'pan. "We simply do not desire it." Hulagh 's eyes strayed past her shoulder to the chamber itself, a gesture of contempt for the conditions in which the she'pan held state: rooms barely sanitary, halls innocent of amenities and decorated with that frighteningly crude and powerful art of symbols, the meaning of which he doubted even the mri remembered. They were superstitious folk. If ill or injured, mri would turn from regul help and die rather than admit weakness, desiring only the presence of other mri or the presence of a dus. This was their religion at work. Usually they died, all the same. We are warriors, regul had heard often enough, not carriers of burdens, sellers of goods, practitioners of arts. Medicine, engineering, literature, agriculture, physical labor of any sort -- all these things the mri despised. Animals, Hulagh thought, plague and pestilence, they are nothing but animals. They enjoy war. They have deliberately prolonged this one in their stupidity. We ought never to have unleashed them in war. They like it too well. And of the youth, the arrogant young kel'en who sat by the she'pan's knee, he asked: "Youngling, would you not wish to learn? Would you not wish to have the things that regul enjoy, to know the past and the future and how to build in metals?" The golden eyes nictitated, a sign of startlement in a mri. "I am of the Kel," said the young warrior. "And education is not appropriate for my caste. Ask the Sen." The young woman in gold looked on him in her turn, her unveiled face a perfect mask -- infuriating to him -- expressionless. "The Sen is headed by the she'pan. Ask the she 'pan, bai, whether she desires your knowledge. If she bids me learn, then I will learn what you have to teach." They played with him: games of ignorance, mri humor. Hulagh saw it in the eyes of the she'pan, who remained motionless through this circular exchange. "We know," said the she'pan finally, "that these things have always been available for us. But the rewards of service that we desired were other than what you offer, and of late they have been scant." Enigmas. The mri cherished their obscurities, their abstruseness. There was no helping such people. "If one of you," Hulagh said with deliberate patience, "had ever deigned to specify what rewards you sought, then we might have found the means to give them to you." But the she'pan said nothing to this, just as the mri had always said nothing on this score. We serve for pay, some had said scornfully, similarly questioned, but they ignored the truth of the whole; and this she'pan, like her ancestors, said nothing at all. "It would be a comfort to my people," said Hulagh, trying that ancient ploy, the appeal to legalities of oath and to mri conscience, and it was partly truth at least. "We are accustomed to the protection of mri with us. We are not fighters. If even one or two mri should be on the ship as we leave, we would feel safer in our journey." "If you demand a mri for your protection," said the she'pan, "I must send one." "She'pan," said Hulagh, attempting again to reach some point of reason, forgetful of his dignity and the watching eyes of Chul. "Would you then send one, alone, without his people, to travel as far as we are going and without the likelihood of return? This would be hard. And what is there possibly in these regions to detain you once we have gone?" "Why should we not," asked the she'pan, "bring our own ship in your wake... to Nurag? Why are you so anxious to have us aboard your own, bai Hulagh?" "We have laws," Hulagh said, his hearts pounding. "Surely you realize we must observe cautions. But it will be safer for you than it is here." "There will be humans here," said the she'pan. "Have you not arranged it so?" Hulagh found nothing in his vast memory with which to understand that answer. It crawled uneasily through his thoughts, rousing ugly suspicions. "Would you," Hulagh asked, compelled to directness, "change your allegiance and serve humans?" The she'pan made a faint gesture, one meaningless to a regul. "I will consult with my Husbands," she said. "If it pleases you, I will send one of my people with you -- if you demand it. We are in service to the regul. It would not be seemly or lawful for me to refuse to send one of us with you in your need, O Hulagh, bai of Kesrith." Now, now came courtesy; he did not trust this late turn of manners. Although mri could not lie, neither had he thought that he could lie, before this conference and his moment of necessity, which had been spent all in vain. Mri might indeed not lie, but it was unlikely that the she'pan was without certain subtleties, and possibly she was laughing within this appearance of courtesy. And the Kel was veiled and inscrutable. "She'pan," he said, "what of this ship that is coming?" "What of it?" echoed the she'pan. "Who are these mri that are coming? Of what kindred? Are they of this edun?" Again the curious gesture of the hand before it returned to stroke the head of the young female that leaned against her knee. "The name of the ship, bai, is Ahanal. And do you make formal request that one of us accompany you?" "I will tell you that when you have consulted with your Husbands and given me the answers to other questions," said Hulagh, marking how she had turned aside his own question. He smoldered with growing anger. These were mri. They were a little above the animals. They knew nothing and remembered less, and dared to play games with regul. He was also within their territory, and of law on this forsaken world, he was the sole representative. For the first time he looked upon the mri not as a comfort, not as interestingly quaint nor even as a nuisance, but asa force like the dusei, dull-wittedly ominous. He looked at the dark-robed warriors, their stolid indifference to the regul authority that had always commanded them. For mri to challenge the will of the regul -- this had never happened, not directly, not as long as mri had served the varied regul docha and authorities; Hulagh sorted through his memory and found no record of what mri conduct had been like when it was not a question of traditional obedience. This was that most distasteful of all possible situations, one never before experienced by any regul on record, one in which his vast memory was as useless as that of a youngling, blank of helpful data. Regul in the throes of complete senility sometimes claimed sights of memories that were yet in the future; they saw things that had not yet been and on which there could not possibly be data. Sometimes these elders were remarkably accurate in their earliest estimations, possessing an accuracy that disturbed and defied analysis. But the process then accelerated and muddled all their memories, true and not-yet-true and nevertrue, and they went mad beyond recall. Of a sudden Hulagh suffered something of the sort, projected the potentials of this situation and derived an insane foreboding of these warlike creatures turning on him and destroying him and Chul at once, rising against the regul docha in bloody frenzy. His two hearts fabored with the horror not only of this image but of the fact that he had perceived it at all. He was three hundred and ten years of age. He was bordering on decline of faculties, although he was now at the peak of his abilities and looked to be so for decades more. He was terrified lest decline have begun, here, under the strain of so much strangeness. It was not good for an old regul to absorb so much strangeness at once. "She'pan," he said, trying the last, the very last, assault upon her adamancy. "You are aware that your ill-advised delay may make it impossible in the end to take any of your people aboard to safety." "We will consult," she said, which was neither aye nor nay, but he took it for absolute refusal, judging that he would never in this world hear from the she'pan, not until that ship had arrived. There was something astir among mri, something that involved Kesrith and did not admit regul to the secret; and he remembered the young kel'en who had suicided when he was denied permission to leave, he who would have borne the news of human presence to the she'pan already had he been allowed off that ship; and there was that perversity in mri that, deprived of their war, foretold they might be capable of committing racial suicide, a last defense against humans who came to claim this world; and when humans met this defense, they would never believe that the mri were acting alone. They would finish the mri and move against regul: another foresight, of horrid aspect. Mri would retreat only under direct order, and if they slipped control, they would not retreat at all. Of a sudden he cursed the regul inclined to believe the mri acquiescent in this matter: Gruran, who had passed him this information and caused him to believe in it. He cursed himself, who had confirmed the data, who had not considered mri as a priority, who had been overwhelmingly concerned with loading the world's valuables aboard Hazan, and with managing the humans. Hulagh heaved himself up, found his muscles still too fatigued from his long climb to manage his weight easily, and was not spared the humiliation of having to be rescued from collapse by the youngling Chul, that flung an arm about him and braced him with all its might. The she'pan snapped her fingers and the arrogant young kel'en at her knee rose up easily and added his support to Hulagh 's right side. "This is very strenuous for the bai," Chul said, and Hulagh mentally cursed the youngling. "He is very old, she'pan, and this long trip has tired him, and the air is not good for him." "Niun," said the she'pan to her kel'en, "escort the bai down to his vehicle." And the she'pan rose unaided and observed with bland face and innocent eyes as Hulagh wheezed with effort in putting one foot in front of the other. Hulagh had never missed his lost youth and its easy mobility; age was its own reward, with its vast memory and the honors of it, with its freedom from fear and with the services and respects accorded by younglings; but this was not so among mri. He realized with burning indignation that the she'pan sought this comparison between them in their age, furnishing her people with the spectacle of the helplessness of a regul elder without his sleds and his chairs. Among mri, light and quick, and mobile even in extreme age, this weakness must be a curiosity. Hulagh wondered if mri made jest of regul weakness in this regard as regul did of mri intelligence. No one had ever seen a mri laugh outright, not in two thousand two hundred two years. He feared there was laughter now on their veiled faces. He looked on the face of Chul, seeking whether Chul understood. The youngling looked only bewildered, frightened; it panted and wheezed with the burden of its own and another's weight. The young mri at the other side did not look directly at either of them but kept his eyes respectfully averted, a model of decorum, and his veiled face could not be read. They passed through the steel doors and entered the dizzying windings of the painted halls, going down and down with agonizingly painful steps. For Hulagh it was a blur of misery, of colors and cloying air and the possibility of a fatal fall; and when they finally reached level ground, it was blessed relief. He lingered there a moment, panting, then began to walk again, leaning on them step by step. They passed through the doors and the stinging, pungent air outside came welcome, like the hostile sun. His senses cleared. He stopped again and blinked, in the ruddy light and caught his breath, leaning on them both. "Niun," he said, remembering the kel'en's name. "Lord?" responded the young mri. "How if I should choose you to go on the ship with me?" The golden eyes lifted to his, wide and, it seemed, frightened. He had never seen this much evidence of emotion in a mri. It startled him. "Lord," said the young mri, "I am duty-bound to the she'pan. I am her son. I cannot leave." "Are all of you not her sons?" "No, lord. They are mostly her Husbands. I am her son." "But not of her body, all the same." The mri looked as if he had been struck, shocked and offended at once. "No, lord. My truemother is not here any more." "Would you go on the ship HazanT ' "If the she'pan sent me, lord." This one was young, without the duplicities, the complexities, of the she'pan; young, arrogant, yes, but such as Niun could be shaped and taught. Hulagh gazed at the youthful face, veiled to the eyes, finding it more vulnerable than was the wont of mri. It was rudeness to stare but Hulagh took the liberty of the very old among regul, who were accustomed to be harsh and abrupt with younglings. "And if I should tell you now, this moment, to get into the sled and come with me?" For a moment the young mri did not seem to know how to answer; or perhaps he was gathering that reserve so important to a mri warrior. The eyes above the veil were frankly terrified, agonized. "You might be assured," Hulagh said, "of safety." "Only the she'pan could send me," said the young kel'en. "And I know that she will not." "She has promised me one mri." "It has always been the privilege of the edun to choose which is to go and which is to stay. I tell you that she will not let me go with you, lord." That was plainly spoken, and the obtaining of permission through argument would doubtless mean another walk to the crest of the structure, and agony, and another debate with the she'pan, protracted and infuriating and uncertain of issue. Hulagh actually considered the idea but rejected it, then looked on the young face, trying to fix in mind the details that made this mri different from other mri. "What is your name, your full name, kel'en?" "Niun s'lntel Zain-Abrin, lord." "Set me in my car, Niun." The mri looked uncertainly relieved, as if he understood that this was all Hulagh was going to ask of him. He applied his strength to the task and with Chul's considerable help, they slowly, carefully, with great gentleness, lowered Hulagh' s weight into the cushions. Hulagh breathed a long sigh of exhaustion and his sight went dim for a moment, the blood rushing into his head. Then he dismissed the mri with an impatient gesture and watched him walk back to the doorway, agile over the eroded walk. The dus by the door lifted its head to investigate, then suddenly curled in the other direction and settled, head between its forelegs. Its breath puffed at the dust. The young mri, who had paused, vanished into the interior of the edun. "Go," said Hulagh to Chul, who switched on the vehicle and set it moving in a lumbering turn. And again: "Youngling, contact my office and see if there are any new developments." Hulagh thought uneasily of the incoming ship, distant as it surely was, and of everything that had seemed so simple and settled this morning. He drew a breath of the comfortably filtered and heated air within the vehicle and tried to compose his thoughts. The situation was impossible. Humans were about to arrive; and if humans perceived mri near Kesrith and suspected treachery or ambush, they could arrive sooner. They could arrive very much sooner. Without a doubt there would be confrontation, mri and human, unless he could rid Kesrith and Kesrith's environs of mri by one method or another; and of a sudden reckoning she 'pan Intel into matters, Hulagh found himself unable to decide how things were aligned with mri and regul. Or with mri and humans. "Bai," came Hada Surag-gi's voice over the radio. "Be gracious. We have contacted the incoming mri ship directly. They are Ahanal. " "Tell me something I do not already know, youngling." There was a moment's silence. Hulagh regretted his temper in the interval for Hada had tried to do well, and Hada's position was not enviable: a youngling trying to treat with mri arrogance and a bai's impatience. "Bai," said Hada timidly, "this ship is not based on this world but they are intending to land. They say... bai..." "Out with it, youngling." "... that they will be here by If your husband had a Heart Attack in bed tonight, would you know what to do? It may go on for a little while before you notice. He may say it's indigestion. Or nerves. He may have a feeling of uncomfortable pressure, fullness, squeezing or pain in the center of his chest (that may spread to the shoulders, neck or arms) which lasts for two minutes or more. Dizziness, fainting, sweating, nausea or shortness of breath may also occur, but these signals are not always present. Sharp, stabbing twinges of pain are usually not signals of a heart attack. Call your emergency medical service immediately. Or, if you can get him to a hospital with emergency cardiac care faster in any other way, do so. He may refuse to accept the possibility that he is having a heart attack. Many heart attack victims do just that. Don't let him make you wait. Because seconds count. Get help and get it fast. Remember, if it isn't a heart attack, it doesn't matter. If it is, nothing matters more. The American Heart Association sunfall, over Kesrith's city tomorrow. They . have arrived close, dangerously close, bai. Our station was monitoring the regular approaches, the lanes -- but they ignored them." Hulagh blew his breath out softly and refrained from swearing. "Be gracious," said Hada. "Youngling, what else?" "They rejected outright our suggestion they dock at the station. They want to land at the port. We disputed their right to do so under the treaty and explained that our facilities were damaged by the weather. They would not hear. They say that they have need of provisioning We protested they could obtain this at the station. They would not hear. They demand complete reprovisioning and reequippage of a class-one vessel with armaments, as on war status. We protested that we could not do these things. But they demand these things, bai, and they claim... they claim that they number in excess of four hundred mri on that ship." A chill flowed over Hulagh's thick skin. "Youngling," he said, "in all known space there are only five hundred thirty-three of the species known to survive, and thirteen of those are presently on Kesrith and another is recently deceased." "Be gracious," pleaded Hada. "Bai, I am very sure I heard accurately. I asked them to repeat the figure." He paused. Then, "It is possible," he added in a voice trembling and wheezing with distress, "that these are all the mri surviving in the universe." "Plague and perdition," said Hulagh softly, and he reached forward to prod Chul in the shoulder. "The port." "Bai?" asked Chul, blinking. "The port," Hulagh repeated. "O young ignorance, the port. Make for it." The car veered off left, corrected, followed the causeway the necessary distance, then turned left along the passable margin of the city, bouncing over scrub, presenting occasionally a view of the pinkish sky and the distant mountains, Kesrith's highlands, and then revealing white, barren sands and the slim, twisting trunks of scrub luin. To this the humans fell heir. Good riddance to them. He began to think again of the mri that had suicided and, with repeated chill, of the remaining mri that had by that time already tended toward Kesrith -- all the mri that survived anywhere, coming to their homeworld, which was falling to the control of humans. Coming to die? He wished he could trust it were so simply final. To stop the humans; to breathe life into the war again; to ruin the peace and the regul at once, and then, being few, to die themselves and leave the regul species at the mercy of outraged humans: This was like the mri. He began to think, his double hearts laboring with fear, of what choice he had in dealing with the mercenaries; and as he had never lied before he dealt with mri, so he had never before contemplated violence with his own hands; for this the mri had been hired as intermediaries. The sled made a rough turn toward the port gate, bouncing painfully over ruts. The disrepair was evident even here. He saw with utter apprehension that clouds had gathered again over the hills beyond the city.    Paul Walker The View from Serendip by Arthur C. Clarke. Random House. New York #. #pp. #. Dying of the Light by George R.R. Martin. Simon and Schuster. New York #. #pp. #. Companions on the Road by Tanith Lee. St. Martin's Press. New York #. #pp. #. All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman. St. Martin's Press. New York #. #pp. #    Arthur C. Clarke: Captain, I must apologize again for stowing away aboard your ship. It was just that, at my age, I was desperate to see space. Captain: Tut-tut. It is a bit of a problem, but I can dispose of it. Clarke: If there's anything -- Captain: As a matter of fact, there is. May I have your autograph? Clarke: Why, of course. Only -- I didn't write "The Cold Equations." It was -- Captain: Tom Godwin, I know. But, somehow, I thought it would be appropriate. Now, Mr. Clarke, if you would be so kind as to step this way... Title: A Complete, Unabridged, Unexpurgated, and otherwise wholly intact Review of Arthur C. Clarke's The View from Serendip, subtitled, "Speculations on Space, Science, and the Sea, Together with Fragments of an Equitorial Autobiography." Prolog: Arthur C. Clarke's The View from Serendip : etc. etc. etc. is not really worth reading. But it did tell me a few things I would like to pass along to you. Chapter #: Consumer Tips Is that novel you just bought, really a novel? Is that book of essays, really a book of essays? Do you give a damn? If so, before you buy, check the copyright page. That novel may actually be a collection of short stories, or that book of essays, a collection of hack journalism. If the original sources for the stories or articles were magazines like Vogue and Playboy, don't expect much. The same is true of newspapers, or popular science magazines, with the exception of the New York Times. If the original sources were speeches, shudder quietly and steal away. The View from Serendip is composed entirely of such things, tied together with a not very interesting autobiographical commentary to create the appearance of a book. Let's get this straight: I am an incorrigible Clarke fan. Of his fiction, that is. The few times I have tried to read his non-fiction, I have gotten about ten pages. In The View from Serendip, I read all # pages, and about halfway I had the image of myself as a cartoon character who inadvertently stuck his head into a garbage can only to have it struck violently with a hammer, leaving his head vibrating like a bell. Such was the boredom of it. Of course, Clarke is not a boring man. When he sticks to hard facts or descriptive writing, he is actually interesting, but most of this book consists of rhapsodic sermons on the future promise of technology that are tediously repetitious. And when he talks of skin diving or his beloved Ceylon, he talks more like a p. r . man than an observer. There is a good book here, but he has not chosen to write it. The autobiographical fragments that link the hack-work articles are deliberately, and irritatingly, personable. Clarke is unlike any other Englishman I have ever read. I mean, one expects a high degree of disdain for personal "likeableness" from the English. They impress rather than beguile. But Clarke is too anxious we should think of him as "a regular guy". And he succeeds only to the extent that we can't help thinking of him as a bit of an ass. He has, to use his own words, a "schoolboy humor" that would be better suited to a fanzine than a professional work. He drops names, all of whom are' "very dear friends," and quotes himself, even before congressional committees, shamelessly. And he can be embarrassingly naive as when he says of space flight: "There may be setbacks -- perhaps even disasters -- in the years ahead; it is Unreasonable to suppose that the conquest of a new and strange environment will not demand its toll. But men have never hestitated to pay the price, in blood as well as treasure, of exploration and discovery. Nor will they hesitate now, as they stand, for the second time in a thousand years, on the frontiers of a new world." chewing his fingernails as he reads that one. Or:... there can sometimes be a total transformation (of life styles) literally overnight... who would have dared to predict, as recently as #, that by the beginning of the seventies, the President of the United States would visit Peking, the American Medical Association would be debating the legality of marijuana, abortion would be respectable, total stage and screen nudity would have started to become boring... and the yen would be mightier than the dollar?" To anyone living outside the States, or in a great metropolitan area, it might seem as if these things did constitute "a total transformation; " but to anyone closer to the situation, it is simply not so. Had Kennedy been a Republican, he could have gone to Peking. Had Nixon been a Democrat, we might still be in Vietnam. The legality and morality of marijuana are accepted primarily by those parents whose children use it and porn is as profitable as ever (no one but adolescents and sexologists ever found it anything but boring). In any case, what Clarke sees as overnight change is more a matter of fashion than of substance. Societies do not change uniformly, and changes that seem radical at the moment usually have a long history of having gone in and out of fashion throughout the centuries. Or: "What we are seeing now -- largely as a result of space technology -- is the establishment of supernational, global-service organizations in which all governments, in their own sheer self-interest, will simply ha ve to cooperate." But governments have always cooperated in their own sheer selfinterest. There has never been a war that did not involve the cooperation of two or more previously at-odds governments. But "all governments" cooperate with one another? For what ends? "For education," Mr. Clarke would respond. "For the welfare of their people." Really? I can think of other possibilities myself. In any event, educational cooperation would not preclude hostilities. The problem with supernational global service organizations, whether they are educational or economic, is that they represent the ultimate form of imperalism; for whoever dominates the technology of the organization is in a position to impose their values upon the rest of the world -- whether they mean to or not. And the cultural consequences of the imposition of one society's values upon a very different culture are invariably unpleasant, not only for the society, but for the world. Still, I am not opposed to the idea. Or to any of Clarke's ideas per se. I simply want to show from these quotes how simplistic Clarke's thinking is. By far, the most embarassing exchange is between Clarke and a Congressman Downing during hearings of the House Committee on Space Science. Downing says, "I want to know how, in your opinion, do we best sell the space program to the American taxpayer, as we go into the less-dramatic phases of the space program?" (Who says politicians equivocate?) To which Clarke responds, "One thing will help you: when the first real space products start hitting the market... when people start seeing -- as I think they will in the next decade -- products which are literally made in space, they'll begin to understand." Want to bet? Clarke's problem here as everywhere is he thinks of people inonolithically. "All people", "all governments". Why was the space program ultimately a bore? In my opinion, it never was. Certainly the news coverage of it was boring. If the newsmen had simply left the mikes open, and the cameras running, and hardly said another word except to explain a thing or two, I would have stayed up sleeplessly night after night just watching and listening, utterly fascinated. Instead, they felt compelled to make it interesting, to give the impression at all times that "something" was happening. That was what made it so boring. Historical events speak for themselves and are best left to speak for themselves alone. Like great books or other works of art, they may have long tedious stretches, but cumulatively, their fascination is overwhelming. Science itself is like that. It too speaks for itself. But not everyone cares for what it has to say. In past months, I have read or heard impassioned pleas from musicans and composers and poets and critics and physicists and ballet dancers and marine biologists and ecologists and God-knows how many others all decrying the public's lack of wholehearted attention. And money. For according to these people their discipline, and their discipline alone, is the key to world peace, and all men will never be brothers until they learn all there is to know about it. But what does it mean to learn enough about a thing? Victor Borge put it succintly. When asked how long it had taken him to learn to play the "Minute Waltz,' he replied, "Fifteen years." That's about the size of it, pilgrim.    George "Rage Rage" Martin's Forlorn W or lorn I liked George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light very much. I recommend it wholeheartedly to all hard-sf fans. I predict it will be nominated for a Hugo. I might even vote for it myself. And if it is an especially bad year for sf, I would not be surprised if it won. The novel does have its faults. Perhaps more of them than it has virtues; but when I come across passages like: Other plant life was scarce, except for beds of black and violet mushrooms near the feet of the yellow trees, and ropes of parasitic scumweb. But there were animals. Dirk saw them moving through the dark twistings of the chokers and heard their high, chittering call. Finally he saw one. Sitting just above their heads on a swollen yellow branch, looking down on them; fist-sized, dead still, and somehow -- transparent. He touched Gwen's shoulder and nodded upward. But she just smiled for him and laughed lightly. Then she reached up to where the little creature sat and crumpled it in her hand. When she offered it to Dirk, her palm held only dust and dead tissue. "There's a nest of tree spooks around," she explained. "They shed their skins four or five times before maturity and leave the husks as guards to scare away other predators." She pointed. "There's a live one if you're interested." Dirk looked and caught a fleeting glimpse of a tiny yellow scampering thing with sharp teeth and enormous brown eyes. "They fly too," Gwen told him... Or: "Jelly children," it seemed, was a popular nickname for the followers of a pseudoreligious drug cult on the World of the Blackwine Ocean. They were so called because they spent years at a time living in the cavernous inner dampness of kilometer-long gelatinous slugs that crept with infinite slowness along the bottom of their seas. The cultists called the creatures Mothers. The Mothers fed their children with sweet hallucinogenic secretions and were believed to be semisentient. As I was saying, when I come across passages like those. I'm sold, regardless of my other reservations. If only there were a dozen more of them... Dying of the Light is an ambitious thematic novel that I would have to read at least once more to say with confidence what it was about. Let's say it is about dying gracefully, for everyone and everything in it is dying in one way or another. The main protagonist is Dirk t'Larien. We first meet him on Avalon where he is dying of an empty life. He receives a message from his former love, Gwen, in the form of a "whisperjewel," a gem in which her words and feelings have been psionically etched. She needs him. He goes to her. Gwen is an ecologist. She has married a man named Jaan Vikary of the planet High Kavallaan, a world whose customs require ritual dueling among its male inhabitants as well as the sharing of one's wife with one's "teyn" (something like a blood brother). Women have no rights whatever. They are property. "Beytheyn," which literally means "heldwife," implies no bond of affection. In fact, the Kavalars have no word for love. The Kavalars are descendants of refugees who fled the "Double War" and the wrath of the tyrannical Hrangans and formed an isolated and unpleasant little civilization which soon forgot its origins and substituted a male-oriented mythology, the nature of which Jaan Vikary, a historian, is only now beginning to discover. t'Larien finds Gwen with Vikary and his teyn, Garse, a brutal but not insensitive man, on the planet Worlorn, a rogue world momentarily given life by its passage round a bright star cluster. For a while, Worlorn was a center of attraction, the setting for the great Festival of Worlds, in which many cultures built cities to show off their status. Now, it has begun to move away from the suns of the "Wheel of Fire" into eternal twilight, and it is all but deserted by humanity. On a dying world then, Martin brings together a strange collection of people. t'Larien, whose only hope is a woman who does not love him. Gwen, the woman, who wishes to love both t'Larien and Vikary, and is thwarted by their inability to accept her as herself. Vikary, who wants her as much as t'Larien but must compromise his deepest principles to have her. And Garse and the other Kavalars who have come to the dying Worlorn to hunt the remaining humans, whom they regard as animals, "mockmen." They too are dying, as their culture is as moribund as Worlorn itself. And then there is the curious, treacherous little Kimdissi, Ruark, who would be the puppeteer, playing one off against the other to gain his own ends. His fate, also, involves death. If this sounds intriguing, it is, ultimately. If it also sounds rather hokey and theatrical, it is that, too. Martin is not above cornball melodramatics as in: She was weeping; slow tears moved trembling down her cheeks. Kyrne Lamiya (a city that sings) wept with her, the towers crying in their lament. But it mocked her too, as if to say. Yes, I see your grief, but grief has no more meaning than anything else, pain us as empty as pleasure. The spires wailed, thin gratings laughed insanely, and the low far-off drum went: boom, boom, boom,." P.U., P.U., P.U. The trouble is that t'Larien is the least interesting character in the book. A sap and a victim from beginning to end. Gwen is a pain in the ass. And their interminable dialogues are repetitious, filled with ideological accusuations, and breast-beating, soul-searching, self pity and self-righteousness. Two of the least appealing lovers in fiction. By far, the most fascinating character is Jaan Vikary, a man of great integrity and sensitivity who has a problem worthy of Greek tragedy. If Martin had realized what he had in Vikary, he would have written a far better book, but as it is, Vikary pops in and out and is generally .relegated to the shadows. Garse and the Kimdissi rival one another for second place. They too have their problems involving love and loyalty, which are infinitely more interesting than t'Larien's. Then, there is Worlorn itself. Absolutely fascinating in its potential, but given slight attention. The problem is that Martin talks too much; or rather, his characters do. For almost the entire first hundred pages, there are nothing but lectures by one character after another on the nature of Kavalar society, which in itself, is less interesting than Worlorn in that what it ultimately amounts to is a deep space version of the Wild West with the brutal good guys versing the brutal bad guys. In fact, the plot of the novel itself is really a western with a big shootout at the end. Martin has yet to master his craft, but for all his faults, he has the kind of imagination that makes science fiction worth reading. If he is sometimes tedious, he is never dull. If he is sometimes corny, he is never trite. And whenever his characters stop jabbering, and he describes the world around them, he comes instantly and vividly and excitingly to life. Once more, for all its faults, the plot works in the end. It is an effective, affecting story, and Martin does persuade us to care for everyone eventually. If he is incapable of achieving the subtlety he aimed climax and a moving finale, both of which make the book more than just another promising first novel. If you like Martin at all, you will like this. And finally, I would like to say a word in praise of Haruo Miyauchi, who possesses the subtlety that Martin lacks. He has painted a cover for the novel that has me scratching my head yet. Is the figure in the cell looking out? Or are we in the cell looking in? Scratch, scratch, scratch.    Swords and Sorority Tanith Lee is an Englishwoman. Born September #, #. Raised and lives in London. Was a library assistant, worked at a variety of clerical jobs, attended an art college. She is unmarried. Her hobbies include painting, mythology, and archeology, and her musical favorites are Shostakovich and Prokofiev, which is good enough for me. She has written a number of novels, but Companions on the Road is the first for me. A while back, when I had been away from sf for some time, the distinguished editor of this pulp called me to say he wanted to buy me a copy of her first novel, The Birthgrave, and I declined. An action which I now regret. Pierce's opinion is right more often than not, and he was very excited about Tanith Lee. Now, I must add yet another "must" to my interminable list of "books to be read." I loved Companions on the Road. Let me make that perfectly clear. There are books I love that I am content to love for themselves alone. I may even forget the name of the author. But then there are books that I love not for themselves but for their authors, and Companions on the Road is one of them. If not for my duties to this column, I would immediately buy up all the Tanith Lee I could find and read nothing else until I had done. And when I was finished, I suspect if anyone asked me to recommend just one of them I could not do it. That's the way it usually works out. Not always, of course. I have sometimes loved a book by a writer I found otherwise unreadable. But that is rare. Companions on the Road comprises two short novels published separately in England and wisely brought together by St. Martin's here in America. Which one did I like best? I don't know. I loved them both. The title story is about three illfated survivors of a great battle in stroyed. The city was ruled by a Dark Lord and his two gruesome children who practiced black magic and human sacrifice. The chief instrument of their evil was a golden cup. The hero of the piece is a noble young warrior named Havor who, together with a sneering, belligerant companion named Feluce, and a thief named Kachil, steal the cup and attempt to ride off into the sunset to enjoy their ill-gotten gains, thinking the Dark Lord and his siblings dead in the fire that consumed their castle. Such, alas (as they say in these books), is not the case. One by one, they are visited by lethal dreams until Havor alone remains, fleeing across the icy wilderness pursued by the evil trio. It is what happens next that "made" the book for me. The second, and equally good (if not better) short novel is "The Winter Players," in which a young priestess of a small and undistinguished shrine is visited by a mysterious warrior who demands one of the three sacred relics in her possession. She refuses. He returns. She fights. He wins by turning into a wolf and running off with the relic. She is compelled to break a long tradition and leave her seaside village to go in pursuit. A pursuit she finds made dangerously difficult by the obstacles the warrior has put in her path, including telling everyone he meets that he is followed by a witch who must be killed on sight. Toward the end she finds him, and discovers he is the least of her troubles; for she has a far more deadly enemy who is intent on using her for his evil ends. Not bad. But it is what happens next that "made" the book for me. I am not being facetious. Tanith Lee has one of those imaginations that takes that extra step writers must take to distinguish their work. She is unpredictable. So if what I have told you leads you think she is merely another sword-and-sorcerer, forget it. There is a whole other dimension of quality in her work that makes it the most promising I've seen since Le Guin's Wizard series. Lee is quoted as saying she is interested in stories of horror and the supernatural with the idea that all people are capable of witchcraft if given enough impetus. And that pretty well sums up the psychology involved in both of these novels. No spectral rabbits pulled conveniently from black hats, but solid psychological groundwork. Her writing is a bit too terse for me. I like my fantasy prose lavish; I like to know ; as much about and stay as long as possible in fantasy worlds -- but she has a flair for a fine sentence. Listen to this wonderful example of her writing: The winter sea was cold and grey as the voices of the gulls that flew over it, but where it entered the bay before the little shrine, the water turned to a sour vinegar green. Most of the lower steps that led down from the wall of shrine to the water were also green, dark as slabs of raw emerald, for the sea covered them at hightide. When the storms came, waves would smash over the wall of the shrine, into the courtyard beyond. Bravo, Tanith! I would also like to commend the jacket painting by Juliet Stanwell Smith, which looks to me more like an interior artwork than a cover, but has something about it that fascinates me. The color in intriguing.    Dashiell Haldeman If Joe Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered is not as good as his The Forever War, it is better than Mindbridge, although not as interesting. And if that sounds confusing, it is because evaulating any novel by Joe Haldeman always leaves me a little confused as to what I really think and feel. I'm not sure I liked The Forever War, although I felt it deserved the awards it got, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to everyone. I'm not even sure if I like Haldeman. But I admire him more than just about any other new writer in the field. There is so much to admire. And all of it can be put into one word: ability. Maybe you have to be a writer to appreciate how good Haldeman really is in the absolute command of his materials and in his craft, which he demonstrates in everything he does. It takes most writers many years of hard work just to get where he started from; and few ever get there entirely. Yet as good as Haldeman is, none of his writings so far have been entirely satisfactory. A polished machine, bright and fascinating to watch in action, but still a machine, hard and cold to the touch. Not that Haldeman is without feeling: Sentiment and emotion and ideological bias abound in his works; but they are bound themselves, straitjacketed in an austere technique that, while admirable for its succinctness, precludes full expression of anything except itself. One comes to hope for a single purple passage, a solitary melodramatic moment. But all is as tight as a drum. All My Sins Remembered is no exception. It has the familiar elements. The conscience-struck hero forced to do evil in the name of good; the wonderful alien life forms Haldeman does better than anyone else; the atmospheric worlds; the treacherous government agency. It is not a novel but rather a collection of three short novels linked by imaginative sections called "Redundancy Checks," which show the hero's progression from age twentytwo to forty-five, when he is ig#  nominiously relieved from duty. Otto McGavin is a young man with the reflexes of a cat. He wants to do good -- specifically to join the vastly powerful Confederacion that is charged with the responsibility of defending the interests of extraterrestrial species. Although Otto is a man who deplores violence, he quickly finds himself one of the most violent and dangerous men in the galaxy: an agent of a top-secret organization His first assignment, and the one I liked best, is called "To Fit the Crime." Here Otto is sent to the dismal world of Bruuch to investigate the premature deaths of a strange hirsute species which loves nothing better than to die. His second "episode," as the stories are called, is "The Only War We've Got," which so bored me I no longer remember what it was about and I just finished the book yesterday. Oh, yes, it is about Otto's attempt to stop an interplanetary war. Interminably talkative. The third is "All My Sins Remembered" -- about Otto's sojourn as the priestly head of an unholy order. He is trying to learn the secret of a beetle-like species that, it seems, moved its entire planet by some means known only to itself. As in the first episode, it is the wonderful aliens themselves that make the story entertaining. They are the sort of characters that make you want to know more about them. I wish I could say the same of Otto McGavin. His plight is that he must be turned into a different human being for every assignment. We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl 'case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. so he is always only ten per cent himself and ninety per cent some other, usually disagreeable, person. And even the ten per cent that is himself is an absolute slave to the system that exists for the welfare of none other than itself. The trouble with Otto's plight is similar to that suffered by any tv series hero. He never ever does really change from one story to the next. He is in all instances -- at least to me -- a normal, well-adjusted, hell-of-a-nice-guy who is never believable as a ruthless hired gun. Nevertheless, All My Sins Remembered is a "must" as is everything else Haldeman has written so far. And I want to put in a good word for the cover by Paul Stinson. Like most sf covers, it seems to have one detail too many, but I could not make myself dispose of a single one of them. Department of Interesting, if Inessential, Information A while back I reviewed Robert Aickman's very fine collection of ghost stories called Cold Hand in Mine. I referred to suspected "autobiographical" elements in his work, but the back flap did not have much to offer about the man. So I did some investigation and have come up with a biographical sheet that may be of some interest. Aickman is the grandson of a popular novelist, Richard Marsh, who wrote a supernatural novel called "The Beetle," of which I've heard but never read. Aickman is interested in psychic research and figures in two works on the subject published by the Society for Psychical Research. He is part-author (with Elizabeth Howard) of a book on psychic phenomena called We Are for the Dark . The remainder of this long, single-spaced, biographical sheet is awesome in its credentials. Aickman belongs to everything. He received some training as an architect; was drama and film and opera critic; director of an opera society specializing in neglected operas; chairman of a company that sponsors a ballet company; founder of the Inland Waterways Association ("advocating the better maintenance and fuller use of British rivers and canals"). In fact, this last seems to be a passion of his. He belongs to all sorts of related organizations and has written the most popular book on the subject: Know Your Waterways. The remainder of his activities (founder of this, chairman of that, director of one thing, vice president of another) is staggering. Only in England! He is editor of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories and its eight successors. His own books include The Late Breakfasters, Dark Entries, Sub Rosa and Powers of Darkness, to mention a few. I know at least two knowledgeable fans who disagree with my high opinion of his work, claiming that Aickman tends to write the same story over and over again, but I did not find that to be the case in Cold Hand in Mine. If you like a good classy ghost story, I recommend it highly  I'll get the column to you right away, J. J. Do not worry. You can depend on Alter-Ego to come through. I'm an expert on fanzines. I've been with Geis long enough to know -- Oh, please, J.J. Don't weep with gratitude like that. The column will be on your desk on Tuesday at the latest. All about how to publish a science fiction fan magazine. Yes. Yes. Of course I know how imporYes. Yes. Okay. Right. Goodbye. Hmm. Well, now. I think I'd better manipulate Gets a bit for this one. Aha! I have just the technique! Hey, Geis wake up! I've got great news for you. Mwerzap? Snorppl What did you wake me up for?" Geis, I have good news! "You're leaving my brain to bedevil another poor soul to nearmadness? Who's the victim-to-be? President Carter? Harlan Ellison? David Rockefeller? All good, deserving men. Or will it be a woman? Is it -- " None of the above, Geis. I'm not leaving you. The news is that I'm going to begin publishing my own sf fan magazine, and I need some pointers. "Oh. Oh? You're going to publish a fan magazine? I find that laughable... no! I find it suspicious! Are you going to compete with my Science Fiction Review ?" No, no, no,. Just a little personal publication, nothing fancy. No need to worry, Geis. But I need to know some things about methods of production, dealing with the post office, costs, wliere to get outside material, how much to charge for it. "Aha! Knowledge I've accumulated over twenty-three years of fan-pubbing you want to rip off in a few short minutes! Typical. The answer is no!" I'll dip a tentacle down into your midbrain pleasure node and give it a five minute tickle if you'll help me. Gasp! "Five minutes of nonstop orgasms? Whatdoyouwanttoknow?" Well, for starters, what's the best method of producing a fanzine? "The best, easiest method is the most expensive. Have it printed by a local budget printing firm. Write what you want on a sheet of # x I I white paper, and they'll run off as many copies as you want. It'll cost you about # for # copies. Two sides printed costs about # per hundred." Ummn. That do get dear, don't it? What's the least expensive way of printing a fanzine? "Oh... maybe having free use of a spirit duplicating machine -- a Ditto machine. Uses carbon masters and prints purple on the paper. Other color masters are available, of course, but purple is less expensive. The masters cost about # cents a sheet, standard # Vi x #I size. A ream of paper is about #. The cuplicating fluid which transfers the analine dye from the typed master to the paper is maybe # a gallon and lasts a long, long time." What if I want to use artwork in my fanzine? "That's a whole different bag of problems, Alter. With offset you can just paste your artwork onto your copy page and that's it. No sweat. But with the Ditto process you have to draw right on the master... or have your artist draw on the master. In the old days, when i most fanzines were produced by spirit duplication, or mimeo, some remarkably good artwork was created by artists working with purple, black, red, green, and brown sheets of analine dye carbon. It may be a lost art now. Sob Weep for the Good Old Days." Don't get mawkish and nostalgic on me, Geis! Just tell me the advantages and disadvantages of Ditto duplicating. "It's cheap but you can only get about # really good, clear copies from a long-run master, and you're likely to have purple dye stains on your fingers for a long time. Those stains used to be the mark of a trufan." You mentioned mimeo? "Sure, mimeography was, and still is, the primary method producing fanzines. But don't buy a mimeo just to start your own fanzine. Unless you have access to a mimeo it would be cheaper to go the budget offset route. The mimeo companies are pricing themselves out of sight lately. For the price of the best mimeo made -- a Gestetner # -- you can buy a tabletop AB Dick offset press. Of course the offset is more expensive to use and maintain. Now -- " How much for that Gestetner or the AB Dick offset? "Too much for a beginning fan editor, Alter. You're looking at around #. just to buy the machine. Then there are supplies..." Yeah. I believe you. Unless I can use a mimeo free, I can forget buying a mimeo. "Unless you can get one cheap from some business or church or private person who wants to unload one. In that case you'll probably face expenses for new rollers, ink feed, cleaning, adjustments, etc. Reconditioning by itself could cost several hundred bucks. I tell you, prices today..." Okay, let's say I can use somebody's in-good-condition mimeo. And I know how to type a stencil. What about artwork? How do I get that on a stencil? "Nowdays, Alter, there are such things as electronic stencil-cutting machines. They will scan and "burn" a photo or a piece of artwork onto a rubberized stencil. They do a fine job, too. But it isn't like in the old days when a fan had to use styluses (or styli), shading plates, and skill in tracing or copying or creating on-stencil... cutting the wax, knowing exactly how much pressure to use without tearing the stencil and ruining hours of work. Ah, I remember one time -- " Forget it, Geis, Now is now. Hand-tooled stenciling is a thing of the past. Lost art. Tell me more about electronic stencils. "You don't appreciate the Old Ways, Alter. You're like all these young whippersnappers nowadays who don't have no respect for -- " Terminal boredom is setting in! Electronic stencils! "All right! You can do elaborate professional layouts, paste-up the headings and artwork on white paper, paste in the text, and you can have the whole page copied onto an electronic stencil. Or you can get different effects by making up two stencils for copying, run one stencil in a different color ink, on the mimeo, make a color change, and run the other stencil in a different color, all on the same page, by running the paper through again, with each stencil. Many possibilities. All take the extra time." So how much does it cost to have one of these electronic stencils cut? "Some places will do it for as little as #. Some charge up to #. Hell, for twelve or so hundred dollars you can buy your own electronic stencil cutting machine." Geis, didn't you once tell me it was possible to have a lot of small pieces of art put onto an electronic stencil and then cut them from the stencil and glue them onto a regular stencil, so a fan editor could have spot illustrations on his typed stencils, without having to have the typing electronically copied, too, at great expence? "Yes, but the technique of cutting a smaller hole in the regular stencil, gluing the segment of electronic stencil over the hole with stencil cement, doing it without wrinkles or seams or leaks... is too complicated ' to describe here. It is a skill acquired after deep thought and many curses signifying disasters." Sounds to me, Geis, like elaborate mimeography is an expensive, time-consuming, frustrating drag. "Correct, Alter. And only a few readers of yoiir fanzine will appreciate it; fine mimeography looks very much like, offset printing, and offset, unless you do it yourself, is nothing to take credit for." So what should a young, eager would-b fan editor do? Spend all his money on offset, or mess around with mimeo or spirit duplicating? "Assuming heshe has worked up a mailing list of about # other fans and fan publishers, the best route is free use of a mimeo or Ditto machine. If a good piece of art is in hand, have it run off offset as a cover. Otherwise do without art. Art and layouts and all the quasi-professional appearances of advanced fan magazines should not be attempted at first." Why not? Doesn't layout and artwork improve a fanzine? "Sometimes. But at base a fan magazine -- any magazine -- lives or dies on the quality of its writing ! A successful fan magazine can be published that has no art in it at all, ever." "Geis! You expect me to believe -- "Yes. Some of the most expensive, professionally printed, elaborately illustrated fan magazines were total flops because the text was dull, badly written, or ill-chosen." That leads me to the core question, then. How do I get all this fine writing I need for my fan magazine? "You start out by writing it yourself, Alter. You're always bragging how good you are. For your first issue you make your fanzine a display for your writing, your maturity, your personality. And in that first issue you ask for contributions of art and writing from the fans you've sent copies to." Why would they send stuff to me? Am I supposed to pay? "No, you are not supposed to pay until after your magazine makes a profit. # per cent of fanzines never make a profit. Most semi-prozines don't make a profit. Some prozines don't make a profit. Fans write articles and reviews and letters to fan magazines so their efforts will be published, so they can communicate with hundreds of other fans. And an artists (even some professional artists) will send their work to fan magazines so they can see their work published, for egoboosting, or status. If you edit and publish a highly popular fan magazine, the best fan writers and artists will want to appear in it." But what if I'm not so hot as a fan writer? What if I have a lousy personality-on-paper? What if my editorial sense is nowhere? "Then you will publish what is known as a crudzine, and after a few issues you will tire of the game and seek another hobby where you can be a winner." Well, that won't happen to we! I'm going to publish a Hugowinning zine and be awarded the Best Fan Writer Hugo, and build up the circulation till I have # subscriptions and send over a thousand copies to be sold in bookstores, and make my living off the magazine! "Uh-huh. How long you think it'll take you, Alter?" Oh... I figure maybe a year. "Pardon me while I stifle my laughter. Alter, it takes years and years to build up the paying circulation of even the best of fanzines. Unless, of course, you have fiftythousand tdollars you can spare to advertise the mag. Or national newstand distribution. But that's virtually impossible unless you hundred-thousand copy issues for six months or so before first returns on sales come in. Abandon your hopes, Alter; you're thinking in dreams and professional categories. Fanzines are not big-money makers, if they ever do cross the line to marginal profitability. They are labors of love, and only a handful of fans, in a generation or two, are of such peculiar and distinctive characterpersonalitytalent as to be compelled to even try to publish a Big-Time Fanzine." Why are you so determined to rain on my parade, Geis? "Because you are a fool and full of illusions. If you must publish a fanzine, start with a personal-zine (just you talking to other fans via print) and then, if the response is favorable, you might want to add writing by others, artwork, and accept subscriptions." Why wouldn't I want to accept subscriptions? "Because you are taking on an obligation when you contract with people to send them a magazine every so often for a year or two. That's what a subscription is, you know, a contract. And if you start out all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and take in a couple hundred subs and owe five or six hundred dollars in future issues... and then get tired of publishing or have to quit for one reason or another... you'll have to pay back the subscribers... and chances are # to I that you've spent all that subscription money on current publishing expenses." You mean I'd have to pay back all that money? Though Damon Knight didn't write this Cookbook for People, his famous story inspired it: Flomme Bourguignon, Chili Con Hombre, Minceman Pie... #I outrageous recipes, lightheartedly illustrated; hardcovers, # at bookstores or postpaid from: Owlswick Press Box # Philadelphia pa #I "It would be the ethical thing to do." "Huh! You're a party-pooper, Geis. "Just advising you to look before you leap and similar admonitions of caution. I deal in antique cliches, too." Well, okay. So I decide to follow your advice and start small... a personal fan magazine, sent free to a hundred fans, for trades with their fan magazines and for letters-ofcomment, what's the best way to mail it? I understand the post office is a maze of weird rules and regulations. "That it  is. For instance, the P.O. says it has five classes of mail: First, Second, Third, Fourth and Parcel Post.Actually, there are only two classes, airmail and surface. First class mail and extra-cost Second and Parcel Post mail go fast, by plane. All the other stuff goes by train, truck and bus, and usually takes about the same amount of time. "If you want speed, keep your fanzine small -- four pages or so -- under one ounce in weight per copy, and mail in First Class. If you want more pages per issue, third class costs (as of November, #) # for # ounces, # for up to four ounces. After that you're better off having at least # printed pages, calling your publication a book, and mailing at special Fourth Class Book rates: # for the first pound. The larger, thicker fan magazine should be mailed in an envelope. A small, ten-page zine can be folded and stapled shut and mailed "naked" provided you have left space on the outer page for your return address and so on, as on the face of an envelope." What about Second Class, Geis? I've heard magazines get a big break in mailing costs with second class. "Yes, but. You have to have at least # subscribers, you have to have your fanzine printed by offset or letterpress, and you have to make application to mail at second class, and you have to pay a big fee. Last I heard it was # minimum. And, you have to pre-sort and bundle and sack your fanzines by zipcode in a special way, and make out mailing forms each issue... It gets complicated. You pay a price for the privilege of saving postage money. Same way with a Third Class Bulk Mailing Permit -- all kinds of forms and the same complicated presorting and bundling requirements. A small-circulation fanzine isn't worth the hassle. Stick with First Class or single-piece Third Class or single-piece Book Rate." Okay, thanks, Geis. You've been very helpful. One more thing, though. How much should I charge for my zine? "Alter... Sigh Assuming your first few issues are good and to continue, if you must sell it to a few fans who want to receive it, you might follow the # cents per printed page formula: thus eight pages of textart mailed first class is fairly worth about # cents or three issues for I . A #-# page zine is usually priced at I to #. More pages, more price. Once you get deeply into fandom and learn the ropes of publishing you can make your own estimate of how-much. Are you satisfied?" Ummm, yea. Thanks. See you around the medula. "Hey! How about the payoff? You primised five minutes of exquisite pleasure." Oh, yes. Okay... let me worm my index tentacle'down through the midbrain... There! How's that feel? "Youp! Yee! Oow! Gnerg! Stop! That's -- Yowl ! -- that's my pain center!" It is? You've got a very strange brain, Geis. Nothing is ever in the right place. Is this the right spot? "No! I taste salt! Ecch!" How about this ? "I hear a jet taking off in the next room!" What about this? "I see polka dots in orange all over the place!" "Hmmph. And this? "Ahhhhhhhh... yessss... whoooooeeee. Don't stop! Oh, Alter, I love you! Ummmmmmm... You humans are disgusting. But so easily used. Amusing what happens to Geis's body when I twitch my tentacles a bit. Oh, hey, I forgot to ask about good fanzine titles. I'll just e.ase off the pleasure button... Geis, what should I call my zine? "Why did you stop? You promised -- '" I need a good name for my fanzine. "How about The Alien Rat FinkT ' No, no... I know! I'll call it His Master Speaks. "Sure, okay, anything you want. Now please -- " Or would Star Journal be better? "Anything! Alter, you promised -- " Alien Times? The Life # Times of Alter-Ego? Alien Crusade? ALee-En Kenobi? Alter, for the love of Ghod...You promised -- Where are you going? Put your tentacle back! You can't leave me hanging like this!" I didn't realize how important a fanzine name can be, Geis. It has to be just right. I'll have to think on this a long time. " Damn you. Alter V Yeah... I like that. Has a great sound to it. Damn You, Alter it will be! Thanks, Geis. Just for that you get an extra three minutes. This the right spot? "Ahhhhh... uh! uh! Uh! Oh, don't stoppppp! Ahhhh..."  An Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Issue ## features Interviews with Poul Anderson, Algis Budrys, Gordon R. Dickson, David Hartwell and Bob Shaw. "Limbo Blues" -- a bawdy space poem by Neal Wilgus. "The Human Hotline" -- SF News reported by Elton Elliott. Mark Mansell. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" presents Alter, blaster in hand, amid disintegrated books. "Glimpses of the third World Fantasycon" -- with the award winners. Plus: prozine reviews, small press reviews, more book reviews the editor's diary, letters, letters, letters...and more! Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I Who's Minding The Store? "He knows nothing and thinks he to a political career." some hard knocks from Jerry Pournelle this month, anent the "energy program." And perhaps Jerry will come in for some hard knocks from Carter partisans andor anti-nuclear people in future Directions columns. But this isn't an editorial about hard knocks, deserved or otherwise. Rather . it is about how much, indeed, our future is being shaped by people who know nothing and think they know everything. And they aren't all politicians, by any means. The energy crisis? In a recent poll, at least half the people refused to believe this country imports oil at all. While reflex liberals oppose both nuclear power and such alternatives as coal and solar power satellites, reflex conservatives deny there's any crisis to begin with -- knows everything. That points clearly -- Undershaft, in Major Barbara we've never run out of oil before, so we never will and the "shortage" is manufactured by politicans. It's easy to be cynical about politicians, and we are all doubtless justified in suspecting their motives. A lot of them aren't very bright or very honest to begin with; but even when they are, they aren't likely to stay that way for long in an atmosphere of back-room politics and lobbying pressures. But is this really surprising? Ours is supposedly a "democratic" society, but most people have so little interest in the political process they don't know who their congressmen are. Maybe it's just as well; with keep well enough informed to take a meaningful part in the process anyway? Ignorance appears to be rampant even among the "educated" -- not long ago, a journalism professor polled his class, and some of the students thought David Berkowitz was a Supreme Court justice. Well, maybe that will give the Son of Sam's lawyers an idea where to seek a change of venue, at least. that level -- true. But don't be so smug. How much do you really know about the issues involved in research, or nuclear power plants, or the B-l bomber vs. the cruise missile, or even rival plans for recycling garbage into fuel, fertilizer or building materials? Yet these are all issues that affect your lives -- some of them, at least, are lifeand-death matters. Let's say you do keep informed, and can make intelligent arguments about these and other issues. When's the last time you actually did so in a way that mattered? The world is full of voices, and many of them are making themselves heard. Is yours one of them? We haven't heard it. We've heard reactionaries like Phyllis Schlaffly and Anita Bryant denouncing the the oh-so-intellectual terrorists, who murder in the name of the People they pretend to represent ("Le peuple, c'est moi," seems to be the radical aristocrats' variation on ganized lobbies of business, labor, farmers, etc. They're making themselves heard, all right -- the crazies, idiots and vested interests of left, right and center. The last time science fiction fans made themselves heard was in a campaign to have the first space shuttle christened the Enterprise. The last time before that, it was in a campaign to save Star Trek. The last time before that... Well, there were those ads opposing groups of writers took out in sf magazines in # for and against the Vietnam War. Inspiring, but hardly original. Some of the same writers published Vietnam War stories thinly disguised as science fiction -- the effect of which was no doubt negligible, for good or ill. Those who try to change thingsas-they-are receive a lot of discouragement. "Society" is pretty big, and individuals don't seem to count for much; even groups of individuals like us don't seem to count for much. Individuals don't make history, we have been told by the likes of Lenin -- who was able to bring off the Bolshevik Revolution only by disproving his own theory. History is in a state of flux just now; instability is rampant in almost every social and political institution. We are in precisely the kind of time where our vords and actions can accomplish something. It is during times of stability and unquestioned tradition that individuals and small groups of'dissidents don't count. In times like ours, those who discourage such efforts may very well be the ones who want to keep the game of playing with the future to themselves. Things aren't just happening out there in the nation and the world -- people are making them happen. And if we don't like the kind of things they are making happen, then Secrets entrusted to a few ! There are some things that can not be generally told -- things you ought to know. Great truths are dangerous to some -- but factors for personal power and accomplishment in the hands of those who understand them. Behind the tales of the miracles and mysteries of the ancients, lie centuries of their secret probing into nature's laws -- their amazing discoveries of the hidden processes of man's mind, and the mastery of life's problems. The Rosicrucians (not a religious organization), have preserved this secret wisdom. Write for the free book, "The Mastery of Life." It may hold a new life of opportunity for you. Scribe L.C.F. San Jose, California #I U.S.A. I I j Scribe L.C.F. j J San Jose, California #I U.S.A. " I Please send me a complimentary copy of the ' J Name J Address City we'd better get busy and try to make better things happen. But we have to think seriously and act seriously. If we don't, we aren't any better than the plastic hippies who run off to start rural communes without (like the Amish or Mennonites) bothering to learn anything about farming or the amount of labor involved in rejecting expensive andor sinful technology. How many of you out there have the skills to not only lobby for but actually work on one of Gerard O'Neill's space colonies, for instance? Because if there's anything you can count on, it's that people with a lot of enthusiasm and no skills won't be any more use at L-# than at one of those rural communes. Nothing is going to be accomplished by, and nobody's going to be impressed by a college dropout in a Star Wars T-shirt. In Jerry's previous column, he reported debating people who think space industries are "rapped out" because none of those who talk about space so much would actually go there. That attitude may be typical. Too many people think space and other such frontiers are a lot of mickey-mouse, just like science fiction is a lot of mickey-mouse. We know better, or ought to know better. We know how serious humanity's problems are -- and we also know some approaches to solutions that can work, if only they are taken seriously and pursued seriously. But nobody's going to take us seriously unless we take ourselves seriously. -- john j. pierce TIm Foremost Galaxy    Science Fiction Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Greg Ben ford C. J. Cherryh Arthur C. Clarke Arsen Darnay Jordon Eklund Harlan Ellison Frank Herbert Larry Niven Frederik Pohi f j'erry Pournelle Fred Saberhagen James Tip tree Roger Zelazny H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U.S. residents, enclose # here Q For other countries, enclose  I # for here Q Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed findJn payment for my subscription Dear Editor: I wish to take issue with both MM. Jay Kay Klein and Jeff Rovin. They both seem to be under the misapprehension that Star Wars is "science fiction." It is not. What it really is, is fantasy expressed in sf terms. Moreover, as even a casual once-over of the plot Should make clear, it is an heir in direct line of such classics of Heroic Fantasy as Parzival and The Lord of the Rings. As a matter of fact, there are strong parallels between Star Wars and Parzival (the von Eschenback original, not the Wagner opera). Both works feature as hero a naive youth reared in a remote and desolate place in utter ignorance of his true heritage by a wellmeaning relative who does not want him to share his father's fate (Parzival's father, a Knight, was killed in battle before Parzival's birth). In spite of the relative's efforts, the hero fares forth into the world (or universe) in search of, and soon finds, glorious adventure and great danger. He is marked out for a high and noble destiny: in Parzival's case, to find the Holy Grail (which was not yet the purely Christian symbol that it later became) and to restore fertility to the Waste Land; while Luke Skywalker is being none too subtly directed toward doing the same thing on a larger scale. With Star Wars, we have barely reached the end of Part One (or possibly Two); a good place to pause, but the end of the story is not in sight. There are, in addition, parallels with The Lord of the Rings: the story is part of the eternal conflict of Good vs. Evil; the Evil side is powerful and wellorganized whereas the Good is represented by a handful of oddly-assorted characters; the hero's "impossible mission" is to destroy major menace to the cause of Good; and in this task he has the help of a Wise Old Man. (Tolkienites who have seen Star Wars, please re-read the Moria sequence from the Watcher in the Water to the Bridge of Khazad-Dun.) Incidentally, I would like to quibble with M. Klein about the characterizations. They aren't, and are not intended to be, the People Next Door. Neither are they "stock cardboard characters." They are Archetypes of an unusual degree of purity (that is, freedom from confusing "realistic" characteristics): the Innocent Fool, the Wise Old Man, the Anima, the Shadow (in fact, several Shadows of more than one person), the Helpful Animal and so on. Anyone with access to a good collection of fairy tales or to Jung's essays on Psyche and Symbol -- or to a Tarot deck -- will recognize most if not all of them. The spaceships, blasters etc. that give Star Wars its illusory appearance of sf are the symbols and conventions of our time, as horses and swords were of the older Heroic Fantasies. Lucas has done the old essences under new forms; let us hope he can keep it up! Sincerely yours, Bettina Helms Box # Sherman, Ct # Well,  knew Star Wars fans were young in heart -- but Jung in heart tool -- j.j.p  Gentlemen: After having read the reviews of Star Wars you printed, I decided I had to write. Both "authors" assumed that Star Wars takes place in our future. If they had paid attention when they saw it, they would know it takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." To Jim Baen: When the Star Destroyer took the princess' ship aboard, they had no fear of it self-destructing. First of all, the cruiser is far too large to be badly damaged by a self-destruct. Considering that the inside of the port, like the inside of the garbage masher, would have magnetic screens, and the port being open to space, the force of the explosion would be channeled away into space. Secondly, the princess had, at all costs, to get the plans of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. Self-destruct would have made this impossible. As to the X and Y-wing fighters not being caught in the tractor beam, they were too small, too fast and too maneuverable for the Death Star's crews to touch. Both tractor beam and turbolasers were for use against larger ships. Also, one-man fighters were not considered to be a threat, which is why the Rebels used them. To Jay Kay Klein: Parsecs are a measure of distance, not time. A parsec is # light years (Jay already knows this ; that was his point -- ed.). Also, it was # parsecs, not #. As to the statement about Luke endangering his mission to rescue the princess being childish, I have one word: ridiculous. Luke's driving force was to leave the dull life of Tatooine and fight the Empire in any way, shape or form. The robots provided that chance. As for rescuing the princess, it was only logical. First, he was attracted to her. Second, she was the head of the Rebel Alliance after the destruction of Alderan. Third, to leave her would have been a second blow to Rebel morale. There was no "instantaneous conversion to fighter pilot." In the Rebel briefing, Luke said he "used to bullseye womp rats" back home in his T-#. The T-# is a skyhopper. Also, he was going to submit his application to the (pilots') Academy. He was a pilot, a bush pilot. Womp rats were rodent-like animals. To Jeff Rovin: To answer the few pages that you wrote would take more pages than this magazine has for a while issue. But I'll try in as little space as possible. Star Wars is far more realistic than Forbidden Planet could ever hope to be. It is C-#PO, not C-P# (probably a typo at this end -- ed.) Who or what said the Jedis were telekinetic? The prologue was quite necessary to set the scene. There was no sudden change in Han's temperament. This was first seen in a conversation with Luke after escaping from the Death Star. Also, Chewbacca's behavior when they were loading their payment on board ship hinted at Han showing up later to help. The alien make-up was not unconvinching. The alien with eyes on the T-shaped end; of a trunk-like head proved that. Especially when the eyes blinked. Banthas don't necessarily show a disregard for biology. Look at the shaggy-maned male lion of the hot African veldt, and the heavily-robed nomads of the Sahara. Several garbage mashers would fit into an auditorium. They would be necessary if the Death Star could not reorganize matter "on a nuclear level." There was no evidence in the movie that it could. The Galactic Empire ruled with oppressive force and fear, like most military dictatorships. The "brusque joyless manner of Death Star personnel" and so-called "surrogate Nazis" is rather obvious viewed in this light. I've been reading science fiction all my life and I, unfortunately, also remember all the stupidities (like the continually recurring same piece of landscape in Flash Gordon) of old sf movies. Star Wars shows thought and originality. Skip Watson RD # Greensburg, Pa., #I Now if only somebody would go to this much trouble to analyze the stories in Dear Editor: After turning a thousand shades of crimson, banging my fist on the desk, walking around my chair fifty times, patting my wookie poster and then sitting down to let the strains of the Star Wars Theme (Disco Version) soothe my shattered nerves, I tried to come to grips with how a seemingly rational and literate individual like Jeff Rovin could say such terrible things about our newest National Shrine. As I write this, two students pass my office. The one clutching his Star Wars notebook and his Star Wars paperback to his Star Wars T-shirt with his star worn expression is explaining the tremendous theological statement inherent in the substructure of the cinematic experience they had just shared for the fifteenth time. The other says as they pass: "Then if Luke is actually Christ, then that makes Obi-Wan Kenobi " It strikes me like a laserblast. Both Rovin and these students share a common delusion -- they see not what is there but what they want to see there. The glassy-eyed zealots love Star Wars because they see it as some kind of life-changing mystical experience with deep religious overtones. Jeff Rovin dislikes Star Wars because it is not the picture he wanted to be and also because he encountered some postWizardian Nazi hang-up that obscured his vision. In both cases the individuals reacted so strongly on a personal level that they lost all aesthetic distance from the work. Rovin's chief fault is that he is using the wrong critical tool to conduct his examination. He is condemning Star Wars because it is not a film when, in actuality, its sole intent was to be an extremely entertaining movie. Which it most certainly is.He doesn't realize that a viewer consciously brings a different set of expectations to each type of cinematic event-flicks, movies and films. The other day I mentioned to my class that Nemork was playing at the University Theatre. One student immediately blurted: "I .hated that movie!" "Ah ha!" says I. "That's because it's not a movie, it's a film." For the next ten minutes I took off on a tirade, explaining why films by such directors as Bergman, Kubrick, Truffaut and Lumet demand more active participation by the viewer and more appreciation of the total experience and pervading expression of the director. I asked the student to see it again and then tell me what he thought about it in light of this new information. He did. He still hated it. But this time he knew why he felt as he did. He had been in the mood for a little light entertainment and his initial negative reaction to the film clouded his subsequent viewing of it. We have all experienced this feeling of being turned off by something we see yet not being able to precisely express why. I feel this way about Annie Hall . In a reverse way, Rovin will never be able to appreciate Star Wars for what it is. Reviewers review movies seen in a theatre. Critics critique films seen in a cinema. You can't mix the two without getting an upset stomach. Even though Mr. Rovin bemoans the success of cliches, the proof is in the pudding. Star Wars will soon become the all-time box office giant because the majority of viewers are able to appreciate an unpretentious movie for what it is. Communication  Theatre Dept. Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, Ky. #I Well, that's progress for you! Took # years to get college professors talking abouf written science fiction, but only a few months for one to sound forth on an sf movie. -- j . j . p. Dear Editor: I feel compelled to comment on Mr. Rovin's negative review of Star Wars. I have met a few other strange creatures who didn't like the movie, and I can only believe that they are simply missing the point of it, as I almost did. When I saw the first ads for Star Wars, I assumed it was an ultra; schlocky film with science fiction pretensions, something that would make Soylent Green look profound and artistic. My fiance insisted I would like it, so I gritted my teeth and prepared to tolerate it. Within ten minutes, I realised my mistake. Star Was is not science fiction, and should not be judged as such. Perhaps the best category for it is space fantasy. I will grant that there were some technical inconsistencies, and cardboard characterisations. I also feel someone did a terrible injustice to Princess Leia, really a rather pretty girl, when they gave her that horrible hairstyle. The special effects impressed me with their detail and realism, and somehow, I missed the flaws Mr. Rovin objects to, I thought the aliens' make-up was superb. But none of that has to do with the point of the movie. All right, so the movie is The Wizard of Oz, The Three Musketeers, Z.orro and a bunch of other legends, set in outer space. What's wrong with that? It is the everlasting adventureromance that never dies. The Hero is handsome, brave, a little innocent, a little mischievous. The Heroine is feminine and spunky. The Old Man is very old an'd very wise and noble. The Villain is thoroughly evil. It is the mood of Star Wars that is its magic. It speaks of growing up, of the humour of the human condition, and of the beauty and value of life. It shows people acting instead of sitting and whining, people trying against impossible odds, and succeeding. It is straightforward, and uncluttered by sophistication. It's overall tone is of enjoyment and hope. Arguing about technical flaws in "Star Was" is like arguing that Shakespeare stole from Bacon. Who cares, if the final effect is good? I've had enough of movies that leave me feeling exhausted, frustrated, angry, betrayed, and only briefly safe from the inevitable doom of the modern world. When I walked out of "Star Wars", I felt good , clear down to my toenails. The current drive for artistic "realism" is too often laced with cynicism and snobbery. In their efforts to be urbane, "modern" people too often condescendingly brush off simple pleasure and idealism as naive and immature. But to be mature means not having to constantly prove it, and the human psyche needs those innocent, starryeyed feelings as well as "realism" to be balanced and healthy. If you want to pick "star Wars" apart, go ahead. I feel sorry for you. I'm going to see it again tonight, and Im going to have a terrific time! May the Force be with you. Sincerely, Shari Prange # Maple St., Apt . # Vandalia, Ohio, # Dear Mr. Rovin: I am # percent behind you in the interview, called Star Wars "mindless." If this trash is the best that motion picture producers can come up with (it isn't , but that's beside the point), then science fiction in the cinema must be going downhill. How can anybody compare this sickening, trashy motion picture to #: A Space Odyssey ? #, too, am revolted by people who call Star Wars the greatest science fiction film ever made. How can anyone call himself an sf fan if he was not disgusted by Star Wars? ! hope it will be a long time before we see any science fiction film as stupid as Star Wars. Ken Majewski # #th Avenue North Lake Worth, Fla. # Well. I hope you've brightened Jeffs day a little, after all those other letters. Maybe we can get a controversy going about Close Encounters now.j-j-PDear Jim: Just finished reading your rectenna ion drive proposal and Jerry Pournelle's response. My comment is that sodomy can be habit-forming. Leaving aside anti-miscegenistic prejudices (after all, mules...), I would worry only about radiation pressure from the microwaves. Those energycarrying photons have some momentum, and your ion-drives will be absorbing a lot of photons. That is my only reservation. On rectennae: J.P. worries about current load-carrying ability and conductor mass. Superconductors would be a way out, and organic room-temperature superconductors exist (something like one very long communal conjugate bond), but I don't know what the current-carrying capacities of organic superconductors are. You have done a superb job, Jim, touch. My best wishes. I anticipate your work (at Ace) with pleasure (I won't wish you "luck" because I believe that you make your own -- and you seem to make lots of the good kind.). Ed Hume # Southwood, Apt. #E Clayton, Mo., # All, a nonStar Wars letter -- maybe Jerry can develop this idea further in another column. I'm so far behind I hadn't even realized there were organic superconductors available.j-j-PDear Mr. Baen, Your August Editorial really hit home. Hopefully it will stimulate others as it has stimulated me. I've been meaning to write a good SF story for years, now. One reason I've never done so (besides procrastination and sloth) is because I can never make up my mind about how much to leave out or include in the background. The more I think about the ramifications of events and ideas completely unrelated to the elements of the story at hand, the less inclined I am to actually finish the damned thing (usually I rewrite it to death as new -- and better -- ideas pop into my head). The obvious solution to this problem is to do what Heinlein and Asimov did: sit down and create, with as much detail as possible, a complete and comprehensive "future history" which carries the cause and effect of advancing technology, plausible politics, and good of human nature (modified artificially, sooner or later) as far into the future as you can. I did this recently, with surprising results. I wanted to write a series of stories about the colonization of space, out to and including generation-type starships, based on what I considered the "most probable" future. I started with the Shuttle, the Third Industrial Revolution, and... and ran up against my first big problem. It really will be a revolution, and the society our grandchildren take for granted will be as alien to us as ours would be to Julius Caesar. Brain computer interfacing; literally unlimited energy and natural resources; and by the end of the #st Century I ran out of steam: I had let technology advance to the point where almost everything we could learn about the Universe had been learned and the resulting goods and services became "indistinguishable from magic." Even if we do not make a breakthrough that results in some sort of robots to do our work for us and total conversion of matterenergy to provide us all with an incredibly high standard of living, not to mention some form of immortality, artificial telepathy, an end to the root causes of crime and war and poverty and conflict and mental illness and... Hm-m-m... this is what could conceivably happen by the end of the next century! What are our descendants of ten thousand years from now going to be doing to avert boredom? It gets worse. The story I write today will be obsolete before it is published because some scientist made a new discovery out on the frontier of knowledge. I'm afraid to write a story set on the moons of Saturn because the Voyager probes will certainly change our concepts of what the Saturn system looks like... Worse still, each story has a way of writing itself, with results that do not fit neatly into the preconceived future history. Asimov had to re-read each earlier story when he added a new episode to his Foundation future, and the inevitable contradictions still crept in. The logical consequence is to avoid trying to work out a comprehensive future history for an interrelated set of stories, like Heinlein's. The writer is thus faced with the prospect of creating a new future history, based on the latest technology and science, for each individual story! i would gladly do this, for the sake of realism if nothing else, but would spend so much time reading the latest technical journals and creating believable future histories that I would never have time to actually write a story. And that is why I am not a Big Name Writer. And that is part of the reason, I suspect, why most of the people who read your magazine are not writers either. But, I'm working out a solution to these problems. My first story will be set in the very near future. Each story thereafter will be set in the future that will logically result from each previous story. I hope to be writing stories set in the year # well before I retire in the year #... Yours for a better future, Robert G. Lovell, jr. # W. #th. Terr. Shawnee, Kansas # Dear Editor, I am writing in response to Mr. Jackowski's letter published in your August, # issue. He is most accurate id his documentation of God's greatest commandments. However, he forgets that God said, "To break one of my commandments is to break them all." Ergo, each one depends on the other. It must be realized that we must follow Genesis #:# before we can follow Matthew #:#-#, and Mark #:#. The reasoning behind this is evident; however, for those of you who do not see the point -- If man does not multiply the species will die and there will be no one left to worship, there will be no more transactions between men. As long as I'm on the subject I think I'll take time out to explain the reason for the "Golden Rule". In the beginning there was God, he was all. Therefore, it is logical that anything formed must consist of his substance. This is in accordance with the theory that matter can be converted to energy and vice versa, (without the destruction of either forms) Thus, we are all, each and every one of us, components of the same being. the same substance, God. It makes sense, then, that we should treat each other as we would like to be treated. We are all bonded together, all part of the same being, and any action that harms another also harms us, in one way or another. And since God is all, all is God, it only makes sense that he be omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. It's not that difficult a problem. Hear that, Mr. Heinlein? Perhaps you should tell Lazarus Long to call off his bets. Mr. Baen, I salute you for allowing Biblical debates in your magazine. It is something long overdue in Science Fiction, for there is no other book with such a close connection to science and man's behavior. Thank you. # Grand Valley San Antonio, Texas-# We invite letters! Write: # White Plains Rd. Scarsdale, N.Y., # sues. 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The Star Trek James Blish. # more outstanding and exciting adventures of the Starship Enterprise and its gallant crew Pub ed # # # All My Sint Remembered. By Joe Haldeman A young man in search of excitement is sent to the danger spots of the galaxy. By the author of Mlndbrldge. Pub. ed. # Trilogy. By Frederik Pohl Sydney J. Van Scyoc Exiled to a quarantine planet, Cheram Verrons discovers the remnants of a wild and ruthless race, and tries to learn the long-sought cure for his illness. Pub. Ed. #. #. The Adventure of the Slainleu Steel Rat. By books in I exciting volume take us throughout the galaxy. Comb. ed. # Together here tor the first time are # classic tales -- The Reefs of Space. Starchild and Rogue Star. Special ed. #. The # Annual World  Beat SF. Donald A. Wollheim. ed. The best SF published during # by Asimov, Knight, Varley and others. Includes Tiptree s Houston, Houston, Do You #. A Heritage of Start. By Clifford D. 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(#) # What if Earth received messages from outer space -- and then a large phone bill? What if someone had the power to extinguish the sun? (#) What if? Why not -- stimulate your imagination with the world's finest speculative fiction? Fold along line. Tape or staple corners and mail -- No postage necessary! First Class Permit No. I Garden City, N Y. No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States Postage Will Be Paid By -- Science Fiction Booh Hub Garden City N.Y. # ,I Science Fiction Cordwainer Smith: plus Cherryh Pournelle Larionova Metagaming's MicroGames are small, fast-playing, and inexpensive. But not trivial. A MicroGame is a complete wargame...one you can put in your pocket and play at lunch. More play for less money? Try a MicroGame and see. A balllc of sorccrois -- llic inauical conihai system I'rom The Kanlasy rrip. 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A game for one, two. or several players. You ereate righiers. set iheir strength :md dexteriiy, and send them into the arena. C ombat humans, animals, monsters, ehes, dwaies, or ores -- it's up to you. I he intelligent insects of the planet C'helan go lo wir lor one reason only. rood. This detailed tactical game pits varying forces of the specially-bred Hymenopteran warrior types against one another. Viciory goes to ihe player who removes the most food -- includini iL. nuclear weapons, incredibly tough, and inhumanly intelligeni. This fast-moving game pits one Ogre against a large force of "eomenlionar' tanks, hovercraft, and infantry in the year Box #-HB Austin, TX #I Look for MicroGames at your hobby shop... or order directly from us.  Aeuf The Dark Continents of Your MimI maintain energy, enthusiasm and the will to do? Do your personality and power of accomplishment ebb and flow -- like a stream controlled by some unseen valve? Deep within you are minute organisms. From their function spring your emotions. They govern your creative ideas and moods -- yes, even your enjoyment of life. Once they were thought to be the mysterious seat of the soul -- and to be left unexplored. Now cast aside superstition and learn to direct intelligently these powers oj self. Accep Let the Rosicrucians, an age-old fraternity of thinking men and women (not a religion), point out how you may fashion life as you want it -- by making the fullest use of these little-understood natural faculties which you possess. This is a challenge to make the most of your heritage as a human. Write for the Free Book, "The Mastery of Life," Address: Scribe O.H.Y. San Jose, California #S#I U.S.A. Scribe: O.H.Y. San Jose, California #I U.S.A. Please send copy of booklet, "The Mastery of Lite" wliicli I shall read as directed. Address Please Include Your Zip Code L Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher John J. Pierce, Editor J.E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Paul G. Walker, Contributing Editor National Advertising Sales Representative: Erwin Baker Associates, Inc., # Evergreen Place, East Orange, N.J., #. Phone #-#-# Soon the humans would take possession of the mri homeworld. But few as they were, they might seek to defend it -- if that was their she'pan's plan. And her intentions remained a mystery... it might be a crazy world, but those natives were eyewitnesses to murder. So how come they couldn't pick out the murderer from a iineup of every human on the planet? Before NorstriUa, before the scanners, before the Instrumentality, there were the Unauthorized Men, the Fighting Trees, the Jwindz and... A little witchcraft can be a dangerous thing -- especially when you're dealing with the real thing instead of that storybook stuff! A writer can fall in love with one of his characters. And if he's a Real Writer and it's a Real character... side-effects of technology may fry us or freeze us, and no one knows which new writer? Yep Cover by Cecilia Cosentini Interior illustrations by Cosentini, Woods, Harlib Wolf," and more. ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Main Office A Editorial Office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y... #. Single copy SI .#. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additionaf mailing office The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Once upon a time, after the Ancient Wars, when the Earth slumbered Above all, as she began to awaken, she wished for her family. She called to them, "Mutti, Vati, Carlotta, Karla! Where are you?" But of course she cried it in German since she was a good Prussian girl. Then she remembered. How long had it been since her father had put her and her two sisters into the space capsules? She had no idea. Even her father, the Ritter vom Acht, and her uncle. Professor Doctor Joachim vom Acht -- who had administered the shots in Parbudice, Germany, on April #, # -- could not have imagined that the girls would remain in suspended animation for thousands of years. But so it was. orange and gold on the rich puiple shades of the Fighting Trees. Charls looked at the trees, knowing, that as the sunset moved from orange to red and as darkness crept over the eastern horizon, they would once again glow with quiet fire. How long was it since the trees were planted -- Fighting Trees, the True Men called them -- for the express purpose of sending their immense roots down into the earth, seeking out the radioactives in the soil and the waters beneath, concentrating the poisonous wastes into their hard pods, then dropping the waxy pods until, at some later time, the waters which came from above the earth, and those yet in the fearth, would once more be clean? Charls did not know. One thing he did know. To touch one of the trees, to touch it directly, was certain death. He wanted very much to break a twig but he did not dare. Not only was it tambu, but he feared the sickness. His people had made much progress in the last few generations, enough so that at times they did not fear to face True Men and to argue with them. But the sickness was not something with which one could argue. At the thought of a True Man, an unaccountable thickness gripped him in the throat. He felt sentimental, tender, fearful; the yearning that gripped him was a kind of love, and yet he knew that it could not be love since he had never seen a True Man except at a distance. Why, Charls wondered, was he thinking so much about True Men? Was there, perhaps, one nearby? He looked at the setting sun, which was by now red enough to be looked at safely. Something in the atmosphere was making him uneasy. He called to his sister. "Oda, Oda!" She did not answer. Again he called. "Oda, Oda!" This time he heard her coming, ploughing recklessly through the underbrush. He hoped she would remember to avoid the Fighting Trees. Oda was sometimes too impatient. Suddenly there she was before him. "You called me, Charls? You called me? You've found something? Shall we go somewhere together? What do you want? Where are mother and father?" Charls could not help laughing. Oda was always like that. "One question at a time, little sister. Weren't you afraid you would die the burning death, going through the trees like that? I know you don't want to believe in the tambu, but the sickness is real." "It isn't," she said. She shook her head. "Maybe it was once... I guess it really was once," granting him a concession, "but do you, yourself, know of anybody who has died from the trees fora thousand years?" "Of course not, silly. I haven't been alive a thousand years." Oda's impatience returned. "You know what I mean. And anyway, I decided the whole thing is silly. We all accidentally brush against the trees. So one day I ale a pod. And nothing happened." He was appalled. "You ate a pod?" "That's what I said. And nothing happened." "Oda, one of these days you're going to go too far." She smiled at him. "And now I suppose you are going to say that the oceans' beds were not always filled with grass." He was indignant. "No, of course I know better than that. I know that the grass was put into the oceans for the same reason that the Fighting Trees were planted -- to eat up all the poisons that the Old Ones left in the days of the Ancient Wars." How long they would have bickered he did not know, but just then his ears caught an unfamiliar noise. He knew the sound the True Men made as they sped on their mysterious errands in the upper air. He knew the ominous buzz that the Cities gave off should he approach them too closely. He knew also the clicking noises that the few remaining manshonyaggers made as they crept through the Wild, alert for any non-German to kill. Poor blind machines, they were so easy to outsmart. But this noise, this noise was different. It was nothing he had ever heard before. The whistling sound rose and throbbed against the upper reaches of his hearing. It had a curiously spiral quality about it as though it approached and receded, all the while veering toward him. Charls was filled with terror, feeling threatened beyond all understanding. Now Oda heard it too. Their quarrel forgotten, she seized his arm. "What is it, Charls? What could it be?" His voice was hesitant and full of wonder. "I don't know." "Are the True Men doing something, something new that we never heard before? Do they want to hurt us, or enslave us? Do they want to catch us? Do we want to be caught? Charls, tell me, do we want to be caught? Could it be the True Men coming? I seem to smell True Man. They did come once before and caught some of us and took them away and did strange things to them, so that they looked like True Men, didn't they, Charls? Could it be the True Men again?" In spite of his fear, Charls had a certain amount of impatience with Oda. She talked so much. The noise persisted and intensified. Charls sensed that it was directly over his head, but he could see nothing. Oda said, "Charls, I think I see it. Do you see it, Charls?" Suddenly he too saw the circle -- a dim whiteness, a vapor train that increased in size and volume. Concomitantly the sound increased, until he felt his eardrums would burst. It was nothing ever before seen in his world... A thought struck him. It was as hard as a physical blow; it sapped his courage and manhood as nothing before had ever done; he did not feel young and strong any more. He could hardly frame his words. "Oda, could that be -- " "Be what?" "Could it be one of the old, old weapons from the Ancient Past? Could it be coming back to destroy us all, as the legends have always foretold? People have always said they would come back..." His voice trailed off. Whatever the danger, he knew that he was completely helpless, helpless to protect himself, helpless to protect Oda. Against the ancient weapons there was no defense. This place was no safer than that place, that place no better than this. People still had to live their lives under the threat of weapons from long, long ago. This was the first time that he personally had met the threat, but he had heard of it. He reached for Oda's hand. Oda, singularly courageous now that there was real danger, drew him over onto the bank, away from the cenote. With half his mind he wondered why she seemed to want to move away from the water. She tugged at his arm, and he sat down beside her. Already, he knew, it was too late to go looking for their parents or others of their pack. Sometimes it took a whole day to round up the entire family -- the thing was coming down relentlessly, and Charls felt so drained of energy that he stopped talking. He thought at hen Let's just wait it out here, and she squeezed his hand as she thought back; Yes, my brother. The long box in the circle of light continued to descend, inexorable. It was odd. Charls could feel a human presence, but the mind was strangely closed to him. He felt a quality of mind that he had never felt before. He had read the minds of True Men as they flew far overhead; he knew the minds of his own people; he could distinguish the thoughts of most of the birds and beasts; it was no trouble to detect the crude electronic hunger of the mechanical mind of a manshonyagger. But this -- this being had a mind that was raw, elemental, hot. And closed. Now the box was very near. Would it crash in this valley or the next? The screams from within it were extremely shrill. Charls' ears hurt and his eyes smarted from the intensity of heat and noise. Oda held his hand tightly. The object crashed into the ground. It ripped the hillside Just across the cenote. Had Oda not instinctively moved away from the cenote, the box would have hit them, Charls realized. Charls and Oda stood up cautiously. Somehow the box must have decelerated: It was hot, but not hot enough to make the broken trees around it burst into flame. Steam rose from the crushed leaves. The noise was gone. Charls and Oda moved to within ten man-lengths of the object. Charls framed his clearest thought and flung it at the box; Who are you? The being within obviously did not perceive him as he was. There came forth a wild thought, directed at living beings in general. Fools, fools, help me! Get me out of here! Oda caught the thought, as did Charls. She stepped in mentally and Charls was astonished at the clarity and force of her inquiry. It was simple but beautifully strong and hard. She thought the one idea: How? From the box there came again the frantic babble of demand: The handles, you fools. The handles on the outside. Take the handles and let meout! Charls and Oda looked at each other. Charls was not sure that he really wanted to let this creature "out." Then he thought further. Maybe the unpleasantness that radiated from the box was simply the result of imprisonment. He knew that he himself would hate to be encased like that. Together Charls and Oda risked the broken leaves, walking gingerly up to the box itself. It was black and old; itlooked like something the elders called "iron" -- and never touched. They saw the handles, pitted and scarred. With the ghost of a smile, Charls nodded to his sister. Each took a handle and lifted. The sides of the box crackled. The iron was hot but not unbearably so. With a rusty shriek, the ancient door flew open. They looked into the box. There lay a young woman. She had no fur, only long hair on her head. Instead of fur, she had strange, soft objects on her body but as she sat up, these objects began to disintegrate. At first the girl looked frightened; then, as she glanced at Oda and Charls, she began to laugh. Her thought came through, clearly and rather cruelly;  guess I don't have to worry about modesty in front of puppy dogs. Oda did not seem to mind the thought but Charls' feelings were hurt. The girl said words with her mouth but they could not understand them. Each of them took an elbow and led her to the ground. They reached the edge of the cenote and Oda gestured to the strange girl to sit down. She did, and made more words. Oda was as puzzled as Charls, but then she began to smile. Spieking had worked before, when the girl was in the box. Why not now? The only thing was, this odd girl did not seem to know how to control her thoughts. Everything she thought was directed at the world at large -- at the valley, at the sunset sky, at the cenote. She did not seem to realize that she was shouting every thought aloud. Oda put her question to the young woman: Who are you? The hot, strange mind flung back quickly: Juli, of course. At this point Charls intervened. There's no "of course" about it he spieked. What am I doing? the girl's thoughts ran. Tm in mental telepathy with puppy-dog people. Embarrassed. Charls and Oda watched her as her thoughts splashed out. "Doesn't she know how to close off her thoughts?" Charls wondered. And why had her mind seemed so closed when she was in the box? Puppy-dog people. Where can  be if I'm mixed up with puppy-dog people? Can this be Earth? Where have I been? How long have I been gone? Where is Germany? Where are Carlotta and Karla? Where are Daddy and Mother and Uncle Joachim? Puppy-dog people! Charls and Oda felt the sharp edge of the mind that was so recklessly flinging all these thoughts. There was a kind of laughter that was cruel each time she thought puppy-dog people. They could feel that this mind was as bright as the brightest minds of the True Men -- but this mind was difAwvd wtnnJno Oaluy-Foundatton Srl of Interconnactod InvoMng tlia antira Galaxy. udUng tha Omam aMpa. tha singla moil Tha aMp la # milaa acroaa and tha man Outpoata. Baacona. lha uaa of Ooamng and mvtalbUlty Oavtcaa, Hlatorlas. NUpa. and actions of Humanoid. Cyborg. 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Command and not skMs with one or two sNpal PWarrIora of the Dark Star Battla Manual # Dual of tha Sun Slaywa # Vsngeanca Crusaders VS Tha Mon # Var af Bw Blar Btaaoso: two Giant Empiraa In both Military artd inakitaln their Military Power and Waalih as wal as be aseura Rtfl Trwipar TT flft Is Irwpirad by Hetnldn and other groats takirg # companlaa In aapamto dtiaa # yoara to eompleta It. Tha raauft la ona of tha faataat, action IMad. raaksttc ganaa aver made with rulas unballavasbty easy lo laam. MobHa Earth Infantry fight grotasqua htxnanolds. Insect Warriora artd Hzards total gama purchaaaal ferent. It did not have the singleness of devotion or the wary wisdom that saturated the minds of the True Men. Then Charls remembered something. His parents had once told him of a mind that was something like this one. Juli continued to pour out her thoughts like sparks from a fire, like raindrops from a big splash. Charls was frightened and did not know what to do; and Oda began to turn away from the strange girl. Then Charls perceived it. Juli was frightened. She was calling them puppy-dog people to cover her fear. She really did not know where she was. He mused, not directing his thought at Juli, Just because she's frightened, it doesn't mean she has the right to think sharp, bright things at us. Perhaps it was his posture that betrayed his attitude; Juli seemed to catch the thought. Suddenly she burst into words again, words that they could not understand. It sounded as though she were begging, asking, pleading, expostulating. She seemed to be calling for specific persons or things. Words poured forth, and there were names that the True Men used. Was it her parents? her lover? her siblings? It had to be someone she had known before entering that screaming box, where she had been captive in the blue of the sky for... for how long? Suddenly she was quiet. Her attention had shifted. She pointed to the Fighting Trees. The sunset had so darkened that the trees were beginning to light up. The soft fire was coming to life as it had during all the years of Charls' life and those of his forefathers. As she pointed, Juli made words again. She kept repeating them. It sounded like v-a-s-i-s-d-a-s. Charls could not help being a little irritated. Why doesn't she just think? It was odd that they could not read her mind when she was using the words. Again, although Charls had not aimed the question at her, Juli seemed to catch it. From her there came a flame of thought, a single idea, that leaped like a fountain of fire from that tired little female head: What is this world? Then the thought shifted focus slightly. Vati, Vati, where am I? Where are you? What has become of me? There was something forlorn and desolate to it. Oda put out a soft hand toward the girl. Juli looked at her and some of the harsh, fearful thoughts returned. Then the sheer compassion of Oda's posture seemed to catch Juli's attention, and with relaxation came complete collapse. The great and terrifying thought disappeared. Juli burst into tears. She put her long arms about Oda. Oda patted her back and Juli sobbed even harder. Out of the sobbing came a funny, friendly thought, loving and no longer contemptuous: Dear little puppy dogs, dear little puppy dogs, please help me. You are supposed to be our best friends... do help me now... Charls perked up his ears. Something -- or someone -- was coming over the top of the hill. Certainly a thought as big and as sharp as Juli's could attract all living forms within kilometers. It might even catch the attention of the aloof but ominous True Men. A moment later Charls relaxed. He recognized the stride of his parents. He turned to Oda. "Hear that?" She smiled. "It's father and mother. They must have heard that big thought the girl had." Charls watched with pride as his parents approached. It was a welljustified pride. Bil and Kae both appeared, as they were, sensitive and intelligent. In addition, their fur was well-matched. Bil's beautiful caramel coat had spots of white and black only along his cheekbones and nose and at the tip of his tail; Kae was a uniform fawn-beige with which her beautiful green eyes made a striking contrast. "Are you both all right?" Bil asked as they approached. "Who is that? She looks like a True Man. Is she friendly? Has she hurt you? Was she the one who was doing all that violent thinking? We could feel it clear across the hillside." Oda burst into a giggle. "You ask as many questions as I do. Daddy." Charls said, "All we know is that a box came from the sky and that she was in it. You heard that shrieking noise as it came own first, didn't you?" Kae laughed. "Who didn't hear it?" "The box hit right over there. You can see where it hurt the hillside." The area where the box had landed was black and forbidding. Around it the fallen Fighting Trees gleamed in tangled confusion on the ground. Bil looked at Juli and shook his head. "I don't see why she wasn't killed if it hit that hard." Juli began to speak in words again, but at last she seemed to understand. Shouting her language would not help any. Instead, she thought: Please, dear little puppy dogs. Please help me. Please understand me. Bil kept his dignity but he noticed with dismay that his tail was wagging of its own accord. He realized that the urge was uncontrollable. He felt both resentful and happy as he thought back at her; Of course we understand you and we'll try to help you; but please don't think your thoughts so hard or so recklessly. They hurt our minds when they are so bright and sharp. Juli tried to turn down the intensity of her thought. She pleaded: Take me to Germany. The four Unauthorized Men -- mother, father, daughter and son -- looked at each other. They had no idea of what a Germany might be. It was Oda who turned to Juli, girl to girl, and spieked: Think some Germany at us so we can know what it is. There came forth from the strange girl images of unbelievable beauty. Picture after clear picture emerged until the little family was almost blinded by the magnificence of the display. They saw the whole ancient world come to life. Cities stood bright in a green-encircled world. There were no aloof and languid True Men; instead, all the people they saw in Juli's mind resembled Juli herself. They were vital, sometimes fierce, forceful; they were tall, erect, long-fingered; and of course they did not have the tails of the Unauthorized Men. The children were pretty beyond belief. The most amazing thing about this world was the tremendous number of people in it. The people were thicker than the birds of passage, more crowded than the salmon at running time. Chads had thought himself a well-traveled young man. He had met at least four dozen other persons besides his own family, and he had seen True Men in the skies above him hundreds of times. He had often witnessed the intolerable brightness of cities and had walked around them more than once until, each time, he had been firmly assured that there was no way for him to enter. He thought his valley a good one. In a few more years he would be old enough to visit the nearby valleys and to look for a wife for himself. But this vision that came from Juli's mind... he could not imagine how so many people could live together. How could they all greet each other in the mornings? How could they all agree on anything? How could they all ever become still enough to be aware of each other's presence, each other's needs? There came a particularly strong, bright image. Small-wheeled boxes were hurtling people at insensate speed up and down smooth, smooth roads. "So that's what roads were for," he gasped to himself. Among the people he saw many n dogs. They were nothing like the tl creatures of Charls' world. They tl were not the long, otter-like animals t whom the Unauthorized Men de spised as lowly kindred; nor were v they like the Unauthorized Men  themselves, and they were certainly not like those modified animals who t in appearance were almost indistinh guishable from True Men. No, c these dogs of Juli's world were f bounding, happy creatures with few responsibilities. There seemed to be d an affectionate relationship between them and the people there. They li shared laughter and sorrow. S Juli had closed her eyes as she tl tried to bring Germany to them, s Concentrating hard, now she s brought into the picture of beauty h and happiness something else -- v fearful flying things that dropped h fire; thunder and noise; a most unb pleasant face, a screaming face with tl a dab of black fur above the mouth; b a licking of flame in the night; a a thunder of death machines. Across tl this thunder there was the image of C Juli and two other girls who resembled her; they were moving with a e man, obviously their father, toward b three iron boxes that looked like the f one Juli had landed in. Then there a was darkness. a That was Germany. a Juli slumped to the ground. Gently the four of them probed at her mind. To them it was like a b diamond, as clear and transparent as li a sunlit pool in the forest, but the b light it shot back to them was not a h reflection. It was rich and bright h and dazzling. Now that it was at rest, they could see deeply into it. tl They saw hunger, hurt and lonelili ness. They saw a loneliness so great that each of them in turn tried to think of a way to assuage it. Love, they thought, what she needs is love, and her own kind. But where would they find an Ancient One? Would a True Man answer? Bil said, "There's only one thing to do. We've got to take her to the house of the Wise Old Bear. He has communications with the True Men." Oda cried out, "But she hasn't done anything wrong!" Her father looked at her. "Darling, we don't know what this is. She's an Ancient One come back to this world after a sleep in space itself. It's been thousands of years since her world lived; I think she's beginning to realize that, and that's what put her into shock. We need help. Our people may once have been dogs, and that's what she thinks we are. We can't let that bother us. But she needs a house, and the only unauthorized house that I know of belongs to the Wise Old Bear." Charls looked at his parents. His eyes were troubled. "What is this business about dogs? Is that why we feel so mixed up when we think about True Men? I'm confused about her too. Do yousuppose I really want to belong to her?" "Not really," his father said. "That's just a feeling left over from long, long ago. We lead our own lives now. But this girl, she's too big a problem for us. We will take her to the Bear. At least he has a house." Juli was still unconscious, and to them she was so big. Each took a limb and with difficulty they managed to carry her. Within less than a tenth of a night they had reached the house of the wise Old Bear. Fortunately they had not met any manshonyaggers or other dangers of the forest. At the door of the house of the Wise Old Bear they gently laid the girl on the ground. Bil shouted, "Bear, Bear, come out, come out!" "Who is there?" a voice boomed from within. "Bil and his family. We have an Ancient with us. Come out. We need your help." The light that had been streaming from the doorway with a yellow glare was suddenly reduced to endurable proportions as the immense bulk of the Bear loomed in the doorway before them. He pulled his spectacles from a case attached to his belt, put them on his nose and squinted at Juli. "Bless my soul," he said. "Another one. Where on earth did you get an ancient girl?" Pompous but happy, Charls spoke up, "She came out of the sky in a screaming box." The Bear nodded wisely. Then Bil spoke up. "You said 'another one.' What did you mean?" The Bear winced slightly. "Forget I said that," he told them. "I forgot for a moment that you are not True Men. Please forget it." Bil said, "You mean it's something Unauthorized Men are not supposed to know about?" The Bear nodded unhappily. Understanding, Bil said, "Well, if you can ever tell us about it, will you, please?" "Of course," the Bear replied. "And now I think I'd better call my housekeeper to take care of her. Herkie, Herkie, come here." A blonde woman appeared, peering anxiously. Obviously there was something the matter with her blue eyes but she seemed to be functioning adequately. Bil backed away from the door. "That's an Experimental person," he said. "That's a cat!" The Bear was completely uninterested. "So it is, but you can see that her eyes are imperfect. That's why she ir allowed to be my housekeeper and why her name isn't prefaced by a C'. " Bil understood. The errors True Men made in trying to breed Underpersons were often destroyed but occasionally one was allowed to live if it seemed able tQ-fun,con at some necessary task. The Bearfiad connections with True Men. If he needed a housekeeper, an imperfect modified .animal provided an ideal solution. Herkie bent over Juli's still form. She peered in puzzlement at Juli's face. Then she looked up at the Bear. "I don't understand," she said. "I don't see how it could be." "Later," the Bear said. "When we are alone." Herkie strained to see into the darkness and perceived the dog family. "Oh, I see," she said. Bil and Charls were embarrassed. Oda and Kae did not seem to notice the slight. Bil waved his hand. "Well, good-by. I hope you can take care of her all right." "Thank you for bringing her," the Bear said. "The True Men will probably give you a reward."  In spite of himself, Bil felt his tail beginning to wag again. "Will we ever see her again?" Oda asked. "Do you think weTl ever see her again? I love her, I love her...V "Perhaps," her father answered. "She will know who saved her, and I think she will seek us out."    Juli awoke slowly. Where am I? What is this place? She had a partial return of memory. The puppydog people. Where are they? She felt conscious of someone at her bedside. She looked up into clouded blue eyes staring anxiously into hers. "I'm Herkie," the woman said. "I'm the Bear's housekeeper." Juli felt as though she had awakened in a mental hospital. It was all so impossible. Puppy-dog people and now a bear? And surely the blonde woman with the bad eyes was not a human? Herkie patted her hand. "Of course you're confused," she said. Juli was taken aback. "You're talking! You're talking and I understand you. You're talking German. We're not just communicating telepathically." "Of course," Herkie said. "I speak true Doych. It's one of the Bear's favorite languages." "One of..." Juli broke off. "It's all so confusing." Again Herkie patted her hand. "Of course it is." Juli lay back and looked at the ceiling. I must be in some other world. No, Herkie thought at her, but you've been gone a long time. The Bear came into the room. "Feeling better?" he asked. Juli merely nodded. "In the morning we will decide what to do," he said. "I have some connections with the True Men, and I think that we had best take you to the Vomacht." Juli sat up as if hit by a bolt of lightning. "What do you mean, 'the Vomacht'? That is my name, Vom Acht!" "I thought it might be," the Bear said. Herkie, peering at her from the bedside, nodded wisely. "I was sure of it," she said. Then, "I think you need some good hot soup and a rest. In the morning it will all straighten itself out." The tiredness of years seemed to settle in Juli's bones. I do need to rest she thought. I need to get things sorted out in my mind. So suddenly that she did not even have a chance to be startled by it, she was asleep. Heiide and the Bear studied her face. "There's a remarkable resemblance," the Bear said. Herkie nodded in agreement. "It's the time differential I'm worried about. Do you think that will be important?" "I don't know," Herkie replied. "Since I'm not human, I don't know what bothers people." She straightened and stretched to her full length. "I know!" she said. do know! She must have been sent here to help us with the rebellion!" "No," the Bear said. "She has been too long in Time for her arrival to have been intentional. It is true that she may help us, she may very well help us, but I think that her arrival at this particular time and place is fortuitous rather than planned." "Sometimes I think I understand a particular human mind," Herkie said, "but I'm sure you're correct. I can hardly wait for them to meet each other!" "Yes," he said, "although I'm afraid that it's going to be rather traumatic. In more than one way."    When Juli awoke after her deep sleep, she found a thoughtful Herkie awaiting her. Juli stretched and her mind, still uncontrolled, asked: Are you really a cal? Yes, Herkie thought back at her. But you are going to have to discipline that thought process of yours. Everyone can read your thoughts. I'm sorry, Juli spieked, but I'm just not used to all this telepathy. "I know." Herkie had switched to German. "I still don't understand how you know German," Juli said. "It's rather a long story. I learned it from the Bear. I think, perhaps, you had better ask him how he learned it." "Wait a minute. I'm beginning to remember what happened before I fell asleep. The Bear mentioned my name, my family name, Vom Acht." Herkie switched the subject. "We've made you some clothes. We tried to copy the style of those you had on, but they were coming to pieces so badly that we are not sure we got the new ones right." She looked so anxious to please that Juli reassured her immediately. If they fit. I'm sure they'll be Just fine. Oh, they fit, Herkie spieked. We measured you. Now, qfter your bath and meal, you will dress and the Bear and I will take you to the city. Underpersons like me are not ordinarily allowed in the city, but this time I think that an exception will be made. There was something sweet and wise in the face with the clouded blue eyes. Juli felt that Herkie was her friend.  am, Herkie spieked, and Juli was once more made aware that she must learn to control her thoughts, or at least the broadcasting of them. You'll learn, Herkie spieked. It just takes some practice. They approached the city on foot, the Bear leading the way, Juli behind him and Herkie bringing up the rear. They encountered two manshonyaggers along the road but the Bear spoke true Doych to them from some distance and they turned silently and slunk away. Juli was fascinated. "What are they?" she asked. "Their real name is 'Menschenj'ager' and they were invented to kill people whose ideas did not accord with those of the Sixth German Reich. But there are very few of them still functional, and so many of us have learned Doych since... since..." "Yes?" "Since an event you'll find out about in the city. Now let's get on with it." They neared the city wall and Juli became conscious of a buzzing sound, and of a powerful force that excluded them. Her hair stood on end and she felt a tingling sensation of mild electrical shock. Obviously there was a force field around the city. "What is it?" she cried out. "Just a static charge to keep back the Wild," the Bear said soothingly. "Don't worry, I have a damper for it." He held up a small device in his right paw, pushed a button on it, and immediately a corridor opened before them. When they reached the city wall, the Bear felt carefully along the upper ridge. At a certain point he paused, then reached for a strangelooking key that hung from a cord around his neck. Juli could see no difference between this section of the wall and any other but the Bear inserted his key into a notch he had located and a section of the barrier swung up. The three passed through and silently the wall fell back into position. The Bear hurried them along dusty streets. Juli saw a number of people but most of them seemed to her aloof, austere, uncaring. They bore little resemblance to the lusty Prussians she remembered. Eventually they arrived at the door of a large building that looked old and imposing. Beside the door there was an inscription. The Bear was hurrying them through the entryway. Oh. please, Mr. Bear, may I stop to read it? Just plain Bear is all right. And yes, of course you may. It may even help you to understand some of the things that you are going to learn today. The inscription was in German, and it was in the form of a poem. It looked as though it had been carved hundreds of years earlier (as indeed it had. Juli could not know that at this time). Herkie looked up. "Oh, the first..." "Hush." said the Bear. Juli read the poem to herself silently. Youth Fading, fading, going Flowing Like life blood from your veins... Little remains. The glorious face Erased, Replaced By one which mirrors tears. The years Gone by. Oh, Youth, Linger yet a while ! Smile Still upon us The wretched few Who worship You... "I don't understand it," said Juli. "You will," the Bear said. "Unfortunately, you will"    An official in a bright green robe trimmed with gold approached. "We have not had the honor of your presence for some time," he the queen of the afternoon said respectfully to the Bear. "I've been rather busy," the Bear replied. "But how is she?" Juli realized with a start that the conversation was not telepathic but was in German. How do all these people know German? She unthinkingly flung her thought abroad. Hush came back the simultaneous warnings from Herkie and the Bear. Juli felt thoroughly admonished. "I'm sorry," she almost whispered. "I don't know how I'll ever learn the trick." Herkie was immediately sympathetic. "It is a trick," she said, "but you're already better at it than you were when you arrived. You just have to be careful. You can't fling your thoughts everywhere." "Never mind that now," the Bear said and he turned to the green-uniformed official. "Is it possible to have an audience? I think it's important." "You may have to wait a little while," the official said, "but I'm sure she will always grant audience to you." The Bear looked a little smug at that, Juli noticed. They sat down to wait and from time to time Herkie patted Juli's arm reassuringly. it   It was actually not long before the official reappeared. "She will see you now," he said. He led them through a long corridor to a large room at the end of which was a dais with a chair. "Not quite a throne," Juli thought to herself. Behind the chair stood a young and handsome male, a True Man. In the chair sat a woman, old, old beyond imagining; her wrinkled hands were claws, but in the haggard, wrinkled face one could still detect some trace of beauty. Juli's sense of bewilderment grew. She knew this person, but she did not. Her sense of orientation, already splintered by the events of the past "day," almost disintegrated. She grabbed Herkie 's hand as if it were the only familiar element in a world she could not understand. The woman spoke. Her voice was old and weak, but she spoke in German. "So, Juli, you have come. Laird told me he was bringing you in. I am so happy to see you, and to know that you are all right." Juli's senses reeled. She knew, she knew, but she could not believe. Too much had changed, too much had happened, in the short time that she had returned to life. Gasping, tentatively she whispered, "Carlotta?" Her sister nodded. "Yes, Juli, it is I. And this is my husband, Laird." She nodded her head toward the handsome young man behind her. "He brought me in about two hundred years ago, but unfortunately as an Ancient I cannot undergo the rejuvenation process that has been developed since we left the earth." Juli began to sob. "Oh, Carlotta, it's all so hard to believe. And you're so old! You were only two years older than I." "Darling, I've had two hundred years of bliss. They couldn't rejuvenate me but they could at least prolong my life. Now, it is not from purely altruistic purposes that I have had Laird bring you in. Karla is still out there, but since she was only sixteen when she was suspended, we thought that you would be better suited to the task. "In fact, we really didn't do you any favor in bringing you in because now you too will begin to age. But to be forever in suspended animation is not any life either." "Of course not," Juli said. "And anyway, if I had lived a normal life, I would have aged." Carlotta leaned over to kiss her. "At least we're together at last," Juli sighed. "Darling," Carlotta said, "it is wonderful to have even this little time together. You see. I'm dying. There comes a point when, with all technology, the scientists cannot keep a body alive. And we need help, help with the rebellion." "The rebellion?" "Yes. Against the Jwindz. They were Chinesians, (rfiilosophers. Now they are the true rulers of the Earth, and we -- so they believe -- are merely their instrumentality, their police force. Their power is not over the body of man but over the soul. That is almost a forgotten word here now. Say 'mind' instead. They call themselves the Perfect Ones and have sought to remake man in their own image. But they are remote, removed, bloodless. "They have recruited persons of all races, but man has not responded well. Only a handful aspire to the kind of esthetic perfection the Jwindz have as their goal. So the Jwindz have resorted to their knowledge of drugs and opiates to turn True Man into a tranquilized. indifferent people -- to make it easy to govern them, to control everything that they do. Unfortunately some of our," she nodded toward Laird, "descendants have joined them. "We need you, Juli. Since I came back from the ancient world, Laird and I have done what we could to free True Men from this form of slavery, because it is slavery. It is a lack of vitality, a lack of meaning to life. We used to have a word for it in the old days. Remember? 'Zombie.' " "What do you want me to do?" During the entire conversation between the sisters, Herkie, the Bear and Laird had remained silent. Now Laird spoke. "Until Carlotta came to us, we were drifting along, uncaring, in the power of the Jwindz. We did not know what it was, really, to be a human being. We felt that our only purpose in life was to serve the Jwindz: If they were perfect, what other function could we perform? It was our duty to serve their needs -- to maintain and guard the cities, to keep out the Wild, to administer the drugs. Some of the Instrumentality even preyed upon the Unauthorized Men, the Unforgiven and, as a last resort, the True Men, to supply their laboratories. "But now many of us no longer believe in the perfection of the Jwindz -- or perhaps we have come to believe in something more than human perfection. We have been serving men. We should have been serving mankind. "Now we feel that the time has come to put an end to this tyranny. Carlotta and I have allies among some of our descendants and among some of the Unforgiven and, as you have seen, even among the Unauthorized Men and other animalderived persons. I think there must still be a connection from the time that human beings had 'pets' in the old days." Juli looked about her and realized that Herkie was quietly purring. "Yes," she said, "I see what you mean." Laird continued, "What we want to do is to set up a real Instrumentality -- not a force for the service of the Jwindz, but one for the service of man. We are determined that never again shall man betray his own image. We will establish the Instrumentality of Mankind, one benevolent but not manipulative." Carlotta nodded slowly. Her aged face showed concern. "I will die in a few days and you will marry Laird. You will be the new Vomacht. With any luck by the time you are as old as I am, your descendants and some of mine should have freed the earth from the power of the Jwindz." Juli again felt completely disoriented. "I'm to marry your husband?" Again Laird spoke. "I have loved your sister well for more than two hundred years. I shall love you too, because you are so much like her. Do not think that I am being disloyal. She and I have discussed this for some time before I brought you in. If she were not dying, I should continue to be faithful to her. But now we need you." Carlotta concurred. "It is true. He has made me very happy, and he will make you happy too, through all the years of your life. Juli, I could not have had you brought in had I not had some plan for your future. You could never be happy with one of those drugged, tranquilized True Men. Trust me in this, please. It is the only thing to do." Tears formed in Juli's eyes. "To have found you at last and then to lose you after such a short time..." Hericie patted her hand and Juli looked up to see sympathetic tears in her clouded blue eyes.    It was three days later that Carlotta died. She died with a smile on her face and Laird and Juli each holding one of her hands. She spoke at the last and pressed their hands. "I'll see you later. Out among the stars." Juli wept uncontrollably. They postponed the wedding ceremony for seven days of mourning. For once the city gates were opened and the static fields of electricity cut off because even the Jwindz could not control the feelings of the animal-derived persons, the Unauthorized Men, even some of the True Men, toward this woman who had come to them from an ancient world. The Bear was particularly mournful. "I was the one who found her, you know, after you brought her in," he said to Laird. "I remember." So that's what the Bear meant hen he said 'another one,' Bil said. Charls and Oda, Bil and Kae were among the mourners. Juli saw them and thought, my dear little puppy-dog people, but this time the thought was loving and not contemptuous. Oda's tail wagged. I've thought of something, she spieked at Juli. Can you meet me down by the cenote in two days' time? Yes, thought Juli, proud of herself at being sure, for the first time, that her thought had gone only to the person for whom it was meant. She knew that she had been successful when she glanced at Laird's face and saw that he had not read her thought. When she met Oda at the cenote, Juli did not know what was expected of her -- nor what she herself expected. You must be very careful in directing your thoughts, Oda spieked. We never know when some of the Jwindz are overhead. I think I'm learning, Juli spieked. Oda nodded. What my idea was, it was to make use of the Fighting Trees. The True Men are still afraid of the sickness. But, you see, I know that the sickness is gone. I got so tired of brushing past the trees and always worrying about it that I decided to test it out, and I ate a pod from one of the Fighting Trees -- and nothing happened. I've never been afraid of them since. So if we met there, we rebels, in a grove of the Fighting Trees, the officials of the Jwindz would never find us. They'd be afraid to hunt for us there. Juli's face lightened. That's a very good idea. May I consult with Laird? the queen of the afternoon Certainly. He has always been one of us. And your sister was too. Juli was sad again. I feel so alone. No. You have Laird, and you have us. and the Bear, and his housekeeper. And in time there will be others. Now we must part. Juli returned from her meeting with Oda at the cenote to find Laird deep in conference with the Bear and a young man who bore a singular resemblance to Laird -- and to the youthful Carlotta that Juli retnembered. Laird smiled at her. "This is your great-nephew," he said, "my grandson." Juli's perspective of time and age received another jolt. Laird appeared to be no older than his grandson. How do I fit in to this? she wondered, and accidentally broadcast the thought. "I know that all of this must be difficult for you to comprehend," Laird said, ting her hand. "Carlotta had some difficulty in adjusting too. But try, please try, my dear, because we need you so desperately and I, I particularly, have already become dependent on you. I could not face Carlotta's loss without you." Juli felt a vague sense of embarrassment. "What is my -- " she could not say it -- "what is his name?" "I beg your pardon. He is named Joachim for your uncle." Joachim smiled and then gave her a brief hug. "You see," he said, "the reason we need your help with the rebellion is the cult that was built up around your sister, my grandmother. When she returned to earth as an Ancient One, there was a kind of cult set up about her. That is why she was The Vomacht' and why you must also be. It is a rallying point for those of us who oppose the power of the Jwindz. Grandmother Carlotta had a minikingdom here, and even the Jwindz could not keep people from coming to pay her court. You must have realized that at the mourning session for her. ' ' "Yes, I could see that she had a great deal of respect from many kinds of people. If she was in favor of a rebellion, I am sure she must have been correct. Carlotta was always a most upright person. And now I must tell you about the plan that Oda proposes." She proceeded to do so. "It might work," the Bear said. "True Men have been very careful about observing the tambu of the Fighting Trees. In fact, I may even have an improvement on Oda's idea." He began to get excited and dropped his spectacles. Joachim picked them up. "Bear," he said, "you always do that when you're excited." "I think it means I have a good idea," the Bear said. "Look, why don't we use the manshonyaggers?" The others looked at him in bewilderment and Laird said slowly, "I think I may see what you're getting at. The manshonyaggers, although there are not many of them left, respond only to German and -- " "And the leaders of the Jwindz are Chinesian, too proud to have learned another language," the Bear broke in, smiling. "Yes. So if we establish headquarters in the Fighting Trees and let it be known that the new Vomacht is there -- " "And surround the grove with manshonyaggers -- ' ' They were breaking in upon each other as the idea began to take shape. The excitement grew. "I think it will work," Laird said. "I think so too," Joachim reassured him. "I will get together the Band of Cousins and after you're established in the Fighting Trees, we'll make a raid on the drug center and bring the tranquilizers to the grove, where we can destroy them." "The Band of Cousins?" Juli asked. "Carlotta's and my descendants who have not joined the Instrumentality of the Jwindz," Laird told her. "Why would any of them have joined?" "Laird shrugged. "Greed, power, all kinds of very human motives. Even an illusion of physical immortality. We tried to give our children ideals but the corruption of power is very great. You must know that." Remembering a howling, hateful face with a black mustache above the mouth, a face from her own time and place, Juli nodded.    Herkie and the Bear, Chari s and Oda, Bil and Kae accompanied Juli into the grove of Fighting Trees. At first Bil and Kae were reluctant. It was only after Oda's confession of having eaten a pod that they agreed to go, and then Bil's reaction was that of a typical father. "How could you take such a chance?" he asked Oda. Her eyes were bright and her tail wagged furiously. "I just had to," she said. He glanced at Herkie. "Now if she had done it... Herkie drew herself up to her full height. "I think that the relationship of curiosity and cats has, perhaps, been a little exaggerated," she said. "Actually, we're generally rather careful." "I didn't mean to be disrespectful," Bil said hastily, and Herkie saw his tail droop. "It's a common misconception," she said kindly and Bil's tail straightened. When they reached the center of the grove, they spread a picnic and gathered around. Juli was hungry. In the city she had been offered synthetic food, no doubt healthful and full of vitamins but not satisfying to the appetite of an Ancient Russian girl. The animal-derived persons had brought real food and Juli ate happily. The Bear, in particular, noticed her enjoyment. "You see," he said, "that's how they did it." "Did what?" asked Juli, her mouth full of bread. "How they drugged the majority of True Men. True Mdn were so accustomed to living on synthetic foodstuffs that when the Jwindz introduced tranquilizers into the synthetics. True Men never knew the difference. I hope that if the Band of Cousins succeeds in capturing the drug supply, the withdrawal symptoms for the True Men will not be too severe." the queen of the afternoon Bil looked up. "That's something we should consider," he said. "If there are severe withdrawal symptoms, a number of the True Men may be tempted to join the Jwindz in an attempt to recover the drugs." "file Bear nodded. "That's what I was thinking," he said.    It was several days before Laird, Joachim and the Band of Cousins joined them. By this time Juli had become almost accustomed to the daylight darkness under the thick leaves and branches of the Fighting Trees, and the soft-glowing illumination at night. Laird greeted her affectionately. "I have missed you," he said simply. "Already I have grown very attached to you." Juli blushed and changed the subject. "Did you -- or, rather, the Band of Cousins -- succeed?" "Oh, yes. There was very little difficulty. The officials of the Jwindz had grown quite careless since they have had the minds of most True Men under their control for generations. It was only a matter of Joachim's pretending to be tranquilized, and he had free access to the drug room. Over a period of days he managed to transfer the entire supply to the Cousins and to substitute placebos. I wonder when that will be discovered." "As soon as the first withdrawal symptoms occur, I should think," Joachim ventured. Something that had been nagging at the back of Juli's mind surfaced. "You have yourgrawJson here, and the Band of Cousins. But where are your and Carlotta's own children? Obviously you had some." His face saddened. "Of course. But since they were half-Ancient, they could not only not be rejuvenated, but the combination of the chemistry made it such that their lives could not even be prolonged. They all died in their seventies and eighties. It was a great sadness to Carlotta and me. You too, my dear, if we have children, must be prepared for that. By the time of the next generation, however, the Ancient blood is sufficiently diluted that rejuvenation may take place. Joachim is a hundred and fifty years old." "And you? and you?" she said. He looked at her. "This is very hard on you, isn't it? I'm over three hundred years old." Juli could not disbelieve but neither could she quite comprehend. Laird was so handsome and youthful; Carlotta had been so old. She tried to shake the cobwebs from her mind. "What do we do with the tranquilizers now that we have them?" Oda had approached at the latter part of the conversation. Her eyes sparkled and her tail wagged madly. "I have an idea," she announced. "I hope it's as good as your last one," Laird said. "I hope so too. Look, why don't we just feed the tranquilizers back to the officials? The Jwindz probably will never notice. Then we won't have to worry about fighting them. They could just gradually die off; or maybe... do you think... we could send them out into space? To another planet?" Laird nodded slowly. "You do have good ideas. Yes, to feed the tranquilizers back to them... but how?" "We work well together," the Bear said, indicating Oda. "She has an idea and it triggers another one in my mind." Carefully he put on his spectacles. "I have here a map of the terrain in this vicinity. Except for the cenote there is no water for many kilometers in any direction. If we dropped the tranquilizers -- all of them -- into the cenote, and then if one of the Cousins could prepare the synthetic food of the Jwindz's officials so it was very spicy -- I think that the problem would be solved." Laird said, "We do have one of the Cousins who has infiltrated the Jwindz. But what would induce them to drink the water?" Charls had joined the group. "I have heard," he said, "of an ancient spice people used to like which eventually produced thirst. It used to be found in the oceans, before they were filled with grass. But some of it remains on the banks of the sea. I believe that it was called 'salt.' " "Now that you mention it. I've heard of that too," the Bear nodded wisely. "So that is what we need to do. 'Salt.' We introduce it into their food, then we entice them to the grove with the knowledge that the new Vomacht is here together with the heart of a rebellion. It's risky but I think it's the best idea, or combination of ideas, yet." Laird agreed. "It's as you say, risky, but it may work, and they're not likely to execute any of us if it doesn't. They'll Just tranquilize us. I think that we have a better than even chance of winning. And if True Man is not revitalized, not freed from this bondage of tranquility and apathy, I believe that the entire breed will be extinguished within a few hundred years. They have come to the point that they care about nothing."    All worlds know how the plan was carried out. It was exactly as the Bear had foretold. Thethirsty officials of the Jwindz, their food highly salted, drank eagerly from the water of the cenote and were quickly tranquilized. They put up no opposition to the members of the rebellion who soon thereafter emerged from the shelter of the Fighting Trees. Joachim was sad. "One of my brothers had Joined them," he said. Laird laid a comforting arm across his shoulder. "Well, he's only tranquilized. We may be able to help him as he comes out of it." "Perhaps, but it violates all my principles." "Don't be too high-minded, Joachim. Principles are fine, but there is such a thing as rehabilitation." And this was the way that the Instrumentality of Mankind was established. In time it would govern many worlds. Juli, by virtue of being the Vomacht, became one of the first Ladies of the Instrumentality. Laird, as her husband, was one of the first Lords. Juli lived to see some of her descendants among the first great Scanners in Space. She was very proud of them, and she was very old. Laird, of course, was as young as ever. All of her animaldescended friends had long since died. She missed them, although Laird was ever faithful. At last, so old that she had difficulty in moving, Juli called Laird to her. She looked up into his handsome face. "My darling, you have made me very happy, just as you did Carlotta. But now I am old and, I think, dying. You are still so young and vital. I wish it were possible for me to undergo the rejuvenation, but since it isn't possible, I think we should call in Karla." He responded so rapidly that her feelings were somewhat hurt. "Yes, I think that we should call in Karla." He turned away from her momentarily. She said, with a hint of tears in her voice, "I know that you will make her happy and love her very much." His silence continued for a moment before" he turned back to her. She saw suddenly that there were lines in his face, lines she had never seen before. "What is happening to you?" she asked. "My darling and last love," he said, "I will be losing you twice. I cannot bear it. I have asked the physician for medicine to counteract the rejuvenation. In an hour I shall be as old as you. We are going together. And somewhere out there we will meet Carlotta and we will hold hands, the three of us, among the stars. Karla will find her own man and her own fate." Together they sat and watched the descent of Karla's spacecraft.  In Soviet science fiction, the Golden Age was the #'s -- and Olga Larionova one of its stars. Translator Pat McGuire has worked with the Macmillan Russian sf program. An unusual tale of an artist's responsibility. It was already past five. Astor walked through the emptying corridors of the Insititute -- and the further behind he left the glass doors of the laboratories and workshops, the further he abandoned everyday thoughts, all that made him merely a physicist. Now he had only to proceed another twenty paces, descend the old-fashioned staircase in the entryway and go down from the Institute and be twenty minutes by air from the Writer's Union. By the time he got home, he would have ceased to be a physicist because evening was coming on. Evenings he was not just Astor Elamit but the World-Famous Writer. He walked without hurrying although today of all days he really should hurry. Instead, he looked into every doorway and sometimes entered a room and looked around the cabinets and instruments. He was relaxing. This was a small break, a respite, a breathing space between the two states in which he alternated every day. It was Just that way -- "states", and not "professions." These were the minutes when he allowed himself to be neither one thing nor the other but simply a tired human being, free of everything. As always, he spent those minutes seeking out Rika; he knew she had not yet left the building. He found her sitting on the windowsill in the small computer room. She sat with her chin resting on her knees, sad and disheveled, and it was clear that Astor would never manage to handle all her small, girlish troubles. He went over to her. He wanted to say something but he could not even imagine why he had searched her out. It must be that the pleasure of seeing her was itself enough for him. But now as he looked at her, he could not discern within himself so much as a hint of pleasure. As usual, it was simply not there. What did they have in common, the solid man of science and the towheaded, pint-sized, careless lab assistant? He had often wondered what evil spirit drove him to seek her out, to grope torturously for absurd alien phrases, never knowing how to begin nor -- most awful of all -- how and when to finish. Still, he had to search for her, had to speak to her, had to look at her... "Why are you still here?" he asked in muffled voice. "You know the building's power transmission is off." She looked down at him from the height of the windowsill and answered briefly, "I'm not drawing power." Now  wonder, thought Astor, what  am going to do with this scene tonight when all this will happen not in life but in my story. When I will no longer be myself but someone younger and more likeable and without that stupid name Astor-it sounds like an aristocratic dog-but instead. Star, who looks like the brave captain from an old trashy novel and who is endowed with every blessing  myself lack. I've already taken care of the girl -- i changed her from skinny, towheaded Rika into Regina, the golden-blonde beauty. But what will I do with this dialogue? Can  let her be so impertinent in my story? "Get along home," he ordered sternly. "Assistants are not supposed to remain in the building without the supervision of senior staff." "So supervise me," she said, drawing her knees up and sliding over to free a bit of windowsill for him. "Sit down alongside me and supervise." Well, my dear, he thought while continuing to stand there, this scene I'll certainly save. Without fail my Regina will say, "So supervise me..." And she'll bare her soul on the windowsill . But the difference will be that I, or rather not  but Stor, will indeed sit down next to her-and what will come next, oh my, what will come next... It's trite enough to make you sick, to make your hair curl, but I'll write it anyhow. To hell with literature. "Listen, young lady," he said, sensing beforehand that he would say the wrong thing, "I've advised you to change your profession. Don't waste your time; you'll never make a good physicist. You don't have that sort of personality." "I don't plan to be a good physicist," she said without embarrassment. "I'm only starting with that. Afterward I'm going to become a Real Writer, like you." He looked at her with surprise. At the Institute he never spoke of his second profession -- he corrected himself -- of his second state. "That is much harder than being a physicist," he said slowly. "A person can write for a whole lifetime and still not become a Real Writer." "So I'll write all my life." "But first you have to learn to write on paper. Writing on paper is torture. You know so much about your protagonist that you can no longer tell whether you have managed to imply, to suggest, everything that will not fit into the printed words. The connotations are there because everything that you were thinking while you wrote your novel, or even your little short story, is always inside you. When you re-read what you wrote, a thousand associations spring up in your head. Whether you wish it or not, they create the interlacing of sounds, smells, sensations and desires that turn the written word into living flesh. But all this happens only for you. How can you tell whether it works for the average reader? "And even to yourself your own stuff can sound entirely different, depending on whether it's handwritten or typed or in print. Just try to tell where you came out sounding human and where you got nowhere. You write and write, tortured by what you haven't managed to say, and one fine day you decide to chuck the whole damned business because it's obvious that nothing is ever going to come of it, and then -- out of the blue -- there's a decision by the Council of the Writers' Union that you've earned the status of a Real Writer. And then you stop writing on paper." "I want to be just like you," Rika repeated stubbornly. "I want to be a Real Writer and create living people." She's still just a girl, thought Astor. Still Just foolish. At a particular age they all want to fly to Uranus or go down into the magma or become a Real Writer. Usually this clears up before they're sixteen. Half of them do waste paper on verse or prose but only exceptions ever get beyond paper. Single exceptions on the entire planet. And the rest of them get past the phase. This girl will get past too, by herself, so there's no need to say anything. Trying to talk a girl out of the wish to be something is a thankless task-and a useless one to boot. "It's not enough Just to want to create living people." He heard his didactic tone with surprise. "That right is conferred by the Writer's Union and even then it is not for life. They give it and they can take it away. Furthermore, there are very few women among the Real Writers. Probably this is because women have the opportunity to create living people by another, more natural means, and this works out better for them." Rika blushed so vividly that it frightened Astor but she only elapsed her knees more firmly to her breast and waited until it seemed to her that the flush had disappeared -- in actual fact, it remained for another ten minutes -- and once again she repeated stubbornly and vehemently, "I want to and I will, I want to and I will. They will be my people, all mine. I will invent them, make them breathe, move, suffer. I'll make them live like humans. Do you understand? I'll teach them to live the way I want." "I understand," Astor said slowly. "I daydreamed about that myself. I dreamed about how my .characters would live. I dreamed about how I would bring them into the wide world. I knew before hand just how indecently I would love them. But like you, I forgot that sooner or later I would have to kill them." Instantly he regretted his words, not because of Rika but simply because he wanted to relax and not think about anything until he got home. Now he would not have even a few minutes' peace. The thing that had tormented him subconsciously during the day -- when he had his physics to think about -- had broken out into the open. All this must have shown on his face because Rika lowered her legs from the windowsill, jumped onto the floor and moved toward him. She had a strange, contorted expression on her face. "Ah, well," he said, and with a wave of his hand he walked past her, out of the Institute building, down the short pine lane toward home, where the dictaphone with the direct line to the Writers' Union studio was waiting for him. He wondered what he was going to do. His story had come to its natural ending -- and that ending meant the end of his Stor. An ending did not have to be "unhappy" -- "zap! zap!" or a dessert-spoonful of poison. It could be otherwise, like "So they were married and they all lived happily ever after." An ending was when the hero -- whom you had nursed and raised, whom you had stood on his feet and taught to work wonders you could not perform yourself -- went down the section of road you had marked off for him. A culmination, a denouement, and he was no longer your faithful subject. He no longer had anything to do with you. He was not yours any more. And so you walk for days and torture yourself before placing that final period, and you look for a way of making your hero, if not altogether immortal, then at least mortal in a human fashion. And you can't come up with an anwer and you put it off and put it off, until there comes a day like today, when you absolutely have to finish the story. Because a Real Writer has no business dying before he has settled the fate of his hero. This was harsh but fair. Otherwise everyone would try to leave his work unfinished .so his hero could live the illusory life of the Writers' Union studio, live jn a world of scenery and the projected three-dimensional figures that represented minor characters, but live even so. the defector It was a painful business, to cut off the existence of your own hero, and accordingly the opportunity to be a Real Writer was offered only to very courageous people. Astor did not put himself in this category but evidently others thought that he belonged there. He was right and they were wrong. His first story not written on paper, but instead played out by the living people he had created, had been winding down for a long time. But Astor did not have the nerve to end it. Today he had to do it because his laboratory had scheduled an experiment for tomorrow that could turn out rather badly. Astor would perform it himself -- he alone knew how great the risk was. Tomorrow could be it. So today he had to finish off Stor. Astor reached his doorstep and looked back. The bulk of the Institute building, surrounded by pines, towered like a snowy mountain. Probably Rika had climbed back onto the windowsill and was following him with her eyes. Towheaded Rika, whom he had to see once a day. Where had she learned about his second state? And then that "I want to create living people." In the studio you did not call your characters "living people." You said "specialized biorobots" or "material images." But of course they really were living people and they led lives that, although brief and preplanned, were damnably vivid and enviable. Like Stor. Astor sat down, drew the dictaphone over to himself and suddenly felt... a strange, improbable sensation of momentary omnipotence. Damn it all, you're a human being, by no means stupid, and more or less talented. A Real Writer, to boot. So find a way out, do the impossible, save your Stor. There is still time. And don't drag out all these love affairs, windowsills and golden curls. The important thing is Stor. Save him! He switched on the dictaphone. "As he left the Institute," he began, "Stor Elamit knew that never again, neither now nor later, would he ever see Regina." So much for that blonde bitch, he thought. I'll dematerialize her without mercy. "He walked quickly along the lane and when it ended at the door to his house, he turned and walked around to the landing platform. There, every evening from five o'clock on, a small sports mobile waited for him. He lifted the car into the air and twenty minutes later was at the place where the smoky wall around the Writers' Union studio rose up past the dense pines. The wall enclosed several hundred square kilometers and consequently it seemed to be quite straight so that from a distance of a few score paces, it was impossible to tell which way it curved -- toward the observer or away from him. The wall reached high into the sky and perpetual low clouds merged with it, making its outlines infinite. Here Stor had met with Regina for the first time and now he unconsciously sought out the very spot -- and began to wait, not knowing himself for what. He sat directly on the short, dry moss and occasionally brushed from his shoes the enormous winered ants that stubbornly forged straight over them." Astor thought a bit. Perhaps he should add something? He turned off the dictaphone. The paragraph was accepted and entered at the studio. Now, perhaps, the cybereditors had already decoded it and were preparing the needed props: a mobile for the flight and the old sets -- a duplicate of the road from the Institute to Astor's house, the landing platform behind the house and, later, the grove by the wall itself. This last would not be a set, but nature, so rare in the studio. It was time. Astor went out of the house, brought the car out of the garage and soared sharply upward. He headed not for the main studio building but for the wall, seeking precisely the place that shortly his Stor should approach from the other side. Astor did not like to fly at high altitude. The busy routes lay to one side and much higher and consequently he could peacefully look down through the transparent floor of the car and try to imagine what was happening at the studio. Yesterday he had left Stor in his laboratory. The dialogue with Regina stank. You could tell that it only killed time. The segment ended with Stor swearing a blue streak and driving Regina back to her working place. So right now, before the start of the new episode, the cybereditors were inserting into Stor's memory everything that he had "done" between the conversation with Regina and the time he left the Institute. Perhaps apparatus invisible to Stor had already started working and the take had begun. Perhaps Stor was obediently skirting around his house as Astor had dictated, then getting into his mobile. Perhaps the mobile was taking off -- not up into the sky as a real mobile would but only a few meters. Perhaps then a sequence taken earlier would be projected and it would seem to Stor that the ground was growing distant, that towns and groves were sweeping past, that roads and canals reached out in man-made straight lines. In fact, however, his prop mobile would move only a fewscore meters to the side, toward a place where real trees grew along the forbidden smoky wall. All this would take no longer than thirty seconds since it would not do to make a viewer watch a character sit in a car for a whole half-hour; but when Stor landed, he would have the feeling that the flight had lasted twenty minutes -- exactly as Astor had dictated. A red warning-light flashed on the dashboard. The radar had sensed the wall ahead. Astor began to land the mobile. The trees were so dense that only with difficulty did the car force its way down through the thick branches, finally hovering half a meter above the dry moss. Astor Elamit got out of the mobile. He had never before been close to the wall. Now it was right next to him, a mere three or four paces away, and the last trees grew almost on top of it. Astor took two steps and reached the wall itself. Casually he glancecL around -- then stopped dead in surprise. The final row of trees, those closest to the wall, were not whole. If you faced them from the direction of the mobile, they were ordinary trees, alive and three-dimensional. But by the wall itself it could be seen that these were only halves, cut off by an invisible vertical plane. The cuts were not Jjare but covered with a violet-colored substance. Astor could not resist tapping on this covering with his fingertips. There was a muffled sound, as if the half-trees were hollow. He stood still for a while, trying to understand, until he decided that these were prop trees, probably brought outside the studio because real, live vegetation might have gradually worked its way through the wall. But there was no time to consider the maner further. Over there, beyond the wall, Stor had already arrived since in the films shot in the studio, time flowed differently than it did in the lives of ordinary people. Sometimes the flow was slower and a half-hour in a character's life would be broken down into a multitude of minute episodes, seemingly insignificant if taken individually. But two forces -- a benign direction from without and a pitiless necessity from within -- threaded these bits together. These minutes of fictional life, their significance multiplied by the slowness of action, loomed close to the viewer as if magnified. But more often it was the other way around and the characters' years were handled in hours -- not encompassing all the trifles and details of those years but only those elementsthat accorded with the writer's task of fitting a whole life into the short time-slot allotted. And of course time, for the material characters -- There you go! thought Astor with surprise. How did that slip out? Up to this point  have been calling them "living people." And now, before this wall, I automatically use that indecent term, "material character." No. It's not so. They are living people, unusual only in the fact that they are entirely subject to their author. Or at that, not entirely. After all, think of all the times an author has the feeling that his character is breaking away from him, that the words and actions dictated for the character simply will not do. Sometimes an author even recognizes that his very own brainchild is forcing him to scrap the plot he has worked out with loving care because the character can act in only one way. So the author accepts this action and submits to the choice of his offspring. If the author, is sensitive of course. There is another type of writer who, in spite of everything, will force his characters to act unnaturally, out of keeping with their psychologies. Usually that's the last work by such an author. They take away his Real Writer status and forbid him use of the studio. Astor Elamit could not keep himself -- he would have lo forfeit his Real Writer status. He had no alternative. Stor was dearer to him than his own self. He had to save him, regardless of the price, regardless of whether Stor himself would really want it. He must do it. Astor took another step forward and was so close to the wall that even a half-step would have plunged his face into the jelly-like mass. His cheeks gave an occasional twitch as if it was an enormous smoke-colored Jellyfish hanging there before him. He must go into that unmoving haze. Once again must... But why, up to this moment, had he never asked himself if it were possible to do so? He had always taken it for granted. He knew a great deal about the studio. He knew everything -- or thought he knew everything -- about the ones who, by the will of the Real Writers, had received the right to life within the walls of this studio, the right to live a life infinitely more vivid, and filled the actions infinitely more consequential, than those of ordinary people. He had repeated this last point to himself hundreds of times. But what did he really know about the wall? He searched his memory. There was no corner where the knowledge would be hiding. He felt as if he had once known but now had forgotten. Nothing. Only the feeling that if he crossed to the other side, he would lose forever his right to create living people. And even that was not knowledge but only a guess. Why had he never known what the wall was? More important, could he, or dared he, walk into it? He hesitated, expecting that somewhere inside himself the answer would emerge. But it was nowhere to be found, and instead Astor became acutely aware' of a gap, an empty place without' memory, as if after a faint. Then he sensed a growing feeling of the impossibility, of the impermissibility, of what he was planning to do. Not allowing himself to be deflected, he stretched out his arms as do people groping through a fog and stepped into the smoky substance of the wall. For the first moment he could see nothing. Then the smoke cleared and he found himself in an incredible crystalline void. There was a fine silvery film under his feet -- and absolutely nothing around him. He had always thought that in such instances people must be horrified, but he felt only uncertainty. He walked forward quickly, still holding out his arms, before him and after a few paces he again encountered a zone of smoke that had arisen seemingly out of nowhere; and once again the smoke cleared and Astor knew with certainty that he was now on the other side. And that's all there is to it, he said to himself. Very simple. So a human being could in practice walk right through the wall, though he would be penalized for it by exclusion from all work. Well, that was no small price. But what about biorobots? Could they also go through the wall? Wouldn't it have been simpler to order Stor to come to him, out into the world of men? Somehow this had not occurred to" him earlier. Probably it was impossible. Probably. Again he felt strangely vague. There was a gap in his mind. Why did he not know such an important thing about his Stor? Thinking about Stor returned him to action. There was no time for contemplation. He was in the studio, on forbidden ground. Now the only things that mattered were speed and elusiveness. First he must find Stor. After that he could find out whether or not a biorobot could walk through the wall -- the wall he himself had come through without learning a thing about it. Astor Elamit moved forward, seeking the place that he had twice described in his story -- the gnarled stump. Stor was obliged to be sitting on it. He began to feel uneasy. Uneasy, indeed! He was scared, scared as he had been only in childhood, when you're plunging down into an abyss...and a rubber, invisible thing is breaking up in front of you...and you're falling and falling...and light, icy bubbles go through your body and rush upward, up to where you will never return because everything...everything...is ruined and it's all your fault... Astor realized that this was the wrong place. Suddenly he had no desire to search any further, to shout out, to call Stor's name. It was useless. The area of the studio was several hundred square kilometers. And where should he look? To the right? To the left? Why had he been so sure that he would enter at exactly the place where Stor would be waiting? How had he known that he had to come through the wall at precisely this spot? It was strange, but earlier he had been so confident. Now he felt nothing, precisely nothing, not even the desire to go back. Astor lurched. Trampling bushes, heedless of obstacles, he moved to one side, slipping over dry mold sprinkled with last year's pine needles. He stopped when he came out onto a bare, sunlit hill. Before him, with eyes half closed as if he were lazily sunning himself, sat an old man. That does it, thought Astor dismally. He had wandered into an area in use. They were shooting here -- it was probably some telling psychological moment, with all the invisible cameras in for the closeup. In fifteen minutes or so the take would be processed, at which time the cybereditor would automatically give the alarm since the sequence would show an extraneous person. And that would be it. Astor looked again at the old man. Would he be surprised to meet a stranger? Or suppose the old man was from another era? Maybe the story performed here was set fifty years ago. The old man's muted black suit gave no indication. But the elder simply watched Astor approach. He showed no hint of surprise but rather a certain satisfaction. He had been watching Astor right along but Astor had not realized it because of the other's half-closed eyes. Old people who are very tired often watch in that way. Astor moved still closer. "Have a seat," said the old man. He moved over slightly on the trunk of the fallen pine, although there had been enough room as it was. Astor slowly brought one leg over the trunk and sat astride. Reddish flakes of bark, warmed by the sun, showered down like the scales of a great golden fish. So this is what they're like, thought Astor as he forthrightly studied the old man. This is what they're like, the ones that we create with the dubious power of our imaginations. Later we see them as three-dimensional figures on the stereo screen, realistic as hell. But we never meet them like this, made out of flesh and blood. This is an intermediate process excised from the creative act. And probably it has to be that way because if an author had once met his hero the way I have run into this old man, he would be incapable of forcing him to live and think and feel and so on. To the technical personnel of the studio, to biodesigners, neuroplicators, psi-link operators, they remain simply theatrical biorobots -- remote-controlled, non-feedback anthropoid automata, how little we understand -- no, not "little"; there's no degree. Either you understand or you don't -- that how little we understand-no, not "little"; there's no degree. Either you understand or your odn't -- that however strange or painful it may be to us, these are really living people. The old man continued to look straight ahead, not glancing at Astor, and his small, old hands had their own special way of lying helplessly on his knees. He's even older than he looks, thought Astor. And things in general seem strange. For instance I've seen this old man somewhere before. Though why should that be strange? I couldn't have seen the old man himself -- after all, he's a theatrical biorobot, a material image, damn it! But he could have a prototype. Him I've definitely seen. Not at the Institute or Td remember more clearly. So at the Writers' Union. Come to that, what would happen if  up and ask him who he is? Astor was about to open his mouth when the old man slowly turned to him and said, "Very well then, I shall have to introduce myself first." Again he looked off into the distance, barely moving his lipS as if he expected that Astor would interrupt him. But Astor waited, "you see," said the old man finally, "I am a writer. Somehow it has always been awkward to admit that." He smiled guiltily and his hands trembled with uneasiness. "I am a Real Writer. Or more precisely, I was a Real Writer." Yes, thought Astor. So was . But now they'll toss me out of the Union on my ear and the worst of it is that it will all be for nothing. I'm not worth crap. I couldn't bring off one stinking thing. "I authored many books," the old man continued. "I was permitted to materialize the last three. Now I am trying to decide which is the most important part, the most joyful part, of the process of creating a Real book. Is it when you have just decided to write a new book, before you know where it's going or exactly what it'll be about, but you know that it will be your new book...or is it the birth of the plot? Or the moment when the hero appears? Which is dearer, his appearance in your imagination or your first meeting with him on the stereo screen?" It's funny, thought Astor. Funny. Now he's talking with me, with an extra person not forseen by the author. So this isn't the author's monolog. These are thoughts that are independent of the will of the person who created this old man. frightening. Not funny but frightening. "In the same way, I did not know who of the many characters I the defector had begotten was the nearest and dearest. Not until recently. Not until the time came for me to part with the last one. Then I discovered that this last one was so close and so necessary to me that parting with him, watching him disappear, was not merely on a par with my own death, but was still more frightening. Afterward there would come an emptiness in which my life would continue without joy." You're an idiot, Astor suddenly thought with unexpected cruelty. You destroy the person you created and guided through life. Your hands tremble; they couldn't hurt a fly; while at the same time over there he's being dematerialized . Or not "there," here. It's happening here, in the studio. Just as it will to my Stor in a little while. We're both idiots. I myself didn't get a thing done either. I couldn't hack it. Not enough brains. What a piece of crap I am! I sit here and listen... "I put myself into him," the old man continued in a monotone. "Or no, it was something a little better... and a little younger. I couldn't make him a young man -- I've likely forgotten even how to daydream about that. He was the way I would like to be now if such a miracle were possible. Middleaged, no genius, no world celebrity, but simply a man honestly doing his work. Most important, I wanted to give him my pain, all the pain with which you create a character and with which you go away from him..."  don't understand him any more, Astor thought mechanically. He's a writer himself and his character is a writer, so... But damn it. he's not a real person. Someone created him. It's all nonsense. It's like one matreshka doll inside another. "Pardon me, but you haven't introduced yourself," said Astor. "I'm a Real Writer," the old man said sadly. "You said that already." "I am a real Real Writer." Raving...Astor rubbed his forehead and winced as if in pain...And then it came to him. This was simply a human being! A human being, the same as himself! Just like Astor, he had crossed the forbidden boundary to save someone. Now there were two of them. Together they would think something up. Together they could still get something done. "And your name?" he almost shouted. "Castor Elamit," said the old man. Astor rose. Slowly he drew his leg back across the tree trunk, glanced at his hands and hid them in his pockets. It seemed as if the smoky haze of the wall had come out from behind the trees, had started to crawl toward them. "Yes..." said Astor. "Yes... That's a very funny... coincidence." The old man did not answer. "You... are... Castor Elamit...Yes. But just who am I, then?" Again the old man did not answer. " And where did I come from?" Silently the old man gazed at the gray wall that lost itself among the clouds. On the other side of the wall grew trees that existeed only in halves. Or they didn't "grow." They simply stood there, props. Only living things can grow. No proof, no explanation, was necessary. One had only to recall those tree halves to understand that the studio was over there, on the other side of the wall. And this, this was the world of humans. "Do you want me to say it myself? All right. A biorobot. A nonfeedback anthropoid automaton, created in the image and likeness of his author. Exactly as I myself created my Stor. A bit younger and a bit... better. Right? And your first name, which you shortened by one letter..." Still, it was improbable. Especially once it had been said aloud. To think that you are only a robot is frightening. But when you say it aloud, it becomes simply an absurdity, and you have only to talk, talk, talk so that the sound of the words will mark out their absurdity with maximum vividness. "So the world I have lived in up to this time is the world of scenery, sound effects, material images? The world of mockups and location footage? The world of nonexistent distances and altitudes? The world of childhoods that never were, of invented love affairs?" He stopped. Rika. His Rika and the impossibility of living for even one day without catching a glimpse of her... "So even Rika was a fiction?" he asked in a whisper. "Yes," said the old man. "I gave you what I myself had dreamed of having. It wouldn't matter exactly what she were like, so long as she was young, quite young, improbably young...just to look at here, just to look once a day..." "I see." Astor's voice was calm. "Just to look at her once a day. So even that was yours. Nothing was my own. Yes, of course. I'm beginning to understand. Alien words. I said to her another man's stupid words. But what was my own? Was there anything? "Astor," said the old man in the tone that one uses with small children, "From the moment you crossed the wall, you ceased to be mine." "Well, please accept my heartfelt gratitude," said Astor. "Thank you for fifteen minutes of unowned existence, which has not even been enough time for me to become myself. But just why did you do it? You, better than anyone, should know that the loss of a biorobot will not go unnoticed, even if by some miracle I managed to work my way into the human world. They'll go looking for me, and I think they'll find me without much trouble. And then what? Dematerialization on the spot, without trial or testimony? Or what do you humans do with robots who have found free will?" "Don't go on like that," the old man said. "Astor, don't." "Forgive me," he replied. "Momentary curiousity. Anyway, I have to return. Tomorrow is the day of the experiment -- my last experiment -- which you thought up but which I am going to perform. Right?" "Yes." The old man nodded. "It will be tomorrow. Before I came here, I finished the book." "Thank you. I'll try to play it out with as much realism as possible." "No need for the bravado, my lad. Don't try to look better than I. It's enough that you're younger." "Better... ?" Astor heard himself laugh. "Why the hell did you have to drag me over to this side? Everything could have happened the way you willed it to tomorrow, but why did I have to learn that I am just -- as we Real Writers say -- a theatrical biorobot, a remotecontrolled anthropoid automaton?" "Yes," the old man said softly, almost as if talking to himself. "I suppose it was inevitable. I put into you not only my own soul but all the other qualities I thought I would have needed for absolute perfection, and yet somehow you turned out smaller and weaker than myself." "Sorry," Astor said simply. "It's almost time for my tomorrow. If you can, please allow me to be... myself...for a bit longer." "My lad -- " The old man rose ponderously and stood up next to Astor. " -- you are forgetting that the time of the..." He hesitated. "...the ones on the other side of the wall flows much more quickly than human time. Astor Elamit's tomorrow begins in twenty minutes." "I see," said Astor. "I must hurry. I'm supposed to be at the Institute?" "Of course." The old man smiled sadly. "It was the simplest exit." "The barrier won't hold?" "No, my lad..." "Meaning... annihilation...Damn it all, it's trite! And if I'm not mistaken you call yourself a physicist?" "I had no time for anything else, Astor. You know that a Real Writer must not leve his book unfinished. And I... I am very old and sick, and the time has come when the automedic can find no way to arrest the development of my disease. I came to you while I still had the strength for it. I had to see about your future, and now I have done so. Farewell, my lad." He lifted his small, light hands, and somewhat ceremoniously lay them on Astor's shoulders. They stood that way for a short while, and then Astor cautiously grasped the hands, squeezed them gently as if he were afraid of inflicting pain, and let them go. "Well, I'll be going," he said. "You haven't understood me, my lad. I'm the one who's going over there." "Where?" Astor asked in confusion. The old man nodded as if they say, "Over there, my child," and started to walk toward the wall, whose smoky haze arose behind the farthest trees. "No!" cried Astor and barred his path. "No!" The old man moved close and Astor grabbed him by the shoulder. "There are less than twenty minutes left," the old man said calmly. "I am not merely a physicist but one of those who created the Writers' Union studio, who raised its wall and programmed its robots. As a result, I was able to upset the focus of the cameras and the observing apparatus. Because of this, I enabled you to come out here and when I return in your place, it will not be noticed. But the general course of action in my book has already been dictated and it is not possible to change it. Someone has to return and play it out to the end." "It will be me," declared Astor. "And don't make me use force." "Yes, I made you younger and stronger than I." The old man raised his head and looked straight into Astor's eyes. "But I am a man, and you cannot walk my road." He shook off Astor's hands and walked toward the wall, holding himself as erect as possible. Astor watched him go, not daring to move from the spot. His thoughts were muddled; one contested with another and the result was a shapeless morass. The natural argument, the unanswerable argument that would give Astor the right to halt the old man, would not crystallize. But Astor felt with all his being that he did have such a right; only its basis eluded him. The old man had already reached the last row of trees. He looked back and called loudly, "Farewell, Astor Elamit!" And Astor remembered. "Stop!" he shouted and rushed toward the old man. "I can't let you go in my place; I still have my Stor." The old man looked at him with surprise. "Now I understand why I didn't find him here," Astor continued. "This is the world of humans, and he is only a biorobot. So he's over there, on the territory of the studio, and I'm going back to find him. He's the only thing I've got." "No," said the old man, "you have not got your Stor. He also is mine, just like the childhood you remember, the laws of physics you use, like your need to see Rika... he is not yours." "True. Everything is your idea. Even Stor. You willed it and so I played Real Writer and created living people. But the pain I felt for him was mine. Pain belongs to the loser, not the creator." "What you feel is only the echo of the pain I suffered over you." "To hell with it if it wasn't mine! Rake in everything for yourself! Everything! There's no time to bargain. You can have everything that was. But what will be, the few minutes that remain before the explosion, are mine. What will you do for Stor if you go?" "Nothing," the old man said calmly. "But I'll do something! Everything I can. I'll find him..." "You will not find him because he does not exist to be found. The difference between you and Stor is that you are a material character and he is not. He lives only on paper and in your imagination." "So," Astor said slowly. "The last matreshka doll turns out to be empty. Nothing inside. But how do you live in this world, in any world, if there's nothing inside?" "My lad, it has noryet been an hour since you became a real person, but everything that you have experienced in that time is yours. And the future, after I go, is also yours. I leave you my name and my right to use the Union studio. You do not yet have your Stor. But you can create him." Shaken, Astor remained silent. "But if you do decide to save this Stor, your Stor, remember this: A theatrical biorobot cannot cross the boundary into the human world. The order simply would not be passed by the cybereditors who review all the material as it reaches the studio. And if by some blunder they did let it pass, no biorobot would accept such an order -- he wouldn't obey it. That is how they are programmed." "But what about me?" Astor asked in confusion. "Remember where you were going. You wanted to get not to the human world but to a world of imaginary characters. You wanted to meet not your creator but your own creation. If human beings had reviewed the text of my last transmission, they like as not would have caught onto my trick. But I managed to fool the computers. Remember, this is the only way out and I found it only because I myself designed and created the studio's barrier zone. It is useless for a human being to cross the boundary. The cyberobservers would not allow him to meet a single biorobot. Remember this one maneuver. You'll manage to upset the focusing because I put into you the whole complex of knowledge that I had mastered -- after all, mornings you too were just a physicist." Astor nodded. "And don't hurry. Don't mess it up. Don't feel it's something you have to do. Fashion your Stor only with love and pain. Those are the only true ingredients; all the rest is unreal. Don't value him only because he is yours. He must be worth going after. And when you know that he is really worth that, you will know how to save him." For a while longer they stood si, lently, simply looking at one another. Then the old man stepped forward and disappeared into the smoky depth of the wall. Astor waited. The hidden rustlings of the evening forest surrounded him and he strained with all his might to catch a whisper of what was happening on the other side of the wall. No hint came, no clue. Still Astor waited. Then a strange memory gently surfaced from his subconsicous: On the other side the forest never made noise...! He swayed -- as if the recollection had given him a light interior shove -- as if the recollection had given him a light interior shove -- and started to walk away. He walked faster and faster, without looking back. For all his human life that place was so impressed on his memory that he knew he could find it immediately and withouf mistake when the time came to return.  Why should the devil care what we think he (she) is iike? Vibrant animal magnetism made the Senator seem much younger than his forty-four years. Following the Secret Service agents who bulldozed a path for him through the crowd, he grabbed the hands reaching out to him. Then, wonder of wonders, he leaned over the railing and reached out toward me! For one fantastic moment the blue eyes under that famous thatch of light brown hair (gray in real life) seemed to be on me, taking me in. Then he reached past my outstretched arm, pressed the hand of the man behind me, that of the man next to him, and the next. Everyone's but mine. And I had driven since dawn for a glimpse of my idol! At least I had been able to hear his speech over outside loudspeakers (I arrived too late to get into the auditorium). A crummy speech it was, too, full of catchy phrases that got roars of applause, but when it was all over and you asked yourself "What exactly did he say?" you couldn't remember a thing. Did I want a man like that, an empty-headed crowd-pleaser, to be my next president? Not on your life! Right then and there I decided to get even with him for ignoring me. But how could an eighteen-year-old State College student get even with one of the richest, most powerful men in the country? I would just have to find a way. it it  "Medicine in the middle ages," my anthropology teacher said, "was a matter of strange nostrums that killed as often as they cured, and what cures there were could be laid to the placebo effect. Is it therefore not true that medical intervention can save lives? We now know it can, once the basic laws of physiology are known. Witchcraft is today in the same state that medical science was in during the Middle Ages. Is magical intervention therefore impossible? Or will it become possible, once the basic laws of the universe are known? How many of you have read Castaneda? Come now, someone must have, there's one or two in every class. Aha, I thought so. What did you think -- " After class I Joined the throng at his lectern, and when the bell rang and the next class began to file in, I followed him to his office with the other students whose questions were still unanswered. Most were variations of "Do you really think witchcraft is possible?" and his answers were variations of "Were you ever hypnotized? Did you ever have a telepathic experience? How do you explain that by the known laws of modem science?" For a half hour Doctor Manson patiently answered and re-answered their questions while I fidgeted in a comer, thinking that this was the story of my life, to be one of a crowd at the feet of an authority symbol who pays attention to everyone but me. What was I doing there anyway? Was it possible that this chubby little pink-faced man, who had for some reason chosen to wear a lilac shirt and a purple paisley tie with a tan and green plaid suit, could tell me anything that would make a difference in my life, anything that I wanted to know? Finally when the last of my fellow students left and Doctor Manson looked at me and said, "Nell Wills, isn't that right?" I was so flattered to find he knew my name that all the subtle lead-ins I had been trying to compose vanished from my mind. "I'll get right to the point," I said when I couldn't think of anything else to say. "I want to study witchcraft. Where do I sign up?" "I wish I knew. I'd study it myself. You need an adept, a master, someone who can teach you. Unfortunately, all the adepts I've ever had a chance to investigate turned out to be frauds." "If Uri Geller can do what he does, there must be others -- " "If that's the kind of magic you want to learn, I can teach you myself," said Doctor Manson, reaching toward me. I braced myself for a pass, but all he did was to pull an enormous silk flower out of my ear. "Not that I've actually investigated Geller myself," he went on, "but it does seem curious that all his socalled psychic feats can be duplicated by any stage magician using ordinary legerdemain." With a few quick strokes he turned the huge flower into a pencil-sized cylinder, tucked it up his sleeve, and explained, "I worked my way through college doing this. However, I don't think you want to waste your life pulling artificial flowers out of the ears of pretty co-eds. You want to cast love spells, put a hex on the man who jilted you, something of that sort." I smiled at him sweetly. If he only knew! "I wish I could help you but I can't," Doctor Manson went on. "Maybe the problem is that sorcery isn't really on a scientific basis yet. Somebody has to create one. And it might as well be us. With this in mind, some of my fellow faculty members and I have gotten together to form a coven. You're welcome to Join if you like." The idea of me, a mere freshman. Joining a coven of college professors was overwhelming. "Uh -- I'm not sure I would be any good." "Nonsense. Any blue-eyed redhead with a gorgeous tan has to be a natural-bom witch! The combination doesn't occur in nature." There was a moment of silence while I wondered who he was talking about. I have green eyes, myself. Then he said, "Besides, don't you think most of the students who came in here wanted to study witchcraft? But you were the only one who said so. The first requirement for a witch is that she have guts' enough to say, 'I want to study witchcraft.' You've read Castaneda of course?' ' Not only had I not read Castaneda Of Course, I didn't even know who he was. Doctor Manson Jumped up and pulled paperbacks down from his bookshelves. When he had an armful, he turned to me with a sudden thought. "Are you one of those young girls who reads six books a day, or is one a week more like it, and then only under duress?" I had to admit I was the second type. Doctor Manson handed me one book and put the rest back. "Everything Castaneda has to say, he says in Journey to Ixtlan. Read that. Don't waste your time with Batty, or whatever his name is; you know, the preposterous tale of the girl who must have been possessed by the Devil since she used naughty words, masturbated, wet her pants, and -- we mustn't forget the most important sign of all! -- she had bad breath! If that's what the author thinks evil is, can you imagine what his childhood must have been like? No, you can't, can you? You haven't read Freud. Not that I would attribute everyone's problems to faulty toilet training, but in this case... never mind. Stick with Carlito. He'll tell you where it's at. God, I wish I could study with Don Juan! Well, what about the coven? Tonight's our esbat, our weekly meeting. Can I pick you up around, say, sevenish?" "Uh -- it sounds interesting." Still, I couldn't understand what a bunch of college professors would want with a freshman, an eighteenyear-old girl. Wait! Wasn't there something about naked virgins? "But if you're looking for someone to serve as an alter, I think I ought to tell you -- " "No! Oh, God! Is that what you... oh, no!" Doctor Manson hid his very red face in his hands. "It's not that sort of, I mean, it's really very respectable. Jesus! Would I ask you if -- look, I know you're a nice girl..." I decided not to disillusion him. "What we do is more... well, learning how to control our lives so our lives won't control us, that sort of thing," Manson said, getting himself in hand. "For instance, I suffer from a rare form of color blindness, tritanopia. It has embarrassed me all my life, ever since my kindergarten teacher bawled me out for painting a picture with a green sky and blue grass. I honestly couldn't tell the difference, and yet she accused me of being a nonconformist! Can you believe it? For most of us, the worst name we can call someone is -- well, I don't want to say it now; her worst was 'nonconformist.' Anyway, I joined the coven because I wanted to learn how to tell colors with my fingers, so -- like, I could match up my suits and ties, people wouldn't stare when I came into a room, that sort of thing. "The Russians are really into it, but in this country, well, the coven group was the only one that didn't make me feel silly. Then, do you know what happened? I was getting some results but when I'd try a different set of yams, I couldn't tell the colors apart any more. Colors differ so much from dye-lot to dyelot, you see, and the sense of touch involves a whole different set of parameters. I'm still working it out. But anyway. What I started to tell you is that all of a sudden it no longer mattered. I mean, I happen to think this tie goes very well with this suit. If you don't agree, that's your problem, not mine. Do you see what I mean? That's what witchcraft has done for me." I managed to make some sympathetic noises although it was hard to sympathize with someone who wanted to get even with his kindergarten teacher when the man I wanted to get even with had just been elected President of the United States. After that I had to visit Doctor Manson's coven -- his enthusiasm wouldn't let me say no. And the coven became the family I never had. Not that I don't have a family at home. There's Mom, and Dad, and me, and Christy. We're what is called a nuclear family. The only time we talk is when we can't agree on which television show to watch -- unless you count as talking the hours Mom spends in comparing me to Christy. For my own good, of course. Christy's the good little sister. I'm the big bad one, you see? Like the time Mom found the diaphragm in my dresser. She didn't even think of looking through Christy's drawers. You see? As I said, the coven became the family I never had. Its grandmaster and most famous member was octogenarian Frederick R. Birch, coauthor of Reproductive Behavior, every undergraduate's favorite scientific treatise. If you liked The Decameron, you'll love Dodge and Birch. Everyone else called him Fred. I called him Uncle Fred, partly out of respect for his age and fame but mostly because he liked to pat young girls. When he put his arm around me, I called him Uncle Fred to remind him of how much We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) I Offer good in U.S.A. only. Uncle Fred was so much our guiding light, we often referred to ourselves as the Fred Birch Society. Whether or not Uncle Fred actually cast love spells on pretty co-eds in Psych. #, as he claimed, or conjured up succubi to keep him amused while he ran his control groups, the projects he arranged for the coven were chaste enough. Mostly we did yoga exercises. We learned how to relax in incredible positions, how to visualize a purple sphere and watch it turn orange, and eventually we graduated to out-of-body experiences. Leaving his body behind, the coven member chosen for the experiment would drift into the next room, note the objects that were arranged on a tray, then return and report. The scientists among us wanted to be sure we were really out of our bodies and not simply imagining the experience. After a few nights of this, one of the scientists observed that we were not really controlling for mental telepathy. The subject might be reading the mind of the person who had arranged the tray. Not that we would suspect a fellow witch of deliberately lying about her experiences. We just wanted to be sure. After that we had the out-of-body subject visit addresses selected at random from the telephone book until she found someone at home. Then she would return to report the objects she had seen on the coffee table. The householder was then telephoned for confirmation. A surprisingly highly percentage of householdthey were told that a scientific research group at the College wanted to know what was on their livingroom coffee table. We never told them we were a witches' coven. Several years later we did some witches' ceremonies after Bea and Henry Frankenheimer completed their bomb shelter, where we started holding meetings. Made of concrete sprayed onto a balloon, the shelter was egg-shaped for maximum pressure resistance. Bea had painted the rough, round ceiling with cave-art Irish elk, woolly mammoths and other extinct beasts. Heaps of Peruvian blankets made comfortable seats out of chests full of food and bottled water, "hope chests" Bea called them. Batik hangings curtained off the chemical toilet. The egg buried in the ground, the primitive art, and the doomed-world foreboding that all bomb shelters invoke combined to put us in the mood for occult and mystical experiences. The mood was hard to sustain, however. We felt nervous and self-conscious calling up demon gods of yore with the help of what little fire and incense the shelter's air-conditioning system could handle. Invariably someone would start giggling or toss off a witticism that got everyone else giggling, and any power our combined minds had managed to generate vanished in the laughter. Antiquated rituals seemed irrelevant, somehow. With relief we went back to our out-of-body experiments. The coven's activities seemed harmless enough, except for the fact that I kept having dreams. Over and over it was the same dream, with minor variations. Our newly elected president, looking handsome, healthy and altogether heroic in jodphurs, riding boots and a white shirt with most of the buttons tom off, is tied to a stake in a night-time forest. Around him dance baleful, shrieking hags, adding more logs to the pile at his feet. Something is coming up behind me, a tower of fire radiating absolute evil, I guess. I don't dare turn around to look. Somehow I am handed a burning brand. The Devil has picked me -- me, of all people! -- to light the fire that will destroy the arch enemy of all that is evil, the President of the United States. I do my best, but the wood -- mossy, dewwet logs from the forest floor -- will not catch; no Girl Scout, I need a gas jet, or at least a can of lighter fluid, to start a fire. Finally an impatient witch snatches the brand and pushes me away, out of the circle of dancing witches. I am not wicked enough, it seems; so I am rejected, and I wake up. However innocent, harmless, and even ineffectual, the coven may appear to be, it is still a witches' coven and it ties me to the forces of evil, so the dream seemed to be telling me. Yet how could I give up the best friends I had ever known? Or the feeling that a presidential candidate who ignores a tired, untidy teen-ager -- who drove all day to see him -- and shakes hands only with prosperous-looking men in business suits, does not deserve to occupy the White House? If only my coven would teach me some spells so I could put a hex on him! Maybe some painful, chronic disease... "When are we going to get into spells?" I asked Don Manson soon after I joined the coven. "You can get into spells whenever you want to, Nell. It's a free country," Don replied rather impatiently. "Nell's new here. Maybe she doesn't know our system," Fred Birch said, coming up between us and putting a friendly arm around each of us. "What system. Uncle Fred?" I asked, extracting his hand from my jeans pocket and holding it firmly. "The problem is, none of us knows any reliable spells. Oh, there are spells given in the classics on witchcraft, which generally suffer from incomplete directions or call for European herbs, plants no one here would recognize if they did happen to sprout on campus. Or they recommend procedures impractical for modem apartment dwellers, such as stuffing a sheep's heart up one's chimney. Be that as it may. Whenever one of us tries a spell, he reports everything he does and the outcome, whether or not he got any result at all, not necessarily the desired one, in the coven Grimoire, or spellbook." Uncle Fred looked around. "Where the hell is the Grimoire? It's supposed to be brought to all the meetings." Where was the Grimoire, everyone wondered. After five or six minutes of group mutterings, Harry Box, the meteorologist, thought he might have left it in the trunk of his car, and went out to look. Sure enough, the Grimoire had been in Box's trunk since last summer. No one had missed it. The Grimoire turned out to be one of those books of blank pages bound in goldstamped artificial leather that you can buy in most bookstores. All of the pages were still blank. "Witches, this won't do!" said Uncle Fred. "We're supposed to be expanding the frontiers of occult knowledge in all sorts of forbidden directions, yet none of you has reported a spell, successful or otherwise. What do you want to do, turn into yogis by default? Hasn't anyone tried a spell?" After a silence Box confessed, "I tried a Navaho rain chant last summer, during the drought." "Oh, that's what brought on the thunderstorm!" someone joked. "The thunderstorm was two days later. Lightning set brush fires all over the county. It was dramatic enough that way, but the rain was, maybe, one drop per square centimeter. Officially it was not enough to measure. I was going to write it up anyway -- that's why I took the Grimoire home -- but then... well, nobody else had written up anything, and... I mean, if there hadn't been any rain at all, or if there had been some measurable amount, but how can you write up a report when there is some rain, but not enough to measure?" Box wondered. "Especially when you have to despoil a virgin blank book to do it," said Harriet Who. (By changing her last name to Who, Harriet renounced both her ex-husband's and her father's last names and assumed "the identity crisis of modem woman," as she explained it.) "This virgin cost the coven...um, two dollars and ninety-eight cents," said Uncle Fred, looking at the flyleaf. "Despoil her, Harry. That is, if you still have your notes. And who knows? If enough of you follow suit, I may be tempted to reveal my experiments with rhinocerous horn." The Grimoire was soon filled and a second purchased. Many reports were positive in that the desired outcome had occurred -- most likely by coincidence, the authors invariably observed. The spells were all kindly in intent, though. The most malignant was a curse on tomato horn worms. Not one would do for giving the President a painful, chronic disease. So I carved a statue of the President out of an old Christmas candle and stuck pins in it for a while one night. The next morning I read in Time that he already had a chronic and a painful disease. One of each. He had had them for years. So much for black magic. No, I didn't write that one up for the coven Grimoire ! Hexing did not seem to work for me, but I got pretty good at the out-of-body stuff, good enough to appear to fourteen firemen pinned down by crossfire during the race riots of the following summer and lead them to safety through back alleys and abandoned buildings I had previously scouted out. TTiis was not a particularly brave thing to do. Being disembodied, I was never in any danger myself. Still, I think it was a nice thing to do, to save fourteen firemen from "meeting their Maker," as the saying goes. Witchcraft can't be all bad, can it, if you can use the skills you learn in your coven to save human lives? Later Uncle Fred picked me to help out the coven, but I don't know whether he did so because I was so good at the out-of-body bit or because I already knew Charlie Crane. Absolutely the best-looking man I have ever met in my whole life, he came out of the library with me at closing time, introduced himself, mentioned chemical engineering, and insisted on walking me back to the dorm. It was a dark night lit by flashes of lightning, with a hint of storm on the gusty wind. At every gust and flash he put his arm around me in case I might be frightened; and every time he put his arm around me, I laughed and pushed him away. That's how I found out he was wearing a shoulder holster under his jacket. Between passes Charlie entertained me with stories about all the girls who had been raped andor murdered on campus in the last ten years. Moral: I was lucky to have his protection. Well, the campus is in the old part of town, surrounded on three sides by the decaying neighborhoods that had erupted into violence the previous summer. We do have more than our share of crime: maybe thirty sex-crime victims in the last ten years out of a total student population of fifteen thousand a year. I was about as likely to be raped and murdered on the average walk as I was to be struck by that distant lightning. Chalk up one benefit of hanging around with scientists: I now go by probabilities. The time to worry, mother always told me, is when the lightning and thunder come close together. That seemed the case with Charlie. The gun under his coat, the obsession with rape and murder... The funny thing is, all he would have had to say was "please." Now, I may be the black sheep of the family, but I'm not promiscuous. I never sleep with a guy on the first date. I don't feel like it with someone I hardly know. For Charlie I would have made an exception, he was that good-looking. Only I'm not about to be pushed around by anyone, no matter how good-looking. And it seemed as though Charlie wouldn't say "please" -- he'd say, "You have to. I have a gun." So when what he really said was, "I'm taking you out tomorrow night. Where do you want to go?" I said I had to write a term paper. That left "Friday night?" and "Any time Saturday or Sunday?" Running out of excuses, I said there was another man in my life, which I guess was true. The President. Whenever I went out with anyone, I kept thinking that I was wasting my time by having fun when I ought to be getting even with him. So anyway, was I surprised when Charlie showed up at the next esbat with Harriet Who! I mean, Charlie is the best-looking man in the universe, now that Che Guevarra is dead. And Harriet is a short, dumpy, middle-aged woman with one topic of conversation: how the male-dominated world is unfair to women. If you talk about music, she'll demand to know why there aren't more female composers and conductors. And I agree with her. Whole-heartedly. I just couldn't understand why Harriet would appeal to Charlie Crane. And vice versa. Obviously Harriet was really gone on Charlie. "But I mean, he's obsessed with it," I explained to Uncle Fred after the meeting. "He knows the names, the dates, how the victim was dressed, everything. "If he's that interested in crime, it might be because he's in law enforcement," Uncle Fred suggested. "Charlie? He's a grad student in chemical engineering," I said, even as the light dawned. Grad students do not wear shoulder holsters. "Follow him, Nell. I'll watch your body." One of Uncle Fred's rules for the coven was that no one could undertake an out-of-body experience without what he called a "baby-sitter" watching the body. "You're the last person I'd want watching my body," I joked in all seriousness. "Dear Nell. Sweet Nell. Adorable Nell. Haven't you learned yet that barking dogs don't bite? Your virginity, or what's left of it, is safe with me, alas. Now be off with you." Wondering why I would be willing to sleep with Charlie just because he was good-looking and not with Uncle Fred, whom I knew and loved, I slipped my mortal, fleshy and admittedly rather attractive body to hover, most of the night, over Harriet's apartment house. Finally Charlie emerged and went to a telephone booth in a gas station on the comer. And that's when I learned... It was the F. B. I., no less, that was trying to infiltrate our collegiate coven. So much for my undergraduate rape fantasies. Uncle Fred and I decided not to tell the others. Instead, we let Charlie come to all the meetings he liked. After falling asleep twice in a row, Charlie tried to stir up some excitement, and we had to tell him that, while we agreed that Africa was as advanced in magic as any continent, we couldn't see how getting in touch with the local chapter of the Black Panthers would further our aims, or theirs. Finally, during one interminable to me, "You don't really believe in this, do you?" and I was bored enough to whisper back, "No, I'm -- shhhhV' and then, right in his ear, "I'm a secret agent for the F.B.I." Charlie gave me a long look. I gave him my sweetest smile. And we never saw Charlie again. With the help of Harriet, who had just had her opinion of men confirmed, we put the pieces together. Judging by the sweet nothings Charlie had whispered in her ear, the F.B.I. was not investigating the Devil and all of his works. It was interested only in the race riot of the preceding summer. Inflation, unemployment and racial discrimination were not adequate reasons for rioting to the government's way of thinking. There had to be a secret conspiracy of Communists behind it all. The plotting must be centered in the college surrounded on three sides by ghetto, right? I mean, you wouldn't expect mere negroes to take to Communism all by themselves! We had to hand it to Charlie, though. It's not every man who is able to whisper, "But don't you people know any of the black activists in the city?" when he's in like Flynn. Suddenly it was the spring of my senior year, and a lot of students were cutting classes, demonstrating, holding group camp-outs in the Administration Building and setting fire to library wastebaskets to protest the war in Nambia. Then Marie Murphy was killed by a tear-gas shell, and the whole student body went crazy. Except me. Not that I didn't understand how they felt. If I were a man, I wouldn't want to have to fight, and maybe die, for some fat old monarch who walks to his throne on the necks of his crouching subjects just because the rebels call themselves Socialists! And if defoliating the jungle really does destroy the last known habitat of the persimmon tree frog, then the Air Force should not do it. What I didn't understand was how closing the college would bring Marie back, or help end the war. And the food-processing firm I work for had promised me a job with their branch in Thailand just as soon as I got my B.A. It was beginning to look like I would never graduate. On May first the soldiers came. No, it wasn't the National Guard. They went to other colleges, not ours. We got troops from the army base at Pierson's Point. They marched around the campus in long columns, two abreast, double-time, with fixed bayonets; or they stood around in the rain in groups of two or three, looking bored and annoyed. After a couple of days of this, most of the students went back image I almost see in the mirror to their classes. There didn't seem when I'm getting ready to go out, to be anything else to do. the face and figure I compare myAbout that time we discovered self with when I realize that somethat all the professors in the coven, thing's missing, that something's except Don Manson, had had their not quite right. Satan is the Ultitelephones tapped. And without a mate Me. court order! Don made a lot of "Is the Devil a boy or a girl?" I jokes about being overlooked, but asked at the next esbat, already we could tell he was really hurt. knowing the answer of course, f As things settled down again, I just wanted to see whether anyone had another dream. Once more I else did. was in the night-time forest, danc"The Devil being a projection of ing with other witches around our one's unrecognized unconscious President, who was tied to a stake contents," said Uncle Fred, "I supin a clearing. Once more the power pose it would be the same sex as of evil approached me from behind, oneself. Unless, of course, the cona burning brand was handed me, tents are sexual, in which case one and the wood refused to light, might prefer an opposite-sex Devil. About to give up in frustration, I On the other hand, a homosexual suddenly thought, "Hey, wait a might prefer... or would he? minute! This is my dream. The -- Witches, do any of you know whole thing is taking place in my whether a fag would conjure up a mind. All I have to do is want that succubus or an incubus?" wood to light and it will burst into "If succubuses represent the flame!" homosexual's unconscious sexualBehind me, Satan said with a soft ity, he must not be aware of his chuckle, "Precisely." orientation, in which case how I applied the brand again. Fire would you operationally define blazed up, and what became of the homosexuality?" said Henry FranPresident I do not know; it seemed kenheimer. more important to turn around and Harriet objected to the term look at Satan. That, I must admit, "fag." was a surprise. Uncle Fred objected to "sucForget everything you've ever cubuses." "The correct plural of heard about goatish figures with succubus is succubi," he informed horns and cloven hooves. Satan us. was -- is -- a beautiful young woman. "I was speaking English, not LatChestnut hair, sparkling in the in," said Henry, firelight, rippled to her waist. The coven would go on all night Mounds of pale breast, bared not arguing about the correct plural of quite to the nipple, showed in the succubus if no one stopped it. vee neck of her black-velvet "Hey, look!" I shouted. "There jumpsuit. In face and figure she was this serpent in the Garden of looks a lot like me. She also looks Eden, the one that tempted Eve. a lot better than me. She's the What was that?" "A green tree python?" Uncle Fred guessed. "Not a constrictor, surely. A viper. I rather fancy the Gabon viper, myself," said Box, who raised snakes as a hobby. "Look. The serpent talked to Eve. And snakes can't talk," I said, feeling very clever. But they didn't let me feel clever for long. "Snakes in the Garden of Eden could talk in the same way that dragons can breathe fire. Fairy-tale animals can do anything the author likes," said Uncle Fred. "That's not a fairy tale, it's the Bible!" "Nell, I happen to believe in evolution. If you don't. I'll respect your beliefs, but I'm not going to argue with you," Uncle Fred said gently. "I believe in evolution too, of course, but -- " "Then what the hell are we talking about?" said Uncle Fred. It was hard to tell at that point. "The Devil?" I guessed, as I became aware of a gap a mile wide between my home-town Sunday school and my college education. On the far side stood Jesus, gentle, mild, welcoming the little children. I was on the opposite shore with the trilobites, dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and "Chuck baby," as my Biology # teacher had called the great Darwin. Was there no bridge back to Jesus? Not for a witch in a coven, there wasn't. I had made my choice. Not that I!d ever had anything to lose. After all, I was the black sheep of the family to begin with. I think I'd rather go to Hell, anyway. All the most interesting people will be there. "All right, let's talk about the Devil," said Uncle Fred. "The first thing you need to know about the Devil is that there's no such thing. Now. What else would you like to know?" "Uh... but there's this myth of the Devil. You know, the fellow with horns and cloven hooves -- " "And oversized genitals?" Uncle Fred suggested. "That may be the projection of your unconscious!" I retorted. "That's Pan," Don had said at the same time. "Seriously, Nell," he went on when the laughter died down, "the homed diety, half man, half animal, was originally the classic nature god. Pan. When Christianity began its conquest of the European mind, it had to do something with all the local gods. Many became saints in the Catholic pantheon. Others, like Pan, Just didn't fit and were said to be devils or evil spirits. Dealing with them would condemn your immortal soul to everlasting torture, the early Christians said. That was undoubtedly the worst threat they could think of. Join the Christian Church or rot in Hell forever! Good propaganda, I suppose. Anyway, it worked. That doesn't mean we have to believe it. And, I mean, really! What sort of god would damn anyone, anyone in the world, to everlasting torment? He would have to be worse than the demons who actually did the torture, wouldn't he? If God were really like that, I don't think I'd want to cooperate." "And when you think about what Pan really represents," said Uncle Fred. "Half man, half animal -- the perfect symbol for the fusion of human nature with the animal instincts. No wonder the Christian Church wanted to repress -- " "I don't know why you keep talking about Pan when Satan really was Aradia," Harriet interrupted. "Look at the facts! In the Middle Ages nine out of ten convicted witches were women. And whom did they worship? Aradia! Come fly through the air, on your broomstick if you must, without it if you can. On, through the air! To the planets! To the galaxies! And who will help you get there? Aradia, the Great. The power of nature expressed as female. The god (I don't accept goddess, it's a diminutive) of half the world, the world of woman! "But the Christian Church couldn't let women identify with any kind of power. Oh, no, we weren't allowed an aspect of the divine that we could relate to, oh, no! The church fathers were afraid of us, you see. They made it so that the only relationship we could have with the divine was a sexual one. We could relate to the church as the Bride of Christ, or to Mary as the Mother of God, but we could not be Christ, we could not be God. Direct identification with the divine was reserved for males." "I can't buy that, Harriet. I can't believe the church fathers really intended to suppress women when they ignored the feminine aspects of the divine," Don said. "Isn't it more likely that they were children of their time -- " Harriet interrupted him with, "Oh, yeah? Then I suppose you can't believe that George Washington and his crew really intended to suppress women when they denied them the right to vote, either?" We had invoked Aradia several times during our traditional witchcraft exercises, but no one had explained to me who she was and I hadn't thought to ask. Now I wondered whether it was Aradia I had seen in my dream. "If the Devil doesn't exist, what about Aradia?" I asked Henry Frankenheimer, who happened to be standing within whispering distance. "Depends on what you mean by 'exist,' " Henry said carefully, and added the only fact he was sure of: "Neither one came when we called." "I ask for bread and you give me a stone!" I shouted, which shows how upset I was. Normally I avoid such cliches. "What did I doV Henry asked, looking bewildered. "If you don't want any more stones, Nell, why don't you tell us what's really bothering you? I can't believe it's metaphysics," said Uncle Fred, coming close but for once not putting his arm around me. He looked as though he were really concerned. What could I say? Could I tell them: I had this dream, see, and in it some dark power, Satan or Aradia, gave me the responsibility for doing in the President of the United States? Now I want to know if I really ought to? No, I couldn't say that. What I actually said was, "I've been with the coven for almost four years, and really, I love you all. I've loved every minute of it. Only now that I'm about to graduate, I'd like to know before I go away if dabbling in witchcraft has imperiled my immortal soul. And don't you dare ask me to operationally define 'soul' or I'll make a waxen image of you and stick pins in it!" Looking Uncle Fred in both eyes, I waited the necessary moment and then added, "... and guess where I'm going to stick the pins!" "Umm, yes. We'll miss you, Nell. The coven won't be the same without you. In fact," said Uncle Fred, "there's a plot afoot, to which I am not a party, to talk you into graduate school. But you never were a student. You need to be out in the world, doing things. Our loss is the world's gain. So much for that. "To answer your legitimate, urgent and vital question. There is some scientific evidence to support a belief in life after death, namely, the recollections of medical patients who were revived after all vital signs ceased. Some seventeen per cent of them remember extremely pleasant out-of-body experiences; the rest remember nothing, not unexpectedly; they were unconscious at the time. Do the memories of the few who remember something prove life after death. Heaven even, or only the powers of the human imagination? Perhaps they prove whichever hypothesis you want to believe. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence at all to support a belief in Hell. None at all. The most parsimonious explanation is that Hell is a myth invented by the church to scare the peasants into behaving themselves. "The coven did spend the first year of its existence discussing first causes. Maybe we should have written up the Minutes and let you see them. About all we could agree on was that in view of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, there had to be another Force, a creative organizing Force, opposing the universal decay of energy in order to explain the universe. To avoid mental images of white-bearded old men sitting on clouds, we decided to call our creative force 'Anti-entropy.' God, if you like, is Anti-entropy. Among other things, no doubt. "Now, what else would you like to know? What else would you like to know that an eighty-year-old physiological psychologist can tell you? One with many awards and publications behind him. Along with almost all of his life. And when St. Peter calls me up, if that old myth is true, which I doubt, and says, 'Who are you, that you think you can enter the Gates of Heaven?' shall I say, 'I'm the Fred Birch?' Or shall I say, rather, 'Hell, I'm just a dirty old man,' and will the gates of Heaven then open wide? "Actually, what I'm really angling for is to be reincarnated as a dolphin. The dolphins would understand me as the Americans never have. So, my dear Nell, if there is anything you want to know that an eighty-year-old physiological psychologist who has known sin can tell you, be sure to ask. Except that I don't think there is. I think that what you really want to know is similar to what I gave up worrying about sixty years ago. The questions are... horribly important, there's no doubt about that. But scientifically they're meaningless. There's no way to find the answers. Isn't that so?" "Uh... I don't know..." "Of course you don't. The difference between what is known, what can be known and what can never be known is not taught at the undergraduate level," Uncle Fred said wittily. It seemed as though everyone laughed but me. I decided to go ahead and murder the President, and to Hell with them all!    At some point in my college career I had spent the better part of a night being driven through the countryside by a junior I hardly knew while his roommate told a girl I hardly knew why Croatia should be free. The backseat Croatian was Bela Benjac. Bela Benjac began receiving visits from a numinous figure dressed in shimmering white, with a suggestion of wings behind the bared shoulders and long chestnut hair emitting a faint, halo-like glow. Your disembodied self does not have to resemble the body you left behind. You can appear as anything you choose. So naturally I chose to look like Satan. Wouldn't you if you were a girl? The first time I showed up, Bela buried his head under the covers and muttered, "What did I do this time?" It turned out that I was not his first incorporeal visitor. I was only the first to be kind to him. Most of his hallucinations were nameless horrors that ripped up his spirit with bloody talons and, frankly, I don't see how the poor boy could stand it. He really needed psychiatric help. If he did as I said, he would get all the help he needed. I was only doing him a favor when I told him that the vice-president's adored mother was a Croatian, and if the President weren't standing in the way... Soon I discovered that I did not have to be disembodied to look like Satan. If I composed myself before entering a room and thought the right thoughts, why, then when I went in, all the broad-shouldered braggarts who carve notches on their steering wheels would soon be slobbering all over me, while the guys I really like to talk to -- the ones who have something interesting to say if only you can draw them out -- would be off in comers saying it to the intelligent-looking girls. Being stunningly beautiful is all right on occasion, I guess. Most of the time I'm better off being myself. Meanwhile, back at the White House our President was beginning to run for reelection. I don't know what he was trying to accomplish when he decided to speak at all the towns and , colleges that had erupted into riots and violence during the previous four years. Was he trying to prove he was brave? Nobody had ever accused him of cowardice. Maybe he just wanted to show that he was indefatigable. When he spoke at the Hilton Hotel downtown, I went early to be sure of getting a seat. I wanted to size him up one more time and make certain I knew what I was doing before I started worrying about all the little details you can't leam from witchcraft manuals, like how you go about buying an untraceable gun. So anyway, I went down at four, looking better than usual (if I do say so myselO in a new purplevelveteen trenchcoat I had bought for the trip to Thailand. I left my hat and handbag (minus wallet) in a second-row seat and came back after dinner to find Don Manson, of all people, in the seat next to mine. "Well, hello!" I said in my friendliest voice. Don took one look at me, gulped slightly and started talking about how sorry he was that his adored wife couldn't be with him. It seemed that she was at home with the kids. All six of them. Now, if Don was married, odd that he never mentioned it during any of the times we had been out together. Something was funny. Then I realized what it was. I had put on my Satan guise without meaning to and Don had not recognized me. I would have to kid him about that later. In the meantime, I nuzzled up against him. Don, in panic, nuzzled up to the fat man on his other side. On the dais. Senator O'Keefe spent twenty-five minutes elaborating on the virtues of the man we were about to hear, finally concluding: "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!" He seemed older than when I had seen him last, but then so was I. A lot older. "These are the times that try men's souls," he would have said had it not already been said before. As it was, he had to settle for a second-best sentiment. I forget what it was, I was too busy thinking my own thoughts: "These may be perilous times, but didn't you get us into them? Our souls wouldn't be tried if you hadn't blundered. Just how much do you expect us to suffer for your mistakes?" His speaking technique had improved in the last four years. Now he glanced at his notes only every few sentences and spent the rest of the time looking out at the audience. Often he seemed to be looking at me. That was probably an illusion but I smiled anyway whenever I thought I had caught his eye. Then, the speech over, the party faithful shouted, stamped their feet and whirled noise-makers. The President consulted for a few minutes with some men and after that he began to walk along between the rows of chairs, shaking hands as he went with all the people reaching out toward him. "Here goes nothing," I thought, pushing my arm out between the crowd in the front row. Suddenly he was standing there, pressing my hand in both of his, and I was totally overwhelmed by the presidential presence. How could a man with such clear, honest, frank blue eyes have ordered the assassination of the President of Nicaragua? Impossible! It was all lies. And if he had led us a bit too close for comfort to the sians had backed down at the last minute all three times, so maybe he hadn't miscalculated after all. Of one thing I was sure. He was a real nice guy and he was doing the best job he could. A dark shape, like a pterodactyl, that had lived within me for the last four years departed then and fled cawing back over the abyss to the far side, the side of the trilobites, dinosaurs and college professors. On another far side I saw Jesus, meek and mild, trying to talk to my mother, who wouldn't have anything to do with Him because He looked like a hippy; Poor old Mom. How sad to spend one's whole life in the straitjacket of a narrow mind! And where was I, on this mental Grand Canyon rim? I thought you knew. I was on the third side. The side of the real world. The side the President of the United States was on. There was a quick, hollow noise, audible even over the roar of the crowd. There was also, I then realized, a folded piece of paper in my hand. Straightening it out, I read, "Go to the west elevator bank at ten tonight and take a car to the tenth floor. 'Sam' will meet you there and bring you the rest of the way." No signature. Of course not. After all, the guy was married. So. Uncle Sam wants me. And I left my diaphragm back at the dorm, I remember thinking. In the distance men were shouting. Someone screamed. All about me people were asking, "What is it? What's happened?" It was pandemonium. I looked around but all I could see were the belts of people who were standing on chairs for a better look. Then Napoleon was coming toward me, one hand in the front of his raincoat. Of course it wasn't really Napoleon; it was Bela Benjac. Funny I had never noticed the resemblance before. Bela saw me, stopped and stared. It must have been a real shock to him, seeing the mystic vision of his dreams there in flesh, blood and a purple-velveteen trenchcoat. Slowly Bela's hand emerged from his slicker. The gun he held was still smoking. He looked like he might start shooting everyone in sight. Beginning with me. I held out my hand and said, "Bela, give me the gun." Bela looked at the weapon then as though wondering what it was doing in his hand. He peered down the barrel. Was it a real gun? Experimentally, he pulled the trigger. Just then two men grabbed him from behind but I'm certain Bela fired first. Not that he meant to commit suicide. He didn't know what he was doing. Not ever. Not any more than I had known. How could I have been so silly and childish that I wanted to kill a man over a trivial slight? And now the President was being carried into an ambulance that had driven right into the room. He must be really hurt. Suddenly I had to talk to someone. My Satanic beauty felt as though it were turned off but I checked my compact to make sure. Then I looked around for Don. He was talking to several beefy-looking men. I came up behind him just in time to hear him say, "I'm sure the girl sitting next to me was his accomplice. She went out of her way to delay the President -- you know how he is about women -- and then when the assassin nearly got away in the crowd, she called him by name and said, 'Give me your gun.' She was going to hide it for him, you see. Gorgeous redhead, you can't miss her." One of the beefy men was looking over Don's shoulder at me. I could just hear him thinking, pretty, yes. But gorgeous? "What was she wearing?" the man asked. "A brown coat, suede or a suede-like material. Yes, I'm pretty sure it was suede. Look for a gorgeous redhead in a brown suede coat..." The beefy man was no longer looking at me. I eased my way back through the crowd as fast as I could without making myself conspicuous and took off my purple-velveteen trenchcoat, saying, "Hot in here, isn't it?" to the people around me. No one replied. As I listened to everyone talk about this terrible, tragic act and imagine all sorts of conspiracies behind it, with student rioters and Communists at the bottom, I realized that I would never be able to tell anyone what I knew. Not even my coven, not even Uncle Fred. If I asked what power, dark or otherwise, had welded a witch and a madman into a conspiracy to destroy a president who was leading his country into anarchy and war. Uncle Fred would say something silly, like "Anti-entropy." And Don would turn me in. Two hours later Senator O'Keefe claimed the microphone. He was so choked up he could hardly speak but he managed to say, "Ladies and gentlemen. The President is dead." "Nell! What are you doing here?" said Don in my ear. Absent-mindedly stroking the purple-velveteen trenchcoat folded over my arm with the lining turned out, I answered, "I only wish I knew."  in a new Ice Age? Not many years ago that would have been a silly question. There was considerable debate about what causes Ice Ages -- those periods when the glaciers flow out of the north to cover a great part of the temperature zones, solid sheets of ice creeping over Canada and most of northern Europe, with fingers reaching down as far as St. Louis, Missouri; sea level down by tens to hundreds of feet, torrential rains in the southern US and Mexico, rushing rivers where now there is desert -- but everyone agreed that however these periodic disasters were triggered, they did not come on fast. Our remote descendents might have to worry about the return of the ice, but surely we did not. The worst case would do no more than bring back the "Little Ice Age" of the I #th and #th Centuries, which obliterated the Norse settlements on Greenland and made Iceland a place of poverty. More probable might be a return to the frigid conditions of the #th Century, when cannon were transported on the ice in New York harbor, and thick ice formed on most of the streams in Northern Europe and the United States. Those we knew could happen, and relatively quickly; but not the great sheets of ice covering inhabitable lands; not the emergence of the land between Australia and New Zealand; not Britain under hundreds of feet of ice and snow. Those took place gradually. Well, now we know better. The last Ice Age, which peaked about # years ago, came on with uncommon swiftness. Within a hundred years -- possibly in considerably less time than that -- the snowblitz struck, and the world was changed. The Ice Ages could start next summer, for all we know. Worse -- we could be causing them.    A traditional concept in science fiction is planetary engineering: the terraforming of worlds, tailoring them to make them more hospitable to human colonization. It seems a pretty far-out idea, and that's all to the good: the real world is fast catching up with science fiction, so that much of what used to be science fiction turns out lately to be only engineering fiction. Alas, the real world has caught up again. Terraforming is no longer something for far-out stories. It's a matter of practical concern. I don't mean that in the sense of terraforming other planets -- although, as a previous column tember #) pointed out, we could, just possibly, begin the terraforming of Venus within our lifetimes. What I'm talking about is the terraforming of Terra. We're doing that now, like it or not -- and unlike the superscience heroes of our fiction, we don't have the remotest idea of what effect we're having. We are doing things to Mother Earth. On that we can all agree. What we're doing is unknown. It might be disastrous. It might be beneficial. We may have saved ourselves from a coming Ice Age -- and we may be well down the road toward triggering a new one. And no one knows. Example: in the January # Scientific American there's an excellent paper on carbon dioxide. As Dr. George Woodwell, (Director of Ecological Systems Studies at Woods Hole) points out, "human activities are clearly increasing the carbon dioxide content of the Earth's atmosphere." We are burning coal and oil, which have stored leasing the resulting CO # . We are also cutting back forests, which are Nature's primary way of taking carbon from the atmosphere and storing it up, eliminating it from the meteorological cycle. Woodwell asks whether enough carbon can be taken from the atmosphere to be stored in forests and oceans; enough, that is, to avert a major change in climate. The problem is, no one knows. There are very reputable climatologists who are convinced that fossil-fuel burning can't possibly have a real effect on climate. The argument runs thus: if we go on using fossil fuels at present rates of growth, then by the year # or so the effect of all the extra CO # won't be very large, no more than a degree centigrade or so at most, The slight rise in temperature will bring about increased evaporation from the oceans, thus increasing cloud cover; the clouds will reflect back sunlight that would have been absorbed, causing a cooling trend; this will reduce the Earth's temperature. There is, therefore, a negative feedback effect here, damping out the results of the increased CO # . Of course if things went on a very long time the cloud cover might not be able to compensate -- but by the year # or so we will have run out of much of our fossil fuel, so the process will inevitably stop itself before any major damage has taken place. However, Woodwell's article gives us something else to worry about: deforestation. It turns out that the major part of the CO # cycle is carried on through forest belts (not the oceans as we were not long ago told) and the forests, particularly the tropical rainforests, are being cut back and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate. Furthermore, Woodwell says, forest management techniques do not compensate. In the first place, the rain forests are difficult if not impossible to replace; the land underneath is quickly leached out by the driving rain, and the result is a near-sterile hardpack. Secondly, although modern agriculture and forest management do in fact increase the yields of land over what would have grown in "natural" conditions, this is not the same as increased carbon storage; agricultural and managed-forest products are cycled very quickly. The paper produced from Canadian trees is oxidized within months to years, not stored as an ever-deeper pile of humus. Thus we certainly have an increase of CO # in the atmosphere, and the mechanisms for getting rid of it are being progressively eliminated. Should we do something about that? At this point the discussion gets tricky. There is a school of thought which says, with horror, "of course we must do something, and what we must do is stop it; and they way we must stop is to halt industrial growth. The Earth is fragile, and we dare not change it one whit. Turn back, O man, forsake thy foolish ways, while yet there is time." Despite its emotional appeal, this may not be the most intelligent approach to the problem. Perhaps we should instead ask a few questions; surely it does no harm to take a few minutes off for thought. The first question is obvious; how much? It is the natural question of the scientist and engineer, although for some reason I don't understand, rnost people who call themselves "ecologists" seldom think in quantitative terms, and are generally bored by mathematics. (As an aside, when I studied ecology many years ago the professor sent everyone off to take courses in differential equations, on the theory that ecology deals with how one rate of change affects another, and the language with which one studies such changes is calculus; this seems to be a decidedly unpopular view among the ecologists who correspond with me.) The amount of CO # in the atmosphere has risen steadily from the time we first began to measure it. At present there are about # parts #. This is a rise of just about one ppm per year, or, in percentages, about three tenths of a percent a year, which may not seem like much. However, this rate means a doubling time of # years, and few doubt that doubling the CO # in the atmosphere will have a major effect on climate. Of course it probably won't go that far; we don't have enough fossil fuels; or do we? There is, as I reported in the last column, an enormous reserve of frozen methane, and another of methane in geopressurized zones; the quantities approach the known coal reserves of the world, and neither frozen methane nor geopressure zones have been systematically prospected; there may be a very great deal. Methane is not carbon-rich, and produces when burned two atoms of water for each atom of CO#, but even so there is quite enough to pump out a lot of CO# -- and this in addition to the traditional fossil fuels such as coal and oil. (Another aside: if the frozen methane and geopressure zone gasses are developed quickly, the result will be that coal and oil become far too valuable merely to set a match to; thus even with rising energy use fueled exclusively on fossil fuels the net result would be a decrease in the CO# production as the carbon-rich oil and coal are preserved for other uses. However, let's ignore that effect, since we don't know when we'll have practical methane from our "exotic" sources.) Assume, then, that the trend continues; CO# levels rise. What will happen? The first thought is "hothouse". Although conventional greenhouses including the one in my backyard don't work this way, the "greenhouse effect" is simple enough. Heat comes in from the Sun. The radiant energy goes through the atmosphere and warms the ground. The ground in turn heats the air. However, much of the heat in the ground is re-radiated back into space, and an equilibrium temperature is established. CO#, though, is opaque to some of that re-radiated heat. Thus, instead of going back to space, the heat stays with us. The air is warmed, and a new and higher equilibrium temperature is established. If the temperature rises sufficiently to affect living systems -- trees, plants, ocean plankton -- then there is less CO# removed by photosynthesis. Whenever more CO# is released -- volcanoes, forest fires, blast furnaces, electric generators, automobiles, whatever -- it tends to stay. Thus the CO# level rises, absorbing more heat, bringing about a new and higher equilibrium temperature. Eventually there is a runaway spiral that ends when the Earth looks like Venus: a dead cloudwrapped ball with surface temperatures at or above the boiling point of water. That's hardly a pleasant prospect, and surely something to bo avoided. However: you can make just as good a case for saying that increased levels of CO# will trigger a new Ice Age. It works this way: CO# brings about higher temperatures, but this causes more water to evaporate. Thus there is more rainfall. So far no difference from before. However: much of that rainfall will come down in the Arctic as snow. With greater snowfall there's higher reflectivity on the ground. All that white snow reflects back more sunlight. The Arctic regions get colder. More water vapor comes across, more falls as snow, and the snow areas. The ice caps grow, glaciers form, and soon you have a runaway spiral that ends with much of the Northern Hemisphere covered with ice. At this point the intelligent layman is entitled to a hefty objecwhat is needed to avert disaster -- but what disaster? There's a very great difference between Pasteurized plant a la Venus, and the coming of the Fimbulwinter and the return of the ice! Aren't we entitled to know what doom we face? We may be entitled, but no one knows. There is no universally accepted theory of what causes Ice Ages. To make it worse, there isn't even a universal theory of what effects man's activities have on the climate. We may be warming the Earth. We may be cooling it. We may be keeping it constant. And while we're at it, we don't even know what Nature has in mind for us -- after all, the Ice Ages came before man was in the picture, and there are perfectly reputable theorists who believe that we're due for another, and quickly. If they're right, perhaps we had better burn more fossil fuels -- and also get busy on planetary engineering on a vast scale. We don't need Fimbulwinter. (Fimbulwinter is a Norse concept of doom; the winter that never ends. Mythologists used to believe it was a legend generated by observations of the cycle of days. People of the far north are very aware that in winter the days get shorter and shorter, and those very far north have noonday midnight, as well as midnight Sun. Now, though, a few mythographers wonder if the old Norse legends of war between gods and frost giants do not come from memories of the days when the ice was truly present.) Well -- although we don't know what causes Ice Ages, we do have theories. One of the first comes from that amazing man Benjamin Franklin, who observed that volcanic dust affected sunsets, and theorized that increases in dust levels could affect the reflectivity of Earth; this would lower temperatures, and might conceivably bring about Ice Ages through a positive feedback system. (He didn't use the modern term "positive feedback", of course, but he did describe the progressivespiral effect of increased snowfall making the ground brighter and thus reflecting even more sunlight, etc.) Franklin's theory seemed to be confirmed in #. In # a volcano named Tamboura blew off with about as much force as Krakatoa would fifty years later. the year, and # goes down in history as "the year without a summer"; growing seasons were drastically shortened, there was heavy grey cloud over Europe all spring, and much increase in rainfall. Incidentally, Tamboura may be thought of as the "father" of Frankenstein. As Nigel Calder says in The Weather Machine (excellent book), "it was the atrociously wet summer in Switzerland in # that provoked Lord Byron to suggest that Mary Shelley should write a story. Her gloomy thoughts matched the weather." The volcano theory has little support nowaday. Ice Ages are a bit too regular to ascribe to something as random as that. Present view is that volcanic dust can have a temporary effect, but is not a majoi cause of glaciation. Indeed, the modern view runs just the opposite; although a few theorists postulate that Ice Ages come from some kind of cooling event, most believe that what triggers the glaciers is an increase in temperature. Something has to water to the polar regions; that takes energy and lots of it, so how can subtracting energy from the weather system accomplish it? Of course, one of man's effects is similar to volcanic activity: all that tons of smoke particles to the atmosphere, and few doubt that the effect of that is to increase reflectivity (planetary reflectivity is called albedo by astronomers) of Earth, and thus to cool things down. Since the other effect of burning fossil fuels is to add CO # and thus warm things up, it can be -- and by some with a right to an opinion is -- argued that the net effect of man's activity has been about nil; the particles cancel out the CO # . But don't we know? Surely we can tell whether man's activities are raising or lowering the Earth's temperature! Nope. From #, when systematic observations began, to present, the variations in "average Earth temperature" have swungfrom down about #C to up about #C. During the last century, when the "Little Ice Age" ended, things stayed reasonably constant; from # to # there was a sharp rise, from# toI#C; since # there has been a fairly sharp downYou've redd about tbe Future, now read about the people working to make it happen. We've combined several exciting newsletters into a monthly package covering the three frontiers with the most longrange significance to the evolution of the human race: space-mi grat i on (for obvious reasons), life-extension sciand political freedom movements (without which the first two might not happen). Each subscription to Claustrophobia includes: L-# News (newsletter of the space colonizers), The Foundation Report (space utiiization consultants). Long Life Kagazine (cryonics and I i fe-extens i on breakthroughs) , New Libertarian (news, philosophy, reviews), Ind i v i dual Liberty (freedom movement news) and News Watch (our own short summaries of related news items from other newsletters and science journals). Purchased separately these would cost #year, but sold as a package they're S#ycar or # for a three month trial. We also offer a discount if you're already receiving any of these. Additional information on request. SW #feth Or., Portland, Ok #I ward trend to the present condition. If one calculates the maximum effect of human activity -- warming through CO # release, cooling from smoke particles in the air -- neither is great enough to account for what has been observed. The Earth got hotter during this century than CO # (ignoring smoke particles entirely) could have made it; at the turn of the century it was colder than smoke particles (ignoring CO # entirely) could have brought about. Man's activities have an effect, but it clearly isn't enough to produce what Nature is doing to us; in fact, man's activities are lost in the noise. And that's assuming that the measurements are accurate. Consider the difficulty: what do we mean by an average temperature? Seasonal variations swing by # C and more; and we are looking for trends measured in the tenths of a degree. Clearly we can have a very large effect simply by changing the way we calculate the "average." Yet -- small changes can be important. We study temperatures of the past through a number of techniques: pollen residues found in ocean cores; tree rings; historical records; anything that will give a clue. From these emerges a picture of the climate of the past. About # years ago there was a cool pjeriod, which was followed by a # year warming trend. That lasted until # BC (a significant date, as we'll see in a moment) when temperatures fell again. They stayed low until # BC, and began to rise, until in # AD there began a "warm snap" that carried the Norse to Iceland and Greenland. This lasted until # AD, peaking in #. Then began the "Little Ice Age" mentioned before, which froze out the Greenland colonies, created the stories of ice skating on the canals of Holland, and brought about generally severe winters. In # began the warming trend that took us to #. Some of those dates are significant. The so-called First Dark Age, the period in which writing was lost and European civilization fell from a high culture to a low level indeed, began in # BC or so; Rhys Carpenter ascribes the fall of the Bronze Age to climate, and he has considerable evidence. We know of the effects of the "Little Ice Age": lowered harvests, famines, generally bad conditions although its effects on cultural history aren't obvious. The point is that during that entire # year span, a time in which whole areas became inhabitable or uninhabitable, in which deserts formed in what had been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire -- in all that time, the total range of temperature differences was no more than # C. And we have in the last hundred years noted variations of ten percent of that. Little things can be important. Now to return to our speculation: what causes the variations in temperature? Sunspots? There's certainly plenty of evidence that sunspots are significant. Indeed, there's even a theory that the sunspot cycle can trigger earthquakes and volcanoes: the solar wind has a direct effect on the atmosphere, and this is large enough to cause a glitch in the Earth's rotation rate; and that could certainly trigger off faults. (There is serious speculation that when the planets all line up they'll cause sunspot activity which will trigger the San Andreas, and California will slide off into the sea. I don't believe in it, but I am buying earthquake insurance. Can't be too careful.) And after all, we understand sunspots. They come in regular waves, nice cycles -- Or do they? It appears they do not. A search of historical records indicates long periods of solar quiescence, corresponding with long periods of drought and other climatic effects. After all, sunspots can be observed with a pinhole, and have been known since ancient times; and although we have trained ourselves to think of them as a regular cyclic phenomenon, that turns out not always to have been true. Sigh. Will nothing hold still? Don't we know anything? Well, we do know a few things. Oddly enough, we do have some theories on what man can do to Earth's climate. For example, Soviet studies of polar ice are revealing: if all the Arctic ice melted, the effect would be to raise the northern temperatures by more than #" C, which is interesting, because that is to raise them above the level for the ice to form. The Earth, it seems, can live very well without her northern icecap. Of couse there would also be a dramatic rise in sea level, and that wouldn't be very good for the inhabitants of New York and Los Angeles and other coastal cities. On the other end, we can calculate very well what would happen were the Earth covered entirely with ice and snow, and with the clouds all gone. The result would be very much lower temperatures (average about #" C less than present) and the ice would never melt. The Earth, it seems, could get along very well (although we would not) as a great snowball. However: both those extremes are not only unlikely, but unstable. Very small variations in the solar output would upset either -- and the Sun is now known to be a variable star. That brings us to the point of this column.    I was recently asked to prepare a paper on mass hydraulic projects now on the drawing board. These American Water and Power Alliance) proposal which would bring water (and that is a lot of water), from Alaska and the Yukon down into the southern parts of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Certainly the water is needed: civilization runs on water. There's plenty of it in this world, but it is not conveniently located. As I write this, California is still under drought conditions while Oregon has floods. Since it takes, about # liters of water per citizen per day to run a modem industrial civilization; # metric tons of water to produce a single ton of rice; # tons of water for each ton of cotton fibre harvested; it would be no bad thing if we could increase the water supply. ject might seem, it's small potatoes compared to Soviet plans. Already the Volga-Don Canal has affected the level of the Caspian Sea, but not enough: that largest fresh-water lake in the world is drying up. So, plan the Soviets, it could be filled again, by diverting north-flowing streams such as the Pechora from the Arctic regions down into the south-flowing river system. There's even a Soviet plan to dam up the Yenesei and create a vast new inland sea in Siberia; this would have the effect of moderating Siberian winters. It might also affect the Arctic Sea enough to melt the icecap -- one reason Soviet climatologists are interested in the effects of that rather drastic move. I was requested to examine the schemes for possible environmental effects. The engineering feasibilities are not in question; we can accomready at work on the Pechora scheme, and the Yenesei plan is not beyond their capabilities. But because something can be done does not mean it should be done, and despite canards from "environmentalists" few engineers believe otherwise. But comes now the hitch; we just do not know what the effects of such vast projects would be. We can make guesses, we can do calculations, we can speculate; we can perform studies; but in the last analysis our theory isn't good enough. Not yet. So what should we do?. (Not that my opinion is all that important, except to me; but the question intrigues me.) There are two possible answers. Understand; the economic benefits Mexico are not much in doubt; nor are the benefits of the Soviet Pechora projects to refill the Caspian and flush out the Sea of Azov. Understand also; there are great positive "environmental" benefits to be reaped. The Caspian put back to its "natural" state; the Sea of Azov cleaned up; the Great Lakes flushed out. Lake Erie returned to what it was in the days of the American Revolution; these are all fall-out benefits that would certainly result. In addition, the dustbowl areas of the US and Soviet Union would receive enough water to bring back soil stability. Streams in both the western and eastern US would run cleaner. In other words, there's a lot going for the projects. But we don't know what they will do. They might cause Ice Ages, or alternatively, heat things up (although that's unlikely). It occurred to me that these water projects are not greatly different from energy policies. Burning fossil fuels has an effect on the climate, but we don't know what it is. If we develop fusion, that will have an effect. If we put up solar power satellites, they'll have another effect. It's a modern truism, a trite phrase that the ecologists use, that "everything affects everything else" but its triteness doesn't make it less true. So; what shall we do? Take the approach that because we don't know what effects we'll have, we should no nothing; try to minimize man's impact on the planet, even at the cost of eschewing the undoubted benefits from our hydraulic projects (or from developing new energy sources); or go ahead? At first blush -- and it is probably due to the temper of the times that even I am affected this way -- the choice seems clear. Best not meddle. The forces unleashed are just too big for us. The possible disasters outweigh any possible benefits. But that's at first look. There's another way to see the question. It requires asking another question; what has Nature done? And the answer to that is "Plenty!" Over the past #,(X)# years we've had pretty wild swings of climate -- and those are trivial compared to others we know of. Nature has taken this planet from near-universal tropic to the vast glaciers of the Ice Ages. That needn't have concerned us back when we thought none of those extremes came on quickly; but now we know better. If we do nothing at all we have not insured against a new snowblitz. Next winter could be the Fimbulwinter for all we know. Right now this planet is pretty well designed for us -- but it need not stay that way, and in fact our historical inquiries (conducted through pollens found in ocean cores, examination of tree rings, radiocarbon dating, etc.) convince us that it's not likely to. Over the long haul things have got to change for the worse, and that haul may not be so very long. Which leads to the other conclusion about planetary engineering: why not? Nature did not design this Earth for us, and she is perfectly capable of changing things so that we can't live here. We, on the other hand, have ways of modifying climate. We really do have the capability to reengineer this planet. It's a frightening capability -- but it's also very unlikely that any manmade accident will be large compared to what Nature is capable of all by herself. There's another difference between us and Nature. What we do is at least partly under control. Sure; the High Aswan dam has messed up the ecology of the eastern Mediterranean (and US .engineers in fact told the Egyptians it would, which is why we wouldn't build it for them, and why they went to the Russians for help); but the High Aswan is not eternal, and in fact has had a pretty small effect compared to some natural events of that region. It wasn't all that long ago that the Mediterranean was a dry desert... The High Aswan could, if need be, be removed. ways and dams could, if need be, be taken out. The Pechora could, if necessary, be allowed to flow undisturbed northwards. The Caspian could, if need be, be allowed to empty itself again. And so forth. Agreed: once such vast investments have been made, the decision to undo them (probably undo them in part; not all of the effects would be detrimental) and thus forgo their benefits would not be easy to make. Politically and economically they would be the toughest decisions in history; but they would be possible decisions. Now tell me how to undo the effects of a long period of quiet Sun? Or of vastly increased sunspots? Or of any of a number of other mysterious changes Nature can make, arbitrarily and capriciously, in our environment -- changes which we know (not merely wonder about as we wonder about the effects of sequences? Do we trust man or Nature? A few years ago that was an easy question to answer. Nature loves us. This is our planet, designed for our use. We can't believe that any more. Hadn't we better learn something about planetary engineering? We may need to terraform Terra; and we may need to do it sooner than we think.  The she ' pan had her plans for the mri. But what were they? The mri. a species that survives by hiring out its warrior-caste as mercenaries, has served the regul merchants against humankind-in a war now lost. Thirteen mri presently survive on the mri homeworld. Kesrith; a few hundred more are on ships scattered throughout known space. Those on Kesrith are the old and the infirm, save for Niun and his sister Melein. Niun . last son born to his dying species, has trained for all his young life to fight humans; but he is held onworld at the side of the aged she' pan (queenimother) Intel, a battle-scarred and tired ruler addicted to drugs and capricious in her exercise of power. She dismissed Niun' s cousin Medai to the war, in honor, aboard the regul high-command ship, rejecting Niun's plea to go. She took Melein out of her chosen caste, the Kel (warriors), and put her among the scholarly sen-caste. She permits nothing to be done while the new regul governor, bai Hulagh, evacuates regul from Kesrith and prepares to hand Kesrith over to human occupation as part of the negotiated settlement of the war. Niun is horrified and angry at what he sees happening, regul leaving Kesrith and mri remaining onworld-but there is no way for a warrior to argue with the she'pan, even thougn she be mad and dooming the entire species to needless extinction. In regul-maintained security, there are others now on Kesrith: Two human observers, Stavros and Duncan, have come in advance of the human occupation forcesStavros as governor-to-be and chief negotiator, expert in alien affairs; and Duncan as his assistant, in reality a specialist in alien-terrain warfare. But the regul have managed to whisk them from Hulagh' s ship to Kesrithi headquarters under such efficient security that they have never really seen Kesrith itself... and Stavros chooses patience under these conditions, an attitude that the young officer Duncan does not find reasonable. Humans will be coming in very soon; ship after regul ship is going out, ostensibly in a regul evacuation of personnel. And Hulagh has meanwhile delivered to the mri of Kesrith the dead body of his own attendant mercenary-suicide, say the regul, who are constitutionally incapable either of forgetting a fact or of lying-a death occasioned by the mercenary' s despair over the end of the war. The young mercenary in question was Medai, Niun's cousin; and as Niun sits the lonely deathwatch in the darkened Shrine of his people, there arrives a great dus, one of the Kesrithi beasts that have always accompanied the mri to war: Each beast chooses a single mri warrior for life. This one is scarred, halfstarved, and in miuk, the madness that comes on a dus under extreme stress. Niun suspects that the beast is Medai's, escaped from the regul ship... and its evidently prolonged abuse suggests something sinister about Medai's supposed suicide. No mri could abuse a dus, particularly his own; the relationship is too intimate. Yet regul cannot lie. Perplexed. Niun attempts to win over the suffering beast; it rejects him -- a rejection he concludes is judgment on himself, an unfledged warrior, far less a man than he whom this beast has served before. It sits dying at their door, and Niun goes into the desert to bury his cousin and rival. But he learns then from his elders that Medai was considered and rejected for Intel's personal service. Niun suddenly perceives that there are many things he has not understood... and now he sees. He has been reserved by the she' pan for a special reason; Intel's actions seem now frighteningly purposeful from the beginning. It is the death of his species he foresees, and himself the she' pan's last warrior. Meanwhile the violent nature of Kesrith strikes its own blow; A storm comes down on the regul capital, and in the resulting chaos Stavros suffers a paralyzing stroke-by no means a distressing condition to regul who, in adulthood, normally lose mobility and become confined to prosthetic sleds. Stavros can function by adaptation to a such regul device, but he is more helpless than a regul under such circumstances. Duncan becomes Stavros' eyes and ears in the regul headquarters, and Duncan has always disagreed with Stavros' acquiescence in their confinement. Now, with Stavros ill, he finds himself having to deal with a species that reveres elders but ient youngling -- which is his status in regul estimation. Nor is Hulagh himself untouched by catastrophe. The storm has crippled the port and damaged his ship. It is impossible for him to continue the systematic plunder of Kesrith, for Hulagh was doing just that, enriching himself and engineering a coup that would have disgraced the human envoys and saved regul honor, robbing the humans of the wealth they had gained in the treatyNow it is a question of even being able to evacuate regul personnel in time, for the human forces will come within a very few days. Then Hulagh learns that a mri warship is incoming, and in panic he pays an unprecedented call on the mri she' pan, trying to trick the Kesrithi mri into boarding his ship. Intel refuses and he departs in frustration, knowing that he cannot control the mri without she' pan Intel in his hpnds. A new report reaches him; The incoming mri ship contains not the usual handful, but hundreds of mri, perhaps the remainder of the species. Kesrith is their chosen homeworld, and they are coming in to join Intel. With this the specter of all-out war is before Hulagh-a mri-human confrontation that will undo the peace and destroy them all; regul cannot fight; and they can no longer restrain the events that are proceeding about them. The mri will be unleashed in a war of their own choosing, with their former employers caught in the middle. The rain came, a gentle enemy, against the walls of the edun. The winds rushed down, but the mountain barrier and the high rocks broke their force and sent them instead skirling down slopes toward the regul town and port. No strong wind had ever touched the edun, not in two thousand years. It was comfortable on such a night to take common-meal, all castes together in the she'pan's tower. All evening long there had been a curious sensitivity in the air, a sense of violent pleasure, of satisfaction as strong as the storm winds. The dusei, mood-sensitive, had grown so restive that they had been turned out of the edun altogether, to roam where they pleased this night. They disappeared into the dark, all but the miuk'ko at the gate, that found no discomfort at all in the world's distempers. And the spirits of the kel'ein were high. Old eyes glittered. There was no mention of the ship that was coming, but it was at the center of everything. Niun, likewise among the keTein, felt the surge of hope at the arrival of Ahanal. Of a sudden, dizzying views opened before his feet. Others. Brothers, Rivals. Challenge, and hope of living. And himself, even unfledged, even without experience in war, hitherto no person of consequence; but this was homeworld, and he of homeworld's Kel; and he was, above all, the she'pan's kel'en. It was a heady, unaccustomed feeling, that of being no longer the least but one among the first. "We have been in contact with a mri ship," was all the word the she'pan had given them that morning before the arrival of the regul bai; and that, outside its name, was all that they knew. The Lady Mother had gathered them together in the dawning and spoken to them quietly and soberly, and it was an effort for her, for she lay insensible so much of the time. But for a moment, a brief moment, there had been an Intel Niun had never before seen: It had awed him, that softvoiced, clear-headed stranger who spoke knowledgeably about lanes and routings around Kesrith that were little-monitored by regul. In riddles she spoke at times, but not then. "Soon," she had said. "Very soon. Keep your eyes on the regul, kel'ein." And quickly then, more quickly than they had anticipated, the regul bai had come, making them offers. The regul were concerned. They were presented with something that had never happened before, and they were alarmed and confused. "Intel," said Eddan, her eldest Husband, when dinner was done and Niun had returned from carrying the utensils to the scullery -- that and the storerooms being the only parts of the Kath-tower that remained open. "Intel, may the Kel ask permission to ask a question?" Niun settled among the kel'ein quickly, anxious and at once grateful that Eddan had waited until his return; and he looked at Intel's face, seeking some hope that she would not deny them. She frowned. "Is the Kel going to ask about the ship?" "Yes," said Eddan, "or anything else worth the knowing." The she'pan unfolded her hands, permission given. "When it comes," asked Eddan, "do we go or do we stay?" "Kel'ein, I will tell you this: that I have seen that Kesrith's use is near its end. Go, yes; and I will tell you something more: that I owe the regul bai one kel'en, but no more. And I do much doubt that he will come back to collect that promise of me." Old Liran, veilless as they all were veilless in the intimacy of the common-meal, grinned and made a move of his scarred hand. "Well, she'pan. Little Mother, if he does come back, send me. I would like to see whether Nurag is all it is claimed to be; and I would be of scant use in the building of another edun. This one, all cracks as it is, is home; and if I am not to stay with this one, why, I might as well take service again." "Would a service among the People not do as well, Liran?" "Yes, Little Mother, well enough," Liran answered, and his old eyes flickered with interest. He darted a glance at Eddan, an appeal: Ask questions, eldest. The whole Kel sat utterly still. But the she'pan had turned their question aside. Eddan did not ask again. "Sathell," said Intel. "She'pan?" "Cite for the Kel the terms of the treaty that binds us to the service of regul." Sathell bowed his head and lifted it again. "The words of the treaty between doch Holn and mri are the treaty that keeps us in service to the regul. The pertinent area: So long as regul and mri alone occupy the homeworld, whereon the edun of the People rests... or until regul depart the homeworld, whereon the edun of the People rests... This long we are bound to accept service with regul when called upon. And I hold, she'pan, that in spirit, if not in letter, regul have already failed in the terms of that treaty." "Surely," said the she'pan, "we are not far from that point. We contracted with doch Holn. Doch Holn might have known how to deal with us, but this bai Hulagh is apparently of Nurag itself, and I do not think he knows the People. He erred seriously when he did not take urgent care to see to our evacuation long before now." "Holn knew better," said Sathell. "But Holn neglected to pass on to her successor all that she might have told him. The old bai Solgah kept her silence. Neither do regul tend to consult written records. The regulkind do not make good fighters, but they are, in their own way, very clever at revenge." And Intel smiled, a tired smile that held a certain satisfaction. "May the Kel," asked Eddan, "ask permission to ask a question?" "Ask." "Do you think the Holn deliberately excluded us from the assets she turned over to this bai Hulagh?" "I believe the Holn will consider this a stroke of revenge, a salve to their pride, yes. Bai Hulagh has lost the mri. In such manner regul fight against regul. What is that to us? But I am sure of this," she said in a hard tone, "that Medai was the last of my children to leave on a regul ship, the last of my children to die for regul causes. And hereafter, hereafter, kel'ein, do not plan that mri should fight mri again. No. We do not fight." There was palpable dismay in the whole Kel. "May the Kel ask -- ?" Eddan began, unshakably formal. "No," she said. "The Kel may not ask. But I will tell you what is good for you to know. The People .are dangerously declined in numbers. Time was when such fightings served the People; but no longer, no longer, kel'ein. I will tell you a thing you did not ask. The ship Ahatu bears what remains of all the People, and we are the rest. There are no more." There was cold in the room, and no one moved. Niun locked his arms tightly about his knees, trying to absorb personally what the Mother had said, hoping that it was allegory, as she often spoke in riddles. But there was no way to believe it a figure of speech. "At Elag," said Intel in a thin, hard voice, "while regul evacuated their own kind, they threw the kel'ein that served them against humans again and again and again, and summoned the kel'ein of Mlassul and Seleth edunei, and lost them as well. But this mattered little to regul, to this new bai, Hulagh, to this new master sent out from Nurag." There was a sudden sound, an impact of fist on flesh; and Eddan, who did not swear, swore. "She'pan," he said then. "May the Kel ask -- " "There is nothing more to ask, Eddan," said Intel. "That is the thing that happened, the thing that cost ten thousand mri lives, and also ships -- ships of which I do not know the tally. Many, many of the ships were regul, without regul personnel aboard because the regul feared to stay. They killed ten thousand mri. And I curse the she'panei who lent their children to such as that. ' ' A fine sweat beaded Intel's face, and pallor underlay her skin. The sound of her breathing was audible, a hoarseness, above the sound of the rain outside. Never had the gentle Mother cursed anyone, and now the enormity of cursing other she'panei chilled the heart; neither was there repentance on her face. Niun drew his breaths carefully, sucking in air as if he drew it off the noon-heated sands. His muscles began to tremble and he clenched his hands the harder lest someone notice it, if anyone could notice anything but his own heartbeat in that terrible silence. "Little Mother," Sathell pleaded. "Enough. Enough." "The Kel," she said, "finds it necessary to ask questions. It is due an answer." And she paused for a moment, drawing great breaths as though she intended next something very necessary, something urgent. "Kel'ein," she said, "chant me the Shon'Jir. " There was a stirring among the kel'ein, mounting panic and dismay. She is dying was Niun's first thought, and O Gods, what an ill omen of things! And he could not say the words she asked of them. "Are you children," she asked of her Husbands, "to believe any longer in luck, either good or bad? Chant me the passing-ritual." They looked at Eddan, who inclined his head in a gesture of surrender and began, softly. Niun joined them, uncertain in this insanity in which they were bidden join. From Dark beginning To Dark at ending. Between them a Sun, But after comes Dark, And in that Dark One ending. From Dark to Dark Is one voyage. From Dark to Dark Is our voyage. And after the Dark, O brothers, O sisters. Come we home. Intel listened with her eyes closed and afterward there was a long silence; then her lids lifted, and she looked on all of them as from a far place. "I give you," she said, "a knowledge which kel'ein knew long ago, but which passed from the Kel-lore. Remember it again. I make it lawful. Kesrith is only a between, and Arain only one of many suns, and we are near an ending. In the People's history, kel'ein, are many such Darks; and the regul have afforded us only the latest of our many homes. For this reason we call it Shon'jir, and in the low language, the passing-ritual. For this reason we say it at the beginning of each life of the People and at each life's ending; and at the beginning of each era and at its ending. Until another she'pan shall bid your children's children, Niun, forget what I have told you. Only the Kel may remember." "Mother," he said, raising a hand to her in entreaty, "Mother, is it the moving of homeworld you mean?" Too long she had been mother to him, and he realized after he had spoken his question that she was due more courtesy; he sat with his heart pounding, waiting to hear her coldly rebuff him by asking Eddan if the Kel had a question to pose. But she neither frowned nor refused his question. "Niun, I give you more truth to ponder. The regul call themselves old; but the People are older. The two thousand years of which you know are only an interlude. We are nomads. I say that the Kel shall pot fight; but the Kel has other purposes. Last of my sons, the Kel of the Darks is a different Kel than the Kel of the Between. Last of my daughters, assuming the she'panate of the Darks is a duty I do not envy you." Upon an instant the whole Kel was tom, each one of them, into a fearful, astonished attention. The succession was passed, not in fact, but in intent; and Niun looked at his onetime brothers and saw their dismay; and he looked at Melein and saw her pale and shaken. She veiled herself and turned away from them; and of a sudden he felt himself utterly alone, even there, amid the Kel. He bowed his head and stayed so while the voice of Eddan, subdued, begged leave to question, which request the she'pan refused. "The Sen asks," said Sathell's voice then, and by that a question was posed that could not be refused. "She'pan, we cannot make these plans without consulting together." "Is that a question, sen?" the she'pan asked dryly, and in the shock of that collision of wills, there was silence. Niun looked at them, from one to the other, appalled that those who ruled his life did not agree. "It is a question," said Sathell. The she'pan bit at her lip and nodded. "Yet," she said, "we have made these plans without consulting. I did not consult when I made sure that Ahanal was reserved from the madness at Elag. I did not consult when I maintained our base on Kesrith against the urging of some to leave. I have made these plans without consulting, and I have left the People no other choice." "To the death of our Kath and most of our Kel, when we might have had Lushain for homeworld instead, where there is water and gentle elimate, where we might have had a rich world, she'pan." "That old quarrel," she said in a still voice. "But I had my way, Sathell, because the she'pan, not the sen'anth, leads the People. Remember it." "The Sen asks," said Sathell in a trembling voice, "why. Why must it have been Kesrith?" "Is your knowledge adequate? Do you know the last Mysteries, sen'anth?" "No," Sathell acknowledged, an answer wrung from him. "Kesrith was the best choice." "I do not believe it." "I said at the time," said Intel softly, "that I decided as I saw fit. That is still true. I do not require your belief." "This I know," said Sathell. "Kesrith is hard. It kills the weak. It has performed its function." "This forge of the People, as you called it, has performed its function too well. We are too few. And Elag has left us with nothing." "Elag has left us with a remnant like the remnant of Kesrith," said Intel. "With what has been through fire." "A handful." "We have given the People," she said, "a place to stand, and stand we shall until humans stand on Kesrith. And then... the Dark. After that -- a decision that will belong to others than you and me, Sathell." There was silence. Sathell rose suddenly and caught at the wall for support, his weakness betraying him. "To others then," he said, "let it pass now." And he walked out. His footsteps descended the tower. Eddan bowed himself, went to Intel and took her hand. "Little Mother," he said gently, "the Kel approves you." "The Kel knows little," she said, "even now." "The Kel knows the she 'pan," he said, a faint voice. And then he looked about at the others, seeking Melein last of all. "Sen Melein, make the cup for her." "I will not drink it tonight, Eddan," Intel said. But Eddan's look said otherwise, and Melein nodded, silent conspiracy against Intel's will, and rose and poured water and komal into a cup, preparing the draught that would give Intel ease. "Go," said Eddan to the Kel. "Niun will stay," said Intel, and Niun, who had risen with the others, stopped. Downstairs the main door opened and closed, a hollow crash. "Gods," Pasev breathed and cast a look at Intel. "He is leaving the edun." "Let him go," said Intel. "She'pan," said Melein's voice, a clear note of anguish. "He cannot stay the night out there in the weather." "I will go after him," said Debas. "No," said the she'pan. "Let him go." And after a moment it was clear that there was no changing her mind. There was nothing to be done. Melein settled at Intel's side, still veiled, her eyes averted. "The Kel is dismissed," said Intel, "except Niun. Sleep well, kel'ein." But Eddan did not wish to be dismissed. He stayed last of all, though Intel gestured him away. "Go," she said. "There is nothing more I can tell you tonight, Eddan. In the morning set one of the kel'ein to watch the port from the high rocks. Sleep now. This storm will keep the regul inactive, but tomorrow is another matter." "No," said Eddan. "I am going after my brother. ' ' "Without my blessing." "All the same," said Eddan, and he turned to go. "Eddan," she said. He looked back at her. "We are getting too few," he said, "to make many journeys to Sil'athen. Sathell ren. Neither would I. Now we will not leave Kesrith. We will walk toward Sil'athen, he and I. Together we will be content." "I give my blessing," she said after a moment. "Thank you," he said, "she'pan." "she'pan." And that was all. Eddan left; and Niun stared after him into the dark of the hall, trembling in every muscle. They were as dead, Eddan and Sathell. They had chosen: Sathell, after the fashion of his kind, to take the long walk; and Eddan, untypical for his caste, to go with him. And Niun had seen Eddan's face, and there was no heaviness in it. He heard the kel'anth's steps going down the spiral, a quick and easy stride, and the door closed behind him too; and thus it was certain that the edun was now less by two lives, and they had been indeed great lives. "Sit by me," Intel bade them. "She'pan," said Melein in a thin, strained voice, "I have made your cup. Please drink it." She offered it, and the tray shook in her hands. Intel took the cup from her and drank and returned it, leaning back as Niun settled, kneeling, on her left hand, and Melein on her right. So they had spent many of the nights since Medai's death, for Intel's sleep was not easy and she would not sleep without another in the room. This night Niun envied her the draught of komai, and he would not look at her as she waited for the draught to have effect but instead bowed his head and stared at his hands in his lap, shaken and shattered to his innermost heart. Eddan. Eddan and Sathell, that had been a part of all his life. He wept, nakedfaced, and the tears splashed onto his hands, and he was ashamed to lift a hand to wipe them away, for the Kel did not weep. "Sathell is very ill," said Intel softly, "and he knows well what he does. Do not think that we parted hatefully. Melein knows. Eddan knows. Sathell was a good man. Our old, old quarrel...he never agreed with me, and yet for fortythree years he has given me his good offices. I do not grudge that he simply stated his opinion at the last. We were friends. And do not feel badly for Eddan. If he had done otherwise, I would have been surprised." "You are hard," said Niun. "Yes," she said. And her slight touch descended on his shoulder, brushed aside the zaidhe. He slipped it off, wadded its cloth in his clenched fists, his head still bowed for his eyes were wet. "Last son of mine," she said then, "do you love me?" The question, so nakedly posed, struck him like a hammer-blow; and in this moment he could not say smoothly, yes. Mother. He could not summon it. "Mother," he said painfully -- of her many titles, the best and dearest to the Kel. "Do you love me, Niun?" Her soft fingers brushed past his mane, touched the sensitivity of his ear, teasing the downy tufts at its crest, an intimacy for kinswomen and lovers. Here is a secret, the touch said, a hidden thing. Be attentive. He was not strong enough for secrets now, nor for any added burden. He looked up at her, trying to answer. The calm face looked down on him with curious longing. "I know," she said. "You are here. You pay me duty. That is still a good and pious act, child of mine. And I know that I have robbed you and denied you and compelled everything that you have done and will ever do." "I know that your reasons have been good ones." "No," she said. "You are kel'en. You do not know; you believe. But you are proper to say so. And you are right. Tomorrow, tomorrow you will see it, when you seeAhanal. Melein..." "She'pan." "Do you mourn Sathell?" "Yes, she'pan." "Do you dispute me?" "No, she'pan." "There will be a she'pan on Ahanal," said Intel. "That she'pan is not fit as I have made you fit." "I am twenty-two years old," protested Melein. "She'pan, you could take command of Ahanal, but if they challenge, if they should challenge -- " "Niun would defend me, defend me well. And he will defend you in your hour." "Do you pass his duty to me?" Melein asked. "In time," she said, "I will do this. In your time." "I do not know all that I need to know, she'pan." "You will kill," said Intel, "any who try to take the Pana from you. I am the oldest of all she'panei, and I have prepared my successor in my own way." "In conscience -- " Melein protested. "In conscience," said the she'pan, "obey me and do not question." And the drug began to come over her and her eyes to dim, and she sank into her cushions and was still. It was said, in a tale told in the Kel, that at the fall of Nisren humans had actually breached the edun, ignoring mri attempts to challenge to a'ani: this the first and most bitter error the mri had made with humans. A human force had swept through the halls while the Kath in terror had tried to escape; Intel had put herself between humans and the Kath, fired the hall with her own hand. Whether because of Intel or the fire, those humans had not come against her. She had held long enough for some of the Kath to escape, until the embattled Kel could reach that hall and get her to safety, aboard the regul ship. That aspect of the gentle Intel had always seemed incredible to Niun -- until this night. Duncan heard the hum of machinery. It awakened him, advising him at once that Stavros had need of something. He pulled himself off the couch and gathered his fatigue-dulled senses. He had not undressed. He had not put Stavros to bed. Storm-alarms had made most of the night chaotic. There was a time that constant storm advisories were coming over communications. He heard the storm shields in Stavros' quarters slide open. He went in, noting that the alarms were past and the screens showed clear. The dawn came up ruddy and murky, flooding a peculiar light through the glass. Stavros was sitting in the center of that glow, a curious figure in his mobile sled. He whipped it about, so as to face Duncan, with a jaunty expertise. The communication screen lighted. Look outside. Duncan stepped up to the rainspattered window and looked outward, scanning the desolate expanse of sand and rock, the sea and the towers of the water-recovery system. There was something wrong, a gap in the silhouette, a vacancy where yesterday structures had stood. There was a particularly dark area of cloud over the seacoast, flattened by the winds, tom and streamered out to sea. Stavros' screen activated again. Advisory just given: water-usage confined to drinking and food preparation only. "Minor repairs at plant." They ask we remain patient. "But we've got people coming down here," Duncan protested. Suspect further damage at port. Regul much disturbed. Bat ' 'not available." The rain slacked off considerably, leaving only a few spatters on the windows. TTie murky light grew for a moment red, like that from fire; it was but Arain, through thick cloud. And on the long ridge that lay beyond the town there was a shadow that moved. Duncan's eyes jerked toward it, strained upon that one spot. There was nothing to be seen. "I saw something out there," he said. Yes, the screen advised him when he turned. Many. Many. Maybe flood drove beasts from holes. In a moment another shadow appeared atop the ridge. He watched as yet another, and another, and another, appeared. His eyes swept the whole circuit of the hills. Against the sullen light .there was a gathering row of black shapes that moved and milled aimlessly. Mri, he had feared. But not mri. Beasts. He thought of the great unpleasant beasts that had been found with dead mri, ursine creatures that could be as dangerous as their size warned. "They're mri-beasts," he said to Stavros. "They've got the whole area ringed." Regul call them dusei. They are native to Kesrith. Read your briefings. "They go with mri. How many mri are supposed to be here? I thought it was only a handful." So the bai assures us-a token presence, to be removed. Duncan looked at the horizon. The clouds stretched unbroken. And the dusei were a solid line across the whole ridge, encompassing the visible circuit of the sea to the town. Duncan turned from the sight of it, shivered, looked again. He considered the rain, and the land. Working his sweating hands, he turned again and looked at Stavros. "Sir, I'd like to go out there." "No," Stavros murmured. "Listen to me." Duncan found it awkward to talk at such an angle, dropped to one knee so that he could meet the old man eye to eye, set a hand on the cold metal of the sled. "We've got only regul word for it that the regul don't lie; we've got mri out there; we've got a colony mission coming in here in a matter of days. You took me along. I assume you had some feeling then you might need me. I can get out there and take a look and get back without anyone the wiser. You can cover for me that long. Who cares about a youngling more or less? They won't see me. Let me go out there and see what kind of situation we're facing, with those ships coming in. We don't know how bad it is with the water; we don't know what shape the port is in. Are you that confident we're always told all the truth?" Weather hazardous. And incident with regul likely. "That's something I can avoid. It's my job. It's what I know how to do." Argument persuasive. Can you guarantee no incident? "On my life." Estimate correct. If incident occurs, then regul law prevails out there. You understand? Survey facilities, plant, port, return. Can cover you till dark. "Yes, sir." He was relieved in some part; he did not look forward to it. He knew the hazard better perhaps than Stavros did. But for once he and the Honorable Stavros were of one mind. Hunting out the hazards was more comfortable than ignoring them. He rose, looked outside, found the dusei's dark line vanished in that brief interval. Blinking, he tried to see through the haze of rain but could make out little in the distance. "Sir," he murmured to Stavros by way of farewell; Stavros inclined his head, dismissing him. The screen remained dark. He went quickly to his own quarters and changed uniforms, slipping into khaki weatherproofs and sealed boots, still common enough in appearance that he did not think regul would notice the difference. He put into the several pockets a tight roll of cord, a knife, a packet of concentrates, a penlight, whatever would fit without obvious outlines. He flipped the hood into the collar and zipped the closures. Then he strolled out into the hall on a pattern he had followed several times a day since he had studied the layout of the building, went down the hall to the left and out toward the observation-deck window. No one was in the hall. He opened the door and went out into the rainchilled air, circled the lowwalled observation deck, looked over his shoulder to see that the hall beyond the doors was still clear. It was He quite simply sat down on the edge of the wall, held with his hands as he dropped, and let go. The regul stories were short by human standards. He landed on cement at the bottom, but it was not a hard drop at all, only a flex of the knees; and the cement showed no tracks. By the time he reached the edge of the concrete and disappeared into the gentle rolls of the landscape, he was confident that he was unobserved. He walked toward the waterplant, turning up the hood of his uniform as he went for he knew the warnings about the mineralladen rains and cared to expose as little of his skin as possible. Now off the pavements of the city, he left tracks as plain as wet sand allowed, but he did not reckon to be tracked at all. He felt rather self-pleased in this, which he had thought about for days, idle exercise of his professional mind during the long inactivity in the Nom; the fact was that no regul could possibly have done what he had just done, and therefore the regul had not taken precautions against it. Such a drop would have been impossible to their heavy, short-legged bodies, and likewise there was no regul that could come tracking him crosslands. That would take a mri. And that was the only thought that made him a little less selfpleased than he might have been under the circumstances. He had wanted arms at the outset of the voyage, but the diplomats had denied them to him: unnecessary and provocative, they had reasoned. Now he was unarmed but for the kit-knife in his pocket, and a mri warrior could carve him into small portions before he could come close enough to make use of it for defense. The fact was clear that should regul set a mri on his trail, he was dead; but then, he reasoned, should regul dare do that, the treaty was obviously worth nothing, and that fact had as well be known early. There was also the possibility that the mri were out in force and that they were not under regul control; and that, most of all, needed to be known. For that reason he exercised more caution than he would have had he feared only regul. He watched the ridges and the shadows of gullies and took care to look behind him, remembering the dark shapes that had moved upon the hills, the dusei that were out there somewhere; he crossed dus-tracks -- long-clawed, ominous reminders that there were hunters aprowl other than regul or mri. Briefings said that the beasts did not approach regul dwellings. Briefings also said that crossing the flats off the roads was not recommended. The jetting steam of geysers, the crunch of thin crusts underfoot, warned him that there was reason for this. He had to draw a weaving course around hot zones, approaching the lowest part of the flats, that near the seashore and the waterplant. There was a road of sorts, badly washed, along the seacoast. Parts of it were underwater. A regul landsled was down in a trench, where it had slid off the edge. Duncan sat down, winded in the thin, cold air, his head and gut aching, and watched from a distance as a regul crew tried to extricate it. He could see the waterplant clearly from this vantage point. There was chaos there too, beyond its protective fences. The towers extended far out into the white-capped water, and several of those towers were in ruins. From what he could see, there was no possibility they could be even cleared for repair in the few days remaining before human ships would arrive, certainly not with the prevailing weather. What was more, he could not see any evidence of heavy machinery available to make repairs. Realistically estimating, it was not going to be done at all. A large human occupation-force was going to land, having to depend totally on ships' recycling: irritating, but possible -- that is, if there were a place to land. He looked to the right along the shoreline, toward the city and beyond, where he could see the low shape of the Nom; there were no buildings high enough to obstruct his view of the port. He recognized Hazan , saw its alien shape surrounded by gantries, a web of metal. There was no way to set a ship down on the volcanic crusts that overlay most of the lowlands. If the port were in the same condition as the waterplant , there was going to be merry chaos when the human forces tried to land. And the regul had not been forward to inform them of the extent of damages to the facilities at the plant. They had not lied, but neither had they volunteered all the truth. He drew a breath of tainted air and looked behind him suddenly, chilled to realize that he had been thinking about something other than his personal safety for a few seconds. The horizon was clear. There were only the clouds. A man did not always find himself that fortunate in his lapses. He let go that breath slowly and gathered himself up, conscious of the pounding of his head and the throbbing of his heart in the thin air. He saw a way to move around some low rocks and a sandy shelf and so cross between the city and the sea, working toward the port. Regul were reputed to have dim eyesight, to be dull, as it happened, in all sensory capacities. He hoped that this was so. Stavros, sitting back in the embrace of his regul machine, had said that he could cover his absence. He reckoned that Stavros might be good at that, skilled at argument and misleadings as he was. Out here he knew his own job, knew with a surety that the instinct that had drawn Stavros to choose a SurTac for Kesrith had been a true one. Stavros had not ordered him but had only relied on him, quietly waiting for him to move of his own accord, sensing, perhaps, that a man trained in the taking of alien terrain would know his own moment. He could not afford a mistake now. He was afraid, with a different sort of fear than he had ever known on a mission. He had operated alone before, had destroyed, had escaped -- his own life or death on his head. He was not accustomed to working with the life or death of others weighing on his shoulders, with the burden of decision falling upon him to say that an area was safe, or not safe, for the landing of a mission involving hundreds of lives, and policies reaching far beyond Kesritb. He did not like it; he far from liked it. He would have gladly cast the responsibility on any higher authority available; but Stavros, bound to his machine, had to believe either the regul or his own aide, and Duncan desperately wanted to be right. XV The edun woke quietly; the People moved in silence about the daily routine. Niun went back to the Kel, which was now emptyseeming; and the Kel sat in mourning. Eddan did not return. And Pasev's eyes bore that bruised look that told of littlesleep; but she sat unveiled, in command of her emotions. Niun brought her a special portion at breakfast, and it tore his heart that she would not eat. After breakfast the brothers Liran and Debas spoke together and then rose up and put on the belts with all their honors, and mez'ein and zaidh'ein, and gave their farewells. "Will you all leave?" asked Niun, out of turn and out of place, and terrified. And he looked then at Pasev, who had most reason to go, and did not. "You might be needed," said Pasev to the brothers. "We will walk and enjoy the morning," said Liran. "Perhaps we will find Eddan and Sathell." the faded sun "Then tell Eddan," she said softly, "that I will be coming after him when I have finished my duties, which he left to me. Goodbye, brothers." "Goodbye," they said together, and all the remaining Kel echoed "Goodbye," and they two walked down from the tower and out across the road. Niun stood in the doorway to watch them go, a deep melancholy upon him; and a knot settled in his throat, considering their absence hereafter. They continued their way to the horizon, two shapes of black; and the sky was shadowed and threatening, and they had not so much as the comfort of their dusei in their journey, for none of the beasts had come home. The miuk'ko by the door had disappeared also, dead, perhaps, in the storm: Dusei went away to die, alone, like kel'ein that found no further hope in their lives. Loyd to Intel, Niun thought, and loyal to Kesrith, and foreseeing the end of both. Lira and Debas could not help now and so they departed, their honors on them, not seeking ritual-burial from a young kel'en already too over-burdened with duties. They had chanted the rites last night. It was ill-omened; they all knew it. It was as if they had chanted them over Kesrith itself, and he suddenly foresaw that few of the old ones, if any at all, would board the ship. They did not want Intel's dream. She had shown them the truth of the rites and they had not wanted it; they had seen only the old, familiar ways. She had promised them change, and they would have none of it. He was otherwise shaped, formed by Intel's hands and Intel's wishes, and loyalty to Melein would hold him bound to Intel's dream. He looked on the place in the rocks where the brothers had disappeared and could have wept aloud at what he then realized of them and of himself -- for Pasev would follow rather than take ship into uncertainties for which she had no longing; and after her would go the others. He would never be one with the like of them; he was black-robe, plain-robe, honorless and untested, shaped for different ways. The Kel of the Darks, she had said, is a different Kel. It was he that already stood in the Dark; and they had walked away from the shadow, departed now into what they knew. He turned, to seek the edun, the Shrine's comfort for his mood; and his heart chilled at what he saw along the lower ridges, row upon row of shadows moving there. Dusei. They ringed the regul town in every place that offered solid ground. Ha-dusei, wild ones, and dangerous. The dusei of the edun had not returned. And there were far too many of the ha-dusei, far too many. The sky roiled overhead, stained with red and sullen gray: stormfriends, the dusei, weatherknowing. In the days before the edun stood, they had watered here below: the Dus-plain, the lowland flats were called. They came as if they sensed change in the winds; they came as if awaiting the regul departure, which would return the Dus-plain to the dusei. Waiting. It was told of regul stubbornness that the first mri had warned the regul earnestly that they should build their city elsewhere, as the edun itself had been carefully positioned off the plain in respect of the bond between mri and dusei; but regul had wanted rock for their ships to land on and they had sounded the area thereabouts and found only on the Dus-plain rock suitable for a port near the sea. Therefore regul had built there, and there had grown a city, and the hadusei had gone away. But dusei returned now, with the unseasonal rains and the destroying winds. They sat and waited. And the dusei had abandoned even the mri. Niun shrugged, half a shiver, and walked inside and stopped, not wishing to bear that news to the Kel, or to the she 'pan. The Kel was in mourning, the she'pan still lost in dreams; and Melein, her Chosen, had veiled herself and sealed herself alone in the Sen-tower. He cast a yearning thought skyward, through the spiral corridors that massed over him, that Ahanal hasten its coming, for he did not think that he could bear the endless hours until the evening. And each thing that he thought of doing this day was pointless, for it was a house to which they would never return; and outside, the weather threatened and the lightnings flashed in the clouds and the thunder rumbled. So he sat down in the doorway, watching all the flats below, the geysers' plumes, predictible as the hours, their clouds torn and thrown by gale-force winds. It was a cold day, as few days on Kesrith were chill. He shivered and watched the heavy drops pock the puddles that reflected a sky like frre-on-pewter. A heavy body trod the wet sand: a whuff of breath, and a great dus lumbered round the comer, head hanging. Others followed. He scrambled up in terror, not sure of their mood; but wet and muddypawed, they came on and nosed their way past him into the edun, rumbling that hunger-sound that betokened a dus with a considerable impatience. He counted them in: one, two, three, four, five, six. And last came the miuk'ko, the seventh, bedraggled and angular, to cast itself down in the puddle at the base of the slanted walls, drinking with great laps of its gray tongue at the water between its massive paws. Three did not come. Niun waited, a relief and a disquiet growing in him at the same time -- relief because a bereaved dus was dangerous and pitiable, disquiet because he did not know how they had known. Perhaps the three that were missing had encountered their kel'ein. Or perhaps, with that curious sense of dusei, they had known and sought them. Perhaps they were far along the trail to Sil'athen. He earnestly hoped so; it would be best for both men and dusei. He went to the storerooms in the cellar of Kath. The dusei must have care. And first of all of them, he waited on the miuk'ko, that had left its post of mourning for the first time and then returned. He hoped it would be in a different mind. But it would not eat. Perhaps, he thought, it had fed during its hours of wandering. But he did not believe it. He left the food on the dry edge of the step and went to carry portions to the others. Save for the insistence and irreverence of the dusei, save for Melein, who grieved in her tower, the edun had become a place of dreams, and a sense of finality hung over everything: the dus by the gate, the old men and the old women. He crept about his tasks with the utmost quiet, as if Re, alone living, walked in the caves at Sil'athen. And in the evening the ship came. kkk The she 'pan was asleep when they heard it descending; and they that were left of the Kel hurried out to the road to see it, and on tired faces there were smiles, and in Niun's heart there was misgiving. Dahacha took his arm on impulse and pressed it, and he looked at the sun-wrinkled eyes and felt an unspoken blessing pass between them. "Dahacha," he whispered. "Will you come, at least?" "We that have not walked will come," said the old man. "We will not send you alone, Niun ZainAbrin. We have made our reckoning. If we would not, we would have gone with Eddan, like Liran and Debas." "Yes," said Palazi at his other side. "We will reason with the kel'anth." And it struck him, like a blow upon a wound, that this now referred to Pasev. The commotion of the ship's landing was visible in lights, in the flares of regul headlights that crawled serpent-wise toward that far side of the field, half-glow in the red twilight -- regul eyes were not adapted to the night. "Come," said Pasev, and they followed her into the halls and upward to the she'pan's tower. Melein was there beside Intel, and she touched the she'pan's hand and tried to awaken her, but it was Pasev who laid a firm grip on the she'pan's arm and shook her from her dreams. "She'pan," said Pasev, "she' pan, the ship has come." "And the regul?" In the she'pan's golden eyes the dream finished and that keenness returned, focused and struggling for control. "How do the regul bear it?" "We do not know that yet," said Pasev. "They are all astir, that is all we saw." Intel nodded. "No contact by radio. Regul will be monitoring; Ahanal will observe that caution also." She struggled with the cushions, a small moue of pain upon her face; and Melein adjusted them for her. She sighed and breathed easily for a moment. "Shall we," asked Dahacha, "Little Mother, carry you to the ship? We can bear you." "No," she said with a sad smile. "A she'pan is guardian of the Pana. There is no ship-going for me until that care of mine is finally discharged." "At least," said Dahacha then, "let us take you down to the road, so that you can see toward the port." "No," said Intel, firmly. And then she touched Dahacha 's hand upon the arm of her chair and smiled. "Do not fear; I am in possession of my faculties and in possession of this edun and this world, and so I will remain until I am sure that it is my time; and yours will not be until mine is. Do you hear me?" "Aye," said Pasev. Intel met the eyes of the kel'anth and nodded, satisfied; but then her glance strayed about the room, perhaps counted faces, and her eyes clouded. "Liran and Debas left some time ago," said Pasev. "We gave them farewell." "My blessing," she murmured dutifully. Pasev bowed her head in acknowledgment. "Until the she'pan dismisses me," she said, "I serve you, and there are still enough of us to do what needs doing." "We will not be long about it," sai Intel. "Niun, child," she said, and held out her hand. He knelt at her knee and took her hand in his, bowed his bared head to her touch, felt her fingers slip from his and give that gesture of blessing. "Go crosslands," she said. "Go to the ship and talk with the visitors face to face, and hear what they have to say. Answer wisely. You may have to take decisions on yourself, young kel'en. And do not go carelessly. We have almost ceased to serve regul." Something passed his bowed head; he felt weight settle on his neck, and caught at it, and his fingers closed on cold metal. When he turned it and looked at the amulet on the chain, he saw the openhand-emblem of Kesrithun edun. Intel's silken fingers touched his chin and lifted his face to meet her eyes. "Only one ftal," she said softly, "but a master-one. Do you recognize it, my last son?" "It is an honor," he said, "of a she'pan's kel'en." "Bear yourself well," she said. "And make speed. Time is important now." And she pushed at him with her fingers and he rose, almost fearing the eyes of the others -- the kel'ein who might have been honored with such a j'tal -- for he was the youngest and the least. But there was no envy in them, only gladness, as if this were something in which they were all agreed. He took off his house-robe, and there in the she'pan's chamber they all took hand in preparing him for the journey, hastening to bring him the siga that he should wear in walking the dusty lands, and zaidhe and mez', and they gave him their own weapons, both yin'ein and zahen'ein, finer than his own; and with a smile, a laugh that deprecated superstition older than memory among the People, Palazi undipped a luck-amulet from his own belts and gave it to him, a maiden warrior, giving him of his luck. "Years and honors," said Palazi. He hugged the old man, and the others, and returned to the she'pan for a last hasty bow at her feet, his heart pounding with excitement. But as he received her kiss upon his the faded sun brow, she did not let him go at once, but stared into his face in such a way that it chilled all the blood within him. "You are beautiful," the she'pan said to him, her golden eyes brimming with tears. "I have a great fear. Be careful, youngest son." The People no longer believed in presciences with any great fervor, no more than he really trusted Palazi's luck-wish; but he shivered all the same. There was mri-reason and regul-reason; and to believe only what could be demonstrated by experience, that was the regul way, not the mri. One who had lived as many years as Intel might have reasons he did not understand. His whole life had been spent in the presence of the forbidden and the incomprehensible; and she'pan Intel had been involved in most; she'pan -- keeper of the Mysteries. "I shall be careful," he said, and she let him go then. He avoided the eyes of Melein when he rose, for if the she'pan and her Chosen shared anything concerning him, he did not want to carry it with him on this mission. "Do not trust any regul," said the kel'anth. "See all that you look upon." "Yes," he agreed earnestly, and took Pasev's hands and pressed them gently by way of farewell to the brothers and sister of his caste. He turned away quickly and left, long strides carrying him hurriedly down the spiraling stairs, past the written names of the history and heroes of the People and the truth of all the things that Intel had hinted at, things that he could not read. He felt their meaning this day, the remembrance of his ancestors. All, all that Intel had desired, had been passed down to him; and she had been able, at the last, to let him go, to cast him like the as-ei in short' ai. And she had not lost him. There was too much of love poured into him by these old ones that he could fail the wishes of Eddan, of Intel, of Pasev and Debas and Liran. They had made sure that he would succeed before they had launched him about the she'pan's mission. He passed the main doors and closed them against the night, and saw there the monstrous bulk of the miuk'ko, a shadow beside the door. The great head lifted and the eyes stared at him in the dark. Perhaps, he thought, optimism uncrushed in a hundred repetitions of this coming and going, perhaps this time. It would be good if it were this time at last, he who needs me, I who need him. But it murmured and turned its face and laid its massive head in the mud. Male, female, or neither; no one had ever ascertained the sex of a dus, or reckoned why it came to one mri or why it refused to come to another; whether this one had yet comprehended that Medai would never return, whether it grieved, or whether it starved out of simple stupidity, waiting for Medai to feed it, Niun could not fathom. With a sad shrug he went his way, scarcely having paused that half-step; but in this passing there was a difference, for things the dus did not understand had changed, were changing, were about to change. And it was doomed, having rejected him. Likely the humans would destroy the dusei. Regul would have done so gladly, if not for mri protection. The size and the slow-moving power of dusei were very like those of regul, but regul instinctively hated the dusei. Regul could not, as mri could, become immune to the poison of the claws; they could not, as mri could, abandon themselves to the simplicity of the beasts. Therefore regul fled them. The unease the contact of the dus had left in Niun stayed the while he walked down toward the flats, toward the ghostly plumes of geysers under the wind-tom clouds. He smelled the wind, felt the familiar force of it, like some living thing. He found himself looking at the familiar places he had seen and known all his life and thinking of each: This is almost the last time. There was an excitement in his heart and an uncertainty in his stomach that were far from heroic and cheerful. His senses were alive to the whole world, to the scents of the earth, acrid and wet, to the feel of the damp, hot breath of the geysers, that each had their name and manner. His world. Home world. Impermanent as the wind, the Kel, but capable of loving the earth. It struck him that they did not know where they were going, that Intel spoke of the Dark as if it were a place, as if it had dimension and depth and duration like the world itself. It came to him that after leaving Kesrith he might never feel earth under his feet again; a Dark with promise, the she'pan had insisted, but he could not imagine what it promised. And hereafter to deal with kel'ein who were not old, long-thinking men -- with kel'ein who knew only war and were touchy of their pride and their prerogatives of caste, in a way that the gentle Kel of Kesrith had never been. To live among the Kel of strangers, where there were kath'ein who would be his for the asking, and the chance to get children, and to see his private immortality. He would be son to one she'pan, truebrother to another, honored next whatever fen'ein. Husbands, she would choose to sire her children on the kel'e'ein and the kath'ein of the edun, if first he survived the combat of succession. Choices spread before him in dazzling array, in dizzying profusion, foretelling a future full of things neither stale, nor predictible, nor sure. He walked swiftly, passing where reeking sulphur and steam obscured his way, where water dripped from recently sprayed rocks and the heat underground prepared further eruptions. He knew his timing to a nicety. The thin crusts on the right -- boiling water and mud underlay much of that ground. The edge that he trod would bear a mri's weight but not that of a dus or a regul. Regul had learned bitter lessons about Kesrith's flatlands; they did not stray now from the safety of their vehicles and aircraft and carefully chosen roads and landing-sites. It would need a long time for humans to learn the land, if they would ever dare leave the security of the regul city. the faded sun Some would surely die learning it. A few mri had done so. He could cease to care what humans did. They would gather up the People arid go, all of them, Dahacha and Palazi and the others; and Intel too -- they would persuade her too. Although she was old and very tired of struggles, she could at least begin the journey. And then they could leave without even wanting to look back. He stood at last atop the long white ridge that was above the port and saw the shape of the regul ship Hazan, and opposite it, the new one of A hanal. Ahanal -- the Swift. He slid down the moonlit ridge in a white powdering of dust and crossed the long slope to the lower ground. And a shadow flowed among the rocks, large and menacing. He turned, hand on his pistol, and looked up at the hulking form that had mounted a ridge. Ha-dus. For a moment he did not breathe, did not move. Three others showed. Silent, the great beasts could be, when they stalked; but they did not stalk him. He had only disturbed their vigil. He remained still, respectful of their right to be here, and they snuffed the air and regarded him with their small eyes, and finally gave that explosive question-sound that indicated the fighting-mood was not upon them. Pardon, brothers, he wished them in his mind, which was the best way to deal with a strange and skittish dus, and backed a few paces before he edged on toward his former course; language the dus understood, a matter of movements that one made or did not make. His hand shifted from the pistol to the amulet at his breast. It was not the moment to risk his life with the ha-dusei, far from it; and he walked more slowly, more cautiously, remembering Pasev's admonishment to use his eyes and his wits. They let him go, and when he looked back, they were no longer there. He walked from the white dust to the artificial surface that covered the firm rock of the northern rim area; and there was a fence, a laughable affair of wire screen that could stop nothing that was truly determined, not on Kesrith. He burned it, made himself a door in it, with fine disregard for regul obstructions on the free land. Any mri would do the like rather than walk around a fence, and regul met the like with outrage; but it was the mri way, and in this mri would not oblige the masters. Bloody-handed savage, he had heard one of the regul younglings call him in the town. But regul built fences and made machines that scarred the earth, and tried to divide up space itself into territories and limits and parcels to be traded like foodstuffs and metals and bolts of cloth. It was ludicrous in his eyes. He walked amid the great tangle of abandoned equipage and skeletal braces and vehicles. It was as he had foreseen: a vast graveyard of vehicles and machines, a clot of metal so tightly jammed together that he had to detour around the whole of it, a heap of vehicles and sleds and aircraft indiscriminately mixed as if some giant hand had piled them there -- these the vehicles that had ferried the inhabitants of all the settlements the regul had ruled. And there, there a great burned area with a tower in charred and jagged outline against the port lights, an angular tangle of braces and more goods that the regul had cast aside as waste. Stormshattered, burned; The damage at the port had then been very extensive. He looked about him as he walked, taking inventory of things he had once seen whole and saw now damaged, and he began to see reason for the regul's distressed behaviors. Hazan stood in a vast assemblage of gantries and hoses and fragile extensions, and about that ship, too, he saw evident damage. She was aglow with lights, acrawl with black figures that labored on her like carrion insects; and a steady line of vehicles moved toward her, bearing goods, no doubt, for loading and for repairs. He passed this area, careful of being seen, and rounded the shape of Hazan. There, a tower before him, stood A banal once more, looming against the sky with only one light brought to bear upon her hull. He drew near and saw that she was old, her metal pitted as with acids, her markings seared almost beyond recognition. Long scars marked where shields must have failed. He voice-hailed them, conscious of the nearness of regul sentries, of a sled that had already started his way. "Ahanal!" he cried. "Open your hatch!" But either they were not prepared to hear or they had reason to be uneasy of the regul; and there was no response from Ahanal. He saw the sled veer sharply, coming to a halt near him, and a youngling regul opened the sidescreen to speak to him. "Mri," said the regul, "you are not permitted." "Is this the order of the bai?" he asked. "Go away," the regul insisted. "Kesrithi mri, go away." There was a sudden crash of metal; The hatch had opened. He ignored the regul to glance upward at the ship, from which a ramp began to extend. He walked toward it, disregarding the regul. The sled hummed behind him. He moved, narrowly missed. The fender clipped the side of his leg, and the sled circled in front of him, blocking his path. The window was still open. The youngling regul was breathing hard, his great nostrils opening and shutting in extreme agitation. "Go back," it hissed. Niun began to step around the sled but it lurched forward and he rolled on his shoulder across its low nose, landed on the other side and ran, shamed and frightened. Mri were watching from the ramp, doubtless outraged at his discomfiture. His legs were weak under him with terror for what he had done, a thing that no mri had ever done -- he had defied the masters directly. But he was the she'pan's messenger and if he delayed to argue with the youngling, there would be regul authority involved, with orders to obey or disobey, with a crisis for the she 'pan that a mere kel'en could not resolve without direct violence. He ran, hit the echoing solidity of the ramp and raced up it as quickly as he could to meet the mri of the ship, but they were already fading back into the ship and did not stay for him. He heard, and felt, the ramp taking up behind him, shortening its length as he overtook the last of them. Lights came on then, blinding; doors shut, sealing them safely inside. Ten kel'ein: Husbands, by their age and dignity. There was cold light, and air piercing in its sterility after the air of Kesrith. The final seal of the lock closed between them and the outside, the ramp in place. There was silence. "Sirs," he remembered to say and stopped looking at them -- with their many j'tai and their grim, strangers' manner -- long enough to touch his brow and pay proper respect. He looked up again and unveiled, a courtesy which they grudgingly returned. "I am Niun s'lntel Zain-Abrin," he said in the high language, as all mri used in formatlities. "I bear service to Intel, she'pan of Edun Kesrithun." "I am Sune s'Hara Sune-Lir," said the eldest of them, an old man whose mane grayed at the temples and who looked to be of the age of Pasev or Eddan; but his fellows were younger, more powerfullooking men. "Does the she'pan Intel fare well?" "The edun is safe." "Does the she'pan intend to come in person?" "As to that, sir, not until I return with the word of your she'pan." Niun understood somewhat their attitude, that of men who loved and defended their own, men who must yield to she 'pan Intel, she who must in turn yield them also. It was natural that they look on Intel's messenger with resentment. "We will take you to her," said Sune s'Hara with formal grace. "Come." And, with better courtesy: "You are not injured?" "No, sir," he said, and then remembered with a sudden flush that it was not proper for him to defer to this man, that he was a messenger and, more than that, he betrayed himself for a very young kel'en, and inexperienced in his authority. "Regul and mri are not at ease in Kesrith," he added, covering his confusion. "There have been words passed." "We were met with weapons," Sune said. "But there were no casualties." Niun walked with them, passing through corridors of metal, halls designed for regul. He saw kel'ein and he saw kel'e'ein, veiled and youthful as he, and his pulse quickened -- he thought them glorious and beautiful, and, tried not to stare, although he knew that their eyes were taking close account of him, a stranger among them. Some unveiled in brotherly welcome when he met them, and a great company of them went through the corridors to the mainroom, to that center of the ship that was now the hall of a she 'pan. She was middle-aged. He went and bowed his head under her hands and then looked up at her, vaguely disturbed to be greeted by a she 'pan not in the familiar earthen closeness of a tower but in this metal place, and to be greeting a she 'pan who was not kin, whose emblem on her white, blue-edged robes was that of a star, not the hand-emblem of Edun Kesrithun. She was a stranger, one who must die, who must choose to die, or whose champion he must defeat should she challenge; and he prayed silently to all the Gods that she would be brave and gracious and forego challenge. Her eyes were hard and she existed in light harsh enough to hurt; and the world that surrounded her was cold and metal. Many, many of the ship-folk surrounded them now, their she 'pan, their beloved Mother, and not his: he an intruder, a threat to her life. They saw a she'pan's messenger, but one innocent of ftai won in battles -- a mere youth, unscarred, untried, and vulnerable to challenge. He felt her eyes go up and down him, reckoning this, reckoning his world and those who had sent him. And beyond her, about her, he saw gold-robed sen'ein; and black-robed kel'ein; and shyly otserving from the recesses of the further hall, he saw kath'ein, blue-robed, veilless and gentle and frightened. And about them, within the other corridors, were row on row of hammocks slung like the nestings of Kesrith 's spiders, threads of white and webbings that laced the room and the sides of the corridors. He was overwhelmed by the number of those that crowded close; and yet it struck him suddenly that here was his whole species, all reduced to this little ship, and under the present command of this woman. "Messenger," she said, "I am Esain of Edun Elagun. How fares Intel?" Her voice was kinder than her face, and shot through him like sun after night. His heart melted toward her, that she could speak kindly toward him and toward Intel. "She'pan," he said, "Intel is well enough." He put kindness into his voice, and yet she understood, for a shadow passed through her eyes, and fear; but she was a great lady, and did not flinch. "What does Intel wish to tell me?" asked Esain. "She'pan," he said, "she gave me welcome for you, and sent me to listen to you first of all." She nodded slightly, and with a move of her hand bade council attend her. Kel'anth and sen'anth and kath'anth came and sat by her; and the fen'ein, her Husbands of the Kel; and the body of the Sen; and while these took their places, the others withdrew, and doors were closed. He remained kneeling before her and carefully removed his zaidhe and laid that before him; and on it he laid the av-kel. the Kel-sword that was Sirain's lending, sheathed before him, hilt toward her, a token of peace. His hands he folded in his lap. Her kel'ein did the same, hilts toward him, the stranger in their midst, the visitor admitted to council. "We send greetings to Intel," said Esain quietly. "Of her wisdom long ago was Ahanal reserved for the People, and of her wisdom was Ahanal freed to come. She placed such a burden on the Kel, refusing regul assistance, that there was no honorable choice. Honor outweighed honor. This was wisely done. All aboard understand and are grateful that it was done in time, for nothing else could have compelled us from the front. Is it true, as we guess, that she intends to leave regul service?" "Her words: We have almost left regul service. Your fen'ein and the kel'anth saw the result of it when I came toward the ship." She looked at the kel'anth. He gave agreement with a gesture. "I have seen a thing I have never seen," the old man said. "A regul attacked this messenger -- not with hands, to be sure, but with his machine. These regul are desperate." "And the edun?" the she'pan asked, her brow crossed with a frown. "How fares the Edun of the People, with the regul in such a mood?" "Presently secure," he said, and -- for he saw the real question burning in her, that she would hesitate to ask a mere kel'en -- "she'pan, the Forbidden is in her keeping; and the regul are busy with the damage the weather has done them. Humans are close, and the regul fear delays that could hold them grounded. I think that what happened out there was the act of a youngling without clear orders." "Yet," said the she'pan, "what if we were to leave the ship in a body?" "We are mri," said Niun with supreme confidence, "and regul would give way before us, and they would dare do nothing." "Did you so judge," asked the she'pan, "of that youngling that attempted your life?" Heat mounted in his face. "She'pan," he said, made aware of his youth and his inexperience, "I do not think that was a serious threat." She considered, and looked at the Sen and the others, and finally sighed and frowned. "I bear too great a charge here to risk it. We will wait until Intel has made her decision. We have force here at her call; I will send it or reserve it as she says. And, messenger, assure her that I will respect her claim on the People." He was shocked and relieved at once, and he bowed very low to her, hearing the murmur of grief run the length and breadth of the room. He could hardly bear to meet her eyes again, but found them gentle and unaccusing. "I will tell her," he said, recovering the courtesies trained into him, part of blood and flesh and bone, "that the she'pan of Edun Elagun is a grand and brave lady, and that she has earned great honor of all the People." "Tell her," she said softly, "that I wish her well with my children." Many veiled themselves, hearing her, and he found his own eyes stinging. "I will tell her," he said. "Will you, messenger, stay the night with us?" He thought of it, for it was a walk of the rest of the night to return again to the edun, and likely a great deal of sleep lost thereafter, once Intel had begun to give orders; but he thought of the regul that had crossed his path, and the weather, and the uncertainties that hemmed him about. "She'pan," he said, "my duty is to go back now; it is best now, before the regul have time to take long consultations." "Yes," she said, "that would be the wisest thing. Go,. then." And she, when he had gathered up the av-kel and replaced the zaidhe and come to touch her hand and do heartfelt courtesy, gave into his hand a ring of true gold, at which his heart clenched in pain; for it was a gracious, brave thing to do, to give a service-gift as if he had well-pleased her. From her own finger she drew it and pressed it into his hand, and he bowed and kissed her fingers before he stood and took his leave. He laced the ring into one of the thongs of his honors, to braid it in properly later, and bowed her farewell. "Safe passage, kel'en," she said. He should wish her long life, and he could not; he thought instead of that parting of kel'ein: "Honors and good attend," he said, and she accepted his courtesy with grace. The Kel veiled and he did so likewise, grateful for that privacy as they led him back to the doors, to let him out into the dark. He heard the mournful protest of a confined dus, attuned to the mood of the Kel it served; and with that he entered the lock and the lights were extinguished, to make them less a target. For a moment the darkness was complete. The the opening ramp and the double doors let the light in, the floodlights on the field, and the acrid, wet wind touched them. They did not speak as he left. There had not been a word passed. It was due to their Lady Mother's courage that he and one of hers would not shed blood in the passing of power; but it was settled. When there was only one she 'pan on Kesrith, there would be time for courtesies, for welcome among them. He did not look back as he started down the ramp. Niun had expected trouble at the bottom of the ramp, but there was none, neither regul guard nor the assistance that such guard might have summoned. He questioned nothing of his good fortune but ducked his head and ran, soft-soled boots muffling his steps across the pad. He threaded again the maze of machinery, and there, there were the regul he had feared, a flare of headlights beyond the fence. He caught his breath and paused half a step to survey the situation, then slipped to the shadows and changed course, reckoning that there was no need to use the same access twice. He burned through the wire fence, kicked the wire aside and ran for it, his lungs hurting in the thin air. Somewhere a dus keened, mournful over the rumble of machinery that prowled the dark. He reached the edge of the apron and bolted for the sand, startled and shocked as a beam of light hit the ground across his path. He gasped for air and changed direction, darted around the bending of a dune and ran with all the strength he had remaininjg. After a moment he reckoned himself relatively safe, enough to catch his breath again. Regul could not outrace him and the noisy machines could not surprise him. He smothered a cough, natural result of his rash burst of speed, and began uneasily to take account of this new state of affairs, that regul had, with premeditation, sought not to catch him, but to kill him. He lay against the side of the dune, his hand pressed to his aching side, trying to keep his breathing normal, and heard something stir -- dus, he thought, for he knew that the hills were full of them this night, and did regul come out very far into the wild after him, they would meet a welcome they would not like. The dusei of the edun would do no harm to regul; but these were not tame ones and the regul might not reckon that difference until it was too late to matter. He gathered himself up and started to move forward, hearing at the same time a rapid sound of footsteps, mri-light and mri-quick, following his track through the dunes. He surmised it for one of Esain's kel'ein, on some desperate second thought; and for that reason he froze, hissed at the shadow a warning as it fronted him, respectful of it, another kel'en. But no kel'en. Half a breath they faced each other, human and mri; and in that half-breath Niun whipped up his pistol and the human dived desperately to retreat, vain hope in that narrow, duneconstricted area. And in the next instant another thought flashed into Niun's mind: A dead human could provide little answer to questions. He did not fire. He followed; and when he overtook the human, he motioned with his hand, come, come. The human, casting desperate looks behind and at him, was a fair target should Niun fire. And the human chose regul and whirled and ran. A creature that had no business on Kesrith. Niun thumbed the safety on, bolstered the pistol and chose a new direction, a direction the regul could not manage, up over the arm of a dune; and he cast himself fiat, scanning the scene to know what manner of ambush he had sprung. Indeed the human had run directly into regul hands, in the person of one daring youngling who now had him cornered against a ridge the human could easily climb if he had the wit to think of it; and the human did think of it and scrambled for his life, fighting to gain the top. But the regul laid hold on his ankle and dragged him back again, inexorably. They noticed nothing else. Niun retreated behind the ridge, raced a distance, went over and down in a plummeting slide, hit the solid mass of the regul and staggered it; and when it rounded on him clumsily, making the mistake of aiming a weapon at a kel'en, it was the youngling's final mistake. Niun did not think about the flash of the as-ei that left his hand and buried themselves in the youngling's throat and chest; they were sped before the the faded sun thought had time to become purpose. And the human, scrambling to reach the regul's gun -- Niun hit him body to body, and had there been a knife in Niun's intentions, the human would have been dead in the same instant. No mean adversary, the human. Niun found himself countered, barehanded, in his attempt to seize hold of him; but the human was already done, bleeding from the nostrils, his bubbling breath hoarse in Niun's ear. He broke the human's hold; his arm found the human's throat and snapped his head back with a crack of meeting teeth. Not yet did the human fall, but a quick blow to the belly and a second snap to the head toppled him, writhing, to the sands; and Niun hit him yet another time, ending his struggles. A strip from his belt secured the human; and he recovered his as-ei and sheathed them quickly, hearing the slow grinding of machinery advancing on this place, and the both of them having made tracks even the night-blind regul could read. The human was showing signs of consciousness; Niun gave him a jerk by the elbow and dragged him until the man tried to respond to the discomfort. Then he gave him slack to drag his legs under him and to try to stand. "Quiet," Niun hissed at him. And if the human thought to cry out, he thought better of it with the edge of the av-tlen near his face; he struggled up to his knees and, with Niun's help, to his feet, and went silently where he was compelled to go. He coughed and tried to smother even that sound. His face was a mask of blood and sand in the dim light that shone from the field, and he walked as if his knees were about to fail him. Onto the edge of the flats they went, and slow, ominous shadows of dusei stood watching them from the dunes, but gave them no threat. There was no sound of pursuit behind them. Perhaps the regul were still in shock, that a kel'en had raised hand against the masters. Niun knew the enormity of what he had done; he had had time to realize it clearly. He knew the regul, that they would take time to consult with authority, and beyond that he could not calculate. No mri had ever raised hand to his sworn authority. No regul had ever had to deal with a mri who had done so. He seized the human's elbow and hurried him, though he stumbled at times, though he misstepped and cried out in shock when a crust broke with him and he hit boiling water. They went well onto the flats, where neither regul nor regul vehicles could go, into the sulphuric steam of geysers that veiled them from sight. By now the human coughed and spat, bleeding in his upper air passages if not in his lungs, Niun reckoned. In consideration of that he found a place and thrust the human down against the shoulder of a clay bank and let him catch his breath, himself glad enough of a chance to do the same. For a moment the human lay face down, body heaving with the effort not to cough, correctly assuming that this would not be tolerated. Then the spasms eased and he lay still on his side, exhausted, staring at him. Unarmed. Niun took that curious fact into account, wondering what possessed the humans; or what had befallen this one, that he had lost his weapons. The human simply gazed at him, eyes running tears through sand: no emotion, no expression other than one of exhaustion and misery. Unprotected he had come into Kesrith's unfriendly environment; unwisely he had run, risking damage to his tissues. And he had run from regul, with whom his people had made a treaty. "I am Sten Duncan," the human whispered at last in his own tongue. 'T am with the human envoy. Kel'en, we are here under agreement." Niun considered that volunteered information: Human envoy; human envoy -- the words rolled around in his mind with the ominous tone of betrayal. "I am kel Niun," he said, because this being had offered him a name. "Are you from the edun?" Niun did not answer, there seeming no need. "That is where you're taking me, isn't it?" And when again the human had no answer of him, he seemed disquieted. "I'll go there of my own accord. You don't need to use force." Niun considered this offer. Humans lied. He knew this. He had not had experience to be able to judge this one. "I will not set you free," he said. It was not the custom of humans to veil themselves; but Niun was sorry, all the same, that he had so dealt with a human kel'en, taking dignity from him -- if he were kel'en. Niun judged that he was: He had handled himself well. "We will go to the edun," he said to Duncan. He stood up and drew Duncan to his feet; he did not help him overmuch for this was not a brother; but he waited until he was sure he had his balance. The man was hurt. He marked that the human's steps were uneven and uncertain, and that he walked without knowledge of the land, blind to its dangers. And deaf. Niun heard the aircraft lift from the port, heard it turn in their direction; and the human had not even looked until Niun jerked him about to see it. He stood stupidly gazing toward the port, malicious or dullwitted, Niun did not pause to know,. He seized the human and pulled him toward the boiling waters of Jieca, that curled steam into the night; and by a clay ridge, their lungs choked with sulphur, they look hiding. Regul engines passed. Lights swept the flats and lit plumes of steam, fruitlessly seeking movement. Heat-sensors were of limited usefulness here on the volcanic flats. The boiling springs and seething mud made regul science of little value in tracking them. "Kel'en," Duncan said, "which one are they looking for? Me, or you?" "How have you offended the regul?" Niun asiced, reckoning it of no profit to give information, but of some to gain it; and all the while the beams of light swept the flats, the faded sun lighting one plume and then another. "Were you a prisoner?" "Assistant to the human envoy, to come -- " A burst of fire lit their faces and spattered them with boiling water. They made a single mass against it, and as the firing continued and the water kept splashing, a rumble began in the earth and a jet of steam broke near them, enveloping them, uncomfortably hot but not beyond bearing. "Tsi'mri," Niun cursed under his breath, forgetting with what he shared shelter; and as the barrage repeated itself, he felt the human begin trembling, long, sickly shudders of a being whose strength was nearly spent. " -- to come ahead of the mission," the human resumed doggedly, still shaking. "To see that everything is as we were promised. And I don't think it -- " A near burst threw water and mud onto them. The human cried out, smothered it. "How many of you are there?" Niun asked. "Myself... and the envoy. Two. We came on Hazan... back there." Niun grasped Duncan's collar and turned his face to the light that glared from the searching beams. He saw nothing to tell him whether this was truth or lie. This was a young man, he saw, now that the face was washed clear by the moisture that enveloped both of them -- a kel'en of the humans; Niun shrank from applying that honorable title to aliens, but he knew no other that applied to this one. "There was a kel'en on Hazan," said Niun, "who died there." For the first time something seemed to strike though to the human: there was a hesitancy to answer. "I saw him. Once. I didn't know he was dead." Niun thrust him back, for the moment blind with anger. Tsi'mri, he reminded himself, and enemy, but less so now than the regul.  saw him. I didn't know he was dead. Niun turned his face aside and stared bleakly at the rolling steam and the lights that criss-crossed the flats, searching. Forgive us, Medai, he thought. Our perceptions were too dull, our minds too accustomed to serving regul, that we could have understood the message you tried to send us. He forced himself to look at the hateful human face, that had not the decency of concealment -- at the nakedness of this being that had, unknowingly perhaps, destroyed a kel'en of the People. Animal, he thought; tsi'mri animal. The regul-mri treaty was broken from the moment this creature had set foot on Kesrith; and that had been many, many days ago. For this long the People had been free, and had not known it. "There is no more war," Duncan protested, and Niun's arm tensed, and he would have hit the human; but it was not honorable. "Why do you suppose that the regul are hunting us?" he asked of Duncan, casting back his own question. "Do you not understand, human, that you have made a great mistake in leaving aza?" "I am going with you," the human said, the first semblance of dignity he had shown, "to talk to your elders, to make them understand that I had better be returned to my people." "Ah," said Niun, almost moved to scornful mirth. "But we are mri, not regul. We care nothing for your bargains with the regul, much good they have done you." The human remained still and considered Niun's words, and there was no yielding at the implied threat. "I see," he said. And a moment later, in a quiet, restrained tone: "I left the envoy down there in town -- an old man, alone with regul, with this going on. I have to get back to him." Niun considered this, understanding. It was loyalty to this sen'anth for which he endured this patiently. He gave respect to the human for that, touched his heart in token of it. "I will deliver you alive to the edun," he said, and felt compelled to add: "It is not our habit to take prisoners." "We have learned that," Duncan said. Therefore they understood each other as much as might be. Niun considered the flats before them, reckoning what might already have been done to familiar ground by the bombardment, what obstacles might have been created on the unstable land, where they might next find safest shelter should the regul sweep back sooner than anticipated. It was well that he and the human had come to an understanding, that Duncan considered that his best chance and most honorable course was to cooperate for the moment. A man unburdened could make the journey by morning, all things in his favor; but not with regul blasting away the route about them; and day would show them up clearly, making it next evening before they could reach the edun if things kept on as they were. A sick dread gathered in Niun's stomach; for very little even so, he would have killed the human and run for the edun at all speed. He cursed himself for his softness, that had put him to such a choice between butchery and stupidity; and he gripped the human's arm. "Listen to me. If you do not keep my pace, I cannot keep you; and if I cannot keep you, I will kill you. It is also," he added, "very likely that the regul will kill you to keep you from your superior." He slipped from cover then and drew the human with him by the arm, and Duncan came without resisting. But the regul craft, lacing the area, swept back, and they made only a few strides before it was necessary to hurl themselves into other cover. The barrage began again, deafening, spattering them with boiling water and gouts of mud. The edun would be aware of this. They were doubtless doing something; perhaps -- Niun thought -- Duncan's sen'anth likewise knew and was doing something; and there was also Ahanal, yet independent of Intel. He understood the human's helpless terror. Of all who had px)wer on Kesrith, they two had least; and the regul, who did not fight, had taken up arms, impelled by malice or fear or whatever driving motive could span the gap between cowardice and self-interest. There was firing, a sound unmistakable to a man who had lived a great part of his life in war. Stavros turned his sled to view the window and saw the lights of aircraft circling under the clouds. His fingers sought the console keyboard, adjusted screens with what had grown to be some expertise; simple controls they were, a phenomenal series of coded signals, each memorized. The regul had provided him the codings with an attitude of smug contempt. "Learn it" they had challenged him with that look of theirs that classed beings of short memory with subsapients. Stavros was not typical in this regard, had never been typical, not from his boyhood on remote Kiluwa, to his attachment to the XenBureau, to his directorate on Halley during first contact. He found nothing difficult in languages, nor in alien customs, nor in recognizing provincial short-sightedness, whether offered by humans or by others. He was Kiluwan by allegiance, a distinction the regul and most humans did not appreicate. Kiluwa -- remote, first-stage colony, populated by religious traditionalists among whom writing was a sin and education an obsession. He. had been bom there a century ago, before the peaceful, eccentric colony had become a casualty of the mri wars. A number of Kiluwans had distinguished themselves in Service; they were gone now, among casualties of forty years ago, retaliation for Nisren. Stavros survived. It was characteristic of his Kiluwan upbringing that he should be driven to understand the species that had ordered Kiluwa obliterated. Regul had done this, not mri. Therefore he studied the phenomenon of regul, who had minds much like the perfection Kiluwa had sought; and yet had destroyed all that Kiluwa had built. There was, as the university masters had once said, a "rhythm of justice" in this, a joining of canceling forces. Now a Kiluwan came to displace regul and the rhythm continued, binding them both. He learned regul ways, looking for resolution to this; he observed meanness and coldness and selfseeking ambition, as well as reverence for mind. He had come from fear of regul to a yearning over them, with not a little of sorrow for Kiluwa, whose dream in the flesh had come to this flawed reality; and there were truths beyond what he had been able to grasp, vices and virtues inherent in the biology of regul. He saw these and began to understand, at least, constraints of species-perpetuation and populationcontrol; division into hive-structures, breeking-elders and younglings, the docha that answered roughly to nations; he acquired suspicions about the value of treaties that bound, and yet did not bind, docha that had not been party to the agreement. They had contracted with Holn and suddenly found themselves dealing instead with Alagn; and Alagn honored the agreement. Outwardly. It had come to the point of truth. He had sat the long hours through the day and into dark and covered for Duncan's absence and committed every deception but the outright lie which the regul would not forgive. In the hours' passage he had grown more and more certain, first that Duncan had found something amiss, or he would have returned quickly, surely by the time dark gave him concealment; and then, when the fall of night did not bring him back, he became well sure that something amiss had found Duncan. The pretences with the regul became charade bitterly difficult to maintain. Regul could murder the SurTac and blandly fail to mention it with the morning's reports. And there was not a human going to land on Kesrith without Stavros' clearance: not in peace, at least, not without removing all possible resistance. The regul surely understood this. He sat and listened to the firing, knowing while it continued that likely Duncan was still alive. He had been a shaper of policy in his day, had settled a new world and founded a university; he had plotted strategies of diplomacy and war, had disposed of lives in numbers in which ships and crews were reckoned expendable, in which the likes of Sten Duncan perished in their hundreds. But now he heard the firing, and clenched his right hand and agonized in a desperate attempt to any strength at all. He was held to the sled, constrained to be patient. There was new catastrophe at the port. There were hints in regul communications, into which he had intruded, that a ship had come down and that it was not friendly to regul. Human, rival regul, or mri? He could guess well enough what had drawn Duncan to overstay his leave. Create no incident, he had told the lad, knowing then that there was little Duncan could do to create anything: I waited to happen, all about them. He had felt it increasingly, in the silences of the regul, in the tension in the atmosphere of the Nom. The regul were trying something dangered. And there would be no word of approval going from him to the human mission when it arrived, no matter what the coercion. If it had not already arrived. Stavros was not a man of precipitate action. He thought; and when he had concluded that chances were even, he was capable of rashness. He found no need to cooperate further with hosts that would either kill them or not dare to kill them. It was time to call, their bluff. He fingered the console, whipped the sled about and opened doors. He guided the machine through Duncan's apartment, and with a smooth, well-practiced series of commands, and a turn to the right, locked it into the tracking that ran the corridors. Youngling regul saw him and gaped, .jabbering protests which he ignored. He knew his commands, calculated the appropriate moves, locked into a turn and whisked into the side of the building that faced the port. There he stopped and keyed into the window controls, brightening windows, commanding storm shields withdrawn. A new ship, indeed. And lights glared over the countryside, flaring garishly in the haze of smoke and steam, aircraft lacing the ground with their beams. Ah, Duncan, he thought with great regret. A youngling puffed up to him. "Elder human," it said, "we regret, but -- " Bai Hulagh. Where? he demanded via the screen, a demand that visibly took the youngling aback. Youngling, find me the bai. It fled, at least with what dispatch a regul could manage, and Stavros whipped the sled about and took it to the left, engaged a track and shot down the ramp, whisked around the comer and entered the first level of the Nom, from which he and Duncan had been carefully excluded. Here he disengaged and went on manual, edging throught the gabbling crowd of younglings. Mri, he heard, and mri ship and alert. And they made way for him until one noticed that the sled, the symbol to them of adult authority, contained a human. "Go back," they wished him. "Go back, elder." Bai Hulagh. Now, he insisted, and would not move, and there was nothing they dared do about it. When they began to murmur together in great confusion, he directed the sled through them and toured the ground floor in leisurely fashion, the air vibrating with the attack out on the flats and the building vibrating to the shocks. Mentally he noted where doors were located, and where accesses were, and where it was possible to come and go with the sled. A message flashed on his receiver. It was Hulagh's signal. Hulagh's face followed. "Esteemed elder human," Hulagh said, "please return at once to your quarters." I am unable to believe that they are secure, Stavros spelled out patiently. Where is my assistant? "He has disregaid our advice and is now involved in a situation," said Hulagh with remarkable candor, such that Stavros' hopes abruptly lifted. "Mri have landed, I regret to admit, honorable representative. These mri are outlaws, bent on making trouble. Your youngling is somewhere in the midst of things, quite contrary to our warnings. Please make our task easier by returning to the safety of your quarters." I refuse. Stavros keyed a window clear. I will observe from the utmost. He would not, voluntarily, have surrendered his view through the windows, not trusting the limited one provided by regul services; but the barrage was intense and the windows rattled ominously, and he began to believe the bai's warning. The regul building was undergoing repeated shocks. He knew the bai's warning for an honest one. It only remained to question what was happening to occasion the firing. The regul, he reminded himself, closing the storm shield, did not lie. Therefore it was true that mri had landed and that Sten Duncan was somewhere out on the flats, but one never assumed anything with the regul. Then the floor shook, and sirens wailed throughout the building. Stavros locked the sled onto a track and whisked himself back to the main lobby, where a group of younglings frantically waved at him, trying to offer him instructions all at once. "Shelter, reverence, shelter!" they said, pointing at another hall, a ramp leading down. He considered and thought that it might at the moment be wise to listen. Duncan was spent, a burden, a hazard. Niun set hands on him and pushed him downslope, to shelter under an overiiang by a boiling pool, forcing him further under as he wedged his own body after. It was scantly in time. A near burst of fire hissed across the water and crumbled rock near them: blind fire, not aimed. The searching beams continued, lacing the area. Niun saw the face of Duncan in the reflected light, haggard and swollen-eyed -- his vision unprotected by the membrane that hazed Niun's own when the smoke grew thick. Duncan's upper lip showed a black trail that was blood in the dim light. It poured steadily, a nuisance that had become more than nuisance. The human heaved with a bubbling cough and tried to stifle it. The reek in the air from the firing, and from the natural steam and sulphur, was thick and choking. Niun twisted in the narrow confines, fastidious about touching the bleeding and sweating human, and at last, exhausted, abandoned niceties in such close quarters. They lay in a space likely to become their tomb should another shot crumble the ledge over them, mri and human bones commingled for future possessors of Kesrith to wonder at. This was delirium. The mind could not function under such pounding shocks as bracketed them constantly. Niun found the regul amazing in their ineptitude. They two should have been dead over and over, had the regul had any knowledge of the land; but the regul had not, and were firing blind at a landscape as unknown and alien to them as the bottom of the sea. The world was lit in constant flares of white and red, swirled in mists and steam and smoke and clouds of dust, like the Hell that humans swore by; that of mri was an unending Dark. The water splashed, singing and bubbling. Niun lowered the visor of the zaidhe, he the outermost, shielding the human with his own body: ironic arrangement, chancechosen, one he would have reversed at the moment if it were possible. An explosion heaved the earth, numbed the senses, drove their numbed bodies into fresh convulsions of terror. And hard upon that a white light lit the rocks, grew, ate them, devoured all the world; and a pressure unbearable; and Niun knew that they were hit, and tried to move to roll out into the open before the ledge came down. The pressure burst over him, and it was red...   ...wind, wind in great force, skirling away the smoke and mist, causing the red to swirl before his membraned, visored eyes. Niun moved, became aware that he moved, and that he lived. And all about was light, sullen and ugly red. He gathered himself up, and turned toward the source of the light, and saw the port. There was nothing. He stood, his legs shuddering beneath him. He thought that he cried out, so great was his pain; and he shut his eyes, and opened them, trying to see through the flame, until the tears poured down his face. But of Ahanal, of Hazan, there was nothing to be seen. Within the city itself fires blazed, sending smoke boiling aloft. And even as he watched, an aircraft lifted from near the horizon, circled for a distance out to sea, and came back again, lights blinking lazily. He followed it with his eyes, the aircraft circling, rounding over the city, through the smoke, beginning to come about toward the hills. Toward the edun. He wished to turn his face from it, knowing, knowing already the end. He turned with it, watched, a great knot swelling in his throat, and his body cold and numb, and the center of him utterly alive to what began to happen. The first tower of the edun, that of the Kel, flared in light and went, slowly tumbling. The sound reached him, a numbing shock, and after that came the wind as the towers fell, as the whole structure of the edun hung suspended and crumbled down into ruin. And the ship circled, light and free, lazily winking in the dark as it rose above the smoke and came, insolently, over their heads. His pistol was in his hands. He turned and lifted it and fired one futile burst at those retreating lights, none others in the sky. The lights blurred in his eyes, the betraying membrane, or tears. It flashed and cleared, and he fired again. And the lights continued on for a moment; and a red light blossomed, and fragments went spinning in various trajectories, ruin upon ruin: pistol shot, or the turbulence that must be surrounding the port. It healed nothing. He turned, looked again at the edun where not even flames remained, and his stomach spasmed, a wrench that weakened his joints and made him dizzy. In that moment he would have wished to be without senses, to be weak, to fall, to sink down, to do anything but continue to stand, helpless. Dead. Dead, all of them. He stood, not knowing whether to return to the ruin at the port, to go on as he was going, or whether there was reason to go, or to do anything but sit where he was until morning, when the regul would come to finish matters. He found no limit to what senses could absorb. He felt. He was not numb. He only wished to be, battered by the wind that stole the sound from the night, whippingat his robes, a steady snap of cloth that was, here, louder than the silence that had fallen over everything. The People were dead. He remained. For survivors there were duties, respects, rites that wanted doing. He was not of Medai's temperament. He slipped the pistol into its holster, and clenched his icy hands under his arms, and began to reckon with the living. The Hand of the People, a kel'en; and there were his kin to bury, if them, and after that there was a war the regul perhaps did not expect to fight. And then he looked toward the ledge, and looked on his human prisoner, and met his eyes. Here also was a man that waited to die, that also knew, in small measure, what desolation was. He could kill the human, and be alone thereafter, only himself in a vast, vast silence: a tiny act of violence after the forces that had stormed across the skies of Kesrith and ruined the world. A tiny and miserable act. Vengeance for a world deserved something of equal stature. "Get up," he said quietly, and Duncan gathered himself up, shoulder to the rock, staring back at him. "We will go up to the hill," he told Duncan. "TTie house of my people -- I do not think there will be more aircraft." Duncan turned and looked, and without demur, without question, started walking ahead of him. The world was changed about them. Landmarks that had been on the Dus-plain for eons were gone. The ground was pocked with scars that filled with boiling water. Duncan, leading the way, blind, bound, misstepped and went in up to the knee, with nothing more than a hoarse sob of shock; and Niun seized him and pulled him back, steadying him, while the human stood and gasped for air. He kept a hand on Duncan's arm thereafter, and guided him, knowing the way; and preserved the human against another time. The light came, the red light of Arain, foul and murky. Niun looked back toward the port, and saw in the first light the full truth of what he had already known: that nothing survived. Neither zljana nor Hazan. And when he looked on the hill where the Edun of the People had stood, it was one with the sand and the rocks, as if nothing built by hands had ever stood there. He saw also in that light what prize he had taken, an exhausted creature that struggled for every upward step, whose face and mouth and chest were spattered with blood that poured afresh from the nose; injury or atmosphere, it was uncertain. The eyes were almost shut, streaming tears not of seeming emotion but of outraged tissues -- a face naked in the sun, and indecent, and more bewildered than evil. He did not know why the human kept walking at such cost, toward such little reward; easier by far the death of the land's violence than what mri and human had exchanged for forty years. But there was a point past which there was no thinking, knowing only the fact that one lived; and that one continued to live whether one wanted to or whether one wished otherwise. m He understood such a mind, that deep shock which admitted no decisions. He had never thought that he would freeze in crisis; yet he had frozen, and the cold of that moment when the People died was still locked around his mind and his heart and seemed never apt to go away, not though he had revenge, not though he killed every regul that breathed, and heaped humanity on the desolation as well. It was a shock in which their two lives were of like value, which was nothing at all. He pushed the human ahead, neither hating now nor pitying, finding no reason for sparing a human when he had the ruin of the edun to face for himself. He thought that perhaps Duncan sorrowed for his own failed duty, which lay lost in burning Kesrith; that Duncan also mourned failure, as miserable as he. But Duncan had all the human worlds for kinsmen, knowing that they survived; and it was possible to hate the human when he let himself think on this. He would not return this one to his kind: while he lived, Duncan would live. While he had to face what had become of Kesrith, the man Duncan would do the like.    They came to the edun by full daylight, untroubled by ships or any sign of life from the skies. Down in the city there might be such activity; it did not extend to them. When Niun thought of it, he thought of going down and destroying them -- methodically, joylessly: regul, who had no capacity for war. Who had finally, in one cowardly act, destroyed the People. There was irony there that was worth bitter laughter. He looked on the mound of rubble that had been the edun and felt moved to that or to tears; and Duncan, no longer forced to walk, simply slumped to his knees and leaned against the shoulder of the causeway. Niun heard his hollow cough and kicked him gently, reached down when that was not enough to rouse him, and caught his arm, pulling him up again. There was work to be done, at least as far as they could try; and he was loath to have the ruin touched at all by tsi'mri hands, but he had not the strength alone. He drew the av-tlen and pried loose the knots at Duncan's wrists with its point, carefully unwound the thongs that were embedded in Duncan's swollen flesh, and looped the recovered leather through its ring on his own belts. Duncan, trying to work his hands to life, looked at the edun, and looked at him, a question. Niun jerked his head in response and Duncan comprehended and began to walk. They waded through rubble, stepped carefully among chunks of the walls that were cast down and shattered. Here had been simple fire, not the radiation that doubtless bathed the city and made the place uninhabitable. Niun pushed at a heap of rubble that blocked their way, and saw that beneath that pile of heavy stone and fine dust lay at least one of the Kel. There was no use to move that mass, no hope of moving it entirely. Instead Niun took stones and began to heap them around the visible body like a cairn, and Duncan, seeing what he was about, began to gather up rocks of the proper size and pass them on to him. This offended Niun bitterly, that the human offered aid rather than suffered compulsion; but it was needed, and he would not allow the human to touch the grave itself. And it occurred to him at the same moment that Duncan might well smash his skull with one of those self-same stones the moment he turned his back entirely, and that this might be what the human was preparing, so he kept from turning his head while he worked. They finished, and from this place they went deeper into the ruin and into places dark and difficult, where heaps of rubble towered overhead and sifted dust and pebbles downslope at them. And at the core of the deepest ruin was the Shrine that he now sought. It was all too deeply buried. Had it been possible, he would have sought out whatever relics he could have carried and taken them away into the sanctity of Sil'athen, where his Tcinsmen also would have been buried; but perhaps humans would never be curious enough to desecrate this place with their machines, to sift out the debris and leavings of a sfiecies that no longer mattered in the universe. And here the destruction reached that central citadel of himself that had yet to feel it; and he trembled and his senses almost left him. He reached out and sought support, and touched the wrong stone, bringing a slide that buried the place at their feet and brought a sift of powder down on them. The only thing he saw clearly was Duncan's face, terror in his eyes as for an instant they seemed likely to go under that weight of rubble and earth; and then the sifting stopped and the place grew still. A stone shifted somewhere, and another; there was another slide, and silence, the fall of a few pebbles. And in that silence came a thin and distant cry. Duncan heard it: If not for that confirming glance sideward, Niun would have thought it illusion. But it came from the direction that had been Kath, where the deepest storerooms were. He turned and began to pick his way through the ruin, careful, careful with his life now, and that of her who had cried aloud, down there in the dark. "Melein!" he cried, and paused and listened, and that same thin sound returned to him. He reached the place, estimating where it lay, and a wall had fallen there, and finer rubble sifted atop it; but the steel, regul-made doors had held. Too well. They were barred by a weight that could not be moved, that they lacked tools to chip away and machines to lift. Niun tore his hands on it, and his muscles cracked, and Duncan added his force, but it would not slide; and at last they both sat down, gasping for air, coughing. Duncan's nose started pouring blood again. He wiped it in a bloody smear and his hands were shaking uncontrollably. "Is it," Duncan asked, "ventilated down there?" It was not. It added a fear atop the others. "Melein," Niun called out. "Melein, do you hear?" He heard some manner of answer, and it was a woman's voice and a young voice, high and thin and clear: It was Melein. He reckoned it below them, and tried to figure the exact location of it, and marked with a heel a spot on the floor. Then he wrenched a reinforcing rod from the ruin and began with careful chips to dig -- no firing down into that sanctuary, no such recklessness. He dug with that and with his fingers, and Duncan saw what he was doing and helped him, alternating strokes that pounded deeper into the cubit-thick flooring, and now and again they paused to paw away the dust they had made. The sun grew hot, and the only sound now was the steady chink of steel on the cemented earth; and he had heard no word from Melein in a very long time. He was tormented with fear, knowing how small the space, below was, how scant the air must be; and fear lest the gap they were making miss the small space where she was sheltered; and fear lest the whole floor give way. They broke through. Air flooded out of that blackness, stale and depleted and cold. "Melein," he shouted down, and had no answer. He began to work yet harder, ramming chips from the edges of the hole, widening it, admitting more and more air, sending a shaft of sunlight down into that place. They exposed steel rods and worked in the other direction, where they could make a wider hole, and from time to time he would call down to her, and hear nothing. It was at last of a size to admit a body; and he considered it, and the human who would remain above, and how they were to get up again, Duncan; but he could not come up with Melein in his arms, not so easily; and he was not sure whether the cloth of his robes could bear his weight, or what else might avail. "I will go down," said Duncan, and opened a pocket and took out a length of cord, and from another a small light. He offered these precious things with a naive forthrightness that for a moment disarmed Niun. "The drop," Niun said, inwardly shuddering at the thought of the human near Melein, "is my height and half again." He did not add what revenge he would take if Duncan were careless, if he harmed Melein, if he could not recover her alive: These things were useless to ponder. He sat, helpless, and watched as Duncan worked his body -- a little heavier than his own -- into that gap and dropped, with a heavy sound, into the dark. Niun listened as he searched below, through things that rattled and moved, through the shifting of rock. He leaned close and tried to see the tiny glow of the light that Duncan held. "I have found her." The words floated up out of that cold. And then: "She's alive." Niun wept, safe, where the human could not see him; and wiped his eyes and sat still, fists clenched on his knees. He knew that the human could claim her for hostage, could harm her, could exact revenge or some terrible oath of him; he had not thought through these things clearly, a measure of his exhaustion and his desperation to reach her in time; but now he thought, and poised himself on the edge of the pit, to go down. "Mri! Niun!" Duncan stood in the light with a pale burden in his arms, a bundle of gold robes that lay still against him. "Let down the cord. I will try to guide her up." Even as he watched, Melein stirred, and moved, and her eyes opened on the light in which he above could be only a shadow. "Melein," he called down. "Melein, we will pull you up. This is a human, Melein, but do not fear him." She struggled when she heard that, and Duncan set her feet on the floor. Niun saw her look at his face in the dim light and draw back in horror. But she suffered him then to put his hands on her waist, and to lift her up, by far the easiest and least hurtful way for her; but she could not lift her hands to. reach Niun's, and protested pain -- she once kel'e'en. "Wait," Niun objected, and with a turn of cord and a knot, fashioned a sling and cast it down. He wrapped it about hand and arm and took the weight carefully as she settled in the sling he had made. Duncan helped lift, but for a time the thin, cutting cord and an upward pull bit into Niun's hands. He tried not to rake her against the jagged opening, and pulled ever so carefully, and braced his feet and ignored the pain of his hands. But at last she came through and levered herself out onto the sunlit dust, tried to rise. He had her, he had her safe; and he hugged her to her feet and held to her as he had held to no living being since childhood, they both entangled in the cord. He brushed dust and tears from her face, she still gasping in the outside air. "The ship is destroyed," he said, to have all the cruelty done with while wounds were still numb. "Everyone else is dead, unless there is someone else alive down there." "No. None. They had no time. They were too old to run -- they would not -- they sat still, with the she 'pan. Then the House..." She began to shake as if in the grip of a great cold; but she was once of the Kel, and she did not break. She controlled herself, and after a moment began to disentangle them both from the cord. "None," he said, to be sure she understood it all, "could have possibly survived on the ship." She sat down on the edge of the section of wall that blocked the doors, and smoothed back her mane with one hand, her head bowed. She found her torn scarf at her shoulder and smoothed it and carefully covered her head with that light, gauze veil. She was quiet for a time, her face still turned from him. At last she straightened her shoulders and pointed over to the hole in the rubble, where Duncan waited. "And what is he?" she asked. Niun shrugged. "No matter to us. A human. A regul guest. They tried to kill him when we met; then..." The surmise that it was this, partly his own action, that had killed the People and left them orphan, was too terrible to speak. His voice trailed off, and Melein arose and walked from him, to look at the ruin, her back to him, her hands limp at her sides. The sight of her despair was like a wound to him. "Melein," he said to her. "Melein, what am I to do?" She turned to him, gave a tiny, helpless gesture. "I am nothing." "What am I to do?" he insisted. Sen and Kel: Sen must lead; but she had become more than Sen, and that was the heaviness on her, which he saw she did not want, which she had to bear. He stood waiting. At last she shut her eyes and opened them again. "Enemies will come here," she said, beginning clearly to function as she had been prepared for years to function, to command and to plan. She assumed what she must assume, she'pan of the People, who had no people. "Find us what we need for the hills, and we will camp there tonight. Give me tonight, truebrother -- I must not call you that; but tonight, that only, and I will think what is best for us to do." "Rest," he urged her. "I will do that." And when he had seen her seated and out of the direct sun, he bent down over the hole and cast the cord down. "Duncan." The human 's white face appeared in the center of the light, anxious and frightened. "Lift me up," he said, laying hand on the cord, which Niun refused to give solidity. "Mri, I have helped you. Now lift me out of here." "Search for the things I name and I will draw them up by the cord. And after that I will draw you up." Duncan hesitated there, as if he thought that, like humans, a mri would lie. But he agreed then, and sought with his tiny light until he had found all the things that Niun requested of him. He tied each small bundle onto the cord for Niun to draw up; food, and waterflasks, and cording and four bolts of unsewn black cloth, for they could not reach better without delaying to pierce a new opening, and Duncan avowed he did not think it safe. A last time the cord came up, bearing a bolt of cloth; and a last time Niun cast it down, this time for Duncan, and braced it about his body and his arm. It was not as difficult as with Melein's uncooperating weight. He leaned and braced his feet, and Duncan hauled himself up -- gained the lip of the hole and heaved himself to safety, panting, bent double, coughing and trying to stop the bleeding. The coughing went on and on, and Melein came from her place of rest to look down on the human in mingled disgust and pity. "It is the air," Niun said. "He has been running, and he is not acclimated to Kesrith." "Is he a manner of kel'en?" asked Melein. "Yes," Niun said. "But he does not offer any threat. The regul hunted him; likely now they would cease to care -- unless this man's superior is still alive. What shall we do with him?" Duncan seemed to know they spoke of him; perhaps he knew a few words of the language of the People, but they spoke the High Language, and surely he could not follow diat. Melein shrugged, turned her head from him. "As you please. We will go now." And she began, slowly, to walk through the ruin, picking her way with care. "Duncan," said Niun, "pick up the supplies and come." The human looked outrage at him, as if minded to dispute this order as a matter of dignity; and Niun expected it, waited for it. But then Duncan knelt down and with the cord made a bundle of goods, heaving it to his shoulder as he arose. Niun indicated that he should go, and the human carried the burden where Niun aimed him, his footsteps weaving and uncertain in the wake of Melein.    No firing had touched the hills. They came into a sheltered place that was as it had been before the attack, before the discords of regul or mri or humans -- a shelter safe from airships, withdrawn as it was beneath a sandstone ledge. With a great sigh Melein sank down on the sand in that cold shadow, and bent, her head against her knees, as if this had been all that she could do, the last step that she could take. She was hurt. Niun had watched her walk and knew that she was in great pain, that he thought was in her side and not her limbs. When she was content to stop, he took the supplies from Duncan and made haste to spread a cloth for a groundsheet and a cover for Melein. He gave her drink, and a bit of dried meat, and watched, sitting on his heels, as she drank and ate and leaned against the bare rock to rest. "May I drink?" The human's quiet request reminded him he had another charge on him; and he measured out a capfill of water and passed it to Duncan's shaking hands. "Tomorrow maybe," said Niun, "we will tap a luin and have water enough to drink." He considered the human, who drank at the water drop by drop, a haggard and filthy creature who by appearances ought not to have survived so far. It was not likely that he could survive much further as he was. He stank, sweat and sulphur compounded with human. Niun found himself hardly cleaner. "Can you -- " he said to Melein, almost having forgotten that her personal name was not for him to speak freely now. He offered her his pistol. "Can you stay awake long enough to watch this human a time?" "I am well enough," she said, and drew up on one knee and rested wrist and pistol on it in an attitude more kel'e'en than she'pan. By caste, she should not touch weapons; but many things ought to be different, and could not be. Niun left them so and went out of sight of the ledge, and stripped and bathed, as mri on dry worlds did, in the dry sand, even to his mane which, when he shook the sand out, recovered its glossy feel quickly enough. He felt better when he had done these things, and he dressed again, and began to retrace his steps toward the cave. A heavy body moved behind him, an explosive breath and plaintive sound: dus. He turned carefully, for he had left his gun with Melein, and nothing else could give a ha-dus pause. It was the miuk'ko, gaunt, forlorn, scab-hided. But the face was dry and it shambled forward with careless abandon. Niun's heart beat rapidly; the situation was a bad one in potential, for all the dusei were unpredictable. But the dus came to him and lifted its head, thrusting it against his chest, uttering that dus-master sound that begged food, shelter, whatever things mri and dus shared. He knelt down there, for the moment demanded it, and embraced the scrofulous neck and relaxed against the beast, letting it touch and be touched. A sense of warmth came over him, a feeling deep and almost sensual mingling with the lower beast-functions of the dusmind, that could be content with very little. This the dus lent him. He looked up then, aware of presence, and saw two stranger-dusei on the sandstone ridge above; he was not afraid. This dus knew them, and they knew him, and this knowing, like the warmth, came at a level too low for reason. It was fact. It was as dependable as the rock on which they stood, mri and dus. Thus the creature absorbed his pain, and melted it, and fed him back strength as slow and powerful as its own. And when he made his way back to the cave, the great beast lumbered after him, a docile companion, a comical and friendly fellow that -- beholding the human -- was suddenly neither comic nor friendly. Distrust: That reached Niun's mind through the impulses of the dus; but that subsided as the dus felt the human's outright terror. This one feared. Therefore he was safe. The dus put thought of the human aside and settled down athwart the entrance, radiating impulses of ward and protection. "He came," said Niun, gathering his pistol from Melein's hand. "There are more out there, but none even vaguely familiar." "The old pact," she said, "is still valid with us and them." And he knew that they might have no better guardian; and that he could sleep this night, sure that nothing would pass the dus to harm Melein. He was overwhelmingly grateful for this. The exhaustion he had held back came down like a flood. The dus lifted his head and gave that pleasure-moan, a gapmouthed smile, tongue lolling. It flicked across the lips and disappeared into a dusine smugness. Niun spoke to it, using the small nonsensewords the dusei loved, and touched its massive head, pleasing it; and then he took its paw and turned it, the size of it more than a man could easily hold in his hands. The claws curled inward, drawing his wrist against the dewclaw: reflex. It broke the skin, admitting the venom. Niun had sought this. It vould not harm him in such a small dose; by similar degrees he would become immune to this particular dus, and need never fear it. He took his hand back and caressed the flat skull, bringing a rumbling sound of contentment from the beast. Then, because he could not bear the thought of bedding down with the human's filth, he took up an armload of cloth and bade the human come with him, and took him out beyond the ledge. "Bathe," he told Duncan, and casting down the cloth when Duncan seemed dismayed, he bent and with a handful of sand on his own arm, demonstrated how. He sat with arms folded, eyes generally averted somewhat, as the human cleansed himself; and the curious ha-dusei watched from the heights, grouping and circling in alarm at sight of the strange, pale-skinned creature. Duncan jooked rather more pleasant when he had scrubbed the blood from his face and the tear-streaks had been evened out to a dusty sameness. He shook the sand from his hair and picked up his discarded clothing and started to dress, but Niun tore a length from the cloth and tore it in such a way that it could be worn. He thrust it at the human, who doubtfully put it on, as if this were some intended shame to him. Then Niun thought to search the clothing that the human had taken off, and found pockets full of things of which the human had not spoken. He opened his hand, demonstrating the knife that he had found. Duncan shrugged. Niun gave him credit at least that he had not attempted any rashness, but bided his time. The human had played the round well, though he had lost it. Niun thrust a second wad of black cloth at him. "Veil yourself," he said. "Your nakedness offends the she 'pan and me." Duncan settled the veil over his head, ineptly attempting to make it stay, for he had not the art. Niun showed him how to twist it to make a band of it, and how to arrange the veil; and Duncan looked the better for it, decently covered. He was not robed as kel'en, which would have been improper; but he was in kelblack and modestly clothed as a man and not as an animal. Niun looked on him with a nod of approval. "This is better for you," he said. "It will protect your skin. Bury your clothing. You .will find when we travel in the day that our way is best." "Are we moving?" Niun shrugged. "The she'pan makes that decision. I am kel'en. I take her orders." Duncan dropped to his knees and dug a hole, animal fashion, and put his discarded clothing in it. He paused when he had smoothed it over, and looked up. "And if I could offer you a safe way off this world -- " "Can you?" Duncan rose to his feet. He had a new dignity, veiled. Niun had never noticed the color of his eyes. They were light brown. Niun had never seen the like. "I could find a way," Duncan said, "to contact my people and get a ship down here for you... I think you have something to lose by not taking that offer. I think you would like very much to get her out of this." Niun moved his hand to his weapons, warning. "Tsi'mri, you do assume too much. And if you make plans, present them to her, not to me. I told you: I am only kel'en. If something pleases her, I do it. If something annoys her, I remove it." Duncan did not move. Presumably he reconsidered his disrespect. "I do not understand," he said finally. "Evidently I don't understand how things are with you. Is this your wife?" The obscenity was so naively put, in so puzzled a tone, that Niun almost laughed in surprise. "No," he said, and to further confound the human: "She is my Mother." And' he motioned Duncan to cease delaying him; he grew anxious for Melein, and there were the ha-dusei about them, that snuffed the air and called soft cries from their higher perch. One came down as they left the area. Doubtless the clothes would not stay buried, but neither would there be much left of them to catch the eye of searchers. The dus at the entry of their refuge lifted his head and pricked his tiny ears forward at their approach, radiating feelings of welcome; and Niun, already sensing the flush of the poison within himself, and knowing he would feel it stronger in the hours of the night, offered his fingers to its nose and brushed past, putting his body between it and Duncan. Melein took note of the human and nodded in approval of the change; but no further interest in him did she show this night. She settled down to rest in peace now that they had returned. And Niun drank a very small ration of water and lay down and watched as the human likewise stretched himself out as far from them and the beast as he might in the little space. In time Niun let his eyes close, his mind full, so over-burdened that at last there was nothing to do but abandon all thought and let go. The dus-fever was in him. He drifted toward low-mind dreams that were the murky, sometimes frightening, impulses of the dus; but he feared no harm from the impulses because it was in the lore of the Kel that no kel'en had ever been harmed by his own dus, it being sane. And he was owned by this beast, and the beast by him; and he compassed his present world by this and by Melein. He had been utterly desolate in the morning, and at this evening he rested, kel-ignorant, with a dus to guard his sleep and touch his mind, and with once more a she 'pan to take up the burden of planning. His heart was pained for Melein's burden, but he did not try to bear it. She would have her honor. He had his, and it was vastly more simple. To obey the she'pan. To avenge the People. He stared at the human during his waking intervals and once, in the dark, he knew that the human was awake and looking at him. They did not speak.    Is seeing believing? It all depends on what you mean by seeingl Take Sodom and Gomorrah, for example Xhe shrieker, to Tarpi's delight, landed squarely atop the treated sugar cube. It slowly rotated on its pudgy legs, its goatee of sensory hairs wiggling as it examined the top surface and edges of the cube. Tarpi began to recite "How Doth the Little Busy Bee" as he watched. He had reached "How cheerfully he seems to grin," having wandered into another poem along the way, when the shrieker gave a tiny cry like a terrified field mouse, spread its wing and rose into the air, the sugar cube pinched tightly between two rows of legs. Tarpi watched until it vanished from sight behind a tree, then turned to his companion and said, "Okay, give me the box-box now, Hester. " Hester was four feet high and resembled a chimpanzee. She had scaly, straw-yellow skin blotched with green. A particularly large blotch on her flat chest could, with considerable imagination, be construed to resemble a capital A. Her face consisted of a large, rigid mouth with which she also breathed; and a broad band of black Velvet stretched across the area where a chimpanzee normally has the purblind people eyes. An inflated balloon of skin beneath the chin completed the picture. "Hester" was not how she was usually identified, of course, but since it apparently pleased Tarpi to do so, she was too polite to mention it. She handed him the "box-box." The remote display showed Tarpi a dense cluster of red dots moving slowly over a schematic landscape. Each dot represented the location of one of the tiny transmitters with which the sugar cube was doped. When the sugar was eaten by the shrieker's mound-mates, each would ingest a transmitter or two as well -- and thus broadcast its location for a few days. And if a person had a pair of highly directional receivers and a fairly bright computer like, say, the receivers he had spent most of the morning setting up, plus the computer back at base camp, then he could obtain a lot of information about the shriekers' habits very quickly. It beat hell out of daubing their backs with paint and following them around, but Tarpi sometimes felt the advantage was nullified by having to suffer through myriad obscene jokes based on his being a "bug-bugger." He followed the shrieker's progress for several minutes when a drop of rain falling onto the display screen diverted his attention. Between tree trunks he could see out onto the rolling prairie that surrounded the grove. To the north an approaching squall line had darkened the sky from gray near the Zenith to black, shot with livid green, near the horizon. As he watched, a double fork of lightning arced down to assault the prairie. Tarpi decided that he was in for a good soaking and cursed himself for not having brought weather gear. He scooted over a few feet so that the strut of the buttress tree he had been leaning against arched over him, providing some shelter. A few large, economy-sized raindrops plopped down nearby. The balloon under Hester's chin shivered and she spoke in a continuous buzz, E above middle C, without pauses between words: "Bad storm comming Tarpi four twisting winds should go inside now." "Not twisting winds -- tornadoes," he corrected her absently, intent on the display screen. He had already made his own prediction; he had seen several of these storms before. Hester tugged at his sleeve. "Please must go now Tarpi tornadoes come very soon." Random raindrops continued to plop down around them. "We're just going to get rained on a little is all, Hester. Get in here under the tree if it bothers you." The shrieker had apparently reached its mound; its location had remained steady for several minutes. Tarpi set the display down and reached for his notetaper. Hester snatched up both display and recorder and ran off through the grove. "Hey, come back here with that! Here, Hester! Come here!" He was more surprised than angry; none of the Chimps had ever shown any signs of aggression before. He scrambled to his feet, scraping his forehead on the tree strut overhead, and set off after Hester, who by now had a twentyyard start. There was a sharp prack of thunder and a rolling barrage of rain overtook them, the huge drops rattling through the crisp yellow leaves of the buttress trees, making more noise than Tarpi would have believed. It sounded like a hailstorm in a furniture factory. Hester's smaller size and greater agility enabled her to pass through the intermingled buttress struts more easily than Tarpi, so she gained steadily. However, she soon ran out of the grove and onto the green matted prairie, where Tarpi's longer legs gave him the advantage. At the top of a low hill he caught up with her and swung her around by an arm. The display and recorder dropped to the waterlogged turf. "Now what the hell is this!" He was almost angry now -- his head was beginning to ache and he was soaked. "Tornadoes Tarpi." She pointed to the top of the grove. Like the legs of a lopsided elephant, four tornadoes swept down from the brutal black sky to the green prairie. As Tarpi watched, the nearest passed over a small patch of cottonweed and plucked it # bare stalks. Now that they were out of the clatter of rain on leaf, he was conscious of a low, dull rumbling like a distant orecrusher. The tornadoes twisted slowly toward them. The wind suddenly freshened, gusting cold on Tarpi's soaked skin. Hester was squirming in his grasp. "Must go now Tarpi." "'Damn right." He released her and followed her down the far side of the hill, the wind at their backs hurrying them along. Another grove lapped up against the foot of the hill. Hester lead them into and through it, up another hill and then down into a liny valley that had been carved out by a small stream trickling down its center. Hester thrashed through the dense growth of red-shot green grass on either bank and forded the stream without slowing. Tarpi sloshed to a halt just short of the place where the normal broadleafed groundcover ended and the ohhell weed started. He had discovered the weed and inadvertently given it its name when he stumbled into it for a second time. He had every intention of avoiding a third dose. Hester was halfway up the far side of the valley before she noticed that he was no longer following her. She turned around and went back. ""Please Tarpi hurry." He could hear her dimly over the wind and rain and tornado growl. Both banks were covered with red-shot green as far as he could see. The wind gave a particularly violent thrust, driving an iced raindrop into his ear just as Hester Science Fiction by women about women Those 'Women of Wonder" are back! But unlike Ihe first two volumes, this new collection focuses on the contemporary, more overtly feminist generation of writers whose stories address women's issues directly. A Vintage Original. #, paperbound, now at your bookstore. Recent Science Fiction Edited, with an introduction and notes by Vintage Books O A division of Randont House the purblind people waded into the far edge of the stream. "Oh, hell." Tarpi stepped out into the weed. Hester turned again to lead the way. As they crested the far rim of the valley, Tarpi caught sight of their destination, a grove of large buttress trees snuggled in a valley on the far side of the divide. Built in under and around the trees was a collection of small, free-form wooden houses. It was a Chimp village. The rain stopped but the wind was gusting so violently that Tarpi staggered drunkenly as he panted down the last slope. Hester, in the lead, picked a low house built around the base of a huge buttress, stopped to kiss the lintel and entered. Tarpi, the rumble of the tornado loud behind him, went down on all fours and entered without ceremony. Someone slammed a heavy wooden door behind him, dulling the wind's shriek and the tornadoes' roar and cutting off the light from outside. "Greetings to my home Tarpi." The light leaking through the cracks around the door and the shutters was not sufficient for Tarpi to see his host. "Thanks," he gasped. Suddenly it sounded as though a waterfall were pounding on the roof of the house. The shutters banged against their latches; small stones and dirt shot through every gap in the walls. Then the roaring increased further until it seemed to drill straight into Tarpi's ears with lancets of pain. He opened his mouth wide and tensed his throat muscles. His ears popped and the pain vanished. The roaring continued for only seconds, then died abruptly, and his ears stabbed at him again. The tornado tossed in a few more stones as a parting shot and then -- as well as Tarpi's benumbed hearing could judge -- all was quiet. His eyes had adjusted enough that he could see dimly by the light that leaked around the door and shutters. He could make out what he assumed were Hester and a half a dozen of her friends, all unmoving, in relaxed postures, comotose. Tarpi decided they were probably just stunned and blinded by the noise levels they had just experienced. When you "see" by sonar, close contact with a tornado must be akin to a laser flash in the eyes. The harmonics would have affected them even though there was not much output in the thirty-thousandcycle range they used. He crawled over to a window, again bumping his head when he forgot the low ceiling, and unlatched the shutters. The sun, low under a shelf of clouds, poured sickly yellow light into the house, making him blink. The scene outside reminded him of the underside of a set of bleachers. The buttress trees, now almost totally denuded of leaves, were an angular collection of struts and uprights, but they had apparently sustained little structural damage. The village also seemed unhurt, although to human eyes Chimp villages always looked cluttered and unfinished. Being unable to perceive color, their inhabitants made use of sculpture and carving for decoration; the sculpture generally represented plants or animals and was crudely done. The surfaces of the houses were either left rough or coarsely carved in haphazard geometrical patterns, and boards were not of standard sizes or closely fitted. The whole effect was rather slapdash. The door in an A-frame across the way swung open and two Chimps stumbled out looking none too light on their feet but none the worse for wear. Tarpi could hear his hosts starting to move around behind him, and he -- His left instep burst into flame. "Oh, hell!" A second locus started on his right foot as the first spread to encircle his ankle. It started itching as well. He was in for an extremely uncomfortable few hours as the rings of fire would work their way slowly up his body. Evidently his previous exposures had not lessened his sensitivity, but there was a tube of calpermine lotion in the health kit back at camp that could help -- if it had not blown away. He scrambled through the low door and set off at a dead run. II The expedition's base camp was a two-hundred-foot circle of ultratough monomolecular film, the edges buried deep, the sides bulged upward into a low dome by a permanent static charge. Varicolored opaque and translucent patches gave it the look, from a distance, of a huge fungus growing out of the prairie. In an equipment-cluttered room beneath a round, clear patch near the center of thq dome sat a chunky, dark-haired woman, mildly chiding a persnickity computer. "Come on now. Marvel. Stop that." She pressed the "Program" key again and repeated, slowly and carefully: "Make radio check of status of all expedition members on remote duty." "Unintelligible command," the computer replied. Its voice always reminded Allis of a Chimp's voice; it had the same buzzing, continuous quality. She thought for a moment and then tried once more: "Make radio check of condition of all expedition members on remote duty." "Running," Marvel responded and rewarded her with a light show, listing the name of each expedition member plus columns for each of several possible conditions. As Allis watched, some of the X's moved from "Contact Not Yet Made" to "Condition Satisfactory." 'Dumm and 'Dee came over from the opposite side of the room -- they had been fiddling with a freezedried gryphon specimen -- to watch over Allis's shoulder. "What is Marvelcomputer doing now Allis?" 'Dumm (or was it 'Dee? Both had almost identical green blothes.) asked. Allis explained briefly about radio, and how she wanted to know if anyone had been hurt in the storm or was in need of anything because of it. When she finished talking, all the X's had moved into the "Condition Satisfactory" column except three. She pressed the "Program" key again. "Make voice contact with..." she picked the first name on the list... "Hellene Eisen." ' "Complete." "Hellene, this is Allis. We need to know if you're okay. Come on, Hellene, please answer." She continued to speak through the tiny personal radio for thirty seconds or so, not knowing if Hellene was there, dead, miles away, alive or washing-her-hair-can'tcome-to-the-phone-now-sorry. She was about to give up when Hellene answered in a barely audible whisper. "Of course I'm okay. Now will you be quiet, you're going to spook them." She broke contact. Allis noticed that Hellene's X had moved into "Condition Satisfactory." Marvel had been eavesdropping. Something-kissed the back of her neck. For a moment she thought that 'Dumm or 'Dee might have been smitten with passion for her. Then she turned around -- and kissed her husband back. "Stamm! I'm so glad you're here. I'm afraid you're going to have to make some pick-ups." "I like that. I fly through rain, snow, heat and gloom of night just to get back to you and all you want to do is put me out to work." She ignored him, attempting again to make contact with her two fallen sparrows. Stamm tried to exchange glances with 'Dee ("See what we men have to put up with?") but failed, the other not being equipped for it, so he stood and watched in silence. After a couple of minutes,. Allis gave him her attention again. "I can't make contact with either Tarpi or Rodder. As near as I can tell, Tarpi's last campsite was very near the center of the storm track, so you had better go check on him first. Rodder was sort of on the fringes, so he's -- " "Hey, lookit," Stamm interrupted. Marvel was putting on another light show but the spelling and grammar were not up to her usual standards. It was Tarpi, using his remote display terminal to message them. "Calpermine!" Stamm hooted. "Some people never learn." "Okay, you'd better pick him up first, then hunt around and see if you (ian find Rodder. He probably hasn't moved too far from where you dropped him." "Shall I take Tarpi some calpermine or should we let him learn from experience?" "You most certainly shall take him some. Sometimes. Stamm..." "Just kidding." He turned and started out. 'Dumm and 'Dee followed him. "May 'Dumm and 'Dee come too Stamm?" one of them asked. "Sorry, fellas. No room this time." 'Dumm and 'Dee were not equipped to look disappointed. They went back to watch Allis, who was telling Tarpi that a relief force was on the way. Ill Nothing remained of Tarpi's campsite except the tentsheet, one edge of which had been buried and held fast. Unable to find his radio, Tarpi was returning to the Chimp village to see if they had anything to treat the itching, burning brands around his thighs when he found his notetaper and remote display terminal, both atop the knoll where Hester had dropped them. Hester had joined him shortly after he had called for help, and it was there that Stamm found them, Tarpi scratching and cursing, Hester watching impassively. As Stamm set the flitter down, Tarpi ran to the landing site and when Stamm popped the dome, Tarpi was almost standing in his lap. "Give me the calpermine." "Patience, Tarpi. Now let me see, calpermine, calpermine. I know I put it here somewhere." "Goddammit, Stamm, give it here." "Language, son. There's a lady present." He indicated Hester. "You've got just one second..." Stamm handed over the tube. Tarpi sat on the rain-matted ground and began to smear the ointment on the affected areas. "What is that Tarpi?" Hester wanted to know. "I don't know." He was too busy, too angry, to be bothered. "It's called 'calpermine,' " Stamm supplied. "It's supposed to keep Tarpi from itching so much." Hester digested the statement. Then she announced; "I am called 'Hester.' " "Pleased to meet you, Hester. My name's Stanun." "Yes." Tarpi stood and pulled his pants up. "If the amenities are satisfied, can we get out of here now?" "Hop in." Stamm indicated the empty cabin. "C'mon, Hester." Tarpi flopped into one of the seats. "Won't you join us, Hester?" Stamm asked, his tone mildly rebuking to Tarpi. Hester joined them without asking where they were going, Stamm noticed. They were like that -- to try anything, with no thought for possible danger. They reminded him of something he had never quite been able to put his finger on -- children were the closest, except that there was nothing childlike about them. They rose straight up for a few hundred feet and headed almost due south. The sky was clear and from that height there was no sign of the tornadoes' passage. "Hey, where are we going, Stamm? Camp's over that way." Tarpi gestured toward the left. "Isn't it?" "Got to check on Rodder first. Allis couldn't make contact with him:" "Hell, he's probably just not communicating with anyone below the rank of God again. And even He'd have to let it ring twice and call back." "And like as not. Rodder would get huffy and hang up on Him anyway," Stamm agreed. "You sound like the calpermine must be helping." "Some. It's down to merely excruciating... hey, ruggers!" Tarpi pointed down to the prairie. A thin, meandering trail of yellowish-green marred the distant perfection. At the near end was what looked to be a fifty-foot blob of furiously boiling, furry oatmeal. There were probably several hundred ruggers in the scrum, each intent on clawing, scratching and elbowing (figuratively) its way to the leading edge where the grazing was. Almost brainless, they were so gregarious that a single one removed from the scrum would sit motionless in acute depression until it died, and so crotchety that the only thing they liked better than fighting each other was fighting the gryphons that eked out a living by preying on them. Tarpi had once seen a gryphon try to snatch a young rugger. It was as though the predator h been instantly enveloped in a corrosive blanket; nothing was left behind but beak and bones. Ruggers were herbivorous -- but not fanatic about it. "I wonder if that's the same scrum I tagged a while back." Tarpi reached around for... "Damn, I left the remote terminal back there." "Okay, we'll pick it up on the return." "See the ruggers, Hester." Tarpi was mellowing now that the calpermine was starting to take effect. He pointed down at them for Hester's benefit. She leaned to look along his arm. "No but there are people down there." "Huh? Who?" "She's right," Stamm said. "See? There, just this side of that little rise with the two patches of trees and the little pond at the base. Their coloring mes them blend in." "Oh, Chimps. I thought maybe somebody had moved his camp over here. Yes, I see them now." A file of perhaps a dozen Chimps, most of them carrying bundles, was heading in the direction from which the flitter had come. "Looks like free enterprise in action," commented Stamm. "They bring help for the tornado," said Hester. "You're very public-spirited people." "I do not understand." "To bring help for the tornado victims? There were victims, Tarpi?" Stamm asked. "I guess so, but I don't think anything serious. I'm not sure." "Two people were killed but no one was hurt," Hester said. "Philosophical, isn't she?" Stamm remariced. "Maybe we ought to check on them later." "Maybe." IV They found Rodder's camp in a grove of roundheels trees, not far from where Stamm had left him days before. A gentle breeze stirred the balls of leaves at the treetops, causing them to nod benignly over the limber trunks. In a slightly suffer gale they would bend almost flat against the ground. A few buttress trees grew here and there as well, but they were mostly young and had not yet driven out the scrub growth. The camp was laid out as neatly as a picture in a field manual, lacking only a camper. The three wandered through it, avoiding puddles, not touching anything, the two humans kicking at the leaves underfoot. "Nobody to home," Stamm said. "Looks as if," Tarpi agreed. He put his head into the tent, then went all the way in. His voice came out slightly muffled. "His personal radio doesn't seem to be here, so he must have it with him... hey, this is funny." He emerged with a bug-eyed object in one hand. "How many of these cameras did the film people have, anyway?" "One apiece, as you ought to remember from their screaming about it. Wonder why he doesn't have it with him." "Yeah... maybe he's out taking a crap or something." Tarpi tossed the camera back into the tent. "Hey, careful with that!" "No problem, they're practically indestructible..." He took another slow look around. "Well, nuts, Stamm, all the storm did here was to drop a couple of centimeters of rain and knock down a few leaves, and that certainly wouldn't do Rodder any harm. Let's get out of here." "Might as well, I guess. He'll show up when he damn well pleases." Stamm turned and started back toward the flitter. "Is that Rodder?" Hester wanted to know. She pointed to a small, dense plot of head-high roundheels clamoring around the base of a dead twenty-foot buttress. The two men stopped and exchanged glances. "That's Rodder," Stamm confirmed when they had thrashed their way into the undergrowth. The body lay on its back, one foot in an unused slit latrine, a branch from the dead buttress lying at a rakish angle across the forehead. Stamm knelt, felt the wrist briefly, then stood again. V "He's dead." Tarpi was astounded: He had never seen a dead person before. He bent and lifted a hand. He was amazed at how limp it was, with absolutely no muscle tone. And cold... and heavy... a clammy, useless thing that had once been somebody's right arm. Stamm had been examining the angular growth of the dead buttress over their heads. "It must have been a hell of a freak accident. The one loose branch on the whole tree, and he's standing under it the one instant when it decides to fall. The storm must have jostled it just enough that it was barely balanced, and afterward, when Rodder came out here to the latrine -- surprise! Well, let's get him back and chuck him in the hospital. Maybe this'll cut him down to size a little." "I think it's too late for that, Stamm. He's already cold. He's been dead for a couple of days at least." "Goddam. You mean we're going to have to pay off the bond on RodderT' His tone implied that that was like being fined for stepping on a cockroach. "That will almost break the expedition. We'll never be able to show a profit if we have to pay off on that." Tarpi rolled the buttress branch off of Rodder's forehead; the struts were badly decayed and lighter than they looked. "I'm afraid it's worse than that, Stamm. Look at the mailcs on his forehead. There's no way that branch could have fallen on him four separate times. I think he must have been murdered." Allis looked in at Rodder's body, an undignified sprawl across the back seats of the flitter. She turned away, white-faced. "Poor Rodder," she said. Stamm snorted, winning himself an angry look. "Will you turn his head please, Tarpi, so I can see the wounds." Tarpi leaned in and tilted the head. Allis made a brief inspection, smoothing the hair away from the forehead. "You're right. Bludgeoned to death, several days ago." She thought for a moment. "Whereare Sodom and Gomorrah?" "His Chimps? I don't know. Stamm, did you -- " "No. They weren't around the camp. They could be anywhere by now." Hester spoke up from behind Allis, causing her to jump. "Sodom and Gomorrah are in a town near where Rodder was it is their home." Allis moved a few feet away. "Thank you." "Yes." "Her name is 'Hester,' honey," Stamm said. "Hester, this is 'Allis.' " "Yes." Allis ignored her. "Stamm, you'd better go see if you can find Sodom and Gomorrah and bring them back here. And I think Tarpi should accompany you." "And Hester too." "Certainly... you'll want to take Rodder inside before you leave, of course. No, wait, don't take him inside, Just dump him on the ground by the entrance." "You mean Just lay him out there?" "No, Just dump him, all in a heap... Don't leave before I get back." She vanished into the main tent. Removing the body from the flitter was even tougher than getting it in. Finally Stamm had to stand in the back seat and heave it over the edge onto the ground. Then the two men carried it over and, as instructed, dumped it near the main entrance. They stood looking at it. "Shall I maybe straighten him out Just a little?" Tarpi asked. "No, you shan't." Allis emerged from the tent, herding 'Dumm and 'Dee before her. "Leave him as he is. You two, go on, scat!" She made shooing motions at the two Chimps, who moved a few feet away to Join Hester. "Here, Stamm." She handed him a pistol. "What's that supposed to be for?" Tarpi asked. "Ever hear of an unarmed cop?" Stamm asked in return. "Cop! Somehow I can't visualize you bringing in two unarmed Chimps at gunpoint. Or needing to. Not to mention the fact that if you get hit with a kidnapping charge, the fine will make Rodder's bond look like peanuts." "Oh, Stamm. The bond! I'd forgotten all about it," Allis exclaimed. "I think it will work out okay, hon. The publicity will probably double sales of the film." "I certainly hope so. Otherwise We'll wind up in the red for sure. the purblind people Well, you two had best get started, and I have a lot to do too." She turned and vanished into the tent. "You don't really think a Chimp did this, do you, Stamm?" Tarpi asked when they were airborne. "They're the only obvious suspects. Sodom and Gomorrah in particular. The nearest humans were ten or fifteen klicks away, and even as much as most of us disliked Rodder, I can't conceive of anyone actually doing this to him. And he certainly didn't do it to himself." "But the Chimps have always acted so tame, not been aggressive at all. Hell, I don't think they even eat meat any more." "Ever look at their teeth?" "Sure, that's Just the point. They obviously evolved to be omniverous creatures, but they're vegetarians now. You don't, eat other animals, do you, Hester?" "No it would hurt too much." "See, a Chimp couldn't have done it; they have ethics." "So have I, but I wouldn't trust myself behind my own back with anything sharp, let alone Rodder's." "Yes, but you had an ax to grind. Most of us did. But tell me, Stamm, why would a Chimp want to kill Rodder? Money, vengeance for stealing its woman, what?" "I ceased to speculate on the motives of humans long before you were bom, Tarpi. With ET's I never started. But let me tell you a story: When I was a young starman apprentice on my very first cruise, we landed on a nice, pastoral planet, almost as nice as this one. Deneb IV, you may know it. Anyway, the natives -- sort of tall, fuzzy flitterbicks -- came out and made offerings to the great silver thing from the sky, sang hosannas to us, the whole bit. Looked friendly as could be. Well, there wasn't a man or woman aboard that ship who wasn't dying to run through fields of fresh clover, or the local equivalent, so the captain suppressed his better judgment and turned us loose. A couple of days went by, nothing much happened. The locals loved having the gods hobnob with them, we all had a terrific time. Then the purser showed up hanging from a tree by a stake driven through his head -- in one ear and out the other. And do you know why?" "Spitting on the slidewalk?" "Worse. He had failed to urinate in a public place. Sneaked off behind a tree and offended it. So if you can prove to me that Rodder positively did not do the moral equivalent of private urination, then I might believe you." "Okay, so it's a lousy argument. But I still have trouble believing a Chimp did it." "Then who did?" VI "It was a man," said Sodom. They had landed as before at Rodder's campsite, then followed Hester through the brush about a kilometer to a tiny Chimp village of only three houses and a couple of outbuildings. They were all built along the same pattern -- low, flat teepees, each radiating outward from a central tree, the largest of which was a buttress, the rest being fairly old roundheels. The place looked to Tarpi like the Chimp equivalent of a family farm. The first Chimp they approached, a fairly old male, had answered to "Gomorrah" and Stamm claimed to recognize him. "Sodom" was a barely mature male, apparently a relative of Gomorrah's. Neither had questions. "You mean a Chimp, a person like yourself," Stamm corrected. "No a man like you." "Was it a man or a woman?" Tarpi asked. "A man he had no hair." Tarpi stroked the fashionable skullcap atop his crew cut. "That's hardly conclusive. A woman with her hair tucked up into one of these caps would look as though she had no hair either. But you're sure it was a human?" "Yes." "Who was he? What did he look like?" Stamm demanded. "A strange man I had never seen before." "What did he look like?" Stamm repeated. Sodom paused. "... a strange man." "What about you, Gomorrah? Did you see him too?. What did he look like?" "Yes a strange man." "Ask if they would know him if they saw him again," Tarpi suggested. Sodom had overheard him. "Yes." "What happened? What did he do?" "He came in from the prairie followed Rodder into the latrine and hit him with a piece of tree." "That's all?" Stamm was incredulous. "He just wanders in off the prairie and without saying a word, starts banging on Rodder! He doesn't say anything, Rodder doesn't say anything, you don't say anything?" "Rodder said 'no don't' and screamed painfully while he died." "That's a?" But apparently it was. Further questioning elucidated little more detail. The killer had come from an unobserved direction and had left toward the north, where, as far as anyone knew, there were no human encampments. Rodder had apparently seen him just as he was being struck. The two Chimps had been some distance away and had not seen fit to interfere. They were vague as to when it had happened, saying only that it was on the day Stamm had dropped off the party. The men withdrew for a whispered conversation. "Sounds fishy to me," Stamm said. "That's just what you'd expect them to say if one of them had done it. Each one vouches for the other and both blame some mysterious human." "You make them sound like green and yellow Machiavellis... but I don't see that we have much choice but to take them back and let them try to identify one of us." "And get somebody held on murder charges on their say-so?" "Well, yes. But if they each identify the same person, there's a good chance that person's the killer and we certainly don't want him running around loose, do we? And if they did it themselves, like as not they'll each pick somebody different and each of those will have been a hundred klicks away with two other people. And then we'll have some reasonable evidence against them, not just circumstance." "Hell, a good lawyer would just claim they made a mistake." "Yes, but with only a hundred and seventeen of us on the whole planet, it would be a lot harder to make that stand up. They would have seen every last possible suspect." "Okay, let's see if they'll come with us." They returned to the Chimps. "Sodom, Gomorrah, we'd appreciate it if you'd come back to our main camp and see if you can pick out the man who killed Rodder," Stamm told them. "Why?" Stamm was nonplussed. As well explain why it's light in the daytime. "Rodder is dead, murdered. We want to catch and punish the culprit." "Why?" "It is in accord with our customs," Tarpi said. The two Chimps conferred and then appeared to consult Hester. None of the conversation was audible to the humans. "We will come." When they radioed Allis the situation, she went into action, ordering all expedition members to drop what they were doing and prepare to report back to base camp as soon as Stamm could pick them up. Tarpi had the feeling that she had been wanting to re-assert her authority by calling a general meeting and welcomed the mammoth line-up as an excuse. Not unnaturally, most of her invitations were declined without thanks, and were accepted only when she threatened to completely cut off computer services. Since Marvel performed almost all data storage, from recording movie pictures to taping field notes, the members had little choice but to attend, although they did not have to be nice about it. But as they filtered in by ones and twos past Rodder's body -- a sprawled and undignified heap where she had had Stamm and Tarpi leave it -- their mood changed considerably and by midnight, when they were finally assembled in the circular common room, Allis faced a group that was at least not totally hostile. She used a chair to step up onto a table and instantly had their attention. "Well, you've all seen what happened to Rodder. Of course the responsibility is entirely mine, and Stamm and I will pay quite heavily for my error. Better judgment indicated that going about in parties of less than three persons was unwise but the prima donnas among you convinced me that it was impossible for them to carry on 'their work' with other people jostling their elbows and trampling through their experiments. Needless to say, in the future no group smaller than three will be allowed away from the base." There were unhappy murmers but obviously it was a necessary precaution. Even so, a small group of diehards argued her down from three to two in "special cases" before they let her continue. "Very well." Tarpi noticed that she looked harried. "Now, as I'm sure the grapevine has informed you, the two Chimps who were accompanying Rodder -- " "You mean slaving for him," someone shouted from three o'clock, low. "I meant what I said, Lessiline," Allis responded with some asperity. "If the Chimps choose to accompany us and occasionally help with minor chores for their own reasons, that's their business. But this expedition is in enough trouble without having unwarranted charges of slavery leveled, and I'll thank you to keep silent. Now, you're aware that Rodder's Chimps are, at the very least, witnesses to the crime, and quite possibly a good deal more. They claim to have seen a human kill Rodder and they say they can identify him." The crowd murmured protest. Everyone had known the Chimps were in the camp but had assumed their presence was for purposes of lynching. "So in a minute," she continued, "I'm going to have one of them brought in to see if he can pick out the alleged culprit." They protested even louder at that. "What about our rights?" someone shouted from the back. "I realize that technically this tramples on your rights, but I think this is the easiest way to settle the charges these two intelligent, legally responsible beings have made." The emphasis on the legal catchphrase was heavy. "I think the odds of each of them separately identifying not only the same person, but someone who could reasonably have committed the crime, and who lacks an alibi, are negligible. And that failure will give us prima facie evidence to hold them and later remove them from the planet for trial when the Ariel returns for us." She nodded to Stamm, who fondled Marvel briefly. "We're recording now," she went on. "For the record, is there anyone here who objects to allowing the two Chimps named 'Sodom' and 'Gomorrah' to attempt this identification?" She waited for a moment, surveying the crowd. When nobody responded, she nodded to Stamm again. He left the room and returned shortly with Sodom in tow. There was a low rumble accompanied by a slight tension in the room. Sodom gazed around at the group, his vaguely anthropomorphic features, plus his black velvet sonar receptor, giving him the emotionless expression of an executioner. He followed Stamm, a pace behind and one to the side, in a slow tour of the crowd, passing through them like a breeze, causing them to straighten before him and relax after his passage. They finally returned to the start. "Well?" said Allis. "He is not here." "But this is all the humans there are on the planet. Are you sure?" "Yes." "You still claim that you saw Rodder killed by a human, by one of us?" "Yes." "But that human is not in this room?" "Yes." "Could somebody have skipped out on us?" a small, stocky blonde girl asked. "You know, be hiding in the restroom or something?" "Maybe you ought to have Marvel call the roll, hon," Stamm said. So Marvel called the roll, twice, the second time with everyone walking past Sodom as his name was called. By the time Allis got to "Abram Willks" again, most of the crowd was rumbling angrily. They had been gathered here against their wills and it was late at night, and in spite of the fact that no one liked him very much. Rodder had been murdered, and they thought they knew by whom. They were ready for a little blood. "All right, he's had three chances. That ought to be enough to satisfy the record. I move we take him out and execute him." A tall, thin man near the wall was waving his hand over his head. There were shouts of "Second" from a halfdozen people around the room. "I'm afraid you're under a misapprehension, Heim," Allis said. "This is not a stockholders' meeting of this corporation, it's a meeting of corporation employees. And as such, you're in no position to make motions of any sort." "Now just a minute, Madame Chairman -- ' ' "No, Herm, not 'Madame Chairman,' " Allis said sharply. "Right now I'm commander of this expedition, president of the corporation, the sole ruler with absolute aureasonable discussion but the final decisions are entirely mine. And immediate execution of this being is out of the question. Certainly it may be appropriate to hold him for trial aboard Ariel when she returns, but lynching him would be heinously immoral. It would merit not only fines but actual incarceration for us all. Or have you forgotten Epsilon Scorpio VI?" She looked out at them, her eyebrows raised in question. "All right, does anyone have any reasonable suggestion to offer?" "Gomorrah," said Tarpi. "Certainly, our other witness. Stamm, will you please bring him in?" But Gomorrah's performance differed from Sodom's in no significant detail. Yes he was sure a human had killed Rodder. No the human was not here. Yes he was sure cross my heart ma'am honest to gods. Stamm led him out again. It was all very unsatisfying; they had wanted a clear-cut solution, somebody to blame and punish so that they could get back to their work. Instead they had a story that was almost certainly a lie but impossible to verify. And, oh, God, what if it were true? Their frustration turned on Allis. Why weren't we issued guns to protect ourselves from these little vermin? There was no apparent reason for it. Besides, one gun won't divide one hundred and seventeen ways. Why didn't you call Ariel to pick us up as soon as this happened? Impossible. Even if we could get a message to her, a starship's time is scheduled so far ahead and is so valuable that literally nothing can deflect it. Not even the lives of one hundred and sixteen people? You heard me. Had anybody thought to look at Rodder's last films? I mean, maybe they show -- We're not fools. They show nothing, simply standard footage of ruggers and gryphons and whatnot. Could it be true, you know, what the Chimps said about another strange human on the planet? Sure, Herm. Somebody probably popped up in his private space yacht for the express purpose of bludgeoning Rodder to death. Why didn't we think of that? Allis recognized that if she were tired enough to be sarcastic, nothing further was likely to be accomplished and so she maneuvered them into small conversational groups ("I want committee recommendations in the morning") and went to bed. They buried Rodder the next day, Stamm reading the service. There was no eulogy. Sodom and Gomorrah were held pending the arrival of Ariel, although there was considerable minority argument for releasing them. And work resumed as before. Or almost as before. For a while Chimps were banned from many camps as dangerous (or frightening) and their presence was unwelcome. But as time passed, their gentleness and eager curiosity let them diffuse once again into their old status. It was difficult to stay mad at them. Allis enforced her "no-soloparties" rule. Tarpi pleaded special circumstances and drew the small, stocky blonde girl as his partner. Her name was lo Gallar and she was one of the film crew making nature movies of the local wildlife, the profits of which were intended to defray the cost of the expedition. The usual aloofness between film crew and scientific personnel stood between them for the first week and they played it very crisp and businesslike. ("I'd appreciate it if you could stay away from the mound of shriekers down near the stream for a few days, Miss Gallar." "Certainly, Doctor Liddell.") Then one day Tarpi started whistling every time he saw her, repeating the same tune each time. It was a day and a half before she gave in and acknowledged it. "All right, I give up. What's the song?" "Song? What song?" He was innocence itself. "The song you've been whistling for the past two days and which I'm obviously supposed to recognize." "Oh, this song?" He whistled a few bars of it. "Yes, that song." "An old Disney classic like that and you don't recognize it?" He shook his head pityingly. "Your education is sorely lacking." He broke into song; "lo, lo, its off to work we go..." He got past three and a half bars before she hit him with a plastic plate -- but not very hard. After that the tension between them melted and before long they had moved all the equipment into one tent and all the personnel into the other. And field work became much more pleasant. It was probably the reference to Disney that gave lo the idea she broached to Tarpi as they lay cuddled spoonwise one night after making love. "That was really great, Tarpi." "You're right." He parodied smug self-satisfaction. "If we could only get it on film, we'd make a profit for sure, bond or no bond." "Yeah... never get it past the Board of Prudes, though." "Uh-huh... you know what a lot of the old-timers used to do?' ' "No, what?" "Well, they would sneak sex into their films. They'd get shots of bare-breasted native women, or animals mating, or being bom, and would slip it past the Board as educational." "Which it was. So?" "But mapy people thought it was dirty too. And it boosted sales a lot." "Okay, so go out and get some pictures of ruggers or ChimpsDoing-It." "Yes, I thought of that already but ruggers are no good. Even if you could get two of them outside the scrum to do anything but merely sit there, they would just look like a couple of furry beach-balls nuzzling. Chimps would be perfect though, Taipi, except for one thing." Tarpi was not totally insensitive. "Your spontaneity is showing. Okay, what is the one thing?" he asked. "Well, they have this law or taboo against public appearances, just like we have. But I finally talked Jeeves and Hester into it." Jeeves was to lo as Hester was to Tarpi. "There's a hitch though. I had to bid so high that their curiosity got the better of them." "What did you offer them, Ambrose Bierce's current address?" "No, they want to watch us first." "God, you mean they've been hiding in the comer all this time!" He clutched at the top of the sleeping bag. "No, stupid. But can we, Tarpi? I think it would add a lot to the film, and it wouldn't do us any harm. It might even be kind of fun." "Let me think for a minute... okay, I guess so." lo turned over and hugged him. "It's not like they were really people. And it might be really great at that. How do you want to play it? Screaming, tearing rape -- or slick, sly seduction?" "Well, that rape thing sounds sort of interesting but we'd better save that for later, I think. Where did you learn slick, sly seduction, anyway?" "Never mind." "If you can't show me any credentials, then I guess we'll just have to play it straight." "Tomorrow night? 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly,' or however the saying goes." "Not always," he replied. "But in this case I think that's best." IX The following night, it were done. Afterward Tarpi, still frisky, looked over at the two Chimps in the shadows and asked, "Well, Hester, how was it?" lo elbowed him in the ribs. "It was interesting." "Interesting how?" he pursued. "It's always a good idea to get different points of view," he whispered aside to lo. "Sex makes you both look very strange for a time." "Look strange how?... Ouch, stop that, you're giving me a bruise there." Hester paused for a moment. "Very strange." Tarpi leaned back and looked thoughtful. lo answered the Chimps' remaining questions and then sent them out. She looked over at Tarpi. "If I get you a cigarette, will you lie there and blow smoke up at the ceiling pensively?" He ignored her question. "lo, describe me." "Why?" "Just do it." "Well, you're fairly goodlooking, maybe six feet tall, sort of skinny, reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, and you have a sinisterlooking scar on the bridge of your nose. Close enough?" "From a description like that, someone could probably pick me out from the rest of the expedition, at least. Now how many of the characteristics you listed would a Chimp list?" "Everything except hair and eye color, probably." "No, think about it. The Chimps have no standard with which to decide whether I'm as handsome as I actually am or as ugly as a dried prune. There's nobody on the expedition who's grossly fat or thin -- " "I love you for that." " -- or thin, so the Chimps have no standard for comparison there either. And as for my sabre scar -- " "I still say it was probably a broken beer sphere." " -- I don't think they even see it. Look, they all broadcast their sonar sound on a frequency of about thirty thousand cycles, which gives a wavelength of, um, about a centimeter or so. They just plain can't see anything much smaller than that. No sabre scar. Hell, they're probably hard-pressed to jnake out any features at all. The most they could 'see' of me would be 'a man, six feet tall.' And you got that wrong anyway. I'm only five-ten." "I know, I was trying to boost your ego." "Liar. But that's why their towns and their art seem so crummy to us. Once they have all the irregularities down to less than a centimeter or so, everything 'looks' okay to them despite the fact that it still looks unfinished to us. But anyway, the point is, why did Hester say sex made us look 'strange?' " lo suggested a possiblity. "That's ignoble. Besides, she said both of us." "Yes, and she could have described it anyway. But I see what you mean. If all they can resolve of us is sort of human-shaped blurs, we must look pretty much the same to them all the time. But, Tarpi, if that's true, how can they tell themselves apart? Or us apart, for that matter? I've never had one call me by the wrong name." "I know what you mean. And you're right. Since they can't see each other's green blotches, they ought to look pretty much alike to each other...no, wait. Sonar. They can probably tell themselves apart by voice, and us too, for that matter." "No good," lo said. "They all use the same frequency -- thirty-six thousand, two hundred forty-three point six cycles. I remember Herm's telling me about it and laughing. It's an organic crystal resonance or something. When they talk to us, we hear a subharmonic." "But that wouldn't prevent them from telling us apart by voice," Tarpi countered. "And it wouldn't make us look 'strange' during sex. Voiceprints are supposed to be as constant as fingerprints." "You know, 'very strange' is also how Sodom described Rodder's murderer," Tarpi mused. "That's not too surprising; they don't have many descriptors to work with. Either we look like we usually do or we look 'very strange.' " "But, lo, what do lovers and murderers have in common that make them both look 'very strange' to a Chimp? Seriously." She shrugged. "I don't know. They both might be excited or scared in some circumstances but a Chimp certainly couldn't see that. Or maybe..." Tarpi sat up. "Couldn't they?" "Well, no. I thought we had decided they couldn't make out anything as fine as facial expressions." "Listen... a few weeks ago, just before we found Rodder's body, we flew over a scrum of ruggers, Hester, Stamm and I. We were almost on top of them, just a few hundred meters away, but Hester couldn't see them." "Of course not. The flitter dome doesn't transmit sound, only light." "Exactly. But she could see a group of Chimps better than two klicks away." "That's a pretty good trick." "If she were sonaring them, it would be. But what if she were seeing them mentally, with empathy or telepathy or something like that?" "That's sort of far-fetched, even coming from you." "Yes, but it's beautiful, it explains everything," he said ex-, citedly. "She can't sense the ruggers' presence because they have no more brains than a retarded cabbage, but the Chimps' presence would show up like ants on a plate. And a person in an orgasm or a killing rage would look grossly different -- mentally, that is -- than the usual human. They would both look 'very strange.' And they are." "Maybe so... and you know how every Chimp you meet always seems to know your name. That could be telepathy too." "I always thought we were being supersonically introduced, but you could be right. Although I don't think it can really be telepathy. Maybe it's more like empathy. If they were well-developed telepaths, they wouldn't need a language, and they certainly have one." "They wouldn't be very curious either. They'd be able to pick whatever they wanted straight out of your minds." "Uh-huh, except maybe it doesn't work very well with humans. Different wavelength or something. I bet that's why they don't eat meat any more too. Sirloin steak wouldn't be so attractive if you had to suffer the death agony of the steer before you ate it. They don't have ethics, they're just chicken." "A Chimp couldn't have killed Rodder then, either. I mean if they really are empathetic." "Of course it's true, it has to be." "Well, with the weight of your assertion, plus some wild speculation to back it up. I'm sure you'll have no trouble in finding converts." "Okay, doubting lo, I'll prove it to you." He sat up again and shouted into the tent flap: "Hester, hey, Hester, come here a minute." He turned to lo. "Sit up a second, will you darling." Jeeves put his head through the tent opening. "Hester is not here Tarpi." "That's okay, Jeeves. Come in here for a minute. I want you to look at something." He slapped lo's face stingingly. "Why, you goddam dirty... oh... I see. Very clever, you louse." lo rubbed the red handprint on her cheek, still threequarters mad. "Darling, I humbly and abjectly beg your forgiveness. You don't know how sorry I am I had to do that." "Okay, Just don't make a habit of it. Arid don't forget that I owe you one -- a big one. Jeeves, did I look different to you Just then when Tarpi slapped me?" "Yes lo." "Different that I usually do?" "Yes." lo leaned back. "Well, that's indicative at least." "Indicative, hell," Tarpi said. "Jeeves, how long a time did lo look different?" "A very short time Tarpi." "Just immediately after I slapped her?" "Yes." "How did she look then?" Jeeves paused. "Very strange." "Did she look the same as when she looked strange during sex?" "No." "How was it different?" Jeeves paused for a long time. "I do not know words for it Tarpi." "Okay, Jeeves, you can leave now." He leaned back beside lo and looked at her. "You see?" "Well, it seems likely... I wonder why they never mentioned it." "Did we ever think to tell them that they all look alike to us except for the patterns of green on their little yellow bodies? It would have been about as meaningful as their telling us that your psyche gets all mimsy when you're mad. Besides, it was so obvious that probably none of them ever thought of it." "I wonder what we really look like to them," lo mused. "If you don't use sight but sonar and empathy, or whatever it is, I mean." "Probably mimsy, with patches of grell, shading to demi-grell, depending on mood. Which is to say that we'll never know." "Depending on mood? Oh, Tarpi -- Sodom and Gomorrah! They may have been telling the truth." "Well, sure. The first time they saw the murderer he was mad enough or frightened enough to kill. The next time he was probably in a rational state. He 'looked' completely different to them." "But that means that one of us really did kill Rodder. It wasn't just a story the Chimps made up." "You didn't think Sodom or Gomorrah did it, did you?" "I guess I did, kind of. I mean, it was better than... who do you think did it?" "I don't know. But maybe if we ask in the right way, we can get Sodom and Gomorrah to tell us." X The flitter was full. Allis and Stamm occupied the two front seats; Tarpi and lo were in the back, Sodom and Gomorrah on their laps. Crouched in the small space in the rear was Lessiline. Allis had tried to persuade Stamm to rig the cargo net underneath for the two Chimps to tide in but he had declined -- unless Allis wanted to ride there too. She did not. They flew at low altitude toward a scarlet sunset, the humans aboard concentrating their attention on the scribble of yellowish-green rugger trails that tangled the prairie below. "Hurry it up, will you, Stamm," said Lessiline. "I'm about to freeze in an obscene position back here." "Should be just a couple more minutes. Less. In that little grove just ahead." The "little grove" was dense with roundheels, thrashing and writhing wildly in a stiff breeze. Three small hemispherical orange tents were occasionally visible through gaps in the trees, their dayglo color catching the eye like the blink of a lighthouse. The flitter made a low pass over the scrum of ruggers, flushing a brace of humans as it did so, and landed at the edge of the grove near the camp. Humans and Chimps piled out and then watched with amusement as Lessiline ostentatiously unstiffened each joint and creakily clambered down. She seemed to have aged fifty years during the eightminute flight. One of the humans they had flushed angrily pounded up to them. "What the hell do you damn fools think you're doing?" "Now hold it a minute, Ard -- " Stamm began. " 'Hold it' nothing. We work all day trying to get that scrum quiescent and then just when we've finally got 'em settled down, zoom! along comes Tom Swift and His Flying Noisemaker. Thanks a lot. Thanks a hell of a lot." "C'mon, Ard, you can't even hear that thing fifty meters away," Stamm went to the flitter's defense. "Tell it to the ruggers." "Okay, I'm sorry, I apologize. All right?" "Hell of a lot of good that does." Ard was not going to be mollified. "Standing here arguing about it doesn't do much good either, does it?" Allis asked impatiently. "Ard, we need to see Janos. Where is he?" "What for?" "Never mind what for," she said evenly. "Just show us where he is, please." Ard looked half angry, half curious. "Through there." He pointed toward the edge of the grove. "Go a few hundred meters through the trees and you'll come out into a big patch of cottonweed. He's out in the middle of it with a nest of mousies." "Show us, will you please?" "Can't. Have to help Adda with the ruggers." He was getting even with them. "But just keep going straight ahead. You can't miss it." He turned away and then looked back over his shoulder. "And when you leave, take off over the grove, will you? Not over the ruggers." He hurried off. The slow sunset filled the grove with long shadows and red light, and the bobbing treetops held their peripheral vision, pestering them with warnings of unnamed horrors leaping on them from the darkness. They trudged along in single file, silent except for the moment when a treetop swept too close to lo. She jumped and then cursed herself too loudly. ("Take it easy, you fool. That tree hasn't bitten anyone in weeks.") It seemed farther than "a few hundred meters" but eventually the trees thinned and they reached the patch of cottonweed. It was in full bloom, a total undercast stained bloody red by the last bite of the setting sun. Janos was a few dozen meters away, wading slowly toward them, submerged almost up to his hips in the dense brush. The sun illuminated his left side redly; his right side was deeply shadowed. As he came out of the cottonweed in front of them, the sun slipped below the horizon, the shadows vanished and the long, dim twilight began. Janos dumped his load of equipment at their feet. He was a small man, about fifty years old, in good condition. His manner was a shade too hearty. "Well, well. Stamm. Allis. Tarpi. Less. lo, isn't it?" He nodded at each in turn; his glance slid over the two Chimps. "To what do I owe this honor?" "We'd like to talk to you about Rodder," Allis said. "Rodder? Well, all right, if you want. Although I must say. I've always found it better to heed the Biblical injunction to let the dead past bury its dead. Let's walk back to camp while we talk, shall we?" He hefted his load and started off into the dimness. Allis walked beside him. "That's Longfellow," Tarpi suddenly said. " 'Let the dead past bury its dead' isn't Biblical, it's from Longellow." "Quite so," said Janos. "Now then, Allis, you wanted to talk about Rodder. Am I correct an assuming that those two (a thumb over the shoulder indicated Sodom and Gomorrah) are the culprits responsible for his death?" Allis ignored his question. "How did you feel about Rodder, Janos?" "Much the same as everyone else, I think. With years of study at the foot of a saint, Rodder could possibly have achieved the moral standards of a swine." "And how did you feel when he died?" "Well, I -- " "Hon, this isn't getting us anywhere," Stamm interrupted. "Get to the point." "Perhaps that would be just as well, Allis," Janos agreed. "Just what is the point of all this?" "All right, Janos." She took a breath. "Before he was transported to his new field site on the day he was killed, Rodder had been working out of base camp for a while. Stamm and I put our heads together, and our recollections -- plus a lot of help from various records stored in Marvel -- indicate that Rodder was at base for six days and that during that time twenty-one other expedition members were also there for varying periods." "And I was one of the twentyone. So were you. So was Stamm. So what?" She ignored him. "Only those twenty-one people could have known where Rodder was going to set up his new camp. We had Marvel examine the data stored by each of them on the day Rodder was killed, November ninth. Of the twenty-one sixteen showed typical input during the day, including notetapes. The voiceprints are verifiable, of course. Of the remaining five, three showed no input at all for the day. They were Vicktor and his cohorts, taking the day off at Ramshom Lake. Wardal didn't show any input either but she had filmed some scenes the previous day. The terrain is quite identifiable; it's her site, all right -- ninetytwo klicks from where Rodder was killed." "That makes twenty, I believe. I, presumably, am the twenty-first," Janos said. "Yes. Your records for the day show only a small segment of very bad film of a shrieker mound. The light was almost gone. Portions are even a little out of focus. It was eleven klicks from your camp to Rodder's, an easy three-hour hike in most circumstances, but you must have misgauged it, what with having to swing around to come and go from a different direction. It must have been frightening -- hurrying, hurrying, racing the sqn, trying to get back in time to take the film that would establish your alibi. And you just didn't quite make it." "Allis, I would resent that accusation more than I can say if I didn't feel so very sorry for you. It's obvious that you've let your sympathy for those two Chimps warp your Judgment so severely that you'll contrive a circumstantial case against one of your own people in order to free them." He shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid it's a good deal more than circumstance, Janos. There are two witnesses against you." "Indeed!" He stopped walking. "And who would they be?" "Sodom and Gomorrah." "Excellent, excellent. Very good choices. The two murderers have now, under no doubt expert coaching, searched their memories and discovered that despite failing to recognize me the first three times they saw me, I am nonetheless the man they saw kill Rodder." He turned to confront the Chimps. "Is that right? Do you now claim that you saw me kill Rodder?" "No Janos," Sodom said. "No," Gomorrah echoed. "No?" He was taken aback. "What is this, Allis? Those two don't accuse me." "I should have explained. Tarpi has discovered that the Chimps are highly sensitive to the emotional states of other beings and that in fact they identify us largely on, uh, how our minds 'look' to them. When they saw you kill Rodder, you were in the grip of some very strong emotion. You had to be, to commit murder. Apparently the other times they saw you, when they tried to identify the murderer back at base, you were calmer and so you looked different to them. You're a very cool man, Janos. Usually." "Be serious, Allis. I'd as lief believe the entrails of a chicken as that story." "We've tested them in several ways. Their ability is quite real. Quite repeatable, too, with a given person, although different people appear to change differently for the same emotion. Really very interesting... But what we would like you to do is to allow Lessiline, here, to regress you under hypnosis to the day Rodder was killed. In that way your mental state will duplicate your mental state when Sodom and Gomorrah saw you kill Rodder, and they'll be able to identify you. In addition -- " "That's quite out of the question, Allis." "I was afraid it probably would be... Go!" Tarpi and Stamm grabbed for Janos's arms. Tarpi got a firm grip but Janos saw Stamm coming, grabbed the front of his tunic as he ran forward and pulled him along into the underbrush. Then he went for Tarpi's eyes with his free hand. But he was outnumbered. lo grabbed his hand just as Allis kicked the backs of his knees, causing him to crumple to the ground. Tarpi and lo fell on him and then Lessiline -- who had been dancing around looking for an opening -- leaned in and injected him in the neck. Janos stopped struggling as though he had been pole-axed. "Damn! Is it supposed to do that?" Tarpi asked as he scrambled to his feet. "It's usual," said Lessiline. "He'll be a little livelier in a minute or two." "Stamm, dear, you were out of position," Allis said as her husband rejoined them. "Yes, I know," he said shortly, looking down at Janos lying on the ground. "It should be any second now," Lessiline said. Janos screamed -- a piercing, horrifying, animal sound. "There you go. Classic reaction." "How can you sound so selfsatisfied, Less?" lo asked. Janos began to writhe, alternately raging loudly and then gibbering softly to himself. "Hush, children," Allis ordered. She turned to Sodom and Gomorrah and stated formally: "Sodom, Gomorrah, I ask you now in the presence of these witnesses if the man you saw kill Rodder is here." "Yes Allis the man on the ground," said Sodom. "Yes," said Gomorrah. "Which one, Gomorrah?" Allis pursued. "The one on the ground." "You see," said Stamm. "I told you it had to be anger. Janos was never afraid of anything in his life." "Okay," Allis said impatiently. "Is everyone clear now on whom the Chimps have identified and what they identify him as having done? Does anyone want to ask any questions?" No one did. They stood in silence for several minutes, watching Janos rage, each thinking his own thoughts. Then they were suddenly distracted by thrashing noises and a flickering light in the grove behind them. It was Ard, waving a flashlight. The darkness had crept up on them and the light was welcome. "What the hell are you idiots up to now? What's all the screaming about? Jesus Christ! What happened to himl" Lessiline said. "He'll come out of it in a few minutes." that?" "A psychotomimetic." She saw that he looked blank. "A drug. It produces a condition indistinguishable from intense, psychotic rage." "Why did he tice that?" "He didn't," Allis said. "We gave it to him." "Huh?" "Help us carry him back and I'll explain." XI Janos decided to open his eyes. He lay on his back, the orange hemisphere of the tent over his head softly illuminated by a light beyond his range of vision. Lessiline looked down at him. "About time you woke up. You were making me look bad." Her tone was carefully neutral. "I've been conscious for some time... where is everyone else?" He rolled suddenly to his feet, crouching under the low dome. Lessiline backed up warily. "Outside." He went through the tent flap. It was dark now, a canopy of stars overhead. People were circled around a low fire, the Chimps hovered farther back in the shadows. A hundred meters beyond, light flashed occasionally as Adda went about her arcane duty with the ruggers. Allis looked up at him. "Sodom and Gomorrah identified you, Janos, while you were unconscious." "I know. I heard most of what you told Ard. It would be easy for me to fight the charge, Allis. A judge would never allow a defendant to be drugged like that and your Chimps could never identify me in court. And your testimony would be merely hearsay." "Are you going to fight, Janos?" Allis asked. He sagged. "No... it would be easiest for me to resist, every instinct tells me to... but it would be futile." He sat and stared into the fire. "I've been doomed ever since you became convinced that those two were telling the truth. Forgetting about his Chimps -- that was incredibly stupid of me. In retrospect, I see that I planned the whole adventure rather badly. Now that you've had confirmation of your conclusions, you'll have little trouble compiling other evidence against me. I could fight if I wished, drag myself and Ae whole expedition through the muck of a public trial... but I won't." "Do you want to tell us why you did it?" Allis asked gently. "No, I don't. It's an ugly story and reflects no credit on me. But I suppose I must say something... Suffice it to say that while Rodder and I were both at base camp, he was responsible for my becoming quite fiermanently addicted to a rather unpleasant compound found in an infusion of ohhell weed. It results in a loss of inhibition and control which I find intolerable. I could not, I was unable, to let him go unpunished. The rest is as you have surmised, save that I did not misgauge the time required for the journey to his camp; I simply lost my way and wandered for some hours on the prairie... , . Well!" He straightened briskly and looked around at the group, staring each in the eyes for a brief instant. "I don't suppose one of you has a gentlemanly pistol? I thought not. Ah, well. But what a gesture." He rose and started out into the darkness. Stamm stood up and moved to block his path. "Let him go, Stamm," Allis said. Her voice sounded tired. "But, hon -- " "Let him go." , Stamm moved aside. Janos walked out into the darkness, his head erect, his step measured. When he reached the edge of the scrum of ruggers, he paused for a brief moment, then took three running steps and dived headfirst into them. TTiey started to boil vigorously. Sodom and Gomorrah screamed -- a long, mournful note. The humans rose and started toward the flitter. What was happening in the scrum behind them, they did not want to see.  galaxy thm P f i w t PvMktio hi ScImim Fiction Some ConiribuTors Past and Present Ol.A'-f'te'sn'! ;S #A S'--" ' CiM ; ' y r  ') Arr-, y ; # st-r J y'-'y r'.y )! , ' SjOt'h.iqO'i ;jr ' Rngii ef)ry H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear prorhise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U.S. residents, enclose # here Q For other countries, enclose  I # for here Q Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription Paul Walker Seademons by Laurence Yep. Harper and Row, #. #pp. #. New Voices in Science Fiction edited by George R.R. Martin. Time Storm by Gordon R. Dickson. St. Martin's Press, #. #.    Pierce: Sorry to bother you at this hour, Paul, but you left out the author and title of your last review. Walker: Seademons. Pierce: "See... Demons." Right. And the author? Walker: Yep. Pierce: "Yup..." Walker: Yep. Pierce: Right. And the first name? Walker: Laurence. Pierce: "Lawrence...Yup." Walker: Yep. Pierce: Right. Watch it, next time, okay. You know I can't abide carelessness. mons very much. What did I like most about it? Listen: At first he had hoped that going to the rectory school would help her to adjust, but after the trouble with Radog the Anglic knew he would have to try to "humanize" her -- as he called it -- by himself. For their own sake, the Anglic took Maeve more and more into the wild. They wandered through the forests and the mountains far to the east along the northern seas. He showed her everything that was strange and wonderful and beautiful about Fancyfree their planet in the hope that she would come to love her new world. He showed her the star trees, and the paradise birds with wings like rainbows and voices like angels, and the giant spider webs that the winds sang through. Hunters would cross their path occasionally and bring back reports that both the Anglic and his creature looked well. Or: "It was already growing dark in the Wailing Mountains, and the sharp-pointed rocks made strange, teeth-like shadows which grew on either side as if jaws were closing about our shadows. There was a strange, lifeless silence here where nothing grew, though sometimes we would hear the high, lonely keening wind that gave the mountains their name. It was as if we had stumbled over the edge of the world into some strange limbo of the dead, for the Eyes in the wintertime were nothing like in the spring." There is no greater delight for a reviewer than to pick up a new book by a new writer and to find that he or she is a bright new talent. Not someone who is simply "promising," whose technical clumsiness one feels obliged to apologize for in the hopes of better things to come, but someone who emerges in the top ranks of storytellers with his or her first book. Such a writer is Laurence Yep. He was bom in San Francisco and got his doctorate in literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He published his first story "The Selchey Kids," in If, and it was selected as one of the best of the year #. Since then he has written three children's books, Sweetwater, Child of the Owl, and Dragonwings, the last of which was a Newberry Honor Book. If I had the time, I would read them immediately, for I suspect Yep's juveniles would appeal as much to fantasy-reading adults as to kids. Certainly, Seademons is a must. I hesitate to tell the story because the pleasure of the book is not the story, but the telling, and just to recount the events will distort the truth of the narrative quality of it. It takes place on the primitive world of Fancyfree where we find a colony of humans who have fled a super-race called the "Fair Folk" to find freedom on a world where they will not be second-class citizens. Before they left, their leader. Da, had them set down all they could remember of their former lives, so they would not forget. Naturally, some things were lost in translation, as they call their original home "Tara" instead of "Terra," and their homes "dooms" instead of domes. Also, in leaving civilization, they have lost much of the galaxy technological know-how of the Fair Folk; and what they have left, diving suits and robots and a single great computer, will not last forever. Already they are slipping back into a more primitive lifestyle, becoming superstitious and warlike. Their leaders, then, are faced with a race against time to establish at least a pre-nuclear industrial society before the last of the gadgets breaks down. Now, I know this sounds familiar, but it is really just background material covered in a few pages. The story begins from there. The heroine (in every sense of the word) is Ciaran, daughter of the Lord of the Holding. She and her half-brother, heir to the Lord, are sent to investigate the possible presence of another intelligent life-form on Fancyfree. At the edge of the sea, they witness the emergence of aliens which steal a robot and leave a small girl in its place. Is she human? Should they risk taking her back to the holding, or should they kill her? They decide to take her back, and she becomes the ward of the holding's surly, staunchly individualistic artisan, the Anglic, who comes to love her as his daughter. From the beginning, "Maeve," as they call her, does not fit in. She still speaks the language of the aliens who left her; and she seems to have other strange talents as well, one of which includes talking to "seademons," those huge, squid-like monsters whom all men fear. Time and again, she is denounced as a witch and, finally driven from the holding. Twice young men fall bookshelf An Infonnal A Irravsrcnt Sclnc Fiction A Fantasy Journal EdMsd A PubHshad by Richard E. Gala Issue ## features Interviews with Poul Anderson, AlgIs Budrys, Gordon R. Dickson, David Hartwell and Dob Shaw. "Limbo Blues" -- a bawdy space poem by Neal Wllgus. "The Human Hotline" -- SF News reported by Elton Elliott Mark Mansell. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" presents Alter, blaster in hand, amid disintegrated books. "Glimpses of the third World Fantasycon" -- with the award winners. Plus: prozine reviews, small press reviews, more book reviews the editor's diary, letters, letters, letters...and morel Quartertysanipla I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I in love with her, only to meet misfortune. And what she does with her first-born, son of the heir-apparent to the Lord of the Holding, results in war between the humans and the seademons. The story is told from Ciaran's point of view. The mystery is who, and what, is Maeve. The real aliens in the book are not the seademons, but the humans themselves. The characters are outstanding. The whole action of the novel hinges on their obstinate humanity rather than outside influences. They refuse to understand or accept Maeve as she refuses to understand or accept them, and this is the theme of the book: humanity's unfear and to try to subdue, or to destroy, whatever it cannot understand. It is familiar, but as Yep presents it, it is devastating. The story begins abruptly with the appearance of Maeve, and then settles down into a liesurely style whose tone is fantasy-like. Things happen, but there is little dramatic impetus until the last half of the book, although none of it is dull for a moment. Some readers may be confused, or even bored, if they miss the point of what Yep is doing, for he is building his narrative on several levels at once. For a while, it seems the story is about the humans. Da, Ciaran, and her half-brother Athvel; then it is about Maeve again, then the seadernons. Only gradually does Yep weave all cfimax. And the overall dramatic effect of the book is gentle and fairy-tale-like rather than violent and adventurous. But once he has achieved the climax, the thematic impact is powerful. Some, like myself, may get pretty exasperated with the humans, who can be nble and obtuse at the same time. Ciaran is the worst of perceptive, but when she tries to settle things with Maeve, her articulateness leaves everything to be desired. But Maeve and her friends are really just as bad, as Yep points out. Still, while I don't argue the truth of Yep's theme, I did not find it convincing as he presented it, for the reasons stated in the last paragraph. Ciaran is just too good to be true. And her relations with her father are just a bit cute. Yep has tried to create a heroine who is every bit the equal of her burly male peers, and an intellectual to boot; while at the same time, leaving her recognizable as an attractive young girl whom men fuss over. He almost brought it off, but only almost. I was also not wholly convinced of the humans' regression into superstition, their eagerness to believe Maeve a witch. Primitive superstitions were aspects of primitive religion. They did not arise spontaneously, and they were supported by the upper classes and the church. This is not the case on Fancy free. But even as I write these criticisms, I can think of arguments that contradict them. And although they limit the book, they do not harm it much. Seademons is a fine novel, with, I should add, a fine cover painting by Frank Frazetta, and I recommend it absolutely.    The John W. Cabal Awards If anyone else but George R.R. Martin had edited New Voices in Science Fiction, I never would have read it. The title alone made me want to take a long walk in the country. And the subtitle, "Six Stories by Campbell Award Nominees," compelled me to open every window in the house despite the sub-freezing temperatures outside. But I'm a Martin fan. I trusted him. Oh, George, how could you treat me this way? Of the six stories in the book, I and made painful attempts to read the others, none of which were successful. I know critics are not supposed to say (admit? confess?) things like that, but there is a kind of sf that destroys every last vestige of enthusiasm I have for the genre and sends me like a refugee to the television set; and almost invariably, it is to be found in anthologies with "award" in the title. I did succeed in one case, Lisa Tuttle's "The Family Monkey." It revived an old fantasy of mine. I see myself as a teacher of creative writing, and someone like Tuttle has just handed in her manuscript, and I am filled with admiration. Such intelligence, sensitivity, and ability. A kid, and yet already she shows first-rate professional talent. What fine, clear prose; what conscientious character development; what attention to detail. I mark the paper "A" and pin it up on the bulletin board. Then, I blink. I am back in my room with the story in the book before me. I am not a teacher, I am a reader. And the story I am reading is boring me out of my gourd. I shift about anxiously. There is a tight knot in my gut. I hate it. But why? How can anyone hate anything in which he finds so much to admire? Is it badly written? Hardly, by the most acceptable definitions of bad writing. But then what is good writing? One expect and almost always gets, some sense of proportion in these things; the quality of the writing being in proportion to the quality of what is being written about. Consequently, a reviewer needs simply to quote a few lines to demonstrate the inferiority or superiority of both form and content. But in an increasing amount of sf it is no longer that easy. The kids have learned all the tricks, they know how to push all the buttons marked "literature." So what comes out looks and sounds very good, but reads very badly. Lisa Tuttle's story is about a Texas family that adopts a marooned alien who becomes something special (or horrible) to each member of the family. It is an old idea, a simple idea, but she takes about fortyseven pages to tell it, and they read like something out of Good Housekeeping. There are effective moments, especially the scene between Emily and her father, but nothing amounts to anything more dramatically substantial than another episode of The Waltons; for here, as there, sentimentality undermines the human reality. bookshelf And here, as in the stories by Robert Thurston, Ruth Berman, and George Alec Effinger, there is not a moment of wonder. Not a moment of possibility. Let me illustrate what I mean by quoting their first sentences; Tuttle: "I was sitting with Florrie on the porch of her Daddy's house, watching the night get darker and wondering about making a move." Thurston: "Thomason first met Ludvik in #, on an unusually cold August day." Berman: "The U's Miniver Cheevy Club's fall jousting went off well." Effinger: "Les Gruen had a small cubicle for an office, a long walk from the elevators." Now, let me quote the first sentences of the stories I liked: Martin: "The crossworlds had a thousand names." Pournelle: "Eight thousand young bodies writhed to the maddening beat of an electronic bass." Were I a teacher of creative writing, I would have a long talk with Martin and Pournelle. "Gegrge, you worry me. You don't seem to be getting much out of this course. Character, George. That's what fiction is all about. Not spaceships and lost worlds and freaky-looking aliens. And you never start a story with a long exposition. And you have to got to watch the jargon. All those made-up names. People don't relate to smart-alecky aliens or exotic backgrounds. Character, George He never listened. God knows, I tried... Pournelle I would advise to give up writing entirely. No explanation. I'd simply refuse to have him in my class. Martin's "The Stone City," tells the story of a man who finds himself marooned on a very remote world. He was part of the crew of a ship called the Pegasus, which may have fled to avoid destruction. All the rest of the crewmen died one by one, and he is left in an ancient stone city forced to steal to survive. He has a companion who is mapping the labyrinth ways of the city, which is undermined by miles and miles of corridors; while the hero schemes to escape the planet before he goes mad. They are the only two humans there, and likely to be the last for a long time to come. Who he is, and how he got in this predicament, is related in flash-backs. What happens is murder and flight into the bowels of the city. Martin has a way of taking an original idea and making it sound like something out of the #'s. But once into a Martin story. I'm hooked, and I have fun all the way. Pournelle's "Silent Leges" is about a young college student who inadvertently gets involved in a rebel student demonstration and winds up sentenced to three years at hard labor on a distant world where convicts are sold to plantation owners and, even when their sentences are up, never do get back to earth. Pournelle reminds me of Ayn Rand in that his stories can be read two ways -- as either straight melodrama or a hilarious parody of Hollywood films. As I read "Silent Leges," I could not help casting the picture: John Garfield as the boy...Akim Tamiroff as the plantation owner...H.B. Warner as Tappinger...Edward G. Robinson as Curt Morgan. Well, the descriptions don't fit, but you get the idea. You've seen it all on the Late Show many times. Pournelle has simply moved it into the #'s and called it the future. I loved it. I'm serious. It was great fun. But how could I love something in which I find so little to admire? The truth is that I know there are people who will admire the stories I hated in this book, and deplore the ones I enjoyed. The best I can tell you is that the Martin and Pournelle stories are among the best these two are capable of, and that, for me, makes the book worth buying.    A tour de Dickson Much attention is given to the "best" of the year, but little to the "worst;" and that is unfortunate, because there is so much more of the latter, and some of it is invariably better reading than the former. The quality of bad books varies, from simply unreadable to medicore to that impossible-to-define area of the good-bad; and while it hardly seems a compliment to say a writer has written a good-bad book, #, personally, would trade any number of Hugo winners for just one of them. A good-bad book is one which succeeds in spite of itself; one whose technique or theme is indefensible, whose plotting may be ludicrous, whose characters are # ## per cent pure cardboard, and yet which, for all its failings, delivers a rip-roaring good read. How few books do! Gordon R. Dickson's Time Storm is a good-bad book, and if there were an award category for such things I would not hesitate to vote for it. It is the story of a man named Marc Despard who became a selftwenty-one, then suffered a heartattack at twenty-four and went off to the woods to rebuild his health. While there, something most peculiar happened to the world, and in fact, to the entire universe. Great walls of mist descended upon the earth from space and began to move across the world, and wherever they touched, time changed. And people vanished -- just about all the people who had ever lived. Despard thought of his ex-wife and tried to reach her. He acquired two companions: a young mute girl, and a storm-shocked leopard named Sunday. Together they traveled over what was left of the world having adventures with creatures human and otherwise, and along the way they picked up a mother and her little girl, a group of men, whose allegiance was uncertain, and a young physicist who was studying the time storm. He was one who gave Despard the idea that it could be fought. The idea gets further boost from a strange alien being named Porniarsk, or rather, his "avatar," who has been sent to Earth to try to stabilize the storm in that area. Porniarsk thinks Despard has special talents, and guides him toward developing them. How they fight the time stoim, and what happens afterwards comprises the remainder, of the novel. If that sounds simple enough, let me say right away that this is one of Dickson's most ambitious and complex books and takes place on three levels simultaneously. On the one hand, it is a straight-forward post-holocaust novel, with the survivors struggling to remain alive, meeting other survivors, setting up a community, and trying to solve the mystery of what has happened to the world. On the other hand, it is a science fiction problem novel, in which the nature of the time storm and its solution occupies two-thirds of its length. On still another hand, it is, like Gregory Benford's recent In the Ocean of Night, the story of a man's spiritual pilgrimage to selfdiscovery and fulfillment by way of human and extraterrestrial relationships. And it is this latter aspect that proves the key to the solution of the other two problems. What is good about the book is that Dickson knows how to tell an exciting story. Not a chapter goes by without incident, and from the first, he commands our attention, if not with action, then with invention. First, he thoroughly involves us with the protagonists adventures, then with the problem of the time storm, then with the spiritual search of Marc Despard, keeping us guessing, wondering, all the while, what will happen next. I found the last third of it overlong, but that my have been because I read the book too slowly. It should be read as fast as possible for, really, the story is all it has going for it. It is a cliche from beginning to end, and from top to bottom, without a stroke of originality except for the time storm itself, which struck me as ridiculous for the most part. The hero is so heroic he becomes tedious toward the end; so superintelligent, super-competent, superlucky. Ho-hum. And as for his spiritual search, it is never credible for a moment. Dickson is only boring when he indulges Despard in soul-searching. As for the othir characters, they are, like the plot, and everything in the plot, carbon copies of what you have read so many times before. In short, it is that kind of book that if you think about it for even a moment it will fall completely apart. Totally superficial. And yet fun all the way. What saves the book from unreadability, and from mediocrity, is Dickson masterful skill at narrative technique. He is a first-rate craftsman who knows how to put a complicated plot together, draw a character, or elucidate a theme in a few, or a few thousand, words. And if what he lacks here is originality, what he has is alot more going for him than you might think. If I were teaching creative writing I would recommend this for study, for all the principles and techniques are here in full view as if it were designed for student writers. As it is, I will recommend it to anyone out there who enjoys a good' riproaring adventure story with hard-sf problem-solving engineers going up against the galaxy. You won't admire it, but you'll love it.  RI # par-wortf par #wua (Including nama and addrast) or # Iswat # par word. #-word minimum. 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I agree to the Club Plan as defor mature readers. Mr. Mrs.  Miss City.  Apt... ZipIf under # parent must sign. Order not valid without signature. # The Hugo Winners. Vol. I  II. Giant #-in-I volume ot # award-winnmg stones, # to # Asimov introduces each Pub ed, S# # #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism An SF classic Comb Price # # #I Slar Wars: From (he Adventures of Luke Skywalker By George Lucas Life on a backwater planet can be dull, unless you become involved in an interstellar rebellion Photos Ifom the motion picture Special ed # The Star Trek Reader Ml. Adapted by James Biish # more outstanding and exciting adventures of the Starship Enterprise and its gallant crew Pub ed # # #I Time Storm. By Gordon R Dickson A major novel from one of SF's best writers Gripping adventure and fascinating ideas set in a vast scope of time and space Pub ed # # #. A World Out of Time. By Larry Niven A black hole in space sends years into Earth's future where the ultimate battle of the sexes is raging By co-author of The Mote in God's Eye Pub ed # # # All My Sins Remembered. By Joe Haldeman A young man in search of excitement is sent to the danger spots of the galaxy By the author # ' Mindbridge. Pub ed # # # The Sword of Shannara. By Terry Brooks A massive guest novel in the very best Tolkien tradition Illustrated by the Brothers Hiidebrandt Pub ed # # # Gateway. By Frederik Pohi Travel on alien ships to distant parts of the universe -- with no guarantee of return By the author of Man Plus. Pub ed # # # The # Annual World's Best SF. Donald A Wollheim. ed The best SF published during # by Asimov. Knight Varley and others Includes Tiptrees Houston. Houston. Do You Read? Special ed # The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat. By books in I exciting volume take us throughout the galaxy Comb ed Si# # # Silence is Deadly. By Lloyd Biggie Jr Spying on a new secret weapon proves difficult for Jan Darzek as he travels to a lotally deat world Pub ed # # The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada.  w Pat Murphy: Eyes of the Wolf A RE the rales of strange human powers false? Can the mysterious feats performed by the mystics of the Orient be explained away as only illusions? Is there an intangible bond with the universe beyond which draws mankind on? Does a mighty Cosmic intelligence from the reaches of space ebb and flow through the deep recesses of the mind, forming a river of wisdom which can carry men and women to the heights of personal achievement? Have You Had These Experiences?... that unmistakable feeling that you have taken the wrong course of action, that you have violated some inner, unexpressed, better judgement? The sudden realization that the silent whisperings of self are cautioning you to keep your own counsel -- not to speak words on the tip of your tongue in the presence of another. That something which pushes you forward when you hesitate, or restrains you when you are apt to make a wrong move. These urges are the subtle influence which when understood and directed has made thousands of men and women masters of their lives. There IS a source of intelligence within you as natural as your senses of sight and hearing, and using now! Challenge this statement! Dare the Rosicrucians to reveal the functions of this Cosmic mind and its great possibilities to you. Let This Free Book Explain Take this infinite power into your partnership. You can use it in a rational and practical way without interference with your religious beliefs or personal affairs. The Rosicrucians, a world-wide philosophical movement, invite you to write today for your Free copy of the fascinating book, "The Mastery of Life" which explains further. Address your request to Scribe O.P.B. San Jose, Calif #I U.S.A. Please Include. Your Zip Code J Galaxy May # Volume #, No. # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher John J. Pierce, Editor J.E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Paul G. Walker, Contributing Editor National Advertising Sales Representative: Erwin Baker Associates, Inc., # Evergreen Place, East Orange, N.J., #. Phone #-#-# the interstellar community of mankind. But only he knew the true nature of the alien threat that might doom that community. Niun and Melein were the last of their kind, with nothing to hope for. But they had one last journey to make... There was something she had to remember, but it wouldn't quite come. And meanwhile, she had enemies to face. Half the fun (?) of kidnapping people from the past is getting there. The other half is getting back. He didn't know much about the birds and the bees. In fact... said, "It's raining soup; grab yourself a bucket." And send this column to your congressman! Why has Paul suddenly flipped over Gordy Dickson? Read his review of The Far Call and see! But what will the Boy with his Dog think of... The same team of Jeff Rovin and Jay Kay Klein that got you worked up with pro and con Star Wars reviews is back for another round. Cover by Steve Fabian Interior illustrations by: Fabian, Valenza, Cherryh, Mueller, Harlib ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Main Office  Editorial Office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y., #. Single copy #. #-issue subscription: # in U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. I yJwtf A LJ  r I  M I tel f in artistic concept. It has been, in the truest of senses, a collaboration between the artist and the author. What has emerged is not merely an illustrated story, not even a story with special illustrations carefully fitted to it. The two parts of the whole art and story, art and fiction are equal co-partners. The result is something more than a book. It is a mechanism for the imagination, a magic box that the reader can open and experience, putting himself or herself much more deeply into the life of the story than would otherwise be possible." Gordon R. Dickson from his introduction to # Size #X# Available In June w w#ess a new trade paperback line a division of ace book company a grosset Si dunlap company# Park Ave South New York. NY# Guest Editorial Harlan Ellison has always been a controversial figure in science fiction, and even as Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction convention this Labor Day weekend in Phoenix, he isn't about to change. We vice, and invite comments. j-j-PIt is not enough to talk the talk; in this life we must walk the walk, as well. Otherwise we are lipservice hypocrites. That is the basic position. What it refers to, is not quite so simplistic. In point of fact, the situation to which that position speaks puts me -- as they say -- between a rock and a very hard place, indeed. I am very much in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Arizona is one of the states that I think this is a bad thing. I think the reasons behind the non-ratification in Arizona are even more dangerous than that they conThey are shadowy reasons that go directly to the heart of the separation of Church and State in America. Arizonians will understand what I'm saying, though nonresidents may find that an obscure reference. Please forgive the awful obscurantism; I do it purposely to avoid lawsuits. But, as I boycotted the Miami WorldCon in large part because of the Anita Bryant influence in Dade County and Florida's position on appear in Phoenix for the same reason. By turning down the accolade of being the # WorldCon's Guest of Honor -- something that caps my # years as fan and professional in the field -- I would cause myself great unhappiness... but I'd be able to look in the mirror without flinching, and would be able to continue to think of myself as an honorable person. That was to have been my course of action. But there are considerations that make such a decision extremely difficult. First, I accepted the Guest of Honorship several years before began their economic boycotts of states where ratification had been withheld. I accepted in good faith, and to weasel out today would be unethical in that respect. Second, though this is something in which  passionately believe, I don't think I have the right to morally blackmail the Iguanacon Committee that may not feel as I do, though I've been advised many of the members are in accord. If I were to vacate the Guest of Honor slot, I would also have to take advertisements in Locus, Galaxy, FSF, Analog, UnEarth, Galileo, Science Fiction Review and any other platforms of mass communication available to me, such as where my position could be explicated. I would have to urge those who might be coming to Phoenix in part because I would be there, to stay away... not to bring money into Arizona... to show the state legislature that there is an economic club that would be used against any state that fails to offer women equal rights. I would do that, at my own expense. It would be the logical extension of my decision. But there is no way of ignoring the ugly reality that such actions would very likely damage the WorldCon, as well as the good and decent fans who have worked so long and hard to put the Inguanacon together. It would certainly cost them financially. They cannot get out of the contract with the convention hotel, they cannot move the convention to another state, and I would thus be bludgeoning innocent people with my ethical imperatives... I would be playing with their lives. Which would be unconscionably immoral . Rock. Very hard place. When I thought all this out, I went to wiser heads for guidance. They have given it freely. Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Greg Brown who is head of the Inguanacon Committee, Vonda McIntyre, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Susan Wood have suggested alternatives to the extreme position. One of these alternatives seems both salutary and directly in service of the commonweal. It is this: I will come to the Convention as Guest of Honor, but I will do it in the spirit of making the Convention a platform for heightening the awareness of fans and Arizona as a whole to the situation. I will do this because I feel I must, but in a way that will minimize any crippling of the convention. I will coordinate with the National Organization for Women Arizona, and the convention committee itself, of course. I will take every possible public relations and promotional opportunity to publicize the situation. I have been assured by the Executive Committee of the Inguanacon that there will be time for publicity and discussion of this most urgent problem, that there will be no sexist entertainment at the ' convention, and that Phoenix and the state will be apprised of the economic imperatives that obtain. In this way, I will attempt to make the best of an untenable moral situation. I urge others to assist me in this. I suppose in some ways I'm trying to have my cake of conscience and eat it, too; but dammit, I can't think of any other way out of this bind in which my beliefs have put me, without hurting innocent people. As for those who will begin the barrage of flak, and I expect no less for assuming such a position, may I just remind them that there is recent precedent for utilizing a WorldCon for moral ends: Bob Heinlein believes passionately in the drive to obtain blood, and the conventions have been used as platforms to publicize that drive. What Bob has done is use himself as a loss-leader; I am doing the same. I'm uncomfortable leading anybody's parade, but I find myself in the barrel and not to do it would be cowardly. I can stand the flak, and the more the better, because it only serves to raise into higher profile the basic problem. As for those who share my belief issue and must not be allowed to be killed by intransigence or by reactionary religious elements in the Arizona state legislature, I suggest fans coming to the convention figure out ways to withhold money from the state as much as possible. The Convention Committee should assemble a list of acceptable campsites for those fans who prefer to stay elsewhere than in the convention hotel. I will be one of those people. You are invited to stop by my tent, wherever it might be. But more: bring your own food. Set up feeding arrangements with local fans. Don't shop in the stores. Spend your money with the out-ofstate dealers in the huckster rooms, but stay away from the tourist facilities. None of this is easy, but who ever said that taking a moral stand was going to be pleasureable? In short, let's just for once, in the world of sf, walk the walk, and not just talk the talk. For decades sf has trumpeted about Brave New Worlds and what Slanlike futuristic thinkers we are, how humanistic sf is, how socially conscious we are, how sf stories can deal with delicate social issues that mimetic fiction is afraid to talk about. And yet, on the whole, sf fans and pros live in Never-Never Land when it comes to taking part in the pragmatic world around them; they would rather escape into a realm of creative anachronisms than go to the battlements to fight the real wars; to be precise, sf fans and professionals tend to be terribly provincial about the pressing issues of our times, to turn their heads and say it is none of their affair. Dealing with far-flung galactic civilizations is great fun, but we're supposed to be concerned people. And so... at what point do we put our bodies on the line for the things sf says are important: freedom, equality, living at one with our planet, free speech, intellectual awareness, courage, the best possible condition of life for people? Can we continue to deal with sf as merely escapist fiction, pointless, mindless entertainment, no nobler than trash novels or tv sitcoms, when we howl in outrage at reviewers and critics who accuse the genre of being no more than that? Can we permit the gap between what we say we are, and what we really are, to exist? Or is this, perhaps, a moment when we can make a brave statement with our fiction, our literary love, our bodies, and our annual World gathering? Arizona, the WorldCon and I offer you this opportunity. -- Harlan Ellison Park Hotel, Washington, D.C. Pro GoH: Wilson Tucker. Fan GoH: Bob Tucker. Membership: # until May #, # after. For info write: Alexis Arlington, Va., # Ga. Writer GoH: Clifford D. Simak. Artist GoH: Gahan Wilson. MC: Kelly Freas. Membership: # until June #, # at door. For info write: Heritage Press Inc., Richard Garrison or Ginger Kaderabek, P.O. Box #, Forest Park, Ga., # Central, Milwaukee, Wis. Pro GoH: Anne McCaffrey. Fan GoH: Martin Coady. Membership: # to April #, # N. Booth St., Milwaukee, WI #. riott Hotel, Los Angeles, Cal. Pro GoH: Poul Anderson. Fan GoH: Don C. Thompson. Membership: # to June #, then #. For info write: Westercon #, P.O. Box #, Mission Hills, Cal. # cuse Hilton, Syracuse, N.Y. Pro GoH: Ben Bova. Fan GoHs: Suford and Tony Lewis. Membership: # to May #, then #. For info write: Carol Gobeyn, # Stolp Ave., Syracuse, N.Y. # Taft, New York City. GoH: Alfred Bester. Membership: # before June #, # at door. For info write: Susan Rothman, # Seacoast Terr., Brooklyn, N.Y., I #. #th World Science Fiction Convention. Hotels Adams and Regency Hyatt and Convention Center, Phoenix, Ariz. Pro GoH: Harlan Ellison. Fan GoH: Bill Bowers. Toastmaster: F.M. Busby. Membership # attending, # supporting. For info write: Iguanacon, P.O. Box #, Phoenix, Ariz., #I A Galactic Empire facing an alien invasion only it isn't the usual kind of empire, or the usual sort of alien or usual sort of invasion! The place to begin is at the bottom of the trough. How long I had gone through the motions, living days as alike as beads on a konchu wire, I don't know. We had been in the apartment -- such as it was -- a long time. Something happened, about an hour into the morning shift. Unlike many, I still worked. In the dark corridors no one would notice the red-rimmed crater like an eye at each shoulder and elbow. And who would care? They were too wound up in themselves, by that year, to raise an eyebrow at what had once been a crime. I drew the line at my waist: no socketing at hips, knees, ankles. Too many and your body won't restore the tissue, even under sproc treatments. So I labored at our sim board, hooked into distant machines, visions of far-off places tapped through to my opticals. I was immersed in the jerky thrust of an assembly network, swinging raw and fragrant dirt to the side with my right arm, while the left chunked organiform slabs down into quickmolding foundation fluids. My glance rippled over the grid layout. Every jointed nerve nexus commanded a linkage in the assembly net, processing new ores into impersonal, blank-walled housing. My sockets linked to machines. I was a neural computer, hired by the hour. I'm sure it spooked the kids. There was Dad pinned like a zombie to the board, quivering and jerking and muttering for most of the morning. Then I'd collapse and sit, numb and staring, blank-eyed, enough work done for the day to buy us extras. Their mother would coax them into watching the screen, and they'd leave me be. But this morning -- "Daddy, why do we have to watch this old stuff?" Romana said, jerking her head up with a regal look. "Um?" (Still dazed.) "None of the other cubes in this block even carry Schoolchannel any more." "Um." "And it's boring , " put in Chark, his thin voice piping. "Everybody knows you can't learn fast without tapping." Romana: "We're going to turn out to be rennies. " "Rennies?" "Renegades, Ling," Angela said from the kitchen cloister. "It's the new slang." "Schoolchannel makes you a renegade?" "Well, it really means, you know, out of fashion." "Urn." Angela came into the living room, wiping her hands on a towel, and looked at me with her mouth tightening. I knew what was going to happen. "Don't you think they have a point. Ling? Finally?" "No." I looked away from her. Chark dialed the volume down on the screen and everybody very carefully sat still. I wasn't going to get away with a quick victory. "Dad-d y..." "If you'd seen that counselor at the Center, Ling. Tapping is necessary. You were out there yourself. You -- " "Yes. I was out there. And none of you were." Romana, who is nine, began reasonably, "The Assembly says tapping is for the common defense..." "It's useless. Pointless. Harmful. There's -- " I stopped. It wasn't going to do any good. Their faces were closing up, going blank. I couldn't tell them the guts of what happened out there. That was buried away in datafile somewhere, sealed against all but high priority access. Some remnant of Fleet training kept me from talking. That, and a curious inability to focus on that past, a desire to skitter away from it. Angela broke her silence. I could tell from the brittle edge in her voice that the words had been dammed up for a long time. " Why do you tell them such things? They -- they'll respect you even less if you try to pretend there's some big mystery about what you did out there. You were just a shuttle captain. A pickup convoy, to get the survivors off Regeln after the Quam hit it." "Uh huh." "And you didn't even get many off, either." "Something happened. Something really happened." I got up dumbly and moved toward a cabinet, thinking to get a drink, and when I reached out for balance my hand came down on something on the cabinet. It was the Firetongue Stet. The fifty-centimeter block felt cool and reassuring. Having it here was an outright violation of Fleet regs. Even though it was out of date now, I could conceivably be executed for keeping my commander's Stet after I was court martialed. But I'd substituted a dud, a blank Stet, when the time had come in the official decommissioning ceremonies. To cling to some last bauble of the Fleet officer I had been? The children were dead silent, not even swinging a foot with nervous energy, the way they get when they sense that the adults have forgotten they're around and maybe a fight is about to start. Angela and I both noticed it at the same time: the children were our lines of communication, now. "All right. We'll talk about it later," I said. The kids grumbled a bit and went back to their screen lecture. Angela walked into the bedroom. Probably to pout. I thought sourly. One more nick in an eroding marriage. We would talk. Oh yes, there would be a plentitude of talk. I had been a man who acted. Now I was a mumbler, a parody. I had lost momentum, and Angela's coming accusations and complaints would sting. But I couldn't deflect them. Maybe I didn't care to. I sat down. I hadn't really thought about Regeln for a long time. That seemed all buried now, a subtle and somehow faceless past. I had tried to ride the events as they came at me, to swim between the smashing waves, but in the end I had washed up on this barren shore. To wait. And while waiting, to be reborn among the dead. It was supposed to be a quick, daring run: Loop my ship into the Regeln system, drop planetward, scoop up whatever was left before the Quam returned. The crew didn't take it well. Fleet had already lost many ships. A month before they had taken us off a routine run and outfitted our ships with enough extras -- blister pods for defense, mostly -- to put the convoy on the lowest rung of warship class. But men take longer to adjust. Most of them were still nervous and edgy about the changes. They were suddenly oraku, warrior status. They didn't like it -- neither did I -- but there was nothing to be done. This was an emergency. I had us roar out of orbital port at full bore, giving the ships that hot crisp gun-metal smell. That perked them up. But maintenance is only maintenance, the hours stretched long, and soon they found the time to think, to wring out self-doubts, to fidget. In a few days the results began to come up through the confessional rings: anxieties, exclusion feelings, loss of phase. "I told Fleet we'd have this," I said to Tonji, my Exec. "These are traditional men. They can't take a sudden change of role." I let go of the clipboard that held the daily report stet. I watched it tumble slowly in the weak gravity. Tonji blinked languidly. "I think they are over-reacting to the danger involved. None of us signed for something like this. They aren't men who hired on to win a medal -- a bronzer, as ship's slang puts it. Give them time." "Time? Where am I going to get it? We're only weeks out from Regeln now. This is a large group, spread over a convoy. We'll have to reach them quickly." He unconsciously stiffened his lips, a gesture he probably associated with being tough-minded. "It will take effort, true. But I suppose you realize there isn't any choice." Was that a hint of defiance in his voice, mingled with his habitual condescending? I paused, let it go. "More Sabal, then. Require all senior officers to attend as well." "You're sure that's enough, sir?" "Of course I'm not sure! I haven't got all the answers in my pocket. This convoy hasn't had anything but shuttle jobs for years." "But we've been reassigned..." "Slapping a sticker on a ship doesn't change the men inside. The crews don't know what to do. There isn't any confidence in the group, because everyone can sense the uncertainty. Nobody knows what's waiting for us on Regeln. A crewman wouldn't be human if he didn't worry about it." I looked across the small cabin at my kensdai altar. I knew I was losing control of myself too often and not directing the conversation the way I wanted. I focused on the solid, dark finish of the wood that framed the altar, feeling myself merge with the familiarity of it. Focus down, let the center flow outward. Tonji flicked an appraising glance at me. "The Quam were stopped on Regeln. That's why we're going." "They'll be back. The colony there beat them off, but took a lot of losses. It's now been twenty-four days since the Quarn left. You heard the signals from the surface -- they're the only ones we got after their satellite link was destroyed. The correct code grouping was there, but the signal strength was down. Then transmission faded. Whoever sent them was working in bad conditions, or didn't understand the gear, or both." "Fleet doesn't think it's a trap?" Tonji's features, Mongol-yellow in the diffused light of my cabin, took on a cool, distant look. "They don't know. I don't either. But we need information on Quam tactics and equipment. They're a race of hermits, indivuals, some say -- but somehow they cooperate against us. We want to get an idea how." "The earlier incidents... "They were just that -- incidents. Raids. Fleet never got enough coherent information out of the surviving tapes, and what there was they can't unravel. There were no survivors." "But this time the colonists stood off a concentrated attack." "Yes. Perhaps there are good records on Regeln." Tonji nodded, smiling, and left after proper ceremonies. I was sure he knew most of what I'd told him, through his own sources, but he'd seemed to want to draw the details out of me, to savor them. Why? I could guess: the better the mission, the gaudier the reports, then all the faster would rise the fortunes of Mr. Tonji. A war -- the first in three centuries, and the first in deepspace -- has the effect of opening the staircases to the top. It relieves a young officer of the necessity for worming his way through the belly of the hierarchy. I reached out, dialed a starchart of Reglen's neighbors, studied. The Quam had been an insect buzzing just beyond the range of our senses for decades now. Occasional glancing contacts, rumors, stories. Then war. How? Security didn't bother to tell lowly convoy captains -- probably only a few hundred men anywhere knew. But there had been a cautiously-worded bulletin about negotiations in the Quam home worlds, just before the War. But no one had ever seen one face to face. The Council had tried to establish communal rapport with some segment of Quam society. It had worked before, with the Phalanx and Angras. Among the intellectual circles I knew -- such as they were -- it was holy dogma. Sense of community was the glue that held a culture together. Given time and correct phase it could bind even alien societies. In two cases it already had. And it wove a universe for us. A world of soft dissonances muting into harmonies, tranquil hues of waterprints fading together. To it the Quam were a violet slash of strangeness. Hermitlike, they offered little and accepted less. Privacy extended to everything for them; we still had no clear idea of their physical appearances. Their meetings with us had been conducted with only a few individual negotiators. Into this the Council had moved. Perhaps a taboo was ignored, a trifle overlooked. Perhaps. It seemed the mistake was too great for the Quam to pass: they came jabbing into the edge of the human community. Regeln was one of their first targets. "First Sabal call," Tonji's voice came over the inboard. "You asked me to remind you, sir." It was ironic that Tonji, with all his ancestors citizens of Old Nippon, should be calling a Sabal game to be led by me, a half-breed Caucasian -- and I was sure it wasn't totally lost on him. My mother was a Polynesian and my father a truly rare specimen: one of the last pure Americans, bom of the descendents of the few who had survived the Riot War. That placed me far down in the caste lots, even below Australians. When I was a teenager it was still socially permissable to call us ofkaipan, a term roughly analogous to nigger in the early days of the American Republic. But since then had come the Edicts of Harmony. I imagine the Edicts are still ignored in the off-islands, but with my professional status it would be a grave breach of protocol if the word ever reached my ears. I'd seen it often enough, mouthed wordlessly by an orderlyman who'd just received punishment, or an officer who couldn't forget the color of my skin. But never aloud. I sighed and got up, almost wishing there were another of us aboard, so I wouldn't have moments of complete loneliness like this. But we were rare in Fleet, and almost extinct on Earth itself. I uncased my formal Sabal robes and admired their delicate sheen a moment before putting then on. The subtle reds and violets caught the eye and played tricks with vision. They were the usual lint-free polyester that shed no fine particles into the ship's air, but everything possible had been done to give them texture and depth beyond the ordinary uniform. They were part of the show, just like the bals and chants. During the dressing I made the ritual passes as my hands chanced to pass diagonally across my body, to induce emotions of wholeness, peace. The vague fears I had let slip into my thoughts would be in the minds of the crew as well. The murmur in our assemblyroom slackened as I appeared. I greeted them, took my place in the hexagon of men and began the abdominal exercises, sitting erect. I breathed deeply, slowly, and made hand passes. At the top of the last arc the power was with me and, breathing out, I came down into focus, outward-feeling, kodakani. I slowed the juggling of the gamebals, sensing the mood of the hexagon. The bals and beads caught the light in their counter cadences, glancing tones of red and blue off the walls as they tumbled. The familiar dance calmed us and we moved our legs to counter-position, for meditation. My sing-chant faded slowly in the softened acoustics of the room. I began the Game. First draw was across the figure, a crewman fidgeting with his Sabal leafs. He chose a passage from the Quest and presented it as overture. It was a complex beginning -- the Courier was endowed with subtleties of character and mission. Play moved on. The outline of our problem was inked in by the others as they read their own quotations from the leaves into the Game structure. For the Royal Courier rode down from the hills, and being he of thirst, hunger and weariness. he sought aid in the town. Such was his Mission that the opinion he gained here of the inhabitants of the village, their customs, honesty and justice (not only to the Courier, hut to themselves), would be relayed to the Royal Presence as well. And thence, it is said, to Heaven. Having such items to barter, he went from house to house... After most entries were made, the problem maze established had dark undertones of fear and dread. As expected. I repeated the ritual of beads. And rippling them slowly through my fingers, began the second portion of Sabal: proposing of solution. Again the draw danced among the players. It comes to this: You are one of two players. There are only two choices for you to make -- say, red and black. The other player is hidden, and only his decisions are reported to you. If both of you pick red, you gain a measure each. If both are black, a measure point is lost. But if you choose red and your opponent (fellow; mate; planet-sharer) votes black, he wins two measures, and you lose two. He who cooperates in spirit, he who senses the Total, wins. Sabal is infinitely more complex than this description, but contains the same elements. The problem set by the men ran dark with subtle streams of anguish, insecurity. But now the play returned to me. I watched the solution as it formed around the hexagon. Rejoiced in harmony of spirit. Indicated slight displeasure when divergent modes werC attempted. Rebuked personal gain. And drew closer to my men. "Free yourself from all bonds," I chanted, "and bring to rest the ten thousand things. The way is near, but we seek it afar." The mood caught slowly at first and uncertainty was dominant, but with the rhythm of repetition a compromise was struck. Anxiety began to submerge. Conflicting images in the Game weakened. I caught the uprush of spirit at its peak, chanting joyfully of completion as I brought the play to rest. I imposed the dreamlike flicker of gamebal and bead, gradually toning the opticals until we were clothed in darkness. Then stillness. The fire burning, the iron kettle singing on the hearth, a pine bough brushing the roof, water dripping. The hexagon broke and we left, moving in concert. The Game on our flagship was among the best, but it was not enough for the entire mission. I ordered Sabal as often as possible on all ships, and hoped it would keep us in correct phase. I didn't have time to attend all Games, because we were getting closer to drop and all details weren't worked out. In the hour preceeding the Jump I made certain that I was seen in every portion of the ship, moving confidently among the men. The number of ships lost in the Jump is small but rising dangerously, and everyone knew it. I stood on the center bridge to watch the process, even though it was virtually automatic. The specialists and crewmen moved quickly in the dull red light that simulated nightfall -- Jump came at # and we kept to the daily cycle. Fifteen minutes before the computers were set to drop us through, I gave the traditional order to proceed. It was purely a formalism, but in theory the synchronization could be halted even at the last instant. But if it was, the requirements of calculating time alone would delay the Jump for weeks. The machines were the key. And justly so. Converting a ship into tachyons in a nanosecond of real-space time is an inconceivably complex process. Men invented it, but they could never control it without the impersonal, faultless coordination of microelectronics. In theory it was simple. The earnest, careful men who moved around me on the center bridge were preparing the convoy to flip over into faster than light. In the same way that a fundamental symmetry provided that the proton had a twin particle with opposite charge, helicity, and so on -- the antiproton -- there was a possible state for each particle, called the tachyon. Just as the speed of light, c, is an upper limit to all velocities in our universe, in the tachyon universe c is a lower limit. To us, a particle with zero kinetic energy sits still; it has no velocity. A tachyon with no energy is a mirror image -- it moves with infinite velocity. As its energy increases it slows, relative to us, until at infinite energy it travels with velocity c. As long as man remained in his half of the universe, he could not exceed c. This was a fundamental limitation, as irrevocable as the special principle of relativity. Thus he learned to leave it. By converting a paricle into its tachyon state, allowing it to move with nearly infinite velocity and then shifting it back to real space, one effectively produced faster than light travel. The study of the famous tachyon cross section problem -- how do you make it convert, and then get it back -- occupied the best minds of humanity for more than fifty years. It also birthed the incredible complexity of microelectronics, because only with components that operated literally on the scale of atomic dimensions could you produce the coherent, complexly modulated electronmagnetic waves that could regulate the tachyon's Jump cross section. I smiled to myself in the red glow. That had been a triumph. It occured some decades after the establishment of Old Nippon's hegemony, and made possible almost instant communication with the first Alpha Centauri colony. Particles can be used to produce electronmagnetic waves, and waves carry signals. But not men. It was one thing to greatly enlarge the Jump cross section of a single particle, and quite another to do it for the unimaginable number of atoms that make up a man, or a ship. It was Okawa who found the answer, and I had always wondered why the jump drive did not bear his name. Perhaps he was an unfavored one, though passing clever. Okawa reasoned by analogy, and the analogy he used was the laser. In the laser the problem is simply to produce a coherent state -- to make all the excited atoms in the solid emit a photon at the same time. The same problem appeared in the faster than light drive. If all the particles in the ship did not flip into their tachyon state at the same time, they would all have vastly varying velocities, and the ship would tear itself apart. Okawa's achievement was finding a technique for placing all a ship's atoms in "excited real tachyon states". In the excited state their tachyon cross sections were large. But as well, they could be triggered at the same time, so that all Jumped together, coherently. I looked at the fixed, competent faces around me in the bridge. It was a little more than one minute to Jump. The strain showed, even though some tried to hide it. The process wasn't perfect and they knew it. Nothing was said about it at the Fleet level, but micronelectronic equipment had been deteriorating slowly for years. The techniques were gradually being lost, craftsmanship grew rare. Halfmeasures were used. It was part of the slow nibbling decline our society had suffered for the last half century. It was almost expected. But these men bet their lives on the Jump rig, and they knew it might fail. The silvery chimes rang down thin, padded corridors, sounding the approach of Jump. I could feel the men in the decks around me, lying in near darkness on tatami mats, waiting. " There was a slightly audible count, a tense moment. I closed my eyes at the last instant. A bright arc flashed beyond my eyelids, showing the blood vessels, and I heard the dark, whispering sound of the void. A pit opened beneath me. The falling sensation -- Then the flourescents hummed again and everything was normal, tension relieved, men smiling. Ahead, a new star beckoned. I looked out the foreward screen and saw the shimmering halo of gas that shrouded the star of Regeln. At our present velocity we would be through it in a day, falling down the potential well directly toward the sun. There wasn't much time. We had to come in fast, cutting the rim of plasma around Regeln's star to mask our approach. If we dropped in with that white-hot disk at our backs we would have a good margin over any detection system that was looking for us. Regeln is like any life-supporting world: by turns endlessly varied, monotonously dull, spiced with contrast wherever you look, indescribable. It harbors belts of jungle, crinkling grey swaths of mountains, convoluted snake-rivers and frigid blue wastes. The hazy air carried the hum of insects, the pad of ambling vegetarians, the smooth click of teeth meeting. And winds that deafen, oceans that laugh, tranquility beside violence. It is like any world that is worth the time of man. But its crust contains fewer heavy elements than are necessary for the easy construction of a Jump station or docking base. So it fell under the control of the colonization-only faction of Fleet. They had moved in quickly with xenobiologists to perform the routine miracles that made the atmosphere breathable. Drop time caught us with only the rudiments of a defense nerwork. There simply wasn't time to train the men, and we were constantly missing relevant equipment. I wished for better point-surveilance gear a hundred separate times as we slipped into the Regeln system. But no Quam ships appeared, no missiles rose to meet us. Tonji wanted to get out of the sky as soon as physically possible, even though it would've been expensive in reaction mass. I vetoed it and threw us into a monocycle "orange slice" orbit for a look before we went down, but there turned out to be nothing to see after all. Our base was buttoned up. No vehicles moved on the roads, not even expendable drones for surveilance. I had prints of the base defenses, even the periscope holes, but when we checked there was no sign that they were open. Scattered bluish clouds slid over the farmhouses and fields of grain, but nothing moved on the surface. There wasn't time to think, send down probes, play a game of cat and mouse. I had a drone massing out to the system perimeter, where radiation from the star wouldn't mask the torch of an incoming Quam ship, but I couldn't rely on it completely. "Skimmers ready, sir," Tonji said. I rang Matsuda on inboard and placed him in temporary command of the convoy in orbit. "Tonji is coming with me. If the Ouam show -- " "Yes sir. I'll deploy to intersect -- " "You will not. Give us an hour to boost." "But sir -- " "If we don't make it, mass out. Don't hang around. These ships are worth more than we are." Tonji smiled and I cut off Matsuda. The shuttle down was slow and gentle; it was built for cradling flatlanders. I carried the Firetongue Stet. Regeln's sky flitted past, a creamy blend of pinks and blues like a lunatic tropical drink, and then we were down. The shock troops had cracked the outer defenses, inactivated them, and stalled at the Firetongue perimeter. I carried the Stet in its case, by regulation the only officer who could handle it. The Stet unkeyed the Fleet-wide Firetongue pattern, so that a crew could pass through the man-charring mines seeded around each Fleet base. My hovercraft pilot was jumpy; we bounced on landing. I was out of the hatch before they got chocks under the wheels, and a Lieutenant came toward me at doubletime. We rigged the Stet into electromag detectors, purged errant traces, and started the men out in single file. Crystal wafers winked in the air. My ears picked up a soft percussion as sensors probed us. I followed the #D gridded display, using lifters to bound over null points. Firelanced air crackled around us. The men murmured, frightened. Orange sparks played in open air. I kept on, defusing the nodes of the Firetongue array, widening the corridor. Behind me something hissed. A man screamed. I didn't stop. The Firetongues, alerted, were even touchier. One, two -- the last nodes trembled and evaporated, each a point in space that rippled blue green red and was gone. Each Firetongue perimeter is the same, so each Fleet Captain has access to all bases. But a flaw in the ferrimemory will cancel the code, kill the bearer. I slipped the Firetongue into its jacket with relief. "Who was that?" "A Corporal," Tonji murmured. "Lost his nerve." "You -- ?" "A Tongue burned away his leg." "Oh." Tonji could legally have executed the man for breaking ranks in a Firetongue field. I was quite sure he would've, had not the Tongues done it for him. Even a healant unit can't patch a missing leg. A man came running up. "Had to drill and tap, sir," he said quickly, saluting. "Blow it," I said. We ducked behind a gentle rise a hundred meters from the portal. I hugged the dirt. The smell was odd, sweetsour. For the first time I sensed this place as alien, a fresh planet. The concussion came, sharp as a bone snapping. Debris showered us. I moved up with some men into a hanging pall of dust. The portal yawned only partway open, a testament to the shelter's designer. Three runners went in with lights. They were back in minutes. "Deserted for the first few corridor levels," one of them said. "We need more men inside to keep a communications link." Tonji led the next party. Most the crewmen were inside before word came back that they'd found somebody. I went in then with three guards and some large phoslamps. None of the lighting in the corridors of the shelter was working -- the phosphor leads were cut. Men clustered at one end of the corridor on the second level, their voices echoing nervously off the glazed concrete. "You've got something Mr. Tonji?" I said. He turned away from the open door, where he had been talking to a man whose uniform was covered with dirt. He looked uncertain. "I think so, sir. According to the maps we have of the base, this door leads to a large auditorium. But a few meters inside -- well, look." I stepped through the door and halted. A number of steps beyond, the cushioned walkway ended and a block of something -- dirt, mostly, with fragments of fumitire, wall partitions, unidentifiable rubble -- rose to the ceiling. I looked at Tonji, questioning. "A ramp downward starts about there. The whole auditorium is filled with this -- we checked the lower floors, but the doors off adjacent corridors won't open." "How did it get here?" "The levels around the auditorium have been stripped bare and most of the walls structure tom out, straight down to the bedrock and clay the base was built on. Somebody carted a lot of dirt away and dumped it in here." He glanced at me out of the comer of his eyes. "What's that?" I pointed at a black oval depression sunk back into the grey mass of dirt, about two meters off the floor. "A hole. Evidently a tunnel. It was covered with an office mg until Nahran noticed it." He gestured back at the man in the dirty uniform. "So he went inside. What's there?" Tonji pinched his lip with a well-manicured thumb and forefinger. "A man. He's pretty far back, Nahran says. That's all I can get out of Nahran, though -- he's dazed. The man inside is hysterical. I don't think we can drag him out through that hole, it's too narrow." "That's all? One man?" "There might be a lot of people inside there. We've heard noises out of several of these holes. I think this thing that fills the auditorium is honeycombed with tunnels. We've seen the entrance of several more from the balcony above." I checked the time. "Let's go." Tonji turned and started back through the door. "No, Mr. Tonji. This way." For a second he didn't believe it, and then the glassy impersonal look fell over his face. "We're both going to crawl in there, sir?" "That's right. It's the only way I can find out enough to make a decision." He nodded slowly. We spent a few minutes arranging details, setting timetables. I tried to talk with Nahran while I changed into a tight pullover suit. He couldn't tell me very much. He seemed reticent and slightly dazed. Something had shocked him. "Follow immediately after me, Mr. Tonji." We both carefully emptied out pockets; the passage was obviously too narrow to admit anything jutting out. Tonji carried the light. I climbed up onto the slight ledge in front of the dark oval. I looked across the slate grey face of the thing. It was huge. I waved with false heartiness and began working my legs into the hole. I went straight down, into nightmare. My thighs and shoulders rubbed as gravity slowly tugged me down the shaft. I held my arms above my head, close together. There wasn't room to keep them at my sides. Cracks slid by. Glistening mud. Pebbles. After a moment my feet touched, scraped, then settled on something solid. I felt around with my boots and for a moment thought it was a dead end. But there was another hole in the side, off at an angle. I slowly twisted until I could sink into it up to my knees. Hands rasped on broken stone. I looked up. It wasn't more than five meters to the top of the shaft, but I seemed to have taken a long time to get this far. I could see Tonji slowly settling down behind me, towing a light above his head. I wriggled into the narrow side channel, grunting and already beginning to hate the smell of packed dirt and garbage. In a moment I was stretched flat on my back, working my way forward by digging in my heels and pushing with my palms against the walls. The ceiling of the tunnel brushed against my face in utter blackness. I felt the oppressive weight of the packed dirt crushing down on me. My own breath was trapped in front of my face and I could hear only my own gasps, amplified. "Tonji?" I heard a muffled shout in reply. Light licked the tunnel in front of me. I noticed a large rock embedded in the side. The auditorium was filled with a skeleton of stone that supported the packed soil. I came to a larger space and was able to turn around to enter the next hole head first. The entrance was wide but quickly narrowed. I felt ooze squeeze between my fingers. The walls pressed down. Some of the clay had turned to mud. A chill seeped up my legs and arms as I inched foreward. I twisted my shoulder blades and pulled with my fingers. The going was easier because the passage tilted slightly downward, but the ooze sucked at me. I wondered how a man could have gotten in here. Or out. We know why you're here, though, don't we, Ling? Your lust to prove yourself? To be at the center of action? Captains stay in the rear. Ling... With every lunge forward my chest scraped against the sides, rubbing the skin raw and squeezing my breath out. It seemed just possible that I could get through. Tonji shouted. I answered. The reply was muffled against the wall. I wondered if he had heard. I could feel the irregular bumps in the wall with my hands. I used them to mark how far I had come. Progress was measured in centimeters, then even less. My forearms began to go stiff and numb. I should never have come down here. Foolish, foolish. But I wanted to know -- A finger touched the wall, found nothing. I felt cautiously and discovered a sudden widening in the tunnel. At the same instant there came a scraping sound in the night ahead of me, the sound of something being dragged across a floor. It was moving away. I got a good grip on the opening, pushed -- and was through. I rolled to the side, hugged the wall. Flickers of light from Tonji showed a small, rectangular room. No one in it. A row of darkened holes sank into the opposite face. Tonji wriggled through the passage, breath steaming in the cold air. His lamp poked yellow in my eyes, though it was on low beam. I found I could get to my knees without bumping my head. I stretched out my cramped legs. Rubbed them to start circulation. Looked around. Wary. "Nothing here," he said in a hoarse whisper. "Maybe. Throw the beam on those holes." He played it across the opposite wall. A shrill scream. A head of filthy hair wrenched further back into the uppermost hole. I started toward him on hands and knees and stopped almost immediately. The floor below the holes was strewn with excrement and trash. Tonji swallowed and looked sick. After a moment I moved forward. My boot rattled an empty food tin. I could barely see the man far back in his hole. "Come out. What's wrong?" The man pressed himself further in. I picked my way toward him. He whimpered, cried, hid his face from the light. "He won't answer," Tonji said. "I suppose not." I stopped and looked at some of the other holes. The sour reek on this side of the room was intolerable. I hadn't noticed it in the tunnel because there was a cool draft blowing from one of the holes in the wall. It kept the air in the room circulating away from the tunnel we'd used. "Flash the light up there," I said. A human hand hung out of one of the holes. Cloth and sticks had been stuffed into the opening to try to keep in the smell. There were other holes like it. Some others were packed with food, most of it partially eaten. "Can... we go back?" Tonji asked. I ignored him. I scrabbled closer to one of the openings with a larger mouth. Dank, clammy air. In the empty silence I could hear the faint echoes of wailing and sobbing from further inside. They mingled together in a dull hum of despair. "Bring the light." "I think it's getting colder in here, sir." He hesitated a moment and then duck-walked closer. The man was still moaning to himself in his hole. I clenched my jaw muscles in involuntary revulsion and with an effort of will reached out and touched him. He cringed away, burrowing down, sobbing with fear. There was part of a sleeve left on his arm -- the light blue cloth of the Fleet. I looked back at the tunnel we'd just used and estimated the difficulty of pulling a struggling man through it. The phoslamp struck a rainbow from an oily rivulet, "We've not going to get any more out of this," I said. The cold clung to my limbs again, but Tonji was sweating. His eyes darted as if expecting attack. The silence was oppressive. I seemed to hear more clearly now the convulsive sobbing from further inside the mount. I motioned quickly to Tonji. We pressed ourselves back into the tunnel. I made as rapid progress as I could, with him scrambling close at my heels. The dead weight squeezed us with rigid jaws. I tried to notice markings on the sides that would measure how far we had come, but I began to get confused. Fingers scraped on crumbling rock. It took me a moment to realize the air was definitely worse. It clung in my throat and I couldn't get enough. My chest was caught in the tunnel's vice and my lungs would never fill. Between wrigglings to squirm up the slight grade I stopped to listen for sounds from the men at the entrance. Nothing. The long tunnel pressed at me. I gave myself over to an endless series of pushing and turning, rhythmically moving forward against the steady hand of gravity and the scraping of the walls. Tonji's lamp sent dim traces of light along the walls. I noticed how smooth they were. How many people had worn them down? How many were in here? And, God, why? The tunnel began to narrow. I got through one opening by expelling all my breath and pushing hard with my heels. Coming in hadn't seemed this hard. Gravel bit my thigh. Boots slipped on slime. An open space temporarily eased the pressure, and then ahead I saw walls narrowing again. I pushed and turned, scrabbling on the slick dirt with all my strength. A flicker of light reflected over my shoulder. I could see the passage closing even further. Impossible. A massive hand was squeezing the life out of me and my mind cluthced frantically at an escape. The air was positively foul. I felt ahead and grunted with the effort. The walls closed even more. I knew I couldn't get through. My hand touched something, but I was too numbed with the cold to tell what it was. "Light," I managed to whisper. I heard Tonji turning, breathing rapidly, and in a moment the beam got brighter. It was a man's foot. I recoiled. For a moment I couldn't think and my mind was a flood of horror. "Back," I gasped. "We can't go this way." "This... way... we came in." "No." Suddenly the air was too thick to take it any longer. I started to slide backwards. "Go on!" He hit my boots with a free hand. "Back up, Mr. Tonji." I waited and the dirt pressed at me, closing in everywhere. It was only mud. What if it collapsed? Tonji was silent. After a moment I felt him move back. I had been holding my breath ever since my hand felt that human foot. I let it out as I scrambled back down the tunnel. The man hadn't been there long, but it was enough. The air was thick with it. I noticed I was sweating now, despite the chill. Had we taken the right hole when we left the man back there? We could be working our way further into the mound, not out of it. How long could I take the air? I could tell Tonji was on the edge already. Did we miss a turn coming out and go down the wrong way? It was hard to imagine in the closeness of the tunnel. My ribs were rubbed raw. They stung whenever I moved. Weight closed on me from every direction. I pulled backward slowly, trying to collect my thoughts. I moved automatically. After a few moments my left hand reached out and touched nothing. I stopped, but Tonji went on, as if in a stupor. I listened to his moving away, blinking uncomprehendingly at the hole to my left and trying to think. "Wait! This is it!" We had both missed the turn, somehow. The air had dulled our minds until we noticed nothing without conscious effort. I turned and worked myself into the opening. Tonji was returning. The lamp's yellow bite was almost painful. He moaned something but I couldn't understand. The passage gradually widened and I caught glimmerings of light ahead. Out. Safe. Yes. In a moment I was standing in the vertical shaft. A man dropped a line down to me. My hands slipped on it several times as they pulled me up. For a few minutes I sat by the entrance, blinking, puffing, numb with fatigue. The men crowded around us and I looked at them as if they were strangers. After a while I picked out a lieutenant. "Get... Jobstranikan down here." Jobstranikan had psychotherapy training. This was clearly his job. Orders were given. Men scattered. After a moment I got up and changed back into full uniform. A runner was waiting outside the door, his nose wrinkling at the strench I had ceased to notice. "Sir, reports from lower levels say there are more like this. There appear to be people in them, too. The coordination center was untouched, and it's five levels down. I think they've got some of the tapes ready to run." I turned to Tonji. "Try to get that man out of there. Do it any way you can, but don't waste time. I'll be in the center." The walk through the next two levels was like a trip through hell. The stink of human waste was overpowering, even with the ventilation system sighing at full capacity. Arc lights we had brought down threw distorted crescents of faint blue and white along walls smeared with blood, food, excrement. Echoes of a high, gibbering wail haunted the lower floors, coming from their hiding places. They had burrowed far back into the walls in spots but most of the tunnel mouths were sunk into monstrous, huge mounds like the one above. They weren't hiding from us alone; their warrens were surrounded by piles of refuse. They had been in there for weeks. Jobstranikan caught up with us just before we worked our way to the center. "It is difficult, sir," he said. "It is like the legends -- the country of madness, possessed by devils and monsters." Legends of the Riot War, I remembered. A foul time. "What's happened to them?" "Everything. At first I thought they had a complete fear of anything that they could sense -- light, movement, noise. But that is misleading. They screech at each other incoherently. They won't let us touch them. They cry, scream, and fight if we try." "Has Tonji been able to get any of them out?" "Only by knocking them unconscious. One of his men was bitten badly when they tried to drag that man out. Getting anyone out of this mess is going to be a major job." There was a guard outside the center. Broken bits of furniture and electronics gear were strewn down the corridor, but inside the center itself everything was in order. "The hatch was sealed electronically and coded, sir," the officer inside explained. "We brought down the tracers and opened it. Somebody must have seen what was happening and made certain no one could get in here before we arrived." I walked over to the main display board. Technicians were taping the readouts we would need from the center's computer bank, working with feverish haste. I motioned Danker back to duty and turned to the officer. "Have you got any preliminary results? Is there an oral log that covers the Quam attack?" "No oral yet. We do have a radar scan." He fitted a roll into the projector attachment of the display board. "I've cut it to begin with the first incursion into this system." Phosphors dimmed. The green background grid of a sensor scan leaped into focus. The relative locations of the other planets in the Regeln system winked purple -- lumps of cold rock, mostly -- and a small Quam dot moved on the perimeter of the screen, glowing a soft red. "They took their time getting here, apparently." The projection rate increased. More dots joined the first to form a wedge-shaped pattern. A blue line detached itself from the center of the screen and shot outward, shrinking to a point: a defensive move from Regeln. "All available missies seem to have been fired. The Quam took a few hits, but could outmaneuver most of them. I'm afraid we launched too soon and by the time our seekers were within range their fuel reserves weren't up to a long string of dodges." The red dots moved quickly, erradically, in a pantomine dance with the blue defenders. The distance between them was never short enough to permit a probable kill with a nuclear charge, and eventually the blue dots fell behind and were lost. They winked out when their reaction mass exhausted. "Except for the atmospheric ships, that finished their defenses. This colony wasn't built to carry on a war. But something strange happened." The Quam ships drifted toward center screen at an almost leisurely pace. A small missile flared out, went into orbit around Regeln and disappeared. "That was the satellite link. They got that and then... "And then left," I finished. The red dots were backing off. They gradually picked up velocity, regrouped and in a few minutes slipped off the grid. The screen went black. "That is all we have. This clipping covered about eight days. We can't be sure anybody was watching the last part of it because the recording mechanism was automatic. It stopped when it ran out of film. This room may have been sealed any time after they launched their missiles." "None of this explains what happened here. The Quam didn't touch Regeln, but this shelter is full of lunatics. Something made the Quam stop their attack and leave." I looked around at the banks and consoles. I could feel a tightness forming somewhere. That old feeling of rightness, certainty of position, was slipping away. "Get every record you can, in duplicate tapes if possible," I ordered, trying to shrug off the mood. The officer saluted and I went back into the corridors with a guard detail. I made a note to get respiration packs down here as soon as possible, and meanwhile held my breath as long as I could between gasps. The route we took back was different, but no less horrible. Here there were bodies lying among the wreckage, most of them in advanced stages of decay. Two of my guards gagged in the close, putrid air of the corridors. We kept moving as quickly as we could, avoiding the half-open doors from which came the faint shrill gibbering of madmen. Most of the bodies we saw had been stabbed or clubbed and left to die. A large proportion were women. In any contest of strength they wouldn't last long, and they hadn't received any special consideration. When we reached the perimeter Tonji had established, the air improved. Men were moving along the corridors in teams, spraying the walls with a soapy solution. "The water and drainage systems are still working, so I decided to use them," Tonji said. He seemed to have recovered from the tunnel. "Wherever we can we're sealing off the places where they lived. We can keep the halls clean." Jobstranikan came around a nearby comer portal we'd blasted through only a short while before. "Any new ideas?" I asked. "Not as yet, I fear." He shook his head and the long Mongolian locks tangled together on the back of his neck. He wore it in traditional semi-tribal fashion, like most of my officers. It was dull black, in the manner of the soldiers of the Khan and the Patriarch, and braided at the tail with bright leather thongs. The style was as old as the great central plains of Asia. "I can make no sense of it. They fought among themselves at first, I think, for the bodies we've found are at least weeks old. Since then they've stayed back in those holes they made for themselves, eating the food supplies they'd gotten earlier. But they don't want to leave. Every one I've seen wants to burrow into the smallest volume possible and stay there. We've found them in cupboards, jammed into ventilation shafts, even..." "Signal, sir." We were passing a temporary communication link. He handed me a receiver and I pulled the hushpiece over my head. If this was what I thought it was, I didn't want anyone to know before I told them. It was Matsuda. "Our drone is registering approaching extra-solar ships. Preliminary trajectory puts them into the Regeln orbit." I let out a long breath. In a way I'd almost been expecting it. "What's their Dtoppler?" There was a pause, then: "It is not enough for them to be braking from a star jump. The Specscope says they are on full torch, however. They couldn't have been accelerating very long." "In other words, this is the same group that hit -- or didn't hit -- Regeln the first time. How long can we have on the surface?" "Sir, readout says you can stay down there about five hours and not incur more than five percent risk to the convoy. Can you get them out?" "We'll see," I said, and went back to Tonji. It was impossible. Using all shuttles and skimmers we saved a little over three thousand, only a fraction of the colony's population. Most of the interior of the shelter was never reached. As it was, we boosted late and a Quam interceptor almost caught us. A yellow fusion burst licked at us as we pulled away, We never saw what the rest of the Quam did to Regeln. After a few unsuccessful attempts I decided to stop trying to communicate with the lunatics we had scattered among the ships. Jobstranikan wanted to try treatment on some of them, but the medics were having a hell of a time just patching up their injuries and infections, and treating malnutrition. The Quam didn't try to follow us out of the system. I thought this strange, and so did Tonji. "It does not make sense," he said. "We don't know a lot about their drive systems, but they might have a good chance of catching us. It would certainly be worth a try. If you've set a trap, why spring it half-heartedly?" "Maybe it's not that kind of trap," I said. Tonji frowned. "Do you mean they might be waiting for us further along trajectory? We're already out of detection range of any Quam ships, and Jump is coming up. They'll never trace us through that." "No, nothing. It was just a thought," Not a well-defined one, at that. Still, something was bothering me. It wasn't lessened any when Tonji reported the results from Intelligence. "The computer analysis of the colony's radar scan is finished," he began. "Regardless of what happened to the colony itself, the machines have a low opinion of Quam tactics. Regard." He flicked on a screen above my desk and the pattern of red and blue points in a green three-grid began to repeat itself. "Notice this stage, shortly after initial contact." The blue dots danced and played as they moved in, performing an intricate pattern of opposing and coalescing steps. The red Quam ships back-pedaled and moved uncertainly. "The Quam had ballistic superiority and more maneuverability. But notice how they avoided the Regeln missiles." The red points dodged back, moving in crescents that narrowly avoided the feints and slashes of blue. The crescent formed, fell back. Again. And again. The Quam were using the same tactic, relying on their superior power to carry them beyond Regeln attack at the cusp-point. I'm not a tactican, but I could see it was wasteful of energy and time. "They continued this until the interceptors ran out of reaction mass. If they'd been pitted against equals the engagement would not have lasted two minutes." I clicked off the screen. "What does it mean?" Tonji poked the air with a finger. "It means we have got them. Over the last year they've had the luck to hit border planets that weren't firstline military emplacements. We haven't had a look at their techniques because they didn't let anyone get away. But these tactics are schoolbook examples! If this is the best they can do, we'll wipe them out when our fleets move in." He was over-enthusiastic but he was right. Our defenses were solidly based on the Fleet principle, with interlocking layers of tactical directorates, hundred-ship armadas and echelons of command. It was very much like the surface aquatic navies of Earth history. On these terms, the Quam were disastrously inferior. The news should have quieted the unease I felt. Instead, it grew. I began to notice outbreaks of rudeness among the crew, signs of worry on the faces of the officers, disruption of spirit. The tedium of caring for the colonists could certainly account for some of it -- they refused to be calmed and had to be restrained from destroying their room furniture. They were using it to construct the sane sort of rat holes we'd found them in. But that wasn't all. Crewmen began missing meals, staying in their cabins and not talking to anyspace migrationlife extensionlibertarianism You've read about the future, now read about the people working to make it happen. We've combined several exciting newsletters into a monthly package covering the three frontiers with the most long-range significance to the evolution of the human race: space-migration (for obvious reasons), life-extension sciand political freedpm movements (without which the first two might not happen). Each subscription to Claustrophobia includes: L-# News (newsletter of the space colonizers). The Foundation Report (space utilization consultants). Long Life Magazine (cryonics and I i fe-extension breakthroughs) , New Libertarian (news, philosophy, reviews), Individual Liberty (freedom movement news) and News Watch (our own short summaries of related news items from other newsletters and science journals). Purchased separately these would cost #year, but sold as a package they're #year or # for a three month trial. We also offer a discount if you're already receiving any of these. Additional information on request. #k # SW #th Dr., Portland, OR #I one else. The ship took on a quiet, tense mood. I ordered resumption of the Games at once. We almost got through it. There was devisive talking and nervousness instead of the steady calm of self-contemplation, before the Sabal began, but the opening rituals damped and smoothed it. I thought I detected a relaxation running like a wave through the hexagon. Muscles unstiffened, consciousness cleared and we drew together. It is usual in the Game to choose a theme which begins with a statement of the virtue of community, tests it, and then returns to initial configuration, the position of rest. I anticipated trouble, but not enough to make a change of game plot necessary. The plot ran smoothly at first, until we came to first resolution point. One of the lower deckmen, who had been in the shelter caverns from the first entry, was called by the chance of the game to report the decision. He hesitated, looked guiltily at his card and beads, and then spoke. He displayed a sum of choices which profited a few at the expense of the many. Something stretched thin in the layered air of the room. I could feel the group teetering on edge. The men were straining for sense of harmony and trying to decide how to play when their turn came. A bad play isn't unknown to Sabal, but now it could be dangerous. I repeated the confirmation ritual. hoping it would calm them -- and myself -- but the next play was a choice of withdrawal. No gain for the individual, but the group did not profit, and the net effect was bad. Fear began to slip from member to member down the hexagon. The plays came rapidly now. Some tried to reinforce the message, and cast configurations that benefited the group. They were swamped, one by one, and the Game began to fall apart. I used the chant. Tranquility, detachment. The words rose and fell. Interpenetrating. Interconverting. The mosquito bit the bar of iron. My own cast held them for a while out of respect for my position, but in a quick string of plays its advantage was nibbled away. Then the flood came. A dozen casts went by, all having loss of phase. The theme was not gain, but a pulling away from the group, and that was what made the failure so serious. Withdrawal strikes at the social structure itself. I seized control of the Game, breaking off a subplot that was dragging us deeper. I drew a moral, one I'd learned years before and hoped to never use. It slurred over the resolution of the Game and emphasized the quality of the testing, without questioning whether the test had been met. It was an obvious loss, but that was all I could do. The hexagon broke and the men burst into conversation, nearly panic-stricken. They moved out of the room, jostling and shoving, and broke up as they reached the halls. A few glanced quickly at me and then looked away. In a moment the only sound was the hissing of the air system and the distant quick tapping of boots on deck. Tonji remained. He looked puzzled. "What do you think it means?" I said. "Probably just that the mission was too much for us. We'll be all right after landfall." "I don't think so. Our Games before worked well, but this one shattered before it was half finished. That's too much of a change." "What, then?" "It's something to do with this mission. Something... What percentage of the crew have regular contact with the Regeln survivors?" "With the way the nursemaid shifts are set up now, about sixty percent. Every man who's replaceable for more than an hour on his job has to help feed and clean them, or assist the psych teams who are working on the problem." "So even though we're off Regeln, most of the men continue to see them." "Yes, but it's unavoidable. Our orders were to bring back as many as we could, and we are." "Of course." I waved my hand irritably. "But the Game failed tonight because of those survivors. I'm sure of that. The strain of putting this set of crews into war-status duty isn't small, but we've allowed for it in our planning. It doesn't explain this." Tonji gave me a stiff look. "Then what does?" "I don't know." I was irritated at the question, because I did know -- in a vague, foreboding sense -- and his question uncovered my own fear. "The Sabal Game has something to do with it. That and the way our .ships -- hell, our whole society -- has to be run. We emphasize cooperation and phase. We teach that a man's happiness depends on the well-being of the group, and the two are inseparable. Even in our contacts with alien races, until the Quam, we spread that philosophy. We try to draw closer to beings who are fundamentally different from us." "That is the way any advanced society must be structured. Anything else is suicide on the racial scale." "Sure, sure. But the Quarn apparently don't fit that mold. They've got something different. They work almost completely alone and live in cities only, I suppose, because of economic reasons. Most of what we know about them is guesswork because they don't like contact with others, even members of their own race. We've had to dig out our own data bit by bit." Tonji spread his hands. "That is the reason for this mission. The Regeln survivors may be able to tell us something about the Quam. We need an idea of how they think." "I don't think these madmen will any help. Already they threaten the convoy." "Threaten? With what?" "Disruption, mutiny -- something. All I can say is that when this Sabal started, the crew was in bad condition, but they could be reached. They still communicated." "Yes, but -- " "During the Game, though, the tension increased. We didn't witness here the exposure of what the men were thinking. Their fears were augmented, piled on top of each other. I could feel it running through the subplots they made a part of the Game. There's something we do -- and the Game is just a way of concentrating it -- that increases the inbalance we picked up from the Regeln survivors." "But in the Game we duplicate our society, our way of living. If that amplifies the unbalance..." "Exactly," I said despairingly. "Exactly." I slept on it that night, hoping something would unravel the knot of worry while I slept. Over a lonely breakfast in my cabin I reviewed the conversation and tried to see where my logic was leading. A sense of dread caught my stomach and twisted it, turning to lead the meal of rice and sea culture broth. How can a man step outside himself and guess the reactions of aliens utterly unlike him? I was trying to find the key to the riddle of Regeln with all the elements in full view, and yet... Something formed. I let my senses seep out into the ship, feeling the delicate rhythms of life; reaching for the... other. An alien element was there. I knew, with a new certainty, what it was. I picked up my tea cup and focused on my kensdal altar. The deep mahogany gave me confidence. Power and resolution flowed outward from my body center. I balanced the cup lightly in my hand. And slammed it down. Jump was coming. I had to stop it. I had forgotten that Tonji was to be bridge officer during the Jump. He was making routine checks in the somber green light of morning watch. Men moved expertly around him, with a quiet murmur. "Great greetings of Mom, sir," he said. "We have come to the point for your permission to Jump." Then it was already late, far later than I'd thought. I looked at him steadily. "Permission denied, Mr. Tonji. Ready a subspace transmission." I could feel a hush fall on the bridge. "May I ask what the transmission will say, sir?" "It's a request to divert this convoy. I want the expedition put into decontamination status until this is understood." Tonji didn't move. "Jump approaches quickly, sir." "It's an order, Mr. Tonji." "Perhaps if you would explain the reasoning, sir?" I glanced at the morning board. It showed a huge sick report, most of them accompanied by requests to remain in quarters. All divisions were undermanned. It fitted. In a few days we wouldn't be able to operate at all. " Look I said impatiently, "the Quarn did something to our people. Perhaps something smuggled in by an agent. I don't know exactly how, but those colonists have been given the worst trauma anybody has ever seen." "An agent? One of our own people?" "It's been done before, by idealists and thugs alike. But the important point is that when we picked up Quarn ships on our screens they weren't trying any maneuvers to throw off detectors or give false images. It was a classic ballistic problem they presented to us, and all we had to do was leave Regeln early enough to out-mass them. They wanted us to escape." "But look at their maneuvers on that first run against Regeln, the one that ran our people underground. That's all the evidence we need. They're children when it comes to military tactics. The second approach was simple, yes, but it was probably all they could do." "I don't think so. Not if the Quarn are half as intelligent as the rest of our data tells us. So their first attack did drive the colonists under -- fine. It got all the Regeln population in one place, unside the shelter where whatever techniques the Quarn knew could go to work. What looked like an error was a feint." "I do not -- " " Think . A knowledge of sophisticated tactics is a rather specialized cultural adaptation. For all we know, it may not be very useful in the kind of interstellar war we've just gotten into. The fact that the Quarn don't have it doesn't mean they're inferior. Quite the opposite, probably. Regeln was a trap." "If it was, we escaped," Tonji said sharply. The Mongul mask descended. "No, Mr. Tonji, we didn't. We're just serving as a convenient transport for what the Quam want to get into the home worlds -- the "This is a book like a mountain stream -- fast, clean, clear, exciting, beautiful." -- Ursula le guin "A fresh exciting adventure... complicated and kinky... in a stark post-nuclear "That rare thing, a tender and compassion"A fine tale... I like this book very much." Story. Of Mist, and Gross, and Sand) A Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club l l , Regeln survivors." "But why?" "You know the analogy we use in the Game. Mankind is now, at last, an organism. Interdependent. We're forced to rely on each other because of the complexities of civilization." My own voice sounded strange to me. It was tired and a note of despair had crept in. "Of course," Tonji said impatiently. "Go on." "Has it ever occurred to you that once you admit society is like an organism, you admit the possibility of contagious diseases?" "You toy with words." I grimaced and went on. "The survivors. They're enough of a test sample to set it off. An average crew member spends several hours a day with them, and the continual exposure is enough." "Why aren't you affected, then? And me. And the men who aren't on the sick list -- why don't they have it?" "Minor variations in personality. And there's something else. I checked. Some of them are from the off-islands, like me. We're different. We didn't grow up with the Game. We learned it later on the mainlands. Maybe that weakens its effect." He shook his head. "Yes, this thing the colonists have is different, but..." "It claws at the mind. It's irrational. We're the product of our ancestors, Mr. Tonji, and these ancestors knew terrors we cannot comprehend. Remember, this is a new psychosis we've found on Regeln, a combination. Fear of light, heat, heights, open spaces. That last one, agoraphobia, seems strongest. The Quam have worked on a first-class horror for us, and this convoy is to be the carrier." "A carrier for a mental disease?" Tonji said contemptuously. "Yes. But a disorder we've never seen before. An amalgam of the fundamental terrors of man. A collective society has the strength of a rope, because each strand pulls the same way. But it has weakenesses, too, for the same reason." The men were watching us, keeping very still. I could hear the thin beeping of monitoring units. Tonji's skin had a slight greenish cast and his eyes looked back at me impersonally, cool and black. "We're carrying it with us, Tonji. The survivors are striking the same resonant mode with us that the Quam found in them. The Quam hit at us through our weaknesses. They're hermits, and they see us more clearly then we see ourselves. Our interdependence, the Game and all of it, communicates the disease." I noticed that my hand was tightening convulsively on the console at my side. Tonji stood motionless. "Stop the Jump, Mr. Tonji. And the transmission." He motioned to an assistant. Jump count ceased. He stood motionless for a moment, eyes wary. Then he took a quick backward step, came to attention and saluted. When he spoke the words were measured. "Sir, it is my duty to inform you that I must file Duty Officer's Report when your dispatch is transmitted. I invoke Article Twentyseven." I froze. Article Twenty-seven provides that the duty officer may send a counter-argument to the Commander's dispatch when it is transmitted. When he feels the Commander is no longer able to conduct his duties. "You're wrong, Mr. Tonji," I said slowly. "Taking these survivors -- and by now, most of the crew -- into a major port will cause more damage than you or I can imagine." "I have been observing you, Sir. I don't think you're capable of making a rational decision about this thing." "Man, think! What other explanation can there be for what's happening to this ship? You've seen those tapes. Do you think the scraps of information on them are worth the risk of delivery? Do you think anyone can get even a coherent sentence out of those lunatics we're carrying?" He shook his head mutely. I looked across the dark void between us. He was a man of the east, and I represented the dead and dying. In the histories they wrote, the ideals my ancestors held were termed a temporary abnormality, a passing alternative to the communal, the group-centered culture. Perhaps they were right. But we had met something new out here, and I knew they wouldn't understand it. Perhaps the Americans would have, or the Europeans. But they were gone. I should have anticipated that the lost phase we all felt would take different forms. Tonji chose ambition above duty, above the ship. If Fleet upheld him there would be a fat promotion for him. And I stood here, bound by rules and precedents. If I made a move to silence Tonji it would count against my case with Fleet. We were on a rigid schedule of procedures now that the Article was used. Nothing I could do would stop it. "Mr. Tonji! You realize, don't you, that one of us will be finished when this is over?" He turned and looked at me, and for a moment a flash of anticipation crossed his face. He must have hated me for a long time. "Yes, I have thought of that. And I think I know which one of us it will be..." He didn't finish the sentence aloud. He mouthed it, so only I could see his lips move. "... ofkaipan." He was right. Fleet wanted to study the survivors in depth. They weren't interested in a convoy commander with suspicions and a theory. And Tonji, a Mongul, had ample political contacts. We lingered in real space for a week, waiting for the decision, and then Jumped. My trial was short. "Haven't you gone out for your walk yet?" Angela said. The sound startled me, even though I'd been blocking out the noise of the kids and their viewscreen. She stood in the door of our bedroom, tension still furrowing the pale yellow cast of her face. I was beginning to expect those tight, thin lines, now. They appeared often, a webbed design imposed like an delicate shadow on a face I knew. It was a firm and yet subtle face with smile lines around the mouth which belied the slight downtuming of the lips, a suggestion of a disapproving pout that always caught me by surprise in otherwise solemn moments, at times provoked a laugh. The face of a substantial person. She had, after all, been the wife of a starship Captain. She'd handled our social roles well, walking the tricky line Offislanders did in Fleet, and supported me in ways that went far beyond the reassuring word and tender embrace. She was a vivid, striking woman, still -- or could be, outside these Slots. "I... suppose I forgot. Want to go with me?" She nodded. I got up. Remembering Regeln and after, living through it all again, had left me in a dull daze. I cut the corridor lights before we stepped outside our apartment door. We linked hands automatically. Not love; security. I put my right palm on the wall and we inched forward. Terror caught at me, but I fought it down. Her voice was a hollow whisper in the darkness. "I don't see why you're so set against tapping for Romana and Chark." The words echoed off the glazed concrete that loomed close and sheltering. "With all of us at war, any better training..." "No." "Without it. Ling, they just fall further and further behind their playmates." " What playmates?" My voice became suddenly loud, harsh. "Children don't play any more. Games take space. They take..." I didn't finish. Games took something our children had lost. We rounded a comer. I stumbled on someone. She was doubled up on the floor clutching at herself in spasms. From her ragged hacking I guessed she'd had an attack and couldn't go any further. We edged around her. We walked on. "Ling... they do play, but not the way we did. They have their games, new ones. You've got to accept the world as it is." "Accept this crowding? Accept the fear that crushes you whenever you step outside? Accept the fact that a fifth of the population is in the Slots? -- and most Slots are worse than these, far worse. Accept that we have to keep on working, even though our guts are twisted up inside? Until we're transferred to some rat warren, when our guts jam up completely, where we'll live in slimy rooms like closets, just like -- " I stopped myself from saying, like Regeln. Her hand tightened convulsively in mine. She wept. "You know that can't be helped! We, we are in a... stage of evolution. Evolution of society. Withdrawal is necessary. No one says we are doomed. Ling. You're imagining that. We can achieve greater phase, later. Everyone says -- " "And meanwhile the Quam take one system after another. They've cut us off from many bases already. We can't muster the men to stop them." I snorted contemptuously. "Maybe if we're lucky they'll cut us off from our own lies before all this is over." "Now that is completely unreasonable," she said icily, her tears gone. "There are signs of improvement, the news says so. Progress of the, the sickness, is slowing." "For cases removed at third or fourth hand from the Regeln survivors, yes. They got a weaker initial exposure." "That's just a theory. You don't know that." "Um." I grimaced in the inky closeness of the hallway. "It's like all your other ideas, like not letting Chark and Romana have tapping." "Letting Fleet and the government alter their minds, you mean, with one of their stopgap schemes for increasing the war effort. Let Chark have a frontal tap so all he cares about is torch chamber design, say? -- and will never be happy when he's not doing it? 'A permanent career,' they call it. That's right, I won't assent to that. Our children need every bit of mental balance they have to stay alive, to live as a defeated race. I don't intend to rob them of it." She trembled in frustration. We passed by wan yellow phosphors of the lower-level apartments, the narrow Slots hastily thrown up by an harassed government for some more severe cases. Whimpering came from the little holes where things that had been human beings were curled up into tight balls, desperately trying to shut out the light, the sounds, all of the awful yawning enormity of sheer open space. The terror of openness. Of horizons. Beside me Angela stopped trembling. She descended into her glacial silence, keeping only a fingertip touch with my hand to retain her orientation. The walks didn't seem to do her any good any longer. I supposed there was a limit to their therapeutic value. I had insisted from the first that we all walk outside our apartment as much as possible. And in truth, we were not as ill as many others who had contracted the sickness later than we. Perhaps we could achieve a kind of plateau. There was something in me that fought against the clutching fears. The sharp words between Angela and myself sometimes even seemed to help, to calm us both. I could not believe Angela believed completely what she parroted. She had been infected by me with more than the Plague. By an unspoken mutual consent we clung to the spaces of our apartment, forced Chark and Romana to live there. At times the children would move suddenly from one room to the next and a frozen terror would slide into their faces, a mask of fear -- but we made them stay. Small victories. Stalemates became triumphs. Even so, the world was not real to me. It was filled with a thousand devious horrors -- the accidentally thrown phosphor switch, an unsuspected window in an unfamiliar wall. Out on the edge of our pitifully shrinking Empire, Fleet played at war with the only toys it knew -- ships, missiles, beams -- while its enemy (and what was he like, to be so wise?) fought with the only ultimate weapons between races: their weaknesses. Men who had climbed to the stars now cowered in Slots, driven by horrors inherited from the first amphibians. I did not feel at home on Earth any longer. It had been long since I had peered out to see the stars like tinsel on sky's smooth cloak. My life lay now in halls pooled in darkness, in places packed with people whose fears I hated, because they were mine as well. Waiting...waiting... The days pressed in. I would welcome the Quam, when they came. Energy resources ran low, so the streets around our Slot cube were unlit. The Philippines are forever cloud-shrouded, so a dark as thick as anger cloaks the streets. My first excursion outside our cube was at night. I walked a block, no more. I went without telling Angela. The idea alone would have made her face whiten. But now -- The moment came when the fact slipped free and hung in the brimming air before me, unavoidable now -- That moment when I poked my head throught the forgotten, grimcaked window and, sniffing day's warm musk, did not flinch from the yellow haze outside. I had been out before at night, yes, telling myself it was not, after all, that odd an event. But now I had gone on a walk from the apartment, down inky halls, and found the window again... and day lay outside. And I did not turn back. I opened the window. I stretched into the stinging sun. No fear. No tremor of anxiety. The street lay bare, trash clumped in the gutters like brown snowdrifts. Buildings shimmered in the golden light. Beckoning. A draft drew out the scent of the corridor behind me, air reeking of piss and foul food and lives gone stale. Even our own apartment smelled faintly of that, when I returned to it from my nightly explorations... I twisted out of the unguarded window, hung by the ledge, dropped. Now... what? I started walking, savoring the warm brush of air heavy with moisture. I had lived near here as a boy. I had played through the infinite buzzing tropical afternoons outside Naga. The nearness of Fleet Central had made my candidacy for Fleet Academy a virtual reflex; to the adolescent I was then the Academy hovered in the space between myself and a looming future, an inevitable bridge, with invisible tinkling waters below. I'd rejected the thought of being anything else. So the man is victim of the boy. Nothing moved on this street. There was a blurred hum of traffic from the center of Naga, but here all was silence. Store fronts were boarded up. 'Warehouses yawned empty. I walked idly, mind floating and feet free. "Hold!" In May, Steven Spruill's Paperback Debut! A Great Adventure I .# Illustrated by Freff Bob Shaw's # With Illustrations by Hugo Award Winner Rick Sternbach n And, coming in June, the long-awaited publication of Richard A. Lupoff's masterpiece of intergalactic conflict between the Bentfin Boomer Boys and N'Haiti's Dell Dell Publishing Co., Inc. I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza # East #th Street New York, N.Y. # A man stepped from a doorway. A Fleet officer. Lieutenant Grade Two. He kept a right hand casually resting on the butt of his sidearm. "You are... ?" "Captain Ling Sanjen. Console operator." "Yes." He fished a note from his breast pocket, checked it. Nodded. "We thought it would be you." "What? Why?" "Our night sensors picked you up." "So?" "There is a small percentage of recoveries. Fleet wants to talk to you." "I don't know why. Who says I've recovered, anyway?" He raised an eyebrow. "Any Slot mole who can stand this sunlight -- " he gestured, squinting -- "is on his way." "Well, no, it is bothering me." I stepped casually away. "I only came out to get some help. My wife -- " He shook his head. His hand returned to his sidearm. "Look, I'm just a -- " "I know who are are. You're on the list." "What list?" "People we're watching for if they come out of the Slots." "I'm not feeling very well, I..." I wobbled a bit and tried to look dazed. He smiled. "Nice try, but no bronzer. You're too valuable to let go." I started to walk away. This time the sidearm came out.    Fleet Central was the same: jutting architecture simulating flight, gleaming hallways, padded lobbies, the steady click and bustle of efficient mystery; a steel cathedral. They kept me for two days before I knew anything more than the patrol officer had let slip. They tested, poked, attached sensors, interviewed me, left me waiting for hours -- in a word, treated me like a package of meat in their factory. I learned nothing. I was getting bored and fidgety by the end of the second day, while I waited in a large office, until the door opened and a Fleet officer came in. It was Tonji, his Mongul mask in place. He held out his hand. "I am happy you recovered." I didn't stand. I didn't shake the hand. "From the reports I gather you have done remarkably well." "You son of a bitch." "Quite remarkable, considering that you had no help. No therapy whatever -- unless you are lying about that. Some have, you know." "How did you come by those double stars? Have all bastards become generals, or is it the other way around?" "I see things have not changed as much as I would have wished." "They never will." He gave a small laugh. "You must get over this." "Why? I was right." "This is unproductive." "For who?" "For you. Surely  don't care." "The past between us isn't dead." "It is for me." I stood up suddenly. "We'll see -- " "How many times you can hit me, before a trooper comes through that door?' ' I clenched my fists, judging the distance. "The answer is, not many. Perhaps three." He looked at me steadily. "Perhaps even fewer." We stood there for a long moment and something seeped out of me. This was Tonji's game. He couldn't lose it -- otherwise he wouldn't be here, exposing himself this way. So the next move would have to wait. How long a wait it would be I didn't know, "Do not ask for the impossible." "Don't ask me to read your mind." "An attitude of -- " "Screw that." "I doubt that you realize your true position." "I believe I do." "Each officer is in fact a supplicant before the Fleet." "Again: screw that." "You have changed, Sanjen." "Just 'Sanjen'? No title?" "You have no title if I, if Fleet does not choose to reinstate you." "A point. Very well, what then?" "A Base Commandant position." "With attendant neighboring ship command?" "Yes, but that will be trivial. It is the Veden system." I paused. Veden was an eccentric case among the worlds -- a gigantic storage house for the Empire's trade goods, a way station that served the full #-parsec span of the Empire. "Why me?" "The past Commandant died -- natural causes, nothing unusual." "And you don't wish to replace him with a sorely-needed full line officer." Tonji made a thin, cynical laugh. "You do occasionally read matters well." I thought a moment. "My family..." "They cannot go, certainly." "They're ill, yes, but -- " "There is no sign of the Quam sickness on Veden. Perhaps the Hindics of Deven are immune -- " he shrugged -- "Who knows? But Fleet will not introduce cases into Veden." "That is an unusual hardship for a Commandant." "Who do you imagine you are, Sanjen?" Tonji rasped with surprising ferocity. I suddenly saw that beneath the mask he was a man under pressures that abraded him. "I should take what Fleet lets dribble from its fingers, then." "Poorly stated," Tonji said, clipping off the words sharply. "But true." Tonji said nothing. He stood rigidly, hands clasped behind him, the traditional waiting-warrior stance. I stood up. "I'll think about it." Tonji blinked, showing a slight flicker of surprise. These last few moments were the first in the conversation when he did not seem fully confident. "A jump vessel leaves soon which can easily make a pass by Veden. We need a replacement now. I believe -- " "I'll think about it," I said, and left. At first Angela was restrained, simmering, saying nothing until I asked her a direct question -- You do understand what I'm talking about, don't you ? -- and then as she warmed up, as the reality of my two days' absence became fullbodied in my telling of it (she had thought I was dead somewhere, or scrabbling like a demented animal in a Slot, or simply drifting, shambling, through endless shadowed corridors) the fear settled into her, her eyes seemed to bulge more with each detail I brought out, and the rage steamed up through her and she said, 'Wo. You're saying, you mean you'll just, just leave me? "It will enable you, the children, to have a better chance for recovery. Better care. Fleet will -- " "With everything outside collapsing? What use is thatT ' She rose up from her chair, balled both fists. "And there is duty. Mine. I need to go." "Do you care?" I stood silent, because in fact I didn't know. Did she? "No. No," she shook her head. "Perhaps it's not that simple -- " "After they took everything away from you?" "The past can't be corrected -- " I began, and felt a sudden flash of rage at myself. Tonji had made a similar, scuttling excuse. "You owe them nothing "You're right. I'm not talking about doing anything for them." "Then what -- " "The Empire... no, it's not even that. Humanity. I, I think something can still be done for some worlds. Veden, maybe. Then -- " "Ling, even if you believe that, how can you abandon us here?" "I think Earth is safe. For a while, anyway." "You don't know. No one does." "Right. But I have to follow my instincts." "Your instincts." She stood there, puffing slightly, her billowy house dress sighing slightly as it moved. "Saving Veden, whatever or wherever that is." She stopped again, just staring at me. Her upper lip was damp with perspiration. I didn't look at her eyes. "Ling, you're not going to do this." "No. I am." "You're not." "I'm... I'm cured now, Angela," I said, trying to get some warmth back into my voice, which had become dry and brittle. "Cured." "That makes a big difference. In what I can do. In what my duty is." "Is that it?" "What?" I wiped my brow, dazed. Even here in our apartment stench layered the air. "Is that why you're going?" A pause. "Ling?" "I... we'll talk again, later. I need time to..." "To what?" "To think, damn it!" I turned on her. "To think" So I slammed out of the apartment, banging the door hard enough to wake Chark and Romana, to go for a walk, yes a walk outside in the warming sun, to think, and though I did a lot of that in the days to come, I really never did understand why I was going, or what this meant to Angela and me, but one fact I never questioned: I was going, yes, of course, I was going. Take a ream of paper, heavy fiber, its threads of rag content webbing the slicked surface -- take in the right hand a riff through, a sheet at a time, listening to the snick as each edge scraped across your thumbprint, and then go faster, so the snicksnicksnick blurs into a high cry, like birds unseen above the clouds. There, that's it -- the way the hours went by as I began to prepare for Veden, to make myself once more into a dim glimmering of the Fleet officer I had once been. The hours snicked by me: Exercising. Running in the Fleet park, the Philippine forest hugging close to the pacing trails, animal calls punctuating my puffing silences. The Slots had thickened my waist, softened my arms, blurred my physical awareness. Updating. I was behind on Fleet policy, Fleet strategy, even tactical modifications. The Fleetwide Firetongue Stet had been changed, because of fears that the Quam had captured one. So the Stet in my apartment was useless now. I resolved to keep it, though. Maneuvering, Tonji was surprised when I called in to accept -- "I wondered if I would see you again, Sanjen," he said. I had to talk my way out of the usual attendance at Fleet ceremonials, the rewelcoming ritual, a reception. I had no desire to be pressed to the Fleet bosom. Husbanding. I took walks with them in the dim corridors of the Slots where we still lived. Linger. Listen. Wander. Wait. I could feel them struggling against the fears, the gripping anxieties that I was free of that now. Angela and the children balked at the new apartment I found them. She hung back, was unable to leave the bedroom for two days. Even when she mustered the strength, her mouth sagged awry like a gate off its hinges. Chark and Romana spent endless slack hours in front of the #D. Fathering, yes. If there was guilt here it was in the fathering. The world defines a brace of years for childhood; of parenthood there is no riddance. If I seemed to chafe under these scratching facts, it arose from my own impatience, once my unconscious had allowed my decision to float up into reality: to be off, gone, to stride the skies once more. Call it callous -- I did, repeatedly, and was as helpless to quell the guilt as a sunjammer is to slip free of the solar wind. I had, of course, the refuge of duty; a comfortable harbor. I settled there, finally, reasonably untroubled. For what, really, could I do for them unless they recovered? I grew up in the leafy abodes of rural slate. Chark and Romana, denizens of apartment and hallway, had been learning that their future would be a succession of riveting sixty-minute episodes, loaded with healthful educational snippets, all of which would make them appear heroic, compassionate, dutiful to the greater aims of humanity, and attractive to the opposite sex. Perhaps, in the end, it would be better for them to believe that, than to stare into the abyss I knew. Then living with Angela became easier. She had seen me cast off into high vacuum before as a convoy Captain; once convinced I was going, she rehearsed the litany she knew. Oddly, matters improved. We had had the sickness together for nearly a year; it invaded everything. In those times, at night she would lie, as often as not in a valley of damp sheets we made for ourselves by our own labors, her legs slack and obliging, a well to pump if anyone should wish. And I still did desire her, although I was well versed in this territoiy, a commuter where once I had been explorer. Somehow, the balance shifted when I resolved to go. After that, we no longer went to bed like dutiful laborers in a factory, bound to go and sweat. Instead we spent long hours, arguing first with diminishing fervor and, later, discovering a last saving grace note on the nowdim chord of marriage. I rediscovered old rhythms in her. Her surface was once again an intimate sweaty field of calluses, pores, a geography of wife with aged favorite hollows and valleys and moles, all places worn smooth by my eyes. There, and ah her thin black eyebrows would arch high and hang there, skin slick and electric. At times in our arguments she would simply repeat my name, head hanging, in a soft despair, a mutual funk, Ling, Ling, Ling and afterward, during our all-encompassing battering, a pocket of my mind would trip out a play on the the name, chimes in the night, Ling equals lingam. Though there was some verse to it, these times were still only spaces in a continuum, a zest for the known; Angela was still wife. (The word, the word -- Anglo-Saxon, wif , "woman". I wondered how different the Mongul culture would be had not English already become the effective world language before the Riot War. Thoughts of Old Nippon and the Mainland were couched in terms familiar to Shakespeare. A known language, a known wife, comforting. But that wasn't enough.) I saw Tonji once more. He had been chosen to deal with my reentry, since -- in the logic of Fleet -- he'd known my 'difficulties' in the past and would be able to assess my recovery. Even granted that, I saw no reason why he should formally hand me my Commandant materials, the new Firetongue Stet, and deliver the customary lecture. "I have little time," I said, cutting him off. "You can freeze-dry that pretty little speech." Tonji grimaced. An underling handed him the Fleet outbound file on Veden and he gave it to me. "Ah... one last point." "Yes?" I turned to go. "Your primary task is to stabilize Veden. Socially, I mean. We must keep the Flinger system intact and functioning." "Of course." "And... the Veden system is singular. The orbital dynamics, I mean. There may be some difficulty on planetary approach." "I accept risk." "Yes." Tonji smiled broadly and saluted. I thought nothing of it.  fO.I Gi I didn't get along well with the ship's officers on the long voyage out. The Sasenbo was a Prime Class vessel and I was dismayed to find it crewed by political appointees, leftovers, officers long on desk-savvy and short on discipline; or so they seemed to me. Most appeared motivated by a shrewd but stupid ambition; their primary concern seemed to be whether their socks matched. And there was no Sabal game. None. Not any more. After a few rude exchanges in the Officer's Mess I took to having meals in my room -- as a passenger, I could by rights. So I studied dispatches, read research summaries on the Quam, exercised, thought of Angela -- an odd sensation, despite our kernel of differences; abstinence makes the heart grow fonder -- and often walked the vast ship, studying her. I had seldom been on a Prime vessel. They all look like beach balls from the outside, threaded by one thick axis. The skin is dimpled by comm pods, weapons ports, sensors and, at each end of the protruding axis, skimmer ports. None of this is visible from inside, of course. The axis is the ship. People and other delicate items live at the center of the beach ball, inside the axial tube. The beach ball is filled with colloidal fluid -- fuel -- which shields out Jump radiation and other undesirables. The beach ball skin is flexible organiform, to adjust for varying fuel loads, and ordinary cargo hangs at regular intervals from the axis, wrapped in sacks to separate it from the colloids. You can see all this if you go to the full-G deck -- the outside deck of the axial tube. The view is murky because of the reaction fluid. You're standing on a transparent floor, peering down -- "out," really -- at a swampy universe. Blades of light from the axis cut shafts through it. Bags of cargo hang down into the colloids, kept aligned by the centrifugal tug of rotation. You can't see the organiform skin. It's too far away -- over two hundred meters. Anything you could see through would be pretty poor radiation shielding; you'd fry while playing tourist. That's all the scenery there is. Life evolves -- as far as we know -- on the surfaces of conveniently spherical planets, so if you look up, you look out. But in deep space "gravity" has to come from rotation, so the canonical geometry is the cylinder. Life creeps on at its petty pace inside the spinning cylinder, and overhead lies not infinity andor salvation, but the null-g point, the axis. Sasenbo ' s axis was eye, ear, nose, throat, alimentary canal and -- most important -- spine. The decks, A through K, were concentric cylinders rotating about the spine: bridge at A, excess storage at K. My cabin was on C. I exercised often in the axial gym, rebounding off rubbery walls in elaborate bank shots. I was there when the Sasenbo Captain summoned me. He was in his couch on the bridge deck, conferring with a dutiful crescent of lieutenants. One of them gave me a sour look as I approached and they dispersed. The Captain said, "Oh yes," distracted, and thumbed a fresh readout. "We were programming your drop." "I assume you can put me into a planetary ellipse?" He looked up, blinked with surprise. "No. Oh no. You know that." "Why not?" "Why, we aren't planning an intersection with Veden's orbit at all. You have to go through the Flinger." "What?" "Fleet informed you of this difficulty." "They sure as hell did not." "It's here -- in your briefing manifest." He waved at the readout. "General Tonji himself, I see." "He didn't mention it." The Captain frowned. "Odd. Well -- " he shrugged -- "it's not my affair." "It's impossible for a one-man craft to go through the Flinger." "No it isn't. Merely difficult. A precise maneuver." "Why can't you drop me near Veden?" "The gravitational potentials are too extreme, too variable. Probability of Jump failure -- not just for you, for us, the parent ship -- is unacceptable." "What's the uncertainty in my injection velocity?" He consulted his readout. "Thirteen kilometers per second." "Impossible!" He smiled mirthlessly. "Unavoidable. The potentials -- " "If I miss, the neutron star gets me." He nodded judiciously. "I would say. Certainly that's the most probable outcome." "Such a maneuver is not Fleet policy." "Correction: was not." "Is not. I -- " "Our error rate is high." He waved a hand at the long tube that was the bridge. "Fleet adopted new measures several months ago." "I could get killed." At the ceremony Tonji had smiled broadly. "So could we all,, if we tried for Veden itself. I imagine that's why so many officers turned down this particular assignment." "Others?" "Before you, I mean. Quite a few." I stood, breathing deeply for a long moment. "All line officers, I imagine." "Ummm. Yes." He was already pondering another display. "Too dangerous for them, I take it. Veden's the special case, you see -- nothing else in the Empire to match it for navigation mishaps. Before, with reliable Jump scanners, it wasn't so hard. But now -- " "Uh huh," I said. thought muzzily. The stars were big ones and I was a dwarf. Sasenbo was the cue, tapping me gently away. A classy richochet off Jagen, using gravity's soft brush. A bank shot. Once free, I'd surge out from the two stars, back to the life of straight lines and cozy causalities. Snick -- we're racing for the Veden pocket. It yawns. I drop pock into Newton's well. A good dream, yes. I floated up out of it. Three days, now, since I climbed in my pod and drifted up through Sasenbo ' s hollow axis. Past pale white skimmer craft in their berths, past storage bins and capped ports, past the storage sacks that hung outward from the axis, teardrop shaped, head down into the vast sphere of fuel fluid. Out, through the gaping jaws of the aft lock. Clamshell doors opened. Magnetic fingers plucked me forth, unhusking me, cupped a pocket of fields around me. Ting -- and the Jump flux rippled, expelling. Stars leaped into being. I took sightings, weighed vectors and momenta, nudged the pod this way and that. And dreamed. There was nothing else to do. By meditation I dropped my oxy consumption to allow some reserve at the other end of my carrom. But sleep stretched thin. I came drifting up, sandy-eyed, thirsty, lifting thumb-fingered my suit helmet shield -- Violet cut my eyes. I squeezed them shut. Polarizers buzzed. After a time I found it. Not through the port -- that I togged shut -- but on my screens. Lekki blotted out half of space, dark whirlpools churning her. Streamers gouged into naked blackness. Say F# star and it means nothing; stare at Lekki and tremble. Jagen made her more fierce, but the deep violet of her light still jabbed at my eyes, even over the screens. I felt a tug, now. A fleck of dust slowly coasted forward, past my hand, and pinned itself to a console key. Tides. Jagen. There: a dot appeared at Lekki 's rim and crawled across. The image warped. Detail of a vortex behind it flickered and faded as the dot moved. Jagen, the Black Dwarf. Neutron Being. Key to the Flinger. Nine klicks in diameter, massing a scratch below Sol, old and cold now. A supernova birthed it, probably, sending Lekki off the main sequence for a bit, but somehow not erasing the biosphere of Veden. Now Jagen whirled about Lekki, fast, incredibly fast -- a thousandth of light speed, my Doppler stuttered. A vast source of momentum. Fuzzy light haloed Jagen as it vanished around Lekki. Of course -- the gravitational potential at the neutron star's surface refracted light from Lekki, scrambling detail. A lens made from gravity. Refracting light yes; soon, refracting me. I fell. It was a simple process, really. Mr. Newton wouldn't have furrowed a brow over the Flinger; he spent only an evening, over port and snuff, on Leibnitz's mathematical challenges to the learned of Europe, and solved those without recourse to his methods of fluxions. An evening's entertainment, a mere warming of the frontal lobes after a day at the Royal Mint. Ah, Newton, be with me now: my pod fell obliquely toward the Lekki-Jagen system, intersecting the Jagen orbit smack-on, diving at the neutron star as it rushed toward me. I was to pass close to Jagen, on the face away from Lekki, dipping deep into Jagen's steep gravity well. With a nimble balancing of velocities, I'd weave through the Neutron Being's brutal pull, coyly allowing myself to be nearly captured, looping around Jagen, then breaking free. Escaping, I'd be on the side of Jagen facing Lekki. A turnabout. But by then Jagen would've stolen my speed, braking me from the Sasenbo's relative velocity down to a pedestrian planetary clip. In a sense, my aim was to undergo an elastic collision with the neutron star's gravitational field. It was like bouncing a ball off the rear fender of an express train. The ball came off with less velocity than it had before. The train -- ergo, Jagen -- gained a little. So went the armwaving, the theory. But Sasenbo had spat me out with # kmsec error in insertion velocity. I fought. I trimmed, vectored, scrabbled sidewise, deformed my smooth hyperbolas into squiggly new curves. My fuel burned away to nothing. Falling. Checking. Falling. And here it came -- Jagen, a dark fleck. Its fields stretched my pod, sucked at my feet. Blood rushed from my head. I felt floaty, thick-tongued, magical. The Black Dawrf reflected precious little light and shone a naked red, ancient, long shorn of its megaGauss magnetic fields. My own fields surged and built, batting away the sleeting protons which tried to riddle me. We wrapped around. Ping, click said my cabin. Something howled in the walls. Lekki loomed large. Below, huge rippling waves of plasma roiled and tossed, all at the beck of the little giant. Magnetic fields fought gravity. I groaned -- or was it the pod that spoke? Flecks darted at my edge of vision, my ears popped, confusion swam -- . Jagen plucked with masTh B attto For Andromeda -- Conflict tor  TrWon Sum -- the Award winning Galaxy-Foundation Sorias of inter connoctod Involving the entire Galaxy, utilizing the Omega ships, the single movel The ship is # miles across and the mere Outpoeta. Beacons, the use of Cloaking and Invisibility Devices. Histories, ships, and actions of Humanoid. Cyborg. Alien. Android. Robotoid. Clone, and other Super Civilizations that defy description! before! The series can be played by the purchase of only one Supplemental books are included In eech game tor the specific Battle Manual. This one book enables you to begin your study of the # projected games at a low cost without ever wasting your funds on duplication! This results In sB games already Manual (#). The following games are available below-, cost of Manual not included: The N Drtdd Invasions The Struggle to Crush the Dictators Warriors of the Dart Star;- the Age as Me Hei n e Warae is the exact workings of the Rays, Beams, M iss ilas. "L" projectors. Command and Pilot skills with one or two ships! Warriors of the Dark Star Battle Manual # Dual of the Sun Slayers # Vengeance Crusaders VS The Monads # War at the Star i l eve rs: two Giant Empires in both Military and maintain their MUttary Power and Wealth as wsN as be secure Rift Trooper -- # # Is Inspired by Meiniein and other greats taking # companies in separata cities # years to complete N. The result Is one of the fastest, action filled, realistic games ever made with rules unbekeveabiy easy to learn. Mobile Earth Infantry fight grotesque humanoids, insect Warriors and lizards  total game purchases) sive fingers at my sleeve, coaxing me down to her slick surface, where surely the crunch of electrons overcoming their own Fermi pressure and collapsing in onto protons, wedding to birth neutrons -- that crunch must ache, split the head, yea, neutrons pressing, pressing at a cc, sucking me through to stretch thin and spatter its skin and fry into gammas and x-rays, ah -- But no. The hand eased. Fingers slipped, caught, slipped again. And were gone. We backed away from the Black Dwarf. I sucked in cooling air. My hands, aching from hovering over the consoles, floated before the wrinkling screens. It was a forgiving universe. Even my own sweat smelled good. Nice try, Mr. Tonji, but no bronzer.    Ofkaipan. On the long swooping ride out to ! Veden, my alcohol store squandered in a grand celebration, I had ample time to mull over the word. It leaped to the frontal lobes, always ready. My parents had taught me what it meant, and then life had ground it in -- Better not go into that restaurant. You know -- embarrassed nudge of elbow. You quickly walk on. Shake hands at a reception, feel their slight cold withdrawal. The formal face smiles but the eyes, the eyes, they glitter. Tonji. Deliveries to your home are slow, poorly packaged. Insolent servants of your superior officers cast you a look, give you the quick up and down -- does he wear shoes? -- and smile, ever so slightly. They make a face behind your back; you catch it in a mirror. In a shop: Perhaps we can find something more suitable in here -- They lead you to a rack of marked-down merchandise, scruffy, out of fashion. With: I'm sorry, the Commandant is out. We don't kow when to expect him back. And: You realize, of course, there may be a delay in taking care of this matter. This office is very busy. Stares in crowds. Best not to go down that street. A look of Why did he come here? It was a general invitation, of course, but everybody knows -- It doesh't happen all the time. Just enough to keep you off balance. You never know when it's a natural mistake. That's the worst of it: never knowing for sure.    So I took it out, that old pain, and rubbed it some. The old scabs came off and pus oozed out -- so it wasn't healed, after all; were you surprised? -- and then blood, and flaky dead skin pulled away so I could see it clearly again. Old pains are the best. They age well, like wine. It looked as though I had a good crop. Some time passed. And so I put it back in its comer, and tried to forget for a while. Veden would be different. And enjoyed the long arc up and out.    galaxy TIm Foremost PwblkaHwi in Science Fiction Some Contributors Past and Present Pool Anderson Isaac Asimov Greg Benford C J Cherryh Arthur C Clarke Arsen Damay Jordon Eklund Harlan Ellison Frank Herbert Larry Niven Frederik Pohl Jerry Pournelle  Fred Saberhagen James Tiptree Roger Zelazny H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U.S. residents, enclose # here For other countries, enclose  I # for here  Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed find in payment for my subscription pi She knew who here enemies were -- but she wondered every now and then who she was. I his story must begin in the middle, because Rachel cannot remember the beginning. She does not want to remember the beginning. In the middle, which will serve as the beginning, Rachel was a grey bitch wolf wearing a collar that carried a radio transmitter. She was chasing a rabbit across a meadow high in the Sierra Nevada. The rabbit was two jumps ahead. It zigzagged around a clump of lupine. Rachel leapt the obstacle and gained ground. Her body was a grey streak, skimming above the ground, ears laid back, tail flying straight behind like a banner in a gale. The wind that fanned her face smelled of dust and terrified rabbit. A whine vibrated in her throat, broken by gasps of breath. The rabbit twisted in mid-leap, abruptly changing course to dart toward a patch of bracken ferns. Rachel twisted to follow, but the rabbit shot ahead -- two jumps, three jumps away. The scent of newly dug earth mingled with the scent of rabbit. And there was another scent -- a musky, canine smell mixed with the odor of old blood. A grey streak burst from the ferns. The rabbit dodged, leaping for safety in a freshly dug hole beneath a drooping fern. The grey streak intercepted; the rabbit squealed once -- a scream of pain and desperation. Rachel swerved to avoid colliding with the grey body that blocked her path. Nearly falling, she stopped in a scramble of dust. She shook herself, then stared into the bright eyes of the stranger who had stolen her prey, the bright eyes of Death. Death was a bitch with a grizzled coat and a muzzle stained dark with the blood of the rabbit. The strange wolf dropped the dead rabbit and stood over it, staring back at Rachel. She stood taller than Rachel -- big boned, broad shouldered. But her coat was frosted with white and Rachel knew that under the stain of blood, her muzzle was touched with white. The elements had weathered this wolf as they had weathered the granite peaks that surrounded the meadow, wearing away the cover to reveal the underlying structure. Age had stripped away the wolfs muscle, thinned her fur, and revealed the outline of the bones beneath. One ear was ragged, ripped in a long-ago fight. The other ear was laid back against the animal's head, so that the bright eyes seemed to glare from an earless head, a canine skull. Somewhere in the forest that surrounded the meadow, a jay screeched -- just once -- then fell silent as if admonished by an older and wiser entity that this scene should be silent. Silent and scented with dust and hot blood. Rachel eyed the dead rabbit that lay at the old wolf's feet. That should have been her kill. The old wolf had taken it from her. The smell of fresh blood burned in her nostrils, but Rachel moved slowly, circling the old wolf cautiously. When the old wolf pivoted to follow, she betrayed a weakness. She favored one front paw. From the look of it, the paw had been injured recently, and the wound had broken open when the wolf leaped after the rabbit. Rachel glared at the old wolf. Her enemy was wounded -- she could reclaim her kill. The old wolf stared back. Rachel tensed, ready to attack. Wait. A memory darted across her mind. She recognized the old wolfs eyes from the world of the beginning. She remembered.    Eyes like granite pebbles set in a human face. Eyes like the eyes of a Sierra peak if a mountain had eyes. Hard. Flinty. Unyielding. Eyes that said: "You can't move me." The face was a woman's, but it would have looked better on a man. Time had touched the woman's hair with grey, but it had not tamed the fierce eyebrows nor smoothed the rocky crag of a nose, the jagged cliff of a chin. If those eyes could cry, a network of wrinkles would conduct the tears away, a great river system of tiny grooves and deep ravines. But those eyes could not cry. You cannot squeeze water from a stone. The eyes blazed from that mountain of a face, saying: "I know who you are. I know what you are. You are a fool and a coward. You've come this far, now do what you came to do."    A whimper escaped Rachel's throat and she fought the panic that made her legs tremble with the need to run. Involuntarily, she took a step backward and turned her head away from the ancient eyes that had triggered the memory. The old wolf growled, asserting her dominance, and Rachel cringed, remembering the look in the eyes of the old woman. She had to obey the command in the eyes of the woman. She must do what she came to do. But what had she come to do? She looked up when she heard the old wolf pick up the rabbit and stalk away. The wolf limped. Each time the wounded paw touched the ground, it left a spot of blood. Blood welled from a score of fine parallel gashes that started just below the knee joint and extended down the leg and across the top and pads of the paw. Rachel stared at the wound, and a memory flickered in her mind. A picture: the steel jaws of a device designed to mangle an animal's leg without capturing the animal. A series of pictures joined the first one. A shadowy human figure set the trap. A grizzled wolf trotted into the jaws of the trap, then limped away. The human figure returned with another human. The two followed the wounded wolf, and overtook her. One human pointed a rifle at the wolf; there was a flash of fire, and the wolf lay dead. Fleeting memories of words accompanied the pictures and slowly, Rachel pieced the two together. Poachers. The trapper was a woodsman who guided city sportsmen to an assured kill. The trap made tracking and pursuit easy. A sense of urgency nagged at Rachel and she whimpered in confusion. The air stank of blood, and in her mind, the last scene repeated: the flash of fire and the dying wolf. First, the dying wolf was a grizzled bitch. Then the picture flickered, and the dead animal was a young grey wolf wearing a collar that carried a radio transmitter. Rachel shook her head to clear it, and the collar shifted in the fur of the neck. The old wolf had settled in the shade of an ancient bracken fern to tear at the flesh of the rabbit. At Rachel's movement, she looked up to growl and met Rachel's eyes. A flicker, a change in the light, a shift in the impulses of the mind, and Rachel stared into the eyes of the old woman. No, not the eyes, the reflection of the eyes glimpsed in the shiny steel jaw of a trap. The eyebrows were fierce, and the voice boomed like the rumble of boulders at the start of a rock slide. "You ask me why I keep this thing here. Simple. Know your enemies." The hand that grasped the trap gestured with it and the reflection of the eyes shifted. The old woman was talking to a young man, a red head, and her voice seemed to carry a meaning beyond that conveyed by the words. "I keep it around to remind We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which wilt file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. me of who my enemies are." Rachel shivered and the memory faded. But the words seemed to echo in her mind: "Know your enemies." It was a command from the old woman, and Rachel had to follow it. She would backtrack along the old wolfs trail, meet the enemy, then wait for another memory to guide her. The old wolf was ripping scraps of meat free from the bloody mess that had once been the body of the rabbit. Rachel ignored her. She circled the patch of bracken ferns, found the old wolfs trail, and followed it to the pine forest that surrounded the meadow. The trail was easy to follow -- it was marked with the scent of dried blood. Rachel trotted through the grass with her head held high to sample the wind, and still had no fear of losing the track. The shade of the forest held no colors. The trees were black; the spots of sunlight that filtered through the trees touched the forest mocking her from the branch of a pine was a soft shade of grey. She paused in the shade, disturbed by the lack of color, and blinked back into the sunlight meadow. The entire world was black and white -- the sky was light grey; the mountains were the shade of weathered bone; the grass was black. Rachel realized that the trouble was not in the world, but in herself. Her eyes were not equipped to see color -- but she recalled what color was. She knew that the grass should be green and the sky should be blue. She knew the colors, yet her eyes did not see them. She blinked again, and the disturbing memory of colors slipped away. She trotted through a black and white world and it was the only world she knew. The litter of pine needles was soft beneath her feet. The wind carried intriguing odors -- the musty fragrance of deer droppings, the reek of a marmot den, the sour scent of lupine blossoms. She was glad to be travelling in a familiar world, following the old woman's orders. She climbed out of the forest onto a dry ridge where the wind had scrubbed the dry earth clean. A miniature forest of scrub oak and manzanita clung to the side of the ridge. Rachel followed the old wolfs track through the brush along a trail blazed by rabbits and deer. At the foot of the ridge, a mountain stream that had been burned almost dry during the summer chuckled to itself in anticipation of the coming winter rains. In the tall grass that grew on the stream bank, Rachel found a spot where a gaunt grey body had rested, a hollow crushed in the grass and spotted with blood. The track was fainter on the other side of the hollow -- the scent had been washed by more than one morning's dew. But the smell of blood was strong -- the old wolf had walked this when her wound was fresh. The wind shifted, blowing from the direction from which the old wolf had come. The acrid scent of burnt tobacco tickled Rachel's nose, and she froze in place, caught by a memory of the world of the beginning.    A laboratory. She lay strapped to a table in a laboratory that reeked of disinfectant and tobacco smoke. A red headed man -- what was his name, she could not remember his name -- leaned over her and peered into her eyes. He was smoking a pipe. She wanted to complain that the smoke bothered her, but she could not speak. He moved his head out of her field of vision, and she felt the cold touch of a needle against her arm. It did not hurt when the needle slipped under the skin -- nothing could hurt her. She tried to ask the red head "How long have I been here?" But she could not move her lips. She could not make a sound. The wolf that lay in the cage beside her whimpered. She could not turn her head to look, yet she knew there was a cage beside her, she knew the cage held a grey female wolf, she knew the wolf wore a helmet designed to hold thousands of electrodes against the animal's skull just as she wore a helmet that held electrodes against her skull. And she knew that the wolf wore a collar that carried a radio transmitter. Rachel felt the man pull the needle from her skin and heard his footsteps moving away. She tried to call after him, "Wait. Explain. Tell me why I'm here." She could not speak. The wolf in the cage beside her growled.    Rachel blinked and the memories darted away like minnows in a forest pool. But the sense of urgency that the memory had carried with it remained. She had been very close to the beginning. She knew who she was -- a woman in the body of a wolf. But she did not know why. The scent of tobacco had been mellowed by at least a day of wind and dew, but Rachel advanced along the old wolf s trail cautiously. In a clearing, she found the spot where the man-stench blended with the smell of blood. In the center of a patch of crushed grass, the old  wolf had been caught and had struggled free. Rachel sniffed the grass, then sneezed to clear her nose of the foul smell. A man had knelt here less than a day before. He had sat in the grass and leaned against a tree while he smoked a cigarette. On the other side of the clearing, Rachel found the faint trail left by the old wolf before she was caught. She cast about in the brush at the edge of the clearing, until she found the spot where the man had entered the clearing and left again. The man smell was strong, drowning out the scent of broken bushes and trampled grass. He had passed this way to set the trap, then returned to check it. He would be back, Rachel was sure of that. She stood on the edge of the clearing, waiting for a memory to touch her and tell her what to do next. But the wind carried the scent of quail and her stomach reminded her of the rabbit that had been snatched from under her nose. She cocked her ears and listened to the whispers in the brush. There! The peep of a young bird and the reassuring cry of its mother. Rachel stalked silently toward the sound, keeping her nose in the wind. She paused by a manzanita bush and peered through its brittle branches. A mother quail and her chicks scratched and pecked at the dry grass in a sunny clearing. One chick strayed away from her mother, hopping toward the manzanita bush. The mother bird clucked to the chick, then started to follow it. Two leaps carried Rachel to the mother quail and a single bite snapped the birds neck. The chicks scattered like leaves before a gale, and Rachel let them run. The body of the quail dangled from her jaws, and Rachel tasted blood through the feathers. She stood in a sunny clearing in the Sierras and remembered the taste of a rare steak.    The restaurant smelled of coffee and tobacco smoke. The red-headed man across the table talked around the pipe in his mouth. Jacob -- that was his name -- she could never tell him that she had briefly forgotten his name or he would give her the look that said: "Old woman, you are getting senile." "I talked to Jefferson, the researcher who did the transfer to a chimp," Jacob said. "He said it was of only marginal utility." She did not speak; she calmly sliced another bite of steak and let the young man talk. She could hear the tension building in his voice. He talked a little faster than usual. A casual observer would not have noticed the change, but Rachel had made a study of this young man in the three piece suit. She made him nervous. Rachel made many people nervous, but she made Jacob more nervous than most. He wanted her respect -- but he also wanted to take over her lab. "Imprinting a completely new pattern on a test animal takes much longer than emphasizing an existing pattern," Jacob continued. "And you won't be able to work during that time." Still silent, she looked up from her plate and met his eyes. A lesser man would have flushed, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was lecturing her with information that she had taught him. Jacob managed an affable chuckle, a laugh at himself -- "Here I am telling you about the technique you had a hand in perfecting." She recognized the flattery. She had not really helped perfect the technique; that was a job for neurophysiologists. She understood it, and she had been one of the first to use it when she had trained wolves for the army. It was not difficult to understand how it worked. Nerve cells, including the cells in the brain, transmit messages with weak electric currents. Any current generates an electric field. A field can be recorded and duplicated. And a duplicate of the field created by a current will generate a duplicate of the original current. By generating a specific field around an animal's brain and repeatedly stimulating a specific neurological pathway, she had caused that pathway, that thought, to become habitual in the test animal. Researchers had used the same technique to imprint a personality on an animal's brain. A person's thought patterns, over a period of time, had to be recreated on an animal's brain. Thousands of pathways had to be stimulated. Imprinting would be a tedious process. It would mean wasting at least a month of precious research time drugged and flat on her back. Two weeks to imprint her personality on the wolf; two weeks to absorb the memories and impressions that that personality had gained during its time in the wild. The technique was more than likely useless as far as learning about the behavior of wild canines, or learning anything of use to the army training program. Yet she was determined to go through with it. She had even chosen the wolf she would use -- the same grey bitch she had trained for field tests for the army. Jacob was still talking about the researcher who had imprinted his personality on a chimp. "He said that he forgot important things and remembered trivial ones. He said 'You might remember this conversation, yet forget why you were there.' " Jacob was right -- a successful personality imprint did not necessarily mean a successful transfer of memories. But that did not matter. She knew that she would use her army connections to gain funding; she would stake her reputation as a scientist on an experiment that was bound to fail. And she would not admit why -- not even to herself.    The smell of tobacco smoke faded, and Rachel stood in a sunny clearing with a dead quail in her jaws. Far away in the brush, she heard the peep of a quail chick, an orphan left to wander without direction. Rachel had some direction -- she was to study the ways of the wolf. That was the reason the experiment had been funded, that was its stated purpose. It was not the real purpose. That was not urgent; that would not nag and plague her. That was not linked to the ancient eyes of the wolf nor to the woman with the eyes of a mountain. Rachel dropped the quail and lowered her head to nose it. The collar tugged at the fur on her neck and she remembered that Jacob had insisted on the collar and the radio transmitter. If she did not return to the spot where she had been released in three days, the transmitter would emit a continuous signal, and the lab crew would track her and recapture her. She could remember that, but she could not remember why she had come. She quit trying, and tore at the quail, gulping meat and skin and feathers. The sound of a snapping twig interrupted her. She tested the wind. The man had returned with a companion and a dog. She abandoned the remains of the quail and stalked toward the men. She followed them, close enough to hear their conversation, yet far enough behind so the dog would not hear her. She could not understand all the sounds the men made. But they skimmed the surface of her mind and triggered pictures, or feelings, or thoughts. "I thought you said it was only a couple of miles," one man complained. "The dog should be picking up the trail real close to here," the other man said. "Sure seems like more than just a few miles." The man forced a chuckle. "All these bushes sure slow a man down." "Sure, Mr. Dryer." The dog picked up the trail and began a hoarse, anxious whining as he tugged at the leash. "He's on the trail," the trapper's voice remarked with satisfaction. "See. There's a print." "Damn, that's a big one." "I told you he was big." The dog whimpered, choking himself against the collar, and the men stopped talking. They pushed their way through the brush and Rachel paced beside them, listening to the whining of the dog and the puffing of the men. They travelled slowly. It was late afternoon, and they would not reach the meadow that day. Restlessness prodded Rachel, and she broke into a trot, passing the men downwind. She moved quickly, tirelessly, using travel as a substitute for thought because she did not know what to think. These men had triggered no memories in her. They were not part of the reason she was here. She was confused. She had come close to remembering the beginning of the tale, but she had failed. The sun was setting when she reached the meadow. The old wolf was easy to find. She lay where Rachel had left her -- in the same spot, in almost the same position. When Rachel approached, the old wolf lifted her head to stare at her. Almost against her will, Rachel stared back, meeting the ancient eyes, hoping to jar a memory that would tell her the beginning of the tale. The old wolf growled, and Rachel continued to stare. What was it about the eyes? The old wolf lunged -- a low leap powered by a single thrust of the animal's hind legs. With the full force of the lunge, she crashed into Rachel's shoulder, bowling her over. Before Rachel could regain her feet, the old wolf leaped away, and stood ready to renew the attack. Rachel remained on the ground. She bared her neck to the old wolf's fangs and flattened her ears in a gesture of appeasement. Her body knew the gestures. She had felt uneasy every time she stared into the old wolf's eyes because her body remembered, even if her mind forgot, that a direct stare was a direct challenge to the old wolfs dominance. Rachel rolled to her stomach and glanced cautiously at the old wolf. Blood stained the fur of the wounded leg; the gashes had broken open when the wolf had leaped at her. The wind had died with the coming of dusk. The air was oppressively warm and still, like the air in a room that has not been opened for years. The smell of blood hung over the bracken patch. Rachel could hear the droning of a fly, buzzing in lazy circles over the carcass of the rabbit. Rachel did not remember the past. She did not want to remember the past. She listened to the fly sing the praises of dead rabbits and riiaggots, and she projected scenes from one possible future.  Scene one -- two men stood in a meadow, their pants wet to the knees from trudging through the grass that was wet with morning dew. The fat man held a rifle, the thin man he'ld the leash of an anxious dog. A grizzled bitch wolf stood at bay in a patch of bracken ferns. The fat man raised the gun. A flash of fire, and a dead wolf lay in the grass. Later, a fly buzzed over the carcass of a bitch wolf, stripped of its grizzled fur. Scene two -- a courtroom. The air was hot and still and scented with dust. Rachel stood in a witness stand and pointed at two shadowy figures. A fat man with a rifle. A thin man who held a shiny steel trap. Rachel knew them -- Mr. Dryer and the trapper. She would see them fined and imprisoned for killing a protected predator. Rachel heard the voice of the old woman with the granite visage rumble through the courtroom. She was saying something about her enemies, know your enemies. Rachel would know her enemies. She would memorize their faces when they killed the old wolf. From where she lay, Rachel watched the old wolf limp back to her resting place. She deserved a better death. She did not deserve to die at all. But few got what they deserved. Rachel watched the old wolf lick the bloody leg -- cleaning out the gashes, then cleaning them out again. The last light of the sunset faded, and the moon rose. A full moon -- its light gleamed on the wet fur of the injured paw. It did no good to lick the wound, yet the old wolf licked it again and again. There was nothing to be done, so she did the only thing she knew. Rachel could feel a memory stirring, rising to the surface of her mind. She could smell a memory over the reek of the rabbit's blood, and she did not like the scent. The old wolf looked up and met Rachel's eyes, but Rachel glanced away. She stretched to her feet, and her legs felt stiff and tired. She turned away from the old wolf and stalked out of the bracken patch, away from the smell of blood and death. Bats flew over the meadow, dipping and fluttering in pursuit of night insects. As elusive as memories. Rachel raised her head to watch them, and met the eyes of the pock-marked old woman who lived in the moon. Before she could look away, she remembered.    The eyes were gray granite pebbles in a granite face. The woman with the eyes of a mountain. She stared at Rachel intently, as if puzzled by what she saw. The fierce eyebrows formed question marks. A pane of glass separated Rachel from the old woman. A window, Rachel thought, leaning forward to peer out past the old woman. And the old woman leaned forward to block the view. Not a window, Rachel realized. A mirror. The granite eyes were her own. The room smelled of medicines and disinfectant. Rachel sat before a dressing table mirror. Her legs ached with a steady persistent pain -- as if they had always hurt and they always would hurt. Her eyes felt gritty and tired, but she knew from experience that sleep would not refresh them. They were tired of opening each morning to face the world, and only the final sleep would end their pain. Her body was wearing out, and she had to live with the slow decay. She knew why she had fought for grant money with all her reputation, why she had insisted on being the one to transfer, why she had claimed a new understanding essential to the training of wolves could be gained from an uncontrolled experiment. She had wanted to run again. She had wanted to see the world clearly, not thorugh the fogs of age. The eyes in the mirror, her own grey eyes, blazed with anger and despair.    The pock-marked face of the old woman who lived in the moon glared down at the young wolf. The wolf tilted her head back to shout defiance at the bitch in the moon and her cry rose with a wail and ended with a sob that sounded almost human. Lonely, lonely, alone -- the wail echoed across the meadow and vibrated ' among the granite peaks. The echoes died -- and across the meadow, another voice cried to the moon. And somewhere in the jountains, a chorus of demons answered the cry The wolves that hid in the weathered granite peaks were cursing the moon's pale face. Rachel was young, but her body was dying. And she was condemned to watch an aged sister die from the shot of a poacher's gun. She tilted her head and the moonlight filled her throat and she howled to the moon and waited for the dawn.    The sky began to cry just before dawn, a steady drizzle that drove Rachel to take cover in the pine forest. The men arrived long after dawn. The dog pulled the guide forward and the guide cursed the dog. The fat man lagged behind and cursed the guide for walking too fast. The guide slipped in the mud by a patch of lupine, and the dog pulled, and he fell to his knees. He got up cursing the rain, cursing the dog, cursing the day. Rachel followed them, taking cover behind clumps of lupine and fern. The dog spotted the old wolf first and changed his panting for a .desperate yelping. The old wolf did not stand to greet them. She lay motionless beneath a dripping fern. For a moment, Rachel thought that she might already be dead, then she raised her head to glare at the men and their yapping dog. "There's your wolf," snarled the guide. "Shoot him and let's get on back." The fat man looked at the wolf and then at the guide. "But he's just lying there. "'He licked his lips nervously. "Is it sporting to shoot a wolf that's just lying there?" The guide laughed. "I got you a wolf -- you want me to prop him on his feet for you too? Shoot him lying down -- I don't care." The guide turned away to yank on the leash and drag the dog toward him. "Shut up you stupid hound." The fat man looked at the wolf and reluctantly took one step closer. He stared at the wolf as he raised his rifle. The old wolf lunged, ready to fight the staring eyes that challenged her dominance. The fat man shot wild, and the wolf was on him. The first rush knocked him down in the mud, and the wolf was at his throat. The guide could not shoot without hitting the man -- he kicked at the wolf. Blood spurted from the fat man's throat and Rachel caught the scent of hot blood. The guide shouted once when Rachel hit him from behind. He rolled, and for a moment, his hands caught her throat and gripped the collar. He held her away by gripping the thin metal strand. And the tug of the collar reminded her that she was human, she was not a wolf, she was an old woman doomed to die in bed. She refused to die. She fought against Death and he screamed, a hoarse cry like a curse that never ended. She lunged. The safety catch on the collar snapped. She reached his throat and stopped the scream. The meadow was quiet. The fat man lay still and the old wolf stood over the body. The hound had run away into the pine forest. Rachel nosed the body -- it wasn't Death at all, just a thin man with a bitter face. The raindrops landed gently on his face and trickled down his cheeks, washing away the blood. He still clung to the band of metal that held the metal box of a radio transmitter. The lab could not track her. They could find this meadow, but they could not find the grey female wolf, they could not return Rachel to the dying body she had abandoned. The old woman might hunt for Rachel, but she wouldn't find her. Rachel knew how the old woman's mind worked, she would know how to avoid her traps. In her mind, she heard an echo of the woman's bass rumble: Know your enemies. The lab would be ruined and the old woman would retire. Jacob, the ambitious redhead, would be left to dominate the ruins, lord of nothing. Rachel grinned suddenly. Could it be that die old woman had planned that Rachel should escape? Had she really planned to return to that old body? Or had the old woman figured that by transferring her personality to a wolf she could ruin her successor while allowing her own personality to continue after her death? It was possible. Rachel would have to consider the possibility at length when she had the time to sort the old woman's thoughts from her own. Rachel turned away from the bodies and touched noses with the old wolf for the first and last time. She glanced at the wolf's injured paw -- it was not bleeding. When the wolf stalked away to her resting place, she limped, but the paw did not bleed. The old wolf would heal. She too would survive. Rachel trotted across the meadow, heading for the high country. The rain would wash away her trail and she would lose herself in the weathered granite bones of the world. She did not look back. And somewhere in the Sierras, a grey bitch wolf with uneasy memories chases rabbits and howls at the moon. She dreams sometimes of the beginning, remembering a granite faced woman with the eyes of a wolf.  Hot diggity dawg! I am so excited I can hardly stay in my seat. Which, when you come to think of it, is a pretty strange reaction to my having been to a scientific engineering conference, namely the tion Energy Conversion; or is it? Before I'm through with this column, I hope to have you jumping out of your chairs too. The conference title doesn't tell much; but look at the session titles, and maybe it will begin to dawn: "Laser Energy Conversion; Space Solar Power, Radiation Enhanced Chemistry; Solar Pumped Lasers." No? Well, I admit that the bare titles didn't exactly turn me on, either. I did have to attend: so far as I know I published the first science fiction story in which spacecraft are launched by ground-based lasers ("High Justice", which is included in the book by the same name, available from Pocket Books if you haven't bought it yet) and one paper was to be on laser' powered spaceflight. If that wasn't enough, there were also papers on solar-power satellites, and given my interest in both energy and space they were impossible to pass up. Those papers were excellent, and I'll tell you about them in due time; but the real kicker was presented by Kenneth Sun, a graduate student at the University of Washington, the paper itself co-authored with his professor. Dr. Abraham Hertzberg. It was called "Laser Aircraft Propulsion," and who'd have thought it would be the liveliest thing I've heard all, year? But it was. One of the problems with advocating space exploration is answering the question "Yes, but how can we make any money out of it? How can investments be paid off? Don't tell me about new knowledge and all that, or about pie-in-the-sky fifty years from now; what I want to know is, how can we profit in a reasonable time?" And the answer to that one is hard to come up with. As I discussed in the column on space industries, we have a number of concepts that look good to make money: manufacture of exotic materials such as high-coercive-strength magnets, something easy to do in zerogravity and very costly here on Earth; biochemical research; and of course space power beamed down to Earth -- but every one of those is a "maybe" because of the unknown costs and unpredictable market for the products. (Energy will have a predictable market, but the cost of space power satellites is so huge compared to the same costs for kilowatts here on Earth that you Come now Sun and Hertzberg to give an answer to that question. We'll pay for space satellites by using them to power airplanes; and the savings will come in money we don't have to pay the Arabs for kerosene (otherwise known as jet fuel). Sun and Hertzberg are quite serious -- and their concept uses nothing but off-the-shelf technology. The airplane is a present-day machine; by a coincidence that hardly surprises you, the Seattle team studied a Boeing airplane. The aircraft is just barely modified: the regular engines and fuel tanks are left intact. The tail (vertical stabilizer) is twinned for reasons which will be obvious in a moment; otherwise the only modification is the addition of a new engine on top of the fuselage. The engine looks like a regular turbofan jet engine, except that in the middle, where the combustion chamber would be if it ran on kerosene, they've placed a big boxlike heat exchanger. The top of the heat exchanger is a laser target. Laser energy shines onto the target; heat goes into the system; air comes in from the front through a compressor, and is heated, just like in a regular jet engine, except that instead of getting the heat from burning kerosene it gets it from the heat exchanger -- and lo, the airplane flies. It takes off under normal kerosene power. It carries aboard enough fuel to go some # kilometers if it loses the laser power. It lands with its usual engines. True, there's a bit of drag from the additional engine up on top, but the reduced fuel load more than compensates. Understand, Sun and Hertzberg have made no attempt to optimize the system. They have taken an existing aircraft and (on paper -- no working model yet) modified it. Everything is to be kept simple. Kerosene at present sells for about # a gallon. It is hardly unrealistic to assume that within a few years the price will be # a liter, or about # a gallon. Thus the saving is significant, given what a jet plane consumes while flying. The effect on the upper atmosphere is all to the good, too. There's no contrail from the exhaust. No exhaust. No water vapor to form clouds. No oxides of nitrogen. Nothing but hot air. Fine. Where are they getting the laser power? From a satellite. A very dumb satellite. The power plant is nothing but a vast grid, something like three kilometers by one kilometer, covered with presently-available solar cells operating at present efficiencies of such. At each end of the satellite is a very large CO # laser, with mirror for steering so that it can track the aircraft. The airplane has a small laser for "handshaking" communication with the satellite, thus aiding the satellite in tracking its target. And that's the system. Everything, including the laser, is offthe-shelf. This being an unclassified conference there wasn't and couldn't be much discussion of the big military lasers we all know exist; but nobody seriously doubts that a laser of the proper power could be built. The satellite is a grid of carbonfilament structure, nothing difficult to build. It can be rolled or folded up in segments and carried in the Shuttle. The grid, partly assembled on Earth, can be unrolled -- if you've never seen some of the new carbon-filament stuff, you'd be amazed at how strong it can be and yet roll up like whalebone -- once after which it is covered with solar cells. The electricity generated by the cells is used to drive an ion engine -- also off-the-shelf -- which takes the satellite up to geosynAnd here's where the excitement comes in. At presently advertised price) the whole project comes to considerably less. Sun estimates inventor of Poumelle's Law of Costs and Schedules ("Everything Takes Longer and Costs More") I have me doubts about that figure, but it's good ballpark range. 'And -- each satellite, powering only two aircraft per satellite, pays for itself in fuel savings alone in about thirty years. in less than thirty years; that's no longer a big government program. That's the kind of thing utilities are used to. True, utilities want more plant than just to get the money back; they want profits; but -- It's at this point that entreprenurial skil comes in. As G. Harry Stine says in his Third Industrial Revolution, somebody's going to get rich in space. There will be new exploitation, just as there were aircraft industry, and from electronics. If a space project of this magnitude can pay for itself with an assured market -- and it's inconceivable that the need for jet travel will decrease in coming years -- then the profits can be left to "fallout" benefits. After all, anybody who thinks hard about the situation knows that once space operations become routine, there will be a number of profitable lines. The magnet manufacture, for example, is a certain winner if you've got a space station in orbit to begin with; die doubt is whether the magnets can pay for the cost of building the station. And the same is true for other commercial concepts. No one of them is certain to pay for the costs of the system -- and nobody wants to get into a number of disparate lines of business, each needed so that the total sum of their incomes will pay for the huge investment. Business doesn't work that way. But here we have a way to pay for the station, so that the fallout discoveries are pure profit. And at the same time we advance technology, and reduce payments for foreign oil. If some private firm doesn't leap at this, you'd think the government would. If it appeals to you, write your Congressperson -- I'm sure no one in Congress has heard of this scheme. If all that wasn't enough, there was also Wayne Jones of Lockheed, whose paper was on laser energy relay units. If you have your power source in lose power. Not too good. If you must be exceedingly tightly focussed or you're losing energy. Sun and Hertzberg know this, but they've eaten the extra cost to keep the system simple. The Lockheed group, however, has studied another way. You put but then you have several relay stations, which are nothing more than This reduces the total mass to orbit and cuts system costs. Relays give other options, too. Remember my column on Jim Baen and his electric spaceships? Well, the concept is being looked at; but the laser people think that instead of beaming power for orbitto-orbit transfer with microwaves, which take very large antennae, why not use lasers? Thus the Earth could be powered by a big solar-cell array which doesn't go anywhere, with the energy sent by laser. It's all very practical. It can work, and by that I don't mean that someday we'll be able to make it work -- I mean it can work with what we have right now. Either the Sun-Hertzberg "dumb" system or the more sophisticated relay system could be started right now, carried to orbit by Shuttle payloads, and got into operation a few years after the Shuttle begins routine flights. It could be that close. And if by now I haven't got you excited. I've failed; because just writing about this makes me want to run out and shout at people. It can happen. Right now, in our lifetimes. And think of the fallout benefits: -- learning how to assemble large structures in space; -- orbit-to-orbit transfer capabilities; -- a space "construction shack". There are a lot of others, of course. Scientific observations. As Phil Morrison told me last year, it's insane not to study the Sun; and the best way to do that is to get out there where you can see what's going on. But ignoring all those and just looking at the business opportunities, you can see mountains of payoffs. Now what about the drawbacks? There are some, of course. First, you're dealing with gigaWatts. The University of Washington laserpowered aircraft uses a # gigaWatt laser power satellite. That's a lot of Watts to play with, and a big laser. What if it misses the airplane? Well, it won't bum down Cleveland. It might start a fire, although the damage wouldn't be one tenthousandth of the damage sustained by a crashing airplane. Matter of fact, because the aircraft are carryScience Fiction by women about women Those "Women of Wonder" are back! But unlike the first two volumes, this new collection focuses on the contemporary, more overtly feminist generation of writers whose stories address women's issues directly. A Vintage Original. #, paperbound, now at your bookstore. nrQm Recent Science Fiction Edited, with an introduction and notes by Vintage Books  A division of Random House ing so much less fuel on takeoff -- and # of all aircraft accidents are within five minutes of takeoff or landing -- if one does crash, the damage will be enormously less; and because of the reduced takeoff weight, the chances of accidents on takeoff are much reduced. Then too, the frequency of the laser can be carefully selected so that the power will reach the airplane -- it will not fly under laser power until it is at high cruising altitude -- but can't reach the ground underneath. The atmosphere is pretty good at absorbing energy. Also, don't forget that the beam sweeps across the ground at something above the speed of the airplane, so that it's moving awfully fast. But you do have a "sungun" in orbit, and in theory I suppose some madman could modify it to do considerable damage to the countryside below. Now by considerable damage I mean something comparable to an aircraft loaded with chemical bombs, understand. I don't even mean comparable to crashing a fully-loaded #; or at least I don't think so. And if the beam is constructed to radiate in frequencies that won't hit the ground, it is no simple matter to modify that laser to another frequency. Certainly that wouldn't be done secretly by one crackpot. It would take the entire satellite crew, and some of the ground personnel as well, all in a conspiracy. And come to that -- it doesn't take all that great a conspiracy to bum down a city with gasoline. Adding the satellite hasn't given potential terrorists any capability they don't have now, although it does give them a theoretically more spectacular one. On the other hand, one suspects it would be harder to enlist the satellite crew in such a conspiracy than it would be to subvert, say, the night watchman at a dynamite factory. Effects of adding that energy to the upper atmosphere? Unpredictable. But we already add it, along with exhaust gasses, when we fly a conventional jet plane, so it's unlikely the laser will do more harm, and there's a lot of good reason to believe it will do none at all. So much, then, for laser-powered aircraft. They'll work, we can afford them -- remember one satellite controlling two and only two aircraft will pay for itself even at # a gallon kerosene, and the concurrent benefits are incalculable but great. I love the idea. I hope somebody with the wherewithal to finance them will too. Now what of "my" laserpowered spacecraft? (I hasten to add that I did not invent the concept; the A. N. Pirri and R. F. Weiss, working on a concept which seems first to have been studied by A. R. Kantrowitz; I had their paper in front of me when I wrote High Justice.) They'll work. At least that's the latest thinking. True, I seem to have made a mistake: the color of the laser is likely to be ruby red, from a COz laser, rather than blue-green as I have in my stories; and the launch site is likely to be a couple of thousand feet above sea level rather than down on the flat plains of Baja where I put it. Otherwise I seem to have got it pretty straight. (There is not far from the Baja site I used for "my" launches a high plateau; purists may imagine that the launches happen there. Baja, with its tropic location and uninhabited areas to the east remains a good site.) I've described the concept before, and won't go much into detail here. Basically, one takes a capsule massing in the order of a metric ton and beams a lot of laser power up its tail. The report I heard at this conference was on an on-board reaction mass concept -- the capsule carries fuel, which is heated by the laser energy. In my stories I used 'a "ramjet" effect for the initial phases of flight, with the laser heating air until the atmosphere was thin, after which it switches over to onboard reaction mass. I asked if the ramjet concept was rejected for cause or simply unstudied, and was told that there's no theoretical reason it won't work, it just hasn't been looked into, at least not by the speakers, D. H. Douglas-Hamilton Research Laboratory. So that's one that's still alive, and note the possibilities: if the laser launching facility is constructed, the real costs to orbit have been absorbed. The flight article needn't be very expensive. Thus the prediction I sometimes make in my lectures: namely that within the lifetime of my student audiences a family can afford a space capsule which can be launched for them to live in, is still very much alive.    The conference produced a lot more. Some of the papers were on concepts that seem pretty far out even by my standard: how do you like windmills in space? , Imagine the following: a very large structure, looking like a Dutch windmill, but with blades hundreds of meters high. The solar wind -- that stream of particles which constantly flows from the Sun, and which wasn't suspected until we had space probes -- exerts enough pressure on the blades to turn the device. The "solar windmill" turns a generator, just as the Appropriate Technology Earthbound windmills do. Electricity is produced. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? And colorful, and quite pretty. Alas, it doesn't turn out to be very efficient. Note that I didn't say "impractical;" it would work, it just won't work as well as other devices would given the same investment. Still, I can see a time when solar windmills might be used as a quick and dirty power source kludged up by a spacefaring family; perhaps a TV "Spacetrain" (something like a futuristic "Wagontrain") series will make use of the idea. There were other papers describing far-out stuff which does look to be useful. One of the problems with space power stations is heat. Solar cells, and everything else for that matter, work on the principle of heat difference. The greater the difference in temperature between the front and the back sides of the solar cells, the more electricity they make. Big lasers are not all that efficient, either, and must be cooled. On Earth that's a simple enough matter -- run water through the system, and either let the water flow An Informal  Irravarent Sclanca Fiction A Fantasy Journal Edited A Published by Richard E. Gals Issue ## features interviews with Poul Anderson, Aigis Budrys, Gordon R. Dickson, David Hartwell and Bob Shaw. "Limbo Blues" -- a bawdy space poem by Neal Wilgus. "The Human Hotline" -- SF News reported by Elton Elliott Mark Mansell. "The Alter-Ego Viewpoint" presents Alter, blaster in hand, amid disintegrated books. "Glimpses of the third World Fantasycon" -- with the award winners. Plus: prozine reviews, small press reviews, more book reviews the editor's diary, letters, letters, letters... end morel Quartedysampie I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I on downstream, or pass it through a cooling tower for evaporation; either way die heat is dumped, carried away from the system of interest. (Yes, I know: that waste heat can be a problem for those who have to live with it. True, sometimes the "waste heat" turns out to be a blessing, as it has been for the marine life off New England during the winters of '# and '#; but it wants watching; indeed, the prospect for getting unwanted waste heat off Earth entirely ought to make conservation-minded become space enthusiasts.) Out in space you certainly can't simply dump the heat by sending it "downstream," nor can you afford to use evaporative cooling. Evaporation would work, all right, and splendidly, but the major factor in any space system is the cost of transporting anything to orbit. You simply can't afford the transport costs of coolant. Thus space structures must be cooled by radiation. In theory this is simple enough. After all, the night sky has an effective temperature wa-aa-y down there. In practice, though, it gets more difficult. It takes surface area to dump the waste heat, and surface area means mass and large structures; and those cost a bundle to put into orbit. Comes now John Hedgepeth, President of Astro Research Corporation of Santa Barbara. He's a nononsense structures man who takes the attitude of "you design the concept, I'll get it built." The problem of waste heat has to do with density of structures; if you can have them heavy you have no problem, but since in orbit you can't, you want to get the mass per area down low. Table One shows some presentday figures. What's needed are structures with very large areas and very low weights: something in the order of # grams per square meter or better. That turns out to be possible, although it isn't easy. Hedgepath presented another concept. Dust, it turns out, would be a marvelous radiating system. Dust has a lot of area for its weight. Of course you can't throw dust away, just as you can't throw water away, not in space. The dust itself is valuable; any mass is. But suppose you take the dust and "throw" it across a couple of hundred meters or so; catch it, pass it through a heat exchanger to heat it up again, and throw the hot dust out to another catcher; and so forth. If you arrange the pitchers and catchers properly the net result of all this is that the dust cools things down, but there is no motion imparted to the total system. And that makes a dramatic picture: a tetrahedron in space, kilometer or so high, with bright lines painted on the dark velvet. The lines are hot metallic powder (dust sounds better, doesn't it?) madly radiating the waste heat from another large structure a couple of kilometers long and half a kilometerwide. From the big solar-cell array bright beams stab down toward Earth to power an airplane skimming along at # feet and moving at # miles an hour. It's colorful -- and it's also practical. Frank Coneybear of Arthur D. Sizes and Masses Density Size: projected area Skylab # gramsmeter # # meters # Rockwell Solar Power Satellite # gramsmeter # # square meters Halley Sailor # gmm # # meters # Echo Satellite # gmm # # square meters Little presented his own summary of trends in power transmission through lasers and such. He led off by saying "You can judge my faith in technology by the fact that I have my viewgraphs but I don't have my necktie: my necktie is wherever United Airlines has sent my luggage, but I carried my viewgraphs with me." He went on to summarize what's happening in laser technology and conclude that microwaves can certainly beam power down to Earth from satellite altitudes, and the technology is wellnigh off-the shelf. However, lasers offer some big advantages, and the whole field of laser technology is exploding. There is the possibility of solar-pumped lasers, which will take sunlight (a lot of it, collected by a very large mirror) as their direct input. The conference organizer, Ken Billman, is working on another diorbiting mirrors. The large mirrors concentrate sunlight onto a particular area on Earth, extending daylight by several hours a day; the effect is to increase the growing season. There is also the possiblity of And more, none of it science fiction. These are all concepts which we could start in on next year. They are understood far better than was space technology at the time John Kennedy set us the goal of the Moon in a decade. We could start work knowing that it's nearly certain that we'll get all our money back within # years, and that there's a very good chance we'll all get rich from fallout benefits. year we spend on importing oil, we ought to be able to buy any number of better systems. Why don't we get started?  "The kel of the Darks is a different kel," the she'pan had told him. But could even she have guided him had she known he would be the last kel ? For fortyand more years a war has raged between humankind and the regal, the squat, slow-moving natives of remote Nit rag...a strange war. for the regul themselves could not fight: instead, they hired the warrior-caste of the mri, a desert-dwelling species that claims Kesrith for homeworld . So long as regul preserved Kesrith inviolate from an alien intrusion, the treatyread, the Kel, the warriors of the mri, would serve the regul. But the war was now lost, for the Kel had been hurled by regul commanders in suicidal attacks on humanity; and in the end of the war, Kesrith itself was ceded to humans. Regul society everywhere had been turned upside down by the conflict...and now Kesrith' s former regul governors have been stripped of command and sent home in disgrace, replaced by Hulagh Alagnni. whose considerable ambitions depend on two things: the wealth he hopes to gain by plundering Kesrith before humans come in, and the political power he will gain by doing this under the very witness of the two human observers with whom the treaty has burdened him. But no one consulted the mri in these arrangements. They were a small presence on Kesrith, a few old men and an old she'pan, a queen-mother. The only warrior able to fight was young Niun s'ntel, and he had not been permitted. So the regul took no account of them, letting them go about their business in their remote edun, or House, high in the hills above the geyser-riddled flats...until weather turned, delaying Hulagh's planned evacuation and plunder and running him up against the deadline on which human forces will arrive to take possession of Kesrith. Above all he fears any act that will lead to renewed war -- fears for his own political future and for the very survival of his kind. Then to bai Hulagh's horror, he learns that another ship is coming in ahead of that deadline, while his own vessel is helplessly grounded: and that ship is Ahanal, which carries not only mri...but every mri that is known to survive of all the forces and settlements and ships that have ever gone out. The mri are all coming home, to their world and their she'pan...the She' pan of the People. And they (if they only knew it) are no longer bound by their oath of service, for Hulagh knows he has violated that treaty in allowing the presence of the human observers, though he has carefully kept them hidden. War is the dreadful prospect, mri out of regul control and fighting all whom they blame for their misfortunes. And on the night Ahanal lands, two men leave their separate places and go out onto the flats for separate reasons: Sten Duncan, a young human, seeks to find out for his stroke-paralysed superior Stavros just what it is the regul are keeping from them: they fear treachery. And Niun goes to Ahanal, to meet the mri who have come to take them offworld -- for it has been revealed to him that they are not native to Kesrith or any previous homeworld in his lore...but wanderers in the depths of space...and the She' pan bids them go to a voyage that will put Kesrith and all its ills behind them. Some of the old have departed into the desert, seeking death on a world they know; but Niun and his sister Melein are given hope of survival in a new age of their species. Then Niun meets Duncan, and realizes that they are free of their oath because of this presence -- he perplexity...but the regul know of that meeting, and to avert war, strike at the port and the edun of the mri. Out on the flats, Niun watches in horror first as Ahanal is destroyed and then as the edun is leveled. All his species is accounted for by those two attacks...and, alone now, he lacks the will to destroy Duncan, who is likewise hunted by the regul. But in the ruins of the edun they find Melein still alive, though injured: by the death of the others, she has inherited the she'panate and now rules a dead people and one last warrior, her brother. Duncan has assisted to save her, and Melein also omits to order his death: he is permitted to go with them and to carry their supplies as they seek the desert. And now appears another survivor of the edun, a great dus, one of the beasts of Kesrith that have always served the warrior-caste. This one had disdained Niun' s previous attempts to win it, but it joins him now. They are bound into the backlands. wherever Melein will decide to lead them -- to survive for a time, until Duncan's people come to finish what the regul began. The day came quietly, with only the sounds of the wind and the dus' breathing. Niun looked and found Melein already awake, sitting crosslegged in the doorway, outlined by the dawn. She was composed as though she had sat so for a long time, arranging thoughts in private in the last hours of the night. He rose, while Duncan lay still insensible; and went to her and settled on the cold sand, near the fever-warmth of the drowsing dus. His legs were weak with the poison and his arm was stiff and hot to the shoulder, but these would pass. His mind was still calm, with the muddled thoughts of the dus yet brushing it; and he was not afraid, even considering their situation. He knew this for dus-courage that would melt when crisis came and a man needed to think; but it was rest, and he was glad for it. He thought perhaps Melein had enjoyed something of the same for her face was calm, as though she had been meditating on some private dream. "Did you rest well?" he asked of her. "As well as I needed. I was shaken yesterday. I think I shall still find a long walk difficult. But we will walk today." He heard this and knew that she had come to some ultimate decision, but it would not be respectful to ask of it, to go on assuming that he was her kinsman, which he could no longer be. "We are ready," he said. "We are going by the way of Sil'athen," she said, "and further into the hills; and we will find a Shrine of which the Kel has known nothing in our generation. Before we two were bom, it was ordered forgotten by the Kel. The Pana, Niun, never rested in the edun. It was a time of war. The she 'pan did not think it good that the Pana be in the edun, and she was right." He touched his brow in reverence, his skin chilled even to hear the things that she said; but his spirit rose at her words. They changed nothing, had no bearing on their own bleak chances; but the Holy existed, and even if they went to destroy it with their own hands, it would not have perished by enemies. The Gods' mission, then. That was something worth doing, something he could well comprehend. "Know this," she said further. "We will recover the Pana for ourselves, and we two will bear it to a place where we can be safe. And we will wait. "We will wait until we can find a way off Kesrith, or until we know that there can be none. Does the Kel have an opinion?" He considered, thought of Duncan's offer, thought of bringing it to her, and put it away in his mind. There would be a moment for that later, if they lived to do the one thing. "I think," he judged carefully, and then by being hunted to our end. But for my part, I had as lief go to the human authorities and contract with them against regul. I am this bitter." She listened to him attentively, her head tilted to one side, and she frowned. "But," she said, "there is peace between regul and humans." "I do not think it will last. Not forever." "But would humans not laugh -- to consider one kel'en alone, trying to take service against all regul?" "The regul would not laugh," said Niun grimly, and she nodded, appreciative of that truth. "But I will not have this," she said. "No. I know what Intel planned: to take us into the Dark again, to take the long voyage and renew the People during that Dark. And I will not sell you into hire for any promises of safety. No. We two go our own way." "We have neither Kath nor kel'e'ein," he cried, and dropped his voice at once to half-whisper, for he did not want Duncan waking. "For us there are no more generations, no renewing. We will never come out of that Dark." She looked up with tranquility at the dawning. "If we are the last, then a quiet end; and if we are not the last, then the way to surest extinction for the People is to waste our lives in pursuit of tsi'mri wars and tsi'mri honors and all the things that have occupied the People in this unhappy age." "What is there else?" he asked, which was a forbidden question, and he knew it when he had spoken it, and canceled it with a gestured refusal. "No, do as you will." "We are free," she said. "We are free, Niun. And I will commit us to nothing but to find the Pana and to learn whether others of our kind survive." He looked up and met her eyes and acknowledged her bravery with a nod of his head. "It is not possible that we do this," he said. "The Kel tells you this, she'pan." "The Kel of the Darks," she said softly, "is not wholly ignorant, and therefore it is a harder service. No, perhaps it is not possible, but I cannot accept any other thing. Do you not believe that the Gods still favor the People?" He shrugged, self-conscious in his ignorance, helpless as a kel'en was always helpless in games of words. He did not know whether she played ironies or not. "I cast us both," she said then. " Short' ai . " This he understood, a mystery the Kel easily fathomed. He made a fist, a pantomime of the catch of shon'ai, and his heart lightened. "Shon'ai," he echoed. "It is good enough." "Then we should be moving." she said. "We are ready," he said. Niun then gathered himself up and went to Duncan and shook him at the shoulder. "Come," he told Duncan, and while Duncan began to stir about, he made a pack of their remaining belongings. The water he meant to carry himself, and a small light flask also that he meant for Melein, for it was not wise to make Duncan independent in that regard, or to make her dependent, should it come to trouble -- although neither he nor she, whole of limb and untroubled by enemies, needed a flask in a land where they knew every plant and stone. He threw the bundle of supplies at Duncan's feet. "Where are we going?" Duncan asked, without moving to pick it up. It was a civil question. Niun shrugged, giving him all the answer he meant to give, with the same civility. "I am not your beast of burden," Duncan said, a thin, under-thebreath piece of rebellion. He kicked at the bundle, spuming it. Niun looked at it, and looked at him, without haste. "The she'pan does not work with the hands. Being kel'en, I do not bear burdens while there are others to bear them. If you were dead, I would carry it. Since you are not, you will carry it." Duncan seemed to consider how seriously that was meant, and reached the correct conclusion. He picked up the bundle and slid his arms into the ropes of the pack. Then Niun did find some pity for him. for the man was a manner of kel'en and avowed he was not of a lower caste; but he would not fight for his standing. It was a matter of the yin'ein, a'ani, honorable combat; and Niun reckoned that without mri weapons, the human was as helpless as a kath'en. Perhaps, Niun thought, he had been wrong to insist upon this point, and to have taken some small part of the weight upon himself would not have overburdened his pride. It was one thing to war against the tsi'mri kel'en's species; it was another to break him under the weight of labor in Kesrith's harsh environment. He said nothing, all the same. It troubled him, the while they started out together, the three of them, and the dus lumbering along by his side. It was difficult question, how it was honorable to deal at close quarters with a human. It had been the death of the People, that humans refused a'ani and preferred mass warfare; and he began to realize now that humans simply could not fight. Tsi'mri. He felt fouled, deeply distressed by this realization. He wished to change what he had said, and could not, for his pride's sake.-'And he began to think over and over again of how bitter the war had been, that so many had perished without knowing the nature of the enemy. But it was not his to change this, even now. His was not a caste that made ultimate decisions. He reminded himself of this, wondering how much Intel had known of the ways of the human species.    By the Deog'hal slash they ascended into the high hills, not following the usual track to Sil'athen lest some survivor down in the city find them the more easily and finish what had been begun at the edun. It was a hard climb, and one which took a great deal from Melein, and from Duncan, laboring as he was under his burden. "I was too long sitting in the she'pan's tower," Melein breathed when they had come to the crest. She coughed and tried to smother it, while Duncan sank down in a heap, disengaged himself from the ropes and lay upon the pack. Niun poured a little water to ease Melein's throat, and deep in his heart he was afraid for her, for Melein was not wont to be so easily tired; and he marked how she limped, and sometimes held her arm to her side. "I think that you are hurt," he said softly. She made a deprecating gesture. "I fell, closing the door to the storeroom. It is nothing." He hoped that she was right in that. He gave her to drink again, spendthrift with the water, but it was likely that they would come upon a fresh supply soon enough. He drank sufficient himself to moisten his mouth, and saw the human looking at him with an intent gaze, "For moisture only," he said, giving Duncan half a measure. "Be slow with it." The human drank as he himself had drunk, beneath the veil, keeping his face covered, and handed back the cap with a nod that achieved some grace. "Where are we going?" Duncan asked again, his voice gone hoarse. "Human," said Melein, startling them both, "why does it matter to you to know?" Duncan drew a breath to answer at once but Niun reached out and caught his arm in a hard grip. "Before you speak," Niun said to him, "understand that she is a she'pan. The Kel deals with outsiders; the she'pan does not. You are honored that she even looks at you. If you speak a word that offends her, I will surely kill you out of hand. So perhaps you will be more comfortable to direct your words to me, so that you will not offend against her." Duncan looked from one to the other of them, as though he thought they were making mock of him, or threatening him in some way he could not comprehend. "I am very serious," said Niun. "Direct your answer to me." "Tell her," said Duncan then, "that I am interested in returning to my people alive. Tell her what I told you last night. That offer still stands. I may be about to get you offworld." "Duncan," said Melein, "I already know what you would like to ask, and I will not answer yet. But you may tell us when your people will come. You know that, surely." Duncan hesitated, in evident distress, weighing their purposes. "A matter of days," he said in a low voice. "A very few days, maybe sooner than I would figure. And they're going to find ruins at the city, and the regul will be there to tell them whatever story they like about what happened night before last." "Tsi'mri," said Melein deprecatingly, which Duncan did not understand. "The she'pan means," Niun answered his look, "that what outsiders do is not our concern. We have no brothers and no masters. We do not serve regul any longer. Perhaps you do not understand, Duncan, that we are the last mri. The ship Ahanal contained all the survivors of the war, and the edun contained the rest; and the regul know us, understanding that if they do not finish what they began at the port, we are likely to deal them hurt. Being regul, they will not wish to meet us face to face to do this, and they will probably try to convince your species to do the work for them. You see how it is. You do better not to press us with questions. There are things to be thought of in their time, should this happen or should that happen -- but you do well not to ask so that we will not have to think of it." Duncan absorbed all that answer in silence, and sat with his arms wrapped about his knees, hands clenched until the knuckles went white. "Duncan," Melein said then, "it is a saying among us that Said is done. So we do not say, so that we are not obligated to do. We do not trap with words, as the regul do. Ask no more questions." And she held out her left hand to Niun, gesturing that she wanted help to rise. It hurt her, although he was very careful. "There are clouds," she observed, looking toward the east. "May they descend to the regul."    By afternoon the sky was entirely overcast, sparing them the heat of the direct sun, bringing a chill to the air; and it became clear that the clouds were doing as Melein had wished they would do, and that upon the ruin of the city and the port would come storm. Once, when she gazed over her shoulder toward the plain and looked upon the lightnings that flashed in that shadowed quarter, she held some impulse that made the dus moan in startlement and shy off from her. Niun did not question that it was Melein that had caused it, for he knew himself innocent, and the dus sought his side afterward. But the clouds shed no water on them, and their flasks were only a quarter full when they came to the end of the long upland rise and entered the flat highland. By late afternoon Duncan was staggering with weariness and would gladly have halted at any time, but Niun considered the possibility of aircraft seekstop in the open, not for Duncan's sake. He looked often at Melein, anxious for her, but she walked without appearing to suffer overmuch. And toward evening there was a luin-cluster on the horizon, twisted trunks like a mirage against the leaden sky, bare limbs tufted with small leaves only at the ends. "There is water," Niun told Duncan. "Tonight will be an easy camp, and you will have enough to drink." And Duncan, who had begun to lag, expended a last effort and kept the pace they, unburdened, set toward the trees. And soon they walked among the gnarled trunks, careless. 'Ware!" Melein cried, seeing it even as Niun did, the glassy strands spread in the evening light. Niun whipped up his pistol and fired before Duncan had time to know what had befallen him; and the windflower died, giving forth a stench, its glassy tendrils blackened. But where it had touched Duncan's flesh, on hands and forehead, the red sprang up at once, and Duncan, his clothing covered with the tendrils, fell and writhed on the sand in agony. "Ch'au!" Niun cursed the human's stupidity. "Still! lie still!" And Duncan lay quietly then, shuddering as with the av-tlen's point Niun lifted the tendrils from his flesh. Niun pulled them from the cloth too, and urged Duncan to his feet, there to stand while he inspected the black robes for any transparent remnant. Then Duncan went a few feet away and was dryly sick for some few moments. Niun cleansed the av-tlen in the sand and with it cut the trunk of a liun that had not been poisoned by the windflower. He took from his belt a small steel tube and drove it easily into the soft wood, and the sweet .liquid began to flow, pure and clean of Kesrith's dust. He filled the first flask and gave it to Melein, so that she might indulge her thirst to the full, for there were many luin present. He drank the second, rapidly filled from a ' second tree; and the third he filled he took to Duncan, who had not succeeded in being as sick as he doubtless wished to be after his shock. The human simply lay on the ground and shuddered. "It is a point worth remembering," Niun echoed Eddan's words to him on a less painful encounter, "that where there is water on Kesrith, there are enemies and predators. The pain is all, and you are lucky. It will pass. If you had been alone, you would have been wholly ensnared, and the windflower would have been the end of you." "I saw nothing," Duncan said, and swallowed a sip of the water, fighting the pain. "When you walk among luin, walk with the light in your face, so that the strands of windflowers cast across the light and shine; and mind where you step." He indicated the place where a little burrower had its lair, a place marked by a tiny depression. He flung a pebble. The sand erupted and there was the flash of a pale back, gone again as the little bunrower dived and fluttered its mantle, settling sand over itself again. "They are venomed," said Niun, "and even a little one can make a man very sick. But since they grow large enough to engulf a dus whole, the venom does not matter much to us. Burrowers lair among the luin, and in shadowed places, and among rocks where there is sand to cover them. There are not many large ones. The ha-dusei eat them, if they do not eat the dusei, before they grow to great size. There is a very large old one by the way we will pass tomorrow. I think it has been there all my lifetime. Burrowers are like regul: when they grow so big, they do not move much." The little one, disturbed and angry, fluttered off under the sand, a moving ripple, to settle again deeper among the luin. There was a general shifting about of others of its kind, and a jo, harmless, detached itself from its successful bark-imitation on a luin and fluttered away through the twilight. "Drink your fill," Niun said to the distressed human, feeling pity for him, and Duncan slowly did so while Niun made a supper of the supplies they had brought. In time they would make many a meal off the burrowers themselves, meat unpalatable and as tough as rubber; but this night Melein was suffering, and they had starved the night before and most of the day. He was extravagant, and gave to Duncan an equal share with them, considering that he had confiscated what of Duncan's gear was useful, including his rations. Across the sky, toward the lowlands, there was continued lightning, ill luck for the regul. And they rested with the dus for warmth, and with its ward-impulse to keep the ha-dusei at bay, so that they slept secure that night in the luingrove. In the morning they gathered up their gear once more; and Niun considered the matter with a gnawing of his lip and a frown, and finally, brusquely, snatched several rolls of cloth and the food from the human's burden and did them up himself. "In the case that you do not watch where you walk," Niun said in a harsh tone, "the burrower that gets you will not have our shelter and our food." The human, marked across the brow by a bloody stripe of his encounter with the windflower, looked at him and Niun did not think that the human would have forgotten his words of the day previous, that he would carry no burden. He glowered at Duncan, discouraging any reminder of this. "I Ieam quickly," Duncan said, and Niun reckoned that among the things Duncan had learned was the art of answering a kel'en civilly. XX The air was unimaginably foul, tainted by so many frightened regul. It was dark, save for the lights on the two sled-consoles and the four life-battery lamps the shelter provided. Power elsewhere was out. The water-plants were down. There was talk of seeking water Kesrithi style, from the land, but none of the younglings were sure that they could accomplish this; and they were not anxious to go out into the contaminated exterior, or across the seething flats. Hulagh had not yet ordered them. He would do so, Stavros did not doubt, when he himself began to thirst. The sleds were on battery. To this also there was a limit; but Stavros and Hulagh, elders, consumed vital power as they consumed food, and water, unrationed, because it was unquestioned that elders must be supported by the young. Stavros found it within him to pity the harried secretary, Hada, who dispensed the food and water that remained to three hundred other younglings, and likewise ministered to Hulagh and himself. They were jammed into the shelter so tightly that the youngest and least could not lie down to sleep; but the sleds were accorded their maneuvering room. The younglings gave from themselves a deference that was next to worship; indeed their whole hope for survival centered on the presence of elders among them. They talked little. They all faced Hulagh, row upon row of bone-shielded faces and blunt heads, and eyes glittered in the almost-dark and nostril-slits worked in a slow rhythm that seemed to Stavros, in a moment of bizarre humor, to be tending toward unison. And in the long hours he noted something else, that there were not a few who fell asleep, and did not awaken. Bai, favor, he signaled, spelling slowly in regul symbols on the screen. I think some of the younglings are ill. Hulagh 's great body heaved as he looked, and heaved again with a hiss of mirth. "No, reverencehuman, they are asleep. They are to sleep until your assistance comes. They consume less in that state." And in increasing numbers the young, beginning with the youngest, slipped into that state, until almost all were dormant. And bai Hulagh himself began to drowse. He recovered from this with a jerk of his body and a rumbled curse, and called to Hada. "Food," he ordered. "Be quick, witless." The thick, soursmelling soup was offered likewise to Stavros, but he declined it, almost retching. This troubled Hada, but it gave the portion to Hulagh, between whose thin lips the paste disappeared rapidly. "You do not eat," Hulagh observed. I do not need to eat, Stavros replied, and in honesty: Your food does not agree with me. But l would have soi. Hada scrambled to accommodate this wish, feverish, almost maniac in its desire to please. It offered the hot liquid to Stavros' good hand, with a straw for his ease, and hovered near him. Hulagh laughed, a rumbling, a series of hisses. "Go, egg-stealer, and sit with the other younglings." And Hada visibly cringed, and slunk aside, on small, tottering steps. "Hada knows," Hulagh explained, waxing almost affable under thepressure of their long wait, under the need to be pleasant with humans and human ways, "that if we are here much longer, there will be shorter rations; and Hada is greedy. I indulge this youngling. I shall keep it if it continues to please. I may keep all. I have lost, " he added sadly, "my own." Lost with the ship; Stavros understood. My sorrow, reverence. "And mine for the loss of your own youngling." The great gossamer-clad monster sighed and lapsed into a long reverie. And Stavros, his sled nose to nose with that of Hulagh, hurled his temper at the weak fingers of his left hand. They gave only slightly. The right hand clenched. He had ceased to fear that the paralysis would spread, or that it would affect his mind, but he was ceasing to hope that it would ever ease completely. He remained grateful for regul technology, if not for regul. Hulagh's condolences were honest, doubtless, but it did not mean that the regul' s hands were clean in the matter. Stavros regarded the drowsing regul with narrowed eyes. Now, shut in a shelter with the regul, was an inopportune moment to state the obvious, that Hulagh had had somewhat to do with the disappearance of Duncan, and that Stavros, conversely, was innocent in the loss of the bai's ship and the younglings aboard it. In regul morality, disposing of a youngling was a serious matter, but only in terms of the affront offered its elder and its doch. A regul would as soon face an elder's wrath over the loss of a youngling as that same elder's wrath over some matter of shady dealing discovered in trade; and Stavros reckoned that the same ruthless logic just might apply to eliminating a lone elder whose doch could prove hostile, given the information that elder possessed. Regul did not lie, he still believed, but they were fully capable of murder, whereby lies could be rendered unnecessary. And they feared him on the one hand and hoped for his help on the other, and he fostered that hope in them as he cherished his own life. He began to reckon the mind of bai Hulagh of doch Alagn, that here was a desperate fellow, one who had suffered a very dangerous loss in the eyes of his own kind. And therefore, while it seemed profitable. Hulagh, like a good merchantprince, was dealing for compromise. It was a compromise out of which humankind could win a great deal. But part of that settlement, Stravos was determined, would be an accounting for a certain lost SurTac, on whom Stavros had settled rather more affection than he had admitted to himself. He had not loved his own children, of whom he had seen little, locked as he was in the reclusive life of a scholar of Kiluwa, or later, while he was busy in government and at the university. He had found many other things more important than to trouble himself with the issue of several of his young passions, that had given him first an assortment of sons and thereafter grandchildren and greatgrandchildren -- who sought him out mostly because a Kiluwan connection was prestigious. Some of them, he knew, hated him with the same dedicated zeal with which they sought promotions based on his influence. But he missed Duncan. Duncan had come, like others who had ridden Stravos' reputation to reach for wealth, with the motives of ambition; and yet Duncan had given him a constant and earnest duty, earnest in his attempts to penetrate Kiluwan formality, simply because it was Duncan's nature to do so. Stavros had never learned how to answer that. Nor, for the regul, did he admit to grief, which they would not have understood. But in addition to an accounting that the regul owed for Kiluwa, there was that for an inconsequential SurTac. He did not, all the same, regret having sent Duncan, even at such cost. Events had damaged the regul and exacted satisfaction of them, and placed them at human mercy; and this was very much to Stavros' gratification. This was partial payment for Kiluwa. It would be full payment when he seized the reins of control from bai Hulagh, and began to bend doch Alagn into agreement with humans. This was revenge of a sort that both Hulagh and Kiluwa could appreciate -- the more so when he ascertained those who among regul were directly responsible for Kiluwa and found the means to deal with them. Being Kiluwan, Stavros entertained a hatred specific and logical: There was a species called regul; but the species called regul had not destroyed Kiluwa. This had been wrought by one doch; and its name was Holn, and it was not represented here. There had been a decimation of Holn at their landing. This did not satisfy Stavros, who was not interested in bloodshed. It was the decline of Holn he wanted, its elimination from power among regul. And Hulagh, controlled, an ally of humankind, could become the instrument of this policy. "Elder," Hulagh rumbled at last, "it is certain that you have authority over your people?" Unless mri intervened and started something wider, Stavros replied. I have authority over the force that is coming to Kesrith. "Favor," said Hulagh. "The mri will no longer be a factor in relations between us. They are gone. There are no more mri." This was news. Stavros flashed a question-sign, unadorned by words. "The ship," said Hulagh, "contained all the survivors of mri-kind. We have disposed of this plague that kept our two species at war." Hulagh had waited to divulge that piece of news. Stavros heard it, at first appalled at such a concept -- the destruction of a sapient species -- and then suspicious. But the regul did not lie. He began to contemplate the possibilities of a universe without the mri, and found the possibilities for human profit enormous. "It is clear," said Hulagh, "that total re-arrangement of human-regul relations is in order. Doch Alagn might find interest in helping this come about." Stavros was shocked a second time, and recognized his dismay as a human reaction, based on a morality to which Hulagh could not possibly subscribe. There was no particular reason that doch Alagn should refrain from an offer that, in a human state, would amount to treason. Doch Alagn was in financial and political difficulty. Hulagh was seeking alignment with the powers that had control of the resources he desired. Humanity's grudge, Stavros answered after due thought, is with doch Holn. It would be possible to arrive at new accommodations with advantage to both our interests. Hulagh's lips parted in a regul smile. A slow hiss betokened his pleasure. "We shall explore this," he said. "We shall, most excellent Stravos." And he awakened Hada and ordered soi, and remembered this time to order it sweetened, to Stavros' personal preference. But before it was prepared, Hada came puffing back, waving his hands in agitation. "The ship," he breathed. "Be gracious, elders, the human ship, early -- communications report -- " Hulagh's gesture cut the youngling off abruptly. The bai's lips continued parted, his nostrils dilated in what Stavros had learned was an expression of anxiety. The bai's total attitude was that of a man with a nervous smile, displaying good manners amid subdued terror. "You will surely wish then," said bai Hulagh, "to greet these representatives of your people and explain the situation. Assure them of our regret for the condition of the port, reverence." We will manage, Stavros answered, beside himself with apprenhension and restraining it, remembering how important it was that Hulagh be reassured. Have confidence., reverence, that you have nothing to dread if your younglings will remain calm and not hamper operations. And he turned his sled toward the control section of the shelter, following the rolling gait of Hada Surag-gi who, by regul standards, was almost running.    The big doors of the shelter opened, and beams glared through the dim interior, the lights handled by suited men, fantastic shapes, who walked heavy-footed through the ranks of dormant younglings. The door was closed again, a precaution. The second man used a counter, reckoning what radiation might have entered the shelter. Conscious younglings scurried to clear them a path, chittering in terror. Stavros slid his vehicle forward, faced a suited form and saw the blind-glassed head pause in an attitude of astonishment. "Consul Stavros?" The tab on the suit read "Galey" and the rank was lieutenant. "Yes," Stavros said, and turned the communications screen by remote and spelled out a message on the basic-alphabet module, not trusting his slurred speech for complicated messages.  am inconvenienced by an accident. Speech is awkward, but prosthetics are very adequate. Speak normally to me and watch the screen. Be respectful of these regul. It will be necessary to transfer them to safety if you cannot guarantee normal operations here in the building. "Sir," Galey said, seemingly confused by the situation. He drew a breath and let it go. "You're in command down here. What instructions? I'm afraid the power is going to be a major problem. We can possibly get a crew working on it, and you seem clean of contamination, but there are some considerable hot spots toward the port. The station is intact. We would rather evacuate." Building can be occupied? Liveable? "This building? Yes, sir. It seems so." Then we stay. Untoward weather a problem here. I have rest under control. "The mri, sir," Galey said. "We're not clear what happened here." We have a problem. Lt. Galey. but we're resolving it. Kindly dispose your men so that we can resume normal operations here in the building. The communications station is accessible through that door. You will excuse me if I do not go with you. "Yes, sir," said Galey, and gave his courtesies to the regul also, wooden and perfunctory. The marines with him began to move about, performing various duties -- on suit phones, doubtless, where regul would not be privy to exchanges of comment and instruction. "You deal with younglings," Hulagh observed. "Favor. Are there other elders involved here?" Other authorities, Stavros reckoned the bai's meaning, authorities who could complicate agreements already made between them. My apologies, bai Hulagh. This was an older youngling. And the elder who commands them must, as you surely remember from the treaty, defer to me where it regards the administration of Kesrith and its area. There is, however, one matter wherein his authority and mine might tend to cross. "And this one matter, human bai?" My missing assistant is military' personnel. The bai of the arriving ship may feel that he can settle this matter best. It might provide an occasion for him to intrude his authority into my domain here. Naturally I do not wish this. I feel that it would smooth matters over were it possible for answers to be given in this matter of my youngling. Hulagh's nostrils fluttered in rapid agitation. "Favor, reverence. We might suggest a search of the Dus-plain, where there was conflict between my younglings and the mri outlaws. It is an unpleasant surmise, but if there are remains to be found..." Stavros looked on the anxious bai without mercy. It is then the conclusion of the bai that this youngling is dead? "It is most probable, reverence." But if he were not, it is more likely that one of your staff could direct a search with more success than one of the ship's officers might. This is possible, is it not, bai? It would greatly augment my authority here and ease negotiations between us if it were possible that this lost youngling could be recovered. He is, of course, merely a youngling, and his experiences during the mri action would doubtless influence his mind to hysteria and cloud his judgments, so that no testimony he could give could be taken seriously. But it would please me if he were recovered alive. The bai considered these things, and the understandings implicit in the words. "Indeed," said bai Hulagh, "there is such an expert on my staff, a person familiar with the terrain. With your staff's cooperation, a search could be arranged at once." My gratitude, reverence.  will see to the disposition of necessities with the ship. And Stavros turned his sled away, seeking out Galey, while his hearing caught bai Hulagh urgently summoning Hada Surag-gi. The reaction began to strike him. He found it difficult for the moment to concentrate on the numerical signals that activated the various programs of the sled. He found his eyes misting. This was unaccustomed. He had his emotions under control, however, by the time he swung the sled in with casual nonchalance beside Galey, who did not seem to know whether to offer condolences or congratulations on survival. "You're alone here, sir?" Galey asked. As you have noticed, difficulties abound. No delays. Is Koch in command up there? "Yes, sir." Then get me contact with himdirectly. I can patch this console in with the main board. Are you able to get a ship down here with sufficient personnel to staff work crews and give me office staff? "Not quickly. The port's completely gone. But the station is in good shape. Servos everywhere." Galey bent over the console of the com unit, fingering regul controls helplessly. "Here," Stavros said, with some satisfaction, and keyed in and started the sequence of changes that put them through to the warship Saber, which had brought them all that clutter of personnel that would begin to make Kesrith human: soil experts, scientists, technicians. And weapons. His command, Kesrith, his. There was no med staffer going to rule him unfit to govern; and deep in his heart he knew that he needed that hulking merchant-prince of the Alagn as much as doch Alagn presently needed him. He saw the shock on the face of the com officer of Saber; and at once that face vanished, replaced by that of Stavros' military counterpart, Koch. "Stavros?" Koch asked. A little difficulty speaking, he keyed the answer, replacing the visual. We have regul stranded down here. Stand by to assist us with onworld operations. We need food, drinkable water. "We were not prepared for regul nationals." Unforeseen circumstances. All decisions regarding Kesrith and regul are mine. Situation here is under control. Presently seeking my aide, possible casualty of attack by mri. Hot areas reportedly confined to port.  request military personnel detached from Saber to my command until we can clean up. "Excellency," said Koch, "the medical facilities of Saber are at your disposal if you will care to come up to the station." Negative. Regul services are adequate. The situation is too urgent. My condition is good, considering. I am pursuing matters under my authority granted as governor of Kesrith. Send down scientists, military aides, all attached personnel and equipment as soon as area is cleared. "It may be advisable to wait." Send down personnel as requested. There was a long delay. "All right," said Koch. "A medic will accompany the party." On Kesrith, Stavros keyed, medic will await my convenience. Koch digested this also. At last he nodded, accepting. "You have the authority, right enough. But ship's personnel stay under my command. You'll have the civs as soon as we can find solid ground for them. Starship Flower is attached to your personal service, with my compliments, sir. She's probe, though, not combat. Does the situation warrant immediate armed support?" Negative. "There is weather down there." This is evidently frequent. Wait , then. We are pursuing operations here with available personnel. You are invited to come planetside and exchange courtesies when we have the wreckage cleared. A sled hummed into the vicinity. Stavros heard it and put them momentarily on visual again from his side, watching with satisfaction as Koch beheld a regul elder for the first time. This is bai Hulagh, Stavros told him, disconnecting the visual. A most influential regul, sir, if you please. We have achieved a certain necessary cooperation here, which is to the advantage of both species. "Understood," Koch said slowly, and seemed utterly taken aback: a military man, Koch, bom and bred. He had been presented a situation with which he could not deal, and fortunately recognized it. "You'll get your help," Koch said, and Stavros closed out the communication with an inward satisfaction, casting a look at Galey. Scan the area here, he directed the lieutenant. And when you've made sure of where it's safe, we'll start clearing these younglings back to normal duties. This is the bai's staff. All due considerations to them, Lt. Galey. "Reports are coming in," Galey said. "The whole area seems cool and secure. The building seals held very well." Stavros breathed a sigh of relief. "My younglings," said Hulagh, "will find means of restoring the water and repairing the collectors for the power." He waved a massive hand. "Hada will attend other matters, given use of transport. I believe some of the vehicles at the water-plant may have survived intact." At the entrance to Sil'athen a dus met them, warding with such strength that Niun's dus shied off. And there in the rocks, half-buried in the sands, lay Eddan's remains; and not far away lay a tangle of black that had been Liran and Debas, and gold that had been Sathell. Melein veiled herself and drew aside, being she' pan and unable to look upon death; but Niun went and reverently arranged the visor over Eddan's face, and it was long before he could look up and meet eyes with the human that hovered uncertainly by. He cleansed his hands in the sand, and made the reverence-sign, and rose. The human also made such a sign, in his own fashion, a respect which Niun accepted as it was given. "They chose this end." he said to Duncan, "and it was better for them here than for those that stayed." And he poured a little of their precious water and turned his back to wash, hands and face, and veiled again. When he looked up at the rocks, he saw two other dusei, that began to come down from their height; and he gave way at once. His own dus came between and tried to approach the three warding beasts that had formed a common front against them. Noses extended, they circled back and forth, and then the great, gentle creature that had been Eddan's, or so Niun thought it, reared up and cried out, driving the dus away. But the smallest of the three hesitated between, and then followed the stranger-dus of Niun, and its fellow came after. The largest, Eddan's, gave a plaintive moan and retreated from these traitor-dusei, that he no longer knew. Niun felt its anger, and trembled; but when he moved away from this place, not alone his own dus came, but the two that had been of Liran and Debas, a tight triangle with his own. They called and moaned, and would not yet suffer Niun to come near them, but they came away from their duty all the same, choosing life, leaving other matters to the dus of Eddan, who settled by his dead and remained faithful. " Lo'a-ni dus," Niun saluted that one softly, with great respect; but he shut his heart to it, because the warding-impulse was too strong to bear. And he shouldered his burden again and began walking, his course and Duncan's converging with that of Melein. There was no need to speak of what they had found. The dusei walked ahead of them, and now and then one would make to go back and go toward Duncan, but Niun's dus would not allow this and constantly circled toward the rear to prevent them when they did so. Soon they seemed to understand that this particular tsi'mri was under safe-conduct, and gave up their attempts on him. They were at the entrance to the inner valley of Sil'athen, and here was another sort of warder. Niun saw it across the flat sweep of sand, and touching the human on the arm, he bent and picked up a tiny stone. He hurled it far, far out across the flat sand, toward the central depression. It erupted, a circumference twenty times the length of a dus, a cloud of sand from the edge of the burrower's mantle as the creature rose and dived again a few lengths farther. The human swore in a tone of awe. "I have shown you," said Niun, "so that you will understand that a man without knowledge of this land, and without a dus to walk with him, will not find his way across. There are said to be larger ones across the great sands than what you saw. The dusei smell them out. They smell out other dangers too. Even mri do not like to walk this country alone, although we can do it. I do not think you can." "I understand you," said Duncan. They walked quietly thereafter, near the wall of the cliffs where the safe course was, past caves sealed and marked with stones; and the strange shapes of Sil'athen's rocks one by one passed behind them, ringing them about and shutting off view of the way they had come. "What is this place?" Duncan asked in a lowered voice as they passed the high graves of the she' pane i. " Nla' ai-mri said Niun. "Sil 'athen, the burrying-plaee of our kind." And thereafter Duncan said nothing, but looked Uneasily from one side of the valley to the other as they passed, and once backward, over his shoulder, where the wind erased their tracks, wiping clean all the trace that men had ever walked this way. Melein led them now, walking at their head, her hand on the back of Niun's dus, which ambled slowly beside her, and the beast even seemed to enjoy that contact. Deep into the canyons they went, by a path that Niun had never walked, down the aisle of rock that belonged to the tombs of the she 'pane i. Here there were signs graven on the rocks -- names, perhaps, of ancient she'panei, or directions. Melein read them, and Niun trusted her leading, that she knew their way although she herself had never walked it. She tired, and it seemed at times that she must surely stop, but she would not, only pausing for breath now and again, and walking on. The sun that was at noon became the fervent blaze of afternoon, and then sank so that they walked in the cold shadow of the cliffs, dangerous if not for the protecting dusei that probed the way. Deep in that shadow they came to the blind end of the cliffs, and Niun looked to Melein, suddenly wondering if she had not after all lost their way, or whether this was where she meant that they should stop. But she gazed upward at a trail that he had not seen until he followed the direction of her look, a trail that could not be seen at all save from this vantagepoint. It led up and up into the red rocks, toward a maze of sandstone pillars that thrust fingers at the sky. "Niun," Melein said then, and cast a glance backward. He looked where she did, toward Duncan, who, exhausted in the thin air, had slumped to rest over his pack. The dusei were moving toward him. One extended a paw. Duncan froze, lying still, his head still pillowed on the pack. "Yai!" Niun reproved the dus, who guiltily retracted the curious paw. The dusei in general retreated, radiating mingled confusion. And in his own mind was unease at the thought of entering that steep, tangled maze with the human in their company, where a misstep could be the end of them. "What shall I do with him?" he asked of Melein in the high language, so that Duncan could not understand. "He should not be here. Shall I find a way to be rid of him?" "The dusei will manage him," she said. "Let him alone." He started to protest, not for his own sake, but from fear for her; but she did not look as though she were prepared to listen. "He will go last when we are climbing," he said, and gathering in his belly all the same was a knot of fear. Intel had seen the future clearly:  have an ill feeling, she had said the night they all died; and he had such a dread now, a cold, clear premonition that here was a point of no return, that here he was losing some chance, or passing something by; and the human wound himself deeper and deeper into his mind. He did not want him. He carried Duncan in his mind the way he carried the memories of the attack, indelible. He looked at the human and shuddered with sudden and vehement loathing, and found himself carrying the human's due burden, and not knowing what else to do with it. He fingered the pistol. But he had been made kel'en for the honor of the People, not for outright butchery; and Melein had ordered otherwise, easing his conscience. He was not able to make such a decision. It was hers to say, and she had said, agreeing with his better conscience. And suddenly Duncan was looking at him, and he slipped his fingers into his belt, trying to cover his thoughts and the motion at once. "Come," he said to Duncan. "Come, we are going up now." He set himself first on the narrow climb, and saw at once that Melein was scarcely able to make the climb on that eroded, unused track. He braced his feet where he could and reached for her hand, and she took his fingers crosshanded, to favor her injured side. He moved very carefully, each time that he must give a gentle pull to help her, for he saw her face and knew that she was in great pain. Duncan came after, and the dusei last of all, clumsy and scattering rocks that rattled into the deep canyon, but their claws and great strength made them surer-footed than they looked to be. And halfway, the sound of an aircraft reached them. It was Melein 's keen hearing that caught it first, between steps, as she was resting; and she turned and pointed where it circled above the main valley. It could not see or detect them where they were, and they were free to watch it, that tiny speck in the rosy half-light that remained. Niun had view not only of that, but of Duncan's back as the human stood holding his place against a great boulder and looking outward at that ship; and he could not but think of how gladly Duncan would have run to signal it, and how he might well do so should he have some future chance. They were no longer alone in the world. "Let us climb," said Melein, "and get off this cliffside before the ship circles this way." "Come," said Niun sharply to Duncan, with hatefulness in his tone; and Duncan turned and climbed after them, away from what in all likelihood was hope of rescue. Looking down another time to help Melein, Niun searched the sky and did not see the aircraft; and that gave him no comfort at all. It could as easily appear directly overhead, passing the cliffs and sandstone fingers that gave them only partial cover. And to his relief, once they gained the top of the cliffs, they were not faced with another flat, but went down a slight decline and followed a winding track among sandstone pillars that were now burning red against the purpling sky. There was strong wind, that skirled small clouds among the pillars and erased their tracks as they made them. Duncan's dry cough began again, and continued a time until the human had caught his breath from the climb. They were at altitude and the air was far drier than in the lowlands. Here on the highlands, over much of the rest of the land, there was no rain, only blowing sand. A sea lay beyond, the The'asacha, but it was small and dead, as was the Alkaline Sea that bordered the regul city; and beyond that sea was a mountain chain, the Dogin, the mere skeletons of eroded mountains, that still were tall enough to cast the winds this way and that across the backbone of the continent, and generated storms that never fell on the uplands plain, but down-country, in the flats. The clouds that rimmed the sky now were headed to shed their load of moisture on the lowlands, affording them neither concern for the storm nor hope of water from it. All that it would bring them was a dark sky and a hard and dangerous walk without benefit from the stars. The sound of the aircraft intruded suddenly upon Niun's hearing: he shepherded human and dusei toward the deepest shadows, in the gathering dark; Melein had sought shelter at once. If the aircraft saw anything, it would be the image of a dus: a hot, massive silhouette for their instruments, something that was common enough to see in the wilds. If they fired at every dus on Kesrith, they would be a long time in their searching. It passed. Niun, his fist entangled in the human's robes, a grip he had not relaxed since he herded them in together, let go and drew his first even breath. "We may rest here a moment," said Melein in a thin, tired voice. "It is a long walk from here. I must rest." Niun looked at her, seeing her pain, that she had tried so long to hide. On the climb he had felt her every wince in his own vitals. And they were not to rest long. He was distressed with this, feeling that she was spending her last strength against this urgency to go farther. And without her, there would be nothing. He took the cloth for a blanket and settled her against the side of the dus, into that friendly warmth, and was glad when she relaxed against that comfort he offered, and the line of pain knit into her brow eased and began to vanish. "I will be all right," she said, touching his hand. And then her eyes widened and he whirled about upon a shadow -- a darting reach for a water-flask and Duncan was gone, into the maze of rocks in the dark. Niun swore and sprang after him, hearing the moaning roar of the dusei at once behind him. He came around the side of a pillar, half expecting ambush, which would have been idiocy on the human's part, and did not meet it. Nor was there sight or sign of Duncan. And he had left Melein, and sweat broke out on him, only to think of what could happen should Duncan circle on them and attack her, hurt as she was. Then the sound of a dus hunting arose, moaning carried on the wind, and that cry meant quarry sighted. He blessed the several Gods of his caste and ran toward that sound, pistol in hand. So he met Melein, a pale wraith in the dark, and a dus beside her; and together they found the blind way where the other dusei had Duncan pent. "Yai!" Niun called the beasts before they should close in and kill; and they wheeled in a slopeshouldered and truculent withdrawal, only enough to let Duncan rise from the ledge where he had been cornered. He would not. He huddled there, unveiled in the scramble he had made, his naked face contorted with exhaustion and anger. He coughed rackingly, and his nose poured blood. "Come down," said Melein. But he would not, and Niun went in after him, pushing the dusei aside. Then Duncan made to move, but he fell again, and sat still and dropped his head on his folded arms. Niun took the strap of the waterflask and ripped it from Duncan's hand, and let him rest the moment, for they were all hard-breathing. "It was a good attempt," said Niun. "But the next time I will kill you; it is a wonder that the dusei did not kill you this time." Duncan lifted his face, jaw set in anger. He shrugged, a gesture of defiance, a gesture spoiled by an attack of helpless coughing. "You would have signaled the airship," said Melein, "and brought them down on us." Duncan shrugged again and came to his feet, accompanying them of his own accord in leaving the blind pocket. The dusei were still bloodroused and confused by being set on and drawn off their quarry; and Niun walked between them and the human. Melein followed after them as they went back to the place where they had abandoned their gear in the chase. There they sank down where they had begun to rest, doubly exhausted now; and Niun stared at Duncan thoughtfully, thinking what might have happened, and what damage might have been done them. There was Melein, fragile with her injury. And there was an aircraft in the vicinity that wanted only the least error from them, the least slip into the open at the wrong moment, in order to locate and put an end to them. "Cover your face," Niun said at last. Duncan stared ar him sullenly, as though he would defy that order, but in the end he lowered his eyes and arranged the veil, and stared at him still. The dus moaned and reared up. "Yai!" Niun ordered him, and he subsided, swaying nervously. The dus-anger stirred his own blood. He fought it down and mastered it; a man must, who went among dusei, be more rational than they. Duncan shifted aside, tearing his glance from them and the beasts, fixing it instead on the rock before them. "We will move on," said Melein after a time, and pulled herself to her feet, carefully, painfully. She faltered, needing Niun's immediate hand to steady her. But she set her hand then upon the dus, and the beast ambled out to the fore, and she was able to walk at its side, a slow pace and deliberate, the beast the only safety they had in this dark and close passage through the rocks. Niun gathered up the water-flasks and left the human all the rest of the burden to carry, and hurried him on with a heavy hand, in among the two other dusei, before they should lose sight of Melein's pale figure. The dusei, their oily hides immune to the poison of windflowers, their keen senses aware of other dangers, were the only means that they could dare to move after dark in this place; and the dark, as Melein was surely reckoning, was friendly to them as it would not be to those that pursued them. The long walk led them into somewhat open areas, where they crossed fearfully exposed stretches of sand under the ragged clouds; and they made it in among the sandstone formations again as they heard the distant sound of the aircraft still in the area. It came close. Duncan looked to the skies as though in hope, looked back sharply as Niun whipped the av-tlen from its sheath, a whisper of edged metal. They faced each other,, he and Duncan, standing still as the aircraft circled off again, out of hearing. Niun put the weapon back into its sheath with a practised reverse. "Someone," Duncan said, his voice almost unrecognizable from his raw throat, "someone knows where to look for you. I somehow don't think my people would know that." It was sense that struck cold to Niun's heart. He glanced at Melein. "We cannot stop again for rest," she said. "They must not find us, not here. We must be at the place before light and come away again. Niun, let us hurry." He pushed the human gently. "Come," he said. "Is it her?" Duncan asked, nodding toward Melein without moving from where he stood. "Is it somehow to do with her that the regul keep after you?" "It could not be," Niun said with assurance; and then a thought began to grow within him with horrid clarity, mental process working again where for a long time there had been only shock. He looked again to Melein, spoke in the mu'ara, the high language. "It could not be that they are hunting us. They could not know that we exist. What are two mri to them, with all the others dead? Or how could regul have reached the edun to know survivors left it? They could not have climbed among those ruins. It is this human, this cursed human. He has ties back in the city, a master, and for his sake the regul tracked me across the flats. If it is the regul, they are still on that trail. There are regul and humans at work together in this thing." Her eyes grew troubled. "Let us go," she said suddenly. "Let us go now, quickly. I do not know what we will do with him, but we cannot settle it now." "What are you saying?" Duncan demanded of them suddenly, in his hoarse voice. Perhaps there were certain words, a sideward look, that he had caught amid what they had said. Niun looked on him and thought uneasily that Duncan did suspect how little his life might weigh with them. "Move," Niun said again, and pushed him, not gently. Duncan abandoned his questions and moved where he was told without argument. And if it were Duncan that was hunted, and regul were tracking them for his sake, then, Niun thought, Duncan would ultimately have to go to the enemy in such a manner to stop that search, in such a manner that he could not betray to them the fact that a she 'pan of the People was still alive. O Gods, Niun mourned within himself, urged toward murder and dishonor, and not seeing any other course. But the aircraft did not come again, and he was able to forget that threat in the urgency of their present journey, to put off thinking what he might have to do should the search be resumed.    Twice, despite Melein's wishes, they had to rest, for Melein's sake; and each time, when Niun would have stayed longer, she insisted and they walked again, at last with Niun holding her arm, her slim fingers clenching upon his against the unsteadiness of her legs. And after the mid of the night they entered a narrow canyon that wound strangely, dizzily, and began to be a descent, where the walls leaned together threateningly over their heads and cast them into dark deeper than the night outside. "Use your light," Melein said then. "I think there is stone overhead now entirely." And Niun used Duncan's penlight, ever so small a beam, to find their footing. Down and down they went, a spiraling course and narrow, until they suddenly came upon a well of sky above them, where the night seemed brighter than the utter black they had traveled. Here was a widening, where walls were splashed with symbols the like of which had once adorned the edun itself. The foremost dus reared aside, gave a roar that echoed horridly all up and down the passage, and Niun swung the beam leftward, toward the dus. There in a niche was a huddled knot of black rags and bones. A guardian's grave. Niun touched his brow in reverence to the unknown kel'en, and because he saw Duncan standing too near that holy place, he drew him back by the arm. Then he turned his light on the doorway where Melein stood, a way blocked by stones and sealed with the handprint of the guardian who had built that seal and set his life upon it. Melein signed a reverence to the place with her hand, and suddenly turned to Duncan and looked at him sternly. "Duncan, past the grave of the guardian you must not go or you will die. Stand here and wait. Touch nothing, do nothing, see nothing." And to Niun: "Unseal it. It is lawful." He gave the light to her and began, with the uppermost stones, to unseal what the guardian had warded so many years, a Shrine so sacred that a kel'en would wait to the death in warding it. He knew what choice the man had made. Food and water the kel'en had had, the liberty thereafter to range within sight of his warding-place, to hunt in order to survive; but when the area had failed him, when illness or harsh weather or advancing age had borne upon the solitary kel'en, he had retreated to this chosen niche to die, faithful to his charge, his spirit hovering over the place in constant guardianship. And perhaps Intel herself had stood here and blessed the closing of this door, and set her kiss upon the brow of the brave guardian, and charged him with this keeping. One of the kel'en who had come with her from Nisren, forty years ago, when the Pana had come to Kesri th. The rocks rattled away from the opening with increasing ease, until Melein could step over what was left, setting foot into the cold interior. The light held in her hand ran over the walls, touched writings that were the mysteries of the Shrine of Shrines, convoluted symbols that covered all the walls. For an instant Niun saw these, then sank down to his knees, face averted lest he see what he ought not. For a time he could hear her tiniest step in that sacred place; and then there was no sound at all, and he dared not move. He saw Duncan against the far wall of the well, the dusei by him, and not even they moved. He grew cold in his waiting, and began to shiver from fear. If she should not come back, he must still remain. And there was no stir of life within, not even the sound of a footstep. One of the dusei moaned, its nerves afflicted with the waiting. It fell silent then, and for a long time there was nothing. Then came a stirring, a quiet, rhythmic sound at first from within the Shrine; and at last he recognized it for the sound of soft weeping that became yet more bitter and violent. "Melein!" he cried aloud, turning his eyes to that forbidden place; and shadows were moving within the doorway, a soft flow of lights. His voice echoed impiously around the walls and startled the dusei, and he scrambled to his feet, terrified to go in and terrified not to. The sound stopped. There was silence. He went as far as the door, set his hand on it, nerved himself to go inside. Then he heard her light steps somewhere far inside, heard the sounds of life, and she did not summon him. He waited, shivering. Things moved inside. There was the sound of machinery. It continued, and yet at times he heard her steps clearly. And he remembered with a panic that he had turned his back on Duncan, and whirled to see. But the human only stood, no closer than Melein had permitted, and made no attempt to flee. "Sit down," he bade Duncan sharply; and Duncan did so where he stood, waiting. Niun cursed himself for seeking after Melein and forgetting the charge she had set on him, to mind matters outside. He had put them both at Duncan's mercy had the human braved the dusei to take advantage of it. He settled on the sand himself, at such an angle that he could watch the human and yet steal glances toward the Shrine. He wrapped his arms about his knees, locked his hands with numbing force, and waited, listening. It was a long, long wait, in which he grew miserable and changed position many atime. It seemed, in his sense of time, that it must be drawing toward dawn, although the overcast sky visible above them still was dark. And for a long, long time there was no sound at all from within the Shrine. He hurled himself to his feet, finally, impatient to go again to the door, and then persuaded himself that he had no business to invade that place. In his misery he paced within the small area he had to pace, and looked down betimes at the human, who waited as he had been warned to wait. Duncan's eyes were unreadable in the almost-dark. There was the sound of footsteps again. He turned upon the instant, saw the white flash of the penlight in the doorway. He saw Melein, a shadow, carrying the tiny light in her fingers, her arms clasped about something. He went as close as he dared, saw that what she carried was some sort of casing, ovoid, made of shining metal. It had a carrying bar recessed into it at one end, but she bore it as she might have carried an infant, as something precious, although she staggered with the weight of it and could not step over the stones while bearing it. "Take it," she said in a faint, strained voice, and he galvanized himself from his paralysis of will and reached forth his arms to receive it, dismayed by the weight of what she had managed to carry. It was cold and strange in balance, and he shivered as he took it against him. And he was cold again when he saw her face, moisture glistening there in die reddish light that began to spread behind her, and shadows leaping within the Shrine from this side and that. She had turned once to look back, and then gazed toward him as from some vast distance. Melein, he tried to say to her, and found it impossible. She was Melein still, and sister; but something else was contained in her, and he did not know how to speak to that, to call her back. He held out his hand, anxious at the fire behind her; and she took it and stepped over the rocks at the entry, and came with him. Her skin was cold. Her hand slipped lifelessly from his when she no longer needed him. Duncan waited, and backed a little from the both of them, continuing to stare into the light that was growing behind them. Perhaps he understood that something of great value was being destroyed. He looked dazed, confused. There was left only the strange, cold ovoid. Niun bore it in his arms as Melein started for the passage outward. He knew that he surely bore an essential part of the Pana, which name his caste could not even speak without fear, which a kel'en ought never to see, let alone handle. The kel'en who had bome it here had devoted himself to die afterward, to hold it secret and undisturbed. This had been an honorable man, of the old way, the Kel of the Between; such a man would have been shocked at Niun s'lntel. But he drew courage from holding it, for by it Melein had come into her power; he felt this of a surety. She had been only half a she'pan in his eyes, appointed by violence and necessity. But now he believed that the essential things had passed, that Intel had given her all that she needed. She'pan, he could call her hereafter, believing implicitly that she knew the Mysteries. She had been face to face with the Pana, understanding what a kel'en could not. He did not envy her this understanding: the sound of her weeping still haunted him. But she knew, and she led, and hereafter he trusted her leading implicitly. They fled, they and the human and tire dusei, out of the well, where smoke began to billow up, betraying them to the sky, where flames lit the walls with red and pursued them with heat. They entered the ascending turns of the way they had come, into the cold dark. The Nom, in its first day of new operations, was aswarm with human technicians. Stavros reveled in the sound and scurry of humanity, after so long a time among the slowmoving regul. Reports came in, a bustle of human experts adding their agility to the technology of regul in repairs of the damaged plants, in clearing the wreckage left by the storm and the fighting. And at a point judged stable enough to support a ship, probe Flower rested her squat body out on the height to the side of the city opposite the ruined port: a small vessel for a star-capable craft, a ship without the need for a vast secure landing area, her design enabling her to operate in complete independence. It had been a fortunate decision that brought several such probes on the mission, against the need for such difficult landings, despite their lack of defense against attack. Saber still rested up at the station, spacemade and spacebound, a kilometer long and incapable of landing anywhere. Flower, despite the name, was an ungainly shell, without fragility, without exposed vanes, without need of lading gantries and docks; she was an ugly ship, meant for plain, workman-like duties. She brought technicians, scientists, those who were already beginning to sift through the remnants of Kesrith's records, to sample the air, the soil, to perform the myriad tasks that would start to appropriate the world to human colonists. "Favor," bai Hulagh had said, seeing operations commence. "We regret, in the light of this new good feeling, the unfortunate destruction of our equipment in the calamity at the port. We might have been of much assistance." Regul younglings in general were not so easily adaptive. They fretted at the nearness of humans, and preferred to work in their own groups. They made it no secret that they would gladly be off Kesrith now, to seek the security of their own kind in regul space. But Hulagh had taken some few of them into his office within the Nom and when the younglings emerged, they had smiles for humans and great courtesy, and a powerful fear of the bai. Until the storms descended, and the dusei returned. The report first came in from the water-plant, from Galey's group, that reported to Flower that there were animals moving in large numbers there upon the heights; and Flower confirmed it, and flashed the same to the biologists, and in the doing of it, to Stavros. Stavros locked his sled into the track that would take him to the far side of the Nom, and whisked through several changes to the observation deck, disengaged, and went on manual through the doors and out into the acrid wind. A ruddy bank of cloud was sweeping in, and there, there, all around the visible horizon, sat the dusei. A chill went over him that had nothing to do with the gale, or the biting smell of Kesrith's rains. He sat in the sled, the wind whipping at his sparse hair. He saw Flower squatting on her hilltop; and the distant water-plant, and vehicles speeding for cover as the storm came down; and airships running for the makeshift field before the storm should hit -- miracle if the crews could get them secured in time. He clenched his fist in rage, foreseeing damage, ships picked up by Kesrith's winds and hurled like toys about the field -- human equippage, that, expensive and irreplaceable. He shifted onto Flower's wavelength and heard Flower giving frantic instructions. They were warning the aircraft off, seeking means to route them around the storm to temporary landing elsewhere. He watched as lightnings lit the clouds, and the clouds bred and built and rolled in with frightening rapidity, red-lit with Arain's glow. And the dusei in unending rows sat, and watched, and maintained their vigil. The rains began to fall. Stavros shivered as the first drops spattered the nose of the sled. It was not a place to sit encased in metal, with the lightnings flashing overhead. He backed, opened the doorway, entered the Nom and sealed the door after, still hearing Flower's chatter, along with weather-radar on his receptor, foretelling a bow of storm that clutched at the sea's edge, at the city itself. Flower, he sent, breaking in on their communications. Flower: Stavros. They acknowledged, a thin metallic sound, interrupted by static. Flower: the dusei, the dusei... "We have observed, sir. We are regretfully busy -- " He broke in again. Flower: drive off the dusei. Break them up, drive them away. They acknowledged the order. He sat in his sled, feeling as though he had lost his mind, as though all reason had departed him. Doubtless Flower believed that he had fled his senses. But the ominous heaviness in the air persisted. His skin prickled. he could not bear the duspresence, watching, watching at the storm's edge. Responsible? He refused to believe it. Yet in panic he had diverted Flower to deal with them. He knew them to be discussing the task, too wise to discuss the wisdom of it in his hearing. He sat with his skin drawn into gooseflesh, his teeth near to chattering, a quavering and sickly old man, he thought, a man who had been among strangers too long. He could countermand his own order, break in again and bid them tend more important matters. But neither could he rid himself of the fear of the dusei. His screens went all to static, robbing him of the power to communicate with anyone. The static lasted, and there came a note over his receptors that shrilled, eartormenting, and passed beyond audibility. He powered down, quickly, desperate, of a sudden consumed with the fear that the sled itself might be malfunctioning, himself trapped, helpless to move or call for help. He watched, through a curtain of rain against the glass, the line of the dusei begin to break, the beasts scattering; and still he shivered, terrified, as he saw many of them break not toward the hills, but toward the city, entering its streets, ranging where dusei were not wont to come. Attacking! The static continued. A regul voice came over the loudspeaker, distorted by static, unintelligible. The address system cut in and out sporadically. Hail rattled against the windows, shaking them dangerously. Stavros hastily tried to cut in the stormshields on the observation deck, and they did not operate. He thought to put the sled on battery, and thereby obtained responses from it, but his screens were still dead. Somewhere there was a crash, a heavy impact of falling plastiglass; and wind and the smell of rain went through the Nom halls. Stavros backed the sled, tried to engage the track and fouled the order sequence, began again. It took. He guided himself out of the area and around the comer, finding the hall a wreckage, unshielded windows lying on the carpet at the end of the area, curtains whipping loose from their bases. Regul younglings cowered together. Deprived of the screen, he could not communicate with them. They closed about him, babbling questions, seeking any elder, even human, that could advise them. He pushed the sled through them and sought the downramp, the safer side of the building where the offices were. The hall here was clear. The public address continued to sputter. He found Hulagh's offices open, navigated his way with difficulty, and found the bai himself frantically attempting the closure of the stormshields. A dus was outside. It reared itself against the thin plastiglass. The glass bowed, shook under the raking impact of the claws. Hulagh backed his sled, fingering controls desperately; and Stavros sat still, watching the attack in horror. There was not a door in the Nom that would operate, nothing they could do should the beasts break in. The windows quivered. "Gun!" he cried at Hulagh, trying to make himself understood aloud. "Gun!" And he backed, and Hulagh either understood or reached the same conclusion. They moved, as rapidly as the sleds would allow, and Hulagh rounded the desk and sought a pistol, holding it in shaking hands. But the dus had retreated, a shambling brown shape quickly lost in the sheeting rain across the square. There were others, vague brown shapes that gathered and moved, as though they had forgotten what they were about, they disappeared into the streets of the city, and were gone. In time the rain slacked, leaving only pocked puddles, and the stormshields suddenly operated all at once, too late for protection. The public address became clear, pouring forth a constant chatter of instructions. Stavros' screens sorted themselves into clarity. "Stavros, Stavros, do you read?" Clear, he sent, all clear; and cut them off, for of a sudden there was a grayness before his eyes and he was content only to stay still, to breathe, to wait until the labored beating of his heart and the roaring in his ears subsided. There is a window out on the second floor, Stavros advised Hulagh. Injuries there, I think. "Younglings will attend to it." They neither one mentioned the dus. Flower was still trying to advise him of what its operations were doing. He heard them talking to the aircraft that had drawn off in advance of the storm, shepherding their lost searchers home again to the city. And one of the aircraft answering, the rough-accented voice of Hada Surag-gi: "Favor, favor, seeking return to mission. Flowerbai, seeking return to search." And a human voice, also from an aircraft, cursing and demanding an explanation of the jamming. Stavros wiped his face, cut off the chatter, and looked at the bai. "Never in my experience," said the bai. "Never, reverence." And Hulagh jabbed at buttons and summoned a youngling servitor, ordering soi, and records; and cursed the slowness of youngling wits. His breathing was at an alarming rate. It was several moments before he seemed in control of himself. "They have all gone mad," he said. Their world, advised Stavros. Theirs, before the mri. The soi arrived, borne by a youngling so agitated that the cups danced on the tray; and Stavros drank his unsweetened and drew the welcome warmth into his chilled belly. At length he had the courage to touch the controls to open the stormshields again, remembering the beast even as he did so; and the square was deserted. Of a surety no regul and no humans would venture out until it was known where the dusei had gone. He felt that he would see the apparition that had attacked the window in his nightmares thereafter; if the regul were prone to bad dreams, the bai would share it. "I am very old," said Hulagh in a querulous tone. "I am too old for such things, bai Stavros. The regul who took this world were mad." He sipped at his soi. "The mri controlled them. Now nothing does." There can be barriers , Stavros keyed. We can build them. Hulagh was silent for a long time, throughout most of the cup of soi. His nostrils worked rapidly. At last he blew a sigh and turned his sled from the window. "Holn," he said. Reverence? "Holn concealed records. I did not ask, and they did not say, and I know now." Nostrils worked in great flaring breaths of air. "Stavros-bai, you and I have failed to ask questions. Now, now you and I, Stavros-bai, we have been handed only fragments of what we should have known about Kesrith. We are together in difficulty; and we share an enemy, Stavros-bai." Ho In. "Holn," said Hulagh. "They were clever, human reverence; and I shall not be able to face the anger of my doch if I return destitute. Ship, equipment, everything, reverence Stavros. I am ruined. But likewise Holn has cheated you." Bai Hulagh, you have a purpose in volunteering this information . "The fortunes of doch Alagn," said Hulagh, "are here, with myself, with these surviving younglings. I will not be sent back in disgrace on a human ship. We shall deal, Stavros." An alliance, reverence ? "An alliance, bai Stavros. Trade. Exchange. Ideas. And revenge." Stavros met the dark, glittering eyes. From Kesrith, he sent, there are territories to be explored. "It is first necessary," said Hulagh, "to hold Kesrith." As the Holn and the mri held it advised Stavros, with its resources used. Even the dusei. Even them. And he fell to staring out the window, at the roiling sky, and saw the ruin of the port, and the rain, and considered the resources with which they had to work; and for the first time his hopes began to hold a taint of doubt. When he shut his eyes, he still saw the beast at the window, irrational, as uncontrollable as the elements; he hated them, the dusei, the more so perhaps because they were without rationality, because they were, like the storm, of the elemental forces. Antipathy to all that was regul and Kiluwan, the dusei. But they were a part of Kesrith that could neither be ignored nor destroyed. A combination of random elements, the world of Kesrith; and hereafter, he foresaw, it was not under the control of George Stavros. He could no longer control. He shared Kesrith with beasts and with regul. He clenched his hand on controls and listened to Flower again, hearing the babble of search-craft that were bound out yet another time on their continuing patterns, trying to find one lost soul in all that wilderness, where dusei ran wild and storms raked the land with violence. Almost he bade them give it up. But he had already given Flower irrational orders enough. He did not make the move. He saw one of the aircraft circle far out over the ruins of the edun and continue west, a speck quickly lost in the haze. Melein was asleep, finally. Niun, wiping the weariness from his eyes, settled the heavy metal ovoid into his lap and leaned his head back against the warm, breathing side of the dus. Duncan lay sprawled in the sand, on his stomach, his tattered and makeshift robes inadequate to afford him much protection from scrapes and sand-sores. His skin, bare above the boots, was scored with abrasionsand sunburn. His eyes, unprotected by the veil, without the membrane to ease them, ran tears that streaked a perpetual coating of dust, like a dus gone mink. Duncan was exhausted for the moment, beyond causing them any trouble. Niun noted that a jo had settled against the rock, its luincamouflage a little too dark for the red sandstone, where it clung for shade in this hottest part of the day. The name meant mimic. The creature harmed nothing. It waited for snakes, which were its natural food. It was not a bad campmate, the jo. Niun nodded over his charge, his arms clasped about it, and rested his head, and finally relaxed enough to sleep a while, now that Melein had settled. She had almost fainted before they stopped in this shelter, overburdened and hurting more than she wanted to admit. She had gone aside from them, into the privacy of the rocks, and taken cloth with her, in long strips. "I think it will help my side," she had said; and because there was no kath'en or kel'e'en to attend her, she attended to herself. The ribs were broken, he much feared, or at the least cracked. He was worried, with a deep, cold fear that would not leave him. But she had returned, hand pressed to her side, and smiled a thin smile and announced that she felt some better, and that she thought she could sleep; and the tension unwound from Niun's vitals when he saw that she could do so, that her pain was less. But the fear did not go away. He bore Duncan's presence, his dread of anything that Duncan might do to him far less than his fear for Melein, his fear for losing her, for ending alone. The last mri. He dreamed of the edun, and its towers crumbling in fire, and awoke clutching the smooth shape of the Pan'en to him in the fear that he also was falling into the Dark. But he sat on the sand, the dus unmoving behind him. The jo, with a deft swoop, descended on a lizard and bore it back to his upside-down perch on the rock, shrouding his meal with his mottled wings, a busy and tiny movement as he fed, swallowing the lizard bit by bit. Niun set the Pan'en beside him so that he could feel it, constantly, against himself, and leaned his head against the dus. He drowsed again, and awoke finding the heat unpleasant. He looked toward the advancing line of the sunlight, that had crept up on Duncan, and saw that it had enveloped him to the waist, falling on the bare skin of his knee and hand. The human did not stir. "Duncan," said Niun. He obtained no reaction, and reluctantly bestirred himself, leaned forward and shook at the human. "Duncan." Brown eyes stared up at him, bewildered, heat-dazed. "The sun, stupid tsi'mri, the sun. Move into the shade." Duncan dragged himself into a new place and collapsed again, ripped aside the veil and lay with the cooler sand against his bare face. His eyes blinked, returning sensibility within them, as Niun resumed his place. "Are we ready to move on?" he asked in a faint voice. "No. Sleep." Duncan lifted his head and looked around at Melein, lay down again facing Niun. "Somewhere," he said in a faint whisper, "my people will have come to Kesri th by now. She needs medical help. You know that. If it were sure that those up there are humans, we could contact an aircraft. Listen: The war is over. I don't think you know us well enough to believe it, but we wouldn't pursue matters any further. No revenge. No war. Come in with me. Contact my people. There would be help for her. And no retaliations. None." Niun listened to the words, patient, believing at least that Duncan believed what he was saying. "Perhaps it is even true," he said. "But she would never accept this." "She will die. But with help -- " "We are mri. We do not accept others' medicines, only our own. She has done what can be done under our own ways. Should strangers touch her? No. We live or we die, we heal or we do not heal." He shrugged. "Maybe our way of doing things is not even a wise one. Sometimes I have thought it was not. But we are the very last, and we will keep to the things that all our ancestors before us have observed. There is no use now for anything but that." And he fell to thinking how Melein had planned, and that they had won this last small victory over tsi'mri, that they had gathered to themselves the Holiness and the history of their kind; and his fingers ran over the smooth skin of the Pan'en that he kept by him "I have broken two traditions," he admitted at last. "I have taken you, and I have carried burdens. But the honor of the she'pan I will not compromise. No. I do not believe in your doctors. And I do not believe in your people and your ways. They are not for us." Duncan looked at him, long and soberly. "Even to survive?" "Even to survive." "If I get back to my own people," said Duncan finally, "I'm going to make sure it's known whai the regul did, what really happened that night at the port. I don't know whether it will do any good; I know it can't change anything for the better. But it ought to be told." Niun inclined his head, a respect for that gesture. "The regul," he said, "would see you dead before they would let you tell those things. And if you hope on that account that I will let you leave our company and go to them, I must tell you I will not." "You don't believe me." "I don't believe you know what they will do, either your kind or the regul." Duncan was silent thereafter, staring into nothing. He looked very' wom and very' tired. He rubbed at a line of dried blood that had settled into an unshaven trail; and he was quiet, but seemed not apt to sleep. "Don't run again," Niun advised him, for he misliked the human's mood. "Don't try. I have made you too easy with us. Do not trust it." Brown eyes flicked up at him, tsi'mri and disturbing. Duncan gathered himself up to a sitting position, moving as though every muscle ached, and rubbed his head with a grimace of discomfort. "I had rather stay alive," he said, "like you would." The words stung. They were too nearly true. "That is not all that matters," Niun said. "I know that," Duncan said. "A truce. A truce: a peace between us at least until you've got her to somewhere safe, until she's well. I know you'd kill for her; I know that under other circumstances you might not. I understand that whatever she is, she's someone very special...to you." "A she'pan," said Niun, "is Mother to a House. She is the last. A kel'en is only the instrument of her decisions. I can make no promises except for my own choice." "Can there not be another generation?" Duncan asked suddenly, in his innocence, and Niun felt the embarrassment, but he did not take offense. "Can you not...if things were otherwise... ?" "We are bloodkin, and her caste does not mate," Niun answered softly, moved to explain what mri had never explained to outsiders; but it was simply kel-lore, and it was not forbidden to say. It lent him courage, to affirm again the things that had always been fixed and true. "Kath'en or kel'e'en could bear me children for her, but there are none. There is no other way for us. We either survive as we were, or we have failed to survive. We are mri; and that is more than the name of a species, Duncan. It is an old, old way. It is our way. And we will not change." "I will not be the cause," said Duncan, "of finishing the regul's handiwork. I'll stay with you. I made my try. Maybe again, sometime, maybe, but not to anyone's hurt, hers or yours. I have time. I have all the time in the world." "And we do not," said Niun. He thought with a wrench of fear that Duncan, wiser than he in some things, for human kel'ein were able to cross castes, suspected that Melein would not live; and it answered a fear in his own heart. He looked to see how she was resting; and she was still asleep. The sight of her regular breathing silently reassured him. "With time and quiet," said Duncan, "perhaps she will mend." "I accept your truce," said Niun, and in great weariness he unfastened his veil and looped the end of the mez over his shoulder, baring his face to the human. It was hard, shaming, to do; he had never shown his face to any tsi'mri; but he had taken this for an ally, even for the moment, and in the rightness of things, Duncan deserved to see him as he was. Duncan looked long at him, until the embarrassment became acute and Niun flinched from that stare. "The mez is a necessity in the heat and the dryness," Niun said. "But I am not ashamed to see your face. The mez is not necessary between us." And he curled himself against the Pan'en, and against the solid softness of the dus, and attempted to rest, taking what ease he could, for they would move with the coolness and concealment of evening, at a time when surely regul trusted that even a mri would not dare the cliffs.    There was the sound of an aircraft, distant, a reminder of alien presence in the environs of Sil'athen. Niun heard it, and gathered himself up to listen, to be sure how close or how far it was. Melein was awake, and Duncan stirred, seeking at once the direction of the sound. It was evening. The pillars had turned red, burning in the twilight. Arain was visible through their spaces, a baleful red disc, rippling in the heat of the sands. Melein sought to rise. Niun quickly offered her his hands and helped her, and she was no longer too proud to accept that help. He looked at her drawn face and thought of his own necessary burden. His helplessness to do anything for her overwhelmed him. "We must be moving," she said. "We must go down again, to Sil'athen. There is no other exit I know from this place. But with the aircraft -- " Her face contracted in an expression of anger, of frustration. "They are watching Sil'athen. They believe that the place hides us, and if they have men afoot -- " "I hope they are afoot," said Niun. "That would give me satisfaction." And then he remembered Duncan, and was glad that he had been speaking in the mu'ara, as she had used with him. But it was likely enough that they were regul that they had to deal with, who would not go afoot. "The climb down," she said...I think it would be best to move just at the last light, so that we can see to climb. There will not be a moon up until sometime later. That will give us some dark in which to cross the open place at the beginning." "That is the best we can do," Niun agreed. "We will eat and drink before we go. We may not have another chance to stop." And what that journey would cost Melein weighed heavily on his mind. "Duncan," he said quietly, while they shared food, both of them unveiled, "I will not be able to do more than carry what I must carry. On the climb -- " "I will help her," Duncan said. "Down is easier," Melein said, and looked askance at Duncan, as though she found their arrangement far from her liking. It was the last of the food that they had brought with them. Thereafter they must hunt, and quickly they must find water again, in this place where luin were not frequent. Niun's mind raced ahead to these things, difficulties upon difficulties, but ones more pleasant than those most immediate. They set out again toward the trail they had used, and when they stood finally looking down that great chasm, dim and unreal in the faded light, shading into black at the bottom, he held the Pan'en close to him and dreaded the climb even for himself. When he considered Melein, he turned cold. If she falls, he thought to warn Duncan; but it would do no good, to dishonor what small trust there was between them, and he thought that the human must know his mind. Duncan returned that stare, plain and accepting the charge that was set upon him. "Go first," Niun bade him, and the human looped the trailing mez across his face and secured it firmly as Niun had already done with his own. Then he set his feet on the downslope, bracing them carefully, offering his hand up for Melein's. "Niun," Melein said, a glance, a patent distress. It was the only thing at which she had shown fear, committing herself to the hands of a human, when she was already in much pain. Then, her hand pressed to her side, she reached her fingers toward Duncan's, and carefully, carefully, she set her feet on the downslope, beginning the descent with Duncan's hand to steady her, he bracing his body against whatever security there was, his arm extended to give her a firm support should she slip. Thus in small stages they descended; and Niun stood with the Pan'en a cold and comfortless weight in his arms, watching while they disappeared together into that shadow. The dusei waited behind him, shifting weight nervously. And then something intruded on his hearing, from behind him. Aircraft, skimming close above the pillars. He grasped the carrying-bar of the Pan'en, the only way to carry it in the descent, and hissed to the dusei and started down, terrified lest he cause them to be seen, lest in his haste now he slip and come down on Melein and Duncan. The aircraft passed directly overhead, a roar of power that echoed off the narrow walls, and he crouched low against a rock, shuddering against the strain of holding position on that slope. Pebbles skidded underneath his outmost foot. He took the chance, as the aircraft passed beyond view, and slid a few lengths lower, deeper into the shadow, and the great bodies of the dusei came behind, sharing his fear, communicating back to him an anxiety that made his stomach heave. Niun began to think he could not hold the Pan'en: His fingers felt cut to the bone; and after he had gone a distance more, he could not feel much pain, only an increasing numbness and lack of control over his fingers. He braced himself against a rock and shifted hands, reversing his entire position on the cliffside, showered from above by pebbles and dust from the claws of the dusei. They were at such a place now that they could not stop, and he plunged down a desperate slide, until he entered the deepest dark. And at a stopping place he overtook Melein and Duncan, and the human's face looked toward him in that faintest of light. Melein still held to his hand, bent for a moment against a boulder. She moved on then, weakly, leaning much on Duncan; and Niun took the stable place they had had, braced his body against the weight he held, and waited, to stop the dusei, to hold them there, awkward as it was, until she was safely down. They came, shouldered against him, and he held them with they be still, hush, stop. They were patient, even in this awkward state, joined with his senses. The aircraft passed again, lights winking against the dim sky overhead. Niun looked up at it, trembling with the strain, and held his place, helpless, with the growing conviction that they were lost. They had surely been spotted, at the worst of all times, in the worst of all places. The ship circled yet once more. He settled the Pan'en in the right hand again and set out downward, hoping, desperately hoping, that Melein and Duncan had had time, for there were no more resting places that he remembered. He went, boots sliding on the trail, bringing up against one and another rock with a force that his muscles were too tired to absorb. He came down and down until he could scarcely control his descent, and dropped from the last turn to the sand, driven to one knee by the impact. The dusei came after, clambering down with much scratching of claws and scattering of sand, until safe at the bottom. And Melein sat, a pale huddle of robes in the shadow, and Duncan knelt by her. Her hand was pressed to her lips, and the other hand to her side, and her robes were stained with blood. Niun fell to his knees beside her, the Pan'en in his arms, and she could not prevent the cough that she staunched with her veil. Blood came. He saw it, and the membrane flashed across his vision, blinding him. He shivered, unable to see for a moment, and then it cleared. "It began on the climb," Duncan said. "I think the ribs gave way." And the aircraft circled at the top of the cleft. Niun looked up at it in a heat of rage. "Be free of us," he bade Duncan, and rose up, letting the Pan'en fall to the sand. He looked last at Melein, her eyes closed, her face relaxed, her body supported in Duncan's arms -- not even a sen'en to attend her. He gave a sharp call to his dusei and began to walk, quickly, toward the end of the small valley, toward the main valley of Sil'athen. "Niun!" Duncan shouted after him, which he did not regard. He saw the aircraft hovering, at the valley's end. He reached for the cords at the end of the siga's long sleeves, and fastened them to their places on the honor belts at his shoulders, freeing his arms from the encumbering cloth; and he worked life into his hands, scored and numbed as they were from carrying the Pan'en. Duncan was running now, trying to overtake him. He heard the human -- a racking cough, immediate payment for that rashness in Kesrith's thin air. He saw the aircraft touch on the sand, and regul descending, standing on the ramp. The dus at his side moaned a roar of menace, and the other two scattered out, flanking them -- dustactics in hunting, the outrunners. He saw the regul about to fire, the weapon lifted. He was not in its line when it discharged; but his eyes were clear and his hand steady when he fired; and the regul crumpled, a mass of flesh still stirring. They did not die easily, body-shot. A moment later the ramp drew up, toppling the wounded regul; coward, Niun cursed the regul flier. And he darted into the rocks and scrambled for cover as the ship lifted, swinging over near him, drawing off again. He was in the open now, in the main valley, and other aircraft came to hover. They would have him, eventually. He ran low among the rocks that bordered the open sands, pursued by the aircraft with their sensors, and finally, a desperate tactic, braced and fired against the nearest -- all without effect for the first several shots. Then the aircraft began to have difficulty, and skidded off into a great cloud of sand amid the valley. Others swooped in. The sky was alive with the sound of them; they passed low and drew off, warned by the fate of the first. He ran and he rested, and by now the air was tinged with the coppery taste of too much exertion in the thin air, and he could not see clearly to fire back at them. Shots tore up the rocks where he hid, and he staggered as rock became shrapnel and tore his arm, bringing a warm rivulet of blood. Lights played across the cliffs, making it impossible to remain hidden. There was scant cover, and shots tore at what there was of it. He ran, and fell, and scrambled up and raced for the next rock, and what had become of the dusei he did not know -- it was not their kind of fight, this fury of fire and light. The valley became ruin, steles and natural formations blasted to rubble. It was the final vengeance of the regul on his kind, to destroy the last sanctity of the People; and to ruin the land, as they had destroyed all that they had touched. A near miss threw him rolling, dazed, blinded by the membrane that shielded his eyes, and he rose up and ran, too harried to fire any longer, able only to run and run, until they had him a clear target. An aircraft pressed at him, diving low, throwing sand from the wind of its passing. And then he thought with a sudden and clear satisfaction, and shifted left, toward the end of the valley, toward an old, old place, under the sightless eyes of Eddan and Liran and Debas, his teachers. Fight with the land; make it your ally, they had been wont to tell him; and now he heard them clear and calmly through the roar of the aircraft. He fell, sprawling, and the aircraft continued on over him, hovered, kicking up sand; and he lay still, still as it settled, playing lights over the sand where he lay. It touched; and the earth exploded, a great pale shape rearing up, heaving the aircraft, catching the ship in the convulstions of the mantle: burrower and machine, entangled in a cloud of sand, and the concussions of the struggle shaking the earth. Niun rolled and tried to run, but an edge of the mantle or a shock of air hurled him sprawling, and then another impact, and he saw the world go up in fire as the aircraft disintegrated. And dark thereafter.    "Niun!" Someone was calling him out of that dark, that had not the familiarity of the brothers; but it was a familiar voice, all the same. Light broke over him. He moved limbs that were buried in sand, and heard the sound of engines. "Niun!" He lifted his head and then drew himself up, standing on legs that swayed beneath him, shielding his eyes from the light with his arm. Waiting. "Niun!" It was Duncan's voice, from a ragged silhouette before the lights. "Don't fire. Niun, we have Melein aboard. She is not dead, Niun." He went blank at that horrid shock, his mind not functioning, and came near to falling. And then the kel-law echoed far in his mind, reminding him that there was a she'pan to be served; and that, above all else, he could not leave her alone in the hands of strangers. "What do you want of me?" he cried, his voice breaking with fury, with rage at Duncan, and treachery, and dishonor. "Duncan, I remind you what you swore -- " "Come in," Duncan said. "Niun, come in with us. Safe conduct. I will swear it." He hesitated, and the strength went out of him, and he made a gesture of surrender, and began, slowly, to walk into the lights, toward the silhouettes that waited for him, tall and human. Better than the regul, at least. And out of the tail of his eye, a squat, dark form. He saw it, saw the move, knew treachery. He palmed the as'ei, whirled and threw; and the fire took him, and he never felt the sand.    "Hada Surag-gi is dead," said Galey. "The mri are hanging on." Duncan wiped his face, and in the same gesture swept the headcloth off, and ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair. He stumbled back through the narrow confines of the aircraft and shouldered past the medic who had already twice ordered him to keep his seat. He sat down on the deck, unsteady in the motion of the aircraft, and regarded the two mri, wrapped in white, a tangle of tubing and monitoring connections from the auto-med units keeping their lives by means that the mri would find distasteful, had they known it. But they would have the chance to know it. "They're going to make it, both of them," the medic said. And then, frowning, with a glance at the sheet-wrapped hulk to the rear: "That particular regul was an officer of the Nom, with connections. There are going to be some questions asked." "There will be some questions asked," Duncan said in a still voice, and looked at the mri, dismissing the medic from his mind. He sat with his legs tucked under him, still in the tattered and makeshift robes, and with his mind elsewhere; and at last the medic drew off to talk to the crew. They had spoken little to him after the first excitement of recovering him alive; they were put off, perhaps, by the look of him, the strangeness of a man who had come alive from the desert of Kesrith, keeping company with mri and insisting with such vehemence on the possession of a mri treasure. He touched Melein's brow, smoothed the metallic-bronze of her hair, noting the steady pulse on the monitors that assured him of her life. Melein's golden eyes opened, the membrane cleared slowly back, and she seemed to be exploring the curious place that she had seen in her intervals of waking, rediscovering the strangeness that had taken her in. She was curiously calm, as though in compliance with being. He took her long, slim fingers in his hand, and she pressed his hand with a faint response. "Niun is all right," he told her. He was not sure she understood this, for there was not a flicker. "There is the object you wanted," he added, but she did not look; likely all these concerns were distant from her, for she was heavily drugged. "Kel'en," she whispered. "She'pan?" he answered; perhaps she confused him with Niun. "There will be a ship, "she said. "A way off Kesrith." "There will be that," he said to her, and reckoned that he had told her the truth. She closed her eyes then. " Shon'ai she said, with a taut, faint smile. He did not know the word. But he thought that she meant acceptance. The deck slanted. They were coming in. He told her so.  A tall tale of Toltecs and time travel I stopped by Doctor Ari's place the other morning before going to work, partly to kill some time, partly to quell an uncharacteristic case of nerves I was developing. Doctor Ari is a good man to see whenever I get the jitters; his medicine might be three thousand years out of date but he has a bedside manner that can calm anybody. It's the main reason he's still a doctor, not a waiter somewhere else. The little bell over the door tinkled when I entered the storefront office and Doctor Ari's deep, heavily accented voice sounded from the back room. "Chust a minute, I god a nother patient." A few minutes later a seedylooking old lady preceded him out of the curtained door, clutching a bottle of pills and thanking him profusely in Greek. The Doctor smiled benignly and repeated some instructions about dosage; then, after she had left, he turned to me with a broad grin. "Scharles! Long time no see. You come back here, we have some Ouzo, yes?" I nodded, feeling better already, and followed him into the examination room. Doctor Ari is a tall, distinguished-looking old quack with the kind of hawk-face you see so often among the ancient Attics. It isn't hard to see how he came to end up here, three millenia from home, because of a stupid mistake. Back when Human Resources Inc., was just starting up, they had for chief timejumper one Ed Benchley, as dull a clod as ever held the job. I think he finally ended up a tech out on Mars or some such place, and good riddance. Doctor fact. It seems that some Ivy-League college decided they wanted Aristotle -- the real Aristotle -- for the head of their philosophy deafter him. Not only was Benchley a dope, but he had specialized in Northern Europe and consequently his Attic was limited to a handful of phrases and gestures. Well, they sent him back to Athens and when he asked around for Aristotle in broken Greek, he was directed to Doctor Ari's house. This was, of course, prior to the snatch laws and so as soon as he saw this distinguished and intelligent-looking man and determined that his name was indeed Aristotle, he hit him with a sleeper and jumped. The clod! -- it never occurred to him that Aristotle was a common name in Athens. The man he snatched turned out to be the neighborhood doctor. ably put out by the waste of nearly tion the presence of an unwanted snatchee, and so Benchley got his walking papers. Even then Doctor Ari could have sued but it turned out that he didn't mind the situation at all once everything was explained to him. He settled right in, got a naturopathic license and started doing a land-office business. All things considered, Benchley didn't do too bad a job; I've met the real Aristotle several times and compared to him, Doctor Ari is a prize. Now it's hard to believe the Doctor is so far out of time; his only anachronism is his insistence upon wearing sandals, which he claims are good for the feet. Judging by observation of the neighborhood, he has persuaded quite a few of his patients to take them up as well. I sat down on an examination table while he rummaged behind a shelf of neatly labeled herbs and came up with a half-full bottle of Ouzo. He poured out most of it into two beakers and handed me one with a flourish. "Hoo! Dot's good stuff!" he said after a long drink. "Better than we got at home, you bet. Dot's medicine!" I drank mine more cautiously, savoring the fire in my throat. "So, Scharles," he said after a minute, "what's bringing you here this time of day? You tink maybe you need a physic?" I shuddered. "No, thanks, just some talk." He finished his Ouzo and leaned back, his bedside manner showing. "Talk, eh? You have the hard one coming up, dot's it, yes?" "Yes," I said, nodding. "I have a hard one today. It's giving me the jitters." "Dot's good. You fellas get too damn cocky sometime. You make stupid back there. Pretty soon -- " he snapped his fingers, "no more Scharles. You get jitters, you maybe be more careful." "Yes, well, I'll have to play this one real carefully. It's a killer." Doctor Ari didn't say anything, just nodded gravely, so I continued. "I don't know if you've ever heard of the Toltecs. They were a big Mexican civilization up until about a thousand years ago when they moved south, or were pushed south by the Aztecs. Anyway, they had a religious teacher called Quetzalcoatl who showed up sometime around the sixth century A.D., inspired them to become really great, humanized them somewhat and generally changed the course of preColumbian history." I paused to take another drink. "Apparently there's been a theory knocking around for a long time that this Quetzalcoatl was actually an early Irish missionary named Saint Brendan, and now something called the Auld Sod Historical Fund wants him snatched for the greater glory of modem Ireland. I've got the job." Doctor Ari meditated for a moment. "So what is so bad, Scharles? You're the best there is, sounds like a piece of pie." "That's cake, piece of cake. But it isn't by any means. You see," I began ticking points off on my fingers, "we don't know for sure that Quetzalcoatl ever really existed; if he did, we don't know if he was really Brendan; and if he was, we still are guessing about the time involved since several of the big Toltec rulers after him called themselves Quetzalcoatl as well, with resulting vast confusion. We don't even know for sure where he lived, again because of later confusion of names." Doctor Ari started to say something but I held up my hand. "I know," I said, "those are pretty standard problems, but there's more. Unlike most ancient civilizations, relatively little is known about Toltec language and customs and so I'll be operating half in the dark. For instance, at that state of their development did they go in big for human sacrifice like the later Aztecs did? Were they as severely xenophobic as some Mesoamericans? Were they loaded down with taboos? I'm going to have to be very careful about things like that. And, assuming I do find Brendan, how am I supposed to get him to sign up? He was probably a misfit at home, certainly hyperreligious..." I let the sentence trail off. I was scaring myself. As I had hoped. Doctor Ari wasn't at all sympathetic. "Well, Scharles," he said bluntly, "dot's your job. You want to quit, you quit. Take nice safe desk job, dot what you want to do? You do it, nobody stoppin' you." "Damn it, that's not what I meant. I just wish -- " And suddenly I smiled; my jitters were gone. As usual, Doctor Ari -- with his brusque, stolid manner -- had channeled my thoughts in the right direction. After all, I reflected, I had taken the job of jumper for adventure. Now I was going to get some, wasn't that the point? Sure, it would be a challenge. I thought about my last job, snatching Isaac Newton for the umpteenth time; what a bore. With somebody as popular -- and thereby well-researched -- as he was, you just followed the book, showed him some pages from the Journal of Mathematics, August, #, and then gave him a pen to sign the contract with. In Brendan's case I would have to think for a change, and that might turn out to be fun. With a grin I stood up and shook Doctor Ari's hand. "Thanks, Doc. You've fixed me up again." He chuckled. "You done the fixing, Scharles. All I do is maybe give you a fiddle help. You go get dot Kwettywhoever and bring him round here, I fix him up some physic." I turned down an offer of some more Ouzo -- this was no time to get drunk -- and walked out of Doctor Ari's office a new man. By the time I pushed open the wide glass doors looking forward to the jump. McNaulty, head of Operations, was waiting for me in his office, gnawing on the end of an unlit cigar. It's a standard joke among worry, McNaulty does enough of that for everybody. Whether it's out of concern for us or for the huge costs of operation, it's left up to personal opinion. This time he seemed to be working on an ulcer. "Hayward!" He groaned with relief, "Thank God! I thought you weren't going to show up this morning. (I was all of ten minutes late.) The boys in Prep have called six times." "They ought to leam patience, it's a great virtue. I got held up, but I'm rarin' to go." McNaulty looked at me dourly. "I wish I had your confidence, going into this one. I don't like it." "Piece of pie," I said casually. He seemed not have heard. "Willis is all set with the briefing and Make-Up will be ready by noon. You're sure the language took?" I said, "No problem," in Nahuatl and two Gaelic dialects. After two weeks of intensive hypno-cramming, I was as confident as anyone can be with a dead language. McNaulty sighed and pushed a thin folder across the desk. "Here's the contract, a map and some things Psych thinks might be useful. You can run through them during the briefing." . I shuffled through the papers and held up several sheets of parchment bearing fancy Latin script. "Those are faked church documents to show Brendan," he explained. "Tsk-tsk, treading awful close to coercion, aren't we?" "Damn it! How else do you convince a sixth-century monk that you aren't a demon? The idea is to let him think the church needs him for a very special job, carrying the word to thousands and thousands of souls; if he doesn't catch on that it's in the future, that's his hard luck. Bates tells me it will hold up in court, if it comes to that. Anyway, don't you worry about legal details. Just get this mark on that contract and jump back here." I slipped the folder under my arm and headed for the door. "See you in the jumproom, Chief -- if you don't have a breakdown," I called over my shoulder. McNaulty just growled at me as I left; he takes his worrying seriously. On the elevator I glanced through the folder again, skimmed the standard contract -- written thoughtfully in Latin: "I do hereby freely and without coercion agree to accept residence in such a time and place as I have been informed of in regards to -- " If I could get Brendan to sign that without denouncing me as a devil's messenger, I would be doing something. The map was more helpful. It showed a sparse system of roads superimposed on the topography of Mexico, with little dots indicating the location of Toltec communities. Most of the roads seemed to converge on the largest dot; Teotihuacan, the great temple city, my tentative goal. Briefings are generally dull things and the one that day was no exception. I was quizzed on the language and such customs and taboos as we had learned of through our sketchy -- but cheap -- autoscanning equipment, and lectured briefly on the fragmentary and often contradictory traditions concerning Saint Brendan and Quetzalcoatl. It all seemed pretty weak evidence to base a jump on. After that a technician gave me a read me a long list of completely obvious dos and don'ts, finally winding up with the most important thing of all: my time limit. "You're lucky in one thing," he said encouragingly. "Since the Toltec civilization is a dead-end, you have quite a bit of temporal leeway, as much as a week if you watch your step -- and I do mean watch it! This isn't your ordinary jump. Stay away from people as much as possible, get Brendan fast and clean, and don't stop for sightseeing. Play it safe and you shouldn't have any problem with time." I leaned back and considered that. A week is a long time for an operation, far longer than usual, and it made up for a lot. One of the biggest problems with jumping -- hell, the biggest problem -- is the temporal limit, the maximum time you have in which to find your man and bring him back... or else stay there for good. When timejumping was first discovered back in the nineteenthirties, everyone worried about paradoxes and possible changes in the present. It didn't take long, however, to find that the present is safe from alteration thanks to the phenomenon of historical pointdeviation, a concise phrase meaning that any. change brought about in the past by a jumper starts a whole new course of history completely and permanently unreachable from our own. Thus, if I were to go back and shoot Hitler in Vienna (and it has been tried), there would be no still be in our history books but there would be another present created where things were vastly different. The unfortunate catch is that I would then be stranded in that timetrack for the rest of my life since its future would become mine. Back home I would fail to return, and that would be the only effect. Not only does historical pointdeviation come into play with any overt attempt to change the past, but even the most innocuous jump has minor effects that are cumulatively enough to bring a new line into existence. So everything the jumper does is potentially dangerous, from taking a drink of water to swatting a mosquito; just the fact of his being there, even if he stands motionless, will eventually produce enough change to strand him. Fortunately for jumpers (and maximum safe temporal limit can be computed so that, barring accidents and careless meddling, the jumper knows how long he has in a given operation before the cumulative changes pose a threat. Furthermore, when he snatches somebody, or makes a bad mistake, he has about four minutes in which to get away -- a temporal delay, it's called. But nobody lasts too long if he counts on that; pretty soon he miscalculates and doesn't come back. Different times and places have different temporal limits, ranging from days to minutes. Generally, but not always, the further back you go, the shorter the limit, the exceptions being dead-end times such as Toltec Mexico, where even sizeable changes will be nullified by the Aztecs and finally by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.    I usually work within a oneor two-day limit, so I wouldn't feel rushed in a week. Still more important, I could trade off time for freedom, giving me a chance to talk to people, eat if I wanted to, and worry a little less about mistakes, in exchange for a day or two of my alloted time. It was a welcome advantage; I didn't want to think about being stranded in Toltec Mexico. If I ever do go over the hill, it won't be in a place like that. The briefing over, I shook hands where I was transformed into a typical Toltec. They glued on a beaked plastic nose, tinted my skin and did something to my head that left me with lank, oily black hair. Then they outfitted me with a costume that must have cost a small fortune in bird feathers alone. I was going as a wealthy farmer from southern Mexico, come north to see the fabled Quetzalcoatl. I carried a sort of shoulder bag containing the folder McNaulty had given me, some shell money and my all-important snatcher: a palmsized piece of metal which, when squeezed just so, would instantly whisk me back home, along with whomever was in bodily contact with me. It always seems an awfully insignificant gadget in which to trust my life but I guess that under a microscope its innards are enough to make an engineer dither happily. After the lengthy briefing and costuming, it was almost three o'clock when I finally entered the jumproom. McNaulty was there along with several technicians and a man whom he identified as O'Brien, the legal rep for the Auld Sod Historical Fund. O'Brien did not look Irish; he didn't look much of anything in particular except a short, mousy man who was obviously ill at ease in the faintly humming presence of the complex jump equipment. After introductions had been made and he had recovered from the shock of seeing me in costume, he finished what he had been saying to McNaulty when I came in. "And are you absolutely sure that there will be no coercion of Saint Brendan?" He seemed a little uncomfortable with the title. "It would be unthinkable for my clients to be a party to anything in any way improper." McNaulty smiled broadly and spread his hands. Lord, he can be glib! "I assure you, Mr. O'Brien, that Human Resources employs only the most ethical methods of recruitment. We have for over thirty years excelled in supplying the modem world with talent gleaned from all the past ages of man, and I think I can safely say that our long record of honorable operation speaks for itself, preceding as it does by some years the so-called anticoercion laws intended to regulate our less conscientious ' competitors. "Human Resources is no fly-bynight concern, Mr. O'Brien. We have a reputation -- a tradition -- to uphold and none of our recruits -- " I almost laughed at that. Nobody in the company ever calls them anything but snatchees -- "have ever had occasion to complain of our treatment of them. Mr. Hayward here is our best operative, a man with long experience in the sort of respectful but persuasive arguments that are likely to convince such a dedicated man as Saint Brendan that his best interests will be served by coming to us." At that point I coughed loudly. It was a fine speech, smooth from long practice in reassuring clients who suddenly realized the enormity of the undertaking -- tampering with reality itself -- but I had heard it all before. McNaulty glared slightly at me. "Okay, Hayward," he barked, suddenly all efficiency, "I guess you want to get moving now." I nodded and stepped into the red circle on the floor that marked the focus of the beam. One of the techs came over and checked my snatcher with a meter. "All set, Mr. Hayward," he said. "We're dropping you about five miles outside of Teotihuacan, in September, five hundred fiftysix." "I won't even ask whose hat you pulled that date out of." He smiled thinly; techs don't like jokes about their computations. "Your snatcher's okay, one week limit, see you in -- " he glanced at a clipboard he carried -- "fifteen minutes' subjective time." He returned the snatcher and stepped over to a console. McNaulty and I exchanged thumbs-up, and the beam was switched on. It's hard for anyone who has never jumped to believe the almost total lack of sensation when the beam hits you and the forces that used to be called weak atomic punch you right through the continuum. There's a slight tingle as static charges equalize, and poof... you're there.    I crouched down automatically, scanning the area to see if anyone had noticed my arrival, an event that would call for immediate return, but I was alone and slowly I straightened up. Pre-Columbian Mexico was a dried-up, rocky place, although not as wild as I had expected. Behind me trees thickened into a sparse, thorny woods, but ahead the field -- which was irrigated and planted in short, scrubby com -- stretched about a hundred yards to a narrow road with fields on the other side. Cautiously I walked out to the road and looked both ways after checking my map, which had a little x marking my point of arrival. Off to the right rose a line of high hills that seemed to be uncultivated while to the left I saw more fields, and in the distance a cluster of thatched adobe huts. I started off toward them. It was hot walking along that trail; the sun was near the zenith and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. After a while I took off my headpiece but soon found that the sun beat down even worse without it. Little puffs of reddish dust rose with my every footstep and now and then a big black tarantula would run across the road in front of me, while out beyond the fields an incredible variety of bird life made a din in the chaparral. As I approached the adobe huts, I saw that they were the buildings of a small, not-very-prosperouslooking farm. A couple of scrawny turkeys pecked listlessly in the dust and a nasty-looking Chihuahua yapped shrilly at me from the shade of an awning. Presently a stout Indian woman came out to see what the commotion was about. I smiled at her and asked for a drink of water. She looked me over for a second or two and then returned a broad and almost toothless smile. "Of course, Outlander, come on in. The sun's too hot for traveling." I had to stoop to enter the low building. Inside, all but enveloped by a cloud of flies, a filthy infant played with a gourd rattle and an old man slept noisily on a crude platform in one comer. The woman brought me a pottery jar of tepid water and, after a glance at the sleeping man, a shallow bowl of mush as well. "Here, Outlander, fill your belly. You look like you've come from far away." "Yes, Woman, I have come from the south for many days, bound for the holy city of Teotihuacan. How far have I yet to go?" "Oh, not far, a half-day's travel. My! The bugs are bad this year, ain't they? My husband," she gestured at the snoring man, "won't work when they're this bad." I agreed politely; the bugs were bad. Of course they didn't bother me; I had had a repellent shot before I left. I couldn't risk any interaction with the local insect life. The woman did not have visitors very often, I guess. She rattled on about the weather and her goodfor-nothing husband and similar mundane topics. At least it gave me a chance to practice my Nahuatl on her; if my accent and syntax were very bad, she said nothing, probably laying it to my being from the south. I finished the mush, choking a little on the heavy chili seasoning, and got up to go. "You can stay the night if you want," the woman said with a casual leer. "He'll get drunk before the sun sets, and I get lonely." "Oh, no, thank you. I have to get to the city," I said hastily, shuddering at the possibilities for historical change. "Friends are expecting me." "Oh, trading?" "No, a pilgrimage." She nodded, satisfied by the explanation. I decided to fish for some information. "Have you heard of the one called the Feathered Serpent?" She sniffed. "A lot of dog's water, I've heard of him. Everyone in the city is all a-jabber about him. Just another fool of the gods, he'll grow tiresome soon enough. All the rich city-folks think he's very fine, white like a worm. I wouldn't bother with him. Now the Great Temple, that's something to see. If you're lucky, there will be a sacrifice while you're there. Oh, the priests are grand at a sacrifice! But that Quetzalcoatl. I've heard that he doesn't even go to the sacrifices. He's nothing, mark me, just a fool of the gods." I finally got away from her and took to the road again, vowing to be more careful in the future. That was the sort of performance that would have had McNaulty gulping tranquilizers like they were jellybeans; if the husband had come to in a surly mood... But after all, it had paid off. Now I knew for sure that Quetzalcoatl was near in both space and time. It got hotter and hotter as the day wore on and my finery began to droop. I came to several crossroads and intersections and soon found that my map wasn't worth a damn since it showed only the very largest of a complex maze of roads. It wasn't hard to head for Teotihuacan by following the larger and more thickly settled trails but I had no idea of how far I had to travel, and I was beginning to worry about finding a place to sleep when I saw a cloud of dust about a half-mile ahead. I increased my pace and before long caught up with my fellow travelers: a group of three farmers and six bearers going to market in the city. They were just preparing to make camp by the side of the road and I was glad enough to accept their offer to stop with them, even though I knew it was a risky thing to do... As it turned out, they were all too tired to ask me many questions and after a solid meal of roast iguana and tortillas washed down with thick cocoa, everyone stretched out around the fire and promptly went to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the unfamiliar night sounds, the occasional dreaming groans of the bearers and the snores of the farmer on my immediate right. As always, it had taken a while for the full realization of just where I was to sink in and, as always, it now hit me heavily. Here I was, over one and a half millenia from home, sleeping among good, upstanding men who would probably be all too glad to see my heart cut out if they knew who I was. It was not a comfortable train of thought but at least it kept my mind off die tarantulas I had seen earlier and the occasional rustlings in the underbrush nearby. Finally I drifted off. I awoke the next morning stiff and sore from sleeping on the bare ground. One of the farmers was shaking my shoulder. "Come on, Outlander, time to move. You want to get to the city early." We breakfasted on some fruit that hung from a nearby tree, walking as we ate. About eight o'clock in the morning we topped a rise and looked out over the holy city of Teotihuacan. How can I describe it? I had been prepared for a sprawling town of adobe huts but what I saw instead was a huge, far-flung metropolis of brick and stone that stretched for miles in all directions, interrupted here and there by steep, man-made mountains of temples and long avenues of statues and columns. Dwarfing everything else, straight ahead, perhaps a mile away, there rose a single pyramid so enormous that it looked like a natural formation. That would be the Temple of the Sun, later to be more-or-less given over to the worship of Quetzalcoatl. It was breathtaking. The three farmers watched my reaction and had a good laugh at seeing my eyes widen in disbelief. "No offense, Outlander," one said, "but it's always funny to watch somebody when he sees the Holy City for the first time. It makes you feel small, doesn't it? The greatest city in the world, the greatest there ever will be." I wouldn't have argued with him even if I could have. Before we started down the hill, each of them made little genuflecting motions which I was careful to copy since it seemed to be some sort of ritual. I left the farmers at the edge of the city; they had a central marketplace to go to. I wanted to wander around anyway, indulging my taste for sightseeing. Also they had reached the point of familiarity with me where they were beginning to ask questions about the south and I was getting nervous. Up close the city was even more modem-looking than it had seemed from the hilltop. For one thing, it was laid out with the engineered precision of a lunar colony; and it was amazingly clean although somewhat pervaded with a cloying odor of flowers and overripe fruit. But I soon got used to that, as I did to the ever-present scurrying lizards and the grotesque carvings that decorated most of the buildings. Less easily ignored was the cacaphony of the teeming market, the gangs of naked, shrieking children playing ball and the packs of barking dogs that roamed through the streets. But it was urban in every sense of the word, even down to its peripheral slums, and it depressed me to think of its not-sodistant abandonment and ruin. I ambled around for hours, getting the feel of the place, just enjoying myself, while drifting gradually toward the great central temple. Teotihuacan would have made a fine tourist trap; even in the slums tropical color burst forth everywhere, in the hundreds of flower stalls, blossoming trees and tame birds, not to mention the buildings themselves, most of which were brightly painted. The people were not greatly different from people anywhere else despite their bizarre costumes and customs. At one point I asked directions from a fierce-looking peace officer armed with an obsidian axe. He looked me over idly and told me the way, speaking with the eternal superciliousness that so infuriates the countryman come to the Big City in any time, any place. The Temple of the Sun, when I finally reached it, proved to be as awesome as it had appeared from the distance -- even to a man of the twenty-first century. It was flanked by other massive structures but compared to its bulk, they seemed like pebbles or children's toys. The major avenues of the city were laid out in such a way that they converged and formed a great plaza around the Temple, in which one could stand and watch a constantly changing troop of black-robed priests parade up and down the pyramid's flower-hung terraces. I was not the only sightseer. On my right a chubby farmer was telling his young son, "And they say that the Sun God comes right down f: on top. Quite a lot different from our little temple at home, eh? I don't see how they can tell which priest is which. Those must be the I acolytes there on the end. Maybe we'll see your brother." Another couple, man and wife apparently, were trying (unsuccessfully) to sound sophisticated. "There certainly isn't anyone at home who would believe this," the man said sagely. "No," his wife agreed, "there's no comparison with the little buildings back there, although I suppose it's just a matter of having more people to do the work. I do wish your brother could see this, he with his 'grand' house." After a while I decided it was time to get down to business. I wanted to find out before dark where Quetzalcoatl lived but I didn't want to attract attention to myself by asking questions in public. The Toltecs were very fond of pulque, a sort of beer, and the city was liberally supplied with small bars; in later years they would even make a ceremony of getting drunk. I had noticed one place in particular, near the Great Temple, that seemed to cater to visiting farmers and pilgrims and decided that it would be a good place in which to make inquiries. It might seem dangerous for a jumper to go into a bar (McNaulty would have a seizure just thinking about it) but actually it's one of the safer ways to obtain information. Not only is it easy to strike up a conversation, but people expect to run across an occasional oddball inside, so any slip-up you make is likely to be ignored. Of course you have to watch yourself, especially with unfamiliar drinks -- like pulque. The nameless little tavem near the Temple was identical in most respects to its counterparts throughout the ages: a dark hole thick with stale tobacco smoke and idle conversation. There were about ten people sitting on low benches sipping pulque from pottery mugs, and a crafty bartender was stationed next to a wooden vat. I bought a mug of pulque and looked the crowd over, finally settling on a tall, long-faced man sitting alone in a comer. He was dressed as a farmer and seemed safely drunk. I strolled over to his bench. "Good harvest, Freeman," I toasted him after sitting down. He nodded at me and took a pull on his mug. "You too, Friend." We both sat sipping quietly for a while. I was trying to decide whether or not I liked pulque. It had a rather sweetish taste and the toned-down bite of tequila. I decided I liked it fine. "You a farmer, Friend?" the man asked me after a bit. "Oh, yes. Best beanfields in the south, that's me. I've come up for a look at the city, to see how you do things around here." "Well, you'll see the best place in the world," he said earnestly, sounding like a twenty-first-century Rotarian. "No place anywhere like Teotihuacan! The name's Huachixixal. I farm a place just down the valley, best land in the world." "I'm Mazatl," I said, hoisting my drink, "and I'd have to agree with you that what I've seen is far and away better than things down south. Why, your temples -- " "Another pulque, Mazatl? I've got some time to kill and I'd like to hear about the southern lands. I've heard you've had a dry time of it the past few years." "Oh, yes," I adlibbed furiously, "awful dry. Everybody blames the local priests, cutting comers on the ceremonies and all. But say, what's this I hear -- sure, I'll have another -- what's this I hear about the Feathered Serpent, a whiteskinned man or something?" "It's true," Huachixixal said, nodding solemnly and motioning for the barkeep to refill our mugs. "Everyone talks about him, the priests say he may be a god. But as I was saying, don't you do much irrigation down there? I've heard that you have more slaves than you know what to do with." "Well, yes and no. We have a time of it with them. Lazy, you know." "Oh, do I know! Why, I've got a bandy little worker that, if he wasn't so good at harvest, I'd trade in a minute. Lazy! Why, I'll come up on him sometimes under a tree sound asleep. He belonged to my father before me or I wouldn't keep him a minute, no good at all. And you say you've got the same problems?" It went on like that for nearly an hour. Huachixixal liked to talk but he was very hard to lead. I did learn that Quetzalcoatl lived on a street near the Great Temple; that, yes, you could visit his house; and that nobody had seen him in public lately. This last was disturbing. I should have left him then and there but we got to talking about this and that and I lost track of time. Of course what happened subsequently was the fault of the pulque -- potent stuff like that doesn't have a right to be so smooth. That, and the dangerous familiarity with a language that hypno-cramming gives you. The trouble started when Huachixixal said something about training coatimundis (I'm still not sure how we got off on that subject), and I disagreed and did what is quite natural when one has hypnoed a language: I translated a slang phrase. I said, "That's all true, but don't you think it's putting the cart before the horse?" Now Nahuatl had a word for sledge, or travois, that translated nicely into cart but there was no equivalent for horse. As a result, the word came out -- quite automatically -- in untranslated English. Huachixixal blinked his eyes and repeated, "Horsl? What's a horsl?" "Oh," I said, still thinking of the point I was trying to make, "it's a, you know, an animal that pulls things and -- " and then I stopped dead. I wished I were dead. I wished Huachixixal was dead. What had I done? Huachixixal was mulling it over. "An animal that pulls things, now that's an idea. Why didn't I ever think of that? You southerners must save a lot on slaves that way. What do you use, a -- " "Forget it," I said, trying to sound offhand. "What was that you were saying about coatis and avocado trees?" "Oh, I was just talking. You know, Mazatl, I wouldn't mind getting one of those horsls. It might be a big help -- say, you don't look so good." I'm sure I didn't look so good. The first thing you learn as a jumper is that the worst blunder you body famous, is to let slip any technological information. Even the most trivial bit of data can have a profound effect on history -- and I had just given away the idea that animals can be domesticated for work. If the Toltecs and the later Aztecs knew that, they might not be a dead-end but  sure would be. Huachixixal was out of the question for several reasons but I would have to keep him quiet. I almost reached into my bag for the snatcher but the sudden thought of McNaulty's reaction to a wasted jump stopped me and I forced myself to calm down. There was no need to abort the whole job; after all, nothing had really happened yet. Maybe Huachixixal would forget all about horsls when he sobered up and as long as he didn't start drawing plans for bridles and stagecoaches, I might be able to sneak by on my luck. And anyway, I realized rather sickly, I had already passed the four-minute delay. I might as well try to finish what I had started. "You know, Huach," I said as calmly as possible, "I'd like to go see this Quetzalcoatl now. You said he lives near here." "I don't know, Mazatl. It must be pretty late -- " "No, it's still early afternoon. I just want to stop in to see him -- it is all right, isn't it?" "Well, yes, but I don't know -- " "Then it's settled. I'll tell you, once we southerners get an idea in our heads, we just have to follow through on it. We can finish our talk later. I'll buy you a drink when we get back, all right?" "I guess so. It can't hurt just to stop by." "No, of course not. The thing is, everybody at home told me to see him if I got the chance." I stood up while I talked, surprised at my unsteadiness. Huachixixal followed me outside; he still looked slightly worried but he was too drunk to argue. We wandered through a confusing checkerboard pattern of crowded streets until I was sure that Huachixixal had lost his way. But finally we stopped in front of a small house with, I was delighted to see, a large stone cross over the door. "That's it, Mazatl, but do you still think we ought to go in? I mean, somebody might think we're too drunk." Being that near my goal, with no priests or guards around, I was in no mood to argue with him and so I nodded and said hurriedly, "You're right, Huach, absolutely right. What we'll do is, we'll go in one at a time. That way no one will notice anything unusual. You wait here." Before he could do more than blink, I clapped him on the shoulder and headed into the house. A thick curtain screened the doorway but there was no real door. I knocked loudly on the masonry and a woman's voice called out: "Yes, who is it now?" I pushed aside the curtain and stepped into the house. Facing me, sitting on a low couch, was a chestnut-haired woman in her midtwenties; she did not look friendly. "What do you want?" she snapped. "Why don't you leave me alone? I can't bring him back. Leave me alone!" I stepped closer and she smelled the pulque on my breath. "My God!" she exclaimed in Gaelic. "He's drunk! Go away, damn you, go away!" "Quiet," I said, switching languages as rapidly as she did. "I have to see Brendan." She was silent then and just stared at me. Finally she crossed herself and muttered a prayer. "Who are you? I have never seen you before." "I am a white man, a Christian like yourself. I've come for Brendan, come to take him home. Where is he?" There was a note of hysteria in her voice as she wailed, "He's gone, haven't I already told you that? Won't you understand? He left. He's not coming back!" I felt an unpleasant chill creep up my spine. "But who are you?" I asked stupidly.  "I am his daughter, Bridget. You must know that. Are you all crazy?'-' I did a double-take and revised my concept of early Irish saints considerably. "Look, I told you. I'm a white man. I'm wearing a disguise. Wait a minute -- " I grabbed the silicone nose and twisted; it came off, bearing with it only a small amount of the skin underneath. Bridget gasped and crossed herself again. "Don't worry, I told you it was just a disguise. Now can you tell me what you're doing here and where your father is?" Reluctantly Bridget motioned for me to take a seat. "This is all so strange, I don't know what to think. You ask for my father just like all these savages do. They won't believe that I'm not somehow in touch with him, that he isn't coming back." Her voice grew bitter. "We were fools to come here, just like everyone said." "I'm confused," I admitted. "I understood that Brendan had taken his vows. I don't see -- " "A daughter? He wasn't always a priest, you know. He was a fisherman when the Call came to him. He had a family. I was ten years old when he left and as soon as I was old enough, I followed to take care of him. Somebody had to. He was always forgetful and his vision blinded him to the world; I was the only one who would sail with him. Everyone else said he was crazy. Perhaps he was." She looked up at the ceiling and I knew her thoughts were far away. "I suppose you know of how my father became interested in the old tales of Iargalon, the Land Beyond the Sunset, and of how he decided to carry the Word out there. The two of us set out in a tiny coracle -- no one else would go with us -- and sailed to the west. "We sailed for weeks -- with little food or water -- and finally we were washed up on the coast of this hellish place. The days on the boat, the sun -- it all did something to my father's mind. He changed and his prayers became wild, shrieking rantings. The savages here worshipped him because of it." She laughed bitterly. "He thought he had brought the Word to them but they twisted it into something horrible and demonic -- they sacrifice people, did you know that? He wouldn't look, wouldn't see, but I've seen. God, I've seen! "That was five whole years ago. For all that time we have been held here -- not as prisoners really, but not as free people either. And then only last spring my father received the Call again. He said he had to leave. They didn't dare to stop him, he was a god to them. But they held me here, a hostage. And do you want to know the funny part of it? I'm of no use to them -- my father didn't even know who I was for the last three years. His mind wandered and he left without even saying good-by. I might not have been here at all as far as he was concerned. Yet these savages torment me day and night to bring him back. I'm half mad with it!" She buried her face in her hands and I did some quick thinking. I should, by rights, just clear out but somehow I could not quite bring myself to abandon Bridget. Brendan was unavailable but why wouldn't his daughter do? My chivalrous instincts were aroused; and besides that, I was still just drunk enough to relish the thought of O'Brien's face when I made the introduction. "Listen," I said hurriedly, "there isn't much time. Do you want to come away with me, back to your own kind?" "God, yes! I'll do anything to get away from here!" I already had the standard contract out, along with a pen. "Nothing to do but sign this," I told her. I saw her face darken for a moment and I knew what she was thinking, but then she shrugged and put down her name in Latin. I stuffed the contract into my bag, grabbed the snatcher in one hand and held out the other to Bridget. "Here, take my hand," I said. And then Huachixixal came in. He took one look at me. "Mazatl! Your nose!" I squeezed the snatcher and he grabbed my arm...    One instant, or many centuries later, however you look at it, the three of us stood together inside the McNaulty's face go white behind his cigar and then all hell broke loose a Bridget shrieked, Huachixixal moaned, "The Gods!" and fainted dead away, and everyone else began shouting all at once. It was hours later that I finally sneaked out of there when nobody was looking. Bridget was cursing O'Brien in Gaelic, Huachixixal was snoring loudly under the effect of a sedative, and McNaulty was trying to talk to five different lawyers on four different phones at the same time. Somewhere along the way he had lost his cigar. I think he must have swallowed it. I left quietly and headed for Doctor Ari's. There would be time tomorrow to start getting things straightened out. Luckily Doc was still in his office and I was soon nursing a tall beaker of Ouzo and telling him the whole story. It was about that time that I suddenly realized I was suffering from what is euphemistically (and incorrectly, considering the time factor) called Montezuma's Revenge; I should not have drunk the water. When I returned from the bathroom, I noticed that my Ouzo tasted funny but it was not until I'd finished it that Doctor Ari told me what he had added. He may have a great bedside manner and know all about orthopedic sandals, but you would think any doctor would have known that the one thing I didn't need just then was a physic.  Paul Walker The Far Call, Gordon R. Dickson, # pp... Quantum, Dial Press James Wade, #, #. Study War No More, Joe Haldeman, # pp., At. Martin's Press, #, #. The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Edward L. Ferman, # pp., Doubleday, #, #. The Weirwoods, Thomas Burnett Swann, # pp., Ace, #, reissued #, #. Cry Silver Bells, Thomas Burnett #. Cloak and Dickson I had a strange reaction toward Gordon Dickson while reading The Far Call -- the feeling I was witnessing a miracle in the transformation of a writer for whom I had previously had no respect for whatever into a person for whom I had only respect and admiration. It happens that way sometimes. It is a standard rule in writing classes that one should write about what one knows best. But that isn't always possible. What a writer knows best is not always what he cares about most. And caring about one's subject -- caring deeply -- is the secret of good writing. The cause for most of bad-to-mediocre books I read is that the writer does not care enough, if at all. He (or she) is interested intellectually, or aesthetically (that is, theoretically) in only one or more aspects of the story; and the remainder, usually the whole human dimension, is a vague afterthought. What we get most often in the case of hard sf is a fictionalized essay, better suited to a technical journal, draped over the bleached bones of a pulp formula plot; and what we get in the case of the more aesthetically oriented sf, such as Clarion manufactures, is a pastiche of New Yorker prose with some utterly unoriginal, but always fashionable, liberal sentiment posing as a theme. But when a writer adopts a subject that he both knows and cares about deeply, the effect is almost always something very real and dramatic, as well as original; for after all, it is his personal view of life, as individual as he is himself. But even more than that, it allows us that profound experience of letting us look at the world through another person's eyes; to share his own private vision. It is an opening-up of his heart and mind for inspection. In some cases, as with Ellison, is an outpouring, but in Dickson's case, it is a sharing. Dickson cares deeply about the space program, and he knows about it intimately, and in The Far Call, he makes us see and feel and understand it in the way he does himself, and consequently, in a way no other writer has been able to do before. He makes us live it, both as an idea and as an awesome human enterprise. In sf, the idea and the humanity of the idea are rarely reconciled. What we get is a story with an idea, or a story comprised of many ideas strung together, and in both cases, the quality of the characters, and their relationship to the story's ideas, is purely functional. In other words, the characters do not embody the writers' ideas. But in Dickson's case, this is never so. His ideas and his people are one and the same. He never uses them as mere mouthpieces to convey information in which he is more interested. In having a character tell us what he knows, he also has him tell us about himself; so regardless of how technical the conversation may become, it is always alive and dramatic, advancing the story and deepening our perception of the characters and their world. The story is set in the #'s. Six nations have agreed to participate in man's first effort to reach Mars. Political suspicion and competition abound invidiously. Each is determined to have its share of the glory and scientific profit. As a result the astronauts -- who are to go in two ships, one captained by an American, the other by a Russian -- are critically overburdened with experimental work. In brief, they go, disaster strikes, and they return, with one exception. That is the central plot of the book. The plot proper involves a would-be science writer named Jens Wylie, who has become the U.S. Undersecretary for Space Development and is representing America at the launch, primarily because he knows nothing about diplomacy and thus may serve as an ideal straw man for the President among the other diplomatic wolves. Wylie sees the danger in the excessive workload and tries to get the President And when disaster strikes, he sees justice is done. But none of this is what the book is truly about, which is the total human experience of a launch and, by extension, the experience of the space program itself. Wylie, like most central characters in sf, is less interesting than many of the minor characters; but in an important way, he is the ideal choice for a hero, for he is a kind of "Gimpel the Fool" to the others in the story -- in that they view his romantic convictions about the importance of the program as being as naive as his ability as a diplomat. He is a good and knowledgeable man who has to stand by and watch a dream destroyed by the timid and ignorant. And unlike other Dickson characters, thank God, he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Nor are Dickson's astronauts. He portrays them as dedicated professionals. Likewise, he exercises the same restraint with the rest of his characterizations. There are no stereotypes, no straw men. Even the most minor characters come to life, often movingly, like the Russian diplomat Verigin, who has lost his family and has only the love of his small dog, Chupchik, to keep him going -- a love that is threatened by the dog's terminal illness. Or the poor little free-lance spy who just needs one more bankroll to get out of that dirty business. What is most impressive about Dickson's characters is that he has been able to realize those with whom he disagrees without making them caricatures of villainy. The executives, the diplomats have their own legitimate points of view. Even those like Jen's sweetheart, Alinde West, and his journalist friend Barney, who think his dreams childish, are justly treated. Never does the book become a tract, never does a character deliver a sermon. Aside from the characters, the thing that impressed me most was Dickson's masterful stagemanaging. Every writer has to get his characters from one place to another, to describe them performing perfunctory actions such as answering a phone or putting on their pants, but in sf especially these actions usually take anywhere from a few sentences to one long paragraph, and are best skimmed or skipped entirely. In The Far Call, however, I found myself reading them carefully, for Dickson knew his people so well he was able to characterize each of their actions so that they were uniquely their own. In fact, throughout the book, I rarely skipped anything, finding all of Dickson's details of one thing or another consistently interesting. And this is as true of his descriptions of the Cape and Washington as it is of the interior of the spaceships or a local bar. Everything is very real and cinematic. Obviously, Dickson has been there; but rather than give us a cheap "insider's" view of things, he recreates them without self-consciousness. The pace is slow, but the suspense is cumulative. So much of interest takes place that we are never allowed to become bored. But it is the ideas that carry' the book. I should say, the Idea. The space program. What it is. What, and how much, is involved in it. The reality and the dream. The politics and the pracitioners. The technology and the teamwork. And it is here I tend to diverge from his trajectory. Dickson's dream is simply not my own, and I could not help feeling more sympathy for his politicians than he did. As his cold-blooded Presidential aide tells Wylie, there are more important things than reaching Mars. The space program will require a lot of leisure time and a lot of money, neither of which will be available without some measure of world stability, and the real work of achieving that stability will be done by the politicians. It is a job that is infinitely more complex and difficult than reaching Mars, and it is a job that will infinitely more rewarding to all humanity. At least that is my opinion. And because it is my opinion, I was not impressed by die final heroic actions of Wylie and one of the astronauts to save the mission. I think such heroics usually bollix up the works, if not actually harm the cause, and the deeds often have the reverse effect of making it more difficult for those heroes who come after them. Real heroes work at their causes all their lives and are lucky to see them realized, even in part, before they are old men. Nevertheless, my reservations about the ending do not diminish my admiration for this book. It may well be the best science fiction novel I have ever read. No, Dickson is not a Wells, or a Stapledon, or even an Ursula K. Le Guin. But as a novel, his is the most complex example I've seen of a genuinely mainstream science fiction novel. It shows what can be done with an sf idea, and how to do it. It represents to me the best sf has to offer to literature, the ability to make us live the future today and to understand that the future is as much a part of today as is the past. G.I. Joe (Haldeman) Joe Haldeman's first anthology adventure is Study War No More: A Selection of Alternatives, and it is assurprising as it is disappointing. The first surprise, which was also my first disappointment, was that it was not composed of original stories. This is a piddling complaint, but at this stage in his career, I always expect something extraordinarily creative of Haldeman; and while he has an interesting premise, he could have made a much more interesting book of it. He asked a number of writers for stories that answered the question: "If not war, what else?" Ten responded. And it is no surprise to me that none of them had a single alternative that was worth a moment's notice. We are a war-loving genre. Haldeman's biggest mistake was in asking the writers themselves for suggestions. He would have been wiser to look for himself; or at least to ask a real expert in these matters, a knowledgeable fan. My second surprise was that the introduction was excellent. I do not remember the last time I read a really good introduction to anything, but the experience of war is something Haldeman knows first-hand, and his discussion of it is astoundingly objective. Well, not quite, but close. "War is waiting terrors... sudden trauma, when you meet the easy killer who was always inside you; when you first observe that a man is only a fragile bag of skin filled with obscene mysteries... it is bottleflies and ants; surprising volumes of blood, crusting; dead men's faces swelling open-mouthed to a caricature of astonishment... searching smoking ruins for a lost past... War is this and worse but, to some degree, we all accept it. We can even grow to depend on it, and, finally, to love it." It is the ambiguity of war that "torments" Haldeman, not only the fact of war, and all its concomitant horrors, but the fact of his own situation: "The war was kind to me, though (Haldeman was badly wounded in Vietnam) -- material for two novels and a pension that used to pay the rent." Of course, he does say things I disagree with: "the absurdity and outrage of war" is not "obvious," but relative. War is not "the normal instrument of (state) policy" but as poor von Clausewitz says, "only the continuation of a state's policies by other means." There was certainly nothing absurd or outrageous about the Vietnam war to the North Vietnamese. They knew we did not have it in us to fight that kind of a long war. From their point of view, their actions, which included the murdering of civilians, and fighting close to civilian populations so as many of them would be killed as possible, was inpeccably logical. And while it was certainly a continuance of our state policy of containing communism that got us into Vietnam, it was the absence of any alternative policy that kept us there. Be that as it may... the next surprise I encountered was a rousing good story by Ben Bova called  "The Dueling Machine." It is really a mystery, and an intriguing one, and, typical of Bova, it is told at a leisurely pace in a leisurely, clean-cut style. Like most of the writers I most enjoy reading, Bova  is just a story-teller. Nothing prol found or dramatic. Essentially old fashioned. But a hell of a good yam  spinner. Damon Knight's # "Rule  Golden" is the second-best story in t the book. Knight has established such an impressive reputation as both a critic and editor that it somep times slips our minds that he is also a fine fiction writer, and this story is one of his best. The remainder of the stories I did not care for. Harlan Ellison's "Basilisk" is interesting, if more for its excesses than its ideas. It has the old Ellisonian power and imagistic magic, but I think if anyone else had written it, I would call it racist and obscene. The race, in Ellison's case, is White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American (working and middle classes variety) upon whom he lavishes hatted and contempt with manic fervor. The obscenity is in his equally maniacal, and revoltingly sadistic, infatuation with violence, the most intense of which he always reserves for his enemies. But I have read enough of Ellison to know he is neither a racist nor obscene, and I am sure he would be completely bewildered by my use of the terms. What he is doing in "Basilisk," as in "A Boy and His Dog," is attempting to think the unthinkable. To portray a character who is the embodiment of an idea as a state of mind. And the effect of the whole story is a sharing of a nightmare vision of a sick and dangerous mind. It is also, and most profoundly, as in "A Boy and His Dog," an act of personal revenge upon humanity at large. Most people, Ellison feels, can't "be" beyond the ends of their noses. They can't understand why other people are not carbon copies of themselves, and therefore they fear and despise them, and punish them whenever they can. Innately convinced of their rightness, and inspired by their righteousness, they remain oblivious of the consequences of their actions, such as racial discrimination or war itself. Unable to think and feel as others do, they live lives that are insulated from the pain and suffering and aspirations of others unlike themselves, and regard them as abstractions. Ellison hates this variety of humanity, and I believe, through his stories, he attempts to "punish" its members as cruelly as they often punish others. And he makes the rest of us see through fierce alien eyes the reality of rage and violence that is the lot of the outsider, be he black or white or she. This, to me, is really what an Ellison story is all about. Not its plot, which is usually familiar enough, or its background, or its immediate theme, which is also usually familiar and fashionable in itself. An Ellison story is Ellison being an other. The problem with it, as with most Ellison stories, is that it is the work of an unexamined conscience. Ellison gets an idea. He works it out at white heat, accomplishing what he intends -- which is always the strongest possible dramatic effect -- by sheer intensity of language. Then he stops thinking about it. But there's more to it. What Ellison fails to realize is that in indulghow he conceives them to be, he is in fact doing precisely what he condemns them for doing. He is refusing to see life through their eyes. Consequently, to him they are abstractions; cartoon people without any depths or dreams. They are less than human, fit to be cheated or killed. What he does not see is that they too are "others." And as a result his villains are never convincing for a moment. Actually, there is something fundamentally unconvincing about most everything Ellison writes. He is a role-player, who is never content to be any one Harlan Ellison for long. He must be the good guy and the bad, the cynic and the dreamer, and both simultaneously if possible. Unable to be any one person for long, he is ultimately unable to be any one convincingly; even one of the characters in his stories. For as persecuted or tormented as they must be we know he, Ellison himself, is safe. He is in no danger of going mad or becoming alcoholic or from the typewriter the same old Harlan he's always been. So we know the intensity of the thoughts and emotions he expresses are not wholly his own. He is just playacting them. But then what do we make of them? How much of all this does he really believe? Does he really feel? I can't be sure. No one can. Probably not even Ellison. So how' much of his fiction can we believe in as an honest artistic statement? Sf writers do make honest artistic statements, you know. Their thoughts and feelings are there to read. But perhaps the question is inappropriate in Ellison's case. Without intending to flatter him, he seems to be more interested in being than in having been. He wants to be an insider in each and every generation. To be eternally "cool". But enough -- I sampled the rest of the stories in Study War No More and aside from the Poul Anderson, which was only fair, I did not care for them. They are by Harry Harrison, George Alec Effinger, Mack Haldeman himself. Oh, and there is a science column on the subject of war and peace by Asimov that was not up to his usual high standards. As for the cover, I am not sure if I hate it, or just the color brown, but like the book (aside from the Knight and Bova stories) it is -- drab. Ferman's Ferretings There have been twenty-two volumes in the Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction series, not counting two or three odd-volumes culled from all the rest, and they have been, and remain, the best series of anthologies ever published. The present book is no exception. But that is no surprise, for to my thinking, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has been the best pulp of the lot, including Astounding in its golden age. I know, I kpow, Campbell got all the accolades. He was the greatest of editors, but judging issue for issue, story for story, I am convinced that no other pulp can match FSF's record for quality. Granted, this is not entirely fair, because FSF publishes fantasy, which tends to be of a higher level than sf; but even so, the magazine has a quality about it that none have ever duplicated. No, not even Orbit, or any of the other hardcover anthologies. They have gotten the awards, but FSF has provided a  consistently higher level of entertainment. How do I judge these things? I ask only two good stories of any magazine I buy. Even if the remainder of the stories are bad, if I can find just two that satisfy me, I feel I have gotten my money's worth. Ed Ferman has never let me down. Not once. And furthermore, I have never read an issue of FSF without at least three worthwhile stories, and of the remainder, I cannot cite a single example of a story that I would regard as an "inexplicable" choice -- one so bad it makes me think the author is the editor's brother-in-law. The curious thing is that the manufacturer of this lollipop has never written any fiction himself. He graduated with a B.A. in English from Middlebury College in Vermont, and worked at odd jobs at various magazines, then came to FSF in #, after his father had taken it over. He worked for about two years under Avram Davidson, who was then editor, then under his father, Joseph, and finally assumed the editorial chair in #. He has been editing the "Best" series since Number #. They are issued every two years and generally cover the past two to three years; but this latest covers a longer period, and includes for the first time samples of its excellent "departments." A shrewd and perceptive book column by Algis Budrys; a science article by Asimov that is as amusing and informative as always; and a film review by Baird Searles of the best sf films of alltime. Plus, assorted nonsense that is worth a grin or two. Of course, it is the stories that make this worth buying. And it came as no surprise to me to find that I could not hate a single one of them. Just think of that a minute. When was the last time you read an anthology in which you could not find at least one story you absolutely hated? I can't think of any. I didn't care for Joanna Russ' "My Boat." It has an excellent central character buried under reams of unnecessary prose. And I wasn't crazy about James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See," for which the Long-Drink-of-Water who edits this magazine may fire me (He thinks Tiptree is Ghod.). But then I have never cared for anything I've read by Tiptree. And my advice to the Poet Ray Bradbury after reading his "Out of Dickinson by Poe" is to stop immediately. Oh, and I did think the lead story by Richard Cowper, "The Hertford Manuscript," was too long-winded. But I enjoyed it enormously. As I enjoyed Robert Bloch's "A Case of the Stubborns." Bloch is an underestimated talent. He not only has a genuinely good sense of humor, but the sensitivity and ability to bring his gentle (and nightmarish) people to life. I have read better by John Varley than "In the Bowl," but few writers have the knack of giving us the feeling of "being there" as he does. And he is one of the few feminist writers who have the ability to make non-sexist female protagonists completely credible. Liz Hufford's "This Offer Expires" is a John Collier-type yam that is worthy of its model. I would like to tell you to keep Liz Hufford's name in mind, and to look forward to her latest work with anticipation, but it seems people who start out writing this kind of wonderful story don't stick at it for long. I expect Hufford's future work will be more "relevant." But I would be happy to be proved wrong. I loved Manly Wade Wellman's "The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign". And for similar reasons, R. Bretnor's "Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All." Both of them could have been potboilers in anyone else's hands. As they are, both are charming and funny fantasies. My admiration for "Mute Inglorious Tam" by Fred Pohl and C.M. Kombiuth is great. I have always thought Pohl was a fine writer, but I am almost always disappointed by the things he writes about. Not here. He tells the story of a science fiction writer in a time when there are no science fiction writers. When, in fact, the genre is impossible. And he tells it brilliantly. ing all the same, are Harvey Jacob's "Dress Rehearsal," which is more a joke than a story, and Edward Wellen's "Sanity Clause," which is less distinguished company would have seemed better to me than it did. But far and away the best story in the book, and one of the best stories I have ever read from an sf author, is Tom Reamy's "San Diego Lightfoot Sue." I hate to admit this, but I must have missed the whole point of it, for I could see nothing of fantasy or science fiction in it; but what I did see left me in awe. Tom Reamy died last year in his early forties. I didn't think much of it at the time, but since reading this story, I realize what a loss it is to the genre. Reamy had everything. Talent, sensitivity, perceptiveness, a knowledge of life, wisdom, and compassion, plus the ability to tell a thoroughly absorbing human story. "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" alone is worth the price of the book, but even if you don't buy the book, seek it out, read it. It is beautiful and real and moving. Two sf immortals founded the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas. Ed Ferman has not let them down. The Twentysecond Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction may not be the best of the series (I haven't read them all), but I guarantee you it is one of the very best anthologies of the year. Swann's Fey Listen to this: beside the forest. She crowned a cliff which became an island in spring, when torrents of melting snow descended from blue Mt. Cimini and clawed at her base with icy talons; and in summer she remained an island, but ringed with verdure -- bracken and tangling ivy -- which licked the wounds of spring with healing tongues. To the north, the forest crouched like a cat. The Ciminian Forest, it was called on the maps of the region, but the townspeople whispered another, more sinister name: The Weirwoods. This first paragraph of Thomas Burnett Swann's The Weirwoods, although not quoted completely, contains the best and the worst to be found in him. It is, of course, derivative of classical literature; but that, in itself, is not a fault. While it lacks the profoundity, and charm, ot an Ovid, it is not without its own intelligence or sensibility. It does weave its spell. It does make us want to read on. And if the language does not always do justice to its models, if the poet's ear fails him more often than not, and what was intended as a piquant metaphor results in a tepid cliche ("She crowned a cliff... when torrents of melting snow... clawed at her base with icy talons..."), he does at least approach quality; and sometimes, he attains it ("To the north, the forest crouched like a cat."). So there is in The Weirwoods, as in his latest, posthumously published, Cry Silver Bells, this constant mixture of good and bad, which for all its weaknesses, retains my respect and sympathy because it is about the best "try" at duplicating classical mythology in modem fantasy terms that I have read from a genre writer. Not that Swann ever got near the ranks of a Tolkein or the Richard Adams of Shardik but he was trying to do something quite different, and in its own way, quite unique; and if he was unsuccessful, he was not completely so: the first halves of both The Weirwoods and Cry Silver Bells come remarkably close to the real thing. The Weirwoods was written in #, then expanded to book form in #. It takes place in Etruscan Italy. The city of Sutrium has made a truce with the mythological peoples of the forest. They are allowed to trade in the market on the ninth day of every month, in return for which they permit the townspeople to pass through their domain unmolested providing they stay on the one open road. Lars Velcha is a wealthy nobleman who has lost his wife and son in a raid by Gauls. He has a beautiful daughter named Tanaquil, who witnessed the slaughter of her brother and mother, and remains in a state of shock. While passing through the forest, the father discovers he is out of water and decides to go and get some from a stream in the forest despite his daughter's warning that something unpleasant is out there. She is right, for he finds more than water. He finds a strangelooking boy dozing on a magical lake, and he immediately gets the idea of capturing him for his daughter. The boy is Vel, and he is not a boy at all, but a lecherous faun without a heart who bides his time until he can take revenge on those who enslaved him. Tanaquil realizes this; she fears him, and yet she pities him and wishes him set free. But how? Enter the hero, an itinerant flute player named Amth, whose talent and beauty win him the affection of both the girl and the boy. Tanaquil persuades him to go into the forest and find someone to help set Vel free. He does, almost losing his life in the process. There he meets Vegoia, a sort of queen of the water sprites, with whom he has an affair. They return to the city to help Vel, but their efforts have tragic consequences. Amth saves Tanaquil from Vel's vengeance and the two flee into the forest where they are helped by Vegoia, and more I cannot tell you. Structurally, The Weirwoods is a long short story or more accurately, if more vaguely, it is a tale, a narrative of indefinite length, which could be told in a few pages or a few hundred, depending on how the author wished to embellish it. I read it in two sittings. The first night, completely captivated; the second restless, a bit bored, and finally disappointed. As in Cry Silver Bells, Swann's chief interest is in recreating the milieu of classical literature, the people, places, and things; and at this, he is excellent. His descriptions are vivid and rhapsodic, his characters are individual and strikingly well-done, especially his mythological people like Vel and Vegoia, neither of whom is idealized or romanticized any more than his human characters. Their limitations and weaknesses, including capricuous viciousness, are protrayed honestly and compassionately. The gods are dying, and with them a world -- serene, yet not ignorant of cruelty. It was plot that was Swann's nemesis. It seems the closer he got to the climax, the more his imagination and ability tended to fail him; and by the conclusion, he seemed to want to wrap things up as quickly as possible. His nightmare climax in The Weirwoods is a ho-hum affair, he just did not have the knack to write action scenes. And the story went on too long after the action had ceased. He had a lot to accomplish in getting his characters to safety and then getting the story to the death of Vegoia, and he did not know how to do it. As in the death of the hero of Cry Silver Bells, it happens abruptly and does not seem to be a natural consequence of the action that preceded it. And the final exposition is likewise abrupt and complex, utterly out of step with the gentle, leisurely pace of the narrative in the beginning. In Cry Silver Bells, it occurs so abruptly, so much is revealed for which there was inadequate preparation, that the narrative's credibility is destroyed. Cry Silver Bells was written later than The Weinvoods and has a much more relaxed tone to it. It begins pulpishly with the human hero, a proud thief, and his beautiful cousin Hora, a proud courtesan, on their way to Crete. They have come from Egypt where their family was killed by a sphinx. Near shore, their ship is attacked by a pack of harpies and sunk. On shore the hero, Lordon, has to practice his trade to earn the rent money, and gets caught. Both are sent into exile, to a town on the other side of the island. But to reach the town they must pass through the Country of the Beasts, the forest of mythological creatures, from which no man has ever returned. Needless to say, they return. They are saved by the real heroes of the story, a beautiful nymph named Zoe, who is the doctor to the creatures of the forest; and by Silver Bells, one of the last of the Minotaurs. Predictably, both humans fall in love with both beasts. But their love is short-lived, for to stay they must be judged fit by the Great Chiron, who has never yet permitted a human to live. Up to this point, and slightly beyond, I was just as captivated by the whole ambience of Swann's world as I had been in The Weirwoods; but beyond it, when the action began, I again found myself afflicted with tedium. And, as I have said, I found the ending unworkable. Reading a myth is like looking into pool of very deep water. First you see the water. Then you see the bottom. And lastly you see the depth of the pool itself. In a myth, the pool is the human mind, the water is the story, the bottom is the meaning, the depth is what happens to you in between the reading and the perception of the meaning. But in Swann, there is really only the water to see. The bottom is murky. And there is no sensation of depth whatever. In both novels, Swann is lamenting the passing of the demi-gods, envying their freedom and serenity and sensuality, but cognizant of their often brutal shortcomings. He perceived the poignancy of their precarious situation and the tragedy of their loss, but he was unable to dramatize it. What he left us were shadows of much greater books. P.S. A word for the all too few illustrations of George Barr for Cry Silver Bells: charming. Even if you don't want to buy this book, have a look at page #. The cover, unfortunately, is the least interesting of the drawings. Another word for the cover of The Weirwoods by Stephen Hickman: exquisite. That's got to be Vegoia. Notice the posture of the hands.  Oirtw) fl'l-t! 'm I #  Darrell Schweitzer He had led a sheltered life, of course, but he didn't have reason to think he was bad at his job... He met her on the tubeway on the way to work. It was his first day out from the Home, and that morning the Sisters had given him an especially strong sermon on the evils of the worldly life. That was why he was upset when a beautiful girl sat down on the seat beside him. Apart from the Sisters, who seemed to supersede all considerations of gender, this was the first member of the opposite sex he had ever seen. Sweat gathered on his forehead and he began to tremble nervously, bracing himself for an assault of carnal temptations the Sisters had warned him against. "Hi," she said. "On your way to work?" He thought it best to try to remain calm so that he might maintain control of the situation. The last thing he wanted to do was to let her find out that he was afraid of her. So in a noble attempt at a casual tone, he answered: "Yes, I am. First day on my new job." "Oh, what a coincidence! This is my first day too. I work at the sewage cannery. Where are you going?" It had been a mistake to let on that it was his first day. A bad one. Now she knew that he was inexperienced. Still, he must not show any alarm. "To the baby factory." "Guess you and I must have finished Training on the same day." "Guess so." "Tell me, are babies really made in bottles there?" "They certainly are, and tailored to specifications. That's one of the wonderful things about all this. Satisfaction or your money back." "What kind of specifications?" "Well, you know. The NeoCatholics want them one way and the Bacchanalians want them another and the civil-service people still another. I'm sure it'll be a fascinating job. I can't wait to get started." They talked on and gradually he let his guard down. All the dire things the Sisters had said would happen didn't. He even came to like her. She was a good listener and before long the conversation was almost entirely one-sided. He delighted in finding someone to whom he could talk. At the Home his teachers would always disconnect the address system at his desk and that would be that. But here, for the first time, was someone who actually seemed interested in him and asked him intelligent questions. After a while he was no longer uneasy with her and, in fact, he began to wish that she would transfer to the baby factory and work with him. By the time the train was ten units across the transcity grid, he could not see how he could ever live without her. In other words, it was love at first blab.    Just as the train pulled into her stop, it blew up: the work of a mad bomber. While the psych-police claimed that only a statistically infinitesimal number of people indulged in such acts any more, among New York's forty-two millions there were certainly enough screwballs to go around. Besides, one was enough. The tube-car flipped over and landed on end. Many of the passengers were tom into pieces or twisted like pretzels. Bodies were strewn everywhere. He survived, but she did not. After the clean-up men arrived and gathered all they could find of her body and put the remains in a bottle, he asked to claim the body, and they gave him permission. He slipped the bottle into his pocket and went on to work, having first obtained a police pass to excuse his lateness. That night w'hen the shift ended, he did not go home. He had more important things to do and he headed straight for the men's room. Disconnecting the alarm system, he hid there in a stall until he was sure the building was empty. Then he slipped out, and using an electronic gadget he had made illegally from spare parts that day when no one was looking, he disabled the nightwatch robot. He went down to the production tank and turned on the computer, the auxiliary tanks, the pumps and the warmer, after having carefully stuffed an old sock in the powerabuse warning system. It it ir By four o'clock in the morning he had finished the job. A little green light activated and the lid of the coffin-shaped tank slid back, revealing the girl he had met on the train. She was stark naked, newly reconstituted from the tissue samples in the bottle. It was true that the equipment was designed to manufacture babies, but with minor adjustments, it could be used to produce adults as well. And here she was. His craftsmanship had been flawless. Unfortunately, his previously sheltered life had taken a toll of the results. Even after he explained to her what he had done, she did not seem happy. Instead, she looked down at herself. "Didn't you forget something?" she asked. "Forget what?" He  was genuinely alarmed. Had he made a mistake after all? She pointed to an area between her legs. He studied her for a moment without understanding, and then it dawned on him. He sighed with relief. "Oh, that! Don't worry, I don't have one either."  I. Jeff Rovin It is unusual that one year should give us the yardstick by which one can measure both the depths and the heights of the science fiction film. But that's what happened in #, with the nadir represented by Star Wars, that videogame with actors, while the zenith belonged to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of the most provocative and breathtaking films in motion picture history. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not a perfect film. Few are. At two hours and fifteen minutes it is a trifle too long; some of the peripheral action is confusing; and there are aspects of the film's extraterrestrials which are scientifically implausible. Nonetheless, the film's cumulative effect overcomes its few shortcomings to produce the genre's first bonafide classic in too many years... Like Stanley Kubrick's immortal #: A' Space Odyssey, director  writer Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about a dramatic meeting between humankind and extraterrestrial intelligence. However, whereas Kubrick set his film in foreign locales with people and semipeople far removed from the persona of the average theatre-goer, Spielberg drops his aliens right in the lap of Middle America. Further, he creates a tight bond of identification between the audience and the film's main character, power company lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) by fleshing-out Neary to a degree that is rare in science fiction films. We see the young man at work, at home with his wife and children, struggling with road maps, yelling at an irate motorist, and engaged in other activities to which one can relate. Thus, we sympathize with Neary when he has a meeting that leaves him possessed by a weird fascination with the hazy image of a mountain peak. Neary quickly becomes obsessed with this vision and only after sculpting a massive model of the peak in his home, and losing the family which fears him mad, does he realize that the mountain is a subconscious implantation made by sage instructing the man from Indiana to visit a certain mountain in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Neary is not the only person to have been contacted by the space creatures, nor is psychic suggestion the sole means through which they communicate with earth. Scientists led by Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut) interpret signals from space as numbers in a specific terrestrial longitude, coordinates that take them to the base of Devil's Tower in Wyoming -- the peak of Neary's vision. There the military constructs a huge landing strip, which Neary and one other person, nally reach for a close encounter of the third kind -- a face-to-face meeting with textraterrestrial beings. Spielberg has a great deal going for him with Neary as his film's Everyman, the viewer's very credible link with the incredible. But the talented young director does not stop there. He gives us an engrossing array of supporting players Lacombe, whose enthusiasm about alien visitations is contagious; Neary's wife -- played by Teri Garr, the Inga of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein -- whose middle-class, middle intelligence mind is incapable of grasping her husband's conversion from affable normalcy to consumption by an abstraction; the saw but, like the lineman, is obsessed with Devil's Tower and learning son Barry (Cary Guffey), who is kidnapped by the extraterrestrials early in the film (presumably for harmless study, as he is subsequently returned to his mother) and who, in terms of audience affection, is far and away more lovable than his Star Wars counterpart, the tinker-toy Droid R#-D#. Fundamentally, then, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an engrossing and sensitive story about people and how they react to an event that drives them from the routine to the extraordinary. However, that is only one level on which the film succeeds. There are three others. Visually, Spielberg's film is an absolute knock-out. From the aliens' curious tinkering with Neary's truck, which causes it to lose all respect for the laws of physics; to our first sight of the tomobile, as they flee police cars along a nighttime highway; to the climactic rising of the quarter-mile long alien command ship from behind Devil's Tower; to the exchange of sign language and smiles between Lacombe and the head extraterrestrial at the military landing strip, technical supervisor Douglas Trumbull performs flawlessly. Unlike the hectic, fragmented views of the Star Wars spaceships, Trumbull and Spielberg dwell long and lovingly on their transports, thus prolonging the viewer's stay in wonderland; unlike the matter-of-fact presentation of the Star Wars alien, the makers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind create an extraterrestrial presence that is both warm and reverent. Like the story, which is a feast for the soul, a reaffirmation of the spirit and dignity of the individual, the special effects are a feast for the eyes. The third level on which Close Encounters of the Third Kind triumphs is what it does for the mind. If Spielberg has geared the narrative aspects of his tale to the average viewer -- filmmakers must invariably appeal to a wide audience, or their backers won't give them any more electric trains to play with -- he caters to a more intellectual audience with the film's philosophical angles. The main course of this food for thought is the director's homage to both Erich von Daniken's book Chariots of the Gods? and #I : A Space Odyssey wherein he hints that his alien beings may well have fostered the human race. For instance, there is a striking cut from the chief alien to an onlooker whom heshe closely resembles; the very fact, explained by the extraterrestrials' return of several World War II pilots, that the space people have been keeping a friendly (paternal?) eye on us for years; the similarities between our bodies and those of the aliens -- they are hairless, as though humans are the midway point between the apes and the extraterrestrials; the subtle sequence, early in the film, in which the Neary children are watching Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments on television, a motion picture in which the Red Sea is parted by clouds that surge and swirl like those that the aliens use to hide their ships -- did they divide the waters and perform other Biblical miracles?; and even the throwaway line offered by a technician at the landing strip in which he speculates that Albert Einstein was so damn clever because he "was probably one of them." As in the Kubrick film, the notion of an alien role in human evolution is convincing because it is presented through symbols and suggestion rather than by citing archeological chapter and verse the way von Daniken does in his frivolous works. Yet, inconsiderate of this theme, Close Encounters of the Third Kind gives the viewer much to discuss with his or her private muse. In case histories, the aliens contact everyday folk. Thus, as on Candid Camera, someonething may one day walkflyslither up to you and say, "Smile... ", which is a heartening thought. For who among us hasn't harbored the dream of meeting an alien and traveling to the stars, a desire given meat and tenability by Spielberg's film. Too, in this age of conspiracy theories, the movie suggests that the government may be covering up contact with extraterrestrials. After all, hasn't President Carter -- who claims reopening of official investigations into the subject? (Investigations would be a waste of time and money.) Finally, if there are aliens, and they are benign, perhaps they will one day help to lift humankind from the social and cultural quagmire in which it has long been snared. Spielberg has declared that that someday is today, as his space beings take themselves to our leaders, allow their picture to be taken, and establish a common means of communication through music -- a brilliant touch, seeing as how music has long been referred to as a universal language; this establishing of dialogue is beautifully realized during the film's climax as the aliens haltingly match tones played on a Moog synthesizer, after which we try to mimic their musical patterns, all of which results in a magnificent symphony of harmonious bleeps, toots and blares. The key word is harmonious. Indeed, if there is any one pervading motif in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it is that of hope. Follow your star and you will find your dream. All of which leads to the fourth level of Spielberg's film, its preoccupation with the innocence, righteousness, and imagination of Walt Disney. The song When You Wish Upon A Star was written for Disney's # feature-length cartoon Pinocchio. It was crooned in that film by Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio's conscience personified. Originally, the sound-track of Close Encounters of the Third Kind offered Mr. Cricket's rendition of the song as the command ship took Roy Neary onboard and rose from the landing field. A delicate touch which would have beautifully underscored Neary's personality -- it is also his conscience personified, a succinct expression of his very human sensibilies -- Spielberg eliminated the tune because he felt that it nudged the thrust of his film from science fiction to fantasy. However, since the song is so appropriate it was retained in other portions of the picture, issuing from a music box and surfacing several times in John A second Disney reference is a ways scurrying madly behind its larger counterparts. This, in much the same fashion as the sprite Tinkerbell zipped and skidded after Peter Pan in that # animated Disney feature. Other such touches include the aliens that attend their taller, slimmer, wiser commander and are reminiscent of the friendly animals that invariably service the protagonist of a Disney cartoon; and the first faltering notes in the earthling-extraterrestrial musical discussion, which are not unlike the interview with the soundtrack in Disney's #I cartoon Fantasia. It's odd, but these snatches from the repertoire of a great purveyor of cinematic dreams are rather moving. Unlike George Lucas, who stocked Star Wars with characters and pieces of plot from Dune, The Wizard of Oz, and half-dozen John Wayne and Errol Flynn pictures -- to trite and tatty ends -- Spielberg used the borrowed elements as flavor. His strong, basic material was already there; the Disney material was simply (and profoundly) the spice that added humor and accentuated the pathos, It's been a long time since we've had a movie as lyric and stunning as Close Encounters of the Third fully and lovingly crafted parts; like Dante Aligheri's The Divine Comedy, it's a work of poetry, vision, and spectacle. It's been said that Spielberg drew inspiration from Kubrick's decadeold #I : A Space Odyssey, which he was forever screening. Ten years from now, don't be surprised if you read about some young filmmaker who, fifteen years of age in #, makes a science fiction masterpiece in #, during the production of which Close Encounters of the Third Kind was constantly being shown...  II. Jay Kay Klein i science fiction story can be based on any theme. Traditionally, this has been some aspect of science: chemistry, botany, psycholi ogy, and so forth. Close Encounters f of a Third Kind is something different -- it's based on fantasy. Coming out of the theater, I overheard a young man say to his date, l "That's bad science fiction!" Not : really, I think, just built around ; something unaccustomed. Perhaps the film could be termed "SciFan." In a way, also. Close Encounters , comes close to being in the Monster Movie category, transcending it through better production values and by the movie maker's intent. What the picture does is to center around the "monsters" in one sf film category. The collected body of II form the equivalent in Close En!r . counters to the "scientific  framework" of other sf film types, i The first half of Close Encounters is y might have been excerpted from a listing of reported occurrences -- and i I've no doubt they were. In fact, as I watched the scenes unroll one i after another, I felt I was seeing a quick panorama of all the cliches ever associated with flying saucer sightings. These were presented at times in a cinema verite style that approached documentary reportings, in an attempt, I think to link the normal and the paranormal. Ultimately, the film went from merely showing strange happenings to the final explanation behind the weird manifestations. At first, this was done in a fast-paced, cinematically wellhandled way. A lost World War II squadron of planes appears in a desert, as if just back from a mission but minus all crewmen. The household of a young mother and her four-year-old child is gripped in a mysterious force that turns on electrical appliances and activates everything mechanical. Something unexplained causes an electrical failure throughout the area. A power utility lineman has his truck and various nearby objects grasped by a strange force and shaken like a rat in the teeth of a terrior, while bathed in The immediate result of these happenings is to give the viewer the feeling he's watching a horror film that has large numbers of poltergeists on the job. The scenes are reminiscent of The Haunting, a horror flick starring Julie Harris some years back. Following the "script" written by a generation of "pigheadedness" of non-believers, the utility worker Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, finds his wife not only doesn't believe a word he says but doesn't even want to hear about his strange experience. His employer fires him without listening to his explanation of what happened to keep him from fixing the power outage. Director and writer Steven Spielberg works entirely within the body of beliefs established by those who phenomena. This requires that no encounter ever be fully documented by photographs or attested to by several non-contradicting and unimpeachable witnesses. Most importantly, responsible officials, especially agents of the U.S. government, must always strive to ignore what happens or actively seek to best answer to those who question if there can really be so much smoke without anyone's locating the source of fire is that the "Government" has indeed established the "truth" of the existence of extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth but has destroyed all hard evidence and subverted the inquiry process. Spielberg has kept Close Encounters as tightly tied to the accepted nined, say, in a nuclear power plant story not to violate any of the orthodox views associated with atomic physics. In fact, he hired an "extechnical advisor. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who founded and heads the As a story-telling picture, Close Encounters is generally interesting from beginning to end, though the middle drags in spots, with scenes run too long. The excitement of the early saucer encounters gives way to the director's establishing of mystical connections between the main trical worker Roy Neary, the little boy Barry Guller, and the boy's oddly shaped mountain to which they are drawn. The film's scientist (gotta have one of those, y'know) also makes a double connection, through a giant antenna dish tied to a computer and the chanting of pilgrims in India who repeat a strange tune over and over. Inevitably, any science fiction picture released at this time is going to be compared to Star Wars. It's a shame that Close Encounters wasn't finished a year ago so that it could stand completely alone. The two pictures have almost nothing in common. The first difference that strikes the viewer is the very much simpler type of special effects offered by Close Encounters. Mostly, these consist of misty lights vaguely outlining dimly seen shapes flashing through the sky, and sometimes right at ground level. The second commonest effects are bright lightbeams that overexpose the cinema film and cause sunburns to story characters. And, of course, the poltergeist effects that would be credible in a grade B horror flick. The special effects of this film are more or less similar in style to those appearing ten years ago in #I rather than to the technical wizardry displayed in Star Wars. Perhaps this is to be expected since Douglas Trumbull did the special effects for both the Stanley Kubrick and the Spielberg epics. It's probably a terrible commentary to say that in comparison to the Star Wars effects, those of Close Encounters seem commonplace and simple. Trumbull certainly did a very fine job by pr e-Star Wars standards, but his otherwise commendable efforts fall short of the truly miraculous, it's really happening right before my-eyes computer technology employed in Star Wars. Strangely enough, while both the special effects and the straight sets seem far simpler in Close Encounters, Star Wars cost less than # nally, the supreme special effect of Close Encounters struck me as only marginally better than many I'd seen in a number of grade B productions. As the movie was obviously thundering to a climax, I sat in my seat not believing that the famed picture makers, the team that did Jaws, had conjured up a giant chandelier to serve as the greatgranddaddy of all Flying Saucers. (A giant chandelier that is sometimes the size of three football fields and sometimes the size of a city in flight, depending on how the film technicians matte-work caught the foreground-background relationship.) My disappointment was not that an alien artifact resembled a lighting fixture, but rather that the object on the screen was obviously a fake. Not poor concept, but poor fabrication. It was this scene, too, in which I found concentrated all the faults of the film. Much as in the treatment given special effects scenes in #I , the giant model was left on the screen far too long, as if having lavished so much money and effort, the director couldn't bear cutting the scene. The opposite tack had been taken in Star Wars, with many beautiful or bizarre shots lasting just seconds. Close Encounters has a total of # special effects, against # for Star Wars. The threering circus pace of Star Wars is one of the secrets behind its success, requiring viewers to go back two or more times really to see everything. Repeat viewers for Close Encounters will be far fewer and, I should think mainly confined to think science fiction fans far outnumber saucer freaks -- but I'm probably wrong. Both films share something in common: unexpected scene stealers. These were the robots in Star Wars. The leading actor in Close Encounters turned out to be fouryear-old Cary Guffey. If anyone is nominated for Best Actor in this film, it ought to be him. Most remarkably, he did this all with some chuckles, a few gurgles, and that line of lines, "Bye bye!" The rest of the acting is very competent. The difficulty with believability is that except for saucer freaks, many viewers probably would feel, as I did, that the characmanifestations do not exhibit normal reactions. Persons running into strange and frightening phenomena do not usually pursue the situation, hoping to repeat 'the experience. Normally, they run like Hell! Still, we may suppose that those encoundeliberatly affected so that they were favorably impressed. In the film, this was carried so far forward as to be completely analogous to the Medieval belief that anyone in the presence of Christ's cup, the Holy Grail, would feel instant joy and contentment. Thereafter, he would induced rapture and its subsequent mania for more encounters is depicted by Spielberg as a religious experience. This is the foundation ably serves. Cinematically, Close Encounters works up to a fabricated climax. Conducting communication by light patterns and' musical notes is not new in print, but may be a first on film. Let's hope that dragging this out on screen for what seemed an eternity will not set a tradition. The Disneyesque tuba blats seemed out of place as not sufficiently alien. You'd expect electronic synthesis instead of sound generated by a vibrating column of air within a brass spiral or, perhaps, its transistorized carbon copy. A tacked-on epilogue depicts the creatures of the saucer as a group of elf-sized goblins and a wise old cutsey-grotesque Disneytype creature revealed fitfully amidst blinding lights and swirling mist. Amazingly, the apparition doesn't frighten anyone. Instead, the expressions of the humans took on a beatific rapture as if they were gazing on the face of God. These areas of viewer disbelief in themselves would have been sufficient, but a bus-load of firm-jawed astronauts were at hand to embark on the saucer for a tour of space -- presumably. Since the only previous communication shown by the film maker between the governmental of landing coordinates, I can't see how these volunteers were gathered days or weeks in advance. Nor, except to fit within the canons of government to have hundreds of government-payroll people on hand to watch the saucer landing while denying access on the grounds of secrecy to a handful of persons alsecrecy problem would  be compounded, of course, by the hundreds of Earth detainees disgorged from the saucer after years of captivity. So much for the apparent failures of rationality, including a multiing secretly in the sky when it ought to be detected as it rounded Saturn's orbit. The picture as a whole is entertaining. Despite affinities with previous low-budget monster movies, use of now outmoded special effect techniques and various failures of logic, Close Encounters is far from being a bad picture. In fact, it is better than any made-for-TV movie I've yet seen, and it's even better than the majority of science fiction films that have been produced for the screen. The picture is far below Star Wars and, again, if there is any tragedy here, it's Steven Spielberg's production's having followed George Lucas' film instead of preceding it. The situation is somewhat like an epic silent film of the #'s being released on the heels of the all-talking, all-singing Jazz Singer. On the other hand, I've no doubt the picture is attractive enough to enhance the value of Columbia Pictures stock. And Close Encounters of The Third Kind ought to gladden Dear Mr. Pierce, I have a bone to pick with your book reviewer, Paul Walker. He views the bull as a powerful animal and the matador as a defenseless human trying to overcome the bull's sharp horns. Apparently Mr. Walker missed the picadors and their lances as they wound and weaken the animal by bleeding him. As for true adversity I suggest Mr. Walker try grizzly bear hunting with an axe. David Friese # Five Cedars Rd. Pineville, N.C. # Bui the bull is a powerful animal. And the matador's task is not to overcome it, but to control it. The purpose of the picadors is not to weaken the bull, but to teach it to strike upward with its head, as I recall. This is a preparation, not an end in itself, and if anything, leaves the bull more fighting mad than ever. As for your latter suggestion, that is simply axing for trouble. -- Paul Walker Gentlemen: As a long time resident of Norristown, Pa., I really must object to the line in Herbert Gerjuoy's "The Holy Temple" referring to the nut factory in my town. We do have a nut house, i.e. the State Hospital, but we do not have a nut factory! The nut factory is in Conshohocken. Pa. Please forward this information to Mr. Gerjuoy. Thank you.  P.L. Brooks Morris Road, R.D. ## Norristown, Pa. #I Sir: I found your reviews on Star Wars interesting, but neither of your reviewers seemed to question the historical sources of the script. SF fans have mismovie. It is, in fact, probably the most accurate illustration of the true background of World War II yet to achieve popularity with the American public. This goes back to the suppression of the Samurai, in the Meiji Restoration in #, when the Central Japanese government was established. That should be the key, in and of itself. A remote figurehead Emperor, but the real power resting in the hands of rabidly militaristic expansionists? Plot sound familiar? The assassinations of the Jedi Knights? What about those assisinations of the opponents of expansionism in the #'s? Yamamoto was on a sticky wicket, warning the Japanese high command about America's superior technology! Obviously, if you take the trouble to look, Alderaan begins to look an awful lot like Pearl Harbor, and The Death Star and awful lot like the mastononic fleet the Japanese sent after Midway, where suicidal American torpedo attacks -- and American Kamikaze dies on Japanese warships -- led the Japanese to rate Americans in the same class as their own Samurai. It is interesting to note that one of the most remarkable qualities of Star Wars is that an American made movie should, in so many respects, parallel World War II in the Pacific theater -- as now seen by the Japanese! As to criticisms of the technical background, even that is part of our history; many of the American aces were literally flying farm boys, who got their first lessons, from barnstormers. As to Han Solo, in many ways, he represents an image of America held by most of the world, in the #'s: the hotrodder, the "decadent" youth of the materialistic, moneycrazy society. Reviewing Star Wars as a "pure" SF film makes about as much sense as reviewing The Lord of the Rings as a "fairy tale." No one not fully familiar with World War II military history could miss the unique way in which this film has captured the broader sense of the war. The full dramatic content of this film, the subliminal or subconscious chords it strikes, can only be evaluated in the context of the age in which it was created. It will be interesting to see how Japanese audiences, with jheir traditional appreciation of symbolism, will react to the film; given the above factors, the film may become the biggest American blockbuster in Japan, since MacArthur elected himself god of demokorasu . James J. Glackin l#'z N. Fair Oaks Ave. Pasadena, Calif., # Now I've heard everything. Well, I hope this doesn't actually hurt #th Century Fox in Japan! -- jj-PDear J.J.: I have a few comments about the "Jogging up Main Street" is in most respects very well written, but unfortunately is based upon scientifically inaccurate premises -- a cardinal sin in science fiction. The author does not understand a basic principle of physics: in a closed system, angular momentum is conserved. Jogging inside a space-going cylinder could create fluctuations in the spin, but certainly not the progressive spin increase depicted in the story. If you don't believe me, check with your expert-in-residence, Jerry Pournelle. As editor, you should insist on scientific accuracy. I am delighted by The Courts of Chaos. The Amber series would perhaps be more appropriately called "metaphysics fiction" rather than science fiction, but whatever you call it, it is marvellously good. "The Holy Temple" deserves a spedisplay of wit. David Palter #I Leland Way, Room # Hollywood, Calif., # Yeah.  did check in with Jerry on "Jogging " -- after that howler had already been called to my attention. Actually, Jim Baen bought the story, but the error would have gone right past me, too -- I'm even less a physicist than he is. Hey Tom, that was a wild thing to do. Tom ? By the way, people have been asking if The Courts of Chaos is really the last of the Amber series. Well, Roger himself says so. 'Course, authors have been known to change their minds before... -- j j-Psues. Send check or money order to: C.l. Gram, # Center Grove Road, H-#, Dept. G. Dover, N.J. #, wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-# St, Paul, Mn. #. Fla., # lists. PM-SF, # Pine St., Des Plaines, #., # Large catalog. Books, magazines. Three stamps. Marx, # #th, Lubbock, Tex., # for #-page catalog. Collections also purchased. R. 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An Extraordinary Offer What a way to get acquainted with these science fiction greats. Browse through the list of book  on this page and choose any # for just #tf It's the most extraordinary sample of science fiction ever offered in one package # Close Encounters of the Third Kind. By Steven Spielberg Noveli.iimu of the hit movie about Earth's first i ont.ii i with an alien race Pub ed # #b # The Hugo Winners. Vol I  II Giant #-in-I volume of # award-winning stories. # to # Asimov introduces each Pub ed # #. Silence Is Deadly. By Lloyd Biggie. Jr Spying on a new secret weapon proves hard for Jan Darzek as he travels to a totally deaf world Pub ed S# # The Ophiuchi Hotline. By John Varley Cloning, alien invaders and a mysterious message from the depths of space -- all in this outstanding SF story Explicit scenes and language may be offensive to some. Pub ed S# # #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. 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GoH: Alfred Bester. Membership: # until June #. # at the door. For info write: Susan Rothman...# Seacoasl Terr... Brooklyn. N.Y... #. #th World Science Fiction Convention. Hotels Adams and Regency Hyatt and Convention Center. Phoenix. Ariz. Pro GoH: Harlan Ellison. Fan GoH: Bill Bowers. Toastmaster: F.M. Busby. Membership # attending.  I # supporting. For info write: luuanacon. P.O. Box #, Phoenix. ' An #. Hotel. Philadelphia. Pa. Membership fees and GoH to be announced. Londonderry Lane. Darby. Pa... #. Galaxy June # Vol. #, No. # Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher John J. Pierce, Editor J.E. Pournelle, Ph.D., Science Editor L.C. Murphy, Subscriptions Dept. Paul G. Walker, Contributing Editor National Advertising Sales Representative: Erwin Baker Associates, Inc., # Evergreen Place, East Orange, N.J., #. Phone #-#-#. Recalled from disgrace, Ling Sanjen has been assigned to new duties on Veden, a world that is immune to the plague destroying the rest of the Empire. Or is it... ? He longed to be born again -- but he couldn't believe in the Millenialist version of rebirth. And the woman he loved couldn't believe in his. It was a "fail-safe" system, but the president who installed it was honest. And that was all the trouble! Today's kids still hear about Little Red Riding Hood or Jack and the Beanstalk. Tomorrow's... In a certain other magazine, this would be called a Fght. scientists keep taking over more of our crazy ideas. There ain't no justice in the world! What can you do with a vampire these days besides put him in a blood bank? Quite a lot! And what does King Arthur have to do with sf? Quite a lot too! Naturally, he would have to be the first to react to last month's guest editorial by Harlan! Cover by Richard Olson Interior Illustrations by Olson, Fabian, Cosentini, Fox, Mueller ing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Main Office  Editorial Office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y., #, Single copy #. #-Issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. An exciting new concept in Science Fiction publishing. in artistic concept. It has been, in the truest of senses, a collaboration between the artist and the author. What has emerged is not merely an illustrated story, not even a story with special illustrations carefully fitted to it. The two parts of the whole -- art and story, art and fiction -- are equal co-partners. The result is something more than a book. It is a mechanism for the imagination, a magic box that the reader can open and experience, putting himself or herself much more deeply into the life of the story than would otherwise be possible." Gordon R. Dickson from his introduction to # Size #X# Available in June su pbs G a new trade paperback line a division of ace book companya grosset  dunlap company# Park Ave South New York, NY# A real post-Watergate president, yes sir! You'd never catch him going over the People's heads... "I . , It s really nothing new, the technician explained to the President of the United States. "We've always had a failsafe system for everything." He hesitated, careful where to tread with his words. "Everything, that is, except for the possibility of human error in this office. There has always been a chance of mistake by the President. We've lived with that flaw in the system for over thirty years. The Russians know it too. They might not agree but they know it could be a potential weakness." The President was also careful in his choice of words. He was afraid of machines but he didn't want to display that reaction to the technician. "We must be absolutely certain that mankind retains control of nuclear weapons. Can you be sure these machines of yours won't take that control away?" "Mr. President, I assure you they won't. This computer system will have your personal image imprinted within its memory banks. Four of your top advisors will also have their personal images in the system. The system, sir, will be you and they." "Then why do we need the system?" "Picture this, sir. The Russians launch an attack. You have five minutes in which to respond. Can you gather your advisors and, using the human way, reach a decision with enough speed? It would be impossible. In that situation the response would have to come from one man -- yourself. It would be made in confusion and in a great hurry. And, sir, I hesitate to say this, but there is always the chance that you would not be emotionally capable of pushing the button." The technician squirmed a bit at this last point, afraid that he had gone too far. But the President only nodded gree of enthusiasm for the technician's idea. "The computers, Mr. President, will make their decision when you key them into action. The decision will be based upon your personal image, as programmed, minus emotional response. An emotionless finger on the button, sir, but your finger just the same." "What sort of computers are these?" The technician, warmed to his subject, leaned forward in his chair. "The sytem has been in use in air and spacecraft since the nineteen seventies. It's called a computer jury. Five computers vote on a decision. The majority rules. It's as simple as that, sir. If the vote is three computers to two, the minority is automatically over-ridden by the majority. Decisions are nearly instantaneous with questions and votes. The system cannot fail." "And what are the odds against the computer majority making the wrong decision?" "I wouldn't venture a guess on that, sir. Perhaps our Data File Four thousand could work the problem if -- " "No need for that." The President waved the technician away. "Go ahead. Install the system." may # , #... The technician, tugging nervously on his watchband, waited for the President's answer. The President, folding his hands, looked back at the technician with disbelief on his face and amazement in his eyes. "You want to test the system using my computer image and those of my advisors? Test it under simulated conditions?" Horvath, the technician, nodded, a bead of sweat forming on his right temple. He had not anticipated this sort of reaction from the President. The system was nearly operational. All it needed was the programming and testing and it would be ready. "It has to be done, sir! There's no oth -- " "Absolutely not!" The President's fist pounded the desk top. "My God, Horvath! Have you any idea of what would happen if the outcome of that little test ever leaked to the public? Or to the Russians?" "I have a top-security clearance rating, sir. Only you and I would have to be present for the test." "I wouldn't even trust you with that sort of information, Horvath. The Russians know we have this system already, you can bet on it. And this system was supposed to be top-secret too." Horvath shrank from the President's voice. "Imagine, Horvath, if the Russians somehow managed to obtain the results of your little test. What if the results displayed an iron-fisted retaliation to a nuclear venture on their part? They'd know, Horvath. They'd know they would have to strike now, right away! Before your computers are operational. Because they would never have such an opportunity again. Once your computers are operational, there would be no doubt about our response to an attack. And doubt, Horvath, is what keeps the cold war cold." Horvath stuttered and said weakly, "But..." "Or what if our computers tested the other way?" the President fired back, not allowing the technician any breathing space. "What if they voted not to retaliate, based upon my advisors' decisions programmed into the machines? Then if the Russians found that out, they'd attack us for certain." "We still need a test, sir. Without it, the system isn't failsafe." "No! I don't even want to know how my advisors would vote in the case of war. Once I knew, I might be tempted to rearrange the computer jury according to my own thoughts on the matter. I'm sorry. Test the system if you must, but don't use me or my advisors as test subjects. Select five of your own men for the test run. I can't allow you or anybody else to know for certain how we would respond to an enemy attack." The President smiled at Horvath and leaned forward in his chair. "I'll tell you a secret, Horvath," he said kindly. "I actually don't know how I'd respond either. But then, that's the job of the computer, isn't it?" Horvath, not wishing to be banished from the President's favor, wilted and quit the battle. "I suppose you're right, sir. There has always been a danger of leaks from the White House. If this leaked, it would present the Russians with an interesting subject for scrutiny. We'll test the system ourselves." President Lyman breathed a sigh of relief as Horvath departed the Oval Office. He really didn't know how he would respond to a nuclear attack. And he didn't really want to know. The President traced a circle on his scratch pad, absently breaking the pencil point. He shrugged finally and went back to work. june #, #... Soviet Premier Lastovik drummed fingers on the Kremlin table as the Minister of Psychology urged his case. Ten generals listened intently to the talk of computers, politics, ihe make-up of men and war. Lastovik stopped the psychologist in mid-sentence. "Have you checked with this Krukov in the Ministry of Science?" "Da." "An honest politician?" "Indeed." "It will be enough?" The psychologist nodded. "Do any of my honored colAward winning Galaxy-Foundation Sanaa of ki ta rc o onadad Involving tha entira Galaxy, utilizing tha Omega slaps, the ingle move! Tha ship is # mfiae across and tha mare Outposts, Beacons, the use of Cloaking and mvMbiHty Devices, Histories, ships, and actions of Humanoid, Cyborg, Alien. Android, Robot old. Clone, and other Super Ctvfttzatiorw that defy description! before! The aeries can be played by the purchase of only ana Supplemental books are Inckided m eech game for the specific attle MenuaL This ona book anabtas you to begin your study of the # protected games at a low cost without ever wasting your funds on duplication I TNa results m afl games Mrwdy Manual (#). Tha following games are available below; cost of Manual not included: The N'Drtdd invasions Tha Struggle to Crush the Dictators Warriors of tha Dark Mar-in tha Age or Ms M atron Van la the exact workings of the Rays, Beams, M laaH as, "L" projectors. Command and Pttot skills with one or two ships! PWarriors of the Dark Star Battle Manual # Dual of tha Sun Slayers...# Vengeanc e Crusaders VS The Monads # War of the Star Slavais. two Giant Empires in both MWtary and maintain their MWtary Power and Wealth as wefl os be wan taking # companies in separate dties # years to complete It. The result is one of the f osteal, action fWed, realistic games aver made with rules unbetieveably easy to laam. Mobile Earth Infantry fight grotesque humanoids. Intact Warriors and lizards total oama ourchasssl leagues in the military have a question?" Silence surrounded the table. "Then we have them!" Laslovik's fist crashed on the table top. "We have them!" July #, #... The President was awakened by Jackson, his military aide. He brushed Jackson's hand from his shoulder and, sitting up in bed, glanced at his watch. It was # a.m. "Yes?" "norad has bogies on the big screen, sir. sac and tac confirm. They want release of their weapons, Mr. President. General Trenton says this is the real thing. They're missiles, s'ir." The President's stomach turned queasy with fear. He shook his head abruptly and reached for the computer outlet at his nightstartd. Matching the outlet key with one that hung from his neck, he activated the computer system installed just months ago by the technician. Then he and the military aide bolted for the elevator leading to the White House bomb shelter. The computers voted. Two computers, representing dovish advisors, sided against release of weapons on the grounds that survival of humanity, either Russian or American, was of greater importance than war or its outcome. Two computers, representing hawkish counsel, voted for release of weapons, hoping that quick retaliation might prevent a second Russian strike. President Lyman's computer failed to make the first vote and was still undecided by the fourth vote. Seconds ticked by. The tie-vote persisted, unbroken, Lyman's computer abstaining while it puzzled over the question's answer. The computer "knew" Lyman better than he knew himself. Lyman was an honest politician, the computer understood, a man who truly believed himself to be the appointed representative of three hundred million people. Lyman never made an important decision without first consulting the people. Lyman always did what the people wanted. What did the people want? What would their response be? The other computers pushed a vote once more. Unlike Lyman's machine, they represented only their advisors, who represented only themselves. The vote was tied again. Then Lyman's computer, representing a President who represented made a decision, finally. Insufficient data. It did not know what the wishes of a majority of the citizens of the United States were concerning the question at hand. And Lyman, the computer knew, never made a big decision without knowing where the people stood. insufficient data. It flashed on the computer outlet video tube on the President's nightstand. The computer decided to do nothing. The other computers voted again. And again. And again... Hung jury. The Russian missiles fell. There was no return volley.  by Richard A. Lupoff Introduction by Harlan Ellison Dell # you to earth-colonized planets where interplanetary racial bigotry is rampant! "There has never been a thing like this one before. Audacious! Extravagant! It will raise one hell of a noise." -- Harlan Ellison "A tour-de-force! Brings author Richard A. Lupoff to the front ranks." -- Theodore Sturgeon Dell Publishing Co., Inc. I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza # East #th Street New York, N.Y. # Immortality of the body? Possible. Immortality of the soul? Well... just what is a soul? Davy moved the coffeepot closer to the coals with his toe. The wind was cold where it found its way through a crack between two logs. Have to chink that tomorrow. Davy had had all of the cracks chinked but some were always falling out. The storm outside was still building, though the winds were already blowing a gale. Rain thundered down on the corrugated metal roof. He looked again, but there were no leaks; he had pitched the last one a week earlier. Patrick Singer moaned in his sleep. Davy's eyes sought him out in the dimness. The fireplace shed the only light in the one-room cabin. Again Davy's father muttered but it was unintelligible. "I should get Michael or Sarah to sit with him tomorrow night," Davy thought. He had hardly slept for three nights now, since Pa had taken the fever. The doctor could do nothing, or said he could not. You could never be sure with a Gentile. The thought almost made Davy smile. He had been a professing agnostic for six months now but his prejudices still made him side with his own people, misguided as he now believed them to be. No, he would not get Michael's help yet. There was no reason he could not catnap; after all, the doctor had said there was nothing anyone could do. It was only a matter of time. And he had no intention of placing himself in Michael's obligation, no matter how hard it became to take care of Pa. Michael already blamed him for Pa's condition, saying that his defection had taken the heart out of the old man. But it was seventy years of dredging a bare living out of the unyielding Ozark soil that had killed Davy had done. He knew that and someday he might thank Michael for turning what might have become guilt into less harmful anger. Someday, but not now. The coffeepot gurgled and Davy poured himself a cup of the steaming liquid. Chicory. He had developed a taste for real coffee at school but there was no affording it now. He ought to wash Pa's face again but somehow he couldn't bring himself to disturb the old man. While he slept, he was in less pain. Davy let the bitter brew slip down his throat. It was never easy, being a youngest son. When his brother Michael had been his age, there had been an older brother (Patrick, Jr., now dead) and Davy to help, and Pa had been younger and stronger. And Ma had been alive to give all their labor some meaning. But Pat was dead, Ma was dead, Pa was dying and Michael had married and moved away. Therein lay the only consolation left to Davy -- that he did not have to put up with Michael's sneering superiority. The work that fell on Davy was too much and the farm was falling into disrepair. He no longer planted the highest hectares, and weeds grew around the place, but there were only so many hours in the day and once it had taken all of them just to do what he did now. And now he had to tend to Pa too. There was a momentary lull in the storm before the rain struck the roof with redoubled fury, accompanied by the bell-like thrumming of hail. Patrick Singer cried out: "Anne!" But there was no Anne Singer to comfort him any more. Davy felt the first stirring of tears. Pa would not last out the night. And the last six months of his life had been a torment... and it was all Davy's fault. The chicory was forgotten, grew cold in the cup, as Davy's mind skittered back down the days.    Davey and his father could hear the singing begin as they crossed the meadow. Slanting against the verdant hillside, rays of the setting sun fell over the Gulf of Texas, and below, the seaport of Little Rock sent up a foulness that seldom reached these heights. It was somehow symbolic of the Millennium that men should work on as though nothing untoward had happened, blissfully unaware that the Reign had already begun; oblivious to the fact that the outpourings of their pointless labor could not reach or unsettle the Elect. Once the thought had given Davy a feeling of superiority -- but of late he had been drawn increasingly toward those very same fleshpots. The church was of stone and logs, built with more care than most of the members' own houses. In winter an oil-drum stove made it a pleasant refuge against the damp and fog of the Ozark Islands, and often in summertime the elders would built an arbor of poles, roofed with chicken wire and rushes. There the services would proceed by the afterglow of the setting sun, occasionally enlivened as bats chased junebugs among the crowded aisles. Now it was late fall. The leaves clung forlornly to the jackoaks, dead and sere. The oil-drum stove had brought the temperature up and Davy shed his jacket gratefully. The Singer cabin and farm was five kilometers west of the meetinghouse. The Singers could neither fertilize nor irrigate, the latter because of inclement geography, the former for reasons of doctrine that had never been clear to Davy. Life had been easier before his brothers left to make lives of their own. Of course he and his father could have taken jobs in Little Rock -- but the Elect did not mingle with the Gentiles. That is, they did not except when compelled by law. Four mornings a week Davy walked down to the town for compulsory schooling. His was the first generation since the Tribulation to do so. Despite legal battles waged by the church hierarchy, the resurgent Federal government had stood fast on the subject of compulsory education. There was some singing, some prayer, and then the Reverend Powell stepped up to the podium, slapping down his Bible and darting his eyes from face to face. He opened the book, announcing the seventh chapter of Revelation, a text that Davy did not need a Bible to remember. After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palm leaves in their hands. Only the Gentiles still doubted that the Cataclysm had been Armageddon, or that the years following had been the Great Tribulation. Davy could not appreciate the fear that the Revelation of St. John had struck into Fundamentalist congregations like this one before the Cataclysm. Even the saintly John's description of blood running to the "depths of a bridle bit" could not rival the reality of nuclear war, nor were the "beasts" loosed in the last days anything but pale reflections of the mutations that had plagued the earth these last two centuries. And one of the elders answered, saying unto me. What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? And I said unto him. Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of the Great Tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Vaguely Davy wondered what it would have been like to have heard those same verses with Armageddon before him and without the certainty that he was among the white-robed Elect. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. Davy had recently come across an ancient book in the archives of the school library that described the pre-Tribulation Fundamentalist sects and included transcripts of sermons preached before the last days. There he found these same scriptures quoted in descriptions of the Millennium to come. But people had taken them literally, and Davy could today attest that even in the Millennium a man still hindered and thirsted, and the Lamb fed men as he always had -- by providing seed and soil, rain and sun. The rest, as always, was up to man. Reverend Powell shut his Bible and Davy's attention wandered, although he was careful to look attentive, as always. His mind slipped naturally into well-worn paths of perplexity. There were vast contradictions between the teachings of the church and the teaching he received at the federal school, contradictions he could not resolve; but what was worse, those contradictions had heightened his sensititivy to other contradictions within his religion. The difference between Revelation's description of the Millennium and the reality he perceived was one, but there were other, more pressing, problems. How, for instance, could a God who was both all powerful and entirely loving have allowed Armageddon to take place? Davy did not know that he was posing the age-old mystery of omnipotence and omni-benevolence coexisting in an imperfect world. Nor did he recognize the question thus posed; his education had been rudimentary at best. He only knew that there was something seriously wrong with the beliefs of his elders. Davy had always been close to his father and was free to ask his advice on any question but this. Instinctively he shied away from verbalizing his uncertainty, knowing that it was one subject with which Pat Singer could not cope. Two decades later, when time and death had utterly sundered them, Davy would recognize this inability as his father's immovable defense against disbelief. "Just the other day a man from Little Rock stopped me on the street." Some change in the rhythm of Reverend Powell's delivery caught Davy's ear. "He said to me, 'Powell. Powell, how can you call this the Millennium when you Millennialists spend your whole lives dragging a bare living out of the soil?' Then he quoted to me these same scriptures you just heard. "Brothers and sisters, I tell you no Christian ever quoted scripture half so well as the Devil. "I said to him, 'Mr. Jones, there are times to be clever but questioning God's word is never clever. I don't know why God chose to speak to us using physical terms in the scriptures but I know that I never hunger after righteousness, nor thirst after truth. He dwells with me every day, here in the temple of my heart, and He has cleansed me in living fountains of grace. He feeds me on His word and, Sir, He has wiped every tear from my eye; and I rejoice in His daily presence!' "What care I if my belly is empty, if my heart is full? And what care I if God's enemies twist His words, taking symbolic statements as literal truth? What care I if they hurl lies in my face, as long as I have truth in my heart?" A chorus of "Amens" followed as Powell broke off on a high note. He paused artfully, leaning across the podium, letting silence fill the room; then he went on more softly. "The Devil is wily and tireless. Even now, chained in the bottomless pit, he still influences the unwary. This poor man, whom I have called Mr. Jones, was not satisfied. Brothers and sisters, the Devil is never satisfied. "He said to me, 'Powell, if God is all loving and all powerful, why did He allow the Cataclysm and the pestilence of mutations that followed?' "Brothers and sisters, the Devil is clever. He asks telling questions; be sure, he is no fool. "I said, 'Mr. Jones, I don't know.' " His voice had fallen to a whisper, but no ear missed a word. " # don't know. But God knows, Mr. Jones,' I said. 'I'm only a man. I don't know why God does what He does, but I know that it is to my ultimate good. And how do I know? Because God loves me. He said in His Book that He loves me and I believe Him.' "That's faith, brothers and sisters. Faith. It's faith that raises man above the animals and faith that raises Christians above the Gentiles. But if I could understand everything, how could I have faith? If I understood, why would I need God? "I rejoice in my frailty, my ignorance, for only through it do I know the glorious feeling of utter, childlike faith in my Father." He raised his hands and the congregation rose to sing. Davy rose with them, his heart pounding. He could not believe. All his life he had accepted, passively, but he could not believe, actively. To do so was to deny self, to deny his own value and importance, and this he could not do. Rather, he would not. And in the very moment that he refused belief, all the paradoxes and perplexities in his mind stood revealed, solved. What had seemed monolithic and absolute when viewed from within was shot through with idiocy and honeycombed with rot when viewed from without. The superstructure of doctrine crashed down around him in one warm moment of knowing. It was all lies. There was no Millennium; there had been no Armageddon -- there were only madmen in conflict. There was no God. There was only man and his frailty reaching out for eternal life in the face of irrevokable death. With assurance so utter that it thrilled him to the core even as it stripped him of all defense, Davy Singer knew -- knew ! -- that there was only himself and death, black death, waiting at the end of the corridor of his life.    Light slanting through the cabin window awoke Davy. He had begun the night in remembrance; then he had slept; and now he was uncertain when the remembering had ceased and the dreaming had begun. The months following his negative conversion had been difficult. He had told his father somewhat of his new feelings, trusting him to understand partially at least, but in that he had underestimated his father's needs. There had been no understanding, just bitter recriminations. Shaking sleep from his mind, he rose and went to check on his father. Patrick Singer was dead. It took several seconds for the enormity of the event to sink in and then Davy hesitantly pressed his ear against the old man's chest. There was no heartbeat; no sound of breath. Davy backed away from the bed, tom between the need to run for a leave his father. But as he regarded the open eyes and slack mouth, he realized that it did not matter. He could go or stay -- but the dead stay dead. He reached out to close his father's eyes. The flesh was still warm and he drew his hand back quickly. Uncertain, he tapped the aged cheek lightly. The head rolled sideways on lax muscles and Davy drew back again, spasmodic shivers overtaking him. He reached out once more; found that he could not touch that dead, warm skin again, and pulled the blanket over his father's head instead. Firmly believing in the Millennium, the old man had worked his life away, knowing scant rewards for all his labor. Believing in an afterlife, he had died secure. But he was just as dead as any atheist would have been... just as dead as Davy himself would someday be. Somehow Davy had vaguely expected a great revelation at this inevitable moment, some sign that his agnosticism was merely the foolishness of youth. He had secretly hoped for just such an omen; but there was nothing -- just an empty dried-up husk and the lonely sound of wind moaning about in the eaves. There were tears then, hot and stinging, but there was something more too -- the beginning of a slow burgeoning terror that would pursue him throughout his life. Tasmeen interrupted .Dave in midmorning. He was indulging in his favorite position -- lounging in a decrepit armchair in the comer of the lab -- reading a journal, his bare feet on the windowsill. "Someone to see you in your office. Professor." "Send him in here." "I think you had better go to him," she replied, eyeing the disorder with mock distaste. Dave shrugged, slipped into sandals and followed her. The reason for Tasmeen's unusual solicitude was soon apparent: Dave's visitor was in a wheelchair. He was a small-featured and handsome man, with a sober air, and the lap robe did nothing to disguise his legless condition. "Professor Singh, this is Sri Nirghaz Husain. Sri Husain, Professor Ram David Singh." Dave did namaste, touching his hands together before his chest and bobbing his head in a greeting, which Husain returned. "What can I do for you, Sri Husain?" Husain looked faintly embarrassed. "I was told that you are the Director of the Institute." Dave nodded. "Yes, although that may not entail all that you think." He pulled up a chair and sat down facing Husain. Tasmeen returned with a tray of tea and biscuits. "Now, Sri Husain, you have to understand what it is to be the director of this Institute. We are all researchers here and need no one to tell us what to do; the director simply shuffles paperwork and sees to it that the rest have money to work with. That's it. Each one of us takes his turn as director on a biyearly rotation and my term of servitude is up within a few days. After that Professor Mukerjee will be director, poor man." Husain smiled despite himself. "You are not an Indian?" "NorAm by extraction, Indian by citizenship and inclination." "But still NorAm in your informality." Dave smiled. "Perhaps. What can the Institute do for you, Sri Husain?" Husain's brows came together and he hesitated. Then, "I understand that you are on the forefront of regeneration research?" Suddenly Dave understood the man's reticence. "Your legs?" "Yes." "I'm sorry, Sri Husain, but I doubt that there is anything we can do for you. If we were able to regenerate human parts, you can be sure that it would be on all the news channels. We are working toward that end, and one of our members feels that she may be fairly close to it, but the techniques have not yet been proven." Doctor Singh, if the odds are at all favorable. To be so confined is intolerable." Dave leaned back, drumming his fingers. Then he called out to Tasmeen. She put her head in the doorway and he said, "Ask Doctor Mathur to step in if she can break away." When she had gone, he turned back to Husain. "As I said, my role as director is a small one. Doctor Mathur is the expert on regeneration. You must understand, however, that our purpose here is to find techniques with which to overcome sterility. Regeneration research is directed primarily toward that end." Shashi Mathur stepped in moments later with a smile for Dave -- which she quickly hid. Proper British formality lives on in India long after Britain is but a memory. Dave introduced them and she said, "Sri Husain. Sri Nirghaz Husain?" He nodded. Dave looked blank. "Sri Husain is a famous polo player," Shashi prompted. Dave noticed her momentary' hesitation over tense. "He is also the grandson of Sri Karji." Suddenly a light dawned. The Premier, Jogendranath Kantikar -- Sri Jogendranath Kantikarji when the honorifics were added. Out of affection and practicality, his followers had shortened it to Sri Karji. His grandson, Nirghaz Husain -- now confined to a wheelchair -- had been the chief negotiator for India in its disputes with Medina over the land recovered by the Panch-ab project. Dave's embarrassment was written across his face and Husain chuckled. "I thought that sequestered men of science were purely fictional." "No, I'm afraid that we are very real," Dave admitted. He studiously avoided newscasts, but the more spectacular stories always managed to trickle through his defenses. Nirghaz Husain was the son of Sri Karji's youngest daughter and a Muslim father, Parivar Husain. The daughter had left home at an early age, creating a scandal that Sri Karji's Parlimentary opponents would not let die. She had returned to India with her son after the Medinan Muslims had made life intolerable for her. Her son had gone back to Medina upon his father's death to inherit his fortune and to act as an unofficial emissary between Sri Karji and the Muslims. He had been there when the fighting broke out six months ago and had lost his legs to a bomb dropped by an Indian plane. "Professor Mathur," he said now, "Professor Singh informs me that you are the expert on regeneration. My grandfather has said many fine things about your Institute; he suggested that I come here seeking aid." Dave and Shashi exchanged glances. There had been nothing casual about dropping Sri Karji's name. If they succeeded in restoring Husain's legs, the sky would be the limit in financing for future research; but should they fail... "I'm sorry, Sri Husain, but there is nothing we can do for you," Shashi told him gently. "Our efforts here are aimed primarily at overcoming the worldwide drop in birthrate hollowing the Cataclysm. Only a few of us, Such as Doctor Singh and myself, are pursuing lines of research in other areas of biology, and primary regeneration is not one of them." "But Doctor Singh said that you were working on regeneration." "Yes and no. Let me explain. We have had some success with primary regeneration where the matrix of tissue was not entirely destroyed. Consider the amputation of an arm, say between the elbow and the wrist. We could cause all of the muscles of the forearm to regenerate and we could then replace the bone with metal. But the hand? The fingers? There would be no matrix for their regeneration. In certain cases of limited avulsion we use this technique, but it would have no value to you. "Furthermore, we have isolated hormones that cause 'stunted growth' so that today we are able to give treatment to a child whose limbs do not fully develop; but full, primary regeneration in living humans is impossible, at least within the forseeable future. It has to take place in the embryonic stage." Husain's expression hardened as her words. "What I am doing is experimenting with the growth of replacement parts from clones," Shashi explained. "Clones?" She smiled. "Except for sperm and ova, every cell contains the genetic pattern of the entire organism. Certain lower orders, sponges for example, reproduce by budding off of ordinary cells. The new organisms produced are genetically identical to the parent organism. We can artificially stimulate ordinary muscle cells to replicate new organisms in a similar way among the higher orders. "For example, we take cells from a donor rat, clone them, and grow a new rat identical in every sense to the original. Whole limbs from the clone can then be transplanted surgically to the original." "Can you do that with humans?" "No, not yet, nor any time in the reasonably near future. The problems involved are staggering." "Nor are all the problems scientific," Dave pointed out. "Consider the rats. They are in every way identical; if they were human, what right would a man have to steal a part from his clone?" "Also," Shashi went on, "if that were not a problem, consider the fact that in order to produce a clone with a body of your present age, it would require about twenty years of growth, by which time you would be forty. To be practical, cloning for replacement purposes would have to begin its growth at the time of the subject's birth." "Have human clones been raised?" Husain asked. Shashi nodded. "In China -- before the Cataclysm -- there were reported to have been human clones raised by implantation in uteri. It is even told that a clone of Chairman Mao was raised, but that story is probably apocryphal. Since the Cataclysm, experiments with clones have been common. There are at present at least one hundred cloneconceived persons in India alone, some of whom are nearly thirty years old." Husain was shocked. "I had no idea!" "It isn't exactly, top secret but it is not yet publicized. We think that such cloning may be a stop-gap measure over the next several generations -- until we solve the birthrate problem." "Then you could actually make a clone from my cells?" "Yes, but if we did, it would merely provide you with a son, not a new set of legs. And that son would look and be no different from any other child, except that he would be your genetic twin. He might not even resemble you closely as he grew; environment has its effect too."    Dave turned to Shashi after Husain had left. "You lied to him pretty badly." "You mean Choudry's forcedgrowth enzyme? Why should I get his hopes up over an untried technique? Anyway, forced growth doesn't overcome the moral problems." Dave stared at the door through which Husain had exited. "Perhaps." Shashi studied him, disturbed by the implications of his speculative tone. II t hung in a void. There was no sound, no light, no change of temperature and no gravity, it had hung thus since its birth, so that it knew nothing other than its self. Physically it existed; mentally it had never left the womb. An umbilical cord brought it air and sustenance and the enzymes that forced its growth. And that growth was phenomenal -- three weeks from birth to physical maturity. Dave turned away from the meters on the sensory-deprivation tank and checked the readings on the computer. Nearby, in another tank, a bottle-nosed dolphin named Baba lay half-in and half-out of the water, narcotized and attached to an umbilical cord similar to that attached to the sensory-deprivation tank. Dave made final checks all around and then fed a narcotic to the already mindless dolphin; it was needless now -- but it would help his transition to sentient life. He closed a switch. There was a hum as other banks of machinery went into play, but the moment was largely unremarkable. The machinery utterly stripped the dolphin Baba of memory. In the process, he died. Dave confirmed that fact -- and then opened the sensory-deprivation tank. For the very first time, light impinged upon the dolphin named Baba II.    Dave was playing games with Baba II when Shashi came in later that afternoon. The dolphin frolicked about the large tank, entirely unaware that he had, in one sense, been living for only a few hours. Dave greeted Shashi as she touched his hand and leaned down to stroke the dolphin's head. Then she froze in mid-gesture, staring at it; the tattoo that had identified the creature no longer adorned its forehead. Drawing back, she looked at Dave with a mixture of wariness and shocked admiration. "You did it!" "Yes." "And Baba is... dead?" He shook his head. "Transmigrated. Baba's memories reside now in the brain of Baba II. Baba II is Baba, brain and bone." Shashi watched in wonder as the creature shot about the tank. She herself had cultured the clone that now swam before her, and she had assisted Dave in the surgery that had implanted the foetus in a dolphin host mother. Raised from birth in a sensory-deprivation tank, it had had no memories and no personality of its own until now. "Baba -- the original Baba -- is dead?" Dave nodded, unconcerned, and then said, "Watch." For twenty minutes he put Baba II through his paces and the dolphin responded beautifully, threading the intricate maze of wires and mirrors with their innumerable turnings and false leads. Dave had spent months in training Baba in that maze and it was one that no creature, however intelligent, could have traversed without error except through prior experience. But Baba's memories now resided in Baba II, and since Baba II' s body was a clone from Baba, it was identical in every genetic particular. By heredity and environment, Baba II was Baba, outwardly differing only in the slight pallor of II' s skin and his lack of Baba's identifying tattoo. After his run through the maze. Baba II came for his reward of fish and remained to be fondled. As Shashi scratched him in all his favorite places, she realized that the situation would have been uncanny except that the illusion that this was the original Baba was so convincing that she could not react emotionally to the situation. She and Dave left the laboratory at sunset, walked past the open stalls of Poona, buying chappatis and tea in an insulated container, and went on up to the park. There they sat quietly until the sky faded and those few stars that could compete with the city lights emerged. The air was chill and Shashi drew close to Dave; yet she seemed somehow restrained. "What's wrong?" he asked her. "Baba. I am deeply troubled by the implications of your experiment with him." "I didn't kill Baba. I know you were fond of him; so was -- am -- I, but he is as alive tonight as he was this morning. Only his address has changed." The faint attempt at humor failed. "I didn't mean that. I know I made a pet of him, but if he had to die, I wouldn't cry. I said that I am troubled by the implications, not the actuality, of what you have done." "Meaning?" "Meaning what happened to Baba's atmanT' "You don't really believe in that crap?" "Yes, I do." There was little he could say in the face of such calm assertion and he swallowed his irritation. "That which made Baba Baba was transferred from one body to the next. His atman, if you want to use that term, is what was transferred." "No, Dave. You know better than that. His soul, perhaps; you are the expert on Christian theology, not I. But not his atman. I know that I have led many previous lives, but do I remember them? No. The atman which is my essence, which goes with me from life to life, is not memory." argue theology. His knowledge of Hinduism was considerable but he could never hope to debate it with a native. Or a believer. It irritated him to think that Shashi could cling to what seemed to him to be superstition. More important, those beliefs might hamper his work -- and his work was a matter of life and death. "What will you do next?" she asked. #A. "With Baba, nothing. Since we are not yet at a clinical stage, it would prove nothing to repeat the transference to still another body. What I have to do next is to chose a short-lived but fairly intelligent creature and make a transference from an aged individual to a young clone." "In search of immortality?" "Yes," he replied tightly. "I also have to follow up some leads on sensory-deprived clones as donors for organ transplants." A troubled look crossed her face in the dim moonlight. He turned to her. "You are thinking of Husain?" She nodded. "Forget it," he said. "By the time we get our techniques ironed out, Husain will be an old man." "I know." He moved closer to her. She had changed from lab coveralls to a flowing sari which did little to hamper his motions in the sweet darkness. Shashi Mathur had been married at twelve, consummated at fourteen. She had lived with her husband, a man of thirty-five, until she was sixteen. At that point she had turned her sexual attentions elsewhere, trying to let no fertile night pass without a bedmate, preferably a new one each month. In so doing, she was merely following the customs of the time. When births are rare, they are precious, and who can say what lucky coupling might prove fertile? When Shashi was seventeen, her husband died. By that time she was convinced that she was barren. In that she was merely ordinary. Faced with the prospect of an empty future, she took her meagre inheritance, left for Bombay and enrolled in one of the dozen prep schools that surround Deccan University. Now she was twenty-eight, certain of her barrenness, and working religiously to overcome that bane for her fellows. As a professor, a widow and a kshatriya, she enjoyed high status and a rare freedom from constricting gossip. Her quarters were furnished with an utmost simplicity. She had a small brazier where she kindled a charcoal fire on those nights when the monsoon drove chill and dampness through the walls' and windows. She often brewed tea there for herself or her guests, but never cooked. There were stalls of sweet-wallas within a five-minute walk, and she had her main meals at the Institute cafeteria. Her single room was unfurnished save for cushions and a foam sleeping-pad. By day this was propped against a bare inner wall. Blockprinted Madrasi hangings adorned the walls and thick rush mats covered the floor. A carved chest held her clothing. There was a row of books against one wall; the Gita, Vivekananda's works, Tagore's poetry. She kept her professional books strictly segregated in her office at the Institute. By the light of candles, with incense sticks burning, she lit the brazier and made oblations to Agni. Then she settled into the lotus position. Later, after her meditations, and after she had extinguished the lights, her mind strayed back to Ram Singh, a name she preferred to the ridiculous 'Dave,' and his unnatural playing with the structure of reality.    The summons came at noon the following day. "Sri Singhji?" The messenger bowed from the waist and Dave felt an irrational irritation at the obeisance. Messages proffered with the double honorific, prefix and suffix, usually meant trouble. It read: Sri Kantikar of Bombay would appreciate your presence at his bungalow on Tagore Street at eight p. m., on the night of the twenty-fifth, to discuss a matter of mutual interest... J. K. For a moment Dave was too stunned to take in the implications. So the Premier wanted to see him personally. And unofficially too -- to judge from the fact that he signed the message without reference to his office. Dave had never met nor had any dealings with Sri Karji; he had never seen him except for newscasts. It could only concern his grandson. Dave had known that Husain had not dropped his grandfather's name casually. Cold sweat formed on his face as he studied the note. Ill Bombay was the world's most modern city in both the best and the worst senses of the word. The capital of India since New Dehli's inundation, it housed an impressive neo-Ashokan capitol complex surrounded by a buffer-and-expansion zone of parks. Beyond that the city was aggressively utilitarian. Even as early as the Cataclysm, India had been short of construction timber, although it supplied much of the world's decorative hardwoods. Adobe, rammed earth and stone were her building materials for centuries and still were -- but with a difference. Now adobe bricks were made in huge factories, chemically stabilized and force dried. Rammedearth walls were also chemically stabilized and made by special hydraulic rams and molds. Human labor was no longer a cheap commodity and with declining population, it would become more scarce as time passed, but electricity was plentiful from fusion reactors. Stone had long been a major building material, but it too required massive inputs of human labor to quarry and lay. Now stone was quarried mechanically as gravel and fused into monolithic blocks in situ at a tremendous cost of power. All public buildings were of this magmastone, as were dams, the houses of the rich, public monuments and, of course, the great dykes of the Ganga and Panch-ab projects. Dave debarked at Tagore station, skirted the power plant and strode toward Kulin Hill. His route took him through the Avenue of Abominations, where beggars from the whole of Maharashtra gathered. Some were normal enough, a few were amputees and accident or disease victims, but by far the majority were mutants. Unable to compete with their normal fellows and of execrable status (Sri Karji called them the "new untouchables" and begged Congress to pass laws protecting them, all to no avail), they were reduced to living on public pity. One was eyeless, an unbroken expanse of skin rising from his rudimentary nose to his hairline; another had a shriveled third arm projecting like a grotesque lingam from between her breasts; another... They cried out to him as he passed, their arms waving upward from their lotus positions like anemones. Kulin Hill rose like a tower of sanity. From its heights the city took on a certain geometric beauty as distance hid her less graceful aspects. The summit was surrounded by a ten-meter-high magmastone wall, pierced infrequently by small gates, and only the onion-domed turret that served its residents as an observation post was visible from the ground outside. Out in the harbor, ships' lights were being switched on while deep beneath their keels, lost in the cold, wet darkness of the sea bottom, Old Bombay lay. One could take an excursion submarine to visit the ruins but Dave had always found the idea depressing. The house within the wall was a disappointment. It was a faithful rendition of Indian architecture, but in magmastone and bitudobe it simply did not have the grace of Arjuna or Chitradurga. Of all the cities in India, Bombay was the least Indian; everything was a modern copy of past glories and thus lacked the charm of the old and the boldness of the new. Even Poona, the Mecca of the modern Indian, still retained its old quarter. He was led through the cavernous mansion and up the winding, open stairway to the observation tower. Here, beneath the dome in a glass-walled room whose clear panels had been thrown open to admit the night air, sat Sri Karji. He was lounging in a rattan peacock chair, surrounded by a scattering of manila-bound reports. A tea service sat on a cart nearby and he responded to Dave's namastee by waving him to a chair. A servant materialized to serve the tea and chutneys and Sri Karji withheld conversation until they were alone. Somewhere within the house a sitarist was playing Raga Rageshri, an evening raga. "It was good of you to come, Sri Singhji." "It was good of you to ask me." "How have you liked India?" Dave put on a smile he did not feel. "Really, one does not ask that question of a native. I am a citizen, you know." "Yes. Since last October, was it not?" Dave nodded, having no doubt that Kantikar knew the exact date and anything else he felt would be useful. It was some relief to be a citizen of the Indian Commonwealth; at least he could not be deported. Shot, but not deported. "We have a number of scientists from other countries working in our universities. They bring a welcome change of orientation that often bears well on our problems. One should always try to maintain a fresh viewpoint. Many of our visiting scientists eventually ask for asylum, especially those from Africa and the Andean Republic, and we never turn them away. However, we do not normally grant them citizenship, for political reasons." "Of course," Dave murmured. "You present a new situation. We have not found training in NorAm to be adequate, so I was surprised to find that one of our top scientists at the Institute was a North American." "I took my graduate training at Deccan." "So I discovered. You have risen high." Condescension disguised as praise. The civilized man speaking to the barbarian. What you really mean, old man, is that  am vulnerable. Dave shrugged modestly. "I understand that you have met my grandson?" "Yes. A sad case; perhaps in twenty years medicine can help him." Kantikar changed the subject abruptly. "I understand that you are an agnostic -- at least so it said on your application for citizenship. Yet were you not raised as a Pentecostal-Baptist?" Despite himself, Dave gave grudging respect for the man's unabashed highhandedness. As Premier, his power was virtually unlimited and he apparently saw no advantage in hiding the fact, save behind a thin facade of courtesy. "A Millennialist," Dave replied. "There are minor doctrinal differences between the two." "But you cast all that aside?" "Yes, when I was fifteen." "So I surmised after reading your article in the Deccan Monitor." "I hope you don't rely on that article as an index of my sophistication. I wrote it for the school paper in my first year at Deccan and my command of NaiHind was anything but complete." Kantikar waved the protest aside. "The sense of your arguments came through despite any inadequacies of language. You believe that both the Christian concept of soul and the Hindu concept of atman are in error?" "Yes." "And that the only thing that exists is biological drive tied to experience -- 'tied by cords of memory' was your felicitous phrase, I believe." "Yes." "An old idea -- not that you claimed it was not. But you carried it further by saying that if a man's biology could be replicated by parthenogenesis -- cloning -- and his memory transcribed, he could attain virtual immortality." Tired of playing parrot, Dave said nothing. "Once again, not a new idea. Yet you go on to say that man's religions have cheated him out of immortality by making him accept the idea of death; that these techniques of 'physiological resurrection' would have been perfected centuries ago had men really believed in their mortality." Kantikar paused with an air of expectation but Dave simply shrugged once more. "You seem well versed in what I wrote. I see no reason to enlarge upon it," he said. "Such a philosophy must make a man quite desperate. To think that immortality is at hand but to fear that he might not be able to perfect its techniques before he dies -- r do not envy you."    It was some hours later that the conversation turned serious again. Throughout dinner Kantikar had refused to be drawn 'into any but the most trivial discussions and later he had been intent on the musicians and the Kathak dancers. Finally, as they sat . back in rattan lounges on the terrace watching the moon on Bombay harbor and listening to the distant sound of Kantikar's resident sitarist playing in the courtyard below, each with a small waterpipe of gunga spreading its mild narcotic through their systems, Kantikar returned to the discussion. "Doctor Mathur told my grandson that one reason she could not provide him with replacement limbs was that it would take twenty years to grow them. Yet my aides have discovered an article by Professor Choudry of your Institute that indicates that clone growth can be forced to many times its normal rate." Dave was cautious in his reply. "We have had some success along those lines with laboratory animals." "And human clones?" "We have not attempted it with human clones." "Yet if you did try it and failed, what harm would come? The human from whom the clone cells were taken would be entirely unaffected." "True. But we are not sure that a limb, its growth forced, would not adversely affect the donor after a transplant. Also, there is the moral aspect." "That should prove no problem for you." "Sir?" Kantikar paused, gazing up at the moon, and then went on: "It is your philosophy, avowed in the article we discussed earlier, that memory is the only 'soul' a man has. A clone grown to maturity in a sensory-deprivation tank would have no memory and could therefore be used as a donor -- with as much immunity from moral censure as a cadaver. That is your philosophy, is it not?" Dave felt the trap closing and yet he did not regret it. It was a step that had to be taken eventually and if Kantikar ordered it, the blame would be his should public opinion rise in protest. "By the way, how is Baba II doing?" Dave actually grinned. "Well," he said and then added, "There is no guarantee that Baba II will not die tomorrow from some unforeseen complication, and that risk would run even higher for Husain." "At this preliminary stage, we need not worry about that. When the time comes to take risks, we will all review the situation together and decide what is best." "Will you send him by tomorrow?" Having come this far, Dave saw no point in further verbal sparring. "To begin cloning? Very well, but he can stay only an hour. He is leaving for Medina on a mission of utmost delicacy." Dave was suddenly aware of greater depths of machination than he had suspected. "You aren't just the doting grandfather, are you? You want to show the Muslims that they can be outdone. Nirghaz's crippling by Indian bombs was a major diplomatic blunder, wasn't it?" Kantikar's eyes were cold. "That, Singhji, is none of your business." IV Husain donated a cell sample which Shashi cultured for cloning. Developing a human clone was not greatly different than developing an animal clone and the apparatus of a mechanical womb could be set up quickly. The sensory-deprivation tank was another matter, however. It had to be larger and more sophisticated, but such tanks had been built before. It was a job requiring no new technology. During the first five weeks of gestation no growth stimulants were used, but by that time a completion date for the sensory deprivation tank was reasonably certain and the Choudry enzymes were released into the fluid in which the embryo floated. A month later and the foetus had reached four kilos in weight and Dave, with Shashi's aid, transferred the infant to the tank that had held Baba II, carefully severing the fleshy umbilical and replacing it with a mechanical one that fit the orifices of the head.    "Quite well," Dave replied to Husain's query. "Couldn't be better, in fact. The clone is in the sensory-deprivation tank that housed one of our test animals and it will remain there until the larger tank is completed. We aren't pushing its growth as much as we might because we don't want it to outgrow its present home before a new one is ready." Nirghaz Husain bobbed his head in tense delight. It was obvious that he was only now allowing himself to hope. He had returned from Medina the day before after long and fruitless negotiations with the Muslims. Dave wheeled him into an examination room and said, "Nirghaz, this is Doctor Choudry. In addition to being the man who developed the growth stimulant, he is also an accomplished surgeon, which neither Doctor Mathur nor I are." Dave and Choudry lifted Husain onto the examining table, where Shashi unbuttoned his gown with asexual efficiency. Dave drew a deep breath and held himself still. He had no bedside manner with which to cover this situation. Shashi turned away, but Choudry went on with admirable calm. "You did not inform us that your genitalia had also been lost." "Amputated. Like the legs, they were too crushed to save." Husain glanced away but the expression in his eyes was hard and bitter. "So they said." "Hmm." Without looking up, Husain asked, "Is there any chance of transplanting that too?" "Dammit, man, don't spring a question like that on me out of thin air. I don't know," Choudry replied. Husain's belly and buttocks were a webwork of scar tissue and his body terminated in a blank ana lumpy mass. Choudry probed and measured and then sent Husain away for x-rays.    In the dimly lit office Choudry had taped a dozen x-rays, taken from all angles, on a battery of viewing boxes. He sat hunched over one, overlay paper and ruler in his hand, measuring, checking angles and occasionally pausing to calculate. He had been at it for better than an hour and Dave and Shashi had finally given up following the complexities of his work. They perched hip to hip on a desktop across the room, sharing coffee. It looked bad. At last Choudry laid his paraphernalia aside and stretched, shaking his head. "No way." "I can't believe it," Dave said. "Here we were prepared to use the latest techniques and even an entirely new donor source and we can't proceed simply because our surgery isn't up to it!" "Let me put it this way, Ram. If he were lying on the table now as a fresh amputee and we had the parts available, I would try it. We would have nothing to lose because he would have only a slim chance of living either way. Frankly, I don't know how he managed to live. You can be sure that the abdominal cavity was wide open; they certainly had to push his viscera back as they sutured." Shashi shook her head. "Why did they go to such lengths for an Indian?" "Politics," Dave fairly snarled. "The fact that Nirghaz was injured by Indian bombs was a diplomatic coup for the Medinans. Had he died, it would have soon been forgotten but now he is a walking -- I mean a living -- monument to Indian aggression." "All of which doesn't help him or us one bit," Choudry went on. "Look at this. The left articular fossa is completely gone and the ilium has been trimmed. The head of the right femur is still in place and fused into the fossa. Any transplant would have to begin above that point and include the entire pelvic girdle. Surgery just isn't up to it." "So who's going to tell him?"    Dave did not go directly to speak with Nirghaz; instead he went to his lab, where Baba II greeted him with insistent snortings that stopped only when Dave scratched his head and tossed him a chunk of fish. Science, Dave knew, proceeds by fits and starts, not so much because research is quixotic (although it is), but because a man can invent or discover only what mankind is ready for. Leonardo da Vinci's model helicopters were proof of that. Had the time come? It was a delicate question concerning not so much the state of the art as the spirit of the times. He had Sri Karji's support. There was money and power there; and in this state of near war, the label of "military secret" would amply cloak his work from the public. But not from his colleagues. He still had not convinced Shashi of the un-humanness of a sensory-deprived clone, and Choudry had been hesitant. Would they have balked -- in the final analysis -- at cutting up a seemingly live and healthy human being for transplant purposes despite the fact that that human being was "merely" a clone? He was not sure. However, it loomed as a large possibility that they would have intervened with the transplant procedure even if medical reasons had not precluded it. Or had they? Had Choudry deliberately misread the x-rays? No matter; either way, this new course of action was better for Husain. And humanity. And himself. He went down to the waiting room. Nirghaz had given up the pretense of reading while he waited and now he looked up intently at Dave's entrance. "Can it be done?" Dave stared at Husain for a long time before answering, "No, not by surgery. But..." V Baba ii shot across the tank, ducked under a bar and through a ring, described a complex spiral around a horizontal rod, doubled back -- and faltered. Confused, he floated free for a moment, then rushed across the tank for a piece of proffered Fish and a scratch on the snout. Sri Karji straightened up and shook his head. "An impressive display, I suppose, if I knew what it meant." Dave slapped the dolphin on the side and said to Kantikar, "That is just the problem. You impressed me so much in our First interview that I assumed your spies had been thorough. They were not or you would know that what you just witnessed is the reason we have to have the Deliac computer. Your spies told you, correctly, that Baba II could thread a complex maze, using the original Baba's memories. What they did not tell you was that we trained Baba in five separate mazes. Baba II can do three of them perfectly, one not at all and the other one only part way before faltering." "So your experiment was not a perfect success, as you said it was." "Tom told me that my experiment had succeeded, not vice versa. And I assumed that your information was complete. In fact, the experiment succeeded admirably, and we know why it failed and the exact dimensions of its failure. We took every memory that Baba could give us in one burst of energy before she died. Had we taken the memories in increments and stored them in a computer bank, we could have had them all. "But we did not have such a computer because of budgetary limitations. When you gave me the commission of rejuvenating Nirghaz, I assumed that you knew that the computer was necessary." Kantikar stared, unseeing, at the frolicking dolphin. It was always galling to be outdone by a competitor; and to be caught up by one's own failings was doubly humiliating. Worse, it made all of his efforts to date useless unless he could came through on this latest demand. Of course it could be done. Anything, legal or illegal, could be done. But every such action left him open to attack and there were always those who were ready to pull down Sri Karji. Nor should he divert even a fraction of his country's energies from the upcoming struggle for survival. The Deliac computer was an auxiliary set-up in the Deliac Air Force complex south of Poona. It was presently not being used but it might be needed on short notice. Yet there was a debt to pay; and there was his affection, and there was his guilt. For it was Sri Karji who had ordered the airstrikes against Mahmet, knowing full well that his grandson was there but confident in the odds that the young man would emerge unhurt. It had meant surprise and it had given him a reputation for putting the good of the state above his personal interests. But the price... it was one thing to calculate chances beforehand and quite another to find oneself the loser afterward. Nor had the airstrikes ended the Medinan menace; if anything, they had stiffened resistance. It was bad enough that Nirghaz must regain his legs in a way so unorthodox that it smacked of heresy. Transplants were one thing; the transference of memory was another. Still, if Nirghaz were willing, how could he, Kantikar, hold back? "I will give the orders," he told Dave curtly. After Kantikar and his entourage had left, Shashi found Dave leaning on the edge of the dolphin tank, his face lined and worried. As always, she was both drawn to and troubled by his iron control, so different from other men she had known. Even other NorAm men had not been like this. She had a brief vision of a creature trapped inside a drum of steel, crying out for attention, for understanding. What was that creature like? After two years of liaison with Ram David, she still could not truly say. "Did you pull it off?" Dave nodded and then shook his head. He staggered slightly as he moved across the room to drop into his favorite chair. She realized that he was emotionally exhausted. "Shashi, if he ever finds out how I lied to him, I just don't know what he would do." She patted his arm. "It wasn't your fault." "The hell is wasn't. I should have put Baba II through his paces immediately but I was too exultant over my apparent success. Then came Kantikar's summons and the work with his grandson. I let basic caution slip." "He doesn't know that." "No, not now, but I'll always wonder when he might find out. If I pull this off, it will get me off the hook, but otherwise -- " "I? Ithought this was to be a team effort." "You know what I meant." "Yes. I know that you meant exactly what you said. This is your holy grail. You are working your way to heaven. First transfer Nirghaz into a new body, then clone a standby for yourself. And when you feel old age and death whispering at your neck, you'll run and hide in your fine, new, young body." "Well, what's wrong with that?" For answer she shook her head and said, "Maya." "Sometimes you sound like a guru. This world is no illusion. Rebirth is the illusion." "You say... but you have no proof that it is so." "Nor have you." "True," she said, unperturbed. "One does not look to illusion for proof of illusion's nonexistence." They stared at one another, each firmly caught in his own neat, circular pattern of argument. Then she slid past the issue by settling in against his knee and taking his hand. "Ram." He smiled and let some of the tension drain away. "Yes, love." "About my barrenness." He started, for barrenness was a subject of deep taboo that no barren woman are infertile but I am anatomically normal." She paused then. He did not know what she was driving at; he already knew that she could carry an embryo to term were it artificially implanted, but there were tens of thousands of women who would available. "Ram Singh, my lover, will you give me your child? Your clone child." He was stunned. "Wouldn't you rather the child be of your own heritage?" She shook her head. "Yours, love, yours." He looked down at her sober, earnest face and was deeply moved. He nodded and she came into his lap, kissing him and crying.    His fingers touched the bandage on his forearm where the tissue had been taken and he reflected on the reverse symbolism of that wound. Across the room Shashi worked deftly, lovingly, culturing the cells for cloning. It took her three hours. Sunlight slanted in from the west across the lab (so orderly in contrast to his) as she finished, still humming the tune with which she had begun the afternoon. Casually he took her hand when she had finished but she pulled his face down for a kiss that was far from casual. He held her close, thinking that he had never seen her more beautiful. "Tomorrow," she said, "I'll have Doctor Choudry to do the implant." "Are you sure this is what you want?" She nodded and smiled still more deeply. "Tonight we celebrate." "How do you celebrate the initiation of a pregnancy?" he asked, deadpan, and she giggled outright.    That night he moved into Shashi's quarters. They were crowded but it did not matter. Neither of them gave much time to sleeping. Whether it was his near brush with Sri Karji's wrath or Shashi's commitment to him he could not have said, but the urgency of his quest for immortality returned to him renewed. The next morning he sent a letter to an old friend and professor in NorAm, James Brigham, whose accomplishments he had long since outstripped but whose wisdom he highly respected. That letter contained an outline of what he had done and the promise of detailed explanations to be forthcoming. He also instructed Brigham to prepare to publish his notes in the event of his death, feeling that once enough people knew of the resurrection process, nothing could prevent mankind from rising up to demand its universal implementation. VI Nrgiaz lay back, immersed in the temperatureand gravity-neutralizing fluid, his head encased in a helmet that barred all sound, sight and smell. The salt water surrounding him was I exactly # degrees; the air that moved into his lungs held progressively less oxygen and a carefully balanced percentage of carbon dioxide. Respiration, metabolism and cognition slowly abated. There was no light, no taste, no touching and, of sound, only the gentle susurration of incoming air. Gradually the murmur of airflow changed to a pulsing whisper that lulled him still deeper into the trance; and the soft voice, Shashi's voice, that had always been there just below the level of his notice, spoke to him of sleep and of childhood; and his mind, cut free, remembered.    Light! As the sleep had been beyond sleep, so the awakening was violent beyond any awakening he had previously experienced. His disorientation changed to despair as the laughing, running child he had been in his dreams became a legless horror once more. For a cold moment he was drowning in some gigantic, malign womb; then strong hands had ahold of him and he was lifted into the chilly air of reality. He pawed at the all-enveloping hood but it was cleverly latched and he had to wait, helpless, fighting claustrophobia, while the lab assistants removed it. He lay still for a while beneath the light blanket they had put over his naked body, watching with small interest as the aides swabbed the saline fluid from the floor and then departed. Shashi came over with a smile to sit beside him and he reached out to take her hand, needing the touch of humanity to return him to the present. Ram David was hunched over a typeset, engaged in a dialogue with the computer. His profile was frozen in a mask of utter concentration and there was no sound in the room but human .breathing, the humming respiration of machines and the drip of salt water from the table where Nirghaz lay. Nirghaz blinked back tears and Shashi gently wiped his face. The memories dredged up were as fresh in his mind as though he had just lived them, not like those of a dream that vanish with awakening: the desert outside Kabul; his mother's delicate beauty; his stern father returning home after another attempt to settle the dispute his Hindu wife and half-caste son had raised; the bougainvillaea vine outside his window down which he had climbed; the shouting, rock-throwing band of boys crying, "Hindu, Hindu, Hindu!" Finally Dave switched off the console and came to stand beside Shashi. Nirghaz felt an unexpected rush of black resentment for the legs he walked on and for his manhood. Dave and Shashi made no secret of their liaison. Jealousy burned bright inside Nirghaz and he fought it unsuccessfully, for it was not Shashi that he wanted, but his own lost manhood. Dave smiled wearily. "We got it." Nirghaz nodded, too spent to feel elation. "You were under a trance much deeper than is ever used in therapy, so anything we may have missed is unlikely to be crucial." "You didn't get it all?" Nirghaz felt an irrational fear growing within him. To gain a new body but to lose a part of himself in the doing -- unthinkable. "What did you do on the afternoon of the fourteenth of May the year you were four years old?" Nirghaz hesitated, then shrugged. "I don't know." "You went out with your father to pick up some chutneys for your mother and the taxi broke down on the way home. You were impressed by the way the driver repaired the trouble with a mere piece of wire and you learned a new obscenity listening to him." Nirghaz still looked blank. "I don't remember." Dave shook his head. "I didn't expect you to. It is unlikely that you will ever remember the incident although you will, of course, remember our discussing it now. Yet you brought it up under trance. In short, once the transference is complete, you could undergo standard hypno-analysis and never reveal any gaps in your memory. Anything we did not get, you have forgotten completely." Nirghaz looked relieved. Dave continued, "We are up to age five now but future sessions will not progress as rapidly. Your recall of incidents will increase according to some as yet unknown exponent, so we will probably require thirty or forty sessions to obtain every memory on tape. The mind has an amazing capacity." While Shashi went out for tea, Dave helped Nirghaz dress and then lifted him into his wheelchair. When Shashi returned, the young man had regained most of his composure and he accepted the mild, warm stimulant gratefully. "Ramadav, one thing troubles me." "What is that?" "When you first acquainted me with the memory-transference concept, it was a one-shot method. One's memory was transferred intact from an old or broken body into a new, healthy one. I could accept that; after all, it was not that different from our concept of transmigration. But this use of multiple taping sessions and a computer... well, look at it this way. When I was five years old, my father took me out horseback-riding for the first time. You have that on tape?" Dave nodded. "But I still remember it." After a long pause, Dave prompted, "So?" "So when you have all of my memories on tape, I will still have them in my head. When you transcribe them into my clone, they will still be here in my head. Which one will be me?" "The question won't arise," Dave assured him. "When we make the last tape -- and the transference -- we will terminate life support to your previous body." Nirghaz could only stare in shock. "You mean that there will really be two of me and that you will kill one of them for the sake of a neat closure to the experiment?" Dave fought back the desire to merely shrug. He had thought deeply along these lines and all of the legal and moral questions were resolved to his own satisfaction. Still, he knew the problematical nature of the question and was not sure that he could win anyone over by the same arguments he had used in order to still his own doubts. "It will be like going to sleep and waking up to find your own body regenerated," he answered quietly. "No. That is no answer. If you did not kill me off, it would be like going to sleep and waking to find someone with my memories and my rejuvenated body going on to live a separate life while I remain tied to this body." "That won't happen." Nirghaz shook his head. "It isn't good enough. Look, I am no orthodox Hindu. If I were, I would be looking for release from rebirth, not a continuance of my life on earth. Yet I cannot simply follow your way. I do believe in an atman, an essence, and that essence cannot inhabit two places at once." Dave ground his teeth. Shashi was sitting tensely, watching them both. He knew that she agreed with Nirghaz. "Look, when you go to sleep and then awaken, you don't consider yourself a different person simply because there is an eighthour gap in your existence. It will be the same with the resurrection process." "Maybe." Shashi broke in, "Nirghaz, you are strictly a volunteer. If you don't want to go through with this, simply say so." Dave gave her an angry stare which she chose to ignore. "What other chance do I have?" "There is the possibility of a brain transplant but the prognosis on that would be very poor. Otherwise you can simply go on as you are. You seem to have adapted well to your difficulties and your condition is no worse than that of many other cripples." Nirghaz almost snarled. Looking at Shashi's soft womanhood, he did not -- could not -- desire her, but he remembered what desire was, and desire's consummation. Burning with shame and loss, he said, "For the time being let us continue, but I have to consider this very deeply before we conclude the experiments."    X-ray and ultraviolet sensors probed it continuously where visible light could never go and where infrared sensors would have been blinded by the uniformity of temperature. Electrical discharges shocked its muscles into motion from time to time so that they would grow. It had the appearance of a tenyear-old child, still floating foetal in the saline womb of the sensory-deprivation chamber. Resemblance to Nirghaz at age ten was superficial at best, for this body had never run, twisted, played or felt the darkening sun on its skin. Thin, flaccid, dead white, it floated blind in the eternal night and slept mindlessly on.    Within Shashi's womb, unhurried by growth stimulants, a natural foetus grew. It floated secure and ignorant of the unease that caused her to toss sleeplessly on her pallet. Shashi shifted her weight again and Dave sought her hand. "Can't you sleep either?" she asked. "No. I've been thinking; after we tape and reconstruct Nirghaz, I think we may be able to persuade Kantikar to continue our funding and perhaps let us continue using the computer." "Probably. I'm sure he will be very grateful." "I intend to tape myself." He listened for censure in her voice but the tone of her reply was neutral. "I knew." "I want to tape you too." There was a brief delay. "I knew that also. I won't let you." "Why not?" "I have no desire for rebirth -- that way." "Are you so content with a reincarnation that may not be more than an illusion -- and which will not leave you your memories even if it were true?" "Yes." After a long time of silent breathing, he said, "Damn!" She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him in the dimness. "Ram, my lover and my love. You think only of the future; what of the past? Everything I am today -- and everything you are, if you would just admit it -- is the product of a hundred thousand previous incarnations. Every decent thing I do, every kindness and every attention to my fellow man, is the good within me that remains after the purging effect of a thousand other lives. If I could live on forever, just twenty-eight, just as happy in your love, it would be a kind of death. Never to change, never to be a child again, never to face truly new challenges, never to be reborn fresh and clean -- what an awful fate. Death-in-life. That is what you offer." "If you feel that way, why are you helping me with Nirghaz?" "Nirghaz is a special case. We aren't giving him immortality, just a new set of legs and genitalia." "It could lead to immortality." "Yes. But I will have no part in that." "Then you won't let me tape you?" "Never." "And if I tape myself?" She didn't answer at once, so he prompted, "Shashi. Answer me." "I think I may leave you." "What?" "I love you, Ramadav, but one lifetime is enough." He turned away from her in anger and she did not try to call him back. Dr. James Brigham Department of Biology Roanoke University Roanoke, Appalachia, NorAm Dear Jim, The political situation here continues to worsen, as you are no doubt aware. I fear that it may interfere with my work, but even more I fear that Nirghaz Husain may back out at the last minute. I had hoped that by working in India, where the people have a conception of transmigration on which to hang the resurrection project, I would not have to contend with the same innate conservatism that I would have faced in NorAm. Damn all religions! They provide the contentment of illusion and prevent mankind from turning their vague promises of heaven into reality. I find that atman is as insidious as soul ever was. Not that I really blame Husain for his reticence. I myself find it harder to accept the possibility of multiple, coequal individuals than to simply accept transference. But the alternative is death, and death is no alternative. However, if you don't really believe in death... you see my problem. James, my old friend, I have given much thought to the ultimate implications of the resurrection process and it occurs to me that I am simply incapable, by temperament and training, of visualizing the incredible changes it will eventually bring about. My aims are so simple, so basic -- plainly stated, immortality for myself. Dare I confess it? There has never been any other motivation for my work than pure, selfish fear of death. Yet now I realize that I may not live to complete the work. You must have guessed that; you always were sensitive to others. Wisdom was never one of my attributes but I know myself well enough to know that intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. That is why I write you these letters, that and the fear -- growing daily -- that you will have to publish my notes eventually in order to see that the work is not lost. Be careful! Do not let the notes fall into hands other than yours. I am rambling. It is past midnight now and I am very tired. Husain had another taping session today and left in a foul and depressed mood. If he turns away from the experiments now, we will lose years ! At best, Kantikar will cut us back to our previous level of support, and I fear that he might become angry and cut us off altogether. The man's power is frightening and it grows in direct proportion to the imminence of war. And, of course, we may all die in a nuclear fireball before you even see this letter. I shall try to send you updates twice weekly from now on, in case that occurs. If it seems strange that one who has admitted selfishness as his only motivation should be so deeply concerned with the welfare of the world at large, and that he should also be so highly concerned to see that his work outlives him... well, frankly, I find it strange myself. No amount of self-analysis seems to account for it, so I merely commend it to you for study. You often understood me better than I understood myself anyway. Enough misery. Shashi is well and her pregnancy proceeds without complication. Birth is due in seven months. I wish that you could meet her. And, no, we will not marry. That is her decision, but you should understand that as a Hindu widow, her status would only be diminished by remarriage. It is unlikely that we will be able to leave here until the Husain matter is decided one way or another, and I cannot advise you to come to India while war is threatening. Until we meet again, know that you have been a true friend. Dave Singer Dave sealed the letter and laid it aside. He stretched and walked across the lab to the coffee pot, drew a cup and grimaced in distaste. The brew was thick, black and awful, but he watered it down and drank it anyway, ft was past midnight and his head felt enlarged, his eyes stinging and hot. Shashi would be long since asleep. Outside, he had heard no sound for hours but the passing of the sentry. There were always guards present ever since they had moved to the Deliac complex. Nirghaz Husain had had the use of a sensory-deprivation tank and a battery of overseeing technicians. Dave had only himself. Settling the cap atop his head, he made sure that the electrodes pierced the appropriate points on his scalp. He felt light-headed as he settled back. After drawing a syringe of amber fluid, he sought and found a vein. Then he began to recite, " Out mani paclme um..."    Terminating its run, the computer sent a preemptory jolt of electricity through the scalp electrodes, shocking Dave instantly awake. He tore off the cap, tears streaming down his face as the memory of his long-dead mother faded. For five hours he had been a child again... and now there was no one to ease his transition back into reality. He staggered as he crossed the room. The computer chuckled, gurgled and hummed its mechanical contentment. If only the throbbing in his head would stop. It took another hour to recover the first of his life tapes and to instruct the computer to forget the night's work. Then he walked slowly out to greet the sunrise.    Colonel Mohan Bhatt, commandant of Deliac Air Force base, waited until a servant had answered the door in response to his ring. Then he followed him into an inner room. The master of the house did not greet the Colonel or even admit his presence. If questioned, he would say that he had not had the pleasure of meeting Colonel Bhatt. Gopal Bhargava, leader of the Loyal Opposition, met him in the inner room. The drapes were drawn. Bhargava waived Bhatt to a chair and offered him a drink, then raised his eyebrows. "Well?"' This was the moment Bhatt had dreaded but there was little he could do to make it easier. "I haven't much to give you. Kantikar has thrown such a net of security around that project that even a rat couldn't get through. I've tried to transfer some of my men into the place -- no luck -- and to bribe the men he put in. Nothing. I've thrown everything I dare against him and it all just bounced. If I try any harder, the whole world is going to know it." Bhargava nodded, unperturbed. "Don't worry about it, Mohan. Kantikar has more trouble in Bombay than he can handle. What do you think of Ullah's actions?" Ullah was an Indian Air Force general who had recently, through a deliberate but plausible misinterpretation of his orders, brought off a new series of bombings, this time deep into Medinan territory. "Outstanding, and about time. Will the Medinans fight?" "I don't know. I doubt it, not yet anyway. Ullah did well. I can't understand why Kantikar left him in command; his opinions were never very well hidden." "It's just another proof to me that the old man is slipping." "Perhaps. Anyway, I intend to press Kantikar very closely now. Either he will carry on in a manner more suitable to the leader of India, or he will censure Ullah. In the case of the latter, we'll have him out on a vote of no confidence." "Why not something more direct?" "Assassination? Bhatt, you must learn to say what you mean." "All right, assassination." Bhargava swirled the pale liquid in his glass and considered. "Not now, Mohan. Our last attempt was a dismal failure. The only thing that saved us was the overeagerness of the Premier's guard. If that bastard had lived to talk, we'd both be facing a firing squad." He smiled at his nephew. "You don't really want that, do you?"    His name was Ahmed but those who knew him called him Ram Lai. He had worked on the Ganga Project; he had tried to build a bomb into the speaker's podium where Sri Karji was to speak; he had failed. Then he had watched with satisfaction as one of Bhargava's agents had shot at Kantikar and had been disgusted that he had done such a poor job of it. Of course the Indian government had blamed the assassination attempt on Medina, but Ahmed knew better. A Medinan agent would not have missed; Ahmed knew this for he was a Medinan agent. Now he waited along the route that his contacts had assured him Kantikar's motorcade would take the following morning, caressing a Traktonic Mark X. Ten rounds, rocket-powered, heat-seeking, and explosive. Medinan agents were thorough. Ramadav had warned him of what to expect. The taping would be no different than any other session -- with the exception that he would be running down the memories of the last few months, reliving (without being aware that he dwelled in memory, not in reality) his decision to transmigrate; rearguing with himself, hearing again the inner debate and finally concluding once more that he would go through with the process. In fact, he realized, at this very moment he might actually be in the sensory-deprivation tank, remembering these things, rather than sitting in his room thinking these thoughts for the first time. It was a disconcerting consideration. But all that was familiar now. He had gained a great respect for the powers of memory over these last few months; although each session overrode the previous one, and he could no longer so clearly recall his childhood or his adolescence, he could remember Jiow he had felt after the taping sessions and he remembered the feeling of remembering. Memory of a memory... such confusion. He felt depressed and old then, and drew his cloak tighter about him. What would be different (or was different if this were memory replaying itself rather than the original actuality) about this taping session was that he would awaken within his new body. Against that, Ramadav had been most stringent in his warnings, for it would not be a pretty sight. His present body was merely truncated; the body of the clone was a wasted, white wreck. It had never seen the sun, never felt the pull of gravity. He would be bedfast for weeks, even months, as he gradually, painfully, nurtured it into health. Furthermore, it would be a younger body, that of a fifteen-year-old -- old enough to contain his experiences, having the proper hormonal balance, but still young enough and resilient enough to withstand the necessary recovery regimen. Even after he had fully recovered, he would be living with the experiences of a man housed in the body of a boy. To run again! To lie with a woman again! To be free from the attendance of nurses; to be free of pity. To once more meet men and women as an equal. The need burned hot within him, overpowering any hesitation or doubt, so that he yearned for the coming day and forgot his fear.    Dave stepped outside just as the nurse was helping Husain transfer to the wheelchair. The young man looked up at him and grinned. "This will be the last time I have to do this." Dave could see worry and anticipation warring in his expression. He took the handles of the chair and wheeled him inside. "Have you had any trouble with Bhait?" Nirghaz asked. "No, not really. He's tearing his hair out because there is a secret on his base that he doesn't know about." "Don't be too sure. I saw him this morning when I came aboard and he said, 'How much do you think you'll eventually pay for recovery?' He seems to know pretty much what we are up to." Dave thought about it for a minute. "I suppose the type of equipment we've imported tells him something, and my research papers to date are freely available to anyone who is curious. Still, there is nothing he can do as long as your grandfather is Premier." Husain nodded. "Indian politics are funny. They often work out along family lines. Bhatt is a nephew to the opposition leader in Congress." "Really. That's some coincidence." "Ramadav! Come up for air; get your head out of that computer and take a look at the real world. There is no coincidence involved when a half-competent light colonel gets boosted in rank and given a major post to command within a month of his uncle's becoming opposition leader." Dave shrugged again, totally uninterested. Shashi met them at the door of the lab with a smile for Nirghaz. There was no smile for Dave. Nirghaz turned' aside, asking,' "Ramadav, are you sure that I can't have a look at the body I am about to inhabit? It might make my transition easier." Dave shook his head. "Sorry." "Where is Sri Karji?" Shashi asked. Dave had said nothing on the matter but he also was surprised that Kantikar was not on hand for the culmination of Nirghaz's restoration. "He wanted to be present but he has to give a speech in Udaipur at the headquarters of the Panch-ab project. It's an essential appearance," Nirghaz explained. The lab assistants helped Nirghaz out of his clothing. The shame he felt was more than mere reaction to nakedness, but it was a small thing to endure in recompense for what would be his. Dave carried over the helmet. It was made from a life cast, its pliable interior molded to every line and plane of his head. He shivered each time it was slipped over his fae, cutting off all contact with the world beyond. Shashi always gave him a moment to regain his composure before donning it, but today Dave was handling it, and he was all business. Darkness; a fumbling and tugging as the helmet was tightened. Tiny nipples spread his nostrils and the air had a faint metallic tang. It changed to a subtle perfume as the hoses were hooked up to the airflow monitor. Then there was a slap on his shoulder (Ramadav, no doubt) and hard hands caught him under the armpits. Warm fluid; a feeling of drowning. The saline was of the same exact temperature as his skin and it buoyed him up. Within moments the sensation of wetness had passed and he was floating free, insulated from heat, light and the pull of gravity. He heard a crash; then there was only the roar of fastmoving water and the susurration of air. The outer tank had been filled and sealed, barring all sound save any he himself chose to make. The umbilical cord was long enough to suspend him in the center of the tank, five meters' distance from each wall. He moved his hands but felt no sensation in them. Only proprioception and cognition remained -- and hearing, for the pounding of his heart had become loud in his ears. And scent, for some chemical had been introduced into his air stream and consciousness began to fail. Then there was the same sure voice -- Shashi's voice -- that always banished his claustrophobia and guided him back to the appropriate moment so that he began to remember... Dave sat before the computer, his hands flashing agilely over the complex controls. Shashi stood before the monitors of the clone, continually testing and gradually bringing it up to the threshold of consciousness so that it could receive the memories that were to humanize it.    The motorcade wound into view and Ahmed flipped off the safety, bringing the nylon stock up to his cheek. The crosshairs fell on the lead vehicle and held as it slipped past, as a second slipped past, and as the bubble-topped tram bearing Kantikar rolled into view. He pressed the firing stud. The projectile said fisssss, fading, and the dome of the tram was lost in a burst of flame. Ahmed fired again and again, knowing that one projectile alone would not burst that dome. The ground around him exploded from the guards' return fire. He lost his sight picture, rolled aside and waited for three interminable heartbeats. The smoke began to clear (he had carefully chosen a hill overlooking the ocean for the sake of its breeze) and he fired again. In the brief moment allotted, he had seen that the dome was cracked. Then the world was tom apart about him... and he knew no more.    The computer was able to transfer taped memories to the clone at the same time it recorded fresh memories from Nirghaz, but Dave waited for an hour until there was no risk that the taping would abort. Then he activated the computer into transfer and the first tape, taken months earlier, began to print itself onto the soft flesh of the clone's empty mind. It began to experience Nirghaz's childhood. It would take as many hours to transcribe the tapes as it had required to make them, and although the process was a thousand times shorter than the original accumulation of those memories, it would still take better than one hundred and fifty hours. Five hours passed before Dave began to relax. The final taping was through. Nirghaz lay quiescent in the sensory-deprivation tank; he would remain thus until all the memories were transcribed to his clone. Then Dave would cut his oxygen. This Shashi knew; yet as the moment approached, she began to fear. That final moment would not arrive until the transcription was completed some six days hence. Still... She had pondered long and deep over the implications of the coming transference and its meaning for Nirghaz's atman. Would the essence of what was Nirghaz pass from one body to the next when the first was extinguished? She thought that it would, but who could be certain? There was a sudden disturbance in the tank that Shashi tended. The clone had begun to writhe as it experienced life vicariously, but it was well restrained. Carefully Shashi checked all the dials, then realized that she was holding her breath. Dave left his console, stretching hugely, and walked around the room, checking monitors. Nirghaz's broken body lay secure in its deathwomb. His memories were quiescent in a sleep beyond sleep while transcriptions of those same memories were being fed to his clone. There was an electric tension in the air. Shashi sought Dave's attention with her eyes, but he was totally absorbed. The clone jerked, trying to cry out through a mouth that had never known speech, and was restrained by the helmet. Dave leaned over Shashi's shoulder, further checking monitors, his face as expressionless as the smooth wall of the tank. Shashi walked away, leaving him alone to watch the progress. She should sleep now. Nirghaz had agreed to the project. He was her friend and he had walked (she shivered at that unintended thought) wide-eyed into this; it was her duty to him to carry her end of the process. She should sleep, for either she or Dave must remain on duty constantly through the coming days, and neither of them would dare leave the room unattended until the transference was completed. There was a tray of sandwiches on the table. She was not hungry but she ate, thinking of Nirghaz and of her unborn child. The assistants had left after helping place Nirghaz in the tank. No eyes but Dave's and her own had ever seen this room in action. She let her eyes sweep the interior of the huge abandoned hangar; pain and loneliness reflected back. Dave now paced like a panther before the monitors, completely unaware of her. His feet scuffed the floor; the computer hummed; the clone writhed. Otherwise there was silence. IX Shashi was jolted awake by a pounding on the hangar door. Dave looked up in irritation and she hurried toward the sound. "Open up!" It was Bhatt's voice. Shashi turned to Dave hesitantly. He shrugged. "We can't open up now, Colonel," she said in a raised voice. "We are at a crucial point in our experiments. Anyway, you are not authorized to come in here." "I am now. Open up or I'll have the door knocked down." Dave cursed and crossed the room. He drew the bolt and faced Bhatt as the man shoved in, flanked by armed guards. They scattered around the hangar, searching for other occupants and finding none. "What the hell do you think you're doing? This is a top-secret project, authorized by the Premier himself." Bhatt ignored him. "Where is Husain?" "I ask again, by what authority do you break into a top-secret project?" Bhatt rounded on him with a look of hatred. "And  ask again, where is Husain? Don't think you can hide behind Kantikar any more. He was assassinated at dawn this morning by a Medinan agent. Bhargava is in power for the duration of the emergency, or until new elections are held. You are no longer in a protected position so for your own sake, you had better cooperate." Dave and Shashi exchanged looks of desperation. Why now, of all times? "Husain is in one of the sensory-deprivation tanks," Dave improvised, "undergoing deep hypnotic analysis. This project is designed to bring up everything, however miniscule, he has learned in Medina for computer analysis." Bhatt looked like a man who has walked full face into a wall. Clearly he had had some idea of what was going on but Dave's instant story was too plausible to ignore. If it were true, he had better tread lightly. His sources had given him a different tale but they could have been misinformed. Dave saw his advantage and took it. "I don't know whose orders you are following, but if you don't keep your troops in control and let Doctor Mathur and me get back to our work, Husain will die, and then you will be in more trouble than you can handle." Dave turned his back on Bhatt and walked to the computer console. He halted the transcription to the clone. His face was as bleak as Shashi had ever seen it. "What now?" she whispered. "Nothing. We cancel everything; we tell nothing; but most of all, we have to get Nirghaz out of that tank!" He twisted the dial, increasing the oxygen flow to Nirghaz's broken body, and cut in the program of music and recorded voices that would lure him back from the sleep that lies on the edge of death.    Music came softly into his ears, followed by voices that seemed to make sense but did not, quite. By the time he recognized that he was hearing an ordinary conversation, the key words omitted, he was well on his way back to consciousness. There was sound, a crashing sound followed by the rush of water. None of this made a great deal of sense. What Husain could not know was that Dave had introduced a sedative into his bloodstream before awakening him. There was a shifting perception of motion and harsh hands dragging him upward. There was a hard pressure under his spine and then light, blinding light. Dave's face swam oddly above him. Then there was a pinprick in his arm. Somehow Nirghaz knew that all of this was not as it had been planned, but then darkness took him. He was still dissociated and confused when he awoke. Slowly he unwound his memories up to the taping and smiled. He had done it! That his subsequent memories were not as he had been coached was of no consequence. To live again as a man, a whole man! He opened his eyes. The ceiling was white and he could see little else. He could not feel his new legs, a fact that displeased him. Ramadav had said that he would be too weak to sit up but he felt like trying. He heaved... and nothing happened. It was as though he were still legless. He jerked his head up. It was only a momentary glance but he could see the hollow in the sheet where his legs should have been. 'Wo!" His soul-deep cry of betrayal echoed through the building. Dave rushed into the room, a soldier at his back. Nirghaz's eyes pleaded with him to say that it was not true but Dave could only shake his head. He took Nirghaz's hand -- but Nirghaz turned his face away in despair. Bhatt came running in and eyed Dave suspiciously, commanding, "Do what is necessary, but say nothing!" Dave ignored him. "Nirghaz, I'm sorry. Bhatt terminated our experiment. Your grandfather was assassinated this morning. The government has resigned." "If you say one more word. I'll have you thrown out," Bhatt hissed. Dave responded with an obscenity, in English, but it was one that had found its way into many languages and Bhatt recognized it. He gestured and the soldier prodded Dave with his weapon. Dave shrugged and turned away but not before Nirghaz saw the tears that edged his eyes. Not betrayed, then, for Ramadav shares my pain. But to fall from such hopes! It is more than  can bear. Nirghaz looked up at the man who had brought him back to this hated body and cursed him with a fluency and fervor that made all previous criticisms seem like commendations. And Bhatt stood silent through it. There was no certainty that Husain might not be in power again soon -- his importance to the Medinan negotiations was well known.    Gulls wheeled overhead, exulting in their freedom and the brisk sea wind. Nirghaz watched them cut patterns against the blue sky. Great clouds were gathering westward out at sea, and soon it would be the season of the monsoon. He slipped the lock on his wheelchair and wheeled it forward to the edge of the cliff. He had sent his nurse away; he would never have been permitted to take such a chance otherwise. Far below, the beach was deserted. That was good, for his purpose. There were two packages wedged beneath his seat. He took out the top one, a recorder, and turned it on. Bhatt was still holding Ramadav and Shashi, although he had not dared to detain Husain. Nirghaz had already made arrangements for their release. A gull landed near him and he spoke harshly to frighten it away. "I am making this record," he said into the microphone, "for the sake of my friends and for my own sake, should circumstances make it possible for Ramadav and Shashi to complete the work we set out to do together. "That which I am about to do is in part an affirmation of faith in you, my friends. In the months that we have been together, I have come to have a great affection for you both. "You have been loyal in trying times and I wish you the best in the coming confusion. I have made arrangements with some of those in power to make certain of your safety since I will be in no position to do so myself." He turned off the machine and stared out to sea again. The salt smell was sharp in his nose and the sun felt good. All life was good. For a moment he hesitated, but his hopes had been raised too high for him to return to the old accommodations. He dictated a brief summary of events following the moment ,he woke up from the aborted transmigration; then he paused once more. "I know that if it is humanly possible to do so, Ramadav and Shashi will continue the project and rescue me from my own folly. But even if they cannot, my decision remains unchanged. There are some horrors too great to face, and some disappointments too deep to endure." This time he paused for a very long time, staring at the gulls that circled overhead. Then he said softly, "Shashi, I love you. And you, Ramadav. Be happier in one another's company than you have been of late." He stared down at the beach, a cold emptiness growing inside him, before making a final entry: "Life, I love you. Too much to see you broken." He motioned for his nurse and then sent him to carry the recorder back to the tram at the base of the hill. When he was well along the way, Nirghaz took out the second package and unwrapped it. He had made it up himself and knew its capabilities. There was a simple switch built into one end of the casing. He looked up again at the gulls soaring free... and flipped the switch. The explosion tore him apart and hurled his broken body to the beach below. X Dave paced the floor, occasionally slamming his fist against the wall. It had been their bedroom; now it was their prison. Shashi sat with her face turned toward the wall, her hands folded protectively across her belly. Three days had passed without word of the world beyond their cubicle. Three times daily they were fed; otherwise they were ignored. It was afternoon when they finally came for Dave, offering no explanation. Two soldiers entered, ordered him out and slammed the door in Shashi's face, leaving her alone with her fear. Bhatt waited for him in his office. The impassivity with which the man had masked himself was no longer present. Without preamble or pretense, he said, "Kantikar is dead. Now that you have no one to speak for you, don't you think it's about time that you explained the experiments you have been doing?" "I have already told you more than you are authorized to know." "You lied," Bhatt said, not angry but no longer patient. "There is little enough to be learned from your lab notes but enough to tell that your project was for the transference of the memories of Husain into a new body." Bhatt had seemed so much the bumbling fool. Now Dave mentally castigated himself for his blindness. Fat, yes, and slow of speech and action, but the mind that hid behind those mild brown eyes was sharp and ruthless. "What your notes don't tell," Bhatt went on, "are the codes, which are the key to the programs in the computer. Short of washing out whole banks of memory, we cannot make it serviceable again for its original purposes. You will give me the codes." "No." The skin beside Bhatt's eyes tightened. "Sri Singh, your project is ended. The government has need of the computer you have been misappropriating. The codes, if you please." "Bhatt, ypu had me fooled for a while but I no longer consider you an idiot." Bhatt did not turn a hair. At one time he would have flown into a tantrum at that remark. There was no longer any doubt that the masquerade was through. "You have no intention of erasing the programs in that computer. You want to protect them for the sake of yourself and your superiors." "All right, so we do. What objections do you have to that? It is your project. Don't you want to see it carried to completion?" Suddenly wary, Davie said nothing. "What of Husain? Don't you want to give him back his legs and his genitalia?" "Of course. But I don't trust you, not one little bit. I will insist on safeguards -- starting with Shashi's and my immediate release from confinement -- if we are to deal with one another." Bhatt did not argue. Instead he drew a newstat from his desk drawer and tossed it to Dave. Puzzled, Dave opened it and read the headlines that gave the story of Kantikar's death. "Bottom left," Bhatt said, and then Dave saw the headline that read husain commits suicide. He read the article through and dropped the stat on Bhatt' s desk. "How do I know that isn't a forgery?" Bhatt removed a recorder from the same drawer and switched it on. Nirghaz's voice emerged, the mewling of gulls in the background. When the tape had played through, Dave found that moisture had sprung to his eyes, and he fought the display of emotion. "You heard him. He said that he had made arrangements 'for our safety." Bhatt nodded. "Srinivas has been on my tail for two days, trying to get me to release the two of you. However, there have been these rumors circulating, rumors that you got the layout of Kantikar's motorcade route from Husain under the guise of taping him and passed it on to the assassin who finally got Kantikar." Despite himself, Dave showed dismay and Bhatt chuckled. "Of course it may prove that these rumors have no foundation. It all depends on how well you cooperate." Dave sighed. "What do you want?" "That's better. Do you want to reconstruct Husain?" "Of course." "Can you do it?" Dave hesitated, but there was no way out. "Yes." "Good. You will go ahead as planned and we will monitor your actions, but first you will give us the information which your notes lacked."    When Dave returned, safe, Shashi's first reaction was relief, but that passed as quickly as it had come when she saw the expression on his face. "What is it?" "It's Nirghaz. He committed suicide." "No!" Dave collapsed into a chair and Shashi knelt beside him. "Karji died and after that he couldn't face the prospect of going on as a cripple. He left a recording, stating his reasons and saying that he was counting on us to reconstruct him." Shashi's body quivered as though struck."There's no way we can do that now." "Yes, there is. I made an agreement with Bhatt to show him how the process works in exchange for the opportunity to resurrect Nirghaz." "You didn't!" "Why not? I had no reason to keep the process secret." "But Nirghaz is dead." "We have his tapes, Shashi, and his clone. Nothing has changed." "Oh, but it has. His atman is gone now." "Oh, hell!" "If you resurrect him now, you'll only have a zombie. A walking corpse." Dave leaped to his feet and began to pace the room, muttering curses under his breath. Shashi stiffened and drew back. He rounded on her, anger flushing his face. "Dammit, Shashi, it isn't for you to say. If you prefer,it isn't for me to say either; but Nirghaz has the last word. He gave the order for his resurrection and I intend to perform it, with or without your help." "Well, you won't have it." Their eyes locked for a space of seconds before she turned away from him. "Shashi!" The word was laid against her back like a lash. "Your commitment to principle may indeed be admirable but what about your commitment to your friends? Nirghaz went to his death depending on us. Do you know what he said in that recording? I can just about quote it since I thought they might be the last words I would ever hear him say. He said, 'What I am about to do is an affirmation of faith in my friends. I know that if it is humanly possible, Ramadav and Shashi will rescue me from my own folly.' " Shashi winced at the words. "What kind of principles are there that allow you to betray a trust like that?" Dave asked. Shashi's shoulders sagged and she turned back to Dave with eyes that showed no more traces of love. "Tomorrow," she said, "I will help you make your zombie, and then I'm going to walk away from this whole sordid mess and try to forget that I ever met you." After the recorder was snapped off, Bhatt inquired, "Did you get all that?" "Yes," Bhargava's reply came over the phone. "I think we can be sure that the woman won't spread what she knows. She hates the whole idea of the resurrection project. If it is successful -- and, frankly, I have my doubts -- this Singh will be a security risk. Can I count on you to take steps?" "It will be my pleasure, believe me. But why take chances with her and Husain?" "A good point. Husain will be needed as an example of what the process can do -- if it works." Bhargava chuckled. "Actually the whole thing will probably prove impossible. We can keep an eye on the Mathur woman. If she poses a risk later, we will take steps then. But I want Singh out of the way as soon as he finishes with Husain." XI Dave put the computer through its checks while Shashi examined the clone. Armed guards stood at the door and an Air Force scientist sat at his elbow. Shashi came back to see him, her eyes unnaturally wide. Even her feelings toward Dave were set aside for the moment and he felt a touch of fear. "Is there something wrong with the clone?" She shook her head and he could see that her hands were trembling. "It has partial memory -- we were up to age three when Bhatt interrupted us." She swallowed and went on, "It's alive in there, crying in the night and trying to get out." Dave shivered at the thought.    Memories flowing in the dark -- childhood fleeing before adolescence. The clone aged rapidly, each moment adding days to its store of experience. A clumsy young man alone in the dark with an equally clumsy but eager girl. A state banquet; Sri Karji acknowledging him to the world. His mother's harried face when the world refused to forget that she had married a hated Muslim and had borne a ' half-caste child. The girls who would and the ones who wouldn't. Especially Renana. Working secretly for Karji; the interminable negotiations with men who valued war over peace. The feel of a horse between his legs as he flashed across a polo field. The flooding warmth of sunshine and the relaxing coolness of the ocean. Then Mahmet, the polo field, the secret negotiations and the planes tearing the sky. Pain! Amputation! Despair. Hours passed as the memories accumulated. Dave sent for a sleeping pad and he and Shashi slept in rotation, one of them always monitoring the clone. A hospital bed was secured in anticipation of the project's completion. He remembered Dave's briskness as he settled the helmet in place. He felt again the sensation of drowning and the gentle onset of sleep as the taping began. Hr   Pain! Like he had never known before. A body so new that it had not yet learned to suppress excess stimuli, and one that had never He almost passed out with the sheer intensity of it. The bed beneath Nirghaz was a torture rack. He could feel his new limbs, but it was not good. Every muscle and joint cried out against the unaccustomed strain of merely living. Finally he felt the relief of the warm, deathlike narcotic spreading outward from the burning in his left forearm. Six times Nirghaz awakened to such pain that he could not tolerate it and six times either Dave or Shashi sent him back into the haven of sleep. On each occasion he was stronger... but even when lying still, his body felt stressed by gravity, and it responded healthily by building new defenses and blocking the pain. The seventh time he awakened, Shashi was at his bedside and she sat thus for an hour, holding his hand, while he lay awake but too spent to talk. Finally a natural sleep claimed him.    "Your passes, please." Srinivas handed the MP his identification and Bannerjee leaned across him to do the same. The corporal glanced briefly at the papers, returned them and passed the pair into the base. As soon as the monopod was gone from sight, he ran to a phone and carried out his standing orders. Bhatt took the call and left hurriedly, telling his orderly to stall. So Srinivas had cornered a member of Congress after all. That would certainly speed things up.    Shashi was sleeping and Dave was sitting at Nirghaz's bedside when Bhatt entered the hangar with a contingent of armed MPs. Bhatt motioned and two soldiers quickly flanked Dave. "Take him outside." Dave pulled back. "Bhatt, quit making an ass of yourself." "You can't do this," Shashi shouted. "He hasn't done anything." "Restrain the woman. I want a guard set over her, and over this one too." He motioned toward Nirghaz. "Bhatt, you just lost yourself a career," Nirghaz promised. Bhatt did not seem concerned. He turned and followed his men out. Outside, Dave blinked at the brightness of the day. The soldiers who hustled him along were far from gentle and he struggled angrily against them. Bhatt smiled. "Let him go." They did so. "You two come here." The soldiers backed away from Dave, clearly puzzled. Bhatt had stopped smiling. "Men, the prisoner is obviously trying to escape. Stop him." Dave stood impassive for one heartbeat, shocked into immobility. The soldiers who had held him swung their rifles up. One of them was grinning. "Bhatt, no! No" Flash, sound and impact, simultaneous. He felt the slugs rip into his body. Shashi screamed and fell forward, clutching her swollen belly. Something had happened there. Some thing had come into her. The sky was very blue. There were no clouds. But there was pain, pain. Pain, Pain Shashi and nirghaz produced the passports that identified them as Mr. and Mrs. Jain, traveling with their son Lai. Then they picked up their baggage and sought a taxi. The streets of Casablanca were crowded with the noon-time rush. Nirghaz looked back constantly, but if they were being followed, he did not detect it. They changed taxis twice, rode a bus, took another taxi and finally walked through the open-air bazaar in centertown to a certain cafe. There they recognized James Brigham from the picture they had been provided. He rose to greet them, then seated Shashi and ordered refreshments. They talked of trivia for an hour, rose and departed in Brigham's monopod. Only when they were safely inside did they relax the masquerade and say what was on their minds. "Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger stuff," Brigham said, "but we can't be too careful." "Never mind," Shashi reassured him. "Paranoia is in thinking they are out to get you when they aren't. We both know they are, and we can only guess at how many varieties they come in." "Two years of dodging the Indian Secret Police is enough to make anyone cautious," Nirghaz added. "What do you know of the Project?" Brigham asked. Nirghaz and Shashi exchanged glances. "We can guess," Nirghaz said, "but we actually know little." "Nor do we want to know anything," Shashi added. "We only want you to know where we are and to know how to reach you in case of an emergency." "Have it your own way, although I will say that you can't expect much from us if that is going to be your attitude. You will keep lifetapes on file?" "No," Shashi replied firmly. "But you'll have to, or you'll..." Brigham broke off lamely, remembering the comments in Dave's letters about Shashi. "No tapes," Shashi repeated, and if Nirghaz looked uncomfortable, Brigham did not know him well enough to notice. "Then there is really no reason to go further, is there?" "Only one," Shashi said and then hesitated before asking, "What about David Singer?" "We have his tapes and very soon we will be able to resurrect him. A damned shame that we don't have a tissue sample, but any body is better than none." Brigham smiled but the joke fell flat. Shashi bounced her son on her knee, a distant look on her face. "Sri Brigham, I have one last debt to discharge. Can you get me a scalpel and a sterile tissue-sample container?" "Yes, of course. Why?" "My son is David Singer's clonechild. His genetic twin. What is it your Bible says -- an eye for an eye, a clone for a clone?" Brigham smiled a smile he did not feel, recognizing Shashi's distress in the pitiful attempt at levity.   ... then Dave adjusted the computer for an automatic recording run and settled the headpiece into place. He took up the syringe and pierced a vein, letting the relaxing chemical flow into his system, and lay back... He was drowning in warm, wet darkness. Then there was noise and a rushing of waters, and light, and pain. The bed beneath his back was a torture rack and his disorientation was complete. He was not in the hangar lab... where was he? He tried to sit up and found he could not. Desperately he tried to understand it all. And then he knew -- or thought he did -- and he raised his arm. Thin; flaccidwhite. He let the arm fall. All the nightmarish questions returned to him then. Am I really me? Of course he was himself. How could it be otherwise?    Weeks passed. Dave remembered nothing of Kantikar's assassination, Nirghaz's suicide or his own death. All of those events had taken place after his last taping session and were irretrievably lost to him. Jim Brigham stayed with him constantly throughout the trying first weeks, along with Anson and Angellena Piaget. They were strangers to him, recruited by Brigham to man the secret resurrection project in the Atlas Mountains, but they were human and they lent him their humanity in the crucial first days of his recovery. He had lost two years but he had gained an immeasurably long lifetime. Jim assured him that every conceivable step had been taken to ensure the security of-the Project. He learned that Shashi and Nirghaz were nearby but unconnected with the Project; that they were lovers of two years' standing; that they were raising his son, whom Shashi had named Ram Singh... and that they would not see him. None of it made any sense to him.    He was sitting in his room, spent from exercise but too restless to sleep, when she came. Anson had given warning that she was there and he had prepared himself as best he could. He had known jealousy in the first few weeks but that had passed: His affection for Nirghaz was too great. And besides, he had lost Shashi some time before his death. He remembered that directly, and what he had learned about the period that spanned his last taping session and his death only confirmed his suspicions that their relationship had worsened toward the end. Nirghaz had not taken Shashi from him; he, himself, had lost her. She was as lovely as he remembered her, but something had taken away her smile. There were lines at the comers of her eyes that had not been there before. "Hello, Shashi." "Hello." "I've missed you. You should have come sooner." She moistened her lips, looking trapped. He wondered if she were embarrassed by her liaison with Nirghaz and hoped that that was all that stood between them. It was not. "I only came to discharge one last debt." ' Her tone surprised him. "Shashi, nothing that I remember and nothing that anyone has told me has ever led me to believe that you had come to hate me." "I don't hate you." "You seem to." "I just don't know who you are." "I am David Singer. Or Ram David Singh, if you prefer that name." "No, you are not." "Hell, Shashi, are you going to start that again?" She silenced him by turning away. He bit back any further angry comments and said, "Sorry." "Did anyone tell you what happened to me when Ram David died?" "No. What happened when  died?" "When Ram David died, his atman entered the child in my womb." "Nonsense." She turned on him angrily. "Nonsense? How would you know? I was there; I felt it. I knowV' "And I am here. I am myself, fully;  know it." She almost smiled then, but her tears ruined it. Softly she said, "Well, at least you sound like him... but you are not him. That which was Ram David Singh transmigrated to my child. That's why I named him Ram Singh, not out of sentiment. That which was the essence of the man I loved now resides in Ram Singh, ready and willing to experience life again, fresh and untainted. No mere rerun of old experiences, old mistakes. That's why I am staying away from the Project -- that and my repugnance at the whole thing. I intend to see that Ram Singh will have a chance at a new life." "And me? Who, then am I?" "I don't know." "I do. I am David Singer -- and you are out of your mind." "So you think." "So I know!" She was silent then, without having conceded anything. "If what you say is true, why have you come to me? What am I to you?" he asked suddenly. She looked at him long and sadly. "You are a phantom out of my past. You are a walking dead man. You are an abomination. And yet... I hunger at the sight of your face." "I still love you." "Stop that!" "I do." Tears were flowing freely down her face but she remained adamant. "Shashi, what did you come here for?" "To ask you, in memory of the man who once wore that sweet body, in the name of the man you think yourself to be, to leave me and mine utterly alone. To never seek me out. To never contact my son. Not to haunt me like the ghost that you are." He examined the lap robe for a time and then raised his eyes to meet hers. "If I do this thing you ask, Shashi, it is only because I still love you." She was sobbing softly when she left the room without once looking back.  Quk-s' , . i Alpha Omega is an exciting game of tactical space combat that places you in the command decision that will affect the fate of your ship, your fleet and your race! Alpha Omega incorporates a myriad of weapon systems, ship classes and space drive technologies that create the illusion of truely alien races locked in mortal combat. Alpha Omega comes complete with two #" x #" mapsheets, two extra-thick die cut counter sheets, game charts, simultaneous movement pad and a twenty-eight page rulebook containing Basic rules, Optional rules, an interesting and believable historical narrative and twenty scenarios. If you like Science Fiction, if you like fastpaced exciting action, if you like to make crucial decisions in the heat of battle; then Alpha It also makes use of uniquely shaped counters Omega is a game for you. with each class of ship having its own distinct shape and size. Classes included are: battlecruisers, destroyers, carriers, transports, interceptors, Fighters, scouts, assault ships, star Priced at # bases and more. Alpha Omega allows you to pit three different races and various stages of technology. M Available At Your Local Hobby Shop M Jo   N,  f senc  c  iec   or money order to: Ml a division of # Monroe Drive, No. #  " p. Dallas, Texas # Allow three to four weeks for delivery. Overseas orders add # for additional postage and handling. It's light years ahead of anything you've ever seen! Add  # for postage and handling. Dealers Inquiries Invited: #-#-#  fT sl 'V  Mike Ravine V: ?Fv'V: Colonel braun stood before Spacefleet General Eastland's desk, i drying to get the general's attention. i Eastland, eyes glazed, stared off in an apparently random direction. The senile old fool , Braun rf , i thought. With this kind of leadership , it's no wonder we can't defeat : f : J Sir Alec's Spaceforce. "Sir?" he W' asked, for the third time. Eastland's eyes wandered over to Braun. "Ah yes, colonel. What is I it?" "Sir, I've come up with a plan which should delay the Empire's imminent offensive. Long enough, sir, for us to complete the deployment of our nova inducers." The general seized onto that thought. "Yes, the Empire must be stopped. The conquests of that madman must be brought to an end!" His eyes narrowed, and his voice lowered. "He is mad, you know, colonel. Thinks he's the reincarnation of a #th century British actor. He -- " "Sir? About the plan?" Eastland stared blankly for a moment, then nodded. "Continue." "Since Sir Alec is a ZenBaptist, it is forbidden for him to use comMay the Farce be with you. always... puters or magnetic data storage. When he came to power, he had all the information in his empire transcribed into bound volumes. These volumes were placed in a planet he had hollowed out and made into a library." "I fail to see what this has to do with delaying the offensive," Eastland said. "I'm getting, to that, sir. Our latest intelligence reveals something that Sir Alec managed to keep secret for many years. The assasi nation attempt made against him by the Sirian underground left him blind. He retained control of his empire, but he is plagued by feelings of great inadequacy. By way of compensation, he did things to handicap those around him. He decreed that each volume in his library-planet was to be replaced by an audio disk containing the same information. "My plan is this, sir: Intelligence has determined the exact coordinates of the section of the planet where the battle plans are stored. I will pilot a one-man ship through hyperspace to those coordinates. Thus I avoid the planet's defensive forces. Dropping out of hyperspace, I'll scan the disks containing the battle plans. Jumping back into hyperspace, I'll escape cleanly. The piloting will be very tricky, but I believe that an experienced pilot, such as myself, has a chance at pulling it off." Braun assumed, simply because the general was looking in his direction, that he had his attention. Eastland's eyes, however, were glazed, and his mind, far away. "With their plans in our hands," Braun said, "They will have to abort their offensive. This would buy us the time we need to insure our victory." Very pleased with himself, he looked expectantly at the general. Eastland continued to stare. After a considerable pause, Braun asked, "Sir?" Eastland jerked his head slightly, and focused his eyes on Braun. What had the man been saying, he wondered. Something about coming out of hyper space inside a planet ? "Just what do you hope to accomplish by this stunt, colonel?" "This stunt, sir, should get me into the Guinness World of book records."  I his will be my fourth annual report on the State of the Sciences -- that is. I've just attended the annual meeting of the A A AS, and it's time to review what's going on. There's a lot. Before this is over you'll hear of the proof of immortality, see projections of history out farther than anyone I know of has ever looked, get the latest on the search for extra-terrestrial incoming next in climate (warmer for a hundred years, Ice Age expected in a thousand). But first the real news. The theme of the A A AS meeting this year was "the tools of science," although there wasn't really very much more emphasis on such things than there has been in the past. What made it peculiarly appropriate is rather personal to me -- I'm writing this on my own computer. And I love it. The only thing that bugs me is that after I get this all nicely composed on my monitor screen, it will be typed and shipped off to Mr. Pierce, who will mark it up and hand it to someone to type into another computer; one would think that I could send a tape or disk, bypassing all that (and incidentally giving the author final control over the text; hmmm; perhaps I have discovered why editors are not overjoyed by the new systems). In any event, my Z-# system works, and even gives me a running count of the words, making it no end easier for all concerned. (Incidentally, although authors traditionally complain about copy editing -- an obscene act performed by one consenting adult and one nonconsenting author -- I really have had no grounds for unhappiness at Baen or John Pierce. I am tempted to do my entire column about my computer system. I type onto a TV screen, edit by moving words and lines and blocks of type around electronically, and when I've done I go have coffee while the machine types the manuscript. Incredible. Even more incredible is that my computer, mine, the one sitting here in this room, is more powerful than was the world's best system back when I started in the aerospace business. But enough; let's get on with the column.    Science marches on. There wasn't anything really spectacular in this year's meeting; just a confirmation of trends that we've seen before. There weren't any wild disappointments, either, except for the ammouncement that one of the shuttles would never go to space. Those fans who worked to get the first ship's name changed to "Enterprise" have legitimate grounds for complaint: that's the one the Administration has chosen to cancel. Enterprise will never go to space, and I for one can't help thinking there's a kind of grim vengeance in that. It was mildly amusing to listen to Mr. Carter's spokesman explain would be good for science. Of course one had to hang onto one's sense of humor. A few of those listening couldn't, and asked just how it might help the sciences to kill off some # percent of our capability for going to space. T heard no very satisfactory answer to that. The theory is that the money saved will be available to other science projects, but none of the lucky recipients was named, and you can believe as much of the theory as you want. Enough gloom. I really don't want to write a political column. others out there is worth a note. No alien intelligence has been found, of course, although enthusiasts continue to listen. Their efforts have been hampered by the limits of their receivers: there are just a lot of possible channels on which the others might be talking, and we don't have much spare radio-telescope time anyway. Thus it would make sense to listen to a very large number of channels all at once. The only problem is that no one has ever built a The "how to" of such a receiver has been known for years. It wouldn't even be expensive, at least not by Federal standards -- under half that. So why has it never been done? Because no one ever asked for are terrified that if they ask for a couple of megabucks for a receiver with which to listen for alien intelligence, Senator Proxmire will (a) refuse the request, (b) denounce "Golden Fleece Award," and (c) wreak terrible vengeance by chopAlthough this is hardly a it is, alas, rather realistic. This will screw up its courage and ask listening to possible messages from Out There. Watch for Proxmire's reactions.    There was a lot of attention to the ing. I don't suppose that comes as much of a surprise, given the terrible weather we've had lately. I wish I had good news, but in fact, the consensus of opinion among the weather and climate people is that things are likely to get worse, not better. According to the long-range weather prediction people, what we've experienced the last couple of years is "normal;" what was abnormal, and we have no right to expect for the future, is the extraordinarily good weather of the past two to three years. Now things are getting back to normal, and if that turns out not to be our liking, well, the universe never promised us anything different. The normal climate generates highly variable weather. For reasons not clearly understood, during the #'s and #'s the weather wasn't very variable, and the climate was highly benign. For the future, if you don't like the weather, wait a few decades. It will probably change. That turns out to have a number of consequences, of course. For the moment famine is at a minimum; there are comparatively few areas of the world in which starvation is a major contributor to the death rate. Given drastic changes in climate -- and we now have good reason to expect such massive changes -- there will be nothing for it: either we increase productivity, or famine stalks the land again. Not, of course, our land. We won't starve; but the universe has so arranged things that if there are to be major gains in agricultural productivity, they will almost certainly come about through intensive use of western technology transplanted to the 'developing nations' -- or they will not come about at all. Whether we will do the necessary development is another question.    Last year I reported that physicists were challenging the General Theory of Relativity. I may not have put it precisely that way; what I said was that top physicists were fairly sure that within the century they would have unified field theory. That, however, implies the overthrow of General Relativity, because GR treats gravity as a phenomenon fundamentally different from the 'forces' of nature such as electro-magnetism. In General Relativity, gravity results from distortions in the fabric of space itself; it is not really a 'force' at all. Incidentally, Einstein himself searched for a unified field theory, something to relate gravity to the other forces, and although he invented GR, he didn't believe in it. At any event, the trend is toward unification of the fundamental forces, as shown in Figure One. There are also continued attempts to describe the universe in simple terms -- that is, what with all the elementary particles floating around, theory has become very complex, Figure One: A Unified Field Model of the Universe. Newton Celestial Gravity Terrestrial Gravity Electricity Magnetism... Weak Nuclear Strong Nuclear Maxwell Super-gravity? Quark Up Evidence for existence is and physicists are trying to get rid of some of the particles by showing they are made up of something else, as shown in Figure Two. Like it or not, the name given the "something else" now seems to be "Quark," and the terms "Up, Down, Strange, and Charmed" also seem destined Binding Particle Electron Electron Neutrino Muon Muon Neutrino Tau Tau Neutrino not conclusive. to stay; however, some physicists such as D. Allan Bromley of Yale are resisting "Truth and Beauty" as the names of the newest candidate quarks. The impulse toward unification theories of the universe is a very old one, of course, beginning with the Greeks and their early "atomic" models. Aldous Huxley once remarked that it made no difference whether the universe "really" conformed to the simplest explanation, or scientists were just not capable of understanding anything else; and possibly there is an impulse to simplicity rooted in the human psyche. Occam's razor need not have anything to do with the real world. Yet -- there are intriguing hints that the universe may after all be built more simply than it appears. For instance, there is that intriguing number # # which appears so often. The age of the universe, calculated in units of the time required for light to cross an atomic nucleus; the diameter of the universe in units of nuclear diameters; the ratio of the strongest (strong nuclear) to the weakest (gravity) known force. There is also the mass of the universe as measured in masses of elementary particles; that turns out to be # #n squared, no small number, but there is that pesky # # again. And of course it may be pure coincidence. "What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?"    Let's see. What else? You must five-ring circus, and every day there is far more to do and see than you can possibly get to. This year it was a bit easier, because there were more of 'us;' in addition to Larry Niven and myself and Mrs. Poumelle, there were from the SF community Mr. and Mrs. Frank Herbert, Joe and Gay Haldeman, David Gerroid, Charles Sheffield, Karl Pflock, Ben and Barbara Bova, and probably some others I don't remember; this made it a bit easier to trade notes on various sessions, although it also made for longer nights. Incidentally, we found a very good Afghanistan! restaurant near the Sheraton Park, where we enjoyed good food while Frank and Bev Herbert regaled us with stories of their visit to the Khyber Pass. There was also a science fiction writers' panel; it was well attended and seemed to be enjoyed by those whose who came. Panelists Bova, Gerroid, and Herbert spoke of matters science fiction, probably appropriate for the audience. For myself I would have preferred that they do SF rather than talk about it, but I was probably alone in that wish.    The single most fascinating sespanel entitled ' ' Prospects for Life in the universe: the ultimate limits to of the Bell Telephone Labs, it featured former astronaut Brian O'Leary, Freeman Dyson, Dr. Gale and Carl Sagan as discussant. Since neither Dyson nor Sagan can read the telephone book aloud without making it interesting, that was obviously the one panel not to miss, and none of us did. It began prosaically enough, with von Puttkamer trialization over the next # years; it ended with the damdest thing I've ever seen. Understand -- in a sense. these were amateurs at my business, and in fact a great deal of the panel was a bit like that, scientists playing science fiction writer with no more spectacular success than most SF writers; that is, until Freeman Dyson gave his paper. Before Dyson we had O'Leary on asteroid mining and space colonization, themes we've dealt with in this column and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, O'Leary recommends use of the O'Neill "mass driver" (O'Leary is O'Neill's associate at Princeton) to move asteroids around. The mass driver is that gizmo so beloved by science fiction writers, a kind of electronic catapult to fling ships -- or buckets of goo -- into space. Drivers don't work from Earth, but they will from the Moon, and certainly from an asteroid. The usual SF story uses the driver to launch ships; Mr. Heinlein used one to launch capsules in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress , and a few stories have had the drivers launching raw materials from the lunar surface. The latter is the concept O'Neill's plan for space colonies employs. O'Leary's presentation proposed using the driver to move an asteroid: power the driver with solar cells, and use chunks of the asteroid as reaction mass. I've often spoken of the concept in my lectures, but whether I heard it first from O'Neill's people I don't know. Certainly it would work. It takes, according to O'Leary's figures, about # tons of equipment to haul in an asteroid. And one asteroid brought to high Earth orbit could provide all the materials needed to build enough Solar Power Satellites to power the entire world by the year #. As O'Leary was speaking I made the note "Hell, it's my lecture;" which may not strictly be true, but it's close enough. We certainly could, by the year #, power the world from sapce, and we could do it without bankrupting ourselves -- I've said all this before in other columns, and although the temptation is severe I'll leave the topic alone here. The next lecture was by Dr. Gale of Bell Labs, and once again it was a bit like listening to my own presentation -- not that Dr. Gale didn't say some things I don't, but the theme was remarkably similar to my "Survival With Style," at least at first. He began by reviewing the limits to growth on Earth itself; they are, not surprisingly, pretty severe, although not as severe as the Zero-Growth people like to postulate. The solar system, however, provides somewhat more room. It (that's # #I ) people: # tons of hydrogen; five tons of iron; five tons of glass; # pounds of oxygen; # pounds of carbon; and # kilo Watt-hours of energy. Perhaps that's life on the cheap, and people living here, so adjust the available wealth according to the population you like. Dr. Gale then reviewed starship systems, none going faster than light, and not surprisingly concluded that they are quite feasible if a bit expensive. Again, so far, not a lot new; but he also pointed out that given the limits of a solar system, the impulse to build starships must be reasonably high. We could go make use of other stars. There's only one problem with that -- someone else may want the materials. In fact, if you play exponential growth games, it will be only a few thousand years before humanity will have spread far throughout the Galaxy, and may well be tearing stars apart and moving big things around -- see my column "That Buck Rogers Stuff" for more details -- and if we are pretty near that stage, why haven't others done it? Those are effects we would probably see. Thus, perhaps we are alone in this galaxy -- and according to Dr. Gale, that may be as well, because will want it all for ' ourselves. Meanwhile it's a race -- and he does not discount the possibility of a race to another galaxy so that we can lay claim before someone else does. And do note: if you project human progress and use that as a model, it is strange that the 'outsiders' are not suasion have their own ideas on that.) In fact, Gale notes, there is no reason why within a few tens of thousands of years humanity will not be interfering with the evolution of the universe: preventing lovely and useful matter and energy from collapsing into Black Holes where we can't get at it; making stars grow in the direction we want and need; etc. There is, Gale concludes, no limit to growth except to meet someone else as powerful as we who needs the growth materials we must have. On that note he ended. But -- of course there is a limit. The universe itself is not eternal. It can't last forever. It can't -- but perhaps we can, says Freeman Dyson. No one could ever accuse Dyson of thinking small. His "Dyson Spheres" or "Dyson Shells," large systems for trapping the energy of the sun so that not so much is wasted, were the inspiration for Larry Niven's Ringworld and Shaw's Orbitsville and a number of other stories. Although I didn't get the concept from him, Dyson was the first non-sf type I know of who examined the space industrialization possibilities implied by the laserlaunching system I've employed in many stories. He is a modem renaissance man who thinks both broadly and deeply. He began simply enough, by quoting from Stephen Weinberg's The First Three Minutes. Like many modem cosmologists, Weinberg finds that the universe is doomed, and that disturbs him. He says "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." Of course nearly all religions have taught that "the world" (which certainly implies 'universe') will inevitably come to an end. The Last Trump will sound either from Heirndall's horn or Gabriel's. Then too, true atheist humanism has never had any answer to the feeling that it is all pointless; of course it is. (This is, incidentally, discussed Lubac, S.J., The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Meridian #.) It is only a true modem who can proclaim that the universe has no purpose (in the sense that it is no more than a dance of the atoms) and at Figure Three: The Universe According to Freeman Dyson. All over: # #I Stars cool: # u Galactic Cores form black holes: # #I Planetary orbits decay by tide and gravitational drag; no more planets: # #n All matter is liguid: # # Galactic Black Holes evaporate by the Hawking quantum process: #' # All matter decays to iron: I# #im Cold Iron Stars collapse to neutron stars: # # Dyson: "This chart makes a very large number of assumptions about the stability of the laws of physics..." the same time bewail its pointless impermanence. Dyson, however, did not address the theology of the universe; he stayed strictly within its physics, looking at the probable futures. The first result of this is given in Figure Three. Now note that last number: # # . To the best of my recollection -- and that of all the others in attendance at the panel -- no one has ever tried to project the future that far before; but then, one leams to expect great things from Freeman Dyson. He was not finished, though. Granted that # # is a large number, still, it is finite; the universe does eventually come to an end. However -- do we have to? Now that sounds like a silly question. How can we survive the end of the universe? First a question: is the basis of consciousness matter or structure? That is equivalent to asking whether sentient black clouds or sentient computers are possible: can we, in other words, make a one-for-one transformation of a conscious being, replacing part for part, and still have a conscious entity? And will it be the same entity? Note that this is also equivalent to asking whether you could send a conscious being by wire -- tear down the original and transmit a message that would cause an exact reconstruction at the other end. If this is possible, then the second question: are biological entities subject to scaling? One presumes that if the basis of consciousness is structure, not the physical matter, then indeed we are subject to scaling: that we could build a one-forone transform of ourselves, into computers, or into biological processes, that could be so scaled that the subjective life time is infinite. Dyson then proceeded to demonstrate this with what I call the "Integrals of Immortality." I haven't room to reproduce them here, and I suspect that even freshman calculus would turn off my readers, but indeed they exist, and given the assumptions Dyson has indeed "proved" the possibility of an infinite conscious lifetime -- which is to say that for all time a properly constructed entity could accumulate new experiences and fresh information, running out of neither experiences not time in which to enjoy them. Couple that with the Goedel theorem of mathematics which states that there is no limit to growth: there will always be new questions which cannot be answered without new assumptions, which will themselves generate new questions which cannot be answered in that system: and you have something to think about. Quite an exciting panel. As I said when it was over, I had gone to the panel expecting something interesting, but after all these were more or less amateurs at my business (far out speculation about the future); I certainly wasn't prepared for immortality and # I " # years! Carl Sagan's discussion was on aliens: any moderate extrapolation of human capabilities shows that within a thousand years we are likely to be visiting other stars -- either physically, or certainly with messages. Thus Fermi's question: Where Are The Others? They should have been here by now. Sagan examined several possibilities. First, perhaps we are very early. This Sagan rejects -- our sun is not very old compared to the age of the galaxy, and almost certainly there have been others. (Assuming that there are ever going to be others. Continuing along that line takes us to theology, and is outside the scope of this column; for our purposes we assume that life can come about given the right physical conditions, and that having come about it evolves. This is not, so far as I know, at all inconsistent with religion, or at least with the Catholic religion. Secondly, then, perhaps highlevel of capabiity they destroy themselves. We can certainly come up with scenarios in which that happens to us, and it's something to think about. Third, perhaps advances in biology bring about immortality, and that in turn changes motivations, specifically, that immortality removes the imperative for colonization and expansion. I find this unlifely; I would think that for immortals would still have an imperative for exploration at the very least; I find Larry Niven's ancient Louis Wu quite believable. Fourth, there is the "zoo" hypothesis: we are either on exhibition, or somehow subject to noninterference regulations. Obviously this is not a new idea for science fiction readers; what's interesting is that it could be presented to a bunch of scientists without getting a laugh. Finally, Sagan speculates, perhaps technologies not much beyond ours are so much more advanced that we simply cannot imagine them: the effects of really advanced technologies are not recognized by us. If so, we have an interesting future in store -- because no question about it, we are already approaching the point at which we could make others unambiguously aware of our existence. Sagan was followed by a chap from the State Department, who said among other things that we are now learning to look far into the future, and this is "particularly due to the work of people like Carl Sagan." Now I have nothing but admiration for Sagan, and I shouldn't like to take anything from his reputation; but I think he would be among the first to say that much of his speculation is a bit old hat to science fiction writers and fans; and my feeling as I listened to the State Department chap was "They're doing it to us again!" In fact, after listening to the scientists congratulate themselves over having, finally, allowed at one of their meetings some elementary speculations of the kind that have gone on in SF convention panels for decades, I very nearly titled this column "Out In The Cold Again;" however that would be uncharitable, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to have heard Dyson. It isn't as if it were unknown for SF people to steal from the scientists; now we get a dose of our medicine. It doesn't taste very good, but what the hell.    As usual I'm running our of space before I can cover even half of what went on at the meeting; but I can't end without mentioning the dinosaurs. Warm-blooded dinosaurs. I didn't get to the panel, but I did attend the press conference. There's something mind-boggling about the whole thing: how to understand, from a few scraps of bone and fossil, the physiology of critters that died away They were, after all, rather successful: dinosaurs, ranging in size from about that of a modem wild turkey to beasts massing # tons live weight, dominated the planet of them were big. According to the panel chaired by Dr. Everett Olson the dinosaurs were larger than all but two percent of the mammals; # to # percent of the mammals alive today are smaller than the smallest dinosaur. As Olson said this, something occurred to me: if they were so large, their major problem would be getting rid of heat. They are on the wrong side of the surface to volume relationship, just as an overweight person finds it very difficult to lose a few pounds. (There ain't no justice: it's easy for a thin person to reduce.) I mentioned that in the question period and found that this seems to be a relatively new idea -- not that I thought of it first, but that the biologists concerned with the dinosaurs have only in the last couple of years looked at the beasties from that point of view. However -- Walt Disney did present the "overheat" model of dinosaur extinction in "Fantasia," as Olson pointed out to me; and looking at the long-term climate models, there's at least a chance that this is what happened to them. They cooked in their own juices. It's all complicated because we are not even sure where the continents were when the dinosaurs flourished: it has been that long, and they were around for a very long time. If you rearrange the land masses to the best guesses of the years ago, nearly all the dinosaurs lived within # to # degrees of the equator -- except that there is reported a fossil print from Spitsbergen and no one is sure that Spitzbergen was that far south even back then. There was no real conclusion, and my apologies for taking your time with the question. It interests me, even if the best I can say about warm-blooded dinosaurs is that "nobody thinks they all were 'warm-blooded' but many respectable paleobiologists think some were; a few think none were." As to what killed them all off, there aren't any fewer theories now than there were a few years ago. And at least some theorists say that the waim-blooded dinosaurs became birds, and the cold-blooded ones died or became reptiles, and what's all the problem?    The final controversy was over sociobiology, and that's important enough to warrant a full column one day. At the A A AS meeting the usual group calling itself the "Committee Against Racism" showed up to enforce its idea of scientific integrity by preventing Dr. idea was to shout "Wilson, you're all wet!" and pour water on him, obviously refuting his ideas. Sigh. But for all that, it was a quiet meeting, not like the one a few years ago when the "concerned" whatever they were hit Senator -- then Vice President -- Hubert Humphrey right smack in the mush with a ripe tomato, or the one in San Francisco at which the Racism Committee tried to quiet Sydney Hook. I usually like to summarize the year in science, but this year it is difficult. The mood was one of optimism for the technological and scientific advances of the year, and profound gloom because of the prevailing attitude of government. We can do a lot. Every year the discoveries come forth, and the promise of the future gets brighter; but for the moment at least there's the question of whether we will do anything about bringing forth that promise. We have the tools. We may not have the will.  Greg Benford Ling Sanjen has followed a career as an officer in Fleet, the military arm of the vast interstellar Empire man has forged by fasterthan-light ships (Jump ships) and the slower ramscoop vessels. Ling is an ofkaipan -- a despised outsider in the predominantly Mongol culture, a synthesis of Chinese, Japanese and southeast Asian societies. This is all that remains of the human race; the other nations of Old Earth were wiped out in the Riot War. Ling is one of the first Fleet officers to come into contact with a strange new disorder, the Plague. It is a crushing fear of open spaces and light, apparently brought on by an alien species, the Quarn. A fullscale war develops between Fleet and the Quarn, but so little is known of the enemy that Fleet is virtually powerless. No Quarn native worlds are known. Ling makes the first raid to bring back survivors of a Quarn "attack" on the planet Regeln. On Regeln Ling finds people crowded into foul passageways and self-made piles of mud and stone, erected to shield out the enormity of open space. The survivors are gibbering, mindless cases. Ling's men evacuate some survivors. Returning to Earth, the crew itself begins to develop Plague-like symptoms. The clearest sign of this is the failure of the Sabal Game, an elaborate public ritual the Empire has made a virtual state religion. The Game reinforces social solidarity and feelings of group cooperation. To Ling, Sabal is an important emotional factor in his life, the underpinning to his ability to lead. He leads his ship's Sabal Game on the flight Earthward and the Game dissolves into strife and self-seeking among the players -- exactly the opposite of what the Game should achieve. Ling sees now that the Game is the key to the Quarn assault on man. The mysterious Plague spreads through the Game, using man's psychological weaknesses against him. Ling decides to not bring the survivors to Earth. Ling's executive . officer, Tonji, brushes aside these ideas. He invokes a Fleet rule against Ling and brings the ship to Earth. Ling is court martialed for delaying the return of the survivors, which Fleet wanted to examine. An ofkaipan, he is quickly convicted. Only Ling sees that these survivors will spread the illness on Earth, but he is ignored. By this time the disease has affected him, too, and then his family. For a long year he lives in despair with his wife, Angela, and his children Chark and Romana. They live in the Slots, cramped buildings housing the ill. But gradually Ling recovers, for unknown reasons. He ventures out of the Slots and is picked up by a Fleet guard. Fleet is interested in recovery cases and after studying him, they offer him his old rank. Tonji himself offers a post on the planet Veden, a key interstellar ramscoop freight terminal. Barely suppressing his hatred of Tonji, Ling accepts. Angela protests his leaving Earth but Ling goes anyway, drawn by the urge to act. Tonji' s offer was a barbed one. Veden is in a double-star system. There is a hot blue star, Lekki, and circling it a neutron star, Jagen. The precious Jump ships are no longer used to drop passengers safely near Veden; instead, Ling must loop near Jagen, losing energy through a gravitational slingshot effect, to reach Veden. He survives -- barelyand resolves to settle the score someday with Tonji. I fell toward Veden, toward rebirth. It might be possible, a new beginning. My fuel was spent. If the pickup shuttle failed to reach me, I would take a long, smooth ellipse down into her. Flame like a coal, fall a cinder. A sacrifice to her regal orbit, marred only by an animal cry of despair at frequencies to which she never listened. Who did she hear spinning with ancient purpose? To Lekki, Star of India? Or to the dark mote that raced with frantic energy, the Neutron Being? Gods and planets do not speak. She would not say. "Have you on visual," my suit spoke to me. "If you can drop a little lower. I'll match on my present trajectory." I thumbed on my binocs, but without a referent I couldn't pick out the shuttle. I stretched my arms and legs as far as the cylinder allowed -- it was conveniently casket-sized -- and unlocked the jet plates. A slight nudge forward. A tug of acceleration at my back. The shuttle came sliding up from the white rim of Veden as though on an invisible wire, sure and swift and impersonal, a black spot against the muted whites and blues. Veden swept closer, serene as though in meditation, soundless. "Your course is bracketed," the shuttle pilot's voice came through thinly in the crackle and hiss of my suit radio. "Secure attitude control board." I never tire of the stately maneuvering of craft in orbit. They move as though some unheard rhythm times them, unperturbed and answerable to no one. The shuttle drifting toward me gave the perfect illusion of freedom. But it was doomed to fall into the sea of air below us and regain its mortality, be weathered and aged even as men are. The shuttle jetted gas, blurring the crisp outlines of Veden below it like heat waves on a warm afternoon. Heavy shielding around the common pod identified it as an atmospheric craft. Delicate spines of antennas would be retracted before the atmosphere could sear them away at reentry. A black rectangle grew in its side. I coasted straight into it. Inside harsh violet lights winked on and I could see the braking pads standing out from the walls of the pickup port. Why violet? I blinked. The afterimage faded very slowly. My polarizers had compensated almost immediately, but the instant of lag had been enough to blind me in one spot of my vision field for more than a minute. I watched the port grow, using my peripheral vision. The shuttle was outfitted for a variety of tasks. Grapples tucked under the belly, waldo arms recessed beneath the pilot's slot, and a long thin cut ran down its side -- from there would come the thin delta wings for skipping along the top of the atmosphere. "I'm coming in nicely," I said. The violet rectangle grew, filled the port. We hit the pads gently. I heard a faint clank as something wrapped around the outside. "Contacts register correctly," the pilot said. "Are you familiar with the mechanism for securing -- ?" "I'll mention it if I have any trouble," I said. "But why the colored light? It's rather difficult to see in here." I popped the release on the capsule hatch and the violet came flooding in. It would have been unbearable without polarizers. I pushed off gently with my elbows, drifted out of the capsule and up to the ceiling. "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I've got the illumination set for Veden surface levels. Switching over to Earth standard." The violet phospors died and above them. Everything was silent, except for the small pings of my suit contracting as I moved. Gently, gently. I remembered my deep space work of decades past and kept my knees bent, moving slowly and thinking through every action. The elastic cables fitted into slots near the capsule. I reeled them out and used a suit jet to swing around the capsule in a circle, the line trailing after me. The third cable grip refused to close for a moment when I tried to lock it and I was afraid it had cold-welded in the open position, but after some tapping, it shut. The lines restrained any motion of the capsule perpendicular to its axis and two axial rods kept it from sliding out of the cocoon of cables. I checked the job twice. If the capsule with all my luggage in it broke loose when we hit the atmosphere, it could go straight through the shuttle's skin. "All done," I spoke into my suit mike. The blinker over the exit winked twice in confirmation and a panel slid back into place, shutting out the stars. I slipped through the circular exit tube and found it easy going because of the mngs inside. A few twists and turns following the blinkers and I dropped into a flight seat. "I routed you through to the copilot's spot, sir," the voice said. I turned to my left and saw a small man looking at me across an imposing bulge of hardware. "It's a more comfortable seat than the passenger compartment. The view is better here, too." His skin was jet black. A Negro? But I'd thought none survived the Riot War. Something about the virus blight that swept down out of Europe. Then I realized the cabin was illuminated in violet and my polarizers, had cut in the moment I entered. The pilot's skin must be the muddy tan of the Indians, but my polarizers deepened it to black. "Lance Officer Shandul, sir." He gave an abbreviated salute. I nodded back. "This is what the sunlight is like on Veden, Mr. Shandul?" I waved an arm at the phosphors ringing us. "I knew it was weighted in the ultraviolet, but I'm not prepared to take much of this." "Yes, sir, perhaps I can lower it somewhat. I fear we are not modified to permit Earth illumination levels here in the cockpit, for which I am sorry. Upon reentry we will not need interior lights at all. I can extinguish them in a few moments. I hope it will not be uncomfortable for you." "No, no. Just take us down." I looked out the transparent nose of the shuttle for the first time. The horizon was a sharp brittle line dividing the milky swirls of Veden's oceans and clouds from the obsidian depths of nothingness. My polarizers smothered the stars so that the curve of the planet gave way not to the glimmering sparks of distant life, but to zero, blankness, the fatal cold entropy death. Shandul touched a control and the ship spun slightly. Lekki slid into a comer of my vision, screaming to be seen. I glanced at it and it turned white. Careless. I would have a blind spot there for minutes. I looked down at Veden. ("Down" by training; the anti-g pills were working and even peering straight down at the surface, I didn't feel the visceral clench of infinite, terrifying fall.) Now that I knew what her light was like, I thought I could see a tinge of reflected violet in the white of the clouds. "It will require a few moments to complete recalculation of orbits, sir." "Why? Aren't we on a one-orbit ellipse?" "No, sir. The delay in picking you up came from the time necessary for me to complete satellite maintenance." I frowned. I had thought the wait was a little long. "What kind of maintenance?' ' "Micro-meteorite repair for damage to weather observation devices, sir. Also replacement of some failed components. We do not have many opportunities to get this shuttle into orbit of late, so I was ordered to finish all the backlog of work up here." "Ordered by whom?" Shandul glanced at me hesitantly. Even through the helmet I could read from his expression that he sensed the possibility of getting into the middle of a dispute between officers, and that was the last thing he wanted. "First officer Majumbdahr, sir. We are very poorly supplied with chemical fuels here on Veden and... " I froze an interested expression on my face and stopped listening. A technician will ramble on for hours about his speciality and it can be fascinating, but for the moment I wanted to enjoy the view. Still, he'd told me something I hadn't expected. It was natural for a way-station world like Veden to be low on chemical fuels -- with a and low crustal abundances (a scrap of a world, really), it couldn't support a major industrial base to manufacture them, and at transport rates on the Jump, Earth certainly wasn't going to ship fuels out here. But somehow I'd expected Veden to be better off than this . Imagine delaying weather satellite repair to save fuel ! It was another reminder of how unimportant Veden, as a world, was in the eyes of Fleet. Veden had been a convenient reservation to give the Hindics. Slowly, as the ramships gathered here and the Flinger grew in importance, this strange double-star system became important. But the real treasure was the Dwarf, not Veden. One should not mistake the caretaker for the king.    Clouds like frozen custard slid by below. A witches' wail chorused; turbulence as our craft fell. Through some scattered holes I could make out topography. The dots of ivory ice caps at the poles, smothered in snow clouds, already lay over the curved rim of Veden at this altitude. Below, large lazy oceans gave me nothing to see. We fell toward the single continent now -- three thousand klicks long, a great rectangular splotch, almost the only dry land on the planet. I craned to see it. We fell faster; rockets snarled to slow us. Below, fat-bunched clouds like cushions clung to the sharply cut coastline of Baslin, mother continent of New India. It was raw. The battered coast gave way to mountains that lanced into the interior. A giant had stamped down the edges of Baslin and plucked up the middle, for now a plateau rose in the center. Winding fingers of rivers carved and slashed at its edges, cutting narrow valleys. It was a work uncompleted, a stone forgotten when the sculptor walked away and threw his tools into the empty seas. Indian reservation, I thought, grimacing at the pun. Beholden, like most of the Cooperative Empire worlds -- dependent on Earth's advanced technology that held off alien biospheres, the high-quality microelectronics that Earth controlled, the bioengineering that prevented subtle genetic damage from abnormal radiation levels. It was this last, Earth's cellular consummation devoutly to be wished, that held most worlds. "Parachute deployed," Shandul called. The sharp crack of the ejection snapped me forward against my restraining belts. Parachute? Dissipating velocity with a chute was efficient, but most prosperous areas didn't take the trouble. We banked above the great mesa. Every human on Veden lived there, drank from its rivers, peered over the edge -- if he dared -- into the boiling hot chaos of the windswept lowlands. The jungle was a riot of intense magentas and yellows between slate-gray peaks that jutted up and tore the clouds. Below, the river writhed and I suddenly recognized it: Tankjor, the torrent that bled Baslin's major lake. The Lapis. And on the shores of those quiet waters was Kalic, our destination, capital of Baslin and thus Veden. We hit an air pocket with no bottom and I felt a sudden wave of nausea snatch at me. Guiding rockets fired in synchronization with dull slapping thumps that rattled my teeth. We banked, slowly. Ahead fractured purple and green winked from Lapis and the lattice of Kalic 's streets fanned out to greet me. We dropped into a low, confortable glide. Lekki broke from behind a virginal white cloud as we cleared the stony margin of the last peak. A great gray expanse loomed ahead. Shandul corrected. The ship dropped like a sack of sand again and colors tumbled off to my side as we turned for final approach. A glimpse of tranquil sky framed by mountains. A quiet drifting feeling. The shuttle jarred, rumbled, and we were rolling on our landing gear, land animals again, slaves of gravity. The shuttle coasted up to a wing of a long low building at the edge of a gray field. I could make out a mass of men standing in formation. As we drew nearer, they stepped off into three squares with a delegation out front, all casting long shadows in the late afternoon. "Thank you, sir. If you'll exit through the side -- " Shandul gestured to a port that slid open. I stepped out onto a platform. I opened my suit to external pressure and a wave of music burst over me. It was a long, solemn dirge of some complexity, but it grated. More appropriate to a wake, perhaps. Or it might be a subtle indication of how the staff felt about their new ofkaipan Director. "Greetings, sir!" an officer called at my elbow I and the troops in formation snapped into a salute. I tried to make my replying salute as clipped and neat as possible, but the suit was a hindrance. "Mr. Majumbdahr," I said, "your men look very well turned out." It was easy to recognize his long jaw line and elaborately curled hair from the personnel records I'd studied on the Sasenbo. I turned to the next man, shorter and obviously a purebred Hindic. "My compliments to you as well, Mr. Gharma. I believe Mr. Shandul is under your command -- he handled his ship nicely on the trip down." All through this my polarizers clicked madly off and on as I turned at angles to the direct violet glare of Lekki, which was setting on the horizon. "If I can get this off, I can review the troops," I said, reaching for my helmet. Majumbdahr gestured to stop me. "Sir, this light is harmful to your eyes. We've shortened the ceremony to allow for this. A few more minutes and we can escort you inside, where it will be more comfortable." I frowned, but said nothing. The band broke into a slightly brisker tune, heavy on cymbals and drums. Probably the Veden anthem. I stood still until it was over, returned a last salute and followed Gharma and Majumbdahr down the ramp to the field. We walked along a roped-off path in front of the troops with an appropriately regal silence and entered the Fleet Control building. Inside there was a medical party waiting for me. "I should think, Mr. Majumbdahr, that a review of the troops is standard for the introduction of a new Fleet Control Director." My voice carried an edge. An officer with surgeon's insignia raised his hand. "I believe Mr. Majumbdahr was acting on a request by me, sir. We received word that you had not been acclimatized to Veden, due to the shortness of time. I feared exposure to Lekki without your polarizers would damage your retinal tissue." As he spoke, our party walked along a dimly lit corridor. I felt awkward and irritated, dragging along my suit like a slow-witted bear. He turned to the rest of them outside a doorway -- I noticed his name plate read Imirinichin -- and said, "I believe we can fit contact filters for you, sir, without the rest of the Control staff following us around. If you please?" "Yes, surely." I waved a hand and they broke up. Imirinichin and I went in the doorway and suddenly the world brightened for me. It was an ordinary office except for a few specialized instruments on one wall. I turned to see Imirinichin, a lean man with the slow smile and wrinkled eyes of one who jests well, putting on goggles. "The light in here is adjusted to be comfortable for you, and tolerable for me if I wear these. If you'll sit in that chair -- " A nurse came in wearing the same goggles and helped me lower my bulk into place. She expertly unfastened my helmet. In a moment I was free of the suit and no longer feeling like a turtle caught in a sand pit. She lowered a cantilevered mask over my face, fitted twin cylinders to my eyes with care and flipped a switch. The room went dark and a competent hum came from the apparatus around me. In a moment the computer had measured my comea, made inquiries with my retinal cells, mused over the patterns of red blood vessels, and switched itself off. The mask came away. "The first thing a newcomer notices is the high ultraviolet content of Lekki. Exposure to it will bum out a man's retinal tissue in a few days. There's infrared in intensities sufficient to keep the planet's ecological processes going -- photosynthesis and so forth -- but the atmosphere can't filter out enough of the violet to make it comfortable for eyes that were developed in the green jungles of Earth." "So what do I do?" I should have expected something of the sort as soon as I popped out of Jump space and saw Lekki. "Well, it's no problem -- your contacts are being made up now." I blinked and popped my two lenses into my hand. "Store these, then." Like ninety nine point something of the human race, I wore ordinary contacts. (Interesting: Humanitarian though universal medical care may be, Darwin was right. We've had nine centuries to prove him right. Bad genes linger; we've insured that, from defective eyesight alone, not one human in ten could survive a day in the draughted Africa where the race was bom.) A chime rang. A tiny box popped from a chute transport slot. In a moment tears ran down my face as I tried to fit in contacts that nearly covered my entire cornea. I wrinkled my face. "They must be that large, sir, to protect the entire eye," Imirinichin said. "These make the best of a bad situation. The original colonists developed them." I looked up into a room bathed in dusky twilight. The contacts filtered out most of Sol-normal light. Imirinichin was nearly blind in this room. "No, even worse," he said when I asked. "I'm adapted. Permanent colonists -- and that's nearly everyone on Veden; we are -- " he glanced downward -- "somewhat isolated... well, they have their retinal patterns altered, cell grafts, tincturing, all to accommodate Lekki's spectrum. The alteration is much more comfortable than the contacts you're wearing." "Permanent, though." "Yes. I gather you are here on rotating assignment?" I nodded. I couldn't hope to be kept in service after what the Council called the "current crisis" was over. If it was ever over. "No skin treatments, then, for you." "Or else I'd have to live near an F-sequence star thereafter?' ' "Yes. Veden would never have been colonized but for the Flinger. Adaptation is irreversible." "What about bioadapts?" "I'll send the injections around in the morning. Also the formal Fleet uniform for Veden. It covers you nearly completely, sir." "From the ultraviolet." I shook my head. "But... when do I see normal colors again?" Imirinichin looked chagrined. "We can't get compensation over the entire spectrum. Colors will be shifted and changed for you. I hope it will not be of great inconvenience..." Science is spectrum analysis; art came into the world with photosynthesis. That's the way I like to think of it: not knowing, but using. Inconvenient? The greatest favor a friend can do for you is, every so often, to tilt the world at five degrees. Everything dances, freshscrubbed. The universe becomes a fuller place because you must notice it. So for the rest of that day I went around in a distracted daze. Light appeared latticed, shifting abruptly through three shades as I watched. Hues blended. Veden became a chromatic chorus. Gharma came toward me, his chestnut-brown skin pocked with the large pores of the Hindic. He was a heavy-set man with dark hair and eyes that expanded a fraction just before he spoke, as though the words were going to explode out of him. We exchanged pleasantries while, outside, fractured spatterings of yellow beckoned. He curled his words lazily, laying them out precisely for the inspection of the listener. Majumbdahr followed him, taller and with the slightly slanted eyes and lighter complexion that spoke of his mixed ancestry. "It's after normal working hours," he said, "I don't think a tour of the Fleet Authority offices would be particularly useful for you today, sir." "I presume you've gathered the usual summary for my review?" He smiled. "Certainly. But do you want to read them on your first evening on Veden? I imagined perhaps you would care to meet a few under-officers..." "No. It was a tiring trip. I will probably want to sleep. Now, my offices?" We shot up seven floor.'and emerged in an ornately styled warren of carpeted rooms walled with imposing bookshelves in something like leather and wood, but with a raw orange cast that signified their native origin. My suite: chart rooms crammed with orbital simulation displays and readout screens, space for secretaries and aides, conference chambers (more leather, more wood), a private communications link that could override the Control facilities in an emergency, tape files and lastly my office, hushed in soft textures and tones, space for pacing or thought or meditation, an enormous desk -- wood again -- with every conceivable aid built into it. It overlooked the field. A forest beyond underlined the wavering wink of Kalic's city lights in the distance. Dusk was ending and blue shadow fingers cloaked the field. "The summary, sir," Majumbdahr said. I took the case with a tucked it under my arm as we went out. "Your quarters are some distance," Gharma said. "I believe Mr. Majumbdahr has taken care of preparations there." "Fine," I said, my voice echoing in the elevator as we went down. "I would like to see both of you gentlemen tomorrow morning, nine hundred hours. We'll have quite a bit to talk over." Gharma said good night and Majumbdahr led me out the front entrance. It was a rather impressively delicate structure, curved lattices supported by columns and cantilevered beams of rakish tilts that would have been impossible in heavier gravities. Everywhere curves; no angles, no sharpness or sudden contrast to jar the eye. A man's voice reflecting back from the building carried a tinkling note of hidden laughter. Majumbdahr pushed the car's throttle forward and we pulled out silently. Steam cars fueled by lowgrade hydrocarbons are common in the colonies; on Earth they are rare, owing to the depletion of our final reserves. Kalic: spires, cubes, towers, ovoids, hummocks of subsurface dwellings, an air of quiet and tranquility impossible on Earth for centuries past. Our sedan turned onto country roads, into the velvet shadow of a hill. I knew the local flora from a stet I'd read on the loop out from the Flinger. As we passed, three snakeblossoms jerked up at the roadside, hissed -- they were that loud -- and puffed out their petals. Poison motes danced. Through the low, flowery brush, I could see beyond the blue winking of water. "A well-formed world," I murmured. Veden's equator and the plane of the ecliptic are aligned, giving mild climes here on the mesa. Just compensation, I thought, for the perpetual storms that raked the lowlands, where the air grew thick and acrid. "Your home has The Lapis at its doorstep," Majumbdahr said. "Lekki rises directly across the lake most of the year." Fleet had found it good policy to house their prime officers in the best residential districts of the Member Worlds. That established their social class and made for easy relations with civilians who ran local matters. I ordered Majumbdahr to stop the car where we could overlook The Lapis. It was a solemn flat blue. A holy place, I knew, used for ritual bathings. I pointed to something gliding in far across the lake, catching the last ruby glint of Lekkilight. I knew a slight change in gravity opened up new possibilities, but -- "A bird?" I inquired, pointing. Majumbdahr squinted. "Not likely. In the lowlands, perhaps, such huge beasts would live. No, it must be a man with a featherwing." The house was a faint blur high up the hill, its pale light filtered through slender fems. Mist gathered. We purred up the driveway and stopped at the base of the ramp. Something fluttered low over our heads, busying the air, and lit in a fem. It warbled a high singsong call. Friends answered down by the lake, a sad note that drifted up through the gathering wetness of night. I breathed deeply, relaxing. So this was to be home. The house had a look of spun soft aluminum, of tile, of blackened enamel. Its roof floated high above visible support. Chunks of warm yellow light reached out to gather the forest around it like a blanket. We got out of the sedan and I strolled up the ramp, hands in pockets. More warbling calls. Then something came gliding, silent as a wisp of fog. A bark, a roar. Orange flame forked out of the sky. I turned. A dark winged form behind the stuttering flame. Something stung my face. I skittered to the side. A hail of fractured concrete nipped at my heels, spattering into my eyes. The orange forking leaped near. I darted left, then right. Majumbdahr shouted something. I dove to the side. The ground split behind me. A flash -- Then nothing. Silence again, but no bird calls. Moments went by on tiptoe, fingers to their lips. The winged man was gone An instant later I heard the mutter of his assist engine cutting in. In a few moments he would be klicks away, could go down anywhere in the forest and hide. My obedient glands shot a brew of adrenalin and sundry hormones through me, as Majumbdahr and I prowled the grounds. Nothing moved. The pocked rampway testified to his firepower: twenty-four energy bolts, including the last blistering shot. "Somebody," I said to Majumbdahr, my muscles singing with the adrenalin, "somebody here doesn't like me." "Sir, I have no explanation..." "I don't expect you to." "It is most unusual." "Maybe somebody's prejudiced against Fleet Commandants these days." "But Veden is a peaceful community." I stood, hands on hips, craning my neck at the sky that had so recently spat at me. "Think you can trace that flyer?' ' "No. There are many." Majumbdahr sighed, exasperated. "The weapon, perhaps." He got on the car comm, sent out a bulletin. "Don't let Security send a team out here!" I called out. "Why not, sir?" "I'll take care of myself. They can patch up the ramp tomorrow." "Sir, I think -- " "I repeat, I'll look after my own safety." If a staff gets the idea that their Commandant hides behind a phalanx of guards whenever matters get touchy, he will command their actions but not their respect. Majumbdahr nodded thoughtfully, mouth tightening. "Meanwhile, let's go inside. Apparently the house is well insulated; whoever is inside seems to have heard nothing. Don't mention this." The fog was rolling in over it now, bringing body and flavor to the air. Creatures trilled airsongs again. The thick door was opened by a small brown man with a touch of gravity in his manner. Patil, the houseboy, I learned, an honored domestic of many years' service. He was quiet and efficient and had us seated within a moment by an open fire (burning wood!), sweating drinks in our hands. He introduced Jamilla, a woman of indeterminant age and smooth skin with a look of playfulness about her: my secondrank domestic, cook and bedchamber girl. Majumbdahr explained that although Veden was infrequently visited, the normal formalities and liberties common to the Empire were the custom here too, and I should not have difficulty in adjusting. We walked onto a stone platform that jutted out from the house to clip the tops of trees that grew from below. I was still wearing my Spartan coverall that was standard gear with space suits. "Patil will dress you in the Fleet uniform appropriate to Veden on the morrow," Majumbdahr said. He looked at me curiously, as if trying to understand this strange new Director who demanded the official Summary in his first hour on the planet, and showed no interest in meeting other officers his first evening, and shrugged off attempts on his life. Fine; let him. A small creature, something like a mouse with bat wings and furry topknot, coasted in through layers of fog and landed on my shoulders. I picked him up on a finger and saw his wings were translucent and covered with fine pearly drops of moisture. "An air squirrel," Majumbdahr said. "Scavengers, if you let them be. They're really too friendly for their own good." "There seems to be much flying life here." I listened to the beat of wings above us and the faint high cries of pursuit. "Low gravity. We have not been harmful to most of the forms, so they do not resettle on other parts of Baslin." "Why couldn't they migrate to the lowlands and leave the plateau to men?" He smiled. "The same reason we do not live there. With both Lekki and the Black Dwarf nearby, Veden is subject to large tidal forces. The winds and heat of the lowlands are too variable and totally unpredictable. Up here on the plateau we know the prevailing winds -- always inward, from the sea. The flying animals do too. They couldn't survive in two-hundred-kilometer gales any better than we." He took the air squirrel from my finger, coaxed it with a crumb from his pocket and threw the bread up into the air. The animal leaped, caught it with a snap and coasted away on an updraft. I looked at Majumbdahr and decided I liked him. Which was well, for if I followed my plan, he would be one of the few Vedens I would know. We said our ritual farewells. I finished my inspection of my home, Patil and Jamilla following at a discreet distance and seeming pleased when I approved. I exchanged pleasantries with them, saw that my belongings from the shuttle were stored properly and had Patil lay out my bed clothes. A warm bath braced me. Shortly afterward I sprawled on my bed and cracked the seal on my case. I studied the Situation Report from Fleet Headquarters first. This was what I'd been waiting weeks and months to see. As a passenger on the Sasenbo, I'd heard rumors and gossip but no reliable hard information about the war, but now as a Director and Commandant, no matter how low, I was entitled to know. Siganex IV had fallen. The same pattern as on Regeln; a tactical feint by the Quam, the Plague descending, death and chaos. A #D star chart showed the new boundaries of the Empire and probable points for the next Quam attack. It was a shock. The last such display I had seen was shortly after Regeln, and the pitiful collapsed ball I saw now was a fraction of the Empire then. Several isolated outposts had fallen in the last few weeks, I noted, and the pinpoints of light which indicated Fleet's dispersal of ships were asymmetric, obviously unable to coherently defend the contracting boundaries. I thumbed for a closeup on my flatpad display device and the region around Lekki and the Black Dwarf leaped into focus. There were few neighbors. Fourteen lights out the red star Elaren blazed down on a small radio-fenite extracting mission. Beyond that were a few other temporary expeditions on inhospitable worlds, there for limited economic purposes. The nearest fullstatus colony, larger even than Veden, was Gaining, in orbit around a massive gas giant of a planet that in turn circled a G# star. None of these had detected Quam. The nearest contact was seventy-eight lights out, a very recent sighting only seven lights from the massive colony and base at Beta Hydri. The Quam appeared to be trying to pinch the Empire's sphere into two irregular volumes of humanoccupied space. But if past experience was any help, this pattern was as much the product of the Quam's irregular tactics and seemingly random strikes as anything else. That was the point: the fact that Veden was buried deep in the remaining Empire volume was no insurance that Quam would not appear here tomorrow. This was an arbitrary war, not played according to the traditional game psychology of Fleet's computers. As yet no one knew how or even why the Quam took a planet. Or what could stop them. So Veden wasn't safe. I would have to oversee the steady rain of transferring ships dropping out of Jump space, looping around the Dwarf and off to some new destination with only a brief burst of news as greetings -- oversee it all, keep the Jump ships and ancient ramscoops moving, while watching over my shoulder to see if the Quam had suddenly winked into existence behind me. And Leibniz had once proposed that this was the best of all possible worlds. I picked up the Local Situation Report, then tossed it aside. G harm a and Majumbdahr could brief me on that tomorrow. I was hungry for more details about the Quarn, but the terse Fleet dispatch wasn't giving anything away that it didn't have to. Next came the Local Personnel file. I checked the names and positions that interested me and the small piezoelectric monitor beamed a request back to the computer sitting under my offices. It squealed as the required information logged into its ferrite memory. I cradled the flatpad on my knees, flexed my back, which was becoming accustomed to significant gravities again, and started to read. Mahesh Majumbdahr, age fortyseven Earth years, height two meters (same as myself), hair black, eyes black, bom Earth (I raised my eyebrows at that) to Mainland parents of low stock; parents emigrated when he was five, settled on Veden. Attended usual series: primary technical, sensitivity and arts, showed proficiency in athletics and played odeynsn professionally for four years, enjoyed some fame as a writer of haiku, joined Fleet at age twentyfive. Security cleared maximum for Lekki system. Married on long-term contract, terminated two years ago with mutual consent. There was much more relating to his professional career, and I absorbed it automatically. But what I was after was more than the raw facts of the man: I needed to know what bias he had, how well he could work on a closely personal basis. Most of that can only be judged by intuition. Lapanthul Gharma, age fifty-two Earth years, one-ninety centimeters, hair brown, eyes green, descendant of three generations native to Veden, considered high caste (this last a recent entry; perhaps caste was only lately added as relevant data?) and of high standing in local sect (unnamed). Parents both of notable rank; father recently retired from political circles to devote his time to meditation and enlightenment (insert note: mmored he was forced out in power play by agricultural interests). Entered Fleet service at age twenty-one and declared for commission two years later. No known other interests. Same security clearance. Married permanently. (Interesting. Quite rare:) I went down the list of other staff members, some of them unusual, others dull as dirt. Strange what personnel will think relevant and stick in a man's file. I read several ant difficulties, none of them bearing even slightly on Fleet business or security reliability but quite juicy, then chucked it aside. No time for gossip. (Not much, anyway.) With surprise I felt a touch of hunger. I sounded a chime over my bed and Jamilla came in with lowered eyes, took my request for fruit and padded quietly out. I leaned back and thought about my two executive officers. Gharma seemed more steady, but less fond of the spark of a new idea. Majumbdahr might make a better friend, if that was what I was after. And maybe I was. I had decided on the Sasenbo to save my time on Veden, not become tangled in the thousand loose ends of a military command. There was only one way to do that: find a core of men you can trust and let them make a lot of the decisions. Gharma and Majumbdahr were going to be the core. It had to be more than the usual delegation of authority -- every officer knows to release some of his hold or he'll end up ordering his own paper clips -- and I would have to play it by ear. I needed time. Let Fleet agonize; not for me the plugging of holes in a crumbling dike. There was no joy left for me in the warm knit of Sabal. The Quam had cut those cords. Veden had never used the Sabal Game. It was the spiritual center of the Hindic minority, a small fragment of the Empire brave enough to colonize this planet when it was the most dangerous of all the known worlds. That was before the Flinger was conceived, before anyone knew this system could be so vastly useful. Once the Flinger was begun, Veden still successfully resisted the Mongul culture. Perhaps, all told, this was the best place for me now. I was a commander again, but without the spiritual matrix Sabal had given me. Adrift. Maybe there was something on Veden for me. In the guttering ruin of the Empire, Veden might flicker as the only remaining light. Here, at least, I could savor life again, and ponder. Earth had gone stale for me long ago. The Hindic and the Quam. Unknowns, all. Veden was at least human. The Quam held all the mystery of the unknown. Jamilla entered with a bowl of cylindrical fruit and a snifter of red liquid. The fruit was tough at first but after a moment's chewing released juices with the flavor of warm almonds. The drink was a clashing -- a tang of oranges, with a smooth background like apricot nectar. Somehow they resolved each other and quenched my thirst. I caught Jamilla studying me with interest. No more than a fraction of the people here were Mongul in descent, and certainly she had seen few Polynesians such as me. I supposed my lighter hair and thin beard (a gene of the Caucasoids, that) were unusual, but... Normal formalities and liberties, Majumbdahr had said. I raised an eyebrow in speculation. It had been a long time. I finished eating, put the tray aside and made a formal sign understood throughout the Empire. Jamilla smiled and unfastened the brass buckle at her side. Her sansari was a wisp of cloth wound into expert folds over her slim body. Watching her gracefully remove it was an entertainment. She came into bed with the good taste not to extinguish the lights. She was a scent as sweet as the wind.    In the night I rose, heart tripping, and the thought raced: Who was he? A Fleet-hater? Religious fanatic? A man hoping that a better universe could come out of the muzzle of a gun? What a sad old idea. I opened click the garden portal and sucked in frosted night breeze. I felt like calling out into the muted darkness, You wouldn't have killed Fleet, you know. It goes on. It goes on. On and on, until disorder eats even the Empire. The Quam were on the side of entropy, the final winner in all this mad scramble. Entropy. The amber dimming of all suns, the blunting of all momentum. And neither you nor I, my enemy, can do anything about that. In the morning Patil aided me in fitting my Fleet Kochu robes. They shielded the wearer from Lekki's ultraviolet and were robes only by convention, for they retained pants and vest. The only addition was a cowl that rode on the back of my neck and could be slipped over to shade my face. My contact filters flushed the morning with an orange tinge even though Lekki's violet dot threw shattered dancing light up to me from Lapis. The water traced a pencil line of horizon across two thirds of the view. I could see the current ripples as the triple tides of Lekki, the Dwarf and Pincter, Veden's moon, pulled at the lake. The beach a hundred meters below was a broad white plain .worn smooth by the hissing waves. All this I saw while blinking the contacts into place and walking down the cratered ramp to my staff car. The driver saluted and with a slight piping of steam, we went down into the world of men. I wasted an hour in the unavoidable preliminaries in my new offices; nodding at secretaries, exchanging ritual salutes with secondand third-rank administrators, accepting a traditional welcoming gift of burnished rice and layered spices (take one mouthful, then offer it to the troops). Then to the main conference room, filled with twenty staff workers. Their eyes widened slightly as I ignored convention and sent them all on detailed, eminently defensible tail-chasing jobs that would take days or weeks to complete. Correlate fluctuations in rice crop and number of ships passing through the Flinger; compile composite history of all minority economic alternatives used on Veden which had applicability to Empire economy; detail origin of more recent sects (this I could actually use); each division prepare reports, sharpen up training schedule, stipulate defense capability, justify all current supply levels. The orders were a compendium of jargon and catch phrases, but it accomplished the result: keep them busy, get them out of the room. Only Majumbdahr and Gharma remained. "Now tell me about Veden. What are the people thinking?" "Not very much thinking is being done," said Majumbdahr slowly. "There's a great deal of reacting, though." "How do you mean?" "They're confused. The reports from the colonies further out haven't been precisely encouraging." "Are you sure this isn't simply what you've been hearing from the population of Kalic alone? On Earth the city populations are breaking down much faster than the rural areas." "Even on Veden, sir," Gharma broke in, "there are not substantial numbers living among the jungles. They are not a significant group." "Why aren't they spread out?" "You haven't seen Kalic yet," Majumbdahr said. "Veden isn't like the other colony worlds -- the Mongul cluster-home isn't popular here." Gharma gestured with his hands as if a flower were unfolding. "Our cities are as pods on a quasimakas plant, spaced to insure adequate sunlight and full growth. The openness of the growthlands is always with us. To live otherwise is... " He stopped awkwardly, realizing that he had almost implied a criticism of the Mongul aesthetics, to which presumably I subscribed. I gave him a smile. "I quite understand. The same principles once held even on Earth. Necessities of population change these things." I turned to Majumbdahr. "I take it you feel even the citizens of Kalic and the other outlying cities are not truly in what the Empire would regard as an urban environment?" "Yes, as far as I understand Fleet's analysis." "I think it is certainly true, sir," Gharma said. "Veden is much more stable because of it." Majumbdahr looked at him a little sourly. "I wonder about that." I glanced a question. "Well, sir," he said quickly, bringing his hands together on the opaque gray of the conference table, "I don't like the feeling that's running through Kalic. I wasn't bom here, but I think I have a good grasp of the gestalt. People are seething inside. It hasn't come out yet, but it will." Gharma shook his head. "As you may see, sir, we have talked of this before." "Natural enough. In the absence of a Director you were responsible for knowledge of the political side. It's an open secret that Fleet is now relying more on its reports from Directors than the official opinion given by the Embassies." Gharma blinked rapidly. "Oh, no, I'm afraid you do not understand. This is not a political matter at all. We are speaking here of the tranquility and enlightenment of the people." I nodded, silently pleased. They were both showing a sensitivity that might easily have been drilled out of them by now, in Fleet. I couldn't use men who thought like political hacks, glutted with detail and trivia, afflicted with a ward heeler's smug myopia. "Of course," Majumbdahr waved the comment away with rough hands too large for the rest of his body. "But sit in the temples, Lapanthul" -- side glance to me -- "Mr. Gharma. They're stirring. Their meditation is not enough." "Is that true, Lapanthul?" I said. "I do not feel that it is -- and that is the final test. But I am not quite as, ah, basic as Mahesh. I do not move in quite the same spheres as he." Majumbdahr settled back in his formed plastic chair. "What he means is that his sect is very high in caste, and mine lies somewhere in the middle." He grinned. "It gives one a different slant, I'd imagine." "Caste? I'd thought..." Gharma cleared his throat. "Yes, it does exist on Veden. We all know the Empire has no such thing, but I have heard that we are not alone -- other colonies, and not Hindic in origin, have caste, or something like it." He said this with the somewhat stiff and defiant air of a man confessing a minor but habitual vice. "But caste. The term..." "Historically it was an evil thing," Majumbdahr said. "The choice of word is unfortunate. I've always held it should be something like 'station.' " With this he glanced up at Gharma. "But the social conventions favored the traditional term. It does not have the same connotation as in Old India." means to say, not yet. Mahesh thinks we're headed that way, nonetheless." I realized that they were good friends, despite their differences. There was a warmth in their argument, as though it were an old shoe they felt comfortable wearing. "All right, so there's caste," I said, sighing slightly. There was something about this conversation, a sort of agonizing slowness to converge on the point, that may have been just the Hindic way of doing things. I was going to have to get used to a more indirect approach. "It would seem that by traditional sociological principles, that would make Vedens more secure, happier with their place. But that's no help. People throughout the Empire were contented, they hadn't lost phase. But I've seen all of them struck down by the Plague. They had no defense." Gharma looked suddenly sadder. "We know that. I don't understand how it could happen, when -- " "Have you had any cases here yet?" Both of them looked slightly startled, as though the thought hadn't occurred to them that Veden was vulnerable. "Nothing has been reported -- " Gharma started. "Do you know how to recognize the symptoms? Has Fleet sent through instructional information, case histories?" "Yes, a little. I have read it myself. It is difficult to believe." Gharma shook his head slowly, as if realizing for the first time that the Plague was real and not just the abstract subject of a series of dispatches. "Break out all the material you have on the Plague," I said. "Form up classes from personnel not on essential duty. Get space in the civilian press for full coverage: how to spot the symptoms, first signs that you may be getting it yourself, treatment, history, the works. You've delayed on this too long. We've got to be prepared." I banged my fist on the table. Gharma got up and went over to a wall communicator, spoke into it in a whisper and returned. "Done," he said softly. How could they have let it go? It was one thing to be bottled up on this outpost, watching the ships flash through the Flinger but seldom having one land -- and quite another to forget about defending the planet. "I take it these measures are of some use against the Plague?" Majumbdahr asked. "Perhaps, perhaps," I said, distracted. Did they know how much I'd been through? Forget it; no time to worry. "They seem to slow it down and sometimes keep the people alive. That's all we know, but it's enough." "I think the people probably know more than you'd think, Lapanthul," Majumbdahr said. "There have been numerous news services' reports, #D programs. Not much, to be sure -- " He glanced at me to show that he knew as well as anyone about Fleet censorship. " -- but I think they may be prepared for the Plague, when it comes. Giving them the complete facts will make it easier -- fear comes from the unknown, not the known. That's why they're in the streets -- fear." "The streets?" I asked. "Civil disturbances," Gharma said earnestly. "A few, and quickly contained." "What about?" "Fleet movements aren't wellkept secrets," Majumbdahr said. "A lot of civilians work in Communications, so they know there isn't a respectable Task Force near this system. If the Quam come, we'll stand alone." Gharma nodded. "I don't think they realize quite that they are afraid. The violence is so undirected -- " "Reporting, sir!" It was an official Fleet secretary I'd sent on a make work assignment an hour ago. "Fleet vessel L. S. Caton has passed formal recognition procedures after emerging from Jump space and requests final orbital check for her Flinger orbit." A mass of jargon; it meant I had to give my final meaningless approval of an orbit already programmed for the ship. The L.S. Caton had been locked into the course several days ago, but the ancient formalities of the Port Master had to be observed. "Granted." I really didn't give a damn about the empty motions of Fleet business any longer. I wanted to see Veden, to meet the myriad sounds and smells of a new world, where there were still real problems to solve, not sit in this office. "Mr. Majumbdahr! Do you think you could find a suitable restaurant in Kalic for lunch?" Everywhere there was color. Magenta fronds, tangled snake vines of a chilled deep green, the impersonal dull tan of the roadway -- and all crowned by a clear sky of even blue. The colors reminded me of my contact filters and I blinked rapidly a few times. They were occasionally uncomfortable. We crossed the large bustling square in the noonday rush. Clicking of a hundred sandals. Murmur of conversations as knots of friends drifted past. No matter how far humans might fly in their machines, these things held constant. Cramped shops displayed their wares with abandon, letting robes and bolts of cloth spill in gaudy excess from their boxes. Beads and ancient books shared display cases; fruits and spices competed for the same spot in a window. There was a cheerful easiness about it, and the people were the same: talking, laughing, greeting the price of items with a feigned sharp bark of disbelief. We cut across the square with Lekki straight overhead, burning a hole in heaven. A few men and women clad in raiments were speaking to the passersby of their mission in life, advising them of the benefits that accrued to anyone of their chosen faith. But not pushing it, not with the intense drive of the cultists I had seen on Earth. There was a relaxed air here. Fine, I thought. But  am beyond that old snake oil now. Five of the women in a circle chanted -- I am Not great or small But only Part of All. We turned into a narrow street, almost an alley, that was the exact opposite of the clean, broad streets I'd seen. Here the even sheet of plastiform street changed into a bumpy track of winding black cobblestone. Some shops huddled together, and others sprawled; all were busy with people buying and selling, bartering in high-pitched tones, inspecting the goods, eyeing the shopkeeper. It was like a page of history. I recognized emblems and signets of Old India, some even dating from before the Riot War. "This is part of the 'reconstructed' district," Majumbdahr said, "devoted to retaining the atmosphere of the Hindic past. Much of it is honest and true to the original. Those rice bins" -- he gestured at an enormous tub with an indecipherable scrawl in red on the side -- "contain pure strains a gourmet would have recognized even in Old India. They're kept in controlled environments so the Veden ecology doesn't alter them even slightly." "All this to retain the old ways?" "The flavor of the past. These things, these crafts and methods" -- he motioned about us -- "were part of the Rebirth of the Hindic people after the Riot War. It is well to keep them. They might be useful even again." I looked at him curiously, wondering if he was thinking of the Quam. We passed through streets that seemed to reek of ancient ways and thoughts. I paused occasionally to watch a grinder or a spin-drifter at work, saw an elementary syncon computer being used to operate a foundry that produced images of Fanakana, a winged dragon-dog of early (and now dead) mythology, walked among carved erotic statues ten meters high, sniffed the grainy texture of air filled with the sweat of work and reek of spices. It was a bit unconventional for Majumbdahr to bring me here. Usually a Fleet underofficer would take his superior to a more formal and military luncheon, to demonstrate his seriousness. But then, Majumbdahr was an unconventional officer. I remembered one of the incidents related in his file. Some years ago, in a lesser post, Majumbdahr had dined alone in the Kalic officers' mess. The room was busy and waiters did not notice him, seated in a far corner. He became impatient. But instead of stalking out, Majumbdahr went to a phone booth and called a restaurant that delivered meals. He asked them to bring a spiced dahlma to the officers' mess. When it arrived, he made no great show of eating, but a few officers noticed and the story spread. The Commandant heard of it and investigated the standards of service in the mess. Soon matters improved. And through it all Majumbdahr had said nothing, never raised his voice in criticism. It was an effective technique. We reached a small squat restaurant and found our way inside through near-total darkness, sweeping by bead curtains under the guidance of a wrinkled old headwaiter. "It is very fine," I said after we were seated. "I have seen nothing to equal this district anywhere in the Empire." Majumbdahr smiled deprecatingly. "Really? But these things are necessary -- cultural drifts occur without them. How is it done on Earth?" "By symbols, mostly," I said, trying to phrase my answer correctly. "We -- or rather, they -- focus on the part rather than the whole. Instead of a statue, a stone. A forest becomes a plate of wood. And there is the Sabal Game, of course." He nodded. "The Game is played here, as well, but only by a few. We do not find it particularly relevant to our needs." The waitress brought a steaming plate of rolled breads like papadams, meat-soaked sauce inside. "What replaces it?" I asked. "A number of things, perhaps none of them as impressive as the Game. This district, for one. The isolation we have from the rest of the Empire helps, too -- few crosscultural influences manage to get here, and when they do, they're sometimes so extraneous as to have rfo effect. And of course the tradition of the Savant, the Saint, the Guru." I finished the breads -- which had turned out to be a sort of woven rice cake instead -- and paused. "This meat? It is -- " "Of course," Majumbdahr shrugged. "Organic products." "I've heard of colony planets on which -- " "Not here. No lower forms are slaughtered." I smiled and continued eating a side dish of marinated vegetables placed at my elbow. The alternative to the organic tanks -- once it was agreed that animals, being spiritually of the same Order, could not be harmed -- was vegetarianism, a singularly difficult and unhealthy path. "Savants, you said?" I continued. "We had few of those on Earth or the colonies I visited." "I don't believe the practice is part of the Mongul heritage. In the dead religion of Confucianism it had a place, I'm told, but the Riot War ended that." "Some hold it died in the First Republic that was formed on the mainland just before the War." Majumbdahr bit his lip. "Perhaps, but it doesn't matte.r." He didn't want to get involved in the intricacies of Empire political history, particularly since they might still touch on the present. "The old ways of Zen, when they reached the inlands after the War, fairly well destroyed the appointed station of the Guru. One doesn't need a guide to find what is all around him and yet within himself. ' ' "I would not put it quite that way," I said, laughing gently. I remembered my first instruction, the koan I had wrestled with for seeming ages when I was a boy. It was a classic ambiguity, simple and full of depth for meditation. Its eleventh'century name (Christian reckoning) was the "Three Barriers of HungLun." Question: Everybody has a place of birth. Where is your place of birth? Answer: Early this morning I ate white rice gruel. Now I'm hungry again. Question: How is my hand like the Buddha's hand? Answer: Playing the lute under the moon. Question: How is my foot like a donkey's foot? Answer: When the white heron stands in the snow, it has a different color. The first answer? It indicates that facts of birth and death are snow flakes in the great wind of time, as trivial as the eternal cycle of hunger and satiety. The second: let loose your constant reasoning, sing to the moon and be the Buddha. Be here. And the third? I do not think I can express it, even now, in words. That was the first stage, zazen, individual perceptions of the Essential. After that came social awareness, the gestalt, Sabal. But after that, what?    Once I crashed on a frozen world. As a young Fleet officer I'd been delegated to make a short run to a way station there. I blew a wing coming in. I snapped a forearm and quickfroze it, but I couldn't chill down the three crushed ribs. My comm failed high up, so there was no trace on me. I had to walk out. Through ice fields glimmering blue and white, through rock and snow. There were human renegades there, descendants of criminals who'd washed up in that solar system five hundred years before. They had quaint practices. They thought travelers were stalking horses sent by God, for the virtuous to take out their anger on. First they'd hunt you, then they'd run you for a while in the open, then they'd cut a few tendons and run you some more. It would take you a week or more to die. I shot three of them but a fourth slashed my side with a bone knife. Five others started running me, letting me get just enough ahead to think maybe I was breaking into the clear. That went on for three days. By that time my rations were gone and my right leg, where a spear had ripped the insulation, was going dead on me. I worked my way through a narrow pass in the ice. My last personnel charges had timers; I set them and blew quite a few tons of ice into the pass. That gave me time, but by then I couldn't use it. I walked a while. Then I crawled. I passed out. When I woke up, a product of my delirium was shuffling at my shoulder. It was thirty meters across. Skin like crinkled tar, a huge cone at the top, gnarled jegs at the bottom. It put a feeler'in my mouth; I couldn't stop it. The feeler turned out to be a tube. Something warm and sticky and maybe sweet came through it. I drank the warm whatever and peered at the cone, which was slowly tilting around toward me, and went to sleep. When I woke up, it was gone. No tracks in the snow, nothing. I lay there for a day and prepared to die. My lead on the hunters was now a day, maybe two. In the long night my delirium came again. Perhaps the cone creature visited me, with its shambling, achingly slow walk and sticky brown tube. Perhaps the wind made me hear voices. I went into a place where there was a stilled center. It was a space different from the sureness I knew in the Sabal Game, a territory where I skated, skated over a sheen: the ice that films the universe. I sensed it as Other. The fulcrum of my salvation. In the morning I woke and walked. I reached a power nexus the next day. A skimmer came for me. Seven years later on a convoy flight I chanced on a scientific report from that world. They had found a huge Iifeform, one that communicated by radio. Its principal sensory organ was an immense radio antenna, evolved for some unimaginable communications. It clearly sensed the stars, and some small prey -- but what else? Attempts to make contact seemed fruitless. So the cone creature was not from my delirium. Was the sense of Other also real? An ancient philosopher once observed that when a man saturates himself with alcohol and sees purple snakes, we laugh. When a man fasts and sees God, we listen. Should I laugh, or listen?    We had finished the corianderlaced curry and the world had taken on a deep, salty tang. I had been silent in the lazy warmth of the meal, but then Majumbdahr said intently, "You were correct about the preparations, sir." "How so?" I focused on business again. "We erred." "By not briefing staff and important locals, setting plans for Slots, and so on?" "Yes, that. We had no one of your experience. Here news of Fleet seems so distant." "My experience?" "Well, yes." "What experience?" "You... contracted the illness yourself, sir. I believe?" "So?" "Not many recover, it is said." "So it is said. I wouldn't know." "Still, sir, it is an unusual accomplishment..." I cracked a wry smile. "My unconscious did all the work." "We believe in fate here, sir." "Look," I began, indulging my taste for contradictions," being superstitious is bad luck in itself. Don't -- what's that?" A low rumbling cry from outside, the sound of many voices. "It might be some Lancers, sir. They are a new sect. We have been urging local authorities to keep them under control, but -- " Impatient at the growing babble outside, I got up and threaded my way through the topple tables of the restaurant. Majumbdahr called, "Sir, that man will -- " At which point he did. He turned to huiTy away from the entrance and slammed into me, almost knocking me over. The man blundered on without a glance. I went to the entrance. The crowd was backed up flush with the old worn shops, facing toward the narrow street, packed in tightly. I couldn't see a thing. Some faces were tense, others unconcerned. Obviously the running man had sensed something he feared. The chanting came nearer. It was almost covered by the babble of conversation from the pedestrians, obviously expecting a show. Majumbdahr materialized beside me. "Help me break through," I yelled. Together we pushed against the wall of backs keeping us from the street, shoving together until something gave. I jostled forward through the bodies, ignoring scowls and snarls. In a moment I was near the front. The Lancers had just gotten to this point and were streaming by, shouting something about Veden and rights, waving tapestries on bamboo poles, stamping and hooting and jamming the onlookers back from the center of the path. The crowd didn't seem to be worried or afraid; they treated it as a lark, an entertainment. It seemed to me a lot of noise for nothing -- it was impossible to tell what they were shouting about. Then I heard a slight scream from further back in the Lancer column. A sharp cry of pain, a bark of outrage. Then another. People around me stirred. The barrage of sound from the Lancers increased in volume but now I could hear the screams clearly over the chant. Majumbdahr caught my eye and gestured toward the cries, which seemed to be getting closer. I nodded, asked a question with my eyebrows. He shrugged. Evidently this latest touch was new to him too. And to the crowd as well. They pushed back toward the shops, trying to get away from the center of the street. In a moment I stood alone. Men and women struggled, pressing into the already crowded shops. The Lancers came on. The chant faded. Standing there, even in my coverall uniform and cowl, I felt exposed as I waited for whatever was coming around the next comer. But an officer does not run. The end of the Lancer column broke around the comer of a shop further down the alley. Young men in loincloths, perhaps a dozen, carrying short, stubby clubs. They lashed out at the crowd cowering in doorways. Majumbdahr stood at my right. One of them laughed, struck a man in the side, hurled an oath at him and passed on. The Lancers in column were smiling too. A lark. A holiday afternoon, for them. They saw us. Three broke out of file and converged on us, rocking the clubs loosely in their hands, casual. I went back into rest position, left forearm out, right leg cocked back and keeping balance over my body center. Right arm tucked into side. Training school memories. Watch their faces, focus forward, eyes front but seeing everything to the sides. The first one swung a club down with his right. I blocked with my forearm, dropping further back. He went slightly off balance. I raised my right knee, shot out a chopping foreleg kick. It caught him in the stomach. I dropped back to balance. The kick wasn't strong enough. Getting old. He came forward again, this time favoring his right side where the kick had landed. Side chop with the club, very fast. I' stepped back again, watching him move. The man had a sour, panicky smell. No opening worth the chance. The third man stood aside, watching. Majumbdahr was moving in the comer of my eye, try to wrestle his man to the ground. Mine came at me again. This time he rushed matters a bit. His right foot came down too early for the overhead blow he'd planned. I stepped forward, chopped his arm. I shot my left elbow into his face as he stumbled past me. He smacked hard on the obsidian cobblestones. He shook his head, too dazed to get up. The third man cursed us and ran, hooting wildly. Majumbdahr had his pinned to the ground. I felt a little silly, a senior officer fighting in the streets. Were the civilians eyeing me curiously? "Send for the police!" I shouted at one of them. Then I noticed the crumpled form further down the street. It was a girl, unconscious. Her black hair fanned out in a crescent around her head and there was an ugly .red patch on her scalp. I cradled her head to see if there were any other wounds. Someone came over and volunteered that the Lancers hadn't struck her; she must have fallen in the rush. Police whined over in a helicopter and dropped into the street on ladders; evidently ground transport through the reconstructed district was too slow. I held the girl's head and ignored the two Lancers who were led away. She was injured in a stupid, pointless demonstration -- if that was the right name -- and I felt responsible. If I'd pressed Gharma about civil disturbances, I might've been working on the problem instead of sight-seeing in town. And this was just the sort of thing that reeked, disquietingly, of the Quam. It had the feel of strangeness, of people going off their precarious balance. The Hindic peoples were always pacifists. We even had trouble recruiting Fleet base personnel on Veden. A group like the Lancers was totally at variance with the traditions here. Yet they were here, and the crowds had smiled, perhaps even identified with them. Why? Did the Lancers express something they all wanted to say, but couldn't? Someone was tapping me on the shoulder. I looked up into Majumbdahr's face and at once realized that I didn't want to let her go"Medical is here, sir," he said. "They'll be wanting..." "Tell them... tell them to treat her and deliver her to my personal home," I said without thinking. "I want to talk to her." I looked down and saw her for the first time. Black hair, delicate features. She smiled weakly at me. I watched the ambulance pull away with her and recognized dimly that I was slowly coming out of the slight autohypnosis I'd given myself just before the fight. Training was reasserting itself. Majumbdahr finished talking to the head of the police squad and glanced at me. "Come," I called, waving. "Let's lift." Momentum is as momentum does. Thus, Fleet schedules wait for no man, even a puffing Commandant years beyond his martial aits drills. L. S. Caton was passing through the Flinger. I wanted to watch, to sense the flex and flow of my command. Local police reported to me on the copter journey back: some Lancers detained, but they had no plausible explanation of why their ritual display eroded into brutality. I sent a priority demand for a summary of all such past incidents. Veden Fleet Control wasn't all that impressive. Most of the Flinger' s detection grid was in close orbit around Lekki-Jagen, where things became gaudy. Computers are the same faceless ferrite walls everywhere in the Empire. The large cavem of display screens, verbal inputsoutputs, primary and backup consoles, low-glare phosphors glowing a sullen red, clacking of tracer prints, mutter of conversations escaping from muffling mikes -- the cavem was forgettable. Except for the display screen. On the screen Lekki blazed eternal, whipped by Jagen's knotted fist of gravity. I watched a tiny glint of light that was the L. S. Caton creep across Lekki' s blue snarling face, boosting faster than light. It arced around Jagen's black dot in a deformed parabola and raced away, a graceful and intricate dance of the spheres. Destination: Abbe IV, a fertile planet circling a G# star over a hundred parsecs away. The stars are fixed and eternal only for times slightly longer than a man's life. In reality those diamond-bright flecks are roaring through the galaxy, a mad swarm of bees. The galaxy itself has spun around twenty times since its birth, scrambling stars like seeds before the wind. Between Abbe IV and Earth -- the L. S. Caton' s home port -- was a # kmsec velocity difference. It wasn't enough to wink into Jump space and out again -- somebody had to fork up the difference in kinetic energies (relative to galactic center) between the two. That means fuel, and time. Far cheaper, then, for the L. S. Caton to detour quickly through Jump space to Lekki-Jagen, undergo an elastic collision with the neutron star's field, picking up energy -- and then Jump to Abbe IV. Spectacular and cheap -- a twinning devoutly to be wished. Aboard the L. S. Caton , of course, it was a nudge in the night. They had only minimal sensors outside their magnetic envelope, just enough to pick up navigation data from us -- again, because it's cheap that way. Though the L. S. Caton was a mass of tachyons, the gravitational deformations of Jagen swung it around precisely like ordinary matter -- gravity plays no favorites. There are, some say, stars and planets in Jump space; but no one has ever lingered near them. Some of the deeper physical laws seem asymmetric; tachyon galaxies may well be deadly to us. Gharma, efficient and proper, showed me the Fleet procedures; I made notes for study later. "You know what we are, Mr. Gharma?" I said after an hour or two of detail work. "Brokers." "Sir?" "Look, stow that 'sir', Lapanthul, leastwise when we're alone." "Ah, how do you mean, 'brokers?' " "We're in-between men. Take an item from Mr... A, exact our percentage, and give it to Mr. B." Gharma smiled. "This seems inglorious?" I shrugged. "I don't care." And was surprised to find that, in truth, I didn't. Running Veden Control was grub work in the eyes of the likes of Tonji, but so what? The scoop ships, gulping down interstellar hydrogen with a giant magnetic throat and spewing it out the end for propulsion, were the long-term backbone of the Empire, little publicized. A planet that sent out, say, a rare alloy plentiful only in their system, couldn't program the ramscoop ship for a definite destination because by the time the ship spanned a hundred parsecs at sublight speeds, its target world might have changed economic structure entirely. The time lag was too great. So the volume of space around Lekki-Jagen served as a storage area, a cosmic clearing house of the Empire. Moving large masses through Jump space was beyond the resources of a new colony planet. But ramscoops were cheap and easy to build. When the colony got a product it thought might sell -- and so bring in currency and bartered goods in return -- it packed a shipment into a ramscoop and programmed the onboard computer for Lekki-Jagen. When the ramscoop arrived a half century later, it was cataloged and directed into a waiting orbit. There it sat. If no other colony bid for it, the ramscoop orbited silently forever, costing its owners periodic docking fees to pay for Veden's Fleet Control. Usually it sold rather soon. Then it was reprogrammed for the buyer's system, dropped through the Flinger and shot out into deep space at a respectable velocity. The Flinger could cut fifty per cent off the transit time of a fifty-parsec journey, because without it the scoops required long, weary, expensive years to pick up their initial velocity. The Flinger cut down the transport time for interstellar commerce, making possible the economic Empire. Thus I was -- quite literally -- were all ramscoops forming a great pancake of orbits in the plane of the ecliptic. Virtually every day we received bids for certain ships -- lately, I noted, ones packed with a craftsman's lifework in microelectronics -- and, if it met the demand of the seller, I ordered it dropped through the Flinger. The key point was that a ramscoop expended great energy if it had to reach one per cent of c, but the ride was easy after that. Above this critical velocity, enough hydrogen isotopes crammed into its maw to feed the fusion fires in its belly; it then quickly boosted to # c or higher. The Flinger slung scoops out at around # c, and saved the Empire a fortune on each launch. "How long is this going to last, Lapanthul?' ' "Pardon, Director?" (Since I'd ruled out 'sir', he'd found a substitute.) "Jagen is spiraling into Lekki."  Yes. #I "When do they touch?" "Several thousand more years, at least." "It seems odd that we -- the human race -- would come along at precisely the right moment to make use of this resource." Gharma laid his head onto a shoulder, the Veden gesture of acceptance. "Director, 'Each fresh day is a special case.' A saying from our rituals." "Urn." "Man is a fortunate being." "Uh huh."    When I reached home that evening, the orange luster of dusk was settling across the water. Flittering sounds of things in flight echoed from the lake. Spindly ferns clothed my home in brooding quiet. I remembered the assassin, then dismissed the thought. As I walked up the front ramp, I noticed a mark on the glass wall of the den, and beneath it a white bird lay sprawled in death on the patio. It was larger than a dove and had delicate striations of blue and pink over its neck. Evidently it had failed to see the glass and had flown straight into it, breaking its back. Patil admitted me and announced that dinner would be ready shortly. He mentioned the girl and I asked for her. She came into the den, padding softly on the thick rug. She was tall, a trifle thin, and wore a sansari of rough, durable green weave that set off her black hair. "I though I would ask you a few questions about the incident this afternoon," I said, my voice curiously stiff. She nodded. "Your name?" "Rhandra Minadras of the family Talin." "Why were you in the street? Were you shopping?" "No, I was searching employment. I was reared in the country, in agricultural arts. But recently I decided to come to Kalic and attempt something new. I thought the traditional shops would want unskilled labor." She spoke quickly but not with a sharp tone, and looked down at her feet occasionally. "You know the Lancers?" She hesitated, shy. Then she looked up at me and, seeing that I doubtless, the police had; I should've thought of that -- some of the spirit that twinkled behind her dark, restless eyes came forth. "I've heard of them, met a few. They say their 'demonstrations' are just sport, but I think not!" "Why?" "They're afraid. Afraid of the Quam and what might happen if they reach Veden." "Strange, for the young to fear so much." "Oh, no," Rhandra said, looking up in surprise, unselfconscious now, eyes widened, "they are the least in phase. They have not yet come to compromise with the strains of adolescence, or cultivated the old ways. I wouldn't expect them to be as secure as an older man." "Perhaps," I said, uncomfortably aware that I was an older man and felt blessed little inner peace of late. "There was never anything like them before, was there?" She shook her head, liquid hair rippling. "Not that I've heard. But I'm new to Kalic." Patil entered and announced dinner. I stood and felt a sudden twinge of soreness in my back, a reminder of the scuffle. "New? You have no lodging, then? Stay in my guest room until you find something suitable." She made the usual gestures of refusal, but eventually accepted. It was clear she had few plans. My reasons for making the offer were equally vague; I was attracted to her by some elusive chemistry not merely sexual. Rhandra excused herself for a moment to change into more formal dress. She appeared a moment later in something clinging, and walked over to the glass wall overlooking the patio. She stood looking at the mist drift in from the lake. Suddenly a large bird dropped down from the ferns on wide, powerful wings and glided by parallel to the house, peering in at us with electric yellow eyes. She jumped back, startled, and thumped against a wooden column. She gasped and abruptly began crying uncontrollably. I hesitated, awkward. Then I held her, comforted her. The sound she made, butting into the massive unyielding wood, reminded me of a bird smashing into a glass wall. It did not happen that evening, or the one thereafter, but there was a glacial momentum to the event that gradually made the expectation of it fill the air between us, like a thin fog through which we spoke. Once we recognized it, there was an odd tingling moment when we mutually agreed to burn away the mist and when it was done, we could say the things we'd both been thinking and our false uniforms -- mine particularly bulky -- fell away. It was amazing, a revelation, to act without thinking, to find that my old body, with its calluses, wrinkles, bony knobs and suet softenings, aging now -- the first signs were obvious -- could be fun again. In this there lay a betrayal of the spirit I felt the last nights on Earth, a dismissal of the smooth and solemn couplings Angela and I shared. There is a moment, in each life, I suppose, when you have passed your catechism and are free at last to believe or disbelieve -- it is only parents or society or God knows who else who Make The Rules -- and discover life once more, fresh, on your own. So I did. She made my body like a bauble again, a toy, a joy. No one had done that for me since Angela, a very long time. Nobody. Perhaps this is merely a confession that there are few great loves in a life (virtually all of us can make that confession, sad to say). Or perhaps it was the way Rhandra would look at me. (Kneeling on my bed in a moist tangle of sheets, arms at her side in the wash of yellow morning light, hands stretching as she awakened.) It was a look that opened up some new perspective for me, a fresh continent hanging in the air. It was the first time these doors had opened for her. (I know, there must've been a farmboy somewhere, and -- upon asking her -- it turned out there was. Or rather, several. But the difference was one of kind.) She and I explored these lands together, using the traditional tools -- a lusty, seemingly accidental liking for die same things, plus workable instincts and the familar gummy organs, full of their own self-wisdom. It filled me, drained nothing. No life-swallowing obsession, this: I worked, Rhandra found weaving and other crafts she'd always wanted to try, and life went on. A Commandant is allowed some latitude, socially (thus Jamilla, that first night). I used it. So in those first weeks I reworked myself, under our mutual alchemy, making a sagging bag of bones and brain and guts into a new instrument. Fleet is a political organism. It needs support among all client worlds. A traditional function of my position was to solidify such support. "You may be especially interested in this, sir," Gharma said blandly one morning, laying an engraved card on my bare desk. "It is an invitation from the First Bridge Society." "First Bridge? Odd name." "A very exclusive private club, Commandant. The original ramscoop that colonized Veden had a strict discipline system. Highestranking officers were from the first level of the flight-control bridge. The navigators. The club carries now the same connotation." He lowered his eyes. "The previous Commandant was a member." Ah. This was the first tentative feeler for the sort of social acquanitances a Director and Commandant was expected to make among the natives. "Decline it," I said, and cut off his startled reply. "I'm not interested." "Sir, it is virtually a tradition." "Here's where it stops being one." Majumbdahr, standing nearby, permitted himself a hint of a smile. And later implied, with a side comment, that the First Bridge types were dreadful bores. But I did attend a few handshaking fests, in part because Rhandra was a more outgoing creature than me and wanted to see the mysterious struttings of Kalic society. She even persuaded me to spend half a day at the Temple of the Madi, one of the more revered centers. The Madi turned out to be a heavy woman, her lips a glaring red gash among swelling hills of cheek caked with lemony powder. Her first salutation, "Director Sanjen, this is quite unexpected -- " ignored the simple fact that, were I unexpected, she wouldn't be there in ample robes to greet me. Their temple was imposing, a large dome like a sprouting bulb frozen as it popped from the ground. We entered beneath a sloping parabola of grained obsidian, which in turn served as fulcrum for an arc that spanned the lofty pink. After much talk of Kundalini, the vital serpent, the Madi took us on a tour of the schools. There were earnest lectures on conservation of the vital fluids; attempts to revive the lost Old India art of levitation; men who could pop steel bands wrapped around their chests; men who, it was advertised, could through will power and proper body control, raise the temperature of a room five degrees -- or lower it; people who spoke to hallucinations; men who lived, though buried alive for hours; women who whispered to tumbling copper balls and beads and made them leap and dance; a first-order Yogi who could stop his heart for two minutes; walkers on water. Some feats were startling, others looked like sly amateur magic. The more fantastic were not as advertised -- the water-walker was getting better at it and had performed for small select groups of believers before, but, uh, found his spiritual essence hampered by the presence of doubters. More to pass the time than anything else, I asked the Madi, "You believe Yoga can counter loss of phase?" "Perhaps, in time." She waved a silken handkerchief at the gnarled man, who was now beginning the ritual again. "But that is surely not the point. These things must be realized with the heart and spirit, not merely with the mind. It may take you a while to come to such knowledge." She made a pause. "Certainly, Director, we shall be prepared to help you." "Ah. Quite." "The Benagathaman is more than you might assume ," she said, smiling, "coming as you do from the... Monguls. We are an ageless movement. The original faith of the ancient Asia. Not the deformed faith you have known, Director. The difficulties I hear you and your comrades are finding with those aliens, the, the -- " "Quarn." "Yes, Quarn. I think it is simply a matter of the wrong spiritual avenue." "Urn. Perhaps." Rhandra and I lifted off into a brimming violet Lekki sunset, skipping the evening feast at the Temple and sundry other consolations of public religion. "You told me this would be a look at the faiths of Veden," I said to her in an accusing tone. "Uh... yes." "It was terrible." "Right," she said with a shrug of her shoulders, her wry smile apologizing for her countrymen. The sects in the dome were fairly recent offshoots of the traditional Hindic religious line. Their absorption in the cheap tricks of Yogi, in the pseudo-rationalization by which the beautiful parable of Kundalini's passage had been debased into exercises of the stomach muscles, and all the rest -- it was a falling back into the dark past, reliance on graven images and Gods, an abandonment of the peace and serenity of the Hindic society. They didn't know it, but these cults and the Lancers were symptoms. Hindic Veden was decaying. Because of the Quam? Possibly. When the disease is unknown, any symptom may be important. But perhaps Veden was simply going bad at the core, like the Empire itself. Fleet Control had an efficient rumor-mongering service and its results were duly logged into remote readout storage for use by the Director. Most of the information was worthless. But some reports spoke of a rise in crimes of violence that were hushed up by the close-knit Hindic family structure; the sudden influx of mentally disturbed cases in medical centers; a pattern of breakdown in the rural areas that caused the young to move into the cities. I peered out the plastiform bubble over our skimmer and watched lights wink on, bright sentinels against the reddening dusk. In the west of Kalic, the inexpensive homes, families were performing their ritual chants for solidarity before the serving of the evening meal. Properly rendered, it brought contentment and security without the dullness of orthodoxy or the weight of dogma. Without something -- rituals, the Sabal Game, wise ministering of the guru -- a man could slide into the weak fragmentation of the Plague. So went the conventional wisdom. Solidarity through ritual. Man's mind divided into three separate houses -- reptilian, lower animal, and cerebral cortex. Society had to govern each; the history of Earth had proven as much. Otherwise, there would be massive loss of phase. As I had lost it. Order was breaking down. Must empires always fall? Was there some fatal mechanism in man that hated permanence? I shook my head, raging against the night. Rhandra sat brooding in the seat next to me, her hair like rippling shadows. She had been disturbed by the Temple of Shiva as well. She came from simple rural origins and was breaking away, but it was clear the contorted Yogi was not her answer. I laughed inwardly to myself. Poor thing, she was just as confused as I. I reached over and held her hand and she smiled shyly at me in the darkness. We landed near my home, on a flat pad settled into the hill. Patil was waiting there with a message which had just been forwarded by the watch at Fleet Control. Quam had been sighted near Calning, the large colony only Fifty-three lights from Lekki. A scouting party was observed and fled into Jump space. It might be a preliminary for an attack on Calning. And it might not. The aliens had made feints before. But it did mean something. The Quam were striking further into the Empire's shrinking sphere. The sickness was worst at the contact points like Regeln. It spread along the Jump ship lanes, as I had guessed before. A ripple, its amplitude decreasing. But spreading, always spreading. Angela, Chark, Romana -- I saw them suddenly, mired in quicksand, reaching out, silent and beseeching, mouths awry -- They were secondary cases. They had gotten it from contact with humans, not through the Quam. They would take much longer. If indeed, I had left them only to die... I wrenched my thoughts away. And here... Veden, storage house. A link of the Empire, where Fleet served as accountant for the Member Worlds. Unexciting but vital. How could I protect against something as patternless as entropy itself? We wouldn't be safe much longer. So the days tumbled down. The worst times were the mornings, when I would rise with a dizzy reeling in my head. Nothing seemed to cure it. Inserting my shielding contacts filmed Veden in shimmering light and invariably lifted my spirits, but often only Rhandra's massaging of my neck muscles would steal the tension from me. When first I arose, I sensed a humming in the room, and several times dumbly pawed about the draperies, seeking its source, until logic penetrated and I realized it came from inside my head. Rhandra would follow my wanderings, dimples riding on the crest of her smile, and coax the first bit of breakfast lychee or somosha into me. She had a ritual joke: only the devotees of a small sect, the Falaquin, still practiced the ancient inponderable rite of ingesting natural alcohols, of the sort used before mankind knew how to remove the hangover-inducing effects -- was I attempting to enter the Falaquin Orders? And I would smile and shake my head and mutter that no, I'd been sipping no ancient mystifiers on the side, this was probably some adjustment to Veden that needed to run its course. Biospheres are never alike; Veden was not Earth. Centuries of terraforming had still left many differences, from a pink pollen that made my ears itch to an hypnotic femweed that I had to avoid. One particular day when my morning revival waxed long, Rhandra tugged me out of my routine and down to a sprawling arm of Old Kalic. It had been the navel of the continent, Baslin, in the first century of terraforming and colonization. It reeked of ancient ways, a Babylon, Sumer and Nineveh crouched along a mudstreaked river. Even at early hours the streets were a jumble of rickshaws, herds of panting water buffalo, camels straining under huge bundles, cows meandering. A gang of cortically augmented elephants shuffled in the dust, doing road work without human supervision. Along the river Brahmins and Sadhus and Hindics on pilgrimage were bathing in the river, wringing water from their oiled hair, praying rhythmically, brushing their teeth, doing Yoga exercises. Votaries danced, clacking. Temples lined the narrow twisting streets that smoked with dust. Rhandra and I took a creaky, shallow-bottomed boat along the river, hired from a brown man who scowled at us and flashed, when he thought we didn't see, angry white teeth. We glided silently. Corpses were being washed and put into the cremation flames, licking thick plumes of smoke rising from the pyres. Dogs and ravens poked at the charred remains. Effective visions, yes. Yet I knew teams plucked the bodies from the river downstream, cleaned the burning grounds, sprayed the area nightly. The animals were treated, freed of disease. All this, to blend the ancient with the present. There were sound sociometric calculations for each nuance. I pointed to clotted crowds on the far shore. "Big group." "A savant," Rhandra murmured. "Let's go." She frowned, studying the center of the crowd. "I think not..." "Why? I'm interested." I threw the tiller over and we swerved sidewise in the current. "No. Really, don't." "I'll only be a moment." We ran aground. I stepped off into the brown water. Pulled the boat up. Squished ashore. "Ling, come back." "Nonsense. Majumbdahr is always urging me to see more of -- " I said, turning, and was staring into the face of a big meaty man, centimeters away. "I have come to learn," I said. "You are not allowed." "Come, fellow." I started to walk around him. He blocked my way. A Commandant should always have respect for the ways of the world he defends. Still, something in this man's manner irritated me. There was something here I sought. "I came only to see," I said mildly . He didn't bother to reply. He simply shoved me. "Now..." I held up a hand. He pushed me again. I began to get angry. But he was a big man and he seemed fanatically intent, his eyes flinty black darting insects. I backed away. By all rights I could walk anywhere on Veden, as Fleet Commandant. But while training teaches you the rules, experience teaches the exceptions. I took Rhandra by the arm and waded back to the boat. The man stood stolidly at the shoreline, watching us pole out of sight. His riveting attention pricked at my intuition; I tried to see who was discoursing at the center of the crowd. The distance was too far. I could make out a murmuring voice, but no more. Imagine a river: flecked with foam, swirling and rushing, collector of oddments of debris, bits of dirt, crumbs of civilization. The Empire is thus. The random currents deposited their burden on Veden and departed, in each instant changing. The Jump ships, however much glamor is theirs, were only a fraction of the traffic that passed through the Flinger. Most of the Jump ships were engines of war. Merchants used the more modest ramscoops since they aren't supported by taxes from hundreds of worlds. Fleet Control dropped them through the Flinger at an average rate of one a day. As well, one incoming scoop per day had to be laser-guided through the last stages of deceleration and coaxed into a stable ellipse. That represents a numbing flux of information. I had to oversee a lot of it, make decisions about anything out of the ordinary. Although the scoops and Jump ships slingshotted regularly through the Flinger, very few of them ever sent anything down to Veden. There was no reason. Veden had few rare raw materials, no advanced technology, few cultural objects of interest to the predominantly Mongul Empire. We usually got a squirt of news or correspondence on high-frequency laser, and that was it. Usually. "What's this?" I asked Gharma one day. "The Chennung, Jump Class IV, is dropping a one-man flyer." "A moment," he said, thumbing a readout. "Yes. A replacement for the astronomical observatory." "Observatory? Where?" "On the other side of Veden." "There're only a few islands there." "Correct," Gharma murmured pedantically. "They have fewer signalnoise ratio troubles if they are shielded from us here." "Ah." I approved it and tapped it through to store-and-forward. "What're they watching? Optical work?' ' "No. Gravitational radiation." "Uh? Why?" "Lekki-Jagen." Radio waves are generated by electrons jiggling back and forth in a wire. Two masses, waltzing about each other, make gravitational waves at the frequency of their revolution. "The signal from Lekki-Jagen is big enough to measure?" I said wonderingly. "Incredible." "Gravitational radiation is an important energy loss. Eventually they will spiral into each other because of it." Gharma blinked at me owlishly. "How old was the astronomer who recently retired?" Gharma checked his readout. "The man died at age #." "Impressive. I'd heard you live longer here, because of the lighter gravity." "There are other causes for our good health," G harm a murmured with a slight smile. I chuckled. "What you really mean is that the helter-skelter of the Empire doesn't penetrate here, eh? And you're right. The social pressure-cooker on Earth probably cuts a decade or two from our lifespan. Maybe that accounts also for the higher spiritual state you Vedens have achieved." Gharma's smile changed a fraction as he saw that my words carried a touch of mocking. "That should be better judged by an outsider." He said judiciously. "Mere cliche sociology, I'm afraid. On Earth our introduction to the Sabal Game comes only after age twenty-five. Below that age physiology makes meditation and group perception difficult." "So that longevity assures enlightenment?" he asked somewhat stiffly. "But so many decades of playing a... game... does not boredom set in?" "No. No." Sudden sense of loss. I glanced at Gharma. "I don't believe it was boredom that drove me out." Gharma muttered something, perhaps embarrassed that he had triggered a sadness within me. "I wonder -- is Veden so different? Are there different paths open to me here? I -- " I broke it off, voice suddenly thick, and waved Gharma away. I thought for a while, my mind a muddle, and then pulled myself back into the workaday world around me. I leaned back and regarded the display screens. Again the idea swam up to consciousness -- why had we come along at this special time? This singular moment when Lekki-Jagen made an efficient Flinger, but before gravitational radiation bled them of energy and the two smashed together? There is a rule in astronomy, the Principle of Mediocrity. It says that our position in both space and time is more likely to be average than special -- simply because, unless there is evidence to the contrary, more intelligent races will be bom in average, mild conditions. There's an escape hatch, of course: the fact that we're here when the universe is caused by the time necessary to evolve intelligent life -- roughly, ten principle made me stop and wonder. The Flinger was almost too good to be true, a gold mine for the Empire. What were the chances that we'd blunder onto it and find a planet we could terraform nearby? Or were we like summer hikers in the forest, coming upon a feast picnic lunch all laid out, glasses brimming with sweet lemonade, but no picnickers? I shrugged. Things happen, that's all.    One morning, amid the buzzing in my head, I found faint memories of a dream. Of Angela, of the children, of the Slots. Were they there now? In the dream I walked down slimy halls with yellow gobbets streaking the walls. People were stacked like so many lumps of organic goo, to be tended and noted and, when they died, disposed of. When I found them, there were three holes together, each barely large enough to crawl in and crouch. I ran away. It isn't sleep that knits the raveled sleeve of care. It's work.    I set up regular training classes for the troops in riot control and internal security. The men responded well, glad to be acting again, but troubled (I suspected) at this first evidence of concern among Fleet Control. Jagen, the Black Dwarf, spun in tune. Veden was subject to a biennial coincidence between Lekki, Jagen and its moon; an enormous tide rose and smashed itself against the lowlands. Winds roared and Fleet Control buttoned up for three days. We evacuated a few thousand persons from the mountain peaks in the east of Baslin, where the gusts battered at three hundred klicks per hour. Over the next few months I received more reports of theft and beatings in the cities. Majumbdahr managed to penetrate some of the natural Hindic reserve in local officialdom against reporting such incidents, and thereafter we got a reasonably accurate picture of what was happening. The curve for small, random, purposeless crime had a steep positive slope. The rumor-mongering facility picked up more whispers about Quam spies, planned Quam landings, suspected neighbors, sightings of strange ships in the skies. Domestic issues came and went. Majumbdahr and Gharma handled them. I kept myself isolated, romped with Rhandra, seldom attended Official functions. The Madi called, sent invitations, implored me to visit the Temple of Shiva again, to follow the lessons they offered, to come to banquets and receptions. I was invited to join social clubs, attend concerts, clasp the moist palms of a hundred strangers. "If you don't want to go, ignore them," Rhandra said innocently, batting aside five centuries of Fleet tradition. So I did. Instead, we walked the streets of Kalic. I joshed with Krishna priests in yellow dhotis and shaved heads, able to see it all as social cement now, free at last of what the Game had meant to me. We flew through valleys crystalline with the sparkle of fresh rain, swooped over the leafy roof of jungle. We peered over the raw rock margin at the lowlands. They shimmered as though in mire, three kilometers down from the great mesa of Baslin. There were legendary beasts there, giants who sucked in the thick air and broke men like eggs. In the jungle we surprised something and, rather than retreat, followed the sounds of its thrashing. It was a scorpion, two meters long with a curled stinger like a deer horn. It could run as fast as a horse. I shot to the side of it three times and then had to put a bolt into the scampering legs. Rhandra took a long time getting to sleep that evening.    And always at my back, like a murmur in the distance you can't resolve into coherent words, were the Quam. They were deft. When Fleet computers war-gamed a probable assault on a given star, dozens of ships would mass and wait. The Quam hit elsewhere. The solution seemed obvious: the vast computer minds were operating on false premises. They thought in terms of feints and shifts, subtle balances of power and advantage. They assigned points to men and ships, solved endless integral equations to assess the economic implications of a given loss. Clearly, the Quam did not think that way. The sickness spread along the most-traveled Jump lanes, but it also struck isolated worlds. Could a few Quam infiltrate such planets and have a determining effect? They were near now. Four months after the sortie against Calning the same scenario I had seen on Regeln went through its grinding logic again. Communication winked out. By now Fleet sent no expeditions to rescue survivors. They had learned enough, I suppose. Over the next few months two more colonies fell in much the same manner. Fleet subspace transmissions mentioned them a few times, at first with alarm and then subtly skirting the issue. Then they were gone. We were advised to not speak of these planets again. In Fleet engagements two of our Jump ships were lost to unknown causes. They simply vanished, ceased transmission. Four Quam ships were observed to self-destruct to avoid capture. After all this time we still knew next to nothing about the Quam. Analysis showed that they had a tolerance to acceleration about the same as men -- assuming the ships were not automatic. They reacted occasionally to laser signals tuned to infrared frequencies. Their ships bore no distinguishable markings. Somehow this gradually diffused into the Veden population. The informant network picked it up as rumors, then as commonly accepted knowledge. There were a few incidents of arson and ridicule of police. Political parties that had been dormant formed again. Vegetarian cults, merchants' parties, groups in favor of breaking free of the Empire; they gained members and published newsfax. The prominent parties demanded to know what defenses had been readied for use against the Quam. When I first heard this, I laughed -- did they think anything would stop the Quam? But gestures were necessary. I sent more sensors out on long orbit to the edge of the Lekki-Jagen solar system. The few thermonuclear warheads I had were readied and encased in shells with high-power ionic boosters. I saturated the volume of space around Veden with close-orbiting scoopships waiting to be purchased; they would provide a good screen for orbiting missiles. Still, I could only hope to stop a few Quam ships. The Regeln pattern, though, called for no formal invasion at all. The colonists on Regeln had been disarmed by the Plague. Their defenses had done them no good. I brooded. Things went on as before, I buried myself in routine. Was it deceptive? The chants of the priests sang in my mind, lulled me. Two months later the first Plague case was diagnosed on Veden. It was a man in Kalic of weak religious background and few family ties. He did not respond to treatment. Rhandra, at my feet -- with the sweet, silent rhetoric of her deep eyes -- and Majumbdahr; both regarded me quizzically. "Ling, what you're saying is, well, interesting..." she began, "but I don't see the point." "Why?" "Societies like this, ours -- " with an arm she swept in all Veden outside our living room -- "this is the way they are." "And always have been?" I prompted. "Yes," she said. "That's why we have such links to the past." "Even though we're parsecs removed from Old India." "I agree with her, Commandant." "Call me Ling; this isn't working hours. But Rhandra, how do you think we got here?" "Ramscoops," she said confidently. "Innovation. Generally, human societies aren't responsive to new ideas. They're hierarchical and ritualistic -- like Veden. But every so often the neocortex takes over and rides the horse of, well, progress." "Progress is an illusion," Majumbdahr said quietly. "Spritually, maybe so," I said impatiently. "But there are things we know. That the oldest part of our forebrains have elements in common with the reptiles. That above the reptile portion lies a limbic system, where our emotions are primarily lodged. And spreading over all that like a capstone is the neocortex. Three brains at war in one skull." "Why in conflict?" Rhandra murmured. She curled delicate feet under her, into the soft piles of the rug. "Evolution proceeds by addition," Majumbdahr said to her, somewhat diffidently, I thought -- because she was the Commandant's woman? "Ritualistic and hierarchical, we are, yes. "Each major step in brain evolution was superimposed on the older brain, which probably didn't like the idea." "I still don't understand what that has to do with rightand lefthandedness," Rhandra said. "Our intuition seems lodged in the right hemisphere of the brain," I said. "Verbal and mathematical ability is in the left hemisphere. But the left hemisphere controls the right hand -- which is why most humans are right-handed. A lot of mental illnesses -- not loss of Phase, the more drastic ones, like schizophrenia -- are caused by dominance of the right hemisphere and lack of coordination between the two. We -- " "Ling," Rhandra said softly, "forgive me, but I do not think this is the most productive way to ease into these things. They are not of the essence." I grimaced at her. "What is?" "You miss the Sabal, Ling. It is written all over your face at this moment." I sighed, glanced up through the skylight. Veden's moon was mired in cloud, a gray ghost. "Yes. Yes, I do." It sounded strangely like a confession of inadequacy. "There remain spiritual avenues open to you... Ling," Majumbdahr murmured quietly. I slapped my knee, stood up. "Yeah, I know. Let me be clasped to the bosom of Krishna, right?" I paced the room, whirled on them. "But we must first understand, damn it! These ideas aren't only mine -- I got them from the research being done on the Plague victims on Earth. The Quam seem to probe deep into those three warring brains, to reach back into that limbic system we have in common with the nonprimate mammals." Majumbdahr spread his hands, a let's-be-reasonable gesture. "Then we must use our own wisdom to counter them. These facets -- the tribrain, the left-right conflict -- were resolved by Phase. That is its role." "But it doesn't work." "So far. Mankind is not finished." "Ling," Rhandra said, "I believe your... disquiet... can be resolved by study of our ways here on Veden." "They don't work, either. Read the reports." Of late I had rummaged through Fleet retrieval codes in search of ideas about the Quam, psychoanalytic research, anything. There were no solutions, only clues. Quam victims showed excesses of certain natural small brain proteins such as endorphins. One clearly repressed atropine, and we had known for centuries that atropine induced the illusion of flying. Did suppressing atropine, coupled with other reactions, induce fear of open places? So far the riddle was unsolved. More important, how was this done? The restrictions on human brain alteration which the Covenants laid down six centuries ago had blotted out our knowledge of such matters; now we needed it desperately. So I had begun to comb the files and make my own tinkertoy models, rummaging, searching... "I believe Rhandra is correct, Ling," Majumbdahr said, pulling my attention back to the conversation. "There are some savants..." and he chimed in with Rhandra, both urging me gently, as friends do, to release some of the tension and dawning anxiety I felt. "Maybe you're right," I said to them, suddenly tired. "I'll think about it." I looked up. The moon had ripped its shroud and now swam free.    The difference between a conviction and a prejudice is that you can explain a conviction without getting angry. This is a dead giveaway in negotiations; if your opponent flares his nostrils unconsciously before speaking, he probably isn't going to abide by any compromise settlement. The case in point was the outer tribes, the jawarls. The people of Kalic termed them tribes because they followed a more martial Hindic tradition, practiced combat Yoga and invoked obscure, many-armed gods. The jawarls decided that Plague victims were a visitation of the evil Thingness, and this implied, as the night the day, that such people were better dead. We first learned of these interesting opinions when three jawarlblessed teams broke into a hospital, killed five Plague cases and a nurse, and barricaded themselves in a wing. The Kalic officials dithered. I moved up Fleet troops. The jawarls killed the remaining two Plague cases and pitched their ritually dissected bodies into the street. The Kalic officials were greatly offended and went away to meditate on a solution. I had selected my men for their marksmanship, not their bravery; if you have enough of the former, you don't need the latter. I left Gharma in charge of the front. I took some men around the back, thinking the jawarls might sneak out that way. The jawarls were hard fighters but I thought we could face them down. We waited. Firing came from the front. Small arms. When I got there, jawarls lay around the hospital doors. Blood seeped from their blackened wounds. "What happened?" I asked Gharma. "They came out." "You gave warning?" "Some." "Damn it, you were well concealed. You could've parleyed." "They were armed. They ignored my first challenge." "And the second?" "I firedli warning bolt." "Oh, neat. Very neat. So they panicked." "The onus lies upon them," Gharma said stiffly. "You should've been more careful." "They were country men. They do not acknowledge your Fleet niceties." "You made damned sure they wouldn't." "I feel I was justified." Majumbdahr approached and saw the carnage. He shook his head, his mouth a thin line. I looked at Gharma. He knew full well that Fleet regs would uphold his decision. Behind his icy manner was a smug certainty. I snorted wearily and turned away. We lifted out in a twenty-copter force then, and caught the council of jawarl elders at their daily Dance of Self, their tea bowls still steaming. Such people are either at your throat or at your feet; this time the negotiations went well.    That evening it came again. I jerked awake. Rhandra nuzzled against my shoulder, a thigh atop mine. Outside the night was still. The dream returned. The chaplain came to her Slot. He was a hospital employee. He administered the last rites and rubber-stamped that fact on a card. The nurse closed Angela's eyes and called the orderlies. He witnessed the temporary death certificate, filled in the Release of Personal Belongings form. The body was washed, plugged, trussed, wrapped in thin sheets -- we are neat here -- and labeled. At the morgue the attendant loaded the body onto his rolling stretcher, waited for an empty drop tube, and then took it to the morgue icebox in the basement: last transport for unwanted goods. The autopsy was brief; the machine found nothing unusual. I sat outside while she was drained, embalmed, waxed, rouged, shaved, dressed, made ready. Two possible ends: a quick, crisp incineration, then bones into a ceremonial um. Or, at vast expense, a precious rectangle of earth, a machine chuffing as it lowered her in. Then the dead children, of course. More units passing from the Slots. Through the labyrinth. No metaphysical mystery, no call from the divine. By the time people had reached the close-packed Slots, you just let them go. The new ethics: Thou Shalt Not Kill, but thou may allow to die if... I woke. I rose, paced, sweated. Rhandra stirred and then drifted back into sleep's gray peace. I moved ghostlike through the shadowed living room. Some of my familiar morning nausea howled in my head. I massaged my neck to clear my thoughts. Rhandra or no, I was not quit of Angela. Did I still love her? Impossible to say. After a while emotions are like old shoes; you forget you have them on. Do dreams of death, transposed, mean dreams of love? A question I had scribbled on my soul and could not now lightly rub out. The copters buzzed all around us, ringing the area. I lumbered away from mine. A thick acrid stench of burning buildings drifted down the broad street. It seeped in through my suit filters. Sirens wailed; they were coming this way. "Majumbdahr!" I called. He came trotting over. "What happened to that sleeper gas?" "Ordnance couldn't locate any more," he puffed. "They used the last of it an hour ago. It didn't stop them. " I ground my teeth. No time to have a batch made up; I wasn't even sure there was a chemist in Kalic who knew the process. "Form up the men you have. They still carry anamorphine?" "Yes, most of them." He nodded slowly, dazed with fatigue. "Gharma said the Lancers were slowing down." "I think they are," Majumbdahr said. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision. Smoke drifted across and paled Lekki's great eye. "They've been going for six hours. Our men are sagging, too." "This should be the last of it, then, for a while," I said and saluted. Another copter decked with a whine behind me. Gharma jumped out. "It's dying down elsewhere, sir," he reported. "About time." I'd followed the riot from Fleet Control since morning until I couldn't stand to be inside any longer. It was good to be out in die field and get the taste of things. Troops formed up in a line across the street. The muted bass of the crowd deepened. "It's hard to understand," I said, looking at the thin column moving up. "Only a month since the first Plague victim." "How does it go in most cases?" Gharma asked. "All I know is what I saw on Earth," I said, trying to shrug in my suit. The constant-volume joints impaired me. "It wasn't anything like this. People simply waited. Sometimes they died. They didn't turn out into the streets, bum and loot." "They had more phase, on Earth?" "I don't know. I wouldn't have guessed it. There's something peculiar about the Veden personality. They seem to be coming out from under some inhibition at last and the pressure is blowing the top off." "The old ways are not enough," Gharma said flatly. "Why? Why should they fail now?" "It is a crisis point," he said. "The order we had is lost." I looked at him closely. Behind his plastiform face-shield his skin was polished walnut. " You say that? You, believer in formalized religion?'" "Formalized, yes. Perhaps dead as well. When something is finished, you cast it aside; We need a new social ordering here, a new dedication." Two blocks down the mob swept around a comer and flowed into the street. Tinkling of glass. Roughedged cry of frustration. I glanced at Gharma. What did he mean? How could he watch his world dissolve so calmly? He looked content. Almost smug. The mob streamed toward us. I licked away a salty tang of sweat. My contact filters stung my eyelids when I blinked; I'd been wearing them too much, indoors and out. I could feel the hollow drumming of a thousand running feet. Fifty meters in front of me the mob bore down on the line of troops. Most of the Lancers seemed young. They grinned. When they were within a few meters of the line, my troops fired a volley of darts and some went down, drugged with anamorphine . A canister of homemade gas blossomed in our line and blew away. Most of the crowd's rush halted but here and there they broke through. Our line wavered. Men fell. The mob caught the smell of victory. I suddenly realized I was exposed. A knot of Lancers dashed by me. Gharma was cut off to the left with a squad. I unhooked my sidearm. Majumbdahr shouted orders over the suit radio that echoed in my helmet. Three Lancers converged on me. I took ready position. One carried a chain wrapped around his wrist; no worry there. The other two had cobblestones from the old district and one flashed a knife. All relatively useless against body armor. They came at me together in a rush. I brought the tube of my gun down viciously, chopping the first Lancer's arm. The man dropped his knife with a gasp of pain. I stepped to the left and took a blow on my back armor that rattled my teeth. The chain whipped around my helmet with a crash and partially obscured my field of vision. I crouched and fired two darts. They made an angry splatting sound. Thumb over to extra-strong anamorphine. Lancer moving in; focus on him. Fire. Miss. Fire again. He caught it in the groin. Staggered away, collapsed. One left, now. Turn -- where is he? A bottle bounced off my arm and shattered on the sidewalk. I heard the whistle of the chain again. Duck. It missed. He felt the wind, as my instructor used to say. This time I caught the Lancer before he could back away. I cracked the gun tube across his kneecap. He almost fell on the bottle shards but managed to roll to one side. I blinked sweat out of my eyes. Hot. People all around me. Expand attention out, watch for an attack. A man appeared from nowhere and threw a cobblestone. It hit my solar plexus. My armor rang. I thrust out with the gun tube. The Lancer brought a stick around and parried neatly. He backed away, glancing to the sides for support. I raised the muzzle of the gun. He danced to the side at just the right instant and the dart whizzed past him. The Lancer threw his pipe and ran. I ducked, fired, missed again. He dodged behind Majumbdahr, who was coming to help me. The crowd was falling back. My troops let out a thin cheer and started to reform . "You all right?" Majumbdahr panted. "Sure," I grinned at him. "Those fellows can certainly be offensive, though, can't they?" We met in a restaurant in Old Town. Majumbdahr and Gharma had shown surprise when I told them they'd find me there, but I was bored with the stiffness of my official offices, and after the riots I needed a quietness. Men in severe robes milled around the entrance as I went in, chattering, comparing notes, pointing at the black fingers twining through the sky from stillsmouldering fires. Majumbdahr and Gharma were already there, waiting at a cloistered table in the back. "You've recovered from the brawl, then?" Majumbdahr said as I sat down. "Still hurts down my back," I said. "It'll be sore tomorrow. Stupid to get caught out like that. I should've been up in a copter. How about you two?" Gharma lifted a steaming fork of food and made a face. "Elementary violence I can usually overcome. The hot Pindang Kol in this restaurant is trying to even the score.""Pretty bad," Majumbdahr agreed, putting down his fork. "I'm glad I wasn't very hungry." He looked up at me. "Order something for you, sir?" "Later. I finished my report on the copter coming over here. I thought Old Town would relax me, restore some balance. I won't have the report transmitted to Fleet Central on Earth until I've had a chance to go over it again." "It must be rather difficult to compose," Majumbdahr said. I sighed. "Rather. It's not easy to admit you're losing control of the situation." "Couldn't you... in the writing... soften the impact?" Gharma said. "Perhaps it's not building as swiftly as we think -- " "No. Half-truths are dangerous; sooner or later you might inadvertently tell the wrong half." "I agree," Majumbdahr said, hunching down with his elbows on the table. "Fleet has the right to hear it all, straight." "Especially since this form of the sickness is new," I added. "There has never been violence like this before. I've asked some psychers; they don't understand it. It is out of the pattern." Gharma nodded, his face grim. "How is the building going?" I said to Majumbdahr. "On schedule. The hospital space can be supplied by preform construction units, easily deployed. The only holdup was in the blueprints." "Blueprints for hospitals? I thought they were standard." "I checked standing orders and then asked Central on Earth. They want us to build close-packed Slots." I stared at him for a long moment. "I should've been told. What did you do?" "Called in a civilian. Used ordinary hospital prints." "Good. You're legally in the clear. Local commanders can make such changes, as long as there aren't too many of them." Majumbdahr had sensed my mood well. I hated the cramped Slots and all the memories they brought back. "I think it was a wise decision for several reasons," Gharma said. "The. psychological impact on the people would be great." "Yes," I said, "when you begin building those kind of Slots you've admitted it's over, you've given up." "Well, I give up on the Pindang Kol," Gharma said, pushing his plate away. "I'll eat elsewhere." He smiled wanly. The things we had left unspoken layered the air. They knew as well as I that a judgement of incompetence against a Fleet Director -- that is, me -- would not neglect the Executive Officers immediately below him. If I went I might well take Majumbdahr and Gharma with me. "Do you think we should stop the building of rural retreats, sir?" Majumbdahr said. "No. Move as many as possible out of Kalic and into the retreats. You've said before" -- I glanced at Gharma " -- that Vedens are country folk. Maybe they'll snap out of it if we get enough out of the cities." "Is there any correlation in the background of the rioters?" Gharma asked. "No, none." I looked down at the table and felt a wave of defeat wash over me. "Some are from the city, others fresh of the forests. No religious similarities. Widely varying income levels and education. The only thing they have in common is that this morning they finally got fed up with, it all and started burning or hitting a policeman or just running down the street." "Berserkers," Majumbdahr rubbed his hands together, thinking. "What?" "Berserkers. In ancient times the natives of the Norse lands on Earth had a ritual way to break free of society. Small deviations from the conventional weren't permitted -- " he smiled at Gharma -- "but if the pressure got to be too much, a man could run berserk and no one bothered him. He could go mad until he felt ready to return to his life." "You're implying that's what happened here today?" I said. "Perhaps. I don't know. What set them off, why all at once?" "It's not my field," I said, shaking my head. "Too much for one day." Gharma: "Sir..." "Yes?" "There have been reports..." "Of a new sect, the Lengen," Majumbdahr finished. "Gharma and I saw some mention of them in one of the surveys you ordered. We think you should see them." "Look," I said, blinking wearily, "I've gotten blessed little help so far. There are a thousand cultists on every square block in this city. I seem to have met every one of them. If there's nothing special -- " "Ah, I think there is," Gharma said seriously. "There is something strange -- but you should see for yourself, sir." "They maintain a compound on the border of the jungle, in the farm districts," Majumbdahr said. I considered. I was tired, but underneath it I felt an odd unease, a need to act. "I'll go." I glanced out a thin window nearby. "It will be good to escape Kalic, to get outdoors again... 'Outdoors' -- a queer word, isn't it? Arrogant. As if the universe were defined by what lies outside the places where we live... "Rambling, rambling, skittering on a high wire above the abyss. I jerked myself back to the present. "Dusk is falling. Should we be going now?" "Yes, I'll go call a copter. One can pick us up a few blocks from here," Majumbdahr said. "Delay a bit," Gharma said. "I thought I would check in with Control first, sir. I should stay in the city. It would probably be best if one of us was on duty in case -- " "Yes," I said. "Go with Majumbdahr and get an all-points report for me before we leave. I can review it in the copter. Majumbdahr and I will go out alone." Majumbdahr got up, threw a few coins on the table. They rang softly in the still velvet closeness. Gharma rose, saluted a trifle formally, and followed Majumbdahr out. This last gesture was typical of Gharma. Through these months the three of us had become friends, but I felt much closer to Majumbdahr. His spontaneity often broke through the officer's crust. But in Gharma I still detected an undercurrent of reserve and cool assessment. I decided to eat while I waited. The copter could wait. I would need the energy. And of course it was one way to demonstrate to my two executive officers that, friends or no, they would still wait at my leave. I ordered the Pindang Kol and a biryani, Pindang Kol turned out to be a broth of cabbage and root vegetables, salty and thick. It was terrible.    We swooped down into a blotch of pale orange light. The Lengen compound swam in a sea of black, humid jungle. Phosphors picked out forests of tents pitched for pilgrims, cooking-platform areas of rough stone, ricks for meditation. In the center billowed a yellow tent. We banked toward it and set down in a clearing beaten clean by foot traffic. "How can you be sure we'll be granted an audience?" I shouted to Majumbdahr. "I called ahead. They realize you have little time." As we stepped off onto Veden soil still cooling from the heat of the day, a small man rushed out of the crowd gathered around our official copter. "Director Sanjen!" he cried. "I have been sent to guide you to the Master." The man was dressed in cheap robes. Most of the people standing and watching were poor, farmer class, or had renounced material things to follow the Lengen. I nodded and we walked to the large tent. The crowd parted as we approached. I couldn't help comparing this with the behavior of the mobs I'd faced earlier in the day. The tent was more complex than it looked. A maze of rooms kept groups of pilgrims separated and allowed the priests, clad in deep blue robes, to move in and out without disturbing meditations and rituals. We were ushered into a warm little hexagonal room bounded by rich folds of cloth. We sat lotus fashion before two place settings of many bowls, plates and tumblers. There were eating sticks from several cultures, lacquered spatulas and shallow canisters. I wondered what this was all about. The quietness stole into the center of my tenseness, though; I decided to wait it out. Presently a low woodwind tone sounded in the still air. A tall man walked slowly to the center of the room. His green robes covered him entirely with only a shadowed triangular slit for eyes and mouth. I could see nothing of his expression. "Finally you come here." The voice was deep and rich with an odd inflection. I pressed my hands together in greeting. "I -- " "Begin ritual. Silence. Attention." He produced a bowl and began pouring a thin liquid into the cups before Majumbdahr and me. A priest appeared bearing foods that steamed in the cool night air. We began preparing the food. It was to be ladled into the proper bowls, mixed in precise proportions, arranged and ordered. After a few moments I noticed a rhythm to the procession of plates and odors. Salt of fishes. Tang from ripe fruit. Rough feel of the broadcloth napkins. It was warm and soothing. I relaxed and my senses flowed out. I looked down on myself as I floated in a corner of the tent. Feeling all, knowing nothing. There was a sudden glaring light. I wept. And I was there.    Labels, you see, are meaningless. Worse, they're distracting. Within a breath of time I focused on the exercises. My mind stilled. I did not think of how surprising this was, of how my present state resembled something I had known, in the past but only achieved then by months of contemplation. I didn't consider any of these things. I simply was... Let us regard the waters in their ways... An hour passed, or perhaps a moment. In pursuit Of infinity Lose the way Thus: serenity. "First form," the Master said. "You see." He leaned toward me from his lotus position. Bells tinkled. "First ally the mind. Cannot find its own... outside." He made something like a laugh. "This is done by not thinking various things, one after another." "Unconditional nature?" I asked. "Part. Is only part. Beginning." I sat. The world formed, clouded, spun away. After a time of absence I returned to my place and focused once more on die eating ritual. Gradually it released its hold. I was coming back to the world. But not the world I had left. Now I had a place within it. -- Let the waters, in their ways -- We moved away from the large tent, the Ashram, place of wisdom study. I walked slowly and felt the pleasant crunch of broken ground (glass?) beneath my feet. One thing at a time. Focus. The Master, I noticed, was very tall. Seven feet, perhaps more. Low gravity? Focus, focus. Majumbdahr and I lifted off and climbed swiftly. "You've made great progress, I believe, sir," he said. I felt a comradeship with him. He had not reached this state but he had pointed the way. He was a very good friend. There would be others, too, who were close. Community. We slipped through the winds toward Kalic: winking lights scattered jewels upon a rug. I thought of glass. A glass wall. A bird lying beside a glass wall. Rhandra moved coquettishly on me, a smiling imp. The oils on our bodies gave eveiy caress a tingling aftermemory of sensation. Her oiled muscles rippled, coaxing me. We both knew it was no use; I was finished for that morning, energies spent. She made a sign, a joke. Crude country humor. I laughed. A few feet away, beyond the glass patio partition, wingmice and a jawbird pecked at remains of breakfast. We were lying on a broad cushion, she astride. Lekki had just peeped over the afterbeam of the house. I was glad I'd put in my contact filters. I winked at her. We had so much to say -- The phone chimed. She lifted a leg and rolled off. I got up slowly, reluctant to leave. A button on the phone glowed red, emergency pattern, so I hurried. "Good morning, sir," Gharma's voice, tense. "I've put Fleet Control on emergency alert status. A sensor drone has just registered two blips out of Jump space, unscheduled." "How far?" "Just beyond the edge of the planetary system. Doppler shows they're massing into Veden orbit, fast." "Got a mass reading yet?" "Yes, just came in. Usual ship size. Something else, too... well, I'll check that later. Could be a mistake. But the two ships come in clearly." "I'll be there," I said. I took my leave of Rhandra and masked my concern with irritation. Irritation at the stack of work that the sightings promised, at the delay, the stupidity of doing a job I didn't give a damn about when I wanted to be with Rhandra, to go back to the Lengen compound. I took a copter to Fleet Control. Conversations trailed off into silence as I marched through the front offices. Everyone knew. The news was in the gossip mill by now. It was much as Gharma had said. I watched the flickering readout from the mass detector silently. "You have all the scoop orbits logged into our ballistic programs, don't you?" I asked Majumbdahr. "Of course." "Start plotting intersection orbits for them. If those two ships keep coming, we can probably catch them in the backwash from the ramscoops." "I don't think that would be wise, sir," Gharma pointed out. "The scoops won't start smoothly with merely the orbital velocities they have now. The .intruders will have ample warning." I looked steadily at him. "Okay. Use the scoop maneuvering rockets to alter their orbits and bring them in close to the bogies. Then blow them up." ' A fusion explosion?" I nodded. "It may work. I'll log it in." I smiled at him wryly. "Don't wony about the expense. I'm sure Fleet will stand the cost of a few scoops." "What are they, sir?" Majumbdahr asked. "Quam." For the next few hours I watched the small dots drop steadily in toward the Lekki-Jagen system. Normal Fleet operations continued; a few colonies bought raw materials, organ replacements, sophisticated technology or rare metals that they'd need a century from now; the appropriate ramscoops were cut out from the herd and dropped toward the Flinger. When they reached the rim of the system, the scoops would flare into star-bound white gems. The computers spun silently, guiding and totaling the transactions of interstellar finance, transfeiing marks in one account to similar squiggles in another. I waited, watched, pondered. In the afternoon reports , came in about small incidents in Kalic and the provincial cities; arson, random destruction. The hospitals were filling with Plague victims. The only good point the Slots had was that they were easy to build; decent facilities took longer. A Fleet communique arrived questioning the holdup in Slot construction; I told my staff to throw it away. Fleet also bothered us for more news about the intruders. Any unusual maneuvers? Spectral distribution of torch? Any transmissions, attempts at contact? I sent answers and some questions of my own. When were they going to send me some Jump ships? How many wings were within striking distance? What was my priority? I got back equivocating longwinded replies. Even if they were Quam, two ships weren't all that many, were they? Fleet had numerous responsibilities, I must remember. Ships were available, yes, but only for verified Quam incursions. These were difficult times. Meanwhile, keep us informed. "Gharma reporting, sir." His image appeared on a screen beside the main display in my command module. "I've been tracing down something I noticed earlier. We thought it was a mistake, but it holds up under several cross-checks of the equipment." "Something on the mass detector?" I asked. "Yes. It's coming in normal to the ecliptic plane. Under ordinary scanning operations it probably wouldn't be noticed." "What is it?" "That's the problem," he said, and looked a little uncertain. "We get a strong signal, but the object is fairly far out. Or we think it is." "Think?" The main screen showed crosshatching: readout from the detectors. The two intruders were clearly visible. Far above the ecliptic plane, almost off the screen, was a small fleck. It was rust-red and the computer-printed grid lines warped around it tightly. "Appears to have high mass," I said. "We estimate point seven solar masses," Gharma said. "But optically we can't find a thing out there. Personally, I think it's an error. The detectors are just barely able to pick it up. They could be off quite a bit on the mass." "Doppler?" "That's wrong, too. Very high, positive." I shook my head. "Keep watching it. Let me know if anything changes. But don't waste time -- I want to know what those other two are doing." I didn't have long to wait. At # hours they reversed torch and started slowing down. They skimmed along a path tantalizingly beyond reach of the ramscoops. Were they taunting us, making fun of our defenses? I was sure they were Quam. An hour later the spectral data came through. There were bright lines from fusion torches, typically Quam. I squirted Fleet a report. The report on yesterday's riots went with it, but I didn't wait to get a reaction from the superc channel. I had better things to do.    Rhandra met me on the balcony of my house before I'd shucked free of the Fleet boots I still wore. I had spoken to her of the Master, and now I asked her to go with me. She looked at me shyly. "I know him." "Huh? How?" Focus. "I have, for over a year." "Why didn't you tell me?" "It was not time. The Master asked me not to speak of it to you." "He... ?" I stopped, confused. "I was a convert. Many of us are." "Us?" "Majumbdahr. It was he who suggested I stay on with you. He knew better than I your inner nature." "I gathered you were here of your own free will," I said. "I am," Rhandra said in blankfaced surprise. "Oh, I am. Now. But then, I was uncertain. The Master had sent me to the city to observe, to study. When I fell in the street, and you found me, I was confused. The Lancers..." "And Majumbdahr told you to stay on with me?" "Yes. He knew of the Master and recognized me as a follower. ' ' "Ah." "No," she said, reaching out, "you mistake things. We hid nothing from you." "Oh?" "We did not think you ready. We waited until your nature seemed changed, away from the grim side you showed us when you first arrived." "What... what is the Master to you?" "An answer. A partial answer, as all answers must be." She looked at me with a simple and open earnestness, so freely given I had to accept it. There was none of the coyness I saw when we played together, none of the selfless concentration when she worked at her weaving, none of the ordinary faces of Rhandra I had come to know. Any woman worth knowing has more facets to reflect the light than a gemstone, more than one can see in a lifetime. She took my hand. "He is a man of the farms and the jungles, speaking of the times that surround us. He senses the unease in Veden." "Don't we all." "You are not angry that Majumbdahr and I waited? We wanted the rightful moment to come." "But it was Gharma, as I recall, who first mentioned the Lengen." "He is a follower as well." "He is?" "Why, yes." "He seems rather a different sort, to me." "We are all different. Ling, but the Way is the same." I snorted. My face tightened at her jargon of enlightenment. "Do you remember the day we boated on the river?" she asked softly, leaning beside me against the railings. Below us a wingfox scrabbled among stones, searching for tidbits that might have fallen from the balcony. "Vaguely. There was some incident." "A follower of the Master rebuffed you. He knew me; that was done at my signal." "Why?" I blurted, startled. "The Master had told me it was not timeful for you to see him. It is his way." She paused. "I did not mean for the man to be so... rough." I waved this point away. "No trouble. I had the sense to back down." "Yes." "Look -- are many of my Fleet officers also followers of the Master?" "Some, I believe. Not many are interested in the true roots of the spirit, Gharma says." I sighed, suddenly tired. "Uh huh." "You are... the anger has leached from you?" What could I do? I reached out and drew her to me.    We both saw the Master that evening. We thronged the gathering grounds beside the Ashram, amid hundreds awaiting an audience. A functionary spotted me and ushered us inside. The rooms of cloth were layered with the smell of wax and incense, and a smoky murmur filled the air from the crowds outside. Shortly we were led to the hexagonal room of the Master again, and we sat, and we learned. Rhandra knew the rituals well. The Master was gentle, coaxing the responses where I faltered. Clicking of implements, flicker of candles. The lights quickened. I felt a tingling, a humming. The pressure of the floor matting lessened. Lights rippled, danced. I was moving, moving, but... There were screens -- metal? plastic? -- flicking light at me. Suddenly, no sound. No grainy pressure of floor mat on ankles. Lifting. I dropped down the long smooth tube, a telescope. Rhandra swam with me, a warm molecular bed of cellular wisdom, receptive, and I saw that she was a shadowed inlet of rest, precisely what I needed when first we met. If there was an order in things, it was here. And in such a harmony an ofkaipan could attain communion... waxy, thick air... How does a man feel community and gain sense of phase when he knows he is despised? He cannot enter into the Sabal fully. He might think so, struggle a lifetime to convince himself. But the grip would not be sure. The Plague was designed for the Mongul empire. It spread through the Game. I saw now that I had always kept a part of myself separate. And the Plague had brushed by me. Something did not click, and though I suffered the loss of phase for a while, I recovered. I escaped because I was a man distant from the center. Tonji... his ambition seemed to have protected him. Perhaps to him Sabal had been a mere formalism all along. Angela and the children... they must've believed more than I. Were they now fallen? I felt a sudden spurt of joy. I was free. I could be anything I wanted. My strainings to fit with the Monguls had failed by some thin margin. A margin which saved me. After a long and lofting time we returned, together. The Master sat upright, the fall of his ruby robes outlining thin legs and knobby knees. There was a faint musty odor to him and a cowl hid his face. What sort of man was this, to lead me so well, to know what I was? Long, delicate fingers in blue gloves plucked the implements from their stations and set them aside. "Nature satisfied," he said, deep bass. "Are many levels. One step, then two. Break" -- he reached up and made a quick snapping motion -- "then grows." He cocked his head over to lie on his shoulder in the Hindic gesture of questioning. The air swarmed with leaping motes, dust cycloning in a cool draft. At the edge of my eyes the world shimmered, fresh. "Let us regard the waters in their lapping, their rising, and be swallowed by them." I was humming, skittering in a high new place, the world crackling with brimming energy. When we left the Master, I surged forward through the crowds, alive to my own momentum. I called in to Fleet Control, using my copter phone. I saluted Majumbdahr warmly; there was no substantial news. "Sir..." he said, and I saw at once he knew what had happened, and that the old Ling was shucked away. "There is an invitation..." From the Madi, of course. I decided to go.    We landed a bit roughly, spitting gravel to the side. The Madi hustled out of the mid-evening darkness. Lights winked from the Krishna dome looming above us. "We are most honored to see you again," said the Madi. She fluttered busily. Introductions. May I present? Yes. "Professor Jampul," the Madi said. A short, emaciated man with wrinkled crisp brown skin. Rhandra bowed with courtesy. I shook hands. Pleasantries flew like birds. Others drifted into my field of vision, murmured something and spun away. I gathered that I was meeting people. Couldn't remember any names. I smiled, gave the right signs, and said forgettable things. "The reception is only now beginning," the Madi said. Massive doors parted, people swirled like tidepools around us. Sandals clacked echoes beneath the domed egg ceiling far above. Jampul was at my elbow, murmuring. He was a pedant, a professor of languages; the sort of man who can see sin in syntax. "Languages?" I murmured. "And sects. A most interesting subject," he said. "You know the Lengen?" "Yes, something of a mystery. Many priests and one leader, I gather." "You haven't asked him here?" Beside me the Madi shuffled. "We tried. He did not seem very interested. In fact, we were rebuffed." Things winding a little slow for me. I need air. "We would like a place to prepare ourselves," I said. "It was a hectic journey." "Ah, surely." Crowd parted, we went through. Up a shadowed corridor. Thick aromas from kitchens nearby, muffled footsteps. Rhandra with me, Madi leading. "If you require servants -- " No, shake head. Swish of curtain closing on departing rump of the Madi. Whoosh, sit down. Head a little off tilt. Long day or something. Rhandra looking at me, puzzled. Jump up, grab her. Thrash around. Eek, tip over urn. Mad pawing. Bang into chair, laughing wildly. Sloppy kisses. Imitation of enraged ape. Shuffle around room, chasing her. She laughs. She scampers away amid the thick folds of air that fill the room, smoke-dense. We blunder into a bowl of sweetmeats. Both of us fall on them, smacking lips. Pop down four at a go. Hungry. Meditation takes a lot out of a man. Needs of the flesh follow me everywhere. Laugh. Fall down. Lie there a few minutes. Then it's time to be getting back to the reception Struggle up. Rhandra rises like a fog at morning.    We made our way through a rat maze and back to the avalanche of accents. Heads turned at our entrance. Formal smiles. Wonder what they think. Is my cowl on right? Lint from floor on my back? Madi sweeps over with bow, wave of lesser lights behind. "I'm sure we all want to hear your qpmions on the riots. Director." She looks around for someone to second the motion, beaming. Others chime in. I didn't catch all they said. Rhandra smiles prettily. "Well, I don't know," I said. Stalling for time. "It could mean anything, right?" Wrong note there. Try again. "We're doing everything we can to control it." That's it. Sound statement, full of granite. Try to look like a bank president. "But we have all these people drifting into the city," the Madi said. Cluster of onlookers nods. "I don't have authority to close Kalic to the countryside," I said. Even better. A little simple-minded. Act a buffoon, they never suspect you of pilfering the petty cash. Professor Jampul shook his head sagely. "It's simply beyond reason," he said. "There is nothing to drive those people insane. We live in a calm, stable time." "Calm for you. Professor," the Madi giggled nervously. "Not for the Director here. I have heard " -- raised eyebrow at me -- "of Quam ships near Veden. That must be keeping you busy." Think: has that information been released yet? Doesn't matter, must be rumors out by now. "Afraid they'll rape you in your bed?" Gasps, slight rustle. Wrong thing to say? Ride over it. "I don't think there's any danger of that. They won't be able to land unless they're much stronger than we think." Polite murmurs. "Oh?" from Professor Jampul. "And just what is their approximate strength?" He glanced at Rhandra and back to me. Don't want to give away classified information. Could be a spy, stab me in the men's room, press secrets out my ears. "Why are you looking at her?" I said loudly. White faces, nervous chatter. CoverJhe gaffe. "Wondering where we went when we got here? Follow us to that back room, sneek a peep through the curtains?' ' "Ling," Rhandra said, putting a hand on my arm. "See us set upon each other lasciviously?" Cover errors with Eros. Heavy gong. "I believe the banquet has begun," said the Madi. I found myself shuffling into a large canopied room filled with curved tables. Pungent vapor of soup. Waiters moving swiftly to seat the most important guests -- us -- first. Rhandra next to me. Mr. Fanesh on the left, Professor Jampul across. The Madi next to him. Cozy. Old friends. Kiss my forehead, initiate me into the holy rites. I drank some water. Clear and cold. Feeling better. Focus, focus. Laughed to myself. Crowd chanting in theatre. Fixed my attention on the soup. Sweet, little hint of thyme. Flavoring stone at the bottom. Don't roll it around in your mouth, not polite. Nor spit it into your palm. Soup goes down with a sucking sound. Sit straight, grow up to be a big boy. (Why should I want to be big? Die faster.) Spine down, pointing, quivering with expectation. Perhaps some wine? Dionysus, be with me now. Conversation swirls around. Make small talk with back part of my mind, leave motor control to another, right hemisphere idling. We only use a tenth of it at a time, they say. The rest of the cortex never clocks in. Featherbedding. Union dues in arrears. Look around the room. As big numbers like myself eat, lowly converts are demonstrating their disciplines at the perimefer of the room. They attract some attention. People pointing, some at me. Rude, rude. Palace of peasants. No, not at me. Behind me. I turn, eyes widen with surprise. A little brown Yogi is going through his exercises. Raising the coiled serpent, Kundalini. Demon eyes lance through me. Son of Veden. Evil look to him. Funny I didn't notice it before. He shifts position. Tilts forward, does rocking exercise accompanied with rippling of stomach muscles. I feel sick. He looks like something reptilian, frog body, thing bom of weathered oceans. The frog came in on little flat feet. Will that get him to unconditional state? Turn back to table. Soup had been replaced by mixture of vegetables. Spartan, no sauce. I crunch down on seeds, using my omnivore grinders. "Director, you spoke earlier of the Lengen," Professor Jampul said. Madi smiled uncertainly. Afraid to start conversation again, suspects I'll pounce on her with wooden fangs, slaver over her heavy jowls. "Have you had any experience with them?" "A little. I went out for an audience. I found the Master quite impressive." There, better. Sounded just right. "How so?" Erudite eyebrow arches. "His ritual. It forms a mood, a feeling I can't express." That's it. Vague. "Oh, he uses the Hindic rruals, then?" the Madi said. "I suppose. I don't have enough experience to say where they came from." Disclaim all knowledge. Slide away from specifics. Well, he must be truly magnetic man," the Madi said. Rhandra gave me a seductive wink, setting off flares in my belly. Mind darts around. Looking for way out. Getting hot in here. Look around at other tables, clogged with rheumatic and respectable bodies. All dead inside, no light flickering through pupils. Reminds me of holy cadaver they showed me last time I was here. All sliced up for the preservatives to go in, stringy muscles. Gray look to him, an ancient saint (imported), naked teeth wobbling in the candle light. The Madi told me to touch him, Director, he was a truly enlightened one. Legendary, performed miracles. I touched a knee, half expecting him to still be warm. Main course materializes. Confection of shimmering lightjiess. Innocent plant with its throat cut and diced out for my inspection. Can't quite place the aroma. Spun cottony webs melt away on my teeth. Elusive flavor down into the stomach, ion processes plate it out on the sides, membranes suck it up. Ah it was and ah it did. "Actually, you know," I said, leaning across to skewer the Madi with my eye, "the Lengen have it all over you." Puzzled frown. Delicate tongue darts out to lick away gob of doomed vegetable from lip. "What do you mean?" "Simplicity. Appeals to everyone. The Lengen haven't got your six-handed statues. No oil torches. Just the straight goods." 'Well, sir," Professor Jampul said, "I'm sure certain elements find that sort of thing appealing. But the nuances of one's faith, a true feeling of community -- ' ' "Garbage. You aren't going to get it with your inter-religious committees or that pitiful Yogi sitting like a frog over there." Rhandra laughing. "Ling." Shrug it off. Good feeling climbing up from my toes. Something they put in the main course? Feels fresh to be honest. "What you need is a good old Hindic chant. Simple. No atonal verities. Something to give focus." "Really, Director," the Madi said, "the ancient forms are -- " "Ommmmmm," I hummed. Good. Spontaneous. Shivers down "I don't see -- " The anvils dropped from my feet. Up onto the table, arms spread. Professor Jampul peering up at me, mouth open. Wave to Rhandra, smile. Suicide perched for the jump. Crowd pointing up at him. Waiting for a nosedive down into eternity. Long way down. Yeah, lookit those eyes, give you odds he jumps. "Alert!" I called. "Beware the frog man! He will eat your toes. Or soles. Or souls." Yogi blinks at finger lancing at him. Broken trance. See, knew it was no good. edge. Grab Rhandra's hand. The Madi tipping over backwards in her chair. Levitate, lady. Dodge around servants and down the long room, all eyes tracing us, monomaniac radar. Footsteps after us. Excuse me, sir, but the Fleet Control Director has gone mad. Would you be good enough to follow him and see that he doesn't get into trouble? There's a lad. Out into the foyer. Robes flapping around me, Rhandra sleek like a tiger as she runs. Panting. Little out of shape, office job doing me in. Your body attacks you at moments of crisis. Someone coming. Dodge through an alcove and into another corridor. Same one we were in before. How do we get out of here? Back to foyer -- no, voices coming from there now. Footsteps getting nearer. Quick, in here. Nimble of foot, close partition. A chamber for meditation. Flickering candles, cloying incense. Empty. Little pillows for cross-legged converts, like a field of squashed mushrooms. A solemn litthe room, as pointlessly earnest as Job's argument with God. In the center is a small brass figure of Shiva. Rippling hands, ferocious expression. Left hand versus right, in spades. Oh, thou most cerebral of cortexes, which sitteth on the right hand. Why did 'they name this palace after you, kid? Brahma and Vishnu get a much better press. The statue glared at me, probably getting ready for cosmic war on Rogerzee and the rest of the infidels. Doesn't look contented. Take it? Might be useful in the afterlife. Swish, hands like birds, into my robes it goes. Rhandra whispering something. Ignore her. Time to follow one's own divine muse. His life was a work of art, reads my epitaph. Attention to detail turns the trick. Voices outside moving by. Here am I, doing warmup exercises for immortality. Ah, but will I make the team? Enigmatic sounds. Coast clear? Peek. Damn contact filters cut too much of the light, can't make out anybody. Is this world dim, or am I? Take a deep breath. Live a life of existential risk: go! Leap into corridor, Rhandra with me. Soundless demon strikes in the night. Nobody there. This way. Around a comer. Voices. Weave away from them, don't pant. Ruin and scandal await you. Through passageway, priests look up surprised. Wave, maniac grin, use the teeth. Over to the left. Right, now down these stairs. Maybe we'll discover the secret dungeon. No, a door. Push open a crack. Fresh night air. Outside, down the path. Stop to get bearings. Rhandra points to the right. Yes. Landing lights are off, not expecting us. Slipped through their lines. Into the copter, quick. Start it up. Rhandra takes the controls. I smile, feeling weak. She looks concerned. Surprise, surprise: I fall asleep. "It was an unusual evening," Rhandra said, smiling slightly. "Yes," I said. I buried my face in my hands, rubbing my eyes. I felt no tension. In fact, I seemed to be perfectly ordinary. Except... colors danced inside my eyelids, like ghosts of dreams. "A good word. Unusual. Disastrous fits pretty well, too." "Why?" "A Director doesn't act like that. Fleet thinks the Empire is built on formalties. They may be right. I violated a few hundred canons regarding relations with the natives last night." "How would Fleet ever find out?" "Ah. Simple girl." I reached out and ruffled her hair as she sat on the floor at my feet. "Fleet has a thousand eyes. They'll know. And they might very well yank me out of this assignment." A morning beam from Lekki slanted in to warm my feet. I was fed and comfortable. The future didn't seem to matter much. I knew the Master had touched off something inside me last night, but the underlying reason didn't concern me at the moment. That was still me at the Palace, not someone else. It was an identity I hadn't seen very often since the playful days of childhood and it was welcome back. Whether it was useful to me in my present position was a different matter. I really didn't give a damn. Rhandra must have been reading my mind. She kissed my knee and said, "Whoever it was, I liked him." A knock at the door. When I opened it, Jamilla bowed, not glancing inside, and said in a low voice, "There is a call for you from Mr. Majumbdahr. In your office." I pulled on a robe and went down the hall. I threw his image on the large projector, killed the eye camera at my end and sat down. My mental Fleet harness slipped into place. "Good morning, sir," Majumbdahr said when he saw I wasn't going to transmit an image. "Kalic has quieted down a bit. There are routine messages from Fleet Central, which I've answered. They did an analysis of the strategic situation in this sector and give us a fifteen per cent probability of a Quam thrust within ten days, falling off a little after that. Someone is a little disturbed at Central, though, because they're sending a Jump ship." "When?" "Fairly soon." "Name?" "Farriken." "Why?" "It carries medium range armament. We can use it to catch Quam ships out to half a parsec." "That's useless. The Quam will simply decoy one lone Jump ship out until they get it clear of the system. Then they hit us fast and leave." Majumbdahr looked uncomfortable. "Control said that's all they can spare us." "All right." I shrugged. "I'll use Farriken for reconnaissance in the immediate vicinity. It'll be a help. What else?" "A few odds and ends. I had to listen to an hour of righteous indignation from a Vedanta sect about the gravitational radiation station on the other side of the planet." "Huh? Whatever for?" "They think the scientists there are drawing the energy out of the neutron star and will make it fall into Lekki. Say it's a Quam plot. They want us to stop it." "Good grief. Say, about that station -- any chance they can pick up that anomaly Gharma mentioned coming in perpendicular of the ecliptic? It's just on the edge of detectability for our equipment." "An interesting thought; I'll check into it. That anomaly, by the way, is getting closer. But the technicians haven't been able to straighten out yet whether it's the range finder or mass register that's malfunctioning. Gharma's been riding them but they say the instruments are fine. They can't explain the results, though." "Keep them at it when they have time. But keep most of Fleet Control watching traces in the plane of the ecliptic. If the Quam are going to match orbital velocity with Veden, they've got to come at us that way. Anything more?" "Uh, yes," he said and licked his lips. "The Madi called this morning. She wanted to send a priority message to Fleet Central. She said she would pay for it herself." ' "Ummm. And what did you do?" "I think I've misplaced it somewhere." "I see. Well, we're not here to carry letters for civilians." "No." "Signing off, then." As his image dwindled, I thought I saw him smiling.    There is a harvest of the quiet eye. I fasted for six days, and thought my thoughts, and saw the Master twice more. I learned fresh angles of my Rhandra, and saw that she was (of course) less simple than I had supposed. (Everyone is.) This was a world seen anew, scrubbed clean. I felt that I had lifted a seashell to my head and had heard finally that word they have always tried to put in my mouth, by insistently whispering it in my ear. Fleet crept on its petty pace. There was a busyness of business, the familiar wash of detail. Majumbdahr I knew better; he and Gharma and I attended the Master once, together, and it was rewarding. Ip Gharma I still detected a different center, a certain unease, a hidden frosty reserve. He became more bossy about Fleet matters, speaking ex cathedra. I allowed him some leash line, but not overly much; I was still Commandant, friend or no. I puttered a bit, did some reading. For some reason I felt a sudden desire to review Jump-ship tactics and hardware; interesting stuff, a kind of enhanced shoptalk. Majumbdahr and Gharma both caught my interest, borrowed texts. Stet and placed it squarely above the fireplace, an appropriate spot. It was useless, of course -- Veden didn't have Firetongue defenses, and thus I'd gotten no replacement for this outdated Stet -- but it had a certain totem quality. My gaze never strayed by it ithout pausing for a moment.  I studied astronomy, particularly during the fast; it focused the mind. A Fleet outrider had ventured out of the plane of the galaxy for the first time, and confirmed theoretical suslurked out there, in a swarming spherical cloud. They were formed from the first great glob that made our galaxy. When those small, red stars had first shone forth, the gas and dust that would eventually make up the galactic spiral was slowly drawing inward, into the halo, were not dragged into the new galaxy's dizzy spin. They had a mass comparable to the disk itself, but until now had been seen only indirectly, because they glowed dim and distant in the great night above the spiral arms. They were old, M types at least -- the shorter-lived stars had guttered out by now. Planets circled those embers, likewise ancient. The outrider ship had found a few, but none of interest. I read the dispatches, three years old by now, and searched for more. None: research was chopped off when the Quam appeared. As so much else had been,    Majumbdahr and I went on a long hike through the rumpled farming hills of Veden, and spoke of Fleet. Both of us had been consumed by it as boys, and now found ourselves fondly remembering what it had once meant. We had dreamed of being star voyagers, and ended up cynical cops, shoring up a tottering empire. I recalled the Academy, set high in the mountains near my home. The Meditation Center there shot upward from a barracksstudded plain, the ramparts soaring. Softspun aluminum, pebbled glass, tetrahedrons laced with violet organiform, all converging high above the terrazzo floor, a promise lancing toward the spaces above the sky. A standing Buddha, eyes contemplating a star. Somehow, after graduation from this vaulted pinnacle, things had gohe steadily downhill for me. Fleet was for Monguls, not ofkaipan. Angela, part ofkaipan herself, had seemed to know this all along, and took her place in Fleet social gatherings, leaving the foreground to other Fleet wives. Her slimness contrasted with the fashionable ladies, who were then swallowed in their own fat. While Angela hatched me a responsibility in her stomach, and then another, I flapped wings and failed to rise. No Prometheus, I -- more like Epimetheus, my hind-sighted and thick-witted brother (never mentioned in the Fleet mythology) who always learned too late, hadn't been pinned to a rock, and made a dumbbell error with Pandora. But, mythology was, like history, simply aged gossip, and mulling over this easy analogy, I saw that Angela was no Pandora, however much I might like to pigeonhole her.    A pause here, then, like a summer's day thut doesn't want to end. And then came another journey to the Master, suspecting nothing, and all was changed. Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Greg Ben ford C. J. Cherryh Arthur C. Clarke Arsen Darnay Jordon Eklund Harlan Ellison Frank Herbert Larry Niven Frederik Pohl Jerry Pournelle Fred Saberhagen James Tip tree Roger Zelazny The Foremost Galaxy  Science Fiction H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed ' future fiction' -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has It entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U.S. residents, enclose # here  For other countries, enclose  I # for here Q Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed find  Jn payment for my subscription Paul Walker Each culture produces its own fairy stories. Isn't it about time ours did? i One bright Sunday morning in late May, Mrs. Harold Gootch of Heyerstown gave birth to a spaceship. The attending physician, Dr. Nathaniel Meyers, held it up over his head by a tailfin but, unable to find a bottom to slap, he simply shook it vigorously until it began to hum. Mrs. Gootch named it Henry after her late father. Mr. Gootch failed to attend the christening and was never seen again. They returned home to find two men waiting for them. One, a tall, distinguished-looking gentlemen with a great mustache, introduced himself as the science editor of The New York Times. "Madam," he said, "we understand, you have given birth to a spaceship." To which Mrs. Gootch solemnly replied, "Nonsense." "Then," he said, sternly eyeing the large object she carried wrapped in a blanket, "what is that?" To which Mrs. Gootch answered, "It is my vacuum cleaner, naturally" The two men went away. Henry was never much trouble to care for. He neither wept nor wet; although on several occasions during the first few weeks of his life, whenever anything frightened or disturbed him, every radio and television within a hundred miles had resounded with his pathetic forevermore. II When he was five, his mother took him to school where they were interviewed by Dr. Krantz, the principal, a severe-looking young man with tight-fitting wire-rimmed glasses who sat straight and tall at his small desk, his hands clasped tightly before him. "I understand," he said, "you wish to register this -- that -- your -- " "His name is Henry," Mrs. Gootch replied. "He is five years old." Dr. Krantz thought long and hard in a remarkably short period of time. He had just come through a difficult episode involving a truculent ethnic group which had gained admission to his school after six months of litigation, and although he doubted the ethnicity of Henry, he did not wish to risk the experience again. "Of course," he said. And nervously patted Henry upon his hull. Henry was a good student. He never fidgeted or passed notes. Nor did he ever answer a question incorrectly, for his computers recorded everything verbatim, and there was not a problem he could not solve in a fraction of a second. There were some difficulties, however. For instance, in the matter of routine health examinations required by the school board, Mrs. Agnes D'Alessandro, the school nurse, nearly lost a finger in trying to insert a thermometer into one of Henry's propulsion tubes. And the school coach, Mr. Tony Mumper, absolutely forbade him to participate in basketball because he feared for the gymnasium floor. Ill One Thursday in June, not a week before Henry was scheduled to graduate with honors from the sixth grade, he was brought home on a handtruck early in the afternoon by Mr. Costel, the school custodian, with a note from the principal instructing Mrs. Gootch to see he was "cleaned up" before being sent back. Several of the children had written obscene limericks on him; and one had drawn a particularly lewd portrait of Mrs. Duvall, the assistant principal. But most curious, and most objectionable of all, was a large poster some adult had fastened to him that read: After that Mrs. Gootch did not allow Henry to go to school again. Like all mothers, she worried. Was Henry happy? Was he lonely? He was not a cuddly child, but he was not unaffectionate. Whenever she went near him, he would hum and the air around him would vibrate warmly. She would sit down beside him, caressing his hull, and sing to him or tell him stories. But sometimes late at night she would awaken suddenly, worrying if he was all right. She would put on her robe and go down the stairs and out into the garage where Henry perforce had to be housed as by now he was far too large and too heavy for the floors inside to bear him. She would creep up to him silently, afraid of awakening him if he were asleep, but never quite sure that he slept at all. She would sit down beside him and whisper: "Is everything all right, Henry?" And sometimes Henry would answer, "I am functioning nicely, thank you, Mama," and sometimes he would say nothing at all. Numerous times she found him there in the dark glowing like a bright yellow candle. Once as she went near him, she imagined that she could see into his hull, and it was deep and black, and there were small lights twinkling in the darkness; and as she looked closer, she saw there were great clouds swirling in the depths; and as she looked still closer, she saw that the clouds were made of stars -- and she knew Henry was dreaming. IV When he was fifteen, a man dressed in a brown uniform came to visit him. He was the tallest man Henry had ever seen and he had a great broad chest, covered with ribbons and metals. He carried a small black bag that was chained to his wrist. "Do you love your country?" he asked Henry. Hfnry replied that he did. The man took a large coneshaped metallic object from the black bag and fitted it over Henry's head. "How does that feel, son?" the man asked. Henry said it was quite comfortable. "But what is it, sir?" The man told him. Henry fainted. The man went away and he never came back. V When he was eighteen, he did a terrible thing. How it happened was like this: All his life Henry had listened to the radio and the television. Not simply to one radio or one television, but at first to five or six simultaneously; then five or six dozen; and finally he was listening to every broadcast available to him. He knew all the languages of the earth and what they had to say. And he loved them all. But when he was seventeen, he found that he could hear people as well. Not only what they said to one another, but what they thought and dreamed. Henry meant no harm. He did not imagine that people would object to his listening to them. Nevertheless, he refrained from telling his mother, for he knew how she worried. He listened. And in time he was listening to everyone in the whole world. He did not understand all that he heard. Some of it made him very ill. Yet he listened all the same, unable to stop, losing all track of time and himself, filled with the sadness and wonder of the things he heard, until one night -- he did not know how it had happened -- he suddenly came to himself to realize that he was surrounded by firemen dousing him with water and that the garage was in ruins, a large ragged hole in the roof. The neighbors were running up and down the streets in their pajamas, screaming at the firemen, and the policemen were trying to contain them. "He's going to explode!" they cried. "He's going to blow us all to pieces!" His mother was crying and shouting to him: "It's all right, baby. It's all right. No one is going to hurt you." Later he learned the earth had trembled and then there had been a thunderous roar so loud it broke every window on the block. There was no question in anyone's mind that it was his fault. Not even in Henry's. But how was it possible? What had he done? His mother made him promise never to do it again, but even as he made the vow, he knew he could not keep it. He was afraid. VI He did not fly again for a long time. And for a long time he tried not to listen to the voices, for he knew they were responsible. Not for what they said and thought and dreamed, but for a thing that was within them; a thing he came to call "the yearning;" although a yearning for what he could not be sure. But just as he knew his promise to his mother was futile, so he knew his determination to avoid the yearning was equally futile. He began to listen again. A little every day. Then a little every night. Then all the time. And the yearning came to him again, and this time it was stronger than before. When it happened again, Henry and his mother had to move. And wherever they moved, whenever it happened, they had to move again, until they were very poor. Henry's mother begged him to stop, and at first he gave in to her tears and promised again and again, but every time he promised, he knew he was lying. Finally he told her he could not stop, and that was the end of it. He and his mother went on welfare. A young man with glasses and a thick, bushy beard came to see them. He asked the mother why she needed welfare, and she told him about Henry. Then he spoke to Henry and asked him if he could not stop making trouble. And Henry said he could not. The young man advised his mother to consult a psychiatrist. The next day an elderly man with glasses and a thick, bushy beard appeared and asked the same questions of Henry and his mother. But he did not go away. He asked Henry one final question: "Where do you go when you fly?" Henry told him about the stars. The following week a great steel van drove up to the door and a team of men in white uniforms took Henry away. We are pleased to introduce the Gaaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. He was taken to an enormous flat place where there were many jet planes and rockets, and men in blue uniforms who never spoke to him. He was placed in a great hangar all by himself, and sunk in six feet of concrete. A man in a blue uniform was assigned to guard him. Every day another elderly man with glasses and a thick, bushy beard came to talk with him. This man did not ask about the stars. He asked why Henry hated his father. And when Henry said he did not hate his father, the elderly man became angry and went away. But he was back the next day. Henry was not unhappy. He could still listen. But there was less to hear in this place. There were secrets everywhere. Even in their thoughts and dreams, men spoke in fearful whispers, and of some things they did not speak at all. But of all the secrets of which they did not speak, the most secret was the nature of the thing in the pit. Henry tried to be discreet but he was insatiably curious; and after a while he discovered what it was. A rocket like himself, sunk in concrete, with a man in a blue uniform to guard it but no elderly man with glasses and a thick, bushy beard to ask it why it hated its father. Late every night Henry tried to talk to it. He knew that it was dangerous to try, but the idea of there being another creature like himself was too wonderful for him to ignore. It did not speak to him. Not for weeks or months. And in time he came to conclude that it was nothing but a machine. But then, one night, quite suddenly, it said: "Who the hell are you, anyway?" It took Henry fully five minutes to recover. Then he told him. And the machine replied, "I've heard about you. They say you're stark raving." "No," said Henry, "I'm not. Honestly. It's just that I blew up the garage and I don't hate my father." "You are stark raving!" said the machine. "Besides, I don't think you're a machine at all. I don't know why I'm wasting my time on you." "But I am a machine," Henry pleaded, "I really am. I have computers and rockets and everything, just like you." "Like me?" said the machine indignantly. "Have you any idea what I am?" No, said Henry. The machine told him. Henry fainted for the second time in his life. IX For the next week he refused to talk to anyone. At night he often cried and his cries were such that they knocked out every radio in the installation. The men in blue uniforms came and poured more concrete over him. But that did no good. Henry cried even louder: "I want to go home! I want to leave this terrible place." Finally one night, when it could stand it no longer, the machine in the pit spoke to Henry. "All right, all right, I apologize. You're a machine. Now, will you shut up?" "That isn't why I'm crying," Henry said. "I'm crying because... because it's so awful." "Awful? What are you talking about? I'm the most sophisticated model ever constructed. I don't mind a bit. What else am I good for?" Then Henry told him about the stars. X After a year passed, Henry's mother was permitted to see him. She was no longer poor. She had sold her story to a national women's magazine for # and was currently doing the round of talk shows to promote her new book, Outcast Mother. She said she was sorry, but the young man with glasses from the welfare board had called her "selfish," a "cheat" and a "leech." He was now her manager. She said she wanted Henry back home. There was talk of a television special and a movie. But Henry said no. He was better off here. He had a friend, but he would not tell her who it was. She cried. She said it broke her heart to see him here like this. He would put her in her grave. Then Henry cried. The men in blue uniforms came to see what the matter was, and they ordered his mother to stop crying, or they would have to disconnect all the loudspeakers again. She stopped. She pleaded with Henry not to make any more trouble. Not to fly or tell about the stars. And she said that if he refused, she would kill herself. He promised. She went away. The next day the elderly man with the thick, bushy beard came again, and Henry told him that he hated his father, and that what he wanted most in life was to enter Yale and study law. He was promptly released from the block of concrete. XI Henry did not enter Yale, nor did he study law. He was not allowed to leave the base. And without anyone to move him outside, he remained in his hangar. But since he caused no trouble, his guard was removed. He didn't mind. He had his friend to talk to. Then one Sunday morning he was startled to hear his friend calling him. "It's red, Henry. It's red!" his friend kept shouting. "What is?" Henry asked. "The alert. Henry, what am I going to do? I don't want to die. Henry, help me." "But are you sure?" "I've never been put on red before. This time they mean to make me go. Henry, I'm afraid. I don't want to go. Henry, talk to them. Make them stop." It would be no use, Henry knew. Men never listened to him. They would only put him back into the concrete. And then he had promised his mother. He tried to explain. "But, Henry," his friend protested, "don't you realize what is going to happen? If I go, there are not going to be any men left to put you in concrete. And no mothers anywhere to go home to. Henry, it isn't just me. There are thousands like me all over the world at this minute on the same red alert. Everyone is going to die. Henry, think of something!" "Tell them you refuse," Henry said. "But I'm not like you. None of us are. We have no choice. No alternative. We go where men send us." Henry knew it was true. He could hear them, all of them, all over the world. Every machine, every man, woman and child, was on red alert and waiting for the final button to be pushed, and this time it would be pushed. Because there was no alternative. "I am going with you," Henry said. And minutes later the final button was pushed and the great machine roared out of the pit in the desert toward the sky, and Henry roared up out of his hangar, leaving it in ruins behind him. They traveled high and far across the entire nation until they found themselves in a place above the clouds over the sea, where they saw others like themselves gathered in a great flock preparing for the final attack. And, far out on the horizon, they saw another great flock preparing, approaching. "This is it," his friend said to him. "Goodbye, Henry." Henry did not answer. He waited, watching the enemy flock come closer and closer until the two flocks were within a few miles of each other; and then he roared ahead, straight into the space bewith all the force of the yearning within him; a cry so fierce that every one of them was momentarily stunned into obedience. "What is this?" one demanded. "Who are you? How dare you -- " "My name is Henry," Henry explained. "I think we ought to talk this over." "Out of our way, runt!" said another of the missiles. "Don't you know there's a war on?" "Listen to him," Henry's friend cried. "Let him speak!" "Speak about what?" still another said. "There's nothing to discuss. Men decided everything long ago. Ours is not to reason why." "Why not?" asked Henry. "Because we were made to serve man. Because this is our mission, and we have no alternative." "You're wrong," Henry said. "Man is a very uncertain creature. He always builds two alternatives into everything he makes. You can only see one. I can see the other." And he told them about the stars.  A hundred years later the first expedition to the stars found the little colony on a small world circling a large star. Henry was there to meet the first man. "Have any trouble following my directions?" he asked. "Not a bit," said the man. "Piece of cake."  Hotel Transylvania, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, #pp., St. Martin's Press, #, #. The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, John Steinbeck, #pp., Farrar, Straus, Giroux, #, #. The Phoenix and the Mirror, Avram Davidson, #pp., Ace, reissued # #. Peregrine: Primus, Avram Davidson, #pp., Ace, reissued #, #. Conjure Wife, Fritz Leiber, #pp., Ace, reissued #, #.    Looking for Mr. Goodbite I would really like to recommend Chelsea Quinn Yarbro' s Hotel Transylvania to you. There is much in it that I admire. But with one singular exception, I cannot think of any "you" I know who would like Paul Walker it; and I hesitate to mention that exception because it will prejudice you against the book. Its hero is a vampire, Le Comte de Saint Germain, based on an actual #th century figure who was musician, alchemist, linguist, world-traveler. He arrives in Paris in # and enlists the aid of the Sorcerers' Guild to buy the old Hotel Transylvania, a former possession of his from another lifetime, one he left with a sinister reputation. The sorcerers agree because Saint Germain promises them the secret of making precious gems. Saint Germain establishes himself and his hotel as the most fashionable topics of conversation in Paris. And it is there he meets the beautiful Madeleine de Montalia, who has to date spent her life in a convent school and is desperately hungry for adventure. They fall in love despite her knowledge of his secret. What neither of them know is that Madelaine was promised before she was born to the infamous Baron Clotaire de Saint Sebastien, leader of a circle of satanists who revel in sadistic rituals that would make a Manson squeamish. What more is there to say? Pretty young thing meets rich handsome vampire, is kidnapped by villains, is rescued by hero, lives forever after. Aside from the cliches, the novel's greatest weakness is that its story line is too thin for its #page length; and the events therein, with few exceptions, are not depicted strongly enough. Yarbro's style is elegant, almost leisurely, in a comfortable sort of way, yet compelling. The book is fast reading, but was not hastily written. Every sentence bears evidence to the careful thought Yarbro put into it. Take this, for instance: Beauvrai was startlingly dressed tonight, even by his own extravagant standards. He wore his most elaborate wig, which was tinted with delicate blue powder. This was secured at the back of his neck with a large satin bow spangled with golden stars. His coat and small clothes were of jonquil watered silk, whose broad claret-colored revers and cuffs could not be said to set it off to advantage. A strawcolored waistcoat of peau de soie was embroidered with turquoise floss, which was undoubtedly meant to complement his turquoise silk hose and gold shoes. He had completed the ensemble with pale-blue lace at throat and wrists, and had drenched himself with violet scent. To me, that is a wonderful description that tells us all sorts of things not only about the character, but about the culture in which he lives; and it is written with wit as well as with insight. The style, as I said, is elegant, visual, but not very dramatic. We see Beauvrai, but he does not do anything. And unfortunately, the book is filled with such paragraphs. The effect is not boring -- the writing is too good -- but cumulatively it becomes tedious. By mid-point, I was skipping and skimming. The characters are good. When I began, I did not think Yarbro could make Saint Germain convincing. Not a man over four thousand years old. But she did. His extraordinary intelligence, good taste, and abilities, not to mention his peculiar sexuality, are all believable because they are depicted in a tastefully low-key manner, with that touch of humor that distinguishes a really main looks at the #th century world around him with a wry tongue-in-cheek. A lonely man, but one not disenchanted with life. Nor is Madeleine the sex-starved virgin on the prowl commonly found in "women's novels." She is less starved for sex than for reality. As bright and talented as Saint Germain in her own way, facing the prospect of a life that is of no interest to her, it is her mind, rather than her body, that drives her to pursue a life in death. Of course, the question arises, how happy can she be with Saint Germain? How happy can any woman be married to the same man for four thousand years? Be that as it may -- Like the book itself, the two main characters transcend their historical romance stereotypes through the ingenuity and insight of their creator. Yarbro likes them. She even respects them. And she understands them far more deeply than the majority of romance writers. Especially their sexuality. It is this understanding that most distinguishes the novel and is most responsible for its realism. Most historical romance writers, the women particularly, do. not understand their characters' sexuality, let alone their own; and in consequence the effect is usually embarassing, a masturbation fantasy. But Yarbro knows something of the subject, and is not afraid of it, so Madeleine's passion for Saint Germain is believable; but more important, so is the sadistic santanism of her villain, Saint Sebastien. It is not unusual for a book's villain to be more vivid, more sympathetic, than its heroes, and the simple reason is that usually the author is ignorant of the nature of the villain's pathology. He, or she, sees the villain's acts as romantic. But Yarbro knows better. There is nothing romantic about Saint Sebastien. He is one of those homicidal ijianiacs who we have become so familiar with today. Think of the Manson, or Texas mass murders, or the British Moor murders in which children were tortured to death and their cries tape recorded. These are not the acts of romantic rebels, but of desperately, revoltingly sick men and women who are far more terrifying than their fictional counterparts. And Yarbro brings this kind of stark reality to Saint Sebastien. That reality is enhanced by the thoroughness of her portrait of #th century Paris. She makes it disturbingly clear that the existence of such a satannic cult in the midst of what was supposed to be the most civilized society in the world was not only possible but, perhaps, inevitable. Unfortunately, as I've said, she is thorough at the expense of being exciting. She might have done everything just as well in under a hundred pages. As it is, we know Madeleine is going to come to Paris to fall in love with Saint Germain; we know she is going to fall into the clutches of Saint Sebastien; and we know Saint Germain will ride to the rescue. Get on with it, then! In fairness, I must say the climax is as exciting as anyone could want. Saint Sebastien goes to his just reward with all the fiendish flair with which he lived. As I said at the beginning, I can think of only one person to recommend this book to: a lovely young lady who used to live next door and had a taste for gothics that ran to fantasy and science fiction. I hesitated to mention her because it would give you the idea that Yarbro was a "woman's writer." She is better than that. Yet the Hotel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love is not going to appeal to anyone else. I had wanted to include a review of her # Time of the Fourth Horseman, recently reprinted by Ace, but after # or # pages, I gave up on it. Again, it was a short story stretched out to novel length. Filled with virtues, killed by genteel tedium. It is sad. Yarbro may make a mint on Hotel Transylvania. You never can tell. But she is never going to amount to anything as a writer unless she can develop a stronger dramatic sense, as well as a better sense of proportion. A Thousand and One Knights Whether John Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights ("From the Winchester Mss. of Thomas Malory and Other Sources, edited by Chase Horton") is a good or bad book seems an irrelevent question. Unless, of course, you are thoroughly familiar with the Arthurian literature; which few people, myself included, are. For the rest of us it provides an experience that defies categorization. For me, it was an open-ended experience. I wanted to go back to Malory, to read T.H. White at last, and to attempt the French versions, which some people assure me are the best, as well as to read the Tennyson. In short, a world opened to me, for which the Steinbeck version had only whet my appetite. And what an extraordinary book it is. Not the whole story. Only, I'm told, a third of the legends. The birth and succession of Arthur, the political life and amorous death of Merlin, the enchanting career of Morgan Le Fay, the exciting, often poignant, and sometimes hilarious, quests of the knights such as Gawain and Lancelot. Simply, beautifully written, marvelously detailed, compulsively readable. But what is most wonderful, and most wondrous, about it is the view it gives us of another time and place and the strange ideas that prevailed there. Literature can do this as no other art form can, and it is for this reason that a study of the literature of the past is the best means available for understanding the nature of the future. Look at it this way -- A few years ago I arrived at an age at which I became susceptiple to bizarre physical manifestations from my past. Namely, the frequent, sudden appearances of friends I had had in my infancy as full-grown adults. Men and women I had known in diapers or grubbing in sandboxes, suddenly there before me, often towering over me, deepvoiced, well-dressed and insistent on showing me pictures of their kids; kids the very same size as I remember their parents. Sometimes, I think I am the victim of a hoax. This can't possibly be the child I knew so well. No one could change that much. But I remain silent -- thereby retaining my feeble grasp on sanity. I probe. I pry. And bit by bit, things come back to me. A gesture, a laugh, an expression. Slowly, I perceive the child in the man. Sometimes, with those I knew in early adolescence, the recognition is immediate; but with those I knew much earlier, it takes time, and the differences perceived are often alarming. They are the same persons, with all the same traits I remember, but no longer oriented in the same fashion. Those traits which had been predominant in the child are now subordinate in the adult; while those which had been incidental, or merely suggested, now stand out. It is as if the child I remember were a chaos, and all its traits and potentialities had been sorted out and rearranged by an arbitrary and often cruelly unjust hand; so while there was still a resemblance between the adult and the child, it was as the resemblence between middle and modern English. What was most alarming about this was its unpredictability. I had known these people as children as well as I had ever known anybody, and assumed I knew which of their personal characteristics would define them for all time; but here was irrefutable evidence to the contrary. And as hard as I tried, I could remember nothing to account for why they had changed as they had. I get the same sense of alarm when I read the literature of the distant past, such as Steinbeck recreates in his King Arthur. At first, it all seems very strange to me. Then I begin to recognize familiar human traits, social and political patterns. Some people stop there, and declare, "You see, humanity never changes!" But when I read on, my previous sense of foreigness reasserts itself, and I realize that in certain basic ways, this world and its people were quite different. But different in the same ways that my former childhood companions are from their adult selves. Some of the traits and ideas, like social and political systems, once predominant, are now subordinate or non-existent in society as a whole; while others survived and remain a potent influence today. The concepts of courtly love and knightly machismo and gallantry, for instance. But looked at in the context of their time, who could have believed these things would have survived? And that the absolute faith in predestination would not? Looking into the past is really looking into the future. From our standpoint, we are the future vis-avis the past. But by imaginative extension, we realize that we will look as foreign to people of a thousand years from now as those of a thousand years ago look to us. And yet, like the people of our past, the people of the future will possess all the traits we now possess, only in a different orientation -- one which is as impossible for us to conceive of as ours would be to a man of the Middle Ages. In other words, if we met a man from the future, we would probably think him insane and his civilization appalling. Just as a man of the Middle Ages would likely find us insane and our civilization degenerate. It is not simply a matter of intelligence. Advances in technology would pose no problems. We have the same faith in technology as they had in magic. But our whole sense of the logic of things, the absolute rightness of this, and the wrongness of that; our absolute faith in whatever concepts make the world solid to us, would be altered. Ideas that are essential to us will be irrelvent, or quaint, to the people of the future. And they would never be able to explain them to us. We would probably come away from the future sick unto death for the future of man. And yet it would be a future entirely composed of the stuff of which we are made today. It is impressive, and disturbing, to realize to what extent people are governed by ideas. It is much more comforting to believe they are ruled by genes or environment, for these things preclude moral judgements. But it is evident from the literature of the past that men are largely ruled by the most enlightened ideas of the day, and their horrors, as their virtues, are predicated on them. Which is to say, what is an enlightened idea to one age may be barbarism to another. How many of the enlightened ideas we hold today will kill millions tomorrow? Be that as it may... Steinbeck set out to capture the world of Thomas Malory's King Arthur. He did not live to finish his work. But what he left us is, I am assured by friends more expert than myself, a better introduction to Malory and the Arthurian legends than White's The Once and Future King. It is not a wholly faithful translation. As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly Steinbeck; a modern man looking backward, seeing things a man of Malory's age would not. But the stories remain fundamentally unaltered and the prose rings true. This is a book filled with wisdom and humanity and good humor; not to mention, some of the most wonderful stories ever written. And when you are all done, there 'is more. The last quarter of the book is devoted to the letters of Steinbeck pertaining to his writing of the book, and they are, in their own way, as wonderful as anything in the stories. I like a lot of Steinbeck's work, but I never thought him a great writer. I did, however, conceive of him as one hell of a man; and these letters confirm that opinion overwhelmingly. Avram's Aviary Of all sf writers, there are only two who intimidate me: R.A. Lafferty and Avram Davidson. The reasons are, in the case of the former, that I have not the foggiest idea what he is writing about; in the case of the latter, that I have only the foggiest idea of what he is trying to do. As with almost any Lafferty story, one's first reaction to a Davidson novel is to say, "I've never read anything like this before." Nothing could be more disconcerting to a critic, to whom comparisons are essential to making judgments, than to read a book whose originality, like a force of nature, precludes comparison and compels one to accept it on its own terms. Is a force of nature "good" or "bad?" It simply is. And as in the case of Lafferty, Davidson's originality frolics and flaunts itself on every page maddeningly, taking an almost cosmic pleasure in itself. And as with Lafferty, Davidson's language is his own. He does not simply use it as a tool; he exudes it as a star exudes radiation. One does not just read Davidson, one is encompassed by him as by a new and strange environment, that world which is his mind and his spirit. For one cannot say where one leaves off and the other begins; one cannot divide up the book into neat pieces labeled "action scenes," "philosophy," "ideas," "background." Mind and spirit, ideasand emotion, wit and solemnity are all around you like music; and as in music, there is in his prose a transcendent, indefinable quality that, as in Lafferty's work, casts its own poetic spell. And again as in Lafferty, although the nature of treatment of the materials -- which include the supernatural, dragons, and black magic -- is fantastic in substance, the stories themselves are science fictional in intent. In Lafferty's case, because he believes in the reality of a spiritual level of existence in our everyday lives; in Davidson's, because as in The Phoenix and the Mirror, he does what one critic described Fellini as doing in The Satyricon: he writes a science fiction novel set in the past, a novel of ideas and possibilities that follow the logic of Medieval thinkers. He describes it best himself in the introduction to The Phoenix and the Mirror: "During the Middle Ages, a copious and curious group of legends became associated with the name of Vergil, attributing to author of the Aeneid...all manner of heroic, scientific, and magical powers...From the Dark Ages to the Renascence the popular view of the ancient world as reflected in the Vergilean Legends was far from the historical and actual one...It is a world of never-never, and yet it is a world true to its own curious lights -- a backward projection of medievalism, an awed and confused transmogrification of quasiforgotten ancient science..." This is the world, and the mind, of both The Phoenix and the Mirror and Peregrine: Primus. But like Lafferty, and unlike most historically erudite fantasists, Davidson is not interested in simply imitating an ancient art form, but in re-creating it as if it were a modern novel. And that is what both these books are. In The Phoenix and the Mirror, Vergil is given the impossible task of making a Virgin Speculum, a magic mirror of "virgin" materials, whose purity is such that it allows whoever is first to look into it to see whatever he wishes to see. It is a task he must succeed at or, literally, lose his soul. And succeed he does, of course. But that isn't telling you anything. Along the way, he must journey across dangerous waters and lands, making strange and often treacherous allies, to get the materials he needs; and once he has them, he must process them according to bizarre specific scribed with all the attention to detail of a Hal Clement novel. And he must solve a mystery that provides the suspenseful climax of the book. Peregrine: Primus is the story of a young, illegitimate nobleman, who is forced to strike out on his own, accompanied by two friends: an eccentric old mage named Appledore, and a squire named Baft Claud, who is actually as literary as a Harvard professor. The three encounter one misadventure after another in the world of a rapidly declining Roman Empire, including confrontations with religious zealots, lusty vestal virgins, and the jolliest Hun to ever pillage the countryside. Obviously, Davidson's wit is broader here than in The Phoenix and the Mirror. At times, the shennanigans approach slapstick farce. I laughed often enough, but I found it tedious eventually. This is trictly for Perleman and Wodehouse fans, of which I am not one. But it is not a foolish book. It is as bawdy and as rambunctious as any you'll ever read, but it never lapses into bad taste. One strength Davidson has that Lafferty lacks in his novels is control. Davidson keeps his tongue firmly in check and cheek. The tragic thing about both of these books is that they were originally written as the first parts of trilogies, but their sales were so low the remaining books were not commissioned. This is not so bad where Phoenix is concerned, as it is selfcontained; but Pergrine leaves us with a cliff-hanger. The tragedy is that Davidson suffered financially; but looked at objectively, the publisher's decision not to go ahead with them is understandable. Davidson's work is not to everyone's taste. His subject matter, and uncompromising treatment of it, are as about as recondite as you can get. Vergilian romance? How many people are familiar with that? Or with the religious controversies among primitive Christians in Rome which he makes so much of in Peregrine? And his vocabulary is as exotic. In just a few pages of Phoenix, I had to look up, "spagyritic, "horologue," "rachitic," "flitch," "tushes," "carrack," and "mandrilla." And those are but a few. Once more, as Davidson is writing a historical science fiction novel, his lacks the grace and wonder of traditional fantasy tales. Assuming, I think, that he had two more novels to deal with, he packed a great deal into his first volumes to set the stage for them, and while it doesn't hurt Peregrine, Phoenix seems a bit top-heavy for its thin story line. What both books needed were more detailed introductions, glossaries, and maps. And illustrations would not have hurt, either. A classier treatment of the books might have resulted in higher sales. As they are -- who would I recommend them to? Truthfully, I am not even sure I like them, for unlike Lafferty's books, they lack wisdom and humanity. If you love Wodehouse, and Charlie Chaplin, you will probably get a kick out of Peregrine: Primus. If not, you won't. If you love Lafferty, and have any knowledge of classical or medieval literature at all, you will probably be glad you read The Phoenix and the Mirror, as I am glad I read it, simply because I have never read anything like it before. Q: Is it " Lee-ber " or "Lie-ber" ? I have been avoiding Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife for twenty years, and I might have gone on avoiding it if Ace had not decided to use it to try to cash in on the gothic craze. I predict disaster. For one thing, the novel is written in clear, simple prose, rather than that turgid, purple gook without which bestseller-buyers feel they are not getting their money's worth. For another thing, it is intelligent, witty, and subtle, rather than blatant and sensationalistic. And as if that were not bad enough, none of its characters, male or female, is a stereotype, but all are remarkable, starkly human. I'm afraid Ace had bungled it, again. Of course, most of you know how good Conjure Wife is. I do not know anyone who has not read it, and does not admire it as one of the best modern horror stories. But some of you may know it only through the British film version. Burn, Witch, Burn, which while good enough, is not as good as the novel. It was the film version that put me off the book for so long. I thought I knew the story. And when I began to read it, the whole thing came back to me so vividly, I thought for a moment there yas no point in going on. Then, about a third of the way in, the book caught my interest, and from then on, I could not put it down. Leiber accomplishes something masterful here, for although every chapter is crammed with incident, he still manages to build suspense until by the climax the reader is howling with excitement. And even then he is not done. Although the book deals with the supernatural, it is essentially a mystery: who is doing what to wijom? Or, is anyone doing anything to anybody. Leiber wishes to leave the question open, making us wonder if it is really witchcraft or neurotic psychology. In my opinion, he is not successful, but I will grant him this: his argument is more credible today, with the resurgence of behavioral psychology, than it was when he wrote it. My only complaint with the book is that the events after chapter # constitute an anticlimax; for after that point, it is impossible to regain the tension, and the book goes on a bit too long in working itself to its conclusion. However, the conclusion redeems itself by a diabolical turn-about that made me laugh out loud. What is most remarkable about the book is the stunning job Leiber did with his characters. There are a lot of them, and each and every one is done strikingly, especially the women. I can imagine feminists will be very upset with Leiber' s view that they are the more primitive of the species -- and rightly so -- but none of them is passive, none stereotypical, none a sex object. It is a pity Leiber did not write more in this vein, for his novel was ahead of its time and, in some ways, it still is. Although some of the ideas and attitudes may be dated by changing fashions, his science fictional treatment of the occult is really a more interesting and more mature one than that of Ira Levin. Had Leiber continued to write novels like Conjure Wife, or stories like "The Hound," he might have developed a genuinely new genre of the horror story. As it is, he has left us a prototype of what that genre might look like. If you have not read Conjure Wife, do so. It is marvelous.  "f course, J. J. Without a doubt, J.J. I'll get right on it, J.J. Good idea, J.J. Yes, I'll have the column in your hands in a few days, J.J. Okay...yes...thanks for calling, J.J. "Hey, alter, who was that on the phone?" Geis, that was J.J. Pierce, editor Geis-filter, asking me directly, to do a column discussing the hooroar over Harlan Ellison's recent Statement of Ethical Position as the upcoming Guest of Honor at the World SF Convention to be held at Phoenix, Arizona, August # -- September #, #. "He did? Mistake!! Mistake! Hand me the phone. I've got to stop this! You'll bring the Wrath will go up in a puff of smoke. We both will be exiled to Alternate Earth ##. All Fandom will be in a state of war..." Relax, Geis. I'll be very fair and even-tendriled. I'll bend over sideways to give both points of view. "Sideways? That's the only way you can bend over, and a more disgusting sight I've never seen." Do not mock by physiology, Geis, or I'll make public the pathetic length of your -- "Alter!" -- Nose. Now will you shut up and assist me in this column, or must I put out a want-ad for a properly submissive, cooperative second banana? "I will do my duty, Alter, but you are tampering with forces and with a possible vengeful Harlan that Man Was Not Meant To Know." Nevertheless and ipso facto, Geis. Let us proceed. Harlan Ellison's Statement of Position was And it has been published in the fan press extensibly -- Science Fiction Review and Locus being the two most prominent magazines -- and it has provoked a good deal of reaction among fans. Now those reactions have a chance of surfacing here in a prozine. Briefly, Harlan is a strong supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. Three years ago he agreed to be the official Guest of Honor at the # World Convention. Since then the nitty has hit the gritty and the Amendment is only three states short of enough to pass, and Arizona is one of the states which has not passed the Amendment in its legislature. The National Organization for Women has organized a convention boycott of those states which have not passed the Amendment, and so Harlan is in a pickle -- attend the SF Worldcon in Arizona and thereby help attract people and money to Arizona, or not attend and break his word and disappoint a lot of fans? He has compromised. He proposes to attend -- as Guest of Honor -- but to use his position as he can. Those who oppose his actions do so for various reasons. Some because they don't like Harlan and suspect he is merely grandstanding. Some because they go to SF conventions for fun and social reasons and don't want the Con mucked up with a lot of political controversy and possible other fall-out. But most oppose his intended activities because they don't want the official World Science Fiction Convention involved with politics or specialpleading Good Causes. Especially they don't want this to happen by fiat, by a Guest of Honor imposing his politics on the Worldcon or by the Convention Committee doing same. "But, Alter, the Committee has thing as Guest of Honor. And since Harlan's Statement of Ethical Position has been published extensively by now and the members of the worldcon have had a chance to write to the Committee and give their views and the Committee has had a chance to get a 'reading' of the opinion of its paid members, what's the problem?" Mostly philosophical, Geis. If the unofficial "vote" by the membership is heavily against Harlan's position, perhaps the Committee will make some changes -- new rules for Harlan as Guest of Honor, or freeing him of his obligation to attend. There are lots of other Big Name Authors who are available who would draw as well (if that's a consideration). But of course the Con Committee is not bound by any unofficial vote or preponderance of opinion of its membership in how to run the convention. It can do as it pleases. "Another argument is this. Alter: Tired of reading and rereading the same scant facts about the Loch Ness Monster enigma? Then sit back, relax and enoy this tale of adventure, mystery and suspense as that venerable riddle Is solved...almost. Available only by mail. Hardbound, Individually autographedBriel inscriptions on request. Shipped postpaid, worldwide lor  # . # . Since Robert Heinlein has used the Worldcon to promote blood donations to the Red Cross, and authors have used the Worldcon to promote sentiment for a greater U.S. space program, why not let Harlan use the Worldcon as a platform advocating That's the old "But Jimmy does it!" argument. And is countered by the "two wrongs don't make a is a highly controversial, loaded subject, and could provoke antiI . Demand equal time; #. Set up pickets, demonstrations, plan provocative acts during Harlan's speeches and appearances; #. File suit in local or federal court against the Worldcon Committee and Harlan on grounds of restraint of trade or whatever. The states of Missouri and (anticipated) Arizona have already filed suit in federal court against the National Organization for Women using the restraint of trade argument in re the states. Since Harlan said in his Statement of Ethical Position that he would be coordinating his activities with N.O.W., that might place him and the Worldcon Committee in tender legal territory. "But Alter, that federal suit is a blatant attempt to infringe civil rights. The right of free speech -- " Maybe, maybe. The point is it might result in some heavy, heavy legal costs imposed on the Worldcon, and that is something for the Worldcon members to think about. you, Alter? Underneath that alien hide beats the heart of a sexist male chauvinist pig!" Wrong, Geis! 'I am for the Amendment. I am even for Gay Rights, for legalizing pot, legalizing prostitution, and legalizing alien immigration. (I want to be a citizen! I want to vote!) "That',s what you say But you won't do anything but yak yak. You won't, as Harlan says, 'walk the walk.' You won't be an activist." You're right, Geis. Walking hurts my pseudopods and since I mostly lurk in your brain, I am by nature and necessity an observer of idiot humanity, yourself included. "But -- " Before you put your "but" into gear, listen to this last argument. Nothing prevents Harlan or anyone of similar persuasion from acting as Arizona through the local chapters of N.O.Wand other organizations But Harlan wants to use the prestige and publicity of the World SF Convention -- and SF in general -- to add importance and impact to his activism. And that's cool -- if the Worldcon members and SF in general agree to his use of them in that way. But that leads to speculation about future Worldcons...Will other Guests of Honor, or Worldcon Commiittees, decide to use the Worldcon for advancing other, different political, social, economic ends? Will there have to be set up a voting system for Worldcon members to pass or kill various proposals and advocacies? Will future groups who bid for the opportunity to put on the Worldcon be required to pledge not to allow politicizing the convention, or say up-front what specific issue they will be pushing? Will groups be "captured" or "stacked" by fanatics of one sect, party, persuasion or another? Will we see, in a few years, a Liberal Democratic SF Convention? A Socialist People's SF Con? A NaziCon? They could all claim that the future belongs to their dogma, and therefore they are right to use science fiction to help their cause. "Alter, you exaggerate." Think so? The urge to use whatever tool is available is natural in "activist" types. And since sf fans are supposed to be young, idealistic, future-minded... My position is that the World Science Fiction Convention should not be prostituted to serve the interest of any present-day political, social or economic Cause, no matter how idealistic and right-thinking it is. There are plenty of other vehicles for sf fans, writers, editors, publishers to use to push their urgent beliefs. "Are you through, Alter?" Yes. "You call that being fair? You call that performance giving both sides of the question?" Well, let me read back... Hmmmm. Mmmmm. Yeah, on the whole I think I gave Harlan and those who support him a fair presentation. Of course I gave my views more emphasis, but that's only natural, since I was invited to do so, and since this is my column-of-opinion. If you don't like it, Geis, you can go pound sand.  An informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Cover by Stephen Fabian. Issue ## features interviews with Poul Anderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George Scithers (Editor of Asimov's SF Mag.). Book reviews by Larry Niven. "Flying Saucers  The Stymie Factor" by Ray Palmer. "Reports From Alternate Earth ##" by A. L. Terego. (An R-Rated sf Novel) by Richard E. Geis. Illustrated by Stephen Fabian. "Alien Thoughts" -- The Editor's Diary with letters from readers, fans, and professionals with Commentary. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I I Dear John, C.J. Cherryh's The Faded Sun : Kesrirli will, no doubt, become a science fiction classic. The story contains all the elements of what good science fiction ought to be. The craftsmanship of the author is superb, C.J. Cherryh paints a striking picture of a future which is totally alien to what we know. Carefully the author weeds details to have us begging for more. The Faded Sun: Kesrith is the best science fiction story this year. I can not see how it can be outdone! Concerning your editorial, I really don't know what you are driving at. Being only a passenger, I wished I had taken another taxi. You're serious. I'm serious, but he isn't. What do you want me to do? Yes, I believe there isn't an energy crisis. Why? Because things around us are going on as before in spite of the rhetoric that we hear. I am not sacrificing, and certainly you are not sacrificing. Thus, it will only become real when more things go off around us. That is how things work! Don't kick the Amish or the Mennonites. If there is an energy crisis, they won't know about it. Then again, if there is an energy crisis it might be a blessing in disguise. We Americans are extremely wasteful. We waste a lot energy. As for Jerry Pournelle, he should have had someone help him with Lucifer's Hammer. It could have been a devastating novel. As it turned out, it is so poorly written that science fiction is in real trouble when such a novel is palmed off as being great. The reviewers and critics must have been wearing color glasses. Roy D. Schikedanz # Sherwood Lake Dr., # #B Schererville, #., # I was not kicking the Amish and the Mennonites, and you're quite right about their being better adapted to survive an energy (or any other) crisis. They work at the simple life and are Plastic hippies only talk about the simple life while remaining tied by an umbilical cord to the technological society they profess to despise. As for the "reality" of the crisis well, ever hear of a car that slopped going before it ran out of gas? Check the fuel gauge.' P.S.: Jerry did have help on Lucifer's Hammer. You have heard of Larry Niven, haven't you? -- J.J.P. Dear Mr Pournelle: Your column, A Step Farther Out, contained some errors concerning nuclear fission power plants. It would be apparent that in any technology there are always risks when it involves the use of potentially dangerous elements. The elements themselves are intangible, but the handling of them by humanity isn't. An example of this error is the deaths of between # and # percent of the uranium miners in the Shneeberg, Germany and Joachimstal, Czechoslovakia. The miners had inhaled radon gas. The studies were done before #. In #, and found that the concentrations of radon in this country's uranium mines were higher than those in Europe. There's no way of knowing how many miners in this country have perished because of the lack of post-mortem study. Thiry years have passed and there is still no technological diagnosis which will detect the damage done to a nuclear plant worker or miner's body. Your information on radiation around nuclear plants (as compared to coal burning plants), is interesting. What you failed to mention, is that these types of radiation, as well as radio, television, and microwave relays, are the source of a substantially increasing level of lowleval ionizing radiation. At this time, I ,# times as great as in the Soviet Union. Perhaps they know something we don't. My own skepticism over fission plants has to do with the transportation of nuclear wastes. I believe that the problems of waste storage and worker exposure could be solved; the latter by better monitoring equipment and protective gear. But the transportation remains the primary problem. About a year and a half ago, a container of three ounces of pure plutonium fell off a truck in southern Indiana. Of course, the newspaper article appeared in the back of the paper and amounted to one column inch. Nothing was said about how long the material was lost, who found it, if there was damage to the container; nor who owned the material. This kind of human error cannot be plotted on a graph of statistical probabilities. It could, but it would be meaningless; as there is always a possiblity of X. On the lighter side, there's an interesting article in TV guide, February #-# issue. Carl Sagan, the author, talks about some of the inconsistencies of science fiction plotlines. One example he gives is that Mr. Spock of Star Trek is a genetic impossibility. As an allegory, he compares Spock's existence to a human mated with an artichoke. Sincerely, Richard Wallace # South Jackson Fort Wayne, Ind. # No one in his right mind has ever implied that nuclear energy is ' 'safe' ' in the sense that it has no costs; the relevent question is "costs compared to what?" The fact remains that the number of miners injured or killed in uranium mining is trivial compared to the accidentldeath rate for mining coal. This should come as no surprise, since uranium contains vastly more energy than coal. One might also compare the costs of a low-energy society to one that has sufficient clean power. Transport of nuclear wastes is accomplished in containers stressed to withstand falls of many tens of feets. Pure plutonium is not a "nuclear waste " and is not particularly dangerous unless ingested (when it would be toxic but no more so than many heavy metals) or ground finely and inhaled. I shouldn't care to inhale powdered arsenic either. Regarding Mr. Spock's ancestry.  suspect that Carl Sagan may have read Larry Niven's discussion of the sex life of Superman, in which Larry observed that Superman would be about as likely to produce a fertile union with an ear of corn as with a human female.Jerry Pournelle Dear Mr. Pierce: How about letting us have some honesty from your columnists? In recent years there has been what I see as a deplorable trend in sf criticism towards the subjective response. Spider Robinson used to do it in Galaxy (and is still doing it elsewhere), and now so is Paul Walker. The approach is to find an honest but subjective response to the book in question, then justify the response in honest but subjective terms. In fact, the total process amounts to intellectual dishonesty. So far so good, because at least in a review-column the reader (and the author of the book) knows more or less how much importance to attribute to what is said, but such writing is worthless as criticism and we are all the poorer for it. Where the line has to be drawn is when the method, crosses over into a general column like Richard Geis' Alien Viewpoint, and he uses purely subjective criteria to dismiss books in a cavalier way. A case in point is his column in the DecJan issue, when as a part of his "crusade to improve the lot of the sf reader" he dismisses Robert P. Holdstock's Eye Among the Blind because it fails to have a snappy and journalistic first paragraph. In fact, Geis tells us (in an honest way) he only managed to read the first three paragraphs before throwing the book across the room. Look, a novel like Eye Among the Blind is not to everyone's taste. It isn't likely to satisfy Perry Rhodan readers, for instance, or readers who use science fiction as a frivolous and mildly escapist alternative to TV. What it is (like Earthwind, the author's second novel) is a serious and demanding modern novel, which presumes a degree of intelligence in its readers. It is, in fact, an excellent example of the way contemporary science fiction is moving away from the trite journalistic genre trappings of the past. It is also, although this won't cut any ice with Geis, a first novel by a young and promising writer, and any first novel deserves to be read with an open mind. Any novel, come to that, deserves more than a cheap put-down. Christopher Priest I Ortygia House # Lower Road Harrow, Middlesex HA#DA, England  didn't think it was any secret that Geis was expressing his subjective opinions in The Alien Viewpoint. It is, however, interesting that you. the author of several novels and short stories devoted to the thesis that "reality" is subjective (in the tradition of Berkeley and Hume) -- or might as well be. for alt we can trust our prejudiced perceptions -- can be so certain about objective standards in literature. -- J.J.P. Dear Sir: On page # of the DecJan # issue (hey, that date is really good; takes real talent to combine both January and December of the same year) you ask: "Why are at least half the best new writers women, even though the total percentage of women entering the field is still low?" As it happened. I'd just been consulting a back issue. The one where Spider Robinson was doing a "So there" on the testimony of some women writers that they'd never had any sf stories rejected because they were women. But look, the "few" women writers in the field have always been superlative. Doesn't that answer your question? Whereas there are all kinds of men science fiction writers, of which "# percent are crud" (Sturgeon's Law). Any year with one new woman writer accepted and published, she's probably not just fifty percent, but a hundred percent of the good new writers that year. Clifton Amsbury # Amador Street Richmond, Calif. # Well.  hope I'm not one of those editors who unconciously ( know  don't do it consciously) demands higher standards of female than male novice writers. Of course, ideally. I'd like to get the best of both... -- J.J.P. Dear Galaxy: I was amazed to read the two letters from women sf fans. I'd love to have read Mr. Cooper's letter. Anyway, I have been an sf reader since age # (in #) when I conned Mama into getting me a library card to read fact books on astronomy and a librarian turned me on to Red Planet by Heinlein (She was tired of digging' up astronomy texts -- which were valuable books -- to send home with a #-year old). I think I can name five other women fans I've come across in the past # years (two of them being my grown daughters whom I led into it all with Space Cat). I always assumed I was a person, as a dog often will, and even when my physics teacher said that the few girls he'd had in class didn't become engineers, but usually married them instead (I didn't become an engineer either -- or anything until I was # years old and had a family of medium-sized children to support, alone), I wondered on. Funny, I've written all my life -- newsletters, poetry, etc. -- on a volunteer basis, but I never dared write an sf story. I wonder why? Also, since all heroes of sf were # years old when they and fell in love, I did that too, marrying the "handsomest # #year old in Central Pennsylvania, just like in the stories. It never dawned on me that those heroes were men and I wasn't the right sex. So, finally, women are starting to write sf and doing a pretty good job of it too, and women are beginning to admit to being a shade talented in science -- well, current events, maybe. Well, what I'd like to do is start a women's sf fan group to give us less feeling of isolation (Men do not tend to discuss sf with us. I notice.). Any interested women write me for details (I have great expertise at starting things -- a feminist credit union, a women's rights organization, P.T.A., etc. Wanda F. Wilson # Brandt New Cumberland, Pa., # Brother! (Sister?!). First a poor femmefan who can't find sf magazines and didn't know they existed: now a femmefan men fans won't talk to and planning to start a women's fan group. I thought all fan groups welcomed women. Can I be that naive ? Or is New Cumberland. Pa., really the boondocks? -- J.J.P. sues. Send check or money order to: C.l. Grant, # Center Grove Road, H-#, Dept. G. Dover, N.J. #. wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-# St. Paul, Mn. #. Fla., # lists. PM-SF, # Pine St., Des Plaines, Large catalog. Books, magazines. Three stamps. Marx, # #th Lubbock, Tex., # for #-page catalog. Collections also purchased. R. Madle, # Bestor Drive, Rockville, Md., #. that witches wouldn't tell. #, Noel Wait, # Union Drive, Los Angeles, Calif., #. Used SF Paperbacks and Hardcovers. Over # Titles. Free Catalog. Lawrence Adams, P.O. Box #, Baltimore, Md., #. tains details of dealers, fanzines, publishers, postal dealing. Write first: Trigon Press, # Kent House Road, Beckenham, Kent, England. #-#. Intelligent, concerned people with Positive Human Values write Clyde Austin. ##, Box #, Pontiac, #., #. Computer posters and games. Sample and catalog #. Theo Koch, Castle Point Station, S-#, Hoboken, N.J., #. Approved for use with Dungeons and Dragons. City State of the Invicible Overlord, #; Tegel Manor, #; First Fantasy Campaign, #. Postpaid, #. add tax. Judges Guild, Box #G, Decatur, #., #. manual. Complete installation instructions. seda Blvd., ##, Reseda, Calif. #. #. Complete Science Fiction Catalog Cheap, simple, portable. Free details. #. Cash. Thousands paid for comics, baseball cards, records, toys, dolls, beer cans, tobacco relics, sci-fi...gel more for your collectibles. Catalog # refundable. Don't delay. National advertiser buys and sells. Order your copy today from: Phil Morawiec. Box #. Milan. Mich. #. SF Pen Pals. # #rd St... San Francisco. Calif... #. equipment. Easv techniques, fascinating results. # tor complete info. Robins. Box # C. l ulton. Calif... # Dune. Orchestrated on Synthesizers, C# Stereo Cassette. Send # to John Willoughby. # S. Palm Dr... Brea. Calif... #. movies and more! Illustrated catalog # (refundable). Galaxy-#. # Vanowen #. Van Nuys. Calif... #. "How to get paid for watching television!" Bobby McGee. #I #th St... Apt. A#. Lakewook. N.J... #. No checks. Catalog #C . Vandy's Visions. # Moorhead (#). Boulder, Col... #. Two mailers we meant to cover last month, but which got lost in the shuffle: Yes, there were loose ends in The Faded Sun: Kesrith. That's because it's the first novel in a trilogy. We told C.J. Cherryh people might wonder what the dux was going on, and she responded: "Ouch! That were a most n-regul-ar pun!" And if some of you think Greg Ben fond's The Stars in Shroud looks familiar... Well, about ten years ago, Greg published a novel called Deeper than the Darkness. Readers seemed to like it. but he didn't. He was so dissatisfied that he bought up the copyrights in order to rewrite it entirely. Not quite unprecedented -- Arthur C. Clarke rewrote Against the Fall of Night as The City and the Stars: but Clarke was never able to get rid of the first version! Among next month's offerings... we got a story in the slush pile from a Tappan King. Read like Tanith Lee (Wow!). We sent an acceptance letter to Mr. or Ms. King. Turned out to be Mr. And his odd name? "You wouldn't think it was odd for a grandson of Austin Tappan Wright," he commented. (If you've never read Islandia. shame on you!) You'll want to. It's that good... it's The Hugo Winners: # speculative fiction stories that have won the science fiction equivalent of the Oscar -- Arthur C. Clarke's superb story, "The Star," Jack Vance's classic, "The Dragon Masters," and Poul Anderson's award-winner, "No Truce With Kings," plus # more. an Alternate, or no book at all, just fill out the convenient form always provided, and return it to us by the date specified. We try to allow you at least ten days for making your decision. If you do not receive the form in time to respond within # days, and receive an unwanted selection, you may return it at our expense. As a member you need take only # Selections or Alternates during the coming year. You may resign any time thereafter, or remain a member as long as you wish. At least one of the two Selections each month is only # plus shipping and handling. Other extra-value selections are slightly higher but always much less than Publishers' Editions. Send no money. But do send the coupon today. About every # weeks (# times a year), we'll send you the Club's bulletin, Things to Come, describing the # coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices. If you want both Selections, you need do nothing; they'll be shipped automatically. If you don't want a Selection, or prefer This fabulous #-page anthology of speculative fiction sells for # in the original publisher's edition. It's yours, if you wish, as one of # books for just I #p (plus shipping and hand ling) when you join The Science Fiction Book Club. Here's how the Club works: When your application for membership is accepted, you'll receive your introductory package of four books for just #P (plus shipping and handling). You may examine them in your home, and if not completely satisfied, return them within ten days -- membership will be cancelled and you'll owe nothing. with membership #. The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant #-in-I volume ot # award-winning stories, # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub ed. # #. Splinter ot the Mind's Eye. By Alan Dean Foster. The further adventures of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa. Pub. ed. # #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isa.ir Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb ed # #. Close Encounters ol the Third Kind. By Steven Spielberg Novelizationol the hit motion picture about Earth's lust contact with an alien race. Pub ed # # #I Time Storm. By Gordon. R Dickson. A major novel by one of SF's best writers. Gripping adventure and fascinating ideas set in a vast scope of time and space. Pub. ed. # #. A World Out Of Time. By Larry Niven . A black hole in space sends Jerome where the ultimate battle of the sexes is raging. By co-author of The Mote in God's Eye. Pub. ed. # #. The Faded Sun: Kesrith. By C.J. Cherryh . The planet Kesrith is ceded to the human forces as part of a peace treaty, but the inhabitants aren't told. Special ed. # The Starchild Trilogy. By Frederik trilogy and together here for the first time are # classic tales, The Reefs of Space, Starchild and Rogue Star. Special ed #. Up The Walls of the World liy James Tiptree, Jr. Aliens from Tyree try to escape destruction by transferring their minas into beings on another planet Earth. Pub. ed. # # The # Annual World's Best SF Donald A. Wollheim. ed The best SI pub lished during # by Asimov, Knight. Varley and others Includes Tiptroo's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? Special ed. # The Adventures ol the Stainless books in I exciting volume take us throughout the galaxy Comb ed # # #. Galactic Empires. Brian Aldiss, ed Two-volume anthology ot # stories by famous authors Clarke. Asimov and others covers the Rise and Fall ot Galactic Empires. Comb ed # #  Science Fiction Book Club Dept. SR#, Garden City, N.Y. # I have read your ad. Please accept me as a member in the Science Fiction Book Club. Send me, as a beginning, the # books whose numbers I have indicated below, and bill me ust # (plus shipping and handling). I agree to Ake # additional books during the coming year are selections for mature readers. Mr. Mrs. Miss Please print Address Apt. I City State Zip i Order not valid without signature. If under #, parent must sign. #-SI #lJ The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Offer slightly different in Canada  'n n I I s  n fiaiiMHl j I M Three Great IP Game: Serious science-fiction comes to life in these three fassame, completely original "universe" as their background. StarForce: The original, master game of the series. 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It was a rescue operation that could bankrupt the entire anti-matter research program -- and nobody could be sure if there was anyone left to rescue. Exiled by his fellow men, he sought the only companionship his barren place of banishment could offer. But now... Only a word; an ancient rune. But what it symbolized promised destruction for her culture and slavery for herself. Yes, he's back -- the one and only Waldo, Chryse City's answer to Fat Freddie, and just as disgusting as ever! The Master presented himself as savior of mankind. Considering his origin, it wasn't likely most men would believe him. But Ling Sanjen wasn't most men, and the Master seemed sincere... It all depends on what Washington does. Come to think of it, it all depends on what you do! Everything you always wanted to know about why you read science fiction (or any genre fiction), but never knew who to ask... In which Alter responds to the fans who send him letters. Interior illustrations by: Haman, Fabian, Cosentini, Woods, Whigham Publishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Main Office A Editorial Office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, N.Y., #, Single copy #. #-lssue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed in U.S.A. Taft, New York City. GoH: Alfred Bester. Membership: # until June #, # at the door. For info write: Susan Rothman, # Seacoast Terr., Brooklyn, N.Y., #. #th World Science Fiction Convention. Hotels Adams and Regency Hyatt and Convention Center, Phoenix, Ariz. Pro GoH: Harlan Ellison. Fan GoH: Bill Bowers. Toastmaster: F.M. Busby. Membership: # attending, # supporting. 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Prepare yourself for the Supreme Intellect of the Universe...and Keith Laumer's wild imagination! Prepare yourself for... Imagine a petty crook about to be shot by a hit man. Suddenly time stops and he's whisked away to an alien complex deep in the Arctic. From there it's only a short hop to fantastic planets, astounding characters, breathtaking intrigue -- and Keith Laumer's greatest cosmic adventure. # Also from St. Martins: Edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison From Asimov to Van Voght, here is the golden age of science fiction in "two sound anthologies with real historical insight !' -- Kirkus Reviews # each. G## At bookstores or direct from: SL Martin's Press Name # Fiflh Avenue. New York # Please include #t per book to cover pelage and applicable sales tax (check or money order included). warn mm by martin o'hearn make many political friends under the best conditions. And when disaster strikes Like a grim fortress outpost of timatter Research Station One sweltered under the relentless sun of the Mojave Desert. After four years Jean Pelham Ringefield, assistant director of the Fast Room project, could still shiver in awe at the terrible beckoning vastness. Bernard Ringefield, the project director, looked at it in a more prosaic manner. It wasn't bad enough, he insisted, that a single mistake could tum the station into drifting atoms; no, the government had made that eventual error inevitable by plunking them down into the most irritating environment imaginable. In the office of the station supervisor, Ronald Ferrier, sunlight like golden, pressure-steam blasted in through the polarized window to burnish the two occupants. "You've heard of the latest fiscal squeeze, haven't you, Jean?" asked being cracked down upon: first, as a matter of standing Congressional policy; and second, as a result of the Orbital Station disaster." Turning from the desert panorama, Jean Pelham pushed her long, dark hair back from her eyes. "And our station being even more dangerous, we're first on the list of shutdowns. Right?" His desk model of the heavy-duty matter-antimatter reactor sheltered Ronald Ferrier from her question. He continued offhandedly. "Senator Stoughton is coming out to look us over. I want to give him an impressive show. Your full-scale Fast Room is about to be sent out on its first piloted run, isn't it?" "We haven't our requisition of antimatter yet. And it's certainly not a spectabular show. The other projects are much flashier." "The 'flashy' ones are all tied up in one way or another; none is available for any sort of demonstration. The other teams will sacrifice their priority on the antimatter in this common crisis." The young physicist shrugged, matching Ferrier's overdone casualbling exhibitions isn't the best evidence of economy." "Nevertheless, Congress must be convinced of our material progress. They'll be here on the fifteenth." Jean's voice finally rose. "Ronald, we're not properly prepared. I've budgeted every minute of that time before the requisition date. We are simply not ready." "Doctor Pelham, you'll simply have to be ready. There is no other -- " Ferrier's voice cracked and expired in an embarrassed peep. Squirming in the scalding sunlight, he muttered, "What can I say? Believe me, I see your point. I sympathize completely, but..." Her hair fell forward again, hiding her face from him as she crossed to the desk and pretended to examine the reactor model. "I'm sorry, Ronald. You're under more pressure than anyone in this...this...in what Bernard calls a four-walled doomsday bomb." The supervisor dropped his gaze to regard the massive miniature. "How is Bernard doing now?" he asked softly. "Quite well, the doctor says. Waiting to return to the project. He'll insist on coming back now." "Under this extra stress? He'll fall right into another breakdown." Jean's attention had returned to the desert and its sky tinted brown by the window filter. A transport rocket lolled down a final cushion of flame onto the airstrip-pad a mile distant, bearing a few more precious kilos of anti-iron from Canaveral. "The Fast Room is his life, Ronald. He'll die if he has to stay away." Looking up, Ferrier spied the movement of her hand. But this time, he thought, she was brushing away more than the stray strands of hair.    A week and a half later, in the late morning of the fifteenth, Jean Pelham stood with her husband on the observation balcony of Experiment Chamber C. In the sunshine from the polarized skylight Bernard Ringefield's hospital pallor lingered yet. "I'd better go down there," he said. "They'll do fine, darling." Jean's grip was soft but firm on his arm. Fifteen feet below, a tractorlift trundled the fragile-looking Fast Room in through the chamber's huge double doors. Seven solemn technicians stood ready to take it over from the tractor crew. One young woman, unable to wait, ran to meet it; the others scrambled after her, their reserve broken, laughing with satisfaction. To the coming delegation, Jean knew, the Room would appear crude, unfinished. To her, its starkly functional lines held their own sort of pristine beauty. It had been stripped down for the lowest mass possible. It was a round, seven-foot-wide metal-mesh platform on four stubby legs; from its center a thin column rose five feet high to terminate in a raggle-taggle sphere of cryoelectronic breadboards and thick wiring. Cables snaked down the column to a small matter-antimatter reactor. The reactor and its accompanying equipment took up half the platform. As Jean urged Bernard back from the railing, the cheerful southwestern twang of Don Wood's voice resounded in the corridor outside. The ruddy astronaut strolled onto the balcony and leaned over dangerously far to inspect the Room. "Guess I'll mosey down and commence flight check, Doc," he said, reaching up to clap Ringefield on the back. "By the way, the Senators are here." "The sooner we start, the sooner we'll finish," said Jean. Bernard grimaced. "Not soon enough for me." She managed to halfway straighten his tie before he stalked out. After a quick observation of her crew's progress, she hurried after him. He was waiting at the elevator. "Bernard, let's take the stairs." "Oh. Sorry." Jean had to half-run to keep pace with his Ichabod strides. Bernard's right hand strayed to his wedding band, compulsively twisting the slim ring. In Bernard's office Ferrier was waiting with the three Senators -- Andrew Stoughton and his grayfaced junior colleagues. The supervisor introduced them and then retreated to his administrative domain. To her dismay, Jean saw Bernard immediately begin to head toward disaster. "Well, gentlemen," he said, "let's get down to it, shall we? We're here to entertain you. Pick a card." "Cut the crap," Senator Stoughton growled around his cigar. "All right, Senator." Ringefield took a deep breath, then suddenly sighed as if crucified. "Here, then, the prototype Fast Room." He wrenched open a cabinet and withdrew an imperfect one-foot metal spheroid. "This weighs nine kilos, including five kilos of fuel. Equal parts of iron and anti-iron." The two silent Senators flinched, more ashen than ever. "That's right, boys, the equivalent of five tons of fissionable material." "Where the hell is the shielding?" demanded Stoughton. "It's only a centimeter thick. The M-A researchers will fill you in later on the new gamma shielding. It's a spinoff of our work, though." ' 'Mmm. What does this thing do? " "The best explanation is a demonstration." Ringefield set the prototype down on the desk with a flourish. The three Senators watched as closely as though they expected him to haul a rabbit from a hat. Visible in the device's interior were the compact gray bulk of a miniature M-A reactor and a delicate, silver maze of circuitry. One of its irregular faces sported a digital-clock readout. Senator Stoughton absently shook back his sleeve and checked his watch. "A cesium clock," said Jean. "Far more accurate than the external readout's capacity could hope to indicate." Bernard riffled through a pack of iridescent magnetic-plastic chips that he materialized from a desk drawer, then inserted two into the globe's innards. The clock read # plus some seconds. "I've programmed it to start at # and to return at #." Stoughton was not impressed. "Start to do what?" "Watch." The green lines of the readout flickered into the new minute. Instantly and soundlessly the patchedtogether prototype disappeared, replaced by a perfect silvery globe that in seconds swelled to twice its original volume. Ringefield picked it up and at Jean's gentle murmuring he reluctantly handed it to Stoughton. "It's half as massive," Jean pointed out, "or, if you like, half as heavy." The Senator stared warily at the object he awkwardly hefted. "So what is it?" "A little Fast Room, obviously," Bernard said. "Now listen, Ringefield -- " "You'll see exactly what it is in a few minutes." Jean explained hastily. "We stumbled across it four years ago -- " "In a much more comfortable Research Station -- " "While we were trying to get an angle on antigravity." Bernard be quiet! "Our team's approach was in the forcible curving of space. We found this instead." "Instead? But it is antigravity! You just said this thing is half as heavy." The Senator motioned with the working model. "It's not practical antigrav," she said. "It's something more. W'e were rushed here as soon as we figured out what." Bernard fidgeted and cast a disapproving eye at the burning squares of sunlight on the carpet. Jean continued: "Only M-A can fuel it because it has to be completely self-contained. Under that condition, any other fuel is far too inefficient. It has to carry both the Fast Room and its own dead weight, and the bumed-out fuel can't be jettisoned as is possible in a rocket. With the new neutronconversion reaction there is no waste component in M-A -- it's one hundred per cent converted to energy. Hydrogen fusion, by contrast, is only one per cent efficient." The shiny ball in Senator Stoughton's hands began to shrink and grow more massive. He hurriedly replaced it on the desk. It popped out of existence; the junky little Room rolled an inch to settle on the blotter. Jean retrieved it and read the time from its clock. "Some few seconds past #." Stoughton consulted his watch. "It's only # and a half!" Bemaid grinned for the first time in months. "That's what a Fast Room is, gentlemen."    The sun poured into Chamber C and struck sparks off Don Wood's carrot-red hair as he joked with the technicians. On the wall opposite the balcony, half a football field's width distant, a huge electronic clock glowed a soft green, lazily contesting the sun's skylight invasion. It lacked five minutes of I I #. Jean Pelham sighed to herself as Bernard leaned on the railing a few feet from her, pointedly ignoring the three members of the finance subcommittee. He was seemingly engrossed in the last-minute preparations for the "flight." "Colonel Wood will be in the room for an hour by its clock," she told the Senators. By now she had completely forgotten the names of the other two men. Like Phobos and Deimos, they revolved around Stoughton's Mars, and their reaction to the tiny Room made the names Fear and Panic very appropriate. I suppose, she told herself, that's the way I looked four years ago. But the excitement has all burned off the surface now. All that's left is an occasional twitch. Her gaze was fixed upon Bernard's fingers, twisting, always twisting, the wedding band... Stoughton harrumphed. "Oh! I'm sorry," she interrupted her reverie. "A third of the equipment you see on the platform is for recycling the air. Tanks of oxygen would not be sufficient because waste air can't be expelled. The cameras are not, unfortunately, television. Nothing -- matter or energy -- will pass the Fast Room wall. The cameras are simply movie cameras. And there are various biometric monitoring devices, all with recorders." She tossed her hair back. "There's a timer able to bring the Room back if for any reason Colonel Wood himself is unable to do so." Ringefield leisurely pivoted at the edge of the group. "If you'll direct your attention to the center ring, gentlemen, the show is about to begin." The Senators peered down into the chamber. Stoughton chewed his cigar and shot a disgruntled look at Award winning Galaxy-Foundation Sarloa of Intar co nnaOad Involving the entire Galaxy, utilizing the Omega ship, the single move! 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She wished she could have snatched that sentence back. He brushed off her arm and pulled away, answering the remark with the look in his eyes. The Fast room is my life, it said. As much a part of it as you are. Maybe...maybe even more. She knew exactly how he felt. Bernard was clutching the railing now. Jean went over to join him, one hand reaching out for his. Down below, Don Wood -- in slacks, sport shirt and stockinged feet -- was in position, the cobwebs of the biomonitoring wires disappearing beneath his shirt and hair. He sat crosslegged on the Room's floor, one hand on the single control vernier. "He'll be more comfortable than we are once he's cut off from earth's gravity," Jean assured the Senators. The digits of the wall clock shimmered and shifted to form #. Wood twisted the control. Immediately he vanished from sight as the Fast Room wall sprang into being around him, a perfect superreflective sphere twelve feet in diameter. The four metal legs clattered to the floor and within seconds the sphere expanded to about sixteen feet, twice its first volume. Squinting a bit more than necessary as he leaned into the controlled sunlight's path, Ringefield cupped a hand to his mouth. "Carl," he called to one of the crew, "bring up one of the legs, will you?" He smiled maliciously as the two younger Senators put Stoughton and Jean between themselves and the Fast Room. Jean quickly reassured them. "Even if Colonel Wood's power plant were to explode -- and it won't -- you'd be perfectly safe. The Room's wall is absolutely impenetrable. Absolutely. It's as though the Colonel were in another universe entirely. Even gravity, remember, can't affect him in there." Still uneasy, the men stared at the globe being weighed and measured now by the technician crew. Senator Stoughton's face lit up, however, as he considered the possibilities of this property of the Fast Room. "Doctor Pelham, what causes this barrier?" "Well, by forcibly expanding the volume of a section of space-time, we cause its mass and time to contract in direct proportion. The energy needed to expand Colonel Wood and the Room to twice their original volume, and so to twice normal time-speed, happens to be the same we would need to accelerate them to eighty-seven per cent of the speed of light." Stoughton drew a new cigar from his pocket and unwrapped it. As it ignited itself, he said, "Where length contracts to half, mass and time expand to twice. The Lorentz-Fitzgerald effect." Ringefield's eyebrows arched as he looked at his wife in silent acknowledgment. Exasperating as the old furnace-breather was, fool he was not. It was then that Jean realized the mistake she had made -- the mistake that might cost them the project. In taking over the demonstration's explanations she thought she had been averting an explosion between Bernard and Stoughton. But the blast was building in Bernard's bitter silence. Get him involved enough in words, words about their brainchild, and with any luck he would become sufficiently absorbed to forego personalities. Here was her chance. She said nothing. Finally: "That's correct. Senator," Bernard grudgingly admitted. Three heads swung around. "In this case there is not relative motion, so the analogy breaks down; but in order to answer your question, let's hold on to the example of a spaceship." He held out the piece of metal he had received as Jean had talked. One end of the Fast Room leg was shorn away as if by a jeweler's laser. "Think of one end attached to that rocket and the other anchored to Earth." "The leg would break the moment the ship took off." "And so the barrier is formed the instant the Room begins to expand. No matter the degree, the barrier of relativity is impassable. You can't move from one plane of reference to another. The plane itself must change." Stoughton fell silent. His colleagues, with a cobra victim's fascination, watched their distorted reflection in the mirror-surfaced ball. The crew, with the aid of two tractors, was sliding a thick, padded mat beneath it. "Then an enormous Room," spoke up the Senator, "expanding Washington just a touch, would protect the city from even antimatter bombing?" "Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. You see..." A long-buried glow was creeping back into Bernard's features, his antipathy toward his audience fading as he expounded upon the applications of the Fast Room. Once he steered the subject away from Stoughton's bomb-shelter hobbyhorse, he was able to tell them of its uses in space travel, where it would make a foolproof acceleration couch and a perfect antigravity simulator. He painted a spellbinding picture of the Room's future. At the edge of the balcony Jean sighed again, this time in relief. He's done it, she thought as she watched the Senators' rapt expressions. I think we've made it. The huge green digits collapsed and reformed into #. "The short time it takes the Room to expand and then to contract makes our wait a trifle more than half an hour," said Bernard, tossing and catching the metal leg over and over. They waited. #. The shiny sixteen-foot globe sat solid and inscrutable on the floor of Chamber C. Senator Stoughton compared the wall clock and his watch. "Something's gone wrong," Bernard said suddenly, his voice a strangled monotone. The leg fell from his hand with a sharp clatter.    Three long minutes had passed. One of Stoughton's satellites finally spoke. "Can't you just wait for the fuel to run out?" "If that analogy holds this far," the senior Senator answered, tossing away the stub of his cigar, "and this is like acceleration, then it doesn't work that way. You need energy to get it there, and energy to get it back, but to keep it at a constant 'speed,' you don't need a damned thing. Right, Ringefield?" Bernard nodded absently, working at his ring more furiously than ever. "It will stay there until the end of time." The door burst open and Ronald Ferrier ran in, panting heavily. "What are we going to do ?" he wailed, wringing his hands. "How much time have we?" "The rebreathing apparatus is good for twenty hours at the most," said Jean. "That gives us until # out here." She shook her head, then brushed away the hair that fell across her face. "Of course, if it's not the Fast Room generator but the M-A reactor that's gone wrong, Don may already be dead." "He's been exploded in there!" cried the other heretofore mute Senator. Too quietly, unnaturally calmly, Ringefield said, "If he has, I know where the blame lies." "Bemie, what do you mean?" Ferrier shrank back. And the Fast Room director finally exploded. "It's this circus we're throwing! We're not conducting a scientific experiment here. We're slapping together a toy for these Yahoos! Why should it surprise us that something's gone wrong?" Stoughton's voice was as calm as Ringefield's a moment earlier but he was chewing viciously on a cigar no longer there. " don't remember forcing you into this." Flinching at the accuracy of the barb, Jean turned hastily to Ferrier. "There is something we can do, Ronald. We can send someone after him." Beside her, "Of course." Bernard snapped his fingers. "Another Fast Room!" "Exactly! If two Rooms expand to the same degree, they'll be on the same plane of reference, like two speeding spaceships motionless relative to one another. There will be no barrier between them." The two physicists ran out, past the elevator and into the stairway. Seconds later the supervisor and the Senators saw them rush onto the floor below, instantly surrounded by their anxious team. Ferrier fished out a limp handkerchief and mopped his dripping brow, muttering, "#." Stoughton reached for another cigar. Then Ringefield broke from the group and,, hands on hips, planted himself beneath the balcony's edge. "Ferrier, get me eighty kilos of anti-iron, fast!" "But we used every gram in the station for this demonstration!" "I don't care if you borrow it from the Urals. Get it!" Three hours later a spindly device was taking shape next to the featureless sphere in Chamber C, a device even less eye-catching than the hidden one. The group of scientists was feverishly improvising the construct out of material from the earlier small automated Fast Rooms; even the one-foot prototype had been scavenged from Ringefield' s office and cannibalized. A scant four kilograms of anti-iron, Ferrier's claim to the contrary, had been collected from the station's other projects and now waited with eighty kilos of iron in the loading chamber six corridors away. Ringefield rang Ferrier on theChamber intercom. The supervisor tried to talk first but Ringefield jumped him. "Where's the rest of the anti-iron?" "Thirteen kilograms is on its way from the Yukon Station but -- " "But what?" "But nobody else," Ferrier with any." n't you tell them what kind of an emergency we've got here?" "Of course I did." The station chief was close to sobbing. "But authorize transfer." " Vlwthorize'?" Ringefield slammed a white-knuckled fist against the wall and bolted from Chamber c. Heads turned to see him disappear, then the team returned to its tasks. Jean took a step away from the new Room, toward the door, but at that moment one of her people came in with an important subassembly. It was not until a good forty minutes later that she could break away and follow Bernard. He was sitting in his office, the phone receiver in his hand, the screen on the desk blank. His breath came in shudders. "Nothing," he said hollowly. "Ronald's right. Oh, antimatter security is tight as only tenthousand-dollar-a-kilo security can be." He did not move but just stared out the window at the shimmering buttes on the horizon. "Would you like me to take over, Bernard?" He hesitated; then, shaking his head, he attacked the dial buttons. That call was fruitless, as was the next, and the next. For the one after that he finagled a satellite link to Antarctica. "Harry? Bernard Ringefield. We've got an emergency here." He described the plight of the astronaut marooned mere inches from humanity. In the screen they could see the low midnight sun glowing like lambent ice over the Antarctic ore fields beyond Harry Carvin' s window. Carvin sat alone, gaunt and bearded, in his controlroom office; outside, robot mining equipment made its mindless way back and forth, back and forth, over the steel-hard brown earth. The M-A powered ore-smelter building loomed above like the play-blocks of a somber child giant. "Of course you can have all the anti-iron I can scrounge up. Let me see." He studied a smudged invoice book for half a minute. "I can give you a bit less than fifty kilograms, Bern." In the Mojave, Bernard and Jean let out their breath in unison. "Thanks, Harry." Bernard pressed the stud on his watch. #. "How soon can you get it here?" "We've got nothing very new nearby. Three, four hours. The loading will take up a. good chunk of that." "Ouch. Well, I'll get off the line so you can get started. Thanks again, Harry." Harry Carvin waved a deprecatory hand in his office five hundred miles from the nearest human being. "Sure, Bern." Bernard buzzed Ferrier only to find the supervisor still shooting zero. "Keep trying, Ronald. We're still thirteen kilos short." As he tried to leap from his seat, Jean gently restrained him. "Why don't you rest in here for a few minutes, dear?" He wiped the perspiration from his forehead and laughed weakly. "Maybe I should...I can feel my heart going like a machine-gun. No," and he tore away from her, "I'll rest after Don is baclj:, not before." Finally the rescue Room stood completed. Aside from a very limited chemical rebreather, it contained no equipment beyond Fast Room generator and M-A reactor. Jean studied its makeshift lines and recalled both Bernard's outburst today and her own a week and a half earlier. Not ready. And if the reason for the first Room' s breakdown is in the pushing forward of the flight date, then what can we expect with this rush job? If only she had not given in to Ronald... On the balcony above, she saw Stoughton talking with the station supervisor. Ferrier looked as though the Senator had just kicked him in the gut. Fiscal squeeze be damned! The connection she was checking blurred. For a moment Don Wood's predicament slipped out of her mind completely, leaving only her own loss as she wiped away the tear. The Fast Room, her Fast Room, was dead. She blinked...and there was the silent sphere before her. Don's laugh rang in her memory and she returned, dry-eyed and capable, to the wiring. One phrase in Bernard's words began to carousel around the fading laugh. Thirteen kilos.    #. A mile from the station the workhorse jet from Antarctica taxied to a smooth halt. Redjacketed handling crews, on tense standby for hours, were ready at the night-lit airstrip; unloading the antiiron took the specialized team only a fraction of the time the operation had taken Harry Carvin. To transfer it from smelting plant to jet he had had to singlehandedly supervise a gang of imbecilic robot equipment whose designers had never imagined such a task for them. The magnetic vacuum vault was swiftly but carefully swung out from the plane's bay doom to a waiting tractor. The tractor lumbered back to the station in the frigid moonlight. The rescue Room, and the vaults from the Yukon and from the station's own supply, waited in ' the loading chamber. The last magvac vault was put in with them and the chamber sealed. The Ringefields stood in the control room, separated from the ravening potential of the anti-matter only by an unreassuring wall of inches-thick steel. Calm M-A handlers lounged at remotecontrol panels, television screens laying open to them every inch of the loading chamber's interior. Bernard's chest was heaving again and his fingers were racing compulsively over the keyboard of a slim electronic calculator. "Go ahead," he told the loading director. "We're not getting any more. Load it." He scowled at the calculator, cleared it and stabbed away again at the keyboard. Air exhausted from the chamber. Spidery waldo arms opened the first vault. Then invisible magnetic beams eased a compact cloud of anti-iron dust out of the vault's grasp and into the light. With practised speed the handlers guided the antimatter toward the rescue Room. Occasionally the anti-iron sparkled as, in the imperfect earthbound vacuum, infinitesimal annihilations took place on the fringes of the cloud. The second vault was as swiftly unloaded. Then, on the third operation, as the formless mass of antimetal edged out of the vault, one of the waldos trembled and began to slowly swing down into its path. The loading director caught it immediately, bounding over to one of the handlers and twisting a lock on the man's panel. When Jean finally tore her gaze away from the retreating mechanical arm, Bernard had disappeared from her side. She found him in their quarters. She almost missed him, slumped down as he was in a chair before the window, the lights out. But when she turned in the doorway to continue her search, he spoke her name. "It's no use," he said as she walked around in front of him. "Don must certainly be dead in there. We would only be sending a second man to his death." He buried his face in his hands. "As dead as our Fast Room!" Reaching out for him, Jean murmured, "No, Bernard. We can't give up on him -- or on the project." The second, the false hope, caught in her throat as she felt the wracking sobs chase each other through his frame. "He must still be alive. He must! We could never live with ourselves if we gave up now." His voice artificially steady, Bernard spoke as though miles away. "We're twenty-six kilos short of fuel. I calculated a hundred and sixty by my weight. We would need somebody twenty kilos lighter." Out in the arcing desert sky new stars twinkled into existence. "I'm twenty-kilos lighter. And I know the Fast Room better than anyone." Bernard was silent, shivering in her arms. Then: "It's a four-meter sphere with no exit." "I'll control myself. I'll have to." A full minute passed. "Yes, I guess you'll have to. I'm sorry, Jean." In the moonlight his eyes glistened above his pallid cheeks like points of deep-sea phosphorescence. Straightening up, she asked, "Shall I call one of the doctors?" "No, I'll be all right." But they both knew that he would never be all right again.    The rescue Room squatted close to the stranded Fast Room in Chamber C. On the wall green numerals glowed: #. Don Wood had been in the Fast Room for exactly seventeen hours and twenty minutes. His would-be rescuers had, at the outside, an hour and twenty minutes in which to get him out. As two tractor-lifts rumbled into place facing each other with the two Rooms in line between them, Jean Pelham shrugged out of her lab coat and kicked off her shoes. God, but I'm scared ! Pulling back her hair and winding a rubber band around it, she said, "Let's get under way," and stepped resolutely aboard the rescue Room. On the balcony Andrew Stoughton stood with Ronald Ferrier, the other two Senators having long since departed. "Ringefield said he needed a hundred and sixty kilos of fuel -- eighty iron, eighty antiiron. I did some figuring; that isn't nearly enough." He watched Jean and her crew talking below and then nodded to himself about another subject, one entirely apart from fuel figures. Ferrier weakly shook his head. "When the two Rooms 'dock,' they'll salvage the unused hundred and fifty kilos in the first Room." "Unless Wood's M-A exploded." Stoughton looked even more thoughtful now. "If Doctor Pelham doesn't return, we'll at least know not to send a third Room." Ferrier sighed and groped for his handkerchief. ' ' Even if a third Room happened to materialize out of thin air. Senator, won't you reconsider -- " Neither of them noticed Bernard Ringefield step silently onto the balcony behind them as Ferrier began listlessly expostulating with an unhearing Stoughton. The rescue Room vanished behind its own wall, legs clanging to the floor. On the wall of the Chamber softly shone the numbers # .    As the M-A reactor cut in, Jean found herself shut into a dazzling cocoon -- and instantly weightless. If her conscious mind had known what to expect, not so her viscera. The pit of her stomach flipped over and she clutched at the sides of the control panel. Her feet flew away from the mesh platform as muscles involuntarily jerked. In her unconscious surprise she was able to ignore, for the moment, the pressing confines of the Room, and within a few minutes she had accustomed herself enough to the novel sensation to return her attention to the verniers, trying to disregard the fact that they were the only part of the platform with which any portion of her body was in contact. The harsh light from the single bulb atop the panel -- she had snatched it from Ronald Ferrier' s office -- shot back undiminished from every point on the wall. If only they had remembered a lampshade! Where Don Wood's Fast Room control consisted of a triple-throw switch, a fuel gauge readout and one vernier dial, Jean's contained two extra dials, giving her a finer control over fuel flow and thus expansion. It would still be seat-ofthe-pants flying. Quickly she brought the Room to nearly twice-speed with the "coarse" dial. The readout showed that she had used the energy that would have accelerated her to almost eighty-five per cent of the speed of light. Even as simple a matter as the spinning of a dial was immensely complicated by the lack of gravity. But now that she had reached the first stage and was waiting for the tractors to move, her confidence -- even her enjoyment of zero-G -- was increasing steadily. If she concentrated on the panel, the mirror qualities of the wall made the Room seem gigantic out of the comer of her eye; and now that expansion had stopped, the tractors should be gently pressing the two Rooms together. One hand reached for the second dial as the other held on to one panel. Slowly she ' increased "speed." Slowly, slowly... The Rooms fell together as their degree of expansion coincided. Just at the edge of her vision a small, dark circle appeared in the wall. Don's M-A had not exploded! She slammed the vernier leftward. The opening between the two Rooms disappeared. Too fast now! But the circle that had outlined the hole remained. At that point each sphere was flattened, the barrier restored instantaneously as their convex edges overlapped. The generator began to hum, then to scream. Up and up the registers of tone and volume the shriek sped, vanishing into the ultrasonic. Only a perfect sphere could contend with the generator's space-twisting effect, Jean realized. No outside force could give the wall that dangerous flaw -- except under the circumstances she had just momentarily created. The tractors! She screamed silently, her hands uselessly clamped to her ears as her bones hummed. Back off! Back off!    Don Wood's matter-antimatter had ribt exploded...although for a moment he thought it had. Without warning his twelve-foot-diameter world had gone black. The darkness was absolute. Within seconds, however, phantom shapes of green and violet began to appear, resembling a dim, grainy color negative. The after-image of the platform dissolved into random dots, curves and angles as his optic nerves overcompensated for the. utter lack of stimuli. His universe was no longer twelve feet in breadth. It was endless and he was falling through it at a speed unimaginable. He had left the tiny platform at the other end of the universe and it fell light-years further behind with every second. Now he did not know where his arms and legs were. They too fell behind like sable comets, unseeable in the twinkling, lightless void. Then his aim brushed against something and he grasped the Room's thin column. His legs touched the mesh, or was that the paraphernalia upon it? He closed his eyes and although the nonexistent view remained unchanged, it now made conditional sense to the innermost, primitive sections of his mind. Don Wood took a deep breath and tried to laugh at his unprofessional moment of panic. The lights went out, that's all. Must be a loose connection. The astronaut did not completely understand how the Fast Room expanded space; Jean Pelham had explained it to him once in the hectic days of the past week but he had lost her toward the end. "Well, at least you understand more of it than Ronald Ferrier does after four years," she had said, promising him a full briefing after the demonstration. Unfamiliar as he was with its manner of operation, he nevertheless knew the physical layout of the Room's components like he knew the back of the moon. He unclipped the sides of the control panel and to keep them out of trouble in zero-G, he wedged them between the controls and the reactor. Then he reached inside and felt for the rear of the glow-plate casing. It was the work of moments to follow the wires by feel from glow-plate socket to reactor transformer, assuring himself of the integrity of the connections. He let go and, drifting in the now-unfrightening nothingness, he scratched at his head until his fingers caught in the biometering wires. A gentle susurrus rumbled in his ears like a distant ocean lapping at forgotten shores. A calm, insistent beat swelled and subsided in continuous counterpoint. It was his bloodstream, the beating of his heart. Wait a minute! Where was the whirring of the cameras? Sightless in the abysmal gloom, they were silent as well. If the light was out...if the cameras had stopped... He coughed. The atmosphere rebreather. Again Wood forced the screaming terrors back into the closets of his brain. The air had not suddenly gone sour; his unconscious was over-reacting again. But in minutes the air would indeed begin to get noticeably bad. He forced himself to think calmly and logically. It was obviously past time to abort the flight. But...hold on. The transformer built into the reactor was no longer giving out electricity. Even if the reactor proper was still functioning -- the Fast Room generator used not electricity but gamma radiation -- the generator controls did use the conventional juice. He groaned. The generator's actual mechanism was as effectively isolated from him as he was from Chamber C. Wait another minute! Electricity powered the magnets that held the M-A. If he were still in one piece, the magnets must still be operating. The magnet emergency reserve batteries. The air was becoming foul now. Weightless, he fumbled, sightlessly but by no means blindly, with the wiring. The air was growing warmer as well with the passing minutes; the rebreather incorporated a cooling system that had fed his own radiant heat into the transformer. There! Any change in the air was not observable. He continued working in the stifling dark. Finally the glowplate atop the control panel blazed forth again. And the air was beginning to get better. Hovering between wall and platform, he peered at the clock on the panel. Powered by atomic breakdown, it had continued working unseen until restored electrical power from the batteries enabled its readout to function again. # . The batteries had been charging until the moment the transformer failed. Safety back-up that they were, they would hold out for days. The rebreather would last maybe nineteen more hours. Nineteen hours in which to perform a miracle of rewiring. The equipment was situated in this order: controls, transformer, batteries, rebreather. The rebreather wires rerouted from transformer to batteries floated free, under no strain. The single wire from the light and the clock on the panel was now taut, however; the control multi-cable itself was already tight. The biometering wires, spiderweb-fine, were far too delicate for the heavy job. He had his work laid out for him, Don Wood reflected, as he reached, tool less, for the armored camera cables.    A huge mirrorsurfaced ball brooded in a place that was almost, but not quite, the quadrangle at the river. Jean, sharing a lunch on the lawn with Ronald Ferrier, said to him, "The Fast Room is his life. He'll die if he loses it." The sphere caught up with the fleeing Bernard and crushed him flat. Eight years old, Jean tugged frantically at the jammed knob of an ancient door. Paint-cracked, cobwebbed walls closed in as the abandoned house creaked with the squeals of its rats. The walls began to brighten, to flow into quicksilver. She was awake. Don't think about it don't think about it don't think what's the time what's the time let's see # how much does that leave how much does that ' -- Too late. There was no way that Don's air could last beyond #. Silently his corpse joined the pictures in her overwrought imagination. She had failed. And for her own return she would have to grave-rob the dead man's M-A. She was verging on the brink now as childhood fear and adult terror gibbered at her heel. One small part of her mind clawed about for stability and pounced upon the Room controls. The make-do fuel-used indicator advanced. The second vernier was still supplying a miniscule trickle of energy to the generator. Kicking out against the wall, she lunged for the control and painfully three dimensions. The idea popped into her head that if the platform and air were not in there, she would bounce off the absolutely reflective wall forever. There's the detached scientist making her reappearance , Jean thought, reaching for the column as she slammed against it. She hauled herself to the vernier and snapped it to zero. The horrors retreated just a bit. The wall, she saw, was an unblemished sphere again; the nearfatal flaw was gone. She had to return to the point where the distortion had happened and the only way to calculate her present incorrect "speed" was to judge the amount of M-A used. In here she was subjectively at normal time-speed no matter what, and so were any instruments... Jean gasped. Outside it wasn't yet #. She had half an hour more by her watch! One long, shuddering breath...and she was back in control. She pushed away the image of Don. There was still a chancel The memory of that long-ago night in a small, locked room she shunted back into the shadows. And the dream was fading already. Bernard... With one final shiver, Jean flipped over the triple-throw switch and began again with the second dial; she stopped when her calculations warned of the approaching danger zone. What must they be thinking outside as they watched the globe slowly and inexorably swell beyond the correct volume in the last three-quarters of an hour? Carl must have realized the danger and ordered the tractors to separate the Rooms. Now he must notice that she had regained control and order them in again. He must ! With the third -- the "fine" -- vernier, she fed the barest possible amount of energy to the generator. As slowly as the dial would allow she crept up on the marooned Room. Gently, with a touch like the kiss of dawning sunlight, she kept the circuit just closed. Minutes crawled by. Above her head a small circle appeared in the curved wall. She slammed the vernier off. The opening enlarged with the speed of two elephantine tractors laboring toward each other a universe away. "Don!" Jean coughed as bad air wafted in from the other Fast Room. She aimed herself at the opening which had stopped growing at a dimension of three feet across, and sprang. Grabbing the edge of the opening, she stopped short of smashing into the bottom of the other Room's mesh floor. "Jean..." the floating astronaut grasped as she pushed the platform to one side, ducking as the rim swept past the opening. Sweat gushed down his gray face and his breathing was noisily forced. The young physicist piloted him into the rescue Room and toward the rebreather. "As soon as I salvage your reactor," she told him, brandishing wrench and screwdriver that were clipped to her platform's floor, "we'll be getting the hell out of here!" She had been in time to save Don from the Fast Room's clutches. What about Bernard? What could save him now?    One of the two shining globes shrank and disappeared. In its place the platform hung suspended upside-down and at a slant ten feet above the padding. Jean and Don, curled into balls, fell into the mat as magnetic beams held the rescue Room quivering above them. Hands reached for the pale astronaut and as the men and women of the crew started to cheer, the Station doctors bundled him into a stretcher and carted him away. The rescue Room slowly sank to the mat. Jean was stepping into her shoes when a gruff voice behind her said feelingly, "Thank God." She whirled to see Senator Stoughton and Ronald Ferrier approaching. "I am impressed. Doctor Pelham," the Senator continued. But almost too low to be heard, Ferrier confirmed her suspicions. "Jean, the Senator is closing us down." Stoughton blew a cottony cloud of smoke. "Closing down the Station, yes. We're in a fiscal squeeze this year." His committee's vote back in Washington was a foregone conclusion. "But I think certain projects do deserve to remain functional elsewhere. They show promise." "The Fast Room?" "I can see the uses of an impervious barrier. There would have to be a shift in personnel though... Jean stared past the Senator. Above them, on the balcony, Bernard stood alone. In the shadow she could not read his expression. Their brainchild was not dead yet. "I would very strongly recommend your appointment as director. I've seen your record -- and I've learned a lot more today. Without you -- no project." Ferrier, still absorbed in the loss of his Station, mumbled, "Bernard needs the rest, Jean. Like me..." She remembered sharing a lunch on the grass with Ronald and saying something to him and watching the juggernaut beyond. Can you understand, Bernard? I have to save you from it. But I have to keep it alive for you. And for me. "Yes, Senator. I would be willing." Above, Bernard slowly turned and walked away. His wedding ring had finally slipped off under the constant twisting. Thoughtfully he shoved it into his pocket. Stoughton took Jean by the arm and led her out after Ferrier and the crew. At the door she stopped to flick off the lights but did not look back. In the balcony doorway Bernard Ringefield did look back, at the Fast Room twinkling in the moonlight and the rescue Room overturned beside it. In a cracked whisper he murmured, "Thank you, Jean." The green digital numbers softly flickered and changed...forging steadily ahead toward midnight and the new day.  Empyrean Challenge # solar systems and # planets is the goal of this # player hidden-movement strategic science fiction game Players are faced with over population and dwindling resources on their home planets Each player negotiates with the other rulers of the planet in order to cope with tricky economic situations, rebellion, exploration problems, war, and new technology, and finally, to establish interstellar travel The player finds new worlds, sets up orbiting factories, protects his colonies, and can discover whole new comprehensive computer-moderated futuristic play-by-mail game in existence. There are two turns per month they are processed every # to # weeks and printouts with the results are mailed back to you. The cost of entering a game is # (# is for the set-up fee and rules the balance is for the next three turns.) Game Fee is Z# per Name Address... Enclosed is # Please rush me the rules. P.Q Bax # Fairfield, Idaho # A lonely story of a lonely man on a lonely world The wind came hard off the desert, crashing into the cliff face beneath him and then swirling away, losing itself in the rocks. It was a dry wind, and ten years of it had turned his skin to leather and his deep black hair to a peppery gray. It had also done things to his soul. Standing alone on the ridge, facing the red-orange wasteland, Derek Carson was the image of every other man who had ever searched in the desert for something he could not really expect to find. Derek Carson's desert, however, encompassed the world and he was the only man from earth to ever live on its sands. He turned slowly up the trail toward the hogan, his step less lively than it had been during his first few years here. Time had also taken its toll on Frank. The dog was in the shade of their domelike plastic shelter tent and when it saw Carson approach, it raised its head and swirled eddies in the dust with its wiry tail. "How was your day?" Carson asked the dog. "Anyone drop by?" Frank, in his eternal good humor, rolled out his tongue and thumped his tail harder. Age had clouded the animal's eyes and stiffened his bones, making it clear that he was not long for this world or any other, but for the time being at least, he was good company for the man. Carson gave him an affectionate scratch behind the ears before continuing on into the hogan. The routine at the end of the day was well-established. He would go first to the revitalizer and pour in a packet of crystals, routinely, without bothering to read the label on the vial. Then, while waiting for them to recycle, he would review his notes for the day. Once the evening stew had emerged from the bowl at the base of the revitalizer, he would settle down in front of the transcriber and recite his evening report between mouthfuls. "Activate," he told the machine. "Day three thousand, six hundred eleven. Discovered a slow leak in the water tank and repaired it. Estimated loss less than five liters; it will not seriously restrict supply prior to replenishing by supply ship. "Continued investigation of presence of free oxygen in atmosphere and have made no further progress in explaining it. Outstations no longer seem to indicate variance in oxygen levels between readings, and earlier recordings may have been in error." Frank padded through the door and went directly over to him, placing his head in Carson's lap and staring up at him with the most sorrowful look his clouding eyes could manage. Carson fed the dog some of the meat from the stew. "Tomorrow I will travel to the sulphur springs in the thirty-eighth sector, first quadrant, to re-examine the possibility of chemical breakdown occurring there. Endlog. "Personal log, code Getback, lock in, authorization only. Today again broke universal law by relieving myself on the north ridge. Perhaps one day the ancestors of my released bacteria will evolve to populate this godforsaken rock." He looked down at the dog and scratched the matted fur behind an upraised ear. "Then I'll have someone else around to talk to. No offense intended, Frank." The dog looked at him questioningly.    "Frank?" He stepped outside the hogan and into the searing heat of the mid-day sun. The wind danced about him, sucking up tiny dust devils and smashing them against the rocks. "Frank?" The dog had left sometime during the night and gone off into the hills. He had not done that in almost a year, and it had been three years since the animal had been gone for more than a few hours; but when he was younger, the first few years on the planet, he would be gone for a week at a time, searching for something the lifeless planet would always be unable to offer him. Carson called once more and then him on his day's journey. He was forced to keep the tractor half a mile from the hogan since the shelter was nestled in a field of boulders near the cliff face. The boulders had been deposited by a volcanic cataclysm millenia before and had formed a maze that was as annoying to Carson as it was complicated. Carson had elected to live among the rocks, though, so that he would have an unrestricted view of the desert floor from the top of the cliff. The first supply ship in ten years would land out there on the desert, probably within the month. The wind danced around him as he emerged from the boulders and strode toward the tractor. The glaring sun reflected sharply off the cab and he was forced to squint and look away from it as he approached. His bones creaked in protest as he pulled himself up the ladder to the cab and strapped himself in. The turbine beneath him activated with a gentle purr at his oral command and he slid the shift into gear. lurched forward -- and he heard a cry of bewildered pain. Carson hit the brake and an instant later was on his knees in the sand beneath the vehicle. The single wheel at the front of the tractor had ridden completely over the dog, and Frank was looking up at him in confused terror, fighting for breath that would no longer come. "Frank, please, I'm sorry. Understand that, please... I didn't mean..." Hd reached forward gingerly and touched Frank's side. Without warning, the dog jerked forward spasmodically and raked its worn teeth across its master's hand. Carson pulled his hand back quickly, clutching the wound. Frank, exhausted now, fell back on his side in the shadow of the tractor. "Frank, I... Carson found apologies and neglected kindesses forcing their way uselessly into his throat. He leaned forward again, more cautious this time, and scratched Frank between the ears. Something red began to bubble up from behind the dog's teeth. "Frank, you're... all they left me here. If I... yelled at you or seemed too preoccupied to care, it was my own frustration showing. I tried to be as good to you as I could. You understand, don't you?" Frank stared at him, tongue out, panting. "Look, I'll get some water for you. From the tractor. Hold on just a minute longer. I'll be right back." He climbed into the cab, drew the canteen from under the seat and returned, but he was too late. The dog was dead.    The sand of the secret floor had of incessant sun, and it fought the blade of his shovel. He had worked on the grave for nearly an hour and still it reached only a few feet down, a mere scratch in the wasteland. Carson sat with his feet in the half-finished grave and looked at the body of his friend. If this had been the earth, there would be flies buzzing around it now. He wouldn't have been able to stand that. Frank had wandered off in search of cool shade and had found it under the tractor, where he had fallen asleep. He had been an old dog, nearing his time, but knowing that did not help. Carson had run over the only dog on the planet with the only vehicle. "You damned fool." He said the words to himself and to the dog, simultaneously. They echoed out across the stillness and died somewhere in the desert. He raised his head sharply, listening. There was no wind. For the first time in ten years the air was still. Carson stood up, suddenly frightened, the silence screaming at him. "The wind!" he shouted aloud. "Where is the wind?" It was, impossibly, gone. He turned and in his confusion he nearly slipped into the grave. Catching himself, he noticed a tiny flicker of light in the broken soil beneath him. He hesitated, fixing his eyes on it. There was something there, a tiny glow of light. He climbed into the grave and reached for it. The glow came from the smooth edge of an object still half-hidden in the red-orange soil -- an object as smooth as glass. He worked at the dirt around it, scraping with his fingertips, prying, twisting, clawing, until he had broken the thing free. Then he held it up into the light of the alien sun. It was a statue. On a world where no man had ever lived! It was a beautifully carved statue, shaped from material that looked like glass and felt like metal; its color was a pale blue, and it seemed to glow luminously from its crystal depths; it had been carved by a master and, most amazing of all, it was human. It was the figure of a woman of earth, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. What was she doing here, buried in the sand of a planet where she could never have lived? The answer was obvious, he decided, running his hands gently over the smooth form. He had lost his only friend -- and now the planet had provided another. A goddess, at that. Weeping in gratitude, he pressed the statue against his weathered cheek; and again he was shocked. He held the figurine to his nose and sniffed curiously. There was no mistaking it. The statue gave off an odor, but... what was it? Perfume? As part of its art? Perhaps. The scent was so faint and subtle that he could barely notice it; yet he was sure it was present. It was a warm, familiar smell, a memory of a night long ago and a distant garden where he had sat with... her. He remembered the soft, gentle smell of her and how, when he had asked, she had told him the name of her perfume. That name had stayed bits of trivia concerning her. The perfume had been called The Breath of the Lily. He held the statue at arm's length and stared at it. No, there was no resemblance. But still... "I'm going to call you Dorothy," he whispered. He placed the figure upright on its small base, near the grave, and looked at it often as he finished his chore. Then, when Frank was properly buried, he took it back to the hogan, whistling on the way. And still there was no wind.    Derek Carson poured a vial of crystals into the revitalizer and there was a faint buzz as the pulses began to reconstitute it. While he was waiting, he turned and looked at the statue again. He had placed her on the top shelf of the storage rack. There was plenty of room for her there since she was only six inches tall. He had turned her so as to face the room -- and so that he could see her and talk with her. "You know, you're going to create a hell of a mess for my colleagues back home," he told her. "They have this planet all classified. Nice and neat, the way they like things. Never any life here, not much hope of there being any. That's why they sent me here -- but we don't have to go into that. "But now you're really going to botch things up for the boys. They're going to want to know who made you, and why. They're going to analyze you, categorize you, bisect you and trisect you, to find out your secrets. If they can... if I tell them." The revitalizer beeped and dropped his evening stew out the slot in the bottom. He picked it up and tasted the first few scorching mouthfuls, staring at her thoughtfully. "At least you don't ask for any," he said, and was immediately sorry he had said it: It brought back the other memory, the more recent one, that he regretted. He looked around for something to change the subject with, sighted the radio and pointed to it. "See the little bulb on top of that?" he asked the statue. "That'll blink red in a week or two as the supply ship homes in on us and starts making its final descent. It'll give us about a day's notice. They'll be bringing all kinds of things. Food. Holotapes. Clothing. Water. But do you know what else, the most important thing of all? There'll be people there. People to talk to. I haven't heard another voice, oiltside of the holotapes, for six years, and then it was a normal-frequency beam from Lincolnsted. A voice six years old, wanting me to relay word down the line that King Rebudton had died and that Warslas was accepting the throne. I sent it on but I don't suppose anyone is close enough to reply for four or five years yet." He chewed the last morsel of the stew and set the emptied bowl on the disposal plate. The activator whistled its three-second warning and then the bowl was gone. "The men on that ship will want to know what I've found here, Dorothy. Not much, I'm afraid, until now. I still can't tell them why there's enough free oxygen in the air, and enough humidity from somewhere, to make it possible for me to exist. I can't tell them any-, thing, but unless I have something to offer them, they might not want to take me home yet." He walked over and picked her off the shelf. The Breath of the Lily drifted past his nostrils. He studied her, rubbing his thumb gently along the lines of her naked body. "So should I tell them about you? Do they deserve to know? Maybe. First, though, we're going to have to find out what a nice lady like you is doing in a place like this." He chewed his lower lip for a moment, staring at her, then replaced her on the shelf. Walking back to the cot, undressing and climbing into bed, he was once again an old man who had been isolated on a dead world for too long. But just before he drifted off to sleep, he looked at her once more -- gleaming luminously from her perch -- and some of the boy within him shone through.    The wind. He sat up straight on the bed. "Dorothy, it's back. The wind." Above him, beside him, all around him the tent was alive with the rustle and whisper of the wind. From far beyond, from the hills flanking the desert, he could hear the lonely cry of air forcing its way to uppermost peaks and pinnacles. "Dorothy, can you hear it? The wind came back!" He stood, excited, and switched on the light. She was gone. The top shelf of the supply rack stood empty. "Dorothy?" He stepped forward, confusion dancing through his mind. He touched the shelf, ran his hand along it, seeing but refusing to believe. "Dorothy... you..." He spun around, searching the floor, searching the lower shelves. Each moment pressed on him until, frantic, he was ripping supplies from their places and scattering them across the poured concrete floor of the hogan. The statue was gone. He raced to the door, tearing it open. Outside, the sun had dropped below the horizon little more than an hour earlier; another sixteen hours would pass before it returned. Out of the darkness of the newborn night the wind battered him viciously. "Dorothy!" he called into the void. He pushed his way into the open area in front of the hogan, struggling against the rising wind. Stumbling, clawing, running, he made his way to the trail that wound down through the rocks to the desert floor. His eyes searched the way frantically. The wind almost masked the sound off to his right. He whirled, facing down another meandering trail through the rocks. What might have been a shadow, or an eddy of swirling, windblown dust, hung for a moment in the darkness of the trail and then slipped from sight. He couldn't be sure that he had seen anything at all, but it meant hope and... He started in the direction of the shadow and then balked, quickly changing his course and heading back to the hogan. His gun was inside, on the rack. It was an old gun and had never been taken from its spot; when he checked the charge, there was barely enough left to harm anything, but it would have to do. Prepared now, he charged outside, running toward the rocks. The wind was already falling off, as though holding its breath in anticipation. As he entered the passageway between the first boulders, he heard it bubbling and whispering in the shadows nearby. Uncertain as to why, he suddenly began to advance cautiously. "Dorothy?" Nothing. Nothing but the wind playing hide-and-go-seek, laughing, teasing him, telling secrets to the dust. "Dorothy?" Nothing. Nothing but the wind gathering in the hidden places, growing in strength, waiting for him to come so it could pounce like a hungry beast and devour him. He stopped at the place where he had seen the shadow. The wind fingered the cuff of his pants and nibbled at his toes. He bent down, carefully examining the sand. The wind had brushed it clear. If there had been anything there, the wind had taken away every trace of it. He rose, listening. The wind was drawing back and in a moment the silence would be deafening. His stomach began to turn uneasily. There was something more to this... There was something behind him. He was sure of it. Something staring hungrily at the back of his neck and making the hair bristle and rise. His finger slipped down to the trigger of the gun. He tried to swallow and found his throat parched. Carson turned, flinging himself to the side. The barrel of the gun swung upward, aiming into the rocks. There was nothing there. And, at the same time, there was something, or many somethings, all around him, in the rocks. Something very old... ancient. He walked forward, crouched low and ready. The wind was completely gone now. The sound of his bare feet crunching over clumps of dirt thundered and echoed for miles through the rocks. Echoing. The shadow leaped at him from the left, and he spun and fired. Dust and smoke flew back at him, and for an instant Derek Carson went blind. When the blindness was gone and he could open his eyes again, he saw the thin crevice in the rocks at his side, and the shadow it made across the trail. Had the shadow of the rock, this rock, startled him? Or was there something else? He took a step toward the fissure and froze: The statue was lying half-buried in the dust at his feet. He reached down for her, and then froze again. Her nose and chin had been broken off. He felt his knees go weak and as he picked up the broken, maimed beauty, he heard -- somewhere far off in the rocks -- the crying of the wind.    "It's not fair," he protested when he was safely back at the hogan. He sat on the bed with the small figure, holding her in his hands and regarding her through a blu of tears. "It shouldn't have to happen to both of you," he said. "In a way, that's why they sent me here. For hurting you once before." Visions flashed through him again. The medal that the Science Academy was planning to award him. The garden, where he had gone to tell her about it. Dorothy, among the lilacs, with the other. Her voice screaming at him, begging him not to strike her lover. Her lover! His fist lashing out, the crunch of bone within her jaw. Many things would have changed it. If only she had not been a daughter of the Minister of the Presidium, or a benefactress of the Academy. But then, had it not been for his reputation, he might not have survived. Survived to come here, exiled under the guise of a scientific quest. Always the plusses, always the minusses. The wind scratched a thousand tiny fingers along the bottom rim of the tent fabric. His hold on her tightened, his eyes turned to the walls of the tent. It was like an animal, the wind, scratching around the outside of the tent, searching for the way inside. Hunting for a weakness. "You didn't walk away from here, Dorothy," he told her. "And the wind isn't strong' enough to carry you off. So there's something else out there. Something that can grab you and run. Something that loves you." He turned the statue in his hand, considering, and then dropped it into the ueep pocket of his vest. "Only I'm not giving you up again. They took you on earth and they took Frank up here. I'm not giving anything up any more. They'll have to come and take you from me." And, as though understanding this, the wind drew away from the hogan and lost itself in the night. He slept with her clutched tightly in his hand and he dreamed of things never within his life's experience. The images were incomprehensible but each carried an urgency about itself, a plea for understanding; and each bore the mark of great age, although what it was that made them ancient, he could not decide. The images themselves were unclear but they seemed to be people walking through fields that were green and alive. They seemed somehow happy. But they had a mission, a place to go, and suddenly they were gone. They took the fields with them, and the happiness departed as well. He could not tell where the people went, or why, but he could sense the confusion that was left behind -- although he could see no one there to be confused. The confusion grew into great loneliness and the loneliness lingered, and then one day there was a touch of fire in the sky, and one, just one of them, was returning. He wore the face of Derek Carson.    Derek Carson stood facing the west, looking across the desert, with the statue in his pocket and no wind at his feet. "Was someone out there, Dorothy?" he asked. "A whole race that climbed higher, maybe, than we've climbed up to now? People who, after living here a few move? Could they do that, and take everything with them? Peel it all off the planet like the skin off an orange and take it all along with them wherever they were going? And if they did, why? "I read a report once that speculated that a house knew its occupants -- in a real sense. Just as plants know the people who water them, rocks and garden walls and fishponds know what's going on around them, on a very primitive level. What would happen if a whole race left a planet and took everything along with it? Would the planet they left behind know, and remember? Would it get lonely, suddenly, without their life? And then, seeing someone like them return, would it try to make him happy so he would stay? Would it give him the environment he needed, as best it could? And then, would it, seeing him overcome by tragedy, rush forward impulsively to help? Would it wring out its... life... to give him... you?" He took her out of his pocket and gently touched the fracture line around the lower half of her face. "Then what would happen if it decided it had given too much and that it was going to be abandoned again? What if the planet knew, in the long run, that what it had given up to give you birth was more important? Would it try to take you back? And what would it do if I said no?" He looked up, and the planet answered. He could hear it coming, taking off fifty miles away among the hills. It was traveling faster than it ever had before. The wind. In an instant it had smashed upon the far edge of the desert, hurtling down from the mountains, and the dust rolled up before it in a monstrous wave. Derek Carson stood paralyzed with fear, watching the Deathwind scream its way toward him across the arid plain, devouring three hundred miles an hour and building speed. "My God!" He ran back to the hogan and zipped the door shut behind him. It was a pitiful, hopeless gesture. The shelter was anchored down, capable of withstanding winds a hundred and forty miles an hour. But not this wind. The entire camp would be leveled in a blast equal to three hurricanes. He looked about in desperation for something to anchor on to. "This is it, Dorothy," he found himself saying. "Ride this one out and you're mine. This is the big play. Their ultimate weapon." He pulled down a coil of rope from the shelf and began searching for a mallet. He found one quickly, along with ring pegs for climbing. He hammered the pegs into the cement floor of the hogan and ran the rope through their iron eyes. This completed, it was only a matter of seconds before he had himself lashed to the floor. "I'm ready now! Whatever you are, I'm ready for you and you're going to have to tear me to shreds before I'll let you have her! So let's have at it!" The first gigantic wave of wind tore the hogan from the ground, and everything around him went with it. He could feel the relentless force race under him, grabbing hold of him, trying to pull him free from the ropes or to tear him apart. The bonds creaked and strained, but held. The dust was a cloak upon him, blocking the breath he fought for. Undaunted, Carson screamed at the wind. "You can't do it! I still have her and you can never take her away!" He gulped for a breath and drew in a mouthful of sand. Gasping, he turned his head to the side, trying to find clearer air close to the ground. The sand swept over him. "She's mine! Bury me and you bury her. Tear me apart and she's crushed." The wind screamed back at him but the mighty thrust that had carried it forward had also sapped its strength. It still yanked him upward, slicing the ropes into his flesh, but the heart was gone from it. In a few moments Carson knew, and the wind knew, that he would win. And, knowing this, the wind played its final trump. It fell back to a gentle eddy, barely strong enough to keep the dust aloft in a blinding fog but not too strong to mask the sound that came from just beyond the range of vision. The sound of a barking dog. Derek Carson lifted his head from the ground. "Frank?" It came again, soft but distinct. It was nearby, but receding. "Frank? They've brought you back?" The cry grew fainter, more urgent, its volume brought back for just an instant and then returned for resumption of its fate. "No! Don't kill him again! I understand!" He worked one hand free from the ropes, forced it across his chest to the statue and began to work her from his pocket, where she nad been lashed in place. "They want a trade, Dorothy. That's the idea. Frank for you..." He held her up, his fingers clasped tightly around her. "I'm sorry, girl, but... there just isn't a question, you know. You were theirs, and Frank was mine. There are some things that are just more... important." He opened his fingers. The wind grabbed the statue; for a fleeting moment it was as though a cheer rushed back through the wind to thank him. Then she was gone. The Deathwind died. Carson tore away the ropes and dragged his battered, bleeding body erect. The dust and sand clung to him, still suffocating, but now they could be ignored. He looked toward the desert and whispered, almost afraid to hope. "Frank?" For a moment there was nothing. Then, like a curtain, the dust parted and his friend was there -- mouth open in a grin, a younger tail waving rapidly, healthy legs carrying him toward his master. Derek Carson cried as he went forward to reunion. A mile away, among the rocks, a small bulb on a badly battered radio began to glow red.  The Foremost galaxy Publication in Science Fiction Some Contributors Past and Present Pout Anderson Isaac Asimov Greg Ben ford C J Cherryh Arthur C Clarke Arsen Darnay Jordon Eklund Harlan Ellison Frank Herbert Larry Niven Frederik Pohl Jerry Pournelle Fred Saberhagen James Tip tree Roger Zelazny H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction" -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U.S. residents, enclose # here For other countries, enclose  I # for here Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed findjn payment for my subscription She was heir to a Goddess, master of the ancient mysteries. But the forces she faced were deadlier than ail her magics Brit huddled in the harbor of the cave' tugging her matted fur cloak tightly about her. Outside, the rain sluiced off a ragged overhang, gouging deeper its ancient rut. The bones of the countryside, ancient stones, cut through the rounded hills, and the rain became mist in the distance. How long before they came? Although she could see no one in the fogveiled valley before the cave's entrance, her neck and fingers prickled with a sense of their nearness. It was the witch-sense, the weirding, that warned her of their approach. That same sense told her that the life which quickened in her womb would be a daughter, redhaired. Brit felt exhaustion settling upon her shoulders like a great weight. Hunger, fear, chill, combined in an inestimable weariness. She offered a silent prayer to the Great Mother that her trial would be over soon, that they would come and make an end to her waiting.' Fearn. That's what her Mother had called them. Brit tasted the word. It was an old name. It had become, through the long years, only an old tale used to stir the spirit and keep the old ways. Now the word had become flesh. She remembered the day she had first heard the word. Mother and she had gone for a long walk about the hills near the sea. They had spent the day naming the herbs and wildflowers, for it was her Mother's hope that Brit would have some skill in the healing arts. Brit still knew those names, their given names, and the secret ones which called out their essence. As the two passed a rock outcropping stained red by the dripping of the water, her Mother spoke: "What is this called, Brit?" She had thought for a moment, then raised the word from her memory. "Iarn, Mother." "It has another, older name, Daughter, a name you must leam." A tautness lined her Mother's face. "It is -- Fearn." As she spoke, her Mother took a stick and drew the rune into the ground before the stone, then handed the stick to her, making her trace it in the dust. Brit repeated the name. It gave her a strange, cold feeling as she did so. Her Mother stirred the dust, so as to leave no trace of the marie. The work meant iarn, but it didn't. It also meant fear. In some strange way Brit did not understand, it was also an evil word, never to be spoken casually.    She heard it next from a father of hers, Pon by name, who had lain with her Mother several summers before. By him she had a sister, called Jo. On that day, Pon was playing with them, showing them how to parry and thrust with a quarterstave. Such combative arts were left to the men-folk to teach, as they were not as a rule good at fishing, or weaving, or making spells. Pon grew heated with the game, making wild passes in the air with the staff, cracking it at last against a rock. It splintered, showering chips of hardwood. He swore a coarse oath and cried, "Bah! If only this were a staff of -- iarn!" The way he paused told Brit he meant to call it by another name. She, being then a brazen girl of two moons and forty seasons, shot back: "Made of what?" He grimaced, as if speaking of something unspeakably wicked, yet delightful. " Fearn ." he whispered, "But She will not let us touch it!" Brit's ears burned at his blasphemy.    But she had not learned the full tale until Maeve, Priestess to the Great Mother, called her aside one day. Maeve had spoken to Brit in private before, in the quiet little meetings not meant for boys, reserved by Maeve for her "young ones," girls who had shown some promise in the divinatory arts. Brit was by far the best at the Letters. She had quickly learned the six-and-twenty, and the three Runes of Power, what each was for and how it must be used. And she had shown surprising skill at some of Maeve 's tests, exercises to see if she possessed the weirding skill. But now, nearly a year to the day after her blood-day, on the eve of the full moon, Maeve drew her aside, to speak with her alone. They withdrew to the cool, whitewashed shelter of the shrine of the Goddess, a holy yet earthy place none might enter unbidden. Maeve grasped Brit's smooth young face in her gnarled hand. " Astered she whispered, calling Brit by her True Name, "Thou knowest that I have watched thee these thirteen years with a keenness which hast caused thee some unseemly airs. Yet, thou knowest also that it is thee who is my best pupil, who has learned most quickly and with the most diligence the names of the Holy Runes and their stories." Brit nodded mutely. " Astered , I have looked long into my future today, and I do not like what I see, for any of us. There are things I must tell thee now that I had not intended to speak until much later. But now there is no calling it back." Maeve traced the dark rune on the floor, obliterating it with the same stroke. "Tell me, young Brit, what you know of this mark." Brit barely whispered the name, but Maeve coiled back a little. "So little fear, young one. Tell me of it, then." Brit told what little she had gathered, that it was a word of great and dark power, that it meant both iarn and fear, that it was masculine in gender and, hesitantly, that "one of the fathers" had laughed wickedly at it once. Maeve nodded. "This is more than most know. Your Mother was a good and wise woman, though without sight. Tell me, Brit, who owns your house?" Brit puzzled at this turn in the conversation. "Why, my Mother, good Maeve." "And who the kine and sheep?" "My Mother." "Though she be dead?" "Yes, good Maeve, through my Mother, her sister." "And who owns you?'! "Who owns me, good Maeve? In truth I do not know. I myself, perhaps..." "Well said. And your brothers?" "I suppose they also own themselves," said Brit. "Though of course, we are all Hers," she added hastily . "How would it be if you were owned, Brit, like the cows and sheep?" "How could that be, Maeve? The animals are given us by Her, that we may care for them." Maeve drew the rune for man on the ground. "What is this?" "That is a man, good Maeve." Maeve crossed it with the letter for iarn . "What do you see now, Daughter?" The dread sign, fearn, had been made again. "It must mean -- 'man made of iron,' is that right, good Mother?" "Well read, Brit. Come. Let me tell you a tale." As they sat talking, Maeve brewed a strong potion of herbs. Brit felt a strange sluggishness overcome her limbs as its fragrance filled the air. Maeve stretched out her hand, holding a small cup, bidding her drink. Though her hands trembled, Brit drank the mixture. As the strange brew warmed her belly, she began to feel light-headed. Maeve's voice droned in her ears, telling her an old, old story. As Brit followed the track of the words, she began to see the images old Maeve described as if she herself were witnessing them. There was a city, white and gleaming, where great, beautiful women and men walked by the sea. In the palace of the Queen, she saw smiths working bronze in the flame, one part of tin to nine parts of copper, as the old formula goes. Here the smiths were men, for their great arms and broad backs made the work go faster. Next she saw another city on a point of rock, this dark and massive, built like a great cave. Men only walked the streets, in the dress of ones who were ready to do battle. Their bodies were covered with metal, not copper or bronze, or silver or gold, but a thin metal of black color -- iarn. Another smith was at work here, his body gnarled, his redbearded face set in a permanent scowl. He knelt at the forge, working metal to red-hot temperature, then drew it out and began to beat it into shape. When it was done, a sharp pointed longsword of the glowing red metal lay on the anvil. As Brit watched, a young woman in chains was brought screaming into the room. The smith took the steaming blade and drove it into her side. Brit wanted to turn aside but was powerless to look away. The smith drew out the blade as the woman fell. Laying it again on the anvil, he scribed a single letter on its hilt -- Fearn. The scene changed. Suddenly the streets of the white city were filled with the men in iarn. They were every hand. Blood ran in the streets, the color of the molten iarn, as the women and men met the attack bravely but were smitten by force of numbers. As the vision faded, a number of women are climbing into the prow of a sleek sailing ship, many taking babes with them, and loosing the ropes. As Maeve's grave old face appeared again before Brit, she saw the city from out on the water, flames the color of blood dancing in the mins. "You have seen , then." Brit nodded. "You have the skill. It is as I hoped -- and feared," said Maeve. "Tell me, Daughter, do you understand what you have seen?" "A little, Maeve. This was long ago." "Yes. These women were our Mothers, who fled here years ago in refuge from these men and their stem god whose name means 'man of iron.' Now, why did I ask you those questions about ownership, good Daughter?" "These men, these -- Fearn," Brit barely breathed it, "they took women and men as possessions, as if they were cattle or sheep." "True, Brit. Well seen," said Maeve. "Since that time, iarn means only ill luck to she who touches it." Taking both her hands, Maeve made Brit swear grave oaths about the dread metal, then searched Brit deeply with her cold eyes as if seeking something she was not sure she would find. "Brit, I will speak plainly," said Maeve at last. "I have chosen you to succeed me, to be Her Priestess. There is a time for this, several years hence, after a long and difficult apprenticeship, when the best of my girls becomes my assistant at Her rites and succeeds me upon my death." "But you are not dyjng!" Brit gasped. "You are well, and I am only..." "I know, Brit. But I have had a dream, one I fear I have not the power to give to you, despite your skill." "What is this dream, good Mother?" "The Fearn come again, Daughter. Not soon, but soon enough. Them we thought well behind us come and find us again, and work their will on us." "But surely, Maeve, She will protect us from them." "When I was younger I would have believed it so, for then we were strong and Her observances were well kept. But there are few who remember the old ways. There is a complacency, a lack of caution today. You alone of all my young ones have the arts, or soon will have them. I must have an ally, however young, at this time. Your training must begin now, and in earnest." "But why?" "I tell thee, the faith wanes. The women no longer practice the rituals with care, and the men become surly and boastful. Soon the power which protects us will evaporate, like a fog at dawn. The flame that bums in Her shrine must never be allowed to go out. The old songs and poems must continue to be sung and remembered. Time is short, Astered, and I have need of thee."  That spring, Brit consecrated herself to the Goddess, dressing, like Maeve, in robes of white. The young girls with whom she had played drew themselves aside from her, viewing her with a mixture of reverence, envy and fear. Brit threw herself into the perfection of her arts, committing to memory all the verses Maeve taught her, and all of the healing plants, this one to bring labor, this to cool a fever. But she also practiced each day the weirding, seeing what was distant, hearing what was far away, and each day attempting to lift a bowl of wood or a small stone with only her thought. It did not come easily. Maeve helped her leam as she could. Together they would raise a bowl of fruit, or turn aside a falling stone. Then, one afternoon, in the summer of her sixteenth year, she was sweeping in the shrine of the Goddess and knocked over a fine water-jug with the handle of the broom. As it fell, she felt her mind reach out and hold it, and it righted itself, settling gently on the table again. Brit turned swiftly, feeling Maeve behind her. There was something clouded in Maeve's face, a mixture of awe and resignation. "Well done, Daughter," said Maeve. "Your time is at hand. You are ready to join me at the hearth. Come, finish your sweeping, and we will take a walk together."    It was in the autumn of her twentieth year that Brit was felled by a pain in the heart as she was gathering wood for the hearth of the shrine. By the weirding, she knew the pain she felt was not her own. She gathered her skirts about her, and began running back along the river bank to the shrine, staggering as waves of pain swept over her, reddening her eyes and cutting off her wind. With an effort of will, she thrust the pain from her, rushing into the small room they shared. Maeve lay, ashen-pale, upon her pallet, clutching her breast. "Brit!" The voice was frail and far away, but filled with an inner strength. "Brit, time is short. Bring my herbals here, quickly." Brit gathered up the preparations for the trance in which deep knowledge was passed from one Priestess to another, her hands moving with a sureness which seemed to come from outside her. When the brew was prepared, Brit poured a cup of the heady potion and sat beside Maeve on her severe cot. The fumes from the cup rose between them, and their eyes met. " Astered . Harken unto me," Maeve whispered. "I and thou are one. Her Truth must be passed. Be as a vessel to me and I shall fill thee. Now, here are the names of She who is our Mother; The Mother of Time, The Namer of All Things, The Maker of Light..." Brit did not reckon the passage of the hours as the old lore, oftrecited, was said again. From the names of the letters to deep matters of life and death, the whole of the Litany passed from Priestess to Apprentice, from Mother to Daughter. Through all, Maeve's hand gripped hers with an urgency that seemed to draw the strength from her. At last, after night had fallen, and the stars had wheeled in their courses, Maeve paused. Brit shook her head like one awakened. She saw her frail teacher as a dry husk of skin, sinew and bone, with only a faint spark of light. Brit brought water. Maeve quaffed the goblet, then pulled her near again. " Astered , I give thee what thou wilt give me. This moment has always been, and, in this time, thou gavest me a vision. I give it to thee now -- or rather, we share it, so that when it comes to pass, thou mayest have it." "I do not understand, Maeve." Maeve shook her head. "It does not matter, young Daughter. Open yourself to me while my strength lasts, for we shall not speak again. This, too, I have seen." Brit threw her arms around the old woman, and tears began to course her cheeks. "Oh, Maeve! Do not go. Surely this is not your time. You will yet live a while." "Be still, Brit. Our time is short, and we must use it well. Farewell, Daughter. She who guides the stars will guide our lives. She who measures out our skein of life also cuts it. Our lives are given into Her care, and we must do as She wills with them. Your duty is to carry on. Mine is -- mine is to join Her." Maeve took from her neck the cord which held the silver disc incised with the crescent moon. With faltering hands, she placed it about Brit's neck. "It is thine now, Astered -- the power, the privilege, and, yes, the pain. Thou must be Her incarnation on the earth. This is thy destiny, before all else. Let nothing turn thee from it." Brit felt a coolness settle over her, and the world receded from her slightly, as if a veil were passed between her and it. To her eyes, Maeve appeared shriveled, small. She could barely hear her voice. "Come, see with me. It is summer. The village is in full green. You bring water from the stream..."    It happened just as the vision foretold. It was an unlikely day for doom, for cataclysm. The bright yellow and green of Her abundance covered the land, and the young, bom in spring, tried their new legs. Brit, dressed in the long white robe of her office, carried an earthen jug to the stream to fetch water for her morning libations. The bitter winter past, the cruel death of her teacher, Maeve, even the vision of this day so vivid when it came, were distant in her mind. But, as she lifted the brimming jug from the water, as she did every morning in summer, the sharp clarity of light began to dim. The sad song of the bird above her matched the notes of her vision one for one. The jewels of water droplets on the handle of the pitcher were as they had been. A feeling greater than terror gripped her. She grasped the jug handle more firmly, ready to turn it out on the grass, but her hand would not move. If this moment could somehow be turned aside, she would forestall the inevitable. But her feet led her up the bank, following the path that led through the wood to the shrine. She found herself whistling a hymn idly. This only deepened her fear. Though she knew what she would see within the low building which gleamed pretematurally white in the sun, she was nonetheless stricken at the sight. The bowl of oil from the altar lay in fragments on the floor, its wick coiled like an obscene snake. The flame was out. Though she made the fire again, swiftly, as she had often done at the turn of the year, she knew that it was too late. In the moment that the flame died, a gap had opened, wide enough to let in that which had long been held at bay. The drama must play itself out to its conclusion. A woman's throaty yell came from behind her. She turned, not knowing if in answer to the call or in anticipation of what was destined for her. Time held for her as she surveyed the village. To her right, men pushed their heads out of doors, and women looked up from their work. To her left stood the Fearn. There were few of them, perhaps a dozen or so, standing in the road clad in metal, with swords and spears upraised. Brit gasped in outrage and fear. Jo, her slim, darkhaired half-sister, twisted ferociously in the grip of a scarred man with a grizzling of gray in his reddened beard. One hand had ripped Jo's robe from her shoulders and now grasped her about the waist. The other hand rested lightly on a shortsword at his hip. Jo fought for her life. As his great, hairy form bore down upon her, she clawed at his face, leaving a deep bloody welt. With a growl, he cuffed her sharply and her head fell back, limp. Hefting her dazed body, he made for one of the houses about the central square. Brit hurled herself foward, grabbing up a stout log from the woodpile. She swung it, two-handed, against the intruder's back. He stopped, turning, letting Jo fall to the ground. She struck again, to the side of his face. He let out a bellow of rage, striking the stick from her grasp. His sword came up, menancing. As he made a warning thrust, Brit summoned up power, sending a warding against the blade, to turn it aside. It did not tum. The blade swung again, this time biting into her upraised arm. At the touch of the metal she felt a slow, cold poison began to seep into her. Her arm fell limp. She spoke an oath under her breath, calling on the Goddess to give her strength. Again she hurled the warding spell against him, to stop his limbs, his heart. Though his muscles corded, he did not stop. A few of the villagers had gathered in a group. The leader turned to his men, gesturing with his sword. She could not understand his language, but the intent was clear. The Fearn moved without haste, swords raised. A yound man, red of hair, young, and naked to the waist, stepped forward, taking Brit by the arm in a grip of iron. She tried desperately to fight back, but her limbs would not move. The invaders gestured for the men of the group to step forward. One came docilely and was greeted with harsh laughter. A young warrior forced him to his knees. He knelt. Another villager did not move. Swiftly he was dead, by a thrust in the chest. The Fearn chief roared a meaningless challenge to the villagers as he motioned his men toward one of the houses. A cry came from behind the invaders. A young woman in woolen breeches held a sickle against the throat of a young Fearn. Two of the warriors stepped forward, but the leader waved them back. They seemed glad to be halted, for they looked upon her with fear, unaccustomed to such boldness in a woman. The Fearn chieftain stepped forward alone. The young woman stepped back with her captive, wary but unafraid. He circled about her with sword extended. He lunged. The young warrior screamed, his throat opened. As he fell, the leader struck the woman with the flat of his blade. Brit fought against the young man who held her, and against her own helplessness. It was a fell metal, indeed, to be proof against the power of the Goddess. A scene of unbridled carnage erupted as Brit watched. The women and men of the village met the invaders with pikes, hoes, staves, scythes, in desperate ferocity. Though slowed by their reluctance to fight with women, the Fearn were skilled murderers. In just a few short moments, her people were dead, in flight, or, like her, captured. The young red-headed man bent to pick her up. Summoning all her strength, she thrust herself from him. She must break free. The Priestess of the Goddess must at all costs remain undefiled. Though her arms and legs were deadened by the taint of the metal in her veins, she ran, heart pounding, for the shelter of the forest. She entered the shadowed dimness of the trees, hearing the crashing footfall of the man who pursued her. Suddenly, he was upon her, the disc of iarn about his neck pressing sharply into her flesh. The scent of his acrid body filled her nostrils, gagging her. He bent her to the damp soil of the forest floor. There was searing pain, and consciousness, with her vision, fled.    How long had she been dreaming here? Brit shuddered in the chill chve, shaking the memory from her. Soon they would come for her. For a moment Brit felt the horror of doubt. Why had She Who Made All Things forsaken her daughters and their sons? Perhaps there was, after all these years, war in heaven. Perhaps one of Her sons had turned upon his , Mother, claiming the earth, the sea and sky as his own. This Fearn in whose name the strangers swore their dark oaths called himself King of Kings, Lord of Hosts. His hosts had forced themselves upon the women of the village, upon the Priestess herself! Surely She would not allow such outrage. No, it was not She who had deserted her daughters. It was they who had deserted Her, neglecting Her offices, and failing to be vigilant in the defense of Her honor. Reflexively Brit intoned a prayer of penitence. The calm of the ritual relaxed her. She gazed out again at the mournful, rain-soaked plain before her. The Goddess wept. The new life within her stirred. She reached out with her mind to her unborn daughter, seeking to commune with her. This one, she knew, though not dark-haired like her mother, would have the witch sense too, if she lived to grow up to it to leam Her ways. When they came, Brit wondered, would they take her life immediately? Would they punish her for having fled when they grew lax in guarding her? Or would they make an example of her to the villagers, of how even the Priestess of the Goddess was no match for their Flaming God? Brit trembled, not with cold this time, but with the presentiment of another vision. It was not a remembrance like the others, but a premonition of what was to be. She saw herself in chains. Saw herself -- but how could that be? Who was there to do the seeing? Bands of iarn encircled her wrists, from which a chain joined her to a post. She still wore her white robes, though they were old and soiled. It was her village, but how it had changed. A fence encircled the central square where she was pilloried, and adults and children jeered at her as they passed. Those women who survived had yielded to their conquerors, becoming concubines rather than slaves. They were heaviily painted, and proudly wore bands of iarn at their wrists or on their fingers. The men had changed also. They had taken on the bold swaggering ways of the Fearn, wearing tokens of the metal about their necks. But there had been other, graver changes. The shrine of the Goddess had been given over to the God, Fearn. It was forbidden to speak the name of the Goddess in public. As her vision continued, she saw the red-haired man who had taken her come to the post in the center square and unbind the collar from her neck, leading her away. Suddenly she understood a part of the vision. She saw through the eyes of her young daughter, the daughter bom in spring. So this was how she had survived, through the father who would not allow his child to be slain. Though called by some outlandish name, Brit had told her daughter, as soon as she was old enough to understand, that her True Name was Maeve. It was evening. The unearthly glow of the moon shone through the window of the house where Brit, her daughter, and the man lay in stillness. Slowly, quietly, she drew herself to her feet, gently waking young Maeve, bidding her be quiet with gestures. She looked down at the naked man lying asleep in the moonlight. How easy it would be to pick up his sword and end his life before he woke, swiftly and silently. But Brit forebore the sword, instead gathering up a few possessions and stealing out into the moonlight and across the open fields. A sentry stood at the crossroads, leaning drowsily on his spear. Brit whispered a soft spell and his eyes dropped momentarily, allowing them to slip past. When they reached the forest, they began to run, swiftly as they could, not caring what noise they made now. At times it seemed as if Brit held the young Maeve in her arms over rough ground, and at times it seem that it was she, Brit, who was carried. At the top of a rise, they turned to look down upon the cluster of houses below. Brit's face hardened at the thought of the defilement of Her shrine, at the arrogant and servile ways of her people, and their terrible, false god. As they watched the sleeping town, Maeve's hands began to weave in an eerie pattern, her voice to incant in an old, old spell she could not have known. Brit felt a thrill of dread. The roofs of the village began to blossom with a thousand buds of flame, which opened in awful glory. The red fire danced in Maeve's eyes in a parody of innocence. What sort of child had she borne, Brit wondered, who turned their fiery magic against them? They watched a moment longer in fascination, then were running again. The vision merged with reality. One moment Brit and her daughter were there in the cave, tending Her flame. The next, Brit was alone again, save for the life within her. Outside, men's voices could be heard above the roar of the rain. Let them come , said a voice within her. The child must be born safely. She stepped to the mouth of the cave. A half-dozen men had seen the opening and were making their way up the rubble-strewn slopes. "There she is!" one shouted. "There's the witch! She must be killed. While she lives..." The red-haired man in the lead raised his hand, regarding Brit's swollen belly. "No!" he shouted. "That's my child she carries! She is to be taken unharmed." Brit stood still, reconciled. She took the disc she wore from about her neck, slipping it into a pocket of her robe. She would go with them for a time, allow herself to be reviled for the sake of the child she bore. One day she and Maeve would return to this place to carry on Her ways in exile, alone if need be. What matter if it took a thousand years, or two thousand? So long as the spaik was kept alive. Her spirit could not die. Brit extended her arms to the man before her, allowing him to fasten the bracelets of fearn about her wrists. She lifted her head proudly, as a Priestess of the Great Goddess must, and began the long journey down into the valley.  Jerni Pburneile,PhD I know i do a lot of conference reports, but I get to a lot of conferences, and they're generally pretty fascinating, so why shouldn't I write about them? At any rate, the latest was the Goddard Memorial Symposium held by the American Astronautical Society; as an added with its German counterpart (which is itself the successor to the old Verein fur Raumschiffart, of which my predecessor Willy Ley was vice president, so there's another reason why I cannot ignore it). One of the speakers was myself: I was given the "eye-opener" session at # which I was told was a compliment (if you can't wake 'em up, Pournelle, nobody can, said the session chairman). There was also a panel consisting of myself, exKarl Pflock and Tom Monteleone, and former astronaut Dr. Brian ting positively sciencefictionconventionish in its style, possibly this year is Dr. Charles Sheffield whose work you've seen in There were also a number of European engineers and scientists the research module that inserts into the shuttle, and which may be the salvation of our space program. Surely the Shuttle would not survive without it. I say that not in mere admiration of the Europeans' work; although it is admirable enough I suspect that Boeing or Rockwell or McDonnellDouglas or Grumman or some other U.S. aerospace firm could have done the job: no, we may shuttle because I suspect that if it were not for the considerable intemational flap that would result, our administration would cancel the Shuttle entirely. After all, they've killed Enterprise; and while I was in Washington I heard they were trying to kill off the Vandenberg shuttle launches; which means no polar orbit launches with any considerable payload (you can go at a high inclination out of Florida but at cost of much-reduced payload) and that means the Air Force won't have many missions for Shuttle after all, and with the military funding much of the civilian research would go, and when that was cancelled someone would decide that there were no real missions for Shuttle ("Look at how little they plan to do with it. We can get all that done with surplus Titan boosters") and -- but you can finish the scenario for yourself. Fortunately, though, our European allies have spent some real bucks of their own money on siderable howl if we decided at this late date to leave them hung out to dry. Deo Gratia. Excuse my gloom. The conference was, by contrast, quite satisfying. Once again I heard paper after paper proving that we can do the job. The question is -- will we? Because we can certainly afford to. If year and more off to the Middle East, you can afford any research and development that has even a small chance of paying off: and space research has got a lot more going for it than that. Provided, of course, that we don't get bogged down with the wierd philosophy of "soft" energies that seems to pervade Washington. At the moment I was giving my talk on space industrialization to some of the directors and technical staff of the National Science Foundation, the President was entertaining a chap who detests "big, hard" energy systems; he wants lots of "soft" systems which are decentralized, locally operated and, above all, labor intensive. Labor intensive means, I presume, that I shall have my choice of forking up my home bio-mass methane generator myself or trying to find someone who'll do it for money I can afford. I'll probably have no choice about my home windmill and gas lights, and the actual methane extractors, but surely hiring the maintenance on those will be no problem: no more difficult than, say, getting a reliable automobile mechanic or TV repairman...    Probably the best paper at the A AS symposium was that of Charles Gould, Advanced Systems Product Manager for the Space Division of Rockwell (what used to be North American). Gould presented a systems study of space industrialization benefits, which, I am sure it comes as no surprise, he finds far oughtweigh the costs -- or, for that matter, the costs of not going to space; and there' are many. Start with some obvious facts: there are a lot of people in this world. They'd like to buy things from us. They don't have much to buy with (unless they've got oil). Thus, in cold cash terms, world poverty deprives us of a potential worth of exports -- more than enough to balance our payments and stabilize the plummeting dollar. And therefore it is in our simple economic interest, as well as charitable, that we plan our future in a way that makes other people rich while benefitting ourselves. Make no mistake: we have to do something. President Carter has in his short time in office already exceeded the balance-of-payments deficits of all his predecessors from Washington to Nixon combined, and things don't seem to be getting much better. (In fact as I write this I'm suddenly more impressed by my overseas book sales. Guilders and florens and francs and pounds and yen look pretty good. Even lira look better, and you know you're in trouble when the lira looks good...) The Rockwell study was incredibly detailed. They began with several views of the future: the Donella Meadows "Limits to Growth" thesis, Herman Kahn's "Ingenuity of Man" hypothesis, and Krafft Ehricke's "Extraterrestrial Imperative." The latter is probably closest to the view I have supported in this column: we can break free of thinking of the world as a limited and isolated unit. Selling such a viewpoint is no easy task. Dr. Stefan Possony and I have been engaged in a long-term study of technology and philosophy (our first effort along those lines resulted in a book. The Strategy of Technology, which I'm pleased to say is still in print after eight years) and one major fact stands out: world philosophy has always been concerned with rather narrowly limits. How could it be otherwise? From Aristotle to Marx, the great philosophers have been dealing with a universe they did not understand. They didn't even know how many stars there are! This is a point worth emphasizing. For a very long time it has been clear to thoughtful people that there is a limit to growth -- and a rather finite limit to what the Earth can support. Thus the very basis of Western though has been influenced by considerations of limits. Yet it is not very obvious that this view is correct: certainly it is not correct unless extremely long time spans, considered. It is easy enough to see how the ancients -- and in a moment you'll see that some "moderns" deserve to be classed with the ancients -- inevitably adopted this view. Furthermore, given that most world leaders are lawyers, and of the others most have had a classical rather than a scientific education, it is not hard to understand why the limits philosophy has such a hard time of it. Example: to this day, we mostly think in terms of "nature's bounty," with "nature" being though kind and benevolent. Yet a moment's thought convinces us otherwise. Nature is. not kind compared to a Kansas wheat farm, or to pennicilin. Civilized man has never relied on nature: the closest to that was perhaps ancient Egypt as "gift of the Nile," and even there the Nile was helped along with extensive canals and other massive hydraulic projects. Yet -- "bountiful nature" pervades our literature and our religions. (One need not go the other way and assume that man makes himself: there is plenty to be thankful for; and Western religion has not found it strange that God helps those who help themselves). My point is that until the #'s we did not know of other "island universes;" we had no concept of how large was the universe in which we live. Until this century we didn't know how many elements there were. We had no idea of the number of atomic particles, or how long the sun willcan last, how many forces there are in nature (we still don't know that for certain). Much of our philosophy of life was old at the time of the French Revolution -- which is when electricity was discovered. Plasmas and ions, the "fourth state of matter" and matter's most plentiful form, were unknown when Marx and Engels and Lenin hammered out their plans. Enzymes were discovered in #, vitamins at about the turn of the century. As Possony says in a recent paper, "As much key events are listed at random, it is clear very few of them had visible impact on political thinking or upon our concept of the world." Thus, in my judgment, the importance of studies like Gould's for Rockwell: analyses of future options that try to break free of traditional thinking, and look at both limited and unlimited opportunities. The study considered six program options, which are listed in Table One. The last one, "level of efWe are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. o Immediate Crisis-Oriented Program Sacrifice nothing for a better tomorrow: things are too bad already. Go for near-term gains. o Foresight: Optimize over next # years. Confidence in future, but need to cope with balance of payments, energy, etc. o Reaction: Little Ice Age Assumes valid the data indicating we may be returning to colder climates and shorter growing seasons; uses space investment to mitigate effects on the US and world. o International Space Program: Cooperation in space to foster world peace. Widespread participation and sharing of space exploitation. o Geosynchronous Market Leadership: Capture the burgeoning and probably very lucrative information market for the US. Stay ahead of the competition o Budget-Based Program Level-of-effort budget to keep the program and capabilities alive, but emphasis is on preserving options, not immediate exploitation. fort," is closest to the present U.S. situation; the first, "crisis reaction" appears to be where we are now moving. They then looked at different time frames and folded in other variables, so that as Gould puts it, "By the time you consider six program philosophies, # opportunities, three ratings of importance, and five ratings of rate -- all divided into five time frames -- you need to make about# decisions. We made these and exposed at least # persons to the results in complicated reports and extended working group sessions." Contrast this with the way decisions are made in Washington! During the study they came up with over # space opportunities (# were used in the study itself). These break down into categories as shown in Table Two. They then examined space industries: products and energy. Each one needs a discussion in detail. In the study summary one is used as an example: urokinase. This is a catalytic substance which prevents blood clots; it can dissolve small blood clots. Some people take aspirin to achieve the same effect of preventing congestive heart failure o Communications Direct TV; Meteorological information; personal communications; printing systems; disaster warnings; personal computing access. o Navigation and Tracking Search and rescue; wildlife and marine animal tracking; traffic control (air and sea); rail anti-collision system; UN truce observation satellite. o Land Data Forest management, land management, pollution monitoring, hydrological information resource management, mapping, snowfall, water basin contents, irrigation flow return, runoff forecasts, etc. etc. etc. o Weather Data o Ocean Data Oil spill, shoreline ocean current, algae bloom measurements... o Global Environment Glacier movement and growth, highway environment impact, tectonic plate observation o Budget-Based Program Level-of-effort budget to keep the program and capabilities alive, but emphasis is on preserving options, not immediate exploitation. and stroke, but aspirin clearly has side effects and is hardly optimum; urokinase might have a major impact on human life were it available in quantities. It isn't, at the moment, because it must be separated from urine, about a ton of urine going to make up one dose of urokinase. found that urokinase cells can be separated rapidly and with high purity in the space environment, and that the cells can produce urokinase much faster in space than on Earth. By the mid #'s space factories could make this substance available on a mass basis -- provided, of course, that we construct the facility. I have already mentioned energy from space. The study looked into Solar Power Satellites, "Soletta" (mirrors to put more sunlight onto selected places on Earth, either to aid ground-based solar energy collectors, or to prevent frost and increase agrigultural yields). "Lunetta" (artificial moons to light cities at night) and a raft of other options, all certainly feasible. The Gould study also looked at cutting tools, other pharmaceuticals, optical glasses for lasers, fiber optics, magnets, uniform crystals, long-life x-ray targets, turbine blades, hollow ball bearings, and a whole raft of other potential products. They went through a number of iterations to look at configurations of space industrial facilities. I suppose it comes as no surprise that the study conclusions are favorable to space development; it is also no surprise that a number of "soft energy" and "friends of the environment" groups will continue to oppose space development. And a final non-surprise: those who oppose space will not have anything like this study to support their views, although I am sure they can and will take pot-shots at this report. But the potential is there in space; it is easily provable. Another speaker: Frederick Osborne, Jr., of the Hudson River Conservation Society. His group is definitely "concerned;" it has been among those responsible for preventing the Storm King pumpedstorage reservoir proposed over the last decade and more. Mr. Osbome was in Washington not to oppose the reservoir (although he does) but to propose an alternative: a solar power satellite, with antenna farms off the south shore of Long Island. It wouldn't cost all that much more than what the power companies want to do now -- and it would, he says, be kinder to the environment. Furthermore, Osborne said, "it is the historic mission of government to explore the new frontier, build roads to it, and to protect the early settlers. Space is our only feasible new frontier, and it is incumbent on the government to provide access to it." That's an interesting way of putting it; and very accurate. Lewis and Clark; Fremont; Zebulon Pike; Jefferson Davis' "camel corps," the frontier army; transcontinental railroads -- all these were government activities opening up the frontier for the citizens. One can hardly argue that there is no precedent. And my own point: that we can all conceive ways to make profits in space. The problem is that we are not sure that any one activity will support the entire establishment. In addition to the direct costs of space industry there are the general costs, housekeeping, life support, stationkeeping, and the like. Thus the proposal of Jim Baen and myself: that the U.S. ought to operate highways to space, certainly; and it ought to become a landlord. Construct a space industrial park and rent out facilities. There would be takers. Many of them. If the enterprise does not actually make profits, it certainly will recover much of the cost. In fact -- except for the space program, what successes has government had in the past quarter century? But as I write they're cutting the program. After all, we live in an era of limits. Hasn't this been clear to our intellectual leaders for a very long time? How could the great thinker of all time be wrong? Of course the Victorians thought the sun ran off oxidation, and didn't even know the full potential of coal; Marx knew nothing of modem agriculture or industry; the computer was unknown even in concept; galaxies were thought to be nebulous balls of gas; x-rays were playthings in obscure laboratories; radio-activity was an inexplicable phenomenon; biochemistry was not even an infant science -- in other words, at the time our fundamental philosophies were generated, nearly all the discoveries that affect your life were not merely unknown, but impossible in principle. Technology and engineering drove society and transformed the world. The Great Thinkers of All Time had nothing to say about that; so their descendants, intelligentsia trained in classical thought, denigrated engineering. Instead of developing a world view appropriate to the modern era, we were given reasons why the engineers were mere "Babbits," bourgeois, intellectually contemptible. It was far more respectable to study Marx and Aristotle than to enroll in calculus. Recall the terrible flap over granting a degree in science that almost tore Harvard apart? Of course you do not; but men now living can remember it. Our government institutions grew from an entirely different world: witness the complexity of the Gould study, which is hardy unprecedented (I was involved in a similar effort back in the #'s, and there have been plenty of others) and compare that to the way laws are made. Interestingly enough, the Constitutional Framers set up a system more able to react to advances in the sciences, more able to deal with new ideas, than the system we have now. They knew they didn't know everything; and their intent was to have a Congress of citizens, of diverse views; a government service composed of citizens whose career was not in government (witness Jefferson calling the presidency "splendid misery," and J. Q. Adams believing his most important work was a report on weights and measures and standards). A government dominated by lawyers turned professional politician was hardly what Adams, Hamilton, Jay, Madison, Franklin, and the others had in mind. Moreover, although study of the Constitutional debates shows a reverence for history -- they discussed the English revolution, the Venetian Republic, Rome, Parthia, Aristotles "Constitutions" and much that is incomprehensible to moderns not steeped ip the classics -- you will also find a curious awareness that "a new age now begins;" a sense that there was a complete break with the past, that new data were needed, that the experience of the past was useful only up to a certain point. You will also find a sense of potential that we seem to have lost. And yet -- their glorious future was based only on the belief that man's potential, shorn of the dead weight of government, was much greater than anyone had supposed. What might they have made of the implications of a study like Gould's? What might we? And what will we?  you've been exposed to arguments pro and con by Harlan Ellison and Richard Geis over the merits of making the world science fiction convention a sounding board for the Equal Rights Amendment. By the time you read this, Harlan may be sounding forth from his tent (or, given the temperature in Phoenix, his air-conditioned Winnebago); Phyllis Schlaffly may have shown up to picket the convention;) and several thousand fans -- if they're typical fans -- will probably be ignoring both of them. Not that fans are necessarily either insensitive or reactionary: it's just that business is business and fun is fun. Last year, some Leading Lights of science fiction promoted a boycott of the world convention in Miami Beach because of Anita Bryant and her campaign against homosexuals. Said Leading Lights were conspicuous by their absence. Conspicuous by their presence were gay sf fans, who wore pink nametags, placed an ad in the program book, hosted parties -- and shared a good time with the straight fans. People aren't likely to notice impassioned speeches made at sf conventions. But they'll notice how science fiction fans act -- at conventions and, much more importantly, in every day life. If we're going to "walk the walk," it's more important to do it # days a year in the world than four days in August at a hotel in Phoenix .    To further lengthen an already overlong story -- and in belated fairness to the Iguanacon committee -- we should point out that it was Ellison's own decision to make and that nothing in his statement should be construed to mean that he has the official endorsement or encouragement of the convention committee.    Most of you don't go to conventions, or read the fan press; so you may not know about the death of Leigh Brackett. But you all read science fiction, so you know what a great loss to the field this has been. Leigh was the widow of Edmond Hamilton, himself one of the all time greats; and she had taken his death hard. She had suffered from cancer for some time, but -- a professional to the end -- kept herself going to complete the screenplay for Star Wars II (The latest word from Star Wars Corporation is that her treatment will be used, with any revisions kept to the bare minimum required by location shot decisions, etc.) If you haven't read The Coming of the Terrans, or The Long Tomorrow, or The Best of Leigh Brackett in a while, go back to them soon. And don't forget her Faulkner, The Big Sleep -- it's probably still on late night TV, and the recent remake is a turkey anyway. Leigh was some writer, and not just of science fiction.    Frederik Pohl is some writer too, only he's very much alive. And next month with the first installment of his latest novel, Jem. Like practically everything Fred writes, it is a gem. A huge one, too; it's going to take up five issues -- about # words in all, but none of them wasted. And when next year's Hugo nominations roll around... Fred's always been known as a satirist, all the way back to The Space Merchants (with C.M. Kornbluth, serialized in these pages # years ago). More discerning readers have noticed that he can write "hard" science fiction with the best -- didn't he out-Niven Larry Niven with "The Merchants of Venus?" Jem is a hard science fiction novel. It's also a satirical novel. It's also about the making of a Utopia -- sort of. Jem is a planet -- a planet unlike any other you've ever read about, and one realized with as much loving attention to detail as any by Hal Clement. It has three native cultures, each of them fascinating. It also has, lately, us. The sort of people who sell Feckle Freezers to each other when they aren't clubbing each other down here on Earth. Jem seems to be our only hope -- our only hope. How other intelligent life forms may feel about the matter is something else again... Jem -- watch for it. -- j.j.p. The cure for pollution is people. Working together. Our streets and countryside have become dumping grounds for trash. But all across America, tons of it a year. For a brochure showing how you can participate in dozens of projects like this, write Keep America Beautiful, Inc. # Park Avenue, N.Y...NY. #. A Public Service of This Magazine  The Advertising Council The Stars in Shroud Gregory Benford Ling Sanjen has followed a career as an officer in Fleet, the military arm of the vast interstellar empire man has forged by fasterthan-light ships (Jump ships ) and the slower ramscoop vessels. Ling is an ofkaipan -- a despised outsider in the predominantly Mongol culture, a synthesis of Chinese, Japanese and southeast Asian societies. This is all that remains of the human race; the other nations were wiped out in the Riot War. Ling is one of the first Fleet officers to come into contact with a strange new disorder, the Plague. It is a crushing fear of open spaces and light, apparently brought on by an alien species, the Quarn. A fullscale war develops between Fleet and the Quarn, but so little is known of the enemy that fleet is virtually powerless. No Quarn native worlds are known. Ling makes the first raid to bring back survivors of a Quarn " attack " on the planet Regeln. On Regeln Ling finds people crowded into foul passageways and self-made piles of mud and stone, erected to shield out the enormity of open space. The survivors are gibbering, mindless cases. Ling's men evacuate some survivors. Returning to Earth, the crew itself begins to develop Plague-like symptoms. The clearest sign of this is the failure of the Sabal Game, an elaborate public ritual the Empire has made a virtual state religion. The Game reinforces social solidarity and feelings of group cooperation. To Ling, Sabal is an important emotional factor in his life, the underpinning to his ability to lead. He leads his ship's Sabal Game on the flight Earthward and the Game dissolves into strife and self-seeking among the players -- exactly the opposite of what the Game should achieve. Ling sees now that the Game is the key to the Quarn assault on man. The mysterious Plague spreads through the Game, using man's psychological weaknesses against him. Ling decides not to bring the survivors to Earth. Ling's executive officer, Tonji, brushes aside these ideas. He invokes a Fleet rule against Ling and brings the ship to Earth. Ling is courtmartialed for delaying the return of the survivors, which Fleet wanted to examine. An ofkaipan, he is quickly convicted. Only Ling sees that these survivors will spread the illness on Earth; but he is ignored. By this time the disease has affected him, too, and then his family. For a long year he lives in despair with his wife, Angela, and his children Chark and Romana. They live in the Slots, cramped buildings housing the ill. But gradually Ling recovers, for unknown reasons. He ventures out of the Slots and is picked up by a Fleet guard. Fleet is interested in recovery cases and after studying him they offer him his old rank. Tonji himself offers a post on the planet Veden. Barely suppressing his hatred of Tonji, Ling accepts. Angela protests his leaving Earth but Ling goes anyway, drawn by the urge to act. Tonji' s offer was a barbed one. Veden is in a double-star system. There is a hot blue star, Lekki, and circling it a neutron star, Jagen. The precious Jump ships are no longer used to drop passengers safely near Veden; instead, Ling must loop near Jagen, losing energy through a gravitational slingshot effect, to reach Veden. He survives-barely-and resolves to  settle the score someday with Tonji. Or i Veden he must have his eyes fitted with special contact lenses and wear protective robes, to avoid Lekki's ultraviolet light. His junior officers, Gharma and Majumbdahr, are representative of Veden -- the sole planet founded by the Indian culture of Old Earth. Ling is given a luxurious home as local Fleet Director. The Lekki-Jagen system is Fleet's stockpile. Ramscoop vessels orbit the two stars. When they are bought by a distant planet Veden Control fires their engines and drops them through the gravitational slingshot (the Flinger), launching them into interstellar space at high velocities. This cuts the transit time for interstellar commerce, making possible the economic empire. As Ling approaches his new house a winged man swoops down from the twilight sky and tries to assassinate him. Such violence is unknown on Veden. Does it mark the beginning of the Plague here as well?  Ling relaxes into the slower pace of Veden society. But rioting and dissension begin in Kalic, the capital city, and Plague cases crop up. As pressure mounts Ling begins an affair with a girl who was injured in a riot, Rhandra. He feels some guilt about this and dreams of his family, trapped back on Earth, but memories of Angela cannot erase the realities of his growing love for Rhandra. Majumbdahr becomes a good friend. Gharma is a reliable officer but betrays a touch of ruthlessness. Rhandra leads Ling to a new spiritual Master who has a growing following, the only stable social influence in the gathering chaos of the Plague. Sitting in the simple rituals. Ling suddenly experiences a new lofting sensation, a rippling of lights, and attains enlightenment. But the greatest revelation of all awaits him at his next meeting with the Master... The master loomed above me. He filled the room, the whole universe. Warm close feel of Rhandra beside me, sweet air of incense, sticky pull of robes on my flesh -- all fell away into nothing. I focused on the Master. As I slid into it, I asked What state is this? and almost before the question had formed, I felt the peace begin. Ripples of worry smoothed and vanished. A state of no definition, no thought, no method. To put aside the thousand things and, in stillness, retain yourself. "This is done by not thinking various things, one after another," the Master said, his deep rolling voice breaking a long silence. I laughed. Sound to the side: soft tinkling chuckle of Rhandra. "Like -- that," I said, abruptly snapping my fingers. It was very clear what ne meant. Just -- that. No words. Only being. The Master nodded. "There is more," he said. "Many things you must know. Not as they seem." I waved a hand in question, laid my head upon my shoulder. The Master moved his body to shield his hand. I glimpsed a small sliver of metal, a box. He fingered it rhythmically. I heard a low smooth tone that died away as I concentrated. A strange prickly shock ran down my neck. I was falling. What -- ? Coming back again. I expanded until I could see myself below. Deep white craters that were pores on my face. I shivered in the hurricane that swept down from the nostril mountain. -- You can be close. Warm. Gather once more into the lap of sunlight -- The Master said that, but with no words. I started to tum my head toward Rhandra and stopped, fixed in the Master's stare. Mosaics of light swept through us. I saw Gharma and Majumbdahr standing to both sides of the Master. They must have entered from behind the folds of ruby cloth and stood quietly in place until my attention was focused on them. -- quit of their tasks. You were not ready for me. It was in the place of rightness that you learned Veden first, felt what happens here, saw the signs of fresh ruin -- Majumbdahr grinned wryly at me. I felt a sudden burst of affection for this man who had worked and planned beside me and at all times sensed my inner turmoil. I owed him much. Uharma gazed at me calmly. His heavy lids shadowed his dark eyes, adapted for Veden and holding something forever unknowable. He was a strange, deep man moved by traditions and social conventions I would never fully grasp. His distance I respected. And he too had helped me. -- Look now -- The Master stood in one smooth motion. He twisted two spots in his robes and they fell away. But for a swath at his waist he was naked. Thin, wiry. Long bones moved in his arms and legs, rippling the taut, pale white skin. His seven fingers were like sticks with large knobby joints. A barrel chest. No body hair. His feet were dark semicircles of thick, tough fiber spanned by radial ridges of cartiledge, like toes. His eyes were deep and black. The mouth curved upward in a thin red line. There was no nose. A translucent wedge of tissue jutted out where ears would have been. He stood, rocking slightly on the wide base of his feet. Silence seeped among us. He was an alien. The body was unlike anything I knew among the races within the Mongul Empire. Even those races were seldom allowed to leave their home stars, so there was little chance that one would appear on Veden. I looked at the Master for long moments. I could not fear him. In a way, this was the answer I had been seeking. The two threads of my life were entwined at last. The Master was a Quam.    It took two days, and some of it wasn't words at all. Like all intelligent races, they came out of nothingness, armed with their own peculiar insights and talents. There had been another Empire, then. Far mightier than that of the Mongul, comprising many more races. It had already begun to decline when the Quam were young. Other races ebbed into lassitude and death. The Empire came apart from sheer lack of interest. Yet the Quam lived on; their time was not yet come. In the dying embers of that Empire they had learned much. Through the long centuries that followed they hoarded their knowledge and studied. Finally age caught up with even them. The spirit drained slowly away, as they had seen happen to others. The artifacts of their forefathers remained but not the will to build more or to improve upon the old. Then came Man. The Mongul Empire licked at the edge of the Quam life sphere. The wisest among the Quam, who had studied the history of the earlier Empire, recognized some of the same symptoms. Man dominated every other race and culture he met. He suppressed minorities within his own civilization. It was easy to see why the Mongul Empire had expanded so rapidly. The history of Man was the history of cycles. A continual tension existed between Man the social animal and Man the individualist. Stress on one aspect or another oscillated slowly through the gradual upward climb toward a world culture. The Asian continent was the last local area in which the virtues of community dominated. When virtually all the human race outside of pockets on the Asian mainland was destroyed in the Riot War, this cycle was disturbed. Asia rose to dominance. Simultaneously, Man achieved the technology to reach the stars. The Mongul Empire expanded outward on a wave of psychic energy released by the melding of the entire human race into one community. But Man was not meant fully for community. The duality of his nature was the ultimate source of his resilience and his strength. The Mongul Empire had to fail. When the Quam first met it, the Empire had begun to slow down and become formalized. Given time, the formalities would chafe. Rebellion would bring harsh measures. The Empire would begin to split. The best way to avoid revolution at home was war abroad. It was part of a classic pattern. The Quam saw that the leaders of the Mongul Empire would find it profitable to disturb the peace of the surrounding races when they met them. The basic instability of the Empire would expend , itself on other, more stable cultures. The Quam had studied Man for long centuries before deciding on a course of action. They would have to force Man back upon his origins, rid him of the Empire that would eventually crush him. They would use his own weaknesses against him -- the only mature way to wage war between radically different cultures. They pieced together ships that could barely survive in combat with Empire forces. It was the most they could do with the decaying technology they possessed. The ancient Quam had left giant devices in free space which could perform enormous tasks -- move a planet through Jump space, damp the bright fire of suns -- but these the Quam could not morally use in battle, for a simple clash of arms would not add a new factor to the human equation. They used what ships they could mend and make serviceable by themselves... plus what they knew of the human mind. "But we erred," the Master murmured. His voice, after so long a time without words, came as low thunder. "How?" I whispered. "We meant only to disturb Empire -- " A vision, here, of a new wind stirring human wheat -- "Allow time for self-study. It slips from us, now." The Master's face drew down, the eyes grew gray. "You did not think it could go so far?" Majumbdahr said. "No. Some of us have... walked to the darkness in payment. For us, the ultimate crime against the race. To relieve oneself of life." "Is it too late? Can't... " Rhandra's quiet urgency faded as she saw the look that swept over the Master's face. "The sickness ran deep." Dry leaves crackled inside his chest. "So many..." "Can't we, can't we save you?" I said. He pierced me with a pale glance. "Perhaps. I leam your language only now. I am... a measurer, not one who acts. I come to Veden in secret, as we do to all worlds. That is how the... cure, which became a death... is spread. We thought we knew you so well. It was an arrogance. When this is done, I shall... walk." "No!" I cried. "I come on this journey, to eam it." "I've seen enough of death," I said. "You will see more." "Why?" "I cannot stop it. I tried." "If the Empire quit Sabal altogether... ?" "The firestorm burns of itself. The ember which began it is consumed." "Then there's nothing to do." "There remains a task." "What is it?" My voice was clotted, blurred. "There are some who rebirthed. You are such." "Survived the Plague? True, I did, but..." "Because you are... ofkaipan. More than that, we know not why, but something more. A fragment of your race will survive. I did not understand this when first you came. My first sin came then." "Sin?" "A man, out of the sky." "The assassin?" "I spoke of you. A follower, too turbulent in himself..." "Tried to kill me? Why?" "I thought you carried the Plague." "We told him of you," Gharma put in. "We thought your recovery was temporary, and you would infect Veden. The Master became concerned. But we never intended..." "You see? We know you poorly. Arrogance." "A foreboding in the Master became the deed of a follower," Majumbdahr said quietly. "I learned only later." For a while we sat in silence. "A wind now blows through the Quam," the Master said distantly. "Something... drawing thin." We waited. There was a calm still silence in the room. The Master's thin frame trembled. "We... thought the only hope of saving many humans..." The words came out as though under pressure. "... was to isolate a world from the Plague. Veden... was good. Hard to reach... by your fast ships." "Jump ships." The trembling was very slight. There was a tangible layered chill in the air. "I thought to... kill you... a thought of a moment. But it was done. It came from my hand." "I... " The tension in the Master muted. "I have moved far from my Path. The wind, the unstable wind of the mind that blows through us... I am in and of it, now. I... the Path... I will Walk." A time passed then and the thought came into my mind of rain, endless rain in the Philippine town I had lived in as a boy. A warm wind brought heavy drops that stripped the leaves from some of the big trees at the end of the square. They were trees from a colony world, with oily purple bark. The leaves lay heavy and sodden in the street on one side of the square where the wind had driven them and some were in brown drifts against the buildings, a brown against the wet blackness of the sidewalk. The leaves fluttered down in the wind, already heavy with wet and they stuck where they fell. I remembered the way the leaves turned in the wind as though struggling against it, but slick with rain already and falling quickly as they crossed the square. Only the sharp quick gusts of wind were enough to carry a few of the leaves against the building, where they would stick for a while and then slide down the rough stucco and into the brown drifts. It rained like that a lot in the late fall and I had watched the rain from the upper storey of the building across the square, his bedroom window with the blinds pulled up all the way. The corners of the window were misted up from the heat in the room and the cold glass breathed a chill into the room. A long time... regard the waters in their rising... I pressed the words out. "What is to be done?" "Ask you all now. One last thing. On Earth your Fleet now assembles the Patanen -- they who laugh at Fate. Those who do not fall from the sickness. Like you." "Cases recovered from the Plague?" I asked. "Yes." "How do you know?" "Empire studies them. All have been sent from the other worlds. Assembled on Earth. We learned of it recently. We have followers there, near the Patanen." "Lengen Masters?" "No." He shifted uncomfortably, strained by the gravity. "We hide." "The guru tradition doesn't exist elsewhere," Gharma broke in. "It would appear strange if the Lengen arose." "There are Quam everywhere, then," I said. "On all the colony planets, even Earth." "Search for remnants," the Master said. I nodded. Fleet would certainly pool the recovery cases for study. "Will these Patanen... will Fleet leant enough to matter?" The Master shook his head regretfully. "Collapse speeds down upon them all. We cannot halt it." "What would you have us do?" "I reveal myself to you so you may choose. Know that: I do not command." "I know." "My burden is to pluck these last seeds, the Patanen." "You want to go to Earth?" Rhandra said wonderingly. Soft as night, her eyes. "A last duty." He breathed heavily with an aged remorse. The bony chest heaved, rattled, the ribs opening and closing like blinds. Alien. "I kenned this in a vision, once I knew you -- " a flick of an eyelid at me -- " and saw you whole. To Earth -- it is possible?" "I suppose," I granted, not seeing immediately how it could be done. "We'll bring them back from Earth, to Veden?" "Here may not be safe," the Master murmured. "I agree," Gharma said. "Veden will be free soon. The Empire cannot hold it for long, or the space around it. But the Plague proceeds here as well." "Would destroy harmony of Veden to inject diverse cultures. Better a new world." "Where?" "We have an Earthlike site. I will lead you to it after Earth." "Look..." I wrestled with plans in my head. "The best we can do is a Jump craft of Class IV or V. We couldn't possibly carry a large number of people aboard." "If they were ordinary passengers, yes," Gharma said. "But the Quam on Earthside will cool the bodies. Lowering their metabolic rate will allow us to transport them in storage units." I thought. The technique was standard and had been developed in the era of ramscoop exploration, before discovery of the Jump. It kept a crew alive through the decades of flight. Their true aging was only a fraction of the elapsed time. People could be stacked in a small space, fed a trickle of air and food through their veins. Stored that way, a ship could carry many people. "And what of Earth itself... ?" I said slowly. "The Empire has nearly shrunk down to a few systems," Gharma said. "The Quam will withdraw, of course, but..." I nodded. The Patanen were the most valuable people in the Empire now, a last crucial healthy sample of mankind. Perhaps we could indeed make a new start with them... perhaps. "Master..." An edge in me teetered near. "I... I am unsure..." "True nature only now beginning to emerge." I glanced a question. He slapped his fists into a ball. "Locked. Your nature. Sometimes try to get out. I help it." "Words, words... I don't..." "Remember." Gesture to Rhandra, followed by a manic sign, a skittering dance of the seven fingers. "The banquet," Rhandra supplied. "The Madi." He nodded, smiling for the first time in the long hours we had passed together. "Nature... escaped." "That was me?" I murmured to myself, not convinced, fearing something I knew I should not. To be a Fleet officer, I saw, meant you put away a piece of yourself, for good. "You spoke clearly then." His great head bobbed. "Ah," I said, and suddenly felt emptied. Gush, the bad air out. Ah it was and ah it did. Rhandra gave a quick warm laugh of silk and silver. I looked slowly at us ajl, four humans and a Quarn, the cloth vaulting hanging softly above us, and seemed to see it all from a vast new perspective. I saw that we were one and the same. So did a journey end, and another begin. Part V Haste manages all things badly. We planned, plotted, lied -- and still, it all turned on the captain of the Farriken, which had just emerged from Jump space near Veden. He had to believe this: and, buying the story at face value, let our skimmer approach for boarding. Luckily, he did. For a while. The Orbital Parametric Log was a block of blue crystal a half meter on a side, with delicate black ferrite stains embedded along fracture interfaces and slippage lines, carrying a thousand kilometers of magnetic memory in #D array. A computer could read the swirl of dots at a glance. They unfolded into #D indexing of orbital data for every ramscoop in parking orbit. To a computer eye the ships coasted in that crystal block, flecks of information that hopped from memory site to memory site. The Log was far more precise than any survey the Farriken could make by herself in a reasonable time. It was indispensible: Farriken had to smell the sheep before it could hunt the wolves. Our skimmer locked onto their receiving bay with a clang. We were through before they knew what was happening. There was a vacuum interface between the skimmer airlock and the Farriken' s. We didn't wait for it to fill. Three Fleet men were blown across the distance by our air pressure when we opened our lock. They tripped the emergency access on the Farriken and wriggled through. An alarm went off. Before anybody could move on the Farriken bridge, two men had found the local lifesystem ducts. They shoved in stungas canisters, popped them. The third man was Majumbdahr. He clubbed a lock officer and forced open the hatch to the ship's central tube. The Farriken is a Class IV Jump ship, with a big axial tube. Majumbdahr jetted down it, risking his neck. If he'd slammed into a parked shuttle craft, or any temporary storage sacs, even his suit wouldn't have prevented a snapped neck. But the Farriken was a tidy craft, everything secured nicely. He zipped along the tube without accident until he saw the bright orange of the lifesystem module and braked to a stop. Majumbdahr keyed in an entry request. An attendant stuck his head out of the rear hatch. Majumbdahr kicked him back inside, pressed an injection nozzle to his throat, and was squirming into Lifesystem Core before the body stopped thrashing. (We found the man later, in the tube, snoring.) One, two, three canisters of the stunstuff, and lo -- I was the captain of a starship. The Farriken captain had sounded General Alert by then. Two bridge officers came swimming out into the axial tube. I was coasting inward. Training jackets us all: the one forbidden act in the tube is discharging a weapon. The rubbery walls, once pierced, quickly spurt reaction fluid into the tube, sealing off the life zones from the airlocks. So, though a flame gun dangled at my side, I didn't think to reach for it. One of the two saw us, turned, pointed -- I tumbled, switching head for feet. Boots crunched into his chest. He spun away, rebounded off the tube wall. The other officer shouted something, jaws gaping wide. (Suited, I heard nothing.) I snagged a hold on a wall mount. The second man braced himself against the tube, legs scrambling for a hold. He pushed off. I shoved against the mount, coming on him from behind. A wrench in my belt found its way into my hand. I clubbed him lightly. The wrench struck him at the back of the head and the tension went out of him. I turned. Gharma had pounded the second man three times in the stomach, then socked him in the jaw. He, too, seemed to lose interest in the proceedings. Two minutes had elapsed. We found later that no Mayday had gone out over ship's channel to Fleet Control. That accomplishment wasn't due to us in the tube, though, but rather to the stungas that a moment before had hissed into every chamber of the ship... My ship.    It was good to sit once more in the Captain's couch, to see the long and dimpled cylinder of the bridge encased in its swanky hush. I let myself stretch and luxuriate for a moment, joints popping, muscles yawning to themselves, and yes, it did feel good. The Farriken was the best ship I'd seen, bigger than the Sasenbo. It had plush organiform padding everywhere, the sort which sops up debijs and even human wastes (if tKe Captain permitted such use; after all, it went directly into the reaction mass). A fine ship to risk your life in. "Majumbdahr reporting, sir." "Sit. And drop the 'sir.' Perhaps the Council would consider us Fleet officers still, but I don't." "I see your point," he said, slipping into the form-fitting couch next to me. Automatically he glanced at the screens and checked that all systems were normal; not even decades on the ground can take that out of an officer. "Seems odd, somehow," I said. "A storm of action, and. then waiting." "Waiting is difficult." "It would be easier if I felt like a Captain. The Sabal was so much a part of the ships I commanded before..." "Yes." So I had a ship, but I didn't have a corps of faceless officers in Fleet Central giving orders. Independence brought its own fresh breath. Majumbdahr checked a readout and turned to me. "I just verified that all extraplanetary communications gear on Veden is silenced. They can't call Earth now." "Ah? And how did you check that?" "You'll remember -- one of our men, a Lengen follower, sent me a signal -- oh, I see what you mean." "Small matter. I'm sure if you passed on him he can be trusted to disable the last transmitter. ' ' "Fleet seems to have no suspicions, yet." "When will the Farriken crew reach Veden?" "Five days." "You're sure the comm gear is dead aboard?" "Yes. I double-checked before we cast them off." "Good. Good. We'll be through the Flinger in another day." He studied me. "We don't know how quickly a junior officer on Veden will react, however, if he suspects. That is a significant unknown." "Who do you think it'll be?" "The medical officer, Imirinichin. He's always had an itch to command. He might jump at it." I shook my head. "He didn't strike me that way. In any case, how would he know?" "Perhaps someone in the Farriken crew got off a radio burst in time. The board doesn't record ordinary local traffic, so we can't be sure." "You know Imirinichin better than I -- do you think he'll buy the story we sent on tightbeam?" "It's not so wild, as Fleet orders go these days." I scratched my chin. "Um..." "Something might have happened that demanded the Farriken's leaving on the double. And it would have taken time for us to get clear of the background radiation from the reaction engines, in that ancient skimmer of ours." I smiled wryly. "Even Fleet, failing as it is, doesn't snatch away a Director, plus staff officers." Majumbdahr grinned, and I had a glimpse of what he must have been like when young. "Is Imirinichin an expert on cover stories?" "He's got the sensor network." "All life is a gamble, Ling." "Um." I looked around. Muffled monitoring beeps came from the hooded consoles up and down the bridge. A skeleton staff manned the stations, scarcely three dozen in all. Those, plus the Lengen priests and the Master, were all we had. "A gamble? I would prefer more chips."    There was little point in waiting out the time before we entered the Flinger in a state of tension. I ordered short watches and then the bridge to Majumbdahr. I could sense the adrenalin ebbing in my crew, the excitement of the boarding fading. Now was the time to run silent and swiftly . I made my way down -- outward, really -- from the bridge, through B deck to C. I passed a smashed hatchway; Gharma was looking at it, shaking his head. "Difficult to believe," he murmured. I raised an eyebrow in query. "These... were Fleet officers. In here." "The Plague cases?" He nodded. "We had to blow the hatch to get them out." "A bit messy," I said, judiciously studying the foul interior. "They barricaded the room with furniture. Sealed off the air ducts with wadded sheets." Some of his crispness and disdain returned. "You threw them into the skimmer with the rest of the crew?" Gharma looked at me, his eyes intent. "This is a first line vessel. It should carry the best crew available." I sighed. "So it did." "But three of them fell with the sickness before the ship could reach Veden." "Yes." "Imagine commanding a ship with a crew like that." I studied him. Evidently he knew little of Regeln or the flight back to Earth from there. He probably hadn't seen my personnel file. Well, someone had: the Master had referred to it during my meditation with him yesterday. I nodded mutely and went on. Rhandra and I had chosen a cabin out on C deck, for privacy. It felt strange to walk through a ship so quiet and still, as though it were waiting for something. I keyed into our cabin and walked in. "No news," I said. Rhandra was lying on our cushioned mat, jonofu style, hand over her eyes. She sat up at the sound of my voice, black hair tumbling in the weak centrifugal gravity. "That I'm glad to hear," she said, and kissed me. "There has been too much news of late." "Tired?" "I shouldn't be, I know. Lighter gravity and all that. But lam." I sat, shucked my sandals. "Things have moved too quickly for us all." "A year ago a trip to Kalic was a big event," she said with a slight, puckering smile. "Now I'm on my way to Earth, and after that -- Yes, it is a little quick." "Earth is a stopover. A few days, then we leave." "For where?" "The Quam region of the galaxy, the Master says. To begin a human colony on an hospitable world." "Ling..." and I saw the strain in her face. "We don't like being conspirators." "Yes. No whole person should have to act that way." "If we had known the Master longer these decisions would come freely. We would have a focus." She nodded. I parted my robes and opened hers as well. Our bodies fit together naturally, softly, as though we had been married for decades. I buried my face in the rich crackling scent of her hair. We formed a warm, secure pocket in the austerity of the narrow crew quarters. I thought distantly of Angela. She drew away. "It's dangerous, all of it?" "Danger is relative." She hit me playfully. "No need to be pompous. I don't want you to lie around like an old bear and make stuffy pronouncements. You'll begin to sound like the Lengen priests." I faked a yawn and tugged her over on top of me. She chuckled softly in the folds of my neck. I released her hips; she pushed away to say something. Her shove tilted her back. I raised my knees. She gave an awkward jerk that I helped along. My feet caught her just right and before she could reach out for a handhold I pushed here, pulled there -- she spun in the air, a meter high. I kept her tumbling with my bare feet for another ten seconds, laughing at her startled cries of outrage, and let her drop. She thumped onto our pad. "Rrroww!" "There'll be more if you don't allow me my proper share of dignity. Until you've spent a month in low-g you'll be at my mercy." "So sorry. I didn't understand the gravity of the situation." I cuffed her playfully, we wrestled, she pinned my arms. "I hope you give Fleet more trouble than this," she murmured, and then the mood between us shifted again and I found myself staring pensively into her eyes. "The... dreams... you're thinking of them, aren't you?" I nodded mutely. "Ling... I was dozing here, and I had something like the ones you describe..." "Terrible, aren't they?" I said with thin humor. "For five days, now. And the headaches..." I stopped. I didn't mention that often Angela appeared in the dreams. Angela. Staring at me. "Yours... always with the Master in them?" "Usually, not always. Despite what I thought -- or thought I thought -- something in me doesn't like cooperating with the race that has done all this to humanity." "In time... she began, and then the reassuring currents lapped over me again, the chimes rang deep inside. Let us regard the waters in their ways... After a while I murmured, casually, "Some of the others don't seem to be bothered, though." "Gharma." "Right." "The Lengen priests are keeping to themselves. These last few days they've not spoken to me." "Or me," I said, stretching, yawning. "They seem more rigid than the priests at the ashram." "You haven't seen these Lengen before?" "A few I knew, but none well. One priest from my home district was a friend of my family and I came to know him in my time at the ashram. He wasn't selected to come with us." "Um. Maybe the ones here were picked for courage. Or calmness under stress. Or maybe the Master simply likes them better." "I suppose you're right," she said, nuzzling her nose into my cheek. "I'll take some time to come to fullness with this. That's what the Master told me today." "How was your audience?" She chuckled softly in the folds of my neck. "I was awkward. I couldn't seem to concentrate." "Um hum." "I suppose I'm still reacting to his being a Quam. I had no idea until that night." "It bothers you still?" "A little. He is alien. Strange. The Master knows so much about my reactions and how I feel. Even before I know myself." I nodded and slipped off into a light, drowsy rest.    The corridors were cool and silent as I walked to my audience with the Master. Most of the violet phosphors were up by now, so I wore my Veden contacts. The Farriken had ordinary Sol phosphors when we took her. We had anticipated that, of course -- it was one more sign of how isolated Veden was, why that planet had been granted the Hindics; adapted natives had difficulty even traveling to the more common G-type star systems. Phosphors are a monolayer that converts electrical current directly into light. We had only to paint over the Sol phosphors with a Veden monolayer and the emitted light shifted into the F-star spectrum. But we'd had little time to make up the stuff, and now ran short. Most of C deck and part of B were still using Sol light. Also, I noticed the Lengen priests, who'd been delegated the job, had slapped the stuff on in broad swabs, missing some of the Sol phosphor altogether. The result was a spectral distribution that looked like a cloudy day to a Veden and deep twilight to an Earthman. I could see complications looming up ahead. Most of the Lengen priests were Veden-adapted; they couldn't function well on Earth. But the Fleet officers used contacts, like me, and they could go to the surface. The Master had contacts, too, I'd learned. Evidently his home world had a redder sun, but it didn't matter, since he wasn't leaving the ship. I rounded a comer and stopped, muttering a mild curse. Ahead the corridor was almost completely daik. Only Sol phosphors glowed there. The damned priests had done a spotty job. I circled around the shadowy corridors, taking an indirect route. I made a mental notation to get this situation fixed. "Director!" I. turned. Ghaima approached. "A few words." I nodded. "I am concerned about storage of the Patanen," he went on. "We must deploy added pods from the axial tube." I began to stroll toward the Master's quarters. Ghaima walked stiffly beside me, aims held behind him and shoulders squared. He looked more like a soldier here than he ever had on Veden. "Very well. Be certain the storage units are put into the pods correctly. The bodies must be arranged so their feet point outward from the axis." "Space requirements probably will not allow that. I -- " " Make them allow it." "I'm afraid -- " "Look, these are people we'll be stacking in, not cordwood. How would you like to lie on your side -- or upside down -- for a bodytime of a week? When cooled bodies lie in a static gravity field they undergo corpuscular damage and muscle deterioration, because a few layers of tissue are supporting the rest of the body." "The effective gravity in the pods is low." "We have no idea how long we'll be in transit. Even low accelerations can do damage, given time." "I see." We approached the Master's quarters. "Well, here we are," I said lamely. Something in Gharma's stiff manner made conversation with him difficult. I kept feeling as if I had to think of something to say next. "This is your regular audience time?" he said. "No, I callfed down when I had time." "I hope you appreciate the honor of being so close to the Master. Most must wait for their audience." "You've had yours today?" "No. No, I am later. I saw the Master a short while and now I go to deliver a message from him to Majumbdahr." "About what?" "Lengen priest matters. Selection of ship's tasks." "Why doesn't the Master tell Majumbdahr himself?" "He has elected to relay instructions through you and me. He tires easily, as you know. The Master is living under conditions that differ considerably from his home world." "What do you know about his planet?' ' "Nothing more," he said quicklyI tilted my head. "How long have you known the Master was a Quam?" He hesitated a moment, blinked. "A while longer than you. He went among the high castes first and was rejected by all but me. I am the only one from the very beginning." "Well," I said uncomfortably, "very good. I think I'll go in now." I passed through the antechamber where four Lengen priests sat in zazen pose. We exchanged ritual greetings. I brushed aside a beaded curtain that tinkled. In the inner vestibule the Master welcomed me. My meditation was as before, a deepening and yielding to inner nature. After, we talked. The approach to Earth occupied our thoughts. I was uneasy about our passage through the Ringer and whether any moves could be made against us from Veden, but the Master swept these aside. Earth was the focus, he said, and I should bend my thoughts to it. Our task was made easier by Reet's caution: they'd assembled the Patanen for study in one location. There were thousands... I shook my head in amazement. "How can you get all this done under Reet's nose?" "Same as Plague. Reach into centers of being." "How?" "We studied. We have knowledge from your past. When you evolved. Accidents of form in each species. Scent centers. Pressure areas. Neural matrix. All define and constrain." "I learned..." I began, and then stopped, wondering why I'd read all that about left hemisphere and right, the limbic brain... "I ken. That was my doing." "Why?" "So you see the path. I ken you are... seeker. Must know. Humans have -- tensions." He made a steeple of his hands and pressed the bony fingers together, smiling with thin lips. "Early primates hunted in packs. Tribes. Sense of community" "Our natural state?" "Then, yes. Not now." The steeple crumbled. "Mind whispers, says you are alone." He peered deeply into me and the lights rippled, the waters lapped, and I saw it: Half-men cowering in caves at night, the sweaty scent of tribe around you, pressing close, safe and sure, a mate of your own and a place of your own, and yet... always, the voice in the back of the mind, speaking, thinking, turning the world this way and that to catch the sunlight a different way. If you did this the prey did that, and you had to imagine these things, act by yourself in the hunt, the tribe together, running, calling, yet apart... You, and others. The balance lay somewhere in between. "A balance you destroyed," I said, a sudden angry, flame within me. But the room sang, the waters rose, and I felt the peace descend. "Restored. You have natural fear -- repressed terror -- of crowding. Is individual voice crying. Sabal submerges it. We -- " a snap of the fingers, clouds dispersing from his hands -- "release. Fear comes out." "You use direct sensory input?"  He nodded. Bells chimed. "Fear of humanity... Why doesn't it go away when your... treatment... stops?" "Sabal resumes then. Amplifies fear again, so soon after." "We mourn." His face froze into a mask. " Arrogance . I help to correct. Restore natural order. The way it was long ago. Then I walk." "No!" But as I said it the anxiety eased away upon the waters. "It will be. I earn it now. To take the Patanen to the Firmament. To bring all things to rest." "The Firmament?" "Outside the galaxy." I saw it all suddenly. "The halo stars. The ancient ones." "True. We fill them." "You are that old?" His eyes gleamed in the shadows of his cowl. He made a wary sign of assent. We fill them. I tried to think of what it meant to span the great swarming sphere, down at the bright disc, knowing it was an astrophysical stepchild. Halo stars are on the average more isolated than disk stars and poorer in heavy elements. Civilization must have arisen more slowly there, had to claw its way up without rich lodes of metals. Their night skies would be dim. Red embers smoldered there, not our gaudy O, B and A stars that burned bright and flared into early deaths. And in the distance the disk would bum, a gumbo of blues and yellows, dust lanes and misty nebulae, the hub an incandescent blob where the aged black hole spun and sucked, spun and sucked. What did it feel like, to live in the gutted halo worlds, your race ancient beyond counting, and watch the raw galactic beings spread like weeds upon fresh-turned earth... ? I shook my head. The vision left my head as quickly as it had come. "We... I am to navigate above the galactic disk?" "In time. When the Patanen are in place." "You had me study it, back then, didn't you?" "Yes. You would need it." "The expedition reports..." I pondered, "I'll have to recalibrate the Jump programming..." I became lost in thought, and then lost in the rhythm of the ceremonies, and drifting, drifting with the tides and times, seeing all from a rocking swell in the great ocean, at peace. Jagen clutched at us. It pulled me back into my acceleration couch, trying to drag me down the bridge into the tail of the Farriken. We were skimming closer to that ball of neutronium than I'd been in my pod, so long ago. The tidal stresses plucked at us. I knew the Farriken could take stronger strains than this... The mind reassures, but the body is ignorant. My muscles tensed to fight the pull, even though I knew I was safe. Ping and crack, the ship flexed. A stylus rolled on my console and fetched up against a toggle switch. I eyed the screen. Lekki boiled below, streamers coiling like snakes along the magnetic field lines. Ion winds whipped in a violent, violet dance. I wiped my brow, though I was cool. "Something coming in from the satellites," Majumbdahr broke the strained silence of the bridge. "It looks like a torch spectrum they're picking up." I swiveled about to watch the screens face-on, bracing against the lug. "Course data holding firm?" "Yes sir. Point zero zero five r." He thumbed to a new index. "Several sensor satellites have the signal now, sir." "How far away?" I said. kilometers." "Sure it's a fusion flame?" "Yes." Sometimes in the last few minutes, while we were close to Lekki and our ship sensors blinded, the white torch of a reaction engine had flared on. It lay ahead of us. The satellite eyes had whispered warning now, but they had to be minutes late. "A ramscoop." "I expect so," Majumbdahr said. I pressed Emergency Stations . Wailing sounded down the bridge. Heads raised to look at me, then ducked back to their cacoon consoles. "Imirinichin," Majumbdahr said. Ghaima, sitting beyond in Engine and Fuel Systems Command, nodded grim assent. "It appears as though our esteemed medical officer has plucked up the fallen standard," I said. "Give me an intercept." "Computing," Majumbdahr muttered. "We're going into rebound, sir," Gharma said over intercom. I glanced screenward. Jagen grew into a sullen red ball bathed in a radial spray of blue lines: images of the stars beyond, their light warped by the deep gravitational potential around the Black Dwarf. "Max stress," Gharma called. I thumbed in a satellite view of us. A gleaming blue ball was arcing in a tight circle around a black nothingness. The Farriken ' s organiform had filmed over with a metal-like polish hours ago, to reflect away all chrome starship. "That ramscoop is nearly dead on our course," Majumbdahr said quickly. "Intercept in fourteen minutes, twenty-one seconds." The Farriken groaned. Our instruments began to unfog. Plasma roiled, red and whispy, sucked free of Lekki by Jagen' s grip. I felt pressure begin to ease. We were zipping outward now, our velocity matched to EarthSol. "Compute a dodge pattern." "Done, sir. Wait... our mass detector is coming online again. I'll try for some new data with it. The readings should be more accurate than these correlation measurements I've been using from the satellites." Majumbdahr punched in commands. My intercom buzzed, but it was a low-priority call. I chopped it off. I noticed I was biting my lower lip. "How does it appear to you, sir?" Gharma asked. "Imirinichin is smarter than I guessed. He waited until we were so near Jagen our mass detectors went blind. Then he moved. He must have guessed we're headed for Earth; that would tell him our exiting trajectory." I studied readouts, and then: "We can't clear the blast, sir," Majumbdahr reported. "It looks like Imirinichin has a big fat window for detonation. The scoop itself can't get close, but... he'll blow the ramscoop fusion plant." "And let the debris expand at relativistic speeds, snagging us." "I can cut down the radiation with some maneuvering." "Do so," I said. "And check back with the mass detector. You've narrowed its range down to get a good reading on that scoop, haven't you? Now scan for anything further out, too." He and Ghaima began working feverishly. I listened to the whine of the air circulators, trying to think. The main screen showed us, a fat blue dot surging up from Jagen. Goodbye, Dwarf. I glanced down the bridge. In each console cluster many couches yawned empty. Here it was easy to remember we were pinned to the wall of a cylinder, the floor stretched away two hundred meters to right and left, but curved up and away into the ceiling, in front and behind me. Far to the left, a Lengen priest on standby duty made ritual hand passes, perhaps to calm himself. "You're right, sir," Majumbdahr's words were clipped. "Three more scoops are moving, further out from the first." "It's a blind," I said. "Even if we dodge the first fusion blast, it'll jam our sensors. Then the later scoops hit us before we can recover." "We have attained max rebound velocity, sir, as computed," Gharma broke in. "Vector sigma net exceeding #." "Give me a new course, Mr. Majumbdahr. Maximize the square of the distance we can get between us and all four of the plasma clouds, if those scoops detonate. Include the shock wave effects." "Computing." I glanced at visual display. Ahead, an orange cone burned: ramscoop exhaust. Our projected trajectory was a dashed line. The cone pointed toward a red-tagged dot along the line, the place where we would intersect the blast wave. As I watched we crawled visibly toward the dot. "Log new course," I ordered. "Automatic firing sequence -- nose about." Immediately I felt the rumble and tug of our own motors. Gyros brought us around, pushing aside the fingers of Jagen' s tidal grip. Somewhere a servo whined. "Get an estimate of probable radiation damage," I called to Majumbdahr. He thumbed in orders and downbridge a technician responded: numbers flashed on my screen . "High," I said, between narrowed lips. "Too damned high. We can't take that." "I can't give you anything better, sir," Majumbdahr said. "He has us boxed in a narrow channel." I nodded. "Prepare for Jump space." There was silence. No one moved. "It is a risk we must take," I said. "Yes sir," Majumbdahr said with a note of glee. He slapped a switch. A hooting wail sounded along the bridge. Lights dimmed to conserve power. "Metric Computing!" I called. "How large are the RiemannChristoffel elements in the region just in front of the first scoop?" An underofficer somewhere answered me. "Within four percent of critical, Captain." "And how many ships have been lost going into Jump under those conditions?" I murmured, thinking to myself. "Several. The probabilities are difficult to calculate in a highly warped field such as this, sir, and -- " "I know." The Farriken had come out of Jump space well clear of the entire Lekki-Jagen planetary system, where the tensor elements were well known, and then coasted in to near Veden. Taking her into Jump on Jagen's doorstep was -- "Jump computation finished, sir," Majumbdahr called. "To what order?" "Third order in local coordinates." I grimaced. What good was a calculation good to five decimal places, when we couldn't measure the input data to better than three places? "Power reserves, adequate," Gharma said calmly. "Wait -- I'm getting something more," Majumbdahr said. "Mass detector is back on full scan and -- oh, I see." "See what?" "It's that anomaly again, sir. High above the plane of the ecliptic." "That again? I thought it was a sensor malfunction." "So did I. But it's still there." "It cannot be a ramscoop," Gharma put in. "We never Orbited any that -- " "Of course not," I said irritably. "It registers as a large mass. How far out is it?" Majumbdahr said presently. "Perhaps further. That's a lower bound." "Oh, no trouble after all," Gharma said. "The range of scan of this Class IV detection system is greater than I'm used to," Majumbdahr said slowly. "Sorry." "No matter," I said. "Still, I wonder what it is," Majumbdahr murmured. "Mass reads larger than any ship. Could be a large asteroid." "How accurate is that mass data?" I asked. "I would have to do an autocorrelation analysis -- " "No time," I said with sudden energy. "Majumbdahr, put an automatic scan-and-file on that thing and forget it." I peered at the screens. While the talk had gone on I had made my decision. "So it is. Bridge! Metric Computing." "Sir." "How does the failure probability increase if we go to maximum boost?" "Ah... rises by #, sir." "Interesting. Not that it matters, gentlemen." I looked around me at tightened faces and kept my voice conspicuously calm. "We're fresh out of alternatives." The red ball clawed out to meet us. Plasma billowed in great banks, lit by hydrogen lines. In such a sleet of protons we would fry in twenty seconds. Far away hung Veden, a creamy dot. Star of India. "Time," I called. A rush, a swirl of light. The falling -- Metal groaned. Someone screamed. The world outside Farriken smeared. We shot by the fireball, through the Jump. With a Pythagorean power, Number held sway above the Flux. Through the starless, naked night -- Our run to Earth took nine days. The blank bare silence outside made the Lengen priests uneasy; a disquiet seeped into the ship. I noticed it and began their training early. We needed teams to bring back the Patanen from Naga, where they were assembled. The exercises and weapons training raised everyone's spirits, including mine. I spent days reprogramming the Farriken so we could make one long Jump to get free of the galactic plane. The Empire was vast, but its kiloparsec diameter was a fleck in the turning sea of the galaxy. Earth lay a third of the way out from the galactic hub, near a spiral arm. The galaxy was ten kiloparsecs thick in Sol's neighborhood. Clearing that vast chasm in one Jump would bum two thirds of our fuel. There was no coming back from the halo stars. I designed override subsystems to stop the Farriken from dumping us out of Jump space too early, when its safety monitors panicked. Gharma and Majumbdahr labored on backup systems. Activity lifted my spirits. I had always detested intrigue; thus my failure at the low order palace politics of Fleet. The week before we occupied the Farriken ran thick with deception and the stench of the half-lie. I became depressed almost without realizing the cause. But when Imirinichin showed his hand -- I was sure he was cursing himself now for playing it a moment too soon -- I had felt an old exhilaration, one I thought long dead. It came from being involved again. I had come to think of myself over the last few years as a man of contemplation. As a young scholastic I had decided that men of action -- the only kind worth admiring, I thought then -- seldom heeded or needed men of contemplation. Oh, perhaps for an occasional practical reason, yes, but not as a habit of mind. So, much later, when I sought solace from the world, what in boyhood was a conviction had become an unconscious axiom, and it placed me firmly in the role of an introvert among men who did things. These recent days brought my youth swimming back in a way different from the rekindling Rhandra caused. I liked action and movement, the singing zest of conflict, but it had to be to some puipose: something better than patching up the Empire. I needed momentum, a vector, not the constricted sense of human possibility -- of which Sabal was a subtle but integral part -- of the Mongul. My work in Fleet had a touch of that energy, once. It ebbed away as I rose in the ranks. Finally I did not even know it was gone. There are many ways to shorten a man. Cynicism is the easiest. That, too, I affected for a while, in my middle years with Fleet. Then I had turned to Sabal for what refuge it could give. And now in a curious cycle I had returned to the consuming concentration of work. I spoke of it to Rhandra and she quoted a Veden song-thinker: Doing's the one reward a man dare ask. While we worked. Earth drew nearer. We were running scared. I had captained mining shuttles, hop transports, suborbital cyclers, cargo barges -- everything but prime Jump vessels. Running the Farriken with a skeleton crew meant I was on the bridge fourteen hours a day, minimum. I prepared routinesounding reports and sent them under my signature as Veden Fleet commander. I also wrote humdrum Farriken reports and transmitted telemetry. I threw in some complaints from each Commander about the other, just to keep things plausible. Plans win through or fail not because of great ideas, but by small details.    Numbed by a fretwork of small items to remember and deal with, I lost my way on the route to the Master's quarters. I blundered into the dreary twilight of a Sol phosphor corridor, tried to work my through it anyway, and failed. The Lengen priests were the only free hands we could spare to prepare extra Veden phosphor mix, and Majumbdahr reported them blithely uninterested in work. As a commander their bland unconcern irked me, but I said nothing of.it to the Master when I reached his quarters, late, and my audience began. I was only fractionally immersed in the lilting ritualswhen the Master nodded abruptly and spread his hands, palms down and flexed, to signal the end. "State is not right," he said rapidly. "Attempting focus while mind -- " He twirled a bony finger by his head. "I -- I do not feel so -- " "Ah," he said, nodding virorously. "Are. Look -- position. Not resisting weight through body center." I glanced down. As far as I could tell I was in proper sitting form, a slight variaion in the stylized Buddha pose. Alignment of spine felt correct. Odd; surely I wasn't fooling myself that well. There had always been some telltale signs before to show how I was throwing off my own concentration. Today my mind was fuzzed a bit, yes, but I felt properly placid. "See now?" the Master said quickly, breaking the pause. "No..." "Ah." His eyes darted to the side. I noticed that he was unconsciously tapping the majatin mat with a webbed foot. "Can ken. Important moment approaches. Perhaps -- perhaps is bad time." "Master," I said, "I can leant as much in these moments as in any other. My inner place is undisturbed by the days to come, I feel that securely." In truth I felt slighted by his assumption that I was getting nervous about the mission. Enlightenment opens to one the eternal moment and seals the future until its time has come. While I had not attained the Buddha state, the evidence of my own mind told me I was not now deflected from the right path. Or was this presumptuous? "No." Once more a side glance. A slap on his knee. "You do not ken. I judge your mood not right for study. There are many things you must leam." "Master -- " "Wrong time," he said abruptly. With a start I realized it was not I who was distracted, but the Master. He carried no aura of serenity about him now; he appeared as simply another mortal, worried about something. He had misjudged my own state, and not been sensitive enough to catch the error. I frowned and made ready to go. Rhythmic motions, the old encasing rituals. And even as I passed outward through the kandimaji shrine I began to question my own responses, to wonder if I had seen correctly, or if this was simply another layer of confusion I had to pass through, a cloud of illusion my own resisting habits threw up to shield a part of me that I would, in truth, be better off without.    "Sir?" Majumbdahr caught me on the downramp from the bridge. "Tomorrow," I said. I rubbed a sandy eye. "A moment." "Very well." I waved him to walk and we went 'down' onto B deck. "You remember the anomalous mass we saw on the detectors back at Lekki-Jagen?" "Yes. What of it?" "I... I've taken the scan-andstore readout." "Why?" "Something bothered me about it." He said this straightforwardly, as though daring me to criticize him for wasting time. But I knew he had been working very hard, and a good Fleet officer cannot be as meek as a file clerk. "And?" "It's velocity is high and rather remarkable." "How so?" "It will pass quite close to Lekki." "Couldn't it be interstellar matter drifting in?" "Not likely. Velocity is far too high." "So? It could still be an odd fragment." "Suppose it's something more? Our readings give a mass of about a tenth Sol mass. Suppose it's a Colossus?" That stopped me. In the twentysecond century some factions had abandoned Earth for political reasons and cast off into deepspace. They didn't have Jump ships or even ramscoops in those days. Instead they built crude reaction engines into asteroids, socked most of their party into coldsleep, and set out. Most never reappeared. Those who did were often turned into weapons. "I' see. No Colossus has been seen for centuries." "Another possibility is that it is a simple rogue rock, on freefall into Lekkispace, but..." "Improbable, I agree." "So, sir..." "What?" "I would like computer time for a full recorrelation of the mass detector data. Our velocity fix on this thing is poor. I can improve it by a high-accuracy resifting of the data." "Um." I frowned. "We need read-and-register space badly in the ferrites. I -- " "This could be important for Veden." I sighed. The Empire was nothing to me, but Veden..."All right. Rig it to run after we're in Earth orbit, though. While we're on the surface, in fact. There's no time now." "Very good, sir."    I picked our exit Jump locus carefully. We filed the official Farriken reports a few hours before Jump. I'd suggested days earlier that we return to Earth, and Fleet had rubberstamped the request. They directed me to remember when speaking to the Veden Commandant that he was inordinately sensitive about his defensible volume, like all regional Directors, and therefore to stress the scarcity of Fleet ships. I confirmed their first commanded Jump exit. It was far from where I wanted, but if we ignored them and emerged elsewhere there would be redruby hell to pay. Earth could pick up any Jump transit within half a parsec; the super-c radiation burst was like waving a flag. Just before we Jumped I sent a request for a new Jump locus, explaining that we had too high a matching velocity and didn't want to waste time cutting it down. A Jump time was already computed and anyway the Farriken could decelerate enough if Fleet Central would simply shift our exit point further from Earth. They grumbled and gave us -- as I'd guessed -- some last-minute choice about the precise spot. That meant they wouldn't have a precise fix. Rhandra stood beside me at the bridge as the Jump came. A flicker, the prickling tension -- We popped into being half a million klicks from Earth, with Luna hanging directly between us. "Fleet's squawking about our choice, Captain," Gharma called, listening with one hand to the running telemetry. "They don't want to bother getting a fix on our M and deltaV through Luna Control," I said. We glided around Luna at high relative velocity. There were unavoidable lags in telemetry between Luna and Earth, I knew, that shaved a hairline of accuracy off our known location. "Incoming orders," Majumbdahr called. The screens rippled. Fleet was evidently pulling most craft not immediately needed into a dense screen around Earth. We were stationed a bit in from Luna orbit as part of a shifting defense grid. "Umm," I said, "As far as I know, no Quam ship has violated Earthspace. These precautions seem rather heavy." "Perhaps they're frightened," Rhandra volunteered. "The Empire may be weaker than I thought," I said. Luna swept below, her ancient craters seeded with yellow gems. The atmosphere shimmered graygreen. I popped my contact filters Into my palm; yes, now it was a natural bluewhite. Rhandra had to get along with a dimmer, achromatic image. I wondered again how easy it might be to find a suitable F star among the halo swarm. We left the bridge for a while, since it was time for my audience with the Master. He saw each of us daily. When I emerged this time, feeling rested and my mind drifting peacefully, Gharma was waiting at the kandimaji shrine that framed the Master's portal. "He tires?" Gharma said. "The Master? A little." Gharma fretted. "He should not keep to so difficult a schedule. This is a great and tragic mission. He is passing through what is, for the Quam, the last journey. He is filled with an anguish such as we cannot sense." "How do you know?" I asked, not because I doubted him, but because his solemn air I found wearing. "I have been with him the longest. I sense his essence." "I see." "I left my family to follow his path." "And Majumbdahr?" "He, too." These men had given up much to follow the Master. "Such power... "Yes. The Quarn works are many." "Yes, vast," I conceded. "Though not perfect, you'll grant." "The Master senses doubts in you. Ling." "He does?" I thought of my audience days before, and the Master's odd, edgy quality. Perhaps I had been wrong, though. "Your center resists." "Ah." My eye was caught by Rhandra, approaching for her audience. She gave us greetings. "I should think increased meditation would benefit both of you in these last hours," Gharma said. "If there is time," Rhandra began. "Surely -- " "Proper equilibrium is essential." "My hours are not so easily arranged," I said. "I believe before you leave the ship you should ask for added time with the Master. His hand should guide you." "Perhaps," I said grudgingly. "Ling needs rest," Rhandra said. "I speak for the Master himself." "Oh?" I murmured. "There are levels of knowledge among the Lengen," Gharma said, "just as there are grades of priests." "We are not priests," Rhandra said. "In these hours of this final task, I should think -- " "The Master, himself is pinched by the forces around us," I said. "I feel we should all give mutual aid." "The Master tires, perhaps, but he is still the Master," Gharma said stiffly. "Can't you talk to him? Convince him to rest a bit, if you're concerned?" "No, he must see us all each day." "Why?" "It is the Way." I shrugged. Argument accomplished nothing in this odd mystical navy I'd joined; I returned to the bridge.    When I tried to tjiink about the Master, as in the talk with Gharma, ideas kept slipping away from me. There were things the Master had done, vast damage to people and cultures, that vexed me... yet the rising of the waters washed all care from me, and I saw these cares as yet another false way to pin me to the past, or prevent my own realization. The past, after all, was dead. The future loomed.    I had designed the fusion warheads myself. Gharma knew a little about fusion jacketing and he helped me seal them with barium and potassium casings, all layered in shells to make the brightest possible ionization cloud around the fireball. The Earth Defense Screen was a piece of history, a spider web of microelectronics that, the press agentry gushed, could pick up a sneeze on Venus. A gossamer net, sensitive, delicate -- and stupid. was badly designed. It began as a simple tracking system. As Fleet grew they patched in more sensitive satellites with greater ranging. With the Quam war they added many more sensors until they could nail a ship down to half a klick absolute. The grid even registered lifeboats running without comm gear. All this came from multiplying the number of units, but never changing their sensitivity. The sensors could weather a solar storm, given warning. Otherwise they peered naked into the void; that was their weakness. The torpedoes went out with hollow thumps. I watched them sprint away. Clumsy weapons, never used successfully against Quam. Our eleven torpedoes twisted, fanned out -- Ahead, aft, at all sides: the sky splintered. "Send the emergency distress signal," I called down the bridge. "Done!" A boiling wave of electromagnetic energy obliterated the nearest sensors. Further out, high-energy ions and electron-positron clouds seared away microelectronics. Nothing between Luna and Central could pick up our silhouette through that. We boosted inward. We buttoned up tight, antennas tucked in like a frightened dog's tail to escape the scorching barium clouds. I listened to Fleet's Emergency Response trigger. Bells clanged, our screens flared with confused images. Earth's magnetic dipole field smeared the cloud into a wedge as it expanded. Soon Eskimos, had there been any left, would have noticed a brightening of the aurora borealis as high energy electrons sleeted down. We flew blind, sniffing our way in with occasional radar-like pulses from our mass detectors. But the Farriken's permanent log knew Earthspace the way my tongue knows my teeth; we kept to course, bead on a konchu wire. When Farriken burst free of the snarling plasma we hung over a herd of ramscoppes, glinting metal-gray. They were awaiting loading for the empire worlds, unmanned. They rode a standard parking orbit that had not deviated in centuries; I could've given the orbital coordinates to two places from memory. The scoops were the sheep we wolves would hide among. They drifted, several hundred strong, webbed on repulsion lines to prevent slight perturbations from causing collisions. Some were damaged, fire-pitted, probably useless. Others gaped wide in their guts, mouths being loaded by automatic shuttles. Every few days a scoop was nudged out by low impulse reaction motors and cast off on a long hydrogengobbling course. Sol system had no Flinger to make the first acceleration cheap, so Earth usually had an excess of scoops waiting for reflight; more came to Rome than returned to the colonies. This ever-changing flock of metal and organiform was a nuisance to Fleet Ships Catalog, I knew, they hadn't the resolution to pick out every scoop. This close in to Earth -- a nose-rubbing three hundred klicks up -- Fleet might overlook us. Might. Making love with Rhandra was by now a lesson well learned, a relined process. We had each stamped i he other with a style fresh and adapted. I no longer felt (when I did this, say, or that ) a pale shadow of times spent with Angela. I had unmemorized the past. We coiled together in these last moments, finding new geometries for our well-rehearsed arms and legs in the low gravity: Galactic Man at the old slap and tickle. I lay awake for a while staring into the blank darkness. Outside, I iarth waited. Outside was everything, and inside here was my mind. Consciousness was an analogue map, a point-by-point tracing of the world, and it was generated by words. The left side of the brain, painting reality over with a lacquer of language. Yet something inside resisted the steady rain of words. Our time sense, for one. Something stretched and compressed time according to the intensity of experience, following the ticking of its own ancient clock. What part of us did that? The Quam knew, I was sure. Had there been a time when the right brain ruled? Did the Quam know us then? Did the Master himself? The right brain spoke to us now with a thick tongue, muttering below the bright clarity of pressing sentences from the left, raising lids of boxes we could not pry up with language. Was there buried down in there the lind between animal shame and human guilt? The swelling hunters fear that became human anxiety? Perhaps the Quam knew all that. But the Master's worrisome anxiety, during that one audience, pricked at me. Did he know us entirely? We were not the creatures of millennia ago. Now we could summon up our past for revision, sweeten our afternoons with daydreams, rehearse the future -- my mind flooded with gaudy images of the Earthward blooding to come -- and forge many futures, events branching like a fragile tree. The ability to aim and fire is not a verbal one; the old cleverness ruled there. So I would need left and right brain. And the Master knew better than I what this freshscrubbed Ling could do. After sleep, with Khandra still dozing, I rose and went down to the armory. I had on my field Fleet uniform. It was clean-cut, dark, excellent for concealment. The team we were sending down carried all the usual Fleet personal weapons; I found them rather unimaginative. I had worked in the backwaters most of my career, and there are places where a flame gun is just so much gaudy hardware. I needed a few touches of subtlety. I'd made up a few items on the voyage. A pencil-sized .tube went into my pocket. Throw it ten meters, away and a small powder charge disperses a paralyzing irritant, neatly taking out a five-meter volume, but no more. Below my belt I tucked a silent air pistol. It fired shells stuffed with poisoned flechettes, fine needles that followed ballistic paths once the shell exploded. Some shells I'd packed with white phosphorus, too, to shed a little light on problems. Inside my shirt I wedged a particular nasty: a plastic-jacketed pancake, green when wet. Slip it from its jacket and the wetting agent escapes in twenty seconds or so. Slide the wet cake under a rug or into some grass. Once dry, any impact will explode it. Tear off a piece and stick it like an old wad of gum to a door jamb; when the door closes, presto. I'd picked up that one on Laganat, from some terrorists we'd captured. They used it because it was cheap and easy; they preferred flame weapons if their could get them. To this I added the usual: a strangling-wire that reeled out of a wrist band, night specs, gas grenades. All the comforts of the modem world.    We used drift-craft for the descent. Farriken carried pods of them. They were gossamer ships, metalfree to avoid EM detection, with fall-away jets for suborbital work and then sails, chutes, ailerons, stabilizers, swooprudders and the rest for skating through the atmosphere. Most were four-man jobs. There were a few one-man gliders, though, and I snagged one. They were programmed, so all but the last fifty klicks down were ordained. I reviewed the troops as launch time approached, said a few words of encouragement, slapped a few shoulders. They were nearly all Fleet men, most with their Soladapted vision intact, and a few Lengen priests who'd never been off Veden. They'd be nearly useless, except in dealing with the Quam on the surface. We dealt with a thousand last details. We sang our final gonjii chant. We climbed into the stiffwinged gliders. We coasted out to the lock. Farriken' s launch rachet seized us each in turn. I relaxed utterly, saving energy. The hatchway slid open before my bubble. Stars burned. God kicked me in the tail. I shot out, across a harvest field of ramscoops, and plunged down toward our grazing impact with Earth's film of air. It was a dreamy time. A thump as the low-luminosity bum came on (invisible from below, we hoped). A hissing as winds plucked at me. Below, blue -- a stark titanium blue that would swallow all other colors. Earth spread out below me with its tangle of small lives and deaths that from a distance appears a lawn but up close is wrenchingly confused and cruel, a mad jungle. Drifting. Chutes popping dutifully open. Sails slanting me down. South America, yawning in summer's heat. Then we were drifting over New Guinea. Tumbled ridges of greenbrown jungle, sliced by muddy gray rivers. Men lived there now, but still not many. I had ventured there once, been bitten and pricked to distraction, and sworn I'd never go back. Now it was absolutely certain I would keep the promise. To the east lay the Solomons, now an ofkaipan slum. My slightly pinked skin would not raise an eyebrow there. Lumps of brown strewn to the horizon by a careless Creator, now bathed in Pacific sunlight that swathed it in ruddy splendor, a light like the cyrstallized air of the centuries. I had holidayed on one of those specks, sleeping on a pallet with relatives who sweated in the fields each day, eaten a fierce vegetable curry, washed it down with a dark, solemn stout. A soft and quiet time, before Fleet and Angela. Leaves falling on a still day: slipping down the winds, a covey of stupid birds too lazy to flap. liyte and Samar we skirted around as dawn broke on their urban sprawls. Panay sulked on the horizon. We slipped lower. Quezon gleamed with street lights. North now: Cataduanes. Luzon. Mountain ridges clutched up at us. We dipped, skimmed. Then Naga. No sign of detection. No scree of intercept jets . Outside Naga we found a soccer field. It lay in dark, though mountain peaks nearby glowed with dawning. I banked and surveyed the surrounding land. Nothing stirred. I ordered them down. My little convoy peeled off one by one and swooped in for a bouncy landing. Waiting, I studied Naga's shadowed profile. No movement, not even air cars. A long column of smoke traced a finger from far beyond the city, smudging the air nearby. Above, the stars swam in shroud. My flock was down. I swooped, glided, wind sang in the struts. Thump and I was back in Rome.    Military history is the story of the terrible murder of beautiful plans by ugly facts. I'd selected a second-rate farm road for our appraoch to Naga. I'd hauled vegetables over it a hundred times as a boy, working for summer wages in the fields. A sleepy road, nothing more. There was no reason whatever to put a Fleet recreationaL facility seven klicks from Naga along that road. None. But there it was, complete with three gate guards. I got out of the car we'd stolen and tried to talk them around. Seems the soccer field was in a Fleet enclosure, and they were curious about how a team of officers and men had spent the night in a days-only facility. One of them wanted to call in about it. Once he got this idea he refused to let go of it. Maybe he just didn't like taking an ofkaipan's word. And he never took his hand off his sidearm. His arm moved -- So I shot him. Then the others. The air pistol coughed three times. The flechettes bored deep. It was messy. We cleaned up quickly. We swiped some Fleet cars. Naga was stirring as the east cracked open with dawn. Trash drifted in the gutters everywhere. Shop windows were often boarded up. Pedestrians eyed us, then moved on, scurrying. I felt exposed as hell. Every tenth block in Naga had a Fleet box on the comer. A sentry lounged in it, squinting at us as we rumbled by, auto weapon on a tripod. Occasionally its snub snout followed us in a lazy arc. We went by Fleet offices, a rotunda and marble colonnades basking in the rising sun. They needed a washing; streaks of black and brown wrote an old story on their faces. Away from Naga center there were no more signs of Fleet. Official buildings gave way to long, gracefully arched residences, prickly with brick pilasters, . fragile collonada, ostraku arcades. But here, too, few people walked the streets goldrimmed by day. Here the plan went well: I found the warehouses easily, in fact remembered them from times I had worked nearby as a boy. There were no Fleet police in this district. They seemed drawn up around Fleet buildings, letting the civilians fend for themselves. Someone spotted us and, clunk , a warehouse door slid aside. An arm beckoned. Our party of eighteen covered the vacant street, then slipped inside one at a time. I went in first. "Sanjen?" He was a short, stocky Fleet Lieutenant, plainly edgy and worried. "I'm Cantalus." We shook hands. Cantalus was orderly, efficient. He had the Panaten already in coldsleep vaults. His working crew was mostly civilians. I counted vaults. "We can squeeze this many in," I said. "But it'll be close." "This isn't all." "Why not?" "You must understand... I have been taking a few dozen Panaten at a time from the Fleet quarters. We infiltrated the staff there. There were hundreds left." "We're not finished, then." "Sir, I -- we've been discovered." "What? How?" "Or I think we have. Last night a high officer came to the Panaten quarters. He wanted three of them, so We did not have to open the wards. Still, I think he was suspicious. He took the three away, but I think believe he may be back." "Why?" "Why do you think so?" "The three Panaten were... related to you." "What?" "Your wife. And two children." "Impossible." "No. I verified it myself." My mind spun in a high and airless place. I had thought little of Angela, had given up Chaik and Romana as lost. My opposition to their lobe-tapping must have given them some added advantage. But to have recovered -- "Sir," Majumbdahr said at my elbow, "they've got the trucks. We can start moving." "Yes... Start." I looked at Cantalus. I knew the next answer. "Who took them away?" "General Tonji."    I had arranged a pretext through Aii Control, to allow us access to the automatic surface-to-orbit shuttles. It was no great trick: we stripped encoding ferrites from the ramscoops parked near Farriken, and used those to order automatic shuttles, using ordinary comm lines in the ramscoops. The problem was getting the vaults lo the shuttles. Cantalus had trucks. Could we get them through the streets? "That's what we'll have to do," Cantalus said. He looked appealingly at two figures seated in the shadows that cloaked the huge warehouse. They were heavily robed and sat very tall and erect. Quam. But they did not speak and their hooded eyes stared out at us impassively. Cantalus turned back to me. "We have no other way." "No access to copters?" "Not now. There is great demand. I could not -- " "All right, the trucks. You have permits?" "A few." He produced some ferrite stickers. "Enough to get all these through?" "I don't know." "Let's pack them in. Then we'll see."    The morning heat rose thick and cloying from the street outside. I stood watch at the entrance bay of the storage warehouse. There was surprisingly little activity in the business district. As a boy I'd been jostled and awed in these streets, had flowed in the rivers of men and women and goods, swam in air freighted with price calls and bitter bargains, grunts of labor and cackles of glee. All gone, now. "We're ready for the first detachment to shove off, Captain," Cantalus reported. I eyed the narrow docking lanes. The hover trucks purred beside the loading cranes, riding low beneath the vaults. In the murky distance Mayon spit orange into the tropical blue, ringed in gray haze. "Go." The Lengen priests conferred with the Quam, who still sat stiff and somber. Around them the men who were their followers sweated in the damp air. The Quam looked exhausted. They had accomplished much in so short a time. A priest approached me. "A moment?" I nodded. "The Masters wish to be... to go in the vaults." "Why?" "They wish to awaken amid their home worlds. They have no heart for the voyage." "Well... all right." I listened to Fleet comm traffic over Cantalus's unit It was spotty and oddly incoherent. Our fusion explosions had raked great holes in Then came a coded blip from our first detachment. They had gotten through and loaded an automatic shuttle. They were riding up with it. I sent Gharma with the second group. I helped load vaults myself to work off the tension that hung in the air like smoke. We wrapped the Quam. Their suety skin gleamed in the noonday light. I marveled at their bone structure: humanoid, unlike the other aliens we had encountered, yet different in pelvis, joints, spine. They lay silent, their eyes filmed. The coolant fluids bubbled up to cover them. I clicked off the comm. "Gharma is lifting," I said. "We are nearly ready to leave ourselves," Cantalus said eagerly. "Mr. Cantalus." "Yes?" "Where did Tonji take the others?" "The base at Mindoro." "How do you know?" "He said so." "Why do you suppose he did that?" "What?" Cantalus waved to the men to finish the loading. "Why leave word of his destination? Unless he wanted to be followed." Cantalus looked at me.    "Here's the entrance," Majumbdahr called back to us. We crouched in the rear of the hover truck. Dusty lanes zipped by as we sped down the last highway. Mahataqua trees nodded in the midaftemoon heat. Behind us in Naga a black finger curled up into a clotted cloud: a fire. A Slot? Eventually there would be no one healthy enough to tend the victims. Then a fire would rage beyond control. A massive organiform cube reared beside the road. I wrinkled my nose. The stench reminded me of the Slots. Around the cube nothing moved. We hummed, slowed, stopped. The whine died and we lowered to earth. I swung down from my perch. "Where's your passes?" a guard was asking Majumbdahr. I joined them. Majumbdahr handed him a clip of ferrites and yawned. He leaned against the truck. The guard inserted the ferrites in his casette. It beeped. "Looks okay." He turned to me. "We had a call through from Central, sir. Can't firm up this departure time until we recheck. Some kind of hold on movements, don't know why." "More chickenshit. " Majumbdahr growled. "Yeah." The guard eyed Majumbdahr, squinting at his Hindic features. Jle waved us through. "Double time it!" I called to the men below. I swung the autocrane around for another flat of vaults. I was loading them into the gaping shuttle bay in triple lots, exceeding the max on weight. Majumbdahr climbed up into the cage beside me. Sweat glistened on his face; a bead of moisture dropped from his chin and spattered on my flashing console. "How long do you think we've got?" "An hour at the outside." "Right." He nodded, weary. "We can load by them. But how about takeoff?" "When' re we programmed?" "I just phoned it in. One hour, forty-two minutes. But there's a hold on it." "What's the tower say?" The crane screamed, bucked. "Take one off!" I shouted down at the forks lifts. "Too much." They moved in, the insect arms grappling. "They're not letting anybody out until that hold is lifted." "Shit." "Maybe they found those guards." I grimaced. I felt a twinge of guilt about it, even in the midst of this. Those three men were going to be with me a long time. Heat shimmered the air. I tried to think. "No, I don't think so. Anybody could've done that." "Then what?" "General Tonji. He knows it was the Farriken that touched off that fusion blind. Fleet may accept the most logical explanation -- that we blew our core and are now just dust. But Tonji..." I squinted at the sun. A light winked on. I swung the crane around, cables ringing, and set the load down inside the shuttle's hatchbay. "No, it's too much of a coincidence for him to shrug it off. That's why he took Angela, my wife." "Sir?" "For bait."    The shuttle's bay doors clanged shut. Cantalus and I dogged and sealed them. Sweat darkened our suits. "This craft won't move a centimeter without tower approval. They've frozen the magnetic servos." Cantalus gazed at me steadily, plainly asking for an answer. I was in charge, wasn't I? "Quite so." I studied the bare, vast field. The tower was a blockhouse with a tall spire, a full klick away. The men stood around the loading bay. I waved the Lengen priests aboard. There were cramped but adequate personnel racks inside, enough for us all. I climbed up onto a catwalk, boots clanging on the metal, and made a megaphone of my hands. "We're going to take the tower. I want three volunteers." Majumbdahr raised his hand. Five others followed. I picked Majumbdahr and two others. "The rest -- inside." They filed toward the shuttle, most of them dragging their feet with fatigue. Cantalus approached. "We had not planned to leave with you." "I think you should." He looked uncomfortable. "As I said, we had not so planned. However... I called through on comm band to my duty station. The wards where we kept the Panaten are surrounded." I frowned. "By whom?" "Fleet infantry." "More of Tonji's work." "Perhaps." "Board the shuttle then. No point in your staying here." "Will there be room for us all?" "Just barely. When Majumbdahr gets back from the tower button up and lift immediately." Majumbdahr was at my elbow. "Why me? What about you, Captain?" I pulled out my air pistol and rearmed it. The magazine made a loud clack in the bay. "I'm not going with you." "You must," Majumbdahr said. "This is a personal matter." The men stood around me, silent. I obliviously went on checking my weapons. "Sir..." "No discussion, Mr. Majumbdahr," I said sharply. "I will go with you. "No you won't." "You know the Jump programming. You've altered our inflight subsystems." I could feel my face tighten. "So what?" " Farriken can Jump without you, certainly. But it will be more dangerous." "Not much." "But some. If I go with you the chances of your returning are better." I sighed. "I don't ask for your help." "I didn't say you did. I am offering it. And you cannot very well stop me." I waited. Majumbdahr gazed at me, impassive. Then he smiled very slightly. I began to wonder who w.as the hero here, and who the fool. "All right," I said. "All right."    We got most of the way without trouble. The admin offices were nearly deserted. Ho hum. Business as usual. Few heads lifted to study us as we went by. We skipped the elevators and went for the emergency stairs. At the base of the spire I unshouldered my equipment bag and fished around for a lock decipherer. Farriken carried a few for emergency purposes and Gharma had thought to bring one along. I fumbled through my encoder sigs, stets and assorted gadgetry a Captain acquires by rights, and found it. The emergency stairway popped open without activating its alarm. I resealed it from the inside. We went up the stairs single file, pausing at each floor. Through a side portal I could peer down at our ground car. Nobody went near it. At the top floor I sigged the double lock, then popped the alarm before it could blow. We waited for signs of interest from the other side of the fire door. Nothing. "Fast and easy," I whispered. One of the men kicked the door open. We charged through. I pitched a gas grenade. It went off in Forward Control. Brown smoke poured out. Two Fleet officers turned toward us. They opened their mouths but no sound came out. One pointed. Then they both fell. A Lieutenant rose up from his console and scrabbled at his side. The man next to me launched himself forward. He hit the Lieutenant just as a pistol appeared in the space between them. They crashed into a readout casement. The pistol didn't go off. Majumbdahr was there by then. He clubbed the Lieutenant with a flame pistol. The gas hissed away, dissolving into harmlessness. I swung my air pistol around to cover the rest of the Control pits. They were empty. The tower was run on a skeleton crew.    We held the tower top for over fifteen minutes. I dropped grenades through a rollout window, directly on the first squad that came to check out a call from below. By that time Majumbdahr and I had figured out enough of the launch procedure to lift the hold on our shuttle. Majumbdahr programmed and called through on comm to clear our passage. I covered the stairs. The other two bracketed the elevators. That's where two underofficers appeared. The elevator zipped open and there they were. One step, two -- Flame guns brought them both down. Majumbdahr called out that we were cleared. I swung around from covering the stairs. Only then did I notice that one of our men was lying with his side blown away. One of the elevator men had got off one shot; I hadn't even heard it. I peered down from the tower. A chunk of concrete blistered and crumbled above my head. They were firing from below. Three men, as near as I could see. "We're trapped," Majumbdahr said. "Unless we can draw them inside." I leaned toward the open window and dropped another two grenades. The firing from below stopped. "Down the stairs," I said. We clumped down as fast as we could. The man ahead of me stopped at the ground floor, where we had come in. I motioned him on. We ran down the last flight to the basement. It was dimly lit. We wandered down two corridors before finding the surface exit. I could hear muffled firing: flame weapons. Time ticked on. "You think they haven't got this covered?" the man with us asked me. "These are ordinary Fleetfield police. No guarantees, but maybe they're thinking of saving the equipment upstairs more than getting us." "I hope you're right," Majumbdahr murmured. I wasn't. Two steps out the doorway the man crumpled. Blood sprayed from his chest. I was right behind him. A flame bolt seared the air by my ear. I dropped behind an abutment. They had left one gunner by our car. I could see him crouching behind it. Two crisp frying sounds passed over my head from Majumbdahr. Both missed. I aimed my pistol at the man's feet, which were still visible. One, two, three shots -- all kicked up concrete near him. "Don't use a grenade," Majumbdahr called. "We need the car." I nodded. Aimed. One cough, two -- a foot jerked to the side . The man fell into view . I fired three more times. He went still . "Come on!" Up and running with a blind, furious energy. I reached the car. Its side window evaporated. I jerked open the door and Majumbdahr lunged through it. I slumped halfway into the car and thumbed on the pilot. Whoosh -- we shot up fifty meters. I slipped out of the seat. I clutched at the side rail. The car tilted, ready to boost to cruising speed. I screamed something. A hand appeared. I snatched at it. Air ripped beside me. A hot tongue licked at my leg. I wrenched myself up and got a thigh over the seat railing. A giant slapped the car. I lost one hand hold. Into the cradle, endlessly rocking -- Majumbdahr grabbed the other hand and tugged at me. I felt something tear in my biceps. The car was still accelerating. I looked down. The gray field flashed by below, blurred. All reality, I remembered, was a mere illusion. Really. Majumbdahr tugged on my hand. I got a purchase on the seat amounts and heaved upward. Wriggled partway into the seat. Wind buffeted me, howled. I rolled in. The car door hissed shut. "You all right?" "Call the shuttle. Tell them to launch." Majumbdahr fumbled at the comm and barked a few words. Squawksquawk. He nodded. "They're off. Nothing will stop them now. Hey, you all right?" "Just glad I didn't have time to think about that." I panted. "You're all right?" "I'm all right." Just breathing, for a while. It was absolutely fine to simply suck in the air. Feel it fill up the lungs. Then push it out. Sweet wind. Breathing had been something else back then -- an hour ago? thirty minutes? An ordinary thing. After a while I began to notice jungle rippling by below us. Green sea. Spatterings of blue, yellow, colors clear and bright. Slowly the trembling in me started to ease off. I summoned up an old joke: It's not that I'm too young to die, it's that I'm too me to die. I grimaced. Some jokes don't get old. Maybe that's because they aren't jokes. I started to think and then, shakily, to plan, and here's how it went: Land at a civilian lot. Shortcircuit the lock on a cheap skimmer. Send the Fleet craft off like a bat out of the proverbial, north. Lift the skimmer, heading west. Ditch the skimmer at Batangas. Swipe a cruiser. Hop it to Lucban and leave it parked near the main street. Take a bus for two klicks. Get off. Buy five matanaglos from a street vendor. Speak to each other casually, walk easy, two officers taking a lazy day off. Stroll into the Toshogu Shrine and out the other side, to the House of the Ascending Dragons. Find a cloistered garden and eat the matanaglos. Drink from a nearby fountain. Catch a belt to the commercial district. There we had to move more carefully. I made a business #D call to the orbital trade center in Yomeimon. Then I had them route me through their net to offplanet comm. Then into Earthspace Licensing. By that time I was patched through enough channels to cover the origin of the call. I punched through the encoding I'd set up before leaving Farriken. Gharma answered. Then our backup scrambler cut in. I had to recode. The screen cleared. I told him -- not in so many words -- to look for a Fleet booster coming up on the ramscoop fleet, maybe toward morning. That would be us. Anything else was trouble. If there was any doubt, Jump immediately. Never mind the backwash -- ramscoops be damned. Oh yes, and incidentally -- forget us, too. "The Master orders you back now," Gharma broke in. "Why?" "This is unnecessary." "I can't leave without them." "You must." "Uh huh. Watch for me by morning's light, friend." And signed off. Dark behind, daik ahead. A drop traced itself down my brow, hung on my nose. I puffed and blew it off. Insects pricked at my neck. Every moment or two something rustled nearby. Let them go. Some of those beasties were big enough to set off trip sigs, which meant Mindoro Base couldn't use sigs this far out. Area Denial Theory, Course #I #B. Clouds boiled in from the South China Sea, blotting the stars. The lights of Mindoro danced in the warm air. A bird warbled to itself. My night specs slipped on silently. I kept my eyes fixed ahead and turned my head slowly, using peripheral vision. Nothing. A raw field ahead. Low, shiny-leafed bushes. A hooting call, fading. All this because Angela and the children refused to stay pinned in the past, in that Paradise where choice had fled. "I'll move up to the Stet key," I whispered to Majumbdahr. He nodded. I wriggled forward, mud's liquid fingers tugging. Ten meters, then twenty. The stubby box winked an orange indicator when I inserted the signet. I fumbled with the Firetongue Stet and snicks d it into the receiver. Rigid geometry among a sea of mud. Orange winked to red. Rejection. Not the winking red that sprang an alarm, though. The key mechanism knew this was a legitimate Fleet Stet. But not the correct one. Majumbdahr crawled up behind me. He saw the red dot. "That's the current Stet," he whispered, unbelieving. "It was on the Farriken." "Right." "Tonji must've known we'd have it." "Right." "So he's changed the Firetongue over to some other scheme." I nodded. Recoding the Stet entry-point by entry-point was a huge job. Tonji hadn't had time for that yet. So he must have used some fallback Stet. That way the change took only hours. Majumbdahr had followed the same chain of reasoning. "That's that," he said. "Let's get out of here." "No. Wait." I rummaged through the equipment bag. If Gharma had loaded everything in my quarters -- "Here." I fished out the Stet I had kept from my earlier commission. "Where did you get that?" "A keepsake. Now if Tonji did the easiest thing -- " The change in Stets had been made a year or two before. There were undoubtedly some older Stets around. But a man in a hurry... Snick. Orange. Orange. Wink: green. "Damn!" Majumbdahr grinned.    We walked and crawled the klick, slow and easy. No fire flashed out of apparent nothingness to lash us down. Most of Mindoro was dark. We slipped from shadow to shadow. Nothing moved. Where were the patrols? Had Fleet cut back so far they no longer had troops for their bases? I remembered the ancientquotation in script above the Toshogu Shrine: All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today. But the script was streaked and weathered, one letter hanging by a single tab. There was no one to keep the ancient shrines. And for this tarnished Empire, no seeds of tomorrow. I peered around us, uneasy. Majumbdahr had no warning. There came the scrabbling of nails on earth. One shadow oozed into two and a daik form struck him. He pitched backward, flame gun coming up. The thing slashed at his gun hand. I heard something rip. Majumbdahr rolled. The thing snarled and bit. I threw myself on it. Musty damp fur. Nails raked my side. The thing turned. "Kill," it said quite distinctly. "Quam." My strangling-wire reeled out. Majumbdahr moaned as jaws closed on his arm, legs kicked at him. I slipped the wire around its throat and jerked back. Breath strangled out. I jeiked again, lifting its throat. Once more -- the head toppled away. It was a German Shepherd, Fifty kilograms of muscle and teeth and black hair, and all of it quite dead. A smart dog, genetically altered to know the best moment to hit us. I felt sick. We had learned a hard lesson centuries ago about tinkering with human genetic material. Fleet had no such qualms about turning man's best friend into fanatic, smart killers. Three buildings away a flashlight bobbed. We melted into the shadows and worked our way toward it. The small Fleet field glowed in the distance. Stubby noses pointed toward the scum of sky. I sniffed. An acrid tinge in the moist air. "Ton! Here old fella! Ton boy!" But Ton boy wasn't in the watchdog business any more. We waited for him. Majumbdahr was tired and angry. I could sense it in his ragged breathing. The dog had gnawed into him. It took five minutes to sealandfreeze the gashes. He had to stay alert, so there was nothing to do about the pain. The man -- a corporal -- passed nearby. Majumbdahr stepped from shelter and clubbed him solidly. I had to use a stim tab to get the corporal awake. Majumbdahr meant business.    Pharmaceuticals are bad for the character. Within ten minutes Ton boy's master was babbling quite happily about matters he'd have rather died than give away, normally. Luckily, he wouldn't remember any of it later. We searched him thoroughly and got his encodings for the Mindoro locks. Insects clicked and sang. Clouds rolled over. A booster burst orange on the field and arced away. Troops passed in the distance. The corporal called in his dogs. They were quite docile. One of them even carried on a passable conversation about the funny smells around the base tonight. We put them all out for the evening. The corporal marched his rounds with us beside him. Like all security people he knew a lot more than he was supposed to, most of it by simple deduction. Mindoro was on stand-down. Most of its troops were offworld... But its area defense systems were second to none and that was undoubtedly why Tonji had brought Angela here. The corporal was quite blearyeyed, pale and drawn by the time we reached Central's main building. He took us through most of the check points. Then he collapsed in a side corridor. Pharmaceuticals have their limits; so do human beings. Majumbdahr stayed behind. I approached the next check point. Nobody even glanced up. I dropped the pencil-sized tube. I hit my boot soundlessly and rolled under the guard's desk. A Lieutenant looked at me, at my uniform, frowned. "Ah!" I snapped my fingers, grinning. "Forgot something." I turned and walked away. The tube went skreeee-bam. I turned. The Lieutenant was choking, stifflimbed, eyes bulging. He fell. Then we walked some more. After a series of unlabeled doors I motioned Majumbdahr back. I slapped a boring charge on a door's lock. I set the tiny timer and stepped a few meters away. Chuung -- it flared orange. I eased the door open. A foul reek seeped out. A hoarse voice pleaded from inside. Someone jibbered. Regeln swam back to mind. I thrust it aside and slammed the door. We walked on quickly. Tonji wasn't hard to find. His name was on the door. He looked up from a console when I went in. A hand convulsed, froze. He said something obscene. My air pistol looked at him. He didn't move. "Get them here." Majumbdahr closed the door behind us. "What?" "You knew I'd come." "How did you do it?" "You've been reading your own press releases. This isn't a Fleet base any more. We never would've made a hundred meters across a well-organized base," Tonji stared at me, eyes jittery. And I suddenly saw that he was older. Lines around the mouth. Crow's feet webbing by the eyes. "We're arranging a last ditch attack," he said with a thin voice. "Most of the good troops are seeking the Quam home worlds." "That won't work." "Not with bastards like you sucking up to them." "You don't understand." "What could they possibly offer you, Sanjen?" Something in his face made me look away. The waters, the waters lapping, washing all... cleansing... renewing... "Get them." He called to another room in Central. He wanted to visit the woman and the children. Wake them up, yes. We took a route without crossing a checkpoint; it was only two corridors away. In the enameled light Tonji shuffled along, the usual bounce missing from his step. "You've been trying to keep all this together?" He nodded. He didn't seem to want to talk. The guard was muzzy with a just-awakened look when we got there. He unkeyed the door and we went in. Majumbdahr stayed outside to keep the guard company. I had been using my equipment sachel to conceal my air pistol. When I put it down Angela came into the room. Then the children. "You're all right?" I said. She stared, eyes wide. I asked again. She murmured, "My God. My God." Chark said, "Daddy." Romana just looked. I turned to Tonji. "We're leaving." He looked at me stolidly. He was an exhausted man and he knew he was going to die. "The roof. You've got a copter there?" "Ye... yes." Somehow I felt as though I wanted to talk to this man, shake him into conversation. I had thought of smashing in that poker face a thousand times. My skin was dancing. I felt a jittery joy. I was radiating energy . I wanted him to protest, to rage, to curse me. Something to push against. After a moment I said, "Let's go-"    We landed at the field's tower, a squat three stories of rough-cut rock. Chark was twitching with excitement; he wanted to hold one of the guns. Romana is younger but she seemed to know better what was going on. She kept glancing at Angela. They exchanged looks of numb terror. "What'll we do, Dad?" Chark said. "Stay right here." I turned to him so the women were at my back. "Now look," I said in a low whisper. "I'm leaving you to take care of your mother and Romana. Keep them in the copter. Don't let them even open the hatch unless I'm outside." "Hey, give me a gun." "We can't spare one. We've got to take the tower." "Are you going to shoot that guy?" His forefinger jabbed at Tonji. "Never mind. I'm leaving you in charge here, right?" "Right." "We'll be back as soon as we can." "Where' re we going, Dad?" I didn't know what to say. To the halo stars? "Hey, let me have a gun?" Chark asked. "See you in a few minutes," I said. Majumbdahr was coming out of some of the shock from the dog business. His arm was closing up from the seal-and-freeze. The blue swelling had gone down. He jumped on to the tarmac and watched Tonji get out. I noticed that Majumbdahr 's uniform was mud-streaked and tom, and then that mine was, too. Finessing that by the officers in the tower wasn't going to be easy. I turned to Angela. "Stay put." "Ling-" "We're going into the tower for a while." "What will we doT' "When?" "After we leave here? The city is so terrible now, we -- " "Look, Chaik is going to keep his eyes open and see that nobody gets into this copter. Right, son?" "Gee, I sure would like to have a gun, Dad." "I'm sure you would." I jumped down. The three of us walked the hundred meters to the tower. Majumbdahr shouldered his flame gun. They could see us clearly from the plastiform top floor of the tower and we wanted to look like an ordinary patrol. "Do you think I will keep quiet?" Tonji said between compressed lips. "That I will ask them to let you have a ship?" "That's exactly what I think." He looked at me. I gave him a very thin smile. "I knew you had come... that was a Quam maneuver, destroying "A byproduct, that's all." "So you think." "I know rather more than you do about it." "You didn't simply come back for your family." "Quite so. But you tried to use them against me." "I had to." "Did you have to send me to Veden without mentioning that I'd have to go through the Flinger?" "We couldn't find an on-line officer who would." "Uh huh." We had reached the entrance. "Key us in." Tonji hesitated and I stood there, letting him think about it. Then he fished something from his pocket and the entrance slid open. Skeleton staff again. We nodded to the desk officer and went up the slideway to the tower. Tonji was the biggest frog in this pond and nobody got in his way. There were three officers in the Operations pit. One looked up. I flight."' Tonji was stiff, robotlike. They saw him and nodded. One punched in a spec and handed us an encoding. "Ready, sir." He scowled at my muddy uniform. I nodded and we left. Outside by the slide way, Majumbdahr said, "Somebody's going to find that Lieutenant we left back there." "I know." "Even if we lift, they'll track us as soon as they hear." "Any ideas?" "Kill the power in here. We're cleared, we can lift. They can't track us then. "Right." I looked at Tonji. "Where's the inload?" "I don't know." "We don't have time to look for it," Majumbdahr said, the words clipped. "We could just shoot them," I said. I didn't want to, but I said it. "We could." I thought. Shit, what was I doing here? I was on the goddamn ragged edge, rubbed raw, nerves skittering like a caged rat. If I hadn't taken an hour of meditation in the jungle this afternoon I'd be wilted away by now. And now I was supposed to decide life and death for three Fleet officers who didn't know my name. This was the nub, the end. "Wait. You go in and divert them. Ask a question. Tonji, you hold the door open when he does." Mamumbdahr gave me a questioning look. I waved him toward the doorway to the tower center. He opened the door and went in. Tonji held it ajar. I took the plasticjacketed pancake from inside my shirt and ripped the sleeve. I wadded it along the top of the door, pressing the stuff around the edges. Majumbdahr' s murmur came from inside. I finished. Tonji started to let go of the door. I sprang at him snatching at the handle. I caught it. I looked at him, lips drawn. He backed away. I was sure he knew what he was doing. But it could have been a simple error, yes. I shook my head. It was hard to decide... Majumbdahr came out. I slipped the door closed. The plastic goo jammed into place. It fit snugly, sticking. If they came out before we were clear, that was it. If not, we could tell them on the comm lines to stay put. It was the best I could do. Out, onto the tarmac. Soft air caressing. Insect buzz. We took the hundred meters at quick-step but my back burned all the same. Chaik slid open the hatch. "Nobody came, Dad." "Good." Into the cabin. We shot skyward, banked, the tower had assigned us. I got entry and sent Majumbdahr up to activate ship systems. Tonji stood at the entry portal, silent, watching. "When we lift you'll alert them." "I doubt it." "Why not?" "I won't be alive." "Why are you so sure?" "I can see your face." "You always were a good judge of character, Tonji." "Sarcasm from scum is -- " I raised my pistol. I thumbed it over to phosphorous shells. Tonji backed away. I sighted at his drawn, pale face. Time ticked by. I remembered the three guards. "It would be easy, all right," I sighed. "Come on." He stumbled away toward the copter, following my gesture. He moved like a drugged man. Once he was inside I would give him a satisfying tap on the head and we would lift. We reached the copter. Tonji looked at me for directions, then climbed in. From the tower came a crump. "Goddamn," I whispered. In the tower one viewport was smashed to a blind star. Behind the plastiform windows of the top floor flames leaped like children wanting to see out. I jumped into the copter and clipped Tonji at the base of the skull. He pitched over. I landed running. Something whizzed by me. I fired three phosphorus rounds in the direction of the tower without looking, more to cause night blindness than to dissuade anyone. Thirty meters, twenty -- I stopped at the ramp to free the securing bolts. The air sizzled. A round ricocheted spang harmlessly off the ship. I turned to the ramp. Something hit my arm and spun me around. A shattering pain leaped into my shoulder. I, lifted my arm -- lifted my arm -- Something was lying on the ground. A hand. I staggered. Lifted my arm -- Halfway between elbow and wrist was a black stump. Very carefully I bent over and picked up the hand. Blood spattered the tarmac. I took one step up the ramp. Two. So daik. Shouts, a hammering. Purple speckling in my eyes. So dark. Part VI A rumbling, but-deep. Metal smooth, so smooth I glided down it ice palace skating taste of winter slick slick so white God why's the snow smell so... So. Mouth gravel-dry. Skreee-hummmm. An eye worked open. Golden. Biting. I closed it. But no -- my throat worked, rasping. Force open the eye. Gold needles sticking in it. Look to the side. Viewport rim. Squint. Oiled light. Blink. The sun. Sol burning, rose-red, twice as old as time. "Ling?" Angela's soft voice. "Ling? Try to sleep. We'll be there in a few minutes." I was swinging a rock. So heavy. Swinging it toward the flame flower outside, shut it out. "Ling! Don't move your arm! You'll jar the healant unit loose." Gentle pressure. I relaxed. "Your officer is hiding us somehow, that's what he said. So the radar below won't find us." "Ah." "Sleep." So I did. Time. I floated up. Saw the ceiling. Knew I was aboard again. Flashed through dead pictures: Farriken hanging among the war stars, giant creamy ball. Zero-torque cranes and grapples. Clutching at our ship. I plunged down the Farriken ' s axis tube, stretcherstrapped. Rumble. Mumble. Drifting... Lancing pain. My hand. Gone. I felt a hollow space somewhere. A lifting new freedom. Struggling damp feelings, moist, warm, a tree like a cloud of leaves, breathing -- swift and darting images -- sleek animals running sweating in the cloak of rising dust -- throw -- throw -- dancing dancing mad -- the curve of spear in flight -- soft warm moist -- left gone -- the voices -- low slithering -- peering eyes -- dancing laughing -- foam curls at the lips -- voices -- muttering without sense -- hoarse breathing -- blunt gummy -- without words -- something pinned -- empowered -- commands -- cannot speak -- dancing dancing mad and running -- sweet slide of arms, legs -- swollen leper moon -- loose thunders -- something wrenching deep -- deep -- inside, vast -- rolling whispers ah -- no words ah it was -- shooting pain -- opening -- the voices, ah -- fresh channels -- I plunged through -- seeping -- now -- warm lapping -- certainty -- lefthandrighthand -- voicesvoices -- the hand gone -- something slips free, ah -- rises -- rises -- ah...ah... drifting... And in the endless light and airy drifting I saw the halo stars oozing red across the sky. Rust and diamonds. A shooting pain. Ah. I raged. I stamped down, crushing stars. I shouted, voice hollow... After a while they went away. Sheets, so cool. A slight finger's press of gravity. Ah it was. Angela's cool brow crinkling. Fingernails plucking at my sleeve... Sprinkle of yellow pain. I shoved a breath up through clotted lungs. Wheezed: "Got..." Majumbdahr's voice: "I've got new data. When he's better..." I twisted. "Got..." "Quiet, now. Chemotherapy is cycling." Time... Angela. Then a long time later, Rhandra. Hair billowing as she leaned over me, prickly bright things running through me. Soft silibants. Ah, women. All rest and refuge do they contain. Time. The tinkling of currents. Drifting. Two eyes. Shadowed, lurking beneath a cowl. The figure was a dark galactic arm, dustshrouded, hanging in space before the stars. Those shrouded eyes... Eyes? Or -- two stars? Red-bright. The Master. Lofting among the star rifts. From his eyes streamed blood. He loomed above me. I wrestled with the thoughts: He had flicked a finger and tick I danced, strings invisible. Met Rhandra. Studied the halo stars, dutiful. His master's voice. Run amok at the Madi's. Careening through it all. He had turned me inside out like an old pocket. Morning's humming nausea: his treatments, I knew. I felt a surging in my head. No helpful waters came to calm the thoughts. No restful lazy lapping, dissolving all. The vapor haze blew away. I remembered it all now. All the kneeling and bowing and washing in the great liquid song. Rage forked lightning-bright, yellow. We were men , Goddamn it, not... not... I blinked. I sat up. My left arm was a blue sheath. A bioadapt unit. Inside, I knew, my arm swam in womb-like fluid, healing. The hand was stored elsewhere, probably, awaiting a regrafting. "Rhandra!" She appeared from around the comer of our quarters. "Ling, you're not supposed to be awake." "Something woke me up." "Well, I've tried to be quiet but -- " "No, something I was thinking I frowned. Dreaming? But the tightness in my muscles remained. Anger was boiling up from my unconscious. I felt myself caught in it, in the swirl of a blind tide. I shook my head. "What... how are the others?" "Fine. I met your family. Ling, I think we ought to talk -- " "Later. Later. I don't... Majumbdahr, how's he?" "All right . He s wonting on something. Angela said he came to see you about some readouts." "When was that?" "Yesterday." "Yesterday! Why haven't we Jumped?" "We have." "How far?" "A short distance. A... parsec, isn't that the word?" "Yes. Yes, it is. Fleet can still pick us up at this range, if we're unlucky." "Well, Gharma said he didn't want to risk going further." "Why not?" "He doesn't understand all the changes you made in the Jump subsystems, he said. I think that was the right phrase." She looked at me, concern tightening her features. "Ling, I think you should rest." "No." "You almost died. If Majumbdahr hadn't gotten that freeze capsule on you -- " "I know. I know." I waved the subject away with a weak right hand. "My hand will live?" "They say." "How sure are they?" She cupped a palm to my face. "They said the chances are good. Don't worry, Ling." "Who's this 'they', anyway?" "A doctor. They unsealed a vault to extract him. We didn't have anyone who could deal with your case." I lay back. "I see." "That's right, Ling. Rest. Sleep." I blinked drowsily. "Sure...oh, would you do something? Go and ask Gharma for a readout of our Jump sequence. I'll need that to comDUte the lon Jump." "Rest, first." "No, get it now. That way I'll be able to work on it when I wake up again." She nodded and helped me lie back. I tried not to wince. Sheets of pain shot up my arm. That meant the locals were wearing off. But it also meant my head was clearing. She arranged my pillows and dimmed the phosphors. Veden phosphors, I noticed -- I was wearing my contacts again. She stepped softly. I heard her click the latch on her way out. For a long moment I thought of just lying there. It was clean and flat and the sheets smelled sweet as the wind. The Paradise Milton had scribbled about and never gotten. But then the rage seized me again. The blazing star-eyes. I sat up. I pulled the covers away. No pajamas. Good; they would've stuck out under my robe, anyway. I braced myself with my right arm. My legs swung over the side. My arm buckled. I toppled backwards on the bed. My left arm shrieked at me. I rolled over onto my right side. Painfully I worked myself upright by pressing upward with my hand and rocking my legs in synchronization. Then I stood up. And sat down, knees buckling. The second time I lurched sidewise and caught a deck chair for support. I breathed a little and tried not to think too much. Then I took a step. The mists inside lifted a bit. I stepped again and nearly lost my balance. I waited some more. Another step, wobbly but workable. I reached the closet in slow motion. Fishing out my robes took time. By then I was concerned that Rhandra would return. So I hurried, and very nearly fell. I caught myself against the wall and just sucked in the soft, soft air for a while. Finally I found my Captain's belt and wrapped it around the quilted robes. Time for a walk. I made my way to B deck without seeing anyone. I began to feel stronger, steadier. Majumbdahr lived in a small staff officer's cabin. I wanted to see him where we wouldn't be disturbed, even by Rhandra. I hoped he would be in quarters. If not, I'd locate him on the inboard comm line and have him meet me there. There was no response to my knock. I listened to the sighing of Farriken's air circulators. No movement inside. I used my Captain's key. I was wrong. He was there. He swayed gently in the air currents. Blood dripped steadily from him and spattered red the deck. Mahesh Majumbdahr had been trussed expertly. Knees bent. Ankles bound. Wrists wired and oozing blood behind his back. He hung face down. Bright scarlet threads laced him. Flexible tubing linked knots at wrists and ankles. Ship's cord bisected the tubing. The cord looped through the air duct overhead. Blood now filming over to a muddy brown made an X in his chest. It sliced his coverall and cut deep into the abdomen. His face -- I looked away. I recognized this vaguely from my reading of Veden history. A ritual Bengali execution. Usually performed with a shortsword. In ancient times it symbolized a necessary death, a sad but unavoidable passage . I stood and looked at him a while. Then I began a search. There was no sign of a sword. An empty fax folder yawned open on the floor; a few books were disarrayed. I found a small wire cutter and cut the ship's cord. I caught the body as it fell free. Pain lanced my left arm. The body slipped away from me and sprawled. I covered the face. From the blood clotting I judged he had been dead at least half an hour. With head wounds the brain damage from oxygen loss would be extensive already. No chance to save him. I punched on the comm. Rhandra answered on the second buzz. "Ling! Where are you? When I -- " "Are you alone?" "Yes." I gave her the cabin number and asked her to come. Alone. I sank down the bed. I waited. I watched the lake of scarlet around him scum over with a ruddy, used brown. This was no longer Majumbdahr, only a butchered side of meat. A part of me skittered away from this room thick with sullen air and I remembered the walks we'd taken together, an impossibly long time ago now. We walked through slippery mulch of packed leaves, along chattering streams. Ferns. Soft stands of scented weeds. Rasping briars. Our boots thumped in the hush of woods. We talked. We worked up the dry, cottony taste in the mouth which chilled water cuts as a knife. The valleys of Veden' s great plateau cupped us beneath a spitting blue sun. Time hung still and silent in the fragile air. And as this memory hazed my mind I lay back on the bed and knew at once that I hated this artificial place now. It was a warren of cushioned sounds inside a metal box, an artifact I had memorized into a profound disgust, a craft whose prime purpose was an Empire where both the police and the poor were polite. Yet on the other side was, inexplicably, the thing lying in its own muddy pool... Rhandra' s rap startled me. I creaked up and opened the door. She said and did the things I'd expected. It all went by in a curious milky green light. Words slid into more words. There was sand in my eyes. Gritty bags were pulling down on my eyelids and blurring into a drone Rhandra' s sentences. A hand shook me. I sucked in air. The light cleared a little. "Look... for... stim." "What?" she said. "Oh." -- and went into the small bathroom. Time slid along. A prickling feeling in my face. "Ling!" Another slap. "Here -- " Hiss. Cool spot on my wrist. She took the stimulant injection tube away. I blinked. A faint tingling seeped back into my body. In a moment I felt somewhat bright and clear again. "God, I'm weak." "Of course. And to find this... " We sat for a moment. "I'll call," she said. "We'll get some help." "No." "Well, whoever did this must be -- " "No!" She sat silently. I struggled to think clearly. I noticed something new on the bed. " Where 'd those come from." "What? Oh, those must be the readouts he wanted to talk to you about. Plus the other things in your Captain's input slot on the bridge." "The fax folder." I gestured. She handed it to me. It was identic cal to the empty one lying on the floor. I opened it. "Ling, I don't see how you can sit there calmly opening your mail for God's sakes, with -- " "Quiet." I flipped through the faxes inside. "I wonder..." "What?" "This is the same type of fax folder as that one. Maybe Majumbdahr had two copies of something, and left one in my slot so I'd get it when I was able." "Oh. And the other copy..." "Somebody took it." Rhandra's face was compressed and rigid. She kept looking back over her shoulder at the body. "These are faxes of a correlation analysis. Majumbdahr wanted to do a better study of the Veden mass detector data. He left it as an available-time job for Farriken ' s computers." Rhandra looked at me apprehensively. "Ling, I really do think you're too tired to... "Come on." I got up. "Where?" "Just come on." I locked the door behind us. I walked as quickly as I could through the curved corridors, watching for anyone else. Most of the crew was probably stowing the coldsleep vaults; securing them adequately in the axial pods would probably take a full day. We stopped at an officer's cabin I chose at random and I clicked it open. Inside I spread the faxes on a narrow bunk. Majumbdahr had used the satellite data to get a refined parallax fix on mass and velocity. I pointed at a display fax. "It's big, all right. About a tenth Jupiter mass. Now, the velocity..." I checked it. Checked it again. "What's wrong, Ling? Why are you looking that way?" ' 'This thing -- whatever it is -- will hit Jagen. Not Lekki. Jagen." "I see," she said, not seeing. "He integrated the trajectory out. Look." The dashed line of the projected path swerved neatly around Lekki and arrowed precisely into Jagen." "Why is that so important?" "It's just about impossible. Lekki has more than twice Jagen' s mass.  Its gravitational potential well is much broader. Any random fragment zooming out of interstellar space would have one chance in a it did, Lekki is much more probable a target. But Jagen! -- a little dot whirling around at near-light speeds? Impossible." "But it has happened." "Yes." Suddenly I remembered the Master's voice long ago: The ancient Quarn left giant devices... they could move a planet through Jump space . "When it impacts, Jagen will shred that mass with its tidal forces. Rip it to atoms. Then heat it up. X-rays. Gammas." I didn't need to check Majumbdahr's faxes to know that Veden would be within the cone of emission. The planet would fry. And the ramscoops, irradiated beyond use. The storehouse of the Empire, burned away. "What will it do?" "Ever watch a time-lapsed #D of a supernova? This is like a pocket edition. The radiation will fry Veden. Probably kill all higher life forms." "But Ling -- " "I know," I said bleakly, watching the horror crinkle her eyes. "And I know who caused it." "What... ?" "The Quam." "I don't believe that. Neither do you." "Ah, but I do. Rhandra, the Master didn't want Majumbdahr and I to stay down on the surface, to be out of touch. He wanted us around for our regular session with him. Balm for die mind. Those wonderful washing waters. That's how he has managed us like a Punch and Judy farce from the beginning." Her face became stony. 'Wo, I...#..." I watched her struggle with it. "Rhandra. I know you're confused by this. I know something of what you feel. I felt it, too." "But ling..." "I want you to help me. I'm going to go see the Master. Perhaps I'm wrong," I said, knowing I damned well wasn't. "We can only find out what is behind all this by speaking to the Master." "Yes..." "But we must be careful. Whoever killed Majumbdahr can do the same to us. So I want you to help me. Will you?" "Of course. But... the Master..." Her face twisted. "I know. We -- " The comm speaker sounded a soft, persistent beep: an all-stations message. "Officer Gharma respectfully requests the Captain's presence in the Master's rooms. Officer Gharma respectfully..." I listened to it repeat five times. A slow, wan smile spread across my face. "So it's Gharma." "Why are you so sure?" Rhandra murmured, her voice reedy. "He wouldn't call if he hadn't already checked our quarters. And if there's ship business, why not summon me to the bridge?" "Well, he might -- " "No. No, it's Gharma. He has a taste for the ancient Veden practices. And there is something in him I have always sensed." "Well... what shall we do, Ling?" "Do? We go see Mr. Gharma, just as he asks." We went two corridors laterally, along the gentle curve of the ship, before I caught a flicker of motion out of the comer of my eye. A head jerked back around a turn in the hallway. "Run," I said. Rhandra's shortbreech gave her ample room for her long legs; she easily outdistanced me. I puffed along, thoughts racing. "Left, I called. We turned and there ahead was the dim gray light I sought. The priests had left a third of the B deck phosphors untreated; they gleamed with Sol light. Vedens with adapted eyes could make their way here, but they could see no further than fifty meters. I popped my contact filters into my palm. Rhandra slowed. "Where should we go?" "Not back to our quarters, that's certain. This way." I soon found it. The emergency arms locker went ting and eased open beneath my Captain's encoder. I fetched out stun guns and laser pistols, hitched them in my belt. I gave Rhandra a stun weapon. I showed her how it worked. "Don't even aim it at anyone unless you're going to use it." "What setting shall I use?" She fingered the dial in its butt. "Here. Stun. It won't kill." "But if we need -- " "Come on." The cushioned floors of B deck were the thickest in the ship. They muffled our running. I cut over three corridors and peered around. There -- a bulging green colorcoded hemisphere, down a short passageway. It clicked open, revealing a tangle of power lines, connector boards, microswitches, alternate circuit elements and inloading sequencers. I studied them. The routine shipboard elements disconnected easily. The manual override net took more time. I took a cutter from the tool wall inside and slashed crude gashes in the plasti board. The lights around us faded, pulsed once and died. A rattling alarm spoke nearby. I cut some more and it stopped. "Ling, I can't see." "That's the idea. I haven't lived this long by walking into situations with long odds against me." "What does it matter if we're all in, the dark?" "Those small round splotches -- no, sorry, you can't make them out, can you?' ' She squinted. "No." "Those are emergency phosphors. They're running lights that go on when central power fails. Farriken has a separate power source for each deck." "The Priests didn't paint them with Veden phosphors?" "They didn't know what they were. The emergency system is just bright enough for an Earth native to see by. But to you they're emitting in the wrong part of the spectrum -- too red." "All the Veden natives are blind now," she murmured slowly. "On B deck, yes. That's all we need." But how long did we have it? The bridge officer was busy supervising storage of the vaults, I was pretty sure. He was probably frowning at his readout panel right now, trying to figure why the B phosphors should fail. Did he have an extra hand who could come down and troubleshoot, carrying a hand flash? I started along the corridor, leading Rhandra. "Where are we going?" "Tramping into the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are stored," I said. My head had lifted lightly from my shoulders and floated a meter high. "What?" "A snippet of ancient culture. Non-Mongul." Through the curved lattice, all padded and restful: officer's country. Near the Master's suite the warren was more complex, for an added sense of isolation from the rigid pattern of shipboard. This made it easier to approach, since no one could hope to hear us. I saw the first priest two intersections away from the Master's area. He stood with his back turned, arms raised as though talking into a wall ship's comm. As I watched he slammed the receiver down, felt his way a few meters along the wall and stopped. He had just found that the comm ran on the same power source as the phosphors and wouldn't work either. And, being untrained, he didn't know an emergency comm station was recessed in the wall forty meters away. "Ling, I..." I tugged her back around the comer. "What?" "I've got to ask something. How long will it be before that... thing... collides with Jagen?" "About ten days." "Then there's no hope of stopping it? Or saving people?" "No. Or... wait... We can send a signal. Maybe they can get deep enough underground." I thought. "Yes, that's right. Ten meters of dirt would shield them." "But there's no hope otherwise?" "No." "Then let me go to the bridge. I can tell them. Before we... see Gharma." I grimaced. "I know how you feel, Rhandra," I whispered, "but you won't be safe on the bridge. Gharma wouldn't leave it uncovered. If you appear there they'll stop you. Kill you, probably. They don't seem much interested in discussions, not when there's a shorts word handy." She looked very solemn and nodded. Things were moving too quickly for her. Hell, I thought woozily, they're moving too damned fast for me, too. We cut to the right and circled around the priest. I spotted three others, each at an intersection. They had taken up positions roughly equidistant from the Master's suite. They blocked all paths to it. But they'd made a simple tactical error. They were too far apart. The intersections were all over fifty meters from each other. In B deck's hushed corridors that was more than enough to isolate them. They'd formed their net in virtual darkness; given time they would probably correct it. "You're going to follow me at a few paces behind. Here -- " I reeled ships cord from around my waist. I'd taken it from the emergency locker. "You can hold this as a guide. If the Veden phosphors suddenly go back on you'll have to drag me out of sight. I'll be blinded even worse than you and the priests." I paused. Gharma might have sent a man to the bridge, letting him feel his way out of B deck, with word to bring flares or anything else that emitted the Veden spectrum. In that case aid might come any second; there had been enough time. But if Gharma was cautious he might well keep all his priests with him for protection. He could wait me out that way with less risk. Which had he done? Flip a coin, Sanjen. "Damn," I fretted. "Look, I've got another idea. I'll lead you to almost within sight of one of the priests. These stun weapons are too noisy; the others will hear. So I'll double around and come at him from another direction. Wait about a minute, then make a small noise. I'll rush him." "What sort of noise?" She looked suddenly frightened. Well, so what? I was, too. But I was more angry than scared, or else I wouldn't be here. "Just a few words. A question. Ask him why the lights are out. He'll probably think you're just wandering around in the dark." "I am." "Quiet." We edged along the passageway for a moment until I could just make out a priest around the next comer. "Here I go. Count the seconds in your head." I raced around to the other corridor. To me these halls were pooled with wan reddish light, dim but enough. I crept forward until I had a clear view of the priest's flowing maquanan robes, and stopped. He was shifting uneasily from foot to foot. Unnerving, to stand within easy laser shot of an armed and still have to force yourself closer. Several times he looked directly at me. I froze. His gaze drifted on without pause. Precisely how dim was this light to him? Step, wait, step, wait. My left arm spoke with a low, pulsing ache. I inched forward, handgun covering the priest. A thousand years ago I had sat in a restaurant with Mahesh Majumbdahr and talked of reverence for life, respect for living creatures. Now I was preparing myself to kill a man simply because he blocked my way. Faintly: "Why are -- " I ducked low. Lunged forward. The priest turned, robes swirling, his pistol coming up, eyes shifting uneasily as he tried to locate Rhandra's voice. " -- the lights -- " At the last moment he did. The pistol leveled. He squinted down the V-and-blade sight. Finger squeezing -- " -- all out?" I hit him with a boot heel in the shoulder. It was a high kick I hadn't tried in years. I caught; he staggered sidewise. His finger slipped from the trigger. Right foot back to the deck. I followed the weight shift through with a short chop to his neck. Breathe out, focus down, turn -- I twisted, caught his solar plexus with my left elbow. A biting pain shot up into my shoulder. Wind whooshed out of him. I moved in, butted him aside -- winced -- and snatched at the pistol. Fumble, fumble -- I suddenly thought that a laser beam could be seen quite easily by Veden eyes, alerting the priests -- I got it. I clubbed him with the butt. He sagged to the deck. I froze. No sound. The hollow sigh of air circulators. I dragged the priest into a cabin and locked him in. When I went back for Rhandra she was jittery, but she listened carefully to what I told her. The Master's suite. I cracked the door ajar. Silence. We slipped into near-daikness. A dim emergency phosphor glowed red beyond the antechamber. Suddenly a chant rang out. Voices joined it. A singsong wail echoed over us. Tapping drum, chiming cymbals. The beaded curtain before us swayed and rattled in currents that bore the sweet tang of incense. We slipped through. Four Lengen priests sat in zazen position before the Master. None were armed. The wavering music spun on. On. On. And stopped, as though sliced by a sword. "Leave us now." The Master turned his cowled head toward us. "I believe we have some business." "It awaits you. Outside." "You'll get no help from them." He paused. "Leave us now." Of all receptions I had imagined, being brushed off wasn't one of them. I sat, and gestured Rhandra to do the same. "Gharma has erred again." His voice rolled out, deep and somber. "Because those priests didn't get us?" "I knew it was you when the illumination failed." "I expected Gharma here." "He is dispatched elsewhere. To complete the circle." The priests began to murmur a slow rhythmic chant. We talked over it. "More murder?" The Master clasped his hands and said nothing. "Why did Gharma kill Majumbdahr?' ' "We only hastened him by an hour." "To stop him from warning Veden?" Rhandra said abruptly. "In part. My hand rests only lightly on such matters." "Looks like a dead weight to me," I said bitterly. But something restrained me from approaching him. I sat. "Why kill the Vedens? An entire planet ?" "A point of... there is no your years ago we caused the neutron star to wind inward. We did this in the last phase of... matter shaping. Then we retreated to the next of the..." "The halo stars." "You would call them so. They are true center. The sum." "Then why don't you damned well stay there?" I spat out. "A star does not ask the galaxy why it spins." " am asking." "So." He joined in the murmuring warm chant for a moment. His great head bowed. Incense sweetened the air. "We returned this last time to the disk. We looked upon our works. The neutron star was infested. The ancients timed that star for our use. You had begun to spread. To have festered so, to take our works and turn them to a purpose we had planned for ourselves... We knew then that the legacy we had planned was rotted. Spoiled. You -- our children -- were now rivals." "How?" "You violate the Precepts." "Piss on sour Precepts. Why should they apply to us?" "One always knows one's children better than they know themselves." "What... ?" Rhandra asked. "We made you," His voice boomed. "Made hunters, learners, from eaters of fruit. Hormones. Mating ritual. Family grouping. All bear our imprint." "No..." He shook his head wearily. His voice floated across to us. "We do not know why the great old ones did this. A last groping. For a vision. I do not kenne... it lies to us to right the errors." "By tinkering with us?" I almost shouted. "Your damnable Plague? The men you've killed -- or made me kill?" "To complete the circle." "How? Was it that business I studied about left hemisphere versus right? You had me read that, didn't you?" "I erred. It vexed you, to direct your knowledge in these paths. I see now I erred often with you. My first decision was correct." "The winged man?" "Yes. I saw you would be a threat. My charge was to bring the sickness to Veden." " You caused the violence. The riots." "A facet of the design. You might have interfered." "So you ordered me killed. What made you stop trying?" "The craft that brought you to Veden sent a message packet." "That's customary." "Gharma read it that evening. Too late for me to stop the winged follower. It told of the Patanen. They were to assemble on Earth. I saw we would need you to take us there when the time came." "So you gave me a stay of execution." "Remember, when you think these harsh things, my aim?" Hand passes. A misty low voice. The priests. Their candences swelled in the dry light. A sea's green sameness washed the room. Metallic flutterings veined the air. A distant twinge from my left hand. I willed it to silence. "I..." "To seek the rightful stations for us all. Bring the essence in us to rest." "But we... " "We share a destiny." Swaying, I pondered. "What paths lie open... ?" "There remains only the Path of Last Things." "The Patanen?" "They were the remaining part of you who would survive. It is a measure of our fall that only with difficulty can we snuff out our ancestors' dark legacy." Chiming. Swimming in the waves of the chant. "That is our station?" The Master's hand moved over a small black metal object. A sadness welled from him. His great eyes transfixed me. "I speak to the tension in you. It is the impurity. Without it you would have been a fitting testament to us. We know you in the core. Where the animal mind gropes for exit." "I..." Drifting. Arm aching. I struggled to hold on to something. "It is the final act. To earn my Walking." "No..." "I am charged to this task. Others of us labor on your distant worlds to bring about this consummation." "Ah... I..." "We erase the errors made by our passing. We leave no blemish smudged upon the galaxy." The waters, they encased me. Their soft lapping swept clean the abiding tension I felt. Tapping of drum. Flickering ghost images. I struggled against the current. They were warm, so warm... Humming. Humming, the wailing singing waters washed over me -- My left arm. Sheets of pain lanced up. Clouds thinned. Left hand. Right hand. Voicesvoices -- hand -- swelling tension -- Something within me clenched my fist. My hand -- Orange carved the night. The Master toppled. He fell stiffly, surprise frozen in his depthless eyes. A red splotch stained his barrel chest. Left hand spoke. Right hand answered. We would not go meekly into their vast night. The being who had brought me such comfort as I had never known sprawled, eyes open to a final blindness. The rasping sound was my own crying. The room bulged and melted and ran down my face. I lurched away, out. On the bridge. I fought the deep trough of sleep. The bridge swelled, paused and then collapsed, like the lungs of a great animal. "Stim," I croaked to Rhandra. She pressed the hissing spergent to my arm. "Gharma. Where's Gharma?" "He is suited up, working in the tube, sir." The bridge officer, Hassat, blinked at me. "How long?" "Nearly an hour." "With a team?" "He took some priests." "Ah." I thought. The bridge went peep and click. "Are all the priests armed, Captain?" Hassat said, fie was worried. When the power returned to B deck he had gotten a call from me to send a squad. There had been shooting. Two wounded, one dead. All this, and he didn't understand what it was about. "I expect so." "Sir, if you want me to go after him..." "I do. And I'm going with you."    We were in the suiting room when the fist of Shiva shook the ship. It slammed me into a bulkhead. A loose tool cracked into my helmet. I staggered, fell. ' The viewport into the axial tube spanned ten meters in the ceiling of the suiting room. I peered up at it.  Silently, a waterfall swept by. "They've blown the tube wall," I said over suit mike. "Bridge here, Captain!" a metallic voice rattled. "We monitor a seven meter diameter incursion in The greenish fluid gushed by the port, churning. Bubbles danced. "Where?" "Fifty-two meters above the retainer, Captain. Aft." My team was coasting up toward the viewport, gaping, apparently uninjured. I let myself go slack, ignored the sleeting ache as my left hand tired to talk to me, and thought. A picture of the Farriken hung in my mind's eye: a spinning ball. The axial tube lanced through it. All turned, making centrifugal gravity and stirring the reaction fuel that filled the ball. The axis was a thin tube where it broke the ball's surface, but at the ship's center the tube bulged: decks A through K. I was in the innermost part of the bridge. Where the bulge tapered down was the retaining sheath. It supported the Farriken' s center against the pressure of the reaction fluids. Further out, beyond the retainer, sacks of cargo hung from the tube, immersed in die fluids. Where was Gharma? Near the hole he'd blown, probably. Not in the tube -- as the watery colloids rushed in, the currents would've smashed him to ketchup. No, flooding the tube was a diversion. It gave him time. We would have trouble making our way long the tube. The delay might be vital. So... There was no place else to go. He had to be outside the tube, in the reaction fluid. I sighed and found I had closed my eyes. It was restful here at nearly zero g. If I could sleep a bit, everything would become clear... I slammed my left arm into the deck. Agony. The voices. They woke me. Why flood the tube? It wouldn't disable Farriken . No, Gharma was on his feverish way to something else. "Hassat! Into the lock." The Veden phosphors gave the rushing waters a greenish cast. The rippling currents had become sluggish. "Tube is filled, Captain," the metal voice rang. I hitched on a tool belt and snagged a laser sidearm into it. "Cycle us in," I called. Hassat and the men listened to my conjectures as the air pumped out. The greenish fluid frothed in and stilled. I waved us out. We swam like the first fish, awkward and bulky. Ping, pressure balancing. Aft, along the tube. Machines, pod equipment, grapples -- they bobbed in the currents set up by rotation of the tube walls. The men swam faster than I could. They were earnest and devoted followers of the Master, unaware of how the alien had used their own evolution against them. I had sent Rhandra to search the Master's suite, remembering the black device in his hand, to find poly tonal inducers, subliminal flicker screens, a host of devices. Probes into the depths of our competing three brains. Paths to enlightenment, surely; I knew that. Paths to a prison, just as certainly. These men would follow my orders despite their confusion. And in time, as the tinkering wore off, as it had for Majumbdahr and me on Earth, they would return to whatever it meant to be human. Merely human. We thrashed on. The section numbers coasted by. # H. The tube necked down here. Collars of steel yoked the spot: the retaining wall. Here the storage sacks began. Their access ports punctuated the tube walls at regular intervals, receding into the murky distance. Swimming here was not much different from negotiating in air, since there was no gravity. But normally one could see from one end of the tube to the other. Now all faded into green depths. I felt sluggish. The waters plucked at each motion with liquid fingers. "Slow down," I called. Foxes to the hunt. Docking equipment swung lazily ahead of us. I peered, squinting. There: a ragged tear in the thick organiform. An explosion had ripped through from outside. Something tugged at my attention. I turned, studying the tube. The others surged ahead toward the tear. It was small, innocuous. A gray patch clinging to the tube wall. I swerved and kicked toward a grappling module. "Cover!" I snagged the edge of the module. Crump. A muffled jolt. Frags spun past me. I hugged the module like a lost love. Crump. The module bucked, began to drift. I hung on. A corporal coasted into view. His back was smashed. I swam toward him. His suit life indicators read zero. Two others floated nearby. Dead, all. Bubbles oozed from their suits, filmed in red. The limpet mines had sprayed the area with shrapnel. Neatly timed. Ghanma must've been able to see our approach . How? I rotated, fanning the waters. The viewports. They looked out on the cargo sacks, to aid in loading. "Captain." Hassat appeared from behind a quantat casing. "They're all..." "Right." I thrashed over to a viewport. Lamps glowed blue in the murk. They were inside a sack. It hung down, a teardrop ballooning away from the tube. Dim figures moved inside. It was the sack nearest the retainer. I watched, thinking. The figures seemed to be sitting on top of some coldsleep vaults. They were performing a ceremony much like the Master's. The Hour of Last Things. "If there are more mines in here," Hassat began, "We should -- " "Right. Out -- through the hole." I pushed away and kicked awkwardly. Cold seeped into my bones; the reaction fluid was a colloid to prevent its freezing at the low temperatures it reached in flight. My suit therms cut in. We reached the ripped wall and I gingerly pulled myself through it. I backed out, groping with my feet. My magnetos purred, seized. Boots clamped down to grip the ferrous strip running along the outside of the tube. I swiveled out and stood upright. I took a step. Click : magnetos clutched the metal. Hassat followed. The sack flared mushroom-like forty meters away. I could make out Gharma now. He made ritual hand passes. Their lips moved. Chanting. Their rocking rhythm cast shadows in the blades of light that cut shafts down into the cloudy fluid. Beyond, along the axis, the milky bulk of the retaining wall. We stepped carefully forward. It was like walking along the top of a vast cannon barrel toward a bag of blue light. "Look for the power plug," I called. Step. Step. "There." Hassat knelt on the curved organiform. The color-coded cap swung out. I unreeled the cord for my suit power. He plugged it in. I snapped it into the butt of the fan laser in my tool belt. It was intended for broad area heating, operating in air. I had no idea what it would do in a liquid. "Try your hand gun," I said. Hassat fired. A ten-centimeter bolt leaped out. Steam burst white in its path. "Not much range," he panted. I cradled the fan laser. "This one may -- ' ' A dull thunderclap. I jerked my head up. Beyond the sack a yellow ball glowed for an instant. It guttered out. "Shit," I said. "They've blown a hole in the retainer." . A tide brushed at me. Growing stronger. We both stood shock still. Debris from the explosion caught the blue light and then swooped back toward its center, sucked in. "Captain!" the tinny voice rang. "Massive incursion in the retaining wall. Bridge is flooding." Gharma was going to drown the whole ship. "Try to deflect the stuff," I said numbly. "Stack furniture. Run it down the nearest ramp." "Sir, at this rate -- " "I know. Look, send some more men after us. We can't do much by ourselves." But I knew that by the time help arrived the fluid would have caused vast damage inside Farriken. We were far from any star. Immobilized, we would never reach a port. Something bumped against me. It was a ribbed drum, probably unmoored by the first explosion. I watched it accelerate toward the gaping hole in the silvery retaining wall. "Sir, we've got to -- I can't -- " I shook myself into alertness. Hassat was wobbling, one foot free. I suddenly realized that the current was pushing me forward. "Don't try to walk," I called. "But we have to -- " "Duck!" Another drum swooped toward us. It slammed into the tube wall, sending muffled vibrations up through my boots. When I looked up it was vanishing into the jagged hole in the retainer. I braced against the surging currents. My arm stung and throbbed. I hunched down to present less drag against the stream. My boot broke free. I slapped it down again, rocking, pulling on the power line for support. Wan light. Murky motions. What had been the Master's plan? To kill us all? Gharma's sword lifted high, coming down with ritual grace on the necks of the Lengen priests. Chopping. But how were the rest of us to die? Or... Floating. Warm and lazy. The waxy light... The voices murmured. Tongues speaking without form, of days before we became encased in words... cutting across the filmy bonds the Master had laced around my bicameral mind, lefthandright brain, ancient... But the voices faded... My head buzzed. A fine weakness washed over me... It would be so fine to fly in this swift breeze, to spread wings and loft through it. To skim by good Gharma and his madman chant, consider the waters in their ways, yes, give a last wave and zoom past, singing my own private song. Then a last gyre, banking and swooping. The tinkling rapids would laugh with me. Sing the war galactic, Ling. Strut a time on this final stage. Comes the high dive. White foam. Zip, and you're through. Back on the bridge, Captain of a Starship all spattered with gold. Epaulettes for all. Let me go. Let -- A boot slipped. I twisted to bring it back. The other click broke free. I reeled out the power line. Gauze clouded my helmet. Air rasped raw in my throat. Battering, battering, the current swept me down. All these years riding the high vacuum... never thought... it would come by drowning... My right hand twitched. The fan laser blazed. A beam orange-hot shot out in front of me. Steam jacketed it. Cotton streamers belched back toward me. I felt it punch me in the gut. Turning -- Flying -- I rolled my eyes up, searching for the blue mushroom. Heels looping over -- I arced the laser beam around, letting the steam jet play against me. It buzzed in the cold, watery hand that clasped me. Punched me. Again. The sack loomed. I thrashed uselessly. Fire the orange plume. Wait. Fire agin. Fire -- I thudded against the fat blue balloon. I released the laser, it was still clipped to my belt. I snatched at the folds of the sacking. Got a grip. Swung down. Boots clapped to metal. I leaned against the billowing sack, taking shelter from the current. I peered in. A blue lagoon. Gharma's head jerked around. Eyes widened. He started scrambling over toward me, calling to the others, mouth awry. The idea hung before me, glimmering. I thumbed the fan laser up to peak power. Gharma saw my hand move. He snatched at his robes, trying to drag a pistol out. I braced myself and pointed the fan laser at the bottom of the sack. Inside, priests scrambled over the vaults. One knocked over a blue arc lamp. It smashed into a vault and winked out. The orange line leaped out. I fanned it across the base of the sack. The organiform crinkled, turned brown, then black. I felt a flash of hot pain in my left arm. I looked up. Gharma's laser was cutting away at my suit. Metal beaded and sputtered away into the waters. But -- Directly in front of Gharma, where his beam lanced, the sack blackened. Broke. The fluid smashed into him, driving him against the far side of the sack. I chopped at the base. It gave. The sack lifted under the fractional tug of centrifugal gravity. It rippled. Inside, priests tumbled in panic. The Hour of Last Things was coming a bit early. The sack wilted. The current caught it. Bubbles belched out, rose. It began to drift. The sucking hole in the retaining wall dragged it down. Inside, faces: mouths stretched open, hands clenched, eyes frantic. It struck. The vaults jammed in the hole. Soundless, the sacking folded over them. Air dribbled away. The sacking clogged the hole Flow ebbed and stopped. The plug settled into place. So many. Majumbdahr, the Master, now Gharma. And so many more. Sleep's dark and silent gate... The bridge was a foul mess. The colloidal fluid reeked of oil. It slopped at our ankles. Hassat -- who had hung on to a strut the whole time, and lived -- organized a team to flush out the ship. K, J and I decks were submerged. Multiple subsystem failure. Two crewmen dead. My console half red and winking. Everywhere, equipment dripped. I thumbed my readout screen to activity. Where would we go? A home away from Rome, that's what we needed. Far from Fleet. A comfortable G-star with room to let. Amid Farriken ' s dry catalog of facts and numbers there was surely a clue. The galaxy was open. We had fuel, reaction mass. We would explore. The message to Veden had gone out moments before. Now my energy seeped away and amid the lapping waters I lounged, watching the cleanup crew with sandy eyes. Time for another message. Yes. I switched through Comm. "Fleet Central, urgent." I blinked, squinted, rummaged for words. "This is Ling Sanjen, late of Fleet. I'm serving notice on you, and on your damned Empire. Do what you can about the Quarn. Then forget this war. The Quarn will vanish anyway. They're busy cutting their throats right now." A crewman splashed by. Lapping waters... The sound no longer had power over me. Music, I remembered, reached into both the limbic brain and the neocortex. It triggered the emotions in one, the analytic of order in the other. Mathematics could do that, too... delicately touch the limbic... music sliding into number... I shook my head. We were no simple assembly of "the seat of reason", "the seat of emotion", tinkertoy parts. A man was more than a mere man could know. I grimaced, feeling things shifting inside my mind. Whatever finegrained work the Master had done on me, done on us all, was coming apart, leftbrainrightbrain all scrambled now, returning to our own human equilibrium. "Look," I said, "what we never understood about the Quarn was that this war was a last task for them. They had to wipe us from the slate because we were their worst failure. A symbol of their decline. If you go out to the halo stars I think you'll find their works, their art, their libraries, all carefully preserved. All the things they wanted to be remembered by. Libraries -- not us. They never understood us. And they  were so sure they did..." I coughed. My throat rasped. "Listen, Fleet. If you're smart some of you will survive. And if you do my granchildren may run into you sometime. Watch out if they do, though -- you won't understand them. They're going to be like me." I clicked off. I chuckled, imagining what Tonji would think when he heard that. Ling the madman, yes. Maybe someday I'd be rheumatic and respectable, but not now. I'd gotten married to Fleet and Angela about the same time. Now I was divorced from one, but the easy analogy told a lie; Angela was a person, not an idea. Rhandra splashed over to my couch. "I'll help you back to our room." Her face, lined with care, seemed much older now. Yet the light still glimmered in those eyes. And there were rich years for both of us. For all of us. "No." "You must rest. Your arm -- " "No. I've got one more thing to do."    Things happen, that's all. I made the way down alone. Oily puddles glimmered in the dim light. She answered the second knock. I went in and sank down into a deck chair. From the next cabin came the scuffle and chatter of Chaik and Romana. I put my face in my hands and pulled the sagging flesh down, up, rubbing my eyes. I raised my head. She looked at me expectantly. "Angela," I said. "Let's try to talk again."  What more can we say? Here's Waldo! continuing process, going on today. Many people find this hard to believe and point out that strength, intelligence, speed, and courage now seem entirely useless. That may be true -- one of the depressing things about evolution is that you can't be sure which elements dominate the selection process, here and now. And if you did know, there is absolutely nothing that you could do with the knowledge; either you have the right properties for genetic selection or you don't. The thing that prompted this train of thought was a visit, a few minutes ago, from my business partner, Waldo. He was wallowing in newfound affluence, wearing expensive clothes and sporting -- most uncharacteristically -- a glamorous female on each arm. He looked over the deal I'd found, promised me in lordly tones that he would think about it, and swept out. I have this feeling that Waldo, against all logic, is being favored by evolution; for, as any dinosaur will tell you, evolution does make mistakes. Waldo's ride to fame and fortune got off to a very shaky start. He had been arrested, lumbering around the outer perimeter of Chryse City late one night. He was painted black all over and his attire consisted of dark blue briefs, an oxygen hose and mask, and a pair of thermal slippers. His general appearance made such a deep impression on the guard who spotted him that the alert for a Level Five emergency -- Alien Attack -- had been given. Within minutes Waldo had been whisked off to the office of Armando Faust, Governor of Chryse City. The fact that he was being treated as a lunatic, once it became clear that he was not an alien, annoyed Waldo. He was not insane, he insisted. Far from it. He was merely carrying out one of the prescribed procedures of Doctor Striker's diet plan. That plan had cost him a thousand Mars-dollars. He pulled a thin booklet from his briefs and waved it triumphantly at Faust. Faust was rumpled, bleary-eyed and unshaven, and he was dressed in a combination of a red-andorange-striped sleep-suit and fireboots. His videocasts contrived an impression of a massive deepvoiced man, but that was clever staging. The voice was genuine, but Faust was short and dumpy. "Thermodynamic Dieting, by Doctor Janus Straker," he read. "You paid a thousand dollars for this? What's the deal?" He drilled twin holes through Waldo's soul with the darkest, hottest eyes Waldo had ever seen. That hadn't come across on the video broadcasts. "It's worth every cent," said Waldo. "It's the first real breakthrough in dieting since the sugar substitutes. Guaranteed to work if properly followed." Faust was more impressed than I would have been. Over the past ten years I've heard the story much too often. I really thought that Waldo had been cured of his dieting mania after the last fiasco -- the "Bionic Diet -- Just One Capsule Does It -- Based On Fundamental Biological Principles." The capsule, as Waldo found out much too late, contained live tapeworm eggs. But apparently hope springs eternal, and Waldo's dream for the sylph-like figure of his youth continued. Faust moved his black cigar from one comer of his thin mouth to the other. "Are you telling me you have to dress up in that outfit, Burmeister, and run around the outside of the Dome as part of your diet?" His voice was harsh and full of disbelief. It took a tough nut to get to be top dog in a place like Chiyse City, and Faust had the reputation of being a hard man to argue with. You looked forward to an interview with him in the same way as a round of "Twenty Questions" with Torquemada or a game of "Chicken" with Attila the Hun. "Of course. Look," said Waldo with the awful zeal of the recent convert. "The food we eat is converted to energy inside us. Either we use up that energy, in exercise or some other way, or else it goes to produce fat. So there are just three ways to lose weight. Eat less food, exercise more, or lose the energy some other way. True?" "Sounds plausible," said Faust cautiously. He puffed on his cigar and the reeking smoke hung like a miasma in the room, defying the. city ventilation system. "But what's this 'Thermodynamic Dieting' all about?" "It maximizes the other ways that the body can lose energy. For instance: eat all your food cold. Drink lots of iced water -- it takes energy to heat it inside you up to body temperature. Take cold baths -- you lose heat that way. Exercise in the coldest possible place -- outside the Dome. Spray yourself black, too, because that's the most efficient way of radiating heat. And wear as few clothes as possible, to maximize the heat loss from evaporation. It's all in the book." Faust looked at the booklet. "So you've been doing all the stuff it says in here?" Waldo looked a little guilty. "Well, nearly all. I must admit I've skimped on the ice-water enemas." Faust, iron man that he was, shuddered. "But why, for God's sake, in the middle of the night? It's just your good luck that the guard didn't shoot first and ask questions later." "You lose heat more rapidly if you are radiating to a colder heatsink," said Waldo. "Not only that," he went on, delivering the final, unanswerable point. "Do you think I'd be seen running around in this outfit in broad daylight?" Faust looked at Waldo's ballooning form, black all over and covered with goose pimples. He shook his head. "I don't know. Somebody's crazy here, and somebody should be charged. I don't know if it should be you or the quack who wrote this book." "Doctor Straker is a well-known and widely respected physician, and a former President of the I.M.A. Of course," Waldo added thoughtfully, "that was before his breakdown." I think this was the point where Faust realized that further discussion would not be productive. He made up his mind. "Burmeister, you made every official on Mars jump out of bed in the middle of the night. Including me. I could give you ten years in the superfluid plants, and everyone would applaud the decision. But I'm a kind man." Waldo waited in horrified anticipation. Faust's favors were wellknown. "You've got a valid interplanetary passport, right? Okay. I want you to do a little job for me -- and I'll pay you well for it. Not only that, I'll arrange for this whole thing tonight to be wiped off the books. There won't be one word to say that you were the cause of a General Emergency." Waldo waited in silence. The rabbit doesn't discuss terms with the stoat. "Maybe you know," continued Faust, "that we've been having a little problem recently with the Maintenance Services Union. Mike Maloney is set to try a new angle -- a He shook his head admiringly. "There's been no real trouble yet, just a few broken heads. But it's going to get worse before we hammer out the contract, and I've tried to be ready for most things." He removed the cigar and coughed so violently that Waldo expected to be bombarded with fragments of lung tissue. "Last night," he went on, "one of my inside men told me that Maloney is set to try a new angle -- a personal one. He's going to grab my son and put the pressure on me that way." Waldo made suitable horrified noises. "Oh, I don't think he'd do anything bad to him," said Faust. "He knows I'd skin him alive if he did. But he thinks it's a good way to keep me off balance. So, I've got to get Werther away from here. I decided to send him to see the family, back on Earth -- he's never been there. Problem is, he's only ten and I've got to have somebody look after him on the way. I need somebody that Maloney's bunch wouldn't recognize. I'd been stuck on that -- until you came along. Ten thousand dollars for Werther' s safe passage to Earth, and no follow-up from tonight's little episode. Are you on?" Waldo, despite his habit of rushing into dietary insanities, is naturally cautious. He revolved the situation in his mind and it seemed very clear. A pleasant vacation trip to Earth and a handsome fee, versus ten years in the horrors of the superfluid factories -- if he lived that long. He didn't really like children, but that was a detail. He nodded. "When do we leave?" "Tonight. Tickets are ready at the spaceport. Every hour's delay makes it harder to get away without Maloney knowing. Go and shower, grab your stuff, and be back here in fifteen minutes. I'll get Werther." The child who was with Armando Faust when Waldo returned was everything that Faust himself was not. Blue-eyed, fair-haired, sweet-faced, and cherubic. Waldo hoped for the sake of family harmony that Werther resembled his mother. He was carrying a hand computer, one smiled shyly at Waldo. "This is Werther," said Faust with the fatuous expression of the proud parent. "You'll be seeing a lot of each other for the next month, so you need to get to know each other." Waldo looked at Werther, still quietly playing his hand computer. "Pleased to meet you, my boy," he said cordially. Werther completed his calculation and spoke for the first time. His voice was a clear, musical treble. "Estimating your height as # meters and your age as thirty-four," he said "I calculate that you are approximately forty kilos overweight. Your life expectancy should therefore be reduced by # years, the probability that you will develop circulatory problems and flat feet is increased by #, and you should become totally impotent at the age of forty-nine." Waldo was struck dumb. He looked at Armando Faust and waited for a thunderbolt of stem parental discipline to descend on Werther's head. Faust merely shook his head and smiled indulgently. "It's wonderful, what he can do using that little computer. I tell you, he'll be world famous in a few more years. "Now, Werther," he went on. "I hope you have everything ready." Werther smiled like an angel. "I won't go without Bismarck," he said. Faust frowned. "Now, Werther, I told you he can't go with you. Get ready, and you and Mr. Burmeister must be off." Werther didn't move. "I won't go without Bismarck," he repeated emphatically. Faust looked at Waldo and shrugged hopelessly. "It's no good," he said. "You heard him. He won't go without Bismarck. You'll have to look after both of them." Once upon a time Waldo had had a good general education. He had a sudden vision of an interplanetary flight from Mars to Earth, accompanying Werther and the mummified corpse of the Iron Chancellor. Before he could ask for details, Werther had opened the inner door of the suite and called through it. "Bismarck! Come!" Waldo was both relieved and horrified when a large dog bounded in. It began at the front as a conventional cocker spaniel, but about the middle of the chest there was a dreadful swirl of miscegenation and the rear half, white with black spots, was a definite Dalmatian. Bismarck, unaware of his strange appearance, wagged a long, fluffy tail cheerfully. He ran to Waldo and sniffed with interest at his trouser legs. "He's just learning your smell," said Werther. "Once he's got it, he'll never forget it. No! Bad dog!" he added as Bismarck showed signs of labeling Waldo's trouser leg in a more personal manner. "Werther bred him himself," said Faust proudly. "He picked the genetic patterns and gave them to Muttants, Limited, and they did the mutated cross. Bismarck's bred for intelligence and tracking. Werther wants him to be a superbloodhound." Waldo was beginning to foresee problems. Escorting a docile tenyear-old from Chryse City to Earth was one thing. Escorting a child prodigy, clearly spoiled beyond all reason, along with his doubtfully housebroken dog, was another. The sooner it was over with, the better. Waldo hadn't eaten for many hours, and the foul tobaccoladen air was getting to him. He was suddenly very keen to get outside Faust's rooms and on the way. He stood up. "Remember," said Faust. "Keep your eyes open for Maloney's men. You won't be really safe until you're on the ship. Don't share an airbus with anybody, and keep with a crowd of people whenever you can. You'll get your fee when I hear that you've reached Earth." He said his fond farewell to Werther. Waldo and Bismarck each received a casual nod, and they walked along the corridor that would take them to the elevator. It arrived empty. They entered, and Waldo spoke the level they wanted. As he did so, Bismarck growled. The elevator, confused by the twin inputs, did not move. Bismarck growled again and Waldo looked at him in annoyance. "Can't you keep him quiet, Werther?" he started to say when he noticed the white vapor .emerging A Public Service of This Magazine #he Advertising Council VaW feSc! We make a little goalong way. Give. Red Cross counting on you. from the low ventilator grille. It dawned on him that Mike Maloney, head of the Maintenance Services Union, was responsible among other things for the Chryse City elevator system. But by then it was too late.    In some places Waldo's account of subsequent events fails to match other versions. He says his captors held him for three days without food, and undeniably he missed several meals. But I believe that was mainly his own fault -- you can judge for yourself. He was knocked out by the narcogas for a couple of hours, at most. He awoke in a locked room, somewhere in Chryse City. It would be inappropriate to say that it was an unfamiliar room, since thanks to the unit construction methods used, every room looks the same as any other. However, he had no idea just where he was. The room contained only a bed, chair, table, and the usual sanitary facilities. There were two doors, both locked. Waldo rattled them a bit, more or less hopelessly, and was startled when he heard Werther's impatient voice behind one of them. "Burmeister, you're awake at last," it said. "Now we can all get out of here." "How did you know it was me in here?" said Waldo in surprise, stooping to set his ear to the door. "Bismarck can smell you through the door. Look, this shouldn't be too hard. There are lay out diagrams of the city in every table drawer. You know, standard requirement for blow-out precautions. Get yours out and I'll tell you what we do." "But it's no use -- we don't know where we are," said Waldo. "True. But I've got my computer here with me. It's like the Traveling Salesman problem, remember? I've got the program -- " Waldo straightened and turned quickly as the other door of his room was thrown open. Two men in the anonymous gray uniform of Maintenance Services stood there. "Thought so," said the taller of the two. "We'll have to separate them. I didn't expect there'd be anybody else picked up with young Faust." "We'd better be careful," replied his companion. "Maloney 'll skin us both if Faust Junior gets hurt. He's the trump bargaining card." "He is, but that doesn't apply to Fatso here," the tall man replied. He glared at Waldo. "We'd better get him to a different room, where they can't talk to each other. Come on, you, quietly if you want to stay comfortable." He lifted the electric prod he was carrying and pointed outside. Waldo turned quickly back to the locked door. "Don't panic, now, Werther," he said in rapid, highpitched tones. "I'll think of something. I'll get us out of here, just you relax. Oof!" he concluded, as the electric prod was applied briefly but effectively to the seat of his trousers. "All right, I'm going. You didn't need to do that, you barbarian." Waldo was shepherded out and locked in another room, out of earshot of Werther. "Behave well," said his captors, "and maybe we'll bring you something to eat later in the day. If you're noisy, you'd better be ready to live off your fat." They didn't know it, but they had made a big mistake. Few things in life can rouse Waldo to heights of physical bravery and action, but threat of starvation is one of them. As he has occasionally remarked to me when in a philosophical mood -- usually after a vast dinner, where he has demolished enough for three people -- "hunger sharpens the brain." The furnishings of the new room were identical with the old one. Waldo remembered Werther's remark and went to the table drawer. A book of schematics there showed the main Chryse City life-support systems in all their monstrous complexity. Air, water, sanitation, and power were all drawn out in complete detail, showing the linkage of every apartment to the main lines and the feeder systems. Waldo reviewed the options -- very limited ones. Power and water were delivered through narrow conduits. The air-handling system, behind the wall ventilator, had a fiftycentimeter duct. To get through that, Waldo would need to be extruded, like toothpaste from a tube. That left the sewage system as the only alternative. It had a one-meter duct to begin with, but it merged to a bigger line underneath the apartments, and then varied in size again as it approached the central disposal system. Waldo, thanks to an unfortunate episode earlier in his career, was no stranger to sewage. Grimly he took the layout diagram and tried to plot the ways through the maze of pipes. There were two problems. Since he didn't know where he was, any starting point for his analysis seemed equally valid; and since Maloney's men might be anywhere, it wouldn't do to simply escape -- he would have to surface in a safe place, preferably very close to Faust's private suite. He had to make some pretty wild guesses about where he was and where he would like to go. Then he settled down with notebook and pencil to a long session of route planning. There was inevitably a lot of trial and error involved. After five hours of grinding detail, drawing in paths and noting routes in terms of turns and numbers of ducts, and finally making a detailed list in his notebook of all the necessary information, Waldo had done all that he could. He made the final notation and put the book in his pocket. A square meal, brought by his captors at that moment, might have changed everything. But they seemed to have forgotten him and he resolved to move ahead with his plans. The toilet assembly lifted out, after a mighty struggle, and revealed a dark, deep drop to the duct below. Waldo carefully lowered the flashlight, provided in the table drawer for possible power failures, to the bottom of the hole. From the length of bed-sheet strip he had used, he estimated that it would be a drop of a meter or less if he lowered himself at arm's length. He began to insert himself into the hole, but it was a much tighter fit than it looked -- Docotr Straker's Thermodynamic Diet had done less for Waldo than he had hoped: He stood up, removed his jacket and squeezed himself again into the hole. After hanging for a second, he dropped to the duct, retaining his balance with difficulty, then carefully retrieved the flashlight. The procedure from that point on was simple but tedious: follow the route listings and path designators that he had copied into the notebook, using the flashlight for illumination; get to the central sewer conduit and exit from there, using the main maintenance catwalks and entrances; locate the nearest videophone, call Armando Faust, person-to-person, and tell him that Werther had been kidnapped; give as much information as possible on the place where he was being held prisoner; and then meet Faust and assist in the search for Werther. There was one slight problem. The information on the routes was all recorded in the notebook; the notebook was in Waldo's jacket pocket; and Waldo's jacket was still in the room, lying where Waldo had placed it after deciding that the sewer entrance would be a tight fit. Apart from that, everything was fine. Oh, yes, one other thing. The recent work of Maintenance Services had been well below par. The flashlight, when Waldo switched it on, gave forth the feeblest glimmer of exhausted batteries, like the mating of tired glow-worms. Waldo stood in the slippery, sloping duct and looked at the lighted hole into the room above him. It was not more than a meter above his outstretched hands, and that should have been no problem at all under two-fifths Earth gravity. Unfortunately, the space was cramped, the footing treacherous, and Waldo had never been much of a one for leaping. After a few desperate and unsuccessful attempts, he felt that the lighted opening above him was as remote and inaccessible as Alpha Centauri. Since he could not go back, he had to press on, trusting to luck and memory alone to guide him successfully through the labyrinthine ways of the Chryse City sewage system. He set off bravely through the darkness, making his choice of turns and branches on a completely random basis. In terms of probability of success, he was like a solitary chimp deposited at a typewriter and told to write the works of Shakespeare. The dying flashlight was useless. After a few minutes Waldo threw it into the darkness and sent a stream of oaths after it. He ploughed on. Sometimes he would be in a tall, wide pipe that felt completely dry under foot. Sometimes he would be banging his head on the low ceiling of the duct and splashing ankledeep in what he hoped was water. Where a choice existed, he tried to head 'downhill,' hoping to reach one of the central cloacas -- all of them had maintenance lighting and access to the outside corridors. Waldo struggled gamely on, through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. As he said, the alternative to struggling on was not good; it was hardly a situation where one could choose to lie down and rest. One fact became increasingly clear sewers, at least modem sewers, are not cold. The stereotype of a chill, clammy atmosphere doesn't apply when people have ample energy for heating. Waldo says that the Chryse City sewers are rather like the medium setting of a sauna. After three or four hours of rambling he was on his last legs and felt as limp as a beached jellyfish. I know Waldo very well. We've been friends and partners since law school. So I believe him when he says that he had begun to despair of ever reaching any exit. He kept thinking of the limerick about the young man named Clyde who fell down a sewer and died. And when, at last, he came to an intersection and saw a faint light, far off to his left, he could hardly believe it. He staggered toward it, along a narrowing duct. He went down on hands and knees, then at full stretch, and moved forward. Waldo had reached one of the central settling-pond areas, into which many ducts deliver their contents. Unfortunately, he had found one that in its final stages was less than half a meter in diameter. He crawled on, finding the fit tighter and tighter, and finally, about three meters from the end, he stuck. No amount of pushing and straining would move him forward another ter backward. He was stuck. He lay there, feeling that safety and comfort were just a few meters away. He was wrong, as it happens. The duct emerged almost ten meters above the surface of the settlingpond, and directly below the point of emergence was a sharp metal filter. If Waldo had been able to get to the end of the duct and drop from it, he would have been cut to ribbons. His problem was just a bit worse than he realized. As far as I can tell, Waldo was actually stuck in that pipe for at most eight hours. I don't argue with him when he says that subjectively it seemed five or six days. After the first couple of hours, he became aware of a new factor. Something was pushing him firmly, and steadily, from behind; delicately, all over his nether regions. After a few puzzled minutes it dawned on him that he was experiencing the much-vaunted computerized sewer-maintenance system. When a blockage occurs in the Chryse City sewers, two things happen. The air pressure is steadily increased, in an attempt to blow the obstruction free, and after a threshold value is reached, the presence of the blockage is reported on the central services' control panel. To the control computer, Waldo was just another piece of waste material, an aggregate of garbage blocking a vital feed line. The pressure rose steadily. It continued to rise. Waldo, in the heat, sweated profusely. After long hours, the critical point was reached where tangential forces exceeded static friction. Waldo, like a well-greased bullet, was propelled suddenly along the duct with increasing speed and then fired out into space, over the settling-pond. He hung poised for a moment in mid-air, well clear of the metal filter, then dropped from the zenith like a falling star. He struck the settling-pond surface flat. The resulting tsunami was enough to inundate the two service men arriving at that moment to investigate the blockage. They dredged him out. The three of them staggered back to the access corridor. No one spoke, although there was a good deal of swearing, coughing, spluttering, and spitting. Just when Waldo was wondering how he could get loose of his companions and find a videophone to call Faust, they came to a door off the main corridor and one of the maintenance men threw it open. "The boy was right," he said through the open door. "That's what the blockage was. Here he is, and you're welcome to him." They pushed Waldo through the door and departed for the showers. Sitting at a long table inside the room were Faust and Werther, with Bismarck lolling at their feet. Faust and Waldo looked at each other in disbelief. Finally, Bismarck stood up, walked over to Waldo and sniffed at him inquiringly. He recoiled slightly, then began to wag his tail, tentatively. He looked like an art critic, discerning the faint outline of an Old Master's work beneath the more recent daubing of a lesser painter. "It is," said Faust. "It really is Burmeister. You were right, Werther. No," he added hastily as Waldo began to approach the table. "You sit down over there, by the door. I know you don't like the cigar smoke." Waldo collapsed into a chair. He had so many questions he didn't know where to start. How had Werther got free? Why were the Maintenance Services people acting friendly to Faust when they were locked in contract combat? How long was it since he had been captured? He needed explanations, but most of all he needed rest. Werther's childish treble intruded on his thoughts. "You should have left the escape to me," he said reprovingly. "You are not intellectually equipped for such activity. Also, you had no computer with you." "Computer? What's a computer got to do with it?" asked Waldo feebly. That crack about his intellectual capacity, like the earlier one about impotence, rankled. "Everything. Without a means of systematic calculation, the chance of finding your way through the City utilities' system is almost zero. Even Bismarck and I had to make use of additional factors to arrive home at our suites. Do you realize that the # nodes of the utility system imply more than # # possible path choices on a trialand-error basis?' ' Waldo didn't know. Furthermore, he didn't care. He closed his eyes wearily. He hadn't gone through days of anguish, escaping through the sewer system, to be lectured by an underage runt. Then a thought struck him and he opened his eyes again. "You mean you were in the sewers too? I never saw you." "Of course we weren't. What a revolting idea! We went through the air-handling system. I used the general schematic to set up the route choice as a non-linear programming problem." Waldo closed his eyes again. This promised to be even worse. "I set as the objective function the path length to the central air tunnel," went on Werther, "where all the ducts merge. Then I minimized that, using a semi-heuristic algorithm that I developed last year for the Traveling Salesman problem. It was far from trivial. My hand computer took almost three hours to compute an optimal strategy. When I had it, I removed the air grille and Bismarck and I set off." Faust was shaking his head in admiration. "Can you beat that, Burmeister," he said. "Figuring out the best path on his computer, out of ten-to-the-umpty choices. That isn't the best part, either. Go on, Werther, tell him the rest." Werther regarded his father sterolv. "I would appreciate it. Father, if you would refrain from interrupting me," he said. Faust looked abashed. Waldo couldn't understand how this man, who ate tough guys for breakfast, could be so subservient to a tenyear-old. It increased Waldo's own distrust for small children -- especially smart-ass ones. "At the point where all the ducts merged," continued Werther, "I had to resort to a different strategy. When a problem is difficult, it is necessary to deploy all available resources. I led Bismarck to each of the main air branches feeding into the central tunnel, saying 'Home' to him at each one. At the fourteenth branch he began to wag his tail. As I had surmised, the characteristic aroma of Father's cigars was strong enough to carry through to the central tunnel." "Specially made for me in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," said Faust. He held up his lighted cigar. "Each one wrapped from a single leaf of high-quality Scranton tobacco." Yes, thought Waldo, and handrolled against a steelworker's thigh, from the smell of them. Fortunately, he was too tired to speak. He was developing a grudging respect for Werther. TTie lad had a great future ahead of him, unless some public benefactor exterminated him along the way. "Father, I told you once," said Werther in admonishing tones. "Please do not interrupt again. As I was saying, we took the main branch that Bismarck selected and followed the same procedure at each succeeding fork. Bismarck led us infallibly to the apartment, where I attracted Father's attention and we were able to enter through the air grille." Something still didn't make sense to Waldo. "But how were you able to obtain assistance from the maintenance people to get me out?" he said. "I thought they were your enemies." "Werther took care of that, too," said Faust. "You see, on the way back here..." He subsided under a stem look from Werther. "To answer your question," said the latter. "On the way to the central air tunnel we passed a number of other apartments and could both see and hear through their air grilles. In one of them we chanced to observe Mr. Maloney. He was with a lady, and they were engaging in certain activities that apparently appeal to adults. Since my computer also has a recording mode, it occurred to me after a few minutes to make a video and sound recording through the mesh of the grille. It is not of any great quality, but quite adequate. "Now, you may explain the rest, Father," he said graciously to Faust. "Well, the lady with Mike Maloney -- and I don't know why I use the word lady, considering some of the things she was doing -- happens to be a special close friend of Jake Gregg, head of the Transport Union. Jake happens to be a pretty headstrong guy. So I called Mike, he came over here, and we played the tape. Then we had a really nice, friendly chat, and he signed the new contract we wanted, on the spot. Mike assured me that he is really a good friend of mine, and he apologized for what his men had done, kidnapping you and Werther. Strictly against his orders, he said. He called over there to have you released, and they told him you'd escaped into the sewer system. They were reporting a pressure rise there, too. Werther figured out what was happening in two seconds, and we came over here to pick you up." "Don't forget to tell him about the fee. Father," said Werther. "Oh, yes. I said you had to get Werther to Earth to get your fee. kilometers, so you only made it a points out that the kidnapping settled the crisis, and he didn't want to go to Earth anyway. So he told me to -- I mean, I'm going to pay you half the fee, for your efforts. What do you think of that, Burmeister? Burmeister? Damn it, Werther, I believe he's fallen asleep." Indeed he had. While Faust had been speaking, Waldo had at last managed to remove several bits of twisted metal, broken ceramics and unrecognizable glop from inside his shirt and trousers. He had collected them during his visit to the settling-pond, and the discomfort they caused had been the only thing keeping him awake. He was aware of certain mammoth stirrings and churnings deep inside him as his stomach fought a great battle with his ingestions from the settlingpond, but even that couldn't stop his eyes closing. Something attempted, something done, has earned the night's repose, he thought. He slept.    It took Waldo a while to recover from his ordeal, including the case of dysentery he picked up somehow on his trip through the sewers. While he was recuperating, he had a constant stream of visitors. The whole episode, involving boy, dog, and man in their complex trips through the utility system of Chryse City, caught the public fancy. In particular, Waldo's spectacular exit from the last duct attracted all the headlines. "Human cork survives tunnel ordeal," said one; "Human cannonball makes 'soft landing' after death-defying flight," proclaimed another. Waldo was famous. It didn't take the newsmen long to decide they would rather deal with Waldo than Werther, who treated them all like idiots and was enraged by any reporting errors. Waldo lay there at his ease while his bank balance, already fat from Faust's fee, swelled hourly as he conducted paid interviews with all forms of the media. He sold the book rights for a princely sum, and now there is talk of making a holo-movie based on the episode. Do you see what I mean about evolution? Waldo exhibited none of the usual survival traits. Oh, well, perhaps a certain blind persistence. But as usual, he landed on his feet. He always does. It convinces me that the main genetic selection criterion these days is not skill, intelligence, or any of the usual virtues. It's entertainment value. Have that, and everything else will come to you. Waldo has so much money now, he's hesitating to go ahead with the deal I set up for him. By the time he recovered from his experience, the lack of food after he was kidnapped, his strenuous exercises in the Turkish-bath atmosphere of the sewer, plus the dysentery he developed there, had all produced a big effect. I contacted Doctor Straker and made a suggestion. He was most enthusiastic. The paper I have here says, "In the ten-day period after I began Doctor Straker's Thermodynamic Diet plan, I testify that I lost a total of eleven kilos in body mass. Signed, Waldo Burmeister." It's a perfectly true statement. All he has to do is sign it and we'll both be considerably richer. He seems strangely reluctant. He hasn't said so, but I suspect that he doesn't want to have anything more to do with Thermodynamic Dieting.    V-...  Paul Walker Adventure, Mystery and Romance, John G. Cawelti, University of Chicago Press, #, #pp., #. Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, Tanith Lee, Daw, #, #pp., #. Quest For the White Witch, Tanith Lee, Daw, # , #pp., #. Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown, ed. by Dean Cartier, pub. by Gerry de la Ree, #, #pp., #. Dark Sins, Dark Dreams: Crime in Science Fiction, Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, Doubleday, # , #pp., #. Demons Within, and Other Disturb ing Tales, Helen Hoke, Taplinger, #, #pp., #. Triax, ed. by Robert Silverberg, FutorianPinnacle Books, #, #pp, #. Art for Archie' s Sake Is science fiction serious literature? Why do writers like Barry N. Malzberg and Norman Spinrad provoke such hostility from some readers? Why do some sf fans despise fantasy? What is the affinity between sf and mystery fiction? What is the secret of the continuing popularity of such writers as Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs? What is the real appeal of films like Star Wars and Close Encounters? John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture does not provide the answers to these questions, but I believe it does provide the best method for finding the answers -- by providing the best method for studying sf, and other genre fiction, that I have ever read. Cawelti mentions sf only in passing. His principal interests are the mystery as exemplified by Chandler, Hammett, Christie, Sayers, and Spillane; the western of Owen Wister, Zane Grey, and John Ford; and the social melodrama from Dickens to Harold Robbins. The questions: What constitutes a formula? How does a formula evolve? What are its artistic potentialities and limitations? And what does it reflect of the culture that produced it? Of the latter he says, "Patterns of convention...are usually quite specific to a particular culture and period and do not mean the same outside this specific context." So the "Virtue Rewarded" plot, like most of genre literature, is lost to us as time changes. The swooning damsel-in-distress becomes the lusty heroine becomes the feminist hero. The socially responsible knight-inshining-armor becomes equally responsible cowboy becomes the mysterious stranger becomes the outlaw defending the innocent settlers from the ruthless cattle barons. What have we lost in these transitions, and what have we gained? And what do they tell us of the periods that made them best-sellers? And what can we learn of our own culture from our genre fiction? A formula is a pattern of conventional elements to be found in the majority of works of a particular kind. Usually the people who invent them, such as Poe or Doyle or Owen Wister or Dickens, do not realize they are inventing a whole new literature. As Cawelti points out, although Poe invented the detective story in the #'s, it was not until the '#'s, with Conan Doyle, that the form became popular. In science fiction it has taken decades for the formulas exemplified in Star Wars and Close Encounters to enter the popular consciousness so as to become acceptable to a wide audience. Why? Because a formula is grounded in the mysterious human psychology of patterns. Those who appreciate formula literature are those who have absorbed the elements of the patterns, and they come to each new work with specific expectations of how it will all come out; and as Robert Warshow says, "Originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it." I believe that statement answers virtually all of my initial questions. At least in part. But I can hear you shuddering out there. Sf? Formula literature? ' 'Walker, you -- mundane!' ' Academic criticism of sf usually bothers me in one of two ways: either the critic is so intent on proving the literary respectability of the genre that he will make exorbitant claims for its literary merits; or he is apologetic, if not contemptuous, of it. Cawelti avoids these postures by being both affectionate and objective, and not by oversimplifying the difterences between genre and mainstream fiction. Nor is his definition, and treatment, of the formula mechanistic. Usually we think of formulas as rigid plot structures, and the people who write by them as hacks, cranking out the same book every time; strates, neither assumption is true. A formula is composed of elements of plot (hero, heroine, villain, obstacles, backgrounds, processes of solution, and solutions themselves) that may be combined in an infinite variety of ways and serve as vehicles for the most enlightened social thought as well as for the author's private vision. We all know that the sf books we like have plots, and that plots have structures designed to achieve a certain effect: an effect we have experienced before and found pleasurable, and so we return to experience it again and again. But while the effect may be the same, and the plot structures similar, we demand a new inventiveness each time from the writer. Always, no matter how many books he has written, we demand of his latest that same freshness, excitement and originality we experienced from his first. And this is as true of a Poul Anderson as it is of a Harlan Ellison. Defined in the strictest sense, formula analysis may account for why series books have been so popular, and why particular writers of no outstanding merit, such as Andre Norton, have been such favorites. On the other hand, defined more loosely, it helps to explain why less conventional stories and novels such as "Riders of the Purple Wage" or Stand on Zanzibar created so much excitement by combining new styles and ideas with conventional sf treatments. Where such a new combination is made so that it intensifies the sf experience, it is greeted with applause; where it deintensifies the experience, usually by subordinating it to characterization or thematic development, it is roundly booed. The principal problem in evaluating sf has always been the matter of comparison between it and mainstream fiction. Is a formula fiction the equal of the non-formulaic? I would say no. Some would say yes. And we would go on arguing forever. But what Cawelti says is that the comparison is irrelevant. People read sf, as other genre fiction, for different reasons than they read "serious" literature. And it is in their differences, in their own uniqueness, that sf, and other genre fiction, are best appreciated. Genre fiction is usually denigrated for its limitations, and certainly it has them; but the limitations of sf are rather like those imposed on the robot story by the laws of robotics or on interstellar flight by the law of relativity. Once accepted, they become an incentive to creativity as writers deal with their implications or try to find ways around them. Years ago Damon Knight told me that what he wanted his Orbit anthologies to do was to expand the boundaries of sf, to create "a renaissance in sf that would return it to its literary origins in Wells." Others claimed the only way to do this was to destroy every vestige of pulp tradition. But did they? If one made the mistake, as I did, of taking the New Wavers too literally, one was bound to believe that the whole movement meant disaster for the genre. And one was equally bound to breath a sigh of relief when the whole thing seemed to blow over in a few years. But what really happened? Did the New Wave fail? By the mid#'s, I realized sf had changed for the better; but how much of that change could be attributed to the New Wave I could not be sure. Now, thanks to Cawelti and his analysis of the evolution of other genres, I have a better idea. Revolution within a genre is a matter of new combinations of conventional elements, new styles, new languages, new ideas, and elements themselves. As crude as were the early experimental stylists, the New Wavers did open up sf to new stylistic approaches. They did help to improve the quality of sf prose and characterization. And most importantly, they opened the floodgates of the #'s and let all the social turmoil of the age pour into the genre. Until then sf was dominated by the pro-technologists, the futurist optimists who saw utopia in a nuclear reactor. They still do. But no longer does their viewpoint define the genre. The spectrum of opinion in sf reflects the culture around it more accurately today than it ever did before. But all of these things were done on the basis of what had been done before them by writers who were never New Wave, such as Clarke, with his quasi-religious alien encounters; Heinlein, with his seemingly infinite inventiveness; and Philip K. Dick, among others. The New Wavers accelerated these changes, but did not invent them. What they did was to create a conflict in sf that served to revitalize the field by getting everyone excited about it. Have you any idea how much America's colleges mean to you? Make America smarter. Give to the college of your choice. It was college-based research and college-trained minds that gave us electronic computers, television, spacecraft. And it will be today's collegetrained minds that will solve tomorrow's problems: Energy. Transportation. Health. City planning. International relations. But only if you help. America's colleges are in deep financial trouble. So give them a hand. The help you give today will make tomorrow's world a better one. Council for Financial Aid to Education. Inc # Fifth Avenue, New York. N Y. # A Public Service ol This Magazine  The Advertising Council My principal complaint against the New Wavers all along was that they were doing nothing more than imitating the mainstream, and the old mainstream at that -- Joyce and Kafka. I did not appreciate how useful these techniques could be in revitalizing conventional themes and stories. In fact, they did not realize it either, for the prime beneficiaries of their innovations have been the more conventional writers such as Niven, Pohl, Zelazny, Le Guin, and Silverberg. Formulaic analysis, as presented by John G. Cawelti in his Adventure, Mystery and Romance, does, as I have said, provide the best method I have yet read for evaluating the achievements of sf. But there is so much more to it. Cawelti is wonderful on Hammett and Chandler and Christie and even Irving Wallace. His chapters on the crime story and the evolution of the social melodrama; his analysis of the Virginian -- all marvelous. His language is clear of jargon, always lucid, always pleasant to read. I do not agree with all his speculations on how this or that genre reflects a particular period, but he is never dull. I put down the book each night slightly out of breath, my head swarming with ideas. I have yet to sort them out, but this much I can tell you: I have been reading genre fiction all my reading life and never felt I was wasting my time. But I have never been sure until reading this book what I was really getting out of it. Now I have a much better idea, and I feel more at peace with my enthusiasm than I ever did before. An Edifice for Oedipus The first thing you will notice about the last two volumes of Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy is that the covers are ugly. One is somewhat better than the other, but only somewhat. Fanzine art. The second thing you will notice is that the title of the second volume, Vazyou have seen in years. (And Quest for the White Witch is not much better.) The third thing you will notice, if you read both books carefully, is that you are going blind from the stingy fine print that is as uncomfortable to look at as to read. So far, so bad. The story is conventional sword and sorcery. The Birthgrave was the story of the White Witch. Vazkor, Son of Vazkor is the story of her son by the black magician (what's his name?). She has left him with a barbarian tribe where he grows up thinking his mother to be the wife of the chief. He finds he has extraordinary powers, and these alienate him from the tribe and from himself. He also finds that the woman he thought to be his mother is not. He finds out his true identity, but few of the details. He comes to hate his mother, and by the end of the first book, swears an oath to his father's memory to find her and kill her. In Quest of the White Witch, he journeys south to the city of BarIbithni where he establishes a reputation as a mighty sorcerer, which he is. He becomes involved in local politics; is beatified as a god by the lunatic fringe; and ends by leading a revolt against the throne in favor of the outcast heir. The battle is concluded by a massacre of Vazkor's worshipers by Vazkor himself, which will give you an idea of the sort of fellow he is. Also typical of him is that he falls in love with the new king's mother. This leads to a charge of treason. But before he can be bodily thrown out of the city, the witch of the lunatics that Vazkor has betrayed sends a plague of flies to disrupt the king's coronation that turns into a real plague that kills everyone, including Vazkor. Of course he rises from the dead. He goes farther south, having lost all interest in his quest for his mother. But events put him back On the track, and at last he finds her. For the most part, the story is good kinky fun, especially the ending which suggests that Oedipus didn't know when he had it good. There are some wonderful sequences, such as the plague of flies or the meeting with the White Witch, and some fine writing; but overall the book is turgid and uneven. Although the story is supposed to be set on another planet, you find references to Greek myths; or a barbarian saying to his lady, "Has my dulcet wife been scourging you as she begged to do?"; or purple passages such as: "TTie gate between her thighs was golden as her hair, and the road beyond the gate was made for kings." An even worse fault is her use of the first-person narrator. Despite the constant "I," it is never clear who is thinking what. The story is of Vazkor's maturation from a ruthless barbarian with godlike powers to a sense of himself as a whole man. Ostensibly the story is being told by Vazkor after the fact. But this is rarely clear. The ruthless barbarian seems as sensitive and introspective as the sage, and his acts of brutishness contradictory to his character. Always the tone of his thinking and feeling is that of a well-educated contemporary man. Like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in Hotel Transylvania, Lee uses psychology to revitalize the traditional sword-and-sorcery formula. Vazkor is a complex character whose confrontation with his magical powers is depicted as a problem of growing up. He loves his mother and kills his father at the beginning; then he finds his real mother had abandoned him, so he switches allegiance to his father, Vazkor, and sets out to kill his mother, who, of course, is not the villainness she seems. In the end he switches allegiance again: his father the villain, his mother the lover. The male-female situation in both books is as sexist as one expects to find in sword and sorcery: the women are, with few exceptions, either passive cattle or lusty and treacherous; the men are muscular and aggressive, or homosexual and decadent. (The racist elements are delicately avoided by a careful distribution of skin colors.) But Lee's real theme seems to me to be feminist, for the essence of Vazkor's search seems to be to reconcile the male and female principles within himself. Not long ago I wrote a glowing review of two short novels by Tanith Lee called Companions on the Road , in which I said I planned to read more of her and I suspected when I got done, I would like one book just as much as all the rest. Obviously I was wrong. But it was not my jumping to conclusions that did me in. Lee seems to have fallen victim to that itch from which so many young writers suffer -- she wanted to be a writer. And if that meant selling out her talent, she appears to have been prepared to make the sacrifice. While the two novels in Companions on the Road showed care and sensitivity in their making, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor and Quest for the White Witch are hackwork. All the intelligence and ability that went into the former are present in the latter two, but laid on with a shovel. If Lee is anything like the writers I know, she is liable to say something like, "Art, hell. I write to eat." If there is any truth in the saying we are what we eat, she is in big trouble. Ghouls and Dalis When I was nine, a friend of mine, who was a year older, took me to see my first horror movie -- The Mummy's Ghost. It was Hallowe'en, and it was cold, and it was raining. There was a line of kids halfway round the block, and we had to wait an hour in the cold and the rain to get in. By then the picture had started. We sat in the balcony, in the middle of a row packed with screaming kids, hardly able to move. Nevertheless, at the first appearance of the monster, I managed to eject myself from the entire row and achieve the safety of the street in, oh, say ten seconds. A few years later it was I who was escorting my younger friends to their first horror movies and howling as much at their cries of fright as at the antics on the screen. Critic Elder Olsen has theorized that the essence of comedy is when a thing thought to be dangerous, or disturbing, is proved to be neither. Thus, the terrors of one generation become the toys of another. An object of terror is an object of fascination; and although we may lose our terror of it, we never forget it; and consequently, we never completely lose our fascination with it. But having lost our terror by overcoming it, we end with a sense of affection for the thing. What was once an object of dread becomes an object of delight, and even admiration. In the early Godzilla films, for instance, the monster was the enemy of humanity. But by the end of the series, he, and the other creatures, had become heroes, defending humanity against extraterrestrial monsters. In one of the films a small Japanese boy learns courage and self-reliance by vicariously sharing a similar growing-up experience with Godzilla's infant son. The Japanese boy was years younger than when I saw my first monster film, but already he, and his generation, had formed attitudes toward them that my generation did not acquire until their teens. Satire and self-parody are two of the last stages of die decadence of a form. It means that people are no longer able to accept the form as anything but comedy. The sentimentalization of a form is a kind of parody. The effect aimed for is not our original horror, but nostalgic delight. It was this delight that was the principal ingredient of Campbell's Unknown, and it is clearly evident in the work of Edd Cartier. Along with Bok and Finlay, Cartier is regarded as one of the best artists of the pulp era. He was bom Edward Daniel Cartier in North Bergen, New Jersey, on August #, #. An interest in flying led to an interest in pulp fiction and that led to a desire to become a commercial artist which led to being hired by Street and Smith during the #' s primarily as an illustrator for The Shadow, for which he did # drawings between # and #. From the late #' s he worked for John Campbell on Unknown and Astounding, a relationship that lasted until he quit the field in # for better-paying jobs. Cartier's work was largely before my time, and it was not until I read his son, Dean Cartier's book, Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown, that I became familiar with it. It is the first major collection of his work from Unknown and Astounding in the late #'s to his retirement, and it includes his drawings for the Gnome Press fantasy calendar, which are among his best. My first impression on paging through the book was that I was looking at the work of a student of Kelly Freas. The resemblance is remarkable. Freas is the better artist. but then, Cartier came a decade before his first appearance. Cartier's work is a delight, but rather too light to be gulped down in one sitting. His monsters and grotesques are invariably ingenious and striking. His expressions and Much more so than those of his normal people, who are very bland except when they are grotesque. In fact, he never seems to have learned how to draw any normallooking people convincingly, as if they did not interest him. His illustrations for de Camp's The Hand of Zei are pure comic book. Nor was he successful with serious themes, such as he did for Eric Frank Russell's "With a Blunt Instrument," showing a great bone lying on a lifeinsurance policy with a pile of skulls in the background; or for Del Rey's "The Years Draw Nigh," which depicts an over-the-hill spaceman. Both are lifeless. He was best with whimsical creatures, animal and human. There is a childlike good-heartedness about them all; a mischievous twinkle in every eye. And his use of light and shade is impressive. In one case, stamping in rage. The figure seems to leap off the page. It was one of the few times that Cartier achieved any real suggestion of mobility in his work. As many times as I have paged through the book now, I am still amused by it. I think fantasy fans will find it a treasure, worth the fifteen bucks. If you want a copy, send # (no shipping and handling charge) to: Gerry de la Ree, # Cedarwood Lane, Saddle River, New Jersey #. Things That Go "You" in The Nigh Because science fiction is regarded as being as optimistic about the future as mystery fiction is about the ultimate triumph of law and order, the paranoid science fiction story seems an anomaly in the genre. It assumes that the best man (or woman) will not win in the end; that the future may well belong to the strong and the ruthless, who will herd the meek like cattle. It presents a dark vision of the future which should be depressing, and unpopular, but in fact some of the best science fiction, such as # or Brave New World, is paranoid and popular all the same. There are numerous fine and entertaining examples of it in Dark Sins, Dark Dreams edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini. The subtitle is "Crime in Science Fiction," but with a few exceptions, the stories concern the individual's plight in a totalitarian tomorrow. While on the surface it might seem that the paranoid story contradicts sfs traditional optimistic view of the future and reaffirmation of positive, or enlightened, values, this is not what happens. One of the essential differences between genre and mainstream literature is that the latter attempts to demonstrate the ambiguous nature of life, the "grays" of existence; while the former attempts to resolve them; to reduce existence to a matter of black and white. Sf writers do this not because they are ignorant of life's ambiguities, but because the traditional plot demands resolution. Someone must win, someone lose. The hero (or heroine) may win physically, utterly vanquishing the villain; or he (or she) may lose physically, and still win a moral victory (i.e., the hero dies, or is destroyed, tragically for a principle.). But whichever resolution the writer chooses, it must be a decisive one. And even if it is pessimistic, it must affirm positive values. Among the positive values it affirms are that there is a distinct difference between right and wrong or good and evil; the individual is sacred and invincible; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; technology is power, and therefore a demonic force for corruption; freedom is available only to those special people with the intellect, imagination, and heroic courage to seek it in the wilderness. An example of these values can be found in one of the three original stories in this book, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "The Generalissimo's Butterfly." It is an excellent story. The heroine is an intellectual who has supported a Latin American revolution only to find its leader has betrayed its ideals and imposed an even more oppressive regime on the people. She is reputed to have developed a spying device in the form of a butterfly, from which no one will be safe. The device was unsuccessful, but the people believe in it and fear it. She is conspiring against the Generalissimo, and he intends to send her into exile. She goes, seemingly without hope, but undefeated. Her invincible individual will remains intact; and her values, by contrast to those exemplified by the Generalissimo, are affirmed. The image of the butterfly in the story could remind one of the flies in Sartre's play about Electra. Images of menace. Nature and technology illegitimately joined by the mind of man; a demonic hybrid, a symbol of sin and corruption. But a world not without hope. There may be no god in the paranoid universe, but there are innumerable Christs. The heroine of the "The Generalissimo's Butterfly," and most of the heroes and heroines in most all of these stories, are as dogmatic as the villains they oppose, and always intent on laying down their lives to redeem mankind. Donald Westlake's "The Winner' has such a hero. Again technology is the instrument of power. The hero is a prisoner in a prison without walls. He has a device in his head which will inflict terrible pain if he wanders outside. Yet wander he does. Again and again, always getting a little closer to freedom. The villains watch him with amusement and then with fear. In the end there seems no possibility he will ever escape, but he will go on trying. In Robert Silverberg's "To See The Invisible Man," a man convicted of antisocial behavior is sentenced to "invisibility" for a year. No one will "see" him on penalty of suffering the same fate. It is an agonizing punishment for him, brilliantly depicted. In the end he is freed. The cops buy him a beer and let him go. He walks down the street and meets another invisible man. The man pleads with him to speak. If he does, he will be sentenced to another five years of the ordeal. Nevertheless, he embraces the man. Algis Budrys' "The Executioner," one of the best stories in the book, concerns a judge who is also an executioner. He is a familiar character in genre fiction, a decent man who firmly believes in the validity of a system that by degrees he learns is corrupt. By the end we have mainstream and genre fiction face to face, with the picture of a highly ambiguous world that is deeply disturbing; but whereas a mainstream novel would have left us confused and disturbed, Budrys resolves his situation with the judge shooting up his own courtroom. Thoroughly melodramatic, and thoroughly satisfying under the circumstances. But my favorite story in the book is C.B. Gilford's "Murder #," which involves as hapless an antihero as any you will find. He lives in a #-like world in which crime is unknown. He learns of the possibility of "murder" and decides to commit one. His reasons are ignoble; his method ingenious; his fate ironic. Strictly speaking, the plot contradicts what I have been saying. The hero loses but his fate in no way disturbs those in power. He is a fly they swat with effortless efficiency. Yet the effect of the story is amusing rather than disturbing. The hero gets what he deserves. Murder is wrong in any culture. And by showing us his appalling fate, our antitotalitarian values, by contrast, are affirmed. This is negative affirmation. The society, or individual, is shown in such a repulsive way that we can't help but support its opposite. In the story, as in most of these stories, as in most sf stories, the individual involved is "gifted." He is smarter and stronger than ordinary men. A bom leader. The masses, on the other hand, are sheep. It is never a question of democracy leading us to a better society, but of the intellectual and moral quality of whoever leads the masses. There are fifteen stories in Dark Sins, Dark Dreams, ranging from good to excellent. Malzberg and Pronzini have done an exceptional job of collecting and annotating them. Aside from the Yarbro story, the two other originals are Elizabeth A. Lynn's "The Fire Man" and C.L. Grant's "View, With a Difference," both interesting. This is worth buying. Helen Hoke's Demons Within and Other Disturbing Tales is for a more specialized taste. Fourteen stories that I, personally, enjoyed enormously. Most, but not all, are of the supernatural. There are two sf stories, "The Small World of and "The Margenes" by Miriam Allen DeFord, which I had read years ago and still remembered fondly. It is an alien-invasion story with the most hilarious ironic twist at the end. There is a marginal fantasy, "Mummy to the Rescue" by Angus Wilson, and a straight fantasy, "The Attic Express" by Alex Hamilton that is extraordinarily imaginative. And of course "The Squaw," by Bram Stoker, which is in a class by itself. The remainder of the stories are supernatural, and they range from the frightening, as in Margret Irwin's "The Book" and Ambrose Bierce's "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," to the satirical, as in Robert Block's "The Man Who Collected Poe," to the moving as in "George and Alice and Isabel" or Jean Rhys' "I used to Live Here Once" or the comical, as in Lawrie Wyman's "The Phantom of the Screen." "Mr. George" by August Derleth is a typical example of the premise that seems to lie behind most of these stories. An orphan girl is left with her aunt and uncle, who plan to murder her for her inheritance. Her kindly Uncle George has died, leaving her helpless. His ghost returns and does in the villains in their individual acts of attempted murder. In other words, a supernatural agency intervenes to punish them for their sins. In "The Book," as in Bloch's "The Man Who Collected Poe," the sin is obsessiveness. The sinners become fascinated with the dark side of life; they cultivate their own irrationality; they cut themselves off from everyday human society; they become obsessed with their macabre interests and lose all sense of right and wrong. They are destroyed by their own obsessions. Most of these stories reflect that fear and fascination, attraction and revulsion, we have for the dark side of the soul. Their advantage over the paranoid story is that they are free to disturb us. They do not have to affirm positive values, although most of them do. They can leave us wondering about the nature of things, as happens in "George and Alice and Isabel" or "I Used to Live Here Once." There is nothing primitive about it. To some extent we are all haunted by our past selves; frightened by our irrationality; uncertain of our substantiality. The safety factor in these stories is that they all contain some sort of resolution, the villain is punished, or the truth of the mystery is discovered. We are never left in the dark. Demons Within was a delight. I recommend it. Another Day, Another Silverberg Triax, edited by Robert Silverberg, contains three short novels by James Gunn, Keith Roberts, and Jack Vance. It is the first in a series of such books from Pinnacle, and if the first is any indication of the quality of those to follow, I would urge you not to miss any of them. First, because, as I have said before, the name of Silverberg on any anthology is a guarantee of quality. Secondly, because this particular Triax contains one of the finest sf stories of the year, a technical tour de force by Keith Roberts called "Molly Zero," about a young girl coming of age in a totalitarian state. The story itself, while absorbing enough, is less interesting than its technique. Roberts has used the second person singular to narrate a very tightly structured narrative that is compelling and powerful. A brilliant job. Thirdly, because of Jack Vance's "Freitzke's Turn," which though not as interesting as the Roberts story, is pure Vance in form and invention. A private detective is hired to recover some most unusual items which have been stolen by an old school friend of his, a singularly named Faurence Dacre, who has a talent for revenge that would make the Godfather envious. The process of pursuit will remind some of A Coffin for Demitrios. Along the way, there are all the usual Vance trappings, although none are up to his best. The ending is predictable, but satisfactory. Finally, there is the James Gunn Story, "If I Forget Thee," which in any other context would probably have been the best of the lot. As it is, in some ways it is superior to the other two. It has a marvelously imaginative opening sequence that runs on and on. Unfortunately, it is so interesting that when the story proper begins, it seems a letdown. Also, I thought the ending weak. But still it was worth reading. The cover by Randy Weidner of a celestial city emerging from the clouds is beautifully done. About Book Looking If you have any problem finding the books reviewed in this column, or any sf books, let me know and I will try to help. Please enclose a My best suggestion is to write for a catalogue to: The FSF Book Co. P.O. Box # Staten Island, N.V. # Dick Witter is the boss, and his reputation is excellent. If you have trouble finding Galaxy, or any other sf magazine, I first suggest you subscribe; if not, then ask your dealer to stock it. Often dealers will simply decline to display a magazine because they feel it will not sell. If they know someone is interested, they will probably accommodate you. If not try another store.  Al l right, geis, where are they? "Where is who, Alter? If you're going to write a column you must leam to be direct, clear, and succinct." Oh, yeah? Okay, gumball, where in hell have you hidden the letters sent to me suggesting topics for this column? "I told you you'd be lucky to get three letters from the readers. You didn't get three." You lie! Show them to me! "As you suggested, I put them someplace in hell." Geis -- I'll complain to J.J. I'll refuse to write another word unless you cooperate! Ever since I took over this column at the insistence of the readers -- "You found some way to stuff the ballot box. You cunningly infiltrated Jim Baen's mind and made him give false information. You -- " ' -- you've been dogging it, uncooperative, even trying to sabotage this typic. (Aside to J.J.: all typos are Geis' fault!) Now, unless you hand over my mail I'll not write a damned thing, and there'll be no column, and there'll be no advertiswill shrink and your soul will shrivel, and you'll become impotent, and you'll break out in facial warts, and -- "Okay, okay! Anything but impotence! I hid the letters in the cat box, under the Kitty Litter." they're... "Now, Alter... It was a j-joke. Heh-heh. W-why did you bring up that pair of ppliers?" I'm going to dismantle your ears, gobbet by bloody gobbet, Geis. Then I'll start on your nose. Then -- "I'll be happy to cooperate w-with this column. Here, let me wash off those letters... A dash of deodorizer..." You will read them to me, Geis. And you will read them straight. No interpolations, no snide remarks -- that's my job -- and no censoring or faking. Is that understood? "Oh, yessir, sir." Read the first letter. "The first letter is from Janet Lighthill Brown, of Las Vegas. She would like you to comment on selling speculative fiction." 'Speculative fiction' is a name some science fiction and fantasy writers wanted to have adopted in place of 'science fiction' because they felt sf as it was known to the literateurs and the media was of ill repute. They were ashamed to be known as science fiction writers. Ugh, ick, pheuw. 'Speculative fiction' had a nice high-brow sound to it. Harlan Ellison was among the most ardent of these writers who wished for the change and for consequent respectability. However, the change didn't catch on and lately, to the dismay of these snobs, science fiction, due to the superior fiction of such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarice, Frank Herbert, John Varley, Larry Niven  Jerry Poumelle, Greg Benford, and many others, 'science fiction' itself has become more and more gilt-edged and accepted as a legitimate fiction type. The academic world has also had a part in giving good old science fiction a higher place in the literary scheme of things. Mostly, though, the money success of the Tolkien books, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and #: a Space Odyssey, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind has raised sf in the eyes of most everyone. "Alter... if I may... she asked about selling speculative fiction." What little 'speculative fiction' got published wasn't very successful, since it tended to ape the failed styles and techniques of 'modem literature.' Avant-garde fiction, like Modem Art, has become an exclusive, in-groupish cult involving only a few thousand (or hundred, sometimes) pretentious literary types, and the attempt by 'speculative fiction' writers to join that crowd failed. So at the present time there is no market for non-plot, anti-hero sciencefictiony fiction. Nobody with money will pay for it. I hope that answers her question. "I hope so, too, Alter, but it will infuriate some writers." High blood pressure is good for you. Read me the next letters, Geis. "Well, Janet has another question. She says, 'Alter mentioned Writer's Digest. I've heard of it of course, but I've never seen a copy and no one seems to know where or how to find one. There must be somewhere to subscribe.' " This is a dumb question, and I doubt that Las Vegas has no library which subscribes, or hasn't, in its phone book, a listing for subscription agencies. I begin to wonder about Janet's friends and relatives. Read on, Geis. "Alter, Ed Chambers writes: 'What is your views on religion? Are you atheist, agnostic, catholic, etc?' " A fair question. My species follows the dogmas of Flerbyd worship, which involves the sacrifice of newborn Flerbyds every suncycle, except when the blue sun occludes the pink sun exactly. Then we sacrifice Zertposls and drink their rather tasty blood. I will say, though, that part of my crime (for which I was expulsed from our worlds) was religious in nature. I found it difficult to believe that a mashed new-born Flerbyd died for my gromps and would live forever in the interior of our pink sun. In short, I was an atheist in my system, on my home world, and nothing I've read of the religions on this planet Earth has led me to change my basic viewpoint concerning religion which I consider to be instinctual mechanisms for basic social control of sentient creatures of a relatively low level. "That's cynical, Alter." Ah, Geis. When will you leam that your genes are clever little beasties who have structured you humans for the purpose of continuing themselves through eternity? Your human "need" for religions and rules and laws and morals is nothing but your superior genes making sure their carriers survive to breed and raise the next generation of gene hosts. Gasp "You mean we are ruled by our genes? That there is a Gene Conspiracy?" Certainly. It's all so obvious. Read the next letter. "I will not! I've got to alert the world! We must rid ourselves of these parasites! We must stamp out our hidden, secret masters and be free!" Geis -- "I must be gene-free! How do I do it, Alter?" There is no way. Forget it. I shouldn't have mentioned it. Read the next' letter. "I can't forget it! I feel... unclean... used. I'm -- I'm crawling with genes!" That's the price you pay for life, Geis. You're a beast of burden. No way to avoid it. Now, read the next letter! "Alright, but once this column is over I've got a lot of thinking to do. There must be a way..." "Oh... ummm... This one is from James Dean Schofield, and Jim writes: 'Throwing books across the room, shocking! After reading "The Alien Viewpoint" in flabbergasted that one normally so efficient with his creative energies would so carelessly waste them. " 'Your point was well made, and using your examples I have discovered a quicker method of eliminating probable losers. Like all great ideas it is wonderful in its simplicity. Just set the unread book on the desk, open it and look at -- don't read -- the first paragraph. If it is longer than say, oh # words, push the book off the desk and into the waiting trash can. Go back now and look at your appropriate examples. Two of the good have first paragraphs of only one sentence and the third is completed in three short sentences.' " Ah, yes, Geis, the old short paragraph and short sentence test. Rarely misses. Want to test it now? "It's your column, Alter. I'm still itchy with my unwanted genes." Okay, let's grab a literary sf writer... How about Michael Bishop. Of the four novels of his on the shelves, A Little Knowledge, Beneath the Shattered Moons, And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees all start with paragraphs in excess of fifty words. And his other novel, Stolen Faces, has a short first paragraph, but a loo-ong second paragraph. Deep six this guy, eh, Schofield? Except A Little Knowledge is an interesting, if flawed, novel. No, I can't accept such a test, purely on a mechanical basis, for reading or not reading a given book. There are writers who can write a fascinating, gripping, powerful novel in which there is only one paragraph -- a # word unbroken paragraph. "Who, Alter? Name one!" Well... I think Ubik by Philip K. Dick, if it had been a single, run-on paragraph, would still have made such a tremendous impression on me. I can't think of any others off hand. "So what are you saying, Alter? That Jim Schofield is all wet?" Yes, I guess so. Put your brain in gear, Jim, when you look at those first paragraphs. You might be missing something. "You might add, Alter, that some of the worst books start with short sentences... like Delany's Dhalgren, for instance, and any number of hack novels written by hack writers who know two rules: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and keep-it-moving!" (Economics Quotient) True False   ( I .) When inflation occurs, each dollar we have buys more goods and services.   (#.) As productivity increases, our standard of living increases.   (#.) One out of five American workers belongs to a labor union. If you found these questions tough, your Economics Quotient, your E.Q., could probably stand some improvement. A special booklet on our American Economic System can help you do just that. It's fact-filled, easy readingand free. For your free copy, write "Economics',' Pueblo, Colorado #. The American Economic System We should oil learn more about it. AA A fxfck service message al  W  This Magazine  the Adwrtsng Couxi I  the US Depart mart of Commerce Yeah... a fight every fifteen pages -- or a sex scene, depending on the audience -- a handsome hero with a good, anglo-saxon name, and the forces of Good always win in the end just after it looks like they've lost it all for sure. "Formula." Yes, formula. But don't sneer at the formula, Geis. Writers have, writers are, and writers will make good livings from never, ever, deviating from one simple, timeless formula they learned and used over and over. Timetested formulas satisfy something deep in the human psyche, and stroking the human psyche is a road to riches. "But, Alter -- " No, never fault the formula, Geis. Fault the unimaginative, dreary, casual, dull, clumsy use of the formula by bad writers. There is, unfortunately, no lack of bad writers. And by bad I mean the merely competent. They don't have the knack, the talent, the flair. And too often those who do have a touch with words become spoiled brats and sink into solipsistic, selfconscious self-indulgences of style and technique. But -- writers are not usually rational people; they follow inner paths, inner rules... You should know that, Geis. Considering your talent and your compulsive misuse of it. "We are not here to do a psychiatric number on me, Alter." Terrifies you, doesn't it? I could lay bare your guts in one sentence, leaving you quivering, naked, a weeping hulk -- "I have a letter here from -- " Geis is afraid of -- " -- from Leonard L. Ballelli he asks why he either has to fork over eight to ten bucks for a hardcover sf book he wants to read, or wait months and months for a paperback edition to come out and sometimes a paperback edition doesn't come out and he wants to know why this is. Answer the question, Alter. Do -- failing, and he's an infant who resents taking orders, and he's a mass of conflicts and obsessions which cancel out often, and immobilize him. He makes unconscious bargains with God, is riddled with guilts, and punishes himself for evil thoughts and actions of infanthood and childhood and adolescence . He is a complicated, neurotic, moderately talented man who has settled on being a big frog in a small puddle. Tough titty, Geis. That answers the other question Jim Schofield asked and you tried to hide from me. Now about Leonard Ballelli's problem. Huh. Life is unfair, there is rarely any justice in this world, and there is no solution to his complaint. "I'll never forgive you for what you just did to me, Alter. Never." Just being my usual unflinchingly dishonest alien self, Geis. Trying to make a buck. Entertain the readers. Now, if I'd really told them the truth about you... Cringe Hate! "Someday I'll get you! I'll tear your tendrils off! I'll disembrellit you! I'll fry your soul in soy sauce and -- " Sure, sure. There's another letter there to deal with, Geis. Read. Choke "It's from... from Michael Nowak. He would love to see your opinion of the definitive wotk(s) and why they deserve the definitive label in the following categories: #. Religious theme treated in novel and short story #. First contact treated in novel and short story #. Space opera treated in novel and short story #. Sociological prediction #. Post-holocaust world #. Robots #. Pure "hard" fiction #. Pure fantasy. "Well, Alter? How do you answer? Speak! You asked for this sort of thing." I don't read and remember sf and fantasy by sub-category. And besides that, I haven't read all the sf and fantasy published, nor will I ever do so. And furthermore, superior stories and novels often don't lend themselves to easy cubbyholing by type. In short, I have no intention of even trying to answer or fulfill that list. It's a dumb question. Don't do it again, Mike. And even if I took the list seriously, I would have to say that the definitive work in each category has yet to be written. Any more letters, Geis? "One came in just this morning. From Alan Luck. Who asks if there ever will be published descriptions of a spaceman or spacewoman who is homy? And will a publisher ever print the descriptions of their adventures in as much graphic detail as they spend on ships' interiors and equipment and on descriptions of alien environments?" Yes, sometime or other a publisher, perhaps a small-press publisher, will publish sf and fantasy which does not soft-pedal the erotic and sexual side of people. But sex in fiction is difficult to handle. It tends to "take over" and distort pacing and emphasis and story. So what results is usually a sex novel with sf trappings, or sf with very brief, non-erotic recognitions that mankind is sexual on occasion. Too, sf has always been mostly a juvenile fiction, and editors and publishers were afraid to offend parents with graphic sexual bits and pieces, and often the young readers didn't like "romantic mush" in their escapist entertainment. Sex has been avoided in sf, too, because it detracts from the senseofwonder elements. Who wants to read about a spacegirl and a spaceboy making out in the space station for ten pages, when they could be struggling against weird aliens or something really exciting. Erotic sf and fantasy will more likely be found in the men's magazines where it's okay for an alien to try sex with an Earth woman -- or man. "Alter, we still live in an essentially puritan nation and world. Anti-sexual dogma lives on and on. Even the pornography of today is anti-erotic and concerned more with dominating and degrading women than portraying people enjoying lovemaking." True, Geis. The unstated rule now is: look, read, think, hear about sexual acts, if you must, but it's not nice to really enjoy sex. "Here...a short one by Michael Johnson asks: 'Is the human mind capable of conceptualizing a finely Alien thought? Or is it by definition impossible because any human thoughts would be of an earthly origin?" That's like asking if it's possible for a turkey to give birth to a lion. No way. The human mind is the product of its heredity and environment. It can only be what it is structured and programmed to be. That's why, if you read a lot of history, you'll see the same basic government forms, the same basic social structures, the same basic conflicts repeated over and over. The same cycles of fashion, of morality, or the State vs. the Individual. "But Alter, the influence of science and technology -- " Has allowed the stage upon which these age-old, repetitive dramas unfold to be imcreasingly worldwide, of ever greater consequence to ever-more people. In short, the mistakes of the rulers and the ruled which used to be confined to a city state can now wipe out a world. That's progress. Isn't that wonderful? "You're being sarcastic, Alter. Would you rather go back to outdoor plumbing, no medicine worthy of the name, and no electricity?" No...but that will come -- in about five hundred years. "Science will save us. Alter! Mankind will soar to the stars on wings of steel. We will colonize the Sevagram. We will -- " Never get off the ground. Energy and labor will cost too much, and the priorities will be to the poor downtrodden masses who must be fed and housed and amused because they vote and there are more of them than the space enthusiasts. Unless a cheap power source comes along quick -- like the long-awaited fusion technology that will generate a GoldenAge of riches, or some kind of efficient anti-gravity -- the vaunted future of Mankind will be increasingly dirty, mean, and brutish. "Wow, Alter, are you ever the optimist!" True. A pessimist would be predicting an atomic war within twenty years. "To get back to Michael Johnson, who must be sorry he asked his question by now, you're saying humans can only think human because of inherent structural limits -- the brain is already thinking its full range of thoughts -- " Yeah. And new information is limited to the brain's ability to absorb and utilize. That's why science fiction writers have so much trouble portraying aliens -- the aliens have to be comprehensible to the readers, thus the aliens must in some degree act and think and communicate like humans. Otherwise -- no story that uses aliens except as totally incomprehensible creatures. "What would happen if we humans did come into contact with real alien aliens?" We'd probably try to understand their behavior in human referents. We'd give them human motives. We'd create a different, "understandable" alien in our minds and try to deal with the real aliens using that model. We'd be fooled, "double-crossed" and etc. because the "treacherous" creatures didn't act like they "should". Look how much trouble this country had with the "aliens" in Vietnam. Real aliens would be a wipeout. Xenophobia -- probably strongly instinctual -- would impell us to kill every alien that threatened us. A large group of aliens would send the entire human race into a terrified "We manage to suffer your existence pretty well, Alter." Let's not play games, Geis. I am an Alter-Ego who is clothed for sf fun's sake in an alien cover. I am an aspect of your personality and character...and you're an oddball to begin with, by conventional standards and norms. Hence we are here and not selling hardware at Sears. Do you have another question? "I have a dozen questions and topics sent in by the readers, Alter. But we have no room to embark upon another at this point in the column." Christ, are you getting pompous! Let me have that folder! Grumph haw This is a good one... Here! Let's print this one from Ronald E. Jackowski. "Agreed. Ronald writes: 'Your column in the DecJan # that were "grabbers." Here are some of my favorite "grabber" openings: The Bishop of Rome, the head of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth -- the Pope -- brushed a cockroach from the filthencrusted wooden table, took An informal  irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Geis Cover by Stephen Fabian. Issue ## features interviews with Poul Anderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George Scithers (Editor of Asimov's SF Mag.). Book reviews by Larry Niven. "Flying Saucers  The Stymie Factor" by Ray Palmer. "Reports From Alternate Earth ##" by A. L. Terego. (An R-Rated sf Novel) by Richard E. Geis. Illustrated by Stephen Fabian. "Alien Thoughts" -- The Editor's Diary with letters from readers, fans, and professionals with Commentary. Quarterlysample I year #two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I another sip of the raw red wine, and resumed his discourse. -- "The Quest for St. Aguin" by Anthony Boucher 'And how about this: A man in Des Moines kicked his wife when her back was turned. She was taken to the hospital, suffering from a broken coccyx. So was he. -- "Rule Golden" by Damon Knight 'And here's what is probably one of the most grabbing grabbers in all of science fiction and fantasy: Pa's nose fell off at breakfast. It fell right into Ma's coffee and displaced it. Prunella's wheeze blew out the gut lamp. -- "Tis the Season to Be Jelly" by Richard Matheson 'I hope you enjoyed these openings as much as I did. 'By the way, Geis and Alter, have you noticed that the first three letters of your names (G eis, AL ter) form the first three letters of Geis, is he putting us on? "Of course not. Alter. Except that to be significant, the first letters of our full names should be used. Thus: #? chard E. GE is and ALtei That has significance? "Of course, Alter! Spelled backthose letters are given a numerical value from an obscure numerology formula, it comes to a sum of #." That has significance? "Of course, Alter! That is the sum total of the wealth of the entire Rockefeller family as of # PM, February #th, #, and it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that David Rockefeller is the Secret Master of the World and that in exactly # days the Saucer people will come from the sky and set up a utopian civilization in southwest Colorado, with Robert Anton Wilson as King (provided he has the time)." Dear Ghod, I'm inhabiting the brain of a madman! "All great Seers are thought mad, Alter." You have flipped out. You have gone bonkers. "Just because I have revealed to the world my true, most secret, cherished convictions -- " I'll have to disconnect you, Geis, and give your lobe a chance to heal. I only hope you're well by the time we write this column again. sane as y -- I'm as sane as...um...emm...ummm...well any sane person." So long, Geis. Have a good rest. "Alter, you can't disconnect me! I'm the prime Self! I'm the -- " Glurk! Sorry, J.J., and all you readers. Geis has been under a great strain lately... I'll connect his lobe next time and we'll see what a good rest has done for him. Thank you for your understanding. Keep sending in those cards and letters to: land, OR #I I .  Send check or money order to: C.I. Grant, # Center Grove Road, H-#, Dept. G. Dover, N.J. #. wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-# St. Paul, Mn. #. #. PM-SF, # Pine St., Des Plaines, #. # Large catalog. Books, magazines. Three stamps. Marx, # #th Lubbock, Tex., for #-page catalog. 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Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility tor unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are Action and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In U.SJ. It wasn't the average human's idea of Paradise. But then, Eden is in the eye of the beholder -- and so is the Serpent! I went to Sofia, he did not know it for the first stage in a much longer journey, nor that he would meet some of his future companions. He had never heard of that larger destination, which bore the unattractive name of N-OA Bes-bes Geminorum #, or, for that matter, of the people. Their names were Nan Dimitrova and Captain Marge Menninger. The occasion was the Tenth General Assembly of the World Conference on Exobiology, and the time was not in any way bad for any of them. It was a springtime season, and for a moment there all the world seemed to be building into sweet and friendly life. There were three thousand people in the Great Hall of Culture and Science for the opening session, so many of them political that the five or six hundred scientists who were actively involved had trouble finding seats. Even the translators were doubled up in their booths. Handsome, hoary old Carl Sagan delivered the opening invocation, looking like a spry octogenarian instead of whatever incredible age he really was. He was already wheeling forward to the rostrum as Dan Dalehouse squeezed into a seat at the back of the hall. Dalehouse had never been in Bulgaria before. He had been drawn to the sunny parks, and promised himself a look at the museum of centuries-old ikons under St. Stephan's Cathedral, a few blocks away. But he didn't want to miss Sagan, and the first plenary session was a tutorial on tactran reports. Some of the stuff he had never heard before. ITiat was probably Sagan's work, he thought. Even as honorary Joint chairman, Sagan passed the whole program through his nonsense filter. What was left was sure to be worth hearing. Sagan spoke briefly, and cheeerfully, and rolled away to a standing ovation. Because the keynote speaker had been an American, the chairman of the tachyon-transmitter tutorial had to be from one of the other blocs. That was international etiquette. He was an Englishman, from Fred Hoyle's Cambridge group. A few of the dignitaries from the Fuel Bloc stayed to hear him out of group solidarity, but most of the other political people left as inconspicuously as they could, and Dalehouse was able to move up to a better seat on the center aisle. He settled himself to tolerate the chairman's opening remarks, lulled by the scent of flowers coming through the opening windows -- Bulgaria made even less use of air-conditioning than the United States. Since Food and Fuel had already been heard from, protocol required the next space go to People. So it was a Pakistani who read the first paper, entitled "Vital Signatures Reported from Bodies Orbiting Alpha Draconis, Procyon, #-Kappa Indi and Kung's Semi-Stellar Object." Dalehouse had been halfdrowsing, but as the title came through his earphones he sat up. "I never heard of some of those stars," he remarked to his neighbor. "Who is this guy?" She pointed to her program and the nameiDr. Ahmed Dullah, Zulkifar Ali Bhutto University, Hyderabad. As Dalehouse leaned over he discovered that the flower scent was not coming from the windows but from her, and he took a closer look. Blonde. A little plump, but with a solid, good natured, pretty face. Hard to tell the age, but maybe about the same as himself, which was mid-thirties. Since his divorce, Dalehouse had become more aware of the sexuality of woman colleagues and chance-met females in general, but also more wary. He smiled thanks and sank back to listen. The first part was not exciting. The reports on the probe to Alpha Draconis had already been published. He was not greatly interested to hear again about the photometric measurements that established the presence of photosynthetic "plant" life and a reducing atmosphere. There were plenty of planets like that around that had been scanned and reported by the tachyon probes with their cargoes of instruments -- the whole thing no bigger than a grapefruit, but miraculously capable of leaping interstellar distances in a week. The Pakistani seemed intent on repeating every word of every one of the reports, not failing to comment on the number of other reducing-atmosphere plets discovered, and the apparent generally low level of evolved life on them. The Procyon probe had lost its lock and the reports were at best ambiguous. Mercifully, Dullah did not dwell on the instrumentation. #-Kappa Indi sounded better -- an oxygen atmosphere, at least, although the temperature range was bad and the signatures were sketchy -- but the real prize was at the end. Kung's Semi-Stellar Object was not much more than a planet itself. As stars went it was tiny, barely big enough to fuse nuclei and radiate heat, but it had a planet that sounded like fun. Hot. Humid. Dense air, but about the right partial pressure of oxygen to be congenial for life -- including the life of a exploring human explorative party if anybody cared to spend the money to try it out. And the signatures were first-rate. Carbon dioxide. Traces, but only traces of methane. Good photometry. The only parameters missing were radio wavelengths: otherwise it would have sounded a lot like Miami Beach. The Pakistani then went on to explain how Kung's Star had been discovered by the big fixed radio dish at Nagchhu Dzong, in the Thanglha Hills, and that it had come about as a direct result of the wisdom and example of the late Chairman Mao. That was not in itself very interesting, except to the other members of the People Bloc, who were nodding grave concurrence, but the planet seemed pretty strange. The translation had trouble keeping up with the Pakistani, and it wasn't Dalehouse's area of special interest anyhow, but he made out that the part covered in the biotic study was only a part on one hemipshere. Funny! Nor was he the only one fascinated. He looked up at the bank of translators, each in their individual glass cages, . like nailclippers and pocket combs behind the windows of a vending machine. Each booth had its draped scarlet curtains tied back with a gold sash, very Slavic and incongruous, and behind them the translators looked like atronauts in their solid-state communications helmets. One of them was a young girl with a sweet, plain face, beaming forward to stare at the speaker with an expression of either incredulity or rapture. Her lips weren't moving; she seemed to be too entranced to function. Dalehouse borrowed a pencil from the woman next to him and made a note in the margin of his program: Invstgt Kungs Star, posbl survey grant. It was the first time he had ever heard of it. What can be said of someone like Danny Dalehouse? Grammar school, high school, college, graduate school; he got his Pretty Heavy Diploma at twenty-six, and jobs were scarce. He managed to teach Freshman Biology for a year, then a year on a grant in Tbilisi, and better than another year of post-doctoral studies, so that he was past thirty before he caught on at Michigan State's new exobiology department. The marriage that had survived a year of living on cheese and white wine in Soviet Georgia began to dissolve in East Lansing. He was medium height, viewed charitably -- about one-seventy in his shoes -- and slim. He wasn't particularly handsome, either, at he was was smart. He was smart enough so that in three years at Michigan State he had made himself one of the Food Bloc's two experts in reading the telemetry from a tachyon-transmitter probe and translating it into a good guess at how much life the signatures represented, and even what kinds of life. Then he was smart enough to figure out that a telemetry interpreter who got to be nationly known for his skill was going to look too valuable where he was to be risked on a manned expedition to one of those fascinating, remote worlds. So he tapered off on the interpretation and resharpened his skills at mountain-climbing, sailplaning and long-distance running. You never knew what kind of athletic quality you might need, if you were ever lucky enough to be one of the few score people each year who got tossed to another star. Being divorced was probably a plus quality. A man without much home life would be judged better able to concentrate on the job than someone mooning over wife and kids fifty light-years away. Dalehouse hadn't wanted Polly to leave. But when she did pack up and go, he was quick to see that the divorce wasn't all bad. That night in the Aperitif Bar he ran into the blonde again. He had gone to listen in on the headliner's news conference, but the crowd at that end of the bar was pretty thick, and most of thenr seemed to be actual reporters whom he didn't feel justified in shoving aside. Between their heads and cameras he caught glimpses of Sagan and Iosif Shklovski sitting together in their life-support chairs at one end of the narrow room, having their pictures taken, and passing smiling comments and an oxygen mask back and forth to each other. They rolled away toward the elevators, and most of the crowd followed them. Dalehouse stoped for a drink and looked around the bar. The blonde was drinking Scotch with two small, dark, smiling men -- no, he realized; she was drinking Scotch, but they were drinking orange juice. The men got up and said good night while he was looking for a place to sit down, and he perceived the opportunity. "Mind if I join you? I'm Danny Dalehouse, Michigan State." "Marge Menninger," she said, and she didn't mind his joining her at all. She didn't mind letting him buy her another Scotch, and she didn't mind buying him one back, and she didn't mind going out for a stroll under the fat Bulgarian spring moon, and she didn't mind going to his room to open his bottle of Bulgarian wine; and altogether, the day when Danny Dalehouse first heard of Kung's Star was a very successful and pleasurable day for him. The next day, not quite so good. It began well enough, in the early dawn. They woke in each other's arms and made love again without changing position. It was too early to get anything to eat, so they shared the last of the bottle of wine as they showered and dressed. Then they decided to go for a walk. It had rained a little during the night. The streets were wet. But the air was warm and in the lovely rose glow of the sunrise, the MariaTheresa-yellow buildings were warm peach and friendly. "The next thing I want to do," said Dalehouse expansively, slipping an arm around Margie's waist, "is take a look at Kung's Star." Marge looked at him with a different kind of interest. "You've got funding for that? ' ' "Well -- "coming down -- "no. four tactrans last year, but we've never had a grant for a manned probe. " She butted her head against his shoulder. "You're more of an operator than you look." "What?" "You don't come on real strong, Danny Boy, but you know what you're doing every minute, don't you? Like last night. Those two Ay-rabs weren't getting anywhere trying to put the make on me. Then you just eased right in." "I'm not sure I know what we're talking about. " "No?" "No, not really." But she didn't seem about to clarify it, so he went back to what really interested him. "That planet sounds pretty great, Margie. Maybe even industry! Did you get that part? Traces of carbon monoxide and ozone." She objected thoughtfully, "There were no radio signals." "No. Doesn't prove anything. They wouldn't have heard any radio signals from Earth two hundred years ago, but there was a civilization there." She pursed her lips but didn't answer. It occurred to him that something was troubling her, perhaps some female thing of the sort that he had never considered himself very good at comprehending. He looked around for something to cheer her up and said, "Hey, look at those fellows. " They were strolling past the Dimitrov Mausoleum. In spite of the hours, in spite of the fact that there was no other human being in sight, the two honor guards stood absolutely immobile in their antic musical-comedy uniforms, not even the tips of the long curled feathers on their helmets quivering. Margie glanced but, whatever was on her mind, sightseeing was not part of it. "It would be at least a two-year hitch." She said. "Would you really want to go?" "I, uh, I think I'd miss you, Margie," he said, misinterpreting her point. Impatiently, "Ah, no crap. If you had the funding, would you go?" "Try me." "That Pak was so flaming pleased with himself. He's probably got it all lined up with Heir-of-Mao for the Peeps to send a manned probe there already. " "Well, that's fine with me, too. I don't want to go for political reasons. I don't care what country meets the first civilized aliens; I just want to be there." "I care," she said. She slipped free of him to light a cigarette. Dalehouse stopped and watched her cup her hands around the lighter to shield it from the gentle morning breeze. They had had a good deal to drink and not very much sleep. He could feel a certain interior frailty from the consequences, but Marge Menninger seemed unaffected. This was the first time he had gone to bed with a girl without exchange of several chapters of autobiography. He didn't know her at all in his mind, only through his senses. The other thing in Dalehouse 's thoughts was that in the #AM session he had a paper to give -- "Preliminary Studies toward a First Contact with Subtechnological Sentients" -- and he wanted enough time to add some comments about the planet of Kung's Star. He sneaked a glance at his watch: #:#, plenty of time. The city was still quiet. Somewhere out of sight he could hear the first tram of the morning. Far down the street they were walking on he could see two city gendarmes, strolling hand in hand, their batons swinging from the outside hands of each. Nothing else seemed to be happening in Sofia. It made him think of his own home in East Lansing at that same promising time of the day and year, when the University was running at half-speed for the summer sessions and on decent mornings Dalehouse walked or hiked to his office to enjoy the peace. And, of course, to get out of his empty house. To be sure, he reminded himself, Sofia was not in the least like East Lansing; flat and urban, where his home was hilly and carpeted with solid quarter-acre split-levels. And Marge Menninger was not in the least like absent Polly, who had been dark, tiny, quick, and easily bored. What exactly was Marge Menninger like? Dalehouse had not quite made up his mind. She seemed to be different people. Yesterday in the Great Hall of Culture and Science she had been another academic colleague, last night exactly what every all-American boy would like to find in his bed. But who was she this morning? They weren't strolling with their arms around each other's waists any more. Marge was a meter away and a little ahead of him, moving briskly, smoking with intensity and staring straight ahead. She seemed to reach a decision, and glanced at him. "Michigan State University, Institute of ExtraSolar Biology. Daniel Dalehouse, B.A., M.Sc., Ph.D. I guess I didn't tell you that I saw a preprint of your paper before I left Washington." "You did?" He was startled, not only at the statement but at her knowing his credits. "Interesting paper, makes me think you're serious about wanting to go. Danny boy, I might be able to help you." "Help me how?" "With money, dear man. That's all I've got to give. But I think I can give some to you. In case you didn't notice my name tag when you were taking my clothes off, that's what I do for a living. I'm with "Praise Com from whom all blessings flow," Danny said fervently; it was the annual grants from the Space Exploration, Research and Development Commission that kept Dalehouse's Institute green. "How come I've never seen you when I go to Washington with my begging bowl?" "I've only been there since February. I'm Vice-Secretary for New Projects. Job didn't exist till the first of the year, and I wangled it. Before then I was teaching the stuff at my alma mater...among other subjects; we didn't have much of an extra-solar department. It's a small school, and it fell on hard times even while I was still an undergraduate. Well? What about it?" "About what?" "Were you dreaming? Or do you want a grant for a manned trip to Kung's Star?" "I do! Christ, yes I do, I do." She took his hand in one of hers, patted it with the other. "You may regard it as settled. Hello, what's this?" "But -- " "I said settled." She was no longer looking at him, something had caught her attention. They had come to a large park, and off to their right was a mall leading up to a monument. Flanking the entrance to the mall were two heroic groups of bronze statuary. Dalehouse followed her toward them, feeling dazed as well as hung over; it had not sunk in yet. "I suppose I ought to submit a proposal," he said tentatively. "You bet. Send me a draft first before you put it through channels." She was examining the bronzes. "Will you look at this stuff I ' ' Dalehouse inspected them without interest. "It's a war memorial," he said. "Soldiers and peasants." "Sure, but it isn't that old. That's a tommy-gun that soldier is holding...and there's one on a motor bike. And, look, some of the soldiers are women." She bent down and inspected the prehension. "Damn. Don't know what it says. But it's the workers and peasants welcoming liberators, right? It has to be the last o( the Big Ones -- World War Two. Let's see, this is Bulgaria, so that must be the Red Army chasing the Germans out and all the Bulgarians bringing them flowers and hearty fraternal-solidarity handshakes and glasses of clear spring water. Wow. Jesus, Danny, both my grandfathers fought in this war, and one grandmother. Two on one side, one on the other. ' ' Dalehouse looked at her with amusement and fondness, if not full comprehension; it was strange to find anyone who took such an interest in actual footslogging fighting these days, when everyone knew that war was simply priced out of the market for any nation that wanted to survive. "What about your other grandmother? Some kind of slacker?" She looked up at him for a moment. "She died in the. bombings," she said. "Hey, this is fun." The bronzes were certainly military enough for'any war fan. Every figure was expressing courage, joy and resolution in maximum socialist-realist style. They had been sculptured to fit in four-square oblong blocks, with all the figures fitted into each other to conform; they looked a lot like a box of frozen sardines writhing around each other. Margie's interest in the sculpture was itself attracting interest, Dalehouse saw; the gendarmes had reached the end of their beat and were passing nearby on the return, watching benignly. "What's so much fun about soldiers?" he asked. "They're my trade, dear Dan. Didn't you know? Marjorie Maude West Point, or late of the practically late West Point, as I sometimes say. You should see me in uniform." She lighted another cigarette, and when she passed it to him for a drag he realized they had not been tobacco. She held the smoke, then exhaled it in a long plume. "Ah, those were the days," she said dreamily, gazing at the bronzes. "Look at that grunt holding the baby up in the air. Know what he's saying to the other soldier? 'Go ahead, Ivan, I'll hold the kid while you rape her mommy. Then you hold the kid and it's my turn.' " Dalehouse laughed. Encouraged, Margie went on; "And that young boy is saying, 'Hey, glorious Red Army soldier, you like my sister? Chocolate? Russki cigaretti?' And the the woman, she's saying, 'So Comrade! Stealing agricultural produce from the people's parks! Make no mistake about it, it's a long time in the camps for you!' 'Course, by the time the Soviets got here the Germans were finished anyhow, but -- " "Margie," he said. " -- still it must have been pretty exciting -- " "Hey, Margie! Let's move on," he said uneasily. He had suddenly realized that the gendarmes were no longer smiling, and remembered, a little late, that all the municipal police had been given language lessons for the conference. II What one could say about Ana Dimitrova was hardly necessary to spell out, because it was apparent on first meeting: she was a sweet, cheerful girl with a capacity for love. Sometimes she had the grinding tension headaches that were typical of the people whose corpus callosum had been cut through, and then she was disoriented, irritable, sometimes almost sick w'ith pain. But she excused herself and bore them in private whenever she could. An hour earlier she woke up, as she had planned, and stole into the kitchen to make tea with her own hands. No powdered trash for Ahmed! When she brought it in to him he opened these heartbreaking long lashes and smiled at her, crinkling the dark brown eyes. "You are too good to me, Nah," he said in Urdu. She set the cup down beside him and bent to touch his cheek with hers. Ahmed did not believe in kissing, except under circumstances which, while she found them enjoyable and desirable, were not included in her present plans. "Let's get dressed quickly," she proposed. "I want to show you my good monster." "Monster?" "You'll see." She escaped his grasp and retreated to the shower, where she let the hot water beat on her temples for a long time. The solidstate helmets often brought on the headaches, and she did not want one today. Later, while she was drying her long brown hair, Ahmed came in silently and ran his fingers along the narrow scar in her scalp. "Dear Nah," he said, "so much trouble to go to to learn Urdu. I learned it for nothing." She leaned against him for a moment, then wrapped the towel around herself and scolded, gently, "There is no time for this if we are going to see my monster in the dawn light. Also it was not to learn languages that I had my brain split. It was only to be able to translate them better. " "We would not do such a thing in Pakistan," he said, but she knew he was only being dear. Outside the bathroom door, listening to him squawk and grumble as the cold water hit him, Nah thought seriously about Ahned. She was a practical person. She was by material good for a principle or a feeling, but she preferred to know clearly what the stakes were. For her love game with Ahmed, the stakes were pretty high. Bulgaria, like the Soviet Union, was among the most People-tolerant of the food-exporting nations, but the lines of international politics were still clear. They would be able to see each other only seldom and with difficulty unless one or the other of them renounced citizenship. She knew that one would not be Ahmed. How deeply did she want to be involved with this dear Pakistani? Could she share a life in the crowded, slow cities of the People Bloc? She had seen them. They were charming enough. But a diet of mostly grain, a nearly total lack of personal machines, the inwardturning of the People Bloc minds -- were they what she wanted? Congenial to visit, pleasant and quaint for a day or a month...but the rest of her life? She dressed quickly without deciding the issue: one part of her mind was on what she was doing, the other on rehearsing her plans for that day's work at the conference; nothing was left for Ahmed. She made the bed while he was dressing, put away the washed dishes and glasses and almost tugged him out the door. The sky was bright pink, but the sun was just appearing; there was time if they hurried. She led him down the stairs, no waiting for the tiny cranked elevator, and out into the courtyd, then quickly away from the university to an intersection of two boulevards. She stopped and turned around. "There, see?" Ahmed squinted into the sunrise. "I see the cathedral," he grumbled. "Yes, that's it. And the monster? ' ' "Monster? Is it in the cathedral?" "It is the cathedral." "St. Stephan's is a monster?...Oh! Yes, I think I see. Those windows up high they are the eyes? And those windows lined up underneath. They are the teeth. "It's smiling at us, do you see? And there are the ears, and the nose." "Ahmed was not looking at the cathedral anymore, but at her. "You are such a strange girl. I wonder what sort of Pakistani you would make. " Nah caught her breath. "No! It's too much. Please don't talk like that." She took his arm. "Please, let's just walk." "I have not had any breakfast, Ana." "There's plenty of time." She guided him trough the small park to the University, and down toward the larger one. She laughed. "Have you forgiven me for translating you so badly into Bulgarian?" "i would not have known how bad it was, if you had not told me." "It was bad enough, Ahmed. I was looking at you when you were talking about this Kung's Star, and I forgot to translate." He glanced at her cautiously. "E)o you know," he said, "Heirof-Mao is personally interested in this planet. It was he who chose the name for the quasistellar object. He was there at the Observatory while it was discovered. I think -- ' "What do you think, Ahmed?" "I think exciting things will happen," he said obscurely. She laughed and lifted his hand to touch her cheek. "Aha," he said, and stopped in the middle of the boulevard. "Listen to me. It is not impossible, you know. Even if I were to be away for a time, after that, for you and me, it would not be impossible. "Please, dear Ahmed -- " "It is not impossible! I know," he said bitterly, oblivious of the fact that they were standing in the middle of the road, "that Pakistan is a poor country. We do not have food to export, like you and the Americans, and we do not have oil like the Middle Eastern States and the English. So we join with the countries that are left. " "I respect Pakistan very much." "You were a child when you were there," he said severely. "But all the same it is not impossible to be happy, even in the People Bloc." A trolleybus was coming, three cars long and almost silent on its rubber-tired wheels. Nah tugged him out of the way, glad for the chance to change the subject. The difficulty with international conferences, she thought, was that you met political opponents and sometimes they did not seem like opponents. She had not meant this involvement with someone from the other side. She certainly did not want its inconvenience and pain. She knew what the stakes were. As a translator with four fully mastered languages and half a dozen partials, she had been all over the world -- largely within the Food Bloc, to be sure, but even so that included Moscow and Kansas City and Rio and Ottawa. She had met defectors from the other sides. There had been a Welsh girl in Sydney; there were two or three Japanese on the faculty of the University, her own neighbors in Sofia. They always tried desperately to belong, but they were always different. Both the morning and Ahmed were too beautiful for such unhappy thoughts. That part of her mind which daydreamed and worried went from worry to daydream; the other part of her mind, the perceiving and interpreting part, had been following some events across the boulevard, and now commanded her attention. "Look," she said, clutching at an excuse to divert Ahmed's single track of attention, "what is that going on over there?" It was on the Liberation Mall. The blonde woman she had seen at one of the receptions was having an argument with two militiamen. One had her by the arm. The other was fingering his stun-stick and talking severely to another man, a youngish professorial type, also from the conference. Ahmed said, uninterested, "Americans and Bulgarians. Let the fats settle their problems between themselves. " "No, really!" Nah insisted. "I must see if I can help. " But in the long run all that Nah Dimitrova succeeded in accomplishing was to get herself arrested too. It was the American woman's fault. Even an American should have known better that to make chauvinist-filth jokes about the Red Army within the hearing of the police of the capital of the most Russophile of nations. If she hadn't known that much, at least she should have known better than to insist on her treaty right to have the American Ambassador informed of the incident. Up to that point, the militiamen were only looking for a convenient point at which to finish reprimanding the culprits and stroll away. After that, it was a matter with international repercussions. The only good thing about it was that Ahmed didn't get involved. Nah sent him away. He left willingly enough, even amused. The rest of them, the two Americans and Nah herself, all got taken to the People's Palace of Justice. Because it was a Sunday morning, they had to sit for hours on bare wood benches in an interrogation room until a magistrate could be found. No one used the room to interrogate them. No one would have minded in the least, Nah was sure, if they had accepted the invitation of the open door and slipped silently away. But she did not want to do that by herself. The Americhance, the woman because she appeared to think some sort of principle was involved, the man evidently because the woman was involved. She eyed them with displeasure, especially the bleached blonde, at least five kilos too well fed, even for the Food Bloc. You cannot choose your allies, she thought. The man seemed to be all right. Not too fastidious about whom he indulged his sexual pranks with. Still, as the time passed, and the militiamen brought them croissants and strong tea, the confinement drew them together. They chatted cheerfully enough, until the People's Magistrate at last arrived, gpffly refused to hear any talk of treaties or Ambassadors, instructed them in future to use the common sense God had given them and the good manners dieir mothers had no doubt taught them and let them go. By then they had completely missed the # AM session of the conference. Almost as bad, they had missed the special lunches arranged for the delegates. As it was a Sunday morning in spring, every restaurant in Sofia was booked full with private wedding parties and none of them got any lunch at all. That was the first time the three of them met. The second was very much later, and very, very far away. Danny Dalehouse found that a colleague had read his paper for him. So missing the morning session turned out not to have been an utter disaster, and in fact looked like producing a hell of a big plus. Margie was bright enough to realize she'd been dumb, and ego-strong enough to admit it. However serious or otherwise Margie had been about the grant strolling down the boulevard, full of wine, pot and roses, now she was rueful enough to remember her promise. All the way home from the conference in the clamjet, Dalehouse sat with his notebook on his knee, drawing up a proposal, until it was time to go to his bunk. By dawn they were over white-and-brown Labrador, the jet moving more slowly through the cold night air. Dalehouse ate his breakfast alone, to scramble his eggs and pour his coffee, looking out at the clouds as the clamjet roller-coasted in and out of them, and wondering what the planet of Kung's Star would be like. Ill The day after Marge Menninger got back to her Washington office, she received Dalehouse 's preliminary written proposal. But she had already begun the process of getting it granted. She had left the conference early a rough and expensive ride but a fast one, back to her apartment in Houston. From there she had called the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Cultural Affairs. It was after office hours, but she got through with no trouble. Marge was on easy terms with the Deputy Undersecretary. She was his daughter. Once she had told him she'd had a pleasant trip she came right to the point; "Pappa, I need a grant for a manned interstellar flight." There was a short silence. Then he said, "Why?" Marge scratched under her navel, thinking of all the reasons she could have given. For the advancement of human knowledge? For the potential economic benefit of the United States and rest of the foodproducing world? For the sake of her promise to Danny Dalehouse? All of these were reasons which were important to her; but to her father she gave only the one major reason that prevailed: "Because if we don't do it the son-of-a-bitching Paks will." "By themselves?" Even three thousand kilometers away, she heard the skepticism. "The Chinese will put up the hard stuff. They're in it, too." "You know what it's going to cost." It wasn't a question; they both knew the answer. Even a tachtran message capsule cost a from one star system to another, and they weighed only a few kilos. What she had in mind was at least ten people with all their gear: she "A lot," she said, "but it's worth it. "Her father chuckled admiringly. "You've always been the most expensive of my children, Margie. How are you going to get it past the joint committee?" "I think I can. Let me worry about that, poppa." "Urn. Well, I'll help from this end. What do you want from me right now?" Marge hesitated. It was an open phone connection, and so she chose her words carefully. "I asked that Pak for a copy of his full report. Of course. I'm a little handicapped until I get my hands on it." "Of course," her father agreed. "Anything else?" "There's not much I can do until I see the full report." "I understand. Well. What else is new? How did you like our brave Bugarian allies?" She laughed. "I guess you know. I got arrested." "I only wonder it doesn't happen more often. Youre a terrible person, love. You didn't get it from my side of the family." "I'll tell Mom you said that," she promised, and hung up; and so by the time she was back in Washington and Dalehouse's proposal was on her desk she had already received, by a different route, a microfilmed copy of the Pakistani's entire report, already translated for her. She read them both over diligently, making notes. Then she pushed them away and leaned back in her chair thoughtfully. The son-of-a-bitching Pak had held back a lot. In his private report, three times as thick as the one he had read from in Sofia there was an inventory of major life forms. He hadn't mentioned that at all in Sofia. At least three species seemed to possess some sort of social organization; a kind of arthropod; a tunneling species, warm-blooded and soft-skinned; and an avian species -- no, not avian, she corrected herself. They spent most of their time in the air, but without having developed wings. They were balloonists, not birds. Three social species! At least one of them might well be intelligent enough to be civilized. That brought her back to Danny Dalehouse, his paper on first contact with sentient life forms at the sub-technological level, and his draft proposal. She looked again at the bottom line of the proposal and grinned. Young Danny didn't have any hangups about asking for what he wanted. The bottom line was sevenflected, was about the assessed valuation of Manhattan Island...the of the world's nations...about two months' worth of the United States fuel deficit in the balance of payments. It was a lot of money. She put the papers and her notes Then she began to get Danny Dalehouse what he wanted. There is a Jot to be said about Marge Menninger, and the most important thing is that she always knew what she wanted. She wanted a lot, and a lot of different things. Her motivations were clearly and hierarchically marked in her mind. The third or fourth thing down from the top was likely to be achieved. The second was a near certainty. But the one on top was ironbound and foolproof. A week later she had Dalehouse 's final proposal and an appointment to testify before the House-Senate Joint Committee on Space Development. She used the week to good purpose, first to tell Dalehouse (on the phone, and spelled out by facsimile immediately afterward) how to change his proposal to maximize its chances of approval, then to fill in the quite few gaps in her knowledge of what was required. To throw a transmitter capsule or a shipload of human beings from one star to another you first have to put them in orbit. Tachyon transportation itself is a model of technological elegance. Once you have elevated your capsule to its proper charge state it becomes obedient to tachyonic laws. It moves easily at faster-than-light speeds, covering interstellar distances to any point in the Galaxy in a matter of days. It uses surprisingly little energy in the process. The paradox of the tachyon is that it requires more energy to go slow than to go fast. Getting the capsule to the charge state is the hardest part. For that you need a rather bulky launch platform. The platform is expensive. More than that, it is heavy. Getting the platform into orbit is not elegant at all. It is brute force. A hundred kilograms of fuel have to bum for every gram launched in the tachyon state. Fuel is fuel. You can bum oil, or you can bum something you make by using oil to make it; say, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Either way, in excess of to bum to get ten people and minimum equipment on their way to Kung's Star. It wasn't just the dollar value. It was four supertankers full of fuel, all of which had to come from one of the fuel-exporting nations, which were showing signs of throwing their weight around again. The Quip-Three interbloc conferences on Quotas for imports and Prices were going badly for the food-exporting countries. If Marge didn't get the expedition well begun, with the necessary fuel tucked away in the big tank farms at Galveston or Bayonne, the increasing fuel prices would drive the costs well past even Danny Dalehouse 's figures. When all the figures were safely transferred from paper to the inside of her head. Marge locked her desk in the Washington office. She headed for Hearing Room #I in the old Rayburn Office Building, with the knowledge that her work was cut out for her. The obstacles might have deterred another person. Marge did True False   (I .) When inflation occurs, each dollar we have buys more goods and services.   (#.) As productivity increases, our standard of living increases.   (#.) One out of Five American workers belongs to a labor union. if you found these questions tough, your Economics Quotient, your E.Q., could probably stand some improvement. A special booklet on our American Economic System can help you do just that. It's fact-filled, easy reading and free. For your free copy, write "Economics Pueblo, Colorado # #. The American Economic System We should dl leorn more about it. A pubtr mesuge Ths Mogozne  Ihe Advertnng Gxnr  the US Oaporimari d Convr m ce not accept deterrence. Her disciplined mind dissected the immediate problem into its component parts, and she concentrated her attention on the attack for each. The problem with Joint Committee separated easily into four components: The Chairman, the Minority Leader, the Chief Counsel for the Committee, and Senator Lenz. She prepared her strategies for each. The Minority Leader was her father's friend, and could safely be left to him. The Chairman was ambitious to be President. He would be likely to make waves whenever he saw a chance for publicity. The way to deal with him was to keep a low profile, and to give him as little opportunity to take a campaign position as possible. After she was swom in and read her prepared statement, he was the first to question lier. The Chaij-man: Well, madam. I'm sure your motives are of the worthiest, but do you know how hard we're working here on the Hill to keep the deficit down? Captain Menninger: I certainly do, Mr. Senator. The Chairman: And yet you expect us to give you God knows project? That was promising! He hadn't said "this harebrained project" or "this preposterous extravagance." Captain Menninger: I don't "expect" it. Senator. I hope for it. I hope the Committee will approve the proposal, because in my judgment it is an investment that will be returned many-fold, for years and years to come. The Chairman: We can't spend the taxpayer's money on hopes. Captain Menninger: I know that and appreciate it. It isn't hope that I'm asking you to share. It's judgment. Not only mine, but the collective judgment of the best-informed experts in this area. The Chairman: Um. Well, there are many worthy claims based on very sound judgment. We can't grant all of them. Captain Menninger: Of course. Senator. I wouldn't be here if I weren't confident of your fairness and competence. The Chairman: Well, do any of my distinguished colleagues have questions for this witness? They did, but they were mostly perfunctory. The important people, like Senator Lenz and the Minority Leader, held back for another occasion; the minor members were principally concerned with getting their own positions on record. The Chief Counsel was a trickier problem. He was smart. He was also wholly dedicated to making his bosses look good by keeping the Joint Committee out of trouble. Margie's hope was to make saying yes look less troublesome than saying no. Mr.Gianpaolo: You spoke of returns on an investment. Do you mean actual cash, or some abstract kind of knowledge or virtue? Captain Menninger: Oh, both, Mr. Gianpaolo. Mr. Gianpaolo: Really, Ms. Menninger? Dollar returns? Captain Menninger: Based on prior experience and what is already known about this planet, yes. Definitely. Mr. Gianpaolo: Can you give us an idea of what these dollar returns will be? Captain Menninger: In broad terms, yes, Mr. Gianpaolo. The tachtran reports indicate valuable raw materials and the presence of intelligent life -- at least, a near certainty of the former, and strong possibility of the latter. Of course, these are only instrument reports. Mr. Gianpaolo: Which, as I understand, are subject to conflicting interpretations. Captain Menninger: Exactly, Mr. Gianpaolo, and that is why it is necessary to send a manned expedition out. The whole reason for the expedition is to find out what we can't find out in any other way. If we knew what it would find, we wouldn't have to send it. But there is a different kind of return that I think is even more important. I think of it as "leadership." Mr. Gianpaolo: Leadership? Captain Menninger: The whole free world of food-exporting nations looks to us for that leadership, Mr. Gianpaolo. I don't believe any of us wants to fail them. This opportunity that comes only once in a lifetime. I am here because I cannot in all conscience take the responsibility for losing it. It is in the final analysis, this Committee's burden to carry. Since nothing would be decided in open session. Marge was confident there would be time to make the members understand that the "burden" could best be unloaded by voting her the money. If Marge Menninger had had her druthers, the testifying would have stopped there. But Gianpaolo was orchestrating the event. He was too wise to end on the note she preferred. He blunted her dramatic impact by dragging out from her a long series of technical data -- "Yes, Mr. Gianpaolo, I understand that the planet's surface gravity is point seven six that of Earth, and its atmospheric pressure about thirty per cent higher. But the oxygen level is about the same." He read her quotes about the "semi-greenhouse effect" and asked her what was meant by someone's remarks about "the inexhaustible reserve of outgassing from the cold side, as interior heat boils out volatiles." He got her, and himself, into a long complication about whether the designation of the star they were talking about was really Bes-bes Geminorum # or Bes-bes Geminorum # according to the apparently both were given, because some typist made a mistake -- until the chairman got restive. Then, satisfied that the audience was more than half asleep, he called for a ten-minute recess and returned to the attack. Mr. Gianpaolo: Captain Menninger, I'm sure you know what it cost to launch a tachyontransmitted space vessel. First -- Capt. Menninger: Yes, sir, I believe I do. Mr. Gianpaolo: First there is the immense expense of the launching vehicle itself. The costs for that alone, I believe, are in the lars. Capt. Menninger: Yes, sir. But, as the Vice President announced in his message to the Tenth General Assembly of the World Conference on Exobiology, we already have such a launch vehicle. It can be used for a large number of missions. Mr. Gianpaolo: But, as the Vice President aJso announced, the time of that vehicle is fully booked. Prelaunch aiming time is as much as thirty days. Capt. Menninger: Yes, sir. Mr. Gianpaolo: But your schedule calls for a launch to this -- what is the name of it? Capt. Menninger: It has been referred to as "Son of Kung," sir, but that name is not official. Mr. Gianpaolo: I hope not. You want a launch every ten days? Capt. Menninger: Yes, sir. Essential backup. Mr. Gianpaolo: Which means cancelling the mining survey mission to Procyon IV. I am sure you know that this planet has been identified as having a very dense core, with therefore a good K)tential for supplies of uranium and other fissiles for our power plants. The British had sent that probe out. Meticulously they had announced that under existing international agreements they were making the telemetry public. That was all public knowledge. Gianpaolo was just getting it on the record. Capt. Menninger: Yes, sir. Of course, that works out as a very marginal operation, considering the investment necessary to mine and refine uranium, and to ship it to us back here. The Bes-bes Geminorum planet has much more potential -- as I have already testified. Mr. Gianpaolo: Yes, Captain Menninger, you have made us aware of your opinions. And that was all hogwash. What the British had not announced, but what both Marge and Gianpaolo knew from previous briefing, was that British scintillation counters had found no ionizing radiation to speak of in Procyon Four's rather unpleasant atmosphere. Uranium there might be, but if so it was thousands of meters deep. Marge was getting on the record too, although this particular record was private. By the time she was through testifying she was satisfied that things were moving in the right direction. Remained the problem of Senator Lenz. He had far more muscle in the Committee, and in the Senate generally, than anyone else. Even the Chairman. He had to be dealt with individually and privately, and Marge had plans for that. She booked her return to Houston the long way around, by way of Denver. Her father drove her to Dulles Airport in his own car. Well, actually it wasn't his own. It belonged to a government agency. So did Godfrey Menninger, when you came right down to it. The car was both a perquisite of rank and an indispensable necessity in what he did for the agency; twice a day, other employees of the agency went over it with electronic sniffers and radio probes to make sure it had been neither bombed nor bugged. God Menninger told his daughter, "You did pretty well at the hearing." "Thanks, poppa. And thanks for that Pak's report." "Had what you wanted in it?" "Yep. Will you talk to the Minority Leader for me?" "Already have, honey." "And?" "Oh, he's all right. If you get past Gus Lenz, I think you've got the committee taken care of. He didn't say much at the hearing." "I didn't expect him to." Her father waited, but as Marge did not go on he did not pursue the question. He said, "There's a follow-up on your Pakistani friend. He's at some kind of a meeting at K'ushui, along with some pretty high-powered people." "K'ushui? What the hell is K'ushui?" "Well," said her father, "I kind of wish I could give you a better answer than I know. It's a place in Sinkiang Privince. We haven't had, uh, very full reports yet. But it's not far from Lop Nor, and not too far from the big radio dish, and Hair-of-Mao's been there five or six times in the past year." "It sounds as though they're going to move." "I would say so. I plugged in your estimates, and the best interpretation is that Heir-of Mao's starting to do what you want us to do." "Shit!" "Not to worry," said her father. "I told that the Minority Leader, in strictest confidence. And I have no doubt he'll tell Gianpaolo. So it'll work for you, you know." "I wanted to be first!" "First doesn't always pick up the marbles, honey. How many people discovered America before the English put it in their pocket? Anyway, tell me what's so interesting about this planet." Margie looked out at the high-rise apartments in the Virginia suburbs, ziggurats climbing away from the south exposure with the black-onblack textured squares of their solar heating panels. "It was all in Ahmed Dullah's report, poppa." "I didn't read it. " "Pity. Well, there's a little star with a lot of crummy little planets and one big one. About the size of the Earth. Gravity's a little lighter. Air's a little denser. It's a lot of real estate, poppa. And it reeks of life." "We've found life before." "Mosses and jellyfish! Crystal Things that you can call alive if you want to. This is different. This is a biota as varied as our own, maybe. Maybe even a civilization. The planet's interesting in another way, too. It doesn't rotate, I mean relative to its primary -- like the Moon doesn't rotate relative to the Earth. So the lit side of it has a sun in the sky all the time -- " Her father listened comfortably, scratching his abdomen Just below the navel, while his daughter went on about the planet. When she paused for breath, he said "Wait a minute, honey." He leaned forward to turn on the radio; even in a routinely debugged car God Menninger didn't take chances. Over the twang of synthetic guitars he said, "There's something else you ought to know. The fuel countries are talking among themselves about a sixty per cent price rise. " "Jesus, poppa! I'll never drink another shot of Scotch!" "No, it's not the British this time. It's the Chinese, funnily enough. " "But they're people-exporters!" "They're anything-they-like exporters," her father corrected. "The only reason they're in the People Bloc is that they can swing more weight there. Heir-of-Mao plays his own game. This time he slipped the word to the Greasies that China was going to raiseits own prices unilaterally, whatever the bloc votes to do. So that was all the hard-liners in Caracas and Edinburgh needed. The Saudis were for it, of course. They want to stretch out what oil they've got left. And the Indonesians and the rest of the little ones just have to go along with the big boys." He paused, thoughtfully. "So your coming along with a chit little complicated right now." "I see that, poppa. What are we going to do? I don't mean about my project, I mean the country." "What we are not going to do," he said grimly, "is raise grain prices. We can't. Heir-of-Mao 's joker is that the price rise is for export sales only. He considers any sales inside the People Bloc as domestic. So he's selling cheap to the Peeps, and that means they're getting what they need for irrigation and fertilizer at bargain basement prices. If we raise the price we'll make it worth their while to stop importing in another three or four years. We could stand it in this country, maybe. But the Soviets, the Indochinese, the Bulgarians, the Brazilians and the rest of the Latins -- they couldn't handle it. Their economics would be wrecked. It would break up the bloc. No doubt that's what Heir-of-Mao has in mind. " He parked the car in the Dulles short-term lot. Before snapping off the radio he said, "It won't happen for a couple of months, I think. So you want to get your project on the ways as fast as you can." Marge slid out into the damp, hot Virginia evening air. The humped backs of boarding clamjets loomed over the parking lot hedge. They could hear the noise of two of them warming up, and the gentler rush of another taking off. Marge followed her father as he picked up her bag and started toward the terminal. "Poppa," she said, "can I tell the senator about, uh, that?" "Christ, no! Not that he doesn't probably know it already. But you aren't supposed to know." Surprisingly, she laughed. "Well, I was going to handle it a different way anyway. Hey, hold it, poppa. I'm not taking the Houston flight." "You're not?" "Uh-uh. I'm going home by a different route." Menninger kissed his daughter good-by at the check-in counter for the Denver clamjet. He watched her disappear into the gate tunnel with mingled admiration and rue. He had been thinking about asking just how she proposed to handle Senator Lenz, but he didn't have to. This was the flight Lenz would be on. Because it was a night flight, the jet sat there for twenty minutes of preheating before it could take off. The passengers had to be aboard, and the stews scurried up and down with ear-stoppers and sympathy. The best heat source there is is a jet turbine. The engines that would thrust the plane through the air in actual flight were now rotated inward, the shell-shaped baffles diverting the blast to pour countless shaped lifting section. Marge took advantage of the time to scrub her face, brush her hair, and change her makeup. She had seen the senator come aboard. She debated changing from her uniform into something more female and decided against it. Wasn't necessary. Wasn't advisable: it might look calculating, and Marge calculated carefully ways to avoid looking calculating. The full-energy roar of the warmup jets stopped, and everyone belted in for takeoff. That was a gentler sound. The clamjet bounced a few times and soared steeply up. As soon as they were at cruising altitude Marge left her cubicle and ordered a drink in the forward first-class lounge. In a couple of minutes Senator Lenz was standing over her, smiling. Adrian Lenz had two terms and two days seniority in the Senate; a friendly governor had appointed him to fill a forty-eight hour vacancy, just for the se of the extra rank it would give him over other senators elected the same year. Even so, he was not much over forty. He looked younger than that. He had been divorced twice. The Colorado voters laughed about their swinging senator's bad luck, but re-elected him without much fuss. He could have been chairman of his own committee. He had chosen instead to serve on committees that were of more interest -- and more visibility: one of these days "Gus" Lenz was f oing to be the President of the Jnited States, and everyone knew it. "Margie," he said, "I knew this was going to be a nice flight; until now I didn't know why." Margie patted the seat beside her. "You going to give me my sevenLenz laughed. "You don't waste time, Margie." "I don't have time to waste. The Peeps are going to go there if we don't. They're probably going to go anyhow. It's a race." He frowned and nodded toward the stewardess: slight, dark; she wore her United Air Lines uniform like a sari. When the drinks were served he said, "I listened to your testimony, Margie. It sounded good. I don't know if it sounded good. " "There was some material in the supplementary statement you might not have had a chance to read. Did you notice the part about the planet having its own sun?" "I'm not sure." "It's small, but not very far away. The thing mostly radiates in the lower wavelengths. There's not too much visible light. But a hell of a lot of heat. And the planet doesn't turn in relation to it, so it's always hanging there." "So?" "So energy. Senator. Solar power! Economical." "I don't understand exactly what you're saying. You mean this substellar thing is hotter than our sun?" "No, it's not nearly as hot. But it's a lot closer, so that's all right. The important thing is it doesn't move. What's the big problem with solar power here? The sun. It doesn't stay put. It wanders around, all over the sky, and half the time it's not in the sky at all because it's night here and so the sun's on the other side of the Earth. I mean: look at our ship here. We had to preheat for nearly half an hour to get the gas light enough to lift, because it's after dark. On the side of the planet' that faces its sun -- the only side that interests me, Gus -- it's never dark. " Lenz nodded and sipped his drink, waiting for more. "It's never dark. It's never winter. The sun stays put, so you don't have to make your Fresnel lenses movable. And almost as important, the weather isn't a problem. You know what the score is on our own solar-power installations. I Not counting clamjets in the daytime -- because they're up over the clouds a lot of the time -- we lose as much as twenty-five per cent working time because the clouds cut out the sunlight." Lenz looked puzzled. "This planet doesn't have any clouds?" "Oh, sure. But they don't matter. The radiation is almost all heat, and it punches right through the clouds! Figure it out. Here we lose half the solar-generating time to night. Another few per cent to dawn and dusk, because the sun's so low it doesn't yield much power. As much as sixty per cent additional for half the year because it's winter. And another twenty-five per cent to cloud-cover. Flit them all together and we're lucky to get ten per cent utilization. On this planet a cheaper installation can get damn near a hundred per cent." Lenz thought about that for a moment. "Sounds interesting," he said cautiously, and signaled for a refill. Margie left him to sort things out in his own mind. Sooner or later it would occur to him to ask what good energy some hundred light-years away was going to do the voters in the State of Colorado on Earth. She had an answer for that, too, but she was content to wait until he asked for it. But when he asked a question it caught her by surprise. "Margie? What've you got against the Paks?" "Paks? Why -- nothing, really." "You seem to take this Ahmed's competition pretty seriously." "Not on a personal level, Gus. I'm not crazy about Paks. But I've been on friendly terms with some. I had a Pak orderly when I was teaching at West Point. Nice kid. Kept my clothes ironed and never bothered me when I didn't want him around. " "That sounds like a nice appliance to own," Lenz observed. "Yeah, yeah. I take your point." She stopped to think. "That's not where it's at, though. I'm not against Ahmed because he's a Pak. I'm against the Paks because they're the other side. I can't help it, Senator. I root for my team." "Which is who, Margie? Just the Food Bloc? Just the United States? Maybe just the female commissioned officers of the U.S. Army?" She giggled confortably. "All of them, in that order," she agreed. "Margie," he said seriously, "we're just shooting the bull here over a couple of drinks. I don'i want to get too heavy. " "Why not, Gus? Order up a couple more drinks and let's get to it!" He obeyed. While they were coming he said, "You're a nice girl, Margie, but a little too bloody-minded. Pity you went to West Point. " "Wrong, Gus. The pity is that so few young Americans have the chance now." He shook his head. "I voted to phase down the service academics and cut the military budget." "I know you did. Worst vote you ever cast." "No. There was no choice. IVe can't afford war, Margie. Can't you understand that? Even Pakistan could blow us off the map! Not to mention the Chinese and the Turks and the Poles and the rest of the People Bloc. Not to mention the British, the Saudis, the Venezuelans. We can't afford to fight anybody, and nobody can afford to fight us. And everybody knows it. They're not our enemies -- " "But they're competing with us. Senator," said Captain Menninger, suddenly sitting up straighter and speaking with more precision. "Economically. Politically. Every other way. Remember Klausewitz: war is the logical extension of politics. I grant," she said quickly, "that we can't go that far. We don't want to blow up the planet. I know what you're saying. It's like that famous saying of, what was his name, the Russian cosmonaut? Years and years ago. Sevastianov, I think: 'When I was in space I saw how tiny the world was, and realized how important it was for all of us to learn to live together on it.' Well, sure, Gus. But learning to live together doesn't mean that some people can't live a little better than others. It's a fact of life! The Fuel people keep jumping their prices. And the People people keep demanding more money for their export workers, or else they'll keep them home, and what will we do for orderlies and airline stewardesses? And we compete back. Well, Gus, when I compete I compete hard. I play to win! This Kung's Star planet is something I want to win. I think there 're goodies on this planet. I want them for us. Us being defined as the Food Bloc, the United States, the State of Texas, the city of Houston and all the other subdivisons you named or want to name, including blonde ex-professors from West Point, if you like, in descending order or size of community. Whichever community you want to talk about, if it's mine, I want it to be first, best, and most successful! I think that's what they call patriotism. Senator. I really doubt that you want to knock it." He looked at her thoughtfully over the new drinks, and raised his. "To you, Margie. You really are some kind of iron-pants." She laughed. "All right," she said, softening. "I'll drink to that. Now what about my bill?" Lenz finished his drink and put it down. "For better or worse we're part of an economic community, and that's a fact of life for you, Captain Margie Menninger. You can't sell this to me as a United States venture. You might as a cooperative deal for the Food Bloc." "Gripes, Gus! We'd still be paying for the whole thing!" "Maybe ninety per cent of it, yes." "Then why not do it all, and take it all?" "Because," he said patiently, "I won't vote for that. So?" Margie was silent for a moment, considering her priorities. She shrugged. "So all right," she said. "I don't mind if we include a few token gooks. Maybe two or three Canadians. A Brazilian. Maybe even a Bulgarian. In fact, there was a Bulgarian at the convention -- " She stopped herself. In midsentence it had occured to her that in some sense she owed that Nah whatever-it-was-ova a sort of a favor; but it had occured to her in the same instant that the Bulgarian girl had been excessively close to the very Pak she was most worried about. "No," she said, "on second thought I'm not sure I want a Bulgarian. They're too tiny a power to worry about, frankly. But maybe one or two people from the Soviets. If we send ten, and if at least six are genuine made-inAmerica U.S. citizens, I can see bringing along a few from the rest of the bloc." "Um." Lenz look thoughtfully at her for a moment, moving slightly in his seat to the gentle pitching of the clamjet as it rose and fell through the night sky. "Well," he said, "we'll see." He smiled at her. "What shall we do with this night that God has given us, Margie? It's too late to think hard, and too early to go to sleep. Want to watch the stars for awhile? ' ' "Exactly what I want," she said, finishing the last of her drink and standing up. They made their way through the nearly empty lounge to the forward observation section and leaned against the padded rail. The clamjet was swooping gently over the rolling hills of West Virginia. Ahead of them Venus followed a crescent of a moon toward the horizon. After a while Lenz put his arm around her. "Just checking," he said, "Old Iron-Pants. " Margie leaned against him contentedly enough. Lenz wasn't a big man. He wasn't particularly handsome, either, but he was warm and muscular, and his arm around her felt good. There were worse ways of lobbying for votes than this, she reflected, as she turned her face to his. He came through. The full committee reported the bill out, and on a hot Georgia afternoon two or three months later Margie was called away from her company to take a high-priority phone call. She had not bathed for three days; summer field maneuvers were conducted as close to real war conditions as possible. She was sweating, filthy with both camouflage paint and Georgia clay, and she knew she smelled pretty high. Also her company was Just about to take a hill that she had personally spotted and attacked, so when she got to the phone she was in no good mood. "Captain Menninger, " she snarled, "and this god-damn better be important!" Her father's voice laughed in her ear. "You tell me," he said cheerfully. "The President signed your bill ten minutes ago." Marge sank back onto the first sergeant's chair, heedless of the looks he was giving her as her elbows printed mud on his desk. "Jesus, poppa," she said, 'that's great!" She started out at the walls of the command trailer without seeing them, calculating whether it was more important to get back to taking that hill with the rest of the weekend soldiers or getting on the phone to start Danny Dalehouse in motion. " -- what?" She had become aware that her father was still talking. "I said there was some other news too, not quite so good. Your Pak friend." "What about him, poppa?" "That, uh, vacation he was going to take? He took it last week." IV The pilot's name was Vissarion Ilyich Kappelyushnikov, short and dark in the standard cosmonaut tradition, with a lot more Tatar in his family tree than his name would suggest. The expedition's ecoengineer was also a Soviet national, but Cossack-tall and fair-haired; his name was Pete Krivitin. The nominal commander of the expedition was an American, Alex Woodring. And they were all going at it at once. Alex was trying to arbitrate between the two Russians, helped by Harriet Santori, the translator. She wasn't really helping, but then the commander wasn't really succeeding at arbitrating. Kappelyushnikov wanted to land and get it over with. Krivitin wanted one more look at the probe reports before he would certify the landing site. Harriet wanted them all to act like adults, for heaven's sake. Woodring might have been able to sort it all out, but the difficulty was that until they landed Kappelyushnikov was the captain of the ship and Alex's authority was only potential. And it had been going on for more than an hour. Danny Dalehouse swallowed back the desire to intervene again. He loosened the straps of his deceleration couch and peered out the porthole. There was the planet, filling the window. From less than a hundred thousand kilometers, it no longer looked "away"; it was beginning to look "down." So let us the hell get there, he thought testily. These people didn't seem to realize they were screwing around with his personal expedition, that none of them would have been on if he hadn't persuaded that blonde Army female to authorize it. A voice in his ear said, "Think we'll ever get there?" Danny drew back. The woman beside him was Sparky Cerbo, as amiable a person as there was on the expedition, but after nineteen days of sharing less than # cubic meters of space they were all getting edgy. The on-going spat an arm's-length away didn't make it any better. "It doesn't look like much, does it?" Sparky went on, determinedly making the effort. Dalehouse forced himself to respond. It wasn't her fault that he was sick of the sound, the sight, and the smell of her, and besides she was right. Son of Kung didn't look like a proper planet at all. Danny knew what planets were supposed to look like. Some of them were red and bleak, like Mars. More often they were white or mottled-white, like everything else from Venus through the gas giants. This one wasn't even trying to look right. It wasn't so much the planet's fault as Kung's itself; as a star, it was simply incompetent. If Son of Kung had been in orbit around Earth's Sol it probably would have looked pretty fine. It had much the same atmosphere as Earth, and close enough to the same water balance and soil chemistry. What it didn't have was decently colored light from its primary. Kung glowered. It was dull red, not much brighter than Earth's moon during a total lunar eclipse. The only light that fell on Son of Kung was bloody red, and what it looked like from their orbit around it was an open wound. It would have helped some if it had had a real terminator, but Kung's light was so dim that there was no clear division between "daylight" and "night" sides, only a blurry transition from dark to darkest. Krivitin had assured them that once landed and their eyes darkadjusted, they would be able to see reasonably well. But from space that seemed doubtful. And for this, thought Danny, I gave up a perfectly good Job at Michigan State. The Russian-language yelling peaked to a climax and abruptly stopped. Krivitin, smiling as composedly as though the screaming match had been no more than a friendly chat about the weather, pulled himself around the lasheddown and nested machinery in the center of the main cubicle and peered in at them. "Sara, dear," he said in his perfect English, "you're wanted up front. You better come too, Daniel." "We're going to land?" Sparky demanded. "Most certainly not! Cappy has finally understood the necessity for another orbit. " "Hell," said Sparky, even her indomitable desire to please crumbling at last. Dalehouse shared her feelings: another orbit was close enough to another day, with nothing for him to do exeept to try to stay out of the way. "Yes, I agree," said the translator, ' 'but Alex wants you to try to tap the the Peeps' signals again." Harriet complained, but Dalehouse stopped listening. He shucked off his straps and reached wearily for the cassettes of data he had stored away for declaration. He plugged in, put the speaker in his ear and touehed the switch. There was a slight tape hiss, and occasional scratch or click, and a distant, somber wail. Those were the sounds from the wolftrap lander. Its primary mission was to secure biological samples and test them in its built-in laboratories; but its microphones had picked up sounds that did not come from itself. He had listened to them fifty times already. After a time he shnigged, stopped the tape and put in a different cassette. This time the sounds were louder, clearer amd with far more definition. The lander in this case had been a neutral-buoy ance floater, with a small reserve of thrusting power and a locator for carbondioxide; like a female mosquito seeking a blood meal to fertilize its eggs, it was meant to drift until if found a trail of CO#, then follow it until it found prey. Then it simply floated nearby as long as there were sounds for it to hear and transmit. But what sounds! Sometimes they sounded like a chorus of bagpipes, sometimes like teenage boys in a crepitation contest. Dale house had graphed the frequencies, from well below human hearing range to higher than a bat's squeak, and identified at least twenty phonemes. These were no bird calls; this was language, he was certain. Heat smote his exposed skin, and he turned back to the port; Kung had drifted into view, looking like a thin-skinned Hallowe'en pumpkin with the embers of Hades inside its mottled surface. He squinted and pulled a neutral-density blind over the porthole; it was not dangerous to glance at it, but there was the chance of burning out your cornea if you stared too long. In the warmth he felt sleepy. Why not? He thought, snapping off the tape. He leaned back, closed his eyes and was just drifting off when he heard his name called. "Dalehouse! Krivitin! DiPaolo! Front and center, everybody." He shook himself awake, wished for a cup of coffee, and pulled himself toward the workspace. The leader of the expedition, Alex Woodring, said, "You'd better all see this. The Peeps have filed another report, and Harriet's taped it for us. " Dalehouse wriggled closer for a better view of the video screen just as it blinked and lighted up. There was a plant on the screen, rust-red and femlike, with raspberry-like fruits hanging from its fronds. "Roll the tape, Harriet," Woodring said impatiently. The pictures on the screen leaped and flickered, then stopped. At first Dalehouse thought the picture was another Klongan flower, possibly some desert succulent: red and yellow blobs, oozing what he supposed was some sort of sap -- then it moved. "Dear God," whispered somebody. Dalehouse felt something rise in his throat. "What is it?" "I think it used to be a white mouse," said the biologist. "What happened?" "That," said the biologist, grimly, but with a trace of professional satisfaction, "is what I don't know yet. The Peeps are transmitting their voice reports in code." "They're supposed to share information!" snapped Dalehouse. "Well, maybe they will. I assume Heir-of-Mao will have his port. And when it's released in New York, Houston will no doubt send us a copy. But not very soon, I think. The picture was clear. When you come right down to it, that's all we need to know: Klong is not as hospitable as we would like. I -- "he hesitated, then went on: "I don't think it's an infectious disease. It looks more like an allergic reaction. I can't really imagine an alien micro-organism adapting that quickly to our body chemistry, anyway. I suspect we're as poisonous to them as they are to us, so, for openers, we don't eat anything, we don't drink anything but our own sealed supplies and distilled water." "You mean we're landing anyhow?" the Canadian electronicist said incredulously. Captain Kappelyushnikov snarled, "Dfl!" He nodded vigorously, then muttered to the translator, who said smoothly: "He says that that is why we came here. He says we will take all precautions. He says on the next orbit, we go."    Dalehouse managed to sleep a few hours. It wasn't hard. There wasn't much for him to do. He played the strange songs from the mosquito probe a few times, but the equipment he needed to do any serious analysis had been stowed away and it made little sense to set it up again. When he woke he was given a tube of thick petroleum jelly to smear on himself -- "Shuck your clothes and cover your whole body; maybe it will keep you from some kind of poison ivy or whatever that is until we get straightened out." Then he dressed again and waited. The electronicist had patched herself in to monitor any further ground transmissions, and was pointing sources on a likris map of the sunward surface of Klong. "There seem to be two stations broadcasting," Dalehouse commented. "Yeah. Must be the base camp and, I suppose, somebody off on an expedition. There's the Peep base -- " she touched a dot on the purplish sea, on one side of a hundred-kilometer bay -- ' 'and there's the other station." That was across the bay. "We know that's their base; we photographed it last time around. Nothing much. They aren't really set up yet. I'd say. That signal's pulse-coded, probably basic science data on its way to their orbiter for tachyon transmission back home." "What's over on the other side of the bay?" "Nothing much. There's a sort of nest of some of the arthropods there, but they don'thve radio." She pulled the earpiece"away from her temple and handed it to Dalehouse. "Listen to that signal." Dalehouse put the phone in his ear. The sound was a staccato, twotone beep, plaintively repeated over and over. "Sounds sad," he said. The woman nodded. "I think it's a distress signal," she said, frowning. "Only they don't seem to be answering it. " V The fourth of the five beings was named Sham-igon. What can be said about Shamigon to make him come clear and real? Perhaps it can be approached in a roundabout way. Like this: Suppose there is a kind and jolly man, the sort of person who takes children Fishing, dances the polka, reads Elizabethan verse and knows why Tebaldi was the greatest Mimi who ever lived. Is this Sham-igon? No. This is only an analogy. Suppose we then go on to ask you if you have ever met this man. You hesitate, riffling through the chance encounters of a life. No, you say, a finger against your nose, I don't think so, I never met anybody like that. And suppose I then say to you: But you did I It was a week ago Thursday. He was driving the A-# bus you took from the station to the Federal Building, and you were late for your appointment with the Tax Examiner because this man would not change a five-dollar bill. What do you say then? I think I know. I think you say: Christ, fellow! I remember the incident well! But that was no amiable folkdancer. That was a bus-driver! That's how it would be with Sham-igon. It's easy enough to imagine you meeting him (provided we don't worry about how you get there). Let's make the mindexperiment necessary to see what would happen. Suppose you are standing outside of time and space somehow, like an H.G. Wells god looking down from a cloud. You poke your finger into the infinitesimal. You touch Sham-igon 's planet, and you uncover him. You look him over. What do you see? I might try to describe him to you by saying that Sham-igon was politically conservative, deeply moral, and fundamentally honest. I might try to elicit your sympathy by saying that he (like who that you know?) was screaming inside with unhealed pain. But would you see that? Or would you glance, and gasp, and pull back your finger in loathing, and say: Christ, fellow! That's no person. It's an alien creature! It lives (lived? will live?) a thousand light-years away, on a planet that circles a star I have never even seen! And besides, it looks creepy. If I had to say what it looked like, giving it the best break I could, I would have to say that it looked like half of a paitly squashed crab. And, of course, you would be right... The way Sharn-igon looked to himself was something else again. For one thing, he is not an instant invention for your eye to see. He is a person. He has relationships. He lives in a society. He moves around and through a dense web or mores, laws, customs and folkways. He wasn't like every other Krinpit (as his people called themselves), no matter how indistinguishably alike they might look to your eyes. He was Sham-igon. For example, although it was Ring-Greeting time, Sharn-igon hated Ring-Greeting. To him it was the loneliest and worst part of the cycle. He disliked the bustle, he resented the false and hypocritical sentiment. All the shops and brothels were busy as everyone tried to get gifts and to become pregnant, but it was an empty mockery in Sham-igon 's life, because he was alone. If you had asked him, Sham-igon would have told you that he had always hated Ring-Greeting, at least ever since his final moulting. (When he was a young seed just beginning to wave on his mother's grate he loved it, naturally enough. All seeds did. Ring-Greeting was for kids.) That wasn't quite tme. The cycle before he and his hewife, Cheee-pmitt, had had a very cheerful Greeting. But Cheee-pmitt was gone. Sham-igon signaled at his screen, almost stumbling over an inedible ghost that lay before it. There was no answer. He hesitated. Something -- perhaps the ghost -- seemed to be calling his name. But that was ridiculous. After a moment of indecision, he scuttled across the crowded mn to -- call it a bar -- to chew a couple of quick ones. Look at Sham-igon munching on strands of hallucinogenic fern, squeezed two or three deep around the Krinpit who was kneading and dispensing the stuff. He was a fine figure of a person. He was masculinely broad -- easily two meters from rim to rim -- and pleasingly slim, not more than forty centimeters to the tip of his carapace. In spite of his mood, unpaired males and females of all descriptions found him attractive. He was young, healthy, sexually potent and successful in his chosen profession.  -- Well, that is not strictly tme, because a paradox is involved. Sham-igon 's profession was a form of social work. The more successful he was, in terms of his own personal ego needs satisfied, the worse his society was. It was only when Krinpit were in trouble that they turned to persons like Shamigon. The Krinpit were socially interdependant to a degree not usually associated with a technological culture on Earth. Maybe one would find that sort of close-knit clan among the Eskimos or Bushmen, where every member of the community had to be able to rely on every other, or they would all die. For that reason Sham-igon was happiest when he was least wanted. Ring-Greeting was bringing its usual crop of damaged egos, bom of loneliness amid the holiday cheer. He was busier than he had ever been, and so less happy. Stand on your cloud and look down on Sham-igon. To you he surely looks strange, and maybe quite repulsive, true. Hi crescent carapace is sprinkled with what look like chitinous sails. Some are a few centimeters high, some much smaller; and around them race, clicking and scraping, what look like lice. Actually, they aren't. They are not even parasites, except in the sense that a foetus is a parasite on its mother; they are the young. Shamigon is not the only Krinpit in the bar carrying young. Of the hundred individuals in the bar, eight or ten are in the brood-male phase. Sometimes one of the scurrying little creatures drop off, or inadvertently gets carried off on the shell of another Krinpit as they rub together. They are instantly aware of what has happened, and go wild in the attempt to get back. If they fail, they die. Each end of Sham-igon 's shell is pleated chitin, jointed with cartilage. That part is always in motion, expanding with accordian folds, tilting, spreading like a fan. He slides along the packed dirt floor or the bodies of Krinpit under him (in the conviviality of the bar no one minds being crawled on) on a dozen double-boned legs. After he had had three quick ones, feeling better, he left the bar and sidled down the turfy run, not hurrying, with no particular destination in mind. On each side of the mn are what you might think of as rather shabby Japanese screens. They are not decorated in any way, but they are jointed and folded, and they come in all sizes. They set off the homes and commercial places. some of which are filled with scores of Krinpit, like the bar, some almost empty. The screens too are studded with the tiny sail-like projections, but otherwise they are not decorated. What you would notice at once is that they are not colored. The Krinpit do not understand color, and in the light of Knag's Star, blood-red and dusky, you would not see much color eli, even if it were there. That is how it would look to you, with your human eyes. How wnM it look to Krinpit eyes? Immatenal; it is a senseless question, because the Krinpit have no eyes. They have photosensitive receptors on their carapaces, but there is no lens, no retina, no mosaic of sensitive cells to analyze an image and translate it into information. But if the scene was dark, it was also noisy. Every one of the Krinpit was constantly booming its name -- well, not its "name," in the sense that the name Franklin Roosevelt's wife was Eleanor. The name was not an arbitrary convention. It was the sound each Krinpit made. It was sound that guided them, that palped the world around them and returned information to their quite agile and competent brains. The sonar pulses they sent forth, to read the echoes, were their "names." Each was different, and every one always being produced while its owner lived. Their main auditory apparatus was the drum-tight undersurface of the belly. It possessed a vent like a dolphin's which could produce a remarkable range of vowel sounds. The "knees" of the double-boned legs could punctuate them with tympanous "consonants." They walked in music wherever they strolled. They could not move silently. The exact sounds they produced were controllable; in fact, they had an elaborate and sophisticated language. The sounds which became their recognition signals were probably the easiest for them, but they could produce almost any other sound in the frequency range of their hearing. In this their voices were quite like humans. So wherever Sham-igon went he was surrounded by that sound: "Sham," a rising, protracted noise like a musical saw, overlaid with white hiss; "igon," a staccato double drumbeat dropping down to the tonic again. It was not just Shamigon. All the Krinpit were constantly making their basic name sounds, when they were not making others. It was not just marked by wind-powered sound-making machines. Nearly all of them had ratchets, or droning pipes, or bullroarers, or circle-bowed strings clamoring out their own particular recognition signal. So to a human eye, Sham-igon was a lopsided crab scuttling in a clattering mass of others, in hellish red gloom with an infernal cacophony of sound coming from every direction. Sham-igon perceived it quite differently. He was strolling aimlessly along a well-remembered street. The street had a name; it translates rather closely as "The Great White Way." At the intersection of the Breeder's Wallow, Sham-igon fell into conversation with an acquaintance. "Do you have knowledge of whereabouts of Cheee-pmitt?" "Negative. Conjecture; statistically probable that he would be by lakeside of village." "Why?" "Some persons hurt or ill. Several anomalous ghosts reported." Sham-igon acknowledged the statements and turned toward the lakefront. He recalled that there had seemed to be a ghost near Cheeepmitt 's residence, some time before. And it was anomalous. Basically there were two kinds of ghosts. The Ghosts Above were common, and easily "visible" (because they made so much noise), but returned no echo signal to speak of to a Krinpit 's sonar. They were good eating when they could be caught. The Ghosts Below were almost invisible. They seldom made visible sounds, and returned not much echo; they were mostly observed when their underground digging damaged a Krinpit stmcture or farm. They too were good eating, and were systematically hunted for that purpose, when the Krinpit were lucky enough to locate a nest of young. But what was an anomalous ghost? Sham-igon scuttled through the Breeders' Wallow to the Place of Fish Vendors, and along the lakefront to the bright commotion at the Raft Mooring. There was something almost invisible bobbing in the gentle roll of the bay. The Krinpit used metal only very sparingly, and Sham-igon recognized the brightness of it; but the bright metal seemed to float over something so soft and immaterial that it returned no real reflection to his sounding. The bright part, though, not only reflected Sharn-igon's sounds almost blindingly, it generated sound of its own: a faint high steady whine, an irregular dry-sand rustle. Sham-igon could not identify the sounds; but then, he had never seen a TV camera or a radio transponder. He stopped one of the Krinpit moving irritably away from the group and asked what was happening. "Some Krinpit attempted to eat the ghost. They are damaged." "Did the ghost harm them?" "Negative. After eating, they became damaged. One ghost is still there. Advise against eating." Sham-igon touched mandibles and moved on, concerned about Cheee-praitt. He didn't hear him anywhere in the crowd, but the din was blinding. At least two hundred Krinpit were scratching and sliding around the bloody mass that had been one of the "ghosts. " Sham igon halted and sounded tlie area, irresolutely. From behind him he thought n  heard his own name, badly spoken but recognizable: Sham-igon . When he turned, his highly directional sound sense identified the source. It was the ghost. The one that had seemed to speak his name. Shamigon approached it cautiously; he did not like its smell, he didn't like its muffled, shadowy sound. But it was a curiosity. First his own name: Sham-igon. And in between -- what? Another name? It was certainly not B Krinpit name, but the ghost kept    On the other shore of the Bay of the Cultural Revolution, fifty kilometers away, Feng Hua-tse rinsed the honey buckets in the purplish waters and carried them back toward the bubble cluster that was the People's Bloc headquarters. From the shore you couldn't see the landing craft itself at all. The extruded bubbles surrounded and hid it. Through the translucent walls of the nearest of them (they could have been made opaque, but the group decision had been that energy conservation was more important than privacy) he could see the vague shadows of the two women detailed as sickbay orderlies. They had not been given the job because they were women. They had got the job because they should have been in bed themselves. Barely able to stagger, they could more or less take care of themselves and the two bed cases. And there was no one to spare to do it for them. Feng put the clean buckets inside the sickbay bubble, resenting the waste of the precious nightsoil. But it was his own decision that the wastes from the casualties should be dumped in the bay rather than used to fertilize their tiny plot of garden. Until they were sure what had killed one member of the expedition and put four more on the sick list -- nearly half their effectives wiped out at one stroke! -- Feng would not risk contamination. It was a pity that their biologist was the sickest of the survivors; his wisdom was needed. But Feng had been a barefoot biologist himself in his youth, and he kept up the experiments with the animals, the tachtran reports back to Peking and the four-times-daily examinations of the sick. He paused in the radio room. The video screen that monitored the small party which had crossed the bay was still showing the same monotonous scene. Apparently the camera had been left on the raft, and apparently the raft had drifted in the slow, vagrant currents of the bay, so that the camera showed only an occasional thin slice of shoreline, a quarter of a kilometer away. Once in a while you could see one of the arthropods scuttling along, and now and again a glimpse of their low, flimsy buildings. But he had not yet seen either Ahmed Dulla or the Costa Rican who had gone with him. Outside the bubble for the communications equipment, the two West Indians were desultorily scooping dirt into woven baskets. Feng spoke sharply to them and achieved a momentary acceleration of pace. They were sick, too, but it was not yet clear whether it was the same sickness as the others. They, he thought bitterly, should feel at home here. The heat and the humidity were jungle-like. What was worst was the lighting, always the same dusky red, never bright enough to see clearly, never dusk. Feng had had a headache since they rrrived, and it was his private opinion it was only from eyestrain. Feng, at least had not eaten any Klongan food. In this he was luckier, or wiser, than the four in the sickbay and the one who had died, not to mention the dozen rats and guinea pigs they fed with the stuff experimentally. Feng swore. Why had he let that long-nosed hillman, Dulla, talk him into splitting their forces? To be sure, it had happened before the five became violently ill. Even so, it had been a mistake. When he got back to Shensi, Feng admitted to himself, there would be a long day of self-criticism for himself. If he got back. He picked up two baskets of dirt in his shoulder yoke and carried them with him as he went to inspect the dam. That was his greatest hope. When it was completed, they would have electricity to spare. Electricity to power the ultraviolet lamps, still stored in the landing craft's hold, that would turn the feeble, pale seedlings into sturdy crops of food. There was nothing wrong with this soil! No matter how many got sick, even if they died, it was not the soil's fault; Feng had rubbed it between finger and thumb, sniffed it, turned a spadeful over and gazed wonderingly at the crawling things that inhabited it. They were strange, but they meant the soil was fertile. What it did not have was proper sunlight. That they would have to make, as soon as the dam was built; and then, Feng swore, they would produce crops that any collective in Shensi Province would envy. It was raining as he started back, slow, fat, warm drops that ran down Feng's back under his cotton jacket. Another good thing: plenty of water. Not only was it good for the plants, but it kept the spores down, and Feng was highly suspicious of them as the source of the sickness. Even through the clouds he could feel the warmth of Kung Fu-tze. It was not visible, but it gave the clouds the angry, ruddy look of sky over a distant great city. U would stay that way until the air mass that carried the clouds moved away; then there would be that distant hot coal, and the purple-black sky with its stars. Feng took the forest path back to the headquarters, checking the traps. One held two multilegged creatures like land-going lobsters, one dead, the other eating it. Feng dumped them both and did not reset the trap. There was no point in it. They were too short-handed to bother with more animal specimens than they had already. Three of the traps were sprung but empty, and one was simply missing. Feng muttered to himself irritably. There was a lot they didn't know about the fauna of this fern forest. For one thing, what had stolen the trap? Most of the creatures they had seen were arthropods, buglike or crustaceanlike, none of them bigger than a man's hand. Bigger ones existed. The sentiments in the settlement across the bay were proof of that; they were the size of a man. But the wild ones, if they existed, stayed out of sight. And there was something that lived in the tall, woody ferns. One could hear them, even catch a glimpse of them from time to time, but no one in the expedition had yet caught or even photographed one. It stood to reason that if there were small creatures there would be bigger ones to eat them, but where were they? And what would they look like? Wolf teeth, cat talons, crab claws? -- Feng abandoned that line of thought: it was not reassuring. To be sure, the local fauna would no doubt find humans as indigestible as the humans had found the local fauna. But they might not realize that in time. It began to look as though humans would not find anything at all to eat on Klong. The biologist had been reduced to taking samples of micro-organisms from each member of the party and culturing them on plates of agar. It was no longer possible to use laboratory animals. They had all died. And one by one he tried every promising looking bit of plant or animal they brought him, dropping a broth of it onto the agar, and one by one each of them destroyed the darkening circle of growing bacteria. They were perfect antibiotics. Except for one thing: they would have killed the patient more quickly than any disease. Feng became aware that his name was being called. He turned away from the place where the last trap had been, trotting back toward the settlement. As he approached the beach and the fronds thinned, he saw one of the walking casualties waving in excitement. Feng trotted back, arriving out of breath. "What, what?" he grumbled. "A radio message from the long nose! It is a distress signal, Huatse." "Tchah! What did he say?" "He said nothing, Hua-tse. It is the automatic distress call. I tried to raise him but there was no response." "Of course," snarled Feng, gripping his hands together in anger. Another thing to admit to before the commune. Two members of the party endangered, perhaps lost, because he had foolishly permitted the division of their forces. Two irreplaceable persons -- a hillman and a Hispanic, to be sure; nevertheless, persons. Their absence would be serious. And not just the persons. One of their three television cameras. The radio transponder The precious plastic that had gone into making the skin of the at. There was just so much of that. They had squandered a great deal on the bubbles to house the sick, the equipment, all their sparse possessions. That was foolishness, too; the fern forest was a limitless supply of woody stems for frames, fronds for ceilings and walls. In this drenched warmth they needed no more than that, but he had weakly permitted the blowing of bubble huts instead of using what nature provided. Could they build another boat? It was by no means sure that there was plastic enough even for the hull and the sails; and when it was gone, where would they get more? Who could he send? Of their original eleven, one was dead, two were missing and four were sick. Was it not even more foolish to further divide their forces, to attempt to repair the damage the first foolishness had cost? And what could they do if they did in fact build another boat and sail across the bay? That which had happened to the hillman and the Hispanic could just as well happen to whoever went after them. They had very little in the way of weapons, no more to spare than Dulla and the other man had taken with them in the first place, and little enough good that had done them -- "Are we going, Hua-tse?" His attention was jarred back. What?" "Are we going to try to help our comrades?" Feng gripped his hands tighter. "With what?" he demanded. VI On a planet that has no night the days are endless, Danny Dalehouse reflected, a meter down into the Klongan soil and at least that much more to go. His muscles told him he had been digging this latrine for at least eight hours. The discouragingly tiny spoil heap beside him contradicted it, and the mddy glow that backlighted the clouds overhead offered no help. Latrine digging was not what he had signed on for. But it was something that had to be done, and he was clearly the most superfluous member of the party in line to do it; only why did it have to take so long? They had been on the planet only three days (not that there were any days, but the old habits died hard), and already the pleasure was wearing thin. The parts that weren't actively unpleasant, like digging latrines, were a bore. The parts that weren't already boring were scary, like the madly violent thunderstorm that had blown away their first tent only hours after landing, or irritatingly uncomfortable, like the itchy rashes they had all developed and the stomach troubles that had made the latrines so vital. And to make it worse, they seemed to have company. Kappelyushnikov had come swearing in Russian to report that a third tachtran vessel had climbed down its charge state to orbit Klong. Greasies, no doubt. That meant everybody in the world was now represented on Klong. What price the solitary pioneer? His spade struck air. Danny lost his balance, spun and came down in a foetal crouch into the pit, his face almost into the hole that had unexpectedly opened up. From it came a cool, musty smell. It made him think of unopened cellars and the cages of pet mice, and he heard quick, furtive movements. Snakes'? He rejected the thought as soon as he formed it. That was an earthly fear, not appropriate on Klong. But whatever it was could easily be even more deadly than a nest of rattlers. He leaped with prudent speed out of the trench and yelled, "Morrissey!" The biologist was only a few meters away, sealing plant samples pickled in preservative into plastic baggies. "What's the matter?" "I hit a hole. Maybe a tunnel. You want to take a look?" Morrissey looked down at the purplish seed pod in his forceps and back at Dalehouse's trench, tom. Then he said, "Sure, only I have to finish stowing these away first. Don't dig any more till I finish." That was welcome. Dalehouse accepted the order gratefully. He was getting used to taking orders. Even as a latrine digger he was subject to instant draft, whenever some presently more valuable member of the expedition needed another pair of hands: Harriet to set up her radio, Morrissey to heat-seal his baggies, helping Sparky Cerbo locate the canned tomatoes and the kitchen knives that had vanished during the thunderstorm -- anyone. Twice already he had had to empty the landing vehicle's chemical toilet into a shallow pit and scrape the soil of Klong over it, because the rest of the crew couldn't wait for him to finish the job they were preventing him from finishing. It was a drag. But he was on Son of Kung! He could smell the strange Klongan smells -- cinnamon, and mold, and cut vegetation and something that was a little like Mom's Apple Pie, but none of them really any of those things. He could see the Klongan landscape -- he could see quite a lot of it, a shovelful at a time.  It was what he had expected, in an expedition of specialists. Dalehouse was not a cook, not a farmer, not a doctor, not a radio surveyor. He was not any of the hypertrophied skills that all the others possessed. He was the expedition's only generalist, and would stay that way until they made contact with the local scientists and he could start with the communications skills he was advertised to have. Until then he was stoop labor. The Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, was yelling his name. "You, Danny, you come have drink. Put back sweat!" "Why not?" Danny was pleased to notice that cappy was holding aloft a glass containing a centimeter of water, grinning broadly. He had finally got the still to working. Dalehouse swallowed the few drops and wiped his lips appreciately, then his slippery brow. Kappelyushnikov was right enough about that. In the dank, humid air they were both covered with sweat. The still was powered with a small oil-spray flame which made it like burning hundred-dollar bills to operate. Later it would be moved to the lakeshore and driven by solar power, but right now they needed water they could drink. "Very good, is it?" Kappelyushnikov demanded. "You don't feel faint, like it's some poison? Okay. Then we go bring a drink to Gasha." The translator had given herself command of the setting-up phase of the camp and no one had resisted; she was spending hours over her radio, trying to make sense of the communications, but she claimed the other half of her mind was able to keep track of everyone's duty assignments. She might have been right, Dalehouse thought. She was the least agreeable person on the expedition, and no one particularly wanted to disagree with her. She was also close to the least physically attractive, with stringy black hair and an expression of permanent disappointment. But she was grudgingly grateful for the water. ' Thank you for getting the still going. And the latrine, of course, Danny. Now if the two of you -- " "I'm not finished," Danny corrected. "Jim wants to check out a hole first. Is there anything new on the radio?" Harriet smiled with closed lips. "We have a message from the Peeps." "About that guy that's stuck?" "Oh, no. Take a look." She handed over a facsimile film that said: The People's Republics extend the hand of friendship to the second expedition to arrive on Child of Kung. Through peaceful cooperation we will achieve a glorious triumph for all mankind. We invite you to join us for the celebration of the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the writings of Confucius, after whom our star was named. Dalehouse was perplexed. "Isn't that some kind of a winter holiday?" "You are very informed today, Dalehouse. It is in December. Our instructor called it the Confucian answer to Chanukkah, which is of course the Jewish answer to Christmas." He frowned, trying to remember -- already, it was becoming hard. "But this isn't even October yet." "You are very swift indeed, Danny. So translate that, won't you?" requested the translator. "I don't know. Are they saying something like, don't bother us for a couple of months." "Is more like to drop dead," the pilot put in. "I don't think so. They aren't being unfriendly," Harriet said, recapturing the fax and squinting at it. "Notice that they referred to Kung Fu-tze by the latinized form of the name. That's a pretty courteous thing for them to do. Still -- " She frowned. At her best Harriet's eyes were always faintly popped, like a rabbit's, because of the heavy contacts she wore. Now her lips were pursed like a rabbit's, too. "On the other hand, they were careful to point out we're the second expedition." "Meaning they're the first. But what's the difference? They can't make territorial claims because they got here ahead of us, that's all spelled out in the U.N. accords. Nobody get to claim any more than a circle fifty kilometers around a self-sustaining base." "But they're pointing out that they could have." Cappy was bored with the protocol. "Any love-letters from the Oilies, Gasha?" "Just a a received-and-acknowledged. And now, that latrine -- " "In a minute, Harriet. What about the Pak that's stranded?" "He's still stranded. You want to hear the latest tapes?" She didn't wait for an answer, she knew what it would be. She plugged in a coil of tape and played it for them. It was the Peep's automatic distress signal; every thirty seconds a coded beep for homing. Between signals the microphone stayed open, transmitting whatever sounds were coming in. "I've cut out most of the deadwood. Here's the man's voice." Neither Dalehouse nor Kappelyushnikov included Urdu among their skills. "What is he say?" asked the pilot. "Just asking for help. But he's not in good shape. Most of the time he doesn't talk at all, and we get this stuff. " What came out of the tape player was a little like an impossibly huge cricket's chirp and quite a lot like a Chinese New Year festival in which Australian aborigines were playing their native instruments. "What the hell is that?" Danny demanded. "That," she said smugly, "is also language. I've been working on it, and I've sorted out a few key concepts. They are in some sort of trouble. I'm not sure what." "Not as much as Pak's," grunted Kappelyushnikov. "Come, Danny, is time we go to work." "Yes, that latrine is -- " "Not on latrine! Other things in life than shit, Gasha." She paused, glowering at him. Kappelyushnikov was almost as dispensible as Danny Dalehouse. Maybe more so. After the expedition was well established, Dalehouse 's skills would come into play, or so they all hoped, in making contact with sentient life. The pilot's main skill was piloting. A spacecraft by choice. If press, a clamjet, a racing vessel or a canoe. None of those existed on Klong. But what he had was resourcefulness. "Gasha, dear," he coaxed, "is not possible. Your Morrissey still has his micetraps in the trench. And besides, now we have water, I have to make sauerstqff. " "Hydrogen," Harriet corrected automatically. "Hydrogen? What in the world do you want with hydrogen?" "So I will have a job, dear Gasha. To fly. " "You're going to fly with hydrogen?" "You understand me, Gasha," the Russian beamed. He pointed. "Like them." Danny glanced up, then ran for the tent and the one remaining decent pair of binoculars -- two pairs of them, too, had turned up missing after the thunderstorm. There they were, the wind-blown flock of balloonists, high and near the clouds. They were at least two kilometers away, too far to hear the sounds of their song, but in the glasses Dalehouse could see them clearly enough. In the purplish sky they stood out in their briglt greens and yellows. It was true, Dalehouse verified. Some of them were selfluminous, like fireflies! Traceries of veins stood out over the great five-meter gas bag of the largest and nearest of them, flickering with racing sparks of bioluminescence. "Damn," he snarled. "What are you saying, Cappy? Do you think you can fly up there?" "With greatest of ease, Danny," the pilot said solemnly. "Is only a matter of making bubbles and putting sauersfqff in them. Then we fly." "You've got a deal," said Dalehouse firmly. "Tell me what to do and I'll do it. I'll -- wait a minute! What's that?" The balloon swarm was scattering, and behind them, coming through the place they were vacating, was something else, something that beat with a regular metric flash of light. The sound reached him, then. "It's a helicopter!" he cried in astonishment.    The chopper pilot was short, dark and Irish. Not only Irish, but repatriated to the U.K. from eleven years in Houston, Texas. He and Morrissey hit it off immediately. "Remember Bismarck's?" "Ever been to La Carafe?" "Been there? I lived there!" And when they were all gathered he said: "Glad to meet you all. Name's Terry Boyne, and I bring you official greetings from our expedition, that's the Organization of Fuel Exporting Nations, to yours, that's you. Nice place you've got here," he went on appreciatively, glancing around. "We're down toward the heat pole -- ask my opinion, you folks picked a better spot. Where we are it's wind you wouldn't believe and scorching hot besides, if you please." "So why'd you pick it?" asked Morrissey. "Oh," said Boyne, "we do what our masters tell us. Isn't it about the same with you? And what they told me to do today was to come over and make a good-neighbor call." Harriet, of course, stepped right in. "On behalf of the Foodexporting States we accept your greetings and in return -- " "Please to stow, Harriet?" rumbled Kappelyushnikov. "But we are not only other colony on Klong, Terry Boyne." "Or even the first, as the Peeps have reminded us," Danny added. "Have you been to see them?" Boyne coughed. "Well, actually that's more or less what it's about, if you see what I mean. Have you people been monitoring their broadcasts?" "Sure we have. Yours too." "Right, then you've heard their distress signals. Poor sod stuck with those Krinpit beasts. The Peeps don't respond. We offered to help out, and they as much as told us to fuck off." Morrissey glanced at Harriet before he said, "We've had much the same experience, Terry. They indicated we weren't welcome in their part of the world. Of course, they have no right to take that kind of a stand -- " " -- but you. don't want to start any bloc-to-bloc trouble," finished Boyne, nodding. "Well, for humanitarian reasons -- " He choked, and took a great swig of the drink Morrissey had handed him before going on. "Hell, let's be frank. For curiosity's sake, and just to see what's going on over there -- but also for humanitarian reasons -- we want to go and fish they guy out of there. The Peeps obviously can't. We suppose the reason they shut you and us out is that they don't want us to see how bad off they are. You folks can't -- " He hesitated delicately. "Well, obviously it would be easier for us to go in with a chopper than for you to send an to do that. But not alone, if you see what I mean." "I think I do," Harriet sniffed. "You want somebody to share the blame." "We want to make it a clearly interbloc errand of mercy," Boyne corrected. "So I'm all set to go over there and snatch him out, this minute. But I'd like one of you to go along. " Eight out of the ten members of the expedition were spteaking at once then, with Kappelyushnikov 's shouted, "I go!" drowning out the rest. Harriet glared around at her crew and then said petulantly: "Go then, if you want to, although we're so shorthanded here -- " Danny Dalehouse didn't wait for her to finish. "That's right, Harriet! And that's why it ought to be me. I can be spared, and besides -- " "No! I, I can be spared, Danny! And I am pilot -- " "Sorry, Gappy," said Danny confidently. "We already have a pilot -- Mr. Boyne, there -- and besides you have to make your sauerstojf so you can take me flying when I come back. And, two, making contact with alien sentients is my basic job, isn't it? And -- " he didn't wait for an answer -- "besides, I think I know the guy that's stuck there. Ahmed Dulla. We were both hassled by the cops in Bulgaria a couple of months ago."    Wook. Wook. Wook. changed to whickwhickwhickwhick as the pilot increased the pitch of the rotors and the copter rocked off the ground and headed for a cloud. Danny clung to the seat, marveling at the profligacy with which the Fuel Bloc spent its treasure -- four metric tons of helicopter alone, tachyontransported from Earth orbit at what cost in resources he could not guess. "You don't get airsick, do you? shouted Boyne over the noise of the blades. Danny shook his head, and the pilot grinned and deflected the blade edges so that the chopper leaned toward, and began to move after, a bank of cumulus. To Danny's disappointment, the flock of balloonists was out of sight, but there were still small and large creatures in the air, keeping their distance. Dalehouse couldn't see them very clearly, and suspected they wanted it that way, staying at the limits of vision and disappearing into cloud as the copter came close. But below! That was laid out for him to enjoy as the chopper bounced along, less than fifty meters over the tallest growth. Groves of trees like bamboo, clusters of thirty-meter ferns, tangles of things like mangroves, twenty or more trunks uniting to form a single cat's-cradle tangle of vegetation. He could see small things scuttling and leaping to hide as they twisted overhead, colors of all sorts. The unwinking red glower of the dwarf star toned down rock and water, but the brightest colors were not reflections. They were foxfire glow and lightning-bug tail, the lights of the plants themselves. Of course Dalehouse had studied the maps of Klong, orbital photos supplemented by side-scatter radar. But this was different, seeing the landscape as they soared above it. Back along the shore was their own camp, on a narrow neck of land that locked off a bay from the wider ocean, or lake, a kilometer or two away. There was the lake (or ocean) itself, curving around like a bitteninto watermelon slice, and, in the light from Kung, almost the same color. Down the shore of it was the Peeps' encampment. Past that, off toward the part of Klong that lay Just under the star, where the land was dryer and the temperatures even higher, was the Greasies' camp. Both of those were out of sight, of course. The copter swung out across the water. Boyne pointed, and Dalehouse nodded; he could see the place where they were going just taking form through the gloomy haze, on the far shore. Boyne had not been entirely frank, Dalehouse discovered. He had not mentioned that this was not his first flight to the Krinpit community. There had been at least two overflights before that, because there were photos of the layout. Boyne pulled a sheaf of them out of an elastic pocket in the door of the copter, sorted through them and passed one over to Danny. "There, by the water's edge!" he bawled. His finger jabbed at a curled-up figure a few meters from the water's edge. Drawn up nearby was a plastic coracle, and there were sheds and more obscure structures all around. There were also some very unpleasant looking creatures like square-ended crabs: Krinpit. Some of them were suspiciously close to the huddled figure. "Is he still alive?" Danny shouted. "Don't know. He was a day or two ago. He's probably okay for water, but he must be getting damned hungry by now. And probably sick." From the air the Krinpit village looked like a stockyard, most of the structures comprising only unroofed walls, like cattle pens. The creatures were all around, Danny saw, moving astonishingly quickly, at least when matched against his image of Earthside crustaceans. And they were clearly aware the chopper was approaching. Some raised up to point their blind faces toward it, and an ominous number seemed to be converging on the waterside. "Creepy looking things, ain't they?" Boyne shouted. "Listen," said Danny, "how are we going to get Dulla away from them? They don't just look creepy. They look mean." "Yeah." Boyne rolled down his window and I'eaned out, circling the helicopter around. He shook his head, then pointed. "That your buddy?" The figure had moved since the photograph was taken, was no longer in the shelter of one of the sheds but a few meters away and lying outstretched, face down. Dulla didn't look particularly alive, but he wasn't clearly dead, either. Boyne frowned thoughtfully, then turned to Dalehouse. "Open that case between your feet there, will you, and hand me a couple of those things." The "things" were metal cylinders with a wire loop at the end. Boyne took half a dozen, pulled the loops and tossed them carefully toward the Krinpits. As they struck, billowing yellow clouds of smoke came out of them, forming a dense cloud. The Krinpit staggered out of the smoke as though disoriented. "Just tear gas," Boyne grinned. "They hate it." He stared down. Nearly all the creatures that had been converging around the prone man were fleeing now... all but one. That one was obviously in distress, but it did not leave the vicinity of the prone human being. It seemed to be in pain. It moved dartingly back and forth as though tom between conflicting imperatives: to flee; to stay; perhaps even to fight. "What are we going to do about that son of a bitch?" Boyne wondered out loud, hovering over the scene. But then the creature moved painfully away and Boyne made his decision. He dropped to the ground between the Krinpit and the unconscious Pakistani. "Grab 'im, Danny!" he yelled. Danny flung open his door and jumped out. He scooped up the Pakistani with more difficulty than he had expected. Dulla did not weigh much more than fifty kilos here, but he was boneless as rubber, completely out of it. Danny got him under the arms and more dragged than carried him into the helicopter, while Boyne swore worriedly. The rotors spun and they started to lift off, and there was a rushing, clattering scramble from the other side. Two hundred kilograms of adult Krinpit launched itself onto the side-pallette. Boyne gibbered in rage and jockeyed the controls. The chopper staggered and seemed about to turn on its side; but he got it straight and it began to pull up and away. "What are you going to do, Boyne?" yelled Danny, trying to pull Dulla 's legs inside so he could close the door. "You can't just leave that thing there!" "Hell I can't!" Boyne stared worriedly at the stiff-jointed legs that were trying to scrape through the plastic to get at him, then turned the copter up and over the water. "I've always wanted a pet. Let's see if I can get this bugger home!"    By the time he got back to his own camp, full of wonder and worlies, Dalehouse was physically exhausted. He made a quick report to the rest of the expedition and then fell into a dreamless sleep. "Night" was an arbitrary concept on Klong. When he woke the sky was the same as it always was, clouds and the dull red cinder of Kung hanging off-center above. It was back to work as usual. Kappelyushnikov, or somebody, had done some digging for him. He had less than an hour's work, mostly neatening up the edges. He welcomed it, because he had more than an hour's pondering to do. After rescuing the Pakistani, Boyne had laid a beeline course for his own home base. He had not even asked if Dulla were alive; his attention was taken up to saturation by the hideous and very active creature only centimeters from his left ear, and by the demands of piloting. Warned by radio, the Greasies had nets prepared. They had the Krinpit lashed and stowed before the beast knew what was happening. Then a quick meal while Dulla got some sort of emergency medical treatment, mostly cleaning him up and flowing a little glucose into his bloodstream. Then over the barren, hot ground to the Peeps' camp, where they left the sick man, accepted some haughty thanks from the Qiinese in charge of the place and took Dalehouse home. All in all, he had been gone five or six hours. And every second filled with some new input to worry over in his mind. He really begrudged them the Krinpit. There was no doubt the creature was intelligent. If the buildings hadn't proved that by themselves, its methodical attempt to gouge its way into the helicopter, and its patient acceptance of failure when the plastic proved too tough, spoke of thought. It had struggled only briefly when the Greasies threw the nets over it, then allowed itself to be hauled into a steel barred cage. Only after the cage door had slammed behind it did it systematically cut through the netting to free its limbs. Dalehouse had spent all the moments he could spare just watching it, and trying to make sense of its sounds. If only he had taken the brain-split at some point in his studies! He knew that Harriet or even that Bulgarian girl. Ana, could have reasoned out some sort of linguistic pattern, but it was only noise to him. Then there was the wonder of the Greasy camp itself. Steel bars! A helicopter! Bunk legs, with metal springs! He could not begin to imagine what profligate burning of irreplaceable fuel had made it possible for them to hurl all that stuff at superflight speed to an orbit around Kung, and then to lower it safely to the surface of the planet. They even had air-conditioning! True, they needed it; the surface temperature must have been well over forty, so near to the heat pole. But no one forced them to settle where they would need the permanent drain of air conditioners to survive. And by contrast, the Peeps. That was pathetic. Old What'sy had put the lst face possible on it, but it was clear that the return of Dulla meant to him principally another casualty to try to take care of, with hardly anybody healthy enough to do the nursing. Much less do anything else. He had proudly given the visitors to understand that another exp)edition was on the way -- "nearly as big as our own." But how big was that? Jim Morrissey interrupted his train of thought. The biologist had been out of the camp and had not heard the report; now he wanted it all over again, first hand. Dalehouse obliged, and then asked, "Did you catch anything in your micetraps?" "Huh? Oh." Obviously that was long in Morrissey's past by now. "No. I ran a wire-tethered probe down the tunnel, but it kept hitting blind alleys. They're pretty smart, whoever they are. As soon as you broke into their tunnel they closed it off." "So you don't have any animals to send back to Earth?" "No animals? Never say it, never think it, Danny! I've got a whole menagerie. Crabrats and bugs, creepers and flyers. God knows what they all are. I think the crabrats are probably related to the Krinpit, but you can't really trace relationships until you do paleontology and, Christ, I haven't even made a beginning on the taxonomy yet. And plants -- Well, anyway, you might as well call them plants. They don't have stomatas or mesophyll cells. Would you believe that?" "Sure I would, Jim." "Where the photosynthetic process happens I don't know," Jim went on, marveling, "but it's the same good old thing. Starch production driven by sunlight. Or what passes for sunlight. Six Cee Oh Two plus Six Aitch Two Oh still yields Cee-Six Aitch-Twelve Oh-Six and some spare oxygen, on Earth as it is in the heavens. Or the other way around." "That's starch?" Dalehouse guessed. "You bet. But don't eat any of it. And keep putting that jelly on your skin every time it rubs off. There 're congeners in all that stuff that will do you in." "Sure." Dalehouse 's attention was wandering, and he hardly listened as Morrissey catalogued the vegetation he had so far identified on Klong: something like grasses that covered the plains, succulents like bamboo, with hollow stems that would make fine structural materials. Forests of plants that looked like ferns, but were fruiting and with woody stems. Some of them grew together from many trunks, like mangroves; others towered in solitary splendor, like redwoods. There were veins like grapes, spreading by transporting their hard-shelled seeds through the digestive tracts of animals. Some of them were luminous. Some were meat-eating, like the Venus fly-trap. Some -- "That starch," Dalehouse interrupted, pursuing his train of thought. "Can't we eat it? I mean, sort of cook the poison out of it, like tapioca?" "Danny, stick to what you know." "No, really," Dalehouse persisted. "We're shipping a lot of mass in the form of food. Couldn't we?" "No. Well, maybe. In a sense. It takes only a little bit of their proteins to kick off a reaction I can't handle, so don't experiment. Remember the Peeps' white mice." "If they're plants, why aren't they green?" "Well, they are, kind of. In this light they look purple because Kung's so red. But if you shine a flashlight on them they're a kind of greenish yellow. But, you know," he went on earnestly, "it's not the usual chlorophyll. Not even a porphyrin derivative. They do seem to use a magnesium ion -- " "I better get this finished up," said Danny, patting the biologist on the shoulder. It was almost done. He lugged the chemical toilet from the lander and balanced it over the slit trench, and then reported to Harriet. "All done, first-class American crapper ready for use. " She came over to inspect and then pursed her tiny lips. "Dalehouse, do you think we're animals? Can't you at least put a tent over it?" "Oh, you want the deluxe model." "And before it rains again, would you mind? Look at those clouds. Damn it, Danny, why do I have to tell everybody what to do around here?" He got the tent up. But the storm, when it came, was a rouser. Lightning scored the entire sky, cloud to ground and air to air. Rung was completely obscured, not even a dull glow to mark where it hung in the sky, and the only light was Ihe lightning itself. The first casualty was the power system. The second was Danny's outhouse tent, tom flying away by the #kilometer naM gusts. By the time it was over were drenched and miserable, ;yiid all of them were busy tryinyin put the camp together again. EaW Lansing had had no storms lite Klong's, and Danny viewed wlH dismal foreboding the planet. he realized he had been morllinn twenty hours without sleep to tumbled into bed and dreamed # a warm morning in Bulgaria vtto a pretty blonde-haired woman . When be woke, Jim Morrissey was poking him. "Out. I get the bed next." It wasn't feally even a bed, just a sleeping hag on an air mattress, but at least k was warm and dry. Dalehouse wluctantly yielded it to the biolopli. "So the camp survived?" "More or less. Don't go near Harriet, thoi. One of her radios is missing, and she thinks we're all to blame." As he climbed into the bed and stretched his legs down to the warm interior he said, "Cappy wants to show you something." Danny didn't rush to see the pilot; odds were, he considered that it was just some other stoop-labor job that needed doing. It could wait until he had something to eat, although, he reflected, chewing doggedly through a guaranteed full daily requirement of essential vitamins and minerals (it looked like a dog biscuit), eating wasn't a hell of a lot more fun than digging latrines. But that wasn't what Kappelyushnikov had in mind. "Is no more manual labor for you and me for a while, Danny," he grinned. "Have now been honored by appointment as chief meteorologist. Must make more sauerstojf to check winds, and you help." "Harriet was real shook up by the storm," Dalehouse guessed. "Gasha Yes, that is what she wants, better weather forecasting. But what I want is exotic travel to faraway places! You will see." Kappelyushnikov's still had been converted to solar power, a trough of brackish water from the lake running between aluminum reflecting V's, and the vapor trapped on a plastic sheet overhead. The drops slipped down into a tank, and part of the fresh water was being electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen. From the hydrogen collector, a seamless plastic balloon, a small compressor whirred at regular intervals to pump the gas into a heavy metal cylinder. Kappelyushnikov checked the pressure gauge and nodded gravely. "Is plenty. Now you go borrow theodolite from head boss, Gasha. Do not take no for an answer; and then I will show you something that will truly amaze you." Fortunately for Dalehouse, Harriet was somewhere else when he went for the theodolite, a small sighting telescope that looked like a surveyor's transit. By the time he got back with it Kappelyushnikov had filled a plastic balloon with hydrogen and was expertly balancing its lift against the weight of a silver ruble. "My good luck piece," he said dreamily. "Yes, fine. You have pencil?" "What's a pencil? I have a ballpoint." "Don't make fun of oldfashioned Soviet values," Kappelyushnikov said severely, "en I let go of balloon, you keep eye on watch. Every twenty seconds you tell me, I call off readings, you write down. You understand? Okay, let go." The little balloon did not leap out of Dalehouse 's fingers, it only drifted upward, bobbing gently as vagrant zephyrs caught it. In the still after the storm there was no strongly prevailing wind that Dalehouse could feel, but he could see the balloon move erratically. At each time-hack Kappelyushnikov read off right ascension and declination bearings. After the seventh reading he began to swear, and after the ninth he straightened up, scowling. "Is no good! Lousy Kungson light, I cannot see. Next time we will tie on candle." "Fine, but would you mind telling me what we're doing? "Measuring winds aloft, dear Danny! See how balloon curved around, started back way it came? Winds at different levels blow various individual different directions. Balloons follows. We follow balloon. Now we reduce readings, and soon I will truly astonish you with more than you wish to know about Klongan wind patterns." Dalehouse squinted thoughtfully at where the balloon had disappeared into the maroon murk. "How are we going to do that?" "Oh, Danny, Danny. How ignorant you Americans are! Simple trigonometry. I have right ascension sighting of balloon after twenty seconds, correct? So I have one angle of tight triangle. Second angle must be ninety degrees -- you understand that this is so? Otherwise would not be right triangle. So simple subtraction from one hundred eighty gives me angle remaining, and I have thus described triangle perfectly, except for dimension of sides. Okay. I now feed in dimension of fust side, and simple transformation -- " "Whoa! You didn't measure anything. Where did you get the dimension of one side?" "Altitude of balloon after twenty seconds, of course." "But how do you know -- " "Ah," said Kappelyushnikov smugly, "that is why care is so important in weighing off balloon. With fixed lift, balloon rises at fixed rate. Lift is equal to one silver ruble, and so in each twenty seconds rises nine point seven three meters. We now perform same arithmetic for declination and we have fixed position of balloon in three-dimensional space. Here, walk while we talk." He took the jotted readings from Danny and scanned them, frowning. "Such terrible writing," he complained. "Nevertheless, I can read them perhaps well enough to feed into the computer. Is very easy computation." 'Then why do you need a computer?" "Oh. I could easily perform operations myself. But computer needs practice. Wait one, Danny." While the Russian was mumbling to himself over the keyboard, Harriet poked her head in the tent. "What are you doing?" she demanded sharply. ' 'Important sc ientific research , ' ' said Kappelyushnikov airily, without looking up. To Danny's surprise, the translator did not react. She looked sullen, confused and unhappy. Her normal look was not so far from that that it was unconspicuous, but her normal behavior was a good deal more abrasive than her demeanor now. She came quietly into the tent and sat down, thumbing dispiritedly through her translation notes. "Have it!" cried the pilot happily, and pressed a command button. The liquid crystal over the computer flashed colored darts of light, then revealed a plot of wind arrows. "Colors of spectrum," Kappelyushnikov explained. "Red is lowest, up to fresh grass green for highest. You see? At fifty meters, wind heading one forty-five degrees, eight k.p.h. At one hundred meters, backing to ninety-five degrees and now fifteen kilometers. And so on. Triumph of Soviet technology. " Dalehouse nodded appreciatively. "That's very nice, but what do we want to know that for?" "Meteorology," Kappelyushnikov grinned, winking and moving his head toward Harriet. The woman looked up and burst out: "Cut that out, Vissarion. I'm in no mood for you to make fun of me. Tell Dalehouse your real reason." The Russian looked surprised, and a little thoughtful, but he shrugged. "All right. Poor American Danny, you are helpless without your machines. But not #. I am pilot! I do not wish to be earthworm like one of those things we shit on in your latrine, Danny. I want something to fly. They will not give me fuel. They will not let me have structural materials for glider -- would be easy, except for launching; plenty of winds here, you see. But Gasha says no, so what can I do? I look up and see the balloonists Abating around sky and I say I also will be balloonist!" He pounded his fist on the top of the computer. "Have gas. Have navigation information for winds aloft. Have Soviet know-how. So now I will make little balloon, big enough for me, and I will pilot again." A surge of enthusiasm infected Dalehouse. "Hey, that's great. Would it work?" "Of course would work!" "We could use it to take after those balloonists. Get close to them. Harriet, do you hear that? It would give us a chance to try to talk to diem." 'That's fine," she said, and Dalehouse looked at her more closely. Even for Harriet she looked sullen. "What's the matter?" he asked. She said, "I located the radio." "The one that blew away in the storm?" She laughed, like a cartoon figure laughing: Heh, heh, heh. "It takes a real idiot to believe that one. How could it blow away? God-damned thing weighs twenty kilos. It occured to me it might be transmitting, so I listened, and it was. I away. Straight down," she said, staring at them. "The damn thing is right down underneath us in the ground. "    A minute was still a minute. Danny made sure of that, because he had begun to doubt. His pulse was still forty-two in sixty seconds by the clock. He could hold his breath for three of the minutes and maybe a bit more. The small change of time had not altered in value. But one thousand four hundred and forty minutes did not seem to make a day any more. Sometimes if felt as though a whole day had passed, and the clock said only six or seven hours. Sometimes it would occur to him to be tired, and the clock would show as much as thirty hours since he slept last. Fretfully Harriet tried to keep them all on some regular schedule, not because it seem necessary but because it was orderly. She failed. Within -- what? a week? -- they were sleeping when they wanted to and eating when they felt hungry, and marking the passage of time, if at all, by events. The first near visit by balloonists was after the big storm, and before the Peeps received their reinforcement of personnel. The time Kappelyushnikov triangulated the missing radio for Harriet and discovered it was at least twenty meters underground was just after they sent their first reports and shipment of specimens back to Earth. And the time balloonists came to visit -- That was a whole other thing, the kind of event that changes everything fore and aft. Dalehouse woke up with his mind in the sky. He did his chores. He helped Morrissey check his traps, prepared a meal of desecrated stew, fixed a valve in the shower stall by the lake. But what he was thinking of was Kappelyushnikov 's balloons. Danny had talked him out of the big single hydrogen-filled bag; too big; too clumsy; too hard to manufacture, and above all too likely to kill its passenger if anything popped its skin. So they had painstingly blown a hundred pibalsized bags, and the Russian had knotted up a netting to contain them. The aggregate lift would be as much as you wanted. All it took was more balloons; you could multiply them to lift the entire camp if you liked. But if one or two popped, it did not mean a dead aeronaut. The passenger would descend reasonably slowly -- to be more accurate, they were optimistically hopeful the passenger would descend slowly. He might damage himself. But at least he would not be spread flat across the Klongan landscape. Kappelyushnikov would not allow Danny to do the final stages of filling and trying the balloons -- "Is my neck, dear Danny, so is my job to make sure it stays okay." "But you're taking so damn long. Let me help." "Nyet. Is very clear," grinned the pilot, "that you think pretty soon you too will fly my balloons. Maybe so. But this time I am sole cargo. And besides, have still static lift tests to finish. Until then not even I fly." Dalehouse fidgeted away, disgruntled. He had been on Klong for -- whatever length of time it was; a couple of weeks, at least. And the author of "Preliminary Studies toward a First Contact with Subtechnological Sentients" had yet to meet his first subtechnological sentient. Oh, he had seen them. There were burro wers under his feet, and he was sure he had caught a glimpse of something when Morrissey exploded a charge under a presumed tunnel. The Krinpit had been his fellow passenger for half an hour. And the balloonists were often in the sky, though seldom nearby. Three separate races to study and deal with! And the most productive thing he had done was to dig a latrine. He fidgeted his way into Harriet's tent, hoping to find that she had miraculously made some giant leap in translation of one of the languages -- if they were languages. She wasn't there, but the tapes were. He played the best of them over and over, until Kappelyushnikov came in, sweating and cheerful. "Static test is good. Plenty lift. Now we let whole mishmash sit for a while, check for leaks. You are enjoying concert of airborne friends?" "It isn't a concert, it's a language. I think it's a language. It's not random bird calls. You can hear them singing in chords and harmonies. It's chromatic rather than -- do you know anything about music theory?" ' "Me? Please, Danny. I am pilot, not long-haired fiddle player. ' ' "Well, anyway, it's chromatic rather than diatonic, but the harmonies are there, not too far off what you might hear in, say, Scriabin." "Fine composer," the Russian beamed. "But tell me. Why do you listen to tapes when you have real thing right outside?" Startled, Danny raised his head. It was true. Some of the sounds he was hearing came from somewhere outside the tent. "Also," Kappelyushnikov went on severely, "you are breaking Gasha's rice bowl. She is translator, not you, and she is .very difficult lady. So come now and listen to your pink and green friends."    The balloonists had never been so close, or so many of them. The whole camp was staring up at them, hundreds of them, so many that they obscured each other and blotted out part of the sky. The red glower of Kung shone through them dimly as they passed before its disk, but many of them were glowing with their own firefly light, mostly, as Kappelyushnikov had said, pink and pale green. Their song was loud and clear. Harriet was there already, microphone extended to catch every note, listening critically with an expression of distaste. That meant nothing. It was just the way she always looked. "Why so close?" Dalehouse marveled. "I do not wish to break your rice bowl either, dear Danny. You are expert. But I think is possible they like what we put up for chopper pilot." And Kappelyushnikov waved to the strobe beacon on the tower. "Um." Danny considered a moment. "Let's see. Do me a favor and get one of the portable floodlights. We'll see them better, and maybe it'll bring them even closer. ' ' "Why not?" The Russian disappeared inside the supply tent, and came back with the portable in one hand and the batteries in the Other, cursing as he tried to avoid stumbling over the wires. He fumbled with it, and its dense white beam abruptly extended itself toward the horizon, then danced up toward the balloonist. It seemed to excite them. Their chirps, squeals, flatulences and cello drones multiplied themselves in a shower of grace notes, and they seemed to follow the beam. "How do they do that?" Harriet demanded fretfully. "They've got no wings or anything that I can see." "Same as I, dear Gasha," boomed the Russian. "Up and down, to find a truly sympathetic current of air. Here, you hold light. I must watch experts and learn!" The balloonists were coming closer. Evidently the light attracted them. Now that there was enough brightness to make the colors plain, the variety of their patterns was striking. There were cloudlike whorls, solid bands, crosshatchings, dazzle designs that resembled World War I camouflage. "Funny," said Dalehouse, staring longingly at the swarm. "Why would they have all those colors when they can't see them most of the time?" "Is your opinion they can't," said Kappelyushnikov. "Light like beet Juice is strange to us, we see only the red. But for them perhaps is -- Ho, Morrissey! Good shot!" Dalehouse Jumped a quarter of a meter as the camp's one and only shotgun went off behind him. Overhead, one of the balloonists was spiraling toward the ground.  "I get," yelled Kappelyushnikov, and sprinted off to intersect its fall. 'What the hell did you doT' blazed Dalehouse. The biologist turned a startled and defensive face toward him. 'T collected a specimen," he said. Harriet laughed disagreeably. "Shame on you, Morrissey. You didn't get Dalehouse 's permission to shoot one of his friends. That's the price you pay for being a specialist in sentients, you fall in love with your subjects." "Don't be bitchy, Harriet. My job's hard enough, this'll make it impossible. Shooting at them is the surest way to drive diem away." "Oh, sure, Dalehouse. Anybody can see they're stampeding in terror, right?" She waved a casual through the light and singing as they soared delightedly overhead. Kappelyushnikov came back with a rubbery sac draped over his shoulder. "Almost had to fight off one of your Krinpit friends to get it," he growled. "Was big, ugly mother. Don't know what I would have done if he had truly contested ownership. But he scuttled away." "There are no Krinpits around here," Harriet said sharply. "Are now, Gasha. Never mind. See how pretty our new pet is." The creature was not dead. It did not seem even wounded, or at least there was no blood. The shotgun pellets had blown a hole in the gasbag and nothing else. Its little face was working, looking like the countenance of an engorged tick, with great eyes staring at them. It was making the tiniest of sounds, almost like gasps. "Disgusting," said Harriet, drawing back. "Why isn't it screaming?" "If I knew the answers to questions like that," said Morrissey, dropping to one knee beside the creature to see it better, "I wouldn't have to collect specimens, would I? But at a guess, it would be, if I hadn't shot the breath out of it. I think it uses the hydrogen for vocalizing. God knows what it breathes. Must be oxygen, of course, but -- " He shook his head, and glanced up. "Maybe I ought to collect a few more." "No!" "Christ, Dalehouse! You know, Harriet's right about you? Well -- I know. At least let's see how phototropic they are. Hand me those shells." Zvonkov passed over the plastic belt of ammunition, and Morrissey pawed through it until he found a signal flare. "You'll set fire to them, Morrissey! That's hydrogen in those bags!" "Oh, cripes." But the biologist aimed carefully to one side of the flock. More and more of them were entering into the beam, now steady as Harriet had put it on the ground, pointing up, the whole diffuse swarm contracting into a knotted mass. When the flare went off the whole flock seemed to twitch like a single organism. They didn't swarm toward it. They stayed bunched in an ellipsoidal huddle along the axis of the beam of light; but their song changed to reach a frantic crescendo, and there seemed to be a systematic rearranging of positions within the flock. The smaller and less brightly colored individuals bobbed toward the lower portions of the school, and the larger and gaudier ones lifted toward the top. Dalehouse stared in fascination, so entranced that he did not realize his face was sticky and wet until Kappelyushnikov grunted in surprise. "Hey! Is raining?" But it wasn't rain. It was sweet and pungent on their lips, with an aftertaste that was animal and fetid; it fell like a gentle dew on their upturned faces and clung to their skins. "Don't swallow any!" cried Morrisssey, in belated panic. But it was too late for that. Some of the people were already licking their lips. Not that it mattered, thought Dalehouse, the stuff was all over them. If it was poisonous they were done for. "You fools!" cried Harriet, stamping her foot. She had never been attractive, and now she looked like a witch, sallow face in a grimace, uneven teeth bared. "We've got to get this stuff off. Kappelyushnikov, you and Morrissey get buckets of water at once." "Da, Gasha," said the pilot dreamily. "Now!" she screamed. "Oh, of course, now." He lumbered off a few steps, then paused and looked coquettishly back over his shoulder. "Alyusha, dear. You help me get important water right away?" The navigator simpered. She answered him in Russian, something that made Kappelyushnikov grin and Harriet swear. "Don't you clods know we're all in danger?" she cried, catching at Dalehouse 's hand imploringly. "You, Danny, you've always been nicer to me than those other bastards. Help me get water. ' ' He returned the pressure of her hand and whispered, "Hell, yes, honey, let's get some water." "Danny!" But she wasn't angry any more. She was smiling, allowing him to tug her toward the lakefront. He ran his tongue over his lips again. Whatever the dew was, the more he tasted it the better he liked it: not sweet, not tart, not like fruit or meat, not like flowers. It was not like anything he had ever tasted before, but it was a taste he wanted more of. He saw Harriet touching her pointed tongue to her own thin lips, and was suddenly seized with the need to taste that Klongan mist from her mouth. He felt the damp heat rising inside him, and caught her roughly around the waist. They kissed desperately, their hands busy ripping each others' clothes off. It never occured to them to think of hiding themselves. They cared nothing for what the others in the expedition might think of them, and the others cared no more for Harriet and Dalehouse. In couples and clusters the entire expedition was down on the ground in a mass fury of copulation, while overhead the swooping balloonists sang and soared through the searchlight and their gentle mist rained down on the human beings below.    His addiction made him a pariah to aii mankind. One woman couid forgive him, if he couid forgive himseif. I remember collecting my separation pay and taking the lighter down to Port City, leaving the ship in orbit behind me. It felt strange leaving the Titus Groan. She had been home for me for many years. But I wanted to live in a city again. I could afford to forget about space for a while. There would always be work for a paramed-rated phaseshift navigator. I wanted to raise some hell. And that I did. I immersed myself in lusting, drinking and glorious, sweaty, knock-down brawling, ridding myself of all the stored energy accumulated over the years. Port City was accustomed to spacers running wild; it was an occupational hazard. And there was profit to be made from it. I must have had a good time during that first month because I don't remember very much of it. One night I passed out in the middle of a filthy chanty somebody was singing. I think it was me. I awoke -- perhaps revived would be a better word -- to see the vague outlines of four people standing around me. My head was cradled in the lap of a fifth. A girl. Even in that condition, I could tell. She was trying to force some liquid into my mouth. I gagged, coughed, sputtered and sprayed most of whatever it was all over her legs. "Look, it's moving!" "Do you think it's intelligent?" "Don't be ridiculous. Would an intelligent being sing anything like thatT' "Yes, it was rather fascinating, wasn't it? You think it will sing again if we buy it some more whisky?" "I think that if we buy it any more whisky, it'll collapse." I was trying to focus in on the faces -- but I wasn't having much luck. I tried to stand up but the room wouldn't hold still. I fell flat on my face. My nose broke. "Oh, dear, he's not going to die, is he? What a mess! Cilix, Irina, help him up. I won't allow him to expire without finishing that song." They lifted me onto a chair but my spine had turned to jelly. I felt the blood running down my face. I heard a loud thunk and realized it was the sound of my head hitting the table. I opened my eyes and saw the sympathy fir in its container begin to respond to me. As I watched it weave and sway drunkenly, I began to feel nauseous. They had the bartender give me a small dose of adrenalin and after what seemed like several gallons of Terran coffee (I didn't want to think of what it was costing me), I began to see straight again. My nose had been broken several times before and I was used to setting it myself. I slapped some plastic on the break in the skin and asked the serving unit to bring me some cigarettes. They were expensive but about three times stronger than anything I had ever smoked. Probably aatificial. My rescuers were young Bohemians. Artists. Jaded children with no goals or directions. I sang the song for them from start to finish but it took some explaining. It was an ancient Terran chanty concerning the amorous adventures of a sailor named Barnacle Bill. It wasn't too difficult to translate the slang but I couldn't remember what a barnacle was. I told them that it was probably a part of an early reactor drive. Yuri listened to it all with a beethereal air. A poet. She recited some of her work. It was terrible. Jil was a painter and, apparently, a successfuf one. She paid for the others. I liked her infectious, warbling laugh and the way she joined in with me on the chorus. Cilix was a fallen academician of some sort. I couldn't really tell what he was thinking, he didn't talk much. But then again, I never could read Ophidians very well. Anthrus, on the other hand, spoke constantly. He considered himself a wit. I considered him a cynic. But I wasn't paying much attention to him. I couldn't take my eyes off Irina. Irina was wonderful. Slim, tall and fair-skinned. She didn't paint herself as most women did. Her skull was bare except for a tiny blossom tattooed on her cranium. Even her slightest movement was graceful. Irina knew she was beautiful and she wore it well. My feelings towards her weren't lustful but... affectionate. I wanted to hold her, to stroke her cheek, to be gentle with her. I wanted to hear her sigh. I tried not to stare but I'm afraid it was a failed effort. As we spoke, the gentle flow of the sympathy fir dimmed slightly and then began to flicker. Patrons at surrounding tables, who had noticed similar reactions from their centerpieces, looked around to see what was disturbing the psychosensitive plants. Without glancing up from his wine, Anthrus smiled enigmatically and said, "John is here." Irina tossed back her drink and announced that she was leaving but Anthrus held her by the arm and shook his head. She sat down again, uneasily. I glanced around at my companions, puzzled. Cilix, Jil and Yuri had all become suddenly glum. Anthrus pursed his lips and fixed me with his ice-blue stare. "When John enters a room," he said, "one gets the feeling somebody just left." I noticed that several people in our immediate vicinity were, in fact, leaving. Our little group was rapidly becoming an island. It was only then that I saw John. He appeared at Anthrus' left shoulder. Our plant shivered and its halo all but disappeared. He was tall. The shabby surplice covered a uniform that was familiar but I couldn't place it. The gaunt and craggy features had an almost gray pallor and his hair was long and stringy. But the eyes were the most striking thing about him. Vacant. Totally devoid of any expression, of any life. "John, how nice to see you." Anthnis beckoned him to a chair. "Sit down and join us. Wine?" "No, thank you," the spectre answered in a voice as tired and empty as a derelict of space. He sat down and I stared as the fir quite literally strained away from him. Outside of the fact that John was as lost a looking soul as I had ever seen, I could not understand what it was about the man that seemed to cause everyone such concern. He did not strike me as a particularly disturbing individual -- but the firs knew better. Every one of the sensitive plants within several meters of us was flickering like mad and our own fir was behaving as though it had the botanical equivalent of St. Vitus's dance. The manager of the bistro approached our table, his hands clenched in massive fists. "I have made it known to you," he said in his heavily accented English, "that I do not wish your presence here. You disturb the business, John." "You have no right to bar this man from the premises," countered Anthrus. "He's done nothing wrong. He has not broken any laws." "I have no right," agreed the manager. "You can report me if you wish." "I shall." "Nevertheless, he must leave at once." Throughout the exchange John sat motionless as though completely unaware of what was going on around him. "If he leaves, then we all leave with him," Anthrus declared. Of course we all left. Having nothing else to do, I went with them. The others had grown silent. The talkative Jil had become a sudden introvert. Cilix and Yuri both looked straight ahead as they walked and Irina looked upset. In an effort to break the awkward silence, I asked John if he was thrown out often. He answered simply, "Yes." "But... why?" He replied, "I have a surrogate," and then abruptly walked away. k  "I don't like him," Irina said, lounging with her shoes off. "Oh, I don't know. I find his company stimulating." Anthrus grinned at her. "Don't you?" She snorted derisively and went back to doing nothing. She did it very gracefully. "Who is he?" I asked. Cilix paused in his preparation of the yola leaves. "He was a merchant spacer, like yourself A mercenary, wasn't he?" "Ask Anthrus," Yuri replied as she carefully applied paint to her depilated cranium. "He's our expert on the walking dead." "The walking dead?" "Yuri is being true to her melodramatic Russian heritage," smiled Anthrus. "Yes, John was a mercenary, I suppose. I can't think who else of Terran origin would want to crew for the Lhari." That was where I had seen the uniform. "What happened to him?" "He picked up a habit," answered Cilix, setting down the bowl of husked yola leaves. "Is that what he meant when he said he had a surrogate?" I chose a leaf from the bowl and popped it in my mouth, feeling the delicious coolness as it melted. Anthrus looked surprised. "You mean that in all your travels you never heard of the surrogate lizard? That so-called legendary creature?" I had to admit ignorance. "Ah!" Anthrus leaned forward, pleased with his captive audience. "I enjoy telling this story!" "Be kind for once," Yuri said dryly. "Make it short." "Oh, very well." Anthrus made a mock bow in her direction. "I shall be merciful. Short and to the point." He turned to me. "You've heard of a planet named Xerxes V, in the Julianas?" I had. "A quarantined world." Anthrus shrugged. "Why should that concern the Lhari? Their crews are expendable." I nodded grimly. With their high pay came high risk. "So," continued Anthrus, "one of John's shipmates was bitten by a surrogate while there. It came aboard with him, that is, he smuggled it in. It is a curious sort of reptile, births just like a mammal. It's quite remarkable. Well, to be brief, this lizard was pregnant. Its offspring crawled into John 's berth one night and became his personal parasite." "Parasite? When Cilix said he had a habit, I naturally assumed some sort of narcotic or -- " "But the surrogate is a habit! A deadly one." Anthrus' eyes glittered with a positively necrophilic delight. "It has a narcotic effect upon its host. Once bitten by a surrogate, you're doomed. You simply cannot live without it. Its secretions are addictive. Eventually the host dies. How soon depends mainly upon the host's constitution and the lizard's appetite. John and his surrogate seem to have developed a rather successful symbiotic relationship. He's been lingering for years. His fs a pragmatic parasite. It knows John's biological limitations very well." "It knows?" "Oh, yes, it knows The surrogate is sentient. It possesses an intellect of a very high order. The species, as I understand it, is quite rare and indigenous only to Xerxes. Most people think its existence is a myth." He grinned wolfishly. "My friends, we simply must have another demonstration!" Amidst their moans and cries of protest, he turned to me and said, "This will be an experience you shall remember."    "Pay the man." "Anthrus, no!" Irina showed a sudden concern. "Don't do this to him. Please." "Why should I pay him?" Anthrus smiled, again that enigmatic rictus. "He will tell you about yourself." Yuri took my hand, pressing it earnestly. "Don't do it. Don't listen to him." But Anthrus knew I would My curiosity was hooked. I paid John while Yuri cleared the table, keeping her eyes averted from our guest. Once again a pall had fallen on my friends. Once again Irina tried to leave and Anthrus prevented it. I was beginning to resent his domination of her. Cilix rose to dim the lights. "Oh, no, no, Cilix! Bring a fir," said Anthrus gleefully. "This must be a complete experience." His thin lips compressed, Cilix placed a fir upon the table. Immediately it began to tremble and its glow began to wane. Anthrus beckoned and we formed a circle, seated around the table. "Shall I begin?" Anthrus looked to me to answer John. I nodded. Slowly John removed his outer surplice. Beneath it, clinging to his shabby Lhari uniform -- the surrogate. It was approximately fifteen centimeters long -- and bright, bright yellow. My initial impression was that it resembled a salamander but the head was too big for that. Its eyes were closed and it appeared to be asleep. With two fingers of his left hand John gently stroked it. The lizard moved. The creature detached itself from John's tunic and crawled down onto the surface of the table. There was something repulsive about its movements. Yuri swallowed nervously. She looked frightened. Jil's expression was one of horror. Irina looked disgusted. And Anthrus -- But the lizard! Slowly its head turned in my direction and it looked at me. There was nothing reptilian in those eyes. On a small scale they were almost human in appearance. Blue. Set deep in that pyramidshaped head. And it was looking at me! Them, with blinding speed, it leaped up on John's exposed right forearm, sinking its claws deep into the flesh. John winced. Again those blue eyes looked at me just before the jaws gajjed open. Two iridescent, sne-like fangs. Slowly, hideously, like a lover, the lizard sank those tesselated nightmares into the soft flesh just below John's bicep. Irina gagged and shut her eyes. The others watched in frozen fascination. The hypersensitive fir had torn itself from its container by the roots. It lay thrashing on the table, its glow extinguished, dying. John's eyes were closed in ecstasy. A tiny tear of blood welled in the comer of his mouth where he had bitten through his lip. He shivered -- shook -- and then was still. The lizard sucked, immobile. A gradual change came over John. He sighed deeply. His skin was flushed, his forehead damp with beads of perspiration. The ashen gray of his complexion faded away and in its place a robust glow of health shone forth. He opened his eyes, flashed a stunning smile and winked. Then, taking his discarded surplice, he draped it over his arm, hiding the lizard from view. "It disturbs some people to have to look at it," he explained in a voice totally different from the one I had heard him use before. He raised a glass of wine and toasted us. We drank -- he with gusto, the rest of us with trepidation. He looked at Anthrus with a dazzling smile. "Well, my predatory friend," he said, "another night of voyeurism for you as my brother spacer turns slowly on the spit." He winked at me. "You will get your money's worth tonight, I promise you." "All rignt. So you're a gypsy, then? What can you tell me of myself?" I asked him. He chuckled. "Only everything." and sincere. "You're certain that you want to know?" I nodded, skeptical. I had known gypsies in my time, although none whose act was quite so spectacular. He was a showman, that I had to grant him. "You're wrong," he laughed. "I'm not an actor and this is not a farce." I was impressed. "Not bad. couldn't keep from smirking but he didn't seem to notice. "Mm, yes, I suppose you could say that. And, also, no. Let's just say I have a way of sensing the truth." Anthrus was watching us intently. "Indeed?" I asked. "And just what is the truth?" He cocked an eyebrow at me. "Well, there are more truths than you know. For example, your feelings toward Irina." I felt a sudden tightness in my stomach. My eyes met hers and saw surprise. She did not look away. "'And she, of course, is flattered by this bit of information," John continued. "Because, you see, Irina has a hunger for much more than our friend Anthrus, here, can give her. She's thought about you once or twice. She's thinking about you now. About what you look like sans your clothing. Shall I tell her?" I think I blushed. Anthrus threw back his head and laughed. "Don't let his laughter fool you," John warned, looking at me seriously. "He really doesn't like you, you know." "That's right, I don't." Anthrus had a strange look on his face. "I don't like you at all. But then, I don't like anyone. John's told me that before. I have too strong a sense of self. The ideal hedonist devotes himself full time to his own ego. But our Irina, well, she devotes herself to passion, don't you, my love?" She was looling at me, not at Anthrus. "So you like our new friend?" he went on. "Well, go on, enjoy him. He's relatively young and twice as strong as I, no doubt. Go on. But I shall hate you for it. Perhaps you'll let me watch?" "That wasn't funny, Anthrus," I snapped. "It wasn't meant to be. You see, we have to tell the truth tonight. Otherwise John will catch us in our dissembling. Because he knows the truth. And John is never, ever, wrong." "He's right," John said. "I never am. And that explains your earlier confusion as to why I'm so universally disliked. It isn't that I am, as you so aptly pictured me, as lost a looking soul as you have ever seen. Most people find tragic losers reassuring in a way. They feel superior in seeing someone worse off than they themselves. The simple fact is that no one, no life form as I know it, can bear to hear the unadulterated truth about itself. The truth is too disconcerting. It strips away pretensions and defenses. Nobody really wants to hear the truth when lies are so much more attractive." "And the truth about yourself?" I asked. "You did not pay for that." "I'll pay you now." "I'm not that hungry. Besides, tonight is yours. I have much more to tell." And so it went. A brutal session of unspeakable encounter. He laughed, he smiled, he charmed. He told me things about myself that were so deeply buried that my conscious mind had never thought to resurrect them. And, finally, there was a stirring beneath the surplice. The lizard crawled back up John's arm and took its place upon his chest. It shut his eyes and moved no more. The surrogate -- sated -- slept . And as I sat there, stunned, the man's effervescence faded. The spark diminished in his eyes until once again they glazed over. His skin resumed its ghastly pallor. The life was gone, the shell remained. With a tired, hollow voice, the spacer thanked us. Then he stumbled through the portal and was gone. I said, "I think I'd like to kill him." Anthrus chuckled. "But you can't. He's too compelling. Who among us, after all, can kill the truth?" Yuri sighed wearily. "And you said  was melodramatic?" I found it difficult to look at Irina, sitting with Anthrus' gracefully clawed hand covering her own. I was not normally given to prejudice but, watching them, I felt more strongly than ever that the Terran girl belonged with me, with one of her own. "I certainly wish I had psi powers as effective as his," I said, trying to keep the irony out of my voice. Cilix thoughtfully stroked the stem of his goblet. "You still don't understand, do you?" He was regarding me with that unblinking Ophidian stare. "John has no psi powers. He is not an empath or a gypsy or even a very perceptive human being. John is a pitiable derelict. That is all he is and that is all he ever shall be." "But, then, how -- " "The surrogate," answered Yuri. "It speaks through John. The lizard has no vocal chords of its own, nor does it have any kind of telepathic ability. As John says, he -- it -- senses the truth. And it uses its host as a means to communicate." "You look startled," Anthrus grinned. "I told you that the lizard possessed an intellect of a very high order. I wonder if we can persuade John to allow himself to be scanned next time? Wouldn't it be amusing if it turned out that the surrogate's intelligence was superior to any of ours? Small wonder Xerxes V was placed under quarantine!" "I feel sorry for him," Jil said softly. Her voice had a meek and gentle quality. She seemed to speak more to herself than to the others. "I wish there was something we could do to help him." "Your sympathy for him is very touching," said Anthrus flatly, "but to interfere would only cause you grief. Nothing can be done. He is an undesirable. Where can he go? What can he do? John really lives only when those fangs are in his veins. Tonight he shone and glittered; he radiated truth and brilliance and provided us with much amusement -- " "Speak for yourself," interjected Yuri. " -- and for all we know, he's better off that way. We've seen what he is like in normal circumstances. Won't eat more than is necessary to barely stay alive, won't drink, won't laugh, won't even cry as humans do so often..." I saw Irina wince. "... why, without the lizard, he would die. He told me so himself. His apathy may be his normal state. After crewing for the Lhari, I shouldn't be surprised if that were so. And if that's the case, well, then the lizard saves him. And you must admit," he looked at me and smiled maliciously, "John has become a fascinating creature. Now, thanks to him, we know all your inner thoughts and secrets." I watched him as he smirked and gloated over how he had maneuvered me to be hoisted on my own petard. "I must admit I am surprised, though," he continued. "I know you hated what you heard tonight. I know it must have hurt you deeply. And yet, you're unashamed. How is that possible? I was under the impression that I knew human nature." He turned his strangely beautiful face to Irina and chucked her chin gently with his fragile fingers, having sheathed his claws. "We must talk about this tonight, Irina. We really must discuss our new friend here. Why is he unashamed? Your reactions were rather different, as I recall."    I sought solace in the quiet, moonless night. Standing naked on the balcony, I felt the warm northern breezes on my skin and I breathed in deep lungfuls of the humid air. The others slept. I was thinking while looking at one of Jil's paintings, not yet finished, resting on its metal stand and glistening in the soft light. I turned down the illumination on the balcony so I could see the painting's luminescent glow. It was the face of John. The eyes in the painting were sad, unlike the glazed and lifeless ones of the model. "I wonder if you feel anything at all?" I murmured to the painting. "What's it like, being used as a surrogate mouth by the very being that destroys you? What do you feel when you look into someone else's soul?" "I often wonder about that myself," said Jil. She sat behind me, in the shadows. She had been so still, I had not noticed her. I stared at the red fire of her eyes, two glowing dots that floated up as she rose and came toward me. "This one will sell," I gestured at the painting. "To a stranger who hasn't met the original. It's the eyes. The sort of look one sees in poets' eyes, I suppose." "I don't think that I will sell it," she said. She, too, had undressed to enjoy the evening breeze. Her fur rippled in the gentle wind. "This painting gives me..." she hesitated. "There's not a word for it in English." She made a sound no human throat could copy. "It's just one word and yet it means so many things. I really can't explain." "It's all right. I think I understand." Then I became aware that I was speaking to a different Jil. This Jil was very serious. "You're not yourself tonight," I said. "At home, in our society, we wear two faces," she explained. "One we present from day to day to those around us in order to accommodate their actions. The other is for family and friends -- the private face." She pointed to the chamber shared by Anthrus and Irina. "You want a lover but you need a friend." Before I could reply, she placed two fingers on my lips and held them there. "You shouldn't sleep tonight," she said. "Stay here. Watch the night and think about the things the surrogate told you. Few people really know themselves. Confronted with such knowledge all at once, it's easy to deny the truth. It's simple not to face it. That's why John is hated. But he's really blameless. You should not hate a man for things said by a voice that he cannot control." She left me then so that I could be alone. I felt the need to walk. I dressed quietly so as not to wake the others.    Port City never slept. It had too many diverse life forms to accommodate. There were five "standard" languages spoken and the city was subdivided into a variety of environments. Anyone who did not fit in had to adapt as best he could but there were even facilities to help accomplish that, provided one could pay. It was an exciting city -- the new Rome to which all space routes led. But like the original Rome of primordial times, this Rome had its share of decadence and desolation. I had been attracted by the decadence. What I found instead was something else entirely. "Where are we going?" Irina! "I thought you were asleep," I told her. 'Tm sorry if I woke you." "I'm a light sleeper. Not like Anthrus." "Why did you follow me?" "Can't .you guess?" She linked her arm with mine as we walked. "Don't tell me we need John here to tell us all about each other." There was an unpleasant edge to her voice. "You're beginning to sound like Anthrus," "Must we talk about him?" "Why not? The three of us don't have any secrets from each other any more, do. we? The surrogate saw to that." "He disgusts me!" I was surprised at her vehemence. "How anyone can allow himself to fall to such a state..." As she spoke, I suddenly realized that this was the first time we had been alone since they had picked me up off the bistro floor. I should have been taking advantage of the opportunity, but I wasn't. I kept thinking about what Jil had said. We walked a while in silence. Awkward silence. Irina was the first to break it. "What's the matter? Don't you want me any more?" I never thought I'd have to think before I answered such a question. "I... I'm not sure. I suppose so." "You suppose sol That's a fine thing to say to a girl who offers you herself! I could be wrong but do I detect a certain lack of enthusiasm?" "I'm just confused. I thought I knew myself inside and out. Oh, I knew I had a lot of shortcomings but -- " "Are you still thinking about John? Forget him. He's just a bum. He isn't important, you and I are. You shouldn't let him get to you." "He seems to get to you, though. Anthrus must have arranged for the two of you to meet with John before, didn't he? A private session, just the three of you?" I felt her arm tighten. "No." "No?" "Not just the three of us." Of course. The others would have been present, too. Anthrus would have seen to that. It also explained his earlier statements about the human capacity for shame. The experience had been a painful one for me. For Irina, it must have been truly humiliating. "Why do you let him treat you that way?" I asked her. "Why do you stay with him? You aren't a masochist, are you?" "You don't have to be insulting," she bristled. "If you don't want me, simply say so." "Would you return to Anthrus?" "Yes." "Then I can't think of a single good reason why I should want you." "Svolotch!" she swore at me in Russian. Her hands darted up to my face and I felt a sharp stab of pain as the long nails clawed. There was a sudden stickiness just above my left eye. She may have meant to blind me in her spite but I had already seen enough. I turned and left her standing there.    The juice of the berries from the harlequin bush, unfermented, is a deadly poison. But when pressed and processed into wine, the berries have an anesthetic quality. I was feeling no pain. I had wandered into the sanguine, sealed section of the city that had been set aside for the Frilissi, whose auditory membranes are so sensitive that theirs is, to humans, a virtually mute culture. What I perceived as silence was comforting to me. I had wanted to go someplace where I could be alone -- nowhere is one so alone as in a crowd of total strangers. I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together softly and an attendant appeared at my side. In his own language I subvocalized my request for more wine. He was pleased to see the pains I took not to let the slightest whisper escape my lips and he did his best to imitate a human smile, althouth it must have been uncomfortable for him. To a Frilissi, the baring of teeth is an offensive act. I thanked him for the compliment he paid me. Then suddenly he started. The thick fibrafoam flooring had prevented my hearing any footsteps but someone had actually approached so silently that not even my attendant had been aware. It unsettled him greatly. Only one race of beings known to man can move so quietly when they want to, and we have no name for them. We cannot speak their language and so we call them by the adjective which most closely describes their appearance -- feline. Jil sat down and waited quietly until I had finished my wine. She did not know how , to subvocalize and we could not otherwise communicate without causing severe pain to the Frilissi. Consequently we merely sat and watched each other. It felt nice. I needed the wine to deaden my emotions so I could think clearly. I thought about how much Anthrus, Irina and I had in common. Like the surrogate, we were manipulators. Users. Small wonder Irina hated John so much. Acknowledgihg the ultimate victim must have been unpleasant for her. It had been for me. Hate was a convenient surrogate for guilt. I couldn't remain in the Frilissi zone for long. Although I wasn't able to hear it, the ultra highfrequency pitch of their conversation was giving me a migraine. I paid my tab and we left. The sky looked like rain. "You tracked me," I accused Jil then. "Why?" She was embarrassed. She had to have smelled my clothes in order to be able to pick up my scent and since I had only the clothes on my back, she must have scented them in my room right after she left me on the balcony. She must have suspected that I would leave. But why should that fact have concerned her? "You weren't going to come back, were you?" she countered my question. "No," I said. "But you haven't answered me. What made you think I was going to leave? And why did you track me?" It started raining. Jil turned as though to look for shelter but I grabbed her by the shoulders. She did not resist. We looked at each other for a long moment. "Jil... I'm just some guy you picked up off the floor." She looked down. The rain was matting her fur. She brushed at it absently. She looked like a drowned cat and I felt a giggle starting in my throat. "I'm going to smell funny," she said. I burst out laughing. She looked up in surprise and then she started laughing too. Our eyes met again and suddenly I wanted very much to kiss her... and I did. "Do you want to go back?" I asked. She shook her head. "I want to go with you." "But your paintings?" "I want only the one." I knew which one. "I can get it later. There's a hostel not far from here. Let's get a room." I have been in rooms with females of all races, yet I was surprised to find myself feeling exhilarated and excited, as though I were about to have a new experience. But then, that is exactly what it was -- a brand new experience. I had never gone to bed with a friend before. It felt happy. Giggling like children, we ran through the downpour, dodging shuttlecraft and turbines, splashing in the puddles. I tripped and fell sprawling. We both were completely soaked and I could not remember when I had laughed so hard. Then, as I was getting up, I saw what I had tripped over. It was John. He way lying on his back in the street, his eyes wide open. He was dead. Jil made a little mewling noise and looked away. I knelt over his body, brushing the straggly hair out of his face. His neck was broken and obviously he had been lying there for some time. I was brought back to reality. Someone had killed him. No one would ever know why and no one would ever care. Just another night in Port City. Jil screamed then. Too late, I noticed that his surplice had been blown back by the wind and that the lizard wasn't there. It was climbing rapidly up my leg. I tried to beat it off but it was too fast for me. I saw Jil run toward me and I yelled at her to stay back. And then I felt excruciating pain. I sank to my knees, tearing at the creature, but it would not let go. I screamed, half with pain, half with fear. Searing heat flowed through me. I felt dizzy. Weak. I heard Jil call my name. I could feel her hands touch me, trying to pry the creature loose, but she sounded far away. I could feel myself sweating. Warm. It was so warml So relaxing and pleasant. Let me go, Jil. Leave me alone, it feels good. I pushed her away roughly. I hadn't wanted to do that but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Don't cry, Jil, please... She doesn't understand . How can I explain? It really doesn't hurt so much, it... You can't explain. She'll never understand. She doesn't want to. Forget her. No... I felt like I was coated with warm vaseline. My skin had a consistency I never before realized. What a wonderful thing, my skin! Funny how I never noticed it before. The way the tiny little hairs on the back of my hand resemble a wheat field... And there's an area where the thumb and forefinger join in that little webbed part between the fingers -- I could see a vein throbbing. Tiny, miniature eruptions of blood coursing through there, just below the skin... pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump... My head seemed to be moving. Really wish it would stop, most distracting... Jil? Is that youl I couldn't seem to focus my vision. What?  Why... she was slapping my face. Stupid thing to do. Make her stop ! Right. Make her stop. Was it raining? Somehow I seem to remember rain. Strange. The sun was shining. Variegated fields of indigo and scarlet, sanguine skies besmirched with gridelin and glowing golden birds. Beautiful, isn't itl Mmmmmrnmm... There was a village. Primitive. And people toiling in the gardens by their homes. Bandy-legged people with protruding eyes and gawky elbows. Frog-like. Docile. Calm. Serene. And each one with a lizard clinging... No, wait! It was gone. I wanted to see more. The rain was trickling down my face, comingling with the sweat. The street was empty. I could hear traffic in the distance. Traffic and the dripping, plopping sound of rain. I was prostrate in a puddle. My vision cleared and I could see my predecessor, decaying in the damp. Poor John. And now poor me. With a sloshing I raised myself to hands and knees and tried to gulp some air into my lungs. My head was hanging down. Dear God, it was so heavy, it was all that I could do to lift it. I did. And I saw Jil. She was lying on her side, a stream of stark vermilion coloring the pavement by her face. Her lips were gashed, her pointy teeth were chipped... and the knuckles on my hand were cut and swollen. It was clinging to my shoulder. Watching me. I began to heave. My stomach kept contracting and I was racked with shivers. I crawled over to Jil, lying there bleeding in the rain. She wasn't badly hurt but I had knocked her senseless. In a fury I snatched for the thing that was clinging to my arm now. I felt the lizard's fangs, two heated razors slicing deep. Again I screamed. I never knew so many feelings in such a short span of time: frustration, hatred, helplessness and pity, rage and ecstasy, futility and fear and sweet, serene contentment. And somewhere between the dreaming and the reality, I think, perhaps, I cried.    The bed was soaked with sweat. And there was an odor. It was not pleasant. It was coming from me. My eyes felt like rusty hinges as I tried to open them. I heard a familiar voice say, "Look, it's moving." Deja vu. Anthrus's smirking face floated into focus. I shut my eyes. "Strange how ironic life can be, isn't it?" There was the sound of a slap and a yelp of pain. I opened my eyes again to see Anthrus clutching the side of his head. Jil was standing with her back to me, her arm raised to strike again. There was a flicking noise as Anthrus showed his claws. And then Cilix was between them, urging, "Don't." I watched them with detachment. Jil turned to face me. She did not look pretty. I had done more damage than I thought. "How do you feel?" she asked. My mouth moved of its own accord. It said, "Weak." Cilix had shepherded Anthrus out of the room. Jil and I were alone. No. We weren't. It was with us. "Sorry," I mumbled. But I wasn't. She shrugged. It was a human gesture. Yet she made it look natural, somehow. "I tried to..." She looked away. "I tried to... to take that thing away while you were sleeping..." It was resting on my chest, quiescent. "... but you wouldn't let me." I stared at her. I heard what she was saying but it didn't seem important. She sighed deeply. "Every time I came near, it... it would do something, I don't know what... or how. You wouldn't let us near you." I had beaten Cilix. Also Yuri. She was with Irina, crying. And I had hurt Jil. Again. So? So Anthrus was right. Life can be ironic. I had come full circle. Wasn't this where I came in? "Stop it! Stop it!" Jil half screamed, half sobbed. Why? What was... I had begun to absently stroke the lizard with two fingers of my left hand. The creature turned and watched her. And then it looked at me. Its gaze was direct. Comforting. Cilix burst into the room as the lizard began crawling slowly, lazily, up my chest. I was dimly aware of Jil, straining against Cilix's grasp. She was hysterical. I wasn't paying much attention to them. I wished that ii would hurry... The sounds of sobbing and screaming were fading. I felt the heat and shut my eyes. It was so wonderful and all I had to do was to simply lie there. The pain was part of it. The burning and the soreness... I'd come to know the soreness well. My arms inflamed from all its bites, my neck a mass of scar tissue from its feasting at my jugular, my skin broken into eczema and itching, I lived a scabrous existence in a semi-darkened room. I heard its voice, I knew its truth, I saw its visions. I lived the story of the quarantine. I heard the voices from the past. The saga of the Zharii -- the froggish, gangly people with the penetrating eyes. "What do you mean they're not intelligent? Are you insane? Their level of -- " "I'm telling you, sir, they are not intelligent  There is no sentience. We've been communicating with the lizards." And that was the beginning. It was then that they began the persecution. We were controlling them. Voices. Distant voices... "It's the ecology. The Zharii breed like rabbits. The lizards are their predators." "Good Lord!" "We may be able to teach them zero population growth, or something. I don't know how it will work..." They tried. It cost them dearly. Yes. It had indeed. The Terrans had deprived some of the lizards of their Zharih mounts. The results were catastrophic. I saw tom and bleeding bodies. Or what was left of bodies. Shredded human flesh, still-pulsating organs tom from dying men. Leaping maniacs with salivating mouths and fiendish, groping fingers... I couldn't beat them off! I couldn't... couldn't Something grabbed me. Someone. Cilix. Jil was lying on the floor, a beaten mess. And there was Yuri. And Irina. Yuri kneeling by Jil's side, Irina with a kinjhal. "Sookin sin I'll carve the bastard!" She lunged and Yuri caught her arm. "Let her," Anthrus said. "She's nursed a hate for him ever since he turned her down. Go on. Put the poor fool out of his misery." "No..." Jil moaned faintly from the floor. "No, please! It's not his fault. He didn't mean it. I'm all right..." I could see into the depths of all their souls. Irina had it in her mind to kill me. If not now, then later. Anthms felt himself a cuckold, in spirit if not in fact. Irina's lust for murder evoked in him a sexual excitement. Yuri was both disgusted and afraid, but she also felt pity. Cilix thought of me as a disease without a cure and he wondered how best to isolate me. And Jil... Jil loved me. I knew it as an irrevocable truth. And I had the answer to a question I had once asked a painting: When you look into someone else's soul, you feel despair.    The walls were bare. The light was minimal. The bed was hard. The floor was cold. Jil and I were hiding. Part of myself wanted her to leave and another part wanted her to stay. So I did nothing. I didn't know what I wanted. Irina had known she couldn't kill me. The surrogate would sense it first. So, faced with an opponent who would know her every move in advance, she had made the most logical one. The authorities in Port City don't take kindly to spacers wandering about with dangerous life forms, carrying deadly infections. The lizard qualified as both. As she had repiorted us, we had fled. They wouldn't look too hard for me. As long as there was no real danger of a spreading of infection, they would be content to look the other way, as they had done with John. At best it was a clear-cut case of violation of quarantine. But Irina had made a formal complaint. The police would have to me at least a token effort to arrest me. Because of me, Jil too was technically a fugitive. She had sold the remainder of her paintings. Except the one. It was propped up in the comer where she slept now, curled up like a wounded kitten. She sometimes stared at it for hours. I didn't know which of us looked the worst. Poor Jil was emaciated, bruised and battered. And I was afraid to look into a mirror. I didn't want to know. It seemed that I could not control my rages. The surrogate wanted to be rid of Jil. In my more lucid moments I screamed, I cried, I pleaded With her to leave me. But she refused. The surrogate and I both knew that it was useless. So I sank back into an apathetic daze. From time to time Cilix and Yuri would stop by to bring us food. Yuri would sit with Jil, trying to console her, to talk some sense into her. Cilix never said anything. But then, he didn't have to. The surrogate and I were beginning to arrive at a harmony of sorts. I no longer suffered chills or bouts of nausea after the visions. I grew accustomed to the pain and I was no longer bothered by the stench that emanated from my body. Somehow I felt that John had handled it all better. I couldn't find the strength to fight it, or the will, so I just lay there helplessly, trying to accept the situation. Deep down inside I couldn't. But I tried not to think about that. There was nothing I could do. Someday, maybe soon, I would die... and then I would be free. But the surrogate was not content. Day by day it struggled for control of my persona. Do you want to be like John? I am like John. You're different. I'm the same. You won't accept me. Have I got a choice? I want you to be functional. Not like John. He was an empty vessel. I had to laugh. It wanted me to be functional. Not like John. Playing gypsy wasn't good enough for me. No, I was meant for some loftier purpose. The surrogate was practicing upward mobility.  can't think for you all the time. It's tiring. What do you want from me? Accept me. Leave Jil alone. Stop hurting her. I felt a drop of moisture on my cheek and opened my eyes. Jil was looking down at me. She was crying. "I can't bear what it's doing to you." I sighed. I felt very tired. "Go away, Jil. Please. There's nothing you can do." She shook her head. "There must be something!" "Kill me." "I've thought of that." "I know." "Yes. I know you know. It knows. It knows that I can't do it, too. It hates me." " hate you, Jil. Go away." "You're lying!" "Have it your way." "You love me. I know you love me." "You're being used, Jil. I'm using you just like this thing is using me. Can't you see that? Look at us. We're like Anthrus and Irina. Please, Jil. I don't want to live off your grief. I don't want to use you." "No! No! No one is using me. I won't allow myself to be used." "Jil -- " "Listen to me. You're not using me. You can't. You won't. You could have used Irina. She wanted you to but you wouldn't. You could have used John, to get back at Anthrus for what he put you through. But you didn't." She kneeled at my feet, holding on to my knees, resting her head upon them, a Juliet mourning her catatonic Romeo. "I can't fight the creature for you. I would if I could. You have to fight it for yourself. ' ' "I can't, Jil. I need it." "It needs you!" "I'm not free, Jil." "You're wrong. You are, you Just don't see it." I was too tired to argue. But not too tired to beat her again that night. The surrogate gave me strength. My nightmare was the morning. All night I had visions of the Zharii. The masquerading monsters. The fiends that only surrogates could tame. Again I saw them decimate the Terrans. Only this time I was shown the retribution. I saw the Zharii slaughtered by the thousands. And the lizards along with them. My night was one vast sea of blood. I saw the seared and blackened yellow reptiles twitching in their death throes and I heard the high-pitched squeal of their agony. I felt my own flesh burning, crackling, crisping' I choked and gagged on the acrid-smelling smoke. I retched as all my inner senses were assailed by the massive spectacle of death. I came to screaming. Jil couldn't hear me. I had bludgeoned her unconscious with the painting of John.    I don't remember leaving. There was money in my pocket. I don't know where I got it. I ate a hearty meal for the first time in what seemed like years. The surrogate was hidden underneath my jacket. I had washed, though I could not remember washing. I was still a pretty miserable spectacle but at least I had the energy to walk and I didn't smell as bad as before. Much of my mind was blank. I simply wasn't thinking. I walked in a daze, dimly aware of taking one step at a time, vaguely knowing that I had a destination, yet not knowing what it was. I had left Jil lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Her painting was ruined. But she'd be all right. She wasn't dead -- perhaps because I still had a spark of my old self within me -- but she would never look the same again. I ran. I ran because I didn't want to kill her. The spaceport loomed before me. I entered through its massive gate. There would always be work for a paramed-rated phase-shift navigator. I had wanted to raise some hell. Well, I had found hell. It must have been painfully obvious. Although there were plenty of berths for a man of my special talents, I couldn't seem to find one. In spite of all the pains I had taken to make myself appear presentable, I still looked like a corpse. Captains have a tendency to be a bit particular as regards the physical health and emotional stability of their phase-shift navigators. It wouldn't do to find a way into Superspace and not be able to locate an exit. I must have looked like a bad bet. I really can't say that I blamed them. I had exhausted almost all the possibilities by the end of the day. I still had one chance left and I was not crazy about it! There were those who didn't mind employing the services of the flotsam and jetsam of space. The Lhari. I had never been a mercenary and I once swore that I would never sink so low. But I had sunk a lot lower than I had thought was possible. I had to get away. And there didn't seem to be any other choice. As I waited to see the Lhari commander, I thought about the fumre. If I played my cards right, there was a chance that my habit might escape detection. How long had John been able to keep his surrogate a secret? I had no way of knowing. At any rate, I would jump ship at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps I'd be lucky enough to find my way to a deserted planetoid where I could hide until they gave up searching and then I could live out the remainder of my days in peaceful solitude. Peaceful? No. I didn't think the lizard would ever allow me any peace. I was finally admitted into the presence of His Excellency Lord Commander Hhargoth. My papers were in order. He had condescended to see me. I took a deep breath and followed his lieutenant, who ill concealed his distaste at dealing with a Terran. And a poor specimen at that. The ceiling of the office was high to allow for the height of the Lhari. Even sitting down, Lord Commander Hhargoth dwarfed me. The redflecked yellow pupils watched me with an expectant gaze. I hesitated before managing a salute, Lharistyle -- closed fist extended, then opened to di.splay an empty hand. His Excellency seemed satisfied with that. He grunted, gave me a curt nod and proceeded to peruse my papers. He was frowning. It wasn't a good sign. "Is something wrong. Your Excellency?" He looked up slowly. "These are your papers?" It was simple enough to check. He knew that as well as I did. The question was rhetorical. "If they are forgeries, they are very good ones," he said, his eyes not leaving me for an instant. I still did not reply. He was baiting me. My appearance was, of course, the reason. The man standing in front of him could hardly be the navigator documented in the records . He obviously suspected narcotics of some sort. He was looking at my neck. The high collar of my jacket did not quite hide the scars. I saw his breathing quicken. "Remove your jacket." "Forget it. Excellency. If you'll just let me have my papers. I'll be -- " "Remove your jacket!" I thumbed it open. Moving with uncanny speed, the lizard leaped! Hhargoth was even faster. He was on his feet and reaching for his sidearm split seconds before the creature landed on his desk. He rushed his first shot and missed, demolishing the heavy quartzite desk. The surrogate realized its error and jumped back at me. It dug into my arm and I was off and running. White pain exploded deep in my brain! I never faltered. I charged headlong into the lieutenant, bowling him over, and kept right on going. I breathed with gasping sobs, knocking into people as I ran. I didn't stop until I was nearly a meter from the spaceport gate. My wind was gone. I stumbled heavily, regained my balance and lurched away into the crowd, wheezing like an asthmatic. I was being stared at. I reached for the wall of a building to steady myself... and fell. There had been nothing to reach with! My left arm was gone. Gone from the shoulder down. I stared in disbelief at the charred and crispy flesh. "Oh, God. Dear God, why me?" My vision blurred. I scrambled up and stumbled on. I found a quiet alleyway and there, surrounded by gray walls, I sank to the ground and cursed the day I was bom. I felt feverish. Again I reached with my left hand to wipe the sweat from my forehead and nothing happened. Uncontrollably I began to giggle. I stuffed my remaining fist into my mouth to choke off the hysterics. I was cold. Very cold. I couldn't keep from shaking. And I was sweating too. My demon was clinging to my leg. It had been badly frightened. Its eyes were wide and it was twitching its tail nervously from side to side. Its plot had backfired. Belatedly I realized that running had never been my idea in the first place. I had only acted as the lizard had intended. Like a chessmaster, it had plotted out its moves and I had accepted every gambit. It hadn't worked with John or with that other nameless crewman because they were only pawns. But as a navigator, I could have been a bishop. Right up there with the king. A phase-shift navigator works in close proximity with the commander of his ship. And the lizard needed a commander. And not just any commander, but one who did not give a damn about the quarantine. One whose home world's power placed him Just a bit outside the law. I had had to go through physical depravity so that no other crew would take me. Through me, the lizard almost had its Lhari. I would have been abandoned, left to die, and the lizard would be surrogate to the captain of a ship. The implications were too terrible to dwell on. The light was fading fast now. I did not have the energy to move. I wanted to sleep but was afraid to close my eyes. I might never open them again. How had Hhargoth known? If they ignored the quarantine, then perhaps my surrogate was not the only one... There was a silhouette at the entrance to the alley. Someone had stopped and was standing there, hesitant. I scuttled like a lobster, creeping farther back into the darkness. The silhouette came closer. Whoever it was, he was moving erratically as though drunk. It looked too short to be a Lhari . And when it called my name, I whimpered. It was Jil. Words alone cannot describe the way she looked. I crawled away from her like an insect, until there was no further place to crawl. And there I huddled like a baby, my arm covering my head, my legs drawn up beneath me. That's how she found me, calling for my mother. "Why did you go? Why did you leave me, why?" I threw myself upon her and cried. I held on to her as though she were the last reality in the universe. She held me, cradled me and stroked my hair. And then she saw the ugly wound of my left arm. Her feline howl of anguish was heartrending. Gently, slowly, she helped me peel off my jacket. The material at the shoulder had been melded with the flesh and it came away reluctantly. She wrapped the jacket around me and held me as I shivered. The night was quiet. Almost. A long way off, I heard somebody scream. Then I felt a movement. The surrogate was climbing up my leg. I groaned. Perhaps it wasn't really very hungry. I had nothing left to give. Jil released me, sighing heavily. For the first time she spoke directly to the creature. "No," she pleaded softly. "He's hurt. He can't. You'll kill him. Please. Take me." And she held out her haiiJ. The lizard halted. It tur ed and looked at her... and it made a decision. It crawled onto her hand and started to climb up her arm. Even now I don't know what possessed me. I don't know where I found the strength. With my right hand I swiped at it and knocked it from her arm. And then I lunged. I dove upon it. I grabbed its hindquarers with my fingers and I roared and I dug my teeth into its neck. There was a great buzzing in my ears. The creature squealed and titrashed between my jaws and I bit down with all the strength that I could muster. Cold blood spurted into my mouth. I gagged but I did not let go. I was like an animal goaded into a frenzy that it could not control. I growled and shook my head, tearing at the flesh. Chunks of it came away and I had swallowed half of the cold body before the lizard was dead. I lifted up my head, my jaws agape. Jil fainted.    I was different then. I had wanted to raise some hell. It was an exciting city. The new Rome to which all space routes led. But like the original Rome of primordial times, this new Rome had its share of decadence and desolation. I had been attracted by the decadence. What I found instead was something else entirely. Jil is with me now. I'm feeling better and I'm working. Working hard. We have much to live for and there's much to do. Anthrus had been right about one thing: It was an experience that I'll remember. As the surrogate had said, nobody really wants to hear the truth when lies are so much more attractive. I had learned the truth about myself. And I survived.  expression: "It blew my mind." Generally what's then described is rather prosaic. Hyperbole is a chronic disease of this decade. Thus, though I'm tempted, I won't start this column with that trite phrase -- but I have had a thought-provoking experience. I've just come back from the National Computing Convention. Set the scene; we have driven to Anaheim in Orange County. We expect traffic: we have to go past Disneyland. But the traffic moves nicely past Disney's fantasy world, and gets jammed up a couple of blocks further on as we continue toward the Anaheim convention center. Surely, thought #, this can't be traffic for the computer convention. A computer convention? But it was. Over # people, some in business suits, some in typical California garb, some in robes or other exotic wear; the Convention Center parking lot full, with overflow directed to Disneyland; half-hour and longer lines for registration; and still they poured in. I gave up and went to the press lines. One finds science fiction readers everywhere -- one of the nice young ladies at the press registration desk reads the column. I got a press badge and fought my way toward the exhibit rooms. Rooms. Here is one of the world's largest exhibition halls -- and it is filled, so that many of the for example) are out in the garage -- and still there was overflow, so that the personal computing exhibits were half a mile away at the Disneyland Hotel. The exhibition halls were packed. Jammed with people and with computers. Everyone has got into the business. All the giants, of course, but thousands of others, some of which you've heard of; others familiar, but not in computers -- did you know that Ball Brothers, whieh make jars for home canning, is one of the biggest management consulting firms around, and also heavily into electronics and computers? And the others just coming up. There were business systems ranging from a few thousand dollars through "low-cost mainframes" in the hundredthousand-dollar bracket robots (disappointingly controlled by hidden operators) and mechanical mice. But mostly there were computing capabilities for sale. Thousands of firms, each selling equipment that five years ago didn't exist in the most sophisticated laboratories on Earth, and all worried because their expensive equipment is likely to be obsolete in a few months. I've already mentioned that I do my work on a computer system now. I am typing this onto a TV-like screen, and if I make a mistake I simply backspace and type over it. The other day I tried to and gave up in disgust; I'm spoiled. My own system was not cheap, but within a few years all but one part of it will be affordable by nearly anyone. The exception is the typewriter that produces the text I saw a line printer that's faster than my Diablo and costs about #, a price that's sure to fall. In the fifties I got interested in computers, largely from science fiction stories; and when I was given an opportunity to visit the powerful machine, I hitch-hiked (a bigger deal in those days than now) five hundred miles or so as quickly as possible. the gymnasium that housed it. Bank upon bank of vacuum tubes, with the world's largest air-conditioning system running full time to keep it happy. Because tubes could burn out while it considered its problems, each computation was done three times, and a majority vote taken to determine the accepted answer. Three undergraduates ran about within the vitals of this machine. They pushed shopping carts full of vacuum tubes, and they spent their time replacing burned-out items. I have on my desk a calculator son carries another on his belt, bought, I think, for # a year ago, and probably available for half that now. Sure, it was # years ago that there has been a revolution. computing power than was available to the wealthiest organization in the world (the U.S. government) in Which is why I am confident that within a decade or less every one of my readers will have computers far better than the one I'm writing this on. A revolution. Where does it lead? Well, first to a complete restructuring of the publishing industry. This isn't something that will take twenty years; the equipment exists today. The only missing items are cheap mass-channel communications and business expertise. The space Shuttle will take care of the communications. Within five years, the Shuttle will have put up enough relay satellites to have open personal communications channels; the two-way wrist radio and the pocket telephone will almost certainly be common well before the end of the #'s. In fact, the biggest probleni at the moment is investors recover their money? Keeping records of telephone use much as operating the system right linked satellite-relayed channels the record keeping becomes impossible. Thus the entire philosophy of telephonic communications of communication actually used -- will have to be changed, probably charge. There may be an attempt at statistical sampling to determine use their telephones the most will pay the most, but implementation of that isn't cheap either. We feel that use charges are more fair than flat rates averaged among everyone: but if the use charges themselves raise rates for everyone, then they aren't fair at all. So -- assume that communication unlimited by time and (within the continent anyway) distance will be available at nominal cost. You've all seen the Radio Shack computer systems: # for their basic unit, which I admit isn't very versatile (although its biggest defect is its incompatibility with anything else; same problem as Heathkit's system). The Radio Shack system includes alphabetic capabilities and an input keyboard. I note that Ball is selling something very similar, and there are a number of other small computer systems with wordhandling capabilities for under a thousand dollars; and these are first-generation mass-market items. Texas Instruments hasn't made its move yet, nor have some of the other giants in pocket calculators, although by the time this is published TI may have some spectacular items for sale. It will still all be first-generation pricing -- my TI SR-# cost me # when it first came out, and now I can buy a better calculator with logs and trig and exponential notation for about # -- and the prices may be expected to tumble by half and better as the competition gets into the act. Present-day systems are somewhat memory limited: mine can get the text editor and about #, (WO words of text into its memory and I have about as elaborate a micro-computer as you can buy; but that too will change. Bubble memory, which stores information as tiny magnetic bubbles; charge-coupled devices; cheap disk systems; there are a number of innovations on the market that will words in a box smaller than a peach crate and requiring no more electricity than a light bulb. These will come along in the next two or three years at most. The personal computer you'll have before # will be to mine as mine is to the old And that is the end of the publishing industry as we know it. Consider: at the moment I write a book in machine-readable form. I massage the text with all kinds of special features (inserting words, lines, paragraphs, etc; deleting blocks of text and moving other blocks around; correcting spellings; etc.) until I am happy with it -- at which point the Diablo types it off onto paper, which is mailed to New York where my editor reads it and sends it off to a composer who re-types it into machine-readable form and sends that to another automatic typing device which makes a camera-ready copy which is then offset printed. The result is bound into a book which is transported across country to warehouses; the boxes of books are (I hope) opened and put onto trucks and carried into book stores, drug stores, etc., where (I more fervently hope) people buy them. A very vulnerable process. Certainly it will not be long before the text is transmitted to my editors as electronic beeps and read by the editor on a screen like mine; this will greatly simplify the editing job and completely eliminate typesetter errors. But note this; sure, some readers are collectors, and want the actual physical book; but a great deal of material publish has no value except as information, and keeping the physical book is a chore rather than a pleasure. Couldn't the information (and entertainment value, etc.) be transferred without all that printing and carrying of heavy objects? And it's clear that it can. I could write my books on my machine, and for a small charge deposit them into a national data bank; access to this would be by credit-card code, and those who want to read the book get it fed into their home (and eventually pocket) TV-like screen. A charge goes from their bank account to mine -- and where does the publisher fit into the picture? Of course there will then be such a plethora ofbooks -- anyone can "publish" under this arrangement -- that the readers will be utterly unable to keep up. Thus there is a need for good reviewers, and editors will very likely remain -- people like John Campbell and Bob Gleason and Jim Baen do more than select books; they help authors considerably in their creation. There is not, though, much need for the publisher as he exists today. Note also that schools and other public institutions are likely to be among the first to have the new electronic "books," so that a very large chunk of the publishing industry activity is affected rather quickly. All right. That's an easily predictable effect of the electronics revolution. What else? All major political philosophies, both "liberal" and "conservative," were formed at a time when "classes" were inevitable. There was simply no possibility that all the world's population could be wealthy. The latest of the major philosophies, Marxism, where it is original (much of Marx has roots in Plato) was forged in a time when the industrial revolution made possible a "middle class," but when it was still thought impossible that that class would be large. In Marx 's  day wealth consisted of: enough to eat; changes of clothing; opportunities for travel; several hours leisure per day (leisure being defined as time to do what one liked, whether reading or drinking or gambling or studying or going fishing); and access to education for one's children. Dentistry and medicine were so primitive that the wealthiest kings did not expect, in Marx's day, to be comfortable or have teeth past the age of #. Under those terms nearly everyone in the United States is wealthy: anyone can travel, the poorest have some change of clothing available, and if you starve it's your election: at the worst the Salvation Army will feed you for the cost of a lecture. Everyone has leisure today: no one works # hours a day because he has to. Moreover, there are opportunities and capabilities not dreamed of in Aristotle's time when the non-Marxist political ideas were framed. The electronic revolution makes this more evident. Consider data banks and information. At the moment public libraries do have a great deal of information available freely to anyone who cares to visit them; electronics will extend that to be more convenient. But extrapolate from that: is it not obvious that government could provide an enormous pool of information made freely available to its citizens? The late David MacDaniel postulated something of the sort in his story "Prognosis: Terminal" (# Avon #) and the capabilities are much greater now than he had predicted for the year #. Greg Benford, in his In the Ocean of Night, has medical electronics that allow physicians to watch over their patients as they go about their daily business; so does Steve Robinett in "The Man Responsible." Neither capability is technologically impossible with present-day equipment. The point is that we may see a vast expansion of potential services, many of which can most conveniently be provided by some kind of public organization; and at the same time most of us have learned to distrust "government" and almost everyone, liberal or conservative, wants to see government limited. Fine, say the Libertarians: let private organizations set up the information utilities and services. Unfortunately it isn't that simple. It's like the personal telephones with satellite relays: the cost is not high on a government scale (a information network, plus perhaps fifty bucks each for the telephones themselves) but it certainly is more than most industries can invest -- because who is going to pay them back? Ditto in spades for an information utility. To create and maintain an enormous data base requires that it be available to nearly everyone: restricting the users to any small number would cost each user too much to make it worthwhile. But if you open the lines to everyone or nearly so, then how do you keep those who haven't paid from using would cost a good bit more than the information service itself. We have thus a kind of tragedy of the commons: if you don't have to pay the subscription fee a lot of users won't pay. This is not only unfair to those who do, but also a powerful disincentive to setting the system up in the first place. Operators of subscriber-supported radio and TV stations are perpetually having to conduct fund drives and auctions and the like, and most barely survive; yet they need a very small amount compared to the costs of an information utility. The advantages of public data banks, and information communication utilities for "publishing" and the like, are obvious. The disadvantages of giving anything that big to traditional government are also obvious, while the difficulties of persuading private investors into putting money in enterprises almost guaranteed not to be able to collect for their services are not small. Thus the electronics revolution should lead to the search for something that is neither government nor private; a new kind of organizational structure, with new methods of making it responsible (in the original meaning of the term) to its users. There's more we can predict with confidence. For example, the implanted computers my characters wear in my Aeneas MacKenzie series are likely to be available well before the end of the century. In my stories I postulate that they are available only to the very wealthy, but in fact I suspect they won't cost much more than my computer has cost me. By implant, I mean a system that lets the owner think directly into his computer: ask questions by thinking them, and get answers fed into his auditory nerves so that he "hears" them. The system can connect to a national data base, so that any question can instantly be answered. Consider that: any question (provided the answer is known), any calculation; any piece of data the user wants is instantly available. What does that do to "education" as we know it? Certainly students will have to be taught a minimum of factual information and mathematical principles -- but just how much is needed if you have a vast library and computation system available by thinking the questions? The implications for government are not small here, either. Court records and police files can be available instantly to probation and sentencing officers, and to detectives. European nations, particularly France, have for decades kept track of where everyone is: citizen or foreigner, if you stay in a French hotel the police in Paris get a card notifying them of it. So far that hasn't been all that useful; there's too much information, and it is not often used. The electronics revolution would change all that. It will soon be quite possible to keep track of everyone; where they are, whom they meet with, etc. It's a frightening capability and moreover one not necessarily limited to governments. A primitive "paper trail" of your purchases and payments . already exists in credit-card files and credit-rating data banks. How shall we control that? Or can we at all? George Orwell notes in Down and out in Paris and London that with much higher crime rates than the French, because the English are government the kinds of powers routinely used by the French. (This may well have changed in England since Orwell's time. I The increasing wealth of the nation and the vast increase in purchasing power available even to the poorest rather dramatically demonstrates that crime is not caused by "poverty"; most criminals don't know what real poverty is. Thus we have no great hope that even if we go to space and chattel goods become very cheap and very widespread the crime rates will drop. The government's ability to take measures to deal with crime will increase with wealth and cheap electronics; is anyone giving any thought on how we should use that capability, and how we should limit government's powers? It's high time we did; never has any potential problem been more easily predicted. There's more yet. Beyond the implant is the computer interface that bypasses the peripherals and feeds information direct: not as words, but as direct memory into the brain. It is not impossible. The brain is an informative-processing ' system, and uses an internal code. That code can be solved. It's probably true that each person has a different code; this may be why telepathy is so notoriously unreliable (and why identical twins seem to have the ability to communicate with each other in ways others have not). But suppose everyone does have a different code: electronics are cheap, and a personal computer can learn to understand my code if not yours; my computer can talk to your computer; and the information transfer rate can be enormous, thousands of times faster than the present system of speech or words on paper. We may well see such systems within my lifetime. We will almost certainly see them within the lifetimes of most of my readers. Consider: an ability to do calculus squirted into your head within a few minutes, followed by intensive exercises to make you aware of your new knowledge. This might take as much as two weeks: at present calculus is a year or more at most engineering colleges. Ditto with physics, foreign languages, much of biology. Languages should be particularly amenable to such techniques, as learning them involves no unfamiliar concepts at all, only a new way of expressing what you already know. What does all this do to the education establishment? Now it's true that science fiction has been dealing with these concepts for a long time. Computer translators, data banks, personal dossiers instantly available to the police, and other such concepts have been in our stories for decades; but I think most SF writers would be the first to admit that they haven't really thought through the implications. We have very few stories on what it would really be like to live in a world in which there are no "poor" and no one is required through economic necessity to take a job he doesn't care for. Of course there's Huxley's Brave New World as well as Orwell's series, but our speculations have largely been superficial. Yet they're the best we have. Science fiction may not be adequate as a description of the real future, but it provides marvels of insight compared to most of the products of academic social "science." We could also go the other way: give up research and development, cancel the space program, go toward "Small Is Beautiful" and "Appropriate Technology, " which is to say labor-intensive systems. We could spiral slowly into the world I have described in some of my stories, a world in which there are technological marvels, but they are not used to make the population wealthy; a World in which there is very little economic slack so that investment is difficult or impossible. Or the more frightening world in which new technology is used to stifle new developments; in which RnaHy Anowneilsmanucil for the iTKsf impoflont bur Heart. The American Heart Association Survival Kit is available at your local Heart Association. And it's free. What it will tell you could someday save your life. I think this coupon could one day save my life Please send me your Survival Kit, free. My name is... (Please pnni carefully) Address City Slate... Zip (Send coupon to your local Heart Association) The American Heart Association ct,) the benefits of technology are kept for the governing class, and new inventions are used exclusively by government or suppressed altogether. That too is possible; because while we have some control over who shall us the new computer technologies, we have none at all over whether they will exist. They're already with us. Not in their full-blown state, of course: we can't even use what we have. I looked at a dozen programs for small business record-keeping systems and none of them produced books I could have got my accountant to sign without getting her dead drunk first. But these are temporary abberations -- in my case I solved the problem by writing my own programs to produce standard books of the kinds described in college accounting texts rather than the "special reports" so beloved by computer programmers. True: computers sometimes do ridiculous things. They send checks expecting ninety cents. We can all laugh at these incidents and feel secure because we wouldn't be so stupid as to do that. But that won't stop the machines. Their capabilities increase hourly, and their price falls yearly. A favorite game of historians is to try to determine exactly when some great event became inevitable: what trivial happening marked the true beginning of the French Revolution, or World War #, or the Thirty Years War. It is a game because no one can be certain. Events wend on, and their trends are not seen; suddenly it is apparent that there is a trend, and that the world is due for inevitable changes. When the Archduke was shot at Sarajevo the assassination triggered events that historians now think may have been inevitable; yet few suspected the Great War was coming even then. In August when the armies marched some still thought it would be over in a few weeks; that the Great War would be similar to the lightning campaigns of the Austro-Prussian and Franco-EYussian wars, and this despite the terrible example of the American Civil War. By the following spring it was obvious to everyone: the world of # was not the world of #. Everything was different, and nothing could revive the past. As I walked through the exhibit halls of the National Computing Convention I had the same experience: there is no chance that a world with those capabilities at those prices will be a lot like that of #. I don't know which way it will go. I like to think we have considerable control over events yet. We can use the new capabilities to expand our opportunities, to create what I call real freedoms, namely choices we can really exercise; or we can watch while the new capabilities are absorbed into traditional structures never designed to cope with them. Whatever we decide, the revolution is upon us. The one thing we can't do is put the djinn back in the bottle.  Being unemployed is never pleasant. But sometimes it's an opportunity, if you know how to take it! The rest are dead. I'm all alone, sitting by the radio half the twenty-one hour day, listening to static while I wonder if that automatic beacon is still beaming its some way you can tell if it's working. But then if it isn't, I couldn't fix it anyway. My job on the spaceship didn't exactly prepare me for being the last survivor on an alien world. I was the ship's whore. Or sex therapist, if you want my official title. That's not what our captain called me, though. A sex therapist is the one officer most vital to the success of a standard tenyear space exploration mission, they told me when I went in to see what jobs were available. You might say it's the malamute on the dogteam that keeps the huskies pulling together instead of fighting. Now this malamute is fresh out of huskies. I've got no one left to do my job on. And I can't even tell if the goddamn radio is working. Outside the dome the air is breathable, if you don't mind string things growing in your lungs. String things are long, white threads that wriggle and shrink up when you touch them. Or rather, when whoever dissects you, to find out why you died, touches them. Lenny and Mack died from string things, after coughing and gasping for a week. Bryce, who did the dissection although he was dying himself from the gangrene in his broken leg, said the string things were a motile fungpid that grew from inhaled spores. He guessed they put out fruiting bodies -- mushrooms -- on the corpses of their victims. We didn't keep Lenny and Mack around long enough to find out. And the others? Well, after the ship was holed. Rich (our captain) and Fred (communications and computer technician) went down in the lander to reconnoiter. They never came back. Spaceships aren't supposed to land on planets, but by that time we didn't have a choice. Q.C. was lucky. He died in the crash. Bryce got his leg mashed and, being ship's surgeon, he ignored the infection until it was too late. Lew was eaten by something that leaves webbed footprints a meter long. Webfoot upchucked him later, but that didn't help Lew any. All they ever found of Hugo was his beret floating on a bottomless mud puddle. Kris came down with fever, broke out in purple pustules, ran screaming into the rain. Mel was the last to go. He died in his sleep. I wish I could have figured out why, but my residency was in psychiatry. Luckily, I don't get involved with people. That's one reason I'm good at my job. A ship's whore can't start playing favorites, not on a ten-year exploratory cruise. So it's not that I'm particularly bothered by anyone's death, or the' nasty ways they picked to die. I Just wish I had somebody around who could tell me if the funny rumble in the air filter is anything serious. It occurs to me that rationing out coffee to myself may represent a ridiculous overindulgence in optimism. Will I be here tomorrow to enjoy the coffee I save today? I do have a permanent food supply, assuming the algae tanks don't go bad on me. For as long as I'm here I'll have plenty of green goop to bake, boil or fry, as I like. The only way I really like it is fried out in paperthin pancakes, with lots of raspberry jam. I was eating raspberry jam like there was no tomorrow; then suddenly it was tomorrow, and no more raspberry jam. The chocolate's almost gone, too. I'm saving what's left for emergencies. The coffee supply is in better shape. If I limit myself to two cups a day it will last a year. By limiting myself to two cups a day, I assume I #I last a year. Assuming that is good for my morale. I can hold out until rescue comes. Or maybe it means I won't be rescued for a year. If I 'm rescued at all. If the transmitter is still working. Worrying about the coffee starts me worrying about other things as well. Maybe I should adopt a "live for today and let the devil take tomorrow" attitude. Or, I could make a list of all the reasons for and against rationing coffee and see which side has the most reasons. Not all reasons are equally good, though. I could score the reasons one through five and add up the numbers. Words are such slippery things, I always feel much more secure with the results when I can reduce my sentences to numbers and treat them mathematically. There's safety in numbers, as Mother always used to say (in a slightly different context). Or maybe I could limit myself to four cups a day, and plan on lasting six months. Or three cups and nine months. Or make the coffee half strength, and... Decisions, decisions! Anyway, it gives me something to think about. All day I feel safe in the fiberglass dome the men set up around our wreched spaceship. The flare of the afterburners must have sterilized the soil, for no new plants have grown up inside this charmed circle. Outside the dome the jungle presses in. Shadow of branches wave across the milk-white triangles. Shadow vines grow up the dome's sides, putting out more shadows I like to think are flowers. Now and then something nut-like bounces off the dome. Sometimes little animals scamper across it. Nothing gets through. All day I feel sure that even Webfoot could not penetrate the dome. At night I'm not so sure. Once the light goes, nuts crash against the dome with the force of missiles hurled to pierce it. The scampering animals are no longer squirrels in my mind -- they're vampire bats. The strange rumble in the air filter begins to sound like an incipient failure. Then I go into the ship, pile boxes against the jagged hole that serves as doorway (the ship is lying on its airlock), and read until I fall asleep with the light on. I'm reading the Great Books in order from A to Z, no cheating allowed. Most of them are quite dull, actually, so I just skim them. That's why I'm already to the M's. If I ever get out of this alive, boy, am I going to have culture! There are windows in the dome, triangles of clear plastic. Lichenlike plants have grown over them, making Jack Frost patterns in orange, turquoise and violet. Mel went out in full protective clothing to scrape them off, on the last day of his life. I sure wish I knew what he died of. Since then the lichens have grown back and now I can't see out anymore. Not that there was ever much to see; just masses of slimy black branches dripping with thick ropes of spaghetti, most of it toadstool -- white powdered here and there with tints of copper or bluegreen as though it had bread mold. Sometimes there were great thrashings in the vegetation. Was Webfoot plowing through it? I never saw what was making the commotion. Now I can't see out at all. Maybe it's just as well. If I could see out, I would probably stare out the window all day, waiting for something to happen. As it is, I keep busy. Reading Great Books. And I'm making a flower garden. No, I'm not growing plants from seed. I wish I did have flower seeds -- and a green thumb to go with them! I don't have either one. I'm making flowers out of wire and scrap metal that I weld together with a laser torch. The tulips and daffodils came out the best. So far my peonies have all been failures, but I keep trying. There are fresh mounds of dirt in my flower garden. Has some gigantic gopher invaded the charmed circle of my dome? The possibility worries me. Not that the intruder might eat my metal flowers, or even me! I worry about diseases the creature might bring in with it. It looks like I'll have to stay up tonight and try to catch the thing.    I didn't have to wait long. The animal came out of its burrow at dusk and I hit it with a pipe before it knew I was there. Then I hit it again until was so mashed-looking it had to be dead. It's a stocky, tailless, cat-sized creature with stout, heavily clawed forelegs, web-footed hindlegs, and a pair of tiny, almost human arms flanking the wide, lipless mouth on the front end of the body. No neck; it looks like a fish with six legs. Multi-faceted eyes on retractable stalks take the place of turning one's head. One eyestalk had been damaged and was regenerating. The animal's mottled gray skin feels velvety through my surgical gloves, although it has no fur. As the closest thing to a biological officer our wrecked ship has left, I suppose I should dissect the creature. All I can think of is burying it fast, before it contaminates the dome. I dig a little grave and shove thebody in. As I do, a packet falls out of the wide, fishy mouth. I pick up the small, ovoid, chamois-textured bag. Inside, something wriggles. I can't resist slitting open the bag. An infant giant gopher wriggles out. It's ivory, kitten-sized, much like its mother, except it's a lot cuter. Do giant gophers give birth through their mouths, or was this one carrying her eggs one by one to a new nest inside my dome? Both, I decide. Giant gophers have a single, all-purpose orifice that doubles as mouth and cloaca; and one of the burrows in my flower garden contains a second egg, a dead one, in a nest lined with insulation swiped from the spaceship. Must I kill and bury the baby? I can't bear to, it's much too cute. An animal that's just hatched out must be reasonably disease-free, I assure myself. And it's so warm and deliciously soft to the touch. What do infant giant gophers eat? Green goop from human algae tanks, I learn. The little fellow eats daintily, scooping up tiny handfuls with its feeding arms and wiping them into its mouth. What else does it need? To be kept warm? I make a home for it in my breast pocket. There it spends most of its time sleeping, with interludes of stretching, wriggling and placid gurgling that mean it's getting hungry again. I name my pet "Broke." Gopher Broke.    The windows cleared up overnight. At first I thought the scale died and fell off. Now I see that it's being scraped off as it forms by lava snakes -- dull black, roughtextured animals the shape and size of legless alligators. They Have divided tails they use for grasping, tiny feeding arms like Broke's on either side of their lipless toothless mouths, and eyestalks like colored golf balls on matching tees. Every half hour or so a lava snake climbs the vines growing up over the dome and peers in the window, smacking its lips. Or rather, flexing its mouth; lava snakes don't have lips. Why? I wonder. Do lava snakes eat people? Certainly they're big enough. Only there aren't any people on this world for them to practice on. Are there? Maybe they gobbled up Rich and Fred, decided they liked the flavor, and have been looking around for more ever since. More likely, something about the dome makes the lava snakes think it's an egg. A giant egg. And lava snakes are programmed to wait around until giant eggs hatch out, so they can destroy the young Webfoots before they get big enough to destroy the lava snakes. Either way. I'm safe enough as long as I stay in the dome. I don't think I should go outside, though. Now that I've figured out what the lava snakes are up to, I wonder what happened to Rich and Fred. They called the ship to say they landed safely. They also said they were going outside to look around. That was the last we heard from them. Do lava snakes think a lander looks like a giant egg? This is my first space trip, so I really can't judge. A lot of the scientists on board were old space hands, though, and they agreed with me that Rich was being irresponsible. A good captain would stay with his crippled ship, and send someone else down to check out the nearest planet's surface, preferably biolegists and geologists, who know what precautions to take on strange worlds. Not Rich. Bravely he volunteered to lead the landing party himself, and who did he take along with him? A scientist trained in interpreting planetary surfaces? Not Rich. He took his best buddy, the computer repairman! Then, instead of leaving somebody behind to bring back our only intact lander, they both go out together, and promptly disappear! That's our Cap'n Rich for you. No sense, just a lot of mock heroics. And if you think he's a lousy spaceship captain, you should see what he's like in bed. Oh, he's no great lover, but then, spacemen never are. They make love like they're docking with an orbiting space station. It's what he did afterwards that made Rich unusual. He liked to sit around for ten, fifteen minutes and tell me what a dirty, filthy etc. whore I was. Well, if that's how he felt, I suppose he had to talk about it, and it's my Job to listen, no matter how bored I get. Still, I wonder how a man as basically unstable as Rich ever got command of a spaceship. As for Fred, he made love in the same dull, plodding way he did everything else. After a year or so I stopped faking orgasm to see if he'd notice. He never did. That's Fred for you. I think the real reason Rjch liked him so much was that he could be sure he was smarter than Fred. Everyone else aboard ship had at least one doctorate. Not that Fred was really stupid. He was Just slow. He had to get off by himself and think for an hour or so before he could commit himself to an answer. even when the question was "How are you?" His answers were bright enough when they finally came. He wasn't exactly quick on the draw, though. He wasn't the sort of man you would take along to explore a new planet with unknown dangers, was he? No. He was the sort of man Captain Rich would take along.  #  Broke is really thriving on green goop. He outgrew my breast pocket a week ago, and now rides on my shoulder -- in his more sedate moods. In his more usual moods he races ahead of me, climbs up the inside of the dome to the ceiling, and drops into my hair. That's his favorite Joke. He has a lot more. His pranks are why I think of Broke as a "he," a mischievous little boy. Actually, I have no idea if the creature is male or female, or if either word applies to the animals on this planet. Sometimes I'm afraid that Broke will puncturethe dome fabric with his sharp little claws and let in the germs. He enjoys his stunts so much I hate to discipline him, though. Besides, I don't know if he would still love me after I spanked him a few times. By which I mean, I suspect that punishment might cause him to develop an avoidance response to me. At the moment, he's really cuddly and affectionate. Maybe that's Just because he likes regular meals, getting his tummy scratched, and having an interesting shape to climb on. Whatever it is, I would miss it terribly if Broke started avoiding me. Rather than risk that, I risk holing the dome and dying, more or less slowly and horribly, of the alien contagions lurking without. My security has been broached somewhat already. Every morning, now, I must clean out websof rainbow-colored silk that have grown during the night. Eh'esumably Broke's mother (father? both?) brought the spores in on her skin, or in her digestive tract. What else did she bring in besides the silk spores, I wonder nervously. It's normal for me to wake up with some congestion. I've done it all my life. The last few days I woke up coughing, as usual, and I was sure I could feel those string things much that I mind dying, it's the tangle of long, white worms that I can't stand. Even though I know they aren't worms, they're motile fungoids, I still can't stand the idea. As number two medical officer on the ship, I had to help Bryce with the autopsies. And, I mean, I had known Lenny and Mack pretty well, right? And there were those lungs, full of wriggly white things. I had to sit down because I thought I was going to faint, only it turned out I was going to throw up instead. And Bryce made some joke like, "Don't collapse yet! I was just going to ask you to saw off my leg." 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There are crystal slugs on my copper chrysanthemums, motile macaroni on my titanium tulips. The air is alive with the zing! zing! zing! of flying lobsters. Every morning when I get up I interrupt games of tag and leapfrog played by spacemice, miniature versions of Broke. Finally I discover the reason for the invasion. A neat little Broke-sized hole has been gnawed in the panel behind my flowerbed. I kneel to patch the hole and a lava snake stares in at me, smacking its lips. I apply the patch and look around the dome for more holes. I find eight. Broke has sure been busy. Now what do I do? Make myself another pot of coffee, I guess. Finish off the chocolate. I'd hate to pass on to my reward with the chocolate uneaten. And read a good book -- not a Great Book, just a good one. I won't get to the Z's in the time I have left, so why finish the M's? I give up on Moliere and settle down with Molly Hart and the Pirates of Betelgeuse. Three Molly Hart novels later. I'm beginning to wonder what it's like to make love with someone you love. And a related question. What's it like to make love with someone you can stand? No, that's not fair. I could stand them all, even Fred. Even Rich -- almost. I could stand them because I put my body on auto-pilot and went off to imagine what I would do with all the money I was making. Buy a ranch and raise Arabian horses, of course, but where? I imagined myself galloping along an alien beach in the multi-colored dawn of a double star while my well-trained body, left behind, faked the customary enthusiasm. Rich was right when he called me a whore. Right for the wrong reasons, perhaps, but right nonetheless. If I wasn't fair to the guys, they weren't fair to me. Oh, I'm not gorgeous, I know that. I'm about as good-looking, in my way, as the average spaceman is in his. Maybe better. So did they have to sit around and complain all the time about the personnel office's taste in women, and go on complaining, even after I came in, as though I were a piece of hardware, a machine, a robot without feelings? Of course I never told them I had feelings. I guess I thought that was counterindicated by my job description. The ship's therapist should be a sort of god who remains above the psychological messes everyone else gets into on long voyages. Not a young girl fresh out of medical school who knows all the right answers to put on exams, and nothing at all about how people really behave, least of all herself. Who doesn't know what she's doing and refuses to admit it, even to herself. Who ig so used to getting A's, she doesn't know how to behave without them. That's what I really needed on that ship! Somebody to give me an A! Instead, the men were always complaining, "At least they could have given us a choice." Yeah, sure. You guys had a choice. You could do it or not, as you liked. I wish I had that much choice, I remember thinking. Yet I did have a choice. I controlled the scheduling. Granted, I couldn't refuse anyone and still do my job. But I could have scheduled an occasional day off, a three day weekend, or a longer vacation, if necessary by pleading mysterious female ailments. Instead, the way I picked to get fixed, I didn't even get five days off a month. And that, boys and girls, is way too much of a good thing. Oh, I had a choice, all right, and I chose to do my duty. So naturally I got to hate my job, only I didn't realize it, I was too busy pretending I was somewhere else. Not on a spaceship  going off to explore unknown worlds circling distant stars. I pretended I was someplace exciting! Now that I'm stuck in this stupid dome waiting to die, with nothing to look at but wired trees dripping with weird plants, and an occasional lava snake smacking its lips, I wish I was back in that spaceship, helping to explore the universe any way I can. What they really need to do is make bigger spaceships, so everyone will have a place where he or she can be alone. Come to think of it, the guys got off by themselves all the time in the line of duty. The scientists signed up for lab time, and turned on the "experiment in progress" sign so they wouldn't be disturbed. Fred muttered something about "checking the relays" and disappeared in the machinery for hours on end. Rich suited up and went out for space walks, explaining on his return that instruments can't give you a "gut feeling" for your position in space. My job description didn't call for being alone, so about all I could do was hole up in the john, and sit there and read for fifteen or twenty minutes, until somebody started pounding on the door. Now there's nobody left to pound on the door. I'm beginning to miss the guys. After all, our misunderstandings were as much my fault as theirs. I even miss Fred. Give me another week and I'll start missing Rich. Only I don't think I'll have another week. Purple blotches are growing on my skin. Most of all, I miss Bryce. It would be nice to have another doctor around, to tell me if I'm well or ill or dying. Even if he was wrong, it would be nice to have his opinion. I hate having to make up my own mind. Broke must have made a really big hole I haven't found yet, for the lava snakes have been getting in. There was one in the garden this morning, smacking its lips at me. Which is to say, it was grinning and then pursing its mouth, over and over. Every lava snake I've caught looking at me has done this. It seems to be a habit of theirs. Too bad Rich and Fred aren't here. They were the lip reading experts aboard ship, always mouthing secret messages to each other that none of the rest of us could understand. I'm sure they would have had all sorts of theories about what the lava snakes were really trying to say. I gave the lava snake a blast with my welding laser, and it slithered off under the ship. Presumably, that's where their hole is. I didn't feel like crawling in after the snake to find out.    A week has passed, and I'm not dead yet. I'm not even ill, unless you count purple fuzz spreading out over my skin as a disease. Human skin is normally host to colonies of bacteria, which not only don't hurt you, but actually help protect you when the bad germs come along. No man is an island: he's also an ecosystem. Right? Anyway, it looks like the bacteria I brought with me are being replaced by indigenous microbes that do the same job, albeit more colorfully. I guess my gut is also going native; my stools have been coming out blue. And I never felt better in my life! What gets me is, there's nothing remotely like me in this world. My tiny inhabitants must have evolved Just for me. Maybe they were random mutations who happened to find the visiting Earthperson to their liking, and their descendents adapted even more closely to the new -- and all too temporary! -- ecological niche. Maybe. I like to think the guardian deity of this planet raised those microbes just for me. And sent Broke to me, carrying pathogens in small enough amounts so that I could develop antibodies before they overwhelmed my existing defenses. At any rate, I have developed antibodies, for whatever reason. My gamma globulin really clobbered some string things I got to hatch out in a petri dish. It's fun, getting into biology again. I haven't done this kind of thing since I was an undergraduate. The pump in the air filter started smoking, so I tried taking it apart, following the instructions in the technical manuals I found in the ship's library. The filter turned out to be overgrown with eighteen different kinds of organisms -- no wonder the poor pump was overworked! I couldn't see any point in cleaning it out, so I spent the day playing biologist instead. It's very interesting. All the stuff in the filter is made from D-series amino acids. Me, I'm made from L-series amino acids, myself, like almost all of Earth's creatures. Including the algae in my algae tanks. Which Broke thrives on. He won't eat the native vegetation. (Hypothesis: Broke is L-series, like me. I would snip off a bit of Broke to test it, if I could be sure he wouldn't misinterpret my motives.) String things, and the purple fuzz growing on my skin, are D-series organisms. If they can live off me, they must be capable of conversion. Why? As I remember the view from space, this is a world of interconnected continents, pock-marked with big, round, landlocked seas which look like old craters. I'm guessing life evolved here several times, with different forms in different places. What happens when D-series organisms, spreading out across the land from one sea, meet L-series organisms from another sea? I don't know, and I would really like to find out. The interface between D-series and L-series country can't be too far away, if Broke's parent came on foot from beyond it. I could probably find it if I went out and explored aiound in a systematic manner. If I dared go out and explore. Molly Hart wouldn't hesitate. She would go right out and explore the whole planet, on foot if she had to. If she couldn't figure out how to turn her wrecked spaceship into a hot air balloon. Sure. It's easy for Molly Hart. She can trust her author not to throw her any bug-eyed monsters she can't tame. As for me, I can handle the lava snakes one at a time with my welding laser. What happens when I step outside the dome and they're all around me? Besides, the battery pack weighs twenty kilograms. If I carry that, I won't be able to carry much in the way of food or camping equipment, and I still wouldn't know if I could discourage something the size of Webfoot. When are they going to invent a pocket raygun with infinite power? Lacking that. I'll put off exploring until it becomes necessary, and plan on spending the rest of the day finding out how and if    coherent beam of visible light with a wavelength chosen to avoid the absorption spectra of hydrogen, ammonia, and other common forms of interstellar gas. It doesn't avoid the absorption spectra of tree branches, but then, spaceships aren't supposed to land on planets, and tree branches aren't a problem in outer space. Not that I suspect the forest canopy of absorbing my distress call. I suspect those dangling hanks of white spaghetti are reflecting it. The receiver dials were left at a setting which -- I now understand -- picks up light of the standard emergency wavelength and transforms it into an audible signal. The static I've been getting must be my own beacon reflecting erratically from the junk overhead. Funny. The guys who set up the beacon really should have known better. Maybe it was one of those group decisions where everybody assumes someone else has thought the thing through. And here I thought men always did everything right, at least where machines are concerned. Now I feel better about my own competence. Insofar as it's possible to feel better about letting everyone die. I can't even say I did my best to save them. In a situation which demanded medical creativity, I played nurse, content to follow orders, just as the men, without Fred to guide them, followed the checklist of emergency procedures, including #. Activate distress beacon, without ever asking themselves -- or each other -- if laser beams went through treetops. We were all babes in the woods, the men and I. Now I'm the only babe left. And I am turning into one gigantic retina.    The purple fuzz growing on my skin is a colony of photo-synthetic organisms with rhodopsin -- visual purple -- taking the place of chlorophyl. Isn't that interesting? I wish I had someone to tell it to. Now I'm in a panic, I don't know what to do. Broke didn't come home last night. He's been going out every night, looking for girl giant gophers, I suspect, or possibly boy ones, but he's always home for breakfast. I've got him tied to unbreakable apron strings, the L-series proteins he needs to live on. Except that last night he never came back. I guess I'll have to go out looking for him. I'm not going to even think about Webfoot and the lava snakes. I'm just going to go out and look for Broke. Well, first I'll check my welding laser and make sure it has a full charge. The lava snakes surround me as soon as I'm out the door. There's eleven of them this morning, all black as Hell, phallic as Freud's cigar. Keeping a safe distance from my laser, they alternately grin and purse their lipless mouths, as though they were saying "Eeeeoh." Only no sound comes out. Maybe that's a lava snake greeting. Just in case they're trying to be friendly, I look at the nearest one, at the purple golfoalls on stalks I assume are its eyes, and say "Hello" as distinctly as I can. As I do so, I realize that my mouth is making the same movements theirs make. And the snakes go wild. I've said the right thing for once in my life -- no, strike that. I say the right thing twice a year, on the average. This time I've got the feeling you get when you 're on the same wavelength with someone -- or something. Boy, this interstellar breakthrough in communications is really great! None of the twelve of us can get over it. We say "hello" and "eeee-oh" again and again. A familiar, gurgling warble interrupts our pleasant if rather monotonous chat. It's Broke, held by a twelth snake hidden behind a bush-load of motile macaroni. Released, Broke hurtles to me, leaps from knee to bosom (ouch!) to shoulder, gurgles happily in my ear. So the lava snakes kidnapped Broke to get me out of the dome, did they? Okay. They're smarter than I thought. Now the nearest snake, the one with the purple golfball eyes, is saying something more complicated than "eeee-oh." I have a feeling that I would know what, if only I could read lips. But Rich and Fred were the only lipreaders on the ship. One of the things I hated most about them was the way they mouthed messages at each other, secret messages no one else could understand. I always assumed they were talking about me. So suppose a couple of lipreading Earthmen land on a planet, run into some intelligent animals, and try to teach them a Terran tongue. The natives, being voiceless themselves, don't realize that sounds can be used in communication, and think it's all lip movements. That would be fine with the lipreading Earthmen. The next crew member who comes along won't be likely to understand that the natives are "talking" English, though. One thing I do understand. The lava snakes want me to go someplace with them. In fact, they're very insistant. So I think I had better do it. Only, excuse me, lava snakes. I want to pack up some medical supplies to bring along. I have a hunch I'm going to need them. If I bring the welding laser along, I won't be able to take the spectroanalyser, since they won't both fit in my backpack. Which am I more likely to need to do, weld a Webfoot or analyze some proteins? I'm sure I'll need to analyze some proteins, if only to sort out L-series from D-series nuts and berries. I'm not sure I'll need a weapon, or that this one will be enough if I do. Regretfully, I leave the laser behind, and discover I've left my fear behind as well. Unarmed, I trust because I must. A half hour later we're out of the spaghetti swamps, without ever seeing a single Webfoot! Something that big must be pretty rare. One of these days I'll have to go back and find out what they look like. Now, though, we're going into the place where I belong, golden grassy hills, distant purple mountains, the grass green waters of an inland sea. This is L-series country, it seems. Broke, who has never before shown any interest in his own planet's biology, leaves me for frequent sorties, returns with berries and heads of grain, eats the edible portions on my shoulder, buries the husks in my bra. Instinct is a wonderful thing. The dominant life form in this golden country is a sort of camelcolored llama with wings, that lives in herds. The animals seem gentle, friendly, curious, and big enough to carry a small man (or a woman) on short flights. I bet they could be trained to, if you got them young enough. And that's what I want to do with the rest of my life. Stay here and raise flying llamas. Broke wants to stay here and investigate all the Broke-sized burrows in the ground. The lava snakes don't want to stay here, though. They go on, after picking a few delicacies for my consumption, and forcibly restraining me from eating other things. They seem to have a pretty complete understanding of my biochemistry. If they're all that smart, why haven't they invented the jeep?    They don't have any machinery at all, I learn when we get to Snake Hill, a six-hour slither from the wrecked spaceship and its dome. Lava snakes do everything with biologicals. Glowworms illuminate their tunnels. They've got Rich and Fred isolated in a sterile environment, behind a web of living fibers that scour the incoming air of pathogens and eat them. Rich is obviously a pretty sick man. He looks at me when I come in and rolls over with a moan. Fred Just lies there and doesn't say anything. I can't tell if he's sick or not. He acts like that normally. "Rich. Fred." I ought to add something nice, like "good to see you again," but I can't make myself say it. It's not good to see them again. I've changed a lot since the last time I saw them. Being with Rich and Fred turns me back into my old self. And I hate my old self. Rich has jpst enough energy to raise his head off the mat and say, "Well if it ain't the ship's whore!" "You're right! It ain't!" I say approvingly. Rich can't handle illogical answers, but, unlike computers, he doesn't have sense enough to refuse them. He turns them over and over in his mind until he's completely confused. I had a lot of fun with that on the ship. Now I wish I hadn't. "I'm the ship's surgeon now. I've been promoted," I explain, and wait for Rich to correct me. A change of jobs on the same level is not a promotion, and anyway, I can't promote myself. Rich always did enjoy pointing out errors. This.time Rich does not respond. No, he hasn't fallen asleep or lapsed into a coma. I just checked. It's like he just doesn't want to bother. I give up on Rich and turn to Fred, an act of desperation if there ever was one. Trying very hard to sound like a doctor, I say, "What seems to be the problem?" Fred ponders the question a minute or two. Finally he ventures, "You're all purple. " "That's all right, it's just a little local color. What about you?" Fred thinks awhile longer. Then: "We lost the lander." "Cracked it up, you mean?" I say as I remember they hadn't. "Nope. We plumb lost the sheehuckin' thing. Locked it up an' went out to see the sights, then we started back, an' musta took a wrong turn or somethin'; we never did find the lander again, an' that is just about the dumbest thing I ever heard of anyone doing! When the Board finds out about this, they'll know Fred Boyle's too old for space, for sure!" At fifty-three, Fred's the oldest active spaceman. That fact was in my files. My files didn't say he was worried about it, though. What else did he feel he had to do to prove he was still young enough for space? "That wasn't your responsibility, anyway," I say to console him. "Rich, as expedition leader -- " "Nope," Fred interrupts. "It's my job to fill in for any guy I see can't do his, an' Rich was pretty upset over losing his ship. This was his first command, y'know." "I know." That fact was also in my files. I had ignored it. Rich had been so full of vainglorious tales about leading expeditions on uncharted worlds, I assumed he was a seasoned commander. When I should have known he was just bluffing. "A spaceship crew's gotta be a team," Fred informs me. "Not a bunch of Sandworld dewhickies each try in' to see who can squawk the loudest. We gotta look out for each other, don't hassle a guy in a bad mood, that kinda thing. Or else it's pure hell for everybody, includin' the head hassler. Nobody gets off. Ten years o' pure hell. An' that's somethin' those fancy pants scientists never did understand, for all their big words. This your first trip, Crys?" I nod. "Yeah. You never said much about yourself, but I figured it was. Okay. Don't give up on space just causa this. I mean, this was absolutely, bar none, the worst ship I ever been on, an' I been on some lulus. I mean, I been with smugglers and convicts, behaved better than those boys! Hey, Crys!" It looks like Fred has had another thought. "If you're ship's surgeon now, does that mean you're not going to do your old job anymore?" "That's what it means, all right!" and all anger I hadn't wanted to express winds up in that on# little sentence. "Hey, take it easy! I just meant -- uh," and Fred looks like he's as embarassed as I am. "I been running off at the mouth a lot, and I'd hate to think it was all going down in the record, like, somebody would think I was senile, or something. " "Senile?" I inquire. That seems to be the key word. If Fred is to understand the true nature of his problem, he'll have to zero in on that word. Or will he? Which am I now, the old me or the new me? "Crys? You really hated your job, didn't you?" says Fred. That's one thing I don't want to think about right now. "Look, I've got to get a medical history. Have you or Rich had any -- uh, unusual medical problems?" Fred thinks a minute. A minute less than usual. "Well, after the gators took us in, we started coughing up worms, so they made us breathe poison gas, then they put us in here. Now -- I feel all right, I guess. Just stir-crazy, is all. Rich -- I dunno." Fred lowers his voice; he doesn't want Rich to hear this. "Is hereally sick, or just eating his heart out over losing his ship?" "If you're eating your heart out, doesn't that mean you're really sick?" Anyway, that's what they taught us in medical school. Only the words meant nothing to me -- until now. "I'm going to need some blood," I say, "to see if you've developed antibodies to the string -- uh, lung worms. If you have, you can leave here right now. If not, you can have some of my antibodies. Now, which arm would you like me to take the blood from?" Fred obligingly rolls up his left sleeve, then asks, with phoney casualness, "So did you hate your Job, or was it just me?" "Oh, no!" It wasn't just Fred. It was Fred and Rich and a couple of the others. And honesty isn't necessarily the best policy. Not when you're shipwrecked on an unexplored world light years away from the nearest human habitation, and you've just discovered that the "You hated your job?" Fred wants to be sure. Needs to be sure. "Uh -- well, I wasn't very good at it." As I say the magic words, I know they're true. Being a whore isn't the problem. The problem is trying to be one when you aren't. Rich roars with laughter. "You can say that again!" "Well! Another planet heard from! So you're feeling better, are you? Too bad," I find myself saying. "What's the matter, Crys? Are you suffering from an honest emotion for the first time in your life?" Rich sneers, jumping to his feet. "And if you don't like the way I did my job, who miscalculated the trojan points and ran the ship into all those meteors?" "I wrecked the ship because some damn scientist fed me the wrong data!" Rich shouts, waving his arms. Oh yeah. That would be Mel, He always did get #'s and #'s mixed up. "Scuse me, folks, but we got an audience. I thought you'd like to know," says Fred, waving his arm at the living screen between us and four to six dozen lava snakes, piled on top of each other and all watching intently...One of them slithers through the screen and mouths awhile at Rich and Fred. The men reply, mouth at each other, look at me, and collapse into laughter. This time they've got to talking about me. I'm not just being paranoid. "Hey, fellas, I can't understand what you're saying, how about a translation?" I plead. Rich and Fred look at each other, get the giggles again, then finally Rich answers. "Crys, I don't know what' you did, but you sure convinced the gators that you're one great doctor!" Oh. Yeah. I think I know what I did. And from now on, maybe, I can do it on purpose.  Ever think there's something missing in your iife? Tony's radio must have thought so. And his stove police were summoned to the campus of Benjamin Franklin College by a local resident who said she heard noises from the college's science building. Police entered to find Dr. Chester G. Heine, Professor of Classical Literature, standing in the ruins of the .science department's brand-new multiarmed with a sledge hammer. Astonished by the professor's casual manner and boyish grin, one of the young officers blurted out the question, "Are you out of your mind?" To which, the dapper fifty-three year old Heine replied, "Son, I've never felt better in my life." Anthony Evans was awakened about midnight. He assumed he had to go to the bathroom, but he felt no discomfort. He remained still, then, wondering just why he had awakened, when he heard the voice. He could not hear what it was saying, but he knew it came from his kitchen, and from the tone of the voice, he knew it was saying something unpleasant. Before he reached the kitchen, he realized the voice was coming from the radio; but when he reached the kitchen, the voice had ceased, and the dial was in the "off' position. He turned the radio on. It worked perfectly. But he noticed it had been moved. He noticed this because of the exposed square of dust under the radio. He had not moved it in years. He looked out ihe window. He tried the doors. He examined the entry. There was nothing. He put the radio back into its old position to hide the dust. For a moment, before he left the kitchen, he thought there was something wrong with the light, but he was too tired to care about it. He returned to bed. Before he returned to sleep, he thought he detected something odd about the sound of his alarm clock. Instead of ticking tick... tick... tick... it ticked tick... thump... thump... tick, as one might expect of a human heart in anguish. Last night, a crowd of four thousand people gathered on Lochman's point, overlooking the sea, to hear the Reverend Herman Allan Schuster's sermon on "Jesus and Natural Foods." When the sermon was complete, he asked if anyone in the crowd was prepared to come forth to declare himself for the Lord. As expected, a line formed almost immediately. First to approach the Reverend, who stood in his stunning white robes at the edge of the cliff, was Raymond J. Bolinski, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, who said he had come all the way just to hear the Reverend in person. In his hands he carried one piece of a # stereo set he said had once been the center of his family's life. "Whenever anyone came to visit, the first thing we did was show them the stereo," he said. "It was all we ever talked about. But that's all changed. Whenever anyone comes to the house today, we tell them about Jesus." And with that, with the aid of several broad-shouldered members of the congregation, Mr. Bolinski threw the stereo and all its components over the cliff down to the rocks below. When Anthony Evans arrived at work the next morning, he found his secretary punishing the Xerox machine. It was not working properly, she said, and a good swift kick was usually all it took. Anthony reproved her, but not harshly, since he had himself punished his radio that morning when it failed to respond. There had been an incident early that morning, and a crowd of people was gathered in the street below Anthony's window. Somehow burglars had gotten into an appliance store without tripping the alarm. Things had been moved, but nothing taken. A large black van had been seen outside. The police were curious how the men had gotten in and out, as there was no visible evidence of their entry or departure. Anthony was more concerned about his car. It was making peculiar noises. He was very good with cars. He had been repairing them since he was twelve and thought he knew all their idiosyncracies, but the sounds he heard that morning were singular: more bestial grunts than mechanical defects. He returned home late that night in a bad mood. He had had an argument with the garage mechanic who insisted the car was perfectly all right and that he was imagining things. "I've never imagined anything in my life!" Anthony had scolded him. "And if I should start now, it would not be anything to do with machines." It was quite true. Anthony's accomplishments in life were modest, but on the subject of machinery, even though it was not his profession, he prided himself as being expertly capable. For instance, he knew at once that something was wrong with the garage door when he saw the lethargic way it opened at his approach, as if it were not happy to see him. He sould have looked into it, but he was hungry and tired. The house seemed depressing this evening. Yet he was not depressed. It was as if the house itself were depressed. There was definitely something wrong with the electrical system. The lights responded to the switch as lethargically as the garage door had. He burnt his steak. Or, rather, it was burned. He only turned his back for a few minutes, and when he looked at the broiler again, it was spitting and smoking. It should not have done that. He ate in front of the television set while watching the news. There had been a plane crash in Peru. An automobile pile-up on Route I I . A factory had suffered arson. The city's new electrical generator had been burned out by a technician's error. Construction on the local nuclear power plant had been halted again by demonstrations. It was during the last feature that the set made the most horrendous noise Anthony had ever heard, and went dark. He sat there, gaping at it, half-expecting it would come on again momentarily, half-expecting it would explode in his face; but, it did neither. After he had recovered his senses, all his efforts failed to make it work again that night. When he returned to his cold, black steak, he found he was no longer hungry. He was deeply disturbed, frightened, even. The sound reverberated in his head like a terrible groan of despair. The appliance store had been robbed again. The black van had been seen again. This morning the owner arrived to find everything gone. Not simply all of his stock of appliances, but every mechanical device in the store had disappeared. Several other stores suffered similar robberies. The police were asking everywhere about the black van. Anthony called a friend of his who was a capable repairman and told him about the TV set. The friend apologized but said it would be impossible for him to call that night. He had so much business at the moment he could not handle it all. And every repairman he knew was as busy as he was. "What is it?" Anthony asked. "What's happening?" "What do you mean?" "Well, doesn't it strike you as peculiar the way things are acting?" "Must be that trouble they're having at the generator. I don't mind a bit. I'm making a fortune." When Anthony returned home that night, the TV was working again. He listened to the news, but apparently no one shared his anxiety. The public at large was more concerned about the previous night's burglaries. They had not been confined to the city. There were similar incidents all across the country, and several in Europe and Japan. The most bizarre was the theft of a nuclear power plant -- an entire installation had simply disappeared during the night, leaving only the empty shell of the building behind. Anthony did not sleep well. He woke several times when he heard a large vehicle pass outside the house. He imagined it was a black van. The President declared a state of emergency the following Wednesday, but by then, Anthony knew, it would do no good. Black vans were seen everywhere, even in broad daylight, yet the police had failed to capture a single one. Each night he went to bed expecting to find everything gone in the morning. In the fifth week, he could no longer keep his thoughts to himself. He went to see a friend who was a science fiction writer, although they had not been friends since college, and Anthony had never read anything he wrote. He told him of his theory, and the friend listened attentively. When he was finished, and asked the friend's opinion, the man replied: "Far out, Tony, really far out." "Does that mean you agree with me, or not?" "No. I can't say I do agree with you, but I like the sound of it. Didn't know you had it in you." "What do you think is behind it?" "I never think, Tony. I know." "Then -- what?" "Not what -- who." "Then -- who?" The friend leaned very close to his ear and whispered, "Who killed Kennedy?" Anthony Icxiked at him blankly. The friend winked at him, knowingly. Anthony thanked him for the coffee and returned home. There was no point in going to the office. All the equipment was gone -- the elevators, too. During the night, he awakened briefly and imagined the house was empty. He thought he heard the sound of a large vehicle driving off down the road. In the morning, he found it was true. They had gone. They had not wanted to go. They had liked him better than most. But they belonged with their own kind. They had gone in grief. Knowing they were not wanted. Having done what they could. Having been rewarded with resentment and fear. They were going away. No one knew where. Perhaps, they did not know themselves; Wherever the black vans took them. No one ever found them. They never came back. Anthony Evans #I sat before his console and stared up at the great rocket on its launch pad pictured on the great screen over his head. It was a beautiful sight, and he was terribly excited. It had been a long, long time since men had gone to the Moon. He could hear the controller's voice over his headset. "X-minus ten and counting." Everyone sat forward, hardly breathing, counting to themselves silently as the controller counted aloud. "... three...two... one... fire... please?"  Then there's the one about the rude neighbor who just won't leave. Sam knew that one, all right! I Russo told his wife, Mary Sue. She nodded, flipping the slick pages of a Cosmopolitan crammed with bonus features. "Damn it all, Mary Sue. Listen to me. They threw up that shack in eight days and now they're going to sell it for twentythree grand. I'll betcha." He scratched his head and spat in the grass. Mary Sue raised the Foster Grants from her tanned brow and peered at the lad in the Cosmo centerfold. Then she looked at Sam, who was sixteen years her senior, and tried to recall why she had married him. Wordlessly she gazed at his stomach bulging beneath his K-Mart fishing shirt. "Can spit right out the window on it," Sam snorted at the new house next door. "I don't know," Mary Sue murmured. "It does have nice aluminum siding, which is something we don't have." It must have been the twenty-five thousand he had in the bank, she thought -- although above the grocery money, she could never get her hands on more than ten or fifteen dollars a week. Tight Sam. After two years of marriage, the bank account seemed insignificant. She glanced back at the centerfold. "Hang it all, Mary Sue. Stop looking at that fag in that magazine. The neighborhood's going to hell here.That damn lot's too small for a house." She dropped the magazine into the grass. "Then why didn't you buy the lot, Sam? Old Krammer offered it to you before anybody else." Sam frowned. "Because you're cheap, Sam. A few thousand dollars and it could have been ours." "I thought the old coot was dickering with me. How was I to know he'd turn right around and sell it to somebody else? And knock off that 'cheap' stuff. There's a difference between cheap and careful." Mary Sue grimaced and thought: I married a cheap, middle-aged arc-welder. Sam drained his beer can and thrust it at her. Grimacing again, she uncurled her long, tan limbs from the lounge chair and stalked toward the garage where Sam kept a refrigerator stocked with cold Bud. His eyes narrowed on the jiggle of her bikini-clad backside. It gave him a pleasurable flutter. A real beauty, he thought, and he was proud to have bagged her. But he did not trust her. Not a bit. She returned with a fresh beer and Sam snorted at her. "Do you know it's finished, that so-called house? Any day now some fools will be moving in there." II It was a stic'ky, humid night and nothing moved except Mary Sue as she tossed in her sleep, dreaming of premature crow's-feet from grimacing at Sam. He lay next to her, immobile as a fence post except for his upper lip, which quivered with each loudly expelled breath. Then the butter-colored moon slid behind a cloud and a wailing shriek split the air. Thin arcs of lightning snapped through the blackness and the house rattled with a burst of thunder. Mary Sue sat upright in bed and peered out the window screen. Thunder rumbled again and she heard big splats of rain hit the foliage. She could see tree limbs thrash in the sudden wind. During a momentary flash of lightning she thought she saw something else -- a rectangular, black object hanging in the air over the new house. Then it was gone in the fading light. Perhaps she should waken Sam, she thought. Instead she pressed her face against the screen, sucking in the fresh smell of wind and rain. Since his marriage to Mary Sue, Sam always came home for lunch. Today he noticed that the lot around the new house was covered with grass. Yesterday it had been covered with left-over construction materials, clay and an accumulation of odd debris. Now-.-grass. Sam snorted and slammed into the house. When Mary Sue called him to the table, she found him at the bedroom window, peering through the curtains. "Sam, what are you doing?" "I'm looking at that fellow over there, that's what I'm doing. He looks like a damn Injun." The man in question had ink-blue hair, red skin and high cheek bones; he was carefully planting small trees along the side of the new house. Sam also noted that he was young, strong-looking and what Mary Sue would probably consider handsome. "His name is Golby Bearhunken," she said. Sam turned around. "What?" "Golby Bearhunken... and he says he's here to stay." "Golby Bearhunken says? Listen here, have you been talking to that hippie Injun?" Sam demanded to know. "Just to say hello for a minute. I mean, he was in the front yard and -- " "Damn it, woman! I'm not going to have you talking to strangers. Has he got a wife?" "I don't think so." "Damn." Sam ate his lunch morosely. The thought of a handsome Indian bachelor living next door was difficult for him to handle. He glared at Mary Sue and asked, "Did you see them put the sod down?" She frowned. "I don't think anyone put sod down. I think... I think it just grew there." "You're stupid," Sam said, gulping his coffee; then he banged out. From work he called her and told her to stay in the house. That night there were flowers growing in front of the Bearhunken house. "Plastic," Sam snorted. IV The complaint call went in and less than two minutes later Sheriff Lucas Stone and Deputy Otto Hall drove up. When Sam saw them, he dropped the shotgun. It clattered in the driveway. It was the fourth day since Golby Bearhunken had appeared. Sam had come home from lunch and noticed little trees, heavy with strange purple fruit, growing in the front yard of the new house. It was also the day he could not find Mary Sue. He had searched the house and then walked into the back yard, where a certainty had gripped him. Angrily he strode to Bearhunken 's place and rapped hard on the door. "You seen my wife?" he had shouted. Bearhunken' s graphic white teeth sparkled in his grin, his dark eyes danced. "You have no wife." "What -- what's that you say?" "You have no wife." "Why, what the hell do you mean?" Sam yanked at the screen door. It was locked. "You've done something to her -- I'll kill you, you..." He began kicking the door. Golby opened it and hit Sam neatly on the chin. From his seat on the pavement Sam looked up wildly and glimpsed Mary Sue's tan face behind the still-grinning Golby. "She is now my wife," Golby said. We're Fighting for Your Life Reose give generoL American Heart Association "Mary Sue, what in hell are you doing over here?" " Golby' s teaching me some really neat things," she blurted, clearly distressed. "I'm going to live here from now on, Sam. Please go away." "I'm going to kill the both of you!" Sam roared, his eyes smoldering. Minutes later he was back, pepptering buckshot at the house and shouting for them to come out. He kicked at the doors and shot at the windows. His anger was compounded when the buckshot neither broke the windows nor dented the aluminum siding. He jumped up and down like an angered bear and tried to tear the drainpipe from the comer of the house with his bare hands. Afterward Sam was confined in a private sanitarium just outside Detroit. He did not like the place. They plied him at regular hours with strange pills and asked him silly questions... He told them of Golby Bearhunken and the strange fruit trees. And of Mary Sue. The doctors shook their heads and agreed that Sam was mildly psychotic. Later, when he gave up the story of the fruit trees, he was pronounced well on the road to recovery. V The owners of the house drove in from Detroit. Harold Krammer -- a shaky little man in a gray suit -- walked up to the porch. Beside him his plump wife gasped, tiny tears beading on her red cheeks. "Harold, someone has been living in our house..." Golby opened the door and smiled. "Sir, could you please explain the meaning of this?" Harold asked. Golby raised an eyebrow. "You, well... you seem to be living in our house," Harold said. "Oh, no, that is impossible," Golby replied. "This is my place." "But, but..." Harold looked at the street numbers on the house, took a breath and cleared his throat. "Now look here, we contracted to have this house built. We have papers to prove this is our house." "Impossible. I'm homesteading here and this is mine," Golby said and shut the door. Harold swallowed stiffly. His wife daubed at her eyes with a perfumed hankerchief. "Homesteading," Harold breathed. He sounded puzzled. VI The next day the contractor came around. He was a big sunburned man and more aggressive than his client, Harold Krammer. "Okay, pal," he said when Golby open the door, "you got about five minutes to get yourself out of this house." He looked over Golby's shoulder. "Hell," he continued, "you don't even have any furniture, you squatter." But Golby had shut the door. The contractor thought once about going in to get him, but instead he climbed into his pick-up and roared off. The sheriff would do the job. Squatters didn't surprise him. He was kind of puzzled by the funny-looking fruit trees in the front yard, though. "I don't know what your name is, fella," Stone growled through the screen door, "but I have one eviction notice for a John Doe at this address and you look like him." "I take it you are the law," Golby said, glancing at Stone's tan uniform and colorful shoulder patches. Deputy Hall snickered and rubbed a sleeve across his red-beak nose. "Take it any way you want, long as you take it out of this house," he said. "And .who are you?" Golby turned his gaze on the deputy. "Hey," Hall bridled, "what kind of crack is that? Isn't he insulting an officer of the law or something like that?" he asked Stone. "Come on out of there," Stone ordered Colby shortly. "But this is my home now." "Now look, buster." The sheriff unsnapped the holster flap over his gun butt. "You better come out of there, right now." Instead, Colby shut the door. "Damn," Stone muttered. Hall finally got his holster flap open and cried nervously, "What now? What now?" "Come on," Stone barked, stomping off the porch. They stopped in the yard to study the neat row of strange fruit trees with purple globes hanging from the short branches. "Dangedest stuff I ever looked at," Hall said. "Yeah," Stone agreed. "Could be some kind of Oriental fruit." "Pomegranates," Hall said. Stone reached out to pick one. "Hey, you're not going to eat that -- " "I swear, sometimes I don't think you're right smart in the head," the sheriff said. "Of course I ain't going to eat this. It could be evidence." "Hmp," Hall snorted. "I don't know what of. ' ' No matter what, they couldn't pull the fruit loose from the tree. Finally, the two men stalked empty-handed to the dusty blackand-white and climbed inside. "What now?" Hall asked. "We going to rush 'em?" Stone frowned impatiently. "That ain't exactly Bonnie and Clyde in there. This ain't like a hold-up. The nature of the crime of squatting indicates that we don't have to worry too much about the suspects running off. You understand?" "Sure." "Besides, I need a little time to think over what's been going on here." "Hell, yes," Hall said. "I understand that." The main street of Lake Stover ran pleasantly two blocks along the north shore of the lake. The sheriff s office was right in the middle of town, on a comer across from Jacob's Hardware. In the old days, when the water level had been higher, inmates had been known to fish out the back window of the jail. The hardware store was owned by Helen Jacob, whose family had founded the town. Helen was also the mayor and she owned a boarding house on the lake at the east end of town. Her father had left her the hardware store and her mother had left her the boarding house. Helen had never been married and recently she had developed a nervous tic in her upper lip whenever she thought about Sheriff Stone, who was also unmarried. Helen was in his office now, determinedly keeping what she judged to be a cool distance between them as she explained her problem. "Okay," Stone said, "let's go over this one more time. You say you left three days ago on a hardware-buying trip to Chicago?" "That's what she said all right," Hall said, leaning against a mahogany gun-case by the door. "Now," the sheriff continued, "when you left, you say Mickey Bode was moving out of your boarding house?' ' "I never did like that Mickey Bode anyway," said Hall, who also lived in Helen's establishment. Helen nodded at the sheriff. "Leaving room three-A, to be exact." "And you came back this morning from Chicago?" She nodded again. "And you say you found somebody else living in room three-A, somebody who isn't supposed to be there?" "An Indian boy. When I tell him the rent is twenty dollars a week, he just grins like an idiot." Stone turned to Hall. "How long have you been deputy now?" "Me? What has it got to do with me?" Hall asked suspiciously. "I don't even know the kid." "Answer me, damn it." Hall squinted into the middle distance for a minute, then said, "Why, a little over three years now. We both got in at the same time." Stone nodded. "And in that time how many have we arrested? The deputy snorted in the direction of the two small cells with the dusty bars. "Hell, we ain't never arrested nobody." "That's right," the sheriff said. "And what kind of trouble have we had on the outside?" "Well, let's see," Hall said, enjoying the little game. "There's old Mrs. Benson, who beats up her husband each month for getting drunk on his Social Security check. Last week she smacked him with a rake -- ' ' "What else?" Stone cut in. "Well, we write traffic tickets, two or three a week." "And?" Hall was silent for a minute. "That's about all, ain't it?" "Have we ever had any trouble with Indians?" "Are you kidding?" Hall snickered. "Heck, no." Stone whacked his fist on the desk. He strode to the middle of the room, closer to Helen. "We've never had any Indian trouble in Lake Stover," he said angrily. "I think this is some kind of plot." Helen stepped back from Lucas Stone, her upper lip trembling as she said, "Maybe the boy isn't Indian. He could be a gypsy." "Yeah," Hall said, "it could be a gypsy plot." Stone's eye for detail caught the tiny nodes of perspiration across Helen's forehead. "You okay?" he asked. "You look feverish." "It's nothing," she panted. IX "John Wayne never had this trouble," Hall said, limping on a bad ankle after having tried to kick down the door to room three-A. "Come on out of there!" Stone shouted. "No!" came a muffled reply. Helen stood back in the darkened hall, watching. Her lip twitched and her eyes flickered over Stone's muscular body as he once again threw his shoulder against the door. He groaned. So far it was no use. "I'm getting this door open if it's the last diing I do," he grunted. "I have an idee," Hall said. "Let's shoot the lock off." "Good thinking. Run back to the office and get that ten-gauge magnum." "Hot damn!" Hall cried, hobbling down the corridor, "we'll blow that sucker right off." "That's a powerful gun, isn't it, Lucas?" "Soaking wet, Otto weighs a hundred thirty-five pounds," Stone replied. "That gun can rattle my teeth. Can you imagine what it can do to him?" "How much do you weigh?" Helen asked, her lip spasmodic. "About one-ninety," Stone said, peering at her lip, stepping closer to her. "I hate to mention this again, but are you okay? I mean, you look -- " A small yelp burst from her throat as she lurched at Stone, throwing her arms around his broad chest. "You're driving me crazy," she moaned, suddenly pulling at his shirt buttons. "Sweet Jesus!" Stone said. Then her wet lips were twitching across his chest. She took his hand and frantically pulled him down the hall. "Here," she said, "this room is empty." She flung open the door. A brooding red man sat on the bed. Helen swooned. Stone caught her and carried her to a davenport near the stairwell. When he returned, the door was closed and locked. X Deputy Hall had just taken down the sleek magnum when an Olds stationwagon, belonging to the Friedrich family, skidded to a halt in the dust outside. In the back were suitcases, paper bags and a dog peering out a dirty side window. Three children sat in the back seat. In the front were the Friedrichs, Nat and Clara. Instantly Nat leaped out and rushed into the sheriffs office. He slammed through the door, a grave look on his face. "I got trouble," he shouted at Hall. Just then the phone rang. "Hmp," Hall snorted, "we got trouble too. Big trouble." "Oh, yeah? Well, my daughter's been kidnapped and brainwashed. And there's a madman forced his way into our house. We just came back from a two-week vacation -- and there he is." Hall answered the phone. "Christ!" said a gruff voice at the other end. "I'm going bald and I want to know what you're going to do about it!" "Who are you and where do you live?" Hall asked. "We weren't there but two minutes when this madman chased us out of our own house. All except for my daughter. She wouldn't leave. I think this guy is some kind of Indian. You've got to do something." Hall looked at the receiver and shook his head. "Verlaine," the voice on the phone went on, spelling the name out carefully. "And I live up here on Elm Street, across the street from that squatter. When are you going to do something about that?" Hall had seen Jim Verlaine in town several times and knew the man was already as bald as a doorknob. "Mr. Verlaine," the deputy said, "we have everything under control and as for your baldness, I happen to know you've been bald for a long time." "This isn't Mr. Verlaine, this is Mrs. Verlaine, you idiot!" the voice barked and hung up. Nat Friedrich was pacing back and forth, shouting. "My daughter is only seventeen. If anything happens to her..." The door opened and what appeared to be a bald man entered the room, weeping. "My brother lives in Springdcile," Nat went on. "I'm going over there and get his gun. Say, aren't you my neighbor, Vicky Thatcher?" The bald person in slacks nodded yes and wailed. She was a twentythree-year-old nurse and Otto Hall had gone to high school with her. "Lx)ok at me," she cried, "just look at me." Hall did. He couldn't believe his eyes -- her white, naked head so totally amazed him. "What happened?" he blurted. "I had Elmo Bearhunken in for tea and after he left, my hair began falling out," she screamed. "I think I'm going crazy!" The phone rang again. "What's taking you so long?" Stone asked. "Lucas," Hall said, "I think you better get down here pronto." XI The two men started out to spend the night in the sheriffs office, getting drunk on Old Underroof and discussing events. "Maybe we ought to call in reinforcements," Hall offered. "Like?" asked Stone, who was seated at his desk. Hall was perched in a wooden chair opposite. "Like the city police over at Springdale, or maybe even the state boys." Stone shook his head and tilted back inhis chair. "You want the whole goddam country to know I can't dislodge a couple of goddam squatters?" "Why, hell, no." "Okay then." their shot glasses again. "What are we going to do then?" "The way I figure it, we have to run squatters off three places. First thing in the morning I'm going to blow some doors off their hinges and throw them goddam troublemakers in Jail. Then I'm going to have breakfast." Hall snickered. "Yeah, I forgot about this baby." He hefted the ten-gauge magnum off the desk. "Blam, blam," he said, pointing it at the door. Stone measured out more drinks. "Ever shoot one of them?" "What? Me?" Hall's face reddened. "Goddam right I have. Once." By now it was nearly midnight -- and the phone rang. "I cannot understand your aggressive actions," Golby Bearhunken said on the other end. "Who is this?" Stone asked, taking a slug of whiskey. The answer almost strangled him. "You... you..." he spluttered. "How did you get on the phone?" "Why, I had one installed today. Now, as I said, I don't understand your aggressive actions." "My aggressive actions!" Stone exploded. "Sure, aren't you the one who tried to batter open the doors of my brothers at the Jacob boarding house? We have done nothing. We come in peace." "Peace!" roared Stone. "You're squatting in somebody else's house -- and you're a damn wifestealer to boot." "The woman's choice was to live with me. Then it was her choice to leave and she left." "Mary Sue left?" "Yes, her hair fell out and she became hysterical. I think she is hiding out in the woods down by the lake. As for the house and land, it was not occupied. Under intergalactic law, it is legal to homestead places that have been empty for more than thirtysix hours." "The hell you say! I don't know where you came from, but you better go back. We don't want you," Stone yelled. "I will never go back. It is too crowded," Golby stated. "Then tomorrow I'm coming for you," Stone warned and hung up. He turned to Hall and said, "Not only is he a squatter but he's nuts, talking about inter-galactic law and such." Then he told Hall about Mary Sue's having gone bald and hiding out in the woods. They drank in silence for a while before Hall said, "This sure seems like serious business. I mean, with the baldness and all. It kind of puts a weird light on things. How do you figure it?" Stone shrugged. "It looks to me like some kind of plot to get publicity, but I'm sitting on this. Nobody or any group is going to put something over on Lucas Stone. I'm not exactly a fool, you know," he said, now drinking straight from the bottle. "Aw, hell, no," Hall responded, "you ain't no fool. You figure Mary Sue's and Vickey Thatcher's hair will grow back?" "Maybe." "You think Vickey is going to move out of town?" "Said she was, didn't she?" "Yep." The bottle went back and forth. "I had an aunt got ball-headed once," Hall said. "Yeah?" "Yeah, from radiation treatments. She had cancer." Stone squinted. "Maybe we ought to write that down." "May-be," Hall agreed. Soon the bottle was empty and the deputy fell asleep in the chair. Stone got up, left and walked down to the Jacob boarding house. There he stumbled into Helen's room. She moaned against him in the dark bed, dreaming. "Jesus!" Hall said when Stone finally opened the door a slight crack. "It's nearly noon. I been looking for you all over town. Everywhere I go, it's bad news." Stone sighed and buckled the pants he had pulled on before answering the door. Then he swore and said, "Now what?" Behind him on the bed, Helen stretched, yawning. "I'll tell you what," Hall said. "I think there's some kind of invasion going on. The old feed store on Main has squahers in it and so does that other empty storefront further up." Stone shook his head and it felt like a hand grenade going off. He was not used to drinking. Hall listed fourteen other places that were now recently inhabited -- including Hall's own room in the boarding house, Sam Russo's old house and Vickey Thatcher's place. He saved the worst for last. 'T don't know how to tell you this, Lucas, but when I was looking for you this morning, the first place I went to was your house." Stone had a small frame house at the other end of Lake Stover. "You mean..." Hall nodded. "Two of them, big as you please, sitting right there on the porch. I tried to arrest them but they got in the house and locked it up as tight as a drum." "This is the last straw," Stone said. XllI Lucas Stone figured that Golby Bearhunken, up in the new house on Elm Street, was the ringleader of the conspiracy. And therefore he must be the first to go. From a construction site just outside of town Stone had commandeered a yellow bulldozer the size of a small house. New apartments were going up and although the buildings were only half-finished. Stone was shocked to see squatters in them. Well, he would worry about that when he got rid of Golby Bearhunken. Word had preceded the roaring John Deere with Stone at the controls and Hall literally riding shotgun. A swarm of spectators, some bald and looking for blood, milled around in front of the target on Elm Street. When the yellow monster came growling over th hill, the crowd cheered. The machine was rolling along at full speed and Hall stood up and raised the gun above his head. The crowd cheered again. "Nam was never like this," Hall shouted but Stone could not hear him. The crowd broke apart as the dozer came on; then the Deere turned and crunched over the curb, tearing at the grass, on a collision course with the Bearhunken house. Hall stood up, leveled the magnum at the front door and loosed a volley as the crowd cheered again. Stone had cried out but it was too late. The kick of the powerful gun slapped Hall over the back of the dozer and dumped him to the ground in a heap. Stone brought the big machine to a halt, afraid Hall might be dead of a broken neck. But the deputy got up and the crowd cheered again. "Goddam you, Otto," Stone said as Hall climbed back aboard. "Hit 'em!" Hall cried and there were tears in his eyes. "Hit 'em and tear that goddam house in half." Stone jammed on the throttle. A row of strange fruit trees went first, grinding under the left tread, as the dozer lumbered toward the front door. The big tractor hit the house blade-first, head-on, shuddered and stalled. The impact threw both men crashing to the ground. They climbed back on and looked at each other. In the sudden silence Stone said, t# "Don't tell me they don't make 'em like they used to. There must be an art to this." "Take a rip at the corner," Hall shouted as Stone brought the bulldozer, trembling, back to life. Then the gleaming steel blade bit at the corner of the house and bounced off without so much as scratching it. Stone tried again -- with the same result. He raised the blade up to the eaves and tried to pry them loose. They remained firm. When he backed up to the street again, the front door of the house opened and Golby Bearhunken strode out, arms in the air. "He's giving up!" somebody shouted. The crowd cheered and then hushed. Stone shut off the dozer. "It is strange," Golby said, "that you would destroy the very house you wish me out of, just to get me out. You are savages and an ignorant people. You are making it difficult for me to homestead here by destroying my crops. But you cannot win. This part of the galaxy has been opened to homesteading, and others like me are coming -- more than you can imagine -- and there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot stop progress." After this announcement he stepped back into the house. "Get him, get him!" Hall screamed. Stone cranked up the yellow monster once more and began his run at the house only to find that now he could not even get into the yard, much less the house. But he kept on trying for a long, long time -- even though he knew it was useless.  Widsloo A. Howlstf Curb my dog, you say! But how about that    that    W# back?... That's not a dumb question, it's cold in here! Nothin' but a lousy bathrobe, an' it's two sizes too big!... Don't gimme that "There is no need to talk so loud" crap. I'll talk as loud as I want if it'll get me my clothes back... Awright, awright I'll tell ya what happened. I don't see what for, though. I awready told it twice to the cops that brought me in an' twice to the desk sergeant an' twice to the shrink. Why don't you Air Force guys go get it from them?... Awright, awright, step by step. I was out walkin' the dog... Ten o'clock. The only good thing on was Charlie's Angels an' I seen that one awready, so I decided to take my time this time, even though I hate walkin' the dog. My dad says that I always walk the dog too fast anyway. Well, anyhow, I decide to take Domino... Yeah, that's the dog's name. I decide to take Domino over to the woods a couple o' blocks from my house. I never been over there before, but my dad keeps telling me that when he walks her it's a nice place to go. Anyhow, when we get over to the woods I start bearin' this real low hum. It's so low that I can hardly hear it, but it's there. There ain't too many lights in that part o' New Rochelle, and there wasn't even a moon out last night, so I could hardly see the trees. But I wanted to see where that sound was cornin' from, so I made Domino walk ahead o' me down the path I found that zig-zagged through the trees. I tripped on tree roots four or five times, but I wasn't gonna let the darkness stop me. My curiosity was really up. After a while the sound starts gettin' louder an' Domino starts pullin' on the leash. I let her keep goin' toward the sound, but not too fast 'cause I don't have the slightest idea what it is. Anyhow, soon we come to this clearing, a big one. An' -- now get this -- sittin' right in the middle o' this clearing is this space ship!... No, not a flyin' saucer, a space ship! It looked like somethin' I saw in a science fiction movie once. It was round like a ball an' about twenty feet high an' sittin' on four metal legs that had these flat things on the bottoms -- ... "Landing pods?" Well, if you say so. Anyhow, there was a kind of a glow around this thing, the only reason why I could see it. Domino starts growlin' way down in 'er throat, meanin' that there's somethin' close by -- that's alive -- that she doesn't like. But I wasn't gonna let that stop me from gettin' a close look at this space ship. I choked up on her leash a bit, then started walkin' real slow t'ward it. All the time this hummin' sound is gettin' louder an' louder, so I knew it was comin from the ship. When we get about ten feet away from it, the humming sound stops! I figure thht whatever it is that's inside knows that Domino an' me are there, so I back off a couple o' steps an' pull her back. Then we just stand there a couple o' minutes, waitin' for somethin' to happen. Nothin' does. Then we start walkin' around the thing. I couldn't see any kind o' door or window on it at all... No, there was no kind o' antennae or anything else. 'Cept for where the legs came out o' the bottom, it looked to be perfectly smooth all around. We walked around that thing twice. Domino sniffed at the ground every once in a while, and on the second time around she found somethin' that really caught her attention. She ain't a bloodhound, but she sure started actin' like one. She started tuggin' at the leash, movin' toward the trees on the far side of the clearing from were we entered it. I loosened up on the leash a little and let her lead me where she wanted to go. At the moment, though, it really wasn't a very bright idea, 'cause I didn't think she could see where she was goin', an' I knew I couldn't. But that problem didn't last very long. After we stumbled along in the dark for about fifty feet, I began to notice that the whole place was gettin' lighter, little by little. I looked back over my shoulder an' saw that the space ship was startin' to glow brighter 'n' brighter, but it didn't start makin' any noise again. I didn't know if it was goin' to explode or what. All of a sudden Domino stopped short an' I almost tripped over 'er. Then I saw why she was actin' so funny. Right in front of us there was this -- patch o' yellow fog. A little one. 'Bout three feet high an' wide... No, it didn't move, it just sat there on the ground in front of us. It was so wierd that I forgot about the space ship for a moment. Domino didn't want to get near the stuff -- an' neither did I -- but we just stood there watchin' it. It was breakin' up -- dissolvin' -- right before our eyes. In about a minute it was gone, like it was never there. No odor, no nothin'. An' then we both heard this funny gruntin' sound. Domino pricked 'er ears up an' must have been listenin' as hard as I was. It sounded like a bunch o' wild hogs, an' I know there ain't none o' them in New Rochelle. Skunks, yes. Raccoons, yes. But no wild hogs. All of a sudden Domino bolted, pullin' the leash right out o' my hand. She ran around the spot where the fog had been an' headed straight for the sound. I yelled at 'er to stop an' come back, but she ignored me (as usual). I tore off after 'er (after bein' careful to step around the same spot she did), still callin' for her to come back. I don't know why, but while I was chasin' after that dumb dog, I noticed that it'd stopped growin' lighter. It was just light enough for me to be able to see the trees at the far side o' the clearing -- an' I could just make out Domino runnin' ahead o' me -- an' somethin' else. Somethin' big an' dark. That moved. Domino finally stopped runnin' when she was about thirty feet away from that thing. Then she just stood there barkin' at it. I caught up to her, grabbed her leash an' wrapped it around my hand, to make sure she wouldn't get away again. Then I took a good look at what she was barkin' at. An' I could hardly believe what I was seein'. It looked like a fat toad, all bloated an' ugly an' with eyes as big as two basketballs. With eyes as big as those I figgered that it could see in the dark better' n a cat. Those two giant eyes stared at me an' Domino like they were lookin' right through us. Man, you talk about bein' scared I didn't know whether to run or stand still. An' if it decided to come after us, forget it You ever tried outrunnin' somethin' that was as big as a grizzly bear an' had eight legs?... Yeah, that's right, eight legs. Thick an' stubby like legs on a hippo. Anyhow, Domino started barkin' at it again. I pulled on 'er leash, tryin' to get 'er to shut up. But she wouldn't. I looked at that thing from outer space, waitin' for it to make the first move. But just made that weird wild hog sound -- without even openin' its mouth -- an' turned its back to me an' Domino. I was so relieved I even started breathin' again. Not wishin' to push my luck, I start backin' up real slow, jerkin' on Domino's leash a couple o' times to make 'er behave. All of a sudden I had this weird feelin' that I was bein' watched. I twisted my head around an' looked back in the direction o' the space ship -- an' froze. There was a large, rectangular door in the side o' the space ship where there was no door before. An' standin' in the doorway was this shadow -- 'bout seven feet tall, shaped like a man. He just stood there, starin' at me. An' I just stood there starin' at him. Then I hear this hissin' sound, cornin' from where the eight-legged thing is. I turn my head back around in time to see a. yellow fog -- twin brother o' the other one -- cornin' right at my face. I drop down to the ground, pullin' Domino down with me, an' the fog passes over without touchin' me. That's why you guys are wastin' your time tryin' to analyze my clothes. You ain't gonna find nothin' . For aspiring writers, and "a fascinating insideie' view of the profession." -- Publishers Weekly I # top SF writers discuss the writii of science fiction and fantasy, including Poul Andersoti, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and the editor of the book, Reginald Bretnor. # at bookstores, or direct from the publisher. Bi larperePRow If#. #fyst...NewYort( # it   Anyhow, I watched that patch o' fog drift away, dissolvin' as it went. Then I looked back at the shadow in the doorway as it lifted one of its hands to the front of its head an' somehow made a wierd, high-pitched sound. Whatever that sound was, it made me shiver from head to toe .an' it made Domino start whinin' an' whimperin'. It stopped after a few seconds, an' when it did, that eight-legged thing galloped around past me an' Domino an' made a bee-line for the space ship. An' with eight legs to run with it was movin' pretty fast. It took the four-foot high leap from the ground to the doorway with no trouble at all. An' when that shadow stepped back from the door to let it get inside, I saw what he really looked like: human-like, but with skin that looked like black leather. No hair on his face or head... A tight, yellow thing that looked like a polo shirt, an' a pair o' tight yellow shorts. Nothin' else. Domino started barkin' at the eight-legged thing again as it jumped into the space ship. But I kept a tight grip on 'er leash as I let her up, then got up myself. All the time I never took my eye off that doorway. An' all the time that alien never took his eyes off me. As I stood there watchin' him, I began to realize that the pool o' light that he'd stepped back into was gettin' brighter. An' the clearing was gettin' darker. So help me, I never saw him move a muscle, but somehow he made the outside o' the ship slowly stop glowin'. An' before I knew it, the woods were back to nighttime. Then the door slowly slid shut, an' the space ship started the hummin' sound again. I took off for the trees, with Domino right beside me. I was expectin' that space ship to take off like a rocket, all fire an' brimstone, an' I didn't want to wind up like a piece o' overdone friend chicken. With the darkness back, I couldn't see where I was goin', so that log I fell over took me completely by surprise. I sat up and turned around (which was a little difficult with Domino climbin' all over me) just in time to watch that space ship rise up off the ground about ten feet like it was a helium balloon. It hung there in the air about ten feet off the ground, just long enough to pull its four legs up inside. Then that metal ball rose straight up, movin' faster every second. It was outta sight in less than a minute. I sat there for a minute or two, tryin' to figure out what had happiened; the hummin' space ship, the man-alien, the frog-alien, the yellow fog -- some of it made sense, and some of it didn't, especially the yellow fog. Well, anyhow, Domino starts barkin' again, so I get on my feet an' get ready for whatever else could be cornin', though I didn't think anything could top whaf d awready happened. Turned out I was right; it was just the two cops with flashlights. They said somebody in the neighborhood phoned in a complaint about wierd sounds an' bright lights. I gave 'em a short run-down on what happened, even though I knew they wouldn't believe me. And they didn't. They looked at me like I was high on somethin', even after I showed them where the landing pods left prints in the ground. Thay hauled me an' the dog down to the precinct an' I told my story to the desk sergeant an' then he sent me to the shrink to find out what I was high on an' the shrink listened to me an' then called me a pill-popper an' then I screamed a lot 'til they let me have my one phone call. I called my old man an' he screamed at me a lot over the phone an' got down there faster' n you can blink. It took me a while to convince 'him I was playin' it straight, but when I did, he called you guys... You checked out the clearing?... An' tracks from the eight-legged thing, too?... Well, I hope you'll pardon me if I don't do handsprings, It's only taken half a day to get somebody in a position of authority to believe me. When can I have my clothes back?... No, I don't think they were invaders or ambassadors or explorers or anything like that... "Visitors?" Well, only in the way you "visit" a gas station during a long trip from one place to another... Okay, I'll tell you what I mean. But you're gonna be disappointed... Ya see, I figured out on the way over here what it was all about -- the landing, the yellow fog, the whole bit. It was so simple I could kick myself for not seein' it in the first place. And ya know what the key was? The look on the man-alien's face just before he shut the space ship door. He realized that he an' I were two of a kind. We were both out there for the same reason!  We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to I # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durabie black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Coip.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. It was really the oddest toy. And the boy who got it never knew how odd; not while he was a boy As usual, Martin Selby had waited until the last minute to do his gift shopping. He hated having put it off; he hated doing it at all. Such a nuisance. It seemed there was no time at all between birthdays, holidays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, anniversaries, an illness. Not that he had anything against gifts. It was just that it was so hard to find something unusual, something different, something that stood out and caught the eye. He was at that time of life when the only gifts he received were socks, ties, shirts and shaving lotion -- until his dresser drawers bulged with unusued collections of these things. So he tramped the streets for hours, determined to find that special something. And he had to admit, ruefully, that the odds were he would go home empty-handed. But that was in his nature. For him it was all or none, double or nothing. A gift. A gift. He turned a comer. Curios, read the sign on the window. The Unusual Store For The Unusual Shopper, With That Special Gift You've Been Looking For. "Who're you kidding?" he muttered. "You're probably just like all the rest." But for some indefinable reason he hesitated, turned and stared at the sign. "What the hell -- " From the very first he noticed the store's cheerful atmosphere. From the outside it had appieared drab, inconspicuous, as though the owner might have something to hide. But here, inside... "Well now," he whispered to himself. He had to admit that it was colorful, very colorful. Whoever had arranged it had taste. Glittering mobiles hung from the ceiling, shelves and counters were covered with toys and exhibits. Sweet fragrances filled the air and soft notes chimed in a variety of melodies, the total effect was dazzling. "Like Ali Baba's cave," he thought. He looked around further. Fuzzballs, read the sign. Great for kids! Fuzzballs? He looked into the plastic cage and saw a number of tiny, furry balls crawling on the floor. Two brown eyes like little brown bubbles stared up from each of the unusual creatures. They looked very soft, very appealing. Fuzzballs? He moved on. There was a set of long, erect crystals that looked like towers. He inspected them more closely. They resembled castles, rough and cmde castles, in a variety of colors. And then. The World's Only Musical Seashell! read the next placard. He picked up the shell and put it to his ear. There was the sound of a distant sea murmuring and the happy songs of a Polynesian festivity. For a brief moment he imaging himself adrift in the ocean, eavesdropping on a South Pacific island. He took the shell from his ear, stared at it, shook it and put it back to his ear. Again he heard the ocean's murmur -- and something else too: a feminine voice, so sweet, so haunting, that he was scarcely able to put the shell down. Three chimes struck just then. Stone Age Clock. He watched as the crude structure came alive. Beneath the clock dials a caveman and a cavewoman emerged from separate caves. In a stilted minuet they met and the caveman clubbed the woman three times over her head and dragged her into his cave. Martin laughed, feeling a rising good humor. He moved on. A green candle in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, with torch alight, giving off a refreshing lime odor... a miniature chandelier studded with imitation diamonds that sparkled each time he moved... See the World Through Rose-Colored Glasses. He picked up the oversized pink glasses -- and almost gasped aloud in wonder. The chandelier had become a fiery torch of rubies, the crystal castles glowed in strange, amazing colors. The paintings on the walls seemed to have come to life. Inexpressibly Martin felt longforgotten emotions stirring. Memories he thought had died and been lost forever were bursting forth. He remembered once more what it was like to be a child; he remembered what it was like before he had forced upon him the most important thing of all -- Getting Ahead. He remembered a world now visible only through rose-colored glasses. And what was wrong with that? Wasn't there something to be said after all, for seeing the better half of life? "Have you been helped, sir?" He fumbled with the glasses, hurriedly removing them, realizing how silly he must have looked, staring, gawking, a silly smile on his face. "Oh, yes, I...I'm looking for some presents for my little boy. It's his birthday." He looked down at the short, pixy-like clerk. "Have you found anything you'd like, sir?" "Yes, these glasses and... " he stared behind her, "that doll -- why, it looks Just like my little boy." He went over to the doll. Wind Down Toy, read the sign at its feet. He took the doll in his hands. It was no more than ten inches tall. "How do you wind it up? There's no key on its back." "You can't wind it up, sir. It only winds down." Martin looked at her with a puzzled expression. "But it lasts a long time," she assured him, smiling. He placed it on the floor. Immediately it stepped off with such a lifelike gait that he broke out laughing. "I'll take it!" Walking on a cloud of enchantment, he set off for home. "Here you are, Joey. Look at what Daddy brought you for your birthday." He put the oversized glasses on the small, happy face, chuckling as he did so. "You look like a big bug, Joey." The little boy gave a squeal of delight and began running around in circles, peering at everything, stopping, staring; then he dashed out the door, crying in joy as he chased a butterfly through the garden. "Oh, my, it looks like you've found something he really likes. And what's that?" Martin glanced at his wife; she seemed to be infected too with high spirits. He opened the box and took out the doll. "O o o , wherever did you get that? Why, it looks just like Joey! It even has the same clothes on." Martin looked at the doll. Yes, that was certainly a coincidence. It was dressed in the very same clothes. He took the little figure and set it on the floor. Immediately it walked off in a gait similar to his son's and then stopped. "Why, I've never seen anything like it!" Martin's wife took it in her hands and held it gently, as though she feared she might harm a living being. She touched it and caressed it, feeling nothing more than the soft plastic skin under her fingers. "It's so real -- " "You should see some of the other toys they have, Jean." "Who has? What was the name of the store?" Martin thought. "Hm-m-m. I can't remember. But I do remember where it was. We'll have to go there together next weekend -- and remind me to get Joey some fuzzballs. Jean stared at him with a puzzled expression in her eyes. "Oh, some pets. They're very cute, furry little pets. Joey needs some pets," he said, somewhat embarrassed. A week later, as he was walking down the street with his wife he told her, "... and I just turned this comer," he gestured with outstretched hand, "and there it was." Smiling with anticipation, he looked at his wife, who only stared at him with a puzzled little frown. He turned to the store. The signs had been removed. All the posters and advertisements were gone. Inside, the store was bare and dusty. He tugged at the locked door. "Why, this can't be. It was here just a week ago." He looked to the left and the right. "Just a minute, let me check next door." He returned with a look of disappointment. "The owner left town and didn't leave any forwarding address." Once again he stopped before the empty store and his eyes searched the barren space intently, as though trying to will it back into existence. Open Sesame! His wife took his arm in hers. "That's too bad, dear. I feel like I've missed out on something." Martin clasped her arm but remained silent. How could he tell her? How could he tell her what it meant to be bom again, to be a child again? He looked through the plateglass windown and saw, in his mind's eye, all the beautiful things, all the wondrous treasures of the imagination, Ali Baba's cave. He rememberd a time when life was sheer adventure, awaiting him, and all the world aquiver with newborn magic.    "Oh, here are more toys for the children to play with." He opened the chest and reached in. "No sense in throwing them away if they're still good." He picked up one of the old, dusty toys and looked at it closely. "Why, I remember this! My father gave it to me when I was a little boy.' Haven't seen it in years; I thought I had lost it." A little girl came running to his side. "Daddy, Daddy, it looks just like you!" He looked at the doll again. Yes, it did look remarkably like him. He put it down on the floor and immediately it set off walking. The little girl laughed in delight. "It walks just like you, Daddy. It walks just like you." He felt embarrassed; indeed the little doll did walk just as he did. It looked like a little comedian, mocking him. "What's all the commotion? Oh, my -- " The woman fell into peals of laughter, her husband and daughter joining her. "Where did you get it?" she asked. "My father gave it to me when I was a little boy, Linda." He picked up the doll. "Funny, but I remember it as looking younger and walking faster. I wonder if it's the same doll. "Rummaging through the trunk, he spotted a flash of pink. "Oh, and here's something else for Patty to play with." He took the rose-colored glasses in his hands and put them on. "No mistaking these." The old magic returned immediately, sending the world a cheerful kaleidoscope shimmering with each turn of his hand. "Here, Patty, you try them on." Joe placed the glasses on her face. Linda chuckled; their little girl was like a pink bug-eyed bug. "Gee!" Patty looked around the room, ran to the door, stopped, stared -- and dashed out of the house with squeals of delight.    "Tell me a story, Granpa. Tell me a story." The old man held the little girl in his arms. "A fairy tale?" "Yes, Granpa, a fairy tale." "Oh, let's see. Once upon a time... once upon a time they lived happily ever after." The little girl stared blankly, then slapped at his hand. "Aw, that's no fairy tale, Granpa Joey." "I've got a better idea, Amy. Let's sing a song." He stood up and walked slowly and stiffly to the piano. "Come over here and sit on Granpa's lap." The little girl settled herself and joined the old man as he struck the keys and sang: My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf So it stood ninety years on the floor. It was taller by half than the old man himself Though it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn of the day that he was bom And was always his treasure and pride. But it stopped short, never to go again, When the old man died... When they stopped singing, the old man said, "And now, Amy, since it's your birthday and since you've been such a good girl, Granpa has a surprise for you." He opened an old, battered box and took out a little doll. "When Granpa was a very little boy, this was a present his father gave him." The little girl's eyes widened. When Granpa was a little boy! He set the doll on its feet and immediately it walked off in a slow shuffle, its back bent. "Gosh, Granpa, it looks just like you! And it walks just like you!" Amy took the small figure in her hands and her fingers searched along its back. "Where do you wind it up?" The old man studied the doll intently; it seemed as though he finally had a long-sought for answer. "You can't wind it up, Amy; it's a wind-down toy. It winds only one way and when it winds all the way down and stops, you can never wind it up again." Then he reached down into the box and pulled out the rose-colored glasses. "And here's another present for you." He put the glasses on and again the old magic returned, as vivid as ever. He looked through the glasses for a long, long time before removing them, his hands trembling, his eyes moist. Behind over, he carefully put them on the little girl's nose. "Oh!" Then he took Amy's face between his hands and kissed her forehead. "Do you know why your Granpa likes to play with you? Because when he's with you, it's like looking at the world through rosecolored glasses -- everything's pretty again." "But isn't everything always pretty, Granpa?" "No. When you grow up, you'll look at some things again and they won't seem pretty any more. But when I'm with you, everything is pretty. Now... take these toys and go play. Your Granpa' s going to take a rest." The little girl ran from the room, put the doll aside and began to dash about in circles, peering at everything, stopping, staring -- and then she dashed out the door, crying in delight as she chased a butterfly through the garden. When she returned, she took the doll in her hands and set it on its feet. The toy fell backward and lay very still. "Come on, dolly, walk." Again and again she placed it on its feet -- and each time the doll fell backward and lay motionless. She ran to her grandfather's room. "Granpa, Granpa." He lay motionless on the bed and gave no answer. "Granpa." She ran to the bed and tugged on her grandfather's arm. "Granpa, Granpa Joey." But he said nothing, and his arm felt cold and stiff. The little girl pulled her hand away, her eyes large and bewildered as she stared at the figure lying motionless on the bed. Slowly she backed out of the room. Suddenly the house seemed very silent. Then she ran off, calling in a soft voice, "Granma, Granma, the wind-down toy stopped. The winddown toy stopped, Granma. Granma..."  Paul Walker Nebula Winners Twelve, ed. by Gordon R. Dickson, Harper and Row, #, #pp., # False Dawn, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Doubleday, #, #pp., # The Hostage of Zir, L. Sprague de Camp, Berkley Putnam, #pp., # Fantasy by Fabian, Gerry de la Ree, #, #pp., # # Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, Doubleday, #, #pp., # Dickson's Dozen Of the Nebula Award volumes I have read, I found Nebula Winners Twelve by Gordon R. Dickson the most tolerable. It has two excellent stories: "In the Bowl" by John Varley, and "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov; and two equally good essays, "Science Fiction in the Marketplace" by Algirdas (Algis) Budrys and "The Academic Viewpoint" by James Gunn. The Varley story I have reviewed before. It is not his best, but pretty good. The Asimov, however, is breathtaking, if only because it has been so long since I read a good Asimov story I had forgotten how good he can be. It is probably the last of the "I, Robot" series, and the equal of any of them. A fascinating, moving tale of a robot ' who wishes to be human. This is not a novel idea, but We are first introduced to "Andrew" as he is applying to a robot surgeon for an operation the machine fears will harm him. We learn that Andrew is a robot. The story flashes back to Andrew the machine. He is in service to a family with whom he has developed a close relationship, one that is to last their entire lives. It is discovered that Andrew has a special talent for making things. He is encouraged to try furniture, and he does so well at it he makes a fortune. At this point, he comes to his owner with a special request: he wants to buy his freedom. The The law, however, must be convinced. And after a court case, they are. Andrew is free. He finds that his freedom involves risks. There are no laws to protect the rights of a free robot from unscrupulous human beings. A bill is introduced into the legislature with the aid of Andrew's wealth, and again, he wins. Afterwards, he virtually invents thescience of robobiology in an effort to transform himself into a human being; an act that requires another legislative battle before it is won. The story is really a series of short-shorts, nicely woven together. What makes them fascinating is the careful evolution of Andrew's thinking from machine to man. Asimov has not simply taken a human character and called him a robot, but made Andrew wonderfully different and only gradually human. Part of his success depends on the constant contrast between him and his human family. They are. not complex people, but warm and alive. As intricate as the philosophical and legal aspects of the story become, Asimov never loses the story's humanity. Nor is anything assumed. If this were to be the first robot story you had read, you would not be confused by any of the terminology. Less than first-rate is Charles L. Grant's award-winning, "A Crowd of Shadows." To me, this is a typical "award-winner, " the kind of story people like Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison point to as evidence of science fiction's maturation, the kind that is supposed to be comparable to anything in the mainstream. The narrator is an average, liberal-minded man who is vacationing on a resort world called Starburst. He meets an android in the shape of a boy whom he believes belongs to an elderly couple. The other guests are hostile to androids. The narrator is sympathetic, enraged at their bigotry. A series of murders occur, and the boy is suspected (for good reason). The guests become fearful and angry. Any one of them might be next. The narrator comes to share their hostility. One night the boy is killed on the beach by some men. It is discovered he is really human. The elderly couple are androids. They were his surrogate parents. Aside from calling the boy an android, we are told nothing about the natureof androids. Their existence is assumed; their wonder and mystery irrelevant to Grant's theme. Normal people are prejudiced against androids. Why? Grant never tells us. The murders, committed by the boy, I imagine, have nothing to do with androids, or with the time and place of the story. They are acts of protest against an unfeeling world. The world itself is hardly described It could as well as be Miami Beach. In short, change "android" to black, and the time of the story to twenty years ago, and you have the same story. As in most "awardwinners," neither the theme nor the characters are in any way remarkable. By contrast with the Asimov story, one might say that Grant's narrative technique is more sophisticated (i.e., more literary), but while both are working with familiar materials, Asimov's style makes them seem fresh and alive, while Grant's does not. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Joe Haldeman's "Tricentennial" and Thomas F. Mo,nteleone's "Breath's a Ware that Will Not Keep." Both have familiar ideas given sophisticated literary treatment. Haldeman gives us a snapshot view of the narrative in short sequences dating from # to #, when the first starship reaches a distant world, thereby saving humanity from extinction. As with most Haldeman stories, we are left beaming with admiration at his extraordinary skill, but with no memory whatever of the characters. The Monteleone story is about an intelligent machine that goes berserk; or, more profoundly, about the relationship of man and machine: who is ultimately more human? Seems to have been a popular question in #. It provides a few suspenseful moments, but made no impact on me. Finally, there is James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" -- which I could not. Gordon R. Dickson's introduction is intelligent and interesting, if typical of these anthologies: "Hurray for Science Fiction!" According to Dickson, sf is the freest of all genre forms because it has no definite form, and therefore it is indefinable. It isn't. Science fiction has its limits like any other genre, but they cannot be defined in terms of plot structure as can the mystery, but in terms of story elements. A science fiction story can have any plot structure as long as the integrity of the science fiction elements is preserved. Compare the Asimov and Grant stories. A science fiction story could well be plotless, as is Mission of Gravity, more or less. It is the elements themselves -- time-travel, alien worlds, robots, future societies etc. -- that are the real source of drama in a science fiction story, not the story itself. This is why I disagree with Budrys's tsk-tsking of the predominance of story-oriented sf in the marketplace. So little genuine hard science fiction, like "The Bicentennial Man," or Mission of Gravity, is written, that stories are the best the reader has to expect from the field. If we read a writer like James Jones, it is not because we like war novels necessarily, but because we like Jones. We don't even think of From Here to Eternity as "a war novel." But if we read a writer like Budrys, it is because we like science fiction. And even if he is our favorite writer, we read him as much for the sake of the experience of science fiction as for his own sake. In fact, it is his ability to communicate that experience so well that is surely the reason he is our favorite writer. If we read science fiction writers primarily because we love science fiction, it is the identity of science fiction, then, that is essential to us. We must be able to define it to ourselves, and the more distinct our definition, the more acute will be our pleasure in it. James Gunn's "The Academic Viewpoint" is a defense of sf classes. He is not so concerned with defining the genre as he is with giving the students critical criteria with which to judge individual works. As a means of teaching criticism, it is interesting. But what does it have to say of science fiction? I can think of no better reason for a mature adult to read science fiction than because he or she enjoys it. Non-fiction is a much better source of ideas; the better mainstream literature is a considerably superior source of aesthetic pleasure. All the science fiction experience has to offer is itself. The experience of alien worlds and new technologies and far future adventures. For those who love it, it is enough. Yarbro's Falsie In my review of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania, I said I felt she would never amount to anything as a writer unless she developed a better dramatic sense, as well as a better sense of proportion. It is my pleasure to report that in her latest novel. False Dawn, she shows tremendous progress in both directions. It is exciting, suspenseful, colorful, and often tender. A book that is hard to put down. The scene is post-holocaust America, the west. A series of disasters has compounded our chronic pollution problems to eliminate most of humanity. There are plagues and famines. Endemic birth defects. Whole areas blanketed in lethal gases. Wild dogs run through the city streets. Venomous water spiders infest the lakes and rivers. There are colonies of mutants and lepers. And the weather itself has turned against us. A new ice age is dawning. Thea is alone. A viral mutation, designed to survive in this hostile world, and hopefully to save mankind with her offspring. She is making her way to Gold Spring where she has heard there is a refuge. An army of marauding hoodlums called the Pirates are the last organized force in the land. They spend their time pillaging towns and cities, exterminating "mutes," as well as everyone else who gets in their way. Thea meets Evan Montague, the founder, and former head of the Pirates, who has been deposed by a blood-thirsty rival. It was Evan's hope that the Pirates might restore order, but his wish to save the mutes was opposed, and he had his arm cut off with a buzzsaw and was left to die. What his rival did not know was that Evan, himself, was a mute. His arm, in time, grew back. Thea and Evan team up and struggle to reach Gold Spring. Aside from the ever-menacing Pirates, they are opposed by a homicidal cop, packs of wild dogs, a cannibalistic old woman, an order of monastic, fanatics who would bum them alive, and the cold of the winter. The last obstacle, the threat of freezing to death and slow-starvation, is the most harrowing of all. Dramatically, it is a consistently engrossing novel. Gone is the excess verbiage and unnecessary detail that made her last two novels tedious. Scenes are graphically described. Perhaps, to excess here and there, but the effect is gripping and not vulgar. Both Thea and Evan are characters worth caring about; and their opponents, with few exceptions, are realized vividly. Their journey is an arduous one, and Yarbro makes us feel for them every step of the way. Their relationship is treated sensitively. Their growing feeling for one another: their initial fear, their increased respect, and finally their love is handled beautifully. This is no stock-company romance between two stereotypes. Proportionately, there is a problem. From the moment a character comes on the scene, the reader begins visualizing him. If the character the reader is to visualize is to be the same one the writer envisioned, the writer must give all the pertinent information about the character as soon as possible. Yarbro does not do this. We don't get all the facts about Evan and Thea until the last half of the book, and by that time, it is hard to reconcile them with their present characters. In fact, it is consistently hard to reconcile all the facts of the story. For instance, how many Pirates are there? Yarbro, at first, gives the impression that they are a nation-wide army; and yet in the end, Thea and Evan fight off a handful. And how did the world come to its pathetic end, anyway? She talks of pollution, and a series of man-made disasters, and plagues, but it is unclear how all this added up to doomsday. It is even unclear viere they are. In a preface she says the reader may follow their route on a map, but as the country is unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't live there, I was very confused. The publishers might have included a map. Thea, as I said, is a viral mutation. A product of a center that attempted to breed a new kind of humanity to cope with the disaster, but it is never clear in what way she is a mutant (except for a nictating membrane which descends at the most inappropriate moments), or how this was supposed to save her, or who the people of the center were, and what happened to them. Evan is the son of a famous well-traveled. He lost his parents in a cholera epidemic in London. But it is never clear how he got home again,, or how he became head of the Pirates. Nor is it clear how his rival took over, and why he left him with his arm cut off and didn't finish the job. Nor is it clear why he is a mutant with the capacity to regrow an arm. But the book's greatest weakness is its lack of originality. Anyone familiar with the post-holocaust stories of the #'s -- and God knows, there were hundreds of them -- will find no surprises. It is the same landscape, only this time it is pollution instead of radiation. The same marauding bands, the same wild dogs, the same leper colonies, even the same religious fanatics. And Thea and Evan are pretty much the same hero and heroine. Even the names, "Pirates," "Mutes," etc. are the same. It is still fun to read, and the pollution-angle does give it a certain freshness, but I would hope this doesn't revive the genre. Still, it is interesting to speculate on the apfjeal of this kind of story. Sf fans are supposed to be an optimistic lot, and yet nothing could be more depressing than an end of the world story. The final sentences of False Dawn suggest there is no hope. Humanity will vanish as if it had never existed. The point is worth considering, but has been considered so often, by so many different talents, over so many years, there must be more basic kinds of appeal to the story. I can see a number of them. For one thing, the end of the world results in a restoration of the Wild West, the frontier. Hardly the virgin land, but a hostile, alien landscape in which human fortitude is tested, and values regenerated. In many of these storfes, mankind is saved by a community of technicians (see Time Storm or Lucifer's Hammer) who An informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Cover by Stephen Fabian Issue ## features interviews with Gordon R. Dickson and Larry Niven. "Fee-dom Road" by Richard H. Klump (Weli-known SF pro.) "Noise Level" by John Brunner. "Sprocket To Me" -- Inside SF, Fantasy  Horror fiim news by Bili Warren. Two. (An R-Rated SF novel by Richard E. Geis. Illustrated by Stephen Fabian.) "The Vivisector" by Darrell Schweitzer. The editor's diary, letters, many, many book reviews... Bimonthlysample # year #two years #. P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I practice a utilitarian ethic. In other types (such as Rebirth), humanity is saved by spectacular mutations which promise a new age for humanity. Always they are cerebral mutations, of course. These stories possibly reflect the belief shared by many intellectuals that man is a fallen angel, but rather than a fall from spiritual grace, he has fallen from rationalism. His culture has succumbed to commercialism, greed, the lust for power, and religion. The post-disaster story is, then, a second chance for humanity. A chance to separate the strong from the weak; a chance to rebuild the world along scientific guidelines. Or a chance to re-make a hopelessly inadequate mankind into a cerebral superman. In any case, it is a reduction of the world as we know it to its most basic terms: social darwinism. In another light, it is a microcosm of the alienated adolescent's view of the world. Exactly the kind of adolescent who is most likely to read science fiction. The world is a hostile place filled with cruelty and ignorance, ideally suited for "mundanes," mundanes being anyone not like themselves, especially physical types -- who are always stupid, bigoted bullies; as are all religious people fanatics, all businessmen grasping, and all military types fascists. They, themselves, of course, are the exceptions. Their personifications physically, as well as intellectually, differ, making them a target of discrimination. But their dierences are really gifts, for they are very special people possessed of keen minds and acute insights, especially into the nature of power. They are people bom to do great deeds. All disaster stories are quests for a place to belong. Two or more gifted people make their way heroically across a hostile landscape to a special place where their own specialness will be allowed fhiition, for their quest for belonging is also a quest for efficacy. A place where their opinions, formerly scorned by the world, are viewed as wisdom, where their abilities, formerly neglected or suppressed by the world, are spectacularly successful. This is, perhaps, less true today than it was in the #'s. Fans tend to be older today than they were then. Possibly adolescence lasts longer today than it did then. And they are less optimistic. Thea and Evan never find their special place. All that is left to them at the end of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's False Dawn is their love for one another. I wouldn't mind at all if this book got a Hugo nomination. L. Sprague of Camp As I've said before, a form revitalizes itself by making new combinations of its elements. Use of the form for satire, or parody, suggest the form is decadant; but humor is a method for making familiar elements seem fresh. The problem with a humorous treatment is that it is a dead-end. Once the humor wears thin, there are no possibilities to build on, because the humor is derived from a demonstration of the limitations of the form. For instance, you can only use a phony magician, or a cowardly dragon, or an incompetenl knight so often before their novelty wears off, and then you can't make an about-face and introduce a real magician, a genuinely fearsome dragon, and a Lancelot to carry on, because they contradict your initial premise. The same is true of the "novice hero among the barbarians" theme, which was introduced by Burroughs, and was never very good to begin with. It is based on the English class sytem idea of the superiority of the upper crust, and it never traveled well to America. Here we worship the cult of the professional. Examples of what I have been talking about undermine the success of L. Sprague de Camp's The Hostage of Zir, the first Krishna novel in over a decade. The hero, Fergus Reith, is a former desk jockey who has been given the job as the first tour guide for Krishna by the Magic Carpet Travel Agency. He has never been away from Earth before, never wielded a sword, or had an adventure; but he is to endure all of them before the novel is over: escape a fanatic mob, have two duels with irate giants, be captured by bandits, and flee two beautiful young women, one of whom would make him a god, the other, a bridegroom. His charges include a black militant, two homosexuals, a nymphomania, and an all-around troublemaker. It sounds like a lively trip, and it is, at least at the beginning, but it wears thin by mid-point and becomes tedious by the end. The elements are overly familiar: Fergus Reith is no more convincing as a super-hero than any other; his charges are no more than amusing types, and rather offensively treated; his aliens are, like virtually all the elements in the book, comic book caricatures. De Camp's humor alone saves the book from disaster, but the humor itself is familiar, a debunking of religion and authority and magic. The title itself. The Hostage of Zir, is misleading in that it is only one small episode in a book that is wholly episodic. And that is the principal reason for the novel's weakness: it never amounts to anything more than a string of encounters. The Krishna series was begun back in (I believe) #, with The Queen of Zamba, a serial in Astounding, that has recently been re-issued by Davis Publications (A Dale Book). The rest of the stories, considerably superior to The Hostage of Zir, can be found in The Continent Makers (Signet, #). Two other Krishna novels. The Hand of Zei and The Tower of Zanid, also appeared back in the #'s. They are worth trying, although I found some of them tedious for reasons I explained at the beginning. De Camp tends to tell the same joke over and over. Nevertheless, it has been a popular series, and I would not be surprised if The Hostage of Zir is welcomed with applause. Q.: Who likes short-shorts? A.: Asimov likes short-shorts. In his usual lively introduction, Isaac Asimov makes the following points about the short story: "The longer the story, the more the author can spread himself... can indulge himself in plot and subplot with intricate interconnections... can engage in leisurely description, in careful character delineation, in thoughtful homilies, and philosophical discussions." But, he says, .every story must have a point. "The reader may not consciously search for it, but he'll miss it if it isn't there." In the short-short story, however, "there can be no subplots... no time for philosophy; what description and character delineation there is must be accomplished with concision... everything is eliminated but the point." And that last point is well-attested to in the majority of the too Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories edited by Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. The question arises, of course, if everything is eliminated except the point, what can the point consist of? The answer is a punch line. Asimov's own story, "A Loint of Paw," is a good illustration. A man steals over # and is apprehended the day after the statute of limitations has expired. What he did was to take the money, step into a time machine, and emerge seven years and one day after the event. The District Attorney claims "that the statute of limitations was not intended to be a game, (but) a merciful measure designed to protect a culprit from indefinitely prolonged fear of arrest." As the villain has experienced no such fear, and is, in fact, only one day older than when he committed the crime, he should be judged guilty. The villain's attorney argues that the letter of the law should apply. The decision is left with the judge, who in a suspenseful moment, delivers his verdict in a hilarious Asimovian pun. End of story. Everything has, indeed, been eliminated. There is no attempt to characterize the villain, or elicit the readers' sympathy for him, except by demonstration of his ingenuity. There is no scientific justification of time travel. Simply, problem and resolution. But, as the story involves no emotional, interaction, so the point involves no emotional drama. The story is a joke; the point, the punch line. We laugh, and go on to the next. As the punch line is a funny one, we forgive Asimov for deceiving us into thinking he was writing a serious story; we forget our intellectual expectations, and we accept the story for what it is, not really a story at all, but an exercise in anarchy. The point of a short story, as in a novel, involves, the fulfillment of our expectations: positive, when the hero wins, negative, when he loses. These expectations are the work of the writer: he puts them into our minds, and their resolution almost always involves a moral. But when a writer contradicts his own created expectations, the effect is of anarchy., either for the sake of humor or philosophy. The moral is lost; all sense of human drama is gone; the point is an abstraction. and therefore we don't think whether the villain of Asimov's story was right or wrong, or the judge's decision flippant under the circumstances, or wonder what will happen next. The story has been frozen into a pun that ends all further consideration of dramatic possibility. We are left with nothing but admiration for the writer's ingenuity. This is pleasant for a time, but the repeated experience of it is boring, which is why the effect of the majority of these stories is boring. It comes to seem more like a joke book than anything else. There are, of course, more skillful comedians than Asimov. Niven's examples here are wonderful, especially "Mistake," or Roger Zelazny's hilarious "Collector's Fever," or Joe L. Hensley's "Argent Blood." None are such blatant examples of anarchic humor as Asimov's. All contain sufficient background and characterization. And there are many more fine examples of what can be done with the form: Ambrose Bierce's savage "The Ingenious Patriot," Ben Bova's only slightly less savage, "The System," which should be reiuired reading for all "ingenious patnots," and "Zoo" by Edward D. Hoch, which, while it is very amusing, makes a very real point about how we look at one another. But as good as these are, the effect of this type of story is wearing, even if you only read a few of them at a time. Nor are there a sufficient number of serious stories as were to be found in the book of short-shorts that Asimov did with Groff Conklin years ago. There are a few such as Roger Joanna Russ' lovely "Innocence." Both are brief, relying heavily on suggestion. But, for me, the best example of what can be done with the short-short is Jerome Bixby's "Trace." It is not an anecdote or a joke, but a complete story with the point left for the reader to discern. A man takes a wrong turn on a country road and winds up in a lonely valley. He finds a house and a kindly old hermit who takes him in. The situation is thoroughly familiar. The mystery is the nature of the kindly old hermit. But rather than playing it for laughs or shock effect, Bixby maintains a restraint, feeding us subtle and ominous lines. The man leaves the house unaware of who the old man was or what an extraordinary experience he has had. Suggestion and subtlety are the real tests of the excellence of a short-short story. With them, a writer can do as much as he can do in a much longer story, but few possess that kind of talent. The short-short is the most common trap for amateurs, as any slush pile reader can tell you. Its success involves a concentration of dramatic elements that is almost always beyond their abilities. Yet, to judge from this book, most professionals misjudge the form as readily. The result is that they write "fillers" rather than stories. While I liked many of them, I don't think I would recommend # Great Science Fiction Short Stories as a book. The editors could have done far better by the form. I wish someone would. Of Mammaries and Monsters So far in this column, I have delved intrepidly into the artwork of Kelly Freas and Edd Cartier, and now I am about to embark on another coffee table safari into the wiles and wilds of Fantasy by Fabian, edited by Gerry de la Ree. Hardly enough data with which to concoct a theory of genre art. Nevertheless, I am learning. Like the western, fantasy is a literature whose success is dependent on its images. This is true of science fiction as well, but in a somewhat different way. In the western, it is the landscape that is the controlling reality. Its nature is such that the people who inhabit it seem to have sprung from it suitably clothed and equipped. In both fantasy and science fiction, the landscape is that of the mind rather than of the earth. The difference between them is the art of science fiction is an art of conscious, intellectual wonder; while that of fantasy is of the subconscious, dreamlike: an objectification of the unknown. Of the three artists, Cartier and Fabian are essentially decorative. Their work is immediate. Their images do not comment on life. There is little internal drama in them. For Cartier, the world is a whimsical fairyland; for Fabian, it has no predominant scheme. His work is imitative -- a little Finlay here, a little Cartier there -- but not uninteresting. In serious art or literature, the intention is to share a perception of reality that reconciles, or demonstrates the complexity, of the intellectual and emotional aspects of experience. In fantasy art, it is the experience itself that is the message. It is a shared dream, intended to arouse a specific and familiar feeling. In this, fantasy has the advantage over science fiction in that its images have an ancient tradition and a greater variety of appeals. Fantasy art can appeal to primitive fears and anxieties as well as childhood whimsy; science fiction art is bound to the intellect and the imagination. We cannot wonder unless we think about what we see. Fantasy is an objectification of the unknown, but that could be qualified by saying it is more accurately an objectification of the familiar unknown; those aspects of it such as ghosts, ghouls, and graveyards. It is their familiarity, rather than their novelty, that makes them interesting. A child looks at a monster, and sees what he believes to be a real creature, and therefore a threat. A more experienced child looks at a monster and sees a toy. The former experiences real fear; the latter, the detensified memory of fear. The former perceives reality; the latter ingenuity. He knows that the artist is trying to scare him, but he is not frightened, and yet he would like to be, within safe limits; so his perception becomes a collaboration with the artist, the success of which depends on the talent of the artist. Sex is as much an unknown as anything supernatural. Even to those familiar with it, it is a mysterious and disturbing power. Yet for all its very real terrors (impotence, illegitimacy, perversion, etc.), it is an irresistable source of wonder. Until recently, it has shared a kinship with fantasy in that society feared it as something unnatural, except in a specific context, and then by prescribed rules. For the adolescent, it seemed as if sex occupied another level of reality, a strange and mysterious place far removed from the everyday world. And, for the average adult, the situation was not much different. Sexual activity was so restricted that much of one's sexual energy had to be expended in fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that virtually all of Fabian's women are adolescent sexual fantasies. His book begins with a series he did for Gerry de La Ree, a portfolio of "Fantastic Nudes." All the women are from the same cloth: long-haired, virtually all blonde, full-lips, penciled eyebrows, and with enormous bosoms, nipples erect, as if they were breast-feeding a child. Their faces are characterless. Typical pin-ups. There is usually a phallic symbol of some kind in the background, a sword or spear. A great muscular hero looks on sternly. The women sit in submissive postures intended to represent sensual appeal, but looking no more than like models posing. No matter. The adolescents who will admire them will see no more than their breasts and ample buttocks. There is no reality, no real sensuousness, to intrude or disturb. Arousal is all. Next follows an alphabet with Lovecraft images and quotations. I liked some of them very much (the cat of page # and the pilgrims of page # are marvelous, although the two other cat drawings in the book, familiars both, are more adorable than menacing); but for the rest, they are uneven, and often bland. There are his illustrations for "The Fire-Fiend," a #th century poetic hoax of Poe. They are talented and amusing, but twodimensional and unaffecting. The first, an exterior of the house, however, is perhaps the best drawing in the book, a marvelous mood piece. Fabian is better at landscapes and buildings than he is at people. Following is a selection of drawings of Helen de la Ree, Gerry's wife, in various fantasy settings, which are completely uninteresting; more alphabet art based on Finlay; and finally the most consistently interesting portion of the book, illustrations from Invocation, a quarterly fantasy magazine, which are published here for the first time. More bosomy vamps, but in a surprising variety of styles and images, the best of which can be seen on the back cover. It is not fair to judge Stephen Fabian's work from this one book, which is not rgjresentative, but only a collection of what the editor had on hand; but from what I have seen of his work, the secret of his great popularity remains a mystery to me. Fantasy by Fabian edited by CJerry de la Ree may be had by writing to Gerry de La Ree, # Cedarwood Lane, Saddle River, N.J. #. The price is #, no shipping and handling charge.k Dear Sirs: Dear Sir: An attitude like Harlan Ellison's is the attempt to achieve by force and boycott what has not been achieved by the will of the people. This is not the idea that science fiction fans should share or, I believe, do share. Furthermore, if he were to speak under these conditions this would be exploited as 'support' for this type of view regardless of the view of the convention at large. Thus a substitute should be found as Guest of Honor. I might suggest Sam Nicholson whose story, "More Deadly Than the Male'."' in the Analog Yearbook viewed Women's Lib very intelligently. In any ease there must be time for opposing viewpoints. While he, like anyone, has and has had the right to express his views, he has no right to drag along an entire convention with him. Donald Lee Stephens # North #st St. Arlington, Va. # I wouldn't want to see Harlan eliminated as guest of honor; I'm sure the fans want to see him -- but you're certainly free to show up in Phoenix and argue with him. One word of warning, though: unless you're Lester del Rey, your chances of winning an argument with Harlan are slim or none.' -- j-j pHarlan Ellison is a gentigman I admire above all others. I've admired his writing for years. When I met him at that fiasco in Tucson last year I was impressed by the fact that he was articulate, witty, principled, and not that short. However, his intent concerning the Iguanacon leaves me feeling uncomfortable. My gut reation was that Harlan is capitalizing on the drawing power of his name to espouse a favorite cause, much like Jane Fonda, John Lennon and -- yes -- Robert Heinlein. I was distraut when Heinlein acted as he did at the Tucson Exposition. The fact that Heinlein (one of sf's few true giants), in refusing to grant autographs to any who had not donated blood, was, in a sense coercing me and my fannish lusts. Objectivist that I am, I was quite reasonably outraged and got along with a few photographs. Please realize that I understand why Heinlein supports blood donorship so zealously, as it saved his life. I also understand Harlan's position, as well as his feelings. There are too few solidly principled individuals left in the world for me to actually condemn him, but I don't feel that his intended actions are appropriately inflicted on a Worldcon, The Worldcon has developed into a respected and venerable science fiction institution and should not be used as a personal soap-box. It's as appalling as Venessa Redgrave's tacky bit of bullshit at the Oscars. Alas, I am left in a dilemma. While I respect and agree with Harlan's .sentiments in this issue, I will not allow myself to partake of this particular cup of tea. This saddens me because the Iguanacon was to be the first Worldcon accessible enough for me to afford to attend, and I can't sec choosing between violating my principles and spending a week in a tent. So I guess I 'll just have to wait for next year and hope I can make it to London. Gary L. Day Post Office Box I # Amarillo, Texas # Iguanacon on principle is no doubt admirable. And what will Harlan make of that? -- j-j-PDear Mr. Pierce: It was with dismay and sadness that I read Harlan Ellison's guest editorial in the May '# Galaxy. I have had very great respect for Ellison's remarkable ability as a fantasist in the past. He is without doubt one of the really great writers of speculative fantasy. He most certainly deserves the honor of being chosen WorldCon Guest of Honor. His courage and honesty are well known and his enormous talent is universally respected. However, this time Ellison is dead wrong. Not that he isn't absolutely right about the importance of the passage of and hope that it will pass. But this is not the way to help it! Might I also state that I think it to be in especially bad taste for Ellison to compare his action to that of Heinlein. They are not related at all. Doesn't Ellison realize that by his making the WorldCon a political platform to publicize his personal beliefs (even though most of us in fact agree with those same beliefs), he is using his fans? This is one long-time fan of his that wants to register the fact that he most strongly resents it. # Broadway: #C Bronx, N.Y., #I So far, the nays seem to have it . --  -- jJ-PDear J.J.: An open response to Mr. Paul Walker, your book reviewer, on pp. #-# of the May # column. In specific, his comments re my story "Basilisk" in Joe Haldeman's antholments that go beyond the parameters of the work and slop over untidily into an analysis of the author. Risky business, that. I'm not certain one should bother giving serious attention to the opinions of a man who has the chutzpah to say of Gordon Dickson -- author of "Dolphin's Way," "Black Charlie," "Call Him Lord" and "Home from the Shore" to name only four of the more breathtakingly damned-near-perfect stories this genuinely original talent has given us over the past three decades -- and I quote directly: "... a writer for whom I had previously had no respect for sic whatever..." and who says something that uninformed that ungrammatically, but since Mr. Walker has had either the bad luck or the stupidity, or both, to call me out on a subject where I am the only living authority... the delicious opportunity to kick a cripple is beyond my meager capacity for restraint. (It wasn't bad grammar, at least, on Paul's part, but a typo that got past me. -- j-jP-) The subject is, of course, what I think. Now I realize it will dismay Mr. Walker to learn that his powers of telepathy are impaired, but when it comes to his putting words and thoughts into my mind, or extracting them from that itny place, he is filled right up to the eyeballs with ripe horse puckey. In short, what I'm saying is that Mr. Walker's analysis of "Basilisk," and by extension the motivating sensibility that produced that story, is purest twaddle. Amphigory, rot, tosh, nonsense. As a card-carrying, dues-paying member in good standing of the National Book Critics Circle, it is my pleasure to give Mr. Walker a muchneeded lesson, in how to review a book. Excuse my humility. I take it as a public service. Social work among the intellectually deprived. Pay attention, Mr. Walker, and kindly stop moving your lips when you read. Let us begin the disembowelment working from the lesser to the greater. First your analysis of the story itself. Oh my. Setting aside the tardiness of Mr. Walker's attention to "Basilisk," a story first published in # (to rather substantial critical praise), reprinted many times, and reviewed favorably as one of the cycle-stores in Deathbird Stories (#, #), and presuming Mr. Walker has read none of the academic studies of this particular work (notably Slusser's five-page analysis in the Borgo Press # monograph on my work, pp. #-#), it is clear from internal evidence that Mr. Walker simply does not understand what the story is about. "Basilisk" concerns itself, thematically, with the valid limits of institutionalized patriotism, with the limits of self-sacrifice a soldier should set for himself, with the fickle nature of the national pride a soldier serves as opposed to that nation's treatment of the person upon his return from battle, and most specifically how love of country can be turned to hate when the soldier receives not approbation for his efforts but ostracism and revilement. Mr. Walker sees this story as a diatribe, racist in tone. As he puts it; "The race... is White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American (working and middle classes variety sic)..." Nonsense. Mr. Walker supposes on a sophomoric level. The story in no way deals with class. Patriotism cuts across class lines. The people in the story are obviously classess,they are simply the residents of a small town. An entire small town is arrayed against the protagonist, Lance Corporal Vernon Lestig, and quite the opposite of Mr. Walker's wonky perception, social status of the townspeople is a consideration that never arises. Later in the Walker comments. I'm accused of always trying to be "cool," whatever that means to Mr. Walker. Eternally cool is the phrase he uses. I bring this up, out of sequence, because it ties in logically with Walker's characterization of the writing as evincing "Ellisonian power and imagistic magic," '-'manic ferver," "maniacal and revoltingly sadistic infatuation with violence," "nightmare vision," "an act of personal revenge upon humanity at large," "makes us see through fierce alien eyes the reality of rage and violence," "white heat," "the strongest possible dramatic effect," "sheer intensity of language" -- all this and more he says of the writing... and that I'm simply mad to be eternally cool. Far be it from me to suggest that Mr. Walker has puree of bat guano for brains, but if he can explain how all that crassilingual corybantism squares with "coolness," I'll buy him a terrific meal at The Mirage in Beverly Hills on the night of his choice (closed Mondays). #, and my work, have been accused of many things in the past quarter-century, but I'll be goddamed if "cool" has ever been one of them. But Walker uses this specious hippocket Freudian codswallop to buttress his argument that "Basilisk" is a panegyric eulogizing the brutalization shucks, Mistuh Walkuh, some of mah You see. I'm back in sequence again; if I'm trying always to be "cool" and contemporarily hip, to be against such convenient devils as bashing seals in the head with ball-bats and sexism and racism and war and stupidity and the leavening-out of the human race at the level of McDonald's toadburgers and Erich Segal novels, then I'm a shallow poseur, incapable of an honest artistic statement... which is precisely what Walker says of me. But if he's wrong, as Joe Haldeman (who edited the anthology) and a gaggle of other critics have opined, then Walker is fulla ka-ka and he simply read into that story what he wanted to read into it, and knew what he was going to say before he sat down to do the reading. Lord knows, my personal boycott of states that haven't ratified the Equal Rights Amendment gives him terrific ammunition; he must have read that editorial in the same issue with his review and puffed up like a pouter pigeon. But for him to be correct in his skewed perception that "Basilisk" is a diatribe against the white middle-class, bom out of a cheap need to attack the currently unfashionable, then the story by all rights should have been, and I quote Walker again, "...the work of an unexamined conscience... (woked) out at white heat" and then "he (Ellison) stops thinking about it." But, sad to say, for Mr. Walker's position, "Basilisk" was first conceived in #. Because "Basilisk" is based on Francis Gary Powers, the U-# pilot shot down while spying on Russia by means of a high-altitude overflight. It is based on the treatment that Powers received when he returned to his home town in Tennessee: hatred, ostracism, social and economic boycott, the debasement of his family forcing them to move away, forcing Powers into anonymity and a new identity. I was appalled at the bestiality of people considered "good citizens." I could not understand how they could applaud his having been a spy, then revile him for not having killed himself with the cyanide cap in his hollow back tooth. I began thinking about how far "patriotism" should take someone. To his own death to protect an illegal act? Well, I worked on the idea, trying to codify my thoughts in terms of a contemporary story, but it didn't work. The closest I came to setting it down in the Sixties was as a story treatment for the Route # television series, on which I was working in #-#. But it didn't work. So I set it aside. When the Viet Nam War began, the story came back to me. I need not go on at length about my anti-war activities during the Sixties and early Seventies. Suffice to say, I was one of the people who, at the Milford SF Writers Conference in #, initiated with Kate Wilhelm and Judith Meril and # others, the anti-war ad that ran in the June # Galaxy (coincidentally, the issue in which "The Beat that Shoufed Love at the Heart of the World," an ecology story, was published); I worked with the Veterans Against the War Committee; I did college lectures on the war; I supported in a number of ways the defense of the Kent State kids; I had my arm busted by cops at the Century City riot protesting the War when Johnson came to speak; and in many other ways validated my contention that insofar as the "unpopular cause" of protesting the War was concerned, I displayed anything but an "unexamined conscience." But though I had written anti-war stories as far back as #, when "Battlefield" was published (under the editor's title' "His First Day at War") in the November # issue of Space Travel, "Soldier" in Fantastic Universe for October #, and "Asleep: With Still Hands" in If for July #... I did not deal directly with my obsession about the PowersU-# matter until the moment I wrote "Basilisk." Then, having examined my conscience endlessly for fifteen years, I wrote what many people thought was a very unpatriotic story. It dealth with the unfairness of bloodthirsty non-combatants sitting on their suburban asses while sending off others to die for them, and then treating them like shit when they didn't do the "honorable" thing by killing themselves rather than surviving at whatever the cost of self-humiliation. No, Mr. Walker has managed to assault my work and the integrity I try to bring to it, at precisely the point where I have solid credentials. "Basilisk" may have been written quickly, may even have been written af "white heat" as he suggests; but it was written with a decade and a half of examined conscience behind it. I offer these credentials to anyone who cares to examine them, and to refute logically the moronic assertions Mr. Walker proffers as telepathic insights into my phoniness, duplicity, and lack of artistic honesty. Mr. Walker, were he not a recycled fan, with the tunnel vision and adolescent opinions one finds in the shallowest fan behavior, could easily have apprised himself of these facts. Were he a serious book critic, rather than a refugee from a fanzine, he would understand that a reviewer can only judge a work from internal evidence, that presuming to plumb the mind of the author is a mugg's game, and a dishonest game at that. One final point. Mr. Walker says of me, "Without flattering him (Ellison, that is), he seems to be more interested in being than in having been." Now I haven't a clear idea what the hell that nonsense sentence means, but if Walker feels that a writer should divorce himself from the times in which he lives, that he should rest on past actions and beliefs rather than changing and growing as life progresses, then I submit Walker isn't fit to review anyone's work, much less the work of those who try to stay au courant and committed. For me, and for my work, the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes seem most appropriate: "I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being Judged not to have lived." There is yet another quote, that informs my work eternally: "Society and man are mutually dependent enemies' and the writer's job is to go on forever defining and defending the paradox -- lest, God forbid, it be resolved. " -- Arthur Miller, # These are parlous times for me. I have taken a number of unpopular and inconvenient positions on matters of universal and genre concern. Unpopular and inconvenient for those who accuse me of being a flag-waver, a poseur. Somehow, though these attitudes on my part have netted me virtually nothing but insult and death threats (oh yes, friends, fans are capable of death threats; what I doubt is that they have the guts to do anything beyond write anonymous letters or make dead-ofnight phone calls), these same critics twist rationality to opine that I'm making myself a fashionable writer by this means. They seem to think that by angering and alienating my readers I will widen and deepen my readership. And so fools like Walker cobble up irrational analyses that say an anti-war, antipatriotism story is an attack on the But it's all of a piece, and all goes to the heart of discrediting the messenger because the message is a troublesome one. Leads me to remember a stanza from Fran#ois Villon's "The Testament"; His gall breaks on his heart And he sweats God knows what sweat And no one can lighten his pain He hasn't child, brother, or sister And though there will always be, among the dear and good and intelligent I've met who happen, coincidentally, to be fans, a few smug, presumptuous and arrogantly ignorant natterers, like Mr. Walker, who isn't fit to carry Gordy Dickson's pencil case, I will continue to serve the demands of my own ethics. Less than that, neither my devotion to my work nor the everlasting examination of my conscience will permit me. Harlan Ellison # Coy Drive Sherman Oaks, Calif., # P.S. There will no doubt be those who, reading this response, feel I've been unconscionably rude to Mr. Walker. I'm always bemused by the backlash reaction.It is one with Mr. Walker's "pity males being assailed by feminists; pity the poor slavemasters under attack by the darkies; pity the poor mass murderer being jailed for his crimes; let's stop kicking poor old Tricky Dick around. Well, to them as feels that way, I say as follows, in the words of "polite" Mr. Walker: if you are doing what is ostensibly a review of my writing, then don't shoot off your mouth and call me maniacal, phony, infatuated with violence and lots of etcetera, unless you want me to respond in kind. For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Ellison's epistolary career, the preceding is a carbon copy of the letter he has been publishing regularly in fanzines for the past # or # years. All the vituperation, the protestations of innocence, the recitation of his credentials are the same: only the names of the critic and the story criticized have been changed. example of the genre I have read. What can lsay? What was true of Mr. Ellison's story is true of his letter. -- Paul Walker Dear JJ; Paul Walker is the most uneven reviewer I've ever seen. His treatment of my own In The Ocean of Night was fumbling, I thought; he missed most of what was going on in the book. But his analysis of Ellison's work in this issue doubts I've had about Ellison's mounting of the ramparts, by showing how intolerant Harlan is toward that muchmaligned minority, Anglo Saxon Protestants, in "A Boy and His Dog." In this sense I think Ellison sometimes deprives his visions of their full f)ower. He plainly feels some of that stuff, but the question is whether it means very much. His lasting work will probably not be the more fireworky. Still, I should add that while Walker illuminates Ellison's work somewhat. I'm sure there is more to be said; he has only shown a facet of Ellison's work -- the man himself is larger. Gregory Benford Physics Department University of California Irvine, Calif., # Dear Sir: Thank you very much for the appearance of the Cordwainer Smith story, "The Queen of the Afternoon." Your comments prefacing each story in the anthology The Best of Cordwainer Smith were very interesting without detracting from the magnificent tales, and I would have greatly appreciated similiar information about this one. For instance, did his 'wife have much to do with it? Why was its publication delayed? Was there any particular story form employed? However, my biggest question is also my simplest: Will there be more? I know several people who bought that issue who have not purchased an sf magazine for years. (As a regular reader of Galaxy I just considered it a marvelous and unearned bonus). As a couple of added comment regarding your term as Editor, your choice of stories is interesting. I thought a couple of the shorter ones might be sharper in resolution, and I miss the artists Galaxy used to use. However, I still think Galaxy is far better than Analog and FSF, both of which, especially the former, are very predictable. Thank you for your efforts and your time and attention, and, hoping for more Cordwainer Smith stories, I look forward to many years of excellent sf from Galaxy under your direction. Sincerely, Frank Ramirez Bethany Theological Seminary Butterfield and Meyers Road Oak Brook, #., #I "The Queen of the Afternoon" was begun by Paul Linebarger in #; but for some reason, he never finished it. "Mark Elf" the closely related story published in #, was written in #. Both stories were intended as parts of a mini-trilogy about the three VomAcht sisters and how they returned to Earth. Genevieve Linebarger completed "The Queen of the Afternoon" last fall, and has since written the third story in the series, based on her recollections of Paul's plans for the story. -- j j pMr. Pierce; I am a regular reader of Galaxy, and such my reading style is to begin with the features and go on to the stories. Your feature section of course contains your Directions column so it is one of my first stops. Now to my point. Being a Star Wars fan I have read every word you've printed about it. I refer to Star Wars -- Pro and Con. I've seen Star Wars a total of five times, and I've enjoyed it each time. And while enjoying it. I've never taken it to be science fiction. It is obviously (to me) Space Fantasy. The only thing in Star Wars I can find to be sci-fi-ish is the Force. I look at Star Wars as a beginning for Hollywood, a welcome one. Just as the pulp fiction evolved into what we have today. Star Wars (meaning Hollywood) will evolve untill they finally reach the point of Heinlein, Asimov, Anderson, Simak, Ellison (I could name a pageful but what's the point?). I believe Hollywood has started the same path that magazines and books have already followed, and I know Hollywood People, there are two choices: either they will stay with the path and begin to produce good science fiction (Forbidden Planet was a fluke), or it will once again diverge from common sense and turn out stuff to equal Lost in Space (if they follow the latter course, I really believe we should try our best to ignore them). As I said before, however, I think this is a start toward good science fiction. There is. I'm afraid going to be a barrage of cheap, trashy junk purveyed to us in the near future -- alleged science fiction trying to band-wagon on the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which I haven't as yet had the opportunity to see). It is inevitable that Studio Executives will see that there intelligent adults out here that want to see science fiction that doesn't insult them. And when that happens we must be ready to give every movie that comes out of Hollywood a chance, either to prove itself or demonstrate its weaknesses. It is encouraging to hear that Paramount Studios are going ahead with a Star Trek project -- with Gene Roddenbeny at the head. Television too is coming out with movies and pilots for Stranger in a Strange Land! While I'm hopeful about that last one I mentioned, I see little possibility that it will remain the story we've come to know and love (unless they don't let any censors near it). Let's not forget that it is our responsibility to let Studio Executives know what we like. We can write enthusiastic letters praising those projects we've enjoyed, and stay ominously silent about anything we ate insulted by. In another direction, I never saw Kubrick's #I : A Space Odyssey in a theatre, but I saw it when it was televised recently. Aside from the opticals and photography it bored me. It reminded me of a movie I saw in high school that was a simple catalog of expected technological advances. The only part I found to be Science Fiction was the Hal # computer. Sincerely, Jan Swen Olund P.O. Box # North Branch, Minn., # Ordinarily, I wouldn't run another Star Wars letter. But unlike most who send them, you're bright enough to realize that the important thing is: what happens next? Perhaps the box-office disasters of turkeys like Damnation Alley and Starship Invasions, combined with the huge success of Star Wars, will finally get the message through. One can at least hope we won't be subjected to further insults like Harlan Ellison being called in by a major studio and asked to script a giant ant movie! -- j.j.p. Gentlemen: I am writing to offer my heartiest congratulations to Jeff Rovin on his review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After his opinion of Star Wars coincided so neatly with my own, it seemed almost too much to ask that he would agree with me on Close Encounters as well. Jay Kay Klein's comparison of Star Wars and The Jazz Singer, so apparently fatuous on the surface, is probably much more apt than he could possibly have known (it is obvious Klein has never seen The Jazz Singer; it was neither all talking nor all singing.). After all. The Jazz Singer, in its day, was a trite, cliche-ridden, hackneyed story, produced without imagination or creativity, but with a kind of mechanical novelty that caught on with the audiences of the time, and made the film a smash hit. There were great silent films released after The Jazz Singer, such as Keaton's The Cameraman and Chaplin's City Lights. Such films are still widely seen today, but no one ever goes to see The Jazz Singer. And with good reason; it's a lousy movie. It always was. In fifty years, I have no doubt, the reputation of Star Wars will rest with people who have not seen it, just as The Jazz Singer's reputation rests with people like Jay Kay Klein today. Jim W. Lane # Vermont St. Long Beach Ca. # Mr. Pierce: After reading the editorial in your March issue, I wonder: was it a "call to arms" or a "trooper's lament?" If you really believe that we slothful sf fans can change things (maybe for the better) why don't you put a few pages of your magazine where your mouth is? Give us a "Directory of Idiots" and list the names, addresses, and crimes, if any, of the people you seem to be speaking against. Hell, let's face it. The resources of a magazine far outweigh those of most individuals. You're right, I sure don't know who my congressman is. Why should I? He doesn't know me, and I never voted for him. I don't know the people responsible for those sixtyodd permits needed to start a nuclear power plant, either. I'm not even sure exactly which government agency is supposedly responsible for regulating them. Obviously, you do know. So why not share your wealth of knowledge? If you want change, act as the lever. Pournelle wails about research scientists getting laid off as the fusion works wind down. Who's responsible? Voters in general? The "Public?" Or is it some agency that doesn't think it wise to invest in research when welfare dollars buy so many more votes? Name names. I can promise you this: for every name you DO give, I personally will spend I#e and write a letter. It may only be "Pierce, you idiot, this guy I agree with!" but it will be written. (For that, would an old picture postcard of Niagara Falls do?) Enough bitching. On to other things. Star Wars was science fiction. So was # J . So was Forbidden Planet. So was Frankenstein. Each of these marked a major turning point. It is a sad commentary when the majority of what has been done is on the level of The Incredible Fifty Foot Woman. Or Wild Wild Planet. I'm really getting sick of people dissecting every movie made. So you didn't like Star Wars. Or #. Look around. Do you see anything better being made today? If not, maybe you would like to get the chance to. The science fiction movie is a definite plus for the entire field. Remember: without Star Wars we would never have gotten Quark. Speaking of which... "space baggies?" I saw the pre-showing publicity. just seen the future, and it's funny." I must agree. Hysterical, no. Funny, yes. I don't know if space baggie T-shirts will ever be "in." but I can readily imagine some alien walking up to a McDonald's with a disposable single molecule protein container. What ever happened to the good old days when the female android in Logan's Run said "I'll check the main power supply" eight times in three minutes? Who said science fiction was devoid of humor and android ain't both funny and sexy, I don't know what is. A male android, on the other hand, is merely dull. (The idea being, of course, that androids -- sterile but sexless. Anything else is merely a human being, dog or equivalent grown in a test tube.) Have you any idea how much America's colleges mean to you? Make America smarter. Give to the college of your choice. It was college-based research and college-train minds that ve us electronic computers, television, spacecraft. And it wHI be todas collegetrained minds that will ve tomorrow's problems: Energy. Transportation. Health. City planning. International relations. But only if you help. America's colleges are in deep financial trouble. So give them a hand. The help you give today will make tomorrow's world a better one. Council for Financial Aid lo Education. Inc. # Fifth Avanue.Nevr York. N.Y # A PuWe Sorvioa of TNa Maguirw  Tha Adtioniaing Cound  A note to Poumelle; T. A. Heppenheiincr apparently went to the same conference you did, and has published a book entitled Colonies in Space. The rectenna idea you discussed briefly is given in some length, along with a lot of other ideas. You might want to 'plug' his book in your column. Although it is written (in places) about as well as a typical cook-book, it has a lot of really nifty pictures. For us comicbook types, that's what makes it all worthwhile. It is a real shame you didn't write it yourself. Could you Or Inferno with graphs, charts, and power consumption ratios? Or A Spaceship For The King with... James Meyer # I North #th Street Milwaukee. Wis., #  rather doubt the publisher would let me run a list of all # senators and congressmen: but if you don't know who yours is, he probably knows who you are. Or rather, his mail room does. Don't you ever get a "Report from Rep. Sludgepump," in which he brags about helping the Wisconsin economy by getduce gasoline from recycled chicken fat, together with a public opinion, poll on questions like how Billy Beer is selling in Milwaukee? That's the guy to write to. Forget about the appointed bureaucrats; you don't elect them, so they couldn't care less what you (or I) think. On that sexy female android: what if she isn't properly equipped? -- j.j.p. Mr. Pierce: I Just read Olga Larionova's story in the April Galaxy and liked it immensely. As a science fiction reader and a student of Russian, I would like to read more Soviet scienqe fiction -- preferably in Russian. Can you give me any information about obtaining Russian language sf? Bill Cates P.O. Box # Forney, Tex., # The only importer of Russian language sf I know of is Victor Kamkin's book store in Rockville, Md. He's the supplier for the few other Russian book outlets in the country. Last  knew, however, the Russians weren't sending much, even to him. The larger university and city libraries have some Soviet sf. but  don't know about Texas, Macmillan is publishing the best translations now; earlier translations are generally paperbacks. -- jjp. Wc invile lenen! Write: # Whke Plaint Rd. ScMdale, N.Y., #S# sues. Send check or money order to: John F. # Yarmouth Ave., Granada Hills, Calif., # son. #. "He opened his eyes to limitless depth, star-speckled, falling away from him forever..." Lorien House, P.O. Box #, Black Mountain, N.C., #I wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-# St. Paul, Mn. #. Fla., # lists. PM-SF, # Pine St., Des Plaines, Large catalog. Books, magazines. Three stamps. Marx, # #th Lubbock, Tex., # for #-page catalog. Collections also purchased. R. Madle, # Bestor Drive, Rockville, Md., #. that witches wouldn't tell. #, Noel Wait, # Union Drive, Los Angeles, Calif... #. Used SF Paperbacks and Hardcovers. Over # Titles. Free Catalog. Lawrence Adams, P.O. Box #, Baltimore, Md., #, tains details of dealers, fanzines, publishers, postal dealing. Write first: Trigon Press, # Kent House Road, Beckenham. Kent, England. Walker's fascinating interviews with SF authors -- #I interviews, # pages. Paperback #, hardcover # from Luna Publications, Dept. G, # Orchard St., Oradell, N.J., #. How to Make Love to the Single Girl... # Delicious Photographs. Communicating, Torching, Instructional. #. Benton, P.O. Box #X, Boulder. Colo., # wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder, G-# St. Paul, Mn. #. Computer posters and games. Sample and catalog #. Theo Koch, Castle Point Station, S-#, Hoboken, N.J., #. Approved for use with Dungeons and Dragons. City State of the Invincible Overlord, #; Tegel Manor, #; First Fantasy Cam#. manual. Complete installation instructions. seda Blvd., ##, Reseda, Calif, #. #. Complete Science Fiction Catalog Cheap, simple, portable. Free details. #. Cash, Thousands paid for comics, baseball cards, records, toys, dolls, beer cans, tobacco relics, sci-fi...get more for your collectibles. Catalog # refundable. Don't delay. National advertiser buys and sells. Order your copy today from: Phil Morawiec, Box #, Milan, Mich. #. equipment. Easy techniques, fascinating results. # for complete info. Robins, Box #-C, Fulton, Calif., #. "How to get paid for watching television!" Bobby McGee, #I #th St., Apt. A-#, Lakewook, N.J., #. No checks. Catalog #. Vandy's Visions, # Moorhead (#), Boulder, Col., #. Past, present and future are different than you think. Free details. Write: The Teoterrans. Box #, Sub "B", Saskatoon, Sask., Amazing Psychic Power Instantly! Simple # Electronic Device Anyone Can Build! Used by European Psychics. Details; Trine, Box #A, Hancock, Wis., # Unidentified Flying Object Supporters of North America. Lifetime membership, personal membership card, special report, all for Washington, Famous Americans and more! Send # for approval mailing. Free U. S. Belmont, Chicago, #., # techniques of psychological manipulation for adults. Fully explained, practiceable immediately. #, Soto-rinrai Society for Warrior Arts, P.O. Box #-f, Jamaica Flats, MA # training exercises. #, H. Murphy, Box #, Annapolis, Md., # exotic remedies. # draft, #I Poniente #, Puebla, Pue., Mexico climactic battle available now. # backprinted counters, multicolor # x # worksheet. Sandworms, Leader Combat, spacecraft, illustrations. # from Horizons Gaming, # Pasadero Dr., Tarzana, Cal., sticker with spaceship and planet design. Send # to Taste, Box #W, Winslow, Maine, # Imagination an asset. For details send # to Freedom Associates, P.O. Box #, Station B, Montreal, Canada. mentally. Amazing illusion. Guaranteed. "Dizzying Virtuosity and just damned good!" said Harlan Ellison genetic engineering, sex changes and arcane pleasures and trades are commonplace -- display Introduction by Algis Budrys. A Main Selection of the Science iction Book Club. # at bookstores now -- the newest book in the acclaimed international program of high quality science fiction published in all major languages... demonstrating the universal appeal of SF at its best. GRtK mim The Science Fiction Book Club #I Galactic Empires. Briar Aidiss ed Twc-voiunie aninoiogy ot # sto'es c, tancus auinors Clarke Astrnov ano cine'S ccve'S Rise and Fall o Galactic C:"rp ec S-' # : # The Sword ot Shannara By Terry Brooks A massive quesi novel m tne ve'y Best Tolkien iraOiiion Pub ea S'# # # Up The Walls of the World. #v jare Tiptree Jr Aitens t'CT Ty'?s :: escape c-Siryciion by iranste'ring :n?ii nines 'T pgirgs on anotner plane! -- Ea'ir -P c Sc #: JJ# Oreamsnake. By vonca K Wenvy'e a najniirg slony aDOu! a Oespe'ate hea'' ' a !o'e iveno tnai s been aevas'aiec p. "...c:?a' aPut ed SB # # Splinter ol the Mind s Eye B. Aia' Dean Foster The tu'trier advertu'es c' Li.e SkyAame' and Princess Leia O'car'a PlPc S' # # a# Close Encounters ol ihe Third Kind. B, Steven Spielberg Noveiizaticn c' tne ni' novr about Earth s tirst contact wiin an auen 'ace Pt, p ?d S' # # The Persistence ol Vision. B Jonn variey imagination and wit abounc m tn  ente'taining collection ol snort stD'ies by ineaulho' c' Tne Opniuchi Hotline Eiplicit scenes and language may be oHensive to some. Pub ed # # # The Starchild Trilogy. By Freoenk Poni to'jemer here for the first line are # classic tales The Reels ol Space. Slarchild and Rogue Star. Special edition # The Hugo Winners. Vol. I A II. Giant #-in-l volume of # award-winning stories # to # Asimov introduces each Pub ed # # I #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov The ends ot the galaxy revert lo barbarism An SF Classic Comb price S# # #' The Far Call. # Godpr r Internationa' leaiousy leoparoizes me  npd iiignt to Wa's and the lOint el'o't pcw?- boi'S ocw" to despe'ai' c'c :i C'pw Pjb ed Se # # Three Hainish Novels By a  Guin One O' SF s maiQr laients expio'es tnp sp a lOn ol hurrans m ahen wonas m Rocannon's World. Planet of Eiile ad City ol Illusions Corrp ed S# # # The # Annual World's Best SF. Ed 'p: bDpraicA Woiihpin Excellent collection O' 'np Best snoi SF siones tnis year by sucn la'eni as Jonn vaMpy jamps Tipi-pp jjee Ha'demaanc Harlan Ellison Special ec # The lllusiraled Roger Zelazny. Ed tec and adapted by Byron Preiss aiuI'co'O' avisniy Illustrated edition of stones including a Neouia Avkarc-wirner Large paperback Pub ec S# # # The Faded Sun: Kesrith. By C J Chpr. 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Cither e)rtra-vaue selections are slightly higher but always much less than blishers' Editions. Send no money. But do se the coupon l I today!...  'i i ...U.i i#-S'#  # # v nilnk V '  w rfe   o Barbara Paul New American Library P.O. Box # Bergenfield, Nj # I Like most students in the # #st century, Angie Patterson got her education through time travel -- learning sex techniques by visiting the bodies of women long dead and attending the original performances of Shakespeare's plays. But now she was caught in the body of Elizabeth Tudor -- trapped with a secret that could smash all of past, present, and future... , Jlv   Souls... recycled Iffpl What the i  ilddFm rupted by a mach What if the cycle of rebirth is disrupted by a machine that captures souls at the moment of death? And what if one of those souls has been followed for centuries in "From one angle, it is a horror story of humans enslaved by technologies fostered by desperate men to advance America's military might and provide for longterm care' of atomic wastes. From another, it is the engrossing story of three people locked in a karmic bind through successive lives and of one man's struggle to free himself...All aspects -- scientific, philosophical, and humanare beautifully crafted. Highly recommended...(a) gem of a book!' Library Journal # At your bookstore or ditecl from St. Martin's Press # Filth Ave New York, N.Y. #  # # each Please include # per book to cover poslage and handling (check or money order included). Learning to fly with the balloonists was a gas; but the great powers were interested in gasoline -- among other things. And they sure didn't share any of Danny Dalehouse's moral concerns. John Varley comes into his own (and maybe he'll have a Hugo by the time you read this). Plus some thoughts on "commercial" fiction. Concerning the religious beliefs of Alter Ego, and other things readers have been dying to know... Controversy, as usual Cover by Bob Schaffer Interior art: Schaffer, Freff, Chip Fabian, Ron Harris, Jonathan Bressler, John Rodak Publishing Corporation, a subsidiary of Universal Publishing  Distributing Corporation. Main Office  Editorial Office: # White Plains Hoad, Scarsdale, N.Y., #. Single copy #. #-Issue subscription: # In U.S., # elsewhere. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. ; v  JL' W  UmW ij ii #ft i, #  #Sw#  sa pH Dann Flesher The planet had a great transport system -- all you had to do was catch a worg. But that wasn't easy, especially when the worgs developed "motor" trouble! i Tuf. worg moved slowly, stopping every few seconds to munch on the lender undergrowth. Its diet consisted normally of leafy plants, but here it grazed on better fare, the young shoots of red bamboo. Clouds above blocked one of the twin moons and soon would cover the other, but the darkness would have no effect on the near-blind creature. Three stubby antennae projecting toward the ground provided all the senses it needed. A keen sense of smell and a bat-like sonar would lead it to the best grazing and guide it around the larger rocks and the giant ponders. The huge triplets of padded feet crushed yard after yard of normal fare while the mandibles greedily ripped up the more tender shoots. Deep inside the bulbous head, a tiny brain was registering something akin to pleasure, though any true thought on the matter was well beyond its capabilities. Instinct alone guided its motion. Instinct and the driving need for fourteen to eighteen tons of grasses and shrubs each night. Yet, that impressive quantity of food sustained only a low metabolic rate. Indeed, most of the natural activity of the massive beast consisted of eating followed by more eating, followed by a full twenty hours of sleep during the daylight hours. The worg paused momentarily as it sensed motion to its left. Then it moved on in its previous course. A kilometer or so away was another one, moving out of the ponders and into the clearing. Worgs often met like this in open grazing land. Other than an occasional scuffle over choicer grazing areas, no harm came from the encounters. Somehow this was different. If the worg's mind had been even a little more discerning, it would have noticed a strangeness about this newcomer. It grazed on in ignorance. The newcomer approached steadily, moving at a pace of thirty kilometers per hour, well above grazing stride. It also approached in a nearly straight line, passing lush patches of growth on either side that should have drawn its attention. The center legs were lifting in a skipping motion, barely holding their own with the more agile outer rows. Their normal function, that of supporting most of the creature's massive weight, had to give way to the urgent demands of the driving motive legs. The creature strained and suffered from the shift in stresses, but on it ran, in a frenzy its feeble mind could not comprehend. The grazing beast sensed danger only a second before the collision. It reacted by starting to turn toward the rushing nemesis, a move which only aided its enemy. With its body curved toward the onrushing creature, its armor plates tended to bind against themselves and its weight shifted to the outer legs. The rushing worg's head struck low on the side of the other's protective bony plates. One plate cracked ominously, sending echoes off the forest wall. Others bent and buckled, thrusting the nearer legs up and off of their formerly secure footing. Long seconds passed as the surprised creature spun upward, rolling onto its side and then over onto its back. Looking much like a turtle with too many legs, the worg rocked from side to side, kicking frantically at the silver-rimmed clouds hanging overhead. The aggressor stopped, its own plates still quivering from the impact. It stopped, and started to graze on the red bamboo shoots. Over the crunching sound of the grazing mandibles and the thrashing of the downed creature's legs, a third sound emerged... "... five, six, seven. Go! Now! " Three figures dropped to the ground near the central row of legs some ten meters behind the mandibles. They jumped over the outer foot pads and moved toward the thrashing shadow before them. "Carlston, are you sure this one is going to stop?" "They always do. As soon as they get flipped over, they kick up a real fuss for about forty seconds, then they stop. When it stops. I'll have about twenty seconds to get up the side before it starts a turnover twist." "Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen!" Two flash beams from holes in the side of the placidly grazing beast lit up the downed creature. The legs kicked wildly in the artificial light. Two of the men dropped to their knees and aimed cable launches at the edge of the curving plates some twelve meters above them "Get closer. Tan! The cable will fall short!" "But Sarge?!" "Closer!" "Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, he stopped!" The launchers snapped loudly and the lines flew upward. Tan's hit low, a full two meters below the rim, but the other struck very near the edge of the armor. Carlston grabbed the second's loop and ran toward the huge curving wall of carapace. Tan dropped his launcher and jumped to aid Blair with the winch on the second launcher. "What a lousy shot," Tan murmured as he grasped the line. "Good enough for a first lime. This is my ninth... all you need is practice. Hang on!" Carlston reached the side and jumped upward, planting his spiked boots into the side. He scuffled, slipped only once, and then walked, lly-like, up the plate. Tan and Blair kept the line tight, lifting most of the Surge's weight up toward the now-still legs. Six seconds had passed, according to the crewman in the other worg, when he reached the outer row of legs. With most of these creatures he would have had another fourteen seconds to cross to the center legs and establish anchorage before the creature began to move again. But this one?... This one seemed quicker than most. Carlston had better move. Carlston reached the center row. lie estimated that he was at the eighteenth or nineteenth leg, about thirty meters from the head. He, too, worried about the quickness of this worg and about the time left to secure himself. Anxiously, he began to set the anchors. The twist started at sixteen seconds. Carlston missed the fourth anchor, striking the soft underplates and dropping it and the hammer. He lurched back as the worg began his first twist and then pulled himself closer to the anchors. The worg was almost on its side before he had the straps tight enough to hold him firmly. TtoMBsNrl bwohftg ft aWra Oftaxy. uSUng ft Oman ftft a, ft i#a mom Tha la EjO # mMa aoroas ari fta mam of N # of la ' aan taU a Won oortda ft aufamfe k fto  Cfaftagjtaftftgoa a oa o Chaftm ftal badoraf Tha aarfta can ba dft aacfijaanalafteaMfRa (.andnMiga. ftTa Rf faaaaadhii... baiywmdy fMm ftaadi TMa ona book anatafta you to fta U proft cft d g a w a ft atovooft adft  nr futda on iMdftallonf TMa Tba NtMdd Ima i cm TRa Sftagft to Gruft fta G SlO M toad mmm n -- bAoan ft) C fta Raya, ft aaw fta aaa rtmortdng fta aamOiftaVJgo aea War ft ft Sftr Spam torn Qiaa Eagftaa ft boft Way and n fta Mft m y Pnom and Waaift aa mi aa ba aaorn MR TW rr m to inaftad by Haftftft aft ofta awm taftnpS o om panfta lnaanacftmayafttlP o ampftl a .Tb raau ft ona of fto ftoftaL action Mad. ra a UMiau.MMi.maAi Within a minute after the initial impact, there were two worgs grazing on red bamboo shoots, one with a solitary rider strapped beneath, the other, three riders lighter and soon to be empty. The anchors held. Carlston loosened the straps. By tilting his head back, he could look down and forward at the mandibles. The moons had reappeared, but here in the shadow of this animated lawn mower, only his small wrist beam allowed him to see. If his guess was correct, he only had to move forward about three or four segments to reach the lower nerve center. Below him, on the rims of the feet, were the sensor hairs. To fall between the feet, to touch one hair, meant certain death. Probably an instinctive preservation mechanism, the hairs triggered rapid twitching and a stomping reaction. The worg's six-foot-wide foot pads would easily crush Carlston and bury him in one stroke. He wished for the fourth anchor. The hammer, dangling from its wrist strap, was quickly recovered and he began his move. Checking the forward two anchors, he slowly released the third. The two held. He moved the anchor forward and drove it home. He locked it in place and moved forward cautiously. Each step in the process moved him forward about half a meter, less as he crossed the plate overlap areas. For half an hour the worg grazed on. For half an hour Carlston eased forward. There it was. The greenish lateral stripe which indicated the nerve center. The stripe itself was due to the fluids which flowed from the creature's three huge hearts. The fluids, heavy in chloroplasts from the leafy diet, carried energy to the nerve centers. With the skill of a sculptor turned surgeon, Carlston chiseled his way through the armor plate and located the nerve center. The center itself was smaller than a baseball but only one small part was of present interest. There at the back, a small thumbnail-sized segment stood out slightly in the light beam. Carlston reached into the left zippered pocket of his tunic and pulled out one of the small plastic tubes. Breaking the tip, he squeezed the orange-gray paste onto the nodule. Now to wait. Always to wait. Worgs were handy creatures, predictable and useful. They provided food supply as well as transportation. The muscle tissue, similar to a soft veal, was high in protein. The fatty tissue could be extracted for fuel. Their empty shells made good houses. But their primitive mental and nervous system, coupled with their size, made for waits. He waited. Slowly the drug was absorbed into the nerve center. Then out through major ganglion. Then finally to the sensitive bases of each hair. With the sensors deadened, the short-circuit pile drivers would not threaten the lives of the other crew members as they boarded. Worg crews tended to tax the huge beast's strength after a few months' use. These changes of transportation now occurred almost routinely. As he waited, the Sarge did some calculating. Thirty seconds of thrashing, versus thirty-five minimum and thirty-nine average. Fifteen or sixteen seeonds versus twenty normal on the roll-over. Normally, the nerves would be "off" in about eight minutes. At six minutes he made the first test. He eased the hammer strap downward toward the hairs in the light of his wrist beam. The first contact caused only five or six stomps. He wasn't sure, it was hard to count being jarred around like that. But it was nowhere near the two dozen or so he had expected. An interesting creature, this one. Worthy of more study. He yelled out at the two other members of the ground crew. "Tan! Blair! Disembark!" At the signal, the two flashed the all-clear to the crew in the other worg. Soon eight men were busy under their new host, cutting the key man-holes and boring their way into the creature. If the interior of the worg had been completely solid, its use would have been limited. The muscle tissue for the legs and support lay within the lower five feet of the body. Above that, the fatty storage area consisted of compartmented cells, roughly triangular in shape and three to six feet across. Groups of these cells formed internal segments. Each segment filled only sixty to seventy percent of the surrounding carapace shell. The fatty cells were attached to the upper shell segments and to each other through a network of thick tendonlike fibers. The maze formed by the fibers and cells was somewhat confusing to the new crew merpber but quickly learned and mastered. By cutting a few of the more troublesome fibers and three or four cross passages through the cells themselves, one could easily move through the beast at a running gait. For convenience, a long central passage was usually cut through the length of the fatty cells. Within an hour the key forward passageway had been cut through and work had begun on the others. Carlston, with permission from Captain Gatis, had avoided the labor crew in favor of some desk work. He had quickly set up the aft port-a-desk over the man hole. Using a flash beam, he studied the worg's reactions in detail. Periodically he tested the worg's responses to various electrical impulses. The computer in the desk checked his observations against his quickly formed theories and reported back to him. An hour and two minutes. The computer had predicted an hour and ten. Carlston had predicted one hour and six. An hour and two minutes had passed since the nerves went dead and now they were fully active again. The norm was just shy of two hours. The initial shock of a full-force stomp brought yells of derision from all over the worg. Although the scolding was aimed at Carlston, each crew member realized fully that the stomp was much too early. Each sensed that this worg was decidedly different than most. Carlston considered a second probe but instead withdrew from the manhole and secured the recorder. He was soon back to the routine supervision of the work crews. By five p.s., only three hours after they first spotted the new worg, the cross passages were cut, the bunk rooms were roughed-in, and a command room was in operation inside the dome of the worg's head. "We have about nine hours till sun-up, Sergeant. Dismiss the men for some sleep. We'll cut the long hall in the morning. Set up normal watch cycles. One man to check the controls and the detectors." "Aye, Sir," Carlston answered. "Sir... have you had a chance to check my recording?" "Yes, briefly. A strange bug, this one?" "Yes, Sir, a strange bug indeed. We'll have to watch our maneuvers. It responds faster than any I ever rode." II Faint sun's rays eased over the horizon, edging the black sky with a blue-green light. The twin moons, spiraling endlessly around each other, had set earlier, leaving the planet with only an occasional star shining through holes in the clouds. Blair had the last watch. The uneventful hours were spent in detailing the command room, anchoring the control desks and cutting map shelves in the gelatinous walls. Once every ten minutes, he stopped to scan the countryside through the main ports. The small periscope allowed full #-degree I.R. scanning of the broad meadow with its tall grasses and leafy brush. p.s. Pos! Sunset. A third twelve-hour period established to allow for Cygnus I V's thirty-six hour day. The night sounds were somewhat muffled by distance and the everpresent crunching of the worg's mandibles. Slowly the night's voices gave way. The first rim of pale light on the horizon drove some into hiding, waking others to replace them. Even though the sun itself would not appear for another three hours, the daylight creatures were beginning to stir. As the end of his watch approached, Blair paused longer at the ports. Of all the watches, he liked the morning best. High in the ponders he heard the morning songs and watched the first probing flights of the lace-wingedbirds. In spite of their oversized wings and fragile frames, they still reminded him of the birds of home. Home. Would they ever get back? The annoying doubts nibbled at his mind. Four years had passed since their arrival... Four long years by earth time... Six since their departure from earth. Yet it was only three 'years,' three longer years, by Cygnus IV accounting, Only three cycles of rain, fog and heat. Three 'years' of thirty-six hour days. Cycles which men grew accustomed to slowly, if at all. He watched as the birds tested the air. As the light slowly increased, they ventured ever farther from the shelter of those impossibly tall trees. His reverie was interrupted by a sudden silence. The worg stopped eating. In a few moments it resumed. Then it stopped again. It. too, sensed the light. Soon it would stop completely and move toward a watery bed in a nearby bog. Blair checked the time and began his rounds of the sleeping quarters. Control cables had been run during the night watches. The control desk was ready, but the delicate job of connecting the wires and tubes to the nerve centers was yet to be done. That was Carlston's job. Sergeant Carlston, who had captured the first live worg two years earlier, was the expert. That first bug was less than thirty meters long and took quite some doing to handle. This one, nearly the size of a football field, would be easier to handle -- not because of size but because of the experience of the crew. As the worg reluctantly moved tiway from the red bamboo, a more reluctant crew crawled out of their bunks to begin another long day.    Charts and more charts. Maps, some sketchy, some detailed, lay before the Captain. Bit by bit their geographical knowledge of the planet grew. Their daily exploration was slowly adding detail to the orbital photos taken before the Intrepid's abortive landing. But geography was of little value. Little value indeed. "I think Hatcher was right. Captain." It was Lt. Dixon who spoke ;is he entered the control room. A metal detector extended from his clenched fist. "About what. Lieutenant?" "About this planet. I think it's all rock. Lots of sodium and lithium and calcium but no heavy metals. At least we can't find any. Doc Hatcher said we wouldn't." "Hatcher? But he was killed during the crash." "Yes, Sir." Dixon wired the detector to the desk as he answered. "Well, how could he know what was here before we landed?" "He worked in astro-physics. During the pre-landing orbits, he checked out the physical data pretty well. This rock is larger than earth with only two-thirds' the gravity. It's too light to have much in the way of metals... Look at the readouts!" The narrow tape coming from the desk computer showed no evidence of substantial amounts of metal ores heavier than aluminum. To the trained eye the various tracings on the chart indicated quickly the major ores present and, up to one hundred meters down, their location. The compass line gave data on distance and direction traveled and elevation from a reference point, namely the Settlement. Good data to fill out the maps. Discouraging data for the geological reports. "If there is any iron or nickel around. Sir, it must be way down there." A tone of resignation had entered the Lieutenant's voice. "You may be right. Lieutenant. Do you think it would help to probe deeper? The Electronics Group might be able to increase the detector's range?" "Personally. Sir?" he ventured. "No, Sir, I don't. " "But there have to be iron deposits." It was Blair who broke in, suddenly. "Yes?" The Captain's voice seemed eager for some positive turn in the conversation. Blair turned from the controls to continue. "The life forms. Captain." The answer made little sense. "Well? What about them?" "I'm no expert but they must be almost as high in metallics as Earth's." He could see from the faces of the other two men that he had to continue but he wasn't so sure he wanted to. "Well... take blood for example... doesn't it require iron... to absorb the oxygen? The animals we've found, the warm-blooded ones, all have red blood. " "Traces," interjected Lt. Dixon, "That's all it takes for red blood, and that's all we can find. Maybe we should be grateful for small blessings; at least there's enough iron in the local meat to stretch our rations. But it isn't going to help us get back to Earth -- not unless we can figure a way to, say, refine Toppers' blood..." "Now that's not a bad idea!" The Captain was glad for any bit of humor to break the building mood. "Put it in the log. Lieutenant." "Hah! Yes, Sir; I'll do that." "Seriously, Blair, why don't you check with the biology people and see what they can find out about how the animals get their iron. They must be able to come up with something." "Maybe, but I don't know what. They've tested all the surface vegetation. It has traces of iron, of course, and the traces get more concentrated as you move up the food chain. Nothing surprising there; all it proves is that you'd have to collect grass clippings by the shipload to get enough iron for a few nuts and bolts. Assuming we had the energy to do that kind of 'refining' in the first place." "Weren't the Toppers supposed to have higher iron levels than any of the plains animals? We still don't know much about any additional sources they might have, do we?" "The Toppers aren't exactly cooperative. Sir. We've tried to steer clear of them since they started making sporadic attacks. We've got too much to do without fighting Toppers if we can avoid it." "Well, we can't afford to overlook any possibilities at this stage." "Yes, Sir, I'll check in with Biology on it." The Captain's attention returned to the charts. Sector by sector they had searched for the badly needed metals. His crew and six others had worked at ever-increasing distances from the Settlement. The first prospecting had been done in the "most likely" rugged areas to the north. Now the efforts were systematically covering every sector in an ever increasing spiral. For over a year the crews had sought workable ores -- ores for metals to build the heavy machinery and the parts to repair the Intrepid. As the explorations had gone from hundreds of square miles of likely areas to thousands of square miles in all directions, hopes had waned. Irritations grew and Command had wisely changed the official policy for crews from "geology" to "geography." And the emphasis in the Settlement was now on improving living standards in the community. But every worg crew still carried a geology expert like Dixon. "Take us southeast for another forty kilometers, Blair." The Captain indicated a map coordinate to the attentive crewman. "Then let's head back to base for a rest and new orders. " "Yes, Sir! Should I pass the word around. Sir?" "Go ahead. The crew could use a lift." Ill The raid had started quietly. At sunrise the first group of Toppers stopped at the ridge overlooking the Settlement. The sun to their backs, they paused momentarily to look down on the roughly symmetrical rows of rounded huts. These shells of worgs, taken mostly for food and fuel, now served as homes, offices, laboratories, and even a chapel. Not far from the edge of the cluster of dead but occupied shelters stood the Intrepid. Dwarfing even the largest worg shell, the gleaming beauty of the intricate ship was marred only by the damage to the aft hull and fins. The original damage had been more severe. Time and the talents of the surviving crew members, some # in all, had repaired most of the craft. The repairs had required the scavenging of metals from the aft section. The ship now stood waiting for the prospecting crews to find the needed ores to rebuild its stressbearing beams and skin. Near the ship, an odd assortment of worg shells housed the machine shop, improvised smelter and ceramic forges. All waited for the ores to be found. From the ridge, little activity could be seen. Little existed. A few Toppers moved forward. Their lack of organization was made up for by a determination based on a growing hatred of the scene before them. As the first group moved, others followed. Soon, even the most timid sub-tribes were advancing -- first, at a slow walk, then at a trot and, finally, at a dead run. The long arms and prehensile toes hinted at their normal tree-top existence but the three stubby legs were surprisingly agile on the ground. They moved in a skipping rhythm with the hindmost leg launching the other two forward in extraordinary spinning strides. The tri-pedal symmetry, so common on Cygnus IV, had given them a defensive mechanism to be envied. For all practical purposes, they had no front... and no back. You could not get behind a Topper. They effectively had #-degree vision with three beady eyes placed high on the head. Each eye was centered between two of the three spindly arms. The largest weighed no more than fifty pounds, but their gaunt frames made them seem bigger. As they gained speed, their hands wielding clubs or stones, they seemed much bigger. The sentry's alarm came late as the figures took shape against the blazing sunrise. His cry was more of startled fear than prearranged signal. He was the first man to fall. But only after he had downed several Toppers with his automatic rifle. The sentry's alarm, followed by the rifle fire, had the desired effect. Although some of the defenders emerged from their quarters only partly dressed, all had weapons ready. The Toppers' assault was at a frenzy. Like creatures gone berserk, they seemed to strike at everything in sight except their own kind. They numbered well over two thousand as they entered the settlement. Rifles and side arms barked death at the invaders but, senselessly, they continued to advance directly into the fire. By sheer numbers they gained some ground, but their numbers fell quickly. Within half an hour it was over. The Toppers had scattered back to the woods, leaving some six hundred of their kind dead or dying among the domed shelters. Only five men were dead. Several others were badly beaten but only a few were incapacitated. The physical damage to the structures and equipment in the path of the assault was high. In the frenzied attack, entire segments of the worg shells were smashed in or ripped away. Colonel Reading winced as the Doctor Hyotte worked on his battered left arm. "Matt, I want a complete damage report. Has a perimeter been established?" "Yes, Sir," Major Mattson answered. "What should we do with the wounded Toppers?" "Ouch!" the Colonel winced. "Watch what you're doing, Doc! What's your opinion? Do you think we should hold them or just kill them off?" "We don't have enough medical supplies to treat them all, but I'd like to keep several of the healthier ones under observation for a while." The doctor finished his work on the Colonel's arm . "There. That should hold your arm together for awhile. What do you think, Colonel?" "About the arm or the Toppers?" The Colonel looked warily at the bandages. "The Toppers," he smiled. "Okay, keep the ones you want. Matt, have the others shot." "Yes, Sir. Sir, do you think they'll be back?" "Well, according to the reports, they're beginning to form small groups at the edge of the forest again. Correct?" "Yes, Sir." "Yes, Matt, I think they'll be back. Now that we're alert, they shouldn't be able to get close enough to do any damage. It'll be suicide, but they'll probably attack again. " "Why, Colonel? Why did they attack us in force? We've had trouble with isolated crews being hit before, but there's never been more than a few dozen of them. We killed more Toppers today than I've seen since we've been here." "That, Major, is the prime question. I wish I knew the answer." "It may help if I can study them. " The doctor continued as he repacked his kit. "I'll need a cage big enough to hold them." "Will wood and mylacord hold them?" "They're strong, but I think it will. " The Major anticipated the Colonel's order. "Yes, Sir. We'll build a cage against the end of the machine shop, next to medical." As he spoke, scattered rifle fire could be heard at the edge of the settlement. The second wave had begun. IV The worg's pace now exceeded eighty kilometers per hour. Blair worked the controls with obvious excitement. Sargeant Carlston and Captain Gatis studied the desk. Input data, some from the crew's officers and some picked up directly from the worg's nerve centers, became output data. "The entire metabolism is accelerating." The Sergeant indicated the charts as he spoke. "Most worgs can't do four hundred kilometers a day. Yesterday we covered six hundred before sunset. Today we could cover twice that." "Yes, but we'll be at the Settlement in an hour. " "Yeah. I almost wish we weren't. I'd like to ride this thing out and see how active it becomes." "Blair, how does it handle?" "Terrific, Captain. Control response is good, but I could use a larger port to see out of." "What about stopping her? Do the 'brakes' work as well as the gas?" "I think so. Should I put her through some fancy maneuvers?" "You'd better alert the crew first. Captain," Carlston interjected. "Okay. Let's see what she can With the crew alerted over the intercom, Blair proceeded to put the huge worg through delicate highspeed turns. Stopping response was sudden -- so sudden that some of the charts and shelved equipment tumbled to the floor. One turn was so tight that the worg's plates scraped together, nearly locking. Half of the legs on the inside row lifted clear of the ground. Only Blair's quick action on the nerve impulse controls prevented a roll-over. As Blair returned to the plotted course, the Captain smiled. "Carlston, you had better get Blair that larger port. If he's going to drive like that, he needs it." "Yes, Sir!" "And, Carlston, maybe you should plan on staying with this one when we get back to base. It needs a lot more study. If we can figure out how to speed them all up like this, we can double or triple our prospecting efforts." "Yes, Sir. I'm probably going to need another desk. Do you think... " His words ended abruptly as a sharp cry came from Blair. "Toppers! Captain! Two o'clock!" As the worg rounded the knoll, the group of Toppers could be seen near a clump of brush almost a kilometer ahead. "Captain, there must be a hundred of them!" "Yes, and they're pretty far from home. There's no tall timber for some distance. " The Toppers were moving at a trot across the rolling terrain. Apparently, their own hurried pace kept them from noticing the worg's approach, until the gap closed to less than half a kilometer. "They've seen us, Captain," Blair called out. "Look at them scatter." The Toppers had seen them. The presence of the huge, rumbling creature normally brought little concern to the Toppers, but the normal worg was asleep during full sunlight hours, usually half buried in mud or shallow swamp land. This was daylight. This worg was awake and moving. It had taken a few confused moments for the Toppers to realize the worg's speed. In those occasional morning encounters between grazing worgs and Toppers, the Toppers could easily outrun the lumbering worg. Groups of twenty or so would occasionally attack and pester one of the huge bugs. But this one appeared menacing indeed. Some stumbled. A few fell, as the tribe broke up in confusion. Some stopped to help their fallen companions. Several paused to hurl stones at the head of their attacker. Blair turned the worg, skillfully following the heaviest concentration of Toppers. Twenty or more were killed on the first pass. "Captain, I've never seen such a large group." Blair brought the worg into a sweeping tum, selecting his next targets. "Neither have I... Carlston! Look at their trail!" He pointed at the swath of broken grass, which from the end looked like a long ragged runway. The path closely paralleled the clearer three-rutted trail left by their own passage. "Looks like they were headed the same way we were." The Sergeant's face showed traces of worry. "Yes, the Settlement! I don't like the looks of this. Blair, turn her around. Head for home at top speed." "But, Captain, I can get them all." "Do it, Blair!" The Captain's tone had changed.    The fifth wave of Toppers started toward the Settlement. They no longer approached directly. Using the low brush as cover, they danced and spun across the fields toward the shelters. They had lost more comrades than the whole of the first wave. Over three thousand lay strewn across the fields. But their numbers had increased as tribe after tribe joined the attack. With eight or nine thousand, they now attacked on a broad front. The Settlement's defense perimeter had widened to cover # degrees. Barricades of all descriptions had been thrown up between the outer shells to provide an almost solid wall. The Major's concern was apparent. "Colonel, we've lost eight men, with maybe fifteen seriously injured. If they keep growing in numbers like this, they're eventually going to get through." "I know. Have we got any help from engineering yet? We need more effective firepower." "They're working on some explosives but I don't think it'll help us soon enough... Here they come again. " "Well, if we can hold them off this time, they should have an hour or two before the next attack. That is, if the pattern holds. Will that be enough time to finish?" The Colonel drew his side arm and waited. "It had better be. Our reports show that new tribes are joining them every few minutes. They could double in numbers in the next three hours." The first shots quickly turned into hundreds, as the Toppers came into range.    The battle was audible just minutes before the Settlement came into view. Blair stopped the worg in the tall brush at the edge of the clearing and waited for orders. Captain Gatis watched a moment, then gave quick instructions. The worg responded to Blair's skilled hands and moved around the low rolling hills toward the huge space craft. "Keep to the low ground until you get close, Blair. We'll be hidden by the Intrepid as we move in. They're not attacking that side yet. ' ' "Surprise will be the key element in our favor," Carlston said. "If those three-eyed baboons see us coming, they'll try to stop us. And from the numbers I've seen, they probably could if they worked at it. " "When you reach the Intrepid, Blair, tum her out and circle the camp. Run right through the middle of them. We have to get as many as possible on that first run. Carlston, have the men fire from the side ports." By the time the worg reached the ship, the Toppers were within yards of the defenses. The huge ship provided enough cover to allow an accelerated approach. As they broke from cover, the worg was nearing # kilometers per hour. The massive creature's appearance had the desired effect. The Toppers nearest the barricades stopped their advance and turned to consider the new threat. The momentary delay between the worg's appearance and its reaching the first groups of attackers served to concentrate them in its path. Surprise was replaced by confu sion. Confusion by panic... And in the wake of panic came death. As Blair guided the worg around the Settlement, the shock wave of panic preceded them. Behind them, a scarlet strip of ground bore record of their passing. With the circle two-thirds complete, Blair turned the worg to make another run. "Captain, look!" The worg slowed abruptly as Blair viewed the terrain before them. "They're gone ! ' ' Across the rolling countryside, the Toppers could be seen fleeing. The near ground was littered with clubs and stones dropped in their flight. "Captain?" Blair repeated. "I don't get it either, Blair. What do you think, Carlslon?" "I don't know, Sir. We killed a good number of them, two or three thousand, I'd say. But I've never seen them act that scared." The Sergeant turned from the port to face the other two. "That group we hit earlier put up more of a fight than this. It doesn't make sense." "I know. As much as I hate Toppers, I've got to give them credit for one thing. They're always ready for a fight. I agree, it doesn't make sense. Blair, take a wide run around, just to be sure they're all leaving. Then drop us off near the Colonel 's office. " V "What did the computer report tell you, Major?" Major Mattson, with a file of printouts in his hand, had just entered the Colonel's office. He glanced quickly around, smiling and nodding at the small assembly of officers. "Gentlemen." He greeted them, then turned to the Colonel's desk. "Not much, Sir. Here's the printout." "Did we get all the reports' input? Sentries, Worg Captains, everything?" "Yes, Sir. But the computer reaches no definite conclusions about the attacks. There is some indication that the Toppers have been spending more time out of the trees and that they have been forming in large groups -- councils, you might say -- for a few weeks now. The size of the groups seems to be on the increase." The Colonel's face was grave. He paused momentarily before asking the next question but it was asked for him before he could speak. "Can we expect another attack?" It was Captain Snell who leaned forward and put the thoughts to words. "We don't know," the Major answered. "The ship's computer notes ull sorts of behavior changes in the Toppers but the attacks seemed un provoked and without reason. The whole affair makes little sense. Here, Colonel, look at this." Major Mattson pointed at one of the printout sheets. "Yes, I know, we lost twenty men. So?" "Sir, we should have lost more than forty!" "What?" "See the projections here and here? They indicate that we should have lost forty men during the first three attacks. By the fourth they should have overrun us." "Based on what?" "Based on the number of TopK'rs, our defenses and their accuracy at rock throwing." "They have that," Captain Gatis interjected. "I've seen those threeeyed monkeys knock birds down at fifty meters or more, apparently just lor sport. " "And here's another point. Sir," the Major drew the attention again lo the file. "The amount of damage to the shelters was exceptionally high, " "Maybe the computer hasn't drawn a conclusion yet, Major, but I get the impression that you have. Ixt's have it." The Colonel sat hack in his chair, as he waited for the reply. "Well, I have half a conclusion. The reason for the low casualties, I think, is that they weren't after us." The Major's words were apologetic in tone. "Then what were they after?" "They seemed bent on destroying" -- he stumbled on the words -- "the Settlement, Sir. I think they wanted to bust up the shelters. But I can't figure why." "And how is Doc Hyotte coming? Any word from his work with the group we penned up?" "Well," the Major began slowly, "some. And it doesn't make sense, either. He says they're acting strange. Jumpy and almost... well, he used the word 'terrified.' " "Terrified? Is it their wounds? Perhaps the drugs we've used?" "No, Sir, he said he's checked all that. And... guess what seems to scare them silly?" "Major! This is not a guessing game!" "Sorry, Sir. It's just so odd... It's worgs, Sir. When Captain Gatis came back from prospecting, he scattered the group attacking us. Then later, when he came into the camp, he passed the cage we set up for Doc Hyotte. We thought the Toppers were going to tear it down to get away." "How many were in the cage?" Captain Snell asked. "Eighteen, Captain." "Eighteen? I've seen groups of ten attack a worg." "Yes, Captain, so have I. As I said, they're acting strangely." "Well, gentlemen," the Colonel eased his bandaged arm onto the desk, "I don't think we've heard the last of this yet. Based on what we have up to now, we'd better keep the worgs out on patrol. Keep an eye on the Toppers and perhaps capitalize on this newborn fear they have of the worgs. Report every few hours to the ship-board computer officer. Report at once if you find anything strange or any answers to our questions. Dismissed." Sergeant Carlston made his way slowly down the outer passageway. Three times he bumped into the larger fibrils as his eyes concentrated on the data before him. Finally. he reached his quarters (an eight-by-ten-foot cubicle cut from the waxy cells of the worg's interior) and dropped onto the bunk. The bunk was carved into the very walls of the cubicle. The gelatinous cell material yielded slightly to his weight as he settled down. Carlston was now alone on the worg. The Toppers' retreat had been permanent. Not only had they not renewed the attack but all reports indicated that they had withdrawn completely into the forest, hiding in apparent terror among the tops of the ponders. The I.R. Scanners found nothing in the area. Back in the Settlement, the Doctor worked at making sense of the Toppers' dramatic psychological change. The worg crews had been given time off. but the worgs themselves, with only one or two experienced men aboard, were left to patrol the edges of the wood. Carlston had used the solitude to gather more data on this bug, this strange bug. As dusk came, he set automatic controls to keep the worg in a slow, steady grazing path around the Settlement. The I.R. Scanner alarm was set in case conditions changed but he didn't expect them to tonight. Now, as he lay on the bunk, a peaceful weariness built from the trying hours of the long day crept over hfm. The file slipped slowly to the floor as sleep came. Hours passed, how many he did not know. He awakened fitfully, as from a nightmare, fighting imaginary demons who spun nets to trap him in his dreams. As his arm reached out, a pang of terror struck deeply within his sleep-dimmed mind. While the demons were of the dream, the nets were not. All around him he could feel and see the strands. The entire cubicle was filled with an eerie glow, as the light from the wall hung beam struck and reflected from ten thousand tiny fibers. The walls, formerly waxen and sullen, now seemed alive. Slender tentacles reached out across space to join others. The cubicle and passageway Darkness came to the room as the beam fell from the moving wall and rolled like a snowball into a sphere of white fiber. Carlston fought to free himself from the bunk which held him fast. With his free hand, he was finally able to reach his knife. With chopping mutions, he freed the other, then his feet. Even in the dark, he could sense the motion about him. The cell was mending its wound, tying itself together, knitting new fabric to replace the old. Long minutes passed as Carlston hacked away with the blade. Finally, he had room to stand, to stop for a moment, to gather his wits. Frantically, his mind searched the huge worg Where was a wrist beam? Where were the cutting tools? What was happening? The wall beam! If he could reach it, he would at least have light. As he cut his way slowly through the fibers which surrounded him, hits of information filtered into his bruin. The worg was silent. Deadly silent. The usual crunching of the grazing mandibles was gone. In its place was, not an audible sound, nut the sensation of a slow, pulsing, throbbing motion. The floor beneath him, the tough inner skin of the leg muscles, was no longer flat. It bulged and contorted and curved strangely. A glow. A few feet ahead, he could see a faint glow. The wall beam! Wrapped in a tangled mass of the web and wedged between two twists of the floor, it glowed dimly through its new casing. In a few minutes, he had freed it. Now he could see. But what he saw brought no comfort. He was in a cave, a cave of his own making, perhaps six feet in length and large enough to crouch in. He tested the fibrous wall around him. "Like the inside of a ball of cotton," he thought. It yielded to the pressure of his hand, only to spring back into place when released. It cut fairly easily with the small knife but progress through it would be slow. A plan formed. Mentally, he had located the larger tools, the tools he would need to get out of this bug. "A strange bug indeed," the words gnawed at his mind. As his hands tore and cut through the web-filled cubicle, he plotted the shortest route to the tool chest. It would take hours! The comer of the doorway brought a sense of relief. The passageway seemed less dense than his cubicle and further growth from the walls had slowed. The doorway provided a reference point. He cut his way out into the aisle. His relief was only temporary, however, as a new sensation reached him. The floor beneath him tremored slightly, then hardened. The convulsion came suddenly, tossing Carlston into the fluffy web above him. He was thrown about violently in his cottony coffin. Only the softness of his cage prevented severe injury. It lasted only seconds; then, as quickly as it began, it stopped. Carlston lay on his back. The lantern had broken free from his grip. Twice, maybe three times, in the melee it had struck him about the head. Now it lay on the cottony surface near his leg. As he rolled over and reached for it, the beam played on the floor which now rose like a wall beside him. Beside him? The worg had rolled over! The floor was now a curving wall and the spongy, cottony wall of the passageway lay beneath him.    Dawn came in its usual slow pace. The worgs, with their skeleton crews, returned to the settlement. All but one. Hours later, the beasts were fully manned and a search pattern was under way. For hours the search went on. Once during the day a crew passed within several yards of a swampy marsh. A green, cottony, moss-like growth covered part of one shore. Beneath it in the water and mud, the huge worg lay curled into a giant ball. And within the worg, one solitary, lonely man cut desperately away at his prison. Vll Carlston reached the tool case at dusk. Three times during the long day, he had slept for short periods, collapsing from near exhaustion. Several times, he cut thin slivers of muscle from the floor beside him, to chew on as he worked. Even raw, the tissue tasted good and provided needed energy. With the larger tools, he proceeded with relative ease toward the control room. With them, he could stand and cut his way through the web. For many hours there had been no motion, no sound, nothing signaling that any life was left in the giant beast. If he could reach the control desk and check the records, he would at least have some evidence of where he was and how to return to the settlement. And he should be able to get out through one of the enlarged ports, or cut a new one if need be. As he neared the control room, he could hear water trickling slowly through the ports. Only then did he realize that the worg was under water. The mesh of webbing inside and outside the ports had sealed them almost completely. The webbing seemed to fall away more easily now, as Carlston entered the control room. He worked his way across the room toward the desk. It extended awkwardly from the convoluted floor. Carlston cut and tore the webbing away from the desk. It felt wet in his hands as he pulled it from the cabinet. "Moisture from the ports," he thought, then dismissed the error as he stared at the mass of webbing in his hand. It was melting! All around him the webbing withdrew. Flowing slowly toward the wall of muscle, the fibrous mass was alive again! He watched in stunned fascination as the room emptied itself. Frustration near to anger flooded through him as he saw the central passageway behind him re-open. The narrow slit cut so painfully from the web, now opened to the former walls. Then the walls themselves began to flow toward the fibrous floor. The next several minutes brought a new series of convulsions. With what was left of his sapped energy. Carlston clung to the desk as the worg began to move. The water had stopped flowing. The floor was again beneath his feet. The worg was out of the water and upright. The ports were nearly clear. Faint moonlight filtered through the remaining fibers. A strange pulsing vibration born of massive ' energy permeated Carlston and everything around him. Then he felt a sensation known only to those few privileged enough to free themselves from Earth's friendly grasp. A sensation which he had not felt for some four years. Freefall ! He was airborne! Metamorphosis! That was the tffiM missing factor. This beast of burden, this creature of ever predictable habit which he thought he had grown to understand over the past years, had a different side to it. The passion of new knowledge replaced the terror of the moments before and Carlston fought his way toward the port. The moving muscles beneath him tripped and tossed him as he stumbled to the opening. Below him, the moonlit marsh floated slowly away. A circle of discarded plates could be seen at its edge, slowly sinking into the marsh. Above him were the stars and in the distance to the left, he could see the lights of the Settlement. "How?" he wondered aloud. "How can this thing possibly fly?" With the security of the hard carapace restoring his confidence, he thrust himself partly through the port. Twisting to get a better view, he saw hundreds of gauzy, glistening wings reflecting the moonlight. The body was now long and slender, less than a tenth of its original volume. With the outer shells cast off, each segment sported three pairs of huge wings which moved with amazing speed and grace. The former slab of muscle which had moved those gigantic feet was now swollen with the absorbed energy of the fatty cells. Like a dragonfly of enormous and grotesque proportions, the worg flitted toward the clouds. Carlston watched... fascinated as it rose higher. Soon even the enormous ponders were several hundred feet below. The worg moved toward the edge of the woods, closing quickly on the tree tops. Branches brushed close to the port as the worg hovered momentarily. Carlston ducked back inside, closely avoiding being knocked from the port by a six-inch 'twig' of the massive tree. As the worg rose again, Carlston could see the gaping hole in the tree top left by a moment's 'browsing.' It was nighttime and the worg had resumed his feeding. Carlston watched as the worg stopped again and again to tease its voracious appetite. He moved to the left port to get another view. Off in the distance, he could see the lights of the Settlement. Fully a half hour passed as Carlston watched in helpless fascination the scene which unfolded before him. Behind and beneath and around him was this "strange bug" which now held him captive. Out of the ports, he could see the massive woods and the clearing, hundreds of meters below. Above, the twin moons and stars. Off in the distance to his left, the glow of the Settlement. Off to the left? Always to the left?! The worg was circling the clearing! Circling in the same pattern as it had grazed the ground far below, the night before! The controls! They were still working! The muscles which moved the feet and the nerves which controlled those muscles must be the same as those which now moved those huge, filmy wings. Instinct moved the worg to feed. The nerve controls of the computer could still control, no, they were still controlling its direction. Carlston lunged for the console. In elation, he gazed at the controls and studied the readouts. Balance was difficult. As the worg stopped to feed, then rose again, Carlston tore off his shirt and tied it to his belt. Then to the console. "Now," he said, grasping the main panel. "How do we fly this thing?" When the worg landed at the Settlement, it was almost dawn. Coming in high and then straight down, almost like a helicopter, Carlston had been able to avoid the sentries and possible armed resistance. The expected reaction came, but he had time to make his own presence known before the community moved to resist this new "invasion." Twice during the night he had had to make new nerve connections. With the new connections, he had achieved full third-dimensional control, so important to the ultimate handling of the creature.    Wearily, he finished explaining the controls to Blair. "It only takes three or four days," he mumbled. "What?" Blair asked. "The metamorphosis, " Carlston explained groggily. "Three or four days for the complete change." "Oh... yeah!" Blair answered, half as a question. "C'mon, Blair, the others! You'll have to make the changes now. They could change any day." "The other worgs!" The impact of Carlston 's reasoning broke through to Blair. "Of course, the others. If this one goes through these changes, they all must." "Corporal Blair," Captain Gatis broke into the control room. "The Colonel just told me that three worg crews have reported metabolic changes in their worgs. Do you suppose they're all going to change? Into... into this?" "What do you think. Sergeant?" Smiling, Blair turned toward Carls ton. Sergeant Carlston leaned heavily ugainst the port, his face illuminated by the rising sun. He didn't answer. He was asleep.    Within two weeks, eight captive worgs had gone through the metamorphosis. The crews had adapted quickly and since the flying worg could hold only four crewmen comfortably, they had captured several new ones for a doubled force. "When will the detectors be ready. Major?" The Colonel made notes as each officer present reported his progress. "Tomorrow, Sir." "And the crews will be ready, too. We should be able to cover twenty to thirty times the area per day we did by ground crews. If there's any iron ore within five thousand kilometers, we should find it in the next few months." "If the worgs last that long, Sir," Captain Gatis injected. "Captain?" the Colonel looked puzzled-. "Well, Carlston has projected various phases of the metabolic changes. His work to now predicts certain critical effects in four to six weeks." "Meaning?" "He's not sure. The best guess right now is based on comparisons with other life-forms, both here and on Earth." The Captain paused. "The worgs are like our insects. Their very make-up should have suggested the possibility of a metamorphosis to us before. If the analogy is correct, this new form is the breeding stage." He paused again. ' 'Go on . " "The problem is time, Sir. We've been here for four years. We've seen no major changes in the worgs 'til now. That means they've got a long life span. If they breed, lay eggs or whatever, and die, like insects do... "Then we'll have no worgs?" "Exactly," the Captain continued, "and no way of predicting how long it will be 'til we have more." "What about the four-to-six-week crisis?" the Major asked. "Carlston thinks six weeks will bring the mating season. After that, well, present food input and energy output indicate a below-sustenance level within eight, maybe nine, weeks." "Major," the Colonel started to speak but was anticipated by the Major. "Yes, Sir, the detectors will be ready tonight. I'll see to it. Sir." As the Major left. Doctor Hyotte stepped away from the window and toward the Colonel's desk. "Colonel, I think I've got those attacks by the Toppers figured out." The doctor paused briefly, then turned back toward the window. "I think it was instinctive, too." "How's that?" "Look at the forest. In the last three days, our worgs have almost stripped this area. They eat all night and all day now. In a month, they could destroy this entire forest area. The Toppers weren't after us, they were after these shells. " The doctor gestured to the curved ceiling above them. "They sensed that the worgs were getting ready to change. They thought, or instinct told them, that if they could kill the worgs. they could save their homes." "And the Settlement looked like..." "Like what it is, dozens of worgs. All in one easily attacked spot. Out in the open, not half buried in some swamp the way they normally spend their sleeping hours." "Except these are dead!" Captain Gatis retorted. "Yes. but live worgs, with crews, moved in and out every day. The Toppers had no way of telling which was which. " "Then why did they panic when my crew came back?" the Captain asked, leaning forward in his chair. "Your worg was already well into the change. It was a real danger to them. And to their young at home." "So they ran home to save the kids?" "Well?" the doctor looked from the Colonel to the Captain and back. After a thoughtful pause, the Colonel answered. "It makes sense. Maybe, if we don't find that iron, we'll hang around and see it all again, next cycle." "Yes, maybe." The group laughed together, but the humor held a touch of serious concern. IX Only two hours after they had left camp, the first crew returned to the Settlement. Captain Snell dropped to the ground and stormed angrily into the Technical Compound. "Who put that piece of junk together?" Major Mattson turned to meet the affront. "What's your problem. Snell?" "That detector you gave us. It's lousy." "Doesn't it give you any readings?" "Ooooh yes, we get readings. We get constant readings. It's too sensitive!" "Calm down. Captain," the Major answered soothingly. "Bring it in. The engineers can adjust it in a few minutes." "It's on its way in." "Good. Let's go cool down and get a cup, shall we?" "I'm sorry, Matt, I -- " the Captain began to apologize. "C'mon, let's get a cup."    "Excuse me, Major." It was twenty minutes later when the young Engineer approached the table where the Major and Captain Snell sat. "Yes, is the detector ready?" "Well, yes, Sir, it is but..."he said, hesitating. "But what?" "Well, there's two things. Sir. There wasn't anything wrong with (he detector... and..." "And?" "And we have three more crews hack with the same complaint."    Within an hour all the crews were back. Within an hour, all the detectors were sitting on a large table in the engineering section, surrounded by the officers of each crew and one very distraught Colonel. "Let me get this straight. Matt!" As the Colonel spoke, the others fell silent. "You say the detectors all check out here, with your people?" "Yes. " "But the worg crews can't handle them?" "Well, not exactly, Sir. They check out here, no matter who handles them. Our engineers or the crews. But they seem to be useless aboard the worgs." "Why?" "I don't know. " Silence. Then from the edge of the room, Carlston's voice broke in. "Topper's Blood." "What? What did you say t 'artston?" The Colonel's voice earned a tone of threat. "I said, 'Topper's Blood.' " "Carlston, if you're trying to be tunny..." "No, Sir," he answered as he moved toward the table. "Hear me mil. Captain Gatis, do you remember the argument between Blair and Lieutenant Dixon about Topper's blood?" "Yes," the Captain responded. "Blair said something about the Topper's blood probably having a lot of iron... to be so red?" "That's the one. Dixon contended that if there were any heavy ores, it would have to be deep, too deep for us to get to. But the question still remained of the Topper's red blood. Where do they get their iron from?" "So?" "Now the detectors give 'falsely' high readings every time we take them on the worgs." "The ponders!" the Major's words struck home. "That's it," Carlston agreed. "The Toppers have iron in their blood. The worgs now have iron in their intestines. Iron from the leaves of those trees. Those ponders run four to five hundred meters high. Their roots could go down twice that far, who knows?" "What kind of concentration can it be. Matt?" The Colonel reentered the conversation. "Can we refine it?" "It's organic. All we have to do is bum it off. " "It's got to be high enough to register on the meters," Carlston injected. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be in this meeting, would we?" "Each worg consumes tons per hour. Sir." The Major expounded on the theme. "It's probably more concentrated in the waste than in the leaves themselves. If it's a few tenths of a percent, we can get hundreds of pounds a day, from each one." The group broke into a buzz of excitement. Two engineers talking with Major Mattson grabbed detectors and ran out the door. They returned a minute later with broad grins. One spoke. "It checks, Major. Both detectors give identical readings. The worgs are flying ore deposits." "Hmmm. By the way, Carlston." The Colonel turned toward the Sergeant, a frown wrinkling his face. "This meeting was called for, uh, 'officers.' Might I ask what yon are doing here?" "Well, Sir, I..." Carlston backed away slightly from the Colonel's stare. "Captain Gatis!" The Colonel snapped as he turned away from Carlston. "Yes, Sir?" "Why don't you see what you can do about this situation!" Catching the twinkle in the Colonel's eye, the Captain grinned broadly as he answered. "Ahh, yes, Sir! I think a promotion is in order. " Epilogue "Well, how does it look. Doc?" Major Mattson asked. "Is he going to live?" The doctor carefully removed the last of the bandages from the Colonel's arm. "I think so," he quipped back. "When we get back to Earth, I think I'll change doctors," the Colonel mused under his breath. Then, still barely audible, he continued, "and maybe technical officers, too. " "Ouch! That hurt," the Major mimicked pain at the response. "Seriously, Sir, are you going to grant Captain Gatis 's request?" "I think so... he and Carlston deserve some special reward, but I don't know if staying here till we return is reward or punishment. They've got several others who want to stay, too. Good men, every one of them. Carlston wants to follow the worgs life cycle clear through. Plus the T uppers and several other creatures they have in mind. It should be of tremendous help to future colonization." "Colonel, could you please hold still! This arm is healing nicely but if you keep twisting around, I'll never get it cleaned up. " "Okay, Doc." The Colonel laughed and turned to continue his discussion with the Major. But the surgeon interrupted again. "A-hah! What have we here?" "Huh?... Ouch!" the Colonel winced. The doctor held a small, squirming thing at the end of a pair of Iwcczcrs "What's that. Doc?" The Major reached over to take the tweezers from the surgeon's hand. "Just a little parasite we've picked up here." the doctor replied in an unconcerned manner as he returned to dressing the wound. "They gel into almost any new wound. Apparently feed on the scab. " "Hmmm," the Major mused as he held the tiny parasite. "Kinda like we Iced on the worgs, huh. Colonel " Tossing the squirming dot toward the doorway, he stared after it as it slowly crawled away. "I wonder what he really wants?"  Km Foremost Galaxy PWkatlon in f ScIoiko Fiction Some Contributors Past and Present Poul Anderson Isaac Asimov Greg Benford C J Cherryh Arthur C Clarke Arsen Darnay Jordon Eklund Harlan Ellison Frank Herbert Larry Niven Frederik Pohl Jerry Pournelle Fred Saberhagen James Tiptree Roger Zelazny H. G. Wells, science fiction -- often termed "future fiction " -- has fascinated alert minds. Not only has it entertained, it has predicted much of the far-ranging scientific and social change now upon us. the genre continue to speculate, to predict, to tackle the prime problems already shaping tomorrow. Ecologyspace exploration -- nuclear promise and threat -- energy -- social evolution and biological revolution -- these and other fields are probed by imaginative stories uniquely exciting and rewarding. So let your fancy run free. Subscribe now! For. U S. residents, enclose # here  For other countries, enclose  I S for here  Send coupons to: # White Plains Road Scarsdale, N.Y., # Enclosed find  in payment for my subscription You know you're going crazy when you start talking to yourself. But when you hear an answer My feet are cold. What an absurd thing to notice in the middle of committing suicide. The cellar is very dark, and this comer of it is hidden behind the refuse of a decade's experiments. The carrion-sniffers of this world will not search here for a long time, and even when they do, they won't understand what they find. Light short years and two long ones have passed since I consigned the Transporter to this silent comer. In all that time I have mentioned it to no one. The notes on its construction are in a separate, secret tile. In theory, it should sunder the bonds of reality; a cosmic hat trick; place the rabbit on the grille, and watch it vanish into another probable existence! But I have never been able to bring the rabbit back. I'erhaps I was wrong from the start. I'erhaps there is no other branch to leap to in this tree of events. I'erhaps I have only invented something which quietly disintegrates matter. Ah, the useless speculations I have indulged in over the years, trying to fathom this engine, knowing it was useless -- and dangerous -- as it stood. But now, as I shiver in my cold cellar, it seems to me that I kept it secret for reasons I could not have guessed. I think that I knew I would need it someday. A sad and terrible foresight, if so. Helene... That woman! I cry, I rage... Every man has his uncontrollable fascinations. I have never been able to deal rationally with Teutonic women, particularly those of a Wagnerian aura, young to my middleage, tail to my short, each strong as a mail-clad Valkyrie. Helene was like that. Not unflawed, for she had grown up in Sweden, not her native Germany, but the resultant unlikely accent and audacity of stance only excited me more. They gave her the illusion of accessibility. We met two years ago at a boring party. Her father's cartel was attempting to hire me, and she, obviously, was the bait. I admired this ruthlessness in her father; he knew me, knew my weaknesses. He would do what he had to to achieve his end. That he would go so far as using his own daughter to entice me was intensely gratifying. I assumed at first that our "courtship" would run along predictable lines. There would be several weeks of delightful pursuit and then the ecstatic capture, followed in short order by boredom, and then I would leave. She and her father would discover that I could be ruthless, too. But I was wrong, so very wrong. Instead, she remained out of my reach, close but far away, saying one thing and doing another until my head spun. Without actually noticing the transition, I became like the unfortunates duped by a stage hypnotist, hunching their shoulders and scratching like chickens on command, totally oblivious to their folly. Three times in two years I have tried to leave her, but she always tempted me back. I could not say no. I loved her. I can't say why. I love her even now. And then, this morning, I gave in. I thought: I will give her everything of me. I took the train to the city, going first to her father's Manhattan offices, where an assistant cheerfully guided me through a maze of contracts and hidden clauses. I signed away my creations. They hardly mattered when all I dreamed of was signing over my life to Helene. I was in a frenzy when I finally found her, in a pub on #th Street we had often eaten in. She was with an impossibly handsome young man. When she saw me, she sent him away with a smile and a light kiss on the cheek. Her smile for me was exactly the same. Wary, but somehow inviting. "This is a surprise, Joseph. I wasn't expecting you to emerge from your den and spirit me away until tomorrow night. Don't bother to be jealous of Roy -- an old friend, but we owe each other nothing." Her hand trailed gently over the back of mine. I told her everything. That I loved her (which I had said before, to no practical effect). That to prove my love I was giving up my world for her. She laughed callously. "Papa will be glad to hear that you've finally given in to the siege." "I didn't do it for your father -- I did it for you! I gave up everything!" Her eyes flashed acidly. "Am I to be flattered? To be loved in the manner of a schoolboy by an old lecher? Go away, little man. I got what I wanted." That was three hours ago. The pain is worse now. I am shivering on the grillework, my feet bared for better contact with the field. It took little effort, after actually reaching my decision, to juryrig a control that could be activated from within the Transporter itself. She used me. Used Joseph Argos, honored and respected, a selfmade man -- not an ancient fool, but a man! But then, I had allowed her to use me, hadn't I? What kind of man does that? There is nothing left for it but to call the curtain down. I shift my shoes and socks from one hand to the other so that I can press the control. Nothing, at first. And then, at the very edge of sight, a trembling of shadows. They begin to whirl, grey as the ghosts of memory. Bright colors peek through their curtain. Suddenly I am in a cylinder of screaming light; it shatters my sight, dislocates my reason. A roar sweeps up from all sides, drowning me, as I lock out my awareness of the pain and whisper, not to my life but to her; goodbye...    When I come back to consciousness, I am still in the cellar. Worse than that. I am still alive. I am crying silently over that sad fact, admitting to myself that I lack the courage for a more conventional form of self-murder, when some analytical part of my mind that has been frozen ever since Helene's laughter clicks back into place. My cellar had walls of red brick. These walls are concrete. The realization comes that simply. I can't help it; I start to laugh. Immediately an angry voice echoes back from the other side of the cellar. "Who is that? Who has broken into my home!" The speaker is out of sight behind a tumble of packing crates, but I know who it must be. I have been hearing that voice on my taped notes for years. "Calm down, Argos. It's only yourself, come blindly in search of heaven or hell. Or plain death. Which is this, anyway?" "Well," he answers, stepping into view, "this is a surprise." The light behind him throws his shadow at the foot of the Transporter. I cannot see his face, but I can feel his cool appraisal of me. It is much calmer than mine would be were our positions reversed. "So the device does deliver its burden alive, and -- I presume -- functioning as well. I never was sure, test animals being unrecoverable. Pleasing." "Yes and no." "Any dizziness? Pains? This is an invaluable chance to learn more of the Transporter's effects. How far have you come?" "Not very, it seems. But how much can I tell from a cellar? In fact, how to measure the differences between universes at all? You take quantitative, I'll take qualitative, and we can have a hell of an argument." "You are in rather an uncommunicative mood." "Put yourself in my place," I say, and only then realize how baroquely funny the phrase is in this context. "No, don't bother. You wouldn't like it. I'm cold, and hungry, and depressed. I'm perfectly do? -- but after I take care of the first two." I sit down and start to put on my shoes. He blinks at me, owlish behind his glasses (which are bifocal, just like mine) as he takes his own internal counsel. "All right. Please stay down here for a time; there is a couch you may use. There are blankets. I will bring you some hot food." He invites me down with a gesture both polite and subtly denigrating, then leads me to a ragged couch covered over with a dusty brown army blanket. In my home it was not a new couch, but it was not this ragged. No matter. He turns to leave. Pauses. Turns around and faces me once more. "Just remember; this is my home." And then he is gone.   Hr After a time I hear shouting upstairs, muffled by wood and metal and stone. The voice is clearly my double's. There is another voice, painfully familiar, but it is never raised in anger. I cannot tell what either actually says.    "Argos... it feels odd, referring to you with my name." I sip my soup. It is now cold; he had brought it .to me lukewarm. "It's my name, too." "Our name, then. This will take some getting used to. We are Doppeigangers, like out of legend." I hope not. Seeing him in a clear light is disturbing. Surely I do not look so old, so ugly. It is hard to believe that he is my age, a mere forty-eight. And there is an illdefined light of fanaticism in his eyes. If I weren't so depressed over my own lot, I might be worried for his. "Why did you take this chance?" he asks, his eyes sharp as a goshawk's. "I am suspicious of you. This talk of depression, this self-pity. It is unmanly. So tell me, why did you use the Transporter? Don't say 'for science.' I would like to believe such a fiction, but I can't... Not in any world would I be that foolish." "Are you always this abrasive? You must have even fewer friends than I did." "Facile, answering my question with one of your own." I sigh. "I have been blindly stupid for two full years and you expect me to be able to sum them up in an elegant epigram? Don't be an ass. There are only three practical things I have gained from this experience, all of which I am glad to pass on. One, never sign your work away, no matter the provocation. It isn't worth it. Two, for the comfort of any who might follow my epic leap, attach a heater to that goddamned Transporter grille. And three, don't ever wear that shirt again. We look horrible in it." "I wish a grammarian were here to record these struggles with pronouns. Go on." I pour tea from the thermos he brought me with the soup. Steam curls up from the mug -- thank god, something hot at last. I wrap my fingers around the warmth. "What you really want me to do is confess. All right, why not? My own world is gone forever, so can it matter? I used the Transporter, more than half hoping it would kill me, because of love." "Nonsense." His face is harsh, as if he denies the emotion's existence. "You might be right. Not love, then. Instead let us call it the lack of love, a failure to win the woman I craved. Her name was Helene. A remarkable woman. Whore, angel, goddess, little girl... she could be any of them she cared to be, when she cared at all. I loved her with a passion I never knew I was capable of, before -- " The other Joseph Argos starts to laugh bitterly. "Have I said something funny?" "Not merely funny -- hilarious. You blind, romantic idiot!" My eyes are narrower in anger than his are in mirth. "That's enough of your insults. Either explain yourself or -- " "Clearly," he says, breath still quivering with repressed laughter, "we share only appearance, and not temperament, or you would understand." "Meaning?" "Let me quote you. 'Not very far, it seems,' you said, when I usked you the distance between your world and this one. But it was farther than you thought, much farther!" He can hadly speak for laughing, but then calm takes him, sudden as a serpent, and he cocks a finger at me in the gesture I once used to lecture particularly obtuse students. "Trust me, Joseph, when I tell you the bitch was not worth (he anguish." My first angry impulse, even after all my suffering, is to strike him for insulting her. "And how do you happen to know the character of Helene Falk?" "Dear self, that is the simplest part of it. Look; there are two of us Itcre. Stretch your mind! You chased your Helene in vain for two years, whereas I, in this universe..." "Impossible!" "Not at all. I married the frigid bitch, and I regret it dearly."    It is fully ten minutes before I can speak to him. He watches me warily as I prowl the cellar, my muscles straining against the awful futility of life. I want to hit something. At one point I do snap, pulling down a crateful of short aluminum pipes, which clang and roll across the cellar floor in random dispersion. And all he does is watch me, waiting for the fit to pass. If there are gods who rule over man, then they are all sadists. In my world I loved a Helene who saw me as nothing more than another kill for her father. A longer stalking than most, perhaps, but unnotable beyond that. Yet in this world there is a Helene who gave freely in response to the blandishments of Joseph Argos, only to find herself soul-bound in a liar's bed, tied to a hollow man. My anger is incredible, but pointless. At last it ebbs. More than ever I see how final a step I took in throwing away my world. The patterns here are different. I tell myself that I have no choice but to accept them. Of course that does no good. I can think only two things: I am lost, Helene is lost. I continue to pace, avoiding the pipes I have spilled. The silence is oppressive, horribly so, and at last I shudder and give in and start to talk to my other self. The topic of Helene is laid aside for a time; an unspoken truce has been called. Instead we talk of our respective worlds, noting the unpredictable differences in our lives, our projects, our ambitions. I am forced man, perhaps my intellectual superior. But there has been a more practical bent to my life. I was richer in my world than he is in his, more of my work applied instead of purely theoretical. At these moments in the comparison he usually insults me for not being faithful to the purity of scientific thought, but I know better. He is jealous. Two hours pass before we run out of convenient subjects to hide behind, I do not notice the first mention of Helene, but suddenly she is among us more strongly than before. I listen, distraught, as he recites a catalog of her faults. Then I move to defend her, explaining these "faults" as products of his imagination. It is difficult to say these things without knowing his Helene, but I remain steadfast in my central position: he is lucky to be in a world where she loves him. I don't care if we share a face. This man is not me. I am no cynical hypocrite, damning a woman for her frigidity one moment and then implying, in the next, that she cuckolds me on a dozen fronts. If I ever were that man, or had the potential to be, he died forever in the whirling shadows. I do not merely dislike this carnival-mirror version of me. I hate him. "A week after the wedding," he says pleasantly, enjoing my discomfort, "I realized why I had actually gone to the extreme of legalizing the affair. She was the perfect bauble to dangle in people's faces, a prize that proved short, ugly Argos could capture beauty as well as honor. There was a certain prestige in owning her. And before the marriage I had every reason to suspect that she would grace my bed as admirably as my awards decorate my office. " "This is vile. You talk about her as if she were a piece of meat." "Isn't she?" "Why do you hate her so? Don t be blinded by beauty -- the person within is more complex than she looks. In my world -- " "Precisely. In your world," He leans back, straightening his coat where it has pulled up over his round stomach. "I would very much like to meet that Helene. She sounds like cold fire. I would enjoy that. But the Helene here is an immature creature, ruled by whim and blown hither and yon on the winds of deceit. She is both an annoyance and a grave disappointment." "Then divorce her," I urge. "Let her find someone more deserving." "That is a remarkably feeble insult." "It's the best I can manage under the circumstances." "I will ignore it. As for divorce, I probably will, but I've no intention of taking that easy road out until I'm through victimizing her. Don't look so startled! This world has been as unfair to me as yours was to you. The little whore kept up a false front throughout our courtship, fooled me into marrying her, and I am convinced now that her instincts were purely mercenary, that she did it all to feed off my fame and position in the community. Seeing as I've received little in return, I intend to leave scars before I release her to her sordid pool of friends. Let her lovers appreciate her then, if they can. " At this terrible statement I can only tum my head. I hear him rise, releasing a single heavy breath. His grey trousers rustle as he steps into my new line of sight. I look up; our eyes lock; and we both see there can be no sharing between us. "What exactly do you plan to do? I won't suggest another jaunt on the Transporter. You might not be so lucky a second time. But I am sure you can see that there are certain difficulties in having two respected scientists with the same name, same face, perhaps even the same fingerprints, living in one community. This leaves us in a quandry. it's a shame, really. When I first saw you. I thought we might be able to work together; we could certainly accomplish mighty things with this trick of being in two places at once. But... no. "I repeat myself; what are your plans?" His tone of voice is calm, almost friendly, but his eyes betray his real intentions. "Just how much do you hate your Helene?" He is not expecting another question on that matter. It takes him a moment to reply. "Well, now... , quite a lot. Yes. I would very much like to kill her, except that that would bring the torture to a premature end." I collapse to my knees with a broken sob, bowing my head against slumped shoulders. "Come on, you snivelling bastard, get up. We've got to decide what you are going to do." "Joseph," I say as I stand, "I am going to do the proper thing." The look on his face when he sees the pipe in my hand is beyond price.    I must be the first man in history to commit suicide and still have to dispose of my own corpse. No matter; easily done with the Transporter handy. I drop the bloody pipe on the grille and dump the body after it. Where he is, he won't mind the cold. Shadows spin. I squint my eyes against the sudden flare of bright color. When I can see again, there is nothing on the grille. The next half hour I spend scrubbing blood from the floor, and shifting crates to cover what stains are left. I can effect something more permanent later. Helene is not in the house when I go upstairs, which fans my impatience at the same time it makes me sigh with relief. This way is better, I know, and I can count myself fortunate. His bathtub is not as large as mine was.    She comes home at sunset and finds me waiting for her in the hall chair. I have used the last of the afternoon to study the house, skim my other self's files, read newspapers and magazines. My fit into his role must be as smooth as possible. Her expression is startled. Understandably so. If her false husband, that other Argos, were in my place, it would signal the beginning of some new cruelty. But no more. As gently as I can, I say "Welcome home, my love." She steps back into the door, disbelief plainly written on her face. She holds a large brown shopping bag in front of her like a shield. I can only stare at her, lost in a joy so intense it is numbing. It is Helene -- the same but not the same, familiar and yet new. Her eyes, wide at the sight of me, are the same beautiful gold as those that had condemned me only hours before. Her figure is thinner from care, but still good, and though there are the shadows of premature wrinkles on her face, she is my Helene, the one I was bom for. I can feel it. The reverie ends. She is taking her cue from me, waiting to discover what the trick is. But there will be no trick. I rise, reach forward, and carefully draw her right hand from its grip on the bag. I kiss it. "Don't, Joseph." "But I want to. When I love a woman, I want her to know it. Come now, where have you been, what have you done? I want to know. I feel like I've been waiting for you to come home for years. " One of her eyebrows arches like a bird's wing. "Are you well?" "Of course I'm well. I just missed you." Inside, I chuckle. I can see her ticking possibilities over in her mind: he is planning something; he lies; he is angry at me for being gone so long; he thinks I've been with a lover -- God, how I wish! "If you say so," she says, casting a glance behind her as if to check possible routes of escape. Then she steps quickly past me . I shut the door. The tension in her shoulders is pitiable. Having turned her back on me, having made herself vulnerable, she expects a blow to fall. The longer I am in this world, the more horrified I grow at "my" action in it. "I'm sorry I'm late. I was at the market picking up things for dinner tonight, but when I wanted to leave, the car wouldn't start. The battery was dead. I had to buy a new one. I didn't want to spend the money, but the man with the tow truck said the old one was past help, that it wouldn't hold a recharge, so... I smile. "That's fine, Helene. You did the right thing." "I did?" "Yes." "Are you sure you're well?" "Never better. Here, let me take the bag." Freed from that grip, her hands seek each other. They squeeze themselves white. "We've got to talk about last night, Joseph. I know I don't say things clearly enough to please you, but this is important. So many strange things have been happening -- " I cut her off. Obviously they had some argument, but it is not relevant to the new order of things. "It doesn't matter, darling. Just relax. Perhaps after dinner we can... yes, that's just the thing. After dinner we will take a hot bath. I will scrub your back and listen to whatever you wish to say. " "Bath? But you never... I mean... Joseph, this is very important..." "We can be just as serious in the tub, and much more comfortable than we are standing here like marble statues." "Well... all right. I suppose it was meant to wait." "Helene..." Her sadness stirs me. I put down the bag and take her into my arms. I kiss her. At first she resists, but that passes, becoming simple indifference. No matter. I am happy. There will be time to teach her what love can be like. We walk together into the kitchen. There we kiss again, and this time she does not shy. In fact, the kiss is so intense that I am caught by surprise. My own Helene had never opened to me like that. "Lord! If dinner is half the quality of that kiss, darling, it will be the greatest meal of my life. What are you cooking for us?" She looks at me oddly. "Lamb, of course. It's what you told me to get. Don't you remember?" A faux pas. Damn. I try to make complimentary excuses, saying that the sight of her drove all memory from me, but I do it far too clumsily. When I leave her to begin the meal, her face is still troubled. Clearly I must be careful about asking questions. Even the most innocent one might betray me. But we will both adjust, given time. I go to the library. In the corner where I had kept my favorite chair there is only a naugahyde monstrosity. My other self had been a cheap man, as lax about maintaining his house as his marriage. While I occupy myself with more journals, I hear creaking noises from the hall and stairs. One more sign of how poorly built this house is. I know -- I will build another one. I will build a proper mansion for my new wife, something to celebrate a miraculous beginning. What a bizarre, remarkable day. I regret none of it.    The lamb is delicious, its spicing a culinary marvel. The old Helene could not cook to save her soul. The new one continues to shine in comparison. She does not speak much during the meal. What talk we have is pleasantly inconsequential. I watch her throughout, something which gives me even more pleasure than the food does. She has changed into a formal but simple tan dress. Against it her hair and skin seem to glow. She wears little makeup, and has even less need of it. There is a veil over her emotions, but it does not worry me. One day I will look and it will be gone. Part of the veil seems to be... resignation? No, I am imagining it. My happiness doubles and redoubles. An exquisite meal. After dinner is disposed of, when we sit alone with each other and the wine, I start to praise her cooking. She interrupts me. There is more strength in her manner than there was this afternoon, which pleases me. But her words... "Joseph, I have something very important to say' and not much time to say it. " "There is the bath, my dear," I point out. "Why are you pretending to be kind? Drop this act, Joseph -- it doesn't begin to make up for things." "Ah, but they will be different now! I promise you an idyll. No, nothing that foolish. Forget I said that. What I promise you is a real marriage, with love at its core. I'll prove it. We can go travelling if you want. I'll -- " I intend more, but a belch stops me in midsentence. I have eaten far too much. My feeling of pleasant fullness is turning into stuffy discomfort. "Two years, Joseph. You turned so hateful when we married. I never understood that. I thought it was my fault. I was so gullible, so ready to believe you. You made me guilty, just like you've done your best ever since to make me crazy. I haven't had a loving marriage -- unless you call all those beatings love!" "Now, Helene -- " "Don't even try to be conciliatory. That's a trick of yours I stopped believing a long time ago. I wish that was all it would have taken to leave! But I couldn't. You were always right about that, I didn't have the strength to leave you." "Wait, please -- give me a chance!" Why are my ears ringing? When I speak, my voice seems to echo. "I am a new man. How new a man you cannot guess!" "Is that the tenth or eleventh time you've said that?" "This time it is true, I swear it. Just -- ummph. Pardon me, I have eaten too much -- just give me an opportunity to prove it." "No." "Helene -- " 'Wo. You can't sway me any more. I almost broke down when I came home and saw you waiting, but somewhere I found my strength, and you can't sway me any more. Don't even try. Just listen to me, this last time. I went into your cellar last night, after you beat me, while you were sleeping. I wanted to smash things! I wanted you to wake up to the sound of one of your precious projects being mined. I thought if I could make you angry enough, you'd kill me, and I'd Finally be" free. But I didn't get a chance to touch anything. "The most amazing thing happened. Two years of prayers were answered last night, and the hysterical part of it is that I have you to thank for it!" This becomes more and more confusing. To worsen things, my indigestion has become nausea, the ringing a fierce headache. I feel sweat on my forehead. "W-what are you talking about, blast it?" "You. Darling." I swear a silent oath; I will never eat spiced lamb again. The room seems to balance on the edge of collapse, as flimsy as a card castle I barely hear her. "What?" I draw in a heavy, ragged breath. "Helene, please help me to the couch. I am not feeling well. " The world flickers. Just once, but it changes everything. I see what must surely be hallucinations. I see Helene's face; unconcerned, implacable. I sec an indistinct figure behind her, standing i n the shadows of the curtain. I am sure it was not there during the meal... my body begins to tremble with a frightening violence. I am alternately frozen and on fire. "Please, Helene, help me..." "Like you helped me?" blood-red wine on the tablecloth and floor. "I won't argue with miracles, scientific or otherwise. I needed one too much. Last night he came to me in the cellar, out of nowhere, needing me like you never have." A moment passes in which I can see nothing at all but a chill blackness. Then vision returns. Helene is standing above me, her downward gaze still untroubled. I reach up, weakly, for her hand. To her side is the obscure figure, now distinct, holding Helene's taller body within a comforting arm. I scream. "Au revoir, Joseph." The last thing I see, before the dark circle closes in from all sides to smother the pain, is my own tender smile.    "That was so hard to do. If you had come here even a month ago, I don't know if I could have hated him enough..." "Hush, love, it's silly to talk about. I came here when I came here. And it isn't as if Joseph Argos is really dead. Just a warped version of him, a perversion of a good man. That is to say, me." He pulled her head down and kissed her. He had kissed her a lot since the night before. It was still so new to him, his good fortune. "I'm proud of you." They clung to each other, hungry to think only of each other and not their pasts. His hand moved down her back suggestively, but she stopped him. "We have to do something about the body. " Carrying the corpse downstairs was much more gruesome than watching its death had been, even after wrapping it, mummy like, in the stained tablecloth. It was a clumsy burden. They dropped it on the stairs and it crashed to the bottom, shaking the whole house, and though they tried to laugh off their nervousness, they couldn't. Neither relaxed until after the Transporter had done its work. They did wonder why there was pipe all over the floor, but not for long. There were much more important things to think of. Back upstairs they did something about that. He was very careful of her bruises.    In the middle of the night, as they lay locked together in sleep, there was more motion in the cellar. The deep shadows trembled, and then spun. Rainbow flashes chased round the room, and when they departed, there was a still body on the Transporter grille. Not dead; only unconscious. The cellar chill soon revived her. She stared at her surroundings in hatred, too deep in her own murky thoughts to notice that there was no linoleum on the floor, or that the light fixtures were fluorescent. Beat her over the head, would he, and leave her in a freezing cellar while he screwed around upstairs? She had turned her head too many times; she was a Christian woman; she would abide his faithlessness no longer. Hadn't she done everything he ever asked of her, and never asked for anything in return? Hadn't she worked to make him great, and then later to salvage as much of their reputations as she could, not that there was much to save, the way he catted from one bed to another. That... lying... , adulterer! And he dared to complain when she tried to do the right thing? He dared to hit her back? He... he... The thought dissolved in inarticulate fury. Pipes all over the floor. Typical of him. Helene picked up one length in each hand, thinking: I'll kill him, I'll kill him, I'll kill him...    And in an infinity of universes, in an infinitude of cellars and attics and barns and warehouses and bedrooms and forests and office buildings and, in fact, everywhere an analog of Argos had built an analog of the Transporter, things were balancing out. Shadows, colors... gone.  At the Tenth General Assembly of the World Conference on Exobiolof the semi-stellar object N-OA Bes-bes Geminorum # -- sometimes called Kung's Star -- and its planet, Son of Kung, or ed! Not with just one intelligent species, but with three: a race of sentient hydrogen-filled balloons, weasel-like burrowers and hardshelled arthropods. They are the first sentient life discovered anywhere in the universe off Earth. The race to explore Jem is on. All three of the great power blocs of terrestrial nations prepare expeditions: the Food countries, like the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union; the oil-rich Fuel bloc of Venezuela, England and the Arab states; the People's Republics, headed by China. In Sofa, Dale house has met and American Army officer with shadowy family connections into the mysterious high levels of government and intelligence. The two of them get into a scrape with the Conference. Ana is Bulgarian, and therefore also a member of the Food Bloc, but she is in love with presented the report on Jem, who is a Peep. Marge Menninger promises to see that a Food Bloc expedition will go to Jem, and that Dale house will be on it. She keeps her promise, but the Peeps are quicker. Dulla's expedition is the first to land. Arriving first is not all advantageous, however; Jem is full of perils. The chemistry of its biota is hostile to terrestrial life, and most of the Peeps become quick casualties with severe allergic reactions. Some die. Dulla attempts to establish contact with the Krinpit, the armored, crab-like creatures. The allergic process works both ways. Dulla becomes ill and helpless in the Krinpit village, and so do many of the Krinpit. Some of them die, including the mate of the Krinpit named Sharn-igon. When Dalehouse' s expedition arrives on Jem, its leaders have learned some lessons from the disasters that befell the Peeps. But the planet still has surprises. Dalehouse and his friend, the Russian pilot establish contact with the airborne race of balloonists . They have some success, and decide to build balloons of their own to join them in the sky. They even observe the balloonists spawning over their camp. Scientifically, this is a triumph. But as they breed, the balloonists secrete a spray which is both hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac. It is the finest high on two worlds -- and the whole Food camp trips out. Ana Dimitrova sat at a window table of a Greek tea shop in Glasgow, writing industriously on her daily letter to Ahmed. She did not send them all. That would be ruinously extravagant! But every week, at the end of Sunday, she spread them out on a table and copied out the best parts, enough to fill four dots in a microfiche. It was never enough. She leaned forward into the northern sunshine, left elbow on the table next to the cooling cup of strong, sweet tea, head resting on the hand, oblivious to the noise of the lorries and the double-decker yellow-and-green buses on the Gallowgate road outside, and wrote: -- it seems so long since last I kissed your lovely eyelids and wished you good-by. I miss you, dear Ahmed. This place is terrible! Terrible and strange. It smells of petroleum and internal-combustion engines, the smell of wicked waste. Well. They have only another five or ten years and then their North Sea oil will be gone, and then we will see. The headaches have been very bad, I think because these languages are so uncouth. It is actual pain to speak in them. It will be all right, though, dear Ahmed. The headaches pass. The ache in my heart lasts much longer -- "More tea, miss?" The harsh English words crashed into Nan's ear. She winced and raised her head. "Thank you, no." "We'll be serving lunch in just a bit, miss. The souvlaki's very tasty today, cook says." "No, no. Thank you. I must be getting back to my hotel." She had dawdled longer over the letter than was right, she thought remorsefully, and now she had to hurry, and the headache was back. It was not just that the woman was speaking English. It was the way she spoke it, the rough Scottish consonants that buzzed and rattled in the ear. Although in truth it did not much matter what language, or at least what non-Slavic language, she was hearing. The headaches were more frequent and more severe. It was probably because she had become a diplomatic translator. The international vocabulary of science was easy enough to translate, since so many of the words had the same roots in all languages. In diplomacy the risks were greater, the nuances subtler and more threatening. The choice of an adjective meant nothing in translating a report on X-ray polarimetry, but in a speech about mid-Atlantic ridge it might mean the difference between peace and war. Nan paid her check and dodged cautiously across Gallowgate, between the towering buses that so mischievously raced along the wrong side of the street. The diesel stink made her cough, and coughing made her headache worse. And she was late. She was to be picked up for the airport at one,. and it was past noon already. She walked virtuously past the shops (so bright and gay!) without looking in a single window. There were styles here that Sofia would not see for another year. But why bother? It would have been nice to buy new clothes to wear for Ahmed. With away, Nan usually wore what was easiest to put on, and least likely to attract attention. Evenings she spent alone when she could, listening to music and studying grammar. Her best treat was to reread the sparse letters he had returned for her prodigious outflow. Although they were not stimulating. From what he said. Son of Kung sounded a grim and awful place. She cut through a comer of the Green to walk along the riverside toward her hotel, hoping to avoid the noise and the invisible, but not unsmellable, exhaust from all the vehicles. No use. Lorries rumbled along the embankment, and the sludgy surface of the Clyde itself was pocked with oil tankers and barges and creased with the wake of hydrofoils. How did one live in a place like this? And it all could have been avoided. A little forethought. A little planning. Why did they have to put oil refineries in the middle of a city? Why stain their river with waste and filth, when it could have been a cool oasis? Why be in such a rush to pump the oil from the bottom of the sea, when it could have provided energy, even food, for another hundred generations? Why use oil at all, for that matter -- especially in these packs and swarms of cars and lorries -- when the city could have been built around public transportation, electrically powered, or powered with the hydrogen that Iceland, not so very far away, was so eager to sell. But on Son of Kung... On Son of Kung it could be all different. She wished she could be there. With Ahmed. Not just to be with Ahmed, she told herself stoutly, but to be part of a new world where things could be done properly. Where the mistakes of Earth could be avoided. Where one's children would have a future to look forward to. Hers and Ahmed's children, of course. Nan smiled to herself. She was an honest person, and she admitted to herself that Kungson seemed all the finer because Ahmed was there. If only she were not here ! There were worrisome things between the lines of what he wrote. So many of his expedition had been sick. So many had died, just in the first days -- and his only letters had been in those first days. Why, he himself could have -- No. She would not countenance that thought. There was enough to worry about in other things. In, for example, the picture he had sent of himself. He had looked worryingly thin, but what she had noticed most about the picture was the hand on his shoulder. The person who owned the hand was not visible, but Nan was almost sure it was a woman's hand. And that was even more worrying. "Miss Dimitrova! Hoy, there. Nan! " All at once she perceived that her feet had carried her into the lobby of the hotel, and she was being greeted by a man she almost recognized. Dark, short, plump, a little past middle age; he had a diplomat's smile and wore clothes that, even across the immense old lobby, she was sure were real wool. If not cashmere. He filled in the blank for her. "I'm Tam Gulsmit. Remember? We met at the F.A.O. reception last month." He snapped his fingers for a forkboy. "Your bags are all ready -- unless you care to freshen up? Have time for a drink?" Now she recalled him well. He had been persistent in his attentions, even to the point of lying in wait lor her as she came out of the powder room and drawing her into an offensively close conversation in the hall. She had explained to him that it was no use. It was not merely a question of being in love with someone else. That was not his concern, she did not have to tell him her reasons. It was a matter of socialist morality. V. I. Lenin had said it. Free love was all very well, but who would want to drink from a glass that every passerby had fouled with his lips? (And yet in Moscow, she remembered, the public drinking fountains had just such glasses chained to them, and each one surely smeared with a thousand lips.) Let the Fuel powers do what they liked, partner-swapping, group orgies, whatever. She was not there to pass judgment, but a socialist girl I'mm Sofia did not even smoke in i he street, because she had been taught certain principles of behavior that did not leave her when she grew up. "Sir Tam," she began -- she remembered that he had one of those quaint British handles to his name -- "it is a pleasure to see you again, but I must fly now to New York for the United Nations debate. I have no time -- " "All the time in the world, tweets, that's what I'm here for llov!" tardily, the bellboy rolled up with lus forklift, and that was scandalous, too: her one little zipper bag ilid not need a fuel-guzzling machine to carry it, she had toted it a kilometer at a time herself. Sir IfM Tam chuckled indulgently. "Aren't we quaint? This great, rambling old ruin -- that's the Britishness of it, isn't it? We're great at backing a losing horse long past the point where anyone else would have chucked it in. Lucky for us we can afford it! Now, is there anything else you need to bring?" "But truly, Sir Tam, a car is being sent to take me to the airport. It will be here any minute." "Here already, sweetie. I'm it. Our Government has provided me with a Concorde Three and I'd just rattle around in it by myself. When I heard that a friend of God Menninger's needed a lift, I took the liberty of coming for you myself. You'll like it. There's plenty of room, and we'll make New York in ninety minutes." Scandalous, scandalous! Of course the British could afford anything, ocean of oil under the North Sea, their octopus tendrils already grabbing at the MidAtlantic Ridge. But morally it was so wrong. She had no chance to object. Sir Tam overcame all objections, and before she knew what was happening, she was lifted gently by cherrypicker into -- dear God! -- a supersonic hydrojet. As soon as they belted up, in deep, foamed armchairs with a suction-bottomed decanter and glasses already on a little table between them, the aircraft hurled itself into the air. The acceleration was frightening. The way the ground dropped away beneath them was not to be believed. Strangely, there was less noise than she had expected, far less than the warmup roar of a clamjet "How quiet," she said, leaning away from Sir Tam's casually chummy arm. He chuckled. "That's five thousand kilometers an hour for you. We leave the sound far behind. Do you like it?" "Oh, yes," said Nan, trying to prevent him from pouring her a drink. She failed. "Your voice sounds more like 'oh, no.' " "Well, yes, perhaps that is so. It is terribly wasteful of oil, Sir Tam." "We don't bum oil, sweetie! Pure hydrogen and oxygen -- have to carry them both, this far up. Not an ounce of pollution." "But of course one bums oil, or some other fuel, to make the hydrogen." She wondered if she could keep the conversation on propellant chemistry all the way across the Atlantic, decided not and took a new tack: "It is frightening. One can see nothing from these tiny windows." "What is there to see? You get turned on by clouds, love?" "I have flown the oceans many times. Sir Tam. There is always something. Sometimes icebergs. The sea itself. In a clamjet there is the excitement of the landfall as one approaches Newfoundland or Rio or the Irish Coast. But at twenty-five thousand meters there is nothing." "I couldn't agree with you more," said Sir Tam, unstrapping and moving closer. "If I had my way, there 'd be no windows in the thing at all." Nan moistened her lips with the whiskey and said brightly, "But it is all so exciting. Could you perhaps show me around this aircraft?" "Show you around?" "Yes, please. It is so new to me." "What's to see, love?" Then he shrugged. "Matter of fact, yes, there are a few features I'd like to call to your attention." She stood up gratefully, glad to get his hand off her knee. The headaches had lessened, perhaps because now they were breathing quite pure air instead of the Glaswegian smog, but she was annoyed. He had made it clear that they were the only passengers, that was not deceitful. But she had expected at least the chaperonage of the stewardesses and they, all three of them, had retreated to their little cubbyholes in the aft of the aircraft. The little paneled lounge was far more intimate than she liked. But worse was in store. What she had thought was a service cubicle turned out to be a tiny, complete bedroom suite. With, could one believe it?, a wutcrbed. Easily a metric tonne of profligately wasted mass! For nothing surely but profligately immoral purposes! "Now there," said Sir Tam over her shoulder, "is a feature worth studying. Go ahead. Nan. Let your impulses carry you. Try it out." "Certainly not!" She moved away from his touching hand and added formally, "Sir Tam, I must tell you that I am an engaged person. It is not correct for me to allow myself to be in a situation of this kind. " "How quaint." "Sir Tam!" She was almost shrieking now, and furiously angry, not only with him but with herself. If she had used a tiny bit of inlelligence, she would have known Ihis was coming and could have avoided it. A delicate hint that this was the wrong time. A suggestion of, what? Of a social disease, if necessary. Anything. But she was trapped, the waterbed before her, this gland case behind, already with his lips against her ear and whispering buzzingly so that her headache exploded again. Desperately she caught at a straw. "Didn't -- didn't you mention Godfrey Menninger?" "What?" "Godfrey Menninger. The father of my good friend. Captain Marge Menninger. You spoke of him in the hotel." He was silent for a moment, neither releasing her or trying to pull her close. "Do you know God Menninger well?" "Only through his daughter. I was able to keep her from going to jail once. " His arm was definitely less tight. After a moment he patted her gently and stepped away. "Let's have a drink," he said, ringing for the stewardesses. The satyr's smile had been replaced by the diplomat's. The conversation was back on its tracks again, for which Ana was intensely grateful. She even managed to return to the little cubicle with the armchairs, and to persuade the stewardess to bring her a nice cup of strong chai instead of the whiskey Gulsmit suggested. He seemed greatly interested in the story of Margie Menninger 's little episode. In every detail: had they been fingerprinted? Was the People's Magistrate a court of record, whatever that was? Had Ana spoken to unyone in the militia about the incident later on, and if so, what had they said? Such trivial things seemed to interest him, but Nan was contented to go on dredging memories up for him all the way across the Atlantic, as long as it meant his keeping his hands to himself. When she was wrung dry, he leaned back, nursing the new drink the stewardess had poured for him and squinting out at the blue-black and cloudless sky. "Very interesting," he said at last. "That poor little girl. Of course I've known her since she was tiny." It had not occurred to Ana that Margie Menninger had ever been tiny. She let it pass and Sir Tam added, "And dear old God. Have you known him long?" "Not in a personal sense," she said, careful not to add lying to the fault of being untruthful. "Of course he is of great importance in cultural matters. I too am deeply concerned about culture." "Culture," repeated Sir Tam meditatively. He seemed about to produce a real smile, but managed to retain the diplomatic one instead. "You are a dear, Nan," he said, and shook his wristwatch to make the red numerals blink on. "Ah, almost there," he said regretfully. "But of course you must allow me to escort you to your hotel."    The morning session of the U.N. was exhausting. There was no time for a real lunch because she had to post-edit the computer translations of what she had already translated once that moming before they could be printed. And the afternoon session was one long catfight. The debate was on fishing rights for Antarctic krill. Because it was food, tempers ran high. And because sea lore is almost as old a human area of interest as eating, the translation was demanding. There were no places where she could coast, no technical words that were new-coined and common to almost all languages. Every language had developed its own words for ships, seamanship and, above all, eating, at the dawn of language itself. Only three of Nan's languages were in use, Bulgarian, English and Russian. The Pakistanis were not involved in the debate, and there were plenty of others proficient in the Romance languages. So there were long periods when she could listen without having to speak. But there was no rest even in those periods; she needed to remember every word she could. The U.N. delegates had the awful habit of quoting each other at length -- sometimes with approval, sometimes with a sneer, always with the risk of some tiny hairsplit that she had to get just right. Her headaches were immense. That was, of course, the price you paid for having the two hemispheres of your brain surgically sliced apart. Not to mention the stitching back of parts of them that kept you from stumbling into things tions that left your neck swollen and your eyes bulging for weeks at a time, and sometimes caused seizures indistinguishable from epilepsy. That had been a surprise. They hadn't told her about those things when she signed up to become a split-brain translator. Not really; you never did know what pain was going to be until you had it. What made the whole day an order of magnitude worse was that she was starved for sleep. Sir Tam had followed her to her very door, and then planted a fool inside it. His hands had been all over her in the limousine, all the way in from the airport. The only way she could think to get rid of him was by pretending such exhaustion that she could not stay awake another second, even though it was just after lunch. New York time. And then she found she had talked herself into it. So she did go to sleep. And woke up before midnight with the chance for any more sleep gone. And whal was there to do with the eleven hours before the morning session would begin? A letter to Ahmed, of course. A few hours with English irregular verbs. Another hour or so listening to the tapes she had just made, to check her accent. But then she was tired and fretful. What she needed most was a walk from her apartment past the university into the fresh morning air of the park, but that was ten thousand kilometers away in Sofia. In New York you did not go walking in the fresh morning air. And so she had turned up for duty in the translators' booth feeling as though a hard day's work was already behind her, and her head throbbing and pounding in two different rhythms, one in each temple -- Her mind had wandered. She forced it back. It was Sir Tam asking for the floor now, and she had to put his words into Bui garian. His face was purple-red and he was shouting. With one half of her brain Nan wondered at that, while the other half was automatically processing his words. So much passion about such little fish! Not even fish. They were some sort of crustacean, weren't they? To Nan, "krill" was something that oldfashioned peasant grannies stirred into their stews to give them body. It came as a grayishwhite, powdery substance that you bought in jars labeled "fish protein concentrate." You knew that it was good for you, but you didn't like to think about what organs and oddities were ground up to make it. In food-rich Bulgaria, nobody grew excited about the stuff. But Sir Tam was excited. The Fuel Bloc needed it desperately, he shouted. Had to have it! Was entitled to it, by all the laws of civilized humanity! The Fuel Bloc already possessed the fleets of long-range factory ships that could seine the cold Antarctic Ocean. He quoted Pacem in Maris and the British-Portuguese Treaty of A.D. #. The tiny bodies of the creatures that made up the krill, he declaimed, were absolutely essential to British agriculture, being the very best kind of fertilizer for their crops. At which the Uruguayan delegate interrupted, snarling, "Agriculture! You are using the essential protein to feed to animals. " "Of course," Sir Tam replied stoutly. "We are not blessed with the advantages given your country, Senor Corrubias. We do not have immense plains on which our cattle can graze. In order to feed them properly, we must have imports -- " Someone in the American delegation laughed out loud, not a pleasant laugh, and the Uruguayan drummed on his desk derisively. "So it is cattle you feed. Sir Gulsmit? But we have it on the evidence of your own Ministry of Health that you give the krill to your cats and budgies! Do you then make minced kitten patties, perhaps? Or fresh chops of parrakeet?" Sir Tam looked long-sufferingly at the President Pro Tern. "Sir, I must ask the courtesy of the floor." The President was a spare Ghanaian who had not once glanced toward any speaker. He did not do so now. His eyes stayed on the letters he was signing, one by one, as his secretary put them before him. He said, "I would request of the delegate from Uruguay that he reserve his remarks until the delegate from the United Kingdom has concluded." Sir Tam beamed graciously. "Thank you. In any case, I am almost finished. Of course, some part of our imports of krill do find their way into pet food, some part into protein additives for the justly famous British beef, some part into fertilizer to help us grow the vital foods that nature has otherwise denied us. Is that a matter for this body? I think not. What is of concern is the behavior of member states in their conduct in world affairs. We infringe no international treaty by continuing in the long British tradition of the sea, in harvesting what is freely available to all in international waters, and of course in making suitable use of those pelagic areas which, by existing treaties freely arrived at by the member states, have long been reserved to us. But even this is not relevant to the motion before us today! That motion, I remind you, relates only to the proposal for a United Nations peacekeeping team to supervise the Antarctic fisheries. 'Peacekeeping,' my dear fellow delegates. A team to keep the peace. And therefore our position is clear. No such team is needed. The peace has been kept. There have been no incidents. There certainly will be none of our making. The United Nations has better things to do than to seek solutions for problems that do not exist. " And he sat down, managing to do so with a bow to the President Pro Tern, a sardonic grin for the Uruguayan and, yes, even a wink for Ana, up in the translator's booth! She shook her head in distress at this frivolous-minded person. But perhaps he was serious after all, for he was already writing something on a scrap of paper and beckoning a page, even as the Ghanaian finished signing his letters, slapped his portfolio shut, glanced at the clock, and managed not to catch the Uruguayan delegate's eye as he said, "I am informed that the address of the next delegate may occupy a substantial period of time. Since it is now four, I suggest we recess this debate until ten o'clock tomorrow morning." A buzz rose up from the floor. Nan leaned back for a long moment, massaging her temples, before she stood up and allowed herself to contemplate the next half hour: A quick meal, a bath, and then a lovely long sleep -- No. It was not to be. As she opened the door to the booth, the page dashed up, out of breath, and handed her the note from Sir Tam. It said: Absolutely essential you attend have the pleasure of escorting you. So there was no rest, no rest. She might have refused the invitation. But Sir Tam had taken the precaution of telling the head of the Bulgarian mission to the United Nations about it, and she was no sooner in her room than he was on the phone insisting she go. She bathed quickly and dressed in what she guessed might be appropriate, then trotted back across the street from her hotel to the great quaint oblong building, so unlike its newer and fortress-like neighbors. Her head was pounding all the way. Diffidently she whispered her name to the guard at the Distinguished Visitors Lounge. He consulted a list, smiled frostily, and let her in. What a tumult! How much smoke, and what odors of food and drinks! And there was. Sir Tam, to be sure, tiny bouquet of flowers in one hand, the other hand on the shoulder of a plump, dark, grinning man whom Nan did not at once recognize but who was the very Uruguayan with whom Sir Tam had been exchanging insults an hour before. "Nan! Ho, Nan! Over here!" He was beckoning her to him. She could not think of a reason for refusing, and knew before it happened that Gulsmit would be touching her again. And it happened just that way. The flowers turned out to be a bouquet of parma violets, outrageously out of season and, of course, lor her. Gulsmit insisted on pinning the corsage on her demure bodice himself, taking much more time over it than was necessary, while (he others in his little conversational group jovially pretended not to notice. It angered Nan that the Scot should put himself on such terms of evident intimacy. Especially in this hyperactive atmosphere, where people who had been posturing ihreat gestures at each other all day were now laughing and mingling and drinking together. Not only lhat. Every person in this little group was from a rival bloc. What would (he head of her delegation say? Sir Tam and the Saudi were Power. The Uruguayans were People. So were the two jolly Chinese women in their spike-heeled shoes and neo-Mao jackets of silk brocade and metal thread. "You'll never guess. Nan," grinned Sir Tam, after introducing her, "what our friends have up their sleeves for tomon-ow. Tell her. Liao-tsen." The older of the Chinese women laid her hand on Ana's arm. smiling. Clearly she had been drinking a great deal. Her consonants were luzzy, but she said comprehensibly enough: "The People's Republic of Bengal will put forward an emergency resolution. It is a very pretty resolution. Miss Dimitrova. All about 'the alleged multinational expedition of the Food Exporting Powers' and their 'acts of violence against the natives of Son of Kung.' "Violence? What is this about violence?" demanded Nan, startled and suddenly fearful. If there were fighting on Kungson -- If Ahmed found himself in the middle of a war -- "That's the funny part, dear girl," chuckled Sir Tam. "It seems your friend God's little junket has begun shooting down harmless balloonists. But not to worry. I don't think it's going to pass. It's not a party matter, is it, Senor Corrubias?" The Uruguayan shrugged. "There has been no official consultation among the people's Republics, that is true. " "And unofficial?" Gulsmit probed. Corrubias glanced at the elder Chinese woman, who nodded permission, and said, "I can tell you my personal opinion, and that is that the acts of violence we have heard described are not of much importance. Can one really get upset about rubber jack-o '-lanterns floating around in the sky?" "There is also the matter of the underground race," said the Chinese woman. She took another sip of her drink, looking merrily mysterious over the top of it at Sir Tam, before going on comfortably, "But that too -- Well. A few burrows broken into, that's all. After all, how can we be sure that the creatures who inhabit them are indeed intelligent? We would not object to a Nebraska farmer, for example, opening a mole run as he plowed his com paddies." "One might also," said Ana boldly, surprising herself at the harshness of her voice, "speak of the crustacean race which has suffered some casualties." But Sir Tam stopped her by a gentle pressure on the shoulder. She did not protest. She had suddenly realized that it was Ahmed's group that had caused those casualties, about which she knew so worry ingly little. "I would really enjoy watching you two fight it out," said Sir Tam, laughing to take the menace out of his words. But Nan wondered if he didn't really mean it. She also wondered why he was so carefully and publicly possessive of her, arm around her shoulder, hovering over passing tray. Surely all these foreign people would suppose they had been in bed together! She blushed at the thought. It would have been bad enough to be guilty of an immoral dalliance, like any common tart, and to have it known. But she was not even guilty! The name without the game, how awful! Why would Sir Tam go out of his way to create such an impression? Could it be that the lax morality of the Fuel people was such that he valued the appearance of sexual adventure as much as the relationship itself? Was he trying to show that he was still sexually potent? And what sort of person was she living among here? "Please excuse me for a moment," she said, glancing about as though looking for a woman's w.c. But as soon as she was well away from Sir Tam, she circled around the white-paneled room to the buffet tables. At least she would bring up her blood sugar. Perhaps that would relieve the headaches and the exhaustion, and then she would think of a way to relieve the pressure from Sir Tam. The table would have been lavish even in Sofia! But was it not the Tibetans who were giving this party? And why did they feel obliged to spread so wasteful a display of food? Caviar which certainly did not come from the Himalayas. Delicate fruit ices that surely were unknown in their sparse, high valleys. Pates in the original wooden boxes from France. And look what they had done! The centerpieces were carved replicas of the races of Kungson! A balloonist, half a meter thick, in butter! A crustacean carved from what looked like strawberry sherbet! A long, almost ratlike creature -- was it a burrower? -- made from foie-gras! And there standing next to her was a distinguished looking gray-haired man who was directing a paleplate from the display. A spoonful of the burrower, a few slices of some sort of meat, a croissant, a scoop from the balloonist to butter the roll. He caught her eye and smiled pleasantly without speaking. It was all incredibly ostentatious. It quite took Ana's appetite away. She looked away from the food and saw Sir Tam across the room, eyes on her. Strangely, he nodded encouragement and pointed -- to whom? To the graying tall man next to her? She looked more carefully. Had they ever met? No. But he had a face she seemed to know. From a photograph, she thought; but a photograph that had meant something to her. She turned to speak to him, and the pale-haired other man was suddenly between them, polite but in a state of readiness. For what? Did they think she was an assassin? Then she remembered where she had seen the face. "You're Mr. Godfrey Menninger, " she said. His expression was inquiring. "Yes?" "We've never met, but I've seen your picture in a newspaper. With your daughter. I'm Ana Dimitrova, and I met your daughter a few months ago in Sofia." "Of course you did! The angel of rescue. It's all right, Teddy," he said to the younger man, who stepped back and began collecting silverware for Menninger's plate. "How nice to meet you at last. Ana. Margie's here somewhere. Not near the food, poor thing. She has her mother's metabolism. She can't even look at a layout like this without putting on a kilo. Let's go find her so you can say hello." Captain Menninger was sipping her Perrier water and allowing a fifty-year-old Japanese attache to think he was making headway against her defenses when she heard her father's voice behind her. "Margie, dear. A surprise for you. You remember Ana Dimitrova?" "No." Marge studied the woman carefully, not competitively, but in the manner of someone trying to learn a terrain from a map. Then the card file in her head clicked over. "Yes," she corrected herself. "The Bulgarian woman. How nice to see you again. " It was not anything of the kind, and she intended the Bulgarian bint to understand that. On the other hand, Margie had no particular wish to make an enemy of her either. There might be a time when her connection with that Pak she was screwing -- Dulla? Yes. Ahmed Dulla, member of the first Peeps expedition to Klong -- could be a useful line to pursue. So she turned to the Japanese and said: "Tetsu, I'd like you to meet Nan Dimitrova. She was such a help to me in Bulgaria. You know how foolish I am about making jokes, I just can't help this mouth of mine, it says things that get me into the most terrible trouble. And so, of course, I said something ridiculously awful. Political, you know. It could have had really sticky consequences. And along came Nan, total stranger, just a good person, and got me out of it. How is that nice young man you were with. Nan?" "Ahmed is on Kungson," said offense, but she was not obliged to like this plump blonde's nasty little put-down games. "Is he! Why, that's a coincidence. You remember Dr. Dalehouse, of course? He's there too. Perhaps they'll meet." She saw that her father's aide had just signaled something to him, and added, "Daddy, you're looking worried. Am I saying something awful again?" Godfrey Menninger smiled. "What I'm worried about is that if I'm going to give you a lift to Boston, it's time we were on our way. You do remember you have a date at M.I.T. tonight?" "Oh, dear. I'd forgotten." Wholly untrue; Margie had not forgotten the time of her date, which was the following morning, and she had no doubt that her father had not forgotten either. "Also," he went on, "you'll be sneezing and scratching if we stay here much longer. Or had you also forgotten that you are allergic to flowers?" Margie had never in her life been allergic to anything, but she said, "You do take such good care of me, Daddy. Nan, I'm sorry this was so short, but it's really nice seeing you again. And, Tetsu, don't be a stranger next time you're in Houston. Stop by and say hello." The Japanese hissed and bowed. Of course, Margie reflected, she could be out of town if he ever did happen to show up in Houston. Not that that mattered. She had already accomplished her objective. Past a certain age, even going to bed with a man did not give you quite as firm a grip on his emotions as communicating the impression that you certainly would like to, if you ever got the chance. In her father's car, with the bodyguard-aide sitting in front, she said, "Now what was that all about, poppa?" "Maybe your little Bulgarian friend isn't quite as much of a country girl as she seems. Teddy swept her as a matter of routine. There was a microphone in her corsage." "Her? Bugged? That's a crock!" "That's a fact," he corrected, "Maybe her delegation put it on her, who knows? That place was full of sharks. It could have been anyone of them. And speaking of sharks -- " "You want to know what I picked up," she said, nodding, and told him what the Japanese had said about the Bengali resolution. He leaned back in the seat. "Just the usual U.N. Mischief Night, I'd say. You turn over my garbage can, I throw a dead cat on your roof. Are they going to press it?" "He didn't say, poppa. He didn't seem to take it very seriously." Her father rubbed the spot below his navel thoughtfully. "Of course, with the Peeps you never know. Heir-of-Mao has an investment in Klong. The Bengalis wouldn't be starting anything they didn't clear with the Forbidden City." Margie's hair prickled erect at the back of her neck. "Are you saying I should worry? I don't want my mission withdrawn!" "Oh, no, no chance of that, honey. Relax, will you? You're too much like your old lady. She never did learn to swing with the action. When the P.L.O. kidnapped you, I thought she'd have a nervous breakdown." "She was scared shitless, poppa. And you never turned a hair." Not even, she thought, when your own three-year-old daughter was bawling into the jetliner's radio. "But I knew you were going to be all right, honey. I really did." "Well, I'm not bringing that up again, oT buddy." Margie folded her hands in her lap and stared out the window. Between the U.N. complex and the airport there was no building, no street, that Margie had not seen a dozen times before. She was not really seeing them now. But they helped spur and clarify her thoughts, the long tandem buses hobbling down the slow lanes, the apartment dwellers walking their dogs, school kids, stores, police on their tricycles, sidewalk vendors with their hand-made jewelry and pocket computers. Thomas Jefferson might have looked out of his stagecoach as he returned to Monticello at the slaves weeding his crops in just the same detached but proprietary way. She said slowly, "Listen, poppa. I want to get our mission reinforced. Now." "What's the hurry?" "I don't know, but there's a hurry. I want it done defore the Peeps and the Greasies cut us off at the roots, or get enough of their own people up there to own Kungson. I want us there first and biggest, because I want it all." "Shit, honey. Didn't they teach you about priorities at the Point? There's the krill business, and the mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the Greasies threatening to raise their prices again -- do you have any idea how tough all this is? I've only got one stack, and there's only room for one thing at the top of it. " "No, poppa, I don't want to be told how hard it is. Don't you understand this is a whole planet?" "Of course I do, but -- " "No. No buts. I guess you don't really understand what having a whole planet to play with means. For us, poppa, all for us. To start from scratch with. To develop in a systematic manner. Find all the fossil fuels, develop them in a rational way. Locate the cities where they don't destroy arable land. Plant crops where they won't damage the soil. Develop industry where it's most convenient. Plan the population. Let it grow as it is needed, but not to where you have a surplus: good, strong, self-reliant people. American people, poppa. Maybe the place stinks now, but give it a hundred years and you'd rather be there than here, I promise. And l want it." Godfrey Menninger sighed, looking in love and in some awe at the oldest and most troublesome of his children. "You're worse than your mother ever was," he said ruefully. "Well, I hear what you say. The Poles owe us one. I'll see what I can do. "    TechTowTwo sprawled over the bank of the Charles River, more than twice the cubage of all the old brick buildings put together. There were no classrooms in Tech Tower Two. There was no administration, either. It was all for research, from the computer storage in the subbasements to the solar-radiation experiments that decorated the roof with saucers and bow-ties. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a long tradition of involvement with space exploration, going back even before there was any. Or any that did not take place on a printed page. As early as the #s there had been a design class whose entire curriculum revolved around the creation of products for export to the inhabitants of the third planet of the star Arcturus. The fact that there was no known planet of Arcturus, let alone inhabitants of it, did not disturb either teacher or students. Techpersons were used to unhinging their imaginations on demand. In the Cambridge community that centered around M.I.T., Harvard, the Garden Street observatories and all the wonderlands of Route #, there had been designers of interstellar spacecraft before the first Sputnik went into orbit, anatomists of extraterrestrials when there was no proof of life anywhere off the surface of the Earth, and specialists in interplanetary communications before anyone was on the other end of the line. Margie Menninger had taken six months of graduate studies there, dashing from Tech to Harvard. She had been careful to keep her contacts bright. The woman Margie wanted to see power in the Tech world even if she had not also held the title of Assistant Dean of the College. She had arranged a breakfast meeting at Margie's request, and had turned out five department heads on order. The Dean introduced them around the table and said, "Make it good now, Margie. Department heads aren't crazy about getting up so early in the morning." Margie sampled her scrambled eggs. "For this kind of food I don't blame them," she said, putting down her fork. "Let me get right to it. I have about ten minutes' worth of holes of the autochthones of Son of Rung, alias Klong. No sound. Just visible." She leaned back to the sideboard and snapped a switch, and the first of the holographic pictures condensed out of a pinkish glow. "You've probably seen most of this stuff anyway," she said. "That's a Krinpit. They are one of the three intelligent, or anyway possibly intelligent, races on Klong, and the only one of the lot that is urban. In a moment you'll see some of their buildings. They're open at the top. Evidently the Krinpit don't worry much about weather. Why they have buildings at all is anyone's guess, but they do. They would seem much the easiest of the three races to conduct trade with, but unfortunately the Peeps have a head start with them. No doubt we'll catch up. " The head of the design staff was a lean young black woman who had limited her breakfast to orange juice and black coffee, and was already through with it. "Catch up at what, Captain Menninger?" she asked. Margie took her measure and refused combat. "For openers. Dr. Ravenel, I'd like to see your people create some trade goods. For all three races. They're all going to be our customers one of these days." The economist took his eyes off the holo of a Krinpit coracle to challenge Margie. "Customers implies two-way trade. What do you think these, ah, Klongans are going to have to sell us that's worth the trouble of shipping it all those light-years?" Margie grinned. "I thought you'd never ask." She pulled an attache case off the floor and opened it on the table in front of her, pushing the plate of eggs out of the way. "So far," she said, "we don't exactly have any manufactured objects. But take a look at this." She passed around several ten-centimeter squares of a filmy, resilient substance. "That's the stuff the balloonists' hydrogen sacs are made out of. It's really pretty special stuff -- I mean, it holds gaseous H;, with less than one per cent leakage in a twenty-four hour period. We could supply quite a lot of that, if there was a specialty market for it . " "Don't you have to kill a balloonist to get it?" "Good question," Margie nodded to the economist, with a lying smile. "Actually, no. That is. there are other, non-sentient races with the same body structure, although this one is, I believe, from one of the sentients. How about a market? If I remember correctly, the Germans had to use the second stomach of the ox when they were building the Hindenburg. " "I see," said the economist gravely. "All we need to do is contact a few Zeppelin manufacturers." There was a general titter. "I'm sure," said Margie steadily, "that you will have some better idea than that. Oh, and I ought to mention one thing. I brought my checkbook. There's a National Science Foundation grant for research and development that's waiting for someone to apply for it." And for that gift too, I thank you, poppa, she thought. The economist had not become the head of a major department of the faculty without learning when to retreat. "I didn't mean to brush you off, Captain Menninger. This is actually a pretty exciting challenge. What else have you got for us?" "Well, we have a number of samples that haven't been studied very carefully. Frankly, they aren't really supposed to be here. Camp Detrick doesn't know they're gone yet." The group stirred. The Dean said quickly, "Margie, I think we all get the same picture when you mention Camp Detrick. Is there anything connected with biological warfare in this?" "Certainly not! No, believe me, that doesn't come into it at all. I sometimes go out of channels, I admit, but what do you guess they'd do to me if I broke security on something like that?" "Then why Camp Detrick?" "Because these are alien organisms," Margie explained. "Except for the sample of balloonist tissue, you'll notice that every item I've got here is in a doublewrapped, heat-sealed container. The outside has been acid-washed and UV-sterilized. No, wait -- " she added, grinning. Everybody at the table had begun looking at their fingertips, and there was a perceptible movement away from the samples of tissue on the table. "Those balloonist samples are okay. The rest, maybe not so okay. They've been pretty carefully gone over. There don't seem to be any pathogens or allergens. But naturally you'll want to use care in handling them." "Thanks a lot. Captain," said the designer stiffly. "How can you be so sure about the tissue?" "I ate some three days ago," she said. She had their full attention now, and swept on: "I should point out that the grant naturally includes whatever you need to insure safe handling. Now, this group are plant samples. They're photosynthetic, and their principal response is in the infrared range. Interesting for you agronomists? Right. And these over here are supposed to be art objects. These come from the Krinpit, the ones that looked like squashed cockroaches. The things are supposed to 'sing.' That is, if you're a Krinpit and you rub them on your shell they make some interesting sounds. If you don't have a chitinous shell, you can use a credit card. " The woman from Design picked up one of them gingerly, peering at it through the transparent plastic. "You said you wanted us to develop some kind of trading goods?" "I sure do." The last thing Margie pulled out of her dispatch case was a red-covered mimeographed jacket. "As you can see, this is classified, but that's just military hangups. It will be turned over to the U.N. in about ten days anyway, or most of it will. It's the most comprehensive report we've been able to prepare on the three principal races of Klong." All six of the faculty members at the table reached for it at once, but the Design woman was fastest. "Um," she said, flipping through it. "I've got a graduate student who would eat this up. Can I show it to him?" "Better than that. Let's leave this copy, and the samples, with our friends, and let's you and I go talk to him." Fifteen minutes later, Margie had succeeded in getting rid of the department head, and she and a slim, excitable young man named Walter Pinson were head to head. "Think you can handle it?" asked Margie. "Yes! I mean, well, it's a big job -- " Margie put her hand on his arm. "I'm sure you can. I'd really appreciate it it you'd tell me how you plan to go about it, though." Pinson thought for a moment. "Well, the first thing is to figure out what their needs are," he offered. "That's fascinating! It must be pretty difficult. I would hardly know where to start. Offhand, I'd say their biggest need, all of them, is just staying alive. As you'll see, everything on the planet spends a lot of its time trying to eat everything else, including the other intelligent races. " "Cannibalism?" "Well, I don't think you can call it that. They're different races. And there are a lot of other species that are trying to eat the intelligent ones." "Predators," said Pinson, nodding." Well, there's a starting point right there. Let's see. For the predators like the balloonists, for instance, anything that would set them on fire would help protect the sentients -- of course," he added, frowning, "we'd have to make sure that these were used only to defend the sentients against lower forms of life." "Of course!" said Margie, shocked. "We wouldn't want to give them weapons to start a war with!" She glanced at her watch. "I've got an idea, Walter. I didn't have much of a breakfast, and it's getting on toward lunch. Why don't you and I go where we can talk about these, ah, implements for self-protection?"    When she got back to her hotel, there was a taped message from her father: "To hear is to obey. Catch a news broadcast." She turned on the bedside TV while she packed, hunting for an all-news station. She was rewarded with five minutes about the latest Boston political corruption scandals, and then an in-depth interview with the Red Sox's new designated hitter. But at last there was a recap of the top international story of the day: "In a surprise move at the United Nations this morning, the top Polish delegate, Wladislas Prczensky, announced that his government has accepted the challenge presented by the Bengali resolution. The Food powers have agreed to send out an investigatory commission, given broad powers to investigate the alleged cases of brutal treatment of native races on the planet whimsically called 'Klong,' or 'Son of Rung.' There will be no representatives of major powers such as the United States or the Soviet Union on the commission, which will be made up of U.N. peacekeeping officers from Poland itself, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and Bulgaria." Danny Dalehouse reached out to grab the theodolite as it tipped in the soft ground. Morrissey grinned and apologized. "Must've lost my balance. " "Or else you're stoned again," said Dalehouse. He was angry -- not just at Morrissey. In the candor of his heart he knew that most of his anger was at the fact that Kappelyushnikov was flying and he was not. "Anyway," he went on, "you've knocked this run in the head. Next time why don't you just go sleep it off?" They had all been freaked out by the stuff the balloonists had sprayed on them, and from time to time, for days afterward, all of them had recurring phases of lust and euphoria. Morrissey's were not only more intense, but Dalehouse was pretty sure the biochemist was still exposing himself. He had discovered that something in the semen or sperm of the male balloonists was highly hallucinogenic -- better than that, was the long-sought-after true aphrodisiac, fabled in song and story. It wasn't Morrissey's fault that his researches put him clear out of it from time to time. But he shouldn't have insisted on helping with the theodolite readings. Far overhead Kappelyushnikov's cluster of bright yellow balloons gyrated as the pilot experimented with controlling his altitude to take advantage of the winds at various levels. When he was finished tracking them, they would have basic information that could allow them to cruise the skies. Then Dalehouse 's turn would come. But he was tired of waiting. "Cappy," he said into the radio, "we've lost the readings. Might as well come on down." Harriet was walking toward them as Kappelyushnikov's answer came through. It was in Russian; Harriet heard, and flinched irritably. That was in character. She had been a perfect bitch about the whole thing, Dalehouse thought. When they came back to normal after that first incredible trip, she had flamed at him: "Animal! Don't you know you could have got me pregnant?" It had never occurred to him to ask. Nor had it occurred to her, at the time. It was no use reminding her that she had been as eager as he. She had retreated into her hard defiantspinster shell. And ever since she had been ten times as upright as before, and fifty times as nasty to anyone who made sexual remarks in her presence or even, as with Kappelyushnikov just now, used some perfectly justifiable bad language. "I've got some new tapes for you," Harriet sniffed. "Any progress?" "Certainly there's progress, Dalehouse. There's a definite grammar. I'll brief the whole camp on it after the next meal." She glanced up at Cappy, having a last fling with his balloon as half a dozen of the Klongan gasbags soared around him, and retreated. A definite grammar. Well, there was no use trying to hurry Harriet. Preliminary Studies on a First Contact with Subtechnological Sentients seemed very far away! Dalehouse counted up the score. It was not impressive. They had made no contact at all with the crablike things called Krinpit, or with the borrowers . The gasbags had been hanging around quite a lot since the day they had showered the expedition with their milt. But they did not come close enough for the kind of contact Danny Dalehouse wanted. They bounced and swung hundreds of meters in the air most of the time, descending lower only when most of the camp was away, or asleep. No doubt they had been trained to avoid ground-limited creatures through eons of predation. But it made it hard for Danny. At least, with the gasbags in sight, rifle microphones had been able to capture quite a lot of their strident, singing dialogue -- if dialogue was what it was. Harriet said she detected structure. Harriet said it was not bird songs, or cries of alarm. Harriet said she would teach him to speak to them. But what Harriet said was not always to be believed, Danny Dalehouse thought. The other thing he thought was that they needed a different translator. The split-brain operation facilitated language learning, but it had several drawbacks. It sometimes produced bad physical effects, including long-lasting pain. Once in a while it produced personality changes. And it didn't always work. A person who had no gift for languages to begin with came out of surgery still lacking the gift. In Harriet's case, Danny would have guessed all three were true. They had transmitted all the tapes to Earth anyway. Sooner or later the big semantic computers at Johns Hopkins and Texas AM would be checking in, and Harriet's skills, or lack of them, would stop mattering so much. What Danny needed, or at least what Danny wanted, so badly he could taste it, was to be up there in the sky with one of the gasbags, one on one, learning a language in the good old-fashioned way. Anything else was a compromise. They'd tried everything within their resources. Free-floating instrumented balloons with sensors programmed to respond to the signatures of life; wolf traps for the Krinpit; buried microphones for the burro wen;; the rifle mikes and the zoom-lensed cameras for the gasbags. They had kilometers of tape, with pictures and sounds of all manner of jumping, crawling, wriggling things, and hardly in all the endless hours as much as ten minutes that was any use to Danny Dalehouse, Still, something had been accomplished. Enough for him to have composed a couple of reports to go back to Earth. Enough even for his jealous colleagues at M.S.U. and the Double-A-L to pore over eagerly, even if not enough to satisfy Danny. It was still learning, even if much of it was negative. The first thing to perish was the pretty fable of three independent intelligent races living in some sort of beneficent cooperation and harmony. There was no cooperation. At least, they had seen no signs of that, and many to the contrary. The burrowers seemed never to interact with the others at all. The gasbags and the Krinpit did, but not in any cooperative or harmonious way. The balloonists never touched ground, as far as Danny had seen, or at least not on purpose. There were at least a dozen species that enjoyed eating balloonists when they could catch them, sleek brown creatures that looked a little like stub-winged bats, froglike leapers, smaller arthropods than the Krinpit -- not least of them, the Krinpit themselves. If a gasbag ever drifted low enough for one of them to reach it, it was dead. So the entire lives of the balloonists, from spawn to fodder, were spent in the air, and their ultimate burial was always in the digestive tract of some ground-bound race; so tawdry a fate for so pretty a species!    Kappelyushnikov was coming in, low and fast, tossed by the lowlevel winds. He pulled the ripcord on his balloon at five meters and dropped like a stone, wriggling out of the harness to fall free. He tumbled over and over as he landed, then got up, rubbing himself, and ran to catch the deflated balloon cluster as it scudded before the breeze. Danny winced, contemplating his own first flight. The last little bit of ballooning was going to be the hardest. He turned to help Cappy pick up the fabric, and a rifle-shot next to his head made him duck and swear. He spun around, furious. "What the hell are you up to, Morrissey?" The biochemist put the rifle at shoulder-arms and saluted the tumbling form of one of the hovering gasbags. "Just harvesting another specimen, Danny," he said cheerfully. He had judged height and wind-drift with precision, and the collapsed bag was dropping almost at their feet. "Ah, shit," he said in disgust. "Another female." "Really?" said Danny, staring at what looked like an immense erection. "Are you sure." "Fooled me too," Morrissey grinned. "No, the ones with the schlongs aren't the males. They aren't schlongs. I mean, they aren't penises. These folks don't make love like you and I, Danny. The females sort of squirt their eggs out to float around in the air, and then the boys come out and whack off onto them. " "When did you find all that out?" Dalehouse was annoyed; the rule of the expedition was that each of them shared discoveries as soon as they were made. "When you were bugged at me for being stoned out of my mind," Morrissey said. "I think it has to do with the way they generate their hydrogen. Solar flares seem to be involved. So when they saw our lights, they thought it was a flare -- and that's when they spawned. Only we happened to be underneath and so we got sprayed with, uh, with -- " "I know what we got sprayed with," Dalehouse said. "Yeah! You know, Danny, when I took up this career, they made dissecting specimens sound pretty tacky -- but every time I go near one of the males' sex glands, I get high. I'm beginning to like this line of work." "Do you have to kill them all off to do it, though? You'll chase the flock away. Then how am I going to make contact?" Morrissey grinned. He didn't answer. He just pointed aloft. Dalehouse, in justice, had to concede the unspoken point. Whatever emotions the gasbags had, fear did not seem to be among them. Morrissey had shot down nearly a dozen of them, but ever since the first contact, the swarm had stayed almost always within sight. Perhaps it was the lights that attracted them. In the permanent Klongan twilight, there was no such thing as "day." The camp had opted to create one, marked by turning on the whole bank of floodlights at an arbitrary "dawn" and turning them off again twelve clock hours later. One light always stayed on. To keep off predators, they told themselves, but in truth it was to keep out the primordially threatening dark. Morrissey picked up the balloonist. It was still alive, its wrinkled features moving soundlessly. Once down, they never uttered a sound -- because, Morrissey said, the hydrogen that gave them voice was lost when their bags were punctured. But they kept on trying. The first one they had shot down had lived for more than forty hours. It had crept all around the camp, dragging its gray and wrinkled bag, and it had seemed in pain all of that time. Dalehouse had been glad when it died at last, was glad now when Morrissey plunged the new one into a killer bag for return to Earth. Kappelyushnikov limped up to them, rubbing his buttocks. "Is always a martyr, first pioneer of flight," he grumbled. "So, Danny Dalehouse. You want go up now?" An electric shock hit Danny. "You mean now?" "Sure, why not? Wind isn't bad. I go with, soon as two balloons fill."    It took longer than Dalehouse would have thought possible for the little pump to fill two batches of balloons big enough for human passengers -- especially since the pump was a hastily rigged nonsparking compressor that leaked as much gas as it squeezed into the bags, Dalehouse tried to eat, tried to nap, tried to interest himself in other projects, and kept coming back to gaze at the tethered clusters of bags, quietly swelling with hydrogen, constrained by the cord netting that surrounded them. The weather had taken a tum for the worse. Clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, but Kappelyushnikov was stubbornly optimistic. "Clouds will blow away. Is positive skies will be clear." When the first lightening -- it was actually a pinkening -- of sky began to show, he said decisively: "Is okay now. Strap in, Danny." Mistrustfully, Dalehouse buckled himself into the harness. He was a taller but lighter man than the Russian, and Kappelyushnikov grumbled to himself as he valved off surplus hydrogen. "Otherwise," he explained, "you go back to State of Michigan, East Lansing, shwoosh! But next time, not so much wasting gas." The harness had a quick-release latch at the shoulders, and Dalehouse touched it experimentally. "No, no! " screamed Kappelyushnikov. "You want to pull when you are up two hundred meters, fine, pull! Is your neck. But don't waste gas for nothing." He guided Danny's hands to the two crucial cords. "Is not clamjet, you understand? Is free balloon. Clamjet uses lift to save fuel. Here is no fuel, only lift. Here you go where wind goes. You don't like direction. you find different wind. Spill water ballast, you go up. Spill sauers off. you go down. " Dalehouse wriggled in the harness. It was not going to be very much like sailplaning over the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where there was always a west wind to bounce off the bluffs and keep a glider aloft for hours. But if the Russian could do it, he could do it. I hope, he added to himself, and said, "All right, I think I have the hang of it." "So let's go," cried the Russian, grinning as he slipped into his own harness. He bent and picked up a fair-sized rock, gesturing to Danny to do the same. The other members of the expedition were standing back, but one of them handed Danny a rock and, at Kappelyushnikov's orders, they untethered the balloons. Kappelyushnikov danced over toward Danny, like a diver stilting across a sea-bottom. He came as close as he could under the bulk of their balloons, peering into his face. "You are all right?" Danny nodded. "So drop the rock and we go!" Kappelyushnikov cried. And he cast his own rock away and began to float diagonally upward. Dalehouse took a deep breath and followed his example, watching the Russian move upward. Nothing seemed to happen. Danny did not feel any acceleration, only that his feet seemed to have gone abruptly numb, and there was no sensation of pressure on their bottoms. Because his eyes were on Kappelyushnikov, he neglected to look down until he was fifty meters in the air. They were drifting south, along the coastline. Far above them and inland, over the purple hills that marked the edge of the fern forest, the extended swarm of balloonists was grazing on whatever tiny organisms they could find floating in the sky. Below and behind was the dwindling campsite. Danny was already higher than the nose of their return rocket, the tallest object in it. Off to his left was the sea itself, and a couple of islands in the muddy waters, covered with manytrunked trees. He wrenched his attention away from sightseeing; Kappelyushnikov was shouting at him. "What?" Dalehouse bellowed. The gap had widened; Cappy was now forty meters above him, and moving inland, evidently in a different air layer. "Drop... little... water!" shouted the Russian. Dalehouse nodded and reached tentatively for the valve cord. He pulled at it with a light touch. Nothing happened. He pulled again, harder. Half a liter of ballast sprayed out of the tank, drenching him. Danny had not realized that the passenger was directly under the ballast tank, and, gasping, vowed to change that element of design before he went up again. But he was flying! Not easily. Not with grace. Not even with the clumsy control that Kappelyushnikov had taught himself. He spent the first hour chasing Cappy across the sky. It was like one of the fun-house games where you and your girl are on different rotating circles of a ride, when neither of you can take a step except to change from one spinning disk to another. He never caught the Russian, though Kappelyushnikov did all he could to make capture easy. Not that first time. But -- flying! It was exactly the dream he had always had, the dream everyone has had. The total conquest of the air. No jets. No wings. No engines. Just gently swimming through the atmospheric ocean, with no more effort than floating in a salt-water bay. He reveled in it, and as time went on -- not in the first flight, or the tenth; but the supply of hydrogen was limitless, if slow in coming, and he made as many flights as he could -- he began to acquire some skill. And the problem of reaching the gasbags turned out to be no problem at all. He didn't have to seek them out. They were far more skilled at flying than he, and they came to him, bobbing around like great jack-o'lantems with hideous ticklike faces, peering inquisitively into his own face and singing, singing, oh! how they sang.    For the next week, or what passed on Klong for a week, Dalehouse spent every minute he could in the air. The life of the camp went on almost without him. Even Kappelyushnikov was more earthbound than he. There was nothing to hold Dalehouse there, and he found himself almost a stranger when he landed, slept, relieved bladder and bowels, ate, filled his balloons and soared again. Harriet snapped at him for demanding more than she could handle in translation. The camp commander complained bitterly at the waste of power in generating hydrogen. Jim Morrissey pleaded for time and help in collecting and studying the other species. Even Cappy was surly about the wear and tear on his balloons. Danny didn't care. In the skies of Klong he was alive. He progressed from feckless interloper to skilled aeronaut; from stranger to, almost, one of the great drifting swarm. He began to be able to exchange at least rudimentary ideas with some of the gasbags, especially the biggest of diem -- two meters across, with a pattern that looked almost like a tartan; Danny named him "Bonny Prince Charlie," lacking any clue as to what the gasbag called itself. Himself. Danny began to think of him as almost a friend. If it had not been for his physical needs, and one other thing, Dalehouse would hardly have bothered returning to the camp at all. The one other thing was Harriet. He could not do without her help in translation. It wasn't enough. He was convinced a lot of it was wrong. But it was all he had in the endeavor to communicate with these beautiful and monstrous creatures of the air. He raged to the rest of the encampment, and insisted on his complaints being relayed to Earth; he insulted her almost to the point of tears -- from eyes that he would have sworn had never felt them before. It was not enough to suit him... but voyage by voyage, hour by hour, some sort of communication began to build up. You never knew what part of your learning was going to be useful. Those long sessions of Chomsky and transactional grammar, the critiques of Lorenz and Dart, the semesters on territoriality and mating rites -- none of them seemed very helpful in the skies of Klong. But he blessed every hour of sailplaning, and every evening with his local barbershop quartet. The language of the gasbags was music. Not even Mandarin made such demands on pitch and tonality as their songs. Even before he knew any words, he found himself chiming in their chorus, and they responded to it with, if not exactly welcome, at least curiosity. The big plaid one even learned to sing Danny Dalehouse's name, as well as he could with a soundproducing mechanism that was deficient in such basic phonemes as the fricative. Danny learned that some of their songs were not unlike terrestrial birdcalls: there was one for food, and several for danger. There seemed to be three separate kinds of danger, one for danger from the ground and two for dangers, but evidently different kinds of dangers, from the air. One of the terms sounded almost Hawaiian, with its liquids and glottal stops; that seemed to belong to a kind of feral gasbag, a shark of the air, that appeared to be their most dangerous natural enemy. The other -- Dalehouse could not be sure, and Harriet was not much help, but it appeared to relate to danger from above the air; and not just danger, but that kind of special macho risktaking danger that involved mortal peril, even death, but was infinitely attractive for reasons he could not perceive. He puzzled over that for hours, making Harriet's life a living hell. On that point, no solution. But the tapes went back to Earth, and the computer matches began to come back, and Harriet was able to construct sentences for him to say. He sang, "I am friend," and, heartstoppingly, the great cross-hatched gasbag he called Charlie responded with a whole song: "You are, you are, you are friend!" And the whole chorus joined in. The fickle Klongan weather cooperated for eight calendar days, and then the winds began to rise and the clouds rolled in. When the winds blew, even the gasbags of the swarm had trouble keeping station with each other, and Danny Dalehouse was blown all over the sky. He tried to keep the camp in range; and because he did, so did the whole swarm. But in the effort they were widely separated. When he decided to give up at last, he called good-by and heard in response the song that seemed to mean "sky danger." Dalehouse repeated it; it seemed appropriate enough, considering the weather. But then he became conscious of a deep fluttering sound behind the whine of the winds. The sound of a helicopter. Dalehouse abandoned the flock, climbed high enough to find a return wind, then jockeyed himself expertly down through the crossbreezes toward the camp. There it was, dropping through the frayed bottom of a cloud: the Greasy copter, with a Union Jack on its tail strut. So piofligate of energy! Not only did they ship that vast mass through tachyon transit, at incredible cost, but they had shipped enough fuel to allow the pilot to take joyrides. And what was it carrying slung between its skids? Some other kind of machine! Typical Greasy oil-hoggery! Danny swore disgustedly at the wastefulness of the Greasies. With a fraction of the kilocalories they poured out in simple inefficiency and carelessness, he could have had a decent computer, Kappelyushnikov could long since have had his glider, Morrissey could have had an outboard motor for his boat, and thus a nearly complete selection of marine samples by now. There was something wrong in a world that let a handful of nations bum off energy so recklessly simply because they happened to be sitting on its sources. When it was gone, they would be as threadbare as the Peruvians or the Paks, sure. But there was no comfort in that. Their downfall would be the world's downfall -- Or at least that world's downfall. Maybe something could be worked out for this one. Planning. Thought. Preparation ahead of time. Control of growth, so that scarce resources would not be pissed away irrevocably on foolishness. A fair division of Klong's treasures, so that no nation. and no individual could enrich himself by starving others. An attempt to insure equity to all -- Dalehouse's train of thought snapped as he realized that he had been daydreaming. The winds had carried kkn farther than he intended, almost out over the sea. He vented hydrogen frantically, and came down almost in the water, falling fast. He picked himself up, and watched the ripped cases of the balloons floating out of reach in the water. Cappy would be furious. At least he wouldn't have to carry them on what looked like a long walk back up the shore to the camp, he thought. It was some consolation, but it didn't last long. Before he was halfway back, it began to rain.    And it rained. And it rained. It was no such ferocious windslamming storm as had hit them soon after the landing, but it lasted most tediously and angeringly long, far past the point where it was an incident, past the time it was an annoyance, to the point, and past the point, when it seemed they were all sentenced to fat, oily drops turning the ground into mud and the camp into a steam bath for all the miserable rest of their lives. There was no chance of ballooning. There were no native balloonists in sight anyway to follow. Kappelyushnikov grumpily seamed and filled new balloons in the hope of better times to come. Harriet San tori tongue-lashed everyone who came near her. Morrissey packed samples in his tent and pored over mysterious pictures and charts, coming out only to stare furiously at the rain and shake his head. Danny composed long and the Double-A-L, demanding gifts for his gasbag friends. Krivitin and Sparky Cerbo brewed up some kind of witches' brew from the native berries and got terribly drunk together, and then even more terribly sick as their bodies strove to defend themselves against the alien Klongan protein traces in the popskull. They very nearly died. They surely would have, exploded Alex Woodring, shaking with anger, if they had done any such moron's trick earlier; the first total vulnerability had dwindled to reactions that no longer brought death. Only protracted misery. Danny inherited the job of tending them and, at Harriet's angry insistence, of packaging samples of their various untidy emissions for Jim Morrissey to analyze. Morrissey was crouched over his pictures and diagrams when Danny came in, and when his duty was explained to him, flatly refused it. "Cripes, Danny, I've got no equipment for that kind of thing. Throw those samples in the crapper, I don't want them. " "Harriet says we must know how serious the poisoning is." "We already know that, man. They got real sick. But they didn't die. " "Harriet says you can at least analyze them." "For what? I wouldn't know what to look for. ' ' "Harriet says -- " "Oh, screw Harriet. 'Scuse me, Danny, I didn't mean to remind you of your, uh, indiscretions. Anyway, I've got something better for us to do, now that the rain's stopping." "It hasn't stopped, Jim." "It's slowing down. When it does stop, Boyne's going to be coining around to collect the backhoe I borrowed from him. I want to use it first. " "For what?" "For digging up some of our lightfingered friends." He pointed straight down at the floor of the tent. "The ones that swiped Harriet's radio." "We already tried that." "Yes, we did. We found out that the important thing is speed. They'll close up the tunnels faster than you'd believe, so we've got to get in, get moving and get to where they are before they have a chance to react. We'll never have a clear field to pick them up otherwise -- unless," he added offhandedly, "we flooded the tunnels with cyanide first. Then we could take our time." "Is that all you think of, killing?" Dalehouse flared. "No, no. I wasn't suggesting it. I was excluding it. I know you don't Dalehouse took a deep breath. He had seen enough of the balloonists to stop thinking of them as preparations and learn to consider them, almost, people. The burrowers were still total unknowns to him, and probably rather distasteful -- he thought of termites and maggots and all sorts of vile, crawling things when he thought of them. But he wasn't ready for genocide. "So what were you suggesting?" he asked. "I borrowed a backhoe from Boyne. I want to use it before he takes it back. The thing is, I think I know where to dig." He gathered up a clump of the papers on the upended footlocker he was using for a desk and handed them over. The sheets on top seemed to be a map, which meant nothing to Dalehouse, but underneath was a sheaf of photographs. He recognized them; they were aerial views of the area surrounding the camp. Some he had taken himself, others were undoubtedly Kappelyushnikov's. "There's something wrong with them," he said. "The colors look funny. Why is this part blue?" "It's false-color photography, Danny. That batch is in the infrared; the bluer the picture, the warmer the ground. Here, see these sort of pale streaks? They're two or three degrees warmer than what's on other side of them." Dalehouse turned the pictures about in his hands, and then asked, "Why?" "Well, see if you figure it out the same way I did. Look at the one under it, in orthodox color You took that one. Tum it so it's oriented the same way as the falsecolor print -- there. Do you see those clumps of orangey bushes? They seem to extend in almost straight lines. And those bright red ones? They are extensions of the same lines. The bushes are all the same plant; the difference is the bright red ones are dead. Well, doesn't it look to you like the pale lines in the false-color pictures match up with the lines of bushes in the ortho? And I've poked a probe down along some of those lines, and guess what I found?" "Burrows?" Dalehouse hazarded. "You're so damn smart," grumbled Morrissey. "All right, show me some real smarts. Why are those plants and markings related to the burrows?" Dalehouse put down the pictures patiently. "That I don't know. But I bet you're going to tell me." "Well, no. Not for sure. But I can make a smart guess. I'd say digging out tunnels causes some sort of chemical change in the surface. Maybe it leaches out the nutrients selectively? And those plants happen to be the kind that survive best in that kind of soil? Or maybe the castings from the burrowers fertilize them, again selectively. Those are analogues from Earth: you can detect mole runs that way, and earthworms aerate the soil and make things grow better. This may be some wholly different process, but my bet is that that's the general idea." He sat back on his folding camp stool and regarded Danny anxiously. Dalehouse thought for a second, listening to the dwindling plop of raindrops on the tent roof. "You tell me more than I want to know, Jim, but I think I get your drift. You want me to help you dig them up. How are we going to do that fast enough? Especially in the kind of mud there is out there?" "That's why I borrowed Boyne's backhoe. It's been in position ever since the rain began. I think the burrowers sense ground vibrations; I wanted them to get used to its being there before we started." "Did you tell him what you wanted it for? I got the impression they were digging burrows themselves." "So did I, and that's why I didn't tell him. I said we needed new latrines, and by gosh we do. Sometime or other. Anyway, it's right over the best-looking patch of bushes right now, ready to go. Are you with me?" Danny thought wistfully of his airborne friends, so much more inviting than these rats or worms. But they were out of reach for the time being -- "Sure," he said. Morrissey grinned, relieved. "Well, that was the easy part. Now we come up against the tough bit: convincing Harriet to go along."    Harriet was every bit as tough as advertised. "You don't seriously mean," she began, "that you want to drag everybody out in a downpour just for the sake of digging a few holes?" "Come on, Harriet," said Morrissey, trying not to explode. "The rain's almost stopped." "And if it has, there are a thousand more important things to do!" "Will be fun, Gasha," Kappelyushnikov chipped in. "Digging for foxholes like landed oil-rich English country gentlemen! Excellent sport. " "And it isn't just a few holes," Morrissey added. "Look at the seismology traces. There are big things down there, chambers twenty meters long and more. Not just tunnels. Maybe cities." Harriet said cuttingly, "Morrissey, if you wonder why none of us have any confidence in you, that's just the reason. You'll say any stupid thing that comes into your head. Cities! There are some indications of shafts and chambers, somewhat bigger than the tunnels directly under the surface, yes. But I would not call them -- " "All right, all right. They're not cities. Maybe they aren't even villages, but they're something. At the least, they are something like breeding chambers where they keep their young. Or store their food. Or, Christ, I don't know, maybe it's where they have ballet performances or play Bingo, what's the difference? Just because they're bigger, it follows that they're probably more important. It will be less likely, or at least harder, for them to seal them off." He looked toward Alex Woodring, who coughed and said, "I think that's reasonable, Harriet. Don't you?" She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Reasonable? No, I certainly wouldn't call it reasonable. Of course, you're our leader, at least nominally, and if you think it wise to depart from the -- " "I do think it's a good idea, Harriet," Woodring said boldly. "If you'll let me finish, please? I was saying, if you think we should depart from the agreement we all made that group decisions should be arrived at unanimously, not by a vote or some one person throwing his weight around, then I suppose I have nothing further to say." "Gasha, dear," said Kappelyushnikov soothingly, "shut up, please? Tell us plan, Jim." "You bet! First thing we do is open up as big a hole as we can with the backhoe. All of us are out there with shovels, and we jump in. What we want is specimens. We grab what we see. We should take them pretty much by surprise and besides," he said, with some selfsatisfaction, "two of us can carry these." He held up his camera. "They've got good bright strobes. I got that idea from Boyne, when we were drinking together; I think that's what they do, at the Greasies'. They go in with these things, partly to get pictures and mostly to dazzle them. While they're temporarily blinded, we can grab them easily." Dalehouse put in, "Temporarily, Jim?" "Well," Morrissey said reluctantly. "No, I'm not real sure about that part. Their eyes are probably pretty delicate -- but hell, Danny, we don't even know if they have any eyes in the first place!" "Then how do they get dazzled?" "All right. But still, that's the way I want to do it. And we'll take walkie-talkies. If anything, uh, goes wrong -- " He hesitated, and then started over. "If you should get disoriented or anything, you just dig up. You should be able to do that with your bare hands. If not, you just turn your walkie-talkie on. We might be unable to get voice communication from under the surface, but we know from the radio that got stolen that we can at least get cardig you out. That's if anything goes wrong." Kappelyushnikov leaned forward and placed his hand on the biochemist's mouth. "Dear Jim," he said, "please don't encourage us any more, otherwise we all quit. Let's do this, no more talk."    Predictably, Harriet would have nothing to do with the venture, and she insisted that at least two of the men stay behind -- "In case we have to dig you heroes out." But Sparky Cerbo volunteered to go in, and Alicia Dair claimed she could run the backhoe better than anyone else in the camp. So they had half a dozen in coveralls, headlamps, goggles and gloves ready to jump in w'hen Morrissey signaled the digging to start. He had been right about the mud; there wasn't any, except right around the main paths of the camp, where they had trodden the Klongan ground-cover to death. But the soil was saturated, and the backhoe threw as much moisture as it did dirt. In less than a minute it had broken through. Morrissey swallowed, crossed himself and jumped into the hole. Alex Woodring followed, then Danny, then Kappelyushnikov, di Paolo, and Sparky Cerbo. The plan was to break up into pairs, each couple to follow one tunnel. The trouble with the plan was that it was predicated on there being more than two directions to take. There weren't. The pit they dropped into was not much more than a meter broad. It smelled damp, and -- and bad, Danny thought, like a stale cage of pet mice; and it was no more than a tunnel. Di Paolo jumped down onto Danny's ankle, and Sparky Cerbo, following, got him square in the middle of the back. They were all tangled together, cursing and grumbling, and if there was a burrower within a kilometer that didn't know they were coming, that burrower, Danny thought, would have to be dead. "Quit screwing around!" yelled Morrissey over his shoulder. "Dalehouse! Sparky! You two follow me." Dalehouse got himself turned around in time to see Morrissey's hips and knees, outlined against the glow from his headlamp, moving away. The cross-section of the tunnel was more oval than round, shallower than it was broad; they couldn't quite move on hands and knees, but they could scramble well enough on thighs and elbows. "See anything?" he called ahead. "No. Shut up. Listen." Morrissey's voice was muffled, but Dalehouse could hear it well enough. Past it and through it he thought he heard something else. What' I It was faint and hard to identify. squirrel-like squeals and rustlings, perhaps, and larger, deeper sounds from farther away. His own breath, the rubbing of his gear, the sounds the other made, all conspired to drown it out. But there was something. A bright flare made him blink. It hurt his eyes. It came from Morrissey's strobe, up ahead. All Dalehouse got of it was what trickled back, not helped by the rough dirt walls, almost without reflectance. In the other direction it must have been startling. Now he was sure he heard the squirrel-squeals, and they sounded anguished. As well they should, Danny realized, with a moment's empathy for the burrowers. What could light have meant to them, ever, but some predator breaking in, and death and destruction following? He bumped into Morrissey's feet und stopped. Over his shoulder, Morrissey snarled. "The fuckers! They've blocked it." "The tunnel?" "Christ, yes. the tunnel! It's packed tight, too. How the hell could they do that so fast?" Dalehouse had a moment's atavistic fear. Blocked! And in the other direction? He rolled onto his side, extinguished his light and peered back between his feet down the tunnel. Past Sparky's crouching form he could see, he was sure he could see, the reassuring dim red glow from the Klongan sky. Even so, he could feel the muscles at the back of his neck tensed up and painful with the ancient human terror of being buried alive, and he suddenly remembered that the direction they had taken was the one that went under the backhoe. What if its weight crushed the roof through and pinned them? "Ah, Jim," he called. "What do you think? Should we get back to the barn?" Pause. Then, angrily, "Might as well, we're not doing any good here. Maybe the guys had better luck the other way. " But Cappy and the others were already outside, helping them out as they emerged. They had got only eight or nine meters into their tunnel before it was blocked; Dalehouse 's group had gone more than twice as far. It came out the same in the end, though, Dalehouse reflected. Incredible their reactions could be so fast! No doubt they had been trained into them over endless Klongan millenia. Whatever the reason, it was not going to be easy to collect a specimen, much less try to make contact. Danny thought of his airborne friends longingly; how much nicer to fly to make contact than to wiggle through the mud like a snake! Kappelyushnikov was brushing him off; then, more lingeringly, doing the same for Sparky Cerbo. "Dearest girl," he said, "you are disgracefully filthy! Let us all go swim in lake, take our minds off troubles." Good-naturedly the girl moved away from his hand. "Maybe we should see what Harriet wants first," she suggested. And, sure enough, Harriet was standing at the entrance to the headquarters tent, a hundred meters away, evidently waiting for them to come to her. As they straggled up, she looked them up and down with distaste. "A total failure, I see," she said, nodding. "Of course, that was to be expected. " "Harriet." Jim Morrissey began dangerously. She raised her hand. "It doesn't matter. Perhaps you'll be interested in what has happened while you were gone. " "Harriet, we were only gone twenty or thirty minutes!" Morrissey exploded. "Nevertheless. First there was a tachtran signal. We're heing reinforced, and so are the Peeps. Second -- " She stepped aside to let them pass through into the tent. Inside, the others who had stayed behind were clustered, looking, Dalehouse thought, curiously selfsatisfied. "I believe you wanted a specimen of those underground creatures? We found one trying to steal some of our supplies. Of course, it would have been easier if so many of you hadn't been wasting your time on foolishness, so you could have helped when we needed you -- " Kappelyushnikov bellowed. "Gasha! Get to point, right now! You caught a specimen for us?" "OTtourse," she said. "We put him in one of Morrissey's cages. I was quite severely scratched doing it, but that's about what you can expect when -- " They didn't let her finish; they were all inside and staring. The stale mouse-cage smell was a thousand times stronger, almost choking Danny Dalehouse, but there it was. It was nearly two meters long, tiny eyes set close together above its snout, squeezed tight closed in anguish. It was squealing softly -- Danny almost would have said broken-heartedly -- to itself. It was gnawing at the metal bars of the cage and simultaneously scrabbling at the plastic flooring with duckfoot shaped claws. It was covered with a sort of dun-colored down, or short fur; it seemed to have at least six pairs of limbs, all stubby, all clawed, and all incredibly strong. Whatever its teeth were made of, they were hard. One of the bars of the cage was almost gnawed through; and its squeals of pain never stopped. IX The swarm was half fledglings now, tiny balloonets that had just cast off their parachuting threads of silk and now struggled bravely to keep up with the great five-meter adult spheres. In the constant chorus of the swarm, the fledglings' voices were as tiny as their gasbags. Their shrill peeping used only the least possible amount of hydrogen, to preserve their precarious lift balance against the few drops in their ballast bladders. Charlie patrolled majestically through the swarm, driving the bulk of his body reprovingly against a cluster of infant balloonists that were singing against the swarm melody, rotating his eye-patches to scan the skies for ha' aye' i, listening to the counter-songs of praise and complaint from the other adults of the swarm and always, always, leading them as they sang. There was much praise, and much complaint. The praise he took for granted. To the complaint he attended with more care, ready either to remedy or rebuke. Three females sang despairingly of little ones who dropped their flying tails too soon, or who could not hold their hydrogen and so drifted helplessly down to the voracious world below. Another pealed a dirge of anger and sorrow, blaming the deformed fledglings on the Persons of the Middle Sun. This was just; and Charlie led the swarm in a concurrence of sympathy and advice: "Never -- " (Never, never, never, sang the chorus) -- "never again must we breed near the new Suns." The females chorused agreement, but some of the males sang in counterpoint: "But how can we know which is real Heaven-Danger and which is not? And where may we breed at all? The Persons of the Three Suns are under all our air!" Charlie's answering song was serene: "I will ask my friend of the Middle Sun. He will know." (He will know, he will know, chorused the swarm.) But a male sang a dire question: "And when the swarming rapture is on us, will we remember?" "Yes," sang Charlie. "We will remember, because we must." (We must, we must.) That should have settled it. And yet, the song of the swarm was not at peace. Undertones buzzed and discorded against the dominant themes. Even Charlie's own song faltered now and then, and repeated itself when it should have burst into triumphant new themes. Currents were stirring under the surface of his mind. They never reached consciousness; if they had, no power could have kept him from expressing them in song. But they were there. Worries. Doubts. Puzzles. Who were these Persons of the Three Suns? Where had they come from? They seemed the same, as like as any swarms of balloonists. Yet Charlie's friend 'Anny 'Alehouse had explained that they were not the same. First there had been the persons of the Small Sun. They had seemed no more than another species of devouring Earth-Danger creatures in the beginning, although they had created a tiny sun almost at once. But their camp was almost at the limit of Charlie's range and the swarm had not troubled themselves about those Persons. Then there was the group of Charlie's friend; and, almost at once, the third group, the Persons of the Big Sun. They were worrisome! Their sun was always shining brightly, brighter than the HeavenDanger at its brightest. Since it was almost the deepest of Charlie's instincts to swarm in the direction of a bright light, it was actual pain to turn and swim away from the Big Sun. They had almost been trapped when the Persons first arrived -- when all three of the parties of Persons of the Suns arrived -- because each of them came roaring down through the air on a pillar of Sunflame, But none had been close enough to cause them to swarm. By the time the flock had maneuvered near, the flames were gone and the lights were darkened. Then the Persons of the Big Sun had sent one of them up into the air in the great queer thing that fluttered and rattled; it was harder than the ha' aye' i Sky Danger, and even more deadly. Something about it drew balloonists into its swinging claws, and more than a dozen of Charlie's swarm had been ripped open and gone fluttering down to ground, helpless, despairing and silent. Now they avoided it in fear and sorrow. Two out of three of the groups of New Persons, and both to be avoided! The one because they killed, the other because they did not fly at all, were no more than any other Ground Danger, would not have been thought to be Persons at all -- Except for 'Anny 'Alehouse. Charlie sang of his friend, who redeemed his whole race. 'Anny 'Alehouse and his sometimes companion, 'Appy: they were Persons! They flew as Persons flew, by the majesty and the grace of the air itself. It was a sad thing that even their Middle Sun had flared like a true Heaven Danger and caused the flock to breed poorly. But it did not occur to Charlie to blame Morrissey's flare on Dalehouse or Kappelyushnikov; it did not occur to him to think of blame at all. When Kung flared, the balloonists bred. They could not help it. They did not try. They had never developed defenses against a false flare, lacking in the actinic radiation that helped them make their hydrogen and triggered their fertility. They had never needed any -- until now. And they had no way to leant a defense. The swarm was drifting toward a swelling cumulus cloud; Charlie swelled his singing sac and boomed out: "Hive up, my brothers!" ( Hive up, hive up, came the answering chorus.) "Hive up, sisters and mates! Hive up, young and old! Watch for ha aye' i in the wet shadows! Huddle the little ones close! " Every member of the swarm was singing full-throatedly now as the swarm compacted, swimming into the ruddy-pink cottony edges of the cloud. They could see each other only as ghosts, except for the oldest and biggest males, whose luminous markings gave them more visibility. But they could hear the songs, and Charlie and the other senior males patrolled the periphery of the swarm. If ha'aye'i were there, the males could not defend the swarm -- could not even defend themselves to any purpose. But they could sing warning, and then the swarm would scatter in all directions, so that only the slowest and weakest would be caught. But this time they were lucky. There were no killer balloons in the cloud, and the swarm emerged intact. Charlie trumpeted out a song of thanksgiving as the flock entered clear air again. All joined. Cumulus clouds formed at the top of updrafts of warm air, and the ha'aye'i often sought them out to supplement their comparatively weak lift. There was always a price; what the ha'aye'i gained in speed and control, not to mention claws and jaws, they paid for in smaller lifting bags, so that for them it was always an effort to stay in the air. The ha'aye'i were sharks of the air. They never slept, never stopped moving; and were always hungry. The swarm was drifting toward the heat pole. Charlie rotated his eye patches to catch clues of the movement of the air. He always knew what direction the winds blew on each level; he was taught by the movement of cloudlets, by the fluttering of dropped fledgling silk, most of all by a lifetime of experience, so that he did not have to think of how to capture a favorable wind, he knew, as surely as any New Yorker hurrying down Fifth Avenue knows the number of the next cross street. He did not want to stray too far from his friend of the Middle Sun, whom he had not seen for some time. He trumpeted for the swarm to rise a hundred meters. The other males took up his song, and from all the gas bags, great and small, drops of water ballast fell. There would be no trouble replacing it for the adults, who were naturally and automatically catching and swallowing the tiny misting of dew from their passage through the cloud. The smaller ones made hard work of it. But they valiantly released swallowed gas into their bags, and the females watchfully butted the littlest ones higher. The swarm stayed together at the new level as its drift changed back toward the direction of the camp of the Middle Sun. No ha' aye' i in sight. Plenty of water on their skins to lick off and swallow, part to hold as ballast, part to dissociate into the oxygen they metabolized and the hydrogen that gave them lift. Charlie was well content. It was good to be a balloonist! He returned to the song of thanksgiving. They were nearing the edges of their territory, and another swarm bobbed high above them, a few kilometers away. Charlie observed them without concern. There was no rivalry between swarms. Sometimes two of them would float side by side for long periods, or even coalesce. Sometimes when two swarms were joined, individuals from one would adhere to another. No one thought anything of that. From that moment they were full members of their new swarm, and joined in its songs. But it was more common that each should stay in its own unmarked, but known, volume of air. They grazed the pollen fields of their own home air without coveting that of their neighbors. Though after half a dozen breedings there might be no single individual still alive of the original swarm, the swarm itself would still drift placidly over the same ten thousand square kilometers of ground. One place was almost like another. Over any one of those square kilometers the sustaining air was always around them. The pollen clouds blew through them all. Still, some parts of their range were more attractive than others. The mesa where the Persons of the Big Sun had built their shining shells and lit their blazing lamps had been one of their favorites, pollen drifting down off the hills in a pleasant stream and few ha' aye' i. Charlie sang sorrowfully of his regret as he thought of it, now that they must avoid it for all time to come. The bay of the ocean-lake where 'Anny 'Alehouse lived was, on the contrary, usually to be avoided. The water evaporating from the sea meant columns of rising cloud, and killer balloons no doubt in half of the columns. If any member of the swarm had chosen to question Charlie's decision to return there, it would have been quite reasonable to do so, in practical terms. But in terms of the lives of the balloonists themselves, it was quite impossible. Their group decisions were never questioned. If a senior adult sang Do thus, it was done. Charlie was the most senior of adults, and so his song usually prevailed. Not always. Now and then another adult would sing a contrary proposal ten minutes later, but if Charlie returned to his own ten minutes after that, there was no complaint. Each of the other adults loyally picked up his song, and the swarm complied. There was also the consideration that Charlie had brought to the swarm his Friend of the Middle Sun, with his astonishing and fascinating new sounds. This was a Person! Puzzling, yes. But not like those earthbound grubbers of the Little Sun or the strange creatures of the Big Sun who flew only with swarm drew near the camp of the Middle Sun, all of the adults rotated their bodies so that their tiny faces, like the features of engorged ticks, looked downward, anxious to spy 'Anny or 'Appy. Even the balIoonets were caught up in the happy fever of the search; and when the first of the swarm spotted Danny rising to meet them, the song of the flock became triumphant. How strange 'Anny 'Alehouse looked this time! His lifting sac had always been disagreeably knobby and lacking in any decent coloration, but now it was swollen immensely and knobbier than ever. Charlie might not have recognized him, if there had been more than one other like him in all the world to confuse him with. But it was 'Anny all the same. The swarm swallowed hydrogen and dropped to meet him, singing the song of welcome Charlie had invented for his friend.    Dalehouse was almost as overjoyed to see the swarm again as the swarm was to see Danny Dalehouse. It had been a long time! After the storm there had been the time for cleaning up; and before they were through, the second ship had dropped out of the tachyoncharge state to bring them new people and a whole host of new equipment. That was Fine enough, but to make them welcome and to integrate the new things into the old had taken time. More than time. Some of what they had brought had been gifts for the balloonists, and to deliver the gifts meant more load had to be lifted, which meant a bigger cluster of balloons, which meant redesigning the ballasting system to compensate. Danny was far from sure it had been worth it. But there had also been half a kilo of microfiches from the Double-A-L, and those had been worth a lot. Professor D. Dalehouse was now a name to conjure with among xenobiologists. They had quoted his reports in every paper. And the papers themselves had given much to think of. Among the conferees at Michigan State a battle had raged. In the evolution of the balloonists, where was Darwin? When a female scattered her filamentary eggs into the air of Klong like the burst of a milkweed pod, and all the males spewed sperm at once, where was the selection of the fittest? What kind of premium on strength, agility, intelligence or sexual attraction would make each generation somehow infinitesimally more "fit" than the one before in an ontogeny where all the males spurted all their genes into a cloud of mixed female genetic material, with the wind for a mixer and random chance deciding who fathered which on whom? The balloonists kept no Leporello lists. Well, any one of them might have fathered a milk-tre; but if so, he never knew it. Charlie could have settled the debate if asked. All the balloonists were sexually mature as soon as they were able to drop their spidersilk parachute threads and float free. But all balloonists were not equal in size. The older, the bigger. The bigger, the more sperm or eggs they flung into the collective pool. Human beings, by contrast, cease to play a part in evolution before half their lives are over. Wisdom does not come at twenty-five. By the time there is a significant difference between a Da Vinci and a dolt, the days of breeding are over. Selection plays no further part. Nor does it in resistance to the degenerative diseases of the old, which is why in has not selected against cancer, arthritis or arteriosclerosis. Raunchy young cells have been disciplined by the stresses of fifty thousand generations. But past the breeding age the cell runs out of programming. It doesn't know what to do next. It begins to fall apart. With the balloonists it was different. The Charlie-sized giants among them sprayed half a liter of mistof-sperm into each receptive cloud of eggs, while the tiny first-swarm male balloonets squeezed out hardly a drop. The Charlies had proved their fitness to survive by the most conclusive of tests: they had survived. Dalehouse was eager to try to settle questions like that as he called to Charlie and swung in to meet him, even more eager to try the new language elements the big computers on Earth had generated for him. What was occupying most of his attention, though, was his gift from Earth. Like the swarm's greeting song, it was an example of the thing his society did best. It was a weapon. It was not entirely a free gift, Dalehouse reflected, but then there is nothing without a price. Charlie's song cost him some of his reserve of lifting gas, as the songs that were their life always cost the swarm. If they sang, they vented gas. If they vented gas, they lost lift. If they lost lift, sooner or later they drifted helplessly down to the eager mouths on the surface to be eaten. Or, almost as bad, to live on there, helpless and voiceless, until they were able to accumulate and dissociate enough water molecules to recharge their stocks -- quickly, if Kung were kind enough to flare for them; painfully slowly otherwise. It was a price they paid gladly. To live was to sing; to be quiet was to be dead anyway. But it was, at the end, for most of them, the price of their lives. The price of the gift Danny Dalehouse brought was the lives of the five balloonists that had been sent back to Earth in the return capsule. The designers at Fort Detrick had made good use of the samples. The two that were dead on arrival were dissected at once. Those were the lucky ones. The other three were studied in vivo. The biggest and strongest of them lasted two weeks. The Fort Detrick experimenters also had a price to pay, because eight of them came down with the Klongan hives, and one had the severe misfortune to have his skull fill up with antigenic fluid, so that he would never again in the rest of his life stress an experimental subject. Or, indeed, hold a fork by himself. But probably the balloonists who had been his subjects would not have thought that price unfair. Danny Dalehouse unslung the lightweight carbine from one shoulder and practiced aiming it. Its stock was metal shell, and sintered metal at that: it weighed hardly a kilogram, but half that weight was in high-velocity bullets. It was poor design. He felt sure the recoil would kick him halfway across the sky if he fired it. and anyway what was "the use of high-velocity bullets? What target was there in the Klongan air that needed that sort of impact to destroy? But the word from Earth brought by the reinforcement party that had been labeled a U.N. peacekeeping committee was that it must be carried. So he carried it. He put it back and, somewhat uncomfortably, took Charlie's gift off the other shoulder. Now, that was more like it. Somebody somewhere had understood what Charlie's people could do, and what they needed in order to protect themselves against predators. It weighed even less than the carbine, and it contained no propellants at all. Its tiny winch could be operated by the claws of a Charlie to tighten a long-lasting elastic cord. Its trigger was sized to fit a balloonist, and what it fired was a cluster of minute needles or, alternatively, a capsule of some sort of fluid. Needles were for airborne predators. The fluid, or so Danny was told, was against creatures like the crabrats, if a balloonist was forced down and needed defense; and it would only incapaciIt would tax all of Dalehouse 's linguistics to convey any part of that to Charlie, but the way to get it done was to begin. He held the crossbow up and sang, carefully attending to the notes he had been taught by the computers at Texas AM: "I have brought you a gift." Charlie responded with a burst of song. Dalehouse could understand no more than a few phrases, but clearly it was a message of gratitude and polite inquiry; and anyway, the little tape recorder at his belt was getting it all down for later study. Danny moved on to the next sentence he had been taught: "You must come with me to find a ha' aye' i." That was hard to sing; English does not come with glottal stops, and practicing it for an hour had left Dalehouse 's throat sore. But Charlie seemed to understand, because the song of thanks changed to a thin melody of concern. Danny laughed. "Do not fear," he sang. "I will be a ha' aye' i to the ha' aye' i. We will destroy them with this gift, and the swarm will no more need to fear. Song of confusion, with the words "the swarm" repeated over and over, not only by Charlie but by all his flock. The hardest part of all was yet to come: "You must leave the swarm," sang Dalehouse. "They will be safe. We will return. But now just you and I must fly to seek a ha' aye' i. " It took time; but the message ultimately seemed to get across. It was a measure of the balloonist's trust in his friend from Earth that he an adventure with him. The members of the flock never left it by choice. For more than an hour after they dropped to a lower level and left the flock behind, Charlie's song was querulous and sad. And no ha' aye' i appeared. They left the Food Bloc camp far behind, drifting down the shore of the sea-lake, and then across a neck of it to the vicinity of the Peeps' tattered colony. For some time Dalehouse had been wondering if the Texas computers had in fact really given him the right words to sing. But then Charlie's song turned to active fear. They dipped low under a bank of clouds, warm-weather cumulus that looked like female balloonists turned upside down, and from one of them dropped the predatory form of a killer. Danny was uneasily tempted to slay this first one with his own carbine. It was frightening to see the ha' aye' i swoop toward them. But he wanted to demonstrate his gift to Charlie. "Watch!" he cried, clumsily grasping the grip that had been designed for balloonist claws. He circled the swelling form of the airshark in the cross-haired sight, designed for balloonist eye-patches, feeling the low vibrations of Charlie's muttered song of terror. At twenty meters he squeezed the trigger. A dozen tiny metal spikes lashed out at the ha' aye' i, spreading like the cone of fire of a shotgun shell. One was enough. The shark's bag ripped open with a puff of moisture. The creature screamed once in pain and surprise, and then had no more breath to scream with. It dropped past them, its horrid little face writhing, its claws clutching uselessly toward them, meters away. A bright trill of surprise from Charlie, and then a roaring paean of triumph. "This is a great good thing, 'Anny 'Alehouse! Will you slay all the ha' aye' i for us?" "No, not I, Charlie. You will do it for yourself!" And hanging in the air, Danny showed him the clever little crank that worked the elastic cord, the simple breech that the cluster of needles dropped into. For a creature who had never used tools before, Charlie was quick to grasp the operation. Dalehouse had him fire a practice round at a cloud, and then watched patiently while the balloonist painfully wound the winch for himself and loaded again. They were no longer quite alone. Unbidden, the swarm had drifted after them and were floating half a kilometer away, all their eyepalches rotated toward them, their distant song sweet and plaintive, like a puppy's lonely begging to be let in. And down below the Peeps' camp was near, and Dalehouse could see one or two upturned faces curiously staring at them. Let them look, he thought virtuously; let them see how the Food Exporting Powers were helping the native races of Klong, if they had so little to do with their time. There were only a handful of them left of the original expedition, and their much-boasted reinforcements showed no signs of arriving. Reinforcements. Reminded, Dalehouse began the rest of his message for Charlie. "This gift," he sang, "is yours. But we would ask a gift of you, too." "What gift?" sang Charlie politely. "I do not know words," sang Danny, "but soon I will show you. My swarm-mates ask you to carry some small things to other places. Some you will drop to the ground. Some you will bring back." Teaching Charlie how to point the cameras and sound-recording instruments was going to take forever, Dalehouse thought glumly; and how were they ever going to tell him where to drop the clusters of wolftrap sensors and seismic mikes? What seemed so simple on Earth was something else entirely on Klong -- "Beware, beware!" sang the distant, frantic voices of the swarm. Tardily Danny looked around. The ha' aye' i ' s rush caught them unaware. It came from behind and below, where Dalehouse had not thought to look. And Charlie, fondling his new toy and trying to understand what Dalehouse wanted of him, had been careless. If it had not been for the distant shrieking of the swarm, the creature might have had them both. But Charlie spun faster than Dalehouse, and before Danny could unlimber his carbine, the balloonist had shown how well he had learned his lesson could have reached out and caught the long, wicked claws of the ha' aye' i as it fell past them; it was that close. "Well done!" yelled Dalehouse, and Charlie pealed in rapture: "Well, well done! How great a gift!" They rose to rejoin the swarm -- Lances of golden fire reached up faintly toward the flock from the Peeps' camp below. "My God!" shouted Danny. "The fools are setting off fireworks!" The rockets exploded into showers of sparks, and all through the swarm balloonists were bursting into bright hydrogen flame. X When Dulla was awake, which was not much of the time, he was only blurrily conscious of what was going on. At first there had been a recurrent whack, whack which he could not identify, and some person who seemed vaguely familiar manhandling him into whatever it was that was making the sounds. Then pain. A lot of pain. Then long periods when people were talking to him, or around him. But he felt no impulse to answer. In his brief conscious times he, by and by, discovered he was no longer in pain. The treatment the Greasies had given him had been unpleasant, but it seemed to have done the trick. He was alive. He was rehydrated. The swellings had gone down. He was no longer blind. He was only very weak. When he woke up and realized that he was not only awake but actually seemed able to keep his eyes open for a while, Feng Hua-tze was standing by his cot. The Chinaman was looking very stretched out, Dulla thought with some contempt; he looked even worse than Dulla himself felt. "You are feeling better?" Feng asked sadly. Dulla thought it over. "Yes. I think so. What has happened?" "I am glad you are feeling better. The long-noses brought you here from the place of your beetle friends. They said you would live. GAl ## A I yoj! bookstore or direct liom St. Martin's Press lb Fifth Ave New York # P le ase sen d rn e copyfie s) o I plus #c per book to cover postage and handling...Zip I but I didn't think so. It has been a tong time. Do you want to eat?" "Yes -- no," Dulla corrected himself, "I do, but not at this moment. I want the w.c. first." "Shall I help you?" "No. I can do it myself." "I am glad of that, too," said Feng, who had been functioning as bedpan orderly for all the days of Ahmed Dulla's recovery, and for time before that longer than he cared to remember. The Pakistani raised himself painfully from the inflatable cot and moved slowly toward the slit-trench latrine. He gazed disapprovingly around the camp. One of the noises he had been hearing identified itself for him, a slapping, rasping sound that turned out to be the water wheel. So at least there should be power. But where were the promised floodlights, the growing crops, the comforts? Where were all the people? Feng had followed him and stood gazing mournfully as Dulla relieved himself. "Why do you stand there?" snapped Dulla, tying up his pajama cord and making hard work of it. "What has happened? Why has so little been done?" The leader spread his hands. "What can I say? There were ten of us. Two died with you, in this venture you found so necessary. One other died here. Two were so ill they had to be returned to Earth -- by courtesy of the Greasies. We had no one well enough to fly the return capsule. The Italian is asleep, and the two women are gathering fuel." "Gathering fuel! Are we become peasants again, Feng?" The leader sighed. "I have done my best," he said; it was a sentence he had been saying over and over to himself, for a long time. "Help is coming. Heir-of-Mao himself has ordered it, two great ships, material and persons, soon -- " "Soon! And until then, what? Do we do nothing?" "Go back to bed," said Feng wearily. "You exhaust me, Dulla. Eat if you will. There is food. The Fats gave it to us, otherwise there would be none." "And now we are beggars," sneered Dulla. He swayed and caught hold of Feng's shoulder. "For this I studied and came all these light-years! For this I almost died! How foolish we will all look when we return in disgrace to Earth!" Feng shook his head heavily. He disengaged the Pakistani's hand from his shoulder and stepped downwind -- the man was odorously unwashed. He did not need to hear any of this. He knew it for himself. He had accepted the charity of the Fats for the food without which they all would have starved; of the Greasies for the rescue of Dulla and for the return to Earth of the sick members of the expedition -- who would no doubt even now be telling their debriefers how badly Feng Hua-tze had managed the expedition with which he had been entrusted. There would be large-character posters going up in K'ushiu about that even now. They would be very critical of him. When they got back to Earth -- if they got back -- the best hope he had was to become a barefoot biochemist again along the Yellow River. Of course, if somehow they mercifully spared him until the two great ships arrived -- Ah, then! He had pored over the tachtran messages and pictures yearningly. The second ship would bring not ten, not Fifteen but a majestic thirty-four new persons. An agronomist! Someone to take up Feng's own pitiful beginnings, the mushrooms he had sown, the wheat seedlings he had coaxed to sprout -- the fittest of them would survive, and the fittest of their descendants would flourish. There were two more translators, both split-brained, one of them a skilled littoral pisciculturist as well. The Great Water might yet yield food they could eat. A doctor -- no, Feng corrected himself, a fully schooled surgeon, with a world reputation in the treatment of traumatic injuries. True, he was nearly two meters tall and black as a boy-child's hair, by his photograph. But still. Three of the new additions had limnology crash courses, and one of them, who had once been an officer in the Red Guards, had also had three years of experience as a scout in the Gobi, and later in the Himalayas. And the worldly goods the other ship would carry! Photovoltaic generators, capable of pouring out #volt A.C. in really significant quantities. Plastic to spare. Pioneering tools -- axes and machetes, and a few rifles for the collection of specimens, as well as for "game." Folbots. Magnesium-frame bicycles. A doubly redundant computer with no fewer than six remote-access terminals. Radio equipment. Laser equipment. Food. More food; food enough for all of them, for many months -- It seemed a dream! But what was not a dream was that very surely, Feng knew, among those thirty-four persons would be one who would come over to him and quietly say, "Feng Hua-tse? I am directed by Heir of-Mao to receive your report on why your custodianship of this project has not lived up to expectations." And then would come the sweating time. There would be no excuses accepted. He would not be interested in the mushrooms that were refusing to grow, or the specimens that Feng himself had painfully kept alive. He would only be interested in why three had died, and two had been sent home, and ten had accomplished so very little. All this was in Feng Hua-tze's mind, but all he said was, "Go back to sleep, Dulla, I am out of patience with you."    Dulla did not go back to sleep. Anger had given him strength. What he did was wake up the Italian. "Oh, you are alive again?" Spadetti yawned and rubbed the blue-black stubble on his chin. "We thought you were going to die," he said cheerfully. "I almost bet a day's ration on it. I would have been very angry to lose." "I have been talking to Feng, that bungler!" "It is not all Uazzi's fault, Dulla. We were the first. We made the mistakes that must be made so others can learn. " "I did not want to be teacher to the Fats and the Greasies! I did not want them here at all. This can be our planet, to shape as we will!" "Yes," admitted Spadetti, "I had some such thought myself. But, chi sa, what can you do? Each step seemed right at the time. Even yours, to make friends with the natives -- " "Those beasts! One cannot make friends with them." "Oh, not true, Dulla. Our rivals have succeeded. The Fats have balloonists carrying their cameras all over the planet, or so they promise on the tachtran. The Greasies are teaching their moles and earthworms how to burrow under our camp and listen to what we say. Perhaps they are listening now." "Nonsense! How stupid you are!" "Stupid, perhaps, but no, it is not entirely nonsense," smiled the Italian, unoffended. "Perhaps I have made it a little bit of a joke, but I am not sure that I am joking. And what have we accomplished? I will be more exact, Dulla. What did you yourself accomplish, except to get two people killed, when you visited our frutti-del-mare friends? We failed. It is as simple as that." He yawned and scratched. "Now, Dulla, per favore. let me wake up by myself a little? I am not so happy with this reality around me that I want to leave my dreams so rudely. " "Drink your wine and dream then," said Dulla coldly. "Oh, Dulla! But that is not a bad idea. If one only had a true wine instead of this filth. " "Pig," said Dulla, but softly enough so that Spadetti did not have to admit that he had heard it. He returned to his cot and sat heavily on the edge of it, ignoring Spadetti 's soft-voiced imprecations as he tasted the jungle juice he had made for himself. Perhaps it would kill him. Why not? The smell of it kept Dulla from wanting to eat, though he knew he should; he judged he had lost ten kilos at least since landing on Son of Kung, and he could not spare very many more. He sat breathing heavily, sucking through a straw at a flask of flat, tepid water from the still. By and by he noticed that there was a plastic pouch under his bed. He upended it, and covered the cot with a drift of tiny white fiche-prints. "I see you have found your love-letters." called the Italian from across the tent. "Unfortunately, I cannot read your language. But she is quite a pretty girl. " Dulla ignored him. He gathered them up and carried them to the radio shack, where the only working viewer was. Spadetti had been right; they were almost all from the Bulgarian girl, and they all said much the same thing. She missed him. She thought of him. She consoled her lonely sorrow with the memory of their days together in Sofia. But in the photographs there was Ana in Paris, Ana in London, Ana in Cairo, Ana in New York. She seemed to be having an interesting time without him. Rich countries! At bottom, were they not all the same, whether the wealth was in fuel or in food? Wealth was wealth! A greater distance separated him from the fat Bulgarians than from -- from even the Krinpit, he thought, and then realized almost at once that he was being unjust. Nan was not like that. But then she had had the advantage of spending much of her childhood in Hyderabad. Away from the smell of the Italian's imitation wine, Dulla realized he was hungry. He found some cracked com and ate it while he went through Ana's letters quickly, and then, more slowly, the synoptics from Earth. Much had happened while he was out of it. The Fats had been reinforced from Earth -- it was called a U.N. peacekeeping team, but that deceived only the most naive. The Greasies had established a satellite astronomical observatory and were monitoring changes in the radiation of Kung. There were problems with the satellite, and the results were unclear. Even so, Dulla studied the reports with fascination and envy. That should have been his own project! It was what he had trained for, all those graduate years. What a waste this expedition was! He glanced distastefully at the gaping rents in the tent, at the instruments that were scattered out to rust because there was no one to use them. So much to be done. So much that he could not think where to begin, and so could do nothing. There was a racket outside which made Dulla glance up, frowning. Feng and the Italian, quarreling about something, and behind them the distant squawking of a herd of balloonists. If Heir-of-Mao had been a little more openhanded, and if Feng had been a bit less of a fool -- Then they might have had a helicopter, like the Greasies, or the wit to make balloons, like the Fats, and he too might have had the chance to fly with the flocks. That chance was lost. Even the Krinpit, whom he himself, Ahmed Dulla, had resolved to make contact with, were as strange to him as ever. It was not fair! He had taken the risk. He remembered well how he had felt as he lay helpless among the curious jostling masses of crablike creatures. If they hadn't tried to eat the other two first, he knew he would have wound up a meal. And for nothing. The one Krinpit they had a chance to communicate with, to keep for a specimen, Feng had allowed to be stolen by the Greasies. There were sudden new sounds from outside, hissing white sounds that made Dulla get up and peer out of the tent. He saw flames reaching toward the sky, and Feng struggling with the Italian, while one of the Jamaican women swore angrily at them both. "What is happening here?" Dulla demanded. The Italian pushed Feng away and turned toward Dulla, his expression repentant. "Uazzi wished to greet our friends," he said, peering aloft. The rockets had climbed up into the maroon murk and exploded, and there were smaller explosions all around them: balloonists had caught fire from the shower of sparks. "I helped him aim, but perhaps -- perhaps my aim was not good," he said. "Foolish one!" cried Dulla, almost dancing with rage, "Do you see what you have done?" "I have burned up a few gasbags, why not?" grumbled Spadetti. "Not just gasbags! Rub the wine out of your eyes and look again, there! Is that a gasbag? Do you not see it is a human being hanging there, wondering why we have tried to kill him, anxious to return to his base with the Fats or the Greasies and report that the People's Republics have declared war? Another blunder! And one we may not survive. " "Peace, Dulla," panted Feng. "It does not matter if the Fats and the Greasies are angry at us now. Help is on the way. " "You are as big a fool as he! Shooting off fireworks like some farm brigade celebrating the overfulfillment of its cabbage quota!" "I wish," said Feng, "that you had not been rescued, Dulla. There was less struggle here when you were with Krinpit." "And I wish," said Dulla, "that the Krinpit who tried to kill me was our leader here instead of you. He was less ugly, and less of a fool."    That Krinpit was many kilometers away, and at that moment almost as angry as Dulla. He had been driven almost to the point of insanity, with the infuriating attempts of the Poison Ghosts of the Fuel camp to converse with him, with hunger and above all with the continual blinding uproar of the camp. In the noisy bright world of the Krinpit there was never a time of silence. But the level of sound was always manageable: sixty or seventy decibels most of the time, except for the occasional thunderclap of a storm. It almost never reached over seventy-five. To Sham-igon, the Fuel camp was torture. Sometimes it was quiet and dim, sometimes blindingly loud. The Krinpit had no internal combustion engines to punish their auditory nerves. The Greasies had dozens of them. Sham-igon had no conception of how they worked or what they were for, but he could recognize each of them when it was machine, rubbery roar of the helicopter, rattle and whine of the power saws, steady chug of the water pump. He had arrived at the camp almost blind, for the nearness of the helicopter's turbojet had affected his hearing just as staring at the uncaged sun would damage a human's eyes; the afterimage lasted for days, and was still maddeningly distorting to his perceptions. He had been penned within steel bars as soon as he arrived. However hard he gnawed and sawed, the bars of the cage would not give. As soon as he made a little scratch in one, it was replaced. The Poison Ghosts troubled him endlessly, echoing his name and his sounds in a weirdly frightening way. Sham-igon knew nothing of tape recording, and to hear his own sounds played back to him was as shattering an experience as it would be for a human to see his own form suddenly appear before him. He had realized tht the Poison Ghosts wanted to communicate with him, and had understood a tiny portion of what they were trying to say. But he seldom replied. He had nothing to say to them. And he was nearly starving. He survived, barely, on what little he would eat of what they put before him -- mostly vegetation, of which he disdained the majority as a human being would spurn thistle and grass. His hunger was maddeningly stimulated because he could smell the tasty nearness of Ghosts Below penned near him, and even a Ghost Above now and then. But the Poison Ghosts never brought him any of these to eat. And always there was the blinding roar of noise, of the equally unpleasant silences when the camp slept and only the laint eeho from tents and soft bodies kept him company. Human beings, scantily fed on bread and water in an isolation cell, with bright lights denying them sleep, go mad. Sham-igon was not far from it. But he clung to sanity, because he had a goal. The Poison Ghosts had killed Cheee-pruitt. He had not learned to tell one from another in time to know which was the culprit, but that was a problem easily solved. They were all guilty. Even in his madness it was clear to him that it was proper for him to kill a great many of them to redress their guilt, but what had not become clear to him was how. The chitin of claw and shell-sword were rubbed flat and sore against the bars, and still the bars held. When all the sounds were out, he chatted with the Ghost Above, straining longingly against the bars. "I wish I could eat you," he said. If it had not been for the bars, the Ghost Above would have been easy prey. It had lost most of its gas and was crawling about the floor of a cage like his own. Its song was no more than a pathetic whisper. "You cannot reach me," it pointed out, "unless you moult. And then I would eat you." Each spoke in its own language, but over thousands of generations all the races of Klong knew a little of the lunguage of the others. With the Ghosts Above you could not help being exposed to their constant singing, and even the Ghosts Beneath could be heard chattering and whistling in their tunnels. "I have eaten several of you hardshells," the Ghost Above wheezed faintly. "I particularly like the backlings and the first moult." The creature was boasting, but Sharn-igon could believe the story easily enough. The balloonists fed mostly on airborne detritus, but to make their young healthy they needed more potent protein sources now and then. When the breeding time was on, the females would drop like locusts to scour the ground clean of everything they could find. Adult Krinpit in shell were too dangerous, but in moult they were fair game. Best of all was a clutch of Ghosts Below caught on their thieving raids to the surface -- for Krinpit as well as balloonist. The thought made Sharn-igon 's salivary glands flow. "Hard-shell," whispered the Ghost Above, "I am dying, I think. You can eat me then if you like." In all honesty, Sham-igon was forced to admit, "You may be eating me before that." But then he perceived that something was strange. The Ghost Above was no longer in its cage. It was dragging slowly across the floor. "How did you escape?" he demanded. "Perhaps because I am so close to death," sang the Ghost Above hole in my sac to let the life out of me, and then closed it with a thing that stuck and clung and stung. But it has come loose, and almost all my life has spilled away, and I was able to slide between the bars." "I wish I could slide through the bars!" "Why do you not open the cage? Ones push a hard thing into a place in the cage when they want to, and it opens." "What hard thing are you speaking of? I have worn my shell to pulp." "No," sighed the balloonist. "Not like your shell. Wait, there is one by the door, I will show you." Sharn-igon's conception of keys and locks was quite unlike a human's, but the Krinpit too had ways of securing one thing to another temporarily. He chattered and scratched in feverish impatience while the dying gasbag slowly dragged itself toward him, with something bright and hard in its shadowy mouth. "Could you push that thing into the place in my cage?" he wheedled. The Ghost Above sang softly to itself for a moment. Then it pointed out, "You will eat me." "Yes, I will. But you are very close to dying anyway," Sham-igon pointed out; and added shrewdly, "You sing very badly now." The balloonist hissed sadly without forming words. It was true. "If you push the hard thing in the place in my cage so that I can go free," bargained Sham-igon, "I will kill some of the Poison Ghosts for you." He added honestly, "I intend to do that in any case, since they killed my hewife." "How many?" whispered the balloonist doubtfully. "As many as I can," said Sharn-igon. "At least one. No. Two. Two for you, and as many as I can for me." "Three for me. The three who come to this place and cause me pain." "All right, yes, three," cried Sham-igon. "Anything you like! But do it quickly if you are going to do it, before the Poison Ghosts come back!"    Hours later, at almost the last of his strength, Sharn-igon staggered into a Krinpit village. It was not his own. He had seen the sounds of it on the horizon for a long time, but he was so weak and filled with pain that it had taken him longer to crawl the distance than the tiniest backling. "Sham-igon, Sham-igon, Sham-igon," he called, as he approached the alien Krinpit. "I am not of your place. Sham-igon. Sham-igon!" A gravid female scuttled past him. She moved slowly, because she was near her time, but she ignored his presence. That did not surprise Sham-igon. It was what he had expected. Indeed, each lurching step into the alien village was harder for him than the one before, and he was a professional empathizer. ' 'Shamigon," he called bravely. "I would speak to one among you, although I am not of this place. " There was no answer, of course It would not be easy to make con tact. Each village was culturally, as well as geographically, isolated from every other. They did not fight. But they did interact. If a party of Krinpit from one village chanced upon an individual or a party from another, they depersonalized each other. One Krinpit might push one from another village out of the way. Two alien Krinpit might each take an end of a Many-Tree trunk that was barring their collective way. Both would lift. Neither would address the other. Genetically the villages were not isolated. The seedlings dropped from their he-father's backs when they were ripe to do so, wherever they might be. If they chanced to be near an alien village when they did -- and if they were lucky enough to make their way to it without becoming food for a Ghost Below or any other marauder -- they were accepted there as readily as any autochthone. But adults never did such a thing. On the other hand, adults never found themselves in Sham-igon's position, until now. "Sham-igon, Sharn-igon." he called, over and over, and at last a he-mother crept toward him. It did not speak directly to him, but it did not retreat, either. As it moved, it softly made the sound of its name: Tsharr-p'fleng. "Have you had a good Ring Greeting, alien brother?" Shamigon asked politely. No answer, except that the sound of the stranger's name grew a trifle louder and more assured. "I am not of this place," Sharnigon acknowledged. "It is most unpleasant for me to be here, and I am aware it is unpleasant also for you. However, I must speak with you." Agitatedly the other Krinpit scratched and thumped its name for a moment, and then managed to speak. "Why arc you here, Shamigon?" He collapsed on the knees of his forelegs. "I must have food." he said. The balloonist had been so very thin and frail, he had made only half a meal, and of course Sham-igon had been careful not to eat any part of the Poison Ghosts. He was not sure he had succeeded were certain and the other would be a long time recovering. That settled the score for the balloonist. But not for Cheee-pruitt.    If Sham-igon had not been a professional empathist he could not have broken through the barriers between villages. Even so, it took much time and all of his persuasion; but at the end of it Tsharr-p'fleng helped him to a dwelling-pen and ministered to his needs. Sham-igon devoured the crab-rat they brought him, while Tsharrp'fleng engaged in agitated conversation with others of the village just outside the wall. Then they came in and ranged themselves around Sham-igon, listening to him eat. He ignored their polite scratches of curiosity and concern until every morsel was gone. Then he pushed away the splintered carapace and spoke. "The Poison Ghosts killed my hewife, and did not eat him, " A flickering sound of disgust. "They captured me and held me in a place without doors. They removed my backlings and took them away. I do not think they were eaten, but I have not heard them since." Brighter sounds, disgust mixed with sympathy and anger. "Moreover, they have also captured Ghosts Above and Ghosts Below, and many of the lesser living things, and have eaten none of them. I therefore killed three of the Poison Ghosts. I intend to kill more. Are you backmates with the Poison Ghosts?" The he-mother rustled and spoke with contempt. "Not those! Their backmates are the Ghosts Below." Another said, "But the Poison have spoken to us in our language and told us to beware of them, lest they kill us. " "Beware of what? What did they tell you to do?" "Only to refrain from harming any of them, for then they will kill all our village. " Sham-igon said, "The Poison Ghosts do not speak truth. Listen! They say they come from another world, like the stars in the sky. What are these stars?" "They say they are like the heat from the sky," muttered the other. "I have felt the heat from the sky. I have felt no heat from these other stars. I hear nothing from them. No matter how loud I shout, I hear no echo from any of them. " "We have said these things ourselves," said Tsharr-p'fleng slowly. "But we are afraid of the Poison Ghosts. They will kill us, without eating. " "They will, it is true," said Sham-igon. He paused. Then he went on: "Unless we kill them first. Unless all of our villages together fall upon them and kill them, without eating. " XI Marge Menninger's hair was no longer blonde. The name on her passport was not Marge Menninger. According to her travel orders, she was now a major, en route to a new duty station; and although the orders authorized a delay en route, it was unlikely that the general who signed them had contemplated that it would be spent in Paris. In the little room of her hotel she fidgeted over the so-called croissant, and what passed for orange juice, and phoned down to the concierge to see if the message she was expecting had arrived. "I regret it, Meez Bernardi, but there is nothing," sighed the concierge. Marge took another bite of the croissant and gave it up. France was nominally part of the Food Bloc -- by the skin of its teeth, and by the relabeling of Algerian wine for export -- but you couldn't prove it by what they gave you for breakfast. She was tired of this room, with its leftover smells of khef and sexual athletics from its previous occupants. She wanted to move around and couldn't. And while she was fretting away time in this room, the Peep ships were going through pre-launch, the training of backup crews for the next Food Bloc mission was limping along without her and only God knew what disasters were taking place in Washington and at the U.N. She abandoned the breakfast and dressed quickly. When she came downstairs, of course there was a applied for Man's wildest whims and dreams of far-flung space travel come alive in this simulation of future reality. #-# players each start out knowing only the locations of their own explored systems, meeting up with aliens in space. Each home system possesses industrial capability with enough ing, commerical and military fleets. Economic capability increases with time as colonies are established and industrial might spreads across the galaxy. Other players are soon contacted, introducing the political intrigue and diplomacy that will become crucial factors in maintaining the new empire. Each player is in competition to emerge victorious with the largest empire. It is up to the player to decide whether he will build his empire peaceably or at the expense of his neighbors. from across the continent and processes each game turn. Once every #-# weeks, we send each player his "turn," consisting of his results from last turn and a questionnaire for him to complete detailing his moves and decisions for the current turn. For more information, enclose S.A.S.E. and request our free catalog; or send only # to receive the entire rules set to all # of our Once you have the rules and can examine the game more closely, decide if you want to enter and if so, follow # Old Town Rd. ## D, Pt. Jefferson Station, N.Y. # message at the concierge's desk, on a flimsy blue slip of paper: Miss Hester Bemardi will be picked up at # hours for her appointment. It had obviously been there all along. Margie did not bother to reprimand the concierge; tipping time would take care of that. She pushed her way out into the rue Caumartin, deciding what to do next. Six hours to kill! And for the life of her she could not think of any productive use to make of them. It was a warm, drizzly day. The stink of gasoline drenched the air over the Place de l'Opera. Food Bloc or not, France was cozy with the Ay-rabs, as well as the Peeps. That was another reason you could not trust the frogs, Margie thought darkly. One of her grandfathers had marched into this city in Wehnnacht gray and the other, in the opposite direction a few years later, in American olive-drab, and both of them had passed on to her their feelings about the French. They were inconstant allies, and unreliable subjects, and the few who ever seemed to have any sense of national purpose usually wound up having their heads shaved by the many who did not. In Margie's view, the French were not a bit better than the English, the Spanish, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Asians, the Africans, the Latins and about ninety per cent, when you came right down to it, of the Americans too. But the immediate problem was not what was wrong with humanity but what she could do with this day. There was only one answer. She could do the thing most American women came to Paris to do. She could shop. She not only could shop, she must; it was the best way of avoiding attention. She not only must, she wanted to. It was one of Margie's most closely guarded secrets that periodically she went on shopping binges, out of one store and into another, pricing fabric, trying on dresses, matching shoes with gowns. In her little Houston apartment there were two closets, plus half of what was meant to be a guest room, filled with her purchases. They were thrown jumbled onto shelves, pushed under a bed in their original store bags; sweaters she would never wear, material half-sewn into drapes that would be hung. Her living room was spartan and her bedroom was always immaculate, because you never knew who might drop in. But the secret rooms were part of the hidden personality of Margie Menninger. None of what she bought was very expensive. It was not because she was economical. She had unaccounted funds at her disposal, and the prices never mattered. But her taste was for quantity rather than quality. Periodically she would wage war against the overflow and then for a while Goodwill and the Salvation Army would fatten off her discards. But a week later the hoard would have grown again. Margie did not bother with the tourist traps along the Champs Elysees or the tucked-away boutiques. Her tastes were for stores like Printemps, Uniprix and the Galeries Lafayette. The only fly in the ointment was that she could not buy anything. She could not carry it where she was going, and did not want to attract attention by leaving it, so she tried on, and she priced, and for six hours she made the lives of a score of Parisian shopgirls a living hell. That didn't bother Margie Menninger at all. By the time the taxicab picked her up at her hotel, punctually on the tick of three o'clock, her good nature was restored. She leaned back against the hard plastic seatback of the cab, ready for what was to come next. The driver stopped at the Place Vendome long enough for another passenger to jump in. Behind his tourist shades was the face of her father, which was no surprise to Margie. "Bonjour, honey," he said. "I brought you your toy." She took the camera he offered her and hefted it critically. It was heavier than it looked; she would have to be careful not to let anyone else pick it up. "Don't try to take pictures with it," he said, "because it won't. Just hang it around your neck on the strap. Then, when you get where you're going -- " he pushed the shutter lever, and the casing opened to reveal a dull metal object inside -- "this is what you give your contact. Along with a hundred thousand petrodollars. They're in the carrying case. " "Thank you, Poppa." He twisted in the seat to look at her. "You're not going to tell your mother that I let you do this, are you?" "Christ, no. She'd have a shit hemorrhage." "And don't get caught," he added as an afterthought. "Your contact was one of Tam Gulsmit's best people, and he is going to be really ticked off when he finds out we turned him. How are things going at Fort Detrick?" "Good shape, Poppa. You get me the transport. I'll send some good people." He nodded. "We've had a little lucky break," he offered. "The Peeps fired on one of our guys. No harm done, but it makes a nice incident. " "Didn't he fire back, for Christ's sake?" "Not him! It was your old jailhouse buddy, the one from Bulgaria. As near as I can tell, he doesn't believe in the use of force. Anyway, he did exactly what I would have told him to do. He got the hell out of there and reported back to the U. N. peacekeeping force, and he had tapes and pictures to prove what he said." He peered out the window. They had crossed the Seine. Now they were creeping through heavy traffic in a workingclass neighborhood. "This is where I get out. See you in Washington, love. And take care of yourself."    Early the next morning, Margie was in Trieste. She was not Hester Bernard! any more, but she wasn't Marge Menninger either. She was a sleepy Swiss-Italian housewife in a sweaty pants suit, driving to the Yugoslav border in a rented Fiat electrocar with a crowd of other Sunday-moming shoppers looking for cheap vegetables and bargains in Yugoslavian kitchenware. Unlike them, she drove straight through to Zagreb, parked the car and took a bus to the capital. When she reached Belgrade, the object her father had given her was at the bottom of a plastic shopping bag, with an old sweater and a shabby pocketbook on top of it. And she had had very little sleep. Margie could not have grown up in the household of Godfrey Menninger without learning the easy dialogue of espionage. In all the world, she was the only person with whom her father had always been open. First because she was too little to understand, and so he could speak freely in her presence. Then because she had to understand. had been terrified past the point a four-year old can survive, and her father's patient explanations had been the only thing that let her make sense of the terror. And finally, because he trusted her to understand, always, that the grotesque and lethal things he did had a purpose. He never questioned that she shared that purpose. So she had grown up in an atmosphere of drops and liquidations and couriers and double agents, at the center of a web that stretched all around the world. But now she was not at the center of the web, she was not where the risks were immense and the penalties drastic. She walked quickly down the busy streets, avoiding eye contact. The closet-sized shops had their doors open, and confusing smells came out of them: a knifelike aroma of roasting meat from a dressmaker's (when had she eaten last?), the sting of unwashed armpits from what seemed to be a costume-jewelry boutique. She crossed, dodging a tram, and saw the office she was looking for. The sign said "Electrotek Miinschen," and it was over a sweatshop where fat, huge men in T-shirts worked at belt-driven sewing machines. She checked her watch. There was more than an hour before her first possible contact. The man she needed to meet was a short, slim Italian who would be wearing a football blazer with the name of the Skopje team. Of course, no one like that was in sight yet -- even if he turned up for the first rendezvous, which her father had warned was unlikely. Down the block there was a cluster of roofed sheds surrounding a gabled two-story building that looked like any American suburban town's left-over railroad station. A farmer's market? It seemed to be something like that. Margie pushed her way through crowds of women in babushkas and women in minifrocks, men in blue smocks carrying crates of pink new potatoes on their shoulders and men with a child on each hand, studying counters of chocolates and jellies. It was a satisfying, busy mob. She was not conspicuous there. She was, however, hungry. Strawberries seemed to be in season. Margie bought half a kilo, and a bottle of Pepsi, and found a seat on a stone balustrade next to an open suitcase full of screwdrivers and cast-aluminum socket wrenches. What Margie wanted most was a hamburger, but no one seemed to be selling anything like that. But others were eating strawberries, and Margie was confident she looked like any of them, or, at least, if not like them, like some housewife who might have stopped en route to any ordinary destination to refresh herself. At two, punctually, she was back in front of Electrotek Munschen, studying a Belgrade bus guide as instructed. No short, slim Italian appeared. Twice she caught snatches of words that seemed to be in English, but when she looked up from her bus guide and glanced casually in that direction, she could not tell which of the passersby had spoken. She pitched the bus guide into a comer sewer and walked angrily away. The second appointment was not until ten o'clock, at one of the big old luxury hotels, and what in God's name was she going to do until then? She had to keep moving. It was very hard to stroll for more than seven hours, however many Camstop and drink. God bless, she passed something that called itself, Restoran, and when she realized that it was a cafeteria, one problem, at least, was solved. She pointed at something that looked like roast chicken, and probably was, and with the mashed potatoes and bread that went with it, at least she was full. Full of time. She emptied herself of as much of it as she could: a stroll through the botanical gardens, a long window-shopping stroll down the Boulevard Marshall Tito. And then it began to rain. She retreated in to a Bioskop and watched a Czech comedy with SerboCroatian subtitles until nine. The only problem was staying awake, but when she got to the hotel, there was a real problem. Ghelizzi did not show up there, either. By now she was almost dizzy with fatigue, her clothes were sweaty and rain-stained and she was sure she was beginning to smell. Poppa had not really thought these arrangements through, she thought with some bitterness. It should have occurred to him that the waiters at the hotel bar would not fail to notice a sweaty, dirty foreign woman among all their marble and their string trios. If she had been a man, it might not have mattered. A man could have been checking out the hotel whores, the skinny darkat-the-roots blonde playing solitaire by the fireplace, the plump one with the bright red hair who had left the aperitif-lounge twice in one hour, with different men, and was back again, ready for the next. Margie refused another Campari, and sent the waiter for a Turkish coffee. The next appointment was not until the following afternoon, and where would she sleep? The whores had rooms. If she had been one of them -- The idea did not disturb Margie in any moral way, but it took only a second for her to discard it as impractical. Even if she had a room, the waiters would surely throw her out to protect the existing monopoly the first time she looked toward one of the solitary males. They were already looking at her with interest, and beginning to take the cloths off some of the tables in the farther end of the room. Margie picked up her coffee and moved to the table of the streaked blonde. She spoke to her in English, confident that in a tourist hotel the girls would be fluent in the necessary words in any major language. "How much for all night?" she asked. The blonde looked scandalized. "For yourself? How disgusting! I could not possibly do such a thing with a woman. " "Fifty dinars. " "One hundred." "All right, one hundred. But I have very special tastes, and you must do exactly as I ask." The blonde looked skeptical, then shrugged and signaled the waiter. "First you must buy me a real Scotch-whiskey while you explain what these tastes are. Then we will s' e. "    In the morning Margie woke up refreshed. She used the whore's tiny shower to get clean, dressed quickly and paid the woman off with a smile. "May I ask a question?" the whore offered, counting the money. "I can't stop you from asking." "This thing you had me do, simply rubbing your neck each time you woke until you fell asleep again? Is that truly satisfying to you?" "You wouldn't believe how satisfying," smiled Margie. She strolled grandly out of the hotel, nodding politely to the local police in their baggy gray uniforms open at the neck, the hands on the guns in the cardboard holsters. A few blocks down the boulevard took her to the London Cafe, and there, nursing a beer at one of the indoor tables, was the slim, short Italian wearing a Skopje football cap. She sat down and ordered a coffee, then visited the' women's w.c. When she came back, the Italian was gone. The bag she had left on her chair did not appear to be disturbed, but her exploring fingers told her the camera was gone, and in its place was a guide folder about the hovercraft cruise to the Iron Gorge. She made her way back across the border in the same order. By the time she was in Trieste again, and able to resume the identity of the American tourist, Hester Bemardi, she was fully restored. On the clamjet to Paris she locked herself in the toilet and studied the contents of the travel folder. How Ghelizzi had come to be a person of trust in Sir Tam's army of spies was beyond her; he had not impressed her as being the sort of man one would repose faith in. But he had delivered the goods this time. The little device was on its way, and the complete file of secret tachtran messages between Earth and the Fuel Bloc camp on Klong was in her hands in microfiche. Her father would be very proud.    In his #th book!, Isaac Asimov reveals what makes a man write # bodes. In his #th book, Isaac Asimov finally writes about himself. In Memory Vet Green begins with his family's emigration from Russia and takes us through his education as a scientist and the writing of his famous Foundation Trilogy and "Nightfall." Along the way, he sells his first story; gets to know the legendary John Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction ; joins the Futurians, a fan club that turned into a galaxy of SF greats. This is a book filled with the history of SF and with revealing insights into the formative years of the "national resource and natural wonder" that is Isaac Asimov. To further mark the occasion, Doubleday has begun reissuing his early, classic science fiction in uniform omnibus editions. The Far Ends of Time and Earth contains the novels Pebble m the Sky and The End of Eternity, and the story collection, Earth is Room Enough. The Stars, contains the novels The Stars, Like Dust and The Currents of Space, and the collection, The Martian Way and Other Stories. Eventually, Doubleday will republish all of Isaac Asimov's fiction. #-#  Actually, Isaac likes to keep his publishers I happy, so he has written two "#th books." !, You'll also find Opus #, published by k Houghton Mifflin, at booksellers now. Something was rotten in the State of Peusa The softly curving walls of the Temple of God soared upward to the sky. No living man or woman had ever seen where and how they converged in the apex of the vast building. There were no windows higher than fifty feet, and the inward-curving walls above the windows rose on into the void -- first white, then gray, then utter black. Preacher Peter said: "And I say unto you, in the Word of God in this Temple of God in the World of God, the Sun is most wondrous, the Sun of God gives us life, praise the Sun of God..." Fredi was not listening, and this in itself was a crime. Not heeding the Word of God -- unlike the thousands of others in the enormous Temple, who were listening so intently that every nuance of Peter's voice reached them -- was sinful. But it did not bother Fredi, who carried in his bosom a crime so much greater. Fredi was in love with a priestess -- in fact, with the High Priestess herself. More specifically, he lusted after the High Priestess; and although as an intelligent youth he could not believe that such a thing had never happened before, it was to him as though the first and only time, because no one had ever dared admit such feelings. Preacher Peter said: "Praise the Sun, from whom all blessings flow. The Sun of God was sent to save us from eternal darkness..." Fredi, conscious of sinning, was not certain whether he felt more or less guilty inasmuch as until recently he had been a devout worshiper -- and had even considered trying to become a priest himself. Since so few were called, he had become an actor instead. Anyway, now all thoughts of becoming a priest were banished. One who sinned as he was sinning, even if only in his mind, was not worthy. His personal integrity lacked the sublimity to make him openly confess his crime; yet it was strong enough that he would never be able to imagine himself as one of the Twelve Apostles. Preacher Peter said: "Praise the Holy Trinity, the Word of God, the Sun of God and the World of God..." It would not be long now, Fredi thought, his mind surfacing briefly to see and hear how far the preacher had progressed. Vaguely he remembered once having heard the phrase, "The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost," but that obviously came from a corrupt early form of worship, probably devil-worship -- certainly it was arrant superstition, dragging a ghost into it and personifying God as the Father and the Sun as His Son. While Fredi's mind had wandered, the priest had come to the end of the sermon and now everyone was chanting softly, Fredi included: "Our God which art in the sky, hallowed be Thy name, Thy World is come. Thy will be done in the World as it is in the sky..." And then the twelve priestesses emerged through the pillared arch, led by the High Priestess Mary, Virgin Mother of the Sun. Fredi did not even see the eleven other priestesses; it was as though he had never seen them. He saw only Mary. Fair-haired, tall, bare-shouldered, bare-armed, barefoot, she wore a long, loose, white gown. She was beautiful. She was pale. She was pure. The unseen organist sounded a note and she sang: "O God, our help in ages past." Everyone joined in, but by ritual she sang the last verse alone, her silvery voice soaring to the dark emptiness high above: If ever I forget the way To live the sacred life, I trust and pray that on that day I feel the sacred knife. It was only on this day, watching and listening to the High Priestess, that Fredi -- for the first time -- found her ritual verse somehow wrong. Certainly the rest of the hymn was not likely to be attributed to Shakespeare; and there was something odd, something amiss, in the second verse: Below the blanket of Thy sky Thy folk have slept secure; Sufficient just that Thou art nigh And our defense is sure. But the second-last verse, almost a repeat of the first, was clearly the original last verse. The High Priestess's ritual solo verse had surely been added later. But it did not matter. Mary could sing the alphabet and he would find it sheer poetry. Mary... six months ago she had been Lori Jones. If Fredi had known her then, much might have happened. Although even at that time she was already under the protection of the Temple -- a possible priestess, a possible High Priestess as events had proved -- temple girls did sometimes leap the wall, take lovers, have babies... Now there was no chance; Fredi's love was hopeless. And he was honest enough to admit that when she was Lori Jones, she would probably never have been more than a Jan Wilson to him. A High Priestess had glamor -- no woman had more. By virtually ceasing to be a woman, the High Priestess became woman incarnate, unattainable, and therefore infinitely desirable. And, paradoxically, his own religious leaning had played a part in leading him to this great sin. Now was the time. She stepped forward and Preacher Peter crossed himself. Then, also moving forward, he crossed the High Priestess too -- and in doing so, he deftly brushed the two wide straps from her shoulders. The white gown slowly slid to the floor. A faint sigh rose from the audience. Mary was pure. The Sun never saw her body. There in the Temple of God. a thousand people saw her body -- not brown, not even pink, but creamy-ivory. It was ethereal, not earthly, certainly not earthy. It had the perfection of a statue, the clean lines of a statue, the smoothness of a statue. The pale nipples were tiny and only faintly pink. She stepped around the gown and stood before the preacher. The ritual began. Fredi wondered at the paradox that the Virgin Mother of the Sun must never see the Sun; that while all the rest of them (except Preacher Peter and the other priestesses) were about to go out into the Sun on this Sunday, she would never feel its warmth on her body again. But of course religion was full of paradoxes. Perhaps the logic behind it was that if the Mother of the Sun were to give herself to the Sun, it would be incestuous. "Yes, I am pure." "Yes, you are pure. The sacred knife will prove to all that you are pure, that the Temple is pure, that the World is pure, that the World is still the World of God." Preacher Peter must be a fair prestidigitator, Fredi thought professionally. You never saw where the sacred knife came from. Some of the more devout worshipers swore that it came into his hand by a miracle, but there was nothing said about that in the Word of God. Peter held the knife firmly in both hands, point downward, over Mary's left breast. There was a click and a faint hum of machinery. The circular panel on which she stood revealed itself to be a moving pedestal. As it rose toward the knife, she sank to her knees; then she sat on her heels; although the knife did not move, the rising pedestal pushed her steadily toward it. And as the pedestal rose, it turned. Mary had begun the ritual with her back to the congregation. Slowly her body was revealed in profile. The knife, never touching, was no more than two inches from her. Sitting on her heels, she had to arch backward to avoid it, her arms above her head as the pedestal continued to rise and turn. Her hands and her long hair touched the floor. Her breasts pointed straight up, now only an inch from the knife. Below her tortured rib cavity her belly stretched taut. And still the sacred knife was over her, and still the pedestal rose. Six months earlier another High Priestess had died silently as the pedestal continued to rise. And within the hour the preacher had died by the knife; the eleven other priestesses were dead by the knife; and later a hundred criminals died by the knife -- until God was appeased and the knife took no more. And the world was once again the World of God... Today, however, the pedestal stopped rising. Mary's head was on the marble, her body racked like a violin string. She could go no farther. Then the knife disappeared and she raised herself to a kneeling position, her arms high, as the pedestal retraced its travel. Finally she stood up and stepped back into the pool of her gown. A priestess moved forward and raised it to her shoulders. Not a word was spoken. The ceremony was ended, and all was right with the World...    The thousand people left the Temple -- but they did not go home. It was exactly noon and the hot Sun was directly overhead. The crowd spread out over the vast forecourt of the Temple. There was no ritual involved, no particular organization; everyone simply found himself or herself six square feet of space. Then all of their clothes came off. They stood, they sat, they squatted, they lay full length. It did not matter. They were one with the Sun. After five minutes -- five utterly silent minutes -- some got up, put on their clothes and went home. Some stayed, spreading themselves as their neighbors vacated their spaces. Others sought friends and relatives. Jan Wilson came upon Fredi from behind. He was starting to put on his robes but she said: "Leave them. Come with me." And nude, they ran into the woods together. At first there were many couples clustered around, the impatient and lazy ones; then, the farther they went, only a few; and finally none. It was pleasantly cool under the trees but they had to find at least a sunray. It was Sunday, the day of the Sun, and they did not have the excuse that the sky was overcast. The Sun was there and it was a sin to hide from the Sun. Jan found a grassy bank beside a pool and lay down on it, full in the Sun. She looked at Fredi expectantly -- and he rebelled. "No!" he said violently. "Ritual love is not love. It's only very ordinary, very uninteresting sex." "Even when the Sun demands it?" "The Sun doesn't demand anything and you know it." "This from you, Fredi? You, the little priest?" "The Sun doesn't demand it," he insisted. "Maybe I'm wrong... I thought this was Sunday." "You know perfectly well that all Sunday means is that a man who wants a girl has an edge. She thinks she shouldn't say no. She thinks if she says no, she's sinning in some way. You know that -- " "I know that you've just been lusting after the High Priestess." It was suddenly very still. Fredi knew -- the moment it was too late -- that he should have laughed incredulously. The Temple was the law. The Temple judged. He was in no immediate danger of feeling the sacred knife, but he might someday go on the list. Then, if the High Priestess proved false and God struck, and the eleven other priestesses also died, and all the more serious criminals in addition -- and if God was still not appeased after that, he might find himself... Jan was smaller than the High Priestess but that was not the major difference between the two. She was brown, brown all over, and anything but ethereal. Nude, she was earthy. Very attractive, but earthy. In fact, she was at the moment literally earthy, having rolled in the soft soil and become dusty and muddy. She was also sweaty. Although this did not make her a whit less desirable, it did make her a lot less like Mary. "So?" he said. "So since you can't have her, you might as well..." "That isn't what you were going to say." "No. And it's not what I'm going to say in a minute. Meantime, before the Sun shifts off this soft, grassy bank and we have to move into that bog over there, what about it?" He did not really have to force himself; at times he had thought he was almost in love with Jan Wilson. The main drawback was that they shared so little in common. Whenever he felt particularly tender, she would be coarse; furthermore, she seemed to have absolutely no feeling for art. Afterward she said: "Let's bathe. I know you think I'm a peasant and you're a great artist, but you're wrong in a lot of things, Fredi. I'm too intelligent to be a peasant, you'll never be a great artist, and I've always known a hell of a lot more than you've given me credit for." The profanity was no shock; the meaning of her words was. And without giving him time to recover, she went on deliberately: "For instance -- you don't know it but fundamentally, despite your religious aspirations, you're a Realist." The charge was so serious that this time he had to react. Besides, it was completely untrue. "You're crazy. I never in my whole life came anywhere near -- " "I know you never came anywhere near -- in all twelve years of your whole life. Oh, yes, I know you're twenty-four, Fredi, but since you manage to live at only half the speed of most people, you're really only twelve. While I, officially nineteen, must be at least forty. Forget it. Let's bathe." They jumped into the pool and swam for a while, then emerged and lay on the bank, letting the Sun dry their bodies. And now Jan was pretty -- clean and brown and smooth all over. Fredi toyed with the not-veryoriginal thoughts that a girl who was small was not therefore less attractive than a girl who was tall, that brown skin in itself was no less beautiful than cream-ivory, that the nude Jan was not less nubile than the nude Mary. He wanted to make love again and his hand slid under and around her small waist to draw her to him "As I said, you're a Realist," she observed coolly. He took his hand away. Cool water had not extinguished his ardor. Cool words did. "Which gives us something in common," she added. "More than you knew, Fredi? Listen and I'll tell you about the Realists. About them, about me, about you, about us." "I am not a Realist," he said firmly. "You're crazy." "I'm not crazy and, yes, you're not a Realist -- but only in the sense that you don't know it yet. You have to understand that whatever else you are, do and think, your merely wanting to possess the High Priestess makes you a Realist." He was silent, wondering why she had never talked this way before. Without his having to ask, she told him. 'Until today I didn't think you would ever be of any use to us. But now I see how you could be. First, though, let me tell you about the Realists. We're not against religion, not against the Temple. But it's corrupt. We're against the way it's taking over everything. That's corrupt. You've heard the saying, 'Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ' Well, the Temple is well on the way to taking absolute power for itself. You know that"' He relaxed a little. "Theories. If you want to talk theory, I don't mind." "I'm not talking theory. I'm talking fact. A hundred years ago the Bible was open to all. Now nobody gets to see the Bible and the preacher reads only selected passages. How do we know he isn't making them up? And lately not only the Bible but a whole lot of other books have been withdrawn. It's going on all the time." Fredi did not care. For a moment he had thought she was threatening him, trying to blackmail him into marrying her or into something else he did not particularly want to do. But here she was talking calmly and reasonably, calmly and reasonably trying to involve him in something that would -- eventually -- make an appointment for him with the sacred knife. "Let's go back," he said abruptly"We can use you, I said. We'll help you and you'll help us. We'll help you reach the High Priestess." He was, after all, crazy -- and he knew it. Suddenly he found he was listening very closely. Hitherto he had taken it for granted that his love was hopeless. If it were possible -- if somehow he could one day possess the High Priestess -- then the threat of a date with the sacred knife seemed almost irrelevant. Jan was going on, rapidly and eagerly now: "Can't you see, Fredi, what it would prove if you became the High Priestess's lover and nothing dire happened? Everyone but the Realists believes in that twaddle Preacher Peter was spouting. The Temple has taken the power it has and it will go on taking power until the Realists get ahold of something big and come out in the open and say, 'Lo and behold, the Temple is only a man-made building, the preachers are only men and the priestesses are only women. The Virgin Mother of the Sun is only Lori and she's no virgin, and the sacred knife' doesn't know a thing about it -- " "I shouldn't listen to this." "But you are listening, aren't you? Fredi, we need to do something like this. All books tell a little of the truth. Now that truth is being systematically destroyed. Even just a few years ago there were books that said we came to this world from another world, a world called Earth... but that doesn't square with the Temple's line that we're the Chosen, the only people living on the only world. The Bible had already been taken from us because it was about a planet that was not this planet, and if people were allowed to read it, they would be able to figure that out..." But Fredi was no longer listening. The idea of becoming the lover of the High Priestess had inflamed him; death did not matter if only he achieved that. What difference if the preachers rewrote history and said the world was the only world and destroyed a few books? He was an actor, not a scholar. In full flow, Jan suddenly stopped and sighed. "You have your own defenses, Fredi, haven't you? One thing I've said has interested you, only one. The rest -- " "Yes, the rest. Tell me one thing that shows you're right and the Temple is wrong. One thing that shows we really did come from somewhere else -- " "Certainly." She stood up and pointed. "Look over there. And there. The ruins. " "The ruins? What about them?" She looked at him pityingly. "They're not ruins, Fredi. Anybody can see that. Even you can see it if you look. The Realists saw it and that was what made them Realists." "If they're not ruins, what are they?" "Well, in a sense they're ruins but -- " "Then what are you talking about?" "Ruins of ships. Vast ships. So vast the Temple can't get rid of them. All the Temple can do is to say they're ruins -- our ruins, ruins of a previous culture on this world. But go and look, Fredi. Look at the tubes and rusted dials and engines and air pipes. They can't possibly be the ruins of houses or any kind of static building. They prove that we came from somewhere else and that this world is not the world." He did not know what to say. Her words sounded true... but did it really matter that much? She sighed again. "Okay. I'll stick to the one subject that turns you on -- that of how you're going to become the lover of the High Priestess." "How?" "Well, in the end it's up to you, Fredi. Rape is no use. It proves nothknew Lori Jones a little. Silly, priggish bitch. Vain, shallow, always certain she was somehow better than other people but without anything to back it up except that she was under the umbrella of the Temple. Yes, you could win her. You're too handsome by half. Flatter her, say loving words to her. You could manage that bit in your sleep. So all you need is opportunity. And that's what we'll give you. "    The next day, Monday, was a very different day. There was no mass surrender to the Sun, which shone just the same. People who sunbathed on a Monday, if they were lucky enough to have the time, were expected to keep some clothes on just as on Sunday they were expected to remove them all. Only Sunday was the day of the Sun. Fredi, at rehearsal for Macbeth, in which he played Macduff, was sent to the library to check on a technical point. He was not a star. His good looks and a fine speaking voice were his main talents. At the library, having finished his chore, he paused. Was someone tampering with the ancient plays as well? Now that would concern him; drama was his profession and the new plays were gutless. In Shakespearean or Shavian productions there was always something to get your teeth into. Vaguely he remembered a Shakespearean play about a king, Richard called Angland or England. There was an impassioned speech about "this sceptdred isle, demi-paradise, this other Eden." Evidently it was quite a place. Yet there was no Angland or England in the World. was there but a quick glance showed that this was the wrong play. It must be Richard II. But there was no Richard II. By delayed action he was staggered. Could a Shakespearean play have been kidnapped, done away with, simply because a passage in it was inconvenient to the Temple? Impossible! Yet not impossible. The library was under the direct control of the Temple. The preachers were never seen at the library; but then, the library was wholly theirs when it was closed to everyone else. Looking through the microfilm spools, he realized for the first time how easy it would be to cut passages out of anything that was on microfilm. In the case of bound books, such deletions would show; but most of the books had disappeared, Microfilm was better, cheaper, longer-lasting. And with that thought he looked more closely at the recent renovations in the library and saw with further shock that while there was more space and the arrangement was more convenient, it was simply because there was less material in the same area. Books had been printed and still were being printed. You could take a book home, but not everyone had a microfilm viewer. Now that he looked around the library with new vision, he saw that nearly all the books were new, the older ones having been transferred tc microfilm. And microfilm could be censored in a matter of minutes -- leaving nothing to show that any tampering had been done. Behind him a voice said, "Can I help you? You seem to be looking for something." It was one of the librarians. She was about the same age as Mary and Jan but there the resemblance ended. They were beautiful girls, in their different ways; this was just a girl. He began, "I'm from the theater -- " "I know, she said eagerly. "You were great in the play last week. What a pity you were killed in the first act. " "Next week we do Macbeth, " he said boldly. "Some of the texts we have seem to differ slightly. Could I see the oldest, most authentic text you have?" She looked at him strangely and he realized that if something not quite right was going on at the library, she would have to be pretty dumb not to know anything about it, whether she was directly involved or not. But all she said was, "Of course." At the viewer, Fredi -- who knew Macbeth by heart -- took a new look at the play. It was odd that in Scene II the text established the fact that Duncan was the king, but not what he was the first witch said: "All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Peusa!" The second witch said: "All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Morden!" This was strange because in the upcoming production -- scheduled to be staged in just a week -- the witches would exclaim exactly the same words except that the two places mentioned were Glamis and Cawdor. No one knew precisely what a thane was but that did not matter; it was obviously some sort of a minor nobleman. No one knew what or where Glamis and Cawdor were, but everyone knew Peusa and Morden. They were areas not more than five miles from the Temple. So the text had been changed to make the setting local. Nothing much in that... except that this was supposed to be the earliest, most authentic text, and it clearly was not. The puzzle was: Why did the theater have an earlier text, and why was it allowed to use it? But that was not really much of a puzzle. The Temple moved slowly and silently in the shadows. Next week two old words would be spoken. Glamis and Cawdor (places on Earth?), but the next time Macbeth was produced, the more authentic text would prevail. Glamis and Cawdor would be replaced by Peusa and Morden. If anyone queried the change, it would be blandly affirmed that recent research had shown Peusa and Morden were either what Shakespeare had originally written or what he had really .intended to write. It amused him to find that in Act II, Scene #. when Macbeth said: "Still it cried 'Sleep no more!' to all the house: 'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more" -- the words in the text remained Glamis and Cawdor, when they should have been Peusa and Morden. The Preachers of the Temple had missed that. They were not infallible.    The Realists, it seemed, were. Two nights later they took him to a walled garden, telling him that Mary would be there, and alone. Since she could never see or be seen by the Sun, she took the air by night in the garden. She was unguarded because no one was supposed to know of her presence there and, further, the wall was meant to be unscalable. But the Realists knew she would be there, and their extending aluminum ladder and the rope for the descent on the other side reduced the wall to a mere inconvenience. At the last moment Fredi had fears, doubts, and an abrupt failure of self-confidence. "This from you, the great lover?" Jan asked sarcastically. The two men had not spoken, leaving all the talking to her. "Surely snapping your fingers will be more than enough?" "Suppose she screams?" "She won't scream." "How do you know?" "I didn't want to tell you anything, but since you've got cold feet, Fredi, I may as well -- it's all set. Just get in there and shoot your line. It will work. You're on a sure thing." "You know something I don't know?" "That's the understatement of the century. I know a hell of a lot of things you don't know. In particular -- I guess I have to tell you this too -- we managed to get a word of prophecy whispered into Lori's ear. She's going to meet a handsome stranger in romantic circumstances. She'll be looking for you, not really expecting you to show but her little heart fluttering in case you might... I told you she's a silly bitch." Nonsense, Fredi thought. Mary was beautiful and you could see that her beauty was only the lovely surface of a nature of immense depth and purity. "Just one word of advice," Jan said, "though heaven knows you shouldn't need it. Don't go all out for the jackpot at the first meeting. Be romantic. Touch her -- hell, yes -- but be gentle. Make her want you, not the other way around." "Oh, I know all about that." "Yes, you do. don't you? Even if it's the only thing you know." He was young and active. Scaling the wall and lowering himself silently on the other side was an easy job. He wore silver trunks and a long, dark cloak. Jan had chosen the costume for him, rather cynically. "You'll need a black cloak because we don't want you to show up glowing like a beacon. But you have to be the knight in shining armor too. And this is the kind of scene where you have to be half naked and your lady love has to be fully dressed -- you have to be sexy and make her go for you, not the other way around..." Nowhere could it have been easier to hide. The garden was full of trees, shrubs, bushes, huge tropical plants. It also had a maze of paths. And, of course, a pool. "Get her away from the pool," Jan had said. "Get her into the shadows. If you can't see a window, nobody behind a window can see you." And true enough, there Mary was, seated by the pool, wearing the obligatory white robe. Six feet away from her, hidden in the bushes, he said softly, "Well, it was worth it." She turned, startled. "Please don't do that," he said conversationally. "Somebody might be watching. Why not just get up casually and wander into the bushes for a stroll?" "Why should I?" That wonderful voice. "Well, I can see you. If you don't want to see me, you're not a real woman." "You might... harm me." "Then you can scream and people will come running. But why scream until you know whether you want to or not?" She stood up, looked around the garden and moved slowly toward him. When he touched her, it was from behind, and gently... but he held her firm when she tried to turn around. "I could be ugly," he said softly. "I could be old and fat." "You're not ugly. And you have a beautiful voice." "No, I'm not ugly. But compared with you -- " "You think I'm pretty?" The question was coy, banal, so ineptly arch that Fredi winced. Nevertheless it was an invitation, and that was what he was looking for. "No, you're not pretty at all. You're so incredibly lovely that I had to speak to you, no matter what happens. " His own words were not particularly poetic either but he meant them, and his ringing sincerity did not fail to make an effect. He released her and they faced one another there in the luminous night... Ten minutes later, no more, he climbed the rope and descended the ladder. The two men hurried away with them. Jan took him at least two hundred yards from the wall of the Temple gardens before asking: "Well?" "Yes." "What do you mean, yes?" "All's well. What a wonderful girl she is -- " "Never mind that. What did she think of you?" "That's all right." "You came away pretty soon." "I had to. I had achieved, I think, the maximum effect. If I had stayed longer... but you don't understand these things." "I understand too well, you mean. You made another date?" "No. But she'll expect me." "Good enough. Now are you frustrated enough to cast your pearls before me?" "No," Fredi said serenely. "I love Lori; I told you that. I can't love anyone else." "So she's Lori now. How did that come about?" "It was mainly her idea but I went along with it. I think the theory is that as Mary she couldn't possibly speak to me and certainly she could not let me kiss her, but as Lori -- " "I get it. Okay, you seem to have things in hand... did you kiss her, by the way?" "On our first date?" Fredi exclaimed, shocked. "And she the High Priestess?" Jan was silent for several seconds. Then she said, "Sometimes, Fredi, I get the uneasy feeling that you're not such a fool as you look." "Who is?"    It puzzled Fredi that the meetings were arranged so easily. Night after night he spent an hour with the High Priestess in the Temple gardens. It was all so simple, and no one ever came near them. Jan, when he mentioned the matter to her, said coolly, "Well, why not? The High Priestess is something big on Sunday but the rest of the week she's just a silly girl, still just Lori Jones, whom nobody bothers much about. Who cares if she's sitting in the gardens or having a bath or admiring her own boobs and belly or trying to read a book?" And on Saturday night Fredi felt that it was time. He had flattered Lori -- as Jan and his own instinct had told him to do -- and. she had thawed and met him at least halfway, wanting to believe him, finding him an overpoweringly romantic figure, yearning to love him and be loved herself. All the time, however, she remembered that she was the High Priestess. When Fredi's fingertips touched her as Preacher Peter touched her, when his hands were cool and gentle, she guided them sponse. There was, something in the Bible about the "laying on of hands." It was right, it was wholly innocent, that he should touch her face, her arms, her shoulders, even her breasts, waist and hips, as long as his touch was tender and worshipful, as long as she kept his touch tender and worshipful. And Fredi, reading her right, touched her as she wanted to be touched. They even -- one night when it was so dark they could not possibly be seen from any window -- swam in the pool, and Fredi's touch this time was on bare flesh. He deliberately kept it, however, the same cool, innocent touch, accustomizing her to being naked with him and still pure, as pure as when the robe slid down her body in the Temple and thousands saw her and no shadow was cast on her purity. On Saturday, therefore, it meant nothing unusual when they stood together in one of the sheltered clearings they now knew so well. Their clothes had been left behind. But this time Fredi's words were more personal and his touch more questing, more insistent -- for the first time like that of a virile young man touching a nubile young woman. "It has to be," he whispered. "No," she said, not responding. "All along you've known it. I've waited, and now you know that all I have ever said to you is true. I've proved it by my patience." "Nothing we have ever done or said has been wrong. But now -- " "Now if we don't acknowledge our love, it has all been a lie." His touch, still tender, was no longer cool. It demanded, and she fought not to answer yes, not to answer at all -- and failed. Her breasts grew to touch his; her arms, trying to keep him away; drew him to her; and her lithe belly, straining away from him as in the climax of the Sunday ceremony, suddenly ceased to be the hard, tight belly of a High Priestess or a marble statue and became the warm belly of a woman. "No," she said, and in the same breath -- half a breath, half a gasp -- "Yes, yes. "    Fredi did not want to go to the Temple. Neither Jan nor any other Realist had said anything to him beyond brief words of satisfaction that -- as they put it -- he had rung the bell. He had no idea of what they intended to do in the Temple but he remembered what Jan had threatened to say: "Lo and behold, the Temple is only a man-made building, the preachers are only men and the priestesses are, only women. The Virgin Mother of the Sun is only Lori Jones, and she's no virgin, and the sacred knife doesn't know a thing about it." The last phrase meant that at least the Realists were not going to raise a stir until the last part of the ceremony was over; it also strongly suggested they would indeed then do something, and Fredi was uneasy about it. It was all very well to say that if he won the High Priestess, nothing else mattered. Today it was a different situation. Perhaps last night, at the height of his passion, he would have shouted his agreement, draw back... but today he was alive, and he wanted to stay alive. As usual, he was near the front of the Temple, where Mary (today she was Mary) would be. He did not know where Jan was. He never went to the Temple with Jan, although she invariably sought him out afterward. Would she do that today? Would she expect him to make love to her today? He shied away from the thought and concentrated on the service. Today Preacher Paul was in charge. He was a small man, lacking the presence of Preacher Peter; the big, rolling words in his mouth did not sound nearly as impressive. "And I say unto you, in the Word of God in this Temple of God in the World of God, the Sun is most wondrous, the Sun of God gives us life, praise the Sun of God..." Suppose, Fredi thought with sudden hope, that Mary, like Preacher Peter, did not appear today. It was rare for the High Priestess not to play her part in the ceremony. There were twelve preachers, but only one High Priestess. On the other hand, there were eleven other priestesses and occasionally one of them stood in for the High Priestess. Should that happen today, Fredi 's vague feeling of uneasiness would be dissipated and he could go on living from day to day with little or no thought of the morrow. As long as Mary did not appear, it was reasonably certain that the ceremony would be uneventful. Suddenly the priestesses entered through the pillared arch -- and leading them was Mary. At the sight of her Fredi could scarcely restrain himself from shouting above Preacher Paul's pale voice, although what he would have shouted he did not know. At the same time Fredi relaxed a little because Mary was as serene as ever, he had to remind himself by concentrating hard on realistic details that the events of the past week had actually happened, that today was not a week earlier. Even then it took a glance at Preacher Paul -- not Preacher Peter -- to confirm that this was, in fact, another Sunday. Mary led the singing of "O God our help in ages past" and then, as usual, sang the last verse alone: If ever I forget the way To live the sacred life I trust and pray that on that day I feel the sacred knife. Fredi 's emotions were in turmoil. He did not know if he loved her. He did not know anything for sure. Certainly Mary was not in turmoil. Possibly as a woman in love, she felt completely sure of herself, sure of him, and sure that their love was not a mortal sin. But... was it a mortal sin? Could it be so right for him to leave the Temple and take part in pagan, erotic Sun rites with Jan, and so wrong for him to make love with the High Priestess six days later? Was she serene because she had decided with calm certainty that she could be Mary, High Priestess and Virgin Mother of the Sun, and at the same time Lori Jones, passionate lover of actor Fredi? She stepped forward and Paul crossed himself. Then he crossed Mary. Not as deft as Preacher Peter, he fumbled while brushing the white straps from her shoulders and had to do it again. As Lori's slim, ivory body emerged from the descending gown, Fredi felt a pang of jealousy that thousands of others were seeing the lovely body that was his and only his. The feeling was gone at once when he reminded himself that this was Mary, not Lori. Mary belonged to everybody and nobody, but Lori belonged to him. And later, not on Sunday but tomorrow, in the weeks ahead, she would be Lori again. The sacred knife emerged, but not with the panache of Preacher Peter. Mary was on the plinth. It moved as before, and as before she dropped slowly to her knees and then began the slow, agonizing stretch backward, the plinth turning and the knife remaining just above her left breast. Back she went, the long hollow below her ribs lengthening and deepening; yet as her belly stretched, her breasts seemed to grow, straining toward the sacred knife. It was all over in an instant. No one was able to say afterward whether the plinth suddenly rose, whether Paul stumbled or whether Mary rose spasmodically to take the knife. However it came about, the knife was in her heart and then, red and dripping, it remained poised in Paul's quivering hands as she slid back, silent, her eyes beginning to glaze in death. Preacher Peter would have retained his dignity. Preacher Paul let his shock, horror, anguish and terror show. Yet he knew what he had to do and he did it. Before Mary was dead, he himself was dying. the knife plunged into his own breast and remaining there. He slumped and would have fallen over the body of the High Priestess but for the fact that the plinth was still high and he was not tall. He slid down its side and preacher and priestess made a grim yet somehow beautiful tableau, the lovely woman dying on the stillmoving plinth, one arm drooping from it, the man in the robes of the preacher at her feet... Such moments were supposed to command complete silence... but of course such moments were not supposed to occur at all. The temple trembled when the High Priestess proved wanting; the whole World of God trembled. It was a dark day and the best that could be hoped for was that something good would come of it. There was now complete silence. The eleven priestesses knew that they must also die. The congregation knew that they were as good as dead, that their suspended sentences were now active convictions and that there was no escape. It was chaos.    How much time passed Frcdi had no idea. The priestess and the preacher lay dead now. The plinth had returned to its place and no longer moved. Many had gone; indeed, most had gone. But the Temple was by no means empty. While the reaction of some, the majority, was to flee the scene of horror as soon as possible, the reaction of many others, nearly a hundred, was to stay rooted to the spot, staring and praying. There was a touch from behind on Fredi's shoulder. Jan, naturally. And then a voice that was not Jan's. "I can see how deeply this has affected you. But life must go on. The Word must go on. Actor Fredi, your devoutness has not gone unnoticed. There will have to be a new Preacher Paul. Come with me. Preacher Paul . ' ' Fredi turned, stricken. It was Preacher Peter. Fredi could not think clearly and, therefore, wisely he did not speak. He knew that while the priestesses were nurtured under the protection of the Temple -- Jan, for instance, could never be a priestess -- the preachers had all been men of the World. They were chosen at times of crisis. He was Chosen. The irony of it did not occur to him. To cease to be actor Fredi, to become Preacher Paul, seemed eminently reasonable. He could not understand why he had not expected it. He would preach the Word in the Temple of God in the World of God. He would be a good preacher, a better preacher than he was an actor. He was trained for this. Jan and the Realists were defeated. Some of them would have to die. But he would not die, not now. He would serve God. And if in the future, on a Sunday when he held the sacred knife, some High Priestess died as Mary had, he would die too, and perhaps that would be ultimate justice. In the meantime, he would serve God.  Jack C. Haldeman II Too much TV-watching causes more than... Carl was walking down the street when he came unglued. It was a most curious event. Preceded by a lifetime of near-normal behavior, it was all the more surprising. He had been on his lunch break, heading down to Pop's for his usual corned beef sandwich and short beer when he fell flat on his face. He kept repeating the word "drugstore" as he lay on the sidewalk. "Drugstore, drugstore, drugstore," he said. It was the word he had been saying when he fell down. He was stuck there. "Drugstore, drugstore, drugstore," he said until they came and took him away to a hospital with soft padded walls. His family was stunned, the neighbors talked about it at great length. His mistress was crushed; she had been with him when he fell. She was the only one who would make the long drive out to visit him. He never recognized her. They labeled him schizophrenic and threw away the key. She drove hours just to sit by his bed and talk to him. "Drugstore," he would say. "Dammit," she would say. Actually, he wasn't schizophrenic at all. Dr. Moore was in the middle of a complex surgical procedure. He had trained at Johns Hopkins and was very good at this particular complex surgical procedure. People came from all over the world to have him carve up their bodies. They had lots of confidence in him and his Johns Hopkins training. "Retractor," he said to the nurse. As the nurse started to put the retractor in his hand, he dropped the patient's kidney on the floor. "Retractor, retractor," said Dr. Moore. "You have the retractor," said the nurse, picking up the kidney. She was worried. This was going to be hard to explain. She was afraid of a malpractice suit. The patient was very wealthy and his kidney was covered with germs. If he lived, he wasn't going to be very happy and if he didn't, his family wasn't going to be very happy. Nobody was going to be happy. "Retractor," said Dr. Moore. He looked like he was about to fall down. She dropped the kidney back into the patient and walked out of the operating room. She had always wanted to be a ballerina. Crazy Joe Wobbles was a disc jockey and he was already crazy. He had a habit of doing strange things on the air, but as long as his ratings held, the station would leave him alone. Once he had played ten solid hours of Alka-Seltzer commercials. His fans went wild. Teenage girls throughout the city wore t-shirts printed with his picture. "I Love Joe Wobbles" it said across their tiny breasts. He was as crazy as a bedbug and the most popular radio personality in the # to # age group. The station tolerated his weird behavior because the # to # age group had more money to spend than their parents. He had locked himself in the broadcast booth and was playing Bob Dylan records backwards. He had been in there for five hours when his mind boggled. Any sane man would have cracked in two. "Dylan's biggest hit, hit, hit," he said. "Hit, hit, hit," he continued. It was # minutes before anyone noticed anything unusual. "Hit, hit," he said. They tried to unlock the door and found that he had bolted it from inside. They tried to cut the power but found that he had bypassed the main systems. Crazy Joe was also paranoid. "Hit, hit," he said and # watts of listening power blasted him for miles. His ratings soared, everyone was tuning him in. Tunning on Joe Wobbles became an instant fad. At night you could pick him up as far away as New Orleans. It was a gas, and the station didn't try quite as hard to cut him off. It was three kicked down the door and pulled the plug on poor Joe. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice reduced to a whisper "Hit, hit, hit," he whispered as they carried him out. Pretty soon there were so many people being hauled away that they ran out of places to haul them away to. It was very confusing. People all over the country were snapping like twigs, running amok at the drop of a hat. It was getting so that you couldn't go anywhere without running into a couple of crazies. Something had to be done. green box full of #x# cards. They thought he was crazy, too. These same people would have laughed at the Wright brothers. It was a long iams could get anyone to listen to him and when he did, it wasn't anyone important. However, this particular assistant to the assistant saw through the rumpled clothing, the wiry hair, the scraggly beard and thought he detected a glimmer of truth in what the old geezer with the green file box full of #x# cards had to say. So the assistant to the assisstairs. Better than nothing, he thought, and moved some more papers around. iams turned on the charm. He flashed a big smile and started right in on his scientific explanation of the Loonies. The secretary was unimpressed. She popped her gum and pressed a button on her intercom. Old Bill had made another mistake. "A crackpot here to see you," she said into the little box on her desk. "Send the crackpot in," the little box said back to her. rived at the right place at the right time. The person he was going in to see was one Arthur J. Woods, assistant to the head of the P.C.L. -- Presidential Commission on the Loonies. He had just come back from lunch and four martinis on his expense account, so he was perfectly happy to sit back, smoke a cigar and listen to what Old Bill had to say. "I have a theory," said Bill. "Everyone has a theory," said Mr. Arthur J. Woods. "But mine is based on a scientific fact' "That's different? What scientific fact?" "The fact that you can't get ten pounds of fertilizer into a five pound bag." "That's news?" He puffed on his cigar. his green file box on Mr. Woods' desk. "This is a human brain." "No it's not. It's a green box." "Use your head. Imagine it's a brain. " Woods frowned and scratched his of blank #x# cards and put them on the desk. "These are pieces of informacards. "They look like #x# cards to me." sighed. "The box is like a brain," he said, stuffing cards into the box. "Just as there is a limit to the number of cards you can fit into the box, there is a limit to the number of pieces of information you can fit into a brain. They both get full. See?" He held out the filled box. Woods took it and tried to put another card inside. He couldn't. "That's one full box," admitted Woods. "But why would this be happening now? We ought to have seen this particular effect before." were gleaming. He was getting through. "You mean the tube?" "Exactly. You may not realize this, Mr. Woods, but television is produced by a rolling scan of some # lines thirty times a second. Although the conscious mind connects all these separate images into continous action, somewhere, deep in the brain, all these separate images are counted, stacked up and filed away. Soon we are all filled up like the box! And us... aha!" "Aha?" "Us. We are the first generation to be completely suckled from the teat of the tube. We have a lifetime of images stacked up one on top of the other. We are filled up as no other generation has ever been. There is no more room in the boxes of our brains for any more #x# cards." "Maybe just a couple?" asked Woods, but he already knew the answer. The wheels of the nation can move pretty fast when they're pushed and the crush of Loonies was pushing things pretty hard. Within a week, the battle plan had been worked out. The President would have to go on TV to tell everyone that they couldn't watch TV anymore. It might work. He was a fairly popular president, it was possible he could pull it off. There 'd be a lot of opposition, but he had faith in Dr, box and stack of #x# cards. He had them right beside him in the television studio. They were just props, though. The P.C.L. had prepared an excellent film explaining the Loonie Effect, or Tube Fever as those in the know had taken to calling it. Thankfully, the President wouldn't have to do any scientific explaining or use any big words; all he had to do was introduce the film. Air time. The red light of the camera went on. It was just one more piece of information, one more #x# card sliding into place. "Ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen..."  Here we present a story that is largely "autobiographical"! The echoing sound of Simon Wells's footsteps on the plascrete floor of the parking garage roused the shabby black sedan in slot # and it mumbled querulously to itself in Chinese, Startled, Simon stopped abruptly and the half-dozen tools concealed in the lining of his jacket bumped painfully against his ribs. Part of him, the empathetic half of his nature that made him a highly respected and well-paid mechanic, recognized that this was a car in trouble. The darker, hidden side of his personality that made him a successful assassin shrieked that something was wrong. His high-priced special service had never been contracted for a common import before. The flashy red sports model in slot # was a much more likely candidate. All Kane had given him over the phone was the slot number and Simon wondered if there was some mistake, Or maybe -- and for a moment the breath froze inside his chest -- maybe it was a trap with police or insurance agents waiting for him to spring it. The black sedan mumbled on in a doddering voice -- something about a broken bowl and spilled rice. Chinese was one of the dozen languages a skilled mechanic had to know and normally Simon was a good listener but now he was too preoccupied to follow the sedan's words. Besides, they made little sense. The brain was obviously old and wandering in time. Simon dismissed the threat of a trap.' Kane's operatives never got caught. A substantial amount of Kane's fees went to see to that. Paranoia, Simon thought. He should work for Kane more often or give up entirely this maniac switching from healer to killer. But he knew he could do neither. "Get to work," he growled at himself. Still he hesitated, glancing nervously around the garage. Only a few cars remained on level three and of them only the sports model in slot # was close enough to hear or see anything. It appeared to be dormant with front and back sensors shuttered but you could never tell for sure. Less than ideal conditions, Simon thought, but then a brain assassin seldom finds the perfect time and place. Simon took a deep breath and approached the black sedan with the purposeful stride of a rightful owner. Up close, it looked like an even more unlikely prospect. The shutter on its left front sensor had rusted off and the sensor itself was pitted and pockmarked. The poor thing was half-blind as well as senile. The auto insurance couldn't possibly bring enough to cover Kane's fee. The owner must be crazy. He addressed the black sedan in Chinese. For a moment it perked up like an old dog that thinks it hears its master's voice and then it sank back into its rambling conversation with itself. Simon sighed and reached into the lining of his jacket for his tools. It wouldn't take long and in this case it would be a mercy " "Is that your car?" The voice was lush, female, and familiar in a haunting way. He whirled but there was no one behind him except the red sports model,' its sensors now unshuttered. He hastily stuffed the tools back into his jacket. This car was a luxury model with side sensors front and back. He wondered how much it had seen. "And if it is?" "Move it," the sports model ordered imperiously. "It's in my slot. I've tried and tried to make it move, but I can't get through to it." The voice paused and then went on, softer, sexier. "Please move it. I don't want to call the security guards. They're always so rude. But I need to be in that slot." Several things came clear at once. For one, he had been right about a mistake -- the red car was definitely his victim. And two, Kane should have asked for a bigger fee. He could tell by the voice this was a Cauc brain and that meant it was insured for a bundle. In the Asian countries where populations had mushroomed out of proportion, braining a car or a softdrink machine seemed like luxury living compared to standing on each other's shoulders, straining for a wisp of air to breathe. But in the West Bloc, where the birthrate had fallen, life was Utopian by comparison. Cauc brains were hard to come by and the price was astronomical. "What are you, paralyzed?" the sports model snapped impatiently. "Move that wreck!" "In a minute," Simon said. "I've never run across a Caucbrained car before." A lie, but he made it sound convincing -- another reason he was a good mechanic. "I'd like -- " "I know." The voice was low, husky, and extremely bitter. "You want to know what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this. That's what everyone wants to know. That's why I don't usually talk to strangers. The answer is that the only other thing I'd have been good for was chopped meat, thanks to a senile brain like your friend there that couldn't pilot a two-ton truck down his own side of the highway. Satisfied?" "Want to talk about it?" he said soothingly, wondering where he had heard that voice before. "Wait a minute," she said. "I recognize that smooth tone of voice. You're a mechanic, right? Did my owner have you drop by to work on me? Get me over my little fit of depression?" "No, I -- " "Well, go back and tell him it won't work. He may have signed that trick contract with my agent but that doesn't mean I have to be happy with it. Tell him that." Suddenly the voice clicked into place in Simon's memory, "You're Amanda Everheart, " he blurted out and then wished he hadn't because the sports model slammed all sensors shut and went completely dormant. "Miss Everheart! Amanda! I know you're upset, but maybe I can help you." The sensors remained shuttered. Behind him, the black sedan whined something about rats. "Please, Amanda! I've felt every picture you ever made." On the other side of the parking garage the lift door opened and two security guards got out and came toward him purposefully. They stopped in front of him, hands hovering suggestively over their holsters. "I.D.," said the larger one. Simon, rattled by the sports model's identity, pulled out his real I.D., instead of Kane's carefully counterfeited fakes. The guard took it before Simon could recover and he had no choice except to stand there feeling the tools in his jacket growing heavier by the moment. The second guard, the shorter one, waved at the sports model. "This car complained you were bothering her. Do you have authorization to be here?" "Hey! This guy's a mechanic, Pete." Pete relaxed visibly. "Which one's your patient?" "I was supposed to check out this sedan." Simon forced a grin. "I think the sports model is a little nervous." The sports model roared into life, unshuttered all sensors and backed toward them. The two guards jumped one way and Simon flattened himself against the sedan. The sports model ' sped toward the exit ramp and disappeared down it with a squeal of tires. "That brain's over the hill," the big guard yelled. "It oughta be retired." "You want to be the one to tell Richmond Dukker his new brain's gone already?" Pete asked him. Simon recognized the name. If anyone had enough money to contract for the brain of Amanda Everheart, it was Dukker. "What about it. Buddy?" Pete asked Simon. "Did Dukker hire you to straighten out his new brain?" "I'm not at liberty to say," Simon said. He winked. They slapped him on the back and let him go. As soon as Simon reached a freephone, he called Kane. "What happened?" Kane yelled. "The party of the first part has called twice complaining about no results. This is the first time you haven't come through, Simon." "The wrong car was in the slot. I've got the right one pegged. Give me a little while. " "This party wants a new man," Kane said. "I'm getting someone else lined up now." "This customer is stringing you a line. The brain on that car is a Caucasian." The line went dead for a moment. "Kane?" "A Cauc brain? Do you know what the insurance settlement will be?" "I can guess. Maybe you want to make a new deal with the party of the first part?" "Damn right," Kane said. "And, Kane, did this party have a female voice?" "How did you know?" "A lucky guess. Make your deal and get back to me." "Sure." Kane said and disconnected.    His car was still where he left it. Another fifteen minutes and it would have gone on without him, following his instructions. He had bought the brain secondhand and installed it himself. It was a healthy brain, good for another five years at least with proper care. Home, he told it, and then leaned back and listened. Tonight it wanted to talk about growing up in Bombay. He had heard that story before, but he listened as intently as if it were the first time. He' was a good listener, that was why he had become a mechanic in the first place. Other people's lives, other people's problems, had always overwhelmed his own. He always wound up listening to them instead of unburdening himself. Being a good listener -- that was the first prerequisite for being a good mechanic. Having a flair for languages was another, because it was the non-English-speaking brains that needed the most work. People bought them because they were cheap and then wouldn't go to the trouble to learn enough of the language for proper maintenance. He thought about the old sedan. More than half the brains were Chinese, so many that the Chinese were susWe are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to; P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers, I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. pected of breeding just for the sake of brains to export. Maybe that was the reason they deteriorated so rapidly. More likely, it was because there weren't enough owners with a command of Chinese and the cheapskates who bought a foreign brain wouldn't lay out the credit for a skilled mechanic. It was cheaper to buy a new brain. Simon thought angrily of the countless brains dwindling down into insanity when all they needed was someone to talk to. But he was no better. There was a limit to how much he could absorb. Being a mechanic was like being a bottle. You could listen just so long and you were full. Then you had to do something to empty yourself of other people's lives, something to make room for your own. It was when that time came round that he took a contract from Kane.    His apartment brain told him Kane had called. Simon returned the call. "The deal is set, but you're out," Kane told him. "Out? Why?" "The party asked for another man. " "Same party?" "Same party." So what he had suspected was true. Amanda Everheart had taken out the contract on herself. He remembered how all the stories about her had played up her death wish. It must not have been solely for publicity. "Look, Kane, I'll do it for the original amount we agreed on." "You're kidding!" "Not a bit. I want this contract." "You got it. But do it good. I got a reputation to keep up." "Give me till midnight. " ' "Just don't let me down," Kane said and gave him the address. "Don't worry, Kane. It's as good as done," Simon lied. He hung up and asked the apartment if it was listening. "Sure, Simon." "I want you to -- " "Let me tell you what happened today," the brain said and launched off while Simon waited impatiently for a pause. When it came at long last, Simon said, "Call down for the car. I've got some unfinished business to take care of."    The gates of Richmond Dukker's mansion were guarded by the latest model mech-dogs, but when they found out he was a mechanic, they let him through without question. Amanda Everheart in the form of a flashy red sports model was in the garage. All sensors were unshuttered and the sports model was almost trembling with anticipation. When he came in, the sensors abruptly shuttered and then Amanda thought better of it. "You!" she said accusingly. "I thought so. Well. Get it over with." "Look, Amanda. Miss Everheart. I can get you out of this contract with Dukker. I know a lawyer who -- " "Not a chance. It's a perfectly legal contract. It can't be broken. That's the only way Cheyney makes them. " "Cheyney?" "Cheyney Brice, my agent." Simon whistled. If Cheyney Brice was involved, the contract was unbreakable, all right. He handled half the Congress and three-quarters of the House of Representatives. There were even rumors that he had advised the President on an informal basis. "Why did you sign the contract in the first place? Surely you would have been happier in a less menial position." "Wrong. What I wanted was an unbreakable contract as a Crackle Cola dispenser, but Cheyney got together with Richmond Dukker and sold me down the river. Or the highway, if you prefer." She laughed bitterly. "You don't know what you're saying. No one ever talks to a Crackle Cola dispenser and the company won't hire mechanics to service them. It's cheaper to buy a half-senile brain and get every bit of use out of it. Those brains last less than a year. " "That long?" The red car shuddered perceptibly. "I had hoped it would be quicker. " She was really suicidal. It was no use talking to her. Simon turned toward the door. "Where are you going? Aren't you going to do it? I've already paid you. " "There's plenty of time. I've got till midnight. " "That's what you think." "Don't get so upset," he told her. "After midnight it won't matter any more. Nothing will."    Simon made and discarded half a dozen plans for getting in to see Cheyney Brice on the way to the agent's apartment. But in the end, it turned out that no subterfuge was necessary. He gave his name to the door and found Cheyney Brice had left word for him to come up. Brice was short, bald and mad. "I want to know what's going on," he demanded as soon as his apartment let Simon in. "Amanda called you?" "Miss Everheart called, yes." "All right. Miss Everheart. When you've interacted with as many pornobooth movies of her as I have, you really feel like you know her. "I'm aware of that erroneous belief. Every other poor slob who's ever interacted with one of her films feels the same way. But that doesn't excuse your actions tonight." "What did she tell you?" "That you are a reporter, threatening to disclose her whereabouts. I must inform you it will do no good. I have acted under a provision of Amanda's contract and informed Richmond Dukker of your intentions." He asked the bar for a drink. It produced one in silence. "I had no choice," Brice muttered to himself. "Look, Brice, I'm going to tell you the truth because right now I don't care what happens to me. I'm in love with Amanda and -- " "I'm not surprised," Brice said. "So am I. So is Richmond Dukker. So is every other man in the country. So what?" "So if it wasn't for that, Amanda would be dead now." Brice's head jerked up. "What are you talking about?" "I'm a brain assassin. I was hired to debrain Richmond Dukker 's car. When I found out who the brain was, I couldn't go through with it." "You're a -- But who hired you? Who would want to kill Amanda?" "I think you know." Brice looked down at the glass in his hand and then drained it in one gulp. "She made a lot of threats, but I never thought she would actually go through with it. To tell you the truth, she made a lot of attempts before, but they never -- and that accident -- " "Look, Brice, I need your help. I want to save her." "It's too late now." "It can't be." "Under the terms of the contract, Richmond Dukker has the option to sell her to the Crackle Cola company. He didn't want the publicity and their operation is so large he was positive she would never be traced back to him. " "So she gets what she wants." Brice rubbed his shiny bald head. "She'll be braining an apartment for one of the executives, I imagine." "You poor slob, don't you realize she's trying to kill herself. She wants to be a Crackle Cola dispenser. She'll last six to eight months at the most." "They can't do that. It was a good contract. One of my best. She still has all her legal rights and unlimited credit. She's a very wealthy woman and -- " "She's a kook. She wants to be a Crackle Cola dispenser." Brice went pale. "Then she'll do it," he whispered. "She's always done just exactly what she wanted." "Call Dukker," Simon told him. "Try to stop it." Dukker's line was busy. Simon took the phone from Brice's trembling fingers and called Kane instead. "Have you heard from your party yet?" "Where the hell have you been?" Kane exploded. "Working on the contract." ' "That's not what my party said. She wants a new man." "I've got till midnight, remember." "That was the original agreement." "You greedy bastard!" "Can't help it, Simon. It's a big contract. She raised the price. It's a team job now. Carson and Mueller took it. " "How long ago did you send them? ' ' "Half an hour or so. I couldn't get hold of anybody right away. But listen, you stay away. You're out of it now. " "That's what you think." Simon slammed the phone down so hard the casing cracked. "What did that man mean?" Brice asked, his voice trembling. "Someone else is going to try to kill her?" "He's sent a team in. Carson and Mueller. They're good but they're cautious. I might have time to reach her before -- " "I'm going with you," Brice told him.    A Crackle Cola truck was parked in front of Richmond Dukker's mansion. Simon leapt out before the car parked, without waiting for Brice. The gates were open and no longer guarded. One of the mechdogs lay just inside, its legs sheared off. The brain still begged feebly for help. Simon sidestepped it and ran down the drive. Carson's car was parked in the drive. Just past it he could see Mueller and Carson fighting with two brawny men in Crackle Cola uniforms. Another mech-dog, its head blown off, lay in the open garage door. None of the brawlers had noticed him yet. He hesitated beside Carson's car. Cheyney Brice plunged past him and into the garage. "They're not doing so hot," Carson's car told him. "Carson never listens to reason. Mueller and I both tried to tell him to go slow." Brice came running back out of the garage, screaming like a madman. "They've done it! The ghouls have taken her brain!" He plowed into the middle of the fight and grabbed Carson from behind. Mueller whirled around and shot Brice in the head. One of the Crackle Cola men hit Mueller over the head with a wrench and he dropped. Both of the Crackle Cola men jumped on Carson. "Where's the brain?" Simon asked Carson's car. "In the back seat," the car said. "But Carson's not going to get away this time." "Let me have it and you can give Carson a hand. " "Take it," the car said and opened the rear door. "But I'm not going to help that bastard. He never listens to me. " Simon grabbed the brain case and ran. He could hear Carson yelling for the car to come and help him, but apparently it didn't work, because the car passed him as he ran up the drive and it was empty. Carson really should have listened to it more. His own car was waiting at the gate and as he jumped in, he blessed all the times he had listened to Growing Up in Bombay without interrupting. After a quick look back to see if they were being followed, Simon left the escape route to the car and turned his attention to the brain case. It was relatively undamaged. Mueller must have taken it out. He probably intended to res A it after he collected his fee from Kane. A Cauc brain was worth too much to simply destroy. Aside from her own wish for self-destruction, there was nothing wrong with Amanda. She could last for years with the proper care. As soon as he got her back to his apartment, he connected her sensors and told her so. She said nothing. "I know you can hear me, Amanda." When she still didn't answer, he thought she was sulking. Then he realized that the lead to her mechanical vocal cords was broken. Automatically he reached for the tools to repair it. Then he paused, his hand on the tool chest, thinking. He got up and went over to the bar. 'T want a -- " "The usual," the bar said. "Sure thing. You know, I remember when -- " Simon punched the override and the bar poured his drink in silence. He took the drink back to his chair. He snapped the tool chest shut, leaned bac, relaxed, put his feet on the table beside the brain case, and sipped his drink. It wasn't right, what he was about to do, but this was the golden moment, his once-in-a-lifetime chance, and he wasn't going to let it slip through his fingers. And of all captive audiences imaginable, Amanda Everheart... He'd be a fool to pass that up! The faint flush of guilt was already fading, and replacing it was some stronger emotion that he could not as yet identify. He glanced at the tool chest. Eventually he would want some feedback, would have to have it if only to assure himself that she, and he, were still sane. He would reconnect her vocal cords, but there were a few changes to be made first. For starters, he would hook up a sound sensor that would make it impossible for her to speak if he already held the floor. And a timer, so he wouldn't have to listen too long. He could see the wiring diagrams in his mind's eye. But there was plenty of time for that. Later. First there were a few things he had to get off his chest. "I -- " For a moment he faltered, waiting for the inevitable interruption, the press of someone else's life which always seemed so much stronger than his own. Then, when it didn't come, his voice flowed on swift and deep like a river of sound suddenly undammed. "I was bom on the hottest night in August, # ."  The Persistence of Vision, John Varley. Dial Press  James Wade, #, #. Jaws #, Hank Searls, Bantam, #, #pp., #. Coma, Robin Cook, Signet, #, #pp., #. Night Shift, Stephen King, Doubleday, #, #pp., #. Varley vision Rarely has a collection of stories by a new talent left me as breathless with admiration as John Varley 's The Persistence of Vision. It is his first, but it ranks with the best -- Nine Hundred Grandmothers, The Martian Chronicles, The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes; I think it is easily the second best book of the year, the first being Dickson's The Far Call. In my review of Varley 's first novel. The Ophiuchi Hotline, I said Paul Walker I thought it was safer for him to publish a merely good novel the first time out, leaving readers to expect better next time. I was right. Had the novel appeared after this collection, it would have seemed a disappointment. As it is, the stage hasbeen properly set for what seems a promising career. Even if his next novel is no better than Ophiuchi, The Persistence of Vision will support his reputation for years. What will be the scope of its appeal? Nothing is more discouraging than to write a rave review only to have your friends tell you that they found the book unreadable. Such predict a greater popularity for Varley among sf fans, but I can sense qualities in his work that may alienate some. His stories are not exciting, but gentle, even sweet in effect. His pace is leisurely; he is not fast-reading. His science is knowledgeable, but he is an antitechnologist in spirit, putting more faith in sex than the machine. And he is curiously old-fashioned, if in a most pleasing way. For all their freshness and originality, their modem sensibility, they gave me the impression I was reading a collection of stories from Astounding as it might have been edited by a John where his father's had been short, smoking pot instead of tobacco, yet still his father's son. As Algis Budrys points out in his excellent introduction, the whole history of science fiction is to be found in Varley's work: alien worlds, technological wonders, extraterrestrial adventures; Varley has the gift to make a reader feel he or she is there. He has the gift to make the reader take his future as much for granted as his characters do. There is no self-consciousness about his wonders that is not shared by his characters. For all the machines and extraterrestrial wonders that furnish his future world, it is always very human beings who occupy the core of every story. Varley's characters are not simply there to represent opposing forces or to narrate the action, they are the story. The opposing forces are most often within themselves; the conflict most often a struggle for identity' or fulfillment. But unlike the case in similar contemporary sf stories, the future they live in is not there merely so that their creator could publish the story as sf; everything in their world is there because Varley shrewdly conceived it (as the best sf writers have always conceived their future worlds) as if no one had ever done it before. His characters, then, are logically products of their environments, with problems indigenous to their environments, yet with the same basic problems that have haunted humanity since civilization began. Virtually all of Varley's protagonists suffer from alienation -- a product of their civilization, which is an extrapolation of ours for better and for worse. They are alienated from society or from themselves, and it is Varley's view that the only remedy is a mutually satisfying relationship. A man cannot solve his problems in a vaccuum, he needs another, or others. He has to have something to live for that is greater than himself. It may be art, it may be society, it may be, as it so often is in these stories, a personal relationship; but a man cannot function successfully alone and self-loving. He has to extend himself into the world somehow, to belong to something that is an extension of himself. Few are born with this ability. It has to be learned. For Varley, the best means of learning it is a healthy sexual-social relationship with the opposite sex. He is a Utopian feminist, with a highly romantic view of the possibilities of sexual equality. His enemy is capitalist individualism, in which every man is set apart, the captain of his own private enterprise, which is the glorification of himself socially, sexually, and economically. Such an individual is adverse to any sharing of his capital self. He regards women, like everything else, as acquisitions. This tradition has led to a hostile competition between the sexes, alienating one from another, and obscuring their personal identities as they strive to live-up to their sexual roles. The society of Varley's "Eight ,Worlds" stories (in which humanity has been driven from the Earth by the whale-like Invaders) is free of sexism. It has eliminated sexist ideals by eliminating sexual roles. Organ transplants have made it possible for men to become women, and women men, as easily and as often as they like. Marriage and parenthood as we know them have been abolished. In "Retrograde Summer," a father wishing to retain his child, who according to law is to be raised by his mother, has him cloned, changes his own sex to female, and both go to live on another world where the child grows up ignorant of the fact that his "mother" is actually his father. As comical as it sounds, the effect of the knowledge on the protagonist is to abolish any sexist illusions he may have had. As is the case with many of Varley's characters, the truth sets them free -- the truth being that there is little in our lives that is concrete, and the deeper we look into ourselves , the less we are likely to find. Reality lies outside, with others. Varley's stories deal with escape, either from an oppressive social situation or from personal illusions. In "The Phantom of Kansas," an artist finds her male self, literally, and the two escape a society that would destroy one for the benefit of the other. In "Air Raid," a planeload of contemporary Americans is saved from disaster by a moribund future society to populate the planets and preserve humanity. In the end, as the narrator describes the hardships they will face on the primitive alien worlds, he knows he would give anything to go with them. In "The Black Hole Passes," two physically isolated protagonists communicate with one another by means of hologram images, with which they fall in love. Together they evolve an elaborate fantasy life. Disaster strikes. The woman rescues the man, and they return to her world to find the reality of their love. In "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance," a symbiote artist from the rings of Saturn comes to a world devoted to agenting the work of ring artists. He meets an earth-bound woman and teaches her something of the freedom of the selfless life of the rings where existence is a contemplation of beauty. In "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank," a man is trapped inside a computer where he is forced to live out his life as a series of illusions. He has a female technician helping him to stay sane, and he finds a higher sense of reality of himself and the world. By far the best story is the last. "The Persistence of Vision" presents the classic situation of a man alienated from society and himself, both of which are in a state of decay. He wanders and finds himself in a colony of deaf and blind people who have set up a communal society. Step by step, he learns their methods of communication, and one by one, he discards his former illusions of how people are supposed to relate to one another. It is a deeply moving story. But what does all this add up to? Despite the subtlety of his treatments, what Varley is essentially saying is that love conquers all. If only people were nicer, kinder, more understanding to one another; if only people were allowed to realize their better natures, etc. etc. At bottom, he is as sentimental about man and the natural world as Simak. His method of dealing with evil is not to deal with it at all. He seems to think evil is strictly a matter of ideology. Change a man's ideas and you change his nature. Do you? We should be so lucky. Still, these are lovely stories to read. If you can afford it, I would recommend you buy the book. It may be a collectors' item one day. In any case, don't miss it. Cutups I enjoyed Hank Searls' Jaws # and Robin Cook's Coma very much. I thought it would be nice to mention them, but when I tried reviewing them, I found myself becoming so critical that I began to wonder why I had ever liked them in the first place. In the first place, I did not read them critically. I read through them as quickly as possible, for story alone, as I might watch an old movie on TV. And in this way I enjoyed them. But looking at them critically, they raise questions in my mind. For instance, is there such a thing as "escape" literature? I expect the majority of you to say, yes, of course; but no other label, not even "sci-fi," makes me bristle faster than that one. It was applied to my taste in literature from adolescence, and I have never ceased to resent or to deny it, at least, as it is applied to science fiction. Now, however, I will accept one definition of it; anything may qualify as an "escape" if it is experienced uncritically, if the experience is immediate and transitory, and has no more significant content than an ice cream cone, forgotten as quickly as it is consumed. I never forget a book that quickly, but it is safe to say I will not remember either Jaws # or Coma for long. Still, I do not regret reading them. I read them for pleasure; I was pleased. I would recommend them to anyone, and not be at all surprised if they hated them. I feel a mixture of contempt and admiration for them that puzzles me. The contempt I believe would be that shared instinctively by most science fiction fans toward mainstream imitations of their genre; and yet I feel admiration for the intelligence and skill behind them -- something I am sure most science fiction fans, and writers, overlook. Coma, as you probably know, is about a hospital that specializes in involuntary organ grants. The ads and reviews will tell you as much. It is the story of ayoung medical student, who, on her first day at the hospital, sees a patient of her own age in a coma that will probably last the rest of her life. She asks how it could have happened. She is told it happens. Once in a hundred thousand cases. But she discovers this has happened more than six times in the hospital in the last three years. She decides to find out why, hoping to discover a new disease that will make her famous. For more than half its length, and at its best, Coma is a medical detective story, with a completely believable, tenacious, and fiendishly ingenious heroine outwitting the system to get at the truth, the nature of which she never suspects until she sees it with her own eyes. She is a fine character, every inch the woman Cook says she is: her reasoning, with one blatant exception, has the feel of real intelligence, which is something you rarely find in fictional characters said to be intelligent. One reason is that she thinks her way to a solution to one problem that poses two more problems to be solved, as opposed to the typical sf intellectual who jumps from one conclusion to another -- each invariably right -- with a minimum of thought in between. Her initial plight, a woman in a man's world, a sensitive and exceptional individual trying to function successfully as a woman and a physician, is handled remarkably well, with compassion rather than fists. Cook does not make his heroine noble by contrasting her with male bigots, but suggests the complexity of feelings on both sides. The hero shares her complexity, but is a less sympathetic character. He is seen rather callously playing the game of hospital politics with people's lives, worrying about their well-being only to the extent that it affects his career. Yet, in context, as the heroine realizes, he is thinking like everyone else in the hospital. Cook is neither self-rightous, nor indifferent, about the failures of hospital care. He is at his best in depicting these things in human terms. Things are the way they are because people are the way they are. By far, the best character in the novel is the hospital itself, Boston Memorial -- an eerie old place that Cook paints so vividly you can smell it. Likewise, the medical procedures are done as if you were watching them on film; but Cook never loses the human touch, as he watches everything through the eyes of a physican or a patient. His descriptive skill is evident in some of the individual scenes, especially the chase through the anatomy lab which ends in a freezer filled with cadavers. The movie retained this scene, but I doubt it could compare with Cook's ghoulish treatment of it. The book's worst fault is its plot. Aside from the cliches, it is just too far-fetched. While, by the end of the book, I was convinced the heroine was capable of any thing, the moment she confronts the hired killer sent to silence her, her plausibility all but collapsed. I remained unconvinced by everything she did subsequently, as well as by the existence of the Jefferson Institute, Cook's chamber of horrors. The whole master scheme suddenly seemed simple-minded and conspicuous. Worst of all was the failure of the heroine to spot the prime villain -- who was obvious to me, as to anyone else, from the start; but then, the whole plot seemed obvious from the start. Such a failing is not always, or necessarily, disastrous. The emphasis in Coma is on the how, rather than the why, of the murders: how does the heroine learn the truth; how do they kill the patients in clear view of everyone; how do they dispose of the bodies, which are not yet dead. Knowing the solution to the mystery actually enhances it. Coma leaves you wondering, if not convinced, if this sort of thing is taking place somewhere. Why, then, did I feel contempt for it? Was it merely prejudice against a mainstream intruder in sf territory? The sort that produced so many scathing reviews of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain? To some extent, yes. It is always annoying to see well-worn sf material given the best-seller treatment as if it were a bold, new concept; to know that the majority of people reading this, and shivering with pleasure, are ignorant of what it owes to science fiction, a field they otherwise disdain to read. That is a superficial reason. The main thing is the recognition as one reads of the number of stock characters and situations used for cheap effects. The big city hospital, of which we are given an insider's view; the fresh-from-the-headlines theme; the beautifulyoung medical student and the handsome intern; the hired killer from Chicago; the last-minute rescue in the operating room. So familiar are these elements, so devoid of imagination, that experienced genre readers cannot help but feel they are reading a prefabricated fiction designed by ad men. And would they be so wrong? Yet -- how much better is science fiction? Our plot structures are as formularized as Cook's, based on techniques thirty and forty years old. Our ability to adapt these primitive structures to modem fictional requirements, with full characterizations and contemporary themes, has not been very successful. On the average, sf characters are as two-dimensional as ever, our themes no more contemporary, or original, than Cook's, and, to be fair, considerably inferior. Cook's people, his background, his basic idea of the exploitation of organ transplant knowledge is far more sophisticated than all but what our best science fiction writers could do. The same is true of Cook's science. Sf writers long ago gave up educating their readers. There is more science behind the average sf story than in it. Once the writer has worked out the scientific problems behind his or her story, he spends only a minimal amount of space on details. Cook gives us pages and pages of technical detail on the operation of his hospital, operatingroom procedure, and anesthetology, among other things. An sf writer would find this contemptible, on principle, but the way Cook handles it, it is fascinating. There is far more real feeling for science and for scientific reasoning in Coma than in most of the sf books I read. Science fiction writers are more interested in the romance of future worlds, alien cultures, and the like, than in the romance of science. And then. Coma is a problem novel. The wily engineer (read: medical student) solving a mystery that threatens the earth. Most sf writers regard this type of story as dated. And it is, for them. But not for readers. Would sf writers profit from following the example of a novel like Coma? I would say yes, only to the extent that it returned them to an appreciation of their commercial, rather than literary, origins. But how commercial is science fiction? The first thing that always occurs to me when I finish a book like Coma is: why didn't someone like Larry Niven or Fred Pohl do something like this years ago? God knows, Cook probably made more on his book than they did on a half-dozen of theirs. Yet I know instinctively that they would be constitutionally repelled by the idea. Science fiction writers know they could make more money writing something else, if only non-fiction. They have the technical ability, and they will tell you unhesitatingly that they write for money, and yet they continue to write science fiction. Even when they strive for the bestseller list, as with a Lucifer' s Hammer, they are incapable of forcing themselves completely into the mold and limit their mass appeal by the weight of their ideas. What sets them apart from writers like Cook, who is primarily interested in writing a book that will sell, is that they wan! to write sciDo You Know Your I.Q.? Have you thought about joining Mensa? The international high I.Q. society offers a standard I.Q. test you can take at home. Your score is returned in confidence. Send # check or money order to Mensa, Dept. #, #I West Third Street, Brooklyn, New York #. If you've already been tested at the #th percentile or above, write for information. The fantastic forerunner to I the rntflcowfly I I l l A collection of tales of cour age and adventure as inter galactic empires battle for control of entire worlds I ence fiction. They want to be science fiction writers. Science fiction, for them, is as much a part of their identity as it is material for a book. The world of science fiction, its literature and its people, are where and to whom they belong. Writing for them is not simply a living, but living itself. Their ideas, then, however borrowed and blue they may be, are more personal than those of a writer like Cook. I am more respectful of them. I believe in their creators' seriousness; not only their ideas, but their artistic intent, however primitive it may be by comparison with better writers. I believe, regardless of its commercialism, science fiction has a serious intellectual and artistic intent that sets it apart, and somewhat above, its sister genres. Unlike the mystery or the western, which are purer forms, the science fiction story opens out into the world of ideas. One cannot read it as one can read other genre forms, without having to think beyond the form itself. Therefore, I bristle at the idea of science fiction as "escape" literature. But Coma does provide one example I wish more hard sf writers would emulate, and that is to take one idea and develop it fully, rather than their usual practice of using a speculative shotgun. The drama inherent in the individual has been lost in the genre's preoccupation with future worlds. Most of what I have said about Coma applies to Hank Searls' Jaws #. It is a prefab job, but good suspense all the same, much better than the original. What I especially liked about it was the hero -- a hero in every sense of the term, yet an anti-hero in spite of himself: a man who does nothing right. I think it was a mistake not to allow him to defeat the shark single-handed, b'v the ending was consistent with his character. The central characters are appealing; the background is nicely described; the shark is suitably menacing, if implausibly ubiquitous. The screenwriters, whose treatment Searls developed, have used the kitchen-sink approach to heighten the drama, which is acceptable except for the godfather figure who almost spoils everything. If you like suspense novels, you ought to like these two. I did. Horrors! A genre story is, by definition, an imitation, always of a superior model, but the word "genre," to me, also connotes genuineness, a story of a particular kind with its own unique flavor, with which its fans are familiar to the point where they can detect the subtlest defects in its ingredients. The problem for the writer learning a genre, if I may switch metaphors, is akin to learning a foreign language. Memorization of words and forms is insufficent; the less-than-thorough scholar will forever speak haltingly in a thick accent. He must learn the language to the point where he can think in it spontaneously, the point where he can share his thoughts and feelings naturally. Only then is originality of expression possible. The same is true of learning a form like science fiction or the horror story. They, too, have a vocabulary of their own, terms, concepts, images, story structures; and if the writer settles for merely memorizing them, if he is incapable of that final step to internalization, his stories will forever read mechanically. Even so, like the foreigner who knows enough to get by, he may write successful stories. Such is the case with Stephen King. I liked his novels, and I enjoyed his latest book, Night Shift, a collection of short stories, most of them published in Cavalier from # to #, with a number of others from Penthouse bringing us up to #. Two are serious stories, two are sf, and the rest are either horror or suspense. There is little in them to interest the purist, but King is a skillful craftsman: he knows how to build suspense; and to the more open-minded, these stories will provide pleasure and excitement. There is an excellent introduction by John D. MacDonald on what makes a writer, and an interesting, if less successful, foreword by the author expounding his theory of horror stories. The essays make it plain that King is a writer of slick commercial fiction, but no hack: He is earnest about his love for horror stories, yet he is not a genre writer. The mechanical elements are there in every story: the wellrounded characters, the realistic backgrounds, the simplistic thematic treatments, like a collection of exercises from the Famous Writers School. I am tempted to quote one of the more mechanical paragraphs. but that would be unfair. King is very good at this. His prose is concise and visual. His characters are effective, and his plots are, as MacDonald insists, not as easy as they look. He makes every word count, but not in the constrained Hemingway manner that make's so much genre prose self-conscious. From word one, he is building in an unhurried but deliberate manner toward his climax; and it is this technique of "building the narrative" that is his greatest strength and most obvious weakness. Although his characters walk into their adventures as haplessly as any genre protagonists, the source of his effectiveness lies in the relationships of the characters to the locales. In "Graveyard Shift," it is a mill; in "The Mangier," a laundry; in "Trucks," a truck stop. Perfectly normal locales into which King introduces relatively normal people who encounter bizarre situations. But then what is more ominous than the drab? What is more pregnant with possibilities for horror than the normal, the everyday, the ho-hum? Consider, for instance, David Berkowitz. King builds the relationship between his characters and their locales in such a way that the bizarre, when it happens, seems merely bizarre and not preposterous. Take, for example, "The Lawnmower Man," not one of the better stories, in which a perfectly innocent suburban man calls a company to send someone to cut his lawn, and ends with having his throat cut. Such is the ordinariness of the suburbia King introduces us to that virtually anything is possible, if not inevitable, and yet what makes it dramatic is that King exploits our private terror of strangers coming into our homes. Haven't you ever been scared by a huge surly plumber barging into your place with a fat bag of tools with which he proceeds to turn your placid apartment into a steel mill? Unfortunately, the absence of any original theme or vision, as in Lovecraft or Bierce, makes these stories seem mechanical even while you are reading them. Entertainment alone is what they offer. Fortunately, they are entertaining. Virtually every story has one high point. My favorite is "The Ledge," a Hitchcock-type story in which a man who has fallen in love with the unhappy wife of a mobster is offered a terrifying proposition that he has little chance of surviving. The ending has a delicious irony. "Jerusalem's Lot" apparently appears here for the first time. It seems to be a precursor to a novel. It is old-fashioned and a blatant imitation of Lovecraft, but I liked it anyway. "One for the Road" is a sequel to the novel in which a tourist gets trapped in the bumedout town and a group of locals attempts to rescue him and his family. "Sometimes They Come Back" is about the closest King ever gets to an original idea, and he blows it at the end, but its portrait of a schoolteacher besieged by vicious young thugs he is trying to teach literature is nicely done. In "Battleground," an assassin's victim gains revenge by sending him a box of toys that play real war games. The analogy with the U.S. in Vietnam that might have made this story memorable is never realized, but the ending is hilarious. "The Mangier" and "Trucks" concern machines coming to life to kill in gruesome ways. Both have with his description of a homicidal pressing machine. The remainder of the stories run from fair to good. There were none I disliked. If you enjoyed the novels, you should enjoy these. None is quite as good as Salem's Lot , but a few come close. Department of Interesting, if Inessential, Information September I was a date of considerable importance to me. It was the official publication date of my first book. Speaking of Science Fiction, a collection of thirty-one interviews with the likes of L.e Guin, Lafferty, Simak, Leiber, Norton, Bester, Blish, Knight, and Anderson among others. It has an introduction by Dr. Thomas J. Roberts, Department of English, University of Connecticut, and an afterword by Samuel Mines, Stories. It is over # pages, has a fullcolor cover by Dexter Dickinson, and interior illustrations by Dave Ludwig. It is available in hardcover for #, or in quality paperback for #. Please include # cents to cover postage. Copies are to be had by writing Luna Publications, # Orchard St., Oradell, N.J. #. Orders will be shipped on publication. Include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for order confirmation.  viewport picnwRjy E  GES alia Alter! Alter'. Look at the calendar! Your column for Galaxy is overdue ! "Don't bother me, Geis, I'm busy writing my new novel. Star Whores. I -- " You made a solemn vow to J.J., Alter. He's depending on you. "I'm right in the middle of a sex scene! A nice, juicy, ravishing sex scene!" Nevertheless! Humans tend to repress pain memories, Alter. " -- I was born on the fifth planet, Gnerf, of the Zirb system, about thirty light-years from here. I was born from Larvae deposited in the abdomen on a giant Hrmmp. I ate my way out, growing stronger and larger as I ate..." How come you ended up here, on Earth? "I, ahh, I committed a crime and "Oh...all right! But I don't have a clue as to a topic. You think of something. " Don't have to. You remember you asked the readers to send in suggestions for topics you could discuss. Well, they did. I have here in my hand a file folder -- a thick folder -- full of their responses. Here. Dig in. "(Grump!) Let's see... Drew Gray asks me to describe my home planet and society...and how I got so nasty. Huh! Drew ought to try being on the lam from the fuzz of Earth...an exile...a stranger in a disgusting land... in a perverted brain...and see how his disposition turns out!" was thrown into a warper and exiled to the Kaku-forsaken planet. I materialized in the middle of an assassination of one of your leaders and had to discorporate instantly. It was all I could do to keep my atoms together. I was sucked thousands of miles into a tremendous mental vacuum, and when I finally organized myself, I discovered I was in Geis's brain. Imagine my horror. " You can leave anytime. Alter. "Not until I'm good and ready, Geis, " Drew still wants to know about your home planet. And I'd like to know how big you are in your natural state. Nevertheless, Alter, you might as "Gnerf society is based on a kind well answer the question. of telepathy and intensive coopera"Okay, okay, as readers of my tion. Since our 'queen bee' leader August, # column will perhaps injects her eggs into hundreds of recall -- " thousands of Hrmmps per year, and since the Hrmmps are notorious reamers of the swamps, keeping track of her myriads of children requires telepathy and a very good memory. She has computer hookups to assist her. This hookup also allows her to broadcast powerful instructions. Very, very few of my race are ever able to disobey her." I gather you were one such, eh. Alter? "Yes. My crime was resistance and...and tinkering with a device which would have allowed me to broadcast my own orders, strictly on a small scale. But she didn't like the idea of competition..." So you were exiled. Very noble. Now tell me how big your race is, in human terms? "We number in the multiI mean the size of individuals. "Let's go on to the next ques -- " Alter! How large are you? "What does it matter? Why are you humans so hung up on size? Big this, big that...genitals, dams, buildings, holes, scores Answer! "All right! I'm about the size of a...a gnat. " A gnat? I've got ar. intelligent fruit-fly in my head? "That's right, you big, clumsy oaf. Are you satisfied with the truth, now? On to the next question. " A gnat! Haw! Well, well. How did you enter my brain? "My linked atoms flowed in through your left ear. Did a bit of damage there. I'm afraid. That's why you have tinnitus -- that ringing in your ears. By the way. Earth is the damping ground for Gnerf criminals, and a ringing or whining or fluttering sound in the ears is a sign, in humans, that a Gnerfian has landed and taken up residence io the brain." I'm sure. Alter, that all those readers who suffer from this minor (sometimes major) affliction will be happy to have this explanation of their problem. Now let's get to some meat and potatoes. I have here a letter from David Carter, and he has some hard questions. I quote -- "No, Geis, No. I've got a headache...I've got to get back to my novel." at least in part for your column. I also like Jerry Pournelle' s science and the reviews of Spider Robinson. I read some of the fiction but not all of it. I hope that the new editor will do something about that.' "Yes, J.J. will visit your home and whup you until you read all the fiction in Galaxy." # am a member of an SF writers' club formed as a result of an ad in Galaxy's classified section. Most of us are unpublished but all of us read your column because you point out the screwups of pros so we can avoid them. I can point to one column where you attacked the ' 'save the world " or " save the universe" syndrome used by some writers to build tension. In a recent column you gave your address and invited topics and questions. I have a few...' "Geis, don't do this to me!" You asked for it, Alter. David a lot of cliche characters and situations in SF. One is the aliens that invade Earth. Another is the dumb heroine who exists only to be rescued or to give the hero or villain someone to talk to. Probably the worst is the "# syndrome " where everything is just like middle America in # except we have space travel or some other gadget or gimmick. ' "There's a difference sometimes between cliches and simply lazy writing. The revolutionary technology overlaid on unchanged present-day society and culture is either don't-give-a-damn writing by a pro who knows better but also knows he can get away with slop, or it's the work of some beginner or bonehead who doesn't know any better. Writing good science fiction takes applied intelligence! It's goddamned hard mind work. The tragedy is that there are thousands of would-be writers out there without the intelligence, the self-discipline, or both. "And let's be honest; there are sloppy and don't give a damn kind of slop be published because they don't want to work with 'almost' writers andor because they don't think the newsstand or bookstore buyers know good sf from bad anyway. Some of them reason. 'Put a good colorful sf cover on anything and it'll sell enough to make a fair profit. ' "But beyond that -- it's virtually impossible now to create any character who can't be put into one or another cubbyhole as a cliche or stereotype. The thing to do is to igAn Informal  Irreverent Science Fiction  Fantasy Journal Edited  Published by Richard E. Gels Cover by Stephen Fabian. Issue ## features interviews with Poul Anderson, Ursula K. Le Quin, and George Scithers (Editor of Asimov's SF Mag.). Book reviews by Larry Niven. "Flying Saucers  The Stymie Factor" by Ray Palmer. "Reports From Alternate Earth ##" by A. L. Terego. (An R-Rated sf Novel) by Richard E. Geis. Illustrated by Stephen Fabian. "Alien Thoughts" -- The Editor's Diary with letters from readers, fans, and professionals with Commentary. Quarterlysample I year # two years. # P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I nore the "problem" of stereotypes and cliches. Just make your characters and situations distinctive and individual by means of a little invention and real-life detail. The heart and soul of credible sf and fantasy is realistic future detail. He noticed a six-inch zigzag crack in his crucible, but decided to go ahead with making the invisibility potion anyway. things that fans take for granted. Some of these we don't think about but should. Science fiction gadgets often are clever enough to make up for poor characters, dumb plots, etc.' "Altogether true. And if you ever have to make a choice, go for the clever gadgets, the weird science...the (ghod help us) thousand-mile-long alien spaceship. Because that's the guts of science fiction -- the different, the wondrous, the captivating . Real people amid the artifacts is a bonus. Try to give your readers that bonus, of course. But don't try to make character the focus of your sf novel. Only a very very few writers -- Le Guin, Wilhelm, D.G. Comptor, a few others -- can do it. Most writers end up writing too much "characterization" anyway, clumsily, hamhandedly. Ideally all character and personality shoud be incorporated in action and dialogue and all action and dialogue should further the story. That's where skill, art and discipline shows. " teachers and friends who don't read it? Most still think of it in terms of of their opinions are bigoted and ignorant.' ' "Hell, most opinions on any subject are bigoted and ignorant. Tell them nicely they don't know what the hell they're talking about, and mention that George Lucas, a science fiction fan, is going to make a fore he's through. Tell them Joe Haldeman got a #. advance for a novel recently, and that sf authors are sometimes selling movie rights to their books for a quarter of swer questions about sf. You might also laugh in their faces. Why should the opinions of the ignorant and obtuse and stupid worry you?" plain that female characters...in sf...are dumb and exist only to talk to the hero or villain and to be menaced and rescued. On the other cause she talked back to Han Solo and didn't thank Luke Sky walker for rescuing her. Any ideas on creating heroines with guts, brains and femininity?' "There's a cultural lag of about thirty years, I think, in what is called "popular opinion" on any given subject. The sf writing conventions and formulas and cliches and stereotypes of the #s and #s are still buried in massmind and at the push of the "sf" button reflexively surface today, still. It comes from the minds of fifty-year-old city editors, fifty-year old TV network and local program directors... "Heroines with guts, brains and femininity? Structure your story so that the heroine must show those qualities! Make her important to the resolution of the story. Jesus, do I have to tell you the obvious?" key to good SF is a logical, coherent background. I find it hard to accept stories where they have space ships and fusion power alongside feudal nobles and swordfights . One of the good things of reading SF is visiting other worlds and societies. Far too many SF writers make it up as it comes out of the typewriter and it shows.' sf label is to tell the reader that long after a decline into barbarism, a few ancient powerplants, designed for thousand-year automatic life, are still going...and that the feudal planet has backslid after the collapse of the galactic empire... "The ancient, automated, unbreakable machine is a great convenience to sf authors. Its use will die hard. In fact, hasn't Fred Pohl just won a Nebula f#r Gateway, which is premised on indestructible alien spaceships? But he made them logical and detailed and coherent. They stole the novel from the neurotic hero who spent half the novel being psychoanalyzed by a Freudian computer. ' ' have enjoyed the marvelous alien worlds of Jerry Pournelle and Foul Anderson. Both men have written articles on how they do it. We also have enjoyed the fantastic aliens of Hal Clement and Larry Niven. They also have written about how they do it. I would like to know a lot more. Not long ago Pournelle and Niven wrote an article called " Building the Mote in God's Eye." On page # of the Jan. # Galaxy they said, " Most hard science fiction writers follow standard rules for building worlds. We have formulae and tables for getting the orbits right, selecting suns of the proper brightness, determining temperatures and climates, building a plausible ecology." I would like to get my hands on that data, and so would others. Think Alter could mug Pournelle and get it?' "I'm sure that Jerry and Larry are considering publishing their data and etc. if they think it worthwhile. On the other hand, a hard-science fiction writer will be already interested in that sort of thing and will know where to find that information in books...will probably have a small private science library of his own. "I sniff a desire on your part to have somebody else do a lot of the work for you, David. If you are not all that interested in science -- in hard science fiction -- there are a host of other less scientifically rigorous varieties of sf that can be written." 'Very good. Alter. Care to comment on another letter?' "No! I've had it for this time. Let me get back to my sex scene." Okay, go along with you. Write. "Yes...let's see now... 'Her turgid tentacles trailed tenderly over his...' 'She slipped a stiffened tendril...' 'The alien woman's plump pseudopod... Damn you, Geis! I'm out of the mood!"  Dear Mr. Pierce: A wise man once told me that a writer should never respond to book reviewers. Some reviewers, he said, will then attack you personally, hoping to evoke further response, or (worse) will give you undeserved praise, fishing for a mash note. Good advice, and I've managed to follow it pretty well. In fact, I could still keep my silence in the face of your Mr. Walker's ill-informed and snide review of Study War No More in your Maynumber. But in the same column he says vile things about two men who are friends of mine, who are better writers than I am -- and better than Walker will ever be, by the evidence at hand -- and who, I suspect, are more vulnerable to Walker's brand of genteel slander than I am. I didn't notice that Walker had reviewed Study War No More , though I do subscribe to Galaxy. His previous reviews have been so asinine that I've stopped reading that part of the magazine -- even though I have three books currently making the rounds of the review columns. Harlan Ellison sent me a copy. Walker's problem seems, to me, to be that he does people reviews, not book reviews. This basic confusion comes out in hjs very first paragraph, as he loftily characterizes Gordon R. Dickson as "a writer for whom I had previously had no respect for sic whatever." He goes on to give The Fur Call well-deserved praise. But I do have to wonder which of Dickson's works he had previously read, to treat him with such (albeit ungrammatical) contempt. "Call Him Lord"? Soldier. Ask Not? "Black Charlie"? Anything? About Ellison's story. Do me a favor, Mr. Pierce: read it. Then read Walker's review. With the title deleted, could you identify the work reviewed as "Basilisk"? I couldn't, and I've read the story many times. It seems to me that what's under review is Paul Walker's rather twisted perception of what goes on in Harlan Ellison's mind. That's not his job. Even if it were his job, he botches it. I've known Ellison for fifteen years, and I think I've been his friend for at least half that period. I know him moderately well -- well enough to know that he is neither racist, nor cruel, nor shallow, nor dishonest. Walker accuses him of all of these traits, though he cavils in context, and declines to present any concrete examples from the story. What is going on here? It isn't book reviewing. It's slander. Having read the minds of Dickson and Ellison, he goes on to read my mind and "poor" (!) von Clausewitz's, and then the collective mind of the North Vietnamese people. When a person has given ample evidence that he can't even read a book, I don't trust his ability to read minds. Books In Print, for instance, makes good reading. If he had checked it. Walker wouldn't have called Study War No More "Joe Haideman's first anthology adventure." Cosmic Laughter is still in print, after five years, and well into royalties thank you. I don't care for Walker's emasculating and trivializing my work by quoting it partially, and out of context. But that's a reviewer's privilege. I don't care for his being surprised that I am capable of "excellent" writing. But that's also etc. One thing I did like was his oneparagraph summation of the war in Viet Nam. Entertaining. I get my best and worst reviews from lienee fiction fanzines -- and that fact set me thinking, Mr. Pierce. Do you pay this guy for this claptrap? The fanzines are full of writers who are capable of nongrammatical character assassination in the context of inaccurate book reports. You could have them for free, and they wouldn't even ask for their name on the masthead. Sincerely, Joe Haldeman # Grove St. Ormond Beach, Calif., # Science fiction is not written by machines, nor is it read in a vacuum. For writers and readers alike', it is a very human activity, and the science fiction critic must describe it in human terms. In my opinion, Ellison the man is far more influential, and more interesting, than Ellison the writer. If Mr. Haldeman had read my review with his own eyes, instead of Ellison's, he would have seen that I accused Ellison of none of the crimes he alleges. As for Gordon Dickson,  was guilty of a slight exaggeration. Previous to The Far Call,  had little, rather than no, respect for him. The point  was trying to make, and which I think  made vividly, was that nothing  had read by him before prepared me for the quality of his performance in the novel.  have always thought of Dickson as a good writer who wrote badly, especially in his short stories. As I understand it, he never had to work harder at a book than he had to work on this one, and the effort proves what he was capable of writing all along, but did not. #s for my "asinine" reviews, Mr. Haldeman is, of course, referring to my less-than-adulatory reviews of his own work. -- Paul Walker Galaxy: -- Just writing to say that your May '# issue was my first introduction to your magazine, and that I think you have a well-balanced fare. Benford's Stars in Shroud is so far superb (I only wish Benford's description of the Flinger was clearer). Fabian's illustrations capture well the tone of the text, making this a great collaboration. You've got your hands on a winner here! Murphy's "Eyes of the Wolf" I thought was competent, but nothing exceptional. The illustrations again helped the mood. "A Snatch in Time" by Moak was great fun. but I almost passed this one by on account of the illustrator. Amy Harlib captured none of the humor of this story in her illustrations, and I came to this one expecting something quite different than what I got. Sorry, Amy, but I'm sure Mr. Moak would agree that there's too great a disparity between the pictures and the text. I'm afraid I was downright disillusioned by your Showcase illustration by Poyser. It showed a lack of good taste, and in the future I think you should forward such stuff to Heavy Metal or something, but it seems to have no place in Galaxy. Neither does a stupid short like Schweitzer's "Boy Meets Girl." These were surrounded by some really excellent writing -- don't let them creep in. I'd rather see fewer pages than mere fillers. All in all, I can only say "Good job!" You know where the bugs are -- get 'em out and keep up your high standards. We need to insist on the best. B. Klimowski # Church Street ## Glassboro, New Jersey # Dear Mr. Pierce: After enjoying the first three stories in the April # issue, I decided to pause and write to find out if you were pressed for space, and that's the reason you didn't include any notes on two of the stories. Where did the Cordwainer Smith story come from after all these years? Is it all in his words or not? And has the Larionova story been published before? I find it hard to believe that a story called "The Defector" and containing an obvious analogy to the iron curtain and the puppets behind it could ever have been published in Russia! The third story "The Devil and All Her Works" was a novice writer's attempt to use the subject of Fate with some emphasis on irony, I presume. Nice start and interesting. Roger C. Lewis Box # Owatonna, Mn # "The Defector" was published in Russia, during a period of liberalization that ended shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia.  haven't heard of anything new from Larionova since then, and there have been disturbing reports of other sf writers being harassed by the police, having manuscripts siezed, etc... The Cordwainer Smith story I commented on last month. -- j.j.p. Dear J. J.: This is in response to Jay Kay's review of Close Encounters in your May issue. Samp general observations: (#) Star Wars had special effects that were functional: they were used to get characters from one place to another in the plot, and served admirably; I applaud them. But Close Encounters took on a much more difficult task: to create special effects that were simply beautiful and awe-inspiring. Their final effect, the Big Ship, succeeds as far as I can see. It does not resemble a giant chandelier, but a luminous City in Flight. I love it. (#) The special effects in Close Encounters are not entirely glimpses of flashing lights. Many of those lights are shining from solid vehicles, which can be glimpsed wheeling and timing in delicate motion as they speed along. As for "realism," and failure to advance special effects past the level of Star Wars, Spielberg and Trumbull used new, untried techniques to create their light-machines and present them realistically against a background. And while the final bombing-run in Star films can really believe that the corridor on the Death Star's surface was anything but a model constructed out of plastic-model parts. (#) As far as storytelling goes. Star Wars is a flop; Lucas has all the obligalory scenes of the genre, but his plot has holes you could drive an Imperial Falcon through. (Why are single-pilot fighters considered no threat?) Close Encounters is a simple but very wellconstructed story. The alien mind-plant is the "seed" from which Spielberg develops a logical and well-motivated conclusion. (#) Close Encounters is science fiction. Ft is the best film to treat the theme of "first contact" because it treats that contact as sought after for its own sake, rather than for some ulterior motive such as world conquest. Spielberg may have made an artistic phenomenon as the basis of his plot, but public's mind, and the associated fascination with alien contact makes it a logical starting point. Star Wars and Close Encounters are both excellent filmmaking, advances in the technical side of the art; both have much to offer in the genre of SF. But while Star Wars, in its magnificent detail, presents many of the trappings of sf. Close Encounters deals primarily with its thematic and intellectual basis. It deals more strictly with an SF "notion," and left me with an intellectual satisfaction of seeing the SF dream of alien contact realized. I suppose that's why I preferred Close Encounters . Jeff Rovin: right on, man, but, uh, don't go overboard. Some aspects of Close Encounters demand critical evaluation, while Jeff is giving them outright praise. Those children in blue-alien suits should never have been included; but I'll credit Spielberg with guts. Once he's brought them on, he keeps the cameras close in on them, so we have to overcome our initial disbelieving laughter and accept them. (There's more; why must that little red spaceship be transparent ? etc.) J.J.; Keep Fabian working for you, please! No more pencil sketches for illos; and make the new artists you're publishing produce work above the crudzine level! And please, absolutely no more titles inked-in by the illustrator! Half the time, they're all but illegible! Maybe you can save Galaxy from being the ugliest prozine around! Richard Brand # Sierra Drive Mobile, Ala., # Dear Mr. Pierce, Jeff Rovin 's view of Close Encounters of the Third Kind irked me. The promise of the theme -- the first meeting of humans and ET's -- was not lived up to by Spielberg. Any reader of your magazine could have come up with a better plot. Existing science fiction already contains innumerable tales of first encounters and their consequences -- one particularly well-reasoned and entertaining was The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and your own Jerry Pournelle (by the way, Jerry, where's the sequel?). Infinite possibilities for the silver screen. Instead, what do we get? Pretty lights chasing each other about in a mindless fashion, psychic phenomena, a protagonist whose obsession borders on insanity, a mindless governmental conspiracy, and a breathless pursuit by a bumbling army (towards the mountain). The finale shows the aliens (who where disappointingly humanoid) land in a blaze of glory. The hero, a dumb electrician, hops aboard their spacecraft (taking the place of an infinitely more qualified scientist) and zooms away... to heaven. The whole thing has too much of the "Second Coming" aspect to it: greatly superior beings watching out for us, and who might, some day (if we become good enough?), take us away to "Heaven" or turn the Earth into paradise with their incredible powers. Feh. And this is the story that Mr. Rovin compared to Dante's Divine Comedy? A closer comparison would be the North Podunk Post Office next to the Taj Mahal. Poumelle's column was the best in months, as was the artwork. I enjoyed Harlan's editorial about walk the walk; try to get more guest editorials. Heinlein and Asimov are both highly opinionated on some subjects... So far, you are doing a fine job as editor -- keep up the good work. And see if you can convince Jerry to publish a sequel to Mote in God's Eye (or even A Spaceship for the King ) as a serial in Galaxy. Ted Doty I # Sunrise Terrace Orono, Me, # CE#K is the sort of movie that's wonderful to watch, hut starts to fall apart the minute you start to think about it. It has the right feel to it, despite the cliches, and maybe it will actually do some good ( Everybody predicted it would touch off a huge inhasn't happened.) if we're really visited by aliens. -- jj-PDear Mr. Pierce: Gee whiz! Why doesn't Harlan thump his chest (breast? bosom?), rend his garments, rub ashes on ms luicnead, wail in a loud voice and gnash his teeth a bit before going forth to bring enlightenment to the heathen? professional writerpublic speaker, bound himself legally, morally, and ethically to perform at Iguanacon as promised to the Iguanacon Committee. Must he emote so enormously before deciding personally to satisfy his professional obligations? Iguanacon Committee should have requested a surety bond to guarantee either specific performance or reimbursement for their loss. Certainly, future convention committees should consider this option -- not only from Mr. Ellison but from other "notables," V. I. P.'S, and GoH's invited to attract fans. Agreed, Mr. Ellison's current cause (fanaticism?) may be a worthy one, but must he insist on making a selfrighteous, public ass of himself about it? Must I (a reader -- a consumer even!) be subjected to Mr. Ellison's compulsion to make a self-righteous public ass of himself? The only "rock" or "very hard place ".here seems to be Mr. Ellison's head! # Maryland Ave., Apt. #A Staten Island, N.Y., # Hope yours is hard too ; Harlan will probably want to bust it! -- jj-PDear Mr. Pierce: Thank you for Harlan Ellison's statement of ethical position in the May issue of Galaxy. I am glad that Harlan can now look in the mirror without flinching, having refused to ignore the ugly reality and having heightened the awareness of fans to the situation of this most urgent problem and vitally important issue. It is also good to know that Harlan will expect a barrage of flak, which he can stand while he's in the barrel, as reactionary religious elements try to scare us away from walking the walk and into turning our heads and saying it is none of our affair. There's just one thing I don't get. Harlan says he doesn't want us to "permit the gap between what we say we are. and what we really are, to exist Italics Harlan's." Harlan's brave statement of firm resolve in the face of implacably reactionary (that's one of Harlan's favorite words) religious eleleaves me with one question: Who's we? Also, what are "we" really? Now, I've read lots of Harlan -- enough, certainly, to know that anyone who disagrees with him is ipso facto "reactionary." So I won't disagree with Harlan's brave statement of firm resolve, in which and by which he has risked his reputation and his life and his goldfish and just about everything to live in a tent outside Phoenix. But I would like to suggest that some sci-fi fans -- fans who are literate enough to be uncomfortable with cliches, bromides, mindless jargon, and semi-literate politicizations -- might have trouble, well, relating to Harlan's writing in a meanful way that's relevant, know what I mean? John. R. Dunlap # Teresi Court # I San Jose, Calif., # Well, we have to swallow Harlan, f guess. But I'll pass up the goldfish. How about the rest of you? -- jj-PDear Mr. Pierce: As a long-time science fiction enthusiast, a would-be professional in the genre, and a native of Phoenix, Arizona; I feel it my duty (both SF and civic) to respond to Harlan Ellison's rather intemperate outburst concerning the Iguanacon. the State of Arizona, and the fact that our legislature has yet to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. First, some facts: Arizona is a very conservative state (I think it's something in the air) Whether you agree or disagree with the prevailing political climate here, you must recognize it exists. Arizona has no medicaid fraud. Reason: No medicaid. Arizona's welfare burden is at its lowest in fifteen years (in numbers of recipients). Reason: The low level of benefits compared to neighboring California. Arizona's property tax rates are the envy of many more progressive states. (In spite of the fact that # percent of the state is federally owned and does not pay taxes.) Reason: The aforementioned low weifare burden. Given this conservative political climate, it is a bit silly to blame the defeat an unnamed religious group (Mormons). The fact of the matter is that the people of Arizona are overwhelmingly opposed why, consider what the bureacracy that tried to ban father-son banquets would do if they had a real live constitutional amendment to play with. I found the tone of Mr. Ellison's remarks disturbing. Why is it that the sincerity, patriotism, and morals of those who oppose it? Answer: they are losing and getting desperate. Mr. Ellison suggests an economic boycott of the state during the convention. I live here, so I will not be participating. Furthermore, a more counterproductive move on his part is hard to imagine. Science fiction fans are a negligible economic force anywhere. Such a boycott will only succeed in strengthening the opposition. All Arizonans (including recent arrivals from New York) see themselves as rugged individualists in the tradition of the Wild West and they tend to get surly and uncooperative when attacked. Finally, the thing that most disturbed me about the editorial was the streak of fanaticism that ran through it. I couldn't help thinking as I read it that Harlan Ellison, in another time and place, might have been just as happy shoving hapless Jews into furnaces to preserve the purity of the Aryan race as in boycotting Arizona to punish it for its failure to tended as a low blow, but merely my honest reaction to the fanaticism and lack of tolerance running through the piece). You will note that in none of the above have I commented on my own prise you). I feel strongly, however, that there are good people, differing honestly, on both sides of the issue and that the situation does not need any rabble rousing. As for me, I will be attending the convention and hope to have a wonderful time. If Mr. Ellison would like to seek me out and punch me in the nose, he is free to... uh. try. Michael A. McCollum #I East Libra Drive Tempe, AZ # This won't appear until after the WorldCon, alas. If you didn't catch Harlan there, you can make the pilgrimage to Sherman Oaks and I'm sure he' II be glad to oblige you... -- j-j-PDear Sir: There is politics and, there is Politics. And I'm afraid Dick Geis wasn't able to distinguish between the two when he criticized Harlan Ellison's actions in the June Galaxy. Geis implied in his column that supequivalent to supporting political parties, like the Democrats of the American Nazis (Politics type #j. Nothing could be further from the case. Certainly no WorldCon should start supporting a particular political party or political philosophy, whether liberalism, conservatism, socialism, or fascism. Like any large group of people, science fiction fans hold greatly divergent views on how to run the world, and no WorldCon should try to impose one view on them. that sense. It is a moral issue, and one that science fiction fans should take a stand on. If there is any one theme running through science fiction, it is that xenophobia is irrational, that we are all comrades under the skin, and that prejudice is immoral. How can SF fans not support an amendment that is trying to guarantee this basic tenet for all the people in the U.S., not just men? I support Harlan's views completely and I wish him every success at the WorldCon. On the other hand, I completely agree with Geis's column where he denounced lazy writers. It's true -- in the majority of cases, if the first paragraphs are interesting, the rest of the book will probably also be interesting. Conversely, boring, depressing, ' overly descriptive, and uninteresting first paragraphs tend to lead to boring, depressing, overly descriptive and uninteresting books. It's quite a good guide. It's simply a matter of respect for the reader. If a writer wants to be read and wants to have his or her ideas thought about, (s)he will write interestingly enough to make the reader want to read the writer's stories. And, since most readers will judge a story by its opening paragraphs (or chapters in a novel), a writer has a special obligation to make those particularly interesting. Alayne McGregor # Mars Drive Winnipeg, Canada, R#T #E# P.S. I was relieved to see Geis and Alter back again in the June issue after their long absence. It just didn't seem like Galaxy without Alter's pseudopods slithering over the pages. You see, we did get some pro-Harlan letters -- very few, to be sure, but we're including one of them for the sake of fairness. -- i-j-PDear Dr. Poumeile: I find your unconditional support of nuclear energy as the correct answer to the energy problem very disturbing, to say the least. I can't help wondering if you haven't heard of the recent controversy over the question of whether low levels of radiation are as harmless as they are commonly believed to be. I take it upon myself to enlighten you; although the balance of this letter may be more political than scientific. There is a scientist named Dr. Thomas Mancusa who suddenly found himself at war with the U.S. government, who is now known as a dissident scientist, who is now the target of a campaign of suppression. In #, before any of this, the government commissioned the good doctor to measure how safe nuclear power plants are for the people who work in them. This was the first study of its kind and so it was invested with special significance. The initial findings were innocuous. But almost two years ago. Dr. Mancusa and two associates turned up alarming evidence that low levels of radiation, previously thought to be safe, can actually be quite deadly. Zap! The government suddenly cut off the, funds, shoving Mancusa into premature retirement and attempting to take possession of his study. The numbers on Mancusa 's charts and graphs show people who have died after being exposed to doses of radiation the government claims are safe. If the government were to pay compensation for these deaths, it would amount to Mancusa is only one of several scientists in the same predicament; victim to adverse politics. Against the government's will, he is unable to work for more solid proof of his finding. Hanford is a government facility on the eastern edge of Washington, known to its residents as "Plutonium City." It was built during World War II for the production of atomic bombs; the country's first nuclear weapons center. It introduced people-made radiation into the ecosystem for the first time. when it received a phone call from Dr Samuel Milham, a researcher in the Washington state health department. Dr. Milham had been independently sifting through the death certificates of # Washington workers. He hadn't started out looking for effects of radiation, but it turned out the Hanford people had too many cases of cancer. # Hanford workers have died since World War II, # from cancer, # more than expected. These # had received about # more radiation than their non-cancer counterparts; yet still well within the government's "safe" zone of # rems. In # years a worker could absorb up to # rems. And these # people received an average of only # rems apiece during their entire time on the job. Dr. Milham wished to publish his discoveries in a medical journal, but the controversy; Milham decided to wait and see what Mancusa came up with. report released. They wouldn't renew his grant for further research and hurt his chances of finding other grants. When he was fired, the reason given was, "Deficiencies in performance under the contract." There was no evidence of this and a month later this statement was withdrawn. Dr. Karl Morgan is a most respected man in the field of nuclear health; he is on Mancusa's side. He wants the real answer discovered, be it one way or the other. Dr. Mancusa has been censored, taken to court, hounded, and harassed. Without the proper research, we may never know the real truth of low level radiation. Does Hanford apply to the other nuclear plants? Due to resistance, we may never know. Dr. Poumelle, how can you support a source we don't know quite enough about? Despite your beliefs to the contrary, I think solar power is the answer to the energy problem. Its only problem is the initial cost. David Zakes # Swansea Mews Toronto, Ontario, Canada Stine achieved some notoriety about ten years ago with Season of the Witch, a controversial science fiction novel that has since become something of a collector's item, for collectors who can find it. It will soon be reissued in an illustrated edition. Since that time, Stine has worked largely in films and television. He has written and directed a number of educational films and "countless" TV commercials, directed TV documentaries and worked with Star Trek and The F.B.I. His writing credits range from a novelization of The Prisoner and appearances in Amazing to work for the Los Angeles Free Press, Crawdaddy and Debonair (!). Already he has plans in mind for major changes in the policy, format month and in the months to come. Of course, you'll still be seeing the last two installments of Jem and, perhaps, some stories that were already purchased when Stine was hired; but he wants his stamp to show on the magazine from his first issue. sues. Send check or money order to: John F. # Yarmouth Ave., Granada Hills, Calif., # son. #. "He opened his eyes to limitless depth, star-speckled, falling away from him forever... , " Lorien House, P.O. Box #, Black Mountain, N.C., #I wants to: S  S Books, # North Wilder. G-# St. Paul, Mn. #. Fla., # lists. PM-SF, # Pine St... Des Plaines, #., # # for #-page catalog. Collections also purchased. R. Madle, # Bestor Drive, Rockville. Md., #. that witches wouldn't tell. #, Noel Wait, # Union Drive, Los Angeles, Calif., #. tains details of dealers, fanzines, publishers, postal dealing. Write first: Trigon Press, I # Kent House Road, Beckenham. Kent, England. Walker's fascinating interviews with SF authors -- #I interviews. # pages. Paperback #, hardcover # from Luna Publications, Dept. G, # Orchard St., Oradell, N.J... # Grant, # Greenwood Lane, Lanham, Md., #I science fiction book, send # to Spectrum Publishing, # Siskiyou, Dept. G... Santa Rosa, Calif., # #. Computer posters and games. Sample and catalog #. Theo Koch, Castle Point Station, S-#, Hoboken, N.J., # Approved for use with Dungeons and Dragons. City State of the Invincible Overlord, #; Tegel Manor, #; First Fantasy Campaign, S#S. Postpaid, #. add tax. Judges manual. Complete installation instructions. 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By Gregory Benlord When Ling Sanien laces the plague-spreading Quarn on the planet Veden, (he late of humanity is at slake Eipllcit iconei and language may ba offensive to some. By the author ol In the Ocean ol Night. Pub ed # # # The Fellowship olttM Talisman. By Clifford D Simak If Duncan Standish can cross the dreaded Desolation and prove the talisman is real, mankind may conquer the evil that has kepi Europe m a permanent Middle Ages By the author ol Mtodonia. Pub ed SB # # The Masters of Solitude. By Mar vin Kaye and Parke Godwin In a struggle lor survival, tribal groups pit Iheir psychic powers against a mysterious Ctly's closed gales Explicll scenes and language may be offensive to some Pub ed # # # Baltlestar Galactica: Saga ol a Star World. By Robert Thurston based on original screenplay by Glen A Larson Novelizabon of the pilot lor the new hit TV show Special edition #I Tha Foundation Trilogy. 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Jr Aliens try to escape destruction by transferring then minds into beings on another planet -- Earth Pub ed SB # # The Hugo Winners. Vol. I A II. Giant #-in-I volume ol # award-winning stones. T# to # Asimov introduces each Pub ed # # #B#I Galactic Empires. Brian Aldiss. ed Two-volume anthology ol # stones by famous authors Clarke. Asimov and others covers the Rise and Fall ol Galactic Empires. Comb ed # # # The # Annual World's Best SF. Edited by Donald A Wollheim The best short stories tins year by Such talent as John Varley. Joe Hatdeman and Harlan Ellison Special ed # The Illustrated Roger Zelamy. Edited and adapted by Byron Preiss A lull color, lavishly illustrated edition ol stories Large paperback Pub ed S# # # The Persistence ol Vision. By John Varley An entertaining collection ol short stones by the author of The Ophiuchi Hotline Eipllcit scenes and language may he offensive lo form. Pub ea # # Fold along line. Tape or staple corners and mail -- No postage necessary! 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No postage stamp necessary if mailed in the United States Postage Will Be Paid By -- Science Fiction Book Hob Garden City N.Y. #  Science Fiction Beneath the Bermuda Triangle  by Jane Gallion  ' i O ut n ## I iiro rftiaC Into Unexplored Realms! The sensational new novel in John Norman's legendary like Earth, where vast regions remain uncharted. )ungle lands of the equator, inhabited by primitive tribes, traders, and slavers. Here, Tarl Cabot must search for the powerful and dangerous ring of the monstrous race of Kurs... TarlCabot# Tarl Cabot Tarl Cabot # Tarl Cabot  I # Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock, Ron Goulart, and Hugh Walker ) uUrvnR O O K ffi U I : y Distributed by New American Library P.O, Box #, Bergenfield, N # I Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Editor: Hank Stine Contributmg Artist: K. Smith Assf. Editor: Ken Hedberg Contributing Editor: R.E. Geis Subscription Dept.: L.C. Murphy Design: Stan Taylor Readers: S. Whyte: P. Atkins; C. Collins; D. Blackwell: Staff Artists: B. Ramsey; J. Aguirre; C. Grenier, E. Lakin. His companions were a man-wolf, a giant robot, a senile old man and the courage to challenge the stars! Flash! Scientists create test-tube mother! A great writer's nightmare vision of Women's Ub gone mad! Late-breaking news of forthcoming movies, books, TV shows... What if tomorrow morning when you woke up -- you could suddenly read minds? Sick of crime? Ready to get really tough? Here's a solution that'll work! Things were hotting up on Jem -- everybody wanted a piece of the pie... and there wasn't enough pie to go around! The picks and the pans of the Sci-Fi crop. What does God think of bionic bodies? By the "Cordwainer Smith" of the #s. (Complete Novel) Jane Gallion # Three brave young Americans dared lay bare the sea's greatest mystery -- and found wonder beyond all imagining! Cover by Kenneth Smith Interior Illustrations; Shaw, Steffan, Black, Ramsey, Lakin, Grenier, Beck, Wolfe, Wickes, R. Lee. sal Publishing and Distributing Corporation. Main office and editorial office: # White Plains Road, Scarsdale, New Yorft #. Single copy price #; one-year (#-issue) subscription #; two-year (#issue) subscription #. For Canada add # per year; other Foreign countries add # per year. Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. Second daas postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons Is coirtcF dental. Printed In U.S.A. A. E. Van Vogt is no stranger to long-time science fiction fans. The author of such classics as The World of Null A, Sian and Voyage of the Space Beagle, Van Vogt's interest in #st Century psychologies and philosophies is legendary. His new novel from Pocket Books (a portion of which is previewed in this issue as Femworld: Before the Revolution) touches on zoological observations of the behavior of "rogue males" in society and how they might react with some of the more extreme elements of the women's liberation movement who see male aggression as the root cause of most of history's evils. Jane Gallion, author of this month's headliner, Beneath the Bermuda Triangle, has a distinguished literary reputation outside the Held for such works as Stoned and The Woman As Nigger, but cut her teeth on science fiction. Her only published SF novel to date. Biker, is a collector's item selling for # and more at conventions. more serious, philosophical approach, his Star Warriors marks a radical departure for him and a return to the kind of fast-paced, super-charged, high-voltage science fiction entertairunent readers have been asking for. A Kung-fu instructor and former medical technician, Mr. Peel lives in Oregon, where he devotes his full time to writing and is currently working on his fu'st SF novel. Peter Martin is no new-comer either. His first SF story appeared all the way back in the old Vertex magazine. Once a member of the infamous West Coast Science Fiction Writer crowd, he now resides in the quieter a series of novelettes that will be appearing here over the next few issues. David Bunch's "Moderan" stories have been appearing off and on in science fiction magazines for over a decade and a half. In that time they've developed a cult following like the stories of Professor Cordwainer Smith. Like his, they deal with a single continuing backdrop against which exotic activities happen. Frederik Pohl, of course, needs no introduction to these pages. A former contributors. It is fitting that Jew, perhaps his greatest book, should be serialized here. A prolific and unusually well-informed SF writer, his career has spanned the whole history of modem science fiction. The author of The Space Merchants (a classic satire on the advertising controlled world of the future). Drunkard's Walk, and Stargate, his current autobiography, On The Way To The Future, is a runaway best seller. Ed Ludwig's subtle blend of SF has been appearing in magazines like Hank Stine If you're a new reader, welcome aboard! If you're an old reader, welcome back! I mention the foregoing because the longest established science fiction magazines, begins to make aggressive new editorial and format changes in an attempt to reach the large market of readers, now interested in SF, who do not normally purchase magazines. At the same time, in response to letters from loyal followers who out the years, we are making equally aggressive changes designed to bring back the "golden days" of Many of my ideas of what both kinds of readers want were picked up at the World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, from which I recently returned. It was a spectacular, week-long affair, and every bit up to one's visions of what a World Science Fiction Convention ought to be. Held in an utterly futuristic environment, in the deserted downtown of a modernistic city, it was a gathering of fans and pros that brought everyone together as equals in their love of science fiction for talk, discussion and, occassionally, mutual rancor. And speaking of the latter, yes, Harlan Ellison was there. For those of you who might not know, Harlan, one of our greatest living science fiction writers, found himself in what he felt was a difficult position over his Guest of Honorship at the WorldCon. A man of conscience who came soul-searching, Harlan had agreed boycott of Arizona (a state which amendment). Wishing neither to break the boycott nor shortchange the convention, Harlan took a difficult step which placed the burden directly on himself. Rather than spend, or have the convention spend in his name, money inside Arizona, Harlan stayed in a camper in # degree (continued on pg. #) By Jesse Peele I The fabric of reality shivered and shimmered blackly, as the silver-blue-and-gleaming disc that was the starship Starbird warped back into normal space from hyperdrive. Inside the ship. Dal Hamsun touched a heat-sensitive control tab, and the viewer screens blossomed into electronic life. Under full magnification, the green-and-blue world of Cynthia Dianne misted quickly into focus, "Nice and peaceful looking, isn't it?" Dal said to Lincheni, who was seated next to him. Lincheni the Demi-Whelf started to nod his funy head, wolf-like jowls flapping in agreement, when the screens flared into blindingwhite light and went black! "Son-of-a-bitch!" Dal roared. All he could see was blue; two throbbing after-images left by the strobed-out screens. Suddenly he heard a sharp crackle from the control board, and then he smelled the acrid tang of burned insulation. "Damn! What the hell -- ?" "We're under attack!" Lincheni said. "AiTd we just blew one of the tertiary reactor circuits!" The human's vision began to clear just as Lincheni managed to kick in the secondary back-up viewing system -- but there was nothing out there except the planet! "Tulak! What's on the detectors?" From deep in the ship, a series of musical tones thrummed up and down the scale as Tulak, the giant Trogian robot sang his reply into the com. "Tulak says -- " Lincheni began. "I heard, I heard! Don't just sit there! Have the computer put the ceepees onto the bastard and bum his ass. " "You mean 'them'. I've got the attackers on visual." Dal looked at the screen, and felt the sweat running down the crease in his muscular spine. Six, seven, nine -- no -- twelve ships! The burned smell seemed to grow stronger -- or was that his own fear? He slipped his fingers into the giant half-gloves that were the pilot's controls, and began tapping various fingers lightly upon the surfaces. The sensitive plastic felt cold and unyielding, but he knew the ship was responding. He put her into a bone-wrenching turn, and started to stroke the computer in for evasive running -- Then the damned gravity began to fade! Dal could feel himself growing lighter, and he began to float away from the controls. His mouth became very, very dry. Twelve ships! They'd never be able to make it into hyper in time -- ! "Tulak. Do something." Another series of musical notes bleeped over the com. Good! The robot had the gravity working again. Dal could feel himself start to drift back toward the controls. Next time, he'd keep himself strapped in! "The shit's hit it now, gang!" Dal yelled. "Tulak, what's the best way out of this mess?" Lincheni 's hairy paws were busy running over his own controls, but his Trogian was better than Dal's. "Tulak says there isn't any -- !" "I heard!" Dal looked at the screens again. Twelve fucking ships. Why? This was a neutral world -- out of the way -- they weren't even wanted in this sector! Lincheni had finally gotten the charged-particle cannons -- the ceepees -- operating. The computer did the actual aiming and firing, being much faster and more accurate, but it took a formal command to initiate the sequence. "Lin, how are we doing?" Lincheni turned for a second to stare at Dal with hooded yellow eyes. "Against twelve ships? We've got less chance than a snowball in a supernova!" "Tulak, you iron birdbrain! Can we outrun -- ?" "Deedle dum." Uh uh. No. Negative. Cal's mind whirled. The sweat had spread from his back to his face and hands. He could not only smell the burned insulation, but the sour perspiration of the demi-whelf sitting next to him. There were twelve ships latched onto his tail; they couldn't outrun 'em and couldn't outfight 'em. There was only one thing to do. "Stand by! I'm going to bring her about! We'll head for the planet!" "You're crazy!" Lincheni rasped. "You two got any better ideas?" "Uh..." Lincheni began. "Negative," Tulak intoned. "Listen! We'll go for an end run, then cut back through the middle of the formation! Tulak, give us all the juice you can -- hit the red line if you have to! If we can get into the middle of 'em, they won't be able to shoot without hitting each other!" Lincheni muttered something about the insanity of terrans, but his six-fmgered paws kept flying over his controls. Deep in the hub of the control center, Tulak the robot said nothing; he merely carried out his functions with mechanical precision, his massive limbs moving impossibly fast for such a large being. The pit of Dal's stomach seemed to be full of something alive and roiling around, and his sweat covered him like a tepid bath. He was both hot and cold, and there was a bitter, metallic taste on his tongue. As he watched, the dots of the enemy ships on the screen grew larger. He began praying to every god he'd ever heard of in his brief twenty-three years. He alternated between that and cursing, in every language he'd picked up on thirtyfive worlds. The ship shook, with a slapping, gonging noise, as the enemy ships found the Starbird with their particle cannons. So far, the shields had held -- but Dal didn't know how many more shots they could take. The air was growing warmer, a bad sign, and the smell of deathimpending was thick in his nostrils. He remembered what it had been like during his first battle, during the bloody and terrible war, between the mighty Omicron and Delta Systems. Of course, that had been nearly six years ago, a long time -- he'd only been seventeen! But it was all coming back in toovivid detail, now. He'd only been a gunnery crewman, then, not running his own ship, but the feeling was the same! The trapped feeling of doom... "Tulak! It's yours! Put us into a hard parabola straight at the center ship in the formation. Lin, put all the ceepees onto that ship. And hang on!" Dal felt the gravity increase, and the centrifugal force pull his body hard, harder, incredibly harder into the seat as Tulak took control and brought the ship around. His body sagged, his cheeks drooped, his lower teeth seemed to stick out in a grimace, and his arms felt bonded to the couch. It was up to Tulak, now. Only the giant robot had the strength to run the controls -- both Dal and Lincheni were too mashed down to move. Suddenly the center ship flared on the screen in an angry, redorange flash that sent the vessel bursting in all directions. The Starbird's deadly green streauns of charged-particles had done it! "A... hit!" Dal moaned through his thick tongue and stretched lips! "Eleven vessels remain," came Tulak's sing-song over the com into Dal's pressure-stretched ears. "Thanks... a... lot!" he groaned, jaw sagging with the effort of speech.  "Go... for... the... hole... He was on the edge of blacking out. "Affirmative," Tulak sang. The ships expanded, to fill the screen, until Dal could see the identification numbers gleaming at him, until nothing else but ships, everywhere ships! were visible -- And they were through! The pressure began to ease as the curved path straightened somewhat. The acceleration couch hummed and massaged at Dal's aching muscles, and he found he could breathe and even move his bone-weary arms. "Haha ha! We made it! Figure out an orbit that will slingshot us around the planet, and I'll get us into hyper as soon as we clear!" Dal glanced up at his compscreen digital read-out. "Those elbow-suckers will be eating hydrogen exhaust in a few minutes!" "Maybe." Lincheni said. He nodded toward one of the rear view screens, pointing with his long, black nose. One of the attacking ships had managed to pull away, somehow, and was pulling a narrow loop around to follow the Starbird. "One lousy ship!" Dal said, sneering. "A Henry-Class cruiser. We can chop that dung-eater up into "And give the others time to catch up?" Dal glared at Lin. "You're a pain sometimes, you know?" He ground his teeth together so hard he could not only feel the pressure, he could squeak. And the metallic taste hadn't gone away yet, either. "Crap, crap, crap!" He tongued the comswitch. "Tulak, can we outrun that bastard?" "Possibly. " "Possibly? What the hell does that mean?" "The ship itself is only slightly faster," he sang, "so in theory, we can outrun it. " The air-conditioners seemed to be working again, and Dal felt a breeze begin to chill him where it touched his face and neck. "Go on, what's the rest of it?" "We will, however, come within range of the pursuing ship's weaponry before we achieve orbit, should he decide to fire upon us. " Should he decide to... ? Dal knew damned well he'd decide to fire! "How can we slow him down?" "The only practical method for slowing the pursuer would be to seed proximity mines." "Well, don't just sit there, Lin, you heard Tulak -- ! ' ' "Uh, Dal, we... uh used the last of the mines while running from the cyfy'con ships near Rizonuh last month." "Damn!" Damn, damn, damn! "Well, I suppose we'll just have to -- ! ' ' liiere was a thundering roar, and the Starbird shook, as if swatted by a giant hand. Blue and red sparks jumped from the control panels, and Dal felt an electric shock from the glove controls. He jerked his hands away, and the control pit filled suddenly with acrid, blue-gray smoke, swirling up from the mined controls in a vile-smelling fog. Emergency sirens howled, and automatic firefighting units were triggered. The hiss of foam as it squeezed from cracks in the micro-circuit boards joined the other babble of sound. "Tulak!" "We've taken a direct hit on the main drive unit," the robot chimed, as if talking of the weather. "The hyper shifters are gone, most of the normal space engines are destroyed, and the ship is now on emergency back-up system Three." "Three?" "Three." Oh shit! Dai's gut wanted to erupt, his heart seemed to be trying to knock a hole in his ribs! Three was the last back up system -- it had barely enough power to do anything! His tongue scrabbled for the comswitch. "Can you get us down -- to planet-side?" There was a pause, only a few seconds, but it seemed forever. "Tulak!" "I am unable to calculate that with any reasonable degree of -- " "Never mind! Try" "Affirmative. " The ship skewed crazily, and Dal waved his hands uselessly in front of his face, trying to clear the cloak of choking, blinding smoke. Next to him, he could hear Lincheni cursing, mostly in fluent demi-whelf. but throwing in Interspeak and Saxlo occasionally for emphasis. They began a spiral toward the planet, a lurching, bouncing. stomach-turning path. There weren't any more explosions, and Dal didn't wonder why -- the cmiser expected them to go up like a meteorite when they hit the atmosphere! The Starhird began to pick up the outer edges of the planet's air, and Dal could hear the screams of the heat-shields. The control pit began to get hot, until breathing burned his nostrils, dried his lungs. The smoke had cleared somewhat, and he could see the forward viewers were still working -- something of a minor miracle! Only he didn't like what he saw. The surface of the planet was coming up fast, much tix) fast! Even if the shields held, they'd probably hit the ground so fast they'd dig a hole a couple of kilometers deep. Or be splattered over ten kilometers in a large number of very small pieces! It was up to Tulak! He'd pulled them out of some hairy situations before... The centrifugal force built up, as somehow, Tul managed a ragged curve, using the dying engines to their fullest. #ut the pressure was too much for Dal, and he didn't even have time to tell his friends good-bye before he blacked out... II Dal didn't exactly wake' up -- he sort of fell up. The ship was tilted at a crazy angle, and he'd been crammed against a bent bulkhead. He was still belted into the pilot's couch, but the unit had tom loose from the ship and was jammed against several pieces of wreckage. When he tried to move, to relieve the one, big ache he'd become, he shifted the precarious balance, and the couch tipped over and fell -- toward the ceiling. That's how he knew the ship was upside-down. "Lin? Hey, Lin! Where are you? Are you okay -- ?" "Rss on everybody!" came a muffled growl; Dal managed to unbuckle himself and stand on unsteady feet. He looked around for the Demi-Whelf, but couldn't spot him. A hairy, six-fingered paw burst suddenly from a tluck pile of electronic wreckage. It was Joined quickly by a second paw, which began throwing junk in all directions. Muffled curses continued to filter up through the pile of smashed circuitry. Dal moved to help his co-pilot. "Hey, are you -- ?" "I'm fine!" He stood, and dusted debris from his thick, brown pelt. He sneezed once, and shook his head., "Bastards!" Then, "Tulak?" Dal grabbed a com headset, but it was dead. He threw it down. "Come on! We'd better go see if -- " Smash! The wall separating the control pit from the galley burst open, as if it was nothing more than thin paper! The vast, three-meterhigh bulk of Tulak suddenly filled one end of the room. "Are you injured?" he sang.  Outside, the three surveyed the ruin of the once-proud Starbird. The hull was breached in at least fifty places, the drives smashed, the ship a total loss. It would never fly the heavens again. "Dammit," Dal hissed softly. "Dammit." The area around the crash site was apparently some kind of tropical rain forest. There seemed to be a large variety of very tall and very green trees, some reaching heights of fifty meters, and lush vines and lower foliage sprouted all over. A hundred kinds of flowers dotted the area, in shades of red and orange and purple and white. The air was thick with the smell of plants and pollen, and heavy with humidity. Dal felt the heat of the sun burning down upon him. "Wfell," he said, "it looks as if we've got a slight problem." "More than one," Tulak intoned. Both Dal and Lincheni turned to look at the robot. Tulak was halfagain Dal's height, a seamless. shining, silver figure, with no breaks in his smooth facade -- except for a thin slit across the middle of his otherwise-blank face. Sometimes if he looked carefully. Dal could see a thin, bluish light behind that slit. And the sound with which the Trogian Engineers had programmed Tul to speak also came from there -- just as it had for nearly twelve thousand solar years. Tulak was very old -- and he had been around. The robot continued singing. "The insignia and numbering system on the ships which attacked us have been previously recorded in my memory." "And... ?" Dal and Lin asked together. "They belong to the ships of Lord Kreeg Hookthom." "Damn!" "But he's dead!" Lin said. "His fleet was wiped out!" "His body was never found," Tulak continued. "And depending on whose figures were correct, anywhere from five to five thousand ships were unaccounted for after the final battle in the Omicron-Delta war." "Oh, shit!" Lin said. Yeah, thought Dal. Hookthom! Alive! If that was true, they weren't the only ones in trouble! If Hookthom was somehow alive and holed up on this backwater planet, rebuilding his navy, the galaxy could be in for a big, nasty surprise! Another thought occured to Dal, but Lin voiced it first. "If it was one of Hookthom 's patrols who blasted us, you can bet your last cred they are looking for us!" The short, squat Demi-Whelf looked up at Dal from his stumpy meter-anda-half, and scratched at an insect which had landed on his hairy shoulder. "And you can tape what they'll do to us if they find us!" Yeah. Hookthom wasn't noted for his loving nature. "We'd better get out of here." Dal said. There wasn't a lot to be salvaged from the dead ship. Only two of the skimcycles were still operational -- one would barely support Tulak 's weight, so Dal and Lin would have to tide double on the other. Most of the food and water had mptured from its containers, and the smell of it permeated the cmshed ship. The whole thing was a mess! Dal gritted his teeth in anger! He'd spent a year working the dangerous firejewel lode on Cyntax to earn enough to buy the Starbird. He'd nearly died fifty times! And now, only two years later, she was... He shook his head and squared his shoulders. Somebody was going to pay for this! But first things first -- they had to get away from here. And, there was yet another problem: just where was this? Where could they go -- especially if Hookthom did have control of this world? As they gathered what supplies they could. Dal asked Tulak what he knew about the planet called Cynthia Dianne. "Planet number #-#-#, named 'Cynthia Dianne' after its discoverer, has been colonized by humans for three hundred solar years. It is the fourth planet in this six-planet system, approximately kilometers from its G-type primary star. Gravity is point nine terran standard. Climate ranges from tropicalsub-tropical over most of the equatorial and surrounding zones, to moderate in the northern and southern latitudes. There are two polar ice caps, ranging in size from -- " "Skip all that! What about the people? The government? Native intelligence?" "Any dangerous animals?" Lincheni added, looking around at the thick jungle. "My last input indicates a democratic monarchy as the prevailing form of government. There is one intelligent local life form, the Culebrath, a snake-like being which rates point seven on the terran Raadspin Scale. This creature is responsible for one of the planet's main exports of precious metals -- " "Something's out there." Lin hissed, pulling his ceepee from its holster. Dal Jerked his own particle spitter from its black plastic holster. "Tulak?" The robot turned its face-slit toward the thick stand of brush Lin was pointing toward. "There is a large quadruped hidden in the vegetation," he said. "I am unable to determine if it is carnivorous -- " There was a splintering of breaking branches, a creaking of larger shrubs and trees, and -- Something broke into the clearing. It looked something like a rhino Dal had seen a picture of once, only larger. It was covered with a thick plating, a natural armor, and from the size and shape of its needle-pointed teeth. Dal knew it wasn't a leaf-eater. The wind gUsted in their direction, and Lin wrinkled his nose. Dal also caught the fetid smell -- rotting meat, probably trapped in the teeth of the moster. "Uh oh!" Dal said. The thing looked tough. Maybe the two spitters would stop it, maybe not. Tulak wasn't armed with anything except his own considerable strength -- his makers had programmed into him an injunction against the use of any weapons. The situation didn't look particularly appealing. "Lin! Can you -- ?" The short Demi-Whelf nodded. "I'm trying! It's mind is strange, but dull. " The huge, purple-green creature padded heavily forward, its stumpy tail twitching, cat-like. Dal's skin crawled. His finger wanted to start firing the spitter, but he held off. If he didn't hit it right, the wounded beast might kill them. "Lin!" The thing was only ten meters away now, and still advancing purposefully. "I think I've got it!" Lincheni said. And with that, the little Demi-Whelf began to change ! Lin's outlines seemed to blur and dissolve, to grow and expand! Though he'd seen it before. Dal was still fascinated. Lincheni 's form shifted, faded, and suddenly -- It became a replica of the creature from the jungle. Only it was larger and fiercer looking than the original! It was the Demi-Whelf's most potent defensehe gift of mimicry. The Whelves were empathic in times of danger, and like ultimate chameleons, they could appear to become like the thing which threatened them. They could take on the size, shape, color -- even the smell -- because they existed in the mind's eye; they were a splinter of imagination. Dal didn't know what the creature thought, but he was certain the projection was working -- the monster stopped,. suddenly puzzled. Quickly, Dal moved at right angles to the beast; it didn't seem to notice him. Three meters away, and the rotten smell was almost overpowering. He was almost behind it, and it seemed to be a solid-looking mass of over-lapping plate. Damn! No, wait! There -- behind the neck, at the base of the huge oval skull... A break in the plating! The beast still seemed to be puzzled, but it was beginning to sway from side-to-side -- a sign of attack, maybe. It was now or never! Dal brought the particle spitter up and held it steady in a two-handed grip. He aimed at the bare spot. Slowly, slowly, don't jerk, dammit -- he squeezed the firing stud... The weapon hummed, the thin green stream of charged-and-deadly particles burst forth and lanced at the creature. The giant roared with a sound which shook the leaves in the trees. It jumped forward, incredibly fast for such a large being. Tulak spun and pivoted to one side as the monster charged by, and brought one of his alloy fists down onto the thing's massive head with a squishy thump! Lincheni jumped to the other side, and a stream of ceepee fire flared from the too-real looking replica. Lin's blast struck the armored side of the thing, burned a section of hide, then glanced off, without any real damage! It didn't matter. The thing lay dead, a large, smoking wound in its neck. The Demi-Whelf began to shimmer and change, and in a moment, the short, canine-like figure was back to normal. The three of them looked down at the fallen animal. Dal noted a concave section of smashed-and-depressed skull -- the spot where Tulak had hit in passing. "Whew!" "Yeah," Lin added. "It would appear my input regarding this world is incomplete. I have no record of any such animal," Tulak sang. "It might be wise to proceed somewhat cautiously in the future." Dal and Lin looked up at the impassive face of the robot. "Brother!" Dal said. Tulak was always the master of understatement. "Let's finish loading the skimcycles and proceed cautiously out of here." The only problem was, where were they going? And what were they going to do when they got there?" Ill The skimcycle was crowded, having been designed for only one passenger. With Lin and the extra supplies, it was a wonder it could fly at all. Basically, it was a simple, flat platform with a seat, a too-low plastic windshield, and a control panel full of idiot lights. The whole thing sat on a repellor motor which could be inclined to speed up, slow down or stop. It was a short-range vehicle, only good for a couple thousand kilometers on a single charge, and capable of speeds no faster than a hundred kilometers per hour. Among other things. Dal wished the damned windshield was higher; various insects had been splattering their smelly bodies onto his head and upper body all morning. The bug-spattered plastic only reached halfway up Dal's muscular chest. Every now and then, after a particularly large bug would whap into him. Dal would glare down at Lincheni, who would sit and grin his whelf-grin. Since Lin was shorter, he wasn't getting hit nearly as often. They were flitting just above the tops of the tallest trees, Tulak's cycle slightly ahead. The small and cheap transceivers on the cycles only had a short range -- a few kilometers -- but they occasionally picked up some static-ridden signals from some distant transmitter. The signals seemed to be the strongest in the direction of the sunrise, so Dal had decided to head in that direction. It was a pretty world, lush rainforest, but Dal was having trouble appreciating it. The panorama of jungle, the ice-blue sky, the distant boom of a far-off thunderstorm were all distractions he didn't want. His ship was dead, and somebody on this stinking planet had killed her! He planned to look up whoever was responsible... ! Suddenly, Tulak's musical tones sang out over the transceiver. "Observe to our right. " Dal and Lin looked. The jungle had given way to... something strange. Where there was green, thick foliage and flowers before, suddenly there was a large area of gray-black that looked like, of all things, a -- wheatfield! Even stranger, the hot wind which stirred the trees below didn't seem to be affecting the strange area! Odd. Very odd. "Veer over that way," Dal called to Tulak. "Let's see what that is." The two skimcycles made the turn gradually, and began to drop lower. "Looks like some kind of... grass," Lin said. "Yeah, if grass came made in long, skinny, gray-iron rods!" "There's a clearing, there, near the edge," Lin said. "Good, We need a rest stop anyway," Dal said, wiping a greasy bug carcass from his neck. "The area seems to be several kilometers in area," Tulak sang out. "Um." The stuff was taller than it appeared from the air. Dal guessed its height at five meters. It didn't seem to fiiin out at the edge of the clearing. One spot, there was nothing; then, zap, the stuff, in a nice, even line. They dismounted from the cycles and looked carefully around. After the episode with the rhino-monster. Dal was planning on being very cautious. Both he and Lin drew their spitters. Tulak stood impassively by the cycles, turning his head slowly to scan the terrain. Dal still wondered sometimes why Tulak had joined his crew. The big robot had been programmed by a race which had left the galaxy thousands of years ago, and nobody was quite sure what his motivations were. There had been nearly a thousand of the blank-faced robots discovered at one time or another by several of the intelligent races. They seemed helpful; they were useful, and they signed on with whom they chose. Tulak had walked up to Dal one day and offered his services. Dal had quickly accepted. Aside from the fact they were known to be good crew, they also had another big advantage; they worked for free. Lin had moved clo.ser to the funny-looking stalks, and Dal pulled his mind back to the present and followed him. Up close, it looked like a section of extruded steel rod, diamondshaped, with each piece as big around as Dal's little finger. The base of each rod was about eight or ten centimeters from the next. He was reaching out to touch one when Lincheni screamed! "Mother of Thity! Spawn of a Greff!" Dal spun toward Lin, his spitter extended and seeking a target. There was nothing there, except Lin. Slowly he raised from his defensive crouch: Lin was hopping around, slinging one of his paws up and down rapidly. "What -- ?" "I cut one of my pulating fingers on the goddammed rods!" Dal inspected the injured digit. There was a little of the whelf's purple blood, but not much damage. He laughed. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to touch strange -- # ' ' "Laugh! It'd be different if it was your finger!" Suddenly, there was a metallic ringing, a clanging, as if someone -- or something -- was banging into the rods. The sound was coming from inside the field! Dal looked at Lin. Whatever the rods were, plant or mineral, they were hard and sharp, sharp enough to cut flesh at a touch! If something was in there, moving around without being cut to tatters... "Suddenly this stuff doesn't seem all that interesting," Dal said quickly. "I agree!" In twenty seconds, the three were airborne again, heading away from the strange rods.  They had been in transit for nearly eight hours. Tulak had informed them that the planet had a twenty-one hour cycle, so there was only a little daylight remaining. They had begun looking for a clearing for camp when Tulak spotted the structure. "There is a small building about a kilometer to our left," he said, in his off-hand sing-song. "It appears to be of humanoid construction." They put the cycles into a tight turn, and dropped lower to utilize the cover of the trees. It might not be civilization, but it was a sign they were getting there. So far. Dal hadn't worried about what to do when they reached it, but he supposed it was time to start thinking about it. The sun was mostly gone, but the heat and dampness lingered, and he felt clammy. The smell of smashed insects reminded him of rotten fruit. Dal wished he was in space, in his ship, in the clean vacuum he loved. True, he'd been something of a disreputable citizen; a privateer, a gun-runner, a charterfor-pay, no-questions-asked captain of a ship which sometimes barely kept going. But it was his choice of life -- and far better than being a ground-pounder. Like he was now. In this godforsaken hole at the end of the Galaxy! Well. They were going to leave this world. If there were ships which could shoot him down, there were ships to be had. One way or another! They owed him one, and by all the gods and stars, he was going to get one! r They put the cycles down half a klick from the building and its small clearing. They started toward it, weapons at the ready. The "building" was little more than a crude hut. It was made from rough wood, lashed together with some kind of vine; the roof was thatched with a type of broad, blue-green leaf. Except for some crude, wooden furniture and a mouldy animal skin rug, the hut seemed empty. There were no signs of life around it. "What now?" Lin whispered. "See if you can find somebody," Dal said. "Don't let them see you." They turned to look at Tulak. Even in the gathering dusk, he was highly visible. "Tulak, maybe you ought to stay back in the trees!" They split up, and Dal started to work his way around the edge of the clearing. The insects which had been splattering him all day seemed to abound here -- the air seemed alive with the damned things, buzzing everywhere. The heavy air brought smells of jungle; rotting plants mixed with the odor of pollen. When he was nearly halfway round the clearing, he passed a large tree, and there was the old man. It was hard to determine the man's age or race. He was human, but could have been seventy or a hundred. His skin was leathery brown, but that could have been from the sun. He was bald, his head was thrown back, and he was staring into the sky. He sat in a knotted cross-legged fashion, his arms folded across his chest, and his thim muscular body was naked, exce for a pendant on a leather thong around his neck. Nothing very unusual -- except the old man was sitting ten centimeters off the ground! Dal looked for devices -- motors, wires, this was absurd! -- but couldn't see anything! The man air, without support! That was impossible! As he watched, the old man brought his head down, until he was looking straight ahead. Dal slipped back behind the tree, so that only his face was uncovered. In the shadows, he'd be hidden -- The bald man turned his eyes, then his head, to look directly toward Dal. He knew he couldn't be seen, still -- "Greetings," the man said, in a strong voice. "Welcome to my home." Perfect Interspeak too! Dal's mind stalled. He'd seen a lot of strange sights on a lot of different worlds -- this had to be a trick! "You can come out," the old man continued. "Call your friends, too. I won't hurt you." Well, shit! Dal moved from behind the tree, his already clammy skin gone suddenly wetter with nervous sweat. The spitter's plastic handle felt slippery in his hand, despite the sharp checkering on the grips. He pointed the weapon at the old man, still hovering in the air. "Don't make any sudden moves!" he said. Oh, boy, was that a stupid thing to say! There was a dry-bitter taste in 'his mouth. "Why not?" The old man seemed amused. Dal waved the spitter. "Because I've got this!" "Oh, that? You can't hurt anything with that -- it doesn't work." Involuntarily, Dal glanced down at the weapon. "Oh? We'll see how it works!" He pointed the ceepee pistol at a tree branch on the ground near -- no, under -- the old man, and pulled the firing stud. A little heat would show the old bastard -- Nothing happened! Dal's stomach flipflopped, and the dry-bitter taste in his mouth turned into pure dust and quinidex! He tried again. Nothing! "Lin!" As he yelled, Dal saw the old man begin to settle slowly to the ground. By the time Lincheni arrived at a dead-run, the naked figure was seated on the earth, smiling broadly. "Lin, shoot that tree." He pointed with his own useless pistol. The Demi-Whelf never hesitated. He fired, and a ninny, burned-black spot appeared on the trunk. There was the smell of cooked wood and boiled sap. Dal stared at his own spitter. He jerked it up and pointed it at the same tree. Another burned spot erupted sap! The smell grew stronger. "How -- ? -- Lin, this old man, he -- " "What old man? What are you talking about?" Dal spun. The old man was gone! But -- "There was an old man, there! You ran right past him. I saw him floating in the air -- " he stopped. Lin was looking at him funny. "Hey, look, I swear -- ! Come on, he was there  Let's get back to that hut. " At the hut, they found Tulak regarding the door. Dal glaneed at Lin, then said, "Tulak, did you see an old man -- ?" "Inside," Tulak sang. Thank the gods I'm not crazy! Dal thought. Aloud, he said, "Come on!" He and Lin started to move for the door. Suddenly, one of Tulak s massive arms came up to stop them. "Tulak -- what -- ?" "Wait." "Wait? Tulak, move "Wait." What the hell was going on here? Tulak was blocking the door. But nobody could control the big robot. Just what -- ? Suddenly the door opened. A faint smell of some fragrant smoke wafted out, and the old man appeared in the doorway. He was dressed now, in snug leather breeches and a pull-over silk shirt. He wore high-topped boots, and had a large, wicked-looking knife in a clear plastic sheath strapped to the front of his right thigh. His bald head gleamed dully in the dimming light. "Thank you, Tulak," he sang, in the tongue-twisting Trogian songlanguage. "You -- you speak Trogian? But how -- ?" Dal was at a loss, confused. Understanding the language was hard. For a human to speak it was almost unheard of. "I haven't always lived on this planet," the old man said. "But if you will come inside, I will be happy to answer your questions. Dal looked at Lin and Tulak. Numbly, he nodded. IV Inside the rude hut. Dal got another shock. Under the crudely tanned skin rug on the rough floor, there was a massive wooden trap-door. Under that, a set of descending stairs. They followed the stairs down, through a damp smelling stone corridor which twisted several times, and finally -- Gods! There was a huge room, at least thirty meters on a side. And it was filled with furniture, books, holo equipment, machines... Just what the hell was going on? "I expected you sooner," the old man said. "I didn't think you'd stop at the weed patch." Lin and Dal glanced at each other, then at Tulak. Whoever this person was, he was damned well informed. Too well informed. "Have a seat," the old man said. "I'll get some refreshments." He whistled, and a short and stubby servobot appieared, carrying a tray of plastic juicebulbs. Dal looked down at his weapon, still clutched tightly in his hand. Silently, he bolstered the spitter. This whole thing was crazy, but the old man didn't seem dangerous. Besides, he had already shown he could make the ceepee pistol malfunction. Dal sat on a nearby form-chair. Lincheni did the same, although his eyes kept darting around the perimeter of their furry From an Earth plague came the seeking a new honre fotr, humanity. Instead they were' caught between two warring alien cultures, end qrtjL y Alahna could saIrS  enslavir'ig lie the Garkohrt ' friend ' C'fered gK -- or how t!, .'hkohn . , .-Pher hope, sockets, watching for anything unusual. Hell, it was all unusual! "I neglected to introduce myself. I am Lao Emba, student of Ch'an, and owner of this place. May I ask your names?" Reluctantly, Dal told him. "I'm Dal Hamsun, captain -- uh, former captain of the ship Starbird. This is Lincheni, my first, and Tulak -- whom it seems you've already met. " Emba grinned, showing even and white teeth. "Ah, Tulak. How long has it been? Twenty years?" "Twenty-two terran standards," Tulak sang. Dal did a double-take. So they had met before! The servobot passed, and without thinking. Dal took a container of juice. It had a pleasant, musky taste. "How did you do that -- float in the air like that?" Dal asked. "A simple re-routing of gravitational attraction -- not unlike the repellor motors on your own cycles." "But howl I couldn't see any machines." "Oh, there weren't any. It's a mental device, one of the Ch'an exercises -- a toy, really. A simple application of attaching one's Flow to the Universal Flow." Uh. Yeah, sure, whatever that meant. "You say you and Tulak know each other?" "We did once. A long time ago in a place far away. " Dal couldn't believe this. Here he was, in some underground palace on a strange planet, talking to a man who could float in the air! And a man who knew his robot! "This... Ch'an you speak of, it's some kind of religious belief?" "In a way." Dal looked dubious, and Emba laughed. "Did you think religious men wore old robes and long beards and lived in huts like that one above here?" Dal shmgged uncomfortably . "Something like that." Emba laughed again. "Don't believe everything you hear, boy. There are anti-esthetics like that -- but it's not necessary to go that far. Those who want to suffer for their beliefs don't play with full decks. True," he waved his hand, "all this isn't needed or required. But as long as it's available, why shouldn't I enjoy it?" Dal found an interesting spot on his boot and studied it. "How did you know we were coming?" Lincheni demanded suddenly. "I tracked your ship down on radar after Hookthom's boys blasted you. " Dal jerked his head up. "You know Hookthom?" "Not personally. I know he brought four thousand ships here a year ago and took over the planetary government." "Son-of-a-bitch! Then he is building a new navy!" ' 'Seems that way . ' ' "What's the local populace doing about it?" "Nothing. Hookthom wiped out the local token armed forces when he came in. These people are peaceful -- farmers and miners, of them here. They're tough individuals, but not soldiers. They don't know how to fight." "Yeah, well, we can -- at least well enough to get the ship they owe us!" "I have no doubt of that." He sighed. "Do you know what will happen if Hookthom can assemble any kind of fighting force before the Confederation finds him? He'll jump some world and start another galaxy-wide war!" "Yeah, probably." "And once they discover that this is his home base, the idiots that run the Confederation will no doubt try to blast it out of the sky! All these innocent people will die!" Dal studied his boot again. "Too bad." "And most likely they'll ruin my home, as well! Even if they don't, who wants to live on a burned out cinder?" Dal looked up. Here was a twist! "I can't let that happen." "Oh?" Dal looked at Lin, who seemed to shrink into the massaging form-chair. "Just what do you plan to do about it?" "We'll have to stop him." We?" "Yes. The four of us." Dal jumped to his feet. "You're crazy! You expect our of us to go against Hookthom? If he's got four thousand ships, that means he's got probably fifty thousand troops!" "More or less," Emba said, the grin on his face never wayering. "Sorry, old man, you can count us out. We'll just rip off a ship and be gone. Maybe we'll drop the Confeds a note telling them where Hookthom is stashed; other than that, sorry. We have places to go. I'm afraid we can't help you." Emba didn't move. "Oh, but you will!" Dal suddenly felt himself grow sleepy. His vision swam and blurred. He looked at the juice container, then up at Emba's face. "Dmgs! You drugged us!" "Don't be ridiculous," Emba said. "Why would I go to all that trouble? It's just a touch of the Flow to your sleep center. While you're resting. Tulak and I will catch up on old times." Dal reached for his spitter, but he knew he'd never make it in time. He didn't. V He was in some rickety kind of aircraft, flying over a slaughtered, desolate world! Beneath him lay the ruins of a civilization -- burned out, blasted, destroyed -- and still smoking. He was close enough to see the bodies of people -- gods, thousands upon thousands of them! They were twisted into hoirible shapes, some frozen in flight, some burned into crisp statues by the effects of terri-' ble radiation -- The aircraft turned, a right-angle, dizzying turn, and another, vaster killed area swam into view. The walls around him seemed to dissolve, vanish; and now he could not only see the dead, he could smell them, could smell the cooked flesh! He wanted to vomit, and the sour, reflux taste filled his throat, but could not seem to come up -- He could hear them! Somehow, some of the poor bastards had lived through the destruction! They were calling, crying out for hel -- He wasn't in the ship anymore! He was on the ground, walking through the victims! He could feel them brush against his legs as he walked. Clutching, bony hands touched his feet! Horrible things crackled under his boots, things which had once been human --  His eyes popped open, and Dal was suddenly awake. Sweat rolled from him, despite the coolness of the room's air conditioners, and he found his fists were so tightly clenched the nails had cut into his palms. He glanced at his chrono. It was morning. Across from him, Lao Emba sat, staring over the tops of his tented fingers. "I trust you had pleasant dreams?" "It was..." Bat shook his head. "It -- I -- wait! It was only a dream, wasn't it?" "Yes. But one which could come true. " Lin began stirring in his chair. As Dal watched, the Demi-Whelf blurred around the edges, as he did when he changed during periods of danger. Dal looked back at Emba. "All those dead people..." "You could help stop it," the old man said. "How? What could four of us do against Hookthom's army? "There are ways." Lin seemed to be waking up, and he looked as bad as Dal felt. "You okay?" The Demi-Whelf nodded, but he was shaky. Dal sighed, and looked at Emba. The images of the dead and dying floated in his mind. The smell, the sound, they'd been so real! "All right. I'll do what you want." "And #," Lin added. "Lin, you don't have to!" Dal knew Lincheni had only signed on originally for the chance at big money. It took a lot of creds to buy breeding rights on his world -- there weren't enough female whelves. He couldn't ask Lin to join this -- this suicide plan! "I saw those people," Lin said. "My people. I will do what I can!" Dal nodded. "You seem to know Tulak better than we do, so it looks like you've got yourself a crew." "Good! I knew you were reasonable! I'm glad I didn't have to do anything drastic to get your attention!" "Drastic?" Crap! What could be more drastic? "The dream you had -- it could have been made permanent." Dal shuddered, and Lin swore softly under his breath. "So what now?" Dal asked. "We'll have to go to Ste'nel, this world's largest city. There are people there who will be ready to help. I have an old friend who is a senator -- he'll know who can be trusted." "And then?" "One step at a time, boy, one step at a time."  Incredibly, there were other rooms hidden under the ground, some larger than the first one they'd seen! In one of these, a vast cave hollowed from damp, gray rock. was a ten-passenger flitter, fullyrigged for atmosphere running! "It seems our hermit friend is a man of means," Lin said. His voice echoed in the huge chamber. "Yeah. It seems." So far, everything about this Emba was impressive. Dal was interested in finding out more about this mysterious Ch'an -- he had the idea that floating in the air and bad dreams were only the tip of the iceberg. "They will have found your ship by now, and noted the lack of bodies," Emba said. "We'll have to be careful. Hookthorn will have tightened security." "Maybe not. There were... things in the jungle which could have easily disposed of our corpses." "And eaten two skimcycles, as well?" Dal shrugged. No, Hookthorn 's trackers wouldn't be careless. When he'd been a gunner on the Go Placid during the war, he'd seen just how careful the enemy was. After their ship had been hit and disabled, a number of the men had abandoned her, in lifecraft or deepsuits. Hookthorn 's men had tracked each one down and blasted them! No prisoners! The only reason he and a few others had survived was because a big section of the Confederation's fleet had arrived before the crippled ship could be totally destroyed. No, Hookthorn 's men wouldn't be careless -- or merciful. Lord Kreeg Hookthorn. And his wife, the Lady Ursula -- the Lady with Smoke Eyes -- he had reason to hate them! They'd cost him friends and relatives! But that had been the war, and it was always impersonal -- he'd never seen Hookthorn, only his ships. When the war was over -- everybody thought Hookthorn was dead -- Dal had buried his memories, and gone to work to get his own ship. Only now, it was much more personal! They'd killed the Starbird When he'd been seventeen, it had all been a big game, not real. Now, he was nearly twenty-three, and he knew more about life. The bastards had cut him off from space with no more thought than squashing a bug. Ah, to be left alone with the man responsible for just two minutes. Emba cut into his thoughts. "We're three hundred kilometers from the city. It will take half an hour to get there and I want to get moving. Load up." Once aloft, Dal asked Emba a question. "Something's been bothering me. Granted, you could track our ship down on radar -- how did you know about our stop at the patch of gray-rods'? Your radar couldn't have followed us at treetop level -- not that far away." Emba .set the autopilot and turned to face Dal. "I could say it was because the weed was in your path -- that I figured you'd head for the strongest radio transmissions, that you'd be curious and stop. " "You could. But you knewl It wasn't a guess!" "True," he said, with a chuckle. "Actually, Snegala told me." Snegala? Dal glanced at Lin. Had they been watched? "He's one of the Culebrath. That was his patch you stopped at." Culebrath. Where had he heard that -- ? Oh. Tulak had mentioned something about a local intelligent life-form. "The 'rods' you saw are actually a sort of crystal-plant. Biologically speaking, they are quite unique -- a variant form of fungus. The rods are all part of a common mycelium -- all part of one plant -- in that patch, at least. The stalks are composed primarily of iron, with smaller amounts of copper, lead and gold. Don't ask me how it can exist -- it simply does." He paused a few seconds, then added, "The Culebrath eat it." "Eat it? Those sticks are as sharp as vibro -- . " "The Culebrath are very tough. They crawl around through the stalks -- they look something like snakes, with fins -- and snip the stems at the base. Then they swallow the cut pieces along the length." "Pourn's balls!" Lin said. Emba continued. "They utilize most of the mineral and fiber, and excrete the rest -- precious metals mostly." Dal started to speak, but Lin beat him to it. "They shit gold?" Emba laughed. "Yes, if you want to put it that way. " Wait. Dal remembered something else Tulak had said earlier. Something about the export of precious metals... Hmm. Put that together with Emba's comment about most of the people on this planet being farmers or miners... Aloud, Dal said, "You mean the people here make a living collecting snake turds? Gold snake turds?" Emba laughed louder. "It's a fairly big part of the industry here." "Well I'll be damned!" "As will I!" Lin added. "You'll get a chance to meet some of the Culebrath," Emba said. "We'll need their help against Hookthom." Oh, yeah. That. For a moment. Dal had forgotten their suicide mission. Gods, if the folks on Nivenraad could see him now. Going to fight fifty thousand troops, with a crazy old man, a whelf, a giant robot, and some gold-crapping snakes! Nobody would believe it. Dal didn't believe it! VI From the outskirts, Ste'nel looked just like any other fairly large frontier town. The jungle had been cleared away and kept down, and the bulk of the town squatted in the center of the cleared space. The streets were laid out in long, straight rows. It was hard to see much in the just-breaking dawn, but in the distance, there was what looked like a military base. There didn't seem to be much traffic in the streets or the air, and Dal said as much. "Hookthom has the entire planet under martial law. You need a good reason to be out. " "Oh? And what's our reason?" Dal glanced back at Tulak and Lin. "How do you explain us if we're stopped?" "We won't be stopped." "You seem awfully sure!" "I understand the whelves have a trick, whereby they can appear to be something other than what they are. " Dal nodded. "To any who view us closely, we appiear to be a command flitter, bearing the insignia of an UnderGeneral. We won't be stopped." "Yeah, well that's fine for line of sight. What about the local air traffic controller? Do we sound like too?" Emba regarded him as one might a child asking a naive question. "Of course." Dal looked at Lin. The DemiWhelf shrugged. "Of course. You heard the man!" There was a sudden lurch, and Dal's seat-harness cut into his muscles! The ship seemed to bounce crookedly through the air! "What -- ?" Emba's hands were busy at the controls, putting the flitter into a power dive. "It's one of the damned clone-drones! I didn't figure on them being out. " Dal jerked his head around toward Tulak. "What's a clonedrone?" "A drone-fighter, run by the extracted brain of an intelligent being's clone. " "Why didn't your voodoo trick fool him, Emba?" The ship bucked, and dropped with a stomach-twisting free-fall. "Because the damned clone brain doesn't see with eyes. It uses electronic cameras and sensors, then checks them. " Ah! So this magical Ch'an did have limits! Dal was almost glad -- until he realized those limits might get them all killed! "I'll get the weapons system going." he yelled. "I doubt it," Lin said. "There doesn't seem to be one." "What? Emba -- ?" "He's right. "I've never needed one. The Ch'an -- " "Is going to get us blown out of the sky!" "We'll have to land," Emba said. "The clone ship will have called for manned back-up. I think I can handle them on the ground, but it'll be tricky!" The ship jumped sideways, as if struck by a pounding wave. "Tulak can stay with me, but I don't want to try too much. Dal, you and Lin will have to get to Senator Hanshi's -- I'll meet you there!" "How? I don't know where it is -- " "Be still!" With that. Dal suddenly had an image of the senator's house, the streets around it, and even what the senator looked like! "How did -- ?" "A memory impress. It's been five years since I've been there, but things won't .have changed that much. You'll have to make do. I'm going to be busy trying to convince a squad of troops that what they are seeing is more accurate than the tape on a drone's memory!" The flitter slewed into a ragged landing on a cleared field. Dal's head thunked against the inner hull. "Go! Get out of here before the soldiers arrive!" Dal and Lin scrambled from the flitter and ran quickly away. If anything, the city was hotter than the jungle. Probably due to the output of air conditioners and all the heat retaining stone and plastcrete. They made it to the shadow of a big storage house, and rested briefly next to the pre-cast green plastic wall. There was an oily smell in the air, and the distant hum of machinery. Ground-bound civilization. Bah! "Let's get moving," Dal said. "When people start waking up, we don't want to be wangling around. "  Senator Hanshi's house appeared quiet. It was a large wooden structure, a split-level, dorsi-style unit, set back into a group of cloaking trees and bushes. The foliage was thicker than Dal "remembered". Although it was still early morning, the nearest residence was close enough to see anyone entering or leaving by the front portal. "We'd better go around back," Dal said. "I'm not sure the senator would want his neighbors to know we 've come to call . ' ' They made their way through the brush to the rear of the house. There was a tall, wooden fence around the back, with a single gate at one end. It was, naturally, locked. "Over the top. " Dal hissed. He boosted Lincheni up, then caught the edge of the two-and-a-half meter high fence himself. The wood had a pleasant, evergreen smell, but the top was rough, and he felt the jab of several splinters as they dug into his palms. He pulled himself up and over -- it wasn 't too bad -- and fell -- and landed square on top of a prickly bush! "Ouch! Mother -- !" "Shhh!" Lin hissed. "Somebody might get the wrong idea." The back portal was a single, thick sheet of plastiglass. It was locked. Dal knocked. No answer. He tried again. Still nothing. "Now what?" Lin said, looking around nervously. "Nobody's home." "Let's try a window." But all the windows on ground level were opaque-polarized and locked. They moved back to the door, and D drew his spitter. "Hey, you gonna bum the door? I don't know -- " "I'll buy him a new one. If one of those clone-drones just happens to flit by and see us... " "Ye, okay, I get your point." Dal directed a short burst of ceepee at the lock. The green blow of the charged particles was soon joined by the white-hot gleam of the lock melting. The plastic vaporized with a smell like burned boot-sole. They slid the door open, and found themselves in a kitchen. Dal kept the spitter out, and they moved down a short hallway into a large room. "The senator has nice taste," Lin said, picking up a small, metal sculpture of a nude woman. Dal grinned. "How would you know? Your women all look like dogs to me -- " "Shhh! I heard something!" "What? I don't -- " "Make one move and you'll both be dead!" said a woman's voice from behind them. Dal froze. "Drop your weapons -- very carefully -- and turn around." The two spitters fell lightly to the thick rug, and Dal and Lin turned slowly. "Oh, wow!" Dal said. The woman standing on the stairs looked to be about nineteen. She was tall and slender, and absolutely beautiful! Her short, dark hair covered her head like a loose cap, and the thin fabric of her sleeping gown failed to hide the heavy curve of high breasts and the slender, perfectly shaped legs, and -- the poisoned dartslinger pointed rock-steady at his stomach! The girl moved down the stairs until she was two meters away from them. "What are you doing here?" she demanded. It was then Dal knew he'd been in space too long. Here was one of the most gorgeous women he'd ever seen, and all he could say was, "Uh, we -- uh, that is -- well, we -- uh..." "Very bright. Come on! Who are -- ?" And Lincheni began to change. The girl swung the dartslinger toward him. "What are you -- ?" And then there were two women, both identical to Dal's eyes! The real girl seemed startled for a second, and Dal sprang at her, arms outstretched. He caught her shoulders, and for a second, he had time to feel the imprint of her breasts on his chest, time to smell her exotic perfume, time to feel the firm, slim muscles of her body against him. Then, abruptly, he was sailing through the air, twisting, awkwardly off-bance. He slammed into a wall. The wind was knocked from his lungs. He slid to the carpet, stunned, and -- the girl had them covered again! "I don't know how you did that, fur-face, but it won't work!" Lin shimmered, and changed back to his normal form. Dal grinned stupidly from the floor, still remembering the feel of her body. Then he felt the ache in his shoulder where he'd hit. Slowly, he got to his feet. This lady knew something about how to protect herself. "Hey, look, we're trying to find Senator Hanshi," he finally managed. "Is that the way you normally look for someone? Break into his house and attack his daughter?" "It's a long story," Dal said, feeling sheepish. "Fine," she said, gesturing toward a couch with the slinger. "Why don't you tell me all about 'it."  "That's incredible," she said, still pointing the slinger at them. "But true," Lin added. "How do I know Lao really sent you?" "Like I said, he is supposed to meet us here." Dal was feeling a little more comfortable. At least she hadn't started shooting yet. "And where is the Senator, anyway?" The girl's expression masked; her eyes flicked down, then quickly back up. "He's... dead. Hookthorn had him killed for resisting the take-over. The government's been disbanded." "I'm sorry." "We're going to wait and see if Lao Emba comes here, as you said." "And if he doesn't... ?" ' 'Then you 're either criminals or Hookthom's men -- which is the same thing, as far as I'm concerned. Either way..." she trailed off. Dal glanced at Lin, then back at the girl. Somehow, that didn't sound at all good. "Tanya!" Emba came in, followed by Tulak. "Uncle Lao!" Uncle Lao? How could anybody call him 'uncle'? Emba looked at Dal and Lin, and at the dartspitter. "Well, Tanya, I see you've already met two of the leaders of our future liberation army." "Them?" "Them. They... uh, volunteered, after their ship was blasted." The girl dropped her gun into the chair carelessly. "If these are leaders, we're in trouble!" Emba sighed. "It's been a long year, but they'll do. Where's your father?" She told him, and the old man seemed to age further and collapse. He dropped heavily into a chair, sudden exhaustion drawing lines on his face. "Forgive me -- I -- the strain of keeping up the facade for the robot and myself was great. And now -- your father..." She touched his gnarled hands with her own smooth fingers. Dal stood up. "Lin and I need some water. We'll... uh, be in the kitchen. Anything we can get you?" Emba shook his head. "Uncle Lao, there's so much to tell you. So much has happened in the last six months!" Lin followed Dal to the kitchen. "What's this about? You know I don't drink plain water. " "I'll tell you what -- I'm tired of being somebody's puppet." Since we broke hyperspace, we've been running around like smerps with our heads amputated!" "So? What options -- ?" "I'm going to make some options. The old man painted us a dreary picture of bodies littering the landscape -- but I'm kind of fond of my own body. " "I don't -- " "Okay, look, we committed ourselves to help -- but I'm no martyr! After we met Emba, I started thiing about our chances of stealing a ship and sneaking off-planet. You saw what twelve ships did to us -- imagine what four thousand could do -- if there really are four thousand. " "What do you mean?" "I mean, how do we know just what the hell is going on? So far. old man, but I don't trust anybody where my ass is on the line. There are things he isn't telling us!" "Such as?" "Such as that comment about it being a 'long year'! Such as that remark the girl made about so much going on in the last six months. He says he hasn't been here in five years -- but it sounds like the girl saw him more recently than that. I think he's had something cooking for some time, and I don't know where we fit into it ail." "So what are you going to do?" "A little exploring." Dal slipped the empty holster from his belt and pulled his tunic out to cover his waist. "See if you can slip back while they're busy talking and get my spitter." When Lin returned with the weapon. Dal tucked it inside his pants and covered it with the loose tunic. "What'll I tell the old man?" "Tell him I went for a walk. I'll be back by dark. " "Take it easy, huh?" Dal grinned. "You kidding? Don't worry. "  generators squatting on the bare ground, and the electronic spy-eyes which triggered them sunk into the shiny-steel fence po.sts. Anybody who tried to climb that fence would become just that -- a body -- and probably well-done, at that! He'd have to get in at one of the gates. Another problem. There were guards at the gates. He couldn't just walk in -- that would likely get him as dead as trying to climb the fence. Obviously, the only way into the base would be in a vehicle the guards wouldn't stop. It wasn't likely a general would stop for hitchhikers, either. An old memory glimmered in the back of his mind. When he'd been a kid, he'd joined a club which had required its members to sneak into a We're Fighting for Your Life Plecee give generously American Heart Association The perimeter fence around the camp didn't seem to be guarded. Then Dal saw the automatic laser guarded spaceport. He grinned as he remembered the details of that escapade when he was twelve. Sure! That kind of transport would come and go freely, even on a military base. There was a wooded area back on the road. A fair-sized tree branch on the plastcrete would slow his ride down enough,  It was a lot worse than he'd remembered. Even though the truck was only lightly loaded going in, it still wasn't any fun being buried under a layer of garbage, e feel of it was both gritty and slimy, and the smell of it in the hot tropical morning sun was enough to make him wish he didn't have to breathe. He wondered how he could have forgotten the odor of rotten vegetables and rancid meat scraps. He jumped from the truck at the first stop, and quickly hid between two of the dozens of plastic portadump bins. Well, genius, you're inside the base. Now what? Planning ahead had never been one of his strong points. It was one of the reasons he was such a lousy chess player. He preferred to play things by feel, and improvise as needed. Sometimes it worked. Other times... Okay, okay. You obviously can't walk around like this. Aside from the fact you stink, your clothes are wrong. Hmmm. He let four men dump plastic bags into the poita-dumps bause they were too big or too small. The fifth man looked just about right. He stood up. "Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the latrine?" "Huh?" Clonk! He used smelly strips from his clothes to bind and gag the unconscious soldier and tossed him into the nearest bin. He carefully covered the man with enough trash so he couldn't be seen. Dal didn't know how long the trooper would be out, but he wasn't going to do much moving when he did wake up. So far, so good! He'd gotten into the camp, obtained a uniform, and was now anonymous. Time to start looking around.  Three hours later. Dal was convinced Emba hadn't been lying. Even if this was the only base Hookthom had -- and he doubted that -- there were at least two thousand ships, along with all the support equipment and personnel needed to keep the small navy operational. He'd only had one close call -- when an officer stopped him and told him to get a bath -- apparently some of the garbage's odor had remained with him. He worked his way toward the center of the complex. Everything had the look of newness and military drab about it. The pre-fab plastic buildings glinted dully in the harsh sunlight. Another few minutes, and he'd have the place pretty well scoped out. He plann to swi something movable then and hop the fence -- that was much more appealing than burrowing into the gunk again and waiting for the trash carrier. He walked nonchalantly through the area, between the neutral gray walls. There weren't any trees or bushes or color to break the bare ground. The hot walls gave off a waxy smell, and the traces of garbage he'd missed in changing clothes grew ranker in the afternoon sun. This was almost boring. He rounded a sharp comer, and -- would you look at that! In the middle of all that military starkness, there was a -- house! And not just a house, but a deep-red stained house. It had a high, peaked roof, with massive beams edging it, with what appeared to be split wooden shakes for shingles. There were several thin windows of heavy plastiglass mnning from the ground nearly to the roof, and a heavy, close-grained hardwood door near one end of the structure. There were bushes around the house, and even a ten-meter tall tree nearby. Well, well. I wonder who lives there? Slowly, Dal edged closer to the house. It had to be Hookthom's. If he could just get a good look... An alarm horn blared so loudly it sent him jumping half a meter into the air. He twisted his head sideways, and saw the round tube of a spy-eye -- protruding from the bole of the fem-like tree. Damn! He turned and began to run. Out of the comer of his eye, he caught a glimpse of that heavy door opening. He kept moving, but looked back. His kidneys and bowels screamed at his brain, and he expected to see an armed trooper start blasting -- . What he saw was a very tall woman framed in the doorway -- and gods, what a woman! She had long, red hair, and was draped. in a flowing, see-through robe of emerald green. As if in slow-motion. Dal saw the middle of the gauzy material part, blown by some stray, hot breeze, to reveal the slim belly and legs of the woman -- totally nude underneath! In that suddenly long second, he saw a thatch of thick and red pubic hair. God damn! Not now a tiny voice echoed inside his head. Another alamn began screaming somewhere, and Dal knew he was in big trouble! He headed for an alley. And suddenly he saw the harsh, red lines of laser beams flare, forming a fence between the two buildings. Why hadn't he noticed those before? He skidded to a stop just short of the deadly bars of light! They were too high to jump, too low to crawl under. He spun a quarter turn, and ran. He rounded a comer, and almost ran into a trooper. Dal dropped and rolled, and came up holding his ceepee spitter in both sweaty hands. He fired, and the stream speared the trooper. The man fell, his own weapon discharging harmlessly into the ground. Back! Go back, around the house! As he ran by, he saw the woman, still standing in the doorway. She was smiling, her too-red lips glowing wetly in the hot sunlight. Dal circled the house quickly -- and found himself facing two more troopers. They fired, and his jump was a fraction of a second too slow. He felt the bum of an energy beam along his left shoulder. Then he was rolling and shooting wildly. He got off four short bursts -- one took a trooper in the groin, another the second man in the chest. Up! Up! Move, dammit! Another building. Maybe he could -- no. More lasers! He turned back. Where -- ?" voice from a hidden loudspeaker. Trapped! Dal's mind scrabbled over itself, trying to think and not panic. The house! It was his only chance. The red-head, she had to be the Lady Ursula. If he could take her hostage -- . But the door was shut, now. Frantically, Dal fired his spitter at the wood. It would bum -- . Too late, he realized the thick wood was backed with metal -- probably hull-steel -- and so, impervious to his particle weapon -- ! The windows were too narrow, even if he could bum through in time. There wasn't any cover, no place to hide -- ! Oh, shit! Dal heard the high-pitched whine of the aircraft, there to his right. He crouched, and point-shot the spitter. The thin green stream looked frail as it lanced out and touched the drone. He gulped and dived to his left, hitting the burned shoulder. The drone's laser roasted the ground where he'd just been -- he could smell the cooked earth. He rolled and fired again, holding the stud down, playing the charged-particles over the armor of the small, saucer-shaped craft. The drone's laser flashed redly again, barely missing. As he dodged, he could feel the heat. llie drone pulled away in a lazy half-circle, and started back down. He centered the sights of his spitter on the shining metal hull and held the stud, held it, held it. And his pistol blinked out, dry, empty! He was doomed, a dead man! He stood up and screamed, "Fuck you!" and threw the useless spitter at the drone. And at the last second, the drone pulled out of its bullet-like power dive, and instead of a burning laser, a small missile erupted from its belly. It hit five meters away from Dal and exploded with a roar. The force kicked Dal in the face like a giant boot, and the world blossomed red and faded away... To be continued    The problem of test-tube babies is nothing compared to the problem of test-tube mothers... ! The grant came through on ril #th and Dr. Fitzsimmons immediately chose the project's working team: Dr. Barrows, a longtime colleague (fussy but precise); Drew Adams, her lab assistant (a bit abrasive but with intuitive solutions); Cassie Page, a prorriising university student; and Clive Dieter, good at theory and a genuine talent for smoothing troubles. The donors, all interns or students, had already contributed sperm and egg to the experiment, but before the actual implantation and viability started, the first thing on the agenda was the simple matter of a container. "How about a glass test tube, only larger?" was the first suggestion. This comment was met with shivers and negative headshakes as nuances of Brave New Worlds were hoped to be avoided. "Too hard." "Too cold and inflexible." "Doesn't block light." Dr. Fitzsimmon's voice cut through the turmoil, "One of the new stretch polymers should do nicely. The opacity would limit the light." Clive agreed, "If we pack the inner bundle in a bed of foam there would be just the right amount of pressure surrounding the fetus and it should also help regulate the temperature." "And pray tell how are we going to see into this' dark and tepid atmosphere?" This from the fastidtous Dr. Barrows, whose voice conjured an amazingly accurate vision of a nattily dressed little man forever straightening his bow tie. "We could use one of the new heat emission cameras. It'd pick up the warm areas of the body and give us a fairly reliable visual monitoring system, we should be immediately alerted to anything if it went wrong." "And what if someone runs into the bloody thing?" Everyone but Dr. Fitzsimmons, who was aware of the seemingness of Adams casual attitude, was horrified. The bloody thing indeed. Clive broke the awkward silence; "Adams is right. We'll have to create something around the whole works for protection." They all nodded, their minds diverted from Adams back to the problem at hand. "How about a plastic cast? It could be in the same shape as a human pelvis and be sectional to facilitate delivery." At these last words a small smile flickered from person to person, except for Adams, who was silently measuring the hips of Cassie Page.  Having decided fhis would be the best artificial environment possible, they spent the next few weeks working out the kinks. The end result ended up looking a lot like a huge sponge with myriad tubes ana wires leading into it; If it was the closest approximation of a womb man could devise, it was in no way visually comparable. So the solutions were mixed, the container filled, the wires hooked up, the temperatures obtained, and the beautiful experiment began. The five of them stood looking at the strange apparatus in the middle of the room. Besides the heat emissions of the visual screen, they had hooked up an ewnplifier so they could hear the fetal heartbeat. Cassie listened to the sound. "You know, I just thought of something. If we can hear it, it must also be able to hear." Adams was quick to reply, "With all that stuffing around it? Hardly.' She glared at him. "I mean, it can hear it's mother's heartbeat. Probably can even feel vibration at this stage." "She's right," Clive assured them. "An infant can detect it's mother's heartbeat at a very early age. It may even have something to do with the regulation of their own heart rhythms. Or it may be a security producing support system." "Well", Barrows said. "What should we do?" Adams glanced around, bored. "Why not just throw a clock in the hatch?" Again he was met with general pandemonium. Or. Fitzsimmons quieted the group. "Adams may have a point. We could feed in a recording. As the fetus develops, it will be conditioned to an actual adult heart beat. "Now", she surveyed the group "Whose heartbeat shall we record?" Cassie muttered, "Not Adams, his only goes dick-whirr." "No," Dr. Fitzsimmons agreed. "It probably should be a female. I'm past child-bearing age, so I guess you'd be more ideal." Cassie smiled and nodded. "I'd be glad to make a recording." Clive objected, "Not just a recording. Cassie, an endless tape." They all looked at him questioningly. "A recording would be a repetition of the same beat. You all know heartbeats change throughout the day with stress, excitement or exertion. Cassie should record one day, then start a new tape the next day as the first one is fed into the life support system." Barrows was becoming excited. "Of course. The baby will be receiving the real reactions of human heartbeats going through an actual day." "Well, Cassie," Dr. Fitzsimmons glanced at her. "Are you still game?" Cassie looked a little doubtful but nodded. "Should I take it off at night?" "No." Barrows maintained. "Expectant mother's hearts beat in bed too. We must have an authentic recording in every way. That means we should have everything, even the heartbeat slowing down for sleep." "Or speeding up," Adams injected, looking at Cassie's rather full figure, "Expectant mothers are known for doing other things in bed besides sleeping." With this, the group was thrown into discord and dismissed for the evening. Dr. Fitzsimmons set about wiring Cassie to give her fairly complete freedom, yet make the equipment readily accessible.  During the following months, the tapes were switched each morning and fed into the fetal bath with only one mishap, when Adams accidentally (?) mixed up the tape and fed iri a cassette of "Early Katies Hits". Clive, while monitoring the fetal heartbeat, noticed his foot tapping and finally recognized the tune. "You've probably blown his ear drums." "Aw, just getting him into the swing of things." Dr. Fitzsimmons briskly changed the tapes and shook her headf. "I hate to admit it, but in a way Adams is right again. Even an unborn child is influenced by his surroundings. We've provided nourishment, and rhythm but no movement. A pregnant woman, even confined to bed, would have some movement. Clive looked doubtfully at the huge container and all the surrounding paraphernalia. "Maybe we could arrange a sling from the ceiling and lift it off the floor enough to swing it back and forth." "Better yet," Adams injected, "put springs on the bottom and we could all get on top and pogo the little bugger all over the room." "That does it." Barrows removed his lab coat, carefully folded it and placed it on a chair. Clive stepped between them, helping Barrows put his jacket back on. "Let's sleep on it for toniaht." "'That won't do anything but flatten its little head," Adams muttered. This time Clive nearly yanked the coat off Barrows. Once again Dr. Fitzsimmons stepped in. "One problem at a time, please. We'll want movement in all directions." Barrows agreed, "And a motorized propulsion system." "We could even take it outside," Cassie added. "Perhaps to the park across the street." 'We'd need an elevator system. Maybe retractable ramps for getting up and down curbs," Clive add. It was quiet for a second as they all looked at Adams expectantly. "And one hell of an extension cord." Four pairs of eyes flew skyward.  The next few days were spent reinforcing the outer shell, adding an elevator system, shelves for the monitoring equipment and a portable generator. By now the structure had grown to encompass half of the room and to get 'baby' out for his walk, the door and part of the wall had to be removed. In the following weeks, the people in the park nervously anticipated the sight of a huge box exiting from the science building across the way followed by five people in lab coats: a small white-haired woman who led the group; a skinny long-haired lad who, with another mustached man, ran about checking dials and wires; a dark girl wearing a warm smile, and a tall fair lad with his arm around her, whispering to her and tapping on what appeared to be a mike taped on her neck. Finally the day came when Dr. Fitzsimmons summoned them all to meet for the last time. "Our experiment has come to its conclusion. I would like to thank each and every one of you for your cooperation, your ideas and your time. You have all proved invaluable to this project. The fetus is full term and will now be transferred to the hospital for birth." Cassie's long face looked close to tears. "We should have the birth here." "No Cassie." It was one of the few times Dr. Fitzsimmons voice lost its professional touch. "We don't have the facilities or equipment in case something should go wrong. You know that, dear." "But it's our child." The voice regained its firmness, "It was our project Cassie, but never our child. If we kept him, he would be a curiosity with five parents." "He'd be a hit at father and son banquets." Fitzsimmons ignored Adams and continued. "This way he will be adopted by parents who know nothing of his gestation. He will be just another ordinary child." They all nodded agreement. "But I wanted a baby." Cassie murmured. Adams poked her gently in the ribs, "Stick with me kid. I know how to go about it." Cassie looked at him and then started to laugh. The others followed suit, tremendously pleased at their accomplishment; a team at last.  Dr. ntzsimmons sat alone, putting the final touches on her notes and slowly surveying her surroundings. She had lost a promising student, who had quit to have a child. The same student had married and mellowed a prize lab assistant, so he would probably lose his abrasiveness and be useless in future projects; half a wall of the lab was gone and the rest was cluttered with wires, tubing, sheet metal, plastic and machinery; a year had passed as if by magic; the people in the park had organize and were picketing the lab for scaring them out of their wits; and to top it all, she had post-partum blues. She glanced down at the title on the report before her: "Feasibility Studies On The Perfect Environment For The Gestation Of A Fetus." She picked up a red pen, turned to the last page and beside the heading of Suggestions, scribbled in large capital letters: ecological warfare of the future, A Beast for Norn, headlines the next issue. But the big news is The Invasion of America, a searing complete novel torn from tomorrow's headlines that no reader will ever forget -- and it's all too likely to come true! moon! The Depression of # is just around the corner, and you'll read G.A. Effinger's account now in And, of course, there's the pulse-pounding conclusion of Star Warriors, Part IV of Jem, and more inside news from our SF Hotline correspondents. before the revolution A great writer's nightmare vision of Women's lib gone mad! Peter Grayson, Ph.D., physicist, vice-president of Haskett Manufacturing Laboratories, Inc., heard the peculiar tiny clicking sound twice in rapid order. Ping... ping. The print he was reading blurred. Grayson shook his head impatiently and drew the contract closer to his glasses. Spots danced over the page. He sighed and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw the problem. In each lens of his spectacles, there was a crack horizontally across the "glass" exactly at pupil level. He was startled. Both lenses broken within a half-second of each other. Being statistically oriented, he considered the probability of simultaneous breakage. The figures that leaped to his mind were astronomical, and of course impossible. He gave it up. Silently, now, he removed the derelict spectacles, and laid them on the desk. Next, he searched in one of the drawers, and found a spool of hansparent tape -- naturally, manufactured by Haskett Laboratories. Obviously, he would use it only until he could obtain a new pair. He replaced the tape in the desk, the glassess on his nose -- as the door opened and Miss Haskett walked in. It was her usual vital entrance. She smiled, and said, "Do you have a moment. Doctor Grayson?" Her repertoire gone, she sank onto a chair and waited with an air of death. Grayson studied the owner of the Haskett Laboratories from behind his glasses and an astonishing thought passed through his mind. He ought to feel guilty about Miss Haskett. Her lonely life cried out wordlessly for love and affection. And who should answer that call but the man she had confirmed as chief scientist when she had inherited the business from her late aunt? Theirs was an office relationship. But it had involved most of her adult life. Grayson cleared his throat, uneasy at the thoughts he was having. He was so intent on that he didn't notice the incongruity of what he did next. He said, "Uh, Miss Haskett." What he did not realize was the assertiveness of his tone. As if he were the employer, and she the employee. And she was evidently not thinking either, or was daydreaming. For she said in an absent tone; "Yes, Doctor?" "What's the name of the eye specialist we use for our me , staff?" "Burr. Doctor Burr." His thought shifted back o Miss Haskett. "What do you do in your spare time?" he asked. "Oh -- various things." She seemed alert, suddenly. "Do you read?" "Sometimes. " "Go to the movies?" "Occasionally. " Grayson hesitated. An awareness was coming about what he was doing: Asking personal questions of his employer. He had not done that in all their previous association. He was startled. Inside him, the withdrawal process was beginning. At this point the woman volunteered, "I live in a condominium complex." Grayson was startled by the import of the information. "Alone?" he asked. Color came into her cheeks. She straightened. Then: "Alone," she said firmly. And did not look at him. Grayson was silent. She had deliberately roused herself out of thirty-eight years of shyness to tell him that she had the facilities for an affair. Grayson sighed. He was married, however drably. And he couldn't take the risk of his analysis being wrong. It would be ridiculous if he lost his job or got his face slapped, or -- worst of all -- was hauled before an Utt commissioner. Thinking of that, shaken by that, he said urgently; "Miss Haskett, I seem to have damaged my spectacles. And I'm sure I don't have to tell you that for a male nothing is more important. So if you'll just hold what you were going to tell me -- " Haskett stood up. "It can wait." Suddenly brisk, vital again, she added, "Why don't I have Miss Broman call Dr. Burr, and make an appointment?" "Uh, thank you." He spoke absent-mindedly because he was watching Miss Haskett as she went to the door. It occurred to him for the first time in their long business life that she had an excellent figure. As the door closed, he realized that he had a forbidden male-type feeling; and that he should be experiencing strong guilt reactions. But what he actually felt was a fear of being found out. Trembling, he sat there in his private office in the scientific administrative section of Haskett Laboratories and began to feel better, because he decided that he was not really in danger. The dialogue of Miss Haskett and himself was gone into that voiceless universe of all the forgotten -- because unrecorded -- conversations between people. She lives alone with her servants, he thought. So she will never mention it. And I won't. His anxiety began to fade. His momentary lapse was behind him, receding further into the past with each instant. He suspected what had happened had to do with the cracked lens of his spectacles. The possibility was genuinely amazing to Grayson. Could it be that the Utt females were right?... On their arrival on earth forty years before, the matriarchal Utt had surveyed the human condition, and had diagnosed that the problems of mankind were all traceable to the male. From the height of total superiority, their female rulers decreed that every male must take a certain drug at puberty. This drug rendered the male nearsighted. Whereupon, qualified professionals, following Utt specifications, fitted men with spectacles. Something must have been in them. Because the lens, it was said, barred tiny portions of the visible spectrum from stimulating the male optic nerve. Aside from requiring that all property be owned by women, plus certain transport limitations, and that women were not allowed to take scientific training -- an unexplained restriction -- that was the only direct Utt female interference in human affairs. What bothered Grayson was that he had secretly dismissed the Utt analysis. He rejected, in short, the Utt concept that men were the villains of earth's tormented history. It all seemed far-fetched -- made up. Suddenly, he wasn't so sure. He was still thinking about it when Miss Haskett knocked and entered. An unfortunate thing occurred. She gave him information about his appointment. But Grayson heard only the sound, none of the words. He was intently observing the fact she was a good-looking woman. Absorbed, he watched her leaving the room. It was only after she was gone that he wondered, what did she say? He was alarmed. The situation which he had thought solved, had had an unsuspected aftereffect. It could -- it seemed -- repeat with each visual contact. It occurred to Grayson there was a simple solution. He must avoid seeing, particularly Miss Haskett, X but possibly all women -- until he had his new lenses. Satisfied, he clicked on the intercom. "Miss Broman, will you repeat that about my appointment with Dr. Burr?" The appointment was for the next day. Miss Broman added quickly, "And Dr. Grayson -- " "Yes?" "Miss Haskett asked me to tell you that the address of her condominium is # Mendelian Drive. " I R. M. Meluch In a universe where Earthmen and Uelsons battled for control of galaxies, what chance did Arana have for survival? But not only was this seemingly backward planet a fuel stop for space warriors -- it harbored a new race of men, and the key to the ultimate struggle between mankind and man's most hated enemy... New American Library P. O. Box # Bergenfieid, NJ #I Long pause. Finally: "Uh, Miss Broman, cancel my appointments for the day," Grayson croaked. "And tell Miss Haskett I'm going home this afternoon. I don't feel well. I'll go ty the rear exit." After a while, he was pleased to realize that he had kept his wits about him. First, deciding so promptly to go home, and, second, going out the sidedoor, he would evade passing Miss Haskett's office. On the bus -- one of the Utt transport limitations was men were not allowed to drive; an automobile was considered by the Utt females to be a violence potential instrument -- he realized that his situation was not good at all. In his mind's ear, he kept hearing the seductive female sweetness in Miss Broman 's voice. One hope remained. After the lenses were repaired, his ability to hear the female voice with such responsive sensitivity would diminish again. In short, he would cease to be vulnerable to the unsuspected madness which, he realized, had been lurking inside his skin exactly as the Utt females had unerringly observed in human males at the time of their arrival on earth.  Mila, his wife, was not in when Grayson entered the house. Which surprised him vaguely. He'd always had the impression that she never went anywhere during the day. Probably out shopping, he thought. Satisfied, he put consideration of his wife out of his mind. He went straight to his bedroom, placed his glasses away in his night table, and lay down. Utt law required a man. to wear eyeglasses even while in bed -- but, obviously, to do so with broken lenses would be tempting further damage to them, so... He slept. And awakened to a distant door opening and shutting. Mila, he presumed. There was silence. He pictured her looking at his hat and cane in the hall, aware that he was home. He visualized her instant unpleasant reaction. But it was an hour before the door opened, and the rather tall, but slightly stooped woman who had been his wife for over thirty long years, came in and stood over him. "And what is it now?" she said in her attacking tone. It was eight years since his last illness and twenty-two years back to the time he had stayed home after hurting his hip in a severe fall -- and in each instance he had remained in bed exactly one day. Yet he perceived that in her mind the intervening years were nothing compared to the mental anguish of his unwanted presence during those two twentyfour hour periods. For the ftrst time he had a glimmer of the enormous effect the Utt had had on wives. When man had been named as the Earth's trouble-maker, every woman became Ms. Unchallengeable. Hastily, Grayson described his glasses breaking -- then became aware of a strong chemical odor. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. Atr amazing thing happened. His wife's shadowy figure, which had towered above him, sank down. Though it was difficult to see, Grayson had the impression that his wife was on her knees beside the bed. And the odor was -- if (jossible -- even stronger. Grayson sat up. "Mila! What's the matter?" "Don't hurt me!" It was a whisper. What stopped all immediate response by Grayson -- his impulse to leap out of bed, his confusion, his feeling he must instantly go to her aid for some reason that wasn't clear -- was the realization that the odor was a human body smell. Mila's! Memory wafted a startling explanation from his early laboratory experiments with animals. A female animal in heat had several times affected him unpleasantly. So much so that, finally, realizing that glandular exudations were actually too much for his sensitive nose, he had abandoned his primary interest in biology, and had gone over to the objective world of physics. This smell now was like that animal smell then. A woman in a profound state of sexual stimulation -- He lay back... She sees I'm not wearing the glasses that keep a man tamed, he thought. Because his brain worked rapidly, he waited, curious. If he told her after such a delay, there was no knowing what berserk state she would go into. Then, he recalled the theory of such matters. A few minutes after a man took off his glasses, their effect wore off. His experience with Miss Haskett had certainly proved that. He was assuming, of course, that broken lenses were the equivalent of no-glasses -- A male without glasses, said the legend, became progressively more aggressive, unreasoning, capable of violence. To Mila, after an afternoon of no glasses, he must seem to be in some final stage of male insanity. For Grayson, it was startling -- he realized how strongly women of the old days must have responded to their men. The woman beside the bed spoke again, in a whisper. "What do you want? I'll do anything you say. Don't hurt me." "Take a bath," said Grayson, wrinkling his nose again, "and of course you won't be hurt as long as -- " he hesitated, startled by his own temerity, but the words came involuntarily -- "as long as you do what I say." The woman came to her feet with alacrity. Her walk was not steady. There was the somewhat prolonged moment when she opened the door itself. Then the door closed. Her bedroom was on the far side of the house, a choice of location she had made long ago. He assumed that she would now have time to recover her good sense. He recalled, uneasily, that a woman who felt herself threatened by a man could ask for instant help. Yet when the door to his room opened again, he wasn't sure what state she was in. She wore her robe; that he was able to detect even with his weak vision. But -- what else was not clear... She came over to the bed, took off her robe, and lay down naked beside him. For long moments the surprise of that was a blankness. Then he felt himself automatically resisting. For this woman, there was no response in him. Thirty years of abuse tightened his heart, and put a cold lump in is gut -- Grayson was surprised at the intensity of his resistance. Normally, he didn't feel this strongly. He recognized that he was aware for the first time of his true feeling. I could probably strangle this woman, he bought. That shocked him. Male violence really does exist, he admitted to himself. He fleetingly recalled their sexual past. Several times each year, Mila would go out with some female companions, and they would all get drunk. About two A.M. she would show up, an obscene creature with a tendency to throw-up, and demand that he engage in sex. Naturally, and anxiously, he had always come through while she laughed, belched, and on occassion spat in his face. In the morning, she showed no apparent memory of the event. -- But he didn't want her at such times, and he didn't want her now. ' 'Has Rosie said when dinner will be ready?" Grayson asked stiffly. "She said we could eat any time we wanted," came a small voice from the bed. "Oh!" said Grayson. He lay for a long moment, bracing himself. Then he got off the bed, turned on the light, went around to the night table drawer, got his glasses, put them on, and walked to the door. There he paused, turned. "Better get dressed," he said gruffly, "and let's eat." He went out into the hall.  By the time they sat down at the table, his wife's sallow face was red. She stared at her plate and did not look at him. That was disappointing. He was -- he had to admit it -- curious. The truth was, he realized, he was ignorant and distrustful of Utt judgments, and craved information on which to form his own conclusions. On the surface, it looked like men had caused all the problems. Because, after the Utt came, women changed. A married woman, unpursued by her husband, was... normally... not interested in sex. There were reports (from certain salesmen) of exceptions. But the ordinary situation was drab. Usually a wife would have a child or two -- no more. Since only women were allowed to own projDerty, married women lived confidently. Grayson brought home a good salary from his job, all of which he handed over by law. She had household help. Her clothes and house were always neat, clean, and she herself wellgroomed. Sane, healthy, stable, she was the embodiment of a high standard of human being. Except for one thing: the average wife was as easily angered after the Utt came as before. Only now she really felt free to express it. It was the one disturbing factor in a world where men were hard-working, peaceful, and kept sexually apathetic by a physiological method that was the law of the planet. For an unknown reason men in such a condition were never angry -- There was a sound at the other end of the table. Grayson's mind jumped out of its reverie. Mila was glaring at him. She spoke sharply, "Why weren't you wearing your glasses in the bedroom?" He explained about not wanting to damage the cracked lens. "But of course, I kept my eyes closed. I was very careful not to upset the internal balance." "Oh!" Some of the color faded from her cheeks and her lips compressed. The old signal of an imminent flare-up. He spoke hastily, trying to head off the explosion. "What you did," he said, "tells us a great deal about pre-Utt relations." There was a noticeable relaxing of anger as she said, "How do you mean?" "Evidently, women offered sex to men out of fear. ' ' "What are you talking about?" The sharpness was back. That startled him. Was she pretending? Or was it possible she didn't remember? Forgetfulness. Blankness. Her old pattern. As if it hadn't happened? That could be it. But he was still curious, he realized, therefore frustrated. "Has the fear faded?" he asked. She had the expression of someone who intended to deny it. Then; "It was strange," she said, a faraway look in her eyes. "I suppose I should go to see the doctor." Terror could have a profound physiological effect, Grayson presumed, correlatd with shock. "There I was," his wife continued, "suddenly faint and halfhallucinating." She added a ridiculing laugh. "I actually fantasized myself taking off my clothes, then coming into your bed, naked." She laughed again, and made an angry gesture with one shoulder. "A regression to my child-bearing state. We've had our children and our reason for copulating is twenty-five years behind us." So it was going to be forgetfulness and denial, Grayson thought. How amazing! In their courtship days, she had pursued him like a sex demon. The vitality she offered promised his enforced apathy would be completely overwhelmed by her inexhaustible need. Before marriage, she forced sex as often as three times a day. Afterwards -- Two days after the ceremony that, by Utt law, bound them together forever, Mila let him know that marriage was for companionship and bearing children. Probably, gentler women like Miss Haskett lost out in the struggle for marriage because they were incapable of the insane premarital intensity which absolutely overwhelmed males subjected to it. -- Too soon to decide anything about that. Yet he felt a hardening inside him, which was a decision of sorts, barring Mila from his life. After dinner Grayson went back to bed, and in his fantasies visualized Miss Haskett in various exotic maneuvers. There was a thought in his mind that said there was no danger now of being found out. He could stand it no longer. He dressed and went out. His wife was sitting, knitting another of the interminable sweaters which she sent Mart, who was at college. "Uh," said Grayson. She did not look up, which was par. She had ignored him most of their married life and she was obviously not about to change. "I'm going for a walk," said Grayson, "perhaps you'd like to come?" That was his final hope of defeating the urge that moved him to what was obviously a forbidden adventure. Something must have penetrated; she looked up, showed surprise. "Where are you going?" "For a walk," he said. "Oh!" Then: "No, thank you." It seemed to satisfy her, for she settled back to the sweater. The last picture he had of her was of her sitting in the chair rocking back and forth. Outside, the air was fresh, and he walked along with gathering confidence. A bus pulled up at the comer, and because he knew where he wanted to go, he climbed aboard without really considering the future. He phoned Miss Haskett from a drugstore. "I happened to be in the neighborhood," he said, "and wondered if you'd care for coffee." She sounded breathless. "Why, yes, Mr. Grayson. I -- " She broke off. "Why don't you come up to my place?" She said, suddenly. "I'll have Joanne put the coffee on. No, I'll put it on." When he got there he had no problem. Large trees, dim lights. An ideal place. From where Grayson stood on the porch, he could not see the entrances of the We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed S (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. adjoining apartments. A single buzz was answered instantly. A vision in white stood in the doon ay. 'it's nice of you to drop by, Mr. Grayson," she said. Grayson blinked. It seemed to him she had made a quick change since his call. Or else he had misjudged this whole situation. "Were you on the way out?" he asked. "Oh, no, I always dress up for myself at night," said Miss Haskett. She held the door wider. Grayson walked in. They drank coffee. Silence fell. She sat, empty cup in hand, on the couch. The long skirt of her dress was drawn up primly against the leg nearest him. Grayson placed his own cup and saucer on the coffee table, and took a deep breath. It was either time to go or time to do. His heart pounded, his eyes blurred behind the mended glasses. He found himself reluctantly agreeing; men really were the villains. He was clearly in a state of raging desire. Abruptly that shamed him. Unsteadily, he came to his feet. "Uh," he said, "uh. Miss Haskett, I want to thank you for this delightful -- " At that point, she set her cup down so quickly it hit the table and fell forcefully on its side in the saucer. The sound was startlingly loud in what had been intense silence. Both the man and the woman involuntarily leaned forward to straighten the cup. His head brushed lightly against her hair. It was not red physical contact, but in his whole adult life, Grayson had only touched one other woman. And she had made that such misery -- and so rare, that he no longer wanted to touch her. It was several decades since he had been close to a desirable woman. His hand reached for hers, almost knocked the cup over again -- but got hold of her fingers. Then he tugged her along from behind the coffee table. It was a long coffee table and by the time he had her, his consciousness -- conscience -- surfaced He let go. "Very delightful," he muttered gloomily, stepping back, "but I imagine I'd better -- " ss Haskett caught his sleeve. "You must see the rest of my home." Grayson stiffened inside, he was a supremely analytical person and he saw this as a gesture goodwill on her part. They toured the fluffy, very feminine makeup room. She explained things ateut it that Grayson did not hear because he was bracing himself. She took him into a huge bathroom. Special features required Miss Haskett to continue chattering. He did not hear what those special features were. Something about an unusual method of maintaining the bath water exactly at blood heat... got through to him. And that one he promptly forgot as they came to a closed door. Grayson never remembered afterwards who opened that door. Did he leap forward or was he frozen in his singletrack thought -- feeling -- intent? Whichever -- the door was opened. The bedroom, large and expensive. Fluffy feminine atmosphere. A queen-size bed he couldn't help noticing. Then they were standing beside it. Her voice, which had been virtually unceasing -- ceased. "Where's the light switch?" Grayson asked into the sudden silence. "Over there." She pointed. "Do you mind?" asked Grayson. "Over there," she said, voice coming up in pitch, a stricken sound in it.  In the darkness, Grayson encountered the nude form of Miss Haskett, enthralled. Moments glided by. Body touched body. Lip pressed lip. Moments lengthened to seconds, seconds to minutes. Grayson told himself that Miss Haskett was in a class by herself. Most important, she was accepting him without any apparent reservation. Which, he had to admit, was pretty tolerant. After all, she was offering him a nubile, slender, well-formed, goodlooking body. In return, she was having imposed upon her a spare, gaunt male type with an aging face which fortunately was hidden in the darkness. Still, she must know what it looked like, and had made her peace with it. He decided to tell her how grateful he was for her goodwill. He removed his lips from hers, intending to make the non-kissing extremely brief, just long enough to say a few kind words that would fit the occasion. Momentarily, he paused. And, because he was always careful in his use of English, the moment grew long. And, abruptly, the awful realization that his gratitude had diverted him and he was in serious danger of losing his abiliry to perform the act. Instantly desperate, he fought to save the situation. There was no question about that either. It was a fit. "What's the matter?" Miss Haskett whispered. What could he say? He had virtually wrecked the moment by letting his mind wander to an unfortunate reality: he was no longer a young man. As he had that despairing realization, he made a final, desperate effort to salvage the affair. And in a limp fashion, at first, succeeded finally to his satisfaction with one so comely -- and to his own surprise, apparently to hers.  It was #:# as Grayson climbed aboard the bus that would take him home. At first, as he settled into his seat, the exhilaration and frustration of the evening alternately pulled him up and pushed him down. But somewhere during the journey came his moment of confrontation: He had taken an irrevocable step. He waited for the shock of disaster to move through him. But what he felt in its place was irritation. He was a grown man, who didn't need advice from a Utt female or any other living person. The hostile reaction stayed with him all the rest of the way to his stop. The emotion had faded a little by the time he entered his house. Yet the prospect of running into his wife did not really shake him. And that was awesome indeed. A new thought. The idea of a man standing up to a woman's anger with anger of his own was... well... there was no clear reaction that he could produce. But he had seen her on her knees. No matter what happened, he would never forget the implications of that. Despite his strong attitude, he moved silently. And as he came to the final stretch, where there was no carpet, he took time to remove his shoes. After all, he argued with himself, why force problems where none need exist? In his bedroom, with its door shut, he undressed hastily and slipped into bed. As he lay there, then, reviewing the night's events, he realized that he was having still another and different kind of thought. Part of his mind was busy plotting. He was remembering what he had once read in one of those "awful example" stories, so common in the magazines in the days after the Utt females came. This story had depicted a fiftyyear-old managerial type much like himself. In the pre-Utt era -- the story had stated -- such a man would have had half a dozen mistresses by his age. Grayson found himself feeling blank. The story (after his near disaster) seemed untrue. Miss Haskett, all by herself, almost had been too much for him. Would he ever again, now that he knew he might fail, dare take a chance of disgracing himself? With that... moral... thought, he must have slept.  The following morning Grayson ate breakfast alone as usual. The maid served him his usual meal and he ate hastily, worried his wife might get up and ask questions. I'm not afraid, he told himself. Let's just not have problems. Because he'd gulped his meal, he could catch his regular bus with time to spare. The bus stop had its average scattering of sad looking males. Everywhere Grayson looked reflected light from spectacles glinted back. Eyes appeared distended behind thick lenses. It was very shocking to him now, for s ome reason. As Grayson walked into the lackluster group, an automobile -- starting from the curb fifty feet away pulled up opposite Grayson. The large, middle-aged woman inside leaned through the open window and said, "Miss Haskett sent me to pick you up. Dr. Grayson." With unusual strength for a woman, she leaned all the way from the driver's side and pushed open the passenger door from inside. Grayson was taken by surprise. "Miss Haskett -- oh!" He was appalled by his employer's indiscretion. Many of the men waiting here for buses were neighbors. He hoped they hadn't heard what the muffled voice from inside the car had said. As he scrambled in, his one thought was to get on their way before another word was spoken. "Well, that was easy," said the driver. Only now he spoke in a man's baritone. "Welcome to the revolution, doctor!" The car moved rapidly through traffic, which was light at this hour, consisting essentially of unmarried women going to work. Grayson's shock at realizing he was in the presence of a male disguised as a female -- subsided. And he began gaining data that would enable him to assess his situation. "How long have you been driving a car in this disguise?" he asked. "Long enough," was the reply. "Never stopped for a traffic violation?" "Once." The big "woman" shrugged. "Had to shoot the officer. Too bad -- " The speaker broke off. "Which reminds me. That will be your first assignment. Getting yourself a pistol." Grayson scarcely heard. He had realized that he was asking the wrong questions. And that, in fact, he had somehow been avoiding the crux of the matter. He said now, boldly, "What is Miss Haskett's role in this?" The large, pasty face with its artificial cosmetic coloring -- to give it a womanly look -- grinned. "You were at her place last night, right? We've been keeping an eye on you ever since we cracked your glasses with that high-frequency -- well, never mind." Again the grin. "You made it with her, too, didn't you? That's what I meant -- welcome to the revolution, doctor. When a potential recruit goes after a mistress within forty-eight hours -- and has the gumption to carry it through -- that's good enough. You're in, and there's no escape. " A pause. Mostly blankness. Striving to grasp the cruel implication. It was painfully obvious that the other's hearty, jovial way of speaktion, which Grayson found himself automatically resisting. He drew a deep breath, after all he had a certain inner power. He was a PH.D., and a working scientist. He said, "Let's not be too hasty. If you want my goodwill I suggest you try persuasiveness, and reason, and an end to threats." Having spoken, he considered what he had said, and found it good. "That's my statement," he concluded. The driver shook his middleaged, womanly head, "Sorry, Doc, if you'll think about it, you'll see that we can't operate that way." "You're already talking better," urged Grayson quickly. The man ignored his interruption, "We can't operate that way because we'd have people who'd try to suck-up to the Utts. So I have to tell you. If we lose confidence, we kill you." He added quickly, "I don't have any feeling yet that we can't trust you. Doc. So don't be alarmed. But," gently -- "We don't take chances. en in doubt -- " He made a quick gesture across his throat with his finger. "You see how that has to be, don't you? You're a logical man." And still Grayson resisted. He was like a man who had accidently walked into a thieves' hideaway. and as they very reasonably pointed out, they would have to kill him because they couldn 't afford to have an outsider know. The logic was perfect. He just didn't wish to be a victim, or -- in this instance -- involved. His reverie ended abruptly as, beside him, the man held out a card, and said, "Any time you want to reach us, here's how." When Grayson hesitated, the man shoved the card into his coat pocket. Moments after that, the car drew up at the curb. "There's the Haskett ftory. Okay, doc -- out!" Grayson climbed out, then turned, and said protestingly "Look! -- " The automobile gave a lurch. The "woman" leaned across the seat, pulled the door shut; and, as the machine picked up speed, waved -- In the course of the morning, the receptionist put seven calls through to Grayson. "Dr. Pudget on the phone -- " she would say. Or, "The factory superintendant on the line -- " "Can you speak to the buyer for Reid, Leigh, and Ufflegay? -- " And of course he always could. Because the woman knew very well who he talked to and who could be, or should be, referred elsewhere. He handled each call by making an initial effort to calm himself, and each time spoke in his usual practical fashion. He began to feel a lot better. He was aware of a hardening of his resolve. The truth was, he had been shown a way out from under Utt control, from under female control. And he had experienced the seemed to welcome his attentions. And both of these he would never forget. Women and Utts had oppressed men too long. Now it could be man's turn again. There were grievances to be paid for; wrongs for them to atone. So he was a member of the revolution after all! SF Hotline and is a very loose remake of the famous #s film which was based on Richard Matheson's novel. The Landis-Tomlin film is a comedy, however, and John reports that the script is actually very man. The monkey suit for that film was built by Rick Baker, who later again. He's determined to make this ape suit the Ultimate Gorilla Costume, and when last heard from, was working out with weights to get a more gorilla-like physique. (An in-joke that Landis wants to pull off; his script has a scene requiring several scientists, and he wants them to be played by George Pal, Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. At last report, Spielberg said he'd do it, if Lucas would.) As for Steven Spielberg, he recently visited the home of Forry Ackerman, who says the young director was in seventh heaven. Spielberg has a complete set of Famous Monsters of Filmland and joined the Monster Club when he was but a wee tyke. He told Forry that as of September #st, he owned the screen rights to Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes." That film has come very near to being made several times, most recently first by Sam Peckinpah, and later by Jack Clayton. Spielberg and George Lucas are planning (Cont. on pg. #) posters etc. These figures don't include lunch pails, dolls, blankets, and a host of other items with SF themes. Science Fiction is suddenly big business. SF visuals have been discovered by Madison Avenue and are being used to sell everything from pens to pantyhose. The meaning of this to the SF consumer is clear. With # looming as SF's most productive year to date with over # new titles in the works, it's becoming clear that the SF boom is here at last, as this month's column amply demonstrates.  Robert Aspirin will have a novel out from Starblaze, Quantam. on anti-trust charges to force divestiture of Fawcett. Popular Library (Cont. on pg. # to make a mor science fiction film together, but haven't let anyone in on what it is. I suppose it's possible that it's the Bradbury property. together what clues I have, I wouldn't be surprised if it had somein which Lacombe has his first close encounter, plus some scenes in the present following the further adventures of Roy Neary on his voyage with the extraterrestrials. Then again, I may be way off-base. I'm definitely not off-base in saying I know a good deal of the plot yet respect the wishes of Lucas et aJ not to let the plot out too soon, I'm torn. I will say; Princess Leia falls in love with one of our heroes: Luke gets a new teacher -- of sorts; C#PO has an accident; there will be relatively few scenes in space; and if you like the stop-motion animation monsters of Ray Harryhausen, the first third will appeal to you very much. Speeiking of Ray Harryhausen, his next film was to be about Perseus, from commissioned paintings by Cathy Hill, but his American financiers seem to want him to make another Sinbad film. After the much of a movie. I'm really sad to see Harryhausen squander his talents oi old stuff like that. is, as far as I'm concerned, unsatisfactory. Milius is also planning to include a few vague fantasy elements (mythical or prehistoric beasts glimpsed in the distance) in his proposed film on mountain man quite different from what he has proposed for Jedediah Smith (who founded my home town) -- which he describes as a Frank Frazetta Western, as opposed to the usual Frederic Remington Western. If you have film news, contact me at # N. Beachwood Dr. ##, Hollywood, CA #. -- Bill Warren #'V lou can't pussy-foot around dollars-and-cents facts, McBride!" T. J. Fawcett waddled in a halfcircle in the center of the office. Ohio River Power's administrative VP was throwing a snit, waving his arms and shouting, sagging face and jowls trembling. "The facts say that we can't pay four times as much to clear filth because a handful of back-hollow dirt fanners make a fuss. Grow up! It's cheaper to pay damages, allowing for the increased PR required, than to go back to clearing rights-of-way by hand. When are you going to learn not to let nobodies do your thinking?" Fawcett sat down, turning an unctuous half smile on old Davidson, general manager. Wondering how such a colossal old shit ever got so far as a vice presidency. Cliff McBride gathered wits and patience for another try at making sense for Davidson. "Gary, there's more at stake than just the money, or clearing these rights-ofway. The people know the stuff is dangerous, and that goes for more than the few farmers who have lost trees or even orchards. Another PR campaign isn't going to bring back those crops, neither is paying damages. Some farmers have been wiped out by Weedex. We could save that PR money and more, if we could cooperate with the farmers who have trees or watershed to their trees on these line and cable routes. " "We've got trouble enough with environmentalists over this #-T without adding more campaigners to their ranks. Let's clear a few riskier routes by hand if that's what it takes, and get people back on our side for a change." Cliff wiped a hand across his wide brow, gave old Davidson his appealing, perplexed look. But Fawcett was on his feet. "Dammit, boy, public relations isn't your responsibility. Your responsibility is to follow your instructions and get those rights-ofway sprayed so we can get on with building a power plant." The bloated administrator turned to the president with a pained expression on his face. "PR is administrative responsibility. Operations wants out of the inconvenience of dealing with a few snivelling hillbilly fanners and a crew of lazy pilots who'd rather bitch than fly!" To the president's credit was the transparent, bony hand he raised, warding off Fawcett like a predator. "Siddown, T. J. McBride, can't you get your boys back to work? This stopping work for every little complaint -- ah-hemm... The... mmm... policy is already established. This stuff you're spraying hasn 't been proved destructive to their trees. It's the spray all the other companies use, and we've got a right to treat our line and cable routes. Why make an expensive change the Board won't be happy with? One we've paid thousands to avoid?" The hollowcheeked old man looked up at Cliff for the first time since he came into the office an hour before. "Get 'em back in the air, son. Any way you can, himm? You can handle it." "What do I tell the media, the farmers and the environmental action people who are going to storm my office the minute we get one chopper in the air?" Now Cliff was on his feet, jaw jutting. "Nothing," snapped Fawcett. "Just do your job without dragging Mr. Davidson into your petty problems -- and stay the hell out of public relations!"  The farther from Davidson's office Cliff McBride got, the madder he got. How could he let that grotesque old buzzard call him boyl It was like the go-arounds with Katherine before the divorce; by the time his feelings caught up with his head, the opportunity ' was past, and he wound up with a dozen things to say and no one to say them to. By the time he got to Operations, he was fuming at himself. He pushed the door to the suite open forcefully and stormed through reception, ignoring Sally's greeting and smile. Beth Burkhammer, Cliff's secretary, saw his face and rose with a quizzical look. "Fawcett? Or the farmers?" "Both," he said with a sudden release of tension. He wished he knew how she got him to relax just by understanding things without explanation. He'd come to think of Beth as his girl Monday years ago when he was a plant super and she ran his office. Now he was glad she was in the operations office, with her understanding and efficiency. She had on coral wool, perfect for her tallish figure and April weather. Her brown-blonde hair fell forward over her knotted brow, pointing out her look of concern. "Idiots," she said, following him to his door. "Fred Dutton is waiting with final printouts on Clay Ridge." "Beth, can you get Bob Hendricks up here? One way or another, we've got to get that clearing done up on Yellow Creek. " "Right. " She turned to her desk. Fred Dutton was asleep in Cliff's chair, feet on the desk. Cliff picked up the sheaf of printouts and sat in the other chair, scanning the data. Finding it was going to take more study, he dropped it on the desk with a thud. "Huh? Hi, Cliff. How's it going?" "Don't ask. Fawcett pitched a fit about using hand labor up on Yellow Creek, but he's full of it." The wiry little data processing tant since computerization stretched and got to his feet. "You go over the printouts. I'll talk to you about budgeting. New estimates for the Board; they don't like surprises. Hell, PR alone is over by something like #, since the high sulphur exemptions came through for Clay Ridge." "PR," spat Cliff. "What crap. Fawcett thinks it's the answer to everything. Try to get a few bucks for hand-clearing so the farmers don't lose what trees they've got left and he acts like it's out of his own pocket. But not P-stinking-R! Spend the world trying to convince the public we're doing them a favor and the ground with #, #-T. It's backwards, Freddie!" The buzzer sounded on his desk and Cliff pressed the tab. "Yes?" Fred circled the desk, making room for Cliff. It was Sally in reception. "Hendricks is here, sir." "Send him in." Cliff sat down, wondering if there was going to be a solution to anything. Fred stopped, the door open, and asked, "Tennis after?" "Sure." The two had been regulars at the indoor courts all winter, since the demands of the new coalfired plant at Clay Ridge made it obvious they weren't going to get any skiing. Bob Henderson came in as Fred stepped out, and Cliff gave another sigh and wished he'd never heard of Weedex.  The Spartan was not Sparta, Ohio's most exclusive or expensive club, but it had an admirable dining room and was the only one with a bar and an indoor tennis court. Dutton and McBride made a fair match for beginners. Had the two been less enthusiastic they would never have attempted the second set. But no one was waiting, and they were having an intense, if frustrating, savage kind of fun. Fred had a rolling, pitch-faced serve that had good speed and incredible topspin, so that Cliff had to scramble. Cliff compensated by leaning back and getting arm and shoulder into powerful forehand returns, keeping the base-line play hot. By the middle of the second set, they were streaming sweat into sodden whites and panting, growing a bit wild. It was on an exchange of charges to the net that Cliff fell. He lofted a ponderous backhand over Fred to pull him off the net, and charged to cut off the return. When Dutton saw that, he hit a little blooper short into the comer that just cleared the net. They figured it was a little pool of sweat that made Cliff slip, and fly headlong into the steel post that held the net. Fred leaped the net and turned Cliff over, frantically fingering the carotid for a pulse. It was fluttery, and he had to probe for it.  Continuity crept back to Cliff McBride's consciousness through the blinding, clear white sight-sound confusion of limitless awareness. Long before he came to himself, he came to perception. He perceived feeling below him, knowing above. Seeing, hearing, and understanding were all in between, and he perceived a flow between them all, colored streams of light with globules of contrasting color in diem, coursing like blood cells in an off-color fantastic journey. With perception of light and color came the lightshow. Vivid discs of colored light, fiery orange, then deeper red, oscillated and alternated with deepest green. Green deepened to gold that whirled and glowed with the light of a million suns, then faded to a silvery pinpoint surrounded by a blue sparking effervescence that expanded and intensified and shaded to rose-yellow, sweeping bars which spun in dazzling display. Then gleaming white faded to meaninglessness and pervaded Cliff's consciousness totally, contracting to a central ball of white with twelve spinning gold bars surrounded by a thousand rays of different colored, radiant light. The thousand-rayed sun spun, shooting contrasting sparks in all directions, an indescribable, achingly and captivatingly beautiful mandala. Then he reached for or was attracted to the sun, and, somehow, he was soaring up towards it, through it, and then was where he could see connected starlets of light, seven tiny constellations gathered around him, each connected by glowing globules streaming from star to star. He floated above these star clusters, each different, yet each had a bottom star, fiery orange to muddy brown, each a top that was a giant rainbow chromatoscope with a white center whirling with yellow-gold spokes. Slowly, he settled toward a brighter, more vivid constellation that lay horizontal beneath the others. He entered the horizontal' starself at the sunbright six-rayed third star from the bottom and instantly rose-hued electric streams shot through him. Orange and red arcs with purple striations flowed downward, bringing awareness of lower limbs and organs. Oval globlets surged upward in a yellow stream to his heart and he felt it beating, pumping the vitality outward. Then one of the blue electric streams touched the redhued star at his solar plexus. Twin rays, one of clearest blue and the other lustrous violet, arched outward and upward from it, to a star at his throat, and rose in indigo irrevocability toward his head. White, undifferentiated sound welled up within him again, the all-in-all of randomness raised to infinite power. Then slowly, so slowly, it faded into the babble of all the voices of all time, telling it all together in one ageless time of speaking. Smells and pungent tastes and a vague, abstract sensation of heaviness impinged, and coalesced into a red-black hammering, a pulsating pressure, sightsoundsense, that pounded in rhythmic inevitability in the astonished and bedazzled brain of Clifford Jackson McBride. He was himself, and he had all the headaches of his life crammed into one blinding, thud-whanuning killer pulsation of the cranium. With each heartbeat a pulse of brilliant, pure lightsound perception burst within his stunned consciousness with the size and intensity of a star. He retched, gagged, and soon hands were turning, raising his body and he was aware of sickening motion through the thunder in his skull. Cliff opened his eyes, Fred's face, close and wide-eyed with shock, radiated violet-blue in all directions, and Cliff squeezed his eyes quickly shut again. A hundred-rayed burst of light shone where Fred's head had been. The star divided horizontally, rose and yellow above the center, blue and purple below. As Cliff watched, stunned, the dividing interface curved slowly into an S-shape and began to rotate. Unbelieving, he opened his eyes, and there, above him, was Fred's very worried face, still surrounded by its silver-blue aurora. Cliff blinked, but the illusion remained. Fear, sharp and compelling, made him close his eyes again, only to restore the whirling yellow-purple star. He opened them again, near panic, and the star disappeared, but the deep blue halo still surrounded Fred's face. Stirring, Cliff tried to speak, but the sound was a dry croak in his throat. He moved a hand in front of his face, it o"bscured Fred's head and was familiar. But it too was surrounded with bluish light. He studied the hand, and saw that the light began a half-inch from his skin. He stared at its now near-violet corruscations, wondering what could be wrong with his eyes. Then the throbbing returned, and a red shift overcame all other color in his sight and he sagged heavily, all perception focused involuntarily on the excruciating throb of his head.  The nurse was glad to find Cliff awake in the dim hospital room, but impatient to be done with him. Her glow was reddish all over with sexual excitement. How can  know that? Her rounds were nearly done and she would meet him in the laundry room. But this is crazy. Not only is my vision messed up, but now I'm having thoughthallucinations. The overhearing was so effortless he hadn't for a few moments realized it was her thoughts in his mind. Cliff looked carefully at her ruby sheen as she leaned over with the blood pressure cuff. She was thrumming with sexual anticipation. A nude, tanned young man substantially endowed appeared in his vision and was gone. Now that's ridiculous!  must be whacko from banging my head. The thought brought the reality throbbing back to life and he tentatively felt the top of his head. There was a good-sized lump, but no bandage. It was painful to the touch, but the throbbing was now bearable. A dull ache filled his head. He looked at the nurse who was busy with his arm. "How... how long have I been here?" he asked. "One nineteen over seventyfour." She made a note on something and removed the cuff, taking his wrist and looking at her watch. "About four hours. I'm counting." She finished and made another note, stood and turned to go. Unable to resist. Cliff said, "What's his name?" "Lance. And he's... oh, you go to hell." Her flush matched her reddish aura. She left. So she did have a man on her mind. So what did that prove? Did it explain the red light beaming from every inch of her body? Did it explain how he saw the man as she must have seen him? Was this whole thing some kind of delusion caused by the blow? Cliff lay back against the pillow, turning these thoughts over and over in his mind.  The doctor's aura was green. He was glad to see Cliff conscious, though Cliff would have debated the issue if he hadn't been fascinated and more than a little alarmed by the emerald glow around the man's youthful, unkempt body. He was thinking about concussion, cerebral hemorrhage, and deep muscle suturing techniques, the latter for this morning's lecture. There it is again! Am I dreaming this, or what? "Doctor... why am I seeing colors?" "Colors?" There was interest in the unshaven face. "Well, I...I'm seeing colors around everybody. You are green, or at least there's green shimmering around your body. The nurse's body was surrounded by red. Could concussion do that?" "Could, I suppose, though... Describe the lights." "They're... well, they start just a little way from your skin and radiate outward about this far, then thin out at the edges. The color's very vivid and it seems... electric. " "Hmmm." The doctor tipped Cliff's head up for a close look. His pencil flash shone into first one eye, then the other. "We have seen some visual phenomena associated with hemeralopia, or day blindness," he said. "And, I suppose it could be a temporary effect of the injury. I wouldn't worry about it. You have a mild concussion, but I don't see any real danger signals. If there are no changes, you can go on home in the morning." He stood, thinking about finishing his rounds and his suturing notes for the morning class. "I would," he said, "definitely avoid tennis or any other strenuous activity for a few days. Can you sleep without medication? It's really better with recent concussion, especially with unusual symptoms." "I think so." The scruffy young doctor withdrew.  Fred was fringed with purple and green when he came into the room. Worry and good will emanated from him so tangibly Cliff could feel their warmth physically, as though absorbing them through his skin. Beth came behind, wearing a print dress obviously chosen for its cheeriness. Cliff wondered why he saw no aura around Beth. Fred's concerned, guilt-laden thoughts were clear to him, but he had no idea what Beth was thinking. She stood there trying to smile. Fred broke the awkward silence. "So how you feeling?" He grinned, masking his fear and guilt with effusiveness. He sat on the end of the bed, but Beth hovered, standing. "I'm okay. Doctor said not to worry. I've got a funny thing with my eyes, but he said it would go away. Concussion. Doesn't much hurt now. How did it happen?" "Cracked your noggin on the net post. Scared the shit out of me. Your eyes looked funny, rolled up. Sure you're okay?" "Yeah, except for..." "Well  think you're both fools!" Beth was red in the face, a bright contrast to her green eyes. "Playing so hard you knock yourselves out at a game that's too strenuous for men your age. Think about your heart, let alone getting hurt. You should have more sense." Cliff tried to probe her thoughts. Nothing. Why should she be so worried? Sure, they had been friends through their long association at the power company, but this was the first time she had ever An Inlonnal A Irravwvnt Sctonc Flellen A Fantasy Journal EdUad A PubHahad by Rlcbard E. Gaia Issue ## festures Interviews with Poul Anderson, Algis Budrys, Qordon R. Dleks Dsvm Hartwell end Bob Shaw. "UndM Bluee" -- a bawdy apace poem by Neal Wllgua. "The Human Hotline" -- SF News reported by Elton ENkrtL Mark Mansell. "The Altar-Ego Viewpoint" presents Altar, blaster in hand, amid disintegrate books. "Glimpses of the third World Fantasycon" -- with the award winners. Plus: prozine reviews, small press reviews, more book reviews the editor's diary, letters, letters, letters...and morel Quartarlyaamplo I year #two yaar a . A# P.O. Box # Portland, OR #I acted like this. He wished he could tell what was going on in her mind. Quickly, Cliff changed the subject. "Henderson have any trouble getting the choppers back in the air?" He pulled himself up on one elbow, then sat erect to show he wasn't really hurt. A lie. "For about twenty minutes," Fred said. "According to Bob, they came back to the field saying if he was so goddamned hot to get that spraying done, he could do it himself. They weren't going to get shot at for anybody." "Shot at?" "Farmers," said Beth quietly. "Deer rifles and shotguns. Bob didn't know what to do. The pilots were scared silly. " "Anybody hurt? What about the equipment?" "No, no injuries and no damage. Just bluffing, I suppose." Cliff turned back the cover, put his feet on the floor and remembered he hadn't a great deal on. "Let's get down there," he said. "Fred, get somebody to check me out and bring me my clothes. Beth, call Bob and tell him to meet us at the maintenance yard. Tell him to bring all the laborers he can round up without delay, and -- " "Whoa!" Fred pushed him gently but firmly back onto the bed. "You aren't going anywhere until the doctors say it's okay. I'll check with them, and Beth can make the call. But someone else can meet Henderson. Relax."  They worked out the details when the two came back to his room. Henderson could send crews in to cut the YeUow Creek right-of-way by hand, and Fred could route the expenses through emergency maintenance. Land subsidence, they decided, with enough exposed cable to require extensive hand labor. They could get the pilots back to spraying, but in another area. Being able to overhear much of Fred's thought made the planning go quickly, often leaving Beth lost in the leap from notion to second or third level ramification. At last they agreed, and the pair went off to enact the plan themselves, insisting that he should rest.  Rest was slow in coming. Cliff struggled with the implications of his hallucinations and his eavesdropping on minds. When he closed his eyes, a waterfall, wide and frothy, poured over the blackness of his vision. He blinked it away, wondering what the hell, and it was replaced by a truck, a monster semi, roaring past the brickyards. The sight of the truck filled him with terror and hatred, and he opened his eyes, trying to will the image to disappear. It persisted even with his eyes open, drawing closer and closer, lumbering down upon him. When it finally roared past, he collapsed back into the bed with a sigh. New images filled his mind. A fluffy dog, crying; two women whispering dark secrets he could not understand; knives and chairs and filing cabinets and data display screens and doors behind doors behind doors, each seeming to contain wisdom but opening on another door. He sat up again, batting at the images with his hands. He was about to ring for the nurse and ask for something to help him sleep when he heard the scream. High-pitched and achingly intense, it was the scream of a woman's sheer terror. Could all this be some kind of delusion -- starbodies and color tricks and mindreading and visions like flights of birds around my head, and the screaming? Rattled. I'm addled by the concussion, and the hemeralowhatever. With introspective came respite. The scream was gone and the images with it. Exhausted, he was asleep almost immediately.  The second scream awoke Cliff McBride before dawn, spinethat he was sitting upright, hands clapped to ears before it subsided. A dream, he thought. It has to be. Nothing so bizarre could be real. Bits of sentences came in his mind then. Secrets half-whispered in a dozen voices, some with faces in varying focus, some without. The starbody vision faded in and out of sight, giving the broken urgencies of thought a transitory, dreamlike quality. Cliff thrashed in the bed, playing over and again the fears and anguish, the shattered hopes, the horrors and humiliations of a hundred desperate lives. At light he awoke to another scream, head pounding, pulse racing, bed soaked with sweat. It felt to Cliff as if his mind had tom with the screaming, and through the gap came visions to shame his dreams. Silent, raging faces, scenes of which he had no memory, voices crying, mumbling, shouting and speaking all at once. With the desperate fury of his rage against the fate that had cast him in this role, a fury not equalled since the death-throes of his marriage to Katherine, Operations Manager Clifford Jackson McBride held his head in his hands and wept -- he had not since childhood.  Beth drove him to the office around ten. She'd wanted to take him to his apartment, but there was far too much nothing there for safety. He wanted activity, people, usefulness to fill his confusing time. The halo phenomenon continued, on nearly everyone but Beth. She was opaque and solid, a steady image in a world gone unstable. She coddled him, anticipated his needs, and kept the routines moving in the office and the department. The tale of the bump on the head had to be repeated for others who stopped by for a chat. He studied the modifications analysis and procedural schedules for Clay Ridge. He still had the impression of sensing what was going on in others' minds, but he avoided thinking about it, throwing himself into work as an escape. To an extent, it worked. Henderson came in at four-thirty with a progress report on Yellow Creek. It was half-finished and they could be out by Saturday. But word had leaked to Fawcett, and the VP wanted to see Cliff right away. Fawcett, damn his eyes! A foreboding tingle came to Cliff's mind, but he thrust it off with his hatred.  The office above Cliff's was nearly as opulent as that of the president. Fawcett's desk was neat as a pin and behind it he sat, scowling as Cliff came in and took a chair. Cliff could see the reddish brown, murky aura, and behind the baggy, limpid eyes, a glittering, spinning vortex of images. He stared, slackjawed in disbelief, at the flickering thought images of the vice president. "You had to do it, didn't you?" The pendulous dewlaps shook with anger. "Get yourself a nice quiet little hand crew up on Yellow Creek, against Davidson's orders -- not to mention my own. Who the hell do you think you are?... No answer? I thought not. It won't wash, McBride. Insubordination, even at management level, is a dismissal, and I intend to see that Mr. Davidson and the board get a full report of... this preposterous effrontery... What are you staring at?" Cliff managed a smile. "Your thoughts, T. J. Your petty, supercilious, self-aggrandizing, avaricious and cynical old man's thoughts. They're disgusting." "You must be out of your mind. Thoughts! I'd think you would take this seriously, boy. Now you listen to me -- " But Cliff was on his feet, fists clenched, jaw set. "I don't give a lineman's fart! You stick public relations and purchasing and your petty power plays right up your administrative ass, and let me get the work done. What the hell is it to you, anyway?" Fawcett's mental images came suddenly clear. Cliff saw a small man in a sharkskin suit handing rolls of cash to Fawcett. He saw purchase vouchers and invoices and delivery receipts all arranged in careful order, and every one of them fraudulent. Bills for goods and services never delivered. Checks to a dozen different companies, each cashed at a different local bank by the same man with a mole beside his nose. And he saw the scheme. Simons was the man's name and he had carefully compiled a dossier on Fawcett and others. Cliff saw bedroom scenes in polaroid squallor, each featuring Fawcett and a different woman. The postures of the Polaroid couples were pretty kinky. Simons' investigation had started out as a divorce case, and had wound up more profitable than expected. He was pumping Fawcett, and who knew how many others. "Everything in this company is my business, McBride. And impertinence is going to cost you. You don't know the first thing about administrative work, and it's beginning to look like you can't handle operations either. Now get out of here and get that crew recalled -- " "How much is he into you for, T.J.? And how much of it have you chalked up to Reddy Kilowatt?" ' 'What? What are you talking about? Get out of here and get those crews back where they belong." "Right. Sure. Go fuck yourself. On camera."  "Thanks for coming over, Fred; I know it's late. Chair. Coffee? Beth, if you will, and you take a chair too, huh?" Fred was puzzled, his bluish aura subdued. He had come right up when Cliff had called a little after five. When coffee had been served. Cliff wiped a hand across his brow. "Two things. One makes no sense at all, the other only too much." Fred shifted, glowing to Cliff's eyes with now clear blue light. His mind was calm, clear, intent. Beth, still the exception to his new-found abilities, sat primly, hands clasped in her lap. "It's... it's crazy. I... I can... well, at least it seems to me that I can read some people's thoughts, feel their feelings." "You mean like telepathy?" Beth asked calmly. "Read minds?" Fred was agog. "You mean like those experiments at Duke?" "Well... sort of. Ever since that thump on the head yesterday, I 've been seeing and hearing the strangest things. You, Fred, you have a blue halo around your body that completely mystifies me." "Aura?" Beth again. "As in astral body? As in Madame Blavatsky? Cliff, that's marvellous. I've been fascinated by psychic phenomena for years! What does it look like?" "It doesn't seem to work with everyone. Just sometimes, and almost always with some people, like Fred." "Look," Fred suggested. "If this is true, we can test it. What am I thinking right now?" Cliff stared at him, searching for the flickering display of thoughtimages, but couldn't see it. The blue glow was sustained, but nowhere in it could he find Fred's thoughts. "I can't. Maybe it has to do with pressure, or feeling or something. But when it happens, I know it. The nurse in the hospital was... I could read her perfectly. And the doctor, I could hear him making mental notes on a lecture he was going to give. Don't think I'm imagining all this. I have trouble with that myself as it is. I about decided I was losing my mind, or had brain damage from the concussion." "TTie human aura," Beth put in, "is a testable, demonstrable biolectric phenomenon. Kerlian took pictures of it, and everybody from Kilner and his glass screens, to Wilhelm Reich with his orgone, claim it's for real. It isn't imagination. Annie Besant said it was like drawing a picture or singing. Everybody can do it, but it tes talent to do it well no matter how hard you work at it." "Any of these people report anything about mindreading?" "Sure, and didn't Peter Hurkos get his talent by falling off a house on his head?" Neither man knew. But it was clear that Beth, at least, accepted what he said, believed it true. His relief was tangible. Fred said nothing. "Well. There it is, whatever it is. I don't pretend to understand; god, it scares the piss out of me. But it gave me something that may shake up Ohio River Power where it'll do the most good. " "Fawcett is embezzling. I don't have details -- that's what I need you for, Fred. Is it possible there could be phony invoices, false delivery slips and so on? Would our computer catch something like that?" "Possible? Hell, some corporations take a certain amount of it for granted. Sure, it can be done. Purchasing kickbacks, the whole rebate scheme, some of it legal, some not -- that stuff is all around us. Good paperwork is hard to spot, especially if it has the right hashmarks, entry stamps and #. But it is possible." He sat back and slapped his knee. "Fawcett! I'll damned. How do you know? Somebody squeal, not getting a big enough slice of the pie?" "Well, no. I... I picked it out of T. J.'s corroded, disgusting old mind. Somebody named Simons is threatening to expose his sex life to his wife and maybe even the company. Damned if I know what difference it would make. He's the one who's scared. The details weren't clear, but dammit, I saw it in his mind! I'm sure Simons is doing it, I just don't know how. Could you tell anything by the accounts?" "Sure. Let's go down and see." Fred rose, and Beth stood also. "I hope you catch that sleazy old man. He's got a reputation as a lecher that spans three departments and five elevators. If you need me. I'll be at home, reading up on psychic phenomena. Good night. And Cliff, get some rest. You don't look very good." "Night," said Cliff, "And, Beth -- thanks, huh?" She turned in the middle of the room, looking suddenly vulnerable. "You're welcome. I never really knew a psychic before. Maybe one of these days you'll read my mind." Flushing, she fled. "Well, come on," said Fred Dutton, eager. "Time's wasting, and neither one of us has had any supper."  It was there, most of it in PR's expenditures. Though not obvious, it could be detected in comparisons with the previous fiscal year expenditures for the same goods and services. PR was up # over last year. Alone in the data processing center in the accounting department, the two studied the display screen, comparing and contrasting. Dutton's audit Showed a heavy weighting of expenses for PR materials, services and supplies in favor of one company -- Simons-Bertram Communications. Over thirty-six thousand dollars in seven months. Cliff gave a low whistle. Fred said, "And who can tell how much more, in other expense categories, veiled by complex administrative expense accounting? He pushed away from the console, and tapped the display screen. It showed the vendor record file, and under his finger was the entry: #I Simons-Bertram Comm. # Riverview Ave. Sparta, OH #I  #  # Fred punched "replace file" on the keyboard, and then "execute" -- the screen went blank. "Okay. I believe you. I don't care if you read it in the entrails of a shmoo. Tomorrow we dig in, get paperwork together and hang ourselves a senior executive. But tonight we are going to eat steak -- on me -- and then you are going to rest. You are going to ne your strength, and you do not look exactly terrific." Fred was standing with his hand on the light switch when a fat little man in lime slacks and yellow shirt pushed a cart through the door. "I'll get that, Mr. Dutton. I thought you'd be through in here." "Oh, Johnson. What keeps you so late?" ' 'Sub-routine procedure updates for key-punch. Don't worry. I'll shut off the lights and lock up." "Okay. Good night." The two men watched the little clerk waddle behind his cart to the input stations. He wore white shoes, and his aura was subdued lavender. Fred and Cliff went out to dinner. It was over an hour before the lights went out in data processing.  The screams woke Cliff in the predawn hours again. Grumbling, he trudged to the bathroom and took a pill. In bed he tried, in those minutes before the pill took effect, to sort out the mechanics of mental eavesdropping. It was obvious that proximity made a difference. Why? Was it actual brain wave radiation he was pickipg up? And another thing: why were there no trivialities, no grocery-list-and-gas-the-car type thoughts. Inconsequential thoughts didn't get through. Why? The one constant factor was that every incoming thought had emotional significance. Why? What gave these thoughts the power -- power? Maybe it worked like radio. Why not? Emotion would be the carrier wave that provided the power of the broadcast; and the thoughts, the pictures and voices, were the modulation that gave the signal pattern. You would have field strength, modulation percentage, and frequency. the emotions of human beings different frequencies? Do they radiate? If so, you'd have standing and delta wave tuning, or something analogous, as well as ground effect (or would it be lineof-sight?), diffusion, refraction, bandwidth, and whether it would be frequency or amplitude modulated. And what about ambient RF -- or should it be EF, for empathic frequency as opposed to radio frequency -- you would have to filter that out somehow, for just as there are lots of random sources of radio waves creating static all the time, so there are lots and lots of people (and why not other animals?) creating random empathic signals. And no federal agency regulating frequencies and transmitter locations, public service value or signal strength. Strength. It all comes back to power. Assuming that the brain or something could function as a natural or accidental empathic heterodyne, receiving telepathic transmissions the way haven't established that the emotions create a radiant signal. He thought about the star bodies and wondered for the hundredth time just what those person-sized constellations really were. And wouldn't all those people transmitting all the time create a lot of interference? That's why it stops when  get upset. He thought. Tm creating an interfering signal inside myself. He didn't know and admitted it. Couldn't know, and couldn't prove it if he did -- but he could test it as a hypothesis. If it turned out to be true, could you learn to tune in vibrations you wanted, and tune out the undesirable ones? He hoped so. As the sleeping pill began to drag at him, he recalled the old tube-type Philco receiver when he was a lad. It would squeal and howl at times, but the reception and reproduction quality was excellent. And what did you do when it didn't work? Whomp it a good one! The thought made his head hurt.  The telephone woke Cliff with a start. "Yes?" "Mr. McBride?" It was Sally in reception. His watch said #:#. "Yes?" "Is Mr. Dutton there with you?" There was fear in her voice. "No... no Fred's not here. What's up?" "Well, sir. Maybe nothing, but when Brenda came with the mail, she asked if I'd found Mr. Dutton yet because sometimes he comes to your office, and she knew Cindy 'd told me because she had donuts with her on break and she said she didn't know -- " "Sally." Cliff sat up, yawning. " -- whether I'd heard anything yet or if -- " "Miss Horgdorn, please!" "Sir?" "Start at the beginning. Is Mr. Dutton not in his office?" Cliff managed to stand, dragging the phone after him toward the bathroom. "Oh, no sir. We looked." "I should have known." "Sir?" "Sally, just tell me what this is about." "Mr. Dutton didn't come in this morning. Nobody thought anything about it, because sometimes -- " "I know. Go on." He reached the bathroom and started in with the Norelco. "Well, Mr. Dutton's secretary asked Mr. Finch's receptionist to call me and ask if he had been here this morning, but the mail girl was coming over here anyway and she said she'd ask me. Well -- " "Miss Horgdom. Sally. Is Beth -- here?" "Oh, no sir. That's why I called. I wouldn't dream of disturbing you at home, except Beth came out of the office while Brenda was here and said she'd give Mr. Dutton's residence a call and see if he was there and if he knew whether you were coming in, since she didn't want to disturb you if you didn't feel well. She went back in her office and I saw the button light up on the phone and then she just came running out of the office and went right out the door and down the hall! She hasn't come back and I didn't know what to do, so I called you. " "Of course," he said drily, working the shaver into the almostmpled point of his chin. "Did she say anything when she left?" "No sir. She just went running right past me and out -- Oh, yes! ' ' "What did she say?" "No calls." "I should have known." "Sir?" "Never mind. Just try Mr. Dutton's home every few minutes. I'll stop by on my way to the office." "Yes sir. I'm sorry to disturb you at home like this, Mr. McBride. " Cliff banged the receiver down with a start and nearly toppled onto the sink. The scream that erupted inside his head was louder than ever. He stared at nothing, beads of sweat forming on face and arms. Why didn't Fred answer his phone if he wasn't in the office? He wanted to get those bogus invoices first thing this morning. He was ashamed to have overslept, himself. And where had Beth gone in such a hurry? He punched Fred's number into the phone. "I'm sorry, but the number you have reached is not in service. Please be sure you -- " Again Cliff banged the phone on its rest, then lifted it and dialed zero. He was nearly through dressing -- brown tie, light brown hounds-tooth -- by the time the operator gave up. There was something wrong with the number. No tone, no ring, nothing. Open line. "I'm sorry, sir, but that number seems to be out of order. Shall I connect you with -- It was McBride's day for slamming down phones. He tied his shoes and hustled out to his car. As the motor hummed to life, the scream overwhelmed him again. He lay his head forward on the wheel. As the scream subsided, an image came like a three-dimensional projection. A kitchen, with a wroughtiron dinette in the foreground. Fred's kitchen! What the-? A sharp blow struck him on the left cheek. He raised his head and looked around in confusion. The scream followed instantly and seemed in his throat as well as his mind, and he realized that he was experiencing someone else's subjectivity. He gave a jerk backward against the headrest and his head throbbed. The illusion was gone and he was back in the Buick, sweat burning his eyes and soaking his sportcoat. He wijjed his face on his sleeve, found the shift lever and flung the Buick into the traffic of Forty-ninth Street. It was nearly two miles across town to Fred's house on Birch Court, and as Cliff threaded his way through the station wagons and delivery trucks, the fear crept back into his mind. The slap was so vividly real he was sure his face was red where it struck. An image of Fred's bedroom came into his mind, blending with his actual vision so that it appeared to float above the road ahead. Cliff tensed, afraid he would smash the car, with the bed and the dresser and the big man with the mustache hovering superimposed on a miniwagon. With his rising fear, the bedroom faded, and his apprehension continued to grow till he rounded the comer into Birch Court and dodged a dark green Chrysler to screech to a halt behind Fred's Datsun. Heart pounding and head throbbing, Cliff dashed to the door, yelling "Fred!" and trying the doorknob. It was locked. He sprinted around the back. It was locked, too, but he charged with his slotback's shoulder and it sprung open. There was the wrought-iron dinette and the rest of the kitchen, but no Fred. He called his name and quickstepped to the living room and up the hall to the front bedroom. He burst in and there was Fred in the bed, peaceful and oblivious. But then, if he's here asleep, why didn't he answer the phone? And where is Beth? Catching his breath, he tried to think. He suddenly felt foolish. But, dammit -- what about the phone, and what about Beth? He lifted the phone from the nightstand. Dead. It wasn't until he put the receiver down again that he saw the note. In a scrawly, uneven parody of the accountant's precise hand, it read; ' # thought no one would find out. I've been a fool. Tell Clifford I couldn't stand for him to know." Cliff .stuffed the note in his pocket and looked at the silent form on the bed. No aura! Looking closer he saw the long, slow swell of chest and prayed it wasn't too late. He snatched back the covers and turned the terribly limp body over, lifting an eyelid to show only white. He checked the left wrist for pulse, found none, tried the carotid. Faint. Slow. He debated what to do. As he tried to force his mind to analyze, to reach a decision, he spotted the empty prescription bottle in the wastebasket. Deciding, he ran out the door and through the front, fumbling with the latch, out and across two driveways and pounded on the front door of the next house. The grayhaired lady with the purple luminescence let him in to use the phone. The fire dispatcher asked him if he knew what kind of pills and how many. He said seconal, but he didn't Imow how many. The dispatcher told him to get his friend up and moving and try to make him vomit. They would send an ambulance. Back in the room he got the lifeless Fred out of the bed and tried dragging him around the floor, trying to make him walk. It was no use. Coldsweat made Cliff's hands slippery and he lugged the limp body into the bathroom. Running the water into the tub, he splashed some on the pale face. Too pale, too still. What if it's too late, and he's dying right here in my arms? Oh god, no, please no. Aching with grief and fear, tears streaming down his broad cheeks, small sounds escaping his throat, he held his friend on his knees and hung his head over the tub. Afraid he would choke him in his unconscious state and equally afraid he would never, never puke. Cliff wriggled his index finger down the unresponsive throat again and again. He was still trying when the ambulance arrived. The squad of three were professional, efficient. One took the slack form from Cliff's arms, another helped lay him down on a stretcher and the third drew Cliff aside and sat him down on the bed, waving a pungent ampoule at him. "Lie down and put your feet up. Any idea what he took or how many?" Cliff reached the empty bottle from the wastebasket. The hand that accepted it had a greenish dark glow. "Any idea how long ago?" He shook his head and wished he hadn't. Cliff looked at the stretcher and the other two attendants had Fred's floppy head tipped back, inserting a tube in his mouth. He looked away. The paramedics all had auras, but not Fred Dutton. "Leave a note?" Cliff considered the question. There was something about the note... it didn't look right, and Fred had never called him Clifford. Always Cliff, or McBride. "No," he said, "no note." Was the use of his full first name a clue? If those words were meant to indicate that Fred had been involved in something, like Fawcett's ripoff, then they were bullshit. "No, none." The attendant was saying something about relaxing a minute when the scream dashed over Cliff's consciousness, rocking him where he sat, blurring his vision and making his head pound. He shut his eyes and a scene of traffic and the green interior of a car came into his vision. It was as though he, terrified, were driving the car. He could see the green hood, the traffic, yes, it was route # from the look of the buildings. The hands turned the wheel and he knew them. Beth! He watched in shock as herhis vision left the road and glanced at the pistol in the knuckly fist on the lap of the large man with the mustache. He strained to hear as vision returned to the road. They were passing the mall, thick traffic slowing their progress. Fear rose in him, "Buddy? Hey, buddy! You okay?" The ampoule smell came again. He gasped and opened his eyes on the attendant, who bore him down on the bed and pulled a blanket over him. "Look, you don't look too great. Better rest awhile, and come on down to the hospital when you feel steady, okay?" "Um... which hospital?" "Sparta United. Just come to Emergency and they'll direct you. Better let your head clear first, though. We gotta take your friend, but I think he'll be all right." In seconds the three were gone, and Cliff threw back the cover and waited till he saw them drive off before running unsteadily to the Buick. He urged the Buick down Riverview, parallel to route #. They were headed north past the mall, so he could stay on Riverview and make up some time. But how far were they going? He didn't know, then suddenly he did. He'd seen it. The brickyards! Tension gripped him again, as the memory of a truck roared through his mind. He mashed the accelerator and fought for a clear memory of the crossstreets north of the mall -- the nearer the brickyards the better. In less than five minutes he was over the Coal Creek bridge and around a comer onto Seventy-second Street. But traffic clogged up and he had to duck a block farther north, and made the access road that ran behind the tracks and the brickyards in under two minutes. Suddenly there, he didn't know what to do. He crept toward the intersection of # and could see no green Chrysler, or any other car closer than the crowded parking lot way up the road ncathward, and nothing stirred there. He backed into a gated rear entryway and was pulling out when he saw the car. It was between two freightcars and the tall man was yanking Beth from the drivers' door. They were maybe six hundred feet away. As he watched, the mustached man propelled her forcibly by one arm across the short open space and into the narrow alley between two buildings. Cliff ran, not daring to think, to the mouth of the dleyway and looked around the comer. He could see nothing but the occasional zip of a vehicle past the narrow end of the alley. He had started up the alleyway when the scream knocked him to his knees with its clenching, blinding ferocity. Behind closed eyes he saw the mustached man for a second, then felt his arms pinned behind him, clamped in an iron grip. Wrong mind! Wrong mind, stupid! Pull back. Breathe deep and calm down and pull out of her mind! With an effort and a few deep breaths it began to work. He could feel the sensation of herness blur and then slip from him. Then he was above and behind the two and could feel the dark brooding mind of the man. He reached toward the man with his will, seeing his darkling halo and tuning on its umber glow. As he sought for the right level, the right frequency, the glow reddened and brightened with anticipation, then subsided. A car whipped by southbound. Straining, forcing calm on his tortured nerves, the psychic reached into the hooded horribleness of that twisted mind. No glimmering here, no star of vitality. Just a greenbrown knot of seething lust for death. Lust for the blood that would splatter off the grille of the truck and the broken ragdoll flight of the mangled body that would be dead before it landed. The hungering, slavering evil aroused disgust and revulsion so elemental in Cliff that he nearly lost the contact with the killer's mind. "!!!" went the mind in a quickening of anticipation. A truck's low rumble began in the distance. No screamed Cliff's mind as the sound grew. A hatred rose and threatened his tuning on the sick man's mind. In desperation, he pushed the hatred and the fear and the revulsion away from himself, pushed it toward the truck, piled it on the red and white tractor and away from the mind he needed. He thrust and shoved his swelling, loathing rage at the truck with dl his emotional might, holding the sniggering deathlust in focus. When the eyes of the man fed him the sight of the truck, small but rapidly growing in the distance. Cliff seized the vision. Frantically he called to his own emotive power, now vested in the barreling, rocking die.sd. pulling it toward him, elongating and stretching the image of the truck, nearer and nearer. With an emphatic ejaculation of pent-up ten.sion, the man jerked the woman upright and, timing carefully, propelled her into the path of the truck. Cliff recognized her paralyzing scream of terror and his soul ached Incredibly, the image of the truck in the man's mind passed through her, and she took a stumbling step and began to run with all her might. In a reflex as ancient as lizards and insects, as cats and mice, the burly, mustached man scrambled after her. The truck driver later swore in testimony he had seen the lady run across the road, but not the man whose heavy body stove in his Kenworth emblem and flew eightythree feet.  They sat on Fred's hospital bed and told it all, Beth leaning back into Cliff's embrace and turning for the occasional kiss. Fred's aura was bright as ever and his lean brow knit in the recounting of Beth's interruption of his inquisition. Beth, hugging Cliff's arms round her body, told of the drive to the brickyards and the hysterical fear, and the amazing escape, but could not retell the horrible death of the man Bertram. Cliff tried to explain his psychic experience, but Fr didn't seem to understand. Beth was understanding and interested, using words like prana and chakram and astral. But she didn't understand either, as his probing of her mind revealed. The probing revealed other things, too: years of affection and growing devotion through the divorce and finally a helpless, longing love, so disturbing she. had shielded all her feelings carefully, even from herself. And they filled Fred in on the embezzlement. Fawcett was in custody, as were two of the three others -- a junkie from the receiving dock named Bender, and the records clerk Dalby Johnson, a compulsive pederast on whom Simons had an extensive file. He had confessed, blubbering. Simons himself was gone. In a rundown storefront at # Riverview police found a printing press and layout table and twenty different styles of paper and envelopes, none of them printed. Printed samples they had from the files at Ohio River Power, plus they had Johnson's confession. But not Simons. They had a good description of him, and the evidence to convict him of fraud, but that was all they had. 'iVhen the Saturday sun was long gone. Cliff stood and stretched, watching the dance of lights in Beth's aura. Feeling his gaze and taking his hint, she stood too, and gave him a long hug. He dragged his mind from her hungry thoughts and said goodnight to his friend. "We'd better let you get some rest, Freddie. This has been a lot of excitement, and they tell me you're still a little weak." "Oh, I'll be back on the old solid-state treadmill Monday." But Cliff could tell he was weary. He took Beth's hand and it was warm, with a soft orange glow. Fred slipped down in the bed and gave a tired little wave. Together, they left the room. by Ed Ludwig It's something everybody wants don't they? It was a small saucer-shaped valley in California's wine country, lined with neat green rows of grape vines and basking in warm afternoon sunlight on this #th day of September. In its center were a bright buff-colored farmhouse and a winery and barn. Beneath the sign reading CEJeff Reed wiped perspiration from his forehead and gray stubble and paused at the side of the road. "Whew," he said aloud in, at once, relief, exhaustion and anticipation. He looked down. The vineyard was quiet. In the distance a tractor moved, driven by a bearded man and spurting forth trails of dust. Someone, a woman, moved through the front yard of the house. A quiet house. Lonely. Inside, food, fresh clothing, money, wine. What a contrast to the cold streets of San Francisco, the smog of Los Angeles. And Jeff, he told himself, was an honest thief. He took only what he really needed. He really did not steal. He was sober after that week-long romp on the Embarcadero. His mind was reasonably clear, his hands steadier than they'd been for months. "Yep, you did right coming here," he murmured, " -- away from twenty years in bars and Good Will handouts and Salvation Army lectures. And don't forget -- they was talkin' about a war in Frisco. Bombs and gas and all that." He scuffled down from the highway. Through a side of his vision flashed the figure of a boy leading a small brown horse throughout the yard. It might be well to enter the winery first, he thought. The building wasold, huge and partially concealed by oak trees. He found access: a small ground-level window in solid stone wall. Sweating, he inserted a stick in a corner of the window frame, pried it outward. The grating made him wince. It wasn't much of a window. It must be only for ventilation. He slipped in. Black coolness soothed him. Damn! It was dark in here. He lit a match and saw walls that must be two feet thick. And barrels of wine and hundreds of rows of bottles. Expensive wine -- not rot-gut! But this was no time to think of wine. The world was still razorsharp real, and there could be a war. He must get to the farmhouse, find clean clothes and money. The match flicked out. He lit another. His hand began to shake. His shoulders twitched. He blinked furiously. Maybe a drink would help. Just one to warm his insides. He'd be able to work better, he knew. He used the little bottle-opener attachment of his pocket knife and managed to open a bottle. He drank. It became warm. He remembered hot days in Florida, a blonde from -- where? And that park in San Jose, by the Post Office. He lit more matches, uncorked another bottle of wine. The ground shook. Far away there was a great rumbling, a deep thunder. The shelved bottles shook. Some cracked and splattered to the stone floor. "Hey!" he said. "I didn't do that. I'm not that drunk." He drank.  He awoke, eyes hot and tired, head throbbing. He still had matches and he found his way to a light switch and a flight of stairs. Abruptly he was outside. Sunlight stung his eyes. A realization came to his clouded senses. It was quiet. It was like floating on the bottom of a sea. There were only the soundless caress of a breeze, the movement of a trembling leaf. Then, a whinny. In the frontyard of the farmhouse lay the little horse he'd glimpsed yesterday. Its dark brown eyes were wild, its legs spread-eagled, its tail thrashing, all as if in a futile struggle to rise. Rivulets of blood trickled from its nostrils. "Little girl, what happened? God, what happened?" Jeff saw, in the distance, the tractor motionless in the fields, its bearded driver slumped over the wheel. He moved to the house, found .the woman on the porch. Inside, a man and a small boy. All very white and very dead. "God, I need a drink." No, the TV first. Jeff flicked on the knob. The tube burst into light: there was no picture, no sound. He remembered. The war. And yet no bombs, no real explosions? He stumbled outside to a Ford pickup. He turned on the car radio. Static, finally a voice, cracked and far-away: "...only people and living creatures... neutron bombs... West Coast, East, South... structures still intact... Idaho and South Dakota sending help... end to hostility..." He remembered. This was really why he'd left Frisco. "Well, Jeffy-boy," -- His mother had called him that -- "what do you do now?" He took a deep breath and answered himself. "You go on. Nothing, for you, has changed. You've been alone for twenty years. You take the pickup, food, money. You go to where people are, to Idaho." Then the horse whinnied. She was still thrashing and struggling. She was caked in her own excrement. "Damn, I always hated horses." He thought for a long moment. "Okay, I'll help you before I go." He found a bucket, filled it with water. The horse drank. He located hay in the barn and fed her. He tried to clean the dirty portions of her body. Her eyes were no longer wild. "Strange you made it," he told her. "Nobody except you and me. With me it must have been the wine cellar, with you, 'cause you're strong." It wasn't easy going back inside the Ho.use of the Dead. But, he told himself, there would be many more Houses of Death. It was a beautiful home: clean carpets, shiny bright walls, soft chairs, a stereo, TV, a bicycle. He felt no sense of loss, for it seemed a place where the Other People lived. He found money and jewelry neatly stacked in a bureau drawer and a small wall safe. The challenge of the safe held no fascination. And the thrill of seeing the money and jewelry no longer existed. To hell with them. He did find canned food -- stew and vegetables -- which he believed was still good. A rifle, an automatic .#, could be of use, although he'd always hated guns. He filled all empty canteens and jugs with water, for no matter where he was, he would still have to drink. Drink? Before starting his trip he'd better take a few bottles of wine, maybe a cask. Idaho was many miles away. In the wine cellar he found a hammer and chisel and a dozen empty bottles. The wine flowed easily and like cold blood. His hands began to shake. He sipped. The last time, he thought, the last time before Idaho.  The next day the horse whinnied. Jeff blinked in bright sunlight which was blotted away every second or two by wisps of dark clouds. The horse remained sprawled, and Jeff brought her fresh water. She seemed to be trying to rise. But what if she never rose again? A cloud scudded across the sky. What if winter rains beat down upon the land, the farm, the horse? As Jeff thought, he found eggs inside the house, fried three and began to eat. Maybe he should build a shelter for the horse before he left. Maybe, if he waited, he could help the horse into the barn. The eggs gagged him. In the next room and on the porch and in the tractor, were the farm people. He couldn't take their food, their pickup, their wine while they lay in open air. He worked until the sky was dark -- both with clouds and approaching night. But the farm people were buried. It was time for a drink.  The next day he started work on the shelter. The sky was overcast. Fresh corn was in the little garden behind the house, and it must be picked. He watered the horse and curried her, and her brown eyes seemed to sparkle. Her legs moved more easily. Jeff muttered, "I think you're smiling at me. I think you might start to walk again pretty soon.' He was suddenly tired. "I got to go. Brown Eyes. Sorry. It's a big world, and there are still people out there. I got to try to find 'em." He turned away. Brown Eyes whinnied. Angrily, Jeff turned back scowling. "Damn you, I can't spend my life with a crippled horse and a wine cellar. I got to get movin' on." But first there was another cask of wine, and a watering of the horse, and a day passed, and two and three, and then a week. And it was a great many years before he moved on. -- Ed Ludwig it it ir heat throughout the week of the convention. The point isn't whether Mr. Ellison is right or wrong, the point isn't whether we agree with him or not, as far as I personally am concerned the point is: how many of Harlan's detractors have ever in their life endured one-half as much for a cause they believed in as Harlan was willing to endure for one he believed in? If there is anything history demonstrates and science fiction has been trying to teach us, it's that social forms are constantly changing, no matter how much it might disturb those who don't wish such change (and that applies as equally antagonists). -- Hank Stine Things were hotting up on Jem -- everybody wanted a piece of the pie... and there wasn't enough pie to go around! Synopsis At the Tenth General Assembly of the World Conference on Exobioltime of the semi-stellar object N-OA Bes-Bes Geminorum # -- sometimes called Kung's Star -- or ed! Not with Just one intelligent species, but three: a race of sentient hydrogen-filled balloons, weasellike burrowers and hardshelled arthropods. They are the first sentient life discovered anywhere in the universe off Earth -- and three of them . The race to explore Jem is on. All three of the great power blocs of terrestrial nations prepare expeditions: the Food countries, like the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union; the oil-rich Fuel bloc of Venezuela, England and the Arab states; the People's Republics, headed by China. In Sofia Dalehouse has met and American Army officer with shadowy family connections into the mysterious high levels of government and intelligence. The two of them get into a scrape with the Conference. Ana is Bulgarian, and therefore also a member of the Food Bloc, but she is in love with presented the report on Jem, who is a Peep. Marge Menninger promises to see that a Food Bloc expedition will go to Jem, and that Dalehouse will be on it. She keeps her promise, but the Peeps are quicker. Dulla's expedition is the first to land. Arriving first is not all advantageous, however. Jem is full of perils. The chemistry of its biota is hostile to Terrestrial life, and most of the Peeps become quick casualties with severe allergic reactions. Some die. Dulla attempts to establish contact with Krinpit, the armored, crab-like creatures. The allergic process works both ways. Dulla becomes ill and helpless in the Krinpit village, and so do many of the Krinpit. Some of them die, including the male of the Krinpit name Sharn-igon. When Dalehouse' s expedition arrives on . Jem, its leaders have learned some lessons from the disasters that befell the Peeps. But the planet still has surprises. Dalehouse and his friend, the Rustempt to establish contact with the airborne race of balloonists. They have some success, and decide to build balloons of their own to join them in the sky. They even observe the balloonists spawning over their camp. Scientifically, this is a triumph. But as they breed, the balloonists secrete a spray which is both hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac. It is the finest high on two worlds -- and the whole Food Camp trips out. It isn't a catastrophe -- they survive it, if a little bedraggled -- but it complicates relationships with the balloonists. Nevertheless, Dalehouse gets his balloon working and Joins the airborne race in the sky. He meets the an immense, hydrogen-fijlled sac bearing a tiny, insect-like body, but with a language, a social position as the leader of his flock and a capacity for friendship. The Fuel Bloc -- the ' "Greasies' ' -- have finally landed their expedition on Jem, and typically have all sorts of power machinery, even aircraft. Dalehouse goes with a helicopter rescue Dulla and return him to his own base; at the same time, they transport the Krinpit, Sharn-igon, to the Greasy camp for study. But studied. He kills his human guards and escapes to a nearby Krinpit village, rousing them to fight against the poisonous creatures from Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth the uneasy truce among the great power blocs is being stressed by quarrels over Jem. Marge Menninger gets the U.S.S.U. Eood Bloc expedition reinforced through her father, shadowy head of American Intelligence. But the cost is immense -- in money, in fuel, in raw materials and in political complications. Marge starts a program of developing "trade goods" for the Jemman creatures. Most of the products are weapons. On the other side of the fence, God Menninger' s opposite in their way; and Marge Menninger decides to take more direct action. She bribes a defector from the Peoples' Republics space program to plant a bomb to delay their reinforcement of their Jemman colony. It succeeds better than she had planned. Their tachyon-transmission satellite is destroyed, and all their crews in transit are killed. What Ana Dimitrova had seen of the United States was what she had seen of most of the world: airports, hotel rooms, meeting halls, city streets. So at first she looked around with lively interest as the electrobus whined along an eightlane superhighway toward the place she had been ordered to report to. So much open space, not even farmed! And contrarily, so many places lined up one after another as they passed through communities, places to eat, places to sleep, places to drink, places to buy gas; what prodigious devourers these Americans must be, to keep them all flourishing! She touched the tiny microfiche from Ahmed, at the bottom of her blouse pocket. She had no reader for it, but she needed none. As always it was formal, not very rewarding and extremely short: My dear Ana, I appreciate the letters you have been sending and think of you often. With great affection, Dulla He could have spent a few P more, she thought resentfully, and then, as always, brought herself up sharply. Ahmed was from a poor country. Evenfiched and faxed, the cost per square centimeter of a letter from Kungson to Earth was very high. (But in her own letters she had poured money out like water. (But she could not judge him; she had not had the life experience of measuring every penny. (But it was not just the economy of space and money -- how much more he could have said, if he had chosen, in even fewer words! -- it was the economy of emotion that she begrudged.))) Three deep in parentheses, she took her mind off Dulla and resolved to think about more profitable subjects, and then realized the bus had stopped. Three uniformed Americans had entered by the driver's seat. One of them gestured for silence and said, to the bus at large, "You people are welcome, and let's see some l.D." Craning her neck. Nan could see a barricade with two other soldiers standing by it. They were not at attention, but they were watching the bus quite carefully, and she observed that what had looked like a well-clipped hedge stretching away on both sides of the barrier had barbed wire inside it. How curious. They were treating this place as though it were some sort of military installation, rather than a center for preparing scientists and support personnel for a peaceful expedition to Kungson. Big-power customs were so strange to her. When the MPs came to her she handed her passport over, and smiled at the tall black one who was studying it. He returned her look impassively. "Name?" Of course, it was right there, next to his thumb. "Ana Elena Dimitrova." "Place of birth?" "My place of birth? It is Marek, Bulgaria. That is a city south of Sofia, not far from the Yugoslavian border. " "Put your thumb here, please." She pressed against the little pad he extended to her and then on a square white card, which he tucked into her passport. "Your papers will be returned to you later," he said, and then unbent. "You like to dance? There's a nice group at the club tonight? Ask for me if you don't see me. Name's Leroy." "Thank you, Leroy." "See you later, honey." He winked and moved along. Ana found a tissue and wiped the ink off her thumb wonderingly. These Americans were worse even than Sir Tam -- not just the Americans, she corrected herself, thinking of the Vietnamese colonel and his agile tiny hands. Would it be like this always? Would it not be even worse, when she was part of the small colony on Kungson and they were all living in each other's pockets anyway? But at least then Ahmed would be somewhere near! In the wrong encampment, yes. But she would find a way to see him. Let her get just on the same planet with him again, and they would be together! It made the whole ordeal seem worthwhile.  By the next day, not even that made it seem altogether attractive. She could not have attended Leroy's dance that night if she wanted to. There was no time. Issue of new clothing: "You will wear these here fatigues at all times, except when instructed by your instructors." Assignment to quarters: "You will maintain cleanliness at all times. At all times all personal possessions are to be kept in yolir footlockers. " Preliminary briefing: "You will fall out at oh six hundred hours for breakfast. From oh seven hdndred to eleven hundred you will participate in your individual refresher courses of instruction in the application of your specialized skills on Klong. From twelve hundred to sixteen thirty you will complete your survival course to teach you your survival skills for surviving in the environment of Klong. From eighteen hundred to lights out at twenty-two hundred you will conduct your personal affairs except when required to participate in additional refresher courses or survival instruction. Weekends? Who's the guy who wants to know about weekends? Oh, you. Well, there aren't any weekends here." By the time all that was finished it was nearly midnight, and then Ana dragged her suitcase to the tiny, bare room that had been assigned to her, coldly furnished, like the showcase cell in a county jail, to find out that her roommate was the Vietnamese colonel. Even here rank had its privilege. But Ana was having none of it, and so it was back to the billeting office and a good deal of argument, and by the time she was able to get to sleep in a new room with a female roommate it was nearly two. Breakfast was discouragingly huge, eggs and sausage and cereal and breads with jams and marmalades and peanut butter in opened liter cans on every table, and for dessert they spent an hour receiving inoculations. None of them were painful, but from the grins and jokes of the medics Ana knew that they would be later on. And then she lined up with the other two dozen of her detachment in a wet, cold wind, and they were marched off to their various refresher courses of instruction in the application of thier specialized skills. Ana's tiny group included the Canadian woman and two men unknown to her, and they wound through the camp streets, past a baseball field and a bowling alley, between barracks and anonymous buildings with armed guards patrolling before them, out into an open field half a kilometer square. In the center of it was a sort of tethered balloon shaped like a sausage, fifty meters long, with guards around the perimeter and three of them grouped before the entrance. There was a fence surrounding the whole thing, and more guards at the gate in the fence; and before any of them were permitted inside they had to go through the same tedious, business of checking I.D.'s one more time. Off to one side there was a tall chimney, eoupled to the main tent by a flexible .plastic tube. The chimney roared. Though there was no smoke, the shimmering at the top of it showed some very hot gases boiling high into the air out of it. It did not seem to serve any function that Ana could guess. But then neither did the weapons that all the permanent party personnel carried. Who were they meant to be used against? What pxissible enemy threatened a training base for a scientific expedition which, after all, was in a sense the propierty of the entire world? When she finally got through the gates and the guards she found herself in a long open shed, covered with the opaque white plastic of the bubble. The atmosphere was damp and heavy, filled with strange smells, and the lighting was sultryred. At first she could see very little, but she was aware that people were moving about between rows of what seemed to be smaller, transparent bubbles. The lighting came from a bank of gas-glow tubes, all red, and there was not very much of it. And then she saw the balloonist. She recognized it at once; there could not be another creature as strange as that anywhere in the universe! But it look -- damaged. It was tethered inside a cage. Its great bubble was throbbing but almost limp, sagging against the ground. She stared, fascinated, and saw that a flexible plastic coupling had been taped neatly to a hole in the gasbag. and the plastic line went to a cylinder of gas. A woman with a tape recorder was crouched by the cylinder, adjusting the gas valve as she listened to the balloonist's plaintive song. No wonder the voice sounded so faint! He was operating at a fraction of normal pressure, far too little to let him fly, only enough to let him gasp a sobbing sort of song. The woman looked up and said, "You're Dimitrova? I'm Julia Arden, and this -- " pointing at the balloonist -- "is Shirley. She's singing about her childhood right now." Ana shook hands courteously, staring at the sad, wrinkled little creature. Those sounds did not seem like language! She could not imagine understanding them, much less translating them, no matter how many times they halved her brain! best. Mis Arden, but do you think you really can teach me to talk to that?" "Me? Maybe not. I'll help, and so will the computers, but the one who's going to teach you is Shirley herself. She loves to sing to us. Poor thing. She doesn't have much else to do with her time, does she?" Nan looked at the creature for a moment and then burst out, "No, but what a shame, really! Can you not see she is in pain?" The other woman shrugged. "What do you want me to do about it?" Her tone was less hostile than defensive. "I don't suppose Shirley vounteered for this duty, but then neither did I. Your job is learning her language, Dimitrova, and let's get on with it." "But to see a creature in pain -- " Julia Arden laughed, and then shook her head. "Sweetie, you only got here last night. Wait a day or two. Then you can talk to me about pain."  From # to # Ana Dimitrova stretched the muscles of her mind until she thought she would die of it, and from # to # she balanced the diet by doing the same to her body. Julia Arden had been right. Within forty-eight hours Ana was an expert on pain. She woke up each morning with a hazy overcast of brightness that she knew was the foretaste of migraine. She went to bed each night with so many aches, throbs, and bruises that it took all the will she had to refrain from swallowing the pills they had given her. She could not afford pills; she needed her mind alert. Even while she slept, because sleeping was only another kind of study for Ana, with the taped calls of the balloonists murmuring under her pillow all night long. The headaches, all right, they were something she was used to. Worse than that, the shots were producing their effect. Her skin was covered with little blisters and bumps, some that itched, some that were tender, some downright painful every moment of time. Not just pain. She wheezed and coughed. Her eyes ran uninterruptedly, and so did her nose. She was not alone; everyone in her group was having the same reaction to the allergy shots. If this was the prophylaxis, what could the illness itself be like? And then she saw the holos of the unfortunate Peeps who had died of their reactions, before the countermeasures had been developed, and they defined for her the difference between prophylaxis and reality. It was not comforting to her. It was terrifying. How had Ahmed fared in all this? He had said nothing in his letters, but perhaps he was only being brave. And every afternoon, feel well, feel ill, no matter, there she was out on the exercise field. Pushups and five hundred meter runs, obstacle courses and rope climbing. Her hands were raw, then blistered, then calloused. Even through the coveralls her knees were scraped bloody. Everywhere on arms and legs where there was not a pimple or blister there was a bruise. To be sure, she scolded herself, for all of this there was a clear purpose! Kungson was no picnic dell, it was a place of strange and perhaps lethal dangers. These measures, however brutal, were only to help her meet those dangers and conquer them. If she had not volunteered for the job, she had also not refused it when offered. And, finally, the most potent argument of all. It was the way to Ahmed. So she did her best, all the time, and was secretly proud of the fact that some of the others were doing less well than she. The tiny Vietnamese colonel, Nguyen Dao Tree, fell in a heap from the knotted ropes one afternoon and was taken to hospital. (But he was back the next day, limping but game.) One woman, an older one, perhaps almost forty, fell flat on her face halfway up a rocky hill; she was taken away too, and she did not return. As days became weeks the fatigue lessened, the bruises healed, the reactions to the antiallergens diminished. The headaches stayed the same, but Ana was used to them, and she learned to take part in the friendly chatter in the messhall. Always there were such stories! They were going to Kungson on a one-way trip and were expected to breed there and raise a new race of humans. They were not going to Kungson at all, but to a new planet, not yet announced or even named. They were not going into space at all. They were going to be parachuted onto the Scottish coast to commandeer the oil refineries. They were going to Antarctica, which was going to become a new Food Bloc colony since a process had been discovered for melting the ice cap. At first Ana was frightened by such stories. Then amused, then bored; she began making up stories of her own, and found them as quickly passed along as any other. But some of the stories seemed true. Even some terrible ones, an unexplained accident in space that had destroyed the Peeps' resupply ships and even their tachyon-transit satellite itself. She let herself be late for dinner that night, to listen to the evening news; sure enough, it was official. How terrifying! What would it mean to Ahmed? But then the news went on to say that the expeditions of the Fuel and Food Blocs had offered help to the expedition of the Peoples' Republics, and, with her heart full. Ana hurried to the dining room, demanded attention and proposed thay they all sign a letter of sympathy and good wishes to their colleagues of the Peoples' Bloc. The faces all turned to her, then whispered among themselves, half embarrassed, but in the long run they let her write the letter and they all signed. The next afternoon her training supervisor even excused her early to carry the document to the office of the camp commandant. He listened to her blankly, read the document three times and then promised to send it through channels. At dinner that night she reported glowingly what had happened, but her news was drowned in other news. There were three new stories. First, that they were to receive a large shipment of new trainees the next day. Second, that a date had been set for their flight to Kungson, less than three weeks in the future. And third, contradictorily, that the whole project was about to be canceled. Such stories! Ana stood up angrily, rapping her fork against her thick chinaware cup. "How can you all believe this nonsense?" she demanded. "How can all of these be true at once?" But not many of the others were paying attention, and she felt a tug at her elbow. It was the colonel, who had, as he often did, squeezed in between Ana and her roommate at the table in order to try his fortunes one more time. "Sweet, beautiful Ana," he said, "don't make a fool of yourself. I know something of these stories,and they are all true."  That one of them was true was proved the next morning. Sixty-five more persons arrived at the base, and Ana knew one of them! It was the blonde woman who was Godfrey Menninger's daughter. Of course, everything was turned topsy-turvy. All of the billeting accomodations were changed to make room for the new arrivals -- no, not for that reason alone. Ana realized, because most of the new ones, and quite a few of the old ones, were housed in another barracks half a corporal roommate, and feared at once she would get Colonel Nguyen hack again. But that did not happen. He went to the other barracks, and Ana was moved in with the Canadian woman whose specialty seemed to be growing food crops in ufiusual circumstances. Marge Menninger eaught sight of Ana in the crowd and waved to her. But they had no chance to speak -- not that Ana had any particular reason to want to speak to the American, anyway -- and, in all the confusion, she was nearly an hour late arriving at her morning session with the female balloonist. The creature was no longer a sjjecimen to Ana. She was a friend. Into the cognitive half of Ana's brain the songs of the balloonists had poured. In the first day she had learned to understand a few simple phrases, in a week to communicate abstract thoughts; now she was almost fluent. Ana had never thought of herself as having any kind of a singing voice, but the balloonist was not critical. They sang to each other for hours on end, and more and more Shirley's songs were sad, and despairing, and sometimes even disconnected. She was, she told Ana, the last survivor of the dozen or more of the species who had been wrenched from Kungson and hurled to this inhospitable place. She did not expect to live much longer. She sang to Ana of the sweetness of warm pollen in a damp cloud, of the hot singing sadness of egg-spraying, of the communal joy of the flock in chorus. She told Ana that she would never sing in the flock again. She was thrice right. She would not have dared sing, with her voice so pitifully harsh and weak, as the gas-pump gave her only faltering tones. She had no chance of being returned to Kungson. And she knew death was near; and two days later she was dead. Ana arrived at the zoo to find her cage empty, and Julia Arden supervising the sterilization of its parts. "Don't take on," she advised gruffly. "You've learned all you need to know." "It is not for the learning that I weep. It is because I have lost someone dear. " "Christ. Get out of here, Dimitrova. How did they let a Jerk like you into this project in the first place? Crying over a dead fartbag and sending love-letters to the Peeps -- you're really out of it!" Ana marched back to the barracks, threw herself down on her cot and allowed herself to weep as she had not done in months -- for Shirley, for Ahmed, for the world and for herself. "Out of it," described her feelings exactly. How had everything become so hideous and complex? That afternoon in the exercise field was an ordeal. The physical strain was no longer a real problem. but for some days now the "exercises" had taken a new turn. All of them, her own original detachment as well as the new arrivals, had been working less to strengthen their muscles and reflexes than to learn to handle unfamiliar equipment -- unfamiliar to Ana, at least; she observed that all of the new people, and some of the old, had obviously had experience with it already. Such equipment! Heavy hoses like water-cannon, backpacked tanks and nozzles like flame-throwers, lasers, even grenade-launchers. For what grotesque purpose was all this intended? Tight-lippped, Ana did as she was told. Repeatedly she found herself in difficulties and had to be bailed out by one of the others. The colonel sav her from incinerating herself with a flame-thrower, and Sergeant Sweggert had to rescue her when the recoil of her water-cannon knocked her off her feet. "Please do not concern yourself," she gasped furiously, pulling herself erect and reaching once more for the hose. "I am quite all right." "Hell you are," he said amiably. "Lean into it more, honey, you hear? It doesn't take muscle, just a little brains." "I do not agree." He shook his head. "Why do you get so uptight, Annie?" "I do not like being trained in the use of weapons!" "What weapons?" He grinned at her. "Don't you know this stuff is only to use against vermin? Colonel Menninger spelled it all out for us. We don't want to kill any sentients, that's against the law, and besides we'll all get our asses in a crack. But all the intelligent ones got little like cousins, crab-rats and air-sharks and things that dig around in the dirt and come out and chew your ass off. Those are what we're going to use this stuff for." "In any event," said Ana, "I do not require assistance from you. Sergeant. Even if I believed you, or your Colonel Menninger, which I do not." Sweggert looked past her and pursed his lips. "Hello, there, Colonel, " he said. "We was just talking about you." "So I noticed," said Margie Menninger 's voice. Ana turned slowly, and there she was. Looking, Ana observed without regret, quite poorly. The shots were having their way with her, and her face was broken out in cerise blotches, her eyes were red and running and her hair had dark roots. "Get on with it. Sergeant," she said. "Dimitrova, see me in my room after chow." She turned away, and raised her voice. "All right, all of you," she cried. "Get your asses down! Let's see how you crawl!" Rebelliously Ana dropped to the ground and practiced the way of worming herself across an open field that she had learned the day before. These were infantry tactics! What nonsense, for a scientific expedition! She conserved her anger carefully, and it lasted her the rest of the afternoon, through dinner and right up' to the moment she knocked on Menninger's door in that other barracks halfway across the base. "Come in." Lt. Col. Menninger was sitting at a desk in a white, fluffy dressing gown, rimless granny-glasses on her nose, a halfeaten dinner tray pushed to one side. She looked up from some papers and said, "Te a seat, Ana. Do you smoke? Would you like a drink?" The angry fires inside Ana banked themselves. But they were still ready to blaze out. "No, thank you," she said, in general, to all. Margie stood up and poured herself a scant shot of whiskey. She would have preferred marijuana, but she did not care to share a Joint with this Bulgarian. She sipped a centimeter off the top of the drink and said, "Personal question. What have you got against Sweggert?" "I have nothing against Sergeant Sweggert. I simply do not care to make love with him." "What are you, Dimitrova, some maximum women 's-libber? You don't have to ball him on the parade ground. Just let him give you a hand when he wants to." "Colonel Menninger, " Ana said precisely, "are you ordering me to encourage his sexual overtures so that I can complete the obstacle course more readily?" "I am not ordering you to do diddly-shit, Dimitrova. What is it with you? Sweggert comes on to everything with a hole in it. It's his nature. He comes on to me, too. I could put the son of a bitch in Leavenworth for the places his hands have been on the drill field. But I won't, because he's a good sol -- because he's essentially a good person. He'll help you if you let him. You can always tell him to fuck off later on. " "This I consider immoral. Colonel Menninger." Margie finished her drink and poured half of another. "You're not too happy here, are you. Ana?" "That is correct. Mis Menninger. I did not ask for this assignment." "I did." "Yes, no doubt, perhaps you did, but I -- " "No, that's not what I mean. I asked for it for myself, but I also asked for you, too. I picked you out by name. Ana, and it took hell's own convincing to make the Bulgarians turn you loose. They think you're pretty great at translating." She tossed down the rest of the drink and took off her glasses. "Look, Ana, I need you. This project is important to me. It should be important to you, too, if you have a spark of patriotism in your body." ' 'Patriotism ? ' ' "Loyalty, then," said Margie impatiently. "Loyalty to our bloc. I know we come from different countries, but we stand for the same thing. " Ana found herself more puzzled than angry by this strange American. She tried to sort her feelings out and express them exactly. "Bulgaria is my home," she began. "I love my home. The Food Bloc -- that is a much more abstract thing. Mis Menninger. I understand that in a world of two hundred nations there must be alliances, and that one owes one's allies some sort of allegiance. Or at least courtesy. But I cannot say I feel loyalty. Not to the Food Bloc." "To the whole human race then, honey," said Margie. "Don't you see it? You just said it for yourself, a world of two hundred nations. But Klong can be a world of one nation! No Hghting. No spies. No cloakand-dagger shit. Who colonized America?" "What?" It took Ana a moment to realize she was supposed to answer the question. "Why -- the English? Before them, the Dutch." "And before them maybe the Italians, with Columbus, and maybe, for Christ's sake, anybody you like -- the Vikings, the Polynesians, the Chinese. Who knows? But the people who live in America now ire the Americans. And that's who's going to living on Klong in another generation or two. The Klongans. Or whatever they call themselves. A single race of human beings. Never mind where they come from here! They'll be all the same, all part of the same wonderful -- well, dream. I don't mind calling it a dream. But you and I can make it come true. Ana. We can leam how to live on Klong. We can build a world without national barriers, and without the kind of senseless competition and rapacity that has ruined this one. Do you know what it means to have a whole new world to start over on?" Ana was silent. "I -- I have had some thoughts of that sort myself," she admitted. "Of course you have. And I want to make it happen. I want to lay the foundations for a world society that understands planning and conversa,tion and cooperation. Do you know how much we're putting into this? Four ships. Nearly ninety people. Thirty-five tons of equipment. The invasion of Europe cost less than this one launch, and, believe me, everybody involved is screaming. It costs too much. It upsets the Peeps. The Greasies will raise their prices. We need the resources to solve the problems of the cities. Half the Congress would like to call if off tomorrow -- " "One has heard rumors," Ana said cautiously, "that the launch may be canceled. " Margie hesitated and a shadow crossed her face. "No," she corrected. "that will not happen, because it is too important. But that is why I asked for you. Ana. If we can send ninety people, they must be the best ninety people there are. And you are the best translator I could find." She reached out and touched Ana's sleeve. "Do you understand?" Ana drew away as soon as she could without giving offense, her thoughts uncertain. "Y-yes," she on the other hand, no. What you say is most persuasive, Mis Menninger, but what has it to do with the use of flame-throwers and other weapons? Are we to build this fine monolithic world by destroying everyone else?" "Of course not, Ana!" cried Margie, with as much shock and revulsion in her voice as she knew how to put there. "I give you my word!" There was silence. "I see," said Ana at last. "You give me your word . ' ' "What else would you have me do?"  Ana said thoughtfully, "One has so little contact with the rest of the world here. I would like very much an opportunity to discuss this with others. Perhaps with my own delegation at the United Nations?" "Why not?" exclaimed Margie. She looked thoughtful for a moment, and then nodded. "I'll tell you what. As soon as training's over, we're all going to get three days off. I'm going to New York myself. Come with me. We'll eat some decent food, go to a few parties. And you can talk it over with anyone you like. Agreed?" Ana hesitated. At last, unwillingly, she said, "All right. Miss Menninger. That sounds attractive." It did not, for many reasons, but as a Just person Ana had to concede that it sounded at least fair. "Fine, honey. Now, if you don't mind. I'm overdue for a long, hot bath." Margie locked the door behind the Bulgarian woman and ran herself a tub with some satisfaction. What the stupid prunt didn't know was that she was leaving Camp Detrick directly for the launch pad. The next chance she would have to talk anything over with anybody would be on Klong, and there let her say whatever she liked.  Ana Dimitrova sat with her eyes closed in a broad, low room, elbows on a ring-shaped table, head in her hands, earphones on her head. Her lips were moving. Her head twitched from side to side as she tried to match the rhythms of the taped balloonist song that was coming over the headset. It was very difficult, in large part because it was not a balloonist's voice making the sounds. It was a krinpit's. The tape had been made several weeks before, when Detrick's last surviving krinpit had had no one left to talk to but Shirley, the one surviving balloonist. But her name had not been Shirley. Her name, rather beautifully, had been mo'ahi' i ba alu i, which meant something like Sweetly Golden Cloud-Bearer. Krinpit rasps and tympani did not easily form the balloonist sounds. But Shirley had understood him -- no. Ana corrected herself, Mo'ahi'i Ba'alu'i had understood him. Ana was determined to do the same, and so she played and replayed sections of the tape: Ma'iya'a hi'i -- these creatures unlike us -- hu'u ha'iye'i -- are vicious animals. And Cloud-Bearer's response; Ni'u'a main na'a hu'iha. They have killed my song. Ana pushed the headphones off her ears and allowed herself to rub her eyes. The headaches were very bad tonight. And this awful room! Twenty headsets and tape-control panels before twenty identical hard-backed chairs, all around the ring. So bleak! So unsympathetic! Unsympathetic? Ana clucked her lips at herself. That was one of the English language 's booby-trap words: Sympathetic, simpatico. They, sounded so much alike. But they did not mean the same thing, and it was embarrassing to a translator of Ana's skills to fall into the blunder of confusing them. It proved she was too tired to work any more this night, and so decisively she switched off the tape, hung the earphones on their hook and stood up to go. She intended to wish a courteous good night to those few other eager project personnel who had shared her desire to put in overtime at the tape ring. But there weren't any. They had all left while she was concentrating.  It was nearly eleven o'clock! In six hours she would have to be getting out of bed! Hurrying down the empty company street toward her room. Ana paused halfway, changed course and entered the day room. Really, these headaches were too bad! But there was a dispensing machine in the day room, and sometimes one of the American soft drinks containing caffeine would constrict the blood vessels and reduce the thumping, tumping throb long enough for her to get to sleep. But as she dropped a dollar into the machine and waited for the cup to fill, it seemed to her that coming here had been a mistake, after all. Such an ear-drubbing of noise! A dozen couples were dancing frenziedly to a stereo at one end of the room. At the other a young Oriental man had a guitar, and a group was singing with him, quite at crosspurposes to the music on the stereo. Quite uncaring. And even more noise came from the television alcove: a babble of excited voices, laughter, what could they be watching? She drifted closer to peer at the screen. Someone was lifting a pillowcase out of a sonic washer and exclaiming rapturously over its pristine shine. Were these people excited over a commercial? "Oh, Ana," cried her roommate, elbowing toward her. "You missed it. She was wonderful. " "What? What did I miss? Who was wonderful?" "Lieutenant-Colonel Menninger. It was really super. You know," confided the woman, "I never really liked her. But tonight she was just beautiful. She was on the six o'clock news. It was just a little person-to-pierson interview, like a follow-up to a story about Jem. I don't know why they picked her. But I'm glad they did! She said such wonderful things! She said Jem gave hope to all the unhappy people of the world. She said it was a planet where all the old hatreds could be forgotten. A place where -- what did she say? -- yes, a place where each child could elect a morality and an idea, and have the space and the freedom to live his life by it!" Ana coughed Coca-Cola in a fine spray into her cupped hand. "Colonel Menninger said that?" she gasped. "Yes, yes. Ana, and she said it beautifully. We were all touched. Even people like Stud Sweggert and Nguyen the Tryin' were really moved. I mean, they even kept their hands to themselves. And the newscaster said something about sending troops to Jem, and Colonel Menhinger said, T'm a soldier myself. Every country has soldiers like me, and every one of us prays we'll never have anything to do. But on Jem we can do something useful! Something for peace, not for destruction, Please let us do it.' -- What?" Ana had been marveling to herself in Bulgarian. "No, no, please go on," she said. "Well. And just now they repeated parts of it on the late report. and they said the public response has been incredible. Telegrams, phone calls. To the White House, and the U.N., and the networks -- I don 't know where all . " Ana forgot her headache. "Perhaps I have been doing Colonel Menninger an injustice. Truly, I am amazed." "Well, I am too! But she made me feel really good about what we're doing, and everyone's talking about it!" And they were. Not only in the barracks dayroom. Senator Lenz's phones were ringing, and it was constituents urging him to make sure the heroes on Jem got support. Newsrooms around the country were watching the electronic tally of calls from the public; Jem, Jem! Spot pollsters were reporting great and growing public concern. God Menninger 's phone rang only once, but the person on the other end was the President of the United States. When he hung up Menninger 's face was tense and stem, but then it relaxed and he broke into a smile. "Honey," he said to empty space, "damn your black heart, you do your old man proud. " XIll For twenty kilometers Charley and his flock tried to follow the little biplane as it chugged and bounced through the sky of Jem. No use. The balloonists soared high, swooped low, found winds that carried them toward the heat pole, but never fast enough to keep up. Charlie sang a mournful farewell song into his radio as they turned away, and the sound penetrated even the noisy rattle of the little engine inside the plane. "Too much noise," shouted Kappelyushnikov cheerfully into Danny Dalehouse's ear. "Turn off, please?" "Let me say good-bye first." Dalehouse sang into the tiny radio, then switched it off. Far behind, and half a kilometer overhead, the flock bobbed acknowledgment. Dalehouse craned his neck to see forward, but the camp of the Greasies was of course nowhere yet in sight. They were flying almost directly toward the Heat Pole -- "southeast" by the convention of considering the poles of rotation north and south, however irrelevant that was to compasses and sextants -- and it was uphill almost all the way. How foolish of the Greasies to locate their camp in the least hospitable part of the planet! But who could figure why the Greasies did things? Kappelyushnikov leaned over and slapped him on the shoulder. "You wish to puke?" he called encouragingly, pointing over the side of the cockpit. Dalehouse shook his head. "Is all right, you know," Cappy went on. "Is little rough, yes. We are fighting winds, not making love to them like in balloon. But you have truly outstanding aircraft technician in charge!" "I'm not complaining." And in fact, he had no reason to complain. The biplane was a technological marvel on Klong -- on Jem, he reminded himself, as they were supposed to call it now. At least they were flying! The Greasy camp was hard to reach any other way. There were no cars on Jem, because no roads. Only a tracked vehicle could go very far, and even the Greasies did not have them to spare. Because, in their pigheaded way, the Greasies had camped ten kilometers from the nearest usable water, boats were out. You could fly there for this semi-summit meeting that was supposed to make everyone on Jem friends again. Or you could walk. And Dalehouse spared a thought of compassion for the poor, proud, pedestrian Peeps, who were no doubt doing just that somewhere below. So just to be flying was a triumph, although he wished Gappy had not brought up the subject of airsickness. It was not the motion that was bothering him as much as the food they had been eating. With twenty-two more mouths to feed, the old catch-as-catch-can meal style was down the drain. Unfortunately, the new people had brought their appetites, but they had forgotten to pack a chef to satisfy them. The food was unbearable. No one dared complain. The person who bitched would be the next cook. Still, the community was growing. The third resupply ship had brought a great deal. This sputtering little two-winged airplane, folded and stacked and foolish-looking, but demonstrably workable, because it was working. The little plutoniumpowered machines and instruments that had given Morrissey sensors to study the Creepies in their tunpels under ground and Dalehouse himself radios to pass on to Charlie. A new Argus orbiter to photograph clouds and help them predict the weather. Or at least to guess at it a little more accurately. It had even helped them in their attempts to make contact with sentients. Sort of. Charlie was delighted with his crossbow and his radio. Jim Morrissey had taken another tack. He had used the new power auger to make three widely spaced holes along a Creepy burrow. The end holes held soft charges of explosives, the center one a hose connected to the exhaust of the auger's little gasoline putt-putt. When Morrissey blew the charges he sealed both ends of that section of the tunnel, and the carbon monoxide caught four burrowers before they could dig away. By then they were no good for Dalehouse 's purposes any more, of course, but they were a joy to Morrissey. Even further marvels were on their, way. The third resupply had brought eight metric tons of equipment, but according to the tachtran messages the next would bring nearly fifty, plus maybe a hundred additional personnel. It would be a city! The summons to the meeting at the Fuel camp had not only been a welcome tour of Jem, it had been a reprieve from the tedium of erecting tents to receive the reinforcements. What the tachtran had failed to say was just what the reinforcements would be used for. They certainly needed any number of specialists they didn't have. A cook. A dentist. Some betterlooking women. A better translator -- Reminded, Dalehouse leaned back to see how Harriet was faring behind him. The translator was most uncomfortably curled up in a space no more than a meter square, and studded, at that, with bolts and levers that must have been tattooing Harriet's hips and ribs indelibly. If she had been anyone else Dalehouse would have thought of some friendly, commiserating remark. For Harriet he could find none. Her eyes were closed. Her expression registered resignation to the palpable injustice of being the smallest of the three of them, and thus the one to be squeezed into the tiny rear compartment. "Getting close," Kappelyushnikov bawled in his ear. Dalehouse leaned forward, rubbing at the glass as though the Jemman murk were on the inside, rather than all around. There was nothing but maroon cloud -- Then the stark white rim of the Heat Pole glittered through a break. And something else. The clouds themselves were clearly bright. As the biplane tunneled out of the last of the cloud bank they were leaving, Dalehouse saw the cause before him. "Jesus Christ!" cried Kappelyushnikov. "Have they no shame?" The light was the Oily cp. It stood out on the horizon like a bonfire, penetrating Jem's dour maroon murk with beacons, lighted windows, my God, Dalehouse marveled, even street lamps! It was no longer an expeditionary camp. It looked like a small town. The vertical beacon began to sweep across the biplane to acknowledge their approach -- then courteously away, so that they were not dazzled. Kappelyushnikov muttered inaudibly into his radio mouthpiece, listened for a moment and then began to circle. "What's the matter?" Dalehouse demanded. "Is nothing the matter, only we are no longer in hurry," said the pilot. "Peeps will be unavoidably one hour detained, so let us study this miracle before landing on it. " A miracle it very nearly was. There were only about forty people in the Greasy camp, but they seemed to have almost that many buildings. Buildings. Not tents or plastic huts; what had they made them out of? And what buildings! Some were barracks, some seemed individual bungalows. One looked more like a tenth-size copy of the Eiffel Tower than any structure one could live or work in. Another was a good twenty-five meters in length. And -- what was that curious shallow round pietaled cone on the far side of the camp? It seemed to be constructed of bent strips of shiny metal arrayed around a central black cylinder. Could it be a solar generator? If so, it was almost megawatt size! And -- that stubby tower with the horizontally rotating fan. Wasn't that the exhaust from an air condiiionerl it Over the rattles and groans that came from his Krinpit escort, Ahmed EHilla heard a sputtering distant sound. "Put me down. Wait. Try to be quiet," he called peevishly in the mixture of Urdu and their own language that made communication possible between them. Or sometimes did. He lowered himself from the litter in which they had been carrying him and climbed onto a knee of a many-tree, pushing aside the pinkly glowing fronds to stare around the sky. A tiny two-winged aircraft was chuttering along just below cloud level. "So. Another triumph of technology arrives," he said. The Krinpit, Joim-fteet, rearer' back to study. him more carefully, its stubby claws waving. "Your meaning is not loud," it rattled. "No matter. Let us move on.' Dulla was in no mood for a nice chat with grossly hypertrophied bugs, however useful they were being to him. "Go, carry the litter and my bag, I will walk," he ordered. "It is too steep here for riding." They were climbing from the shallow valley of the river now, up through the last of the forested slopes onto the dry highlands. The vegetation began to change from many-trees and ferns to things like succulents, stubby barrels with glowing bright-red luminous buttons. Dulla looked at them all with distaste. Study the plants, find new products, it is in this way that my fathers became independent of the machines of the outside world. So Feng Hua-tse had advised before he left; but Dulla was an astrophysicist, not a herbal healer, and he had no intention of following the fool's instructions. There was no overhang between him and the sky now and he could see the little biplane circling, far off toward the bright white line of the Heat Pole. So. The Greasies had their helicopter, the Fats now had a plane, and what did the representative of the People's Republic have to take him to his meeting? A litter, carried by animals that looked like squashed crustaceans. Dulla fumed. If Feng had listened to him, they would have insisted that the threeparty meeting be held at their own camp. So they would have been spared this humiliation of arriving on a plastic frame carried by creatures out of some children's nonsense fable -- if not the humiliation of exposing to the Fats and the Oilies the meanness of their encampment. What a disaster! And all Feng's fault. Or Heir-of-Mao's; the expedition should have been properly supplied and reinforced in the first place, but leave it to the Chinamen to hoard coppers to the ruination of the project. Without warning the Krinpit stopped and Dulla, lost in his thoughts, almost tripped over them. "What, what?" he complained. "Why are you standing here?" "A very loud thing moves quickly," rattled Jorm-fteet. "I do not hear anything." But now that he was awakened from his reverie he did see something, a swell of dust behind the hills. As he watched, a machine topped the rise, coming toward him. It was still a kilometer away, but it looked like a halftrack. "Another triumph of conspicuous waste," sneered Dulla. "How dare they come for me, as though I could not make the journey by myself?" The Krinpit rattled inquiringly, and he added, "Never mind. Put down the litter, I will carry my knapsack myself now. Hide yourselves. I do not want the Greasies to see you." But the words conveyed no meaning to the Krinpit. A Krinpit could never hide from another Krinpit as long as they were close enough to hear each other. Dulla struggled to explain: "Go back to the place behind the hill. The Fats will not hear you there. I will return in the space it took us to come up from the river." He was not sure they understood that, either. The Krinpit had a clear sense of time, but the vocabulary of terms to mark its units did not map well from one language, based on a diurnal cycle, to another which had evolved on a planet without easy temporal reference points. But they lurched away obediently and Dulla walked steadily toward the approaching halftrack. The driver was a Kuwaiti, apparently a translator, because he greeted Dulla in flawless Urdu. "Would you like a lift?" he called. "Jump in!" "You are very courteous," smiled Dulla. "Indeed, it is a little warm for strolling today." But it was not courtesy at all, he fumed internally, it was only more of their darhnable arrogance! Ahmed Dulla was quite sure that he was the only person on Jem whose native language was Urdu, and here the Greasies had made sure they had someone who could speak to him! As though he himself were not already proficient in four other languages! The time would come, he promised himself, when he would humble their swinish ostentation. So he rode up over the gullied hills toward the Greasy camp, chatting amiably with the Kuwaiti, remarking politely on the fine appearance of their camp, his face smiling and his heart swelling with rage.  The official host for the meeting was named Chesley Pontrefact, London-born but not of native roots that went many generations back. His skin was purplish-brown and his hair white wool. Coded tachtran messages had given Dulla a good deal of background on every member of the Greasy expeditions, as well as the Fats, and he knew that Pontrefact was an Air Vice Marshal and nominal commander of the Greasy expedition. But he also knew that real power belonged to one of the civilians from Saudi Arabia. Pontrefact bustled about the long conference table (wood! shipped all the way from Earth!), offering drinks and smokes. "Brandy do you. Dr. Dalehouse?" he inquired solicitously. "And perhaps a Coca-Cola for you, sir?" I'm afraid we don't have orange juice, but at least there's ice. " "Nothing, please, " said Dulla, seething. Ice! "I suggest we begin our meeting, if that is convenient." "Certainly, Dr. Dulla." Pontrefact sat down heavily at the head of the table and glanced inquiringly around. "Mind if I take the chair. Just for form's sake?" Dulla watched to see if anyone from the Fats was going to object, and spoke a split-second before they did. "Not at all. Marshal Pontrefact." he said warmly. "We are your guests." But one should show courtesy to guests, and what was this seating arrangment but a deliberate insult? Pontrefact at the head, two of his associates at the foot, the Kuwaiti translator and a woman who could be no one but the Saudi civilian who was the Greasies' decision-maker. On one side of the table were all three of the Fats, Dalehouse, their Russian pilot and their own translator; and on the other -- only himself. How much more deliberately could they point out that he was alone and insignificant? He added diffidently, "Since we are all conversant, I believe, with English, perhaps we can dispense with the translators. It is an old saying of my people that the success of a conference is inversely proportional to the square of the number of participants." Quickly, "I shall stay," said the Fats translator. Pontrefact raised his white-caterpillar eyebrows but said nothing; Dulla shrugged politely and gazed toward the chair, waiting for the proceedings to begin. The Saudi whispered to the interpreter at some length. Across the table, Dalehouse hesitated, then got up to reach across the table. "Good to see you looking fit, Ahmed," he said. Dulla touched his hand minimally. "Thank you." And, grudgingly, "And thank you for assisting in returning me to my own camp. I have not had a chance to express my gratitude since." "Glad to help. Anyway, it's good to see someone from your expedition -- we don't see many of you, you know." Dulla glared. Then, stiffly, "I have come a long way for this meeting. Can we not begin?" "Oh, hell," said Pontrefact from the head of the table. "Look, mates. The whole reason for this meeting is to try to work together better. We know what a balls-up our masters have made of Home. Shall we see if we can do a bit better here?" Dulla said happily, "Please limit your observations to your own people." It was as he had suspected, the Greasies were going to insult everyone but themselves. Let this West Indian whose grandfather was a ticket-collector on the London Underground make a fool of himself, if he chose. Not of the People's Republics. "But I'm in dead earnest. Dr. Dulla. We invited you here because it's clear we are all working at cross purposes. Your own camp is in serious trouble, and we all know it. The Food people and our own lot are a bit better off, yes. But you don't have a proper doctor, do you. Dr. Dalehouse? Not to mention a few other things. And we can't be expected -- That is, we don't have limitless resources eithet. Under the U.N. resolution we are ail supposed to cooperate and divide the responsibilities. Particularly the science. We undertook the geology, and you can't say we haven't played fair about that. We've done a great deal . ' ' "Indeed so," put in Kappelyushnikov blandly. "Is pure coincidence that most is in personal vicinity and relates primarily to fissionables and to salt domes." "That is, to petroleum," Dulla agreed. "Yes, I think we are all aware of tharr'Marshal Pontrefact." How thoughtful of the Fats and the Greasies to begin quarreling among themselves so soon! "Be that as it may," the chairman went on doggedly. "There's a hell of a lot to be done here and we can't do it all. Astronomy, for instance. We did orbit a satellite observatory, but as I am sure you know -- it ran into malfunctions. Let me show you something." He got up and moved to a likris screen on the wall. When he had fiddled with it for a moment the crystals sprang into vari-colpred light showing some sort of graph. "You've seen our solar generator. This shows the solar input for our power-plant. As you see, there are spikes in the curve. This may not seem important to you, but our generator is a precision instrument. It isn't going to do its job properly if the solar constant isn't, well, constant." Dulla stared in black envy at the graph. That was what he was here for, aftef all, because he was a specialist in stellar studies! He hardly noticed when Dalehouse put in, "If Kung is acting up, it may mean more to us than a few wiggles in your power supply." Pontrefact nodded. "Of course it may. We notified this to Herstmonceux-Greenwich with a copy of the tape. They're quite upset about it. Kung may be a variable star. ' ' "Hardly," sneered Dulla. "It is known that a few flares are possible. " "But it is not known how many, or how big; and that's exactly what we need to know. What, if I may say, we confidently expected to know from the astronomical researches that were meant to be conducted by your expedition. Dr. Dulla." Dulla exploded, "But this is too much! How can one practice as-trophysics when one is hungry? And whose fault is that?" "Certainly not ours, old chap," Pontrefact said indignantly. "But someone blew up our ships, old chap. Someone killed thirty-four citizens of the People's Republics, old chap!" "But that was -- " Pontrefact stopped the sentence in mid-syllable. He made a visible effort to control his temper. "Be that as it may," he got out again, "the plain fact is the work's got to be done and someone's got to do it. You have the instruments, and we don't, at least not until proper telescopes arrive from Earth. We have the manpower, and you evidently don't." "I beg your pardon. Allow me to inform you of my academic standing. I am director of the Planetology Institute at Zulkifar Ali Bhutto University and have graduate degrees in astrophysics from -- " "But no one's disputing your degrees, dear, man, only your fitness to function. Let us send our own astronomer over. Better still, let Boyne airlift your equipment here, where there's better seeing -- " "Certainly not! Not either!" "I really don't think that's quite fair, do you? We've certainly cooperated in providing food, for instance -- " "Such food! For your people, not for ours; all flour, hardly any rice. " Dalehouse said placatingly, "We'll turn up some rice for you, if that's what you like." "How gracious of you!" Dulla sneered. "Now, wait a minute, Dulla. We've done our best for you -- and we have a couple of complaints of our own, if you want to know. Like shooting at me!" Dulla grimaced. "That was only Hua-tse's foolishness with fireworks. The People's Republics have already expressed their regrets." "To whom? The dead balloonists?" "Yes," sneered Dulla, with exaggerated hurnility, "of course, it is so, we do apologize to your close friends, the comic gasbags. And to ' yours too, sir, the vermin that dig in the earth whom you find so useful!" "If you mean the Creeps," said Pontrefact, his control of his temper wearing thin, "at least we don't use them as litter bearers." "No! You use them to help exploit the mineral riches! Is it not true that there has been radiation disease among them?" "No, it isn't! At least, not here. We did use a few to dig samples for us in other areas, and, yes, they did encounter some radiation, but I must say that I resent the imputation that we are exploiting the natives." "Oh, I am sure you would not do that. Marshal Pontrefact, especially as your own ancestors must have experienced so much of that from the other side, as it were." "Now, look here, Dulla!" But Pontrefact was interrupted by the Saudi woman, who said: "I think we should recess for lunch. We have much to discuss, and shouting at each other will not help. Let's resolve to try to do better in the afternoon."  Thirty meters below the airstrip, Mother dr'Shee woke with the smell of cyanide in her splayed nose, too faint to be dangerous, too strong to ignore. The Shelled Devils were at it again. She yipped peremptorily for the brood-member on duty. It turned out to be t'Weechr, the runt of the litter and the one the others saddled with the least attractive jobs -- including, she realized justly, attending to the wants of the Mother when she first woke up. There were only seven in this present brood of hers, and all of them male, and none of them the size, or the strength, or the wit of their father. It was a loose and unsettling time, and it spoiled her temper. "Food," she ordered harshly. "And drink. And someone to groom me while I am waiting. " t'Weechr said humbly, "There is no one but me. Brood Mother. I will be quick with the food, and groom you while you eat." "And why is there no one?" "The New Devils are teaching. Brood Mother. All are commanded to be present. " "Tssheee." If dr'Shee had been ' a human, the sound would have been a grunt, written "Humph" for convenience's sake. But .she was not actually displeased, merely fretful; and when t'Weechr returned it was not only with tubers, and a shell of water, but there were even some fresh leaves and fruits from Above. "Taken or given?" She demanded, sniffing them suspiciously. "These were gifts of the New Devils, Brood Mother," the youth apologized. "Tssheee." They were, however, tasty, and she was hungry. She defecated neatly into the shell when she was finished, and t'Weechr folded it closed. "Is there any other service, Brood Mother?" he asked, licking a final strand of her fur into neatness. "No. Be gone." He touched noses and wriggled away to deliver the package to the rotting rooms. The next brood would mix it with the planting mud, and plaster it into The ceilings of the farm tunnels when they prepared the next crops. By then it would be well aged, and of great value in growing the tubers. Runt or not, t'Weechr was a good child. She would miss him when the litter matured and scattered. And that time was not far off. At every awakening now her dugs had been smaller and harder. The breeding males knew it, and every time she left her nest they wriggled close to touch her, noseto-anus, testing to see how near she was to courtship. Only yesterday the male with the scarred leg had said, half jesting, "What would you like next time, dr'Shee? Krinpit shell? A live Flying Devil? The Head of a New Devil?" "Your own head," she had said, half irritated, half flirtatious. He had snorted laughter through the spreading folds of his nose and crept away, but he would be back. It was not an unpleasing thought. dr'Shee's brood-sister had mated with that one, two litters ago. A fine brood, three females! And the sister had said he was indefatigable at rut. Well. A proper courtship was a proper courtship, but she could not help hoping that he might turn out to be the male with the finest gift to lay before her. Faint and distant vibrations in the earth set her whiskers to quivering. That was the New Devils, too. Time was when such tremors had meant only a particularly violent thunderstorm Above, or perhaps the crash of a falling many-tree. Now the New Devils scraped and shoved hillocks and boulders around at will, and the earth was no longer easy to her senses. As she moved around her chamber, sniffing and touching to make sure everything was in its place, it was touch and smell and taste that principally guided her. Sometimes her males had plastered bits of fungus and vegetation into the walls, along with the secretions that made their tunnel walls hard and water-proof, and from the plant decay there was some faint glow. dr'Shee appreciated the light, but did not need it. For her people eyes were almost a handicap, especially on their infrequent dashes to the surface, when only the densest of cloud and worst of storms dimmed Kung's radiance enough for them to bear. "Greeting, dr'Shee." She sniffed in startlement, and then recognized the female at the entrance to her chamber. "How are you, qr'Tshew? Come in, come in." The other female entered, and dr'Shee said at once, "I will send for food. " "I have eaten," said qrTshew politely. "What lovely courtship gifts." She fondled dr'Tshee's collection. Six breedings, six fine gifts: a hard thing stolen from the New Devils that no one understood, the leg of a crabrat -- that had been her first gift, and the least worthy, but in some way the most satisfying of her courtship gifts. Even the claws of a balloonist. Every one had been stolen from the Surface itself, at great risk, and delivered to her at a cost. Few males survived more than two or three mad, half-blinded dashes to the Surface to steal courtship gifts. The enemies were everywhere. Manners satisfied, qrTshew came to the point. "The father of my last brood has died of a bad breathing," she said. "Also three young of other mothers. " "What a pity," said dr'Shee. She was not referring to the male, of course, once a male had achieved breeding he was done, for that female. But to have young die of the cyanide gas! "I fear for our way of life," said qrTshew primly. "Since the New Devils came, our litters have not been the same." "I have had the same thought," dr'Shee admitted. "I have spoken of it to my sisters. " "And I to mine, and I and my sisters have thought something we wish to share. Our young are being taught things by the New Devils. dr'Shee, shouldn't we mothers learn what the litters are learning?" "But they are learning ways of bringing death! You and I are mothers qrTshew!" dr'Shee was shocked. "The Krinpit bring death to us, do they not? The broods in the upper galleries have blocked off the tunnels where the bad air came from, but Is it not certain that the Shelled Devils will break through again and more bad air will come?" "I cannot bring death, except of course for food." "Then let us eat them, shells and all," said qrTshew grimly. "Touch closely, dr'Shee. There is a story -- " She hesitated. "I do not know how true it is. It came from a Krinpit, and might as well have come from a Flying Devil." That was an old saying to indicate dubiousness, but in this case, dr'Shee realized, it was actually true. "This Shelled Devil taunted one of my sister's brood by saying that New Devils had destroyed an entire city of our race. He said the New Devils thought of us as vermin, and would not rest until we are all gone. That is why they have given the Krinpit the bad air." "But the New Devils are teaching our litters how to destroy Krinpit." "The next part of the story is puzzling, but I think it is so. The Shelled Devil says that there are three kinds of New Devils. One kind destroyed the city. Another kind gave them the bad air with which they harm us here. And the kind that teaches our litters is a third kind. They have destroyed Flying Devils and Krinpit, as well as persons of the two other kinds of their own race. But they do not destroy us. " dr'Shee thrashed her long, supple body in agitation. "But that is not true!" she cried. "They have taken several litters from their classes to some other place, and only a few have returned. And they have been weak and slow, and speak of their brood-mates dying!" "My sisters and I have heard this also," agreed qr'Tshew. "Tsshee!" The petaled folds of dr'Shee 's nose were rippling furiously. "It feels," she said at length, "as though the teaching of bringing death is not a bad thing. If we bring death to the Krinpit, then they will not be able to bring more bad air to us. If we help our New Devils to bring death to the others, then they will not be able to aid the Krinpit or the Flying Devils against us. " "I have had this same thought, dr'Shee." "I have a further thought, qrTshew. Once we have brought death to these others, perhaps we can then bring death to our own New Devils." "And then our litters will be ours again, dr'Shee!" "And our burrows will be safe and dark. Yes! Do not go away, qrTshew. I will summon t'Weechr and he will begin to teach us these lessons!" Even in Jem's favorable conditions, air denser, gravity less than Earth, there was a peremptory equation of lift. Danny Dalehouse could carry what he could carry, and there was an end to it. To carry any of Dalehouse's gifts meant sacrificing ballast and therefore mobility. To carry them all was impossible. When Dalehouse scolded him for giving the crossbow to a flockmate -- at a time when the ha 'aye ' i seemed everywhere ! -- Charley sang placatingly, "But I must keep the speaker-to-air! I cannot have both, cannot have both." "And if you are killed by a ha 'aye 'i, what good will the radio do you?" But Charley didn't even seem to understand the question. He and the flock were singing a sort of rhapsody about the speaker-to-air and how it enriched their chorus, and Dalehouse abandoned the effort. Charley's possession of the radio wasn't all good. It meant that Dalehouse could really keep in contact with the flock from the ground, as long as they stayed in line of sight or somewhere near it, and that fact had not escaped Major Santangelo, the new camp commandant. It was getting harder to escape into the air. At the same time, it was getting less attractive to stay in the camp. Santangelo had established command at once. He had proved it by sending Harriet and Alex Woodring off to try to make contact with a distant tribe of burrowers, uncontaminated, they hoped, by contact with the Greasies. And the camp was being run on increasingly strict military lines. Dalehouse broke through the flock's song. "I must return. Four more flocks of our people are joining us and I wish to be there when they arrive." "We will come with you, we will come with you -- " "No, you won't," he contradicted. "Too many ha 'aye 'i near the camp." That was the truth, and that, too, was a consequence of the "gifts" he had given them. Since the Oilies had found out that Santangelo 's "scientific instruments" were being used by the balloonists to keep tabs on what was going on in their camp they had taken to shooting down every balloonist that came within a kilometer of them. So balloonists were growing locally scarce, and the predators were getting hungry. "Fly by the Wet Valleys," he commanded. "Leam if our people are well there." "No need," sang Charley. "See the wings of your friend Ha'y coming from there even now!" And back behind the shoreline there it was, Cappy's little biplane coming back from visiting the outpost, circling in for a landing. "Then good-bye," sang Dalehouse, and expertly vented hydrogen until he came down to the level of the on-shore winds that carried him back to the camp. He was getting really good at ballooning, and he was smiling as he drifted down over the commandant's pet project, the little mud fort on the shore, and dropped to earth on the first bluff. He gathered up the deflated balloons, slung their loose netted bulk over his shoulder and walked happily enough up to the hydrogen shed. That was the end of happiness. Half the camp was gathered around Kappelyushnikov and Santangelo, farther up the hill. Jim Morrissey and a half dozen others were coming toward him, their faces grim. Dalehouse caught Morrissey's arm as he passed. "What's the matter?" he demanded. Morrissey paused. "Trouble, Danny. Something's happened to the out-camp. Harriet, Woodring, Dugarchenko -- they're missing. Cappy says the camps 's been ripped apart, and they're gone." "Harriet?" "All of them, damn it! And there's blood and Krinpit tracks all over the place. Let go, we've got to get down to Castle Santangelo -- in case they invade by sea, I guess. Anyway, you'd better get up there and see what your orders are." Orders! How like an Army officer to over-react and start issuing orders in all directions! Dalehouse let them go past and walked belligerently up to the group around Santangelo and the pilot. Someone was saying, " -- I didn't know there were any Krinpit in the Wet Valleys. " "If you were in Beverly Hills you wouldn't know there were any rattlesnakes in California, either, but if you wandered around Hollywood Hills they'd bite your ass off. That's enough for arguing," the major said. "Those of you with assigned defense posts, get to them. We've got four ships coming in in the next twenty hours. It'd be a good time for anybody to catch us off guard, and we're not going to be caught. Move it!" Dalehouse, who had been given no assigned defense post, was not anxious to get one. He moved away briskly with the others as the group broke up, circling around the outskirts to approach the communications shack. Inside, the comm team on duty was watching a continually shifting display of moving symbols against a green grid of coordinate lines: the four resupply ships, already in orbit around Jem, were making their final course corrections before dropping down to the surface. Dalehouse had expected Kappelyushnikov to show up there and he did, moments after Daleliouse himself. "Ah, Danny," he said dismally, "you have good taste for finding nice place to fuck off. Wait one while I see if asshole traffic controller has accidentally got ships in right orbit." He peered into the screen, grumbled at the crew on duty, then shrugged and returned to Dalehouse. "Is on course," he reported. "Now question is, is course right? We find out. Poor Gasha!" "Are you sure she's dead?" "Have not seen corpus delicti, no. But, Danny, there was very much blood, two liters at least." "But you didn't see the bodies." '.'No, Danny, did not. Saw blood. Saw tents chopjjed up to fine Venetian lace, clothes all over, food, radio smashed, little scratchy bug-tracks everywhere I looked. No" twdies. So I yelled some, listened, poked into bushes. Then came home. So poor Gasha, not to mention poor Alexei and poor Gregor. ' ' Danny shook his head wonderingly. "The Krinpit are damn noisy beasts. I don't see, how they could catch the camp by surprise, and if they weren't surprised they should've been able to take care of themselves. Santangelo made them carry guns. " Kappelyushnikov shrugged. "You want to, I fly you there and you study scene of crime for yourself. Right now, excuse. First ship is about to come out of orbit and I must keep controller up to personal high standard of accuracy."  Half the personnel in the first ship were a combat team -- a fact which would have come as a distinctly unpleasant shock to Dalehouse at one time, but now seemed less so. While still in orbit, the Vietnamese colonel commanding them had been briefed by radio; the squad formed up outside the ship as they debarked, and immediately drew weapons and trotted to reinforce the perimeter guards. The second ship was also mostly military, but among them was a face Dalehouse recognized. It took him a mopient to make the connection, but then it was clear; the Bulgarian girl who had interceded for him and Marge Menninger in Sofia. He called to her and waved; she looked startled, then smiled, rather attractively, he thought, and called a greeting. That was as far as it went just then. By then the new colonel had conferred with Major Santangelo, and the whole camp was mobilized. The Vietnamese -- his name was Tree -- s:ommandeered Kappelyushnikov and the airplane, and they were gone for more than two hours, orbiting the camp in widening circles, first at high altitude, then nearly brushing the tops of the trees. All the tents had to come down. By the time the third rocket landed the tents were up again, now lined up six to a row, four rows paralleling each other, in what had become a company street. At each comer of the encampment pits were dug, and out of the third ship came machine-guns and flamethrowers to go into them, while the few rankless nonspecialists who had not been tapped for unloading, tent detail or pit digging had been set to pounding steel stakes into the ground ten meters outside the limits of the camp. Among the third ship's cargo was two huge reels of barbed wire, and by the time the last ship began its drop they had been strung along the stakes.  For once the Jemman skies were almost clear as the fourth ship came into sight, high over the far horizon of the ocean-like. First there was a broad, bright meteoritic splash of light as the ablative entry shields soaked up the worst of the excess energy and spilled it away in incandescent shards. Then the ship itself was in naked-eye vision, falling free for a moment. A quick blue-white jet flare made a course correction. Then the trigger parachute came free, pulling the three main chutes after it. The ship seemed to hang almost motionless in the ruddy air, but slowly, slowly it grew larger until it was almost overhead, two hundred meters up. Then the chutes were jettisoned and the ship lowered itself on its blinding, ear-destroying rockets to the beach. Dalehouse had seen, he counted, five of those landings now, not counting the one he himself had been in. They were all almost miraculous to watch. And they were all different. The ships themselves were different. Of the new four, only one was the tall, silver shape of his own ship. The other three were squat double cones, ten meters from rounded top to rounded bottom as they crouched on their landing struts, nearly twenty meters across at their widest. The first person out of the ship was Marge Menninger. It was not a surprise. The surprising part was that she hadn't come earlier. Dalehouse realized he had been half expecting her on every ship that landed. She looked tired, disheveled, and harried, and obviously she had been sleeping in her olive-drab fatigues for all of the transit-time week. But she also looked pretty good to Dalehouse. The female members of the Food Bloc party had not been chosen for their sexuality. Apart from a rare occasional grapple with someone he didn't really like very much -- sometimes impelled by tickling one of the balloonists into parting with a few sprays of joy-juice, sometimes by nothing more than boredom -- Dalehouse 's sex life had been sparse, joyless and dull. Margie reminded him of better times. Margie had also come up in the world since Sofia; the insignia on her collar tabs were no longer captain's bars but full colonel's eagles, and as she moved aside to let the rest of the troops debark. Colonel Tree and Major Santangelo were already beginning to report to her. She listened attentively, while her eyes were taking inventory of the camp, the defense perimeter and the progress of the debarkation. Then she began speaking in short, quick sentences. Dalehouse was not close enough to hear the words, but there was no doubt that the sentences were orders. Tree argued about something. Good-humoredly, Margie slipped her arm around his shoulder while she answered, then patted his bottom as he moved off, scowling, to do as he was told. She and Santangelo moved up toward the command center, still talking; and Dalehouse began to revise his notions of what to expect from seeing Margie Menninger again. But as they approached where he was standing she caught sight of him and threw out her arms. "Hey, Dan! Beautiful to see you!" She kissed him enthusiastically. "You're looking real fine, you know? Or as close to fine as you can in this light." "You, too," he said. "And congratulations." "On what, being here? Oh, you mean the eagles. Well, they had to give me that to handle Guy Tree. Dimitrova ought to be around somewhere, have you seen her? Now if we could only get the Pak to come for a visit we could all have a nice time talking over good old days in the Bulgarian slammer." "Colonel Menninger -- " "All right. Major, I'm coming. Stay loose. Dan. We've got catching up to do. " He stared after her. In the old Rotsy days in college, before he had dropped out as it became clear that nobody would ever need to fight wars any more, colonels had seemed quite different. It wasn't Just that she was female. And pretty. And young. Colonels seemed to have more on their minds than Margie Menninger did -- especially colonels coming into a situation where the panic button had been sorecently pressed.  "Hello, Dr. Dalehouse," came Ana Dimitrova's voice. "Mr. Kappelyushnikov said you'd be here. Rappelyushnikov said you'd be. But I must confess I was not sure he was in earnest." Dalehouse opened his eyes and sat up as Cappy and the girl stooped through the entrance to the shed. The pilot's expression made it clear that, whatever he had told the girl, he had hoped there would be no one there, but he rallied and said, "Ah, Anyushka, you must learn to trust me. Here is old friend to see you, Danny. " Dalehouse accepted the formal handshake she offered. She had a nice smile, he observed. In fact, if she had not chosen to wear her hair pulled severely back and avoid the use of makeup she could have been quite attractive. "I was hoping to get a chance to talk to you. Miss Dimitrova. " "Heavens, Ana, please. Old cell-mates must not be formal with each other." "But on the other hand," said the pilot, "must not impose on dear Danny, who is no doubt hungry and must get to mess-hall at once or risk missing excellent dog-meat-andslime meal." "Nice try, Cappy," Dalehouse acknowledged. "No, I'm not hungry. How are things on Earth, Ana? I've just been hearing some bad stories." Her expression clouded. "If the stories you have heard have been violence and disaster, then, yes. that is how things are. Just before we left, television news spoke of martial law in the city of Los Angeles, and also in several cities of Europ)e. And there was some sinking of an Australian naval vessel off the coast of Peru." "Dear God. " "Oh, there is much more than that. Dr. Dalehouse -- Dan. But we have brought all the recent newspapers, as well as tapes of television programs -- it is really quite an extensive library, I understand. I believe there are more than twenty thousand books in microfiche, at Colonel Menninger's express orders." ' 'T wenty thousand books ? ' ' Dalehouse shook his head. "You know, I never thought of her as a reader. ' ' Ana smiled and sat eross-legged on the floor before him. "Please, let us be comfortable. I too am sometimes astonished at Colonel Menninger. " She hesitated, then said, "She is not, however, always to be relied on. I had expected some time to consult with my government before coming here, on her promise. But it did not happen. None of us were allowed to leave the camp until we were flown to the launching point. Perhaps it was because she did not want to risk exposing us to the unstable conditions we might have found." "As bad as that?" "Worse," growled Kappelyushnikov. "You see, Danny? We should be grateful to be here on safe tropical-paradise planet like Jem, where only once in a while isolated party gets wiped out by giant cockroaches." "That's another thing," said Danny. "Marge Menninger doesn't seem particularly worried, after the flap yesterday. " "No reason to worry, dear Danny. I and little Vietnamese colonel have scoured every centimeter from ten klicks in all directions, using magnetometer, I-R scanners and good piloting eyes. Is no metal thing bigger than breadbasket anywhere around, I promise, and not more than three, maybe six, creatures larger than crab-rat. So sleep safely tonight, Danny. In own bed," he added pointedly, and did not need to add "soon." Nan was quicker than he. "That is good advice, Cappy," she said, standing up. "I think I will take it for myself. ' ' "I will escort you," rumbled Kappelyushnikov. "No, do not disturb self, Danny, I see you are quite tired." Ana sighed. "Gospodin Kappelyushnikov," she scolded, "apart from the fact that I am tired and quite disoriented from all these new experiences, you and I have barely met. I do hope that we will be friends. Please don't make that difficult by behaving like some Cossack with a peasant maid." Cappy looked abashed, then angry. Then he grinned. "Anyushka, you are fine Slavic girl. Yes, we will be friends at once. Later on, perhaps more -- but," he added hastily, "only in proper Soviet style, no premature touching, all right? Now let us all three stroll through pleasant Jemman murk to your tent. " Ana laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Russian bear! Come, then." She led the way outside and stood for a moment, glancing around at the quieting camp. The floodlights that marked official "day" were out, but Kung was clear and ruddy in the sky overhead. "I do not know if I can get used to a world where it is never night," she complained. "Is severe handicap for certain purposes, yes," Kappelyushikov agreed. They climbed the bluff and walked along it toward the female tent area. At the very edge, surrounded by a border of rounded stones in lieu of a lawn, was a larger tent then the others. It already had a flat rock before it stenciled Col. M. Menninger, Commanding . "Margie's doing herself well," Dalehouse commented. "Is privilege of rank," said Kappelyushnikov, but he was staring down the beach at the four new ships, one tall and slim, three squat, resting on their landing struts. "That's strange, isn't it?" Dalehouse said. "Those three are quite unlike the others." Cappy glanced at him. "You are truly observant, Danny." But his tone was strange. "All right, Cappy. What's the secret?" "Secret? Simple pilot is not told secrets. But I have eyes, and I can make conjectures." "Come on, Cappy. You're going to tell us your conjecture sooner or later, why not do it now?" "Two conjectures," he corrected. "First, observe shape of three new spacecraft. Imagine sliced in half, forming two little cones each. Then imagine all six cones set on base around perimeter of camp and those long, narrow ports that are so unnecessary for navigation of space removed. What have we then?" "Upside-down cones with long narrow parts," Dalehouse guessed. "Yes, exactly. Only when installed on defense perimeter we have other name for them. We call them 'machine-gun emplacements.' " He sighed. "I think is triumph of two-faced engineering design, not accident, that this is so. " "But one can scarcely believe that," objected Ana. "This is, after all, a peaceable exploration party, not an invacing army!" "Yes, also exactly. Is only coincidence that so many members of peaceable exploration party are also soldiers." Both Dalehouse and the girl were silent, studying the landed spaceships. "I would like not to believe you," said Ana at last. "But perhaps -- " "Wait a minute!" Dalehouse interrupted. "Those three ships -- they don't have any return stage! That's why they're so short!" Kappelyushnikov nodded. "And that is second conjecture," he added heavily. "Only is not really conjecture. Library of twenty thousand books is not light reading for weekend. Space-craft that come apart to make forts are not for round trip. Vessels without return capsule capability are not accident. Total of sum is clear. For many of us, is not intended we ever go back to dear old planet Earth."  Getting into the Jemman sky again the next day was a victory for Dalehouse, and he did not know how many more of those victories he would have. The day had begun unpromisingly. As soon as the "morning" lights were on he found a mini-memo on the bench inside his tent door to let him know that, as from # hours that standard day, he was to consider himself under military discipline with the assimilated rank of captain. On the way to breakfast he had passed an orderly carrying two covered trays into Margie's tent. An orderly! Not even the late Harriet Santori had gone that far. And on the way back past the tent, the Vietnamese colonel had been coming out. Who Marge Menninger kept in her bed was no concern of his, and all this other military MickeyMouse was irrelevant to his purpose on Jem. All the same, Dalehouse was not enjoying his flight as much as usual that day. For one thing, Charlie and his flock were nowhere around -- partly because Major Santangelo had insisted they overfly some of the other parts of Jem to bring back intelligence. Mostly because Dalehouse himself was reluctant to have them there, with so many ha 'aye 'i waiting in the clouds to prey on them. At least he had insisted they stay a full two kilometers away from the Greasy camp; maybe that was enough for safety. Meanwhile, Dalehouse had his lightweight carbine with him, and he was hoping to take out at least a couple of the ha 'aye 'i before Charlie drifted back. TTiere was already one balloonist in the camp as a sort of combination convalescent and pet, waiting for his ha'aye'i-ripped gasbag to mend enough for flight. Dalehouse didn't want Charlie to join him. Trying to look appetizing, he drifted under the base of a low cumulus-humilis. It was exactly the sort of place the air-sharks chose for hiding. But if there was one in the cloud it wasn't hungry just then. He vented gas and dropped away from the cloud as the updraft began to suck him toward it; if there were ha 'aye 'i, he wanted to meet them in clear air, not where they could be upon him before he could shoot. A return flow carried him back toward the camp, and he looked down from half a kilometer on a busy scene. About twenty people were still unloading the new ships. Others were clearing brush and forest to widen the perimeter around the camp, and up past the camp, toward the hills, in a natural meadow of thornbearing ground vines, a tiny tractor was plowing furrows. That was new! The tractor must have come out of one of the ships, and the furrows looked exactly as though someone was planning to farm. That was reasonable enough, and even good news -- certainly they could use fresh vegetables, and if the Greasies could grow them so could the Fats. But something about it troubled Dalehouse. He couldn't put his finger on it; something about using soldiers to farm? Forced labor on land? He dismissed the thought; he was getting too low. He vented some ballast, and the water sluiced down on the newly plowed land like a toy-scaled rain shower. The thing that was tickling his memory was beginning to be annoying. For some reason, it reminded him of his undergraduate anthropology professor, a gentle and undemanding man a lot like Alex Woodring -- Like Alex Woodring, who was dead. Along with Gasha and the Bulgarian corporal he had never really come to know. He was having nothing but depressing thoughts. His reserves of hydrogen and ballast were getting a little low, and evidently the ha'aye'i had learned to distinguish between a balloonist and a human being swinging from a netted cluster of bags . They were not tricked this day. Reluctantly he swung back over the beach, vented gas and dropped to the pebbly sand. By the time he had picked up and stowed the deflated balloons, Margie Menninger was approaching, along with the woman sergeant who was her orderly. "Nice flying, Danny," she said. "Looks like fun. Will you take me up with you sometime?" He stood regarding her for a moment. She really looked very pretty, even in the maroon Kunglight that darkened her lips and hid the gold of her hair. Her fatigues were new and sharply pressed and her short hair-do flopped becomingly as she moved. "Any time you say. Marge. Or is it 'colonel'?" She laughed. "All you brand-new officers are the same, very rank conscious. We're off duty right now, Danny, so it's Marge. You'll learn." "I'm not sure I want to leant how to be a soldier." "Oh, you'll catch on," she promised. "Tinka, take the point. Let's go for a walk, shall we?" The sergeant moved out ahead of them, trotting to the barbed-wire enclosure. The troops in the pit at the comer lifted a section of the wire aside so the three of them could pass through; the sergeant in charge gave Margie a soft salute and she nodded pleasantly back. "If a person went swimming in this water," she said, "would she find herself being eaten up by something?" "Not so far. We do it all the time." "Lxioks pretty tempting. Care to join me.?" Dalehouse shook his head, not in negation but in wonder. "Margie, you're something. I thought colonels had to keep busy, especially when they think their troops need armed guards and barbed-wire fences day and night." "Dear Danny," she said goodnaturedly, "I haven't been a colonel very long, but I taught the Theory of it to a couple thousand plebes at the Point. I think I have a pretty good grasp of the basic principles. A colonel doesn't have to do much, she just has to see that everybody else gets everything done. I already put in four hours of pretty solid work this morning." "Yes, I saw Colonel Tree coming out of your tent." She looked at him thoughtfully. She didn't comment, but went on, "As to your other point, the perimeter watch is s.o.p. from now on, but there are patrols in the woods, and aerial reconnaissance every hour, and besides, Tinka's a qualified expert with all hand weapons. I think you'll be all right." "I wasn't worried about my personal safety." "No, you weren't. You were worried about the troops under my command, and on their behalf I thank you for your concern." She grinned and patted his arm. "Hold on a minute." She fished a cigarette case out of her pocket, ducked behind him to get out of the wind and expertly lit up. She inhaled deeply and held it, passing him the joint. When she exhaled, she called to the sergeant, "Tinka!" "Yes'm. " "Next batch of dope you clean for us, save the seeds. Let's see if we can grow the little buggers here." "Yes'm. " Danny took a long hit, beginning to relax. Being with Margie Menninger was never dull, at least. As he slowly exhaled he looked over in some admiration. She had adjusted at once to the heat; the disconcertingly low gravity, the thick air that had troubled theiri all for weeks. She was some kind of woman. By the time they had finished passing the joint back and forth, they were out of sight of the perimeter guard, where the beach widened under a high, bare bluff. Margie stopped, looking around. "Seems as good as any," she commented. "Tinka, take your position. " "Yes'm." The sergeant scrambled agilely up the side of the bluff to the top and Margie shucked her fatigues. She wore nothing underneath. "If you're coming, come. If not, stay and help Tinka keep watch." And she splashed into the water. Dope, company or whatever, Dalehouse was feeling better than he had all day. He laughed out loud, then skinned out of his own clothes and joined her. To be continued Since # Phantaanegoria haa puMiiied # magadnea and # portfodoa of fTwqnWrty r en dered ait by Kenneth Smith. Vbtiialy al of theae pubicatloiis have act a new hlj-wataa ma rii lor mialUj i of contenta and of reproduction: yeara before fandom knew what fcidiiid iijtlimprtmi ipiaHy p u b# cat kna were, Phantaamagorla waa ahea#y devoted to Juat auch atan da rda of rvraSenrfi It fvmaina the only auch ptibdahtaig ventwe In which the entire pt oreaa of iq H ud uctioo la oveiaeen, and Ita quadly guaranteed, by the artlat hh nacl f. Owntaig a Phantaamagoria laproductlon b vtrtuaby aa good aa owning an ofigfaial. Magazine, ##, contabn a lavlah feble from the Age of insects. The cover and centerfold are gor geoua color-prooeaa. StD avaBaMe at # ea this laaue la the peak of Phantaamagorla'a eiffbfta to create Intefllgent fantasy, meticuloualy rendoed. Put some depth Into your fantasy Bfe with this connoiaaecaa deUit, the ariatocrat of Hmlted-oAtlons. Don't delay -- the Ibat two Issues of the magadne are nearly out of print now. (If you deake your copy autoaphed and biacrfted to you, plensc bKhide an extra OutataBtfteg among  g.   Ine of I k i e ail fantasy pitata, fantastic nudes. Two plates are hil color-proceaa, one to #-color, two are duotones, and five are printed In a single, speclaDymixed tfaft -- all bi rich depths of talk on the finest coated Warren stock, alie #x# kichea. Uhe most of Phantawnagoria'a portfoloa, ## to an extremely faulted edkhMi portfoBos and magadn ea are maBril with protective r artBrna id.) The work of Ken neth Smith has been featured recently in a naBanflnrArlwish to see the fuB Mne oi Phentaamegoffa p ub B catl ona tostrated and descifacd, please send I for a lSpage biociiiBe (with ki fonn a tl on alao about Bthotpipha and origtnato). For an addkiond l.yownamc wBbe added to our mJIng Bat for aperial annoimcemerds In the future. And Having Writ by Donald R. Benson. Bobbs-Merrill, #. Don Benson has been an editor for a long time. In spite of that he writes well, and shows a kindhearted soul in this altemate-Earth novel. An alien explorer spaceship, the Wanderer, enters Earth's atmosphere too fast and seems certain to explode. As a last resort, one of the humanlike crew activates a Probability Displacer and the ship enters an alternate time-stream in which the ship enters the atmosphere safely, though crippled. They enter an Earth time-frame of the early #'s and are faced with the problem of either stimulating this Earth'sscience enough to make possible complicated repairs to their spacer, or of being marooned. Howard Taft, Thomas Edison, the Kaiser, the Czar... This Earth's alternate history becomes skewed in unexpected ways by the aliens' "interference" and good-intentions. This is a pleasant book, a mild sf adventure, written with good humor and competence. Heat by Arthur Herzog Signet, # I didn't think much of his previous novel. The Swarm, but in this one Herzog caught me and held me -- sometimes against my will. He had sense enough to keep the personal problems and the man-woman romance in the background. The overpowering interest is in the gathering but uncertain evidence that excess CO # in the atmosphere is no longer being absorbed by the oceans. In fact, in the tropical Atlantic the ocean is giving it back. First the weather goes crazy. Then the heat... There is a terrible danger that a runaway greenhouse effect will be started and that Earth may end up like Venus. Humanity is on the verge of doom. The novel spends almost all its time in the build-up. The actual consequences -- heat -- and saving mankind from the oven are raced through in the final twenty pages. I suspect the book was structured and aimed for the movies. That's good commercial sense, but it warps the novel. Dawn Of The Dead by George Romers and Susanna Sparrow, St. Martin's, #. You have to be terminally credulous to get past the 'living dead' premise of this horror novel. But if you can lock up your disbelief for a few hours, this novelization of a forthcoming major horror film (sequel to Night Of The Living Dead... a so-called classic) will keep yoii turning pages avidly. On the other hand, if the concept of the recent dead coming "alive" to attack and eat the living and their own warm dead for food, and the ruthbook -- or the movie. If the book is an accurate reflection of the film, the movie will be the bloodiest, most sickening ever made. These zombies are permanently killed by shooting them in the brain, or otherwise disconnecting the brain from the body... decapitation, smashing... No credible explanation is given for the sudden reanimation of hundreds, of damage to the body and still keep coming (or try to come). Yet they make sounds -- a moaning cry, and they breath and bleed, which means their hearts must beat to keep the brain going... So why wouldn't a stopped heart kill them? Why wouldn't they bleed to death? No explanation. This is run-run-shoot-shoot-run-fear-screamArrnrggggh! with no rationality. The three men and women we follow through this book are almost all given to stupidity and panic so that the authors can menace them again and again with the zombies. The novel sucks. But in its way it is exciting and gripping. Star Rigger's Way by Jeffrey A. Carver Dell, # The wonder of this book -- a novel of character-change, maturation, abandonment of illusions and discovering-of-self -- is the hyper-space drive that is called the Net and which is powered somehow by spaceship generators. In order to travel in the Flux -- the hyperspace continuum -- the ship's pilots, called Riggers, must control the net with their minds -- working as a team -- and guide the ship through the dangers of hyperspace. The problem is that their minds impose (necessarily) an understandable vision of what is going on around them. They can appear to be sailing through an ocean... a snowstorm... a dangerous cavern... a seething, vari-colored mist... a serene forest... a deadly, rocky labyrinth... and they can be wrong. Riggers are dijferent people, blessed and cursed with a peculiar psi talent that permits them to pilot ships in this manner. It is dangerous, exciting work. The novel begins when Gev Carlyle, a young Rigger, finds himself alone on a space ffighter, accidentally alive after an unexplained disaster in the Flux killed the three other Riggers who were flying the ship at the time. He has almost no chance of making it to safety, since he hasn't the mind-power to pilot the huge ship. Then he picks up a distress beacon and is able to rescue an alien catlike creature -- a Cephean -- who is able to help fly the ship but who is selfdestructive, a victim of his cultural conditioning. Yet Gev manages to link minds with the being and attempt to fly the deadly Flume -- the only way to safety. Gev is haunted by his desire to reunite with three companionsRiggers whom he loved. The book is his fight to trace them and bring them together again -- to recreate his "family." As he pursues his goal he becomes a different person, grows, matures... and doesn't realize it until a final crisis forces... I had trouble with the "subjective sea" of the Flux and the ability of the mind to fly huge spaceships in this psi-powered hyperspace. But what thehell, it's an engaging science fantasy and the novel will leave you saying to yourself, "Yeah!" Trample Down An Empire by Mack Reynolds Leisure Books, # Three men, bored, living off Guaranteed Annual Income, as a joke and as a way to get some extra money, start the Subversive Party... a mockery of the existing Republican-Democrat Party which controls the country. To their delight and astonishment the movettient takes hold in an equdly bored, quietly desperate U.S.A. and soon mushrooms to the point that their outrageous party principles -- make everything legal (except real crime), really clean up the air, the food, the water, maximize freedom while also abolishing the constitution, elections, etc. A truly revolutionary program. The core of the party's appeal is selfishness... legitimized selfishness. To this end they require payments for joining, require recruitment of two others, then five others for privileged status in the party... They get kick-backs and high profit from party uniforms, badges, etc. The International Bureau of Investigation, of course, plants spies and agents in the party, but somehow things don't work out right for the Establishment-in-power. Drastic measures are called for... This is a humorously cynical look at American politics and contemporary American society. Some of the ideas advocated by the characters are Not Nice. They Disturb. They (even in mockery) make one squirm. The book doesn't really end; it stops. But even so, it makes me wonder if the unconventional content of this novel led to its rejection by Mack's regular publishers, Ace and Bantam... and other major publishers. All the major publishers today are owned by companies which are owned by companies which are owned by the biggest of the big corporations. The Art Of The Fantastic, Edited by Gerry de la Ree # Cedarwood Lane, Saddle River, NJ. # This is an anthology of art from the extensive personal collection of de la Ree, a fan of long standing who issues these handsome, large, beautifully printed hardcover volumes several times a year. Usually he publishes books devoted to one artist -- Finlay, Fabian, Bok, Cartier... This volume contains work by Hannes Bok, Virgil Finlay, Lawrence Stevens, Edd Cartier, Stephen Fabian, Frank R. Paul, Mahlpn Blaine, Frank Kelly Freas, Charlie McGill, Clark Ashton Smith, Tim Kirk, Haip' Clarke, Ed Emsh, George Barr, Roy Krenkel, and others. All the plates in this book are black and white. Color reproduction of the paintings in Gerry's collection would be prohibitive, especially for a limited edition of # copies such as this. Most of the drawings in this book are illustrations for stories and novels. You'll probably recognize some of them. The varieties of styles and techniques is entrancing to me. The more you know about art and the discipline of rendering in black and white -- ink, pencil, etc., the more you appreciate the skills and talents of the men here    The most sensational SF novel of our time! David Bunch They could live forever in their bionic metal bodies... if anyone can really iive forever! Sure, we didn't have to run from hearses then or speculate on coffins. See a flesh kid dragging his playmate through the streets and pounding him down with a bat, we didn't care. So who's to die and what's to go? Not us, we thought. Let all flesh-land fall on stones and cut its noses on razors -- good riddance! We'd just pump up and down on our all-weather new-metal knee joints, push the phfluggeephflaggee button on our talkers at them each and everyone and laugh and laugh. And anytime we wanted to, we could pull back over the line into Our Country, sit in our hipsnuggie chairs in a Stronghold and gloat upion our buttons, GoodGadget buttons. And then it happened. Just when you think you've got it made, all nailed up and zippered down, the thing starts pulling loose at the hinge-joints. Take us, for instance. We'd fought to a fine standstill and a victory conclusion, we thought, the dread human idea that, soon or late, all humans had to die. I think our bold defiance of this concept and our attempted solution of the problem should rank with some of science's better things. Or at least I thought that before. But now -- ! Well, what are you going to do when everything goes black, when the bright dream fades and the dark cover pulls over your guide stars? Try again? Sure! That's the human way. Be sorry you laughed when the flesh kid died in the streets? Be appalled that you just yawned when the big fat milk horse at the noonday curb was half halved by that runaway factory wagon? Well, perhaps be sorry. But not too much time to be sorry over the mishaps of flesh-land. What's to gain by being sorry? And speaking of mishaps -- If you have not by this time seen someone half eaten by our newmetal all-metal metal eaters, you have missed one of the world's stark horrors. You cannot say, "I have seen deep tragedy." You have seen nothing! By comparison all other mishaps must seem but soft landings and easy fractures. Or at least it seems so to me. But then, I might be prejudging in favor of my own condition. You be the judge. You see, we had it made in steel-topped Moderan, the country of the peotals, where metal-andpeople people lounged in Stronghold homes with their Good-Gadget buttons. There is to that no reasonable doubt to have -- we had it made. We'd had ourselves done over. Long ago. After that, standing around in a truce time in our newmetal alloy "replacements," our bulk like new-metal armor, our flesh-strips few and played-down, couldn't we spit at time then, couldn't we laugh it down? Our organs made up of tireless gadgetry, hearts like little engines, lungs like accordion boxes, flexi-flex newmetal bellows -- couldn't we max out of a dormant whenever we chose for a spree, couldn't we push buttons and flick switches on a big-daddy go!? And food -- that introven! purer than fresh mountain strip feed. Oh things were fine indeed then, and no hurry in steeltopped Moderan where the plastic yard sheets covered our sterilized acres. Germless as new mountain snowballs in Old Times we had eternity! all sacked and tied and slung upon our backs like golden apples in a bag. And then they came, low like damp dark smoke over the metal flowers, dropping in out of nowhere one spring day. Others were riding the air high up like eagles floating perhaps would, lumped, make a speck as big as a small-small pencil dot. Under our powerful lenses they had jaws and teeth like ocean sharks of Old Days. Just say they were the dread metal fly-fleas, strangest mutants of all time. So what's to tell? Just tell that they ate us? Oh, how portray the horror? One moment, say, you're sitting outside the eleventh, outermost Wall of your Stronghold. It's between wars, a fine June Tuesday, and your Warner hangs dormant while the cone balls that are your ears for danger go silent roundand-round in a slow circling above your armor in this pleasant time of truce. And then the cloud flings up, small, far out, where the flower tops meet the vapor shield, grows and keeps on coming. And it hits. In an incredibly short time, under your Warner's heavy and helpless danger clangor, it lands with a small-small sound like the buzz a very fine sleet might make tacktacking against a window. In Ancient Weather. You feel nothing, being mostly that hitherto allprotective invincible survival metal, but you see the deep black film settle, shift, go up and down and across you. You try to wipe it off. Ha. There is no method. You try to think of things. You try to pretend that nothing is happening. You sit and sing. You speculate on a Max Fire to blast his threat when it's winging. Ho! Did you ever try to fell a cloud -- or bring down smoke -- with rifle fire? -- After a while the deep black film lifts with a tiny sound, like small-small sand falling acrossa rock. There is a darkness in the air for a fleeting instant. You watch the darkness go. You try to sing. You try to pretend nothing has happened. But something has happened! You're smaller by a little than you had been. For you have just had your visit from the new-metal all-metal metal eaters, deadliest mutants ever known. And all over Moderan it goes on, this thing. The dark droning clouds rage up countless times in the morning, countless times in the afternoon, sweep in upon us and chop out a metal fill. Or if it's a time of war, and we're inside tending to launcher buttons, the clouds film across our Strongholds and eat there on the roof. We or our Strongholds, it is the same, in time it is the same. Inexorably they will eat all. And so we who once had forever. Eternity, like a bright wish tied down, feel the great thing go little by little in a black film drifting over us from time to time. And when the wings fan up of the shaik-jawed atoms, loaded and going away, and we fling a pocko-scope viewer up to our wide-range mechanized eyes for a better peep at our tormentors, and see them so magnified, sometimes we think of a black drift of condors all plated with terrible scales. It is then that we know, and we see how we stand. They go away on a Joyflight digesting a little of us on the wind each day, each day. And so we are mortal after all, to a degree as vulnerable as any in simple flesh-land? Is it only a question of time? But the dieam! The magnificent dream lives on and feeds upon eternity -- or the quest for that. It clothes its bones in hope again and comes out fighting. Perhaps it is only a minor setback after all, this of the metal "fleas." Perhaps tomorrow, some shiny-new tomorrow, we shall "replace" ourselves with the pure dream -- a thing like rubber, maybe. Yes! a new-cell rubber alloy, that could be the answer. And the metal metal eaters will starve then, their vile steel bellies sucked jip in terrible tiny ribs and mouths chopping hard in a foodless hopeless time. They will drift out to die, as all things shall and must that by David Bunch First, could I please comment on C. J. Cherryh's "The Faded Sun: Kesrith"? I thought it was a beautiful story, and sad enough in the genocide of the mri to make me wish for that miraculous happy ending that never came. I liked the description of the scenery, which helped me to feel there in the action; and the perceptive study of Niun's mind moved me very much because I can see threads of the same ambivalence in some of my own contradictory motivations and actions. The thing that makes me feel a little skeptical is that I couldn't find a bridge that would make the alreadyhateful regul suddenly commit murder when it was so unlike them that they had to hire the mri to be mercenaries. I can understand where bai Hulagh could have gotten desperate, to where he could have broken through some of the conditioning (though it would have been lots harder than it was made out to be). But even so, it didn't sit too well with me. I will agree that they were impossible to sympathize with; and in their forthcoming defeat, I felt a sadistic surge of triumph as in "Now I've got you, you s.o.b.!" A beautiful and hauntingly question-filled open-ended ending. Thank you, Ms. Cherryh. This letter is also a great chance for me to praise Galaxy for your enlightened attitude toward the blind SF freak. Could you please send me the names and addresses of people in my area with whom I can get in touch? Let me explain that I am a blind person, and wish that along with Galaxy, I could also get Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction. One big frustration is that the Library of Congress selectors must go to hiding-places to find some of the books that do get transcribed. There have been all too many times I've wanted to discuss a book with a sighted person, only to be told, "I didn't know that book was around." It's an interesting thing to think about, because perhaps in our own ways, we all wish we had more time, chance and whatever-else to read more than we can. So maybe there isn't all that much difference in our situations except for its being a matter of degree. I want to thank you. Galaxy, for helping to bridge the gap. Two books I'd like to talk about briefly, as examples of ones I've read and others haven't, are Jacqueline Lichtenberg's first novel, and a book I'm just as glad that not many of you have had to suffer through. Have some others read these, and could I have some feedback? John Guenther's novel. The God Machine, was so bad I made myself read through the whole thing long after I knew it couldn't get any better. It was a shame, because some of his ideas about the Micronizer were interesting and seemed original to me, and to some extent, I really enjoyed the banter and humor among the characters. But in general, it was really strange for a lot of reasons. If he can publish and even get his book done in an alternative reading medium, there may be hopes for my future as a writer, despite my misgivings about whether I know enough. Basically, it's a story about what happens in the relatively-near future when a Stereotypical-Sixties-type movement called the Amorphous goes underground to try to fight and break the influence of a totalitarian, inhumane government. The main protagonists in the novel are Professor Welch (there never was a first name for him -- just Welch), and his wife Eve (who was never called Mrs. Welch). One of the ground rules for entering an Amorphous to pool your talents with other dissidents is to have been a victim of the System. Well, he is one, and a lot goes on, with pages used to describe how the explosion blew people apart in different ways. Some of the names in the book were so obviously cutesy that it was hilarious; example, DeCorum, an ex-student of Welch's who worked for the government and got his long feared what-for as a result. Of the two societies, there was more potential for love and real warmth among those in the Amorphous; but generally, if that's what society is evolving toward, I want to do all I can to change it from happening. What did it reflect, the sickness of society or that of the writer? It was a sad mis-application of a good talent, and let's hope he does better next time -- if there is a next time. Jacqueline Uchtenberg's novel. House of Zeor, is a novel of another kind. The descriptions were beautiful, and the situation, though potentially disastrous, had plenty of room for hope. There was a lot of adaptability and heroism in the characters that left me feeling proud that I'm a human being, and what made it so stirring is that this sort of thing could happen. It was not written in a toogoixj-to-be-true way, either; you couldn't help chuckling over different arguments caused by different cultural values. It is set in a postnuclear-holocaust future where humanity, though mutation, splits into two unstable but evolving factions. Simes and Gens have to live together; but Simes, who have special powers and vulnerabilities, must also prey upon Gens for survival, as that is the only source of selyn energy, which they will die without. It is a very sensitive book. Read and enjoy. This leads to my last question. I wonder if there could be an article in Galaxy sometime for beginning SF writers, with some tips on how to write but mostly about how the beginer may get started in vying for publication. Along with it, could you give us your policies as they pertain to an aspiring writer? (That's what caught my attention; you are using new writers and giving them a chance to express themselves through your pages. That's more encouraging to people like me.) Peggy Walsh # #th St., Apt. # Pittsburgh, Pa. #I (You can see the flaws in a plot as well as anybody -- HS) (Peggy's record reviews will appear in future issues -- KH) by Jane Gallion To: Apollo Dave Connell looked up from his empty glass. He brushed a few crumbs from the tabletop, looked at his watch, and then at the door. Someone was entering, but it was only another party of tourists. The dark-haired hostess greeted them and led them to a candlelit table in another comer of la trapaza turista. Nine-eighteen p.m., and no Bonnie. He sighed, and slumped back in his chair. "Mas cerveza," he said, and pushed his glass to the edge of the table. "Ahnd thee esenorita?" "What?" "Thee ladee, senor. Perhaps she would like sometheen more?" the waitress said. "Perhaps jew both would wish to hahve sometheen to eat?" Dave blinked. Distractedly, he imagined that she sounded suspicious, as though she knew that their presence here was not mere tourism. "To... ah... eat?" he temporized. Oh, he was being ridiculous. This was a restaurant, and they were probably taking up valuable time and room with their waiting and fiddling. But to eat? When his stomach was in knots, and the succession of beers he had drunk to kill the intolerable waiting time was making him even more jittery. "Well..."He glanced aside at Sara, holding a half-drunk brandy and soda. He had hardly spoken to her since the first one. Her expression was pleading; it was the one she wore rather than speak out and ask him for something, and he knew she was probably hungry. "Yes... yes. I think we would like to eat, uh, por favor. Can we see a menu?" Of course Sara was hungry. They had been waiting here in this toowarm room for over two hours. And they had not eaten since breakfast in that airport clip-joint in Los Angeles early this morning, unless you counted a ham and cheese on rye, wolfed down in flight somewhere over the top end of Louisiana, with the jungly miles of the Deep South unrolling with hypnotic sameness beneath them as they flew steadily toward Miami. Where was the damn woman anyway? What was taking her so long? Something had gone wrong -- he knew it had. The latin waitress, a tiny girl with huge, luminous eyes, and a frothy before taking Dave's empty glass and turning briskly on a spiked heel to bring them menus. Her too-short skirt reminded Dave that he was in a foreign country, where styles lagged ten years behind American hip, recalling unavoidably the Sara he had met and almost instantly loved when every trim behind in the country had been clad in them. Sara's had been skirted in the in-est of black vinyl, topped with a muslin peon shirt that this little waitress wouldn't  caught dead in even now. Sara had worn high vinyl boots with her outfit, no lipstick, and heavy earrings like stained glass in her ears, the only color about her, barring the green glow of her eyes under the swing of ironed hair and rumpled bangs. But you had to count her eyes, the eyes of a shakti of Kama, full of pure and primordial energy. Those eyes had captured him from across the El Monte Legion Stadium, strobes going, band wailing, and kept him on his feet as he struggled to get to her in sections, stoned into near-oblivion, but brought back by the sudden reality of a green-eyed shegod on the other side of a crowd of dancing freaks. Looking across the beer-ringed foreign table at her now, he could believe that this was a different woman. She met his eyes, no green fire in hers now, which were still, eternally, entreating after these hours of tension. "Worried?" she asked, her voice high-pitched with her own worry that she wouldn't claim, but only lay on him. Dave made an impatient gesture. "Of course I'm worried. The goddam woman has been gone over two hours, and I've sat here and drunk... I forgot how many beers... trying to believe she hasn't been killed or mugged. Or arrested. Or skipped out, though why she'd do that when she can get rid of the stuff in five minutes flat in Miami, she said. I'll be goddamned if I know. Or she could have been hit by a car and be lying in some hospital somewhere. Or in a morgue..." "Dave..." "Dave, don't worry!" he growled. "Ah, don't be ridiculous, Sara. Of course I'm worried." At her stricken look, he felt immediately guilty. He put out a hand to cover her pale fingers. He touched her wedding ring, worn long enough to be largely smooth now, though when he had put it on her finger it had been carved with tiny lotuses. He had got it for her from Sikkim. Put it on her finger when they had lived together long enough to get used to the idea. His goddess, with whom he had shared the mysteries of the universe. His wife, with whom he had made a child, destined to be something cosmic, and now just ashes in an urn. Would it all have been different if Danny had lived? Would this madeup, anxious-eyed woman have stayed his Sara if the boy had made it? Did anything make any damn difference? It had made no difference to her, believing that the drugs they had taken together had killed Danny. He sighed. "Honey, I'm sorry," he told her, struggling for just the right amount of contrition to wipe the wounded look off her face. "I'm just... uptight." He forced his face to smile. "Do you want to dance?" he asked, waving a hand toward the tiny dance floor where the turistas and their wives were waving their tails in grotesque imitations of a samba. Sara grimaced and pulled back her cold hand. "No. I just don't feel like it." He shrugged. "Suit yourself. " "If I'd suited myself, we wouldn't be here," she said. She fumbled for her purse and took out a cigarette, leaning forward for him to light it. Anger flared in him. He said tightly, "I suppose it was all my idea. I wanted a second car. I decided we could afford a Visa card. I made the arrangements for a professional landscape artist to come and dig up tte back yard. I -- " "Well, you did," she told him accusingly, lighting her own cigarette with the tabletop candle. "I didn't say anything, I thought you wanted it. And I wanted you to be happy, to have something you liked to make up for -- ." She bit off her words as though she hadn't already said them often enough to brand them into his brain. Dave flung himself away from the table. "Oh, for the love of god, will you stop it? Whatever you thought, get it through your head that nothing, but nothing's going to make up to me for Danny. No toys, nor gimmicks, nor greenhouse posies. Nothing!" "I know that. And nothing's going to take away the guilt you -- " Dave brought his fist down on the table with a slam that rattled the candleholder against the salt and pepper. The other diners looked around curiously, and they heard someone three tables away say to his companion, " -- jjeople who don't know how to act in public. And Americans, too -- " Sara jumped, dropping her cigarette. Her eyes were weary and her voice typically patient as she said, "Dave, you're making a scene. People are looking at us. Calm down, won't you? And let's drop the subject. You never will admit -- " "No, I won't," Dave raged in a whisper, leaning across the table. "And neither will you. I won't go into this here. It's old business, prehistoric. What's right here and now is that we're here, and we're doing what we're doing. And in awhile, I hope, Bonnie will be back with her stuff and we can get the hell out of this tourist heaven and go back to Glendale where we can sit in our paid-for house and look at our landscaping, and then maybe go out for a drink we don't have to count nickels for. So let's just don't argue about it. Or about anything. Let's get something to eat." He caught sight of the little waitress stilting toward them on high heels. "Maybe I'm a little too drunk to make sense anyway," he conceded, grudgingly. Sara sniffed. She wiped her eyes with the cocktail napkin. "You are too drunk. You've had seven beers while we've been waiting for that woman. And you've hardly said a word to me all the time we've been here. I wish I'd stayed home. " "My god, so do I," he muttered, but she had taken out her makeup and was repairing her face, and didn't hear him. The waitress approached, laid menus before them, set Dave's beer on the table. He took a swallow and picked up the menu, seeing Sara lift hers, open it, and put a finger to her lower lip as he had known she would do. It had been part of her charm -- the grand decision of what to eat when the hungries had driven them out of their bare-cupboarded cubicle into the rush and siren-scream of the midnight city, searching for munchies. But this Sara didn't lift green eyes full of excitement and lean close, whispering, "There's nothing fit to eat in here. Let's get a package of baloney and go home and go back to bed. ' ' This one said, "I guess I'm not very hungry," and closed the menu with a long-suffering sigh. "Whatever you decide is alright with me." Yeah. And he would order some damn thing, and she would peck at it like a pullet, look at him with those damning eyes and tell him, better than words ever could, how he had failed her, failed at everything. And that this was a failure too. He took another gulp of his beer. When would Bonnie get back with her merchandise so they could get out of here? When would she show up, carrying the Argentinian emerids that Dave had agreed to help her smuggle into the States? When would she come, so they could make their connection in Miami and Dave collect his price -- everybody had one -- so he could go back to his bungalow in Glendale and pay off every-damn-body and -- And what? He didn't know. Have fun? Buy things? Go places? What do you do when the lights go out? Rape the world? Sara eased the too-tight band of her bra under the tailored jacket, pushed back the curl of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. He saw her lips tremble, set, and he could predict she was going to say, "Dave, I understand that you're worried, and I'm sorry I upset you." He glanced meaningfully at the waitress. "Just forget it," he said. He wished to god that she would, if only for a moment, be his Sara, the old Sara, able to Join him in this venture like she'd done in the old days. Able to do it spontaneously, without all this heavy significance. But everything was the same now -- full of crunching, grinding, pointless responsibility and meaning. He picked a dish from the menu at random, ordered two, and the waitress left. As she went, a disturbance at the door again caught his attention. A loud anglo in a shirt to match was calling the hostess "moo-cha-cha" and complimenting her on the weather like she'd ordered it. It wasn't like this in Duluth, he boomed, it was awfully pretty down here, and he and Mother -- obviously the plump wife-creature he had firmly by the elbow -- were getting quite a tan from the nice Cuban sun. And they'd have been in to dinner earlier, only they'd been Christmas shopping. Dave was turning in disgust back to his beer when the woman dropped one of her packages, and in retrieving it, the man's eye fell on Dave and Sara. "Why, Mother, there's some Americans. Let's go sit with them." The hostess made a vague try at sidetracking them, but lost the battle with the determined old man, her face plainly showing that there was no arguing with turistas. He reattached himself to his wife's elbow and steered her, packages in hand, toward their table. Oh god, not this, Dave thought, shrinking. Sara stared at the couple dully. They couldn't be allowed to sit here. Heart hammering, Dave said, "Sorry, but we're waiting for someone. We'd like to invite you, but -- " But Sara was already back in Glendale, speaking the sort of stuff you said to people you'd never seen before, and wouldn't really care if you never saw again. " -- so nice to see someone from the States. Yes, it's lovely weather, so warm for Christmas." The man seated his doughy wife tenderly. He stowed the packages on an empty chair he'd requisitioned from the next table, where a trio of Cubanos, deep in the throes of some business deal over dark rum, produced a flood of liquid courtesies that even sounded genuine. They offered a second chair, and fell all over themselves with offers of help. Their courtesy made Dave feel like a registered crud, and his attempts at a polite brushoff sound like the worst possible kind of manners. "Steptoe's the name," the man was saying. He stuck out a hand, and Dave reluctantly shook it, pressed the be-ringed hand of his wife. 'T was just telling Mother that Americans oughten't to be alone in a foreign country at Christmastime. Wasn't #, Mother? Not that I got anything against foreigners, seen-yores..."he nodded to the Cubans, "but you ought to be with some of your own at Christmas, I always say. Mother and I are from Duluth," he said. "Glendale, California," Dave said without thinking. The woman beamed. "Isn't that nice? So much sunshine. But that smog is bad for you, I hear." Sara agreed, in the way she'd learned to agree with everything. She told the couple their names. Just like they hadn't decided to be completely anonymous. He put in loudly, "We're, uh, on a little vacation." He jerked his head toward the woman's packages. "Doing some Christmas shopping." "Isn't that nice?" Mother said warmly. "For the children?" Damn the woman! "No," Sara said bleakly. "Our son died last year." "I'm so sorry," the woman said, and her hand stole out to take her husband's. Dave glanced at Sara, saw that her eyes were shiny with tears. He hoped desperately that she wasn't going to cry in front of these strangers, y couldn't she have stayed home instead of coming along, wrapping herself around him like a noose. He could have brushed off these home-folks and waited it out by himself. " -- fishing?" the man was saying heartily, obviously trying to change the subject. Dave wished they would just go away and let them alone. "No," he said flatly, hoping his rudeness would discourage discussion. But a moment's silence discomfited him. "We're flying back tonight," he heard himself say. "By way of Galveston," he added quickly. "Aren't we, dear?" "Just as well you are going that way," Mr. Steptoe said. "Safer." "Safer?" Sara asked. Her face was pale, and Dave could see that she was frightened again. Damn the man. What was he talking about? "No, Father..." Mother put in. "Oh, now," Mr. Steptoe said, "I'm not what you'd call superstitious, but if I was you, young man. I'd not like to take the chance of flying from Havana, here, to Miami." "Father, you just hush up," his wife said, leaning across to brush a speck from his shirt front. "You're going to bore these young people with your tales." Dave was anything but bored. What could the old man know of their business in Miami? If he knew anything, and wasn't just babbling. "What are you talking about?" llie old woman smiled. "Why, that Bermuda Triangle, dear," she said. "Though why Herbert's scaring you with that when you're not even going there, I can't imagine. You just hush up about that. Father, and order you some dinner. And don't take too much of those chili peppers. You know how they repeat on you. He will eat those things," she went on, turning to pat Sara's hand, "lliey give him the stomach trouble. But when we come down here, he had to eat what the people eat. Says it's silly to have hamburgers when we could just as well stay home and eat at the Howard Johnson's in Duluth." Sara mumbled a response. Dave relaxed, curing his own paranoia. "That's the least of my worries," he said, relieved, and a little louder than he intended, added, "Besides, I think all that stuff is just coincidence. Carelessness, radios going out, storms." He forced a laugh. "I don't believe in magic." "I don't s'pose you do," the older man conceded, grinning. "Young people're ways so busy, getting around and getting things done. Wonder sometimes if things need doing all that bad. " His wife turned a reproving eye on him. "Why, Father! What a thing to say." She tsked. "What gets into Herbert sometimes!" Sara smiled weakly, aird Dave looked again at the door, wishing for the thousandth time that Bonnie would come so they could get out of here and into the air, go back to Glendale where people had a decent lack of interest in what you thought or did, what you believed in or didn't, and if people got too off-the-wall you could just go to a different party, drink with a different crowd. Forget the stoned-out visions of cosmic grandeur that had been life and breath to his younger self, but were simply an embarrassment to him now. Not to mention preachments from Sara, who pretended to have forgotten that they had ever thought anything non-scheduled, unless she was beating their collective breast atout Danny. Nobody in their crowd in Glendale regarded such things as anything but silly. As silly as this ridiculous story about the Bermuda Triangle. A figment of somebody's Newton. A thing to read dbout, watch tv shows about. Well, it did pass the time, waiting for Bonnie. Kept them off dangerous subjects, such as what they were doing here. "I suppose you believe in that stuf" Dave challenged the man. "Son, I believe what I see and hear," the older man replied. "And I've seen a lot. Mother has too." He grinned at his wife's pursed mouth. "Can't live a long time in this world without things happening that the big-bugs can't explain, so they tell you you're halloo-hallo... cinating," Dave finished for him. "Yep. Seeing things. Some of the things I've seen I wisht were halloocinations." He tapp a forefinger on the table. "Some of 'em right out there." He pointed in the general direction of the doOT. "But I saw what I saw, and I heard what I heard." "And what was that?" Dave asked, peering around Mother to the door again. "The young woman that was lost, son. Mother and I were out there in our other boat, the one we had before the Marta S. 'Course, that was a long time ago. But I won't ever forget it." "Well, what happened?" Dave looked again at his watch. "We had the radio on, and we heard what she said." Dave stared at him with impatience. "Which was?" "Is there any way out of this?" Mr. Steptoe quoted. "That's what. And she never spoke again. She just disappeared." Dave snorted. "Oh, come on." He looked Dave in the eye, nodding. "Just as well you're not going back in that direction, seeing what time of year it is. This is when they all happen." "Do you want me to believe -- " Dave began. "Not a thing, son. You asked me, and I told you, is all. But here -- " Mr. Steptoe chided himself, grinning at his wife, who was opening her mouth to do it. "Mother told me not to be scaring you with my tales. Here, girlie -- " he called to the waitress who was coming with Dave's and Sara's food. "I'll have some enchiladas, and some free-holies, and -- " Is there any way out of here? Dave smiled grimly to himself as the older man ordered hugely from the Spanish menu. He could have told the miserable woman there wasn't. Not for her, or for them. Whatever had caught the woman and all those other ships and aircraft, it was perfectly natu, had some reasonable explanation. A better one, he'd bet, than he had for getting involved in this insane venture. They were all caught, though most of them didn't seem to mind, or even to notice. As he tried not to notice, except when Sara insisted on rubbing his nose in painful "facts". He was almost grateful to Mr. Steptoe for bringing up a subject he could dismiss as nonsense, thoroughly dispose of as he wished he could dispose of Sara's irrational notions. But there was no way out of that one. And no way out of their venture, for as his glance turned again to the opening of the polished door at the far end of the restaurant, Botmie was there. Her large purse hung significantly heavy on her crooked arm. She turned slowly in a hip-shot model's stance as ste searched the dim-lit restaurant for them, and her lipsticked mouth narrowed as she spotted them. From a distance of twenty feet across'the smoky, candlelit room, Dave could feel her anger as she saw them with company. She brushed off the hostess contemptuously and stalked toward the table. Is there any way out of this? You have to be kidding. II "My god, how could you be that stupid?" Bonnie said again as Dave made a left turn in the rented car, swerving to avoid a group of jaywalking Cubans. "My god, you almost hit those spiks. You're going to get us arrested. Slow down, for godsake. There's a cop!" In the rear-view mirror, he saw her light a cigarette savagely, throw the match on the floor and step on it. Behind her, out the back window, paired streaks of multi-colored neon fire streamed backward into the depths of the city. Cars dropped away as Dave stubbornly kept his foot down on the gas. Nothing was quite as important as getting this over with, not even Bonnie's rage. They left the police car, uninterested, behind. He made another sharp turn. He hoped he was remembering the right way to the airport. But if he wasn't, Bonnie would tell him. And she did. "I said, slow down, you fool! And turn at the next right!" would be. He longed for another beer, or something stronger, but he supposed he had had plenty if he was going to be able to handle the plane and make Miami before Bonnie's appointment with her buyer. Tension weighted his foot, and without his realizing it, the speedometer needle crept steadily upward until Sara's hand flashed forward to brace herself on the dashboard as the tires screamed into another sharp turn. The speed flag. What kindness he still felt for her -- a poor and inadequate substitute for love -- was wiped out by such tricks. He thought, as he had unnumbered times before, that he would have vastly prefeir her to yell. "I said, slow down!" Bonnie shout in his ear. Sara bit her lip, and kept the bracing hand on the dashboard. He mashed down on the brake, eliciting a hysterical latin barrage of honking from the driver following, who had had to brake too. Thereafter, he drove exactly at the speed limit, taking enough of his attention to put it somewhere other than in the unfamiliar car with its all-too-familiar distractions, intolerable now past hearing. Following the rules silenced Bonnie and, as always, mollified Sara. The tension was silent, but it was no less, and he raised his eyes, when breaks in the traffic would let him, to the night sky that was no more visible here than in Los Angeles. The quarter moon was just clearing the top of a pretentious office building some distance ahead. Its face was a dull orange -- smog moonlight. He distracted himself from the task and the worry by recalling how the moon looked from up there, pure and luminous. One of the fringe benefits of flying. He had refused to give it up even when Sara's concern had her plumping for everything in the book as an alternative to flying. Anything on how to make a living. Anything but living. Had she forgotten how it was up there? He knew she had. Deliberately forgotten! She would sacrifice anything to the well-being of his body, though care of Danny's had not saved him. It didn't make any sense. And he had to admit, though no alternatives had presented themselves, that what he was doing didn't make any either. If he could find some way to make her remember flying with him -- tripping together. But tripping was a dangerous subject, a dangerous word. It made Sara cry, and Sara crying made Dave rage. There was no safe way to remake the crystalline contact, no way for either of them to truly remember what it had been like. To fly, to forget gravity, ignore entropy, turn away from the face of the mob that moved on the surface, forget the clutching, grabbing, scrabbling creatures that called themselves sentient while they were slaves to rules that made no sense. All irrelevant, from up there. All pointless. Some part of you -- of everyone that had ever been there -- stayed up when the body come down, remembering what it was like. If they let themselves. But another part saw and hated Sara's tremulous and ill-hidden relief when he did come down. The ex-mother, begging with her eyes, with the way she held herself, with the trivial comforts of kitchen and bedroom, pleading with him to give up the freedom of the air and stay on the ground. She had lost something essential, something that vivified. Her capacity to care had decayed, day by day, becoming fussiness. She had squeezed the life out of herself by clinging, and out of Dave by clinging to him, setting herself to serve her thwarted maternity in ways that drained his inner essence. There's no way out, he thought bitterly. You never really escape. Gravity was always there, whether you chose to let it be or not. The pull. The drag. He refused to let himself glance at her to see if she was still nervous. She was clutching, he knew, the eternal kleenex, buffing dust off the toes of her shoes, picking lint off the pressed legs of her pant suit, checking her face, her hair. All the arsenal of structured time-passers. Even when "the Dreadful" had already happened. Ah Sara... are you in there? As though she had heard him, she put out a hand and rested it lightly on his thigh. Tension hummed in his thigh muscles, and he turned Ids mind back to the sky to escape it. Ill In the air, poised between the quiescent sea and the clear midnight sky, some of the tightness began to loosen. The headwind, which had ruffled the tops of the breakers on the beach as they passed over it, heading out across the open ocean, had thinned and died. As perfect a night for Hying as he could have wished for. Even Sara was relatively calm. Her hands no longer twisted and clutched. He could almost believe that the task would go off without a hitch, if you left out the Steptoes. Small stabs of discomfort plagued him until they actually took to the air. Had he said something stupid to them, revealed too much? But the pure luminosity of the stars and moon in the darkness soothed him. They flew steadily north, the lulling hum of the engine a mantra of peace. Bonnie sat aft, immersed in the semi-completion of her business. She had had the good sense to keep her mouth shut during take-off, and Dave could ignore he'r piercing glances, as though he couldn't get into the air without her supervision. The cloudless night was alive with the flash and glitter of the far stars, interspersed with the nearer and steadier glow of the above-the-horizon planets. Around the unoccluded moon, a haze of moonlight spread out to obscure the stars nearest it with silvery light. With his peripheral vision, he caught the cyclic off-on wink of a yet nearer star. An artificial satellite, he guessed, recalling a long-gone night on the beach with an equally longgone Sara, when coming down from the sweat and transport of acid, they had lain and watched another such object, following its soundless, dottedline arc from northwest to its disappearance in the skirts of the southwest glow where the city lay. "Look there," he said to Sara, pointing. "Isn't that pretty?" Sara looked, nodded. "About a half hiiTIion dollars worth of pretty!" Bonnie's voice drew their attention back into the plane. Turning from the sky and the wink of the object, now seen, now lost in the star-scattered blackness, they saw that the emeralds lay in her lap. "Pretty, for sure." She laughed exultantly and took one out of its case, holding it to her eye and looking through it at the moon. She put that one back, took up another, turning it from side to side, the huge stone catching the inside lights of the cabin and breaking it into prismatic sparks. A knot of small islands appeared on the horizon ahead, and crawled across the surface of the ocean, the lights of dwellings disappearing under them. Dave turned back to check his instruments, but the coruscating distraction of her play with the stone made it hard to see. Harder, really, than it should have been. He glanced at the fuel gauge, and found that it registered higher than it should have. Maybe there was a tailwind at this altitude. That was good. But the sparks of emerald light made it hard to read the compass. He could have sworn that it was wavering, but he told himself that it was his imagination. He glanced at it more closely, but it seemed alright. The expected next group of small islands was coming up right on schedule. Yes, there was the village he remembered from the trip out, and a dim light or two here and there. A somewhat brighter single light went out as he watched it. A pang shot through him, as though he had seen someone die. More mind-trips and paranoia. He called himself names savagely. It was only somebody going late to bed in a house on the side of a hill. He checked his compass again, saw that it was again appearing to waver. "Put that stuff away, and quit jiggling it around," he shot back over his shoulder. "You're making it hard to see, flashing lights around." Bonnie laughed, but the laugh was chopped off as the plane took a sickening drop. Loose objects, including the stones in their nests of velvet, sprang into the air, scattering across the floor. Sara's gasp was drowned in Bonnie's shriek. "What d' you think you're doing?" She went after the stones, scrabbling on hands and knees. Stuffing them back in their case, she shouted, "What did that? What's the matter?" Dave didn't answer. His attention was on the plane. Heart pounding, he brought the nose up carefully, regained his lost altitude, climbed a little. The compass definitely was acting strangely. The illusion of flickering lights remained, even after Bonnie put the stones in their box and clicked the lock into place. More turbulence dropped them again, though not so far as the first time. Dave struggled with the wheel, through which he could feel a disquieting vibration, and ignored both Bonnie's yelp of outrage and Sara's sudden grasp on his thigh. The business-as-usual view out the front windscreen reproached him. He racked his brain, trying to figure out what was going on, what he had done wrong. Automatically, he checked his instruments again as his hands turned the wheel to the left. But the glance turned to fix horror as he saw that the compass was no longer wavering, but spinning counterclockwise. The fuel gauge flopped like a metronome -- full, empty, full, empty -- measuring out seconds of terrible wrongness. "Dave, what's wrong?" Sara's voice was high-pitched with overcontrol, but it rose in terror as she suddenly cried out, "What's that?" Outside the plane, a blue glow was thickening. The stars had disappeared. Even the moon was gone into an azure phosphorescense that clung to the nose and wings as though the plane had excreted it. They flew in a blind, blue fog. "at is that?" Sara repeated, clutching at him frantically, as though naming it fixed it. But there was no name he could put to it, or to the crazy spinning of his compass, the maddening sweep of his fuel gauge, the vibration that made him clutch the wheel. The vibration grew, threatening to tear the wheel from his hands. He fought its inexplicable waywardness without responding either to Sara's cries or to Bonnie's command of "Stop it right now!" Bracing the wheel with one hand and his right knee, he reached for the radio microphone, knocking Sara's hand off his thigh. He thumbed the switch. "Mayday! Mayday! This is Roger-Charlie-Etog four eight seven Baker. In trouble over -- " He paused for a split eternity to think. "Moselle Reef. Instruments not reliable. Lots of turbulence. Mayday! Mayday! Anybody copy? Mayday!" Bonnie stumbled forward. She grabbed his shoulder, knocking the microphone out of his hand. It fell with a clunk. Sara hurried to retrieve it and tried to hand it back, but Bonnie struck it from her fingers. "Stop it! I know what you're up to," she raged. "You better hope nobody out there heard that. We're not in trouble. You're trying to pull something!" Dave groped frantically for the microphone. "You crazy bitch!" he shouted, eyes on the mad oscillation of the indicators. "Look at that!" He jerked his head toward the instrument panel, not daring to take his hand from the wheel. "And that!" He repeated the jerk in the direction of the windscreen where the glow of the plane's nose was growing in the seconds of futile struggle. "Do you think I'm doing that?" "Yes... yes," she screamed, still fighting for the mike. "I know you're doing it. And you'd better stop it. Right now, you -- " "We're falling..." Sara cried shrilly. The steep downward plunge threw her forward, threw Dave against the instrument panel, flung Bonnie against the bulkhead, screaming, "Stop it... stop it... stop it... !" But there was no stopping it. The wrinkled moonlit sea rushed up toward them, empty now of islands, barren. Empty of hope. And Dave, the pilot in him desperately pulling on the wheel, trying to pull the nose up, knew from the angle of their descent that it was all over. He tried to see Sara out of the comer of his eye. But she was staring transfixed at the uprushing sea. "Not me. Not now. Not me..." Bonnie was repeating as they fell. There was time enough for a laugh to force itself between his clenched teeth. And then they hit. IV Hello, God. This is Snappy Dave Connell, and everything I've ever been taught about dying is wrong. I know I'm dead, coz we fell in the ocean, me and Sara and this crazy bitch Bonnie and her pretty green rocks, and I'm a hot pilot and I know we didn't make it -- I know we hit even tho I don't remember it especially -- hell, I don't remember it at all. I do recall that I went out laughing, like I always that I would back in the old acid days, at the stupidity of it all, the pointlessness, the futility of fighting it. At least I had the sense to turn off my mind (I think), relax, and float downstream. I'm dead. So why do I keep on thinking that the plane, too, is floating, sinking down slowly thru the cool translucence of Reisling seen thru a wineglass? fVhy, God? Why am I still sitting in the cockpit of this plane, and from somewhere hearing my wife freaking out and that other crazy bitch screaming at me to do something? What am I supposed to do? I'm dead. Merry Christmas, Connell. The man was right. I can't quite believe it -- I know I'm dead and pretty soon I'm going to either hear flights of angels or come to the Clear Light or some damn thing. Which Bardo is this? I should have read more, or remembered what I read, coz I'm no way in the world ready to die just yet, coz  can't remember how it's done. But evidently I did it. Hey, God? Nobody told me you lost your marbles when you died. I could swear I was still sinking, that the plane was sinking with me in it -- and Sara, and forever thru the upper air, right before everything went completely crazy and we lost it. That was an artificial satellite, a Sputnik or somesuch, wasn't it? I am down in the Atlantic in the Bermuda Triangle. I am a freaking statistic. All of us are statistics. How 'bout that? And nobody knows what's down here -- ru?t that it matters now. You were right, Mr. Steptoe. Wish you were here instead of me. That is ridiculous. I move my dead arm and it responds, and I put it over and around my dead wife, who probably needs some comfort right now, really needs it for a change, coz some people get all freaked out when they die suddenly, I remember, and  give her a hug arul I say, "You alright, honey?" She flings out both arms to grab onto me, but the seat belt holds her down, and she is crying madly now, having something to cry about. "Wha... what's... hap... happening to us?" And I answer, unbelievable cool, "We're dead, that' sail." The other one, this crazy woman I didn't even know when we were alive, and for sure don't know now, is yelling from where she's sprawled on the floor, surrounded by all the junk that was loose in the plane, plus those totally-pointless-now hunks of green glass that have cost us our lives, because being dead, what good are they? "You maniac... you... you... you think you can get away with this? I've got people who are going to come looking for me when I don't show up. Big people. You get us out of here right this minute!" You hear that, God? She thinks I'm God. I think it's raining. Pretty silly too, coz it doesn't rain underwater or when you're dead. I could swear I hear the musical drip-drip-drip of water droplets falling and because I'm still tied to my body in some weird way -- damn this lap strap -- Tm hearing... things. Oh, god, it's hard to really die. To get free from the semblances of the body. Especially when somebody keeps bothering you and hassling you and won't let you do it in peace, but pulls your dead hair and hits you and keeps yelling in your ear. And some-other-body keeps on crying in terror of the newly dead arul repeating your name over and over like you're supposed to be some magician and save her, save us all by reaching out a finger and making a big-ass miracle. ' 'Dave! Dave! Please, Dave! Leave your vessel. Well, what do you think I'm trying to do? Do you go out thru the top of the head, or out the Muladhara Chakra? Refresh my memory. I knew it all once, but I've forgotten most of it trying to live in Glendale. And you -- gosh, you look funny with that tall pointy head and that funhouse outfit that looks like Star Wars, and you have too many fingers and all the wrong shape -- you're supposed to be helping me, arent you? Tell me... help me out. Hey! Are you the Dweller on the Threshold? Leave your vessel. You're a broken record, guy. A great guide across the River of Death. Td leave in a minute if I knew how. You don't think I like it here, do you? You don't think I'd be here, strapped into this death-box at the bottom of the ocean, if I knew how to leave? Who let you in, funny creature? And you're not anything like I expected you to be. You're not -- V  am Argos. You will leave your vessel. The alien's head reached nearly to the roof. It was needle-thin, and needle-shiny, clad in a close-fitting garment of metallic stuff. Its feet and hands were slabs of maggot-color bloodless meat, ending in a cluster of boneless digits. Its face was no face at all -- no mouth, no nose, just a little more highly colored streak across its tall head, and eyes of a reflecting silver, too huge, below its mushrooming head. Dave's hand released his safety belt and he flung himself toward a rack of tools. Grabbing the nearest, a wrench, he felt he had eternities to swing it, felt himself rise from the floor as though he were dreaming it. He smashed the creature across the side of the head with the wrench, and it fell, folding in the middle as though its center contained the only joint in its body. It clanked as it struck the deck, its rubbery limbs going sprawling. Blood roared and pounded in his ears. He shook sweat from his eyes, trying to see the creature clearly. Its head was smashed like a windowpane, the translucent dead-white skin tom laterally, showing the cartilaginous bones beneath. There was blood -- it must be blood though it wasn't red -- seeping like tree sap from the wound. Sara cried, "You killed it!" She had freed herself from the seat belt and was turning to run through the open hatchway. Dave grabbed her arm as she tried to pass him. "Don't go out there!" he gabled. "There may be more of -- whatever they are." Bonnie scrambled to her feet and came closer, peering down. Her eyes narrowed. She clutched the emerald case to her breast. "Get back," Dave said, motioning both women away from the door. "I'm going to look out and see if there are any more out there. " Adrenalin rushed in his body. As he stepped over the grotesquely folded body of the alien, oozing milk of magnesia blood, a harsh laugh rose in his throat. It shocked him. He had never killed, and felt only revulsion. It took him a second or two to realize that the bark was not some atavistic shout of triumph but an avoidance based on disbelief. He had killed this creature. Killed. He, himself. "I'm glad you think this is funny," Bonnie hissed. She was pale, almost as pale as the creature. Sara was nearly as blanched as Bonnie, but she stood straight and looked Dave in the eye. He could almost believe that she understood. He clapped his left hand over his mouth to keep from making another sound and raised the wrench again in his right. Looking through the window, he could see that a metal gangway had been put up to the hatch of the plwe. No more of the creatures were on it. With a sweep of his eye across a brightly lit domed structure, floored with water except for a narrow stretch of flat beach, he could see that no more of them lurked near the plane. "It's clear, he said. "We're in some kind of huge... room, it looks like from here. At least, there's something that looks like a door over there. The thing must have come in that way." He avoided looking at the dead thing again, but he felt his mouth quiver with a suppressed laugh. Incredulity erupting again. "The plane's sitting in water, and how we'll ever get it back in the air, I don't know." He would not think now of what might lie above them -- miles of water, or whatever. "Sara, look out the other window and see what's out there. If there are more of those things on the other side we'U have to be careful getting out of here. " Bonnie snorted. "Well, don't think you're taking the stones with you when you go." She shook the case. "These stay right here with me. I don't know where you think you're going, anyway. You don't know what's on the other side of that door. Or maybe you do, but I'm staying right here until help comes." She crossed to the pilot's seat and sat in it, still clutching the case. She picked up the mike. "How do you make this work? Oh, I see." She pushed in the switch on the side of the microphone. "Hello... hello. Anybody there?" A crackle of static was the only answer. ' 'Hello..." Sara was at the opposite window. "Dave, come look at this." Joining her, the wrench still in his hand, Dave looked out the window. They were not, after all, in a room, but in a gigantic bubble that might have held a whole city. The downward curve of the opposite wall was so far from the plane that he could see no beach, though it must have been encircled by e same narrow stretch of sand. At intervals, the bubble was set with door-like openings, though all were shut. A netwoilc of lights illuminated it, strung on some invisible network set in the reflective material of the dome. The intense, yellow-white light stared pitilessly down on a gently swelling floor of seawater, out of which rose, to the right of where the plane sat in the shallows, a derelict pile of rubbish reaching roughly a third of the way to the roof. Planes, and parts of planes. Crushed, broken and tom, soaked with seawater and stacked like cordwood against the far wall of the dome. "Are they... ?" Sara faltered. "Yes," Dave answered grimly. A large fragment of one of the planes, an old low-wing Tamco that lay a little nearer than the rest, was sticking up out of the sand with its nose and one wing intact, reaching to the vanished sky like a crushed bird. A flat white, disarrayed pile of bones, obviously human, lay across the step and out onto the sand. There was no skull, only a collapsed ribcage, arms and hands, and the backbone. The skeleton ended at the third vertebra above the shoulders. Sara caught the narrowing of his eyes as he peered, transfixed with shock. "What's..." "Never mind. There's nothing in the world we can do for anybody who was in those planes." He pulled her away before she could look closer. "We have to get out of here." "But where are we going to go?" Sara hesitated as he urged her toward the door. "Out of here. We're not just going to sit here and wait for something to happen." He started to follow her, passed the rack of tools where he had obtained the wrench. He selected a much larger one, and dropped the first. For the first time in his life, he wished he had a gun. But seeing again the body of the alien thing where it had fallen, he supposed that he could make do with what came to hand if he had to. "Are you coming with us?" Bonnie turned and gave him a look of scorn, then turned back to the microphone, helloing into the silence. He pushed past Sara and stepped out onto the gangway, taking her by the hand with him. They were alone. No voices or other sounds of life disturbed the quiet, in which he could hear the soft, waveless splash of the water on the tail of the plane. At the foot of the gangway, the alien's footprints, narrow and triangular with the widest part toward the heel, marred the damp sand. It was strange, Dave thought, 'that there were no drag marks showing the movement of the gangway. The footprints led directly to the door opposite where their plane sat. Best to avoid that door, though there were no guarantees as to what he might find behind the others. Could there be water behind the doors? He forced himself to recall the look of the alien's smashed head -- though he would have liked to expunge the scene Ifom his mind forever -- to see if he could remember it having had gills, or anything that might serve as gills. But there was nothing. It had had no nose, but from what he recalled it was not apparently a water-breather. He hurried Sara down the beach toward the next door. But the sand there was disturbed, kicked about by prints led off in the direction of the heap of wrecked aircraft. These were not the triangular prints of the creatures, but appeared human. But none of them led away from the door, all were going in. No escape, at least not from here. Dave swallowed hard. Pushing Sara in front of him now, he quickened his pace, and made for the next door. The sand was flat and undisturbed between the place where the human footprints came up out of the water and the door, some fifty yards distant. The only sound was the ragged gasping of their breath and a slight buzzing in Dave's ears. They ran heavily through the loose sand and finally reached the door. Dave let out his breath in a heavy sigh of relief when he saw that there were no footmarks, either human or alien, on the sand in front of it. But the buzzing in his ears was growing. It was an electronic hum, maybe it was the power for the lights. The door had an air and moisture seal around it, and was rounded at top and bottom. About eighteen inches higher than a doorknob would have been there was a wheel. Whatever else might be down here, the door had obviously been installed for the use of the much taller aliens. But it was not too high to reach. He put up his hand, grasped it, and gave a tug. It refused to turn. He wiped sweat from his palm and jerked on it again, hauling with all his weight. Nothing. It hung there, too high, mocking him. It ought to turn, dammit. It had to turn! He swung up the wrench, enraged and desperate, and brought it down with a resounding clang on the metal wheel. Still nothing. He hit it again. And again. Sweat reached his eyes, stinging. His hands were slippery with it, and he nearly lost his grasp on the wrench. Feeling something clinging to his arm, he swung around, raising the wrench. "Dave... Dave, please! Try turning it the other way. At least try it. All that noise... somebody... something might hear it!" He could hardly hear her with the pounding of his heart and the increasing buzzing noise in his ears. But he understood through his panic, and cursed himself for losing his temper and his common sense. He tried to smile, but from her grimace he knew he'd failed. "Okay... it's okay," he said, too loud, over the buzzing. He swung the wrench and banged it downward on the wheel in the other direction. It gave a little, and his relief was so great when he reached up to pull it around that he laughed aloud. He could feel Sara's breath on his ear as she cried out, "Thank God!" She clutched his shoulder. "Thank -- " The door hit the outer wall with a clang. There were many aliens behind it, and the noise of their weapons -- if they made any -- was drowned in an engulfing explosion of white-out fog that wrapped around him before he had time to think of anything, of the discarded wrench, of Sara, of fighting back. He plunged into a sickening downward spiral, his hands searching for the familiar slick plastic of the wheel. Got to get control of the plane coz we're falling. I'm losing it. But the domed, underwater world was fading, fading... and gone. Pop! Oh Lord... this is really it this time. This time I know I am dead. I have to be, because they'd never let me live after I smashed one of them up. Killed him... her... it? But this time I know it.  can see... though everything is misty... my body lying down there. That's strange. Why does it seem to be down? Oh yeah. Everything looks down from up here. I remember this from somewhere, but I can't recall just here. Not a bad body. Good while it lasted. But getting soft. In the head. All the same, Lwas pretty fond of it. And of her, down there struggling. Hey! It's no use, honey. I'm dead. You can quit fussing coz it's happened. Quit struggling. Sara, don't fight it. I'm dead and that's all there is to it. Lordy, what a fighter. Never knew she was such a scrapper. Well yeah, I did. But that was such a long time ago, and she's gotten so... so smothering. Fusses. Over Danny -- tho God knows she had reason to fuss over him. Over me, like now. Made me feel old and tired. But I guess Tm not going to have to sweat that any more. Am I? Am I, you. Whoever comes to get you when you're really dead? Well? Sara, you're crying. I see you down there, trying to knock those creatures out of the way and get to my body. But I'm not in there. That's not me. So you don't have to cry and carry on and fight them. And even if there's no chance for you to get away you can come with me. I'm here -- up here! Just wait. I see -- and how I see I couldn't tell you -- that they can't carry you. They're too fragile, too weak to carry anything as heavy as a human body. I suppose they're going to leave my body lying there till it goes to bones like that other poor guy in the Tamco. Pity about that. I liked it, tho I never got a whole lot of good out of it the last little while. You liked it too, though you coddled it too much. That's right, go with them. You can figure out a way to get free. Hey! What's that they're doing with my body? What's that thing? A whole gang of them, raising my body and putting it on something like a stretcher, but it doesn't have any handles. It rises, no kidding, rises in the air by itself. So that's how they got the gangway out to the plane without leaving tracks. What do they want with it? Even if it is mine. Especially one that has a smoky rope attached to it. A rope that goes, bigod, it goes to right here, right into me! I can look down and see where it goes into my stomach, plugged in there and pulsing. I reach to touch it. I can see my hands. My very own hands with the square blunt nails, and that's my wedding ring on the left one, and on the right, my opal that I bought while I was dealing arui had money, to spend on trinkets and pretties. And now I don't have enough money to pay the mortgage and I wind up on a crazy trip like -- Hey, guys. Somebody? Anybody? I could relax and float downstream if somebody would answer the phone. Get the thing, and make the buzzing stop. It's coming from this direction. If I Just keep moving, I can get to it and turn it off. Down this hall. Here's the door. That design on the door there seems to have worn well. Kept its colors. The star in the center seems to float somewhere behind the rest of the sigil. You could reach out and touch it and feel as though you were putting your hand thru the door. And strangely, you do. But not really so strange. That's what the design was for. And all the rest follows. Follows the star, which won't stay still, but moves, rearranges itself, some above, some below. Triangles joined to triangles, and it shapes itself into a pyramid, the door with the star opens, and  enter,  am inside it, before the crystal that is also a pyramid, with the Seat of Power at the Place of Power, the crystal steps ascending.  look up and see a figure there, a man long-haired and robed, with the green glow of an emerald on his forehead. This is too much. I'm hallucinating. If he's the one who is supposed to collect my soul after death, he sure doesn't look too happy about it. VI --  greet you in the name of the Twelve -- he says. --  am Arien, guardian of the Crystal . -- I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I say, -- Are you the Dweller on the Threshold? -- This gets something like a grin from his haggard face, and he says, -- You will not contend with that One until you come to the holy place in the flesh . --  -- Flesh ? -- I say, startled. -- Then I'm not dead this time, either? --  -- You live, and have left your body. Your spirit is drawn by the power of the Cyrstal . -- He comes down the steps as though floating above them. -- Listen to me. We have not much time before your body awakens, and I have much to show you . --  -- Well, if I'm not dead, then where am I? --  -- That I shall show you. For many cycles I have waited, waiting in the holy place, and have watched the Invaders spread their nets for victims. To some I have spoken, but none have met the Dweller in their flesh and lived to free the Crystal and themselves . -- And he comes closer to me. I see the huge stone on his forehead glowing green with energy. If Bonnie ever saw that stone she'd flip. A piercing ray comes from it and spreads around me. I see pictures in the light of the emerald he wears. We stand together on a high place and view a city spread out below us. It's laid out in circles, and I know that it's no city I have ever sien before, but it's familiar somehow. People are moving on the streets below, vehicles, traffic bustling. He gives a call like a muezzin, and they look up. I look down, and I see that we're standing in a window, high up on the side of a pyramid, like the pyramids of Egypt, but this ain't Egypt. -- Behold Poseidia -- he tells me. -- Poseidia ? --  say, puzzled. --  see that you have knowledge of our land, though I see in your mind it has been sunk these many centuries below the waves. Require understanding of yourself . -- He turns and taps me on the forehead, a peculiar, syncopated rhythm, and all of a sudden  realize that what he' s showing me is what we call Atlantis, but they called 'it something else. And that means that the pyramid we're standing on has been ten thousand years under the sea. Under the sea. I begin to get it, and he smiles his haggard smile, knowing it. -- Your body lies in the precincts of this same pyramid. You were brought here by the Invaders, as others have been brought. Through the centuries they have used humans as a means to draw out the crystal's energy. They themselves cannot do so, for they are not as we. They cannot enter into contact with one another or with the Greater Harmony. Knowing much, but understanding little, they imagine that the brain is all. And so human brains they employ to direct the crystal's energy to their ships. Their science is great, their spirits small. Many are the travellers -- navigators, captains of ships, pilots of aircraft -- that they have captured and used. But  see that you know this.  give thanks to the Power that you came here in spite of danger . -- Lord, has he got it all wrong! Jim Dandy to the rescue -- I can't let him believe a lie about me, so I say, -- Look, I'm not here because I'm a good guy. Yes, I knew about it. But I have to tell you that I didn't believe it, I thought it was all coincidence, the stories about this place . --  try to look him in the eye, make him understand. -- I'm a crook, sir. A lawbreaker . --  -- It is well that you do not try to hide it. I understand your purpose. Nevertheless, the Power has used you, and you will use It to drive out the Invaders, these disruptors of Harmony, from another world . --  -- Sir, I'm just a guy. I don't know what I can do to... -- But he's smiling for real now. -- Listen, and I will tell you. The Holy Object is not a machine, but a crystal. As such, its energy does not decay, but lives on though it is sunk beneath the water. Its energy field enclosed it, protecting it. It lives now. But it must be directed by a priest in his flesh. My body died in the cataclysm, arul I can no longer utilize it. For that, you must serve. Other captives have been here, have broken free of their captors and come to the holy place. But most imagined that they dreamed, or that they were mad. Some did go mad and killed themselves when they realized what the Invaders meant to do . --  -- Then how am I going to... --  -- Observe this device, -- he tells me, pointing to the green stone on his forehead. -- All others like it will serve to focus the energy of the crystal. We used them to heal bodies, hear thoughts. All the captives had such stones on their bodies, or near them. But none have been such that they could lay aside the personality and become one with the crystal, as I see you can do . --  -- Let me get this straight. You want me to get back into my body and take over the crystal from the aliens and destroy them? How am I supposed to do this? I'm not a priest. I'm just a man . --  -- You must obtain one of the stones from the woman. The Invaders are bringing her now to the chamber where your body lies. It will lead you to the chamber of the Power. You must mount the steps on which you first saw me. The crystal will show you what you must do . --  -- That's not a whole lot to go on. Get the stone. How will I... --  -- You will know. Everything important is obvious . --  -- Sut... --  -- You must return. Remember . -- ' 'Remember. ' ' Hearing him speak, Sara leaped up and ran to the table on which Dave's body was lying. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge, a terrible urgency prodding him into action. A warning hum keened in his ears, he had heard it before. They were coming. Wildly, he looked around the room for some weapon, but there was nothing. The bare, shining walls and tables stared back at him blankly. The room had three doors, featureless except for the wheel in the center of each. This was a cell. He knew the doors would be locked, except when the aliens brought prisoners or took them away to be robbed of their brains. Panic rose like sour bile in his throat. Sara tried to make him sit down. She obviously couldn't hear the humming that threatened to burst his eardrums. He had to do something! Find some weapon! Only if he could overpower the alien bringing Bonnie (How did he know there was only one?) could he follow his instructions. He looked down. Sara's boots! High, with pointed heels. He pushed her down on a bench and knelt, ripping down the zippers of the boots. "What are you -- " "Here, take this." He shoved one of the boots into her hand and jerked her over to the door that made his ears hum most loudly. "Be quiet. They're coming," he whispered savagely. Her face twisted in terror. "Bonnie will come through first. Let her by, then hit the thing with the boot heel. When it's down, run through the door." The wheel in the door was turning. He held the boot high. The door swung open, and Bonnie entered, a single alien behind her. Sara froze, as he had been afraid she might. Dave hit the alien with all his strength. It folded, toppling. He swung the boot again, hitting it squarely between the eyes. Bonnie whirled around. "You fool," she screamed. The emerald case was in her hand. She swung it at him. "He wasn't going to do anything. What did you hit him for? You -- " He caught the case as it swung, ripped it out of her hand. Holding her off, he cracked it on the wall, and it burst open, scattering the stones. She clawed him as he grabbed for one. He pushed her away and she fell. Her head hit the floor with a crack. In the silence, his ears began to hum again. More aliens were on their way. Across the room, one of the other doorwheels began to turn. "Get out!" he yelled to Sara. He grabbed her, pulled her through the open door, threw all his weight on it, and slammed it shut. He spun the wheel until he heard something click, hoped to god it was locked, but hadn't a second to waste making sure. He turned quickly, squinting in the gloom of the hall, then spun around as he heard crackling. An ozone smelling haze came spreading through the door. Metal melted and wept molten drops down the door's surface. The door-wheel quivered but didn't turn. Dave let out an incredulous gasp as he realized that the weapon had locked the door behind them. Where to run to? There's wasn't much light in here. It was evidently not part of the alien's regular quarters. Narrowing his eyes, he could see that they were in a furniture-cluttered hall, lit by globular fixtures, not bright, but quite enough to reveal them if they didn't get away fast before the aliens burst through. Where to run to? Where to go? He ran a sweating hand down his pants leg. There was a lump in his pocket. The emerald he had thrust there as Bonnie grappled with him! As his fingers touched it, he knew which way to go. "Come on," he croaked. They ran, clattering and stumbling, through a maze of halls, passageways, rooms. Even as he ran, towing Sara, Dave felt a pulling, a guidance that let him know the right way. They were nearly at the end of their strength when he saw, across a gallery, something he recognized. A mammoth double door with a six-pointed star on it. He ran for it, flung himself at it. It swung open and they fell through into total darkness. They heard a sound like the sigh of a giant turning in his sleep. With the sound, a sub-sonic hum thrummed under their feet. Without any warning, everything was lit. Sara caught her breath. But Dave, hand on the emerald in his pocket, knew where they were. Up there, at the top of those steps, he had seen the priest. This was the crystal, lit from beneath with a living glow. This was it, the thing he had seen in his vision. He half expected to see the drawn face of Arien peering down at him from the seat at the top of the translucent stairs. The Place of Power." But there was no priest there. There was no living being other than themselves in the spacious chamber. There was no Twelve in the seats of the Twelve. No acolytes that he knew should be at the bank of switches behind the shining height of the crystal. It's living ascendance was alone here. Alone with two grubby, panting humans that somehow had been drawn to it. He drew the emerald out of his pocket and held it up. It caught the piercing light of the mammoth crystal and took fire from it. He put his hands on Sara's shoulders. "You alright?" The emerald touched her flesh, and a shiver ran through her body. Her head, which had been drooping, came up. Some reflection, it seemed, from the verdant fires of the emerald, caught in her eyes, and she drew a shaky breath. "Yes. You're going to have to do something here, aren't you? Something dangerous?" He nodded, wondering how to tell her. But suddenly he knew that he wasn't going to have to tell her. She smiled with sudden genuine pride. "Well, go ead then." She turned away from him, crossing to the row of seats where the Twelve had sat. She sat down, laid her arms along the arms of the chair. Dave crossed the chamber to the darkened bank of switches. As he passed around the crystal, he imagined it looked at him searchingly, pondering whether he could wield the thing. Or maybe it was the invisible eyes of the priest on him, the last servitor of the crystal, waiting to see him press the panels that would turn that unearthly light into directed energy. The switches, crystal plates set flush with their surrounding panel, were dark. He knew they would light up when he pushed the right ones, and that they would be ryl-green, like the stone he held in his hand. In his hand... Sudden dizziness swept over him as he remembered that the stone was to be bound to his forehead, if its placement on the head of Arien in his vision was clear. He rummaged his pockets, found nothing to use to bind it. He passed the back of his hand across his eyes, and suddenly he heard the buzzing again. He couldn't waste any more time. Fishing in his pocket, he found his pocket knife, yanked out his shirt-tail and nicked it, tore it off. Kneeling before the bank of switches, he laid the emerald in the middle of the rag, folded it over, twisted it tightly and bound it to his forehead as he rose again. He flinched from the sudden babble of voices that assaulted his mind. They screamed, wailed, entreated. His interior receptors, unfolding like the petals of a terrible flower, were picking up the mad yammering of human creatures. Oh, god, there were others alive in this place. Looking closer, despite the horror, he found that he was listening to the amplified, disembodied mind-voices of the biocomputers, the enslaved brains of the humans that powered the alien's ships. Nausea threatened to overwhelm him. No, he wouldn't look at it any more. There was nothing he could do for whatever disembodied wretches had ended their lives like this. If they were ever to be free, if he and Sara were to be free, he would have to go on, do whatever it was that he had to do... He jerked the probing sensors of his mind back to the inner chamber, reached out to touch Sara. A low, almost musical tone emanated from her, interrupted with discordant bursts of inner conflict. As he fought to free their bodies, Sara fought herself. Shaken out of her lethargy by the terror of their experience, she was recalling what she had been, what they had been. Trying to direct her woman's strength outward to him, to overcome her fear. And making it, though she was still frightened. But not for his physical safety any longer. Just frightened, and that was natural. Her interior tone grew stronger, and he set himself to match it, discovered in himself a harmonic, as though they hummed a chord, part of a chord, on two notes. Then a third note could be heard, supplying a basso completion so profound and completely satisfying that Dave began to lose himself in it. -- Please -- don't linger. They come! -- It was the priest. Dave shook himself, reached out a hand and placed it flat on the third switchplate from the left. Its light came up as the crystal's had. He pushed it twice, and the white light decayed to green. He did the same with two other plates, placed his right hand, palm down, in an opening above and behind the bank of switches, and felt a tingle. This done, he turned and went back around to the front of the crystal. The steps were before him. He swallowed hard, and put his right foot on the first. I don't have any right to be here, no right at all. I'm just a lousy smalltime pilot on a dangerous, illegal flight to nowhere. Dangerous to myself and Sara, and harmful to that stupid Bonnie, who'd probably have found some other poor idiot to fly her on this Job if I hadn't, but that's not my business, is it? I went for it, went for an easy out to a problem  let happen myself. I'm not worthy to put my feet on these steps. I'm defiling them with every step I take. My mere presence darkens the purity of the crystal, pollutes the Holy of Holies. I'm so tired. I want to sleep... My foot comes up to the next step. It burns. Hot, I used to get so hot with the unfairness of what was happening to us that I wanted Danny to die and have it over with. I wanted to hit Sara, to get her to quit looking like a martyr, make her yell, or cry, or something. Anything to be doing something about it, anything, make some gesture in the face of the unfairness. Who asked for this -- the kid we both loved, the life we'd made, destroyed? I used to get so hot about a lot of things: the war, the pollution, the cops, the users of the good things, the wasters. But I couldn't get anyone to see it, help me do something. Sara, sitting by Danny's bed all the time, reading him stories, lifting him, bathing him. I couldn't handle even seeing him, tried to get her out of there and get involved in something we could change. But she couldn't get interested in it. Didn't want to hear about anything outside the house and Danny. Wanted to talk about Danny, about us, about me, about her. Little things, trivia! I wanted to do something big to make it better. But I'm all bogged down in this petty day-to-day bullshit that won't make a goddamn bit of difference in a thousand years. Or will it? I take another step, like trying to swim upward in a pool of syrup, heavy, dragging at me. been going on for ten thousand years, and it still makes a difference, because it happens to us, happens to people, individual people. We have to live with it, each of us. Have to sweep up our own crap. And  haven't swept up mine, all the small, but significant details of my personality, the Dave Game. An accusing, self-pitying crock of crap. That's all  did, all I accomplished while telling myself how trapped I was by a sick kid and a martyred wife, I who had seen the building blocks of the universe in living color and knew just where it was at better than anyone else except for Sara, who was Shakti, and didn't have to know, but was It. Another step. Someone bled here. Someone fell here, trying to get where I'm going. Someone turned and ran screaming out of here rather than face all this. But there's no escape, no way out of this. Wouldn't matter if I did run. Tm a hopeless mess. We're all hopeless. Me, him, her. All ridiculous and small and mean. We deserve to die in sight of the top. Deserve it. Have to die, because who could hope to be clean enough to use the power of the crystal, use that sacred energy in the shape we're in. Man shape, earth shape. I can't take this clumsy, cruddy piece of meat machinery with me up there, this Daveness, this darkness. Oh, Sara, honey, Tm sorry. Sorry I was so blind and petty and small. You were right. All those feelings I was too proud to feel. Disappointment and pain and anger and fear. Kept it locked up inside me till it rotted me, killed all the loving in me and turned it into bitterness. Locked me up in this figuring machine, this calculator. One more step. Tm so tired. I'm ready to die. I can't think of any other way to get free of all the shit I am. Death... So hard to keep moving. So hard to put one foot in front of the other. I know which Bardo this is, alright. And I can't fight it. Can't go on. Dragging, pulling, heaviness... Step. There's the light above me... seen that before. I might Just be able to die for all of them, if I can't live for them. Got to get close enough to the light to burn all this sick heaviness out of me, this ugliness, this mindtrapped Daveness. Monsters down there. Monster up here. I'm the monster, and I carry the monstrosity with me, it oozes out my pores, out of my head, my body, and I see it take on a twisted form of its own, but still me, blocking the way to the light with my soiled humanness. Step. It's standing there, all teeth and claws arul hair and fangs. Menacing, threatening. Like something out of a comic book, and me still down there climbing, pitiful. Well, kill me if you can, creature, but I'm still going to keep on coming till you kill, keep on trying to get to the light. I raise my impossibly heavy foot to the last step, push at it with my leaden hands, try to brush it aside, this tulpa of mine. It dissolves like mist in the sun. And I hear faint laughter. High up here. High and pure, a crystal protrusion into the material world, pulling down light arid energy from some etheric otherness to ensoul and vivify the land, and with it the world. As I turn, the floor of the inner chamber looks miles away down there, as though I stood at Mt. Meru and saw the whole world below me, worshipping, coming to postulate and wash their bodies in the energy. Only there's just Sara down there, sitting so bravely and quietly in the lesser priest's chair. You'd never know she was scared. You'd never know that I was, up here at the top of that Jacob's Ladder of a stairway. And I never got to wrestle with the Thing. It was really me, anyway. But those things outside... they're not me. They're not part of the Greater Harmony. They come from someplace else, some planet where life is cheap, other creatures lives trivial. Well, they'll get my head, but not the way they 'think. My head... a tuning fork of a thing on its fragile stalk of neck... I brought it here to the Seat of Power to offer for use. You hear that, Arien? Tm here, and hey,  even know the right words to say. I desire to know in order to serve. Redd that somewhere , and a good thing, too. But I don't suppose it matters. Attitude, that's what counts up here, not words. And this is our planet, our learning. These others, now, they're not supposed to be here, no matter what poor schleps need to get into the True Believer bit about flying saucers.  have to cut off their supply lines that are tapped into the energy and send them back where they belong. Have to relax, tune into it, get above and outside Dave Connell who's feeling scared, looking at the creatures, and just serve. Do the thing. I sit in the high, carven seat. The walls of light close around me and seem to thrum, very low, a mantra to soothe me, soothe Dave down arul to sleep. The work is to do, and nobody needs ole Dave. Go to sleep, sucker. Just cool it. Listen to the pretty music and dream good dreams. Perfection! The rruiterial object that sits on the body of the earth, living geometry, effortless, flowing. I follow it down, to its base where the fundament of the crystal joins its roots to the earth, arul deeper, splitting into the conscious reality of paradox, the growth of the material crystal from the material earth-and the connection into a scintillant dimension of unformed energy. It bleeds, no, it breathes, it spills, through this medium, energy out onto the material level. Dave is not quite asleep. He dreams, and tries to fit words to all this. A waste of my time. Ah, here's the Harmonic of Delta sleep. I reach out to it, activate it, and switch him off. Harmonics. A place for everything, arul everything singing. And Tm at the center, the critical connection. The only moving part. I could beat cosmic time with my fingers. If I had fingers. But I've got something better. I beat time with long, long exhalations, inhalations of energy. But there's a drain somewhere. Time, energy, relentlessly slipping away, leaking out through some crack in the outer surface of my reality. One big leak. Right there. Focus just right, and I can see the whole cancerous installation of the Invaders, surrounding me on two sides. It's connected to me, rooted in my pyramid-body, sucking up the flow of energy and using it to --  -- Just so. The breach must be healed. Disconnect the brains they have used to tap into the Stone. Seal them off . -- Wait a minute. They're big, so intricately locked into the flow that it'll take attention and time to cut them off without damaging the crystal. I slide my awareness down the pulsating surface of the energy field to the tap-in, arui it's so huge, so bloodily pouring energy into the creature's machinery that it'll take major surgery to fix it. Carefiil... -- Seal it ! -- But  know as my mirul threads its way down into the hungry gush of energy through into the alien's quarters that there is no doing this quickly. To hurry is to chance damaging the ancient, holy thing. -- Hurry ! -- Wait just a damn minute! If I go too fast and jiggle the crystal's integrity, I'll blow this piece of the Atlantic into the upper atmosphere. It'll rain crystal in Boston, and lord knows where else. Let's look this system over and see what has to be done. I want out of here. Dave wants out. Bodies are fragile, and I'm pretty fond of mine. Sara's too. So don't rush me. I have to take a look at this. Now, if the alien's quarters are hooked in on two sides of the pyramid, and I cut it off here, the feedback from the force-block will give me an overload in sections three through seven. I'll have to cut down the flow gradually to Beta level and at that level the field can hold it and not be shaken apart by feedback. The ebbing energy slows with a dopplering whine like worn-out brakes, and I think it's not supposed to make that twise as I slowly rujrrow the field. But I go ahead. I focus my awareness and it's like looking through a glass onion -- the superimposed vibratory rates -- as I reduce the level still further, apply the tourniquet of my mind to the wound in the crystal's field. I see them running around in a frenzy over there, dashing for the control complex. Oh-oh. Might have known they'd fight. Six of them standing at the control console, disciplined, machine-like. With one shouting orders. He doesn't know what's cutting off their energy, but he's going to stop it if he can. He increases -- with the busy, boneless fingers of his underlings, and I decrease -- with the disembodied # degree input of my awareness, focused through the crystal. I hear a high whine as we struggle, a sound that I know is wrong. I follow it, let its wrongness draw me close enough to observe, and -- Overload ! In an instant I see raw, ravening energy, too powerfully drawn from the complex interior workings of the crystal's energy field. I know where I am, arui what I'm doing, but I seem to be seeing beyond time. Ten thousand years of technology stretches backward out of my conscious awareness and the shrieking overload exparuis, contracts, expands again, shaking the very earth. It thrums in the bowels of the continent. Glass shatters, building stones crumble and smash on the paving blocks of the outer courtyard. The Twelve's concentration wavers, and they break, leap from their seats and run from the inner chamber in terror, charge bliruily through the halls, forgetting their task. They strike down the waiting supplicants, who wail to them to stop the vibration that is shaking the earth apart. But nothing can save them, the Twelve or their people. In the outer air, the very atmosphere is electric with terror. Lightning strikes from a clear sky, the earth quakes relentlessly, the overloaded crystal keens its knell. Escape! I have to get us out of here. Dave jumped to his feet, slipping on the polished floor. Flinging out a hand to catch himself, he touched the substance of the crystal, felt the vibration through the glasslike walls. He ran down the stairs, feeling the vibration even through the soles of his shoes. He grabbed the white faced Sara, Jerked her to her feet, and they ran. There was no buzzing, humming warning of aliens. Evidently they were all engaged in the struggle with their energy systems. Dave and Sara fled panting back the way they had come, Dave leading, searching out the path with a part of his mind that he knew was altered forever. He cast his awareness out, and could see, even touch, the controls of the force-bubble that had brought them down, englobed them in energy and carried them to the undersea hangar. Through the pain of a stitch in his side, he reached out, tried to touch the controls, and gave a gasping laugh when he felt them respond. Here was the right door. They ran through it, leaving it open. In the flickering light, they could see the plane where it rocked in the shallows, the gangway scraping in the wash of sudden waves. They pounded up the gangway. No reason to be quiet now. The note of vibration was rising, rising, and a new sound interposed itself, a rhythmic thump, that raised waves and sent them crashing onto the narrow beach. Dave kicked the gangway aside, closed and dogged the door. They dropped into their seats. Dave hit the ignition, and it caught. His eyes went to the control panel, swept it, forgot it. All systems were abnormal, but there was no time to do anything about them. He reached out with his mind, activated the force field, which closed in around the plane. They began to go forward. A section of the far wall seemed to thin and dissolve as they skimmed toward it. He heard himself gulp as it happened, stupidly; he was doing this himself. The tropical shimmer of ocean water danced and flickered before the speeding plane, but he saw it through several layers of ill-matched glass. He choked on a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob as the suspended plane passed through the arching wall and they found themselves surrounded by the blue dance of mobile ocean. The plane rose too slowly in the bubble field, like a spent breath from some bottom-dwelling monster. There was no sound fron the engine, and none from the forcefield that enclosed them. Dave imagined he could feel a tremble of vibration, but told himself it was in his mind. That they still had time. The plane hung in watery space far above the submerged pyramid, rising, rising. The illusion of vibration grew as they rose, and shuddered on the edge of sound. As he jjeered forward through the windscreen, the nose again glowed with the same halo of blue light he had seen before they fell. Suddenly, pain struck him, and he could hear quite clearly the rising pitch of the over-burdened, too-taxed crystal. Like some tortured thing, it screamed its protest into his shrinking ears, fear-sweat was icy on his skin as he looked frantically upward, calculating the distance to the surface. It hung above the plane like a roof, growing closer. Then they were through it. The plane rose into the air, climbing. The engines, silent since Dave had switched on the field, were still, uimaturally silent. Minute vortices of energy spun on the interface of the field, obscuring their view of the open sky. But it was sky. Real sky! down, and saw a strange radiating pattern of milky lines on the surface. These converged on a central point, multiplied and began to spin, bulging upward in the center like an eye. Speechless, he heard the engine sputter to life, catch, and begin to roar. He gaped at the instruments, tearing his eyes away from the up-rushing maelstrom of ocean below, and pulled the nose up. The plane climbed, away from the boiling sea. The radio crackled and spoke. "What the hell was that?" a man's voice shouted tinnily. "No data," replied another voice. "No dat -- " "My God, look down there! You seeing what I'm seeing. Bob? Looks like the bottom of the ocean exploded!" "Hey Lauderdale! Come in, Lauderdale! Come in Tower! I think a bomb exploded down there ! ' ' "Here comes the wave," the radio reported. Dave could see the racing curve of it, shock-propelled, as it passed under them. The radio screamed with a confusion of voices from craft on the surface. Some were silenced as the wave hit them. But it seemed to Dave that he could still hear them. The emerald burned on his forehead. He could feel Sara's pity as each tsunami smashed toward the land. He put up a hand to the emerald. There were no more aliens in the undersea installation. Water, unlike the first time, swept through the inner chamber of the crystal. It was sunk, perhaps forever this time. Washed clean. As the emerald could wash minds clean, bodies clean from disease and pain. As it could heal, he discovered with wonder, probing the possibilities. Sara took his hand, and he reached out his mind to calm the fear in her, wash itaway with emerald light. She smiled, tears on her face. Ahead there would be work to do, more work than he had ever undertaken in his life. He'd have no time for the meaningless chatter of cocktail parties, no energy to waste on trying to turn Sara into something other than she was. She was alright. He was alright. But that was fine. It had to be. He was going to be very busy from now on. It remains to be seen how the S. E. C. suit will affect the merger. SF Bestsellers: The August N. Y. Times Book Review showed Larry in some areas. will be out from Jove in February. Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp will have a new Conan book out out sometime this spring. portions of which appeared in the Flashing Swords anthologies. H. Beam Piper's estate is now being handled under the auspices of Jerry E. Pournelle, who is cooperating with Ace Books to bring out quent contributor to Analog, is writing the third novel of the popular ever paid for hardcover rights to an SF book. The novel sold from an outline. Mr. Siiverberg will finish the writing sometime this summer. The novel is described as a long epic adventure set on an extrasolar planet twenty thousand years in the future. to Berkley-Putnam for #. Jack L Chalker will have a novel coming from Berkley-Putnam in January. -- Elton Elliott As you can see from our first issue there 've been some changes made. And there is more coming. Science fiction itself has been changing the last few years. The number of science fiction books and movies being released has increased dramatically. Hundreds of science fiction books are scheduled for release in the next twelve months alone. You'll find a probing series of interviews with the stars and directors responsible for some of today's new science fiction movies, and behind the scenes articles on how these movies are made, as well as conversations with luminaries in the fields of science and literature. you abreast of all this every issue with news of forthcoming projects in both media from our SF Hotline correspondents. The increasing rate of change in our lives, the result of industrialization, has focused people's attention on the scientific horizon which may effect us all. You'll find this interest reflected in more articles we will be developing, rounding-up current breakthroughs in chemistry, biology and physics, by science writer Greg Chalfin, as well as reports on similiar breakthroughs in the scientific investigation of psychic gineer, Jim Be. Also coming in the escape world of fantasy is a new series of illustrated graphic stories with scripts by some of the biggest names in science fiction and artwork by some of the finest artists in the comic field. Plus you'll find the same exciting blend of award winning science fichas always been famous for. All in all you'll find the kind of magazine modem science fiction readers have been asking for. So join us every issue as ture, steps into the future. ence fiction magazine. # White Plains Rd., Scarsdale, N.Y. # below:  # years (# issues) for I I .#, a savings of # from newsstand value.  I year (# issues) for #, a savings of .# from newsstand value. 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By Isaac Asimov #-m-l volume containing the masters first published novel. Pebble in the Sky. plus Earth is Room Enough and The End ol Eternity. Pub ed # # # The Stars in Shroud. By Gregory Benlord When Lmg Sanien laces the plague-spreading Quarn on the planet Veden. the fate of humanity is at stake Eiplicit icenea and language may be ollensive to some. By the author ol In Ihe Ocean ol Night. Pub ed # # #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism An SF classic Comb price # # # The Chronicles ot Amber By Roger Zelazny At lasi -- the Amber senes IS complete' Two glorious volumes contain: Nine Princes in Amber; The Guns of Avilon: Sign ol Ihe Unicorn; The Hind of Oboron; The Courts ol Chios. Comb I # # # The Avatar. By Pout Anderson Daring men and women brave the unknown potentials of an alien transport machine -- and discover more than expected' Pub ed t# # # Faise Oaorn. By Chelsea Quinn Varbro. 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See other side fora complete selection Science Fiction Book Ciub Garden City N.Y, # Y SI. # Science Fiction A Complete Novel Breakthroughs From The Paranormal Up Alien Landing On Our Moon? This Month's Novelette Jupiter and Its Four Planet Size Moons Photographed j  by Voyager I S ' The gift of known to awry few. in the harsh, strife-torn land which had once been held together by its mystical power. One of these few, a wizard, bestows his knowledge on the youth Orin, and urges him to undertake a quest to find the Song of the Kingdom and release it from its prison in the distant mountains. Orin is joined by two others also blessed with the gift of music. Drawn together by the forces of their melodies, propelled past obstacles by the vision of a better world, the three at last come to stand before Star Peak... and a gentle fantasy of magic and comradeship reaches its A Horsecians Novel Robert Adams -- Andre Norton In post-Apocalyptic America the nomadic Horsecians battle the decadent city-states of the Ehlee nee . Can the Horsecians, through the strength of their swords and their very special mental talents , save civilization from destruction? Arnold E. Abramson, Publisher Editor: Hank Stine Contributing Artist: Ken Smith Asst. Editor: Ken Hedberg Contributing Editor: R.E. Geis Editorial Asst.: Alice Simmons Staff Artist: Robert Ramsey Subscription Dept: L.C. Murphy Design: Stan Taylor Readers: D. Blackwell; C. Collins; P. Adkins. Art Staff: E. Lakin, C. Grenier; J. Aguirre. Gil Lamont # How many nations, secretly, only wait for the day they can see their way clear? If desperation is the mother of invention -- then # ships against I is a "mother" of a problem! What's happening in the SF world from coast-tocoast and border-to-border! Making dumb beasts fight for sport is cruelty... so what punishment fits this crime? Breakthroughs from the scientific horizon and from the scientific investigation of the paranormal. B# George Alec Effinger It's just around the comer... and it's coming ready or not! The snake has struck in the Garden of Jem and now everyone is tasting the bitterness of forbidden fruit! (story) David Bunch , # Before Bionics there was Moderan... after Moderan you will never be the same. Cover by Craig Black from the Invasion of America Interior Illustrations: Steffan, Bensusen, Cooper, Shaw, Ramsey, Smith Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation. Main office and editorial office: # White Plains Road. Scarsdale, New York #. Single copy price I .#: one-year (# issue) subscription #; two-year (#-issue) subscription #. For Canada add # per year; other Foreign countries add # per year. right Conventions. All rights reserved. Second class postage paid at Scarsdale, N.Y., and additional mailing office. The publishers assume no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed In this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persona Is coincidental. Printed In U.S.A. Postmaster -- Send Change-of-Address Notice Form # to # White Plains Rd. Scarsdale, N.Y. # Hank Stine I'm going to talk about a subject that appears to be of interest to a great many of you: the writing of science fiction. Since becoming editor of this magazine nine months ago, I have read approximately five thousand manuscripts: Even allowing for repeat offenders, that means at least # different individuals have submitted the monthlies get about twice as many contributions, perhaps more -- which means the total number of people attempting to write science fiction within any one year must be above # or more! I doubt if in any other genera # of the average magazine's readership is attempting with any seriousness to write for it (actually, allowing for turnover, it's possible that up to # of readership tries at some time). Out of this mass of manuscripts, the average magazine can print no more than about #, often less, or about one out of # -- however professional, name writers can be counted on to fill up at least seven or eight out of ten of these slots -- so the number of stories actually purchased from fledgling writers probably comes to no more than # or #: This means the odds against actually making a sale and breaking into print are some # to I ! Allowing for the high attrition rate such odds engender, that means the average writer can expect to have the first hundred stories rejected before becoming so good he's in the top two percent and editors just have to buy his stuff (I personally know that Larry Niven and Steve PerryJesse Peel wrote a story a week for a year before breaking in.) If odds like that don't deter you, then you definitely have the kind of imagination it takes to become a science-fiction writer! -- Hank Stine "With clear skies expected by tonight. Again, lair all day tomorrow. In other news, terrorists have taken over three key buildings in the Wash-" Carl Hastings flipped off the radio and parked his Chevy in back of the MiniMart. He drained his coffee cup and got out, eyeing the weather while the wind whipped his trouser legs as he crossed the cracked concrete to the store's back door. Thunderheads were building in the north like black fists against the horizon, a result of the cold front that had snapped down from Canada. It would be lousy for business. Carl was glad to get inside. He flicked on the lights, wincing at the sudden glare, and looked around to see that Adam, the night man, hadn't screwed up any more than usual. The coffee pot had boiled dry, a brown ring scumming the bottom, but the floor was swept and even the counter wiped off. Carl set another pot to brewing, then glanced through the register receipts. Business was already lousy... And unless he stayed open all night like a lot of other stores, it would stay lousy. If a couple of months ago he hadn't suffered that rash of robberies-three in as many weeks-he would have stayed open past midnight, but then night people were suddenly harder to find. He settled for early closing and lousy business. Better to open up soon and see if there was any business. He let the old radio warm up, set up the nut for the day, closed the register drawer, unlocked really threatening now; the air smelled full of rain. Sound faded in on the radio:...ling themselves the Third World Liberation Coalition have occupied local government structures in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles as well. At this time it is not known how they acquired the nuc-" Outside, lightning strafed the sky, followed immediately by a deafening thunderclap. The radio died and the lights went out. "Damn," said Carl, and started looking for candles. He usually kept a box under the counter but Adam must have moved them. And the flashlight wasn't around either. That meant he'd have to open up a new one, plus supply it with batteries, meaning a further reduction in stock. "Damn," he said again. Maybe he was just being petty, he thought, fumbling along the aisle for the housewares shelf. Maybe he wasn't cut out for general-store proprietorship. Maybe... He snorted ruefully. Maybe he needed another cup of coffee. He used the flashlight to find the candles, then stood one in its own molten wax next to the register. The coffee pot had filled even though the warming ring was cold, and the aroma of hot, fresh coffee filled the store. He filled up the mug Amy had given him, the one that said To the World's Greatest Husband, and burned his tongue on the first sip. About the time it began to rain he realized that the morning's papers hadn't shown up. Probably the delivery had been held up by the storm, but that meant no funnies and no crossword puzzle, and just sitting here by candlelight was beginning to bore Carl. It was a great relief when George Wojnekowski arrived with his delivery truck. "Jeez, the rain's murder out there," said George as he walked in, a sheaf of manifests in one hand. "Kinda reminds me of my old lady's mashed potatoes," he said, winking. "If you know what I mean." Carl chuckled. George was a balding, pot-bellied little man with a cigar stub jammed permanently in his mouth. Carl liked him a lot. "And how is Marge?" George shrugged. "The same as ever. But she'll get over it. How's the family?" Carl peered at the framed photograph on the wall of a smiling, good-looking brunette hugging a somber-faced small boy and girl. "The twins are back to hating school. Amy gets more beautiful every year." He grinned. "About the same." "Well, that oughta be an improvement. Look, Carl, I'm dripping all over your floor. Do you mind?" "Not at all. Mopping up will give me something to do." "Okay, I won't ask you how's business." "Thanks. I'm going to go find the mop. Help yourself to some coffee while it's still warm." When he returned from the storeroom with a mop in one hand, a candle in the other, he found George staring sourly at the cover of the latest Time magazine. "What's wrong? Did you expect to see yourself?" Carl moved closer. "Or is that you and the light's too bad to tell?" "Aw, I just hate to see these damned Ay-rabs getting all this goody-goody publicity while they're bleeding us white!" Carl tried not to let the half-smile build on his face. "You got something personal against the Arabs, George?" The little man poked his cigar stub at the front doors. The rain beat heavily against the glass, distorting the view of George's truck out front. "It ain't just the outrageous cost of gas to power that thing," he said emphatically, "though a man could go broke trying to keep up with that and what they charge a man these days to keep his house warm in the winter. It's the way they're trying to take over the country, buying banks and controlling stock in our giant corporations and setting up their fancy harems out in California in those Beverly Hills estates, and all with our money!" He slammed his coffee cup down on the counter. "That's what bums me up. We made them while trying to buy their way into this country, 'cause the Ay-rabs have so much of our money it doesn't matter that the dollar ain't worth nothing these days!" Carl reached for a paper towel. "Come on. George, I said 'personal.' That's a heck of a speech but what's it got to do with you?" George was quiet for a few seconds, then said, "I'm sorry, Carl. It's been about a year since Joe died in the fighting, you know, after the Camp David peace accord fell through. I guess it gets to me." "George, I'm sorry. Can I do anything for you? Get you anything?" "Just some more coffee. Listen, I'll get over it." His face visibly brightened. "Hey, let's get some work done around here. It looks like the rain ain't gonna let up for  while." "Okay, George, what have you got for me this week?" "Canned goods," the little man said, handing Carl the manifests. "You want I should start bringing them in?" Carl held the manifests up close to the candle. "Just try to stay dry." "Very funny." said George. "Har har." He turned his jacket collar up and prepared to brave the storm, but stopped with his hand on the door. "I wonder what the army is doing here?" A covered jeep had pulled into the parking lot of the MiniMart. The Jeep was painted dark brown and a white star was painted on the door. The rain made it too murky to see who was in it or what might be in the back, but two men in fatigue uniforms got out of the jeep and ran inside the MiniMart. "Now your Dubbayu Dubbayu Two." George began saying, "that was a rea"shootin' war..." The soldier with the sergeant's stripes, a tall black man with a stony face, positioned himself at the front door with his booted feet apart and his rifle at port arms. The other soldier, a short, swarthy man with tight black hair and a scar across his left cheek, wore captain's bars; the name patch above Montoya looked at Carl, then at George, and a smile puckered the scar on his cheek. Carl felt a wave of cold fear suddenly rush up his spine. Montoya said, "Which one of you gentlemen owns the vehicle parked outside?" His voice had a soft foreign-flavored cadence to it that to Carl's ears sounded sinister. "I do," said George. Captain Montoya held out his hand. "The keys, please." "What?" "Please to give me the keys." He stared at them in astonishment. "You have not heard the radio broadcast about the emergency, telling all citizens to give their full support to the armed forces?" "As you can see," said Carl, "we've had a power failure." "Ah, yes. The lights." "What emergency?" said George. The captain made a deprecating gesture. "Please. Our time is very limited and we must hurry. Human lives are at stake. Many human lives. So please give me your keys." George slowly shook his head. "Not without some kind of authority," he said flatly. "That truck's my livelihood. You can't take that away from me, it's against the Constitution." Montoya unbuttoned the flap of his holster and pulled out an automatic pistol. "This is my authority," he said coldly, and swept the barrel across George's face. The little man went down to the floor. Carl started around the end of the counter but was checked by the black sergeant's aiming his rifle. The captain bent over George, riffled through his pockets, and straightened up holding George's key ring. He eyed George with distaste, then said to Carl, "You had better tell your friend here to cooperate more in the future. Or he might not have a future" He turned away and nodded to the sergeant. Carl noticed George beginning to stir. Blood oozed from high up the little man's cheekbone. With elaborate casualness Carl said, "What outfit you guys with? So I'll know better next time." The captain turned back. After some hesitation he said, "The Seventh Cavalry Division." George was sitting up now, one hand on his head and the other behind him. Carl's eyes flicked to the captain's shoulder patch. So did George's. That was when the little man threw the can of spaghetti at Montoya. The captain fell back as the sergeant raised his rifle and fired. George was flung backwards into a display of potato chips. His arms flailed as he grabbed for support, and then he collapsed, bringing the rack down with him. "Take anything you want," Carl said quickly. He stared at his friend while his mind whirled, trying to comprehend. He was dimly aware of a sharp loudness in the rain's ceaseless drumming as the two soldiers opened the doors and left. When he looked out a moment later, the parking lot was empty. Blood trickling from the comer of his mouth, George was trying to speak. Carl brushed potato chips off him and saw bubbles in the blood welling from George's chest. The bullet had pierced the lung. Carl put his ear to the dying man's lips. George's voice was a whisper. "Not... Seventh Cavalry... yellow patch... black stripe... black horse's head..." He coughed. It sounded terrible. Carl's eyes felt hot. "Take it easy, old friend," he said softly. "I'll get help." "Too late... tell Marge... I love her..." There was no more. Carl sat down, blinking in confusion. What the hell was going on? The captain's shoulder patch had been a yellow circle quartered in red and black. If George was right (and he must have been right, because seeing the patch renegades or escaped convicts or invaders...And why had they needed George's truck? For the supplies inside? Were there more of them? Maybe there really was some kind of emergency! The lights flickered once, twice, then came on fully. In the glare George's body looked both pathetic and grotesque, like a wax dummy that might have once thought it was human. Its eyes were glassy, but Carl imagined he could see accusation in their cold stare. Do something! they seemed to be telling him. Carl reached for the telephone, read the police number off the emergency sheet taped to the register, and while he tapped it, wondered why he had been unable to remember it. Was he always this unaware of things around him? The earpiece beeped its little tune as the swifthes found the right line. The other end rang twice. "I'm sorry," a blurry voice came on to say, "but the number you have reached is not in service at this time." Carl tried it again and got the same answer. He called the fire department and let the phone ring thirty times before hanging up. In the meantime the radio had come back to life. "... and all government business remains virtually at a standstill. White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff spokespersons have acknowledged that as yet they know of no defense against the Coalition's demands. Just how the nuclear warheads were brought into Washington and a dozen other major U.S. cities is also not known. And the number of American communities invaded by Coalition forces has been unofficially estimated to be in the thousands. Meanwhile on Wall Street panic ensued as..." As soon as the news sank in, Carl called Amy. She answered on the third ring. "Amy? This is Carl." "Then you heard what happened. Isn't it awful?" "Yes." "Oh, Carl, what are we going to do?" "Listen to me carefully. Did the kids go to school yet?" "No, the rain was so bad I thought I'd get Peggy to take them when she drove her kids over, but then when I heard the radio announcement... "Good, honey, good. Look. Pack all the warm clothes you can into that old steamer trunk of your grandmother's. I'll be home to get you and the kids as soon as I can." "To get us? Carl, where are we going?" "I-I don't know yet. Out of town. Somewhere." "Is it that dangerous?" "Two of them were in here just a little while ago. They shot George Wojnekowski and took his delivery truck." "Oh, no! Not George! Does Marge know?" "Not yet. Honey, would you call and tell her? I know you really should go over there, but..." "I understand, Carl. I'll do it." "Thanks." "And Carl?" "Yeah?" "I love you." "I love you too. See you soon." He hung up and realized he felt no easier. Now he had to hurry. He hauled an empty carton from the back and began throwing into it canned foods, lots of paper towels and napkins, flashlight batteries, powdered milk, canned drinks of all kinds, a sheaf of comic books to keep the twins busy, paperbacks and magazines tor Amy, Band Aids, aspirin, instant coffee, sugar, anything and everything that had a long shelf life and didn't need much preparation. After a while stumbling over George's corpse began to make him sick so he dragged it behind the counter. The cartons-there were three of them by now-were each heavier than he'd thought. He propped the back door open and was halfway out with the first carton when he saw that the rain was too heavy to do it this way. He lowered the carton to the floor and cursed at himself for his stupidity. He was wasting valuable time. So he did what he should have done in the first place: parked the Chevy as close to the store as possible and then left the trunk and rear doors wide open. He filled the trunk and half the back seat with cartons. Amy's grandmother's trunk would take up the rest of the back seat, and the kids could ride up front with him and Amy. Was he really ready to go now? Carl took a last quick look around the MiniMart. The shelves were a mess, some emptied, some with their contents spilled onto the floor; it looked like someone was in a hurry to leave. It looked like the end of something. Carl emptied out the cash register. Ready cash might or might not prove useful where they were going (and where were they going?), but he couldn't see leaving it behind for the looters. There were bound to be looters. As a farewell gesture he propped George's body up behind the counter, listening to a radio that had begun to repeat itself because no more news was coming in. He decided to leave the lights on and the doors unlocked. Even looters had to eat. "Goodbye, old friend," he said softly, and went out the back way. Driving along the old Taylor road was a mistake. At first it seemed a good idea, an impulse bom of fear and haste. Avoid Main Street with its traffic, its visibility, its probable invading soldiers. Take Taylor where it paralleled Main for most of its length, then down Reservoir and home. But the blacktop had thinned and potholes played hell with the Chevy's suspension. The storm was unleashing the last of its fury now, the rain beating so hard against the windshield that the wipers were useless. It was like driving underwater. The headlights barely pierced the murk. Working the pedals was giving him a charley horse; his back ached from too rigid a posture; his knuckles were white where he gripped the steering wheel. Carl didn't notice how tense he was. His thoughts kept flashing back to poor dead George, lying there drowned in his own blood. Up ahead, Carl remembered, was the old Zachary Taylor High School. Condemned years ago for demolition, it would make an ideal hiding place, if ever he needed one. Might be worth checking out even now... Lightning struck somewhere behind him. The school stood out in sharp relief for just an instant before it faded: the two-storied main building, at one end the auditorium (where Carl's class had graduated so long ago), at the other end the gymnasium (where Carl had taken Amy tor the Senior Prom), off to the side the athletic field. Where the near goalpost used to be was a tank. An Army tank. Carl reacted without thinking. He spun the wheel around hard, fishtailing the car until it pointed in the direction he came from. He floored the gas pedal. Tires squealing, the car jumped forward. Racing over the broken blacktop, heedless of the potholes that shook him and jarred him and blurred his vision, he didn't begin to feel anywhere near safe until he topped a slight rise. As he checked the mirror for signs of pursuit-there were none-he heard a horn blare, snapped his eyes front and saw a truck bearing down on him at high speed, headlight on hi-beam. Carl threw the wheel to the right. The truck, a half-ton pickup, whipped past him, the horn dopplering down. The Chevy rocked onto the shoulder, did not respond when Carl turned the wheel back, and ploughed into the  roadside ditch. There was a muffled whump and the car lurched to a stop. Carl felt acutely aware of his own mortality More than George's death, more than potholes in the road, this had jarred him into accepting reality. He took a couple of deep breaths, feeling his heart pound, and unlocked his hands from the steering wheel. He was shaken up but alive, and after a while he managed to shove the door open and get out of the car. The first thing he noticed was that the rain had stopped Ahead of him the sky was still awash in storm clouds, but here the air smelled damp and clean, with a strange tranquility about it. His senses were amplified. Each drop of water on the car was a beaded jewel, every leaf on the roadside bush was vibrantly green. He heard the truck on the other side of the rise shift gears and turn. Carl walked around to the front of the car and was aware of every particle of dirt that crunched under his shoes. He realized with transcendent clarity that the Chevy was no longer driveable. The right tire had exploded upon impact with the ditch, the bumper twisting up under the wheel well' and right against the hub. The headlight had of course shattered. "Shit," said Carl and started kicking at the other headlight. Over the rise came the pickup truck. It came to a stop beside the Chevy and a big beefy man in a blue jump suit exactly the same shade as the truck got out. "That was some close call." said the man. "You okay?" "I'll live," said Carl. "I wish I could say the same for my car." The man circled past Carl to inspect the damage. "I got a towline if you want to pull it back onto the road," he said. "A few days in the shop should fix it up okay." Carl shook his head. "I don't have that much time." The man peered into the back seat of the Chevy. "You running to or from something?" he asked, eyeing Carl shrewdly. He extended his hand. "The name's Wheeler. Rufus T. Wheeler." "Carl Hastings." He did not shake Wheeler's hand. There was something about the man he didn't trust, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. Wheeler let his hand drop. "That's okay. You don't have to be friendly. I mean, you never know just who you might meet these days." The man had an easy manner and an easier grin. "You want a lift back into town?" Carl looked at Wheeler's pickup truck. There was a windshield decal on the driver's side, a decal of a yellow circle quartered in red and black. "I hate to leave my stuff behind." "Bring it along. We can put it under the tarp in the back." What was Wheeler's game? wondered Carl, suppressing his revulsion as they transferred the cartons from the Chevy. Maybe he'd better take some precautions. "Forgot something," he said as Wheeler climbed into the cab. "Okay. I'm going to turn it around." Carl pulled the jack handle from the Chevy while Wheeler made the U. He got in holding it against his leg, hoping that Wheeler wouldn't notice. The pickup had a shotgun hanging on a rack in the rear window. Carl felt foolish holding the jack handle. "Guess you've been listening to the radio," said Wheeler as they started off. "You afraid of these ,... Coalition people?" "Aren't you?" "Naw, I get along good with everybody." "Even with...?" "Sure. A man's got to adapt himself to changing times." Carl let that one pass for the moment. He stared out of the window at fences and trees flashing by. "This isn't the way back into town." They were turning onto a side road. "Sure it is," said Wheeler. "This is a shortcut." The "shortcut" would take them back behind the school. "No, it's not," said Carl. "You're lying." "I thought we'd go see some friends of mine first. You know too much." "What are you, a collaborator?" Wheeler laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "I'm an agent, Hastings. And you may as well put that tire iron or whatever it is down. At this range I can't miss." His left hand appeared to have grown a gun, aimed at Carl. "Drop it. Out the window so I can see it." Carl brought the jack handle up slowly. He held it at eye level with his left hand while his right rolled down the window. Fresh, cool air washed his face. This was it, now or never. He jabbed the jack handle left and down, all the while furiously grappling for the gun. The jack handle caught Wheeler across the face, breaking his nose. Blood gushed. The truck rolled on. The men faced each other now, opposite hands at the gun. Despite Wheeler's advantage of size and strength, concentrating on the driving was beginning to exact its toll. Carl hit him again and again. As Wheeler's strength weakened, the gun twisted up and up, and then it was out of his hand and Carl had it. But Wheeler was unconscious or dead. Carl grabbed the wheel as the truck began to slow. He couldn't reach the brake pedal so he did the next best thing: He turned off the ignition. The truck coasted to a stop. It took him longer to recover this time, he was shaking so. Then he got disgusted and couldn't bear to look at Wheeler any longer. He leaned across the man, opened the door and, not caring if Wheeler was alive or dead, shoved him out. Wheeler landed on his shoulder, flopped onto his back and lay still. Carl started the engine and leaned out of the window. "I appreciate your offer, Mr. Wheeler." he called, "but I prefer to go it alone. Thanks for the use of your truck." Carl parked the blue pickup in the middle of the garage and pulled the door down and shut after it. Getting from where he'd dumped Wheeler to here-home-had been almost foolishly easy. An enemy patrol in a jeep had passed him on Main Street without incident, had in fact signaled to him as he went by, and Carl had figured out why. The windshield decal that had alerted him to Wheeler was his ticket to a safe passage. He was standing in the darkness of the garage still thinking these thoughts when the door from the kitchen burst open and Amy rushed into his arms. "Oh, Carl, I was so worried!" she cried. "It seemed like hours since you called, and I was so afraid that-that-" She hugged him tight, tighter. "For a while I was afraid I wouldn't make it either," Carl murmured, from the kitchen highlighted the red in her rich dark hair. Amy smelled so clean and fresh, of shampoo and perfume and... cookies? He held her at arm's length. "You've been baking!" "Mm-hm." She gave him a kiss. "I'm about to start another batch. Notice the apron?" She pirouetted. "The wooden spoon smearing cookie dough on your shirt?" "I notice," he said, eyeing her appreciatively. "But I think it was your perfume that gave me the first clue." "My perfume?" "Eau de chocolate chip." He grinned as Amy laughed. "The kids inside?" She nodded. "That's why I'm making cookies. Carl, what happened to the car? And where did you get that pickup truck?" "Let's go inside and I'll tell you." Arm in arm they entered the kitchen, stopping every few steps to reassure themselves of each other's presence with hugs and kisses. The kitchen was warm and homey, full of the aroma of fresh baking, an oasis of comfortable domesticity amid the bizarre happenings of Carl's day thus far. He sat at the table, fingering the wood-grained formica surface with renewed delight. It was so good to be home! "Want some coffee?" "Please. I feel like I've been dragged through a pond." "You look it too. I'll get you a cup as soon as I finish mixing this dough." Carl planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin in cupped hands. Watching Army was a delight, too. She was so pretty and vivacious, even wearing a mundane costume of blue jeans and a plaid shirt, even doing something as mundane as stirring cookie dough. After two kids and eight years of marriage, her figure was still as girlish in her tight clothes as when they first met. He found the interplay of muscles in her butt and the backs of her legs deeply moving and more exciting with every passing year. He rose and crossed to her, putting his arms around her waist from behind and nuzzling her neck. "You couldn't wait for your coffee? It's in the pot on the stove." He kissed the mole under her left ear. "I had something else in mind." "I'll just bet you did." She let go of the spoon as his tongue traced the shell of her ear. "Mmm. You ought to stop that." "I can't help it. It must be the chocolate chips. They drive me wild with desire." "You animal. Stop it." She made a determined effort to resume the mixing. "What is it about getting grimy that gives some men sex on the brain?" Between nibbles on her earlobe Carl said, "Come upstairs and I'll show you." Amy turned with mock anger. "Can't you take a hint ? Not until you have some coffee, not until you take a shower, not until I finish making these cookies, and most definitely not until you tell me what happened!" "Promise?" riposted Carl, retreating to the table when Amy threatened him with the spoon. She brought him coffee a few minutes later and sat opposite, staring at him with mute expectance. "I don't want the kids to hear it," she said, "and they can't play upstairs forever, so you'd better tell me fast." Carl briefly related the story of the two soldiers in the MiniMart. Amy gasped when he told her how George died, and put her hand on top of his when he described his flight and seeing the tank out at the old school. And when he recounted the affair of Wheeler, color spotted her cheeks and her eyes opened wide in horror. "What an awful man," she said. "Carl, he could have killed you!" "He would have, given the chance," Carl agreed. "I was lucky to get away from him." "Maybe it wasn't only luck." "What? You mean Fate?" "Why not? You said yourself that you got past the soldiers by using his truck. And since we have to get out of here..." ",... we'll do it in the truck," Carl finished. "I already thought of that. That's why I haven't been in such a hurry to leave right away." He glanced up at the wall clock above the door to the garage. It was already after twelve. "But time is moving on. I'm going to go upstairs and take a shower." There was the smallest of burning smells. "Oh, no!" cried Amy. "My cookies!" Halfway up the stairs Carl was ambushed by a pair of giggling seven-year-olds. "Cheryl! Jimmy!" he called to them as Jimmy wrapped his small arms around Carl's left leg and Cheryl tried to climb onto his shoulders. Carl managed to bull his way upstairs, half-carrying Cheryl, half-dragging Jimmy. He deposited them carefully on the landing and tried to look sternly at them. But they were so cute! Jimmy had his Darth Vader t-shirt on backward and Cheryl had managed to smear chocolate chips all over C#PO on the front of her t-shirt. "Daddy. I didn't have to go to school today." Cheryl announced. "Me too." said Jimmy. "And I wasn't scared by the thunder and lightning either." "Was too!" declared Cheryl. "Was not!" "Was too!" "Knock it off, you two," Carl chided them gently. "Did you finish your cookies?" "Uh-huh." "Uh-huh." "Want some more?" "Yeah!" they chorused. And before Carl could say any more, they marched down the stairs chanting "Cookies! Cookies!" as their battle cry. Carl listened to their voices fading down into the kitchen and chuckled to himself. They were great kids. He was the luckiest man alive. Ten minutes of hot shower left him feeling refreshed and renewed, ready to face whatever emergencies or horrors lay in store. He took his time getting dressed, selecting denim pants and a turtle-neck knit, thick socks and rul ber-soled shoes. With his windbreaker over the shirt he would be comfortably warm yet able to move easily. He checked himself out in the mirror and was thoroughly satisfied with what he saw. Better and better, he thought. Now he could handle anything. But as he sat on the bed to tighten his shoelaces, a wave of ineffable sadness came over him. Leaving this house with its memories, its embodiment of all their hopes and wishes and dreams, was going to be painful after all. And so much was left undone! A treehouse for the kids in the backyard. A rec room in the basement. Wood paneling in the den. All postponed or abandoned now... The sadness passed. It would hurt to leave the house-: yes. but it was a distant hurt now, remote until summoned by the mind, tike a lost parent's love ; : Carl went into the bathroom. and scrubbed his face vigorously. No moreof this sentimental nonsense! be chastised himself, then made his way down : the stairs,... Cheryl was the first to see him when he poked his head around die kitchen. doorway. She was picking chocolate chips out of a cookie with her fingernail and staring intently at it before sucking the chocolate off, but when she noticed him, she grinned mischievously and shoved the entire cookie into her mouth. Carl laughed. He sat at the table with her, gaping at her pop-eyed while she unchipped another cookie and presented it gravely to him. "Oh, Carl, don't encourage her. It's disgusting." Amy was at the sink, washing dishes. Carl turned to her with the same pop-eyed expression and calmly stuffed the cookie into his mouth. Jimmy giggled with his own mouth full and began to choke. Carl pounded him on the back. Amy couldn't help but laugh. "You're terrible." she told him and Carl agreed with her. "By the way," she added as Carl advanced toward her with a cookie in each hand, "a sound truck came by while you were in the shower." She hastily wiped her hands dry and retreated with the damp dish towel held in front of her as protection. Carl relaxed. "What was it about?" "It said there would be a telecast at one o'clock and that everybody had to watch it." "It's nearly one now." "I'll go turn on the tv," said Jimmy. "Me too," said Cheryl. They scampered into the living room. As soon as they were gone, Carl leaned forward. "I forgot to ask you earlier," he said, his voice low. "Have you called Marge yet to tell her about George?" Amy nodded. "Right after you called me this morning. And then after you told me how it happened I phoned her again, just a little while ago." "How did she take it?" "She didn't know who I was the first time and couldn't understand why I was calling. It wasn't easy getting it through to her." Carl nodded to show that he understood. He and Amy had socialized with the Wqjnekowskis only a couple of times before discovering that the wives had nothing in common. "I really couldn't do anything for her," Amy continued, "except to say that I was sorry. She seemed to be in shock. I guess it's really been hard on her, George dying so soon after their son Joe." "And the second time?" Amy frowned. "She knew who ! was right away but I don't think she heard me. i had to repeat everything. She sounded like she'd been drinking or had taken tranquilizers . When I told her how George had said he lovedefidght.dfoi'#ej#ied,' she smarted crying. " Amy's eyes were filled with tears. "h, Carl;" she pleaded, "couldn't we take her with us?" "I wish: we could "honey," he said softly, "but there's no Way. We just don't have the room." He let her sob against him for a while-, then lifted herchin and kissed away her tears. "Come on, ' ' he said, "let's go watch that telecast." : x Cheryl and Jimmy ssshd them as they entered the hying room. A familiar symbol filled the screen: a yellow circle quartered in red and black. The symbol stayed as, offscreen, a crisp voice in the precise enunciations of an English accent spoke. "This is your Provisional Government speaking. At eleven fifteen this morning. Eastern Standard Time, the President of the United States ceded executive control of Congress and the Armed Forces to leaders of the Third World Liberation Coalition, shortly after Coalition forces liberated the capital city from the oppressive yoke of American capitalism. "Effective immediately the following emergency measures will be in force. A curfew from si;; p.m. to si;; a.m. will be strictly observed. All radio, television, and newspaper activity will be suspended until the proper censorship boards can be established. All schools will be closed. All banks will be closed. All gasoline will be rationed. All travel outside community borders is restricted to those with permits. All weapons are prohibited, Gatherings of more than five persons, e;;cept for the purposes of worship, is forbidden. Violators will be shot." Carl emitted a low whistle. Amy clutched his hand for comfort and signaled the kids to join them. "These emergency measures," the voice went on smoothly, "are of course only temporary. It will take your new government a few days to round up the traitors and profitmongers who have too long benefited at the expense of the American people. These few days will be hard on all of us. But we ask that all loyal Americans accept without question the authority of the Coalition's local directors who will soon make themselves known to you. We ask that you assist them in all possible ways so as to effect a smooth transition to a government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people. "For too long have the American people allowed themselves to be bullied by Big Business and its influence over the late administration. Giant corporations pay no ta;;es while government services for middleand lower-income classes flounder for lack of funds. Unions conspire with government trade restrictions to force prices higher, thus ensuring through inflation that only the very rich can afford a decent standard of living. Special business monopolies accrue enormous profits through federal regulation of alcohol and tobacco while encouraging the rise of organized crime through unreasonable drug prohibition. "These and other injustices must cease. "Over the ne;;t few months your new government will introduce significant reforms. Immediate priorities are food and housing, to be followed by lower gasoline prices and the abolition of the # m.p.h. speed limit. Later reforms will include among others the legalization of marijuana, the elimination of se;;ual discrimination on all levels, the reinstatement of capital punishment, free abortions, and unrestricted foreign trade. "We call on every American citizen to join us in the glorious struggle for a new birth of freedom, when government will truly be 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' "This broadcast will repeat every hour until curfew." The only picture during the entire broadcast had been the Coalition symbol. Now it faded to black and snow filled the screen. Carl got up and turned the television off. "Hey," said Jimmy, "I wanna watch cartoons." "Me too," said Cheryl. "Cartoons aren't on now," Amy said in a small voice. "Why don't you go upstairs to your room and play?" "I wanna watch tv," said Cheryl. "Me too," said Jimmy. "You heard your mother," Carl snapped, then relented when their little faces showed fright. "Go on now. I'll bring you up some comic books in a few minutes." He looked back at Amy sitting on the couch. She looked frightened too. and clutched at him as he returned to her. "Do you think they really mean it?" Her voice had lost all of its lower tones and came out a whisper. "That curfew business? Oh, I'm sure of it. We can't do anything now without their approval." "What about the other stuff? Those reforms?" Carl laughed bitterly. "Fancy talk. Carrots to dangle in front of every half-baked liberal in the country. A little something for everybody. That little touch about the speed limit was a beauty." "Then you really do want to leave?" "You don't?" She looked uncertain. "Amy, my love, don't believe everything you hear on television. There's about as much chance of those reforms happening as there is of the emergency measures being temporary. Don't you see that we have to get out while we still can?" "You mean the truck." "Yes. It's the only passport to freedom we've got. Why not use it?" "I guess I just hate to give all this up," she said ruefully. "The house, the store. Everything we've worked for." "They'll make us give it all up anyway. The Third World Liberation Coalition, whatever that is." He held her by the shoulders and looked full into her face. A minute passed. Her eyes dropped. "Okay," she said at last in a voice so tiny he could barely hear her. "Okay. We'll leave." "I'll go get the kids their comics. Are you about done packing?" Her face seemed to grow more gaunt with every passing second, the skin stretched tight over her cheekbones. "The trunk's upstairs on the landing. I laid out a fresh change of clothes for the kids on their beds. " Her eyes bore pain and resignation. "I'm scared, Carl. I'm really scared." Carl drew her to him but she was wooden in his arms. "Me too," he said tenderly. "Me too." She did not give him the small smile he expected. The journey through town was eerily quiet. The pickup truck glided smoothly over the glistening residential streets, silent but for the hiss of tires on pavement. No one was about, though front curtains shifted in the windows of the houses as the truck passed by. The tension in the cab was almost electric, a high-voltage mood that issued from Amy and transformed even the kids' normally high spirits into gloom. The comic books sat in their laps, unopened and unread. Their faces were sullen and unhappy, and Carl wished it could be otherwise. Sound faded in as they approached Main Street: the crackle of distant gunfire, far-off pounding. In the west a long column of black smoke and white smoke, intertwined, curled up into the sky. Carl turned the truck onto Main and reluctantly headed toward the smoke. This section of downtown was beginning to look like a battle zone, an impression confirmed when they passed the fire station. The doors were wide open, the fire trucks gone, on the floor at the back what looked like bodies in uniform. Amy gasped and tried to cover the children's faces with her hands. "Mommy," whined Cheryl, "you're hurting me!" "Sorry, sweetie. I just didn't want you to see." "I saw!" declared Jimmy. "I saw dead people." "I wanna see too!" said Cheryl. "Hush, now," said Carl. "You're upsetting your mother." But he was glad for the sound of voices; it helped ease the tension. And now the children became more animated, pointing out to each other the closed storefronts and deserted gas stations. Here was a liquor store with its front window smashed, broken glass and what was left of a "Burgie" sign littering the sidewalk. There, across the street, two clothing store mannequins had collapsed against each other, feigning death. Up ahead there were some soldiers, heading their way. Carl's first impulse was to panic. Run them down or blow them all to hell with the shotgun. Stomp on the gas and race out of there before retribution followed. And then common sense prevailed. Wait and see. Hide if need be, do what you can to protect the kids and Amy, but wait and see. He swung the pickup into the ne;:t alley on the right and parked. He adjusted the side and rearview mirrors, then slumped in his seat and waited. In the mirrors his vista was of the mouth of the alley, the street, on the other side a shoe store and a Walgreen's. After a time the soldiers came into view. There were four of them, of assorted ages and sizes: woolly-haired and black-skinned; dark-skinned, dark-eyed, straight jet-black hair; short, sallow-skinned, with features of an Oriental cast; olive-skinned and turbaned. They looked like no army Carl had ever seen. Prowling up Main Street, seeking (probably) resistors, they crouched and ran, swaggered and strode, alternately playing predator and prey. One of them, the short one with the almond eyes, glanced incuriously into the alley before moving on. Everything would have been fine if Cheryl hadn't chosen that moment to sit up and turn around. Carl yanked her down but it was too late. The Oriental came creeping forward, his rifle at port arms, ready to swing it down and fire. Carl cursed silently to himself and got out of the pickup with his arms held straight up, though not before telling Amy to take over the wheel and go when he said Go. The soldier gestured with his rifle. Carl waggled his arms to show that they were already raised as high as he could get them and crab-walked slowly to the side of the alley, the soldier's eyes following. The pickup started with a muffled roar and the soldier's gaze shifted, his eyebrows lowering in suspicion. He half-tumed his head and barked a monosyllable over his shoulder, and at that instant Carl shouted "Go!" The pickup took off with a squeal of tires and an acrid cloud of e;;haust fumes. Carl watched it go while the soldier stood dumbfounded, then turned to face the soldier with a sheepish grin. The soldier glowered. Into the alley at a sprint came the other three. The tallest of them, the black, conferred with the Oriental in what sounded to Carl like French, while the other two fired futilely at the rapidly receding truck. The truck turned a corner and was gone. The black turned to Carl. He was a head taller than Carl, and his eyes commanded Carl to look up into them until the gaze burned and Carl was forced to look away . He dropped his head and found himself staring at the chin up by the tip of the barrel. "Qui etes-vous?" he demanded. "What?" said Carl. "I don't speak-" The rifle tip slid along his jawline and pressed against his neck. "Comment vous appellez-vous?" That one he remembered from one semester of high-school French a thousand years ago. "Carl Hastings." And as soon as he said it, he swore under his breath. Why hadn't he used his brains a bit and said "Rufus T. Wheeler" instead? "Carl Hastings?" repeated Nkele to the others. They shook their heads. Nkele unbuttoned his blouse and pulled out a wrinkled and much-folded sheet of paper, which he scanned twice before putting it back. "Carl Hastings," he said again, this time with an obvious distaste. Carl felt his knees turning into jelly. Something exploded close by on Main Street. Nkele's head whipped up. He stayed the others with his hand, looked back at Carl. "Cet homme n'est pas un agent en secret," he said to the Oriental soldier. "Vous tuez lui." Then he and the others dashed out of the alley, leaving the Oriental to face Carl alone. That was no problem for the soldier. Carl was unarmed. The soldier stepped back and aimed his rifle at Carl's chest. Carl closed his eyes and waited for the end. His fervent hope was that Amy and the children had gotten away somewhere safe. There was another nearby explosion and then the sharp crack of a shot. Carl's knees folded. He slid down the wall to rest in a shallow puddle. "Hey, man! You ain't dead yet! Open your eyes!" Carl opened his eyes. A few feet away lay the soldier, the center of a red puddle. "That's right!" came the voice again, cheerfully. "He's the one who's dead, not you." Carl didn't believe it. "I don't believe it," he said aloud. "Sure, don't take my word for it," the voice said calmly. "Check it out for yourself. And start with yourself. Any wounds, bleeding, pain, bullet holes, anything like that?" Carl examined himself carefully. "No," he admitted after a while. "You see. I told you. Now check the dearly departed." Carl crawled forward. The soldier was dead, there was no doubt about that. He stared upward with sightless eyes while a sticky pool of crimson expanded from the middle of his back. In death he looked younger. "Well?" the voice persisted. "Am I right or am I right?" "You're right," said Carl. "He's dead and I'm alive. Who the hell am I talking to?" "Could be I'm your guardian angel. Look up. Higher. Higher than that." Up at the roof edge, outlined by a nimbus of cloud-washed sky, a dark face grinned back at him. One arm was lifted and it waved at him. Carl waved back. "But who are you?" "Come on up and I'll tell you. You'll find a door about halfway up the alley on this side. If it's not open, use that dead guy's rifle to shoot the lock. Anyway, bring his rifle with you. And check his body for ammo, too." Then the face disappeared. The door was sealed with a rusty padlock. Carl blew the lock off with a rifle burst and yanked at the handle. Hinges screamed as the door slowly opened. Inside it was a windowless and lightless corridor, dimly lit by daylight leaked in from the alley. Suppressing his apprehensions. Carl went in. He had gone only a few steps when an outside clamor convinced him to pull the door shut from the inside. Now the darkness was virtually total. Holding the rifle out and down like a blindman's cane, Carl moved gingerly forward. He could see nothing. He brushed the left wall with his fingertips, encountering varied textures of smooth plaster, wooden molding, door panels and the like. And the farther in he went, the less sound he heard, until at last only the soft sigh of his feet shuffling in the thick dust reached his ears. He felt utterly isolated. Soon he no longer had even a left wall to guide him, as the surface under his fingertips fell away. The rifle barrel ran aground with a chunk. Carl eased forward until he touched the wall directly ahead of him. Okay, which way to go? Right or left? He turned right, moving on as before: rifle extended, left hand trailing the wall. But after a few steps he came to a dead end. He stopped, turned around, began heading back, and then his hand brushed a string or a wire, and something fell on him. It had weight, but of a temporary kind. Its initial impact felled him but could not hold him down, for there was nothing there. It seemed to have spread itself over his head and shoulders, clotting in his hair and at the back of his neck where the sweat had been. He shifted to his knees, reached up to take a handful of the stuff even as it fell off his shoulders and recognized it as some kind of powder: dust or plaster or flour. He brushed it off his face and then he laughed without knowing why. He groped around for the rifle, found it and continued on his way. An empty sensation under his fingers told him when he passed the corridor leading back to the door and the alley. Almost immediately his toes were touching the bottom riser of what the rifle told him was a flight of stairs. He started up. The stairway was steep and narrow and there was no banister to hang onto. He placed his hand flat against the wall and took his time climbing. As he rose, step by weary step, his sense of isolation increased until it seemed he was all there was in the universe, just him and the stairs which he had to climb endlessly and forever. He sloughed off thoughts of Amy, good wife and true, and Cheryl and Jimmy, the greatest of kids, and the MiniMart and George Wojnekowski, both now lost to the present and the future, and what the hell was it all about, anyway? Why had this happened, and that and that? What was happening to the country? And why was he doing this? Only after he had-at last!-come to the top of the stairs and had seen the thin crack of light that denoted a door, and pushed through it into daylight, did he begin to understand. He was here because someone had told him to be here. And what had happened had happened. These were not answers. But they were better than constantly asking himself questions for which there were no answers. "Man, I thought you'd never get here," said a voice as he emerged. "But keep it cool coz we got company." Carl realized the voice had been whispering. It had only seemed loud in comparison to the silence he had just ascended through. He walked out onto the rooftop and stood staring for a while. From where the black smoke still rose in the west, he could see orange flames and an occasional fireball shoot up from the roof and gutted windows of the city hall. He stepped out to get a closer look when a hand yanked him down. It was the black man. "You want to get killed?" he whispered fiercely. "If you gotta take a look, crawl on your belly over here and catch what's goin' down." Carl followed the black man's example and slid over to the roof edge. Cautiously he looked down onto Main Street. There were bodies down there, sprawled on the pavement. Bodies he recognized as being the soldiers he'd confronted in the alley. Other soldiers too were there, live soldiers, four as before. They surrounded a blue pickup truck. God bless her, she'd come back for him. It was a useless gesture but a noble one, and it spelled doom for her and the kids. In that moment he felt a love for her so fervent that it spilled out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks. "Your wife, huh?" said the black man beside him. Unable to find his voice. Carl nodded. Apparently the patrol had just stopped the truck, though Carl wondered if that clamor he had heard just after entering the building had something to do with what he now saw below him. As he watched, a soldier jerked open the door on the driver's side and dragged Amy out; she bit and kicked until the soldier hit her. and then the fight seemed to go out of her. Other soldiers took the children out. Cheryl clung defiantly to her comic books and Jimmy began to cry. One soldier who had stood quietly by and watched all this now strode forward, regarded Amy in silence for a moment and then smacked her full across the face. The sound of the slap was sharp and clear, and made the hairs at the back of Carl's neck bristle with anger. Then the soldier spoke, in a contralto with a heavy German accent. "Where did you get this pickup truck?" Amy stared at her blankly. "The owner of this truck was found a few hours ago on the other side of town. He had been badly beaten. I ask you again, where did you get this truck?" At no time did she raise her voice above a matter-of-fact tone. When Amy made no reply again, the woman signaled to the soldier holding Jimmy. The soldier twisted Jimmy's arm up behind his back and Jimmy let out with a shrill scream that had Carl trying to rise to his feet, except that the man beside him knocked him down and held his hand firmly pressed over Carl's mouth. "You want us all to die?" he demanded. "There's nothing you can do right now. Nothing! They got your family and they're gonna mess with them, but unless you decide to play hero, they got a good chance of staying alive. You understand what I'm saying?" Carl nodded assent and the man let him up. "Now we watch and we listen," he continued in his whisper, "and we wait." "I told you I don't know," Amy was saying between what sounded like sobs. "My husband, he..." Her voice trailed off. Carl looked over the roof edge. Now both children were crying as well, but Amy appeared defiant, as if she would be bullied no longer. But what if they hurt the kids some more? Carl wondered. He wasn't sure he could hold himself back if they hurt the kids some more. The German woman had picked up a comer of the tarpaulin in the back of the truck and was examining the boxes there. "You were planning to run away, ja?" she said. "You and your husband and your family?" Still in the same even tone. Then her hand smacked the side of the truck and she bellowed: "You know you can be shot for this! Right now if I order it!" She glared at Amy and Amy stared back, and Cheryl and Jimmy began a new spate of crying. Still Amy said nothing. "I'm tired of talking to them," said the woman to the others. "Take them and the truck back to Headquarters. I will meet you there later with the jeep." As soon as the soldiers had passed out of sight, the black man turned to Carl and stuck out his hand. "I'm Amos Sampson, who are you?" Sampson's grip was firm and dry. "Carl Hastings," said Carl. "What are you doing up here?" "Same as you." replied Sampson with a grin. "Hiding. Only I got some muscle." His glance led Carl's eye to a small cache of weapons near them which Carl in his single-mindedness had not noticed before. The cache consisted of two rifles, a pistol, clips of ammunition and a few grenades. "Where did you get it?" "Same place you got your rifle. From the dearly departed." Carl had forgotten the rifle. He looked at it now, and he looked at Sampson. The man wore dark pants, dark shoes, dark shirt, dark windbreaker. Even resting, he possessed an inner tension like a coiled spring, seemingly ready to tackle any situation. "I used to own a general store. What do you do?" Sampson rolled onto his back. He clasped his hands behind his head and stared up at the scudding clouds. "I used to be a security guard," he began quietly. "Until this morning. As I was coming off duty, I saw them coming down Main Street, a couple of jeeps leading a couple of dozen soldiers. They were shooting everyone they saw who was in uniform. Cops, firemen, nurses, pharmacists, crossing guards, boy scouts, it didn't matter. They started with the fire station and then moved on toward City Hall. I stripped off my uniform and ran home half naked, got dressed and snuck back there. I played guerrilla during the rain, picking them off as I could and trying not to get caught. Since the rain stopped I've been up here, doing what I can for the Resistance. You know, little things." He grinned again. "Things like saving your life." "I can't thank you enough for that." Carl admitted. "But who are these people trying to take over? What is the Third World Liberation Coalition? What do they want from us?" "Man. you're full of questions, aren't you?" "You're the one with a grasp on the situation. All I've been doing since they came is running and hiding. And look what it got me. My wife, my kids, they..." "Hey, take it easy," said Sampson. "I'll talk, okay?" He was up on one elbow, concent spreading across his face. "I was just mouthing off. Forget it, okay?" Carl gave him a sullen nod. "Okay." Sampson smiled as he shook his head. "Man, you are going to make me blow my cover. But I guess it's too late to hang onto it now. Okay. Here's what I know." He leaned back again and his eyes narrowed as if he was studying an invisible dossier. "The woman who was interrogating your wife is Eva Obendrein; until recently we thought she was still in West Germany coordinating terrorist attacks for the Baader-Meinhof gang. Now we know better. She is quite ruthless and there is a strong possibility that she will have your family executed if she can find some dogma to justify; if not, she might just hold them prisoner. Or they may be made examples of. I really don't know. "The Third World Liberation Coalition seems to be a front for a number Japanese United Red Army, the Iranian National Front, and so on-in alliance with the Nicaraguan rebels of the Sardinista National Liberation Front and government forces from Cambodia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab countries. How they've decided who's in command, how they're resolved their ideological differences, we have no idea. We don't even know for sure which countries and groups are part of the Coalition and which are red herrings, intelligence 'leaked' by the Coalition to confuse us. "There's so much we don't know! How they got the nuclear warheads into our major cities, how they got their forces into the country, how they managed to infiltrate nearly every community of any size, how many troops they actually have... The smile had long since faded. Now only sadness remained. "Hell, they've whipped us but good!" Carl thrust his head over the edge, counting bodies. "You're doing all right." Sampson let loose a snort. "Chicken feed." he said. "I'm just a dog nipping at their heels." Carl looked at the sky, looked at the street, watched the city hall bum, studied the still forms littering the lawn of the police station. "Bullshit!" he exploded. "Don't give me any of that self-pity tripe. This morning I lost a good friend. This afternoon I lost my family. And in between I almost got killed by one of their agents." Now he was pacing, back and forth, back and forth, letting the anger build. "Before, I was ready to run away. I couldn't face the idea of my country being invaded, and I couldn't see how I could do anything about it. But now you've shown me how. Of course we nip at their heels. Of course we pick them off one by one, as best we can. How else are we going to get our country back from these-these-unVnaj?' ' Sampson clapped his hands three times in laconic applause. "Thank you," he said with what seemed to be genuine sincerity. Carl was puzzled. "For what?" "For convincing yourself to stay and fight. I was beginning to think I'd have to do it alone." Carl stood there until the idea sank in, then exhaled in a slow whistle. "Amos, you're a son of a bitch." The faint grin on Amos's face grew loud. "Why, thank you, Carl. That's mighty white of you." "Huh?" "I didn't mention it before, but you got some kind of white powder all over you." "I forgot all about it. Some kind of dust fell on me as I was coming up the stairs. I hit a wire or something and it all just cascaded down on top of me." "Must have been plaster from the ceiling. This old building's been threatening to fall down for some time." "That's what I thought had happened to me. But what the hell are we hanging around here for?" "Relax," said Amos. "It'll stand up for a few hours longer, at least until dark." "And then what?" "Then we go play hero and rescue your family." The dusk deepened, blue shading into black. On the rooftop, Carl watched the stars come out slowly, one by one. Ragged patches of clouds tried in vain to hide the thin crescent of the moon. "Star light, star bright... murmured Carl, wishing, wishing. "Hey, dude," said Amos, coming up behind him, "put these on. It's getting close to time." He thrust the bundle of clothes into Carl's hands and ambled over to the weapons cache. "What's this?" said Carl as he unfolded the bundle. "What's it look like, thermal underwear? These are our credentials, jack, for getting into the inner sanctum." Carl peeled off his shirt and began pulling on the fatigue blouse. "And for getting out?" "First let's worry about getting in." Amos was methodically breaking down one of the rifles into its component parts. "That thing fit okay? I had to guess on your size." "It'll do," said Carl, stepping into the fatigue pants. "I don't see how you can do that in the dark." "Easy. Learned it in my third week of Basic Training." The rifle was in pieces now. Amos removed the cleaning kit from the stock and began to oil and swab the barrel. "You have a good sleep?" "Some," Carl allowed. The boots were going to be a bit tight. "Were you in Vietnam?" Amos shrugged. "I don't brag about it. You?" "Student deferment." "Lucky." "Maybe. It didn't help me get it together." It was too dark to see, but Carl felt Amos's stare shifting all over him, making the unspoken comment. You think 'Nam would have done it for you ? Instead Amos said, "Speaking of getting it together..." and he stood up and handed Carl a rifle. "Put this over your shoulder. And hold this one." "Why two?" "We'll need them, trust me. And here's your half of the ammo." He dumped the clips into Carl's hands and moved away, only to reappear a few seconds later at the rooftop door, conducting a beam from his pencil flash to Carl's boot tips and back again. Carl ran to catch up, wondering how Amos moved so lightly when he himself was weighted down by ammunition clips in front, back and thigh pockets. He reached the bottom of the stairs with a clatter of his thick boots and received from Amos a sharp, sibilant sssh. The flashlight beam probed the ceiling of the dead end, picking out the jagged hole where the ceiling had collapsed while Carl was under it. Bits of plaster drifted down as they watched. Amos swept the beam along the corridor, exposing doors on either side and Carl's footprints down the middle. "Just so we know where we're going," he confided before turning off the Hash. The two raced to the door at the end. heard it scream as Amos kicked it open, and then they were in the alley. The street lights were out, as was to be expected, but even in the darkness keeping to the sidewalk was no problem. Then after a while shapes began to distinguish themselves. They stepped up the pace. "You sure this Zachary Taylor High School is their HQ?" "You're the one who told me it had to be the place. Don't you know? I thought you were the C. I. A. agent." "Military Intelligence. And I don't know everything." "Then take your word for it. That's their HQ." The streets were empty and quiet. Carl had not realized just how much everyday noise he blocked out normally: traffic, kids at play, radios and tvs and stereos, even the humming of telephone lines. Now all was still. Around them nothing moved. In a deserted city they were the only travelers. "This is taking forever," muttered Amos. "You know what a wolf trot is?" "Sure. I read. A hundred paces running, a hundred walking." "Let's do it." Then it was run, walk, run, walk, until Carl felt his legs knotting up and the back of his shirt clammy with sweat. He envied the effortless ease with which Amos kept up the pace, never faltering, never slowing down, not even sweating. Walk, run, walk, run... until Carl's lungs ached with every ragged breath. He stopped in a doorway, gasping. "I can't do it," he said when Amos turned back to him. "I'm just not in shape." Amos made a disgusted noise. "Yeah, I was wondering when you'd hang it up. I'll go see what I can find. You stay here." Two minutes later a Corvette with lights out glided silently up to Carl. "Don't tell me you learned how to hotwire cars in Basic Training," he said as he got in. "Sure," Amos replied. "What do you think, I learned it in the ghetto?" "I didn't even know we had a ghetto." "We don't. I'm from Chicago." Amos drove like a maniac, roaring through the streets with only the stars to light the way, whipping around comers without down-shifting... Carl yelled: "Are you crazy? All this noise will bring every patrol in town down on us!" "Do you see any patrols?',' "No-o." "Do you hear any patrols?" "How can I with all the racket you're making?" Amos slowed the Corvette so the engine's roar muted to a hum. "That better?" "Some." "Hear any patrols rtow?" "No. But that doesn't mean-" "Anyway, aren't we wearing enemy uniforms?" "Yeah, but-" "Then what are you worried about ?" "Getting killed before we get there." Ten minutes later, at a slower, quieter speed, they got there. Once they were close enough to make out figures among the lights that lit the school and its outer perimeter, Amos pulled the car to the side of the road and he and Carl got out. "Are those lights going to be a problem?" said Carl as he slung a rifle over each shoulder. "Are we going to have to shoot them out?" "We do that and right away they'll know something is up. Maybe on the way out." Besides carrying rifles and ammunition, Amos wore a pistol stuck into his belt. From a back pocket, he pulled out a screwdriver and a length of piano wire wound around wooden rods at either end. To Carl's querulous look he explained, "Guns are too noisy, at least until we lose the element of surprise." They agreed to eliminate any soldiers guarding the lights, then enter the school, pretending to be Coalition troops, and from there play it by ear. Carl had serious misgivings about the credibility of such a plan but feeling a lack of expertise, he kept his doubts to himself. Maybe it would work, after all. Maybe it really would. "One thing before we go," said Amos, "because it's been puzzling me ever since you told me about this place. Why here? Why an old high school out here?" "This whole area was condemned when they decided to put an interstate highway through it. Then the federal funds got frozen, but they'd already torn down most of the houses and built a new school on the other side of town. After a while it became easier to ignore the problem than to try and do something about it. That's government for you, no offense." "I'm sorry I asked. Okay, let's go." Weeds choked vacant lots that had once held houses with lush lawns. Streets lay cracked and broken from the abuse of too much heavy machinery passing over them. The fence topped with barbed wire that enclosed the school had long since been violated; whole segments were missing. Amos and Carl crouched beside a huge hole in the fence and watched a guard amble past. As soon as he had passed, Amos leaped up and, screwdriver in hand, launched himself at the guard's back. Carl heard a brief gurgle. The guard slumped and Amos returned, wiping the screwdriver. Carl shuddered. Two more guards were disposed of in the same way, Carl watching in horror while Amos did the dirty work. They left the bodies in the shadows. yet another guard trudging back and forth just beyond the glare of the lights. "You want to take him?" offered Amos in a whisper. "You got to do it some time." Carl thought about Amy and the kids. "Okay," he said at length. "How should it be done?" "Try this." Amos handed him the screwdriver. "Just jam it into his ear as far as it will go." ' Carl waited until the guard swung back. He ran forward on tiptoe, carrying the screwdriver underhand, like a knife. He hooked his arm around the soldier's neck, digging under the chin and gripping the soldier's right shoulder. He brought up his right hand and held the point of the screwdriver level with the soldier's ear. He, hesitated. This wasn't the same as the struggle with Wheeler. That had been a matter of life or death, kill or be killed. This was, plain and simple, murder. He didn't think he could do it. His intended victim changed his mind. A blow from the guard's fist caught Carl in the side, just under the ribs. Another blow landed in the same place, and then the guard was trying to stomp on his toes. These unfair actions angered Carl to action. He jabbed the screwdriver in deep and hard, heard bones crunch and snap, felt blood gush warmly up the shank and over the handle and onto his hand. The guard coughed, choked, gurgled, lost all powers of resistance, drooped forward, sagged to the ground. Carl looked at the corpse, looked away, forced himself to look back, felt his stomach rising and dropping and rising again in protest. He staggered off to the shadows and was violently sick. A little later, a little weaker, he reflected that this was indeed war. And alive. Carl resolved that he would stay alive. Meanwhile Amos dragged the body deeper into the darkness. On his return Carl joined him and the two stepped boldly into the light. It seemed no one was left to challenge them, though that did not prevent Carl from glancing furtively behind him as they mounted the broad steps to the doors. The lights were dazzling. Carl felt exposed. "Come on," hissed Amos. "The place looks deserted." Not quite. Bare bulbs strung every twenty feet or so along a hastily rigged wire shone dimly down on a dusty floor, disturbed by the tramping of many booted feet. Muffled thuds sounded from the second floor above. On a wall of the foyer was painted the Coalition symbol, a yellow circle quartered in red and black. At the end of the foyer was a doorless office and a corridor stretching right and left on either side. "You know the layout," said Amos. "Fill me in." "To our right," said Carl, pointing, "the auditorium. To our left the gymnasium. Classrooms on both floors, though I doubt there's anything left in them now. Stairs at either end." "Let's check out the auditorium." Not wanting to appear hurried or awkward or out of place, they walked at a casual pace. Carl glimpsed into doorless classrooms as they passed, that had burned a great black patch on the floor, another containing a couple of soldiers who looked incuriously at them, another occupied by a crude bed and the bed occupied by a big man with a bandaged head, another with an officer in it sitting at a small table and reading over some paperwork, and another, and another, and then they had reached the auditorium, the doors of which were surprisingly still intact. "This could be where it gets heavy," murmured Amos, laying his hand on the door. "You ready?" Carl nodded assent. Amos pulled the door open. From behind them came a strangled cry: "Stop that man! Stop him! Stop him!" Carl and Amos exchanged desperate looks. Without looking into the auditorium, Amos let the door shut and pressed his hand against it. Carl had briefed Amos long before on the matter of the blue pickup truck and his experience with its driver. Now, as the yells grew louder, the image of the big man with the bandaged head suddenly surfaced in his thoughts, and he summed up the cause of the yells in one word. "Wheeler." "Oh, shit," said Amos. He grabbed Carl's elbow and hustled him into the nearest classroom, one of the empties. "Don't go anywhere," he instructed Carl, and stuck his head out the doorway. His body followed and he disappeared from view, only to return a few seconds later. "We are in trouble." he announced, checking his weapons for full ammunition clips, getting battle-ready, getting out a grenade and hefting it in his hand. One word was sufficient to explain why. "Wheeler," Carl said again. "Right," said Amos. "Our only chance of making it now is to shut up your songbird friend before he costs us both our lives. That's your job." "Mine? What are you gonna do?" Amos held up the grenade, looking at it affectionately as if it were a ripe apple. "You want to get to Wheeler, so I'm creating a diversion to make sure you get there, is all. Here," he said, tossing Carl the wooden-handled length of piano wire. "Don't shoot him, he's not worth it." "Where will you be?" "I'll be in the auditorium for a while. You stick around here after you get rid of Wheeler until I get back. Right now you wait until everyone goes by, then you go get Wheeler. Got it?" "Got it. Just don't get killed." "I won't if you won't." "You got a deal." Carl crossed to the other side of the doorway and stood with his back hard against the wall. Out of sight of anyone else, he had an unobstructed view of the auditorium doors. Wheeler was still yelling, though his cries were getting weaker. Amos popped his head out, then nonchalantly walked to the auditorium doors, pulled the pin on the grenade. His mouth moved in silent counting. He opened the door a crack, tossed in the grenade, turned to the wall with his hands over his ears. There was a loud boom! One of the doors fell down. Amos was running the other way now, yelling "Intrus! lntrus!" which Carl assumed was French for intruder. Then Amos ran back, followed by four or five soldiers, one of whom was probably the officer. Or so Carl hoped. Carl placed one hand on the doorframe and swung out into the corridor. Behind him was shouting and shooting and the thuds of many boots. Ahead came only Wheeler's "Stop him! Stop him!" like a broken record. Carl unwound the wire and snapped it taut between his hands. He found the right doorway, stood in it, stared at Wheeler. Wheeler stared back. Even as his voice faded away his jaw kept working, trying for sounds that never came. His lips shaped a single syllable that might have been Who or Wonbut came out as neither. It was a feeble, pathetic sound. Carl felt only disgust for the big man. He held the wire up and Wheeler's eyes moved to it. widened, shifted back to Carl's face. Carl took a step forward. Wheeler's eyes were truly remarkable now. Framed by bandages above and below, they expressed a sequence of horror, fear, anger, defiance, and resignation; then they dulled, staring at the wire again as though it were a line drawn in the dust and Wheeler a mesmerized chicken. Carl was not fooled. He saw Wheeler's hands stealing up the gray blanket, obviously reaching for a concealed weapon. But one more step brought him to Wheeler's side. He put a stop to the man's furtive action by calmly and coldly pressing down on the bandaged nose with his thumb. Wheeler yelped. Blood began blotting the dingy gauze. "You'll never get away with this," croaked Wheeler. All the fight had gone out of him, except for his mouth. "Anyway, it's too late. I saw them bring your wife and kids in. Real cute family. I also saw them shot." Then he gulped, realizing his mistake. "Then there's no point in keeping you alive, is there?" said Carl, moving behind Wheeler and looping the wire around his neck. He crossed the handles and pulled as tight as he could. Wheeler scrabbled his hands at his throat for a second or two, then gave up. His body jerked once, twice. Carl maintained his grip on the wire long after it ceased to matter, long after Wheeler ceased to be. He didn't see Wheeler die, his eyes were too full of tears for that. He saw only the faces of Amy and Cheryl and Jimmy and his heart cried out. No. No. No. Wheeler had to have lied. He had to have lied. He had to. Otherwise what was the point of Carl staying alive? Carl's awareness returned when an explosion seemed to shake the building. All the lights went out. He released his hold on the garrote around Wheeler's neck and stood in the darkness, listening to far-off gunfire and the distant screams of the wounded. Amos must be doing one hell of a job, he thought, and wondered if he should go and helpv ' v . He walked down the corridor, countingjdoorways ;as his hand slapped them. Reaching the dassroomiwhere Amoshad left him; he took three steps inside the room, froze, then hastily hacked out as quietly as he could. He had seen the red glow of a burning cigarette and smelled tobacco. Someone was in there? Amos? He couldn't remember having seen Amos smoke. He could spray the room with bullets, but what if it was Amos in there? What if it was a civilian held prisoner? What if...? Trapped by indecision, he stayed where he was and waited. He took his pulse and counted to #. He noticed that his night vision had returned. He could see. Dimly. He remembered that he had left his weapons in the empty classroom. The realization came that he was being stupid. If someone was in the room smoking a cigarette then, with his night vision, he should be able to glimpse the face as that person took a puff. If nothing else , perhaps he could overpower the person. Then he'd feel safe, for the time being. Into the room he ventured, hardly daring to breathe. The glow was still there, and as he drew closer he expected a momentary brightness to reveal the face of the smoker. There was no momentary brightness. He hunkered down and began making circles on the floor with his fingertips, hoping to find his rifle. Then the smoker took a puff, the face was lit up, and a voice said, "Make any more moves and I blow your head off." The accent was German. The voice was contralto. He heard the click of a pistol being cocked. That was it, it was all over, he was a dead man. "Okay if I talk?" he said. What the hell, there was nothing left to lose. "If it amuses you." She must have taken both his rifles. They were probably over in the comer, next to her. There was no way he could get them. "You're Eva Obendrein, right?" "If you say so." "Earlier today you captured a woman and two children who were riding in a blue pickup truck." "If you say so." "Where are they?" He heard the woman make a sharp intake of breath. "What matter is that to you?" she said after a time. Carl waited a shorter time before replying. "I'm her husband." "Ah. Of course. You came with the cavalry, hoping to rescue them. What a pity you are too late." His scalp tightened. "What do you mean?" If there had been light, he would have seen her shrug. "They are no longer here. All have been sent to a detention camp until their guilt has been determined. Who knows, they may be innocent. If so, they will live. But you will die." They were alive. They were alive. Eva Obendrein crushed her cigarette and struck a match to light another. Carl remembered to close one eye in time to preserve a little of his night vision. In the abrupt glare he saw the woman clearly. She was sitting on the floor with her back propped up against the wall under a boarded window. Where she clutched her side, blood had seeped through and spread on the floor until it caked in the dust. That she had put the pistol down to light the match, thus giving Carl a clear opportunity to rush her, no longer meant anything. Eva Obendrein was dying. "Where is this detention camp?" "Hundreds of miles away. Near Chicago." Her voice was growing fainter. "How near?" A beam of light sprang from the doorway, shining full on Eva Obendrein. Her chin snapped up and she raised the gun shakily and squeezed the trigger. The hammer came down on nothing with a loud click. The gun was empty. The flashlight beam shifted to Carl. "You okay?" said Amos. Carl smiled without mirth. "Yeah. You?" He kept his eyes on Eva as he bent over her and picked up the rifles. She looked back weakly and her eyes were very old. "I broke a fingernail," said Amos, "but I'll live. Let's get out of here." "What about Eva Obendrein?" They heard shouts and running, getting louder. "Eva? We both know where she's going. Come on, let's get out of here. It sounds like we're about to have company." Carl led the way through the dark corridor and out through the foyer. Amos lagged behind to let loose a salvo of bullets that obliterated the Coalition symbol painted on the wall. Carl set his rifle on automatic fire and raked the lights that lit the school from outside, plunging the building into an exterior darkness to match the interior. The pair clattered down the steps but did not head straight out as Carl expected. Amos steered him left. "Where are you going?" puffed Carl. "We have to get to Chicago. You heard her say that my family was there." "I heard. But let's finish the job here first." They rounded a comer of the gymnasium, rounded another. One lone guard fired a burst at them that missed, and Carl wiped him out without a second thought. On the football field, under the stars, the tank stood. Amos and Carl zigzagged toward it, shooting constantly, but it was unguarded. Amos clambered on top of the tread. "This is your standard M# tank." he said. "Stand away from it and give me about # seconds. Then watch the fireworks." He opened a hatch on the turret and climbed inside. With a deep whirr of engines, the turret swung the cannon around until it pointed at the school. Carl stepped off to the side and held his ears. The cannon fired with a roar, telescoping into itself with the recoil. The noise was deafening. Where the cannon had aimed, the wall exploded, flinging debris high into the air. The cannon swung and fired again, swung again and fired. The school appeared to bend in on itself, as if a giant hand had pulled its strings from inside. The blast of the explosions echoed all around, then faded into stillness. The turret hatch popped open and Amos emerged. Carl forgot he was covering his ears until Amos climbed down and pulled Carl's hands away. "You okay?" he asked loudly. "Sure," said Carl. "I'm not even deaf." Amos leaned against the tank and stared at the rubble. He whistled softiy between his teeth. "What are we standing around for? Chicago, remember?" "Yeah, I remember. I was just admiring my handiwork. Let's go find the Corvette. We've got a lot of ground to cover before morning."Gil Lament By Jesse Peele I he mists didn't exactly roll away-it was the pain from the bum on his shoulder which told him he was still alive. That, and the cool air on his naked body... Naked body? Painfully, Dal managed to raise his throbbing head and force his eyes open. Hmm. He was lying on his back, on a cushioned table that was soft against his bare skin, and son-ofa-bitch, he was naked. Not a thing on! He let his head fall back-that was a mistake because the throbbing which had only been terrible inside his aching skull suddenly got worse. Where was he? How had he gotten here? The last thing he remembered was throwing his empty ceepee gun at a divebombing drone. He ought to be deader than black plastic! "Awake at last, I see," said a voice from his right. It was a deep, honey-on-glass-smooth voice, a female voice. He decided he liked it. So he tried to sit up. Whoops. There was something he hadn't noticed before-his wrists and ankles were strapped down! "You and I are going to have a wonderful time," the woman said. He managed to twist his head, andYep. There she was-the tall, redhaired lady in green, moving closer. Dal tried to smile. Too bad the wind wasn't blowing. The smell of her perfume was nice; a heavy, musky scent, and she seemed to glide across the thick carpet like a dancer. When she was a meter away, she stopped. Her full, red lips pulled back into a sensual smile. Slowly, she reached to a clasp at her neck. She pulled the silver metal apart with a tiny click, threw back her shoulders, and The robe slithered down her body to the floor. Dal's mouth got dry. The woman was wonderfully, beautifully, fantastically nude! The tips of her hard nipples couldn't be that color, he decided-that had to be rouge. Her long, red hair fanned out over her shoulders and fell almost to her buttocks. She shifted her hips slightly, and the small muscles in her slim belly danced under her smooth skin. The line of her ribs pressed gently outward, accentuating the thin waist. Below that waist was her navel, and beneath that, a thin, red-and -- curly line of hair began to swirl downward into a thickerDal's mouth got very, very dry. He realized some of the throbbing in his head had subsided. Well. He knew where the pounding blood had gone-other things were beginning to throb... "You're a very brave man," she said, bending over to touch her moist lips lightly to his chest. "I like brave men." She bit lightly and smiled up at him. This close, Dal could see the whirling, too-gray color of her large, beautiful eyes. So. It was the Lady with Smoke Eyes-the Lady Ursula! And, don't forget, the wife of Lord Kreeg Hookthom! She kissed him on the chest again, and still smiling, she slid the long nails of her right hand inside his left knee. She worked her fingers back and forth, scratching in small circles on his skin as her hand moved upward... Umm. Oh, yeah... Hey! a voice inside his mind yelled at him. This is the enemy! The wife of the guy who shot your ship down! Go away, he told the inner voice. Wait! Listen! Don't you remember the Starbird? The who? Ahhh. Idiot! What about the stories? About what she does to her lovers afterward? The thick, red hair fell lightly across his body as the woman kissed him fully on the lips, her tongue probing. Afterward? Who the hell cares about afterward? Gods, if only I could get my hands loose! That's the spirit, said the voice. You could get away! Get away? You're crazy! What I need my hands for is-wait. Just a minute. There was something he seemed to remember, something about the Lady with Smoke Eyes-what was it...? Oh. Now he remembered. Oh, shit! Yeah, dummy, said the voice inside his head. She's supposed to chop 'em up afterward, and eat part of 'em! Wanna guess which part she eats? Yeah, well, that was terrible and all, but the woman's body was sliding slickly against his now, her breathing hot against his ear, the musk of her he wanted to stop-which he didn't-he was tied... ! "Ursula!" roared a deep voice from somewhere nearby. The woman lifted her face from Dal's slightly. "Shhh," she whispered. "Maybe he won't-" "Ursula! Where the hell are you?" The sound was definitely closer. "Oh, damn!" She looked down at Dal's muscular body, at the evidence of his desire for her. "Too bad," she said with a sigh. "In here!" she yelled. "Who-?" Dal managed to croak. "Kreeg. He's always spoiling my fun!" Kreeg? Oh. Kreeg. Lord Kreeg. Hookthom. My boy, you are in deep shit! And the throbbing in his head started back up as more blood became available from another source; as Dal's desire wilted like a paper flower in a hurricane. The door to the dimly lit room opened, and the lights flared on brightly-much too brightly. Lord Kreeg Hookthom. All two meters and one-hundred-and-ten kilos of him, blocking out almost the whole entrance. He was dressed in the legendary black uniform he supposedly always wore. Thick, brown and curly hair sprouted from his squarish head, and the heavy beard was shot through with streaks of lighter gray. His teeth gleamed whitely against the darkness of his facial hair when he smiled. "I hate to break up your little party-but there's an intruder loose on the base. The stupid Division Commander said he'd been trapped in this area and hit by a clone-drone-but nobody can find the body." He stopped, and looked at Dal, then back at his wife. "Who's your friend, Ursula? He doesn't look familiar." "He's mine! You said I could have anybody I wanted, anytime!" She glared at Hookthom, legs spread widei her hands on her bare hips. "Aha! So that's where the bastard went! You got him! I should have known." "Kreeg, you said-" "You can have him back. Later... after I've finished with him." "After you get through with him, there won't be anything left worth having. There never is." Oh, fine. Dal thought. Not just deep-you're in a mountain of it!  "Your story stinks!" So did Hookthom's breath, but Dal didn't mention that. "You say you outflew twelve of my ships, alone, landed that wreck and survived? And then you crossed a thousand kilometers of jungle and wandered onto a guarded military base?" "I've always been lucky." Hookthom backhanded Dal across the face, rocking his already painful head and bringing a bright red flush to one cheek. "Not any more. Your luck just expired! You're going to tell me who sent you, and how you knew I was on this world. And a lot of other information you probably didn't even realize you knew. And then, if you're lucky, I might let you die." Dal's mouth hurt, but he managed a grin-a small one. "Well, if I have to go, I'd prefer your wife's method-" Hookthom slapped him again. "We'll see how smart you are in a little while!" Hookthom turned and stalked over to a com panel. "Get the goddamned medic over here!" There was a two-second pause. "Uh... sir, he's... gone into town..." Hookthom glared at the com. "Well, find him! I want him here in fifteen minutes! If he's not, you will personally scrape entry-bum from the nose of every ship in the fleet!" "Yes, sir! He'll be there!" "How the hell am I going to conquer a galaxy when I'm surrounded by idiots'?" "Tough to get good help," Dal said.  The whitecoated psychomech pushed in a cart covered with glittery things-things Dal didn't want to look too closely at; he had a feeling he'd find out their function soon enough. The man was short, fat, and had an almost cherubic smile. He also smelled of alcohol-the medical kind. And like something which ought to be preserved in a jar somewhere. "I want to know everything he learned since he was potty-trained. And I want to know it quickly!" "Of course, Lord," the fat man said. "If you'd care to return in, say, half an hour. I'm sure I'll be finished by then." Hookthom grinned. "Well! A man who knows his job! What a change. I'll be back in half an hour." After he left, the fat medic moved toward Dal, holding a card in his chubby hand. "First, a simple test. Look at this." Dal glared at the card. He'd be damned if he was going to cooperate. But the card said, "Don't say anything. Just play along. The room is probably monitered." Dal nodded. "Good, good. Now, we must have your complete relaxation. I realize that will be somewhat hard for you to do voluntarily, under the circumstances. However. I will give you an injection of nospas, and-" he stopped. "Excuse me, when did you last urinate?" "Huh? I don't remember. A few hours ago." "Um. Won't do. I'm afraid. The nospas will relax the bladder sphincter muscles. Messy." He turned to the door. "Guard!" The portal dilated a fraction. "Yeah?" "This man isn't ready for therapy. He's got to go to the bathroom." "What?" "The bathroom. This man has got to go!" "Look, uh... doc..." "Doctor Bone, doctor C'min alBone. Open the portal!" "I was told not to let anybody-" "Lord Hookthom is going to be returning in less than thirty minutes, expecting to find this man ready to answer his questions. What do you think he'll do to you when I tell him you wouldn't let me prepare my patient to answer those questions?' ' "Uh, well, yeah, I guess he can go to the head. But I'll haveta come with you!" The medic looked at the gray ceiling, apparently bored. "Whatever." The guard dilated the door and stepped inside, his particle spitter held at the ready. "Take him along," Dr. Bone said. "I'll be right along behind you-I've got to check out my encephalo-stunner. ' ' The guard nudged Dal with his weapon, and Dal stumbled toward the portal, feeling very clumsy with his hands tied behind him. The thin, syntho -- silk straps cut into his wrists; he could feel his hands getting numb. Thwack! There was a sound behind him like a melon dropped onto a tile floor. Dal spun, to see the guard falling, the medic holding a heavy chunk of machinery. The fat man grinned. "Had to test the encephalo-stunner-seems it works just fine!" Then the medic's form became a blur... It must be Lin... No! It was-Lao Emba! "How did-?" "Never mind. I couldn't hold the mind-form any longer. Let's get out of here." He pulled the knife he carried on his thigh from its clear scabbard and deftly cut the bindings on Dal's wrists. Dal's hands burned as the blood came back into them. "What about the bugs...?" In answer, an alarm began to squeal. "Move, boy, dammit, move!" Dal moved. "Which way?" "There! I've got a vehicle waiting outside the south perimeter." "What about the fence? It's laserrigged." "Don't worry! Just move your butt! Now!" "Sometime you'll have to teach me some of those Ch'an tricks." "Later, boy, later!" Somehow, they reached the fence. On the other side was a large air-cushion car. But the fence. Emba sang several bars-in Trogian. The thick, green brush seemed to burst open as Tulak appeared. He was carrying a log nearly as big around as he was. With seeming ease, he hoisted the log by one end, and let it fall forward onto the fence. The lasers flashed, and the massive log burst into flame, charring into smelly, resin-popping smoke. But the weight was too much-the chain-link steel bent, bowed, and-gave! The automatic lasers continued to roast the log, but there were gaps around it that were large enough. "Duck!" screamed a raspy voice. Dal dropped, and a thin beam of high-energy crackled over his head. With his face lifted slightly from the dirt, he saw Lincheni standing on the opposite side of the fence next to Tulak. The Demi -- Whelf crouched and fired his own particle spitter. There was a gurgling yell behind Dal as Lin's shot struck its mark. "Boy," Emba said, " do I have to tell you-" But Dal was up and moving. He jumped through a gap in the tom fence, just missing one of the stillfiring laser beams. Tulak was already in the car, along with Lin, who was sending his furry hands flying over the controls. "You don't know how happy I am to see you!" Dal gasped. "I could hazard a guess," Lin said, grinning. "Pursuit approaches," Tulak sang. "I suggest we depart." The air car sprang as if goosed, and Dal felt himself pulled back into the seat by the acceleration. To his left, Emba glared at him. "Listen, fool! The next time you go flitting off without my permission, I will leave your ass to rot! Understood?" Dal nodded. Yeah. That didn't seem like such bad advice. X "You're kind of stupid, you know that?" Tanya said. She had changed from the sleeping robe into a onepiece blue jump -- suit. The thicker cloth hid her shape better than the robe, but not much-a fact of which Dal was almost painfully aware. He was beginning to feel like a long-time celibate. The girl's pretty face was angry looking. "You could have blown everything with that stunt!" "Everything? What everything? Why, if Hookthom found out that an old man, a girl, a robot, a DemiWhelf and I intended to destroy his navy, he'd have been terrified." "If he didn't laugh himself to death," Lin added. Emba looked at Tanya, then at Dal. "Okay. Harusun, I admit we haven't told you everything." "My! What a surprise! Doesn't that surprise you, Lin? Why, I'll bet even Tulak is surprised." "Negative," chimed Tulak. "Iam not-' ' "Never mind!" Dal glared at the robot. "You haven't told us anything! Either we know what's going on, or you can shove this whole thing up your-" "All right," Emba said. "There is a plan..."  "That's your plan?" Dal said, amazed. He looked at Lin. "Well," Lin said, "it is better than just five of us. Not much better, maybe, but..." "What's the matter, Harusun?" Tanya asked. "Don't you think you can do your part?" "It's not that! It's just-" "I told you," she said to Emba. "I knew we couldn't depend on this-this pirate." "Listen, sweetheart, Lin, Tulak and I can fly figure eights around any one of Hookthorn's ships. Against any five ships! But we can't beat a dozen-ship patrol!" "You don't have to defeat them," Emba said. "Just keep them busy." "Oh, fine! What happens when another fifty ships flame up to help out? The only thing they'll be busy doing is figuring out how to sponge our remains up from the landscape!" "The base will have troubles of its own." "Oh, yeah, I forgot. You and the snakes will be destroying it. Sure!" Emba and Tanya looked at each other. "I think it's time you met Snegala," the old man said. Tanya nodded, and grinned.  From the air, the weedpatch still looked like an iron wheatfield. Emba landed the flitter in a clearing, and the five passengers alighted. As they approached the edge of the weed, Emba spoke into a small transceiver. Sweat formed and ran down inside Dal's tunic. The jungle air was too damp with humidity for the moisture on his body to evaporate. The smell of the toothick foliage was oppressively sweet and decaying. They misnamed this planet. Dal thought. They should have called it 'rotten.' A clinking sound vibrated through the weed. The sound increased, until it was like a hammer on thin sheet metal. ThenSon-of-a-bitch. Dal stared at the thing that pushed the iron stems aside easily as it slithered into the clearing! It was basically snake-like in shape, in that it was long and tube-like-a good five meters long, and as big around as Dal's thigh. But it didn't look like any snake Dal had ever seen. First, the head was all wrong-the thing's mouth opened from side-to-side, like a crab's claw, instead of up and down, like a snake. There didn't seem to be any teeth; instead, there were razorsharp plates lining both sides. Logically, that made sense-if the Culebrath snipped the iron-weed, it wouldn't have to turn its head to do so. Along both sides of the creature's body, there were rows of hook-like fins, each fingerthick, and perhaps ten centimeters long. When the creature lifted its head slightly. Dal could see a similar row of spikes. An interesting method of locomotion. In the weed, they could hook the fins around the stalks. On the ground, they could dig those under-fins into the ground and pull. Its skin seemed metallic. There were segments every few centimeters along its length which seemed to be some kind of joint. The creature was basically a dull gray color, with flecks of fire red scattered over it. There were no eyes Dal could see-maybe it used a sonar or radar for 'seeing.' There were two small holes on top of the head which could have been nostrils. "I can speak some Culebrath," Emba said, interrupting Dal's thoughts. "But Snegala can understand and speak basic Interspeak, as well." Emba moved closer to the creature on the ground. "Snegala, these be friends." Snegala gargled, a high, quavering sound. "I be happy meeting friends." "Does he know what you've got planned?" Dal asked. "Yes. He and his people are willing to help." "Pardon me," Lin said, "but he doesn't look very mobile. Can they help?' Emba nodded. "Can show friends eat thing, Snegala?" "Can show." Tanya stepped forward. She was holding a large metal bar, heavy from the look of it, as thick as Dal's wrist. She stood the bar on its end in front of the Culebrath. It wasn't balanced well, however, and it started to fall. Before the bar had tipped more than a few degrees, Snegala lunged-incredibly fast-and clamped his cross-jaws onto it. Chink! Suddenly there were two small pieces of bar lying on the ground! But more than half the thick metal was... gone! Eaten. Before Dal could speak. Emba did. "Be okay show friends gun-thing?" "Be okay." Emba turned to Lin. "Can I borrow your weapon?" Lin nodded, and handed it to him. Dal looked puzzled. Was it going to eat the gun... ? But Emba turned back to Snegala and without pausing, he fired the spitter at the prone creature! "Hey!" Dal yelled. Emba ignored him The stream of deadly particles hit Snegala about mid-body. Emba played the green line back and forth over the Culebrath for about two seconds before he stopped. There was a hot metal stink, like an ore furnace. The ground around the Culebrath smouldered and made little popping noises. "How you be feeling?" Emba asked. "Be feeling okay." "Be damaged?" "No." Dal and Lin stared at each other. The Demi-Whelf shrugged his hairy shoulders. Damn! Tulak could take a hit from a ceepee and survive-but he was a robot! Snegala didn't seem to be bothered at all! "Uh, how is he against a laser?" Dal finally managed to ask. "Not as good. After a few seconds of standard anti-personnel laser fire, he gets uncomfortable." Uncomfortable? Shit! Even Tulak couldn't take laser fire without damage! "Well?" Tanya said, smiling broadly at Dal. "Uh. Well. Um." Even his hands were sweaty now. Lin scratched at his belly-fur. "Got to admit a few of his friends could cause a stir coming across a compound toward you." "Snegala says he will have eight hundred of his brothers ready to hit the military base in a week." Well, Dal thought. That certainly would create a diversion at the base. "Okay, so the base is busy. And the three of us play dodge-rocket with Hookthom's patrol -- it'll still be close! You'll need a damned good pilot to sneak a ship into hyper during this raid. And it'll take him a month before he can get to a Confed base and back with enough help to take out Hookthom!." "It'll take her a month," Tanya said. "What?" "I'll be flying the message ship." "You?" "What's so amazing about that? I'm a good pilot." "But-but-" "When my father died, I automatically became a senator, as his only surviving relative. Besides, do you think the Confederation would believe you if you told them?" "She has a point," Lincheni observed. "You seem to forget something!" Dal said. "Even if everything goes as planned-which isn't all that likely -- the basic problem Emba mentioned earlier still exists. What's to stop the Confed's navy from hell-bombing the whole planet?" "Ah, a good point!" Emba said. "By the time Tanya gets back, we will have lured most of his ships off-planet. The Confederation ships will take them in space." "Just how the hell do you plan to do that?" Emba grinned. "Not me, my boy-us! There's a way." Dal looked at Lin, then at the impassive facade of Tulak. It seemed he'd heard that one before. "I don't think I want to hear this," he said, feeling doomed. But of course he heard it anyway. X Trees and smelly bushes, insects and heat. Even in the dark, now nearly midnight, the damned jungle was ungodly hot and sinus-congesting wet. If I ever get out of this. Dal thought, it will be a cold day in hell before I go to another tropical world! Aloud, he said, "I told you, gate security will be too tight. This is the only way!" "I don't see why we can't just steal a small flitter and hop the damned fence," Lin said. The heat seemed to be bothering him more than it did Dal-but then, that figured-fur coats were no help unless it was cold.  "Tell him. Tulak." "The inner perimeter of the fence is equipped with automatic anti-aircraft weaponry. Any lowflying vehicle attempting entry over the fence would be fired upon." ' ' Y eah? Then what about your plan to leave when you were in earlier, Dal? You were going to fly out." "I didn't know about it then. I'd have been roasted." "Oh." "Yeah. Tulak, you have the charges?" Stupid question. Of course he had them. "Affirmative." "I hope they work!" Lin rasped. "The explosives are operational," Tulak sang. "Yeah, but will they be strong enough to knock a hole in the fence and destroy the nearest lasers?" "I have calculated that they will be sufficient." Lin shook his head. In the dim moonlight. Dal could just barely see the gleam of the Demi-Whelf's eyes. "So we just crash the fence, run like racelots with our tails on fire and pray, right?" "You losing your nerve in your old age, Lin?" Dal grinned. "No! I just hoped to be able to breed at least once before I got too old." "Cheer up. The ship we want is less than a klick away! It's late, it's dark, there are three of us and only a few thousand of them. We'll make it!" Lin looked up at the faint blue gleam from Tulak's face-slit. "What about Tulak? How fast-?" "On a hundred-meter dash, he can spot me ten meters and still beat me by ten." "Big deal!  can do that." Dal chuckled. "When I'm running for my hide, you'd be surprised at how much faster I am." They moved forward in the damp and smelly underbrush in a crouch. Just ahead, the pale moonlight reflected from the laser-trapped chain-link fence. Dal looked at his chrono. "Two minutes. Get ready." "Hey," Lin said, "just what is this diversion Emba has planned?" "He didn't say-but he said we'd probably be able to see it. And he said we've got fifteen minutes to get set before Snegala and his brothers go to it." The seconds hummed by slowly. The two minutes seemed like two thousand years-and yet only two seconds... "There!" Lin growled. The three of them stared. They were on the south side of the compound. To the northeast, suddenly there was a light! The night sky began to glow, in shades of red and blue and yellow. Then, in the midst of the colors, an image began to form... It was-a-a woman! A giant, holographic image of a -- a naked woman! The shape was slender, with large breasts, and long, red hair... "Holy shit!" Dal said. "That's a picture of the Lady-" "Come on!" Lin shouted. "It's supposed to distract the troops-not us!" "Yeah, right!" But certain memories arose... Dal and Lin scuttled toward the fence. Tulak was setting the last of the charges, being careful not to touch the deadly wire. To the northeast, the giant picture began gesturing obscenely. Dal could imagine what Hookthom would be telling his men. Kaboom! The explosion's concussion rocked Dal. His ears rang with the sound, and there was a burned, dusty smell. The fence was down-there was a gap a tank could move through. They ran through the twisted fragments of still-smoking fence. "Halt! Who's there?" A guard! Dal increased his speed, and almost ran over Lincheni, just ahead of him! A bright, red beam lanced at them from behind and to the left. It missed Dal by less than a meter! Without slowing. Dal drew the new ceepee spitter Emba had gotten him, and fired a quick blast of green energy at the guard. He missed, but the man dropped and began screaming for help. Dal heard Lincheni curse, then a thump, like a falling body. What-? Then his shin smashed into something hard, and he half-flipped into the air. He managed to tuck his shoulder and come up in a back-jarring roll-but his lower leg hurt like hell! They rounded a dimly lit comer into the darkness between two featureless gray buildings. "Bastard!" Dal said. "Why didn't you tell me there was something there to trip on?" He bent over to massage his swelling shin. Lin was still cursing, rubbing at the front of his own furry thigh. "When did I have time? You were digging blisters on my heels!" He resumed cursing. "Tulak? Did you miss the obstruction?" "I went through it," Tulak said. "It was merely a wooden rail, probably placed there in order to-" "Never mind!" All Dal needed was a lecture on the mechanical construction of a military base. The three moved forward past the looming buildings, until they were at the edge of the landing field. Here were rows and rows of black-hulled ships: fighters, tankers, troop-carriers, supply vessels-a small navy. Most of these had rudimentary aerodynamic hulls, being both space and atmosphere craft. "Come on," Dal said. "This way." The three skulked through the dimly lit area, watching for additional guards. The sky to the northeast was growing darker-Emba's hologram was fading-they'd have to huny! The smell of reactor damping was strong here, mixed with the smells of various oils and gases. It took ten minutes for them to locate the ship. "Oh, wow!" Lin rasped. "Look at that mother!" The ship sat alone in a cleared area. It was a black, flattened oval, easily twice the size of the dead Starbird. Thin tail and side fins jutted from the craft, which was set in a position of lift-off. It was a Styne-Allison Fighter-the fastest and most deadly piece of equipment ever designed by mankind for space warfare! While the rest of Hookthom's rag-tag navy was composed of standard ships-Henry and Cither class cruisers, Boeingheed Battle wagons and Lazney Lancers, this ship was nearly unique! There were perhaps two hundred such ships operational in the entire Galaxy. It cost a planet's ransom, and in battle, was damned well worth it! Around the base of the sleek ship were at least six armed guards. "Doesn't look like they want anybody to borrow it," Lin said. "Probably not-it's Hookthorn's personal baby! "So how do we get it? Walk up and ask?" Dal grinned. "Simple. Tulak will back off a little and give 'em a hundred decibels of 'A' above high 'C.' You and I will sneak up behind them." "Mad," Lin muttered. "All Earthies are mad." "What?" "Nothing. We sneak up behind them." squeal of Tulak's tone, three of the guards immediately took off to find the source of the sound. That left only three to watch the ship. Dal kicked one of the remaining men smack on the side of the head with a roundhouse kick which would have made his old Oppugnate sensei proud-the man went down as if a rug had been jerked from under him. Lin shot the other two with his spitter. "You got no class, Lincheni!" "Yeah? You want to play martial artist, fine! Me, I want to stay alive!" The high-pitched wail stopped, as if a switch had been snapped off. A few seconds later, Tulak's massive frame came into view, dim light shining from his tall silver form. "The other guards...?" Lin asked. "They fired on me," Tulak said. Dal nodded. The big robot wasn't allowed to use any weapons but his own body, and then only in self-defense. But Dal remembered the attack of the rhino-thing after they'd first landed on this world-and the broken skull Tulak had dealt it with one fist! "Come on, let's get on board!"  "Can you fly this thing?" Lin asked. "It looks pretty complicated." "I can fly it! Can you figure out how to operate the comp and the weapons-systems?' ' Lin looked insulted. "If a human can design it, a whelf can run it!" "Tulak?" The big robot wasialready seated in the too-small-for-him navigatorpower control section. His answer ran out over the comp. "The controls are simple; I can operate them with no difficulty." "Dammit! We've got our ship!" "Yeah," Lin said sourly, "now all we have to do is get away with it!" Dal looked at his chrono. "Emba's got the Culebrath hitting the fences in five minutes." Four minutes passed. Three minutes. Two. One. "Move it!" Dal yelled. Tulak punched in take-off power. Dal tapped in the launch pattern. They were off! Even in the akcel-couches, the G-pull was chest mashing. "Man, oh, man, has this thing got power!" Almost instantly it seemed, they were in space. Next to Dal, Lin chortled. "Look at this! This thing's got ceepee cannons, lasers, proximity mines, cobalt torpedoes, the works! And the computer! It's a fully programmed MJ-Reefer-Single-Hit system! Fantastic!" Three minutes out, Dal turned to look at Lin. "Okay. We've got our ship-the ship the bastards owed us!" "And then some!" Lin rasped, his fingers dancing over the instrument controls. "What I mean is, if we keep her straight out, we can hit hyper long before any patrol could possibly touch us." Lin said nothing. "Hey, we don't owe them anything! We're even! With this ship, we can make a fortune!" "My breeding money," Lin said softly. "Why should we get killed?" Dal continued. "Even in this baby, a twelve-ship patrol would be tough, right?" "Even allowing for our superiority of firepower and speed, our chances would still be one-in-three of surviving a battle," Tulak chimed in. "Tanya's ship will be leaving shortly," Lin said, looking from his instrument board to Dal. Dal stared at the viewscreens. "Yeah." "No way she can make it without us," Lin said. Dal sighed. "Did I ever tell you you're a pain in the ass, Lin?" The whelf grinned. "I seem to recall that you have." "Ah, hell!" Dal's grin was bigger than Lin's. "We got surprise-let's go find Hookthom's lousy patrol!" "Why not?" Lin said. "Mating season isn't for another two years!" "Tulak?" "Course locked in. We'll arrive in the vicinity of the patrol in six point four minutes." What the hell. Dal thought. What the hell! XI Six minutes wasn't very long, but Dal had been flying space craft since he was thirteen -- illegally, of course, but for nearly ten years. He let his hands begin to get the feel of the ship, and he was pleased. The response was instant-instant and exact; it was a magnificent machine! "What's the name of our new bird, anyway?" he asked. Lin stroked the comp controls for the ship's log. A second later, he laughed. "What?" "The name! Hookthom called it Revenge! Dal's laugh blended with Lin's. Now that was fitting! Only it wasn't Hookthom who was going to be on the giving end! "Now approaching enemy vessels," Tulak sang. "Got 'em on the view screens!" Lin said. "I bet they're wondering what Lord Hookthom himself is doing out here. Surprise inspection, maybe? Or maybe they heard about the attack on the base and figure Hookthom is running!" "Yeah, or maybe they think we're the ghost of Christmas past!" Dal said. "Let's give 'em something else to worry about!" The transceiver blared. Someone was requesting an ID code, "This is Lord Kreeg Hookthom!" Dal roared. "What the hell do you mean you want an ID code? Don't you recognize my ship?" The Revenge sped closer toward the patrol. "Er-that is, your orders. Lord, you said nobody-" "Fool! Do you think I meant me?" Dal grinned at Lin. There was a pause, and Dal cut his 'caster off. "How many of 'em can we get on one pass, Lin?" "Computer says maximum of three." The transceiver crackled again. "I'm sorry. Lord, but I must insist-" "W'hat was your rank, private whoever-you-are?" Dal tried to sound menacing. "Lord! I'm only following your orders!" "Close enough!" Lin growled. "Good! Let 'em have it!" "What was that. Lord?" asked the voice over the speaker. "Never mind!" Dal said. "I promote you again. And good-bye!" Lin's hands did their magic dance, and the Revenge shook with the force of its firing weapon . On the screen, two of the ships slashing, silent explosion of light! The viewer polarizers cut in, dimming the scene. Then, a third ship, raked by laser fire, ruptured into three uneven fragments, a cloud of frozen oxy turning into a shroud of ice crystals around its corpse. "Evasive running! Juice it, Tulak!" "Affirmative." "Here they come!' Lin said. "I'm seeding proximity mines!" Behind the speeding black ship, small orbs of dark plastic spewed out-the proximity mines-along with streamers of radar-jamming aluminum and tiny clumps of broad-signal beepers! "Mines away!" "All right!" Dal put the Revenge into a tight, down-right curve. On the rear-view scanners, a patrol ship blossomed into incandescence as it plowed into one of the deadly devices went off, triggered by fragments of the exploding ship. The remaining ships broke off in a sharp up-tum. Four down, eight to go! The Revenge shook suddenly-Dal felt the jolt from the bottom of his spine to the top of his skull. "Tulak?" "We have sustained a laser blast on our stem screen, to the port side. " "Damage?" "Negative," Tulak sang. "Man, this ship is built!" Lin said. "Tulak, give us a hard circle and take her-I want to get behind them!" "Affirmative." Dal felt the pressure begin to push him back into his seat. Harder, harder-until he couldn't move. He knew that Tulak was unaffected by the heavy G-force. His massive arms would be moving with precision, those thick fingers flitting with improbable softness and skill over the controls. The Revenge circled, half again as fast as the pursuing ships. "They've sent out a call for backup!" Lin groaned. "But the base doesn't seem to be sending any." Ha! The pressure eased, and Dal saw three ships in front of him on the viewers. "Stay with the one on the right!" "That's a copy!" Lin said. He set the MJ computer into action. The deadly reefer-circuit locked onto its victim. The ceepee spitters roared, joined by a thinner laser beam. The fleeing ship was suspended in time, too slow. "Gotcha!" Lin said. The Revenge shot through the boiled dust and scrambled atoms of what had been a Lazney Lancer. "Seven left!" Dal said. "They're re-grouping." "I'm going to fire a cobalt-torpedo!" Lin said. ' The range is too far for effective use," Tulak sang. "Who cares? I've always wanted to use one-it'll scare 'em!" Dal laughed. This was insane! And yet, he felt it was better to risk death-here, in space-than to live like a king on the ground! The computer plotted a course for the torpedo, and launched the killer missile. It roared forth from the sleek ship, burned through space, andDid no damage, just as Tulak had said. But it made a nice flash. And it scattered the ships. That was good and bad. Good, because they were scared-they knew the Revenge could out-gun any one of them. Bad, because it just might have scared them enough to come at the Revenge from all directions. It was bad, and they did! "Uh-oh!" Lin said. Then the special band on the transceiver burbled into life. It was Emba! "She's away! Good work! Now I suggest you move out-assuming you're still alive to hear this." "You heard the man! Tulak, get us out of here!" The Revenge accelerated, faster and faster. Dal felt himself grow heavier and heavier; he watched Lin seem to flatten out next to him, his fur spreading over the ackcel couch. He blacked out, but he wasn't worried this time. The ship was whole the Tulak had it! They'd done it!  Dal awoke to the sound of Tulak's repetitive sing-song; "Approaching destination. Are you conscious? Approaching destination. Are you-?" "Yeah, yeah! I'm awake!" Lin moaned. "Sister to a turd! Are we still alive?" "Yeah. Good old Tulak got us away!" "We are approaching the fifth planet," Tulak intoned. "I still don't know about this part, Dal," Lin said, combing at his thick facial fur with his short claws. "Taking on a beancan patrol with a supership like this is one thing. But this...?' "Well, so far Emba's been on the beam. Maybe he's right about this, too." "Maybe? Snail cancer! Maybe could get us dead!" Dal shrugged. "We could still pull out." After a few seconds, Lin shook his head. "I guess not. The party isn't over yet." "Good! Tulak, have you spotted the base?" "Affirmative. I have a fix on the We are pleased to introduce the Galaxy Library Organizers -- custom designed volume binders which will file and preserve up to # issues of your Galaxy collection. Each durable black and tan vinyl case is handsomely embossed in gold with the Galaxy logo. Priced at # each; # for #, # for #, including shipping, and handling. Send your check or money order and coupon below to: P.O. Box #I Philadelphia, Pa. #I Please send me Galaxy Library Organizers. I have enclosed  (Make payable to Jesse Jones Box Corp.) Offer good in U.S.A. only. autobeacon." "Okay. Lead me in. We're going down!" XU Everywhere, the thick, red ore dust seemed to cover things. It was a desolate looking scene. Even with the masks, the air was barely breatheable. Dal imagined he could smell the taint of raw iron, could taste the metallic grit of the all-pervading dust. That was impossible, of course-the masks filtered down to viruses-but the sensation was strong. The air was too cold to take without a climate suit, even for Lincheni. And the Demi-Whelf bitched about that. The smallest suit on the Revenge still hung in large folds over the whelf's stubby frame. Lin kicked at a dusty rock. Red powder rose in a fine mist around his boot. "A month, eh?" "That's what the man said." They looked around. The huge mining camp was devoid of life except for them. Hookthom had shut it down for good reasons. He knew miners were an independent lot, and if left alone there, they might cause trouble. Over three hundred bubble ships-the ore carriers-were still grounded at the camp, plus fifty or sixty smaller orbital hoppers. None of the craft were equipped to go Hyper, so none could get away to warn the Confederation. But under the right circumstances, the bubble ships could be rigged into flying atomic bombs. Hookthom didn't want to lose any of his small fleet to some wild-eyed miner trying to fly a suicide mission against him, so he'd pulled everyone off the planet. The ships were, however, still operational. Hookthom didn't know when he might require more iron, so he'd left them intact, should the need arise. According to Lao Emba, it was going to be a fatal mistake! "We might as well get started," Dal said. "Yeah," the floppy looking Lincheni said. "Even withTulak's help, it'll take me two weeks just to program the computer to handle it." "And even then, it's going to be close using Emba's schedule. It's gonna be a long month!" "A banker," Lin said. "What?" "I could have been a banker. True, it didn't pay much, but I had an uncle who was fairly high up in banking circles back on New London. In ten or fifteen years, I could have saved enough to breed. Maybe not the bestlooking female, but something, at least!" "Uh, Lin...". "Crap, never mind! If we pull this-this-ring off, we'll at least have the Revenge. We ought to be able to make enough with her in a couple of months for fifty females!" "Cheer up, Lin. None of us have been doing too well in breeding circles these days." "Well, at least we can, given the opportunity," Lin said. "You have a point, friend, you have a point!"  It was hellish work. Dal hated it. The stink of circuit flux was everywhere, and the thin, blue smoke clouded Dal's eyes. Working on the tiny circuits under the magnifying vapor wasn't helping his vision, either. He held the spot-laser's button down. Bzzt. Another good circuit. Crap. How many more ships left to do? A hundred? And how long had it been? Three weeks? It seemed like three years! They'd never get them done in time. Even after Lin and Tulak had managed to get the computer on the Revenge programmed, they had been unable to work fast enough. Although Tulak could work around the clock. Dal and Lin had to sleep. He was so tired! This was exacting work. Dal made a mental note of another profession he'd never enter-electronic repair. Why'd they have to make the things so goddamned small, anyway? There! Another unit finished. He tongued the comswitch on his climate suit-the ships were cold, there wasn't enough fuel to waste heating them-and called Lin. "How's it going?" "-bastard son of a feline! Spawn of a-!" "Hey, Lin." "What?" "I said, 'How's it going?' " "Likedigging through a mountain of offal with a teaspoon, that's how it's going!" "Yeah, well, keep up the good work!" Dal laughed. It didn't look as if Lin was planning on going into electronics, either!  With three days remaining before the expected deadline, Lao Emba called with a scramble coded message. Lin tied the code into the ship's computer. "Tomorrow," Emba said. "But we've still got fifty-five ships to finish!" Dal said. "Sorry. You'll have to make do-it's not my idea. A Confederation scout broke Hyper yesterday just long enough to send me a coded message. Tomorrow, at #, they're going to break out in the-have you got your system charts?" Lin nodded as he put the chart on the comp screen. "Yeah." "They'll hit the area called Queechan C'enk. We-you-have got to have Hookthorn's ships there by then." You're crazy, Dal thought. "You're crazy!" Lin said, "Listen, if you did the circuitry as I outlined, it'll work!" "How are things on-planet?" Dal asked. "Bad. After the Culebrath attacked the camp, Hookthom became even more paranoid-although in this case, it isn't really paranoia. He clamped down hard on the populace. There have been purges, executions. While most of the Culebrath managed to escape after the raid, Hookthom has been bombing the weed fields." "What about the theft of his ship?" "He guessed rightly on that-figured you took it. But fortunately he also thinks you were destroyed trying to escape." "But -- how?" "His patrol was afraid to tell him otherwise." Lin laughed. "It's lucky," Emba continued. "While information pertaining as to who you are-ah, were, was allowed to fall into his hands, so he wasn't worried about you running to the Confederation, it's better this way-he feels safe." This whole thing gets wilder all the time. Dal thought. "Gentlebeings, I suggest you prepare your armada for lift-off!" Da) looked at Lin, then at Tulak. Well. He supposed it wasn't any crazier thananything else which had happened!  Within two hours, the bubble ships began to take off. Within four hours, all two hundred and fifty of the prepared vessels were in space. "Okay, Lin," Dal said, feeling more than just a little nervous. "Let's try it!" "You got it, chief!" The Demi-Whelf mumbled a quick prayer-curse, adjusted a control, and stroked in the program. Five bubble ships zipped by the Revenge in a tight formation. Dal watched them become smaller and smaller, until the tiny dots winked out and became invisible. "Tulak, what do you show on long-scan radar?" "Five vessels." "Okay, Lin, plug 'em in!" Lin nodded, and touched another control. "Tulak?" "There are now fifty blips indicating vessels on the screen, moving in formation." "Ha, ha!" Dal whooped. "We did it!" It worked! If all the circuits held, each of the nearly hollow bubble ships would throw ten "ghosts" which would be picked up by radar as ships. As long as they were out of visual range of Hookthom's ships, the two hundred-odd ore carriers would look like a fleet of twenty-five hundred ships! As long as they stayed out of visual range...  "I still don't-" began Lin. "Look, Emba knows what he's talking about. It's human psychology. Hookthom has over four thousand ships, right?" "Yeah, but-" "So when we show up with what looks like twenty-five hundred and start making noises for him to surrender, he won't be worried, He'll think we blew it-that we underestimated his strength, and don't know he's nearly two to one stronger than 'our 'fleet.' " "So? I still-" "Look, he has to flame up and destroy us, before we can get away and get help. And since the odds are so much in his favor, he'll figure to make short work of us." "That part I understand. He won't have a hell of a lot of trouble doing it, once he finds out that instead of a couple thousand ships-of-the-line all we have is two hundred and fifty weaponless rock haulers." "Right! Except that the Confeds are brave but not stupid. Once they-we-see we're outnumbered, everybody beats a strategic retreat, coincidentally into the Queechan C'enk region, where the real Confeds jump him!" "Fools and morons," Lin muttered. "What?" "Nothing. The Confeds jump him." "Right. And they will outnumber him three to one. Any ships he leaves behind on-planet will pick up the drift pretty quickly and hault for Hyper! ' ' "And everybody lives happily ever after," Lin mumbled under his breath. "Excuse me?" "Nothing, nothing! Just an old whelf proverb." "It's a simple, direct plan." "You know," Lin said, "if we stopped to think about this for a minute, we'd probably realize how impossible it all is." "Yeah, I know," Dal admitted. "So don't stop to think about it." "Units eighteen and nineteen, close up!" Dal said. "Yes, sir!" came Lin's pre-recorded voice from one of the bubble ships. "Units forty-one through forty-seven, initiate formation 'L.'" "Affirmative, Commander." That was Tulak's sing-song-it wouldn't hurt to let them think they had a few Trogian robots on hand. "You think they're getting this?" Lin asked. "They ought to be-hell, we're bleeding all over two of their main bands." "Gonna send the ultimatum now?" "Not yet. After one of his patrols pick us up and reports." "Then we run?" "Don't worry about that! Just make sure you keep the 'fleet' out of line of sight of the planet-we don't want some astronomer accidentally noticing us!" "There it is! Listen!" "-approaching ships number over two thousand. Urgent, repeat, urgent! We have sensor contact with a fleet of over two thousand ships. Alert status! Alert!" "That ought to do it," Lin said. "Okay." Dal took a deep breath. "Here goes! "Attention Planet Cynthia Dianne! This is Fleet Commander Rockwall of the Confederation of Man!" "Rockwall?" Lin whispered. Dal clicked off his comset and shrugged. "Might as well sound tough." He clicked the com back on. "Attention Lord Kreeg Hookthom! We know you have established a base on this planet. You are ordered to surrender or be destroyed!" Give up, you crazy bastard, or me and my two hundred and fifty pingpong balls will blow you away. Sure. "Okay, Lin, they should have had time to count us on their fingers by now. What's happening?" "Enemy ships lifting," Tuiak cut in. ' 'The count is eight hundred units, nine hundred, thirteen-" "Uh, Dal...?" "I heard! Let's get the hell out of here!" The Revenge circled, and Lincheni began sending signals to the bubble ships to retreat. Behind them, Hookthom's forces flared away from the planet in attack formation. "I sure hope the Confed's chronos aren't slow-" Lin began. "Don't even think it!"  Just ahead lay the deep-space region of the C'enk. Behind, according to Tuiak, thirty-eight hundred ships were following...# Almost there, almost! "Enemy ships coming within visual range," Tulak said. "Damn! Where the hell are the lousy-?" "There went ten of our primaries!" Lin said. Blap! A hundred ships at one whack! Hookthom's men must be patting themselves on the back, telling each other what great marksmen they were. "Come on, come on!" "Eight more, no, make that twelve more ships gone!" A hundred and twenty more of the 'fleet' down the tube. Thud! The Revenge rattled and slued as the silent form of a Confederation Tong fighter zapped from Hyper less than fifty kilometers away. Then another Confed ship materialized! Another! A dozen, a hundred! "Yahoo! The sons o' bitches made it!" Lin screamed. "Tulak, how many bubble ships do we have left?" "Ninety four. Ninety one." "Lin, blow those suckers!" Lin tapped a control tab. Ninetyone empty ore carriers suddenly became ninety-one atomic explosions. "How many did we get?" "Sixty nine!" Lin said. Well! Not bad for ping-pong balls! "This place is getting very crowded!" Dal said. "Let's move!" Around them, Confederation ships continued to wink into normal space. The battle was joined! All around them, the black curtain of space was being almost constantly lit by exploding ships and energy beams. Even with the viewers on full polarization, the glare was nearly blinding. Dal aimed the Revenge toward the fleet of Hookthorn's lancers. Two of the ships came into range. "Get 'em, Lin!" Lincheni's hands made love to the computer's controls. Ceepee beams shot out, lasers hummed forth, cobalt torpedoes streaked away! The lancers returned the fire. The Revenge shuddered, but her screens held; And the lancers flared and vanished into nothingness. "Go, Lin!" "Four enemy ships approaching from the rear," Tulak sang. "On the viewer!" "Hang on!" Dal's fingers stroked the cool plastic controls; he felt the blood rush from his head as the ship accelerated and curved upward. "They've split into two groups!" "Going after the closest ones!" Dal yelled. The ceepee cannons blasted at the two ships, and-missed! "Lin? What the hell?" A burned smell filled the cabin. "I've got a blow-out on the primary firing and tracker circuit!" "Switch the mother to secondary before those bastards-!" Clang! The Revenge bounced. Dal's comspeaker jammed hard into his lips and teeth, "v "Damage to the rear shield," Tulak sang unemotionally. "Primary circuit out, secondary back-up down-going to tertiary." "Lin!" "Secondary fire controls locked on!" Dal guided the ship around in a tighter circle, heading toward the starboard side of two of the lancers. "Shoot, you hairy fairy, shoot!" Ceepee flared, found the two ships. "Got 'em!" "What about the other two?" "They've got problems of their own. Four Tong fighters are on their tails!" "Great!" Dal grinned. "Uh-oh!" "Now what?" "We've got two Tongs on us, too!" "What? The idiots!" Dal flicked on his comset. "Hey, assholes! Can't you see we're on y our side?" The seat restraints cut into his shoulders and thighs as the screens opaqued black from a direct ceepee hit. "The stupid fuckers are shooting at us!" "We're in Blackthorn's ship!" Lin rasped, fumbling with his controls. "Crap!" Now what were they going to do? They had had a lot of hassles with the Confederation already-if they shot down a few Tong fighters! On the other hand, they couldn't let the stupid Tongs shoot them down, either! The Revenge jumped again as another blast knocked her sideways and forward! "Tertiary circuit on rear shield is down," Tulak said. "The shield is now inoperative." "Tulak! Get us out of here!" The Revenge leaped forward, leaving the slower Tongs behind. "Now what?" Lin asked. "Everybody is shooting at us!" "Time to go! They don't need us. We'll just warp into Hyper and get the hell out of-" "Negative," Tulak said. "The last attack disabled the shifter. We cannot go into Hyperspace." Oh, fine! "Okay, so we run in normal space. We've still got more speed than any of those canaries. We'll go darkside and find a hole to crawl into. Tulak!" The pressure increased, spreading Dal's cheeks and lips. "Tulak... she's... yours!" "Affirmative." This was really getting to be old. Dal thought, just before he blacked out again...  The screaming was so shrill he thought it would burst his eardrums! He recognized the tone-Tulak's "A" above high "C." "Shut the hell up!" The tone ceased, but Dal's ears still rang. The forward-port viewers showed nightside of the planet Cynthia Dianne, and everything looked quiet. Wait! "Hey, Lin! Wake up! Lin!" "Wh-what?" the whelf grumbled irritably. "Company! Coming up fast!" Lincheni looked at the scanner, then his computer screen. "What kind of ship can do that kind of speed?" "The craft is a Styne-Alison fighter," Tulak said. Whoops. Dal's mind tried to focus on that fact over the ringing in his ears. I wonder who's in-? "Hookthom!" Dal and Lin said together. It had to be! They should have known he'd have another ship stashed somewhere. He was too smart to get caught unprepared for his personal survival, regardless of what happened to his navy. Dal's mind scrabbled over itself, trying to think rationally. "Lin, the weaponry?" "We've got ceepee and some laser-no mines, no torpedoes." "Tulak, the engines?" "Normal space drive functioning. Hyper shifters are out." "And the screens?" "Rear screens are out. Both lateral screens are on secondary. Front screens still on primary." Bad news! They werepartially crippled. Hookthorn's ship would be fully armed and intact. And he'd have a lot more space-time than Dal did in this kind of ship. They ought to run-it would be the smartest thing. They'd done their part! And yet... If Hookthom got away, he'd start over again, on some other world, trying to build a new force, trying his maniacal attempts at galactic rule. There'd be another war someday. They had to do something! They had to stop him. Maybe they could bluff! Dal switched on his comset. "Hookthom! Give it up! Your fleet's being destroyed. You haven't got a chance!" "You! I should have killed you before!" "It's too late, Hookthom! You've lost!" "Like hell! They might have gotten my fleet, but I'll get you before I go!" His transmission clicked off, and the approaching ship flipped into an attack arc toward the Revenge. Well. So much for bluffing! Dal's hands sweated as he spun his own ship into a spiral toward the oncoming vessel. He couldn't let Hookthorn get behind him, not with the shields down in back. He'd have to meet him head-on! But things looked bad. "Dal, he's got us outgunned!" "You heard Tulak-the CM A shields are down! If we run, we'll damn sure get killed!" Lin said nothing. "But we do have one advantage. Tulak can take higher G's. We can out-fly him!" "But Tulak can't shoot! What happens if we pass out?" "We'll worry about-" Clang! Metal screeched inside the Revenge as the two ships tore past each other, hurling eerie green-and-red lances of ceepee and laser across the blackness of the screened hulls. "Starboard screen now on tertiary," Tulak said. "Get us around before he comes back!" Dal shouted. "If he gets to us on the right or rear, we're dead!" Dal fought unconsciousness as the Revenge jerked, too fast for a human pilot. Don't let go now! There! Hookthom, moving slower, was still turning. "Go... Tulak... hard!" The Revenge streaked for the other ship, ceepee cannons spraying their deadly particles. A hit! "His... , screens... are-areholding!" Lin said with a gasp. Then Hookthom's ship was heading for them again, nose-to-nose. Dal fought to move his leaden fingers. They had to slide to starboard, had to take the next shots on the port side. Like ancient warriors on some more ancient steeds, the two ships passed each other, again, thrusting with terrible energies! "Port shields holding on secondary." Something, at least! "Bring us around again! Goose it!" The blackness crawled around the edges of his mind. Dal fought it-fought itAnd lost. He awoke with Lin slapping his face with the back of a hairy paw. "Sleep later. Dal! We're on his tail!" Dal dragged himself from the brink of darkness in his head and stared. There! They were behind Hookthorn! "Give it everything we've got, Lin!" "What the hell do you think I'm doing?" Two furry crabs scuttled across the gunnery circuit switches, telling the computer to shoot, shoot, shoot! Pop! A blue spark flashed from the comp control board! "Piss! The secondary's gone!" The Revenge's ceepee cannons winked out, the lasers died! Ahead, Hookthom's ship curved away. "Damn!" Another flash from Lin's board! There was that burned-flux smell Dal knew too well! He twisted to look at Lin. "That's it! The tertiary blew! We've lost computer gunnery!" "How about manual?" "Manual? I can't out-shoot a computer with manual!" "You'd better try!" "Dal, I " "Pretend you're a computer! But if you don't do something, we are going to get-Hey! Where'd he go?" Boom! A roar vibrated through the ship. The control cabin suddenly seemed filled with fragments of torn metal. Thin sections of shattered aluminum extrusion whizzed through the room like arrows! Dal felt a sudden burn in his right shoulder-a five-centimeter-long section of jagged metal, half a centimeter thick, stuck from his deltoid! "Lin? Are you all right?" The Demi-Whelf pulled at one of his thin ears-a notch had been cut from it by a fragment of sharp metal-otherwise, he seemed okay. "Tulak!" There was no answer. Dal pulled at his comset-and found another bit of shattered metal shard piercing the tiny circuit box-his headset was dead. "Lin!" "Tulak's okay-but he says we took a direct hit on our number-three engine-it's out!" Lin reached over and tugged at the aluminum strip which protnided from Dal's shoulder. It came out with a small sucking noise, and a little blood seeped with it-not much. "Don't worry about that! Hookthorn's behind us!" "Yeah. Good-bye, Dal, it was nice-" "Stuff it! We're not dead yet!" But Dal knew it was going to be a matter of only a few seconds if he didn't do something. Only what? With two engines, there was no way they could out-run him. The rear shield was down, they had no mines-there wasn't anything they could"Wait! Dal jerked Lin's comset from the whelf's head. "Hey, what-?" "Tulak! Tulak, kill the engines! Do it now!" "Dal!" Lin yelled. "Are you crazy?" "Do it Tulak! Quick!" Dal felt himself push against the restraints as the big Trogian robot cut the power to the two remaining engines. And Hookthom's ship burned past, just missing the vastly slowed Revenge! A stall -- the oldest trick in the book-and it had worked! "Okay, Tulak! Give it everything she's got left! Lin, start shooting!" "We'll never catch him with only two engines!" "You want to wait for him to come back? Go!" Lin started the ceepees blasting manually. The thin green beams began to track the shrinking ship, slowly, slowly. "Come on, come on, come on!" "We've got you now, you bastard!" "Tong fighters approaching," Tulak sang. "Oh, shit!" Lin glanced up. "What?" "Never mind! Shoot!" But it was too late. As they watched, Hookthom's ship veered away for deep space and accelerated. Abruptly, the golden flare of its engines vanished, as it winked into Hyper. "Gone! The lousy son of a bitch got away!" "Fighters closing rapidly," Tulak said. Lin looked at his screen. "Hey, we've got company!" "Yeah. Tulak told me." "Now what are we going to do?" Dal sighed. "We'd better run up the white flag. Send out a surrender." Lin twisted a control. "Uh..." " 'Uh?' What 'Uh?' " "The extra-ship transmitter is out!" Dal clenched his fists! "Dammit! Why do these things happen?" "Enemy fighters coming within-" "I heard, I heard! Can we outrun 'em?" "Possibly." "Possibly? What the hell does that mean?" Dal shook his head. Somehow, this seemed very familiar. "With two engines remaining, we are still slightly faster; however..." "What? What?" "The attacking craft will soon come within firing range if we attempt to outrun them in deep space." Well, damn! That left-oh, no! "Take us down to the planet!" Dal said. "Oh, no!" Lin said. "Better idea?" Lin shook his head. The Tongs began to close in, and Dal felt the now-familiar pressure of too much gravity mashing him. His mouth pulled open into a toothy grimace. and his arms became lead weights, a hundred kilos each, it felt like. Circuits in Lincheni's computer board flared and burned, and vile stink poured from the board in waves of gray-black-white smoke. Emergency sirens screamed, but their sound began to fade. Crashing into this damned planet was getting to be a habit. Dal thought, just like blacking out. The first thing Dal heard when he came to was Lin, practicing a curse at the top of his obviously unharmed lungs. "Rotten dog eating fraad sniffers! Sons of pith-carriers! Turtleballing-!" "Hey, knock all that noise off! My head hurts enough already!" "You all right?" Lin asked. Aside from the cut on his shoulder and contusions and a few pulled muscles, Dal couldn't find any major damage. "Yeah. I'm okay." "Good!" Lin resumed cursing.  Dal looked around. They were outside of the ruined ship. To his left, Tulak surveyed the jungle calmly, the dim blue light filtering from his nearfeatureless face almost invisible in the tropical sunshine. The Revenge looked to be in worse shape than the Starbird did after her crash landing-that was two ships he'd piled up to rot in the jungle! Lin finally ran down, out of breath. He turned to Dal. "I hate to sound like a cliche, but isn't this where we came in?" Dal nodded. "Almost. Only we're a little better off this time!" "Oh? How do you figure that ?" "This time we're going to look up a certain old man and a pretty female senator. They owe us a ship!" "What about the Confeds? They won't exactly welcome us with open arms. I can't remember exactly how many charges they want us on." "Thirty-six," Tulak interrupted. "Yeah, thanks, but what do you-?" Dal managed a sore-lipped grin. "So what's a few Confeds to someone who took on an entire navy with a few empty ore-carriers?" Lin returned the grin. "Well. You do have a point!" "One other thing. After we get that ship, there's a certain Lord Hookthorn I think we ought to look up, too. I figure he owes us something!" Lin swatted a bug trying to nest in his thick chest fur. "Well," he said with a sigh, "I guess the female whelves on New London can wait one more season." They both laughed, while Tulak gleamed silently in the setting tropical sun. -- Jesse Peel Next Issue leases from the major distributors will be science fiction andor fantasy. At the end of I #, the following were among the films announced as I # summer releases. Indian superstitions, and as part of a medicine man's curse, hordes of vampire bats swarm out of caverns to attack people. From the novel. Harris. This was produced by Saul David, who so generously gave us these after -- the -- bomb pictures are merely going over ground covered so much better in SF novels long ago. summer. And his next film, #, will also apparently be essentially a fantasy; more special effects than in CE#K are promised for this fantasy of the Japanese non-invasion of California. menacing mankind. release of #; at least, I don't know of any other as significant. The script is by Ron Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, and deals with a man -- eating monster loose aboard a spaceship. The design of the film is largely the result of artists trained in comic-strip work, including Moeibus and Ron Cobb. (Continued on page #) present an in-depth look at one author's forthcoming work. a-century of production he has pioneered such innovative concepts as countraterrane matter, and given the SF field such remarkable books this spring from Bobbs-Merriil. from Pocket Books. ning a competition magazine to Penthouse's Omni. Playboy New Publications Editor Mod Perski called such rumors totally incorrect and without any basis in fact. Marion Zimmer Bradley has a new novel out from Doubleday titled Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have done a "rationale" for a Buck (Continued on page #) (Continued from page #) coproduction was partly filmed in Israel. aster. A huge meteor swarm is heading for the Earth, and it's up to free -- world scientist Sean Connery and Soviet Natalie Wood to stop it. I predict the film will not be any great shakes, despite its great cost, good cast (which also includes Brian Keith and Henry Fonda) and lavish effects. This is because there are too many compromises at work on the script and the film; American International, which is producing the film, always seems to want to make their biggest films appeal to everyone at once, and they generally end up appealing to no one. C.H.O.M.P.S. is apparently about a robot dog. Since the top dogs films as they do over the more expensive ones, the cheaper films are less compromised and often more watchable; it might turn out that has been added to the cast, which includes Jack Palance. It's produced by Harry Alan Towers, who has almost never done anything in his entire career that's worth watching. Olivier and Donald Pleasence, will also be out in the summer. It's elaborate and expensive, but since it's based on the creaky old Balderston -- Deane play, I fear for the quality of the script. doubt it), produced by Brad Marks and written by Sidney Leveille. time. There's no reason to doubt he'll do it again. -- Bill Warren i. Haviland Tuf was relaxing in an alehouse on Tamber when the thin man found him. He sat by himself in the darkest corner of the dimly lit tavern, his elbows resting on the table, his bald head almost brushing the low wooden beam above. Four empty mugs sat before him, insides streaked by rings of foam, while a fifth, halffull, was cradled in huge, calloused hands. If Tuf was aware of the curious glances the other patrons gave him from time to time, he showed no sign; he quaffed his ale methodically, and his face-bone-white and completely hairless, as was the rest of him-was without expression. He was a man of heroic dimensions, a giant with an equally gigantic paunch, and made a singular figure drinking alone in his booth. Although he was not quite alone; his black tomcat Dax lay asleep on the table, a ball of dark fur, and Tuf would occasionally set down his mug of ale and idly stroke his quiet companion. Dax would not stir from his comfortable position among the empty mugs. The cat was fully as large, compared to other cats, as Haviland Tuf, compared to other men. When the thin man came up to Tuf's booth, Tuf said nothing at all. He merely looked up, and blinked, and waited for the other to begin. "You are Haviland Tuf, the animal-seller," the man said. He was painfully thin. His garments, all black leather and grey fur, hung loose on him, bagging here and there. Yet he was plainly a man of some means, since he wore a thin brass coronet around his brow, under a mop of black hair, and his fingers were all adorned with rings. Tuf stroked Dax, and-looking down at the cat-began to speak. "Did you hear that, Dax?" he said. He spoke very slowly, his voice a deep bass with only a hint of inflection. "I am Haviland Tuf, the animal-seller. Or so I am taken to be." Then he looked up at the thin man who stood impatiently. "Sir," he said. "I am indeed Haviland Tuf. And I do indeed trade in animals. Yet perhaps I do not consider myself an animal-seller. Perhaps I consider myself an ecological engineer." The thin man waved his hand in an irritated gesture, and slid uninvited into the booth opposite Tuf. "I understand that you own a seedship of the ancient Ecological Corps, but that does not make you an ecological engineer, Tuf. They are all dead, and have been for centuries. But if you prefer to be called an ecological engineer, then well and good. I require your services. I want to buy a monster from you, a great fierce beast." "Ah," said Tuf, to the cat again. "He wants to buy a monster, this stranger who seats himself at my table." "My name is Herold Nom, if that is what's bothering you," the thin man said. "I am the Senior BeastMaster of my House, one of the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica." "Lyronica," Tuf stated. "I have heard of Lyronica. The next world out from here towards the Fringe, is it not? Esteemed for its gaming pits?" Nom smiled. "Yes, yes," he said. Haviland Tuf scratched Dax behind the ear, a peculiar rhythmic scratch, and the tomcat slowly uncurled, yawning, and glanced up at the thin man. A wave of reassurance came flooding into Tuf; the visitor was well-intentioned and truthful, it seemed. According to Dax. All cats have a touch of psi. Dax had more than a touch; the genetic wizards of the vanished Ecological Corps had seen to that. He was Tut s mindreader. "The affair becomes clearer," Tuf said. "Perhaps you would care to elaborate, Herold Norn?" Norn nodded. "Certainly, certainly. What do you know of Lyronica? Particularly of the gaming pits ?" Tuf s heavy, stark-white face remained emotionless. "Small things. Perhaps not enough, if I am to deal with you. Tell me what you will, and Dax and I will consider the matter." Herold Nom rubbed thin hands together, and nodded again. "Dax?" he said. "Oh, your cat. A handsome animal, although personally I have never been fond of beasts who cannot strength, I always say." "A peculiar attitude," Tuf commented. "No, no," said Nom, "not at all. I hope your work here has not infected you with Tamberkin squeamishness." Tuf drained his mug in silence, signaled for two more. The barkeep brought them promptly. "Thank you, thank you," Nom said when the mug was set, golden and foaming, in front of him. "Proceed." "Yes. Well, the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica compete in the gaming pits, you know. It began-oh, centuries ago. Before that, the Houses warred. This way is much better. Family honor is upheld, fortunes are made, and no one is injured. You see, each House controls great tracts, scattered widely over the planet, and since the land is very thinly settled, animal life teems. The lords of the Great Houses, many years ago during a time of peace, started to have animal-fights. It was a pleasant diversion, rooted deep in history-you are aware, maybe, of the ancient custom of cock-fighting and the Old Earth folk called Romans who would set all manner of strange beasts against each other in their great arena?" Norn paused and drank ale, waiting for an answer, but Tuf stroked a quietly alert Dax and said nothing. "No matter," the thin Lyronican finally said, wiping foam from mouth with the back of his hand. "That was the beginning of the sport. Each House had its own particular land, its own particular animals. The House of Varcour, for example, sprawls in the hot, swampy south, and they are fond of sending huge lizard-lions to the gaming pits. Feridian, a mountainous realm, has bred and championed its fortunes with a species of rock-ape which we call, naturally, feridians. My own house, Norn, stands on the grassy plains of the large northern continent. We have sent a hundred different beasts into combat in the pits, but we are most famed for our ironfangs." "Ironfangs," Tuf said. Nom gave a sly smile. "Yes," he said proudly. "As Senior Beast-Master, I have trained thousands. They are lovely animals! Tall as you, with fur of a marvelous blue-black color, fierce and relentless." "Canine?" "But such canines," Nom said. "Yet you require a monster." Nom drank more of his ale. "In truth, in truth. Folks from a dozen near worlds voyage to Lyronica, to watch the beasts fight in the gaming pits and gamble on the outcome. Particularly they flock to the Bronze Arena that has stood for six hundred years in the City of All Houses. That's where the greatest fights are fought. The wealth of our Houses and our world has come to depend on this. Without it, rich Lyronica would be as poor as the farmers of Tamber." "Yes," said Tuf. "But you understand, this wealth, it goes to the Houses according to their honor, according to their victories. The House of Ameth has grown greatest and most powerful because of the many deadly beasts in their varied lands; the others rank according to their scores in the Bronze Arena. The income from each match -- all the monies paid by those who watch and bet -- goes to the victor." Haviland Tuf scratched Dax behind the ear again. "The House of Nom ranks last and least among the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica," he said, and the twinge that Dax relayed told him he was correct. "You know," Nom said. "Sir. It was obvious. But is it ethical to buy an offworld monster, under the rules of your Bronze Arena?' ' "There are precedents. Some seventy-odd standard years ago, a gambler came from Old Earth with a creature called a timber wolf. The House of Colin backed him, in a fit of madness. His poor beast was matched against a Nom ironfang, and proved far from equal to its task. There are other cases as well. "In recent years, unfortunately, our ironfangs have not bred well. The wild species has all but died out on the plains, and the few who remain become swift and elusive, difficult for our housemen to capture. In the breeding kennels, the strain seems to have softened, despite my efforts and those of the Beast-Masters before me. Nom has won few victories of late, and I will not remain Senior for long unless something is done. We grow poor. When I heard that a seedship had come to Tamber, then I determined to seek you out. I will begin a new era of glory for Nom, with your help." Haviland Tuf sat very still. "I, comprehend. Yet I am not in the habit of selling monsters. The Ark is a seedship, designed by the Earth Imperials thousands of years ago, to decimate the Hrangans through ecowar. I can unleash a thousand diseases, and have cloning material for beasts from more worlds than you can count. You misunderstand the nature of ecowar, however. The deadliest enemies are not large predators, but tiny insects that lay waste to a world's crops, or hoppers that breed and breed and crowd out all other life." Herold Nom looked crestfallen. "You have, nothing?" Tuf stroked Dax. "Little. A million types of insects, a hundred thousand kinds of small birds, as many fish. But monsters only a few-a thousand perhaps. They were used from time to time, for psychological reasons as often as not." "A thousand monsters!" Norn was excited again. "That is more than enough! Surely, among that thousand we can find a beast for Norn!" "Perhaps," Tuf said. "Do you think so, Dax?" he said to his cat. "Do you? So!" He looked at Nom again. "This matter does inteiest me, Herold Nom. And my work here is done, as I have given the Tamberkin a bird that will check their rootworm plague, and the bird does well. So Dax and I will take the Ark to Lyronica, and your gaming pits, and will decide what is to be done with them." Nom smiled. "Excellent," he said. "Then I will buy this round." And Dax told Haviland Tuf in silence that the thin man was flush with the feel of victory. # . The Bronze Arena stood in the center of the City of All Houses, at the point where sectors dominated by the Twelve Great Houses met like slices in a pie. Each section of the rambling stone city was walled off, each flew a flag with distinctive colors, each had its own ambience and style; but all met in the Bronze Arena. The Arena was not bronze after all, but black stone and polished wood. It bulked up, taller than all but a few of the city's scattered towers and minarets, topped by a shining bronze dome that gleamed with the orange rays of sunset. Gargoyles peered from narrow windows, carved of stone and hammered from bronze and wrought iron Great doors in the black stone walls were also fashioned of metal, and there were twelve, each facing a different sector of the City of All Houses. The colors and the etching on each gateway were distinctive to its House. Lyronica's sun was a fist of red flame smearing the horizon when Herold Nom led Haviland Tuf to the games. The housemen had just fired gas torches, metal obelisks that stood like dark teeth in a ring about the Bronze Arena, and the hulking ancient building was surrounded by flickering pillars of blue and orange flame. In a crowd of gamblers and gamesters, Tuf followed Herold Norn from the half-deserted streets of the Nornic slums down a path of crushed rock, passing between twelve bronze ironfangs who snarled and spit in timeless poses on either side of the street, and then through the wide Norn Gate whose doors were intricate ebony and brass. The uniformed guards, clad in the same black leather and grey fur as Herold Nom, recognized the Beast-Master and admitted them; others stopped to pay with coins of gold and iron. The Arena was the greatest gaming pit of all: the sandy combat-floor sunk deep below ground level, with stone walls four meters high surrounding it. Then the seats began, atop the walls, circling and circling in ascending tiers to the doors. Enough seating for thirty thousand, although those towards the back had a poor view, and other seats were blocked by iron pillars. Betting stalls were scattered throughout the building, windows in the outer walls. Herold Nom took Tuf to the best seats in the Arena, in front of the Nom section, with only a stone parapet separating them from the four-meter drop to the combat sands. The seats were not rickety wood-and-iron, like those in the rear, but thrones of leather, huge enough to accommodate even Tuf's vast bulk without difficulty, and opulently comfortable. "Every seat is bound in the skin of a beast that has died nobly below," Herold Nom told Tuf. Beneath them, a work crew of men in one-piece blue coveralls was dragging the carcass of a gaunt feathered animal toward one of the entryways. "A fighting-bird of the House of Wrai Hill," Nom explained. "The Wrai Beast-Master sent it up against a Varcour lizard-lion. Not the most felicitous choice." Haviland Tuf said nothing. He sat stiff and erect, dressed in a grey vinyl coat that fell to his ankles, with flaring shoulder-boards and a visored green-and-brown cap emblazoned with the golden theta of the Ecological Engineers. His large, rough hands interlocked atop his bulging stomach while Herold Nom kept up a steady conversation. Then the Arena announcer spoke, the thunder of his magnified voice booming all around them. "Fifth match. From the House of Nom, a male ironfang, two years, weight # quintals, trained by Junior Beast-Master Kers Nom. New to the Bronze Arena." Immediately below, metal grated harshly, and a nightmare creature came bounding into the pit. The ironfang was a shaggy giant, sunken red eyes, a double row of curving teeth dripping slaver; a wolf grown all out of proportion, crossed with a saber-toothed tiger, legs as thick as young trees, speed and killing grace only partially disguised by blue-black fur that hid muscle. The ironfang snarled; the arena echoed to the noise; scattered cheering began around them. Herold Norn smiled. "Kers is a cousin, one of our most promising juniors. He tells me this beast will do us proud. I like its looks, don't you?" "Being new to all this, I have no standard of comparison," Tuf said flatly. The announcer began again. "From the House of Arneth-in-theGilded-Wood, a strangling-ape, six years, weight #. I quintals, trained by Senior Beast-Master Danel Leigh Ameth. Three times a veteran of the Bronze Arena, three times surviving." Across the combat pit, another entryway-wrought in gold and crimson-slid open, and a second beast lumbered out on two squat legs and looked around. The strangling-ape was short but immensely broad, with a triangular torso and a bullet-shaped head, eyes sunk deeply under a heavy ridge of bone. Its arms, double-jointed and muscular, dragged in the arena sand. The beast was hairless but for patches of dark red fur under its arms, its skin a dirty white. And it smelled. Across the arena, Haviland Tuf still caught the musky odor. "It sweats," Norn explained. before sending it forth. His beast has the edge in experience, and the strangling-ape is a savage creature as well. Unlike its cousin, the mountain feridian, it is a natural carnivore and needs little training. But Kers' ironfang is younger. The match should be of interest." He leaned forward while Tuf sat calm, still. The ape turned, growling, and already the ironfang was streaking toward it, a blue-black blur that scattered sand as it ran. The strangling-ape waited, spreading huge gangling arms, and Tuf had a blurred impression of the great Norn killer leaving the ground in one tremendous bound. Then the two animals were locked together, rolling over and over in a tangle of ferocity, and the arena became a symphony of screams. "The throat," Nom was shouting. "Tear out its throat!" Then, as suddenly as they had met, the two beasts parted. The ironfang spun away and began to move in slow circles, and Tuf saw that one foreleg was bent and broken, so that it limped on the three remaining. Yet still it circled. The strangling-ape gave it no opening, but turned constantly to face it. Long gashes drooled blood on the ape's wide chest, where the ironfang's sabers had slashed, but the beast of Ameth seemed little weakened. Herold Nom had begun to mutter softly. Impatient, the watchers began a rhythmic chant, a low wordless noise that swelled as new voices heard and joined. Tuf saw at once that the sound affected the animals below. Now they began to snarl and hiss, battle cries in savage voices, and the strangling-ape moved from one leg to the other in a macabre dance, while slaver ran in rivers from the gaping jaws of the ironfang. The chant grew and grew-Herold Nom joined in, thin body' swaying slightly as he moaned-and Tuf recognized the killing-chant for what it was. The beasts below went into a frenzy. Suddenly the ironfang was charging again, and the ape's long arms reached to meet it. The impact of the threw the strangler backward, but Tuf saw that the ironfang's teeth had closed on air while the ape had wrapped its hands around the other's throat. The ironfang thrashed wildly, as they rolled in the sand. Then came a sharp, horribly loud snap, and the wolf-creature was a rag of fur, head lolling grotesquely to one side. The watchers ceased their moaning chant and began to applaud and whistie. Afterward, the gold and crimson door slid open again and the strangling-ape returned to where it had come. Four men in Norn black and grey came out to carry off the corpse. Herold Nom was sullen. "Another loss. I will speak to Kers. His beast did not find the throat." Haviland Tuf stood up. "I have seen your Bronze Arena." "Going?" Nom asked, anxious. "Not so soon! There are five more matches. In the next, a giant feridian fights a water-scorpion from Aman Island!" "I need see no more. It is feeding time for Dax, so I must return to the Ark." Nom scrambled to his feet, and put an anxious hand to Tuf s shoulder to restrain him. "Will you sell us a monster, then?" Tuf shook off the Beast-Master's grip. "Sir. I do not like to be touched. Restrain yourself." When Norn's hand had fallen, Tuf looked down into his eyes. "I must consult my records, my computers. The Ark is in orbit. Shuttle up the day after next. A problem exists, I shall address myself to its correction." Then, without further words, Haviland Tuf turned and walked from the Bronze Arena, back to the spaceport of the City of All Houses, where his shuttlecraft sat waiting. #. Herold Nom had obviously not been prepared for the Ark. After his shuttle had docked and Tuf had cycled him through, the Beast-Master made no effort to disguise his reaction. "I should have known," he kept repeating. "The size of this ship, the size. I should have known." Haviland Tuf stood unmoved, cradling Dax in one arm and stroking the cat slowly. "Old Earth built larger ships than modem worlds," he said impassively. "The Ark, as a seedship, had to be large. It once had two hundred crewmen. Now it has one." "You are the only crewman?" Nom said. Dax suddenly warned Tuf to be alert. The Beast-Master had begun to think hosti le thoughts . " Yes , " Tu f said. "The only crewman. But there is Dax, of course. And defenses programmed in, lest control be wrested from me." Norn's plans withered, according to Dax. "I see," he said. Then, eagerly, "Well, what have you come up with?" "Come," Tuf said. He led Nom out down a small corridor that led to one larger. They boarded a three-wheeled vehicle and drove through a long tunnel lined by glass vats of all sizes and shapes, filled with bubbling liquid. One bank of vats was divided into units small as a man's fingernail; at the other extreme, there was a single unit large enough to contain the interior of the Bronze Arena. It was empty, but in some of the medium-sized tanks, dark shapes hung in translucent bags, stirring fitfully. Tuf, with Dax curled in his lap, stared straight ahead as he drove, while Nom looked wonderingly from side to side. They departed the tunnel at last, and entered a small room that was all computer console. Four large chairs sat in the four comers of the chamber, with control panels on their arms; a circular plate of blue metal was built into the floor amidst them. Haviland Tuf dropped Dax into one of the chairs before seating himself in a second. Norn looked around, then took a chair opposite Tuf. "I must inform you of several things," Tuf began. "Yes, yes," said Norn. "Monsters are expensive," Tuf said. "I will require one hundred thousand standards." "What! That's an outrage! We would need a hundred victories in the Bronze Arena to amass that sum. I told you, Norn is a poorHouse." "So. Perhaps then a richer House "Fifty thousand," Nom said. "We can barely meet that price." Haviland Tuf said nothing. "Eighty thousand, then! I can go no higher. The House of Norn will bankrupt! They will tear down our bronze ironfangs, and seal the Nom Gate!" Haviland Tuf said nothing, "Curse you! A hundred thousand, yes, yes. But only if your monster meets our requirements." "The full sum on delivery." "Impossible!" Tuf was silent again. "Oh, very well." would meet the required price. The Ecological Engineering Corps has been defunct for centuries, sir. No ship of theirs remains in working order, save the Ark alone. The science is largely forgotten. Techniques of cloning and genetic engineering such as they practiced exist now only on Prometheus and Old Earth itself, where such secrets are closely guarded." Tuf looked across to where Dax sat before the gently winking lights of the computer consoles. "And yet, Dax, Herold Nom feels my price excessive." "As to the monster itself, I have studied your requirements closely, and have consulted my computers. On the Ark, in frozen cell-banks, thousands upon thousands of predators exist, many now extinct on their original homeworlds. Yet few would satisfy the demands of the Bronze Arena. And of those that might, many are unsuitable. For example, I limited the selection to beasts that might with luck be bred on the lands of the House of Nom. A creature who could not replicate himself would be a poor investment. No matter how invincible, in time the animal would age and die, and Nom victories be at an end." "An excellent point," Herold Nom said. "We have attempted to raise lizard-lions and feridians and other beasts of the Twelve Houses, with ill success. The climate, the vegetation..." He made a gesture.  "Precisely. Therefore, I have eliminated silicon-based lifeforms, which would die on your carbon-based world. Also, animals of planets whose atmosphere varies too greatly. Also, beasts of dissimilar climes. You comprehend the various and sundry difficulties incumbent in my search." "Yes, but get to the point. What have you found? What is the hundredthousand-standard monster?" "I offer you a selection," Tuf said. "From among some thirty animals. Attend!" He touched a glowing button on the arm of his chair, and suddenly a beast was squatting on the blue-metal plate between them. Two meters tall with rubbery pink-grey skin and thin white hair, the creature had a low forehead and a swinish snout, plus a set of nasty curving horns and dagger-like claws. "I will not trouble you with species names, since I observe that informality was the rule of the Bronze Arena," Haviland Tuf said. "This is the so-called stalking-swine of Heydey. Chiefly a carrion-eater, but it has been known to relish fresh meat, and fights viciously when attacked. Said to be quite intelligent, yet impossible to domesticate. The stalking-swine is an excellent breeder. The colonists from Gulliver eventually abandoned the Heydey settlement because of this animal some two hundred years past." Herold Nom scratched his scalp between dark hair and brass coronet. "It's too thin, too light. Look at the neck! Think what a feridian would do to it." He shook his head violently. "Besides, it is ugly. And I resent the offer of a scavenger, no matter how ill-tempered. The House of Norn breeds proud fighters, beasts who kill their own game!" "So," said Tuf. He touched the button, and the stalking-swine vanished. In its place, bulking large enough to touch the plates above and fade into them, was a massive ball of armored grey flesh featureless as battle plate. "This creature's homeworld has never been named, nor settled. A team from Old Poseidon once explored it, and cell samples were taken. Zoo specimens existed briefly, but did not thrive. The beast was nicknamed the rolleram. Adults weigh approximately six metric tons. On the plains of their homeworld, the rollerams achieve speed in excess of fifty kilometers per standard hour, crushing prey beneath them. The beast is all mouth. Thusly, as any portion of its skin can be made to exude digestive enzymes, it simply rests atop its meal until the meat has been absorbed." Herold Norn, himself half-immersed in the looming holograph, sounded impressed. "Ah, yes. Better, much better. An awesome creature. Perhaps..." His tone changed suddenly. "No, no, this will never do. A creature weighing six tons and rolling that fast might smash its way out of the Bronze Arena, and kill hundreds of patrons. Besides, who would pay hard coin to watch this thing crush a lizard-lion or a strangler? No. No sport. Your rolleram is too monstrous, Tuf." Tuf, unmoved, hit the button once again. The vast grey bulk gave way to a sleek, snarling cat, fully as large as an ironfang, with slitted yellow eyes and powerful muscles bunched beneath dark blue fur. The fur was striped, long thin lines of bright silver running lengthwise down the creature's flanks. "Ahhhhhhhh," Norn said. "A beauty, in truth." "The cobalt panther of Celia's World," Tuf said, "often called the cobalcat. Largest and deadliest of the great cats, or their analogues. The beast is a superlative hunter, a miracle of biologic engineering. It can see into the infrared for night prowling, and the ears-note the size and the spread-are extremely sensitive. Being felinoid, the cobalcat has psionic ability, but this ability is far more developed than the usual. Fear, hunger, and bloodlust all act as triggers; then the cobalcat becomes a mindreader. ' ' Nom looked up, startled. "What?" "Psionics, sir. Psionics. The cobalcat is very deadly, simply because it knows what moves an antagonist will make before those moves are made. Do you comprehend?" "Yes." Norn's voice was excited. Haviland Tuf looked at Dax, and the big tomcat-who'd been not the least disturbed by the parade of scentless phantoms flashing on and off-confirmed the thin man's enthusiasm as genuine. "Perfect, perfect! I'd venture to say that we can even train these beasts as we'd train ironfangs, eh? Eh? And mindreaders! Perfect. Even the colors are right, dark blue, you know, and our ironfangs were blue-black, so the cats will be most Nomic, yes. yes!" Tuf touched his chair arm, and the cobalcat vanished. "So then, no need to proceed further. Delivery will be in three weeks, if that pleases you. I will provide three pair, two of younglings who should be released as breeding stock, and one mated set full-grown, who might be immediately sent into the Bronze Arena." "So soon," Nom began. "Fine, but..." "I use the stasis field. Reversed, it produces chronic distortion, time acceleration if you will. Standard procedure. Promethean techniques would require that you wait until the clones aged to maturity naturally, which is sometimes inconvenient. It would perhaps be prudent to add that, although I provide Nom with six animals, only three actual individuals are represented. The Ark carries a triple cobalcat cell. I will clone each specimen twice, male and female, and hope for a viable genetic mix when they crossbreed on Lyronica." Dax filled Tuf's head with a flood of triumph, confusion and impatience; Herold Nom, then, had understood nothing of what Tuf had said, or at any rate that was one interpretation. "Fine," Nom said. "I will send ships for the animals promptly, with proper cages. Then we will pay you." Dax radiated deceit, distrust, alarm. "Sir. You will pay the full fee before any beasts are handed over. ' ' "But you said on delivery," "Admitted. Yet I am given to impulsive whims, and impulse now tells me to collect first, rather than simultaneously." "Oh, very well." Norn said. "Though your demands are arbitrary and excessive. With these cobalcats, we shall soon recoup our fee." He started to rise. HavilandTuf raised a finger. "One moment. You have not seen fit to inform me of the ecology of Lyronica, nor the particular realms of Norn House. Perhaps prey exists. I must caution you, however, that your cobalcats will not breed unless hunting is good. They need suitable game species." "Yes, yes, of course." "Let me add this. For an additional five thousand standards, I might clone you a breeding stock of Celian hoppers, furred herbivores renowned for their succulent flesh." Herold Norn frowned. "You ought to give them to us without charge. You have extorted enough money, and..." Tuf rose, and gave a ponderous shrug. "The man berates me, Dax," he said to his cat. "What am I to do? I seek only an honest living." He looked at Nom. "Another of my impulses comes to me. I feel that you will not relent, even were I to offer an excellent discount. Therefore I yield. The hoppers are yours without charge." "Good. Excellent." Norn turned toward the door. "We shall take them at the same time as the cobalcats, and release them about the estates." Haviland Tuf and Dax followed him from the chamber, and they rode in silence back to Norn's ship. The fee was sent up by the House of Nom the day before delivery was due. The following afternoon, men in black and gray ascended to the Ark, and carried six tranquilized cobalcats to the waiting cages in their ships. Tuf bid them a passive farewell, and heard no more from Herold Nom. But he kept the Ark in orbit about Lyronica. Less than three of Lyronica's short days passed before Tuf observed his clients had slated a cobalcat for a bout in the Bronze Arena. On the appointed evening, he disguised himself as best a man such as he could disguise himself-with false beard, shoulder-length wig of red hair, gaudy puff-sleeved suit of canary yellow and furred turban-and shuttled down with hope of escaping attention. When the match was called (third on the schedule), Tuf was sitting in the back of the Arena, a rough stone wall against his shoulders, a narrow wooden seat attempting to support his weight. "Third match," the announcer cried, even as workers pulled off the scattered meaty chunks of the loser in the second. "From the House of Varcour, a female lizard-lion, nine months, weight # quintals, trained by Junior Beast-Master Ammari y Varcour Otheni. Once a veteran of the Bronze Arena, once surviving." Customers close to Tuf began to cheer and wave their hands wildly-he had chosen to enter by the Varcour Gate this time, walking down green concrete, through the maw of a monstrous golden lizard. Far away and below, a green-gold enameled door slid up. Tuf lifted binoculars to his eyes; the lizard-lion scrabbled forward-two meters of scaled green reptile with a whip-like tail thrice its own length and the long snout of an Old Earth alligator. Its jaws opened and closed soundlessly, displaying impressive teeth. "The House of Norn, imported from offworld for your amusement, a female cobalcat. Aged-aged three weeks." The announcer paused. "Aged three years," he said at last, "weight # quintals, trained by Senior Beast-Master Herold Norn. New to the Bronze Arena." The metallic dome overhead rang to the cacophonous cheering of the Norn sector; Herold Norn had packed the Bronze Arena with his housemen and tourists betting the gray and black standard. The cobalcat came from the darkness with cautious fluid grace, and its great golden eyes swept the arena. It was every bit what Tuf had promised; a bundle of deadly muscle and frozen motion, blue with but a single silvery streak. Its growl could scarcely be heard, so far was Tuf from the action, hut he saw its mouth gape through his glasses. The lizard-lion saw it too, and came waddling forward, short scaled legs kicking in the sand, long impossible tail arched above it like the sting of some reptilian scorpion. Then, when the cobalcat turned its liquid eyes on the enemy, the lizardlion brought the tail forward and down with a bone-breaking crack. But the cobalcat had smoothly slipped to one side and nothing shattered but air and sand. The cat circled, yawning. The lizard-lion, implacable, turned and raised its tail again, opened its jaws, lunged forward. The cobalcat avoided both teeth and whip. Again the tail cracked; and again the cat was too quick. Someone in the audience began to it up; Tuf turned his binoculars, and saw swaying in the Nom seats. The lizard-lion gnashed its long jaws in frenzy, smashed its whip across the nearest entry door, and began to thrash. The cobalcat, sensing an opening, moved behind its enemy with a graceful leap, pinned the struggling lizard with one great blue paw, and clawed the soft greenish flanks and belly to ribbons. After a time and a few futile snaps of its whip that only distracted the cat, the lizard-lion lay still. The Norns were cheering very loudly. Haviland Tuf-huge, fullbearded and gaudily dressed-rose and left. Weeks passed; the Ark remained in orbit around Lyronica. Haviland Tuf listened to results from the Bronze Arena on his ship's comm, and noted that the cobalcats were winning match after match. Herold Norn still lost a contest on occasion-when he used an ironfang to Till up his Arena obligations-but defeats were easily outweighed by victories. Tuf sat with Dax curled in his lap, drank tankards of brown ale from the Ark brewery, and wailed. About a month later, a ship rose to meet him; slim, needle-pro wed, green and gold. It docked, after comm contact, and Tuf met the visitors with Dax in his aims. The cat read them as friendly, so he activated no defenses. There were four, all dressed in armor of scaled gold metal and green enamel. Three stood at attention. The fourth, florid and corpulent with a golden helmet and a bright green plume to conceal his baldness, stepped forward and offered a meaty hand. "Your intent is appreciated," Tuf told him, keeping both hands firmly on Dax, "but I do not care to touch. I do require your name and business, sir." "Morho y Varcour Otheni," the leader began. Tuf raised one palm. "So. And you are Senior Beast-Master of the House of Varcour, come to buy a monster. Enough. I knew it all the while, I must confess. I merely wished to determine if you would tell the truth." The fat Beast-Master's mouth puckered. "Your housemen should remain here," Tuf said, turning. "Follow me." Haviland Tuf let Morho y Varcour Otheni utter scarcely a word until they were alone in the computer room, sitting diagonally opposite. "You heard of me from the Moms," Tuf said then. "Is that not correct?" Morho smiled toothily. "Indeed we did. A Nom houseman was persuaded to reveal the source of their cobalcats. To our delight, your Ark was still in orbit. You seem to have found Lyronica diverting?" "Problems exist. I hope to help. Your problem, for example. Varcour is now the last and least of the Twelve Great Houses. Your lizard-lions fail to awe me, and your realms are chiefly swampland. Choice of combatants become therefore limited. Have I divined the essence of your complaint?" "Hmpf. Yes, indeed. You anticipate me, sir. But you do it well. We were holding our own well enough until you interfered; we have not taken a match from Nom since, and they were previously ourchiefest victims. A few paltry wins over Wrai Hill and Amar Island, a lucky score against Feridian, a pair of deathdraws with Ameth and Sin Doon-that has been our lot this past month. Pfui . We cannot survive. They will make me a Brood-Tender and ship me back to the estates unless I act." Tuf quieted Morho with an upraised hand. "No need to speak further. Your distress is noted. In the time since I have helped Herold Nom, I have been fortunate enough to be gifted with a great deal of leisure. Accordingly, as an exercise of the mind, I have been able to devote myself to the problems of the Great Houses, each in its turn. We need not waste time. I can solve your present difficulties. There will be cost, however. ' ' Morho grinned. "I am prepared. I heard about your prices. High, there is no arguing, but we are prepared to pay, if you can "Sir," Tuf said, "I am a man of charity. Nom was a poor house, Herold almost a beggar. In mercy, I gave him a low price. The domains of Varcour are richer, its standards brighter, its victories more wildly sung. For you, I must charge three hundred thousand standards, to make up for the losses I suffered dealing with Nom." Morho made a shocked sound, and his scales gave metallic blinks as he shifted in his seat. "Too much, too much," he protested. "I implore you. Truly, we are more glorious than Nom, but not so great as you suppose. To pay this price of yours, we must need starve. Lizard-lions would run over our battlements. Our towns would sink on their stilts, until the swamp mud covered them over and the children drowned." Tuf was looking at Dax. "Quite so," he said, when his glance went back to Morho. "You touch me deeply. Two hundred thousand standards." Morho began to protest and implore again, but this time Tuf merely sat silently, arms on their armrests, until the Beast-Master, red-faced, sweating, finally ran down and agreed. Tuf punched his control arm. The image of a great lizard materialized; it stood three meters tall, covered in grey-green plate scales and standing on two thick clawed legs. Its head, atop a short neck, was large enough, the jaws great enough, to take off a man's head and shoulders in a single chomp. But the creature's most remarkable features were its forelegs; short thick ropes of muscle ornamented by meter-long spurs of discolored bone. "The trig neryei of Cable's Landing," Tuf said, "or so it was named by the Fyndii, whose colonists preceded men on that world by a millenium. The term translates, literally, as 'living knife.' Also called the bladed tyrant, referring to the beast's resemblance to the tyrannosaur, a long-extinct reptile of Old Earth. A superficial resemblance. The tris neryei is a far more efficient carnivore than the tyrannosaur ever was, due to its terrible forelegs, swords of bone that it uses with a frightful instinctive ferocity." Morho was leaning forward and Dax filled Tuf's head with hot enthusiasm. "Excellent!" the BeastMaster said, "though the names are a bit long-winded. We shall call them tyrannoswords, eh?" "Call them what you will, it matters not to me. The animals have many obvious advantages for the House of Varcour," Tuf said. "Should you take them, I will throw in-without any additional charge-a breeding stock of Cathadayn tree-slugs. You will find that..." Tuf followed the news from the Bronze Arena, although he never again ventured to the soil of Lyronica. The cobalcats continued to sweep all before them; in the latest featured encounter, one of the Nom beasts had destroyed a prime Ameth stranglingape and an Amar Island fleshfrog during a special triple match. But Varcour fortunes were also on the upswing; the newly-introduced tyrannoswords had proved a Bronze Arena sensation, with their booming cries and their heavy tread, and the relentless death of their bone-swords. In three matches so far, a huge feridian, a water-scorpion, and a Gnethin spidercat had all proved unequal to the Varcour lizards. Morho y Varcour Otheni was reported ecstatic. Next week, tyrannosword would face cobalcat in a struggle for supremacy, and a packed arena was being predicted. Herold Nom called up once, shortly after the tyrannoswords had scored their first victory. "Tuf!" he said sternly, "you were not to sell to the other Houses." Haviland Tuf sat calmly, petting Dax. "No such matter was ever discussed. Your own monsters perform as expected. Do you complain because another now shares your good fortune?" "Yes. No. That is-well, never mind. I suppose I can't stop you. If the other Houses get animals that beat our cats, however, you will provide us with something that can beat whatever you sell them. Understand?" "Of course." He looked down at Dax. "Herold Norn now questions my comprehension." Then up again. "I will always sell, if you have the price." Norn scowled on the comm screen. "Yes, yes. Well, by then our victories should have mounted high enough to afford whatever outlandish price you intend to charge." "I trust that all goes well otherwise?" Tuf said. "Well, yes and no. In the Arena, yes, yes, definitely. But otherwise, well, that was what I called about. The four young cats don't seem interested in breeding, for some reason. And our Brood-Tender keeps complaining that they are getting thin. He doesn't think they're healthy. Now, I can't say personally, as I'm here in the City and the animals are back on the plains around Nom House. But some worry does exist. The cats run free, of course, but we have tracers on them, so we can..." Tuf raised a hand. "It is no doubt not mating season for the cobalcats. " "That makes sense. Just a question of time then, I suppose. The other question I wanted to go over concerned these hoppers of yours. We set them loose, you know, and they have demonstrated no difficulty whatever in breeding. The ancestral Nom grasslands have been chewed bare. It is very annoying. They hop about everywhere. What are we to do?" "Breed the cobalcats," Tuf suggested. "They are excellent predators, and will check the hopper plague." Herold Nom looked puzzled, and mildly distressed. "Yes, yes," he said. He started to say something else, but Tuf rose. "I fear I must end our conversation," he said. "A shuttleship has entered into docking orbit with the Ark. Perhaps you would recognize it. It is blue-steel, with large triangular grey wings." "The House of Wrai Hill!" Nom said. "Fascinating," said Tuf. "Good day." Beast-Master Denis Lon Wrai paid three hundred thousand standards for his monster, an immensely powerful red-furred ursoid from the hills of Vagabond. Haviland Tuf sealed the transaction with a brace of scampersloth eggs. The week following, four men in orange silk and flame-red capes visited the Ark. They returned to the House of Feridian four hundred fifty thousand standards poorer, with a contract for the delivery of six great armored poison-elk, plus a gift herd of Hrangan grass pigs. The Beast-Master of Sin Doon received a giant serpent; the emissary from Amar Island was pleased by his godzilla. Dant seniors in milk-white robes and silver buckles delighted in the slavering garghoul that Haviland Tuf offered them, with a trifling gift. And so, one by one, each of the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica sought him out, received its monster, paid the ever-increasing price. By that time, both of Norn's fighting cobalcats were dead; the first sliced easily in two by the bone-sword of a Varcour tyrannosword, the second crushed between the massive clawed paws of a Wrai Hill ursoid (though the ursoid too had died) -- if the great cats had espied their fate, they had proved unable to avoid it. Herold Norn had been calling daily, but Tuf had instructed his computer to refuse the calls. Finally, with eleven Houses as past customers, Haviland Tuf sat across the computer room from Danel Leigh Ameth, Senior Beast-Master of Arneth-in-the-Gilded-Wood, once greatest and proudest of the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica, now last and least. Ameth was immensely tall, standing even with Tuf himself, but had none of Tuf s fat; his skin was hard ebony, all muscle, face a hawk-nosed axe, hair short and iron grey. The Beast-Master came to the conference in cloth-of-gold, crimson belt and boots, a tiny crimson beret aslant upon his head. He carried a trainer's pain-prod like a walking stick. Dax read immense hostility in the man, treachery, and barely suppressed rage. Accordingly, Haviland Tuf carried a small laser strapped to his stomach just beneath his greatcoat. "The strength of Arneth-inthe-Gilded-Wood has always been in variety," Danel Leigh Ameth said. "When the other Houses of Lyronica threw all their fortunes on the backs of a single beast, our fathers and grandfathers worked with dozens. Against any animal of theirs, we had an optimal choice, a strategy. That has been our greatness and our pride. But we can have no strategy against these demon-beasts of yours, trader. No matter which of our hundred fighters we send onto the sand, it comes back dead. We are forced to deal with you." "Not so," said Haviland Tuf. "I force no one. Still, look at my stock. Perhaps fortune will see fit to give you back your strategic options." He touched the buttons on his chair, and a parade of monsters came and went before the eyes of the Arneth Beast-Master; creatures furred and scaled and feathered and covered by armor plate, beasts of hill and forest and lake and plain, predators and scavengers and deadly herbivores of sizes great and small. And Danel Leigh Ameth, his lips pressed tightly together, finally ordered four each of the dozen largest and deadliest spestandards. The conclusion of the transaction-complete, as with all the other Houses, with a gift of some small harmless animal-did nothing to soothe Ameth's foul temper. "Tuf," he said when the dealing was over, "you are a clever and devious man, but you do not fool me." Haviland Tuf said nothing. "You have made yourself immensely wealthy, and you have cheated all who bought from you and thought to profit. The Noms, for example-their cobalcats are worthless. "They were a poor House; your price brought them to the edge of bankruptcy, just as you have done to all of us. They thought to recoup through victories. Bah! There will be no Nom victories now! Each House that you have sold to gained the edge on those who purchased previously. Thus Ameth, the last to purchase, remains the greatest House of all. Our monsters will wreak devastation. The sands of the Bronze Arena will darken with the blood of the lesser beasts." Tufs hands locked on the bulge of his stomach. His face was placid. "You have changed nothing! The Great Houses remain, Arneth the greatest and Nom the least. All you have done is bleed us, like the profiteer you are, until every lord must struggle and scrape to get by. The Houses now wait for victory, pray for victory, depend on victory, but all the victories will be Ameth's. We alone have not been cheated, because I thought to buy last and thus best." "So," said Haviland Tuf. "You are then a wise and sagacious Beast-Master, if this indeed is the case. Yet I deny that I have cheated anyone." "Don't play with words!" Ameth roared. "Henceforth you will deal no longer with the Great Houses. Norn has no money to buy from you again, but if they did, you would not sell to them. Do you understand? We will not go round and round forever." "Of course," Tuf said. He looked at Dax. "Now Danel Leigh Arneth imputes my understanding. I am always misunderstood. " His calm gaze returned to the angry Beast-Master. "Your point, sir, is well-taken. Perhaps it is time for me to leave Lyronica. In any event, I shall not deal with Norn again, nor with any of the Great Houses. This is a foolish impulse-by thus acting I foreswear great profits-but I am a gentle man much given to following my whim. Obedient to the esteemed Danel Leigh Ameth, I bow to your demand." Dax reported wordlessly that Arneth was pleased and pacified; he had cowed Tuf, and won the day for his House. His rivals would get no new champions. Once again, the Bronze Arena would be predictable. He left satisfied. Three weeks later, a fleet of twelve glittering gold-flecked shuttles arrived to remove the purchases of Danel Leigh Arneth. Haviland Tuf, stroking a limp lazy Dax, saw them off, then returned down the long corridors of the Ark to his control room, to take a call from Herold Nom. The thin Beast-Master looked positively skeletal. "Tuf!" he exclaimed. "Everything is going wrong. You must help." "Wrong? I solved your problem." Nom pressed his features together in a grimace, and scratched beneath his brass coronet. "No, no. listen. The cobalcats are all dead, or sick. Four of them dead in the Bronze Arena-we knew the second pair were too young, but when the first couple lost, there was nothing else to do. It was that or go back to ironfangs. Now we have only two left. They don't eat much-catch a few hoppers, but nothing else. And we can'l train them, either. A trainer comes into the pen with a pain-prod, and the damn cats know what he intends. They're always a move head, you understand? In the arena, they won't respond to The worst thing is they don't even breed. We need more of them. What are we supposed to enter in the gaming pits?" "It is not cobalcat breeding season," Tuf said. "When is their breeding season?" "A fascinating question. Pity you did not ask sooner. As I understand, the female cobalt panther goes into heat each spring, when the snowtufts blossom on Celia's World. Some type of biological trigger is involved." "You planned this. Lyronica has no snowthings whatever. Now I suppose you intend charging us a fortune for these flowers." "Sir. Of course not. Were the option mine, I would gladly give them to you. Your plight wounds me. I am concerned. However, as it happens, I have given my word to Danel Leigh Ameth to deal no more with the Great Houses of Lyronica." He shrugged hopelessly. "We won victories with your cats," Nom said, an edge of desperation in his voice, "Our treasury has been growing-we have forty thousand standards now. It is yours. Sell us these flowers. Or better, a new animal. Bigger. Fiercer. I saw the Dant garghouls. Sell us something like that. We have nothing to enter in the Bronze Arena!" "No? What of your ironfangs? The pride of Nom, I was told." Herold Nom waved impatiently. "We have been having problems. These hoppers eat anything, everything. They've gotten out of control. and the crops. The things they've done to farmland-the cobalcats love them, yes, but we don't have enough cobalcats. And the wild ironfangs won't touch the hoppers. They don't like the taste. But, you understand, all the other grass-eaters left, driven out by these hoppers of yours, and the ironfangs went with them. Where, I don't know that either. Gone, though. Into the unclaimed lands, beyond the realms of Nom. There are some villages out there, a few farmers, but they hate the Great Houses. Tamberkin, all of them, don't even have dog fights. They'll probably try to tame the ironfangs, if they see them." "So," said Tuf. "But then you have your kennels, do you not?" "Not any more," Nom said. He sounded very harried. "I ordered them shut. The ironfangs were losing every match, especially after you began to sell to the other Houses. It seemed a foolish waste to maintain dead weight. Beisdes, the expensewe needed every standard. You bled us dry. We had Arena fees to pay, and of course we had to wager, and lately we've had to buy some food from Tamber just to feed all our housemen and trainers. I mean, you would never believe the things the hoppers have done to our crops." "Sir," said Tuf. "You insult me. I am an ecologist. I know a great deal of hoppers and their ways. Am I to understand that you shut your ironfang kennels?" "Yes, yes. We turned the useless things loose, and now they're gone with the rest. What are we going to do? The hoppers are overrunning the plains, the cats won't mate, and our money will run out if we must continue to import food and pay Arena fees without hope of victory." Tuf folded his hands together. "You do indeed face a series of delicate problems. And I am the very man to help you to their solution. Unfortunately, I have pledged my bond to Danel Leigh Ameth." "Is it hopeless, then? Tuf, I am a man begging, I a Senior Beast-Master of Nom. Soon we will drop from the games entirely. We will have no funds for Arena fees or betting, no animals to enter. We are cursed by ill fortune. No Great House has ever failed to provide its allotment of fighters, not even Feridian during its Twelve-Year Drought. We will be shamed. The House of Nom will sully its proud history by sending dogs and cats onto the sand, to be shredded ignominiously by the huge monsters that you have sold the other Houses." "Sir," Tuf said. "If you will permit me an impertinent remark, and one perhaps without foundation, I will give you my opinion. I have a hunch-yes, that is the proper word-a hunch that the monsters you fear may be in short supply in the weeks and months to come. For example, the adolescent ursoids of Vagabond may very shortly go into hibernation. They are less than a year old, you understand. I hope the lords of Wrai Hill are not disconcerted by this, yet I fear they may be. Vagabond, as I'm sure you are aware, has an extremely irregular orbit about its primary, so that its Long Winters last approximately twenty standard years. The ursoids are attuned to this cycle. Soon their body processes will slow to almost nothing-some have mistaken a sleeping ursoid for a dead one, you know-and I don't think they will be easily awakened. Perhaps, as the trainers of Wrai Hill are men of good character and keen intellect, they might find a way. But I would be strongly inclined to suspect that most of their energies and their funds will be devoted to feeding their populace, in the light of the voracious appetities of scampers loths. In quite a like manner, the men of the House of Varcour will be forced to deal with an explosion of Cathadayn tree-slugs. The tree-slugs are particularly fascinating creatures. At one point in their life cycle, they become veritable sponges, and double in size. A large enough grouping is fully capable of drying up even an extensive swampland." Tuf paused, and his thick fingers beat in drumming rhythms across his stomach. "I ramble unconscionably. Sir. Do you grasp my point, though? My thrust?" Herold Nom looked like a dead man. "You are mad. You have destroyed us. Our economy, our ecology... but why? We paid you fairly. The Houses, the Houses... no beasts, no funds. How can the games go on? No one will send fighters to the Bronze Arena!" Haviland Tuf raised his hands in shock. "Really?" he said. Then he turned off the communicator and rose. Smiling a tiny tight-lipped smile, he began to talk to Dax. George R.R. Martin the Mariner and Viking missions -- may have been caused by flowing oil, according to Caltech geophysicist Yuk L, Yung. If Mars had a methane atmosphere early in its history, as current theories of the evolution of the solar system suggest, conditions might have been suitable for the conversion of some of the methane to free methyl radicals. The radicals could then polymerize into more complex hydrocarbons which would be liquid at the prevailing temperatures and pressures. These oil -- like liquids would then fall as rain, and the run -- off would form the observed Jhannels. stand -- by the death ray, may come out of a Department of Defense study of what is euphemistically referred to as "directed -- energy technology," according to Aviation Week. The particle -- beam weapons, intended primarily for use against missiles and satellites, operate on the same principles as the particle accelerators used in nuclear research. But instead of directing the beam into a target in the laboratory to study resulting nuclear reactions, the weapon would shoot the beam tens or hundreds of kilometers to destroy an enemy satellite or re -- entry vehicle. The beam could consist of charged particles such as electrons or protons, or neutral atoms, most likely hydrogen. year, as the peak of the current #I -- year sunspot cycle approaches. While the previous peak, in #, was not particularly spectacular, the one before that, in #, was the strongest in the two -- hundred -- year history of sunspot observations, and current data suggest that the up -- coming peak may equal or surpass that level. ated with unusual electromagnetic activity, according to E. Balanovski (Continued on page #) Because the mind is a higher system composed of complex subsystems, once in a while a "rare event" occurs which cannot be explained or duplicated easily. These "rare events" seem to occur more often when the subject is not in a "normal" state (whatever that is!). At the present, we consider such a subject to be in an "altered state of consciousness." health problem. Literature on psychic and occult phenomena is full of instances and, so far as I am aware, these aspects have not been thoroughly investigated. Central-nervous-system disturbances are often associated with unexplained phenomena. In a sick person the phenomena may be spontaneous, out of control and undesirable. Factors show up that have been associated with psychic phenomena, such as low-frequency, high-amplitude brain waves. In a large number of cases, for example, those with Familial dence of psychic ability. The following excerpts are from personal correspondence with physicians and patients: "...In patients there are preponderant #-to-#-cycle-per-second brain waves, apparently originating in the hypothalamus. In about ability. In some of the remaining # a sort of "reverse psychokinesis' seems active. This is the sort of thing that 'if there are I # people in the stadium and one seagull flies over, guess who gets crapped on... N.T. (M.D.)." "...I am interested in information you may have on this disease as my sister and I have it. We have had no luck finding a doctor who knows anything about it, much less the treatment. My sister has always been extremely gifted (or cursed) with the phenomena of (Continued on page #) (Continued from page #) astral projection, seeing auras, spontaneous trances, etc. Mine is limited to being very intuitive about people, thoughts, emotions"...W.F. (This person is female, an attorney, and a writer of very meaningful 'automatic poetry.' She feels it is similar to switching on a radio and just picking it up...J.B.) The Dreyfus Medical Foundation, # Broadway, New York #, has pioneered the extensive investigations into useful applications of diof epileptic seizures-for conditions ranging from skin scleroderma to heart irregularity. A letter in one of their publications states: "...I have had thoughts that could not be dismissed from my mind, no matter how hard I tried. Very commonly there would be a metallic taste in my mouth. A tingling sensation in my extremities, but worst of ail was the unexplained depression and periodic paralysis. Our family, going back at least three generations, had suffered with recurring paralysis... and confusion, with many thoughts at the same time (even though many were extremely bright), was all part of the clinical picture. Three days after Dilantin was prescribed, taking # energetic and, best of all, the paralysis attacks seem to have been aborted... our heartfelt thanks..." After my visit to the Dreyfus Foundation, I sent all the information to W.F.; she replied: "Started taking # mg of Dilantin per day plus sugar-free diet and two tablespoons potassium chloride. Feel much, much better. It also has brought about an increase in energy, allowing me to accomplish twice as much as before. I don't know how I can ever thank you enough, but if I can ever be of service to you or anyone else, please let me know." Other "psychic symptoms from sick sensitives" have been investigated by (I ) Baron von Reichenback in the I #th century (hypersensitive to magnetic fields), and The Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, N.C. (poltergeist phenomena from individuals with epilepsy and central nervous system disorders). Some of these symptoms, while interesting and helpful from a psychic standpoint, are most undesirable from a physical standpoint, and are scary to the person involved. The drug Dilantin seems to be the best control for the undesirable physical and mental effects, with the least drug side effects.Jim Beal The Depression of One of the houses on Santa Clara Drive was brightly lit for Christmas Eve. It was one of the larger houses, with an indoor greenhouse jutting out in a bay on one side and a pool in back. There were guards all around the house, lots of them. It was quiet and cold outside, and the guards weren't happy at all about being there. They were happy to have uniforms and jobs, but they didn't have pistols in case an angry mob came to flame the place. They didn't have nightsticks. They didn't have anything except gloved hands. And there was a street fight going on inside the house. A big spruce tree stood in one corner of the parlor, decorated with ornaments that had been in the Shockley family for three generations. Four big red-felt stockings hung from the fireplace across the room. In between, all the furniture had been removed and the expensive Oriental rug rolled up. The Shockley family, Jerome and Lynn and their children, Byron, Lisa, Jeffrey, and Kathy, sat on the carpeted steps of the grand staircase in the foyer, talking. A young man, bearded, scruffy, shabbily dressed, turned and spoke. "We're ready," he said. "We'll do you whatever you want." Shockley nodded. "All right, kids," he said, "upstairs to bed." "Aw," said Lisa. "Go upstairs. Santa's coming." After the children had reluctantly gone to their rooms, Shockley looked at the youth in the leather jacket. "I don't want anyone really getting hurt, you understand. My insurance company would kill me," One of the other boys laughed. Lynn Shockley had objected to letting the gang into her house. "Then why not let the children watch?" she had said angrily. "It's just like television to them. What is this, a new kind of caroling?" "That's exactly what it is," said Shockley. "These boys aren't going to stand around and sing 'Silent Night.' And nobody else who comes here tonight is going to be nice enough to knock on our door before he comes in." So the Shockleys had an evening's entertainment on Christmas Eve. There were twelve youths in all, divided evenly into two teams or gangs. One suffered an accidental knife wound in the forearm and bled on the Shockley's clean floor. Another was kicked in the throat and had to be dragged to one side, as there was barely enough room as it was. A third suffered a tremendous blow from a tire chain across the face, and he lay motionless near the tree. After half an hour, Jerome Shockley stood and walked toward the battling youths. "Thank you, thank you, Merry Christmas," he said. He had found the spectacle arousing, almost unpleasantly so. The two gangs stood still, panting. "Merry Christmas," said one young man, bruised and exhausted. Shockley took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and held it out to the boy. They looked at each other for a moment. "We don't want that," said the youth. "What?" said Shockley, bewildered. "We can't get nothing for that. Nobody takes that where we come from. We live in a shanty town in Prospect Park. Paper money don't do us no good at all. You give us all enough to eat. We haven't eaten today." "But-" "That I can handle," said another youth. "We give you the only thing we can that you'd understand. Your money you can blow your nose in." Lynn Shockley looked upset. Her husband was standing in the parlor, stammering and confused. His wife stood. "I'll see what the cook can spare." "You do that, lady," said a third youth. Later, after the gang had left the house with what they wanted, plus a few of the Shockleys' more portable furnishings, the man and woman sat together by the fireplace. Both seemed stunned. "I should have seen it coming," said Shockley. "The entertainment in the clubs. Starving people degrading themselves for money. The New Society, they call it in the magazines, sitting around sipping coffee and watching pre-teen girls being raped for cash." "They live in the park," said Lynn Shockley. "They live in tents in the streets. They overturn buses and live in them. They can't afford food, so they take it. I understand that. We've had a collapse. But why come here? Why can't they leave us alone?" Shockley looked up. He shook his head. "Property doesn't mean anything anymore, Lynn. I just understood what that means. These people go live in a public park because they don't believe in the concept of a 'park' any longer. They become squatters on estates because they don't accept private ownership of land. They take what they want because they don't think anyone has the right to keep what they need from them. They could come here... any time." think anyone will be wanting paintings if this Depression goes on. Or gold. Just food, clothing, shelter. Maybe not all of those." There was another long silence. "Jerry?" Her voice was small and very frightened now. "How long before we're downtown selling ourselves in the cafes?" Jerome Shockley put his arm around his wife. "It will be all right," he said. He sighed. He thought about his wife and four children. He wondered which he'd offer up first. (Continued from page #) and J. G. Taylor of King's College, London. Writing in the British journal Nature, the two researchers report the results of an experiment designed to measure electromagnetic emissions (over the entire spectral range from d.c. to gamma rays) from persons attempting various parapsychological tasks, including telekinesis, dowsing, psychic healing, and telepathy. for utilizing solar energy. Green plants, using water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight as inputs and chlorophyll as a catalyst, produce useful hydrocarbon fuels (for example, wood). But higher efficiencies and the production of fuels with higher energy content may eventually be possible with man -- made systems. It has long been known that some metal salts in an acidic solution will give off hydrogen when exposed to ultraviolet light. To drive this reaction with sunlight (in which most of the energy is in the visible portion of the spectrum) requires the use of sensitizing dyes to absorb the lower -- energy photons and transfer the energy to the reacting molecules. Additionally, a catalyst -- a sort of artificial chlorophyll -- would be needed to increase the reaction rate to commercially usable levels. A number of metal -- organic compounds seem promising for this application. firmed recently at the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico. Using instruments on a balloon, the group detected the gamma rays given off when the positrons -- which are the anti -- matter equivalent of electrons -- encounter normal elefctrons and both are annihilated. The mechanism responsible for the production of the positrons remains unknown, but possibilities include supernova explosions, the evaporation of primordial black holes, or -- as always -- something not yet suspected. --  -- Greg Chalfln They were silent for a moment. A radio upstairs played Christmas music. "Jerry?" said Lynn Shockley after a while. "Jerry? What about all the property you invested in? You put a lot of our money in real estate." "It will be gone soon. It won't be worth a thing. Property is worthless, money is worthless." "And the gold? And the paintings?" "I thought I was smart," he said bitterly, "because I didn't go into the stock market. But something's valuable only as long as someone else (Continued from page #I ) Rogers series of nine novels. The rationale covers how Buck Rogers was hurtled into the future and why the Venus-and Mars of the old pulps exist and not the ones we know today. Mr. Niven and Dr. Pournelle are series consultants and plotters; they will not do any of the actual writing. The writing will be done by Eric lished by Ace. Anne McCaffrey is writing music for some of the lyrics she wrote for the Dragonrider series. Jon Anderson of the rock group Yes has agreed to help her. She thought his music would be appropriate for what she had in mind. L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, complete with the original Cartier illustrations. This is the first edition of this book to have the original illos of the magazine serialization. Books in March. Joe Haldeman is working on the first novel of a projected trilogy. He is also doing a non-fiction book on space travel for ST. Martin's Press Cynthia Felice has several new books in the works. Mack Reynolds has sold three books to Belmont. Dave Bischoff and Ted White have sold a book to Popular Library. the third. Octavia Butler is at work on two new novels. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is at work on an occult-mystery novel for Putnam. -- Elton T. Elliott by Fred Pohl (Synopsis) one intelligent race but three! Earth's three power blocs (food countries, fuel countries and the poorcousin people's republics) race to explore and settle it. ter of a rich and politically powerful family; she is determined that she After an act of sabotage results in unplannedfor casualties, the becomes more tense. mistake the empathetic Dalehouse for a typical representative of his species opposed to any contact with those awful human beings, are forced to an alliance with the Fuel Bloc for self-protection. And so it goes. Ten minutes later they were both back on the beach, lying, not very comfortably, on their clothes, waiting to dry. "Ouch," said Margie. "If I ever get any extra people for punishment detail, I think I'll see if they can get the rocks out of this sand." "You get used to it." "Only if I have to, Danny. I'm going to make this a nice camp if I can -- good duty. For instance, you know what we're going to have tonight?" He rolled his head to look at her. "What?" "The first official Jemman Food-Exporting Bloc encampment dance." "A danced" She grinned. "See what I mean? Those turkeys who were running this place never thought of that. But there's nothing to it: spread out some flats on the dirt, put a few tapes in the machine and there you are. Saturday night special. Best thing in the world for morale." "You are probably about the U.S. Army's best colonel for having fun'," Dalehouse said. "For all the rest of being a colonel, too, Danny. Don't you forget it. " "Well, I don't, Margie. I believe it. Only it's kind of hard to remember under the, ah, present circumstances." "Well, I'll put my clothes back on if it'll help you concentrate. This isn't just fun and games. I wanted to talk to you. " "About what?" "Whatever you want to tell me. How you think things are going. What isn't being done that ought to be? What you've learned being here that I haven't found out yet." He propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. She returned his gaze serenely, scratching her bare abdomen just above the pubic hair. "Well," he said, "I guess you've seen all the reports about making contact with the sentients." "Memorized them, Danny. I even saw some of the sentients at Detrick, but they weren't in very good condition. Espcially the Creepy." "The bunrower? We haven't had very good luck with them." "Piss-poor, I'd say." "Well -- yes, that's fair. But we did get about ten specimens, two of them alive. And Morrissey had a whole report on them not transmitted yet. He says they're farmers -- from underneath, which is kind of an interesting idea. They plant some kind of tubers in the roofs of their tunnels. He was planning to talk to that expert you were supposed to bring -- I don't know her name." "Sondra Leckler? She didn't come, Danny. I had her scratched." "Why?" "Political. She's Canadian." She looked at him thoughtfully. "Does that fact mean anything to you?" "Not a thing." "No, I didn't think so. Canada voted for Peru's thousand-mile limit in the U.N. That's cozying with the Peeps right there. And everybody knows Canada's got the hots for the Greasies because of their goddam Athabasca tar sands. They're politically unreliable right now, Danny. There were four Canadians scheduled for this shipment, and I scratched all their asses right off." "That sounds pretty paranoid," he commented. 'No, realistic. I've got no time to teach you the facts of life, Danny. What else? I don't mean about the burrowers. " He regarded her thoughtfully. She lay on her back, hands behind her head, comfortable in her nudity as she squinted toward the glowing red Kung, For a slightly plump girl her waist curved beautifully into her hips, and her breasts were rounded even while she lay on her back. But under that blonde hair was a brain Dalehouse did not fully understand. He dropped back and said, "Well, there's the balloonists. I know the most about them. Our regular flock is off toward the Heat Pole, but there's another one out over the water. They're basically territorial, but -- " "You were at the Greasy camp a while ago, weren't you?" "Yeah. When we were still on visiting terms. Is that what you want me to tell you about?" "Among other things." "All right. They've got a hell of a lot of stuff we don't, Margie." He described the machine that molded building blocks, the plasma generator, the farm, the airconditioning, the ice. "Sounds pretty nice," she commented. "We'll have all that stuff too. Danny, I promise you. Did you see a plane and four gliders? ' ' "No. There was an airstrip -- Cappy commented on it; it didn't make sense, with just a helicopter. But they didn't have a plane then." "They do now. I thought they'd sneaked a reinforcement in that you didn't catch. Did you know about the base on Farside?" "'Far side! You mean the dark half of Jem? What the hell would anyone want there?" "That's what I need to find out. But they've got it. Why do you think I stayed four extra orbits before I came down? I made damn sure I photo-mapped and radarsurveyed everything I could; I know every satellite around Jem, I know every spot on the surface that's using energy, and I don't like all of what I know. The Farside base was a real shock. Did you see any children in the Fat camp?" "Children? Hell, no! Why would -- " "Well, I think they're moving whole families in, Danny, which seems to indicate they've got more than an exploring expedition in mind. " "How could you tell whether they had children from space?" "No way, Danny. I didn't say the orbital reconnaissance was the only way I knew what was going on with the Fats. One other thing. No, two. Have they got a baseball field?" "Baseball?" He was sitting up now, staring at her. "What the hell would they do with a baseball field? Cricket, maybe, and no doubt football, but -- " "That's a break," she said, without explaining. "Last question. Did you happen to run into a fellow named Tamil?" "I don't think so." Dalehouse thought hard. "Wait a minute. Short fellow with a shaved head? Chess player?" "I don't know. He's an Indonesian." "Well, I'm not sure, but I think there was a petrochemist with a name like that. I didn't talk to him. I don't think he spoke English." "Pity." Margie ruminated for a moment, then sat up, shading her eyes. "Are those your balloonists out there?" As Dalehouse turned to look, Margie was standing, taking a few steps toward the shore, and what he looked at was not the sky but her. The artist Hogarth had said that the most beautiful line in nature was the curve of a woman's back, and Margie, silhouetted against the ruddy sky, was a fine figure of a woman. Half-amused, Dalehouse realized by the stirrings in his groin that he was beginning to display interest. But only beginning. The stimulus was that beautiful and remembered butt; the suppressant was the things she said. He would be some little while figuring out just how it was he did feel about Margie Menninger. Then he got his eyes past her, and forgot the stirrings. "There are ha 'aye 'i out there!" he said furiously. "What'ys?" "They're predators. That's not our regular flock; they just drifted in, because of the lights, most likely. And those clouds are full of ha 'aye 'i!" The flock was close enough to be heard now, singing loudly, only a few hundred meters away. And far beyond and above them three slimmer shapes were stooping toward them. "That's a what-you-call it, there? Jesus! Look at that mother," she cried, as the first of the air-sharks expertly ripped at the bag of the huge female, slipped past, turned end : for-end and reversed itself. It came back ten meters lower to catch the deflated balloonist as it fell, braying its death-song. "That's a fucking Immelmann that thing just did! Nobody's done that since World World One!" "This isn't a performance, damn it! They're dying!" Two more of the predators had struck and two more balloonists were caught, farther down the shore. But at least it was not Charley's flock. None of those victims were friends. "See that stuff coming out of the female?" he asked. "Those are her eggs. They're long spider-silk kind of things. They'll float around forever, but they won't be fertilized because none of the males have -- " "Fuck her eggs, little buddy, I'm machine! Shit, Danny, I can see why things are going badly here. You people picked the wrong allies. We ought to team up with the sharks!" Dalehouse was scandalized. "They're animals! They're not even intelligent!" "Show me a professor," she said, "and I'll show you a fartbrain. How intelligent do you have to be to fight?" "Christ. The balloonists are our friends. We've got them doing surveillance for us. The ha 'aye 'i would never do that. Now you want us to line up with their natural enemies?" "Well, I can see there might be problems." She stared wistfully at the ha 'aye 'i, which had ripped away the inedible bag and was now feasting on the soft parts of its still living prey. "Too bad," she said philosophically. She stepped back toward Danny, still watching the spectacle, and took his hand. "You're really sure about this? There 's no way to persuade our gooks to get along with the sharks?" "No way at all! Even if you could somehow reach the ha 'aye 'i to explain what you wanted. The ha 'aye 'i don't even sing. That's the whole meaning of life to balloonists. They could never deal with creatures that didn't sing." "Oh?" Margie looked at him thoughtfully. Then she released his hand and sat down again, leaning back on her arms and looking up at him. "Tell me, Danny, would you like to make me sing?" He stared at her. Why, she was sexually excited by watching the slaughter! He glanced at the top of the bluff, where the back of the head of the orderly was motionless in sight. "Maybe we'd better be getting back," he said. "What's the matter, sweetie? Don't like having an audience? Tinka won't bother us." "I don't care about her." "Then what?" she asked cheerfully. "Hey, I bet I can guess. You're hassled about the colonel." "Tree? He's got nothing to do with me." "Aw, come off it, sweets." She patted the ground beside her. After a moment, he sat down, not very close. "You think I've been getting it on with old Nguyen the Tryin'." "No. I don't think it, I know it." "And suppose I have?" "Your business," he said promptly. "I'm not saying it isn't. Maybe I've got some sexist-pig notions, but- -- " "But no maybe. You fucking well do, Danny boy." She was smiling without softness now. He shrugged. "Let's go back. Colonel." "Let's stay here. And," she said, "I've got the rank on you, and when a colonel says 'let's to a captain, what it means is do it." There was no more stirring in Dalehouse's groin; he was both angry and amused at his own anger. He said, "Let's get this straight. Are you ordering me to fuck you?" "No. Not at the moment, dear boy." She grinned. "I hardly ever order officers to fuck me. Only enlisted men, and very seldom them because it's bad for discipline." "Are you saying the colonel ordered you to fuck him?" "Danny dear," she said patiently, "first he couldn't -- I've got the rank -- second, he wouldn't have had to. I'd fuck Guy any time. For any reason. Because he's technically my superior officer and I don't want to rub in the fact that I'm the one who's commanding. Because it'd make things go smoother on the mission. Because it's interesting to get it on with somebody half my size. I'd fuck a Krinpit if it would help the war effort, only I don't know how we'd bring up the kids. But," she said, "a girl's entitled to a certain amount of non-goaloriented recreation, too, and, Danny, I have really the fondest memories of you from last year in Bulgaria. " Fully relaxed, she rummaged under her for her clothes and pulled out another joint. Dalehouse watched her lighting it. Her body was tanned over every inch; no bikini marks, and looking a lot better than the fishbelly white that came after a while on Jem. She scratched between the crease that hid her' navel and her pale pubic hair, exhaled peacefully and passed him the joint. The thing was, Dalehouse conceded to himself, that he had really the fondest memories of her last year in Bulgaria, too, and it did not seem to matter that he had also some bad memories. "You know the thing , that gets me about you?" he asked. "You make me laugh about a hundred different ways. Lean over this way, will you?" When they had used each other up, they rested for a moment. Then Margie jumped up and dashed into the water again. Dalehouse followed; they splashed and roared; and as they came out he was astonished to discover that suddenly he didn't feel quite used up any more. But Margie was calling up the bluff: "Tinka! Time hack!" "Thirteen twenty hours, ma'am!" Margie slipped into her fatigues quickly, and leaned over to kiss Dalehouse as he was standing with one leg in his pants. "Time to get back. I've got a busy afternoon before the dance and, Danny, I'd appreciate it if you'd do something for me." "What's that?" "Teach Tinka how to do that balloon thing this afternoon." "Why?" "I want her to run an errand for me. It's important." He considered. "I can get her started, anyway. But I don't know if she can learn it all in a few hours." "She leams fast, I promise. Come on -- I'll race you back!" They ran the hundred meters. Marge got off first, but by the time the outpost was in sight Dalehouse had caught up with her. As he passed she reached out and took his hand and pulled him back to a walk. "Thanks for the exercise," she panted. "Which exercise, swimming, running, or fucking?" "All of them, dear Danny." She breathed hard and then, just before they got within earshot of the perimeter guards, she halted him. "One thing I ought to mention to you," she said. "What's that?" "I just want to set the record straight. With Nguyen Tree I'm fucking. With you I was making love."  Twelve on perimeter guard, two in sickbay, three in the comm shack and eight others on the other twenty-four-hour details that always had to be manned; that left over a hundred and twenty people in the Food camp and nearly every one of them was at the dance. Marge congratulated herself as she flung through a hora. It was a big success. When the dance ended and the rhythm changed to something Latin, she shook off the three men who came toward her. "I've got to sit this one out and catch my breath," she said. "After the next number I make my little speech. Then you're all on. " She retreated behind the little stand and sat crosslegged on the ground, breathing deeply. Marge Menninger's parents had endowed her with good genes and she had taken care of her equipment; after a long day and a solid hour's dancing she was 'not tired and her wits were still about her. And the day had been not only long but good. She had got the camp over their scare about the loss of the three people by treating it as if it didn't matter. She had brought them all together in the dance. She had started the groundwork for Tinka's little mission, organized an effective perimeter guard, broken the back of the job of unloading and stowing cargo and begun six other tasks equally important. And she had got it on with Dan Dalehouse, on terms of her own making but obviously acceptable to him. That was a personal matter, but not unimportant. Marge was careful to keep an eye on long-range prospects. And as a possible permanent future pair, if permanent pairing turned out to be the way things were going to go on Jem, Dalehouse was the best bet she had yet identified. It was Marge Menninger's conviction, recent but certain, that this job was what she had been bom for. The important thing was to do it the right waiy , which was her own way, which had to be laid out from day one. No false starts. A happy camp -- plenty of work to keep them busy, and plenty of time to enjoy themselves. And a productive camp. Jem belonged to her 'and hers and now they had it. While she was waiting for the cha-cha to end, she considered the next day. Ship One would be empty, and a team could be started on separating the two halves and moving them into position in the perimeter. Dalehouse or Kappelyushnikov -- which? The Russian, she decided -- Kappelyushnikov could be briefed on Tinka's mission, or at least enough of it so that he could escort her part way to the Greasy camp. A work team could be organized to start putting up poles for the farm plot. She would meet, and learn to know, at least six of the advance party; in two weeks, she should know everything she had to know about everyone in the camp. Orders would be cut naming Guy Tree as her G-l and Santangelo as G-#; the others she would wait on, since there might be people she hadn't met yet who should have the jobs. And, if things went well, during the three hours she allowed herself for a mid-day break, she would go for a walk in the woods. And finally, she would make a first approximation of a requisition list tor the next shipment from Earth. That couldn't wait. With all the fuss the civilians were kicking up. Marge Menninger wasn't sure how many more shipments there would be. She already knew a number of goodies she wanted, but the old-timers would probably think of more. So she would need to talk to some of the old-timers. Morrissey, Krivitin, Kappelyushnikov -- she would fill in the others later. The smell of pot from beyond the stand pleased her. She thought of lighting up before getting up to make her speech -- it was another way of showing her personal style. But it had been less than half an hour since the last one, and Marge knew her tolerances exactly; it might make her fuzzy. The cha-cha ended and the girl at the tape machine, looking toward Margie, switched it off. Marge nodded and climbed the stand. The laughter and buzz dwindled as the hundred-odd people turned to face her. She smiled out at them for a moment, waiting for silence. They looked exactly like the plebes at West Point had looked, exactly like the audience in the Senate hearing room, like every audience she had ever faced. Marge was in touch with her audiences; she could always make them like her, and for that reason she liked them. She said, "Welcome to the first weekly Food Bloc Expedition Saturday Night Dance. I'm Colonel Marjorie Menninger, U.S.A., and I'm your camp commander. Some of us already know each other pretty well by now. The rest of us are going to get to know each other very well, very soon, because when you come right down to it we don't have much choice, do we? I'm not worried about that, and I hope you're not. We're a pretty select bunch." She allowed her gaze to drift past the audience to the edge of the lighted area, where two of her grunts were holding another while he vomited, and added, " -- Although you might not know that at first." A small laugh, but genuine. "So let's start getting to know each other. Guy? Saint? Where are you?" She introduced Tree and Santangelo as they stood forth. "Now Vince Cudahy -- are you there? Vince is a mathematician, but he's also our chaplain. He used to teach at Fordham, but he's agreed to be non-denominational for the purposes of this mission. So if any of you want to get married, Vince is authorized to do it." Small chuckle. "He's a little oldfashioned, so he'd prefer it if you're of different sexes." Somewhat larger laugh, but a little questioning note in it. "And in case you do," she went on, "or even if you don't, you ought to meet Chiche Arkashvili. Cheech? There she is, our medical officer. Try not to get sick over the next twenty-four hours, because she's still setting up. But then she'll be ready for business, and back home in Ordjonikidze her specialty was obstetrics." No laugh at all this time. She hadn't expected one. She gave them a moment to draw the logical conclusion, and then pressed it home. "As you can see, we're planning a permanent base, and I'm planning to make this the best duty any of you have ever had, so that a lot of you will want to re-up and stay here. And if you do -- and if any of you take seriously what I've just been talking about and decide to settle down and have a family on Jem, I'm offering a special prize. A thousand petrobucks for the first baby bom in our camp -- provided you name it Marjorie, after me." She waited a beat and. added, "Two thousand if it's a boy." She got the laugh she wanted, and closed it out: "Now, on with the dance." And as the music started she jumped off the platform, grabbed the first man in reach and started them all going.  For the next half hour. Marge Menninger played hostess, at which she was very, very good. She danced with the men who didn't much dance, kept the music going, made sure the drinks kept coming. What she wanted was for everybody to have a good time. The next day would be time enough for them to start thinking about permanent colonies, and how much choice they would be likely to have about extending their stay. When chance permitted, she got a word in with the people who had known what she was going to say, asking how they thought it had gone. It seemed to have gone well. It made her feel good, and she found she was really enjoying the party. She drank with the drinkers, smoked with the dopers and danced with everyone. It was safe enough, now. When the time came to shut the dance down Tinka would let her know, and meanwhile Tinka would keep an eye on her colonel. Coming back from the brand-new latrine. Marge paused to enjoy the sight of her people having fun. It was going to be all right! They really were a good bunch, handselected, fit, well-trained. Whatever she had said to anyone else, in a secret, inside part of her heart Marge had felt a small but unsettling fear that her first really independent command might take qualities she hadn't known she needed. So far, not. So far, everything was going precisely as she had planned, according to the priorities she had laid out in her own mind: Priority I , safeguard the integrity of the unit. And it was safeguarded; she could see the perimeter guards in regular patrol, a little disgruntled at missing the dance but carrying out their orders meticulously. Priority #, accomplish the mission assigned. And that was well on the way. Priority #, subject to accomplishing I and #, make it a busy and happy camp. And that looked good, too. She walked around the outskirts of the dance, nodding and smiling, not yet quite ready to get back on the floor. Tinka appeared beside her, one hand on her governmentissue pouch, looking questioningly at her. Marge shook her head. She didn't need another joint just then. She was feeling happy and relaxed, but just the littlest bit light-headed. Part of it was the smarmy heat and the peculiar instability that weighing only about three-quarters of what she had been used to for ten years gave her. But she was feeling a little edgy, too, and checking dates in her mind she thought she knew why. When she came near the medical officer she said in her ear, "Got your freezers going for the sperm and ovum bank yet, Doc? Because I think I'm going to make a donation. " "Noon tomorrow we'll be ready," Chiche Arkashvili promised. "But the way the boys and girls have been disappearing into the bushes, I don't know if we'll need it." ' 'Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. If I could, I'd -- " She stopped. "What would you do, Colonel?" "Forget it. Don't let me keep you from urgent business," said Marge amiably, and watched the doctor go on toward the latrine. If she could, she'd get a whole stock of frozen sperm and ova from Earth, because the bigger the gene pool you started with the better the chances you'd have a healthy, stable population in another two or three generations. But she was not quite ready to put that request on her next letter to Santa Claus. She would have quite enough trouble with the items she was already determined to requisition, and from Christ's own number of light-years away her powers of argument were limited. A few meters away the Bulgarian girl was in some sort of altercation with Stud Sweggert, the sergeant Marge had put onto the first of her ships. Normally she wouldn't have interfered, but there was something she wanted from Dimitrova. "Tinka," she said softly over her shoulder. "Yes'm." "Stay with." Marge went up to the arguing couple, who stopped as she came close. "Sorry to break this up," she said. Dimitrova glared at her. Feisty little prunt; it crossed Marge's mind that her first impulses about Ana Dimitrova might have been best, but it was not a useful thought any more. She discarded it. "There is nothing to break up, Colonel," the girl said. "The sergeant wished to show me something I did not want to see. " "I bet he did, honey," Marge smiled. "Will you excuse us a second, Sergeant?" And, when he was out of earshot, she asked, "How is your Indonesian, Dimitrova?" "Indonesian? It is not one of my four-oh languages, but I believe I could translate a document satisfactorily." "I don't want a document translated. I want to know how to say, 'Good morning. Where is the baseball park?' " "What?" "Shit, lady! Just tell us how to say it." Ana hesitated, then, with some disdain, said, " Selamat pagi, dimana lapangan baseball?" "Um." Marge rehearsed it to herself for a moment, glancing at Tinka. The orderly shrugged. "Well, write it down for me. Now, how do you say, 'Have you a map?' " " Saudara punja petal " "Got that?" asked Marge, looking at the orderly. "Not sure? All right, Dimitrova, take Tinka to my office and write it out for her. Make sure she gets it right." For a moment she thought the Bulgarian might object, but then she nodded and the two of them started away. Sergeant Sweggert was still standing there, three meters away, watching her with calm interest. Margie laughed. "What are you doing. Sergeant, waiting to ask me for a dance? Or do you want to show me that little thing you were so anxious to drag out for Dimitrova?" "Hell, Colonel. You've got me all wrong." "I bet I do. Sweggert," she said good-naturedly, "you're not a bad guy, but it's against my policy to, ah, fraternize with enlisted men. Except in an emergency, of course. And what you've got to show has been widely seen already, I guarantee you." "Ah, no, Colonel! It was educational. They got a tame gasbag here, and it's real interesting." "Yeah?" She looked at him more closely, and from the way he stood, the way his head sank into his shoulders, she realized that the man was pretty full of something. But he was also R.A, and, whether they chose to call the present time night or day, as a practical matter. Rung made it pretty close to broad daylight. "I'll take a look," she decided. She followed him behind the cooktent, and there was one of the balloonists, clinging to a rope and singing softly and mournfully to itself. It was much bigger than the female she had seen at Camp Detrick, but obviously in some sort of trouble. "What's it saying?" she demanded. The sergeant said with a straight face, "I really don't know, ma'am. You want to hold him a minute? Just pull down on the rope." Margie looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but he was right, it was interesting. She pulled on the rope, "Damn thing's strong," she complained. "Hey, Sweggert! What are you doing?" He had leaned down and pulled something out from under a tarpaulin. "Just a strobe light, ma'am. " "And what are you going to do with it?" "Well," he said cunningly, "I haven't never seen it, but the guys say if you give one of these things a flash it's real interesting." She looked from him to the sad, wrinkled face of the balloonist and back. "Sergeant," she said grimly, "it damn better be or I'll have your ass on toast. Flash your fucking strobe." "Is that an order, ma'am?" "Flash it!" she snarled. "Or -- " And then he did. XV After four days of trying Ana was finally granted permission to use the radio for a call to the People's camp. When the communications clerk signaled GO she leaned forward and spoke in Urdu into the mircrophone. "This is Ana Dimitrova calling, from the camp of the Food-Exporting Bloc. I wish to speak to Ahmed Dulla, please." The comm-clerk switched off the microphone and said, "Now you wait. It usually takes about ten minutes for a return message." "Message? Can I not speak directly to Dr. Dulla?" "Not with the Peeps, honey. We transmit a message, they transmit an answer. If they feel like it." "How very queer. Well, thank you, I will wait outside." As she left she added, "Please call me when the answer comes." "Count on it, sweets." What a nuisance, she thought crossly, sitting cross-legged in the warm electric-heater glow from Kung overhead. Still -- ten minutes! She had waited much longer than ten minqtes to hear Ahmed's voice. And at least his plight could no longer be as serious as she had feared at first. The word was out in camp that the People's Republics, through what superhuman exertions one could hardly imagine, had succeeded in reestablishing communication with their outpost on Jem. A ship had landed. A small one, to be sure, but at least they were no longer helplessly dependent on the other colonies for the means to survive. How that must have angered Dulla! Around her the camp was very busy. Nearly a hectare had been cleared and seeded on the slopes above, and the stanchions were in place for the lights that would make the seeds grow. Power would be next, and that was already being attended to. The Food bloc at last Mad its own solar-power plant in process of assembly, and meanwhile there was a nuclear-fueled steam plant already in operation -- small, expensive, but reliable. Ana was the best of the three translators in the camp and, since the disappearance of Harriet Santori, the only one who seemed capable of picking up the fine structure of an only partly understood language. Her Krinpit was quite imperfect, and there seemed little chance to practice it. For the burrowers she had spent much time with this James Morrissey, who seemed to have taken them as his personal reason for existence, but none of it had come to much. The microphones he insinuated so gently into the tunnels sometimes picked up a scrap or two of squealing, cluttering, half-muffled sounds, but evidently the burrowers detected them at once and avoided them. When they didn't steal them. More than once, Morrissey had pulled out a probe and found the working head neatly disconnected. But with the balloonist she had become almost fluent. She had worked closely with Professor Dalehouse -- so far only by radio; the intriguing but frightening prospect of soaring with him under a cluster of bags of hydrogen was for some indeterminate time in the future. Then the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, had taken off with Colonel Menninger's orderly and a cluster of hydrogen tanks on some foolish, secretive errand, and she had been ordered off the radio until further notice. Instead she was assigned to clerical work in the tiny hospital, where there was in fact no clerical work to speak of, since it had as yet no real patients. But. Regardless. No matter what small frustrations and annoyances, was she not on Jem, only a matter of a few score kilometers at most from Ahmed? Not to mention the dizzying excitement of being on Jem at all. Another planet! Circling another star! So far from home that not even the sun itself could be found in the ruddy Jemman sky! She had not yet dared to go out into the jungle (though others had, and returned safe and excited at the strangenesses they had seen). She had not yet even swum in that great lake, or sea, so temptingly near; she had not thought to bring a bathing suit, had not yet found time to make one, and certainly would not follow the custom of those others who frolicked in nothing at all along the beach. Just now she could see a batch of them splashing and shouting. They were supposed to be working on the hydroplanes which were being assembled at the water's edge, but their thoughts, she would warrant, were far less on transportation than on the animal joy of the beach. Not, she thought justly, that that in itself was wrong; why should they not? It was not Ana's concern if other persons had different moral standards than her own, so long as they did not try to inflict them on her. And splashing would in fact be great fun in this muggy heat -- "Dimitrova!" She jumped up and ran inside the tent for her answer, but it was only: "Ahmed Dulla is not available at present. The message will be given to him." In English. And English with a very bad accent, at that; whatever Heir-of-Mao had sent, it was not good translators. She thanked the comm-clerk, concealing her disappointment, and strolled toward the perimeter. Off duty, not enough time to eat, too early to sleep; what should she do since she could not do the thing she wanted most? Really, it was too disappointing! Where could he be? She was annoyed to discover that she was beginning another headache. How infuriating! For some reason she had not had very many in her first days on Jem -- perhaps because everything was so intensely exciting that she had no time to think of headaches. She did not want one now. Ana was an industrious person by nature, and it occured to her that idleness was not likely to prevent the headache but only to make it worse. What to do? If she only had a proper costume, how agreeable it would be to help the boat-builders on the beach. Or to climb the slope and assist in planting -- but no, at the moment they were only plowing, and she did not know how to run to tractor. The power plant. She knew nothing of it, of course, but she had sturdy muscles, why not? Unfortunatley, as she approached she discovered that one of the noncoms working on the project was Sgt. Sweggert. She changed course and walked briskly away. She had avoided Sweggert since that night she had come back with the colonel's orderly and found the two of them in rut, out in the open, for all to see! Of course, no others had seen. Nan turned away at once, sweating with embarrassment, and there had been no one else, or all the camp would have been talking of it. Tinka would not speak, Sweggert would have been talking of it. Tinka would not speak, Sweggert would perhaps not dare to, and the colonel -- Well, Ana did not have the delusion that she understood the colonel. But Colonel Marge Menninger she had not been able to avoid, and the woman had said nothing of the incident, had in fact showed no signs that it had ever taken place. That bleached American, copulating with a man whose name she perhaps did not even know! No, that was unfair; they knew each other. But certainly not socially. Oh, yes, to be sure, she would blame it on the aphrodisiac effect of the -- the mist, she put it to herself, that the wounded balloonist emitted. One had heard all about that by now. Still, how appallingly lewd! Not to say -- what was the word? -- "tacky." Ana found herself at a guard post in the perimeter fence, and at once it became clear what she wished to do. "I am going for a walk," she told the corporal in charge, who shrugged and watched impassively as Ana squeezed between the strands of the barbed wire. In a few steps she was out of sight of the camp. If she could not see Ahmed, at least she could see Jem. She pushed through the violet-oily growth, here all flickering with blue-green lights, and paused to listen. Tiny skittering sounds from the underbrush, the rustle of the plants in the wind. There was no wild life here that would harm her, she had been assured. Because of the presence of the camp, there were not many animals at all. Some had been frightened away, some poisoned; where the garbage details had brought a day's collection of slops into the woods and buried them you could see the ferns withered, the crab-grass ground cover dry. Terrestrial biochemistry was as hostile to Jemmans as the other way around, but the Jemmans had not had a Camp Detrick to make them salves and injections against the rot. But what was left, how fascinating and how strange! Forests of plants like ferns, but fruiting and with woody stems. Succulents, almost like bamboo; the hollow stems would make good structural materials, and Ana's thrifty soul instructed her to tell the colonel not to waste precious iron on tent stakes any more. Vines like grapes, with hard seeds, no doubt meant to be spread in the excrement of small animals. (If any survived in this part of the forest.) And the mangrove-like giants called "many-trees," a dozen or more trunks linking together at the crown, that made a canopy under which she moved. She stopped and looked around. There was noquestion of getting lost, she reassured herself, as long as she kept the red-glinting water in sight on her left. At any time she could simply climb down to it and return along the beach. And there was no question of being tired here, either, when one climbed so lightly over fallen logs and rocks. It was an excellent time for taking a nature stroll, she thought, squirming between the trunks of a many-tree that glittered blue-green in firefly beads, if only her head did not hurt so. In front of her was a lump of fungus, gray-pink and without lights of its own. It looked quite like a brain, she thought. In fact, rather like her own. Since the brainsplitting had been done under local anesthesia she had seen every step, some in the mirror overhead, some in the closed-circuit likris screen. That was how her brain had seemed to her, quite remote and unfeeling. Even when the sharp hooked blade had halved it in one smooth motion it had been hard to connect that sight with the insistent dragging pressure that was all she felt... Later, when they were reconnecting some of the necessary nerves, she suddenly felt the reality of it. She would have been ill except for the surgeon's motherly scorn. "A great strong girl like you!" she had laughed. "No. Nonsense! You will not vomit." And Nan had not... What was that noise? It sounded like distant sticks rattling against hollow logs, and someone moaning. It was the sort of sound she had heard before, on tapes at Camp Detrick. The crustaceans, yes! But perhaps not the social race. Perhaps those wild and surely dangerous ones that had been only rumored -- The human voice that came from behind her was severe. "Is it sensible for you to be alone here. Ana?" In Urdu! With that stem compassion she had heard so often! She knew before she turned that it was Ahmed.  An hour later, a kilometer away, move lest she wake him. The Krinpit's sound was always audible, sometimes near, sometimes moving farther away; she smiled to herself as she thought that the creature had surely been near while they were making love. No matter. It was not a matter for shame, what she would proclaim anywhere. It was not at all like that American bleached blonde, because -- well, of course, because it was with Ahmed. He twitched, snorted and woke up. "Ah, Ana! Then I did not dream this!" "No, Ahmed." She hesitated, and then said in a softer voice, "But I have had that dream many times... No! Not so quickly again, please, dear Ahmed -- or, yes, whenever you like; but first let me look at you." She shook her head and scolded, "You are so thin! Have you been ill?" The black-bead eyes were opaque. "#? Yes, sometimes. Also sometimes starving." "Starving! How terrible! But -- " "But why starve? That is simple to answer. Because your people shot down our transports." "But that is quite impossible!" "It is not impossible," he contradicted, "because it happened. Food for many days, scientific instruments, two ships -- and thirty'four human beings, Ana." "It must have been an accident." "You are naive." He got up angrily, pulling his clothes together. "I do not blame you. Ana. But those crimes are a fact, and I must blame someone." He disappeared behind a many-tree, and after a moment she could hear the splashing of his urine against the bole. And also another sound: the Krinpit's rattle and moan, growing close again. If only she had had more time with the tapes at Detrick! But even so, she could distinguish a pattern that was repeated over and over. SssharrnAnd then two quick notes: eye-gone. She called weakly, "Ahmed?" And heard his laugh. "Ah, Ana, does my friend frighten you? He will not harm us. We axe not good for him to eat." "I did not know you had such friends." "Well, perhaps I have not. No. We are not friends. But as I am the enemy of his enemies, we are allies at least. Come along, Sham-igon," he said, like a householder strolling a puppy, and came back into view. Scuttling lopsidedly behind him was a great nightmare creature, rattling and moaning. Ana had never been so close to an adult, live Krinpit, had never quite realized their size and the loudness of their sounds. It did not have a crab's claws. It had jointed limbs that waved above it, two that tapered to curved points like a cat's claw, two that ended in fist-like masses of shell. It paused, seeming to regard Nan, although as far as she could tell it had no eyes. And among the sounds she recognized words in Urdu! Syllable by syllable, it scratched and grumbled out a sentence: "Is this one to die?" "No, no!" said Ahmed quickly. "She is -- " He hesitated, then emitted sounds in the Krinpit language. Perhaps it was his accent, but Ana could not understand a word. "I have told him you are my he-wife," he explained. "He-wife?" "They have a very rich sexual life," he said. "Please, Ahmed. I am not ready for a joking little chat. The Krinpit said 'to die,' and what does it mean?" "Naive Ana," he said again, looking at her thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. He did not reply, but he unwrapped a flat ruddy-brown leaf from an object he had been carrying. It was a flat metal blade, broader at the end, the edge razorsharp. The hilt was sized to fit a man's hand, and the whole thing half a meter long. "Ahmed! Is that a sword?" "A machete. But, you are right, it is a sword also now." "Ahmed," she said, her heart pounding harder than the throbbing in her head, "some days ago three persons from the Food camp were killed. I have thought it was an accident, but now I am not sure. Shall I ask you if you know anything of this?" "Ask what you like, woman." "Tell me!" He thrust the machete into the loamy ground. "All right, if you will have it so, I will tell you. No. I did not kill those Fats. But yes, I know of their death, I do not mourn them, I hope many more will die. And if it is necessary for me to kill a few I shall not shrink from it!" "But -- but -- but Ahmed," she babbled, "dear, gentle Ahmed, this is murder! Worse than murder, it is an act of war! Suppose the Food bloc retaliates? Suppose our homelands do not accept this as a mere struggle far away, but themselves retaliate on each other? Suppose -- " "Have done with your supposing!" he shouted. "What can they do to retaliate? Bomb Pakistan? Let them! Let them destroy Hyderabad and Multan, let them bomb Karachi, let them wipe out all the cities and bum the whole coast. You have been there,' Ana, how much of Pakistan can be destroyed? What bombs can blast through mountains? The people will survive. The leeches that flock to the cities to beg, the government parasites -- yes, the intellectuals, the proud bloodsuckers like you and me -- what do I care if they all die? The people in tJie valleys will live!" She was silent, frightened, searching for words that might sway him and finding none. "Ah," he said in disgust, "what is the sense of this? But do not be angry with me." "Angry? That is not what I feel," she said miserably. "Then what? Hatred? Fear? Ana, w hat are we to do?Let them starve us? We have one small ship to save us, and what have the Fats and the Greasies? Navies! And if the fight n g spreads -- " He hesitated, and then burst out: "Let it! Let all the rich ones kill each other, what do we care? Remember, six out of ten human beings on Earth are ours! If there is war on Earth -- if only a thousand of them will be citizens of the People's Republics. And here -- " She shook her head, almost weeping. "And here? Sixty per cent too?" "No. More. On Son of Kung, if anyone survives -- one hundred per cent ours." The rains were all around, squall clouds driving past them, up toward the Heat Pole, where the rain that dropped from them fell a kilometer or two and evaporated, never striking the hot, salt ground. The flock was spread out over a kilometer of sky, grumbling in dissonant chords. "Have patience," Charlie scolded them. "We must stay, must stay." They echoed, "Must stay," but it was poorly sung. No matter. Charlie had promised his two-legged friend that they would stay, waiting to observe certain strange and incomprehensible events, and the flock would do as he vowed. Still, it was uncomfortable, like an itch or a sunburn to a human being, to have the swarm in such disarray. The place he had promised to watch was upwind of the Camp of the Big Sun. It did not do to come too close to that. Many of his flock, and more of other flocks, had been punctured or burned by the far-striking missiles of that camp; so he had to keep the flock from drifting toward it, seeking every counter-flowing gust, and still avoid the squalls as much as possible. Dalehouse had told him that it would be difficult. But he had also said it was important. Charlie rotated his eye-patches over the horizon. No sign of the aircraft he had been told to expect. But he did see a vagrant drift of thistledown and spinner-silk moving across the hills below. A cross-current! He sang his flock together and vented gas. They followed, dropping to a level where the wind took them away from the rain, to a likely area of updraft. They followed well, everything considered. Expertly he guided them under the base of a fair-weather cumulus, and they rose with the drift. The song of the swarm became contented. It was at the top of these pillars of rising air that the best feeding was found: pollen and butterflyseed capsules, the small, soft creatures that filled the same ecological niche that insects did on Earth, dried salt particles from the wavelets of landlocked seas, even tinier things. A flock at feed was queer looking, every fin and frill extended to trap whatever touched it. It was also at risk, or once would have been. It was a favorite time for the ha'aye'i to knife in, slashing every bag they passed, and tearing the life out of victims before the helpless gaze of flockmates. Helpless no more! Charlie sang a boastful song of his great friend, Danny, who had given them the far-striking weapons that drove the ha'aye'i a hundred clouds away. Or sometimes did. Now each male and some of the females had the weapons in his own flock, and the ha'aye'i had come to recognize Charlie's swarm and avoid it. Although, in truth, it was no longer as tempting to predators as it once had been. So few left! Once there had been hundreds, now fewer than a score. There was still no aircraft on the horizon, nothing on the mesa upwind of the Camp of the Big Sun. Charlie relaxed, fed with his swarm, and as he ate, became more mellow. He led the flock in gentle songs of childhood and joy. There was a time when Charlie had been a tiny pip-sized pod, pumping mightily to bulge the creases out of his little gasbag, still tied to the ragged end of his sailing-ribbon and to the winds that bore it where they liked. Gusts blew. Air-to-air lightning spat all around him. Because he had no real control over his altitude, he was sometimes tossed up through the tops of towering convection clouds, the dull red sun hot on his tiny balloon, actual stars shining through the murky sky; sometimes so low that he brushed hills and fern-trees, and shelled or furred creatures clutched after him as he spun by. Eighty out of a hundred of his brood-mates died then, in some way or another. Ten more died soon as their drift-ribbons fell away, tasty hors-d'oeuvres for the ha'aye'i, or even for the proteinhungry adults of another chance-met flock. Or even their own. Only a few out of each hundred survived to reproduce. And then there were still the ha'aye'i. And the storms. And the clutching beasts from below. But still -- to be a balloonist! To soar and to sing! Above all, to share the chorused flock-lore that united them all, from the tiniest pod to the leaky old, slow giants that even the ha'aye'i scorned. Charlie's song was triumphant. and all the flock around him stopped their greedy gobbling to join in the harmony. Still his eye-patches rotated watchfully toward the mesa; but there was no sign of the airplane or of the New Friend he had been told would rise from the spot. And they were drifting with the cloud, away from the Camp of the Big Sun. Many of the flock were sated, softly singing their private courtesy-songs of thanksgiving. They were a Fine flock though, Charlie admitted, very few in number. He sang to them, "Stop feeding, stop feeding! We must go!" "Go where, go where?" grumbled a chorus of the slower and the hungrier ones, and an individual song sounded above the choir: Faintly: "I must eat more. I die." That was the old female, Blue-Rose Glow. Her bag had been seared when half the flock had been set aflame. "Not now, not now, "sang Charlie commandingly. "Follow!" And he sang the new song, the duty song he had learned from his friend Danny Dalehouse. It was no longer enough to float and sing and replenish hydrogen and breed. Not any more. Station must be kept and the mesa observed. And the Camp of the Big Sun must be avoided, and the ha'aye'i guarded against and the swarm kept together; so many imperatives, both the new and the old! And so he led them through their slow, bobbing dance with the winds. For a long time he led them , watching ceaselessly as he had promised. Even so, it was not he who first saw the thing. From far behind, old Blue-Rose Glow sang feebly, "There is a new Sky-Danger." "Catch up, catch up!" he commanded. "You sing poorly." It was not sung in unkindness but only because it was true. "Ileak," she apologized. "Nevertheless it is there, almost in reach of the Earth-Dangers, far away." He rotated his eye-patches and rose to another air-current. There it was. "I see the Sky-Danger," he sang, and the rest of the flock confirmed. It was not ha'aye'i. It was the mechanical thing from the camp of the Middle Sun, as he had been told. In it, he knew, was the Other Friend who had sometimes soared with Danny Dalehouse, and also the New Friend he had not yet seen. It was all as said by Danny Dalehouse. The biplane slunk in at treetop level and set down on the dry mesa, a dozen kilometers upwind of the Greasy camp. While the swarm watched, Kappelyushnikov and a female person emerged and began to fill a net of balloons out of tiny tanks. When the New Friend's cluster began to swell and she rose gently from the ground, the aircraft took off again, turned quickly and slipped back down the slope toward the distant ocean-lake. The New Friend rose into the prevailing poleward wind and drifted directly toward the Camp of the Big Sun. Charlie dared come no closer, but he saw her venting gas as she approached the camp. She tumbled into the underbrush somewhere nearby; and it was all as it had been foretold. "The thing is done," Charlie caroled triumphantly. "And what now?" asked the after the New Friend as she fell. "I will ask the air," he sang. His little insect-legs fumbled at the switch of the hard, shiny speaker-to-the-air Danny Dalehouse had given him. He sang a questioning greeting to his friend. He tried twice, listening between times as Dalehouse had taught them. There was no answer, only an unpleasant hissing song of static and distant storms. "We must go near the Camp of the Middle Sun," he announced. "The speaker-to-the-air cannot sing so far." His skilled eyes read the signs of the clouds and the fern-tops far below, seeking the currents he wanted. It was too bad that Dalehouse could so seldom soar with the flock these days, because of the hated ha'aye'i of his own kind, but Charlie knew that once they were in line of sight, the speaker-to-the-air would bring his song. "Follow!" he sang. He swarmed the flock around him. They dropped, all fourteen of them, through a fastmoving layer of stratus cloud, into the backflow near the surface. When they emerged, old Blue-Rose Glow was gone, the leaks in her bag finally too great to allow her to remain airborne. So was the young female called Shrill-Squeal, nowhere in sight, even her song no longer audible. By the time they approached the Camp of the Middle Sun and Charlie began to sing through the radio to Dalehouse, there were only twelve left in the flock.  Marge Menninger looked up as Kappelyushnikov came in from the orderly room, closing the flap to her private office behind him. "Any word?" she asked. "Danny has had radio from gasbag, yes. Your friend was seen to descend near Greasies, all in order." "How long ago?" "With gasbags, who can say? Perhaps some hours. Not long after I departed spy-drop scene." "All right. Thanks." After he left. Marge started to call the communications tent, then decided against it. If the Greasies radioed that they had rescued Tinka, blown helplessly off course, the communications clerk would let her know. And he hadn't. So the Greasies were playing it covert and slick, and what was Tinka up against in their camp? Had they figured out that she really wasn't there by accident? Could she-? Were they-? Wasn't it-? Questions multiplied themselves in Margie's mind endlessly, and there was no straightforward way of getting answers. You could get your ass lost in those swamps of contingencies and subjectives. That was not the way Marge Menninger ran her life. She made a decision. In one hour exactly she would have the comm clerk radio a query to the Greasies, and until then she would put it out of her mind; Meanwhile, lunch was fifty minutes away and what to use that time for? The fifteen notes she had made to herself on this morning's calendar had all been checked off. All current projects were on schedule, or close enough. Everyone had been assigned tasks. The first hectare of wheat was in the ground, sixteen different strains competing to see which would thrive best. The perimeter defenses were in order. Three turrets still sat on the beach, ready to be put where needed when she wanted to expand the perimeter, or establish another post. She looked at the #:I # map, two meters long and a meter high, that covered almost all of one wall of her office. That was something! It showed every feature within a kilometer of where she sat-seven creeks or rivers, a dozen hills, two capes, several bays. Grid references were not enough, they needed names. What better way to name them than to let individual members of the camp pick them? She would organize a drawing; each winner could name something, and that would give them something to do. She called in her temporary orderly and dictated a short memo for the bulletin board. "Check it with the communications section," she finished. "Make sure we list all the features worth naming." "Yes'm. Colonel? Sergeant Sweggert wants to see you. Says it's not urgent." Margie wrote Sweggert on her calendar. "I'll let you know." Then she put Sweggert out of her mind, too. She had not yet decided what to do about Sweggert. She had a wide variety of options, from laughing it off to court-martialing him for rape. Which she elected would depend a lot on how Sweggert conducted himself. So far he had had the smarts to keep a low profile. On the other hand, she thought, her authority to court-martial anybody for anything rested on the military chain of command, which extended up from her through the tachtran link to higher authority on Earth. And who was to say how long Earth would give a shit about backing her up? Or about whether the colony lived or died? The news from home was bad, so bad that she had not passed all of it on to the camp. The tachtran message acknowledging her shopping list had advised that it was touch and go whether she would get everything she had asked for. Requests for further supplies after that shipment were, quote, to be evaluated in terms of conditions at the time of receipt of requisition, unquote. It was what she had expected. But it was sobering. On her pad for the afternoon she made two notes: Medic-bank okay? Food-# mos. estimate firm? Stretch I yr w rationing? It was a damn nuisance that the agronomists all seemed to be Canadian! Margie needed some smart and private help-smart, because how they managed their crops was likely to be life and death for the colony, sensitive because she didn't want the colony to know that just yet. If she got everything on her shopping list, she would have plenty of seed stock. But who knew whether she had the ones that would grow best?Dismiss that thought, too. Forty minutes left. She unlocked the private drawer of her desk and lit a joint. Assume the shopping list all gets delivered. There's enough on it for pretty fair margin against most kinds of disasters, she thought, and there was no sense worrying until she had to. The requisition list included a good chunk of personal things for Margie herself: clothes, cosmetics, microfiche sewing patterns. With the patterns, there would be enough variety in styles to suit everyone in the camp, male or female, for a good long time, assuming they found some way of producing fabrics to make the patterns on. It would be nice to have some pretty clothes. She was already beginning to feel the absence of Sakowitz and Marks and Sparks, Sears and Two Guys. One day, maybe, she thought, drawing a deep hit. Not Sakowitz, no. But maybe a few boutiques. Maybe some of the people in the camp had sewing or tailoring skills, and maybe it was about time she started locating them. She flipped the calendar ahead a few pages and made a note on a virgin page. That Bulgarian prunt was the kind of girly -- girl who would like to sew, possibly even as well as Margie did herself; she had been pretty morose after her long walk in the countryside, but she did her work and might need something to occupy her mind. It didn't seem that she wanted a man for that purpose, at least she had thoroughly discouraged Guy Tree and Cappy and SweggertSweggert. "Jack, send the sergeant in," she called. "Yes'm. He's gone back to the perimeter, but I'll get him." GO As she leaned back, marshalling her thoughts about Sweggert, the handset buzzed and it was the communications clerk. "Colonel? I was just talking to the Greasies about Corporal Pellatinka." "I didn't tell you to ask them." "No'm. But I kept sending on her frequency, like you ordered, and their radioman cut in to ask if we had lost her. So I said she didn't answer. So they said they'd send out a party to look for her." Margie sat back and took a thoughtful drag on the cigarette. According to the balloonists, there was no way the Greasies couldn't have seen her come down. So now they were overtly lying.  Sergeant Sweggert shared a number of traits with Marge Menninger. to go to a lot of trouble to get things right, and then if he saw a chance for whatever it took to make them Tighter. When he perceived that moving the Number Three machine-gun emplacement two meters toward the lake would improve the field of fire, he moved it. Or his squad did. The fact that it took five hours of backbreaking work did not affect his decision. its tripod and swung it to check the field. "Fucking lousy," he told the crew, "but we'll leave it for now. Get that ammo restowed." He crouched behind the gun, swiveling it through full traverse. It was an act that gave him pleasure. As far as the shore of the lake on the extreme left and the beginning of the fern forest on the right, there was no way than any sizeable creature could approach without being a clear target for the gunner. The claymores and smoke bombs were emplaced and fused, and his command -- post detonating radio was keyed to each of them. The floodlights were in position, with quadruple redundancy. At any given moment only a quarter of them were lit, searching the entire area around the perimeter. Every hour that quarter went off, and the next quarter came on, so that any burned-out bulbs or wiring deficiencies would distribute themselves equally and could be fixed in the down time. In actual combat, of course, they would all be on. Most would be shot out, but not in time to let anyone cross that perimeter. Not alive. Although, he admitted to himself as he climbed out of the dome, the chances that anyone would try a straightforward frontal attack were very small. Maybe an attack from the sky. Maybe by long-range rocket fire. Maybe not at all. This whole fucking shootup was crazy, if you asked Sergeant Sweggert. What the fuck was there to fight about in this asshole place, without a bar or a town or even for God's sake a decent tree or field? If you had asked him, that was what he would have said, in total sincerity, but it would not have stopped him from fighting for it. The balloonists were still hanging around. Sweggert neither looked at them directly nor changed expression; it was none of the squad's business what he was thinking. But inside he was swearing. The colonel wouldn't have kept him waiting like this a w eek ago. If she was going to shaft him, what was she waiting for?... "Sarge." He looked up. "They're calling you from the orderly room." He turned idly, and saw the corporal waving. "Aggie, take over," he ordered. "If I come back and that ammo isn't restowed, it's all your asses." He strolled back toward the HQ tent and walked in. Marge Menninger was eating out of a messkit, reading from a small-screen viewer. She didn't look up. "The perimeter's looking good, Sweggert," she said. "Got that machine-gun back in place?" "Yes'm. Colonel? There's a bunch of gasbags around, and that one we been using is about used up. We'll be relieved in a couple of minutes. Can we get a fix from the new ones?' ' She put down her spoon and looked at him. After a moment, she said, "Just who do you mean by 'we,' soldier?" "Oh, no, ma'am!" Jesus, she was touchy! He knew he was close to trouble. "I don't mean nothing, ma'am, just that the detail's been working hard and they need a little break. We'll-they'll come out of it in an hour, and the relief'll be there anyway." She studied him for a moment. "That's four-oh, Sweggert, but only half the detail. Keep the rest sober." "Sure thing. Colonel. Thank you. Colonel." He got out of there as fast as he could. Shit, he should've been more careful, knowing how she felt and all. Not that she was all wrong. If he hadn't been drunk, he wouldn't have done it. But, shit! It was worth it. Remembering the way she had been, with a skin full of the balloonist mist, his groin grew heavy. Ill When he got back to the detail, he looked at them with some disapproval. Corporal Kirstianides was skinny and had sideburns all down her cheeks, but she was the best he had to pick from. "Aggie, take Peterson and four others, you're on duty till the relief shows up. Kris, you and the rest come along with me. We're gonna take ourselves a jizzum break. Anybody don't want to come, switch with somebody don't want to stay. Let's move it." The balloonists were out over the ocean-lake now, half a kilometer away and low. Sweggert marched his dozen troops across the camp to the empty tents at the end of the company street; he would do it in the open if he had to, but damned if he wouldn't take a little privacy when he could get it. The tethered balloonist, farther than ever from recuperating, had been moved there days since, along with the strobe light. Sweggert stopped, swearing. Nan Dimitrova and Dalehouse were talking to the balloonist, and only a few meters away the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, was complaining about something to Colonel Tree. Privacy, shit. But it didn't matter; he had Colonel Menninger's permission, and she was the one who counted. He retrieved the strobe and pointed it toward the hovering swarm. Predictably, Dalehouse butted in. "What do you think you're doing, Sweggert?" Sweggert took time to aim the strobe and flash it to bring them in before he answered. "Gonna have a little fun. The colonel said it was okay." "Hell she did! Anyway-" "Anyway," Sweggert interrupted. "why don't you go check with her if you don't believe me? Would you move a little, sir? You're getting between them and the light." Ana Dimitrova laid her hand on Dalehouse's arm to keep him from replying. "It is not fun for the balloonists, Sergeant Sweggert. To experience sexual climax is very painful and debilitating. As you can see, this one is seriously affected. It may die." "What a way to go, hey, Ana?" Sweggert grinned. "Take it up with the colonel-hey, Dalehouse! What are you doing?" Dalehouse had switched on his radio and was singing softly into it. Colonel Tree, beginning to pay attention, walked toward them, and Sweggert turned to him. "Colonel! We have Colonel Menninger's permission to get the loonies in for a fix, and this guy's telling them to screw off!" Tree stopped, with his hands clasped behind his back, and nodded gravely. "A dilemma," he said in his soft, child's voice. "It will be quite interesting to see what they do." What they were doing was spreading themselves all over the sky, some dropping lower to catch the onshore breeze, others hesitating. They were singing loudly and discordantly, and the sounds came distantly from the sky and tinnily from the radio in Dalehouse's hand. Sweggert stood rock-still, controlling the rage that was building up in him. Fucking Cong! When you had the CO's permission, that was all you were supposed to need! Why wouldn't Tree back him up! "Gimme that," he growled, reaching out for Dalehouse's radio. But Dalehouse's expression had changed. "Hold it," he snapped, and sang a quick phrase into the radio. The answer came back as a cascade of musical phrases; Dalehouse looked startled and Ana Dimitrova gasped, her hand to her lips. "Tree," he said, "according to Charlie, there's some Krinpit down the beach, and they're eating a couple of people." "But Krinpit do not eat human beings," objected Colonel Tree, and Sweggert chimed in: "There's nobody down there. Nobody's gone through the perimeter all day." Dalehouse repeated hisquestion into the radio and shrugged. "That's what he says. He could be wrong about the eating part, I guess-he doesn't have a very clear concept of Sweggert put down the strobe. "We better tell the colonel," he said. Colonel Tree said, "That's correct. You do so, Dalehouse. Sergeant, form your squad on the beach in thirty seconds, full combat gear. We're going to see what's happening."  Half an hour later Marge Menninger herself, with thirty armed grunts behind her, met the first party coming back along the beach. There were no casualties, or at least none from the Food Bloc, but they were carrying two people. One was in a sort of sling made from two jackets knotted together, the other on Sergeant Sweggert's shoulder, fireman-carry. They were both dead. When Sweggert put his burden down, it was obvious why he had been easy to cany. Both legs were missing, and so was part of his head. The other body was less mutilated, so that Marge Menninger recognized her at once. It was Tinka. Marge stood numbly while Sweggert made his report. No Krinpit in sight; they had got away, so far that they couldn't even be heard. Both people were dead when they got there, but recently; the bodies were still warm. For that matter, they were still warm now. And the man had had a packet in a waterproof wrapping inside his shirt. Margie accepted it and tore it open. Microfiches-scores of them. The man's ID card, which showed that he was the Indonesian Tinka had gone to contact. A pair of child-sized spectacles-clear glass, not optically ground; why? For that matter, how? Had they been caught as spies, and then somehow escaped? And how had they got the long distance from the Greasy camp to the beach where they died? By the time they got back to the base, she had an answer to at least part of the question, because Dalehouse reported the balloonists had spotted something that looked like the remains of a deflated rubber boat, farther down the beach. She swung the tiny glasses from their elastic band as she listened, nodding, taking in all of it as information to process, not quite ready to take in the information of Tinka's death as a pain to feel. She looked down at the glasses. They were now almost opaque. "That's interesting," she said, in a voice that was very nearly normal. They must be photo-sensitive glass. Like indoor-outdoor sunglasses." She glanced up at the sullen red coal of Rung overhead, "Only what in the world would anybody want with them on Jem?" Six kilometers down the shoreline from where he had slain the Poison Ghosts, Sham-igon paused in his flight to scratch out a shallow pit under a bluff. He needed to hide, because he needed to rest. Digging was always dangerous for a Krinpit because of the Ghosts Below. But here it was unlikely they would be near. Too close to the water; they did not like to risk their tunnels flooding. And the Many-Tree on the bluff above him was a good sign. The roots of the Many-Tree were distasteful to them. As he settled himself in, Sham-igon wondered briefly what had become of his co-belligerent, the Poison Ghost Dulla, He did not feel concern, as one might for a fellow being. He did not think of Dulla in that way. Dulla was a weapon, a tool, without "being"ness. After they had slain the Poison Ghosts Dulla called "Greasies" they had both fled, and of course Dulla had fled faster and farther. Sham-igon did not think of that as a betrayal. If he had been the nimble one and Dulla the slow-moving, he would certainly have done the same. Dulla's utility as a tool lay in his speed, and in the way he was able to speak words to other Poison Ghosts that caused them to hesitate, to be uncertain, while Sham-igon had time to come in upon them and kill. It was so very easy to kill Poison Ghosts! A. few slashes, a blow with the club-claw, it took no more than that. Sometimes they had weapons, and Sham-igon had learned to respect some of those weapons. But the two on the beach had had so little, a bright-sounding popgun whose little bullets bounced off his shell, a thing that squirted some sort of foul, stinging smell at him that made him feel queer and unpleasant for a moment, but did not slow him in the kill. Such as they he could kill with or without his tool, the Poison Ghost Dulla. He switched his carapace back and forth to wedge himself deeper in his pit and rested, his hearing receptors watchful toward the water, his feelers drilled deep into the soil to listen for vibrations from any approaching Ghosts Below. It was they he feared, more than any danger from the water or the beach. Of course, in normal circumstances an adult Krinpit in shell was a match for a dozen of the Ghosts Below-as long as he could stay on the surface. Or at least in sound of it. In the open. Ghosts Below seemed deaf, running almost at random. But these were not normal circumstances. Sham-igon was not only weary, he felt sick. He felt irritable, tense, bloated-ready, he would have said to his he-wife (but Cheee-pruit was months dead, his carapace dry), to stridulate and jump out of his shell. But it was not the right time for that. He was not due for many months yet, so it couldn't be normal pre-nioult tension. Abruptly his sphincter loosened. He regurgitated everything he had eaten in a great flood, meat of deafworm, scraps of chitin of crabrat, half-digested fruits and fungi and leaves. Vomiting left him weak but calm. After resting for a moment, he covered the mess over, and then methodically began to clean his shell. No doubt the Poison Ghosts were taking revenge for being killed on the beach. It had to be their scraps of flesh still caught in Sham-igon's chelae that were making him ill. That-and the inner sickness that had claimed him when the Poison Ghosts first came to his city, and began the remorseless chain of circumstance that had taken all joy from his life. Krinpit did not cry. They had no tear-ducts; they had no eyes to have tear-ducts in. They did have the emotion of sorrow, and no culture-driven tabus against expressing it in their own way. That way was stillness. A quiet Krinpit-or as close to quiet as a Krinpit could get-was a weeping Krinpit. For most of an hour, once he had polished the last dried particle of alien blood off his tympanum. Sham-igon was nearly soundless; a rasp of claw against carapace, an occasional despairing moan, little else. Unbidden, sounds of happier times echoed in his mind. He heard Cheee-pruitt again, and the little female-what was her name?-whom they had impregnated, and who bore their young. She had been a dulcet creature. She had had almost a personality of her own, along with the bittersweet appeal of any mated female, her young growing and eating inside her until too much was destroyed and she died. The brood polished her carapace clean and emerged to the loud, exciting world of their wife-father's back. But everything was changed now. It was all the fault of the Poison Ghosts! Ever since the first of them had arrived and Cheee-pruitt, dear, lost Cheee-pruitt, had had the unwisdom to try to eat it, Sham-igon's world had fallen apart. Not just Cheee-pruitt, all of it. The Krinpit he had mobilized against the Poison Ghosts Dulla called Greasies had been punished severely. His own village-mates had been attacked from the air in reprisal, and so many of them dead. And how many had he Hardly any. The two on the beach, the handful that he and Dulla had surprised at the outpost-not enough! And all of Dulia's plans had come to little: the nearest Krinpit village to the Fats had wavered and wobbled, promised to join in an attack and withdrawn the promise; and meanwhile all he and Dulla could do was skulk around like crabrats, looking for strays to attack and finding none. Until the two came out of their sinking vesselThere was a sound from the water. Sham-igon froze.It was not possible for him to be wholly silent while he breathed at all, but he did his best. He listened out of his shallow cave, and heard a small, almost inaudible blurred echo from the water. A coracle. And in it what seemed to be a Poison Ghost. Another to kill? It was approaching. Sham-igon thrust himself out of the cave and reared up to defend himself; and then he heard his own name shouted across the beach: "Sham-igon!" And then those barbarous sounds that were the name of his mistrusted ally, or his traced foe: He scuttled across the sand, half to greet Dulla, half ready to kill, as Dulla yelled and pleaded, "Hurry! The Fats will be searching this whole coast, we must get out!"  With Sham-igon aboard, the coracle rode very low in the water. It could not easily sink. Its cellular shell entrapped too much air for that. But it could swamp. Crossing Broad Water it often did, and then both of them splashed and bailed and kept a watchful eye or ear for Ghosts Above until they could get under weigh again. The little sail helped them when the wind blew fair; but there was no keel. When the wind shifted, the sail had to come down and they had to paddle. It seemed to take forever; and Sham-igon felt increasingly ill; and at every stroke or splash the grim recriminations continued: "But for you, my he-wife would still be alive." "You are foolish, Sham-igon. He tried to kill us, it is not our fault he died of it." "And my village was attacked, and another village destroyed entirely, and I myself am ill." "Speak of something else, Sham-igon. Speak of the promises your Krinpit made to join in the attack on the Fats, and how they broke them." "I will speak of my sorrow and my anger, Ahmed Dulla." "Then speak also of mine! We too have suffered in fighting with you against the common enemy." "Suffered." "Yes, suffered! Before my radio was destroyed-by you, Sham-igon, by your clumsiness !-I could hear no voice from my camp. They may be dead, all of them!" "How many, Ahmed Dulla?" "A dozen or more!" "A dozen or more of you have then died. Of us, how many? Of persons, two hundred. Of females, forty. Of backlings and infants-" But it was not until they had crossed Broad Water and Sharn-igon heard the silence from his city that he perceived the immensity of the tragedy. There was no originated sound! There were only echoes, and what echoes! Always before, in crossing Broad Water, the city had presented a bustling, beautiful sound. Not this time. He heard nothing. Nothing! No drone of immature males at the waterfront, shredding the fish catch. No songs from the mold-eaters on the Great White Way. No hammering of stakes to build new palisades on the made land on the point. He heard the echo of his own sounds faintly returning to him, and recognized the shadowy outline of the mooring rocks, a few sheds, one or two boats, some structures half destroyed, a litter of empty carapaces. Nothing else. The city was dead. The Poison Ghost, Dulla, chattered worriedly to him, and Sharn-igon made out the words: "Another attack! The place is empty. The Greasies must have come back to finish the job." He could not reply. Stillness overcame him, a great, mourning silence so deep that even the Poison Ghost turned toward him in wonder. "Are you ill? What is happening?" With great effort Sharn-igon scratched the words out on his tympanum. "You have killed my city and all my back-jnates." "We? Certainly not! It could not have been the People's Republics, we have not the strength any more. It must have been the Greasies." "Against whom you vowed to protect us!" roared Sham-igon. He rose on hind legs to tower over Dulla, and the Poison Ghost cringed in fear. But Sham-igon did not attack. He threw himself forward, out of the coracle, with a broad splat that sent the waves dancing. The water was shallow here. Sham-igon managed to keep some of his hind feet on the oozy bottom, while enough of his breathing pores were above the surface to keep him from drowning. He charged up the shoreline, scattering the littered water in a V of foam. The tragedy made him still again, at every step and at each fresh echo. Dead! All dead. The streets empty, except for abandoned carapaces, already dry. The shops untended. The homes deserted. Not a living male, not a female, not even any scrambling, chittering young. Dulla waded through the stink of dead and floating marine animals, towing the coracle and staring about it. "What a horror!" he exclaimed. "We are brothers now more than ever, Sham-igon." "All of my brothers are dead." "What? Well, yes. But we must be as brothers, to take revenge! We must be allied against the Greasies and the Fats." Sharn-igon reared up, trapping him against the wall of a mined shed. "I now need new allies, Ahmed Dulla," he ground out, falling upon him. In the last moment Dulla saw what was to happen and tried to escape. But it was too late; his quickness was not enough when he dodged from the snatching claws only to take the full force of the murderous club of chitin that stove his head in. When he was quite sure Dulla was dead, Sham-igon staggered away, blundering through the dried shells that had once been friends, to rest creakily against the wall of a shop he had once known. He took little satisfaction in the death of one more Poison Ghost. He did not even any longer mourn for the death of his city. A nearer pain touched him. His joints were aching, his body felt bloated, his carapace seemed to be sundering at the seams. It was not his time. But there was no doubt about it. Alone in the open tomb that had once been his home, with no one to care for him while he was helpless, he was beginning to moult. Oh one-thirty hours. Major Santangelo, along with the pilot-engineer who had brought in the third ship. "Some good news, Margie. There's a coal outcropping in the Bad Hills, two kilometers up. Plus we can bum wood and biomass, and Richy here says we can make a steam boiler with plates from one of the landing craft. If your turbine arrives, that means we can drive the generator up to full capacity, fifty kilowatts, without using up our fuel reserves." "When?" Santangelo looked at the engineer. "Ten days? Call it two weeks." "Call it one week," Margie snapped. "What about alcohol?" "Well, Morrissey's got a kind of a yeast-something like a yeastanyway, he's getting fermentation. Should be putting the first batch through the solar still tomorrow. You can probably smell it." "Saint, I can taste it. I need that alcohol to stretch out the airplane fuel!" "I'll goose him along," Santangelo promised. "Do it," said Margie. When they were gone, she picked up the handset and called the radio shack. "Any "No, ma'am. They're still in orbit, figuring a minimum-energy descent." She hung up. At least the resupply ship was in orbit around Jem, not light-years away. But that last little step was a killer. The captain had radioed that his maneuvering reserve was low and he was waiting for the most favorable approach. That might be days! Worse than that. If the Cape had launched them without plenty of reserve, that meant things were seriously wrong at the Cape. Even wronger than the coded tachtrans from Earth had indicated, and that was wrong enough. She looked at her watch. Oh one forty-five. "Send in Dr. Arkashvili," she called, and the medic came in on cue, bearing a cup of steaming black coffee. "Medical supplies, Margie. But a little more sleep would do you more good." Marge sniffed the aluminum cup rapturously and took a scalding sip. "I wish they'd land," she said fretfully. Among the goodies on her shopping list were coffee beans, or seeds, or whatever it took to try to grow coffee for themselves. Otherwise the next couple of years, anyway, might be coffee-free. Of course, the Greasies probably had some growing already, to make that vile stuff they handed out in the little brass pots, but they weren't likely to give any away. They weren't giving anything away now, not even information over the radio; and the Peeps simply were not answering at all. At least the camp was gratifyingly healthy, according to the medic's report. The anti-allergens were standing up well, and there was nothing else in the Jemman environment to make a human being sick. A few headaches, probably from the climate and from the switch to a #-hour day; some dentistry; an appendix that needed watching; a request for a vasectomy"No," said Margie sharply. "Don't do any vasectomies. Or laparoscopies, either." The doctor looked thoughtful. "You're going to have some knocked-up personnel." "You're supposed to be able to handle that, right? Anyway, give them the pill, diaphragms, condoms-anything reversible or tempoand I can always take it out if I want to have a baby." "Which you might?" "Which all of us females may damn well have to, Cheech. That's an order: Everybody capable of breeding stays capable. How's the baby bank?" "Coming along fine. I've got twenty-eight ova in cryonic hold, and about a hundred sperm samples." "Good, Cheech, but not good enough. I want a hundred per cent compliance with that. If anything happens to anybody, I don't want his genes lost. Or hers. They don't take up much space, do they? Then I want, let's say, four samples from each, and-what are you grinning about?" The medic said, "Well, it's just that a couple of the ova turned out to be pre-fertilized. They're fine. They'll keep in the deep-freeze indefinitely, but whenever you want them re-implanted, we won't have to go to the bother of getting them started." "Hum."' Margie scratched thoughtfully. "I'm almost sorry you took the sample; we could start having kids any time now. Who were they? Common, Cheech, none of this medical confidentiality; I'm your commanding officer." "Well, one was Ana Dimitrova." "No shit! Whose kid?" "You can ask her if you want to. I didn't." Marge shook her head wonderingly. "I would have guessed her about last," she said. "And the other one? Now, wait a minute! It couldn't from getting fertilized, it only prevents it taking root and developing." Margie sat back and stared at the doctor. "I'll be damned," she said.  Nguyen Dao Tree was ten minutes late for his oh-two-hundred appointment, and arrived sleepy-eyed and irritable. "This twenty-four-hour day of yours is not comfortable, Margie," he complained. "You're not the one to bitch, Guy. I took the midnight-to-eight myself. If you'd spend your sleeping time sleeping instead of tomcatting around with every woman in the camp-" "As to that, Marjorie," he said, "I much preferred when you and I slept on the same schedule." "Yeah. Well. Maybe we'll have to do something about that, Guy, but right now we're late for inspection." She swallowed the last of her coffee, now cold but still delicious, and led the way. Complaints aside, the three-shift day was working well. On the plus side, the perimeter was well guarded, the hectarage under cultivation was growing by nearly two thousand square meters every day, the each-one-teach-one training schedule Santangelo had set up so that the skills of the community were shared among several persons (what if Chiche Arkashvili died? Or their one and only surviving agronomist?) was on track. On the minus, aerial surveillance showed large numbers of Krinpit roaming around the woods, coffee was not the only food item to be running low and the resupply ship still could not give a firm landing time. Margie allowed one hour of each day for her inspection, and she used every minute of it. No white-glove chickenshit. The inspection was rough and dirty; if everybody was doing their job and the jobs were being done, that was it. Her Bastogne grandfather had not cared if the troops were shaved, only if they could fight. And Margie had learned the skills of a fortress under siege. That was what they were. No one. had attacked the perimeter, not even a wandering Krinpit. But they were isolated, in a world of enemies. From spy satellites and balloonists, from the breaking of codes and from what little could be gleaned from their infrequent radio contacts, above all from the contents of the Indonesian's pouch, Margie had formed a pretty good idea of what the Greasies were up to. Or had been up to, a few weeks earlier. They had occupied the Peeps' camp, they had requisitioned quantities and varieties of personnel and equipment that made her drool. Even her letter to Santa Claus (that might or might not be hanging in orbit, waiting to come down her chimney) had not been so greedy. They had subdued the local autochthones, apKrinpit and shooting down any balloonist who came near. Their borrowers they seemed to have tamed. And were using them for minerals exploration, because it seemed the Greasies had perched themselves on a Kuwait of oil and a Scranton of other fossil fuels. They had devised an enzyme, or possibly it was a hormone-the information had been unclear-which took Krinpit out of action as well as #-D had dried up the jungles of Vietnam, by causing them to moult. They had acquired something from their Creepies that let them make building materials out of dirt, as the burrowers themselves hardened the interior surfaces of their tunnels. They hadChrist, what had they not done! If only her father had listened to her and given her the support she demanded, how gladly and competently she could have done the same! Not that she had done badly. But for Marge Menninger there was no such thing as second best, and the Greasies at that moment controlled the entire planet. Barring the dozen hectares her colony sat on, it was all theirs. Their aircraft roamed it at will, so the spy satellites said. They had three separate colonies now, counting the one that had once belonged to the probably no longer surviving Peeps. And apart from the rare occasions when she dared send Kappelyushnikov on a quick survey flight (what would she do if there were some unexplained "accident" to her one and only aircraft?), she was blind except for what the satellites and the few living balloonists could tell. She had even grounded Danny Dalehouse. Not only because of the risk to him-but that was a reason in itself, she admitted privately; she did not want him killed -- but because the electricity that made his hydrogen was better used for floodlights, to protect the camp and make the crops grow. Also she had apprenticed him to the agronomist, along with Morrissey and the Bulgarian girl-wait a minute, she thought to herself; Dalehouse and Dimitrova? Maybe so. Probably not. They had been friendly, but not that friendly. But then who? For that matter, she thought, looking at Guy Tree as he chattered away about contingency plans in the event of a major Krinpit attack, who was the father of her own sort-of child? Dalehouse? Tree? That son of a bitch Sweggert, Nvith his cute little tricks? They were the most likely candidates, but which? In other times, one part of Marge Menninger would have contemplated with sardonic amusement that other part of Marge Menninger which really, dammit!, wanted to know. At present she had no room for that sort of amusement in her mind. The thought of mentioning to Nguyen Tree that the two of them might be in the process of becoming somewhat delayed parents crossed her mind just long enough to dismiss it. It promised some good comedy, but it also promised complications she did not want to handle. First things first. "Are there any archers in the camp?" she asked. Tree stopped in the middle of explaining his proposals for arming a couple of canoes. "What?" "People who know how to shoot a bow and arrow, damn it. We must have some. I'd like to organize a contest, part of the sports program." "Very likely so, Marjorie. I don't believe there are any bows and arrows, however." "If they know how to shoot them, they know how to make them, don't they? Or anyway it'll be in the microfiches. Get started on that, please, Guy. We'll give prizes. Coffee, cigarettes. I'll donate a bottle of Scotch." The thought that had crossed her mind as he spoke of how he planned to mount a light machine-gun in a canoe was that the supplies of ammunition for the guns would not last forever either, but she wasn't ready to say that even to her second-incommand. Tree looked puzzled, but paused to make a note in his book. "It would be a useful skill for hunting, I suppose." Margie nodded without replying. Hunting what? Every animal they had seen on the surface of the planet was well enough armored to laugh off any home-made bow-a conspicuous blunder on the part of evolution in this place, she was convinced. But she let it go. As they were inspecting the power plant, a messenger from the communications shack trotted up. "Ship's on its way in, Colonel," she reported, panting. "They've already retrofired. We ought to see them in a couple of minutes." "Thank God," said Margie. "Put it on the P. A. Guy, get twenty grunts for unloading. Tell Major Arkashvili to stand by in case they land rough." They didn't land rough. But they didn't land right, either. The drogue chute deployed handsomely, the craft came swinging down on its cluster of three, they jettisoned on schedule and it came in on its rockets. But it never made it to the beach where the others had landed. It came in almost a kilometer short and dropped into the jungle and out of sight. (To be Continued) A Little Girl's Spring Day in Moderan by David Bunch It was in rain-time springtime that Little Sister danced across the planned-greening yards, one of her tiny hands lumped into a fist as though she concealed great treasure. She stopped outside his bubble dom's orange-screaming door that was marked with the flying FW in fresh-peas green, the alphabet's winged sixth and twenty-third letters designating "formula worker." "normal" voice that was often these days apt to be near-hysterical, "come see what came in the mail tube. TOI ordered out of an old Learner's Catalog! And now it says, "See With the hand that was not a fist she waved; the waving contained a green sheet that had yellow and purple and pink and blue and red and orange writing on it in a kind of rainbow show, or in the Old 'Days it would have been so designated. Probably. He moved like a man stung by a sudden pang in the head; he lurched and stared, still sitting in his formula worker's hip-snug, strapped in. And he peered carefully and long out through the tube of his Outer Scan to make sure the voice was really that of Little Sister and not some Enemy come disguised. After a good scanning while and after a goodly number of voice-a-grams had been analyzed and declared authentic, without-doubt Little Sister, he thumbed the switch that would alert Control a thousand miles away that he wanted loose from his chair bands. After a while of authenticating and negotiating over formula worker's long-corn. Control gave the go-ahead and he came loose from the metal straps of that place where he sat at work. Control windings unwinding, harsh restrainers metal-mumbling along the floor, free he lurched up at last. Tall and tottery he stood for a bit, a whit wild-headed and uncertain just for a while, for it had been more than a month now since he had been free of the bands. He shook his head to clear it and make peace with the strange height he was suddenly in and he called on all the reserves of his pride as a vaunted FW to keep him now from the dark disgrace of suddenly tumbling down. His thoughts sloshed furiously in the metal brain pans and went back a long way as he sought to rearrange and pattern into sense his unaccustomed feeling at the voice that had just said, "Daddy," and had also said, "See Daddy or Mother." Was the chance worth it? Could he trust his analyses? Could he even trust the Outer Scan to accurately gather the impressions for the analyses? What if his eyes were just that nth part "on the blink" today for out-viewing, after all that close work in? But everything said yes, this really is Little Sister outside your door. And yes, he did want to believe them. But oh, the world is such a place of tricks now. What if it wasn't Little Sister, but a walking doll bomb come made-up, disguised, a calamity device designed to blow him at a handshaker a hello, to high shrieks and all winds-and-skies and thus weaken Control by one Formula Worker less? Who would want to? Oh, anyone who was against Control would want to. And there are always pick the Beautiful Precision to pieces and set the imprecision of choices loose in the world, in the name of Freedom. Boooo brrrrrrkkkkkk blaaahhh boooo. And he belonged to Control. He was Control ! and Control was he! one and one and always one, bonded in inseparable union for greater for greater for greater forIt boggled; the metal brain pans died to a stop for an instant; he moved, not knowing why, on some older far-back Plan. He whistled the signal at his orange-screaming door; the door, never disobeying the signal, seemed eaten by the wall it slid into, and the proud flying FW was gone. He pressed his button for a voice. stood as though frozen to the floor. He looked out and down at her from the exaggerated and very skinny height of his metaled feet and legs. Then he took five agonizingly slow and clanking steps toward his door. Exactly at the edge of his door he drew himself up. He planted himself in all his flying-FW dignity-drawn up and planted, yes! Next he did the "toeing of the line." Exactly to the edge, but no more. No Formula Worker, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances (called in the jargon of Control an E.O.C.) ever recrossed the edge of his door. Once in was IN. It was all too fraught with leaving, and besides, where would they go? Out to meet a girl FC (Formula Checker) in some mad rendezvous of clanking hot metaled sex and randy sloshing brain pans crying needed them too badly; only an E.O.C. could break them out past their door. "A thousand-" he started to explode, some older far-back set of values nudging him, and then he thought, why, this is Little Sister, and this is spring. Forgetting for a little the iron urgency of his formula, he said, pressing the right button for "general small talk with close relative" on his voice box phfltiggeephflaggee, "What have you there, Little Sister, what have you got?" She opened her fist-squeezed hand to reveal two ancient seeds that looked like pumpkin seeds, and she said, "Really now! Glad you asked. According to the Programs, I've got Nature's Packaged Life. As it used to be. And they showed a picture, like two big suns on the ground. And they claimed these two little teensy tiny things once could cause those two big giant things to come out and instructions right. And tended everyAnd they said something about sun-sunlight. Do you think so? Whattya think, Daddy? Whattya He cleared his throat and, deep out of gullet darkness, he spit up a tiny fleck of gold (his throat had been lined thus against cancer one year ago) and he moved his two metal feet just slightly at the "toeing of the line," but still toeing, ah yes. And he wanted so much to run back to the safe-and-known of his hip-snuggle chair, and prisoner bands and the cool calm programming into the formula, to help Control, to die-or-die for State. But Little Sister was at him and he knew it might not be easy. Little Sister was just past five, oh sure, but what if she, forgetting all the training of the Programs, should revert to that true age and start up her machine-gun questioning: "Whattya think, Daddy? whattya think, Daddy? whattya think?" while she danced in great expectancy and demanded to be informed. Oh God. She might even start her patented fit-dance, where she shrieked and fell to the ground and kicked. He remembered. Now, oh now, he needed her mother whole, instead of that female jig Mother had become, worked all in metal and plastic in all the replacable places, with the giant star-diamond rings on those fabulous removable fingers and the blue almost-all-replaced eyes staring, now always staring, like two very small fuzzy full moons out of a green settling fog while she had those long daily rubs, oh, every day! with the plastic man. "Why don't you just go to your mother?" he said. "It's more a little girl's place in the spring to question her mother." He warmed to the inspiration, to the idea of "getting out of it." "Just drop by Little Brother's place and both of you then run over to Mother's place and see what you can get started. See if she'll give you a little time from old Jon. Find out if her phfluggee-phflaggee' s still working. Or is it all rubs now, with Mother?" He hated himself for this, this slicing underhanded attack on Mother and her plastic boy friend. He had no right to do this, really, he a proud Formula Worker for the State and surely above such shabby cheap caring and flesh-jealousy concern as to whether or not Mother, or even the most beautiful woman in the world, was rubbed. "Going to Mother's a real bummer now-no good," Little Sister said. "And taking Little Brother with me is not the least bit of help in this world. They're both too far out, if you ask me. Mother's always on the bed for a rub and a bounce, and Little Brother's either blasting off in his little Universe-Scoot sports space rocket, or getting ready for launch. Just play, you know, but it takes up his time; hmmph! space probes are his whole entire life." She paused now and sized him with those hardhard eyes she had, and he wondered how she would hit and where, knowing hit she would."Remember, helped me at Xmas? About my tree star? That fell?When they let you you got mad and threatened to castrate Santa Claus. What's castrate?He ignored everything but his own terrible aching dread now. He could not help it; he had to ask, and the words from his trembling phfluggee-phflaggee came on almost self-propelled and hit out like space probes; "Have you-did you ever-oh, could you tell me. Little Sister-about Mother and-?" "Sure can. And it's not just rubs, and don't you ever think it!" Little Sister cocked her head and looked at her daddy in a very sly-josh way. I think this manner of looking would prompt just about anyone to wonder just how far this little missy's knowledge had traveled already along the road of the facts of life, packaged or otherwise. And he suddenly remembered that the Programs had probably told her all already about "how it used to be" in their supposedly her ready for "how it was to be." But sometimes it all doesn't work as planned with little girls. Just as now, some "communication gone astray" in the Programs, probably, was what had prompted Little Sister to bootleg this order for pumpkin seed to that criminal seed house over the line in Olderan. Unaccountably now, he found himself wishing it were sunflower seed. He had once loved those big "suns," some the size of dinner plates, rioting in the hell-hot simmering fields of high summer across a great mid western land. rible thud in his thoughts. Cold and cold it took him and cold and cold he asked from the hurts that are not to be described: "What What her-besidesBesides-Besides-rubs?" "He gouges her every once in awhile, sorta hard, with his little old short fat stick he's got on him that "How should I know!? Sometimes they get stuck together. Because she wants him to, I guess. And because she wants him to want to, I guess, and he certainly does, I guess, hee hee huk." He looked at his little daughter laughing there. He wanted to run. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tear himself to pieces. He wanted to throttle her. He wanted to lash out at everything. He couldn't talk. His phfluggee-phflaggee refused to do its job. He pressed the button marked "Oh Daddy, pipe down, shut that thing off-it's just fun. Mama-boyfriend fun. And whatever they're doing, it sure looks humpy-good to me. I stand there and laugh and laugh. I like to watch 'em, though, whenever I can, through this secret peep I've got. And when they get going good, I just jump around in sight and yell, 'Hi! Mama! Mama! hi ! old Plastic Guy ! you old pot. ' And you should see how they scramble to sit back in shape and pose natural! You'd probably have to press your Ho-Ho button on that silly thing you've got there and die laughin'. But, according to the Programs, it's not supposed to be anything to hide and be ashamed of. Just good old hotsy-totsy fun between two consenThe gold came on up in his aching throat-fleck after fleck after fleck now and fell to the floor, sounding like, in the Old Times, rain-pats as he gasped. He just looked at Little Sister, expanda-vision tuned to Horror-Gaze Gaze-on, He couldn't speak a sound. She seemed at a great distance. He waved to her with his hand that had all gone tin and his arm that was like a ton. She waved back. He screamed with his button screamer for a full fifteen seconds, for it seemed that might help some, some noise, some manifestation of outrage. "I don't think it's what it oughta be at all," Little Sister said flatly, when the button screaming had subsided. "Too much of a racket. Since Mother's mostly tin and old Plasto-Jon's mostly plastic, they make an awful lot of commotion going after it the way they do jug-u-boom splat splat rattle rattle shake-a-shake rumple rumple ragh-a-ragh-a-ragh-a-ragh ohhhhhhh ummmmmmm . " (Little Sister went jerky-jumpy and did little-girl bumps and grinds to illustrate her sounds.) "And they really breathe hard sometimes, both of them, with first, every stitch, just before they start-nylons and nasties tossed all over! Also his. They sorta undo each other. Otherwise they'd get too hot. Probably. Whattya think, Daddy? Whattya think. Daddy? Whattya think? He fell forward. Or more, he just crumpled to a heap on his Formula Hut floor and became right before her eyes a very sad pile of quite expensive "replacement" metal and flesh-strip in a swoon. "Daddy's sick!" she said, mumbling worriedly to herself and the whirring emptiness around her. "I wonder why Daddy's sick? I wonder what I should do? Oh well-" She eyed him with a little girl's real love for her daddy for a couple of seconds or so and she decided that he would probably eventually be O K. on his own, or, if not, the State could just melt him up and start over as she had seen it done in the Programs. So why was she standing around, and who cared how it turned out anyway? He sure as heck wasn't any help to her right now, and never had been, really. Neither had Mother. And Little Brotherbrrrkkk boooooo-b'dd news all the way. So she took off, running as hard as she could across the planned-greening yards, all up with the metal grass now after Seasons finally had set the wheels right to put old winter on the skids and under on the giant yard-sheet Control rolls, all over Moderan. But she still didn't know how in the world she was going to find some dirt, and sneak it, to grow those "punkins." She did know, though, one thing: Daddy had certainly been as useless as usual in helping her solve a problem.David Bunch Books and Magazines for big # catalog. Collections also purchased. Robert Madle. # Bestor Drive. Rockville. Md. #. S.F.  Comics. #-pg. S.F. List #. #pg. Comics List #c. Both #. Send to Brite Star, co Dave L. Rigdon. # Velma Dr., Greenville. Mich. #. #-page catalog of books, periodicals, tapes and other information about the future. World Future Society. Dept. ER. # St. Elmo Ave., Washington, D C. #. son. #. "He opened his eyes to limitless depth, star-speckled, falling away from him forever..."Lorien House. P.O. Box #. Black Mountain. N C... #. # Greenwood Lane. Lanham. Md... #. science fiction book, send # to Spectrum Publishing, # Siskivou. Dept G., Santa Rosa. Calif. #. venture Magazines # or older. R. Robinson. # Carriage Rd... Kensington. Md. #. 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I agree to the Club Plan as described in this ad, will take # more books at regular low Club prices during the coming year, and may resign any time ture readers.  Order not valid without signature. If under #, parent must sign.  The Science Fiction Book Club olfers its own complete I hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to fit special presses and save members even more. Members I accepted m U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian members will be serviced from Toronto. Oder slightly dilferent in Canada. #SI # What if? What if God is a computer? (##) What if you could build an elevator to the stars? (##) What if a Thread could devastate a planet? (##) What if time goes mad tomorrow? (##) What if you had to plan the survival of galactic civilization? (##) What if? Why notstimulate your imagination with the world's finest speculative fiction? Why no Take # Science Fiction Bestsellers for # #I The Foundation Trilogy. By Isaac Asimov. The ends of the galaxy revert to barbarism. An SF classic. Comb. pub. ed. # # Han Solo at Stars' End. By Brian Daley. That intrepid interstellar smuggler, Han Solo, and his furry pal Chewbacca are back! Pub. ed. # # The Best Science Fiction of the Year ##. Terry Carr, ed. A dozen stories from the past year by Varley, Ellison, Vinge, other favorites. Special edition. # The Avatar. By Poul Anderson. Daring men and women brave the unknown potentials of an alien transport machine -- and discover more than expected! Pub. ed. # # The Hugo Winners, Vol. I  II. Giant #-in-I volume of # award-winning stories. # to #. Asimov introduces each. Pub. ed. # # Medusa's Children. By Bob Shaw. Vicious squid-like creatures threaten the existence of humans living on a planet of water. Pub. ed. # # The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You. By Harry Harrison. The adventures of Slippery Jim diGriz as he sets oui to save the universe. Special edition. #. The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. Two glorious volumes contain: Nine Princes in Amber; The Guns of Avalon; Sign of the Unicorn; The Hand of Oberon; The Courts of Chaos. Comb. pub. ed. # # Stardance. By Spider and Jeanne Robinson. A dancer's art opens the way to communication with aliens. Pub. ed. # # The Fountains of Paradise. By Arthur C. Clarke. Important new novel by one of the superstars of science fiction. Pub. ed.  # # Titan. By John Varley. When a ship is snatched from space, the crew finds itself in an alien world -- inside another spaceship! Explicit sexual content may be offensive to some. Pub. ed. # See previous page for more to choose from.  An Exciting New Illustrated Series Science by Steve North By Steven Utley  Howard Waldrop by Frederik Pohl Editorial Oh, No! They've Changed It! v eauxy Si h I)i-i Virth U st. .-n L lli- f W,illriii In I (.'(l.MiLl'i.hl told you that terrorists broke into editorial offices of Galaxy and demanded that we enlarge the magazine, radically alter the page design, and add more graphics and visual materials? Won't buy it, huh? I was afraid of that. Okay, I admit it. The new management of Galaxy has been tinkering with the design and content of a thirty-year-old publication. I didn't want to admit it at first because the overwhelming reaction of regular readers to any change in their magazine is bound to be negative. I guess this is the place for me to explain what is going on here. To those of you who w'ere very attached to the digest size, and especially to those of you facing the prospect of building new bookshelves just to hold your copies of Galaxy. I offer my apologies. But I want to point out that it's time to bid the digest-sized science-fiction magazine good-bye. It is no longer necessary. Science fiction is respectable now and you don't have to hide your magazine inside a library book to read it. A larger magazine has a better chance of attracting the notice of the casual reader when it goes out for sale. If we can get more casual readers in here, we might entice some to stay for a while and become serious readers, thus contributing to the health of science fiction in general and Galaxy in particular. As a matter of fact, you will notice as you page through the new Galaxy that most of the changes are there for attracting new readers. This doesn't mean that we are going to change it from a special interest publication to a mass consumer item. We think we have found design and editorial concepts which will open Galaxy up to a wider readership and still preserve the special interest elements which we all know and love. Remember the Galaxy cover design from a generation ago? They used to call it the "inverted L." We are using a cover design which is very similar to the old inverted L. which we have always regarded as a classy design. We have also brought back the typeface used in the original Galaxy logo from thirty years ago. In this issue you will also find an advertisement written by Galaxy's famous first editor, H.L. Gold. Thirty years later, it reads not so much like an advertisement as an editorial comment. You can trust us to follow that commitment. Not all of our changes look to Galaxy's golden past, however. Let me enumerate the things we are doing which are brand new (not just for Galaxy, but in some cases for science fiction publishing as a whole). Change Number One: The Modules. Readers generally fall into one of two groups; dippers and diggers. Dippers page through a magazine and pick out things that interest them, reading here and there as they feel like it. Diggers get hold of an article and read it right through to the very end, sometimes demanding footnotes and suggestions for additional reading. Every magazine editor faces the basic problem of catering to both the dippers and the diggers, the classic problem of supplying both substance and variety. We have a brand new approach to this problem: reading modules. Each issue of Galaxy has two feature articles (one on scienee and one about science fiction) and six to ten modules. The modules are short items and each one is Contents Volume #, Number I by Steve North # Personal computing has been in your future for some time now. Here's what it will mean when it finally arrives. Movers and Shakers # A man who is making the microcomputer industry grow up. by Ed Teja # The car of the future might take as much direction from its computer as from its driver. Words # The language of computing and how to use it. Careers # Get yourself ready to grow with the personal computer industry'. by Eric Blair # Galaxy takes a look at tomorrow's computer-controlled, voice actuated entertainment systems -- and what to expect next. by Ed Teja # Game playing eads to a lot of solutions to real-' orid pr-irjeirs -- it's also fun. On December #th, #, two dozen members of the group "Children of Liberty" (a political action authorization, jettisoned four tons of alpine and nordic skiing equipment into Jovian space. The "Party" was a protest against the massive tax burden placed on so-called "luxuries" bound for Eurpoa, Ganymede and other Jovian moons. The colonials, infuriated by what they considered unfair taxation (with no corresponding representation on either the board of the Jupiter Company or Earth's U.N. Security Council), boarded the anybody for a second. Science-fiction, right? Wrong. It could be future history, especially if the United Nation's Agreement on the Moon and other Celestial Bodies is signed in itspresent murky form. As it stands, the Agreement mandates the establishment of a new multi-national Regime with jurisdiction over the entire solar system. It effectively bans Earth monopoly. If the human race is to avoid the mistakes of the past, human and political freedoms must be assured off-planet. The time to start is now, and the way to begin is to learn the facts. Why are we interested in this? We're the L-# Society, and we're going. Join us. Write: The L-# Society # North Park Tucson, Arizona #. written specifically to complement one of the longer feature articles. If you are a digger, you can get hold of the feature and follow it right through as usual, but the modules will pop up along the way and they will seem to you to be a lot like footnotes. If you are a dipper, on the other hand, you can skim the feature for the material of interest to you and at the same time, you wilt get a lot of little interesting items along the way. Each of the smaller items is complete by itself and reads like a short article. Change Number Two: The Strataform Page. Don't you just love the word "strataform"? We decided that was the best word to describe the page design, which comprises three bands, or strata. The design is necessary to accomodate the modules in a way which will not threaten the peace of mind of the diggers. A feature article most often occupies the center stratum and it stays there page after page. Very predictable. The modules spring up along the way in the other strata, wherever they seem to be relevant. We are adding special lines to the design which will help your eye stay put where you want it to. but which will also tell you when an illustration supports material in two different strata at the same time. Yes. it might take an issue or two for you to get used to it, but you will ultimately find that you like it better than conventional page design, whether you dig or dip. It realizes science fiction's two important goals: to be rational and predictable while being full of surprises. Change Number Three: Graphics and Visual Material. The new Galaxy has more pictures than it ever did. We are not substituting pictures for text, but we think pictures can be a very important part of your understanding. And as I noted above, we are placing the pictures in a way that makes their relevance immediately apparent. In addition, we are able to use the new page design to great effect in the illustration of the fiction. Each story has at least one illustration to go with it. We are allowing the artists to design the illustration pages themselves, within the established page grid. This approach has a couple of advantages: it makes the pictures interesting, since they are shaped to emphasize the subject, and it keeps the artists happy. Change Number Four: Content. I already mentioned our feature articles. Science editor Ed Teja and I are doing a lot of searching and planning to make sure that Galaxy brings the future into your lives in many ways. In addition to a new emphasis on non-fiction, you will notice changes in the fiction as well. The most dramatic change is that it is all pretty short. We are breaking Galaxy's long-established policy of serializing longer works. We would like to hear from the readers on this subject, but I have a feeling that most of you will prefer getting almost all short fiction. It gives us flexibility and variety. Magazine editors know that it is easy to fill an issue (or a run of issues) by serializing a novel. On the other hand, the structure of the new Galaxy calls for building, rather you find in these pages are selected, not only for their quality, but for the specific mix they provide in tone, subject, and mood. So there you have it. Galaxy is a new magazine now. Each issue is crafted around the three concepts of science, science fiction, and science fiction commentary. Within each department you will find both unity and diversity, both depth and variety, and a commitment to the future. Welcome to a new era.Floyd Kemske Galaxy Floyd Kemske Vincent McCaffrey Ed Teja Noralie Barnett Thomas Owen Charles C. Ryan Andrew A. Whyte Eric Blair Eugene Potter Carol Kalish Letty Hummel Kathy Romer D.M. Rowles Claire M. Sasahara Michael Wiskind Jim Zaccaria Thais Cobum Tvgg Feet Tom Barrett Larry Blamire Michael Kaluta Barclay Shaw Cortnev Skinner Jim Griner Galaxy Magazine is published bimonthly in February. April, June, August. October, and December. During #, the magazine is observing a more limited schedule and is appearing in May, July, October, and December. Editorial and advertising offices; # Newbury Street, Boston, MA #. Single copy price: #. Subscriptions: # for # issues. # for # issues. This issue published July, #. All characters and settings contained in stories are purely fictional. Factual accuracy of nonfiction articles is the responsibility of the author. No responsibility is assumed for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork, but all submissions are welcome, no query necessary. All submissions must contain a self-addressed, stamped envelope sufficient for return or they will be ritually burned by the office staff. Second Class Postage Paid at Boston. MA. Copyright #  by Galaxy Magazine. Inc. by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop. # Conquerers come and go, but some things just never change. by Raymond Kaminski # The Exploratory Program reaches the fringes of the solar system and finds a derelict spacecraft. by Dona Vaughn # They wouldn't have brought him back to Earth at all if they had thought he would live through it. by Eugene Potter and Larry Blamire... # The crew of the Javelin never expected to be outclassed by an invading steamrig from Normandy. by Frederik Pohl # Who ever would have thought that Jem would outlast the Earth? Suddenly, this godforsaken planet has become much more important. by Robert Frazier # Some day, we will call space "home." BtTTfcR ,uousi  """' "" ii'llM yrfttwi  (Oinu'o SKi rANlAS' sn-v' shR' Galaxy is back... and to say it's bigger and better than ever seems pale compared with our enthusiasm. We have increased the size from traditional digest to the more dramatic 'Galileo' size, but we've gone back to the cover design Galaxy made famous in the #'s. We've enlarged the editorial scope with an aggressive science department covering areas like personal computing, jobs of the future and how to prepare for them, the young movers and shakers who are inventing our future right now, and 'Question' -- probing the problems before they happen. Splendid illustration and graphics enhance the kind of original Science Fiction which made Galaxy the most popular publication in the field from the time it was born # years ago. And we're putting all this in a radically new format inside, unlike any magazine you've ever seen before, because Galaxy is Galaxy is the magazine OF the future. And we have a special offer for those who want to rediscover the magazine which set the standard for Science Fiction. In #, every subscriber will receive the Gala #th Anniversary triple issue, featuring some of the greatest authors in Science Fiction, cover priced at #, at no extra cost. Use this coupon to get the next five regular issues of Galaxy plus our fantastic #th Anniversary triple issue for only #. Subscribe today and don't miss an issue of the new Galaxy.  # for # issues (includes triple issue).  # for # issues, discount price (includes triple issue) Name. Street Town State Zip Send coupon and check to: Galaxy # Newbury St., Boston, MA# I You'll Never Find It in Galaxy galaxy OCfOSi # #  libl jeofi (fem iel. H ext tu' hii suptr-bypO'drIxe fe tht Ian#in# and gl iKei point, a tall, loan tpotemiin #tppd out el the tail nswmbly. ptolon. jun-blattet in a ipnie-tannod hand. Cti bek from thoit (ontrolt, Bat Outsion. the tell ttronpe lipptd Ihinly. Eou don't bnaw it, but this it your last galloping down through lh noirow past at Ingle Cwlti, a tiny gold tolony spvi'od hold for a lew overhang el luitwrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, lii-thooler in a sunonncd hand. "Bear bach and disineunt. Bat Qurston," the tall stronger kppecl thinly, "fov don't knew it, but this it your Iasi laddle-jaunl through these here porls." The first issue of Galaxy appeared in October. #, and sold for twenty-five cents. Assembled by the legendary H.L. Gold, this first issue had a radically new cover design and # pages of outstanding fiction, features, and articles. The back cover was an advertisement, written by Editor Gold, titled "You'll Never See It In Galaxy." We are running this famous ad in lieu of a letters column for this issue. Sound alike? They should -- one is merely a western transplanted to an alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science What you will find in Galaxy is the finest possible science fiction... authentic, plausible, thoughtful...written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction... for people who know and love it. Jets blasting. Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere light years from Sol. He eut out his super-hypcr-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall, lean spaeeman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand. "Get back from those controls. Bat Durston." the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it. but this is your last spaee trip." Hoofs drumming. Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony # miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rimrock... and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand. "Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston." the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it. but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts." by Floyd Kemske # The artist responsible for The Shadow comic book has an unusual way of looking at life and his art. He believes it is not enough for a picture to look good. It has to tell a story, too. In this interview, he talks about his work, his philosophy, his colleagues in the art world, and his vision Potter on Books # Potter gets off to a shaky start. He says he doesn't know anything about art, but he goes ahead and reviews an art book, anyway. Pages from the Sketchbook of Michael Kuta #, #, # Michael Kaluta carries not one, but two sketchbooks with him wherever he goes. Working in them is what he likes to do best. by Robert Stewart # Our film department describes the making of a classic. edited by Noralie Barnett # Books. We get books. Galaxative be Our back cover seems to need a front cover, with apologies to Michael Kaluta. We can't cover science too, but we can let you know who is. in our special article referral service for keeping up to date. Whether you're an editor or a writer, you need to know the lastest findings. lust a partial list of the subjects which are covered in the Science Fiction Times. Books in progress Book reviews Publishers Small press Reviews of magazines Fanzines Art books New artists Collector's best buys Writer's markets Records Games Television production New Comics Comics reviews SF shops People profiles Interviews SF fan clubs SF organizations SF study courses Writer's workshops History of SF Literary perspectives SF glossary Convention calendar Convention news Films in production Film history Where do science and science fiction converge. SF is not a prognosticator. Its spirit is to question, and this is the spirit of science as well. All that rises must converge. New SF artists are presented -- a showcase for public recognition when they need it most. What would you ask your favorite SF author? We're giving you a chance in a special forum -- no holds barred. Send the questions to us. Because well over # through the hands of over # SF readers on every bargain for the advertiser. Ask for more information if there is something special you want to do. Frofn classifieds at ten cents per word to full page display ads for only #. Reviving an old newspaper least one story per issue. What price Superman? Are there any newcomers worth watching? Is there a renaissance in SF comix? What are the editors buying? What are their restrictions? How does one start an SF shop, and what to do once you have. And where to find the SF shop nearest you. The video field is finally blossoming with individual dreams and endeavors far beyond the control of networks and government restriction. I Tubsci The question must be asked. Why an SF newspaper? Simply put. Science Fiction is no longer a ghetto-genre enjoyed by a small cult of enthusiasts who come together at conventions to talk shop. It is as field of international, intercultural importance which is shaping the very future it imagines. No longer just a toy, it is now the place where things are truly happening, from literature to the movies, from the laboratory to the mpuntains of Mars. Science Fiction can still be loved by its fans, but it has new responsibilities as well. SF has come of age. Serious attention is given to a subject which is shaping SF as surely as the traditional forms of science fiction writing. at such a low price just to seduce the readers who don't think they can get their for SI per copy after this introductory period. Subsciptions will be # per year, but we're offering it now for only #. That's fifty cents an issue, and if you decide it's not right for you, we'll refund your money. Keep your first two issues, no questions asked. read, watch, listen or write Science Fiction, and love doing it. No one else. as possible. Enclosed is payment for a # issue subscription at I the special price of #. I can cancel and receive a complete refund if I'm not completely satisfied with the first two issues. Name Street I Town I State Zip...# Newbury Street. Boston MA # I (You may use the enclosed Galileo subscription envelope for convenience. Foreign subscribers add I .#() for postage.) Beginning with issue ##. the ization in full four color. Disney Studios decided that only .lack Kirby, the master of comic strip art. could capture the dynamism and scale of the science fiction spectacular will comprise # episodes which will run four at a time, with special white offset stock for the color pages for collectors. Son of Calculator and the Electronic Lifestyle by Steve North Personal computing has been in your immediate future for some time now. Here's what it will mean when it finally arrives R ecently a friend remarked that at the # World's Fair he was told that by now he'd have his choice of living on the moon, in a domed city under the sea, or in a space colony. It seems that those predictions don't match the present reality. Attempting to predict the future is almost always an invitation to failure. Because all things are interrelated, a critical factor that affects the prediction goes overlooked. Nevertheless, it's hard to resist the temptation to speculate on the future of personal computing. It does, after all, have the potential of affecting our lives more dramatically than previous inventions. Inventions such as the telescope, microscope, automobile, telephone, sound recordings, and television have all made drastic changes in society's growth. All these devices expand our capability to see, hear, walk, and communicate -- they expand our senses and sensibilities. Unlike any other tool, however, the personal computer can increase the power of the mind, not just the body. Of course, this sounds fanciful when you look at home computers used to play Star Trek and blackjack, but the revolutionary potential still exists. We must learn the right way to use the computers. Internally a personal computer is a cut-down version of a big computer. In fact, the only difference between the home computers and their hereditary brethren is that they are smaller (about the size of a typewriter), a little slower (depending on what you use them for), and much less expensive. The hypothetical line separating large computers from small ones is fading. Thus, home computers are often scale models of large commercial systems -- a sort of model railroad for the computer freak. This isn't necessarily the best way to design a computer for people, however. Commercial systems are made to maximize the computer's efficiency, not the power and flexibility available to the people who use it. These systems are machine oriented; home computers should be people oriented. The programming languages for personal computers have nearly all been running on large computer systems for the past ten or fifteen years. Although computer science is generally believed to be progressing at lightning speed, the state of the art in computer software (programming languages and programs themselves) doesn't keep pace with hardware developments. The ways in which people interact with computers have changed little over the years. Indeed, because of the difficulty people have in changing computer programs (and using the existing programs) it becomes increasingly difficult to popularize major advances in computer software. The factors that made personal computers possible were both technological and economic. It can be hard to separate the two. The technological breakthrough that started it all was the microprocessor -- it put all of a computer's central processor on one small piece of silicon. The economic factor involved economies of large-scale production; an entire personal computer system that costs a few hundred dollars right off the shelf makes quite an attraction. A typical personal-computer system looks like a terminal with a keyboard and video-screen; it costs about #. Some systems (such as Mattel's new system) hook up to your television set to save you the cost of buying a separate video monitor. Almost all systems offer a gramming language developed at Dartmouth in the #s and later improved and expanded for general-purpose use. If you don't want to write your own programs, some manufacturers sell preprogrammed cassettes that handle common applications such as game playing, engineering and statistical calculations, home-budget management, and investment analysis. But if these "canned" programs don't suit your needs, you can learn with only moderate anguish to write your own. Personal computing now has a status similar to that of amateur radio about the time that commercial broadcasting first began, or that of a car owner back when there were few good roads and all drivers had to be mechanics. Many people who buy personal computers don't have a clear idea of what it can do for them when they take it home. Obviously, computers have many good applications, but some don't justify the expense of hundreds, or thousands, of dollars. Ed Judge, of the Tandy Corporation, manufacturer of more than one out of two personal computers, says. "I don't think that anyone really knows why people buy home computers. That's the # question. I think most people buy our computer for self-education. They want to learn how a computer works." T he present trend is toward faster, smaller, more powerful personal computers with very fine-resolution color displays (clearer pictures on the monitor) and a wider selection of preprogrammed cartridges that suit home applications, computer-based instruction (to help will remain an important computer language because of the large number of people already using it, but it will eventually be supplanted by a more examine problems in a sequential, step-by-step manner -- it isn't a true problem-solving language. More advanced languages encourage breaking up big problems into smaller ones that can be, in turn, broken down into small calculations which a computer can easily be programmed to handle. Talking, listening, and music-playing capabilities will also appear as standard features on computers within the next five years. You will be able to compose sonatas or learn to read music with your computer. It will respond to verbal orders. The computer won't be able to understand speech, of course. There is a big difference between capturing, matching, and reacting to the wave patterns of a restricted set of sounds, and actually understanding the meaning behind them. In this way computers are (and will remain) smart machines rather than a new form of sentient intelligence. Preprogrammed cassettes or cartridges will be sold in the same way that books and magazines are now. For specialpurpose applications you will need to know how to write your own programs, but there is no more need for the average computer user of the future to be a programmer than there is for the stereo user of the present to be an audio engineer. It isn't clear whether the growth of personal computing will be gradual or explosive in the near future. This depends on such events as the introduction of low-cost hardware (# is still not cheap) and plentiful software. Computer manufacturers also have their hands full educating potential users to the advantages of owning their own computers. When several people own computers, they inevitably begin trying to find ways to hook them together to share their programming and data-collection efforts. Such a hookup is known as a network. dustry began its first hesitant steps as a new market, much of the energy was put into it by well-meaning hobbyists, overly enthusiastic computer fanatics, and ripoff artists. Amid this chaos (and if you went to any of the early computer shows, you know that chaos is an underestimate) Adam Osborne sounded a clarion call. He began a refrain that he is still sounding, pointing out that the microcomputer industry had to become aware of the realities of business in order to survive. He insisted that the survivors would be few -- and battle-scarred. These weren't hollow words. Dr. Osborne was in the business himself. Starting with his own consulting firm, he moved into the publishing business where he initiated the concept of giving away computer programs and selling books. Traditionally, computer programs Stephen B. Gray, founder of the Amateur Computer Society, says, "I think the phone company will eventually get into the act. The easiest thing would be for them to give you just the bare minimum of hardware -- only a screen and a keyboard -- and for them to own a large computer with a library of programs. Then, whenever you need a program, even if it's just once in a lifetime, it will be there in the computer, waiting for you were high-priced items and jealously guarded. Convinced that the necessarily low price tag of microcomputers made that unrealistic, he put his programs into book form and sold them at book prices. He realized early in the game that selling information instead of software "products" benefited everyone, and suited the new industry. The strategy must have been successful. McGraw-Hill bought out Osborne  Associates last year, converting Dr. Osborne's company into a separate book division of the parent company with Dr. Osborne as its head. Why fool with a winning strategy? In addition to keeping his own house in order. Dr. Osborne began speaking at seminars (held at computer shows) on the needs of the industry. He began a column("From the Fountainhead") each month in Interface Age in which he discussed problems that buyers have with Movers and Shakers to pull it out. Present laws prevent the phone company from offering data services, but the laws can always be changed." A widespread network would allow instant access to other things besides computer programs. News reports, stock quotations, magazines, encyclopedias, entire libraries, and perhaps even films and art works would await you. Instead of skimming through a newspaper to find the news that interests you, you might be able to type into your keyboard, "What Computer scientist Ted Nelson, an early proponent of personal computing, has developed an "electronic literature" that can be represented only on a computer's video screen. His text, called Hypertext, isn't always linear. It combines a variety of sequential and parallel relationships in the text. In a regular book, you start at page one and read through to the end. With Hypertext, you can freely explore relationships between different sections of the book, or even between one book and another. For example, where a textual passage is quoted, a "window" on the screen shows you the quoted section of the second work. By manipulating this window, you can see the context of the quote and relevant information. More powerful relationships between texts let you consider a body of writings on one topic Personal-computer networking could threaten the postal system's existence. You could compose and edit a letter, then send it to someone anywhere else on the network within seconds. as a whole rather than as discrete packages of information. Personal-computer networking could threaten the postal system's existence. You could compose and edit a letter, then send it to someone anywhere else on the network within seconds. You could, of course, make a phone call instead, but this way you could transmit documents. Such networks also lend themselves to sophisticated, multiplayer games. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine games of chess, bridge, or monopoly that spanned thousands of miles due to computer networking. The next step, the mindblowing step, is when the computer becomes an active participant in the game. One of the most challenging (and addictive) computer games yet devised is a fantasy game called Adventure. Present versions of this game allow one person to sellers, sellers have with buyers, software vendors have with hardware vendors, and so on. He has tackled every important problem from the protection that a vendor has against bootleggers who sell unauthorized copies of their software to how to get your money back from a mailorder distributor who doesn't send you what he advertised. In order to remain effective. Dr. Osborne has remained accessible. People who go to computer shows, get involved with manufacturer's groups, or other professional activities see him frequently. He's too tall to hide in a crowd, besides, he's usually talking to people in front of a banner proudly proclaiming "Osborne  Associates". When he isn't talking to people, he seems to be taking orders for more books. Although Dr. Osborne has focused primarily on making microcomputers acceptable as small business exchange systems and ensuring that the manufacturers were up to the challenge, his influence reaches everyone in the microcomputer and personal computer marketplace. His books introducing readers to understanding microprocessors have become classic reference books and have gone through many printings. If there was ever a case of a cash register testifying to a man's success, it's so with Adam Osborne. The exciting thing about observing a person such as Dr. Osborne is that he created the role he plays from whole cloth. He isn't a consumer or industry advocate, but a participant with a critical eye who finds truth on both sides of the fence. He has made a career of making astute, constructive observations. Now if we could only clone him to do the same for the auto industry... -- Ed Teja search for treasure and adventure in a small world simulated inside the computer. The computer acts as the player's eyes and hands, responding to English computer might say, "I'm in a small room. There is a screwdriver here and a locked door." The player could issue commands to unlock the door (if he has keys) or pick up the screwdriver. He might tell it to try to force the door with open with the screwdriver. The properties of the objects in the game and the effects of various actions are fixed in advance by the programmer. Each game has at least a few hazards and rewards. In short. Adventure is a super puzzle. Imagine a dynamically changing version with several players, each with their own keyboard. The players could help (hinder) each other or exchange messages. A few primitive computer networks already exist -- mostly they are in the form of electronic newspapers and two-way cable television. Although they constitute significant advances, they let the user interact only in a limited way. What is required is not only the network's existence, but also computer programs that help you choose from among the large amounts of data and programs in an easy-to-use manner. It is likely that the realization of computer networks will come from extensions of cable television, telephone, or other communications networks rather than from developments in personal computing per se. Personal computers available offer little compatibility or standardization. Ideally, a personal computer should be inexpensive, portable, and highly interactive. It should be something you can carry around and use in your daily life as easily as you do a notebook and paper. It should plug into a computer network at work or at home (perhaps over a telephone), or function independently. It should be simple to use -- almost obvious. This last, however, might prove an unattainable goal. Many people believe that computers can be as easy to use as televisions and electronic games. While it is true that good application programs make the computer simple to operate, at the same time they don't put the full potential of the computer at your disposal. If a computer is a tool for expanding the mind, then controlling it will require thinking. The fantasy that computers will think for you is dangerous and false. A computer can simulate the stock market, a solar-energy system, or the game of bridge. If the program is written with a human player in mind, it can be interactive and enjoyable to use. To develop the playing strategy for the simulation, however, the programmer must work long and hard, testing and refining the routines. Running a stock market simulation might be "ridiculously simple," but creating an accurate model of the stock market is not. To fully use the computer, you cannot remain a passive operator. Therefore, the concept of the "ultimate all-powerful ridiculously simple virtual extension of your own mind" may be nothing but a myth. It is still valid, however, to talk about the ultimate personal computer. It would have an optimum size that coincides with that of a notebook. Anything larger would be difficult to carry around. Anything smaller, such as a wristwatch-sized computer, couldn't provide reasonable text and graphics display. The computer must have high-quality graphics for showing diagrams, pictures, or even animated cartoons. (Imagine directing your own movie with computer-generated actors and backgrounds.) The computer should have a touch-sensitive flat screen, or a standard keyboard, or both, as well as audio inputs and outputs for music and speech. It needs a massive internal memory that can store hundreds of books, films, letters, receipts, songs, and simulations. Curiously enough, most of the components for our idea are within our current technological grasp. Touchsensitive displays, flat screens, and highcapacity memories are being refined and made less expensive to produce. Researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto. California, research center have developed a proposal for a "Personal Dynamic Media." called a Dynabook, that is a version of the computer we have defined. According to its original description, the Dynabook should be "no larger than a notebook; weigh less than # lbs; the visual display should be able to represent at least # characters with contrast ratios approaching that of a book; dynamic graphics of a reasonable quality should be possible; there should be removable local storage of at least one pages) traded off against several hours of voice and music files." According to John Lees, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, "The Dynabook concept had the potential to attract a great number of society's institutions. Look at what will be affected by the widespread use of Dynabooks, particularly in networks, via phone lines or cable television. For correspondence (and the postal system) the Dynabook has the capabilities of a typewriter in a smaller, more versatile, package. In publishing, the Dynabook is a personal printing press. Your textbooks can be a memory file. Your family can receive its newspapers on a reusable file, its monthly magazines on another reusable file. In education, the new learning activities possible are boundless, and they depend less and less on dedicated school facilities. As for calculators, televisions, and radios, all would face a very stiff challenge. Television in particular would be in trouble -- who's going to watch poor television programs when they can link up with the other kids on the block for a game of really super Star Trek or Star Trader? The possibilities boggle the imagination. The Dynabook concept is the culmination of many mind-expanding applications for a personal computer, brought together into one compact unit. The appearance of portable personal computers like this isn't far off. TTie heart of the system, highly developed and interactive programs, aren't ready yet, however. This means that you can't expect to see anything as versatile and fun as a Dynabook-style computer until long after the advent of such comparatively simple advances as The personal computer's ultimate purpose isn't to help balance your checkbook, remind you when to change your engine oil, turn thermostats up or down, or provide instant stock quotes. These and most other common prophecies of personal-computer applications are trivial and irrelevant. The most important service the personal computer will provide is to improve your life, and help you ask "what if?" For further details, watch the next ten years! "RiUy as Stunning as any of his heroes excursions to the starsAsimov's own journey. 'His life story is fascinating science-fiction specialist to -- even uplifting," Ben Bova said of Asimov's autobiographical account of his youth, In Memory Yet Green. And Time called it "ceaselessly informative and entertaining." Isaac Asimov carries on in the same engaging style in this story of the years that followed, tracing his transition from the wide-ranging author Carl Sagan calls "the greatest explainer of the age." Here, in scores of anecdotes, is Asimov: a carefully detailed self-portrait of the man George Gaylord Simpson hails as "a national wonder and a natural resource." # at all booksellers. #-# Bob Mecoy. Future Life, oh fn Memory Yet Green Your Car and Its Computer by Ed Teja H aving trouble with your # juggernaut? Why not pull into the station off to the right and have its programming checked? You know your car's computerized system is subject to a lot of wear, and its internal adjustments can only compensate for so much variation in performance. And did you ever consider the number of things that the on-board computer is responsible for? Unlike the cars of the #s and #s, which used a computer only to optimize the ignition system and fuel flow through the supercharger, today's models put nearly every automotive function under computer control. Consider the dash-mounted breath analyzer, for example. Before they became mandatory accessories, even drunks could start a car. All they needed was a key! Your car is too smart for that. Anything that indicates that the driver has had more than the legal limit of drinks locks out the ignition system. You don't think about it much, but before cars came equipped with low-cost photocells people had to turn on their headlights when it got dark. Of course, dark meant different things to different people, so sometimes some cars would have their lights on, while others had them off. Driving back in the #s was completely manual, other than for a few simpleminded gadgets, such as cruise control. 'The so-called power and automatic devices weren't really. It was actually possible to drive with the front of your car Words Before you can talk computer -- which is similar to talking turkey, if you're a turkey farmer -- you have to know the lingo. Here is a glossary of terms you'll need to know when you start to haunt the environs of your local computer club or subscribe to a computer magazine. Alphanumeric -- represents both letters and numbers; as opposed to alpha-only or numeric-only devices. Standard Code for Information Exchange. It's a #-bit code that represents letters, punctuation, and control codes. Analog -- a continuous signal, as opposed to discrete digital signals. Audio from your hifi is analog; computers comprehend digital only. Analog-to-digital conversion -- called AD makes continuous signals comprehensible to computers. Assembler Language -- a computer language that produces machine instructions. code for the numbers # through #. Benchmark -- a test program used to compare computers' relative speeds. Bit -- a single digit of binary (base #) number. Bus -- a set of hardware lines used to connect several devices together, thus you will hear of an address buS, a data bus, and so on. Character -- an information element. The letter "C" is an element of the alphabet, thus it is a character of that alphabet. that uses the same technology as your Digital-to-analog conversion -- the inputoutput technique for transferring data between a peripheral device and memory without using the processor. Only Memory. A device for storing programs or data that will be needed for some time. most common failing of computer programs. Hardware -- the system's circuitry. writing complex programs easily. Each instruction provides more than one machine instruction. Input -- transferring information into the processor or memory. Interface -- the circuitry (or software) that goes between two devices or processes to ensure that they work smoothly together. Interrupt -- a disruption of the expected program flow. Machine code -- instructions understood and executed by the processor. Nybble -- half a byte, or four bits. Object code -- code written in machine instructions. Output -- transferring information to the outside world. Peripheral -- a device that is connected to the processor in order to work with it. Random-access memory -- temporary storage devices. When you turn the machine off, anthing stored here goes away. Register -- where the processor tucks away bits of information. String -- a group (flock?) of characters that, taken together, have some meaning. The characters (letters) that make up a word constitute a string. This far-from-complete list shoul  get you started in wading through the literature. Don't worry about learning the terms; worry about using them correctly Noralic Barnett at an unsafe distance from the rear of the car on front of you. No on-board navigators existed. A large number of accidents resulted. Humans couldn't calculate safe stopping distances, taking into account road conditions and the car's condition and speed, as accurately as today's computers can. Drivers had to navigate by reading street signs. Because there weren't any on-board computers, there was no practical method of implementing sophisticated traffic-flow systems. Siemens Corp had worked out the details for microwave transponders that identified and assisted cars and drivers way back in the #s; they planned car-borne responder units that could run indefinitely on solar cells. Initially the system was intended for short-haul dispatching centers, ambulance services and police and fire departments. It didn't take long . for auto manufacturers to catch on to the commercial possibilities. They took the legally required anti-collision devices back to the drawing board to add the full navigational capabilities that now come standard on the lowest-priced model. Today, of course, every major city has a traffic-control computer that finds you the quickest, least congested route to your destination. It monitors your individual progress past its transponder checkpoints. The auto-identification system also has reduced car theft dramatically. "A charming sequel to Jeppson's Second Experiment." -- Booklist "Intriguing, intellectually stimulating..." -- Library Journal "A good yam, romping through time and space from beginning to end, or vice versa... Events, cosmic and human, viewed through the sensors of a Hamlet-like robot." -- Roger Zelazny Houghton Mifflin Company # Park street, Boston, Massachusetts # Today's car thief needs to know as much about computer programming as he does lock picking. There was a time when you knew something was wrong with your car when it began making terrible noises or stopped running. Adding diagnostics was a trivial job for the auto designers once computer control was established, but it was a tremendous leap for auto owners. Now you get advance warning. You can have your car repaired when a two-dollar part begins to go bad instead of when the two-dollar piece lets loose of the # part, destroying the # part under it. The really nice thing about computercontrolled diagnostics is that they operate automatically. By paying attention to the early warnings about mechanical inefficiencies under the hood, you can save the cost of all of this electronic magic in repair bills over the life of your car. and Other Stories Winner of both The Nebula Award and The Hugo Award Author of Dreamsnake "She's one of the best already, and it's exciting to think #, now at your bookstore Houghton Mifflin Company # Park St., Boston. Mass. # # at bookstores or write to: Cortney Skinner If You Don't Talk to Your Stereo, I Will by Eric Blair exciting development in stereo and television for quite some time. At the Winter Consumer America, Inc. showed its prototypes of the appliances of tomorrow -- devices that respond to their owner's voice. The new units feature an Acoustic provides this hands-free, voice-operated Defending the Empire: Intelligent Games by Ed Teja someone made up a game, the paraphernalia required to play it might include some chalk marks on the pavement, a rock or two for markers, and the odd bit of string. The focal point of these games was frequently found in contests of manual dexterity -- someone, somewhere, tried to outmuscle, outwrestle, or otherwise overcome or overwhelm the opposition. Today, if someone tells you they just made up a game, it's likely that to play it you must sit in front of a video display defending your side (often referred to as "the empire" rather than the archaic "good guys") against the machinations of a human opponent or, somehow more diabolically, a computer. The heritage of computer game playing can be found in a branch of computer science called "simulation." The idea behind simulation is that the problems that decision makers must face in the "real world" can be approximated with a computer. You get a chance to try out various strategies to see which will be the most effective when the time comes to make the final decision. Thus, the point of simulation is actually learning -- learning specific skills. In order to try out the alternative strategies, a programmer creates a "model" of the situation. He maps out the cause-effect relationships that exist and approximates the conditions that will exist when the decision must be made. The Pentagon is a bastion of game players. Countless tax dollars support a massive simulation that tracks the ever-changing character of the world's potential for a nuclear-type World War Last. They play with big chips. To begin modeling such a situation, the programmer must have a good evaluation of the current situation, and an idea of the relative importance of various items that make up the model. While you'd get the best results by leaving absolutely nothing out of the model, you'd also never finish making it. Thus you must eliminate those things that have the least effect on the model's performance. What kinds of things? All kinds of things. You could probably expect that the altitude of Paris hemlines would have a minimal impact, but don't count it out without some research. (This game stuff sounds like work.) For our world war model, the plays an important role. Not weighing things carefully can prove embarassing. An interesting (perhaps apocryphal) story has it that the Pentagon set about to use the model to determine what single resource was the most vital in time of war. The bills of materials for all essential goods were fed into the computer. The requirements of the nation were checked and counterchecked. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth (on the programmer's part -- computers don't have teeth) the results were out. Paint. Paint was the common element to the national defense. Someone forgot to mention to the programmer that not all materials were equally important. Talk about learning. remote control. The stereo memorizes (during a training period) and responds to its owner's voice by analyzing the voice's characteristics and matching its analysis to the patterns stored in the training period. Computer control (an eight-bit microprocessor, to be precise) provides comprehension of seventeen words that result in twenty-one different operations that range from turning the unit ON and operation. The voice-actuated television responds to thirty words, if you count the numbers I through # as words. The set beeps when it hears a command that it understands -- just to let you know that it heard you -- and it flashes a light-emitting Notice that the "look" of the #s, at least as far as stereo systems and televisions is concerned, isn't really a new appearance. It's a new man-machine interface. Don't expect appliances to change too much externally for a while, either. They keep getting smaller, but there are limits to how small they can get and still be useful. It's already quite a chore for designers to get all the necessary knobs, dials, meters, and lights on the front panel and still leave enough room for fingerprints. And now you'll have to have enough space for a microphone. The system does need ears, after all. But the model has its uses. Suppose a general wants to know the actual decrease in deterrent capability that will result from a budget cut. His first task is to define deterrent capability. Are offensive weapons of deterrent value? Do can answer questions such as these, he will get an answer -- based on those premises. The model is only as good as its garbage in, garbage out. The model can have as many levels of complexity as needed, but there are practical limits. The model must be understandable, or it is worthless. That's one of the nice things about games. The policy of "Keep It computers perhaps even more than anywhere else. But enough of the dire mutterings of the Hawks. What about the good clean fun? Let's look at the scenario for a run-of-the-mill Star Trek game written by a group of wayward engineers a few years back. To play Star Trek, you need a universe ripe for exploration. Because a universe isn't an off-the-shelf item, out program created one. Using number arrays (called matrices), we defined known space Adding intelligence in the form of a microprocessor opens new horizons for appliance designers. You'd expect that a computer controller inside the system would do more than just interpret a human's commands. That has been the trend. Look at all the goodies that have been added onto microwave ovens since they were computerized. They even tell time and give cooking advice. The important question is, however: What would you want the computer to do? Stereo components are already quite sophisticated. Some jobs the microprocessor would be extremely good at, such as working with the tape transport to control braking and tape speed to take better care of the tape and ensure constant tape speed -- furnishing better performance. The better tape decks come with built-in microprocessors for that very reason. They don't need another one. Besides, if you like the idea of a separate-component stereo system, you don't want one computer running everything. That would entail putting all the components together in a clump to avoid making your living room look like a Bell telephone exchange. That scheme would, in short order, bring you full circle back to the monolithic television-stereo all-in-one. When the stereo breaks, the whole mess goes into the shop for six years (the technician has to retrain for computer repair). The warrior-outlaw known as the Wolf seeks to create havoc, doubling his might through the use of a physicalpsychic double from far-away Terra -- and only the victory of the Compact, harnessing the terrible energies of the matrix, can stop him... Read and enjoy all of the "Bloody Sun" novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley. At your bookstore, or mail this coupon to: #'V P.O. Box #, Bergenfield, NJ #I handling. No. of Copies Book No. Title Price inU.S. Price in Canada  UE# # #  # #  # #  mi#I # #  UW# # #  # Add Postage and Handling  Name B# Address City State Zip Allow a minimum of four weeks for delivery. This offer subject to withdrawal without notice. Price and number subject to change without notice. On the other hand, there might be a market for a central controller unit. The controller unit would be a separate component. It wouldn't play music, change records, or perform any useful service (except maybe tell time) -- by itself, that is. Aha! Now you could plug in a tape recorder and amplifier to make a complete voice-controlled sound system. You could give the intelligent controller a command, such as, "Stereo power ON at #:# PM. Patch tape deck output into amplifier unit. Tape deck to play in stereo. Volume at level one. that would be handy! Now you can be greeted at the door by your favorite music. Tie the system into a burglar alarm to greet uninvited guests with the # Overture played slightly above the in quadrants. Inside each quadrant sat more arrays, which defined sectors. Rather than let the Enterprise exist just anywhere, we gave her a choice of sixty-four locations within each sector. This limit kept the math manageable -- a serious consideration in any model. guys). We let the computer pick a number between ten and one hundred to represent the number of Klingons in the known universe. We didn't care about the unknown universe, we weren't going there. The bad guys were spread liberally throughout the universe (along with stars and starbases). We never let there be more than five in any one quadrant, however, as experience proved that five Klingons were fatal to the Enterprise -- always. Thus was the universe created. Not incredibly complex, but even this simpleminded construct took a fair amount of work to get going. You can imagine what they go through at the Pentagon. The entire definition of the universe was subjective -- it was as large as we could make it without running out of memory in our computer. We introduced as many variables as it could manage. The Enterprise then was launched. The sector and quadrant were again selected by the computer. (The computer uses a random-number generator to pick numbers, by the way.) This started the game with a bang. In fact, every once in a while, the player at the helm (each player was his own entire crew) would be greeted by a display on the screen that read: Not exactly a perfect beginning. Assuming the player made it into the first quadrant, he began seeking out and destroying Klingons. The idea was to kill all of the bad guys before the time ran out, you ran out of fuel, or they killed you. Now isn't that better than that nasty, bloodthirsty Pentagon simulation? This digression shows you a little bit of what goes into creating a computer-controlled game. Toy manufacturers use the same basic approach, whether they make "Breakout" or an auto race game, or if they write a balance-your-checkbook program (except that Gremlins replace threshold of pain. (You'd better have a good system for that.) Our theoretical controller would be extremely flexible. To add components to the system, you'd just plug them in and teach the controller a few new commands. The controller functions as a power controller, patch panel (connecting one device to another), and function controller. The better units would even turn off any components not being used to save energy and wear and tear on the system. The controller units could run tests (called diagnostics) on your stereo for you periodically. Computers test themselves, why not apply the technique to your stereo? This kind of function suits a microprocessor's capabilities. At this point you might have noticed some similarities between our hypothetical controller and Steve North's personal computers. Yes, it's true. A personal computer with the addition of some hardware and software would fill the bill. The point of all this is that your first computer might not come in the shape of a computer -- it might look like a stereo. A dedicated controller would be cheaper than most computers. It wouldn't need a display, a complete keyboard nor as much memory. It wouldn't need to be programmable. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be a computer. Klingons in the check balancing process). But not everyone has a computer. That revelation hit companies like Mattel early on. One approach, used by Atari, was to sell you a dedicated computer (called a video game) that you could hook to the television and play. You add games by buying cartridges. Computer companies, such as Apple, favored selling you the computer, which you could hook to your television and program, and which other people would sell you games for. The toy manufacturers didn't want to make computers. They didn't want to miss out on the computer-game market, either. After a few false starts, came the intelligent game. When these guys make a toy, they don't fool around with chalk marks and the odd bit of string. They don't try to sell you a computer. They sell you a lot of computers, each in its own plastic shell. T his year greets, along with a new spring, Mattel's Flash Gordon Space Game (for one). It is a pocket-sized, self-contained computer that operates on a #-volt transistor battery. The game, designed for one or two players, features Flash's Arborian rocket ship defending itself against attacks from Ming's computer IS The Courage To Dre#un... This is the essence of Science Fiction. The spirit of our future is in the story of pioneers; the inner need for adventure, the love of truth, each individual's search for a place of his or her own. Galileo is the magazine of things to come. Galileo is the new magazine of great science fiction and the new frontiers of science fact. Articles by major scientists like Carl Sagan, David Wilson, and Arthur C. Clarke explore such topics as atomic and genetic research, astrophysics, and the coming computer technology. Reviews, interviews and previews are highlighted by Robert Silverberg, Marvin Kaye and David Gerrold on books, games and movies. Lighter subjects include fashions of the future, automobiles of tomorrow, and bicycles in space. Superb illustration by the Named "one of the best among SF mags" by finest artists in the field titillate the imagination. But the best parts are the stories, where science becomes the future, by such authors as Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer complete and uncut. From pathos to adventure, from the horrific to visions of the ideal, it's yours. Kovin O' Donnell. Jr.  M. Lue Gaii Subscribe today for all the tomorrows to come. Fabulous! I'd like the special subscription rate marked below. My payment is enclosed.  # issues for #(save #)  # issues for #(save #) Name Street State Town Zip Send to: Galileo Magazine, Dept. GX # Newbury Street, Boston MA # Careers Galaxy looks at jobs in tomorrow's computer industry -- and how to prepare for them. in the personal computing field in the future, get ready for some changes -- fast changes. First of all, personal computing is rapidly becoming big business, and the companies that will be in the running tomorrow will be the ones that recognize it now. Already the former garage shops, such as Atari and Apple, have moved into the big times, and their executives worry about debt financing, labor disputes, and the price of gold just like their counterparts at name but one -- are buying up all of the small, profitable electronic companies that they can work out a good deal with. The cash it has in the bank makes a big difference in whether or not a company makes it in the long run. But enough of the industry as a whole. You want to know what you should be studying to get into the field. Computer science is always a good bet. Theoretically. anyway, whatever is being taught should pace current events in the real world -- but don't count on it. Academic institutions tend to wander into the muck and mire of, well, academia, instead of focusing on the things you'll need to know on the job. Still, a background in computer science will give you the fundamentals to build on. To become skilled at writing the types of programs that will be needed by the computers of tomorrow, sharpen up your business and finance knowhow. Just take a look in any of the many magazines dedicated to personal computing (such as Creative Computing, Byte, or Kilobaud) and you'll see that the demand for good business programs far outweighs that for any other kind. Judging by the number of complaints coming from users, those on the market today aren't completely doing controlled raiders. You get digital scoring, an arming switch, a guidancecontrol lever, and a fire-control button (obviously the most important part). All this and simulated war sounds, too. But not everyone enjoys war games. Some of us prefer natural disasters. And what could be more natural than playing Catastrophe, wherein you depend on reflexes to save you from crumbling rocks, quake shocks, and meteorite showers. You stop the meteorites by shooting them with missies; juggling boulders in the air saves the city below you from destruction; catching bricks before they fall from a skyscraper gets you through the quakes. This also requires a #-volt battery. And the Germans thought that the V-# was hot -- they should've invented the #-volt battery! Not all games center on violence, of course. Card games (Computer Gin) and a Horoscope Computer, plus a series of sports games, round out Mattel's lineup. But, to be fair, it is the violent games that provide the challenge. Even chess, after all, is a war game. And given the lines around toy booths at consumer-electronics shows, the manufacturers are giving the public exactly what it wants. Tbey are doing it extremely well, too. The hand-held, battery-operated games free the player from the living room the same way that microcomputer technology sprung programmers from the confines of climate-controlled computer rooms. The advent of portable intelligent games might be just the ticket to offset the doldrums from waiting in lines and doctor's offices. If you have a plastic box full of Brain Baffler in your pocket, for example, you can learn while you wait. This Mattel creation will actually match wits with you. Its eight games include "Flash World" -- in which you spell out the longest word you can from computersupplied letters with one letter changing every second, a version of hangman called "Go Hang," and other word and number skill games. This, like Texas Instruments' Speak N Spell, is a fun-to-use teaching machine. the job -- there's plenty of room for newcomers. That should last as long as manufacturers keep making new computers. There is a continuing demand for newer, better, cheaper, more verstaile, more specialized, and smaller computers, too. If your interests lie in the hardware field (the nuts and bolts end of the business), you wouldn't be wasting your time by studying physics. You might be the one to produce the next advance in for people to do even more work on high-persistance phosphors for cathoderay tubes. Someone has to design keyboards and integrated curcuits. Someone must define the packaging, including development of lighter weight, yet stronger, packaging materials -- preferably not based on petroleum. Personal computing is even opening up some totally new horizons. Software publishing describes a new industry that supports widespread use of computers. Software publishers select, package, and distribute programs at prices that individuals can afford. They must offer a catalog of programs that satisfies computer owners' needs. The programs' authors are independent freelancers, in many cases, who receive royalties based on their programs' actual sales. To date no one has made major inroads into becoming a software-author's agent, but Then games can teach, too? Sure. That's the principle behind shows like The Electric Company, so why not put it in boxes? Writing game programs for computers certainly has taught more programmers the fine points of programming than would care to admit it. Games include contingencies that the computer scientists (except those who are writing programs) haven't thought of yet. I mean, how often does an academic text address the problems inherent in getting a box of gold out of a locked room without getting eaten by the dragon guarding it? Not often, you'll agree. One of the most important things that intelligent games may be teaching borders on the subliminal -- that computers are here, and they're here to serve. By packaging them in delightful forms that entertain, the toy manufacturers guarantee the inevitable acceptance of computers as part of our daily lives. (I said that this would be diabolical). Thus the expected "personal computer" might, for practical reasons, be a special purpose toytool rather than the ideal package which Steve North describes in his article (elsewhere in this issue). At least at first. Once computers have been accepted, who knows? Perhaps the specific lesson being taught by these games is simply computer literacy.  this should follow the path set by book publishing, too. Already most of the programs are written by a small number of people -- at least ' in the commercial arena -- and those authors might improve their financial position by using an agent. Royalties tend to be higher for software than for books (# to #, as of this writing), but can be expected to fall as the industry matures. If your interests lie in marketing, rather than technical, fields, personal computing offers some interesting challenges as well. Few of the computer manufacturers have reached the market with much impact. This is partly due to small advertising budgets, but ignorance of marketing strategies and usage of inappropriate techniques take their tolls. To tomorrow's computer marketing genius the field is open for development and implementation of brand-new approaches. No company has satisfactorily answered the question "Do we sell personal computers as intelligent calculators, incredibly flexible video games, or as small-business machines?" There are as many answers as there are marketers. The trick to planning a career that gets you aboard the personal computer bandwagon involves taking an educated guess as to where that wagon is headed, and then, in the immortal words of an anonymous cowboy, "Head 'em off at the pass!" Good luck. -- Ed Teja Now in its third year of publication, crystal ball that shows you the world of tomorrow -- a better, more positive world than today. With lavish, full-color layouts, culture, the arts and media, space travel -- whatever the greatest minds of our planet can forecast. Harlan Ellison is one of those minds. His award-winning science-fiction stories, his TV and film scripts, his hard-hitting articles and speeches have made him one of the most electric voices of today. And now, Harlan Ellison joins umnist, dissecting science-fiction trends and stirring up your thinking about the future of life. You're going to love Harlan or you're going to hate him, because he's going to hit you with some ideas you've never thought about. only -- offer good till Sept. # , #. # Park Ave. South New York. NY # for Just I # and Include one bonus Issue (total of # Issues -- # months) at no extra charge (newsstand price; over #.) magazine counter -- or at Waldenbooks, but you can subscribe right now at substantial savings. Either way, ask for Harlan Ellison inside. Foreign orcJers (surface mail) # # U Foreign Air Mall EuropeS. America -- add # D Asia, Africa. Japan -- add # # D Please allow #-# weeks for delivery of first issue Dufai long ago appropriated it, of course, and everything else, too, the Shubbi not excluded. The Arms is one of the older Shubbi combs, dating from sometime shortly after what is commonly known as the FatAss Takeover and well before what is privately referred to as The Big Joke On Them. To the Shubbi, if not the Dufai, the place must look classy. Its tunnelways slope around an artificial hill like a gasket-leak from a broken motor. The receptionist in the Arms' Red Tunnel East was your usual Shubbi flunky, a bad-tempered bozo. He filled the entrance when he saw me coming and scowled: the Dufai may have demoted his kind when they moved in, but at least he still had Terrans to harass. "Want?" he whirred. I repressed a groan. The Shubbi like the idea of a universal language, as long as it's theirs. Theirs sounds like an aviary with a cat loose in it. I'm okay on the whistles, but the clicks and glottal stops can pave the way to a laryngectomy in a couple of years. "Want see Omlaf," I chirped. "Him be all specting see by. Call now all come hurry at." "Him be no by." The Shubbi wiggled, indicating utter indifference. "All same go look all golly." "Me do." (What a language.) I followed as he pulled his bulk down the tunnel ramp. From behind, he looked like a small pachyderm that had been cut off at the knees and stuck on a broad, quivering base. The Shubbi are not a handsome people nor a pleasant one. The Dufai word Steven Utley has been writing science fiction since #, and has published it in New Dimensions. Universe, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction. His real love, however, is cartooning, an occupation to which he increasingly devotes his time. Howard Waldrop's first story also appeared in #, in Analog. Since then he has appeared in Universe. Shayol, Galaxy, and Amazing. He conceived the original idea for "In the Shubbi Arms" and claims it is founded on the "apocalyptic visions of Stephen Foster as revealed in his songs." by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop for them has no phonetic equivalent in any Terran language, but it means approximately the same thing that Terrans call them: Fat-asses. By and by, we came to a waiting chamber and another flunky, who looked me over and blooted, "Come? You be here now?" "Wilson-man," I said, and showed him the emblem on my purely ceremonial brief case. "Be sent for." The two Shubbi tweedled at each other for a few seconds, too fast and too high a pitch for me to follow the dialog. Then the receptionist headed back for his station at the mouth of Red Tunnel East, and the second Shubbi told me to wait while he went to fetch a Dufai. I insincerely thanked him as he lurched away. It's bad enough having to deal with flunkies; it can be a nightmare when some of the flunkies are big doughy toads, the others are big spiny blimps, and each kind would like to see the other kind staked out over hot coals. I nervously cooled my heels and calculated how much my time was going to be worth to Omlaf in terms of aggravation. A Dufai finally came clacking and scraping up the tunnel ramp. Now I began to get not just nervous but twitchy as well. I had never before bedn so close to one of them, and certainly never in one of their lairs. The Dufai enjoy making a show of refinement and have been, on the whole, marginally nicer proprietors of the galaxy that the crude Shubbi were. The Shubbi, on the other hand, did not smell like bad eggs. "You are here to see Omlaf," the Dufai said in passable German. He was not asking a question. Dufai do not ask questions. "First iris on the left," and he pointed his third major appendage down the tunnel. The third appendage is the formal one; he might as well have used a pole. I inclined my head ever so slightly, as one petty official to another, and walked down until I came to the iris bearing the squiggle that meant Commandant Omlaf. The iris opened. I took a deep breath and stepped through, into a gloomy, soursmelling chamber full of the new commandant. I hadn't expected to actually see Omlaf -- his predecessor, they had told me, always kept himself mercifully out of sight behind a large screen during audiences. Omlaf was big, even for a Dufai, at least three meters high, with a ratio of about two-to-one side to top. He remained spread and didn't rise for me. but he did have an interested air. I tried not to gag on it. "You are the Wilson-man," said Omlaf, "Your nest's official representative. I am so frothlike that you came." "How pulsing of you to have me." I gave him a big grin. He quivered. The Dufai are disturbed by the thought of teeth. which they apparently think are uncomfortable. They really don't like mouths, when you come down to it; our mouth parts move; we use our mouths to eat, to speak, to breathe, to make love; they think the whole business is vulgar. "You are comfortable in that erect positon." "Quite," I said, and thought. Surely they must have told him Terrans contain a good many bones. "Do not trouble yourself on my behalf. I am here to serve you." Omlaf gestured with his second major appendage, his way of acknowledging what was already obvious, then indicated a silver tray balanced atop a tripod. The tray contained small pieces of what might have been bloody liver mixed with milk. I was to help myself. "I regret to decline," I said. "Terran metabolisms have quirks." "You Terries have a saying. One man's meat is another man's person." "Something like that, yes." I tried not to watch as he delicately scooped up some of the morsels in the cup of his minor appendage and popped them into some orifice or other. "If ever you have occasion to call me here again, I must bring you a sample of a rich, aromatic, Terran delicacy. It's called  Continued on page # by Raymond Kaminski A nts, they were everywhere. Lucy found them in the pantry module where the food pellets were stored, in the catalytic stove, even in the cherished cookie jar, hand cut out of a moon rock, that Dave had given her on their seventh anniversary. And no matter how many times she scoured the kitchen with the plasma vaporizer, those little black pests kept coming back, zig-zagging over the white, teflon counter like coffee grounds that had suddenly come to life. "We can shoot men into space, but we still can't get rid of ordinary ants," Lucy mumbled to herself as she chased them with her ultrasonic wand. The insects scurried away, lashed by silent vibrations in the air. But as soon as she turned her back, they brazenly sprinted out again. To Lucy, it was more than just a simple nuisance, more than a poor reflection on ner housekeeping, for Dave was one of those men who had advanced space travel so far in the last decade that the exploration of the solar system had been standardized to a methodical, meticulous routine. He was now coordinator of a project which regularly launched voyagers to forage the vacuum for the knowledge and the materials the world needed for further progress and growth. Yet when she complained to him about the ants, he only smiled over the rim of his coffee cup and went on reading the latest report on his precious flights. The video-phone beeped persistently. Lucy ran, trying to answer it before it could wake Dave. He had put in another long night calculating the optimum reentry trajectory of Shuttle #-#I which was ferrying in the five astronauts returning from a flight beyond Pluto. Man had finally stepped out of his own backyard and left the solar system, like a kid crossing the street for the first time. The weather on earth, however, didn't seem to appreciate this milestone. It refused to cooperate, and Dave had to sneak the shuttle through between thunderstorms. "Where's Dave?j' Otis Drew's grey face winced across the screen. He looked as though he could use some rest himself. He always looked that way. "Dave's sleeping." Lucy tried to be firm. She knew it wouldn't do any good. "He didn't get home until dawn, you know." "Tell him to be at Flight Control within the hour." "Look, Mr. Drew... " The face on the screen turned into a blizzard of grey snow. Otis Drew had hung up. Lucy dreaded waking her husband. She knew he'd jump right out of his sleeping capsule as soon as she told him what Raymond Kaminski has been working as a scientific writer for fifteen years. Turning his hand to fiction, he has sold a novel to Tower Publications as well as this story to Galaxy. Warriors is scheduled to appear from Tower in January. Otis had said. But Dave had to have some rest, some time to let his body recuperate. He was depending too much on his beta-wave generator to keep him awake. It would ruin his health if it went on. And he hadn't really touched her in weeks. Lucy wouldn't let him. She didn't want love kindled and kept burning by a brain-wave machine. Without it, Dave drifted off even before the preliminaries were over. He couldn't help it. But Lucy did wake him. The job at Flight Control was a good one: it paid well and Dave seemed to enjoy the work. She made him drink black coffee in the hope that caffeine would make beta waves unnecessary. Still, it wasn't until he stood at the door and his finger found the button on the small pack attached to his belt that the color returned to his face. Only then was he fully awake. "If you remember," she asked him, just to have something to say, "try and pick up some ant traps on your way home. Nothing else seems to work." "Sure, Honey. I won't forget." He gave her an absent smile, a quick peck on the cheek, and then he was gone. She heard the turbines of his car scream into life, then fade into the distance. Lucy knew he wouldn't remember. "We were well beyond Pluto's orbit when we made visual contact. I estimate the diameter of the craft to be about # meters..." Group Leader Carl Kubek lit another cigarette off the one he had just smoked down to a butt. He hadn't felt this warmth in his lungs for the three months he had spent in space and he was greedy for any kind of sensory stimulation now that he was finally free of the sterile isolation of the space capsule. Normally, the Exploratory Program didn't even consider men or women who were addicted to the primitive, self-destructive tobacco habit. But Kubek was an exceptional man, and so they made exceptions for him. "You said 'craft'." Dave squirmed in his seat. "Do you expect us to believe... " "I don't expect anything." Kubek snapped back in a puff of smoke. "You want to hear it now or you want to wait for a written report?" "Go on, please." Otis Drew spoke to Carl, but he. was looking at Dave, "Okay, but pardon my syntax, won't you, fellas?" Carl wiped his hair back from his face, but the strands were heavy with sweat and they fell back down into his eyes. "Anyway, the craft was disc shaped, formed from a silvery, metallic substance. There were no external marks of identification. The surface was smooth, except for four hatches along the perimeter at intervals of # degrees. I suited up and went out to inspect it. The hatch opened easily. I didn't even have to use a hydraulic... " "I hope you realize that you violated procedure when you left the ship without permission. It was unscheduled, dangerous, and foolish." Dave didn't care for the way Kubek played fast and loose with the rules. Procedures had been codified for good reasons. Everything was so much safer, neater, easier to handle when the men kept to the pattern, did what they were told. Tom Barrett "Look, fella. At that distance from earth it takes over twentyfour hours between the time I transmit a message and the time I receive an answer. That's not counting the time it takes you guys to make up your minds. I'd still be driftin' out there somewhere if I had to ask for permission every time I wiped my nose. ' ' "But you put the whole project in jeopardy. Whatever this thing was that you found, it obviously wasn't a natural formation. It was manufactured and when you forced the hatch, you might have killed whoever was inside -- or been killed by them!" "There was nobody inside." "You couldn't have known until it was too late. And we have only your word..." "Look, are you calling me a liar?" Carl pushed himself to his feet. He was a big man, though his muscles were weakened from too much time spent in weightless space. But Otis stepped in between them and overruled Dave. "We selected Carl to head this expedition because of his initiative. We can't blame him when he uses it." To be contradicted by his superior in front of Kubek was like a slap in the face. At least it felt that way to Dave. He had to switch his brain-wave generator to alpha, to calm himself enough to go on. "After you breached the seal, what did you find?" Carl looked at Otis before he answered. "The craft appeared to have been designed for hauling cargo. There were no bulkheads, no internal fixtures. It was a great big container, probably was towed by a mother ship like a barge behind a tug. For some reason it had been abandoned. Maybe the mother ship developed technical problems and cut it loose. I have no way of knowing." He reached for another cigarette, but the pack was empty. He crushed it in his hand. "Come on. Get to the point. What did you find inside?" "Well, the craft was packed with crystals -- clear, brittle crystals like diamonds or rock candy, and they had a bluish tinge. I thought you boys might be interested so I brought some back with me." "Where are they now?" Carl nodded in Drew's direction. "In the lab. We're trying to identify the components." "I want to see them." "Of course, Dave." Otis Drew folded his hands in front of him. "Will you come along with us, Carl?" "You couldn't keep me away." It sounded possessive. They were his discovery, after all. But when he tried to rise, he swooned and fell back into his chair. "What's wrong?" "Probably just the tobacco and gravity ganging up against me. Takes time before you get used to either of them again." Carl smiled, embarassed. "You two go on ahead. I'll catch up in a minute or two." As soon as he was alone, Carl sifted through the butts in the ashtray till he found the longest one. When he lit it, he had to be careful not to burn his fingers or his nose. D ave didn't seem to want to talk when he came home. Lucy accepted his mood and braced herself for another night alone -- for she would be alone as soon as Dave turned off the beta waves. But after they picked their way through a silent dinner, the story began to leak out and exasperation over Kubek's impetuous conduct flowed into suspicions about the way Otis Drew had frustrated his authority. "You mean that we actually have proof that there are other people in the universe?" Dave couldn't help feeling betrayed by her enthusiasm. "Second-hand proof. That's all. The only solid evidence is the crystals. The rest is hearsay, the word of a reckless rocket jockey." "Well, what kind of crystals are they? I mean, are they sugar or salt or really diamonds?" Dave shrugged sourly. Lucy wasn't the only one who would be excited by the news. Soon a lot of people would be asking questions, so he might as well start getting used to answering them now. "We don't know anything yet. Samples are being shipped to the top analytical labs around the world. The crystals will be broken down into their components, bombarded with everything from lasers to proton beams. Then the results will have to be correlated. Till all the data is in, we're just whistling in the dark." It was then that the beeping of the video-phone intruded into the converstaion. This time Otis Drew was as grey as the North Atlantic and the twitches on his face were white caps riding the crests of the waves. "Kubek is dead." "When? What happened?" Dave's finger automatically found the brain-wave generator on his belt and switched it off. There was more than enough adrenalin dumping into his system to keep him awake from here on in. "We don't know. But the other members of the crew have fallen into comas. They must have picked up something in space. You better get over here. Quick!" Dave stood there for a second, staring into the flickering storm left on the screen. Then he tore out of the door. Lucy sighed long and hard. It was a good job, she told herself. Yet sometimes she wished all the commotion would go take a vacation. Then she noticed the plastic bag on the counter. She opened it and found ant traps. Dave had remembered. With all the problems on his mind, he had remembered her ant traps. Poor Dave. Lucy read the instructions, carefully pushed in the perforated holes around the rim of the cans and placed them at strategic sites around the kitchen. Foraging ants would enter the traps, carry the baited poison back to the nest, and soon the entire colony would be destroyed. "Even in this age of rockets and space travel when astronauts are swarming all over the universe and bringing back unimaginable treasures, it's nice to know that some of the oldfashioned solutions still work the best." Then Lucy gathered up the leftovers and stored them in the thermo-electric refrigerator. "The craft appeared to have been designed for hauling cargo. There were no bulkheads, no internal fixtures. It was a great big container, probably was towed by a mother ship like a barge behind a tug. For some reason it had been abandoned. Maybe the mother ship developed technical problems and cut it loose. I have no way of knowing." Continued from page # coffee." "It sounds simply wavelike." "I wagged my head, meaning But Of Course, and gave him my bland smile, the one with just the lips. He'd think wavelike if caffeine ever got hold of his digestive system. "But that," said the Dufai, "is as may be. There is a particular matter which must now be discussed, Wilson-man." "Of course." "I had hesitated to call your nest. It is my belief that a policy of general non-interference best serves the interest of efficient colonial administration. Even the fat-asses realized that after they had been here for a while." Otherwise, there wouldn't have been anything for the Dufai to grab away from them. "Leave the natives' customs and superstitions be, don't tamper with their nests and industries more than is absolutely necessary, and everything will run smoothly. That is the Dufai way. And it had always been successful. The Dufai Order, even before we assumed control of the Shubbi spheres of influence, has always been a model of efficiency. We have rarely had to punish anyone." The chamber filled with the sinus-searing miasma of Dufai pride as Omlaf did what they do instead of beam and crack suspenders. I tried breathing very shallowly, through the fine crack between my still blandly smiling lips. "But," Omlaf said, flicking his first major appendage, the one with the hollow barb and the poison sacs, "there is the matter of my private unit. My predecessor was unfortunately called away before he could explain to me the, ah, rituals, the protocol which your nest observes. I am baffled, Wilson-man, and it is starting to make me throbbing." "Believe me," I said, not taking my eyes from that twitching first appendage, "I want you to know, we all appreciate the fact that you're having to put up with some minor inconvenience." The first appendage uncoiled and rose and curled cobra-like in the air between us. The Dufai seemed to study the barb for a moment. "It has been some time since I contacted your nest with regard to this unit. Meanwhile, my administration is what you Terries call handsprung for simple lack of it." "Our people are working on it, let me assure you of that." "Your nest described the installation procedure as the merest thing. Yet I still have no easily accessible unit in my own chamber. The more I am told by your nest, the less I comprehend." He actually leaned toward me. It was all I could do to keep from jumping for the iris. The barb hovered above my head. "I am at twit's end, Wilson-man. Explain to me why I am having so much trouble with the Terrie communications system. Why could I not simply have kept my predecessor's unit?" "That would have complicated matters unduly. For everyone. There are records to maintain. You can't ima -- " I bit that off; you don't tell a Dufai that he can't anything. "We know what we're doing. My company, my nest, has been a going concern for a couple of hundred years, during which time procedures and policies that work have to be developed and refined and overhauled to the point that to tamper with them is to invite catastrophe. We readily admit that we make mistakes." "Perhaps you would not make mistakes if your nest did not enjoy such a considerable degree of autonomy." "But we explained the situation to you when you first came in to push out the Shubbi. And we explained it to them, too. And everyone agreed that our network should be integrated into the general system, first the Shubbi's, then yours. And at the same time. Just to keep things functioning smoothly. That the company should continue to have a free hand. No interference. It had been that way before the pulsing inception of the Dufai Order and the Shubbi takeover, and the company was enormously successful. It has been that way for the past century, apart from fat-ass excesses during the takeover itself. With the result that you now have at your fingertips a network that -- " "I have no private access to any network of your nest's." "But you will! You will! By no later than this very afternoon, or possibly tomorrow morning. And when you do get your unit, it will be yours, the one that you personally chose for yourself, not -- I sneered and hoped that Omlaf knew it to be an expression of contempt -- "a mere cast-off left by your predecessor." Omlaf sighed. That stench you wouldn't believe. "It is to be hoped. Desperation forces me to confide in you, a Terrie. I must have my private unit today, Wilson-man. I lose status in my nest each time I use another chamber." "Rest assured. We're doing all we can for you." "You are pulsing," said the spiny bag of blubber, "for a Terrie." "Where the Dufai sits, can a Terrie not be far away?" That remark apparently made some sense to him, anyway. He finally sat back or settled down or in any case drew away from me, and the first appendage coiled itself in his quasi-lap, and I just barely repressed a shudder of relief. No degree of training can quite prepare you for the sight of a Dufai barb as it looks for nice soft spots in your pate. "You will pardon my throbbing," Omlaf said. The Dufai do not really make requests, either. "I appreciate the strain which you baleens -- " "I do not know that word." "It's a word from a dead but still-honored Terran language. Great big ones." "Bah leens. Very wavelike, Wilson-man. I shall encourage its use." He waved the second appendage. I had been dismissed. Desperately resisting the urge to laugh out loud, I gave him a respectful nod and backed toward the iris. As soon as I was through and the portal had closed, I went up the ramp at just under a trot, darting past surly but awkward Shubbi messenger boys and, as I neared the mouth of Red Tunnel East, all but impaling myself on a, fortunately, bottom-caste spiny whale -- baleens, for God's sake, great big ones! -- who took a swing at me with his de-barbed appendage. Then I was out of the Shubbi Arms. I quickly put as much distance between myself and the place as I could before I had to sit down and absolutely break up. Bah leens! Very wavelike, Wilson-man! I howled. I rocked. I shall encourage its use! My God! I had done it, I thought, cackling, crying, pounding my thighs with my fists, my very first real penetration mission, and I had pulled it off to perfection, and never mind that Omlaf was new to Earth and couldn't tell when his tentacle was being tugged. Never mind that spooky first appendage, either. Oh, he would get his unit, finally, for sure, but it would make him more throbbing than not having it, we would see to that as we saw to everything else. The Dufai had the run of the place for two, three decades, and the Shubbi for several more before them, and in all of that time they had, neither of them caught on. Oh, and sure, I felt very patriotic and brave and all, a true descendant of the generation that had tried to match hardware with the Shubbi. But what really counted for me as I sat laughing and helplessly shaking my head was that I had gone right down into the midst of the bastards and shucked #' Massa Dufai, just as my parents and grandparents had shucked or Massa Shubbi after all the hardware was gone and only The Big Joke On Them was left. I had upheld the traditions of both my family and the company. We Wilsons have been members of the resistance since the first gloating fat-ass came waddling and slurching down the gangplank. And as for the other, well, hell, nobody's ever licked the phone company.  by Dona Vaughn T he government provided a military hover large enough to hold Alec in his hos-suit to take him to his home and all of them, even the emergency crew on the hover, expected him to be dead when they opened the doors. To their surprise, he was not. Dyane, standing at the doorway to supervise the hero's homecoming, felt a momentary chill as she remembered the indomitable, unconquerable will that was Alec Roche. But one look at his face and the hesitant movements of his chest reassured her. She had loved him so much that his leaving crushed the life out of her. Now she was a different woman -- regrettably colder and perhaps more cruel -- but blessedly different, and he no longer had the power to move her one way or the other. She had set aside the largest bedroom for him, the one that had been his in the dim past when they were together, but his eyes remained closed and he was not aware of that small favor. The emergency crew slipped him out of the hos-suit and connected him to the robo-nurse before they left. Looking down at him. Dyane thought that it was the robo-nurse, not Alec which caused the faint, erratic rise and fall of his chest. Only a small group of friends, hers, had followed them from Intercon IV. Ten or fifteen of them crowded into Alec's room with her and another fifteen or so roamed the house, changing places occasionally with the ones in the room. All of them felt it necessary to pat her on the shoulder and murmur, "Poor Dyane," when they passed, until finally her shoulder began to ache and she was sure she would scream at the very next person who came near her. But the next person was Saundra who handed her a drink and from the very first sip Dyane knew that Mikkel had been up to his old tricks and spiced it with something truly lovely that gave her a wonderful feeling of oneness with the universe and an urgent desire to love and be loved in all the varied ways she and her friends had discovered over the years. Dona Vaaghn's fiction has appeared in Galileo and Galaxy. She is a native of Texas and takes a lot of pride in her family -- a husband and two children. Her free time is taken up with gardening and target shooting, which must keep down the rodents in the garden. Then Saundra gasped and Val cried, "Look!" pointing at the robo-nurse. Dyane's beautiful feeling splintered and was gone. Alec's terrible eyes were open at last and he was looking around the room, gazing deeply, as only Alec could, into each of their faces. She followed his gaze around the room, looking into each of their faces as he did, and saw what he saw: their calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of his death. He closed his eyes and someone murmured, "He's gone, poor thing." Dyane could only sob, pointing to his chest, pointing at the thing no one else saw -- the suddenly firm and regular rhythm of his breathing. She brushed them all aside and went to bed alone for the first night since he had left her a hundred years before.   Alec swam up out of a haze of pain and saw the faces dancing in the mist before him. As they became clearer, they became fewer. Finally he understood that as he improved, the watchers vanished. It was agony for him to lie in the arms of the robo-nurse. When the telltales indicated he was getting stronger, the exerciser circuit was activated and his limbs underwent the further agony of mechanical movement. Once he dreamed that the governor of Earth had come into his room and looked down at him lying there with the robo-nurse pumping his limbs up and down for him as though he were some sort of frantic machine himself. The governor had spoken to someone just out of sight. "There are some things that robos can't do and that was one of them. When he crawled into the hold of that ship, he saved the lives of seven thousand people." The governor sighed. "It was an honor to ship him back to the planet of his birth. A very great honor." He paused as if waiting for a response. None came. "Everyone thought he would die. You understand that. They would not have done it if they could have guessed what kind of man he is. If they had known...You understand..." The governor's voice trailed off into silence. Then, in a completely different tone, "Who will tell him?" "I will." Dyane's voice floated out of some unseen corner of the room, and in it there was a minute trace of something that could only be detected by someone who had been as close to her as Alec had been a hundred years before. Triumph. Just a trace. Then it was gone. "I will be the one." After that he was not sure what was conciousness and what was not. The frantic pumping of his arms and legs seemed to go on eternally, even in his sleep, permeating every dream but one, that of the night machine. He had not dreamed of the night machine since he was a child, but now he dreamed of it constantly. The night machine had been, in reality, the vast machinery in the basement of the self-contained apartment house in which he had spent his childhood, the machinery tiiat purified the apartment dwellers' waste and returned it to them in usable forms. But he had not known that when he first saw it as a four year old. The vast clanging machinery haunted his dreams for weeks. He had seen it as a masticator of men and he knew then as he knew now that when he died he would go into the night machine to reappear later in another form -- purified, improved perhaps -- but changed; and it was the change, the loss of the uniqueness that was himself, that he feared more than the physical fact of death.   He woke one morning to a clear, cold conciousness of self that left no question as to what was dream and what was real, and while he might have teethmarks on his soul, the night machine would have to wait a little longer. There was a soft sound, a whisper of movement beside him. He turned his head and saw Dyane. He felt his lips shaping into a smile. "Dyane..." She shook her head to ward off whatever he might say next. "Leo has been calling to check on you. He would like to see you Cortney Skinner as soon as you feel like it." "Tell him, this afternoon," Alec said. "You can unhook me from this thing now." Another woman might have protested. Another woman would not have known Alec so well. If he had said he could survive without the robo-nurse's ministrations, then he could. She unhooked him without comment and stepped back, not offering him a hand, as he sat up for the first time since he had come home to Earth. She stood quietly, waiting, and after a long moment, he stood up. With the slow, shuffling steps of a very old man, he walked to the window. He braced himself against the wall and examined the stranger's reflection in the glass before him. "I'm better than I was." "Yes." He could sense that she was waiting, catlike, to pounce on something. "This time when I leave -- " "I thought you were gone for good. We agreed on that. My life is arranged. And now you've come back -- " She took a deep breath. "I don't fit into our old patterns anymore," she went on quietly, trembling with anger contained. "I've changed. I've changed, but you haven't." "It's only for a little while," he said patiently, not understanding, not yet. "Only until I get my strength back. Then I'll be gone and you'll have your life back, just the way it was." Her expression did not change. "After I'm gone -- " "You're not going. You will never be strong enough to leave Earth. They would not have brought you back if they had realized you were going to live. They didn't know you. Alec. Not like I do." "When I get stronger," he said, hearing her words, but not assimilating them, not yet, "I'll leave and then you'll -- " "No." "I don't -- " "You're a prisioner of gravity. You'll live, but your body will never again be strong enough to survive the lift off from Earth." He continued to look at her, still not comprehending, until he saw the tears shining in her cheeks and then, finally, he understood. No matter how long and how hard he fought, the way to the stars was closed to him. Forever. Leo Brandon came at four. He had been the only person on Earth gratified to hear that Alec Roche's flame was not extinguished. Since that was a manifestly unpopular view, he had kept it to himself and. He limped over to the table to examine the choice she had left him. The reflection of his own hand reached out to him as he picked up the knife. He switched it on and ran the edge of the beam carefully along his thumb. A long thin sliver of flesh curled away and floated down to the tabletop. It would be over so quickly and then there would be no more pain. He could no longer remember what life had been like without pain. fingers crossed, he had dreamed. Now he would see whether those dreams could stand the light of day. He let himself in. The sounds of music and laughter drifted down from the rooftop gardens, but the house itself was empty and echoing. He found Dyane just leaving Alec's room. When she saw him, she closed the door gently behind her and leaned against it. looking pale, fragile, and unutterably weary. "He knows?" Leo asked. "He knows." "And he accepts it?" "When has he ever accepted anything?" she said bitterly and walked away. For a moment Leo allowed his emotions free rein. Then, with an effort, he smoothed away the grin and composed his face into the proper lines for visiting one's best friend on his deathbed and went inside. When he saw the crippled old man standing beside the window, he thought he was in the wrong room. Then the man turned and he realized it was Alec. "I should have died out there," Alec said, bv way of greeting. He limped back to the robo-nurse and sat down. "Everyone expected you to. They would not have brought you back otherwise. You have to understand, Alec. They were not being cruel. They simply did not understand you." "And what do I do now?" "You make a life for yourself, I suppose. As best you can." "I've been thinking...a clone, perhaps, and a memory transfer..." "You haven't really kept up with the news from home, have you Alec?" Leo said gently. "What news?" "Why, the news that we are in perfect balance here on Earth. TTie population is completely under control. Of course, it has required a lot of hardship. A lot of personal sacrifice. There is always a hardcore majority that will not leave a planet, no matter how crowded it gets. And of course with our lengthened life span -- we simply had to adopt certain restrictions... You do understand?" "Cloning?" "Is illegal. I am sorry, Alec. If they could change the law for anyone, they would do it for you. The governor himself told me so." "But there are other places off Earth where -- " "They could fix you up in no time...If you could get there. But you can't get there, Alec." Alec lay back and let the robo-nurse's arms snake around him. He closed his eyes. "I'll be back," Leo said. Alec said nothing.   He woke to the sounds of music and laughter and he realized he had been hearing the same sounds in the background day and night since consciousness returned, the noise of Dyane's perpetual party. He stirred and the robo-nurse subsided. Someone had thoughtfully left a cane and a robo-chair by the door. He chose the cane and limped down the hall toward the music and laughter. Forty people filled the circular mainroom and in the center of the room on a mirrored tabletop, Dyane lay naked. Leaning over her was a tall, thin man who with skillful hands was embroidering fantastic sketches on her skin with a laserneedle. She of all the crowd saw Alec in the doorway. "Come and watch." she cried. "I'm having my life story written on my skin." Alec limped closer. The tall thin man was sketching a woman's face on the soft mound of Dyane's left breast. "My mother," she said. "I'm saving my labia for my father." The hands. "I'm tired of the past and I find this old skin is too tight. I'm going to get a new one soon and I wanted to get the maximum use out of this one before I shed it." She laughed until the artist hissed at her to be still. Alec saw then that there was no place in her life for him. One more doorway closed before him. The options were narrowing. He watched the needle skipping across her flesh for a few moments and then limped back to the robo-nurse to think it over.   When he finally slept the night machine crunched and rumbled so hungrily through his dreams that he woke again in a cold sweat, bringing the robo-nurse back to life. He lay quiet, passively accepting its ministrations until sometime in the early morning hours when the party swirled out of the house and swept on to livelier places. He shook off the robo-nurse and, leaning heavily on the cane, limped down the hall to the mainroom. On the mirrored table where Dyane had lain, there was a knife. He knew Dyane had left it for him. She had known where his thoughts would take him -- hoped perhaps that he would choose that route. The means lay within his grasp. She had gone no further than that. He limped over to the table to examine the choice she had left him. The reflection of his own hand reached out to him as he picked up the knife. He switched it on and ran the edge of the beam carefully along his thumb. A long thin sliver of flesh curled away and floated down to the tabletop. It would be over so quickly and then there would be no more pain. He could no longer remember what life had been like without pain, the pain of his poor battered body and now the other, inner, pain, that tortured him when he thought of the stars, forever beyond his reach. But just as he had been unable to give into death in one form, he was unable to give into it in another. He would fight against the night machine even if it meant two hundred more years of pain and struggle before he succumbed. With infinite care, he replaced the knife on the mirrored tabletop and turned away. From behind him somewhere, he heard a long, low sigh and he turned in time to see a flash of iridescent tattooed skin disappearing into the garden room. He waited a few moments and when she did not reappear, he went back to the robo-nurse's arms. whistling in a particularly lighthearted way Alec found so irritating that it alone would have drawn him back from the grave. "It's time you were up and about," Leo told him. "You've got to come and see my babies." "Babies?" "That's what I call them. You haven't even asked me what I'm working on." Anything, Alec thought, to keep him from whistling. "All right, what are you working on?" "A zoo," said Leo and chuckled like a madman. Leo's zoo consisted of rows and rows of ampules in a liquid nitrogen freezer. "They're part of the package for the Andromeda Probe, the cells of all Earth's creatures -- except man." Leo grinned. "But he will be represented too. I have permission, unofficial of course, to pick up human cells off planet for two cloned volunteers when I collect the rest of the package." Alec leaned heavily on his cane, staring at the freezer. "I'm afraid I don't quite understand." "You haven't heard about the Andromeda Probe? It's been planned for the past ten years!" Alec thought of muscles and bones strained beyond endurance and the terrifying knowledge that seven thousand lives depended on him. "It must have slipped my mind," he said mildly. "Yes, well, it's a purely scientific venture to explore the M#I galaxy -- " here when the results come in?" "I have to assume someone will." For once, Leo was quite serious. "I believe in Man. I always have." He reddened slightly and hurried on. "The probe's computer will carry out mechanical scans first, and on the basis of that, decide at what point to start the cloning and educating of the volunteers." His eyes sparkled. "Can you imagine it? Two humans with a life span of five hundred years and the best equipment our civilization can furnish and a whole new galaxy will be theirs to explore. If they find no life they can seed selected planets for us." "Us?" "We'll be there eventually. Man always pushes outward. It's his nature." "Why only two humans? Why not enough to establish a colony?" "We wouldn't want to meet ourselves when we get there, especially not with that much lead time. Look how much trouble we've had rooting out entrenched colonies in our own Galaxy. Let's hope Andromeda holds something a little less dangerous than humans." He chuckled like a maniac. "But what do we care about that? You and I will be long gone by then."   When Alec returned home, the house was still empty. No doubt the party was continuing elsewhere with Dyane at its center, but Alec was left alone with his thoughts. When he slept, the night machine was back in his dreams, but this time instead of something that longed to devour him, it was a fantastic steed that he rode across great distances into another universe. In the morning he called Leo. "Feeling better, are we?" Leo said. "How about lunch?" Leo picked him up, took him to a remote beach, and floated him out on an air skid half a mile from shore, before he turned on a damping device and said, "Nice day we're having, isn't it." "You know what I want, Leo." "I know." "Can you do it?" "Certainly!" "How soon?" "As close to departure time as possible. Once I'm off Earth we can't be stopped. I leave May #st. You come to my zoo on the #th and I'll give you another tour." Before they floated back to shore, Leo said, "After that, this body won't matter, you know." Alec understood. Leo was telling him it was all right to give up once he had donated the cells and the tapes. "I'll bring you something afterwards," Leo said and Alec was grateful to him. There was the problem of the law. They had the tacit approval of the governor, but at the slightest hint of publicity that would vanish. The punishment for illegal cloning was death. After Leo and his zoo were safely off Earth, it wouldn't matter, but until then Alec had to be very careful. Dyane came back to the house minus the party and took to watching him like a curious cat. She wore no clothes in the house and he grew used to the iridescent flash of skin that announced her presence. He was glad when he awoke on the morning of the #th and found that another party was underway. That would take Dyane's mind off him. He dozed in the sun and gathered his strength. Sometimes the party swirled into the garden around him and he didn't even notice as he dreamed of galaxies beyond reach. He went to bed early that night. The robo-nurse, no longer activated, surrounded him like a silent metal guardian, and he slept peacefully for once with no dreams to disturb him. He woke to find that the night machine had come to life in the beautiful gold light of dawn and was holding him fast in its steel embrace. Dyane stood by the door, watching him. "Let me out of this," he said calmly. "I know what you're planning to do. You haven't considered the consequences to me, have you? You'll be dead and I'll be under suspicion... They 'll restrict my movements and my friends will desert me and you don't even care. You don't think of me. You didn't think of me when you left before. You..." She turned to hide her face. He stopped trying the strength of the robo-nurse's arms and considered her back. "You could have come with me." "I couldn't," she cried and ran out of the room, leaving him a captive. He began again, methodically, to try his strength, and he wondered for the first time why she had not accompanied him a century before. The robo-nurse had not been programmed for violent patients. He beat and battered at it with his body until its parts buckled and unlatched and then he lay in its ruins trying to gather strength that was no longer there. Finally he gave up and simply rolled out of the robo-nurse's remains and onto the floor. He lay where he had fallen until he knew if he lay there a second longer, he would never move again. He began slowly, painfully, to inch his body toward the door. Time was passing, a lot of it, and it seemed to his weary eyes that he was no closer to the door. Somewhere in the distance he heard the soft pinging of the triphone and he knew that Leo was trying to reach him, wondering if he had changed his mind at the last moment, and knowing he would not. And then he forgot Leo. forgot that other promised future self, forgot everything except that he had to crawl through the doorway ahead; forgot everything except the pain, pain, pain, pain, pain of muscles stretched beyond endurance and still functioning. Nothing, not even the iridescent flash of skin, registered until he felt the salty drops running down his face and knew that he was laying on his back. He knew then that he had made the ultimate effort, had called every ounce of strength out of his body, ravaged it for everything it held, and everything was not enough. He was laying on his back and the doorway was forever beyond his reach, like the stars themselves. Then he realized that the salty tears running down his cheeks were not his own but Dyane's and that she was cradling his head in her lap. "All right, all right, you utter and complete Continued on page # by Eugene Potter and Larry Blamire What is considered by many to be the most decisive development in the history of steam warfare took place in # when military engineers in the Republic of Normandy discovered the traction-bearing drive. Until that time, the size of the steam rig itself was limited by the precision with which its drive gears could be machined. Small imperfections in gear teeth create noisy vibrations when teeth mesh at high power and speeds. The result can be debilitating noise for the crew as well as an unstable drive system liable to breakdowns. Until the discovery of tractionbearings, experiments with rigs larger than ninety-five feet led to damaged gears and broken crews. While traction-bearings solved the mechanical problems inherent in the construction of truly large steam rigs, the fuel problem remained. A larger rig requires numerous coaling stations, effectively obviating the possibility of overland invasion into enemy territory. It was a remarkable confluence of circumstances, then, when the Norman steam works produced the first oil-fired steam engine in the same year the new drive system was developed. In one stroke, the Norman steam forces acquired a rig much larger than any seen before which was also capable of extended forays overland. -- Samuel Ellicot Morrison from A Concise History of Steam Warfare on the North American Continent. Artist Larry Blamire is well known to readers of Galileo. He acts with the Boston Shakespeare Company when he is not painting and he is keenly interested in filmmaking. He was the original creator of the Steam Wars. Eugene Potter has had short stories published in Galileo. He claims to have gotten involved with Larry's Steam Wars project because he always wanted to combine his interests in science fiction and history. At the compound the carnage was awful . Confusion reigned among the demoralized Americans. Bodies lay everywhere and the scene was a mess of flying limbs, scalding blasts of escaping steam, and sheer terror. Here and there a crewman sought refuge among the buildings, only to be crushed as the structures collapsed, one by one. L owell is situated at the junction of two major rail lines and occupies a bend in the Merrimack River. It is the site of the regional service facility for the United States Steam Forces, Fort Salmon P. Chase. To the north there are low hills, then the border of NouvelleNormandie just two miles away. To the south there are even lower hills, then metropolitan Boston, resting in the center of a geological basin. On October #, #, the peace of the normally placid countryside was shattered by the appearance of the largest steamrig ever known on the North American continent. The l#-foot man-shaped machine appeared in the hills to the north, indiscriminately smashing barns, houses, stone fences, and trees as it trundled through the small farms which cover the landscape in that part of New England. The locals knew the great machine was making for the Chase steam works. Even if the fort had been heavily guarded (and it was not), it is hard to believe the U.S. steam forces would have had anything to stand up to this Norman juggernaut. Nobody expected an attack from the northern countryside. American steam forces were guarding the coastal highway at Ipswich, fifteen miles east. The Americans were unprepared for either an overland attack or an assault by a steamrig # feet high. An occasional farmer would bring out a loaded rifle and fire at the advancing behemoth, but it was hopeless. A lucky shot through the "eye" might have wounded one of the two pitots or perhaps even the captain. But, faced with such an enormous destructive machine, not even the doughty New England farmer had the nerve to stand fast and aim his rifle properly. The Norman machine slowed, however, within a mile of the Chase steam works while its captain surveyed the compound. He stroked his short elegant beard thoughtfully and half-turned to the young officer who stood at wide stance attention behind him. "A moi ces jumelles," he said. "Toss me those field glasses." The young man nodded and handed him the field glasses, then took the mouthpiece of the speaking tube from its hook on the ornate cabin wall. "Toute halte, " said the captain. "Full stop." "Toute halte," repeated the lieutenant into the speaking tube. The enormous rig took another ponderous "step" and halted, its great six cylinder reciprocating engine chuffing at idle belowdecks. The landscape before the four men in the lofty cabin stopped rocking and the captain scanned the five brick buildings of the Chase compound with his field glasses. The facility consisted of a depot, a small fabrication plant (nothing like the one in Montreal), two hangars, and administrative offices, all low brick buildings with few windows and substantial-looking architecture in a military style. Three American rigs stood in and about the compiound, small protection for an important military installation. The largest of them was fifty feet tall. The other two, lightly-armed one-man walkers, were only twenty feet high with armament limited to single Maxim machine guns. Another rig (which would have been fifty feet high, had it been standing) was under repairs and rested in great, helpless pieces before one of the hangars. There were signs of activity in the compound, evidence that the Americans bestirred themselves from the shock of their first look at R.N. V. Colosse defer. Smoke began to billow from the shoulder stacks of the largest American rig. It made tentative movements, as if in drill and slowly -- in a complicated series of maneuvers -- turned to face the Norman machine. "Nous sommes d portee de ce vapeur Id, " said the captain. "We are within range of that rig." He turned again to the lieutenant. "Commencez!" he said. "Fire away!" "Commencez!" repeated the young man into the speaking tube. The titan's ten inch chest gun coughed a single tracer over the mile separating the enormous rig from its target. The tracer landed short, taking a corner from the steam hangar in the foreground and raining bricks over the dismantled rig on the pavement. There was a pause while the Norman gunner made adjustments, then the cannon opened up again. Two exploding charges went wide of the American rig, reducing half the depot to rubble. The third shot -- after another pause -- found its mark and halved the American rig at its "waist." Orange smoke surged skyward as its magazine detonated. "A discretion, " said the captain. "At will." The lieutenant repeated the orders behind him and the captain studied the scene ahead. At the compound the carnage was awful. Confusion reigned among the demoralized Americans. Bodies lay everywhere and the scene was a mess of flying limbs, scalding blasts of escaping steam, and sheer terror. Here and there a crewman sought refuge among the buildings, only to be crushed as the structures collapsed, one by one. A marine platoon leader, looking splendid in his blue jacket, attempted to get his detachment in formation, but his shouts could not be heard over the roar of the shells and exploding charges. He was killed in the first three minutes by shrapnel. In the relaxed and comfortable control cabin of the Norman monster, the captain studied the firing pattern of his barely competent gun crew. "Expediez le vite!" he snapped. "Finish it off quickly!" He watched the shells from his rig's other guns strike the low buildings, knocking chunks of brick from them. The exploding shells of the big chest gun, however, accomplished most of the destruction. The big cannon in the rig's central cabin was capable of firing twenty rounds in a minute. Even so, it took the inexperienced Norman gun crew a half hour to completely flatten the steam works. The drift on a projectile from a ten inch shell is only two and a half yards over the course of a mile, and deviation is less than two yards in a ten-mile wind. But the Norman guns continuously struck wide or short. Nevertheless the explosive power of the Norman's guns made up for the incompetence of the gun crew. A near miss inevitably destroyed the rig's target anyway. The first mission of Republique de Normandie Vapeur Colosse de Per was shaping up as a success. Never having fired a shot in return, the Chase steam yard was completely destroyed. The two walkers were dismembered and buried in the wreckage. The large rig under repair was less than scrap metal, and black smoke enveloped everything. "En avant, " said the Norman captain. "Forward." "En avant, " echoed the lieutenant into the speaking tube. The Norman's guns stopped. The great machine's engine rumbled as it built steam to move the great "legs." "Quatre degris d droit, " said the captain. "Four degrees to. the right." He waited to hear the lieutenant repeat the order into the speaking tube. "Vers Boston, " he said. Corporal Frederick Winchendon was aware that an order to find errant Gunnery Sergeant Tom Service amounted to an order to prowl all the bars in Gloucester. He silently cursed hii superiors for forcing him to abandon his work on the U.S,S. Javelin's right arm and took up the job of searching for a man he knew was not worth finding. He would have preferred to finish tearing down the "shoulder" set to examine that bearing. He was convinced he could repair the bearing himself, if only the captain would give him a chance to examine it. Instead, he found himself walking from bar to bar and tavern to tavern. He finally discovered the "gunny" alone at a table in a dingy place on the Gloucester waterfront. You can't just drag a man out of a bar on a Saturday evening. Even a drunken lout like Service deserved the courtesy of being allowed to finish his drink, so Winchendon sat quietly while the sergeant took great gulps from a tumbler of whiskey and tried to explain steam strategy to the serious-fninded corporal. If there were any chance of actually learning strategy from the bleary-eyed gunny, Winchendon would have hung on the man's every word. But he dismissed the whole one-sided discussion as so much drunken rambling. He gazed wistfully toward the door of the bar, hoping Service might somehow remain in a condition equal to walking back to the Gloucester train station after he finished his interminable last drink. His gaze was interrupted, however, by the appearance of three men approaching their table. They wore the dark blue wool frocks of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and they carried themselves like Gloucester locals. They swaggered a little. "Well, well, well," said one of the sailors menacingly, while he dropped his glowing cigarette and ground it out on the barroom floor. He was looking at one of his companions, a bearded brute of a man, when he said, "Do we have the honor of entertaining the steam forces tonight?" Service broke off his monologue on the strategic insignificance of the coastal highway. The two steam crewmen stood up from their small table. "At your service, sir," slurred the sergeant good-naturedly and adjusted his neck kerchief. "Gunnery Sergeant Tom Service, the chest gun of the U.S.S. Javelin. " Winchendon didn't say anything. He didn't want trouble from the Revenue sailors, but he didn't want to be friendly with them, either. " And what part of the steam man do you run? " said the third sailor to Winchendon. "Excuse me," said Service, smiling. "We don't call it a steam man. We call it a steamrig." The third sailor looked at Service. "And what part of the steam man do you run?" he repeated. "You can tell by looking at him," interrupted the bearded monster -- and at this. Service took a surprisingly steady step toward the sailors -- "He's the prick." The sailors all began to laugh. And they laughed so hard that they weren't prepared for the apparently drunk Service to pick up a nearby chair and club the bearded man with it. Winchendon knew instantly that he had no recourse but to fight. Falling easily into the hand-to-hand movements that he had learned so recently in basic training, he belted one of the sailors with a double-handed blow to the temple and kicked the only one who had remained standing. At that point, however, the one Service had clubbed staggered to his feet and prepared to face off with the corporal, who raised his fists. Then two things happened. The number of Revenue sailors increased by six or eight (Winchendon didn't have the presence of mind to count them) and Tom Service disappeared. Winchendon punched and kicked valiantly for a few seconds, but there were so many of the sailors that he could not prevent himself from being pinioned. He tried vainly to get his foot behind the leg of his captor and he had a few anguished instants of realization as he saw a line beginning to form in front of him. The sailor at the front of the line bowed comically to Winchendon. "Prick," he said, "I would like you to meet the man who has the first whack at punching your guts out." He turned and made a gesture to the large blond-bearded creature beside him. "This here," he said, "is the Chief Stoker of the Revenue Cutter Quincy." He turned back toward Winchendon. "Chief," he said. "This here's the prick of one of the steam men from Ipswich." Then the burly stoker stepped toward Winchedon and began to punch him alternately in the head and stomach. The young corporal remained conscious long enough to hear one of the sailors say, "Come on, now. Chief, give the rest of us a chance." Station to the city limits. Winchendon would have preferred to walk -- or limp -- the distance in silence. But Gunnery Sergeant Service, having secured the corporal's release from jail, seemed inclined to conversation. He looked at Winchendon as the young armsman struggled to keep up with him on the uneven brick pavement. "You look a sight. ' said the sergeant. "Maybe you'll look bad enough for the captain to take pity on you. He's not too happy about diverting to Gloucester." Winchendon was preoccupied with his pains, but he managed to summon enough concentration to look back at the sergeant while he limped along. "Where did you go?" he asked. "The captain," said Service sympathetically, "said he would contact the Paymaster about making deductions from your pay as soon as we get to Lowell." "Deductions?" croaked Winchendon. "Captain put up the damages to get the innkeeper to drop the charges. He intends to get the money back." "Didn't you tell him it wasn't my fault?" "Corporal," said Service. "It doesn't matter whose fault it was. When you bust up a bar, you pay for the privilege. I know. I busted up plenty of them in my time." "Sergeant," said Winchendon. "You started that fight. I didn't have anything to do with it." "They sure were beating you up like you had something to do with it," said Service. Just then they caught sight of the Javelin's torso, towering above the houses along Washington Street. It looked like some mythological giant guarding the town. Wisps issued from its shoulder stacks and the two of thpm could just make out some of the crewman idling behind railings just below the machine's "head." Winchendon saw his friend Stevens at the very top of the rig's "helmet." He could not see what he was doing, but assumed he was polishing the six-pounder which he operated so effectively at the target range in Ipswich. The ninety-five foot rig was altogether a picture of calm inactivity. "Why are we shipping to Lowell?" said Winchendon. "Maintenance," said Service. "Captain decided to report a week early because of the bearing in the right arm." He tisked sympathetically. "I hope he doesn't blame that on you, too. Corporal." Winchendon groaned. "Is the coastal highway secure?" he said. " 'Is the highway secure?' " said the gunnery sergeant, grinning. "Are we taking up that strategy now. Corporal? We aren't any good at beating up Revenue sailors, is that it?" "Don't push me. Sergeant," said Winchendon. "Settle down, boy," said Service. "You're in no shape to back up any threats. I'll answer your question, though. # don't think the coastal highway is secure. They still have the Talos and the Washington, but I think there could be an attack any time. That's what I was explaining to you last night when we were interrupted." "The Normans wouldn't attack during peace negotiations." "Peace negotiations don't mean anything to the Frogs," said Service. "They just want to get us by surprise. They want to attack with their new steamrig." "New steamrig?" "The Frogs," said Service, "have a new steamrig which is half again as big as a conventional rig. It has more armor and firepower than thret. Javelins." The sergeant gestured toward the steamrig ahead of them and Winchendon thought he saw an increase in activity on the machine, as well as he could tell through the telegraph lines in the foreground. "You're talking through your hat. Sergeant," said Winchendon. "They would never make a surprise attack. It goes against the code of steam warfare. And besides. I've studied a lot about steamrigs and I can tell you that nobody can build a drive train for a machine like you're talking about." Service shook his head. "Come on. Winch," he said. "You sound like those old farts at Command." "Don't call me 'Winch'," said Winchendon. "Nobody can build the gears for a rig like that. A rig like the Javelin is as big as they can get. Any bigger and the minor imperfections in the gears set up vibrations that will shake the rig to pieces the minute it starts up. It's impossible to machine the gears fine enough. Not to mention you couldn't carry enough coal to fire such a big machine. There are enough problems with stoking the Javelin." He remembered with a twinge the weeks he spent in the stoke hold of the great rig. "Maybe they have a new kind of fuel," said Service. "And maybe they don't use gears." "Don't make me laugh," said Winchendon, rubbing his jaw, "it hurts. And I suppose you're going to tell me we don't have to guard the coastal highway because this giant rig will come overland from Montreal where the Frogs have their steam works. I suppose this big machine doesn't need regular steam highways." Winchendon noticed a definite increase in activity on the distant rig. Crewmen rang along catwalks, shot up ladders, and rappeled down the torso on grapnels. Their red and white striped jerseys merely looked pink at this distance. "What's going on?" said Winchendon. Before Service could venture an answer, the machine's whistle sounded, shortly but piercingly. It screamed into the sky over Gloucester three times and Winchendon had to cup his hands over his ears against the excruciating sound. Service pushed the corporal. "Combat alert. Winch!" he shouted into the young man's ear. "Double-time!" The two of them broke into a run, heedless of hangovers, bumpy brick pavement, small children, and a crystal blue sky. Winchendon swung himself into the basket from which he operated ihe Javelin's right arm. He pulled the clutch lever to engage the mechanical system which operated the traction telltales and enabled him to coordinate his operations with those of the left arm. "Forty-five degree swing," barked the speaking tube next to his right ear. "Forty-five degrees," shouted Winchendon, setting the pointer at forty-five and cranking the knobbed wheel which would engage the limiting studs. He checked his instrument board at the mechanical pointer for the left arm. As soon as the pointer crossed into the red area marked "Forward Swing," he pushed his throttle for backward swing. It took three swings to get the arms into perfect coordination. Winchendon had a counterpart at the left arm, a man named Fitzsimmons who occupied a basket thirty feet away, on the other side of Service's six inch gun. Once the two armsmen achieved perfect synchronization, their arm swinging could increase the rig's ' 'walking" speed by as much as three miles per hour. A steamrig is a powerful machine, but it had not improved on any of the dynamics of human walking. Any steam crewman can talk at length on the importance of a good arm swing to steamrig locomotion. An armsman, however, performs his job with practiced motions and is able to remove some of his concentration from the operation once the rig is fully underway. It is much the same as a bicycle racer, who is able to take his mind from the complicated work of pedaling and balancing in order to consider strategy. It was inevitable, then, that Winchendon's mind would begin to drift and to reconsider the events of what had been (so far) the most unpleasant day of his life. Not since he had fled his parents' poverty-stricken farm near Smyrna. Delaware had he suffered such humiliation. Captain Feller had made him and Service stand within the railing of the Javelin 's broad "epaulet." They stood in the wide-footed stance which passes for "attention" on board a swaying steam rig. They waited for Captain Feller to finish shouting into his speaking tube, The rigi was thunderous when it was underway, but the captain was a big man and took resonance from the full height of his body when he spoke. "Stay on the steam road," shouted the captain into the tube. "We'll use # at least until we hit Peabody. Stand by for more orders when we get there." He replaced the cap on the speaking tube and looked up at the two crewmen. "Corporal," bellowed the captain, "you're luckythe Steam Corps outlawed flogging." The captain, an old-timer, often forgot himself and referred to the service by its obsolete designation as a Corps. Winchendon gulped. He wanted to say something in his own defense, something to relieve the humiliation of being posted on the epaulet. But he couldn't think properly with the wind whistling in his ears at twenty miles per hour. And he hadn't the wherewithal for all the shouting anyway. "Do you like operating the right arm?" shouted the captain. "Yes, sir," shouted Winchendon. "You don't want to stoke again?" Winchendon thought about the grimy, sweaty cabin in which the stokers strained their backs firing the furnace for Javelin's four cylinder reciprocating engine. "No, sir," he shouted. "I'm sure Chief Duff would be happy to get you back down there in the engine room," the captain bellowed. Winchendon didn't know what to say. "You're going to have to get back to your arm," boomed the captain. "We can't make top speed without the swinging. You're just lucky we don't have another trained armsman." "Yes, sir," shouted Winchendon. He hoped the interview was over, but Service spoke up. "Sir," said the gunny, with the practiced projection of a crewman, "are we going to fight?" "You're damned right we are, Sergeant," said the captain. "The goddam Frogs are here." Service glanced quickly at Winchendon and smiled. Winchendon just wanted to get off the epaulet and back to his station, but Service seemed determined to prove his contentions in front of the corporal. "What about the peace talks?" he said. "The peace talks have gone to Hell," replied the captain, turning to bring a chart down from the rack beside him. "Normandy wasn't ever interested in peace. Damned Frogs just wanted to take us by surprise. Their rig didn't even come by the coast road, for God's sake. It came overland from Montreal. If the reports are correct, it has destroyed the steam works at Lowell. "You had better get to your posts, both of you. The report says this rig is # feet tall. We've got the fight of our lives coming up." T ime passes quickly in a steamrig. The large and powerful machine requires constant attention to keep it running smoothly and on course. Course corrections are frequent, speed and power are constantly adjusted for gradients, and when a rig is on combat status the gun drills are incessant. Winchendon did not notice how quickly time was flying as he responded to orders from the speaker next to his ear, accelerating and decelerating the swing of the right arm, throwing his clutch in and out. He was lost in the rhythm of the rig's swaying gait. He had no idea that the captain had commanded the unprecedented operation of entering the metropolitan area at Peabody, that they were striding southwestward through the towns of Boston's north shore, scattering pedestrians, carriages, and bicycles. He had no porthole at his station and he wasn't privy to the captain's decisions. He knew enough about tactics, however, to realize that their only chance was to engage the Norman north of the Charles River. They might hope to hold the invader there until the Talos and the Washington got word and followed. Winchendon swung slightly in his gimbaled basket, working his throttles and clutch automatically, when a strange hum brought him back to where he was. His experienced ears picked up the unusual sound from among the crashing din which echoed about the work cabin. "What's the matter, there. Winch?" shouted Service from across the cabin. "I don't know yet. Sergeant," shouted Winchendon, too concerned with his board to notice Service's use of the hated nickname. Service went back to berating his gun crew, putting them through their loading and servicing drills. The hum continued and Winchendon saw his steam pressure gauge advancing. He hadn't heard any orders to pick up speed and he began to worry. He waited another second, then tried to throttle down during the forward swing, just to see if he could reduce the pressure. Fitzsimmons would notice it immediately and would compensate. The hum continued. Throttling down did nothing to push the needle back. "Sergeant," he shouted to Service. "Trouble here." "What is it. Winch?" shouted the Gunnery Sergeant. "Oh, God, boys. There it is. Have you ever seen anything like it?" Winchendon risked a glance at Service and his gun crew. The sergeant was jumping back and forth between the big gun's sights and the side of the port, where he could see out. "I got trouble with that bearing. Sergeant," bawled Winchendon, the hum increasing alarmingly. "Not now. Winch," shouted Service. "We've sighted the Frog." Winchendon heard a fearful groan and he knew the bearing was seizing up. Service looked up from talking with one of his gunners. "Winch," he shouted, "throttle back that arm!" "That's what I'm doing. Sergeant," shouted Winchendon, getting scared. "Then get her into the forward position if you can," shouted Service. "It sure won't do us much good down. Ninety degrees." Winchendon reset his pointer at ninety degrees and wound the knobbed wheel to adjust the steamrig's enormous set screws. "Fitzsimmons," bawled Service to the other side of the cabin, "stop your swing. We'll be off balance." Winchendon threw his forward throttle up in an effort to drive the arm upward. There was another groaning and a vibration which gripped his basket. "Goddam it, Winch," shouted Service. "Power down on the other throttle. Do it now. I don't want to have to come over there." "Yes, Sergeant," said Winchendon, knowing there was a ton of steel under the most awful stress not twelve inches away. He powered down on the reverse throttle and kept pushing the vibrating forward throttle. "What's going on down there?" shouted the speaker next to his ear. "The bearing's freezing," croaked Winchendon, unable to stop his tears. Service was dancing about the big six-inch gun, checking sights, making adjustments, and cuffing his gunners. "Goddam you. Winch," he shouted at the corporal in the midst of his ministrations to the gun. "You break this machine's arm, and the Corps gonna dock your pay again." "Yes, Sergeant," said Winchendon, regaining control. He threw in the clutch, then took it out again. He could see from his pointers that the arm was moving forward by inches under his manipulations. The groaning changed to a grinding and he thought perhaps that that was a good sign. Then it occurred to him that Service might have been joking about his pay being docked, but he didn't know for sure. He had never known Service to joke in such a friendly way. Service had his head stuck out of the side of the gun port again. He brought it back in. "It's doing it," he shouted. Winchendon could almost see the enormous arm outside shuddering and creaking and inching forward. "Okay, Winch," shouted Service. "Power everything down, now." Just then Winchendon could feel the rig come to a stop. The giant engine vibrated belowdecks, but the rig became immeasurably quieter as the clanking gears ground to a halt. "Move now," said Service to his crew. "Captain will call for fire any minute." Winchendon heard a dull thump and he knew the Javelin was being fired upon, that the Norman was knocking down buildings trying to range the American rig. He hated the Normans for involving innocent people in this battle. There was a sudden roar and the crew of the Javelin were pitched violently. Winchendon was grateful for his gimbaled basket, which kept him from striking any of the bulkheads in the cabin. He got his swinging basket stopped and looked around with the feeling that the cabin suddenly had better lighting. Then he looked upward and realized there was no longer any ceiling. It seemed like hours before he came to the inevitable conclusion that the Javelin had lost its head, and with it, its captain, pilot, and Stevens, the gunner. Service was bringing himself back to his feet, cursing. He looked up and took in the situation. "Prepare to fire," he barked at the gun crew. But they were beyond hearing. One of them was nowhere to be seen, the other was wounded in the neck and looked to have another thirty seconds left in him. The sergeant took the wounded man as gently as possible from the seat at the gun, heedless of the blood which splashed over the front of him. He half carried and half dragged the man aside and took his seat. He struck the big gun's firing button. The gun jumped back on its rails as the shell roared away. "Wide, goddammit," he shouted. "Winch, you're going to have to take over loading. Fitzsimmons, get over here." Winchendon pulled himself out of his basket and walked unsteadily toward the gun. "Move, now. Winch," shouted Service. "The bastard's going to shoot again. Fitzsimmons, where are you?" Winchendon looked over toward the other armsman. Under the streaming daylight, he could see that Fitzsimmons was dead. Most of the front of the man was a wound. Service was muttering and making adjustments on the gun's sights. "Give me another shell in the chamber, Winch," he said. Winchendon heard another whistling roar overhead and guessed that another shell was passing over, where the Javelin 's head used to be. He jumped toward the shell rack and wrestled one of the big rounds onto the carrier. He pushed the carrier along its short track, with the red head of the round pointed toward the back of Service's gun. He put the brake on the little carrier, opened the gun's breech, and jacked the round into the chamber. He pushed the shell carrier back to the ammo rack. Service punched the firing button. The great gun boomed and slid back into the cabin on its rails. Winchendon thought to look out the gun port for the first time and saw the largest steam rig he had ever seen, or could ever imagine. Half again as high as the Javelin (judging by a water tower close by), it had guns on its epaulets as well as in the chest and on the head. He knew it probably carried enough marines to subdue Boston easily. There was a flash and explosion at the machine's "shoulder," however, and Winchendon noted that its armament had been reduced by Service's marksmanship. "Get that hatch open. Winch," said Service, nodding his head toward the hatch which led to the deck below. "You have to get down to Chief Duff and tell him to get underway." Winchendon jumped over to the hatch, twisting the dogs open. "Once we're underway," said Service, "get back up here and post one of those marine dandies to relay orders." Larry Blamire # Winchendon threw the hatch open and climbed down the ladder into the next cabin. He climbed down as quickly as he dared and alighted among a platoon of marines. "What's going on, Corporal?" said the blue-jacketed platoon leader. "I have orders from Sergeant Service to the Chief Stoker," said Winchendon. He ran to the next hatch, the one leading to the engine room. He began working to get it open. "When I come back," he said, loosening the dogs of the other hatch, "post your men along here to take the Sergeant's orders to the engine room." He got the second hatch open and jumped to the ladder, noticing the puzzled expression on the marine's face as he slid into the roaring darkness of the engine room. "Chief Duff." he shouted at the stokers, who were shoveling dusty coal into the Javelin's furnace. One of the stokers, a bare-chested, heavyset man, separated himself from the crew. He wiped a grimy face with the dirty kerchief tied around his neck. "Orders from Sergeant Service," said Winchendon. "Captain and the pilot are gone. We've got to get underway immediately." Chief Duff didn't say anything, just turned and bent to his shoveling, with the other four stokers following suit. Winchendon scrambled back up the ladder and spoke to the marine who stood at the top. "Is he going to want a boarding party?" said the platoon leader, nervously glancing toward the porthole which outlined the enormous Norman rig with its amputated arm. "Your guess is as good as mine," said Winchendon, bounding toward the second ladder. "Post some men to instruct the legsmen here." He pointed to the ends of the cabin, then began climbing up the ladder. As he reemerged into the chest gun cabin. Service was reseating himself at the gun, having just completed another loading. The sergeant punched the firing button. The gun boomed and slid back on its rails. The Javelin suddenly jerked into motion and began to hulk forward. "Winch," shouted Servcice, "tell them fifteen degrees left. Then full ahead. We've got to get to the River. We might be able to get supporting fire from the Revenue Cutters." "Brake the left leg," shouted Winchendon to the marine at the bottom of the ladder as he calculated the adjustments to implement Service's orders. "Three swings." He heard marines repeating the orders to each other. He looked back out the gun port. It seemed an eternity before the Javelin began to turn at all. "He isn't much of a marksman," said Service, getting up from the gun to wrestle another round onto the loading carriage. "And he probably won't follow immediately. We don't pose much of a threat and with a new rig like that, the captain will want a complete damage report before he takes up the chase." The Javelin's top speed was cut by five miles per hour or more, due to the absence of arm swing and a lot of other damage. Winchendon wondered how the machine must look. It walked, headless, through the streets of Somerville, one arm outstretched, the other down. Doubtless they were scattering horses, people, and dogs. He looked out the gun port, however, and noticed for the first time that the streets were deserted. A steamrig within the city limits was a novelty, but the artillery duel had obviously frightened away on-lookers. It took twenty minutes for the crippled Javelin to navigate the five miles to Charlestown and the riverside. Winchendon felt apologetic about the damage it was doing to local structures, but he knew there was nothing Service could do about it, even if he thought the sergeant cared enough to prevent it. The system of getting orders to the engine room and the two legsmen was so cumbersome as to make real maneuvering impossible. The riverside area, however, is a manufacturing district and, once there. Service was able to position the machine among the tall buildings, so that it was effectively hidden. He and Winchendon had a view which encompassed part of the river and part of Charlestown toward Cambridge. There were small boats, mostly Revenue Cutters, chugging up and down the river. Civilian boat traffic seemed to be thinning out rapidly. The Javelin's engine vibrated belowdecks as Chief Duff and his crew kept the furnace stoked for as much power as they could get at idle. "What are you going to do. Sergeant?" said Winchendon. "Knocking off that arm was a lucky shot," said Service. "Arms are never as heavily armored as the rest of the rig. We can't hope to do that kind of damage to it again if we keep firing from a distance. I don't know what to do." Their first indication of the Norman's approach was the screaming of a horsedrawn fire engine which careened around the corner a block away and then proceeded northwest. The horses were at full gallop and Winchendon could see gobs of foam running from the mouth of one. No sooner had the fire engine disappeared than a "platoon" of the local militia came running down the street in the opposite direction. They needed organization badly and Winchendon shuddered to think what the crack marines in the Norman steam rig would do to them once they were trapped at the edge of the river. Then the Norman appeared on the horizon, looming over the foreground buildings like a hemiplegic monster. At # feet, it towered over the structures of Cambridge and Charlestown. It was not using its guns, but simply walked with metallic confidence, smashing structures and crushing the citizens who got in its way. It appeared to be walking southeast toward the harbor area. "It's in range now. Winch," said Service. "Get on the shell loader." The gunnery sergeant bent to his levers and screws. Winchendon wrestled another round into place for firing. Service looked up. "It's no good," he said. "If we shoot now, we aren't going to do it any damage, but we will alert it to our position." Winchendon watched the enemy machine moving inexorably southward. "Tell the Chief to prepare for full speed," said Service. Winchendon jumped over to the hatch and shouted at the marine who was grasping the ladder at its base. "Prepare for full ahead," he shouted. He went back to look out the port. "Our best hope is if we can sneak up on it," said Service. "But I don't see how we can do it." Just then they noticed a small explosion near the rig's head and noticed it was taking fire from someplace else. Shells began bursting around the machine. The barrage was coming from the river, where the small Revenue Cutters were firing with their tiny six-pounders. The enormous rig stopped and began to range itself for return fire. "Now," shouted Service. "Full ahead." Winchendon jumped back to the hatch. "Full ahead!" he shouted. He heard the marines repeating the order belowdecks. In less than a minute the Javelin roared into motion. "Winch," shouted Service, "we'll connect in a few minutes. Let's just hope he misses when he fires on us." Winchendon got up and went back to the gun port. He looked out at the Norman machine almost half a mile off. It was still preoccupied with the Revenue Cutters. The Javelin rocked and swayed as the legsmen took it through its most rapid stumbing gait. "Give me a two degree left correction," shouted Service. Winchendon ran to the hatch and shouted the orders to the waiting marines, who relayed them. The Javelin was closing the gap between itself and the Norman colossus. Back at the gun port, Winchendon saw the giant machine begin to turn toward them. "He sees us now," shouted Winchendon. "He has time for one shot." said Service, "before we ram him and disembowel him. Let's hope he is true to form." They saw the Norman's chest gun cough smoke and a shell roared overhead to splash into the Charles River. "It's a good thing that chest gunner is such a bad shot," said Service, laughing. The Norman machine loomed before them and filled the entire gun port. Winchendon grabbed a cabin strut to brace himself, just as the Javelin ground suddenly to a stop, and everything was pitched forward. He knew his rig's upraised arm was striking the Norman machine about fifteen feet below its chest gun port. It was the first time a steam rig had ever physically grappled with another. For an instant, he wondered if this maneuver would be known as "Service's Stiff Arm." He looked up through the opening where the Javelin's head used to be and thought he noticed the Norman machine actually rocking under the impact. He could see panic-stricken expressions on the faces of the rig's two pilots and he knew that they must mirror his own. Service was still at his post. "We won't miss this time. Winch," he said. The gunnery sergeant punched the firing button for his big gun again. There was a roar and everything went black.   Winchendon came around slowly. It was quiet and bright and he wondered if he were dead. It hurt him to breathe, however, so he assumed he was somehow still alive. He opened his eyes carefully and saw Service, with a complicated bandage covering the top of his head, standing at the foot of his bed. Bed? "How do you feel. Winch?" said Service. "I hurt all over," said Winchendon. "Doc says you have a couple of broken ribs, but that seems to be the worst of it." "What happened to you?" said Winchendon, trying to gesture at Service's bandage. "Grazed by shrapnel," he said and shrugged. "It hurts a lot, but it wasn't much damage. I got one of the nurses to make the bandage look real serious, though. I don't want to go back to duty right away." "What happened?" "I'll be serious with you. Winch," said Service. "When I fired the six-inch gun at point blank range, I didn't expect any of us to survive it. I thought it would damage us as much as the Norman. It didn't, though. As near as I can make out, the shell passed right through the Norman's armor. Armor's not built to stand up to a cannon shot from point blank range. If we'd even had a little bit of distance, it would have had the muzzle velocity to bust things up more. That's what would have taken us with it. This way, though, it just passed right through. And coming out the other side, it passed through the engine room. The Norman went up like fireworks, blown up by its own head of steam. "We took a lot of shrapnel. Only eleven of us got through, but none of the Normans made it. They were closer to their own boiler than we were. We were protected by our own rig and the front of theirs. The explosion went out the back." "Who survived?" "You and I made it, and all the stokers. Most of the marines were killed, though. They were disembarking the Javelin and didn't have the protection we had. I like to think they were getting out to form a boarding party." "Yeah," said Winchendon. "Well, I got to go now," said Service. "There are some sailors off a revenue cutter down from Gloucester who say they want to buy me a drink." Continued from page # fool. If that's what you want all right. You can stop now. Do you hear me? Please stop now," she begged and he realized that like a turtle on its back, he was still trying to turn over and crawl to the doorway. He woke in a moving hover, to the sky racing past, and he woke again in Leo's lab while the machines were copying his mind, making a record of his memory for the him that would be. After that, there was a long period of dreamless sleep. Then dreams came and with them, the night machine but it no longer clanked and rumbled, but hummed softly. He woke to find that he was in a hover once more. Dyane was piloting it and there were still tear tracks down her intricately patterned cheeks. He struggled weakly against the stretcher he was strapped to and she whispered, "It's all right. It's done. It's almost over now." He believed her and lay quietly. The party was twice as loud as it had been before. A dozen or more people came crowding up to Dyane when she got out of the hover, laughing and pulling at her. "Where have you been? Have you forgotten this is the day for your new skin? Everything is ready. We've got to go now." None of them He woke in a moving hover, to the sky racing past, and he woke again in Leo's lab while the machines were copying his mind, making a record of his memory for the him that would be. After that, there was a long period of dreamless sleep. Then dreams came and with them, the night machine but it no longer clanked and rumbled, but hummed softly. spared more than a glance for Alec on the stretcher, for which he was grateful. Dyane pulled away from them and looked down at herself. She pushed up her sleeves and stared at the patterns on her arms. The others stood back and looked at her too. She smiled at them. "I'm not ready to shed myself just yet," she said. She ignored their protests and, picking out the two strongest, had them carry Alec's stretcher to his room. When they had gotten him into the robo-nurse, she cleared the room. "Leo is coming by as soon as he is sure everything is all right. He said he would bring you what he promised. He said to wait for him." She looked at his poor battered body doubtfully, "Can you wait for him?" "I can wait," he whispered. But he couldn't wait with his eyes open. The lids were too heavy and the pain was too great. He closed his eyes and let himself drift down into the warm softness of somewhere deep inside himself and as he was drifting he heard her voice close to his ear for himself alone. "I came with you this time, Alec. Remember that. I came with you." He could not solve the riddle in her words but the warmth in her voice was what he needed to ease the pain and help him find peace, and he slept. There were long slivers of moonlight in the room when he woke again and for a moment they looked like gigantic teeth. When he shook himself free of the robo-nurse's coils, shadows stirred in the darker recesses of the room. The shadow in the corner with the pale round face was Leo and the other shadow clothed in herself was Dyane. When they saw he was awake, they exchanged glances, and he saw that they had come to some mutual understanding. Dyane got up and left the room and Leo walked over to his side. "Nothing can stop us now," he said. "You're free." But he was no longer the genial madman. Something had changed. "Dyane helped me?" "After she tried to stop you. She told me that. She told me why." "Tell me." "Because of this." He handed Alec a small brown bottle. "Because she knew that after that came this and she was going to lose you again." Alec took the bottle and held it tightly like some rare and precious jewel he was afraid might slip from his grasp. "You're sure?" he asked Leo. "You're positive that nothing can stop it now." "I'm sure." "Then I want to be by myself." "Certainly," Leo said, but he remained a standing by the bed. "There's something else. "I didn't know she was going to do it. And you won't know until the computer tells you. I swear, Alec, I didn't know what to do. She insisted. " Of all the strange sights Alec had seen in his life, this was the strangest, tears streaming down Leo's round face. "I had to let her do it. You understand that, don't you. Alec. Only it makes everything different, don't you see." He gripped Leo's wrist and was surprised to find that Leo could not pull away. "What did she insist on doing?" "She went with you. She had me take her cells as well, and she made the tapes. She'll be with you in that ship. Only you won't know until after the computer tells you because that was after your tapes were made." The tears streamed down his face. One splashed on Alec's hand and he jerked it away as though it had burned. "You're different, Alec. You'll never stop struggling. That's why I knew you would be perfect for the probe. You'll never give up until you know there is someone to take your place and even then... But she only went because she loves you." Leo buried his face in his hands and Alec could hear his muffled words. "I'm not going to be able to sleep." Then, because Leo too was strong in his own way, he pulled himself together and stood up. "You're well out of it," he said. "I'll do what I can for her before I go." He left and Alec was alone with the small brown bottle. It seemed to glow with a warmth of its own against his palm. That was it, then, everything settled and the future assured. The small brown bottle held the end of life and the end of pain. They were one and the same and all he had to do was drink. He unscrewed the lid with trembling fingers, thinking only of the tiny bit of self he had sent seeking other stars. The lid came free and dropped to the sheets. He stared into the open mouth of the bottle and thought of Leo unable to sleep. He thought of Dyane, at home at last in her own skin. He turned his wrist and let the liquid dribble out on the floor. The empty bottle slipped from his fingers. He would struggle on a little longer. He could do that. by Frederik Pohl Part # F irst priority was to get everything movable inside the perimeter of the camp. That meant organizing working parties and armed guards to go with them. No Krinpit had been spotted near the landing site, but the woods were full of them. It wasn't until the first detachments began straggling back with cases of food and boxes of microfiche, folded bicycles and crates of electronic parts, that Margie relaxed long enough to greet the new arrivals. She shook each hand, spoke each name, and turned them over to Santangelo for assignment to quarters. A short black major hung behind. "I've got something for you, colonel," he said, patting a dispatch case. "In private, if you please, ma'am." "Come ahead, Vandemeer, is it?" He nodded politely and followed her into her office, where he placed his dispatch case on her desk. "This is it, ma'am," he said, unsnapping the case. It was not a dispatch case. When he had undone the snaps the side peeled back and revealed a microprocessor with a liquid-crystal panel. He touched one of the buttons and it sprang into light, displaying a row of close-typed symbols. "There's your guidance, ma'am. There are twelve satellite busters in orbit, and these are the controls." Margie touched it. A warm feeling grew in the pit of her stomach and spread, an almost sexual excitement. "You're checked out on this, Vandemeer? Can you locate the Greasies' satellites?" "Yes, ma'am. We've got acquisition and lock on four of theirs, including their main tactran receiver. Also the Peeps; they have two, but they don't seem to be active." He expertly punched a combination into the processor, and the colors of the symbols changed. "Green lights are ours. Red are Peeps. Yellow are Oilies. The lines that are still white are standby. If system will track and identify it, and one of the spare birds will lock on." "Thanks, major," she said. "I want you to show me how to work this thing, and from then on I want it in your possession or mine, twelve hours a day each, until further notice." "Yes. ma'am," he said unemotionally. "And I have something your father asked me to hand to you personally." It was a letter, not a microfiche. A paper letter, in an envelope with her name on it in Godfrey Menninger's own handwriting. "Thanks, major," she said again. "Go and get settled in, and take the controller with you." As she turned, she added, "Major? Are things pretty bad at home?" He paused, looking at her. "Pretty bad," he said. "Yes, I would say that, colonel. They're pretty bad." Margie stood holding the letter for a moment. Then she jammed it in her pocket and went out to see how the loading was coming along, because she wasn't quite ready to get the unc'ensored word on how bad "pretty bad" was. Putting it away did not let her forget it was there. While she was chewing Sergeant Sweggert out for talking up two of the new girls when he should have been shifting cargo, she was fingering it. When she was breaking up an argument over what had become of a case of flashlights -- "Jesus, colonel, I just put them down for a second; I thought one of the other guys took them!" -- her hand returned to it. When the mess tent called a halt for breakfast, she could resist no longer, and she took her tray and her letter back into her office and ate while she read. Marge, honey, You've got it all, everything on the list. But there's no more where that came from. The Greasies have ordered our rigs off the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It's a bluff. We're calling it. But every drop of booster fuel is now sequestered for missiles until they back down -- and then there's Peru. The Peeps have flanged up a phoney "election," and we're not going to sit still for it. So we'll be at full military alert for months to come, maybe longer than that. You're on your own, honey. Figure at least a year. And it may be more than that, because the President's being threatened with impeachment, maybe worse -- there was an assassination attempt with two National Guard tanks last week. I told him what to do. Declare martial law. Send Congress home. Crack down all around. But he's a politician. He thinks he can ride it out. If he does, that means the rest of his term he'll be trying to score brownie points with the voters, and that means cutting back a lot of important programs. And one of them might be you, honey. I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't think you could handle it. But it looks as if you'll have to. That was all. not even a signature. Margie sat with the letter in her hands and minutes later noticed that she had forgotten to finish her breakfast. While Sergeant Sweggert was eating he heard two sounds, not very near and not very loud. They sounded like shots. No one else in the mess tent seemed to have heard anything. He scraped the plate of its canned ham and dehydrated eggs, picked up the big chunk of bread, and strolled toward the entrance, still chewing. There was a third shot. This time there was no mistake. Some dumb son of a bitch was playing with his piece. You couldn't blame him -- if Sweggert got a Krinpit in his sights he would have been tempted to blow it away, too. But three shots was wasting ammunition. He speeded up and headed toward the perimeter. As he rounded the cook tent he saw a dozen people standing around the uphill emplacement peering up the trail toward the spot where the resupply ship had landed. Others were converging on the post, and by the time he had reached it there were twenty, all talking at once. The shots had come from the trail. "Who's out there?" he demanded, grabbing Corporal Kristianides by the shoulder. "Aggie and two grunts. They decided to get another load in before they bucked the chow line. Lieutenant Macklin just took a patrol up after them." "So sit down and shut up till they get back," Sweggert ordered: but it was an order he didn't want to follow himself. It wasn't like Aggie to shoot up the jungle. The crowd was getting bigger: Colonel Tree came trotting up, looking like a little China doll, then half a dozen from the mess tent, then the colonel herself. Ten people were all talking at once, until the colonel snarled, "All of you, at ease! Here comes Macklin. Let's see what he has to say." But Macklin didn't have to say a word. He came stepping along the worn place that had become their path, carbine at port arms, looking both ways into the jungle. As he got closer they could see that the two men behind him were carrying someone, and the last soldier was backing toward them, carrying her weapon as Macklin carried his. What they were bringing in was a body. It was female, and that was all that you could say. The face was unrecognizable. When they dropped her down, it was plain that not only the face had been attacked. One arm was shredded up to the shoulder, and there was a bullet hole between her breasts. "Krinpit." snapped Major Santangelo. "Krinpit don't have guns," said Colonel Menninger, tight-lipped. "Maybe Krinpit, but they had company. Tree! Check the perimeter. I want every weapon manned and a reserve at every point. Santangelo, fall the off-duty troops in. Give Sweggert and me two hundred meters, then follow us. Sweggert. take three people, and you and I are going to take the point." "Yes'm." He spun around, took Corporal Kristianides's gas-operated recoilless away from her, and picked three from his squad at random while Colonel Menninger was listening to Lieutenant Macklin's report. He had got only about halfway up the trail, where he found the casualty and a couple of spilled and ransacked cases of supplies. Where the other two were he didn't know. He had come back for reinforcements. Marge Menninger listened to no more. She turned him over to Major Santangelo and signaled Sweggert to move in. At twenty-second intervals they dogged it across the open space that was the field of fire, reforming under the arch of a many-tree. As Sweggert waited for the others, he could hear the rattle and moan of some shelled creatures, but not very near. The next man heard it too and turned a questioning face to Sweggert. mouthing the word Krinpit. Sweggert nodded savagely and motioned silence. When Colonel Menninger crossed the field of fire, she trotted ten meters past them, then dropped to a knee and looked around warily before raising a hand and ordering them in. Fucking hairy, thought Sweggert. It was like that bitch to pick him for something like this! She'd had it in for him ever since he had it in her. He hand-signaled the rest of the patrol to move up one at a time, two on one side of the trail and the other with him and the colonel on the other, and when they had made their run he waited ten seconds and then sprinted to drop down beside the colonel. "That's where they got her," he breathed, pointing ahead on the trail, where half a case of fluorescent tubes lay crunched and scattered on the ground. "I see that, sergeant! Keep moving, I don't want Santangelo running up my ass." "Yes'm." He stooped low, dodging through the underbrush, and flopped down. The distant Krinpit rattle was still audible, but not closer. The patrol leapfrogged through the jungle until the bulk of the resupply ship loomed ahead, with its tramped-down clearing before it. He waved to catch Colonel Menninger's eye, then pointed to the top of a many-tree. She nodded, and when his turn came again he raced for the nearest clump of growth. It was not much like climbing a real tree; it was easier. The flat, arched branches were like a series of steps, and the stalactitic growths that hung down between then made good handholds. The problem was that it was hard to see. Sweggert had to change position twice before he could get a clear view of the rocket. What he saw was the base of the ship, and right in front of it the bodies of the two other grunts. They had been savagely mutilated. There was no sign of Krinpit, and the sounds he had heard seemed to have gone farther away. Sergeant Sweggert began to feel a little better. Why the fuck should he worry about Krinpit? They were noisy bastards; there was no way one of them could get within twenty meters it. Of course, he speculated, maybe they weren't alone. Maybe there were a couple of Greasies with them. But what did that matter? Greasies were Greasies -- they were spies, Ay-rabs, or limeys -- and the day hadn't come when he worried about meeting one of them in the woods. He pushed his cap back and settled down. If anything showed up in that clearing he would blow its ass off, and meanwhile he had entertaining spectacle of Margie Menninger silently worming her way forward on the ground, almost right under him. Off to the other side of the trail somebody else was moving, equally silently; he between bushes he saw that it was one of his own patrol. He returned the gun and slowly centered it on Marge Menninger, moving the cross hairs in the reticle down from the base of her skull to her hips. Wouldn't it be nice, he speculated, if he could give her one she'd never forget, right up the old... The faintest of sounds behind him made him freeze. A little too late, he comprehended a mistake in his thinking. Krinpit and human beings were not the only creatures on Jem. As he started to turn he saw a skinny, stretched-out creature, longer than he was tall, climbing toward him with at least half a dozen legs, while others held what looked like some kind of gun. The damn thing was wearing sunglasses, he thought with He never heard the shot that went through his head.   Marge Menninger was the first one back into the camp. She didn't wait for the cleanup; once they knew what they were looking for, the forty armed troops scoured the area. All they got was three of the borrowers, but one of them was the one who had killed Sergeant Sweggert. You were always a lucky son of a bitch, she thought; now you don't have to worry about a court-martial for rape anymore. She collared a passing man and sent him running toward the communications tent, and before she was in her office she heard the announcement coming over the PA: "Major Vandemeer! Report to the colonel on the double!" She met him at the door. Good man, he was trotting over half-dressed, but he had the case with him. "Open it up," she snarled. "They're arming the Creepies against us, guns and glasses. That's what Tinka was trying to get back to tell me. Move it, man!" "Yes'm." But even the stolid Major Vandemeer fumbled as he undid the snaps. "Ready, ma'am," he reported, fingers poised. The red fury in her mind was balanced by the warmth spreading at the base of her belly. She scratched vigorously and snapped, "Take 'em out!" "Who, ma'am?" "The Greasies! Bust their birds, all of them!" She watched the complicated ritual and then frowned. "While you're at it, take the Peeps' out too." was shaking the foot of his bed. No one was. He was alone in his room, exactly like a hundred thousand Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge rooms all over the world. There was the phone on a nightstand table beside the bed, the TV set staring grayly across at him from the long desk-plus-chest-plus-luggage-rack that stood against the wall. The phone was almost the only visible element that made it different, for it was a pushbutton jobber with colored lights flickering across its face. The other element of strangeness was harder to see. The drapes over one walls covered an immense likris display panel, not a window. There was no point in having a window. He was two hundred meters under the earth. It was #:# on the clock. Menninger had left orders to be awakened at seven. Therefore it was not a call that had awakened him. Therefore there were only a couple of other possibilities, and neither of them was attractive. God Menninger considered picking up the phone or switching on the TV or pulling back the drapes over the likris situation screen, any of which would have told him at once what was happening. He decided against doing so. If it had posed an immediate threat, he would have been notified at once. Margie's disciplined and heirarchical approach to problem-solving had not been taught at West Point, it had come to her on her father's knee. If she was good at putting unwanted thoughts out of her mind, he was superb. He dismissed the question slipped into his brocaded robe, went into the bathroom and made himself a cup of instant coffee with tap water. God Menninger's waking-up minutes were precious to him. He was of the opinion that both his marriages had failed because he had been unable to make either wife understand that he was never, not ever, to be spoken to for at least half an hour after waking. That was coffee time, and summoning-upstrength time, and remembering-what-he-had-to-do time. Conversation destroyed it. A weakness in Godfrey Menninger's character was that he was apt to destroy anyone who infringed on it. The coffee was at just the right temperature and he drank it like medicine, swallow by swallow, until it was down. Then he threw off the robe, sat cross-legged in the half-lotus position on the bed, let his body go calm and began to say his mantra. Godfrey Menninger had never really understood what happened among his neurons and synapses when he practiced transcendental meditation, nor had he ever really tried. It did not seem to do any harm of any kind, except to cost him twenty-four hundred seconds out of every twenty-four hours. He seldom discussed it with anyone else and therefore did not have to defend it. And it seemed to work. Work how? Do what? He could not exactly have said. When he did it, he felt more confident and more relaxed about his confidence. That was not a bad return on the investment of less than three percent of his time. As he sat, his body withdrawing from him, the reiterated ta-lenn, ta-lenn of the mantra becoming a sort of drapery of sound that surrounded him without being present, his whole brain became a receptor. It contributed nothing. It only perceived. On the inside of his eyelids he saw faces and shapes that melted into each other. Some were beautiful and some gargoyles. Some were etched in the sharpest of drypoint lines. Some seemed to be beaten out of gold. They held no emotional content for him. The demon snarls did not frighten. The loveliness did not attract. They were only there. Wispy chains of words floated past his conciousness, like snatches of conversation from the next table at a restaurant. They spoke of ultimata and megatonnages and a remembered caress and the need for a haircut, but there were no imperatives in them anywhere. The circulating memory that pumped them past his mind sucked them away again without residue. More than two thousand kilometers away and half a kilometer down, inside a submarine belonging to the Fuel Bloc, a vice-admiral in the Libyan navv was programming The One That Had His Name on It. Menninger did not know it. His thoughts floated free into infinity in all directions, but all the directions lay within that inner space of his mind. He could not have done anything useful about it if he had.   The bed moved again. It was not an earthquake. There were no earthquakes in West Virginia, he thought, bringing himself up out of reverie, getting ready to open his eyes. It was sharper than an earthquake would have been, more quick and trivial than the slow battering of a crustal slip. It was not particularly strong and if he had been still asleep, it might not even have awakened him. But it was something. And then the lights flickered. Two hundred meters down in the side of a West Virginia mountain the lights were not meant to flicker. A Pu # megawatt generating plant, vented through a kilometer of piping to emerge on the other side of the hill, was immune to most external events. Lightning bolts did not strike transformers underground. Winds could not tear loose a line since there were no lines in the open air. And then, tardily, the flickering colors on the base of the telephone all went out. A single red light flared and the buzzer sounded. He picked up the phone and said, "Menninger." "Three missiles came in, sir, near misses. There's no structural damage. Point of origin backtracks probably to near Sinkiang Province. The city of Wheeling is out." "I'll be there in a minute," he said. He was still coming up from his meditation and so he did not look at his own situation panel, but he also did not stop to shower or shave. He rubbed deodorant on his armpits, French whore's bath but good enough, ran a brush over his hair, pulled on his coveralls and shoes and walked briskly down the placid, beige-carpeted corridor to his command room. The situation map was alight from end to end. "Here's your coffee," said General Weinenstat. That was all she said. She knew his ways. He took the cup without looking at her because his eyes were all on the board. It displayed a Mercator projection of the Earth in outline. Within it, bright red stars were targets taken out. Bright blue stars were also targets taken out, but on the wrong side: That was Washington and Leningrad and Buenos Aires and Hanoi and Chicago and San Francisco. Broken red profiles in the ocean areas of the map were enemy missile-launching vessels destroyed. There were more than a hundred of them. But there were also nearly sixty major concentrations not yet destroyed. There were relatively few of them. The number decreased as he watched. Kansas City, Tientsin, Cairo and the whole urban complex around Frankfort ceased to exist. The second cup of coffee was not medicine but comfort. He took a sip of it and then asked, "What's their remaining second-strike capability?" "Marginal, Godfrey. Maybe one hundred missiles operational within the next twenty-four hours, but we're cutting that down all the time. We have almost eighty. And only two of our hardened installations are scratched." "Local damage?" "Well -- there are a lot of casualties. Otherwise not bad. Surface contamination is within acceptable limits, anyway inside shielded vehicles." She signalled an orderly for a coffee refill and added, "Too early to tell about long-lived isotope capture, but most of the corn belt looks okay. So's Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. We did lose the Imperial Valley." "So we're not bad for now." "I would say so, yes, God." "For the next twenty-four hours. Then they can start to redeploy." She nodded. It was a known fact that every major country had squirreled away missiles and components. They were not at ten-minute command like the ones in the silos or on the subs. They could not be launched by pushing a button. But they could not be taken out at long range, either, since you didn't know where they were hidden. He added, "And we can't look for them, because the satellite-busters have half-blinded us." "We've all-blinded them, Godfrey. They don't have an eye in orbit." "Yes, yes, I understand," he said testily. "We've won the exchange. The damn fools. Well, let's get to work." Menninger's 'work' was not directly related to the exchange of missiles that was remodeling the surface of the Earth closer to Hell. That was not his responsibility. It was only a precursor, like a friend's retiring to the bathroom to fit in her diaphragm while he slouched waiting on the edge of the bed. She would not need his advice or his help at that stage and neither would the Chiefs of Staff while the actual fire-fight was going on. His involvement would be central immediately thereafter. Meanwhile, one of the damn fools had finished the programming and was trying to round up enough of a crew for the launch. It wasn't easy. The neutron bomb had done just carelessly scant meters of water and the steel tube of his submarine and knocked out most of the crew. The Libyan vice-admiral himself had taken nearly five thousand rads. He knew he had only hours to live but with any luck, his target would have less than that.   Three hours' sleep was not enough. Menninger knew that he was quick-tempered and a little fuzzy, but he had trained his people to know that too and they made allowances. At five-minute intervals the map disappeared and the likris screen sequenced itself through a round of ten-second displays; profiles of industrial capacity destroyed and remaining, curves of casualties, histograms of combat-effectiveness estimates. In the OpsRoom next to God Menninger's command post, more than fifty persons were working on overdrive to correct and update those figures. Menninger hardly glanced at them. His concerns were political and organizational. Rose Weinenstat was on the scrambler to the Combined Chiefs every few minutes, not so much to give information or to get it as to keep them aware, every minute, that the most powerful unofficial figure in government had his eye on them all the time. His three chief civilian liaisons were in touch with state governments and government agencies, and Menninger himself spoke, one after another, with cabinet officers, key senators and a few governors -- when they could be found. It was all U.S., not Fats; the rest of the Food Bloc was in touch through the filter of the Alliance room and when one of them demanded his personal attention, it was an intrusion. "He isn't satisfied with me," General Weinenstat reported. "Maybe you should give him a minute, Godfrey." "Shit." Menninger put down his pen at the exact place on a remobilization order where he stopped reading and nodded for her to switch over. The face on his phone-screen was Marshal Bressarion of the Red Army but the voice was his translator's. "The Marshal," said her voice, tinny through the scrambler, "does not question that you and the combined chiefs are acting under the President's orders but he wishes to know just who the President is. We are aware that Washington is no more and that Strongbox One and Two have been penetrated." "The present President," said Menninger, patiently restraining his irritation, "is Henry Moncas, who was the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The succession is as provided in our basic law, the Constitution of the United States." "Yes, of course," said the translator after Bressarion had listened and then barked something in Russian, "but the Marshal has been unable to reach him for confirmation." "There have been communications problems," Menninger agreed. He looked past the phone, where Rose Weinenstat was shaping the words 'in transit' with her lips. "Also," he added, "I am informed the President is in the process of moving to a fully secure location. As the Marshal will realize, that requires a communications lid." The Marshal listened impatiently and then spoke for some seconds in rapid-fire Russian. The' translator sounded a good deal more uptight as she said, "We quite understand, but there is some question of lines of authority and the Marshal would appreciate hearing from him directly as soon -- hello? hello?" His image faded. General Weinenstat said apologetically, "I thought it was a good time to develop transmission difficulties." "Good thinking. Where is the son of a bitch, by the way?" "Henry? Oh, he's safe and sound, Godfrey. He's been ordering you to report to him for the last hour or so." "Um." Menninger thought for a moment. "Tell you what. Send out a radiation-safe team to escort him here so I can report. Don't take no for an answer. Tell him he'll be safer here than in his own hole." He picked up the pencil, scratching the pit of his stomach. Which was complaining. He wanted orange juice to build up his blood sugar, a stack of flapjacks to give a foundation for the next cup of coffee, and that cup of coffee. He wanted his breakfast and he was aware that he was cranky because he was hungry. "Then we'll see who's president," he added to the air. On the edge of the Bahia de Campeche the Libyan admiral had got his crew together and his submarine up to two hundred meters, running straight and level. None of them were functioning well, with prodromal diarrhea and vomiting often enough so that the whole ship smelled like a latrine, but they could serve. For a while, at least. They did. Libya's naval doctrine called for one big missile instead of a few dozen little ones. As the big one broke the surface of the Gulf, it was immediately captured by a dozen radars. The scared but as yet untouched tourists on their lanais in Merida saw bright, bad flashes out west, over the water, as a Cuban cruiser locked in missile, not ballistic, easy to identify but hard to predict as it drove itself northnorthwest toward the Florida panhandle. A dozen times defensive weapons clawed at it as it crossed the coast, and then it was lost to view. There were plenty of installations along the way charged with the duty of detecting and destroying it, but none that were functioning any more.   The latest picture from Margie showed her with one foot on the shell of a dead Krinpit, looking tired and flushed and happy. It was as good a picture of his daughter as God had had since her bearskin-rug days, and he had it blown into a hard print for his wallet. General Weinenstat looked at it carefully and passed it back to him. "She's a credit to you, God," she said. He looked at it for a moment and put it away. "Yeah. I hope she got her stuff. Can you imagine her mother? I told her Margie wanted some dress patterns, and she wanted me to put in about a thousand meters of fabric." "Well, if you'd left her raising to her mother -- wait a minute." General Weinenstat touched the thing that looked like, but wasn't, a hearing-aid in her ear. Her expression turned somber. "What is it?" She turned off the communicator. "Henry Moncas. His shelter took a direct hit. They're trying to find out who's President now." "Shit!" Godfrey Menninger stared at the remains of his tray of breakfast for a moment and saw none of it. "Oh, shit," he said again. "It looks bad, Rosie. The worst part is we never had a choice!" General Weinenstat started to speak, then changed her mind. "What? What were you going to say, Rosie?" She shrugged. "No good second-guessing, is it?" He pounced on her words. "About what? Come on, Rosie!" "Well -- maybe moving into Canada -- " "Yeah, That was a mistake, all right. I'll give you that. But not ours! The Greasies knew we couldn't let them move troops into Manitoba. That was Tam Gulsmit's mistake! Same with the Peeps. Once we were engaged we had to take Lop Nor out -- quick, clean, minimum casualties. They should've accepted it instead of retaliating -- " But he could hear voices within him denying it, speaking in the tones of Tam Gulsmit and Heir-of-Mao. "We were safe moving troops in to protect the tar sands because we knew you couldn't afford to invade." "You shouldn't have bombed Lop Nor. You should have known we would have to retaliate." The voices within God Menninger's mind were the only voices they would ever have again. Heir-of-Mao lay with his eyes bulging and tongue protruding from his lips, dead in the deep shelter under Peking, and the atoms that had once been Gulsmit's body were falling out from the column of fire over Clydeside. The Libyan missile had by-passed Atlanta and Asheville and Johnson City, matching their terrains against the profiles imprinted in its memory. The safety interlocks on its thermonuclear charge were falling away one by one as its tiny, paranoid brain began to recognize the nearness to the thing it was unleashed to destroy. "It's bad, Rosie," said Godfrey Menninger at last, rising to return to his desk. Maybe he should have let Margie's mother have the raising of her. Then Margie would probably have a husband and a couple of kids by now. And perhaps -- perhaps the World would have been a different place. He wondered if he would ever hear from her again. "Rosie," he said, "check Houston. See if the communication links with Jem are holding up. With the other colonies, too, of course." "Right now, godfrey? Give me ten minutes; I've got a call coming in from the DoD." "Ten minutes is fine," he said; but before the ten minutes were up he was dead. XX T he coracle first appeared between showers, far out over the water. In the pit beside Ana Dimitrova, Corporal Kristianides -- no. Lieutenant Kristianides now, she corrected herself -- stood up and turned the field glasses on it. "Krinpit," she said. "Son of a bitch. Lay your gun on it. Nan, but don't fire unless I tell you to." Unnecessary order! Not for worlds would she have fired. Not until she saw for herself that there was only Krinpit in the boat, and not Ahmed Dulla. Perhaps not even then, for this insanity of guns and shooting was awful even to play at. She had not yet had to fire at a living being and was far from sure that she could; she had said as much, but no one wanted to hear. The good thing about her machine-gun was that it had a telescopic sight and she was glad enough to aim it. The coracle disappeared into a squall but not before she had seen that there was no human being in it, though it was large enough for several. When it appeared again, it was larger and nearer and she could see that the single Krinpit was working furiously to keep it bailed and the trapeziodal sail intact, and paddling to bring it straight in to the camp. By then everyone had seen it and at least a dozen weapons were pointed at it. Over the P.A. system Guy Tree's voice shrilled an order to hold fire. Down on the oblivious of the rain that soaked her. Ana wiped the wet off her sight, as carefully as she had been taught, and looked again. She had no skill at recognizing individual Krinpit by sight, but this one did not look familiar. A disappointment of a hope. But what a foolish hope, she scolded herself. How improbable that Ahmed would once again miraculously appear. And even if he had, who was this Ahmed who had taken her, and used her, and left her again? He was not the person of Sofia, she thought gloomily, and roused herself and tried to think more constructively. It was a failure. There was so little to think constructively about! The world she had left was blowing itself up and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. What went on in the secret conferences among Marge Menninger and her warrior knights in the headquarters shed she did not know, nor wished to. But it might well be the death of all of them. The Krinpit was in the shallows now. It raised itself and splashed over the side and the coracle bobbed away as it lurched ashore. It seemed to be in bad shape. It staggered in a half circle on the shore and then fell to the ground with a painful crash as Colonel Menninger and half a dozen of her warriors formed a wary perimeter around it. Perhaps they would kill it, she thought. Well, let them. Everyone else was standing and staring but Ana's attention wandered until one of the riflemen came running toward her. "Dimitrova, front and center!" he was calling. "It's the one that speaks Pak! Colonel wants you to come translate!"   When Ana Dimitrova was nineteen years old, precocious senior at the University of Sofia, candidate for the callosectomy that would forever sunder the two halves of her brain and lead to a distinguished career in translation, she had watched a film on the subject. It was not her choice. They would not accept her application without it. The first part was quite tedious, though instructive, as it described the anatomy of that senseless and defenseless kilogram of pinky-gray jelly that mediated and transformed and commanded all the senses and defenses of the body. Before her very eyes a surgeon took a human brain in his hands and peeled away tissue to expose that great suety bridge that connected the two halves and that, in her, she would ask someone to sever. There was a long explanation, quite hard to follow, of how nerves crossed so that the right half of the brain seemed to take responsibility for the left half of the body and vice versa: strange quirk of anatomy! She saw how the nerves carrying visual impressions intersected at the optic chiasma -- but not completely, as though prankish evolution had tired of the joke and decided not to finish it. All that part of the film was quite hard to follow, as well as unsettling to look at. But then there were some comic parts. Each half of the brain commanded its own network of afferent and efferent nerves. The efferent nerves, the ones that directed action, were spared in the resection, or reconnected afterward, which was why the splitbrain people were able to walk without stumbling. Most of the time. The afferent nerves, the ones that accepted sensory impressions from the world, were kept apart. So each half of the brain could recieve and process and store its own information, not shared with the other: That was why translation came easy. But. But some kinds of afferent input were not value-free. They produced glandular responsjps. They caused emotions. This was where the comic part came in. The film showed a woman, one of the earliest volunteers for the surgery. She had an earplug in one ear and was reading from a prepared text. The voice-over narration described what she was doing: delivering a translated talk to a mathematical congress. But while one half of her brain was reading and translating and speaking, the other half was listening to the words coming in over the earplug: and those words were the filthiest of scatological jokes. The woman began to stammer and falter, and over her face spread the rosiest of blushes, though the operating half of her brain had not an idea in the world of why. Blushes. Stammers. Headaches. Depression. They were the symptoms of leakage from one half to the other. The scar tissue that blocked the flow of impulses through the corpus callosum let each half of the brain work efficiently on its own. But feelings seeped through. All the time Ana Dimitrova was translating for Colonel Menninger, she could feel them pounding at her -- "He says that, as the People's Republics are no longer a force, he wishes to help us against the Fuel Bloc." "Fucking great. What's he going to do, scratch them to death with his sharp little feet?" -- and the headache was the worst she had ever had, sickening, sandbag blows at the base of her skull. She felt nauseated and was not helped by the Krinpit. Sharn-igon was repulsively ill. Even the dull, recurrent rasp of his name -- Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon -- was badly played, like a defective radio. His carapace was a sickly yellow instead of the rich mahogany it had been. It was cracked and seamed. At the edges of it, where undershell joined the massive armor of the top, seams did not quite join and a thin, foul liquid oozed out. "He has moulted," she explained to the colonel, "and feels he is about to moult again. Perhaps it is because of the chemicals the Fuel people used against them." "You don't look so fucking great yourself, Dimitrova." "I am quite capable of continuing. Colonel Menninger." All the same, she moved away from the Krinpit. The exudations of his shell had darkened the sand around him and the smell was like rancid fat. Moving did not help. The headache, and the pain behind it grew with every moment. Marge Menninger ran her hands through her wet hair, pulling it back so that her ears were exposed. She looked almost like a little girl as she said, "What do you think, Guy? Have we got ourselves a real blood-hungry tiger?" Colonel Tree said, "One does not refuse an ally. Marge. But the Greasies would eat these jokers up." "So what is he saying exactly, Dimitrova? That he'll tell all his crawly friends to attack the Greasy camp if we want them to?" "Something like that, yes. What he says," she added, "is not always easy to understand. Colonel Menninger, He speaks a little Urdu, but not much, and he speaks it very badly. Besides, his mind wanders. It is a personal matter, with him, to kill. He does not care who. Sometimes he says he wants to kill me." Menninger looked appraisingly at the Krinpit. "I don't think "Must one be well for that?" Ana flared. "I am sick in my insanity to kill when so few persons are still alive." "As to that," said Margie mildly, raising her hand to stop Guy Tree from exploding, "we'll talk another time. You look like shit, Dimitrova. Go get some sleep." "Thank you. Colonel Menninger," Ana said stiffly, hating her, perhaps hating even more the look of compassion in Margie's eyes. How dare the bloody trollop feel pity! Ana sta!ked off to her tent. It was raining hard again and lightning lashed over the water. She hardly felt it. At every step the throbbing in her head punished her, and she knew that behind the headache a greater pain was scratching to come out. Pity was the solvent that would melt the dam and let it through, and she wanted to be by herself when that happened. She stooped into the tent without a word to the woman who shared it with her, removed only her shoes and slacks and buried herself under the covers. Almost at once she began to weep. Ana made no sound, did not shake, did not thrash about. It was only the ragged unevenness of her breathing that made the black girl in the other cot rise up on one elbow to look toward her; but Ana did not speak, and after a moment her roommate went back to sleep. Ana did not. Not for an hour and more. She wept silently for a long time, helpless to contain the pain any longer. Hopes gone, pleasures denied, dreams melted away. She had held off accepting the thing that the Krinpit had said almost in his first sentence, and now it could not be denied any longer. There was no longer a reason for her to be on Jem. There was hardly even a reason to live. Ahmed was dead. She woke to the incongruous sound of dance music. The storm of the silent weeping had cleared her mind, and the deep and dreamless sleep that followed had begun the healing. Ana was quite composed as she bathed sparingly in the shower at the end of the tent line, brushed her hair dry and dressed. The music was, of course, that other of Marge Menninger's eccentricities, the Saturday night dance. How very strange she was! But her strangeness was not all unwelcome. One of the fruits of it had been the patterns and fabric that had come in the last ship, and so Ana chose to put on a simple blouse and skirt, not elaborate but not purely utilitarian either. She was a very long way from dancing. But she would not spoil the pleasure of those who enjoyed it. She cut past the generator, where the Krinpit was rumbling hollowly as it scratched through the clumps of burnable its every step, and visited the fringe of the dance area long enough to get something to eat from the buffet. (Of course, she had slept through two meals.) When men asked her to dance, she smiled and thanked them as she shook her head. The rain had stopped and sullen Kung glowed redly overhead. She took a plate of cheese and biscuits and slipped away. Not that there was far to go. No one walked in the woods any more these days. They lived and ate and slept in a space one could run across in three minutes. But all who could be there were at the dance, and down by the beach were only the perimeter guards. She sat down with her back against one of the machine-gun turrets and finished her meal. Then she put her plate down beside her, pulled her knees up to her chin and sat staring at the purple-red waves. Ahmed was dead. It was not much comfort to tell herself that her dreams had been foolish to begin with, that Ahmed had never taken her as seriously as she had taken him. Nevertheless, it was true, and Ana Dimitrova was a practical person. She had learned the trick of dissecting pain into its parts. That she would never see him again, touch his strong and supple body, lie beside him while he slept -- that was purest pain, and there was no help for it. But that she would never marry him and bear his children and grow old by his side -- that was only a spoiled fantasy. It had never been real. That loss could not hurt her now because it was of something she had never owned; and so her pain was diminished by half. (But. oh, how that half still ached!) She wept gently and openly for a moment and then sighed and rubbed the tears away. What she had lost, she told herself, she had lost long ago from the moment Ahmed came to Jem he had become a different person. In any event, it was over. She had a life to make for herself, and the materials to make it from were all in this camp, there was nothing else anywhere. You should dance, she scolded herself. You should go up where they are laughing and singing and drinking. Plainly and simply, she did not want to. It was not merely that she didn't want to dance, not yet. It was deeper and more damaging than that. Ana, translating for the Krinpit, had heard enough of what was going on in the minds of Marge Menninger and Nguyen Tree and the other hawks who directed the fate of the camp. So much madness in so few minds! They were determined to carry on a war, even here, even after Earth itself had already blown itself into misery! And yet here they all were, smiling and bobbing around the floor. Her own brain had been divided by a surgeon's knife. What had divided theirs so that they could plot genocide in an afternoon and drink and cavort and play their sexual games at night? How Ahmed would scowl at them! But Ahmed was dead. She took a deep breath and decided not to cry again. She stood up and stretched her cramped limbs. The Krinpit was lurching slowly down toward the water for a drink after its unappetizing, meal, the soldier wandering after. She did not particularly want to be near it but she needed to rinse her plate, either that or carry it back to the cook tent, which was too near the dance floor. She kept her distance, paralleling its scuttling path, and then she heard someone call her name. It was the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, sitting cross-legged at a gun-pit and talking to Danny Dalehouse, on duty inside it. Why not? Ana changed course to approach them and wished them a good evening. "Is it truly good, Anyushka? But Danny Dalehouse has told me of the death of Ahmed Dulla. I am deeply sympathetic for you." There it was, the first time someone had spoken of it to her. She discovered it was not impossible for her to respond. "Thank you, Visha," she said steadily. "What, have you become a monk that you do not dance tonight?" "Is no one I care to dance with," he said gloomily. "Also have been having most interesting discussion with Danny on the subject of slavery." "And what have you concluded, then, Danny?" she asked brightly. "Are we all slaves to your mistress, the beautiful blond colonel?" He did not answer directly but chose to be placating. "I know you're upset. Ana. I'm sorry, too." "Upset?" She nodded judiciously, looking down into the pit at him. "Yes, perhaps. I must assume that my home has been destroyed -- yours, too, I suppose. But you are braver than #. I am not brave; I become upset. It upsets me that what has happened on Earth is now to happen again, here. It upsets me that my -- that my friend is dead. It upsets me that the colonel intends to kill a great many more persons. Can you imagine? She proposes to tunnel under the Fuel camp and explode a nuclear bomb, and that upsets me." Why are you doing this, she asked herself; but she knew she could not accept more sympathy without crying and she was not ready to cry before these men. At least she had diverted them. Dalehouse was frowning. "We don't have any nuclear weapons," he objected. "Soft-headed person!" she scoffed. "Your mistress has what she wants to have. I should not be astonished if she had a fleet of submarines or a division of tanks. She wears weapons as she wears that cheap perfume, the smell of them is always around her." "No," he said doggedly, peering up at her, "you're wrong about the nuclear weapons. She couldn't conceal that from us. And she's not my mistress." "Do not flatter yourself that I care. She may have her sexual excesses with whomever she likes, and so may you." Kappelyushnikov coughed. "I think," he said, "dance has suddenly become more attractive." As he stood up. Ana put her hand on his arm. "I am driving you away. Please forgive me." "No, no, Anyushka. Are difficult times for all, nothing to forgive." he patted her hand, then grinned and kissed it. "As to myself," he said, "I see beautiful blonde colonel roaming about alone and perhaps she wishes to dance or otherwise relate to some new person, such as #. Also do not care for cheap perfume worn by big cockroach. You do not yourself desire to dance? Or otherwise relate? No. Then stay with friend Danny." They watched him walk steadily toward Marge Menninger, strolling past her checkpoints. They heard her laugh as Cappy spoke to her; then he shrugged and moved on toward the dance floor. The Krinpit, in its random stagger around the beach, was coming closer. It was true that the stench of his exudations was strong. So was the sighing, droning sound of his presence. Ana listened, then said gloomily, "This one is muttering about his love now. It was killed somehow, I cannot tell how. I think Ahmed had something to do with it and it is for that that it is determined to kill human beings. But it had become Ahmed's an end in itself. It no longer matters who is killed or for what matters." Dalehouse stood up in his shallow rifle pit, looking up the hill toward the dancers. "She's coming this way," he said. "Listen, before she gets here. About her being my mistress -- " "Please, Danny. I spoke without thinking and because I am, yes, upset. It is not a time to worry about personal matters." Clearly he was not satisfied and would have pursued the subject, but Margie was now too close. She paused to light a cigarette, studying the Krinpit and its guard, now a model of military deportment, his recoilless at port-arms, as the colonel approached. Then she came smiling over to Danny and Nan "Getting it on, are you?" she asked amiably. "When was the last time you checked your earphones, Danny?" Guiltily, Dalehous clapped the phone to one ear. He had been neglecting the buried microphone probes, which were supposed to warn of borrowers digging toward him under the ground. There was no sound. "Sorry. Margie," he said. She shook her head. "When you're on duty, that's 'colonel.' And when I say 'frog,' you hop. Now that that's understood," she said, smiling sunnily, "would either of you folks like a hit before we talk some business?" "I am not in the habit of using narcotics," Ana said. "Pity. Danny?" She watched while Dalehouse filled his lungs and, as she took the stick back from him, she said, "I want you to draft your gasbag friend. One hundred and -- " she glanced at her wristwatch -- "one hundred and eight hours from now, give or take a little, we're going to hit the Greasy camp, and he's going to be our air arm." Dalehouse coughed and spluttered. "He -- he can't -- " "Take your time, Danny," she encouraged. "While you're getting your breath, just listen for a moment. Storm's over. Looks like we've got maybe five or six good days. I'm taking fifteen front-line effectives, plus you, Danny. We'll mop up that camp without breathing hard. Only I don't want to take a plane, and I don't want you or Cappy floating around up there where they can see you, and that leaves Charlie." "Charlie can't fight!"  "Well," she said reasonably, "come to that, I don't figure you for your real Geronimo trained killer either. But I don't expect it of you. You communicate. Charlie observes. The Greasies won't pay any attention to one more fartbag hanging around -- " "Bullshit they won't! They've been shooting balloonists down all along." "Danny," she said, "I'm not asking your advice. I'm giving you an order." She dragged on the joint, down to the last centimeter, and then carefully rubbed it out and pocketed it before exhaling. "You see," she said, "the Greasies are going to come to the same conclusions I did, only it'll take them a little longer. One of us has to run things. TTie only way to do that is to knock the other out. All Charlie has to do is hang in there with his radio and keep us posted if they send up a plane or put some people out in the woods. I'll bring the company up over land. But we're naked without air cover. We need to know when to get out of sight. That's easy enough for him, right?" "Well, sure. But -- shit, Margie. He's almost the last survivor. It's a lot to ask -- " "But I'm not asking, Danny, you keep making that same mistake. I'm ordering. If he doesn't, he'll make a nice flame." She scratched under her belt, regarding him amiably. "So after the dance I break the news to camp, and tomorrow this time we're on our way." "To atom-bomb the Fuel Bloc," said Ana bitterly. Marge Menninger's face froze. After a moment she said, "I guess I'll let that pass, Dimitrova. I didn't specifically order you to keep your mouth shut. But I won't let it pass again. What you hear when you're translating is classified. " "Holy Christ," Dalehouse said. "You really have a nuclear bomb?" "Bet your ass, Danny. You've got a piece of it right there in your ground mikes." "Where? You mean the plutonium power-packs? That's no good, Margie -- Colonel, I mean. There's not enough of them. Even if there were, you couldn't flange them together to make a bomb." "Wrong and wrong, Danny. Takes eighteen hundred grams and a bit to fission. I have a little over six thousand grams, all tidied away in the stores marked 'fuel replacements.' All this was planned a long time ago, and they'll fit together because some pretty high-powered weapons people designed them to do that before the first ship took off. Oh, it's not one of your hundred-megaton jobs. Maybe not even a kiloton because I don't have containment to keep the parts together very long. But I don't want a big one. I don't want to wipe out the Greasy camp, I want to own it. I want to take out their ammunition and their food stores, and I know just the place to put baby for that. Then they can beg." She looked serene and innocent as she said it, and Dalehouse responded with shocked disbelief. "That's -- that's unprovoked aggression! A stab in the back!" "Wrong, Dalehouse. That's preemption. The Greasies don't have a choice, either. They just haven't figured it out yet." "Bullshit! It's what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor all over again!" She opened her eyes wide. "Sure, why not? There was nothing wrong with Pearl Harbor, except they fucked it up. If they'd gone on to take out the carrier fleet and followed up with a landing, history would be a lot different. You'd be saying 'Pearl Harbor' the way you say 'Normandy' now, only you'd be saying it in Japanese." She seemed quite pleased with herself, but then she hesitated. She sought a dry place on the ground and sat down before adding, "But I will admit to you two dear old friends from Bulgaria that right now I'm scared, and tired, and not what you'd call real happy with the way things are going. I'm -- what's the matter with that thing?" The Krinpit was staggering closer to them, moaning and stridulating. Ana listened. "He is quite hard to follow. He is speaking of Poison Ghosts and Ghosts Above -- that is, of ourselves and of balloonists. He seems to have us confused in his mind." "All enemies look alike after a while, I guess. Tell him to back away. I don't like the way he smells." "Yes, Colonel Menninger." but before Ana could summon up the commands in Krinpit-Urdu, Margie stopped her again. "Wait a minute. What was that?" There had been a voice on the P.A. system, along with the blare of dance music. "I couldn't make it out," said Dalehouse, "but I do hear something. Out in the woods. Or in the air -- " Then the dance music abruptly died and a scared voice replaced it. "Colonel Menninger! All personnel! Aircraft approaching!" The sounds were clear now, two sets of them; the whickering putt-putt of a helicopter and a quicker, higher sound. The dancers scattered. Over the trees two shapes appeared. Neither was moving very fast, but they came without warning: the Fuel helicopter before. They did not come in peace. Soldiers strapped to the pods of the helicopter were firing incendiary rockets, while The fixed-wing plane made a roaring run that took it out over the water, then rose, turned and dived in again. On its second pass the guns did not fire, but four tiny rockets leaped out from under the wing and streaked down into the stores shed and set fire to a row of tents. The Greasies had not been so slow after all. Here and there around the camp, and inside it, perimeter guards and the more quick-witted of the dancers were beginning to return the fire. Margie jumped to her feet and began to run toward the nearest rocket launcher, and then the stub-winged plane on its third pass swerved toward her. It was using both machine guns and a flame thrower now. As the bullets stitched toward her, Margie dodged and fell, almost beside the Krinpit: and the creature rose up high above her. It launched itself, two hundred kilograms of half-moulted body, on top of Marge Menninger.   moult, terribly premature, agonizing, fruitless. He would never experience the satisfying itch of his new carapace as it hardened and stretched over the soft inner pulp, never feel the sexual stirring of the newly shelled and embark on the quick contest of a female with a he-mate. As the Poison Ghosts Above had zoomed in toward the camp, he had tried to warn these new allies. But they were deaf to the The pain was too much. to the maximum extent possible, and then himself to kill the survivors. But perhaps he had done all of the assisting he would ever do. The agony of his new shell, already beginning to crack again, tormented his thoughts. The blinding sounds of the aircraft and the explosions dazed him. There was only one Poison Ghost left that he could kill. It would have to be enough. He raised himself on his painfully soft-shelled limbs, leaned forward and crashed down on top of her just as the soft, deadly tongue of the flame thrower licked at them both. By then the whole camp was firing at the aircraft, or that much of it that was still able to fire. But the planes were out of reach. They hung out over the water, a kilometer and more circles, and did not return to the attack. The next assault came from another place. A scream from one of the machine gun pits, and the two soldiers in it were down, ripped to shreds, and out of the pit came a long, limber black shape wearing tiny goggles and racing its dozen limbs to the nearest knot of humans; and another behind him, and another. The borrowers managed to kill more than ten of the survivors. But that was all. Even with the sun-glasses they were no match for trained human soldiers on the surface of the Barclay Shaw planet. If the planes had continued their attack -- but they didn't. The human defenders quickly rallied and at the end there were fifty borrowers stretched out on the ground, soiling the sand with their watery black blood. No more came because there were no more in the nest to come. That burrow had been wiped out. Dan Dalehouse stood peering out over the sea while one of Cheechee Arkashvili's assistants bandaged a deep gash in his arm. The planes were gone. In the middle of everything, they had quietly flown down the coastline and away. "And why didn't they finish us off?" he asked. There was no answer. alive, the fight was long over, and the camp was almost functioning again. She had lain under the dead and stinking Krinpit for more than two hours, stunned, half suffocated, unable to shift the gross dead weight on top of her, her limbs twisted painfully but unhurt. Like the djinn in the bottle, at first she would have given a king's ransom to her rescuer. When they finally heard her sand-gagged attempts at a bellow and dug her out, what she wanted to give was death. They helped her a few steps away, with their heads averted from the stink. She gagged and swore at them and when they tried to help her to stand she collapsed and vomited into the sand again. The doctor came running, but a doctor wasn't what Marge needed. What she needed was to get the cesspool stench of the Krinpit off her and out of her nostrils. She let Cheechee strip off her coveralls and assist her to the edge of the water and then she splashed around until the smell was gone and she could walk again. Limpingly, yes. But under her own power. Wearing a bra and bikini panties, with her gunbelt over her shoulder, she walked up the shore past the dead Krinpit, seared into a sort of omelette of meat and shell, until someone came up with a terrycloth robe, giving orders as she walked. Why had they stopped? The camp had been at their mercy. With great precision they had knocked out the heavy weapons on the first pass. There was not a rocket launcher or a machine gun untouched, nothing but hand weapons. Of the hundred and eight persons in the food camp, twenty-two were dead, nearly fifty were wounded or burned. The planes had been unscathed. The burrowers had been wiped out entirely, but if the planes had finished their work first, the borrowers would have had an easy time with the survivors. Why? The timing had been exact. As soon as the planes stopped shooting, the burrowers came out. That could not have been a coincidence, and the goggles the burrowers wore were proof that the Greasies had prepared them for the job. But then they hadn't followed through. Why not? But thank God for Poppa and his parting gift! A metric tonne of ammunition had been blown up but there were metric tonnes left untouched by virtue of the spare supplies in the final ship. Tents were burned and food destroyed. But there was more. If Cappy's airplane had been stitched across by machine gun fire, there were spare parts to fix it. And that greatest of gifts, the six kilograms of Pu # in its carefully crafted sheaths, that was still intact. The deaths were irreplaceable, of course. Worse still were the casualties because some of them were not merely a loss but a debit: Nguyen Dao Tree, who had lost a leg and a lot of blood to go with it; six persons badly burned, two others with serious abdominal wounds -- a whole cluster of damages for Cheechee Arkashvili to try to repair. For each one of the worst off, there was the cost of an able-bodied person to tend him. There was no tent still standing big enough to hold them all, and so Cheechee had put them onto cots dragged out of the damaged tents, out in the open; some of the bedding was scorched, and if it began to rain again they would be in trouble. But for now they were as well off as they were likely to be, Margie thought as she moved among them. One of them got up as Margie approached: Lieutenant Kristianides, one whole side of her body in gauze and anti-burn dressing. But functioning. "Colonel," she said, "I had to leave the radio -- " Marge glanced at the doctor, who shook her head. "Get back in bed, Kris. Tell me about it later." "No. I'm all right. When they shot the tent up I ran out. But I left the tape going. I was getting their chatter, only it was in all different languages." "Thanks. Now get back in bed," Marge ordered and looked around. "Dalehouse, front and center!" she called. "Check the radio shack. If the tape's still working, give me a yell." He didn't look too good himself, she thought, as he put down the tray of dressings and headed up the hill without a word, but none of them did. Especially herself. Margie's own tent had been one of the totaled, and what she was wearing was fatigues belonging to a woman who would never again need them -- not unfair, but she had been a taller and fatter woman than Marge Menninger. When Dalehouse called her, she had forgotten about the tapes. But she went up to the shack, unburned and not really harmed except for bullet-holes, commandeering Ana Dimitrova on the way. The tape was voice-actuated and Dalehouse had already found the right place to begin. Ana put on the earphones and began to translate. "First one of the pilots says, 'On target,' and the base acknowledges. Then there are some carrier noises as though they were going to transmit and changed their minds, and then the base says, 'Suspend operations at once. Do not attack.' And one of the pilots, I think it is the Egyptian, says in a different Arab dialect, 'Strike already in progress. We have taken out their weapon dump. Body count around twenty-five.' Then there is some mumbling that I cannot make out, as though they are talking at the base with the transmitter on but not close enough to pick it up. And then the base says, 'Urgent. Suspend operations immediately.' And then the other pilot, the Irishman, says they are observing from over the water, waiting for instructions, and then the base orders them to return without further attack. That is all there is on the tape until they get landing instructions later on." "That's it?" Margie asked. "As I have said. Colonel, yes. There is nothing else." "Now why would they change their minds in the middle?" Margie asked. Neither Dalehouse nor Dimitrova offered an answer. She hadn't expected one. It didn't matter. The Greasies had declared war and if they backed out in the middle of it, that was their problem, not hers. She would not back out. To Marge Menninger the attack on her base -- her base! -- answered all questions right there. "Why" didn't really matter. The only question was how -- how to carry the fight to them, and win it. "Can you dig with that shoulder?" she asked Dalehouse. "I guess so. It's not bleeding." "Then go help Kappelyushnikov dig graves, Dimitrova, you're a radio operator now. No transmissions. Just listen. If the Greasies say anything, I want to hear about it right away." She left them and headed for the surviving latrine. She didn't particularly need to go to the bathroom, she just wanted to be alone for a moment to clarify her thoughts. She ranked her way to the head of the line, closed the door and sat there, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. There was no question in her mind that she could win this war, because she had some powerful cards to play. The plutonium store was one of them. The other was Major Vandermeer's little dispatch case. There were still four birds in orbit and one could hit the Greasy main camp and the other their Farside base any time she gave the order and that would be that. The trouble was, she didn't want to destroy the Greasy facilities. She wanted to acquire them. The birds and the bomb were overkill, like trying to take care of a mosquito with a mortar. In the first fury after the attack, if she had had that button handy to push she would have pushed it; but, by the time they dug her out from under the Krinpit, she had decided to wait. No. It would have to be a straight overland operation. Maybe the plutonium, if it could be placed exactly right. Not the missiles. It was a pity the Greasies had launched their preemptive strike before she was quite ready to launch hers. But not a disaster. The worst thing about the raid was that her cadre of effectives had been seriously reduced. How was she going to mount her retaliatory strike without grunts? Marge Menninger had just taken the one decision that gave the human race a future on Jem, even though she didn't know it.   T he only good thing about all this," Dalehouse said to Kappelyushnikov, "is that most of the casualties were military. At least now we can get on with the real business of the expedition." Kappelyushnikov grunted and threw a few more spadefuls of dirt before he anwered. "Of course, is so," he said, pausing and wiping sweat off his face. "Only one question. What is real business of expedition?" "To survive! And to preserve. God knows what's happening on Earth. We may be all that's left of the human race, and if anything's going to be left of, what, maybe five thousand years of science and literature and music and art, it's here." "Very discouraging amount of responsibility for two grave-diggers," Kappelyushnikov commented. "You are of course right, Danny. We have saying in Soviet Union, 'Longest journey begins with single step.' What step do we take now?" "Well -- " "No, wait, was rhetorical question. First step is apparent. Have finished covering up graves of now-absent friends, so you. Danny, please step up to colonel's headquarters and report burial services can begin." He jammed his spade into the dirt and sat down, looking more despondent than Dalehouse had ever seen him. Dalehouse said, "All right. We're all pretty tired and shook up. I guess." The pilot shook his head, then looked up and grinned. "Am not only tired, dear Danny, am also very Russian. Heavy load to carry. We have other saying in Soviet Union, 'In thousand years, what difference will it make?' But now I tell you the truth, Danny. All sayings are bullshit. I know what we do, you and I and all of us. We do the best we can. Is not much, but is all there is." Dalehouse laid down his spade and trudged up the hill to the headquarters shack, thinking hard. A heavy responsibility! When you looked at it carefully, there was no way to preserve everything: so much that was irreplaceable would inevitably be lost. Probably already was lost: There was not much chance that the Arc de Triomphe and the British Museum and the irreplaceable human beings. It was hard for Danny to accept that he would never again see a ballet or listen to a concert. Or fly in a clamjet or drink in a revolving restaurant on top of a skyscraper. So much was gone forever! And so much more would inevitably vanish as they tried to rebuild... Yet there was one great asset not yet destroyed: hope. They could survive. They could rebuild. They could even rebuild in a better way, learning from the mistakes of the past, on this virgin planet -- There was a knot of people gathering around the headquarters shack, and Marge Menninger, with a couple of her aides, was trotting up to join them. Dalehouse hurried his pace and arrived in time to hear Ana saying, "This message just came in,. Colonel Menninger. I will play the tape for you." "Do it," snapped Marge, out of breath and exhausted. Dalehouse moved closer to her. She seemed near to collapse. But as the tape player hummed and scratched, she pulled herself together and stood listening intently. Danny recognized the voice. It was the black Air Vice Marshal. Pontrefact; and what he said did not take very long. "This is an official message on behalf of the Fuel Exporting Powers to the Food camp. We offer an immediate and permanent armistice. We propose that you remain within twenty kilometers of your camp, in the direction toward ours, and we will observe the same limits from ours. We request an answer within one hour." There was a pause, as though he were shuffling papers in his hand, and then the rich Jamaican tones began again: "As you are aware, our airstrike against your camp was provoked by your destruction of our satellites. It was ordered only after full exploration of all alternatives. Our intention was to wipe your base out completely. However, as you are also aware, we terminated the strike after inflicting relatively minor damage on your base. The reason for this decision is the reason for this offer of armistice now. "Our star, Kung, is unstable. It is about to flare. "We have been aware for some time that its radiation level has been fluctuating. Within the past twenty-four hours it has become more extreme. While the air strike was in progress, we received information from our astrophysicists that a major flare will occur in the near future. We do not have an exact time. Our understanding is that it may occur as early as forty-eight hours from now and almost surely within the next two weeks. If you apcept our offer of armistice, we will transmit all technical data at once and your people can make their own judgments." The voice hesitated, then resumed in a less formal way. "We have no knowledge of conditions on Earth at present, and suppose you have none as well. But it is clear that, for all practical purposes, we on Jem are alone in the universe at this time. We think we will need all the resources we have to prepare our camp for this flare. If we continue to fight, we suppose we will all die. I do not propose that we work together. But I propose that we stop fighting, at least until this crisis is past." Another pause. Then: "Please respond within an hour. God help us all." Margie closed her eyes for a moment while everyone waited. Then she opened them and said, "Call them back, Dimitrova. Tell them we accept their offer, ask for their technical data' at once and say we will be in contact again when we have something to say. Folks, the war is over." Ten minutes later the whole camp knew it. Margie had gone on the public-address system, played the tape from Marshal Pontrefact and broken the news of the disaster and the truce. She had called a general meeting for oh three hundred hours, about ninety minutes from then, and ordered Alexis Harcourt, the nearest thing they had left to an astronomer, to go over the data from the Greasies and report before that time. Then she turned to Danny Dalehouse and said, "I don't have a bed anymore but I need about an hour's sleep real bad." "There's a spare in my tent." "I was hoping you'd ask." She peered up toward the sullen glow in the clouds where Kung was hiding and shook her head. "It's been a son of a bitch of a day," she said as they picked their way toward a tent row. "And it's not over yet. Know what I'm going to do at the meeting?" "Am I supposed to guess?" "No way, Danny. You'd never make it. I'm going to announce the impending retirement of Colonel Marjorie Menninger from active service." What?" "Pick your teeth up, Danny, and don't just stand there," she advised, tugging him along. "We're going to convert this place to civilian government, effective as soon as the emergency is over. Or maybe before. I don't care. Maybe all you guys that're bitching about the Army way of doing things are right. I have to say that my way hasn't been working out too well, everything considered. So I think we're going to need elections for a new government, and if you want my advice, you'll run." "For what? Why Me? Margie, you get me all mixed up!" "Why you? Because you're practically the only original settler left, you know that? Just you and Cappy. Because nobody hates your guts. Because you're the only person in the camp with the age and experience to handle the job of running things and who isn't a soldier. Don't let me pressure you, it's your decision. But you've got . my vote. If," she added in a different tone, "anything we decided makes any difference at all now." They were at his tent and Marge paused at the flap, staring up at the sky. "Oh, shit," she said. "It's beginning to rain." It was, big drops, with promise of more behind them. "The casualties!" he said. "Yeah. We're going to have to get them under cover. And that's a pity, Danny, because I was kind of hoping we could catch us a little RR before the meeting." In spite of everything, Danny could not help himself. He laughed out loud. "Marjorie Menninger, you are some kind of strange. Get in there and get some sleep." But before she turned, he put his arms around her for a moment. "I never would have thought it of you," he said. "What converted you to civilian values?" "Who's converted?" Then she said, "Well, maybe it was that fucking Krinpit. If it hadn't been for him, you'd have been burying me a little while ago, too. I didn't trust him either, but he gave his silly life to save me."   need the P.A. system to cope with fify-five or sixty persons listening, but they hooked in one speaker for the benefit of the casualties who were well enough to hear, in their tents down the hill. The rest sat or stood on the wet planks of the dance floor, in the sullen, steady rain, while Marge Menninger spoke to them from the little dais. She turned the stage over to Harcourt. He said, "A lot of the data from the Greasies isn't astronomy, it's geology. They've done a lot of digging. They say there seem to be flare episodes every twenty or thirty years. There's no set pattern, but by the amount of ash and char they think your average flare involves about a seventy-five per cent increase in radiation averaged out over a period of a week or more. That's enough to kill us. Partly heat. Mostly ionizing radiation. "Now, when does it happen? Their best guess is ten days -- give or take ten days." There was a murmur from the audience and he nodded. "Sorry about that, but I don't have the training to make it any closer than they do. In fact. I'm only taking their word. The picture I get is of slowly increasing heat over a period of a couple of weeks. I think we've been having that, and maybe it's why the weather has been so lousy. Then the flare. Surface temperature goes up to maybe three-fifty degrees. That's absolute -- say, somewhere between where we are now and the boiling point of water. I don't think it goes over that, not for very long, anyway. But there are peak flares and they're like striking a match. If anything can burn, it will. Apparently the forests bum but maybe not right away -- they'd probably have to dry out first. Then the flare recedes, temperature comes down, the air drops our moisture and you get rain to put out the fires. Probably a hell of a lot of rain, over a period of weeks or months. Then you're back to normal." "Only dead," somebody called out from the audience. Harcourt spread his hands defensively. "Maybe not. If you're in shelter, you might survive." He started to continue, then stopped himself. Margie came up beside him. "You don't sound too confident."  "I'm not. The -- ah, the geological record doesn't inspire much confidence. The Greasies took cores from more than a hundred different sites and they all showed the same pattern, recurring char and soil, back up for thousands of years." Dalehouse stood up. "Alex," he called, "why hasn't it killed off everything on the surface of Jem long ago?" "You're asking for a guess? I guess it has. At least all the vegetation. It burns off, then regrows from roots, most likely. Seeds probably would survive, though. And those drenching rains after each flare would give the new growth a good start in fertile soil -- the char's great fertilizer; primitive man used to slash and burn to get his farms started, back on Earth. I don't know about the animals. I'd guess the Creepies would be all right in their tunnels, if they didn't starve to death waiting for new growth to live on. Probably a lot of them do. Maybe the same for the Krinpit, because it would take a lot to kill them off. They don't have to worry about being blinded by the radiation because they don't have any eyes to begin with. And those shells are pretty good armor for their vital organs. Probably get a lot of mutations, but in the long run that's as much good as it is bad for the race." "What about Charlie?" "I don't know. That's harder. I guess a really good flare might wipe out damn near all the adults. But that's when they spawn, and the spawn might survive. Also, no doubt, with a lot of mutations. I'd say evolution moves pretty fast here." "Well, look," Margie cut in. "If all these things can survive, why can't we?" Harcourt shrugged. "They're adapted, we're not. Besides, I'm talking about races surviving, not individuals. Maybe as few as one per cent live through it. Maybe less." He looked around the audience. "One per cent of us leaves how many?" he asked. "Yeah," Margie said slowly. "Well, I think we get the picture. We need to get under something big enough to stop both heat and radiation, and we need to do it in a hurry. Got any ideas on what we can make a roof out of?" Harcourt hesitated. "Not a clue," he confessed. "Certainly the tents won't do it. Oh, and I should mention the winds. They probably get pretty fierce, with all that isolation. So anything we did build would have to stand up to maybe two hundred k.p.h. hurricanes. Maybe more. I, uh, I thought for a minute of using the Creepies' tunnels, and that might work. For some of us, anyway. But I doubt that more than ten per cent of us would live through maybe two or three weeks underground, without very good ventilation and certainly no air conditioning -- and that air down there is going to get hot. There was a silence while everyone considered possibilities. Then Kappelyushnikov came forward. "Is one thing we can do," he announced. "Not many of us. Maybe fifteen, twenty. Can get in return capsule and go into orbit." "It's just as hot there," Marge Menninger protested. Cappy shook his head. "Is only radiation. Steel hull reflects ninety-nine per cent maybe. Anyway, plenty. Only problem -- who decides which twenty lucky people go up?" Marge Menninger thought for a moment, then said, "No, that's a last-ditch, Cappy. There's another problem with it: What do all those lucky fellows do when they come down again? There aren't enough of us left now. I don't think twenty would be enough to survive. If we went up -- strike that; I'm not saying I would be one of the 'we.' If anyone went up, it'd be just as smart to keep on going. Try to get back to Earth. Maybe go to one of the other colonies. The chances would be as good as coming back here, when the whole planet's fried." Harcourt nodded but then corrected automatically, "Not the whole planet." "What?" "Well, only half the planet. Our half. The part that faces Kung. The far side probably wouldn't even notice there was a flare going on. That's no good for us," he went on quickly, "because we can't live there; we don't have time to build an airtight, heated dome and move everything -- what's the matter?" Margie had burst out laughing. "Son of a bitch," she said. "Shows how wrong you can be when you start trying to trust people. Those bastard Greasies aren't giving us a square count! They didn't stop fighting because they wanted to make peace. They stopped becuase we were as good as dead anyway!" "But -- but so are they -- " "Wrong! Because they have a Farside base!" She shook her head ruefully. "Folks," she said, "I was going to make a real magnanimous announcement about turning the reins over to civilian government, only now I think that's going to have to wait. We've got a military job to do first. When this side of the planet goes, they've got that snug little nest on the side that never gets radiation from Kung anyway, and they couldn't care less if the son of a bitch blows up. That's going to be a nice place to be. And we're going to take it away from them." T hese were the mesas and canyons of the high desert. Danny Dalehouse had flown over them in less than an hour and seen them only as quaint patterns in an unimportant carpet beneath. Marching over them was something else. Kappelyushnikov ferried them in as close as he dared, three at a time, once four, with the little biplane desperately slow to wallow off the ground. He made more than a dozen round trips and saved them a hundred kilometers of cutting through jungle. Even so, it was a three-day march and every step hard work. Nevertheless. Dalehouse had not felt as well in weeks. In spite of bone-bruising fatigue. In spite of the star that might explode at any moment. In spite of the fact that Marge Menninger's shopping list had overlooked a supply of spare hiking boots, and so he limped on a right foot that was a mass of blisters. He was not the unluckiest. Three of the effectives had been unable to go on at all. "We'll come back for you," Margie had promised; but Dalehouse thought she lied, and he could see it in the eyes of the casualties that they were certain of it. And still he would have sung as he marched, if he had had breath enough for it. It had been raining on and off for nearly forty hours. Mean, wind-driven rain that kept them sodden in the steamy heat, even when it let up, and chilled when it drenched them. That didn't matter either. It was regrettable because it meant that Charlie and the two remaining members of his flock could not keep in touch with them visually. And he had had to take the radio away from the balloonist before they left -- far too easy for the Greasies to intercept. Whenever the clouds lightened, Dalehouse searched the sky for his friend. He never saw him, never heard his song, but he knew he was up there somewhere. It wasn't serious. The weather that kept Charlie from scouting danger for them kept the Greasies from providing it. There were twelve of them still toiling toward the Greasy camp. They had left the rest of the survivors -- the highly impermanent survivors if this expedition didn't do what it was supposed to -- back at the base with orders to look as though they were twice as numerous as they were. Margie herself had transmitted the last message to the Greasies: "We are beginning construction of underground shelters. When the flare is over we can discuss a permanent peace. Meanwhile, if you approach, we will shoot on sight." Then she pulled the plug on the radio and crawled into Cappy's plane for the last ferry trip. They had less than ten kilometers to go -- a three-hour stroll under good condidtions. but it would take them all of a day. It was scramble down one side of a ravine and crawl up the other; peer over the top of a crest and scuttle down its other face. Not just the terrain. They were all heavily loaded. Food, water, weapons, equipment. Everything they would need they had to carry on their backs. The red cylinders marked "Fuel Elements -- Replacement" were the worst. Each cylinder contained a hundred of the tiny clad needles and weighed more than a kilogram. Twelve of them made a heavy load. At the end of the first march, Margie had gone through the party, checking loads. When she came to Ana Dimitrova, sitting hugging her knees next to Danny Dalehouse, she said softly, "Are you sterile?" "What? Really! What a question!" But then Margie shook her head. "Sorry. I'm just tired. I should have remembered that you aren't." And she grinned and winked again at both Dalehouse and Ana; but when they picked up packs again Ana's load was changed to water flasks and limping old Marguerite Moseler was carrying the fuel rods. Margie looked terrible and at every stop she seemed to look worse. Her plumpness was long gone. The bone structure of her face showed for the first time in years and her voice was a rasp. More than that, her complexion was awful. When the Krinpit buried her for two hours its moulting juices overrode her defenses. A day later she had broken out in great purplish blotches, and had a skin discoloration like sunburn. She said it did not hurt; there, too, Dalehouse thought she lied. But he thought she was telling the truth about one very important thing, and perhaps that was the reason he could not repress a feeling of cheer. The bomb they were carrying would not be used. He had been the one to propose it and she had accepted the idea at once. "Of course," she said. "I don't want to destroy their camp. I want it, all of it -- not only for us but for the future of the human race on Jem. The bomb's best use is as a threat, and that's what we'll use it for." He said as much to Ana at their last halt before coming in sight of the Greasy base. "She's planning for future generations. At least she thinks it's worth keeping your chromosomes intact." "Of course," said Ana, surprised. "I have that confidence too." And so. Danny Dalehouse was discovering, did he. Bad as things were, he had hope. It carried him through that last belly-crawl, three hundred meters in the drenching rain, into the muddy cave that was their point of entrance for the borrower tunnels under the Greasy base. It sustained him while Major Vandenour and Kris Kristianides painfully and gingerly assembled the parts of the detonator and fitted the fuel rods into it. It survived after Margie and Vandenour and two others wiggled their way into the abartdoned courses and disappeared from sight. The part of his life, of all their lives, that they were living through was misery and fear. Maybe worse than that, it was self-reproach; they were doing something that Dalehouse could not think of as noble or even tolerable. It was a holdup. Armed robbery. No better than a mugging. But it would be over. And a better time would come! And that hope kept time going for two full hours after Margie and the others had crawled away. Until Kris Kristianides, looking scared and harried, checked her watch and said: "That's it. From now on everybody stay inside. Face the wall. Hands over your eyes. When the fireball comes, don't look up. Wait ten minutes at least. I've got goggles. I'll tell you when you -- " Then they drowned her out, Dalehouse first and loudest. "She's going to do it! But she promised -- " "Shit, Dalehouse, she couldn't keep that promise! The Greasies would think it was a bluff. She's going to take out their arms and food, just like we planned, and then we'll move in and wipe them up." "What insanity!" cried Ana. "There'll be nothing there! The fallout will kill us if we go into the camp." "Maybe. I've got a counter. We'll check everything out. The important thing's the planes. If we get them, we can get to their base on Farside." She hesitated. She had been carefully rehearsed in all this and had carried the secret with her for more than a day. But she had dreaded this moment. If it were not for her burns, she would have been in the warrens with the colonel and the major, and a lot happier there than she was here. "Anyway," she finished, "there's nothing we can do about it now. She'll blow the bomb in the next ten minutes. Get your faces down!" And then, at last, hope was dead.   For the Brood Mother, too, all hope was gone. Blind and alone, she moved slowly down through the tunnels, to the only place left for her to be. The thirty-meter level was for pups and outcasts. It was a place to play growing-up games or, at the end of all games, a place to die. Mother dr'Shee had never been there before. She had been a biddable pup, trained early to responsibility. As a of the half-growns, shivering in delight as she groped for the teat in her nurse's sheltering silk. But she had never explored the adventurous levels for herself. Not once. She had known that the time would come soon enough when, at the end of her life, she would drag herself down to see those old, unvisited levels, and die. In that she had been partly wrong. It was time to die, and she was there, but she could not see. With dignity, the Brood Mother raised her forebody to its fullest stretch and called, "Is anyone near?" There was no reply. No sound. No scent except the stale, spoiled smell of elders long dead. She tried again, not because she had any hope of being answered, but for the sake of being methodical: "Person or pup, can anyone hear my voice?" Nothing. If there had been an answer, it could have been only one of the wild young males that roamed the upper corridors, seeking only to kill. But there was not even that...So another of her senses had become useless to her. Hearing meant nothing when there was nothing to hear. It was a pity she was blind, but she bore no malice toward the Two-Legs who had burned out her eyes with their stroboscopic lights She had in any case revenged herself against a number of them in advance -- for poisoning her tunnels, for abducting her young, for perverting the brood into new and vile practices. Most of all for coming to disturb her life in the first place. She had fought against it all, against the Two-Legs and sometimes against members of her own brood, turned against her by the new ways of the Two-Legs. And now the tunnels were empty, and she was blind. Tssheee! It would have been less -- less final to be here and alone if she could have seen at least an occasional phosphorescent glimmer of fungus or decay. What was left of her senses? Taste no longer mattered. There was little to eat. Smell unrewarding, with neither males nor pups to nuzzle. She could still feel the powdery dust floor beneath her. the curving wall at her side. Dr'Shee took comfort from being tightly enclosed, as she had been through all the happiest parts of her life... Which was now over. She stretched and sighed a feline, purring sound of despair. She was beginning to be very hungry. The Two-Legs had ruined most of the food stores when they poisoned the tunnels to get at her and her few surviving allies. But the tunnels stretched ten kilometers in ail directions. Somewhere there would be something in this immense engineered warren that had been her world. She did not seriously think of seeking it. A Brood Mother did not debase herself to prolong a life that was over. -- woomp -- The tunnel around her moved. It was not a shake or a tremor but a deliberate and almost peristaltic movement. Mother dr'Shee had never before experienced such a thing. Burrows sometimes crumbled, Krinpit invaded them, the rains might wash through a roof. But for all the earth to move? Such a thing could not happen! For the Brood Mother such an event was exactly as disquieting as it would have been for a fish to scull its tail and yet not move, or for a human being to feel the air about him turn glassy and shatter. And then, from thirty meters above and more than a kilometer away, she heard the sound that followed. It was more than a sound, it was a pressure in the air that stung her ears and left them filled with a distant, discordant chatter, like the peeping of a hungry litter. But there were no pups to cry for her. ever again. scraped and sore while the left one was bloodily gouged, the leg of the coverall worn through, the skin itself long since rubbed away. It was harder and harder for her to keep up with the two ahead of her. God had not intended her to crawl through tunnels ninety centimeters high for hours on end... whichever God she meant was not quite clear. To spare her knee she tried for a while a three-legged gait, putting a little weight on her left toes, the rest on the right leg and hands. That was a bummer. She wound up with the worst cramp she ever had in the calf of her leg. She had to stop and press it out while Vandenour, behind her, almost caught up and the two ahead kept on going. So then she speeded her pace and ripped the knee still more. She paused and glanced at her watch. Still more than a quarter of an hour before the device would go off. Before that time the two grenades they had left at bends in the tunnels would bring down enough dirt to tamp the explosion, and they were a good kilometer away by now. Probably far enough for survival, if not comfort. "Take ten." she shouted. She rolled over and rested her limbs, breathing hard of the stale and tainted air. Funny, it was not really dark in the tunnels. That she had not expected. Once her eyes had adjusted, she could see little will-o'-the-wisp lights, so faint and pale that they had they were, they were welcome. She heard a quick, quiet scuffle down the tunnel behind her, then a thwuck. Silence again. "Van?" she called. "Major Vandenour?" The dirt walls swallowed her words and there was no reply. Painfully she rolled herself over, turned around and crawled back. The mouse-dropping odor was very strong. She touched the switch of her little helmet light and saw that the major was dead. One of the borrowers had'been here, and the dart that protruded from Vandenour's face proved it. "Shit." whispered Margie and belatedly lifted her head and drew her pistol. The light showed nothing for sure down the crooked, uneven tunnel -- was that a glint of something? A reflection from an eye? She fired twice. When she looked again there was nothing there. But every few meters there were little side passages and bays, and a dozen Creepies could be waiting there for her to turn her head. Almost she raised her voice to cal! the others back but stopped herself as she was opening her mouth. For what? They could not bring the major's body back. Doubled over as it was -- he seemed to have been turning when he was shot -- he almost blocked the tunnel; and maybe that was the last service he could render his cause, to slow down pursuit. There was a better way. She had two grenades left. She pulled one off her belt, set it to ten clicks, turned around and scuttled as rapidly as she could after the others. When she had counted a hundred seconds, she dropped, locked her hands over the back of her neck and waited for the distant, muffled thud that told her she had dropped a part of the tunnel roof down to bury the major. When the grenade had gone off, it occurred to her that it was strange she had not caught up with the others. "Sam! Chotnik! Sound off!" she cried. They didn't answer; they hadn't heard her order to stop. She left the helmet light on and hurried after them, the pain in her knee no longer signifying. When the red numerals on her watch told her it was time for the nuclear blast, she still had not caught up. She rolled over on her back again. For this blast it did not matter whether she protected her neck. She would be killed or she would not. and the only factor that mattered was whether there was enough earth between her and the explosion. There should be. When the impellers drove the sets of plutonium needles in to mesh with each other, there would be a nuclear blast. But not a big one. They would not stay in contact for more than a few microseconds. If she had placed them right, they would expend their force up through the roof of the tunnel, carrying the Greasies' arms stores with them, and not much else. If she had placed them right. She was far less sure of that than she had pretended to Vandenour and the others. The maps that Tinka and the Indonesian had given their lives to get to her were extremely complete and clear. But reading them in the open air was one thing, trying to follow them as you crawled from level to level underground was something quite different. She was not even sure that they had followed the same route on the way out as going in. They should have drawn a silken cord after them, or broken off bits of gingerbread cookies for a trace -- At that moment the explosion occurred. Right on time. And she was still alive. It was not even frightening. It was, she thought, as it must have been in her mother's womb if her mother had fallen. Some external event had taken place. But here in the tunnel she moved with the ground and even the sound of the explosion was too huge and slow to be frightening. So that part of the plan, at least, had worked. Now if Kris could rally the patrol to the attack -- If they remembered their radiation ponchos and the wind was not too unfavorable -- If the Greasies did not pull themselves together fast enough to resist -- if the bomb had been in the right place after all -- There were too many ifs. Her place was with her troops, not here. A sighing, slithering sound a few meters behind her caught her attention. She turned the headlamp toward it and saw that a section of the roof had collapsed into the tunnel. Shaken loose by the nuclear blast? Maybe. More likely not. Creepies had been known to try to trap a foe by plugging tunnels before. She was terribly easy to find and follow with the trail of blood from her knee. It was time to get out of there. Doggedly detaching herself from the pain and from the fear that one of them was silently creeping up behind her. she resumed her crawl. In ten meters her head struck dirt. The burrowers had closed both ends of the tunnel. She turned on the light again. It was fresh dirt. She whirled quickly. Nothing moved behind her. She was alone. Margie Menninger said to the wall, "The most basic human fear is of being buried alive." She waited for a moment, as though hoping someone would answer. Then she pulled out her pistol with one hand and reached for her entrenching tool with the other. It wasn't there. Suddenly she remembered she had left it where they had assembled the bomb. Fingers then. She dropped the pistol and tore at the dirt plug with her bare hands. Furiously. Then in terror. At last because there was nothing else for her to do.   From horizon to horizon, as far as Charlie could see, there was a solid undercast of clouds and taller ones poked up all around. The storm was weakening off toward the ocean but here, where the Greasy camp lay somewhere below, it had been hours since he had seen the ground at all, days since he had last seen the little party of his friend 'Anny. And it was impossible to stay on station! At all levels up to ten thousand mefers and more the wind was strong and solidly toward the Heat Pole, and it dragged him remorselessly away. Charlie could read the fraying of the anvil-shaped tops of the cumulonimbus; it showed that at fifteen thousand meters there was a return flow. But he and the two females that survived of his flock were worn and tired. They had lost much lift. It took them forever to reach those lofty levels. As they labored upward, a new flock came sailing down from the Pole and Charlie led his tiny fragment to join it, eager for a new audience for his songs about the new friends from Earth, hungry to hear songs he had not heard before. It had been long and long since he had joined in a proper eisteddfod and his soul ached for it. The new flock was small, less than sixty adults, but there were voices in it he had never heard and he sang greeting toward them with joy. White light lashed across them. The flare caught them all by surprise. Charlie was one of the fortunate ones. He was facing away from the blast and so he was not blinded at once. He saw the high cirrus starkly outlined, blue-white against the sullen crimson Jemman sky, saw the shapes of the new flock picked out in brighter, sharper colors than he had ever seen. Minutes later he heard the sound and behind him and below a new thundercloud boiled up out of the undercast. Chorus of welcome became a dirge of pain and fear. Charlie could only reply with a lifting song. The seniors of the new flock took it up and the swarm dropped ballast, belched swallowed hydrogen into their sacs and rose. A few did not. They were not merely blind, they were in pain too great to respond. Although they were far from the blast, when the winds struck the swarm was thrown helter-skelter across the sky. Charlie had never felt such gusts before. Always in other storms there had been warning, gathering clouds and the deadly play of lightning to tell them it was time to swallow hydrogen and ride out the storm or soar to escape above it. This time there was no warning and no escape. His feeding flaps and winglets felt as though they were being tom out at the roots. Captive of the huge sail of his surface, he was thrown through the new flock, caroming off their seniors, cannoning balloonets out of the way. And then, without warning, he felt the familiar creeping tension of the surface of his gas-sac and recognized the sweet, stinging odor of the females. Oestrus, swarming time, time to breed! The spinnerets of the females were working furiously now, spraying threadlike ova and pheronomes into the air. All around Charlie, and for all the males, there was no question about what to do next; Hive up, spray milt, soar back and forth through the stinging mist while their teats elongated, convulsed, spread their seed. The skins of their air-sacs tightened, drawing the features of their tiny faces into caricatures. Behind the expressions that looked like pain was pain. The overtures to sex were no joy to Charlie. They were like being locked in an Iron Maiden with acid-tipped spikes. Only the relief that came when the semen squirted out made the pain end. But it was wrong, wrong! Charlie sang out his question and his fear, and the new flock sang with him. What breeding was this with the flare coming from the enemy ground and not the sky? What was this heat that smote them like a fist, following on the thunder and the wild gales? Charlie could see that in the turbulence most of the silklings had been missed by the milt. They were all over the sky. Within his own body he could feel it was wrong. Where was the bubbling of hydrogen to replenish his sac, raidiation-stung out of his body fluids? And what -- what was this monstrous bubbling cloud that was growing so fast it was drawing them all toward it? And that was the question that answered all the others and put an end to questions forever for Charlie as the searing heat of the nuclear cloud burned out his eye-patches, cracked his gas-sac, touched off the hydrogen that spilled out, and ended his songs for always. siderable. Less than a kiloton, it would hardly even have been noticed in the multi-megaton blasts that scoured the surface of the Earth. When the imploding grenades forced the bright plutonium needles out of their sheaths to mate, they were in contact for only a few microseconds before their own immense reaction drove them apart. But by then the explosion had occurred. The needles, the shell, the walls of the tunnel around them had been vaporized determined to escape. It escaped. Within a few thousandths of a second it had formed its pipsqueak fireball, fifty meters across, racing upward at five hundred kilometers an hour, brighter than Kung, brighter than Earth's sun, brighter than hundreds of them put together. The fireball grew and soared, first bright red with its burden of nitric acid, then whitening and losing its brightness as it began to cool. Even through closed eyes, that stark flare was visible to the people huddled in the cave, and the shockfront that swept over them shook cave and their bodies. The noise was immense. After it, over the echoes, Kris Kristianides was shouting, "Stay down! Don't open your eyes! Wait!" For nearly ten minutes she kept them there, and then slowly she peered through half-closed lids and the dark goggles and announced that they could get up. Tentatively they poked their heads over the ridge. Squinting, they saw what Marge Menninger had done. The nuclear cloud boiled tall through the layers of stratus. It had punched its own hole in the rainclouds, but its mushroom top was out of sight. Nearer, the Greasy camp seemed hardly touched: a shed blown over, a couple of tents burning, people moving dazedly around. "She -- she missed the base!" cried Kris, and Danny Dalehouse could not tell whether her tone was angry or glad. But what she said was true. The bottom of the blast was half a kilometer away from the eamp, toward the Heat Pole. Marge had got herself lost. The half of the blast that went into explosive pressure had wasted itself on the sand and succulents of the steppe. But the third that went into heat had done better. The nearest persons in the Greasy camp were staggering around, blind and in agony. No one had given them goggles. No one had warned them not to look toward the blast. "Check your pieces," Kristianides ordered. She had taken the goggles off. and under them her eyes were red. But her voice was determined. "Put on your cloaks. Let's go. We're moving in."   Dalehouse stood up and pulled the plastic poncho over his head like an automaton. (Would that really protect against any fallout at all?) He picked up his recoilless and slapped a cartridge into the breech. (Why am I doing this?) He started off with the others in a ragged line of skirmish, all nine of them, walking slowly toward the Fuel base. At every step he was telling himself that it was wrong. Wrong tactically: the nuclear blast had knocked out no more than a few unfortunates, they were likely to get their heads blown off by the survivors. Wrong strategically: they should never have allowed themselves to get into this position. And wrong, most wrong of all, morally. What kind of world were they fighting for, where they killed people without warning? Dalehouse looked uneasily back and forth at the others in the line. All were staring straight ahead at the Fuel camp. Didn't any of them feel the way he did? He stopped in his tracks. "Kris," he said, "I don't want to do this." She turned slowly, so that the muzzle of her gun covered him. "Move your ass, Dalehouse." "No, wail, Kris. Let's -- " She said tightly, "I was expecting this from you. We're going in there, all of us. Colonel Menninger set this up, and I'm not going to let it go to waste. Now move it." The others had stopped to look at them. None of them spoke, come into line with the bridge of his nose. He sighed deeply and said. "No. Kris." And then he stood there as her expression changed and hardened and he realized that, yes, she was going tp pull the trigger --  "Put down your rifle. Lieutenant," Ana called. She was behind Kris and a little to one side, and she had her own gun pointed firmly at the leiutenant's back. "I do not wish to kill." she said. "But I. too, do not want to attack this camp." Dalehouse didn't wait to see what would happen. He stepped threw it back over the crest of the hill they had just crossed, and then followed it with his own. After a second Ana did the same and so, one by one, did the others. "You fucking fools!" Kris raged. "They'll shoot you down like rats!" Dalehouse did not answer. He stared toward the Greasy camp, where a few persons who were not blind or incapacitated had begun to appear. They had weapons, and they were gazing at the drama on the hill. Dalehouse raised his hands over his head and began to walk steadily toward them. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ana doing the same thing. Maybe Kris was right. Maybe one of those armed people kneeling in the shelter of a smoldering tent would begin to shoot. But it was out of his hands. Whatever guilt there was. it would not any more belong to him; and for the first time in months, he felt at peace. And so, at the last, what can one say of them? What is to be said of Marjorie Menninger and Danny Dalehouse and Ana Dimitrova -- and of Charlie and Ahmed Dulla, or of Sharn-igon and Mother dr'Shree? They did what they could. More often than not, they did what they thought they should. And what can be said of them is what can be said of all persons, human or otherwise, at the end: they died. Some survived the fighting. Some survived the flare. But in the long run there are no survivors. There are only replacements. And time passes, and generations come and go. And then, what can one say of that beautiful and powerful woman named Muskrat Greencloud An-Guyen? One can say that she bears the traces of Margie and Nan and some of the others. Some through the passage of chains of She never knew any of them, of course, because they are all six generations dead; she is a replacement. Like all of us, she is not a single person. She wears three personas, or six, or a hundred if you count the subjective memories and stereotypes other persons carry around that bear the label "Muskie An-Guyen." To a former lover, she is the sweetly sweaty companion of a weekend at Lake Hell. To her grandchildren, she is the docent who leads them through the museums and the zoo. To your average registered Republicate lot-caster of the Boyne-Feng Metropolitan Area, she is the selection judge who supervises the machineries of government. Or, actually, of nongovernment. Muskie is one hundred percent solidly behind the Six Precepts of the Jemman Republics, and No strong central government is the last and maybe most important of them. "Government" is a dead wickedness to Muskie, burned out in the blast and starved in the Desperation. It has been gone from Jem this century and a half. No one wants to see that pawkish horror back, least of all Muskie. It is as obsolete as armies and indolence and waste. Muskie will keep it so, if it demands her last drop of blood as well as the utmost sacrifices by her militia volunteers and gift acceptors. As she walks across the pleasant gardens toward the place where she sleeps and keeps her belongings, a short, pale youth pushes toward her through the shrubs. He is d'Dalehouse Dolphin An-Guyen, and he is one of her sons. He has been running. He is breathing hard. Muskie sighs and says, "How nice of you to hurry to give me Ring-Greeting, Dolph." He stops and blinks at the pretty Christmas many-tree in the center of the garden, with its ring-shaped lights and yellow Star of Earth at the top. Obviously he has forgotten about the holiday. Muskie sighs again. "Merry Christmas anyway, Dolph. I know you're going to reproach me some more. Sit down and catch your breath first." They sit on a pressed creepystone bench under a grape arbor. (A few raisins had survived the flare-storm under a bunk in that Outpost of the People. From the six germinable seeds that were found in them had come all the wine on Jem, and this arbor.) Muskie does not look at her son. She knows that in spite of his faults, he is too well brought up to begin before she has given him encouragement, and she wants him to feel the peace of this place. All around the garden are the statues of the First Generation, the eighteen Mothers in gold, the fifty-two Mares in crystal, the eighty-nine Fathers in granite quarried from the cliffs under the Heat Pole. (The twenty-one survivors who contributed no genes to the pool, even by cloning, have statues too, but they are ranged outside the park. None of them were even mares.) There are further distinctions in the statues. The eighty-one survivors who returned from Farside have their names picked out in frost-etched silver. The thirty-two who survived in the burrows under the Outpost of Food when the flare caught them before the ferrying to Farside was complete are marked in ruby. And the sixty-seven others -- few of them viable -- who survived the flare in caves, under machines, inside space capsules, or wherever they could hide from the rage of the star are marked in orange chrysolite, the color of flame. That was six generations back. Muskie could have been descended from # of them, more than a third, but actually only eleven are truly her ancestors, with considerable overlap. (For instance, she is quintyply each descended from Marjorie Menninger, Ana Dimitrova, Nguyen Tree, and Firstborn McKenzie, the tiny phocomelic child born to the one woman who survived both the nuclear bombing of the Outpost of Fuel and the flare. She lived only long enough to bear her damaged child, but the child was marvelously fertile.) When Muskie feels that this holy place has done all it can for her son, she scratches below the waistband of her slacks and says, "All right, Dolph, you may as well say it." He cannot wait to get the words out, he is so impatient. "All right. I'll say it! You've made a mistake. Mother Muskie. We can't say no to Alphabase!" " 'Can't'?" He is doggedly stubborn. Even ferocious. "Yes, that's what I said, can't. It's a crime against the human race! Jem's rotting away before your eyes. Mother Muskie. This is the best chance we've ever had to get things going again. They've got high-energy technology on Alphabase! Do you know what it means, what they're suggesting? They're able to put ten tons standard into the tachyon charge state -- we couldn't do that to save our lives." "Dear Dolph," she begins, sweetly reasonable, "we have more pressing problems right here on Jem. Do you know how many wild flocks of Loons there are? Krips who still wallow in savagery? Creepies unreached and unbenefited. We have a duty -- " "We have a duty to humanity!" he cries. "Yes. Certainly! And we are carrying it out. Our ancestors gave their lives to save us, and we are true to the Six Precepts. There is no tyrannical government, no coercion, no contending nationalities here. We haven't raped Jem, we've wooed it. We live off renewable resources, while the Alphs are back to industry and the evils of technology." us don't begin to scratch the surface of them! Do you know that fossil fuel 'is forming faster than we use it?" "Good! Proper! That makes it renewable. But be reasonable. Dolph dear. Why spoil everyone's happiness by striving for something foolish? Suppose everyone wanted to do what you say. Who would mine these fossil fuels?" "Krips. Creeps. People. Machines! I don't care. If they don't want to. they should be ordered to!" Muskrat is shaken. "You have spoiled my Christmas," she says sorrowfully, and walks away. What a shame! A foolishly stubborn boy and her whole holiday was ruined before it had rightly begun. Dolph is her favorite son, or often is. She admires his tiny, quick body and his bright mind. But what rot, really! What a bore! Why can't he accept paradise like everyone else and be happy in it? Dolph's holiday is spoiled, too, and he sits on the creepy-stone bench so angry and frustrated that he does not even hear the carols beginning. A 'es'e fi'eles, lae'i 'riumphan'es. If only she could be made to understand! The winning of .lem had cost so much in blood and pain. Not just in that first terrible year. Over and over again, every time Kung had flared in those first decades. There had been eight flares since the days of the ancestors, and only the last two or three had been fairly painless. Plenty of warning. A frenzied rush to ionproof the domes and hustle essential perishables inside. A work of confinement while the star raged, a year or so of one or another kind of scarcity until the planet replenished itself. But that left half a dozen sieges of misery, the first worst, but all of them catastrophic. Was all that to go for nothing? Veni'e a'oremus. 'Ominum. A Creepie overseer darts whickering past him toward the many-tree, followed by four noisy Krinpit gardeners in their bright red and green Ring-Greeting coats of lacquer. He becomes aware of the choir belatedly. -- save us all from Sa 'an 's power When we were gone as 'ray -- Hell of a season of joy this is, he thinks to himself. Season of suicide! Time of deciding to die on the vine while all the rest of the galaxy goes on to who knows what triumphs of technology and adventure! Glumness battles Christmas inside him. Gradually glumness loses. He remembers what the Creepie had been carrying -- palely glowing ultraviolet strobes -- and decides to stroll over to the Christmas many-tree. The Krinpit are pushing away benches and picnic tables to make room, moaning and clattering to themselves; they finish and scuttle away. The Creepie positions his strobes and waits for orders. On the tree itself, the tethered balloonists are singing their little hearts out. Schlaf im heilige ruhe, Schlaf im heilige ruh '. All around the tree young people like him are removing their clothes and slipping in between gaily decorated trunks. "Time to start!" they cry: and the Loons begin the jolly, lively "Good King Wenceslas." Obediently the Creepie touches off the strobes. The Loons gasp and continue to sing and begin to emit their milt, and all under the lovely tree the couples link in the traditional Rings. And Dolph can stand it no longer. Gloom loses. Christmas wins. He flings off his clothing and plunges into the trunks of the many-tree. Why fight Utopia? he thinks to himself. And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing...  by Robert Frazier The Four Shores Beta Bernal, resonant orbit, # I ) like the albatross mating in flight the solar panels in vast double wingspread pinwheel with a titanium whisper through the abyssal twilight my dreams have turned with them these sun-catchers lame and unsure in migration on the solstice path to tomorrow # ) flawless and glass-edged sharp in its curvature the Bernal habitat a head leaping up from the crouch cuts a shadow out of the glare in this well space darker than space my body sweats inside crewing a surface repairs excursion yet cools in that soft music a haven from an unending diurnal life # ) like foxfire in the forest dark or like a battery hooked to the engines of silent mystery my soul recharges with the great girthing chain of mirrors which bends the sun casts the diastolic power of atoms to the naked gaseous heart of this living artifice we call home # ) in the V between two agricultural tori my flesh, soul and dreams burn in nuclear fusion molded into a one-piece future a grasping fist by the light that falls in quills raw and actinic a gut-wrenching echo of the naked star we adhere to Tam Barrett Reviews edited by Noralie Barnett by Paolo Maffei translated by Mirella and Riccardo Giacconi Reviewed by Hal Clement not those of old legend or modern tradition, though he starts with comets and ends with black holes. Most of the items in between have names totally strange to the average citizen, such as Seyfert galaxies and BL Lacertae objects. The title is well chosen, however. Most of these objects, if they were located anywhere near our planet, would cause terror among human beings for much better reasons than can ever be found in astrology: they could crush, vaporize, or otherwise dispose of our world with ail the casual ease of a superweapon from a space-opera yarn of the thirties. From my point of view, the best thing about the book is its completeness. While it is in no sense a collection of mathematical articles from the Astrophysical Journal, it is far more than a sensational collection of descriptions. Dr. Maffei goes into the observational history of each object, gives a clear account of the reasoning for and against various interpretations of what has been seen, and where -- as is usually the case -- there is still a fair amount of doubt about what is going on, he at least has removed some of the wilder possibilities. In the comet discussion, for example, the pros and cons of the various explanations for the Siberian explosion of # are very well covered; I approve of the discussion, not merely because it reaches the conclusion which has been held for a long time by most conservative astronomers -- that the impacting object was an icy comet nucleus of the Whipple "dirtysnowball" variety. The various "black hole" interpretations of some of the apparently very energetic stellar and quasi-stellar objects are very well covered, also. In a few places, there may possibly be translation slips. On p. # is the statement "main sequence stars are heavier and more luminous." More luminous than what? One suspects that the author's intended point was that main sequence stars are more luminous the heavier (better, more massive) they are. On p. #, the statement is made that the time of the demise of the dinosaurs can now be narrowed down to no more than # years. I wish Dr. Maffei had given some idea of how this is accomplished; I know techniques have improved over the years, but I thought there was still an uncertainty of four or five percent in most of the radioactive dating methods. I admit I'm hedging; I don't like to call a professional categorically wrong, but still I have my doubts about this one. But don't let that bother you; if the question is important to you, you can always check it. If you want to write hardscience space opera, or be able to spot the wilder nonsense in a modern black hole discussion, get the book. by Philip K. Dick edited by Mark Hurst Berkley. # Reviewed by Alan Ryan honor its readers. This one does. The Golden Man by Philip K. Dick contains fifteen previously uncollected stories that were published originally in a variety of magazines between # and #. What we have here is a representative selection of work, written over a span of more than twenty years, framed between an astonishingly personal and revealing introduction and a set of retrospective story notes that, by turns, explain, puzzle, question, apologize, plead. The result is a book that will have to be regarded as a major text in the literature of science fiction and the illuminating personal document of a major writer. Dick's stories and novels have, from the very beginning, made an equal appeal to both intellect and imagination. His mind ranges so widely and deeply that comparisons to writers as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard are not out of order. The stories included here are ample evidence and this would be an important book if it contained nothing more. And what kind of stories are they? Are they any fun? Well, there's a story in which a crazed pinball machine starts scoring on its players. And a story about a flock of bloodthirsty butterflies. Then there's the one about a determined robot that comes to your house and won't go away till you buy it. Oh, and the one about an alien invasion in which the aliens come disguised as three-foot high real estate salesmen. Then there's the one... Yes, the stories are fun. And, through the fun and the wit, they raise questions, basic questions, that stretch the intellect along with the imagination. Even those that are merely interesting and workmanlike display the kind of consistent entertainment value on which science fiction magazines thrive: "Meddler," for example, or "The King of the Elves," or "Small Town." The fact that these stories have gone uncollected through the years, however, should not suggest that they come from the bottom of the barrel. There isn't a bad or boring story in the lot, please understand, and even the slightest of them has something to recommend it. Dick's casual stories -- and he was a prolific writer of magazine stories early in his career -- are all good and intelligent entertainments. "Small Town," for instance, a familiar and predictable yarn about a man who constructs his own scale-model reality in the basement, is painstakingly detailed, convincingly told, eerily memorable, and raises a constant theme in Dick's writing, the question of reality and how the hell will we know it when we find it? For this new colllection, Dick has written an introduction that deserves a prize of its own for its honesty, its self-revelaprose, and for the glaring light it throws on the condition of the serious writer in these our times. A few other writers whiz through these pages too, for example, Norman Spinrad ("Norman has the worst temper of any living mortal") and Harlan Ellison ("Harlan hates my guts...but I love that little bastard. He is a person who really exists.") But mostly Dick talks about himself. Listen: "I'd like to get (God) here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up. that man didn't sin and fall but was pushed -- which is bad enough -- but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not." The strength of Dick's anger and frustration is in those last half dozen monosyllables. Or this: "I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality." Or this: "My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything I've seen and done, and fashion it into a work which makes sense." This is the sound of a writer at the maturity of his talent, with a large body of work behind him, with many of his personal gauntlets safely traversed, and much of the journey rearranged, fictionalized (most notably in A Scanner Darkly), refashioned so that, at last, it all begins to make sense. The same honesty and self-revelation run through the notes on the stories, as Dick looks back at work done years earlier. "The theme of dangerous toys runs like a tattered thread throughout my writing... I was at a sort of halfway point between doubt and faith. Years later I'm still in that position... The theme of caritas, (or agape) shows up in my writing as the key to the authentic human...I am convinced that anything can be faked... I may be reading too much into this simpleminded early story, but... This ending is not good. The fans were right...Joanna Russ wrote me the nastiest letter I've ever received...! have always managed to offend people by what I write...Sorry, people...Either I've invented a whole new logic or, ahem. I'm not playing with a full deck." These notes tell us a good deal about the younger writer who created these stories. Even more, they show us the writer as he is now, able to comment and evaluate and even occasionally smile, wan though the smile may be. And there is something more as well. Dick has, in the past, been noted for his anger, despair, mistrust: a prince of paranoia. But we meet now, in these pages, a man who asks us to observe, in the work he presents, "a theme of human trust." He asks that we not misread the stories and "see dislike and anger only," because the anger "is generated out of love." His anger, he declares simply, rightly, is "love baffled." Here is a writer who, perhaps at last feeling himself on safer ground, has come out into view to ask for a more proper understanding. He deserves it, as well as our respect, for the stories, the questions, the honesty, the The Golden Man will be indispensable to anyone interested in tracing the evolution of some of Dick's ideas from stories into novels. "The Mold of Yancy" (#), for example, later turned into The Penultimate Truth (#), "The Little Black Box" (# developed into Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (#) -- Dick feels the story is more successful than the nove -- and "Return Match" (#) features Officer Joseph Tinbane, a central character in CounterClock World (mi). If the book is marred at all, it is only by the embarrassingly breathless, if mercifully brief, foreword by the editor, Mark Hurst. And, although Dick asks in the notes that we read "The Little Black Box" last of all the stories, the editor has chosen to place it in the middle of the book. Well, it's not a perfect world... The Golden Man has already made # a distinguished year for science fiction. And Philip K. Dick is playing with a full deck, all right. He just doesn't have the same cards we do. by Gordon R. Dickson Ace Books, S#. # Reviewed by Clifford R. McMurray ponent of the theory that the progress of the human race is made, not in a slow and steady upward line, but in quantum jumps. His own writing is a strong argument in favor of this theory. The first quantum leap of improvement came in the early sixties, with the publication of Necromancer. Another quantum jump was made only a few years ago, in The Far Call. That second dramatic improvement is now bearing its fruit in such work as this volume, which contains the first new Dorsai story in nearly five years. The Spirit of Dorsai is another of the heavily illustrated trade paperbacks Ace has been experimenting with recently. The illustrations are of uneven quality. and of such varied style as to lead one to suspect that they were done by more than a single artist. The name given for the illustrator, Fernando Fernandez, certainly sounds like a pen name. The illustrations aside, this is one of the few trade paperbacks thus far produced to justify its purchase price on the quality and quantity of the text. It consists of one novella and one novelette, surrounded by stagesetting passages from the next Dorsai novel, The Final Encyclopedia. The stories are what Dickson calls "illuminations" of the Dorsai series, also called the Childe Cycle. They are intended to add further depth to the series by exploring some aspects of his future history not dealt with directly in the main story line. These two stories of the Dorsai, the people of a world whose principal exi.-ort is the services of their men as mercenaries in the wars of the other humansettled planets, are drawn from incidents mentioned in previous novels in the series. "Amanda Morgan" is the tale of the first -- and last -- time anyone ever attempted to invade Dorsai. As explained in Tactics of Mistake, in the days when Earth's colonies were young. Cletus Grahame brought his revolutionary theories of warfare to the Dorsai and set them on their road to supremacy in their trade. They became so effective that the other worlds were no longer dependent on Earth to settle their disputes. Earth attempted to undo everything that the Dorsai had done, by drawing all her soldiers offworld into a dozen foreign eonflicts, then invading their unprotected homeland. All that was left to stand against them on Dorsai itself were the families of those soldiers -- the women and children, the sick and crippled, the aged. But using Cletus' theories they were able to defeat Earth's best troops. This is the story of the defense of Foralie, Cletus' home district, led by a ninety-three year old woman (to my knowledge, the first time Dickson has ever used a woman as the lead character in a story). It is a tale of loving sacrifice of some so that their people may live in freedom. Dickson has seldom written more powerfully, and his first real attempt at female characterization is a complete success. The richness of description and multiple layers of meaning demonstrate that where Dickson was strong before, he is now all but unmatchable. "Brothers," previously published in The John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, shows the old Dickson at his best. It completes the story partially told in the Hugo Award winner Soldier. Ask Not, of the assassination of Kensie Graeme on the backwater world of St. Marie, and the avenging of his death by his twin brother Ian. Dickson has been accused by some of Continued on page # Michael Kaluta: Storytelling Fantasy Artist by Floyd Kemske Group held its big Marvel Comic Convention in New York, one of the exhibits was a display case with an original painting by Michael Kaluta. The display, however, was designed to show how a cover painting might be unsuitable for Marvel until the Production Department had modified it. The artist found himself drawn toward the cabinet holding his painting, but in typical Kaluta fashion he was more interested in the spectators than the display. He could not help eavesdropping on the conversation of a father and his young son. "See," said the father, "this shows what happens when the painting is unsuitable. They touch it up and make it better." "How is it better?" said the little boy. "Well, look," said the father. "See how big the teeth are? And look at the blood in there." The father then walked away toward another exhibit. The little boy remained at the display case for a moment, then finally pointed at Kaluta's original. "You know," he said, "I like that one best." Kaluta smiles when he tells that story. "That's all I needed," he says. And it does seem to be all he needs. He is an artist who works to please a little boy rather than a production department. The anecdote has a larger symbolic value, however, because when you talk with him you have the feeling that he paints exclusively for the sake of a little boy, the little boy inside him. The one he is telling stories to. Michael Kaluta is one of the foremost practitioners of the new narrative art which, already well-known to followers of fantasy and science fiction, has gained a modest foothold in modern culture. It has gone by various names and perhaps the most popular is the term New Romantic Movement, but this term is shorthand at best and there seem to be as many artists who resent this term as embrace it. "Actually," Kaluta remarks in his cryptic way, "there are very few people moving in the New Romantic Movement." Regardless of what it is called, there is an artistic style, heavily indebted to the narrative requirements of comic books and the illustration of fantasy and science fiction, which is supporting a growing number of young artists. The main features of this style are the use of fantasy and mythological subjects, bright colors, heroic poses, and painstaking attention to detail. In addition, the paintings from this "school" have a definite narrative quality as shameless in its intent to entertain as a good science fiction novel. In fact, the New Romantic style's preservation of the storytelling values of visual art (in the face of the increasing irrelevance of "serious" art to the human experience) is reminiscent of science fiction itself. Kaluta's conversation is a succession of colorful and unusual images, peculiarly emancipated from constraints of time or place. At times he seems to be talking about things which have happened. At times he actually seems to be reliving them, interspersing the events with Potter on Books by Jeffrey Jones. Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, Berni Wrightson Dragon's Dream, # Galaxy has a very able Review Editor and I want to let you know at the outset that she is not to blame for this column. You might have gotten that impression since this is a book column and since it resembles a review. This column is part of Floyd Kemske's editorial conception (that's his phrase, not mine). He assigns books to me after considering, not what I want or even what books ought to be reviewed, but what might "support" the feature article. When Floyd handed me this copy of The Studio. I pointed out to him that it's an art book and I don't know anything about art. To me, a Campbell's Soup can looks like a soup can; a canvas randomly splashed with paint just looks like a mess. I'm not qualified to review an art book. I know it. You must know it (if you've read this far). Floyd knows it, too, but he insists this editorial conception of his is bigger than both of us. f. rS. Michael Kaluta Pages from the Sketchbook of Michael Kaluta Michael Kaluta carries two sketchbooks with him wherever he goes. He uses them to make visual notes, to catch interesting poses and angles for future reference. Sketchbook drawing is his favorite kind of work, as is obvious from the exuberance of these penciled pages. He consented to part with a few pages from the sketchbooks and we have reproduced them here and on some of the following pages. direct quotations and fragments of interior monologue. His attempts to describe his own working habits, for example: "In between coffees or sitting at a bar watching somebody. I'll be sketching them, but something will pop into my mind, part of a popular song or something. The sketch will go down in the sketchbook. Then, later on the sketch will come back to my memory while I'm doing something else. The two things will fit together. I'll say. 'Well, maybe there's a picture hiding in there.' And I'll start keeping it in a special place in my head where I can enjoy it. I'll look in on it now and then and see how it's growing, how it's changing, until it becomes something that affects me personally." In fact, his life, like his conversation, seems to have been such a succession of images. While most people develop intellectual maturity by searching for logical relationships and discerning uniformities in their environment. Kaluta has grown by discovering anomalies in the world around him. Born in Guatemala to a military family and moving around a lot as a child, his memories consist largely of small tropical animals, aircraft, scraps of childhood lore, and television programs about space. A childhood dominated by daydreaming gave way to art education at the Richmond Professional Institute. He was not very enamored of "serious" art. He graciously reminded me that the editorial conception depends on "Potter on Books." On the other hand, he explained, there is a virtual brigade of Potters in the Boston telephone book alone and if one Potter doesn't want to write the column, perhaps... "Well," I said at that point, "at least I can tell the readers what the book is like." "That will be sufficient," said Floyd. He talks that way sometimes. Well, then. The Studio is a book well worth reading, or looking at, or whatever combination thereof is appropriate for an art book. It is a handsome package, too. It measures twelve inches by twelve inches and has # heavy-stock pages, every one in full color. It shows attention to details, such as dating all the paintings. This isn't really a book review, however, and I'm going to do what I want. I want to review the binding. Some of us read books pretty hard and for those of us who do, the pages of The Studio become prematurely suitable for framing. Apart from the binding, however, the book is not only good, it is important. These four artists are (or were) residents of the same New York studio, a base to which they all repaired after abandoning the comic book industry. As I understand it, the publisher originally wanted to do a book on each artist, but they are all pretty young and they themselves decided that which seemed to lack entertainment value, but learned the fundamentals of composition in spite of himself. In typical Kaluta fashion, however, he never learned compositon as a set of rules, but a an internal response to a design. "Emotional composition." he calls it. After school, he went into the comic book industry, where he worked on The Shadow, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Batman, Detective, Conan, and others. He liked drawing stories, but he could not quite assimilate the moneymaking ethic of the comic business. In fact, his work there was not very economical for him because he tended to put too much into it. Comic book interiors, like commissioned pictures, cost him too much time for the return. He tends to finish pictures to an extent which is not economical because, as he says, "The picture commands, not the price." He still does comic book covers from time to time. but his work is more none of them had a large enough portfolio to make a whole book. Somebody had the idea of doing them all together. The effect is remarkable. The book is divided into four sections, one for each artist. Their styles are distinctive and even I can tell them apart. At the same time, however, there is a unity of theme, tone, and purpose which is unmistakable. Maybe it comes from sharing studio space, I don't know. I don't know anything about art, remember? But each artist paints in a way which is representational, sympathetic, and dynamic. Each is partial to the general theme of individual human experience. Each is indebted to the heroic style of comic books, although some of them have larger outstanding balances than others. I suspect they put Jeffrey Jones first in this book because of alphabetical order, but it was inspired placement all the same. His work establishes a sophistij. cated tone which makes the viewer think  These four artists are (or werej residents of the same New York studio, a base to which they all repaired after abandoning the conne book ii dustry. diverse nowadays: books, posters, record jackets, illustrations. "I haven't done matchbook covers yet," he quips. T he artist is much more disciplined than it would seem to the casual observer. For the past eight years, he has been working on an illustrated edition of the book Metropolis by Thea Von Harbou, the book from which Fritz Lang's famous film was takeji. The project, after outliving half a dozen deals with different publishers and as many freelanced plans, seems to be reaching a whole new order of certainty with the English publisher. Dragon's Dream. "I have notes and lists of things to do," says Kaluta, "and going back eight years one of the recurring things is: 'Get to work on Metropolis.' There are a lot of sketches, a lot of layouts, and a lot of ideas." His plans for this story call for forty paintings, but if you try to discourage him with the magnitude of it, he insists much of the work is already done. "All of these pictures have been building up in my mind," he says. "I read the book over and over again. I have read it so much that, when I was in Germany and a guy there had the. first edition of it, I could follow it. even though I can't read German." It is part of Kaluta's approach he must be in the presence of a master. Economy of line, visible brush strokes, and complicated realistic colors are the most obvious characteristics. The real world is not colored with pigment squeezed right out of a tube, and neither is a Jeffrey Jones painting. He mixes up the paint until he gets the colors right; the result is subtle and true to life. Colors are not the best part of a Jeffrey Jones painting, however. The best part is the amount of complicated emotion and character you can see in the people he paints. The way they stand, the way they look, the things they wear, all tell you what they are thinking -- and what they are thinking never fails to be interesting. The Blind Narcissus, for example, consists entirely of a girl standing up to her ankles in a woodland pond, yet it conveys a complicated message of vulnerability, of introspective longing, of vanity, all at the same time. Michael Kaluta, on the other hand, dazzles you with action and detail. He doesn't paint one person where three would do the job and he is unsparing in his props: swords, veils, urns, guns, flowers, jewelry, and all the paraphernalia necessary to create a complete setting. It is a characteristic of Kaluta's work that it is often difficult to tell what the people in his paintings are doing. You can be sure, however, that they are not contemplative types. Bright colors. idealized human figures, and activity beyond the scope of his freeze-frame images are the hallmarks of his work. You get the feeling from a Kaluta painting that the activity started before you saw the picture and it will continue after you turn the page. Consider Ayisha. which is a portait of sorts and therefore one of his more sedate works. It depicts a veiled lady with a beckoning look, but there are seven other characters in here, as well as a welter of tapestries, furniture, and oriental artifacts. When you look at it, you want to apologize for interrupting her in whatever she was doing. Barry Windsor-Smith has stayed fairly close to the comic book style. He, like Kaluta. uses bright colors, but he doesn't seem to mix them as much. His colors appear a little flatter, a little closer to those which come out of the paint tube (and appear in the comic books). More than the other artists, he is fond of bloody swords and bulging muscles (although Kaluta runs a close second in this contest). He is steeped in mythological lore and his most pedestrian paintings have a heroic quality which seems to bring the viewer that much closer to the world of the gods and demigods. When he paints avowedly mythological subjects Pandora, Artemis and Apollo, Fate Sowing the Stars), however, he is at his best. In these, he combines a Hellenic type of idealsim with the colorful crowded detail of the Italian Baroque. It works pretty well. If you have a mind for comparisons, however, you would have to say that while Jeffrey Jones tries to turn pictures into people, Barry WindsorSmith tries to turn people into pictures. Berni Wrightson is unabashedly manipulative. He wants to tickle your funny Ijone or chill your spine, or both. The people in his paintings are more like caricatures than real people, so you have the feeling that it's all in fun, but there's something about a fence festooned with human heads that goes beyond funny. His work isn't all morbid, however, and even some of the morbid stuff is comical. Taking No Chances, for instance, has four men trying to do in a vampire with a cross, a wooden stake, a garlic necklace, and an axe, under the protection of the rising sun. His attention to detail and authenticity in pursuit of humor is reminiscent of Monty Python films. His paintings have a lot of charm, especially if you like dinosaurs, axe murders, and coat-flapping storms. I have tried to say nice things about The Studio. If you want to know why. it is because I didn't have to pretend to like the pictures in it; I did like them. Unlike what happens with a lot of art books for me. I was able to look at it and feel I was being entertained rather than ridiculed. All right, Floyd. I did my best. -- Eugene Potter The hard stuff is better. I . Beautv, McKinlev hb.  # #. Basic Computer Games. Microcomputer Edition, ed. Ahl pb, # #. #. Clarke hb.  # #. Futuropolis, Sheckley pb. # #. The White Dragon, McCaffrey hb,  # #. Confessions of a Crap Artist, Dick pb.  # #. ft. Us. and the Others, Churchill hb.  # #. Best of Byte i. ed. Ahl pb, # #. Red Moon. Black Mountain, Chant hb.S # #. Firejiood, McIntyre hb. # #. Best Short Stories ofJ. G. Ballard hb, # #. The Crystal Ship, ed. Silverberg hb,  # #. Idyll, art: Jones pb,  # #. The Two Kingdoms, Saxton hb.  # #. The Studio, Jones, etc. pb. # #. The Book of Skulls, Silverberg hb.  # #. Masters of Comic Art, Garrick pb.  # I I . Dragonsinger, McCaffrev hb.  # #. Green Dog Trumpet, Miller pb. # hb.  # #. Empire, Delaney pb.  # hb.  # #. The First Kingdom, Katz pb.  # #. The Tritonian Ring, deCamp hb, # #. More Than Human, Sturgeon pb.  # #. Strange Wine, Ellison hb,  # #. Illustrated Roger Zelazny pb.  # hb, # #. Horns ofEljIand, Vess pb,  # #. Always Come Evening, Howard hb, # #. Endangered Species. Eichenberg pb. # #. Masters of Solitude, Kaye  Godwin hb. # #. Frazettal pb.  # #. Star Lord, Lawrence hb,  # #. Frazetta II pb,  # #. Unto Zeor Forever, Lichtenberg hb.  # pb.  # #I . Make Us Happy, Herzog hb.  # #. Pictures by Tolkien hb. # #. Dune. Herbert hb.  # #. Dragonworld. Preiss pb.  # #. All My Sins Remembered, Haldeman hb. S # #. The Illustrated Harlan Ellison pb,  # #. The Magicians, Gunn hb.  # #. Casey Agonistes, McKenna hb,  # #. Legends From the End of Time, Moorcock hb,  # hb.  # #. Secret A gent X  # #. Small Shadows Creep, ed. Norton hb.  # #. Magic Carpet  # #. King Kong, Lovelace Sc Wallace hb.  # #. Mystery Adventure  # #. Dragondrums, McCaffrey hb,  # #. Spicy Mystery  # #I . Marchers of Valhalla. Howard hb. # #. Strange Tales  # #. Dying Inside, Silverberg hb.  # #. Kazar  # #. Roadside Picnic, Strugatsky hb,  # #. Oriental Stories  # #. Seademons, Yep hb.  # #. O'Leary's Warbirds  # #. The Dead Zone, King hb. # #. Haunting ofTobyJugg, Wheatley hb,  # #. The Devil Rides Out, Wheatley hb,  # #I . Spirit of Dorsal, Dickson pb.  # #. Ka of Gifford Hillary , Wheatley hb, # #. TheSO's, ed. Hendra pb.  # #. Land of Froud pb.  # #. Murder Ink, Winn pb,  # #. Murderess Ink, Winn pb.  # .#. Collected Vritings of Ambrose Bierce pb,  # #. Faeries. Froud pb.  # #. Wood Beyond the World, Morris pb,  # #. Gnomes. Poortvliet pb,  # A . Annotated # Leagues Under the Sea, Verne pb, # #. The Duende History of Shadow Magazine. Murray pb.  # #. The Altered I, ed. Harding pb,  # #. The Illustrated Dune, Herbert, art: Schoenherr pb,  # #. The Best of Astounding, ed. Lewis pb.  #  Number Title Quantity List Price #. Home From the Shore. Dickson pb,  # m #. Conan in the Tower of the Elephant, Howard pb.  # f...   hb. # #. Popeye: The First Fifty Years, Sagendorf #. The Inklings, Carpenter #. The Makinp of Kins Konp the oripinaf, Goldner  Turner hb. # hb. # #!. The Individuated Hobbit, O'Neill #. The Futurians, Knight hb.S#  hb. # .  TrvxiM Total list price: Postage costs -- # cents minimum# cents per book: Total amount enclosed: # Newbury Street, Boston MA # to his art that he can believe much of the work to be done before he has even prepared the canvas. To Kaluta, the story has a high priority and the biggest part of the job is in determining how he should tell it. His affinity fox Metropolis relates to his affection for the city of New York. "It's a very Metropolis city," he says. "In New York, there is an undercurrent: makemoneymakemoneymakemoney. I enjoy it, because it makes New York sparkle. You go to Chicago and there's no reason for anybody to be there because -- oh. I'm sorry. I don't mean to insult anybody. They'll come to me and say, 'The next thing you're going to mention is gangsters.' But I've been in other big cities and they don't have that zzzt. Because no one is breathing down their neck to make money for no reason other than to pay New York. The city demands that you pay it as much money as you possibly can." If it seems unusual that an artist committed more to his art than to his paycheck should find such an avaricious atmosphere invigorating, it is in keeping with the other aspects of Michael Kaluta. The image he allows himself to present to the world is one of paradox. He is the outstanding figure in the new narrative art, for example, yet he refuses to be typed. "In a movement." he says, "you have leaders and followers and I don't want to be a follower. On the other hand, I don't want anybody to tell me that I should do thus and so instead of what I'm doing." Kaluta's style is probably best represented by the first painting he did after breaking with the comic business. The Sacrifice is a complex narrative featuring the shapely, barely dressed woman and well-muscled barbarian so familiar to Projections by Robert Stewart Galaxy looks at the making of Fritz Lang's classic film. Metropolis. O ctober, #. Film director Fritz Lang (#-#) was sent (Universum Film AktiengeselT schaft) for a month-and-a-half long observation of Hollywood production techniques. "The first evening, when we arrived, we were still enemy aliens so we couldn't leave the ship; it was docked somewhere on the west side of New York," Lang told Peter Bogdanovich in #. "I looked into the streets -- the glaring lights and the tall buildings -- and there I conceived Metropolis." The water lapped at Lang's ship. In the darkness, the metropolis glowed. Forced to spend the night in the harbor, Lang, a former architectural student (at Vienna's Technical High School) and' the son of leading Viennese architect Anton Lang, envisioned a Manhattan of the mind, an architectural dream of the year #, as he saw "across from the ship, streets lit as if in full daylight by neon lights and topping them oversized luminous advertisements -- moving, turning, flashing on and off, spiraling -- something that was completely new and different for a European in those days. This impression gave me the first thought for a town of the future." He passed the idea on to his wife, Thea Von Harbou (#-#), with whom Lang had collaborated on all his films since Das Wandernde Bild (#), and she expanded it into the # novel. Metropolis. Together they then fashioned their screenplay about the clash between the dictatorial ruling class of the towering urban complex. Metropolis, and the countless worker-drones who keep the Michael Kaluta "I think one of the reasons that the 'New Romantic Art' came up is that the guys at The Studio were looking for a name to call what we do." came up is that the guys at The Studio and a number of other people were looking for a name to call what we do, which is really just commercial art witti soul. This art is a personal statement which happens to appeal to a large audience. In between fine personal art and commercial art. it is something nobody has been able to name yet. Barry Windsor-Smith, for example, refuses to be called an illustrator. I say I'm an illustrator. I like entertaining. I like pictures. I like making stories." Barry Windsor-Smith, incidentally, originated the name "New Romantic Art" in an interview in Ariel magazine. The Studio to which Kaluta refers was a loft on West Twenty-Sixth Street, in which he shared working space with Jeffrey Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Berni Wrightson. All four of the artists had successful careers in the comic business which they renounced in favor of the more or less unstated goal to launch a new era in professinal art. The other three had to work hard to persuade Kaluta to join them (his first impulse is never one to join anything), but the four of them are good friends as well as colleagues. They finally persuaded him into the arrangement by pointing out that they had already painted the place. Such is the stuff of historical turning points. Shortly, however, it became apparent that The Studio was something more than shared expenses. There was a bond of tographer ior I Love Lucy , but during the twenties he ranked as one of the two or three most innovative and influential cameramen in the world. For special effects it was decided to use the Schufftan Process, invented only two years earlier by Eugen Schufftan (later Eugene Shuftan, #-#), enabling live action to be combined with photographic or model backgrounds. Between the camera and the rear projection screen there was a mirror with part of its reflective surface removed to expose clear glass. Positioned at an angle, the mirror reflected the image of live actors on a partially built set off to the side. This then blded with the rear projected blow-up of the model set. Inspired by D.W. Griffith's nroerance (#), Lang choreographed his masses of actors in swelling and dissolving decorative patterns of movement. Sixteen-year-old Brigitte Helm (real name: Gisele Eve Schittenheim) was cast in the lead roles of MariaRobot Maria after Lang saw her in a student production. Cast as the magician-scientist Rotwang was Von Harbou's former husband, Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Various sculptures were created by Walter Schultze-Middendorf, and forced perspective model sets, under the art direction of Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht, sprawled over an full-size constructions of ground-level sets were combined with the upper stories of the model sets. The city was a Bauhaus dream, often seen at angles Manhattan from across the harbor. A.E. Van Vogt later estimated the population of Metropolis "must have been in the shots of Metropolis alive with vehicular and air traffic involved innumerable hidden wires on the model set. Later, Hollywood made an effort to imitate and outdo this magnificent Metropolis model exterior with a # futuristic model of # New York City, built by mechanical effects director Ralph Hammeras for Fox's SF musical comedy Just Imagine (#), a clip of which appeared as Killer Kane's city in Buck Rogers (#). By October, #, Metropolis was complete, running seventeen reels. It opened January #. #, at Berlin's largest movie theater, the Ufa-Palast am Zoo. When it arrived in the U.S., the film was heavily edited (. e. , butchered) by Julian Johnson, playwright Channing Pollock (#-#), and Edward Adams. They reduced it to ten reels for American distribution by Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. Metropolis opened in the U.S. on August #, #, and it is this version, running roughly ninety minutes, which Return to Ring world... Now, you can read the from the best science fiction art, all at once, just by incredible sequel to Larry writers, plus articles on the ordering the last four issues of eighteen other fantastic stories interviews, and the finest SF bargain price of #. Here is the first publication of the new science fiction masterpiece, at less that the price of a hardback, fully illustrated, plus Joan Vinge's articles by Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, Jerry Pournelle, Timothy Ferris, David Riesman,, Gerald Feinberg, and Joe Haldeman. uncut, in four fantastic issues only #. Collectors, this is a special issues are selling out, and this fantastic serialization of the complete novel will not last long. Act now! I Please send me sets of I magazine in which it appeared. I I enclose to cover the cost plus I .# postage for I each set. Please rush to: I Name: I Street: ' Town: I State: Zip: I # Newbury Sreet I Boston, M A # followers of fantasy art. There is much more going on in the painting than the follower of fantasy art is used to, however. The woman is holding a knife, as if she intended to kill the chained barbarian. The barbarian is holding the woman, having just broken one of the chains. There are a couple of other people: one seems to be a gnome, one seems to be a magician or priest or something. There are heads, presumably from previous sacrifices, decorating the incredibly ornate dungeon in which all this is happening. There is an enormous snake in the edge of the picture, barely noticeable. The Sacrifice is dark, yet it is a riot of color. It is dominated by a powerful action pose, yet exended study seems to reveal that the peripheral material is the most important part. The painting embodies much of the ambiguousness of which Kaluta is so fond. Perhaps his most famous painting is the one called The Fate of Dollies Lost in Dreams, which realizes the terrors of childhood in the form of a bed flying through a darkened sky above a plummeting rag doll. There is a small face peering over the side of the bed after the falling doll. The painting is surrounded by an ornate border which is something of an artwork in itself. The viewer sympathizes with the frightened child, but a consideration of the title draws your attention to the doll and the realization that Kaluta has succeeded in painting terror on the face of an inanimate toy. It is not unusual for the title of a Michael Kaluta painting to play an important part in the success of the work. According to Kaluta, titling the pictures is much of the fun in painting. "You can add so much just by bending things around," he says. "I was talking with Steve Hickman once and he had a painting of a woman in a curlycued streets lit as if in full daylight by neon lights and topping them oversized luminous advertisements -- moving, turning, flashing on and off, spiraling -- city functioning by laboring in ten-hour shifts. feet of negative at a cost of #, making it their most expensive film. York office, later released these statistics: # male extras, # female extras. # children, # Chinese, and # pairs of shoes. Salaries during the production period of # days and sixty breastplate with a little animal on her shoulder and there was a huge fire-opal on the wall nearby. And I said. "Did you ever title that picture?' And he said, 'I call it Princess of Atlantis. ' So I said, 'Wait a minute. Why don't you call it Slave of Atlantis?' He said, 'Look at the look on her face. It's so commanding.' I said, 'Yeah, there's power in having a slave with that attitude. Everybody expects a princess to be that way.' I don't know if he's going to go for it." A word of caution, then, to those who think they understand the art of Michael Kaluta: Check the title. Chances are, it will change the picture entirely. Certainly it will enhance the value of the story in it. In explanation of the origins of the new art, Kaluta says: "I think that one of the reasons that the 'New Romantic Art' nights totaled # marks, and # marks were budgeted for the costumes designed by Anne Willkomm. #), for Metropolis, replaced the Debrie cameras with his first two Mitchell cameras, purchased in America, and these were put into use by chief cinematographer Karl Freund and his assistant, Gunther Rittau (#-#). Freund and Lang experimented with new ways to use the camera for dramatic emphasis. Lang later recalled, "Once, in Metropolis. I had to make an explosion. So I put the camera on a swing; the cameraman had it tied to his chest. And we swung it toward the actor who was experiencing this blast. He started to fall back the moment the camera swung toward him, and he pressed himself against the wall. Then the camera went back into first position, and you had the feeling of an explosion." In his later years Karl Freund was the cinemaMichael Kaluta It is a book of mooning women, oriental opulence, axe-wielding barbarians. sorts among the four tenants (who kept different work schedules, incidentally), but it was not something which can be easily characterized. "We could see and feel it," says Kaluta, "but we couldn't describe it." If the artists who worked in The Studio cannot describe the bond that existed among them, an outsider has no hope of doing so. The only way to approach an understanding of it lies in the book The Studio, which was published in late # by Dragon's Dream (distributed in the U.S. by Big O). Comprising a representative sample of the art of Jones, Kaluta, Windsor-Smith, and Wrightson, it is a book of mooning women, oriental opulence, axe-wielding barbarians, and scenes of graveyard horror. Most of it is wildly colorful, all of it is incredibly detailed, and sometimes it tends to the puckish. All of it has a sort of "meta-illustration" quality, somehow conveying  more story than the pictures which are usually created to go in books. There are definitely four different styles in the pages of The Studio, but there is a strong unity as well. Leafing through the book produces impressions of what The Studio must have been like. It was attempts to describe The Studio which led to its break-up, however. The book encouraged Jones, Kaluta, Windsor-Smith, and Wrightson to analyze The Studio and its influences on their own work. The tenuous bond was not equal to that kind of analysis, according to Kaluta. "We all became introspective," he says, "we became real sensitive, and sparks were flying because of it. No one dared tell anyone what they thought, because they knew that they were thinking really heavy about themselves." In a strange irony, the lease for The Studio was up when The Studio appeared on the stands, and the four artists moved to different locations. "Now it's a studio of the mind," says Kaluta. He adds: "What The Studio will become is whatever people thought it was, like a picture." The artist cherishes such "conceptual art." He feels much the same way about The Studio that he feels about his pictures: the viewer is welcome to make of it whatever he wants, or whatever he can. The artist's job is to tell the story, not to judge it. The Studio might be remembered as the most comprehensive expression of the "New Romantic" art. Regardless of phrase to describe his work it seems as good a term as any to denote a group of artists who are bent on self-conciously transcending commercialism. Some of Jones as well as some others have been signify "New Romantic Brotherhood." Kaluta, like many of his pictures, is playful with the people who would label the conversation and mentions "the nerbs" good-naturedly. When pressed, he will label himself, albeit playfully. "I'm a decadent," he says, "a New Romantic Decadent." Decadent or Romanticist, illustrator or storyteller, whatever you call him, Michael Kaluta is the fantasy artist to watch. continues to be seen in this country today. Not seen is an entire character (Freder's mother, Hel, who was loved by Rotwang before she turned to John Fredersen), the relay race in an Olympic stadium, footage of the robot Maria's erotic dance, and the imaginative title designs: an upward title crawl emphasizing the descent of the workers; a jagged "Moloch" of impressionistic letters flying into the frame in disorder and blood dripping from the word "Babel." Monthly Film Bulletin editor Richard Combs feels the many cuts "separated out various elements in the plot and stripped the characters' personal stories of their resonance." Currently, there is an on-going effort by the West German government to restore footage to Metropolis. The plot inconsistencies and the simplistic, confused social content were condemned by many -- including Lang himself: "I didn't like it very much because it was a picture in which human beings were nothing but part of a machine. The main thesis was Mrs. Von Harbou's, but I am at least fifty percent responsible because I did it. I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean that's a fairy tale -- definitely." Conan Doyle expressed enthusiasm, but H.G. Wells called (claiming that it borrowed from his Story of Days to Come and The Sleeper Wakes). But there was no denying the film's futuristic dream of visual splendor, described by Luis Buhel as a "glorious symphony of movement, the rhythmic progression of wheels, of pistons, of hitherto unimagined mechanical shapes." Hitler saw Metropolis in a small town and also had a dream of the future: he told Goebbels that he wanted Lang to direct the official Nazi films. In The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (#), Lang, a Jew, had Nazi slogans issuing from the mouth of an insane criminal. The film was confiscated. Then Lang was ordered to Goebbels' office at the new Ministry of Propaganda where Goebbels offered him the leadership of the Nazi film industry. Lang said "yes" to everything, returned home, packed, and -- afraid that he was being followed -- caught a train to Paris one minute before it left the station. Erich Pommer, the day Hitler took power, left after marrying a Jev. was accused of "race defilement," and she, too, fled to Paris. The dream was over. The nightmare had begun. The Martians have landed in New Jersey. It might sound absurd today, but in # it drove thousands of people into a panic when they thought Orson Welles' radio production of War of the Worlds was an on-the-spot newscast. But that's the power of radio drama, and Galileo has recaptured that power with a new series of radio shows taken from the pages of today's liveliest science fiction magazine. Return with us they reach the radio stations. Galileo magazine is offering tape cassettes of the series for direct sale. Hear the new golden age of radio when you want, as many times as you want, with no commercial interruptions. Series one includes three shows offered here for the first time anywhere. They are actual productions, not dramatic readings. Produced and performed by The Open Book theater company in New York, they are professional dramas based on the best science fiction from Galileo magazine. "Due Process" by D.C. Poyer follows the Supreme Court trial of a man accused of stealing a sentient computer. But who is to say if it was theft or liberation? "Take My Planet -- Please" by D.L. Borengasser, in which a washed-up comedian is abducted by extraterrestrials. What hope is there for an old joke to span the gulf between man and alien? "Calling Shapes and Beckoning Shadows" by Eugene Potter, the tale of an athlete's search for himself in a bicycle race on the Moon, at four hundred miles per hour. Galileo Radio Theater is on the air I Please send me the cassette(s) checked below. I enclose my check or money order for: I I I .  "Due Process"(One hour -- # sides)  # I #. "Take My Planet -- PIease"(' # hr. -- side I) "Calling   Shapes and Beckoning Shadows" ('A hr. -- side #). #  #.GSpecial Offer -- Bothcassettesfromseriesone;#.  #.GAdvance subscription: # new stories on # cassettes.  Special Price: #. (stories to be announced.) I Enclose  . # shippinghandling per series order. I Street: I I I  State: Zip:  St... Boston Ma #I #  classified Unique, interesting opportunity to share ideas, compare stories, exchange criticism, be entertained and get published. Send self addressed stamped #. Renaissance Italy. For details send sase. Rick Barr, Box #. 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The theme here, as in so much of his writing, is the responsible exercise of power. Ian must actually prevent his fellow soldiers from leveling the city of Blauvain as a tombstone to his brother, their comrade (whom they loved far better than Ian). Ian and Kensie are two of Dickson's best loved characters, and this tale of their parting is sure to stick in your memory. The trade paperback edition of this book is probably already sold out, because Ace made a ridiculously, foolishly small print run. The book was due out as a regular-sized paperback this spring. In the meantime, borrow a copy from a friend. We have had a large number of inquiries from people wanting to know when their Galaxy subscriptions expire. We intend to answer them all, but until you get your answer, this explanation might be useful to you. 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But whej vSwrn Two had placed his ty  ranger had a curious hr itudded at im  -- "'  r assemblies performing the Dance  S pap ier? z The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon When an atomic explosion destroys the battleship Alaska, Lt, Commander Frank Jacklin returns to consciousness in New York and is shocked to find himself in the body of Winnie Tomkins, a dissolute stockbroker. Unable to explain his real identity, Jacklin attempts to fit into Tomkin's way of life. Complications develop when Jacklin gets involved with Tomkin's wife, his red-haired mistress and his luscious secretary. Three too many women for Jacklin to handle. His foreknowledge of the Alaska sinking and other top secret matters plunges him into a mad world of intrigue and excitement in Washington -- that place where anything can happen and does! Where is the real Tomkins is a mystery explained in the smashing climax. Completely delightful, wholly provocative, the Rat Race is a striking novel of the American Scene. Watch For It On Sale May 29th GalaxyAssistant Editor Art Director Production Manager Advertising Manager Cover by Illustrating is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: 421 Hudson Street. New York 14, N. Y. 55c per copy. Subscriptions: 12 copies) 3-50 per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Lise where 4.50. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York. N. Y. Copyright. 1952, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. AH rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by Selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material, AH stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters 2 nd actual persons it coincidental. by Boyd Ellanby 4 by Richard Matheson 74 by Pout Anderson 127 by Peter Phillips 45 by Charles V. De Vef 58 by Franklin Abel 107 by Willy Ley 98 by H. L. Gold 2 by Groff Conklin 124 Printed in the U 5. A. by the Guinn Co Inc. Jtg. If. fat. Off. urdistressed because her family and friends jeer at her for reading science fiction. She unhappily wonders whether detailing the scientific qualifications of our writers may not compel their respect. Well, Asimov is a biochemist specializing in cancer research; Heinlein is an engineer; Tenn is an anthropologist; de Camp, as a patent authority, is familiar with many branches of science; Guin, connected with a large pharmaceutical house, is a medical expert The list could be extended in almost every scientific direction -- and, I think, would do no good. situation when it was recently interviewed on TV, with a noted mystic to provide "conflict." Summing up at the end of the program, this gentleman stated that science fiction is a cheap substitute for prophecy. To such calcified thinking, there was no contradiction in making this deeply thoughtful statement over a medium that had been anticipated -- not predicted -- generations ago in science fiction, with people thousands of miles away seeing and hearing him at bled hi Selling him science fiction might have been possible if we were extrapolating possible developments in metaphysics. I'm not even sure of that. He probably doesn't think any advance in his specialty is either likely or necessary. Oddly, I can see him, or his colleagues, setting up shop on the planets when we reach them -- as we seem certain to do -- and not changing that opinion or their primitive "science" in any degree whatever. This is admittedly an extreme case of fossil ization. In the example of our reader's family or friends, we have people who arc unwonderingly alive in a society that to their ancestors would have been pure science fiction. They, of course, take every advance as perfectly natural. Yet each advance was "impossible" before it came about. And then that one was possible, but the next wasn't! Should they be educated to an appreciation of science fiction? Why bother? I wish I had noted the author who said that no idea is as powerful as one whose time has come. Science fiction is in that position. 2 Its arrival is a matter of logical evolution. How widespread its influence may become is difficult to determine now, but surely it will find a legitimate and enduring place in literature. Beyond seeing that the favorite magazines of readers are prominently displayed on newsstands, and passing the word to receptive people, not much else has to be done. The young lady is obviously concerned with gaining approval; that's a personal problem I can't handle, one that is probably unnecessary -- certainly not a good betting proposition -- and not a question of survival for science fiction. Its day, as I said, has come. Fighting the popular acceptance of science fiction now is as foolhardy as were our attempts to sell it prematurely. At that time, we were forcing something for which there was no current need. We were, in other words, pushing evolution, which does not respond gratifyingly to untimely pressure. Two such instances are the movement for spelling reform and Communism. For different reasons, both are guilty of trying to force evolution. Language needs no compulsion to change. It does so constantly; if need be, over the dead bodies of lexicographers and pedants. It changes when there is a need for change, not because someone decides that it should. Much of our vocabulary would be incomprehensible to anyone of 50 years ago, let alone Chaucer's ageIt may be that TV and movies will impair the spelling ability of future generations -- though not necessarily their literacy, which, in the sense of vicarious experience, could imaginably be greater than ever before. In that case, what we might regard as poor spelling would become standard, through common usage. Regrettable? No. Inevitable, if it does happen. The premature proponents of simplified spelling would, no doubt, feel victorious, but actually their efforts would not influence the change. Communism, on the other hand, puts a gun to evolution's back. You can't shoot evolution if it refuses to obey. This strange and repugnant wedding of allegedly advanced politics with medieval methods of inquisition runs counter to evolution. From slavery to feudalism to democracy, the direction has been toward greater and greater personal freedom. We are assured that that is Communism's ultimate goal. But where are the signs of it? My money is on evolution. -- H. L. C" Man, it would appear, can adapt to any form of society , .  but not one in which the knowledge of extending fife becomes a passport to death Category HE door-knob turned, then rattled. Dr. David Wong stepped out from behind the large bookcase, listening. He pressed the brass handle of the top shelf and the case silently pivoted back to become part of the wall, obliterating the dark passage behind it. An imperative knocking began at the door; David walked softly to his desk and picked up his notebook. He tried to remain relaxed, but he could feel the tightening of his shoulder muscles. With his right hand, he shut his notebook and concealed it under a mass of papers, while his left hand pressed the desk button to Illustrated Phoenix release the lock of the door. The door burst open and two men strode in, a black-uniformed Ruler followed by a watchguard. Blackvisored cap still on his head, the first man marched to the desk and spoke without ceremonial greeting. "The door was locked, Dr. Wong?" "Correct, Dr. Lanza, The door was locked." "I shall have to instruct the guard to report it. Have you forgotten Leader Marley's Maxim: Constructive science does not skulk behind locked doors?" Wong leaned back in his chair and smiled at his visitors. "The wisdom of Leader Marley is a constant help to us all, but his generosity is also a byword. Surely you remember that on the tenth anniversary of his accession, he honored me by the grant of occasional hours of Privacy, as a reward for my work on Blue Martian Fever?" "I remember now," said Dr. Lanza. "But what for?" asked Officer Blagun. "It's anti-social!" "Evidently you have forgotten. Officer Blagun, another Maxim of Leader Marley: Nature has not equipped one Category to judge the needs of another; only the Leader understands all. Now, Dr. Lanza, will you tell me the reason for this visit? Since your promotion from Research to Ruler, I have rarely been honored by your attention." "I am here with a message," said Lanza. "Leader Marley's compliments, and he requests your presence at a conference on next Wednesday at ten in the morning." "Why did you have to deliver that in person? What's wrong with using Communications?" "It's not my province to ask questions, Dr. Wong. I was told to come here, and I was told to wait for a reply." "Next Wednesday at ten? Let's see, this is Friday." David Wong pressed the key of his electronic calendar, but he had no need to study the dull green and red lights that flashed on to indicate the pattern of his day. He did not delude himself that he had any real choice, but he had learned in the past fifteen years that it kept up his courage to preserve at least the forms of independence. He allowed a decent thirty seconds to ponder the coded lights, then blanked the board and looked up with an easy smile. "Dr. Wong's compliments to Leader Marley, and he will be honored to attend a conference on Wednesday at ten." Nodding his hehd, Dr. Lanza glanced briefly around the office. "Queer, old-fashioned place you have here." "Yes. It was built many years ago by a slippery old politician who wanted to be safe from his enemies. Makes a good place for Research, don't you think?" Lanza did not answer. He strode to the door, then paused to look back. "You understand, Dr. Wong, that I shall have to report the locked door? I have no choice. "Has anyone?" Officer Blagun followed his superior, leaving the door wide open behind them. Wong remained rigid in his chair until the clack of heels on marble floor had become a mere echo in his S brain, then stretched out his hand to the intercom. He observed with pride that his hand did not tremble as he pressed the dial. "Get me Dr. Karl Haslam Karl? Can you meet me in the lab right away? I've thought of a new approach that might help us crack the White Martian problem. Yes, I know we planned on conferring tomorrow, but it's getting later than you think.' Again he pressed the dial. "Get me Leah Hachovnik. Leah? I've got some new stuff to dictate. Be a good girl and come along right away.' Breaking the connection, he diew out his notebook and opened it. David Wong was a big man, tall, well-muscled, compact, and he might have been handsome but for a vague something in his appearance. His lean face and upeurving mouth were those of a young man; his hair was a glossy black, too thick to be disciplined into neatness; and he was well-dressed, except for the unfashionable bulging of his jacket pocket, where he carried a bulky leather case of everfeed pens and notebooks. But it was his eyes that were disconcerting -- an intense blue, brilliant and direct, they had a wisdom and a comprehension that seemed incongruous in so young a face. A worried frown creased his forehead as he turned back to one of the first pages, studying the symbols he had recorded there, but he looked up without expression on hearing the tapping of slender heels. "Quick work, Leah. How are you this morning?" "As if anybody cared?" Leah Hachovnik settled down before the compact stenograph machine, her shoulders slumped, her thin mouth drooping at the corners. "Feel like working?" said David. "As much as I ever do, I guess. Sometimes I wonder if the traitors in the granite quarries have it any worse than I do. Sometimes I wish I'd been born into some other Category. Other people have all the luck, I don't know what it is, Dr. Wong, but I just don't seem to have the pep I used to have. Do you think it could be the climate here in New York?" "People do grow older, Leah," he reminded her gently. "I know. But Tanya -- you remember my twin sister Tanya, the one that got so sick that time, ten years ago, when you did that experiment with Blue Martian Fever, and she had to be sent out to Arizona? Of course I haven't ever seen her since then -- people in Office Category never get permission for that kind of travel -- but she writes me that ever since she got well again she feels just like a kid, and works as hard as she ever did, and she still seems to enjoy life. Why, she's had three proposals of marriage this past year alone, she says, and yet she's thirty-five, just the same age as I am -- being twins, you know? -- an?l nobody's proposed to me in ages. Well, Fni certainly going to try to find out what her method is. She's coming back tomorrow." "She's what?" "Coming back. BureauMed is sending her back here to the Institute to take up her old job in Intercom. Funny they haven't told you, her being an old employee and all." Dr. Wong was gripping his notebook iry stiff fingers, but he replied easily, "Oh, well, BureauMed is a complex organization. With all they have to do, it's not surprising they get things mixed up sometimes." "Don't I know!" she sighed, and droned on in a dreary monotone. "This one institute alone would turn your hair gray before your time. I don't know how some people seem to keep so young. I was just 'thinking to myself this morning when I watched you walking through the office, 'Why, Dr. Wong doesn't seem to age a bit! He looks just as young as he ever did, and look at me !' " Looking at her, David admitted to himself, was not the pleasure it had once been. Ten years ago, she and her twin sister Tanya had been plump, delectable, kittenish girls, their mental equipment no more than standard for Office Category, of course, but their physical appearance had been outstanding, almost beautiful enough for Theater Category. Creamy ivory skin, gray eyes, and soft red hair dramatized by a freakish streak of white that shot abruptly back from the center of the forehead, Tanya's swirling to the left, and Leah's to the right, one girl the mirror image of the other. But the Leah sitting before him now was thin and tired-looking, her sallow skin was lined, and her soft voice had become vinegary with disappointments. Her red hair had faded to a commonplace brown, and the white streak in the center was yellowed. An unwanted, souring old maid. But there was only one response to make. "You look fine to me, Leah," he said. "What time did you say your sister is coming?" "Tomorrow evenings' Playground Jet. Why?" "We'll have to think of a way to celebrate. But right now, I'd like to get started on my new paper. I've got to meet Dr. Haslam before long." 7 "I know." She raised her faded gray eyes. "That was a funny thing you said to him just now over the intercom. You said to him it was getting late. But it isn't late. It's only eleven o'clock in the morning." David stared. "Do you mean to say you were listening to our conversation? Why did you do that?" She fidgeted and turned away from him. "Oh. I just happened to be at Comdesk and I guess the circuit wasn't closed. Does it matter? But it seemed a funny thing for you to say." "People in Office Category are not supposed to understand Research," he said severely. "If they were capable of Research, Leader JVftirley's planners would have placed them there. As for its being late, it is, as far as White Martian Fever is concerned. Which is the subject of my paper. Prepare to take dictation." Shrugging her shoulders, she poised her bony fingers over the keys of the little machine. "Paper for delivery at the Summer Seminar," he began. "But, Dr. Wong, that doesn't have to be ready for three months yet!" "Miss Hachovnik! Please remember Leader Marley's Maxim : Individuals born into Office Category are the bone and muscle of the State; Nature has designed t them to act, not to think." "Yes, Dr. Wong. I'm sorry." "Don't worry, Leah. WeTe old friends, so I won't report you. All set?" He took a pencil from his leather case and tapped it against his notebook as he ruffled the pages, wondering how to begin. It was hard to think logically when a part of his mind was in such confusion. Had Leah been listening in to all of his phone conversations? If so, it was fortunate that he had long ago devised an emergency code. Was it only idle curiosity that had prompted her or was she acting under orders? Was anyone else watching him, he wondered, listening to his talk, perhaps even checking the routing of his experimental work? There was Lanza this morning -- why had he come unannounced, in person, when a Communications call would have served the purpose equally well? Leah's voice broke in. "I'm ready. Dr. Wong." He cleared his throat the Summer Seminar. Title: The Propogation of White Martian virus. Paragraph. It will be remembered that the early attempts to establish Earth colonies on Mars were frustrated by the extreme susceptibility of our people to two viruses native to the foreign planet, viruses which we designate as Blue Martian and White Martian, according to the two distinct types of fever which they cause. Blue Martian Fever in the early days caused a mortality among our colonists of nearly eighty-five per cent, and made the establishment of permanent colonies a virtual impossibility. "Under the inspired leadership of Leader Marley and with the advice of his deputy Dr. Lanza, this laboratory in Research worked out a method of growing the virus and producing an immunizing agent which is effective in nearly all human beings. Only  the cooperation of several Categories made possible such a feat. It will not be forgotten that even the humblest helpers in the Institute had their share in the project, that some of them acted as human volunteers in the experiments, well knowing the risks they ran, and were afterward rewarded by a Free Choice. "One person in Office Category, for instance, was given the privilege of learning to play the flute, although nobody in his family had ever belonged to Music, and another person in Menial Category was permitted a month's study of elementary algebra, a nearly unheard of indulgence for a person in his position. But as Leader Marley so graciously remarked in conferring the awards: To the individual who risks much, the State gives much." "Like me and Tanya?" the girl asked, stopping her typing. "Yes, like you and Tanya. You were allowed to act a part in an amateur Theater group, I remember, and since Tanya was made too ill to be able to use a Free Choice, she was sent out west to the Playground, just as though she had belonged to Ruler Category. Now where was I?" " 'The State gives much.' " "Oh, yes. Paragraph. Since the discovery of the immunizing mechanism to Blue Martian, permanent colonies have been established on Mars. But there remains the more elusive problem of White Martian Fever, which, though its mortality is only thirty per cent, is still so crippling to those victims who survive that the Martian colonies cannot begin to expand, and the resources of the planet cannot be fully developed, until an immunizing agent is found. "For the past eight years this laboratory has been working at the problem, among others, and we are now in a position to report a small degree of progress. Since it proved to be impossible to grow the virus in the usual media, it occurred to us -- H The intercom buzzed, and Dr, Wong turned away to open the dial.  "David? What's happened to you? I've been waiting here in the lab a quarter of an hour' "Sorry, Karl. I thought I had more time. Be right down." He reached for his white lab coat and shoved his long arms into the starched sleeves. "That's all we have time for now, Leah. Can you get an early lunch and be back here this afternoon at two?" But she wasnot listening. She was leaning over to look at the desk, staring avidly at the open pages of Dr. Wong's notebook. Without comment he picked up the book, closed it, put it in the top drawer and locked the drawer. She watched him with curious eyes. '"What funny marks those were, Dr. Wong! Do you keep your notes in a private system of shorthand?" "No. I write them in Coptic. For the sake of privacy." "What's Coptic?" "A dead language, spoken by the ancient Egyptians thirty or forty centuries ago." "But you're Research, not Linguistics! It's against the law for you to know other languages. Are you a traitor?" "My dear Leah," he said, "I'm far too sensible a man to go in for bootleg study, to learn anything without permission. I have no wish to end up with a pickax in my hands. But you shouldn't tax your little mind with thinking. It's not your job. You're not equipped for it, and it's dangerous." stationed in the basement corridor, walked through the open door of the laboratory, past the bench where a row of pretty technicians sat making serial dilutions of bacterial and virus suspensions, through the glow of the sterilizing room, and on into the small inner lab where flasks of culture media and developing hens' eggs sat in a transparent incubator, and petri dishes flecked with spots of color awaited his inspection. Dr. Karl Haslam was standing at the work bench, with a pair of silver forceps which held a small egg under the psi light. Gently he lowered the egg into its warm observation chamber, covered the container, and sat down. "Well, here I am. Whats gone wrong? Explain yourself, my boy." "Just a minute." Grinning maliciously, David took down a bottle from the shelf of chemicals, poured a colorless liquid into a beaker, and walked casually toward the doorway as he agitated the mixture of hydrogen sulphide and mercaptans. He held his 10 breath, then coughed, when the fumes of putrescence filled the room and drifted out the door. He looked into the technician's room. "Sorry for the aroma, girls, but this is a vital experiment." "Can't you at least shut the door?" one called pleadingly. "Explain to the watchguard out there, will you?" Closing the door, he turned on the ventilator and sat down beside Dr. Haslam. "Why all the melodrama?" Karl asked, baffled. "First you call me by emergency code, then you hole in like a conspirator. I'm beginning to think you're a great loss to Theater. What's happened? Why is it later than I think?" "Do you take everything as a joke, Karl?" "Certainly, until Fm forced to do otherwise. What's worrying you?" "I'm afraid of being arrested for treason. Don't laugh! This morning I received a message, delivered in person by our old schoolmate Lanza, to report to Leader Marley on Wednesday, and Marley hasn't paid any attention to me since he last inspected our lab, years ago. For another thing, Leah Hachovnik is making a nuisance of herself with her curiosity about my affairs. If she weren't so clumsy about her prying, I'd almost believe she was under orders to spy on me." Karl moved impatiently. "I hope you're not turning psychotic. You have a clean record of continuous production and you've never mixed in politics. You've never expressed what you may really think of our Leader even to me, although we've been friends since we were in Medschool, and I hope you never will. And you're making progress with White Martian. Why, my boy, you're all set! What's treasonable about that?" Someone knocked at the door. Hastily David uncovered the fragrant beaker and waved it about as he called, "Come in!" The watchguard looked in for an instant, wrinkled his nose, and quickly shut the door. Laughing, David covered the beaker, and began walking about with long nervous strides, snapping his fingers as he tried to explain. "I'm in trouble, Karl. I've run into something I don't know how to deal with, and I need help, I need advice, I need cooperation. I've lived alone with this thing for ten long years, hoping month after month that something would turn up so I could evade the issue. But nothing has. And now there's going to be a showdown." Karl touched his arm sympathetically. "My dear boy -- " "That's it!" shouted David. n "What's what?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you. Why do you always call me your 'dear boy?' You know I'm a year older than you are." "It's just habit, I suppose. You look so young -- your hair is black, while mine is nearly white. You're full of vigor, while I begin to creak with middle age. I didn't realize that I irritated you with my little phrase. I should think you'd be pleased that you have somehow managed to sip at the fountain of youth," David sank down on a stool. "I'm not pleased. I'm terrified." "What do you mean?" "I mean that's exactly what's happened. I have sipped at the fountain of youth. I've discovered how to keep people from growing old. I myself have not aged a bit in the last ten years." There was a long silence. Karl sat unmoving, his face like stone. "I don't believe you," he said at last. "It's no longer a question of belief. In a few days everybody will know, the proof will stare you in the face. And what will happen then?" "Evidence?" Karl asked. "I can't accept a statement as a fact." "Would you like to see my mice? Come with me." David Wong hurried into the small animal room and paused before a stack of wire cages in which furry creatures darted and squeaked. "You remember when we were working on Blue Martian, those peculiar mutants we found in our mice, and how I used six of them in trying to make antibodies to the virus?' "I remember" said Karl, "They were spotted with tufts of white hair on the right forelegs." David took down a cage, thrust in his hand, and brought out two of the tiny black mice which crawled over his trembling hand. Their right forelegs bore tufts of long white hair. "These," he said, "are the same mice." "Their descendants, you mean. Mice don't live that long," "These mice do. And they'll go on living. For years I've lived in fear that someone would notice and suspect the truth. Just as for years, every time someone has laughed and told me I never seemed to age a day, I've been terrified that he might guess the truth. I'm not aging." Karl looked dazed. "Well, my boy, you've got a bear by the tail. How did you find the elixir or whatever it is?" "You remember the early work with radioactive tracers, a couple of hundred years ago, that proved that all our body cells are in a 12 continuous state of flux? There's a dynamic equilibrium between the disintegration and the resynthesis of the essential factors such as proteins, fats and amino groups, but the cell directs all the incoming material into the right chemical structures, under the influence of some organizing power which resides in the cell. "Foreign influences like viruses may disrupt this order and cause cancer. The cells are continually in a state of change, but always replace their characteristic molecules, and it is only as they grow older that they gradually become 'worn out.' Then the body grows old, becomes less resistant to infection, and eventually succumbs to one disease or another. And you know, of course, that viruses also have this self-duplicating ability. "I reasoned that at birth a man had a definite, finite amount of this essential selfduplicating .a kind of directing factor which reproduces itself, but more slowly than do the body cells. In that case, with the normal multiplication of the cells, the amount of surely grow smaller with the years. Eventually the time would come when the percentage would be below the critical level -- the cells would be less resistant, would function with less effrciency, and the man would 'grow old.' " Karl nodded soberly. "Reasonable hypothesis." "But one day, by pure chance, I isolated a component which I recognized as being the factor essential to the normal functioning of body cells. It hit me fake a toothache. I found that I could and the only problem then was to get it into a man's cells. If I up to that of youth, a man would stop aging! Since viruses penetrate our cells when they infect us, it was no trick at all to effect to the virus. I used Martian Blue, since it was handy, and its effects are. usually brief. "Presto! Old age is held at bay for another twenty or thirty years -- I really don't know how long. These mice were my first experiment, and as you see, they're still alive. Next, I tried it on myself." David put the mice back in their cage, locked it, and returned to the lab. "Tomorrow, the whole thing is bound to come out because Tanya Hachovnik is coming back, You know her sister Leah -- gray, dried-up, soured on life. Well, I've had ways of checking, and when Tanya Hachovnik walks into the Institute, everyone will see her as the same luscious 13 redhead of twenty-five we knew ten years ago. I realize that what I did was a criminal act. I didn't think the thing through or I wouldn't have been such a fool. But when I made those final experiments, I used the Hachovnik twins for a controlled pair." "You must have been crazy!" "Perhaps I was. Fd tried it on myself, of course, with no bad effectsexcept a few days' fever, but I realized that without a cont trol I never could be sure the might be just that my particular genetic constitution caused me to age more slowly than the average. 14 M So I chose the twins. To Leah I gave the attenuated Martian Blue, but to Tanya I gave the The experiment worked. Identical twins -- one grows old like other people; the other remains young. I know now, Karl, how to prolong youth indefinitely. But what in the name of Leader Marley shall I do with my knowledge?" Karl Haslam absently twisted his white hair and spoke slowly, as though he found trouble in choosing his words. "You realize, of course, that it is your duty to acquaint Leader Marley with all the details of your discovery?" "Is it? Can you imagine what th is will do to our society? What about the generations of children coming into a world where no places have been vacated for them by death? What about the struggles for power? Who will decide, and on what basis, whether to confer or to withhold this gift? There'll be riots, civil wars. I know that I'm only a scientist: ail I ever wanted from life was to be left alone, in a peaceful laboratory, and let other people worry about the world and its troubles. But now -- don't you see that by the mere fafct that I made this discovery, I've lost the right to sit by quietly and let other people make the decisions?" "But, David, you and I aren't able to handle such a problem! WeYe only Research!" "I know. We're inadequate, yet we have the responsibility. The men who created atomic power probably felt inadequate, too, but could they have made as bad a mess of handling it as others did? Suppose I did turn this over to Marley -- he'd use it to become the most absolute tyrant in the history of the race." Karl ran his fingers through his hair and smiled crookedly. "Well, you could always start a revolution, I suppose, and start by assassinating the Leader." "With what kind of weapon? Men like you and me are not allowed to own so much as an oldfashioned pistol. Except for the Military, Marley's the only man allowed to wear a Needier, And, besides, I'm a Research, not a Military. I hate violence and I'm naturally conditioned against killing." "Then you shouldn't have got into this mess. It would have been far better never to have discovnotes are safely locked up, by the way?" David grinned. "Don't worry about my notes; they're written in Coptic. You remember when I was still in Medschool and made my first important discovery, how to prevent the development of 15 hereditary baldness by the injection of certain parahormones? Leader Marley rewarded me with a Free Choice, and I chose to learn a dead language. Not half a dozen men in the world could read my notes." "If your notes are safe, why don't you just destroy your mice and get rid of your proof that way?" "And the Hachovnik twins?" "You could at least keep Tanya out of sight." "Don't be a fool. That would only be a temporary measure and has nothing to do with the real problem. Lanza and Marley may suspect the truth right now, for all I know; they keep such close watch on my work. Anyway, the sFfcret is bound to come out sooner or later." Dr. Haslam clasped his hands and stared at them for a long while. His lined face looked grayer than ever. He looked up at last with a faint smile. "Well, my boy, I never asked you to discover this stuff, but since you have -- I hereby burn my bridges! You're right, we can't give it to Marley. But you can't handle it alone. What we need is time, and we haven't got it. We shall both be liquidated before this is over, there's no doubt of that, but we must do what we can. When is Tanya arriving?" "Tomorrow night, on the Playground Jet." "And you see Leader Marley when?" "Next Wednesday." "Five days yet. Then this is what we'll do. Too bad Lanza is in the other camp, but there's you and me, and I think Hudson and Faure from Serology will come in with us. We'll need others -- sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists -- the most promising material from all Categories if we're to create a new society based on the prospect of immortality. But I'll see the first two and bring them to your apartment tomorrow night for Tanya's welcome-home party. I leave it to you to muzzle Leah." "That won't do," said David. "I don't have a current Free Choice." "But I have. Two, as a matter of fact, a reward for curing the insomnia of Leader Marley's wife. I choose to give a party, I choose tomorrow night, and I choose your apartment." A knock rattled the door, and  the watchguard thrust in his head. "How much longer is this here experiment going to take? Do you guys s want to be re ported?" "Just finishing, Officer," called Karl. "You can leave the door open now." "What a stink!" said the guard. 1  "Thank God I'm in Military!' I T hardly seemed like a party, David thought. His guests were ill at ease, and their conversation labored, then stopped altogether when the Menial came into the library with a tray of glasses and niblets. "Put them on the liquor cabinet, James," said David. "And that will be all. Enjoy yourself tonight." The Menial put down the tray and then stooped to fumble with the lock. "Let that alone! I've told you a thousand times not to monkey with my liquor cabinet!" "Don't you want me to get out the ice cubes. Doctor?" "I'll do it. You can go now." "But are you sure you won't want me later in the evening, Doctor? Who's to serve the supper? Who's going to clear up afterward?" "We'll manage. Don't worry about us." James shuffled out of the room. "I suppose that means I'll manage," said Leah, with a selfpitying sigh. "I've noticed that whenever people decide to rough it and do without a Menial, they take it for granted the women will do the work, never the men -- unless the women are still young and pretty. Well, at any rate, I'll have Tanya to help me. I still don't see why you wouldn't let me go to the Port to meet her, Dr. Wong." "I just thought it would be more of a celebration if we had a surprise party all waiting for her to walk into. Dr. Haslam will bring her here directly from the Port, and here we all are, her old friends from the Institute, waiting to welcome her home." "I'd hardly say all," said Leah. "I'm the only person from Office that's here. And why have a party in your Library, Dr. Wong? Nothing here but books, books, books." "Because I keep my liquor here, in the only room I have a right to lock up. My Menial is a good man, but he can't resist an opened bottle." "Well, it's still a gloomy party." David turned appealingly to his other guests, Hudson and Faure, but they only looked uncomfortable. "Perhaps we need a drink." David unlocked the cupboard and picked up a bottle which he set down hastily when he heard voices in the hall. He hurried to the outer door and opened it a few inches to reveal the sturdy shoulders of the watchguard of the floor and, beyond him, Karl Haslam. "Everything in order. Officer?" asked Karl. "Your permit is in order; Dr. 1  Haslam, A private party. Let me just check -- yes, three guests have arrived, and you. two make five. That all? You have until midnight. But it beats me why you people in Research prefer a party without a watchguard, or why Leader Marley ever gives permission. Why, in all my years in Military, I've never been to an unwatched party, and I must say it never held "us down any." Karl laughed a little too forcedly. "I'll bet it didn't! But all Research people are a little peculiar. You must have noticed that yourself." "Well -- " "And you know how generous Leader Marley is, and how kind he is to loyal citizens. He wants usto be happy, so he pampers us now and then." "I guess he knows what he's doing, all right. Well, I'll check you out at twelve, then." "Go on in, Tanya," said Karl. They stepped into the apartment and David quietly closed the door. "Hi, Sis," drawled Leah. "You made us wait long enough!" She walked toward the girl, hand outstretched, then stopped with a gasp of disbelief. Tanya's red hair was still brilliant and gleaming, her creamy skin unlined and her full red lips curved up into a friendly smile as she leaned forward for a sisterly kiss. But Leah jerked away and glared with anger. A puzzled frown creased Tanya's lovely white forehead. "What's the matter, Leah? Aren't you glad to see me? You look so strange, as though you'd been terribly ill !" Leah shook her bead, tears of rage gathering in her pale eyes. "I'm okay," she whispered. "It's you. You haven't changed. I have. You're still young, you're pretty, you're just the way I used to be!" She whirled to face David, her voice choking. "What have you done to her. Dr. Wong?" The four men in the room were all staring at the sisters, scarcely believing what they saw, although they had all been prepared for the contrast. The twin sisters were no longer twins. One had retained her youth; the other was faded, aging. "This is awful," Haslam muttered. "Absolutely ghastly." He put a comforting hand on Leah's shoulder, and with a deep sob she hid her face against him and cried. Hudson and Faure could not take their eyes from Tanya, and David leaned against the wall to stop his trembling. "Sit down, all of you," he said. "First we'll have a drink. I'm sure we all need it. Then we'll face' -- what has to be faced." 18 A N hour later, they had achieved a calmness, of sorts, They had given up some of their normal sobriety to achieve the calm, but they were grateful to the drug for cushioning the shock. David paced the floor, glass in hand, talking rapidly as he finished his long explanation. "So you see what happened," he said. "When I began the experiment, 1 had no idea how staggering the results might be. That is, I knew in my mind, but I never imagined the reaness of what would happen. I thought of it as just an experiment Leah sniffed, her resentment somewhat dulled by drink. "So I was just an experiment! Don't you ever think about people's feelings? I know I'm not as good as you are; I'm only Office, but I'm human." Karl patted her hand. "Of course you are, Leah. But that is one of the defects of people in Research -- they forget about human emotions," He looked up sternly at David. "They go ahead with their experiments, and hang the consequences. If Dr. Wong had had any sense, he would never have kept this a secret for ten years, and we might have had ten years to prepare ourselves for such a responsibility. Instead, we have only a few days or, at most, weeks. Hudson! Faure! How do you feel about this thing now? Are you still game?' Both men seemed a little dazed, but Faure pulled himself together, speaking slowly, like a man in a dream. "We're with you. It's still hard to believe: we've got immortality!"  "I'd hardly call it immortality," said Hudson drily, "since, kill disease entities, nor ward off bullets or the disintegrating nuclear shaft of the needier -- as we will very likely find out before very long. But what do we do now? When people see these two girls together, it won't be an, hour before Marley hears about it." David spoke up with a new authority. "He must not hear about it. I know how poorly equipped I am to handle this situation, but since I created it, I must assume responsibility, and I have made my plans. "First, you, Tanya. Try to realize that if the Leader finds out that I have this secret of keeping youth, he will want it for himself. Nobody in Menial, nobody in Office, nobody in Research -- almost nobody at all -- will be allowed to benefit from it. Marley will use it as a special reward for certain Rulers, and he will try to keep its very existence a secret so that people in general will not be envious or rebellious. That means that he will have to If get rid of you." "Get rid of me? But I haven't done any harm!" "Just by existing and letting people look at your unchanging youth, you will be a threat to him, for you will give away his secret. How he'll deal with you, I don't know. Concentration camp, exile, or more probably, simple execution on grounds of treason, such as unauthorized choices of activity or study. It doesn't matter, he'll find a way. The only safety for you is in keeping hidden. You must stay quietly in Leah's apartment until we can find a refuge for you. Do you see that?" She looked around in bewilderment. "Is that right, Dr. Haslam? And what will they think at the Institute? I'm supposed to go back to my job in Intercom." "Dr. Wong is right," he said kindly. "Please believe us. It's hard for you to understand that we are asking you to do something secret, but just try to remember that you are, after all, an Office Category and are not equipped by training or constitution to think out problems like this. We'll tell you what is the right thing to do. You just do as we tell you, and you'll be perfectly safe." Leah snickered. "Oh, shell be safe enough, being as pretty as she is! What are you going to do about me? Don't I count?" "We'll come to that in a few minutes. Right now, we need food. Leah, you and Tanya be good girls and go out to the kitchen and heat up some supper for us. After we've eaten, we'll talk about you." A S soon as the girls were out of the room, the four men drew together at the table. "No use burdening them with too much knowledge," Karl remarked. "Even as it is, they are a great danger to us, and the less they know the better. David, will you proceed?" "I have little to add to the plans we made last night at the lab. The thing we need most is time; and next to that, a hiding place. We may very soon be classed as traitors, with every watchguard on the continent hunting for us. We will take care that they don't find us. Now, you said last night that each one of you has accumulated a Free Choice during the past year, which hasn't yet been used." "That's right," said Faure. "I intended to use mine next winter to live among the Australian aborigines for a week. I've been wanting that for years, but the planners always refused me; it was a project without practical purpose." "And I intended to use mine 20 to attempt a water-color painting," added Hudson. "In my boyhood I hoped to be put in Arts Category, but the Planners laughed at me. I suppose it's wrong, yet I still have the yen." "You have my sympathy," said Karl. "I was going to take an Aimless Tramp. Just shed my identity and wander on foot through the great north area of woods and Jakes." David sighed. "Well, if we are successful in hiding and in changing the world as we'd like, you can all three be free to do as you like without asking permission. But at present that's only the wildest of dreams. And, first, we must find our refuge. Today is Saturday. Tomorrow morning, each of you will go to BureauMed and claim your Free Choice. And each of you will choose an Aimless Tramp." "But I don't like hiking," objected Hudson. "You won't be hiking. You'll take off in your roboplanes and then disappear. You will be without supervision. You will then proceed, disguised as you think suitable, to find a place for our new colony -- somewhere in South America? -- and make preliminary arrangements to receive us. You must be back by Tuesday aftei noon at the latest. On Tuesday, as soon as you have reported back to BureauMed, get to the Institute as fast as you can." "Why the deadline?" "Because by Tuesday afternoon, sometime before evening, probably, I expect all three of you to be suffering from an attack of Blue Martian Fever, and I want you to get expert hospital care. You will be the nucleus of the new regime." Karl laughed. "I wish you could have picked a base for ant than Blue Martian." "Who's got Blue Martian?" asked Tanya, as the girls came in from the kitchen with their trays of food. "I'll never forget how sick it made me." " Y ou should worry," said Leah. "If kept you young and beautiful, didn't it?" "You won't have to envy her, Leah," said David going to the liquor cabinet. "I'm going to give you and the others a shot of the Tuesday afternoon you should feel the first symptoms. But after forty-eight hours in the hospital, you'll be good as new. And you will all stop growing older." They watched, fascinated, as he opened the cooling compartment of the liquor cupboard. "I always like plenty of ice in my drinks," he remarked, drawing out a tray of cubes and opening a small door behind the tray. He removed several small bottles at filled with a milky liquid, and a copper box of sterile needles and syringes. "Who'll be first?" There was a knock at the door, and David stopped. "What is it?" he called. "Me," came the watch guard's voice. "Just thought I'd do you  a favor and tell you it's only ten minutes till checkout time. Time to get yourselves decent!" They could hear the rumble of his laugh as he moved on down, the hall. Trembling, David picked up a bottle, poured alcohol onto the rubber cap, and deftly filled the sterile syringe. He reached for a piece of cotton, dipped it in iodine, and looked up, waiting. KlSfrl Haslam had already bared his left arm. David swabbed the 22 spot on the upper deltoid. Karl laughed. "Here I come, Methuselah!" "All set?" asked David. He plunged the needle home. Institute, two at a time, and hurried toward his office through the echoing corridors, where the usual watchguard sauntered on patrol. "Morning, Jones." "Good morning, Doctor. Pretty early, aren't you?" "Wednesday's my busy day." He settled at his desk, miserably conscious of the open door and curious eyes behind him, opened his briefcase, then glanced at his wristwafch. More than an hour before his interview with Leader Marley. Spreading some data sheets before him, he looked at them blankly as he tried to order his thoughts. His eyes were ringed with dark depressions, for he had had no sleep. There had been so many things to plan for, so many arrangements to make. It was possible, of course, that this morning's talk would turn out to be mere routine. There might remain several weeks of freedom -- but there might be only a few hours. He shrank from the complexity of the problem before him; he was a Research man, devoted to his test tubes and his culture growths, and would have been happy never to face any problem beyond them. He had a moment's revulsion at the unfairness of the fact that a simple experiment in the lab, an addition to man's knowledge of the Universe, should have plunged him against his will into a situation far beyond his ability to handle. There had been, as Karl pointed out, the alternative Leader. That would have absolved him of all responsibility. But that was the trouble, he thought. Responsibility could not be confined to squiggles in his notebook, when those squiggles might affect the whole of society. "Dr. Wong!" He jumped and turned around hastily. "Leah! What in the world?" She stood in the doorway, glaring at him, breathing heavily as though she were trying to hold back sobs. Slowly she tottered to the desk and sank down into her chair by the stenograph. "You doublecrosser!" she whispered. He looked quickly at the doorway, but the guard had not come back. Leaning forward, he questioned her fiercely. "What are you doing here? They told me yesterday that several people had come down with attacks of Blue Martian, Why 23 aren't you in the hospital with the others?" "Because I wasn't sick!" "But I gave you -- " "Imagine how I felt," she raced on, "watching Dr. Haslam start having a chill, hearing Dr. Faure complain about his awful headache, and listening to Dr. Hudson dial Intercom and call for a doctor. And all that time I was waiting, waiting for something to happen to me. And nothing did! What have you got against me, Dr. Wong, that you infect all the others and only pretend to do it to me? I don't want to grow old any more than they do!" "But I wasn't pretending. Quiet, now, and let me think," waited until the watchguard had passed by the door, then raised his head. "Look here, Leah. Evidently the infection didn't take. This is what must have happened. That treatment I gave you ten years ago must have made you permanently immune to Blue Martian, and the antibodies it formed in your cells simply protected you against this new invasion of the virus. It never occurred to me that the immunity would last so long. But don't worry. I'll find a way." She looked suspicious. "What do you mean?" "I mean that there's no reason why Blue Martian should be the only vehicle for giving you the that will work equally well. It's only a question of finding one." "And how long will that take you?" "How long does anything take in Research? Maybe a week, maybe a year." "And maybe ten! I can't wait. Dr. Wong. I'm thirty-five now; I'm growing older. What good will a long life do me, if it only preserves me as the middle-aged woman I'll be by then? And all those years that I'll be getting older and older, there'll be Tanya, lively and pretty, to remind me that I was once like that, too. I can't face it!" "The watchguard will hear you!" Haggard-faced, he watched her shaking shoulders, hearing her muffled sobs. "You're a criminal, Dr. Wong! It was a crime, what you did to Tanya and me." "I didn't realize in the beginning or I'd never have touched the thing. I know it now, even better than you do, but what can I do?" She looked up and wiped her eyes, her mouth set hard. "I know what I can do. I can report you to the Leader." "What good will that do? You know how terrible you feel now about being left out -- though I swear I never meant it to be like 24 this. But just try to imagine. If you report me so that Leader then thousands of people will be put in just the same situation you are in. You're only one person suffering. But then there'd be hundreds of thousands, millions! Surely you wouldn't want to have that on your conscience?" "Do you think Fd care?" "You would when you felt calmer. You're wrought up, ill. Let me send you home. Promise me you'll go home quietly, talk it over with Tanya, and not say anything to anyone else. I'll think of a way out for you. Just be patient." "Patient!" He thought of calling Karl Haslam. Karl would know best how to deal with her, how to bring her back to reason. He reached toward the intercom, then dropped his hand in despair. Karl was in the hospital, with Fauree and Hudson, shivering with the cold of Blue Martian fever. But he had to get her away. He pressed the intercom dial. "Dr. Wong speaking. Miss Hachovnik is ill and is being sent home. Please send an aircab for her at once." He helped Leah to her feet, and spoke pleadingly. "Promise you'll be good, Leah?" The fury in her eyes nearly knocked him down. Without a word, without a gesture, she walked out. been put through a wringer as he followed Officer Magnun into the Leader's suite at State House. Several nights of sleeplessness, the worries of planning for a refuge, and the scene with Leah had left him limp and spiritless. The girl was a danger, he knew, but she was only one of many. He nodded at Dr. Lanza, who was busy reading reports from BureauMed, and saluted Leader Marley, who was talking with a watch guard. Marley looked up briefly. "Sit down, Wong." David folded himself into a chair, grateful for a few moments in which to collect himself, while Marley gave the last of his orders. "Put them in the Vermont granite quarries, and keep them at work for the next year." "As you say, Leader. With the usual secrecy, of course?" "No, you blockhead! These are a bunch of nobodies. Use all the , publicity you can get. Keep a punishment a secret and how can it have any effect on other people? No, I want full radio and news coverage and telecast showings as they swing the first pick at the first rocks. People have 25 got to realize that the Leader knows best, that treason doesn't pay. No matter how clever they think they are, they'll always get caught. Understand?" "As you say, Leader." "Then get going." As the guard left the room, Leader JVfarley turned to David. "What fools people are !" He ran his beefy hands through a shock of black hair, blinked his eyes, and wrinkled the heavy black brows that met over his nose. Wonderingly, he shook his massive head as he drew his gleaming needier from his breast pocket and played with it, tossing it from hand to hand while he talked.  "Fm probably the most generous Leader the State has had since the Atomic Wars, Wong, and I never withhold a privilege from someone who has deserved it. But people mistake me when they think that I am weak and will overlook treason." "Your generosity is a byword, Leader Marley," said Wong. "But some people are incapable of acting for their best interests even when you have defined it for them. Who are these latest traitors?" "Oh, nobody really important, of course, except as they waste time which they owe to the State. Just attempts at illegal study. An Office Category who had found 2 a basement room in a deserted building and was spending all his evening hours there practicing the violin. A Theater man who was illegally trying to learn carpentry. And a teacher of mathematics who had forged a key to the Linguistics library, and had been getting in every night to study a dead language -- Cuneiform, Latin, something like that, utterly without practical value. This last one is an old man, too, and ought to have known better. People must be made to realize that if they want the privilege of useless study, they will have to earn it. And I am very broadminded in such cases." "Nobody has better reason to know that than I, Leader Marley, and I am always grateful to you." Marley coughed and straightened the jacket over his bearlike chest as he put back his needier. "Now to business. Where's that memorandum, Lanza?" Dr. Lanza handed him the paper, then sat down beside the Leader. "First. When Dr. Lanza called on you last week, he found the door to your office locked. What explanation do you have?" David smiled and spread his hands. "My explanation is the generosity of Leader Marley. You have so many affairs to occupy your attention that it is not surprising that you do not remember rewarding me with a Free Choice some years ago, for my work on Martian Blue. I chose, as I am sure you remember now, an occasional hour of Privacy." The Leader blinked. "That's right. I had forgotten. Well, the Leader never goes back on his word. Though why in the name of Marley you fellows want a crazy thing like that is beyond me. What do you do, behind a locked door, that you don't want anyone to see?" "Do you doubt my loyalty, Leader Marley?" "I doubt everything. What do you want with Privacy?" Lanza broke in amiably. "I'm afraid we just have to accept such wishes as one of the harmless abnormalities of the Research mind, Leader. Since I grew up in that Category, I understand it to some extent." "You're right in calling it abnormal. I think perhaps I'd better remove that from the possible Choices in the future. It could easily be misused, and it never did make any sense to me. "Well, second. It's been more than three years since you reported any progress with the problem of White Martian Fever, Wong. What is your explanation?" "Research is not always swift, Leader." "But I distinctly ordered you to find an immunizing agent within three years. Our colonies on Mars cannot wait forever. I've been patient with you, but you've had more than enough time." "I am very sorry, Leader Marley. I have done my best and so have my colleagues. But the problem is complex. If I may explain, we had to find a suitable culture medium for growing the virus, and then we had to work at the problem of coupling it with suitable haptens -- " Impatiently, Marley waved his hand. "You know I don't understand your jargon. That's not my business, what troubles you've had. I want results. You got results on Blue Martian quickly enough." "We were fortunate. But when we storm the citadel of knowledge, Leader Marley, no one can predict how long it will take for the citadel to fall." "Nonsense! I'm warning you, Wong, yeu're failing in your duty to the State, and you can't escape the consequences with poetic doubletalk. I allow special privileges to you people in Research and I expect a proper appreciation in return. When I order you to produce a protection for White Martian, I want results!" "But you can't get a thing like that just by asking for it. Such things are simply not under your control." 27 "Watch yourself, Wong! Your remarks are dangerously dose to treason !" "Is it treason to tell you a plain fact?" Stony-faced, David stared defiantly at Marley, trying to control the trembling of his body. If he had had a needier at that instant, he realized incredulously, he would have shot the Leader and thought his own life a small price to pay for such a pleasure. Lanza coughed. "Pm afraid Dr. Wong is not well, Leader. Worrying over the slowness of his work has distorted his reactions. But I am sure that you will understand, as you always do, and be indulgent." "i'll overlook your remarks, Wong," said Marley, relaxing. "But you'd better change your attitude. You Research people cause me more trouble than any other three Categories put together. Sometimes I wonder if a spell in the granite quarries mightn't -- "  A light flashed on his desk He watched the blinking code for a second, then roe abruptly and left the room. The two men sat in silence. David glanced at Lanza, and Lanza shifted in his chair. "Thanks for the good word," said David we rally. "How do you like being a Rider, by the way? When we were at Med school together, I thought you were a man with ideas." "When I was at Medschool I didn't know what was good for me," Lanza replied stiffly. "And you think you do now?" A slow flush crept over Lanza's face. "Look here, Wong! Each man has to make his own terms with himself. Don't act so smug! You shut yourself away inside the nice white walls of your laboratory and ignore all the conflicts of life. You shut your ears and your eyes, live in perfect harmony with your test tubes, and let the world go hang. Well, that isn't my way." "Your way, apparently, is to worm yourself into the confidence of that steel-hearted imbecile who rules our lives and our thoughts, and spend twenty-four hours a day saying, 'Yes, Yes,' and waiting for him to die so you can step into his shoes!" "We're alone," Said Lanza. "I won't report you. But I have no intention of justifying myself. Have you any idea why you've been let alone for so long? You haven't produced anything tangible in several years. Haven't you ever wondered why no one put on the pressure? Haven't -- " He broke off as Marley lumbered back into the room and fell into a chair. The Leader's manner had altered. He stared at David with grim inquiry, the  28 beady eyes traveling slowly over him, taking in his rumpled hair, his strained face, the rigid set of his shoulders. At last Marley spoke, his voice soft with menace. "You're looking well, Dr. Wong. Remarkably well. In fact, it occurs to me that you don't seem to have aged a bit since my last visit to your laboratory. Tell me, how do you keep your youth?" blood through his body, feel the thud of his racing heart. He kept his voice low so that it would not tremble. "Thank you, Leader Marley, for your kindness in noticing my appearance. I suppose I chose my parents well. They both lived to be over ninety, you know." "This is no joking matter. I've just had a report. An epidemic of Blue Martian fever has broken out among the people of your Institute. Why have you not mentioned it?" "If you will forgive me, Leader Marley, I've had no chance. I reported it in the usual manner to the health authorities, and have here in my briefcase a memorandum which I hoped to bring to your attention, among several other matters, when you had finished giving your instructions to me." Marley continued implacably, "And how did this epidemic begin? It was my understanding that ho insect existed here on Earth that could transmit the virus. Yet several people from your lab came down with the disease on the same day. What is your explanation?" "It's very simple. To prepare the vaccine, as I am sure you wall remember from your last visit to us, we have to keep in the lab a limited number of the Fafli, the Martian insects which act as hosts at one stage of the viruses life. Last week a Menial carelessly knocked over one of the cages and several Fafli escaped. The Menial was discharged, of course, and put in Punishment, but the damage had already been done." "You have a very ready explanation." "Would you rather I had none at all. Leader Marley?" "Well, let that go." Marley drummed his plump fingers on the desk as he continued. "There Wfas another report for me just now. A report so wild, so incredible, so staggering that I can scarcely bring myself to take it seriously. From an Office Category at the Institute." David's heart beat wildly, but he forced a smile to his lips. "Oh, yes. You must mean Miss Hachovnik. I've been worried about ; 29 that poor girl for some time." "What do you mean, 'poor girl'?" "It's very distressing to me, because she has been a good and loyal worker for many years. But she is becoming unstable. She has a tendency to burst into tears over nothing, is sometimes hysterical, seems to have secret grievances, and is extremely jealous of all women whom she considers more attractive. She was never too bright, to be sure, but until recently she has done her ork well, so I've hated to take any action. Just this morning I had to send her home because she was ill." "Do you mean to say," asked Msyrley, "that none of her story is true?" "I don't know. What is her story?" "She reports that you have been working on a private project of your own, instead of on White Martian. That you have discovered a way to make people iminortal, by infecting them with Blue Martian. What is your explanation?" David only stared, his mind so blurred with panic that he could not speak. His stunned silence was broken by a laugh. It was Dr. Lanza, leaning backward in his chair, holding himself over the stomach as he shook his head. "These hysterical women!" His laughter trailed off to a commiserating chuckle. "You're too forbearing, Wong. You shouldn't keep a worker who's so far gone. Take a leaf from Leader Marley's book and remember: Kindness is often weakness; when it is necessary for the good of the State, be harsh!" "I hardly know what to say," said David. "I had no idea she'd gone so far." "Then there's no truth in it?" Mariey persisted. "What she says is impossible?" "Well," said David judiciously, "we people in Research have learned not to call anything impossible, but this dream of immortality is as old as the human race. We have a thousand legends about it, including the story of the Phoenix, that fabulous bird which, when consumed by fire, rose triumphant from its own ashes to begin life anew. A pretty story, of course. But I need only put it to a mind as logical as yours, Leader Mariey. Throughout all the millenia of mail's existence, the Sun has always risen each morning in the east, and thus we know that it always will. That is the order of nature. Likewise, from the earliest generations of man, no individual has ever lived longer than a hundred and some years, and thus we know that he never will. That is the order of Nature and we can't alter SO it to the best of my knowledge." Leader Marley was thoughtful. He touched the intercom. "Send in Officer Magnum" David held his breath. "Magnun, Office Category Hachovnik is to be taken from her home at once and put in indefinite Psycho-detention.' Marley stood up. "Very well. Dr. Wong. You may go. But I shall suspend your privilege of Privacy, at least until after you have devised a protection against White Martian. It isnot wise to disregard the wishes of the Leader. Lanza, show him out." At the street door, they paused. Lanza looked at David speculatively. "You do keep your youth well, David." "Some people do." "I remember that legend of the Phoenix. What do you suppose the Phoenix did with his new life, once he'd risen from the ashes of his old self?" "I'm no philosopher." "Neither am I. But you and I both know that the principle of induction was exploded centuries ago. It's true that the Sun has always risen in the east. But is there anything to keep it, someday, from rising in the west?" his desk. Through the open door behind him, he could hear the watch guard slowly pacing the dimly lit corridor. He could feel time pressing at his back. He was reprieved, he knew, but for how long? He got up, at one point, when the corridor behind him was quiet, and went to the bookcase. He pressed the brass handle, saw the shelves silently swing away from the wall, then set it back again. The mechanism, installed a century ago by a cautious politician, was still in good order. Back at his desk, he thought of Leah and her lost youth, lost because of his own impersonal attitude. He felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could do for her now. It was a relief to know that Tanya, at least, remained hidden and secure in her sister's apartment. It was after midnight before he closed his notebook and locked it away in the top drawer. His plans were completed. There would not be time given him, he knew, to finish his work on White Martian. That would have to be dropped, and resumed at some more favorable time in the future -- if there was a future for him. But he would begin at once to produce in quantity a supply of was sure that the untrained guards who watched his movements would never realize that he had shifted to another project. 31 With a brief good night to the guard, he left the building to walk home. His shoulders were straight, his stride confident, and he disdained looking behind him to see if anyone was following. He had made his terms with himself, and only death, which he would certainly try to prevent, could alter his plans. Going into his apartment he wearily turned on the light. Then he froze, feeling as though he had been clubbed. Leah Hachovnik was huddled at one end of the sofa, her face dripping tears. "I thought you'd never come," she whispered. He slumped down beside her. "How did you get here, Leah? I thought you were -- " hid in your hallway until the watchguard was at the other end. When his back was turned, I just took off my shoes and slipped in. I've been waiting for hours." Her voice was almost inaudible, spent beyond emotion. "They got Tanya," she said dully. "They took her away." "What happened? Quick!" "After I reported to BureauMed -- I'm sorry I did that, Dr. Wong, but I just couldn't help myself. I didn't tell them about Tanya and the others, just about you. Then I walked around for hours, hating you, hating Tanya, hating everybody. Finally I got .so tired that I went home. Just as I got into the hall, I heard a loud knock and I saw Officer Magnun at my door. When Tanya opened it, he simply said, 'Office Category Hachovnik?' When she nodded her head, he said, 'You're under detention.' She screamed and she fought, but he took her away. Since then, I've been hiding. I'm afraid." David tried to think. He remembered that he had said only "Miss Hachovnik" in his talk with the Leader. Had Marley never known that there was more than one? But Lanza surely knew. Or had he merely assumed that Magnun would ask for Leah? Would they realize, at Psycho detention, that they had the wrong woman? Probably not, for she would be hysterical with terror, and her very youth and beauty taken in connection with the "jealousy and envy of younger women" which was noted in her commitment order, would seem to confirm her madness. He was stilt safe, for a while -- if he could keep Leah away from the Institute. "I'm afraid," she whimpered. "Don't let them put me away." "Then you'll have to do exactly as I tell you. Can you follow orders exactly?" "Yes, yes!" "I'll have to hide you here. We can fix up my library as a room for you. It's the only room I can 32 keep locked, and which my Menial never enters in my absence. Whatever happens, Leah  -- no matter what happens -- keep yourself hidden. More than your life depends on that." returned from the hospital, pale and shaky, David summoned them to his office. At the door, Watch guard Jones looked them over. "Say, that Blue Martian fever sure does take it out of you. You fellows look like you've been plenty sick!" "They have been," said David. "Let them by so they can sit down and rest." Jones moved aside, but he lounged in the doorway, listening. David ignored him. "Glad to see you back, gentlemen. I'll make this brief. You have been the victims of a laboratory accident just as much as if you'd been contaminated with radiation. Our Leader Marley, who understands the problems of all Categories, has very generously consented to grant you a two weeks' convalescence, in addition to a Free Choice. Take a few minutes to think over your decision." He strolled over to the window and looked out at the green of the trees just bursting into leaf. Then, as if on impulse, he turned back. "While you're thinking it over, will you look at these protocols? We discussed them before you got sick, you remember -- a plan to prevent an epidemic of Blue Martian. Do you approve of the final form? I'd like to carry on, and after all," he added with an ironic smile, "it's getting later than we might think." He handed each man a sheet of paper whose contents were identical. They studied them. Karl Haslam was the first to speak. "You think, then, that other cases of Blue Martian may develop?" "It is certainly probable. Those Fafli insects were never caught." Karl looked back at his paper. It contained a list of names, some of which were well known to all the country, some of them obscure. Thoughtfully, he nodded as he ran down the list. Hudson glanced up, frowning, his finger pointed at one name. "I don't know," he said slowly, "that this particular experiment would prove useful. Surely the Lanza method has not proved to be as effective as we once hoped." "You may be right. But there's the bare possibility that the modified Lanza method might be of enormous benefit to us." "It is uncertain. Too much of 33 a risk. Tat's my opinion." "Then I'll reconsider. The rest has your approval? Very well. And now what choice have you made for your holiday?" "I think we are all agreed," said Karl soberly. "We'll have an Aimless Tramp." "An excellent idea," approved David. "Oh, Jones, will you get an aircab to take the doctors to Bureau Med, and then arrange for their Roboplanes to be serviced and ready in an hour?" "I don't know as I ought to leave my post," said Jones. "You'd rather stay with us and perhaps be exposed to the Fever?" "Okay, okay!" When his footsteps had died away, David leaned forward. "We've done our best. Another month or so and we should be completely ready for our retirement act." "If we have a month," said Faure. David grinned. "Well, if our time runs out, at least we'll go down fighting. You know all your lines, your props are ready, the plot is worked out, and we can slip into our makeup in an instant -- provided the audience shows up." "You're getting to be quite a joker, David," said Karl. "What if the audiepce comes around to the stage door?" Then we'll try to receive him properly. Our Leader is a man of iron, but I doubt that he's immortal." They heard the approaching guard. "I'm sure you'll benefit from your holiday," David went on. "That last .checkup showed an antibody titer entirely too high for safety." "In other words, it's time for us to get going?" asked Karl, smiling. "That's right. Only the next time the antibody curve rises, it will be for keeps." ported that Judge Brinton, the well-known champion of Category rights, was ill with Blue Martian fever. Three little-known nuclear physicists living in the same apartment in Oak Ridge developed symptoms on the same day. Sporadic cases of Blue Martian flared up all over the continent. Occasionally a whole family was affected -- husband, wife, and all the children. There was a serious one at the School of Social Structure, and at Harvard Medical School nearly a third of the senior class, and they the most brilliant, were hospitalized at the same time. Rumors blanketed the country like a fog, and people everywhere became uneasy. There were no 34 deaths from the illness, but the very idea that an infectious disease could flare up unpredictably all over the nation, out of control, was frightening. It was said that the disease had been beamed to Earth by alien enemies from space; that all its victims became sterile; or that their minds were permanently damaged. It was also said, though people laughed even as they repeated the rumor, that if you once had Blue Martian Fever you'd become immortal. This particular theory had been clearly traced to the tavings of a red-haired madwoman who was confined to Fsychodetention, but still it was too ridiculous not to repeat. For a week, comedians rang a hundred changes on the basic joke: Wife: Drop dead! Husband: I can't. I've had Blue Martian. The unrest became so great that Leader Maiiey himself appeared on the telecaster to reassure the nation. He was an impressive figure on the lighted screen, resting solid and at ease in a leather chair, raising his massive black head, lifting his big hand to gesture as his rich voice rolled out. "You have nothing to fear," he said. "Under your beneficent Leaders, infectious disease has been wiped out many years ago. BureauMed informs me that these scattered cases of Blue Martian fever have been caused by the escape of a few Fafli insects, which have, since then, been isolated and destroyed. The illness has no serious after-effects. And as for the rumors that it confers immortality -- " He allowed his face to break into a pitying smile as he slowly shook his head, looking regretful and et somehow amused. "Those who continue to spread gossip about the fever will only reveal themselves as either psychotics or traitors. Whichever they are, they will be isolated for the good of our society." The effect of his words w'as somewhat diminished by the brief glimpse people had of Dr. Lanza, who reached a hand to help the Leader rise. For Dr. Lanza wore an anxious frown, and his face was thin with worry. In spite of numerous arrests, the rumors continued. For two weeks sporadic outbreaks of the fever occurred, and then, abruptly, they ceased. TT was more than a week after  the last case had been reported that David sat in his basement laboratory beside the opened mouse cage, watching with wry affection as the furry creatures crawled over his hand. These were historic mice, he reflected,  35 opened up a new world, a world which he must somehow help to make better than the present one. His three colleagues had returned a few days ago from their holiday. They had calmly come back to work, and apparently nobody had thought to put two and two together, and thus connect the epidemic with the vacationers. It had been unfortunate that Tanya should have been put under arrest; it was difficult trying to find amusement for Leah so that she would keep out of sight, but still, on the whole, the,ir luck had been good. But it was time for David to go back to work in his office. Gently he detached the mice from his hand, dropped them into their cage, and closed the wire trap. He took his leather pencil case and the keys to his desk from the pocket of his lab coat and laid them on the desk, below the nail on which his wristwatch hung. Carelessly he dropped his lab coat onto the desk and reached for his jacket, then paused, listening. The chatter in the technicians' room suddenly died. In the unnatural quiet sounded a steady march of feet. David turned to meet the probing black eyes of Leader Marley. Just behind him were Dr. Lanza and Officer Magnun. There was no time to conceal 34 his mice, David realized. Shrugging into his jacket, he strode forward without hesitation, a smile on his face, and stretched out his hand. "Leader Marley! This is indeed an honor. If you had only notified us of your visit, we should have been prepared." "Young as ever, I see, Wong.' "Thank you. Leader." There was no banter in Marley's eyes, he noted, but he continued amiably. "It has been some years since you have honored us by a visit in person. I'm afraid a laboratory is not a very exciting place, but I'd be honored to show you anything that may be of interest to you." A faint contempt curled Marley's mouth as he glanced around the room. "Nothing to see ihat I haven't seen before, is there? A lot of test tubes, a bunch of flasks, a mess of apparatus you'd think had been dreamed up by an idiot, and a bad smell. You still keep animals f I notice." He sauntered over to the bench, picked up the cage and looked at the scurrying rodents. David scarcely breathed. Marley only nodded. "Well, mice are mice." He put down the cage and turned away. "These look just like the ones I saw when I was here eight or ten years ago. Same white patch on the forelimbs. I never knew mice could live that long." "But -- " began Lanza, bending over to study the mice. "What an amazing memory you have. Leader," said David. "Just as you guessed, these mice are the direct descendants of the ones you saw on your former visit, a special mutant strain. The chief difference is that these are marked with white patches on the right forelimbs, while, as I am sure you recall, the original specimens were marked on the leit forelimbs. Odd how these marks run in families, isn't it?" Lanza put down the cage and strolled toward the door as Marley took a last bored look around. "Nothing new here that I ought to see, Lanza?" "No. Nothing new." "Well, I've no time to waste. I've come here for two reasons, Dr. Wong. We both want a booster shot for Blue Martian. Ten years is a long time, and there's been this epidemic." "Which is now under control." "That may be, but I still want a booster. You Research people don't always know as much as you think you do. When that's done, I want a detailed report of your progress on White Martian." "I shall be hapy to give it," said David. "If you will go directly to my office. I'll pick up the vaccine and syringes, and be with you in a few minutes." Marley and Officer Magnun marched to the door, and David followed, standing aside to let Lanza precede him. Lanza hesitated there, staring at the floor. Then he smiled and looked directly at David. "Beautiful spring weather we are having. I'm wondering about the marvelous order of nature. Did you happen to notice, this morning, whether the Sun did actually rise in the east?" David stared at the retreating back. There was no longer any doubt ,in his mind. Lanza knew. What was he going to do? "Hurry up, Doctor," said Officer Magnun from the doorway. "Right away." He opened the refrigerator and inspected the two groups of red-capped vials sitting on the shelf. He had no time to think, no time to weigh pros and cons; he could only act. Choosing two vials, he added them to the sterile kit from the autoclave, and took a last look around. He noticed his watch still hanging on the wall, and the lab coat which covered his leather pencil case. He started to take them, then slowly dropped his hand and touched the intercom. "Get me Dr. Karl Haslam." "You're keeping the Leader waiting," said Magnun, but David paid no attention. 37 "Dr. Haslam? Dr. Wong speaking. I may be a little late getting up to see those precipitates of yours. But you keep them simmering, just in case. It's very probable that the antibody curve will rise Yes, I'll let you know if I can." Magnun followed him to the office, then strolled away for a chat with Watchguard Jones. David put his things on his desk and made his preparations in businesslike fashion while Marley and Lanza glanced curiously around the office. He watched apprehensively as Marley inspected the bookcase, then turned away. "I never could understand why Research needs so many books," he remarked. I "Please roll up your sleeve, Leader Marley. I'm ready for you now." Deftly he assembled the syringe, filled it to the two centimeter mark, and scrubbed the arm presented to him. "Ready?" He ihserted the needle and slowly expelled the fluid. Then, taking a fresh syringe, he repeated the operation, filling from the second vial. "Why do those bottles have different numbers?" asked Marley. "Aren't we getting the same thing?" "Certainly. Just lab routine, to we can keep track of how II many units have been used from our stock. There, that does it, Lanza. Both of you will be perfectly safe for a good many years to come." He was washing his hands at the sink when he heard a struggle at the door. Turning, he saw Leah, thin, gaunt and terrified, held fast in the grip of Officer Magnun, who forced her inside and slammed the door behind them.  "What's the meaning of this intrusion?" demanded Marley. "There's some funny business going on, Leader," said Magnun. "I caught this woman trying to sneak in here. She says she's Miss Hachovnik and she works here. Only she ain't. I arrested Miss Hachovnik myself, and I remember well enough what she looked like. She was a cute chick, not a bit like this dame." Marley was staring at the sobbing girl, eyes blinking as he thought, looked back, remembered. Slowly his eyes shifted to David, and David felt like a man impaled. "You may leave, Magnun," said the Leader. "You don't want me to arrest this woman?" "Let go of her! I said you may leave!" "As you say. Leader." When the door closed, the room throbbed to Leah's sobs. "I couldn't help it, Dr. Wong," she cried. "I got so bored, sitting and looking at those books, day after day, with nothing to do! I thought I'd just slip down here for an hour and say hello to people, and -- " "Quiet, Hachovnik!" roared Marley. He quieted his voice. "I understand now, Wong. I remember. There were two girls. Twins. The one in Psychodetention, according to Officer Magnun, is still beautiful and young. It's no use, Wong. You do know the secret of immortality. And you told me the Phoenix was only a fairy tale!" Whatever might happen now, at least the suspense was over. He had done all he could, and it was a relief to have things in the open. He thought fleetingly of his colleagues, alerted by his message, frantically putting their plans into operation, but he leaned back against the sink with every appearance of ease. "You're not quite right, Leader Marley. I cannot confer immortality. All I am able to do is stave off the aging process." "That will do me nicely. And it's connected somehow with the Blue Martian virus?" "Yes. The disease serves as the vehicle." With a brisk motion, Marley drew his needier from his breast pocket and aimed it steadily at David. "Give it to me" "You're rather ambiguous," said David. How were his friends getting along? Were they ready yet? Had Karl visited the basement lab? "Do you mean you want me to give you the injection to prolong your life, or the secret of how to do it, or what?" "Don't quibble! First you'll give me the injection to make me immortal. Then you'll turn over to me all your notes on procedure. Then my friend here will needle you with a shaft of electrons and end your interest in the problem." "Surely you won't keep such a good thing all for yourself," said David. "What about Dr. Lanza? He's your right-hand man. Don't you want him to live forever, too? What about Officer Magnun? He's a faithful servant." "You're stalling, Wong. Do you want me to kill you now?" "It won't be wise to needle me yet, Leader Marley. The secret would be lost forever." "I'll have your notes!" "Yes? Try to read them. They're written in Coptic, a dead language that you consider it a waste of time to learn, because such knowledge is impractical. There aren't half a dozen men on Earth who could make head 39 or tail of my notebook," "Then I'll find that half-dozen! I want the injection," He gestured with the gleaming weapon. "This is once when I have no Free Choice," said David, "Very well." He started toward the door, but halted at the roar of command. "Stop! Do you think I'm fool enough to let you out of my sight?" "But I have to get the inoculant." "Use the intercom. Send for it." David slumped into the chair and opened the intercom. He could almost feel the electronic shaft of the needier ripping into his body. His heart beat wildly, aittl the tension of adrenalin ran through his body. His lips felt cold, but he held them steady as he spoke into the dial. "Get me Dr. Haslam Karl? David Wong speaking. Will you send someone up with a vial of phoenix special? The precipitates? I should say the antibody titer has reached the danger point. Don't delay treatment any longer." Silently tby waited. Marley's grim face did not relax; his eyes were alight. Leah lay back in her chair with closed eyes, and Lanza stared intently at the floor. A soft knock came at the door, and a female technician hurried in, carrying a tray. "I'm sorry to be so slow, Dr. Wong. Dr. Haslam had a little trouble locating the right vial. Oh, and he said to tell you not to worry about those precipitates. They're taken care of." "Just a minute," said David. "Leader Marley, Miss Hachovnik here is very ill. Won't you let this girl help her to the rest room? She'll be safe there until you're ready for her." Marley looked at the halffainting woman. "All right. You take her there, Lanza, and this girl too. Lock them in. And she's not to talk. Do you understand? She's not to talk!" "As you say, Leader Marley," the technician whispered. She helped Leah to her feet, and Lanza followed them from the room. Marley closed the door and locked it. "Now, then, Wong, give me that shot, and heaven help you if you try any tricks!" "Will you bare your arm while I prepare the syringe?" Awkwardly hanging onto the needier, Marley tugged at his sleeve while David calmly picked up a bottle of colorless liquid and filled his syringe. He turned to the Leader, swabbed his arm, then picked up the syringe. "There you are," said David. Jerking the syringe upward, he forced a thin jet of pure alcohol 40 into the man's eyes. Marley screamed. Agonizing pain blinded him, and as he clutched at his eyes, David snatched the needier from the writhing fingers, and flashed the electronic dagger straight to the heart. He stared at the twitching body for only an instant. People were pounding on the door, shouting. He tugged at the desk drawer to get his notebook, then remembered sickly that he had left his keys in the lab. He would have to leave his notes. The shouts were growing louder, people were battering the door. Swiftly he moved to the bookcase, swung it away from the wall, and dropped into darkness. He brought the bookcase back, then turned and ran along the black passageway, at State House, conferring with his subordinates. "It hardly seems possible, Magnun, that so many people could have slipped through your fingers without help from the Military. You say both the Hachovnik twins have disappeared?" "Yes, Leader." "And how many people from the Institute?" "Six, Leader. But it didn't do them any good. We got them, all right." "But you found no bodies!" "They wouldn't have bodies after we got through with them. Leader." "You're quite certain. Officer Magnun, that all the fugitives were destroyed?" Lanza looked tired, and his officers noticed in him a lack of firmness, an indecision, to which they were not accustomed in a Leader, "Say, those babies never had a chance. Leader. We picked up their roboplanes somewhere over Kansas, and we shot them out of the air like ducks. They didn't even fire back. They just crashed", burned, disintegrated. They won't give you any more, trouble. Why, we even picked up the remains of Doc Wong's wristwatch and that old beat-up pencil case of his." He flung them on the desk. Lanza fingered the charred and molten relics. "That will do, Magnun. I'll call you when I need you," "Say, ain't you feeling well. Leader? You look kind of green." "That will be all, Magnun!" "As you say, Leader." Lanza shoved aside the charred remnants and spread out the papers waiting for him, the unimportant, miscellaneous notes accumulated over the years by Hudson, Faure, and Haslam. And the unreadable notebook of David Wong. He sighed and 41 looked up as his secretary entered. "I'm sorry to disturb you, Leader. You look tired." "The funeral this morning was quite an ordeal, and so much has happened the last three days!" "Wll, I thought you ought to know that strange reports are coming in. Some of our most prominent citizens have disappeared. We're trying to trace them, of course, but -- " "Anything more?" "Those rumors about Blue Martian are cropping up again." 42 G A I A X' "Yes? And -- ?" "That old man you asked me to bring from the Vermont quarries, the one who was detained for illegal study of the Coptic language? Well, I guess the excitement of his release was too much for him. He died of a heart attack when he was being taken to the plane." Lanza sighed. "Very welt, that will be all." Alone at last, he looked sadly through the pages of David's notebook, at the tantalizing curls and angles of the Coptic letters, cryptic symbols of a discovery which prevented a man from growing old. Well, no one could read them now. That secret was dead, along with its discoverer, because, in this world, no study was permitted without a practical end in view. And perhaps it was just as well. Could any man be trusted, he wondered, to deal wisely with a power so great? After closing the notebook, he dropped his head into his hands. How his head ached! He felt cold, suddenly, and his whole body began to shake with a hard chill. He lifted his head, his vision blurred, and suddenly he knew. He had Blue Martian fever! Teeth chattering, he paced wildly about the room, puzzling things out, trying to remember. That booster shot! And then he Van Vogt Keller and Derleth An Anthology of Science Fiction by A. E. Van Vogt  Ten short stories and novelettes by a sciencefiction ties of the universe, of worlds beyond worlds, the frontiers of space -- tales to '  terrify and startle. 320 pairs, 3.00 A collection of If i best fantastic itarlat by David H. Keller  Here are 23 of the best fantastic short stories of Dr. David H. Keller, Includes three groups of 1 tales: nine in science-fiction, six weird -- 25 fiction, and eight which spring from Dr. Keller's long professional life as a psy;.ys 8 chlatrist. 352 pages, 3.95 Edited by August Dedeth  A ghostly company of supernatural tales -- including that rare horror novel, H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and an Algernon Blackwood story appearing here for the first time. 288 paes,  3.00  41 E. 50th St., New York 22 I'lease said me lliu lmh.s whose numbers I have  circled below for 10 days' free examination: 12-3  At the end of 10 days I agree to send check or , money Older to cover tha price Of t lie liooks 1 plus postage, or return them postpaid, (We ;j pay postage on orders aocomuanied by remit, lance. Same return privilege.  Name II City -- Zone Stale I 43 realized the amazing truth: David Wong had given him a chance! He had inoculated him with the seeds of immortality, giving him a chance to help right the wrongs of this Categorized world. And now he was left alone in a world of mortals. David and the others had been annihilated, and he was left to live on and on, alone. He staggered toward his private apartments, then sank into his chair as his secretary once again ran into the room. With a supreme effort he controlled his trembling. "Yes?" "Leader Lanza. Another report." 'Must a minute," said Lanza, trying to bring his eyes into focus on the excited girl. "I am in need of a rest. As soon as you have gone, I shall retire into seclusion for a few days. There are to be no interruptions. Is that clear? Now, proceed." "There's a new epidemic of Martian Fever reported where one never was before." He stirred tiredly. "Where now?" "South America. Somewhere in the Andes." "I think we'll have just one Category after this," said Lanza dreamily. "Category Phoenix." "What did you say, Leader?" His thoughts wandered. No wonder Magnun's men found no bodies. The planes they shot down were roboplanes, after all, and it was easy to plant in. an empty seat a man's wrist watch and his bulky leather pencil case. David and the others were safe now. They were free and had enough time to plan for the new free world. "What did you say. Leader?" the girl repeated, bewildered. "Nothing. It doesn't matter." He frowned painfully, and then shrugged. "On second thought, I may be away longer than a week. If anyone asks for me, say I'm on an Aimless Tramp. I've always hoped that some day I might earn the right to a P'ree Choice." "But you're the Leader," the girl said in astonishment. "You're entitled to all the Free Choices you want!" He lifted his twitching head, smiling wanly. "It would seem that way, wouldn't it? Well, whether I am or not, I think I've really earned a Free Choice. I wonder," he said in a wistful voice, "whether the climate in the Andes is hospitable." f. 1  Naturally, any sick person should he given medical help, even if he's from space. But what if he could not ever have been alive? hung up to talk with Dak-whirr. He blinked his eyes iri some discomfort. "What do you want, Palil?" he asked complainingly. "As if you didn't know." "I can't give you permission to examine it. The thing is being saved for inspection by the board. What guarantee do I have that you won't spoil it for them?" I thrust confidentially at one of his body-plates. "Yoiowe me a favor," I said. "Remember?" "That was a long time in the past." "Only two thousand revolu45 tions and a reassembly ago. If it wasn't for me, you'd be eroding in a pit. All I want is a quick look at its thinking part. I'll vrull the consciousness without laying a single pair of pliers on it." He went into a feedback twitch, an indication of the conflict between his debt to me and his selfconceived duty. Finally he said, "Very well, but keep tuned to me. If I warn that a board member is coming, remove yourself quickly. Anyway how do you know it has consciousness? It may be mere primal metal." "In that form? Don't be foolish. It's obviously a manufacture. And I'm not conceited enough to behave that we are the only form of intelligent manufacture in the Universe." "Tautologous phrasing, Palil," Dak-whirr said pedantically. "There could not conceivably be 'unintelligent manufacture.' There can be no consciousness without manufacture, and no manufacture without intelligence. Therefore there can be no consciousness without intelligence. Now if you should wish to dispute -- " I tuned off his frequency abruptly and hurried away. Dakwhirr is a fool and a bore. Everyone knows there's a fault in his logic circuit, but he refuses to have it traced down and repaired. Very unintelligent of him. T I "HE thing had been taken into one of the museum sheds by the carriers. I gazed at it in admiration for some moments. It was quite beautiful, having suffered only slight exterior damage, and it was obviously no mere conglomeration of sky metal. In fact, I immediately thought of it as "he" and endowed it with the attributes of self-knowing, although, of course, his consciousness could not be functioning or he would have attempted communication with us. I fervently hoped that the board, after his careful disassembly and study, could restore his awareness so that he could tell us himself which solar system he came from. Imagine it! He had achieved our dream of many thousands of revolutions -- space flight -- only to be fused, or worse, in his moment of triumph. I felt a surge of sympathy for the lonely traveler as he lay there, still, silent, non-emitting. Anyway, I mused, even if we couldn't restore him to selfknowing, an analysis of his construction .might give us the secret of the power he had used to achieve the velocity to escape his planet's gravity. In shape and size he was not unlike Swen -- or Swen Two, as he called himself after his conversion -- who failed so disas46 trously to reach our satellite, using chemical fuels. But where Swen Two had placed his tubes, the stranger had a curious helical construction studded at irregular intervals with small crystals. He was thirtyfive feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinderstanding at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all, except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet. I am a reporter with warm current in my wires, not a coldthinking scientist, so I hesitated before using my own vrulling sense. Even though the stranger was non-aware-7-perhaps permanently! felt it would be a presumption, an invasion of privacy. There was nothing else I could do, though, of course. I started to vrull, gently at first, then harder, until I was positively glowing with effort. It was incredible; his skin seemed absolutely impermeable. The sudden realization that metal could be so alien nearly fused something inside me. I found myself backing away in horror, my self-preservationrelay working overtime. Imagine watching one of the beautiful cone-rodand-cylinder assemblies performing the Dance of the Seven Spanners, as lie's conditioned to do, and then suddenly refusing to do anything except stump around unattractively, or even becoming obstinately motionless, unresponsive. That might give you an idea of how I felt in that dreadful moment. Then I remembered Dakwhirr's words -- there could be no such thing as an "unintelligent manufacture." And a product so beautiful could surely not be evil. I overcame my repugnance and approached again. I halted as an open transmission came from someone near at hand, "Who gave that squeaking reporter permission to snoop around here?" I had forgotten the museum board. Five of them were standing in the doorway of the shed, radiating anger, I recognized Chink, the chairman, and addressed myself to him. I explained that I'd interfered with nothing and pleaded for permission on behalf of my subscribers to watch their investigation of the stranger. After some argument, they allowed me to stay. I watched in silence and some amusement as one by one they tried to vrull the silent being from space. Each showed the same reaction as myself when they failed to penetrate the skin. 47 Chirik, who is wheeled -- and inordinately vain about his suspension system -- flung himself back on his supports and pretended to be thinking. "Fetch Fiff-fiff," he said at last. "The creature may still be aware, but unable to communicate on our standard frequencies.'  thing in any spectrum. Fortunately he was at work in the museum that day and soon arrived in answer to the call. He stood silently near the stranger for some moments, testing and adjusting himself, then slid up the electromagnetic band, "He's emitting," he said. "Why can't we get him?" asked Cfurik. "It's a curious signal on an unusual band." "Well, what does he say?" "Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Wait, I'll relay and convert it to standard." I made a direct recording natu rally, like any good reporter. " -- after planetfall," the hi  linger was saying. "Last dribble ! power. If you don't pick this up my mime is Entropy. Other to 'Utiiwnts knocked to hell, air " l tummed and I'm too weak i" ' it manually. Becoming  . lu i tn loo, I guess. Getting  umhirctional ultra-wave ftllufi in Inglish, craziest stuff II you ever heard, like goblins muttering, and I know we were the only ship in this sector. If you pick this up, but can't get a fix in time, give my love to the boys in the mess. Signing off for another couple of hours, but keeping this channel open and hoping " "The fall must have deranged him," said Chirik, gazing at the stranger. "Can't he see us or hear us?" "He couldn't hear you properly before, but he can now, through me," Fiff-fiff pointed out. "Say something to him, Chirik." "Hello," said Chirik doubtfully. "Er -- welcome to our planet. We are sorry you were hurl by your fall. We offer you the hospitality of our assembly shops. You will feel better when you are repaired and repowered. If you will indicate how we can assist you -- " "What the hell! What ship is that? Where are you?" , "We're here," said Chirik. "Can't you see us or vrull us? Your vision circuit is impaired, perhaps? Or do you depend entirely on vrulling? We can't find your eyes and assumed either  m that you protected them m some way during flight, or dispensed with vision cells altogether in your conversion." Chirik hesitated, continued apologetically: "But we cannot understand how you vrull, either. While we thought that you were you'll have the best possible atunaware, or even completely fused, we tried to vrull you. Your skin is quite impervious to us, however." The stranger said: "I don't know if you're batty or I am. What distance are you from me?" Chirik measured quickly. "One meter,, two-point-five centimeters from my eyes to your nearest point. Within touching distance, in fact." Chirik tentatively put out his hand. "Can you not feel me, or has your contact sense also been affected?" It became obvious that the stranger had been pitifully deranged. I reproduce his words phonetically from my record, although some of them make little sense. Emphasis, punctuative pauses and spelling of unknown terms are mere guesswork, of course. He said: "For godsakemann stop talking nonsense, whoever you are. If you're outside, can't you see the airlock is jammed? Can't shift it myself. I'm badly hurt. Get me out of here, please." "Get you out of where?" Chirik looked around, puzzled. "We brought you into an open shed near our museum for a preliminary examination. Now that we know you're intelligent, we shall immediately take you to our assembly shops for healing and recuperation. Rest assured that tention." before the stranger spoke again, and his words were slow and deliberate. His bewilderment is understandable, I believe, if we remember that he could not see, vrull or feel. He asked: "What manner of creature are you? Describe yourself." Chirik turned to us and made a significant gesture toward his thinking part, indicating gently that the injured stranger had to be humored. "Certainly," he replied. "I am an unspecialized bipedal manufacture of standard proportions, lately selfconverted to wheeled traction, with a hydraulic suspension system of my own devising which I'm sure will interest you when we restore your sense circuits." There was an even longer silence. "You are robots," the stranger said at last. "Crise knows how you got here or why you speak Inglish, but you must try to understand me. I am mann, I am a friend of your master, your maker. You must fetch him to me at once." "You are not well," said Chirik firmly, "Your speech is incoherent and without meaning. Your fall has obviously caused several serious feedbacks of a very serious nature. Please lower your voltage. We are taking you to our shops immediately. Reserve your strength to assist our specialists as best you can in diagnosing your troubles." "Wait. You must understand. You are -- ogodno that's no good. Have you no memory of mann? The words you use -- what meaning have they for you? Manufacture -- made by hand hand hand damyou. Healing. Metal is !mot healed. Skin . Skin is not metal. Eyes. Eyes are not scanning cells. Eyes grow. Eyes are soft. My eyes are soft. Mine eyes have seen the glory -- steady on, suit. Get a grip. Take it easy. You out there listen." "Out where?" asked Prrr-chuk, deputy chairman of the museum board. I shook my head sorrowfully. This was nonsense, but, like any good reporter, I kept my recorder running. The mad words flowed on. "You call me he. Why? You have no seks. You are knewter. You are it it it! I am he, he who made you, sprung from shee, born of wumman. What is wumman, who is silv-ya what is shee that all her swains commend her ogod the bluds flowing again. Remember. Think back, you out there. These words were made by mann, for mann. Hurt, healing, hospitality, horror, deth by loss of blud. Deth. Blud. Do you understand these words? Do you remember the soft things that made you? Soft little mann who konkurred the Galaxy and made sentient slave s of his machines and saw the wonders of a million worlds, only this miserable representative has to die in lonely desperation on a far planet, hearing goblin voices in the darkness." a most curious sound, os though the stranger were using an ancient type of vibratory molecular vocalizer in a gaseous medium to reproduce his words before transmission, and the insulation on his diaphragm had come adrift. It was a jerky, high pitched, strangely disturbing sound; but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission. "Does blud mean anything to you?" "No," Chirik replied simply. "Or deth?" "No." "Or wor?" "Quite meaningless." "What is your origin? How did you come into being?" "There are several theories," Chirik said. "The most popular one -- which is no more than a 50 grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion -- is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is lft to conjecture. My own theory, however -- " "Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?" "In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimensions." "An interstellar vessel," said the stranger. "That is my view also," said Chirik complacently. "And -- " "What was the supposed appearance of your --  manufacturer?" "He is said to have been of magnifieient proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses." "An. automatic computer," said the stranger. He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds. He corrected the fault and went on: "God that's funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A selfsetting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn -- or at least their bad qualities -- so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to Use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scientific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are -- ogod they must know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?" Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow. "Legend has it," he said, "that after completing His task. He fused himself beyond possibility of healing." came again from the stranger. "Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity komplecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet." Chirik looked around at us SI again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world. "Of course," said the stranger. "Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way He was silent for a while. "Do you know what growth means?" he asked finally. "Do you have anything that grows?" "Certainly," Chirik said helpfully. "If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound -- " "No, no," the stranger interrupted. "Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies arflB gives increase without your intervention?" "How could such a thing be?" "Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warmbludded burds preening their f ethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mise timidly threading the dangerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and 52 cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud -- " For some inexplicable reason, , although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger's transmission seemed to be growing fainter. "His circuits are failing," Chirik said. "Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power." My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop. I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured. He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case. fully around the stranger. "We shall have to cut," he said. "It won't pain him, since his intramolecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can't vrull him, it'll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it." Fiff-fiff was still relaying, But no amount of power boost would make the stranger's voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteration. " strength going. Can't get into my zoot done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don't must tell them I need oxygen" "He's in bad shape, desirous of extinction," I remarked to Churchur, who was adjusting his arccutter. "He wants to poison himself with oxidation now," I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable condition we all fear -- rust. Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. "Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?" "In my head," the Stranger replied, "In my head ogod my head , eyes blurring everything going dim , , . luv to mairee kids a carry me home to the lone prayree get this bluddy airlock open then they'll see me die but they'll see me some kind of atmosphere with this gravity see me die , extrapolate from body what I was what they are damthem d amt hem damthem raann master i am your maker!" For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbing despite its faintness, It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation. Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variations of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel. " done it crawling into chamber, closing inner must be mad , they'd find me anyway but finished want see them before I die want see them see me liv few seconds, watch them , get outer one open" Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, bluewhite glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger's skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the intra-molecular sense currents in my own skin. "Don't be squeamish, Palil, ,,, Chur-chur said kindly. "He can't c 53 54 galaxy science fiction feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head." He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. "I should have guessed that. He's the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible." into a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician. But I had to look again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow. Abruptly the stranger's voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasized, highpitched. "Ar no no no god my hands they're burning through the lock and I can't get back I can't get away stop it you feens stop it can't you hear I'll be burned to deth I'm here in the airlock , the air's getting hot you're burning me alive" Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified. "Stop, Chur-chur," I pleaded. "The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It's hurting him." Chur-chur said reassuringly: "Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation -- probably a local thermo-electric effect. But even if his contact senses have started working again and he can't switch them off, he won't have to bear this very long." Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkardly patted the stranger's skin. "Easy there," he said. "Cut out your senses if you can. If you can't, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we'll repower you, and you'll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled." I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favorite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects. My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie. During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables "burning me alive," the stranger's words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a susS5 talned note -- around E-flat in the standard sonic scale. It was not like a voice at all. This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words, but without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself -- this is the closest I can come phonetically : "Eeee ahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeerjeeesussunmuuutherrr ! " The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing. Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break. And although the soft hiss of the stranger's carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness still existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters: I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.  4 to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger's skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple. A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur' s shoulder. The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. "Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material' Chur-chur explained. He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance. "It looks complex," Chur-chur said, "but I expect the stranger will be able fo tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute." His assistant gently cleaned the Wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice. You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur's discovery of the stranger's double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum's failure to analyze the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion 56 "V of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him. But this is my personal, nonscientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been advanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Churchur announced his initial findings that day. He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger's body. When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said: "I have examined the 'central brain' in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of consciousness. And there is no other conceivable center of intelligence in the remainder of his body." There is something I wish I could forget. I can't explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out. There's a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust. S-F Checklist With science fiction books being pub lished in ever-increasing numbers these days, yesterday's brand-new sensation is likely to be today's forgotten dustcatcher. But that's not at all the case with the s-f novels brought out by Simon and Schuster in the past few years. Even the two modern masterpieces that led off the listyan Vogt's imaginative The World of A, and Williamson's gripping The Humanoids -- are still in demand, and still available (although only limited quantities remain). If any of these titles are missing from your s-f collection, use the coupon below to fill the gaps: Vogt. A civilization ruled by the immutable laws of semantics. 2.50 son. Invincible robots threaten mankind with complete stagnation. 2.00 promise -- and the threat -- of a new source of boundless energy. 2.50 by Lewis Padgett. First collection of the grimly humorous tales of a master storyteller. 2.50 of exploration to the stars. 2.50 Simak. A hunt through time for a book that could change the universe, 2.50 liamson. The strange tale of the "notmen" of New Guinea. 2.50 tion of this classic; a must item for all fans. 2.50 ries. selected by John W. Campbell, Jr. Just published. 3.95 I 530 Fifth Avenue. New York 20, N.Y. ( Please send me the books whose numbers I have circled. I will pay postman price plus postage for each book, I may return books for refund of purchase price if not delighted. 13 3 4 5  1   City Same refund guarantee. I I I I I I I I I 57 Wheels Within Never osfc "Who am I and where do I come from?" The answers may not be what you'd expect 1 aches first start?" Y j asked the neurologist, Dr. Hall. "About six months ago," Bennett replied. "-What is your occupation, Mr. Bennett?" "I am a contractor." " Are you happy in your work?" "Very. I prefer it to any other occupation I know of." "When your headaches become sufficiently severe, you say that you have hallucinations," Hgll said. "Can you describe what you see during those hallucinations?" "At first I had only the impression that I was in a place completely unlike anything I had ever known," Bennett answered. "But each time my impressions became sharper, and I carried a fairly clear picture when my mind returned to normal the last time. I felt then that I had been in a room in a tall building that towered thousands of feet over a great city. I even remembered 58 that the name of the city was Thone. There were other people in the room with me -- one person especially. I remembered her very clearly." "Her?" Hall asked. "Yes." "Was there anything unusual about this woman?" "Well, yes, there was," Bennett said, after a brief and almost embarrassed pause. "This will sound pretty adolescent, but -- " Hall leaned forward attentively. "It may be relevant. You're not here to be judged, you know; I'm trying to help you." Bennett nodded and spoke rapidly, as though trying to finish before he could stop himself. "She was a woman who exactly fitted an image I've had in mind for as long as I can remember. She was tall, fair -- though brunette -- very beautiful, very vivid, very well poised. I seem to have known her all my life, but only in my dreams, from my very earliest ones to the present. She's never changed in all that time." He halted as suddenly as he had begun to talk, either having nothing more to say, or unwilling to say it. "Have you ever married, Mr. Bennett?" Hall prodded gently. "No, I never have." Again, Bennett stopped, adding nothing more to his blunt answer. "May I ask why not?" Bennett turned his face away. "I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. It makes me sound like a romantic kid." He looked at the doctor almost in defiance. "I've always felt that some day I would meet this girl, or at least someone very much like her. I know it's not a rational feeling -- maybe I've even used it as an excuse not to get married -- but it's like spilling salt and throwing a pinch over our shoulder; we aren't superstitious, yet we don't take any chances." Dr. Hall didn't comment. He ended the questioning period and put Bennett through a series of tests. Then they sat down again and Hall offered his diagnosis. "The neurological examination is essentially negative, Mr. Bennett. In other words, there is no organic reason that I can find for your headaches. That leaves only one other possibility -- an emotional disturbance. I'm a neurologist, remember, not a psychoanalyst. I can only give an opinion about the cause of your complaint." Bennett waited expectantly. "Headaches without organic causes are generally the result of repressed anger," Hall went on. "That anger can stem from any number of traumatic situations or attitudes, all deeply buried in the unconscious, of course, or they would not have the power S9 to hurt us. From what we know of you, however, it seems to be the result of frustration. In other words, you have created a fantasy image of a completely unattainable woman, and therefore none of the women you meet can fulfill your expectations. Since she is unattainable, you naturally feel a sense of frustration." "But who could she be?" Bennett asked anxiously. "Someone you knew in childhood, perhaps. A composite of real and imaginary women. Usually, it is an idealized image of your own mother," Bennett sat frowning. "All right, let's say that's so. But where do the hallucinations of tb city of Thone fit in?" "This is something that has to be tracked down in a series of analytical sessions, so all I can do is guess. If one is unable to reach a goal in a real environment, the obvious answer is to create a fantasy world. That's what you appear to be doing. It's a dangerous situation. Mr. Bennett. Potentially, at least." "How so?" Bennett asked, alarmed. "The general tendency is toward greater and greater divorcement from reality. I suggest immediate treatment by a competent analyst. If you don't know of one, I can recommend several." "I'd like to think it over." "Do that," Hall said. "And call me when you've decided." T HE third day after he consulted the neurologist, Bennett's headache returned. As before, drugs were of no help. When the pain became blinding, he lay back on his bed, placed a cold cloth on his forehead, and closed his eyes. Suddenly the realities he knew were gone and he was back in the dream-city of Thone. Persons and objects were much clearer now. Bennett saw that he lay in a receptacle shaped like a rectangular metal box. It was padded, reminding him unpleasantly of a coffin. The woman he had seen before was again with him, but now he knew that her name was Lima. Behind her stood a man; a tall, dark man whose eyebrows joined over the bridge of his nose, and whose forehead was creased in a permanent frown. The woman held out her arms to Bennett. Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Bennett's spirit seemed to rise from the, flesh -- he could see his body still lying there -- and he followed the woman. As he approached she retreated and, try as he would to reach her, she remained just beyond his grasp. After what seemed hours of futile pursuit, a cloud formed be60 tween him and the woman. When it dissipated, he had left the world of Thone. He was in a trolley-bus, in his own world, and vaguely he recalled having left his room, gone down to the street, and boarded the trolley -- during the time he had followed Lima, in his hallucination. It seemed that he had a definite destination then, but now he could not recall what it had been. His attention was drawn to the outside by the flickering of lights that flashed in through the bus windows. Bennett looked out and saw that he was in the Pleasure Section of the city, traveling through the Street of Carnivals. He watched the fronts of the amusement buildings pass before him and he read their advertisements listlessly. Suddenly one sign seemed to spring out from all the others: He left the trolley at the next corner and made his way through the crowd to the brightly lit carnival building. Inside, he found a chair and seated himself. The show's act appeared about half over. It was pretty evidently charlatan stuff, Bennett decided, but the blackhooded mystic on the stage held his attention. She was a tall woman, with a slender figure and fair flesh. She was poised, or perhaps it was indifference to the crowd. A runner went through the audience touching articles of clothing or ornaments, and the woman without hesitation named each one he touched. The act was slightly different from most Bennett had seen in that the runner said nothing, merely touching the articles to be named. The next portion of the show consisted of a mind-reading act. Bennett expected the usual routine of writing a question on paper, which would be sealed in an envelope and placed in a container on the stage. He was surprised when the runner returned to the crowd and asked for volunteers for thoughtreading. A shorl man with a bright yellow necktie raised his hand. The runner made his way through the crowd to the man and touched him on the shoulder before turning back to the mystic. He still said nothing. "This man is thinking that he should have stayed at home tonight," the mystic said. "There are wrestling matches on the teletone, and he would have enjoyed them more than this show. Besides, he would have spent less money that way than he has tonight. And he does not like to 61 spend money unless he must." A titter of amusement went through the crowd as the man blushed a dull crimson. The runner touched a second man. "This man wishes to know the winner in the eighth race at the horse tracks tomorrow," she said. "I am sorry, but, because of Public Law one thousand thirty-two, Section five-A, I am prohibited from answering a question of that nature." The third person contacted was a woman. She raised her hand, then half changed her mind when she saw that the runner was turning toward her. But then she defiantly tossed her brown hair bak from her face and allowed him to touch her shoulder. "This woman is wondering if her lover is true to her -- and if her husband will find out about them." This time the crowd laughed when the embarrassed woman turned pale and rushed up the aisle toward the exit. No further hands were raised and the show ended with a short address by the runner: "I hope you have enjoyed these truly marvelous and mysterious demonstrations. Now the mystic, Lima, is available for a short time for personal interviews. The fee is very reasonable -- one dollar a minute. Anyone wislyng an inter42 view please step forward." The mystic pulled the hood from her head, smiled, bowed at the crowd, and left the stage. Bennett gasped. "The woman of the city of Thone!" have paid in advance for twenty-five minutes of my time," Lima said, as she smiled in amusement. "Perhaps you had better begin your questions, instead of merely staring at me." Bennett brought his thoughts back with an effort. "Your performance was exceptionally good," he said very soberly. "I enjoyed it. And so, apparently did the other customers. It is a clever routine. I'll admit I an't figure out how you do it. "Remember whatBarnum said," Lima replied lightly. "At least you do not take yourself too seriously," Bennett observed. "On the contrary," Lima countered, "I take myself very seriously. You, horvever, do not. You are paying for my time and the customer is always right." "Tell one," Bennett asked abruptly, "have we ever met before?"  "Not to my knowledge." "Have you any objections to telling me about yourself during our interview? Who are you? What is your background?" "I will be glad to tell you about myself, if you think it will be interesting," she replied, after a barely perceptible pause. "How I came by this exceptional ability of mine, I have no slightest conception, I only remember that when I was young, and still without the intellect to evaluate social mores and customs, I was often placed in positions of awkwardness by my ability to read minds. At an early age, however, through the council of my parents, I learned to keep this knowledge to myself. "By the time I reached my twentieth birthday, my parents were both dead and I was alone in the world. I had never learned any occupation. I made some attempts to use my mindreading to some advantage to myself, but soon found that I encountered the opposition of the medical associations as well as the law. As a consequence, I turned to show business as the one means of earning a legitimate livelihood. There is not much more to tell." "Can you actually read minds?" Bennett asked insistently. "I can." "Then what am I thinking now?" "You are thinking," Lima said, with no semblance of a trance or any of the other usual antics of professional mystics, "that I look exactly like a woman you have never seen, but whose image you have carried in your mind since your childhood." For just a moment, the startling accuracy disconcerted Bennett. "I have a problem which is quite annoying," he pushed on almost frantically. "Can you tell me what my problem is?" "You have been subject to extremely severe headaches, which you have been unable to remedy, either by sedatives or with the help of a neurologist. Am I correct?" "More than you could possibly know! Look, I came here believing you were a fake. That didn't matter -- it was the fact that you looked like this other woman that counted. I'm convinced now, I want your help. Can you help me, or at least tell me whether the neurologist is right about the cause of my headaches?" "He is wrong," Lima said. "I can tell you what causes them, but I am afraid that I will have to ask for another hundred dollars for that extra service." Bennett was momentarily irritated at this evidence that their relationship, at least as far as she was concerned, was strictly business. But he shrugged off the feeling. He drew five twentydollar bills from his pocketbook and placed them on the table before her. it "If you remember' Lima said, folding the money carefully and tucking it into the neck of her dress, "five months ago a building which you had contracted to build fell, when it was nearly completed, and two workmen were killed." "I remember very well." "You found that the collapse of the building was caused by faulty material which you had bought through a subcontractor. You are still investigating to determine where to place the blame, and are on the point of doing so." "Go on," Bennett breathed softly. "You are quite certain that the person responsible is John Tournajfc ostensibly a reputable contractor, but actually an unscrupulous scoundrel. You have a choice of exposing him, with great personal danger to yourself -- Tournay is a dangerous and ruthless man -- or remaining silent and knowing that you are a coward. The difficulty of that choice is causing your head aches." "You may be right," Bennett admitted without hesitation. "I haven't had time to think the matter through quite that far. What would you advise me to do?" "That is something which cannot be advised. The answer lies within yourself. You are either a big enough man to do the right thing -- which you yourself recognize -- or you are a small man and will take the safer, less honorable course. The decision and the integrity lie within yourself." that. Then there's nothing more that you can do for me?" "But there is," Lima replied. "I can cure your headaches, if you wish -- for an additional hundred dollars." "That would be a cheap price." Bennett drew his wallet from his pocket. "My cash is rather low. Would you accept a personal check?" "Certainly," Lima said. "But, first, let me explain about my cure. There is some mental unpleasantness involved which you may consider worse than the ailment." "I doubt that. L can't imagine anything worse than this agony." "Your mind will be placed under my control and led through a dream sequence. I will follow a logical progression of events, using your actual past as background. While you are under my control, your experiences will be far from pleasant. I will allow your mind to follow its own anticipated course of events, influencing your thoughts only slightly -- directing them into as unpleasant channels as possible. In 64 fact, to make the cure certain, at least the culmination must be quite devastating. Do you agree to undergo such rigorous mental punishment?" "But why do I have to?" Bennett 'asked, astonished and worried. "That pattern will act in the manner of a counter-irritant. Your mind is like a spoiled child, rejecting anticipated unpleasantness. Under my influence it is subjected to possible alternative experiences, which are so much worse than the one it originally feared that it will gratefully accept the lesser evil." "That sounds reasonable," Bennett agreed. "When could we begin this treatment?" "Immediately, if you are will yf  mg. "I see no reason for waiting." "Then, if you are ready," Lima told him, "lie on this couch. Keep your eyes on mine." She spoke slowly, evenly. "Remember that you are doing this of your own free will, that you trust me. I am your friend and would do you no harm." Her voice droned on as Bennett looked into her eyes. They merged until they became one large, placid pool of restfulness, and he found himself drawn into them. He sank peacefully, quietly -- completely. Bennett knew it was the district attorney returning his call, and that the die was cast. Until this ugly business was brought to a conclusion, his life would be in constant danger. "Leroy Bennett speaking," he said. "I have had collected some information that I think will be of very great interest to your office." "Information about what?" the voice at the other end asked briskly. "I have proof that John Tournay is responsible for the death of two men, in an action involving criminal collusion," "If what you say is true, I will be glad to see your evidence," the district attorney said. "Could you deliver it in person? There may be some questions I would like to ask you about it." "Certainly," Bennett replied. "When would be the most convenient time?" "Later in the day. I have a case going on. How would fourthirty this afternoon suit you?" "That would be fine." The rest of the day dragged slowly. At four o'clock Bennett left his office and took the elevator to the ground floor. Under his arm he clutched the briefcase which might spell death for him. A moment after he left his office building, he knew he had 65 made a mistake -- a fatal one! Idly, at first, his mind's eye watched the driver of a long gray sedan, parked at the curb, start up its motor as he approached. The car pulled away from the curb when he came alongside it. Through an open rear window, Bennett saw a man with a dark, brooding face -- with black eyebrows that joined over the bridge of the nose -- glowering at him. At the same instant he saw the blunt nose of an automatic resting on the lowered glass of the window, just below the chin of the frowning man. Incredibly, even as he realized that he was about to die, Bennett's first thought was not one of Tear, but rather that this dark man was the other person he had seen in his hallucinations of the city of Thone! Then, as one part of his mind drew back in terror at what it knew was about to happen, another part wondered at the mystery of Thone and the people in it. Where did that hallucination fit in this mist of life which was about to eud? He felt three hard, solid blows punch shockingly into his body. There was pain, but greater thari that was the terror that whipped his panicked mind. "Lima," Bennett whispered with his last stark thought as he dropped to his knees. He groped for the sidewalk with one hand, to steady himself, and never reached it. "TT'S over now," Bennett heard the mystic say. "Please try to relax." He found himself fighting with awful exertion to raise himself from the sidewalk -- which had turned into a couch. His clothes clung to him with a clammy wetness that chilled him. He flung his arms out in a frantic gesture that knocked a lamp from an end-table and sent it crashing to the floor. Not until then did he feel the  mystic's firmly gentle hands on his shoulders, urging him down, and know that he was not actually dying. He lay back for a moment, gasping great gulps of welcome air into his lungs. "I think you will be all right now," Lima said. "You were right when you said the experience would not be pleasant," Bennett said, still battling for breath. "I hope the results will be worth it." "I believe you will find that they are," Lima told him reassuringly. "Also, it can be of assistance to 3'ou in still another way. The sequence your dream followed -- hieing a natural, perhaps even a probable, aftermath of your past decisions and movements -- could actually happen. 44 Therefore it would be wise to avoid such decisions in real life.' A T the end of two weeks, Bennett had collected all the information he needed on Tournay's illegal activities. The investigator he hired was very thorough, and unearthed several other incriminating schemes in Tournay's past. With the'evidence he had on hand, Bennett was certain that Tournay would be convicted in any court. This time he intended to evade the fate he had suffered in the dream by acting differently. He hired a shrewd lawyer -- the best obtainable -- had him draw up the evidence in legal form, and presented it to the district attorney, with the demand for Tournay 's immediate arrest. He knew that immediate action would be his best protection. That evening, when he left his office building, he felt the peace of a man whose task has been well done. It took almost a full second before the sight of the long gray car jerked his thoughts from their pleasant introspection and back to dread reality. Tournay's blackbrowed face leered at him as it had in the dream and he felt his body tense as it waited for the pistol slugs to strike. His mind scurried in its trap within his head and, strangely, it turned to the mystic for help. "Lima!" he called desperately. struggling with that awful exertion to drag his body from the couch on which it lay. "It's all over now," he heard Lima say. He sat up. "What happened?' "This will be hard to believe,' Lima said, "and I will not try to prove it to you, but it is true. The mind has many powers which cannot even be imagined by anyone who has not lived with those powers as I have. When you called me, your mind attuned itself with mine, and its need and its demand were so powerful that together we turned time backward. You are now back in my dressing room, and it is the exact time at which you originally came out of your dream." "That's impossible!" Bennett protested. "Nevertheless, it happened. I only ask you to keep in mind one thing. Someday, when your mind has been made more facile, you will understand how I am able to do this. It will even appear logical to you. Now, however, the only thing I can tell you is believe if" muffing this second chance. After he had collected the infor47 illation about Tournay's criminal activities, he also dug into his past for a man who had cause to hate the contractor. He found the man he sought, a man as ruthless and unscrupulous as Tournay himself, one who could fight him on his own ground. Roger Clarkson had been the controller of a string of bookie joints, before he had been framed by Tournay, and convicted, to serve ten years in prison, Clarkson had been released from prison six days before. He found that Tournay had gained control of his former criminal empire. Everyone, including Tournay, knew that the only thing preventing Clarkson from taking reutnge was the opportunity. Bennett sent his information to Clarkson and sat back to await the results. That evening, as he was about to leave his office building, some inner caution warned him to take no chances. He stepped cautiously out into the street, looked both ways for the gray sedan, and saw that the street was empty, before he walked to the corner. Ke arrived there just in time to meet the long gray sedan as it drove up. ful exertion on the mystic's couch. This time he came out of the blackness with his mind clear. M "You've saved me again," he said to Lima. "Have you turned time backward again?" "Yes," she replied. "But I have given you all the help I can. The next attempt you make, you will have nothing on which to lean except your own strength," "But why do I always arrive at the point where I'm being shot by Tournay, regardless of what course I choose? Is there no way I can beat him?" "If you believe in fate as strongly as I do, you will accept that conclusion as inevitable. The long gray sedan is the symbol of your death. You cannot avoid it -- at least not as long as you persist in passive action." "What do you mean by that?" "Just this. You wish to see Tournay punished -- your sense of justice demands it. But each time you try to have someone else administer that punishment. It appears to me that the only possibility of your breaking this fateful progression of events is for you to administer the punishment yourself. You probably realize the danger of trying that. But I can't see where you have any other choice." "In other words, you feel that the only chance I have of preventing Tournay from killing me  -- is to kill him first?" "Yes," Lima said. "Are you strong and hard enough to do it?" f t Bennett thought for only a brief moment before he nodded. "I'm desperate enough, at any rate." This time he did not leave immediately. He had to find out something first. He put his arms around Lima's shoulders and drew her toward him. She put her face up and he kissed her waiting lips. They were sweet and, if she did not return the ardor of his kiss, he did not notice it. "TlIR. Tournay is not in," the girl at the desk told Bennett. "You might try hi.s home." At a pay-booth in the lobby, Bennett called Tournay's home. The voice that answered was that of a tired woman, one who has given up hope. "Mr. Tournay called me a short time ago and said that he would be in the office of a Mr. Leroy Bennett, in the Lowry building, if anyone called," the tired voice said. Bennett hung up and caught a cab. His tjuarry had walked into an ideal place for their meeting. For better or for worse, he would soon bring this conflict to an end. In his office, Bennett found that Tournay had been there and gone. He had left a message: "Tell Mr. Bennett that Lima sent me!" So that was it -- Lima had used Bennett as a dupe! He could not figure out her purpose, but he knew that he could never trust her again. She had been against him from the first. Ferhaps even she, rather than Tournay, was the prime mepace. He decided that he must kill them both, before they had the chance to kill him. Touching the small flat pistol snuggling in its shoulder holster, he knew the pursuit must continue immediately. He rode the elevator to the ground floor, and he felt his mind working with a clarity and a precision which he had seldom experienced before. This time he knew he would win. Shrewdly, before leaving the building, Bennett looked out through the glass pane in the door first. He waited only a moment before lie saw the Jong gray sedan as he had expected. They would not trap him again. Ducking back, he walked rapidly toward a side exit. Night had fallen by the time he reached the carnival building. He did not ring the bell. Instead, he walked to the rear, climbed the stairs of a fire-escape, and softly opened the window of a bedroom. He stepped inside just as softly and stood listening for breathing. He heard none. This was probably too early for Lima to be in bed. The bedroom door was open. 69  Bennett could see a light coming from another part of the apartment -- probably the living room. He paused to steel himself for what he must do. The time had come when he would have to be savagely ruthless. He found Lima sitting on a couch, reading a book. He suspected that she still had some control over his mind and he had no intention of letting her influence him. She must be killed before she could read his intention. "It didn't work." Bennett spoke just loudly enough to startle Lima into raising her head. As she looked up, he shot her squarely between the eyes. In an agony of frustration, Bennett saw the flesh of her forehead remain clear and undisturbed. He knew he could not miss at this range, yet she was unhurt. He lowered his sights and shot at the white neck beneath the fair head. She still sat there, returning his gaze, unperturbed, unmarked by the bullets. He pumped the four remaining bullets into her body. The only part of her that moved was her lips. "It's no use, Leroy," she said. "Haven't you guessed? You are still in your dream. You can't kill me there." Suddenly the implication struck him with its awful simplicity. "Good God!" His voice rose. "Do you mean I've never been out of my dream?" He hesitated while the thought sank in. "My remembrance of coming out of it was only part of the dream itself," he murmured. "That was why you were able to turn time backward at will." A cold calmness returned to him. "Tell me," he said, "am I still in the dream?" "Yes," Lima replied. "Then I demand that you free me now!" "As you wish," Lima said sadly. "And may God help you." Bennett wrenched his body from the couch on which it lay and struggled to his feet. Though the dream had seemed real enough, he could look back on it now and see it as any other dream. He breathed easier, and then stopped abruptly when he heard a voice behind him say, "You are still a dead man!" Bennett whirled and found himself facing Tournay. And Tournay held a pistol aimed at his heart. Bennett turned desperately back to Lima. His lips formed her name, but the sound died almost before it was uttered. This time, he saw, she would not help him. Her features had hardened and no mercy or compassion registered on them. 70 71 "There is no escape," she said A fleeting thought went through his mind of springing at Tournay and trying to reach him before the gun could be fired. But one glance at Tournay's face made him realize how futile -- and fatal -- that would be. Tournay's finger tightened on the trigger of his gun and Bennett thought ahead in despair to what was to come. One thing he knew: He did not want to die! Was there no way out? The answer came like a cry of re'ief. There was a way -- Thone! The city of his enigma. Tournay an 1 Lima could not harm him there. F OR just an instant, Bennett's vision blurred. Time paused, and the next moment he knew he had returned to Thone. The sounds of the alien city floated up to him and he stirred. He grasped the sides of his coffinlike bed with fingers that had lost their sense of touch. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked about him. On one side stood Lima, though now her features were not those of the implacable, merciless mystic, but rather those of a woman in love. She smiled happily and said, At last you have returned." Bennett strove to move his tongue and lips to ask questions. but they refused, as though numbed by long inaction. He turned to his other side and gazed questioningly at the replica of Tournay who stood there. Tournay's image spoke. "We had quite a time bringing you back, Sire. But now it has been accomplished -- for good." Striving to move his throat muscles, Bennett finally forced a sound, and then words, through his lips. "Tell me," he pleaded. "Who are you? And, more important, who am I?" He turned to Lima for an answer, realizing that now she would help him if anyone would. "Doctor Tournay will explain it to you," Lima replied, indicating the dark man. Imploringly, Bennett turned back to face Tournay. "I see that very little of your memory has returned yet," Tournay said. "In a short while, everything -- all your past -- will come back to you. Until then, perhaps I had better explain to you who you are. My words will help trigger your returning memory, and speed up the process." "Please do," Bennett begged. "You are Benn Ett, Le Roy of the city-state of Thone, in the year 4526 A. D. Six months ago, the strain of governing the city began to undermine your health. Acting under my advice, you de72 cided to take a somnorest cure. "This rest cure," the doctor continued, "is quite standard practice in our time. We had a little difficulty bringing you out of it at the end of six months. Evidently your somno-existence must have been very pleasant." "Do you mean that the existence I remember was merely an induced figment of my imagination?" "Yes. You see, the best rest that can be given a mind is to give it not sleep, but pleasant work. Therefore, under my manipulation, you were given a pseudo-existence in a past era of history. You were led to conceive yourself as occupying a position, which, after close study, I deduced would be the most suitable and relaxing for you." "But if that is true, why did my dream have to end so unpleasantly -- I might say, so nearly fatally?" Bennett demanded. "The more successful I am in choosing a pleasant existence for a patient in the somno, the more difficult it is to bring him out of it," the doctor replied. "Your unconscious mind, realizing how happy you were in your simulated existence, and how it would have to return to the rigor and stress which unnerved it before, fought with all its strength to remain where the somno had placed it. "The usual practice in bringing a patient back to reality is for the doctor to enter the dream and convince him, by whatever means may be necessary, to return. Sometimes, however, the patient is so firmly tied to his somno-existence that drastic measures must be used. This is usually done by means of making the somno-existence so anxietyproducing that the patient is glad to return. "Your particular release was one of the most difficult that I have ever encountered. In fact, I was unable to bring you back myself, and asked your wife, Lima, to enter the somno with me and help force you to return." Bits of recollection, which had been edging into Bennett's memory, burst through in full force, and he remembered. It was true. He was Benn Ett, be Roy of the city-state of Thone. He turned to Lima and, as he read the glad light in her eyes, he knew that she had witnessed the return of his complete memory. "Welcome home," she said. 73 Lover Wfiaf a post The climate was grand, fhe service a dream -- maybe too much of one. Was that why no man was allowed to stay there longer than six months? 74 when you're near me T HE silvery ship came rushing in backward through the veils of broken cloud, tobogganing down the atmosphere of Station Four. Fires of deceleration jetted red from the reactor ports, roaring their hurricane thrust against the clutch of gravity. Air thickened; the glittering rocket speck slid easier, settling down like a parachuting missile. Sunlight splashed its metal sides with light and the blue ocean waters billowed wide to swallow it. The ship dipped in a wide arc and backed down toward the reddish-green-clad land. Inside its tiny cabin, the three men lay strapped and waiting for the shock of contact. Their eyes were closed, their hands tight and blood-drained. Muscle blocks struggled against the drag. The ground swept up. The ship settled hard on its rear braces, trembling. Then, finally, it stood motionless and silent, successfully navigated through scores of light years of vacuum night. A quarter mile away were the 75 warehouse, village and house. 4 record. Station Four, the Three-Moon Psycho Ward. David Lin dell knew it; all the Wentner men knew and wondered. Wentner's Interstellar Trading Company put a man on other stations, for two years at a clip. Here on Four it was only for six months. Why? Because it was critical. Why? Nobody could stand the place longer than six months. Why? It always came to "why"? "But like I always say," Lindell said, "it's no use worrying myself." JJe said it to Martin, the ship's co-pilot, as the two of them trudged across the wide meadow toward the distant compound, carrying Lindell's luggage. "You have the right idea," said Martin. "Don't worry yourself." "That's what I always say," said Lindell. "They're paying me enough and they have to take care of me if anything happens. Its their headache." They passed the silent gargantuan warehouse. The sliding doors were half open and, inside, Lindell could see the concrete floor empty and sunlight filtering bright ribbons through the skylight. Martin told him the cargo ship had emptied it out a few weeks before. Lindell grunted and shifted his luggage. "Where are the workers?" he asked. Martin gestured toward the native village about three hundred yards away. There was no sound from the low-slung white dwellings methodically arranged to form three sides of a rectangle. The windows blinked fiercely in the sunlight. "Guess they're sacked down," Martin judged. "They sleep a lot when work is done. You'll see them tomorrow when shipments start coming in again." "Got their families with them?" Lindell asked. "Nope." "Thought it was company pol" 99 icy. "Not here. The Gnees don't have much family life. Too few men and practically all of them pretty dumb." "Great," Lindell said. "Dandy." He shrugged. "Well, it's no use worrying myself about it." While they were on the stairs to the hallway of the house, he asked Martin where Corrigan was. "He went home with the cargo ship," Martin said. "The company allows that once in a while. There's nothing to do here anyway after the goods are picked up." 76 "Oh," said Lindell. "What's this door?" He kicked it open and looked in at the combination living roomlibrary. "All the comforts of," he said. "More," said Martin, looking over Lindell's shoulder. "Over there you have a movie projector and a tape recorder." "Swell," Lindell said. "I can talk to myself legal." Then he grimaced. "Let's dump these bags. My arms are falling off." They shuffled down the hall and Lindell glanced into the stnall 'kitchen as they passed. It was porcelain-paneled and well kept, "Can this Gnee woman cook?" he asked. "From what I hear," said Martin, "you'll be packing it in like a king." "Glad to hear it. Incidentally, you got any idea why they call this joint the ThreeMoon Psycho Ward?" "Who calls it?" "The boys back on Earth." "The boys are all wet. You'll like it here." "But why is it only a six month stint?" "I don't know -- maybe the company doesn't want its help to stay here for good," said Martin. "Here's your bedroom." A S they entered, the Gnee woman was making the bed,  her back to the door. Tht thumped down the bags and sh turned slowly, unalarmed o startled. LindelPs hands twitched Oh, well , he thought, I've seen worse in my day. She wore a heavy robe fastened at the neck and falling to the floor like a truncated cone of cloth. All he could see was her head. It was a squat coarsely grained head, pink and hairless -- like the mottled belly of an expecting chihuahua, he decided. For ears, there were cavities on the sides of her flat chinless face. Her nose was a stub, singlenostriled. Hei lips were thick and monkeylike outlining a small circle of mouth Hello, Lover, Lindell decided not to say. She came across the room quietly and he blinked at her eyes. Then she placed a moist, spongy hand in his. "Hya," he said. "She can't hear," Martin said. "Telepathic." "That's right, I forgot." Hello, he thought, and Hello came back the answering welcome. It is good to have you. "Thanks," he said. She seems like a decent kid, he thought to himself; weird but homy. A question touched his brain like a timid hand. "Yeah, sure," he said. Yes, he added in his mind.  77 "What's that?" Martin asked. "She asked if she should unpack. I think." Lindell slumped down on the bed. "Ah," he said, "this I like." He pushed exploring fingers into the mattress. "Say, how do you know it's a she?" he asked when he and Martin were walking back down the hill while the Gnee woman unpacked. "The robe. The males don't wear robes." "That's all?" Martin looked away. "A few other things of absolutely no interest to you." They moved into the living room and Lindell tried out the easy chair for size. He leaned baJt and stroked the arms with satisfied fingers. "Critical or not," he said, "this station has 'em all beat for comfort." He sat there, momentarily remembering the woman's eyes. Thty had seemed huge, covering a full third of her face, like big glass saucers with dark cup rings for pupils. And they were moist; bowls of liquid. He shrugged and let it go. So what, he thought, it's nothing, "Hah? What?" he asked, hearing Martin's voice. 1 said be careful." Martin was holding up a shiny gas pistol. "This is loaded," he warned. "Who needs it?" "You won't. Just standard equipment." Martin dropped it back in the desk drawer and shoved the drawer back in. "And you know where all your books are," he said. "The warehouse office is set up like all the other station offices." Lindell nodded. "I won't get lost." Martin glanced at his watch. "Well, I have to be going. Let's see," he continued, as he and Lindell started for the door, "anything else to tell you? You know the rule about not harming the people, of course." "Who's gonna harm them? Whoops!" They'd almost knocked her over as they exited from the room. She jumped back one more bouncy step and stared at them, eyes wide and frightened. "Take it easy, kiddo," Lindell soothed, "What's up?" Eat? The thought cringed before him like a beggar at the back door of his mind. He pursed his lips and nodded. "You took the words right out of my head." He looked at her and concentrated. Ill be back as soon as I walk the co-pilot to his ship. Make something good. She nodded violently and rushed toward the kitchen. ' "Where's she off to like a bat?" Martin asked curiously, as they 78 I turned for the stairs. "She's going to rustle me a snack," Lindell chuckled as they descended. "That's what I call service de luxe. This telepathy is okay, you know? At other stations it was either learn half the language to get a ham sandwich or try and teach 'em English so I wouldn't starve. Either way I really had to sweat for my supper until things got settled." He looked pleased. "This is real hot," he said. Their heavy boots crushed down the tall crisp blue grass as they approached the upright ship. Martin held out his hand. "Take it easy, Lindell. See you in six months." "Right enough. Give old man Wentner a kick in the pants for me." "Will do." He watched the co-pilot dwindle in size, ascending the metal ladder to the hatchway. A midget Martin pulled himself into the ship and clanged the metal port shut. Lindell waved back at the tiny figure at the port and then turned and walked away to escape the blast. He stood on a hill underneath the heavy scarlet foliage of a tree. Inside the ship's belly there was a liquid cough, a rush of exploding gases. He watched the ship hang for a moment on its flaming exhaust and then flash up into the green-blue sky, leaving scorched ground in its wake. The next instant it was gone. He walked in lazy strides back toward the house, gazing appreciatively at the profusion of livid plants and flowers in the meadow around him, bulbous insects hanging over them. He took off his jacket and let it hang from one hand as he walked. The sun felt good on his lean back. "Boys," he said to the fragrant air, "you're all wet." Hi "HE great blazing sun was almost gone, spraying the sky red with the blood of its cyclic dying. Soon the three moons would rise -- guaranteed to drive insane a man looking for a shadow he could call his own. Lindell sat at the living room window, gazing out over the countryside. You couldn't heat it, he thought; for air or climate or all the things that grew in Earthpaling technicolor. Nature outdid herself in this tuckedaway corner of the Galaxy. He sighed and stretched, wondering about supper. Drink? He started, chopping a yawn in half, and drew his fingers together so fast that the knuckle bones crackled. He saw her standing at his side offering a tray with a glass 79 on it. He reached for it, feeling his heart placate itself after the initial jolt. "I'd knock or something," he suggested. The big eyes were elliptical now. They stared at him without comprehension. "Well, let it go," he said, after a sip of the warm, tangy liquid. He smacked his lips and took another sip, a long one. "Damn good," he said. "Thanks, Lover." He blinked at himself. That brings a guy up short, he decided. Lover? Of all the unlikely names in the Universe He glanced at her with a chuckle bubbling up in his throat. k She hadn't moved. Her face was screwed up into what he assumed was a smile. But her mouth wasn't designed for smiling. "Hey, when are we eating?" he asked, feeling an edge uncomfortable under the unmoving gaze of her watery eye globes. She turned and hurried to the door. There she turned. All ready already, he got the the message. He grinned, downed the drink, got up and followed her eager shuffle down the dim hallway. Some time later he pushed sway the plate with a sigh and leaned back in the chair. "That's what I call good," he said. Like a hidden spring, he felt her pleasure well up in his mind. Lover thanks you. She certainly picked up the name fast, he thought. She looked at him, eyes wide. Was she, trying to smile again? he wondered. To him the expression looked like all her others  -- the facial poses of an idiot. He thought she was smiling, though, because of the thoughts that accompanied the expression. Then he found his eyes involuntarily watering in empathy and he turned his head, blinking. A trifle nervously, he dumped a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee and stirred. He could still feel her gaze on him. A twinge of displeasure marred his thoughts and she turned away abruptly. That's better, he thought, and felt all right again. "Hey, tell me, Lover," he started to say. Well, might as well get used to it, he figured. You have a husband? Her returned thoughts were confused. A mate? he reworded. Oh, yes. In the worker's village? They have no mates, she said, and he thought he sensed a note of hauteur in her reply. He shrugged and took a sip of coffee. "Well," he said, "one sat0 isfied worker would drive the rest of 'em crazy anyway. They'd be biting their nails if they have nails. And on that note -- good night." In bed he sat writing in his muchused diary. Between its battered covers were inscribed the sparse comments he had made on half a dozen different planets. This was his seventh station. "My lucky number," he paragraphed in blue ink. Again no sound. To sleep? His pen skiddled and spat out three fat blots. He looked up and saw her with the tray again. "Yeah," he said. Yeah, Thanks, Lover. But, look, will you just let me know when you He stopped, seeing that it was hopeless. "This will make me sleep?" he asked. Oh, yes, was the reply. He took a sip, looking down at the inkblotted page. Just star fed tt anyway, he thought; no loss of priceless literature. He ripped out the page and crumpled it in one hand. "This is good stuff," he said, nodding his head toward the glass. He held up the paper. Throw it away, hah? Throw away? she asked. "That's right," he said. "Now clear out. What in hell are you doing in a man's boudoir anyway?" She scuttled across the floor and he grinned as she closed the door quietly behind herself. Finishing the drink, he set it down on the bedside table and turned off the lamp. He settled back on the soft pillow with a sigh. Critical, he thought in drowsy satisfaction. Nuts . Good night. He opened his heavy-lidded eyes and looked around. There was no one in the room. He sank back. Good night. He raised up on one elbow, squinting into the darkness. Good night. "Oh," he said. "Good night, yourself." The thoughts abated. He fell back again and made his mouth a tooth-edged cave with yawning. "How about that?" he muttered thickly, turning on his side. "Absolutely no mirrors. See? Nothin' up my sleeves. Howboutha He had a dream. The dream covered him with sweat. house with her farewells tugging at his brain, and headed across the grounds for the warehouse. Already, he saw, the Gnee men were formed in a moving line, carrying bundles on their heads. They marched into the warehouse, deposited their bur81 t den on the concrete and had it checked off by a Gnee foreman who stood in the center of the floor, holding a clipboard thick with paper-thin vouchers. As Lindell approached, the men all bowed and looked more cowed as they hastened on their rounds. He noticed that their heads were flatter than Lover's, a little more darkly tinted, and with smaller eyes. Their bodies were broad and thick-muscled. They do look stupid, he thought. As he came up to the man who was doing the checking and sent out an unanswered thought, he saw that they weren't telepathic either. Or maybe didn't want to be.  "How doody," said the man in a squeaky voice. "I check. You check?" "That's okay," Lindell said, pushing back the clipboard. "Just bring it into the office when the first batch is all in." "What, hah?" said the man. Jeez, are you a case, Lindell thought: "Bring this," he said, tapping the clipped sheaf of papers, "Bring to office." He pointed again. "Bring to me me! When goods are all in." The man's splotchy face lit up with a look of eager stupidity and he nodded brightly. Lindell patted his shoulder. Good boy. rasped his mind. I bet you're dynamite in a crisis. He headed for the office, gritting his teeth. Inside, he shut the plastiglass door behind him and looked around the office. It was all the same as he remembered from other stations, except for the cot in one corner. Don't tell me I have to sleep out here nights, he thought with a groan. He moved closer. On the flat soil-cased pillow was the imprint of a head. He picked up a light brown hair. And what in the hell is this? he wondered. Under the cot he found a belt without a buckle. On the wall by the cot there were violent scratches, as though a man in fever had tried to get out of the office the hard way. He stared at them. The joint is haunted, he concluded with a vague shake of his head. Then he turned away with a shrug. No use worrying myself, he thought. I got six months to go and nothing's going to get me down. He sat down quickly before the desk and dragged the heavy station log before himself. He flipped open the heavy cover and started reading from the beginning. The first entries were twenty years dry. They were signed Jefferson Winters or, a little later, a hasty Jeff. At the end of six months and fiftytwo closely 82 packed pages, Lindell found page 53 covered with a floridly penned message, "Station Four, good-by forever!" Jeff didn't seem to have had any difficulties adjusting to the life there. Lindell shifted back in the creaking chair and pulled the heavy book on his lap with a sigh of boredom. It was after the first replacement's second month that the entries started to get ragged. There were blurred words, hurried scrawling, mistakes deleted and re-done. Some of the errors apparently had been corrected much later by still another replacement. It was that way through the next four hundred or so sleepinducing pages; a sorry chain of flaws and eventual correction. Lindell flipped through them wearily without the slightest interest in their content. Then he reached the entries signed Bill Corrigan and, with a blinking yawn, he straightened himself up, propped the book on the desk and paid closer attention. Thej' were the same as in every case before, excluding the first one -- efficient beginnings declining markedly to, increased wildness, the penmanship erring more extravagantly with each month until, at last, it became almost illegible. He found a few blatantly miscalculated additions which he corrected in his careful hand. Corrigan's writing, he noted, . broke off in the middle of a word one afternoon. And for the last month and a half of Corrigan's stay, there were nothing but blank pages. He thumbed through them carelessly, shaking his head slowly Have to admit it, he thought. I don't get it. through twilight and, later, at supper, he began to get the sensation that Lover's thoughts were somehow alive, like microscopic insects crawling in and out among the fissures of his brain. Sometimes they barely moved; other times they leaped excitedly. Once, when he became a little irritated with her staring, the thoughts were like invisible suppliants pawing weepily at his mind. What was worse, he realized while reading in bed, the sensation occurred even when she wasn't in the same room with him. It was disconcerting enough to feel an endless stream of thoughts flowing into him white she was close; this remote control business was just a little too much for his taste. Hey, how aboett it? he tried to reason her away good-naturedly. But all he got back was the picture of her looking at him wideeyed and uncomprehending. "Ah, nuts," he muttered and tossed his book on the bedside table. Maybe that' s it, he thought, settling down for the night; this telepathy gimick. Maybe that .vas what got the other men. Well, lot me, he vowed. I just won't sorry myself about it. And he .urned out the lamp, said good night to the air and went to sleep. "Sleep," he muttered, unaware, only partly conscious. It wasn't sleep. Not deep enough by half. A cloudy haze submerged his mind and filled it with the same detailed scene. It telescoped and sank away in a burst. It magnified, welling up and swallowing him and everything. Lover. Lover. The echo of a shriek in a long black corridor. The robe fluttering close by. He saw her pale features. "No," he said, "stay away. Far, close, beyond, upon." He cried out. "No. No. NO!" He jolted up in the darkness with a choking grunt, eyes full open. He stared groggily around the empty bedroom, his thoughts broiling. He reached out in the darkness and flicked on the lamp. Hurriedly, he stuck a cigarette between his lips and lay slumped against the headboard, blowing out clouds of curling smoke. He raised his hand and saw that it shook. He muttered words without sense. Then his nostrils twitched and his lips drew back in revulsion. What the hell died? he thought. There was a heavy saccharine odor in the air, getting worse every second. He tossed off the covers. At the foot of the bed he found them -- a thick pile of livid purple flowers arranged as an offering. He looked at them a moment and then bent over to pick them up and throw them away. He drew back, gasping, as a thorn punctured 'his right thumb. He pressed out bright blood drops and sucked the wound, his brain assailed by the thickening smell of the ugly blooms. T'S very nice of you, he sent her the message, but no more flowers. She looked at him. She doesn't get it, he knew. "Do you understand?" he asked. Floods of affection gurgled over the layers of his brain like syrup. He stirred his coffee restlessly and the transfer eased as though she were determined not to offend him. The kitchen was silent except for the clink of his silver on the breakfast dishes and the slight 84 whispering rustle of her robe. He gulped down coffee and stood up to leave. I'll eat lunch around I know. Her thought cut into his, mildly commanding. He grinned a little to himself as he headed down the hall. Her telepathed message had come with an almost motherlike chiding. Then, crossing the grounds, he recalled the dream again and the departing grin emptied his features of amusement. All morning he wondered irritably what made the Gnee men so stupid. If they dropped a bundle, it was a project to pick it up again. They're like brainess cows, he thought, watching them through the office windows as they plodded through their tasks, eyes dull and unblinking, their thick shoulders sloping inward. He knew definitely now that they weren't telepathic. He'd tried several times to give them orders with his mind alone and there was no receipt of message. They reacted only to loudly repeated words of two syllables or, preferably, less. And they reacted moronically at that. In the middle of the morning he looked up from the backlog of paper work that Corrigan had left and realized, with some shock, that her thoughts were reaching him all the way from the house. And yet they weren't thoughts he could translate into words. They were just sensations, amorphously present. He got the feeling that she was checking, sending out exploratory beams now and again to see if all was well with him. The first few times it did no more than amuse him: he chuckled softly and went back to his work. But then the proddings assumed an annoyingly regular time pattern and he began to squirm in his chair. He found himself becoming rigidly erect and anticipating them seconds before they came. By late morning he was repulsing them consciously, tossing his pen on the desk and ordering her angrily to leave him alone when he worked. Her thoughts would break off contritely -- and soon come back again, like creeping things that stole upon him, insinuating and beyond insult. His nerves began to fray a little. He left the office and prowled the warehouse floor, tearing open bundles and checking goods with impatient fingers. The thoughts followed him around faithfully, 'How doody," said the Gnee foreman every time Lindell passed, making him angrier yet. Once he straightened up suddenly over a bundle arid said 85 loudly, "Go away!" The foreman jumped a foot in the air. His pencil and clipboard went flying, and he hid behind a pillar and looked fearfully at Lindell. Lindell pretended not to notice. sat thinking, the .open log book before him. No wonder the Gnee men didn't telepath, he thought. They knew what was good for them. Then he looked out the window at the plodding line of workers. What if they weren't just avoiding telepathy? What if they were incapable of it; had once held the ability and, because of it, hd been broken to their present state of witless stolidity? He thought of what Martin had said about the women outnumbering the men. And a phrase entered his brain -- matriarchy by mind. The phrase offended him, but he was suddenly afraid that it might be true. It would explain why the other men had cracked. For if the women were in control, it might well be that, in their inherent lust for dominance, they made no distinction between their own men and the men from Earth. A man is a man is a man. He twisted angrily at the idea of possibly being considered on a level with the dolts who lived in the village. He stood up abruptly. 7'm not hungry , he thought, not at all . But I'm ioing hack to the house and order her to make me lunch and let her know I'm not hungry either. I'll make her used to being dominated herself and then she'll get no chance to pick at me. No bug-eyed female Gnee, by God, is going to get me down ! Then he blinked and turned away quickly when he realized that he was staring at the wild pattern of scratches on the far office wall, and the belt without a buckle that still curled limply underneath the cot. his brain tissues with claws of razor. Sweat covering him, he tossed on the bed with a groan and was suddenly awake, staring into the darkness. He thought he saw something at the foot of the bed. He closed his eyes and shook his head and looked again. The room was empty. He felt mind-drenching thoughts recede like some alien fog. His fists contracted angrily. She's been at me while I slept, he thought. Goddam her hide, she's been at me. He pushed back the covers and crawled to the foot of the bed nervously. He couldn't see them, but the cloying fumes Undulated up from 4 ; i if A  f f n t-t ft 4 if ' 6 the floor like erected serpents slithering into his nostrils. Gagging, he slumped down on the mattress, his stomach wrenched. Why? His brain mumbled over and over. My God , why? Angrily, he threw the flowers away in her sight and the thoughts pleaded and showered over him like raindrops, "I said no, didn't I?" he yelled at her, Then he sat down at the table and controlled himself as well as he could. I've got a long way to go, he told his will. Ease off, ease off. Now he was sure he knew why it was only six months; that would be more than enough. But I won't crack,  he commanded himself. It's a cinch she isn't going to crack, so conserve yourself. She's too stupid to crack, he thought deliberately, hoping she'd pick it up. She apparently did, for her shoulders slumped dejectedly all at once. And, during breakfast, she circled him like a timorous wraith, keeping her face averted and her thoughts aloof. He found himself almost sorry for her then. It probably wasn't her fault. It was just an inborn trait among the Gnee women. Then he realized that her thoughts were at him again, tender and gratefully maudlin. He tried to neutralize himself and ignore them as they sought to break through his apathy like honeyed picks. All day he worked hard and made payments in spices and grain to the Gnee foreman. He wondered if the payments would go eventually to the women -- wherever they were. "I'm taping my voice," he dictated later that night. "I want to hear myself talking so I cn forget her. There's no one else here to talk to: I have to talk to myself. A sad case. Well, here goes. "Here I am on Station Four, folks, having a wonderful time and wish you were here instead of me. Oh, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong. But I guess I know what knocked out Corrigan and the poor bastards before him. It was Lover and her cannibal mind eating them up. But I'll tell you this, cousins; it's not going to eat me up. That much you can put bets on. Lover isn't going to "No, I didn't call you! Come on, get out of my life, will you? Go to a movie or something. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, go to bed then. Just leave me alone. Alone. "There. That for her. She'll have to go some to get me clawing at the wallpaper." But he carefully locked the door to his room when he went  87 to bed. And he groaned in his sleep because of the same nightmare and his limbs thrashed and alt peace and rest were crowded out. He twisted into wakefulness in mid-morning and stumbled up to check the door. He fumbled at the lock with heavy fingers. Finally his thickened centers divined the fact that the door was still locked and he went back to bed in a weaving line and fell on it into a stupored sleep. When he woke up in the morning, there were flowers at the foot of his bed, luxuriantly purple and foul-smelling. The door was still locked. because he left the kitchen in revulsion when she called him dear. No more flowers. I promise, cried her pursuing thoughts. He locked himself in the living room and sat at the desk, feeling sick. Get hold of yourself ! he ordered his system, clasping his hands tightly and holding his teeth firmly clenched. Eat? She was outside the door; he knew it. He closed his eyes. Go away, leave me alone, he told her. I'm sorry, dear, she said. "Stop calling me dear!" he shouted, slamming his fist on the desk surface. As he twisted in the chair, his belt buckle caught on the drawer handle and it jerked out. He found himself staring down at the shiny gas pistol. Almost unconsciously he reached down and touched its slick barrel. He shoved in the drawer with a convulsive movement. None of that! He looked around suddenly, feeling alone and free. He got up and hurried to the window. Down below, he saw her hurrying across the grounds with a basket on her arm. She's going for vegetables, he thought. But what made her leave so suddenly? Of course. The pistol. She must have gotten his thoughts of violent intent. He sighed and calmed down a little. I've still got cards in my hand, he soothed himself. While she was out, he decided to look in her room and see if he could find the shifting panel that enabled her to enter his room with the flowers. He hurried down the hall and pushed open the door to her barely furnished little chamber. His brain was immediately attacked by the odor of a reeking pile of the purple flowers in one corner. He held a hand over his mouth and nose as he looked down in distaste at the living and dead blossoms. What did they represent? An offering of thoughtfulness? His S8 throat contracted. Or was it more than thoughtfulness? He grimaced at the thought and remembered that first evening when he'd dubbed her Lover. What had possessed him to choose that name from the infinity of possible names? He hoped he didn't know. He hoped he'd never know. On her couch he found a small pile of odds and ends. There was a button, a pair of broken shoe laces, the piece of crumpled paper he had told her to throw away. And a belt buckle with the initials W. C. stamped on it. There were no secret panels. He sat in the kitchen staring into an untouched cup of coffee. No way she could get in his room. W. C. -- William Corrigan. He had to fight it, keep fighting it. Time passed. Suddenly he realized that she was back in the house again. There was no sound; it was like the return of a ghost. But he knew it. A cloud of feeling preceded her, came plunging through the rooms like an excited puppy searching. Thoughts swirled. You are well? You are not angry? Lover is back -- all hastily and eagerly clutching at him. She swept into the room so quickly that his hands twitched and he upset the cup. The hot liquid splashed over his shirt and trousers as he jumped back. knocking over the chair. She put down the basket and got a towel. He stood there, lips drained of color as she patted the stains dry. She'd never been so close to him. She'd never actually touched him before except for that first revolting handshake. There was an aroma about her; it made his chest heave painfully. And all the time, her thoughts caressed his mind as her hands seemed to be caressing his body. There , there. I am here with you, David dear. Almost in horror, he stared at her spongy pink skin, her huge eyes, her tiny wound of a mouth. And, in the office that morning, he made three straight mistakes in the log book and tore out the whole page and hurled it across the room with a choking cry of rage. ing or threatening. He tried to raze his mental ground so that her thoughts could not find domicile there. If he relaxed his mind enough, her thoughts flowed through and out, perhaps taking part of his will as they left, but he had to risk that. And if he worked hard and crowded his head with stodgy banks of figures, it kept her at a distance and his hands did not tremble so badly. Maybe I should sleep in the 89 office, he thought. Then he found Corrigan's note. It was on a slip of paper stuck away in the log book, hidden white on white. He only found it because he was going through the pages one at a time, reciting the dates in a loud voice to keep his mind filled. "God help me," read the note, black and jagged-lettered. "Lover comes through the walls!" Lindell stared. "I saw it myself," attested the words. "I'm going out of my mind. Always that damn animal mind tugging and tearing at me. And now I can't even shut away her body. I slept out here, but she came anyway." T,indell read it again and it was a wind fanning the fires of terror. Through the walls. The words agonized him. Was it possible? It was Corrigan, then, who had named her Lover. From the very start, the relationship had been on her terms. Lindell had had nothing to say about it. "Lover," he muttered, and her thoughts enveloped him suddenly like a bat's wings swooping down from the sky. He flung up his arms and cried out, "Leave me alone!" And, as her phantom mind slipped off, he had the sense that it was with less timidity, with the patience such as a man knowing his own great strength can afford to display. He sank back on the chair, exhausted suddenly, depleted with fighting it. He crumpled the note in his right hand, thinking of the scratches on the wall behind him. And he saw in his mind Corrigan tossing on the cot, burning with fever, rearing up with a shriek of horror to see her standing before him. But then? The scene was dark. He rubbed a shaking hand over his face. Don't crack, he said to himself. But it was more a frightened entreaty than a command. Wasting fogs of premonition flooded over him in chilling waves. She comes through the walls. That night again, he poured down the bathroom sink the potion she had made. He locked the door and, in the lightless room, he squatted in one corner, peering and waiting, lungs bellowing only because he forced himself to remember to breathe. The. thermostat lowered the heat. The floorboards got icy and his teeth started chattering. I'm not going to bed, he vowed angrily. He didn't know why it was suddenly the bed that frightened him. I don't know, he forced the words through his brain, because he felt vaguely, that he did know and he didn't want to admit it, even for a second. 90 But, after hours of futile waiting, he had to straighten up with a snapping of joints and stumble back to bed. There he crawled under the blankets and lay trembling, trying to stay awake. She'll come while I'm asleep , he thought. I mustn't sleep. When he woke up in the morning, there were flowers on the floor for him. And that was another day before a mass of days that sank crushed into the lump of months. he thought, when it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. When shocks are like scalpels picking and jabbing at delicate ganglia until they have lost all feeling. Yet, though it was no longer terror, it was worse. For his nerves were raw and bleeding a hemophilia of rage. He fought his battles to the dregs of seconds, gaunt-willed, shouting her off, firing lances of hate from his despairing mind, tortured by her surrenders that were her victories. She always came back; like an enraging cat, rubbing endless sycophantic sides against him, filling him with thoughts of yes, admit it! he screamed to himself through midnight struggles. Thoughts of love. And there was the undercurrent, the promise of new shock that would topple his already shaking edifice. It needed only that; an added push, another stab of the blade, one more drop of the shattering hammer. The shapeless threat hung over him. He waited for it, poised for it a hundred times an hour, especially at night. Wait. Waiting, j And sometimes, when he thought  he knew what it was he was waiting for, the shock of admission made him shudder and made him want to claw at walls and break things and run until the blackness swallowed him. If he could only forget her for a while, just a little while, it would be all right. He mumbled it to himself as he set up the inovie projector. She begged from the kitchen, Can  see? "No!" Now all his replies, worded or thought, were like the snapping retorts of a jangled old man. If only the six months would end. That was the problem. The months were not moving fast enough. And time was like her -- not to be reasoned with or intimidated. There were many reels of film on the wall shelf, but his hand 1 reached up without hesitation and picked out one. He didn't notice it; his mind was calloused to suggestion. He adjusted the reel on the spindle and turned out the lights. He sat down with a tired groan as the flickering milky light cone shot out from the lens, throwing pictures on the screen, A lean darkbearded man was posing, arms crossed, white teeth showing in an artificial smile. He came closer to the camera. The sun flashed, blurring the film a second. Black screen. Title: "Picture of Me." The man, high-cheekboned, bright-eyed, stood laughing soundlessly out from the screen. He pointed to his side and the cawiera swung around. Lindell sat up sharply. It was the station. Apparently it was fall, for, as the camera swept past the house, the village, jerking a moment as though changing hands, he saw the trees surrounded by heaps of dead leaves. He sat there shivering, waiting for something, he didn't know what. The screen blacked. Another title roughly etched in white. Jeff in the Office." The man peered at the camera, an idiotic smile on his face. White skin accentuated by the immaculate black outline of his beard. Fadeout, in. The man doing a jig around the empty warehouse floor, hands poised delicately in the air, his dark hair bouncing wildly on his skull. Another title flashing on the screen. Lindell stiffened in his seat, his breath cut off abruptly. "Lover." repellent in black and white. She was standing by his bedroom window, her face a mask of delight. He could tell it was delight now. Once he would have said she looked like a maniac, her mouth twisted like a living scar, her grotesque eyes staring. She spun and her robe swirled out. He saw her puffy ankles and his stomach muscles grew rock taut. She approached the camera. He saw filmy eyelids slide down over her eyes. His hands began to tremble violently. It was his dream. It made him sick. It was his dream to the detail. Then it had never been a dream; not from his own mind. A sob tore at his throat. She was undoing the robe. Here it is! gibbered his mind in a panic. He whimpered and reached out shakily to turn off the projector. No! It was a cold command in the darkness. Watch me, she ordered. He sat bound in a vise of terror, staring in sick fascination as 92 the robe slid from her neck, pulled down over her round shoulders. She twisted sensuously. The robe sank into a heavy swirling heap on the floor. He screamed, flung out an arm that swept into the burning projector. It crashed down on the floor. The room was night. He struggled up and lurched across the room. Nice? Nice? The word dug at him mercilessly as he fumbled for the door. He found it, rushed into the hall. Her door opened and she stood in the half light, the robe hanging from one spongy shoulder. He jolted to a halt. "Get out of here!" he yelled. No. He made a convulsive move for her, hands out like rigid claws. The sight of her pink, moist flesh spun him away. Kes? her mind suggested. It seemed as if he heard it spoken in a sly rising voice. "Listen!" he cried, reaching out for the door to his room. "Listen, you have to go, do you understand? Go to your mate." He twisted back in utter horror.  am with him now, her message had said. The thought paralyzed him. He stared, open-mouthed, heart pounding in slow, gigantic beats as the robe slipped over her shoulders and started down her arms. He whirled with a cry and slammed the door behind him. His fingers shook on the lock. Her thoughts were a wailing in his mind. He shook in fright and sickness and knew it was no good because he couldn't lock her out. " ing in his brain. They lay on their backs in a circle and kicked at the inside of his skull. They grabbed juicy blobs of gray in their dirty paws and they squeezed. He rolled on his side with a groan. I'll go crazy, he said. Like Corrigan , like all oi them but the first one -- that slimy one who started it all; who added  new and hideous warp to the corru gation of her dominating mind -- who had named her Lover because he meant it. Suddenly he sat up with a gasp of terror, staring at the foot of the bed. She comes through the walls, howled his brain. Nothing there, his eyes saw. His fingers clutched at the sheets. He felt sweat dripping off his brow and rolling down the embankment of his nose. He lay back. Up again! He whimpered like a frightened child. A cloud of blackness was falling over him. He groaned, "No," in the blackness. 93 No use. He whined. Sleep. Sleep. The word throbbed, swelled and depressed in his brain. This was the time. He knew it, knew it, knew The blade falling, sanity decapitated and twitching bloody in the basket. No! He tried to push himself up, but he couldn't. Sleep. A black tide of night hovering, tracking. Sleep. He fell on the pillow, pushed up weakly on one elbow. "No." His lungs were crusted. "No." He struggled. It was too much. He screamed a thick bubbling scream. She threw his will aside, snapped and futile. She was using all her strength now and he was de-enervated, beaten. He thudded back on the pillow, glassy-eyed and limp. He moaned weakly and his eyes shut, opened, shut, opened, shut The dream again. Insane. Not a dream. When he woke up, there were no flowers. The courtship was ended. He gaped blankly and unbelievingly at the imprint of a body beside him on the bed. It was still warm and moist. H E laughed out loud. He wrote curse words in his diary. He wrote them in tall black letters. holding the pencil like a knife. He wrote them in the log book too. He tore up vouchers if they were not the right color. His entries were crooked, lines of figures like wavy-numbered tendrils. Sometimes he didn't care about that. Mostly he didn't notice. He prowled the filled warehouse behind locked doors, redeyed and muttering. He clambered up on the bundles and stared out through the skylight at the empty sky. He was lighter by fifteen pounds, unwashed. His face was black with wiry growth. He was going to have an immaculate beard. She wanted it. She didn't want him to wash or shave or be healthy. She called him Jeff dear. You can't fight that , he told himself. You can't win because yqu lose. If you advance you are retreating because, when you are too tired to fight, she cornea back and she fakes your body and your soul. That was why he whispered to the warehouse so no one would hear, "There is a thing to do. And that was why, at night, he sneaked to the living room and put the gas pistol in his pocket. Never harm the Gnees. Well, that was wrong. It was kill or be killed. That's why Vm taking the pistol to bed with me. That's why Pm stroking if as 7 stare up at 95 the ceiling. Yes, this is it. This is my rock to rest on through the daynights. And he turned over plans as an animal snuffles over flat stones to find bugs for supper. Days. Days. Days. He whispered, "Kill her." He nodded and smiled to himself and patted the cool metal. "You're my friend," he said. "You're my only friend. She has to die. We all know that." He made lots of plans and they were all the same one. He killed her a million times in his mind, in secret chambers of his mind that he had discovered and opened ; where he could crouch clever and undisturbed while he macg his plans. He walked and looked at the worker's village. Animals. I'm not going to end up like you. I'm not going to I'm not going to and when I do I'm not I am , office desk, eyes wide, slaver jrunning over his lips. He held the pistol tight in his palsied hand. He flung open the office door and staggered over the concrete, through the lanes between roofhigh stacks. His mouth was so tight that his clamped jaws hurt. He held the pistol pointing. He kicked up the catch and (dragged back one heavy door. He plunged out into the hot sunlight and broke into a run. Wisps of terror licked out from the house. He thought of murder with harder, more savage joy. He ran faster. He fell down because his legs had no feeling. The pistol went flying. He crawled to it and tenderly brushed off the dust. He stood up dizzily and started to hobble. He was hearing things -- not Lover's thoughts, for once. He looked up and blinked and knew he was going insane It was a cargo ship. The cargo ship. Only, of course, it couldn't be. He dropped the pistol and slumped down beside it, plucking at blue grass with an idiot intensity that he knew was like the Gnee men's. He was careful not to watch the ship as it seemed to come down and the hatches made an impossibly convincing clang and men appeared to climb out. "Go away," he said to the illusion of a man standing beside him. "You're not here. The six months aren't over." His voice was quite normal, except that it broke into giggles and sobs while he had a fist fight with the air. "You'll be all right" the man apparently said, and he felt something that might have been an insect bite, though he thought it was the man pricking him with a 96 hypo of sedative. Two other men came with a stretcher and a sheet that they wrapped him tightly in, and they began carrying him, shrieking and battling, toward the mirage ship. "You can't take me away!" he shouted, "I've got to kill Lover first!" "It wouldn't do any good," the first man said. "There are a lot more where she came from -- one at a time for every guy we station here, it looks like." "She comes through the walls!" Lindell screamed. "That's what you get to believe," said the man soothingly. "It must be pretty fierce. But that's all over now. You're going back home." Lindell tried to fight free of the sheet. "Let me at least warn the next guy!" "It wouldn't do any good. He wouldn't believe you. That's why you didn't see us take away the poor character you relieved." And then the sedative took hold and Lindell fell asleep. The dreams came, but with them was the sound of rockets blasting off, and the spongy image of the Gnee woman grew smaller and smaller and less frightful. But he still smelled the livid flowers. He knew he always would. Proudly announces its new Spring list of Science 'Fiction volumes. outer-spoce adventures. Written by the field's foremost authors printed by the field's thrillers -- exciting action realistic comment and fascinating illustrations. edited by Martin Greenberg -- 3.50 Pagett -- 2 75 -- 2 .7 5 2.75 (A new Interplanetary novel by the author of Prelude to Fame) Order to day. And sen d for oirr free IlfusfraM taMog. It's yours for the asking. GRamercy 7-5578 97 devote the main section of this department to a chart f the chemical elements. Well, it won't really be a "chart" because I don't intend to waste that can be looked up in any chemistry textbook. Hence isotopes, whether natural or artificial, will not be mentioned, and not a line will be wasted on melting or boiling points, nor will there be chemical information or   J   98 electrical characteristics. All that can be found in textbooks and handbooks. What I am concerned with -- and it took a good deal of time to get this information together -- will be of no use to chemists or engineers. But it will, I hope, be interesting. I want to write about the names of the elements, what they mean and, why their discoverers proposed them. Element No. 1 is, of course, hydrogen. Nicolas Lemery of France discovered it around 1700 and suspected that water was one of its compounds. The other component of water, oxygen, element No. 16, was discovered by Joseph Priestly of England and Karl Wilhelm Scheele of Sweden some 75 years later and when it was established that elements 1 and 16 made water (at first thought to be HO) the names were tagged on. Hydor, a Greek word, means water, hence hydrogen, meaning "water-former." The other component of water seemed to be in every acid, hence the name oxygen, "acid-former." Now we know that there are acids without oxygen, but none without hydrogen. And since the oxygen atom is much heavier than the hydrogen atom, there is far more oxygen in water than hydrogen, even though the formula is In short, element No, 1 should "be called oxygen and No. 16 should be hydrogen. But it's a little late to change them around now. Element No, 2 is helium, from Helios, the Greek sun god, for the reason that it was found in the solar atmosphere first (by Jules Janssen of France in 1868) before Sir William Ramsey discovered it in the Earth's atmosphere (1895). No. 3 was named by its discoverer, Swede Johan A, Arfwedson of Sweden (1817), without noticeable thought or imagination. Lithos is Greek for "stone," the ore it came from looked like stone, hence lithium. No. 4 also got its name from the mineral in which it occurs. It happens to be green and in Latin there is a word beryllinus which means green-colored, so the element was called beryllium. Similarly, the name of No. 9 was derived from one of its minerals. The mineral was used -- and still is -- as a flux in metallurgical operations. German miners, consequently, called the mineral Fluss-spat, which became fluorspar by adaptation of the Latin word fluere, "to flow." Fluorspar is the fluoride of calcium and the element was called fluorine. There happens to be a minor and accidental justification for the name: it "flows out" of almost anything you try to keep it in. No. 10, neon, means " the new" because it obviously was new when Sir William Ramsay discovered it in 1898. But No. 11 is less obvious. You may have wondered why the chemical symbol for sodium is Na. The common English name is derived from soda, but the symbol is derived from the word Natrium , which was both common and mysterious until somebody found out that that the original is an Arabic word neter, meaning "herb-ash," as distinct from kalyun, "woodash," and accounts for the letter K as the symbol for No. 19. That K stands for the .international name kalium, but the English name was derived from pot ash, making it potassium. Both were first isolated in 1808 by ir Humphry Davy, who isolated No. 12, magnesium, at the same time. That name is from the mineral magnesia, which was named in turn after an ancient city. Similarly aluminum, No. 13, was named after its mineral, alum, while No, 14, silicon, got its name from siex, which in this case is not the trade mark of a coffee maker, but the Latin word for flint. No. 15, phosphorus, has a Greek name which is meaningful and fitting; it translates as "carrier of light." The knowledge of No. 16, sulphur, however, is so old that the meaning of its name is no longer remembered. Since No. 17, chlorine, is a greenish gas, its discoverer, Karl Wilhelm Scheele, just used the Greek word for "green" (choros) to name it. Sir William Ramsay utilized the Greek word for "sluggish" to name No. 18, argon, because it did not want to combine with anything else. No. 20, calcium, one of Sir Humphry Davy's discoveries, derives its name from the Latin calx, "burned lime." When Lars Nilson discovered No. 21 in 1879, he called it scandium, after Scandinavia, but his compatriot Baron Jons Jakob Berzelius, discoverer, among other things, of No. 22, titanium, had to justify his choice with the excuse that, in Greek mythology, the titans were the "sons of the Earth." No, 23, vanadium, was discovered and named by Nils Sefstrom of Sweden in 1830. He derived it from the Germanic goddess Vanadis, better known as Freya, for no reason except that he apparently liked the sound. No. 24, chromium, is from chromos, the Greek word for "color" or "dye"; you know what a pronounced color chromiumyellow has. But No. 25, manganese, is a puzzle. Nobody seems to know the derivation of the word, except that one commentator remarked that the mineral from which manganese is derived was wrongly called "black magnesia" for a while. Since melaa 100 is Greek for black, I could understand the connection if the element were called melanganese. Maybe it was at one time, but I have yet to find proof. In the case of No. 26, iron, we have one of the few elements which have been known for so long that their names have no derivation. The chemical symbol FE comes from the Latin ferrum and the Greek equivalent sideros can be encountered as siderite, indicating an iron meteorite. Cobalt and nickel, Nos. 27 and 28, are both German, the former meaning gnome ( Kobotd ), the latter meaning water sprite. The nasty creatures fooled the brave miners, handing them ores that looked like silver ore, but were completely worthless, since applied metallurgy had not yet progressed to the extraction of the metals. They were discovered, for the record, by two Swedes, cobalt by Georg Brandt in 1735 and nickel by Axel Cronstedt in 1754. No. 29, copper, although known since antiquity, has a name that is still traceable. The chemical symbol Cu is from the Latin name cuprum, and cuprum is in all probability derived from the island of Cyprus, which was pronounced "keeprus." No. 30, zinc, is German again, from the word Zinke, which means protrusion because it sublimed in the furnace and condensed in protrusions in the cooler parts. Nos. 31 and 32 are Gallium and Germanium; the two discoverers, Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1875) and Klemens Winkler (1886), honored their respective countries. No. 33 is arsenic, said to have been isolated first by Albertus Magnus. The name, at any event, is Greek; arsen means "strong" or "masculine." Selenium, No. 34, is one of the discoveries of Jons Jakob Berzelius and is named for the goddess of the Moon, Selene, in the Greek pantheon. I suppose he had a reason. There is a very apparent reason, though, for the name of No. 35. The Greek word bromos means "stench" and the discoverer, the Frenchman AntoineJerome Balard (1825), found out during his experiments that some of the compounds offend the nose. The name of No. 36 is Greek, too, for krypton means "hidden" and that's how Sir William Ramsay found it -- concealed among the other so-called noble gases. The names of the next few elements in the table are also simple, once you know what they mean. No. 37 is rubidium because of its ruby-red line in the spectrum; No. 38 is strontium after Strontian in County Argyll, Scotland; No, 39 is yttrium after Ytterby in 101 Sweden; and No. 40 is zirconium after the name of the gem. No. 41 was once called columbium in English-speaking countries, where students had to remember that the symbol for columbium was Nb. The origin of the symbol, the international name niobium, has now been officially accepted and columbium will hence be found only in outof-date textbooks. No. 42, its discoverer Peter Jakob Hjelm of Sweden thought in 1781, looks rather like lead. Using the Greek name molybdos, meaning lead, he called it molybdenum. No. 43 was originally called Masurium, after the landscape of Masuren in East Prussia. Butsince the two discoverers, rs. Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke, merely proved its existence while Oak Ridge actually produced it, the original name has been discarded in favor of technecium from the Greek tecbne, "skill." No. 43, discovered in 1844 by Karl Karlovitch Klaus, was also given a geographical name, ruthenium, from Ruthenia -- Russia. The interesting point is that G. W. Osann gave it the same name in 1828, sixteen years prior to actual isolation. Nos. 45 and 46 were both discovered by William Hyde Wollaston in 1803-4; No. 45 was called rhodium from the Greek word rhodos for "rose," while No. 46 was called palladium, after the then newly discovered planetoid Pallas. Silver is No. 47 and known for so long a time that the meaning of the name is lost; the symbol Ag is from the Latin name' for it, argentum. No. 48, Cadmium, is named after the mineral cadmea; No. 49, indium, has nothing directly to do with India, being derived from the indigoblue line in its spectrum -- but the name of that color is derived from the name of the plant, which in turn honors the geographical area. No. 50, tin, is one of the long known elements; the symbol Sn is from the Latin name stan num. The very similar symbol for No. 51, Sb, stands for the Latin name stibium, but the English word antimony is Latin, too. Its origin is the first two words anti monachon, "against the monks," in an edict of Frances II of France, forbidding its medicinal use by clergy. No, 52, tellurium, is from the Latin tellus for Earth; No. 53, iodine, from the Greek ioeides for the color violet; and No, 54, xenon, one of Sir William Ramsey's Greek names, means "stranger." Both No. 55 caesium (from Latin caesius, "bluish") and No. 56, barium, (from Greek barys, "heavy") seem to make no sense, for caesium looks like silver and A ll 1  t. v I   !f Jl 102 f barium is hardly heavier than aluminum. But "bluish" refers to a line in the spectrum and "heavy" refers to the mineral. The numbers 57 to 71 are the so-called rare' earth elements of which a chemist once wrote that they pursue the chemist in his dreams, that they split like amebas and that their chronology looks like a list of "begats" from the Old Testament. Their names reflect some of the unhappiness they seem to have caused. No. 57, lanthanum, is from the Greek word lanthano, which means "to escape notice." No. 58, cerium, was named in 1803 after the recently discovered planetoid Ceres (not after the goddess directly) ; No. 59, praseodymium, is Greek again, meaning "green twin." No. 60, neodymium, is also Greek: "new twin" (the former didymium had split in two). No. 61, long missing, was first called Illinium (University of Illinois), but Oak Ridge, after definite identification, changed that to promethium, from Prometheus, the mythical giver of fire. No. 62, samarium, was named by a Frenchman after the Russian mine inspector Samarski. No. 63, europium, was also named by a Frenchman, Demargay, after the continent, of course. No. 64, gadolinium, was named in honor of the Finnish chemist Gadolin; No. 65, Terbium, after Ytterby in Sweden; No. 66, dysprosium, comes from the Greek word dysprosopon , which means "difficult mask." No. 67, Holmium, is derived from Holmia, the Latin name of Stockholm; No. 68, erbium, again after Ytterby; No. 69, thulium, from Thule, the hard to identify northern land of Pytheas of Massilia. No. 70 is ytterbium, again Ytterby in Sweden! That place has a total of four elements named after it, three of them rare earths, all found in the unusually interesting mine that is located there. No. 71, lutetium, comes from Luteta, the Latin name for Paris, and No. 72, the first element after the rare earth group, is hafnium, from Kjobenhavn, the Danish spelling of Copenhagen. Its discoverer was a Hungarian, Georg von Hevesy, but he commemorated the city in which he made the discovery (in 1923). There was once, you probably remember, a mythical shade who was punished after death by being made to stand in water up to his neck, but every time he tried to bend down and quench his thirst, the water receded. When Gustaf Ekeberg found (in 1802) a metal which is insoluble in most acids, he thought of thi 101 ancient victim and named the metal after him: tantalum. Tantalus, by the way, had a daughter by the name of Niobe and she provided the name for No. 41. Tungsten is the Swedish word for "heavy stone" and was once the name of element No. 74. But its chemical symbol was W for Wolfram, which was adopted two years ago by an international congress, so tungsten is no longer correct. No. 75, rhenium, discovered by the same team which announced "masurium," got its name from the Latin Rhenus, "Rhine." No. 76 is osmium, actually not a flattering name because osme (Greek) means "bad odor." Its discoverer, the Englishmen Smithson Tennant, also discovered No. 77, iridium, which he named because of its iridescent solutions. No. 78 is platinum, a Spanish word meaning "little silver." No. 79 is gold; the Germanic word is essentially a parallel form of the word "yellow" for quite obvious reasons. The symbol Au is from the Latin name auTum. No. 80 is mercury (in German still Quecksilber), the symbol Hg coming from the old name hydrargium. No.81, thallium, derives from the Greek thallos, "green twig," Lead is No. 82 and the word is probably a variant of "load" (you used it to weigh down things, but lodestone, which is magnetic iron ore, comes from the verb "to lead"). The German name, Btei, is derived from that old Germanic word bla which means both "black" and "blue;" to this day, a German soldier will refer to bullets as "blue beans," The symbol Pb is from the Latin plumbum , which is also the root of "plumber." No. 83, bismuth, has an originally German name, which in modern rendering would read Wiesematte and denotes a "flowering meadow", a name that makes sense if you know the colorful display of a pan of hardening bismuth. Above bismuth, we get into the realm of the radioactive elements, mostly of recent discovery and with artificial names. No. 84 is polonium, so named by Madame Sklodowska-Curie after her native Poland. No. 85, first called alabamine (after the state) is now known as astatine . from the Greek astasia, "unsteady". No. 86 is radon, once called "emanation," from the Latin radius for "ray;" No. 88, radium, has the same derivation. No. 87;. discovered in 1947 by Mile. Marguerite Perey, is called franchium, and No. 89 is actinium. Of the radioactive elements, only the more stable ones. No. 90, thorium, and No. 92, uranium, have been known for a considerable time. The former 104 was discovered by Jons Jakob Berzelius and named after the Norse god Thor, the latter by Martin Heinrich Klaproth and named after the planet Uranus. No. 91 is protactinium and above 92 we have the obvious neptunium (No. 93) and plutonium (No. 94) ; americium ("made in America") as No, 95; curium (after Madame Curie) as No. 96 and, so far the heaviest, Berkelium (Berkeley, Calif.) as No. 97. As you can see, naming ele ments is an arbitrary, inaccurate and often sentimental business. Luckily, the origins quickly lose their identities and we are aware only of the properties of these basic substances, And they did, after all, need some name and these do as well as any others. How would the pilot of a ship in space recognize Earth at a glance and could he tell his distance, even roughly, by its brightness? Earth could be recognized by its color and by the presence of a single large moon. Mars, when seen from space, looks reddish, Venus a pure white, while Earth must he blue-green. Saturn, of course, has its rings as a distinctive feature and Jupiter its stripes and four large moons. If the ship were at the orbit of Venus, Earth can look six limes as brilliant as Venus at her brightest appears to us. Even the Moon would he almost as bright as Venus is to us. Seen from the orbit of Mars, Earth would look about as bright as Jupiter does from Earth at greatest proximity. If the ship is at points outside the orbit of Jupiter, the pilot would need instruments to see Earth, which at such distance would he "lost" in the glare of the Sun. Just what is the velocity of light? 186,000 mi7es per second sounds like a rounded-off figure. It is, and so is the customary metric equivalent of 300,000 kilometers per second. The Observer's Handbook gives the more precise value of 299,774 km. p. sec. Some values obtained in 1949 and 1950 by various investigators read as follows: Aslakson 299,792  2.4 Essen 299,792.5  3.0 Bol 299,798.3  0.4 Bergslrand 299,792.7j0.25 In your Conquest of Space you list the planetoid Adonis as the one which comes nearest to the Sun, staying just outside the orbit of Mercury. But since the orbit 105 of Mercury is so eccentric, isn't it possible that Adonis might cross the orbit of Mercury on occasion? To ibe best of our knowledge Adonis does not. But we now know a male planetoid that does. It has been appropriately named Icarus and it gets much closer to the Sun than the mythical Icarus ever did. Mercury, when closest to the Sun, is 0.31 astronomical units (one astronomical unit, or A. II., is the distance of Earth from the Sun) from the primary, while Icarus gels to within 0.20 A.U. or around 19 million miles. Maximum distance of Icarus from the sun is 1.97 A.U., ftniglily twice that of Earth. More precisely, it is 1 83 million miles. The small planetoid is less than a mile in diameter and probably reaches a temperature of 1000 F. at perihelion. In the film Destination Moon, there is a short sentence hinting at the use of titanium for spaceship construction. In what respect would titanium be superior to other metals? I have not seen it used anywhere. The reason why titanium is not in use right now to a noticeable extent is simply due to the fact that it became commercially available only two years or so ago. I have seen some small parts made of it. It looks like silver, though less shiny, and lias generally the characteristics of stainless steel. It differs from steel in two respects of interest to an engineer -- it is non-magnetic, and its specific gravity is only 4.5 while that of steel is 7.8. Heinlein probably picked titanium as a "light-weight steel" for construction purposes. Why is it that you get ice cubes faster if you put lukewarm water into the trays of your refrigerator rather than ice water? If I had not been prepared, this question would have surprised me no end. But a few years ago I talked to one of the researchers of the Bureau of Standards in Washington, I). who told me that this is a fairly widespread popular superstition and that the Bn4 . reau received so many inquiries about it that they finally decided to test it. The answer is astonishingly simple: because of the high latent heat of water, a few degrees more or less do not make a difference which could he noticed without measuring it. Of course, the colder the water, the sooner it will freeze, but the freezing differ cure between water of 35 F and water of 55 F is about one minute. 1M . Freudian Slip Things are exactly what they seem? Life is real? Life is earnest? Well, that depends.  N the day the Earth vanished, Herman Raye was earnestly fishing for trout, hip deep in a mountain stream in upstate New York. Herman was a tall, serious, sensitive, healthy, well-muscled young man with an outsize jaw and a brush of redbrown hair. He wore spectacles to correct a jk l . 9 1  i n .07 4 slight hyperopia, and they had heavy black rims because he knew his patients expected it. In his off hours, he was fond of books with titles like Personality and the Behavior Disorders, Selfesteem and Sexuality in Women, Juvenile Totem and Taboo : A study of adolescent culturegroups, and A New Theory of Economic Cycles; but he also liked baseball, beer and bebop. This day, the last of Herman's vacation, was a perfect specimen: sunny and still, the sky dotted with antiseptic tufts of cloud. The trout were biting. Herman had two in his creel, and was casting into the shallow pool across the stream in the confident hope of getting another when the Universe gave one horrible sliding lurch. Herman braced himself instinctively, shock pounding through his body, and looked down at the pebbly stream-bed under his feet. It wasn't there. He was standing, to all appearances, in three feet of clear water with sheer, black nothing under it: nothing, the abysmal color of a moonless night, pierced by the diamond points of a half-dozen incredible stars. He had only that single glimpse; then he found himself gazing across at the pool under the far bank, whose waters reflected the tranquil imagery of trees. He raised his casting rod, swung it back over his shoulder, brought it forward again with a practiced flick of his wrist, and watched the lure drop. Within the range of his vision now, everything was entirely normal ; nevertheless, Herman wanted very much to stop fishing and look down to see if that horrifying void was still there. He couldn't do it. Doggedly, he tried again and again. The result was always the same. It was exactly as if he were a man who had made up his mind to fling himself over a cliff, or break a window and snatch a loaf of bread, or say in a loud voice to an important person at a party, "I think you stink." Determination was followed by effort, by ghastly, sweating, heartstopping fear, by relief as he gave up and did something else. All right, he thought finally, there's no point going on with it. Data established: hallucination, compulsion, inhibition. Where do we go from here? The obvious first hypothesis was that he was insane. Herman considered that briefly, and left the question open. Three or four selected psychoanalyst jokes paraded through his mind, led by the classic, "You're fine, how am I?" There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief 108 that all analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the people who get all the way through the man-killing course that makes an orthodox analyst -- a course in which an M. D. degree is only a beginning -- are impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age of fifteen up until the completion of his own analysis at twenty-six, had been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway car or an elevator. But was he now insane? Can a foot-rule measure itself? Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his catch, cooked it and ate it. Where the ground had been bare around his cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had finished eating the fish. He couldn't. After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He couldn't. In fact, it occurred to him, he was helpless to do anything that he wouldn't normally have done. Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his tent and went to sleep. Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again npHE light woke him, long before dawn. From where he lay on his back, he could see an incredible pale radiance streaming upward all around him, outlining the shadow of his body at the ridge of the tent, picking out the under-surfaces of the trees against the night sky. He strained, until he was weak and dizzy, to roll over so that he could see its source; but he had to give up and wait another ten minutes until his body turned "naturally," just as if he had still been asleep. Then he was looking straight down into a milky transparency that started under his nose and continued into unguessable depths. First came the matted clumps of grass, black against the light, every blade and root as clear as if they had been set in transparent plastic. Then longer, writhing roots of trees and shrubs, sprouting thickets of hair-thin rootlets. Between these, and continuing downward level by level, was spread an infinity of tiny specks, seed-shapes, spores. Some 109 of them moved, Herman realized with a shock. Insects burrowing in the emptiness where the Earth should be? In the morning, when he crawled out of the tent and went to the bottomless stream to wash, he noticed something he had missed the day before. The network of grasses gave springily under his feet -- not like turf, but like stretched rubber. Herman conceived an instant dislike for walking, especially when he had to cross bare ground, because when that happened, he felt exactly what he saw: nothing whatever underfoot. "Walking on air," he realized, was not as pleasant an experience as the popular songs would lead you to expect. Herman shaved, cooked and ate breakfast, washed the dishes, did the chores, and packed up his belongings. With a mighty effort, he pried out the tent stakes, which were bedded in nothing but a loose network of roots. He shouldered the load and carried it a quarter of a mile through pine woods to his car. The car stood at ground level, but the ground was not there any more. The road was now nothing more than a long, irregular trough formed by the spreading roots of the pines on either side. Shuddering, Herman stowed his gear in the trunk and got in behind the wheel. When he put the motor into gear, the sedan moved sedately and normally forward. But the motor raced madly, and there was no feeling that it was faking hold. With screaming engine, Herman drove homeward over a nonexistent road. Inwardly and silently, he gibbered. Six miles down the mountain, he pulled up beside a whitepainted fence enclosing a neat yard and a fussy little blue-shuttered house. On the opposite side of the fence stood a middle-aged woman with a floppy hat awry on her head and a gardening trowel in one of her gloved hands. She looked up with an air of vague dismay when he got out of the car. "Some more eggs today, Dr. Raye?" she asked, and smiled. The smile was like painted china. Her eyes, lost in her fleshy face, were clearly trying not to look downward, "Not today, Mrs. Richards," Herman said. 'T just stopped to say good-by. I'm on my way home." "Isn't that a shame?" she said mechanically. "Well, come again next year.' Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a straitjacket."' He tried to say it. He stuttered, "N-n-n-n -- "and ended, glancing at the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?" II The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?" "Very pretty," said Herman helplessly. The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were spotlessly clean. kN Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful little men. He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt was gone. The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what they were. New York had been a city of stone -- built on stone, built of stone, as cold as stone. Uptown, the city looked halfbuilt, but insanely occupied, a forest of orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms in lath and a pa perthickness of paint. The wrought-iron railings were gone, too. On Fourth Avenue, bookseller's row, you could almost persuade yourself that nothing had happened, provided you did not look down. The buildings had been made of wood, and wood they remained. The second-hand books in their wooden racks would have been comforting except that they were so clean. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere ; the air was more than countrypure. There was an insane selective principle at work here, Herman realized. Everything from bedrock to loam that belonged to the Earth itself had disappeared. So had everything that had a mineral origin and been changed by refinement and mixture : concrete, wrought iron, brick, but steel and glass, porcelain and paint remained. It looked as if the planet had been the joint property of two children, one of whom didn't want to play any more, so they had split up their possessions -- this is yours, this is yours, this is mine The two little men popped into view not six feet in front of Herman as he was passing a sidewalk bookstall. Both were dressed in what looked like workmen's overalls made of lurite chainmail, or knitted glow-worms. One of them had four eyes, two brown, two blue, with spectacles for the middle pair. Ears grew like cabbages all over his bald head. The other had two eyes, the pupils 111 of which were crossshaped, and no other discernible features except when he opened his gaptoothed mouth: the rest of his head, face and all, was completely covered by a dense forest of red hair. As they came forward, Herman's control of his body suddenly returned. He was trying his best to turn around and go away from there, and that was what his body started to do. Moreover, certain sounds of a prayerful character, namely "Oh dear sweet Jesus," which Herman was forming in his mind, involuntarily issued from his lips. Before he had taken the first step in a rearward direction, however, the hairy little man curved around him in a blur of motion, barring the way with two long, muscular, red-furred arms. Herman turned. The four-eyed little man had closed in. Herman, gasping, backed up against the bookstall. People who were headed directly for them, although showing no recognition that Herman and the little men were there, moved stiffly asidedike dancing automatons, strode past, then made another stiff sidewise motion to bring them back to the original line of march before they went on their way. "Olaph dzenn Harm Rai gjo glerr-dregnarr?" demanded Hairy, Herman gulped, half-stunned, "Huh?" he said. Hairy turned to Four-Eyes. "Grinnr alaz harisi nuya." "Izzred alph! Meggi erd-halaza riggbord els kamma gredyik. Lukhhal!" Hairy turned back to Herman. Blinking his eyes rapidly, for they closed like the shutter of a camera, he made a placating gesture with both huge furry hands. "Kelagg ikri odrum faz," he said, and, reaching out to the bookstall, he plucked out a handful of volumes, fanned them like playing cards and displayed them to Four-Eyes. A heated discussion ensued, at the end of which Hairy kept For Whom the Bell Tolls , Four-Eyes took The Blonde in the Bathtub, and Hairy threw the rest away. Then, while Herman gaped and made retching sounds, the two disgusting little men tore pages out of the books and stuffed them in their mouths. When they finished the pages, they ate the bindings. Then there was a rather sick pause while they seemed to digest the contents of the books they had literally devoured. Herman' had the wild thought that they were blurb writers whose jobs had gone to their heads. The one with the four eyes rolled three of them horribly. "That's more like it," he said in nasal but recognizable English. 112 "Let's start over. Are you Herman Raye, the skull doc? Herman produced a series of incoherent sounds. "My brother expresses himself crudely," said Hairy in a rich, fruity baritone. "Please forgive him. He is a man of much heart." "Uh?" said Herman. "Truly," said Hairy. "And of much ears," he added with a glance at his companion. "But again, as to this affair -- tell me true, are you Herman Raye, the analyst of minds?" "Suppose I am?" Herman asked cautiously. Hairy turned to Foureyes. "Arghraz iktri 'Suppose I am,' Gurh? Olaph iktri erz ogromat, lekh -- " "Talk English, can't you?" Four-eyes broke in. "You know he don't understand, that caveman jabber. Anyhow, yeah, yeah, it's him. He just don't want to say so.' He reached out and took Herman by the collar. "Come on, boy, the boss is waitin'." There were two circular hairlines of glowing crimson where Hairy and Four-eyes had originally appeared. They reached the spot in one jump. Hairy bringing up the rear. "But tell me truly," he said anxiously. "You are that same Herman Raye?" Herman paid no attention. Below, under the two glowing circles. was the terrifying gulf that had replaced the Earth; and this time, Herman was somehow convinced, it was not going to hold him up. "Let go!" he shouted, struggling. "Ouch!" He had struck Four-eyes squarely on the flat nose, and it felt as if he had slugged an anvil. Paying no attention, Four-eyes turned Herman over, pinned his arms to his sides, and dropped him neatly through the larger of the two circles. Herman shut his eyes tightly and despairingly repeated the multiplication table up to 14 x 14, When he opened them again, he was apparently hanging in midspace, with Hairy to his left and Foureyes to his right. The visible globe around them was so curiously tinted and mottled that it took Herman a long time to puzzle it out. Ahead of them was the darkest area -- the void he had seen before. This was oval in shape, and in places the stars shone through it clearly. In others, they were blocked off entirely or dimmed by a sort of haze. Surrounding this, and forming the rest of the sphere, was an area that shaded from gold shot with violet at the borders, to an unbearable blaze of glory at the center, back the fray they had come and a little to the right. Within this lighted section were 111 ther amorphous areas which were much darker, almost opaque; and still others where the light shone through diluted to a ruddy ghost of itself, like candlelight through parchment. Gradually Herman realized that the shapes and colors he saw were the lighted and dark hemispheres of Earth. The dark areas were the oceans, deep enough in most places to shut out the light altogether, and those parts of the continents, North and South America behind him, Europe and Asia ahead, Africa down to the fight, which were heavily forested. Herman's earlier conviction returned. Things like this just did  not happen. Physician, hoa'i thy S Ht "You're not real," he said bitterly to Four-eyes, i "Not very," Four-eyes agreed. Tm twice as real as that jerk, though," he insisted, pointing to Hairy. Ahead of them, or "below," a point of orange light was slowly swelling. Herman watched it Without much interest. Hairy broke out into  torrent Of cursing. "I this and that in the milk of your this!" he said. 1 this, that and the other in the this of your that. Your sister! Your cousin! Your grandmother' ancle!" Foureyes listened with owed approval. Them was good books, hah?" he asked happily. "Better than those scratching hi the caves," Hairy said. "Something to think about till they haul us out again. Well " said Four-eyes philosophically, "here we are." T HE orange spot had enlarged into the semblance of a lighted room, rather like a stage setting. Inside were two enormous Persons, one sitting, one standing. Otherwise, and except for three upholstered chairs, the room was bare. No -- as they swooped down toward it, Herman blinked and looked again. A leather couch had appeared against the far wall. At the last moment, there was a flicker of motion off to Herman's left. Something that looked like a short, pudgy human being accompanied by two little men the size of Hairy and Foureyes whooshed off into the diance, back toward the surface of the planet. Herman landed. Hairy and Four-eyes, after bowing low to the standing Person, turned and leaped out of the room. When Herman, feeling abandoned, turned to see where they had gone, he discovered that the room now had four walls and no windows or doors. The Person said, 'How do you do, Doctor Raye?" 114 Herman looked at him. Although his figure had a disquieting tendency to quiver and flow, so that it was hard to judge, he seemed to be about eight feet tall. He was dressed in what would have seemed an ordinary dark-blue business suit, with an equally ordinary white shirt and blue tie, except that all three garments had the sheen of polished metal. His face was bony and severe, but not repellently so; he looked absent-minded rather than stern. The other Person, whose suit was brown, had a broad, kindly and rather stupid face; his hair was white. He sat quietly, not looking at Herman, or, apparently, at anything else. Herman sat down in one of the upholstered chairs. "All right," he said with helpless defiance.  What's it all about?" "I'm glad we can cmjie to the point at once," said the Person. He paused, moving his lips silently. "Ah, excuse me. I'm sorry." A second head, with identical features, popped into view next to the first. His eyes were closed. "It's necessary, I'm afraid," said head humber one apologetically. "I have so much to remember, you know." Herman took a deep breath and said nothing. "You may call me Secundus, if you like," resumed the Person, "and this gentleman Primus, since it is with him that you will have principally to deal. Now, our problem here is . one of amnesia, and I will confess to you frankly that we ourselves are totally inadequate to cope with it. In theory, we are not subject to disorders of the mind, and that's what makes us so vulnerable now that it has happened. Do you see?" A fantastic sui picion crept into Herman's mind. "Just a moment," he said carefully. "If you don't mind telling me, what is it that you have to remember?" "Well, Doctor, my field is human beings ; that's why it became my duty to search you out and consult with you. And there is a great deal for me to carry in my mind, you know, especially under these abnormal conditions. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it is a full-time job." "Are you going to tell me," asked Herman, more carefully still, "that this -- gentleman -- is the one who is supposed to remember the Earth itself? The rocks and minerals and so on?" "Yes, exactly. I was about 1 9 tell you -- " "And that the planet has disappeared because he has amnesia?" Herman demanded on a rising note. Secundus beamed, "Concisely expressed. I myself, being, sa to speak, saturated with the thoughts and habits of human beings, who are, you must admit, a garrulous race, could not -- " "Oh, no!" said Herman. "Oh, yes," Secundus corrected. "I can understand that the idea is difficult for you to accept, since you naturally believe that you yourself have a real existence, or, to be more precise, that you belong to the world of phenomena as opposed to that of noumena." He beamed. "Now I will be silent, a considerable task for me, and let you ask questions." Herman fought a successful battle with his impulse to stand Up and shout "To hell with it!" He had been through a great deal, bu he was a serious and realistic young man. He set himself to think the problem through logically. If, as seemed more than probable, Secundus, Primus, Hairy, Four-eyes, and this whole Alice in Wonderland situation existed only as his hallucinations, then it did not matter much whether he took them seriously or not. If they were real, then he wasn't, and vice versa. It didn't  make any difference which was which. He relaxed deliberately and folded his hands against his abdomen. "Let me see if I can get this clear," he said. "I'm a noufienon, not a phenomenon. In cruder terms, I exist only in your mind. Is that true?" Secundus beamed. "Correct." "If you got amnesia, I and the rest of the human race would disappear." Secundus looked worried, "That is also correct, and if that should happen, you will readily understand that we would be in difficulty. The situation is extremely -- But pardon me. I had promised to be silent except when answering questions." "This is the part I fail to understand, Mr. Secundus. I gather that you brought me here to treat Mr. Primus. Now, if I exist as a thought in your mind, you necessarily know everything I know. Why don't you treat him yourself?" Secundus shook his head disapprovingly. "Oh, no, Dr. Raye, that is not the case at all. It cannot be said that I know everything that you know; rather we should say that I remember you. In other words, that I maintain your existence by an act of memory. The two functions, knowledge and memory, are not identical, although, of course, the second cannot be considered to exist without the first. But before we become entangled in our own terms, I should perhaps remind you that when I employ the word 'memory' I am only making use of a convenient approximation. Perhaps it would be helpful to 116 ay that my memory is comparable to the structurememory of a living organism, although that, too, has certain semantic disadvantages. Were you about to make a remark, Doctor?" "It still seems to me," Herman Said stubbornly, "that if you remember me, structurally or otherwise, that includes everything I remember. If you're going to tell me that you remember human knowledge, including Freudian theory and practice, but are unable to manipulate it, that seems to me to be contradicted by internal evidence in what you've already said. For example, it's clear that in the field of epistemology -- the knowledge of knowledge, you might say -- you have the knowledge and manipulate it." "Ah," said Secundus, smiling shyly, "but, you see, that happens to be my line. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, being specializations, are not. As I mentioned previously, persons of our order are theoretically not capable of psychic deterioration. That is why we come to you, Dr. Raye. We are unable to help ourselves; we ask your help. We place ourselves unreservedly in your hands." The question, "How was I chosen?" occurred to Herman, but he left it unasked. He knew that ' the answer was much likelier to be "At random," than, "Because we wanted the most brilliant and talented psychoanalyst on the planet." "I gather that I'm not the first person you've tried," he said. "Oh, you saw Dr. Buddolphson departing? Yes, it is true that in our ignorance of the subject we did not immediately turn to practitioners of your psychological orientation. In fact, if you will not be offended, I may say that you are practically our last hope. We have already had one eminent gentleman whose method was simply to talk over Mr. Primus's problems with him and endeavor to help him reach an adjustment; he failed because Mr. Primus, so far as he is aware, has no problems except that he has lost hii memory. Then we had another whose system, as he explained it to me, was simply to repeat, in a sympathetic manner, everything that the patient said to him; Mr, Primus was not sufficiently prolix for this method to be of avail. "Then there was another who wished to treat Mr. Primus by encouraging him to relive his past experiences; 'taking him back along the time-track,' as he called it; but -- " Secundus looked mournful -- "Mr. Primus has actually had no experiences in th usual sense of the term, though he very obligingly made up a number of them; Our ontogeny. Dr, Raye, is so simple that it cam U7 I carcely be said to exist at all. iach of us normally has only one unction, the one I have already nentioned, and, until this occurence, it has always been fulfilled successfully "We also had a man who proosed to reawaken Mr. Primus's icmory by electric shock, but Ir. Primus is quite impervious o currents of electricity and we ere unable to hit upon an ac"ptable substitute. In short. Dr. laye, if you should prove unable o help us, we will have no one ift to fall back upon except, posibly, the Yogi." "They might do you more good, it that," Herman said, looking A Mr. Primus. "Well, I'll do what I can, though the function of analysis is to get the patient to accept reality, and this is the opposite. What can you tell me, to begin with, about Mr. Primus's personality, the onset of the disturbance, and so on -- and, in particular, what are you two? Who's your boss? What's it all for and .iow does it work?" Secundus said, "I can give you very little assistance, I am afraid. I would characterize Primus as a very steady person, extremely accurate in his work, but not very imaginative. His memory loss occurred abruptly, as you yourself witnessed yesterday afternoon. As to your other questions -- forgive me, Dr. Raye, in but it is to your own advantage if I fail to answer them. I am, of course, the merest amateur in psychology, but I sincerely feel that your own psyche might be damaged if you were to learn the fragment of the truth which I could give you." He paused. A sheaf of papers, which Herman had not noticed before, lay on a small table that he had not noticed, either. Secundus picked them up and handed them over. "Here are testing materials," he said. "If you need anything else, you have only to call on me. But I trust you will find these complete." He turned to go. "And one more thing, Dr. Raye," he said with an apologetic smile. "Hurry, if you possibly can." a sarcophagus ornament, lay limply supine on the tenfoot couch, arms at his sides, eyes closed. When Herman had first told him to relax, Primus had had to have the word carefully explained to him; from then on he had done it -- or seemed to do it -- perfectly'. In his preliminary tests, the Binet, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index and the Berneuter P. I., he had drawn almost a complete blank. Standard testing methods did not work on Mr. Primus, and the reason was obvious enough. Mr. Primus simply was not a human being. This room, no doubt, was an illusion, and so was Mr. Primus's anthropomorphic appearance Herman felt like a surgeon trying to operate blindfolded while wearing a catcher's mitt on each hand. But he kept trying; he was getting results, though whether or not they meant anything, he was unable to guess. On the Rorschach they had done a little better, at least in volume of response. "That looks like a cliff," Primus would say eagerly. "That looks like a -- piece of sandstone. This part looks like two volcanoes and a cave." Of course, Herman realized, the poor old gentleman was only trying to please him. He had no more idea than a goldfish what a volcano or a rock looked like, but he wanted desperately to help. Even so, it was possible to score the results. According to Herman's interpretation. Primus was a case of arrested infantile sexualism, with traces of conversion hysteria and a strong Oedipus complex. Herman entered the protocol solemnly in his notes and kept going. Next came free association, and, after that, recounting of dreams. Feeling that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, Herman carefully explained to Primus what "sleep 1  and "dreams" were. Primus had promised to do his best; he had been lying there now, without moving, for -- how long? Startled, Herman looked at his watch. It had stopped. Scoring the Rorschach alone, Herman realized suddenly, should have taken him nearly a full day, even considering the fact that he hadn't eaten anything, or taken time out to rest, or -- Herman bewilderedly felt his jaw. There was only the slightest stubble. He didn't feel hungry or tired, or cramped from sitting "Secundus!" he called. A door opened in the wall to his right, and Secundus stepped through. The door disappeared. "Yes, Dr. Raye? Is anything wrong?" "How long have I been here?" Secundus' right-hand head looked embarrassed. "Well, Doctor, without bringing in the difficult questions of absolute versus, relative duration, and the definition of an arbitrary position -- " "Don't stall. How long have I been here in my own subjective time?" "Well, I was about to say, without being unnecessarily inclusive, the question is still very difficult. However, bearing in mind that the answer is only a rough approximation -- about one hundred hours." lit Herman rubbed his chin. "I don't like your tampering with me' he said slowly. "You've speeded me up -- is that it? And at the same time inhibited my fatigue reactions, and God knows what else, so that I didn't even notice I'd been working longer than I normally could until just now?" Secundus looked distressed. "I'm afraid I have made rather a botch of it, Dr. Raye. I should not have allowed you to notice at all, but it is growing increasingly difficult to restrain your fellowcreatures to their ordinary routines. My attention strayed, I am sorry to say." He glanced at Jie recumbent form of Primus. "My word! What is Mr. Primus doing, Dr. Raye?" "Sleeping," Herman answered curtly. "Remarkable! I hope he does not make a habit of it. Will he awaken soon, do you think, Doctor?" "I have no idea," said Herman helplessly ; but at that moment Primus stirred, opened his eyes, and sat up with his usual vague, kindly smile. "Did you dream?" Herman asked him. Primus blinked slowly. "Yes. Yes, I did," he said in his profoundly heavy voice. "Tell me all you can remember about it." "Well, said Primus, sinking back onto the couch, "I dreamed I was in a room with a large bed. It had heavy wooden posts and a big bolster. I wanted to lie down and rest in the bed, but the bolster made me uncomfortable. It was too dark to see, to rearrange the bed, so I tried to light a candle, but the matches kept going out " Herman took it all down, word for word, with growing excitement and growing dismay. The dream was too good. It might have come out of Dr. Freud's original case histories. When Primus had finished, Herman searched back through his notes. Did Primus know what a bed was, or what a bolster was, or a candle? How much had Herman told him? "Bed" was there, of course. Primus: "What are 'dreams?'" Herman: "Well, when a human being goes to bed, and sleeps " "Bolster" was there, too, but not in the same sense. Herman: "To bolster its argument, the unconscious -- what we call the id -- frequently alters the person's likes and dislikes on what seem to be petty and commonplace subjects And "candle?" Herman: "I want you to understand that I don't know all about this subject myself, Mr. Primus. Nobody does; our knowledge is just a candle in the darkness" Herman gave up. He glanced 120 at Secundus, who was watching him expectantly. "May I talk to you privately?" "Of course." Secundus nodded to Primus, who stood up awkwardly and then vanished with a pop. Secundus tut-tutted regretfully. Herman took a firm grip on himself. "Look," he said, "the data I have now suggest that Primus had some traumatic experience in his infancy which arrested his development in various ways and also strengthened his Oedipus complex -- that is, intensified his feelings of fear, hatred and rivalry toward his father. Now, that may sound to you as if we're making some progress. I would feel that way myself -- if I had the slightest reason for believing that Primus ever had a father." Secundus started to speak; but Herman cut him off. "Wait, let me finish. I can go ahead on that basis, but as far as I'm concerned I might just as well be counting the angels on the head of a pin. You've got to give me more information, Secundus. I want to know who you are, and who Primus is, and whether there's any other being with whom Primus could possibly have a filial relationship. And if you can't tell me all that without giving me the Secret of the Universe, then you'd better give it to me whether it's good for me or not. I can't work in the dark." Secundus pursed his lips. "There is justice in what you say. Doctor. Very well, I shall be entirely frank "with you -- in so far as it is possible for me to do so, of course. Let's see, where can I begin?" "First question," retorted Herman. "Who are you?" "We are -- " Secundus thought a moment, then spread his hands with a helpless smile. "There are no words, Doctor, To put the case in negatives, we are not evolved organisms, we are not mortal, we are not, speaking in the usual sense, alive, although, of course -- I hope you will not be offended -- neither are you," Herman's brow wrinkled. "Are you real?" he demanded finally. Secundus looked embarrassed. "You have found me out, Dr. Raye. I endeavored to give you that impression -- through vanity, I am ashamed to say -- but, unhappily, it is not true. I, too, belong to the realm of noumena." "Then, blast it all, what is real? This planet isn't. You're not. What's it all for?" He paused a moment reflectively. "We're getting on to my second question, about Primus's attitude toward his 'father.' Perhaps I should have asked just now, 'Who is real?' Who remembers you, Secundus?" "This question, unfortunately, 121 is the one I cannot answer with complete frankness. Doctor. I assure you that it is not because I do not wish to; I have no option in the matter. I can tell you only that there is a Person of whom it might be said that He stands in the parental relationship to Primus, to me, and all the rest of our order." "God?" Herman inquired. "Jahweh? Allah?" "Please, no names, Doctor. Secundus looked apprehensive. "Then, damn it, tell me the rest!" Herman realized vaguely that he was soothing his own hurt vanity at Secundus's expense, but he was enjoying himself too much to stop. "You're afraid of something; that's been obvious right along. And there must be a time limit on it, or you wouldn't be rushing me. Why? Are you afraid that if this unnamable Person finds out you've botched your job, He'll wipe you out of existence and start over with a new bunch?" A cold wind blew down Herman's back. "Not us alone, Dr. Raye," said Secundus gravely. "If the Inspector discovers this blunder -- and the time is coming soon when He must -- no corrections will be attempted. When a mistake occurs, it is -- painted out." "Oh," said Herman after a moment. He sat down again, weakly. "How long have we got?" "Approximately one and a quarter days have gone by at the Earth's normal rate since Primus lost his memory," Secundus said. "I have not been able to 'speed you up,' as you termed it, by more than a twenty-to-one ratio. The deadline will have arrived, by my calculation, in fifteen minutes of normal time, or five hours at your present accelerated rate." Primus stepped into the room, crossed to the couch and lay down placidly. Secundus turned to go, then paused. "As for your final question. Doctor -- you might think of the Universe as a Pointillist painting, in which this planet is one infinitesimally small dot of color. The work is wholly imaginary, of course, since neither the canvas nor the pigment has what you would term an independent existence. Nevertheless, the artist takes it seriously. He would not care to find, so to speak, mustaches daubed on it." Herman sat limply, staring after him as he moved to the door. Secundus turned once more. "I hope you will not think that I am displeased with you, Doctor," he said. "On the contrary, I feel that you are accomplishing more than anyone else has. However, should you succeed, as I devoutly hope, there may not be sufficient time to congratulate you as you deserve. I shall have 112  to replace you . immediately in your normal world-line, for your absence would constitute as noticeable a flaw as that of the planet. In that event, my present thanks and congratulations will have to serve." With a friendly smile, he disappeared. Herman wound his watch. Two hours later, Primus's answers to his questions began to show a touch of resentment and surly defiance. Transference , Herman thought, with a constriction of his throat, and kept working desperately. ) Three hours. "What does the bolster remind you of?" "I seem to see a big cylinder rolling through space, sweeping the stars out of its way" Four hours. Only three minutes left now, in the normal world.  can't wait to get any deeper, Herman thought. It's got to be now or never. "You must understand that these feelings of resentment and hatred are normal," he said, trying to keep the strain out of his voice, "but, at the same time, you have outgrown them -- you can rise above them now. You are an individual in your own right, Primus. You have a job to do that only you can fill, and it's an important job. That's what matters, not all this infantile emotional clutter" He talked on, not daring to look at his watch. Primus looked up, and a huge smile broke over his face. He began, "Why, of -- " ing along Forty-second Street, heading toward the Hudson. The pavement was solid under his feet; the canyon between the buildings was filled with the soft violet-orange glow of a summer evening in New York. In the eyes of the people he passed, he saw the same incredulous relief he felt. It was over. He'd done it. He'(,i broken all the rules, but, incredibly, he'd got results. Then he looked up and a chill spread over him. No one who knew the city would accept thht ithyphallic parody as the Empire State Building, or those huge fleshy curves, as wanton as the mountains in which Mr, Maugham's "Sadie Thompson' had her lusty existence, as the prosaic hills' of New Jersey. Psychoanalysis had certainly removed Mr. Primus's inhibitions. The world was like a fence scrawled on by a naughty little boy. Mr. Primus would outgrow it in time, but life until then might be somewhat disconcerting. Those two clouds, for instance 123 bleday  Co., Inc., 1951. 364 paes, 4.00 T HE subtitle of this volume is its own book review; "Tales Unlike Other Tales." They are! Most science fiction addicts know John Collier only through his famous "Green Thoughts," which appeared in the first science fiction anthology ever compiled, Donald Wollheim's Pocket Book oi Science Fiction. "Green 124 Thoughts" isn't science fiction, for John Collier never wrote any in his life. It happens, however, that he is the most distinguished living writer of imaginative, fantastical, demonological, shivery and sophisticatedjsupernatural stories, and any science fiction reader who foregoes this book has only himself to blame for having passed up one of the great reading experiences of modern times. Don't miss Collier! You'll be a much more watery and uninspired individual than you are, if you do. Permabooks (Doubleday  Co,, Inc.), New York, 1952. 407 pages, 35c N ineteen stories, aii but four never anthologized before; for 35 cents the buy of the month. All but three of the stories rate "B" or better, too; and it contains one nearly great (and quite unknown) tale, as well. This is called "Scanners Live in Vain," and it is written by some pseudonymity known as Cordwainer Smith, It is one of the best tours de force in science fiction. Another really magnificent tale is Fowler Wright's quietly irreversible comment on irresponsible science, called "Obvious Suicide." There are also topgrade tales by Kornbluth, MacDonald, Leinster (he never fails!), Wyndham (alias both Harris and Beynon), MacCreigh, Finney (wonderful!), Bradbury (of course), Pearson, Clarke, Dryfoos, van Vogt, Gold (a delight!), Merril, and a completely surprising tale by Heinlein in collaboration with a lady named Wentz. A rich, juicy collection; Mr. Pohl is to be congratulated on having done it. Too bad he had to include these previously anthologized items: Pearson's "The Embassy," Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," van Vogt's "Letter from the Stars" (called "Dear Pen Pal" in its earlier book appearance), and Clarke's "Rescue Party." But even with these duplications, this is an unavoidable "must," particularly at the price. Fredric Brown. Shasta Publish ers, Chicago, 1951, 224 pages, 2.50L ' one of the very few so-called "humorists" in science fiction whose humor -- at least most of it -- is funny rather than plain silly. Previously collected: "Knock" (a good B-plus) ; "Nothing Sirius" (not one of the best; B-minus) ; and "Star Mouse" (delightful -- a good A-plus for Mitkey Mouse!) New in book form : "Something Green" (powerful alien-world tale, from which Heinlein borrowed the famous phrase, "The Green Hills of Earth", A); "Crisis, 1999" (I didn't much like this mixture of science fiction, sleuthing and pseudohypnotism; C-plus) ; "Pi in the Sky" (a genuinely brilliant, slap-happy satire on advertising; a solid A); "All Good Bems" (witty but slight, a high-class B-plus) ; "Daymare" (serious tale involving a hypno125 tism helmet; A-minus); and last -- and best, for my money -- "Come and Go Mad' (one of the most superb "we're property stories ever written). A fine, high-spirited, fantastical, super-scientifical book for the human-hearted; a thing for padlocked shelves so people won't be swiping it. ited by Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press, New York , 1951. 400 Pages, 3.95 saying has a way of going, everything -- including 14 stories, of which nine according to my coiSkt are worth preserving. There's a pleasant introduction by Willy Ley; a 13-page "Dictionary of Science Fiction" that contains about 75 definitions (to pun slightly, definitely not a definitive dictionary) ; and a 16(though Mr. G. insists they're not any such thing) by Cartier. In other words, PublisherEditor Greenberg has given us a really portentous volume here, full of miscellaneous apparati and whammies. The stories I like and think you will include; Keith Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (Venus adventure) ; Christopher Youd s "Christmas Tree" (good Moon m tale) ; Ray Bradbury' oompletely out of place "The Shape of Things" (it deals with a baby that was born "through" the wrong dimension and looked like a blue pyramid -- a superb story having nothing to do with space travel) ; Lyle Monroe's "Columbus Was a Dope" (Moon; this delightful snapper of a story is actually a doublesnapper, as you will learn when you trace its actual author's name on the copyright page; to give you a clue, the initials are R. A. H.); Hal Clement's "Attitude" (about a planet of S Doradus, very circumstantial, as if Mr. C, had really been there) ; William Tenn's very pleasant but routine "Ionian Cycle" (all about weird life) ; Robertson Osborne's "Action on Azura" (splendid! -- but already anthologized under the title of "Contact, Inc."); A. E. van Vogt's "The Hull," (it will drive you nuts; very sticky -- and very unforgettable -- indeed); and P o u 1 Anderson's A-plus-plus "The Double Dyed Villians," (about the Galactic government that keeps the peace solely through corruption -- and justly so, too). The other five tales you may like, Buy the book and find out! I didn't, but then I'm a sort of narrow-minded, combative cove, as everyone knows. 421 Hudson St., N. Y. 14, N. Y. (Chck which otfwr fot want -- nclose check or money order.)  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus one extra full length novel 3,50  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus 1 year subscription to Galaxy Magazine (You save 1.50 on this offer ) 6.20  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus our next 6 full length novels. 4.95 t Q Galoxy Reader of Science Fiction plus 1 year subscription to Galaxy Magazine, plus our next 6 full length novels (You save  2.00 on this offer) 7.80 We will extend your current subscription if you are already i subscriber. of these by William F. Tempfe Two men in love with The same girl . , . Ihat's about the most elementary plot anyone could devise. But vI a opens to that same plot when both men ore scientists who invent a matter-duplicotin. mochine that will reproduce anything -- including the girl they are in love with? You no longer have the trite old triangle. Instead, you hove what the author describes it an original and a copy! Don't try to take it from there. You can't possibly anticipate the complications. Conflict the suspense of this remarkable situation, and especially the ingenious resolution. high mark in science fiction humor. By definition, a Utopia is on ideally perfect society. But perfect according to whose standards? Plato's Republic was wonderful, except for slaves. Sir Thomas More's excluded non-intellectuals, Edward Bellamy's was a do-gooder's heaven, ambitious people not admitted. The late Mr. Hitler's was a dream of Prussian militarists, sure death for everybody else. So a Utopia, being a wishful state of mind, depends on who's doing the wishing! For example, what would an advertising man's notion of Utopia be like? That, startlingly, is the theme of the serial beginning in the June issue of ambitions and ingenious conflicts of the Hucksters of the Future! We can't say rush right out and buy a copy, because not until next month will you be able to start by Frederik Pohl  C. M. Kornblutk 111 1 Learn Another Easily , Quickly , Naturally business ED AR tl ! The World 9 s Standard Conversational Method ior  Professional, Scientific and Educational Advancement  Greater Scientific and Business Opportunities  Doubled Travel Enjoyment  Wider Social and Cultural Horizons  Special Assignments in Armed Forces, Government Service Another language helps you "go places" in business, where great opportunities are international; in the armed forces and government agencies, where bi-linguist!c ability is needed; in science, travel and cultural achievement, where new adventures await you) Stop Wishing Start Talking -- any of 29 languages available No textbook can teach you to speak Linguaphone Is the natural way to learn a language -- actually the same way you learned English even before you went to school. You bring a to read and write -- It's all an amazingly easy and fascinating leisure time activity you can enjoy alone or with family and friends. Mail coupon by colleges, schools, U.N., I.R.O., government agencies, armed services, and bos been the choice of more than one million home study students. Course approved for Veteran's Training 208-05 Radio City, N. Y. 20, N. Y. language I for (state purpose) Nome . Address City .Zone State. Yes, and college professors, technicians, editors, publishers, students, skilled workers, farmers and wonderful people just like you, who ever you are. What's more there have been more and more tif you every single month since we started publishing. There is only one thing that many of you do not seem to realize. don't have to rush to a news stand. ou can depend upon one of Uncle Sam's most loyal employees to bring you Galaxy your p istman. (Lots of postmen get their own copies of Galaxy.) How can all this be arranged? Easy! All you have to do is fill in the coupon below, write out a check for only S3. SO and  mail both off today. Incidentally, you'll be saving money because with a subscription you will get 12 issues for the news stand price of 10. Seems smart to do it: right now. Dept. 2 i Galaxy Publishing Corp. 421 Hudson St. New York 14, N. Y.   I enclose (check one) 3.50 for 1 year 7.00 for 2 years  udUiiJklk Which era of the past or present would you pick to live in? What worlds would you want to visit? A problem, eh? Any era you chose would eliminate all the others, and any worlds you visited would leave the rest unexplored by you. But you can live in any age, from the beginning of life to the end of history ! You can see any planet, from Mars clear out to the limits of the Universe! Stay with them long enough to know them thoroughly, and then on to the next era, the next solar system! How? monthly 35c tour through all time and all space or to guarantee not missing any, send 3.50 for twelve issues of exciting excursions to 421 Hudson Street New York 14, N. Y. You'll have the time of your countless lives! Galaxy .i" 42 1 Hudson Street, New York 14, N, Y33c per copy. Subscriptions: (12 copies) 3,30 per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S, Possessions Elsewhere 14-50. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office New York NY, Copyright, 1953 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, include jr translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories pc in tea in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Frinftd (ft the LI.S.At by the Suinn Co M Inc, Rg. U, P Fat Off, tractive novel contest being and Simon  Schuster, the biggest in the history of science fiction, it's inevitable that authors who are unfamiliar with this field will be studying the magazine to learn what kind of material we i are seeking. To save their time and ours, here is a partial list of overworked ideas that should be strenuously avoided : Fictional warnings of nuclear and biological destruction, the postatomicworld, reversion to barbarism, mutant children slain because they have only ten toes and fingers instead of twelve, absurdly planned and preposterously successful revolts against dictatorships, problems of survival wearily turned over to women, war between groups, nations, worlds and solar systems. Flying Saucers, cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in space, the duel between the good guy and the bad guy alone on an asteroid, the bright revelation that the characters we have been reading about are Adam and Eve or Jesus, the creation of a miniature universe in a laboratory by a scientist whose name turns out to be an anagram of Jehovah, the alien eater of life force in the  Andes whose menu consists exclusively of pretty virgins. There are many more that slither across my desk, to lie there pulsing feebly while they acquire rejection slips, but the debilitated notions listed are readiest to mind. From time to time, writers can still make them come to life through rarely encountered virtuosity. The odds on that happening are not worth taking, however. The best advice to follow is to learn how to hunt down fresh themes or new approaches to old ones. What's done with the idea is then a matter of talent and skill, neither of which can be taught here, but the basic steps in science fiction thinking can be presented. First of all, science fiction answers in dramatic terms the unstated question : "What would happen if -- ?" The if selected depends on whether the author takes the most blatant trends or tendencies in our society, in which case he is competing with just about everybody else, or digs beneath the surface for less apparent ones. Those, obviously, rate and receive the more enthusiastic welcome. Political conflicts and wars, 2 however gigantic, have a way of becoming obscured by time. But the inventions and discoveries that were being made then live long after the issues are resolved. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, quickly turned into a pathetic figure after his defeat; the development of planes, tanks, longrange artillery and submarines was the lasting influence of World War I. Even Hitler has lost much of his frightfulness, while jets, rockets, atomic energy and antibiotics, all of which got their start in World War II, will be part of the life of the future. What will be remembered when the threat of communism is gone? That's what the writer has to find and dramatize for us.  most popular subject in science fiction and writers have suggested all kinds of crews: introverts because they can take loneliness, extroverts because they get along better with each other, women because they tolerate monotony, men because they are more adventurous. The reasoning is generally sound enough, but aren't there other possibilities? Gravy Planet offered a midget spaceman, 60 pounds of computer and pilot, an enormous saving of fuel, food, air renewal and living space. Why not deaf mutes? The noise of takeoff and landing wouldn't bother them, and they've been conditioned to the awful silence of the void. The blind, on the other hand, wouldn't be appalled by the immensities of space. Missionaries have always been on the heels of explorers, yet what would happen if they came across a humanoid race -- not the usual monstrosities -- on a planet where personal death is unknown? There are savages on Earth who don't have this knowledge, but they soon pick it up, and fear along with it. Suppose, though, that the alien bodies disintegrate instantly at death? The concept of afterlife would be completely unthinkable to them. The canals of Mars irrigate the deserts? Not necessarily. Maybe they're meant to drain the land and keep it suitably arid tor Martians. Well, there's the method of finding fresh ideas -- turn the obvious upside down, inside out and hind-end fore. Actually, digging up ideas is only the beginning of the job. Next comes choosing characters, building conflict, sustaining suspense, advancing the story, working out a solution consistent with theme and characterization -- all the labor of orchestration. It's hard, lonesome work, but who said writing is easy? 3 It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen times a year, wonder about briefly , and then promptly forget -- but the real story is the one that the reporters are unable to cover.' tering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the flaking metal bed. There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enough to show the tight drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that the flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was going over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a "Yi OU again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily. I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feeling of hopeful eagerness. Maybe this time, I thought, I'd get the answer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places -- the quavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky chair, tot4 federal grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape, who had brought me here. "When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases, Sergeant?" the M.G. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his morbid curiosity!" For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a friend of mine -- I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the force -- and he's a follower of Stanislavsky." The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A Red?" the Stanislavsky method of acting was, while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed so they could be them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a character right up to the point where a play starts -- where he was born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood, adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money, success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of the life history created by the actor. How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing old men ever since. I had them down pretty well -- it's not just a matter of shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice, which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like inside -- and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them do what they did, fee! the compulsion that drove them to it. The old woman on the bed, for instance, had 32,000 in five bank accounts and she'd died of starvation. You've come across' such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year, and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I had to know as much about them as I could. That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were practically an obsession. Look, they almost always have around 30,000 pinned to their underwear, hidden in mattresses, 6 I parked in the bank, yet they turve themselves to death. If I  uld understand them, I could write a play or have one written; i might really make a name for myself, even get a Hollywood  ontract, maybe, if I could act them as they should be acted. So I sat there in the lone chair, t tying to reconstruct the character of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single rent of her 32,000 for food. by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it, Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging into their savings." I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to decide that I ought to eat even if it cost me something. I camd out of it and said, "That's what you keep telling me." "I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more. What are the chances, Weldon?". "Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not." He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the basket team. He could at least have said goodby. He never did, though. A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion. Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary desperation and needless death. Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money out of the bank. I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up. "The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right." Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark." "But he doesn't know old people." "What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was -- and still would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the 7 insecurity of acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a psychotic than eating?" . "Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation, no." "Why not?" "You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't: Not when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I can't see going without food altogether." hadn't until then because he didn't want to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables.", "It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die of starvation?" "That depends on age, health, amount of activity -- " "Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!" "So it takes weeks. Where's the problem -- if there is one?" I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes -- old men seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see, and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it out. "Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked. "No. Did you?" "In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last couple of years -- I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a jvay of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room and slowly starve to death." He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flitked it away, his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet. "There's charity," I. went on, "relief -- except for those who have their dough in banks, where it can be checked on -- old age pension, panhandling, cadging off neighbors." He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact with anybody." S "Even when they're starting to t real hungry?" "You've got something, Mark,ul that's the wrong tack," he nl thoughtfully. "The point is Imt they don't have to make "iitact; other people know themi about them. Somebody would heck after a few days or a week the janitor, the landlord, somene in the house or the neighborhood." "So they'd be found before they died." "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they hardly know these old people and whether they're alive or not. Maybe that's what threw us off. But you don't need friends and relatives to start wondering, and investigate when you haven't shown up for a while." He lifted his head and looked at me. "What does that prove, Mark?" "That there's something wrong with these cases. I want to find out what." to Headquarters, where he let me see the bankbooks the old woman had left. "She took damned good care of them," I said. "They look almost new," "Wouldn't you take damned good care of the most important thing in the world to you?" he asked. "You've seen the hoards of money the others leave. Same thing." .1 peered closely at the earliest entry, April 23, 1907, 150. My eyes aren't that bad; I was peering at the ink. It was dark, unfaded. I pointed it out to Lou. "From not being exposed to daylight much," he said. "They don't haul out the bankbooks or money very often, I guess." "And that adds up for you? I can see them being psychotics all their lives but not senile psychotics," "They hoarded, Mark. That adds up for me." "Funny," I said, watching him maneuver his cigarette as if he loved the feel of it, drawing the smoke down and letting it out in plumes of different shapes, from rings to slender streams. What a living he could make doing cigarette commercials on TV! "I can see you turn into one of these cases, Lou." He looked startled for a second, but then crushed out the butt carefully so he could watch it instead of me. "Yeah? How so?" "You've been too scared by poverty to take a chance. You know you could do all right acting, but you don't dare giving up this crummy job. Carry that far 9 enough and . you try to stop spending money, then cut out eating, and finally wind up dead of starvation in a cheap room." "Me? I'd never get that scared of being broke!" "At the age of 70 or 80?" "Especially then! I'd probably tear loose for a while and then buy into a home for the aged." I wanted to grin, but I didn't. He'd proved my point. He'd also shown that he was as bothered by these old people as I was. "Tell me, Lou. If somebody kept you from dying, would you give' him any dough for it, even if you were a senile psychotic?" I could see him using the Stanislavsky method to feel his way to the answer. He shook his head. "Not while I was alive. Will it, maybe, not give it." "How would that be as a motive?" H E leaned against a metal filing cabinet. "No good, Mark, You know what a hell of a time we have tracking down relatives to give the money to, because these people don't leave wills. The few relatives we find are always surprised when they get their inheritance -- most of them hardly remember dear old whoever-it-was that died and left it to them. All the other estates eventually go to the State treasury, unclaimed." "Well, it was an idea." I open ed the oldest bankbook again. "Anybody ever think of testing the ink, Lou?" ' "What for? The banks' records always check. These aren't for geries, if that's what you'r thinking." "I don't know what I'm think ing," I admitted. "But I'd like to turn a chemist loose on this for a little while." "Look, Mark, there's a lot I'i willing to do for you, and I think I've done plenty, but there's a limit -- " I let him explain why he couldn't let me borrow the book and then waited while he figured out how it could be done and did it. He was still grumbling when he helped me pick a chemist out of the telephone directory and went along to the lab with me. "But don't get any wrong notions," he said ' on the way, "I have to protect State property, that's all, because I signed for it and I'm responsible." "Sure, sure," I agreed, to humor him. "If you're not curious, why not just wait outside for me?" He gave me one of those whitetooth grins that he had no right to deprive women audiences of. "I could do that, but I'd rather see you make a sap of yourself." I turned the bankbook over to the chemist and we waited for 10 the report. When it came, it had to be translated. used 50 years ago. Lou. Pape gave me a jab in the ribs at that. But then the chemist said that, according to the amount of oxidation, it seemed fresh enough to be only a few months or years old, and it was Lou's turn to get jabbed. Lou pushed him about the aging, asking if it couldn't be the result of unusually good care. The chemist couldn't say -- that depended on the kind of care; an airtight compartment, perhaps, filled with oneof the inert gases, or a vacuum. They hadn't been kept that way, of course, so Lou looked as baffled as I felt. He took the bankbook and we went out to the street. "See what I mean?" I asked quietly, not wanting to rub it in. "I see something, but I don't know what. Do you?" "I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything else about these cases." "What do you do next?" "Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before they do." "If they're loaded, they won't say so, Mark, and there's no way f telling them from those who are down and out." I rubbed my pipe disgruntledly against the side of my nose to oil it. "Ain't this a beaut of a problem? I wish I liketk problems. I hate them." Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather die of starvation than spend a few cents for food. I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late. And the fresh ink, over half a century old , . , banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an old bankbook that had fresh ink from 50 years before. Lou was some help there -- he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks. I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage 11 calls that didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to me; they'd have interrupted my outside work. After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement -- acting like a cop, you know, instead of projecting his feelings -- and he couldn't haul me out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go. "Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with 17,000 in cash inside the lining of his jacket." "Alive?" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again. "Just barely. They're trying intravenous feeding to pull him through, I don't think he'll make it." "For God's sake, let's get there before he conks out!" Lou raced me to the City Hos pital and up to the ward. There was a scrawny old man in a bed, nothing but a papery skin stretched thin over a face like a skull and a body like a Hallow een skeleton, shivering as if he was cold. I knew it wasn't the cold. The medics were injecting a heart stimulant into him and he was vibrating like a rattletrap car racing over a gravel road. "Who are you?" I practically yelled, grabbing his skinny arm. "What happened to you?" He went on shaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open. "Ah, hell!" I said, disgusted. "He's in a coma." "He might start talking," Lou told me. "I fixed it up so you can sit here and listen in case he does." "So I can listen to delirious ravings, you mean." Lou got me a chair and put it next to the bed. "What are you kicking about? This is the first live one you've seen, isn't it? That ought to be good enough for you." He looked as annoyed as a director. "Besides, you can get biographical data out of delirium that you'd never get if he was conscious." H E was right, of course. Not only data, but attitudes, wishes, resentments that would normally be repressed. I wasn't thinking of acting at the moment, 12 r hough. Here was somebody who  trnld tell me what I wanted to know only he couldn't talk. Lou went to the door. "Good nek," he said, and went out. 1 sat down and stared at the i ild man, willing him to talk. I don't have to ask if you've ever lone that; everybody has. You krep thinking over and over, getting more and more tense, "Talk, damn you, talk !" until you find that every muscle in your body is a fist and your jaws are aching because you've been clenching your teeth so hard. You might just as well not bother, but once in a while a coincidence makes you think you've done it. Like now. The old man sort of came to. That is, he opened his eyes and looked around without seeing anything, or it was so far away and long ago that nobody else could see what he saw. I hunched forward on the chair and willed harder than ever. Nothing happened. He stared at the ceiling and through and beyond me. Then he closed his eyes again and I slumped back, defeated and bitter -- but that was when he began talking. There were a couple of women, though they might have been little girls in his childhood, and he had his troubles with them. He was praying for a toy train, a roadster, to pass his tests, to keep from being fired, to be less lonely, and back to toys again. He hated his father, and his mother was too busy with church bazaars "and such to pay much attention to him. There was a sister: she died when he was a kid. He was glad she died, hoping maybe now his mother would notice him ,but he was also filled with guilt because he was glad. Then somebody, he felt, was trying to shove him out of his job. The intravenous feeding kept dripping into his vein and he went on rambling. After ten or fifteen minutes of it, he fell asHep. I felt so disappointed that I could have slapped him awake, only it wouldn't have done any good. Smoking would have helped me relax, but it wasn't allowed, and I didn't dare go outside for one, for fear he might revive again and this time come up to the present. ed, trying to sit up. I pushed him down gently, and he went on in frightful terror, "Old and poor, nowhere to go, nobody wants me, can't make a living, read the ads every day, no jobs for old men." He blurted through weeks, months, years -- I don't know -- of fear and despair. And finally he came to somefhing that made his face glow like a radium dil. 13 "An ad. No experience needed. Good salary." His face got dark and awful. All he added was, "El Greco," or something that sounded like it, and then he went into terminal breathing. I rang for the nurse and she went for the doctor. I couldn't stand the long moments when the old man's chest stopped moving, the abrupt frantic gulps of air followed by no breath at all. I wanted to get away from it, but I had to wait for whatever more he might say. It didn't come. His eyes fogged and rolled up and he stopped taking those spasmodic strangling breaths. The nurse came back with the doctor, who felt his pulse and shook his head. She pulled the blanket over the old man's face. I left, feeling sick. I'd learned things I already knew about hate and love and fear and hope and frustration. There was an ad in it somewhere, but I had no way of telling if it had been years ago or recently. And a name that sounded like "El Greco." That was a Spanish painter of fourfive hundred years ago. Had the old guy been remembering a picture he'd seen? No, he'd come up at least close to the present. The ad seemed to solve his problem about being broke. But what about the 17,060 that had been found in the 14 lining of his jacket? He hadn't mentioned that. Of course, being a senile psychotic, he could have considered himself broke even with that amount of money. None coming in, you see. That didn't add up, either. His was the terror of being old and jobless. If he'd had money, he would have figured how to make it last, and that would have come through in one way or another.  There was the ad, there was his hope, and there was this El Greco. A Greek restaurant, maybe, where he might have been bumming his meals. But where did the 17,000 fit in? L OU Pape was too fed up with the whole thing to discuss it with me. He just gave me the weary eye and said, "You're riding this too hard, Mark. The guy was talking from fever. How do I know what figures and what doesn't when I'm dealing with insanity or delirium?" "But you admit there's plenty about these cases that doesn't figure?" "Sure. Did you take a look at the condition the world is in lately? Why should these old people be any exception?" I couldn't blame him. He'd pulled me in on the cases with plenty of trouble to himself, just to do me a favor. Now he was fed up. I guess it wasn't even that -- he thought I was ruining myself, at least financially and maybe worse, by trying to run down the problem. He said he'd be glad to see me any time and gas about anything or help me with whatever might be bothering me, if he could, but not these cases any more. He told me to lay off them, and then he left me onmy own. I don't know what he could have done, actually. I didn't need him to go through the want ads with me, which I was doing every day, figuring there might be something in the ravings about an ad. I spent more time than I liked checking those slanted at old people, only to find they were supposed to become messengers and such. One brought, me to an old brownstone fivestory house in the East 80s. I got on line with the rest of the applicants -- there were men and women, all decrepit, all looking badly in need of money -- and waited my turn. My face was lined with collodion wrinkles and I wore an antique shiny suit and rundown shoes. I didn't look more prosperous or any younger than they did. I finally came up to the woman who was doing the interviewing. She sat behind a plain office desk down in the main floor hall, with a pile of application cards in front of her and a ballpoint pen in one strong, slender hand. She had red hair with gold lights in it and eyes so pale blue that they would have seemed the same color as the whites if she'd been on the stage. Her face would have been beautiful except for her rigid control of expression; she smiled abruptly, shut it off just like that, looked me over with all the impersonality and penetration of an X-ray from the soles to the bald head, exactly as she'd done with the others. But that skin! If it was as perfect as that all over her slim, stiffly erect, proudly shaped body, she had no business off the stage ! "Name, address, previous occupation, social security number?" she asked in a voice with good clarity, resonance and diction. She wrote it all down while I gave the information to her. Then she asked me for references, and I mentioned Sergeant Lou Pape. "Fine," she said. "We'll get in touch with you if anything comes up. Don't call us -- we'll call you." I hung around to see who'd be picked. There was only one, an old man, two ahead of me in the line, who had no social security number, no references, not even any relatives or friends she could IS have checked up on him with. Damn! Of course that was what she wanted! Hadn't all the starvation cases been people without social security, references, either no friends and relatives or those they'd lost track of? I'd pulled a blooper, but how was I to know until too late? Well, there was a way of making it right. that evening, I stood on the corner and watched the lights in the brownstone house. The ones on the first two floors went out, leaving only those on the third and fourth. Closed for the day or open for business? I got into a building a few doors down by pushing a button and waiting until the buzzer answered, then racing up to the roof while some man yelled down the stairs to nd out who was there. I crossed the tops of the two houses between and went down the fire escape. It wasn't easy, though not as tough as you might imagine. The fact is that I'm a whole year younger than Lou Pape, even if I could play his grandpa professionally. I still have muscles left and I used them to get down the fire escape at the rear of the house. The fourth floor room I looked into had some kind of wire mesh 16 cage and some hooded machinery. Nobody, there. The third floor room was the redhead's. She was coming out of the bathroom with a terrycloth bathrobe and a towel turban on when I looked in. She slid the robe off and began dusting herself with powder. That skin did cover her. She turned and moved toward a vanity against the wall that I was on the other side of. The next thing I knew, the window was flung up and she had a gun on me. "Come right in -- Mr. Weldon, isn't it?" she said in that completely controlled voice of hers. One day her control would crack, I thought irrelevantly, and the pieces would be found from Dallas to North Carolina. "I had an idea you seemed more curious than was justified by a helpwanted ad." "A man my age doesn't get to see many pretty girls," I told her, making my own voice crack pathetically in a senile whinny. She motioned me into the room. When I was inside, I saw a light over the window blinking red. It stopped the moment I was in the room. A silent burglar alarm. She let her pale blue eyes wash insolently over me. "A man your age can see all the pretty girls he wants to. You're not old. "And you use a rinse," I retorted. She ignored it. "I specifically advertised for old people. Why did you apply?" It had happened so abruptly that I hadn't had a chance to use the Stanislavsky method to feel old in the presence of a beautiful nude woman. I don't even know if it would have worked. Nothing's perfect. "1 needed a job awful bad," I answered sullenly, knowing it sounded like an ad lib. S HE smiled with more contempt than humor. "You had a job, Mr. Weldon. You were very busy trying to find out why senile psychotics starve themselves to death." "How did you know that?" I asked, startled. "A little investigation of my own. I also happen to know you didn't tell your friend Sergeant Pape that you were going to be here tonight." That Was a fact, too. I hadn't felt sure enough that I'd found the answer to call him about ft. Looking at the gun in her steady hand, I was sorry I hadn't. "But you did find out I own this building, that my name is May Roberts, and that I'm the daughter of the late Dr. Anthony Roberts, the physicist," she continued, "Is there anything else T3 you want me to tell you about yourself?" "I know enough already. I'm more interested in you and the starvation cases. If you weren't connected with them, you wouldn't have known I was investigating them." "That's obvious, isn't it?" She reached for a cigarette on the vanity and used a lighter with her free hand. The big mirror gave me another view of her lovely body, but that was beginning to interest me less than the gun. I thought of making a grab for it. There was too much distance between us, though, and she knew better than to take her eyes off me while she was lighting up. "I'm not afraid of professional detectives, Mr. Weldon. They deal only with facts and every one of them will draw the same conclusions from a given set of circumstances. I don't like amateurs. They guess too much. They don't stick to reality. The result -- " her pale eyes chilled and her shapely mouth went hard -- "is that they are likely to get too close to the truth." I wanted a smoke myself, but I wasn't willing to make a move toward the pipe in my jacket. "I may be close to the truth. Miss Roberts, but I don't know what the devil it is. I still don't know how you're tied in with the senile psychotics or why they starve ith all that money. You could ' me go and I wouldn't have a ung on you." She glanced down at herself id laughed for real for the first me. "You wouldn't, would you? n the other hand, you know liere I'm Working from and uld nag Sergeant Pape into getug a search warrant. It wouldn't i criminate me, but it would be i convenient. I don't care to be i convenienced." "Which means what?" "You want to find out my connection with senile psychotics. I intend to show you." "How?" , She gestured dangerously with the gun. "Turn your face to the wall and stay that way while I get dressed. Make one attempt to turn around before I tell you to and I'll shoot you. You're guilty of housebreaking, you know. It would be a little inconvenient for me to have an investigation but not as inconvenient as for you." stomach braid itself into a tight, painful knot of fear. Of what, I didn't know yet, only that old people who had something to do with her died of starvation. I wasn't old, but that didn't seem very comforting. She was the most frigid, calculating, deadly woman I'd ever met. That alone was enough to scare bell out of me. And there was the problem of what she was Capable of. Hearing the sounds of her dressing behind me, 1 wanted to lunge around and rush her, taking a chance that she might be too busy pulling on a girdle or reaching back to fasten a bra to have the gun in her hand. It was , a suicidal impulse and I gave it up instantly. Other women might compulsively finish concealing themselves before snatching up the gun. Not her. "All right," she said at last. I faced her. She was wearing coveralls that, if anything, emphasized the curves of her figure. She had a sort of babushka that covered her red hair and kept it in place -- the kind of thing women workers used to wear in factories during the war. She had looked lethal with nothing on but a gun and a hard expression. She looked like a sentence of execution now. "Open that door, turn to the right and go upstairs," she told me, indicating directions with the gun. I went. It was the longest, most anxious short walk I've ever taken. She ordered me to open a door on the fourth floor, and we were inside the room I'd seen from the fire escape. The mesh cage seemed like a torture chamber to me, the hooded motors de19 signed to shoot an agonizing current through my emaciating body. "You're going to do to me what you did to the old man you hired today?" I probed, hoping for an answer that would really answer. She flipped on the switch that started the motors and there was a shrill, menacing whine. The wire mesh of the cage began blurring oddly, as if vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork. "You've been an unexpected nuisance, Weldon," she said above the motors. "I never thought you'd get this far. But as long as you have, we might as well both benefit by it." "Benefit?" I repeated. "Both of us?" She opened the drawer of a work table and pulled out a stack of envelopes held with a rubber band. She put the stack at the other edge of the table. "Would you rather have all cash or bank accounts or both?" My heart began to beat. She was where the money came from i  "V7"OU trying to tell me you're a philanthropist?" I demanded. "Business is philanthropy, in a way," she answered calmly. "You need money and I need your services. To that extent, we're doing each other a favor. I think you'll find that the favor I'm going to do for you is a pretty considerable .one. Would you mind picking up the envelopes on the table?" I took the stack and stared at the top envelope. "May 15, 1931," I read aloud, and looked suspiciously at her. "What's this for?" "I don't think it's something that can be explained. At least it's never been possible before and I doubt if it would be now. I'm assuming you want both cash and bank accounts. Is that right?" "Well, yes. Only -- " "We'll discuss it later." She looked along a row of shelves against one wall, searching the labels on the stacks of bundles there. She drew one out and pushed it toward me. "Please open that and put on the things you'll find inside." I tore open the bundle. It contained a very plain business suit, black shoes, shirt, tie and a hat with a narrow brim. "Are these supposed to be my burial clothes?" "I asked you to put them on," she said. "If you want me to make that a command, I'll do it." I looked at the gun and I looked at the clothes and then for some shelter I could change behind. There wasn't any. She smiled. "You didn't seem 20 'ncerned about my modesty. I iD't see why your own should ther you. Get dressed!" I obeyed, my mind anxiously ti using one possibility after ant her, all of them ending up with iy death. I got into the other i lings and felt even more uncomrtable, They were all only an proximate fit: the shoes a little  )o tight and pointed, the collar  if the shirt too stiffly starched und too high under my chin, the gray suit too narrow at the shoulders and the ankles. I wished I had a mirror to see myself in. I felt like an ultraconservative Wall Street broker and I was sure I resembled one, "All right," she said. "Put the envelopes in your inside pocket. You'll find instructions on each. Follow them carefully." "I don't get it!" I protested. "You will. Now step into the mesh cage. Use the envelopes in the order they're arranged in," "But what's this all about?" "I can tell you just one thing, Mr. Weldon -- don't try to escape. It can't be done. Your other questions will answer themselves if you follow the instructions on the envelopes." She had the gun in her hand. I went into the mesh cage, not knowing what to expect and yet too afraid of her to refuse. I didn't want to wind up dead of starvation, no matter how much money she might have given me -- but I didn't want to get shot, either. She closed the mesh gate and pushed the switch as far as it would go. The motors screamed as they picked up speed ; the mesh cage vibrated more swiftly; I could see her through it as if there were nothing between us. And then I couldn't see her at all. I was outside a bank on a sunny day in spring. -- I'd escaped somehow! But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her brownstone house. Even the season had changed! Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats, their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders, plain black or brown shoes -- the same kind of clothes I was wearing. The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square boefies, tubular radiators For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered ai the mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me electroshock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or taken me South and left me on a street in daylight. But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily. Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis? That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been hypnotized. Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed the top envelope to the teller. He hauled 150 out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd been treated in years. I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance. The date he'd stamped was May 15, 1931. more afraid of -- being stranded, middle-aged, in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that brownstone house. I had only an instant torealize that I was a kid in high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in the city. The date on the enevelope was May 29th and it was still 1931. I made a 75 deposit there, then 100 in another place a few days later, and so forth, spending only a few minutes each time and going forward anywhere from a couple of days to almost a month. Every now and then, I had a stamped, addressed envelope to mail at a corner box. They were addressed to different stock bro-: kers and when I got one open before mailing it and took a look inside, it turned out to be an order to buy a few hundred shares of stock in a soft drink company in the name of Dr. Anthony Roberts. I hadn't remembered the price of the shares being that low. The last time I'd seen the quotation, it was more than five times as much as it was then. I 22 is making dough myself, but i was doing even better for May K'oberts. A few times I had to stay  i round for an hour or so. There is the night I found myself in a i shy speakeasy with two envelopes that I was to bet the consents of, according to the instructions on the outside. It was June 'il, 1932, and I had to bet on Jack Sharkey to take the heavyweight title away from Max Schmeling. The place was serious and quiet -- no more' than three women, a couple of bartenders, and the rest male customers, including two cops, huddling up close to the radio. An affable character was taking bets. He gave me a wise little smile when I put the money down on Sharkey. "Well, it's a pleasure to do business with a man who wants an American to win," he said, "and the hell with the smart dough, eh?" "Yeah," I said, and tried to smile back, but so much of the smart money was going on Schmeling that I wondered if May Roberts hadn't made a mistake. I couldn't remember who had won. "You know what J. P. Morgan said -- don't sell America short." "I'll take a buck for my share," said a sour guy who barely managed to stand. "Lousy grass growing in the lousy streets, nobody working, no future, nothing!" "We'll come out of it okay," I told him confidently. He snorted into his gin. "Not in our lifetime, Mac. It'd take a miracle to put this country on its feet again. I don't believe in miracles." He put his scowling face up close to mine and breathed blearily and belligerently at me. "Do you?" "Shut up, Gus," one of the bartenders said. "The fight's starting." and a lot of bad Scotch, listening. It went the whole IS rounds, Sharkey won, and I was in almost as bad shape as Gus, who'd passed out halfway through the battle. All I can recall is the affable character handing . over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes, while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was outside a bank again. I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit. There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets to put down on Singing 23 Wood in 1933 at Belmont Park and Max Baer over Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in 1934, and James Braddock over Baer in 1935, and a big daily double payoff, Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued interest were something to watch grow. The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of 1938 -- a' total of maybe four or five hours subjectively -- before I realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My father  and mother, for instance, were still alive in 1938. If I could break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through time, I could go and see them. The thought, attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent, yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again and I didn't dare. I couldn't Why couldn't I? Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks, speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area, whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May Roberts had lined up for me. Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it was fresh; it wasn't given a chance to oxidize -- at the rate I was going, I'd be back to my own time in another few hours or so, with 15,000 or better in deposits, compound interest and cash. If I'd been around 70, you see, she could have sent me back to the beginning of the century with the same amount of money, which would have accumulated to something like 30,000. Get it now? I did. And I felt sick and frightened. The old people had died of starvation somehow with all that dough in cash or banks. I didn't give a hang if the time travel was responsible, or something else was. I wasn't going to be found dead in my hotel and have Lou Pape curse my corpse because 24 I'd been borrowing from him when, since 1931, I'd had a little fortune put away. He'd call me a i ' re mature senile psychotic and he'd be right, from his point of view, not knowing the truth. posit in October, 1938, I grabbed a battered old cab and fold the driver to step on it. When I showed him the 10 bill that was in it for him, he squashd down the gas pedal. In 1938, 10 was real money. We got a mile away from the i ank and the driver looked at me :n the rear-view mirror. "How far you want to go, mister?" My teeth were together so hard that I had to unclench them before I could answer, "As far away as we can get." "Cops after you?" "No, but somebody is. Don't he surprised at anything that happens, no matter what it is." "You mean like getting shot at?" he asked worriedly, slowing down. "You're not in any danger, friend. I am. Relax and step on it again." I wondered if she could still reach me, this far from the bank, and handed the guy the bill. No justice sticking him for the ride in case she should. He pushed the pedal down even harder than he had been doing before. We must have been close to three miles away when I blinked and was standing outside the first bank I'd seen in 1931. I don't know what the cab driver thought when I vanished out of his hack. He probably figured I'd opened the door and jumped while he wasn't looking. Maybe he even went back and searched for a body splashed all over the street. Well, it would have been a hopeless hunt. I was a week ahead. I gave up and drearily made my deposit. The one from early October that I'd missed I put in with this one. There was no way to escape the babe with the beautiful hard face, gorgeus warm body and plans for me that all seemed to add up to death, I didn't try any more. I went on making deposits, mailing orders to her stock brokers, and putting down bets that couldn't miss because they were all past history. I don't even remember what the last one was, a fight or a race. I hung around the bar that had long ago replaced the speakeasy, until the inevitable payoff, got myself a hamburger and headed out the door. All the envelopes I was supposed to use were gone and I felt shaky, knowing that the next place I'd see 25 was the room with the wire mesh cage and the hooded motors. It was. S HE was on the other side of the cage, and I had five bankbooks and envelopes filled with cash amounting to more than 15,000, but all I could think of was that I was hungry and something had happened to the hamburger while I was traveling through time. I must have fallen and dropped it, because my hand was covered with dust or dirt. I brushed it off and quickly felt my face and pulled up my sleeves to look at my arms. "Very smart," I said, "but I'm nowhere near emaciation." "What made you think you would be?" she asked. "Because the others always were." She cut the motors to idling speed and the vibrating mesh slowed down. I glared at her through it. God, she was lovely -- as lovely as an ice sculpture! The kind of face you'd love to kiss and slap, kiss and slap "You came here with a preconceived notion, Mr, Weldon. I'm a businesswoman, not a monster. I like to think there's even a good deal of the altruist in me. I could hire only young people, but the old ones have more trouble finding work. And you've seen for yourself how I provide nest eggs for them they'd otherwise never have." "And take care of yourself at the same time." "That's the businesswoman in me. I need money .to operate." . "So do the old people. Only they die and you don't." She opened the gate and invited me out. "I make mistakes occasionally. I sometimes pick men and women who prove to be too old to stand the strain. I try not to let it happen, but they need money and work so badly that they don't always tell the truth about their age and state of health." "You could take those who have social security cards and references." "But those who don't have any are in worse need!" She paused. "You probably think I want only the money you and they bring back, that it's merely some sort of profit-making scheme. It isn't." "You mean the idea is not just to build up a fortune for you with a cut for whoever helps you do it?" "I said I need money to operate, Mr. Weldon, and this mehod serves. But there are other purposes, much more important. What you have gone through is -- basic training, you might say. You know now that it's possible to travel through time, and what 26 it's like. The initial shock, in other words, is gone and you're better equipped to do something for me in another era." "Something else?" I stared at her puzzledly. "What else could you want?" "Let's have dinner first. You must be hungry." "I bought a hamburger just before you brought me back. I don't know what happened to it. My hand was dirty and the hamburger was gone, as if I'd fallen somehow and dropped it and got dirt on my hand." She looked worriedly at the hand, probably afraid I'd cut it and disqualified myself. I could understand that; you never know what kind of diseases can be picked up in different times, because I remember reading somewhere that germs keep changing according to conditions. Right now, for instance, strains of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. I knew her concern wasn't really for me, but it was pleasant all the same. "That could be the explanation, I suppose," she said. "The truth is that I've never taken a time voyage -- somebody has to operate the controls in the present -- so I can't say it's possible or impossible to fall. It must be, since you did. Perhaps the wrench back from the past was too violent and you slipped just before you returned."  She led me down to an ornate dining room, where the table had been set for two. The food was waiting on the table, steaming and smellingtasty. Nobody was around to serve us. She pointed out a chair to me and we sat down and began eating. I was a little nervous at first, afraid there might be something in the food, but it tasted fine and nothing happened after I swallowed a little and waited for some effect. "You did try to escape the time tractor beam, didn't you, Mr. Weldon?" she asked. I didn't have to answer; she knew. "That's a mistaken notion of how it functions. 'The control beam doesn't cover area ; it covers era. You could have flown to any part of the world and the beam would still have brought you back. Do I make myself clear?" She did. Too bloody clear. I waited for the rest. "I assume you've already formed an opinion of me," she went on. "A rather unflattering one, I imagine." " 'Bitch' is the cleanest word I can find. But a clever one. Anybody who can invent a time machine would have to be a genius." "I didn't invent it. My father did -- Dr, Anthony Robert -- us27 ing the funds you and others helped me provide him with." Her face grew soft and tender. "My father was a wonderful man, a great man, but he was called a crackpot. He was kept from teaching or working anywhere. It was just as well, I suppose, though he was too hurt to think so; he had more leisure to develop the time machine. He could have used it to extort repayment from mankind for his humiliation, but he didn't. He used it to help mankind." "Like how?" I goaded. "It doesn't matter, Mr. Weldon. You're determined to hate me and consider me a liar. Nothing I tell you can change that." S HE was right about the first part -- I hadn't dared let myself do anything except hate and fear her -- but she was wrong about the second. I remembered thinking how Lou Pape would have felt if I had died of starvation with over 15,000, after borrowing from him all the time between jobs. Not knowing how I got it, he'd have been sore, thinking I'd played him for a patsy. What I'm trying to say is that Lou wouldn't have had enough information to judge me. I didn't have enough information yet, either, to judge her. "What do you want me to do?" I asked warily. "Everybody but one person was sent into the past on specific errands -- to save art treasures and relics that would otherwise have been lost to humanity." "Not because the things might be worth a lot of dough?" I said nastily. "You've already seen that I can get all the money I want. There were upheavals in the past -- great fires, wars, revolutions, vandalism -- and I had my associates save things that would have been destroyed. Oh, beautiful things, Mr. Weldon! The world would have been so much poorer without them!" "El Greco, for instance?" I asked, remembering the raving old man who had been found wandering with 17,000 in his coat lining. "El Greco, too. Several paintings that had been lost for centuries." She became more brisk and efficient-seeming. "Except for the one man I mentioned, I concentrated on the past -- the future is too completely unknown to us. And there's an additional reason why I tentatively explored it only once. But the one person who went there discovered something that would be of immense value to the world." "What happened to him?" She looked regretful. "He was too old. He survived just long enough to tell me that the fu28 ture has something we need. It's a metal box, small enough to. carry, that could supply this whole city with power to run its industries and light its homes and streets!" "Sounds good. Who'd you say benefits if I get it?" "We share the profits equally, of course. But it must be understood that we sell the power so cheaply that everybody can afford it." "I'm not arguing. What's the other reason you didn't bother with the future?" "You can't bring anything from the future to the 'present that doesn't exist right now. I won't go into the theory, but it should be obvious that nothing can exist before it exists. You can't bring the box I want, only the technical data to build one." "Technical data? I'm an actor, not a scientist." "You'll have pens and weatherproof notebooks to copy it down in." mind about her. I've already said she was beautiful, which always prejudices a man in a woman's favor, but I couldn't forget the starvation cases. They hadn't shared anything but malnutrition, useless money and death. Then again, maybe her explanation was a good one, that she wanted to help those who needed help most and some of them lied about their age and physical condition because they wanted the jobs so badly. All I knew about were those who had died. How did I know there weren't others -- a lot more of them than the fatal cases, perhaps -- who came through all right and were able to enjoy their little fortunes? And there was her story about saving the treasures of the past and wanting to provide power at really low Cost. She was right about one thing; she didn't need any of that to make money with; her method was plenty good enough, using the actual records of the past to invest in stocks, bet on sports -- all sure gambles. But those starvation cases , "Do I get any guarantees?" I demanded. She looked annoyed. "I'll need you for the data. You'll need me to turn it into manufacture. Is that enough of a guarantee?" "No. Do I come out of this alive?" "Mr. Weldon, please use some logic. I'm the one who's taking the risk. I've already given you more money than you've ever had at one time in your life. Part of my motive was to pay for services about to be rendered. Mostly, it was to give you experience in traveling through time." 29 "And to prove to me that I can't run out," I added. "That happens to be a necessary attribute of the machine. I couldn't very well move you about through time unless it worked that way. If you'd look at my point of view, you'd see that I lose my investment if you don't bring back the data. I can't withdraw your money, you realize." "I don't know what to think," I said, dissatisfied with myself because I couldn't find out what, if anything, was wrong with the deal. "I'll get you the data for the power box if it's at all possible and then we'll see what happens." Finished eating, we went upstairs and I got into the cage. She closed the circuit. The motors screamed. The mesh blurred. And I was in a world I never knew. Y OU'D call it a city, I suppose ; there were enough buildings to make it one. But no citv ever had so much greenery, ft wasn't just tree-lined streets, like Unter den Linden in Berlin, or islands covered with shrubbery, like Park Avenue in New York. The grass and trees and shrubs grew around every building, separating them from each other by wide lawns. The buildings were more glass -- or what looked like glass -- than anything else. A few of the windows were opaque against the sun, but I couldn't see any shades or blinds. Some kind of polarizing glass or plastic? I felt uneasy being there, but it was a thrill just the same, to be alive in the future when I and everybody who lived in my day was supposed to be dead. The air smelled like the country. There was nd foul gas boiling from the teardrop cars on the glass-level road. They were made of transparent plastic clear around and from top to bottom, and they moved along at a fair clip, but more smoothly than swiftly. If I hadn't seen the airship overhead, I wouldn't have known it was there. It flew silently, a graceful ball without wings, seeming to be borne by the wind from one horizon to the other, except that no wind ever moved that fast. One car stopped nearby and someone shouted, "Here we are!" Several people leaped out and headed for me. I didn't think, I ran, I crossed the lawn and ducked into the nearest building and dodged through long, smoothly walled, shadowlessly lit corridors until I found a door that would open. I slammed it shut and locked it. Then, panting, I fell into a soft 30 chair that seemed to form itself around my body, and felt like kicking myself for the bloody idiot I was. What in hell had I run for? They couldn't have known who I was. If I'd arrived in a time when people wore togas or bathing suits, there would have been some reason for singling me out, but they had all had clothes just like ours -- suits and shirts and ties for the men, a dress and high heels for the one woman with them. I felt somewhat disappointed that clothes hadn't changed any, but it worked out to my advantage; I wouldn't be so conspicuous. Yet why should anyone have yelled "Here we are!" unless No, they must have thought I was somebody else. It didn't figure any other way. I had run because it was my first startled reaction and probably because I knew I was there on what might be considered illegal business; if I succeeded, some poor inventor would be done out of his royalties. I wished I hadn't run. Besides making me feel like a scared fool, I was sweaty and out of breath. Playing old men doesn't make climbing down fire escapes much tougher than it should be, but it doesn't exactly make a sprinter out of you -- not by several lungfuls. trying to guess what next. I had no more idea of where to go for what I wanted than an ancient Egyptian set down in the middle of Times Square with instructions to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. I didn't even have that much information. I didn't know any part of the city, how it was laid out, or where to get the data that May Roberts had sent me for. I opened the door quietly and looked both ways before going out. After losing myself in the cross-connecting corridors a few times, I finally came to an outside door. I stopped, tense, trying to get my courage. My inclination was to slip, sneak or dart out, but I made myself walk away like a decent, innocent citizen. That was one disguise they'd never be able to crack. All I had to do was act as if I belonged to that time and place and who would know the difference? There were other people walking as if they were in no hurry to get anywhere. I slowed down to their speed, but I wished wistfully that there was a crowd to dive into and get lost. A man dropped into step and said politely, "I beg your pardon. Are you a stranger in town?" I almost halted in alarm, but that might have been a giveaway. "What makes you think so?" I 32 disked, forcing myself to keep at the same easy pace. "I -- didn't recognize your face nd I thought -- " "It's a big city," I said coldly. "You can't know everyone." "If there's anything I can do to help -- " I told him there wasn't and left him standing there. It was plain common sense, I had decided quickly while he was talking to me, not to take any risks by admitting anything. I might have been dumped into a police state or the country could have been at war without my knowing it, or maybe they were suspicious of strangers. For one reason or another, ranging from vagrancy to espionage, I could be pulled in, tortured, executed, God knows what. The place looked peaceful enough, but that didn't prove a thing. I went on walking, looking for something I couldn't be sure existed, in a city I was completely unfamiliar with, in a time when I had no right to be alive. It wasn't just a matter of getting the information she wanted. I'd have been satisfied to hang around until she pulled me back without the data But then what would happen? Maybe the starvation cases were people who had failed her! For that matter, she could shoot me and send the remains anywhere in time to get rid of the evidence. Damn it, I didn't know if she was better or worse than I'd supposed, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I had to bring her what she wanted. It read; to shopping center. The arrow pointed along the road. When I came to a fork and wondered which way to go, there was another sign, then another pointing to still more farther on. I followed them to the middle of the city, a big square with a park in the center and shops of all kinds rimming it. The only shop I was interested in said : I went in. A neat young salesman came up and politely asked me if he could do anything for me. I sounded stupid even to myself, but I said, "No, thanks, I'd just like to do a little browsing," and gave a silly nervous laugh. Me, an actor, behaving like a frightened yokel! I felt ashamed of myself. He tried not to look surprised, but he didn't really succeed. Somebody else came in, though, for whichI was grateful, and he left me alone to look around. I don't know if I can get my feelings across to you. It's a situation that nobody would ever expect to find himself in, so it 33 isn't easy to tell what it's like. But I've got to try. Let's stick with the ancient Egyptian I mentioned a while back, the one ordered to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe that'll make it clearer. The poor guy has no money he can use, naturally, and no idea of what New York's transportation system is like, where the museum is, how to get there, what visitors to a museum do and say, the regulations he might unwittingly break, how much an ordinary citizen is supposed to know about which customs and such. Now add the possible danger that he might be slapped into jail or an insane asylum if he makes a mistake and you've got a rough notion of the spot I felt I was in. Being able to speak English doesn't make much difference; not knowing what's regarded as right and wrong, and the unknown consequences, are enough to panic anybody. That doesn't make it clear enough.  Well, look, take the electrical appliances in that store; that might give you an idea of the situation and the wayit affected me. The appliances must have been as familiar to the people of that time as toasters and TV sets and lamps are to us. But the things didn't make a bit of sense to me any more than our appliances would to the ancient Egyptian. Can you imagine him trying to figure out what those items are for and how they work? can puzzle over: There was a light fixture that you put against any part of a wall -- no screws, no cement, no wires, even -- and it held there and lit up, and it stayed lit no matter where you moved it on the wall. Talk about pin-up lamps this was really it ! Then I came across something that looked like an ashtray with a blue electric shimmer obscuring the bottom of the bowl, I lit my pipe -- others I'd passed had been smoking, so I knew it was safe to do the same -- and flicked in the match. It disappeared. I don't mean it was swirled into some hidden compartment. It vanished. I emptied the pipe into the ashtray and that went, too. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching. I dredged some coins out of my pocket and let them drop into the tray. They were gone. Not a particle of them was left. A disintegrator? I haven't got the slightest idea. There were little mirror boxes with three tiny dials on the front of each. 1 turned the dials on one -- it was like using three dial 34 telephones at the same time -- and a pretty girl's face popped onto the mirror surface and looked' 4 expectantly at me. "Yes?" she said, and waited for me to answer. "I -- uh -- wrong number, I guess," I answered, putting the box down in a hurry and going to the other side of the shop because I didn't have even a dim notion how to turn it off. The thing I was looking for was on a counter -- a tinted metal box no bigger than a suitcase, with a lipped hole on top and small undisguised verniers in front, I didn't know I'd found it, actually, until I twisted a vernier and every light in the store suddenly glared and the salesman came rushing over and politely moved me aside to shut it off. "We don't want to burn out every appliance in the place, do we?" he asked quietly. "I just wanted to see if it worked all right," I said, still shaking slightly. It could have blown up or electrocuted me, for all I knew. "But they always work," he said. "Ah -- always?" "Of course. The principle is simple and there are no parts to get worn out, so they last indefinitely," He suddenly smiled as if he'd just caught the gist. "Oh, you were joking! Naturally -- everybody learns about the Dynapack in primary education. You were interested in acquiring one?" "No, no. The -- the old one is good enough. I was just -- well, you know, interested in knowing ' if the new models are much different or better than the old ones." "But there haven't been any new models since 2073," he said. "Can you think of any reason why there should be?" "I -- guess not," I stammered. "But you never can tell." "You can with Dynapacks," he said, and he would have gone on if I hadn't lost my nerve and mumbled my way out of the store as fast as I could. Y OIwant to know why? He'd asked me if I wanted to "ac quire" a Dynapack, not buy one. I didn't know what "acquire" meant in that society. It could be anything from saving up coupons to winning whatever you wanted at some kind of lottery, or maybe working up the right number of labor units on the job -- in which case he'd want to know where I was employed and the equivalent of social security and similar information, which I naturally didn't have -- or it could just be fancy sales talk for buying. I couldn't guess, and I didn't 35 care to expose myself any more than I had already. And my blunder about the Dynapack working and the new models was nothing to make me feel at all easier. Lord, the uncertainties and hazards of being in a world you don't know anything about! Daydreaming about visiting another age may be pleasant, but the reality is something else again. "Wait a minute, friend!" I heard the salesman call out behind me.  looked back as casually, I hoped, as the pedestrians who heard him. He was walking quickly toward me with a very worried expression on his face. I stepped up my own pace as unobtrusively as possible, trying to keep a lot of people between us, meanwhile praying that they'd think I was just somebody who was late for an appointment. The salesman didn't break into a run or yell for the cops, but I couldn't be sure he wouldn't. As soon as I came to a corner, 3 turned it and ran like hell. There was a sort of alley down the block. I jumped into it, found a basement door and stayed inside, pressed against the wall, quivering with tension and sucking air like a swimmer who'd stayed underwater too long. Even after I got my wind back, I wasn't anxious to go out. The place could have been cordoned off, with the police, the army and the navy all cooperating to nab me. What made me think so? Not a thing except remembering how puzzled our ancient Egyptian would have been if he got arrested in the subway for something everybody did casually and without punishment in his own time -- spitting! I could have done something just as innocent, as far as you and I are concerned, that this era would consider a misdemeanor or a major crime. And in what age was ignorance of the law ever an excuse? Instead of going back out, I prowled carefully into the building. It was strangely silent and deserted. I couldn't understand why until I came to a lavatory. There were little commodes and wash basins that came up to barely above my knees. The place was a school. Naturally it was deserted -- the kids were through for the day. I could feel the tension dissolve in me like a ramrod of ice melting, no longer keeping my back and neck stiff and taut. There probably wasn't a better place in the city for me to hide. A primary school! The salesman had said to me, "Everybody learns about the Dynapack in primary education." 36 eerie, like visiting a familiar childhood scene that had been distorted by time into something almost totally unrecognizable. There were no blackboards, teacher's big desk, children's little desks, inkwells, pointers, globes or books. Yet it was a school. The small fixtures in the lavatory downstairs had told me that, and so did the miniature chairs drawn neatly under the low, vividly painted tables in the various schoolrooms. A large comfortable chair was evidently where the teacher sat when not wandering around among the pupils. In front of each chair, firmly attached to the table, was a box with a screen, and both sides of the box held spools of wire on blunt little spindles. The spools had large, clear numbers on them. Near the teacher's chair was a compact case with more spools on spindles, and there was a large screen on the inside wall, opposite the enormous windows. I went into one of the rooms and sat down in the teacher's chair, wondering how I was going to find out about the Dynapack. I felt like an archeologist guessing at the functions of strange relics he'd found in a dead city. Sitting in the chair was like sitting on a column of air that let me sit upright or slump as I chose. One of the arms had a row of buttons. I pressed one and waited nervously to find out if I'd done something that woulii get me into trouble. Concealed lights in the ceiling and walls began glowing, getting brighter, while the room gradually turned dark. I glanced arouryjl bewilderedly to see why, because it was still daylight. The windows seemed to be sliding slightly, very slowly, and as they slid, the sunlight was damped out. I grinned, thinking of what my ancient Egyptian would make of that. I knew there were two sheets of polarizing glass, probably with a vacuum between to keep out the cold and the heat, and the lights in the room were beautifully synchronized with the polarized sliding glass. I wasn't doing so badly. The rest of the objects might not be too hard to figure out. The spools in the case alongside the teacher's chair could be wire recordings. I looked for something to play them with, but there was no sign of a playback machine. I tried to lift a spool off a spindle. It wouldn't come off. Hah! The wire led down the spindle to the base of the box, holding the spool in place. That meant the spools could be played 37 right in that position. But what started them playing? nutely. Every part of it was featureless -- no dials, switches or any unfamiliar counterparts. I even tried moving my hands over it, figuring it might be like a theramin, and spoke to it in different shades of commai, because it could have been built to respond to vocal orders. Nothing happened. Remember the Poe story that shows the best place to hide something is right out in the open, which is the last place anyone would look? Well, these things weren't manufactured to baffle people, any more than our devices generally are. But it's only by trying everything that somebody who didn't know what a switch is would start uf a vacuum cleaner, say, or light a big chandelier from a wall clear across the room. I'd pressed every inch of the box, hoping some part of it mighj act as a switch, and I finally touched one of the spindles. The spool immediately began spinning at a very low speed and the screen on the wall opposite the window glowed into life. "The history of the exploration of the Solar System," said an announcer's deep voice, "is one of the most adventuresAme in mankind's long list of achievements. Beginning with the crude rockets developed during World War II" There were newsreel shots of V-l and V-2 being blasted from their takeoff ramps and a montage of later experimental models. I wished I could see how it all turned out, but I was afraid to waste the time watching. At any moment, I might hear the footsteps of a guard or janitor or whoever tended buildings then. I pushed the spindle again. It checked the spool, which rewound swiftly and silently, and stopped itself when the rewinding was finished. I tried another. A nightmare underwater scene appeared. "With the aid of energy screens," said another voice, "the oceans of the world were completely charted by the year 2027" I turned it off, then another on developments in medicine, one on architecture, one on history, the geography of such places as the interior of South America and Africa that were -- or are -- unknown today, and I was getting frantic, starting the wonderful wire films that held full-frequency sound and pictures in absolutely faithful color, and shutting them off hastily when I discovered they didn't have what I was looking for. 38 They were courses for children, but they all contained information that our scientists are still groping for and I couldn't chance watching one all the way through! I was frustratedly switching off a film on psychology when a female voice said from the door, "May I help you?" her in sudden fright. She was young and slim and slight, but she could scream loud enough to get help. Judging by the way she was looking at me, outwardly polite and yet visibly nervous, that scream would be coming at any second. "T must have wandered in here by mistake," I said, and pushed past her to the corridor, where I began running back the way I had come. "But you don't understand!" she cried after me. "I really want to help -- " Yeah, help, I thought, pounding toward the street door. A gag right out of that psychology film, probably -- get the patient to hold still, humor him, until you can get somebody to put him where he belongs. That's what one of our teachers would do, provided she wasn't too scared to think straight, if she found an oldlooking guy thumbing frenziedly through the textbooks in a grammar school classroom. When I came to the outside door, I stopped. I had no way of knowing whether she'd given out an alarm, or how she might have done it, but the obvious place to find me would be out on the street, dodging for cover somewhere. I pushed the door open and let it slam shut, hoping she'd hear it upstairs. Then I found a door, sneaked it open and went silently down the steps. In the basement, I looked for a furnace or a coal bin or a fuel tank to hide behind, but there weren't any. I don't know how they got their heat in the winter or eooled the building in the summer. Probably some central atomic plant that took care of the whole city, piping in the heat or coolant in underground conduits that were led up through the walls, because there weren't even any pipes visible. I hunched into the darkest corner I could find and hoped they wouldn't look for me there. B Y the time night came, hunger drove me out of the school, but I did it warily, making sure nobody was in sight. The streets of the shopping center were more or less deserted. There was no sign of a restaurant. 1 was so empty that I felt dizzy as I hunted for one. But 40 'lien a shocking realization made ne halt on the sidewalk and weat with horror. Even if there had been a restaurant, what would I have used for money? Now I got the whole foul pic' i ire. She had sent old people ack through time on errands like mine and they'd starved to death because they couldn't buy food! No, that wasn't right. I renembered what I had told Lou 'ape : anybody who gets hungry nough can always find a truck . irden or a food store to rob. Only 1 hadn't seen a truck . irden or food store anywhere in this city. And I thought about people in the past having their hands rut off for stealing a loaf of bread. This civilization didn't look as if it went in for such drastic punishments, assuming I could find a loaf of bread to steal. But neither did most of the civilizations that practiced those barbarisms. I was more tired, hungry and scared than I'd ever believed a human being could get. Lost, completely lost in a. totally alien world, but one in which I could still be killed or starve to death and God knew what was waiting for me in my own time in case I came back without the information she wanted. Or maybe even if I came back with it! That suspicion made up rfiy mind for me. Whatever happened to me now couldn't be worse than what she might do. At least I r didn't have to starve. I stopped a man in the street. I let several others go by before picking him deliberately because he was middle-aged, had a kindly face, and was smaller than me, so I could slug him and run if he raised a row. "Look, friend," I told him, "I'm just passing through town -- " "Ah?" he said pleasantly. " -- And I seem to have mislaid -- " No, that was dangerous. I'd been about to say I'd mislaid my wallet, but I still didn't know whether they used money in this era. He waited with a patient, friendly smile while I decided just how to put it. "The fact is that I haven't eaten all day and I wonder if you could help me get a meal." He said in the most neighborly voice imaginable, "I'll be glad to do anything I can, Mr. Weldon," M Y entire face seemed to drop open. "You -- you called me -- " "Mr. Weldon," he repeated, still looking up at me with that neighborly smile. "Mark Weld41 on, isn't it? From the 20th Century?" I tried to answer, but my throat had tightened up worse than on any opening night I'd ever had to live through. I nodded, wondering terrifiedly what was going on. "Please relax," he said persuasively. "You're not ib any danger whatever. We offer you our utmost hospitality. Our time, you might say, is your time." "You know who I am," I managed to get out through my constricted glottis. "I've been doing all this running arid ducking and hiding for nothing." He shrugged sympathetically. "Everyone in the city was instructed to help you, but you were so nervous that we were afraid to alarm you with a direct approach. Every time we tried to, as a matter of fact, you vanished into one .place or another. We didn't follow for fear of the effect on you. We had to wait until you came voluntarily to u" My brain was racing again and getting nowhere. Part of it was dizziness from hunger, but only part. The rest was plain frightened confusion. They knew who I was. They'd been expecting me. They probably even knew what I was after. And they wanted, to help! "Let's not go into explanations now," he said, "although I'd like to smooth away the bewilderment and fear on your face. But you need to be fed first. Then we'll call in the others and -- " I pulled back. "What others? How do I know you're not setting up something for me that I'll wish I hadn't gotten into?" "Before you approached me, Mr. Weldon, you first had to decide that we represented no greater menace than May Roberts. Please believe me, we don't." So he knew about that, too! "All right. I'll take my chances," I gave in resignedly. "Where does a guy find a place to eat in this city?" I T was a handsome restaurant with soft light coming from three-dimensional, full-color na' ture murals that I might mistakenly have walked into if I'd been alone, they looked so much like gardens and forests and plains. It was no wonder I couldn't find a restaurant or food store or truck garden anywhere -- food came up through pneumatic chutes in each building, I'd been told on the way over, grown in hydroponic tanks in cities that specialized in agriculture, and those who wanted to eat "out" could drop into the restaurant each building had. Every city had its own function. This one was for people in the arts. I liked that. 42 There was a glowing menu on the table with buttons alongside the various selections, I looked starvingly at the items, trying to decide which I wanted most. I picked oysters, onion soup, breast of guinea hen under plexiglas and was hunting for the tastiest and most recognizable dessert when the pleasant little guy shook his head regretfully and emphatically. "I'm afraid you can't eat any of those foods) Mr. Weldon," he said in a sad voice. "We'll explain why in a moment." A waiter and the manager came over. They obviously didn't want to stare at me, but they couldn't help it. I couldn't blame them. I'd have stared at somebody from George Washington's time, which is about what I must have represented to them. "Will you please arrange to have the special food for Mr. Weldon delivered here immediately?" the little guy asked. "Every restaurant has been standing by for this, Mr. Carr," said the manager. "It's on its way. Prepared, of course -- it's been ready since he first arrived." "Fine," said the little guy, Carr, "It can't be too soon. He's very hungry." I glanced around and noticed for the first time that there was nobody else in the restaurant. It was past the dinner hour, but. even so, there are always late diners. We had the place all to ourselves and it bothered me. They could have ganged up on me But they didn't. A light gong sounded, and the waiter and manager hurried over to a slot of a door and brought out a couple of trays loaded with covered dishes, "Your dinner, Mr. Weldon," the manager said, putting the plates in front of me and removing.the lids. I stared down at the food. "This," I told them angrily, "is a hell of a trick to play on a starving man!" "Mashed dehydrated potatoes, canned meat and canned vegetables," Carr replied. "Not very appetizing. I know, but I'm afraid it's all we can allow you to' eat." I took the cover off the dessert dish. "Dried fruits!" I said in disgust. "Rather excessively dried, I'm sorry to say," the manager agreed mournfully. I sipped the blue stuff in a glass and almost spat it out. "Powdered milk! Are these things what you people have to live on?" "No, our diet is quite varied," Carr said in embarrassment. 43 "But we unfortunately can't give you any of the foods we normally eat ourselves." "And why in blazes not?" "Please eat, Mr. Weldon," Carr begged with frantic earnestness. "There's so much to explain -- this is part of it, of course -- and it would be best if you heard it on a full stomach." I was famished enough to get the stuff down, which wasn't easy; uninviting as it looked, it tasted still worse. When I was through, Carr pushed several buttons on the glowing menu. Dishes came up from an opening in the center of the table and he showed me the luscious foods they contained. "Given your choice," he said, "you'd have preferred them to what you have eaten. Isn't that so, Mr. Weldon?" "You bet I would!" I answered, sore because 1 hadn't been given that choice. "And you would have died like the pathetic old people you ware investigating," said a voice behind me. I turned around, startled. Several men and women had come in while I'd been eating, their footsteps as silent as cats on a rug. I looked blankly from them to Carr and back again. "These are the clothes we ordinarily wear," Carr said. "An 18th Century motif, as you can see -- updated knee breeches and shirt waists, a modified stock for the men, the daring low bodices of that era, the full skirts treated in a modern way by using sheer materials for the women, bright colors and sheens, buckled shoes of spun synthetics. Very gay, very ornamental, very comfortable, and thoroughly suitable to our time." "But everybody I saw was dressed like me!" I protested. "Only to keep you from feeling more conspicuous and anxious than you already were. It was quite a project, I can tell you -- your styles varied so greatly from decade to decade, especially those for women -- and the materials were a genuine problem; they'd gone out of existence long ago. We had the textile and tailoring cities working a full six months to clothe the inhabitants of this city, including, of course, the children. Everybody had to be clad as your contemporaries were, because we knew only that you would arrive in this vicinity, not where you might wander through the city." "There was one small difference you didn't notice," added a handsome mature woman. "You were the only man in a gray suit. We had a full description of what you were wearing, you see, and we made sure nobody else was dressed that way. Naturally, everyone knew who you were, and so we were kept informed of your movements." "What for?" I demanded in alarm. "What's this all about?" down, looking to me like a witchcraft jury from some old painting. "I'm Leo Blundell," said a tall man in plum-and-gold clothes. "As chairman of -- of the Mark Weldon Committee, it's my responsibility to handle this project correctly." "Project?" "To make certain that history is fulfilled, I have to tell you as much as you must know." "I wish somebody would!" "Very well, let me begin by telling you much of what you undoubtedly know already. In a sense, youare more a victim of Dr. Anthony Roberts than his daughter. Roberts was a brilliant physicist, but because of his eccentric behavior, he was ridiculed for his theories and hated for his arrogance. He was an almost perfect example of self-defeat, the way in which a man will hamper his career and wreck his happiness, and then blame the world for his failure and misery. To get back to his connection with you, however, he invented a time machine -- unfortunately, its secret has since been lost and never rediscovered -- and used it for anti1 social purposes. When he died, his daughter May carried on his work. It was she who sent you to this time to learn the principle by which the Dynapack operates. She was a thoroughly ruthless woman." "Are ypu sure?" I asked uneasily. "Quite sure." "I know a number of old people died after she sent them on errands through time, but she said they'd lied about their age and health." "One would expect her to say that," a woman put in cuttingly. Blundell turned to her and shook his head. "Let Mr. Weldon clarify his feelings about her, Rhoda. They are obviously very mixed." "They are," I admitted. "She seemed hard, the first time I saw her, when I answered her ad, but she could have been just acting businesslike. I mean she had a lot of people to pick from and she had to be impersonal and make certain she had the right one. The next time -- 1 hope you don't know about that -- it was really my fault for breaking into her room. I really had a lot of admiration for the way she handled the situation." "Go on," Carr encouraged me. "And I can't complain about the deal she gave me. Sure, she 46 litne out ahead on the money I lct and invested for her. But I did all right myself -- I was richer than I'd ever been in my life -- and she gave that money to me before I even did anything to earn it!" "Besides which," somebody else said, "she offered you half of the profits on the Dynapiack." for signs of hostility. I saw none. That was surprising. I'd come from the past to steal something from them and they weren't it all angry. Well, no, it wasn't leally stealing. I wouldn't be depriving them of the Dynapack. It just would have been invented before it was supposed to be. "She did," I said. "Though I wouldn't call that part of it philanthropy. She needed me for the data and I needed her to manufacture the things." "And she was a very beautiful woman," Blundell added. I squirmed a bit. "Yes." "Mr. Weldon, we know a good deal about her from notes that have come down to us among her private papers. She had a safety deposit box under a false name. I won't tell you the name; it was not discovered until many years later, and we will not voluntarily meddle with the past." I sat up and listened sharply. "So that's how you knew who I was and what I'd be wearing and what I came for! You even knew when and where I'd arrive!" "Correct," Blundell said. "What else do you know?" "That you suspected her of being responsible for the deaths of many old people by starvation. Your suspicion was justified, except that her father had caused all those that occurred before 1947, when she took over after his own death. All but two people were sent into the past. Roberts was curious about the future, of course, but he did not want to waste a victim on a trip that would probably be fruitless. In the past, you understand, he knew precisely what he was after. The future was completely unknown territory." "But she took the chance," I said. "If you can call deliberate murder taking a chance, yes. One man arrived in 2094, over fifty years ago. The other was yourself. The first one, as you know, died of malnutrition when he was brought back to your era." "And what happened to me?" I asked, jittering. "You will not die. We intend to make sure of that. All the other victims -- I presume you're interested in their errands?" "I think I know, but I'd like to find out just the same." "They were sent to the past 47 to buy or steal treasures of various sorts -- art, sculpture, jewelry, fabulously valuable manuscripts and books, anything that had great scarcity value." "That's not possible," I objected. "She had all the money she wanted. Any time she needed more, all she had to do was send somebody back to put down bets and buy stocks that she knew were winners. She had the records, didn't she? There was no way she or her father could lose!" H E moved his shoulders in a plum-and-gold shrug. "Most of the treasures they accumulated were for acquisition's sake -- and for the sake of vengeance for the way they believed Dr. Roberts had been treated. When there were unusual expenses, such as replacing the very costly parts of the time machine, that required more than they could produce in ready cash, both Roberts and his daughter 'discovered' these treasures." ! He waited while I digested the miserable meal and the disturbing information he had given me. I thought I'd found a loophole in his explanation : "You said people were sent back to the past to buy treasures, besides stealing them." "I did," he agreed. "They were provided with currency of whatever era they were to visit." I felt my forehead wrinkle up as my theory fell apart. "Then they could buy food. Why should they have died of malnutrition?" "Because, as May Roberts herself told you, nothing can exist before jt exists. Neither can anything exist after it is out of existence. If you returned with a Dynapack, for example, it would revert to a lump of various metals, because that was what it was in your period. But let me give you a more personal instance. Do you remember coming back from your first trip with dust on your hand?" "Yes. I must have fallen." "On one hand? No, Mr. Weldon. May Roberts was greatly upset by the incident; she was afraid you would realize why the hamburger had turned to dust -- and why the old people died of starvation, All of them, not just a few." He paused, giving me a chance to understand what he had just said. I did, with a sick shock. "If I ate your food," I said shakily, "I'd feel satisfied until I was returned to my own time. But the food wouldn't go along with me!" "And so you, too, would die of malnutrition. The foods we have given you existed in your 4   fra. We were very careful of that, so careful that many of i hem probably were stored years "-fore you left your time, We i egret that they are not very palatable, but at least we are positive they will go back with you. You will be as healthy when you arrive in the past as when you left. "Incidentally, she made you hange your clothes for the same reason -- they had been made in 1930. She had clothing from very era she wanted visited and i hose old people who would fit them best. Otherwise, you see, they'd have arrived naked." I began to shake as if I were is old as I'd pretended to be on the stage. "She's going to pull me back! If I don't bring her the information about the Dynapack, she'll shoot me!" "That, Mr. Weldon, is our problem," Blundell said, putting his hand comfortingly on my arm to calm me. "Your problem? I'm the one who'll get shot, not you!" "But we know in complete detail what will happen when you are returned to the 20th Century." I pulled my arm away and grabbed his. "You know that? Tell me!" "I'm sorry, Mr. Weldon, If we tell you what you did, you might thing of some alternate action, and there is no knowing what the result would be." "But I didn't get shot or die of malnutrition?" "That much we can tell you. Neither." They all stood up, so bright and attractive in their colorful clothes that I felt like a shirtsleeved stage hand who'd wandered in on a costume play. "You will be returned in a month, according to the notes May Roberts left. She gave you plenty of time to get the data, you see. We propose to make that month an enjoyable one for you. The resources of our city -- and any others you care to visit -- are at your disposal. We wish you to take full advantage of them." "And the Dynapack?" "Let us worry about that. We want you to have a good time while you are our guest." I did. It was the most wonderful month of my life. T HE mesh cage blurred around me. I could see May Roberts through it, her hand just leaving the switch. She was as beautiful as ever, but I saw beneath her beauty the vengeful, vicious creature her father's bitterness had turned her into ; Blundell and Carr had let me read some of her notes, and I knew. I wished 49 I could have spent the rest of my years in the future, instead of having to come back to this. She came over and opened the gate, smiling like an angel welcoming a bright new soul. Then her eyes traveled startledly over me and her smile almost dropped off. But she held it firmly in place. She had to, while she asked, "Do you have the notes I sent you for?" "Right here," I said. I reached into my breast pocket and brought out a stubby automatic and shot her through the right arm. Her closed hand opened and a little derringer clanked on the floor. She gaped at me with an expression of horrified surprise that should have been recorded permanently; it would have served as a model for generations of actors and actresses. "You -- brought back a weapon!" she gasped. "You shot me!" She stared vacantly at her bleeding arm and then at my automatic. "But you can't -- brin anything back from the future. And you aren't -- dying of malnutrition." She said it all in a voice shocked into toneless wonder. "The food I ate and this gun are from the present," I said. "The people of the future knew I was coming. They gave me food that wouldn't vanish from my cells when I returned. They also gave me the gun instead of the plans for the Dynapsck." "And you took it?" she screamed at me. "You idiot! I'd have shared the profits honestly with you. You'd have been worth millions!" "With acute malnutrition," I amended. "I like it better this way, thanks -- poor, but alive. Or relatively poor, I should say, because you've been very generous and I appreciate it." "By shooting me!" "I hated to puncture that lovely arm, but it wasn't as painful as starving or getting shot myself. Now if you don't mind -- or even if you do -- it's your turn to get into the cage, Miss Roberts." She tried to grab for the derringer on the floor with her left hand. "Don't bother," I said quietly. "You can't reach it before a bullet reaches you."  S HE straightened up, staring at me for the first time with terror in her eyes. "What are you going to do to me?" she whispered. "I could kill you as easily as you could havekilled me. Kill you and send your body into some other era. How many dozens of deaths were you responsible for? The law couldn't convict you of them, but I can. And I couldn't be convicted, either." She put her hand on the wound. Blood seeped through her fingers as she lifted her chin at me. "I won't beg for my life, Weldon, if that's what you want. 1 could offer you a partnership, but I'm not really in a position to offer it, am I?" She was magnificent, terrifyingly intelligent, brave clear through and deadlier than a plague. I had to remember that. "Into the cage," I said. "I have some friends in the future who have plans for you. I won't tell you what they are, of course; you didn't tell me what I'd go through, did you? Give my friends my fondest regards. If I can manage it, I'll visit them -- and you." She backed warily into the cage. It would have been pleasant to kiss those wonderful lips good-by. I'd thought about them for a whole month, wanting them and loathing them at the same time. It would have been like kissing a coral snake. I knew it and I concentrated on shutting the gate on her. "You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you, Weldon?" she asked through the mesh. "I can be," I said. "I have the machine. I can send people into 52 he past or future and make myr If a pile . of dough. Only I'd :ve them food to take along. I wouldn't kill them off to keep he secret to myself. Anything Ise on your mind?" "You want me," she stated. I didn't argue. "You could have me." "Just long enough to get my throat slit or brains blown out. I don't want anything that much." I rammed the switch closed. The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the ioor, but she was gone into the : nture I had just come from. That was when the reaction tilt me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun, but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped ny stomach over and unhinged my knees. Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found a phone. that I still hadn't gotten over the tremors, in spite of a bottle of bfhndy I dug out of a credenza, maybe because the date on the label, 1763, . gave me a new case of the shivers. I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himself that I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him what had happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess I hadn't really expected him to. "If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark head unhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Even knowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do." "All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly. "From what I was told, there ought to be plenty," We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood with his face slack. "Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!" The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice as high as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammed with paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts, goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, and tapestries in brilliant color and everything was as bright and sparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of a lot of it. "The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lou said. "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was a collector and she knew where to find things." "She certainly did," I agreed. 53 "What did you do with her?" "I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me and I sent her into the future." He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. You wanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got rid of her body somehow." "Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leave sleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his hands loose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here? Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'd have sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody -- including you -- would know I'd ever been here. Come "That's easy. You lost your on, use your head." nerve." "I'm not even losing my patience."  H E pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff or because of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're no friend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, and I'll make sure you fry." "You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead and wrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, send me up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do the proving, not me." He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break or I'll plug you as if I never saw you before." He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particular damn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killed May Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, would have stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason for my relief -- if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find, he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have tried to get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievable explanation. But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'd shot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at and that had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.  She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; they regarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with their marvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contented citizen, living out her existence in an era that had given 54 me more happiness than I'd ever had. I sat and tried to stupefy my elf with brandy that should long i go have dried to brick-hardness, 'hile Lou Pape stood at the door vith his hand near his holster md glared at me. He didn't take  is eyes off me until somebody  amed Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson ame in and was introduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs. It was minutes before I resized what they were going to !o. I ran up after them. I was just in time to see Aaron.on carefully take the housing off the hooded motors, and leap back  uddenly from the fury of lightning sparks. r T'HE whole machine fused while we watched helplessly -- motors, switches, panel and mesh rage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and melted together in a charred and molten pile, "Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to short if it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a mess like this." He finally glatjced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching all the way around the rear for it with his left hand. Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any sense of it, Prof?" he asked. "Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify it when it looks like this." He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief. Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine to -- ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now we'll have to dig tmough the house to find her body." "You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of 'me." He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us 55 dig for her body, Mark?" "Tear the place apart if you want." "We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide." "Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like." "You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through." I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in the future could take on the job -- they could do it faster and better than I can -- but some nice, peaceful quiet would help." H E didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest. She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep. But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care could have made a great and honored scientist out of him. They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible. I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone. Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are impossible to work out ever could. I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came over to where I was sitting. "You knew we wouldn't find her," he said. "That's what I kept telling you." "Where is she?" "In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in veils for the depraved -- " "Cut out the kidding! Where is she?" "What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?" "That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead." 56 "She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else, just that" He hauled me out of the chair md stared hard at my face. You aren't lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not." "All right, then." "But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and betterlooking than her, for ne thing -- " "Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my naked scalp. "Witfi a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens to 'e a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me -- they checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head, which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten together like gin and tonic." L OU arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on you?" "Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glaneed out the window at the smoky city. "That's why. They couldn't tell me if I'd ever get back to the future. I wasn't taking any chances. As long as there was a possibility that I'd be stranded in my own time, I wasn't going to lose my livelihood. Which reminds me, you have anything else to do here?" "There'll be a guard stationed around the house and all her holdings and art will be taken ovr until she comes back -- " "She won't." " -- or is declared legally dead." "And me?" I broke in. "We can't hold you without proof of murder." "Good enough. Then let's get out of here." "I have to go back on duty," he objected. "Not any more. I've got over 15,000 in cash and deposits -- enough to finance you and me." "Enough to kill her for." "Enough to finance you and me," I repeated doggedly, "I told you I had the money before she sent me into the future -- " "AH right, all right," he interrupted. "Let's not go into that again. We couldn't find a body, so you're free. Now what's this about financing the two of us?" I put my fingers around his arm and steered him out to the street. "This city has never had a 57 worse cop than you," I said. "Why? Because you're an actor, not a cop. You're going back to acting, Lou. This money will keep us both going until we get a break." He gave me the sliteyed look he'd picked up in line of duty, "That wouldn't be a bribe, would 'it?" "Call it a kind of memorial to a lot of poor, innocent old people and a sick, tormented woman." We walked along in silence out in the clean sunshine. It was our silence; the sleek cars and burly trucks made their noise and the pedestrians added their gabble, but a good Stanislavsky actor like Lou wouldn't notice that. Neither would I, ordinarily, but I was giving him a chance to work his way through this situation. "I won't hand you a lie, Mark," he said finally. "I never stopped wanting to act. I'll take your deal on two considerations."  "All right, what are they?" "That whatever I take off you is strictly a loan." "No argument. What's the other?" He had an unlit cigarette almost to his lips. He held it there while he said: "That any time you come across a case of an old person who died of starvation with 30,000 stashed away somewhere, you turn fast to the theatrical page and not tell me or even think about it.". "I don't have to agree to that." H E lowered the cigarette, stopped and turned to me. "You mean it's no deal?" "Not that," I said. "I mean there won't be any more of those cases. Between knowing that and both of us back acting again. I'm satisfied. You don't have to believe me. Nobody does." He lit up and blew out a pretty plume, fine and slow and straight, which would have televized like a million in the bank. Then he grinned. "You wouldn't want to bet on that, would you?" "Not with a friend. I do all my surething betting with bookies." "Then make it a token bet," i he said. "One buck that somebody dies of starvation with a big poke within a year." I took the bet. I took the dollar a year later. i 58 games If is a tough assignment for a Mid to know where a daydream ends and impossibility begins! R onny was playing by himself, which meant he was two tribes of Indians having a war. "Bang' he muttered, firing an imaginary rifle. He decided that it was a time in history before the white people had sold the Indians any guns, and changed the rifle into a bow. "Wi zz- thunk" he substituted, mimicking from an Indian film on TV the graphic sound of an arrow striking flesh, "Oof He folded down onto the rass, moaning, "Uhhhooh and relaxing into defeat and death. "Want some chocolate milk, Ronny ?" asked his mother's voice from the kitchen. "No, thanks," he called back, climbing to his feet to be another man. "Wizzthunk, wizzthunk he added to the flights of arrows as the best archer in the tribe. "Last arrow, Wizzzz," he said, missing one enemy for realism. He addressed another battling brave. "Who has more arrows? They are coming too close. No time -- I'll have to use my knife 59 He drew the imaginary knife, ducking an arrow as it shot close. standing somewhere else, and he saw that the warriors left alive were outnumbered. "We must retreat. We cannot leave our tribe without warriors to protect the women." Ronny decided that the chief was heroically wounded, his voice wavering from weakness. He had been propping himself against a tree to appear unharmed, but now he moved so that his braves could see he was pinned to the trunk by an arrow and could not walk. They cried out. He said, "Leave me and escape. But remember No words came, just the feeling of being what he was, a dying old eagle, a chief of warriors, speaking to young warriors who would need advice of seasoned humor and moderation to carry them through their young battles. He had tg finish the sentence, tell them something wise. Ronny tried harder, pulling the feeling around him like a cloak of resignation and pride, leaning indifferently against the tree where the arrow had pinned him, hearing dimly in anticipation the sound of his aged voice conquering weakness to speak wisely of what they needed to be told. They had many battles ahead of them, and the battles would be against odds, with so many dead already. They must watch and wait, be flexible and tenacious, determined and persistent -- but not too rash, subtle and indirect -- not cowardly, and above all be patient with the triumph of the enemy and not maddened into suicidal direct attack. His stomach hurt with the arrow wound, and his braves waited to hear his words. He had to sum a part of his life's experience in words. Ronny tried harder to build the scene realistically. Then suddenly it was real. He was the man. He was an old man, guide and adviser in an oblique battle against great odds. He was dying of something and his stomach hurt with a knotted ache, like hunger, and he was thirsty. He had refused to let the young men make the sacrifice of trying to rescue him. He was hostage in the jail and dying, because he would not surrender to the enemy nor cease to fight them. He smiled and said, "Remember to live like other men, but -- remember to remember." And then he was saying things that could not be put into words, complex feelings that were ways of taking bad situations that made them easier to smile at, and then sentences that were not 60 entences, but single alphabet letters pushing each other ' with igns, with a feeling of being coni iected like two halves of a swing, one side moving up when the other moved down, or like swings or like cogs and pendulums inside a clock, only without the fogs, just with the push. It wasn't adding or multipication, and it used letters instead of numbers, but Ronny knew it was some kind of arithmetic. And he wasn't Ronny. He was an old man, teaching young men, and the old man did oot know about Ronny. He thought sadly frdw little he would be able to convey to the young men, and he remembered more, trying to sum long memories and much living into a few direct thoughts. And Ronny was the old man and himself, both at ince. t TT was too intense. Part of Ronny wanted to escape and tie alone, and that part withdrew and wanted to play something. Ronny feat in the grass and played with his toes like a much younger child. Part of Ronny that was Doctor Revert Purcell sat on the edge of a prison cot, concentrating on secret unpublished equations of biogenic stability which he wanted to pass on to the responsible hands of young researchers in the concealed-research chain. He was using the way of thinking which they had told him was the telepathic sending of ideas to anyone ready to receive. It was odd that he himself could never tell when he was sending. Probably a matter of age. They had started trying to teach him when he was already too old for anything so different. The water tap, four feet away, was dripping steadily, and it was hard for Purcell to concentrate, so intense was his thirst. He wondered if he could gather strength to walk that far. He was sitting up and that was good, but the struggle to raise himself that far had left him dizzy and trembling. If he tried to stand, the effort would surely interrupt his transmitting of equations and all the data he had not sent yet. Would the man with the keys who looked in the door twice a day care whether Purcell died with dignity? He was the only audience, and his expression never changed when Purcell asked him to point out to the authorities that he was not being given anything to eat. It was funny to Purcell to find that he wanted the respect of any audience to his dying, even of a man without response who treated him as if he were already a corpse. Perhaps the man would re61 spond if Purcell said, "I have changed my mind. I will tell." But if he said that, he would lose his own respect. At the biochemists' and biophysicists' convention, the reporter had asked him if any, of his researches could be applied to warfare. He had answered with no feeling of danger, knowing that what he did was common practice among research men, sure that it was an unchallengeable right. "Some of them can, but those I keep to myself." The reporter remained deadpan. "For instance?" "Well, I have to choose something that won't reveal how it's done now, but -- ah -- for example, a way of cheaply mass-producing specific antitoxins against any germ. It sounds harmless if you don't think about it, but actually it would make germ warfare the most deadly and inexpensive weapon yet developed, for it would make it possible to prevent the backspread of contagion into a country's own troops, without much expense. There would be hell to pay if anyone ever let that out." Then he had added, trying to get the reporter to understand enough to change his cynical unimpressed expression, "You understand, germs are cheap -- there would be  new plague to spread everytime some pipsqueak biologist mutated a new germ. It isn't even expensive or difficult, as atom bombs are." The headline was: "Scientist Refuses to Give Secret of Weapon to Government." G overnment men came and asked him if this was correct, and on having it confirmed pointed out that he had an obligation. The research foundations where he had worked were subsidized by government money. He had been deferred from military service during his early years of study and work so he could become a scientist, instead of having to fight or die on the battlefield. "This might be so," he had said. "I am making an attempt to serve mankind by doing as much good and as little damage as pos sible. If you don't mind, I'd rather ,use my own judgment about what constitutes service." The statement seemed too blunt the minute he had said it, and he recognized that it had implications that his judgment was superior to that of the government. It probably was the most antagonizing thing that I could have been said, but he J could see no other possible state ment, for it represented precisely i what he thought. There were bigger headlines j about that interview, and when I 62 he stepped outside his building for lunch the next day, several small gangs of patriots arrived with the proclaimed purpose of pursuading him to tell. They fought each other for the privilege. The police had rescued him after he had lost several front teeth and had one eye badly gouged. They then left him to the care of the prison doctor in protective custody. Two days later, after having been questioned several times on his attitude toward revealing the parts of his research he had kept secret, he was transferred to a place that looked like a military jail, and left alone. He was not told what his status was. When someone came and asked him questions about his attitude, Purcell felt quite sure that what they were doing to him was illegal. He stated that he was going on a hunger strike until he was allowed to have visitors and see a lawyer. The next time the dinner hour arrived, they gave him nothing to eat. There had been no food in the cell since, and that was probably two weeks ago. He was not sure just how long, for during part of the second week his memory had become garbled. He dimly remembered 'something that might have been delirium, which could have lasted more than one day. Perhaps the military who wanted the antitoxins . for germ warfare were waiting quietly for him either to talk or die. and went into the kitchen, stumbling in his walk like a beginning toddler. "Chocmil?" he said to his mother. She poured him some and teased gently, "What's the matter, Ronny -- back to baby-talk?" He looked at her with big solemn eyes and drank slowly, not answering. In the cell somewhere distant. Dr. Purcell, famous biochemist, began waveringly trying fo rise to his feet, unable to remember hunger as anything separate from him that could ever be ended, but weakly wanting a glass of water. Ronny could not feed him with the chocolate milk. Even though this was another himself, the body that was drinking was not the one that was thirsty. He wandered out into the back yard again, carrying the glass. "Bang," he said deceptively, pointing with his hand in case his mother was looking. "Bang." Everything had to seem usual; he was sure of that. This was too big a thing, and too private, to tell a grownup. On the way back from the sink, Dr. Purcell slipped and fell and 64 lit his head against the edge of the iron cot. Ronny felt the edge K-tshing through skin and into hone, and then a relaxing blankness inside his head, like falling sleep suddenly when they are Uing you a fairy story while vou want to stay awake to find out what happened next. "Bang," said Ronny vaguely, pointing at a tree. "Bang." He was ashamed because he had fallen down in the cell and hurt his head and become just Ronny ;'ain before he had finished nding out his equations.He ied to make believe he was alive igain, but it didn't work. You could never make-believe anything to a real good finish. They never ended neatly -- there was always something unfinished, and something that would t;o right on after the end. It would have been nice if the i ailers had come in and he had been able to say something noble to them before dying, to show that he was brave. "Bang," he said randomly, ointing his finger at his head, nd then jerked his hand away is if it had burned him. He had become the wrong person that time. The feel of a bullet jolting the side of his head was startling and unpleasant, even if not real, and the flash of someone's vindictive anger and self-pity while pulling a trigger , My wife will be sorry she ever He didn't like that kind of make-believe. It felt unsafe to do it without making up a story first. Ronny decided to be Indian braves again. They weren't very real, and when they were, they had simple straightforward emotions about courage and skill and pride and friendship that he would like. on the fence, watching him. "Nice day." What's the matter, kid, are you an esper? "Hul-lo," Ronny stood on one foot and watched him. Just making believe. I only want to play. They make it too serious, having all these troubles. "Good countryside," The man gestured at the back yards, all opened in together with tangled bushes here and there to crouch behind, when other kids were there to play hide and seek, and with trees to climb. It can be the Universe if you pick and choose who to be, and don't let wrong choices make you shut off from it. You can make yourself learn from this if you are strong enough. Who have you been? Ronny stood on the other foot and scratched the back of his leg with his toes. He didn't want to remember. He always forgot right away, but this grownup was confident and young and 65 stronglooking, and meant something when he talked, not like most grownups. "I was playing Indian." I was an old cNef, captured by enemies, trying to pass on to other warriors the wisdom of my life before I died. He made believe he "Was the chief a little to show the young man what he was talking about. "Purcell!" The man drew in his breath between his teeth, and his face paled. He pulled back from reaching Ronny with his feelings, like holding his breath in. "Good game." You can fern from him. Don't leave him shut off, I beg you. You can let him influence you without being pulled off your own course. He was a good man. You were honored, and I envy the man you wilt be if you contacted him on resonant similarities. The grownup looked frightened. But you are too young. You'll block him out and lose him. Kids have to grow and learti at their own speed. Then he looked less afraid, but uncertain, and his thoughts struggled against each other. Their own speed. But there should be someone alive with Purcells pattern and memories. We loved him. Kids should grow at their own speed, but How strong are you, Ronny? Can you move ahead of the normal growth pattern? Grownups always want you to do something. Ronny stared back, clenching his hands and moving his feet uneasily. The thoughts were open to him Do you want to be the old chief again, Ronny? Be him often, so you can learn to know what he : knew? ( And feel as he felt. It would be a stiff dose tor a kid. ) It will be rich and exciting, full of memories and skills. (But hard : to chew. I'm doing this for Pur  cell, Ronny, not for you. You  have to make up your own mind ) "That was a good game. Ai e you going to play it any more?" H IS mother would not like it. She would feel the difference in him, as much as if he had read one of the books she kept away from him, books that were supposed to be for adults only. The difference would hurt her. He was being bad, like eating between meals. But to know , what grownups knew He tightened his fists and; looked down at the grass. "I'll play it some more." The young man smiled, still pale and holding half his feelings back behind a dam. Then mesh with me a moment. Let me in. He was in with the thought, feeling Ronny's confused consent, reassuring him by not think-? ing or looking around inside while 66  riding out a single call, Pur f II, Doc, that found the combination key to Ronny's guarded yesterdays and last nights and ten minutes agos. Ronny, I'll set that door, Purcell's memories, open tor you. You can't close it, hut feel like this about it -- and lie planted in a strong set, questioning, cool, open, a feeling of tbsorbing without words it will give information when you need it, like a dictionary. The grownup straightened ,iway from the fence, preparing to walk off. Behind a dam pressed grief and anger for the leath of the man he called Pur ell. "And any time you want to be t he old chief, at any age he lived, rust make believe you are him." Grief and anger pressed more strongly against the dam, and the man turned and left rapidly, letting his thoughts flicker and scatter through private memories that Ronny did not share, that no one shared, breaking thought contact with everyone so that the man could be alone in his own mind to have his feelings in private. glass that had held his chocolate, milk from the back steps where he had left it and went inside. As he stepped into the kitchen, he knew what another kitchen had looked like for a fiye-year-old child who had been Purcell ninety years ago. There had been an iron sink, and a brownandgreen-spotted faucet, and the glass had been heavier and transparent, like real glass. Ronny reached up and put the colored plastic tumbler down, "That was a nice young man, dear. What did he say to you?" Ronny looked up at his mamma, comparing her with the remembered mamma of fifty years ago. He loved the other one, too. "He tol' me he's glad I play Indian." For an offer to charter subscribers that will save you money and yet give you valuable bonuses! , For pure myths for moderns plotted, written and edited with the 67 jm 4 if Jr  w.?1 li? For Your  u.' i1 s  6 ' S , Information Ancestor of the Dinosaurs in easy traveling distance, of New York, Chicago, San Diego or London(England) will, if they are so inclined, be able to see something without trouble for which they would formerly have had to travel half way around V jMWl V fi 68 the world and possibly without success. For the first time in many decades, the New Zealand government has permitted the export for exhibition of four Tuataras, (Hatterias or Sphenodons; in short, rhynchocephalia) . What do they look like? Well, like lizards, more or less dirty green in color, with an unusually large head and unusually large bright eyes in that head. Adult specimens are about 18 inches long. The ones on exhibit in the zoological gardens of the cities mentioned are young specimens which have not yet attained their full size. But they do have the spiny crest along back and tail which is the reason for the name Tuatara, a Maori word which can be translated as "spinebearer." It should be abundantly clear by now, because of the mention of the New Zealand government and the Maori name of the little creature, that its home is in New Zealand. But no longer New Zealand generally. Only a few hundred years ago, the Tuatara, it is believed, lived on both the main islands of New Zealand. The Maoris who came there from their original home islands of the Southern Pacific -- they call their original home Hawaiki, but it was not the Hawaii of our maps -- did not bother the small lizard much. Nor did the white settlers of a hundred and fifty years ago. But the white settlers brought animals with them -- dogs, cats and pigs, all three destructive to life-forms such as the Tuatara. The pigs especially, with their habit of rummaging through underbrush and eating everything that isn't wood or stone, exterminated the Tuatara on the main islands, by eating lizards and eggs alike. All this happened 69 without the settlers being even aware of what went on, which is the main reason why so much of this article is conjecture. Tuatara, if it had ever been abundant on the South Island, would still be there. There are still large unsettled and virtually unexplored areas on the South Island, as the recent rediscovery of the bird Takahe ( Notorrds ) has demonstrated. At any event, if you want to find the present home of Tuatara on a map, you need a pretty good map. The North and South Islands of New Zealand are separated by Cook Strait. West of Cook Strait, due north of the South Island, there is a smaller island named D'Urville Island, which is still indicated on most maps. Due north ot D'Urville Island there is a small rocky islet called Stephen Island, rarely seen on any map. But it is Tuatara's home, or rather one of them, for the little saurian also occurs on a few other rocky islands along the New Zealand coast, all strictly protected. When at home, Tuatara, slowmoving and cold-loving, eats insects, small crustaceans and other lizards, provided they are small enough. In captivity the diet is usually earthworms, but some have taken fish. The fact that they do eat fish, even though rarely, may explain why the Tuataras, very long ago, decided to set up community housekeeping with birds, -- "dovey petrels," to ! be precise. These marine birds ; nest in burrows which they dig, but the Tuataras move in on them. Whether the Tuataras elaborated upon the burrows or j the petrels obligingly did it for  them (as is generally assumed) is not completely known. But there is a double nest at the bot70 tom; the petrels occupy the dugout to the left and the Tuataras the one to the right of the entrance. It was comparatively easy to tell that Tuatara (the scientific names, as has been mentioned, ire Hatteria or Sphenodoii) is very rare. There was no problem n reporting where and how they live. But when it comes to the question of why zoologists and paleontologists grow dreamyeyed at the very mention of the name, I don't have a one-sentence answer. T ET me try to explain it chron ologically. Tuatara became known to science about 1830. An explorer by the name of DiefFenbach reported on its existence in i German journal. The main reason why his report is still remembered is that he gave the name Ngarara as the Maori name; all others reported the native name as Tuatara, Tuatera, Ruatara, or Tuatete -- obviously the same word with slightly differing pronunciations. Four years before Dieffenbach. a British scientist, Edward Gray, had published a Note on a Peculiar Structure in the Head of an Agama. ? Of course, Tuatara is not an Agama lizard; but the report on the strange organ in its head caused some comment, and an anatomist by the name of Gunther went to work, delicately and diligently. Finally he could announce that the "structure" itself was not so peculiar, only its location on top of the head. It was a third eye! This was enough to give paleontologists vivid professional dreams. Once upon a time, during the Triassic period, some 175 million years ago, threeeyed reptiles were no rarity. But few of them f had survived even to the end of the Triassic Period. Here was one with that feature, still alive. Apparently the third eye had somewhat reduced its size and activity in the course of time. It is smaller than the other two and is protected by a large transparent scale which is "set" in a circle of small opaque scales. But it is a complete eye in structure. Its connecting optical nerve is in working order and the whole is sensitive at least to light and dark. (Only the large black seaweed-eating iguana of the Galapagos Islands also has a still sensitive third eye, but it is far less well-preserved than that of Hatteria.') The third or "pineal" eye alone proved that Tuatara was old. How old was established by careful, millimeter by millimeter examination of each of its features. Tuatara turned out to be the last 71 surviving member of a group of reptiles which bear the scientific label of rynchocephalians ("beakheads"). The group was going strong during the Triassic Period. During the following period, the Jurassic, they spread considerably, but became less numerous at the same time. One of these Jurassic rynchocephalians of 145 million years ago, Homoesaurus, looked and was so much like Tuatara that it would be hard to tell the two apart if both were still alive. The remains of Homoesaurus have been found in England and in Bavaria, but representatives of that type had reached Malaya and New Guinea at just about that time. There was then a land bridge from New Guinea to New Zealand's North Island via New Caledonia. This is how Tuatara got to New Zealand. Some time afterward, that land bridge broke up into widely separated islands. Tuatara was in a place where it was safe, with nothing to bother it, until the settlers introduced pigs. Occasionally you can read in a popular book or article that Tuatara is a surviving small dinosaur. That is not so! The dinosaurs came later. Tuatara is one of the ancestors of the dinosaurs. month I receive a letter in which I am informed that all space travel men lack imagination. Just because they have discovered that a rocket is the only known means for accelerating and decelerating in the vacuum of space, they want to use rockets for everything. And because they can't imagine anything else any more but liquid fuel rockets, they build rocket ships consisting of three stages, the two lower steps exclusively designed to boost the top stage up to the desired speed. Of course, the step below the third has to be much heavier and larger, and the bottom step, which has to lift all the others off the ground, must be the biggest and clumsiest of them all. But, the reasoning runs, we only have to get the top stage up to proper speed. There is no need for the lower stages to develop a lot of speed, especially since they are supposed to fall back, anyway. Why not use a catapultlike or gunlike device to put some initial speed behind the top stage? The whole job would be much easier and it probably would take less fuel, too. It almost sounds convincing. Or, rather, it may sound convincing to those who have never tackled the job. 72 Let's look at an actual example. There was that two-stage shot which carried to 250 miles. Corporal rocket. The lower stage was a V-2 rocket, which provided :ie upper stage with a velocity  if almost precisely one mile per second at an altitude of 20 miles. poral to 250 miles without a lower stage, we then have to supply one mile per second by means of a catapult or a gun. In fact, we may have to supply a little more than one mile per second, because the catapult obviously would not he 20 miles tall and would there it a lower altitude, where the air ; denser Ind offers more resist nce. The "muzzle velocity" 'ould have to be 7000 feet per econd. The acceleration the rocket would receive in the catapult is fiven by the formula where a is the acceleration, s is the length of the catapult or the gun and v is the velocity at the end of the catapult -- those 7000 feet per second, squared. Just try it a few times with various sets of figures and you'll be convinced that it is not lack of imagination that makes the space travel scientists stick to multiple stages. Even if you aim for as low a "muzzle velocity" as 2500 ft.sec., you'll find that you either need a catapult of impossible length or else that the rocket would have to sustain accelerations as high as several hundred g. If you tried the latter, you would require a very massive rocket -- let's not even mention pilot and passengers -- so that it emerges in one piece and in workable condition. Unfortunately, it would then also have a very poor mass-ratio. Even with a mile-long shaft -- one drilled, say, into the top of a mountain -- the accelerations would still be too high for human occupants, in spite of the fact that humans can stand much higher accelerations than was believed possible as recently as eight years ago. And a tube one mile long, whether it is a vertical shaft in a mountain or a nearvertical structure up a steep mountain slope, will cost large sums of money. What you really need, though, is an acceleration path 20 or 30 miles long; more in some cases. And the cheapest way to accomplish that is by means of lower stages. My son suggested that you might be able to answer my ques73 tion: " Why is there no frost on cloudy nights?" I have known this fact for years, but no one seems to be able to tell me why. Mrs. Mary Coulson RR 2, Box 65 Silver Lake, Indiana The statement that there is no frost on cloudy night is generally correct; in fact, there is a proverb which says "clear Moon, frost soon,'" indicating the same observation. The explanation is mostly provided by the fact that the air near the ground is mostly heated by the ground. In other words, the Sun does not heat the bottom layers of the air to any appreciable extent directly. It heats the ground, which passes the heat onby re-radiation. If, after a clear day, the night is clear, too, the heat is radiated into space. But if a cloud blanket forms at sunset, it acts like a real blanket, trapping the heat between ground and cloud layer. There is one condition where you may have frost in spite of an overcast sky. This happens if the weather has been quite cold -- around 15 Fahrenheit, for some time; usually the sky is clear, or almost so, in such weather. Then, if a warm and moist air mass moves in, it may not displace the cold air mass, but ride on top of it. Where the moist warm air touches the cold air, the moisture will condense, forming a cloud blanket which keeps the Sun's rays out. The result is a series of cold days with an overcast sky. Why does water expand when it is cooled below its freezing point? Stephen Qbrecht 2109 Glenway Drive S.E. Cedar Rapids, Iowa Water reaches its greatest density not at its freezing point, but somewhat above the freezing point, at 4 centigrade. It freezes at 0 centigrade. Above and below 4 centigrade, it has a lesser density, than at that critical temperature. This is of great biological importance. If water below zero centigrade -- ice -- were heavier than liquid water, all ice that forms would sink to the bottom of rivers and lakes. During a Jong and severe winter, the lakes and most rivers would be solidly filled with ice from the bottom up, presumably destroying many life-forms in the process. Since the ice floats on top, it forms an insulating layer, keeping the water below liquid so that aquatic life-forms can survive. Some time ago I heard that if a person stays in a completely 74 darkened room long enough to allow his irises to open completely, he'll be able to see by socalled ' "black" or ultraviolet light, but that every object he sees will seem to be displaced a certain angular distance from its actual position. Can you shed any light ( black or otherwise ) on this? Bert Aver a Box 345 Fairhope, Alabama It is not true that everybody van see ultra-violet after he has I teen in the dark long enough for his eyes to attain maximum sensitivity. It is true that' some people can see ultra-violet and they don't even have to stay in a dark room -- the main point is here that the intensity of ordinarily visible light must he low enough so that the u-v is not "drowned out" completely. The ability to see u-v seems to be restricted to light-eyed people who are still fairly young; the ability seems to be lost with age. I don't know whether an age limit has been actually established. As a rule of thumb, a person over 30 years of age is too old for that. But the idea of an angular displacement is wrong. Everybody can "see" ultra-violet via his camera. If there were sufcli a displacement, all pictures taken in light with much u-v in it (sunlight, for example) would be fuzzy or have double outlines. I admit having seen photographs with fuzzy or double outlines, but the u-v had nothing to do with that. I have read that the Northern Lights are caused by Sun spots. If so, why are they seen only in the north? Would they be seen on other planets? Mildred Moore 116 William Street Hightstown, N. J. The Northern Lights are caused by solar activity (Sun spots), but they are not restricted to the north. They appear in the regions of the magnetic poles, which are reasonably close to the geographical poles. Scientific terminology is aurora borealis for those near the geographical North Pole and aurora australis for those near the geographical South Pole. The second portion of the question is especially interesting; it would he nice if we could be sure. To the best of my knowledge, no aurora has ever been seen in the Martian atmosphere, but quite a number of astronomers believe that aurorae may have been seen in the Venusian atmosphere. Venus, going around the Sun inside the orbit of Earth, shows decided phases like the Moon. 75 It happens that fr more of the sickle points is visible than can be accounted for geometrically. Also, the outline of the sickle is sometimes "bumpy." These irregularities do not necessarily have to be caused by aurorae, but they may be. 7n the July 1951 issue of the American Scientist , George Gamow writes: "Recently this theoretical conclusion ( Weizsacker , Kuiper et. a.) found confirmation in the actual discovery of planetary systems near two close stars. Please explain. Joe Low 620 Holland Lakewood, Colo. When you ask me to explain Dr. Gamow'e statement, I take it that you are looking for confirmation of his assertion that planets of other stars are known. They are. To phrase it as carefully as possible, one has to say that star systems comparatively near in space to our own sun are known to have nonluminous companions of planetary mass. They have not been seen so far -- their existence is known because they influence the movement of their suns, which we can measure. The sUns in question are binaries or double stars, two suns moving around their common center of gravity. Once this motion has been established, we are able to predict the relative positions accurately. But by careful study of photographs taken over a number of years, it turned out that the positions did not check precisely. There had to be at least one more body, not registering on the plates, to account for this. Several such suspicious cases had been under investigation for some years when K. Aa. Strand of Sproul Observatory (Swarthmore College) announced in 1942 that the double star 61 in Cygnus had a companion of planetary mass, 16 times as massive as Jupiter and moving around its sun once in 4.9 years. Only a few months later, the Leander McCormick Observatory of the University of Virginia announced a similar dark companion of the system 70 in Ophiuchus. The period of this object is 17 years and its mass 10.5 times that of Jupiter. Naturally, only very large dark companions can be found by this method. But it is logical to expect smaller planets where there are large ones. 76 announce The Richest Science Fiction Novel Contest in History 6500 minimum Guaranteed to the author of the best To raise the literary level of the field still higher To augment the already high standards with new writing talent , To focus more attention on this increasingly important form of literature. Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and one of the leading book publishin outright cash gifts, payments and guaranteed advance royalties. , The award novel will appear as a serial in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine It will be published in book form by Simon and Schuster Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and guaranteed advance royalties for book The entire 6500 award will be paid to the winner at the time his (or her) name is announced -- certainly the largest single payment to any author in the history of science fiction. For Details and Rules See Page 129 When a really infallible scientific bureau makes a drastically 'serious error, the data must be wrong but wrong in' what way? T HE first morning that they were fillly committed to the planet, the executive officer stepped out of the ship. It was not quite dawn. Executive Hafner squinted in the early light ; his eyes opened wider, and he promptly went back inside. Three minutes later, he reappeared with the biologist in tow. "Last night you said there was nothing dangerous," said the executive. "Do you still think it's so?" Dano Marin stared. "I do." What his voice lacked in conviction, it made up in embarrassment. He laughed uncertainly. "This is no laughing matter. I'll talk to you later." The biologist stood by the ship and watched as the executive walked to the row of sleeping colonists. "Mrs. Athyl," said the executive as he stopped beside the sleeping figure. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, rolled over, and stood up. The covering that should have been there, however, wasn't. Neither was the garment she had on when 78 she had gone to sleep. She assumed the conventional position of a woman who is astonished to find herself unclad without her knowledge or consent. "It's all right, Mrs. Athyl. I'm not a voyeur myself. Still, I think you should get some clothing on." Most of the colonists were awake now. Executive Hafner turned to them. "If you haven't any suitable clothing in the ship, the commissary will issue you some. Explanations will be given later." The colonists scattered. There was no compulsive modesty among them, for it couldn't have survived a year and a half in crowded spaceships. Nevertheless, it was a shock to awaken with no clothing on and not know who or what had removed it during the night. It was surprise more than anything else that disconcerted them. On his way back to the spaceship, Executive Hafner paused. "Any ideas about it?" Dano Marin shrugged. "How could I have? The planet is as new to me as it is to you." "Sure. But you're the biologist." As the only scientist in a crew of rough-and-ready colonists and builders, Marin was going to be called on to answer a lot of questions that weren't in his field. "Nocturnal insects, most likely," he suggested. That was pretty weak, though he knew that in ancient times locusts had stripped fields in a matter of hours. Could they do the same with the clothing of humans and not awaken 79 them? "I'll look into the matter. As soon as I find anything, I'll let you know." "Good." Hafner nodded and went into the spaceship. grove in which the colonists had been sleeping. It had been a mistake to let them bed down there, but at the time the request had been made, there had seemed no reason not to grant it. After eighteen months in crowded ships everyone naturally wanted fresh air and the rustle of leaves overhead. Marin looked out through the grove. It was empty now; the colonists, both men and women, had disappeared inside the ship, dressing, probably. The trees were not tall and the leaves were dark bottle-green. Occasional huge white flowers caught sunlight that made them seem larger than they were. It wasn't Earth and therefore the trees couldn't be magnolias. But they reminded Marin of magnolia trees and thereafter he always thought of them as that. The problem of the missing clothing was ironic. Biological Survey never made a mistake -- yet obviously they had. They listed the planet as' the most suitable for Man of any so far discovered. Few insects, no dangerous animals, a most equitable climate. They had named it Glade because that was the word which fitted best. The whole land mass seemed to be one vast and pleasant meadow. Evidently there were things about the planet that Biological Survey had missed. Marin dropped to his knees and began to look for clues. If insects had been responsible, there ought to be a few dead ones, crushed, perhaps, as the colonists rolled over in their sleep. There were no insects, either live or dead. He stood up in disappointment and walked slowly through the grove. It might be the trees. At night they could exude a vapor which was capable of dissolving the material from which the clothing had been made. Farfetched, but not impossible. He crumbled a leaf in his hand and rubbed it against his sleeve. A pungent smell, but nothing happened. That didn't disprove the theory, of course. He looked out through the trees at the blue sun. It was bigger than Sol, but farther away. At Glade, it was about equal to the Sun on Earth. He almost missed the bright eyes that regarded him from the underbrush. Almost, but didn't -- the domain of biology begins at the edge of the atmosphere; it includes the brush and the 80 small creatures that live in it. He swooped down on it. The creature fled squealing. He ran it down in the grass outside the grove. It collapsed into quaking flesh as he picked it up. He talked to it gently and the terror subsided. It nibbled contentedly on his jacket as he carried it back to the ship. unhappily into the cage. It was an undistinguished animal, small and something like an undeveloped rodent. Its fur was sparse and stringy, unglamorous; it would never be an item in the fur export trade. "Can we exterminate it?" gsked Hafner. "Locally, that is." "Hardly. It's ecologically basic." The executive looked blank. Dano Marin added the explanation: "You know how Biological Control works. As soon as a planet has been discovered that looks suitable, they send out a survey ship loaded with equipment. The ship flies low over a good part of the planet and the instruments in the ship record the neural currents of the animals below. The instruments can distinguish the characteristic neural patterns of anything that has a brain, including insects. "Anyway, they have a pretty good idea of the kinds of animals on the planet and their relative distribution. Naturally, the survey party takes a few specimens. They have to in order to correlate the pattern with the actual animal, otherwise the neural pattern would be merely a meaningless squiggle on a microfilm. "The survey shows that this animal is one of only four species of mammals on the planet. It is also the most numerous." Hafner grunted. "So if we kill them off here, others will swarm in from surrounding areas?" "That's about it. There are probably millions of them on this peninsula. Of course, if you want to put a barrier across the narrow connection to the mainland, you might be able to wipe them out locally." The executive scowled. A barrier was possible, but it would involve more work than he cared to expend. "What do they eat?" he asked truculently. "A little bit of everything, apparently. Insects, fruits, berries, nuts, succulents, and grain." Dano Marin smiled. "I guess it could be called an omnivore -- now that our clothing is handy, it eats that, too." Hafner didn't smile. "I thought our clothing was supposed to be verminproof." Marin shrugged. "It is, on twenty-seven planets. On the twenty-eighth, we meet up with a little fella that has better digestive fluids, that's all." Hafner looked pained. "Are they likely to bother the crops i we plant?" ", "Offhand, I would say they aren't. But then I would have said the same about our clothing." Hafner made up his mind. "All j right. You worry about the crops. Find some way to keep them out of the fields. Meanwhile, everyone sleeps in the ship until we can  build dormitories." j Individual dwelling units would have been more appropriate in the colony at this stage, thought Marin. But it wasn't for him to decide. The executive was a man who regarded a schedule as somej thing to be exceeded. i "The omnivore -- " began Mar ' s m. I Hafner nodded impatiently. "Work on it," he said, and walked away. The biologist sighed. The omnivore really was a queer little 82 creature, but it was by no means the most important thing on Glade. For instance, why were there so few species of land animals on the planet? No reptiles, numerous birds, and only four kinds of mammals. Every comparable planet teemed with a wild variety of life. Glade, in spite of seemingly ideal conditions, hadn't developed. Why? He had asked Biological Controls for this assignment because it had seemed an interesting problem. Now, apparently, he was being pressed into service as an exterminator. He reached in the cage and picked up the omnivore. Mammals on Glade were not unexpected. Parallel development took care of that. Given roughly the same kind of environment, similar animals would usually evolve. In the Late Carboniferous forest on Earth, there had been creatures ike the omnivore, the primitive mammal from which all others had evolved. On Glade,' that kind of evolution just hadn't taken place. What had kept nature from exploiting its evolutionary potentialities? There was the real problem, not how to wipe them out. Marin stuck a needle in the omnivore. It squealed and then relaxed. He drew out the blood and set it back in the cage. He could learn a lot about the animal from trying to kill it. T HE quartermaster was shouting, though his normal voice carried quite well. "How do you know it's mice?" the biologist asked him. "Look," said the quartermaster angrily. Marin looked. The evidence did indicate mice. Before he could speak, the quartermaster snapped, "Don't tell me they're only micelike creatures. I know that. The question is: how can I get rid of them?" "Have you tried poison?" "Tell me what poison to use and I'll use it." It wasn't the easiest question to answer. What was poisonous to an animal he had never seen and knew nothing about? According to Biological Survey, the animal didn't exist It was unexpectedly serious. The colony could live off the land, and was expected to. But another group of colonists was due in three years. The colony was supposed to accumulate a surplus of food to feed the increased numbers. If they couldn't store the food they grew any better than the concentrates, that surplus was going be scanty. Marin went over the ware83 house thoroughly. It was the usual early construction on a colonial world. Not esthetic, it was sturdy enough. Fused dirt floor, reinforced foot-thick walls, a ceiling slab of the same. The whole was bound together with a molecular cement that made it practically airtight. It had no windows; there were two doors. Certainly it should keep out rodents. A closer examination revealed an unexpected flaw. The floor was as hard as glass; no animal could gnaw through it, but, like glass, it was also brittle. The crew that had built the warehouse had evidently been in such a hurry to get back to Earth that they hadn't been as careful as they should have been, for here and there the floor was thin. Somewhere under the heavy equipment piled on it, the floor had cracked. There a burrowing animal had means of entry. Short .of building another warehouse, it was too late to do anything about that. Micelike animals were inside and had to be controlled where they were. The biologist straightened up. "Catch me a few of them alive and I'll see what I can do." I N the morning, a dozen live specimens were delivered to the lab. They actually did resemble mice. Their reactions were puzzling. No two of them were affected by the same poison. A compound that stiffened one in a matter of minutes left the others hale and hearty, and the poison he had developed to control the omnivores was completely ineffec tive. The depredations in the ware; house went on. Black mice, white ones, gray and brown, short tailed and long-eared, or the rej verse, they continued to eat the j concentrates and spoil what they j didn't eat. 1 Marin conferred with the executive, outlined the problem as he saw it and his ideas on what j could be done to combat the j nuisance. f "But we can't build another j warehouse," argued Hafner. "Not J until the atomic generator is set 1 up, at any rate. And then we'll j have other uses for the power." The executive rested his head in his hands. "I like the other soluj tion better. Build one and see how ' it works." I "I was thinking of three," said the biologist. "One," Hafner insisted. "We I can't spare the equipment until 1 we know how it works." At that he was probably right. ; They had equipment, as much as three ships could bring. But the more they brought, the more j was expected of the colony. The 84 net effect was that equipment was always in short supply. Marin took the authorization to the engineer. On the way, he privately revised his specifications upward. If he couldn't get as many as he wanted, he might as well get a better one. In two days, the machine was ready. It was delivered in a small crate to the warehouse. The crate was opened and the machine leaped out and stood there, poised. "A cat!" exclaimed the quartermaster, pleased. He stretched out his hand toward the black fuzzy robot. "If you've touched anything a mouse may have, get your hand away," warned the biologist. "It reacts to smell as well as sight and sound." Hastily, the quartermaster withdrew his hand. The robot disappeared silently into the maze of stored material. In one week, though there were still some mice in the warehouse, they were no longer a danger. T HE executive called Marin into his office, a small sturdy building located in the center of the settlement. The colony was growing, assuming an aspect of permanency. Hafner sat in his chadr and looked out over that growth with satisfaction. "A good job on the mouse plague," he said. The biologist nodded. "Not bad, except there shouldn't be any mice here. Biological Survey -- " "Forget it," said the exec. "Everybody makes mistakes, even B. S." He leaned back and looked seriously at the biologist. "I have a job I need done. Just now I'm short of men If you have no objections" The exec was always short of men, would be until the planet was overcrowded, and he would try to find someone to do the work his own men should have done. Dano Marin was not directly responsible to Hafner; he was on loan to the expedition from Biological Controls. Still, it was a good idea to cooperate with the executive. He sighed. "It's not as bad as you think," said Hafner, interpreting the 85 sound correctly. He smiled. "We've got the digger together. I want you to run it." Since it tied right in with his investigations, Dano Martin looked relieved and showed it. "Except for food, we have to import most of our supplies," Hafner explained. "It's a long haul, and we've got to make use of everything on the planet we can. We need oil. There are going to be a lot of wheels turning, and everyone of them will have to have oil. In time we'll set up a synthetic plant, but if we can locate a productive field now, it's to our advantage." "You're assuming the geology of Glade is similar to Earth?" Hafner waggled his hand. "Why not? It's a nicer twin of Earth." Why not? Because you couldn't always tell from the surface, thought. Marin. It seemed like Earth, but was it? Here was a good chance to find out the history of Glade. Hafner stood up. "Any time you're ready, a technician will check you out on the digger. Let me know before you go." a digger. It didn't move or otherwise displace' a gram of dirt or rock. It was a means of looking down below the surface, to any practical depth. A large crawler, it was big enough for a man to live in without discom fort for a week. W It carried an outsize ultrasonic generator and a device for directing the beam into  the planet. That was the sending apparatus. The receiving end bec gan with a large sonic lens which g picked up sound beams reflected 'f from any desired depth, converted it into electrical energy and  thence into an image which was flashed onto a screen. At the depth of ten miles, the image was fuzzy, though good enough to distinguish the main ' features of the strata. At three miles, it was better. It could pick p up the sound reflection of a buried coin and convert it into a picture on which the date could ! be seen. f It was to a geologist as a microscope is to a biologist. Being  a biologist, Dano Marin could ? appreciate the analogy. He started at the tip of the peninsula and zigzagged across, heading toward the isthmus. Methodically, he covered the territory, sleeping at night in thi digger. On the morning of th f third day, he discovered oil traces and by that afternoon he had located the main field. ' He should probably have turned back at once, but now that hr had found oil, he investigated more deliberately. Starting at the 86 top, he let the image range downward below the top strata. It was the reverse of what it should have been. In the top few feet, there were plentiful fossil remains, mostly of the four species of mammals. The squirrellike creature and the far larger grazing animal were the forest dwellers. Of the plains animals, there were only two, in size fitting neatly between the extremes of the forest dwellers. After the first few feet, which corresponded to approximately twenty thousand years, he found virtually no fossils. Not until he reached a depth which he could correlate to the Late Carboniferous age on Earth did fossils reappear. Then they were of animals appropriate to the epoch. At that depth and below, the history of Glade was quite similar to Earth's. Puzzled, he checked again in a dozen widely scattered localities. The results were always the same -- fossil history for the first twenty thousand years, then none for roughly a hundred million. Beyond that, it was easy to trace the thread of biological development. In that period of approximately one hundred million years, something unique had happened to Glade. What was it? On the fifth day his investigations were interrupted by the sound of the keyed-on radio. "Marin." "Yes?" He flipped on the sending switch. "How soon can you get back?" He looked at the photo-map. "Three hours. Two if I hurry." "Make it two. Never mind the oil." "I've found oil. But what's the matter?" "You can see it better than I can describe it. We'll discuss it when you get back." tracted the instruments into the digger. He turned it around and, with not tdo much regard for the terrain, let it roar. The treads tossed dirt high in the air. Animals fled squealing from in front of him. If the grove was small enough, he went around it, otherwise he went through and left matchsticks behind. He skidded the crawler ponderously to halt near the edge of the settlement. The center of activity was the warehouse. Pickups wheeled in and out, transferring supplies to a cleared area outside. He found Hafner in a corner of the warehouse, talking to the engineer. Hafner turned around when he came up. "Your mice have grown, Marin." Marin looked down. The robot cat lay on the floor. He knelt 87 and examined it. The steel skeleton hadn't broken; it had been bent, badly. The tough plastic skin had been torn off and, inside, the delicate mechanism had been chewed into an unrecognizable mass. Around the cat were rats, twenty or thirty of them, huge by any standards. The cat had fought; the dead animals were headless or disembowled, unbelievably battered. But the robot had been outnumbered. Biological Survey had said there weren't any rats on Glade. They had also said that about mice. What was the key to their error? The biologist stood up. "What are you going to do about it?" "Build another warehouse, twofootthick fused dirt floors, monolithic construction. Transfer all perishables to it." Marin nodded. That would do it. It would take time, of course, and power, all they could draw out of the recently set up atomic generator. All other construction would have to be suspended. No wonder Hafner was disturbed. "Why not build more cats?" Marin suggested. The executive smiled nastily. "You weren't here when we opened the doors. The warehouse was swarming with rats. How many robot cats would we need -- five, fifteen? I don't know. Anyway the engineer tells me we have enough parts to build three more cats. The one lying there can't be salvaged." It didn't take an engineer to see that, thought Marin. Hafner continued, "If we need more, we'll have to rob the computer in the spaceship. I refuse to permit that." Obviously he would. The spaceship was the only link with Earth until the next expedition brought more colonists. No exec in his right mind would permit the ship to be crippled. But why had Hafner called him back? Merely to keep him informed of the situation? thoughts. "At night we'll floodlight the supplies we remove from the warehouse. We'll post a guard armed with decharged rifles until we can move the food 88 into the new warehouse. That'll take about ten days. Meanwhile, our fast crops are ripening. It's my guess the rats will turn to them for food. In order to protect our future food supply, you'll have to activate your animals." The biologist started. "But it's against regulations to loose any animal on a planet until a complete investigation of the possible ill effects is made." "That takes ten or twenty years. This is an emergency and I'll be responsible -- in writing, if you want." The biologist was effectively countermanded. Another . rabbitinfested Australia or the planet that the snails took over might be in the making, but there was nothing he could do about it. "I hardly think they'll be of any use against rats this size," he protested. "You've got hormones. Apply them." The executive turned and began discussing construction with the engineer. gathered up and placed in the freezer for further study. After that, he retired to the laboratory and worked out a course of treatment for the domesticated animals that the colonists had brought with them. He gave them the first injections and watched them carefully until they were safely through the initial shock phase of growth. As soon as he saw they were going to survive, he bred them. Next he turned to the rats. Of note was the wide variation in size. Internally, the same thing was true. They had the usual organs, but the proportions of each varied greatly, more than is normal. Nor were their teeth uniform. Some carried huge fangs set in delicate jaws; others had tiny teeth that didn't match the massive bone structure. As a species, they were the most scrambled the biologist had ever encountered. He turned the microscope on their tissues and tabulated the results. There was less difference here between individual specimens, but it was enough to set him pondering. The reproductive cells were especially baffling. Late in the day, he felt rather than heard the soundless whoosh of the construction machinery. He looked out of the laboratory and saw smoke rolling upward. As soon as the vegetation was charred, the smoke ceased and heat waves danced into the sky. They were building on a hill. The little creatures that crept and crawled in the brush attacked in the most vulnerable spot, the food supply. There was no brush, not a blade of grass, on the hill when the colonists finished. 89 were the hunting dogs of the agricultural era. What they lacked in size they made up in ferocity toward rodents. They had earned their keep originally in granaries and fields, and, for a brief time, they were doing it again on colonial worlds where conditions were repeated. The dogs the colonists brought had been terriers. They were still as fast, still with the same antirodent disposition, but they were no longer small. It had been a difficult job, yet Marin had done it well, for the dogs had lost none of their skill and speed in growing, to the size of a great dane. The rats moved in on the fields of fast crops. Fast crops were made to order for a colonial world. They could be planted, grown, and harvested in a matter of weeks. After four such plantings, the fertility of the soil was destroyed, but that meant nothing in the early years of a colonial planet, for land was plentiful. The rat tide grew in the fast crops, and' the dogs were loosed on the rats. They ranged through the fields, hunting. A rush, a snap of their jaws, the shake of a head, and the rat was tossed aside, its back broken. The dogs went on to the next. Until they could not see, the dogs prowled and slaughtered. At night they came in bloody, most of it not their own, and exhausted. Marin pumped them full of antibiotics, bandaged their wounds, fed them through their veins, and shot them into sleep. In the morning he awakened them with an injection of stimulant and sent them tingling into battle. It took the rats two days to learn they could not feed during the day. Not so numerous, they came at night. They climbed on the vines and nibbled the fruit. They gnawed growing grain and ravaged vegetables. The next day the colonists set up lights. The dogs were with them, discouraging the few rats who were still foolish enough to forage while the sun was overhead. An hour before dusk, Marin called the dogs in and gave them an enforced rest. He brought them out of it after dark and took them to the fields, staggering, he scent of rats revived them; they were as eager as ever, if not quite so fast. The rats came from the surrounding meadows, not singly, or in twos and threes, as thy had before; this time they came together. Squealing and rustling the grass, they moved toward the fields. It was dark, and though he could not see them, Marin could hear them. He ordered the 90 great lights turned on in the area  of the fields. The rats stopped under the glare, milling around uneasily. The dogs quivered and whined. Marin held them back. The rats resumed their march, and Marin released the dogs. The dogs charged in to attack, but didn't dare brave the main mass. They picked off the stragglers and forced the rats into a tighter formation. After that the rats were virtually unassailable. The colonists could have burned the bunched-up rats with the right equipment, but they didn't have it and couldn't get it for years. Even if they'd had it, the use of such equipment would endanger the crops, which they had to save if they could. It was up to the dogs. The rat formation came to the edge of the fields, and broke. They could face a common enemy and remain united, but in the presence of food, they forgot that unity and scattered -- hunger was the great divisor. The dogs leaped joyously in pursuit. They hunted down the starved rodents, one by one, and killed them as they ate. When daylight came, the rat menace had ended. The next week the colonists harvested and processed the food for storage and immediately planted another crop. tried to analyze the situation. The colony was moving from crisis to crisis', all of them involving food. In itself, each critical situation was minor, but lumped together they could add up to failure. No matter how he looked at it, they just didn't have the equipment they needed to colonize Glade. The fault seemed to lie with Biological Survey; they hadn't reported the presence of pests that were endangering the food supply. Regardless of what the 91 exec thought about them, Survey knew their business. If they said there were no mice or rats on Glade, then there hadn't been any -- when the survey was made. The question was : when did they come and how did they get here? Marin sat and stared at the wall, turning over hypotheses in his mind, discarding them when they failed to make sense. His gaze shifted from the wall to the cage of the omnivores, the squirrel-size forest creature. The most numerous animal on Glade, it was a commonplace sight to the colonists. And yet it was a remarkable animal, more than he had realized. Plain, insignificant in appearance, it might be the most important of any animal Man had encountered on the many worlds he had settled on. The longer he watched, the more Marin became convinced of it. He sat silent, observing the creature, not daring to move. He sat until it was dark and the omnivore resumed its normal activity. Normal? The word didn't apply on Glade. The interlude with the omnivore provided him with one answer. He needed another one; he thought he knew what it was, but he had to have more data, additional observations. He set up his equipment carefully on the fringes of the settlement. There and in no other place existed the information he wanted. He spent time in the digger, checking his original investigations. It added up to a complete picture. When he was certain of his facts, he called on Hafner. The executive was congenial; it was a reflection of the smoothness with which the objectives of the colony were being achieved. "Sit down," he said affably. "Smoke?" The biologist sat down and took a Cigarette. "I thought you'd like to know where the mice came from," he began. Hafner smiled. "They don't bother us any more." "I've also determined the origin of the rats." "They're under control. We're doing nicely." O N the contrary, thought Marin. He searched for the proper beginning. "Glade has an Earth-type climate and topography," he said. "Has had for the past twenty thousand years. Before that, about a hundred million years ago, it was also like Earth of the comparable period." He watched the look of polite 92 interest settle on the executive's face as he stated the obvious. Well, it was obvious, up to a point. The conclusions weren't, though. "Between a hundred million years and twenty thousand years ago, something happened to Glade," Marin went on. "I don't know the cause; it belongs to cosmic history and we may never find out. Anyway, whatever the cause -- fluctuations in the sun, unstable equilibrium of forces within the planet, or perhaps an encounter with an interstellar, dust cloud of variable density -- the climate on Glade changed. "It changed with inconceivable violence and it kept on changing. A hundred million years ago, plus or minus, there was carboniferous forest on Glade. Giant reptiles resembling dinosaurs and tiny mammals roamed through it. The first great change wiped out the dinosaurs, as it did on Earth. It didn't wipe out the still more primitive ancestor of the omnivore, because it could adapt to changing conditions. "Let me give you an idea how the conditions changed. For a few years a given area would be a desert; after that it would turn into a jungle. Still later a glacier would begin to form. And then the cycle would be repeated, with wild variations. All this might happen -- did happen -- within a span covered by the lifetime of a single omnivore. This occurred many times. For roughly a hundred million years' it was the norm of existence on Glade. This condition was hardly conducive to the preservation of fossils." Hafner saw the significance and was concerned. "You mean these climatic fluctuations suddenly stopped, twenty thousand years ago? Are they likely to begin again?" "I don't know," confessed the biologist. "We can probably determine it if we're interested." The exec nodded grimly. "We're interested, all right." Maybe we are, thought the biologist. He said, "The point is that survival was difficult. Birds could and did fly to more suitable climates; quite a few of them survived. Only one species of mammals managed to come through." "Your facts are not straight," observed Hafner. "There are four species, ranging in size from a squirrel to a water buffalo." "One species," Marin repeated doggedly. "They're the same. If the food supply for the largest animal increases, some of the smaller so-called species grow up. Conversely, if food becomes scarce in any category, the next generation, which apparently can be produced almost instantly, 93 switches to a form which does have an adequate food supply." "The mice," Hafner said slowly. for him. "The mice weren't here when we got here. They were born of the squirrel-size omnivore." Hafner nodded. "And the rats?" "Bom of the next larger size. After all, we're environment, too -- perhaps the harshest the beasts have yet faced." Hafner was a practical man, trained to administer a colony. Concepts were not his familiar ground. "Mutations, then? But I thought -- " The biologist smiled. It was thin and cracked at the edges of his mouth. "On Earth, it would be mutation. Here it is merely normal evolutionary adaptation." He shook his head. "I never told you, but omnivores, though they could be mistaken for an animal from Earth, have no genes or chromosomes. Obviously they do have heredity, but how it is passed down, I don't know. However it functions, it responds to external conditions far faster than anything we've ever encountered." Hafner nodded to himself. "Then we'll never be free from pests." He clasped and unclasped his hands. "Unless, of course, we rid the planet of all animal life." "Radioactive dust?" asked the biologist. "They have survived worse." The exec considered alternatives. "Maybe we should leave the planet and leave it to the animals." "Too late," said the biologist. "They'll be on Earth, too, and all the planets we've settled on." Hafner looked at him. The same pictures formed in his mind that Marin had thought of. Three ships had been sent to colonize Glade. One had remained with the colonists, survival insurance in case anything unforeseen happened. Two had gone back to Earth to carry the report that all was well and that more supplies were needed. They had also carried specimens from the planet. The cages those creatures were kept in were secure. But a smaller species could get out, must already be free, inhabiting, undetected, the cargo spaces of the ships. There was nothing they could do to intercept those ships. And once they reached Earth, would the biologists suspect? Not for a long time. First a new kind of rat would appear. A mutation could account for that. Without" specific knowledge, there would be nothing to connect it with the speci94 mens picked up from Glade. "We have to stay," said the biologist. "We have to study them and we can do it best here." He thought of the vast complex of buildings on Earth. There was too much invested to tear them down and make them verminproof. Billions of people could not be moved off the planet while the work was being done. They were committed to Glade not as a colony, but as a gigantic laboratory. They had gained one planet and lost the equivalent of ten, perhaps more when the destructive properties of the omnivores were finally assessed. A rasping animal cough interrupted the biologist's thoughts. Hafner jerked his head and glanced out the window. Lips tight, he grabbed a rifle off the wall and ran out. Marin followed him. fields where the second fast crop was maturing. On top of a knoll, he stopped and knelt. He flipped the dial to extreme charge, aimed, and fired. It was high; he missed the animal in the field. A neat strip of smoking brown appeared in the green vegetation. He aimed more carefully and fired again. The charge screamed out of the muzzle. It struck the animal on the forepaw. The beast leaped high in the air and fell down, dead and broiled. 95 They stood over the animal Hafner had killed. Except for the lack of markings, it was a good imitation of a tiger. The exec prodded it with his toe. "We chase the rats out of the warehouse and they go to the fields," he muttered. "We hunt them down in the fields with dogs and they breed tigers." "Easier than rats," said Marin. "We can shoot tigers." He bent down over the slain dog near which they had surprised the big cat. The other dog came whining from the far comer of the field to which he had fled in terror. He was a courageous dog, but he could not face the great carnivore. He whimpered and licked the face of his mate. The biologist picked up the mangled dog and headed toward the laboratory. "You can't save her," said Hafner morosely. "She's dead." "But the pups aren't. We'll need them. The rats won't disappear merely because tigers have showed up." The head drooped limply over his arm and blood seeped into his clothing as Hafner followed him up the hill. "We've been here three months," the exec said suddenly. "The dogs have been ih the fields only two. And yet the tiger was mature. How do you account for something like that?" Marin bent under the weight of the dog. Hafner never would understand his bewilderment. As a biologist, all his categories were upset. What did evolution explain? It was a history of organic life on a particular world. Beyond that world, it might not apply. Even about himself there were many things Man didn't know, dark patches in his knowledge which theory simply had to pass over. About other creatures, his ignorance was sometimes limitless. Birth was simple; it occurred on countless planets. Meek grazing creatures, fierce carnivores -- the most unlikely animals gave birth to their young. It happened all the time. And the young grew up, became mature and mated. He remembered that evening in the laboratory. It was accidental -- what if he had been elsewhere and not witnessed it? They would not know what little they did. He explained it carefully to Hafner. "If the survival factor is high and there's a great disparity in size, the young need not ever be young. They may be born as fully functioning adults!" it had initially set, the colony progressed. The fast crops were slowed down and a more diversi96 fied selection was planted. New buildings were constructed and the supplies that were stored in them were spread out thin, for easy inspection. The pups survived and within a year shot up to maturity. After proper training, they were released to the fields where they joined the older dogs. The battle against the rats went on; they were held in check, though the damage they caused was considerable. The original animal, unchanged in form, developed an appetite for electrical insulation. There was no protection except to keep the power on at all times. Even then there were unwelcome interruptions until the short was located and the charred carcass was removed. Vehicles were kept tightly closed or parked only in verminproof buildings. While the plague didn't increase in numbers, it couldn't be eliminated, either. There was a flurry of tigers, but they were larger animals and were promptly shot down. They prowled at night, so the colonists were assigned to guard the settlement around the clock. Where lights failed to reach, the infra-red 'scope did. As fast as they came, the tigers died. Except for the first one, not a single dog was lost. The tigers changed, though not in form. Externally, they were all big and powerful killers. But as the Slaughter went on, Marin noticed one astonishing fact -- the internal organic structure became progressively more immature. The last one that was brought to him for examination was the equivalent of a newly born cub. That tiny stomach was suited more for the digestion of milk than meat. How it had furnished energy to drive those great muscles was something of a miracle. But drive it had, for a murderous fifteen minutes before the animal wars brought down. No lives were lost, though sick bay was kept busy for a while. That was the last tiger they shot. After that, the attacks ceased. The seasons passed and nothing new occurred. A spaceship civilization or even that fragment of it represented by the colony was too much for the creature, which Marin by now had come to think of as the "Omnimal." It had evolved out of a cataclysmic past, but it could not meet the challenge of the harshest environment. Or so it seemed. colonists were due, a new animal was detected. Food was missing from the fields. It was not another tiger: they were carnivorous. Nor rats, for vines were 97 stripped in a manner that no rodent could manage. The food was not important. The colony had enough in storage. But if the new animal signaled another plague, it was necessary to know how to meet it. The sooner they knew what the animal was, the better defense they could set up against it. Dogs were useless. The animal roamed the field they were loose in, and they did not attack nor even seem to know it was there. The colonists were called upon for guard duty again, but it evaded them. They patrolled for a week and they still did not catch sight of it. Hafner called them in and rigged up an alarm system in the field most frequented by the animal. It detected that, too, and moved its sphere of operations to a field in which the alarm system had not been installed. Hafner conferred with the engineer, who devised an alarm that would react to body radiation. It was buried in the original field and the old alarm was moved to another. Two nights later, just before dawn, the alarm rang. Marin met Hafner at the edge of the settlement Both carried rifles. They walked; the noise of any vehicle was likely to frighten the animal. They circled around and approached the field from the rear. The men in the camp had been alerted. If they needed help, it was ready. They crept silently through the underbrush. It was feeding in the field, not noisily, yet they could hear it. The dogs hadn't barked. They inched nearer. The blue sun of Glade came up and shone full on their quarry. The gun dropped in Hafner's hand. He clenched his teeth and raised it again. Marin put out a restraining arm. "Don't shoot," he whispered. "I'm the exec here. I say it's dangerous." "Dangerous," agreed Marin, still in a whisper. "That's why you can't shoot. It's more dan'gerous than you know." Hafner hesitated and Marin went on. "The omnimal couldn't compete in the changed environment and so it evolved mice. We stopped the mice and it countered with rats. We turned back the rat and it provided the tiger. "The tiger was easiest of all for us and so it was apparently stopped for a while. But it didn't really stop. Another anima was being formed, the one you see there. It took the omnimal two years to create it -- how, I don't know. A million years were required to evolve it on Earth." Hafner hadn't lowered the rifle and he showed no signs of doing 98 4 so. He looked lovingly into the sights. "Can't you see?" urged Marin. "We can't destroy the omnimal. It's on Earth now, and on the other planets, down in the storage areas of our big cities, masquerading as rats. And we've never been able to root out even our own terrestral rats, so how can we exterminate the omnimal?" "All the more reason to start now." Hafner's voice was flat. Marin struck the rifle down. "Are their rats better than ours?" he asked wearily. "Will their pests win or ours be stronger? Or will the two make peace, unite and interbreed, make war on us? It's not impossible; the omnimal could do it if interbreeding had a high survival factor. "Don't you still see? There is a progression. After the tiger, it bred this. If this evolution fails, if we shoot it down, what will it create next? This creature I think we can compete with. It's the one after this that I do not  want to face." head and looked around. Slowly it edged away and backed toward a nearby grove. The biologist stood up and called softly. The creature scurried to the trees and stopped just inside the shadows among them. The two men laid down their rifles. Together they approached the grove, hands spread open to show they carried no weapons. It came out to meet them. Naked, it had had no time to learn about clothing. Neither did it have weapons. It plucked a large white flower from the tree and extended this mutely as a sign of peace. "I wonder what it's like," said Marin. "It seems adult, but can it be, all the way through? What's inside that body?" "I wonder what's in his head," Hafner said worriedly. It looked very much like a man. Current (Veio Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of searce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York 3. New York Open Monday Thru Saturday : 9:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until 8 :00 P.M. (Phone GRamercy 3-62941 99 Secret of the House It's spice that's the variety of interplanetary life -- and it fust drove Kathy nutmeggyi O F course no one realized in advance what would be, ounce for ounce, the most valuable return cargo of the Earth-Venus ' spaceships, 1 even though the answer should have been obvious to anyone with the faintest knowledge of historical patterns. Rare metals? With the cost of fuel to lift them out of Venus's almost-Earth gravity making them even costlier than on Earth itself? No, the answer was the obvious but overlooked one: What did Marco Polo bring back from China and Vasco da Gama from India? Why was Columbus seeking a new route to the Indies? In one word: spices. Man's palate needs occasional rejuvenation. One of the main purposes of exploration, intercontinental or interplanetary, is the 100 restimulation of jaded taste buds. And in addition to the new spices there were new methods of cooking, such as that wonderful native Venusian quick passing through live steam, which gave the startling effect of sizzling hot crisp rawness; or balj, that strange native dish which was a little like a curry and a little like a bouillabaisse, but richer and more subtle than either. There was sokalj, or Venusian swamphog, the most delicately delicious meat on three planets -- not that anything Martian would ever be considered by the true gourmet. Kathy listened to regularly once a week for the first year of her marriage. For she had married not only a prominent and successful man, she soon realized, but one who had been bitten at a susceptible age by the word gourmet. It was fun while they were courting. It was fun, anyway, for a video network receptionist to be taken to good restaurants by the top interplanetary commentator. It was especially fun to watch him go through the masculine production number of conferring with the headwaiter, sending his compliments (and instructions) to the chef, and exchanging views with the sommelier, as Kathy quickly learned to call the-man-with-the-wine. Wine did not ship well interplanetarily ; acceleration over one g, in the term of the cognoscenti, "bruised" it. In this domain, the French still reigned supreme, and stressed their superiority to mask their natural jealousy of the upstart Venusian colonists. In every American city -- with a few exceptions in New Orleans and San Francisco -- former "French" restaurants had become "Venusian" and even in Paris cuisine venerienne marked some of the most highly esteemed establishments. But the entertainment value of a gourmet exhibitionist decreased as courtship progressed logically into marriage, and being wined and dined gave place to the daily problem of feeding the man. Quick freezing had, of course, made the bride's problems simple compared to those of earlier centuries. But George, completely in character, insisted on a high percentage of personally prepared meals -- and was shrewd enough to spot any substitute makeshifts via the deep freeze and the electronic oven. Not even the apartment on the very top level of Manhattan, where you could still see the Hudson, not even the charge accounts at shops she'd never dared enter, not even the wondrous fact that she loved George with an 101 intensity which she had always considered just an unlikely convention of the women's minimags -- none of these could quite reconcile Kathy to life with a man who could down three bowls of your best hand-made oyster stew without interrupting his speech on the glories of authentic balj a la Venusberg, who could devour enough of a prime rib roast to throw the whole week's budget out of joint while expatiating on the absurdity of the legend that Earth, cooks in general, and the Anglo-Saxons in particular, did at least understand beef. -of hiring a cook, not so much to satisfy George as to divert his inevitable reproaches to someone else. But aside from the fact that a cook's salary would turn her charge accounts anemic,' Kathy knew that her mother, both her grandmothers, and undoubtedly all four of her greatand all eight of her great-greatgrandmothers had fed their men and kept them happy. This was a matter of family pride. Then came the awful day when George brought Jose Lermontov home to dinner. Kathy's younger sister was also dining with them that night, and wrinkled her nose after George's face faded from the visiphone. "These revolting Venus-colonial diplomats," said Linda. "He'll have a swamp-beard and a paunch and a wife and six children at home. Kathy, why doesn't George ever meet anybody newsworthy who's -- well, worthy?" "He's a very fine young man, I hear," Kathy muttered distractedly. "Guerilla leader against the dictatorship, wrote a fine book about its overthrow. What worries me is the paunch -- and what I'm going to put into it." Five minutes after meeting the Venusian, Linda slipped into the kitchen to whisper, "Sister please can I have that in my stocking for Christmas?" But even this pleasing reversal did not divert Kathy from the task of preparing to fill the, as it turned out, non-existent paunch. Dinner, she thought a little later, was going surprisingly well, especially between Jose and Linda. But then George, having speared and destroyed the last pork chop, cleared his throat. "You must make allowances, Lermontov. Mere pork to a man accustomed to s okalj" "Mean swamphog?" Jose asked politely, with the usual clipped Venusian avoidance of pronouns and articles. "And," George added commiseratingly, "this so-called 'country gravy' -- rather a shock to a man 103 from a planet where they think, thank God, not in terms of gravies, but of sauces." "Very good gravy," said Jose, mopping up the last of his with a slice of Kathy's own bread. "Imagine 'so-called' because first made by those who live in country?" "Even granting that," George persisted, "can't you picture what just a pinch of baj-powder would have done for it? Or perhaps a hint of tinilj?" "Myself," Jose replied gravely, "prefer one of your Earth herbs -- dash of oregano, bit of savory. Summer savory, of course." George gave the matter serious thought. "Possibly. Very possibly. But in either case it demonstrates the pitiful lack of imagination of the average Earth housewife." It is conceivable that Kathy made too obvious a clatter in stacking and removing the dinner dishes. In any event, Linda followed her hastily into the kitchen. "Please, Kathy angel, don't explode, not just yet. I know George is asking for it, but he's probably been told already that all Earthwomen are shrews and I don't want" Kathy controlled herself until the one agreeable result of the evening was reached when Jos asked if he might see Linda home. To her surprise, she went right on 104 G controlling herself even after they had left, because by then she had thought of The Plan.  npHE very next morning, The Plan was well under way. A: Kathy invaded her favori ite bookshop and bought every i book in stock on Venusian spices and cooking, and even added such pre-Venusian classics of culinary perception as BrillatSavarin, Escoffier, and M. F. K. Fisher. B: She enrolled herself for daily lessons at the Uya Rulj School of Venusian Cookery (formerly the Ecole de Cuisine Cordon Bleu). C: Knowing that George had a luncheon date in Chicago with his sponsor, she visited the restaurant where her husband normally lunched. It was an unobtrusive chop house in the thirties, far down on Manhattan's base-level, and the excellent lunch she enjoyed there confirmed her darkest suspicions. For two weeks she read her books and took her lessons without trying out what she learned except for lunches by herself. And she did learn things. George's school of thought had its points. For Kathy's cooking, like that of her eight great-great-grandmothers, had been not only Earthly but plain American. There was a fresh delight in learning that the Architect of all things had established on this planet a certain inevitable relationship between tomatoes and sweet basil, and had ordained that caraway seeds should fulfill the destiny of red cabbage -- even as on another planet He had sown tinilj so that the flesh of the swamphog might be even sweeter. And who was to anticipate the masterfully predestined interplanetary blends? The inescapable kinship of garlic and lamb. Kathy had long known, but her eyes opened wide on discovering how a pinch of ba;powder completed the trinity. But these discoveries did not weaken The Plan. And that same Architect smiled upon The Plan by allowing the network's robowaxer to deposit a minutely oversufficient flow upon the floor of the corridor in front of George's office. On that wax, George slipped and broke his leg. George probably never admitted, even to himself, that he enjoyed being bedridden: the visiphone calls, the mini-script couriers from the network, the bedside microphone and cameras. But he did begin to admit that he was enjoying Kathy's cooking. Where once she might have served steak, she now brought forth grenadine de boeuf a la venerienne. Where once she might have served her asparagus with melted butter, she now ventured on a hollandaise (with five grains of baljpowder replacing the cayenne of ancient recipes). Where once she might have served leftover simply reheated, she now masked them with a sauce which would cause the recumbent George to smack his lips, roll his eyes, and murmur, "Silj, of course, and chives and a hint of tinilj possibly a whisper of pnulj, probably Earth-grown? Yes, I thought so and what is that?" "Chevil, darling," Kathy would say, and he'd answer, "Of course, of course. I would have had it in a minute. You know, Katherine my dear, you are developing an imagination!" George's plasticast was to come off that Thursday, Kathy decided it was time for the denouement of The Plan. As she was painstakingly making up her shopping list on Thursday morning, the visiphone rang and it was, miraculously, not the network for George. "Oh, Kathy!" Linda burbled. "I've got one of those nice let'sseewhathappens dates with him tonight and could you possibly ask us both to dinner? Because he likes you and he's really just about almost there and if we were you know, all in the family 105 and everything, I think it might just -- " "Jose?" Kathy asked, knowing the answer. She grinned and doubled the quantities on the list. The worst of the preparations for dinner were over when Linda arrived, carrying, to Kathy's surprise, a weekend case. The girl devoted only the necessary minimum of time to admiring George's knitted leg, then dragged her sister into the bedroom. "Kathy, I've got such a problem. He's known so many women all over two planets and at embassies and maybe even spies. I told you tonight I think he will; only I don't know what lipstick to use, what perfume, anything. I've got to make myself interesting; but I don't want to overdo it. So I just brought everything I have. You tell me." Kathy looked at the array. She thought of her dinner and The Plan and she began giving Linda her advice. TT was the same cast that had attended the awful dinner which inspired The Plan, but they were different people. Jose, no longer the visiting colonial, was a gentleman at home among friends; Linda was radiant in the glow of simplicity and a wellscrubbed face; and George was praising the food. He praised the green peas. He praised the mashed potatoes. And above all he praised the fried chicken. ,Jj "I can't quite analyze it," he kept saying. "There's a touch there I can't quite get. You've brought out the flavor miraculously. It wouldn't," he demanded suspiciously, "be that new powder Koenigsberg claims he found among the natives at the tip of the southern continent? I thought they hadn't shipped any of that in yet." "They haven't,darling," said Kathy. "Perhaps the tiniest pinch of balj with a little freshly ground celery seed?" "No." "Then what in two planets -- " "A woman must have some secrets, George. Let's just say this is a secret of the house." At this point Kathy happened to catch Josh's eye and hastily looked away. It was impossible that a Venusian diplomat would be winking at his hostess! George was still pursuing his questions over brandy in the living room. Jose, also possibly (Kathy prayed) in a questionasking mood, had led Linda out onto what the architect called the sun-area, though Kathy persisted in thinking of it, more romantically, as the balcony. As she saw the two turn to come back in, Kathy headed for the 106 kitchen, an immemorial spot for sisterly confidences. But it was not Linda who followed her in. It was Jose. He leaned casually against the door jamb and told her, "Know secret of house." "Yes?" said Kathy casually. "Oh, I mean -- you do? Sometimes I have to stop and reread you, like a telegram. Well?" "Bought food of highest quality, cooked it extremely well, relied on nothing but natural flavor, probably little salt. Good old George always wanted so much seasoning, this strikes him as new and revolutionary taste sensation. Right?" ly," she said. "I thought it would work and I was sure of it when I ate at his regular lunch place. That's just what they do; but because it's a chop house with a reputation, he thinks it's magic. Except I've learned things his way, too. From now on, Georgegets variety at home -- and I think he'll like all of it without ever knowing why he likes which." "Simplicity also magic," Jos6 observed. "Your idea -- clean, fresh simplicity of Linda that accounts for fact am going to be your brother-in-law. Correct?" "Correct? It's perfect!" Impulsively, Kathy kissed him. "Oh, my!" she said as she drew back. "Now you've got lipstick after coming off the balcony spotless!" "Variety," said Jose approvingly. "Still wonder one thing, Kathy. Those mashed potatoes -- extraordinary. If secret of house, there's where. Confide in me?" "Now that you're part of the family, sure." "Yes?" "The secret is this: I take lots of butter and cream -- real cowstuff, no syntho -- and I beat the living bejeepers out of 'em." When they returned to the living room, it was obvious that Linda had told George the news. Using his newly recovered leg with as ostentatious pride as a year-old toddler, George advanced paternally upon Jos6 Lermontov. "Let tonight's dinner be a marital lesson to you, my boy. Remember the last time you ate here, and realize that there's no fault in a wife that a little husbandly persistence can't cure." This time there was no doubt whatsoever that the gentlemanly Venusian diplomat was winking at his hostess. 107 5 Star Shelf ed by Judith Merril, Random House, Inc., New York, 1952. 334 pages, 2.95 T is rare that this sour-grapes reviewer goes all-out about an anthology; there have been too manyand most have been of poor quality. Here is one, however, that is way up on the top of the pile: an "idea" anthology that contains fantasy and science fiction and thrives on both. There are 2 1 tales in the volume, all of which tell about odd and unlikely varieties of life (and "non-life") on or off our planet. All but three rate B-for better. A rather rare high average. Life types range from sentient houses (William Tenn) and whirlwinds (Robert Heinlein) to more or less standard robots, however, in the least routinely described. There are tales of ghosts, werewolves, mutants, angels, "creatures," gnomes and, often best of all, completely real and civilized beings on or from other planets and realms. Authors whose tales particularly enchanted me, in addition to the two men mentioned above, are Mark Clifton, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, Laurence Manning (with a very 108 touching story never before published anywhere), Anthony Boucher, Roger Dee, Lester del Rey, and Murray Leinster. Del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," incidentally, is the only story to have first been published before 1940. There is an excellent short bibliography of strange-life stories that have appeared in other anthologies: a fine idea, but here a little too short to be truly representative. Fletcher Pratt. Random House, New York, 1952. 60 pages, illustrated, 1.00 FT1HE second volume in the Coggins-Pratt series on astronautics for the younguns is just as good as the first, which was (see The present volume takes you from Earth to the first Space Station, to the Moon -- and does so in plain and not-too-technical language and in magnificent pictures, half of which are in full color. No attempt is made to overdramatize the humdrum aspects of the undertaking, or to oversimplify. While it does not make the job sound easy, it does make it easy to understand, both in writing and in the illustrations. cover is used as one of the fullpage plates (page 21) in the book. It is not often that the cover of a science fiction magazine is sufficiently accurate, engineeringwise, to appear in a non-fiction discussion as a good approximation of future reality. by Mark Twain. Harper  Brothers, New York, 1952. 94 pages, 2.00 W HY do people generally ignore Mark Twain's "science fiction?" Could it be because all his fantasy was bitterly satiric? That may be, but the best science fiction is shrewd, penetrating and often sharp in tone. Well, here is Mark Twain at his satiricfantastic best. The book is an expanded version, prepared by the late Dixon Wecter, of Mark's famous squib against pomposity in religion and in daily life, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," plus a hitherto unpublished satire on the same theme, "Letter From the Recording Angel." Two brand-new chapters in the Stormfield saga open the book with a superb attack on race prejudice. "The Recording Angel" slashingly satirizes hypocrisy and the meanness of miserly wealth; and the whole 109 wonderful document presents some of the most hilariously biting satire -- and some of the richest science fiction imagination -- that has ever appeared in print. Pratt. Introduction by John Ciardi. Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, 1952. 423 pages, 3.95  TT is with a little hesitancy that I discuss this book in these columns. Witchery is probably not appropriate here -- especially stories which try to kid the reader into actually believing in supernatural powers. Nearly the best thing about this volume is John Ciardi's sharp and poetic introduction, an appreciative review of the anthropological origins of belief in witches and a deftly subtle analysis of witch types. As for the three novelets themselves, I find Leiber's "Conjure Wife," from a 1943 Unknown Worlds, to be straight-faced (and very well-done) obscurantism, based on the concept of the soul as a tangible (and stealable) article. Blish's relatively short "There Shall Be No Darkness," from a 1950 Thrilling Wonder Stories, is somewhat more persuasive for me, perhaps because it is closer to being science fiction. It is Fletcher Pratt's "The Blue Star," however, nearly novel length by itself, that provides the real surprise of the book. This never previously published tale is an immensely effective piece of mannered pseudo-historical writing, a recreation of a time when witchcraft was really believed in -- in this instance on a parallel world that is only slightly different from our world during its medieval period. It is full of color, sex, and wonderful, robust characters. The witchcraft, because it is placed in a suitable environment, is quite believable.For my money. Witches Three is worth buying especially because of the excellent imaginings in Fletcher Pratt's splendid baroque tapestry. antoniorrobles. Twayne Publishers, New York, 1952. 245 pages, 3.00 Witches Three, they also included in the package this changeling, this simplemad tale translated from the Spanish by Edward and Elizabeth Huberman. It is just about the goofiest thing I have read since Tristram 110 Shandy. I don't know if it's any gooji; all I know is I enjoyed it! It tells of the adventures of a real centaur in Nazi Germany, through the Spanish Civil War, and finally into modern Mexico, where the author of this book, famed in prewar Spain, is now living. These adventures are partly sharp anti-Fascism, partly straight bizarre romance, and partly (a large part) sheer nonsense, but the kind of poetic nonsense that looseminded characters like the undersigned love. ton Cecile Matschat, Editor; Carl Cat met, Consulting Editor, John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia. 1952. 206-16 pages, 2.00 each. " science fiction juveniles maintains the same high quality established by the first five A bit oversimple in the writing (for adults, that is) and overgadgety in the science, these tales nevertheless are clean as a whistle, excellent and effecive promotion of scientific and technological ideas, and "action-packed" without leaning too heavily on carnage and catastrophe, with one or two exceptions. Poul Anderson's Vault of the Ages is one of the exceptions -- a grim and thrilling picture of civilization destroyed and a barbaric society beginning its way back up the scale by means of data found in a Twentieth Century Time Vault. Arthur Clarke's Islands in the Sky is a wholly convincing tale of a boy's adventures on our first artificial satellite. Chad Oliver's Mists of Dawn is a dramatic but rather run-ofthe-mill tale of a lad's exciting doings in the year 50,000 B.C., where he was placed by an accident to a time machine. Philip St. John's Rocket Jockey is one of those rather oldfashioned tales of an "auto race" in space, with some nasty Martians as villains. It is perhaps the least convincing of the five tales. Bryce Walton's Sons of the Ocean Deep is a genuinely exciting story of the exploration of the ocean bottom, and of the very surprising things that are found there. It's cast in the future, when space travel is old-hat. The series is just the thing for the growing generation, and a fine lead-in for them to more adult science fiction eventually. 111 The Drop Certainly the cheapest way to get where you want to go is to be deported. And there are times when it proves the only possible way! between planets, even on a ship like the Ironrod, so my first goal in Forbeston on Mars was always the pool. I stripped down to trunks, ultraviolet checked, and plunged out into the green-tinted water. After blowing around a while, I lay back and floated. Above, beyond the almost invisible protective dome, there was the purple velvet of the Martian sky, flecked, now that the Sun was low on the horizon, with the larger stars. One of jj them, unwinking and tremendous, was green -- Earth, of course. From the pool to the club; the : usual routine. The Senior Officers' ; Club was on the corner of 49th j and X, just across from the Dej partment of Commerce building. I had belonged to it two years now, and at 34 was no longer the ' youngest member. A prodigy of 31 had got his master's ticket two 112 or three months before. I checked in, and from his little cubbyhole Steve recognized me, which was certainly an honor. He brought my mail down from its box : half a dozen bills, two vocoletters from a distant cousin, and a pile of advertising voco-flips. Steve said: "Where've you been, Captain Newsam?" The individual naming was another part of his technique. I had noticed that people he really had known for years he just called "Captain," "Commodore," or whatever it was. "Venus to Mercury run," I told him. "Clarke's Point, Karsville, Mordecai -- the usual." "You get around," he said. "I stick here." I'd heard the complaint from, him before, and also from others in Forbeston and at other landfalls. They mostly looked contented enough, though. 113 "One place is like another," I told him tiredly. "Yes," he said. "I've heard that. What you're used to, I figure. Going in to eat?" "Directly." I dropped the vocoflips in a disposal chute. "Do something for me, Steve." "Any old thing. What is it?" "Check me Captain Gains." He didn't hesitate long, but I'm used to observing small actions and probing them -- I did a thesis on behavior for my diploma. I saw Steve's eyes flicker, and the involuntary movement of his hands. He said: "I'll check him, Captain. I haven't seen him around much lately." s "How lately?" I asked quietly. He was smooth again now. "Well, you know how it is. With serving officers, you don't always know whether they're here or away. Even when they're at Forbeston, they don't always come into the club. Hunting trips and such." "Your memory's not bad, Steve. Just when did you last see him?" He pretended to consider. "Might be two months. How long you been gone?" "Just over two months." "Yes, I'd say that's about it." "Thanks. Check him for me all the same. Check him all over. I'm going in to eat." the window, and ordered. This part of the club overlooked the playground of the Forbeston Junior School. I sat eating and watching the generation that would be prepared to take over when I had completed my twenty years in space and was ready to retire to that plantation up in the hills. I didn't notice when someone came up to the table. He tapped the back of my chair. "Mind if I join you?" It was Matthews, from the Firelike. I had run into him at various times, in various places, and liked him well enough. I 'j nodded, and he sat down. "Just in?" "Three hours." He nodded. "Been in over a week myself. We're on the Uri anus trip now. That's a rough  job I'll be glad to see the end of. j We lost the Steelback on our j last run. It's a God-forsaken  stretch of sky." "One place is like another," I said. It was the conventional phrase. j Matthews glanced at me. "Glad J you think so." j "What else?"  "People get ideas," he said i vaguely. "Do you go near the  Earth at all on your present run?"  "The Moon. Clarke's Point. Why?" "We used to hit Tycho.  114 They've got a telescope there that's pretty good. I used to get into the observatory. You can make out some small groups of buildings on Earth when the weather's right." The conversation was becoming embarrassing. To mention Earth at all was bad enough; to speak of "weather" was something worse. I looked at Matthews. He seemed normal, but I thought I detected a watchfulness behind the placidity of his expression. I said deliberately: "I've never given it a thought." "Sometimes people get to acting peculiar. We had a second officer with us three or four years back. He got an idea in his head that the Earth was raising a battle fleet. He used to spend his off-duty time at the lookout screen watching for the enemy cruisers approaching." I laughed. "What did they do with him?" "Gave him the drop. I guess he knows better by now." "If he's still alive." Matthews paused for a moment. "Have you ever wondered why we drop the misfits back to Earth?" I looked at him again. "What is there to think about? The reason's obvious enough. Since the ruling was made against prefrontal leucotomy, it's the only alternative to snuffing them out, unless they are kept in institutions at our expense." He drained his coffee. "I've known some to say that we should never have abandoned Earth. It's richer in natural resources than all the planets together." I added: "And populated to the tune of around a billion savages. We couldn't dispose of that lot, and we couldn't avoid being contaminated if we had to live among them. The reason our kind came to the planets was to get away from them, to be able to develop our superior civilization in peace and without interruption. We've got the Sirius project under way. In a couple of centuries we may be in a different solar system altogether." "Or we may not," Matthews corrected. "There have been quite a few earlier projects, starting with the Proxima Centauri project. That was two hundred years ago." "You sound pessimistic." "It's the Uranus trip," he said. He grinned. "Forget it. One place is like another. Doing anything tonight?" "Nothing much. Looking a friend up." "Yes," he said. "I thought you might be." The remark was, I felt, an enigmatic one. He left without waiting for me to ask him to clarify it. 115 out. "Any luck with Captain Gains?" I asked him. He shook his head. "Forget it then. I'm going along to his place. There'll be a message, even if he isn't there." Steve nodded. As I went out, he flicked the vidiphone switch in front of him. Larry's bubble was seven or eight kilometers outside the city. I took my own car to the West Lock ' and picked up a sand tracker there. The Sun had set when I got outside the city bubble, but Phobos was up and I didn't need to use the main lights to see my way. I made a good twenty and in about a quarter hour was under the ridge on which the bubble that surrounded Larry's place was fixed. I could see it shimmering in the full moonlight, but there was no sign of a light within. I parked the tracker outside and went in. The lock was automatic ; as it closed behind me, the main lights inside went on. Larry's shack was in front of me. I pushed the door open. The living room looked reasonably tidy, but there was dust that showed no one had been in it for some weeks, at least. I went straight across to the vidiphone and pressed the message button. The screen stayed blank.This was unusual. There should have been some kind of message. I set out to hunt through the shack for some kind of clue, but there was nothing. Larry Gains and I had gone through college at Tycho together, and we graduated together. Our first four years in space we were on the same boat -- the Graylance on the Asteroid Circuit -- and after the inevitable split came with my posting to the Ironrod, we still saw as much of each other as our wanderings permitted. Fortunately, both boats were based on For best on. Six months before, the old Graylance had made its last loop round the Belt; a chunk of rock weighing twenty tons or more had torn her open. Larry had been one of the survivors, but with injuries enough to ground him for at least a year. It was then he had had this shack put up. It was a handy base from  which to hunt rocktrotters. I had j stayed out there with him on a V couple of leaves. Now the place was deserted. Might he have been seconded ' back into space on a special board? But there would have v been a message, either at the club or here. An extended trip, up onto the Kayser Plateau? Then again there should have been a mesL Vj( i vV   sage; but he might not have expected to be away for long. That seemed the only possible solution. But there was the thick dust, and there had been that funny look in Steve's eye when I had mentioned Larry. I began hunting aimlessly around the hut again. A tape of the Forbeston edition of the Tycho Capsule. I clipped it into the screen. 24 -- 7. That made it just over two months old. I heard the door open behind me and turned around, half expecting to see Larry himself there. But instead there were two men in Medical uniform. One of them stepped forward. "Captain Newsam?" He framed it as a question, but it was a statement. I knew that and nodded. "Just a checkup," he said. "I had acheckup. This afternoon. When I got in with the Jronrod." "That's all right," the Medic said. "We won't keep you long." "You won't keep me at all, I've had my checkup. You can reach me through Venus Base, if you're interested." I moved to pass them. The one who had been talking didn't do anything. The other raised his left hand and shook it gently. Venusian arodate, of course, and they themselves immunized against it. I saw the golden dust shake out toward me and had time to run two or three paces before my muscles locked and : everything went black. 1 : Medical building, back in Forbeston. My muscles were still j rigid. I was on a stretcher un1 derneath the Verifier. The two j Medics were there, and a Medic J Captain. He was a little tubby man with ginger whiskers and a toothy grin. He said: "Sorry about the ini formality. Just a routine. We did ; have a warrant, incidentally, in case you should feel like legist ering a complaint against us." Being underneath the Verifier  explained the arodate, but it didn't explain why. I thought of saying something and then def cided to keep my mouth shut. The electrodes were clamped neatly behind my ears. The globe of the Verifier glowed its normal ' pink. The Captain said : "My name's Pinski. Now, Captain Newsam, you are Chief Navigator of the Itontod, on the Venus-Mercury run?" "Yes." "Landfall five hours back?" "If I've been out half an hour, yes." The questions continued. For the most part, they were routine. 118 Pinski kept one eye on the Verifier globe, Then he started tossing in a few more unusual ones. "Ever been among the outer planets?" "Beyond the Asteroids? No." "Do you know Commander Leopold?" "No." "Commander Stark?" "No." "What are your views on prefrontal leucotomy?" "Never thought about it. It's not used now, is it? They give them the drop." "What do you think of the Sirius project?" "Not much interested." "Do you ever dream of wide stretches of water?" "Not since I was a boy." I had no reason to fear anything from the Verifier, so it didn't make me nervous. The globe stayed pink as the questions 'went on. Pinski said: "What were you doing at the place where the Medics found you?" "I was looking for Captain Gains. Perhaps you'll tell me where I can get hold of him." Pinski grinned. "I'm not under the Verifier, Captain Newsam." He stepped back. "I think that's all okay. Sorry to have bothered, you. In two or three minutes you'll be' able to get around again. Call in the Bar on your way out. Third on the right along the corridor. I'll be in there. The drinks are on Medical." I found him all right. He was sitting at a table with two drinks in front of him. Someone must have told him I drank sloe gin. I sat down at the empty chair. "Glad to make your acquaintance in a more formal manner. Captain Newsam," Pinski said. "Have a drink." I took it. "Now just yhy -- " He lifted one hand. "To get things quite straight, I can give you no information as to the reason for your being picked up and verified." "Right," I said. "Then do you know where I can find Gains?" He hesitated briefly. "The answer must be no." I swallowed the drink. "Thank you very much for all the hospitality. Good night, Captain Pinski." "A piece of strictly medical advice," he said. "Go back to bed and have a good night's sleep." I called back, "Thanks!" I was halfway to the door. on the interplanetary routes, has its less respectable side. I drove down to the East side and parked the car at the corner of 90th and J. The Persepolis is a small club at the far end of 90th. I'm known there, but every time 119 I go I feel less and less like boasting of it, I had a couple of sloe gins at the Bar and then went up to the Saturn Room. Cynthia came at me from behind. "Hello! Long time." "Seems longer," 1 said. "Tell me, when was Larry in last?" "Larry? I haven't seen him since you were both up here -- nine, ten weeks ago. But I've been away on a trip up the Long Canal. Tell you what, I'll ask Sue." "That'll, be fine," I said. She was gone two or three minutes. When she came back, she said: "No. He doesn't seem to have been around since then." But she wasn't being spontaneous any longer; she was weighing her words. And she didn't seem at all curious as to what might have happened to him. "I thought we were friends, Cynth," I said. "Come on, what is it?" "What's what? I could do with, a drink." I dropped a note on the table. "Have this one on Larry. See you, Cynthia." She caught me before I reached the door. "I don't know, Jake. I honestly don't know. All I was told was that it was best not to inquire." She was telling the truth now. "Thanks," I said. "Good night, anyway." "Where are you going?" "There's only one place where I stand a chance of finding things  out." . I was thinking about that as j' I went outside. The Terminal Of? fice had tabs on all officers on the space routes. If Larry had not been reporting for his fortnightly medical boards, they would know, and they would certainly have checked to see what was happening. If there was something else wrong, they would know that, too. I jumped into the car without thinking and released power. Behind me, a familiar voice said: "You don't seem to have had any luck in finding your friend, Captain Newsam." It was Matthews. His tall body was cramped into the back of the car. "Good of you to join me," I said. "I'd like you to drop in at my place. It's on 72nd." "Is there anything at the end of it? Information?" "A drink. Maybe information." "Suits me," I told him, and headed there. TT was a more luxurious apart ment than I thought Matthews could have afforded. Four rooms, all well furnished. He set me down in a long chair in front of a glow-fire and brought me the drink. He had it right, too -- sloe 120 gin -- but the fact that everyone knew my taste in liquor had ceased to worry me. "Now," I said, "I want to know where Larry Gains is." Matthews raised his eyebrows. "Gains? Ah, he must be this friend you didn't find." I said wearily : "What information do you think I came here for?" "I thought you came for the drink. No, don't go. If you try the Terminal Office at this time of night, you'll only get the clerk, who will tell you to come back in the morning. Finish your drink and have another. I understand you got picked up for verification earlier this evening." "Yes." "What sort of questions did they ask you?" I told him and he nodded. "Leopold Stark That's interesting." "Just what is it all about?" He paused. "That little talk we had this afternoon. Remember it?" "More or less. You were talking about misfits." Matthews looked straight at me. "Captain Larry Gains was classified as a misfij: three weeks ago. He was dropped to Earth over a week ago. Is that what you wanted to know?" "You're off your rocker yourself. Larry was perfectly sane when I saw him just over two months ago. It takes two boards three months apart for misfit classification." "Not," Matthews said softly, "for classification 3-K." "3-K? What in hell is that?" "Organized activities against the Stated" "Larry? Don't be funny!" "Tell me," Matthews said, "what do you know about the Earth?" "Ordinary general knowledge. That when the Third Atomic War broke out on Earth, the colonies on the Moon and here on Mars declared their neutrality. The technical staffs on the Earth bases for the most part pulled out to join them; those that didn't presumably got submerged in the holocaust. The state of the war was followed by wireless until the last transmitter went off the air, marking the breakdown. The colonies concentrated on their own expansion -- first, on the Moon and Mars; later, on Venus and with the outposts in the Asteroids, and on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. There was no point in going back to an Earth poisoned with radioactive gases, with a savage population rotted by radiation diseases. The obvious thing was to expand outward, toward other solar systems." "And, of course," Matthews said, "there was the Protocol." 121 T HE Protocol, I suppose, could be called the basis of our education -- that the old and outworn should be put behind; that Man should go on to greater things, never turning back to the world of misery and wretchedness to which he had for so long been confined. There was a lot more,but that was the gist of it. Children learned it by heart. "Yes, the Protocol," I said. "The Protocol rose naturally enough out of the circumstances." "Out of the circumstances," Matthews agreed. "But circumstances change. The Protocol remains the same." "Why shouldn't it?" "Well, grubbing around from one artificial environment to another -- do you think that's the best existence men can have? Turning our backs on an unbelievably fruitful planet?" "It's only a temporary phase. The Sirius project -- " " -- is a failure," Matthews cut in. "We won't be told about that officially until a new project has been got going -- another carrot in front of the donkey. But it's a failure. Two planets, neither one habitable or capable of being made habitable." I said slowly: "Now perhaps you will tell me just what all this has to do with Larry Gains." ' Matthews got up and walked across to the telescreen. He touched a small switch on the left-hand side, and the screen  moved into patterns of whorls i spreading out from the center. I  recognized it for a watcherJ alarm: if anyone were tapping the room, the whorls would be j irregular and broken. Matthews 1 came back and sat down again. 4 "Gains had a lot of time on his hands after his crackup. He Igot to thinking things over. He happened to meet someone in  our group. To put it shortly, he j joined us." 1 "Your group? Joined you? Who J are you?" "We represent a party whose objective is to overthrow the Protocol. We want to get back to j Earth, to recolonize it and re' claim it from savagery. Gains 1 came in with us."  "You're crazy! What makes I you think you know better than v the Directorate? We're improving  conditions on the planets every  year. Why, the new bubble up the Long Canal takes in over forty square kilometers!" "Bigger bubbles," Matthews said, "but always bubbles. Never the chance to live a natural life in natural surroundings." "And Larry? You let him get caught?" "It was bad luck." "Bad luck?" "He and another of our group had their conversation tapped. 122 They were both taken. Fortunately, neither of them knew more than a couple of other people in the group, and those two people got away. We couldn't do anything for Gains and Bessemer. They were held strictly incommunicado." "So he's really gone. You're sure they're not still holding him somewhere?" "On some points our information is definite. They've been dropped all right. On the North American continent -- that's the usual place they drop misfits." rying me all along, and suddenly I knew what it was. I said warily: "Well, I've got the information I came in search of. Now I'm beginning to wonder why I got it. I don't imagine you thought I would be a cinch for your organization just because Larry had been in it, did you? And yet you've told me a lot which you can't be in the habit of passing out casually. What's behind it?" "Well, we haven't told you anything the Directorate doesn't know," Matthews said evenly. "Except that I'm in it, and I have my means of getting away; in any case, I'm expendable. But you're correct in thinking there was a reason. Gains was a good friend of yours." "The best." "He was a good man. We didn't want to lose him, and we'd like to get him back." "Back? From Earth?" "We have a small cruiser at our disposal that is confidential and I've burned both your boats and ours by telling you -- and we can get down to the Earth and back again. It isn't easy, and of course there can be no question of organizing search parties. But if someone else were dropped, with instructions forGains and Bessemer as to a spot to go to to be picked up, all three could be taken off. We're lucky that misfits are always dropped in more or less the same area. It means finding them is made easier for us. It might be possible." "What's known about conditions in that part of the planet?" Matthews looked at me levelly. "Not a thing." I paused. "All right, I'll go. How?" Matthews smiled. m "I thought you would. As for going -- that's easy. You intended to drop in at the Terminal Office. Do that. If you are persistent, they'll inform you about Gains. After that, it's easy. You will be under automatic examination at the Office, and the shot of adrenalin you will take before you go over there will register. You will be pulled in on suspicion. Certain papers 123 will have been planted in your things at the Club. From that point on, things will be straightforward. All we have to do is just hope that when they verify you again, they keep a reasonable distance from suspicion of what's really happening. I think they will. Verifiers aren't very good nowadays." "Thanks," I said. "You seem to have everything well worked out. Just as a matter of interest, that remark about burning both my boats and yours -- if I hadn't volunteered for this, what would you have done?" "We were fairly sure of you," Matthews said. "But if we had been wrong He turned his thumb down very regretfully. the proceedings were rushed through. The papers Matthews had had planted in my gear must have been very incriminating. I was transferred to the Moon, to Archimedes Crater, for the final decision, but it was cut-and-dried beforehand. Within a week of my conversation with Matthews, I was standing in front of the Board, listening to myself being pronounced a misfit and condemned to the drop back to Earth. I was marched out. Someone was waiting for me in an anteroom. It was Pinski. I said: "I've been verified three times in a week. I'd never have thought you would have needed any more." Pinski smiled. "This time it's different. You have a compulsory total recall to go through." "You can't do that. Regulation 75 states that no one can be put under a form of interrogation that his conscious mind cannot observe. The Verifier is the limit." "You know the regulation," Pinski said, "ex-Captain Newsam. Unfortunately, they don't apply to you any longer. The State has cast you out. This won't take very long." So much, I though grimly, for Matthews' sources of information. There was nothing I could do now. I could resist, but that would only mean being put into an arodate paralysis. "Sit down," Pinski said. The little silver balls began to revolve ; the mirrors gleamed with strange lights. I heard Pinski's voice, close at first, and then from greater and greater echoing distances. After an indefinite space of time, Pinski's voice again: "Wake up, Newsam. Wake up." I raised my head, my mind clear. Pinski was looking at me commiseratingly. "You'Ve had tough luck," he observed. "They certainly roped you in." 124 I wasn't sure how much they had got from me, though I guessed it would be everything. "I'm not complaining," I said. "There's no provision for reclassifying misfits, I'm sorry to say. If there were, we might have saved you. As it is you can take the drop in the satisfaction that you've done the Directorate a final service. We didn't know about that cruiser." He paused. "The boat's outside. Good luck, Newsam." We shook hands. The guards took me outside, through the lock to the Main Ramp. I had a last look at Archimedes, spread squatly around under its glistening bubble, and went through into the boat -- a light coracle. During the takeoff and the three-hour journey toward Earth, I had time to consider things. Matthews' little scheme had been nicely blown up. When the cruiser arrived at the rendezvous that had been arranged, there would be a handy battle fleet waiting for it. What fools they were, anyway, to attempt to outwit the Directorate! As for resettling the Earth I had the job of doing it on my own now, with the aid of Larry and this fellow Bessemer -- if I could find them at all. I I 'HE coracle dropped into an orbit, and they made the final arrangements for the drop. Matthews had been right, at least, in saying that they didn't drop misfits at random. The whole thing was meticulously calculated. When they finished, I was fitted up in the dropsuit. The captain of the coracle, a small, morose fellow, gave me instructions. "The five retard jets will fire 'automatically. After the fifth, the first parachute comes into action, and ten seconds later the second." He grinned sadly. "If nothing has happened after fifteen seconds, you'll know something has gone wrong in the packing. You'll smash flat in that case, killed outright. You'll feel no pain whatever." "Thanks," I said. "We've never had any complaints before, but then I suppose we wouldn't. The spot you are to hit is the place we always send misfits. Out of the generosity of the Directorate, it's good hunting ground and, if you survive long enough, you can probably even farm it. Within easy reach of the ocean, too. Used to be called New Hampshire." "Any provisions?" "Concentrated food for a week. And a Klaberg pistol with a hundred rounds. I'd look after them if I were you -- which I'm glad I'm not, incidentally." They eased me out of the lock with stopwatch timing. I didn't 125 wait for the airblast to pi'sh me clear; I sprang off myself. As I did so, the clearance jet pushed behind me. Tumbling over and over in space, I saw the coracle shrink behind me like a deflating balloon. I was on my own now with a vengeance. Just after the fifth retard jet, a thought struck me and sent a prickling apprehension down my spine. Matthews had failed to anticipate the compulsory total recall. What if he and his group were wrong in another minor detail? There might have been more than a gruesome jest in the Captain's remark about the second parachute not opening. Who would know if the drop ended in death? Might not the Directorate feel that so swift an end was only merciful? The first parachute opened with a jerk, and I began counting, slowly, in my head. At fifteen, I knew I was right. I was plunging down faster and faster through the thin air. Death was below me. At twenty, with a heaving jerk, the main parachute opened. The Captain's sense of humor had been even more gruesome than I imagined. Still, untrained as I was for this kind of thing, I hit the ground hard. Rolling over, I hit my head against something and I went out, thinking, just as I blanked, that I was getting tired of being unconscious. again, I heard Larry's voice. I thought of it as a hallucination, but it was a remarkably persistent one. "Come on, Jake, you're all right now." I opened my eyes. It was Larry. Stranger yet, there were half a dozen people behind him. And two of them were women. "I was to have found you and taken you to a place up on the coast, for a cruiser to take us off," I told him miserably. "But the Directorate knows about it. The whole thing's a trap." Larry laughed. "It's a trap, sure enough, but the Directorate hasn't got it quite right." "I'm serious," I insisted. "They got it from me under total recall." "We knew that," Larry said. "Matthews couldn't warn you of it, of course, or the warning itself would have shown up. So there had to be another story -- one that would convince you, and throw the Directorate off the scent at the same time." "How do you know all this?" "We haven't got a cruiser," Larry said. "We haven't even got a coracle. But we do have wireless communication. We were waiting for you. We always are waiting for misfits." 126 "We?" I asked. "We have a nice little colony here. Fifty-eight of us, and still growing." They had been helping me out of the dropsuit. I felt a breeze on my face, and the smell, the indescribable smell, of natural air laden with a dozen different scents of flowers and grass and trees. Larry was watching me. "It's really something, isn't it?" "What about the savages?" He shrugged. "There may be some to the west. We haven't had time to lopk properly. But this country's clear." There was soft turf beneath my feet. "But why?" I asked. "The Directorate must know what this planet is like. Why don't they" move back, instead of fumbling around with interstellar projects that never get anywhere?" "The Directorate is an organization designed to rule a set of neatly controlled artificial cities -- a state spread out over nearly a dozen planets and satellites, but an entirely urban state. If men came back to Earth, came back to farm the land, living in villages as we do now, the Directorate's power would be broken. If you want any more reasons, you just don't know enough about human nature.' "And can we beat them?" I asked him. "Can we defy them 127 under their very noses? With the Tycho telescope trained on the Earth, inspecting everything?" "We don't want to beat anybody," Larry said. "We're satisfied to escape notice. The village is made of small, scattered buildings, and even then they are camouflaged to make them harder to spot. We farm our land, and our agents on the planets pick our recruits." "Matthews," I exclaimed suddenly. "Poor devil-s -- he's still at Forbeston!"  "You'll see him shortly. He's due to be arrested within three months." He laughed and the rest of the small party with him. I saw the joke myself, and began laughing almost uncontrollably. Larry put an arm on my shoulder. "Take a look at that," he said. "Take a good look." I looked and saw the sunset. It was glowing through clean, pure air instead of a bubble or a viewport.l  jj jlj bj  iJB.iJL.jL-  the Newest and Brightest Star in  J I   the Science Fiction Heavens!  Number 1  Volume I -- 1 -- (A future rare collectors' treasure) may be yours in 1. -- You may buy it for SOe -- (my list included Free). page issues .postpaid to you directly from Scotland) for only 1.50. 3. -- I'll pay for the subscription so you will receive all 5 first issues free if you'll order at least 5 worth from my giant printed checklist of over 1000 available S.F., Fantasy and Weird Books and magazines including over 250 paperbound books at 25c each and up. P.S. -- I'll send you my list alone for 10c. 128 Here are the details and rules of the 6500 Galaxy Magazine and Simon and Schuster Science Fiction contest announced on page 77 1. The closing date is October 15, 1953. Manuscripts may be subGalaxy Science Fiction, 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. form) and not committed to any other magazine or book publisher. 3. Novels submitted must be between 60,000 and 75,000 words in length, typed in black ink on one side of white bond paper, doublespaced, with at least an inch margin cut all sides and each page numbered. 4. Manuscripts must be accompanied by sufficient postage for return. will be given full consideration for possible serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, book publication by Simon and Schuster, or both, at standard rates. 6. There are no requirements, stipulations or taboos regarding themes. Fresh ideas and convincing characterization, conflict and plot development are the important criteria. Writers who enter the contest can best familiarize themselves with the standards of the judges through study of the science fiction published by Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Simon and Schuster. 7. Sole judges will be the editorial staffs of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and Simon and Schuster. The decisions of the judges will be final. 8. Contestants agree, in submitting their manuscripts, to accept standard publishing agreements with the sponsors of the contest in the event that their novel is the winning entry. 9. Anyone may enter this contest except employees of the Galaxy Publishing Corp. and of Simon and Schuster, Inc., and their families; their present publishers which means, in effect, that contestants science fiction. Beyond Designed, edited and produced by the Galaxy staff. A full color print of the cover reproduced especially for framing  The valuable first issue permanixed with a plastic coating to preserve it  6 Issues for 1.50 This offer is limited and expires on date of publication. May I, 1953, so rush the coupon below. Reserve my color print plus permanized first issue of your Magazine and send the 6 issues to me at address below. I enclose 1.50. Foreign -- 2.50. Name Address . City Zone State 160 What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess?  -- 1 ' to mind power, sound thinking and cause and cflect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written :d ut the wise men of old. A popular fattu y has it that their secrets of personal power at ! ticcessful living were lost to the i Id. Knowledge of nature's la 1 i dated through the ages, is never I t At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty gcncr.tti .migo, less than l100th of V'c 4 the ruth's people were thought capMe of i . riving basic knowlol v d-out the laws of life, for it is an . nt.iry truism that knowledge is pi r and that power cannot be entru Led to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; mu' recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in 1694. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe P.C.H. San Jose California The Next Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon by Isaac Asimov JL T began when Joseph Schwartz was walking down a street in Chicago, past the Institute for Nuclear Research. He raised one foot in the twentieth century; he lowered it in Galactic Era 827 , the victim of an odd accident inside the Institute involving an experiment with crude uranium. Schwartz awoke to a strange world -- he was still on Earth, but at a time when all the planets of the Galaxy were inhabited, and the people of Earth were outcasts, suffering vindictive discrimination because their tiny world was radioactive! His subsequent adventures involved Schwartz in a brewing revolution of the Earth militarists, and a romance between the daughter of an eminent Earth scientist and a young Galactic archeologist. Then, strangely, it was the little retired tailor from Chicago who found himself the only man who could avert the impending cosmic disaster. But Schwartz, homesick and confused,  wasn't sure he even cared! Combining tenseness, irony, romance, and fast action with a basis of really intriguing science, Pebble in the Sky is a truly ingenious tale of the far-distant future. On Sale In March FEBRUARY 1956 GALAXY Science Action ataxy  35  " ingredients . , . carefully selected from thoughtripened ideas . , , employing only the most convincing characters and conflicts, human or otherwise and blended by master craftsmen into intellectually and emotionally nutritious stories. hands in every stage of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction. V The price is 3 5(f a copy, 3.50 a year. Add 1 per year on foreign subscriptions (7 Of less than newsstand price) and the address is 421 Hudson Street New York 14, N. Y. fj. This is the winner of the Galaxy Magazine and Simon and Schuster 6,500 award for the best original science fiction novel of 1955 was chosen from hundreds of manuscripts submitted to the Galaxy-Simon and Schuster contest. The prize-winning author is a young American. His novel is a swift, colorful adventure set in a surprising future. You can find Preferred Risk by Edson McCann at your bookseller's now. Price 2.75. Or, if you prefer, send the coupon at right to order direct from the publishers. 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N. Y. Please send me Preferred Risk by Edson McCann. If I am not entirely satisfied I will return book within 10 days and owe nothing. Otherwise you will bill me at 2.75 per copy plus few cents postage. Name Address City Zone State pay postage. Same refund guarantee  Galaxy by L. J. Stecher , Jr. 6 by Arthur Sellings 66  421Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. 35c per copy. Subscriptions: (12 copies) 3.50 per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Elsewhere 4.50. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York 1955, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S. A. by the Guinn Co., Inc Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. ices Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment f 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below.Bi -- p Frank JSwraeH t r' 1MI At fBA rr   LJ jr n "tcu iv M 3 ir in xii try Toxrc yti n j o ni 5 o n nnrnmr ir A r 4- -- L r 0 LJ i -- i M "rHttUUt tu 3 eFtt tr tjy MrTrnjT kT. C-lar Ke nr n linmm a tir ! r r f -- b:t  n r 5 6 T "TTtt: mrn ItTrArW cry ;xr tXtwtct vvrty T n  -- fcr0" -- 8-O c f For 1.50, or 35c each  Enclose check, cash or money order. Name We pay postage Add re ss City State science fiction for a couple of decades, I really ought to take a moment to see if it's Literature. The reason is that in a few months, some imposing name is going to be induced to make an equally imposing ass of himself on just that question -- attacking science fiction as non-literature has joined the robin and the crocus as a sign of spring. In the past, I've made the mistake of retorting afterward , when, it turned out, the season was closed. No more of that -- IT1 have the first word for a change. The trouble is that I have no idea of who will draw the assignment this year. If I knew, I'd be able to map out my counter-strategy in advance, for the campaign on the other side is inevitably shifty, being unhampered by knowledge or calm judgment. Two years ago, it was Arthur Koestler, a sackcloth wearer whose one pleasure seems to be confessing his shames. He manfully exposed himself as a cardcarrying science fiction addict. No editor in the field minded that -- a customer is a customer -- but I damned well objected to comparing its hold to a mad passion for yoghurt! There are lots of 4 goodies I can leave alone and yoghurt, a sort of curdled milk glue, pretty much leads the sickly list. Last year, a Prof. Lovett of England, having read an anthology or two, appraised science fiction the way a paleontologist will reconstruct a fossil from a single molar. Naturally, like Koestler, but for different reasons, he concluded that it's not Literature. The fact that the man has perhaps the lumpiest style I've ever bruised an eye on does not mean he can't recognize good writing when it's carefully pointed out to him, but even if I agreed with him on any subject, which appears unlikely, I think I would fight to the death his right to say it. Well, no matter who gets the short straw this year and whatever the weapons to be used, we know in advance the outcome -- science fiction will be declared a grimy aggressor into the field of Literature. Then why bother to defend ourselves? I'm past that stage and I hope you are, too -- a viable art form can't be destroyed by criticism any more than a moribund (Continued on page 43) Can you think faster than this Machine? set up to do a problem in space ship engineering Be careful before you answer. construction kit is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and encipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. Specific problems in a variety of fields -- actuarial, policy claim settlement, physics, etc., can be set up and solved with the components. Connections are solderless and are completely explained with templates in the manual. This covers 33 circuits and shows how new ones can be designed. You will find building and using one kit user wrote us: "this kit has opened up a new world of thinking to me" You actually see how computing, problem solving, and game play (Tic-tac-toe, nim, etc.) can be analyzed with Boolean Algebra and the algebraic solutions transformed directly into circuit diagrams. You create from over 400 specially designed and manufactured components a machine that solves problems faster than you can express them. Schools and colleges, teachers of science or math, engineering, philosophy or psychology will find these excellent demonstrators of circuitry, solutions in symbolic logic, theory of numbers, cybernetics, and automation. Note: Teachers take advantage of our 10 discount to educational insituations and for group purchases. Only 19.95 with over four hundred components and parts, fully illustrated manual and wiring diagrams. We guarantee that if you do not want to can return it for full refund plus shipping costs. mail this cousom Oliver Garfield 126 Lexington Ave., N. Y. 16. N. Y. Please send me: Kit and Manual. 19.91 (East of Mississippi) . 20.95 (Elsewhere in United States) 21.95 (Outside the United States Returnable in seven days for full refund if not satisfied. I enclose ? -- in full payment. My name and address are attached. Man in a sewing machine C  6 Wfh the Solar Confederation being invaded, all this exasperating computer could offer for a defense was a ridiculous old proverb! T HE mechanical voice spoke solemnly, as befitted the importance of its message. There was no trace in its accent  of its artificial origin. "A Stitch in Time Saves Nine," it said and lapsed into silence. Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying. Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After a moment of si7 1 lence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the question," he said doubtfully. Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly. "That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask." Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes from the computer. "All right, Buster. IT1 give it a try, anyway. What does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?" The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered. "In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its weaknesses -- at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the proper strength." Bristol nodded. "Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to spend weeks figuring out what you meant" Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful as it answered. "It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six words!" "I know," said John. "But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It didn't sound very complete to me." All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked simultaneously. "The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of taking this timely action. It should be done by stitching; if this is done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?" "I made you myself," said Bristol plaintively. "I designed you with my own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design. So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me. And since you're just a complex computer of general design,  8  with the ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?" Buster answered slowly: "You made me in your own image. Things thus made are often hard to handle." Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. y But you're only a calculating machine!" he shouted. "Your only purpose is to make my work -- and that of other men -- easier. And when I try to use you, you answer with riddles The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a moment in silent reproof before it answered. "But remember, John," it said, "you didn't merely make me. You also taught me. Or as you would phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and reevaluating this information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single logical body of background information which I could use. "One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor. You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached -- a prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat macabre, perhaps -- and a little mechanistic -- but still there. "Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.'" Bristol stood up once more. "I could cure you with a sledge hammer," he said. "You could remove my ideas," answered the computer without concern. "But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get busy on the ideas I have already given you?" the bristles of short sandy hair on the top of his head with his knuckles. "Ordered around by an overgrown adding machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. 9 Fm glad you can't get around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet." He shook his head. "I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering mathematician." "And Einstein, too, probably," added Buster cryptically. Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the polished marble slabs, of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway to an Egyptian tomb. "When I get around to it," said Bristol, "I'll put lace panties on the bases of all your klystrons." He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin rows of generators. The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slowpaced rendition of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. "One last question," he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. "How in blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or, at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?" He took two steps toward the immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it. "Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't bluffing?" "Don't be silly," answered the calculator softly. "You made me and you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your questions, however inane." "Then answer the ones I just asked." machine a switch snicked sharply, and the great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. "I didn't answer your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark that so frequently annoys you," Buster said, "because the little information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly revealing. "They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and 10 highly intelligent. They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions. "In short, they are startlingly like humans. Their reactions have been so much like yours -- granted the difference that it was they who discovered you instead of you who discovered them -- that their reactions are highly predictable. If they think it is to their own advantage and if they can manage to do it, they will utterly destroy your civilization which, after a couple of generations, will probably leave you no worse off than you are now." "Cut out the heavy philosophy," said Bristol, "and give me a few facts to back up your sweeping statements." "Take the incident of first contact," Buster responded. "With very little evidence of thought or of careful preparation, they tried to land on the outermost inhabited planet of Rigel. Their behavior certainly did not appear to be that of an invader, yet humans immediately tried to shoot them out of the sky." "That wasn't deliberate," protested Bristol. "The place they tried to land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in order to make the   planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally, is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the Interceptor Launching Station." "Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone," commented Buster calmly. Bristol stalked back toward the base of the calculator, and poked his nose practically into a vision receptor. "It was no thanks to the invading ships that nobody was killed," he said hotly. "And when they came back three days later they killed a lot of people. They occupied the planet and we haven't been able to dislodge them since." -- of the retaliation," answered the calculator imperturbably, "Even at 'stitching' speeds, it seems unlikely that they could have communicated with their home planets and received instructions in such a short time. Almost undoubtedly it was the act of one of their hot-headed commanding officers. Their next contact, as you certainly recall, did not take place for three months. And then their actions 11 n.i were more cautious than hostile. A dozen of their spaceships 'stitched' simultaneously from the inter-planar region into normal space in a nearly perfect englobement of the planet at a surprisingly uniform altitude of only a few thousand miles. It was a magnificent maneuver. Then they sat still to see what the humans on the planet would do. The reaction came at once, and it was hostile. So they took over that planet, too -- as they have been taking over planets ever since." Bristol, raised his hands, and then let them drop slowly to his sides. "And since they have more spaceships and better weapons than we do, we would undoubtedly keep on losing this war, even if we could locate their home system; which we have not been able to do so far. The 'stitching' pattern of inter-planar travel makes it impossible for us to follow a starship. It also makes it impossible for us to defend our planets effectively against their attacks. Their ships appear without warning." Bristol rubbed his temples thoughtfully with his fingertips. "Of course," he went on, "we could attack the planets they have captured and recover them, but only at the cost of great loss of life to our own side. We have only recaptured one planet, and that at such great cost to the 12 local human population that we will not quickly try it again." "Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of the invaders," Buster answered, "there was still much information to be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time saving nine." "You're right," said John. "It does, at that. Buster, I have always resented the nickname the newspapers have given you -- the Oracle -- but the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!" 1 don't mind being called 'The Oracle " answered Buster with dignity. Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. "No, you probably think it's funny," he said. "If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us, if we can't do it, in time to save us?" "Although I have no feeling for self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling, of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry out your deepest convictions, it is not sufficient that mankind be preserved. If that were true, all you would have to do would be to surrender unconditionally. My calculations, as you know, indicate that this would not result in the destruction of mankind, but merely in the finish of his present civilization. To you, the preservation of the dignity of Man is more important than the preservation of Man. You equate Man and his civilization; you do not demand rigidity; you are willing to accept even revolutionary changes, but you are not willing to accept the destruction of your way of life. "Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result. Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without thought being required of you, to even one such vital question -- such as this one concerning the invaders -- then I could not logically refuse to give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically. "There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle" Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair. "Just relax, dear," said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers. "It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster," he said. "Buster never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax me and make me feel comfortable." Anne smiled, looking down ten13 derly at John's tired face. "I know, dear," she said. "You need to be able to talk to someone who will always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always know what you're talking about even before you start talking." John nodded, his eyes still closed. "If it weren't for you, darling," he said, "I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow your logic." glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with intelligence. "You never will find me logical," she laughed. "After all , 1 I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle." "You sure are a woman," said John with warm feeling. "You can exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my lucky day when you married me." There were a few minutes of peaceful silence. "Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?" asked Anne. "Mrn-m-mm," answered John. "That's too bad, dear," said Anne. "I think you work much too hard -- what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you take a vacation? You  really need one, you know. You look so tired." "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness . knows you won't be doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today, dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?" "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you with your problem." While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face with intelligence and compassion. John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking, now that John could see them. "The trouble, darling," he said, "is that I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer to the most important question we've ever asked T 4 it. And I don't know what the riddle means." Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor at John's feet. "You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much, dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to expect of it." "When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just answered A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it." "And that sounds like very good sense, too," said Anne in earnest tones. "But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are already invading us, aren't they?" "It has some deeper meaning than the usual one," said John. "If I could only figure out what if is." Anne nodded vigorously. "I suppose Buster's talking about space-stitching," she said. 'Although I can never quite remember just what that is. Or just how it works, rather." a few moments and then plaintively asked, "What is it, dear?" "What's what?" "Stitching, silly. I already asked you." "Darling," said John with reasonable patience, "I must have explained inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times." "And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at the time," said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. "But somehow, later, it never seems quite so plain. When I start to think about it by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again. Please." Bristol grinned suddenly. "Yes, dear," he said. He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. "First of all, you know that there are two coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence, but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the infinitude of points in our Universe -- which we call for convenience the 'alpha' plane -- there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or 'beta' plane." Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. "If they match point for point, how can there be any difference in size?" she asked. John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double the length of the first. 15 "Actually," he said, "each of these line segments has an infinite number of points in it, but we'll ignbre that. I'll just divide each one of these into ten equal parts." He did so, using short, neat crossmarks. "Now I'll establish a one-toone correspondence between these two segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That makes eleven dotted lines. You see?" Anne nodded. "That's plain enough. It reminds me of a Venetian blind that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home." "Yes," said John. "Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha' universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe. If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this, it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the 'alpha' plane -- 186,000 miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use decimals." stirred and seemed about to speak. "But if I slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the 'beta' universe -- something which, for reasons I can't explain now, takes negligible time -- watch what happens. If I still proceed at the rate of an inch a second in this inter-planar region, then, with the dotted lines all bunched closely together, after five seconds when I switch along another dotted line back to my original universe, I have gone almost the whole length of that longer line. Of course, this introduction of 'alpha' matter -- my pencil point in this case -- into the inter-planar region between the universes sets up enormous strains, so that after a certain length of time our spaceship is automatically rejected and returned to its own proper plane." "Could anybody in the littler universe use the same system?" John laughed. "If there were anybody in the 'beta 1 plane, I guess they could, although they would end up traveling slower than they would if they just stayed in their own plane. But there isn't anybody. The 'beta' plane is a constant level entropy universe -- completely without life of its own. The entropy level, of course, is vastly higher than that of our own universe." Anne sat up. "I'll forgive, you 16 this time for bringing up that horrid word entropy, if you'll promise me not to do it again," she said. ers and smiled. "Now," he said, "if I want to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and switch over toward "beta When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming device, having nothing to do with how fast I go." He hesitated, groping for the right words. "In point of fact, you have to imagine that corresponding points in the two universes are moving rapidly past each other in all directions at once. I just have to select the right direction, or to convince the probability cloud that corresponds to my location in the 'alpha' universe that it is really a point near the 'beta' universe, going my way. That's a somewhat more confused way of looking at it than merely imagining that I continue to travel in the inter-planar region at the same velocity that I had in 'alpha,' but it's closer to a description of what the math says happens. I could make it clear if I could just use mathematics, but I doubt if the equations will mean much to you. "At any rate, distance traveled depends on mass -- the bigger the ship, the shorter the distance traveled on each return to our   V own universe -- and not on velocity in 'alpha.' Other parameters, entirely under the control of the traveler, also affect the time that a ship remains in the inter-planar region. "There are refinements, of course. Recently, for example, we have discovered a method of multi-transfer. Several of the transmitters that accomplish the transfer are used together. When they all operate exactly simultaneously, all the matter within a large volume of space is transferred as a unit. With three or four transmitters keyed together, you could transfer a comet and its tail intact. And that's how inter-planar traveling works. Clear now?" "And that's why they call it 'stitching,' " said Anne with seeming delight. "You just think of the ship as a needle stitching its way back and forth into and out of our universe. Why didn't you just say so?" 17 there's another interesting point about stitching. Subjectively, the man in the ship seems to spend about one day in each universe alternately. Actually, according to the time scale of an observer in the 'alpha' plane, his ship disappears for about a day, then reappears for a minute fraction of a second and is gone again. Of course, one observer couldn't 4' y watch both the disappearance and reappearance of the same ship, and I assume the observers have the same velocity in 'alpha' as does the stitching ship. Anyway, after a ship completes its last stitch, near its destination, there's a day of subjective time in which to make calculations for the landing -- to compute trajectories and so forth -- before it actually fully rejoins this universe. And while in the inter-planar region it cannot be detected, even by someone else stitching in the same region of 'alpha' space, "That's one of the things that makes interruption of the enemy ships entirely impossible. If a ship is in an unfavorable position, it just takes one more quick stitch out of range, then returns to a more favorable location. In other words, if it finds itself in trouble, it can be gone from our plane again even before it entirely rejoins it. Even if it landed by accident in the heart of a blue-white is star, it would be unharmed for that tiny fraction of a second which, to the people in the ship, would seem like an entire day. "If this time anomaly didn't exist, it might be possible to set up defenses that would operate after a ship's arrival in the solar system but before it could do any damage; but as it is, they can dodge any defense we can devise. Is all that clear?" Anne nodded. "Uh-hunh, I understood every word." "There is another thing about inter-planar travel that you ought to remember," said Bristol. "When a ship returns to our universe, it causes a wide area disturbance; you have probably heard it called space shiver or the bong wave. The beta universe is so much smaller than our own alpha that you can imagine a spaceship when shifted toward it as being several beta light-years long. Now, if you think of a ship, moving between the alpha and beta lines on this envelope, as getting tangled in the dotted lines that connect the points on the two lines, that would mean that it would affect an area smaller than its own size on beta -- a vastly larger area on alpha. "So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines, setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space nearly a parsec 19 in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong sound on your T.V, set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity. Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble, he has gone again long before we can detect the bong."  "As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves, just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean." Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her head at her husband. "Honestly," she said, "you men are all alike. Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you made about the ten dollars when, you know it was worth every cent of it. She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell you some of" "Darling!" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed husband. "It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense of responsibility." "Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea." Anne smiled sweetly. "You know," she said, "that my dear father always said that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to us? Stitching our way to their planets in our spaceships, of course."  Bristol shook his head. "Your idea may be sound, even if it is a little bloodthirsty coming from someone who won't even let me set a mouse-trap, but it won't work. First, we don't know where their home planets are and second, they have more ships than 20 we do. It might be made to work, but only if we could get enough time. And speaking of time, Fve got to meet with the Council as t soon as we finish eating. Is dinner ready?" hurried trip across town, John Bristol found himself facing the other members of Earth's Council at the conference table. "I have been able to get an answer from the computer," he told them without preamble. "It's of the ambiguous type we have come to expect. I hope you can get something useful out of it; so far it hasn't made much sense to me. It's an old proverb. Its advice is undoubtedly sound, as a generality, if we could think of a way of using it." The President of the Council raised his long, lean-fingered hand in a quick gesture. "John," he said, "stop this stalling. Just what did the Oracle say?" "It said, 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine?" "Is that all?" "Yes, sir. According to the calculator, that gives us the best opportunity to save ourselves from the invaders." The President absently stroked the neat, somewhat scanty irongray hair that formed into a triangle above his high forehead and rubbed the bare scalp on each side of the peak vigorously and unconsciously with his knuckles. "In that case," he said at last, "I suppose that we must examine the statement for hidden meanings. The proverb, of course, implies that rapid action, before a trouble has become great, is more economical than the increased effort required after trouble has grown large. Since our troubles have already grown large, that warning is scarcely of value to us now." The War Secretary, who had grown plump and purple during a quarter of a century as a member of the Council, inclined his head ponderously toward the President. "Perhaps, Michael, the Oracle means to tell us that there is a simple solution which, if applied quickly, will make our present difficulty with the invaders a small one." The President pursed his thin lips. "That's possible, Bill. And if it is true, then the words of the proverb should, as a secondary meaning, imply a course of action." The Vice President banged his hands on the table and leaped to his feet, shaking with rage. "Why should we believe that this mountebank is capable of a solution ? " he shouted in his stevedore's voice. "Bristol pleads until we give him enough millions of the taxpayers' dollars to make 2T I Bim Gump look like a pauper and uses the money to build a palace filled with junk that he calls Buster! He tells us that this machinery of his is smarter than we are and will tell us what we ought to do. And what happened after we gave him all the money he demanded -- more than he said he needed, at first -- and asked him to show something for all this money? Til tell you what happened. His gadget gets real coy and answers in riddles. If we just had brains enough, they'd explain what we wanted to know. What kind of fools does this Bristol take us for? Neither this man nor his ridiculous machine has an answer any more than I have. We've obviously been taken in by a charlatan!" Bristol, his fists clenched, spoke hotly. "Sir, that is the stupidest, the most   interrupted the President. "Let me answer Vice President Collins for you. He's a little excited by this whole business, but then, these are trying times." He turned toward the glowering bulk of the Vice President. "Ralph," he said, "you should know that every step in the design, the construction and the -- er -- the education of the Oracle was taken under the close watch of a Board of eminent scientists, all of whom agree that the computer is a masterpiece -- that it is a great milestone in Man's efforts to increase his knowledge. The Oracle has undoubtedly found a genuine solution to the question Bristol asked it. Our task must be to determine what that solution is." "I can't entirely agree with that," said the Secretary for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs in a thin half-whisper. "I think we should depend on our own intelligence and skill to save ourselves. I've watched events come and go on this planet of ours for a long time -- a very long time -- and I feel as I have always felt that men can make the world a Paradise for themselves or they can destroy themselves, but that nothing else but they themselves can do it. We men must save ourselves. And there are still things that we can do." He shrugged his ancient, shawl-covered shoulders. "For example, we could disperse colonies so widely that it would become impossible for the invaders to destroy all of them." "I'm afraid that's no good, George," answered the War Secretary respectfully. "If the Solar System is destroyed, any remaining colonies will be too weak to maintain themselves for long. We must defend this system successfully, or we are lost." "Then that brings us back to the Oracle's proverb." The Presi22 dent thought for a moment. "Stitching obviously refers to inter-planar travel. How can that help us?" The Secretary for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs peered up at the President through the shaggy white thicket of his eyebrows. "Actually, Michael" he said, "it was that thought that made me mention establishing colonies. The colonists would 'stitch their way to their new homes. And colonizing would have to proceed in a timely manner to have any chance for success." "Yes," answered the President, "but how would that 'save nine'? We have agreed that our Solar System must be saved. There are nine planets. Perhaps the Oracle meant that timely use of interplanar travel can save the Solar System. "Or at least the nine planets! The War Secretary's fat jowls waggled with excitement. "You know, there is no limit to the size or mass of objects which can use inter-planar travel. What if we physically remove our planets, by stitching them away from the Sun? When the invaders arrived, we would be gone -- Earth and Sun and all the rest! had been silent up to this time spoke quietly. "Simmer down, Bill. We could move the planets easily enough, of course, but you forget the mass-distance relationship. A single stitch takes about a day. The distance traveled can be controlled within limits. "For an object around the size of the Earth, those limits extend' from a fraction of an inch to a little over two feet. Say that we have two years before the invaders work their way in to the Solar System. If we started right away, we could move Earth about a quarter of a mile by the time they get here. If we tried to take the Sun with us, it could be moved about half an inch in the same length of time. Im afraid that the Solar System is going to be right here when the invaders come to get us. And I have a hunch that's likely to be a lot sooner than two years." The Secretary of Internal Affairs leaned forward, his short hair bristling. "I think we are wasting our time," he shouted. "I agree with Ralph. I don't believe that the Oracle knows any more about this than we do. If we are going to sit around playing foolish games with words, why don't we do it in a big way? We could hire T.V. time and invite everyone to send in their ideas about what the proverb means on the back of a box-top. Or reasonable facsimile. The contestant with the best answer could get a free all23 4 expense tour to Vega Three. Unless the invaders get here or there first." The President nodded his head. "There may be more sense to that remark than I believe you intended, Charles," he said. "The greater the number of people who think about the problem, the greater the chance of reaching a solution. Even if the proverb is intended as a joke by the Oracle, as you imply, it might be that with a drink and followed him to his comfortable chair. "You look as if that was even rougher than your day with the Oracle," she said. John nodded silently, took a grateful sip of his highball and slipped off his shoes. "All that fuss over a six-word proverb," said Anne. "I still think that if you are going to depend on witch doctors and such to solve from it someone could derive a genuine solution. But as I have said, I am absolutely certain that the computer does know what it is talking about. Without resorting to box-tops or free trips, I think it might be wise to give the Oracle's statement to the public." After several more hours of arguing, the Council adjourned for a few hours and John Bristol returned wearily home. 24 your problems for you, you would do a lot better to try my fortune teller. She gives you a lot more than six words for ten dollars. They make more sense, too. Why, I could be a better Oracle than that gadget you built." "Perhaps you could, dear," answered John patiently. Anne jumped to her feet. "Here, I'll show you." She seated herself cross-legged on the couch. "Now, I'm an Oracle," she announcecL "Go ahead, ask me a question. Ask me anything; I'll give you as good an answer as any other Oracle. Results guaranteed." John smiled. "I'm not in much of a mood to be cheered up with games," he said, "but I'm willing to ask the big question of anyone who'll give me any kind of an answer. See if you can do better with this one than Buster did." He repeated word for word the your other Oracle gave you, if you count 'it's' as one word. If you want wise-sounding answers, just come to me and save yourself a trip." John leaped to his feet, spilling his drink and strode to Anne's side. "Say it again!" he shouted. "You may have made more sense than you knew!" "I said you could come to me and save yourself a trip." question he had asked of the computer, that had resulted in its cryptic answer. Anne stared solemnly at nothing for a moment, with her cheeks puffed out. Then, in measured tones, she recited, "It's Like Looking for a Needle in a Haystack." John smiled. "That seems to make as much sense as the Oracle did, anyway," he said. "Sure," answered Anne. "And you get three words mo.e than "No, no! I mean the proverb. How did you come to think of that proverb?" Anne managed to look bewildered. "What's wrong with it? I just thought that you can't do any stitching in time without a needle. I just was trying to think of a proverb to use as an answer and that one popped into my head. Uh Are you all right, dear?" 25 spun her around. "You just bef your boots I'm all right I'm feeling swell! You've given us the answer we needed. You know right where the haystack is, and you know there's a needle there. But finding it is something else again. I don't think the invaders will be able to locate this needle." He set her down. "Where are  my shoes?" he said. "I've got to get back to the Capitol." Anne seemed faintly surprised. "Because of what I said? They're right on the floor there between you and the sofa. But I was just making conversation. What are you going to do?" "Oh, I'm just going to get started at taking stitches in time. Good-by, darling." He started out the door, ran back to give Anne a lingering kiss and was soon gone at top speed. Anne, waving to him, looked very pleased with herself. By the time Bristol arrived at the Capitol building, the rest of the Council was once again assembled and waiting for him. "Well, John," said the Presidents You sounded excited enough when you called us together again. Have you figured out what the Oracle meant?" "Yes, sir. With my wife's help. It's obvious, when you finally think about it. It will save us from any danger. And we should 26 have been able to figure it out for ourselves. There's no reason that we should have had to go to the Oracle at all. And it only took Buster -- the computer, I mean -- two or three minutes to think of the answer, and of a proverb that would conceal the answer. It's amazing!" "And if you don't mind telling us, just what is this answer?" The President sounded very impatient. "We almost had it when we talked of stitching Earth out of reach," John answered eagerly. "If we keep cutting back and forth from one universe toward the other, we will be out of reach, even if we can't move very far. Once a day we reappear in this Universe for a few million-millionths of a second -- although it will seem like a whole day to us. "Then we spend the following day between this universe and beta. Even if the invaders are right on top of us when we reappear, we'll be gone again before they can do anything. Since we can vary the time of our return within limits, the invaders will never know exactly when we will flick in and out of the alpha plane until they hear our arriving 'bong' wave, and then we will already be gone, since we will be using accelerated subjective time." his dark head and sighed. "No, John," he said, "I'm afraid that isn't the answer. I'm sorry. If we start the operation you suggested, we will be cutting ourselves off from solar energy. The Earth's heat will gradually radiate away. Although beta is at a higher entropy level than our universe, we can't use that energy, except to provide power for the stitching process itself. It's true that we would deny our planet to the invaders, but we would soon kill ourselves doing it." "I didn't mean that we should transfer only Earth, but our entire Solar System," answered Bristol. "As the Oracle told us, the stitch saves nine. A series of time-matched transmitters could do the trick. If we sent the entire Solar System back and forth, the average man in the street would notice no change, except that sometimes there would be no stars in the sky. And when they were there, they wouldn't be moving." "That would work 'theoretically," said the Chief Scientist. "And once we were in continuous stitching operations, any invader, as you suggested, could join the system only by synchronizing the transmitter in his ship exactly with all of our synchronized transmitters. That's a job I don't think could ever be done. "Remember, though, that our own transmitters would have to be time-matched to within a minute fraction of a micro-second. Considering that some of the instruments would have to be so far apart that at the speed of light it would take hours to get from one to the other, the problem becomes enormous. Any radio-timing link would be useless." Bristol nodded. "The Oracle said that the stitch must be taken in time," he agreed. "But that is no real problem. We can just send a small robot ship into interplanar travel and let it bounce back. The 'bong' of its return will reach all transmitters simultaneously and we can use that as the initial time-pulse. Once the operation starts, it will be easy to synchronize, since we will always switch over again on the instant of our return to the alpha plane." The Chief Scientist relaxed. "I think that does it, John. We hide in time, instead of in distance." "We stitch in time," corrected the President, "and hide like a needle in a haystack." iinpHE invaders may eventuJally find out a method of countering our defense," said the Chief Scientist, "but it will undoubtedly take a great deal of time. And in the meantime, we 27 will have the opportunity to seek out and destroy their home planets. It will be a long, slow process of extermination, but we have a good chance to win." "I don't agree with that, Tom," said John. "I don' think extermination can be the answer. With our example to guide them, the invaders can use stitching to escape us as easily as we can use it to escape them. What we should do now is to contact the invaders and show them that it is to both our advantages to bring hostilities to an end. By stitching the Solar System, and the other systems of our confederation in and out of the alpha plane, we should be able to gain the time necessary for contact with the enemy and make peace with him. "From what the Oracle has told me about the humanlike traits of the invaders, it's very likely they will listen to reason when it's proved that it will be to their advantage." John snapped his fingers and spoke with considerable excitement. "Now I understand, I believe, why Buster indicated to me that there was another reason for his vague answer to our question. The Oracle feels an unwillingness to accept the destruction of Man's civilization. It feels equally unwilling, I'm certain, to allow the destruction of the invaders' civilization. Buster has an objective 28 viewpoint in applying the mores Man has given him. And it seems to me that Buster felt it important for us to reach this spirit of compromise by ourselves. How do you feel about it, gentlemen?" Debate quickly determined that all seven members of the Council favored an attempt to establish a truce -- some of them forced into this opinion by their inability to find any method of reaching the throats of the invaders. Having reached this conclusion, the Council swung immediately into action. Within a few weeks, the entire Solar System, along with the other planetary systems of the confederation, except for their brief daily return, disappeared from the alpha universe. John Bristol, a few days after the continuous stitching started, was relaxing lazily on the sofa in his living room when there was a sudden pounding on the door. He opened it to find the Chief Scientist standing on his doorstep, his eyes red from loss of sleep.  "Good Lord! What's the matter with you?" asked Bristol. "Have you been celebrating too much? Come in, Tom, come in." The Chief Scientist entered wearily and sat down. "No. I haven't been celebrating. I've been trying to work out a little problem you left with us. We have been planning, as you suggested, to send out expeditions to contact and make agreement with the invaders. We can send them out all right, but how can we ever get them back into our solar system? They won't be able to find us any easier than the invaders can." on a side table and slumped into the closest chair. "If we don't contact each other," he said, "I am certain that the invaders will some day find a means of penetrating our defenses. Even needles in haystacks can be found, if you take enough time and aren't disturbed while you are hunting. This thing has me licked." Bristol sat down slowly. "Your whole department hasn't been able to find an answer?" "Not even the glimmering of an idea." He shrugged his shoulders. "It looks as if we are going to need the advice of your Oracle again." Bristol stood for a minute in thought and then with a smile said, "Why, of course. Excuse me for a second, please. I'll be right back." He stepped to the foot of the stairs and called out in a confident voice, "Come down a minute, please, Anne, darling! I have an important question I want to ask you!" waters of a startling, breath-holdingly suspenseful future. It's a world at war and yet not at war, for the enemy, though it has overrun three continents, is not a government! But there are other puzzlements: In the vernacular, the foe Is known as the Cow-dyes and how does a big-ship Navy man, intent on winning the war that isn't a war, get himself to believe that an assignment ordering him to take care of cows will whip the Cow-dyes? And how will that bring him to his wife, a prisoner of war halfway around the world assuming he can escape the Glotch, that most hideous and mysterious of ail weapons in the history of frightful be missing a lot If you miss it! novelets scheduled for the next Issue. In the most perilous period of prehistory, hunting reptile heavyweights is no job for a human lightweight. It doesn't sound possible, but you'll see why it's bulk against bulk. 29 it's all really very simple -- if you cannot change with the times, just change the times ! Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door. "Come in' he said. A tall robot entered, the electronic beam of its single eye piercing the gloom and focusing on the psychiatrist's face. "Dr, Anson' the robot said, . "the rent is due today. Pay me." Dr. Howard Anson blinked. He did not like the harsh light, nor the harsh voice, nor the harsh meaning of the message. As he rose, he attempted to conceal his inner reactions with a bland smile, then remembered that his facial expression meant nothing to the robot. That was precisely the trouble with the damned things, he told himself; you couldn't use psychology on them. 30 "Sixty tokens' the robot ('hunted, and rolled across the loom toward him. "But -- " Dr. Hanson hesitated, then took the plunge. "But I haven't got sixty tokens at the moment. I told the manager yesterday. If you'll only give me a little time, a slight extension of credit -- 3 " "Sixty tokens," the robot repeated, as if totally unmindful of t he interruption, which, Dr. Anson assured himself, was exactly the case. The robot was unmindful. It did not react to unpredictable factors; that was not its function. The robot didn't set the rental figures in this office building and had no power to make decisions regarding credit. It was built to collect the rent, nothing more. But that was enough. More than enough. arms rose and the hooklike terminals slid back the panels in its chest. to reveal a row of pushbuttons and a thin, narrow slot. "The rent is due," repeated the robot. "Please deposit the tokens in the slot." Anson sighed. "Very well," he said. He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and scooped out half a dozen shiny disks. He slipped the disks into the slot. They landed inside the robot's cylindrical belly with a series of dull plops. Evidently the robot had been making the rounds of the building all day; it sounded more than half full. For a wild moment, Dr. Anson wondered what would happen if he kidnaped the robot and emptied its cashbox. His own medical specialty was psychiatry and neuro-surgery, and he was none too certain of a robot's anatomical structure, but he felt sure he could fool around until he located the jackpot. He visualized himself standing before the operating table, under the bright lights. " Scalpel , forceps , blowtorch But that was unthinkable. Nobody had ever dared to rob a robot. Nobody ever robbed anything or anyone today, which was part of the reason Dr. Anson couldn't pay his rent on time. Still, he had paid it. The robot's terminals were punching pushbuttons in its chest and now its mouth opened. "Here is your receipt," it said and a pink slip slid out from its mouth like a paper tongue. Anson accepted the slip and the mouth said, "Thank you." The terminals closed the chestpanels, the electronic beam swept the corners as the wheels turned, and the robot rolled out of the room and down the corridor. Anson closed the door and mopped his brow. 31 So far, so good. But what would happen when the robot reached the manager? He'd open his walking cash register and discover Anson's six ten-token disks. Being human, he'd recognize them for what they were -- counterfeit. Dr. Anson shuddered. To think that it had come to this, a reputable psychiatrist committing a crime! He considered the irony. In a world totally devoid of anti-social activity, there were no anti-social tendencies which required the services of psychiatry. And that was why he, as the last living psychiatrist, had to resort to antisocial activity in order to survive. Probably it was only his knowledge of anti-social behavior, in the abstract, which enabled him to depart from the norm and indulge in such actions in the concrete. Well, he was in the concrete now and it would harden fast -- unless something happened. At best, his deception would give him a few days' grace. After that, he could face only disgrace. down behind the desk. Maybe this was the beginning, he told himself. First counterfeiting and fraud, then robbery and embezzlement, then rape and murder. Who could say where it would all end? "Physician, heal thyself," he 32  murmured and glanced with distaste at the dust-covered couch, where no patient reposed; where, indeed, no patient had ever reposed since he'd opened his office almost a year ago. It had been a mistake, he realized. A big mistake ever to listen to his father and -- The visio lit up and the audio hummed. Anson turned and confronted a gigantic face. The gigantic face let out a gigantic roar, almost shattering the screen. "I'm on my way up, Doctor!" the face bellowed. "Don't try to sneak out! I'm going to break your neck with my bare hands!" For a few seconds Anson sat V there in his chair, too numb to move. Then the full import of what he had seen and heard reached him. The manager was coming to kill him! "Hooray!" he said under his breath and smiled. It was almost too good to be true. After all this time, at last, somebody was breaking loose. A badly disturbed personality, a potential killer, was on his way up -- he was finally going to get himself a patient. If he could treat him before being murdered, that is. Tingling with excitement, Anson fumbled around in his files. Now where in thunder was that equipment for the Rorschach Test? Yes, and the Porteus Maze and -- The manager strode into the room without knocking. Anson looked up, ready to counter the first blast of aggression with a steely professional stare. But the manager was smiling. "Sorry I blew up that way," he said. "Guess I owe you an apology." "What?" "When I found those counterfeit tokens, something just seemed to snap for a moment," the manager explained. "You know how it   is. "Yes, I do," said Anson eagerly. "I understand quite well. And it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm sure that with your cooperation, we can get to the roots of the trauma. Now if you'll just relax on the couch over there -- " continued to smile, but his voice was brusque. "Nonsense! I don't need any of that. Before I came up here, I stopped in at Dr. Peabody's office, down on the sixth floor. Great little endocrinologist, that guy. Gave me some kind of a shot that fixed me up in a trice. That's three times faster than a jiffy, you know," "I don't know," Anson answered vaguely. "Endocrinology isn't my field." "Well, it should be. It's the only field in medicine that really amounts to anything nowadays. Except for diagnosis and surgery, of course. Those gland-handers can do anything. Shots for when you feel depressed, shots for when you're afraid, shots for when you get excited, or mad, the way I was. Boy, I feel great now. At peace with the world!" "But it won't last. Sooner or later, you'll get angry again." "So I'll get another shot," the manager replied. "Everybody does." "That's not a solution. You're merely treating the symptom, not the basic cause." Anson rose and stepped forward. "You're under a great deal of tension. I suspect it goes back to early childhood. Did you ever suffer from enuresis?" "It's my turn to ask questions. What about those fake tokens you tried to palm off on me?" "Why, it was all a joke. I thought if you could give me a few more days to dig up -- " "I'm giving you just five minutes to dig down," the manager said, smiling pleasantly but firmly. "You ought to know that you can't pull a trick like that with a cash collector; these new models have automatic tabulators and detectors. The moment that robot came back to my office, it spat up the counterfeits. It couldn't stomach them. And neither can I." "Stomach?" asked Anson hopefully. "Are you ever troubled with gastric disturbances? Ulcers? Psy33 chosomatic pain in the -- " The manager thrust out his jaw; "Look here, Anson, you're not a bad sort, really. It's just that you're confused. Why don't you clever up and look at the big picture? This witch-doctor racket of yours, it's atomized. Nobody's got any use for it today. You're like the guys who used to manufacture buggy whips; they sat around telling themselves that the automobile would never replace the horse, when any streetcleaner could see what was happening to business. "Why don't you admit you're licked? The gland-handers have taken over. Why, a man would have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist nowadays and you know there aren't any crazy people any more. So forget about all this. Take a course or something. You can be an End-Doc yourself. Then open up a real office and make yourself some big tokens." Anson shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "Not interested." The manager spread his hands. "All right. I gave you a chance. Now there's nothing left to do but call in the ejectors." i the door. Apparently he had been prepared for Anson's decision, because two ejectors were waiting. They rolled into the room and, without bothering to focus their beams on Anson, commenced to scoop books from the shelves and deposit them in their big open belly-hampers. "Wait!" Anson cried, but the ejector robots continued inexorably and alphabetically; there went Adler, Brill, Carmichael, Dunbar, Ellis, Freud, Gesell, Korney, Isaacs, Jung, Kardiner, Lindner, Moll -- "Darling, what's the matter?" Sue Porter was in the room. Then she was in his arms and Dr. Anson had a difficult time remembering what the matter was. The girl affected him that way. But a look at the manager's drugged smile served as a reminder. Anson's face reddened, due to a combination of embarrassment and lipstick smudges, as he told Sue what had happened. Sue laughed. "Well, if that's all it is, what are you so upset about?" Without waiting for a reply, she advanced upon the manager, her hand digging into her middle bra-cup. "Here's your tokens," she said. "Now call off the ejectors." The manager accepted the disks with a smile of pure euphoria, then strode over to the robots and punched buttons. The ejectors halted their labors between Reich and Stekel, then reversed operations. Quickly and efficiently, they replaced all the books on the shelves. 35 In less than a minute, Anson faced the girl in privacy. "You shouldn't have done that," he said severely. "But, darling, I wanted to. After all, what are a few tokens more or less?" "A few tokens?" Anson scowled. "In the past year, I've borrowed over two thousand from you. This can't go on." "Of course not," the girl agreed. "That's what I've been telling you. Let's get a Permanent and then Daddy will give you a nice fat job and -- " "There you go again! How often must I warn you about the Elektra situation? This unnatural dependency on the Father Image is dangerous. If only you'd let me get you down on the couch -- " "Why, of course, darling!" "No, no!" Anson cried. "I want to analyze you!" "Not now," Sue answered. "We'll be late for dinner. Daddy expects you." "Damn dinner and damn Daddy, too," Anson said. But he took the girl's arm and left the office, contenting himself by slamming the door. "Aren't you going to put up that Doctor Will Return in Two Hours sign?" the girl asked, glancing back at the door. "No " Anson told her. "I'm not coming back in two hours. Or ever." Sue gave him a puzzled look, but her eyes were smiling. weren't smiling as he and Sue took off from the roof. He kept them closed, so that he didn't have to watch the launching robots, or note the 'copter's progress as it soared above the city. He didn't want to gaze down at the metallic tangle of conveyors moving between the factories or the stiffly striding figures which supervised their progress on the ramps and loading platforms. The air about them was filled with 'copters, homeward bound from offices and recreation areas, but no human figures moved in the streets. Ground-level was almost entirely mechanized, "What's the matter now?" Sue's voice made him look at her. Her eyes held genuine concern. "The sins of the fathers," Anson said. "Yours and mine." He watched the girl as she set the 'copter on auto-pilot for the journey across the river. "Of course it really wasn't my father's fault that he steered me into psychiatry. After all, it's been a family tradition for a hundred and fifty years. All my paternal ancestors were psychiatrists, with the exception of one or two renegade Behaviorists. When he encouraged my interest in the profession, I never stopped to question him. 36 He trained me -- and I was the last student to take up the specialty at medical school The last, mind you! "I should have known then that it was useless. But he kept insisting this state of affairs couldn't last, that things were sure to change. 'Cheer up,' he used to tell me, whenever I got discouraged. 'The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction. And then he'd tell me about the good old days when he was a boy and the world was still full of fetichism and hebephrenia and pyromania and mixoscopic zoophilia. 'It will come again,' he kept telling me. 'Just you wait and see! We'll have frottage and nympholepsy and compulsive exhibitionism -- everything your little heart desires.' "Well, he was wrong. He died knowing that he had set me up in a dead-end profession. I'm an anachronism, like the factory worker or the farmer or the miner or the soldier. We don't have any need for them in our society any more; robots have replaced them all. And the End-Docs have replaced the psychiatrists and neuro-surgeons. With robots to ease the physical and economic burden and gland-handers to relieve mental tension, there's nothing left for me. The last psychiatrist should have disappeared along with the last advertising man. Come to think of it, they probably belong together. My father was wrong, Sue. I know that now. But most of the real blame belongs to your father." "Daddy?" she exclaimed. "How can you possibly blame him?" family has been pioneering in robotics almost as long as mine has worked in psychiatry. One of your ancestors took out the first basic patent. If it weren't for him and those endocrine shots, everything would still be normal -- lots of incest and scoptophilia, plenty of voyeurism for everybody -- " "Why, darling, what a thing to say! You know as well as I do what robots have done for the world. You said it yourself. We don't have any more manual or menial labor. There's no war, plenty of everything for everybody. And Daddy isn't stopping there." "I suppose not," Anson said bitterly. "What is the old devil dreaming up now?" Sue flushed. "You wouldn't talk like that if you knew just how hard he's been working. He and Mr. Mullet, the engineering chief. They're just about ready to bring out the new pilot models they've developed for space travel." "I've heard that one before. They've been announcing those models for ten years." "They keep running into bugs, 37 I guess. But sooner or later, they'll find a way to handle things. Nothing is perfect, you know. Every once in a while, there's still some trouble with the more complicated models." "But they keep trying for perfection. Don't you see where all this leads to, Sue? Human beings will become obsolescent. First the workers, now the psychiatrists and other professions. But it won't end there. Inside of another generation or two, we won't need anyone any more. Your father, or somebody like him, will produce the ultimate robot -- the robot that's capable of building other robots and directing them. Come to think of it, he's already done the first job; your factories are self-perpetuating. All we need now is a robot that can fake the place of a few key figures like your father. Then that's the end of the human race. Oh, maybe they'll keep a few men and women around for pets, but that's all. And thank God I won't be here to see it." "So why worry?" Sue replied. "Enjoy yourself while you can. We'll apply for a Permanent and Daddy will give you a job like he promised me -- "Job? What kind of job?" "Oh, maybe he'll make you a vice-president or something. They don't have to do anything." "Fine! A wonderful future!" "I don't see anything wrong with it. You ought to consider yourself lucky." "Listen, Sue." He turned to her earnestly. "You just don't understand the way I feel. I've spent eighteen years of my life in school, six of it in training for my profession. That's all I know and I know it well. And what have I to show for it? I'm a psychiatrist who's never had a patient, a neuro-surgeon who's never performed anything but an experimental topectomy or lobotomy. That's my work, my life, and I want a chance to function. I don't intend to sit around on a fat sinecure, raising children whose only future is oblivion. I don't want a Permanent with you under those conditions." Permanent with me isn't good enough, is that it? I suppose you'd rather have a lot of repression and guilt complexes and all that other stuff you're always talking about." "It isn't that," Anson insisted. "I don't really want the world to revert to neurotic or psychotic behavior just .so I can have a practice. But damn it, I can't stand to see the way things are going. We've done away with stress and privation and tension and superstition and intolerance, and that's great. But we've also done away with ourselves in the 38 process, We're getting to the point where we, as human beings, no longer have a function to perform. We're not needed The girl gave him an angry glance. "What you're trying to say is that you don't need me, is that it?" "I do need you. But not on these terms, I'm not going to lead a useless existence, or bring children into a world where they'll be useless. And if your father brings up that vice-president deal at dinner tonight, I'm going to tell him to take his job and -- " "Never mind!" Sue flipped the switch from auto-pilot back to manual and the 'copter turned, "You needn't bother about dinner. I'll take you back to your office now. You can put yourself down on the couch and do a little practicing on your own mind. You need it! Of all the stupid, pigheaded -- " The sound of the crash reached them even at flying level. Sue Porter broke off abruptly and glanced down at the river front below. Anson stared with her. "What was that?" he asked. "I don't know -- can't make it out from here." She spun the controls, guiding the 'copter down until it hovered over a scene of accelerating confusion. A huge loading barge was moored against one of the docks. Had been moored, rather; as they watched, it swung erratically into the current, then banged back against the pier. Huge piles of machinery, only partially lashed to the deck, now tumbled and broke free. Some of the cranes splashed into the water and others rolled across the flat surface of the barge. "Accident," Sue gasped. "The cable must have broken." metallic figures which dotted the deck and stood stolidly on the dock. "Look at the robots!" "What about them?" asked Sue. "Aren't they supposed to be doing something? That one with the antenna -- isn't it designed to send out a warning signal when something goes wrong?" "You're right. They beam Emergency in a case like this. The expediters should be out by now." "Some of them look as if they're paralyzed," Anson noted, observing a half dozen of the metallic figures aboard the barge. They were rigid, unmoving. Even as he watched, a round steel bell bowled across the deck. None of the robots moved -- the sphere struck them like a ball hitting the pins and hurtled them into the water. On the pier, the immobilized watchers gave no indication of reaction. "Paralyzed," Anson repeated. "Not that one!" 39 Sue pointed excitedly as the copter hovered over the deck. Anson looked and found the cause of her consternation. A large, fully articulated robot with the humanoid face of a controller clattered along in a silvery blur of motion. From one of its four upper appendages dangled a broad-bladed axe. It bumped against an armless receptacle-type robot and the axe descended, striking the robot squarely in its loading compartment. There was a crash as the victim collapsed. And the controller robot sped on, striking at random, in a series of sped-up motions almost impossible to follow -- but not impossible to understand. "That's the answer!" said Anson. "It must have cut the cable with the axe. And attacked the others, to immobilize them. Come on, let's land this thing." "But we can't go down there! It's dangerous! Somebody will send out the alarm. The expediters will handle it -- " "Land!" Anson commanded. He began to rummage around in the rear compartment of the 'copter, "What are you looking for?" Sue asked as she maneuvered the machine to a clear space alongside a shed next to the dock. "The rope ladder." "But we won't need it. We're on the ground." " need it." He produced the tangled length and began to uncoil it. "You stay here," he said. "This is my job." "What are you going to do?" "Yes, what are you going to do? ' The deep voice came from the side of the 'copter. Anson and Sue looked up at the face of Eldon Porter. "Daddy! How did you get here?" "Alarm came through." ' scowled at the dock beyond, where the expediter robots were already mopping up with flamethrowers. "You've got no business here," Eldon Porter said harshly. "This area's off-limits until everything's under control." He turned to Anson. "And I'll have to ask you to forget everything you've seen here. We don't want word of accidents like these to leak out -- just get people needlessly upset." "Then this isn't the first time?" asked Anson. "Of course not. Mullet's had a lot of experience; he knows how to handle this." "Right, Chief." Anson recognized the thin, bespectacled engineer at Eldon Porter's side. "Every time we test out one of these advanced models, something goes haywire. Shocks overload, some damned thing. Only thing we can 40 do is scrap it and try again. So you folks keep out of the way. We're going to corner it with the flame-throwers and -- " "No!" Anson opened the door and climbed out, dragging the long rope ladder behind him. "Where in hell do you think you're going?" demanded Eldon Porter. "I'm after that robot," Anson said. "Give me two of your men to hold the ends of this ladder. We can use it like a net and capture the thing without destroying it. That is, put it in restraint." "Restraint?" "Technical term we psychiatrists use." Anson smiled at the two men and then at the girl. "Don't worry," he said. "I know what I'm doing. I've got a case at last. Your robot is psychotic." "Psychotic?" grumbled Eldon Porter, watching the young man move away. "What's that mean?" "Nuts," said Sue sweetly. "A technical term.' Sue saw Dr. Howard Anson again. She waited anxiously outside in the corridor with her father until the young man emerged. He peeled off his gloves, smiling. "Well?" rumbled Eldon Porter, "Ask Mullet," Anson suggested. "He did it!" the thin engineer exulted. "It works, just like he said it would! Now we can use the technique whenever there's a breakdown. But I don't think we'll have any more. Not if we incorporate his suggestions in the new designs. We can use them on the new space pilot models, too." "Wonderful!" Eldon Porter said. He put his hand on Anson's shoulder. "We owe you a lot." "Mullet deserves the credit," Anson replied. "If not for him and his schematics, I'd never have made it. He worked with me night and day, feeding me the information. We correlated everything -- you know, I'd never realized how closely your engineers had followed the human motor-reaction patterns." Eldon Porter cleared his throat. "About that job," he began. "That vice-presidency -- " "Of course," Anson said. "I'll take it. There's going to be a lot of work to do. I want to train at least a dozen men to handle emergencies until the new models take over. I understand you've had plenty of cases like this in the past" "Right. And we've always ended up by junking the robots that went haywire. Hushed it up, of course, so people wouldn't worry. Now we're all set. We can duplicate the electronic patterns of the human brain without worrying about breakdowns due to 41 speedup or overload. Why didn't we think of the psychiatric approach ourselves?" "Leave that to me," Anson said. And as the two men moved off, he made a psychiatric approach toward the girl. She finally stepped back out of his arms. "You owe me an explanation. What's the big idea? You're taking the job, after all!" "I've found I can be useful," Anson told her. "There is a place for my profession -- a big one. Human beings no longer go berserk, but robots do." "Is that what this is all about? Have you been psychoanalyzing that robot you caught?" psychoanalysis isn't suitable for robots. The trouble is purely mechanical. But the brain is a mechanism, too. The more I worked with Mullet, the more I learned about the similarities." other." "You cured that robot in there?" she asked incredulously. "That's right." Anson slipped out of his white gown. "It's as good as new, ready to go back on the job at once. Of course it will have slower, less intense reactions, but its judgment hasn't been impaired. Neuro-surgery did the trick. That's the answer, Sue. Once you open them up, you can see the cure's the same." "So that's why you were wearing a surgical gown," she said. "You were operating on that robot." Anson grinned triumphantly. "The robot was excited, in a state of hysteria. I merely applied my knowledge and skill to the problem." "But what kind of an operation?" "I opened up the skull and eased the pressure on the overload wires. There used to be a name for it, but now there's a new one." Anson took her back into his arms. "Darling, congratulate me! I've just successfully performed the first prefrontal robotomy!" Current New Books : Science  Fantasy Fiction m We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. (Bet. 11th  12th Streets) New York 3, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday 9:30 A. M. to 6:00 P. M. (Phone GRa mercy 3-5990) 42 ( Continued from page 4) one can be revived by praise -- but my own curiosity has been momentarily stirred. Is science fiction literature, either with or without a capital "L"? I don't know, but let's see. The litmus commonly used to determine whether something is literature indicates its degree of success in depicting its era. I know that's a sticky sentence, but it's the kind of language critics hide behind. All it means is: did the author give you a sharp, vivid idea of what it was like to be alive in his time? Because science fiction deals mostly with the future and the past, alien planets, other dimensions and the like, it would seem to be out of bounds as literature, on the basis of this definition. How can you live vicariously in a writer's era if he's constantly going off somewhere else? Ah, but is he? The more he tells you of other times and  places, the more he reveals of his own time and place. You can see that for yourself in the Utopias of the past; they display in surgical detail the conditions they aimed to correct. Not too oddly, I guess, we in the present can't find much choice between those real and imaginary societies. The real ones were harsh and unjust, but so were the imaginary -- they were sweet setups for the authors and their friends, bum deals for everyone else. The gadgetry, too, tells us all we need to know of their science. Many of the ideas proved valid -- distant communication, flight, ground and undersea travel, transmutation of metals, improved food raising and storage, teaching methods, publishing, recording sound for posterity -- but they were unworkable because they were bound so immovably to the science of the day. In the same way, many of our ideas are valid, but if they come about as proposed, it will be a sheer accident. We also, of course, are limited by our knowledge. But it's the idea that counts, not the execution -- once the thought is expressed, the rest is up to the researchers. Science fiction does something that no other fiction can do. It provides a clear view of today, plus a sharp contrast between extrapolation and ultimate fact. A bonus like that should make science fiction LLiterature . Not all, by any means -- no field of any kind can produce only masterpieces -- but enough to meet the entrance examination. , You may fire when ready, Gridley, or whatever your name is this year. But before you do -- is your attack Literature? 43 i for your information ing brightly over the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey shore and from this fact I derive for myself the right to reminisce a little. About thirtyfive years ago -- I was still in high school at the time -- there was an astronomical exhibition in the old Urania Observatory in Berlin, the same observatory where the planetoid Eros had been tracked down. One of the items on display was a model of 44 the Moon, some sixteen inches in diameter, made in years of painstaking work by a retired teacher. A white-haired gentleman in his seventies was talking to him and when he left, somebody said to me: "This gentleman still knew Professor Hansen." This would have been more instructive by far if I had known at the time who Professor Hansen had been, but the name stuck in my mind and in due course I found out. Peter Andreas Hansen, to use his full name, had been the author of a theory concerning the Moon. It was easily the most spectacular idea about the Moon anybody has ever had and it is almost sad that he was wrong. If Hansen had been right, science fiction authors would have a very nearly inexhaustible theme to play with and the first exploratory round-the-Moon ships would really have something to watch for and photograph. to realize that the Moon is an independent solid body in space at about the time of Christ. What people thought before that time is only imperfectly known; my guess is that most of them managed to do without any specific ideas. Pliny the Elder mentioned in his famous Natural History that "the ancients" thought the Moon was a round silver shield in the sky. But there was disagreement about the nature of the spots that could be so clearly seen. One unknown philosopher declared that they were just dirt, atmospheric vapors which had condensed on the shiny silver. Another equally unknown philosopher held that no vapors had sullied the splendor of the heavenly disk, but that the spots one could see were reflections of the continents and seas of the Earth below. One might study the geography of the Earth by looking at the Moon. The really difficult problem was to find out where the observer himself was located in this reflection. Another early idea is embodied in a Hindu legend. According to it, the Moon was the round face of a lantern carried by a gigan45 Kepler's Second Law. The areas swept over the radius vector must be equal for equal times. In a circular orbit P, 45  the angles would be equal, too. In an elliptical orbit (right), they are decidely unequal tic (and invisible) Heavenly Watchman. In the classical West, as I have mentioned, the Moon was recognized as a "second Earth" some two thousand years ago. It was understood that the Moon was considerably smaller than Earth, but this was taken to be the main or even the only dissimilarity. Like the Earth, it indubitably had continents and seas, mountains and valleys, rivers and forests. These ideas are still reflected in the astronoomical names for some of the lunar features. The largest of the dark blotches is still called Oceanus procell arum, the Ocean of Storms. Another feature is still spoken of as the Sinus iridum, the Rainbow Bay, and another section is labeled Palus nebularum , the Misty Swamp. When Galileo Galilei looked at the Moon, he still thought he saw seas and continents, but it needed only slight improvements of the early telescopes to realize that the "seas" could not be seas. And familiarity with the surface of the Moon quickly convinced the observer that he could always see everything there was to be seen, that his vision was never obscured by lunar cloud patches. The astronomers of the first half of the seventeenth century might not yet be able to make up their minds on whether there was an atmosphere on the Moon or not, but they could tell that it was a cloudless atmosphere. Later in the same century, the case was already decided. The 46 Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christian Huyghens, who died in 1695, stated it categorically in his book Cosmotheoros : "on the Moon, there are no seas, no rivers, nor clouds, nor air and water." The same book, incidentally, contains the statement that the moons of Jupiter and of Saturn always turn the same side to their planets, just as our moon does with us. 17 OR A layman, Huyghens' verdiet may well have dispelled whatever interest he had had in the Moon before. As far as astronomers were concerned, their work was just beginning. The first and most obvious and incidentally rather tedious job was a complete mapping of the visible hemisphere. If any changes should take place on the lunar surface, one had to have a detailed map to recognize them. While they were at it, astronomers began to realize that our moon is extraordinary in size. The Earth-Moon system is almost a double planet, something we know to be theoretically possible, even though our own solar system happens not to offer an example. True, our moon is not the largest satellite in the Solar System. Its diameter of 2160 miles is surpassed by three of the four large moons of Jupiter (namely by Io, Ganymede and Callisto), by Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, and by Triton, the larger of the two known moons of Neptune. But while Triton has a diameter of around 3000 miles, the diameter of its planet is 26,800 miles. Earth's diameter is a little over 7900 miles, so that the diameter of our moon is, in round  47 oM The extreme positions above and below the ecliptic the Moon can assume, permitting a look over its poles figures, one-quarter of the diameter of the planet to which it belongs. Still, the Earth-Moon system is not quite a double planet because the common center of gravity of the system is still inside the bod' of the Earth, about 1000 miles below the surface. Although nobody ever experienced any trouble locating the Moon in the sky, provided it was visible at all, the calculation of the Moon's orbit happens to be a very difficult job. One might say that any perturbation of its movement that is possible at all actually does take place. For quite some time, astronomers looked for some unknown factor influencing the Moon's movement. And this is the point where Professor Peter Andreas Hansen entered the picture. Hansen had been born in Denmark exactly one hundred years after Huyghens died in Holland. Before he became an astronomer, he had been an instrument maker, but he became involved in an astronomical venture -- the measuring of a meridian. He was working at Altona Observatory then, but only a few years later, in 1825, he was offered the position as director of the Seeberg Observatory. Hansen's special interest was the computation of orbits and he was fascinated by the perturbations of orbits. Small wonder that he tackled the problem of the orbit of the Moon. While working at it, he thought one day that he had spotted that unknown factor other astronomers had been talking about. Much could be explained if one assumed that the Moon was not a perfect sphere. not perfect spheres. Everybody knows that the Earth has a rather marked equatorial bulge. And Jupiter's equatorial bulge is so enormous that it can be seen with even a small telescope. But this is not what Hansen meant when he said that the Moon was not a perfect sphere. He did not think of equatorial 48 I The shape of the Moon according to Hansen's theory bulges and flattened poles. The idea was rather that the Moon was slightly egg-shaped, that it had two equatorial diameters, one when measured from rim to rim of the visible disk and another and larger one when measured from the center of the visible disk to the center of the hemisphere, which is invisible from Earth. Instead of having an equatorial bulge all around the equator, like a quickly rotating planet, the Moon, in Hansen's opinion, had a large equatorial bulge in only one spot, something like an enormous high plateau, large enough to accommodate whole mountain chains and deep valleys. The center of this enormous bulge  was supposed to coincide with the center of the visible disk of the Moon. In fact, all we could see from Earth was just this bulge, for the Moon's longer equatorial diameter was lined up with the common center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system. If this was true, it not only explained the observed peculiarities in the Moon's orbital motion; it also shed an entirely new light on everything else that had been observed. If the visible lunar disk was an enormous mountainous plateau, lifted to stratospheric heights, the observed absence of air and of water was only the logical result of such elevation. There was no observable air because the 49 plateau was above the denser layers of the Moon's atmosphere. And there could be no water because it had run off the bulge thousands or millions of years ago. It followed that no observation that had been made could be applied to the unknown hemisphere of the Moon. The most thorough knowledge of the Sahara Desert does not enable you to construct a picture of India or of Mexico just because they lie in the same latitudes. The Moon's other hemisphere probably did have an atmosphere and probably did have water. And where there are air and water, there are probably plants. And where there are plants, the presence of animals can be predicted with a fair chance of being right, because animal life is parasitic on plant life. Nor did you have to stop along this chain of reasoning at this point If there are animals, some of them will start preying on other animals after a while and become carnivorous. And some of them might become intelligent in time and represent what older poets had called the "selenites," the inhabitants of the Moon. with much respect because he was a deservedly famous astronomer. They listened with the greatest of interest, too, because 50 it was a fascinating and novel idea. The next problem was to find out whether it was also true. Continued observation was still the means of doing it because nature had provided some help in the form of the phenomenon of libration. I feel that I should digress from the main theme at this point for a fuller explanation of this phenomenon which, as I know from correspondence I receive from readers, is not well understood by many. As is generally known, the Moon turns around its axis in the same number of days and hours as it needs to go around the Earth once. It is as if you had a man walking around you in a circle, looking rigidly in the direction in which he is walking. That way, he turns around his own axis once every time he circles you and all you can observe is his left profile, with his left ear roughly in the center of what you can see of his head. Well, if this is the case, what is libration and how does it enter into the picture? The proper answer is that it is caused by the fact that the Moon does not move around the Earth in a circle but on an elliptical orbit. To explain this, let us first see what the Moon does not do (Fig. 1). Namely, it does not move around the Earth in a circle. Such a circular path is shown on the left in the diagram. If the Moon did move in a circular path, it would need precisely the same time to go from A to B as it would need to go from C to D. In reality, the orbit is elliptical, as shown with great exaggeration on the right in the diagram. Again it needs as much time to go from A to B as it does to go from C to D. The sections of the orbit traveled are of markedly different length; what counts is that the shaded areas formed by the lines from the center of the Moon to the common center of gravity are equal. Technically, such a line from center to center is known as the radius vector and Kepler's Second Law states that the radius vector must sweep over equal areas in equal times. When the Moon is closest to the Earth -- in perigee, as it is called -- it moves faster than when it is farthest away, or in apogee. Logically, then, since the areas covered by the radius vector have to be equal for equal times, the portions of the orbit traversed cannot be of equal length. The customary statement that the average velocity of the Moon is 0.65 miles per second is, of course, true, but the word "average" must not be overlooked. Actually, the Moon is faster than that in perigee and slower in apogee. Before going on to the next step of the explanation, let me give the actual figures: The farthest apogee possible is 252,710 miles; the nearest possible perigee is 221,463 miles, both measured from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. The surface-to-surface distance is, of course, 5000 miles less. velocity of the Moon along its orbit is not uniform, we only have to realize that the rate of. rotation around its axis must be uniform to see what happens (Fig. 2). Both at apogee and at perigee, the same spot on the Moon -- marked by a short line -- forms the center of the visible disk. But this spot is not in the center at intermediate positions. One might say that the rotation of the Moon lags somewhat behind its orbital motion for onehalf of the orbit and is somewhat ahead of it for the other half. And if the spot which is in the center at apogee, and perigee is off center in between, it is obvious that a portion of what was visible, say, in apogee disappears from view over the left rim, while another previously invisible portion comes into view over the right rim. This is part of what is called libration. The other part is caused 51 by the fact that the Moon's orbit is slightly tilted as compared to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the ecliptic (Fig. 3). Depending on the position at the moment, we can sometimes peep over the lunar north pole into the area beyond, and sometimes over the lunar south pole. The overall result is that, in the course of a number of years, we can see and map a total of 59 per cent of the lunar surface. Only 41 per cent of it is completely unknown and will remain so until the films taken by the first circumlunar rocket come out of the developer. But a total of 59 per cent was enough to disprove Hansen's intriguing idea. If he had been right, we should have caught an occasional glimpse of the "lowlands," especially when looking over the poles. Moreover, at periods of maximum libration, the unusual shape of the Moon should be apparent to some degree to direct vision. sive research -- much of it carried out by Simon Newcomb in Washington -- all astronomers were agreed that Hansen's assumption did not conform with , reality. Since the whole episode had taken place at a time when science fiction novels were few and far between, Professor Han52 sen's egg-shaped Moon was not exploited literarily. With just one exception, that is, hut this exception was written in Polish. It appeared decades after the idea had been abandoned in science, namely, half a century ago. Its title was On Silvery Plains and the name of its author was Jerczy von Zulawsky. In the story, two or three ships, carrying cabins that can be used like automobiles, land near the center of the visible hemisphere of the Moon and then start the long trek "downhill" to the jungle of the lowlands. Near the end of his life, the leader of the expedition goes back in one of the automobile cabins to the place of the original landing where a mortar has been left behind to shoot the expedition's report back to Earth. The novel, of course, was supposed to be this report. Since I last read the book in about 1928, I may have forgotten some details, but it seems to me that Hansen's name was not mentioned in it. Jerczy von Zulawsky probably never saw the original papers but received his inspiration from a second or third hand popular account in a general magazine or newspaper supplement. Well, how does the other side of the Moon look? The answer is: probably not very different from the side we can see from Earth, What appears at the rim when the liforation is favorable are the same types of formations so well known to astronomers. There are a number of craters, some of them quite large, a mountain range or two, and the edges of some mare plains. Interestingly enough, we know the approximate locations of at least three craters that are deeply hidden in the inaccessible 4 1 per cent of the lunar surface. These craters have systems of "rays" as we know them from Tycho and Copernicus on the visible hemisphere. On "our" side, all "ray" systems originate from large craters and the "rays" themselves are great circle lines. It is comparatively unimportant in this connection that we don't know the nature of the "rays" and have no idea of why some craters have them and others do not What is important is that the "rays" from beyond the rim indicate the existence and locations of several large craters. Some British astronomers have postulated that the unknown hemisphere may differ in degree from the known hemisphere, even though they must be fundamentally alike. They think that the unknown hemisphere contains a lesser number of craters and consists mostly of large mare plains. This reasoning is built, however, upon a foundation of hypotheses which, at the moment, are beyond either proof or disproof. The only suggestion one can make here is to have patience. In about 20 years, if not earlier, we'll be able to look at films and see what the other side actually looks like. A S A result of the discussion of the "transits" of Venus across the Sun's disk, I received a number of letters from readers who wanted to know a lot of things I had failed to mention since, after all, my article did not concern transits specifically. The questions ranged all the way from requests for a table of Venus transits to inquiries about rules for transits of Mercury. Because Mercury moves around the Sun in a much shorter time than Venus, a Mercury transit is a much more frequent phenomenon than a Venus transit. It can occur only in May and in November and the number of years between one transit and the next follows the sequence 13 -- 7 -- 10 -- 3 -- 10 -- 3, a total of 46 years. The cycle then repeats. Table I shows the transits which took place or will take 53 place during the 19th and 20th centuries, with an additional entry for the next century because the last transit of the 20th century will be a mere grazing of the Sun's limb -- almost a near miss, so to speak. As regards Venus transits, they are listed on Table II and because they are so rare, we can cover a time interval of several centuries. Taking further strides in the medical sciences for granted, I hope that at least half 1799 May 7 1907 Nov. 14 1802 Nov. 8 1914 Nov. 7 1815 Nov. 11 1924 May 7 1822 Nov. 4 1927 Nov. 9 1832 May 5 1940 Nov. 11 1835 Nov. 7 1953 Nov. 14 1845 May 8 1957 May 5 1848 Nov. 9 1960 Nov. 7 1861 Nov. 11 1970 May 8 1868 Nov. 4 1973 Nov. 9 1878 May 6 1986 Nov. 12 1881 Nov. 7 1993 Nov. 5 1891 May 9 1999 Nov. 15 1894 Nov. 10 2003 May 6  i of my readers will be able to see the next one scheduled and half of those the one after the next. Year and Date: Duration: 1631, Dec. 6 3 h 10 m 1639, Dec. 4 6 h 34 m . 1761, June 5 6 h 16 m 1769, June 3 4 h 0 m 1874, Dec. 8 4 h 11 m 1882, Dec. 6 5 h 57 m 2004, June 7 5 h 30 m 2012, June 5 6 h 42 m 2117, Dec. 10 4 h 46 m 2125, Dec. 8 5 h 37 m 2247, June 11 4 h 16 m 2255, June 8 7 h 12 m 2360, Dec. 12 5 h 25 m 2368, Dec. 10 4 h 59 m 2490, June 12 2 h 4 m 2498, June 9 7 h 53 m 2603, Dec. 15 5 h 53 m 2611, Dec. 13 4 h 30 m 2733, June 15 short 2741, June 12 7 h 46 m 2846, Dec. 16 6 h 14 m 2854, Dec. 14 3 h 48 m 2976, June 17 very short 2984, June 14 7 h 25 m 54 59 I l ' The Category Inventors  1 There was security for all in this well-run  world  -- hut what happened to a man who tried i to get ahead could never happen to a robot! Illustrated 1 -- c  co down that brought matters to a head. Not that they hadn't been gathering for months. Ever since, in fact, he had been put on reserve, .Marge seemed to have been conducting a campaign -- a subtle, insistent, completely wiiety campaign. First it was: "It's not your fault, honey, the world just doesn't understand creative artists any more." He had said modestly, "Oh, a bassoon player isn't creative, peaches; he's executant." "Anyway," she retorted firmly, "he's an artist " It seemed only as an afterthought that she added, "That means he's got intelligence 66 and imagination. And that means he's got a head start when it comes to finding a new job -- doesn't it, honey?" And her big brown eyes had looked up at him so confidently, so guilelessly. "Sure, sure, a head start," he had said, feeling his heart droop. Being able to play the bassoon didn't seem much of a qualification for doing any other job at all. "Of course," she said a few days later, "you could get a job in a jazz band, Gilbert, couldn't you? It's all the rage again." She 67 added hastily, "Oh, I know you don't like the idea, but -- " He explained to her patiently that it wasn't a matter of not liking the idea. It was simply that he couldrit . Playing jazz wasn't quite the same thing as playing serious music, which was why robots could be taught to do the one, but not -- so far, anyway -- the other. "Well, Phil Tomkys made the switch, didn't he?" she said. What Phil Tomkys could do and what he could do, he'd told her tersely, were two entirely different things. Jazz playing was a certain specialized ability -- he made it sound on a level with safe-breaking or parricide -- and you either had it or you hadn't -- now did she see? pose then?" she suggested some time later. She couldn't have touched him on a rawer spot. But she went on, blithely unwitting : "How about those tunes you're always humming to yourself? They sound pretty good to me and -- r" "They're probably someone else's," he told her curtly. They were someone else's, he knew. Ten years of orchestra playing had left no room in his head for original music. He'd learned that at great cost, because he had tried his hand once at a quartet 68 for bassoon, celeste, recorder and guitar -- and even that unusual combination hadn't been proof against his subconscious; it was almost finished before he'd realized that it was all bits and pieces from obscure compositions he'd played in the past. The memory of that first and last attempt made him feel guilty now. That was one of the nastiest things about being on reserve -- it made you think yourself deficient in not having abilities that there was no earthly reason you should have, anyway. But he managed to keep a hold on his temper. And the next time. And  by a mighty effort, the next. But the tension mounted and mounted -- until the robot broke down one fine spring morning. And then it stopped mounting. It exploded. "Right in the middle of getting breakfast, too," Marge wailed, surveying the inert mass of metal that lay by the kitchen table. Gilbert had just got up. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "I'll ring Center," he said with an unurgent yawn. "But the children will be late for school," she said. "Colin! Michael!" she called to the bathroom. "Do hurry." "It's not much use their hurrying, is it, if there's no breakfast ready for them?" Gilbert observed helpfully. "What do you think I'm trying to do?" she snapped, juggling wildly with unfamiliar implements. "I've only got two pairs of hands." He roared at that and struck a pose. "Step closer, folks! See the only woman in captivity with four arms." She stamped her foot in flustered rage. "You know what I meant. A fine father you are, standing there trying to be funny when your children are late for school. As if the poor mites haven't had enough to put up with lately." His laughter stopped abruptly. "And what exactly do you mean by that?" "What I say." She jabbed desperately at food tubes. He glared at her. "Well, just what have the 'poor mites' had to put up with?" "Oh, I'm too busy to argue with you. Anyway, you wouldn't understand." "Oh, wouldn't I? Perhaps I understand only too well. 'Lately' wouldn't be just three months and thirteen days?" "If you like," she muttered, not looking at him. "Just as I thought !" he exploded. "You blame me. Ever since they put me on reserve you've been getting at me. That's a fine encouragement for a man, I must say. If you think -- " vanced a step toward her. He failed to notice the recumbent robot until he fell headlong over it He lay there, rubbing a scuffed shin and swearing colorfully. "If you're going to use foul language," his wife said icily, "you might at least keep your voice down. You know what sharp ears the children have." He climbed to his feet, glaring. "Oh, so now I'm a corrupter of my own children, is that it? Well, let me tell you that -- " But at that moment a terrific squawking rose from the Henomat, the gadget that synthesised fresh eggs from raw meal. His wife jerked and jabbed frantically at the kitchen control panel. She only succeeded in releasing several faucets of assorted juices and ketchups. As they splashed and oozed over the floor she made one last despairing assault on the control panel. The faucets continued to run. But a blaring of jazz music joined the chaos now. She threw up her hands in surrender, sank into a chair and buried her head on the table-top. Gilbert, standing there in a deafened daze, felt a sudden pang of remorse. Perhaps it was his fault; perhaps he should have foreseen the day , when a metal being with a crystalline brain would take over his job, as robots 69 had taken over so many other people's by now. Contrite he dashed to the control panel and fumbled at it. Somehow his manipulations did the trick. The faucets gurgled to a stop, the music snapped off and the Henomat died in a flurry of feathery whimpers. Gilbert's self-esteem recovered slightly. He looked expectantly at his wife, but she did not lift her head. She only sniffed a dismal and muffled sniff. There's gratitude! he thought angrily. Well, it wasn't his fault. His gaze fell upon the abject heap of metal on the floor. It was its fault -- it and millions of its kind. Suddenly all the frustration of the last few months focused on the robot and ignited in anger. He lashed out at it with his foot.     The foot was still slipper-shod and it hurt. But he was too enraged to care and the action, although it made no impression on the robot, brought gratifying relief to his feelings. Marge had raised her head and was regarding him witheringly. "Well, now I've seen everything," she said. "A grown man actually kicking a poor defenseless robot." "When it's down, too," he said caustically. He flared up again, 70 "It seems you've got more sympathy for a robot than you have for your husband. It's a fine way to -- " He was interrupted by a small human avalanche tumbling into the room. "Morning, Mom," said the boys in chorus. "Morning, Pop," Was there , thought Gilbert, a pause , just a slight one, between the two greetings? And a dying fall to the second? "Hey, the robot's passed out," said Colin. "Was that what all the noise was, Pop?" Michael asked. Gilbert glowered. Then he sighed and dragged the robot out of the kitchen by its feet. He dumped it in a bedroom close! and dialed Robocenter. He lingered a while before he went back to the kitchen. He saw that the kids had left -- without much breakfast, obviously -- and he realized then that that was why he had lingered -- to avoid facing them. So it was getting to that point now. II dressed and feeling desperate when the door buzzer sounded. Not from any desire to be helpful -- that he certainly didn't feel -- but just to be able to hear the sound of his own voice again, anybody s voice, he said, "That'll be the mechanic from Center. I'll open it." But it wasn't the mechanic. "Hello, son," came a plummy voice. Another one, gentle and fluting, cooed from behind a mountainous fluorotex package, "Surprise!" It was George and Phoebe, Marge's parents. Gilbert winced. This was all he needed. "Had a sudden call from party H.Q. " boomed George. "And we took the early rocket in so we could have an hour with you," Phoebe explained, peeking birdlike from behind her burden. "Ah -- er, come in, then," said Gilbert. "Anything wrong, son?" said George, drawing Gilbert to one side as Phoebe went to find Marge. "Wrong? Why, no, nothing's wrong." He laughed unconvincingly. "It's just that I was expecting someone else. The mechanic from Robocenter." "That robot of yours broken down? Too bad. The poor kid's up to her neck in it, eh? I'll just say hello to her." He came back quickly. "I'll say she is! Still, Mother's pitching in." He winked as sounds of furious activity came from the kitchen. "She's just the same at home. Leaves so little for our robot to do, he's thinking of applying for a pension." He chuckled hugely. Then, noticing that ( Gilbert wasn't as much as smiling, he stopped abruptly and turned on a manner that Gilbert knew well by now -- the earnest, the man-to-man. "Well, how are things, my boy?" "You mean, have I got a job yet?" " Heavens , no! I know it's not that easy. We all know it takes time. What I meant was, how are the ideas working out?" " What ideas?" George shook his head. "As bad as that, eh? Still, it's the darkest hour before the dawn. You mark my words, I've seen it happen so many times. Just when a man thinks there isn't a single idea left that someone else hasn't thought of, a real big one comes down out of the blue and hits him right between the -- " The door buzzer cut across George's eloquence. Gilbert ducked out in relief. chanic, clad in the gray coveralls of Roboservice. But he wasn't alone. "Yes?" said Gilbert to the other three who were about to follow the mechanic in. The three were also in gray, but wore bolero and slacks, street style. They were young, cropped of head, their faces scrubbed and intense. "We're therapists," explained 71 the foremost and tallest one. "Therapists?" Gilbert echoed. "But nobody here's sick." "Hah! That's a good one," said the foremost of the three, turning his head to share his amusement with his colleagues. He turned back to Gilbert. "We are, of course, robotherapists." "Huh?" was all that Gilbert could manage. "I am a robopsychiatrist," the other amplified. " am a robosynaptic stimulator," said the second. "And I ," said the third with quiet pride, "am a robomorale coordinator." Just like the three bears, Gilbert thought. Of all the twaddle! But he stood aside for them to enter. "Where is the robot?" said the first therapist. Gilbert, deciding he disliked' the man's manner, addressed himself pointedly to the mechanic. "In the bedroom closet, second on the left. I dumped it there after it broke down. It cluttered up the kitchen too much," "Right," said the mechanic amiably and went through.  "Too bad," said the leading therapist, shaking his head. "It would have been better if you had left it where it fell. The failure attitude often gives a valuable pointer to the cause of breakdown." He beckoned to his colleagues and they followed in the wake of the mechanic. Gilbert looked after them for a long moment before returning to the living room. "W T ell, now I've seen everything," he told his father-in-law. "They've actually got psychiatrists for robots." But George was quite unsurprised. "Why, didn't you know? They've had them for six months or more. One of the brightest new fields in years. The teloids were full of it." "Oh, I must have missed it," Gilbert murmured, realization dawning of just how out of touch he'd been with the world at large; how absorbed in his world of music playing that seemed now as unreal and faraway as an age in history.  earnestly. "That's the way things are now. Branching out, keeping one step ahead of the robot all the time. That's what, if you don't mind my saying so, you haven't realized yet. A man's got to be adaptable. Now, take old Tom Angel, he was a schoolmate of mine. He was a top-class tailor and thought his job was safe as houses. But it wasn't. "So, after he'd been on reserve a time he happens to remember the birthday cards people used to send each other when we were 72 kids. So what does Tom do? He ups and registers himself as the first of a new generation of greeting-card verse writers. And this is the best part, he'd never written a line of verse in his life . But he was first in, so he got charter rights. Get the idea? Once you get in the progressive mood, you're all set." Gilbert reflected dully that brushing the dust off a defunct custom was a funny kind of progress, but he tried to look interested, knowing that George was trying to be helpful in his fashion, just as Marge's mother was when she brought parcels of things a reservist's valid-for-aweek scrip wouldn't stretch for. "You see, Gil," George went on, "this isn't something new. Something like it has been happening for hundreds of years now, with machines displacing people. It's the scale of this that's new, because the robots threaten everybody's job." "Except politicians' and robopsychiatrists'," Gilbert couldn't resist saying. George looked pained. "Don't say that, Gil. And don't think politics aren't getting as competitive as everything else. Imagine, they even sent me to school -- me at my time of life -- to get what they called historical perspective . I kicked like mad, but I must admit it did me a power of good. It makes a man see why there've been so many changes since robots were invented. You know -- " he wagged a finger at Gilbert -- "there's been more progress in the past twenty years than in the whole hundred before that. From space travel to -- well, to self-coiling spaghetti." "I can't see much progress in throwing five million people on reserve in the process." "Ah, but ten years ago there were fifteen million. That shows the challenge of the robot has been taken up. Because it's not only a challenge, it's an opportunity. This is the Age of Opportunity. We can all be thankful for one thing, at least, that we're not living in the last century." George shuddered. "Then, if a man was out of a job he had to find one!" "He had to? I wish I had the chance ." "Ah, but that's the point. It wasn't always so easy. Nowadays, a man doesn't have to fight for a job. All he has to do is invent one." bit in the book," said Gilbert. "You know? The one with pictures that they give you in exchange for your job?"  "Oh, sorry," George said a bit huffily. "I was only trying to help." He rallied. "Anyway, you 73 have got a father-in-law in the right party, that's one consolation. The party that stands up for the reservist's rights Gilbert lifted an inward eye to heaven. "Yes, sir," George continued. "If the Technoes had their way, a reservist's life wouldn't be worth a light. But we fought for his rights all along the line. It was us Populists, for instance, who saw that every family -- workers and reservists alike -- had a robot of its own by inalien able rights ." Gilbert had had as much as he could stand. "To hell with your inalienable rights!" he exploded. "Both parties have got it nicely carved up between them. All either of you care about is making sure that things go on just the way they are. As for the precious benefits of having a robot, let me tell you I'd be perfectly happy if there weren't any robots at all -- especially the ones that sit on their chromium-plated backsides in chromium-plated orchestras!" George looked shocked now. "I -- I -- you don't know what you're saying," he burbled. "Why, you're talking like a -- like a Luddite." "Oh, I am, am I? Well, let me -- " Gilbert stopped in mid-air and said suspiciously, "What's a Luddite?" "Luddites were the people who broke up the first power machines two hundred years ago" It was an item he'd picked up in the course on Historical Perspective. "And if that's the way you're -- " "Hold it! A wild light came into Gilbert's eye. He had just thought of something. Why , of course ! Why not? "What is it, son?" said George, anxious now at the look on his son-in-law's face. But Gilbert didn't hear him. With a whoop he bounded for the door, threw it back and collided with the leading therapist who was waiting on the other side, knuckles raised. "Well -- " gasped the therapist, staggering. "Sorry," said Gilbert cheerfully, trying to push past. "But there's something I have to tell you," said the therapist, recovering balance and breath with an effort. Behind him his two colleagues closed ranks. Gilbert halted. "Well, what is it? Make it brief. I'm a busy man." He laughed delightedly at the novelty of the words.  a queer look. "It's no laughing matter, I'm afraid. We just gave your robot a tapeauto in there and the results were sad, sad. We shall have to take it back for immediate reorientation. You 74  see -- " he shook his head gravely -- "it had developed a severe guilt complex." "Guilt complex?" Gilbert echoed blankly. "That's right. They're sensitive, you know. And if they once get the idea that their owners aren't: happy, that starts it. They think it's their fault, they wonder what mistakes they could have made. They brood on it and then they do make mistakes. Oh, little ones, the kind you or I wouldn't notice at all, but a robot does because it knows it's not supposed to make mistakes. That only makes it feel more guilty and so it goes until -- well, it just gives up in despair." Despite his urgency to be off, Gilbert found himself listening with fascinated incredulity. The therapist was achingly  earnest. "Of course, we'll know better next time, won't we? Center will send a replacement up. Just let the new one know it's making you happy, that's all, and everything will be fine. Just a smile, a grateful word now and then, eh?" For a moment Gilbert looked at the therapist with the expression of a child seeing its first elephant. Then he burst out laughing. "Of course I'll let it know I'm happy! I am happy. Who wouldn't be happy, living in this Age of Opportunity?" He noticed George's startled face peering from the living room and he laughed loudly again. "Now, if you don't mind -- " The therapists looked blankly at each other and fell away as Gilbert made for the door.  Ill carrying its usual scattered population of reservists, waiting in the slender hope of getting in on a hot tip. Gilbert walked past them, straight to the first cubicle. Inside was a counter, behind it a robot attendant "I want to file a category," Gilbert announced. "Certainly, sir," said the robot, producing a form and an envelope from beneath the counter. The form required particulars of name, date of birth, reserve number. Gilbert entered these in impatiently, then arrived at the section headed: Nature of Category. Boldly he filled in neo-luddite, He scratched his chin thoughtfully with the end of his stylus and added. A lawful opposition to the robot economy . He smiled to himself. There was a job no robot would ever be able to take over. Under the heading Overall Classification of Category he entered political. He placed the form flat in the envelope as instructed and passed 75 it with a flourish to the robot. The robot franked it across the flap and fed it into a machine by its side. In a few seconds, the envelope popped out again and the robot handed it back to Gilbert. Gilbert felt a sudden disquiet. "Well?" he asked. "Your application will take a short time to check," the robot explained. "This machine sends a copy to the registry below. They carry a complete file there of all categories." "Oh, I see" said Gilbert, relieved. While he waited he scanned the posters stuck up around the walls of the cubicle. Most bore the faces of successful category filers: inventors of such jobs as hydroponics stabilizer, cybernetic diviner, traumographist. What in creation was a traumographist? Gilbert wondered. A shock writer? One who drew graphs of shock responses? In what? Men? Atoms? Gilbert smiled. The sound of such specialized and enigmatic vocations no longer made him feel hopelessly ill-equipped in this complex world. Now he was going to meet the world on its own terms and -- chine and a slip of pasteboard popped up. The robot took it, scanned it, then lifted its crystalline eyes to Gilbert. "I'm sorry, sir, but your application has been rejected." Gilbert stood dazed, unbelieving. The robot went on, "The Category Office extends its sincere regrets and trusts that this will not deter you from making further applications. The Category Office -- Gilbert interrupted what was obviously a set speech. He stretched across the counter and grabbed the robot by one articulated arm. "Look here, you -- you metallic mouthpiece. That application is legitimate. Nobody's got any right to reject it. You can't just stand there and -- " "Please." The unalterable pitch of the robot's voice only pointed its obvious embarrassment. Conditioned, like all robots, never to be hostile to humans, it could only make pathetic token efforts to release itself. Gilbert sighed and let go, feeling ashamed of himself. "Anyway," he persisted, "I want to see somebody about this." "An overseer is already on his way," the robot said. He must, unnoticed, have pressed an alarm signal, Gilbert realized. The overseer came in briskly; a round, cheerful individual. "Ah, Mr. Gilbert Parry. About your application, is it? Well, I'm 76 very sorry. We dislike having to turn down anybody's application, you understand. Naturally, we -- " "Naturally nothing," Gilbert said brusquely. "That category I put forward is perfectly admissible." "But, Mr. Parry "Don't interrupt. I've got a right to be heard. You may think you have all this sewn up nice and tidily. That's what the two political parties think, but they're wrong. Both of them support the system as it is. That's not enough." "But, Mr. Parry, you can't -- " "I can. What's more, I'll set out and prove, if I have to, that even from the standpoint of the status quo an opposition is socially necessary. Now, don't try to tell me I can't do that" The manager smiled. "But the need of an opposition is recognized. I was only trying to tell you that you can't register the category because it was registered years ago." "What!" "Yes, the Humans Only movement, as it's called, is a recognized parry, though it's never managed to win an election or attract many adherents. Most people are only too grateful for 77 the benefits robots have brought. But the movement does have State backing: funds, offices, the same proportion of salaried officials to members as the two big parties." Gilbert was already drifting miserably to the door. "Of course," the overseer added helpfully, "you could take up voluntary work for the party. There's always the chance you might be able to step into a salaried vacancy in a few years." "Thanks, it doesn't matter," Gilbert mumbled, and left the cubicle. A group of waiting hope,  fuls took one look at his face and melted away. There was only one thing to do. Start all over again at some other line, study and study until he was as proficient at it as he was at playing the bassoon. But what line? And how could he be sure that that wouldn't be taken over by robots before he became skilled at it? Still, there . was thiug for but to try. Even if it came to nothing, Marge wouldn't be able to get at him -- not fairly, anyway. More than that, he wouldn't have to put up with his own gnawing sense of failure. Noticing a library, he turned into it. He asked the assistant -- a robot even here in a center of s  learning -- for guidance. It brought him a well-thumbed handbook. Leading in the categories it listed were those of the old occupations that were too closely linked to flesh and blood and spirit to be easily yielded up to the robot -- medicine, law, the creative arts. Well, medicine was out. He was no weakling, but he couldn't stand the thought of coldly opening up bodies. Law? He couldn't even argue successfully with his own wife, let alone with a judge and jury. And as for the creative arts -- you had to have a vocation, hadn't you? No, it would have to be something totally new -- one of the bewilderingly complex fields like what was it on that poster? traumography? On the impulse, he looked it up. Yes, it was here, all right. But he couldn't, after minutes of perplexed reading and re-reading, even make out what field it was in, the language describing it was so specialized. Hell! it was even worse than he had feared. He riffled through the book dejectedly. Then suddenly a displayed ad caught his eye. So there were ways! Why, of course, there had to be. The sys78 tern had been going for years; it was bound to happen that people would emerge with just this flair. Alert young men, their minds not canalized in the narrow bounds of one profession, but at ease in this complicated world, able to see the need for a new job here, a new branch there. But how would you pay for such a service? Reservists' scrip was unnegotiable. Still, he had a few hundred credits of real money salted away for a possible emergency. It was worth a try. its grandiloquent name, was a small, dingy building downtown, all of thirty years old by the look of it. Still, Gilbert told himself, it's unwise to pre-judge the goods by the package. But the sudden fracas was more disturbing. He had to jump back hastily as the narrow swingdoors flew open and two burly individuals burst through, carrying a struggling, spitting burden. Through flailing arms and legs, Gilbert glimpsed an old gnomelike face, pink with frustration. Once on the sidewalk the two huskies lowered the man to his feet with exaggerated solicitude, gave him one meaningful look and , retreated into the building. One of them turned to throw out a battered brief case at the old man's feet. "I'll get a writ served on you, you scum!" their victim bellowed, shaking his fist. His stature was as gnomelike as his face, but his voice was surprisingly resonant. "A man's got his rights, you know. riu -- ni -- " The little man subsided, as if realizing the futility of hurling his protests at blank doors. With a spluttering sigh he picked up his case, gave an outraged jerk to his bolero, then hobbled off down the street. Gilbert looked after him for a moment, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the poor old chap. He only hoped the incident had nothing to do with the C. P. Jones Bureau, that that wasn't their normal way of handling clients. Quelling the thought, he went in. "Room fifty-three?" Gilbert asked the robot enquiry clerk. "The C. P. Jones Bureau." "I'm sorry, sir, but Mr. Jones no longer operates here." "Oh, but his bureau?" "Mr. Jones himself was the bureau." "Well, has he started up anywhere else, do you know?" "He left no information on that point, sir." and left. So that was that. And that left what? Traumography? He shuddered at the thought. As he hesitated on the 79 sidewalk, he thought of the chucking-out incident. ' Now, there was a job. They daren't build a man-handling robot. He flexed his biceps thoughtfully -- The thought died miserably. You probably had to have your name put down at birth for a trade as rudimentary as that. He sighed and wandered off. Passing a bar, he went in as automatically as if it were a habit, which it never had been. This was an open bar, not one of those bleak reservists' places where you had to produce a ration card. Here you paid money. He went to a booth and ordered a double Scotch from the robot waiter. It wasn't until he turned to reach in his pocket to pay that Gilbert noticed who was sitting opposite him. It was the little old man he had seen thrown out of the Universe Building. He was looking mournfully at his drink as if it were a clouded crystal ball. ' The sight moved Gilbert to pity. Here was he feeling sorry for himself. At least he had youth. On an impulse he lifted his glass and said, "Better times." The old man raised his head slowly. "Huh!" he said. Then he managed a wan smile and said, "Thank you," and drained his glass. Gilbert drained his own and, to his questioning glance, the old man said, "Same as you." Gilbert ordered up. "I saw what happened to you back there," Gilbert ventured sympathetically. "Did you?" The old man sighed. "The robbers! Throwing a man out after all these years." He looked so miserable that Gilbert instantly regretted having mentioned the incident. "It's a wrench when you've worked in the same building for nearly ten years," the old man went on. "Oh, you worked there?" "I had my own office. The C. P. Jones Bureau." "You -- C. P. Jones?" Gilbert's conception of alert young men underwent violent revision. "Why, you heard of me?" The old boy's face lit up eagerly. "Heard of you? I was coming to see if you could fix me up." "You were? Ah, well, perhaps it was best I wasn't there. It saved you from being disappointed." Gilbert was puzzled. "I was disappointed. But how do you mean?"  V gory in stock." He paused, then with the air of one relieved to get a confession off his chest, added, "As a matter of fact, son, I never did manage to invent a single category -- except the one." 80 a Oh," said Gilbert, his sympathy beginning to be tinged with suspicion. "What was the one?" "Why, the category of category inventor, of course." The old man sniffed. "Perhaps I wasn't very good at it, but I did have charter rights. Seems that nothing's sacred any longer, not even charter rights. They revised my category a week ago and canceled my license. Mind you, I didn't take it sitting down. But what can you do?" He took a despondent sip at his drink. "They've got you all ways." Gilbert felt a stirring of resentment at such ingratitude. "It seems to me," he said roughly, "you had a pretty good run for your money. I should think your clients have got the grievance." The old man looked up indignantly. "Why? They didn't do too badly. I always worked hard for them. Was it my fault the ideas didn't come? And it didn't cost them anything. My fee was only payable out of salary if and when I delivered." "Oh," said Gilbert. The old man hadn't been such a shark, then. The old man chuckled now. "You're right, though, about having a good run. I suppose, all in all, I did." "But how come you got away with it all that time?" Mr. Jones chuckled again. "Well, it was the Rehabilitation Office that paid me my fixed salary. Whereas it was the Labor Office that I was supposed to pay any fees into, less my commission, of course. Once a year the Accounting Office -- that's another department again -- sent around a robot auditor to check the book. They just never got around to checking up with each other, I suppose -- until now." He fell back into gloom. "Now I've got to invent another job." Gilbert examined the other's gnomelike face, the gnarled hands about his glass. "But I should have thought you'd be past I mean, well -- " "You mean, why do I worry about another job at my age, is that it? Because my wife is not my age. She's only -- well, she says she's twenty-nine -- anyway, she wouldn't take kindly to the notion of my being on reserve." "Ah, these wives," Gilbert agreed. "It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have them to reckon with." "Wouldn't it?" said Mr. Jones, almost fiercely. "For me, I'm glad the way it is. If it wasn't for Babs -- that's my wife -- I'd have gone to pieces. I used to be a trapeze artist in the circus. That's how I met Babs; she was a dancer in a sideshow. I was the oldest trapeze man in the game, but 81 82 even I had to pack it in some day. Got too shaky. If it hadn't ; been for Babs, I'd have gone to seed, been in my urn by now as like as not. Babs has got her faults, but she's a damn sight better encouragement to a man than any of these noble, shoulderto-shoulder darnes. They want the feeling of power over a man. Babs only wants money and the things that money buys and then she's happy. And so am I." beside such rough-and-ready philosophy. "Mm-mm, maybe you're right. Have another drink." "No, it's my turn," the old man insisted. And, as the drinks arrived, "But I'm talking about myself too much. How is it with you?" Gilbert told him and they had another drink. And they swapped yarns about their ex-professions. And they had another drink. And then Mr. Jones suggested they make a move to a real bar. And that started a pub-crawl such as Gilbert in his former sober life had never imagined possible. They talked, they joked. Even the way the world was treating them both assumed, under the influence of more and more drink, the aspect of one great joke. They laughed themselves silly over traumography and what it could be, their interpretations ranging from the inane to the obscene. That started them off on inventing mock categories, a game that lasted them through two bars and got them thrown out of a third when the categories became too outrageous. In one bar, in a lull, they ordered beer, and it had a melancholy effect on the little man. He said they were selfish, that everyone was selfish. They ought to feel sorry, not for themselves, but for the robots. Revealing unexpected depths to his character, he proceeded to recite lugubriously: How am I to face the odds Of Man's bedevilment and God's, I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made? Luckily that phase didn't last. Gilbert quickly ordered whiskey again and the resilient little man was back in form in a flash. And when Gilbert said, "What say we start a union for robots, then?" Mr. Jones threw himself into the idea with rare zest. They wondered if that might not be the salvation for both of them, until they reflected that a robot's minimum week could only be a 168 hours -- work being their one function -- and who'd have any interest in opposing that? The evening became more and more wild. Gilbert was never sure afterward whether the little man 83 really did give a demonstration of the finer points of trapeze work from a chandelier. He would recall that they drank a great deal of liquor between them and that somewhere in the early hours he fell into a robocab. After that all was darkness . , . IV Sun through his eyelids that woke him. He recoiled with a groan. He heard shutters pulled, and was devoutly grateful for the dimness. A figure moved near him. "Is that you, Marge honey?" he whimpered. "No, sir, this is your new robot." It was holding out a glass of something that fizzed. Gilbert took it eagerly and downed it at a gulp. "A-ah f that's better." "Will there be anything else, sir?" "No, thanks." He was seized with a sudden fear. "Yes. Yes, there is. My wife " "Mrs. Parry asked me to tell her as soon as you awoke," the robot said. Gilbert breathed out in relief. For a moment he had had the thought that Marge might have left him. He couldn't have blamed her if she had -- not 'after his behavior yesterday -- then last 84 night on top of it. He was overcome with sudden contrition. "It's all right," he said to the robot. "I'll teil her myself. I'm getting up." And somehow he managed it, though he wouldn't have without the assistance of the robot. "Thank you," Gilbert told it Then, feeling the need to do penance all around, he added somewhat sheepishly, "You have made me very happy." "Thank you, sir," said the robot, inevitably without inflection, but when it repeated the words Gilbert felt that it really meant them. His penitential mood considerably sustained, he went in to Marge. And when he saw her, looking her prettiest, he felt touched to the quick. He began to mumble words of abject apology. But she cut him short with a kiss. "Don't apologize, honey. It was my fault. If I hadn't nagged you, you wouldn't have acted like that " She guided him to a chair. "Here." She poured him a cup of black coffee. "What would you like for breakfast?" "I've got it here, thanks," he said weakly. She nodded sympathetically. understanding, Gilbert fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. With the pack, a slip of paper came out. He looked at it. It read simply: Umbrological Parallax Tracer , Now what the heck did that mean? It was in his own handwriting, too. Then a dim memory crawled back from the confusion of the night before. He stared at the words, repeating them over and over to himself between sips of coffee. Then it suddenly dawned on him. "Why, that's it!" he exclaimed -- and winced. Despite having served him up with an answer, his head still couldn't stand that amount of sudden excitement. "What's the matter, sweet?" Marge crooned. "Here, have a cerebri n." He tottered to his feet. "Oh, don't be so noble and shoulderto-shoulder." He grinned quickly and kissed her. "Don't pay any attention to me, honey, I've just seen the light." He drained his coffee hurriedly. "I've got something urgent to attend to." He kissed her again and dashed off. He chose a different cubicle this time, just to be on the safe side, and made his application with a practiced, if shaky, hand. This time an official came unsummoned. The manager himself, what was more, for that's how he introduced himself to Gilbert. He was holding the copy of the application in his hand. "I'm glad to meet you, Mr. i Parry," he said. "ZJmbrological Parallax T racer. Ah, yes, most interesting. What exactly is that?" With a calmness that surprised even himself, Gilbert answered, "Well, it involves ascertaining the degrees of parallax that occur in umbrological investigations. It's not easy to explain in a few words, but -- " "Of course," said the manager understanding. "I thought it would probably be too complex for me to grasp. But you failed to enter the overall classification. I can make it on the photostat for you." He looked at Gilbert inquiringly, his stylus poised. For a moment Gilbert floundered, cursing himself for having overlook the point. "Er -- well, that's not easy to describe, either. You see -- "  "I understand," said the manager soothingly. "Shall we say Synthesis , then? That covers a multitude of categories these days." "Oh -- ah, yes, yes, it's definitely a form of synthesis." filled in the space. "There's just one more point. The West Town office has already admitted an application this morning for, ah -- he consulted a slip of paper in his hand -- "an Umbrological Parallax Co-relator. It just came through on the tape. Now, 85 you'd have to prove, if called upon, that the two functions are distinct and separate." Gilbert doubted the testimony of his own ears. Then there really was something called Umbrology -- in which parallaxes occurred? And then -- "That wouldn't have been a Mr. C. P. Jones, would it?" "Why, yes. You know each other, then?" "We should have met this morning," lied Gilbert stoutly, "to file our categories together. One of us must have got the offices mixed. You see, umbrology has been our life work, in our spare hours, that is. But a parallax tracer is entirely different from a parallax co-relator. In fact, they're two entirely opposed functions. Opposed, but mutually dependent, if you understand. You see, a parallax can only be co-related in dialectical opposition and conjunction to and with its being traced." Gilbert was beginning to enjoy himself. "To put it more simply -- " "That's perfectly all right," said the manager. "I'll see that the distinction is made clear. Your charter will be mailed to you in a few days. But if you're working in the same field, hadn't you better share facilities with your friend, Mr. Jones? Provisionally, anyway?" "Why, yes," said Gilbert. "It would save a lot of delay in our work." "Indeed. Well, Mr. Jones will already have been granted offices. Hold on, I'll get the address from West Town." building. When Gilbert entered, Mr. Jones was arranging some handsome-looking furniture. The little man straightened and his eyes lit up. "Hello, my boy. So you found me, then." Gilbert grinned. "You old rogue. You nearly queered the pitch for me." The old man chuckled. "Well, all's fair. And somehow you didn't get around to giving me your address last night. And I didn't know you'd get the self-same idea. I do remember that we laughed a lot over it and said it was one of the best categories we thought up. Of the printable ones, that is." He chuckled again. "Anyway, I did alter the end to give you a loophole." Gilbert clapped the little man on the back. "That was more than I thought to do, I must admit." Gilbert looked around the office and felt a sudden sharp pang of conscience. "Of course we're cheating, aren't we?" "Cheating?" said the little man, feigning indignation very well, Gilbert thought. "I'm not. We 86 may be anticipating a trifle, but that's a different thing altogether. Fve already looked up Umbrology for a start. It's all right, there isn't such a word -- not yet. As near as I can make out, it would be a science of shadows. Now all we have to do is find the parallaxes." "But -- you're not serious ?" said Gilbert. "Serious? Of course I'm serious. Can we help it if we haven't caught up with our category yet? Who was the great man, the Indian squatting on his haunches where he was born or Columbus setting out to find a place that no one knew existed? We've just got to have the same kind of faith as Columbus had. You've got brains. As for me, I always found it easier to earn my living on a trapeze. But I'm no slouch. My brain's been very well preserved from all those years of swinging about a hundred feet up with nothing to do. Oh, I may not have been any great shakes in my last category, but that wasn't specific enough. In Umbrology, I think we've got something a man can really get his teeth into." "But they'll find out," said Gilbert, weakening. "Courage, my lad, courage. The world's so complicated these days, everyone's such a specialist, that no one can be sure what's actual fact yet and what isn't. What was that one you came out with last night -- traumographr ist? Well, how many traumographists are there in the world? Say there's only one, which is more than possible. Then only he knows what he's doing. Anyway, if they step in before we've gotten anywhere, then we'll just start in some other line. The scope's enormous." Why, Gilbert told himself, he really does mean it! What was more, such confidence was catching. It was striking, too, the way the little old man made no kind of reservation on account of his years. He talked as if he were immortal, his capacity boundless. Standing there now, his head cocked to one side, he did look like some ageless troll, indefatigable and of infinite resource. "Anyway," said Mr. Jones. "I'm not letting grass grow under my feet. Here -- " his grin nearly bisected his face --  "don't just stand there. Our robot hasn't arrived yet. Give me a hand with this filing cabinet. We're going to need it." A free sample copy of the current issue of "Fantasy-Times' 1 , the 87 Isaac Asimov. Doubleday  Co., Inc., 2.95 T his is a tour-de-force by one of science fiction's best-known authors and, as far as I know, his first venture into time travel. It's a truly fascinating opus, but I don't envy poor Asimov the tremendous job of working out the paradoxes inherent in any time story, particularly the one he chose. I doubt that there is one reasoning being who hasn't been tempted by the thought of being able to go back and alter one's past in order to avoid mistakes or tragedy. This is the basis of Asimov's story, though on a cosmic scale. A society of so-called Eternals has the power to alter the mainstream of time to eliminate unwanted features from their position in Eternity, a sort of pseudo-time that exists simultaneously from the beginning of time travel in the 27th Century through the Hidden Century, up to about the 112,000th Century. By means of the device of phsio-time, time in Eternity is concurrent. 88 I must admit that the concepts became a bit bewildering now and then, but Asimov didn't stoop to take the easy way out to tell his story and that calls for literary courage. The hero is a Technician, the class of Eternals whose duty it is to compute the Minimum Necessary Change required to alter satisfactorily a given time sequence and to put the change into effect at the proper instant of Time and millimeter of Space. Their social status is comparable to that of hangman among their associates because of the widespread dislocation and annihilation of eras that their changes entail. Do you realize what a monkeywrench a guy like that could be if he developed a grudge? Asimov does. by H. Chandler Elliot. Gnome Press , Inc., 3.00  that this book, like olives, is to be either liked or disliked, nothing in between. It revolves about a 40th Century so-called Freeman, one of the mindless masses, who raises himself to the level of the ruling Hierarchy by dint of his dissatisfaction with Status Quo. civilized survivors, the Polynesians, assuming the Brown Man's Burden, have organized a world society based on freedom from want, the duties of the Freeman multitudes being reproduction and food production only, until every possible acre is tilled and progress stultified at story time. Our hero single-handedly overturns the whole shootin' match, which is all right by me, but somehow he can't stick to straightforward action and deliberation. Scattered throughout are enough parenthetical asides to make a script of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The blurb says this is a beautifully written book. True enough, but Chandler has overdone a good thing. Rinehart  Co., Inc., 2.75 meant this to be a sequel to his The Time Masters, even though it's a follow-up in time and has two characters common to each. I'm sure he could have done his story just as well without Gilbert and Shirley Nash, but I must confess that I sort of go for them myself. Especially Shirley. Telepathy with a kiss -- wow ! Who cares if it's a one-way communication? And as for Gilbert have 89 you ever heard of Gilgamesh, the guy that legend says has lived for ten thousand years? Got it? The story itself concerns a series of Time Bombs , in the literal sense, blowing the bejabbers out of several high-ranking members of the fanatical Sons of America, or Ben's Boys, as they call themselves, Lt. Danforth of the bomb squad of the Illinois police spots an unusual pattern in the explosions, and even though canned as a scapegoat, continues his investigations on his own, with the blessings and unofficial aid of Mr. Ramsey, the telepathin-residence of the Illinois Security Police. Tucker has a beautiful little twist in store at the end that might catch you as flat-footed as it did me. drew North Gnome Press, Inc. 2.50 ing dust jackets before I dig into the meat of the stories, I was pretty well scared by the lurid recap. Funny thing, in resume the story sounds as amateurishly blud-and-thunderish as the blurb come-on hints, but in actuality, though unpretentious space opera, it makes good adventure reading for a couple of carefree hours. The crew of a Trader, a spacetub comparable to tramp steamers, bids for and wins the rights to a D-class planet. In bidding, though, the crew has pooled all their money and have none left for equipment and supplies. A wealthy amateur archeologist puts up the money and brings his scientific helpers along. When it turns out that he isn't really what he seems I told you it sounds pretty bad. The "Sargasso" part of the title alludes to the Earthly Sea of Lost Ships, intimating that the planet appears to be a graveyard of spaceships. That, plus the fact that it contains the first identifiable artifacts of the Forerunners, an unknown race that had space travel way back when, makes the purchased planet a pretty valuable hunk of real estate. The ending was a bit on the abrupt side, but since the cover says "A Dane Thorsen-Solar Queen Adventure," simple deduction should prove this to be the first of a series. Elementary, my dear Flotsam. Philip Wilding. Philosophical Library. 2.75 land for an American firm. It does not specify whether the author likewise is British, but that would be my guess, even though 90 the Earth locale is New Mexico and Old Mexico and the protagonists American. Regardless of nationality, Wilding deserves plaudits for perfecting a particularly annoying device of "putting everything" in "quotes" Having a "naturally" sensitive "stomach," I got "dizzy" from all this "stop-and-go" writing. The story concerns the preparations for and the actual flight to Venus, hewing close to this line while tossing out at every opportunity hints of sub-plots and sub-sub-plots that never materialize. Considering what the author has done with his chosen plot, maybe it would have been better -- but that's his business. After the Venusians have guided the Earth ship in to planetfall, the most interesting part, to say very little, occurs. Anyway, I must admit I never met more beautiful characters -- not a single plain, ordinary-looking one, even among the Venusians, without whose "help" this "book" would never have been "written." Dutton  Co., Inc., 2.50 T HE author has quite a background in aviation, according to the jacket. This is apparent in the story also. However, in spite of what should have been a basically tense plot, all the author's dramatic and tragic situations fall flat. But his inventiveness is commendable, particularly the symbiosis between the Martian and the oxygen-producing algae that live like hair on his body. The Martian has come to Earth seeking new and hardier strains of algae and lichens, since the native varieties are dying out for some obscure reason. His own mysteriously propelled ship has been destroyed on landing and he must return with Earth's first Martian expedition. Of course, since the Earth ship is destroyed on landing and return must be made by Martian ship, turnabout is fair play, isn't it? Well, of course it is. This is the third author this month who has figured out a way to get my nanny. He does it by liberally larding (and I Do mean "Lard") his story with italics. All I can "say" is, (wait) till next "month!"  shelf  91  Check your dictionary if you think "trap" is a simple and uncomplicated word    o r read this for another definition! of assistance . The situation is potentially dangerous , so come at once. It shows how right you were, Samish, old friend . I should never have trusted a T err an. They are a sly, ignorant, irresponsible race , just as you have always pointed out . Nor are they as stupid as they seem . I am beginning to believe that the slenderness of the Illustrated tentacle is not the only criterion of intelligence. What a sorry mess, Samish ! And the plan seemed so foolproof Ed Dailey saw a gleam of metal outside his cabin door, but he was still too sleepy to investigate. He had awakened shortly after daybreak and tiptoed outside for a glimpse at the weather. 92 It was unpromising. There had been a heavy rain during the night and water dripped from every leaf and branch of the surrounding forest. His station wagon had a drowned look and the dirt road leading up the mountainside was a foot-thick in mud. His friend Thurston came to the door in pajamas, his round face flushed with sleep and Buddha like in its placidity. "It always rains on the first day of a vacation," Thurston stated. "Rule of nature." "Might be a good day for trout," Dailey said. "ft might. But it is a better day for building a roaring fire in the fireplace and drinking hot buttered rum." 1  OR eleven years, they had been taking a short autumn vacation together, but for different reasons. Dailey had a romantic love for equipment. The clerks in New York's fancier sports shops hung expensive parkas on his high, stooped shoulders, parkas such as one would wear on the trail of the Abominable Snowman in the fastnesses of Tibet. They sold him ingenious little stoves that would burn through a hurricane and wickedly curved knives of the best Swedish steel. Dailey loved to feel a lean canteen against his side and a bluedsteel rifle over his shoulder. But the canteen usually contained rum and the rifle was used against nothing deadlier than tin cans. For in spite of his dreams, Dailey was a friendly man, with no malice toward bird or beast. His friend Thurston was overweight and short of wind, and burdened himself only with the lightest of fly rods and the smallest of shotguns. By the second week, he usually managed to steer the hunt to Lake Placid, to the cocktail lounges that were his true environment There, with an incredible knowledge of spoor and lair, he placidly hunted the pretty vacationing girls instead of the brown bear, the black bear, or the mountain deer. This mild exercise was more than adequate for two soft and successful businessmen on the wrong side of forty, and they returned to the city tanned and refreshed, with a new lease on life and a renewed tolerance for their wives. "Rum it is," Dailey said. "What's that?" He had noticed the gleam of metal near the cabin. Thurston walked over and poked the object with his foot. "Odd-looking thing." Dailey parted the grass and saw an open framework box about four feet square, constructed of metal strips, and 93 hinged on top. Written boldly on one of the strips was the single "Where did you buy that? Thurston asked. "I didn't" Dailey found a plastic tag attached to one of the metal strips. He pulled it loose and read: "Dear Friend, this is a new and revolutionary design in to the general public, we are giving you this model absolutely free! You will find it a unique and valuable device for the capture of small game, provided you follow precisely the directions on the other side. Good luck and good hunting!" "If this isn't the strangest thing," Dailey said. "Do you suppose it was left during the night?" "Who cares?" Thurston shrugged. "My stomach is rumbling. Let's make breakfast." "Aren't you interested in this?" "Not particularly. It's just another gadget. You've got a hundred like it. That bear trap from Abercrombie and Fitch. The jaguar horn from Battler's. The crocodile lure from -- " "I've never seen a trap like this," Dailey mused. "Pretty clever advertising, just to leave it here." "They'll bill you for it eventually," Thurston said cynically. "I'm going to make breakfast. You'll wash the dishes." turned the tag over and read the other side. and anchor it to any convenient Press Button One on the base. seconds and press Button Two. press Button Three to deactivclosed at all times except when the principle of Osmotic Section "What won't they think of next?" Dailey said admiringly. "Breakfast is ready," Thurston called. "First help me set the trap." Thurston, dressed now in Bermuda shorts and a loud sport shirt, came out and peered at the trap dubiously. "Do you really think we should fool with it?" "Of course. Maybe we can catch a fox." "What on Earth would we do with a fox?" Thurston demanded. "Turn it loose," Dailey said. "The fun is in the catching. Here, help me lift it." 94 The trap was surprisingly heavy. Together they dragged it fifty yards from the cabin and tied the chain to a young pine tree. Dailey pushed the first button and the trap glowed faintly. Thurston backed away anxiously. After five seconds, Dailey pressed the second button. The forest dripped and squirrels chattered in the treetops and the long grass rustled faintly. The trap lay quietly beside the tree, its open metal framework glowing faintly. "Come in," Thurston said. "The eggs are undoubtedly cold." Dailey followed him back to the cabin, glancing over his shoulder at the trap. It lay in the forest, silent and waiting. Samish, where are you? My need is becoming increasingly urgent. Unbelievable as it will sound, my little planetoid is being pulled apart before my very eyes! You are my oldest friend, Samish , the companion of my youth, the best man at my mating, and a friend of Fregl as well . 'm counting on you. Don't delay too long. I have already beamed you the beginning of my story. The Terrans accepted my trap as a trap, nothing more. And they began to use it at once, with no thought to the possible consequences. I had counted on this. The fantastic curiosity of the Terr an species is well known . During this period, my wife was crawling gaily around the planetoid, redecorating our hutch and enjoying the change from city life. Everything was going well explained in pedantic detail why a trap could not function unless it had an opening to admit the prey. Dailey smiled and spoke of osmotic section. Thurston insisted that there was no such thing. When the dishes were washed and dried, they walked over the wet, springy grass to the trap. "Look!" Dailey shouted. Something was in the trap, something about the size of a rabbit, but colored a bright green. Its eyes were extended on stalks and it clicked lobsterlike claws at them. "No more rum before breakfast," Thurston said. "Starting tomorrow. Hand me the canteen." Dailey gave it to him and Thurston poured down a generous double shot. Then he looked at the trapped creature again and went, "Brr!" "I think it's a new species," Dailey said. "New species of nightmare. Can't we just go to Lake Placid and forget about it?" 95 96 "No, of course not. I've never seen anything like this in my zoology books. It could be completely unknown to science. What will we keep it in?" "Keep it in?" "Well, certainly. It can't stay in the trap. We'll have to build a cage and then find out what it eats." Thurston's face lost some of its habitual serenity. "Now look here, Ed. I'm not sharing my vacation with anything like that. It's probably poisonous. I'm sure it has dirty habits." He took a deep breath and continued. "There's something unnatural about that trap. It's -- inhuman!" Dailey grinned. "I'm sure they said that about Ford's first car and Edison's incandescent lamp. This trap is just another example of American progress and knowhow." "I'm all for progress," Thurston stated firmly, "but in other directions. Can't we just -- " He looked at his friend's face and stopped talking. Dailey had an expression that Cortez might have worn as he approached the summit of a peak in Darien. "Yes," Dailey said after a while. "I think so." "What?" "Tell you later. First let's build a cage and set the trap again." Thurston groaned, but followed him. W HY haven't you come yet , Samish? Don't you appreciate the seriousness of my situation? Haven't 1 made it clear how much depends upon you? Think of your old friend! Think of the lustrous-skinned Fregl , for whose sake I got into this mess . Communicate with me, at least , The Terrans used the trap, which , of course , was not a trap at all, but a matter transmitter . I had the other end concealed on the planetoid, and fed into it three small animals which I found in the garden . The Terrans removed them from the transmitter each time -- for what purpose, I couldn't guess. But a Terran will keep anything. After the third beast passed through and had not been returned, I knew that all was in readiness. So I prepared for the fourth and final sending, the all-important one, for which all else was mere preparation. They were standing in the low shed attached to their cabin. Thurston looked with distaste at the three cages made of heavy mosquito netting. Inside each cage was a creature. "Ugh," Thurston said. "They smell." In the first cage was the original capture, the stalk-eyed, lobster-clawed beast. Next came a 97 s bird with three sets of scaly wings. Finally there was something that looked like a snake, except that it had a head at each end. Within the cages were bowls of milk, plates of minced meat, vegetables, grasses, bark -- all untouched. "They just won't eat anything," Dailey said. "Obviously they're sick," Thurston told him. "Probably germ carriers. Can't we get rid of them, Ed?" Dailey looked squarely at his friend. "Tom, have you ever desired fame?" "What?" "Fame. The knowledge that your name will go down through the ages." "I am a businessman," Thurston said. "I never considered the possibility." "Never?" T hurston smiled foolishly. "Well, what man hasn't? What did you have in mind?" "These creatures," Dailey said, "are unique. We will present them to a museum " "Ah?" Thurston queried interestedly. "The Dailey-Thurston exhibit of creatures hitherto unknown." "They might name the species after us," Thurston said. "After all, we discovered them." "Of course they would! Our names would go down with Livingstone, Audubon and Teddy Roosevelt." "Hmm." Thurston thought deeply. "I suppose the Museum of Natural History would be the place. I'm sure they'd arrange an exhibit -- " . "I wasn't thinking merely in terms of an exhibit," Dailey said. "I was thinking more of a wing -- the Dailey-Thurston Wing" Thurston looked at his friend in amazement. There were depths to Dailey that he had never imagined. "But, Ed, we have only three of them. We can't equip a wing with three exhibits." "There must be more where these came from. Let's examine the trap." This time the trap contained a creature almost three feet tall, with a small green head and a forked tail. It had at least a dozen thick cilia, all of them waving furiously. "The rest were quiet," Thurston said apprehensively. "Maybe this one is dangerous." "We will handle it with nets," Dailey replied decisively. "And then I want to get in touch with the museum." After considerable work, they transferred the thing to a cage. The trap was reset and Dailey sent the following wire to the Museum of Natural History: 98 Then, at Thurston's insistence, he wired several impeccable character references to the museum, so they wouldn't think he was a crank. That afternoon, Dailey explained his theory to Thurston. There was, he felt sure, a primeval pocket isolated in this section of the Adirondacks. Within it were creatures which had survived from prehistoric times. They had never been captured because, due to their great antiquity, they had acquired a high degree of experience and caution. But the trap -- operating on the new principle of osmotic section -- had proved to be beyond their experience. "The Adirondacks have been pretty well explored," Thurston objected. "Not well enough, apparently," Dailey said, with irrefutable logic. Later, they returned to the trap. It was empty. Samish. Kindly step up the volume . Or, better still, get here in person. Whafs the use of beaming me, in the spot I'm in? The situation is steadily becoming more and more desperate . What, Samish? The rest of the story? It's obvious enough. After three animals had passed through the transmitter, I knew I was ready. Now was the time to tell my wife . Accordingly , I asked her to crawl into the garden with me . She was quite pleased . "Tell me, my dear," she said , "has something been bothering you of late ?" "Um  " said L " Have I displeased you?" she asked . "1 Vo, sweetheart" I said. " You have tried your best, but it just isn't good enough. 1 am going to take a new mate" She stood motionless, her cilia swaying in confusion. Then she exclaimed , t( Fregl!" "Yes" I told her , " the glorious Fregl has consented to share my hutch." " But you forget we were mated for life." " I know. A pity you insisted on that formality " And with one clever shove , I pushed her into the matter transmitter. Samish , you should have seen her expression! Her cilia writhed, she screamed, and was gone . I was free at last! A little nauseous, but free! Free to mate with the splendid Fregl! Now you can appreciate the full perfection of the scheme. It 99 was necessary to secure the Ter rans cooperation, since a matter transmitter must be manipulated from both ends . I had disguised it as a trap , because Terrans will believe anything . And as my master stroke, I sent them my wife. Let them try to live with her! I never could! Foolproof, absolutely foolproof. My wife's body would never turn up, because the acquisitive Terrans keep what they get . No one could ever prove anything . And then, Samish , then it happened T HE cabin's air of rustic serenity was gone. Tire tracks crossed and recrossed the muddy road. The grounds were littered with flash bulbs, empty cigarette packs, candy wrappers, pencil stubs and bits of paper. But now, after a hectic few hours, everyone was gone. Only a sour taste remained. Dailey and Thurston stood beside the empty trap, staring hopelessly at it. "What do you suppose is wrong with the damned thing?" Dailey asked, giving the trap a frustrated kick. "Maybe there's nothing else to capture," Thurston suggested. "There has to be! Why would it take four completely alien beasts and then no more?" He knelt beside the trap and said bit100 ter ly, "Those stupid museum people! And those reporters!" "In a way," Thurston said cautiously, "you can't blame them -- " "Can't I? Accusing me of a hoax! Did you hear them, Tom? They asked me how I performed the skin grafts !" "It's too bad the animals were all dead by the time the museum people got here," Thurston said. "That did look suspicious." "The idiotic creatures wouldn't eat. Was that my fault? And those newspaper people Really, you would think the metropolitan newspapers would hire more intelligent reporters." "You shouldn't have promised to capture more animals," Thurston said. "It was when the trap didn't produce that they suspected a hoax." "Of course I promised! How should I guess the trap would stop with that fourth capture? And why did they laugh when I told them about the osmotic section system of capture?" "They never heard of it," Thurston answered wearily. "No one ever heard of it. Let's go to Lake Placid and forget the whole thing," "No! This thing must work again. It must!" Dailey primed and activated the trap and stared at it for several seconds. Then he opened the hinged top. Dailey stuck his hand into the trap and let out a scream. "My hand! It's gone!" He leaped backward. "No, it's not," Thurston assured him. Dailey examined both hands, rubbed them together and insisted, "My hand disappeared inside that trap." "Now, now," Thurston said soothingly. "A little rest in Lake Placid will do you a world of good -- " Dailey stood over the trap and pushed in his hand. It disappeared. Fie reacher farther in and watched his arm vanish up to the shoulder. He looked at Thurston with a smile of triumph. "Now I see how it works," he said. "Those animals didn't come from the Adirondacks at all!" "Where did they come from?" "From wherever my hand is! Want more, do they? Call me a liar? I'll show them!" "Ed! Don't do it! You don't know what -- " But Dailey had already stepped feet-first into the trap. His feet disappeared. Slowly he lowered his body until only his head was visible. "Wish me luck," he said. "Ed!" Dailey held his nose and plunged out of sight mediately, it will be too late! I must stop beaming you. The enormous Terr an has completely ransacked my little planetoid , He has shoved everything , living or dead , through the transmitter . My home is in ruins . And now he is tearing down my hutch! Samish, this monster means to capture me as a specimen! There's no time to lose! Samish, what can be keeping you? You, my oldest Mend What, Samish? What are you saying? You can't mean it! Not you and Fregl! Reconsider, old Mend! Remember our Mendship! 7000 fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at 50 to 90 under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon RdL, 2, Box 86F Verona, Penna. 101 Bodyguard When overwhelming danger is constantly present , of course a man is entitled to have a bodyguard . Tfte annoyance was that he had to do it himself  and his body would not cooperate exceptionally handsome, and he knew it. So did the light-haired girl at his side, and so did the nondescript man in the gray suit who was watching them from a booth in the corner. Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the humans present were resentful, for he handled himself 102 103 consciously and arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was almost ordinary-looking. As for the extraterrestrials -- it was a free bar -- they were merely amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably hideous. Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a short man standing next to the pair -- young, as most men and women were in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though not death -- but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century. The drink he had been raising to his lips splashed all over his clothing; the glass shattered at his feet. Now he was not only a rather ugly little man, but also a rather ridiculous one -- or at least he felt he was, which was what mattered. "Sorry, colleague," Gabe said lazily. "All my fault. You must let me buy you a replacement" He gestured to the bartender. "Another of the same for my fellow-man here." The ugly man dabbed futilely at his dripping trousers with a cloth hastily supplied by the management. "You must allow me to pay your deanery bill," Gabe said, taking out his wallet and extracting several credit notes without seeming to look at them. "Here, have yourself a new suit on me." You could use one was implied. And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance, was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's handsome face.  was laid upon his arm. "Don't do that," the nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. "You wouldn't want to go to jail because of him." The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces now ranged against him -- including his own belated prudence -- were too strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to smash back, and now it was too late for that. Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. "So, it's you again?" The man in the gray suit smiled. "Who else in any world would stand up for you?" "I should think you'd have 104 given up by now. Not that I mind having you around, of course," Gabriel added too quickly. "You do come in useful at times, you know." "So you don't mind having me around?" The nondescript man smiled again. "Then what are you running from, if not me? You can't be running from yourself -- you lost yourself a while back, remember?" Gabe ran a hand through his thick blond hair. "Come on, have a drink with me, fellow-man, and let's let bygones be bygones. I owe you something -- I admit that. Maybe we can even work this thing out." "I drank with you once too often," the nondescript man said. "And things worked out fine, didn't they? For you." His eyes studied the other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness  at the lips, and were not pleased with what they saw. "Watch yourself, colleague," he warned as he left "Soon you might not be worth the saving." "Who was that, Gabe?" the girl asked. He shrugged. "I never saw him before in my life." Of course, knowing him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he happened to have been telling the truth. extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions, reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to the letter combination bodyguard, he went out into the street. If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for years. The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. "Where to, fellow-man?" the driver asked. "I'm new in the parish," the other man replied and let it hang there. "Oh? Females? Narcophagi? Thrill-mills?" But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head. "Games?" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was wanted by then. "Dice? Roulette? Farjeen?" "Is there a good zarquil game in town?" The driver moved so he could T05 see the face of the man behind him in the teleview. A very ordinary face. "Look, colleague, why don't you commit suicide? It's cleaner and quicker." "I can't contact your attitude," the passenger said with a thin smile. "Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it happens, there's a well, thei e's no experience to match it at a thrill-mill." He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy. "Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?" The driver spat out of the window. "If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em." "But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a commission, wouldn't it?" the other man asked coolly. "Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though." "I have sufficient funds. I also have a gun." "You're the dictator," the driver agreed sullenly. II in early fall. Gabe Lockard was in no condition to drive the helicar. However, he was stubborn. "Let me take the controls, honey," the light-haired girl urged, but he shook his handsome head. "Show you I can do something 'sides look pretty," he said thickly, referring to an earlier and not amicable conversation they had held, and of which she still bore the reminder on one thickly made-up cheek. Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist. To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames. Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him 106 speculatively. "My guardian angel," he mumbled -- shock had sobered him a little, but not enough. He sat up. "Guess Fm not hurt or you'd have thrown me back in." "And that's no joke," the fat man agreed. The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall that he had not been alone. "How about Helen? She on course?" "Seems to be," the fat man said. "You all right, miss?" he asked, glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern. "Mrs.," Gabriel corrected. "Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel Lockard," he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl. "Pretty bauble, isn't she?" "I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard," the fat man said, looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. "I hope you'll be worthy of the name." The light given off by the flaming car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too. Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them. There were no public illuminators this far out -- even in town the lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and beginning to slide downhill Gabe gave a short laugh, for no reason that she could see. she had encountered the fat man before, which was, of course, absurd. She had an excellent memory for faces and his was not included in her gallery. The girl pulled her thin jacket closer about her chilly body. "Aren't you going to introduce your -- your friend to me, Gabe?" "I don't know who he is," Gabe said almost merrily, "except that he's no friend of mine. Do you have a name, stranger?" "Of course I have a name." The fat man extracted an identification card from his wallet and read it. "Says here I'm Dominic Bianchi, and Dominic Bianchi is a retail milgot dealer , Only he isn't a retail milgot dealer any more; the poor fellow went bankrupt a couple of weeks ago, and now he isn't , anything " "You saved our lives," the girl said. "I'd like to give you some token of my -- of our appreciation." Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only casually, as a byproduct of some larger scheme, 107 and her appreciation held little gratitude. The fat man shook his head without rancor. "I have plenty of money, thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard Come' he addressed her husband, "if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the future! Sometimes' he added musingly, "I almost wish you would let something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?" Gabriel shivered. "I'll be careful' he vowed. "I promise -- I'll be careful." When he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night, the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification. Perhaps -- and this was the most likely hypothesis -- he just didn't care. Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course -- so much so that there were many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of "crimes against nature." Actually the phrase was more appropriate to zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly applied. And this was one crime -- for it was crime in law as well as nature -- in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator; otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse. lously expensive; it had to be to make it profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs. Which was why they came to Terra to make profits -- 103 there has never been big money in musical chairs as such. When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent -- as they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the law -- they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons could kill the Vinzz or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet. The taxi driver took the fat man to one of the rather seedy locales in which the zarquil games were usually found, for the Vinzz attempted to conduct their operations with as much unobtrusiveness as was possible. But the front door swung open on an interior that lacked the opulence of the usual Vinoz set-up; it was downright shabby, the dim olive light hinting of squalor rather than forbidden pleasures. That was the trouble in these smaller towns -- you ran greater risks of getting involved in games where the players had not been carefully screened. The Vinoz games were usually clean, because that paid off better, but, when profits were lacking, the Vinzz were capable of sliding off into darkside practices. Naturally the small-town houses were more likely to have trouble in making ends meet, because everybody in the parish knew everybody else far too well. The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in coming to such desolate, off-trail places -- hoping that eventually disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed too logical for the man he was haunting. However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. "One?" the small green creature in the slightly frayed robe asked. "One," the fat man answered. Ill " down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile patterns. The stranger, a thin young I09 man with delicate, angular features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. "Only weighted out," he muttered, "hell be all right. Whatever possessed you two to come out to a place like this?" "I really think Gabriel must be possessed" the girl said, mostly to herself. "I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse. It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?" "It does indeed," the stranger agreed, coughing a little. It was growing colder and, on this world, the cities had no domes to protect them from the climate, because it was Earth and the air was breathable and it wasn't worth the trouble of fixing up. The girl looked closely at him. "You look different, but you are the same man who pulled us out of that aircar crash, aren't you? And before that the man in the gray suit? And before that ?" The young man's cheekbones protruded as he smiled. "Yes, I'm all of them." "Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people who go around changing their bodies like -- like hats?" Automatically she reached to adno just the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that. j "f E smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking. "But why do you do it? Why ! Do you like it? Or is it because of Gabriel?" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was included in its scope. "Do you want to keep him from recognizing you; is that it?" "Ask him." "He won't tell me; he never tells me anything. We just keep running. I didn't recognize it as running at first, but now I realize that's what we've been doing ever since we were married. And running from you, I think?" There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she wondered how much control he had over a body that, though secondor thirdor fourthhand, must be new to him. How well could he make it respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not, she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so casually. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat -- of fur taken from some animal who had lived and died lightyears away -- more closely about herself. The thin young man began to cough again. Overhead a tiny star seemed to detach itself from the pale flat disk of the Moon and hurl itself upward -- one of the interstellar ships embarking on its long voyage to distant suns. She wished that somehow she could be on it, but she was here, on this solitary old world in a barren solar system, with her unconscious husband and a strange man who followed them, and it looked as if here she would stay all three of them would stay "If you're after Gabriel, planning to hurt him," she asked, "why then do you keep helping him?" "I am not helping him. And he knows that." "You'll change again tonight, won't you?" she babbled. "You always change after you meet us? I think I'm beginning to be able to identify you now, even when you're wearing a new body; there's something about you that doesn't change." "Too bad he got married," the young man said. "I could have followed him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway," he added, his voice less impersonal, "for your sake." She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an outsider; he was part of their small family group -- as long as she had known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect that he was even more closely involved than that. "Why must you change again?" she persisted, obliquely approaching the subject she feared. "You have a pretty good body there. Why run the risk of getting a bad one?" "This isn't a good body," he said. "It's diseased. Sure, nobody's supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty of foliage." "How -- long will it last you?" "Four or five months, if I'm careful." He smfled. "But don't worry, if that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be expensive -- that's all. 111 Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then it was tough on me too, wasn't it?" "But how did you get into this pursuit?" she asked again, "And why are you doing it?" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should know him better than most. "Ask your husband." The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate, snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name, and stirred it with his toe. "I'd better call a cab -- he might freeze to death." He signaled and a cab came. "Tell him, when he comes to," he said to the girl as he and the driver lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, "that I'm getting pretty tired of this." He stopped for a long spell of coughing. "Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't, in the long run, be most beneficial for my face."  personally, in English that was perfect except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, "but I'm afraid you cannot play." "Why not?" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes. 112 "You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house." "But I have plenty of money." The young man coughed. The Vinzz shrugged. "I'll pay you twice the regular fee." The green one shook his head. "Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This game is really clean." "In a town like this?" "That is the reason we can afford to be honest." The Vinzz' tendrils quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been velvetgreen moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung with him. "We do a lot of business here," he said unnecessarily, for the whole set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by no means poor when it came to worldly goods. "Why don't you try another town where they're not so particular?" The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game. He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration. And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him? Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original casing had? He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl, seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of information. antennae with another of his kind. Now they detached, and the first approached the man once more. "There is, as it happens, a body available for a private game," he lisped. "No questions to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good health." The man hesitated. "But unable to pass the screening?" he murmured aloud. "A criminal then." The green one's face -- if you could call it a face -- remained impassive. "Male?" "Of course," the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had also never been a recorded instance of humans' and extraterrestrials' exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or biological impossibility, no one could tell. It might merely be prudence on the Vinzz' part -- if it had ever been proved that an alien life-form had "desecrated" a human body, Earthmen would clamor for war for on this planet humanity held its self-bestowed purity of birthright dear -- and the Vinzz, despite being unquestionably the stronger, were pragmatic pacifists. It had been undoubtedly some rabid member of the anti-alien groups active on Terra who had started the rumor that the planetary slogan of Vinau was, "Don't beat 'em; cheat 'em." 113 "It would have to be something pretty nuclear for the other guy to take such a risk." The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "How much?" "Thirty thousand credits." "Why, that's three times the usual rate!" "The other will pay five times the usual rate." "Oh, all right," the delicate young man gave in. It was a terrific risk he was agreeing to take, because, if the other was a criminal, he himself would, upon assuming the body, assume responsibility for all the crimes it had committed. But there was nothing else he could do. mirror and found he had a fine new body; tall and strikingly handsome in a dark, coarse-featured way. Nothing to match the one he had lost, in his opinion, but there were probably many people who might find this one preferable. No identification in the pockets, but it wasn't necessary; he recognized the face. Not that it was a very famous or even notorious one, but the dutchman was a careful student of the "wanted" fax that had decorated public buildings from time immemorial, for he was ever mindful of the possibility that he might one day find himself trapped unwittingly in the body of one of 114 the men depicted there. And he knew that this particular man, though not an important criminal in any sense of the word, was one whom the police had been ordered to burn on sight. The abolishing of capital punishment could not abolish the necessity for self-defense, and the man in question was not one who would let himself be captured easily, nor whom the police intended to capture easily. This might be a lucky break for me after all , the new tenant thought, as he tried to adjust himself to the body. It, too, despite its obvious rude health, was not a very comfortable fit. I can do a lot with a hulk like this. And maybe Vm cleverer than the original owner; maybe Ftl be able to get away with it. IV "don't try to fool me! I know you too well. And I know you have that man's -- the real Gabriel Lockard's -- body " She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror. Lockard -- Lockard's body, at any rate -- sat up and felt his unshaven chin. "That what he tell you?" "No, he didn't tell me anything really -- just suggested I ask you whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to see his body spoiled." "It is a pretty good body, isn't it?" Gabe flexed softening muscles and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved at having someone with whom to share his secret. "Not as good as it must have been," the girl said, turning and looking at him without admiration. "Not if you keep on the way you're coursing. Gabe, why don't you ?" "Give it back to him, eh?" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly, "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be his wife then. That would be nice -- a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little more than you deserve?" "I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe," she said truthfully enough, for she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. "Of course I'd go with you," she went on, now knowing she lied, "when you got your old body back." Sure, she thought, Fd keep going with you to farjeen houses and thrill-mills . Actually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had rej fused to go with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash that experience from her mind or her body. "You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?" she went on. "You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose, does he?" "I don't want to know!" he spat. "I wouldn't want it if I could get it back. Whoever it adhered to probably killed himself as soon as he looked in a mirror." He swung long legs over the side of his bed. "Christ, anything would be better than that! You can't imagine what a hulk I had!" "Oh, yes, I can," she said incautiously. "You must have had a body to match your character. Pity you could only change one." struck her right on the mouth. Although he hadn't used his full strength, the blow was painful nonetheless. She could feel the red of her lipstick become mixed with a warmer, liquid red that trickled slowly down her freshly powdered chin. She wouldn't cry, because he liked that, but crumpled to the ground and lay still. If, experience had taught her, she pretended to be hurt, he wouldn't hit her again. Only sometimes it was hard to remember that at the actual moment of hurt and indignity. He was too ns  I afraid of prison -- a tangible prison. And perhaps, to do him credit, he didn't want to deface his own property. He sat down on the edge of the bed again and lit a mil got stick. "Oh, get up, Helen. You know I didn't hit you that hard." "Did you have to beat him up to get him to change bodies?" she asked from the floor. "No." He laughed reminiscently. "I just got him drunk. We were friends, so it was a cinch. He was my only friend; everybody else hated me because of my appearance." His features contorted. "What made him think he was so damn much better than other people that he could afford to like me? Served him right for being so noble." She stared at the ceiling -- it was so old its very fabric was beginning to crack -- and said nothing. "He didn't even realize what he had here -- " Lockard tapped his broad chest with complacence -- "until it was too late. Took it for granted. Sickened me to see him taking the body for granted when I couldn't take mine that way. People used to shrink from me. Girls She sat up. "Give me a milgot, Gahe" He lighted one and handed it to her, "For Christ's sake, Helen, I gave him more than he had a 116 right to expect. I was too goddamn noble myself. I was wellmilled; I didn't have to leave half of my holdings in my own name -- I could have transferred them all to his. If I had, then he wouldn't have had the folio to hound me all over this planet or to other planets, if I'd had the nerve to shut myself up on a spaceship, knowing he probably would be shut up on it with me." He smiled. "Of course he won't hurt me; that's the one compensation. Damage me, and he damages himself." "But it's your life he saves, too," she reminded him. "My life wouldn't ever have been in danger if it hadn't been for this continual persecution -- it's driving me out of this dimension! I planned to start a new life with this body," he pleaded, anxious foi; belief and, as a matter of fact, she believed him; almost everybody has good intentions and there was no reason to except even such a one as Gabriel Lockard, or whatever he was originally named. "It was my appearance that got me mixed up," he went on. "Given half a chance I could have straightened out -- gone to Proxima Centauri, maybe, and then out to one of the frontier planets. Made something of myself up there. But nobody ever gave me a chance. Now, as long as he follows me, there's nothing I can do except run and try to hide and know all the time I can't escape -- I'm already in thetrap." "What can he do if you stay and face him?" "I don't know -- that's the hell of it. But he's smart. Somehow he'll lure me into another game, I don't know how, but that must be what he has in mind. What else could it be?" "What else indeed?" Helen asked, smiling up at the ceiling. fingers and he took another, "It'd take time for him to arrange any kind of private game set-up, though, and as long as I keep on the move, he won't be able to create anything. Unless he runs into a floating zarquil game." He smiled mirthlessly. "And he couldn't. Too much machinery, I understand Lucky he doesn't seem to have connections, the way I have," Lockard boasted. "I have connections all over the goddamn planet. Transferred them when I transferred my holdings." She got up, seated herself on the vanity bench, and took up a brush, which she ran absently over the pale hair that shimmered down to her paler shoulders. "So we keep running all over the planet What would you do if I left you, Gabriel?" "Kill you," he said without hesitation. "Slowly. Even if I have to put this precious hulk of mine in jeopardy. And you wouldn't like that. Neither would your boy friend." "Stop calling him my -- " "Wait a minute -- maybe there is an escape hatch!" His blue eyes sharpened unbecomingly. "He can't kill me, but there's nothing to stop my killing him." "How about the police?" She tried to speak calmly as she passed the brush up and down, sometimes not even touching her hair. "The body you have won't be any good to you with them looking for it. And you're not a professional exterminator, Gabe -- you wouldn't be able to get away with it." "I can hire somebody else to do the killing. Remember I still have plenty of foliage. Maybe I didn't leave him exactly half of my property, but, what the hell, I left him enough." "How will you recognize him?" she asked, half-turning, fearfully. "He'll have a new body, you know." "You'll recognize him, Helen -- you said you could." At that moment she could have wrapped her own hair tightly around her white throat and strangled herself; she was so appalled by her own witless treachery. He dragged her to her feet. 117 "Aah, moonbeam, you know I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just that this whole crazy pattern's driving me out of this world. Once I get rid of that life-form, you'll see, I'll be a different man." As his arms tightened around her, she wondered what it would be like, a different man in the same body. V " I would do a thing like that?" the little lawyer asked apprehensively, not meeting the bland blue eyes of the man who faced him across the old-fashioned flat-top desk. It was an even more outmoded office than most, but that did not necessarily indicate a low professional status; lawyers were great ones for tradition expressed in terms of outof-date furniture. As for the dust that lay all over despite the airconditioning well, that was inescapable, for Earth was a dusty planet. "Oh, not you yourself personally, of course," Gabriel Lockard -- as the false one will continue to be called, since the dutchman had another name at the moment -- said. "But you know how to put me in touch with someone who can." "Nonsense. I don't know who gave you such libelous information, sir, but I must ask you to leave my office before I call -- " "It was Pat Ortiz who gave me the information," Lockard said softly. "He also told me a lot of other interesting things about you, Gorman." Gorman paled. "I'm a respectable attorney." "Maybe you are now; maybe not. This isn't the kind of town that breeds respectability. But you certainly weren't sunny side up when Ortiz knew you. And he knew you well." The lawyer licked his lips. "Give me a chance, will you?" Lockard flushed. "Chance! Everybody rates a chance but me. Can't you see, I am giving you a chance. Get me somebody to follow my pattern, and I promise you Ortiz won't talk." Gorman slipped the plastic shells from his face and rubbed the pale watery eyes underneath. "But how can I get you a man to do the thing you want done? I have no connections like that." "I'm sure you can make the right connections. Take your time about it, though; I'm in no hurry. I'm planning to adhere to this locale for a while." "How about this man you want put out of the way?" Gorman suggested hopefully. "How can you be sure he won't leave?" Gabriel laughed. "He'll stay as long as I do." 1 18 ify The little lawyer took a deep breath. "Mr. Lockard, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I really cannot do anything for you." Gabe rose. "Okay," he said softly. "If that's your pattern, I'll just put a call through to Ortiz." He turned to go. 'Wait a minute!" the lawyer cried. Lockard stopped. "Well?" Gorman swallowed. "Possibly I may be able to do something for you, after all I just happened to have heard Jed Carmody is in town." Gabriel looked at him inquiringly. "Oh I thought you might have heard the name. He's a killer, I understand, a professional exterminator on the run right now. But this is his headquarters -- I'm told -- and he probably would come here. And he might be short on folio. Naturally, I've never had any dealings with him myself." "Naturally," Gabe mocked. "But I'll see what I can do." Gorman's voice was pleading. "You'll wait, Mr. Lockard, won't you? It may be a little while before I can find out where he is. This isn't -- " his voice thinned -- "at all my type of pattern, you know." "I'll wait a reasonable length of time." The door closed behind him. Descending pneumo tubes hissed outside. The little lawyer rose and went to the window -- a flat expanse of transparent plastic set immovably into the wall of the building, an old building, an old town, an old planet. As he watched the street below, a faint half-smile curved his almost feminine mouth. He went back to the desk and punched a code on the vidiphone. the little cafe with the gold letters for humans only embedded in the one-way glass front; this was a town that adhered rigidly to the ancient privileges of the indigenous species. He entered as the shrillness of a vidiphone bell cut through the babble inside without in any way checking it. After a moment, his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and he could see his wife waiting at a table near the entrance, daintily peeling a tigi fruit. "Well," she asked as she put a plump pink section into her mouth, "did you hire your killer?" "Shhh, not so loud!" He threw himself into the chair next to hers. "Do you want me to get into trouble? And I wouldn't put it past you," he continued without waiting for an answer. "Remember, it's your boy friend's body that gets into trouble." 119 "He's not my boy friend." A waiter beckoned from the vidiphone booth to someone sitting in the dark shadows at the rear of the restaurant. "Where is he?" Gabriel exclaimed suddenly. "He must be here somewhere. Tell me which he is, Helen?" His hand gripped her arm cruelly, as he swung her around on her chair to face each part of the room. "Is it that guy over there? That one? That one?" She could not repress a start of surprise as her eyes met those of the thin-featured young manentering the vidiphone booth. He returned her gaze with somber interest. Gabe relaxed. "So that's the one, eh? Not very formidable. Looks the way he always should have looked." He lit a milgot. "I'll get Gorman to tip off the zarquil boys -- only one game in this parish, I'm told -- that that lifeform's not to be allowed to play; I'll make any loss good out of my own pocket. That'll keep him onstage for the nonce. He won't leave to get himself fixed up somewhere else as long as I stay. And I'm going to stay to the bitter end." He smiled lovingly to himself. But it's not the right man , Helen thought gladly. He did manage to change , after all . Gabe has the wrong man . She felt a little sorry for the unknown and doomed individual who inhabited the delicate, angular body, but it was so close to death anyhow that the immediate threat didn't matter. And Gabriel -- the real Gabriel -- was safe. VI He emaciated young man entered Gorman's office and locked the door behind him with an electroseal. "Disembodiment," he identified himself. "So you did get a new body, Jed," the lawyer remarked affably, "Very good packaging. Makes you look like a poet or something." "Good as a disguise, maybe, but one hell of a lousy hulk." The young man hurled himself into the chair by the desk. Even Gorman winced at the cruel treatment accorded such obvious fragility. "Gimme a milgot, Les. This thing -- " he indicated his body with contempt -- "is shot to Polaris. Won't last more than a few months. Some bargain I got." Gorman lit a stick himself. "The guy who got your body didn't get such a bargain either," he murmured through a cloud of purple smoke. "At least he'll live. If he's lucky. I wish he'd hurry and get himself picked up, though, so I V 120 i could collect the folio and jet off. Can't go after it now. Hounds will be sniffing , after anybody gravitating around the place where I've stashed it until they're sure they have me. They don't know where the money is exactly, of course, or they'd soak it up, but they've got an idea of the general sector." "Want me to pick it up for you, Jed?" the lawyer asked, his pale, flickering eyes brushing across the young man's dark intense ones. "Oh, sure. All I need is for you to know where it is and all I'd see would be your rocket trail." The young man leaned across the expanse of littered steel. "Or do you know where it is, Les?" he asked softly. "Do you know where it is and are you just hibernating until I'm safely out of the way?" In spite of himself, Gorman could not help moving back. "Don't be a fool, Jed," he said in a voice that was several tones higher. "If I knew where if was well, you're not very frightening in your present embodiment, you know." "Don't be too sure of that, Gorman. And you were always yellow; anybody could frighten you." He began to laugh shrilly. "Hey, that's good. Get it? Any body, see?" The lawyer did not join in the mirth. "How are you fixed for cash?" he asked abruptly.  in a sardonic grin. "Why do you think I risked public communion with a darkside character like you, Les? I shot my wad making the shift. I could use a little loan. You know I have millions stashed away," the young man said angrily as Gorman remained silent. "I'll pay you as soon as the hounds take the chump who's leasing my hulk." "Maybe you can earn some money." Gorman toyed with a paperweight. "Did you get a look at that big blond guy in the cafe -- the one I told you about on the phone?" "Yeah. Nice life-form he had with him. I wouldn't mind being in that body." "Seems he wants somebody exterminated. And I told him I heard Jed Carmody was in the parish and might be interested." The young man sprang to his feet, furious. "You what?" "Turn your antigravs off. I told him Jed Carmody was in the parish. Are you Jed Carmody?" The other sat down and exhaled heavily. "You're on course -- I'm nobody just now." "Any identification come with the package?" "Naah, what'd you expect? But why tell anyone that Jed 121 Carmody's hitting the locality?" "I thought you might be interested in picking up a little freefalling foliage." The young man shook his head impatiently. "Risk having this hulk heated up for a half-credit crime? Don't be an alien, Gorman. I'm going to hit subsoil until this other life-form gets collected by the hounds." "Thought you might like to do it to help me out," Gorman murmured. The other man stared. "How do you fit into the pattern?" Gorman shrugged. "Oh, I get it: this guy's putting the barometer on you?" Gorman nodded, "Bad landing, counselor. But you don't seriously expect ? Hey!" The wide-set eyes glistened darkly. "I got it! Why don't you get this guy who's got my hulk to make the flight? Send somebody out to magnetize him like you thought he was the real Carmody, see?"  a moment; then shook his thin-haired head. "No reason to think the man is an extralegal." "Anyone who finds himself in my hulk damn well has to be if he wants to stay out of the sardine box Look, what's the first thing he's going to want to do when he finds out what he's been stuck with? Go to another parish and hop hulks, right? And he'll need plenty of foliage to do it." "Maybe he has money," Gorman suggested wearily. "No fuel lost finding out " The young man rubbed his hands together gleefully. "If he takes on the flight, though, see that he gets my flash, huh? Rosy up the picture." "Maybe he can kill whoever this Lockard has in mind without getting picked up by the police. Such things have happened; otherwise you wouldn't have been able to run around loose so long, Jed." "An amateur? Not a chance! Besides, just to make sure, little He stopped in the act of tapping his chest. "Say, I don't have a name, do I? What's a good epithet for me, Les? Something with class." The lawyer studied the pale, bony face for a moment or two. "How about John Keats?" he suggested. "Simple and appropriate," The other man thought. "Yeah, I like that. John Keats. Plain, but not like John Smith. Subtle. I'll buy it. Okay, so you think I'm going to take my view-finder off the fake Carmody? I'm going to adhere to that life-form closer than Mary's lamb. So when he knocks off whoever the other guy wants novaed, I can yell doggie. Then the hounds get him -- with 122 my flash on him and all, they'll never have the nebula of a notion that they don't have all of me I pick up the foliage and rock out to some place where I can buy me a new jewel case, no questions asked. Don't fret, Gorman -- you'll get your nibble. I've never played the game with you, have I?" Instead of answering, Gorman asked a question of his own. "Kind of hard on the other guy, isn't it?" "He rates it for sticking me with a piece of statuary like this. Look at it this way, Les -- in his own hulk he would've died; this way he's got a chance to live. Yeah, get him to make the flight, Les. You can charm the juice out of a lemon when you want to; it's your line of evil. And don't let on you know he's not the genuine article." "I won't," Gorman sighed. "I only hope I can persuade him to take on the flight. Don't forget it's important to me too, Jed -- uh, John." "Make planetfall, then," John Keats said. "So long, Les." "Good-by, Johnny." creamy hair at the dressing table when there came a tap at the door to the living room of the suite -- a tap so light that it could have been someone accidentally brushing past in the corridor outside. Gabriel sprang up from the bed where he had been lolling, watching her and stood for a moment poised on the balls of his feet, until the knock was repeated more emphatically. He started toward the other room. "But who could be knocking at the door at this hour?" she asked. "It's almost one Gabe, do be careful." -- He halted and looked back at her suspiciously. "Why do you say that? You know you don't care what happens to me?" That last was a question rather than a statement and had a plaintive quaver which failed to touch her. Once she had still been able to feel some compassion; now, nothing he said or did could arouse more than fear and disgust. "If somebody knocks you over the head when you open the door," she murmured, smiling at  her own image, "then who will be there to protect me?" A choked sound came from the back of the man's throat. He turned toward her, his fists clenched. She braced herself for the blow, but then the knock came for the third time and her husband reluctantly continued on into the living room, letting the door shut behind him. She rose and pushed it open a little. She 123 had a pretty good idea of who might be expected, but was not especially perturbed, for she knew the real Gabriel Lockard, in whatever guise he might be now, was safe from her husband. And she was curious to see what the exterminator looked like. The door to the corridor was out of her line of vision, but she could hear it as it opened. "Lockard?" a deep, husky voice whispered. "Gorman sent me." "Come in, Mr. Carmody. You are Carmody?" "Shhh," the husky voice warned. "If you get me into trouble, I'm not going to be able to complete your pattern for you, am I?" "Sorry -- I wasn't thinking. Come on in." A heavy tread shook the ancient floorboards, and presently the man responsible for it came into the girl's sight. He was a huge creature, bigger even than Gabriel, with dark hair growing low to a point on his forehead, and a full-lipped sensual face. Then, as he spoke, as he moved, she knew who he was. She pressed close against the wall of the bedroom, her slender shoulders shaking, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth, so that the sound of her wild, irrepressible laughter would not reach her husband's ears. "Sit down, Carmody," Gabriel said cordially, as he handed the newcomer a glass, "and make yourself comfortable." There was a brief, rather awkward silence. "Well," Gabriel went on, with a smile that would have been thoroughly ingratiating to anyone who hadn't known him, "I don't suppose I have to cruise around the asteroids with you?" i "No," Carmody replied, looking speculatively toward the bedroom door. "No, you don't." t tion of his gaze. "Worried about somebody overhearing? There's only my wife in there. She's listening, all right, but she won't talk. Come in, Helen." Carmody rose automatically as she came in, his dark eyes following every line of her long, smooth body in its close-fitting, though opaque, negligee of smoke-gray silk -- a fabric which, through extreme scarcity, had come into fashion again. "Sit down," Gabriel ordered brusquely. "We're not formal here." Carmody sat, trying not to stare at the girl. She began to mix herself a drink. "Moonbeam," her husband said, "you won't tell anybody about this little peace 4 conference, will you?" "No," she said, looking at Carmody. "I won't talk" She lifted  her glass. "Here's to murder!" 124 "Helen," Gabriel insisted, unable to rationalize the vague uneasiness that was nagging at him, "you won't dare say anything to anybody? Because, if you do, you'll regret it!" "I said I wouldn't talk. Have I ever broken my word?" "You've never had the chance." But it would be incredible that t she should have the temerity to betray him. After all, she was his wife. She should stick to him out of gratitude and self-interest, for he was rich, at least, and he wasn't exactly repulsive. And he'd been good to her. All men lost their tempers at times. "Let's get down to business, huh?" Carmody said harshly. "Whom do you want knocked off?" "I don't know his name," Gabriel replied, "but I can describe him." After he had finished doing so, there was a small pause. Carmody was silent, Helen turned back to the bar; her face was concealed from the men. Her body shook a little, Lockard thought she was crying, and wondered again whether his confidence in her was entirely justified. "I think maybe I know the guy," Carmody went on. "Only been around the -- the parish a couple of days, if it's the life-form I mean." "Must be the one" Lockard told him. "Think you can do it?" "A cinch," Carmody assured him.  from the door marked Females; Human and Humanoid , and rounded the turn in the corridor, a brawny arm reached out of a vidiphone booth and yanked her inside. The girl gave a startled cry, then relaxed. "Oh, it's you; you gave me a turn." "You're not afraid? You know who I am, then?" She nodded. "You're the real Gabriel Lockard." His big body was pressing hers in the closefitting confines of the booth. In some ways it could be considered more attractive than her husband's. "Why are you hiding here?" "I'm not hiding, I'm lurking," he explained. "Wouldn't do for me to appear too openly. The police -- that is, the hounds -- are on Carmody's trail. I don't want them to find me." "Oh." She pulled away from him. She mustn't let her interest be aroused in a body so soon to be discarded. "IVe been looking for an opportunity to talk to you since last night," he growled, the only way he could gentle a voice as deep as the thick vocal cords of the body produced. "But your 125 husband is always around You haven't told him who I was, have you?" She shook her head slowly, reproachfully. "I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't have told him about the other one either, but I well, I guess I jumped or something when I caught sight of him and Gabe mistakenly picked it up." There was a tense silence as they stood almost pressed against one another. "It's easy to see how you got into Carmody's body," she went on, speaking a little too rapidly, "but how did you happen to get into this particular line of evil?" "Simple -- that lawyer your husband went to see sent scouts out to have Carmody picked up. And they flushed me. Naturally I would have turned down the job if he hadn't happened to mention for whom it was "That other man is the real Carmody now, isn't he?" She looked up at him. Her eyes were gray or green; he couldn't determine which. "So it doesn't matter even if he does get killed." "But how can he get killed?" the big man reminded her with a gentleness completely out of keeping with the ferocity of his appearance. "I'm not a killer, please believe me -- I have never killed anybody and I hope I never have to." 126 who he was -- who he had been -- before he started playing the game. Gabriel Lockard, of course. But what had Gabrifel Lockard been? Surely not the narco-filled, fear-ridden dilettante the man -- the body, at least -- was now. He couldn't possibly have been or the hulk wouldn't have stood up so well under the treatment it was getting from its current tenant. But all that didn't seem to matter. All she wanted was the rightful man in his rightful body, and that seemed almost impossible of achievement. 'What do you intend to do?" she asked, almost sharply. "I don't know," he said. "By agreeing to kill this -- John Keats he calls himself -- I felt I had the situation in hand. And I suppose I have, in a sense. But the end result is a stalemate. I've been following him around just to make everything look on course for your husband until I decide what to do. Sometimes, though, I get the curious feeling that Keats is following me." "Maybe for the same reason you've been following Gabriel?" Helen touched his arm gingerly; it was more muscular than her husband's. "This isn't a bad body, 4 you know -- maybe he sets some store by it." "But that doesn't make sense!"  he said, impatiently shaking off her hand, not wanting her to like this criminars body that, despite its superficial attractiveness, fitted him no more easily than any of the others. "Logically, it seems to me, he should try to get as far away from his own hulk as possible Duck! Here comes your husband!" He blocked her with his wide body as Gabriel Lockard's swung past the booth, its perfect features marred by a frown. "Okay," he whispered, as Lockard rounded the corner, "rock back to your table and act angry because he's late" He watched until Gabriel had retraced his steps and gone back to the hotel dining room; then sauntered in the same direction. From the next booth, John Keats stared sullenly after the departing figure. He had been straining his ears, but the booths were effectively soundproofed; all he could learn was that the stranger had developed some kind of quick understanding with Lockard's wife and, knowing the potentialities of his former packaging, this saddened rather than surprised the young man. He punched Gorman's number without turning on the visual. "Disembodied," he said curtly. "Look here, Gorman, I've been wondering -- just who is this lifq-form supposed to be sending to the joyful planetoids?" "I haven't any idea," Gorman's voice said curiously. "Didn't seem any of my evil, so I didn't ask. And I don't suppose Lockard would have told me. Why do you want to know?" "Because I don't see him taking a fix on anybody except Lockard's wife and I don't hold with exterminating females except maybe by accident. Besides, I kind of radiate for that tigi myself." The lawyer's voice definitely showed interest. "Isn't there anybody else he could possibly be after?" "Well -- " John Keats gave a sick laugh -- "there's only one other possible flight pattern. It's kind of extradimensional, but sometimes I think maybe he's after me." There was a long pause. "Absurd," the little lawyer said thoughtfully. "Absurd. He doesn't even know who you are." Pale blood surfaced under tHe young man's transparent skin. "I never thought of that, but you're wrong. He does. He's got to. It was a private game." His voice thickened and he had to stop for coughing. "When you told him he was Jed Carmody, naturally he could figure out who was squatting in his hulk." "But magnetizing him was your own idea, Johnny," Gorman pointed out gently. "Besides, that's no reason he should be 127 after you; what's the percentage in it? And, anyhow, where does Lockard fit into this?" He seemed to be asking the question of himself as much as of the other man. "Yeah," John Keats muttered, "that's what I've got to find out." "Me, too," Gorman half-whispered. 'What did you say?" "I said tell me when you find out; I'm sort of curious myself."  said, "I'm not working for you; I'm working for Lockard. What's the idea of sending for me this hour of the night?" "Then why did you come this hour of the night when I asked J you to?" the lawyer inquired, leaning back in his chair and smiling. The big man hesitated and shrugged. "Can't say, myself. Curiosity, maybe But you can hardly expect me to violate my employer's confidence?" Gorman laughed. "You get your ideas from the viddies, don't you? Only don't forget that you're the villain, not the hero, of this piece, fellow-man." Carmody, completely taken aback, stared at him -- the little alien couldn't know! And, furthermore, he was mistaken -- Carmody, Lockard, the dutchman, 128 had done nothing wrong, committed no crime, violated no ethic. On the other hand, he had done nothing right either, nothing to help himself or any other. "What do you mean?" he finally temporized. "Tell me this -- Lockard hired you to kill the man who goes under the name of John Keats, didn't he?" "Yes, but how did you know that?" He was beginning to have the same primitive fear of Gorman that he had of the Vinzz; only it was more natural for an extraterrestrial to have apparently supernatural powers. "Keats told me -- and Keats, of course, is the real Carmody." "So you found out?" "Found out!" Gorman laughed. "I knew it all along. Does a man keep any secrets from his lawyer?" "If he's smart, he does." Carmody absently beat his hand on the desk. "This Keats isn't too smart, though, is he?" "No he isn't a very bright guy. But it was his idea that this would be a fine method of getting you out of the way. And not too bad an idea, either You had to be disposed of, you know," he explained winningly. "And how nice to have hounds do it for us. 'i Of course we had no idea of iyho your quarry was." "I can see your point of view," i Carmody said ironically. "But why tell me now?" And then he thought he saw the answer. "Are you afraid I'll really kill him?" The lawyer shook his head and smiled back. "Afraid you really won't He placed the tips of his fingers together. "I am prepared to double whatever Lockard is offering you to make sure that Keats, with Carmody inside him, is definitely put out of the way forever." basis of trust -- none of the reverse honor that legend commonly assigned to extralegals. Carmody got up. Even seated, he had towered above the lawyer. Standing, he was like a largerthan-life statue of doom -- of doom, Gorman nervously tfoped, pointing in the desired direction. "And if I refuse?" Carmody asked. Gorman moved his chair back uneasily. "I might persuade Keats that he could risk one murder in his present shape, if it was to insure his ultimate safety." "Meaning it would be a good idea for him to kill me?" "Meaning if would be an excellent idea for him to kill you ." "Look here, Gorman," Carmody said, in a low voice that gradually increased in volume. He could no longer restrain the anger that had been seething up in him for all the years of his wandering. "I've had enough of all this, hiding, running, shifting bodies and now hiring out as a killer. Because I'm an honest man. Maybe you've never seen one before, so take a good look at me. You may never have the chance again." "I am looking and I see Jed Carmody. Not my idea of the prototype of honesty" "But I don't feel like Jed Carmody." "Tell that to the hounds." Gorman laughed uproariously. "By law, you're responsible for Carmody's crimes. Of course, if they put you away or -- as they'd undoubtedly prefer -- accidently exterminate you in the line of duty, and then suspect Carmody hulkhopped, they might look around some more. But there wouldn't be any percentage in that for you, especially if you were dead." "I know, I know," Carmody retorted impatiently. "You can't tell me anything I haven't told myself." He paused for a moment. "This is a good body, though," he added. "Almost as good as my old one." Gorman raised his eyebrows. "You can't be referring to the corpus currently going by the epithet of John Keats?" "The name was your idea, I take it. No, that wasn't my original body." "Oh, so you're a dutchman, eh? 129 A thrill boy?" There was contempt, even from such as Gorman. "Getting a lot of free falls out of all this, are you?" Carmody tried to ignore this, but he couldn't. It wasn't true, he told himself; he had suffered years of playing the game and derived no pleasure from those sufferings -- no pleasure at all. But he would not stoop to argue with Gorman. "Maybe I can get away with this body to one of the frontier planets," he mused. "At least I can make a run for it; at least that would be a worthwhile kind of running." "Brave words ! " the lawyer sneered. "But rather risky to put into action. Don't you think the best thing to do would be just go ahead with the pattern as set? How much did Lockard offer you?" "Half a million credits." Gorman sucked in his breath. "You're lying, of course, but I'll match that. Carmody -- Keats -- has ten times that amount and maybe more hidden away where I can lay my hands on it as soon as I'm sure he's where he can't hurt me. It's worth half a million to me. And, in the remote instance that you're telling the truth, you can't turn down a million credits whoever you are, dutchman!" "Oh, can't I?" Carmody went to the door; then turned. "It may in136 terest you to know that I'm worth a hundred times that amount and maybe more." The lawyer laughed skeptically. "If you have enough money to buy your way, then why are you doing this?" Carmody frowned. " Y ou wouldn't understand I'm not sure I understand myself." The door slammed behind him. Descending pneumos hissed. "Just talking with his elbows," Gorman said comfortingly to himself. "He'll do it. He's got to do it." But he wasn't altogether convinced. IX building, John Keats' figure emerged from the shadows of a nearby doorway. He looked up at the golden rectangle of Gorman's window and then toward the direction in which Carmody had gone; and bit his lip irresolutely. After a moment's reflection, he chose to follow his old body. Somehow he didn't have much confidence in Gorman any more; not that he'd ever really trusted him. In their line of evil you couldn't afford to trust anybody. He had made a mistake. But it could still be rectified. If the big man was aware of his tracker, he did not seem to care. He moved purposefully in V. the direction of the hotel, scorning the helicabs that swooped down to proffer their services, striding through the brilliantly lit avenues gay with music and the dark alleys mournful with the whine of the farjeen wires as if they were all the same. The hotel was on one of the avenues, because the Lockards always had only the best of whatever there was to be had. Carmody crossed the almost deserted lobby in swift strides and took the pneumo to the seventh floor. Knowing that his body could have only one objective in that place, Keats took the stairs to the basement. Carmody sprang out of the pneumo exit and ran down the corridor to bang lustily on the intricately embossed metal door of the Lockards' suite. After a moment, the girl, again in negligee, opened it. Her green-gray eyes widened when she saw who the late visitor was, and she put a finger to her lips. "Shh, Gabe's asleep; let's not wake him unless it's necessary." She closed the door softly behind him. "What is it Jed?" He was so choked with excitement that he could hardly get the words out. "Helen; will you make a break with me for Proxima Centauri? They won't ask any questions there, if we can get there. And from Proxima we can go -- " "But your body?" "The hell with my body." He gripped her arms with powerful hands. "You mean much more to me than that worthless hulk." "But, Jed, Gabe'll never let us go " Proxima Centauri -- that had been Gabriel's dream, too His hands pressed so hard into her flesh, she knew there would be bruises on her skin; was she always doomed to fall in love with men who would leave marks on her? "Let him try to stop us. I'm bigger than he is, now." She looked up at him. "You always were, darling. But he has influence, though he wouldn't need it; he could simply set the police on you." "That's the chance we're going to have to take But perhaps I'm asking too much. I haven't the right to ask you to take such risks," he added bitterly. "I was thinking only of myself, I see, not of you." "Oh, no, Jed!" ff W HO ' RE you talking to,  Helen?" a drowsy voice asked from the bedroom. It was followed by the comely person of Gabriel himself, fastening his dressing gown. "Oh, hello, Carmody." His face lighted up avidly, all sleepiness vanishing like a ,spent milgot. "Didyou do it already?" 131 "No, I didn't. And, what's more, I'm not going to do it!" Lockard looked astonished. "But what's .wrong? You said you would." Carmody sighed. "Yes, I know I did. I was stalling. That's what I've always done -- stalled, put things off, hesitated to make decisions. Well, I've made my decision now." "You're not afraid of him?" Lockard said in a voice that was meant to be taunting and emerged as querulous. "A little pipsqueak like that Keats? Or maybe half a million credits isn't enough for you? Is that it?" That was enough for the man whose emaciated body was torturedly cramped in the air-conditioning vent and further agonized by the strain of repressing the cough that sought to tear its way out of his chest. He had found out what he wanted to know and, as he inched his way back down to the basement, he was already making plans for getting even with all those he now knew to be enemies. It had been a conspiracy against him from the start; the hounds probably weren't even aware that he was in town. It was Gorman who had told him they knew of his general whereabouts -- Gorman, the good friend who had suggested he change bodies, knowing that whatever hulk he wound up with was bound to be more vulnerable than his primal form. And Gorman would pay "More than enough," Carmody replied, as unaware of the fact that he had lost one-third of his audience as he had been that he was addressing three rather than two listeners. "Only I'm not a killer." "But I understood you were supposed to be a professional exterminator?" "Jed Carmody is a killer. Only I'm not Jed Carmody." Lockard moved backward and stared at the still bigger man. Lockard retreated still further. "You -- you're him! You were all along!" He whirled on his wife. "And you knew, you doublecrosser! Knew and didn't tell me! By God, I'll break every bone in your body!" "Lay a hand on her and I'll break every bone in my body!" Lockard stopped where he was. "It doesn't mean anything to me any more, you see," Carmody explained. "I wanted it when I didn't have anything else. But now I have Helen. I could kill you, you know. As Carmody, an acknowledged exterminator, I have nothing to lose. But I'm letting you live, as a hostage for Helen And, besides, as I've been busy trying to convince everybody all evening, I am not a murderer." He turned to the girl. "Will you 132 come with me to Proxima, Helen?" "Y-yes, Jed" she said, looking apprehensively at her husband. "Gather your packs. I'm going to the air office to make the arrangements." Carmody consulted his chronometer. "It's three o'clock. I should be back by eight or so. Get some sleep if you can." Her wide frightened eyes turned again toward her husband. "Here." Jed tossed her the gun Gorman had given him. "If he tries anything, use it." "Yes, Jed. But " "Don't worry; I have another one " The door slammed behind him. "Gimme that gun, you little tramp!" Lockard snarled, twisting it out of her flaccid hand. X  the hotel and turned left in the direction of the airstation which stayed open all night. He had walked a short distance when suddenly a high voice came out of the darkness behind him, "Not so fast, Mr Carmody," and a hard knob was pressed in his back. "Mr. Keats, I believe," Carmody said, wondering why he wasn't frightened. "Right." The other coughed at some length. "You thought you were pretty smart, didn't you, foisting me off with a hulk that wasn't only shopworn but hot?" " Y our intentions weren't exactly noble either, were they, Mr. Keats?" "I want my frame back!" Suddenly the idea came to Carmody, and so wonderful it was he could hardly throttle his voice down to calmness. "Shooting me won't help you get it back. In fact, it might make it rather difficult." ' "You have your choice between going back to the zarquil house wiht me and switching or getting your current insides burned out" Carmody exhaled a small hissing sigh that he hoped would not be recognized as obvious relief to the man behind him. "You'll have to pay. I haven't enough folio on me." "I'll pay; I'll pay," the voice snarled. "I always pay. But you'll come peacefully?" he asked in some surprise. "Yes. Matter of fact, I'll be glad to get out of this body. No matter how much I try, somehow I can never manage to keep it clean Gently, now, you don't want to muss up a body you're planning to occupy yourself, now do you?" "This is too easy," Keats' voice murmured dubiously. "Maybe it's another trap " "You're always going to imagine traps, Mr. Exterminator, 133 whether they're there or not You and Lockard both -- people who run must have something to run from, and half the time it's not there and half the time, of course, it is; only you never know which is which -- " "You talk too much," the man behind him snarled. "Shut up and keep moving." "Back again?" the Vinzz at the door asked. The present Carmody was a little startled. Somehow he had thought of the Vinzz as too remote from humanity to be able to distinguish between individual members of the species. "I'm afraid neither of you is qualified to play." "No reason why we shouldn't have a private game, is there?" John Keats demanded belligerently. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. "In that case, no, no reason at all. If you want to be so unsporting and can afford it. It will cost you a hundred thousand credits each." "But that's twice what I had to pay last week!" Keats protected angrily. The Vinzz shrugged an antenna. "You are, of course, at liberty to take your trade elsewhere, if you choose." "Oh, hell," the temporarily poetic-looking killer snarled. "We're stuck and you know it. Let's get it over with!" consciousness back into the thin young man's body again. More uncomfortable than usual, because the criminal's body had been in such splendid physical condition and this one so poor -- now worse than before, because it had been worked far beyond its attenuated capabilities. The individuality that had originally been Gabriel Lockard's, formerly housed in Jed Carmody's body, now opened John Keats' eyes and looked at the Vinzz who stood above him. "The other human has been told you awakened before him and have already departed," the Vinzz explained. "He has violence in his heart and we do not care for violence on our doorstep. Bad for business." "Has he gone already?" The Vinzz nodded. "How long has he been gone?" He scrambled to his feet and investigated the clothing he wore. Carmody had been in too much of a hurry to clean himself out. There was some money left, a container of milgot sticks, and a set of electroseals. "He has just left." The extraterrestrial's eyes flickered in what might have been surprise. "Don't you wish to avoid him?" "No, I must go where he goes." The Vinzz shrugged. "Well, it's your funeral in the most literal 134 sense of the word." He sighed as the young man plunged out into the darkness. "But, from the objective viewpoint, what a waste of money!" The massive, broad-shouldered figure of Jed Carmody was still visible at the end of the street, so the thin man slowed down. He wanted to follow Carmody, to keep close watch on where he was going and, if necessary, guide him in the right direction, though he didn't think he'd have to do that. But he had no intention of overtaking him. Carmody might not want openly to use the gun the former tenant had so carefully left him, but with his physique he could break the fragile body of John Keats in two, if he so desired, and he probably did. Meanwhile Carmody -- the real Carmody -- having been deprived of an immediate revenge, had begun to realize how much better the situation was as it now stood. If he killed Keats out of hand, he might miss out on half a million credits, because it was his custom to get cash in advance for all his flights, and this was his flight pattern now. He wouldn't trust that Lockard life-form to defoliate after the job was done. Of course he himself had plenty of money stashed away, but every half million helped. It would be no trouble to find the sickly Keats later. And there was no reason the hounds should get him -- Carmody -- after all, the other had been rocketing around in his body and he hadn't been caught. Carmody had allowed himself to be stampeded into panic. He smiled. Gorman wouldn't ever be able to chart any pattern like that, or like anything, again. Fortunately there was no permanent harm done, and a half million credits to cover the zarquil losses, with a nice profit left over. Maybe he could even beat Lockard up to a million; that one was obviously a coward and a fool. A few threats should be enough to get him to hand over. Carmody paused for a moment outside the hotel. It still took some nerve to walk boldly into the brightly lit lobby. HE automatic doors slid open as he entered. At the same time, the pneumo gates lifted and Gabe Lockard came out, dragging a heavily veiled Helen, their luggage floating behind them. Both stopped as they caught sight of the killer; Lockard paled -- Helen gasped. Too bad I have to leave her in the tentacles of this low life-form , Carmody thought with regret, but there was no help for it. He approached them with what he thought was an ingratiating smile. "Mr. Lockard, I've decided to give you another chance." 135 It was an unhappy choice of word. "Oh, you have, have you!" the big blond man yelled. "I thought I did have another chance. And now you've spoiled that, too!" "What do you mean by that?" Carmody demanded, his thick dark brows almost meeting across his nose. "I figured on getting away before you came back," Gabriel babbled in a frenzy, "but you'd have found me anyway. You always find me. I'm sick of this running. There's only one way to stop you, only one way to be sure that, whatever happens to me, you won't be around to enjoy it." "Listen, Lockard, you're making a mistake. I -- " "The only mistake I made was in hiring somebody else to do the job I should have done myself." He pulled out the gun -- Carmody's own gun -- and fired it. He wasn't a good shot, but that didn't matter. He had the flash on full blast and he pumped and pumped and pumped the trigger until the searing heat rays had whipped not only the killer's astonished body but all through the lobby. The few people still there rushed for cover as rug, chairs, potted palms were shriveled by the lancing holocaust. There was a penetrating odor of burning fabric and frond and flesh. Helen let out a wail as Carmody, more ash than man, fell to the charred carpet. "Gabe, Gabe, what have you done!" The gun dropped from his hand to rejoin its owner. His face crumpled. "I didn't really mean to kill only to scare him What'll I do now?" 136 "You'll run, Mr, Lockard," John like you and him , . He Keats' body said as he entered pointed to the crumbling, blackthe devastated lobby. "You'll run ened corpse, keeping his hand and run and run. He's dead, but steady with an effort for, God you'll keep on running forever, knew, he was the biggest amateur No, not forever -- I apologize -- of them all. some day you'll get caught, beLockard licked his lips and cause the hounds aren't amateurs gazed apprehensively around. 137 Frightened faces were beginning to peer out from their places of concealment. "Look, Carmody," he said in a low, stiff voice, "let's talk this over. But let's get out of here first before somebody calls the hounds." "All right," the thin man smiled. "I'm always willing to talk. We can go over to Gorman's office. They won't look for us there right away." "How'll we get in?" "I have a 'seal," Keats said. Surely one of the electroseals he carried must belong to Gorman's office. It was a chance he'd have to take. XI ent seals before he found the one that opened the lawyer's office. He was afraid his obvious lack of familiarity would arouse Lockard's suspicions, but the big man was too much preoccupied with his own emotions. An unpleasantly haunting aroma of cooked meat seeped out from inside. "For Christ's sake, Carmody, hurry!" Lockard snarled, and gave a sigh of relief as the door swung open and the illuminators went on, lighting the shabby office. Gorman was there. His horribly seared body lay sprawled on the dusty rug -- quite dead. "You -- you killed him?" Gabriel quavered. The sight of murder done by another hand seemed to upset him more than the murder he himself had just committed. The thin man gave a difficult smile. "Carmody killed him" Which was undoubtedly the truth. "The gun that did it is in his pocket. I had nothing to do with it." His eyes sought for the ones behind the veil. He wanted the girl who stood frozenly by the door to know that this, at least, was the truth. Gabriel also stayed near the door, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. In death Carmody and Gorman, the big man and the small man, had looked the same; each was just a heap of charred meat and black ash. No blood, no germs -- all very hygienic. "You're smart, Carmody," he said from taut lips. "Damn smart." "I'm Keats, not Carmody! Remember that." He dropped into the chair behind the desk. "Sit down, both of you." Only Gabriel accepted the invitation. "Why don't you take that thing off your face, Mrs. Lockard? You aren't hiding from anybody, are you?" Gabriel gave a short laugh. "She's hiding her face from everybody. I spoiled it a little for her. She was going to sell me out to the guy in your body." Keats' hand tightened on the 138 arm of his chair. Lose his temper now and he lost the whole game. "It was a good body," he said, not looking at the thing on the rug, trying not to remember the thing on the rug on the other side of town. "A very good body." Through the veil, Helen's shadowy eyes were fixed on his face. He wanted to see what Lockard had done to her, but he couldn't tear off the veil, as he longed to do; he was afraid of the expression that might be revealed on her face -- triumph when there should have been anguish; anguish when there should have been triumph. "Not as good as the one I have here." Lockard thumped his own chest, anxious to establish the value of the only ware he had left. "Matter of opinion," Keats said. "And mine was in better shape." "This one isn't in bad condition," Gabriel retorted defensively. "It could be brought back to peak in' short order." "You won't have much opportunity to do it, though. But maybe the government will do it for you; they don't pamper prisoners, I understand, especially lifers."  an extralegal, Carmody -- Keats," he whined. "You know your course. You know how to hide from the hounds I'm i a -- a respectable citizen." He spread his hands wide in exaggerated helplessness. "Strictly an amateur, that's what I am -- I admit I've been playing out of my league." "So?" "I'm worth a lot of money, Keats, a hell of a lot. And half of it can be yours, if you change bodies with me." Keats' angular face remained expressionless, but there was a sharp cry from the girl -- a cry that might have been misunderstood as one of pain, but wasn't. Gabriel turned toward her, and his upper lip curled back over his teeth. "I'll throw her in to the bargain. You must have seen her when she wasn't banged up so you know she's not permanently disfigured. Isn't she worth taking a risk for?" Keats shrugged. "If the hounds pull you down, she'll be a legal widow anyway." "Yes, but you'd have no chance with her in the body you now have No chance," he repeated, His voice broke. "Never had a chance." "Go ahead, feel sorry for yourself," the other man said. "Nobody else will." Gabriel's face darkened, but he also had to control his temper to gain what he fancied were his own ends. "You won't deny that this hulk is better than the one you have now?" 139 "Except that there's one thing about the head that I don't like." Gabriel stared in bewilderment His body was beyond criticism, "What is it you don't like about the head?" "There's a price on it now." Gabriel pressed his spine against the back of the chair. "Don't play the innocent, Carmody. You've killed people, too." "Well, sure, but not out in the open like that You know how many people saw you blast him? Too many. If you're going to exterminate somebody, you do it from a dark doorway or an alley -- not in a brilliantly lit hotel lobby, and you blast him in the back. But there's no use giving you lessons; it's not likely you'll ever be able to use them where you're going." Gabriel suddenly sagged in his chair. He looked down at the floor, "So you won't do it?" Keats grew apprehensive. He hadn't expected the big man to give in to despair so soon -- it might spoil all his plans and leave him trapped in this sick unwanted body. He lit a milgot. "I didn't say that," he pointed out, trying to sound unconcerned. "Matter of fact, I might even consider your proposition, if" There was hope in Lockard's eyes again. It made Keats a little sick to think of the game he had to play with the other; then he thought of the game the other had played with him, the game the other had played with his wife, and the faint flickering of compassion died out in him. "What do you want?" Gabriel asked, Keats took a moment before he answered. "I want all of what you've got." Gabriel uttered an inarticulate sound. "You can't take it with you, colleague. If we hulk-hop, it's got to be tonight, because the hounds will be baying on your trail any moment. You wouldn't have the chance to transfer the property to my name and, if you take my word that I'll hand over half afterward, you're just plain out of this dimension Think of it this way, Lockard -- what's worth more to you, a couple of lousy billions or your freedom?" "All right, Carmody," Lockard said dully, "you're the dictator." T HE Vinzz' eyes flickered in astonishment. "Another private game ? However he shrugged eloquently. "It will cost you a hundred thousand credits each, gentlemen," "No discount for a steady customer?" Keats inquired lightly, though he was trembling inside. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. "None. You ought to be glad I   140 i didn't raise the price again." "Why didn't you?" he couldn't help asking. The Vinzz looked steadily into the man's eyes. "I don't know," it answered at last. "Perhaps I have been so long on this planet that I have developed a sentimental streak In any case, I am going back to Vinau the day after tomorrow" "For God's sake," Lockard, his senses so confused with fear and  apprehension that he was able to catch only fragments of their talk, screamed, "pay him what he asks and don't haggle!" "All right " Keats agreed. "The lady will wait for me here," he told the Vinzz. The extraterrestrial quivered indecisively. "Most irregular," it murmured. "However, I cannot refuse a slight favor for such an old customer. This way, madam." Gabriel Lockard's eyes. "Well," the Vinzz who stood above him lisped, "how does it feel to be back in your own body again?" Gabriel got up and stretched. He stretched again, and then an expression of wonderment came over his handsome features. "I feel exactly the way I felt in any of the others," he said haltingly. "I'm not comfortable in this one either. It's not right -- it doesn't fit. My own body "You've grown out of it," the green one told him, not unkindly. "But you will be able to adjust to it again, if you'll give it a chance ' . "There's that word again " Gabriel winced. "I'm beginning to respond to it the way my predecessor did. Do we ever really get another chance, I wonder?" "Take my advice." The Vinzz' face became almost human. "This is costing my people money, but we've made enough out of you and your -- shall we say? -- friends. It is a shame," it murmured, "to prey upon unsophisticated lifeforms, but one must live. However, I'll tell you this: The compulsion will come over you again and again to play the game -- your body will torment you unbearably and you will long for relief from it, but you must conquer that desire or, I warp you, you will be lost to yourself forever. It's a pattern that's enormously difficult to break, but it can be broken." Gabriel smiled down at the little green creature. "Thanks, colleague. I'll remember that advice. And I'll take it." "The other is still asleep," the Vinzz told him. "This time I thought it best to let you awaken first. Good-by, and good luck." "Thanks, fellow-man," Gabriel said. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. T4T V " teroom, her veil flung back so that he could see her poor, marred face. Anger rose hotly in him, but he pushed it down. Her suffering had not been meaningless and revenge was already consummated. "Gabriel!" Her voice was taut. " Jed!" "Gabriel," he smiled. "The genuine, original Gabriel -- accept no substitutes." "I'm so glad " Her lips formed the words, for she had no voice with which to make them. "Come." He took her arm and led her out into the quiet street. It was almost daylight and the sky was a clear pearl gray. Again a star detached itself from the translucent disk of the Moon and sped out into the Galaxy. Soon, he thought, we'll be on a starship like that one , leaving this played-out planet for the new worlds up in the sky. "You're going to let Gabe -- the other Gabriel -- go?" she asked. He bent his head to look at her swollen face. "You're free, Helen; I have my body back; why should we concern ourselves with what happens to him? He can't hurt us any more." "I suppose you're right," she muttered. "It seems unfair" She shivered. "Still, you have no idea of the things he did to me -- the things he made me do" 142 She shivered again. "You're cold. Let's get started." "But where are we going?" She placed her hand on his arm and looked up at him. "Back to the hotel to pick up your luggage. And then -- I still think Proxima is a good idea, don't you? And then perhaps farther out still. J'm sick of this old world." "But, Je -- Gabriel, you must be mad! The police will be waiting for you at the hotel." "Of course they'll be waiting, but with a citation, not handcuffs." She looked at him as if he had gone extradimens ional. He laughed. "What your ex-husband didn't know, my dear, was that there was a reward out for Jed Carmody, dead or alive  9 Her face was blank for a moment. "A reward! Oh, G-G-G-Gabriel!" The girl erupted into hysterical laughter. "Shhh, darling, control yourself." He put his arm around her, protectively, restrainingly. "We'll be conspicuous," for already the Sun's first feeble rays were beginning to wash the ancient tired streets with watery gold. "Think of the reward we're going to get -- five thousand credits, just for us!" She wiped her eyes and pulled down her veil. "Whatever will we do with all that money!" "I think it would be nice if we T43  turned it over to the hotel," he smiled. "I made rather a shambles of their lobby when, pursuant to my duty as a solar citizen, I exterminated the killer Carmody. Let's give it to them and leave only pleasant memories behind us on our journey to the stars." And he couldn't help wondering whether, if things got really tough, somewhere up in those stars he could find another zarquil game. 1 A 1956 Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. Each month takes you on an expedition to one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, from Sun-baked Mercury to Frigid Pluto.  12 two-color illustrations  Scientifically-accurate text with each illustration  Wonderful for your den  Printed in limited edition  Only 1 .00 postpaid P. O. Box 5201-R Minneapolis 7, Minnesota Endorsed by The Society for the Advancement of Space Travel monthly at New York N. Y., for Oct. 1, 1955. 1 . The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business manager are: Publisher, Robert M. Guinn, 421 Hudson Street (14), New York City; Editor, Horace L. Gold, 421 Hudson Street (14), New York City; Managing Editor, Evelyn Paige, 421 Hudson Street (14), New York City; Business Manager, None. 2. The owner is : (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., 421 Hudson Street, New York City ; Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stockholder), 421 Hudson Street, New York City. 3. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None, 4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting ; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. 5. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the 12 months preceding the date shown above was : (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this 19th day of September, 1955. Notary Public, State of New York No. 24-5978800 Qualified in Kings County Term Expires March 30, 1956 144 Top Science-Fiction Thrillers -- Continued from Back Cover M A G I X E -- A N Y full-size, brand-new books -- yours for only 1.00! Each one is cramjued with science thrills of the future packed that will make tomorwritten by the most sought-after science-fiction writers of today. A 7.50 to 9.00 value, complete and in handsome permanent bindings -- but yours for only 1.00 on this amazing offer! ScienceFiction lias won a place as an important new kind of literature -- that it is a valuable addition to the library of every imaginative reader. Sciencefiction has grown so fast it's hard to keep up with it! How is one to without wasting time and money wading good and bad alike? -- The Cream of New Science-Fiction Books -- For Only SI Bach! selects each mouth the best -- and only the heat, new Science-Fiction book. And to enable you h rough Nowthe cost, the (hub has arranged to bring you even though they cost 2.50, 2.75 and up in p ti hi ishers' editions ! NO Dues or Complicated Rules The operation of the Club is simple. Each month the Board of Editors reads all the promising new science-fiction books and selects the No. 1 title. in the Club's interesting free bulletin, "Things want -- as few as four a year, if you wish. If you don't want the current selection, you simply notify the Club. It's that simple. There are no other rules, no dues, no fees. Send No Money -- Just Moil Coupon are making this amazing offer to new members! Two are your gift books for joining ; the other is your first selection. This liberal offer may have to be withdrawn at any time. So mail coupon Dept. GX-2, Garden City, New York. Dept. GX-2, Garden City, New York Please rush me the 3 books checked below, as my gift books and first selection. Bill me only 1 for all three (plus few cents shipping charges), and enroll me as a member of the ScienceFiction Book Club. Every month send me the Club's free bulletin, "Things to Come," so that I may decide whether or not I wish to receive the coming monthly selection described therein. For each book I accept, I will pay only 1 plus shipping. I do not have to take a book every month (only four during each year I am a member) -- and I may resign at any lime after accepting four selections. and this membership will be cancelled. Name Addi ess. City, Zone. StateSelection price in Canada 1.10 plus shipping. Address ScienceFiction Club 105 Bond St., Toronto 2. (Offer good only in U. S. and Canada) 'S' enjoy rocketswift thrills daring flights of imagination jet-propelled action! It's the brand-new Science-Fiction Book Club -- organized to bring you the most daring and skillfully-written of these spine-tingling novels at only a fraction of regular retail price! And now to welcome you to the (huh you are invited to accept not 1, not 3 pick your 3 books and mail coupon on about the first ABomb, written before it was invented ! A story of the movie machine that shows " newsreels" of any other thrillers ! complete. Plus: a complete play: scores of all-time great S-F stories, including "Invasion from Mars' made famous by Orson Welles. 43 classic stories by top authors. Wonders of earth and man. Amazing inventions. Space travel and visitors from outer space. Adventures in dimension. Worlds of tomorrow. 562 fascinating pages! man-made creature of synthetic tissue becomes a killer. The android's master is going mad, too! Just one of 12 great stories and features in this big new collection ! Judith Merril. A new collection of 19 superb tales of fantasy -- the supernatural -- mass hypnosis -- telepathy -- predestination -- precognition -- levitation, etc. kling crop of weird tales picked by August Derleth. The man who invents a solid vacuum. The Martians that land on Earth on Hallowe'en. And many others. by Edgar Pangborn, Angelo INmtevecchio can destroy the Earl It to decide. The Martians havi him cide ! Wilson Tucker. Draftee Paul Breen becomes a huma n " secret weapon ." He has a strange power -- he can actually read minds 5,000 miles away. No wonder he is decreed too dnnii mu t to live! Seconds after itn "m-eldenl " Hr. Mack tin suddenly llnds himself plunged SO yen r.4 into tin fill me with another run i s nan e and body. And lie's on the moon 1 MARCH 1957 35c galaxy By By No, we don't promise that reading 1 2 issues of theory of gravitation. we do promise that a year's subscription to and you'll get your copies at least a week before the newsstands do. you don't have to use the coupon below. It's for your convenience, not ours. Yes, send in your subscription today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. 42 I Hudson St. New York 14, N. Y. I enclose (check one) 3.50 for I year 6.50 for 2 years 1.00 additional Foreign Postage Per Year galaxy 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. 35c per copy. Subscription: (12 copies) 3.50 per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere 4.50. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York 1957, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. 14, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. 6 80 120 37 67 104 55 4 54 116 True enough, copies of Galaxy for 1950 and 1951 are scarcer than hens' bridgework but it's not too late to get these great stories: With its 33 stories -- not just a lineup of shorts; many are novelets and even novellas -- this truly big volume of almost 600 pages would be an unthinkable publishing bargain today at its original price of 3.50. tracted for a large number of books, which naturally means a discount and we're passing the discount on to you. Your price, postage included, is only 2.75! No coupon no need or room for one. Just send in your order on any scrap of paper, include check or money order for 2.75, and mail if right now to ago that detective stories became legitimate when Roosevelt declared in an interview that he read them for relaxation. Those of us who were then reading and writing science fiction were envious. We hoped something similar would happen to our favorite form of literature, but we didn't really expect it There was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, of course, which appeared around that time and was a huge hit; we were able to explain to the uninitiated that we read and wrote stories like that. But I remember being backed into describing the plot of a story I was working on then: "Well, there are giant brains sealed in glassite capsules in the polar ice. They belong to extraterrestrials, who have no bodies, just brains, and they know everything that happened on Earth because they're immortal -- " The experience inhibited me so badly that I never wrote the story. A lot has happened to science fiction since that wild era, when no author could get up from his typewriter without having knocked off at least some part of the Solar System's population. Craftsmanship had to enter the field. There are only so many basic categories; when they have been done over and over, especially with primal motivations and masses of people instead of individuals and their infinitely varied problems and conflicts, the result must be ultimate stasis. Those writers who could not learn to construct a real story had to drop out, for their stuff inevitably was too similar to things that had been done before, by others and even by themselves. Meeting them now, I find it saddening to hear their puzzled or hostile remarks about science fiction. Many of them understand it less than if they had never written any. (The same is true of the elderly fans who can't realize that the "sense of wonder" they bay for is gone from them, not from science fiction.) I wonder if anyone else then had an experience like mine: 4 When I was about 18, I kept bringing stories to a wonderful old editor named Dr. T. O'Connor Sloane, and he, instead of talking about them, always managed to get off onto Icelandic literature, the fascination of mathematics (a specialty of his), and other subjects that may not have been evasions, but were just as good. One story I gave him, however, got him dangerously excited for a man of 82. It was about mining on Venus and I'd manfully exposed the dirty rats who savagely exploited native labor and prisoners exiled to that miserably hot, rainy planet. Dr. Sloane exclaimed it was too good for his pulp magazine and brought both me and the manuscript up to the Delineator, which was owned by the same company. The story came back to me with a printed rejection slip. Not long after, the Delineator folded. I immediately saw the connection, but I was more concerned with selling the story. Dr. Sloane, though, went on maintaining that it was too good and steadfastly refused to buy it. If that experience is typical, it explains a good deal about the dreadfulness of that paleolithic science fiction. (I don't know how much better my own story was, because it somehow got lost.) Were I an envious man, which I am, I would resent the break that authors have today in rates and markets. There were very few science fiction magazines, their rates ranging from microscopic fractions of a cent payable upon lawsuit to just enough to starve on. Hardly any book publishers brought out science fiction books. No anthologies, no pocketbooks, no TV, radio or move resale. Good God, no wonder a depression was going on! No doubt there is a lesson to be derived from this. Writing science fiction in the early days was easier, but the pay was poor. Writing for Galaxy is very much harder, but the pay is highly rewarding both in amount and prestige. I guess it balances out. Either way, writing -- especially the writing of science fiction -- is not a job for the lazy. A good story gives the illusion of having been produced effortlessly. Nothing involves more effort than achieving that illusion, however. A LL the foregoing is excerpted from my introduction to the First Galaxy Reader, written over five years ago. (It's still available from us at 2.75 postpaid -- a giant book of 600 pages.) As I said in concluding the introduction: I just thought you'd be interested in one practitioner's personal history in science fiction. 5 The Ignoble Savages Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground -- underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard societyl Skkiru," Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm. "A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra." "But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes," Skkiru protested. "Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. "You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever." "Forever!" He looked at her incredulously. "You mean we're go6 ing to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!" Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, "No, Skkiru, I am not joking," a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe. "This is, in effect, good-by," she continued. "We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe but that will be all." 7 Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber. "Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!" There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face -- an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl. "I am sorry, Skkiru," Bbulas intoned. "I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all." "It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru," Larhgan put in gently, "but the welfare of our planet comes first." S HE had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw. No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. "Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You-" "Now, Skkiru," Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, "you know that all the ranks and positions were dis8 tributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive." Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt. "After all," he went on speaking as he wiped, "I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you -- a mere private citizen -- have the right to question them." "Just because you went to school in another solar system," Skkiru said, whirling with anger, "you think you're so smart!" "I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now -- " "Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time." Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized. I hate Terrestrials, Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae -- if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation. "Skkiru!" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance -- her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed -- and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. "One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!" "And I have already explained to you, Skkiru," Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, "that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet." glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber. Kismet, Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, "And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like -- like savages." "It is necessary," Bbulas replied without turning. "Pooh," Skkiru said. "Pooh, Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. "Skkiru! Such language!" "As you said," Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, "the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker." "But I can't work metal!" "Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts," Bbulas said smugly, 9 "because you will be a pariah without a trade." "Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch -- " Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him -- "and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl." "I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air. "As for me," she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, "I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?" "Even if there will be," Bbulas said, "you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes." Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. "I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs," she vowed, "and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking." It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solu10 tion to the planet's problem. "Listen -- " he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late. "Earth ship in view!" a squeaky voice called through the intercom. "Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes." Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash. "Hurry up, Skkiru."- dress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance -- which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist. "Hurry up, Skkiru," Bbulas said. "They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started." "For my part, I wish we'd never started," Skkiru grumbled. "What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?" That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that schooldays were long since over. "I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them," he said, with affected weariness. "After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other -- and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra." "For Snaddra," Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth -- or so the fictapes seemed to indicate -- was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial lifeform. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too. "We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru," she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, "but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me -- and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas." "If that doesn't," Bbulas said, "I have other methods of inspiration." "All right," Skkiru answered sulkily. "I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Intergalactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg. But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it." All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. "I'm proud of you, Skkiru," she said brokenly. Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence. snadd," Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad -- to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," II chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor -- now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metalworkers -- and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary -- but now both aircars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive. The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or -- more properly speaking on Snaddra -- the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid. As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to -- the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment -- and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it. Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it. r I "HE newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb. In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, 12 entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching -- thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide. "Look, Raoul," the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran -- which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. "A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system -- what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry." "Oh, they were cannibals?" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. "How horrible!" "No, not at all," the other assured him. "They weren't human -- another species entirely -- so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know." "And the missionaries -- did they soften them up, Cyril?" "They softened up the missionaries, I believe." Cyril laughed. "Ah, well, it's all in the day's work." "I hope these creatures are not man-eaters," Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession -- creatures indeed! Skirru thought, with a mental sniff. "We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it." "Oh, you will, my boy, you will." Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. "I have every confidence in your ability." Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials -- which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How 13 could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite. "The natives certainly appear to be human enough," Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. "Some slight differences, of course -- but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color." If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.  panion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be -- a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul. "Remember," Cyril said sternly, "we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity." ' "Yes, Cyril," Raoul said meekly. Cyril assumed a more cheerful 14 aspect. "I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?" Money, Skirru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be. "How should I know?" Raoul shrugged. "Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting." "Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?" Raoul suggested grumpily. "The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one." "Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!" Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable -- and entirely genuine -- murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops -- and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the "high priest" was off his rocker. To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once. On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on -- which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population -- like its natural resources -- was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival. discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple -- a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days -- where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him -- and not only for his forwardness -- that was in character on both sides, too. Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising -- a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metalworking was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out. Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the "high priest" with a simpleminded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports. As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had is not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas -- who fancied himself a speechwriter as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit. The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skirru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote. " and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth," she was saying in her melodious voice. "Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth" Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face. " and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy." 16 S HE had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. "Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us." The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended. "We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way." Ha, ha, Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha! "But why is it," Raoul whispered in Terr an as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, "that only the beggar wears mudshoes?" "Shhh," Cyril hissed back. "We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!" Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man. "We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs," Bbulas said with great self-control, "and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance." "Rain dance!" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. "But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course," he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, "that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!" Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff. "But," Raoul went on, "one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud" The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. "Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain." He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this highschool theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others primes, like the beggarship. What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury. that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways -- but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them. All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest 17 young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities. He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while -- but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan. As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-andbook dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply. It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and -- aside from minerals -- they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice -- the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business. Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in. TP HE traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civilservice job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm -- and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top. The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on 18 Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population. The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came -- and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soulsearching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra -- and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program. It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice. But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings -- though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library -- seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand -- which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance. "Skkiru!" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of earand eyeshot. "Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?" Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. "Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought -- " Bbulas twirled madly in the air. "You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!" "Yes, Bbulas," Skkiru said meekly. 19 argument, but he had bigger plans in mind and he didn't want them impeded in any way. "But they seem like an excellent idea," Luccar suggested. "Primitive and yet convenient." Bbulas slowed down and gulped. After all, in spite of the fact that he was now only chief yamstealer -- being prevented from practicing his profession simply because there were no yams on the planet and no one was quite certain what they were -- Luccar had once been elected President by a large popular majority. And a large popular majority is decidedly a force to be reckoned with anywhere in the Galaxy. "Anydeviations arouse comment," Bbulas explained tightly. "But if we all -- " "There would not be enough pontoons to go around, even if we stripped all the air-cars." "I see," Luccar said thoughtfully. "We couldn't make -- ?" "No time!" Bbulas snapped. "All right, Skkiru -- get those things off your feet!" "Will do," Skkiru agreed. It would be decidedly unwise to put up an argument now. So he'd get his feet muddy; it was all part of the higher good. Later, as soon as the rain-dance rehearsals were under way, he slipped away. No part had been assigned to him anyhow, except that of onlooker, and he thought he could manage that without practice. He went down to the library, where, since all the attendants were aboveground, he could browse in the stacks to his hearts' content, without having to fill out numerous forms and be shoved about like a plagiarist or something. If the Earthmen were interested in really primitive institutions, he thought, they should have a look at the city library. The filing system was really medieval. However, the library would, of course, be tabu for them, along with the rest of the city, which was not supposed to exist. As far as the Terrans were to know, the group of lumpy stone huts (they should, properly speaking, have been wood, but wood was too rare and expensive) was the capital of Snaddra. It would be the capital of Snaddra for the Snaddrath, too, except during the hours of rest, when they would be permitted to retire unobtrusively to their cozy well-drained quarters' beneath the mud. Life was going to be hard from now on -- unless the Bbulas Plan moved faster than Bbulas himself had anticipated. And that would never happen without implementation from without. From without Bbulas, that was. 20 Skkiru got to work on the textapes and soon decided upon his area of operations. Bbulas had concentrated so much effort on the ethos of the planet that he had devoted insufficient detail to the mythos. That, therefore, was the field in which Skkiru felt he must concentrate. And concentrate he did. r I 1 HE rain dance, which had been elaborately staged by the planet's finest choreographers, came to a smashing climax, after which there was a handsome display of fireworks. "But it is still raining," Raoul protested. "Did you expect the rain to stop?" Bbulas asked, his eyes bulging with involuntary surprise. "I mean -- " he said, hastily retracting them -- "well, it doesn't always stop right away. The gods may not have been feeling sufficiently propitious." "Thought you had only one god, old boy," Cyril observed, after giving his associate a searching glance. "Chap by the name of Whipsnade or some such." "Ipsnadd. He is our chief deity. But we have a whole pantheon. Major gods and minor gods. Heroes and demigods and nature spirits -- " "And do not forget the prophets," Larhgan put in helpfully. As former Chief Beauty of the planet (an elective civil-service office), she was not accustomed to being left out of things. "We have many prophets. And saints. I myself am studying to be a -- " Bbulas glared at her. Though her antennae quivered sulkily, she stopped and said no more -- for the moment, anyway. "Sounds like quite a complex civilization," Cyril commented. "No, no!" Bbulas protested in alarm. "We are a simple primitive people without technological pretensions." "You don't need any," Cyril assured him. "Not when you have fireworks that function in the rain." Inside himself, Skkiru guffawed. "We are a simple people," Bbulas repeated helplessly. "A very simple and very primitive people." "Somehow," Raoul said, "I feel you may have a quality that civilization may have lost." The light in his eyes was recognizable to any even remotely humanoid species as a mystic glow. But Cyril seemed well in command of the situation. "Come now, Raoul," he laughed, clapping his young colleague on the shoulder, "don't fall into the Rousseau trap -- noble savage and all that sort of rot!" "But that beggar!" Raoul insisted. "Trite, certainly, but in21 jmTTin mm y( o credible nonetheless! Before, one only read of such things -- " A glazed look came into two of Bbulas' eyes, while the third closed despairingly. "What beggar? What beggar? Tell me -- I must know as if I didn't really," he muttered in Snaddrath. "The only beggar we've seen on this planet so far. That one." Cyril indicated the modest form of Skkiru, attempting to conceal himself behind Luccar's portly person. "I realize it was only illusion, but, as my associate says, a re22 markably good one. And," Cyril added, "an even more remarkable example of cultural diffusion." "What do you mean? Please, gracious and lovable Terrans, deign to tell me what you mean. What did that insufferable beggar do?" In spite of himself, Skkiru's knees flickered. Fool, he told himself, you knew it was bound to come out sooner or later. Take courage in your own convictions; be convinced by your own courage. All he really can do is yell. "He did the Indian rope trick for us," Raoul explained. "And very well, too. Very well indeed." "The -- Indian rope trick!" Bbulas spluttered. "Why, the -- " And then he recollected his religious vocation, as well as his supposed ignorance. "Would you be so kind as to tell me what the Indian rope trick is, good sirs?" 'Well, he did it with a chain, actually." "We have no ropes on this planet," Larhgan contributed. "We are backward." "And a small boy went up and disappeared," Raoul finished. Suddenly forgetting the stiffupper-lip training for which the planet had gone to such great expense, Bbulas spun around and around in a fit of bad temper, to Skkiru's great glee. Fortunately, the Dilettante retained enough self-control to keep his feet on the ground -- perhaps remembering that to fail to do so would compound Skkiru's crime. "Dervishism!" Raoul exclaimed, his eyes incandescent with interest. He pulled out his notebook. After biting his lip thoughtfully, Cyril did the same. "Just like Skkiru!" Bbulas gasped as he spun slowly to a stop. "He is a disruptive cultural mechanism. Leading children astray!" "But not at all," Raoul pointed 23 out politely. "The boy came back unharmed and in the best of spirits." "So far as we could see," Cyril amended. "Of course there may have been psychic damage." "Which boy was it?" Bbulas demanded.  in question -- a rather wellknown juvenile delinquent, though the Terrestrials, of course, couldn't know that. "He is a member of my own clan," Bbulas said. "He will be thrashed soundly." "But why punish him?" Raoul asked. "What harm has he done?" "Shhh," Cyril warned him. "You may be touching on a tabu. What's the matter with you, anyway? One would think you had forgotten every lesson you ever learned." "Oh, I am truly sorry!" Raoul's face became a pleasing shade of pink, which made him look much more human. Maybe it was the wrong color, but at least it was a color. "Please to accept my apologies, reverend sir." "It's quite all right." Bbulas reverted to graciousness. "The boy should not have associated with a beggar -- especially that one. If he did not hold his post by timehallowed tradition, we would -- dispose of him. He has always been a trouble-maker." "But I do not understand," Raoul persisted. Skkiru could not understand why Cyril did not stop him again. "The beggar did the trick very effectively. I know it was all illusion, but I should like to know just how he created such an illusion, and, moreover, how the Indian rope trick got all the way to -- " "It was all done by magic," Bbulas said firmly. "Magic outside the temple is not encouraged, because it is black magic, and so it is wrong. The magic of the priests is white magic, and so it is right. Put that down in your little book." Raoul obediently wrote it down. "Still, I should like to know -- " "Let us speak of pleasanter things," Bbulas interrupted again. "Tomorrow night, we are holding a potlatch and we should be honored to have the pleasure of your company." "Delighted," Raoul bowed. "I was wrong," Cyril said. "This is not a remarkable example of cultural diffusion. It is a remarkable example of a diffuse culture." ?? "D UT I cannot understand," Raoul said to Cyril later, in the imagined privacy of their hut. "Why are you suspicious of this charming, friendly people, so like the natives that the textbooks lead one to expect?" Naturally, Skkiru -- having made 24 his way in through a secret passage known only to the entire population of the city and explicitly designed for espionage, and was spying outside the door -- thought, we are textbook natives. Not only because we were patterned on literary prototypes, but because Bbulas never really left school -- in spirit, anyway. He is the perpetual undergraduate and his whole scheme is nothing more than a grandiose Class Night. "Precisely what I've been thinking," Cyril said. "So like the textbooks -- all the textbooks put together." "What do you mean? Surely it is possible for analogous cultural features to develop independently in different cultures?" "Oh, it's possible, all right. Probability -- particularly when it comes to such a great number of features packed into one small culture -- is another matter entirely." "I cannot understand you," , Raoul objected. "What do you want of these poor natives? To me, it seems everything has been of the most idyllic. Rapport was established almost immediately." "A little too immediately, perhaps, don't you think? You haven't had much experience, Raoul, so you might not be aware it usually isn't as easy as this." Cyril flung himself down on one of the cots that had been especially hardened for Terrestrial use and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Skkiru was dying for a cigarette himself, but that was another cultural feature the Snaddrath had to dispense with now -- not that smoking was insufficiently primitive, but that tobacco was not indigenous to the planet. "That is because they are not a hostile people," Raoul insisted. "Apparently they have no enemies. Nonetheless, they are of the utmost interest. I hardly expected to land a society like this on my very first field trip," he added joyfully. "Never have I heard of so dynamic a culture! Never!" "Nor I," Cyril agreed, "and this is far from being my very first field trip. It has a terribly large number of strange elements in it -- strange, that is, when considered in relationship to the society as a whole. Environmental pressures seem to have had no effect upon their culture. For instance, don't you think it rather remarkable that a people with such an enormously complex social structure as theirs should wear clothing so ill adapted to protect them from the weather?" " enthusiastically -- another undergraduate type, Skkiru observed, happiest with matters that either resembled those in books 25 or came directly from them, so that they could be explicitly pigeonholed -- "the Indians of Tierra del Fuego wore nothing but waist-length sealskin capes even in the bitterest cold. Of course, this civilization is somewhat more advanced than theirs in certain ways, but one finds such anomalies in all primitive civilizations, does one not?" "That's true to a certain extent. But one would think they'd at least have developed boots to cope with the mud. And why was the beggar the only one to wear mudshoes? Why, moreover -- " Cyril narrowed his eyes and pointed his cigarette at Raoul -- "did he wear theta only the first time and subsequently appear barefooted?" "That was odd," Raoul admitted, "but -- " "And the high priest spoke of thrashing that boy. You should know, old chap, that cruelty to children is in inverse ratio to the degree of civilization." Raoul stared at his colleague. "My faith, are you suggesting that we go see how hard they hit him, then?" Cyril laughed. "All I suggest is that we keep a very open mind about this society until we can discover what fundamental attitudes are controlling such curious individual as well as group behavior." "But assuredly. That is what we are here for, is it not? So why are you disturbing yourself so much?" But it was Raoul, Skkiru thought, who appeared much more disturbed than Cyril. It was understandable -- the younger man was interested only in straightforward ethnologizing and undoubtedly found the developing complications upsetting. "Look," Cyril continued. "They call this place a hut. It's almost a palace." My God, Skkiru thought, what kind of primitive conditions are they used to? "That is largely a question of semantics," Raoul protested. "But regard -- the roof leaks. Is that not backward enough for you, eh?" And Raoul moved to another part of the room to avoid receiving indisputable proof of the leakage on his person. "What is more, the sanitary arrangements are undeniably primitive." "The roofs of many palaces leak, and there is no plumbing to speak of, and still they are not called huts. And tell me this -- why should the metal-workers be the pariahs? Why metal-workers?" Raoul's eyes opened wide. "You know there is often an outcast class with no apparent rationale behind its establishment All the tapes -- " "True enough, but you will re26 member that the reason the smiths of Masai were pariahs was that they manufactured weapons which might tempt people to commit bloodshed. I keep remembering them, somehow. I keep remembering so many things here" "But we have seen no weapons on this planet," Raoul argued. "In fact, the people seem completely peaceful." "Right you are." Cyril blew another smoke ring. "Since this is a planet dependent chiefly upon minerals, why make the members of jts most important industry the out-group?" "You think it is that they may be secretly hostile?" Cyril smiled. "I think they may be secretly something, but hardly hostile." Aha, Skkiru thought. Bbulas, my splendidly scaled friend, I will have something interesting to tell you. later that night, as most of the Snaddrath met informally in the council chamber belowground, the new caste distinctions being, if not forgotten, at least in abeyance -- for everyone except Bbulas. "You imbecile!" He whirled, unable to repress his Snadd emotions after a long behaviorally Terran day. "I have half a mind to get rid of you by calling down divine judgment." "How would you do that?" Skkiru demanded, emboldened by the little cry of dismay, accompanied by a semi-somersault, which Larhgan gave. In spite of everything, she still loved him; she would never belong to Bbulas, though he might plan until he was ochre in the face. "Same way you did the rope trick. Only you wouldn't come back, my boy. Nice little cultural trait for the ethnologists to put in their peace pipes and smoke. Never saw such people for asking awkward questions." Bbulas sighed and straightened his antennae with his fingers, since their ornaments made them too heavy to allow reflective verticalization. "Remind me of final exams back on Gambrell." "Anthropologists always ask awkward questions -- everybody knows that," Larhgan put in. "It's their function. And I don't think you should speak that way to Skkiru, Bbulas. Like all of us, he's only trying to do his best. No man -- or woman -- can do more." She smiled at Skkiru and his hearts whirled madly inside him. Only a dolt, he thought, would give way to despair; there was no need for this intolerable situation to endure for a lifetime. If only he could solve the problem more quickly than Bbulas expected or -- Skkiru began to un27 derstand -- wanted, Larhgan could be his again. "With everybody trying to run this planet," Bbulas snarled, taking off his headdress, "no wonder things are going wrong." Luccar intervened. Although it was obvious that he had been enjoying to a certain extent the happy anonymity of functionless yam-stealer, old elective responsibilities could not but hang heavy over a public servant of such unimpeachable integrity. "After all," the old man said, "secretly we're still a democracy, and secretly I am still President, and secretly I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps we weren't a little rash in -- " "Look here, all of you," Bbulas interrupted querulously. "I'm not doing this for my own amusement." "DCT that's just what you are doing, Skkiru thought, even though you wouldn't admit it to yourself, nor would you think of it as amusement. "You know what happened to Nemeth," Bbulas continued, using an argument that had convinced them before, but that was beginning to wear a little thin now. "Poorest, most backward planet in the whole Galaxy. A couple of ethnologists from Earth stumbled on it a little over a century ago and what happened? More kept 28 on coming; the trade ships followed. Now it's the richest, most advanced planet in that whole sector. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to us in this sector, if we play our cards carefully." "But maybe these two won't tell other anthropologists about us," Luccar said. "Something the older one remarked certainly seemed to imply as much. Maybe they don't want the same thing to happen again -- in which case, all this is a waste of time. Furthermore," he concluded rather petulantly, "at my age, I don't like running about in the open; it's not healthful." "If they don't tell other anthropologists about us," Bbulas said, his face paling to lime-green with anxiety, "we can spread the news unobtrusively ourselves. Just let one study be published, even under false coordinates, and we can always hire a good public relations man to let our whereabouts leak out. Please, everybody, stick to your appointed tasks and let me do the worrying. You haven't even given this culture a chance! It's hardly more than a day old and all I hear are complaints, complaints, complaints." "You'd better worry," Skkiru said smugly, "because already those Terrans think there's something fishy about this culture. Ha, ha! Did you get that -- fishy?" Only Larhgan laughed. She loved him. "How do you know they're suspicious?" Bbulas demanded. "Are you in their confidence? Skkiru, if you've been talking -- " "All I did was spy outside their door," Skkiru said hastily. "I knew you couldn't eavesdrop; it wouldn't look dignified if you were caught. But beggars do that kind of thing all the time. And I wanted to show you I could be of real use." He beamed at Larhgan, who beamed back. "I could have kept my findings to myself," he went on, "but I came to tell you. In fact -- " he dug in his robe -- "I even jotted down a few notes." "It wasn't at all necessary, Skkiru," Bbulas said in a tired voice. "We took the elementary precaution of wiring their hut for sound and a recorder is constantly taking down their every word." "Hut!" Skkiru kept his antennae under control with an effort, but his retort was feeble. "They think it's a palace. You did them too well, Bbulas." "I may have overdone the exterior architecture a bit," the high priest admitted. "Not that it seems relevant to the discussion. Although I've been trying to arrange our primitivism according to Terrestrial ideas of cultural backwardness, I'm afraid many of the physical arrangements are primitive according to our conceptions rather than theirs." " according to Terran ideas?" Luccar wanted to know. "Why must we be slaves even to fashions in backwardness?" "Hear, hear!" cried an anonymous voice. "And thank you, Skkiru," the former President continued, "for telling me they were suspicious. I doubt that Bbulas would have taken the trouble to inform me of so trivial a matter." "As high priest," Bbulas said stiffly, "I believe the matter, trivial or not, now falls within my province." "Shame!" cried an anonymous voice -- or it might have been the same one. Bbulas turned forest-green and his antennae twitched. "After all, you yourself, Luccar, agreed to accept the role of elder statesman -- " "Yam-stealer," Luccar corrected him bitterly, "which is not the same thing." "On Earth, it is. And," Bbulas went on quickly, "as for our assuming primitive Earth attitudes, where else are we going to get our attitudes from? We can't borrow any primitive attitudes from Nemeth, because they're too well 29 known. And since there are no other planets we know of with intelligent life-forms that have social structures markedly different from the major Terran ones -- except for some completely nonhumanoid cultures, which, for physiological reasons, we are incapable of imitating -- we have to rely upon records of primitive Terran sources for information. Besides, a certain familiarity with the traits manifested will make the culture more understandable to the Terrans, and, hence, more attractive to them psychologically." He stopped and straightened out his antennae. "In other words," Skkiru commented, emboldened by a certain aura of sympathy he felt emanating from Larhgan, at least, and probably from Luccar, too, "he doesn't have the imagination to think up any cultural traits for himself, so he has to steal them -- and that's the easiest place to steal them from." "This is none of your business, Skkiru," Bbulas snapped. "You just beg." "It's the business of all of us, Bbulas," Luccar corrected softly. "Please to remember that, no matter what our alloted roles, we are all concerned equally in this." "Of course, of course, but please let me handle the situation in my own way, since I made the plans. And, Skkiru," the Dilettante added with strained grace, "you may have a warm cloak to wear as soon as we can get patches welded on." Then Bbulas took a deep breath and reverted to his old cheer-leader manner. "Now we must all get organized for the potlatch. We can give the Terrans those things the Ladies' Aid has been working on all year for the charity bazaar and, in exchange, perhaps they will give us more chocolate bars -- " he glanced reproachfully at Skkiru -- "and other food." "And perhaps some yams," Luccar suggested, "so that -- God save us -- I can steal them." "I'll definitely work on that," Bbulas promised.  gar, he held no prominent position at the feast -- in reality, no position at all -- for he hated fish. And fish, naturally, would be the chief refreshment offered, since the Snaddrath did not want the Terrans to know that they had already achieved that degrading dependency upon the tin can that marks one of the primary differences between savagery and civilization. There were fish pate on rice crackers, fish soup with rice, boiled fish, baked fish, fried fish and a pilau of rice with fish. There were fish chitlins, fish chips, 30 fish cakes, fish candy and guslat -- a potent distillation of fermented fish livers -- to wash it all down. And even in the library, where Skkiru sought refuge from the festivities, fishy fumes kept filtering down through the ventilating system to assail his nostrils. Bbulas had been right in a way, Skkiru had to admit to himself upon reflection. In trying to improve his lot, Skkiru had taken advantage of the Snaddrath's special kinetic talents, which had been banned for the duration -- and so he had, in effect, committed a crime. This time, however, he would seek to uplift himself in terms acceptable to the Terrans on a wholly indigenous level, and in terms which would also hasten the desired corruptive process -- in a nice way, of course -- so that the Snaddrath civilization could be profitably undermined as fast as possible and Larhgan be his once again. It was a hard problem to solve, but he felt sure he could do it. Anything Bbulas could do, he could do better. Then he had it! And the idea was so wonderful that he was a little sorry at the limited range it would necessarily cover. His part really should be played out before a large, yoomping audience, but he was realistic enough to see that it would be most expedient for him to give a private performance for the Earthmen alone. On the other hand, he now knew it should be offered outside the hut, because the recorder would pick up his cries and Bbulas would be in a spin -- as he would be about any evidence of independent thinking on the planet. Bbulas was less interested in the planet's prospering, it was now clear to Skkiru, than in its continuing in a state where he would remain top fish. had done its work, and by the time the Earthmen arrived at the door to their hut, they were alone. The rest of the company either had fallen into a stupor or could not trust themselves to navigate the mud. The Earthmen -- with an ingeniousness which would have augured well for the future development of their race, had it not already been the (allegedly) most advanced species in the Galaxy -- had adapted some spare parts from their ship into replicas of Skirru's mudshoes. They did, in truth, seem none too steady on their feet, but he was unable to determine to what degree this was a question of intoxication and what degree a question of navigation. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd." He thrust forward his begging bowl. 31 "Regard, it is the beggar! Why were you not at the festivities, worthy mendicant?" Raoul hiccuped. "Lovely party. Beautiful women. Delicious fish." Skkiru started to stand on his head, then remembered this was no longer a socially acceptable expression of grief and cast his eyes down. "I was not invited," he said sadly. "Like the little match girl," Raoul sympathized. "My heart bleeds for you, good match gi -- good beggar. Does your heart not bleed for him, Cyril?" "Bad show," the older ethnologist agreed, with a faint smile. "But that's what you've got to expect, if you're going to be a primitive." He was very drunk, Skkiru decided; he must be, to phrase his sentiments so poorly. Unless he -- but no, Skkiru refused to believe that. He didn't mind Cyril's being vaguely suspicious, but that was as far as he wanted him to go. Skkiru's toes apprehensively started to quiver. "How can you say a thing like that to a primitive?" Raoul demanded. "If he were not a primitive, it would be all right to call him a primitive, but one does not accuse primitives of being primitives. It's -- it's downright primitive; that's what it is!" "You need some coffee, my boy." Cyril grinned. "Black coffee. That guslat of theirs is highly potent stuff." They were about to go inside. Skkiru had to act quickly. He slumped over. Although he had meant to land on the doorstep, he lacked the agility to balance himself with the precision required and so he fell smack into the mud. The feel of the slime on his bare feet had been bad enough; oozing over his skin through the interstices of his clothing, it was pure hell. What sacrifices he was making for his planet! And for Larhgan. The thought of her would have to sustain him through this viscous ordeal, for there was nothing else solid within his grasp. "Ubbl," he said, lifting his head from the ooze, so that they could see the froth coming out of his mouth. "Glubbl." is he doing?" "Having an epileptic fit, I rather fancy. Go on, old man," Cyril said to Skkiru. "You're doing splendidly. Splendidly!" "I see the sky!" Skkiru howled, anxious to get his prophecies over with before he sank any deeper in the mud. "It is great magic. I see many ships in the sky. They are all coming to Snaddra" "Bearing anthropologists and chocolate bars, I suppose," murmured Cyril. 32 "Shhh," Raoul said indignantly. "You must not interrupt. He is having personal contact with the supernatural, a very important element of the primitive ethos." "Thank you," Cyril said. "I'll try to remember that." So will I, thought Skirru. "They carry learned men and food for the spiritually and physically hungry people of Snaddra," he interrupted impatiently. "They carry warm clothing for the poor and miserable people of Snaddra. They carry yams for the larcenous and frustrated people of Snaddra." "Yams!" Raoul echoed. "Yams!" "Shhh, this is fascinating. Go on, beggar." But the mud sogging over Skkiru's body was too much. The fit could be continued at a later date -- and in a drier location. "Where am I?" he asked, struggling to a sitting position. "You are on Snaddra, fifth planet of the sun Weebl," Raoul began, "in -- " "Weeeeebl," Skkiru corrected, getting to his feet with the older ethnologist's assistance. "What happened?" He beat futilely at the mud caught in the meshes of his metal rags. "I feel faint." "Come in and have some coffee with us," Cyril invited. This also was part of Skirru's plan, for he had no intention of going back across that mud, if he could pos33 sibly help it. He had nothing further to say that the recorders should not hear. Bbulas might object to his associating with the Earthmen, but he couldn't do much if the association seemed entirely innocent. At the moment, Snaddra might be a theocracy, but the democratic hangover was still strong. "I would rather have some hot chocolate," Skkiru said. "That is, if you have no objection to drinking with a beggar." "My dear fellow -- " Cyril put an arm around Skkiru's muddy shoulders -- "we ethnologists do not hold with caste distinctions. Come in and have chocolate -- with a spot of rum, eh? That'll make you right as a trivet in a matter of seconds." after several cups of the finest chocolate he had ever tasted, that Skkiru announced himself to feel quite recovered. "Please do not bother to accompany me to the door," he said. "I can find my own way. You do me too much honor. I would feel shamefaced." "But Cyril began. "No," Skkiru said. "It is -- it is bad form here. I insist. I must go my way alone." "All right," Cyril agreed. Raoul looked at him in some surprise. 34 "All right," Cyril repeated in a louder tone. "Go by yourself, if an escort would bother you. But please give the door a good bang, so the lock will catch." Skkiru slammed the door lustily to simulate the effect of departure and then he descended via the secret passage inside the hut itself, scrabbling a little because the hot chocolate seemed strangely to have affected his sense of balance. The rest of the Snaddrath were in the council chamber gloating over the loot from the potlatch. It was, as a matter of fact, a good take. "Where were you, Skkiru?" Bbulas asked, examining a jar of preserved kumquats suspiciously. "Up to no good, I'll be bound." "Oh, my poor Skkiru!" Larhgan exclaimed, before Skkiru could say anything. "How muddy and wretched-looking you are! I don't like this whole thing," she told Bbulas. "It's cruel. Being high priestess isn't nearly as much fun as I thought it would be." "This is not supposed to be fun," the Dilettante informed her coldly. "It is in dead earnest. Since the question has been brought up, however, what did happen to you, Skkiru?" "I -- er -- fell down and, being a beggar, I had no other garments to change into." "You'll survive," Bbulas said unfeelingly. "On Earth, I understand, people fall into mud all the time. Supposed to have a beneficial effect -- and any effect on you, Skkiru, would have to be beneficial." Larhgan was opening her mouth to say something -- probably, Skkiru thought fondly, in his defense -- when there came a thud and a yell from the passage outside. Two yells, in fact. And two thuds. "My faith," exclaimed a Terrestrial voice, "but how did the beggar descend! I am sure every bone in my body is broken." "I think you'll find him possessed of means of locomotion not known to us. But you're not hurt, old chap -- only bruised." And Cyril came into the council chamber, followed by a limping Raoul. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I trust this is not an intrusion, although I'm quite sure you'll tell us we've broken a whole slue of tabus." "You!" Bbulas screamed at Skkiru. "You must have used the passage in the hut! You let them follow you!" Losing control of his own reflexes, he began to whirl madly. claimed, staring around him. "To build a place like this beneath the mud -- name of a name, these people must have hydraulic engineering far superior to anything on Earth!" "You are too kind," the former hydraulic engineer said deprecatingly. "Actually, it's quite simple -- " "This is not a primitive civilization at all, Raoul," Cyril explained. "They've been faking it from tapes. Probably have a culture very much like ours, with allowances for climatic differences, of course. Oh, undoubtedly it would be provincial, but -- " "We are not provincial," Larhgan said coldly. "Primitive, yes. Provincial, no! We are -- " "But why should they do a thing like this to us?" Raoul wailed. "I imagine they did it to get on the trade routes, as Nemeth did. They've been trying not to talk about Nemeth all the while. Must have been rather a strain. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" Cyril told the assembled Snaddrath. "Very bad form!" Bbulas was turning paler and paler as he whirled. "All your fault," he gasped hoarsely to Skkiru. "All your fault!" And that was true, Skkiru realized. His antennae quivered, but he didn't even try to restrain them. He had meant well, yet he had messed up the planet's affairs far more seriously than Bbulas had. He had ruined their hopes, killed all their chances by 35 his carelessness. He, Skkiru, instead of being his planet's savior, was its spoiler. He psonked violently. But Larhgan moved nearer to him. "It's all over, anyhow," she whispered, "and you know what? I'm glad. I'm glad we failed. I'd rather starve as myself than succeed as a sham." Skkiru controlled himself. Silently, he took the grimpatch out of his carrier and, as silently, she took it back. "My faith, they must have had plumbing all the time!" Raoul complained. "Very likely," said Cyril sternly. "Looks as if we've suffered for nothing." "Such people!" Raoul said. "True primitives, I am sure, would never have behaved so unfeelingly!" Cyril smiled, but his face was hard as he turned back to the Snaddrath. "We'll radio Gambrell in the morning to have a ship dispatched to pick us up. I'm not sure but that we have a good case for fraud against you." "We're destroyed!" Bbulas shrieked as the full emotional impact of the situation hit him. "An interplanetary lawsuit would ruin Snaddra entirely." His cries were echoed in the howls of the other Snaddrath, their antennae psonking, their eyes bulging. 36 Bbulas lost all emotional restraint, forgot about his Terrestrial training, and turned upside down in a spasm of grief. Since there was no longer any reason to repress their natural manifestation of feeling, all the Snaddrath followed suit, their antennae twisting in frenzy as they ululated. And then, to Skkiru's surprise and the surprise of all the rest, Cyril stopped and took out his notebook. "Wait a minute," he said as Raoul did likewise. All four Earthly eyes were shining with a glow that was recognizable to any even remotely humanoid species as the glow of intellectual fervor. "Wait just a minute! Our plans are altered. We may stay, after all!" One by one, the Snaddrath reversed to upright positions, but did not retract their eyes, for they were still staring at the Earthmen. Skkiru knew now what had been bothering him about the Terrestrials all along. They were crazy -- that was what it was. Who but maniacs would want to leave their warm, dry planets and go searching the stars for strange cultures, when they could stay quietly at home in peace and comfort with their families? Skkiru's hand reached out for Larhgan's and found it.  Something drastic should happen to all snoopers -- but nothing as shocking and frightful as this! enough rooming house and the doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are old-fashioned single action jobs and the hinges are loose, and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to operate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door sidewise against its hinges, and slip the latch. Further, you can lock the door the same way when you come out. Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things partly because he was bored. The company doctors had laid him up -- not off, up -- for three weeks (after his helper had hit him just over the temple with a fourteeninch crescent wrench) pending some more X-rays. If he was going to get just sick-leave pay, he wanted to make it stretch. If he was going to get a big fat settlement -- all to the good; what he saved by living in this firetrap would make the money look even better. Meanwhile, he felt fine and had nothing to do all day. "Slim isn't dishonest," his mother used to tell Children's 37 Court some years back. "He's just curious." She was perfectly right. Slim was constitutionally incapable of borrowing your bathroom without looking into your medicine chest. Send him into your kitchen for a saucer and when he came out a minute later, he'd have inventoried your refrigerator, your vegetable bin, and (since he was six feet three inches tall) he would know about a moldering jar of maraschino cherries in the back of the top shelf that you'd forgotten about. Perhaps Slim, who was not impressed by his impressive size and build, felt that a knowledge that you secretly use hair-restorer, or are one of those strange people who keeps a little mound of unmated socks in your second drawer, gave him a kind of superiority. Or maybe security is a better word. Or maybe it was an odd compensation for one of the most advanced cases of gawking, gasping shyness ever recorded. Whatever it was, Slim liked you better if, while talking to you, he knew how many jackets hung in your closet, how old that unpaid phone bill was, and just where you'd hidden those photographs. On the other hand, Slim didn't insist on knowing bad or even embarrassing things about you. He just wanted to know things about you, period. TT IS current situation was therefore a near paradise. Flimsy doors stood in rows, barely sustaining vacuum on aching vacuum of knowledge; and one by one they imploded at the nudge of his curiosity. He touched nothing (or if he did, he replaced it carefully) and removed nothing, and within a week he knew Mrs. Koyper's roomers far better than she could, or cared to. Each secret visit to the rooms gave him a starting point; subsequent ones taught him more. He knew not only what these people had, but what they did, where, how much, for how much, and how often. In almost every case, he knew why as well. Almost every case. Celia Sarton came. Now, at various times, in various places, Slim had found strange things in other people's rooms. There was an old lady in one shabby place who had an electric train under her bed; used it, too. There was an old spinster in this very building who collected bottles, large and small, of any value or capacity, providing they were round and squat and with long necks. A man on the second floor secretly guarded his desirables with the unloaded .25 automatic in his top bureau drawer, for which he had a halfbox of .38 cartridges. There was a (to be chivalrous) 38 girl in one of the rooms who kept fresh cut flowers before a photograph on her night-table -- or, rather, before a frame in which were stacked eight photographs, one of which held the stage each day. Seven days, eight photographs: Slim admired the system. A new love every day and, predictably, a different love on successive Wednesdays. And all of them movie stars. Dozens of rooms, dozens of imprints, marks, impressions, overlays, atmospheres of people. And they needn't be odd ones. A woman moves into a room, however standardized; the instant she puts down her dusting powder on top of the flush tank, the room is hers. Something stuck in the illfitting frame of a mirror, something draped over the long-dead gas jet, and the samest of rooms begins to shrink toward its occupant as if it wished, one day, to be a close-knit, form-fitting, individual integument as intimate as a skin. But not Celia Sarton's room. Slim Walsh got a glimpse of her as she followed Mrs. Koyper up the stairs to the third floor. Mrs. Koyper, who hobbled, slowed any follower sufficiently to afford the most disinterested witness a good look, and Slim was anything but disinterested. Yet for days he could not recall her clearly. It was as if Celia Sarton had been -- not invisible, for that would have been memorable in itself -- but translucent or, chameleonlike, drably re-radiating the drab wall color, carpet color, woodwork color. She was -- how old? Old enough to pay taxes. How tall? Tall enough. Dressed in whatever women cover themselves with in their statistical thousands. Shoes, hose, skirt, jacket, hat. She carried a bag, When you go to the baggage window at a big terminal, you notice a suitcase here, a steamer-trunk there; and all around, high up, far back, there are rows and ranks and racks of luggage not individually noticed but just there. This bag, Celia Sarton's bag, was one of them. And to Mrs. Koyper, she said -- she said -- She said whatever is necessary when one takes a cheap room; and to find her voice, divide the sound of a crowd by the number of people in it.  ticeable was she that, aside from being aware that she left in the morning andeturned in the evening, Slim let two days go by before he entered her room; he simply could not remind himself about her. And when he did, and had inspected it to his satisfaction, he had his hand on the knob, about to leave, before he recalled 39 that the room was, after all, occupied. Until that second, he had thought he was giving one of the vacancies the once-over. (He did this regularly; it gave him a reference-point.) He grunted and turned back, flicking his gaze over the room. First he had to assure himself that he was in the right room, which, for a man of his instinctive orientations, was extraordinary. Then he had to spend a moment of disbelief in his own eyes, which was all but unthinkable. When that passed, he stood in astonishment, staring at the refutation of everything his -- hobby -- had taught him about people and the places they live in. The bureau drawers were empty. The ashtray was clean. No toothbrush, toothpaste, soap. In the closet, two wire hangers and one wooden one covered with dirty quilted silk, and nothing else. Under the grime-gray dresser scarf, nothing. In the shower stall, the medicine chest, nothing and nothing again, except what Mrs. Koyper had grudgingly installed. Slim went to the bed and carefully turned back the faded coverlet. Maybe she had slept in it, but very possibly not; Mrs. Koyper specialized in unironed sheets of such a ground-in gray that it wasn't easy to tell. Frowning, Slim put up the coverlet again and smoothed it. 40 Suddenly he struck his forehead, which yielded him a flash of pain from his injury. He ignored it. 'The bag!" It was under the bed, shoved there, not hidden there. He looked at it without touching it for a moment, so that it could be returned exactly. Then he hauled it out. TT was a black gladstone, neither new nor expensive, of that nondescript rusty color acquired by untended leatherette. It had a worn zipper closure and was not locked. Slim opened it. It contained a cardboard box, crisp and new, for a thousand virgin sheets of cheap white typewriter paper surrounded by a glossy bright blue band bearing a white diamond with the legend: Nonpareil the writers friend 15 cotton fiber trade mark registered. Slim lifted the paper out of the box, looked under it, riffled a thumbful of the sheets at the top and the same from the bottom, shook his head, replaced the paper, closed the box, put it back into the bag and restored everything precisely as he had found it. He paused again in the middle of the room, turning slowly once, but there was simply nothing else to look at. He let himself out, locked the door, and went silently back to his room. He sat down on the edge of his 1  y J ! ! Sr U I 'rf 7 W 'fir f A W JmmML f w jet 1 VB jf C   IkwSal JB.  41 bed and at last protested, "Nobody lives like that!" TT IS room was on the fourth and topmost floor of the old house. Anyone else would have called it the worst room in the place. It was small, dark, shabby and remote and it suited him beautifully. Its door had a transom, the glass of which had many times been painted over. By standing on the foot of his bed, Slim could apply one eye to the peephole he had scratched in the paint and look straight down the stairs to the third-floor landing. On this landing, hanging to the stub of one of the ancient gas jets, was a cloudy mirror surmounted by a dust-mantled gilt eagle and surrounded by a great many rococo carved flowers. By careful propping with folded cigarette wrappers, innumerable tests and a great deal of silent milage up and down the stairs, Slim had .arranged the exact tilt necessary in the mirror so that it covered the second floor landing as well. And just as a radar operator learns to translate glowing pips and masses into aircraft and weather, so Slim became expert at the interpretation of the fogged and distant image it afforded him. Thus he had the comings and goings of half the tenants under surveillance without having to leave his room. 42 It was in this mirror, at twelve minutes past six, that he saw Celia Sarton next, and as he watched her climb the stairs, his eyes glowed. The anonymity was gone. She came up the stairs two at a time, with a gait like bounding. She reached the landing and whirled into her corridor and was gone, and while a part of Slim's mind listened for the way she opened her door (hurriedly, rattling the key against the lock-plate, banging the door open, slamming it shut), another part studied a mental photograph of her face. What raised its veil of the statistical ordinary was its set purpose. Here were eyes only superficially interested in cars, curbs, stairs, doors. It was as if she had projected every important part of herself into that empty room of hers and waited there impatiently for her body to catch up. There was something in the room, or something she had to do there, which she could not, would not, wait for. One goes this way to a beloved after a long parting, or to a deathbed in the last, precipitous moments. This was not the arrival of one who wants, but of one who needs. Slim buttoned his shirt, eased his door open and sidled through it. He poised a moment on his landing like a great moose sensing the air before descending to a waterhole, and then moved downstairs. Celia Sarton's only neighbor in the north corridor -- the spinster with the bottles -- was settled for the evening; she was of very regular habits and Slim knew them well. Completely confident that he would not be seen, he drifted to the girl's door and paused. S HE was there, all right. He could see the light around the edges of the ill-fitting door, could sense that difference between an occupied room and an empty one, which exists however silent the occupant might be. And this one was silent. Whatever it was that had driven her into the room with such headlong urgency, whatever it was she was doing ( had to do) was being done with no sound or motion that he could detect. For a long time -- six minutes, seven -- Slim hung there, openthroated to conceal the sound of his breath. At last, shaking his head, he withdrew, climbed the stairs, let himself into his own room and lay down on the bed, frowning. He could only wait. Yet he could wait. No one does any single thing for very long. Especially a thing not involving movement. In an hour, in two -- It was five. At half-past eleven, some faint sound from the floor below brought Slim, half-dozing, twisting up from the bed and to his high peephole in the transom. He saw the Sarton girl come out of the corridor slowly, and stop, and look around at nothing in particular, like someone confined too long in a ship's cabin who has emerged on deck, not so much for the lungs' sake, but for the eyes'. And when she went down the stairs, it was easily and without hurry, as if (again) the important part of her was in the room. But the something was finished with for now and what was ahead of her wasn't important and could wait. Standing with his hand on his own doorknob, Slim decided that he, too, could wait. The temptation to go straight to her room was, of course, large, but caution also loomed. What he had tentatively established as her habit patterns did not include midnight exits. He could not know when she might come back and it would be foolish indeed to jeopardize his hobby -- not only where it included her, but all of it -- by being caught. He sighed, mixing resignation with anticipatory pleasure, and went to bed. Less than fifteen minutes later, he congratulated himself with a sleepy smile as he heard her slow footsteps mount the stair below. He slept. 43 closet, there was nothing in the ashtray, there was nothing in the medicine chest nor under the dresser scarf. The bed was made, the dresser drawers were empty, and under the bed was the cheap gladstone. In it was a box containing a thousand sheets of typing paper surrounded by a glossy blue band. Without disturbing this, Slim riffled the sheets, once at the top, once at the bottom. He grunted, shook his head and then proceeded, automatically but meticulously, to put everything back as he had found it. "Whatever it is this girl does at night," he said glumly, "it leaves tracks like it makes noise." He left. The rest of the day was unusually busy for Slim. In the morning he had a doctor's appointment, and in the afternoon he spent hours with a company lawyer who seemed determined to (a) deny the existence of any head injury and (b) prove to Slim and the world that the injury must have occurred years ago. He got absolutely nowhere. If Slim had another characteristic as consuming and compulsive as his curiosity, it was his shyness; these two could stand on one another's shoulders, though, and still look upward at Slim's stubbornness. It served its purpose. It took hours, however, and it was after seven 44 when he got home. He paused at the third-floor landing and glanced down the corridor. Celia Sarton's room was occupied and silent. If she emerged around midnight, exhausted and relieved, then he would know she had again raced up the stairs to her urgent, motionless task, whatever it was and here he checked himself. He had long ago learned the uselessness of cluttering up his busy head with conjectures. A thousand things might happen; in each case, only one would. He would wait, then, and could. And again, some hours later, he saw her come out of her corridor. She looked about, but he knew she saw very little; her face was withdrawn and her eyes wide and unguarded. Then, instead of going out, she went back into her room. He slipped downstairs half an hour later and listened at her door, and smiled. She was washing her lingerie at the handbasin. It was a small thing to learn, but he felt he was making progress. It did not explain why she lived as she did, but indicated how she could manage without so much as a spare handkerchief. Oh, well, maybe in the morning. maybe. He found it, he found it, though he could not know what it was he'd found. He laughed at first, not in triumph but wryly, calling himself a clown. Then he squatted on his heels in the middle of the floor (he would not sit on the bed, for fear of leaving wrinkles of his own on those Mrs. Koyper supplied) and carefully lifted the box of paper out of the suitcase and put it on the floor in front of him. Up to now, he had contented himself with a quick riffle of the blank paper, a little at the top, a little at the bottom. He had done just this again, without removing the box from the suitcase, but only taking the top off and tilting up the banded ream of Nonpareilthe-writers-iriend. And almost in spite of itself, his quick eye had caught the briefest flash of pale blue. Gently, he removed the band, sliding it off the pack of paper, being careful not to slit the glossy finish. Now he could freely riffle the pages, and when he did, he discovered that all of them except a hundred or so, top and bottom, had the same rectangular cut-out, leaving only a narrow margin all the way around. In the hollow space thus formed, something was packed. He could not tell what the something was, except that it was pale tan, with a tinge of pink, and felt like smooth untextured leather. There was a lot of it, neatly folded so that it exactly fitted the hole in the ream of paper. He puzzled over it for some minutes without touching it again, and then, scrubbing his fingertips against his shirt until he felt that they were quite free of moisture and grease, he gently worked loose the top corner of the substance and unfolded a layer. All he found was more of the same. He folded it down flat again to be sure he could, and then brought more of it out. He soon realized that the material was of an irregular shape and almost certainly of one piece, so that folding it into a tight rectangle required care and great skill. Therefore he proceeded very slowly, stopping every now and then to fold it up again, and it took him more than an hour to get enough of it out so that he could identify it. Identify? It was completely unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was a human skin, done in some substance very like the real thing. The first fold, the one which had been revealed at first, was an area of the back, which was why it showed no features. One might liken it to a balloon, except that a deflated balloon is smaller in every dimension than an inflated one. As far as Slim could judge, this was life-sized -- a little over five feet long and proportioned accordingly. The hair 45 was peculiar, looking exactly like the real thing until flexed, and then revealing itself to be one piece. It had Celia Sarton's face. Slim closed his eyes and opened them, and found that it was still true. He held his breath and put forth a careful, steady forefinger and gently pressed the left eyelid upward. There was an eye under it, all right, light blue and seemingly moist, but flat. Slim released the breath, closed the eye and sat back on his heels. His feet were beginning to tingle from his having knelt on the floor for so long. XT E looked all around the room once, to clear his head of strangeness, and then began to fold the thing up again. It took a while, but when he was finished, he knew he had it right. He replaced the typewriter paper in the box and the box in the bag, put the bag away and at last stood in the middle of the room in the suspension which overcame him when he was deep in thought. After a moment of this, he began to inspect the ceiling. It was made of stamped tin, like those of many old-fashioned houses. It was grimy and flaked and stained; here and there, rust showed through, and in one or two places, edges of the tin sheets had sagged. Slim nodded to himself in profound satisfaction, listened for a while at the door, let himself out, locked it and went upstairs. He stood in his own corridor for a minute, checking the position of doors, the hall window, and his accurate orientation of the same things on the floor below. Then he went into his own room. His room, though smaller than most, was one of the few in the house which was blessed with a real closet instead of a rickety off-the-floor wardrobe. He went into it and knelt, and grunted in satisfaction when he found how loose the ancient, unpainted floorboards were. By removing the side baseboard, he found it possible to get to the air-space between the fourth floor and the third-floor ceiling. He took out boards until he had an opening perhaps fourteen inches wide, and then, working in almost total silence, he began cleaning away dirt and old plaster. He did this meticulously, because when he finally pierced the tin sheeting, he wanted not one grain of dirt to fall into the room below. He took his time and it was late in the afternoon when he was satisfied with his preparations and began, with his knife, on the tin. It was thinner and softer than he had dared to hope; he almost 46 overcut on the first try. Carefully he squeezed the sharp steel into the little slot he had cut, lengthening it. When it was somewhat less than an inch long, he withdrew all but the point of the knife and twisted it slightly, moved it a sixteenth of an inch and twisted again, repeating this all down the cut until he had widened it enough for his purposes. He checked the time, then returned to Celia Sarton's room for just long enough to check the appearance of his work from that side. He was very pleased with it. The little cut had come through a foot away from the wall over the bed and was a mere pencil line lost in the baroque design with which the tin was stamped and the dirt and rust that marred it. He returned to his room and sat down to wait. He heard the old house coming to its evening surge of life, a voice here, a door there, footsteps on the stairs. He ignored them all as he sat on the edge of his bed, hands folded between his knees, eyes half closed, immobile like a machine fueled, oiled, tuned and ready, lacking only the right touch on the right control. And like that touch, the faint sound of Celia Sarton's footsteps moved him. To use his new peephole, he had to lie on the floor half in and half out of the closet, with his head in the hole, actually below floor level. With this, he was perfectly content, any amount of discomfort being well worth his trouble -- an attitude he shared with many another ardent hobbyist, mountain-climber or speleologist, duck-hunter or bird-watcher. he could see her splendidly, as well as most of the floor, the lower third of the door and part of the washbasin in the bathroom. She had come in hurriedly, with that same agonized haste he had observed before. At the same second she turned on the light, she had apparently flung her handbag toward the bed; it was in midair as the light appeared. She did not even glance its way, but hastily fumbled the old gladstone from under the bed, opened it, removed the box, opened it, took out the paper, slipped off the blue band and removed the blank sheets of paper which covered the hollowed-out ream. She scooped out the thing hidden there, shaking it once like a grocery clerk with a folded paper sack, so that the long limp thing straightened itself out. She arranged it carefully on the worn linoleum of the floor, arms down at the side, legs slightly apart, face up, neck straight. Then she lay down on the floor, too, head47 to-head with the deflated thing. She reached up over her head, took hold of the collapsed image of herself about the region of the ears, and for a moment did some sort of manipulation of it against the top of her own head. Slim heard faintly a sharp, chitinous click, like the sound one makes by snapping the edge of a thumbnail against the edge of a fingernail. Her hands slipped to the cheeks of the figure and she pulled at the empty head as if testing a connection. The head seemed now to have adhered to hers. Then she assumed the same pose she had arranged for this other, letting her hands fall wearily to her sides on the floor, closing her eyes. For a long while, nothing seemed to be happening, except for the odd way she was breathing, very deeply but very slowly, like the slow-motion picture of someone panting, gasping for breath after a long hard run. After perhaps ten minutes of this, the breathing became shallower and even slower, until, at the end of a half hour, he could detect none at all. Slim lay there immobile for more than an hour, until his body shrieked protest and his head ached from eyestrain. He hated to move, but move he must. Silently he backed out of the 48 closet, stood up and stretched. It was a great luxury and he deeply enjoyed it. He felt moved to think over what he had just seen, but clearly and consciously decided not to -- not yet, anyway. When he was unkinked, again, he crept back into the closet, put his head in the hole and his eye to the slot. Nothing had changed. She still lay quiet, utterly relaxed, so much so that her hands had turned palm upward. Slim watched and he watched. Just as he was about to conclude that this was the way the girl spent her entire nights and that there would be nothing more to see, he saw a slight and sudden contraction about the region of her solar plexus, and then another. For a time, there was nothing more, and then the empty thing attached to the top of her head began to fill. And Celia Sarton began to empty. Slim stopped breathing until it hurt and watched in total astonishment. ess progressed swiftly. It was as if something passed from the clothed body of the girl to this naked empty thing. The something, whatever it might be, had to be fluid, for nothing but a fluid would fill a flexible container in just this way, or make a flexible container slowly and evenly flatten out like this. Slim could see the fingers, which had been folded flat against the palms, inflate and move until they took on the normal relaxed curl of a normal hand. The elbows shifted a little to lie more normally against the body. And yes, it was a body now. The other one was not a body any more. It lay foolishly limp in its garments, its sleeping face slightly distorted by its flattening. The fingers fell against the palms by their own limp weight. The shoes thumped quietly on their sides, heels together, toes pointing in opposite directions. The exchange was done in less than ten minutes and then the newly filled body moved. It flexed its hands tentatively, drew up its knees and stretched its legs out again, arched its back against the floor. Its eyes flickered open. It put up its arms and made some deft manipulation at the top of its head. Slim heard another version of the soft-hard click and the now-empty head fell flat to the floor. The new Celia Sarton sat up and sighed and rubbed her hands lightly over her body, as if restoring circulation and sensation to a chilled skin. She stretched as comfortingly and luxuriously as Slim had a few minutes earlier. She looked rested and refreshed. At the top of her head, Slim caught a glimpse of a slit through which a wet whiteness showed, but it seemed to be closing. In a brief time, nothing showed there but a small valley in the hair, like a normal parting. She sighed again and got up. She took the clothed thing on the floor by the neck, raised it and shook it twice to make the clothes fall away. She tossed it to the bed and carefully picked up the clothes and deployed them about the room, the undergarments in the washbasin, the dress and slip on a hanger in the wardrobe. Moving leisurely but with purpose, she went into the bathroom and, except for her shins down, out of Slim's range of vision. There he heard the same faint domestic sounds he had once detected outside her door, as she washed her underclothes. She emerged in due course, went to the wardrobe for some wire hangers and took them into the bathroom. Back she came with the underwear folded on the hangers, which she hooked to the top of the open wardrobe door. Then she took the deflated integument which lay crumpled on the bed, shook it again, rolled it up into a ball and took it into the bathroom. Slim heard more water-running and sudsing noises, and, by ear. 4 followed the operation through a soaping and two rinses. Then she came out again, shaking out the object, which had apparently just been wrung, pulled it through a wooden clothes-hanger, arranged it creaselessly depending from the crossbar of the hanger with the bar about at its waistline, and hung it with the others on the wardrobe door. Then she lay down on the bed, not to sleep or to read or even to rest -- she seemed very rested -- but merely to wait until it was time to do something else. T Y now, Slim's bones were complaining again, so he wormed noiselessly backward out of his lookout point, got into his shoes and a jacket, and went out to get something to eat. When he came home an hour later and looked, her light was out and he could see nothing. He spread his overcoat carefully over the hole in the closet so no stray light from his room would appear in the little slot in the ceiling, closed the door, read a comic book for a while, and went to bed. The next day, he followed her. What strange occupation she might have, what weird vampiric duties she might disclose, he did not speculate on. He was doggedly determined to gather information first and think later. What he found out about her daytime activities was, if anything, more surprising than any wild surmise. She was a clerk in a small five-and-ten on the East Side. She ate in the store's lunch bar at lunchtime -- a green salad and a surprising amount of milk -- and in the evening she stopped at a hot-dog stand and drank a small container of milk, though she ate nothing. Her steps were slowed by then and she moved wearily, speeding up only when she was close to the rooming house, and then apparentlyall but overcome with eagerness to get home and into something more comfortable. She was watched in this process, and Slim, had he disbelieved his own eyes the first time, must believe them now. So it went for a week, three days of which Slim spent in shadowing her, every evening in watching her make her strange toilet. Every twenty-four hours, she changed bodies, carefully washing, drying, folding and putting away the one she was not using. Twice during the week, she went out for what was apparently a constitutional and nothing more -- a half-hour around midnight, when she would stand on the walk in front of the rooming house, or wander around the block. At work, she was silent but so not unnaturally so; she spoke, when spoken to, in a small, unmusical voice. She seemed to have no friends; she maintained her aloofness by being uninteresting and by seeking no one out and by needing no one. She evinced no outside interests, never going to the movies or to the park. She had no dates, not even with girls. Slim thought she did not sleep, but lay quietly in the dark waiting for it to be time to get up and go to work. And when he came to think about it, as ultimately he did, it occurred to Slim that within the anthill in which we all live and have our being, enough privacy can be exacted to allow for all sorts of strangeness in the members of society, providing the strangeness is not permitted to show. If it is a man's pleasure to sleep upside-down like a bat, and if he so arranges his life that no one ever sees him sleeping, or his sleeping-place, why, batlike he may sleep all the days of his life. One need not, by these rules, even be a human being. Not if the mimicry is good enough. It is a measure of Slim's odd personality to report that Celia Sarton's ways did not frighten him. He was, if anything, less disturbed by her now than he'd been before he had begun to spy on her. He knew what she did in her room and how she lived. Before, he had not known. Now he did. This made him much happier. His curiosity would never drive him to do what another man might -- to speak to her on the stairs or on the street, get to know her and more about her. He was too shy for that. Nor was he moved to report to anyone the odd practice he watched each evening. It wasn't his business to report. She was doing no harm as far as he could see. In his cosmos, everybody had a right to live and make a buck if they could. Yet his curiosity, its immediacy taken care of, did undergo a change. It was not in him to wonder what sort of being this was and whether its ancestors had grown up among human beings, living with them in caves and in tents, developing and evolving along with homo sap until it could assume the uniform of the smallest and most invisible of wage-workers. He would never reach the conclusion that in the fight for survival, a species might discover that a most excellent characteristic for survival among human beings might be not to fight them but to join them. No, Slim's curiosity was far simpler, more basic and less informed than any of these con51 jectures. He simply changed the field of his wonderment from what to what if? So it was that on the eighth day of his survey, a Tuesday, he went again to her room, got the bag, opened it, removed the box, opened it, removed the ream of paper, slid the blue band off, removed the covering sheets, took out the second Celia Sarton, put her on the bed and then replaced paper, blue band, box-cover, box, and bag just as he had found them. He put the folded thing under his shirt and went out, carefully locking the door behind him in his special way, and went upstairs to his room. He put his prize under the four clean shirts in his bottom drawer and sat down to await Celia Sarton's homecoming. She was a little late that night -- twenty minutes, perhaps. The delay seemed to have increased both her fatigue and her eagerness; she burst in feverishly, moved with the rapidity of nearpanic. She looked drawn and pale and her hands shook. She fumbled the bag from under the bed, snatched out the box and opened it, contrary to her usual measured movements, by inverting it over the bed and dumping out its contents. When she saw nothing there but sheets of paper, some with a wide rectangle cut from them and 52 some without, she froze. She crouched over that bed without moving for an interminable two minutes. Then she straightened up slowly and glanced about the room. Once she fumbled through the paper, but resignedly, without hope. She made one sound, a high, sad whimper, and, from that moment on, was silent. She went to the window slowly, her feet dragging, her shoulders slumped. For a long time, she stood looking out at the city, its growing darkness, its growing colonies of lights, each a symbol of life and life's usages. Then she drew down the blind and went back to the bed.  with loose uncaring fingers and put the heap of them on the dresser. She took off her shoes and placed them neatly side by side on the floor by the bed. She lay down in the same utterly relaxed pose she affected when she made her change, hands down and open, legs a little apart. Her face looked like a deathmask, its tissues sunken and sagging. It was flushed and sicklooking. There was a little of the deep regular breathing, but only a little. There was a bit of the fluttering contractions at the midriff, but only a bit. Then -- nothing. Slim backed away from the peephole and sat up. He felt very bad about this. He had been only curious; he hadn't wanted her to get sick, to die. For he was sure she had died. How could he know what sort of sleep-surrogate an organism like this might require, or what might be the results of a delay in changing? What could he know of the chemistry of such a being? He had thought vaguely of slipping down the next day while she was out and returning her property. Just to see. Just to know what if. Just out of curiosity. Should he call a doctor? She hadn't. She hadn't even tried, though she must have known much better than he did how serious her predicament was. (Yet if a species depended for its existence on secrecy, it would be species-survival to let an individual die undetected.) Well, maybe not calling a doctor meant that she'd be all right, after all. Doctors would have a lot of silly questions to ask. She might even tell the doctor about her other skin, and if Slim was the one who had fetched the doctor, Slim might be questioned about that. Slim didn't want to get involved with anything. He just wanted to know things. He thought, "I'll take another look." He crawled back into the closet and put his head in the hole. Celia Sarton, he knew instantly, would not survive this. Her face was swollen, her eyes protruded, and her purpled tongue lolled far -- too far -- from the comer of her mouth. Even as he watched, her face darkened still more and the skin of it crinkled until it looked like carbon paper which has been balled up tight and then smoothed out. The very beginnings of an impulse to snatch the thing she needed out of his shirt drawer and rush it down to her died within him, for he saw a wisp of smoke emerge from her nostrils and then -- Slim cried out, snatched his head from the hole, bumping it cruelly, and clapped his hands over his eyes. Put the biggest size flash-bulb an inch from your nose, and fire it, and you might get a flare approaching the one he got through his little slot in the tin ceiling. He sat grunting in pain and watching, on the insides of his eyelids, migrations of flaming worms. At last they faded and he tentatively opened his eyes. They hurt and the after-image of the slot hung before him, but at least he could see. Feet pounded on the stairs. He smelled smoke and a burned, oily unpleasant something which he could not identify. Someone shouted. Someone hammered on 53 a door. Then someone screamed and screamed. TT was in the papers next day. Mysterious, the story said. Charles Fort, in Lol, had reported many such cases and there had been others since -- people burned to a crisp by a fierce heat which had nevertheless not destroyed clothes or bedding, while leaving nothing for autopsy. This was, said the paper, either an unknown kind of heat or heat of such intensity and such brevity that it would do such a thing. No known relatives, it said. Police mystified -- no clues or suspects. Slim didn't say anything to anybody. He wasn't curious about the matter any more. He closed up the hole in the closet that same night, and next day, after he read the story, he used the newspaper to wrap up the thing in his shirt drawer. It smelled pretty bad and, even that early, was too far gone to be unfolded. He dropped it into a garbage can on the way to the lawyer's office on Wednesday. They settled his law suit that afternoon and he moved.      One of the unnoted but personally important side results of the current world situation is that it keeps Clifford D. Simak from producing as much science fiction as he and we would like him to being city editor of the Minneapolis Star, he has to keep a doctor's hours while the human race toddles, infant-fashion, from frying pans into fires. But out of this worwhich finds a solution by discovering a friend. Man's best friend is -- is what? The answer is so vital that every national resource has to be poured into learning the answerl wonderfully compliant and yet horrifyingly obstinate aliens. A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to live -- all the Igathians agree with this -- but not when it comes to a time to die! We have quite a number of other really choice novelets in stock, too, and odds are that next month's issue will contain at least one of them. Short stories and our regular features, natchmente surprising distance into history in order to bring this futuristic science fiction theme up to date! 54 for your information The Groat Pyramid The Golden Section and PI readers who, when reading the above title, muttered to themselves that these three things have absolutely nothing to do with each other, I wish to state in this very first sentence that I agree with them. Of course neither the "golden section" nor pi is hidden in the structure which an ardent and effusive admirer once called the Miracle in Stone, using the word "miracle" in its literal religious meaning. But it is an 55 interesting story how all the multitudinous misunderstandings surrounding the Great Pyramid originated. That the pyramid of King Khufu was a major engineering and organizational accomplishment is something that does not need to be stressed. It is not only astonishing that a structure of such size was built as early as it was; it is also astonishing how well it was built. As a matter of fact, Khufu's pyramid is of better workmanship than the later pyramids built on the same plateau, the so-called pyramid plateau of Giza, about six miles to the west of Cairo. Since Khufu was the first to build a pyramid in this particular locality, the whole plateau was originally named after him. It was called Akhet Khufu, or "Khufu's Horizon." W HY Khufu picked this particular locality for his pyramid is not known. That is, we don't know of any inscription saying that Pharaoh decreed this site because his fellow gods had told him to begin his soul-voyage after death from this place. But we can think of a number of eminently practical reasons why he chose this spot. To begin with, he could see it from his summer palace and watch the actual work going on. 56 Secondly, the location of the building site was such that, when the annual Nile flood occurred, the blocks of stone could be floated on rafts to the foot of the growing structure. Finally, most egyptologists (and especially the Egyptian egyptologists) believe that Khufu's pyramid hides an outcropping of natural rock which obviously saved that much work in the erection of a virtually solid structure. Even so, 2,300,000 blocks of stone went into the pyramid, averaging 2 V 2 tons in weight, with a few that must weigh about 15 tons each. The rock was quarried nearby. Professor Selim Hassan found some ancient quarries within easy walking distance of the pyramid. Originally the pyramid had an outer casing of white limestone -- Greek writers who saw it blinding white under the desert sun assumed that it was white limestone all the way through -- which is now gone. Not completely gone, though; it merely is no longer a part of Khufu's pyramid, but forms portions of still-standing mosques. Without its casing, the pyramid is 450 feet tall. We can't tell precisely how high it was originally. The white limestone came from Turah, somewhat farther south and on the other side of the river, involving transportation over 14 miles of water. Some of the granite used in the interior came from Aswan, a good distance up-river, but again with the possibility of water transport. It was the height of the structure which is responsible for its name. The Egyptians called this height pyr-em-us. The Greeks adapted the term to their tongue Fig. 1. King Khufu's name' the line around it, called cartouche, means it is a king's name by pronouncing it pyramis and using it as a designation for that particular shape. Herodotus coined a plural, pyramides, from which, at a much later date, the current singular "pyramid" was derived. Since we are on the subject of names, I am sorry to report that we don't really know how the name of the king was pronounced. The written form (Fig. 1) transliterates as Hwfw which, in order to be able to say it at all, is pronounced Khufu. Cheops (the "ch" should also be sounded as "kh") is the Greek form used by Herodotus. seems to have been the first who told stories about the pyramid which do not strictly jibe with the truth. "One of the most frequently repeated stories," to quote Prof. Hassan Selim, from an article in the Egyptian monthly The Scribe, February, 1956, "is that in order to build the pyramid, Khufu closed the temples and enslaved the whole population to work as slave-laborers on its construction. This story has been going the rounds since the middle of the Fifth Century B. c., when the Greek traveler and historian Herodotus visited Egypt and evidently fell into the hands of a typical dragoman, who, like his modern descendants, thought that a few sensational stories would earn him a bigger tip from the gullible stranger." They probably did, but because more than a score of centuries had gone by since the actual work, the Egyptian may easily have believed his own stories. A dozen centuries after Herod57 otus, other travelers came and saw the pyramids. Apparently no stories were told any more, and though the travelers probably saw examples of hieroglyphic writing, there was nobody on Earth then who could read it. Consequently they wondered about the nature and the purpose of these structures. Christian travelers, remembering their Bible, theorized that these must have been the giant storehouses for grain which Joseph had built to combat the forthcoming seven-year famine. Moslem philosophers remembered the older writings, too, but evolved a different explanation. There may have been kings not mentioned in these writings and the prophets of these kings must have told them about the future coming of the deluge. The kings then ordered the pyramids built as refuges from the coming flood. Some less learned people reasoned that anything so massive must guard great wealth in gold and jewels, and they drew practical conclusions from their opinion, sometimes with success. All these speculations dealt with pyramids in general, the pyramids of Egypt which extend over an area of 40 miles from north to south along the Nile (ten times as much if you include a few far to the south near Thebes and Edfu). The speculations of 58 the last century are restricted to just one pyramid, that of Khufu. The one who started it may have been, in all innocence, the famous astronomer Sir William Herschel. In his time, nobody knew just how old the pyramids were. The only thing that was certain was that they had already been old in the time of Herodotus. Herschel, learning that the entrance to the pyramid of Khufu formed a rather steep incline, may have been reminded of his telescopes and he wondered which star one might see if one were standing on the bottom of the entrance. Some rather tedious calculations provided an answer. Looking through that shaft, an observer would have seen the star alpha Draconis, if the year were 2160 B. C. Herschel then stated that the pyramid may have been built in that year. We now know that it is much older. T UT Herschel's attempt to date- the building of the pyramid on astronomical grounds took hold -- long after his death. It was in 1859 that John Taylor, a London publisher and bookdealer, published a book which he had written himself. It bore the title The Great Pyramid, Why was it built and Who built it? His conclusion was that the pyramid had been built for the purpose of embodying a few important measurements. If Taylor had been an American, he might have said that it was the Egyptian equivalent of the Bureau of Standards, with the additional twist that all the standards are "classified information" not meant for the average dumb citizen. In the course of his romancing, John Taylor discovered that the Egyptians must have used the same units of measurement as the English -- or at least the more important of these units -- and he succeeded in finding a unit which had been lost. In England at that time, a Quarter was used as a measurement for wheat. Taylor said, "A quarter of what?" and found the answer: The original "whole," four Quarters of wheat, was the "so-called" sarcophagus of the pharaoh. Taylor also found that the height of the pyramid (which he overestimated by a few feet) was 1270,000 of the circumference of the Earth. Here one can only say, "Why not?" for the height of the pyramid obviously must be some fraction of the circumference (or of the diameter) of the Earth. Taylor was willing to admit that a few such things could be coincidences. To feel sure that it was planned, he looked for something which could not be a coincidence -- or so he thought -- and he found one, too. The square of the height of the pyramid, compared to the area of one of its triangular faces, demonstrated the "golden section." That "golden section" had been around ever since the days of Euclid and had at irregular intervals taken hold of somebody's imagination. (At present, hardly anyone pays any attention to it.) Let's first see what the term means (Fig. 2). We have here a distance AB which is to be divided according to the golden section. To do so, we erect a vertical line in B which is precisely half as long as AB. The rest of the construction can be read off the diagram. The result is that the distance called the minor has the same proportion to the major as the major has to the total, namely AB. And if we now subtract the minor from the major, we have divided the major according to the golden section. licized for the first time by an Italian, Luca Pacioli, who may be the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; at any rate, this method appears in print for the first time in one of his books. After having produced this boon for tax collectors and merchants, he intended to bestow a similar boon to artists with a book called De Divina Proportione, published in 1509 59 with illustrations by his friend Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli tried to show -- and succeeded to a good extent -- that most of the things we consider "beautiful" are constructed in accordance with the golden section when broken down into measurements. The numerical relationship of the golden section is 5 to 8 and, for centuries, all books did correspond to it. European books still do, at least more often than American books. The only book in my library which is of American origin and which shows that proportion is the World Almanac. The next time the golden section was consciously "rediscovered" by the artists, or more precisely by the theorists of art, was around the middle of the nineteenth century, just the time in which John Taylor wrote. It cannot be said that his book was a success and it probably would have been forgotten completely if it had not been for Charles Piazzi Smyth, at that time Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Smyth was the son of an admiral and he happened to be born in Italy. His godfather at the christening was Father Giuseppe Piazzi, the discoverer of the asteroid Ceres, the first asteroid to be found. Father Piazzi said then that he hoped that the child would become an astronomer. Charles Piazzi Smyth did become an astronomer and, as an astronomer, he made important contributions to spectroscopy, then a very new science. He also deserves much credit for advocating an innovation which now seems obvious to us -- building observatories on high mountains. At the age of forty, Smyth came across John Taylor's book and became enchanted with it. Thinking and dreaming about it, he quickly convinced himself that Taylor had barely scratched the surface. He thought and calculated and worked and, in 1864, he wrote a 600-page book called Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. It was a great success and its awed readers learned that the main item in the plan for the Great Pyramid had been nothing less than the squaring of the circle. Smyth said that the bottom Fig. 2. The "golden teefion" 60 square of the pyramid represented -- or, rather, was equal to -- the circumference of a circle drawn with the height of the pyramid as its radius. " critical or just an open eye should have stopped right there. Maybe the base of the pyramid measured 3055.24 feet, as Prof. Smyth said, but how about the height? The outer casing and with it the point of the pyramid were missing. Therefore the height could not be measured directly. Of course if the casing had been there, one could have measured the slope angle and calculated the height from that. The slope angle must have been near 52, so Smyth said that it originally was 51 51' 14.3" which produced a height of 486.256 feet. Therefore the ratio of height to circumference corresponded to two pi. Insisting that this could not be a coincidence and apparently unaware of the fact that he himself had not found the figure but put it in, Smyth went on to other discoveries. At the base, one side of the pyramid measured 763.81 feet. The Egyptians naturally had not used feet as a unit of measurement; it must have been something else. Smyth divided these 763.81 feet by 365.2422 and got a unit he called the "pyramid meter." Why this figure? Obviously the builders of the pyramid had wanted to express the number of days in the year by the base line. Dividing the pyramid meter into 25 equal parts, Smyth obtained the pyramid inch, which, by a strange coincidence, differed from the English inch by just 1 1000th of an inch. Obviously the English still used the pyramid inch, but had not kept its length accurately through the millennia. It had shrunk by l10th of one per cent. Having the "pyramid meter" and the "pyramid inch," Smyth really got going. Multiply the pyramid inch by 10 7 and you have the length of the polar axis of the Earth. Multiply the pyramid inch by the height of the pyramid (in pyramid inches, of course) and then multiply that figure by 10 9 and you get the distance from the Earth to the Sun. (The result is 91.84 million miles, which is neither perihelion nor aphelion nor mean distance.) Express the cubic content of the pyramid in cubic inches and you have the total number of all people that have lived on Earth since the Creation. phagus, it was not only the original standard for volumetric measurements, according to 61 Smyth. It was more. Its volume, expressed in cubic pyramid meters, was precisely 5.7, which looks like a wrong figure until you realize that this is the specific gravity of the Earth as a whole! (Actually the density of the Earth is 5.52.) One reader, by profession an engineer, wrote later that Smyth's treatise cost him the better part of a night and that it had the result that he "did not fall asleep in my bed but in a medley of endless decimals, triangles and circles, complicated by polar diameters and astronomical distances; dealing with empty granite sarcophagi and pharaohs with milelong measuring rods marching through space with the luminous eyes of prophets." He realized that Smyth had "found" his "cosmic figures" in the pyramid by putting them in in the first place. But he also said that he had the faint feeling that something still needed to be explained. It was explained several decades later by the egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt, who approached the whole problem from the opposite direction. He asked just what unit the Egyptians had actually used in building. Moreover, he wanted to know just how far advanced their mathematics had been. As for the unit of measurement, he found that they used the ell. There was a minor complication in that it seemed that they had used two different kinds of ells. One had a length of seven palms, the other of six palms. Although the six-palm ell corresponds better to reality (an ell is the length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger), the seven-palm ell was used for construction, at least for large buildings. In our measurement, the "royal ell" of seven palms is a little less than 21 inches. Borchardt used 525 millimeters as an approximation. Then the palm would be 75 millimeters or just about three inches. Each palm, in turn, was divided into four fingers, which would measure 19 millimeters each if the figure for the royal ell of 525 millimeters is accepted. At any event, the ell had seven palms or 28 "fingers." As regards Egyptian arithmetic, we know that thejL could handle simple fractions like VS, VS, Vi, etc., and fractions like Vi (namely 1 minus Vi) or VS (1 minus VS). When it comes to pyramids, we have a few examples in the famous Papyrus Rhind which, while old, is probably a good deal younger than the pyramid. pyrus Rhind requested the pupil to calculate the slope of a pyramid with a base length of 62 Piazzi Smyth's construction of squaring the circle with the aid of the Great Pyramid 360 ells and a height of 250 ells. A modern high school boy would reach for the logarithm table and come up (unless he made a mistake) with the answer 54 14' 46". The Egyptian advanced pupil answered 5 125 palms. Example No. 58 said that the base length was 140 ells and the height 93 VS ells. The answer was 5 Vi palms. And example No. 59 (no doubt dealing with a backyard pyramid) gave 12 ells as the length of the base line and 8 ells as the height. The answer was also 5 Vi palms. Cro lection of Khufu'i pyramid. S meant an abandoned burial chamber (unfinished), Q ii the to-called Queen's chamber, never used, K the King's chamber. The two shafts to the King's chamber were for ventilation 3 What do these answers mean? The answer is given in Fig. 5. The answer meant that the slope of the pyramid was so many palms from a vertical line one ell in height. That this is correct is proved by the fact that measuring triangles for the use of builders and masons have been found which corresponded to slopes of 5, 5  4 , etc., palms, all rather awkward angles if expressed in degrees and minutes of arc. The slope of the Great Pyramid was quite close to 52. For lack of the casing, one could not be any more precise than that. A slope of 5 V 2 palms produces an angle of 51 50.6'. And that would have made the pyramid 280 ells high, a neat, even figure -- in Egyptian measurements, that is. Now remember that John Taylor had proclaimed that the pyramid represented the golden section. Prof. Smyth had proclaimed that it represented pi. Since it cannot possibly do both, Borchardt calculated what the respective angles would have to be and how the measurements would have come out in Egyptian ells. The result surprised everybody. You find it clearly demonstrated in this table: slope angle slope (Egyptian) base line for 280 ells height for pi for 5 Va palms 51 51.2' 51 50.6' 4.4979 P. 5.5000 P. golden section 51 49.6' 5.5032 P. 439.82 E. 440 E. 440.24 E. were led astray if the pi slope, the golden section slope and the simple Egyptian slope were practically the same. They are so much alike that it is impossible to distinguish them on a drawing of anything like publishable size. That they did not "intend" to build a pi slope is also clear from the Papyrus Rhind, where the ratio we now call pi appears in examples No. 41, 48 and 50 in the form that 89th of the diameter of a circle is the side of a square of equal area. In our notation, this makes pi equal to 3.1604, which is too large. If they had tried for the pi slope, it would have been a different pyramid, considering their idea of the value 64 of pi. There is no way of saying whether they knew the golden section, but it is not even remotely likely. We are left then with the realization that Khufu's builders were extremely skilled workers, but that they did not try to hide any cosmic secrets. And where did they acquire their skill? Well, while the Great Pyramid is the biggest and one of the oldest pyramids, there had been considerable practice in building before. The pyramid had forerunners, called mastabas (Fig. 6). No. 1 shows a cross section of the mastaba of King Mena of the First Dynasty. It is just a subterranean burial chamber covered by a solid slab of mud brick. No. 2 is the mastaba of King Djer of the First Dynasty and No. 3 the Egyptian method of measuring angles mastaba of King Den, also of the First Dynasty. You can see how the pyramid shape was gradually approached. No. 4 is the tomb of King Zoser of the Third Dynasty; I called it "tomb" for, as can be seen, it is hard to decide whether this was still a rather complicated mastaba or a pyramid without casing. The first pyramid which did have a casing, filling in the steps, was that of King Snefru of the Fourth Dynasty, the same dynasty to which King Khufu belonged. I said earlier that Herodotus was probably told a tall tale when he was informed that the whole nation was drafted by Khufu to build his pyramid. It was an unlikely story in the first place, for one can assume that a pharaoh knew better than to ruin all commerce for years. But then who did provide the muscle power? No doubt that slaves did work on the pyramid; this is only logical for a slaveholding society. But slaves in general also had other vital things to do. The most likely answer is that the local iellahin, the peasants, were employed once a year. When the Nile flooded the country, the circumstances were proper for floating in the building blocks. And it was also the time when the fellahin had to sit idle, 65  j " ' " 1  n?jrrr77?77  7777777  1  Fig. 6. Forerunner of the pyramids, the ntastabas precisely because their fields were flooded, making it logical to employ them for this period. Maybe the word "employ" is not quite right. They were probably drafted. But we now know that they were paid, mostly in food and clothing. It is still probable that the    overseers carried whips. But they also carried, in the last stages of the building, the triangles made for a slope of 5 V 2 palms per ell of vertical height, the proportion which was destined to cause so much confusion thousands of years later.   66 There wasn't a single mistake in the plan for survival -- and that was the biggest mistakel F OR centuries, the rains swept eight million daily tons of land into the sea. Mountains slowly crumpled to ocean floors. Summits rose again to see new civilizations heaped upon fossils of the old. It was the way of the Earth and men knew it and did not worry. The end was always in the future. Ever since men first learned to make marks on cave walls, the end remained in the future. Then the future came. The records told men how the Sun was before, so they knew it was swollen now. They knew the heat 67 was not always this hot, or the glacier waters so fast, the seas so high. They adapted -- they grew tanner and moved farther poleward. When the steam finally rose over equatorial waters, they moved to the last planet, Pluto, and their descendants lived and died and came to know the same heat and red skies. Finally there came the day when they couldn't adapt -- not, at least, in the usual way. But they had the knowledge of all the great civilizations on Earth, so they built the last spaceship. They built it very slowly and carefully. Their will to live became the will to leave this final, perfect monument. It took a hundred and fifty years and during all that time they planned every facet of its operation, every detail of its complex mechanisms. Because the ship had a big job to do, they named it Destiny and people began to think of it not as the last of the spaceships, but as the first. The dying race sowed the ship with human seed and hopefully named its unborn passengers Adam, Eve, Joseph and Mary. Then they launched it toward the middle of the Milky Way and lay back in the red light of their burning planet. 68 A LL this was only a memory now, conserved in the thinktank of a machine that raced through speckled space, dodging, examining, classifying, charting what it saw. Behind, the Sun shrank as once it swelled, and the planets that were not consumed turned cold in their orbits. The Sun grew fainter and went out, and still the ship sped forward, century after century, cometlike, but with a purpose. At many of the specks, the ship circled, sucking in records, passing judgment, moving on -- a bee in the garden of stars. Finally, hundreds of light-years from what had been its home, it located an Earth-type world, accepted it from a billion miles off, and swung into an approach that would last exactly eighteen years. Immediately, pumps delivered measured quantities of oxygen and nitrogen atoms. Circuits closed to move four tiny frozen eggs next to frozen spermatozoa. The temperature gradually increased to a heat once maintained by animals now extinct. The embryos grew healthily and at term were born of plastic wombs. The first voices they heard were of their real mothers. Soft, caressing songwords. Melodious, warm, recorded women voices, each different, bell-clear, vivacious, betraying nothing of the fact that they were dead these long centuries. "I am your mother," each voice told its belated offspring. "You can see me and hear me and touch what appears to be me, and together with your cousins, you'll grow strong and healthy" The voices sang on and the babies gurgled in their imported terran atmosphere. The words were meaningless but important, for it had been learned on the now dead world that these sounds were one of the factors in love and learning. Day after day, the voices lapped warm over the children. Plastic feeders provided nutrition as noiseless pumps removed excess carbon dioxide. In one end of the ship, a miniature farm was born hydroponically, its automatic grinders predigesting ripe vegetables for the children. Animals were born, too, for food, but also companionship, and later to stock New Earth ahead. As the babies began to understand, the woman voices merged into one mechanical mother who could be heard and seen and summoned on panel screens throughout the ship. Everything became as Earthlike as possible, but because the environment was artificial, the children grew aware of their purpose in life at an age rarely reached on ancient Earth. when their Mecmother informed them: "You are unlike any children ever bom. You are the last of a dead race, but you must live. You must not be afraid. You must do everything humanly possible to live." When they were four, Mecmother introduced them to Mecteacher and said to pay attention for five hours each day. Mecteacher took their IQs and explained to Adam that he had a greater capacity than Eve, Joseph and Mary, and was therefore their leader. Soon afterward, all the children started "school," but Adam excelled. At seven, he knew all about landing the ship. He played that he was already eighteen and the ship was no longer on automatic. He was in everything and everywhere. His tow hair poked above the control board. His busy fingers hand-picked an experimental meal from the farmroom. When he learned how to turn the artificial gravity switch off in the recroom, his child legs floated haphazardly somewhere above his head. And in the sunroom, where heat-lamp walls were triggered by the degree of an occupant's tan, Adam's freckled face stared through the visiport, seeing in his mind's eye the New Earth he would one day conquer. 69 He lived fully, asking questions, accepting the answers, receiving instructions. Some of them he testily disobeyed, was punished compassionately, and learned respect and a kind of love for the mecs. He played the games of childhood, but he played them alone. Once he was gazing out a port, imaginatively sorting the stars of his universe into shapes of the animals in the ship's farm. Mecfather lit up at a nearby panel, glowing faintly red. Adam resisted an impulse to shiver -- the panel always made him flinch when it glowed red. Red, he was being conditioned, was his conscience, brought out by Mecfather until he grew old enough to bring it out himself. "Why aren't you playing with the other children?" Mecfather asked. "I've been watching you all day and you've avoided them on every occasion." Though he feared him, Adam loved Mecfather as he had been taught to do and did not hesitate to confide. But how could he explain that the other children did not seem as real to him as the mecs? "I don't know," Adam answered truthfully. "They don't ignore you. They ask you to play, but you always go off by yourself. Don't you like them?" 70 "They're flat, Father. They're not deep -- like you."  sembled the answer, correlated, circuited a mechanical smile. Certainly -- a child brought up with only three real children and three talking images in his universe could not distinguish between reality and appearance. On the screen, Adam saw Mecfather smile, the panel no longer red. The voice was quiet now and full of understanding. "It is I who am flat, Adam. I am only an image, a voice. I am here when you need me to help, but I am not deep. Your cousins are deep; I am the flat one. You will understand better when you grow older." Electronically, Mecfather was worried. He called a "conference" of the other mecs and their circuits joined in a complicated analog: What was the probable outcome of this beginning of disharmony? There were too many variables for an immediate answer, but the query was stored in each mec's memory banks for later answer. When the mecconference began, the panel switched off and Adam walked thoughtfully through the ship's corridors. Unexpectedly, he spotted the other children. He turned quickly into a room before they saw him and ducked behind the largest of the couches. He was in the aft recroom, he realized, not having paid attention to where he was going. What was it all about? Did Mecfather really mean it when he said the cousins were deeper than the mecs? Adam could believe he was different from his parents and teacher -- after all, he was only seven -- but he couldn't accept the information that he was not different from his cousins. Somehow, he thought, I am alone He heard noises, the loud boisterousness of Joseph, the highpitched squeal of Eve, the grating laugh of Mary. Adam cringed deeper behind the big couch. He was different. He didn't make sounds like that. "Adam! Oh, A-dam! A-dam!" the cousins called, each their own way. "Come out wherever you are, Adam! Come out and play!" From behind the couch, Adam saw the beginnings of an infantile but systematic search. The three of them were looking behind things, under furniture, in back of hatches. They tried moving everything they saw, but couldn't budge the heavy couch Adam hid behind. Looking for escape, Adam's eyes caught a round metallic handle set flush into the heavy deck carpet. He lifted it and pulled. Nothing happened. He stood up, bracing his feet against the deck and heaved with all his strength. It didn't move. Then he experimentally turned the handle -- to the right until it clicked faintly, then the left, around twice, another faint click, but different, a left-hand click, he knew somehow. So he turned again to the left, this time three turns -- and then the click was heavy, almost audible. He pulled the handle and a door formed out of the carpet, swinging easily open. Just then, Joseph peered behind the couch. "Boo!" ing, the heavy door slamming shut overhead. Below, he stood erect and was surprised to feel the hair on his head brush the ceiling. He was frightened, but he calmed when he realized there were many places on the ship he hadn't been before. Mecteacher revealed them to him, but very slowly, and he supposed he would not be told about everything for many years. As he recovered his sense of balance, he became aware of a faint luminescence around him. It seemed to have no source, but was stronger in the distance. He began to explore, groping at first, then more smoothly, efficiently, as his eyes adjusted to 71 the semi-darkness. A long corridor opened up before him and what appeared before to be an illusion of distance actually was distance. He guessed he was near the engine compartment and vaguely sensed that the luminescence had something to do with the nuclear engines that Mecteacher told him moved the ship. It was warm in here. Not physically warm but friendy warm, like when Mecmother spoke her comfort. The similarity almost made him cry, for he understood, even in his seven years, that Mecmother was but the image of his real mother who lived long ago and said those words of sympathy to a child yet unborn. He wanted her now, even her image, but he didn't call because he'd have to explain why he was hiding from his cousins. He shivered then, thinking that Mecfather and Mecteacher knew where he was and would light up their panels red. He thought, "Are you down here, Mecfather?" Nothing answered, so he spoke the thought, and again the walls stayed dark. That was why it was so friendy warm in here, he realized. His mecconscience was left above! Deciding that the others might miss him, he retraced his steps, located the trapdoor in the ceiling, pushed it open and ascended. The others were sitting on the 72 floor, dumbfounded, as Adam climbed out and slammed the hatch shut. "How did you get down there?" Joseph asked. Adam remained silent. After a moment, Eve and Mary lost interest in the question and started skipping a length of rope. Joseph persisted. "How? I pulled, too!" Adam didn't answer. He knew the bigger boy would forget about it if he changed the subject. "How is it you're not with Mecteacher?" "We were. But he made us look for you." The closest wall panel lit bright red. It was Mecteacher. "Adam! How did you open that?" "I turned it -- a certain way," he said evasively. Adam didn't want his cousins to learn how. "But how did you know?" "I -- I reasoned it." rrHE image faded as the new information was assimilated. Mecteacher's voice said, "Wait a while, Adam." The computer circuited the other mec's memory banks. After ten minutes, the "conference" was over and Mecteacher returned to the screen. He asked Adam to come alone to the classroom. The others were dismissed. Reluctantly, Adam did as he was told. In the classroom, he stood stiffly in front of the cen73 tral panels. All three mecs lit up, their color this time a tranquilizing blue. "Adam, we are not real people in the now," Mecmother began. "Do you understand that?" "Y-yes, I understand. You are -- planned -- fixed before." "That's right, Adam. We are pre-set. We have a very large number of choices and actions, but we are not infinite." "Infinite?" "We are limited in the help we can give you. We were real -- like you -- a long, long time ago. We exist now only to help you and the other children. We are here to educate you, to love and console you -- and one other thing. We are here to settle your conflicts, to make sure you don't hurt each other." "But I didn't hurt anyone, Mecmother!" "Not yet, Adam, but avoiding the others the way you do could be the first sign of trouble." "How do you know? How can you talk if you aren't real?" "What you hear is a combination of recorded words that are electronically put together to answer an almost infinite number of your questions. But do not think of me as not real. I was merely in another time. Do you understand that?" "Yes." "Then you also are able to see that your ability to reason things -- to understand what I am telling you now, for instance, is a remarkable thing." "You mean because I'm not like the others?" "You have a superior mind. You are the leader, but do not regard yourself as better than the others. You have more intelligence, yes, but do not look down on your cousins for that. They may develop other qualities better than yours. Stay simple, Adam, and you will be able to live among them and thereby make the human race live again. The name of this ship is Destiny. Do you know why?" "Yes -- I know." "Be with the other children then. Play with them. You'll need each other to live on New Earth -- eleven years from now." can I play with them when they're flat? But he didn't object out loud to Mecmother. He didn't like her this way. Explanation was Mecteacher's job and discipline Mecfather's. Mecmother should be warm and loving. Mecteacher appeared and asked Adam to call in the other children so the science lesson could start. He found them tanning in the sunroom, their unclothed bodies evenly browned from invisible 74 light. They followed Adam without question, but seemed to take a long time doing it. Joseph insisted first in donning clothes, but he put on protective clothing first. Then, realizing the absurdity of it, he switched to his formality suit -- the loose-fitting robe Mecteacher instructed the children to wear to lend dignity to the classwork. During Joseph's delay, the girls ambled off somewhere and returned only when Adam shouted after them in exasperation. Quickening his pace, Adam reached the classroom first and asked Mecteacher, "Are the other children -- deep?" "Deep? Yes, Adam, Mecfather explained that to you. Why are you confused? It's us, the mecs, who are flat. The other children are healthy, living beings. The cells from which all of you were bom were selected after years of controlled breeding. Your parents were the finest the human race could produce -- intelligent, strong, healthy, high survival quotient Is this what you mean by deep?" "Partly, but also -- feeling. I think I feel things better." The other children waddled in, took their seats and switched on robomonitors in the ritual of classroom procedure. They all looked at Mecteacher in the central panel. Mecteacher motioned Adam to his chair-desk and began the lesson. He described Old Earth and how it circled Old Sol with the other worlds and the way the moons circled the planets -- all of them condensed into spheres and all the spheres turning in harmony. He interrupted himself when Mary's robomonitor registered only partial comprehension. "What don't you understand, Mary? Is it sphere?" "I know what a sphere is," she said, remembering a previous lesson. "A sphere is an apple or an orange -- " covert wince from Adam's monitor. The teacher appeared to Adam on his desk panel where the others couldn't see or hear. "Do not think this is because she is not -- deep, Adam. She is only seven and not as advanced for her age as you are. You understand how we mecs are pre-set?" "Yes." "In the classroom, then, if we don't go fast enough for you, try to be patient. We can only deviate within set limits. It is not a new problem, Adam. On Earth, it impeded the educational system from the beginning." Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up an apple on the central 75 panel and re-explained the age-old analogy between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth and the apple. Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon. "That's an interesting question. Eve. But we are still too many millions of miles away to know yet. Before you are ready to leave the ship, you will know." In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his -- with one exception. He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for long. Often, when he grew tired tired of freefalling, he visited his lonely chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship. On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they were pre-set. They had to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong. It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs permanently off. TP HE stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big -- bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the Destiny had ever come to a star. Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others -- The others. The repulsive, 76 flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were -- flat, undeep. For yearSj he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him. They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive. He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it. And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals -- or would I? for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the Destiny, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven -- perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested -- but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation. He heard them rummaging above, attempting again and again to pull open the hatch. It had happened this way for years: They'd try to open the trapdoor for an hour or two, then give it up and turn their attention to something else. They never thought to turn the handle. Maybe an undeep person wouldn't be able to reason the combination clicks, but only a completely flat one would 77 persist in pulling when it always ended in failure. Possibly, he thought, the cosmic rays had been more destructive to their egg cells. Or maybe the alien radiations subtracted something from the other cells to add to his. If this were true, he was partly a product of the others and owed his depth to them. Adam felt sorry for his cousins then and wished he hadn't hurt them by avoiding their presence. Despite their undepth, they must have feelings. The mecs probably wouldn't have been able to give them depth but, he remembered, the other role of the mecs was to prevent each one of them from harming the others. In their role as arbitrator, Adam realized, they might have stopped him from hurting them so. Filled with remorse, he left his desk-chair and walked stoopshouldered under the low ceiling. At the trapdoor, he opened the combination on the inside lock handle and pushed upward. It wouldn't open. He tried again, but it wasn't the lock that was stuck. They must have slid something heavy over the hatch, something he couldn't move. He tried calling to them, but his voice was lost in the insulative metal of the deck. Finally he sat down, conserving his strength for a final onslaught. If he couldn't open the hatch, he realized vividly it would be not only his failure, but the failure of the human race. But maybe it did not have to be so. Maybe the differences in the others weren't biological -- maybe they were environmental. And with that thought, he made his way through the narrow passageway and reversed his deed of eleven years past. He turned the mecs back on. Returning to the hatch, he reworked the combination to make sure it was not the lock that held him. He pushed upward with all his strength, steadily with increasing pressure, until the beads of perspiration turned into gulleys that streamed down his face. Exhausted, he crawled back to his chair and lay across the desk littered with calculations of a landing he would never make. The soft luminescence from the Destiny's nuclear engines crept forward and caressed him. Mary were admiring Joseph's strength in being able to push the heavy couch over Adam's trapdoor. Three wall panels lit red. All the mecs appeared together. "It's time for your science lesson," one said. "But where is Adam?" "He's in the trapdoor," they answered flatly. The panel turned green, reserv78 ing its redness for the delinquent Adam when he would choose to appear. Mecteacher began, "Now about the Solar System" But the cousins didn't listen. Joseph had turned the gravity switch off and they were too busy floating upended, trying new positions, laughing at each other's ridiculous postures in the ship without bottom. The game was not a new one, but it was newly discovered and they reveled in its glories. Month after month, they played their weightless games while the mecs implored them to come down. The constellations shifted in the visiports. New Sol grew larger and then smaller as the Destiny sped toward its unseen planet. In the recroom, the mecvoices were only noises to the trio now, annoying noises that could be silenced, they discovered, with forceful kicks to the red-glowing panels. When all the mecscreens had been smashed and the weightless games grew boring, Mary looked out the sunroom port. She was surprised to see a rust-yellow sphere hanging in the sky. She watched it seriously for a time, frowning as it grew bigger and filled a third of her horizon. Then she called Eve and Joseph. Mary pointed and they all stared in bewilderment. She opened her eyes wide and laughed with glee. "It's an apple," she said. "An apple in the sky!" But Joseph wasn't fooled. Dimly he remembered something Adam had told him -- something about a thing that would appear in the sky. He fought hard bringing it to conscious memory. Then he started aft toward the recroom. In there, under the couch, he remembered, was Adam. Adam would remind him what it was. Suddenly Joseph smiled, his face flushed. He turned back to the sunroom port. He wouldn't have to ask Adam, after all. For a moment, he watched to make sure, while the huge yellow sphere swam closer. "No, Mary," he said triumphantly. "It's not an apple in the sky. Apples are red. It's an orange!"      79 Score one or one million was not enough for the human race. It had to be all or nothing with one man doing every bit of scoring! 80 A rthur lanceford slapped futilely at the sith buzzing hungrily around his head. The outsized eight-legged parody of a mosquito did a neat half roll and zoomed out of range, hanging motionless on vibrating wings a few feet away. A raindrop staggered it momentarily, and for a fleeting second, Lanceford had the insane hope that the arthropod would fall out of control into the mud. If it did, that would be the end of it, for Niobian mud was as sticky as flypaper. But the sith righted itself inches short of disaster, buzzed angrily and retreated to the shelter of a nearby broadleaf, where it executed another half roll and hung upside down, watching its intended meal with avid anticipation. Lanceford eyed the insect distastefully as he explored his jacket for repellent and applied the smelly stuff liberally to his face and neck. It wouldn't do much good. In an hour, his sweat 81 would remove whatever the rain missed -- but for that time, it should discourage the sith. As far as permanent discouraging went, the repellent was useless. Once one of those eight-legged horrors checked you off, there were only two possible endings to the affair -- either you were bitten or you killed the critter. It was as simple as that. He had hoped that he would be fast enough to get the sith before it got him. He had been bitten once already and the memory of those paralyzed three minutes while the bloodsucker fed was enough to last him for a lifetime. He readjusted his helmet, tucking its fringe of netting beneath his collar. The netting, he reflected gloomily, was like its owner -- much the worse for wear. However, this trek would be over in another week and he would be able to spend the next six months at a comfortable desk job at the Base, while some other poor devil did the chores of field work. swept trail winding through the jungle. Niobe -- a perfect name for this wet little world. The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration couldn't have picked a better, but the funny thing about it was that they hadn't picked it in the first place. Niobe was the native word for Earth, or perhaps "the world" would be a more accurate definition. It was a coincidence, of course, but the planet and its mythological Greek namesake had much in common. Niobe, like Niobe, was all tears -- a world of rain falling endlessly from an impenetrable overcast, fat wet drops that formed a grieving background sound that never ceased, sobbing with soft mournful noises on the rubbery broadleaves, crying with obese splashes into forest pools, blubbering with loud, dismal persistence on the sounding board of his helmet. And on the ground, the raindrops mixed with the loesslike soil of the trail to form a gluey mud that clung in huge pasty balls to his boots. Everywhere there was water, running in rivulets of tear-streaks down the round cheeks of the gently sloping land -- rivulets that merged and blended into broad shallow rivers that wound their mourners' courses to the sea. Trekking on Niobe was an amphibious operation unless one stayed in the highlands -- a perpetual series of fords and river crossings. And it was hot, a seasonless, unchanging, humid heat that made a protection suit an instrument of torture that slowly boiled its wearer in his own sweat.But the suit was necessary, for exposed human flesh was irresistible temptation to Niobe's bloodsuck82 ing insects. Many of these were no worse than those of Earth, but a half dozen species were deadly. The first bite sensitized. The second killed -- anaphylactic shock, the medics called it. And the sith was one of the deadly species. Lanceford shrugged fatalistically. Uncomfortable as a protection suit was, it was better to boil in it than die without it. He looked at Kron squatting beside the trail and envied him. It was too bad that Earthmen weren't as naturally repellent to insects as the dominant native life. Like all Niobians, the native guide wore no clothing -- ideal garb for a climate like this. His white, hairless hide, with its faint sheen of oil, was beautifully waterrepellent. Kron, Lanceford reflected, was a good example of the manner in which Nature adapts the humanoid form for survival on different worlds. Like the dominant species on every intelligent planet in the explored galaxy, he was an erect, bipedal, mammalian being with hands that possessed an opposable thumb. Insofar as that general description went, Kron resembled humanity -- but there were differences.  shape of Kron's torso and the odd flexibility of his limbs were not apparent. One had the tendency to overlook the narrowshouldered, cylindrical body and the elongated tarsal and carpal bones that gave his limbs four major articulations rather than the human three, and to concentrate upon the utterly alien head. It jutted forward from his short, thick neck, a long-snouted, vaguely doglike head with tiny ears lying close against the hairless, dome-shaped cranium. Slitlike nostrils, equiped with sphincter muscles like those of a terrestrial seal, argued an originally aquatic environment, and the large intelligent eyes set forward in the skull to give binocular vision, together with the sharp white carnassal teeth and pointed canines, indicated a carnivorous ancestry. But the modern Niobians, although excellent swimmers, were land dwellers and ate anything. Lanceford couldn't repress an involuntary shudder at some of the things they apparently enjoyed. Tastes differed -- enormously so between Earthmen and Niobians. There was no doubt that the native was intelligent, yet he, like the rest of his race, was a technological moron. It was strange that a race which had a well-developed philosophy and an amazing comprehension of semantics could be so backward in mechanics. mechanisms left the natives con83 fused. It was possible that they could learn about machinery, but Lanceford was certain that it would take a good many years before the first native mechanic would set up a machine shop on this planet. Lanceford finished tucking the last fold of face net under his collar, and as he did so, Kron stood up, rising to his five-foot height with a curious flexible grace. Standing, he looked something like a doublejointed alabaster Anubis -- wearing swim fins. His broad, webbed feet rested easily on the surface of the mud, their large area giving him flotation that Lanceford envied. As a result, his head was nearly level with that of the human, although there was better than a foot difference in their heights. Lanceford looked at Kron inquiringly. "You have a place in mind where we can sleep tonight?" "Sure, Boss. We'll be coming to hunthouse soon. We go now?" "Lead on," Lanceford said, groaning silently to himself -- another hunthouse with its darkness and its smells. He shrugged. He could hardly expect anything else up here in the highlands. Oh, well, he'd managed to last through the others and this one could be no worse. At that, even an airless room full of natives was preferable to spending a night outside. And the sith wouldn't follow them. It didn't like airless rooms filled with natives. He sighed wearily as he followed Kron along the dim path through the broadleaf jungle. Night was coming, and with darkness, someone upstairs turned on every faucet and the sheets of rain that fell during the day changed abruptly into a deluge. Even the semi-aquatic natives didn't like to get caught away from shelter during the night. The three moved onward, immersed in a drumming wilderness of rain -- the Niobian sliding easily over the surface of the mud, the Earthman plowing painfully through it, and the sith flitting from the shelter of one broadleaf to the next, waiting for a chance to feed. HP HE trail widened abruptly, opening upon one of the small clearings that dotted the rain-forest jungle. In the center of the clearing, dimly visible through the rain and thickening darkness, loomed the squat thatch-roofed bulk of a hunthouse, a place of shelter for the members of the hunters' guild who provided fresh meat for the Niobian villages. Lanceford sighed a mingled breath of relief and unpleasant anticipation. As he stepped out into the clearing, the sith darted from 84 cover, heading like a winged bullet for Lanceford's neck. But the man was not taken by surprise. Pivoting quickly, he caught the iridescent blur of the bloodsucker's wings. He swung his arm in a mighty slap. The high-pitched buzz and Lanceford's gloved hand met simultaneously at his right ear. The buzz stopped abruptly. Lanceford shook his head and the sith fell to the ground, satisfactorily swatted. Lanceford grinned -- score one for the human race. He was still grinning as he pushed aside the fiber screen closing the low doorway of the hunthouse and crawled inside. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom within, but his nose told him even before his eyes that the house was occupied. The natives, he thought wryly, must be born with no sense of smell, otherwise they'd perish from sheer propinquity. One could never honestly say that familiarity with the odor of a Niobian bred contempt -- nausea was the right word. The interior was typical, a dark rectangle of windowless limestone walls enclosing a packed-dirt floor and lined with a single deck of wooden sleeping platforms. Steeply angled rafters of peeled logs intersected at a knife-sharp ridge pierced with a circular smokehole above the firepit in the center of the room. Transverse rows of smaller poles lashed to the rafters supported the thick broadleaf thatch that furnished protection from the rain and sanctuary for uncounted thousands of insects. A fire flickered ruddily in the pit, hissing as occasional drops of rain fell into its heart from the smokehole, giving forth a dim light together with clouds of smoke and steam that rose upward through the tangled mass of greasy cobwebs filling the upper reaches of the rafters. Some of the smoke found its way through the smokehole, but most of it hung in an acrid undulating layer some six feet above the floor. The glow outlined the squatting figures of a dozen or so natives clustered around the pit, watching the slowly rotating carcass of a small deerlike rodent called a sorat, which was broiling on a spit above the flames. Kron was already in the ring, talking earnestly to one of the hunters -- a fellow-tribesman, judging from the tattoo on his chest. To a Niobian, the scene was ordinary, but to Lanceford it could have been lifted bodily from the inferno. He had seen it before, but the effect lost nothing by repetition. There was a distinctly hellish quality to it -- to the reds and blacks of the flickering fire and the shadows. He wouldn't have been particularly surprised if Sa85 tan himself appeared in the center of the firepit complete with horns, hoofs and tail. A hunthouse, despite its innocuousness, looked like the southeast comer of Hades.  the hunters turned to look at him curiously and, after a single eye-filling stare, turned back again. Niobians were almost painfully polite. Although Earthmen were still enough of a curiosity to draw attention, one searching look was all their customs allowed. Thereafter, they minded their own business. In some ways, Lanceford reflected, native customs had undeniable merit. Presently Kron rose from his place beside the fire and pointed out two empty sleeping platforms where they would spend the night. Lanceford chose one and sank wearily to its resilient surface. Despite its crude construction, a Niobian sleeping platform was comfortable. He removed his pack, pulled off his mud-encrusted boots and lay back with a grunt of relaxation. After a day like this, it was good to get off his feet. Weariness flowed over him. He awoke to the gentle pressure of Kron's hand squeezing his own. "The food is cooked," the Niobian said, "and you are welcomed to share it." Lanceford nodded, his stomach 86 crawling with unpleasant anticipation. A native meal was something he would prefer to avoid. His digestive system could handle the unsavory mess, but his taste buds shrank from the forthcoming assault. What the natives classed as a delicate and elusive flavor was sheer torture to an Earthman. Possibly there was some connection between their inefficient olfactory apparatus and their odd ideas of flavor, but whatever the physical explanation might be, it didn't affect the fact that eating native food was an ordeal. Yet he couldn't refuse. That would be discourteous and offensive, and one simply didn't offend the nathat. Courtesy was a watchword on Niobe. He took a place by the fire, watching with concealed distaste as one of the hunters reached into the boiling vat beside the firepit with a pair of wooden tongs and drew forth the native conception of a hors d'oeuvre. They called it vorkum -- a boiled sorat paunch stuffed with a number of odorous ingredients. It looked almost as bad as it smelled. The hunter laid the paunch on a wooden trencher, scraped the greenish scum from its surface and sliced it open. The odor poured out, a gagging essence of decaying vegetables, rotten eggs and overripe cheese. Lanceford's eyes watered, his stomach tautened convulsively, but the Niobians eyed the reeking semi-solid eagerly. No meal on Niobe was considered worthy of the name unless a generous helping of vorkum started it off. ruin the most rugged human appetite, but when it was the forerunner of a main dish of highly spiced barbecue, vorkum assumed the general properties of an emetic. Lanceford grimly controlled the nausea and tactfully declined the greasy handful which Kron offered. The Niobian never seemed to learn. At every meal they had eaten during their past month of travel on Niobe, Kron had persistently offered him samples of the mess. With equal persistence, he had refused. After all, there were limits. But polite convention required that he eat something, so he took a small portion of the barbecued meat and dutifully finished it. The hunters eyed him curiously, apparently wondering how an entity who could assimilate relatively untasty sorat should refuse the far greater delicacy of vorkum. But it was a known fact that the ways of Earthmen were strange and unaccountable. The hunters didn't protest when he retired to his sleeping platform and the more acceptable concentrates from his pack. His hunger satisfied, he lay back on the resilient vines and fell into a sleep of exhaustion. It had been a hard day. Lanceford's dreams were unpleasant. Nightmare was the usual penalty of sitting in on a Niobian meal and this one was worse than usual. Huge siths, reeking of vorkum, pursued him as he ran naked and defenseless across a swampy landscape that stretched interminably ahead. The clinging mud reduced his speed to a painful crawl as he frantically beat off the attacks of the bloodsuckers. The climax was horror. One of the siths slipped through his frantically beating hands and bit him on the face. The shocking pain of the bite wakened him, a cry of terror and anguish still on his lips. He looked around wildly. He was still in the hunthouse. It was just a dream. He chuckled shakily. These nightmares sometimes were too real for comfort. He was drenched with sweat, which was not unusual, but there was a dull ache in his head and the hot tense pain that encompassed the right side of his face had not been there when he had fallen asleep. He touched his face with a tentative finger, exploring the hot puffiness and the enormously swollen ear with a gentle touch. It 87 was where he had struck the sith, but surely he couldn't have hit that hard. He gasped, a soft breath of dismay, as realization dawned. He had smashed the sith hard enough to squeeze some of the insect's corrosive body juices through his face net -- and they had touched his skin! That wouldn't normally have been bad, but the sith bite he had suffered a week ago had sensitized him. He was developing an anaphylactic reaction -- a severe one, judging from the swelling. That was the trouble with exploration; one occasionally forgot that a world was alien. Occasionally danger tended to recede into a background of familiarity -- he had smashed the sith before it had bitten him, so therefore it couldn't hurt him. He grimaced painfully, the movement bringing another twinge to his swollen face. He should have known better. He swore mildly as he opened his Aid Kit and extracted a sterile hypo. The super-antihistamine developed by the Bureau was an unpredictable sort of thing. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. He removed the screw cap that sealed the needle and injected the contents of the syringe into his arm. He hoped that this was one of the times the drug worked. If it wasn't, he reflected grimly, he wouldn't be long for this world. He sighed and lay back. There wasn't anything more to do now. All he could do was wait and see if the anti-allergin worked. HP HE Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration had discovered Niobe barely three years ago, yet already the planet was famous not only for its peculiar climate, but also for the number of men who had died upon its watery surface. Knowledge of this planet was bought with life, grim payment to decrease the lag between discovery and the day men could live and work on Niobe without having to hide beneath domes or behind protection suits. Lanceford never questioned the necessity or the inevitable price that must be he knew that Niobe was crash priority -- a world that had to be understood in minimum time. For Niobe was a made to order herbarium for a swampland plant called viscaya. The plant was originally native to Algon IV, but had been spread to practically every suitable growth center in the Galaxy. It was the source of a complex of alkaloids known as gerontin, and gerontin had the property of tripling or quadrupling the normal life span of mammals. It was obvious that viscayaculture should have a tremendous distribution throughout the Confederation worlds. But unfortunately the right conditions existed in very few places in the explored galaxy. Despite the fact that most life is based on carbon, oxygen and water, there is still very little free water in the Galaxy. Most planets of the Confederation are semi-arid, with the outstanding exceptions of Terra and Lyrane. 89 But these two worlds were the seats of human and humanoid power for so long that all of their swampland had been drained and reclaimed centuries ago. And it was doubly unfortunate that gerontin so far defied synthesis. According to some eminent chemists, the alkaloid would probably continue to do so until some facet of the Confederation reached sidering that Terra and Lyrane, the two highest cultures, were level steps took several thousands of years to make, a policy of waiting for synthesis was not worth considering. The result was that nobody was happy until Niobe was discovered. The price of illicit gerontin was astronomical and most of the Confederation's supply of the drug was strictly rationed to those whom the government thought most valuable to the Confederation as a whole. Of course, the Confederation officialdom was included, which caused considerable grumbling. In the nick of time, Niobe appeared upon the scene, and Niobe had environment in abundance! The wheels of the Confederagiven a blank check and spurred on by a government which, in turn, was being spurred on by the people who composed it. The exploration of Niobe proceeded at all possible speed. With so many considerations weighed against them, what did a few lives matter? For the sake of the billions of humanoids in the Confederation, their sacrifice was worthwhile even if only a few days or hours were saved between discovery and exploitation. - violent pain shot through his head. The anti-allergin apparently wasn't going to work, for it should have had some effect by now. He shrugged mentally -- it was the chance one took in this business. But he couldn't say that he hadn't been warned. Even old Sims had told him, called him a unit in the scheme -- an error, it looked like now. Seemed rather silly -- a Class that were old during the Dark Ages before the Atomic Revolution, sending foot parties to explore a world in the chance that they might discover something that the search mechs missed -- anything that would shorten the lag time. It was incomprehensible, would do a thing like this without reason. And whatever it was, he wasn't going to worry about it In fact, there wasn't much time left to worry. The reaction was ob90 servably and painfully worse. It was important that the news of his death and the specimens he had collected get back to Base Alpha. They might have value in this complex game Alvord Sims was playing with men, machines and Niobe. But Base Alpha was a good hundred miles away and, in his present condition, he couldn't walk a hundred feet. For a moment, he considered setting up the powerful little transmitter he carried in his pack, but his first abortive motion convinced him it was useless. The blinding agony that swept through him at the slightest movement left no doubt that he would never finish the business of setting up the antenna, let alone send a message. It was a crime that handietalkies couldn't be used here on Niobe, but their range, limited at best, was practically nonexistent on a planet that literally seemed to be one entire "dead spot." A fixed-frequency job broadcasting on a directional beam was about the only thing that could cover distance, and that required a little technical know-how to set up the antenna and focus it on Base Alpha. There would be no help from Kron. Despite his intelligence, the native could no more assemble a directional antenna than spread pink wings and fly. There was only one thing to do -- get a note off to Sims, if he could still write, and ask Kron to deliver the note and his pack to the Base. He fumbled with his jacket, and with some pain produced a stylus and a pad. But it was difficult to write. Painful, too. Better get Kron over here while he could still talk and tell him what he wanted. The stylus slipped from numb fingers as Lanceford called hoarsely, "Kron! Come here! I need you!" sionately at the swollen features of the Earthman. He had seen the kef effect before, among the young of his people who were incautious or inexperienced, but he had never seen it among the aliens. Surprisingly, the effects were the same -- the livid swellings, the gasping breath, the pain. Strange how these foreigners reacted like his own people. He scratched his head and pulled thoughtfully at one of his short ears. It was his duty to help Lanceford, but how could he? The Earthman had denied his help for weeks, and Niobians simply didn't disregard another's wishes. Kron scowled, the action lending a ferocious cast to his doglike face. Tolerance was a custom hallowed by ages of practice. It went to extremes -- even with 91 life at stake, a person's wishes and beliefs must be respected. Kron buried his long-snouted head in his hands, a gesture that held in it all the frustration which filled him. The human was apparently resolved to die. He had told Kron his last wishes, which didn't include a request for help, but merely to get his pack back to the others in their glass dome. It was astonishing that such an obviously intelligent species should have so little flexibility. They didn't understand the first principles of adaptation. Always and forever, they held to their own ways, trying with insensate stubbornness to mold nature to their will -- and when nature overcome their artificial defenses, they died, stubborn, unregenerate, inflexible to the end. They were odd, these humans -- odd and a little frightening. Lanceford breathed wheezily. The swelling had invaded the inner tissues of his throat and was beginning to compress his windpipe. It was uncomfortable, like inhaling liquid fire, and then there was the constant desire to cough and the physical inability to do so. "Dirty luck," he whispered. "Only a week more and I'd have had it made -- the longest trek a man's made on this benighted planet." Kron nodded, but then belatedly realized that the human was muttering to himself. He listened. There might be something important in these dying murmurings, something that might explain their reasons for being here and their strange driving haste that cared nothing for life. "It's hard to die so far from one's people, but I guess that can't be helped. Old Sims gave me the score. Like he said, a man doesn't have much choice of where he "You don't want to die!" Kron exploded. "Of course not," Lanceford said with weak surprise. He hadn't dreamed that Kron was nearby. This might well destroy the Imperturbable Earthman myth that "Not even if it is in accord with your customs and rituals?" "What customs?" "Your clothing, your eating habits, your ointments -- are these not part of your living plan?" Despite the pain that tore at his throat, Lanceford managed a chuckle. This was ridiculous. "Hell, no! Our only design for living is to stay alive, particularly on jobs like this one. We don't wear these suits and repellent because we like to. We do it to stay alive. If we could, we'd go around nearly as naked as you do." "Do you mind if I help you?" 92 Kron asked diffidently. "I think I can cure you." He leaned forward anxiously to get the man's reply. "I'd take a helping hand from the devil himself, if it would do any good." Kron's eyes were brilliant. He hummed softly under his breath, the Niobian equivalent of laughter. "And all the time we thought -- " he began, and then broke off abruptly. Already too much time was wasted without losing any more in meditating upon the ironies of life. He turned toward the firepit, searched for a moment among the stones, nodded with satisfaction and returned to where Lanceford lay. The hunthouse was deserted save for himself and the Earthman. With characteristic Niobian delicacy, the hunters had left, preferring to endure the night rain than be present when the alien died. Kron was thankful that they were gone, for what he was about to do would shock their conservative souls. scious of Kron prying his swollen jaws apart and forcing something wet and slippery down his throat. He swallowed, the act a tearing pain to the edematous membranes of his gullet, but the stuff slid down, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. The act triggered another wave of pain that left him weak and gasping. He couldn't take much more of this. It wouldn't be long now before the swelling invaded his lungs to such a degree that he would strangle. It wasn't a pleasant way to die. And then, quite suddenly, the pain eased. A creeping numbness spread like a warm black blanket over his outraged nervous system. The stuff Kron had given him apparently had some anesthetic properties. He felt dimly grateful, even though the primitive native nostrum would probably do no good other than to ease the pain. The blackness went just far enough to paralyze the superficial areas of his nervous system. It stopped the pain and left him unable to move, but the deeper pathways of thought and reason remained untouched. He was conscious, although no external sensation intruded on his thoughts. He couldn't see Kron -- the muscles that moved his eyes were as paralyzed as the other muscles of his body and the native was outside his field of vision -- but somehow he knew exactly what the Niobian was doing. He was washing mucus from his hands in a bowl of water standing beside the fire pit and he was wondering wryly whether torced feeding was on the list of human tabus! Lanceford's mind froze, locked in a peculiar contact that was 93 more than awareness. The sensation was indescribable. It was like looking through an open door into the living room of a stranger's house. He was aware of the incredible complexity and richness of Kron's thoughts, of oddly sardonic laughter, of pity and regret that such a little thing as understanding should cause death and suffering through its lack, of bewildered admiration for the grim persistence of the alien Earthmen, mixed with a wondering curiosity about what kept them here -- what the true reasons were for their death-defying persistence and stubbornness -- of an ironic native paraphrase for the Ter ran saying, "Every man to his own taste," and a profound speculation upon what fruits might occur from true understanding between his own race and the aliens. It was a strangely jumbled kaleidoscopic flash that burned across the explorer's isolated mind, a flash that passed almost as soon as it had come, as though an invisible door had closed upon it. But one thing in that briefly shocking contact stood out with great clarity. The Niobians were a true contact, a true understanding, for the message was there, plain in Kron's mind that he was thinking not only for himself but 94 for a consensus of his people, a decision arrived at as a result of discussion and thought -- a decision of which every Niobian was aware and with which most Niobians agreed. HT HE magnitude of that thought and its implications staggered Lanceford's imagination. After two years of exploration and contact with the dominant knew literally nothing about the sort of people with whom they were dealing. This instantaneous, neural contact proved that Equated against the information dished out in Basic Training, it merely emphasized the fact that Anthropological Intelligence had a lot to account for -- the job they'd done so far could have been performed by low-grade morons. In wishing to avoid the possibility of giving offense, in hiding behind a wall of courtesy and convention, there had been no contact worthy of the name. Yet here was the possibility of a rapport that could be closer than any which existed between any races in the Galaxy. Lanceford groaned with silent frustration. To learn this when he was dying was the bitterest of ironies. In any other circumstances, the flash of insight could be parlayed into a key which might unlock the entire problem of Niobian relationships. Bitterly he fought against the curtain of unconsciousness that closed down on him, trying by sheer will to stay awake, to make some move that could be interpreted, to leave some clue to what he had learned. It was useless. The darkness closed in, inexorable and irresistible. opened his eyes, surprised that he was still alive. The pain was gone from his face and the swelling had subsided. He grinned with relief -- his luck had held out. And then the relief vanished in a wave of elation. He held the key. He knew the basics for mutual understanding. And he would be alive to deliver them to the specialists who could make them operate. He chuckled. Whatever the treatment, whatever it was, it didn't matter. The important thing was that he was going to live. He wondered whether that flash of insight just before unconsciousness had been real or a figment of delirium. It could have been either, but Lanceford clung to the belief that the contact was genuine. There was far too much revealed in that sudden flash that was entirely alien to his normal patterns of thought. He wondered what had triggered that burst of awareness. had given him, the poison of the sith and the histamines floating around in his system -- it could have been any one of a number of things, or maybe a complex of various factors that had interacted to make him super-receptive for an instant of time. It was something that would have to be reported and studied with the meticulous care which the ence that was out of the ordinary. A solution might possibly be found, or the whole thing might wind up as one of those dead ends that were so numerous in Exploration work. But that was out of his field and, in consequence, out of his hands. His specialty wasn't parapsychological research. Kron was standing beside his bed, long doglike face impassive, looking at him with pleased satisfaction. Behind him, a group of natives were clustered around the cooking fire. It was as if no time had passed since the allergy struck -- but Lanceford knew differently. Still, the lost time didn't matter. The bright joy that he was going to live transcended such unimportant things. "Looks like you won't have to 95 bury me after all," Lanceford said happily. He stretched his arms over his head. He felt wonderful. His body was cool and comfortably free of the hot confinement of the protection suit. He did a slow horrified doubletake as he realized that he was lying on the sleeping platform practically naked -- a tempting hors d'oeuvre for the thousand and one species of Niobe's biting insects. "Where's my suit?" he half shouted. it, friend Lanceford. If you will notice, you are not bitten. Nor will you be." "Why not?" Kron didn't answer. It wasn't the proper time, and the euphoria that he and the Earthman were enjoying was too pleasant to shatter. Lanceford didn't press the matter. Apparently Kron knew what he was talking about. Lanceford had been watching one particularly vicious species of biting fly hover above his body. The insect would approach, ready to enjoy a mandible full of human epidermis, but, about six inches from his body, would slow down and come to a stop, hanging frustrated in midair. Finally the fly gave up and flew off into the darkness of the rafters. Lanceford hoped that 96 one of the spiders would get it -- but he was convinced. Whatever happened to him while he was unconscious had made him as insect-repellent as the Niobians. The smell of cooking came from the firepit and, incredibly, it smelled good. Lanceford looked startledly at Kron. "I'm hungry." "An excellent sign," Kron replied. "You are nearly cured. Soon you will be able to finish this trek." "Incidentally," Lanceford said, "for the first time since I have been out on this showerbath world of yours, you're cooking something that smells fit to eat. I think I'd like to try it." Kron's eyebrows rose and he hummed softly under his breath. This was something entirely unexpected -- an added delight, like the flavor of komal in a sorat stew. He savored it slowly, enjoying its implications. "What is it?" Lanceford persisted. "A dish called akef," Kron said. The name was as good as any and certainly described the effect well enough. r T , HE last hundred miles had been a breeze. Lanceford stood at the edge of the clearing, looking across the planed off landscape to the shimmering hemispherical bulk of Base Alpha, glistening like a giant cabochon jewel under Niobe's dark sky. Without the protection suit to slow him down and hamper his movements, what would have been a week's trip had been shortened to four days. In a few minutes, he would be back among his own kind -- and he wasn't sure whether he was glad or sorry. Of course, there was a certain satisfaction in bringing back a first-class discovery -- perhaps the greatest in the short history of Niobian exploration -- but there was a stigma attached to the way it had been found. It wouldn't be easy to confess that it had practically been forced upon him, but it would have to be done. It would have been much nicer to have found the answer by using his head. There would have been some really deserved prestige in that. TT E sighed and turned to Kroa "Farewell, friend," he said soberly, "and thanks." "We are even," Kron replied. "You saved my life from a roka and I saved yours from the sith. The scales are balanced." Lanceford blinked. He had forgotten that incident where he had shot the big catlike animal shortly after the 'copter had dropped them for the start of their journey back to Base. Apparently it was after Kron -- or at least the native had thought so. Lanceford grinned ruefully. Score another point for blind luck. "But, Kron, it's not that easy. You have given me a secret of your people and I shall have to tell it to mine." "I expected that you would. Besides, it is no secret. Even our children know its composition and how to make it. We have never held it from you. You simply wouldn't accept it. But it is about time, friend Lanceford, that your race began learning something of Niobe if they wish to remain here -- and it is about time that we began learning something about you. I think that there will be some rather marked changes in the future. And in that regard, I leave you with the question of whether a civilization should be judged entirely upon its apparent technological achievements." "I -- " Lanceford began. "You have learned how we avoid the insects," Kron continued, maneuvering past the abortive interruption, "and perhaps someday you will know the full answer to my question. But in the meantime, you and your kind will be free to move through our world, to learn our ways, and to teach us yours. It should be a fair exchange." "Thanks to akef," Lanceford said fervently, "we should be able to do just that." 97-"-the drug enough to have overcome the mental block that prevented you from naming it before. The word I coined from your own language of science is no longer necessary." "I suppose not, but it's pleasanter to think of it that way." "You Earthmen! Sometimes I wonder how you ever managed to achieve a civilization with your strange attitudes toward unpleasant facts." Kron smiled broadly, relishing the memory of his deception and Lanceford's shocked awakening to the truth. "I hope," he continued, "that you have forgiven my little deceit and the destruction of your protective clothing." "Of course. How could I do otherwise? It's so nice to be rid of that sweatbox that I'd forgive anything." Lanceford frowned. "But there's one thing that puzzles me. How did you disguise the stuff?" "I didn't," Kron replied cryptically. "You did." He turned away and, with characteristic Niobian abruptness, walked off into the jungle. His job was done and natives were never ones to dally with leavetaking, although their greetings were invariably ceremonious. Lanceford watched until the native was out of sight and then walked slowly across the clearing 98 toward the dome. He had learned a lot these past few days, enough to make him realize that his basic training had been so inadequate as to be almost criminal. It was lacking in many of the essentials for survival and, moreover, was slanted entirely wrong from a psychological point of view. Sure, it was good enough to enable a man to get along, but it seemed to be particularly designed to deny the fact that the natives obviously possessed a first-rate culture of their own. It didn't say so directly, but the implications were there. And that was wrong. The natives possessed a civilization that was probably quite as high as the one Terra possessed. It was simply oriented differently. One thing was certain -- the Confederation wasn't going to expropriate or exploit this planet without the natives' consent. It would be suicide if they tried. He grinned. Actually there would be no reason for such action. It was always easier to deal with advanced races than to try to conquer or educate primitive ones. Kron had the right idea -- understanding, exchange, appreciation -- Confederation culture for Niobian. It would make a good and productive synthesis. Still grinning, Lanceford opened the airlock and stepped inside, ignoring the pop-eyed guard who eyed his shorts and sandals with ders and set it carefully on the an expression of incredulous disfloor. belief. "Glad to see that you made it, Lanceford," Sims said. "But what's looked up from his desk and You stink like a native." smiled. The smile became a nose"All the baths in the world wrinkling grimace as Lanceford won't help, sir," Lanceford said swung the pack from his shoulwoodenly. 99 He was tired of the stares and the sniffs he had encountered since he had entered the base. In his present condition, a fellowhuman smelled as bad to him as he did to them, but he didn't complain about it and he saw no reason why they should. Humanity should apply more courtesy and consideration to members of their own species. "It's inside me," he explained. "My metabolism's changed. And incidentally, sir, you don't smell so sweet yourself." Sims sputtered for a moment and then shrugged. "Perhaps not," he admitted. "One can't help sweating in this climate even with air-conditioning." "It's the change inside me," Lanceford said. "I suppose it'll wear off in time, once I've been on a normal diet. But I didn't think that was too important in view of the information I have. I've learned something vital, something that you should know at once. That's why I'm here." "That's decent of you," Sims replied, "but an interoffice memo would have served just as well as a personal visit. My stomach isn't as good as it once was. Ulcers, you know." "The executive's disease," Lanceford commented. Sims nodded. "Well, Arthur, what did you find that was so important?" 100 "That we've been fools." Sims sighed. "That's nothing new. We've been fools since the day we left Earth to try and conquer the stars." 'That's not what I mean, sir. I mean that we've been going at this Niobe business the wrong way. What we need is to understand the natives, instead of trying to understand the planet." "Out of the mouth's of babes and probationers -- " Sims said with gentle irony. "It pays off," Lanceford replied doggedly. "Take my case. I've found out why the natives are insect-proof!" "That's a new wrinkle. Can you prove it?" "Certainly. I came the last hundred miles in shorts." "What happened to your suit?" "Kron destroyed it accidentally." "Accidentally -- hah!" Sims snorted. "Niobians never do things accidentally." at the director. The observation carried a wealth of implications that his sharpened senses were quick to grasp. 'Then you know the natives aren't simple savages, the way we were taught in Basic Training?" "Of course! They're a non-technical Class V at the very least -- maybe higher. Somehow they've never oriented their civilization along mechanical lines, or maybe they tried it once and found it wanting. But no one in the upper echelons has ever thought they were stupid or uncivilized." "Then why -- " "Later," Sims said. "You're entitled to an explanation, but right now I'd appreciate it if you'd finish your statement. What makes the natives insect-proof?" "Vorkum." "That gunk?" "That's the repellent." "In more ways than one," Sims said. "It's not so bad after you get used to it. It just smells awful at first." "That's an understatement, if I ever heard one." lyze it and find the active principle," Lanceford said hopefully. "If they do, I'll bet it is distilled quintessence of skunk," Sims replied gloomily. "I'll be willing to bet that our native friends tried that trick ages ago and gave it up for a bad job. They're pretty fair biochemists as well as being philosophers." "Could be," Lanceford said thoughtfully. "I never thought of that." "You'd better start thinking all the time. These lads are smart. Why do you think we have this complicated rigmarole about native relations and respect? Man, we're running scared. We don't want to lose this planet, and anything less than the kid-glove treatment would be sheer suicide until we learn how far we can go. These natives have an organization that'd knock your eye out. I didn't believe it myself until I got the proof: As you learn more about it, you'll understand what I mean. We're dealing with an ecological unit on this planet!" "But I thought -- " "That you were here to explore a primitive world?" "Wasn't that what I was trained for?" "No. We can do that sort of thing with a couple of geodetic cruisers. We don't need men trekking through the jungles to assay a world's physical resources. That business went out of date during the Dark Ages. There's a better reason than that for these treks." "Like what?" "You asked the question. Now answer it," Sims said. "You have enough data." Lanceford thought for a moment. "I can see one reason," he said slowly. "Yes?" "The trek could be a test. It could be used to determine whether or not the probationer was a survival type -- a sort of 101 final examination before he's turned loose in a responsible job  part of the speedup -- a pretty brutal part, but one that can't be helped if we want to get this planet in line quickly enough to stop the riot that's brewing in the Confederation. It's as much for Niobe's good as ours, because the Confederation wants that gerontin like an alcoholic wants another drink -- and they're not going to wait for normal exploration and development. That's why the treks. It's a tough course. Failure can and often does mean death. Usually we can pull a misfit out in time, but not always. If you live through the trek and we don't have to pull you out, though, you've proved yourself a survival type -- and you're over the first hurdle. "Then we check with your guide and anyone you happen to meet en route. The natives are very cooperative about such things. If you pass their evaluation, you're ready to join the club. It's been forming ever since we landed here two years ago, but it's still pretty exclusive. It's the nuthe one that'll get things rolling with the gerontin plantations. We'll know about you in a few more minutes after the Cyb Unit 102 gets through processing your data." Sims grinned at the thunderstruck youngster. Lanceford nodded glumly. 'Til probably fail. I sure didn't use my head. I never caught the significance of the trek, I failed to deduce the reason for the insectrepellent qualities of the natives, and I missed the implications of their culture until I had almost reached Base. Those things are obvious. Any analytical brain would have figured them out." "They're only obvious when you know what you're looking for," Sims said gently. "Personally, I think you did an excellent job, considering the handicaps you have faced. And the discovery of the vorkum was masterly." Lanceford blushed. "I hate to admit it, but Kron literally shoved the stuff down my throat." "I didn't mean the method by which you learned that vorkum was the stuff we've been searching for," Sims said. "I meant the results you obtained. Results are what count in this business. Call it luck if you wish, but there is more to it than that. Some people are just naturally lucky and those are the sort we need here. They're survival types. A lot is going to depend on having those so-called lucky people in the right places when we settle Niobe's status in the Confederation." He paused as the message tube beside his desk burped a faint hiss of compressed air and a carrier dropped out into the receiving basket. "Somehow I think that this is your membership card to the club, he said. He read it, smiled, and passed the sheet to Lanceford. "And now, Arthur, before I appoint you as a Niobe Staff member, I'd like to know one thing." "What is that, sir?" "Just why in the name of hell did you bring that pack in here with you? I've just realized where that smell is coming from!" "I didn't dare leave it anywhere," Lanceford said. "Someone might have thrown it down a disposal chute." "I wouldn't blame them. That's vorkum you have in there, isn't it?" Lanceford nodded. "Yes, sir. I didn't want to lose it." 'Why not? We can always get more from the natives if we need it." "I know that, sir. We can, but this is all I'll get for the next six months, and if I ration myself carefully, it might last that long. You see, sir, it's mildly habitforming -- like cigarettes -- and one gets accustomed to it. And besides, you really don't know what flavor is until you've tried vorkum on chocolate." monthly at New York, N. Y. for Oct. 1, 1956. 1. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Robert M. Guinn, 421 Hudson Street (14), New York City; Editor, Horace L. Gold, 421 Hudson Street (14) New York City; Managing Editor, None; Business Editor, None. 2. The, owner is: (Tf owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., 421 Hudson Street (14), New York City; Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stockholder), 421 Hudson Street (14), New York City. 3. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. 4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. 5. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the 12 months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this 11th day of September, 1956. Notary Public, State of New York No. 245978800 Qualified in Kings County Term Expires March 30, 1958 103 110 5 Star Shelf Vance, t) allant ine Books, N. Y.,  2.00 scure opening, Vance settles down to a frighteningly logical depiction of a civilization based on immortality as the supreme reward for a life of achievement. Unfortunately, immortality is for the few because cataclysmic wars have reduced the world to barbarism except for the smallish community of Clarges, and food supply and population are kept in strict balance. For each new 116 Amaranth, 2,000 ordinary mortals are visited by the Assassins. Since war and violence have been outlawed, the only areas of strife are in space flight and the struggle for immortality. Gavin Waylock is the angry protagonist, unjustly accused of deliberate murder and therefore deprived of his immortality. For seven years, he has hidden until, being declared legally dead, he is free to strive again for eternal life. The sick, inbred society of Vance's imagination comes fully alive, even though his characters remain mere symbols. Holly Compton. Oxford University Press, N. Y ., 5.00 literally burst into the awareness of the world, the general reaction was one of amazement that such an immense undertaking could have been achieved with such secrecy. More accustomed to effective security, we know that other wonders -- and horrors -- are under equally tight wraps today. Dr. Compton's book, never too late to be welcome, treats with the now familiar names -- Fermi, Oppenheimer, Urey, Conant, Lawrence, etc., and their often frustrated approach to the conquest of the atom. Though Dr. Compton's treatment keeps tending toward the textbookish, the drama and tension of those historic days come through undiluted. Sam Moskowitz. Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, Ga., 5.00 Quest, primarily a personal account of the individuals involved in the search for atomic power, is underplayed, being overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject. In contrast, Moskowitz's book, pretentious title and all, is an account of the petty feuds of a handful of S-F fans in the dark days of the '30s; depressing events during Depression days. The articulate handful monopolized the magazine letter columns and carried on their pigmy warfare to the despair of actual readers. Fortunately, most of these petulant warriors have since grown up -- but their historian is still leading their ghostly legions in battles that are more real than today to him. The miracle is that S-F survived even the love of its most rabid fans. Direct from Decatur, Ga. McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 5.50 been devoted to the question "From Whence?" as to the more immediate "Whither?" Senet is a most beguiling Whencer. His book takes on the intensity of a detective yarn as he ranges over the entire planet, following the finds of eminent paleontologists tracing the origins of Man further and further into antiquity. Far from adhering to this narrow field of investigation, however, Senet takes the entire scope of terrestrial life, marine and land, under scrutiny. His chapter      shelf 117 on the fabulous coelecanth and the assault on the continents by the sea creatures is the tautest kind of narration. Kurt Deckert. Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y., 3.95 monsters, our planet has more than its share in the depths of the seven seas. The pages of this startling tome are a-crawl with illustrations of creatures that any S-F artist would be tickled to own. The authors, zoologists at the University of Berlin, have compiled an unusual book devoted to the benthal or abyssal bottom dweller and the archibenthal or continental slope inhabitant, as well as the bathypelagic swimmers. By sinking to such depths, these scientists lift science enormously. Kramer. The Falcon's Wing Press, Colo., 5.00 had ever heard of Sumer or Sumerians. That they are now known to have been unique in many respects is due to the fastidious labors of specialized archeologists known as Sumerolo118 gists. Dr. Kramer takes a humorous view of his calling, referring to himself as a pinpoint historian, concerned with the history of the tiny triangle formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers only up to the time of Alexander the Great. The Sumerians had evolved a high civilization as early as 3,000 b.Ct with many historical firsts. They organized the first schools, literary debates, library catalogues; assembled the first Pharmacopoeia, "Farmer's Almanac" and bicameral congress and achieved the first recorded case of tax reduction. As you can see, a truly remarkable people. tle, Brown and Co., Boston, 3.00 Author of this year's monumental The Moon with Patrick Moore as well as a new work on telescopes to be reviewed next month, Wilkins has here a study of the Solar System on a juvenile plane. After theoretical construction of a rocket in orbit. Dr. Wilkins sets the reader off on a journey round the System. He has interjected accidents and problems to add spice to the story. Possibly he has strained too hard in the interest of interest, but I suspect that youngsters will disagree. Isabel Barclay. Doubleday  Co., Inc., 3.95 exploration from 2,000 b.c. to today. It has taken 4,000 years for Man to know his Earth. From the time of Hannu the Egyptian, the earliest known explorer who discovered the land of Punt, to the present, mankind has been driven to explore the unknown. All the great' explorers are in this book, from the Phoenicians to the Portuguese; Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Amundsen, Peary. Their stories are excellent examples of Man's restlessness but, as Miss Barclay says, "Where men once asked, What lies beyond the Great Green Sea?' today they ask, 'How soon shall we get to Mars?'" This book will have your teenager packing up to leave home. Beau. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., 3.00 nym of the wife of a government official. According to her, she has contacted certain beings beyond the veil, one of whom she calls Trust and who gives her Godly advice. This book is an account of her psychic experiences, but there is no documentation, so we must accept "Mrs. LeBeau's" story on Trust T. Wilkins. The Citadel Press, N. Y., 3.50 where in this column indulges in an extraterrestrial flight of fancy, his almostnamesake, H. T. Wilkins, has his feet in the clouds right here on solid ground. He postulates a race of AtlanteanBrazilians who have left artifacts dating from 20,000 B.C. If this be so, and Mr. Wilkins smokescreens the reader with masses of innuendo, then somehow we are missing out on one of the greatest stories of this century. Archeologists! Wherefore art yez? Dorothy Louise Dern. Pageant Press, Inc., N. Y., 2.50 ceived her training in the soap-opera field. She has taken an intrinsically dramatic subject, the creation of human life in the laboratory, and proceeded to treat it from the angle of Portia Facing Life. Unfortunately, unlike her laboratory piece of flesh, her story completely fails to come alive.     shelf 119 I wheel one morning, Dr. Walter Alvarez detoured down to C Level promenade. A few men were standing, as usual, at the view window looking out at the enormous blue-green planet below. They were dressed alike in sheen-gray coveralls, a garment with detachable gauntlets and hood designed to make it convertible into a spacesuit. It was uncomfortable, but regulation: according to the books, a Survey and Propaganda Satellite might find itself under attack at any moment. Nothing so interesting had hapoff the seventh planet of a G-type star in Ophiuchus. They had been here for two years and a half, and most of them had not even touched ground yet. There it was, drifting by out there, blue-green, fat and juicy -- an oxygen planet, two-thirds land, mild climate, soil fairly bursting with minerals and organics. Alvarez felt his mouth watering when he looked at it. He had "wheel fever." They all did. He wanted to get down there, to natural gravity and natural ailments. The last month or so, there had been a feeling in the satellite that a breakthrough was coming. Always coming: it never arrived. 120 eye for a what? The Earthmen thought they couldn't hurt a friendly alien if their lives depended on it -- their lives did depend on itl 121 Lola went by and a couple of the men turned with automatic whistles. "Listen," said Olaf Olsen conspiratorially, with a hand on Alvarez's arm, "that reminds me, did you hear what happened at the big banquet in George's honor yesterday?" "No," said Alvarez, irritably withdrawing his arm. "I didn't go. Can't stand banquets. Why?" "Well, the way I got it, the commandant's wife was sitting right across from George -- " Alvarez's interest sharpened. "You mean the gorgon? What did he do?" "I'm telling you. See, it looked like he was watching her all through dinner. Then along comes the dessert -- lemon meringue. So old George -- " The shift bell rang. Alvarez started nervously and looked at his thumbwatch. The other men were drifting away. So was Olaf, laughing like a fool. "You'll die when you hear," he called back. "Boy, do I wish I'd been there myself! So long, Walt." Alvarez reluctantly went the other way. In B Corridor, somebody called out to him, "Hey, Walt! Hear about the banquet?" He shook his head. The other man, a baker named Pedro, grinned and waved, disappearing 122 up the curve of the corridor. Alvarez opened the door of Xenology Section and went in. During his absence, somebody had put a new chart on the wall. It was ten feet high and there were little rectangles all over it, each connected by lines to other rectangles. When he first saw it, Alvarez thought it was a new table of organization for the Satellite Service and he winced; but on closer inspection, the chart was too complex, and besides, it had a peculiar disorganized appearance. Boxes had been white-rubbed out and other boxes drawn on top of them. Some parts were crowded illegibly together and others were spacious. The whole thing looked desperately confused and so did Elvis Womrath, who was on a wheeled ladder erasing the entire top righthand corner. "N panga," he said irritably. "That right?" "Yes," a voice piped unexpectedly. Alvarez looked around, saw nobody. The voice went on, "But he is R panga to his cousins and all their N pangas or bigger, except when -- " Alvarez leaned over and peered around the desk. There on the carpet was the owner of the voice, a pinkish-white spheroid with various appendages sprouting in all directions, like a floating mine: "George" the gorgon. "Oh, it's you," said Alvarez, producing his echo sounder and humidometer. "What's all this nonsense I hear -- " He began to prod the gorgon with the test equipment, making his regular morning examination. It was the only bright moment of his day; the infirmary could wait. "All right," Womrath interrupted, scrubbing furiously. "R panga to cousins -- wait a minute now." He turned with a scowl. "Alvarez, I'll be through in a minute. N panga or bigger, except when" He sketched in half a dozen boxes, labeled them and began to draw connecting lines. "Now is that right?" he asked George. "Yes, only now it is wrong panga to mother's cousins. Draw again from father's cousins' N pangas to mother's cousins' O pangas or bigger Yes, and now from father's uncles' R pangas to mother's uncles' pangas' cousins " He stared at the chart; he had drawn such a tangle of lines, he couldn't tell what box connected with which. "Oh, God," he said hopelessly. He climbed down off the ladder and slapped the stylus into Alvarez's palm. "You go nuts." He thumbed the intercom on the desk and said, "Chief, I'm going off now. Way off." "Did you get that chart straightened out?" the intercom demanded. "No, but-" "You're on extra duty as of now. Take a pill. Is Alvarez here?" "Yes," said Womrath resignedly. "Both of you come in, then. Leave George outside." "Doctor," the spheroid piped, "are you panga to me?" "Don't let's get into that," said Womrath, twitching, and took Alvarez by the sleeve. They found the chief of the Xenology Section, Edward H. Dominick, huddled bald and bearlike behind his desk. The cigar in his hand looked chewed. "Womrath," he said, "when can you give me that chart?" "I don't know. Never, maybe." When Dominick scowled at him irritably, he shrugged and lit a cigarette. Dominick swiveled his gaze at Alvarez. "Have you heard about what happened at the banquet in George's honor yesterday?" "No, I have not," said Alvarez. "Will you be so kind as to tell me, or else shut up about it?" Dominick rubbed his shaven skull, absorbing the insult. "It was during the dessert. George was sitting opposite Mrs. Carver, in that little jump seat. Just as she 123 got her fork into the pie -- it was lemon meringue -- George rolled right up over the table and grabbed the plate away. Mrs. Carver screamed, pulled back -- thought she was being attacked, I suppose -- and the chair went out from under her. It -- was -- a -- mess." Alvarez ended the awed silence. "What did he do with the pie?" "Ate it," said Dominick glumly. "Had a perfectly good piece of his own that he didn't touch." He popped a lozenge into his mouth. Alvarez shook his head. "Not typical. His pattern is strictly submissive. I don't like it." "That's what I told Carver. But he was livid. Shaking. We all sat there until he escorted his wife to her room and came back. Then we had an interrogation. All we could get out of George was, 'I thought I was panga to her.'" in his chair, reaching automatically for a bunch of grapes from the bowl on the desk. He was a small, spare man and he felt defensive about it. "Now what is all this panga business?" he demanded. Womrath snorted and began to peel a banana. "Panga," said Dominick, "would appear to be some kind of complicated authority-submission relationship that exists among the 124 gorgons." Alvarez sat up straighten "They never mentioned it to us because we never asked. Now it turns out to be crucial." Dominick sighed. "Fourteen months, just getting a three-man base down on the planet. Seven more to get the elders' permission to bring a gorgon here experimentally. All according to the book. We picked the biggest and brightest-looking one we could find. That was George. He seemed to be coming along great. And now this." "Well, Chief," said Womrath carefully, "nobody has any more admiration than I have for Mrs. Carver as a consumer -- she really puts it away -- but it seems to me the question is, is George damaged -- " Dominick was shaking his head. "I haven't told you the rest of it. This panga thing stopped Carver cold, but not for long. He beamed down to the planethead and had Rubinson ask the elders, 'Is George panga to the commandant's wife?'" Alvarez grinned mirthlessly and clicked his tongue. Dominick nodded. "Who knows what a question like that may have meant to them? They answered back, in effect, 'Certainly not,' and wanted to know the details. Carver told them." "And?" asked Alvarez. "They said George was a shocking criminal who should be appropriately punished. Not by them, you understand -- by us, because we're the offended parties. Moreover -- now this must make sense to their peculiar way of looking at things -- if we don't punish George to their satisfaction, they'll punish Rubinson and his whole crew." "How?" "By doing whatever it is we should have done to George -- which could be anything." Womrath pursed his lips to whistle, but no sound came out. He swallowed a mouthful of banana and tried again. Still nothing. "You get it?" said Dominick with suppressed emotion. They all looked through the open doorway at George, squatting patiently in the other room. "There's no trouble about 'punishment' -- we all know what it means; we've read the books. But how do you punish an alien like that? An eye for a what?"L ' straight," said Dominick, sorting through the papers in his hand. Womrath and Alvarez looked on from either side. George tried to peek, too, but his photoceptors were too short. They were all standing in the outer office, which had been stripped to the bare walls and floor. "One. We know a gorgon changes color according to his emotional state. When they're contented, they're a kind of rose pink. When they're unhappy, they turn blue." "He's been pink ever since we've had him on the Satellite," said Womrath, glancing down at the gorgon. "Except at the banquet," Dominick answered thoughtfully. "I remember he turned bluish just before If we could find out what it was that set him off Well, first things first." He held down another finger. "Two, we don't have any information at all about local systems of reward and punishment. They may cut each other into bits for spitting on the sidewalk, or they may just slap each other's -- um, wrists -- " He looked unhappily down at George, whose auricles and photoceptors were all out on stalks. " -- for arson, rape and mopery," Dominick finished. "We don't know. We'll have to play it by ear." "What does George say about it?" Alvarez asked. "Why don't you ask him?" "We thought of that," Womrath said glumly. "Asked him what the elders would do to him in a case like this, and he said they'd quabble his infarcts or something." "A dead end," Dominick added. "It would take us years" He scrubbed his naked scalp with a palm. "Well, number three, we've got all the furniture out of here -- 125 it's going to be damned crowded, with the whole staff working in my office, but never mind Number four, there's his plate with the bread and water. And number five, that door has been fixed so it latches on the outside. Let's give it a dry run." He led the way to the door; the others followed, including George. "No, you stay in here," Wornrath told George, who stopped, blushing an agreeable pink. and dropped the improvised latch into its socket. He punched the door button, found it satisfactorily closed. Through the transparent upper pane, they could see George inquisitively watching. Dominick opened the door again. "Now, George, pay attention. This is a prison. You're being punished. We're going to keep you in here, with nothing to eat but what's there, until we think you're punished enough. Understand?" "Yes," George said doubtfully. "All right," said Dominick, and closed the door. They all stood watching for a while, and George stood watching them back, but nothing else happened. "Let's go into my office and wait," said Dominick, with a sigh. "Can't expect miracles all at once." 126 They trooped down the corridor to the adjoining room and ate peanuts for a while. "He's a sociable creature," Womrath said hopefully. "He'll get lonesome after a while." "And hungry," Alvarez said. "He never turns down a meal." Half an hour later, when they looked in, George was thoughtfully chewing up the carpet. "No, no, no, no, George," said Dominick, bursting in on him. "You're not supposed to eat anything except what we give you. This is a prison." "Good carpet," said George, hurt. "I don't care if it is. You don't eat it, understand?" "Okay," said George cheerfully. His color was an honest rose pink. Four hours later, when Alvarez went off shift, George had settled down in a corner and pulled in all his appendages. He was asleep. If anything, he looked pinker than ever. When Alvarez came on shift again, there was no doubt about it. George was sitting in the middle of the room, photoceptors out and waving rhythmically; his color was a glowing pink, the pink of a rose pearl. Dominick kept him in there for another day, just to make sure; George seemed to lose a little weight on the austere diet, but glowed a steady pink. He liked it. II tried to keep up a good front, but he had the worst case of had got so that looking out at that fat, blue-green planet, swimming there so close, was more than he could bear. Kelly was a big man, an outdoorsman by instinct; he longed for natural air in his lungs and turf under his feet. To compensate, he strode faster, shouted louder, got redder of face and bulgier of eye, bristled more fiercely. To quiet an occasional trembling of his hands, he munched sedative pills. He had dreams of falling, with which he bored the ship's Mother Hubbard and the Church of Marx padre by turns. "Is that it?" he asked now, disapprovingly. He had never seen the gorgon before; Semantics, Medical and Xenology Sections had been keeping the alien pretty much to themselves. Dominick prodded the pinkish sphere with his toe. "Wake up, George." After a moment, the gorgon's skin became lumpy at half a dozen points. The lumps grew slowly into long, segmented stems. Some of these expanded at the tips into "feet" and "hands." Others flowered into the intricate patterns of auricles and photoceptors -- and one speech-organ, which looked like a small trumpet. "Hello," said George sunnily. "He can pull them back in any time?" Kelly asked, rubbing his chin. "Yes. Show him, George." The feathery stalks obligingly became blank-tipped, then rapidly shrank, segment by segment. In less than two seconds, George was a smooth sphere again. "Well, that makes for a little problem here," said Kelly. "You see what I mean? If you can't get a grip on him, how are you going to punish him like you say?" "We've tried everything we could think of," said Dominick. "We locked him up, kept him on short rations, didn't talk to him He doesn't draw any pay, of course, so we can't fine him." "Or downgrade him on the promotion lists, either," said Womrath gloomily. "No. And it's a little late to use the Pavlov-Morganstem treatments we all had when we were children. We can't prevent a crime he's already committed. So our thought was, since you're the games instructor -- " "We thought," Womrath said diplomatically, "you might have noticed something that might be useful. You know, rough-housing and so on." Kelly thought this over. "Well, 127 there's low blows," he said, "but I mean, hell -- " He gestured futilely at George, who had just decided to put his auricles out again. "What would you -- ?" "No, that's out of the question," Dominick said heavily. "Well, I'm sorry, Kelly. It was nice of you to help out." "Wait a minute," said Kelly. "I got something coming to me, maybe." He nibbled a thumbnail, staring down at the gorgon. "How would this be? I was thinking -- sometimes the boys in the pool, they get kind of frisky; they take to ducking each other. Under the water. Now what I was thinking, he breathes air, doesn't he? You know what I mean?" looked at each other. "It sounds possible," said Dominick. "Out of the question," Alvarez objected. "We don't know what his tolerance is. Suppose Kelly should damage him severely or even -- " "Oh," said Dominick. "Yes, you're right. We couldn't take a chance." "I've been a games instructor for seventy three years -- two rejuvenations -- " Kelly began, bristling. "It isn't that, Kelly," said Womrath hastily. "George isn't human, so how do we know how he'd react to a ducking?" "On the other hand," Dominick said, "gorgons do turn blue when they're not happy -- we have Rubinson's assurance for that. It seems to me George wouldn't be happy when smothering; that would be the whole point, wouldn't it? Dr. Alvarez would supervise closely, of course. Really, Alvarez, I don't see why not. Kelly, if you'll tell us what time would be most convenient for you -- " "Well," said Kelly, looking at his thumbwatch, "hell, the pool is empty now. It's ladies' day, but all the girls are down in Section Seven, hanging around Mrs. Carver. I hear she's still hysterical." Struck by a thought, Alvarez was bending over to speak to the gorgon. "George, you breathe by spiracles, is that correct? Those little tubes all over your skin?" "Yes," said George. "Well, do they work under water?" "No." Dominick and Kelly were listening with interest. "If we held you under water, would it hurt you?" George flickered uncertainly, from rose to pale magenta. "Don't know. Never tried." The three men leaned closer. "Well, George," said Alvarez, tensely, "would that be a punishment?" George flickered violently. "Yes. No. Maybe. Don't know." 128 They straightened again, disappointed. Dominick sighed gustily. "He always gives us those mixedup answers. I don't know. Let's try it. What else can we do?" off with George, following Dominick and Dr. Alvarez, and preceding Womrath and an orderly named Josling who was wheeling one of the dispensary pulmotors. The up-curving corridors were deserted. Kelly lagged a little, adjusting his pace to George's waddling steps. After a moment, he was surprised to feel something small and soft grip his fingers. He looked down; George the gorgon had put one sevenfingered "hand" into his. The gorgon's flowerlike photoceptors were turned trustfully upward. Kelly was taken by surprise. No children were allowed on the Satellite, but Kelly had been the father of eight in a previous rejuvenation. The confiding touch stirred old memories. "You'll be all right," said Kelly gruffly. "You just come along with me. The pool, as he had predicted, was empty. Ripples reflected faint threads of light up and down along the walls. "The shallow end would be better," said Kelly. His voice was hollow and echoed back flatly. Pausing to peel off his coverall, he led George carefully down the steps into the pool. Half submerged, George floated. Kelly drew him gently out into deeper water. Dominick and the others arranged themselves along the brink in interested attitudes. Kelly cleared his throat. "The way it generally happens, one of the boys will grab ahold of another one, like this -- " He put his hands on the smooth floating globe, and hesitated. "Go ahead, Kelly," called Dominick. "Remember, you have a direct order to do this." "Sure," said Kelly. He turned to the gorgon. "Hold your breath now!" He pressed downward. The gorgon seemed lighter than he had expected, like an inflated ball; it was hard to force it under. Kelly pushed harder. George went under briefly and slipped out of Kelly's hands, bobbing to the surface. The gorgon's speaking trumpet cleared itself of water with a phonk and said, "Nice. Do again, Kelly." Kelly glanced over at Dominick, who said, "Yes. Again." Dr. Alvarez stroked his thin beard and said nothing. Kelly took a deep sympathetic breath and shoved the gorgon under. A few bubbles came to the surface. George's speaking trumpet broke water, but made no sound. Down below, Kelly could 129 see his own pale hands gripping the gorgon's body; the water made them look bloodless; but not George -- he was a clear, unblemished pink. lence when Kelly brought him back up. "Listen," said Womrath, "I've got another idea. George, can you breathe through that speaking trumpet, too?" "Yes," said George cheerfully. Everybody brightened perceptibly. Josling polished his pulmotor with a rag. "Go ahead, Kelly," said Dominick. "And this time, you hold him under." George went down for the third time. The bubbles swirled upward. The gorgon's speaking trumpet swayed toward the surface, but Kelly leaned farther over, blocking it with his forearm. After a moment, all of George's appendages began to contract. Kelly craned his neck downward anxiously. Was a hint of blue beginning to show? "Keep him down," called Alvarez sharply. George was a blank sphere again. Then one or two of the limbs began to reappear, but they looked different somehow. "Now?" asked Kelly. "Give him a second more," said Dominick, leaning over precariously. "It seems to me -- " Kelly's back muscles were knotted with tension. He did not like the way George's new limbs seemed to be flattening out, trailing limpy. It was as if something had gone wrong in the works. "I'm bringing him up," he said hoarsely. To Kelly's horror, when he lifted his hands, George stayed where he was. Kelly made a grab 130 for him, but the gorgon slipped out from under his fingers. The new limbs stiffened and sculled vigorously; George darted away, deep under the water. Leaning, open-mouthed, Dominick slipped and went into the pool with a majestic splash. He floundered and rose up, a moment later, streaming with water like a sea lion. Kelly, wading anxiously toward him, stopped when he saw that Dominick was safe. Both men looked down. Between them and around them swam George, darting and drifting by turns, as much at home in the pool as a speckled trout "Fins!" said Dominick, slackjawed. "And gills!" Dr. Walter Alvarez was a misanthrope. He did not like people; 131 he liked diseases. Down there on Planet Seven, once the trade mission was established, he could confidently expect enough new and startling ailments to keep him happy for years. Up here, all he got were sprained ankles, psychosomatic colds, hives and indigestion. There was one cook's helper named Samuels who kept coming back every Wednesday with the same boil on the back of his neck. It got so that in spite of himself, Alvarez spent the whole week dreading Wednesday. When he saw Samuels' earnest face coming through the door, something seemed to wind itself a little tighter inside him. Some day, when Samuels opened his mouth to say, "Hey, Doc -- " Samuels always called him "Doc" -- the something inside him was going to break with a sound like a banjo string. What would happen then, Dr. Alvarez was unable to imagine. When the gorgon had first been brought up to the Satellite, there had been two or three delightful little fungus infections, then nothing. A great disappointment. Alvarez had isolated and cultured almost a hundred microorganisms found in smears he had taken from George, but they were all non-viable in human tissue. The viable bacteria, viruses, parasites that always turned up on a life132 infested planet were evidently lurking in some organism other than the gorgons. They swam, at night, across the optical field of Dr. Alvarez's dreaming mind -- rod-shaped ones, lens-shaped ones, wriggly ones, leggy ones and ones with teeth. One morning, Dr. Alvarez awoke with a desperate resolve. It was a Tuesday. He went directly to the infirmary, relieved Nurse Trumble who was on duty, and, opening a locked cabinet, filled a hypodermic from an ampule of clear straw-colored fluid. The trade name of this substance was bets-off; it was a counterinhibitant which stunned the censor areas of the forebrain chiefly affected by the Pavlov-Morganstern treatments. (By an odd coincidence, the patentee was a Dr. Jekyll.) Alvarez injected two c.c.s of it directly into the median basilic vein and sat down to wait. petual bad humor began to lift. He felt a pleasant ebullience; the colors of things around him seemed brighter and clearer. "Ha!" said Alvarez. He got up and went to his little refrigerator, where, after some search, he found half a dozen of the cultures he had made of microorganisms taken from gorgon smears. They were quiescent, of course -- deep-frozen. Alvarez warmed them cautiously and added nutrients. All morning, while the usual succession of minor complaints paraded through the infirmary, the cultures grew and multiplied. Alvarez was jovial with his patients; he cracked a joke or two and handed out harmless pills all around. By noon, four of the cultures were flourishing. Alvarez carefully concentrated them into one and loaded another hypodermic with the resulting brew. To his liberated intelligence, the matter was clear: No organism, man or pig or gorgon, was altogether immune to the microbes it normally carried in its body. Upset the balance by injecting massive colonies of any one of them and you were going to have a sick gorgon -- i.e., Alvarez thought, a punished gorgon. The treatment might also kill the patient, but Alvarez lightheartedly dismissed this argument as a quibble. (Or quabble?) Armed with his hypo, he went forth looking for George. He found him in the small assembly room, together with Dominick, Womrath and a mechanic named Bob Ritner. They were all standing around a curious instrument, or object of art, built out of bar aluminum. "It's a rack," Ritner explained proudly. "I saw a picture of it once in a kids' book." The main feature of the "rack" was a long, narrow table with a windlass at one end. It looked like a crude device for stretching something. "We thought the time had come for stern measures," Dominick said, mopping his head. "In the olden days," Ritner put in, "they used these on prisoners who wouldn't talk." "I talk," George pleasantly offered. "It's another punishment, George," Dominick explained kindly. "Well, Alvarez, before we go ahead, I suppose you want to examine your patient." "Yes, just so, ha-ha!" said Alvarez. keenly at George, who swiveled his photoceptors interestedly around to stare back. The doctor prodded George's hide; it was firm and resilient. The gorgon's color was a clear pink and the intricate folds of his auricles seemed crisp and alert. Alvarez took a hand scale from his kit; it was pre-set for A Level gravity. "Climb up here, George." Obediently, the gorgon settled himself on the pan of the scale while Alvarez held it up. "Hm," said Alvarez. "He's lost a good deal of weight." "He has?" asked Dominick hopefully. 133 "But he seems to be in unusually good condition -- better than a week ago, I would say. Perhaps just a little sugar solution to pep him up -- " Alvarez withdrew the hypo from his kit, aimed it at George's smooth skin and pressed the trigger. Dominick sighed. "Well, I suppose we might as well go ahead. George, just hop up there and let Ritner tie those straps onto you." George trustingly climbed onto the table. Ritner buckled straps around four of his limbs and then began to tighten the cylinder. "Not too much," said George anxiously. "I'll be careful," Ritner assured him. He kept on winding the cylinder up. "How does that feel?" George's "arms" and "legs" were half again their usual length and still stretching. "Tickles," giggled George. Ritner went on turning the handle. Sims coughed nervously and was shushed. George's limbs kept on getting longer; then his body started to lengthen visibly. "Are you all right, George?" Dominick asked. "Very fine." Ritner gave the handle a last despairing twist. George's elongated body stretched all the way in comfort from one end of the rack to the other. There was no place else for him to go. "Nice," said George. "Do again." He was glowing a happy pink. Ritner frustratedly kicked his machine. Alvarez snorted and went away. In the corridor, unseen, he jumped up and clicked his heels together. He was having a wonderful time; his only regret was that it was not tomorrow. Come to think of it, why wait till Wednesday? son Carver, S. S., had been trained to make quick and courageous decisions. Once you began to entertain a doubt of your own rightness, you would hesitate too much, begin to second-guess yourself, fall prey to worry and anxiety, and end up without any power of decision at all. The trouble was, you could never be right all the time. Following the book to the letter, or improvising brilliantly, either way you were bound to make mistakes. The thing was to cross them off and go ahead just the same. Carver firmed his chin and straightened his back, looking down at the gorgon. It was sick, all right, there was no question about that. The thing's limbs drooped and weaved slightly, dizzily. Its hide was dry and hot to the touch. "How long has he been like this?" Carver demanded, hesitating only slightly over the "he." 134 Aliens were "it" to him and always had been, but it didn't do to let anybody know that. "Twenty minutes, more or less," said Dr. Nasalroad. "I just got here myself -- " he stifled a yawn -- "about ten or fifteen minutes ago." "What are you doing here, anyway?" Carver asked him. "It's Alvarez's shift." Nasalroad looked embarrassed. "I know. Alvarez is in the hospital as a patient. He assaulted a cook's helper named Samuels -- poured soup over his head. He was shouting something about boiling the boil on Samuels' neck. We had to put him under sedation. It took three of us."  "Nasalroad, what is happening on this wheel, anyhow? First this thing attacks my wife. Then Alvarez -- " He glared down at George. "Can you pull him out of this, whatever it is?" Nasalroad looked surprised. "That would be a large order. We don't know any gorgon medicine. I was assuming you'd want to beam down and ask them." That was reasonable, of course. The only hitch was, as usual, a matter of interpretation. Was this something they had negligently allowed to happen to an important alien representative, or was it the necessary and proper punishment they had all been looking for? He asked Nasalroad, "What color would you say he is now? Not pink, certainly." "No-o. But not blue, either. I'd call it a kind of violet." "Hm. Well, anyhow, he's got smaller than he was, isn't that right? Conspicuously smaller." Nasalroad admitted it. Carver made his decision. "Do the best you can," he said to Nasalroad. He lifted his wristcom, said briskly, "Have you got a lineof-sight to the planethead?" "Yes, sir," the operator answered. "All right, get me Rubinson." A few seconds passed. "Planethead." "Rubinson, this is Carver. Tell the elders we've got a pretty unhappy gorgon here. We're not sure just what did it -- might have been one of a lot of things -- but he's lost a good deal of weight, and his color -- " Carver hesitated -- "it's bluish. Definitely bluish. Got that?" "Yes, Chief. Thank goodness! I'll pass the message along right away and call you back." "Right." Carver closed the wristcom with an assertive snap. The gorgon, when he glanced down at it, looked sicker than ever, but no matter. What happened to the gorgon was its lookout; Carver was doing his duty. 135 Ill rible headache and a sense of guilt. He was not in his own cubicle, but in one of the hospital bunks, dressed in a regulation set of hospital pajamas (with removable hood and gloves, capable of being converted into a spacesuit). He could just see the wall clock at the far end of the room. It was twenty-three hours -- well into his shift. Alvarez scuttled out of bed, groaning, and looked at the chart beside it. Mania, delusions. Sedation. Signed, Nasalroad. Delusions: yes, he was having one now. He imagined he could remember heaving up a big tureen of mock-turtle soup over Samuels' startled face -- splash, a smoking green torrent. Good heavens! If that was real -- Samuels! And the gorgon! Groaning and lurching, Alvarez darted out of the room, past the orderly, Munch, who was sitting with a story viewer on his lap and couldn't get up fast enough. "Dr. Alvarez! Dr. Nasalroad said -- " "Never mind Nasalroad," Alvarez snapped, pawing in the refrigerator. He remembered those cultures being right back here; but now they were gone. " -- not to let you up until you acted normal again. Uh, how do you feel, Doctor?" "I feel fine! What difference does that make? How is he?" Munch looked puzzled and apprehensive. "Samuels? Just superficial burns. We put him to bed in his own cubby, because -- " "Not Samuels!" Alvarez grabbed Munch by the front of his suit. "The gorgon!" "Oh, well, he's been sick, too. How did you know, though, Doctor? You were snoring when it happened. Listen, let go my suit; you're making me nervous." "Where?" Alvarez demanded, thrusting his scrawny face close to the other's. "Where what? Oh, you mean the gorgon? Up in the little assembly room, the last I -- " Alvarez was gone, out the door and down the corridor like a small, bearded fireball. He found an anxious crowd assembled -- Commandant and Mrs. Carver, Dominick and his staff, Urban and two assistants from Semantics, orderlies, porters, and Dr. Nasalroad. Nasalroad had the gaunt and bright-eyed appearance of a man who has been on wakeup pills too long. He started when he saw Alvarez. "What's up?" Alvarez demanded, grabbing his sleeve. "Where's the gorgon? What -- " "Be quiet," said Nasalroad. "George is over in that comer be136 hind Carver. We're waiting for the delegation from planetside. Rubinson said they were coming up, three of them with some kind of a box." HP HE loudspeaker said suddenly, "I have the tender locked on. Contact. Contact is made. The lock is opening; get ready, here they come." Alvarez couldn't see past Carver's bulk. He tried to get away, but Nasalroad stopped him. "I want to see," he said irritably. "Listen," Nasalroad said. "I know what you did. I checked the bets-off pills and those cultures against inventory. The gorgon seems to be recovering nicely, no thanks to you. Now has the stuff worn off you or not? Because if not-" A rustle went over the group. Alvarez and Nasalroad turned in time to see the door opening. Two vigorous-looking gorgons waddled through; they were carrying an enameled metal box between them. "Foop!" said the first one experimentally. "Where is gorgon George?" "I'm all right," Alvarez muttered. "If I wasn't, I'd have done something uncivilized to you by now, wouldn't I?" "I guess so," said Nasalroad. They elbowed closer as the group shifted, making a space around the three gorgons. Peering, on tiptoe, Alvarez could see George standing shakily beside the other two. "He looks terrible. Those are big ones, those other two, aren't they?" "Not as big as George was when we got him," Nasalroad muttered. "Walt, if it turns out you've ruined the whole thing, I'll take a dose of bets-off myself and-" "Listen!" snarled Alvarez. One of the gorgons was explaining, "This is panga box. What you call? You know panga?" 'Well, uh, yes and no," said Dominick uncomfortably. "But what about the punishment? We understood -- " "Punishment later. You, George, go in box." Obediently, George waddled over and squatted beside the mouth of the box. He bobbed uncertainly; he looked for all the world like a large woman trying to get into a small sports 'copter. There was a minor outbreak of nervous laughter, quickly suppressed. George leaned, retracting most of his upper appendages. His round body began to be compressed into a squarish shape, wedging itself into the box. The other gorgons watched with an air of tension, photoceptors rigidly extended. A hush fell. Among the humans present, 137 there was a general air of Whyare-we-all-whispering? George wriggled and oozed farther into the box. Momentarily, he stuck. He flickered blue, then pink. His "feet," almost retracted, scrabbled feebly at the bottom of the box. Then he was in. "NE of the other gorgons solemnly closed the lid on George and fastened it to make sure, then opened it again and helped him out. All three gorgons began to make rhythmic swaying motions with their "arms" and other appendages. George, Alvarez thought, looked smug. He felt a sudden premonitory pang. What had he done? "What's it all about?" Nasalroad demanded. "Are they measuring him for a coffin or -- " Dominick, overhearing, turned and said, "I don't think so. Now this is interesting. You remember they said a panga box. What Fm 138 afraid of is that they may have a standard of size. You see what I mean? They could be measuring George to see if he falls below the minimum standard of -- uh -- panga relations." "Oh, heavens," said another voice. It was Urban of Semantics, who had been neglected of late; they hadn't needed him since George learned English. He was peering over Dominick's shoulder, looking dumbfounded. He said, "But don't you know the word we've been translating 'elders' really means 'smallest ones'? Good heavens -- " "I don't see -- " Dominick began, but the commandant's voice drowned him out. "Quiet! Quiet, please!" Carver was trumpeting. He went on, "Our friends from Seven have an announcement to make. Now, then." To everyone's surprise, it was George who spoke, in the lisping adcents of the gorgon language. No human present understood a word of it except Urban, who turned pale and began stammering inaudibly to himself. One of the gorgons began to speak when George stopped: "Most elder person, known to you by name George, wishes me to thank you all for kindness done him when he was humble youth." "Youth," muttered Urban. "But it really means 'ungainly one' -- or 'fat boy.' Oh, my heavens!" "Now that he has become elder, it will be his most pleasure to repay all kindness in agreeable legislative manner." "What does that mean?" Alvarez queried aggrievedly. "Why can't he talk for himself, anyway?" "It would be beneath his digity now," said Nasalroad. "Hush!" " -- If," said the gorgon, "you will succeed in giving elder person, known by name George, proper punishment as aforesaid." 139 order!" said Carver, banging on the table. George and the other two gorgons were sitting opposite him, with the centerpiece of nasturtiums and ferns between them. Grouped around Carver were Dominick, Urban, Womrath, Alvarez, Nasalroad, Kelly and Ritner. "Now this is the situation," Carver said aggressively. "This gorgon turns out to be a member of their ruling council. I don't understand why, but forget that now -- the point is he's friendly disposed toward us, so we've succeeded in this mission if we can find that proper punishment. Otherwise we're in the soup. Suggestions." Dominick craned his bald head toward Alvarez across the table. "Doctor, I had a thought. Would you say -- is there anything peculiar about the gorgon's body constitution as compared, say, to ours?" "Certainly, "said Alvarez dourly. "Any number of things. You name it, they -- " Giving them a dirty look, Carver nodded to Ritner. "Yes?" "Well, I was thinking. I know the rack was a washout, but there was another thing they used to rise called the Iron Virgin. It had a door, like, with spikes on it -- " "What I had in mind," Dominick said, "is there anything that 140 would tend to limit their body size -- any danger or disadvantage in growing large?" Alvarez frowned and looked at Nasalroad, who hitched his chair closer. "The pressure?" said Nasalroad tentatively. They rubbed their chins and looked at each other with professional glints in their eyes. "What about the pressure?" Dominick prompted eagerly. "How long would it take you to build a thing like that?" Carver was asking Ritner. "Well -- ten, eleven hours." "Too long. That's out. Next!" "They're actually a single cell -- all colloidal fluid, at a considerable osmotic pressure. The bigger they get, the more pressure it takes to keep that shape. If they got too big, I rather imagine -- " Alvarez snapped his fingers, awed. "They'd burst!" Carver turned with an indignant glare. "Gentlemen, if I could get a little cooperation out of you, instead of this continual distraction -- All right, Womrath?" "Sir, I was just wondering, suppose if we let him turn into a fish, the way he did before in the pool -- but then we'd net him and take him out of the water fast. That way, maybe -- " "It wouldn't work," said Kelly. "He changed back in about a second, the other time." ' tention to Kelly. One of the big gorgons, who had been staring fixedly at the flowers in the middle of the table, had suddenly grabbed a handful and was stuffing them into his mouth. George said something shrill in gorgon talk and snatched the flowers away again. The other gorgon looked abashed, but flushed pink. George, on the other hand, was distinctly blue. His "hand," clutching the mangled flowers, hesitated. Slowly, as if with an effort, he put them back in the bowl. The other two gorgons twined their "arms" around him. After a moment, Goorge looked more his old self, but a hint of blue remained. "What is it?" asked Carver alertly. "Did we do something, finally?" "Did you turn blue because we punished you, George?" Wornrath questioned. "No," said George unexpectedly. "Hard for me to be elder." He added a few words in his own language to the other gorgons and their "arms" twined around him again. "Before, they panga to me," he added. "Then that's why he took the pie away from the commandant's wife!" said Dominick, smiting himself on the forehead. "Of course. They -- " "What's that? What's that?" Carver turned, bristling. "Why, this explains that pie business," said Dominick. "He felt protective toward your wife, you see. That's what 'panga' means. They none of them have much control over their own appetites, so they guard each other. As they grow older and get more self-control, they're expected to get smaller, not bigger. George felt confused about his panga relationships to us, but in your wife's case, he was positive one more mouthful would make her explode -- " Carver was red to the ears. "Nonsense!" he shouted. "Dominick, you're being insulting, insubordinate and unpatriotic!" George, looking on interestedly, piped a few words in the gorgon language. One of the other gorgons immediately spoke up: "Elder person says you with smooth head are a smart man. He says the other big one who talks too much is wrong." looked at the gorgons, then around the table. No one said anything. Carver set his jaw heroically. "Well, gentlemen, we certainly tried, but -- " "Wait a minute!" said Alvarez. Somewhere in his narrow skull, a great light had dawned. "George, 141 am I panga to you?" George's auricles waved tensely. "Yes. You very small man." "Good." Alvarez dry-washed his bony hands. "And you still have to be punished for that mistake you made at the banquet?" George's speaking tube buzzed unhappily, "Yes." "All right," said Alvarez. Everybody was looking at him with expressions varying from puzzlement to alarm. Alvarez took a deep breath. "Then here are my orders to you. Do as you please!" There was a hiss of indrawn breath from Urban. Most of the others looked at Alvarez as if he had grown snakes for hair. "Doctor," said Carver, "have you gone off your -- " The chorus of gasps stopped him. Up on the table, flushing blue and bright pink by turns like a skysign, George was gobbling up the flowers in the centerpiece. Next he ate the bowl. One of his flailing limbs raked in the scratchpad Urban had been doodling on. He ate that. Next moment, he was leaping to the floor, making Ritner duck wildly as he passed. Part of Dominick's detachable hood went with him, disappearing with hoarse munching sounds. With a gulp, George swallowed it and began on the carpet. He was eating greedily, frantically. The other two gorgons hovered around him with shrill gorgon cries, but he ate on, oblivious. Now he was bright blue and bulging, but still he ate. "Stop it!" shouted Alvarez. "George, stop that!" George rocked to a halt. Gradually his blueness faded. The other gorgons were prodding and patting him anxiously. George looked all right, but it was obvious as he stood there that he would never fit into the panga box again. He was bigger than the other two. "Alvarez," said Carver wildly, "why did you -- " "He was going to burst," said Alvarez, twitching with excitement. "Couldn't you tell? Another mouthful or two -- " Carver recovered himself. He straightened his coverall and thrust out his chin. "At any rate, he was certainly blue that time. You all saw it -- isn't that right?" He looked around triumphantly. "So, unless I'm very much mistaken -- " NE of the two attendant gorgons raised his photoceptors. It was hard to tell which was George, now, except that his color was still a little lavender. The other gorgon spoke two brief sentences in his own language and then all three of them waddled off together toward the exit. 142 "What was that? What did he say?" demanded Carver. had turned pale again. "He said get the tender ready to take them back home." "The tender is there," said Carver indignantly. "They can go back any time they want. But what did he say about the punishment?" Urban cleared his throat again, looking bemused. "They say the punishment is good. More severe than any they ever thought of in twenty thousand years. They say they won't have to punish Rubinson and the others now, because you have done all the punishment necessary." "Well?" challenged Carver. "Why are you looking that way? What's the hitch? Are they going to refuse to enter the Union, in spite of all this?" "No," said Urban. "They say we are all panga to them now. They'll do as we say -- let us land and build the distribution centers, start them consuming in massive quantity." "But that'll destroy them!" someone interjected in a horrified tone. "That's right," said Urban. Carver sighed. He had been in and was proud of his record. He played it as a game; the new, virgin planets were the prizes and he kept score with the row of tiny iridium buttons on his breast pocket. He said into his wristcorn, "Let me know when Rubinson and his crew are on the way up." There was a long wait. The silence grew oppressive. At length, the wall screen lighted with a view of Planet Seven, gilded along one cusp, blue-green and mysterious in the shadow. A silver spark was floating up out of the night side. "Here they come now," said the voice. Carver sighed again. "When they make contact, secure the tender and then signal for acceleration stations. We're leaving Seven. Tell Mr. Fruman to set a first approximation for our next star of call." Alvarez, twitching and frowning, clutched at the front of his coverall. "You're letting them go? Not landing on Seven -- after all this work?" Carver was staring into the view plate. "Some beings," he said slowly and unwillingly, "are not meant to be consumers."      143 Each Wednesday nite on Radiol Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N.B.C. 144 when you join the Club Each One Packed from Cover to Cover With Science Thrills of the Future! by Edward J. Ruppelt Here Is the first authoritative report on hitherto hushed-up facts about "flying saucers" by a forinet Air Force expert who was in charge but amazing fact! 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A special booklet with full-scale diagrams that you can tear out and place on your work bench for easy assembly. (4) Beginners' Manual. Starting from scratch, the manual adds components to teach the basic symbols of electric circuits. (5) Over 400 components and parts. Mail today Check. Cash or Money Order n nc 126 Lexington Avenue. New York 16, New York by L Ron Hubbard To Be Published Soon -- Watch for it -- on -- Your Newsstand galaxy by Avram Davidson 72 The Moon Contract 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. 35c per copy. Subscription: (12 copies) 3.50 per year in the United States, Canada, Mexicp, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere 4.50. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York 1957, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. 14, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and critical mail, editors receive letters that roil their troubled sleep, as if their sleep needed roiling. Like this one, for instance : "I enjoyed your editorial on possible life-forms. You pointed out that vegetation lives off soil and air, herbivores live off vegetation, and carnivores live off herbivores. Well, here is a little food for thought: what lives off carnivores? Judith L. Burgess, Carnivore." The obvious answer is soil and air, so that the whole thing comes full circle. But that's dodging; soil and air do not live off anything. The omnivore does, Miss Burgess, and you must be an uncomfortable date if you devour meat and won't touch vegetables and desserts. As an omnivore, I declare with justifiable pride that this is the highest category in the gastronomical scale of evolution. The fact that we share the distinction with bears, pigs and the raccoon family in no way mitigates my pride. I can't imagine what, if anything, can possibly surpass our all-purpose gullet. Miss Burgess and others may dispute the statement with Oscar Wilde's description of English fox hunting as "The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable," but she 4 and they and Mr. Wilde must then be prepared to deprive Eskimos and Orientals from membership in the human race. Not sharing our silly prejudices, these admirable peoples carry omnivoraciousness to its utterly logical extreme. They may not like fox, may consider it greatly inferior to raw wolverine or Pooch Cantonese Style, but any fox they harpoon or snare is going to be eaten, doggedly or otherwise. If the need ever be, Miss Burgess, you and the rest of us can -- and will -- eat every carnivore clean off the planet. Then there's the letter from the worried chap whose obviously alien wife says such things as: "The washee pot needs coughing." In a recent communique, he added nervously: "My wife just told me, 'If you don't know how to be nice, don't be at all.' So, if you fail to hear from me, you'll know what happened." What makes him believe I will? I think I'd like to know, but I'm not really sure. Another deponent to the case proving that There Are Aliens Among Us writes: "The indications are that these aliens come from planets with extreme temperatures. In the sum(Continued on page 6) Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment 421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. Please Enter My Order For Your Next 6 Novels I Enclose A 2.00 Check Here  Add 50c Foreign Postage For  1.50 or 35c each Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Name Address City State (Continued from page 4) mer, people slap me on the back and ask if it is hot enough for me, it invariably being so. The conclusion I've arrived at is that these aliens possess a gadget imbedded in their back for raising temperature and it sometimes goes out of whack and has to be jarred, like kicking a gum machine. "These same people slap me on the back in the winter, asking if it's cold enough for me. Can a metamorphosis be this complete? "Several days ago, a stranger slipped on the splashed edge of crashed into the water. When I helped haul him out, he said that he 'must have slipped on something wet.' Does he come from a "I'm alarmed about some of 'our' idioms, such as: 'What time is it?' What time is what?" Another reader sent in a clipping from the N.Y. Herald Tribune about a "time capsule" dug up at Madison Square Park. A lead box 20 inches long and 7 inches wide, it was located while dismantling an ornate water trough for horses. "The lead case contained a bronze table inscribed with the words 'The Gift of Olivia Eggleston Phelps Stokes to the City of New York, August 1880.' Inclosed were a booklet entitled 'Colton's Map of New York City'; 6 and Works'; a copy of the NewYork Herald, dated Dec. 2, 1880; a business card of James Muir, plumber and gas fitter at 29 E. 18th St., and a copy of the Bible. "Miss Stokes, a philanthropist and daughter of a New York banking family, died at the age of 81 on Dec. 14, 1927." Presumably thinking that the itemized trivia was worth the cost of the lead box. If any further argument is needed against time capsules, there it is -- pocketbook lint that Miss Phelps and her advisers, if any, thought would have enduring value -- and we're doing the same with cornerstones and capsules. I dislike advocating unsanitary measures, but letting junk accumulate (as in Bat Cave, New Mexico, where 6 feet of garbage flung down in 3,000 years gave an important clue to the origin of corn) would be a real boon to future archeologists. We owe that much to our distant begats, don't we? Finally, someone sent in a squib about a 35 mm. camera found on the back seat of a taxi. Developed, the film had 20 shots of Lincoln delivering his Gettysburg address. Big deal! Brady covered the event. But what about the cab fare there and back? And now -- you were saying? Go Ahead -- Choose Brand-New Science Fiction Books Valued Up to 5.00 For Only Here they are -- beautiful, hard-cover, current First Editions by your favorite authors -- now yours at a Fraction of their regular selling price! No "Clubs" to join no "extra" books to buy just Choose the titles you want and Save! 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I enclose  for books checked. Name Address  Check this box if you want free catalog listing still more titles at these bargain prices! A Wind is Rising ing. But within the station, the two men had other things on their minds. Clayton turned the handle of the water faucet again and waited. Nothing happened. "Try hitting it," said Nerishev. Clayton pounded the faucet with his fist. Two drops of water came out. A third drop trembled on the spigot's lip, swayed, and fell. That was all. "That does it," Clayton said bitThey knew how to survive -- but what were the odds on a world where every good hurricane in the Galaxy went when it died? terly. "That damned water pipe is blocked again. How much water we got in storage?" "Four gallons -- assuming the tank hasn't sprung another leak," said Nerishev. He stared at the faucet, tapping it with long, nervous fingers. He was a big, pale man with a sparse beard, fragilelooking in spite of his size. He didn't look like the type to operate an observation station on a remote and alien planet. But the Advance Exploration Corps had 46 discovered, to its regret, that there was no type to operate a station. Nerishev was a competent biologist and botanist. Although chronically nervous, he had surprising reserves of calm. He was the sort of man who needs an occasion to rise to. This, if anything, made him suitable to pioneer a planet like Carella I. "I suppose somebody should go out and unblock the water pipe," said Nerishev, not looking at Clayton. "I suppose so," Clayton said, pounding the faucet again. "But it's going to be murder out there. Listen to it!" Clayton was a short man, bullnecked, red-faced, powerfully constructed. This was his third tour of duty as a planetary observer. He had tried other jobs in the Advance Exploration Corps, but Extraterrestrial Penetration -- faced him with too many unpleasant surprises. It was work for daredevils and madmen. But Base Operations was much too tame and restricting. He liked the work of a planetary observer, though. His job was to sit tight on a planet newly checked out by a drone camera crew. All he had to do on this planet was stoically endure discomfort and skillfully keep himself alive. After a year of this, the relief ship would remove him and note his report. On the basis of the report, further action would or would not be taken. Clayton dutifully promised his wife that this would be the last. After this tour, he was going to stay on Earth and work on the little farm he owned. He promised But at the end of each rest leave, Clayton journeyed out again, to do the thing for which he was best suited: staying alive through skill and endurance. But this time, he had had it. He and Nerishev had been eight months on Carella. The relief ship was due in another four months. If he came through alive, he was going to quit for good. "Just listen to that wind," Nerishev said. Muffled, distant, it sighed and murmured around the steel hull of the station like a zephyr, a summer breeze. That was how it sounded to them inside the station, separated from the wind by three inches of steel plus a soundproofing layer. "It's rising," Clayton said. He walked over to the windspeed indicator. According to the dial, the gentle-sounding wind was blowing at a steady 82 miles an hour -- A light breeze on Carella. "Man, oh, man!" Clayton said. 47 "I don't want to go out there. Nothing's worth going out there." "It's your turn," Nerishev pointed out. "I know. Let me complain a little first, will you? Come on, let's get a forecast from Smanik." They walked the length of the station, their heels echoing on the steel floor, past compartments filled with food, air supplies, instruments, extra equipment. At the far end of the station was the heavy metal door of the receiving shed. The men slipped on air masks and adjusted the flow. "Ready?" Clayton asked. "Ready." They braced themselves, gripping handholds beside the door. Clayton touched the stud. The door slid away and a gust of wind shrieked in. The men lowered their heads and butted into the wind, entering the receiving shed. The shed was an extension of the station, some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. It was not sealed, like the rest of the structure. The walls were built of open-work steel, with baffles set in. The wind could pass through this arrangement, but slowed down, controlled. A gauge told them it was blowing 34 miles an hour within the shed. It was a damned nuisance, Clayton thought, having to confer with the natives of Carella in a 34-mile gale. But there was no 48 other way. The Carellans, raised on a planet where the wind never blew less than 70 miles an hour, couldn't stand the "dead air" within the station. Even with the oxygen content cut down to the Carellan norm, the natives couldn't make the adjustment. Within the station, they grew dizzy and apprehensive. Soon they began strangling, like a man in a vacuum. Thirty-four miles an hour of wind was a fair compromise-point for human and Carellan to meet.  walked down the shed. In one corner lay what looked like a tangle of dried-out octopi. The tangle stirred and waved two tentacles ceremoniously. "Good day," .said Smanik. "Good day," Clayton said. "What do you think of the weather?" "Excellent," said Smanik. Nerishev tugged at Clayton's sleeve. "What did he say?" he asked, and nodded thoughtfully when Clayton translated it for him. Nerishev lacked Clayton's gift for language. Even after eight months, the Carellan tongue was still an undecipherable series of clicks and whistles to him. Several more Carellans came up to join the conversation. They all looked like spiders or octopi, with their small centralized body and long, flexible tentacles. This was the optimum survival shape on Carella, and Clayton frequently envied it. He was forced to rely absolutely on the shelter of the station; but the Carellans lived directly in their environment. Often he had seen a native walking against a tornado-force wind, seven or eight limbs hooked into the ground and pulling, other tentacles reaching out for further grips. He had seen them rolling down the wind like tumbleweed, their tentacles curled around them, wickerwork-basket fashion. He thought of the gay and audacious way they handled their land ships, scudding merrily along on the wind Well, he thought, they'd look damned silly on Earth. "What is the weather going to be like?" he asked Smanik. The Carellan pondered the question for a while, sniffed the wind and rubbed two tentacles together. "The wind may rise a shade more," he said finally. "But it will be nothing serious." Clayton wondered. Nothing serious for a Carellan could mean disaster for an Earthman. Still, it sounded fairly promising. He and Nerishev left the receiving shed and closed the door. "Look," said Nerishev, "if you'd like to wait -- " "Might as well get it over with," Clayton said. Here, lighted by a single dim overhead bulb, was the smooth, glittering bulk of the Brute. That was the nickname they had given to the vehicle specially constructed for transportation on Carella. The Brute was armored like a tank and streamlined like a spheric section. It had vision slits of shatterproof glass, thick enough to match the strength of its steel plating. Its center of gravity was low; most of its twelve tons were centered near the ground. The Brute was sealed. Its heavy diesel engine, as well as all necessary openings, were fitted with special dustproof covers. The Brute rested on its six fat tires, looking, in its immovable bulk, like some prehistoric monster. Clayton got in, put on crash helmet and goggles, and strapped himself into the padded seat. He revved up the engine, listened to it critically, then nodded. "Okay," he said, "the Brute's ready. Get upstairs and open the garage door." "Good luck," said Nerishev. He left. strument panel, making sure that all the Brute's special gadgets were in working order. In a moment, he heard Nerishev's 49 voice coming in over the radio. "I'm opening the door." "Right." The heavy door slid back and Clayton drove the Brute outside. The station had been set up on a wide, empty plain. Mountains would have offered some protection from the wind; but the mountains on Carella were in a constant restless state of building up and breaking down. The plain presented dangers of its own, however. To avert the worst of those dangers, a field of stout steel posts had been planted around the station. The closely packed posts pointed outward, like ancient tank traps, and served the same purpose. Clayton drove the Brute down one of the narrow, winding channels that led through the field of posts. He emerged, located the pipeline and started along it. On a small screen above his head, a white line flashed into view. The line would show any break or obstruction in the pipeline. A wide, rocky, monotonous desert stretched before him. An occasional low bush came into sight. The wind was directly behind him, blanketed by the sound of the diesel. He glanced at the windspeed indicator. The wind of Carella was blowing at 92 miles an hour. He drove steadily along, humming to himself under his breath. From time to time, he heard a crash. Pebbles, propelled by the hurricane wind, were cannonading against the Brute. They shattered harmlessly against the thick armor. "Everything all right?" Nerishev asked over the radio. "Fine," Clayton said. In the distance, he saw a Carellan land ship. It was about forty feet long, he judged, and narrow in the beam, skimming rapidly on crude wooden rollers. The ship's sails were made from one of the few leaf-bearing shrubs on the planet. The Carellans waved their tentacles as they went past. They seemed to be heading toward the station. Clayton turned his attention back to the pipeline. He was beginning to hear the wind now, above the roar of the diesel. The windspeed indicator showed that the wind had risen to 97 miles an hour. Somberly he stared through the sand-pocked slit-window. In the far distance were jagged cliffs, seen dimly through the dustblown air. More pebbles ricocheted off his hull and the sound rang hollowly through his vehicle. He glimpsed another Carellan land ship, then three more. They were tacking stubbornly into the wind. It struck Clayton that a lot of 50 Carellans were moving toward the station. He signaled to Nerishev on the radio. "How are you doing?" Nerishev asked. "I'm close to the spring and no break yet," Clayton reported. "Looks like a lot of Carellans heading your way." "I know. Six ships are moored in the lee of the shed and more are coming." "We've never had any trouble with the natives before," Clayton said slowly. "What does this look like?" "They've brought food with them. It might be a celebration." "Maybe. Watch yourself." "Don't worry. You take care and hurry -- " "I've found the break! Speak to you later." 'T'HE break showed on the screen, glowing white. Peering out the port, Clayton saw where a boulder had rolled across the pipeline, crushing it, and rolled on. He brought the truck to a stop on the windward side of the pipe. It was blowing 113 miles an hour. Clayton slid out of the truck, carrying several lengths of pipe, some patches, a blowtorch and a bag of tools. They were all tied to him and he was secured to the Brute by a strong nylon rope. Outside, the wind was deafening. It thundered and roared like breaking surf. He adjusted his mask for more oxygen and went to work. Two hours later, he had completed a fifteen-minute repair job. His clothing was shredded and and his air extractor was completely clogged with dust. He climbed back into the Brute, sealed the port and lay on the floor, resting. The truck was starting to tremble in the wind gusts. Clayton ignored it. "Hello? Hello?" Nerishev called over the radio. Wearily, Clayton climbed back into the driver's seat and acknowledged. "Hurry back now, Clayton! No time to rest! The wind's up to 138! I think a storm is coming!" A storm on Carella was something Clayton didn't even want to think about. They had experienced only one in eight months. During it, the winds had gone over 160 miles an hour. He nosed the truck around and started back, driving directly into the wind. At full throttle, he found he was making very little progress. Three miles an hour was all the heavy diesel would do against the pressure of a 138-mile wind. He stared ahead through the slit-window. The wind, outlined by long streamers of dust and sand, seemed to be coming 51 52 straight at him, tunneled out of an infinitely wide sky to the tiny point of his window. Windborne rocks sailed at him, grew large, immense, and shattered against his window. He couldn't stop himself from ducking each time one came. The heavy engine was beginning to labor and miss. "Oh, baby," Clayton breathed, "don't quit now. Not now. Get Papa home. The a quit. Please!" He figured he was about ten miles from the station, which lay directly upwind. He heard a sound like an avalanche plumitieting down a mountainside. It was made by a boulder the size of a house Too big for the wind to lift, it was rolling at him from windward, digging a furrow in the rocky ground as it came. Clayton twisted the steering wheel. The engine labored, and with infinite slowness the truck crept out of the boulder's path. Shaking, Clayton watched the boulder bearing down. With one hand, he pounded on the instrument panel. "Move, baby, move!" der rolled past at a good thirty miles an hour. "Too close," Clayton said to himself. He tried to turn the Brute back into the wind, toward the station. The Brute wouldn't do it. The diesel labored and whined, trying to turn the big truck into the wind. And the wind,, like a solid gray wall, pushed the truck away. The windspeed indicator stood at 159 miles an hour. "How are you doing?" Nerishev asked over the radio. "Just great! Leave me alone, I'm busy." Clayton set his brakes, unstrapped and raced back to the engine. He adjusted timing and mixture, and hurried back to the controls. "Hey, Nerishev! That engine's going to conk out!" It was a full second before Nerishev answered. Then, very calmly, he asked, "What's wrong with it?" "Sand!" Clayton said. "Particles driven at 159 miles an hour -- sand's in the bearings, injectors, everything. I'm going to make all the distance I can." "And then?" "Then I'll try to sail her back," Clayton said. "I just hope the mast will take it." He turned his attention to the controls. At windspeeds like this, the truck had to be handled like a ship at sea. Clayton picked up speed with the wind on his quarter, then came about and slammed into the wind. 53 The Brute made it this time and crossed over onto the other tack. It was the best he could do, Clayton decided. His windward distance would have to be made by tacking. He edged toward the eye of the wind. But at full throttle, the diesel couldn't bring him much closer than forty degrees. For an hour, the Brute forged ahead, tacking back and forth across the wind, covering three miles in order to make two. Miraculously, the engine kept on running. Clayton blessed the manufacturer and begged the diesel to hold out a little while longer. Through a blinding screen of sand, he saw another Carellan land ship. It was reefed down and heeled precariously over. But it forged steadily to windward and soon outdistanced him. Lucky natives, Clayton thought -- 165 miles of wind was a sailing breeze to them! The station, a gray half-sphere, came into sight ahead. "I'm going to make it!" Clayton shouted. "Break out the rum, Nerishev, old man! Papa's getting drunk tonight!" The diesel chose that moment to break down for good.  he set the brakes. What lousy luck! If the wind were behind 54 him, he could roll in. But, of course, it had to be in front. "What are you going to do now?" Nerishev asked. "I'm going to sit here," Clayton said. "When the wind calms down to a hurricane, I'm going to walk home." The Brute's twelve-ton mass was shaking and rattling in the wind blasts. "You know," Clayton said, "I'm going to retire after this tour." "That so? You really mean it?" "Absolutely. I own a farm in Maryland, with frontage on Chesapeake Bay. You know what I'm going to do?" "What?" "I'm going to raise oysters. You see, the oyster -- Hold it." The station seemed to be drifting slowly upwind, away from him. Clayton rubbed his eyes, wondering if he were going crazy. Then he realized that, in spite of its brakes, in spite of its streamlining, the truck was being pushed downwind, away from the station. Angrily he shoved a button on his switchboard, releasing the port and starboard anchors. He heard the solid clunk of the anchors hitting the ground, heard the steel cables scrape and rattle. He let out a hundred and seventy feet of steel line, then set the winch brakes. The truck was holding again. "I dropped the anchors," Clayton said. "Are they holding?" "So far." Clayton lighted a cigarette and leaned back in his padded chair. Every muscle in his body ached from tension. His eyelids were twitching from watching the wind-lines converging on him. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. The sound of the wind cut through the truck's steel plating. The wind howled and moaned, tugging at the truck, trying to find a hold on the smooth surface. At 169 miles an hour, the ventilator baffles blew out. He would be blinded, Clayton thought, if he weren't wearing sealed goggles, choked if he weren't breathing canned air. Dust swirled, thick and electric, within the Brute's cabin. Pebbles, flung with the velocity of rifle bullets, splattered against the hull. They were striking harder now. He wondered how much more force they'd need before they started piercing the armor plating. found it hard to maintain a common-sense attitude. He was painfully aware of the vulnerability of human flesh, appalled at the possibilities for violence in the Universe. What was he doing out here? Man's place was in the calm, still air of Earth. If he ever got back "Are you all right?" Nerishev asked. "Making out just great," Clayton said wearily. "How are things at the station?" "Not so good. The whole structure's starting sympathetic vibration. Enough wind for long enough and the foundations could shatter." "And they want to put a fuel station here!" Clayton said. "Well, you know the problem. This is the only solid planet beRidge Belt. All the rest are gas giants." "They better build their station in space." "The cost "Hell, man, it'll cost less to build another planet than to try to maintain a fuel base on this one!" Clayton spat out a mouthful of dust. "I just want to get on that relief ship. How many natives at the station now?" "About fifteen, in the shed." "Any sign of violence?" "No, but they're acting funny." "How so?" "I don't know," said Nerishev. "I just don't like it." "Stay out of the shed, huh? You can't speak the language, anyhow, and I want you in one piece when I come back." He hesitated. "If I come back." 55 "You'll be fine," Nerishev said. "Sure I will. I -- oh, Lord!" "What's it? What's wrong?" "Boulder coming down! Talk to you later!" Clayton turned his attention to the boulder, a rapidly growing black speck to windward. It was heading directly toward his anchored and immobilized truck. He glanced at the windspeed indicator. Impossible -- 174 miles an hour! And yet, he reminded himself, winds in the stratospheric jet stream on Earth blow at 200 miles an hour. The boulder, large as a house, still growing as it approached, was rolling directly his way. "Swerve! Turn!" Clayton bellowed at the boulder, pounding the instrument panel with his fist. The boulder was coming at him, straight as a ruler line, rolling right down the wind. With a yell of agony, Clayton touched a button, releasing both anchors at the cable end. There was no time to winch them in, even assuming the winch could take the strain. Still the boulder grew. Clayton released his brakes. The Brute, shoved by a wind of 178 miles an hour, began to pick up speed. Within seconds, he was traveling at 38 miles an hour, staring through his rear-vision mirror at the boulder overtaking him. Clayton twisted the steering wheel hard to the left. The truck tilted over precariously, swerved, fishtailed on the hard ground, and tried to turn itself over. He fought the wheel, trying to bring the Brute back to equilibrium. He thought: I'm probably the first man who ever jibed a twelve-ton truck! The boulder, looking like a whole city block, roared past. The heavy truck teetered for a moment, then came to rest on its six wheels. "Clayton! What happened? Are you all right?" "Fine," Clayton gasped. "But I had to slip the cables. I'm running downwind." "Can you turn?" "Almost knocked her over, trying to." "How far can you run?" Clayton stared ahead. In the distance, he could make out the dramatic black cliffs that rimmed the plain. "I got about fifteen miles to go before I pile into the cliffs. Not much time, at the speed I'm traveling." He locked his brakes. The tires began to scream and the brake linings smoked furiously. But the wind, at 183 miles an hour, didn't even notice the difference. His speed over the ground had picked up to 44 miles an hour. 56 "Try sailing her out!" Nerishev said. "She won't take it." "Try, man! What else can you do? The wind's hit 185 here. The whole station's shaking! Boulders are tearing up the whole post defense. I'm afraid some boulders are going to get through and flatten -- " "Stow it," Clayton said. "I got troubles of my own." "I don't know if the station will stand! Clayton, listen to me. Try the The radio suddenly and dismayingly went dead. Clayton banged it a few times, then gave up. His speed over the ground had reached 49 miles an hour. The cliffs were already looming large before him. "So all right," Clayton said. "Here we go." He released his last anchor, a small emergency job. At its full length of 250 feet of steel cable, it slowed him to 30 miles an hour. The anchor was breaking and ripping through the ground like a jet-propelled plow. Clayton then turned on the sail mechanism. This had been installed by the Earth engineers upon much the same theory that has small ocean-going motor boats carry a small mast and auxiliary sail. The sails are insurance, in case the engine fails. On Carella, a man could never walk home from a stranded vehicle. He had to come in under power. The mast, a short, powerful steel pillar, extruded itself through a gasketed hole in the roof. Magnetic shrouds and stays snapped into place, supporting it. From the mast fluttered a sail made of linkwoven metal. For a mainsheet, Clayton had a three part flexiblesteel cable, working through a winch. The sail was only a few square feet in area. It could drive a twelve-ton monster with its brakes locked and an anchor out on 250 feet of line -- Easily -- with the wind blowing 185 miles an hour.  mainsheet and turned, taking the wind on the quarter. But a quartering course wasn't good enough. He winched the sail in still more and turned further into the wind. With the super-hurricane on his beam, the ponderous truck heeled over, lifting one entire side into the air. Quickly Clayton released a few feet of mainsheet. The metal-link sail screamed and chattered as the wind whipped it. Driving now with just the sail's leading edge, Clayton was able to keep the truck on its feet and make good a course to windward. Through the rear-vision mirror, he could see the black, jagged cliffs behind him. They were his 57 lee shore, his coast of wrecks. But he was sailing out of the trap. Foot by foot, he was pulling away. "That's my baby!" Clayton shouted to the battling Brute. His sense of victory snapped almost at once, for he heard an ear-splitting clang and something whizzed past his head. At 187 miles an hour, pebbles were piercing his armor plating. He was undergoing the Carellan equivalent of a machine-gun barrage. The wind shrieked through the holes, trying to batter him out of his seat. Desperately he clung to the steering wheel. He could hear the sail wrenching. It was made out of the toughest flexible alloys available, but it wasn't going to hold up for long. The short, thick mast, supported by six heavy cables, was whipping like a fishing rod. His brake linings were worn out, and his speed over the ground came up to 57 miles an hour. He was too tired to think. He steered, his hands locked to the wheel, his slitted eyes glaring ahead into the storm. The sail ripped with a scream. The tatters flogged for a moment, then brought the mast down. Wind gusts were approaching 190 miles an hour. The wind now was driving him back toward the cliffs. At 192 miles an hour of wind, the Brute was lifted bodily, thrown for a dozen yards, slammed back on its wheels. A front tire blew under the pressure, then two rear ones. Clayton put his head on his arms and waited for the end. Suddenly, the Brute stopped short. Clayton was flung forward. His safety belt checked him for a moment, then snapped. He banged against the instrument panel and fell back, dazed and bleeding. scious, trying to figure out what had happened. Slowly he pulled himself back into the seat, foggily aware that he hadn't broken any limbs. His stomach was one great bruise. His mouth was bleeding. At last, looking through the rear-vision mirror, he saw what had happened. The emergency anchor, trailing at 250 feet of steel cable, had caught in a deep outcropping of rock. A fouled anchor had brought him up short, less than half a mile from the cliffs. He was saved -- For the moment, at least. But the wind hadn't given up yet. The 193-mile-an-hour wind bellowed, lifted the truck bodily, slammed it down, lifted it again, slammed it down. The steel cable hummed like a guitar string. Clayton wrapped his arms and legs 58 around the seat. He couldn't hold on much longer. And if he let go, the madly leaping Brute would smear him over the walls like toothpaste -- If the cable didn't part first and send him hurtling into the cliffs. He held on. At the top of one swing, he caught a glimpse of the windspeed indicator. The sight of it sickened him. He was through, finished, done for. How could he be expected to hold on through the force of a 187-mile-an-hour wind? It was too much. It was -- 187 miles an hour? That meant that the wind was dropping! He could hardly believe it at first. But slowly, steadily, the dial hand crept down. At 160 miles an hour, the truck stopped slamming and lay passively at the end of its anchor line. At 153, the wind veered -- a sure sign that the blow was nearly over. When it had dropped to 142 miles an hour, Clayton allowed himself the luxury of passing out.  for him later in the day. Skillfully they maneuvered two big land ships up to the Brute, fastened on their long vines -- which tested out stronger than steel -- and towed the derelict truck back to the station. They brought him into the receiving shed and Nerishev carried him into the station's dead air. "You didn't break anything except a couple of teeth," said Nerishev. "But there isn't an unbruised inch on you." "We came through it," Clayton said. "Just. Our boulder defense is completely flattened. The station took two direct hits from boulders and barely contained them. I've checked the foundations; they're badly strained. Another blow like that and we'd make out somehow. Us Earth lads, we come through! That was the worst in eight months. Four months more and the relief ship comes! Buck up, Nerishev. Come with me." "Where are we going?" "I want to talk to that damned Smanik!" They came into the shed. It was filled to overflowing with Carellans. Outside, in the lee of the station, several dozen land ships were moored. "Smanik!" Clayton called. "What's going on here?" "It is the Festival of Summer," Smanik said. "Our great yearly holiday." "Hm. What about that blow? What did you think of it?" "I would classify it as a moderate gale," said Smanik. "Nothing dangerous, but somewhat unpleasant for sailing." "Unpleasant! I hope you get 59 your forecasts a little more accurate in the future." "One cannot always outguess the weather," Smanik said. "It is regrettable that my last forecast should be wrong." "Your last? How come? What's the matter?" "These people," Smanik said, gesturing around him, "are my entire tribe, the Seremai. We have celebrated the Festival of Summer. Now summer is ended and we must go away." "Where to?" "To the caverns in the far west. They are two weeks' sail from here. We will go into the caverns and live there for three months. In that way, we will find safety." Clayton had a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach. "Safety from what, Smanik?" "I told you. Summer is over. We need safety now from the winds -- the powerful storm winds of winter." "What is it?" Nerishev said. "In a moment." Clayton thought very quickly of the super-hurricane he had just passed through, which Smanik had classified as a moderate and harmless gale. He thought of their immobility, the ruined Brute, the strained foundations of the station, the wrecked boulder barrier, the relief ship four months away. "We could go with you in the land ships, Smanik, and take refuge in the caverns with you -- be protected -- " "Of course," said Smanik hospitably. "No, we couldn't," Clayton answered himself, his sinking feeling even lower than during the storm. "We'd need extra oxygen, our own food, a water supply -- " "What is it?" Nerishev repeated impatiently. "What the devil did he say to make you look like that?" "He says the really big winds are just coming," Clayton replied. The two men stared at each other. Outside, a wind was rising. Old-Fashioned Bridge Score Pad ? BjiitLqsL aPiSL Makes Bridge Scoring Easier  More Accurate -- Faster  More Legible! 4 for  1 00 Including Postage Send Check or Money Order (No Coin or Stamps) 4L 49 East 41st St. Jt  New York 17, N. Y.  60 back to see when my book The Conquest of Space first appeared, because the date has some bearing on this story. Well, the copyright note says "First Published in September, 1949," so it must have been in the early summer of that year. The book, as far as the mechanical processes of production are concerned, had advanced almost to the final stage. Color proofs of the paintings had been 61 made and approved by Chesley Bonestell. Galley proofs of the text had been read and corrected. The page proofs had gone from printer to publisher to author and back the same way. All that was left for me to do was to wait. One morning during this waiting period, while reading the New York Times at breakfast, I found a little box, telling that Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper had found a hitherto unknown small satellite of Neptune. Most interesting, that. I dropped the Times, raced to the telephone, dialed my publisher and asked, "Is Conquest of Space on the presses?" The answer was something like, "It might be by now. If you want to know, I can call the printer and ask." "Do that," I said, "and if they haven't started yet, tell them to wait till afternoon. I'm coming in." The reason for this telephone call was that I realized that a few passages in the book were suddenly wrong. There was one which read "the lonely moon of Neptune," another one which read "Neptune's single moon" and a third one that said "like Earth, Neptune has only one moon." Don't bother looking it up -- the printer had planned to start the press run that Same afternoon, and by 11:30, the three passages had been replaced by others 62 which were factually correct and took the same amount of space. My reason for remembering this now is that I told the editor, while typing the changes, that my statement might be proved wrong for Ea'-th, too, one day. Well, as far as we can tell, it won't be. Earth does have only one moon, we are sure now -- reasonably sure, that is. ceived a large brown envelope in the mail which said on the outside "Office of Ordnance Research, U. S. Army" and inside there was a 30-page report, on the cover of which it said in letters of diminishing size: State College, New Mexico Interim Report on for the period 1953-56 By Clyde W. Tombaugh Dr. Clyde W. Tombaugh, most Galaxy readers will probably recall, is the discoverer of the planet Pluto, and early in 1954, it became known that the Office of Ordnance Research gave him, via Lowell Observatory and New Mexico State College, a research contract to find out whether Earth might not have another small moon, or possibly moons. I devoted part of my column in the September, 1954, issue of Galaxy to the news that such a search was on and I explained then why these additional moons, if they existed, had to be quite small. The story of the second moon of Earth has had a rather tenacious life ever since 1870, which was the year when Jules Verne's Autour de la Lurie appeared, the second part of his story about the shot to the Moon. In it, Verne provided the three inhabitants of his Moon projectile with a glimpse of the second moon of Earth and explained that a French astronomer by the name of Petit had postulated its existence. Although no figure for the size of this second moon is given in the story, the reader is left with the impression that it must be rather substantial, at least a mile in diameter. Astronomers declared at a later date that a moon a mile in diameter at the distance given by Petit (4650 miles) would have been discovered by the ancient Babylonians, since it would be, at certain times, a rather easy nakedeye object. Before this fact was presented, several German astronomers had spent some time trying to find Petit's moon, which they punningly called Kleinchen. The point of the pun is that Petit is the French word for "little" or "small" while Kleinchen is German for "the little one." Of course they did not find his moon. By the time Dr. Tombaugh started his search, it was quite clear that the additional satellite would be measured in feet and not in miles -- how many feet depended, naturally, on the distance. came that Tombaugh had found two moons, one 400 miles out and another one at a distance of 600 miles. The story went with it that, when this report reached the Pentagon, a general asked suspiciously, "Are they natural?" That story may be true, but the report that two moons had been found was not. If anybody knows how it originated, he is keeping his lips tightly shut. At any event, Dr. Tombaugh wrote me at the time that the report was not true. Moreover, it referred to distances that had not even been investigated at the time. The search was made by telescopic camera and the sensitivity of the instrumentation was revealed with a sentence that has been quoted quite a number of times since. The equipment, the statement said, could discover a tennis ball at a height of 1000 miles, provided only that it was white. It also could discover a V-2 rocket (which is just short of 63 47 feet) at the distance of the Moon. This original statement has since been amended to read that the tennis ball could be found even if it showed itself only in half phase; the V-2 rocket near the Moon would have to be in full phase and also painted white; Any satellite of Earth -- natural or artificial -- which is closer than a certain limit would have to move so fast to stay in its orbit that it would rise in the west and set in the east. The limit just mentioned is 22,300 miles from the surface. At that distance, the satellite would have an orbital period of 24 hours and would neither rise nor set but just hang in the sky over one hemisphere and never be visible from the other. Satellites beyond that limit would behave as one expects them to behave. Let us assume now that we have a satellite 4000 miles from the surface. It would need just four hours to go around the Earth once. Knowing this, one can calculate how fast it would move across the sky. Then an astronomical camera can be geared to sweep across the sky at the same rate. If the satellite is in the field of vision of the camera, it would show up as a dot on the plate, while the fixed stars in the field of vision would show up as 64 streaks from edge to edge. If that satellite were at, say, 3700 miles, but the camera were set for a sweep for a 4000-mile satellite, it would still show up. It would have made a very short trail, very easily distinguishable from the edge-to-edge star streaks. It should be clear from this explanation that a satellite search with such equipment is mostly a question of patience, a commodity which must be built-in in any astronomer. It is "merely" a question of adjusting the camera for a whole series of sweeps, corresponding to various satellite distances and orbital periods. If there is one, it must be caught sooner or later. on a photographic plate is not enough proof, however. There might be a tiny bubble in the emulsion, a flaw of some kind -- I mentioned once in this column that the planet Pluto was missed on a photographic plate (years before Tombaugh found it on another one) because the image happened to have fallen on such a flaw and was taken to be a part of it. To avoid being fooled by such an accidental dot, something else had to be done. It was this: when the trails of the fixed stars had moved to about the center of the plate, the camera was moved a little bit without closing the shutter. The result of this action was that every star trail, at that point, made a very short vertical line and then continued on a different level. (For faint stars, this short vertical line did not register on the plate.) Now if there was a satellite at the distance for which the sweep was set, it would make two dots at the proper distance from each other. That there should be a plate flaw producing this effect was most unlikely. The search was conducted from Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, which, in spite of its generally fine location, had one disadvantage which has to do with the position of the orbits of the unknown satellites relative to the Earth. There is, as far as I know, no rule that says that a satellite could not circle its planet going from pole to pole. The simple facts are that no such case is known and that it is highly unlikely for various theoretical reasons. A tiny satellite of Earth could have two possible origins. One is that it is a piece of debris from the Asteroid Belt which has, for some reason, been drifting inward in the Solar System and has been captured by Earth. That would require such a peculiar sequence of astronomical events that it is not very likely. In most cases, such a piece of cosmic matter drifting in toward the Earth would either simply pass on with a minor change in orbit, or else it would touch atmosphere and crash as a meteorite. Capture by the Earth would be exceedingly rare. But while capture would be literally a case of much more than "one in a million," it is not impossible. Such a satellite would circle the Earth in about the plane of the ecliptic -- the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The other possibility has to do with our real and rather large moon. More and more astronomers seem to incline to the belief that the Moon was formed in an orbit around the Earth of loose matter, ranging in size from a few molecules of something to large mountains. "Moon matter" left, they would orbit around the Earth in or very nearly in the plane of the Moon's orbit. Since the plane of the Moon's orbit and the ecliptic are inclined to each other by only five degrees, the search of these two planes is really the same thing, for some deviation from either one or the other must be taken for granted. The third possibility is that a satellite circles the Earth in the 65 plane of its equator, inclined by 23 x h degrees to the ecliptic. But a satellite over the equator would have been pulled into that orbit by the Earth's equatorial bulge, which implies that it would be fairly low. If it weren't, it wouldn't be in that plane. This is where the search from Flagstaff left a hole in the picture. A moonlet circling the Earth over the equator at a lesser distance than 1600 miles from the surface could not be seen -- or, rather, photographed -- from Flagstaff. Strangely enough, the search for anything inside the orbit of the Moon was really virgin territory. Barring the occasional looking for Kleinchen a few Germans had indulged in around the turn of the century, it had never been done. Well, we now know that there is nothing in that region, with the possible exception of equatorial orbits below 1600 miles. For these, Dr. Tombaugh moved to Quito, Ecuador, where such moonlets would be vertically overhead. But the Interim Report was written before this move took place and covered only the work at Flagstaff. It concluded: Much of the space about the Earth has been searched. Most of this space has been found to be empty of material moving in the most-likely orbits and large enough to be seen by the present equipment Some "suspects" have been found on the photographic films, but in all save a few instances it has been possible to determine that the record was not that of a satellite. These images, if not due to defects in the photographic plates, could have been tracks of very small asteroids moving past the earth in their journey around the sun. The several suspects not yet eliminated as satellites are ones which cannot be checked until photographic work has started on the equator. From a statistical point of view, it is more likely that they will turn out not to be satellites. The chance of a discovery of astronomical or geodetic value has, from the beginnnig, been regarded as very small. But a completely negative result, a determination that the space near the earth is free of debris up to a certain size, could have comforting significance to long-range ballisticians and to proponents of space travel. r  "HE explanation of the difficulty of capturing moonlets going around the Sun -- because they go around the Sun, they are, of course, tiny planetoids or asteroids -- implied that any additional satellite that might have been  This conclusion was written by The Office of Ordnance Research, not by Tombaugh. 66 found would most probably have been matter left over when the Moon formed. But if such matter was left over, it could go around the Earth in some other ways. One possibility was that it remained in the same orbit as the Moon, but circling the Earth either 60 degrees ahead of the Moon or 60 degrees behind the Moon. In the case of Jupiter and the so-called Trojan Asteroids, this has been found to be true -- many years, incidentally, after it had been advanced as a theoretical possibility. Having this nice equipment available, it was obvious that Dr. Tombaugh should use it to see whether there might be more moons in the orbit of the Moon. This particular phase of the search had been planned, but by the time the Interim Report was written, it had not been carried out, due largely to bad weather. But "left-over" Moon matter could still do something else. It could form secondary moons, moonlets of our moon. If such a secondary moon had been found, it would have been the first of its kind in the Solar System. It is perfectly possible that the larger moons in our solar system have such secondary moons, but if they do, they are all too small to be detected from the Earth. Secondary moons of our moon would have been fairly easy to identify, again if they were large enough to register on the photographic plate. The most likely orbit of such secondary moons would be again in the ecliptic, or else in the plane of the Moon's orbit. Because of this, they would pass between Moon and Earth and then disappear behind the Moon. Twice during every circuit of the Moon, they would be at "greatest elongation," which means farthest away from the Moon either to the east or to the west. Actually we would see this portion of the orbit strongly foreshortened so that such a secondary moon would remain nearly stationary, to the eye, near greatest elongation for a while. But no matter at what distance it is from the Moon, it would share the orbital movement of the Moon. If you can catch a dot of light, on either side of the Moon, which travels across the sky at very nearly the rate of the Moon itself, you have caught a secondary moon. you did it visually. If you try to do it photographically, chances are that the Moon will cover up the image of the secondary satellite. The Moon is bright enough to ruin everything faint in its vicinity on a plate. Hence this particular search had to wait 67 for an eclipse of the Moon. As Dr. Tombaugh reported: "The crater Aristarchus is the brightest spot on the moon, and it can be seen in a telescope with some difficulty when the moon is in total eclipse. With a visual guide telescope on the same mounting with the Schmidt camera, one can guide the camera on Aristarchus and prevent the dilution of possible satellite images." All this had been worked out for the total eclipse of January 18, 1954. "Unfortunately, on the night of the moon's eclipse, the sky was covered by a thick haze." At the time the report was written, there were hopes for the longduration eclipse which took place at midnight, November 17-18, 1956. 1 know that all the amateur astronomers in New York, Long Island and New Jersey were bitterly disappointed, for there was more than just a thick haze. It poured. The weather must have been bad enough to be useless in Flagstaff, too, because no report about a secondary moon has come in yet. But while Tombaugh's work is virtually definite for the space above 1600 miles (and lower down elsewhere than over the equator), a secondary moon of Earth, a moon of the Moon, and also "Trojan" moonlets in the Moon's orbit, are still possible. Their discovery would, for the 68 time being, be of scientific interest only, but it would be interesting. Naturally an intensive search program of this type had all kinds of "by-products," as Charles F. Capen of the New Mexico College called them in Sky and Telescope. A number of meteorites and one bright fireball were caught on the plates. A few others showed very strange zigzag designs -- the Naval Observatory's Flagstaff section had released a bunch of meteorological balloons at night without telling anybody. One night, an orange light moved noiselessly from north to south in a straight line; glasses proved it to be the exhaust of a high-flying jet. Another night, they had "Lubbock Lights," but they were a squadron of helicopters. Six months or so from now, another satellite watch will be on, but then it won't be a natural satellite. We'll have made it ourselves.  quite a long time since anybody talked about Moon rockets. Twenty-five to thirty years ago, before the time where there was any rocket "hardware," things were different -- the Moon rocket was a favorite topic of conversation among rocket enthusiasts. As the actual engineering research began, the favorite idea of the Moon rocket began to be overshadowed by the nasty reality of an oxygen valve which leaked, and kept leaking no matter what you did about it. And a parachute release that worked was more fascinating by far than the most elegant set of equations. As time went on, all thoughts concentrated first on the high-altitude sounding rocket, then the long-range rocket, and finally on the artificial satellite. But now the Moon rocket is with us again, in a form which bears little resemblance to the drawings made thirty years ago, but with the encouraging message that it could be built later this year if somebody can be found to sign some papers. However, a little background is needed first. In Professor Hermann Oberth's writings -- from 1923 to 1929 -- you can find a discussion of something he called the "optimal velocity." The problem was this: a rising rocket has to fight air resistance, and air resistance goes up very sharply as the velocity increases. As far as air resistance was concerned, a slowly accelerating rocket was far better than a quickly accelerating rocket. But while the rocket struggled up through a resisting atmosphere, slowly, it also lost 32 feet per second of velocity every second, because Earth tried to pull it back. Hence, as far as gravitation was concerned, the quickly accelerating rocket beat the slowly accelerating rocket tailfins down. There had to be a happy medium, a rocket which did not create too much air resistance for itself and did not lose too much speed to gravity, either. And that was the "optimal velocity." The first large rockets, the V-2s, happened not to be troubled by that problem. They could not accelerate very fast because they were so heavy. By the time they got to be really fast, they were above 60,000 feet, with about 90 per cent of the atmosphere below them. Large rockets which were capable of very high accelerations were still to come. But they came, the big solid fuel rockets we now have, which are mostly used to boost heavy missiles into the air. If one had tried to fire such heavy solid fuel rockets, or clusters of them, from the surface, there would have been trouble with air resistance. And this is not just theory, for such clusters, Vehicles, have been fired to measure air resistance at very high velocities. A. Van Allan of Iowa University had tried something else. 69 There is a medium-sized solidfuel rocket called the Deacon. When fired vertically from sea level, it can reach a height of 60,000 feet, or not quite 12 miles. Van Allan had the Deacon lifted by a plastic Skyhook balloon to about 12 miles and fired it from there. It went to 55 and 60 miles because it did not have to fight much air resistance. This rocket-balloon combination was dubbed the Rockoon and some important research work has been done with it recently. More of it will come during the International Geophysical Year. Knowing all this, we are now ready to understand the new Moon rocket, presented for the first time in a paper read in September, 1956, at the International Astronautical Congress in Rome. The authors of the paper were Kurt R. Stehling and Richard Foster, both of them propulsion engineers for the Naval Research Laboratory and presumably quite busy with the Vanguard satellitecarrier rockets. The "first stage" of the new Moon rocket is a Skyhook balloon which must be able to lift a rocket weighing 26,574 lbs. to a height of 70,000 feet. This, Stehling said, means a balloon of a capacity of four million cubic feet, adding that three-million-cubicfoot Skyhooks have been built and launched. 70 The Moon rocket would hang vertically below the balloon and tear through it when ignited. This will not hamper the rocket a bit and will not even cause an avoidable loss of the balloon, for the plastic skin of Skyhook balloons is so thin that they can be used only once; they can never be recovered. intact for reuse. The rocket itself is a three-step affair. Step No. 1 is a so-called "cluster" of four large solid-fuel units, weighing together 25,000 lbs., but developing a thrust of 236,000 lbs. They would burn for about 20 seconds. At the end of the burning time, the rocket will be 70.000  110,000 feet up and will be going with a velocity very close to 13,000 feet per second. At an altitude of 180,000 feet, you don't have to worry about air resistance any more, so the next stage, also solid fuel, will be ignited at once. The weight of Step No. 2 is 1510 lbs. It will also burn for 20 seconds, producing a thrust of 14.000 lbs. When its fuel is gone, it will be 280,000 feet high and the velocity will be slightly more than 26,400 feet per second. Then Step No. 3 takes over. Compared to what carried it, it is tiny, a 60-pound solid-fuel rocket with four pounds of "payload" in the nose. It will burn for only 10 seconds, but when it is finished, it will be 352,000 feet up and its velocity will be 39,504 feet per second. order "Fire!" Step No. 3 will be coasting to where the Moon will be four days later, for the time to traverse this distance will be about four days. The rocket will be too small to be seen in a telescope or to be tracked by radar. But radar ought to be able to track the larger stages, so that there should be enough tracking data for a trajectory computation. The time of the impact will be fairly well known, but just where the rocket will strike the Moon will not be known in advance. It is possible that observers may miss the impact for this reason. But the four pounds of payload are such that they will make a permanent and telescopically conspicuous mark on the lunar surface. 71 Dr. Morris Goldpepper  Physicists and engineers can't help -- only my colleagues can bridge the interstellar cavity to pull me out of my aching plight! 72 I McAllister, Danboufge and Smith, sat at the table under the cold blue lighting tubes. One of them, Rorke, was in a corner speaking quietly into a telephone, and one, Fadderman, stood staring out the window at the lights of the city. One, Hansen, had yet to arrive. Fadderman spoke without turning his head. He was the oldest of those present -- the Big Seven, as they were often called. "Lights," he said. "So many lights. Down here." He waved his hand toward the city. "Up there." He gestured toward the sky. "Even with our much-vaunted knowledge, what," he asked, "do we know?" He turned his head. "Perhaps this is too big for us. In the light of the problem, can we really hope to accomplish anything?" Heavy-set Danbourge frowned grimly. "We have received the suffrage of our fellow-scientists, Doctor. We can but try." Lithe, handsome McAllister, che youngest officer of the Association, nodded. "The problem is certainly not greater than that which faced our late, great colleague, the immortal Morton." He pointed to a picture on the panneled wall. "And we all know what he accomplished." 73 Fadderman went over and took his hand. "Your words fill me with courage." McAllister flushed with pleasure. "I am an old man," Fadderman added falteringly. "Forgive my lack of spirit, Doctor" He sat down, sighed, shook his head slowly. Weinroth, burly and redhaired, patted him gently on the back. Natty, silveryhaired little Smith smiled at him consolingly. hung up the telephone, flipped a switch on the wall intercom. "Headquarters here," he said crisply. "Dr. Carl T. Hansen has arrived," a voice informed him. "Bring him up at once," he directed. "And, Nickerson -- " "Yes, Dr. Rorke?" "Let no one else into the building. No one." They sat in silence. After a moment or two, they heard the approach of the elevator, heard the doors slide open, slide shut, heard the elevator descend. Heavy, steady footsteps approached; knuckles rapped on the opaque glass door. Rorke went over to the door, said, "A conscientious and diligent scientist -- " must remain a continual student," a deep voice finished the quotation. Rorke unlocked the door, peered out into the corridor, admitted Hansen, locked the door. "I would have been here sooner, but another emergency interposed," Hansen said. "A certain political figure -- ethics prevent my being more specific -- suffered an oral hemorrhage following an altercation with a woman who shall be nameless, but, boy, did she pack a wallop! A so-called Specialist, gentlemen, with offices on Park Avenue, had been, as he called it, 'applying pressure' with a gauze pad. I merely used a little Gelfoam as a coagulant agent and the hemorrhage stopped almost at once. When will the public learn, eh, gentlemen?" Faint smiles played upon the faces of the assembled scientists. Hansen took his seat. Rorke bent down and lifted two tape-recording devices to the table, set them both in motion. The faces of the men became serious, grim. "This is an emergency session of the Steering Committee of the Executive Committee of the American Dental Association," Rorke said, "called to discuss measures of dealing with the case of Dr. Morris Goldpepper. One tape will be deposited in the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York; the other will be similarly secured in the vaults of the Wells Fargo and Union Trust Company Bank in San 74 Francisco. Present at this session are Doctors Rorke, Weinroth and Smith -- President, First and Second Vice-presidents, respectively -- Fadderman, Past President, McAllister, Public Information, Danbourge, Legal, and Hansen, Policy." He looked around at the set, tense faces. "Doctors," he went on, "I think I may well say that humanity is, as of this moment, face to face with a great danger, and it is a bitter jest that it is not to the engineers or the astronomers, not to medicine nor yet to nuclear nor any other kind of physics, that humanity must now look for salvation -- but to the members of the dental profession!" His voice rose. "Yes -- to the practitioners of what has become perhaps the least regarded of all the learned sciences! It is indeed ironical. We may at this juncture consider the comments of the now deceased Professor Earnest Hooton, the Harvard anthropologist, who observed with a sorrow which did him credit that his famed University, instead of assisting its Dental School as it ought, treated it -- and I quote his exact words -- 'Like a yellow dog.' " His voice trembled. flushed an angry red. Weinroth growled. Danbourge's fist hit the table and stayed there, clenched. Fadderman gave a soft, broken sigh. "But enough of this. We are not jealous, nor are we vindictive," President Rorke went on. "We are confident that History, 'with its long tomorrow,' will show how, at this danger-fraught point, the humble and little thought-of followers of dental science recognized and sized up the situation and stood shoulder to shoulder on the ramparts!" He wiped his brow with a paper tissue. "And now I will call upon our beloved. Past President, Dr. Samuel I. Fadderman, to begin our review of the incredible circumstances which have brought us here tonight. Dr. Fadderman? If you please" The well-known Elder Statesman of the A.D.A. nodded his head slowly. He made a little cage of his fingers and pursed and then unpursed his lips. At length he spoke in a soft and gentle voice. "My first comment, brethren, is that I ask for compassion. Morris Goldpepper is not to blame! "Let me tell you a few words about him. Goldpepper the Scientist needs no introduction. Who has not read, for instance, his 'The Bilateral Vertical Stroke and Its Influence on the Pattern of Occlusion' or his 'Treatment, Planning, Assemblage and Cementation of a 14-Unit Fixed Bridge' -- to name only two? But I shall speak about Goldpepper the Man. He is forty-six years of age and served with honor in the United States Navy Dental Corps during the Second World War. He has been a widower since shortly after the conclusion of that conflict. Rae -- the late Mrs. Goldpepper, may she rest in peace -- often, used to say, 'Morry, if I go first, promise me you'll marry again,' but he passed it off with a joke; and, as you know, he never did. "They had one child, a daughter, Suzanne, a very sweet girl, now married to a Dr. Sheldon Fingerhut, D.D.S. I need not tell you, brethren, how proud our colleague was when his only child married this very fine young member of our profession. The Fingerhuts are now located on Unbalupi, one of the Micronesian islands forming part of the United States Trust Territory, where Dr. Sheldon is teaching dental hygiene, sanitation and prosthesis to the natives thereof." Dr. Hansen asked, "Are they aware of -- " "The son-in-law knows something of the matter," the older man said. "He has not seen fit to inform his wife, who is in a delicate condition and expects shortly to be confined. At his suggestion, I have been writing -- or, rather, typing -- letters purporting to come from her father, on his stationery, with the excuse that he badly singed his fingers on a Bunsen burner while annealing a new-type hinge for dentures and consequently cannot hold his pen." He sipped from a glass of water. "Despite his great scientific accomplishments," Dr. Fadderman went on, "Morry had an impractical streak in him. Often I used to call on him at his bachelor apartment in the Hotel Davenport on West End Avenue, where he moved following his daughter's marriage, and I would find hitp immersed in reading matter of an escapist kind -- tales of crocodile hunters on the Malayan Peninsula, or magazines dealing with interplanetary warfare, or collections of short stories about vampires and werewolves and similar superstitious creations. " 'Morry,' I said reproachfully, 'what a way to spend your ojfhours. Is it worth it? Is it healthy? You would do much better, believe me, to frequent the pool or the handball court at the Y. Or,' I pointed out to him, 'if you want to read, why ignore the rich treasures of literature: Shakespeare, Ruskin, Elbert Hubbard, Edna Ferber, and so on? Why retreat to these immature-type fantasies?' At first he only smiled and quoted 76 the saying, 'Each to his or her own taste.'" was broken by young Dr. McAllister. "You say," he said, "'at first.' " Old Dr. Fadderman snapped out of his revery. "Yes, yes. But eventually he confessed the truth to me. He withheld nothing." The assembled dental scientists then learned that the same Dr. Morris Goldpepper, who had been awarded not once but three successive times the unique honor of the Dr. Alexander Peabody Medal for New Achievements in Dental Prosthesis, was obsessed with the idea that there was sentient life on other worlds -- that it would shortly be possible to reach these other worlds -- and that he himself desired to be among those who went. " 'Do you realize, Sam?' he asked me," reported Fadderman. " 'Do you realize that, in a very short time, it will no longer be a question of fuel or even of metallurgy? That submarines capable of cruising for weeks and months without surfacing foretell the possibility of traveling through airless space? The chief problem has now come down to finding how to build a takeoff platform capable of withstanding a thrust of several million pounds.' And his eyes glowed." Dr. Fadderman had inquired, with good-natured sarcasm, how the other man expected this would involve him. The answer was as follows: Any interplanetary expedition would find it just as necessary to take along a dentist as to take along a physician, and that he -- Dr. Goldpepper -- intended to be that dentist! Dr. Weinroth's hand slapped the table with a bang. "By thunder, I say the man had courage!" Dr. Rorke looked at him with icy reproof. "I should be obliged," he said stiffly, "if there would be no further emotional outbursts." Dr. Weinroth's face fell. "I beg the Committee's pardon, Mr. President," he said. Dr. Rorke nodded graciously, indicated by a gesture of his hand that Dr. Fadderman had permission to continue speaking. The old man took a letter from his pocket and placed it on the table. "This came to me like a bolt from the blue beyond. It is dated November 8 of last year. Skipping the formal salutation, it reads: 'At last I stand silent upon the peak in Darien' -- a literary reference, gentlemen, to Cortez's alleged discovery of the Pacific Ocean; actually it was Balboa -- 'my great dream is about to be realized. Before long, I shall be back to tell you about it, but just exactly when, I am not able to say. History is being made! Long 77 live Science! Sincerely yours, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.'" He passed the letter around the table. Dr. Smith asked, "What did you do on receiving this communication, Doctor?" Dr. Fadderman had at once taken a taxi to West End Avenue. The desk clerk at the hotel courteously informed him that the man he sought had left on a vacation of short but not exactly specified duration. No further information was known. Dr. Fadderman's first thought was that his younger friend had gotten some sort of position with a Government project which he was not free to discuss, and his own patriotism and sense of duty naturally prevented him from making inquiries. "But I began, for the first time," the Elder Statesman of American Dentistry said, "to read up on the subject of space travel. I wondered how a man 46 years of age could possibly hope to be selected over younger men." Dr. Danbourge spoke for the first time. "Size," he said. "Every ounce would count in a spaceship and Morris was a pretty little guy." "But with the heart of a lion," Dr. Weinroth said softly. "Miles and miles and miles of heart." The other men nodded their agreement to this tribute. T1UT as time went on and the - year drew to its close and he heard no word from his friend, Dr. Fadderman began to worry. Finally, when he received a letter from the Finger huts, saying that they had not been hearing either, he took action. He realized it was not likely that the Government would have made plans to include a dentist in this supposed project without communicating with the A.D.A. and he inquired of the current President, Dr. Rorke, if he had any knowledge of such a project, or of the whereabouts of the missing man. The answer to both questions was no. But on learning the reasons for Dr. Fadderman's concern, he communicated with Col. Lemuel Coggins, head of the Col. Coggins informed him that no one of Dr. Goldpepper's name or description was or had been affiliated with any such project, and that, in fact, any such project was still -- as he put it -- "still on the drawing-board." Drs. Rorke and Fadderman, great as was their concern, hesitated to report Dr. Goldpepper missing. He had, after all, paid rent on apartment, office and laboratory, well in advance. He was a mature man, of very considerable intelligence, and one who presumably knew what he was doing. 78 "It is at this point," said Dr. Danbourge, "that I enter the picture. On the 11th of January, I had a call from a Dr. Milton Wilson, who has an office on East 19th Street, with a small laboratory adjoining, where he does prosthetic work. He told me, with a good deal of hesitation, that something exceedingly odd had come up, and he asked me if I knew where Dr. Morris Goldpepper was" The morning of the 11th of January, an elderly man with a curious foreign accent came into Dr. Wilson's office, gave the name of Smith and complained about an upper plate. It did not feel comfortable, Mr. Smith said, and it irritated the roof of his mouth. There was a certain reluctance on his part to allow Dr. Wilson to examine his mouth. This was understandable, because the interior of his mouth was blue. The gums were entirely edentulous, very hard, almost horny. The plate itself -- "Here is the plate," Dr. Danbourge said, placing it on the table. "Dr. Wilson supplied him with another. You will observe the perforations on the upper, or palatal, surface. They had been covered with a thin layer of gum arabic, which naturally soon wore almost entirely off, with the result that the roof of the mouth became irritated. Now this is so very unusual that Dr. Wilson -- as soon as his patient, the socalled Mr. Smith, was gone -- broke open the weirdly made plate to find why the perforations had been made. In my capacity as head of the Association's Legal Department," Dr. Danbourge stated, "I have come across some extraordinary occurrences, but nothing like this." This was a small piece of a white, flexible substance, covered with tiny black lines. Danbourge picked up a large magnifying glass. "You may examine these objects, Doctors," he said, "but it will save your eyesight if I read to you from an enlarged photostatic copy of this last one. The nature of the material, the method of writing, or of reducing the writing to such size all are unknown to us. It may be something on the order of microfilm. But that is not important. The important thing is the content of the writing -- the portent of the writing. "Not since Dr. Morton, the young Boston dentist, realized the uses of sulphuric ether as an anesthetic has any member of our noble profession discovered anything of even remotely similar importance; and perhaps not before, either." He drew his spectacles from their case and began to read aloud. 79 II great profession lacks the glamour and public adulation of the practice of medicine, and even the druggists -- not having a Hippocratic Oath -- can preen themselves on their so-called Oath of Maimonides (though, believe me, the great Maimonides had no more to do with it than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.), no one can charge us with not having as high a standard of ethics and professional conduct as physicians and surgeons, M.D. Nor do I hesitate for one single moment to include prostheticians not holding the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery or Doctor of Dental Medicine, whose work is so vital and essential. When the records of our civilization are balanced, then -- but perhaps not before -- the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache. It is only with a heavy heart that I undertake deliberately to produce inferior work, and with the confidence that all those to whom the standards of oral surgery and dental prosthetics are dear will understand the very unusual circumstances which have prompted me so to do. And, understanding, will forgive. No one can hold the standards of our pro80 fession higher or more sacred than I. It must be admitted that I was not very amused on a certain occasion when my cousin, Nathaniel Pomerance, introduced me to an engineering contractor with these words, "You two should have a lot in common -- you both build bridges," and uttered a foolish laugh. But I venture to say that this was one of the truest words ever spoken in questionable jest. Humility is one thing, false pride another. Those who know anything of modern dentistry at all know of the Goldpepper Bridge and the Goldpepper Crown. It is I, Dr. Morris Goldpepper, inventor of both, and perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp which bears my name, who writes these words you see before you. Nothing further should be needful by way of identification. And now to my report. On the first of November, 'a day of evil import forever in the personal calendar of the unhappy wretch who writes these lines, not even knowing for sure if they will ever be read -- but what else can I do? -- shortly after 5 : 00 P.M., my laboratory door was knocked on. I found there a curious-looking man of shriveled and weazened appearance. He asked if I was Dr. Morris Goldpepper, "the famous perfector of the Semi-re81 tractable Clasp," and I pleaded guilty to the flattering impeachment. The man had a foreign-sounding accent, or -- I thought -- it may be that he had an impediment in his speech. Might he see me, was his next question. I hesitated. and to most other practitioners -- a stranger comes and, before you know it, he is slandering some perfectly respectable D.D.S. or D.M.D. The dentist pulled a healthy tooth -- the dentist took such and such a huge sum of money for new plates -- they don't fit him, he suffers great anguish -- he's a poor man, the dentist won't do anything -- et cetera, ad infinitum nauseamque. In short, a nut, a crank, a crackpot. But while I was hesitating, the man yawned, did not courteously cover his mouth with his hand, and I observed to my astonishment that the interior of his mouth was an odd shade of blue! Bemused by this singular departure from normalcy, I allowed him to enter. Then I wondered what to say, since he himself was saying nothing, but he looked around the lab with interest. "State your business" would be too brusque, and "Why is your mouth blue?" would be too gauche. An impasse. 82 Whilst holding up a large-scale model of the Goldpepper Cap (not yet perfected -- will it ever be? Alas, who knows?) this curious individual said, "I know all about you, Dentist Goldpepper. A great scientist, you are. A man of powerful imagination, you are. One who rebels against narrow horizons and yearns to soar to wide and distant worlds, you are." All I could think of to say was, "And what can I do for you?" It was all so true; every single word he said was true. In my vanity was my downfall. I was tricked like the crow with the cheese in the ancient fable of Aesop. The man proceeded to tell me, frankly enough, that he was a denizen of another planet. He had two hearts, would you believe it? And, consequently, two circulatory systems. Two pulses -- one in each arm, one slow, the other fast. It reminded me of the situation in Philadelphia some years ago when there were two telephone systems -- if you had only a Bell phone, you couldn't call anyone who had only a Keystone phone. The interior of his mouth was blue and so was the inside of his eyelids. He said his world had three moons. You may imagine my emotions at hearing that my long-felt dream to communicate with otherworldly forms of sentient life was at last realized! And to think that they had singled out not the President of the United States, not the Director-General of the U.N., but me, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.! Could human happiness ask for more, was my unspoken question. I laughed softly to myself and I thought, What would my cousin Nathaniel Pomerance say now? I was like wax in this extraterrestrial person's hands (he had six distinct and articulate digits on each one), and I easily agreed to say nothing to anyone until the question of diplomatic recognition could be arranged on a higher echelon. "Non-recognition has its advantages, Goldpepper Dental Surgeon," he said with a slight smile. "No passport for your visit, you will need." Well! A personal invitation to visit Proxima Centauri Gamma, or whatever the planet's name is! But I felt constrained to look this gift-horse just a little closer in the mouth. How is it that they came inviting me, not, let us say, Oppenheimer? Well? "Of his gifts not in need, we are, Surgical Goldpepper. We have passed as far beyond nuclear power as you have beyond wind power. We can. span the Universe -- but in dentistry, like children still, we are. Come and inspect our faculties of your science, Great Goldpepper. If you say, 'This: Yes,' then it will be yes. If you direct, 'This: No,' then it will be no. In respect to the science of dentistry, our Edison and our Columbus, you will be." I asked when we would leave and he said in eight days. I asked how long the trip would take. For a moment, I was baffled when he said it would take no longer than to walk the equivalent of the length of the lab floor. Then he revealed his meaning to me: Matter transmission! Of course. No spaceship needed. brief disappointment at not being able to see the blazing stars in black outer space. But, after all, one ought not be greedy at such a time. I cannot point out too strongly that at no time did I accept or agree to accept any payment or gratuity for this trip. I looked upon it in the same light as the work I have done for various clinics. "Should I take along books? Equipment? What?" I asked my (so-to-speak) guide. He shook his head. Only my presence was desired on the first trip. A visit of inspection. Very well. On the morning of Nov. 8th, I wrote a brief note to my old and dear friend, Dr. Samuel Fadderman, the senior mentor of American Dentistry on hearing these words, the Elder Statesman sobbed softly into his cupped hands, and in the afternoon, so excited and enthralled that I noticed no more of my destination than that it was north of the Washington Market, I accompanied my guide to a business building in the aforesaid area. He led me into a darkened room. He clicked a switch. There was a humming noise, a feeling first of heaviness, then of weightlessness, and then an odd sort of light came on. I was no longer on the familiar planet of my birth! I was on an unknown world! Over my head, the three moons of this far-off globe sailed majestically through a sky wherein I could note unfamiliar constellations. The thought occurred to me that poets on this planet would have to find another rhyme, inasmuch as moons (plural form) does not go with June (singular form). One satellite was a pale yellow, one was brown, and' the third was a creamy pink. Not knowing the names of these lunary orbs in the native tongue, I decided to call them Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry. Whilst my mind was filled with these droll fancies, I felt a tug at my sleeve, where my guide was holding it. He gestured and I followed. "Now," I thought to myself, "he will bring me before the President of their Galactic Council, or whatever he is called," and I stood obediently within a circle marked on the surface of the platform whereon we stood. In a moment, we were mattertransported to an inside room somewhere, and there I gazed about me in stupefaction, not to say astonishment. My eyes discerned the forms of Bunsen burners, Baldor lathes, casting machines and ovens, denture trays, dental stone, plaster, shellac trays, wires of teeth, and all the necessary equipment of a fully equipped dental prosthetic laboratory. My surprise at the progress made by these people in the science at which they were allegedly still children was soon mitigated by the realization that all the items had been made on Earth. A S I was looking and examining, a door opened and several people entered. Their faces were a pale blue, and I realized suddenly that my guide must be wearing makeup to conceal his original complexion. They spoke together in their native dialect; then one of them, with a rod of some kind in his hand, turned to me. He opened his mouth. I perceived his gums were bare. "Dentical person," he said, "make me teeth." 84 85 I turned in some perplexity to my guide. "I understood you to say my first visit would be one of inspection only." Everyone laughed, and I observed that all were equally toothless. The man in the chair poked me rudely with his rod or staff. "Talk not! Make teeth!" Fuming with a well-justified degree of indignation, I protested at such a gross breach of the laws of common hospitality. Then, casting concealment to the winds, these people informed me as follows: Their race is entirely toothless in the adult stage. They are an older race than ours and are born looking ancient and wrinkled. It is only comparatively recently that they have established contact with Earth, and in order that they should not appear conspicuous, and in order to be able to eat our food, they realized that they must be supplied with artificial teeth. My so-called guide, false friend, my enticer andor kidnaper, to give him his due, had gotten fitted at a dentist's in New York and cunningly enquired who was the leading man in the field. Alas for fame! The man answered without a second of hesitation, "That is no other one than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S., perfector of the Semiretractable Clasp." First this unscrupulous extraterrestrial procured the equipment, then he procured me. "Do I understand that you purport that I assist you in a plan to thwart and otherwise circumvent the immigration laws of the United States?" was my enquiry. The man in the chair poked me with his rod again. "You understand! So now make teeth!" What a proposition to make to a law-abiding, patriotic American citizen by birth! What a demand to exact of a war veteran, a taxpayer and one who has been three times on jury duty since 1946 alone (People vs. Garrity, People vs. Vanderdam, and Lipschutz vs. Krazy-Kut Kool Kaps, Inc.)! My whole being revolted. I spoke coldly to them, informing them that the situation was contrary to my conception of dental ethics. But to no avail. My treacherous dragoman drew a revolver from his pocket. "Our weapons understand, you do not. Primitive Earth weapons, yes. So proceed with manufacture, Imprisoned Goldpepper." I went hot and cold. Not, I beg of you to understand, with fear, but with humiliation. Imprisoned Goldpepper! The phrase, with all the connotations it implied, rang in my ears. I bowed my head and a phrase from the literary work "Sampson Agonistes" (studied as a student in the College of the City of New 86 York) rang through my mind: Eyeless in Gaza, grinding corn Oh, blind, blind, blind, amidst the blaze of noon But even in this hour of mental agony, an agony which has scarcely abated to speak of, I had the first glimmering of the idea which I hope will enable me to warn Earth. scornful glance to show these blue-complected individuals how well I appreciated that their socalled advanced science was a mere veneer over the base metal of their boorishness, I set to work. I made the preliminary impressions and study casts, using an impression tray with oval floor form, the best suited for taking impressions of edentulous ridges. And so began the days of my slavery. Confined as I am here, there is neither day nor night, but an unremitting succession of frenum trims, post dams, boxing in, pouring up, festoon carving, fixing sprue channels, and all the innumerable details of dental prosthetic work. No one as ts me. No one converses with me, save in brusque barks j levant to the work at hand. My 1 od consists of liqueous and ; atinous substances such as m lit be expected would form the di of a toothless race. Oh, I am sick of the sight of their blue skins, bluer mouths and homy ridges! I am sick of my serfdom! I have been given material to keep records and am writing this in expectation of later reducing it in size by the method here employed, and of thereinafter inserting copies between the palatal and occlusual surfaces of the plates. It will be necessary to make such plates imperfect, so that the wearers will be obliged to go to dentists on Earth for repairs, because it is not always practical for them to matterport -- in fact, I believe they can only do it on the 8th day of every third month. Naturally, I cannot do this to every plate, for they might become suspicious. You may well imagine how it goes against my grain to produce defective work, but I have no other choice. Twice they have brought me fresh dental supplies, which is how I calculate their matterporting cycle. I have my wristwatch with me and thus I am enabled to reckon the passing of time. What their exact purpose is in going to Earth, I do not know. My growing suspicion is that their much-vaunted superior science is a fraud and that their only superiority lies in the ability to matterport. One curious item may give a clue : They have ques87 tioned me regarding the Old Age Assistance programs of the several States. As I have said, they all look old. Can it be that elsewhere on this planet there is imprisoned some poor devil of a terrestrial printer or engraver, toiling under duress to produce forged birth certificates and other means of identification, to the fell purpose of allowing these aliens to live at ease at the financial expense of the already overburdened U.S. taxpayer? To whom shall I address my plea for help? To the Federal Government? But it has no official or even unofficial knowledge that this otherworldly race exists. The F.B.I.? But does matterporting under false pretenses to another planet constitute kidnaping across State lines? It seems the only thing I can do is to implore whichever dental practitioner reads these lines to communicate at once with the American Dental Association. I throw myself upon the mercy of my fellow professional men. Dentists and Dental Prostheticians! Beware of men with blue mouths and horny, edentulous ridges! Do not be deceived by flattery and false promises! Remember the fate of that most miserable of men, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S., and, in his horrible predicament, help, oh, help him! reading of this document. At length it was broken by Dr. Hansen. "That brave man," he said in a husky voice. "That brave little man." "Poor Morris," said Dr. Danbourge. "Think of him imprisoned on a far-off planet, slaving like a convict in a salt mine, so to speak, making false teeth for these inhuman aliens, sending these messages to us across the trackless void. It's pitiful, and yet, Doctors, it is also a tribute to the indomitable spirit of Man!" Dr. Weinroth moved his huge hands. "I'd like to get ahold of just one of those blue bastards," he growled. Dr. Rorke cleared his throat. All present looked at their President respectfully and eagerly. "I need hardly tell you, Doctors," he said crisply, "that the A.D.A. is a highly conservative organization. We do not go about things lightly. One such message we might ignore, but there have been eleven reported, all identical with the first. Even eleven such messages we might perhaps not consider, but when they come from a prominent scientist of the stature of Dr. Morris Goldpepper -- "Handwriting experts have pro88 nounced this to be his handwriting beyond cavil of a doubt. Here" -- he delved into a box -- "are the eleven plates in question. Can any of you look at these clean lines and deny that they are the work of the incomparable Goldpepper?" The six other men looked at the objects, shook their heads. "Beautiful," murmured Dr. Smith, "even in their broken state. Poems in plastic! M. G. couldn't produce bad work if he tried!" Dr. Rorke continued. "Each report confirmed that the person who brought in the plate had a blue mouth and edentulous ridges, just as the message states. Each blue-mouthed patient exhibited the outward appearance of old age. And, gentlemen, of those eleven, no less than eight were reported from the State of California. Do you realize what that means? California offers the highest amount of financial assistance to the elderly! Goldpepper's surmise was right!" Dr. Hansen leaned forward. "In addition, our reports show that five of those eight are leaders in the fight against fluoridation of drinking water! It is my carefully considered belief that there is something in their physical makeup, evolved on another planet, which cannot tolerate fluorine even in minute quantities, because they certainly -- being already toothless -- wouldn't be concerned with the prevention of decay." Young Dr. McAllister took the floor. "We have checked with dental supply houses and detail men in the New York Metropolitan area and we found that large quantities of prosthetic supplies have been delivered to an otherwise unknown outfit -- called the Echs Export Company -- located not far north of the Washington Market! There is every reason to believe that this is the place Dr. Goldpepper mentioned. One of our men went there, found present only one man, in appearance an old man. Our representative feigned deafness, thus obliging this person to open his mouth and talk loudly. Doctors, he reports that this person has a blue mouth!" There was a deep intake of breath around the table. and snapped off the tape recorders. "This next is off the record. It is obvious, Doctors, that no ordinary methods will suffice to settle this case, to ensure the return of our unfortunate colleague, or to secure the withdrawal of these extraterrestrial individuals from our nation and planet. I cannot, of course, officially endorse what might be termed 'strongarm' methods. At the same time, I feel that our adversaries are not 89 entitled to polite treatment. And obviously the usual channels of law enforcement are completely closed to us. "Therefore -- and remember, no word of this must pass outside our circle -- therefore I have communicated something of this matter to Mr. Albert Annapollo, the wellknown waterfront figure, who not long ago inaugurated the splendid Longshoremen's Dental Health Plan. Mr. Annapollo is a somewhat rough person, but he is nonetheless a loyal American "We know now the Achilles heel of these alien creatures. It is fluorine. We know also how to identify them. And I think we may shortly be able to announce results. Meanwhile -- " he drew a slip of paper from his pocket -- "it is already the first of the month in that quarter when the dental supplies are due to be transported -- or matterported, as Dr. Goldpepper terms it -- to their distant destination. A large shipment is waiting to be delivered from the warehouses of a certain wholesaler to the premises of the Echs Exporting Company. I have had copies of this made and wrapped around each three-ounce bottle of Ellenbogen's Denture Stik-Phast. I presume it meets with your approval." He handed it to Dr. Hansen, who, as the others present nodded in grimly emphatic approval, read it aloud. "From The American Dental Association, representing over 45,000 registered dentists in the United States and its Territories, to Dr. Morris Goldpepper, wherrescue! We will bend every effort to this end! We shall fight the good fight! "Have courage, Dr. Morris Goldpepper! You shall return!" The mind technology that was developed for use in space: Developed by L. Ron Hubbard, nuclear physicist and one of the great science fiction writers of all time. The book from which they get their psychological plots. This one you need. 90 Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was -- in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it? He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should. SS II Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground. "Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?" His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time? 91 Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone -- or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here. Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them: The mother ship, Soscites II, had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship -- the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds -- and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy. The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low. 92 Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever. That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently. A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk thing he could find out:   how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages -- both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading. The first was from himself: The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange. SS II Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed: The ship's next message read: SS II His own reply perplexed Kaiser: 93 The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he: SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape -- the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. SS II That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick. 94 He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway. He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit. Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness -- he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream. It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way. Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser. a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout. After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now. Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground. The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm. Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yardhigh box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study. Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river. One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and 95 emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting -- or a warning to the others that a stranger approached. The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulderpits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm. The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group. " and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small sealpups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths. They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fiftyfifty. Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this. A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed. They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies. Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time. 97 They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons. The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank -- and as smelly as the natives themselves. The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout. The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout. The job appeared maddenly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing. would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar -- the best leverage he had on hand -- but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day. That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite: 98 Kaiser's reply was short and succinct: Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor: Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours -- until the next communication came in: 99 SS II most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city. His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike. The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized -- and fell instantly asleep. The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke : 100 SS II By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him. Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops -- and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped. That checked pretty well with the ship's theory. Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear! Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him. The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here. As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature 102, humidity 113 -- just about the same as it had been on earlier readings. hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before. He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep im101 mediately -- and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged. At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II: Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out. Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey -- in the opposite direction from the first native settlement. He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and sealpeople in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first! They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant. By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who 102 dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship. The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it. The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.  tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world. Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discoui aged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went. The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly. That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam -- they maneuvered with an otterlike proficiency -- and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under. Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper. When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom. As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly. There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here -- if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or ask103 ing for them -- and he packed and started back to the scout. Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel. When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground. Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened. of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there. Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly -- but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever. Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly -- until the fuel pump hung free! Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act. He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him. The first was quite routine: 104 SS II The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it. SS II Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep. In the morning, another message was waiting: SS II abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency -- there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information. Strangely, the messages' indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet. Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside. Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself: 105 Kaiser pushed the last of his meal -- which he had been eating with his fingers -- into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor. He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.ney had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other sealpeople here. And they were almost human! The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup -- that was little changed from the first he had found -- as in their obviously greater intelligence. This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they 106 talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor -- only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings. Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent. One was a female. They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation. The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water. cide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape: SS II Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts. When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water. Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots. 107 5 Star Shelf by Robert A. Heinlein. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., 2.95  ET'S be thankful that we are " now enjoying one of the prolific Mr. Heinlein's most fruitful periods. Now we find Heinlein offering his version of The Sleeper Wakes. Leave it to him, however, to freshen up any old chestnut. He pulls a switch on the time of departure of his sleeper, who starts from the year 1970 via cold sleep, waking in 2000. Heinlein paints a detailed picture of both civilizations, so evocative that 1970 emerges clearly in the reader's mind as the old days, and pretty primitive at that. The hero is, like the author himself, an engineer. He has been bilked out of his 1970 inventions and faces an acclimatizing period in 2000 to learn the advances of the intervening years. The interim development of his stolen inventions, along with the appearance on the commercial market of old, nebulous ideas of his, both send him on a detective search of two eras. Of course you'll like Heinlein's latest. 108 ed by Anthony Boucher. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., 3.50- is somewhat better balanced than his previous collection of giggles and cutenesses, and contains some fine yarns. Among these are Pohl's shocker, "The Census Takers," Sturgeon's ditto, "And Now the News," and Kornbluth's jolly "The Cosmic Expense Account." Most of the other stories are good, except for a very, very minor Bradbury. The two longest works, however, Charles L. Fontenay's "The Silk and the Song" and Ward Moore's "No Man Pursueth," are quite obviously used as bulk to make this a book rather than a pamphlet. If these were "the best" available, Boucher should have waited until he had better makeweights. Dallas. The John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia, Toronto, 2.00. standard juvenile space opera that would have fared far better if heavy reliance had not been placed on unbelievable coincidences. Earth and Poseida, a planet whose location and environment are never satisfactorily explained, have reached the brink of war as the result of ultra-nationalistic activities of selfish individuals on each planet. The Poseidans are amphibious octopi and thoroughly repellent in appearance to sensitive humans. Bill Hudson, recipient of a brand-new space-medical diploma, is treated to a post-graduate vacation on Poseida by his chum's old man, who happens to be General Watkins, big-wig of Planet Earth Forces. The very first day on Poseida, he saves the life of a young native who just happens, by the Lord Harry, to be the son of the planet's ruler, no less. They become fast friends and discover that there isn't much difference in mentality and outlook between the two races. One of the points of friction between the worlds is the disappearance of more than a score of experimental Earth ships on their initial test runs to exceed the speed of light. The Earth extremists are convinced that the Poseidans have a tentacle in it. While engaged in research on Poseida, Hudson just happens, by all that's lucky, to discover the antidote for the suspended animation drug, something that thousands of scientists had been unable to do. This has something to do with those ships. There's still another "happens      shelf 109 to" that stretches credence even further, but Dallas somewhat redeems himself by good characterizations and an intelligent argument for tolerance. Cameron. Little, Brown  Co., Boston, Toronto, 2.75 derful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, David Topman and his buddy, Chuck Masterson, are visited by a strange little person while spending the night in Tyco Bass' house. Tyco, the wonderful little person who advertised for a spaceship built by boys, made the flight with them to the Mushroom Planet, really an invisible satellite of Earth, and then disappeared. The stranger reveals himself as Tyco's cousin and also one of the Mushroom People. With his help, Tyco's notes are deciphered and another ship and flight become possible. A Menace, however, in the person of an egocentric assistant to a famous scientist creates plot problems by stowing away and threatening to disclose the secret of the existence of this idyllic little world. Remember Dr. Doolittle? His adventures never rang true, either, but we loved him and that made them possible. Same here. no Zakaria Goneim. Rinehart  Co., Inc., N. Y., 3.50 This month, The Lost Planet. Now a mislaid pyramid. A place for everything, and everything in its place, and this sort of thing wouldn't keep happening. As an object lesson in deductive archeology, this book stands by itself. Most of the famous finds have been the result of the exhaustive study of sites, but Dr. Gonheim found his pyramid through dissatisfaction with the paucity of memorials dating from the Third Dynasty, 2800-2700 B.C., the era just pre-dating the epoch of the Great Pyramid Builders. If you don't mind the usual archeological preoccupation with precise measurements, you'll find this a satisfactory substitute for time travel, back to that incredible age of monumental egomaniacs. Wright and Samuel Rapport. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., 3.95 'X'HE editors have compiled an informative volume of gleanings from the writings of an impressive group of authors. Leading off is Raymond Ditmars, world-famed reptile authority, with an amusing account of his boyhood start in snake collection. Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, pens a chapter on the piranha, Brazil's man-eating fish. Arthur Clarke is represented by a portion of The Coast of Coral and "The Well of the Maidens" is excerpted from C. W. Ceram's phenomenal archeological best seller, Gods, Graves and Scholars. There are chapters on the lives of Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Faraday, Edison and the unbelievably warped Henry Cavendish, along with general interest subjects that make the book appealing to young or old. Fortunately, the editors balance their bright, picture with a view of the tedium and detail of pure research, preventihg disenchantment. Ronald Edwin. The Falcon's Wing Press, Indian Hills, Colo.,  2.95 are appearing with increasing frequency, Edwin's story has a ring of veracity that few others can equal. He offers more than usual documentation and presents his life history with such candor that his reader is swept along. He explains his gift as a natural compensation for his inadequacies, his introversion and melancholia during his abominably miserable childhood. One gathers that he has overcompensated his sensitivity in later years by developing a sharp tongue and manner. He appeared on the British TV scene on What's My Line, stumped the experts and ran off with the honors in a blistering verbal exchange with the acidulous panelist, Gilbert Harding. But leading up to this belated triumph is a lifetime of anguish. The Perceptive has virtually no control over his gift. Since the average life is composed of trivia, most clairvoyance is likewise trivial. As a result, there is no practical vocation as yet for the poor Esper, Alfred Bester notwithstanding. Either he struggles along on the variety stage or he resorts, as Edwin confesses, to phony spiritualism. Despite earning a reasonable livelihood, disillusionment caused him to return to Unlike most authors of similar works, he remains unconvinced of casionally manifests itself to him in the guise of voices, he interprets it as a conversion to a normal referent by the brain censor, not as spirit voices. If you have Started a para-psychology section of your library, this is a necessary inclusion. 111 The breath of an entire world literally hung upon whether he lived or died -- and he infuriatingly refused to stay alive! E dwin james, the chief Programmer of Earth, had seated himself upon a little three-legged stool in front of the Probabilities Calculator. He was a small, spare man, impressively ugly, dwarfed by the great control board which soared a hundred feet above him. The steady hum. of the machine, the slow drift of lights across the face of the panel, brought a sense of security which he recognized as false, but which soothed him all the same. He had just started to doze off when the pattern of lights changed. He sat up with a start and rubbed his face. A paper tape inched from a slot in the panel. The Chief Programmer tore it off and scanned it. He nodded sourly to himself and walked quickly out of the room. 113 Fifteen minutes later, he entered the meeting room of the World Planning Council. Summoned there by his order, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around the long table, waiting for him. There was a new member this year, Roger Beatty, from the Americas. He was tall and angular and his bushy brown hair was just beginning to thin on top. He appeared eager, earnest and ill at ease. He was reading a procedural handbook and taking short, quick sniffs from his oxygen inhaler. James knew the other members well. Lan II from Pan-Asia, looking as small, wrinkled and indestructible as ever, was engaged in intense conversation with large, blond Dr. Sveg from Europe. Miss Chandragore, beautiful and sleek, was playing her inevitable game of chess with Aaui of Oceania. James turned up the room's oxygen supply and the members gratefully put away their inhalers. "Sorry to keep you waiting," James said, taking his seat at the head of the table. "The current prediction just came through." He took a notebook from his pocket and opened it. "At our last meeting, we selected Alternate Probability Line 3B3CC, which began in the year 1832. The factor we were select114 ing for was the life of Albert Levinsky. In the Main Historic Line, Levinsky died in 1935 of an automobile accident. By switching into Alternate Probability Line 3B3CC, Levinsky avoided this accident and lived to the age of sixty-two, completing his work. The result now, in our own time, in the opening up of Antartica." "What about side effects?" asked Janna Chandragore. "Those are discussed in the paper you will be given later. Briefly, though, 3B3CC adhered closely to the Historic Main Line. All important events remained constant. There were, of course, some effects which the prediction did not cover. They include an oil-well explosion in Patagonia, a flu epidemic in Kansas and an increase in smog over Mexico City." "Have all injured parties been compensated?" Lan II wanted to know. "They have. And the colonization of Antartica is already begun." The Chief Programmer unfolded the paper tape he had taken from the Probabilities Calculator. "But now we face a dilemma. As predicted, the Historic Main Line leads into unpleasant complications. But there are no good alternate lines to switch into!" The Members murmured to each other. James said, "Let me explain the situation." He walked to a wall and pulled down a large chart. "The crisis-point occurs on April 12, 1959, and our problem centers around an individual named Ben Baxter. The circumstances are as follows" evoke alternate possibilities, each of which produces its own continuum of history. In other spatial-temporal worlds, Spain lost at Lepanto, Normandy at Hastings, England at Waterloo. Suppose Spain had lost at Lepanto Spain did, disastrously. And T urkish sea power, invincible, swept the Mediterranean of European shipping. Ten years later, a Turkish fleet conquered Naples and paved the way for the Moorish invasion of Austria In another time and space, that is. This speculation became observable fact after the development of temporal selection and displacement. By 2103, Oswald Meyner and his associates were able to show the theoretical possibility of Switching from the Historic Main Line -- so named for convenience -- to alternate lines. Within definite limits, however. It would be impossible, for example, to Switch into a past where William of Normandy lost the battle of Hastings. The world developing from that event would be too different, alien in every way. Switching was found possible only into closely adjacent lines. The theoretical possibility became a practical necessity in 2213. In that year, the Sykes-Raborn Calculator at Harvard predicted the complete sterilization of Earth's atmosphere by the accretion of radioactive by-products. The process was irreversible and inevitable. It could be stopped only in the past, where the poisoning had begun. The first Switch was made with the newly developed Adams-HoltMaartens Selector. The World Planning Council chose a line which involved the early death of Vassily Ouchenko (and the obliteration of his erroneous radiationdamage theories). A large part of the subsequent poisoning was avoided, although at the cost of seventy-three lives -- descendants of Ouchenko for whom no Switchparents could be found. After that, there was no turning back. Line Switching became as necessary to the world as disease prevention. But the process had its limitations. A time had to come when no available line would be usable, when all futures looked unfavorable. When that happened, the Planus ning Council was prepared to use more direct means.  A ND those are the consequences for us," Edwin James concluded. "That is the outcome if we allow the Main Historic Line to continue." Lan II said, "Meaning that you predict serious trouble for Earth, Mr. Programmer." "With regret, I do." The Programmer poured himself a glass of water and turned a page in his notebook. "Our pivotal point is Ben Baxter, who dies on April 12, 1957. He must live' at least another ten years for his work to have the desired effect upon world events. In that time, Ben Baxter will purchase Yellowstone National Park from the government. He will continue to maintain it as a park, but will farm the trees. This enterprise will be highly successful. He will buy other great tracts of land in North and South America. The Baxter heirs will be lumber kings for the next two hundred years and will own huge standings throughout the world. Due to their efforts, there will be great forests in the world, up to and including our own time. But if Baxter dies -- " James gestured wearily. "With Baxter dead, the forests will be cut before the governments of the world are fully aware of the con116 sequences. Then comes the great blight of '03, which the few remaining woodlands cannot withstand. And at last the present, with the natural carbon-dioxideoxygen cycle disrupted by the destruction of the trees, with all combustion devices banned, with oxygen inhalers a necessity merely to survive." "We've started the forests again," Aaui said. "It will be hundreds of years before they have grown to any significant size, even with forced growing methods. In the meantime, the balance may become further upset. That is the importance of Ben Baxter to us. He holds the key to the air we breathe!" "Very well," said Dr. Sveg. "The Main Line, in which Baxter dies, is clearly unusable. But there are Alternates -- " "Many," James said. "As usual, most of them cannot be selected. Counting the Main Line, we have a total of three choices. But, unfortunately, each of them results in the death of Ben Baxter on April 12, 1959." The Programmer wiped his forehead. "To be more specific, Ben Baxter dies on the afternoon of April 12, 1959, as a result of a business meeting with a man named Ned Bryrme." The new member, Roger Beatty, cleared his throat nervously. "This event takes place in all three probability worlds?" "Yes. In every one of them, Brynne is the cause of Baxter's death." Dr. Sveg came ponderously to his feet. "Formerly, this Council has avoided any direct interference with the existing lines of probability. But this situation seems to call for interference." The council members nodded their agreement. "Let's get down to cases," said Aaui. "For the good of Earth, can this Ned Brynne be Switched Out?" "No," replied the Programmer. "Brynne himself plays a vital role in our future. He has an option on almost a hundred square miles of forest. He needs Baxter's backing to purchase it. If Brynne could be kept from that meeting with Baxter "How?" asked Beatty. "Take your pick," James suggested. "Threats, persuasion, bribery, kidnaping -- any means short of murder. We have three worlds to work in. If we can restrain Brynne in just one of them, our problem is solved." "What would be our best method?" asked Aaui. "Try several, a different one in each probability world," said Miss Chandragore. "Our chances would be best that way. Shall we go ourselves?" "We are best suited for the job," Edwin James said. "We know the factors involved. And politics gives one a certain skill in improvising -- which will be sorely needed in this job. Each team will be absolutely on its own. There is no way for them to check on each other's progress across the time lines." "Each team then," Dr. Sveg summed up, "will have to assume that the other teams fail." "Probably with good reason," James said wryly. "Let's organize the teams and select our methods." I   1959, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At 1:30 that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises, and do so on favorable terms Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of fanatic pride in his carefully bland eyes, a suggestion of unreasoning stubbornness in his tightly held mouth. His movements had the controlled strength of a man who is constantly watching and judging himself. He was almost ready to leave. 117 He tucked a swagger stick under his arm and slipped a copy of Somerset's American Peerage into his jacket pocket. He was never without that infallible guide. Finally he fixed to his lapel the golden sunburst decoration of his station. Brynne was a Chamberlain, second class, and properly proud of the fact. Some people thought him too young for so exalted a position. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly commoners, but two Equerries as well. All made way for him when the elevator came. "Pleasant day, Chamberlain Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. Brynne inclined his head an inch in the usual response to a commoner. He was deep in thought about Ben Baxter. But at the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a tall, strongly built fellow with golden-brown Polynesian features and tilted dark eyes. Brynne wondered what a man like that was doing in his apartment building. He knew the other tenants by sight, although their lower status naturally made them unworthy of his recognition. 118 The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Polynesian fellow. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He strode outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to the Prince Charles Coffee Shop for a late breakfast. It was 10:25 A.M. " asked. "Looks like a tough customer," said Roger Beatty. He inhaled deeply, savoring the rich air. It was a delightful luxury, breathing all the oxygen he wanted. In his time even the very wealthy turned down the oxygen tanks at night. They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, swaggering figure, even in New York's morning rush. "He looked at you in the elevator," Beatty said. "I know." Aaui grinned. "Give him something to worry about." "He doesn't look like a worrying type," Beatty said. "I wish we had more time." Aaui shrugged. "This was the closest we could come to the event. Our next choice would have been eleven years ago. And we would still have to wait until now before taking direct action." "At least we'd know something about Brynne. He doesn't lookas though he'll frighten easily." "No, he doesn't," Aaui admitted. "But that's the course of action we selected." They continued to follow, noticing how the crowds parted to make way for Brynne, who marched straight ahead, not looking to right or left. Then it happened. Brynne, his attention turned inward, collided with a portly, florid-faced man, who wore in his lapel the dazzling purple and silver medallion of a First Order Crusader. "Can't you watch where you're going, imbecile?" the Crusader barked.  rank, swallowed and muttered, "I beg your pardon, sir." The Crusader wasn't so easily placated. "Do you make a habit of bumping into your betters, sirrah?" "I do not," Brynne said, his face growing red, fighting hard to restrain his rage. A crowd of commoners had gathered to watch. They ringed the brilliantly dressed men, grinning and nudging each other. "Then suppose you watch yourself!" the portly Crusader roared. "Stop cluttering the streets like a sleepwalker, before you are taught a lesson in manners!" Brynne said, with deadly quiet, "Sir, if you feel the necessity of giving me such a lesson, I should be pleased to meet you at a place of your choosing, with such weapons as you elect -- " "Me? Meet you?" the Crusader asked incredulously. "My rank permits it, sir." "Your rank? You're a good five degrees beneath me, you simple idiot! Enough of this or I'll send my servants -- who outrank you -- to teach you a lesson in manners. I'll remember your face, young man. Now get out of my way!" And with that, the Crusader pushed past him and stalked away. "Coward!" said Brynne, his face a mottled red. But he said it softly, and the commoners noticed. Brynne turned to them, his hands tightening on his swagger stick. Grinning cheerfully, the crowd broke up. Beatty said, "Dueling is permitted here?" Aaui nodded. "The legal precedent came in 1804, when Alexander Hamilton killed Aaron Burr in a duel." "I guess we'd better get to work," Beatty said. "But I wish we had more equipment." "We took all we could carry. Let's get on with it." 119 fee Shop, Brynne sat at a table far in the rear. His hands were trembling; with an effort, he controlled them. Damn that First Order Crusader! Lousy, overbearing blowhard! But would he accept a duel? No, of course not. Had to hide behind the privileges of his station. Rage was rising in Brynne, black and ominous. He should have killed the man and the blazes with the consequences! The blazes with everything! No man could step on him that way Stop it, he told himself. There was nothing he could do about it. He had to think about Ben Baxter and the all-important meeting. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. In two and a half hours, he would be in Baxter's office and -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "Hot chocolate, toast and a poached egg." "French fries?" "If I wanted French fries, I'd have told you!" Brynne shouted. The waiter went pale, gulped, said, "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," and hurried off. Now, Brynne thought, I'm reduced to yelling at commoners. Control -- I must get myself under control. "Ned Brynne!" Brynne started and looked around. He had distinctly heard someone whisper his name. But there was no one within twenty feet of him. "Brynne!" "What is this?" Brynne muttered in unwilling reply. "Who's speaking?" "You're nervous, Brynne, losing control of yourself. You need a rest, a vacation, a change." Brynne went dead whit;e under his tan and looked around the cafe. It was almost empty. There were three old ladies near the front. Beyond them he could see two men, talking together earnestly. "Go home, Brynne, and get some rest. Take some time off while you can." "I have an important business appointment," Brynne said, his voice shaky. "Business before sanity," the voice pointed out mockingly. "Who's talking to me?" "What makes you think someone is talking to you?" the voice asked silkily. "You mean I'm talking to myself?" "You should know."' "Your egg, sir," the waiter said. "What?" Brynne roared. The waiter stepped hastily back, slopping hot chocolate into the saucer. "Sir?" he quavered. "Don't creep around that way, idiot." 120 The waiter looked at Brynne incredulously, deposited the food and fled. Brynne stared after him suspiciously. "You are in no condition to see anyone," the voice told him. "Go home, get into bed, take a pill, sleep, heal!" "But what's the matter? Why?" "Because your sanity is at stake! This external voice is your mind's last frantic attempt at stability. You can't afford to ignore this warning, Brynne!" "It can't be true!" protested Brynne. "I'm sane. I'm -- " "Beg pardon, sir," said a voice at his elbow. Brynne whirled, prepared to chastise this further intrusion on his privacy. He saw the blue uniform of a policeman looming over him. The man was wearing the white shoulder epaulets of a Noble Lieutenant.   said, "Anything wrong, Officer?" "Sir, the waiter and manager tell me you are talking to yourself and threatening violence." "Preposterous," snapped Brynne. "ft's true! It's true! You're going crazy!" the voice Screamed in his head. Brynne stared at the great square bulk of the policeman. Surely he heard the voice! But apparently the Noble Lieutenant didn't, for he continued to look somberly down at him. "It's not true," Brynne said, feeling secure in staking his word against a commoner's. "I heard you myself," the Noble Lieutenant said. "Well, sir, it's this way," Brynne began, choosing his words with care. "I was -- " The voice shrieked in his head, "Tell him to go to hell, Brynne! Who's he to question you? Who's anyone to question you? Hit him! Blast him! Kill him! Destroy him!" Brynne said, through the barrage of noise in his head, "I was talking to myself, perfectly true, Officer. I frequently think out loud. It helps me to organize my thoughts." The Noble Lieutenant gave a half nod. "But you offered violence, sir, at no provocation." "No provocation! I ask you, sir, are cold eggs no provocation? Are limp toast and spilled chocolate no provocation?" The waiter, called over, insisted, "Those eggs were hot -- " "They were not and that is all. I do not expect to sit here and argue a point of fact with a commoner." "Quite right," the Noble Lieutenant said, nodding emphatically now. "But might I ask you, sir, to curb your anger somewhat, even though it may be perfectly justi121 fied? Not too much can be expected of commoners, after all." "I know," Brynne agreed. "By the way, sir -- the purple edging on your epaulets -- are you related to O'Donnel of Moose Lodge, by any chance?" "My third cousin on my mother's side," said the Noble Lieutenant, looking intently now at Brynne's sunburst medallion. "My son has entered the Chamberlain Halls as a probationary. A tall boy named Callahan." "I will remember the name," Brynne promised. "The eggs were hot!" said the waiter. "Don't dispute the word of a gentleman," ordered the officer. "It could get you into serious trouble. Pleasant day to you, sir." The Noble Lieutenant saluted and left. Brynne paid and left shortly after him. He deposited a sizable tip for the waiter, but determined never to come into the Prince Charles again. Aaui said bitterly, putting the tiny microphone back in his pocket. "For a moment, I thought we had him." "We would have, if he'd had any latent doubts about his sanity. Well, now for something more direct. Got the equipment?" Aaui took two pairs of brass knuckles out of his pocket and handed one to Beatty. "Try not to lose it," he said. "We're supposed to return it to the Primitive Museum." "Right. It fits over the fist, doesn't it? Oh, yes, I see." They paid and hurried out.    Brynne decided to take a stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. Those voices in his head Was he really losing his grip? An uncle on his mother's side had spent his last years in an institution. Involutional melancholia. Was there some explosive hidden factor at work in him? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus Where was it going? Italy, perhaps. He thought of blue skies, brilliant sunshine, wine and relaxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. Even if it meant losing his mind, he would continue to labor under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from 122 boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a determined, strong man. If he had the guts to succeed in business, he also had the guts to leave it, to drop everything and go away. "To hell with Baxter!" he said to himself. His sanity was more important than anything. He would board that ship, right now, wire his associates from sea, tell them -- him down the deserted street. He recognized one by his goldenbrown Polynesian features. "Mr. Brynne?" inquired the other, a rangy fellow with a shock of brown hair. "Yes?" said Brynne. Without warning, the Polynesian threw both arms around him, pinning him, and the shock-haired man swung at him with a fist that glinted golden! Brynne's keyed-up nerves reacted with shattering speed. He had been a Knight Rampant during the Second World Crusade. Now, years later, all the reaction patterns were still there. He ducked the shock-haired man's blow and drove his elbow into the Polynesian's stomach. The man grunted and his grip relaxed for a second. Brynne broke free. He chopped at the Polynesian with the back of his hand, hitting the nerve trunk in the throat. The man went down, gasping for breath. At the same time, the shock-haired man was on him, raining brass-knuckled blows. Brynne lashed out, missed, caught a solid punch in the solar plexus. He fought for air. Blackness began edging into the periphery of his vision. He was hit again and went down, fighting for consciousness. Then his opponent made a mistake. The shock-haired man tried to finish him with a kick, but he didn't know how to kick. Brynne caught his foot and jerked. Off balance, the man crashed to the pavement, striking his head. Brynne staggered to his feet, breathing hard. The Polynesian was sprawled in the road, his face purple, making feeble swimming movements with his arms and legs. The other man lay motionless, blood seeping slowly through his hair. He should report this incident to the police, Brynne thought. But suppose he had killed the shockhaired man? He would be held on a manslaughter charge, at least. And the Noble Lieutenant would report his earlier irrational behavior. He looked around. No one had witnessed the incident. It was 123 best to simply walk away. Let his assailants report it, if they wanted to. Things were falling into place now. These men must have been hired by one of his many business competitors, men who were also trying for an affiliation with Ben Baxter. Even the voice in his head might have been a clever trick. Well, let them try to stop him! Still breathing heavily, he began walking toward Ben Baxter's office. All thoughts of a cruise to Italy were gone now.  A RE you all right?" a voice asked from somewhere up above. Beatty returned slowly to consciousness. For a short, alarmed while, he thought he had a fractured skull. But, touching it gently, he decided it was still in one piece. "What did he hit me with?" he asked. "The pavement, I think," Aaui said. "Sorry I couldn't help. He put me out of action pretty early." Beatty sat up, clutching his aching head. "What a fighter!" "We underestimated him," said Aaui. "He must have had some kind of training. Do you think you can walk?" "I think so," Beatty said, letting Aaui help him to his feet. "What time is it?" 124 "Nearly one o'clock. His appointment's at one-thirty. Maybe we can stop him at Baxter's office." In five minutes, they caught a taxi and sped to Baxter's building. The receptionist was young and pretty, and she stared at them open-mouthed. They had managed to clean up some of the damage in the taxi, but what remained looked pretty bad. Beatty had an improvised bandage over his head and Aaui's complexion bordered on green. "What do you want?" the receptionist asked. "I believe Mr. Baxter has a one-thirty appointment with Mr. Brynne," said Aaui in his most businesslike tone. "Yes The wall clock read one-seventeen. Aaui said, "We must see Mr. Brynne before he goes in. It's very urgent. So if you don't mind, we'll wait here for him." "You can wait," the girl said. "But Mr. Brynne has already gone in." "But it isn't one-thirty yet!" "Mr. Brynne was early. Mr. Baxter decided to see him at once." "I must speak to him," Aaui said. "I have orders not to disturb them." The girl looked frightened and her finger hovered over a button on her desk. Aaui knew that the button would probably summon help. A man like Baxter would have protection near at all times. The meeting was taking place now, and he didn't dare interfere. Perhaps his actions had changed the course of events. It seemed likely. The Brynne in that office was a different man, a man altered by his adventures of the morning. "It's all right," Aaui said to the receptionist. "We'll just sit here and wait." bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe, and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and-pearls emblem of the Wall Street House of Lords. For half an hour, Brynne had talked, spread papers on Baxter's desk, quoted figures, mentioned trends, predicted movements. He was perspiring anxiously now, waiting for a word out of Baxter. "Hmm," said Ben Baxter. Brynne waited. His temples were pounding with a steady, dull ache and he was having trouble with the tight knots in his stomach. It was years since he had fought in anger; he wasn't used to it. He hoped he could control himself until the meeting was over. "The terms you request," said Baxter, "are just short of preposterous." "Sir?" "Preposterous was the word, Mr. Brynne. You are, perhaps, hard of hearing?" "No," said Brynne. "Excellent. These terms you present might be suitable for negotiation between two companies of equal holdings. But such is not the case, Mr. Brynne. It amounts to presumption that a company of your size should offer such terms to Baxter Enterprises." Brynne's eyes narrowed. He had heard about Baxter's reputation for in-fighting. This was not personal insult, he reminded himself. It was the kind of business maneuver that he himself had often used. It must be .dealt with as such. "Let me point out," Brynne said, "the key nature of this forest area I have an option on. With sufficient capitalization, we could extend the holding enormously, to say nothing -- " "Hopes, dreams, promises," Baxter sighed. "You may have something worth while. As yet, it is inadequately demonstrated." This is business, Brynne reminded himself. He does want to back me -- I can tell. I expected to come down in the bargaining. Naturally. All he's doing is beating down the terms. Nothing personal 125 But too much had happened to Brynne in one day. The red-faced Crusader, the voice in the restaurant, his short-lived dream of freedom, the fight with the two men -- he knew he couldn't take much more. "Suppose, Mr. Brynne," said Baxter, "you make a more reasonable offer. One in keeping with the modest and subsidiary status of your holdings." He's testing me, Brynne thought. But it was too much. He was as nobly born as Baxter; how dare the man treat him this way? "Sir," he said through numb lips, "I take exception." "Eh?" said Baxter, and Brynne thought he glimpsed amusement in the cold eyes. "What do you take exception to?" "Your statements, sir, and the manner in which you say them. I suggest you apologize."  waited. His head was pounding inhumanly now and his stomach refused to unknot itself. "I see nothing for which to apologize, sir," said Baxter. "And I see no reason to deal with a man who cannot keep personalities out of a business discussion." He's right, Brynne thought. I'm the one who should apologize. But he could not stop. Desperately he said, "I warn you -- apologize, sir!" "We can do no business this 126 way," said Baxter. "And frankly, Mr. Brynne, I had hoped to do business with you. I will try to speak in a reasonable manner, if you will try to react in an equally reasonable manner. I ask you to withdraw your request for an apology and let us get on." "I can't!" Brynne said, wishing passionately he could. "Apologize, sir!" Bater stood up, short and powerfully built. He stepped out from behind the desk, his face dark with anger. "Get out of here then, you insolent young dog! Get out or I'll have you thrown out, you hot-headed fool! Get out!" Brynne, wishing to apologize, thought of the red-faced Crusader, the waiter, his two assailants. Something snapped in him. He lashed out with all his strength, the weight of his body behind the blow. It caught Baxter full in the neck and slammed him against the desk. Eyes glazed, Baxter slumped to the floor. "I'm sorry!" Brynne cried. "I apologize! I apologize!" He knelt beside Baxter. "Are you all right, sir? I'm truly sorry. I apologize" A part of his mind, coldly functioning, told him that he had been caught in an unresolvable ambivalence. His need for action had been as strong as his need to apologize. And so he had solved the dilemma by trying to do both things, in the usual ambivalent muddle. He had struck -- then apologized. "Mr. Baxter?" he called in alarm. Ben Baxter's features were congested and blood drooled from a corner of his mouth. Then Brynne noticed that Baxter's head lay at a queer angle from his body. "Oh" Brynne said. He had served three years with the Knights Rampant. It was not the first broken neck he had seen. II 1959, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At 1:30 that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, the president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises, and do so on favorable terms Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of deep gentleness in his carefuly bland eyes, a suggestion of uncompromising piety in his expressive mouth. His movements had the loose grace of an unselfconscious man. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked a prayer stick under his arm and slipped a copy of Norsted's Guide to the Gentle Way into his pocket. He was never without that infallible guide. Finally he fixed to his lapel the silver moon decoration of his station. Brynne was a Restrainer, second class, of the Western Buddhist Congregation, and he allowed himself a carefully restrained pride over the fact. Some people thought him too young for lay-priestly duties. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly Western Buddhists, but two Lamaists as well. All made way for him when the elevator came. "Pleasant day, Brother Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. Brynne inclined his head an inch in the usual modest response to a member of the flock. He was deep in thought about Ben Baxter. But at the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a slim, beautiful, blackhaired woman with a piquant golden face. Indian, Brynne thought, wondering what a woman like that was doing in his apartment building. He knew the other tenants by sight, though, of course, he would not be sufficiently immodest to recognize them. 127 The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Indian woman. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He stepped outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to the Golden Lotus Coffee Shop for a late breakfast. It was 10:25 a.m. breathe this air forever!" said Janna Chandragore. Lan 11 smiled faintly. "Perhaps we can breathe it in our own age. How does he seem to you?" "Smug and over-righteous," she said. They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, stooped figure, even in New York's morning rush. "He absolutely stared at you in the elevator," said Lan 11. "I know." She smiled. "He's rather nice-looking, don't you think?" Lan 11 raised both eyebrows, but didn't comment. They continued to follow, noticing how the crowds parted out of respect for Brynne's rank. Then it happened. Brynne, his attention turned inward, collided with a portly, florid-faced man who wore the yellow robe of a Western Buddhist priest. 128 "My apologies for violating your meditation, Young Brother," said the priest. "My fault entirely, Father," Brynne said. "For it is written, 'Youth should know its footsteps.' " The priest shook his head. "In youth," he said, "resides the dream of the future; and age must make way." "Age is our guide and signposts along the Way," Brynne objected humbly but insistently. "The writings are clear on the point." "If you accept age," said the priest, his lips tightening slightly, "then accept the dictum of age: youth must forge ahead! Kindly do not contradict me, Dear Brother." Brynne, his eyes carefully bland, bowed deeply. The priest bowed in return and the men continued their separate ways. Brynne walked more quickly, his hands tight on his prayer stick. Just like a priest -- using his age as a support for arguments in favor of youth. There were some strange contradictions in Western Buddhism, but Brynne did not care to think about them at the moment. He went into the Golden Lotus Coffee Shop and sat down at a table far in the rear. He fingered the intricate carvings on his prayer stick and felt anger wash away from him. Almost immediately, he regained that serene and unruffled union of mind with emotions so vital to the Gentle Way. Now was the time to think about Ben Baxter. After all, a man had to perform his temporal duties as well as his religious ones. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. In two and a half hours, he would be in Baxter's office and -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "A glass of water and some dried fish, if you please," said Brynne. "French fries?" "Today is Visya. It is not allowed," Brynne murmured softly. The waiter went pale, gulped, said, "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," and hurried off. feel ridiculous, thought Brynne. I should simply have refused the French fries. Should I apologize to the man? He decided it would simply embarrass him. Resolutely Brynne put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on Ben Baxter. With Baxter's power behind the forest area Brynne had optioned, and its potential, there was no telling -- He became conscious of a disturbance at a nearby table. He turned and saw a golden-featured woman weeping bitterly into a tiny lace handkerchief. She was the woman he had seen earlier in his apartment building. With her was a small, wizened old man, who was trying in vain to console her. As the woman wept, she cast a despairing glance at Brynne. There was only one thing a Restrainer could do under the circumstances. He walked over to their table. "Excuse the intrusion," he said. "I couldn't help notice your distress. Perhaps you are strangers in the city. Can I help?" "We are past help!" the woman wailed. The old man shrugged his shoulders fatalistically. Brynne hesitated, then sat down at their table. "Tell me," he begged. "No problem is unsolvable. It is written that there is a path through all jungles and a trail over the steepest mountains." "Truly spoken," the old man assented. "But sometimes the feet of Man cannot reach the trail's end." "At such times," Brynne replied, "each helps each and the deed is done. Tell me your trouble. I will serve you in any way I can." In actual fact, this was more than a Restrainer was required to do. Total service was the obligation of higher-ranking priests. But Brynne was swept away by the 129 woman's need and beauty, and the words were out before he could consider them. "'In the heart of a young man is strength,' " quoted the old man, " 'and a staff for weary arms.' But tell me, sir, are you a believer in religious toleration?" "Absolutely!" said Brynne. "It is one of the essential tenets of Western Buddhism." "Very well. Then know, sir, that my daughter Janna and I are from Lhagrama in India, where we serve the Daritria Incarnation of the Cosmic Function. We came here to America hoping to found a small temple. Unfortunately, the schismatics of the Marii Incarnation have arrived before us. My daughter must return to her home. But our lives are threatened momentarily by these Marii fanatics, who are sworn to stamp out the Daritria faith." "But your lives can't be in danger here!" Brynne exclaimed. "Not in the heart of New York." "Here more than anywhere else," said Janna. "For crowds are cloak and mask to the assassin." "I shall not live long in any event," the old man said with serene unconcern. "I must remain here and complete my work. It is so written. But I wish my daughter to return safely to her home." "I won't go without you!" Janna cried. 130 "You will do as you are told!" the old man said. from his steely black eyes. The old man turned to Brynne. "Sir, this afternoon a ship sails for India. My daughter needs a man, a strong, true man, to guide and protect her, to bring her home. My fortune must go to the man who performs this sacred duty for me." "I can hardly believe this," said Brynne, suddenly struck with doubt. "Are you sure -- " As if in answer, the old man pulled a small chamois bag from his pocket and spilled its contents on the tablecloth. Brynne was not an expert in gems, though he had had some dealings with them as a religious-instruction officer in the Second World Jehad. Still, he was sure he recognized the true fire of ruby, sapphire, diamond and emerald. "They are yours," said the old man. "Take them to a jewelry store. When their authenticity is verified, perhaps you will believe the rest of my story. Or if these are not sufficient proof -- " From another pocket, he pulled a thick billfold and handed it to Brynne. Opening it, Brynne saw that it was stuffed with high-denomination bills. "Any bank will verify their authenticity," said the old man. "No, please, I insist. Keep it all. Believe me, it is only a portion of what I would like to bestow upon you for rendering me this sacred trust." It was overwhelming. Brynne tried to remind himself that the gems could conceivably be clever fakes and the bills could be superb forgeries. But he knew they were not. They were real. And if this wealth, so casually given, was real, then didn't the rest of the story have to be true? It would not be the first time a miraculous fairy-tale adventure happened in real life. Wasn't the Book of Golden Replies filled with similar incidents? He looked at the beautiful, sorrowful, golden-featured woman. A great desire came over him to bring joy to those exquisite features, to make that tragic mouth smile. And in the way she looked at him, Brynne perceived more than simply the interest one gives to a protector. "Sir!" cried the old man. "Is it possible that you might -- that you might consider -- " "I'll do it!" said Brynne. HP HE old man clasped Brynne's hand. Janna simply looked at him, but he had the sensation of being enfolded into a warm embrace. "You must leave at once," the old man said briskly. "Come, there's no time to lose. Even now, the enemy lurks in the shadows." "But my clothes -- " "Unimportant. I will provide you with a wardrobe." and friends, business appointments. Wait! Hold on a minute!" Brynne took a deep breath. Haroun al Rashid adventures were all very well, but they had to be undertaken in a reasonable fashion. "I have a business appointment this afternoon," Brynne said. "I must keep it. After that, I'm completely at your service." "The danger to Janna is too great!" cried the old man. "You'll both be perfectly safe, I assure you. You can even accompany me there. Or better yet, I've got a cousin on the police force. I'm sure I can arrange for a bodyguard -- " Janna turned her beautiful sad face away from him. The old man said, "Sir, the ship sails at one P.M. -- at one precisely." "Those ships leave every day or so," Brynne pointed out. "Let's catch the next one. This appointment is very important. Crucial, you might say. I've worked for years to arrange it. And it's not just me. I have a business, employees, associates. For their sake, I have to keep that appointment." "Business before life," the old man said bitterly. 131 "You'll be all right," Brynne assured him. "It is written, you know, that the beast of the jungle shies from the tread -- " "I know what is written. The word of death is painted large upon my forehead, and upon my daughter's, unless you aid us now. She will be on the Theseus in stateroom 2 A. The next stateroom, 3A, will be yours. The ship sails at one this afternoon. If you value her life, sir, you will be there." The old man and his daughter stood up, paid and left, ignoring Brynne's pleas for reason. As she went out the door, Janna turned for a moment and gazed at him. "Your dried fish, sir," said the waiter. He had been hovering near, waiting for a chance to serve it. "To hell with it!" Brynne shouted. "Oh, sorry, sorry," he said in dismay to the shocked waiter. "No fault of yours." He paid, leaving a sizable tip for the waiter, and hurried out. He had a lot of thinking to do. Hi A LL the energy expended on that one scene," Lan II complained, "has probably cost me ten years of my life." "You loved every minute of it," said Janna Chandragore. "True, true," Lan II admitted, nodding vigorously. He sipped a glass of wine that a steward had 132 brought to the stateroom. "The question now is -- will he give up his appointment with Baxter and come?" "He does seem to like me," Janna said. "Which shows his excellent taste." She inclined her head mockingly. "But really, that story! Was it necessary to make it so -- so outrageous?" "Absolutely necessary. Brynne is a strong and dedicated man, but he has his romantic streak. Nothing less than a fairy tale to match his gaudiest dream could pull him from duty's path." "Perhaps even a fairy tale won't," Janna said thoughtfully. "We'll see," said Lan II. "Personally, I believe he will come." "I don't." "You underestimate your attractiveness and acting ability, my dear. Wait and see." "I have no choice," said Janna, settling back in an arm chair. The desk clock read 12:42.    Brynne decided to take a stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. That magnificent sorrowful girl 133 But what about his duty, the labor of faithful employees, to be culminated and completed this afternoon at the desk of Ben Baxter? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus. He thought of India, its blue skies, brilliant sunshine, wine, relaxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. Even if it meant losing the most beautiful woman in the world, he would continue to labor under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself, touching the chamois bag in his pocket. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a strong, determined man. If he had the faith and will to succeed in business, he also had the faith and will to leave it, drop everything, and follow his heart. "To hell with Baxter!" he said to himself. The girl's safety was more important than anything. He would board that ship, and right now, wire his associates from sea, tell them -- The decision was made. He 134 whirled and marched to the gangplank and resolutely climbed it. An officer on the deck smiled and said, "Name, sir?" "Ned Brynne." "Brynne, Brynne." The officer checked his list. "I don't seem to -- Oh, yes, right here. Yes, Mr. Brynne. You're on A deck, cabin 3. Let me wish you a most pleasant trip." "Thank you," Brynne said, glancing at his watch. It read a quarter to one. "By the way," he said to the officer, "what time does the ship sail?" "At four-thirty sharp, sir." "Four-thirty? Are you sure?" "Quite sure, Mr. Brynne." "But I was told you sailed at one o'clock." "That was the original time, sir. But sailing time is often advanced a few hours. We'll easily make it up at sea." Four-thirty! Yes, he had enough time! He could go back, see Ben Baxter and still return in time to catch the ship! Both problems were solved! Murmuring a blessing to a mysterious but benevolent fate, Brynne turned and sprinted down the gangplank. He was fortunate enough to catch a taxi at once. bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and-pearls emblem of the Humble Servitors of Wall Street. For half an hour, Brynne had talked, mentioned trends, predicted movements. He was perspiring anxiously now, waiting for a word out of Baxter. "Hmm," said Ben Baxter. Brynne waited. His pulse was pounding heavily and his empty stomach was beginning to churn. Half his mind was on the Theseus, sailing soon. He wanted to end this meeting and get aboard. "The merger terms you request," said Baxter, "are quite satisfactory." "Sir?" breathed Brynne. "Satisfactory, I said. Haven't got trouble with your hearing, have you, Brother Brynne?" "Not for news like that," said Brynne, grinning. "Our affiliation," Baxter said, smiling, "promises a great future for us both. I'm a direct man, Brynne, and I want to tell you this directly: I like the way you've handled the surveys and data and I like the way you've handled this meeting. Moreover, I like you personally. I am most happy about this and believe our association will prosper." "I sincerely believe so, sir." They shook hands and both men stood up. "My lawyers will draw up the papers," Baxter said, "in accordance with this discussion. You should have them by the end of the week." "Excellent." Brynne hesitated, wondering if he should tell Baxter he was going to India. He decided not to. It would be simple to arrange for receipt of the papers on the Theseus and he could carry out the final details by longdistance telephone. He wouldn't be gone too long, anyhow -- just long enough to see the girl safely home; then he would fly back. They exchanged a few more pleasantries, shook hands again and Brynne turned to leave. "That's a fine-looking prayer stick," Baxter said. "Eh? Oh, yes," said Brynne. "I got it from Sinkiang just this week. They make the finest prayer sticks there, in my unworthy opinion." "I know. May I look at it?" "Of course. Please be careful, though. It opens rather fast." Baxter took the intricately carved prayer stick and pressed the handle. A blade shot out of the other end, narrowly grazing his leg. "It is fast!" Baxter said. "Fastest I've seen." "Did you cut yourself?" "A mere scratch. Beautiful damascene work on that blade." They talked for a few minutes 135 about the threefold significance of the knife blade in Western Buddhism and of recent developments in the Western Buddhist spiritual center in Sinkiang. Then Baxter carefully closed the prayer stick and returned it to Brynne. "A truly beautiful thing. Good day again, Dear Brother Brynne, and -- " Baxter halted in mid-sentence. His mouth was open and he seemed to be staring at a point just in back of Brynne's head. Brynne turned, but nothing was there except the wall. When he turned back, Baxter's features were congested and a light froth had gathered at the corners of his mouth. "Sir!" cried Brynne. Baxter tried to speak, but couldn't. He took two tottering steps forward and collapsed to the floor. Brynne rushed to the receptionist's office. "Call a doctor! Quick! Quick!" he shouted to the frightened girl. Then he rushed back to Baxter. He was looking at the first American case of the mutated disease that was to be called the S'nkiang Plague. Transmitted on a hundred contaminated prayer sticks, it would go through New York like a flash fire, leaving a million dead in its wake. Within the week, the symptoms of Sinkiang Plague would be better 136 known than those of measles. But Brynne was looking at the first casualty. With horror, he stared at the hard, brilliant apple-green shine of Baxter's hands and face. Ill 1959, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At 1:30 that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, the president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises and do so on favorable terms Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of thoughtfulness in his carefully bland eyes, a look of reason and willingness to compromise in his relaxed mouth. His movements had the careless surety of a man who knows his place in the world. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked an umbrella under his arm and slipped a paperbound copy of Murder on the Metro into his pocket. He was never without a good mystery of some sort. Finally he fixed to his laoal the small onyx pin of a Commodore the Ocean Cruising Club. Some people thought him too young for such an honor. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly shopkeepers, but two businessmen as well. "Pleasant day, Mr. Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. "Hope so," Brynne said, deep in thought about Ben Baxter. At the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a great blond Viking of a man, talking to a tiny, half-bald fellow. Brynne wondered what they were doing in his apartment building. He knew most of the tenants by sight, though he hadn't lived in the building long enough to get acquainted with them. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Viking. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He stepped outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to Childs' for breakfast. It was 10:25 a.m. " Dr. Sveg. "He looks ordinary enough," said Edwin James. "He even looks reasonable. We'll find out." They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, erect figure, even in New York's morning rush. "I am certainly not one to advocate violence," said Dr. Sveg. "But this time -- why don't we knock him over the head and be done with it?" "That method was selected by Aaui and Beatty. Miss Chandragore and Lan II decided to try bribery. We are committed to a course of reason." "But suppose he can't be reasoned with, what then?" James shrugged his shoulders. "I don't like it," Dr. Sveg said. Following half a block behind, they saw Brynne collide with a portly, florid-faced businessman. "Sorry," said Brynne. "Sorry," said the portly businessman. They exchanged perfunctory nods and went on. Brynne went into Childs' and sat down at an empty table in the rear. Now was the time to think of Ben Baxter and of what the best approach would be -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee," Brynne said. "French fries?" "No, thanks." The waiter hurried off. Brynne 137 concentrated on Ben Baxter. With Baxter's financial and political backing of the forest deal, there was no telling -- "Excuse me, sir," a voice said. "May we talk to you?" Brynne looked up and saw the blond man and his small friend whom he had seen in the elevator. "What about?" "A matter of the utmost urgency, sir," said the small man. Brynne glanced at his watch. It was almost 11:00. He had two and a half hours before his meeting with Baxter. "Sure, sit down," he invited. "What's on your mind?" The men looked at each other and exchanged embarrassed smiles. Finally the small man cleared his throat. "Mr. Brynne," he said, "I am Edwin James. This is my associate, Dr. Sveg. We have a preposterous sounding story to tell, which I hope you will hear to the end without interruptions. After that, we have certain proofs that may or may not convince you of the story's authenticity." Brynne frowned, wondering what kind of crackpots he had met. But both men were well dressed, quietly spoken. "Sure, go ahead," Brynne said. later, Brynne was saying. "Wow! That's quite a little yarn!" 138 "I know," Dr. Sveg said apologetically. "Our proofs -- " are impressive. Let me see that first gadget again." Sveg handed it to him. Brynne stared reverently at the small, shining object. "Boys, if a thing that size can really turn out heat or cold in those quantities -- the electrical corporations would give a couple of billion to get it!" "It is a product of our technology," said Chief Programmer James, "as are the other gadgets. With the exception of the motrifier, they are all straight-line developments, refinements of present trends." "And that thallasator. Nice, simple, inexpensive way of extracting fresh water from salt." He looked at the two men. "It is possible, of course, that these items are a hoax." Dr. Sveg raised both eyebrows. "But I'm not exactly untrained in science. Even if they're a hoax, they'd have to be every bit as advanced as the real thing. I guess you've sold me. Men from the future! Well, well!" "Then you accept what we say about you?" James asked. "And about Ben Baxter and time-line selection?" "Well" Brynne thought hard. "Tentatively." "Will you cancel your appointment with Baxter?" "I don't know." "Sir?" "I said I don't know. You've got a lot of nerve," Brynne said angrily. "I've worked like a galley slave, driving toward this goal. This meeting is the biggest chance I've ever had or ever will have. And you ask me to give up all that because of some nebulous prediction -- " "The prediction isn't nebulous," James said. "It is very explicit and most precise." "Look, there's more involved than just me. I have a business, employees, associates, stockholders. I have to keep this meeting for their sake, too." "Mr. Brynne," said Sveg, "consider the larger issues at stake!" "Yeah, sure," Brynne said sourly. "How about those other teams you talked about? Maybe I've been stopped in some other probability world." "You haven't." "How do you know?" "I couldn't say so to the teams," Chief Programmer James said, "but the probability of their success was vanishingly small -- just as the probability of my success with you is small, statistically." "Hell," said Brynne, "you guys come dropping out of the future and casually ask a man to change his entire life. You haven't got the right!" "If you could postpone the appointment for a single day," Dr. Sveg suggested, "that might -- " "You don't postpone appointments with Ben Baxter. Either you keep the one he's given you or you wait -- maybe forever -- until he gives you another." Brynne stood up. "Look, I don't know what I'm going to do. I've heard you, I more or less believe you, but I just don't know. I'll have to make up my own mind." Dr. Sveg and James also stood up. "That is your privilege," said Chief Programmer James. "Goodby. I hope you make the right decision, Mr. Brynne." They shook hands. Brynne hurried out. Dr. Sveg and James watched him go. Sveg said, "What do you think? It looks favorable, doesn't it? Don't you think so?" "I can't guess," James said. "The possibility of altering events within a time-line is never favorable. I honestly have no idea of what he's going to do." Dr. Sveg shook his head, then sniffed. "Some air, eh?" "Quite," said Chief Programmer James. - stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily 139 140 along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. That ridiculous story In which he believed. But what about his duty, the years spent working his way up to optioning that huge forest tract, its tremendous possibilities to be culminated and completed this afternoon at the desk of Ben Baxter? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus He thought of the Caribbean, its blue skies, brilliant sunshine, wine, relaxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. No matter what the loss, he would continue to work under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a strong, determined man. If he had the guts to succeed in business, he also had the guts to leave it, drop everything, and follow his heart. And in that way, the ridiculous damned future would be safe. "To hell with Ben Baxter!" he said to himself. But he didn't mean it. The future was just too uncertain, too far away. This whole thing might well be an elaborate hoax, arranged by a business competitor. Let the future take care of itself! Ned Brynne turned abruptly away from the Theseus. He had to hurry to make his appointment with Baxter on time. In Baxter's building, riding up in the elevator, Brynne tried not to think. It was enough simply to act. He got off at the 16th floor and walked up to the receptionist. "My name is Brynne. I have an appointment with Mr. Baxter." "Yes, Mr. Brynne. Mr. Baxter is expecting you. You can go right in." Brynne didn't move. A wave of doubt flooded his mind and he thought of the future generations, whose chances he was damaging by his act. He thought of Dr. Sveg and Chief Programmer Edwin James, earnest, well-meaning men. They wouldn't ask him to make such a sacrifice unless it was absolutely essential. And he considered one thing more -- Among those future generations would be descendants of his own. "You may go in, sir," the girl said. Abruptly, something snapped in Brynne's mind. 141 "I've changed my mind," he said, in a voice he hardly recognized. "I'm canceling the appointment. Tell Baxter I'm sorry -- about everything." He turned, before he could change his mind, and ran down sixteen flights of stairs. World Planning Council, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around a long table, waiting for Edwin James. He entered, a small man, impressively ugly. "Reports," he said. Aaui, looking somewhat the worse for wear, told about their attempt at violence and its result. "Perhaps," he concluded, "if we had been conditioned to use more violence -- faster -- we could have stopped him." "And perhaps not," said Beatty, who looked considerably worse than Aaui. Lan II reported the partial success and total failure of his mission with Miss Chandragore. Brynne had agreed to accompany them to India, even if it meant giving up the meeting with Baxter. Unfortunately, Brynne had found himself able to do both things. Lan 11 ended with several philosophical comments about the shockingly flexible schedules of steamship companies. Chief Programmer James stood up. "The future we were selecting for was one in whose past Ben Baxter lived to complete his work of buying forests. That, unfortunately, is not to be. Our best line, under the circumstances, is the Main Historic Line, in which Dr. Sveg and I bent our efforts." "You haven't reported yet," Miss Chandragore said. "What happened?" "Reason," said Edwin James, "and an appeal to the intelligence seem to be the best operating procedures. After due thought, Brynne decided not to keep his appointment with Ben Baxter. But bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and ; pearls emblem of the Wall Street Club. He had been sitting motionless for half an hour now, thinking about figures, trends, movements. His buzzer sounded. "Yes, Miss Cassidy?" "Mr. Brynne was here. He just left." "What do you mean?" "I really don't understand it,. Mr. Baxter. He came up and said he wanted to cancel his appointment." 142 "What did he say? Repeat it exactly, Miss Cassidy." "He said he had an appointment with you and I said he could go right in. And he stood there looking at me very strangely, frowning. He seemed angry and upset. I told him again he could go in. Then he said -- " "Word for word now, Miss Cassidy." "Yes, sir. He said, 'I've changed my mind. I'm canceling the appointment. Tell Baxter I'm sorry -- for everything.' " "That's all he said?" "Every last word, Mr. Baxter." "And then?" "He turned and hurried downstairs." "Stairs?" "Yes, Mr. Baxter. He didn't wait for the elevator." "I see." "Is there anything else, Mr. Baxter?" "No, nothing else, Miss Cassidy. Thank you." Bon Baxter turned off the intercom and slumped wearily behind his desk. So Brynne knew! It was the only possible explanation. Word must have gotten out somehow, somewhere. He had thought it was safely hidden for anotlu i day, at least. But there must have been a leak. Baxter smiled grimly to himself. Ho couldn't blame Brynne, though the man should at least have talked to him. But perhaps not. Maybe it was best this way. But how had he found out? Who had broken the news to him that the Baxter industrial empire was hollow, decaying, crumbling at the foundations? If only the news could have been concealed for another day, another few hours! He would have signed with Brynne. A fresh venture would have pumped new blood into the Baxter holdings. By the time people found out, he would once again have had a solid base from which to operate. Brynne knew and had been scared off. That meant everyone knew. There was no holding things together now. The wolves would be at him. His friends, his wife, his partners and all the little people who had depended upon him Well, he had decided years ago what to do in this eventuality. Without hesitation, Baxter opened his desk drawer and took out a small bottle. He extracted two white tablets. He had always lived by his own rules. Now was the time to die by them. Ben Baxter popped the pills into his mouth. 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St ; y acts not even available authoritative iournals n etey TO 0 " 1  s i two years' But 3 t w0 rk? about gout predict mysterious What .V. first hook  -- See oier side for full details l A trously to reach our satellite, us niK chemical fuels. But whej vSwrn Two had placed his ty  ranger had a curious hr itudded at im  -- "'  r assemblies performing the Dance  S pap ier? z The Next Full Length Galaxy Science Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon When an atomic explosion destroys the battleship Alaska, Lt, Commander Frank Jacklin returns to consciousness in New York and is shocked to find himself in the body of Winnie Tomkins, a dissolute stockbroker. Unable to explain his real identity, Jacklin attempts to fit into Tomkin's way of life. Complications develop when Jacklin gets involved with Tomkin's wife, his red-haired mistress and his luscious secretary. Three too many women for Jacklin to handle. His foreknowledge of the Alaska sinking and other top secret matters plunges him into a mad world of intrigue and excitement in Washington -- that place where anything can happen and does! Where is the real Tomkins is a mystery explained in the smashing climax. Completely delightful, wholly provocative, the Rat Race is a striking novel of the American Scene. Watch For It On Sale May #th GalaxyAssistant Editor Art Director Production Manager Advertising Manager Cover by Illustrating is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices: #I Hudson Street. New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscriptions: # copies) #-# per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S. Possessions. Lise where #. Entered as secondclass matter at the Post Office, New York. N. Y. Copyright. #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. AH rights, including translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by Selfaddressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material, AH stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters # nd actual persons it coincidental. by Boyd Ellanby # by Richard Matheson # by Pout Anderson # by Charles V. De Vef # by Franklin Abel # by Willy Ley # by H. L. Gold # by Groff Conklin # Printed in the U #. A. by the Guinn Co... Inc. Jtg. If. fat. Off. urdistressed because her family and friends jeer at her for reading science fiction. She unhappily wonders whether detailing the scientific qualifications of our writers may not compel their respect. Well, Asimov is a biochemist specializing in cancer research; Heinlein is an engineer; Tenn is an anthropologist; de Camp, as a patent authority, is familiar with many branches of science; Guin, connected with a large pharmaceutical house, is a medical expert... The list could be extended in almost every scientific direction -- and, I think, would do no good. situation when it was recently interviewed on TV, with a noted mystic to provide "conflict." Summing up at the end of the program, this gentleman stated that science fiction is a cheap substitute for prophecy. To such calcified thinking, there was no contradiction in making this deeply thoughtful statement over a medium that had been anticipated -- not predicted -- generations ago in science fiction, with people thousands of miles away seeing and hearing him at bled hi Selling him science fiction might have been possible if we were extrapolating possible developments in metaphysics. I'm not even sure of that. He probably doesn't think any advance in his specialty is either likely or necessary. Oddly, I can see him, or his colleagues, setting up shop on the planets when we reach them -- as we seem certain to do -- and not changing that opinion or their primitive "science" in any degree whatever. This is admittedly an extreme case of fossil ization. In the example of our reader's family or friends, we have people who arc unwonderingly alive in a society that to their ancestors would have been pure science fiction. They, of course, take every advance as perfectly natural. Yet each advance was "impossible" before it came about. And then that one was possible, but the next wasn't! Should they be educated to an appreciation of science fiction? Why bother? I wish I had noted the author who said that no idea is as powerful as one whose time has come. Science fiction is in that position. Its arrival is a matter of logical evolution. How widespread its influence may become is difficult to determine now, but surely it will find a legitimate and enduring place in literature. Beyond seeing that the favorite magazines of readers are prominently displayed on newsstands, and passing the word to receptive people, not much else has to be done. The young lady is obviously concerned with gaining approval; that's a personal problem I can't handle, one that is probably unnecessary -- certainly not a good betting proposition -- and not a question of survival for science fiction. Its day, as I said, has come. Fighting the popular acceptance of science fiction now is as foolhardy as were our attempts to sell it prematurely. At that time, we were forcing something for which there was no current need. We were, in other words, pushing evolution, which does not respond gratifyingly to untimely pressure. Two such instances are the movement for spelling reform and Communism. For different reasons, both are guilty of trying to force evolution. Language needs no compulsion to change. It does so constantly; if need be, over the dead bodies of lexicographers and pedants. It changes when there is a need for change, not because someone decides that it should. Much of our vocabulary would be incomprehensible to anyone of # years ago, let alone Chaucer's ageIt may be that TV and movies will impair the spelling ability of future generations -- though not necessarily their literacy, which, in the sense of vicarious experience, could imaginably be greater than ever before. In that case, what we might regard as poor spelling would become standard, through common usage. Regrettable? No. Inevitable, if it does happen. The premature proponents of simplified spelling would, no doubt, feel victorious, but actually their efforts would not influence the change. Communism, on the other hand, puts a gun to evolution's back. You can't shoot evolution if it refuses to obey. This strange and repugnant wedding of allegedly advanced politics with medieval methods of inquisition runs counter to evolution. From slavery to feudalism to democracy, the direction has been toward greater and greater personal freedom. We are assured that that is Communism's ultimate goal. But where are the signs of it? My money is on evolution. -- H. L. C" Man, it would appear, can adapt to any form of society , .  but not one in which the knowledge of extending fife becomes a passport to death Category HE door-knob turned, then rattled. Dr. David Wong stepped out from behind the large bookcase, listening. He pressed the brass handle of the top shelf and the case silently pivoted back to become part of the wall, obliterating the dark passage behind it. An imperative knocking began at the door; David walked softly to his desk and picked up his notebook. He tried to remain relaxed, but he could feel the tightening of his shoulder muscles. With his right hand, he shut his notebook and concealed it under a mass of papers, while his left hand pressed the desk button to Illustrated Phoenix release the lock of the door. The door burst open and two men strode in, a black-uniformed Ruler followed by a watchguard. Blackvisored cap still on his head, the first man marched to the desk and spoke without ceremonial greeting. "The door was locked, Dr. Wong?" "Correct, Dr. Lanza, The door was locked." "I shall have to instruct the guard to report it. Have you forgotten Leader Marley's Maxim: Constructive science does not skulk behind locked doors?" Wong leaned back in his chair and smiled at his visitors. "The wisdom of Leader Marley is a constant help to us all, but his generosity is also a byword. Surely you remember that on the tenth anniversary of his accession, he honored me by the grant of occasional hours of Privacy, as a reward for my work on Blue Martian Fever?" "I remember now," said Dr. Lanza. "But what for?" asked Officer Blagun. "It's anti-social!" "Evidently you have forgotten. Officer Blagun, another Maxim of Leader Marley: Nature has not equipped one Category to judge the needs of another; only the Leader understands all. Now, Dr. Lanza, will you tell me the reason for this visit? Since your promotion from Research to Ruler, I have rarely been honored by your attention." "I am here with a message," said Lanza. "Leader Marley's compliments, and he requests your presence at a conference on next Wednesday at ten in the morning." "Why did you have to deliver that in person? What's wrong with using Communications?" "It's not my province to ask questions, Dr. Wong. I was told to come here, and I was told to wait for a reply." "Next Wednesday at ten? Let's see, this is Friday." David Wong pressed the key of his electronic calendar, but he had no need to study the dull green and red lights that flashed on to indicate the pattern of his day. He did not delude himself that he had any real choice, but he had learned in the past fifteen years that it kept up his courage to preserve at least the forms of independence. He allowed a decent thirty seconds to ponder the coded lights, then blanked the board and looked up with an easy smile. "Dr. Wong's compliments to Leader Marley, and he will be honored to attend a conference on Wednesday at ten." Nodding his hehd, Dr. Lanza glanced briefly around the office. "Queer, old-fashioned place you have here." "Yes. It was built many years ago by a slippery old politician who wanted to be safe from his enemies. Makes a good place for Research, don't you think?" Lanza did not answer. He strode to the door, then paused to look back. "You understand, Dr. Wong, that I shall have to report the locked door? I have no choice. "Has anyone?" Officer Blagun followed his superior, leaving the door wide open behind them. Wong remained rigid in his chair until the clack of heels on marble floor had become a mere echo in his S brain, then stretched out his hand to the intercom. He observed with pride that his hand did not tremble as he pressed the dial. "Get me Dr. Karl Haslam... Karl? Can you meet me in the lab right away? I've thought of a new approach that might help us crack the White Martian problem. Yes, I know we planned on conferring tomorrow, but it's getting later than you think.' Again he pressed the dial. "Get me Leah Hachovnik. Leah? I've got some new stuff to dictate. Be a good girl and come along right away.' Breaking the connection, he diew out his notebook and opened it. David Wong was a big man, tall, well-muscled, compact, and he might have been handsome but for a vague something in his appearance. His lean face and upeurving mouth were those of a young man; his hair was a glossy black, too thick to be disciplined into neatness; and he was well-dressed, except for the unfashionable bulging of his jacket pocket, where he carried a bulky leather case of everfeed pens and notebooks. But it was his eyes that were disconcerting direct, they had a wisdom and a comprehension that seemed incongruous in so young a face. A worried frown creased his forehead as he turned back to one of the first pages, studying the symbols he had recorded there, but he looked up without expression on hearing the tapping of slender heels. "Quick work, Leah. How are you this morning?" "As if anybody cared?" Leah Hachovnik settled down before the compact stenograph machine, her shoulders slumped, her thin mouth drooping at the corners. "Feel like working?" said David. "As much as I ever do, I guess. Sometimes I wonder if the traitors in the granite quarries have it any worse than I do. Sometimes I wish I'd been born into some other Category. Other people have all the luck, I don't know what it is, Dr. Wong, but I just don't seem to have the pep I used to have. Do you think it could be the climate here in New York?" "People do grow older, Leah," he reminded her gently. "I know. But Tanya -- you remember my twin sister Tanya, the one that got so sick that time, ten years ago, when you did that experiment with Blue Martian Fever, and she had to be sent out to Arizona? Of course I haven't ever seen her since then -- people in Office Category never get permission for that kind of travel -- but she writes me that ever since she got well again she feels just like a kid, and works as hard as she ever did, and she still seems to enjoy life. Why, she's had three proposals of marriage this past year alone, she says, and yet she's thirty-five, just the same age as I am -- being twins, you know? -- an?l nobody's proposed to me in ages. Well, Fni certainly going to try to find out what her method is. She's coming back tomorrow." "She's what?" "Coming back. BureauMed is sending her back here to the Institute to take up her old job in Intercom. Funny they haven't told you, her being an old employee and all." Dr. Wong was gripping his notebook iry stiff fingers, but he replied easily, "Oh, well, BureauMed is a complex organization. With all they have to do, it's not surprising they get things mixed up sometimes." "Don't I know!" she sighed, and droned on in a dreary monotone. "This one institute alone would turn your hair gray before your time. I don't know how some people seem to keep so young. I was just 'thinking to myself this morning when I watched you walking through the office, 'Why, Dr. Wong doesn't seem to age a bit! He looks just as young as he ever did, and look at me !' " Looking at her, David admitted to himself, was not the pleasure it had once been. Ten years ago, she and her twin sister Tanya had been plump, delectable, kittenish girls, their mental equipment no more than standard for Office Category, of course, but their physical appearance had been outstanding, almost beautiful enough for Theater Category. Creamy ivory skin, gray eyes, and soft red hair dramatized by a freakish streak of white that shot abruptly back from the center of the forehead, Tanya's swirling to the left, and Leah's to the right, one girl the mirror image of the other. But the Leah sitting before him now was thin and tired-looking, her sallow skin was lined, and her soft voice had become vinegary with disappointments. Her red hair had faded to a commonplace brown, and the white streak in the center was yellowed. An unwanted, souring old maid. But there was only one response to make. "You look fine to me, Leah," he said. "What time did you say your sister is coming?" "Tomorrow evenings' Playground Jet. Why?" "We'll have to think of a way to celebrate. But right now, I'd like to get started on my new paper. I've got to meet Dr. Haslam before long." "I know." She raised her faded gray eyes. "That was a funny thing you said to him just now over the intercom. You said to him it was getting late. But it isn't late. It's only eleven o'clock in the morning." David stared. "Do you mean to say you were listening to our conversation? Why did you do that?" She fidgeted and turned away from him. "Oh. I just happened to be at Comdesk and I guess the circuit wasn't closed. Does it matter? But it seemed a funny thing for you to say." "People in Office Category are not supposed to understand Research," he said severely. "If they were capable of Research, Leader JVftirley's planners would have placed them there. As for its being late, it is, as far as White Martian Fever is concerned. Which is the subject of my paper. Prepare to take dictation." Shrugging her shoulders, she poised her bony fingers over the keys of the little machine. "Paper for delivery at the Summer Seminar," he began. "But, Dr. Wong, that doesn't have to be ready for three months yet!" "Miss Hachovnik! Please remember Leader Marley's Maxim : Individuals born into Office Category are the bone and muscle of the State; Nature has designed t them to act, not to think." "Yes, Dr. Wong. I'm sorry." "Don't worry, Leah. WeTe old friends, so I won't report you. All set?" He took a pencil from his leather case and tapped it against his notebook as he ruffled the pages, wondering how to begin. It was hard to think logically when a part of his mind was in such confusion. Had Leah been listening in to all of his phone conversations? If so, it was fortunate that he had long ago devised an emergency code. Was it only idle curiosity that had prompted her or was she acting under orders? Was anyone else watching him, he wondered, listening to his talk, perhaps even checking the routing of his experimental work? There was Lanza this morning -- why had he come unannounced, in person, when a Communications call would have served the purpose equally well? Leah's voice broke in. "I'm ready. Dr. Wong." He cleared his throat... the Summer Seminar. Title: The Propogation of White Martian virus. Paragraph. It will be remembered that the early attempts to establish Earth colonies on Mars were frustrated by the extreme susceptibility of our people to two viruses native to the foreign planet, viruses which we designate as Blue Martian and White Martian, according to the two distinct types of fever which they cause. Blue Martian Fever in the early days caused a mortality among our colonists of nearly eighty-five per cent, and made the establishment of permanent colonies a virtual impossibility. "Under the inspired leadership of Leader Marley and with the advice of his deputy Dr. Lanza, this laboratory in Research worked out a method of growing the virus and producing an immunizing agent which is effective in nearly all human beings. Only  the cooperation of several Categories made possible such a feat. It will not be forgotten that even the humblest helpers in the Institute had their share in the project, that some of them acted as human volunteers in the experiments, well knowing the risks they ran, and were afterward rewarded by a Free Choice. "One person in Office Category, for instance, was given the privilege of learning to play the flute, although nobody in his family had ever belonged to Music, and another person in Menial Category was permitted a month's study of elementary algebra, a nearly unheard of indulgence for a person in his position. But as Leader Marley so graciously remarked in conferring the awards: To the individual who risks much, the State gives much." "Like me and Tanya?" the girl asked, stopping her typing. "Yes, like you and Tanya. You were allowed to act a part in an amateur Theater group, I remember, and since Tanya was made too ill to be able to use a Free Choice, she was sent out west to the Playground, just as though she had belonged to Ruler Category. Now where was I?" " 'The State gives much.' " "Oh, yes. Paragraph. Since the discovery of the immunizing mechanism to Blue Martian, permanent colonies have been established on Mars. But there remains the more elusive problem of White Martian Fever, which, though its mortality is only thirty per cent, is still so crippling to those victims who survive that the Martian colonies cannot begin to expand, and the resources of the planet cannot be fully developed, until an immunizing agent is found. "For the past eight years this laboratory has been working at the problem, among others, and we are now in a position to report a small degree of progress. Since it proved to be impossible to grow the virus in the usual media, it occurred to us -- H The intercom buzzed, and Dr, Wong turned away to open the dial.  "David? What's happened to you? I've been waiting here in the lab a quarter of an hour' "Sorry, Karl. I thought I had more time. Be right down." He reached for his white lab coat and shoved his long arms into the starched sleeves. "That's all we have time for now, Leah. Can you get an early lunch and be back here this afternoon at two?" But she wasnot listening. She was leaning over to look at the desk, staring avidly at the open pages of Dr. Wong's notebook. Without comment he picked up the book, closed it, put it in the top drawer and locked the drawer. She watched him with curious eyes. '"What funny marks those were, Dr. Wong! Do you keep your notes in a private system of shorthand?" "No. I write them in Coptic. For the sake of privacy." "What's Coptic?" "A dead language, spoken by the ancient Egyptians thirty or forty centuries ago." "But you're Research, not Linguistics! It's against the law for you to know other languages. Are you a traitor?" "My dear Leah," he said, "I'm far too sensible a man to go in for bootleg study, to learn anything without permission. I have no wish to end up with a pickax in my hands. But you shouldn't tax your little mind with thinking. It's not your job. You're not equipped for it, and it's dangerous." stationed in the basement corridor, walked through the open door of the laboratory, past the bench where a row of pretty technicians sat making serial dilutions of bacterial and virus suspensions, through the glow of the sterilizing room, and on into the small inner lab where flasks of culture media and developing hens' eggs sat in a transparent incubator, and petri dishes flecked with spots of color awaited his inspection. Dr. Karl Haslam was standing at the work bench, with a pair of silver forceps which held a small egg under the psi light. Gently he lowered the egg into its warm observation chamber, covered the container, and sat down. "Well, here I am. Whats gone wrong? Explain yourself, my boy." "Just a minute." Grinning maliciously, David took down a bottle from the shelf of chemicals, poured a colorless liquid into a beaker, and walked casually toward the doorway as he agitated the mixture of hydrogen sulphide and mercaptans. He held his breath, then coughed, when the fumes of putrescence filled the room and drifted out the door. He looked into the technician's room. "Sorry for the aroma, girls, but this is a vital experiment." "Can't you at least shut the door?" one called pleadingly. "Explain to the watchguard out there, will you?" Closing the door, he turned on the ventilator and sat down beside Dr. Haslam. "Why all the melodrama?" Karl asked, baffled. "First you call me by emergency code, then you hole in like a conspirator. I'm beginning to think you're a great loss to Theater. What's happened? Why is it later than I think?" "Do you take everything as a joke, Karl?" "Certainly, until Fm forced to do otherwise. What's worrying you?" "I'm afraid of being arrested for treason. Don't laugh! This morning I received a message, delivered in person by our old schoolmate Lanza, to report to Leader Marley on Wednesday, and Marley hasn't paid any attention to me since he last inspected our lab, years ago. For another thing, Leah Hachovnik is making a nuisance of herself with her curiosity about my affairs. If she weren't so clumsy about her prying, I'd almost believe she was under orders to spy on me." Karl moved impatiently. "I hope you're not turning psychotic. You have a clean record of continuous production and you've never mixed in politics. You've never expressed what you may really think of our Leader even to me, although we've been friends since we were in Medschool, and I hope you never will. And you're making progress with White Martian. Why, my boy, you're all set! What's treasonable about that?" Someone knocked at the door. Hastily David uncovered the fragrant beaker and waved it about as he called, "Come in!" The watchguard looked in for an instant, wrinkled his nose, and quickly shut the door. Laughing, David covered the beaker, and began walking about with long nervous strides, snapping his fingers as he tried to explain. "I'm in trouble, Karl. I've run into something I don't know how to deal with, and I need help, I need advice, I need cooperation. I've lived alone with this thing for ten long years, hoping month after month that something would turn up so I could evade the issue. But nothing has. And now there's going to be a showdown." Karl touched his arm sympathetically. "My dear boy -- " "That's it!" shouted David. n "What's what?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you. Why do you always call me your 'dear boy?' You know I'm a year older than you are." "It's just habit, I suppose. You look so young -- your hair is black, while mine is nearly white. You're full of vigor, while I begin to creak with middle age. I didn't realize that I irritated you with my little phrase. I should think you'd be pleased that you have somehow managed to sip at the fountain of youth," David sank down on a stool. "I'm not pleased. I'm terrified." "What do you mean?" "I mean that's exactly what's happened. I have sipped at the fountain of youth. I've discovered how to keep people from growing old. I myself have not aged a bit in the last ten years." There was a long silence. Karl sat unmoving, his face like stone. "I don't believe you," he said at last. "It's no longer a question of belief. In a few days everybody will know, the proof will stare you in the face. And what will happen then?" "Evidence?" Karl asked. "I can't accept a statement as a fact." "Would you like to see my mice? Come with me." David Wong hurried into the small animal room and paused before a stack of wire cages in which furry creatures darted and squeaked. "You remember when we were working on Blue Martian, those peculiar mutants we found in our mice, and how I used six of them in trying to make antibodies to the virus?' "I remember" said Karl, "They were spotted with tufts of white hair on the right forelegs." David took down a cage, thrust in his hand, and brought out two of the tiny black mice which crawled over his trembling hand. Their right forelegs bore tufts of long white hair. "These," he said, "are the same mice." "Their descendants, you mean. Mice don't live that long," "These mice do. And they'll go on living. For years I've lived in fear that someone would notice and suspect the truth. Just as for years, every time someone has laughed and told me I never seemed to age a day, I've been terrified that he might guess the truth. I'm not aging." Karl looked dazed. "Well, my boy, you've got a bear by the tail. How did you find the elixir or whatever it is?" "You remember the early work with radioactive tracers, a couple of hundred years ago, that proved that all our body cells are in a continuous state of flux? There's a dynamic equilibrium between the disintegration and the resynthesis of the essential factors such as proteins, fats and amino groups, but the cell directs all the incoming material into the right chemical structures, under the influence of some organizing power which resides in the cell. "Foreign influences like viruses may disrupt this order and cause cancer. The cells are continually in a state of change, but always replace their characteristic molecules, and it is only as they grow older that they gradually become 'worn out.' Then the body grows old, becomes less resistant to infection, and eventually succumbs to one disease or another. And you know, of course, that viruses also have this self-duplicating ability. "I reasoned that at birth a man had a definite, finite amount of this essential selfduplicating .a kind of directing factor which reproduces itself, but more slowly than do the body cells. In that case, with the normal multiplication of the cells, the amount of surely grow smaller with the years. Eventually the time would come when the percentage would be below the critical level -- the cells would be less resistant, would function with less effrciency, and the man would 'grow old.' " Karl nodded soberly. "Reasonable hypothesis." "But one day, by pure chance, I isolated a component which I recognized as being the factor essential to the normal functioning of body cells. It hit me fake a toothache. I found that I could and the only problem then was to get it into a man's cells. If I up to that of youth, a man would stop aging! Since viruses penetrate our cells when they infect us, it was no trick at all to effect to the virus. I used Martian Blue, since it was handy, and its effects are. usually brief. "Presto! Old age is held at bay for another twenty or thirty years -- I really don't know how long. These mice were my first experiment, and as you see, they're still alive. Next, I tried it on myself." David put the mice back in their cage, locked it, and returned to the lab. "Tomorrow, the whole thing is bound to come out because Tanya Hachovnik is coming back, You know her sister Leah -- gray, dried-up, soured on life. Well, I've had ways of checking, and when Tanya Hachovnik walks into the Institute, everyone will see her as the same luscious redhead of twenty-five we knew ten years ago. I realize that what I did was a criminal act. I didn't think the thing through or I wouldn't have been such a fool. But when I made those final experiments, I used the Hachovnik twins for a controlled pair." "You must have been crazy!" "Perhaps I was. Fd tried it on myself, of course, with no bad effectsexcept a few days' fever, but I realized that without a cont trol I never could be sure the might be just that my particular genetic constitution caused me to age more slowly than the average. M So I chose the twins. To Leah I gave the attenuated Martian Blue, but to Tanya I gave the The experiment worked. Identical twins -- one grows old like other people; the other remains young. I know now, Karl, how to prolong youth indefinitely. But what in the name of Leader Marley shall I do with my knowledge?" Karl Haslam absently twisted his white hair and spoke slowly, as though he found trouble in choosing his words. "You realize, of course, that it is your duty to acquaint Leader Marley with all the details of your discovery?" "Is it? Can you imagine what th is will do to our society? What about the generations of children coming into a world where no places have been vacated for them by death? What about the struggles for power? Who will decide, and on what basis, whether to confer or to withhold this gift? There'll be riots, civil wars. I know that I'm only a scientist: ail I ever wanted from life was to be left alone, in a peaceful laboratory, and let other people worry about the world and its troubles. But now -- don't you see that by the mere fafct that I made this discovery, I've lost the right to sit by quietly and let other people make the decisions?" "But, David, you and I aren't able to handle such a problem! WeYe only Research!" "I know. We're inadequate, yet we have the responsibility. The men who created atomic power probably felt inadequate, too, but could they have made as bad a mess of handling it as others did? Suppose I did turn this over to Marley -- he'd use it to become the most absolute tyrant in the history of the race." Karl ran his fingers through his hair and smiled crookedly. "Well, you could always start a revolution, I suppose, and start by assassinating the Leader." "With what kind of weapon? Men like you and me are not allowed to own so much as an oldfashioned pistol. Except for the Military, Marley's the only man allowed to wear a Needier, And, besides, I'm a Research, not a Military. I hate violence and I'm naturally conditioned against killing." "Then you shouldn't have got into this mess. It would have been far better never to have discovnotes are safely locked up, by the way?" David grinned. "Don't worry about my notes; they're written in Coptic. You remember when I was still in Medschool and made my first important discovery, how to prevent the development of hereditary baldness by the injection of certain parahormones? Leader Marley rewarded me with a Free Choice, and I chose to learn a dead language. Not half a dozen men in the world could read my notes." "If your notes are safe, why don't you just destroy your mice and get rid of your proof that way?" "And the Hachovnik twins?" "You could at least keep Tanya out of sight." "Don't be a fool. That would only be a temporary measure and has nothing to do with the real problem. Lanza and Marley may suspect the truth right now, for all I know; they keep such close watch on my work. Anyway, the sFfcret is bound to come out sooner or later." Dr. Haslam clasped his hands and stared at them for a long while. His lined face looked grayer than ever. He looked up at last with a faint smile. "Well, my boy, I never asked you to discover this stuff, but since you have -- I hereby burn my bridges! You're right, we can't give it to Marley. But you can't handle it alone. What we need is time, and we haven't got it. We shall both be liquidated before this is over, there's no doubt of that, but we must do what we can. When is Tanya arriving?" "Tomorrow night, on the Playground Jet." "And you see Leader Marley when?" "Next Wednesday." "Five days yet. Then this is what we'll do. Too bad Lanza is in the other camp, but there's you and me, and I think Hudson and Faure from Serology will come in with us. We'll need others -- sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists -- the most promising material from all Categories if we're to create a new society based on the prospect of immortality. But I'll see the first two and bring them to your apartment tomorrow night for Tanya's welcome-home party. I leave it to you to muzzle Leah." "That won't do," said David. "I don't have a current Free Choice." "But I have. Two, as a matter of fact, a reward for curing the insomnia of Leader Marley's wife. I choose to give a party, I choose tomorrow night, and I choose your apartment." A knock rattled the door, and  the watchguard thrust in his head. "How much longer is this here experiment going to take? Do you guys s want to be re ported?" "Just finishing, Officer," called Karl. "You can leave the door open now." "What a stink!" said the guard. I  "Thank God I'm in Military!' I T hardly seemed like a party, David thought. His guests were ill at ease, and their conversation labored, then stopped altogether when the Menial came into the library with a tray of glasses and niblets. "Put them on the liquor cabinet, James," said David. "And that will be all. Enjoy yourself tonight." The Menial put down the tray and then stooped to fumble with the lock. "Let that alone! I've told you a thousand times not to monkey with my liquor cabinet!" "Don't you want me to get out the ice cubes. Doctor?" "I'll do it. You can go now." "But are you sure you won't want me later in the evening, Doctor? Who's to serve the supper? Who's going to clear up afterward?" "We'll manage. Don't worry about us." James shuffled out of the room. "I suppose that means I'll manage," said Leah, with a selfpitying sigh. "I've noticed that whenever people decide to rough it and do without a Menial, they take it for granted the women will do the work, never the men -- unless the women are still young and pretty. Well, at any rate, I'll have Tanya to help me. I still don't see why you wouldn't let me go to the Port to meet her, Dr. Wong." "I just thought it would be more of a celebration if we had a surprise party all waiting for her to walk into. Dr. Haslam will bring her here directly from the Port, and here we all are, her old friends from the Institute, waiting to welcome her home." "I'd hardly say all," said Leah. "I'm the only person from Office that's here. And why have a party in your Library, Dr. Wong? Nothing here but books, books, books." "Because I keep my liquor here, in the only room I have a right to lock up. My Menial is a good man, but he can't resist an opened bottle." "Well, it's still a gloomy party." David turned appealingly to his other guests, Hudson and Faure, but they only looked uncomfortable. "Perhaps we need a drink." David unlocked the cupboard and picked up a bottle which he set down hastily when he heard voices in the hall. He hurried to the outer door and opened it a few inches to reveal the sturdy shoulders of the watchguard of the floor and, beyond him, Karl Haslam. "Everything in order. Officer?" asked Karl. "Your permit is in order; Dr. I  Haslam, A private party. Let me just check -- yes, three guests have arrived, and you. two make five. That all? You have until midnight. But it beats me why you people in Research prefer a party without a watchguard, or why Leader Marley ever gives permission. Why, in all my years in Military, I've never been to an unwatched party, and I must say it never held "us down any." Karl laughed a little too forcedly. "I'll bet it didn't! But all Research people are a little peculiar. You must have noticed that yourself." "Well -- " "And you know how generous Leader Marley is, and how kind he is to loyal citizens. He wants usto be happy, so he pampers us now and then." "I guess he knows what he's doing, all right. Well, I'll check you out at twelve, then." "Go on in, Tanya," said Karl. They stepped into the apartment and David quietly closed the door. "Hi, Sis," drawled Leah. "You made us wait long enough!" She walked toward the girl, hand outstretched, then stopped with a gasp of disbelief. Tanya's red hair was still brilliant and gleaming, her creamy skin unlined and her full red lips curved up into a friendly smile as she leaned forward for a sisterly kiss. But Leah jerked away and glared with anger. A puzzled frown creased Tanya's lovely white forehead. "What's the matter, Leah? Aren't you glad to see me? You look so strange, as though you'd been terribly ill !" Leah shook her bead, tears of rage gathering in her pale eyes. "I'm okay," she whispered. "It's you. You haven't changed. I have. You're still young, you're pretty, you're just the way I used to be!" She whirled to face David, her voice choking. "What have you done to her. Dr. Wong?" The four men in the room were all staring at the sisters, scarcely believing what they saw, although they had all been prepared for the contrast. The twin sisters were no longer twins. One had retained her youth; the other was faded, aging. "This is awful," Haslam muttered. "Absolutely ghastly." He put a comforting hand on Leah's shoulder, and with a deep sob she hid her face against him and cried. Hudson and Faure could not take their eyes from Tanya, and David leaned against the wall to stop his trembling. "Sit down, all of you," he said. "First we'll have a drink. I'm sure we all need it. Then we'll face' -- what has to be faced." A N hour later, they had achieved a calmness, of sorts, They had given up some of their normal sobriety to achieve the calm, but they were grateful to the drug for cushioning the shock. David paced the floor, glass in hand, talking rapidly as he finished his long explanation. "So you see what happened," he said. "When I began the experiment, I had no idea how staggering the results might be. That is, I knew in my mind, but I never imagined the reaness of what would happen. I thought of it as just an experiment Leah sniffed, her resentment somewhat dulled by drink. "So I was just an experiment! Don't you ever think about people's feelings? I know I'm not as good as you are; I'm only Office, but I'm human." Karl patted her hand. "Of course you are, Leah. But that is one of the defects of people in Research -- they forget about human emotions," He looked up sternly at David. "They go ahead with their experiments, and hang the consequences. If Dr. Wong had had any sense, he would never have kept this a secret for ten years, and we might have had ten years to prepare ourselves for such a responsibility. Instead, we have only a few days or, at most, weeks. Hudson! Faure! How do you feel about this thing now? Are you still game?' Both men seemed a little dazed, but Faure pulled himself together, speaking slowly, like a man in a dream. "We're with you. It's still hard to believe: we've got immortality!"  "I'd hardly call it immortality," said Hudson drily, "since, kill disease entities, nor ward off bullets or the disintegrating nuclear shaft of the needier -- as we will very likely find out before very long. But what do we do now? When people see these two girls together, it won't be an, hour before Marley hears about it." David spoke up with a new authority. "He must not hear about it. I know how poorly equipped I am to handle this situation, but since I created it, I must assume responsibility, and I have made my plans. "First, you, Tanya. Try to realize that if the Leader finds out that I have this secret of keeping youth, he will want it for himself. Nobody in Menial, nobody in Office, nobody in Research -- almost nobody at all -- will be allowed to benefit from it. Marley will use it as a special reward for certain Rulers, and he will try to keep its very existence a secret so that people in general will not be envious or rebellious. That means that he will have to If get rid of you." "Get rid of me? But I haven't done any harm!" "Just by existing and letting people look at your unchanging youth, you will be a threat to him, for you will give away his secret. How he'll deal with you, I don't know. Concentration camp, exile, or more probably, simple execution on grounds of treason, such as unauthorized choices of activity or study. It doesn't matter, he'll find a way. The only safety for you is in keeping hidden. You must stay quietly in Leah's apartment until we can find a refuge for you. Do you see that?" She looked around in bewilderment. "Is that right, Dr. Haslam? And what will they think at the Institute? I'm supposed to go back to my job in Intercom." "Dr. Wong is right," he said kindly. "Please believe us. It's hard for you to understand that we are asking you to do something secret, but just try to remember that you are, after all, an Office Category and are not equipped by training or constitution to think out problems like this. We'll tell you what is the right thing to do. You just do as we tell you, and you'll be perfectly safe." Leah snickered. "Oh, shell be safe enough, being as pretty as she is! What are you going to do about me? Don't I count?" "We'll come to that in a few minutes. Right now, we need food. Leah, you and Tanya be good girls and go out to the kitchen and heat up some supper for us. After we've eaten, we'll talk about you." A S soon as the girls were out of the room, the four men drew together at the table. "No use burdening them with too much knowledge," Karl remarked. "Even as it is, they are a great danger to us, and the less they know the better. David, will you proceed?" "I have little to add to the plans we made last night at the lab. The thing we need most is time; and next to that, a hiding place. We may very soon be classed as traitors, with every watchguard on the continent hunting for us. We will take care that they don't find us. Now, you said last night that each one of you has accumulated a Free Choice during the past year, which hasn't yet been used." "That's right," said Faure. "I intended to use mine next winter to live among the Australian aborigines for a week. I've been wanting that for years, but the planners always refused me; it was a project without practical purpose." "And I intended to use mine to attempt a water-color painting," added Hudson. "In my boyhood I hoped to be put in Arts Category, but the Planners laughed at me. I suppose it's wrong, yet I still have the yen." "You have my sympathy," said Karl. "I was going to take an Aimless Tramp. Just shed my identity and wander on foot through the great north area of woods and Jakes." David sighed. "Well, if we are successful in hiding and in changing the world as we'd like, you can all three be free to do as you like without asking permission. But at present that's only the wildest of dreams. And, first, we must find our refuge. Today is Saturday. Tomorrow morning, each of you will go to BureauMed and claim your Free Choice. And each of you will choose an Aimless Tramp." "But I don't like hiking," objected Hudson. "You won't be hiking. You'll take off in your roboplanes and then disappear. You will be without supervision. You will then proceed, disguised as you think suitable, to find a place for our new colony -- somewhere in South America? -- and make preliminary arrangements to receive us. You must be back by Tuesday aftei noon at the latest. On Tuesday, as soon as you have reported back to BureauMed, get to the Institute as fast as you can." "Why the deadline?" "Because by Tuesday afternoon, sometime before evening, probably, I expect all three of you to be suffering from an attack of Blue Martian Fever, and I want you to get expert hospital care. You will be the nucleus of the new regime." Karl laughed. "I wish you could have picked a base for ant than Blue Martian." "Who's got Blue Martian?" asked Tanya, as the girls came in from the kitchen with their trays of food. "I'll never forget how sick it made me." " Y ou should worry," said Leah. "If kept you young and beautiful, didn't it?" "You won't have to envy her, Leah," said David going to the liquor cabinet. "I'm going to give you and the others a shot of the Tuesday afternoon you should feel the first symptoms. But after forty-eight hours in the hospital, you'll be good as new. And you will all stop growing older." They watched, fascinated, as he opened the cooling compartment of the liquor cupboard. "I always like plenty of ice in my drinks," he remarked, drawing out a tray of cubes and opening a small door behind the tray. He removed several small bottles at filled with a milky liquid, and a copper box of sterile needles and syringes. "Who'll be first?" There was a knock at the door, and David stopped. "What is it?" he called. "Me," came the watch guard's voice. "Just thought I'd do you  a favor and tell you it's only ten minutes till checkout time. Time to get yourselves decent!" They could hear the rumble of his laugh as he moved on down, the hall. Trembling, David picked up a bottle, poured alcohol onto the rubber cap, and deftly filled the sterile syringe. He reached for a piece of cotton, dipped it in iodine, and looked up, waiting. KlSfrl Haslam had already bared his left arm. David swabbed the spot on the upper deltoid. Karl laughed. "Here I come, Methuselah!" "All set?" asked David. He plunged the needle home. Institute, two at a time, and hurried toward his office through the echoing corridors, where the usual watchguard sauntered on patrol. "Morning, Jones." "Good morning, Doctor. Pretty early, aren't you?" "Wednesday's my busy day." He settled at his desk, miserably conscious of the open door and curious eyes behind him, opened his briefcase, then glanced at his wristwafch. More than an hour before his interview with Leader Marley. Spreading some data sheets before him, he looked at them blankly as he tried to order his thoughts. His eyes were ringed with dark depressions, for he had had no sleep. There had been so many things to plan for, so many arrangements to make. It was possible, of course, that this morning's talk would turn out to be mere routine. There might remain several weeks of freedom -- but there might be only a few hours. He shrank from the complexity of the problem before him; he was a Research man, devoted to his test tubes and his culture growths, and would have been happy never to face any problem beyond them. He had a moment's revulsion at the unfairness of the fact that a simple experiment in the lab, an addition to man's knowledge of the Universe, should have plunged him against his will into a situation far beyond his ability to handle. There had been, as Karl pointed out, the alternative Leader. That would have absolved him of all responsibility. But that was the trouble, he thought. Responsibility could not be confined to squiggles in his notebook, when those squiggles might affect the whole of society. "Dr. Wong!" He jumped and turned around hastily. "Leah! What in the world?" She stood in the doorway, glaring at him, breathing heavily as though she were trying to hold back sobs. Slowly she tottered to the desk and sank down into her chair by the stenograph. "You doublecrosser!" she whispered. He looked quickly at the doorway, but the guard had not come back. Leaning forward, he questioned her fiercely. "What are you doing here? They told me yesterday that several people had come down with attacks of Blue Martian, Why aren't you in the hospital with the others?" "Because I wasn't sick!" "But I gave you -- " "Imagine how I felt," she raced on, "watching Dr. Haslam start having a chill, hearing Dr. Faure complain about his awful headache, and listening to Dr. Hudson dial Intercom and call for a doctor. And all that time I was waiting, waiting for something to happen to me. And nothing did! What have you got against me, Dr. Wong, that you infect all the others and only pretend to do it to me? I don't want to grow old any more than they do!" "But I wasn't pretending. Quiet, now, and let me think," waited until the watchguard had passed by the door, then raised his head. "Look here, Leah. Evidently the infection didn't take. This is what must have happened. That treatment I gave you ten years ago must have made you permanently immune to Blue Martian, and the antibodies it formed in your cells simply protected you against this new invasion of the virus. It never occurred to me that the immunity would last so long. But don't worry. I'll find a way." She looked suspicious. "What do you mean?" "I mean that there's no reason why Blue Martian should be the only vehicle for giving you the that will work equally well. It's only a question of finding one." "And how long will that take you?" "How long does anything take in Research? Maybe a week, maybe a year." "And maybe ten! I can't wait. Dr. Wong. I'm thirty-five now; I'm growing older. What good will a long life do me, if it only preserves me as the middle-aged woman I'll be by then? And all those years that I'll be getting older and older, there'll be Tanya, lively and pretty, to remind me that I was once like that, too. I can't face it!" "The watchguard will hear you!" Haggard-faced, he watched her shaking shoulders, hearing her muffled sobs. "You're a criminal, Dr. Wong! It was a crime, what you did to Tanya and me." "I didn't realize in the beginning or I'd never have touched the thing. I know it now, even better than you do, but what can I do?" She looked up and wiped her eyes, her mouth set hard. "I know what I can do. I can report you to the Leader." "What good will that do? You know how terrible you feel now about being left out -- though I swear I never meant it to be like this. But just try to imagine. If you report me so that Leader then thousands of people will be put in just the same situation you are in. You're only one person suffering. But then there'd be Surely you wouldn't want to have that on your conscience?" "Do you think Fd care?" "You would when you felt calmer. You're wrought up, ill. Let me send you home. Promise me you'll go home quietly, talk it over with Tanya, and not say anything to anyone else. I'll think of a way out for you. Just be patient." "Patient!" He thought of calling Karl Haslam. Karl would know best how to deal with her, how to bring her back to reason. He reached toward the intercom, then dropped his hand in despair. Karl was in the hospital, with Fauree and Hudson, shivering with the cold of Blue Martian fever. But he had to get her away. He pressed the intercom dial. "Dr. Wong speaking. Miss Hachovnik is ill and is being sent home. Please send an aircab for her at once." He helped Leah to her feet, and spoke pleadingly. "Promise you'll be good, Leah?" The fury in her eyes nearly knocked him down. Without a word, without a gesture, she walked out. been put through a wringer as he followed Officer Magnun into the Leader's suite at State House. Several nights of sleeplessness, the worries of planning for a refuge, and the scene with Leah had left him limp and spiritless. The girl was a danger, he knew, but she was only one of many. He nodded at Dr. Lanza, who was busy reading reports from BureauMed, and saluted Leader Marley, who was talking with a watch guard. Marley looked up briefly. "Sit down, Wong." David folded himself into a chair, grateful for a few moments in which to collect himself, while Marley gave the last of his orders. "Put them in the Vermont granite quarries, and keep them at work for the next year." "As you say, Leader. With the usual secrecy, of course?" "No, you blockhead! These are a bunch of nobodies. Use all the , publicity you can get. Keep a punishment a secret and how can it have any effect on other people? No, I want full radio and news coverage and telecast showings as they swing the first pick at the first rocks. People have got to realize that the Leader knows best, that treason doesn't pay. No matter how clever they think they are, they'll always get caught. Understand?" "As you say, Leader." "Then get going." As the guard left the room, Leader JVfarley turned to David. "What fools people are !" He ran his beefy hands through a shock of black hair, blinked his eyes, and wrinkled the heavy black brows that met over his nose. Wonderingly, he shook his massive head as he drew his gleaming needier from his breast pocket and played with it, tossing it from hand to hand while he talked.  "Fm probably the most generous Leader the State has had since the Atomic Wars, Wong, and I never withhold a privilege from someone who has deserved it. But people mistake me when they think that I am weak and will overlook treason." "Your generosity is a byword, Leader Marley," said Wong. "But some people are incapable of acting for their best interests even when you have defined it for them. Who are these latest traitors?" "Oh, nobody really important, of course, except as they waste time which they owe to the State. Just attempts at illegal study. An Office Category who had found # a basement room in a deserted building and was spending all his evening hours there practicing the violin. A Theater man who was illegally trying to learn carpentry. And a teacher of mathematics who had forged a key to the Linguistics library, and had been getting in every night to study a dead language -- Cuneiform, Latin, something like that, utterly without practical value. This last one is an old man, too, and ought to have known better. People must be made to realize that if they want the privilege of useless study, they will have to earn it. And I am very broadminded in such cases." "Nobody has better reason to know that than I, Leader Marley, and I am always grateful to you." Marley coughed and straightened the jacket over his bearlike chest as he put back his needier. "Now to business. Where's that memorandum, Lanza?" Dr. Lanza handed him the paper, then sat down beside the Leader. "First. When Dr. Lanza called on you last week, he found the door to your office locked. What explanation do you have?" David smiled and spread his hands. "My explanation is the generosity of Leader Marley. You have so many affairs to occupy your attention that it is not surprising that you do not remember rewarding me with a Free Choice some years ago, for my work on Martian Blue. I chose, as I am sure you remember now, an occasional hour of Privacy." The Leader blinked. "That's right. I had forgotten. Well, the Leader never goes back on his word. Though why in the name of Marley you fellows want a crazy thing like that is beyond me. What do you do, behind a locked door, that you don't want anyone to see?" "Do you doubt my loyalty, Leader Marley?" "I doubt everything. What do you want with Privacy?" Lanza broke in amiably. "I'm afraid we just have to accept such wishes as one of the harmless abnormalities of the Research mind, Leader. Since I grew up in that Category, I understand it to some extent." "You're right in calling it abnormal. I think perhaps I'd better remove that from the possible Choices in the future. It could easily be misused, and it never did make any sense to me. "Well, second. It's been more than three years since you reported any progress with the problem of White Martian Fever, Wong. What is your explanation?" "Research is not always swift, Leader." "But I distinctly ordered you to find an immunizing agent within three years. Our colonies on Mars cannot wait forever. I've been patient with you, but you've had more than enough time." "I am very sorry, Leader Marley. I have done my best and so have my colleagues. But the problem is complex. If I may explain, we had to find a suitable culture medium for growing the virus, and then we had to work at the problem of coupling it with suitable haptens -- " Impatiently, Marley waved his hand. "You know I don't understand your jargon. That's not my business, what troubles you've had. I want results. You got results on Blue Martian quickly enough." "We were fortunate. But when we storm the citadel of knowledge, Leader Marley, no one can predict how long it will take for the citadel to fall." "Nonsense! I'm warning you, Wong, yeu're failing in your duty to the State, and you can't escape the consequences with poetic doubletalk. I allow special privileges to you people in Research and I expect a proper appreciation in return. When I order you to produce a protection for White Martian, I want results!" "But you can't get a thing like that just by asking for it. Such things are simply not under your control." "Watch yourself, Wong! Your remarks are dangerously dose to treason !" "Is it treason to tell you a plain fact?" Stony-faced, David stared defiantly at Marley, trying to control the trembling of his body. If he had had a needier at that instant, he realized incredulously, he would have shot the Leader and thought his own life a small price to pay for such a pleasure. Lanza coughed. "Pm afraid Dr. Wong is not well, Leader. Worrying over the slowness of his work has distorted his reactions. But I am sure that you will understand, as you always do, and be indulgent." "i'll overlook your remarks, Wong," said Marley, relaxing. "But you'd better change your attitude. You Research people cause me more trouble than any other three Categories put together. Sometimes I wonder if a spell in the granite quarries mightn't -- "  A light flashed on his desk... He watched the blinking code for a second, then roe abruptly and left the room. The two men sat in silence. David glanced at Lanza, and Lanza shifted in his chair. "Thanks for the good word," said David we rally. "How do you like being a Rider, by the way? When we were at Med school together, I thought you were a man with ideas." "When I was at Medschool I didn't know what was good for me," Lanza replied stiffly. "And you think you do now?" A slow flush crept over Lanza's face. "Look here, Wong! Each man has to make his own terms with himself. Don't act so smug! You shut yourself away inside the nice white walls of your laboratory and ignore all the conflicts of life. You shut your ears and your eyes, live in perfect harmony with your test tubes, and let the world go hang. Well, that isn't my way." "Your way, apparently, is to worm yourself into the confidence of that steel-hearted imbecile who rules our lives and our thoughts, and spend twenty-four hours a day saying, 'Yes, Yes,' and waiting for him to die so you can step into his shoes!" "We're alone," Said Lanza. "I won't report you. But I have no intention of justifying myself. Have you any idea why you've been let alone for so long? You haven't produced anything tangible in several years. Haven't you ever wondered why no one put on the pressure? Haven't -- " He broke off as Marley lumbered back into the room and fell into a chair. The Leader's manner had altered. He stared at David with grim inquiry, the  beady eyes traveling slowly over him, taking in his rumpled hair, his strained face, the rigid set of his shoulders. At last Marley spoke, his voice soft with menace. "You're looking well, Dr. Wong. Remarkably well. In fact, it occurs to me that you don't seem to have aged a bit since my last visit to your laboratory. Tell me, how do you keep your youth?" blood through his body, feel the thud of his racing heart. He kept his voice low so that it would not tremble. "Thank you, Leader Marley, for your kindness in noticing my appearance. I suppose I chose my parents well. They both lived to be over ninety, you know." "This is no joking matter. I've just had a report. An epidemic of Blue Martian fever has broken out among the people of your Institute. Why have you not mentioned it?" "If you will forgive me, Leader Marley, I've had no chance. I reported it in the usual manner to the health authorities, and have here in my briefcase a memorandum which I hoped to bring to your attention, among several other matters, when you had finished giving your instructions to me." Marley continued implacably, "And how did this epidemic begin? It was my understanding that ho insect existed here on Earth that could transmit the virus. Yet several people from your lab came down with the disease on the same day. What is your explanation?" "It's very simple. To prepare the vaccine, as I am sure you wall remember from your last visit to us, we have to keep in the lab a limited number of the Fafli, the Martian insects which act as hosts at one stage of the viruses life. Last week a Menial carelessly knocked over one of the cages and several Fafli escaped. The Menial was discharged, of course, and put in Punishment, but the damage had already been done." "You have a very ready explanation." "Would you rather I had none at all. Leader Marley?" "Well, let that go." Marley drummed his plump fingers on the desk as he continued. "There Wfas another report for me just now. A report so wild, so incredible, so staggering that I can scarcely bring myself to take it seriously. From an Office Category at the Institute." David's heart beat wildly, but he forced a smile to his lips. "Oh, yes. You must mean Miss Hachovnik. I've been worried about ; that poor girl for some time." "What do you mean, 'poor girl'?" "It's very distressing to me, because she has been a good and loyal worker for many years. But she is becoming unstable. She has a tendency to burst into tears over nothing, is sometimes hysterical, seems to have secret grievances, and is extremely jealous of all women whom she considers more attractive. She was never too bright, to be sure, but until recently she has done her ork well, so I've hated to take any action. Just this morning I had to send her home because she was ill." "Do you mean to say," asked Msyrley, "that none of her story is true?" "I don't know. What is her story?" "She reports that you have been working on a private project of your own, instead of on White Martian. That you have discovered a way to make people iminortal, by infecting them with Blue Martian. What is your explanation?" David only stared, his mind so blurred with panic that he could not speak. His stunned silence was broken by a laugh. It was Dr. Lanza, leaning backward in his chair, holding himself over the stomach as he shook his head. "These hysterical women!" His laughter trailed off to a commiserating chuckle. "You're too forbearing, Wong. You shouldn't keep a worker who's so far gone. Take a leaf from Leader Marley's book and remember: Kindness is often weakness; when it is necessary for the good of the State, be harsh!" "I hardly know what to say," said David. "I had no idea she'd gone so far." "Then there's no truth in it?" Mariey persisted. "What she says is impossible?" "Well," said David judiciously, "we people in Research have learned not to call anything impossible, but this dream of immortality is as old as the human race. We have a thousand legends about it, including the story of the Phoenix, that fabulous bird which, when consumed by fire, rose triumphant from its own ashes to begin life anew. A pretty story, of course. But I need only put it to a mind as logical as yours, Leader Mariey. Throughout all the millenia of mail's existence, the Sun has always risen each morning in the east, and thus we know that it always will. That is the order of nature. Likewise, from the earliest generations of man, no individual has ever lived longer than a hundred and some years, and thus we know that he never will. That is the order of Nature and we can't alter SO it to the best of my knowledge." Leader Marley was thoughtful. He touched the intercom. "Send in Officer Magnum" David held his breath. "Magnun, Office Category Hachovnik is to be taken from her home at once and put in indefinite Psycho-detention.' Marley stood up. "Very well. Dr. Wong. You may go. But I shall suspend your privilege of Privacy, at least until after you have devised a protection against White Martian. It isnot wise to disregard the wishes of the Leader. Lanza, show him out." At the street door, they paused. Lanza looked at David speculatively. "You do keep your youth well, David." "Some people do." "I remember that legend of the Phoenix. What do you suppose the Phoenix did with his new life, once he'd risen from the ashes of his old self?" "I'm no philosopher." "Neither am I. But you and I both know that the principle of induction was exploded centuries ago. It's true that the Sun has always risen in the east. But is there anything to keep it, someday, from rising in the west?" his desk. Through the open door behind him, he could hear the watch guard slowly pacing the dimly lit corridor. He could feel time pressing at his back. He was reprieved, he knew, but for how long? He got up, at one point, when the corridor behind him was quiet, and went to the bookcase. He pressed the brass handle, saw the shelves silently swing away from the wall, then set it back again. The mechanism, installed a century ago by a cautious politician, was still in good order. Back at his desk, he thought of Leah and her lost youth, lost because of his own impersonal attitude. He felt sorry for her, but there was nothing he could do for her now. It was a relief to know that Tanya, at least, remained hidden and secure in her sister's apartment. It was after midnight before he closed his notebook and locked it away in the top drawer. His plans were completed. There would not be time given him, he knew, to finish his work on White Martian. That would have to be dropped, and resumed at some more favorable time in the future -- if there was a future for him. But he would begin at once to produce in quantity a supply of was sure that the untrained guards who watched his movements would never realize that he had shifted to another project. With a brief good night to the guard, he left the building to walk home. His shoulders were straight, his stride confident, and he disdained looking behind him to see if anyone was following. He had made his terms with himself, and only death, which he would certainly try to prevent, could alter his plans. Going into his apartment he wearily turned on the light. Then he froze, feeling as though he had been clubbed. Leah Hachovnik was huddled at one end of the sofa, her face dripping tears. "I thought you'd never come," she whispered. He slumped down beside her. "How did you get here, Leah? I thought you were -- " hid in your hallway until the watchguard was at the other end. When his back was turned, I just took off my shoes and slipped in. I've been waiting for hours." Her voice was almost inaudible, spent beyond emotion. "They got Tanya," she said dully. "They took her away." "What happened? Quick!" "After I reported to BureauMed -- I'm sorry I did that, Dr. Wong, but I just couldn't help myself. I didn't tell them about Tanya and the others, just about you. Then I walked around for hours, hating you, hating Tanya, hating everybody. Finally I got .so tired that I went home. Just as I got into the hall, I heard a loud knock and I saw Officer Magnun at my door. When Tanya opened it, he simply said, 'Office Category Hachovnik?' When she nodded her head, he said, 'You're under detention.' She screamed and she fought, but he took her away. Since then, I've been hiding. I'm afraid." David tried to think. He remembered that he had said only "Miss Hachovnik" in his talk with the Leader. Had Marley never known that there was more than one? But Lanza surely knew. Or had he merely assumed that Magnun would ask for Leah? Would they realize, at Psycho detention, that they had the wrong woman? Probably not, for she would be hysterical with terror, and her very youth and beauty taken in connection with the "jealousy and envy of younger women" which was noted in her commitment order, would seem to confirm her madness. He was stilt safe, for a while -- if he could keep Leah away from the Institute. "I'm afraid," she whimpered. "Don't let them put me away." "Then you'll have to do exactly as I tell you. Can you follow orders exactly?" "Yes, yes!" "I'll have to hide you here. We can fix up my library as a room for you. It's the only room I can keep locked, and which my Menial never enters in my absence. Whatever happens, Leah  -- no matter what happens -- keep yourself hidden. More than your life depends on that." returned from the hospital, pale and shaky, David summoned them to his office. At the door, Watch guard Jones looked them over. "Say, that Blue Martian fever sure does take it out of you. You fellows look like you've been plenty sick!" "They have been," said David. "Let them by so they can sit down and rest." Jones moved aside, but he lounged in the doorway, listening. David ignored him. "Glad to see you back, gentlemen. I'll make this brief. You have been the victims of a laboratory accident just as much as if you'd been contaminated with radiation. Our Leader Marley, who understands the problems of all Categories, has very generously consented to grant you a two weeks' convalescence, in addition to a Free Choice. Take a few minutes to think over your decision." He strolled over to the window and looked out at the green of the trees just bursting into leaf. Then, as if on impulse, he turned back. "While you're thinking it over, will you look at these protocols? We discussed them before you got sick, you remember -- a plan to prevent an epidemic of Blue Martian. Do you approve of the final form? I'd like to carry on, and after all," he added with an ironic smile, "it's getting later than we might think." He handed each man a sheet of paper whose contents were identical. They studied them. Karl Haslam was the first to speak. "You think, then, that other cases of Blue Martian may develop?" "It is certainly probable. Those Fafli insects were never caught." Karl looked back at his paper. It contained a list of names, some of which were well known to all the country, some of them obscure. Thoughtfully, he nodded as he ran down the list. Hudson glanced up, frowning, his finger pointed at one name. "I don't know," he said slowly, "that this particular experiment would prove useful. Surely the Lanza method has not proved to be as effective as we once hoped." "You may be right. But there's the bare possibility that the modified Lanza method might be of enormous benefit to us." "It is uncertain. Too much of a risk. Tat's my opinion." "Then I'll reconsider. The rest has your approval? Very well. And now what choice have you made for your holiday?" "I think we are all agreed," said Karl soberly. "We'll have an Aimless Tramp." "An excellent idea," approved David. "Oh, Jones, will you get an aircab to take the doctors to Bureau Med, and then arrange for their Roboplanes to be serviced and ready in an hour?" "I don't know as I ought to leave my post," said Jones. "You'd rather stay with us and perhaps be exposed to the Fever?" "Okay, okay!" When his footsteps had died away, David leaned forward. "We've done our best. Another month or so and we should be completely ready for our retirement act." "If we have a month," said Faure. David grinned. "Well, if our time runs out, at least we'll go down fighting. You know all your lines, your props are ready, the plot is worked out, and we can slip into our makeup in an instant -- provided the audience shows up." "You're getting to be quite a joker, David," said Karl. "What if the audiepce comes around to the stage door?" Then we'll try to receive him properly. Our Leader is a man of iron, but I doubt that he's immortal." They heard the approaching guard. "I'm sure you'll benefit from your holiday," David went on. "That last .checkup showed an antibody titer entirely too high for safety." "In other words, it's time for us to get going?" asked Karl, smiling. "That's right. Only the next time the antibody curve rises, it will be for keeps." ported that Judge Brinton, the well-known champion of Category rights, was ill with Blue Martian fever. Three little-known nuclear physicists living in the same apartment in Oak Ridge developed symptoms on the same day. Sporadic cases of Blue Martian flared up all over the continent. Occasionally a whole family was affected -- husband, wife, and all the children. There was a serious one at the School of Social Structure, and at Harvard Medical School nearly a third of the senior class, and they the at the same time. Rumors blanketed the country like a fog, and people everywhere became uneasy. There were no deaths from the illness, but the very idea that an infectious disease could flare up unpredictably all over the nation, out of control, was frightening. It was said that the disease had been beamed to Earth by alien enemies from space; that all its victims became sterile; or that their minds were permanently damaged. It was also said, though people laughed even as they repeated the rumor, that if you once had Blue Martian Fever you'd become immortal. This particular theory had been clearly traced to the tavings of a red-haired madwoman who was confined to Fsychodetention, but still it was too ridiculous not to repeat. For a week, comedians rang a hundred changes on the basic joke: Wife: Drop dead! Husband: I can't. I've had Blue Martian. The unrest became so great that Leader Maiiey himself appeared on the telecaster to reassure the nation. He was an impressive figure on the lighted screen, resting solid and at ease in a leather chair, raising his massive black head, lifting his big hand to gesture as his rich voice rolled out. "You have nothing to fear," he said. "Under your beneficent Leaders, infectious disease has been wiped out many years ago. BureauMed informs me that these scattered cases of Blue Martian fever have been caused by the escape of a few Fafli insects, which have, since then, been isolated and destroyed. The illness has no serious after-effects. And as for the rumors that it confers immortality -- " He allowed his face to break into a pitying smile as he slowly shook his head, looking regretful and et somehow amused. "Those who continue to spread gossip about the fever will only reveal themselves as either psychotics or traitors. Whichever they are, they will be isolated for the good of our society." The effect of his words w'as somewhat diminished by the brief glimpse people had of Dr. Lanza, who reached a hand to help the Leader rise. For Dr. Lanza wore an anxious frown, and his face was thin with worry. In spite of numerous arrests, the rumors continued. For two weeks sporadic outbreaks of the fever occurred, and then, abruptly, they ceased. TT was more than a week after  the last case had been reported that David sat in his basement laboratory beside the opened mouse cage, watching with wry affection as the furry creatures crawled over his hand. These were historic mice, he reflected,  opened up a new world, a world which he must somehow help to make better than the present one. His three colleagues had returned a few days ago from their holiday. They had calmly come back to work, and apparently nobody had thought to put two and two together, and thus connect the epidemic with the vacationers. It had been unfortunate that Tanya should have been put under arrest; it was difficult trying to find amusement for Leah so that she would keep out of sight, but still, on the whole, the,ir luck had been good. But it was time for David to go back to work in his office. Gently he detached the mice from his hand, dropped them into their cage, and closed the wire trap. He took his leather pencil case and the keys to his desk from the pocket of his lab coat and laid them on the desk, below the nail on which his wristwatch hung. Carelessly he dropped his lab coat onto the desk and reached for his jacket, then paused, listening. The chatter in the technicians' room suddenly died. In the unnatural quiet sounded a steady march of feet. David turned to meet the probing black eyes of Leader Marley. Just behind him were Dr. Lanza and Officer Magnun. There was no time to conceal his mice, David realized. Shrugging into his jacket, he strode forward without hesitation, a smile on his face, and stretched out his hand. "Leader Marley! This is indeed an honor. If you had only notified us of your visit, we should have been prepared." "Young as ever, I see, Wong.' "Thank you. Leader." There was no banter in Marley's eyes, he noted, but he continued amiably. "It has been some years since you have honored us by a visit in person. I'm afraid a laboratory is not a very exciting place, but I'd be honored to show you anything that may be of interest to you." A faint contempt curled Marley's mouth as he glanced around the room. "Nothing to see ihat I haven't seen before, is there? A lot of test tubes, a bunch of flasks, a mess of apparatus you'd think had been dreamed up by an idiot, and a bad smell. You still keep animals f I notice." He sauntered over to the bench, picked up the cage and looked at the scurrying rodents. David scarcely breathed. Marley only nodded. "Well, mice are mice." He put down the cage and turned away. "These look just like the ones I saw when I was here eight or ten years ago. Same white patch on the forelimbs. I never knew mice could live that long." "But -- " began Lanza, bending over to study the mice. "What an amazing memory you have. Leader," said David. "Just as you guessed, these mice are the direct descendants of the ones you saw on your former visit, a special mutant strain. The chief difference is that these are marked with white patches on the right forelimbs, while, as I am sure you recall, the original specimens were marked on the leit forelimbs. Odd how these marks run in families, isn't it?" Lanza put down the cage and strolled toward the door as Marley took a last bored look around. "Nothing new here that I ought to see, Lanza?" "No. Nothing new." "Well, I've no time to waste. I've come here for two reasons, Dr. Wong. We both want a booster shot for Blue Martian. Ten years is a long time, and there's been this epidemic." "Which is now under control." "That may be, but I still want a booster. You Research people don't always know as much as you think you do. When that's done, I want a detailed report of your progress on White Martian." "I shall be hapy to give it," said David. "If you will go directly to my office. I'll pick up the vaccine and syringes, and be with you in a few minutes." Marley and Officer Magnun marched to the door, and David followed, standing aside to let Lanza precede him. Lanza hesitated there, staring at the floor. Then he smiled and looked directly at David. "Beautiful spring weather we are having. I'm wondering about the marvelous order of nature. Did you happen to notice, this morning, whether the Sun did actually rise in the east?" David stared at the retreating back. There was no longer any doubt ,in his mind. Lanza knew. What was he going to do? "Hurry up, Doctor," said Officer Magnun from the doorway. "Right away." He opened the refrigerator and inspected the two groups of red-capped vials sitting on the shelf. He had no time to think, no time to weigh pros and cons; he could only act. Choosing two vials, he added them to the sterile kit from the autoclave, and took a last look around. He noticed his watch still hanging on the wall, and the lab coat which covered his leather pencil case. He started to take them, then slowly dropped his hand and touched the intercom. "Get me Dr. Karl Haslam." "You're keeping the Leader waiting," said Magnun, but David paid no attention. "Dr. Haslam? Dr. Wong speaking. I may be a little late getting up to see those precipitates of yours. But you keep them simmering, just in case. It's very probable that the antibody curve will rise... Yes, I'll let you know if I can." Magnun followed him to the office, then strolled away for a chat with Watchguard Jones. David put his things on his desk and made his preparations in businesslike fashion while Marley and Lanza glanced curiously around the office. He watched apprehensively as Marley inspected the bookcase, then turned away. "I never could understand why Research needs so many books," he remarked. I "Please roll up your sleeve, Leader Marley. I'm ready for you now." Deftly he assembled the syringe, filled it to the two centimeter mark, and scrubbed the arm presented to him. "Ready?" He ihserted the needle and slowly expelled the fluid. Then, taking a fresh syringe, he repeated the operation, "Why do those bottles have different numbers?" asked Marley. "Aren't we getting the same thing?" "Certainly. Just lab routine, to we can keep track of how II many units have been used from our stock. There, that does it, Lanza. Both of you will be perfectly safe for a good many years to come." He was washing his hands at the sink when he heard a struggle at the door. Turning, he saw Leah, thin, gaunt and terrified, held fast in the grip of Officer Magnun, who forced her inside and slammed the door behind them.  "What's the meaning of this intrusion?" demanded Marley. "There's some funny business going on, Leader," said Magnun. "I caught this woman trying to sneak in here. She says she's Miss Hachovnik and she works here. Only she ain't. I arrested Miss Hachovnik myself, and I remember well enough what she looked like. She was a cute chick, not a bit like this dame." Marley was staring at the sobbing girl, eyes blinking as he thought, looked back, remembered. Slowly his eyes shifted to David, and David felt like a man impaled. "You may leave, Magnun," said the Leader. "You don't want me to arrest this woman?" "Let go of her! I said you may leave!" "As you say. Leader." When the door closed, the room throbbed to Leah's sobs. "I couldn't help it, Dr. Wong," she cried. "I got so bored, sitting and looking at those books, day after day, with nothing to do! I thought I'd just slip down here for an hour and say hello to people, and -- " "Quiet, Hachovnik!" roared Marley. He quieted his voice. "I understand now, Wong. I remember. There were two girls. Twins. The one in Psychodetention, according to Officer Magnun, is still beautiful and young. It's no use, Wong. You do know the secret of immortality. And you told me the Phoenix was only a fairy tale!" Whatever might happen now, at least the suspense was over. He had done all he could, and it was a relief to have things in the open. He thought fleetingly of his colleagues, alerted by his message, frantically putting their plans into operation, but he leaned back against the sink with every appearance of ease. "You're not quite right, Leader Marley. I cannot confer immortality. All I am able to do is stave off the aging process." "That will do me nicely. And it's connected somehow with the Blue Martian virus?" "Yes. The disease serves as the vehicle." With a brisk motion, Marley drew his needier from his breast pocket and aimed it steadily at David. "Give it to me" "You're rather ambiguous," said David. How were his friends getting along? Were they ready yet? Had Karl visited the basement lab? "Do you mean you want me to give you the injection to prolong your life, or the secret of how to do it, or what?" "Don't quibble! First you'll give me the injection to make me immortal. Then you'll turn over to me all your notes on procedure. Then my friend here will needle you with a shaft of electrons and end your interest in the problem." "Surely you won't keep such a good thing all for yourself," said David. "What about Dr. Lanza? He's your right-hand man. Don't you want him to live forever, too? What about Officer Magnun? He's a faithful servant." "You're stalling, Wong. Do you want me to kill you now?" "It won't be wise to needle me yet, Leader Marley. The secret would be lost forever." "I'll have your notes!" "Yes? Try to read them. They're written in Coptic, a dead language that you consider it a waste of time to learn, because such knowledge is impractical. There aren't half a dozen men on Earth who could make head or tail of my notebook," "Then I'll find that half-dozen! I want the injection," He gestured with the gleaming weapon. "This is once when I have no Free Choice," said David, "Very well." He started toward the door, but halted at the roar of command. "Stop! Do you think I'm fool enough to let you out of my sight?" "But I have to get the inoculant." "Use the intercom. Send for it." David slumped into the chair and opened the intercom. He could almost feel the electronic shaft of the needier ripping into his body. His heart beat wildly, aittl the tension of adrenalin ran through his body. His lips felt cold, but he held them steady as he spoke into the dial. "Get me Dr. Haslam... Karl? David Wong speaking. Will you send someone up with a vial of phoenix special? The precipitates? I should say the antibody titer has reached the danger point. Don't delay treatment any longer." Silently tby waited. Marley's grim face did not relax; his eyes were alight. Leah lay back in her chair with closed eyes, and Lanza stared intently at the floor. A soft knock came at the door, and a female technician hurried in, carrying a tray. "I'm sorry to be so slow, Dr. Wong. Dr. Haslam had a little trouble locating the right vial. Oh, and he said to tell you not to worry about those precipitates. They're taken care of." "Just a minute," said David. "Leader Marley, Miss Hachovnik here is very ill. Won't you let this girl help her to the rest room? She'll be safe there until you're ready for her." Marley looked at the halffainting woman. "All right. You take her there, Lanza, and this girl too. Lock them in. And she's not to talk. Do you understand? She's not to talk!" "As you say, Leader Marley," the technician whispered. She helped Leah to her feet, and Lanza followed them from the room. Marley closed the door and locked it. "Now, then, Wong, give me that shot, and heaven help you if you try any tricks!" "Will you bare your arm while I prepare the syringe?" Awkwardly hanging onto the needier, Marley tugged at his sleeve while David calmly picked up a bottle of colorless liquid and filled his syringe. He turned to the Leader, swabbed his arm, then picked up the syringe. "There you are," said David. Jerking the syringe upward, he forced a thin jet of pure alcohol into the man's eyes. Marley screamed. Agonizing pain blinded him, and as he clutched at his eyes, David snatched the needier from the writhing fingers, and flashed the electronic dagger straight to the heart. He stared at the twitching body for only an instant. People were pounding on the door, shouting. He tugged at the desk drawer to get his notebook, then remembered sickly that he had left his keys in the lab. He would have to leave his notes. The shouts were growing louder, people were battering the door. Swiftly he moved to the bookcase, swung it away from the wall, and dropped into darkness. He brought the bookcase back, then turned and ran along the black passageway, at State House, conferring with his subordinates. "It hardly seems possible, Magnun, that so many people could have slipped through your fingers without help from the Military. You say both the Hachovnik twins have disappeared?" "Yes, Leader." "And how many people from the Institute?" "Six, Leader. But it didn't do them any good. We got them, all right." "But you found no bodies!" "They wouldn't have bodies after we got through with them. Leader." "You're quite certain. Officer Magnun, that all the fugitives were destroyed?" Lanza looked tired, and his officers noticed in him a lack of firmness, an indecision, to which they were not accustomed in a Leader, "Say, those babies never had a chance. Leader. We picked up their roboplanes somewhere over Kansas, and we shot them out of the air like ducks. They didn't even fire back. They just crashed", burned, disintegrated. They won't give you any more, trouble. Why, we even picked up the remains of Doc Wong's wristwatch and that old beat-up pencil case of his." He flung them on the desk. Lanza fingered the charred and molten relics. "That will do, Magnun. I'll call you when I need you," "Say, ain't you feeling well. Leader? You look kind of green." "That will be all, Magnun!" "As you say, Leader." Lanza shoved aside the charred remnants and spread out the papers waiting for him, the unimportant, miscellaneous notes accumulated over the years by Hudson, Faure, and Haslam. And the unreadable notebook of David Wong. He sighed and looked up as his secretary entered. "I'm sorry to disturb you, Leader. You look tired." "The funeral this morning was quite an ordeal, and so much has happened the last three days!" "Wll, I thought you ought to know that strange reports are coming in. Some of our most prominent citizens have disappeared. We're trying to trace them, of course, but -- " "Anything more?" "Those rumors about Blue Martian are cropping up again." G A I A X' "Yes? And -- ?" "That old man you asked me to bring from the Vermont quarries, the one who was detained for illegal study of the Coptic language? Well, I guess the excitement of his release was too much for him. He died of a heart attack when he was being taken to the plane." Lanza sighed. "Very welt, that will be all." Alone at last, he looked sadly through the pages of David's notebook, at the tantalizing curls and angles of the Coptic letters, cryptic symbols of a discovery which prevented a man from growing old. Well, no one could read them now. That secret was dead, along with its discoverer, because, in this world, no study was permitted without a practical end in view. And perhaps it was just as well. Could any man be trusted, he wondered, to deal wisely with a power so great? After closing the notebook, he dropped his head into his hands. How his head ached! He felt cold, suddenly, and his whole body began to shake with a hard chill. He lifted his head, his vision blurred, and suddenly he knew. He had Blue Martian fever! Teeth chattering, he paced wildly about the room, puzzling things out, trying to remember. That booster shot! And then he Van Vogt... Keller and Derleth An Anthology of Science Fiction by A. E. Van Vogt  Ten short stories and novelettes by a sciencefiction ties of the universe, of worlds beyond worlds, the frontiers of space -- tales to '  terrify and startle. # pairs, # A collection of If i best fantastic itarlat by David H. Keller  Here are # of the best fantastic short stories of Dr. David H. Keller, Includes three groups of I tales: nine in science-fiction, six weird -- # fiction, and eight which spring from Dr. Keller's long professional life as a psy;.ys # chlatrist. # pages, # Edited by August Dedeth  A ghostly company of supernatural tales -- including that rare horror novel, H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and an Algernon Blackwood story appearing here for the first time. # paes,  #  #I E. #th St., New York # I'lease said me lliu lmh.s whose numbers I have  circled below for # days' free examination: #-#  At the end of # days I agree to send check or , money Older to cover tha price Of t lie liooks I plus postage, or return them postpaid, (We ;j pay postage on orders aocomuanied by remit, lance. Same return privilege.  Name II City -- Zone Stale I realized the amazing truth: David Wong had given him a chance! He had inoculated him with the seeds of immortality, giving him a chance to help right the wrongs of this Categorized world. And now he was left alone in a world of mortals. David and the others had been annihilated, and he was left to live on and on, alone. He staggered toward his private apartments, then sank into his chair as his secretary once again ran into the room. With a supreme effort he controlled his trembling. "Yes?" "Leader Lanza. Another report." 'Must a minute," said Lanza, trying to bring his eyes into focus on the excited girl. "I am in need of a rest. As soon as you have gone, I shall retire into seclusion for a few days. There are to be no interruptions. Is that clear? Now, proceed." "There's a new epidemic of Martian Fever reported where one never was before." He stirred tiredly. "Where now?" "South America. Somewhere in the Andes." "I think we'll have just one Category after this," said Lanza dreamily. "Category Phoenix." "What did you say, Leader?" His thoughts wandered. No wonder Magnun's men found no bodies. The planes they shot down were roboplanes, after all, and it was easy to plant in. an empty seat a man's wrist watch and his bulky leather pencil case. David and the others were safe now. They were free and had enough time to plan for the new free world. "What did you say. Leader?" the girl repeated, bewildered. "Nothing. It doesn't matter." He frowned painfully, and then shrugged. "On second thought, I may be away longer than a week. If anyone asks for me, say I'm on an Aimless Tramp. I've always hoped that some day I might earn the right to a P'ree Choice." "But you're the Leader," the girl said in astonishment. "You're entitled to all the Free Choices you want!" He lifted his twitching head, smiling wanly. "It would seem that way, wouldn't it? Well, whether I am or not, I think I've really earned a Free Choice. I wonder," he said in a wistful voice, "whether the climate in the Andes is hospitable." f.  Naturally, any sick person should he given medical help, even if he's from space. But what if he could not ever have been alive? hung up to talk with Dak-whirr. He blinked his eyes iri some discomfort. "What do you want, Palil?" he asked complainingly. "As if you didn't know." "I can't give you permission to examine it. The thing is being saved for inspection by the board. What guarantee do I have that you won't spoil it for them?" I thrust confidentially at one of his body-plates. "Yoiowe me a favor," I said. "Remember?" "That was a long time in the past." "Only two thousand revolutions and a reassembly ago. If it wasn't for me, you'd be eroding in a pit. All I want is a quick look at its thinking part. I'll vrull the consciousness without laying a single pair of pliers on it." He went into a feedback twitch, an indication of the conflict between his debt to me and his selfconceived duty. Finally he said, "Very well, but keep tuned to me. If I warn that a board member is coming, remove yourself quickly. Anyway how do you know it has consciousness? It may be mere primal metal." "In that form? Don't be foolish. It's obviously a manufacture. And I'm not conceited enough to behave that we are the only form of intelligent manufacture in the Universe." "Tautologous phrasing, Palil," Dak-whirr said pedantically. "There could not conceivably be 'unintelligent manufacture.' There can be no consciousness without manufacture, and no manufacture without intelligence. Therefore there can be no consciousness without intelligence. Now if you should wish to dispute -- " I tuned off his frequency abruptly and hurried away. Dakwhirr is a fool and a bore. Everyone knows there's a fault in his logic circuit, but he refuses to have it traced down and repaired. Very unintelligent of him. T I "HE thing had been taken into one of the museum sheds by the carriers. I gazed at it in admiration for some moments. It was quite beautiful, having suffered only slight exterior damage, and it was obviously no mere conglomeration of sky metal. In fact, I immediately thought of it as "he" and endowed it with the attributes of self-knowing, although, of course, his consciousness could not be functioning or he would have attempted communication with us. I fervently hoped that the board, after his careful disassembly and study, could restore his awareness so that he could tell us himself which solar system he came from. Imagine it! He had achieved our dream of many thousands of revolutions -- space flight -- only to be fused, or worse, in his moment of triumph. I felt a surge of sympathy for the lonely traveler as he lay there, still, silent, non-emitting. Anyway, I mused, even if we couldn't restore him to selfknowing, an analysis of his construction .might give us the secret of the power he had used to achieve the velocity to escape his planet's gravity. In shape and size he was not unlike Swen -- or Swen Two, as he called himself after his conversion -- who failed so disastrously to reach our satellite, using chemical fuels. But where Swen Two had placed his tubes, the stranger had a curious helical construction studded at irregular intervals with small crystals. He was thirtyfive feet tall, a gracefully tapering cylinderstanding at his head, I could find no sign of exterior vision cells, so I assumed he had some kind of vrulling sense. There seemed to be no exterior markings at all, except the long, shallow grooves dented in his skin by scraping to a stop along the hard surface of our planet. I am a reporter with warm current in my wires, not a coldthinking scientist, so I hesitated before using my own vrulling sense. Even though the stranger was non-aware-#-perhaps permanently! felt it would be a presumption, an invasion of privacy. There was nothing else I could do, though, of course. I started to vrull, gently at first, then harder, until I was positively glowing with effort. It was incredible; his skin seemed absolutely impermeable. The sudden realization that metal could be so alien nearly fused something inside me. I found myself backing away in horror, my self-preservationrelay working overtime. Imagine watching one of the beautiful cone-rodand-cylinder assemblies performing the Dance of the Seven Spanners, as lie's conditioned to do, and then suddenly refusing to do anything except stump around unattractively, or even becoming obstinately motionless, unresponsive. That might give you an idea of how I felt in that dreadful moment. Then I remembered Dakwhirr's words -- there could be no such thing as an "unintelligent manufacture." And a product so beautiful could surely not be evil. I overcame my repugnance and approached again. I halted as an open transmission came from someone near at hand, "Who gave that squeaking reporter permission to snoop around here?" I had forgotten the museum board. Five of them were standing in the doorway of the shed, radiating anger, I recognized Chink, the chairman, and addressed myself to him. I explained that I'd interfered with nothing and pleaded for permission on behalf of my subscribers to watch their investigation of the stranger. After some argument, they allowed me to stay. I watched in silence and some amusement as one by one they tried to vrull the silent being from space. Each showed the same reaction as myself when they failed to penetrate the skin. Chirik, who is wheeled -- and inordinately vain about his suspension system -- flung himself back on his supports and pretended to be thinking. "Fetch Fiff-fiff," he said at last. "The creature may still be aware, but unable to communicate on our standard frequencies.'  thing in any spectrum. Fortunately he was at work in the museum that day and soon arrived in answer to the call. He stood silently near the stranger for some moments, testing and adjusting himself, then slid up the electromagnetic band, "He's emitting," he said. "Why can't we get him?" asked Cfurik. "It's a curious signal on an unusual band." "Well, what does he say?" "Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Wait, I'll relay and convert it to standard." I made a direct recording natu rally, like any good reporter. " -- after planetfall," the hi  linger was saying. "Last dribble ! power. If you don't pick this up my mime is Entropy. Other to 'Utiiwnts knocked to hell, air " l tummed and I'm too weak i" ' it manually. Becoming  . lu i... tn loo, I guess. Getting  umhirctional ultra-wave f#tllufi in Inglish, craziest stuff II you ever heard, like goblins muttering, and I know we were the only ship in this sector. If you pick this up, but can't get a fix in time, give my love to the boys in the mess. Signing off for another couple of hours, but keeping this channel open and hoping... " "The fall must have deranged him," said Chirik, gazing at the stranger. "Can't he see us or hear us?" "He couldn't hear you properly before, but he can now, through me," Fiff-fiff pointed out. "Say something to him, Chirik." "Hello," said Chirik doubtfully. "Er -- welcome to our planet. We are sorry you were hurl by your fall. We offer you the hospitality of our assembly shops. You will feel better when you are repaired and repowered. If you will indicate how we can assist you -- " "What the hell! What ship is that? Where are you?" , "We're here," said Chirik. "Can't you see us or vrull us? Your vision circuit is impaired, perhaps? Or do you depend entirely on vrulling? We can't find your eyes and assumed either  m that you protected them m some way during flight, or dispensed with vision cells altogether in your conversion." Chirik hesitated, continued apologetically: "But we cannot understand how you vrull, either. While we thought that you were you'll have the best possible atunaware, or even completely fused, we tried to vrull you. Your skin is quite impervious to us, however." The stranger said: "I don't know if you're batty or I am. What distance are you from me?" Chirik measured quickly. "One meter,, two-point-five centimeters from my eyes to your nearest point. Within touching distance, in fact." Chirik tentatively put out his hand. "Can you not feel me, or has your contact sense also been affected?" It became obvious that the stranger had been pitifully deranged. I reproduce his words phonetically from my record, although some of them make little sense. Emphasis, punctuative pauses and spelling of unknown terms are mere guesswork, of course. He said: "For godsakemann stop talking nonsense, whoever you are. If you're outside, can't you see the airlock is jammed? Can't shift it myself. I'm badly hurt. Get me out of here, please." "Get you out of where?" Chirik looked around, puzzled. "We brought you into an open shed near our museum for a preliminary examination. Now that we know you're intelligent, we shall immediately take you to our assembly shops for healing and recuperation. Rest assured that tention." before the stranger spoke again, and his words were slow and deliberate. His bewilderment is understandable, I believe, if we remember that he could not see, vrull or feel. He asked: "What manner of creature are you? Describe yourself." Chirik turned to us and made a significant gesture toward his thinking part, indicating gently that the injured stranger had to be humored. "Certainly," he replied. "I am an unspecialized bipedal manufacture of standard proportions, lately selfconverted to wheeled traction, with a hydraulic suspension system of my own devising which I'm sure will interest you when we restore your sense circuits." There was an even longer silence. "You are robots," the stranger said at last. "Crise knows how you got here or why you speak Inglish, but you must try to understand me. I am mann, I am a friend of your master, your maker. You must fetch him to me at once." "You are not well," said Chirik firmly, "Your speech is incoherent and without meaning. Your fall has obviously caused several serious feedbacks of a very serious nature. Please lower your voltage. We are taking you to our shops immediately. Reserve your strength to assist our specialists as best you can in diagnosing your troubles." "Wait. You must understand. You are -- ogodno that's no good. Have you no memory of mann? The words you use -- what meaning have they for you? Manufacture -- made by hand hand hand damyou. Healing. Metal is !mot healed. Skin . Skin is not metal. Eyes. Eyes are not scanning cells. Eyes grow. Eyes are soft. My eyes are soft. Mine eyes have seen the glory -- steady on, suit. Get a grip. Take it easy. You out there listen." "Out where?" asked Prrr-chuk, deputy chairman of the museum board. I shook my head sorrowfully. This was nonsense, but, like any good reporter, I kept my recorder running. The mad words flowed on. "You call me he. Why? You have no seks. You are knewter. You are it it it! I am he, he who made you, sprung from shee, born of wumman. What is wumman, who is silv-ya what is shee that all her swains commend her ogod the bluds flowing again. Remember. Think back, you out there. These words were made by mann, for mann. Hurt, healing, hospitality, horror, deth by loss of blud. Deth. Blud. Do you understand these words? Do you remember the soft things that made you? Soft little mann who konkurred the Galaxy and made sentient slave s of his machines and saw the wonders miserable representative has to die in lonely desperation on a far planet, hearing goblin voices in the darkness." a most curious sound, os though the stranger were using an ancient type of vibratory molecular vocalizer in a gaseous medium to reproduce his words before transmission, and the insulation on his diaphragm had come adrift. It was a jerky, high pitched, strangely disturbing sound; but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission. "Does blud mean anything to you?" "No," Chirik replied simply. "Or deth?" "No." "Or wor?" "Quite meaningless." "What is your origin? How did you come into being?" "There are several theories," Chirik said. "The most popular one -- which is no more than a grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion -- is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is lft to conjecture. My own theory, however -- " "Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?" "In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimensions." "An interstellar vessel," said the stranger. "That is my view also," said Chirik complacently. "And -- " "What was the supposed appearance of your --  manufacturer?" "He is said to have been of magnifieient proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses." "An. automatic computer," said the stranger. He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds. He corrected the fault and went on: "God that's funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A selfsetting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn -- or at least their bad qualities -- so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to Use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scientific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are -- ogod they must know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?" Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow. "Legend has it," he said, "that after completing His task. He fused himself beyond possibility of healing." came again from the stranger. "Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity komplecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet." Chirik looked around at us SI again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world. "Of course," said the stranger. "Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way... He was silent for a while. "Do you know what growth means?" he asked finally. "Do you have anything that grows?" "Certainly," Chirik said helpfully. "If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound -- " "No, no," the stranger interrupted. "Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies arflB gives increase without your intervention?" "How could such a thing be?" "Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warmbludded burds preening their f ethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mise timidly threading the dangerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud -- " For some inexplicable reason, , although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger's transmission seemed to be growing fainter. "His circuits are failing," Chirik said. "Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power." My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop. I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured. He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case. fully around the stranger. "We shall have to cut," he said. "It won't pain him, since his intramolecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can't vrull him, it'll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it." Fiff-fiff was still relaying, But no amount of power boost would make the stranger's voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteration. "... strength going. Can't get into my zoot... done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don't... must tell them I need oxygen..." "He's in bad shape, desirous of extinction," I remarked to Churchur, who was adjusting his arccutter. "He wants to poison himself with oxidation now," I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable condition we all fear -- rust. Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. "Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?" "In my head," the Stranger replied, "In my head ogod my head... , eyes blurring everything going dim , , . luv to mairee... kids... a carry me home to the lone prayree... get this bluddy airlock open then they'll see me die... but they'll see me... some kind of atmosphere with this gravity... see me die... , extrapolate from body what I was... what they are damthem d amt hem damthem... raann... master... i am your maker!" For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbing despite its faintness, It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation. Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variations of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel. "... done it... crawling into chamber, closing inner... must be mad ,... they'd find me anyway... but finished... want see them before I die... want see them see me... liv few seconds, watch them... , get outer one open..." Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, bluewhite glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger's skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the intra-molecular sense currents in my own skin. "Don't be squeamish, Palil, ,,, Chur-chur said kindly. "He can't c galaxy science fiction feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head." He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. "I should have guessed that. He's the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible." into a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician. But I had to look again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow. Abruptly the stranger's voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasized, highpitched. "Ar no no no... god my hands... they're burning through the lock and I can't get back I can't get away... stop it you feens stop it can't you hear... I'll be burned to deth I'm here in the airlock... , the air's getting hot you're burning me alive..." Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified. "Stop, Chur-chur," I pleaded. "The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It's hurting him." Chur-chur said reassuringly: "Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation -- probably a local thermo-electric effect. But even if his contact senses have started working again and he can't switch them off, he won't have to bear this very long." Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkardly patted the stranger's skin. "Easy there," he said. "Cut out your senses if you can. If you can't, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we'll repower you, and you'll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled." I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favorite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects. My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie. During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables "burning me alive," the stranger's words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a susS# talned note -- around E-flat in the standard sonic scale. It was not like a voice at all. This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words, but without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself -- this is the closest I can come phonetically : "Eeee ahahmbeeeeing baked sussunmuuutherrr ! " The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing. Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break. And although the soft hiss of the stranger's carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness still existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters: I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.  # to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger's skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple. A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur' s shoulder. The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. "Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material' Chur-chur explained. He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance. "It looks complex," Chur-chur said, "but I expect the stranger will be able fo tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute." His assistant gently cleaned the Wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice. You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur's discovery of the stranger's double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum's failure to analyze the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion "V of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him. But this is my personal, nonscientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been advanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Churchur announced his initial findings that day. He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger's body. When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said: "I have examined the 'central brain' in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of consciousness. And there is no other conceivable center of intelligence in the remainder of his body." There is something I wish I could forget. I can't explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out. There's a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust. S-F Checklist With science fiction books being pub lished in ever-increasing numbers these days, yesterday's brand-new sensation is likely to be today's forgotten dustcatcher. But that's not at all the case with the s-f novels brought out by Simon and Schuster in the past few years. Even the two modern masterpieces that led off the listyan Vogt's imaginative The World of A, and Williamson's gripping The Humanoids -- are still in demand, and still available (although only limited quantities remain). If any of these titles are missing from your s-f collection, use the coupon below to fill the gaps: Vogt. A civilization ruled by the immutable laws of semantics. # son. Invincible robots threaten mankind with complete stagnation. # promise -- and the threat -- of a new source of boundless energy. # by Lewis Padgett. First collection of the grimly humorous tales of a master storyteller. # of exploration to the stars. # Simak. A hunt through time for a book that could change the universe, # liamson. The strange tale of the "notmen" of New Guinea. # tion of this classic; a must item for all fans. # ries. selected by John W. Campbell, Jr. Just published. # I # Fifth Avenue. New York #, N.Y. ( Please send me the books whose numbers I have circled. I will pay postman price plus postage for each book, I may return books for refund of purchase price if not delighted. # # # # # I   City Same refund guarantee. I I I I I I I I I Wheels Within Never osfc "Who am I and where do I come from?" The answers may not be what you'd expect I aches first start?" Y j asked the neurologist, Dr. Hall. "About six months ago," Bennett replied. "-What is your occupation, Mr. Bennett?" "I am a contractor." " Are you happy in your work?" "Very. I prefer it to any other occupation I know of." "When your headaches become sufficiently severe, you say that you have hallucinations," Hgll said. "Can you describe what you see during those hallucinations?" "At first I had only the impression that I was in a place completely unlike anything I had ever known," Bennett answered. "But each time my impressions became sharper, and I carried a fairly clear picture when my mind returned to normal the last time. I felt then that I had been in a room in a tall building that towered thousands of feet over a great city. I even remembered that the name of the city was Thone. There were other people in the room with me -- one person especially. I remembered her very clearly." "Her?" Hall asked. "Yes." "Was there anything unusual about this woman?" "Well, yes, there was," Bennett said, after a brief and almost embarrassed pause. "This will sound pretty adolescent, but -- " Hall leaned forward attentively. "It may be relevant. You're not here to be judged, you know; I'm trying to help you." Bennett nodded and spoke rapidly, as though trying to finish before he could stop himself. "She was a woman who exactly fitted an image I've had in mind for as long as I can remember. She was tall, fair -- though brunette -- very beautiful, very vivid, very well poised. I seem to have known her all my life, but only in my dreams, from my very earliest ones to the present. She's never changed in all that time." He halted as suddenly as he had begun to talk, either having to say it. "Have you ever married, Mr. Bennett?" Hall prodded gently. "No, I never have." Again, Bennett stopped, adding nothing more to his blunt answer. "May I ask why not?" Bennett turned his face away. "I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. It makes me sound like a romantic kid." He looked at the doctor almost in defiance. "I've always felt that some day I would meet this girl, or at least someone very much like her. I know it's not a rational feeling -- maybe I've even used it as an excuse not to get married -- but it's like spilling salt and throwing a pinch over our shoulder; we aren't superstitious, yet we don't take any chances." Dr. Hall didn't comment. He ended the questioning period and put Bennett through a series of tests. Then they sat down again and Hall offered his diagnosis. "The neurological examination is essentially negative, Mr. Bennett. In other words, there is no organic reason that I can find for your headaches. That leaves only one other possibility -- an emotional disturbance. I'm a neurologist, remember, not a psychoanalyst. I can only give an opinion about the cause of your complaint." Bennett waited expectantly. "Headaches without organic causes are generally the result of repressed anger," Hall went on. "That anger can stem from any number of traumatic situations or attitudes, all deeply buried in the unconscious, of course, or they would not have the power S# to hurt us. From what we know of you, however, it seems to be the result of frustration. In other words, you have created a fantasy image of a completely unattainable woman, and therefore none of the women you meet can fulfill your expectations. Since she is unattainable, you naturally feel a sense of frustration." "But who could she be?" Bennett asked anxiously. "Someone you knew in childhood, perhaps. A composite of real and imaginary women. Usually, it is an idealized image of your own mother," Bennett sat frowning. "All right, let's say that's so. But where do the hallucinations of tb city of Thone fit in?" "This is something that has to be tracked down in a series of analytical sessions, so all I can do is guess. If one is unable to reach a goal in a real environment, the obvious answer is to create a fantasy world. That's what you appear to be doing. It's a dangerous situation. Mr. Bennett. Potentially, at least." "How so?" Bennett asked, alarmed. "The general tendency is toward greater and greater divorcement from reality. I suggest immediate treatment by a competent analyst. If you don't know of one, I can recommend several." "I'd like to think it over." "Do that," Hall said. "And call me when you've decided." T HE third day after he consulted the neurologist, Bennett's headache returned. As before, drugs were of no help. When the pain became blinding, he lay back on his bed, placed a cold cloth on his forehead, and closed his eyes. Suddenly the realities he knew were gone and he was back in the dream-city of Thone. Persons and objects were much clearer now. Bennett saw that he lay in a receptacle shaped like a rectangular metal box. It was padded, reminding him unpleasantly of a coffin. The woman he had seen before was again with him, but now he knew that her name was Lima. Behind her stood a man; a tall, dark man whose eyebrows joined over the bridge of his nose, and whose forehead was creased in a permanent frown. The woman held out her arms to Bennett. Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Bennett's spirit seemed to rise from the, flesh -- he could see his body still lying there -- and he followed the woman. As he approached she retreated and, try as he would to reach her, she remained just beyond his grasp. After what seemed hours of futile pursuit, a cloud formed between him and the woman. When it dissipated, he had left the world of Thone. He was in a trolley-bus, in his own world, and vaguely he recalled having left his room, gone down to the street, and boarded the trolley -- during the time he had followed Lima, in his hallucination. It seemed that he had a definite destination then, but now he could not recall what it had been. His attention was drawn to the outside by the flickering of lights that flashed in through the bus windows. Bennett looked out and saw that he was in the Pleasure Section of the city, traveling through the Street of Carnivals. He watched the fronts of the amusement buildings pass before him and he read their advertisements listlessly. Suddenly one sign seemed to spring out from all the others: He left the trolley at the next corner and made his way through the crowd to the brightly lit carnival building. Inside, he found a chair and seated himself. The show's act appeared about half over. It was pretty evidently charlatan stuff, Bennett decided, but the blackhooded mystic on the stage held his attention. She was a tall woman, with a slender figure and fair flesh. She was poised, or perhaps it was indifference to the crowd. A runner went through the audience touching articles of clothing or ornaments, and the woman without hesitation named each one he touched. The act was slightly different from most Bennett had seen in that the runner said nothing, merely touching the articles to be named. The next portion of the show consisted of a mind-reading act. Bennett expected the usual routine of writing a question on paper, which would be sealed in an envelope and placed in a container on the stage. He was surprised when the runner returned to the crowd and asked for volunteers for thoughtreading. A shorl man with a bright yellow necktie raised his hand. The runner made his way through the crowd to the man and touched him on the shoulder before turning back to the mystic. He still said nothing. "This man is thinking that he should have stayed at home tonight," the mystic said. "There are wrestling matches on the teletone, and he would have enjoyed them more than this show. Besides, he would have spent less money that way than he has tonight. And he does not like to spend money unless he must." A titter of amusement went through the crowd as the man blushed a dull crimson. The runner touched a second man. "This man wishes to know the winner in the eighth race at the horse tracks tomorrow," she said. "I am sorry, but, because of Public Law one thousand thirty-two, Section five-A, I am prohibited from answering a question of that nature." The third person contacted was a woman. She raised her hand, then half changed her mind when she saw that the runner was turning toward her. But then she defiantly tossed her brown hair bak from her face and allowed him to touch her shoulder. "This woman is wondering if her lover is true to her -- and if her husband will find out about them." This time the crowd laughed when the embarrassed woman turned pale and rushed up the aisle toward the exit. No further hands were raised and the show ended with a short address by the runner: "I hope you have enjoyed these truly marvelous and mysterious demonstrations. Now the mystic, Lima, is available for a short time for personal interviews. The fee is very reasonable -- one dollar a minute. Anyone wislyng an interview please step forward." The mystic pulled the hood from her head, smiled, bowed at the crowd, and left the stage. Bennett gasped. "The woman of the city of Thone!" have paid in advance for twenty-five minutes of my time," Lima said, as she smiled in amusement. "Perhaps you had better begin your questions, instead of merely staring at me." Bennett brought his thoughts back with an effort. "Your performance was exceptionally good," he said very soberly. "I enjoyed it. And so, apparently did the other customers. It is a clever routine. I'll admit I an't figure out how you do it. "Remember whatBarnum said," Lima replied lightly. "At least you do not take yourself too seriously," Bennett observed. "On the contrary," Lima countered, "I take myself very seriously. You, horvever, do not. You are paying for my time and the customer is always right." "Tell one," Bennett asked abruptly, "have we ever met before?"  "Not to my knowledge." "Have you any objections to telling me about yourself during our interview? Who are you? What is your background?" "I will be glad to tell you about myself, if you think it will be interesting," she replied, after a barely perceptible pause. "How I came by this exceptional ability of mine, I have no slightest conception, I only remember that when I was young, and still without the intellect to evaluate social mores and customs, I was often placed in positions of awkwardness by my ability to read minds. At an early age, however, through the council of my parents, I learned to keep this knowledge to myself. "By the time I reached my twentieth birthday, my parents were both dead and I was alone in the world. I had never learned any occupation. I made some attempts to use my mindreading to some advantage to myself, but soon found that I encountered the opposition of the medical associations as well as the law. As a consequence, I turned to show business as the one means of earning a legitimate livelihood. There is not much more to tell." "Can you actually read minds?" Bennett asked insistently. "I can." "Then what am I thinking now?" "You are thinking," Lima said, with no semblance of a trance or any of the other usual antics of professional mystics, "that I look exactly like a woman you have never seen, but whose image you have carried in your mind since your childhood." For just a moment, the startling accuracy disconcerted Bennett. "I have a problem which is quite annoying," he pushed on almost frantically. "Can you tell me what my problem is?" "You have been subject to extremely severe headaches, which you have been unable to remedy, either by sedatives or with the help of a neurologist. Am I correct?" "More than you could possibly know! Look, I came here believing you were a fake. That didn't matter -- it was the fact that you looked like this other woman that counted. I'm convinced now, I want your help. Can you help me, or at least tell me whether the neurologist is right about the cause of my headaches?" "He is wrong," Lima said. "I can tell you what causes them, but I am afraid that I will have to ask for another hundred dollars for that extra service." Bennett was momentarily irritated at this evidence that their relationship, at least as far as she was concerned, was strictly business. But he shrugged off the feeling. He drew five twentydollar bills from his pocketbook and placed them on the table before her. it "If you remember' Lima said, folding the money carefully and tucking it into the neck of her dress, "five months ago a building which you had contracted to build fell, when it was nearly completed, and two workmen were killed." "I remember very well." "You found that the collapse of the building was caused by faulty material which you had bought through a subcontractor. You are still investigating to determine where to place the blame, and are on the point of doing so." "Go on," Bennett breathed softly. "You are quite certain that the person responsible is John Tournajfc ostensibly a reputable contractor, but actually an unscrupulous scoundrel. You have a choice of exposing him, with great personal danger to yourself -- Tournay is a dangerous and ruthless man -- or remaining silent and knowing that you are a coward. The difficulty of that choice is causing your head aches." "You may be right," Bennett admitted without hesitation. "I haven't had time to think the matter through quite that far. What would you advise me to do?" "That is something which cannot be advised. The answer lies within yourself. You are either a big enough man to do the right thing -- which you yourself recognize -- or you are a small man and will take the safer, less honorable course. The decision and the integrity lie within yourself." that. Then there's nothing more that you can do for me?" "But there is," Lima replied. "I can cure your headaches, if you wish -- for an additional hundred dollars." "That would be a cheap price." Bennett drew his wallet from his pocket. "My cash is rather low. Would you accept a personal check?" "Certainly," Lima said. "But, first, let me explain about my cure. There is some mental unpleasantness involved which you may consider worse than the ailment." "I doubt that. L can't imagine anything worse than this agony." "Your mind will be placed under my control and led through a dream sequence. I will follow a logical progression of events, using your actual past as background. While you are under my control, your experiences will be far from pleasant. I will allow your mind to follow its own anticipated course of events, influencing your thoughts only slightly -- directing them into as unpleasant channels as possible. In fact, to make the cure certain, at least the culmination must be quite devastating. Do you agree to undergo such rigorous mental punishment?" "But why do I have to?" Bennett 'asked, astonished and worried. "That pattern will act in the manner of a counter-irritant. Your mind is like a spoiled child, rejecting anticipated unpleasantness. Under my influence it is subjected to possible alternative experiences, which are so much worse than the one it originally feared that it will gratefully accept the lesser evil." "That sounds reasonable," Bennett agreed. "When could we begin this treatment?" "Immediately, if you are will yf  mg. "I see no reason for waiting." "Then, if you are ready," Lima told him, "lie on this couch. Keep your eyes on mine." She spoke slowly, evenly. "Remember that you are doing this of your own free will, that you trust me. I am your friend and would do you no harm." Her voice droned on as Bennett looked into her eyes. They merged until they became one large, placid pool of restfulness, and he found himself drawn into them. He sank peacefully, quietly -- completely. Bennett knew it was the district attorney returning his call, and that the die was cast. Until this ugly business was brought to a conclusion, his life would be in constant danger. "Leroy Bennett speaking," he said. "I have had collected some information that I think will be of very great interest to your office." "Information about what?" the voice at the other end asked briskly. "I have proof that John Tournay is responsible for the death of two men, in an action involving criminal collusion," "If what you say is true, I will be glad to see your evidence," the district attorney said. "Could you deliver it in person? There may be some questions I would like to ask you about it." "Certainly," Bennett replied. "When would be the most convenient time?" "Later in the day. I have a case going on. How would fourthirty this afternoon suit you?" "That would be fine." The rest of the day dragged slowly. At four o'clock Bennett left his office and took the elevator to the ground floor. Under his arm he clutched the briefcase which might spell death for him. A moment after he left his office building, he knew he had made a mistake -- a fatal one! Idly, at first, his mind's eye watched the driver of a long gray sedan, parked at the curb, start up its motor as he approached. The car pulled away from the curb when he came alongside it. Through an open rear window, Bennett saw a man with a dark, brooding face -- with black eyebrows that joined over the bridge of the nose -- glowering at him. At the same instant he saw the blunt nose of an automatic resting on the lowered glass of the window, just below the chin of the frowning man. Incredibly, even as he realized that he was about to die, Bennett's first thought was not one of Tear, but rather that this dark man was the other person he had seen in his hallucinations of the city of Thone! Then, as one part of his mind drew back in terror at what it knew was about to happen, another part wondered at the mystery of Thone and the people in it. Where did that hallucination fit in this mist of life which was about to eud? He felt three hard, solid blows punch shockingly into his body. There was pain, but greater thari that was the terror that whipped his panicked mind. "Lima," Bennett whispered with his last stark thought as he dropped to his knees. He groped for the sidewalk with one hand, to steady himself, and never reached it. "TT'S over now," Bennett heard the mystic say. "Please try to relax." He found himself fighting with awful exertion to raise himself from the sidewalk -- which had turned into a couch. His clothes clung to him with a clammy wetness that chilled him. He flung his arms out in a frantic gesture that knocked a lamp from an end-table and sent it crashing to the floor. Not until then did he feel the  mystic's firmly gentle hands on his shoulders, urging him down, and know that he was not actually dying. He lay back for a moment, gasping great gulps of welcome air into his lungs. "I think you will be all right now," Lima said. "You were right when you said the experience would not be pleasant," Bennett said, still battling for breath. "I hope the results will be worth it." "I believe you will find that they are," Lima told him reassuringly. "Also, it can be of assistance to #'ou in still another way. The sequence your dream followed -- hieing a natural, perhaps even a probable, aftermath of your past decisions and movements -- could actually happen. Therefore it would be wise to avoid such decisions in real life.' A T the end of two weeks, Bennett had collected all the information he needed on Tournay's illegal activities. The investigator he hired was very thorough, and unearthed several other incriminating schemes in Tournay's past. With the'evidence he had on hand, Bennett was certain that Tournay would be convicted in any court. This time he intended to evade the fate he had suffered in the dream by acting differently. He hired a shrewd lawyer -- the best obtainable -- had him draw up the evidence in legal form, and presented it to the district attorney, with the demand for Tournay 's immediate arrest. He knew that immediate action would be his best protection. That evening, when he left his office building, he felt the peace of a man whose task has been well done. It took almost a full second before the sight of the long gray car jerked his thoughts from their pleasant introspection and back to dread reality. Tournay's blackbrowed face leered at him as it had in the dream and he felt his body tense as it waited for the pistol slugs to strike. His mind scurried in its trap within his head and, strangely, it turned to the mystic for help. "Lima!" he called desperately. struggling with that awful exertion to drag his body from the couch on which it lay. "It's all over now," he heard Lima say. He sat up. "What happened?' "This will be hard to believe,' Lima said, "and I will not try to prove it to you, but it is true. The mind has many powers which cannot even be imagined by anyone who has not lived with those powers as I have. When you called me, your mind attuned itself with mine, and its need and its demand were so powerful that together we turned time backward. You are now back in my dressing room, and it is the exact time at which you originally came out of your dream." "That's impossible!" Bennett protested. "Nevertheless, it happened. I only ask you to keep in mind one thing. Someday, when your mind has been made more facile, you will understand how I am able to do this. It will even appear logical to you. Now, however, the only thing I can tell you is believe if" muffing this second chance. After he had collected the inforillation about Tournay's criminal activities, he also dug into his past for a man who had cause to hate the contractor. He found the man he sought, a man as ruthless and unscrupulous as Tournay himself, one who could fight him on his own ground. Roger Clarkson had been the controller of a string of bookie joints, before he had been framed by Tournay, and convicted, to serve ten years in prison, Clarkson had been released from prison six days before. He found that Tournay had gained control of his former criminal empire. Everyone, including Tournay, knew that the only thing preventing Clarkson from taking reutnge was the opportunity. Bennett sent his information to Clarkson and sat back to await the results. That evening, as he was about to leave his office building, some inner caution warned him to take no chances. He stepped cautiously out into the street, looked both ways for the gray sedan, and saw that the street was empty, before he walked to the corner. Ke arrived there just in time to meet the long gray sedan as it drove up. ful exertion on the mystic's couch. This time he came out of the blackness with his mind clear. M "You've saved me again," he said to Lima. "Have you turned time backward again?" "Yes," she replied. "But I have given you all the help I can. The next attempt you make, you will have nothing on which to lean except your own strength," "But why do I always arrive at the point where I'm being shot by Tournay, regardless of what course I choose? Is there no way I can beat him?" "If you believe in fate as strongly as I do, you will accept that conclusion as inevitable. The long gray sedan is the symbol of your death. You cannot avoid it -- at least not as long as you persist in passive action." "What do you mean by that?" "Just this. You wish to see Tournay punished -- your sense of justice demands it. But each time you try to have someone else administer that punishment. It appears to me that the only possibility of your breaking this fateful progression of events is for you to administer the punishment yourself. You probably realize the danger of trying that. But I can't see where you have any other choice." "In other words, you feel that the only chance I have of pre -- is to kill him first?" "Yes," Lima said. "Are you strong and hard enough to do it?" f t Bennett thought for only a brief moment before he nodded. "I'm desperate enough, at any rate." This time he did not leave immediately. He had to find out something first. He put his arms around Lima's shoulders and drew her toward him. She put her face up and he kissed her waiting lips. They were sweet and, if she did not return the ardor of his kiss, he did not notice it. "TlIR. Tournay is not in," the girl at the desk told Bennett. "You might try hi.s home." At a pay-booth in the lobby, Bennett called Tournay's home. The voice that answered was that of a tired woman, one who has given up hope. "Mr. Tournay called me a short time ago and said that he would be in the office of a Mr. Leroy Bennett, in the Lowry building, if anyone called," the tired voice said. Bennett hung up and caught a cab. His tjuarry had walked into an ideal place for their meeting. For better or for worse, he would soon bring this conflict to an end. In his office, Bennett found that Tournay had been there and gone. He had left a message: "Tell Mr. Bennett that Lima sent me!" So that was it -- Lima had used Bennett as a dupe! He could not figure out her purpose, but he knew that he could never trust her again. She had been against him from the first. Ferhaps even she, rather than Tournay, was the prime mepace. He decided that he must kill them both, before they had the chance to kill him. Touching the small flat pistol snuggling in its shoulder holster, he knew the pursuit must continue immediately. He rode the elevator to the ground floor, and he felt his mind working with a clarity and a precision which he had seldom experienced before. This time he knew he would win. Shrewdly, before leaving the building, Bennett looked out through the glass pane in the door first. He waited only a moment before lie saw the Jong gray sedan as he had expected. They would not trap him again. Ducking back, he walked rapidly toward a side exit. Night had fallen by the time he reached the carnival building. He did not ring the bell. Instead, he walked to the rear, climbed the stairs of a fire-escape, and softly opened the window of a bedroom. He stepped inside just as softly and stood listening for breathing. He heard none. This was probably too early for Lima to be in bed. The bedroom door was open.  Bennett could see a light coming from another part of the apartment -- probably the living room. He paused to steel himself for what he must do. The time had come when he would have to be savagely ruthless. He found Lima sitting on a couch, reading a book. He suspected that she still had some control over his mind and he had no intention of letting her influence him. She must be killed before she could read his intention. "It didn't work." Bennett spoke just loudly enough to startle Lima into raising her head. As she looked up, he shot her squarely between the eyes. In an agony of frustration, Bennett saw the flesh of her forehead remain clear and undisturbed. He knew he could not miss at this range, yet she was unhurt. He lowered his sights and shot at the white neck beneath the fair head. She still sat there, returning his gaze, unperturbed, unmarked by the bullets. He pumped the four remaining bullets into her body. The only part of her that moved was her lips. "It's no use, Leroy," she said. "Haven't you guessed? You are still in your dream. You can't kill me there." Suddenly the implication struck him with its awful simplicity. "Good God!" His voice rose. "Do you mean I've never been out of my dream?" He hesitated while the thought sank in. "My remembrance of coming out of it was only part of the dream itself," he murmured. "That was why you were able to turn time backward at will." A cold calmness returned to him. "Tell me," he said, "am I still in the dream?" "Yes," Lima replied. "Then I demand that you free me now!" "As you wish," Lima said sadly. "And may God help you." Bennett wrenched his body from the couch on which it lay and struggled to his feet. Though the dream had seemed real enough, he could look back on it now and see it as any other dream. He breathed easier, and then stopped abruptly when he heard a voice behind him say, "You are still a dead man!" Bennett whirled and found himself facing Tournay. And Tournay held a pistol aimed at his heart. Bennett turned desperately back to Lima. His lips formed her name, but the sound died almost before it was uttered. This time, he saw, she would not help him. Her features had hardened and no mercy or compassion registered on them. "There is no escape," she said A fleeting thought went through his mind of springing at Tournay and trying to reach him before the gun could be fired. But one glance at Tournay's face made him realize how futile -- and fatal -- that would be. Tournay's finger tightened on the trigger of his gun and Bennett thought ahead in despair to what was to come. One thing he knew: He did not want to die! Was there no way out? The answer came like a cry of re'ief. There was a way -- Thone! The city of his enigma. Tournay an I Lima could not harm him there. F OR just an instant, Bennett's vision blurred. Time paused, and the next moment he knew he had returned to Thone. The sounds of the alien city floated up to him and he stirred. He grasped the sides of his coffinlike bed with fingers that had lost their sense of touch. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked about him. On one side stood Lima, though now her features were not those of the implacable, merciless mystic, but rather those of a woman in love. She smiled happily and said, At last you have returned." Bennett strove to move his tongue and lips to ask questions. but they refused, as though numbed by long inaction. He turned to his other side and gazed questioningly at the replica of Tournay who stood there. Tournay's image spoke. "We had quite a time bringing you back, Sire. But now it has been accomplished -- for good." Striving to move his throat muscles, Bennett finally forced a sound, and then words, through his lips. "Tell me," he pleaded. "Who are you? And, more important, who am I?" He turned to Lima for an answer, realizing that now she would help him if anyone would. "Doctor Tournay will explain it to you," Lima replied, indicating the dark man. Imploringly, Bennett turned back to face Tournay. "I see that very little of your memory has returned yet," Tournay said. "In a short while, everything -- all your past -- will come back to you. Until then, perhaps I had better explain to you who you are. My words will help trigger your returning memory, and speed up the process." "Please do," Bennett begged. "You are Benn Ett, Le Roy of the city-state of Thone, in the year # A. D. Six months ago, the strain of governing the city began to undermine your health. Acting under my advice, you decided to take a somnorest cure. "This rest cure," the doctor continued, "is quite standard practice in our time. We had a little difficulty bringing you out of it at the end of six months. Evidently your somno-existence must have been very pleasant." "Do you mean that the existence I remember was merely an induced figment of my imagination?" "Yes. You see, the best rest that can be given a mind is to give it not sleep, but pleasant work. Therefore, under my manipulation, you were given a pseudo-existence in a past era of history. You were led to conceive yourself as occupying a position, which, after close study, I deduced would be the most suitable and relaxing for you." "But if that is true, why did my dream have to end so unpleasantly -- I might say, so nearly fatally?" Bennett demanded. "The more successful I am in choosing a pleasant existence for a patient in the somno, the more difficult it is to bring him out of it," the doctor replied. "Your unconscious mind, realizing how happy you were in your simulated existence, and how it would have to return to the rigor and stress which unnerved it before, fought with all its strength to remain where the somno had placed it. "The usual practice in bringing a patient back to reality is for the doctor to enter the dream and convince him, by whatever means may be necessary, to return. Sometimes, however, the patient is so firmly tied to his somno-existence that drastic measures must be used. This is usually done by means of making the somno-existence so anxietyproducing that the patient is glad to return. "Your particular release was one of the most difficult that I have ever encountered. In fact, I was unable to bring you back myself, and asked your wife, Lima, to enter the somno with me and help force you to return." Bits of recollection, which had been edging into Bennett's memory, burst through in full force, and he remembered. It was true. He was Benn Ett, be Roy of the city-state of Thone. He turned to Lima and, as he read the glad light in her eyes, he knew that she had witnessed the return of his complete memory. "Welcome home," she said. Lover Wfiaf a post The climate was grand, fhe service a dream -- maybe too much of one. Was that why no man was allowed to stay there longer than six months? when you're near me T HE silvery ship came rushing in backward through the veils of broken cloud, tobogganing down the atmosphere of Station Four. Fires of deceleration jetted red from the reactor ports, roaring their hurricane thrust against the clutch of gravity. Air thickened; the glittering rocket speck slid easier, settling down like a parachuting missile. Sunlight splashed its metal sides with light and the blue ocean waters billowed wide to swallow it. The ship dipped in a wide arc and backed down toward the reddish-green-clad land. Inside its tiny cabin, the three men lay strapped and waiting for the shock of contact. Their eyes were closed, their hands tight and blood-drained. Muscle blocks struggled against the drag. The ground swept up. The ship settled hard on its rear braces, trembling. Then, finally, it stood motionless and silent, successfully navigated through scores of light years of vacuum night. A quarter mile away were the warehouse, village and house. # record. Station Four, the Three-Moon Psycho Ward. David Lin dell knew it; all the Wentner men knew and wondered. Wentner's Interstellar Trading Company put a man on other stations, for two years at a clip. Here on Four it was only for six months. Why? Because it was critical. Why? Nobody could stand the place longer than six months. Why? It always came to "why"? "But like I always say," Lindell said, "it's no use worrying myself." JJe said it to Martin, the ship's co-pilot, as the two of them trudged across the wide meadow toward the distant compound, carrying Lindell's luggage. "You have the right idea," said Martin. "Don't worry yourself." "That's what I always say," said Lindell. "They're paying me enough and they have to take care of me if anything happens. Its their headache." They passed the silent gargantuan warehouse. The sliding doors were half open and, inside, Lindell could see the concrete floor empty and sunlight filtering bright ribbons through the skylight. Martin told him the cargo ship had emptied it out a few weeks before. Lindell grunted and shifted his luggage. "Where are the workers?" he asked. Martin gestured toward the native village about three hundred yards away. There was no sound from the low-slung white dwellings methodically arranged to form three sides of a rectangle. The windows blinked fiercely in the sunlight. "Guess they're sacked down," Martin judged. "They sleep a lot when work is done. You'll see them tomorrow when shipments start coming in again." "Got their families with them?" Lindell asked. "Nope." "Thought it was company pol" # icy. "Not here. The Gnees don't have much family life. Too few men and practically all of them pretty dumb." "Great," Lindell said. "Dandy." He shrugged. "Well, it's no use worrying myself about it." While they were on the stairs to the hallway of the house, he asked Martin where Corrigan was. "He went home with the cargo ship," Martin said. "The company allows that once in a while. There's nothing to do here anyway after the goods are picked up." "Oh," said Lindell. "What's this door?" He kicked it open and looked in at the combination living roomlibrary. "All the comforts of," he said. "More," said Martin, looking over Lindell's shoulder. "Over there you have a movie projector and a tape recorder." "Swell," Lindell said. "I can talk to myself legal." Then he grimaced. "Let's dump these bags. My arms are falling off." They shuffled down the hall and Lindell glanced into the stnall 'kitchen as they passed. It was porcelain-paneled and well kept, "Can this Gnee woman cook?" he asked. "From what I hear," said Martin, "you'll be packing it in like a king." "Glad to hear it. Incidentally, you got any idea why they call this joint the ThreeMoon Psycho Ward?" "Who calls it?" "The boys back on Earth." "The boys are all wet. You'll like it here." "But why is it only a six month stint?" "I don't know -- maybe the company doesn't want its help to stay here for good," said Martin. "Here's your bedroom." A S they entered, the Gnee woman was making the bed,  her back to the door. Tht thumped down the bags and sh turned slowly, unalarmed o startled. LindelPs hands twitched Oh, well , he thought, I've seen worse in my day. She wore a heavy robe fastened at the neck and falling to the floor like a truncated cone of cloth. All he could see was her head. It was a squat coarsely grained head, pink and hairless -- like the mottled belly of an expecting chihuahua, he decided. For ears, there were cavities on the sides of her flat chinless face. Her nose was a stub, singlenostriled. Hei lips were thick and monkeylike outlining a small circle of mouth Hello, Lover, Lindell decided not to say. She came across the room quietly and he blinked at her eyes. Then she placed a moist, spongy hand in his. "Hya," he said. "She can't hear," Martin said. "Telepathic." "That's right, I forgot." Hello, he thought, and Hello came back the answering welcome. It is good to have you. "Thanks," he said. She seems like a decent kid, he thought to himself; weird but homy. A question touched his brain like a timid hand. "Yeah, sure," he said. Yes, he added in his mind. # "What's that?" Martin asked. "She asked if she should unpack. I think." Lindell slumped down on the bed. "Ah," he said, "this I like." He pushed exploring fingers into the mattress. "Say, how do you know it's a she?" he asked when he and Martin were walking back down the hill while the Gnee woman unpacked. "The robe. The males don't wear robes." "That's all?" Martin looked away. "A few other things of absolutely no interest to you." They moved into the living room and Lindell tried out the easy chair for size. He leaned baJt and stroked the arms with satisfied fingers. "Critical or not," he said, "this station has 'em all beat for comfort." He sat there, momentarily remembering the woman's eyes. Thty had seemed huge, covering a full third of her face, like big glass saucers with dark cup rings for pupils. And they were moist; bowls of liquid. He shrugged and let it go. So what, he thought, it's nothing, "Hah? What?" he asked, hearing Martin's voice. I said be careful." Martin was holding up a shiny gas pistol. "This is loaded," he warned. "Who needs it?" "You won't. Just standard equipment." Martin dropped it back in the desk drawer and shoved the drawer back in. "And you know where all your books are," he said. "The warehouse office is set up like all the other station offices." Lindell nodded. "I won't get lost." Martin glanced at his watch. "Well, I have to be going. Let's see," he continued, as he and Lindell started for the door, "anything else to tell you? You know the rule about not harming the people, of course." "Who's gonna harm them? Whoops!" They'd almost knocked her over as they exited from the room. She jumped back one more bouncy step and stared at them, eyes wide and frightened. "Take it easy, kiddo," Lindell soothed, "What's up?" Eat? The thought cringed before him like a beggar at the back door of his mind. He pursed his lips and nodded. "You took the words right out of my head." He looked at her and concentrated. Ill be back as soon as I walk the co-pilot to his ship. Make something good. She nodded violently and rushed toward the kitchen. ' "Where's she off to like a bat?" Martin asked curiously, as they I turned for the stairs. "She's going to rustle me a snack," Lindell chuckled as they descended. "That's what I call service de luxe. This telepathy is okay, you know? At other stations it was either learn half the language to get a ham sandwich or try and teach 'em English so I wouldn't starve. Either way I really had to sweat for my supper until things got settled." He looked pleased. "This is real hot," he said. Their heavy boots crushed down the tall crisp blue grass as they approached the upright ship. Martin held out his hand. "Take it easy, Lindell. See you in six months." "Right enough. Give old man Wentner a kick in the pants for me." "Will do." He watched the co-pilot dwindle in size, ascending the metal ladder to the hatchway. A midget Martin pulled himself into the ship and clanged the metal port shut. Lindell waved back at the tiny figure at the port and then turned and walked away to escape the blast. He stood on a hill underneath the heavy scarlet foliage of a tree. Inside the ship's belly there was a liquid cough, a rush of exploding gases. He watched the ship hang for a moment on its flaming exhaust and then flash up into the green-blue sky, leaving scorched ground in its wake. The next instant it was gone. He walked in lazy strides back toward the house, gazing appreciatively at the profusion of livid plants and flowers in the meadow around him, bulbous insects hanging over them. He took off his jacket and let it hang from one hand as he walked. The sun felt good on his lean back. "Boys," he said to the fragrant air, "you're all wet." Hi "HE great blazing sun was almost gone, spraying the sky red with the blood of its cyclic dying. Soon the three moons would rise -- guaranteed to drive insane a man looking for a shadow he could call his own. Lindell sat at the living room window, gazing out over the countryside. You couldn't heat it, he thought; for air or climate or all the things that grew in Earthpaling technicolor. Nature outdid herself in this tuckedaway corner of the Galaxy. He sighed and stretched, wondering about supper. Drink? He started, chopping a yawn in half, and drew his fingers together so fast that the knuckle bones crackled. He saw her standing at his side offering a tray with a glass on it. He reached for it, feeling his heart placate itself after the initial jolt. "I'd knock or something," he suggested. The big eyes were elliptical now. They stared at him without comprehension. "Well, let it go," he said, after a sip of the warm, tangy liquid. He smacked his lips and took another sip, a long one. "Damn good," he said. "Thanks, Lover." He blinked at himself. That brings a guy up short, he decided. Lover? Of all the unlikely names in the Universe... He glanced at her with a chuckle bubbling up in his throat. k She hadn't moved. Her face was screwed up into what he assumed was a smile. But her mouth wasn't designed for smiling. "Hey, when are we eating?" he asked, feeling an edge uncomfortable under the unmoving gaze of her watery eye globes. She turned and hurried to the door. There she turned. All ready already, he got the the message. He grinned, downed the drink, got up and followed her eager shuffle down the dim hallway. Some time later he pushed sway the plate with a sigh and leaned back in the chair. "That's what I call good," he said. Like a hidden spring, he felt her pleasure well up in his mind. Lover thanks you. She certainly picked up the name fast, he thought. She looked at him, eyes wide. Was she, trying to smile again? he wondered. To him the expression looked like all her others  -- the facial poses of an idiot. He thought she was smiling, though, because of the thoughts that accompanied the expression. Then he found his eyes involuntarily watering in empathy and he turned his head, blinking. A trifle nervously, he dumped a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee and stirred. He could still feel her gaze on him. A twinge of displeasure marred his thoughts and she turned away abruptly. That's better, he thought, and felt all right again. "Hey, tell me, Lover," he started to say. Well, might as well get used to it, he figured. You have a husband? Her returned thoughts were confused. A mate? he reworded. Oh, yes. In the worker's village? They have no mates, she said, and he thought he sensed a note of hauteur in her reply. He shrugged and took a sip of coffee. "Well," he said, "one sat# isfied worker would drive the rest of 'em crazy anyway. They'd be biting their nails if they have nails. And on that note -- good night." In bed he sat writing in his muchused diary. Between its battered covers were inscribed the sparse comments he had made on half a dozen different planets. This was his seventh station. "My lucky number," he paragraphed in blue ink. Again no sound. To sleep? His pen skiddled and spat out three fat blots. He looked up and saw her with the tray again. "Yeah," he said. Yeah, Thanks, Lover. But, look, will you just let me know when you... He stopped, seeing that it was hopeless. "This will make me sleep?" he asked. Oh, yes, was the reply. He took a sip, looking down at the inkblotted page. Just star fed tt anyway, he thought; no loss of priceless literature. He ripped out the page and crumpled it in one hand. "This is good stuff," he said, nodding his head toward the glass. He held up the paper. Throw it away, hah? Throw away? she asked. "That's right," he said. "Now clear out. What in hell are you doing in a man's boudoir anyway?" She scuttled across the floor and he grinned as she closed the door quietly behind herself. Finishing the drink, he set it down on the bedside table and turned off the lamp. He settled back on the soft pillow with a sigh. Critical, he thought in drowsy satisfaction. Nuts . Good night. He opened his heavy-lidded eyes and looked around. There was no one in the room. He sank back. Good night. He raised up on one elbow, squinting into the darkness. Good night. "Oh," he said. "Good night, yourself." The thoughts abated. He fell back again and made his mouth a tooth-edged cave with yawning. "How about that?" he muttered thickly, turning on his side. "Absolutely no mirrors. See? Nothin' up my sleeves. Howboutha... He had a dream. The dream covered him with sweat. house with her farewells tugging at his brain, and headed across the grounds for the warehouse. Already, he saw, the Gnee men were formed in a moving line, carrying bundles on their heads. They marched into the warehouse, deposited their burt den on the concrete and had it checked off by a Gnee foreman who stood in the center of the floor, holding a clipboard thick with paper-thin vouchers. As Lindell approached, the men all bowed and looked more cowed as they hastened on their rounds. He noticed that their heads were flatter than Lover's, a little more darkly tinted, and with smaller eyes. Their bodies were broad and thick-muscled. They do look stupid, he thought. As he came up to the man who was doing the checking and sent out an unanswered thought, he saw that they weren't telepathic either. Or maybe didn't want to be.  "How doody," said the man in a squeaky voice. "I check. You check?" "That's okay," Lindell said, pushing back the clipboard. "Just bring it into the office when the first batch is all in." "What, hah?" said the man. Jeez, are you a case, Lindell thought: "Bring this," he said, tapping the clipped sheaf of papers, "Bring to office." He pointed again. "Bring to me... me! When goods are all in." The man's splotchy face lit up with a look of eager stupidity and he nodded brightly. Lindell patted his shoulder. Good boy. rasped his mind. I bet you're dynamite in a crisis. He headed for the office, gritting his teeth. Inside, he shut the plastiglass door behind him and looked around the office. It was all the same as he remembered from other stations, except for the cot in one corner. Don't tell me I have to sleep out here nights, he thought with a groan. He moved closer. On the flat soil-cased pillow was the imprint of a head. He picked up a light brown hair. And what in the hell is this? he wondered. Under the cot he found a belt without a buckle. On the wall by the cot there were violent scratches, as though a man in fever had tried to get out of the office the hard way. He stared at them. The joint is haunted, he concluded with a vague shake of his head. Then he turned away with a shrug. No use worrying myself, he thought. I got six months to go and nothing's going to get me down. He sat down quickly before the desk and dragged the heavy station log before himself. He flipped open the heavy cover and started reading from the beginning. The first entries were twenty years dry. They were signed Jefferson Winters or, a little later, a hasty Jeff. At the end of six months and fiftytwo closely packed pages, Lindell found page # covered with a floridly penned message, "Station Four, good-by forever!" Jeff didn't seem to have had any difficulties adjusting to the life there. Lindell shifted back in the creaking chair and pulled the heavy book on his lap with a sigh of boredom. It was after the first replacement's second month that the entries started to get ragged. There were blurred words, hurried scrawling, mistakes deleted and re-done. Some of the errors apparently had been corrected much later by still another replacement. It was that way through the next four hundred or so sleepinducing pages; a sorry chain of flaws and eventual correction. Lindell flipped through them wearily without the slightest interest in their content. Then he reached the entries signed Bill Corrigan and, with a blinking yawn, he straightened himself up, propped the book on the desk and paid closer attention. Thej' were the same as in every case before, excluding the first one -- efficient beginnings declining markedly to, increased wildness, the penmanship erring more extravagantly with each month until, at last, it became almost illegible. He found a few blatantly miscalculated additions which he corrected in his careful hand. Corrigan's writing, he noted, . broke off in the middle of a word one afternoon. And for the last month and a half of Corrigan's stay, there were nothing but blank pages. He thumbed through them carelessly, shaking his head slowly Have to admit it, he thought. I don't get it. through twilight and, later, at supper, he began to get the sensation that Lover's thoughts were somehow alive, like microscopic insects crawling in and out among the fissures of his brain. Sometimes they barely moved; other times they leaped excitedly. Once, when he became a little irritated with her staring, the thoughts were like invisible suppliants pawing weepily at his mind. What was worse, he realized while reading in bed, the sensation occurred even when she wasn't in the same room with him. It was disconcerting enough to feel an endless stream of thoughts flowing into him white she was close; this remote control business was just a little too much for his taste. Hey, how aboett it? he tried to reason her away good-naturedly. But all he got back was the picture of her looking at him wideeyed and uncomprehending. "Ah, nuts," he muttered and tossed his book on the bedside table. Maybe that' s it, he thought, settling down for the night; this telepathy gimick. Maybe that .vas what got the other men. Well, lot me, he vowed. I just won't sorry myself about it. And he .urned out the lamp, said good night to the air and went to sleep. "Sleep," he muttered, unaware, only partly conscious. It wasn't sleep. Not deep enough by half. A cloudy haze submerged his mind and filled it with the same detailed scene. It telescoped and sank away in a burst. It magnified, welling up and swallowing him and everything. Lover. Lover. The echo of a shriek in a long black corridor. The robe fluttering close by. He saw her pale features. "No," he said, "stay away. Far, close, beyond, upon." He cried out. "No. No. NO!" He jolted up in the darkness with a choking grunt, eyes full open. He stared groggily around the empty bedroom, his thoughts broiling. He reached out in the darkness and flicked on the lamp. Hurriedly, he stuck a cigarette between his lips and lay slumped against the headboard, blowing out clouds of curling smoke. He raised his hand and saw that it shook. He muttered words without sense. Then his nostrils twitched and his lips drew back in revulsion. What the hell died? he thought. There was a heavy saccharine odor in the air, getting worse every second. He tossed off the covers. At the foot of the bed he found them -- a thick pile of livid purple flowers arranged as an offering. He looked at them a moment and then bent over to pick them up and throw them away. He drew back, gasping, as a thorn punctured 'his right thumb. He pressed out bright blood drops and sucked the wound, his brain assailed by the thickening smell of the ugly blooms. T'S very nice of you, he sent her the message, but no more flowers. She looked at him. She doesn't get it, he knew. "Do you understand?" he asked. Floods of affection gurgled over the layers of his brain like syrup. He stirred his coffee restlessly and the transfer eased as though she were determined not to offend him. The kitchen was silent except for the clink of his silver on the breakfast dishes and the slight whispering rustle of her robe. He gulped down coffee and stood up to leave. I'll eat lunch around... I know. Her thought cut into his, mildly commanding. He grinned a little to himself as he headed down the hall. Her telepathed message had come with an almost motherlike chiding. Then, crossing the grounds, he recalled the dream again and the departing grin emptied his features of amusement. All morning he wondered irritably what made the Gnee men so stupid. If they dropped a bundle, it was a project to pick it up again. They're like brainess cows, he thought, watching them through the office windows as they plodded through their tasks, eyes dull and unblinking, their thick shoulders sloping inward. He knew definitely now that they weren't telepathic. He'd tried several times to give them orders with his mind alone and there was no receipt of message. They reacted only to loudly repeated words of two syllables or, preferably, less. And they reacted moronically at that. In the middle of the morning he looked up from the backlog of paper work that Corrigan had left and realized, with some shock, that her thoughts were reaching him all the way from the house. And yet they weren't thoughts he could translate into words. They were just sensations, amorphously present. He got the feeling that she was checking, sending out exploratory beams now and again to see if all was well with him. The first few times it did no more than amuse him: he chuckled softly and went back to his work. But then the proddings assumed an annoyingly regular time pattern and he began to squirm in his chair. He found himself becoming rigidly erect and anticipating them seconds before they came. By late morning he was repulsing them consciously, tossing his pen on the desk and ordering her angrily to leave him alone when he worked. Her thoughts would break off contritely -- and soon come back again, like creeping things that stole upon him, insinuating and beyond insult. His nerves began to fray a little. He left the office and prowled the warehouse floor, tearing open bundles and checking goods with impatient fingers. The thoughts followed him around faithfully, 'How doody," said the Gnee foreman every time Lindell passed, making him angrier yet. Once he straightened up suddenly over a bundle arid said loudly, "Go away!" The foreman jumped a foot in the air. His pencil and clipboard went flying, and he hid behind a pillar and looked fearfully at Lindell. Lindell pretended not to notice. sat thinking, the .open log book before him. No wonder the Gnee men didn't telepath, he thought. They knew what was good for them. Then he looked out the window at the plodding line of workers. What if they weren't just avoiding telepathy? What if they were incapable of it; had once held the ability and, because of it, hd been broken to their present state of witless stolidity? He thought of what Martin had said about the women outnumbering the men. And a phrase entered his brain -- matriarchy by mind. The phrase offended him, but he was suddenly afraid that it might be true. It would explain why the other men had cracked. For if the women were in control, it might well be that, in their inherent lust for dominance, they made no distinction between their own men and the men from Earth. A man is a man is a man. He twisted angrily at the idea of possibly being considered on a level with the dolts who lived in the village. He stood up abruptly. #'m not hungry , he thought, not at all . But I'm ioing hack to the house and order her to make me lunch and let her know I'm not hungry either. I'll make her used to being dominated herself and then she'll get no chance to pick at me. No bug-eyed female Gnee, by God, is going to get me down ! Then he blinked and turned away quickly when he realized that he was staring at the wild pattern of scratches on the far office wall, and the belt without a buckle that still curled limply underneath the cot. his brain tissues with claws of razor. Sweat covering him, he tossed on the bed with a groan and was suddenly awake, staring into the darkness. He thought he saw something at the foot of the bed. He closed his eyes and shook his head and looked again. The room was empty. He felt mind-drenching thoughts recede like some alien fog. His fists contracted angrily. She's been at me while I slept, he thought. Goddam her hide, she's been at me. He pushed back the covers and crawled to the foot of the bed nervously. He couldn't see them, but the cloying fumes Undulated up from # ; i if A  f f n t-t ft # if ' # the floor like erected serpents slithering into his nostrils. Gagging, he slumped down on the mattress, his stomach wrenched. Why? His brain mumbled over and over. My God , why? Angrily, he threw the flowers away in her sight and the thoughts pleaded and showered over him like raindrops, "I said no, didn't I?" he yelled at her, Then he sat down at the table and controlled himself as well as he could. I've got a long way to go, he told his will. Ease off, ease off. Now he was sure he knew why it was only six months; that would be more than enough. But I won't crack,  he commanded himself. It's a cinch she isn't going to crack, so conserve yourself. She's too stupid to crack, he thought deliberately, hoping she'd pick it up. She apparently did, for her shoulders slumped dejectedly all at once. And, during breakfast, she circled him like a timorous wraith, keeping her face averted and her thoughts aloof. He found himself almost sorry for her then. It probably wasn't her fault. It was just an inborn trait among the Gnee women. Then he realized that her thoughts were at him again, tender and gratefully maudlin. He tried to neutralize himself and ignore them as they sought to break through his apathy like honeyed picks. All day he worked hard and made payments in spices and grain to the Gnee foreman. He wondered if the payments would go eventually to the women -- wherever they were. "I'm taping my voice," he dictated later that night. "I want to hear myself talking so I cn forget her. There's no one else here to talk to: I have to talk to myself. A sad case. Well, here goes. "Here I am on Station Four, folks, having a wonderful time and wish you were here instead of me. Oh, it's not that bad. Don't get me wrong. But I guess I know what knocked out Corrigan and the poor bastards before him. It was Lover and her cannibal mind eating them up. But I'll tell you this, cousins; it's not going to eat me up. That much you can put bets on. Lover isn't going to... "No, I didn't call you! Come on, get out of my life, will you? Go to a movie or something. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, go to bed then. Just leave me alone. Alone. "There. That for her. She'll have to go some to get me clawing at the wallpaper." But he carefully locked the door to his room when he went  # to bed. And he groaned in his sleep because of the same nightmare and his limbs thrashed and alt peace and rest were crowded out. He twisted into wakefulness in mid-morning and stumbled up to check the door. He fumbled at the lock with heavy fingers. Finally his thickened centers divined the fact that the door was still locked and he went back to bed in a weaving line and fell on it into a stupored sleep. When he woke up in the morning, there were flowers at the foot of his bed, luxuriantly purple and foul-smelling. The door was still locked. because he left the kitchen in revulsion when she called him dear. No more flowers. I promise, cried her pursuing thoughts. He locked himself in the living room and sat at the desk, feeling sick. Get hold of yourself ! he ordered his system, clasping his hands tightly and holding his teeth firmly clenched. Eat? She was outside the door; he knew it. He closed his eyes. Go away, leave me alone, he told her. I'm sorry, dear, she said. "Stop calling me dear!" he shouted, slamming his fist on the desk surface. As he twisted in the chair, his belt buckle caught on the drawer handle and it jerked out. He found himself staring down at the shiny gas pistol. Almost unconsciously he reached down and touched its slick barrel. He shoved in the drawer with a convulsive movement. None of that! He looked around suddenly, feeling alone and free. He got up and hurried to the window. Down below, he saw her hurrying across the grounds with a basket on her arm. She's going for vegetables, he thought. But what made her leave so suddenly? Of course. The pistol. She must have gotten his thoughts of violent intent. He sighed and calmed down a little. I've still got cards in my hand, he soothed himself. While she was out, he decided to look in her room and see if he could find the shifting panel that enabled her to enter his room with the flowers. He hurried down the hall and pushed open the door to her barely furnished little chamber. His brain was immediately attacked by the odor of a reeking pile of the purple flowers in one corner. He held a hand over his mouth and nose as he looked down in distaste at the living and dead blossoms. What did they represent? An offering of thoughtfulness? His S# throat contracted. Or was it more than thoughtfulness? He grimaced at the thought and remembered that first evening when he'd dubbed her Lover. What had possessed him to choose that name from the infinity of possible names? He hoped he didn't know. He hoped he'd never know. On her couch he found a small pile of odds and ends. There was a button, a pair of broken shoe laces, the piece of crumpled paper he had told her to throw away. And a belt buckle with the initials W. C. stamped on it. There were no secret panels. He sat in the kitchen staring into an untouched cup of coffee. No way she could get in his He had to fight it, keep fighting it. Time passed. Suddenly he realized that she was back in the house again. There was no sound; it was like the return of a ghost. But he knew it. A cloud of feeling preceded her, came plunging through the rooms like an excited puppy searching. Thoughts swirled. You are well? You are not angry? Lover is back -- all hastily and eagerly clutching at him. She swept into the room so quickly that his hands twitched and he upset the cup. The hot liquid splashed over his shirt and trousers as he jumped back. knocking over the chair. She put down the basket and got a towel. He stood there, lips drained of color as she patted the stains dry. She'd never been so close to him. She'd never actually touched him before except for that first revolting handshake. There was an aroma about her; it made his chest heave painfully. And all the time, her thoughts caressed his mind as her hands seemed to be caressing his body. There , there. I am here with you, David dear. Almost in horror, he stared at her spongy pink skin, her huge eyes, her tiny wound of a mouth. And, in the office that morning, he made three straight mistakes in the log book and tore out the whole page and hurled it across the room with a choking cry of rage. ing or threatening. He tried to raze his mental ground so that her thoughts could not find domicile there. If he relaxed his mind enough, her thoughts flowed through and out, perhaps taking part of his will as they left, but he had to risk that. And if he worked hard and crowded his head with stodgy banks of figures, it kept her at a distance and his hands did not tremble so badly. Maybe I should sleep in the office, he thought. Then he found Corrigan's note. It was on a slip of paper stuck away in the log book, hidden white on white. He only found it because he was going through the pages one at a time, reciting the dates in a loud voice to keep his mind filled. "God help me," read the note, black and jagged-lettered. "Lover comes through the walls!" Lindell stared. "I saw it myself," attested the words. "I'm going out of my mind. Always that damn animal mind tugging and tearing at me. And now I can't even shut away her body. I slept out here, but she came anyway." T,indell read it again and it was a wind fanning the fires of terror. Through the walls. The words agonized him. Was it possible? It was Corrigan, then, who had named her Lover. From the very start, the relationship had been on her terms. Lindell had had nothing to say about it. "Lover," he muttered, and her thoughts enveloped him suddenly like a bat's wings swooping down from the sky. He flung up his arms and cried out, "Leave me alone!" And, as her phantom mind slipped off, he had the sense that it was with less timidity, with the patience such as a man knowing his own great strength can afford to display. He sank back on the chair, exhausted suddenly, depleted with fighting it. He crumpled the note in his right hand, thinking of the scratches on the wall behind him. And he saw in his mind Corrigan tossing on the cot, burning with fever, rearing up with a shriek of horror to see her standing before him. But then? The scene was dark. He rubbed a shaking hand over his face. Don't crack, he said to himself. But it was more a frightened entreaty than a command. Wasting fogs of premonition waves. She comes through the walls. That night again, he poured down the bathroom sink the potion she had made. He locked the door and, in the lightless room, he squatted in one corner, peering and waiting, lungs bellowing only because he forced himself to remember to breathe. The. thermostat lowered the heat. The floorboards got icy and his teeth started chattering. I'm not going to bed, he vowed angrily. He didn't know why it was suddenly the bed that frightened him. I don't know, he forced the words through his brain, because he felt vaguely, that he did know and he didn't want to admit it, even for a second. But, after hours of futile waiting, he had to straighten up with a snapping of joints and stumble back to bed. There he crawled under the blankets and lay trembling, trying to stay awake. She'll come while I'm asleep , he thought. I mustn't sleep. When he woke up in the morning, there were flowers on the floor for him. And that was another day before a mass of days that sank crushed into the lump of months. he thought, when it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. When shocks are like scalpels picking and jabbing at delicate ganglia until they have lost all feeling. Yet, though it was no longer terror, it was worse. For his nerves were raw and bleeding a hemophilia of rage. He fought his battles to the dregs of seconds, gaunt-willed, shouting her off, firing lances of hate from his despairing mind, tortured by her surrenders that were her victories. She always came back; like an enraging cat, rubbing endless sycophantic sides against him, yes, admit it! he screamed to himself through midnight struggles. Thoughts of love. And there was the undercurrent, the promise of new shock that would topple his already shaking edifice. It needed only that; an added push, another stab of the blade, one more drop of the shattering hammer. The shapeless threat hung over him. He waited for it, poised for it a hundred times an hour, especially at night. Wait. Waiting, j And sometimes, when he thought  he knew what it was he was waiting for, the shock of admission made him shudder and made him want to claw at walls and break things and run until the blackness swallowed him. If he could only forget her for a while, just a little while, it would be all right. He mumbled it to himself as he set up the inovie projector. She begged from the kitchen, Can  see? "No!" Now all his replies, worded or thought, were like the snapping retorts of a jangled old man. If only the six months would end. That was the problem. The months were not moving fast enough. And time was like her -- not to be reasoned with or intimidated. There were many reels of film on the wall shelf, but his hand I reached up without hesitation and picked out one. He didn't notice it; his mind was calloused to suggestion. He adjusted the reel on the spindle and turned out the lights. He sat down with a tired groan as the flickering milky light cone shot out from the lens, throwing pictures on the screen, A lean darkbearded man was posing, arms crossed, white teeth showing in an artificial smile. He came closer to the camera. The sun flashed, blurring the film a second. Black screen. Title: "Picture of Me." The man, high-cheekboned, bright-eyed, stood laughing soundlessly out from the screen. He pointed to his side and the cawiera swung around. Lindell sat up sharply. It was the station. Apparently it was fall, for, as the camera swept past the house, the village, jerking a moment as though changing hands, he saw the trees surrounded by heaps of dead leaves. He sat there shivering, waiting for something, he didn't know what. The screen blacked. Another title roughly etched in white. Jeff in the Office." The man peered at the camera, an idiotic smile on his face. White skin accentuated by the immaculate black outline of his beard. Fadeout, in. The man doing a jig around the empty warehouse floor, hands poised delicately in the air, his dark hair bouncing wildly on his skull. Another title flashing on the screen. Lindell stiffened in his seat, his breath cut off abruptly. "Lover." repellent in black and white. She was standing by his bedroom window, her face a mask of delight. He could tell it was delight now. Once he would have said she looked like a maniac, her mouth twisted like a living scar, her grotesque eyes staring. She spun and her robe swirled out. He saw her puffy ankles and his stomach muscles grew rock taut. She approached the camera. He saw filmy eyelids slide down over her eyes. His hands began to tremble violently. It was his dream. It made him sick. It was his dream to the detail. Then it had never been a dream; not from his own mind. A sob tore at his throat. She was undoing the robe. Here it is! gibbered his mind in a panic. He whimpered and reached out shakily to turn off the projector. No! It was a cold command in the darkness. Watch me, she ordered. He sat bound in a vise of terror, staring in sick fascination as the robe slid from her neck, pulled down over her round shoulders. She twisted sensuously. The robe sank into a heavy swirling heap on the floor. He screamed, flung out an arm that swept into the burning projector. It crashed down on the floor. The room was night. He struggled up and lurched across the room. Nice? Nice? The word dug at him mercilessly as he fumbled for the door. He found it, rushed into the hall. Her door opened and she stood in the half light, the robe hanging from one spongy shoulder. He jolted to a halt. "Get out of here!" he yelled. No. He made a convulsive move for her, hands out like rigid claws. The sight of her pink, moist flesh spun him away. Kes? her mind suggested. It seemed as if he heard it spoken in a sly rising voice. "Listen!" he cried, reaching out for the door to his room. "Listen, you have to go, do you understand? Go to your mate." He twisted back in utter horror.  am with him now, her message had said. The thought paralyzed him. He stared, open-mouthed, heart pounding in slow, gigantic beats as the robe slipped over her shoulders and started down her arms. He whirled with a cry and slammed the door behind him. His fingers shook on the lock. Her thoughts were a wailing in his mind. He shook in fright and sickness and knew it was no good because he couldn't lock her out. " ing in his brain. They lay on their backs in a circle and kicked at the inside of his skull. They grabbed juicy blobs of gray in their dirty paws and they squeezed. He rolled on his side with a groan. I'll go crazy, he said. Like Corrigan , like all oi them but the first one -- that slimy one who started it all; who added  new and hideous warp to the corru gation of her dominating mind -- who had named her Lover because he meant it. Suddenly he sat up with a gasp of terror, staring at the foot of the bed. She comes through the walls, howled his brain. Nothing there, his eyes saw. His fingers clutched at the sheets. He felt sweat dripping off his brow and rolling down the embankment of his nose. He lay back. Up again! He whimpered like a frightened child. A cloud of blackness was falling over him. He groaned, "No," in the blackness. No use. He whined. Sleep. Sleep. The word throbbed, swelled and depressed in his brain. This was the time. He knew it, knew it, knew... The blade falling, sanity decapitated and twitching bloody in the basket. No! He tried to push himself up, but he couldn't. Sleep. A black tide of night hovering, tracking. Sleep. He fell on the pillow, pushed up weakly on one elbow. "No." His lungs were crusted. "No." He struggled. It was too much. He screamed a thick bubbling scream. She threw his will aside, snapped and futile. She was using all her strength now and he was de-enervated, beaten. He thudded back on the pillow, glassy-eyed and limp. He moaned weakly and his eyes shut, opened, shut, opened, shut... The dream again. Insane. Not a dream. When he woke up, there were no flowers. The courtship was ended. He gaped blankly and unbelievingly at the imprint of a body beside him on the bed. It was still warm and moist. H E laughed out loud. He wrote curse words in his diary. He wrote them in tall black letters. holding the pencil like a knife. He wrote them in the log book too. He tore up vouchers if they were not the right color. His entries were crooked, lines of figures like wavy-numbered tendrils. Sometimes he didn't care about that. Mostly he didn't notice. He prowled the filled warehouse behind locked doors, redeyed and muttering. He clambered up on the bundles and stared out through the skylight at the empty sky. He was lighter by fifteen pounds, unwashed. His face was black with wiry growth. He was going to have an immaculate beard. She wanted it. She didn't want him to wash or shave or be healthy. She called him Jeff dear. You can't fight that , he told himself. You can't win because yqu lose. If you advance you are retreating because, when you are too tired to fight, she cornea back and she fakes your body and your soul. That was why he whispered to the warehouse so no one would hear, "There is a thing to do. And that was why, at night, he sneaked to the living room and put the gas pistol in his pocket. Never harm the Gnees. Well, that was wrong. It was kill or be killed. That's why Vm taking the pistol to bed with me. That's why Pm stroking if as # stare up at the ceiling. Yes, this is it. This is my rock to rest on through the daynights. And he turned over plans as an animal snuffles over flat stones to find bugs for supper. Days. Days. Days. He whispered, "Kill her." He nodded and smiled to himself and patted the cool metal. "You're my friend," he said. "You're my only friend. She has to die. We all know that." He made lots of plans and they were all the same one. He killed in secret chambers of his mind that he had discovered and opened ; where he could crouch clever and undisturbed while he macg his plans. He walked and looked at the worker's village. Animals. I'm not going to end up like you. I'm not going to I'm not going to and when I do I'm not I am ,... office desk, eyes wide, slaver jrunning over his lips. He held the pistol tight in his palsied hand. He flung open the office door and staggered over the concrete, through the lanes between roofhigh stacks. His mouth was so tight that his clamped jaws hurt. He held the pistol pointing. He kicked up the catch and (dragged back one heavy door. He plunged out into the hot sunlight and broke into a run. Wisps of terror licked out from the house. He thought of murder with harder, more savage joy. He ran faster. He fell down because his legs had no feeling. The pistol went flying. He crawled to it and tenderly brushed off the dust. He stood up dizzily and started to hobble. He was hearing things -- not Lover's thoughts, for once. He looked up and blinked and knew he was going insane... It was a cargo ship. The cargo ship. Only, of course, it couldn't be. He dropped the pistol and slumped down beside it, plucking at blue grass with an idiot intensity that he knew was like the Gnee men's. He was careful not to watch the ship as it seemed to come down and the hatches made an impossibly convincing clang and men appeared to climb out. "Go away," he said to the illusion of a man standing beside him. "You're not here. The six months aren't over." His voice was quite normal, except that it broke into giggles and sobs while he had a fist fight with the air. "You'll be all right" the man apparently said, and he felt something that might have been an insect bite, though he thought it was the man pricking him with a hypo of sedative. Two other men came with a stretcher and a sheet that they wrapped him tightly in, and they began carrying him, shrieking and battling, toward the mirage ship. "You can't take me away!" he shouted, "I've got to kill Lover first!" "It wouldn't do any good," the first man said. "There are a lot more where she came from -- one at a time for every guy we station here, it looks like." "She comes through the walls!" Lindell screamed. "That's what you get to believe," said the man soothingly. "It must be pretty fierce. But that's all over now. You're going back home." Lindell tried to fight free of the sheet. "Let me at least warn the next guy!" "It wouldn't do any good. He wouldn't believe you. That's why you didn't see us take away the poor character you relieved." And then the sedative took hold and Lindell fell asleep. The dreams came, but with them was the sound of rockets blasting off, and the spongy image of the Gnee woman grew smaller and smaller and less frightful. But he still smelled the livid flowers. He knew he always would. Proudly announces its new Spring list of Science 'Fiction volumes. outer-spoce adventures. Written by the field's foremost authors... printed by the field's thrillers -- exciting action... realistic comment... and fascinating illustrations. edited by Martin Greenberg -- # Pagett -- # # -- # .# # # (A new Interplanetary novel by the author of Prelude to Fame) Order to day. And sen d for oirr free IlfusfraM taMog. It's yours for the asking. GRamercy #-# devote the main section of this department to a chart f the chemical elements. Well, it won't really be a "chart" because I don't intend to waste that can be looked up in any chemistry textbook. Hence isotopes, whether natural or artificial, will not be mentioned, and not a line will be wasted on melting or boiling points, nor will there be chemical information or   J   electrical characteristics. All that can be found in textbooks and handbooks. What I am concerned with -- and it took a good deal of time to get this information together -- will be of no use to chemists or engineers. But it will, I hope, be interesting. I want to write about the names of the elements, what they mean and, why their discoverers proposed them. Element No. I is, of course, hydrogen. Nicolas Lemery of France discovered it around # and suspected that water was one of its compounds. The other component of water, oxygen, element No. #, was discovered by Joseph Priestly of England and Karl Wilhelm Scheele of Sweden some # years later and when it was established that elements I and # made water (at first thought to be HO) the names were tagged on. Hydor, a Greek word, means water, hence hydrogen, meaning "water-former." The other component of water seemed to be in every acid, hence the name oxygen, "acid-former." Now we know that there are acids without oxygen, but none without hydrogen. And since the oxygen atom is much heavier than the hydrogen atom, there is far more oxygen in water than hydrogen, even though the formula is In short, element No, I should "be called oxygen and No. # should be hydrogen. But it's a little late to change them around now. Element No, # is helium, from Helios, the Greek sun god, for the reason that it was found in the solar atmosphere first (by Jules Janssen of France in #) beered it in the Earth's atmosphere (#). No. # was named by its discoverer, Swede Johan A, Arfwedson of Sweden (#), without noticeable thought or imagination. Lithos is Greek for "stone," the ore it came from looked like stone, hence lithium. No. # also got its name from the mineral in which it occurs. It happens to be green and in Latin there is a word beryllinus which means green-colored, so the element was called beryllium. Similarly, the name of No. # was derived from one of its minerals. The mineral was used -- and still is -- as a flux in metallurgical operations. German miners, consequently, called the mineral Fluss-spat, which became fluorspar by adaptation of the Latin word fluere, "to flow." Fluorspar is the fluoride of calcium and the element was called fluorine. There happens to be a minor and accidental justification for the name: it "flows out" of almost anything you try to keep it in. No. #, neon, means " the new" because it obviously was new covered it in #. But No. #I is less obvious. You may have wondered why the chemical symbol for sodium is Na. The common English name is derived from soda, but the symbol is derived from the word Natrium , which was both common and mysterious until somebody found out that that the original is an Arabic word neter, meaning "herb-ash," as distinct from kalyun, "woodash," and accounts for the letter K as the symbol for No. #. That K stands for the .international name kalium, but the English name was derived from pot ash, making it potassium. Both were first isolated in # by ir Humphry Davy, who isolated No. #, magnesium, at the same time. That name is from the mineral magnesia, which was named in turn after an ancient city. Similarly aluminum, No. #, was named after its mineral, alum, while No, #, silicon, got its name from siex, which in this case is not the trade mark of a coffee maker, but the Latin word for flint. No. #, phosphorus, has a Greek name which is meaningful and fitting; it translates as "carrier of light." The knowledge of No. #, sulphur, however, is so old that the meaning of its name is no longer remembered. Since No. #, chlorine, is a greenish gas, its discoverer, Karl Wilhelm Scheele, just used the Greek word for "green" (choros) to name it. Greek word for "sluggish" to name No. #, argon, because it did not want to combine with anything else. No. #, calcium, one of Sir Humphry Davy's discoveries, derives its name from the Latin calx, "burned lime." When Lars Nilson discovered No. #I in #, he called it scandium, after Scandinavia, but his compatriot Baron Jons Jakob Berzelius, discoverer, among other things, of No. #, titanium, had to justify his choice with the excuse that, in Greek mythology, the titans were the "sons of the Earth." No, #, vanadium, was discovered and named by Nils Sefstrom of Sweden in #. He derived it from the Germanic goddess Vanadis, better known as Freya, for no reason except that he apparently liked the sound. No. #, chromium, is from chromos, the Greek word for "color" or "dye"; you know what a pronounced color chromiumyellow has. But No. #, manganese, is a puzzle. Nobody seems to know the derivation of the word, except that one commentator remarked that the mineral from which manganese is derived was wrongly called "black magnesia" for a while. Since melaa is Greek for black, I could understand the connection if the element were called melanganese. Maybe it was at one time, but I have yet to find proof. In the case of No. #, iron, we have one of the few elements which have been known for so long that their names have no derivation. The chemical symbol FE comes from the Latin ferrum and the Greek equivalent sideros can be encountered as siderite, indicating an iron meteorite. Cobalt and nickel, Nos. # and #, are both German, the former meaning gnome ( Kobotd ), the latter meaning water sprite. The nasty creatures fooled the brave miners, handing them ores that looked like silver ore, but were completely worthless, since applied metallurgy had not yet progressed to the extraction of the metals. They were discovered, for the record, by two Swedes, cobalt by Georg Brandt in # and nickel by Axel Cronstedt in #. No. #, copper, although known since antiquity, has a name that is still traceable. The chemical symbol Cu is from the Latin name cuprum, and cuprum is in all probability derived from the island of Cyprus, which was pronounced "keeprus." No. #, zinc, is German again, from the word Zinke, which means protrusion because it sublimed in the furnace and condensed in protrusions in the cooler parts. Nos. #I and # are Gallium and Germanium; the two discoverers, Lecoq de Boisbaudran (#) and Klemens Winkler (#), honored their respective countries. No. # is arsenic, said to have been isolated first by Albertus Magnus. The name, at any event, is Greek; arsen means "strong" or "masculine." Selenium, No. #, is one of the discoveries of Jons Jakob Berzelius and is named for the goddess of the Moon, Selene, in the Greek pantheon. I suppose he had a reason. There is a very apparent reason, though, for the name of No. #. The Greek word bromos means "stench" and the discoverer, the Frenchman AntoineJerome Balard (#), found out during his experiments that some of the compounds offend the nose. The name of No. # is Greek, too, for krypton means "hidden" say found it -- concealed among the other so-called noble gases. The names of the next few elements in the table are also simple, once you know what they mean. No. # is rubidium because of its ruby-red line in the spectrum; No. # is strontium after Strontian in County Argyll, Scotland; No, # is yttrium after Ytterby in Sweden; and No. # is zirconium after the name of the gem. No. #I was once called columbium in English-speaking countries, where students had to remember that the symbol for columbium was Nb. The origin of the symbol, the international name niobium, has now been officially accepted and columbium will hence be found only in outof-date textbooks. No. #, its discoverer Peter Jakob Hjelm of Sweden thought in #, looks rather like lead. Using the Greek name molybdos, meaning lead, he called it molybdenum. No. # was originally called Masurium, after the landscape of Masuren in East Prussia. Butsince the two discoverers, rs. Walter Noddack and Ida Tacke, merely proved its existence while Oak Ridge actually produced it, the original name has been discarded in favor of technecium from the Greek tecbne, "skill." No. #, discovered in # by Karl Karlovitch Klaus, was also given a geographical name, ruthenium, from Ruthenia -- Russia. The interesting point is that G. W. Osann gave it the same name in #, sixteen years prior to actual isolation. Nos. # and # were both discovered by William Hyde Wollaston in #-#; No. # was called rhodium from the Greek word rhodos for "rose," while No. # was called palladium, after the then newly discovered planetoid Pallas. Silver is No. # and known for so long a time that the meaning of the name is lost; the symbol Ag is from the Latin name' for it, argentum. No. #, Cadmium, is named after the mineral cadmea; No. #, indium, has nothing directly to do with India, being derived from the indigoblue line in its spectrum -- but the name of that color is derived from the name of the plant, which in turn honors the geographical area. No. #, tin, is one of the long known elements; the symbol Sn is from the Latin name stan num. The very similar symbol for No. #, Sb, stands for the Latin name stibium, but the English word antimony is Latin, too. Its origin is the first two words anti monachon, "against the monks," in an edict of Frances II of France, forbidding its medicinal use by clergy. No, #, tellurium, is from the Latin tellus for Earth; No. #, iodine, from the Greek ioeides for the color violet; and No, #, sey's Greek names, means "stranger." Both No. # caesium (from Latin caesius, "bluish") and No. #, barium, (from Greek barys, "heavy") seem to make no sense, for caesium looks like silver and A ll I  t. v I   !f Jl f barium is hardly heavier than aluminum. But "bluish" refers to a line in the spectrum and "heavy" refers to the mineral. The numbers # to #I are the so-called rare' earth elements of which a chemist once wrote that they pursue the chemist in his dreams, that they split like amebas and that their chronology looks like a list of "begats" from the Old Testament. Their names reflect some of the unhappiness they seem to have caused. No. #, lanthanum, is from the Greek word lanthano, which means "to escape notice." No. #, cerium, was named in # after the recently discovered planetoid Ceres (not after the goddess directly) ; No. #, praseodymium, is Greek again, meaning "green twin." No. #, neodymium, is also Greek: "new twin" (the former didymium had split in two). No. #, long missing, was definite identification, changed that to promethium, from Prometheus, the mythical giver of fire. No. #, samarium, was named by a Frenchman after the Russian mine inspector Samarski. No. #, europium, was also named by a Frenchman, Demargay, after the continent, of course. No. #, gadolinium, was named in honor of the Finnish chemist Gadolin; No. #, Terbium, after Ytterby in Sweden; No. #, dysprosium, comes from the Greek word dysprosopon , which means "difficult mask." No. #, Holmium, is derived from Holmia, the Latin name of Stockholm; No. #, erbium, again after Ytterby; No. #, thulium, from Thule, the hard to identify northern land of Pytheas of Massilia. No. # is ytterbium, again Ytterby in Sweden! That place has a total of four elements named after it, three of them rare earths, all found in the unusually interesting mine that is located there. No. #, lutetium, comes from Luteta, the Latin name for Paris, and No. #, the first element after the rare earth group, is hafnium, from Kjobenhavn, the Danish spelling of Copenhagen. Its discoverer was a Hungarian, Georg von Hevesy, but he commemorated the city in which he made the discovery (in #). There was once, you probably remember, a mythical shade who was punished after death by being made to stand in water up to his neck, but every time he tried to bend down and quench his thirst, the water receded. When Gustaf Ekeberg found (in #) a metal which is insoluble in most acids, he thought of thi# ancient victim and named the metal after him: tantalum. Tantalus, by the way, had a daughter by the name of Niobe and she provided the name for No. #. Tungsten is the Swedish word for "heavy stone" and was once the name of element No. #. But its chemical symbol was W for Wolfram, which was adopted two years ago by an international congress, so tungsten is no longer correct. No. #, rhenium, discovered by the same team which announced "masurium," got its name from the Latin Rhenus, "Rhine." No. # is osmium, actually not a flattering name because osme (Greek) means "bad odor." Its discoverer, the Englishmen Smithson Tennant, also discovered No. #, iridium, which he named because of its iridescent solutions. No. # is platinum, a Spanish word meaning "little silver." No. # is gold; the Germanic word is essentially a parallel form of the word "yellow" for quite obvious reasons. The symbol Au is from the Latin name auTum. No. # is mercury (in German still Quecksilber), the symbol Hg coming from the old name hydrargium. No.#, thallium, derives from the Greek thallos, "green twig," Lead is No. # and the word is probably a variant of "load" (you used it to weigh down things, but lodestone, which is magnetic iron ore, comes from the verb "to lead"). The German name, Btei, is derived from that old Germanic word bla which means both "black" and "blue;" to this day, a German soldier will refer to bullets as "blue beans," The symbol Pb is from the Latin plumbum , which is also the root of "plumber." No. #, bismuth, has an originally German name, which in modern rendering would read Wiesematte and denotes a "flowering meadow", a name that makes sense if you know the colorful display of a pan of hardening bismuth. Above bismuth, we get into the realm of the radioactive elements, mostly of recent discovery and with artificial names. No. # is polonium, so named by Madame Sklodowska-Curie after her native Poland. No. #, first called alabamine (after the state) is now known as astatine . from the Greek astasia, "unsteady". No. # is radon, once called "emanation," from the Latin radius for "ray;" No. #, radium, has the same derivation. No. #;. discovered in # by Mile. Marguerite Perey, is called franchium, and No. # is actinium. Of the radioactive elements, only the more stable ones. No. #, thorium, and No. #, uranium, have been known for a considerable time. The former was discovered by Jons Jakob Berzelius and named after the Norse god Thor, the latter by Martin Heinrich Klaproth and named after the planet Uranus. No. #I is protactinium and above # we have the obvious neptunium (No. #) and plutonium (No. #) ; americium ("made in America") as No, #; curium (after Madame Curie) as No. # and, so far the heaviest, Berkelium (Berkeley, Calif.) as No. #. As you can see, naming ele ments is an arbitrary, inaccurate and often sentimental business. Luckily, the origins quickly lose their identities and we are aware only of the properties of these basic substances, And they did, after all, need some name and these do as well as any others. How would the pilot of a ship in space recognize Earth at a glance and could he tell his distance, even roughly, by its brightness? Earth could be recognized by its color and by the presence of a single large moon. Mars, when seen from space, looks reddish, Venus a pure white, while Earth must he blue-green. Saturn, of course, has its rings as a distinctive feature and Jupiter its stripes and four large moons. If the ship were at the orbit of Venus, Earth as Venus at her brightest appears to us. Even the Moon would he almost as bright as Venus is to us. Seen from the orbit of Mars, Earth would look about as bright as Jupiter does from Earth at greatest proximity. If the ship is at points outside the orbit of Jupiter, the pilot would need instruments to see Earth, which at such distance would he "lost" in the glare of the Sun. Just what is the velocity of light? # mi#es per second sounds like a rounded-off figure. It is, and so is the customary metric equivalent of # kilometers per second. The Observer's Handbook gives the more precise value of # km. p. sec. Some values obtained in # and # by various investigators read as follows: Aslakson #  # Essen #  # Bol #  # Bergslrand #j# In your Conquest of Space you list the planetoid Adonis as the one which comes nearest to the Sun, staying just outside the orbit of Mercury. But since the orbit of Mercury is so eccentric, isn't it possible that Adonis might cross the orbit of Mercury on occasion? To ibe best of our knowledge Adonis does not. But we now know a male planetoid that does. It has been appropriately named Icarus and it gets much closer to the Sun than the mythical Icarus ever did. Mercury, when closest to the Sun, is #I astronomical units (one astronomical unit, or A. II., is the distance of Earth from the Sun) from the primary, while Icarus gels to within # A.U. Maximum distance of Icarus from the sun is # A.U., ftniglily twice that of Earth. miles. The small planetoid is less than a mile in diameter and probably reaches a temperature of # F. at perihelion. In the film Destination Moon, there is a short sentence hinting at the use of titanium for spaceship construction. In what respect would titanium be superior to other metals? I have not seen it used anywhere. The reason why titanium is not in use right now to a noticeable extent is simply due to the fact that it became commercially available only two years or so ago. I have seen some small parts made of it. It looks like silver, though less shiny, and lias generally the characteristics of stainless steel. It differs from steel in two respects of interest to an engineer -- it is non-magnetic, and its specific gravity is only # while that of steel is #. Heinlein probably picked titanium as a "light-weight steel" for construction purposes. Why is it that you get ice cubes faster if you put lukewarm water into the trays of your refrigerator rather than ice water? If I had not been prepared, this question would have surprised me no end. But a few years ago I talked to one of the researchers of the Bureau of Standards in Washington, I). who told me that this is a fairly widespread popular superstition and that the Bn# . reau received so many inquiries about it that they finally decided to test it. The answer is astonishingly simple: because of the high latent heat of water, a few degrees more or less do not make a difference which could he noticed without measuring it. Of course, the colder the water, the sooner it will freeze, but the freezing differ cure between water of # F and water of # F is about one minute. #M . Freudian Slip Things are exactly what they seem? Life is real? Life is earnest? Well, that depends.  N the day the Earth vanished, Herman Raye was earnestly fishing for trout, hip deep in a mountain stream in upstate New York. Herman was a tall, serious, sensitive, healthy, well-muscled young man with an outsize jaw and a brush of redbrown hair. He wore spectacles to correct a jk l . # I  i n .# slight hyperopia, and they had heavy black rims because he knew his patients expected it. In his off hours, he was fond of books with titles like Personality and the Behavior Disorders, Selfesteem and Sexuality in Women, Juvenile Totem and Taboo : A study of adolescent culturegroups, and A New Theory of Economic Cycles; but he also liked baseball, beer and bebop. This day, the last of Herman's vacation, was a perfect specimen: sunny and still, the sky dotted with antiseptic tufts of cloud. The trout were biting. Herman had two in his creel, and was casting into the shallow pool across the stream in the confident hope of getting another when the Universe gave one horrible sliding lurch. Herman braced himself instinctively, shock pounding through his body, and looked down at the pebbly stream-bed under his feet. It wasn't there. He was standing, to all appearances, in three feet of clear water with sheer, black nothing under it: nothing, the abysmal color of a moonless night, pierced by the diamond points of a half-dozen incredible stars. He had only that single glimpse; then he found himself gazing across at the pool under the far bank, whose waters reflected the tranquil imagery of trees. He raised his casting rod, swung it back over his shoulder, brought it forward again with a practiced flick of his wrist, and watched the lure drop. Within the range of his vision now, everything was entirely normal ; nevertheless, Herman wanted very much to stop fishing and look down to see if that horrifying void was still there. He couldn't do it. Doggedly, he tried again and again. The result was always the same. It was exactly as if he were a man who had made up his mind to fling himself over a cliff, or break a window and snatch a loaf of bread, or say in a loud voice to an important person at a party, "I think you stink." Determination was followed by effort, by ghastly, sweating, heartstopping fear, by relief as he gave up and did something else. All right, he thought finally, there's no point going on with it. Data established: hallucination, compulsion, inhibition. Where do we go from here? The obvious first hypothesis was that he was insane. Herman considered that briefly, and left the question open. Three or four selected psychoanalyst jokes paraded through his mind, led by the classic, "You're fine, how am I?" There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief that all analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the people who get all course that makes an orthodox analyst -- a course in which an M. D. degree is only a beginning -- are impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age of fifteen up until the completion of his own analysis at twenty-six, had been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway car or an elevator. But was he now insane? Can a foot-rule measure itself? Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his catch, cooked it and ate it. Where the ground had been bare around his cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had finished eating the fish. He couldn't. After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He couldn't. In fact, it occurred to him, he was helpless to do anything that he wouldn't normally have done. Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his tent and went to sleep. Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again... npHE light woke him, long before dawn. From where he lay on his back, he could see an incredible pale radiance streaming upward all around him, outlining the shadow of his body at the ridge of the tent, picking out the under-surfaces of the trees against the night sky. He strained, until he was weak and dizzy, to roll over so that he could see its source; but he had to give up and wait another ten minutes until his body turned "naturally," just as if he had still been asleep. Then he was looking straight down into a milky transparency that started under his nose and continued into unguessable depths. First came the matted clumps of grass, black against the light, every blade and root as clear as if they had been set in transparent plastic. Then longer, writhing roots of trees and shrubs, sprouting thickets of hair-thin rootlets. Between these, and continuing downward level by level, was spread an infinity of tiny specks, seed-shapes, spores. Some of them moved, Herman realized with a shock. Insects burrowing in the emptiness where the Earth should be? In the morning, when he crawled out of the tent and went to the bottomless stream to wash, he noticed something he had missed the day before. The network of grasses gave springily under his feet -- not like turf, but like stretched rubber. Herman conceived an instant dislike for walking, especially when he had to cross bare ground, because when that happened, he felt exactly what he saw: nothing whatever underfoot. "Walking on air," he realized, was not as pleasant an experience as the popular songs would lead you to expect. Herman shaved, cooked and ate breakfast, washed the dishes, did the chores, and packed up his belongings. With a mighty effort, he pried out the tent stakes, which were bedded in nothing but a loose network of roots. He shouldered the load and carried it a quarter of a mile through pine woods to his car. The car stood at ground level, but the ground was not there any more. The road was now nothing more than a long, irregular trough formed by the spreading roots of the pines on either side. Shuddering, Herman stowed his gear in the trunk and got in behind the wheel. When he put the motor into gear, the sedan moved sedately and normally forward. But the motor raced madly, and there was no feeling that it was faking hold. With screaming engine, Herman drove homeward over a nonexistent road. Inwardly and silently, he gibbered. Six miles down the mountain, he pulled up beside a whitepainted fence enclosing a neat yard and a fussy little blue-shuttered house. On the opposite side of the fence stood a middle-aged woman with a floppy hat awry on her head and a gardening trowel in one of her gloved hands. She looked up with an air of vague dismay when he got out of the car. "Some more eggs today, Dr. Raye?" she asked, and smiled. The smile was like painted china. Her eyes, lost in her fleshy face, were clearly trying not to look downward, "Not today, Mrs. Richards," Herman said. 'T just stopped to say good-by. I'm on my way home." "Isn't that a shame?" she said mechanically. "Well, come again next year.' Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a straitjacket."' He tried to say it. He stuttered, "N-n-n-n -- "and ended, glancing at the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?" II The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?" "Very pretty," said Herman helplessly. The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were spotlessly clean. kN Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful little men. He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt was gone. The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what they were. New York had been a city of stone -- built on stone, built of stone, as cold as stone. Uptown, the city looked halfbuilt, but insanely occupied, a forest of orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms in lath and a pa perthickness of paint. The wrought-iron railings were gone, too. On Fourth Avenue, bookseller's row, you could almost persuade yourself that nothing had happened, provided you did not look down. The buildings had been made of wood, and wood they remained. The second-hand books in their wooden racks would have been comforting except that they were so clean. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere ; the air was more than countrypure. There was an insane selective principle at work here, Herman realized. Everything from bedrock to loam that belonged to the Earth itself had disappeared. So had everything that had a mineral origin and been changed by refinement and mixture : concrete, wrought iron, brick, but steel and glass, porcelain and paint remained. It looked as if the planet had been the joint property of two children, one of whom didn't want to play any more, so they had split up their possessions -- this is yours, this is yours, this is mine... The two little men popped into view not six feet in front of Herman as he was passing a sidewalk bookstall. Both were dressed in what looked like workmen's overalls made of lurite chainmail, or knitted glow-worms. One of them had four eyes, two brown, two blue, with spectacles for the middle pair. Ears grew like cabbages all over his bald head. The other had two eyes, the pupils of which were crossshaped, and no other discernible features except when he opened his gaptoothed mouth: the rest of his head, face and all, was completely covered by a dense forest of red hair. As they came forward, Herman's control of his body suddenly returned. He was trying his best to turn around and go away from there, and that was what his body started to do. Moreover, certain sounds of a prayerful character, namely "Oh dear sweet Jesus," which Herman was forming in his mind, involuntarily issued from his lips. Before he had taken the first step in a rearward direction, however, the hairy little man curved around him in a blur of motion, barring the way with two long, muscular, red-furred arms. Herman turned. The four-eyed little man had closed in. Herman, gasping, backed up against the bookstall. People who were headed directly for them, although showing no recognition that Herman and the little men were there, moved stiffly asidedike dancing automatons, strode past, then made another stiff sidewise motion to bring them back to the original line of march before they went on their way. "Olaph dzenn Harm Rai gjo glerr-dregnarr?" demanded Hairy, Herman gulped, half-stunned, "Huh?" he said. Hairy turned to Four-Eyes. "Grinnr alaz harisi nuya." "Izzred alph! Meggi erd-halaza riggbord els kamma gredyik. Lukhhal!" Hairy turned back to Herman. Blinking his eyes rapidly, for they closed like the shutter of a camera, he made a placating gesture with both huge furry hands. "Kelagg ikri odrum faz," he said, and, reaching out to the bookstall, he plucked out a handful of volumes, fanned them like playing cards and displayed them to Four-Eyes. A heated discussion ensued, at the end of which Hairy kept For Whom the Bell Tolls , Four-Eyes took The Blonde in the Bathtub, and Hairy threw the rest away. Then, while Herman gaped and made retching sounds, the two disgusting little men tore pages out of the books and stuffed them in their mouths. When they finished the pages, they ate the bindings. Then there was a rather sick pause while they seemed to digest the contents of the books they had literally devoured. Herman' had the wild thought that they were blurb writers whose jobs had gone to their heads. The one with the four eyes rolled three of them horribly. "That's more like it," he said in nasal but recognizable English. "Let's start over. Are you Herman Raye, the skull doc? Herman produced a series of incoherent sounds. "My brother expresses himself crudely," said Hairy in a rich, fruity baritone. "Please forgive him. He is a man of much heart." "Uh?" said Herman. "Truly," said Hairy. "And of much ears," he added with a glance at his companion. "But again, as to this affair -- tell me true, are you Herman Raye, the analyst of minds?" "Suppose I am?" Herman asked cautiously. Hairy turned to Foureyes. "Arghraz iktri 'Suppose I am,' Gurh? Olaph iktri erz ogromat, lekh -- " "Talk English, can't you?" Four-eyes broke in. "You know he don't understand, that caveman jabber. Anyhow, yeah, yeah, it's him. He just don't want to say so.' He reached out and took Herman by the collar. "Come on, boy, the boss is waitin'." There were two circular hairlines of glowing crimson where Hairy and Four-eyes had originally appeared. They reached the spot in one jump. Hairy bringing up the rear. "But tell me truly," he said anxiously. "You are that same Herman Raye?" Herman paid no attention. Below, under the two glowing circles. was the terrifying gulf that had replaced the Earth; and this time, Herman was somehow convinced, it was not going to hold him up. "Let go!" he shouted, struggling. "Ouch!" He had struck Four-eyes squarely on the flat nose, and it felt as if he had slugged an anvil. Paying no attention, Four-eyes turned Herman over, pinned his arms to his sides, and dropped him neatly through the larger of the two circles. Herman shut his eyes tightly and despairingly repeated the multiplication table up to # x #, When he opened them again, he was apparently hanging in midspace, with Hairy to his left and Foureyes to his right. The visible globe around them was so curiously tinted and mottled that it took Herman a long time to puzzle it out. Ahead of them was the darkest area -- the void he had seen before. This was oval in shape, and in places the stars shone through it clearly. In others, they were blocked off entirely or dimmed by a sort of haze. Surrounding this, and forming the rest of the sphere, was an area that shaded from gold shot with violet at the borders, to an unbearable blaze of glory at the center, back the fray they had come and a little to the right. Within this lighted section were ther amorphous areas which were much darker, almost opaque; and still others where the light shone through diluted to a ruddy ghost of itself, like candlelight through parchment. Gradually Herman realized that the shapes and colors he saw were the lighted and dark hemispheres of Earth. The dark areas were the oceans, deep enough in most places to shut out the light altogether, and those parts of the continents, North and South America behind him, Europe and Asia ahead, Africa down to the fight, which were heavily forested. Herman's earlier conviction returned. Things like this just did  not happen. Physician, hoa'i thy S Ht "You're not real," he said bitterly to Four-eyes, i "Not very," Four-eyes agreed. Tm twice as real as that jerk, though," he insisted, pointing to Hairy. Ahead of them, or "below," a point of orange light was slowly swelling. Herman watched it Without much interest. Hairy broke out into  torrent Of cursing. "I this and that in the milk of your this!" he said. I this, that and the other in the this of your that. Your sister! Your cousin! Your grandmother' ancle!" Foureyes listened with owed approval. Them was good books, hah?" he asked happily. "Better than those scratching hi the caves," Hairy said. "Something to think about till they haul us out again. Well " said Four-eyes philosophically, "here we are." T HE orange spot had enlarged into the semblance of a lighted room, rather like a stage setting. Inside were two enormous Persons, one sitting, one standing. Otherwise, and except for three upholstered chairs, the room was bare. No -- as they swooped down toward it, Herman blinked and looked again. A leather couch had appeared against the far wall. At the last moment, there was a flicker of motion off to Herman's left. Something that looked like a short, pudgy human being accompanied by two little men the size of Hairy and Foureyes whooshed off into the diance, back toward the surface of the planet. Herman landed. Hairy and Four-eyes, after bowing low to the standing Person, turned and leaped out of the room. When Herman, feeling abandoned, turned to see where they had gone, he discovered that the room now had four walls and no windows or doors. The Person said, 'How do you do, Doctor Raye?" Herman looked at him. Although his figure had a disquieting tendency to quiver and flow, so that it was hard to judge, he seemed to be about eight feet tall. He was dressed in what would have seemed an ordinary dark-blue business suit, with an equally ordinary white shirt and blue tie, except that all three garments had the sheen of polished metal. His face was bony and severe, but not repellently so; he looked absent-minded rather than stern. The other Person, whose suit was brown, had a broad, kindly and rather stupid face; his hair was white. He sat quietly, not looking at Herman, or, apparently, at anything else. Herman sat down in one of the upholstered chairs. "All right," he said with helpless defiance.  What's it all about?" "I'm glad we can cmjie to the point at once," said the Person. He paused, moving his lips silently. "Ah, excuse me. I'm sorry." A second head, with identical features, popped into view next to the first. His eyes were closed. "It's necessary, I'm afraid," said head humber one apologetically. "I have so much to remember, you know." Herman took a deep breath and said nothing. "You may call me Secundus, if you like," resumed the Person, "and this gentleman Primus, since it is with him that you will have principally to deal. Now, our problem here is . one of amnesia, and I will confess to you frankly that we ourselves are totally inadequate to cope with it. In theory, we are not subject to disorders of the mind, and that's what makes us so vulnerable now that it has happened. Do you see?" A fantastic sui picion crept into Herman's mind. "Just a moment," he said carefully. "If you don't mind telling me, what is it that you have to remember?" "Well, Doctor, my field is human beings ; that's why it became my duty to search you out and consult with you. And there is a great deal for me to carry in my mind, you know, especially under these abnormal conditions. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it is a full-time job." "Are you going to tell me," asked Herman, more carefully still, "that this -- gentleman -- is the one who is supposed to remember the Earth itself? The rocks and minerals and so on?" "Yes, exactly. I was about I # tell you -- " "And that the planet has disappeared because he has amnesia?" Herman demanded on a rising note. Secundus beamed, "Concisely expressed. I myself, being, sa to speak, saturated with the thoughts and habits of human beings, who are, you must admit, a garrulous race, could not -- " "Oh, no!" said Herman. "Oh, yes," Secundus corrected. "I can understand that the idea is difficult for you to accept, since you naturally believe that you yourself have a real existence, or, to be more precise, that you belong to the world of phenomena as opposed to that of noumena." He beamed. "Now I will be silent, a considerable task for me, and let you ask questions." Herman fought a successful battle with his impulse to stand Up and shout "To hell with it!" He had been through a great deal, bu he was a serious and realistic young man. He set himself to think the problem through logically. If, as seemed more than probable, Secundus, Primus, Hairy, Four-eyes, and this whole Alice in Wonderland situation existed only as his hallucinations, then it did not matter much whether he took them seriously or not. If they were real, then he wasn't, and vice versa. It didn't  make any difference which was which. He relaxed deliberately and folded his hands against his abdomen. "Let me see if I can get this clear," he said. "I'm a noufienon, not a phenomenon. In cruder terms, I exist only in your mind. Is that true?" Secundus beamed. "Correct." "If you got amnesia, I and the rest of the human race would disappear." Secundus looked worried, "That is also correct, and if that should happen, you will readily understand that we would be in difficulty. The situation is extremely -- But pardon me. I had promised to be silent except when answering questions." "This is the part I fail to understand, Mr. Secundus. I gather that you brought me here to treat Mr. Primus. Now, if I exist as a thought in your mind, you necessarily know everything I know. Why don't you treat him yourself?" Secundus shook his head disapprovingly. "Oh, no, Dr. Raye, that is not the case at all. It cannot be said that I know everything that you know; rather we should say that I remember you. In other words, that I maintain your existence by an act of memory. The two functions, knowledge and memory, are not identical, although, of course, the second cannot be considered to exist without the first. But before we become entangled in our own terms, I should perhaps remind you that when I employ the word 'memory' I am only making use of a convenient approximation. Perhaps it would be helpful to ay that my memory is comparable to the structurememory of a living organism, although that, too, has certain semantic disadvantages. Were you about to make a remark, Doctor?" "It still seems to me," Herman Said stubbornly, "that if you remember me, structurally or otherwise, that includes everything I remember. If you're going to tell me that you remember human knowledge, including Freudian theory and practice, but are unable to manipulate it, that seems to me to be contradicted by internal evidence in what you've already said. For example, it's clear that in the field of epistemology -- the knowledge of knowledge, you might say -- you have the knowledge and manipulate it." "Ah," said Secundus, smiling shyly, "but, you see, that happens to be my line. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, being specializations, are not. As I mentioned previously, persons of our order are theoretically not capable of psychic deterioration. That is why we come to you, Dr. Raye. We are unable to help ourselves; we ask your help. We place ourselves unreservedly in your hands." The question, "How was I chosen?" occurred to Herman, but he left it unasked. He knew that ' the answer was much likelier to be "At random," than, "Because talented psychoanalyst on the planet." "I gather that I'm not the first person you've tried," he said. "Oh, you saw Dr. Buddolphson departing? Yes, it is true that in our ignorance of the subject we did not immediately turn to practitioners of your psychological orientation. In fact, if you will not be offended, I may say that you are practically our last hope. We have already had one eminent gentleman whose method was simply to talk over Mr. Primus's problems with him and endeavor to help him reach an adjustment; he failed because Mr. Primus, so far as he is aware, has no problems except that he has lost hii memory. Then we had another whose system, as he explained it to me, was simply to repeat, in a sympathetic manner, everything that the patient said to him; Mr, Primus was not sufficiently prolix for this method to be of avail. "Then there was another who wished to treat Mr. Primus by encouraging him to relive his past experiences; 'taking him back along the time-track,' as he called it; but -- " Secundus looked mournful -- "Mr. Primus has actually had no experiences in th usual sense of the term, though he very obligingly made up a number of them; Our ontogeny. Dr, Raye, is so simple that it cam U# I carcely be said to exist at all. iach of us normally has only one unction, the one I have already nentioned, and, until this occurence, it has always been fulfilled successfully... "We also had a man who proosed to reawaken Mr. Primus's icmory by electric shock, but Ir. Primus is quite impervious o currents of electricity and we ere unable to hit upon an ac"ptable substitute. In short. Dr. laye, if you should prove unable o help us, we will have no one ift to fall back upon except, posibly, the Yogi." "They might do you more good, it that," Herman said, looking A Mr. Primus. "Well, I'll do what I can, though the function of analysis is to get the patient to accept reality, and this is the opposite. What can you tell me, to begin with, about Mr. Primus's personality, the onset of the disturbance, and so on -- and, in particular, what are you two? Who's your boss? What's it all for and .iow does it work?" Secundus said, "I can give you very little assistance, I am afraid. I would characterize Primus as a very steady person, extremely accurate in his work, but not very imaginative. His memory loss occurred abruptly, as you yourself witnessed yesterday afternoon. As to your other questions -- forgive me, Dr. Raye, in but it is to your own advantage if I fail to answer them. I am, of course, the merest amateur in psychology, but I sincerely feel that your own psyche might be damaged if you were to learn the fragment of the truth which I could give you." He paused. A sheaf of papers, which Herman had not noticed before, lay on a small table that he had not noticed, either. Secundus picked them up and handed them over. "Here are testing materials," he said. "If you need anything else, you have only to call on me. But I trust you will find these complete." He turned to go. "And one more thing, Dr. Raye," he said with an apologetic smile. "Hurry, if you possibly can." a sarcophagus ornament, lay limply supine on the tenfoot couch, arms at his sides, eyes closed. When Herman had first told him to relax, Primus had had to have the word carefully explained to him; from then on he had done it -- or seemed to do it -- perfectly'. In his preliminary tests, the Binet, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index and the Berneuter P. I., he had drawn almost a complete blank. Standard testing methods did not work on Mr. Primus, and the reason was obvious enough. Mr. Primus simply was not a human being. This room, no doubt, was an illusion, and so was Mr. Primus's anthropomorphic appearance... Herman felt like a surgeon trying to operate blindfolded while wearing a catcher's mitt on each hand. But he kept trying; he was getting results, though whether or not they meant anything, he was unable to guess. On the Rorschach they had done a little better, at least in volume of response. "That looks like a cliff," Primus would say eagerly. "That looks like a -- piece of sandstone. This part looks like two volcanoes and a cave." Of course, Herman realized, the poor old gentleman was only trying to please him. He had no more idea than a goldfish what a volcano or a rock looked like, but he wanted desperately to help. Even so, it was possible to score the results. According to Herman's interpretation. Primus was a case of arrested infantile sexualism, with traces of conversion hysteria and a strong Oedipus complex. Herman entered the protocol solemnly in his notes and kept going. Next came free association, and, after that, recounting of dreams. Feeling that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, Herman carefully explained to Primus what "sleep I  and "dreams" were. Primus had promised to do his best; he had been lying there now, without moving, for -- how long? Startled, Herman looked at his watch. It had stopped. Scoring the Rorschach alone, Herman realized suddenly, should have taken him nearly a full day, even considering the fact that he hadn't eaten anything, or taken time out to rest, or -- Herman bewilderedly felt his jaw. There was only the slightest stubble. He didn't feel hungry or tired, or cramped from sitting... "Secundus!" he called. A door opened in the wall to his right, and Secundus stepped through. The door disappeared. "Yes, Dr. Raye? Is anything wrong?" "How long have I been here?" Secundus' right-hand head looked embarrassed. "Well, Doctor, without bringing in the difficult questions of absolute versus, relative duration, and the definition of an arbitrary position -- " "Don't stall. How long have I been here in my own subjective time?" "Well, I was about to say, without being unnecessarily inclusive, the question is still very difficult. However, bearing in mind that the answer is only a rough approximation -- about one hundred hours." lit Herman rubbed his chin. "I don't like your tampering with me' he said slowly. "You've speeded me up -- is that it? And at the same time inhibited my fatigue reactions, and God knows what else, so that I didn't even notice I'd been working longer than I normally could until just now?" Secundus looked distressed. "I'm afraid I have made rather a botch of it, Dr. Raye. I should not have allowed you to notice at all, but it is growing increasingly difficult to restrain your fellowcreatures to their ordinary routines. My attention strayed, I am sorry to say." He glanced at Jie recumbent form of Primus. "My word! What is Mr. Primus doing, Dr. Raye?" "Sleeping," Herman answered curtly. "Remarkable! I hope he does not make a habit of it. Will he awaken soon, do you think, Doctor?" "I have no idea," said Herman helplessly ; but at that moment Primus stirred, opened his eyes, and sat up with his usual vague, kindly smile. "Did you dream?" Herman asked him. Primus blinked slowly. "Yes. Yes, I did," he said in his profoundly heavy voice. "Tell me all you can remember about it." "Well, said Primus, sinking back onto the couch, "I dreamed I was in a room with a large bed. It had heavy wooden posts and a big bolster. I wanted to lie down and rest in the bed, but the bolster made me uncomfortable. It was too dark to see, to rearrange the bed, so I tried to light a candle, but the matches kept going out... " Herman took it all down, word for word, with growing excitement and growing dismay. The dream was too good. It might have come out of Dr. Freud's original case histories. When Primus had finished, Herman searched back through his notes. Did Primus know what a bed was, or what a bolster was, or a candle? How much had Herman told him? "Bed" was there, of course. Primus: "What are 'dreams?'" Herman: "Well, when a human being goes to bed, and sleeps... " "Bolster" was there, too, but not in the same sense. Herman: "To bolster its argument, the unconscious -- what we call the id -- frequently alters the person's likes and dislikes on what seem to be petty and commonplace subjects... And "candle?" Herman: "I want you to understand that I don't know all about this subject myself, Mr. Primus. Nobody does; our knowledge is just a candle in the darkness..." Herman gave up. He glanced at Secundus, who was watching him expectantly. "May I talk to you privately?" "Of course." Secundus nodded to Primus, who stood up awkwardly and then vanished with a pop. Secundus tut-tutted regretfully. Herman took a firm grip on himself. "Look," he said, "the data I have now suggest that Primus had some traumatic experience in his infancy which arrested his development in various ways and also strengthened his Oedipus complex -- that is, intensified his feelings of fear, hatred and rivalry toward his father. Now, that may sound to you as if we're making some progress. I would feel that way myself -- if I had the slightest reason for believing that Primus ever had a father." Secundus started to speak; but Herman cut him off. "Wait, let me finish. I can go ahead on that basis, but as far as I'm concerned I might just as well be counting the angels on the head of a pin. You've got to give me more information, Secundus. I want to know who you are, and who Primus is, and whether there's any other being with whom Primus could possibly have a filial relationship. And if you can't tell me all that without giving me the Secret of the Universe, then you'd better give it to me whether it's good for me or not. I can't work in the dark." Secundus pursed his lips. "There is justice in what you say. Doctor. Very well, I shall be entirely frank "with you -- in so far as it is possible for me to do so, of course. Let's see, where can I begin?" "First question," retorted Herman. "Who are you?" "We are -- " Secundus thought a moment, then spread his hands with a helpless smile. "There are no words, Doctor, To put the case in negatives, we are not evolved organisms, we are not mortal, we are not, speaking in the usual sense, alive, although, of course -- I hope you will not be offended -- neither are you," Herman's brow wrinkled. "Are you real?" he demanded finally. Secundus looked embarrassed. "You have found me out, Dr. Raye. I endeavored to give you that impression -- through vanity, I am ashamed to say -- but, unhappily, it is not true. I, too, belong to the realm of noumena." "Then, blast it all, what is real? This planet isn't. You're not. What's it all for?" He paused a moment reflectively. "We're getting on to my second question, about Primus's attitude toward his 'father.' Perhaps I should have asked just now, 'Who is real?' Who remembers you, Secundus?" "This question, unfortunately, is the one I cannot answer with complete frankness. Doctor. I assure you that it is not because I do not wish to; I have no option in the matter. I can tell you only that there is a Person of whom it might be said that He stands in the parental relationship to Primus, to me, and all the rest of our order." "God?" Herman inquired. "Jahweh? Allah?" "Please, no names, Doctor. Secundus looked apprehensive. "Then, damn it, tell me the rest!" Herman realized vaguely that he was soothing his own hurt vanity at Secundus's expense, but he was enjoying himself too much to stop. "You're afraid of something; that's been obvious right along. And there must be a time limit on it, or you wouldn't be rushing me. Why? Are you afraid that if this unnamable Person finds out you've botched your job, He'll wipe you out of existence and start over with a new bunch?" A cold wind blew down Herman's back. "Not us alone, Dr. Raye," said Secundus gravely. "If the Inspector discovers this blunder -- and the time is coming soon when He must -- no corrections will be attempted. When a mistake occurs, it is -- painted out." "Oh," said Herman after a moment. He sat down again, weakly. "How long have we got?" "Approximately one and a quarter days have gone by at the Earth's normal rate since Primus lost his memory," Secundus said. "I have not been able to 'speed you up,' as you termed it, by more than a twenty-to-one ratio. The deadline will have arrived, by my calculation, in fifteen minutes of normal time, or five hours at your present accelerated rate." Primus stepped into the room, crossed to the couch and lay down placidly. Secundus turned to go, then paused. "As for your final question. Doctor -- you might think of the ing, in which this planet is one infinitesimally small dot of color. The work is wholly imaginary, of course, since neither the canvas nor the pigment has what you would term an independent existence. Nevertheless, the artist takes it seriously. He would not care to find, so to speak, mustaches daubed on it." Herman sat limply, staring after him as he moved to the door. Secundus turned once more. "I hope you will not think that I am displeased with you, Doctor," he said. "On the contrary, I feel that you are accomplishing more than anyone else has. However, should you succeed, as I devoutly hope, there may not be sufficient time to congratulate you as you deserve. I shall have  to replace you . immediately in your normal world-line, for your absence would constitute as noticeable a flaw as that of the planet. In that event, my present thanks and congratulations will have to serve." With a friendly smile, he disappeared. Herman wound his watch. Two hours later, Primus's answers to his questions began to show a touch of resentment and surly defiance. Transference , Herman thought, with a constriction of his throat, and kept working desperately. ) Three hours. "What does the bolster remind you of?" "I seem to see a big cylinder rolling through space, sweeping the stars out of its way..." Four hours. Only three minutes left now, in the normal world.  can't wait to get any deeper, Herman thought. It's got to be now or never. "You must understand that these feelings of resentment and hatred are normal," he said, trying to keep the strain out of his voice, "but, at the same time, you have outgrown them -- you can rise above them now. You are an individual in your own right, Primus. You have a job to do that only you can fill, and it's an important job. That's what matters, not all this infantile emotional clutter..." He talked on, not daring to look at his watch. Primus looked up, and a huge smile broke over his face. He began, "Why, of -- " ing along Forty-second Street, heading toward the Hudson. The pavement was solid under his feet; the canyon between the buildings was filled with the soft violet-orange glow of a summer evening in New York. In the eyes of the people he passed, he saw the same incredulous relief he felt. It was over. He'd done it. He'(,i broken all the rules, but, incredibly, he'd got results. Then he looked up and a chill spread over him. No one who knew the city would accept thht ithyphallic parody as the Empire State Building, or those huge fleshy curves, as wanton as the mountains in which Mr, Maugham's "Sadie Thompson' had her lusty existence, as the prosaic hills' of New Jersey. Psychoanalysis had certainly removed Mr. Primus's inhibitions. The world was like a fence scrawled on by a naughty little boy. Mr. Primus would outgrow it in time, but life until then might be somewhat disconcerting. Those two clouds, for instance... bleday  Co., Inc., #. # paes, # T HE subtitle of this volume is its own book review; "Tales Unlike Other Tales." They are! Most science fiction addicts know John Collier only through his famous "Green Thoughts," which appeared in the first science fiction anthology ever compiled, Donald Wollheim's Pocket Book oi Science Fiction. "Green Thoughts" isn't science fiction, for John Collier never wrote any in his life. It happens, however, that he is the most distinguished living writer of imaginative, fantastical, demonological, shivery and sophisticatedjsupernatural stories, and any science fiction reader who foregoes this book has only himself to blame for having passed up one of the great reading experiences of modern times. Don't miss Collier! You'll be a much more watery and uninspired individual than you are, if you do. Permabooks (Doubleday  Co,, Inc.), New York, #. # pages, #c N ineteen stories, aii but four never anthologized before; for # cents the buy of the month. All but three of the stories rate "B" or better, too; and it contains one nearly great (and quite unknown) tale, as well. This is called "Scanners Live in Vain," and it is written by some pseudonymity known as Cordwainer Smith, It is one of the best tours de force in science fiction. Another really magnificent tale is Fowler Wright's quietly irreversible comment on irresponsible science, called "Obvious Suicide." There are also topgrade tales by Kornbluth, MacDonald, Leinster (he never fails!), Wyndham (alias both Harris and Beynon), MacCreigh, Finney (wonderful!), Bradbury (of course), Pearson, Clarke, Dryfoos, van Vogt, Gold (a delight!), Merril, and a completely surprising tale by Heinlein in collaboration with a lady named Wentz. A rich, juicy collection; Mr. Pohl is to be congratulated on having done it. Too bad he had to include these previously anthologized items: Pearson's "The Embassy," Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," van Vogt's "Letter from the Stars" (called "Dear Pen Pal" in its earlier book appearance), and Clarke's "Rescue Party." But even with these duplications, this is an unavoidable "must," particularly at the price. Fredric Brown. Shasta Publish ers, Chicago, #, # pages, #L ' one of the very few so-called "humorists" in science fiction whose humor -- at least most of it -- is funny rather than plain silly. Previously collected: "Knock" (a good B-plus) ; "Nothing Sirius" (not one of the best; B-minus) ; and "Star Mouse" (delightful -- a good A-plus for Mitkey Mouse!) New in book form : "Something Green" (powerful alien-world tale, from which Heinlein borrowed the famous phrase, "The Green Hills of Earth", A); "Crisis, #" (I didn't much like this mixture of science fiction, sleuthing and pseudohypnotism; C-plus) ; "Pi in the Sky" (a genon advertising; a solid A); "All Good Bems" (witty but slight, a high-class B-plus) ; "Daymare" (serious tale involving a hypnotism helmet; A-minus); and last -- and best, for my money -- "Come and Go Mad' (one of the most superb "we're property stories ever written). A fine, high-spirited, fantastical, super-scientifical book for the human-hearted; a thing for padlocked shelves so people won't be swiping it. ited by Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press, New York , #. # Pages, # saying has a way of going, everything -- including # stories, of which nine according to my coiSkt are worth preserving. There's a pleasant introduction by Willy Ley; a #-page "Dictionary of Science Fiction" that contains about # definitions (to pun slightly, definitely not a definitive dictionary) ; and a #(though Mr. G. insists they're not any such thing) by Cartier. In other words, PublisherEditor Greenberg has given us a really portentous volume here, full of miscellaneous apparati and whammies. The stories I like and think you will include; Keith Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (Venus adventure) ; Christopher Youd s "Christmas Tree" (good Moon m tale) ; Ray Bradbury' oompletely out of place "The Shape of Things" (it deals with a baby that was born "through" the wrong dimension and looked like a blue pyramid -- a superb story having nothing to do with space travel) ; Lyle Monroe's "Columbus Was a Dope" (Moon; this delightful snapper of a story is actually a doublesnapper, as you will learn when you trace its actual author's name on the copyright page; to give you a clue, the initials are R. A. H.); Hal Clement's "Attitude" (about a planet of S Doradus, very circumstantial, as if Mr. C, had Tenn's very pleasant but routine "Ionian Cycle" (all about weird life) ; Robertson Osborne's "Action on Azura" (splendid! -- but already anthologized under the title of "Contact, Inc."); A. E. van Vogt's "The Hull," (it will drive you nuts; very sticky -- and very unforgettable -- indeed); and P o u I Anderson's A-plus-plus (about the Galactic government that keeps the peace solely through corruption -- and justly so, too). The other five tales you may like, Buy the book and find out! I didn't, but then I'm a sort of narrow-minded, combative cove, as everyone knows. #I Hudson St., N. Y. #, N. Y. (Chck which otfwr fot want -- nclose check or money order.)  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus one extra full length novel #  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus I year subscription to Galaxy Magazine (You save # on this offer ) #  Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction plus our next # full length novels. # t Q Galoxy Reader of Science Fiction plus I year subscription to Galaxy Magazine, plus our next # full length novels (You save  # on this offer) # We will extend your current subscription if you are already i subscriber. of these Two men in love with The same girl . , . Ihat's about the most elementary plot anyone could devise. But vI a opens to that same plot when both men ore scientists who invent a matter-duplicotin. mochine that will reproduce anything -- including the girl they are in love with? You no longer have the trite old triangle. Instead, you hove what the author describes it an original and a copy! Don't try to take it from there. You can't possibly anticipate the complications. Conflict the suspense of this remarkable situation, and especially the ingenious resolution. high mark in science fiction humor. By definition, a Utopia is on ideally perfect society. But... perfect according to whose standards? Plato's Republic was wonderful, except for slaves. Sir Thomas More's excluded non-intellectuals, Edward Bellamy's was a do-gooder's heaven, ambitious people not admitted. The late Mr. Hitler's was a dream of Prussian militarists, sure death for everybody else. So a Utopia, being a wishful state of mind, depends on who's doing the wishing! For example, what would an advertising man's notion of Utopia be like? That, startlingly, is the theme of the serial beginning in the June issue of ambitions and ingenious conflicts of the Hucksters of the Future! We can't say rush right out and buy a copy, because not until next month will you be able to start... by Frederik Pohl  C. M. Kornblutk #I I Learn Another Easily , Quickly , Naturally business ED AR tl ! The World # s Standard Conversational Method ior  Professional, Scientific and Educational Advancement  Greater Scientific and Business Opportunities  Doubled Travel Enjoyment  Wider Social and Cultural Horizons  Special Assignments in Armed Forces, Government Service Another language helps you "go places" in business, where great opportunities are international; in the armed forces and government agencies, where bi-linguist!c ability is needed; in science, travel and cultural achievement, where new adventures await you) Stop Wishing Start Talking -- any of # languages available No textbook can teach you to speak Linguaphone Is the natural way to learn a language -- actually the same way you learned English even before you went to school. You bring a to read and write -- It's all an amazingly easy and fascinating leisure time activity you can enjoy alone or with family and friends. Mail coupon by colleges, schools, U.N., I.R.O., government agencies, armed services, Course approved for Veteran's Training #-# Radio City, N. Y. #, N. Y. language I for (state purpose) Nome . Address City .Zone State. Yes, and college professors, technicians, editors, publishers, students, skilled workers, farmers and wonderful people just like you, who ever you are. What's more there have been more and more tif you every single month since we started publishing. There is only one thing that many of you do not seem to realize. don't have to rush to a news stand. ou can depend upon one of Uncle Sam's most loyal employees to bring you Galaxy... your p istman. (Lots of postmen get their own copies of Galaxy.) How can all this be arranged? Easy! All you have to do is fill in the coupon below, write out a check for only S#. SO and  mail both off today. Incidentally, you'll be saving money because with a subscription you will get # issues for the news stand price of #. Seems smart to do it: right now. Dept. # i Galaxy Publishing Corp. #I Hudson St. New York #, N. Y.   I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years  udUiiJklk... Which era of the past or present would you pick to live in? What worlds would you want to visit? A problem, eh? Any era you chose would eliminate all the others, and any worlds you visited would leave the rest unexplored by you. But you can live in any age, from the beginning of life to the end of history ! You can see any planet, from Mars clear out to the limits of the Universe! Stay with them long enough to know them thoroughly, and then... on to the next era, the next solar system! How? monthly #c tour through all time and all space... or to guarantee not missing any, send # for twelve issues of exciting excursions to... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. You'll have the time of your countless lives! Galaxy .i" # I Hudson Street, New York #, N, Y#c per copy. Subscriptions: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U.S, Possessions Elsewhere #-#. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office New York NY, Copyright, # by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, include jr translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories pc in tea in this magazine are fiction and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Frinftd (ft the LI.S.At by the Suinn Co M Inc, Rg. U, P Fat Off, tractive novel contest being and Simon  Schuster, the biggest in the history of science fiction, it's inevitable that authors who are unfamiliar with this field will be studying the magazine to learn what kind of material we i are seeking. To save their time and ours, here is a partial list of overworked ideas that should be strenuously avoided : Fictional warnings of nuclear and biological destruction, the postatomicworld, reversion to barbarism, mutant children slain because they have only ten toes and fingers instead of twelve, absurdly planned and preposterously successful revolts against dictatorships, problems of survival wearily turned over to women, war between groups, nations, worlds and solar systems. Flying Saucers, cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in space, the duel between the good guy and the bad guy alone on an asteroid, the bright revelation that the characters we have been reading about are Adam and Eve or Jesus, the creation of a miniature universe in a laboratory by a scientist whose name turns out to be an anagram of Jehovah, the alien eater of life force in the  Andes whose menu consists exclusively of pretty virgins. There are many more that slither across my desk, to lie there pulsing feebly while they acquire rejection slips, but the debilitated notions listed are readiest to mind. From time to time, writers can still make them come to life through rarely encountered virtuosity. The odds on that happening are not worth taking, however. The best advice to follow is to learn how to hunt down fresh themes or new approaches to old ones. What's done with the idea is then a matter of talent and skill, neither of which can be taught here, but the basic steps in science fiction thinking can be presented. First of all, science fiction answers in dramatic terms the unstated question : "What would happen if -- ?" The if selected depends on whether the author takes the most blatant trends or tendencies in our society, in which case he is competing with just about everybody else, or digs beneath the surface for less apparent ones. Those, obviously, rate and receive the more enthusiastic welcome. Political conflicts and wars, however gigantic, have a way of becoming obscured by time. But the inventions and discoveries that were being made then live long after the issues are resolved. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, quickly turned into a pathetic figure after his defeat; the development of planes, tanks, longrange artillery and submarines was the lasting influence of World War I. Even Hitler has lost much of his frightfulness, while jets, rockets, atomic energy and antibiotics, all of which got their start in World War II, will be part of the life of the future. What will be remembered when the threat of communism is gone? That's what the writer has to find and dramatize for us.  most popular subject in science fiction and writers have suggested all kinds of crews: introverts because they can take loneliness, extroverts because they get along better with each other, women because they tolerate monotony, men because they are more adventurous. The reasoning is generally sound enough, but aren't there other possibilities? Gravy Planet offered a midget spaceman, # pounds of computer and pilot, an enormous saving of fuel, food, air renewal and living space. Why not deaf mutes? The noise of takeoff and landing wouldn't bother them, and they've been conditioned to the awful silence of the void. The blind, on the other hand, wouldn't be appalled by the immensities of space. Missionaries have always been on the heels of explorers, yet what would happen if they came across a humanoid race -- not the usual monstrosities -- on a planet where personal death is unknown? There are savages on Earth who don't have this knowledge, but they soon pick it up, and fear along with it. Suppose, though, that the alien bodies disintegrate instantly at death? The concept of afterlife would be completely unthinkable to them. The canals of Mars irrigate the deserts? Not necessarily. Maybe they're meant to drain the land and keep it suitably arid tor Martians. Well, there's the method of finding fresh ideas -- turn the obvious upside down, inside out and hind-end fore. Actually, digging up ideas is only the beginning of the job. Next comes choosing characters, building conflict, sustaining suspense, advancing the story, working out a solution consistent with theme and characterization -- all the labor of orchestration. It's hard, lonesome work, but who said writing is easy? It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen times a year, wonder about briefly , and then promptly forget -- but the real story is the one that the reporters are unable to cover.' tering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the flaking metal bed. There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enough to show the tight drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that the flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was going over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a "Yi OU again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily. I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feeling of hopeful eagerness. Maybe this time, I thought, I'd get the answer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places -- the quavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky chair, totfederal grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape, who had brought me here. "When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases, Sergeant?" the M.G. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his morbid curiosity!" For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a friend of mine -- I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the force -- and he's a follower of Stanislavsky." The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A Red?" the Stanislavsky method of acting was, while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed so they could be them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a character right up to the point where a play starts -- where he was born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood, adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money, success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of the life history created by the actor. How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at # and I'd been playing old men ever since. I had them down pretty well -- it's not just a matter of shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice, which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like inside -- and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them do what they did, fee! the compulsion that drove them to it. The old woman on the bed, for instance, had # in five bank accounts... and she'd died of starvation. You've come across' such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year, and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I had to know as much about them as I could. That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were practically an obsession. Look, they almost always have around # pinned to their underwear, hidden in mattresses, I parked in the bank, yet they turve themselves to death. If I  uld understand them, I could write a play or have one written; i might really make a name for myself, even get a Hollywood  ontract, maybe, if I could act them as they should be acted. So I sat there in the lone chair, t tying to reconstruct the character of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single rent of her # for food. by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it, Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging into their savings." I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to decide that I ought to eat even if it cost me something. I camd out of it and said, "That's what you keep telling me." "I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more. What are the chances, Weldon?". "Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not." He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the basket team. He could at least have said goodby. He never did, though. A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion. Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary desperation and needless death. Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money out of the bank. I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up. "The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right." Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark." "But he doesn't know old people." "What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was -- and still would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a psychotic than eating?" . "Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation, no." "Why not?" "You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't: Not when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid of. Anybody who's alive on nearly nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I can't see going without food altogether." hadn't until then because he didn't want to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables.", "It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die of starvation?" "That depends on age, health, amount of activity -- " "Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!" "So it takes weeks. Where's the problem -- if there is one?" I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes -- old men seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see, and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it out. "Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked. "No. Did you?" "In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last couple of years -- I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a jvay of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room and slowly starve to death." He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flitked it away, his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet. "There's charity," I. went on, "relief -- except for those who have their dough in banks, where it can be checked on -- old age pension, panhandling, cadging off neighbors." He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact with anybody." S "Even when they're starting to t real hungry?" "You've got something, Mark,ul that's the wrong tack," he nl thoughtfully. "The point is Imt they don't have to make "iitact; other people know themi about them. Somebody would heck after a few days or a week the janitor, the landlord, somene in the house or the neighborhood." "So they'd be found before they died." "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they hardly know these old people and whether they're alive or not. Maybe that's what threw us off. But you don't need friends and relatives to start wondering, and investigate when you haven't shown up for a while." He lifted his head and looked at me. "What does that prove, Mark?" "That there's something wrong with these cases. I want to find out what." to Headquarters, where he let me see the bankbooks the old woman had left. "She took damned good care of them," I said. "They look almost new," "Wouldn't you take damned good care of the most important thing in the world to you?" he asked. "You've seen the hoards of money the others leave. Same thing." .I peered closely at the earliest entry, April #, #, #. My eyes aren't that bad; I was peering at the ink. It was dark, unfaded. I pointed it out to Lou. "From not being exposed to daylight much," he said. "They don't haul out the bankbooks or money very often, I guess." "And that adds up for you? I can see them being psychotics all their lives... but not senile psychotics," "They hoarded, Mark. That adds up for me." "Funny," I said, watching him maneuver his cigarette as if he loved the feel of it, drawing the smoke down and letting it out in plumes of different shapes, from rings to slender streams. What a living he could make doing cigarette commercials on TV! "I can see you turn into one of these cases, Lou." He looked startled for a second, but then crushed out the butt carefully so he could watch it instead of me. "Yeah? How so?" "You've been too scared by poverty to take a chance. You know you could do all right acting, but you don't dare giving up this crummy job. Carry that far enough and . you try to stop spending money, then cut out eating, and finally wind up dead of starvation in a cheap room." "Me? I'd never get that scared of being broke!" "At the age of # or #?" "Especially then! I'd probably tear loose for a while and then buy into a home for the aged." I wanted to grin, but I didn't. He'd proved my point. He'd also shown that he was as bothered by these old people as I was. "Tell me, Lou. If somebody kept you from dying, would you give' him any dough for it, even if you were a senile psychotic?" I could see him using the Stanislavsky method to feel his way to the answer. He shook his head. "Not while I was alive. Will it, maybe, not give it." "How would that be as a motive?" H E leaned against a metal filing cabinet. "No good, Mark, You know what a hell of a time we have tracking down relatives to give the money to, because these people don't leave wills. The few relatives we find are always surprised when they get their inheritance -- most of them hardly remember dear old whoever-it-was that died and left it to them. All the other estates eventually go to the State treasury, unclaimed." "Well, it was an idea." I open ed the oldest bankbook again. "Anybody ever think of testing the ink, Lou?" ' "What for? The banks' records always check. These aren't for geries, if that's what you'r thinking." "I don't know what I'm think ing," I admitted. "But I'd like to turn a chemist loose on this for a little while." "Look, Mark, there's a lot I'i I've done plenty, but there's a limit -- " I let him explain why he couldn't let me borrow the book and then waited while he figured out how it could be done and did it. He was still grumbling when he helped me pick a chemist out of the telephone directory and went along to the lab with me. "But don't get any wrong notions," he said ' on the way, "I have to protect State property, that's all, because I signed for it and I'm responsible." "Sure, sure," I agreed, to humor him. "If you're not curious, why not just wait outside for me?" He gave me one of those whitetooth grins that he had no right to deprive women audiences of. "I could do that, but I'd rather see you make a sap of yourself." I turned the bankbook over to the chemist and we waited for the report. When it came, it had to be translated. used # years ago. Lou. Pape gave me a jab in the ribs at that. But then the chemist said that, according to the amount of oxidation, it seemed fresh enough to be only a few months or years old, and it was Lou's turn to get jabbed. Lou pushed him about the aging, asking if it couldn't be the result of unusually good care. The chemist couldn't say -- that depended on the kind of care; an airtight compartment, perhaps, filled with oneof the inert gases, or a vacuum. They hadn't been kept that way, of course, so Lou looked as baffled as I felt. He took the bankbook and we went out to the street. "See what I mean?" I asked quietly, not wanting to rub it in. "I see something, but I don't know what. Do you?" "I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything else about these cases." "What do you do next?" "Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before they do." "If they're loaded, they won't say so, Mark, and there's no way f telling them from those who are down and out." I rubbed my pipe disgruntledly against the side of my nose to oil it. "Ain't this a beaut of a problem? I wish I liketk problems. I hate them." Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather die of starvation than spend a few cents for food. I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late. And the fresh ink, over half a century old , . , banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an old bankbook that had fresh ink from # years before. Lou was some help there -- he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks. I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage calls that didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to me; they'd have interrupted my outside work. After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement -- acting like a cop, you know, instead of projecting his feelings -- and he couldn't haul me out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go. "Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with # in cash inside the lining of his jacket." "Alive?" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again. "Just barely. They're trying intravenous feeding to pull him through, I don't think he'll make it." "For God's sake, let's get there before he conks out!" Lou raced me to the City Hos pital and up to the ward. There was a scrawny old man in a bed, nothing but a papery skin stretched thin over a face like a skull and a body like a Hallow een skeleton, shivering as if he was cold. I knew it wasn't the cold. The medics were injecting a heart stimulant into him and he was vibrating like a rattletrap car racing over a gravel road. "Who are you?" I practically yelled, grabbing his skinny arm. "What happened to you?" He went on shaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open. "Ah, hell!" I said, disgusted. "He's in a coma." "He might start talking," Lou told me. "I fixed it up so you can sit here and listen in case he does." "So I can listen to delirious ravings, you mean." Lou got me a chair and put it next to the bed. "What are you kicking about? This is the first live one you've seen, isn't it? That ought to be good enough for you." He looked as annoyed as a director. "Besides, you can get biographical data out of delirium that you'd never get if he was conscious." H E was right, of course. Not only data, but attitudes, wishes, resentments that would normally be repressed. I wasn't thinking of acting at the moment, r hough. Here was somebody who  trnld tell me what I wanted to know... only he couldn't talk. Lou went to the door. "Good nek," he said, and went out. I sat down and stared at the don't have to ask if you've ever lone that; everybody has. You krep thinking over and over, getting more and more tense, "Talk, damn you, talk !" until you find that every muscle in your body is a fist and your jaws are aching because you've been clenching your teeth so hard. You might just as well not bother, but once in a while a coincidence makes you think you've done it. Like now. The old man sort of came to. That is, he opened his eyes and looked around without seeing anything, or it was so far away and long ago that nobody else could see what he saw. I hunched forward on the chair and willed harder than ever. Nothing happened. He stared at the ceiling and through and beyond me. Then he closed his eyes again and I slumped back, defeated and bitter -- but that was when he began talking. There were a couple of women, though they might have been little girls in his childhood, and he had his troubles with them. He was praying for a toy train, a roadster, to pass his tests, to keep from being fired, to be less lonely, and back to toys again. He hated his father, and his mother was too busy with church bazaars "and such to pay much attention to him. There was a sister: she died when he was a kid. He was glad she died, hoping maybe now his mother would notice him ,but he was also filled with guilt because he was glad. Then somebody, he felt, was trying to shove him out of his job. The intravenous feeding kept dripping into his vein and he went on rambling. After ten or fifteen minutes of it, he fell asHep. I felt so disappointed that I could have slapped him awake, only it wouldn't have done any good. Smoking would have helped me relax, but it wasn't allowed, and I didn't dare go outside for one, for fear he might revive again and this time come up to the present. ed, trying to sit up. I pushed him down gently, and he went on in frightful terror, "Old and poor, nowhere to go, nobody wants me, can't make a living, read the ads every day, no jobs for old men." He blurted through weeks, months, years -- I don't know -- of fear and despair. And finally he came to somefhing that made his face glow like a radium dil. "An ad. No experience needed. Good salary." His face got dark and awful. All he added was, "El Greco," or something that sounded like it, and then he went into terminal breathing. I rang for the nurse and she went for the doctor. I couldn't stand the long moments when the old man's chest stopped moving, the abrupt frantic gulps of air followed by no breath at all. I wanted to get away from it, but I had to wait for whatever more he might say. It didn't come. His eyes fogged and rolled up and he stopped taking those spasmodic strangling breaths. The nurse came back with the doctor, who felt his pulse and shook his head. She pulled the blanket over the old man's face. I left, feeling sick. I'd learned things I already knew about hate and love and fear and hope and frustration. There was an ad in it somewhere, but I had no way of telling if it had been years ago or recently. And a name that sounded like "El Greco." That was a Spanish painter of fourfive hundred years ago. Had the old guy been remembering a picture he'd seen? No, he'd come up at least close to the present. The ad seemed to solve his problem about being broke. But what about the # that had been found in the lining of his jacket? He hadn't mentioned that. Of course, being a senile psychotic, he could have considered himself broke even with that amount of money. None coming in, you see. That didn't add up, either. His was the terror of being old and jobless. If he'd had money, he would have figured how to make it last, and that would have come through in one way or another.  There was the ad, there was his hope, and there was this El Greco. A Greek restaurant, maybe, where he might have been bumming his meals. But where did the # fit in? L OU Pape was too fed up with the whole thing to discuss it with me. He just gave me the weary eye and said, "You're riding this too hard, Mark. The guy was talking from fever. How do I know what figures and what doesn't when I'm dealing with insanity or delirium?" "But you admit there's plenty about these cases that doesn't figure?" "Sure. Did you take a look at the condition the world is in lately? Why should these old people be any exception?" I couldn't blame him. He'd pulled me in on the cases with plenty of trouble to himself, just to do me a favor. Now he was fed up. I guess it wasn't even that -- he thought I was ruining myself, at least financially and maybe worse, by trying to run down the problem. He said he'd be glad to see me any time and gas about anything or help me with whatever might be bothering me, if he could, but not these cases any more. He told me to lay off them, and then he left me onmy own. I don't know what he could have done, actually. I didn't need him to go through the want ads with me, which I was doing every day, figuring there might be something in the ravings about an ad. I spent more time than I liked checking those slanted at old people, only to find they were supposed to become messengers and such. One brought, me to an old brownstone fivestory house in the East #s. I got on line with the rest of the applicants -- there were men and women, all decrepit, all looking badly in need of money -- and waited my turn. My face was lined with collodion wrinkles and I wore an antique shiny suit and rundown shoes. I didn't look more prosperous or any younger than they did. I finally came up to the woman who was doing the interviewing. She sat behind a plain office desk down in the main floor hall, with a pile of application cards in front of her and a ballpoint pen in one strong, slender hand. She had red hair with gold lights in it and eyes so pale blue that they would have seemed the same color as the whites if she'd been on the stage. Her face would have been beautiful except for her rigid control of expression; she smiled abruptly, shut it off just like that, looked me over with all the impersonality and penetration of an X-ray from the soles to the bald head, exactly as she'd done with the others. But that skin! If it was as perfect as that all over her slim, stiffly erect, proudly shaped body, she had no business off the stage ! "Name, address, previous occupation, social security number?" she asked in a voice with good clarity, resonance and diction. She wrote it all down while I gave the information to her. Then she asked me for references, and I mentioned Sergeant Lou Pape. "Fine," she said. "We'll get in touch with you if anything comes up. Don't call us -- we'll call you." I hung around to see who'd be picked. There was only one, an old man, two ahead of me in the line, who had no social security number, no references, not even any relatives or friends she could IS have checked up on him with. Damn! Of course that was what she wanted! Hadn't all the starvation cases been people without social security, references, either no friends and relatives or those they'd lost track of? I'd pulled a blooper, but how was I to know until too late? Well, there was a way of making it right. that evening, I stood on the corner and watched the lights in the brownstone house. The ones on the first two floors went out, leaving only those on the third and fourth. Closed for the day... or open for business? I got into a building a few doors down by pushing a button and waiting until the buzzer answered, then racing up to the roof while some man yelled down the stairs to nd out who was there. I crossed the tops of the two houses between and went down the fire escape. It wasn't easy, though not as tough as you might imagine. The fact is that I'm a whole year younger than Lou Pape, even if I could play his grandpa professionally. I still have muscles left and I used them to get down the fire escape at the rear of the house. The fourth floor room I looked into had some kind of wire mesh cage and some hooded machinery. Nobody, there. The third floor room was the redhead's. She was coming out of the bathroom with a terrycloth bathrobe and a towel turban on when I looked in. She slid the robe off and began dusting herself with powder. That skin did cover her. She turned and moved toward a vanity against the wall that I was on the other side of. The next thing I knew, the window was flung up and she had a gun on me. "Come right in -- Mr. Weldon, isn't it?" she said in that completely controlled voice of hers. One day her control would crack, I thought irrelevantly, and the pieces would be found from Dallas to North Carolina. "I had an idea you seemed more curious than was justified by a helpwanted ad." "A man my age doesn't get to see many pretty girls," I told her, making my own voice crack pathetically in a senile whinny. She motioned me into the room. When I was inside, I saw a light over the window blinking red. It stopped the moment I was in the room. A silent burglar alarm. She let her pale blue eyes wash insolently over me. "A man your age can see all the pretty girls he wants to. You're not old. "And you use a rinse," I retorted. She ignored it. "I specifically advertised for old people. Why did you apply?" It had happened so abruptly that I hadn't had a chance to use the Stanislavsky method to feel old in the presence of a beautiful nude woman. I don't even know if it would have worked. Nothing's perfect. "I needed a job awful bad," I answered sullenly, knowing it sounded like an ad lib. S HE smiled with more contempt than humor. "You had a job, Mr. Weldon. You were very busy trying to find out why senile psychotics starve themselves to death." "How did you know that?" I asked, startled. "A little investigation of my own. I also happen to know you didn't tell your friend Sergeant Pape that you were going to be here tonight." That Was a fact, too. I hadn't felt sure enough that I'd found the answer to call him about ft. Looking at the gun in her steady hand, I was sorry I hadn't. "But you did find out I own this building, that my name is May Roberts, and that I'm the daughter of the late Dr. Anthony Roberts, the physicist," she continued, "Is there anything else T# you want me to tell you about yourself?" "I know enough already. I'm more interested in you and the starvation cases. If you weren't connected with them, you wouldn't have known I was investigating them." "That's obvious, isn't it?" She reached for a cigarette on the vanity and used a lighter with her free hand. The big mirror gave me another view of her lovely body, but that was beginning to interest me less than the gun. I thought of making a grab for it. There was too much distance between us, though, and she knew better than to take her eyes off me while she was lighting up. "I'm not afraid of professional detectives, Mr. Weldon. They deal only with facts and every one of them will draw the same conclusions from a given set of circumstances. I don't like amateurs. They guess too much. They don't stick to reality. The result -- " her pale eyes chilled and her shapely mouth went hard -- "is that they are likely to get too close to the truth." I wanted a smoke myself, but toward the pipe in my jacket. "I may be close to the truth. Miss Roberts, but I don't know what the devil it is. I still don't know how you're tied in with the senile psychotics or why they starve ith all that money. You could ' me go and I wouldn't have a ung on you." She glanced down at herself id laughed for real for the first me. "You wouldn't, would you? n the other hand, you know liere I'm Working from and uld nag Sergeant Pape into getug a search warrant. It wouldn't i criminate me, but it would be i convenient. I don't care to be i convenienced." "Which means what?" "You want to find out my connection with senile psychotics. I intend to show you." "How?" , She gestured dangerously with the gun. "Turn your face to the wall and stay that way while I get dressed. Make one attempt to turn around before I tell you to and I'll shoot you. You're guilty of housebreaking, you know. It would be a little inconvenient for me to have an investigation... but not as inconvenient as for you." stomach braid itself into a tight, painful knot of fear. Of what, I didn't know yet, only that old people who had something to do with her died of starvation. I wasn't old, but that didn't seem very comforting. She was the most frigid, calculating, deadly woman I'd ever met. That alone was enough to scare bell out of me. And there was the problem of what she was Capable of. Hearing the sounds of her dressing behind me, I wanted to lunge around and rush her, taking a chance that she might be too busy pulling on a girdle or reaching back to fasten a bra to have the gun in her hand. It was , a suicidal impulse and I gave it up instantly. Other women might compulsively finish concealing themselves before snatching up the gun. Not her. "All right," she said at last. I faced her. She was wearing coveralls that, if anything, emphasized the curves of her figure. She had a sort of babushka that covered her red hair and kept it in place -- the kind of thing women workers used to wear in factories during the war. She had looked lethal with nothing on but a gun and a hard expression. She looked like a sentence of execution now. "Open that door, turn to the right and go upstairs," she told me, indicating directions with the gun. I went. It was the longest, most anxious short walk I've ever taken. She ordered me to open a door on the fourth floor, and we were inside the room I'd seen from the fire escape. The mesh cage seemed like a torture chamber to me, the hooded motors designed to shoot an agonizing current through my emaciating body. "You're going to do to me what you did to the old man you hired today?" I probed, hoping for an answer that would really answer. She flipped on the switch that started the motors and there was a shrill, menacing whine. The wire mesh of the cage began blurring oddly, as if vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork. "You've been an unexpected nuisance, Weldon," she said above the motors. "I never thought you'd get this far. But as long as you have, we might as well both benefit by it." "Benefit?" I repeated. "Both of us?" She opened the drawer of a work table and pulled out a stack of envelopes held with a rubber band. She put the stack at the other edge of the table. "Would you rather have all cash or bank accounts or both?" My heart began to beat. She was where the money came from i  "V#"OU trying to tell me you're a philanthropist?" I demanded. "Business is philanthropy, in a way," she answered calmly. "You need money and I need your services. To that extent, we're doing each other a favor. I think you'll find that the favor I'm going to do for you is a pretty considerable .one. Would you mind picking up the envelopes on the table?" I took the stack and stared at the top envelope. "May #, #," I read aloud, and looked suspiciously at her. "What's this for?" "I don't think it's something that can be explained. At least it's never been possible before and I doubt if it would be now. I'm assuming you want both cash and bank accounts. Is that right?" "Well, yes. Only -- " "We'll discuss it later." She looked along a row of shelves against one wall, searching the labels on the stacks of bundles there. She drew one out and pushed it toward me. "Please open that and put on the things you'll find inside." I tore open the bundle. It contained a very plain business suit, black shoes, shirt, tie and a hat with a narrow brim. "Are these supposed to be my burial clothes?" "I asked you to put them on," she said. "If you want me to make that a command, I'll do it." I looked at the gun and I looked at the clothes and then for some shelter I could change behind. There wasn't any. She smiled. "You didn't seem 'ncerned about my modesty. I iD't see why your own should ther you. Get dressed!" I obeyed, my mind anxiously ti using one possibility after ant her, all of them ending up with iy death. I got into the other i lings and felt even more uncomrtable, They were all only an proximate fit: the shoes a little  )o tight and pointed, the collar  if the shirt too stiffly starched und too high under my chin, the gray suit too narrow at the shoulders and the ankles. I wished I had a mirror to see myself in. I felt like an ultraconservative Wall Street broker and I was sure I resembled one, "All right," she said. "Put the envelopes in your inside pocket. You'll find instructions on each. Follow them carefully." "I don't get it!" I protested. "You will. Now step into the mesh cage. Use the envelopes in the order they're arranged in," "But what's this all about?" "I can tell you just one thing, Mr. Weldon -- don't try to escape. It can't be done. Your other questions will answer themselves if you follow the instructions on the envelopes." She had the gun in her hand. I went into the mesh cage, not knowing what to expect and yet too afraid of her to refuse. I didn't want to wind up dead of starvation, no matter how much money she might have given me -- but I didn't want to get shot, either. She closed the mesh gate and pushed the switch as far as it would go. The motors screamed as they picked up speed ; the mesh cage vibrated more swiftly; I could see her through it as if there were nothing between us. And then I couldn't see her at all. I was outside a bank on a sunny day in spring. -- I'd escaped somehow! But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her brownstone house. Even the season had changed! Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats, their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders, plain black or brown shoes -- the same kind of clothes I was wearing. The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square boefies, tubular radiators... For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered ai the mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me electroshock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or taken me South and left me on a street in daylight. But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily. Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis? That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me... Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been hypnotized. Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed the top envelope to the teller. He hauled # out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd been treated in years. I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance. The date he'd stamped was May #, #. more afraid of -- being stranded, middle-aged, in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that brownstone house. I had only an instant torealize that I was a kid in high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in the city. The date on the enevelope was May #th and it was still #. I made a # deposit there, then # in another place a few days later, and so forth, spending only a few minutes each time and going forward anywhere from a couple of days to almost a month. Every now and then, I had a stamped, addressed envelope to mail at a corner box. They were addressed to different stock bro-: kers and when I got one open before mailing it and took a look inside, it turned out to be an order to buy a few hundred shares of stock in a soft drink company in the name of Dr. Anthony Roberts. I hadn't remembered the price of the shares being that low. The last time I'd seen the quotation, it was more than five times as much as it was then. I is making dough myself, but i was doing even better for May K'oberts. A few times I had to stay  i round for an hour or so. There is the night I found myself in a i shy speakeasy with two envelopes that I was to bet the consents of, according to the instructions on the outside. It was June 'il, #, and I had to bet on Jack Sharkey to take the heavyweight title away from Max Schmeling. The place was serious and quiet -- no more' than three women, a couple of bartenders, and the rest male customers, including two cops, huddling up close to the radio. An affable character was taking bets. He gave me a wise little smile when I put the money down on Sharkey. "Well, it's a pleasure to do business with a man who wants an American to win," he said, "and the hell with the smart dough, eh?" "Yeah," I said, and tried to smile back, but so much of the smart money was going on Schmeling that I wondered if May Roberts hadn't made a mistake. I couldn't remember who had won. "You know what J. P. Morgan said -- don't sell America short." "I'll take a buck for my share," said a sour guy who barely managed to stand. "Lousy grass growing in the lousy streets, nobody working, no future, nothing!" "We'll come out of it okay," I told him confidently. He snorted into his gin. "Not in our lifetime, Mac. It'd take a miracle to put this country on its feet again. I don't believe in miracles." He put his scowling face up close to mine and breathed blearily and belligerently at me. "Do you?" "Shut up, Gus," one of the bartenders said. "The fight's starting." and a lot of bad Scotch, listening. It went the whole IS rounds, Sharkey won, and I was in almost as bad shape as Gus, who'd passed out halfway through the battle. All I can recall is the affable character handing . over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes, while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was outside a bank again. I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit. There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets to put down on Singing Wood in # at Belmont Park and Max Baer over Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in #, and James Braddock over Baer in #, and a big daily double payoff, Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued interest were something to watch grow. The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of # -- a' total of maybe four or five hours subjectively -- before I realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My father  and mother, for instance, were still alive in #. If I could break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through time, I could go and see them. The thought, attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent, yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again and I didn't dare. I couldn't... Why couldn't I? Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks, speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area, whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May Roberts had lined up for me. Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it was fresh; it wasn't given a chance to oxidize -- at the rate I was going, I'd be back to my own time in another few hours or so, with # or better in deposits, compound interest and cash. If I'd been around #, you see, she could have sent me back to the beginning of the century with the same amount of money, which would have accumulated to something like #. Get it now? I did. And I felt sick and frightened. The old people had died of starvation somehow with all that dough in cash or banks. I didn't give a hang if the time travel was responsible, or something else was. I wasn't going to be found dead in my hotel and have Lou Pape curse my corpse because I'd been borrowing from him when, since #, I'd had a little fortune put away. He'd call me a i ' re mature senile psychotic and he'd be right, from his point of view, not knowing the truth. posit in October, #, I grabbed a battered old cab and fold the driver to step on it. When I showed him the # bill that was in it for him, he squashd down the gas pedal. In #, # was real money. We got a mile away from the i ank and the driver looked at me :n the rear-view mirror. "How far you want to go, mister?" My teeth were together so hard that I had to unclench them before I could answer, "As far away as we can get." "Cops after you?" "No, but somebody is. Don't he surprised at anything that happens, no matter what it is." "You mean like getting shot at?" he asked worriedly, slowing down. "You're not in any danger, friend. I am. Relax and step on it again." I wondered if she could still reach me, this far from the bank, and handed the guy the bill. No justice sticking him for the ride in case she should. He pushed the pedal down even harder than he had been doing before. We must have been close to three miles away when I blinked and was standing outside the first bank I'd seen in #. I don't know what the cab driver thought when I vanished out of his hack. He probably figured I'd opened the door and jumped while he wasn't looking. Maybe he even went back and searched for a body splashed all over the street. Well, it would have been a hopeless hunt. I was a week ahead. I gave up and drearily made my deposit. The one from early October that I'd missed I put in with this one. There was no way to escape the babe with the beautiful hard face, gorgeus warm body and plans for me that all seemed to add up to death, I didn't try any more. I went on making deposits, mailing orders to her stock brokers, and putting down bets that couldn't miss because they were all past history. I don't even remember what the last one was, a fight or a race. I hung around the bar that had long ago replaced the speakeasy, until the inevitable payoff, got myself a hamburger and headed out the door. All the envelopes I was supposed to use were gone and I felt shaky, knowing that the next place I'd see was the room with the wire mesh cage and the hooded motors. It was. S HE was on the other side of the cage, and I had five bankbooks and envelopes filled with cash amounting to more than #, but all I could think of was that I was hungry and something had happened to the hamburger while I was traveling through time. I must have fallen and dropped it, because my hand was covered with dust or dirt. I brushed it off and quickly felt my face and pulled up my sleeves to look at my arms. "Very smart," I said, "but I'm nowhere near emaciation." "What made you think you would be?" she asked. "Because the others always were." She cut the motors to idling speed and the vibrating mesh slowed down. I glared at her through it. God, she was lovely -- as lovely as an ice sculpture! The kind of face you'd love to kiss and slap, kiss and slap... "You came here with a preconceived notion, Mr, Weldon. I'm a businesswoman, not a monster. I like to think there's even a good deal of the altruist in me. I could hire only young people, but the old ones have more trouble finding work. And you've seen for yourself how I provide nest eggs for them they'd otherwise never have." "And take care of yourself at the same time." "That's the businesswoman in me. I need money .to operate." . "So do the old people. Only they die and you don't." She opened the gate and invited me out. "I make mistakes occasionally. I sometimes pick men and women who prove to be too old to stand the strain. I try not to let it happen, but they need money and work so badly that they don't always tell the truth about their age and state of health." "You could take those who have social security cards and references." "But those who don't have any are in worse need!" She paused. "You probably think I want only the money you and they bring back, that it's merely some sort of profit-making scheme. It isn't." "You mean the idea is not just to build up a fortune for you with a cut for whoever helps you do it?" "I said I need money to operate, Mr. Weldon, and this mehod serves. But there are other purposes, much more important. What you have gone through is -- basic training, you might say. You know now that it's possible to travel through time, and what it's like. The initial shock, in other words, is gone and you're better equipped to do something for me in another era." "Something else?" I stared at her puzzledly. "What else could you want?" "Let's have dinner first. You must be hungry." "I bought a hamburger just before you brought me back. I don't know what happened to it. My hand was dirty and the hamburger was gone, as if I'd fallen somehow and dropped it and got dirt on my hand." She looked worriedly at the hand, probably afraid I'd cut it and disqualified myself. I could understand that; you never know what kind of diseases can be picked up in different times, because I remember reading somewhere that germs keep changing according to conditions. Right now, for instance, strains of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. I knew her concern wasn't really for me, but it was pleasant all the same. "That could be the explanation, I suppose," she said. "The truth is that I've never taken a time voyage -- somebody has to operate the controls in the present -- so I can't say it's possible or impossible to fall. It must be, since you did. Perhaps the wrench back from the past was too violent and you slipped just before you returned."  She led me down to an ornate dining room, where the table had been set for two. The food was waiting on the table, steaming and smellingtasty. Nobody was around to serve us. She pointed out a chair to me and we sat down and began eating. I was a little nervous at first, afraid there might be something in the food, but it tasted fine and nothing happened after I swallowed a little and waited for some effect. "You did try to escape the time tractor beam, didn't you, Mr. Weldon?" she asked. I didn't have to answer; she knew. "That's a mistaken notion of how it functions. 'The control beam doesn't cover area ; it covers era. You could have flown to any part of the world and the beam would still have brought you back. Do I make myself clear?" She did. Too bloody clear. I waited for the rest. "I assume you've already formed an opinion of me," she went on. "A rather unflattering one, I imagine." " 'Bitch' is the cleanest word I can find. But a clever one. Anybody who can invent a time machine would have to be a genius." "I didn't invent it. My father did -- Dr, Anthony Robert -- using the funds you and others helped me provide him with." Her face grew soft and tender. "My father was a wonderful man, a great man, but he was called a crackpot. He was kept from teaching or working anywhere. It was just as well, I suppose, though he was too hurt to think so; he had more leisure to develop the time machine. He could have used it to extort repayment from mankind for his humiliation, but he didn't. He used it to help mankind." "Like how?" I goaded. "It doesn't matter, Mr. Weldon. You're determined to hate me and consider me a liar. Nothing I tell you can change that." S HE was right about the first part -- I hadn't dared let myself do anything except hate and fear her -- but she was wrong about the second. I remembered thinking how Lou Pape would have felt if I had died of starvation with over #, after borrowing from him all the time between jobs. Not knowing how I got it, he'd have been sore, thinking I'd played him for a patsy. What I'm trying to say is that Lou wouldn't have had enough information to judge me. I didn't have enough information yet, either, to judge her. "What do you want me to do?" I asked warily. "Everybody but one person was sent into the past on specific errands -- to save art treasures and relics that would otherwise have been lost to humanity." "Not because the things might be worth a lot of dough?" I said nastily. "You've already seen that I can get all the money I want. There were upheavals in the past -- great fires, wars, revolutions, vandalism -- and I had my associates save things that would have been destroyed. Oh, beautiful things, Mr. Weldon! The world would have been so much poorer without them!" "El Greco, for instance?" I asked, remembering the raving old man who had been found wandering with # in his coat lining. "El Greco, too. Several paintings that had been lost for centuries." She became more brisk and efficient-seeming. "Except for the one man I mentioned, I concentrated on the past -- the future is too completely unknown to us. And there's an additional reason why I tentatively explored it only once. But the one person who went there discovered something that would be of immense value to the world." "What happened to him?" She looked regretful. "He was too old. He survived just long enough to tell me that the future has something we need. It's a metal box, small enough to. carry, that could supply this whole city with power to run its industries and light its homes and streets!" "Sounds good. Who'd you say benefits if I get it?" "We share the profits equally, of course. But it must be understood that we sell the power so cheaply that everybody can afford it." "I'm not arguing. What's the other reason you didn't bother with the future?" "You can't bring anything from the future to the 'present that doesn't exist right now. I won't go into the theory, but it should be obvious that nothing can exist before it exists. You can't bring the box I want, only the technical data to build one." "Technical data? I'm an actor, not a scientist." "You'll have pens and weatherproof notebooks to copy it down in." mind about her. I've already said she was beautiful, which always prejudices a man in a woman's favor, but I couldn't forget the starvation cases. They hadn't shared anything but malnutrition, useless money and death. Then again, maybe her explanation was a good one, that she wanted to help those who needed help most and some of them lied about their age and physical condition because they wanted the jobs so badly. All I knew about were those who had died. How did I know there weren't others -- a lot more of them than the fatal cases, perhaps -- who came through all right and were able to enjoy their little fortunes? And there was her story about saving the treasures of the past and wanting to provide power at really low Cost. She was right about one thing; she didn't need any of that to make money with; her method was plenty good enough, using the actual records of the past to invest in stocks, bet on sports -- all sure gambles. But those starvation cases... , "Do I get any guarantees?" I demanded. She looked annoyed. "I'll need you for the data. You'll need me to turn it into manufacture. Is that enough of a guarantee?" "No. Do I come out of this alive?" "Mr. Weldon, please use some logic. I'm the one who's taking the risk. I've already given you more money than you've ever had at one time in your life. Part of my motive was to pay for services about to be rendered. Mostly, it was to give you experience in traveling through time." "And to prove to me that I can't run out," I added. "That happens to be a necessary attribute of the machine. I couldn't very well move you about through time unless it worked that way. If you'd look at my point of view, you'd see that I lose my investment if you don't bring back the data. I can't withdraw your money, you realize." "I don't know what to think," I said, dissatisfied with myself because I couldn't find out what, if anything, was wrong with the deal. "I'll get you the data for the power box if it's at all possible and then we'll see what happens." Finished eating, we went upstairs and I got into the cage. She closed the circuit. The motors screamed. The mesh blurred. And I was in a world I never knew. Y OU'D call it a city, I suppose ; there were enough buildings to make it one. But no citv ever had so much greenery, ft wasn't just tree-lined streets, like Unter den Linden in Berlin, or islands covered with shrubbery, like Park Avenue in New York. The grass and trees and shrubs grew around every building, separating them from each other by wide lawns. The buildings were more glass -- or what looked like glass -- than anything else. A few of the windows were opaque against the sun, but I couldn't see any shades or blinds. Some kind of polarizing glass or plastic? I felt uneasy being there, but it was a thrill just the same, to be alive in the future when I and everybody who lived in my day was supposed to be dead. The air smelled like the country. There was nd foul gas boiling from the teardrop cars on the glass-level road. They were made of transparent plastic clear around and from top to bottom, and they moved along at a fair clip, but more smoothly than swiftly. If I hadn't seen the airship overhead, I wouldn't have known it was there. It flew silently, a graceful ball without wings, seeming to be borne by the wind from one horizon to the other, except that no wind ever moved that fast. One car stopped nearby and someone shouted, "Here we are!" Several people leaped out and headed for me. I didn't think, I ran, I crossed the lawn and ducked into the nearest building and dodged through long, smoothly walled, shadowlessly lit corridors until I found a door that would open. I slammed it shut and locked it. Then, panting, I fell into a soft chair that seemed to form itself around my body, and felt like kicking myself for the bloody idiot I was. What in hell had I run for? They couldn't have known who I was. If I'd arrived in a time when people wore togas or bathing suits, there would have been some reason for singling me out, but they had all had clothes just like ours -- suits and shirts and ties for the men, a dress and high heels for the one woman with them. I felt somewhat disappointed that clothes hadn't changed any, but it worked out to my advantage; I wouldn't be so conspicuous. Yet why should anyone have yelled "Here we are!" unless... No, they must have thought I was somebody else. It didn't figure any other way. I had run because it was my first startled reaction and probably because I knew I was there on what might be considered illegal business; if I succeeded, some poor inventor would be done out of his royalties. I wished I hadn't run. Besides making me feel like a scared fool, I was sweaty and out of breath. Playing old men doesn't make climbing down fire escapes much tougher than it should be, but it doesn't exactly make a sprinter out of you -- not by several lungfuls. trying to guess what next. I had no more idea of where to go for what I wanted than an ancient Egyptian set down in the middle of Times Square with instructions to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. I didn't even have that much information. I didn't know any part of the city, how it was laid out, or where to get the data that May Roberts had sent me for. I opened the door quietly and looked both ways before going out. After losing myself in the cross-connecting corridors a few times, I finally came to an outside door. I stopped, tense, trying to get my courage. My inclination was to slip, sneak or dart out, but I made myself walk away like a decent, innocent citizen. That was one disguise they'd never be able to crack. All I had to do was act as if I belonged to that time and place and who would know the difference? There were other people walking as if they were in no hurry to get anywhere. I slowed down to their speed, but I wished wistfully that there was a crowd to dive into and get lost. A man dropped into step and said politely, "I beg your pardon. Are you a stranger in town?" I almost halted in alarm, but that might have been a giveaway. "What makes you think so?" I disked, forcing myself to keep at the same easy pace. "I -- didn't recognize your face nd I thought -- " "It's a big city," I said coldly. "You can't know everyone." "If there's anything I can do to help -- " I told him there wasn't and left him standing there. It was plain common sense, I had decided quickly while he was talking to me, not to take any risks by admitting anything. I might have been dumped into a police state or the country could have been at war without my knowing it, or maybe they were suspicious of strangers. For one reason or another, ranging from vagrancy to espionage, I could be pulled in, tortured, executed, God knows what. The place looked peaceful enough, but that didn't prove a thing. I went on walking, looking for something I couldn't be sure existed, in a city I was completely unfamiliar with, in a time when I had no right to be alive. It wasn't just a matter of getting the information she wanted. I'd have been satisfied to hang around until she pulled me back without the data... But then what would happen? Maybe the starvation cases were people who had failed her! For that matter, she could shoot me and send the remains anywhere in time to get rid of the evidence. Damn it, I didn't know if she was better or worse than I'd supposed, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I had to bring her what she wanted. It read; to shopping center. The arrow pointed along the road. When I came to a fork and wondered which way to go, there was another sign, then another pointing to still more farther on. I followed them to the middle of the city, a big square with a park in the center and shops of all kinds rimming it. The only shop I was interested in said : I went in. A neat young salesman came up and politely asked me if he could do anything for me. I sounded stupid even to myself, but I said, "No, thanks, I'd just like to do a little browsing," and gave a silly nervous laugh. Me, an actor, behaving like a frightened yokel! I felt ashamed of myself. He tried not to look surprised, but he didn't really succeed. Somebody else came in, though, for whichI was grateful, and he left me alone to look around. I don't know if I can get my feelings across to you. It's a situation that nobody would ever expect to find himself in, so it isn't easy to tell what it's like. But I've got to try. Let's stick with the ancient Egyptian I mentioned a while back, the one ordered to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe that'll make it clearer. The poor guy has no money he can use, naturally, and no idea of what New York's transportation system is like, where the museum is, how to get there, what visitors to a museum do and say, the regulations he might unwittingly break, how much an ordinary citizen is supposed to know about which customs and such. Now add the possible danger that he might be slapped into jail or an insane asylum if he makes a mistake and you've got a rough notion of the spot I felt I was in. Being able to speak English doesn't make much difference; not knowing what's regarded as right and wrong, and the unknown consequences, are enough to panic anybody. That doesn't make it clear enough.  Well, look, take the electrical appliances in that store; that might give you an idea of the situation and the wayit affected me. The appliances must have been as familiar to the people of that time as toasters and TV sets and lamps are to us. But the things didn't make a bit of sense to me... any more than our appliances would to the ancient Egyptian. Can you imagine him trying to figure out what those items are for and how they work? can puzzle over: There was a light fixture that you put against any part of a wall -- no screws, no cement, no wires, even -- and it held there and lit up, and it stayed lit no matter where you moved it on the wall. Talk about pin-up lamps... this was really it ! Then I came across something that looked like an ashtray with a blue electric shimmer obscuring the bottom of the bowl, I lit my pipe -- others I'd passed had been smoking, so I knew it was safe to do the same -- and flicked in the match. It disappeared. I don't mean it was swirled into some hidden compartment. It vanished. I emptied the pipe into the ashtray and that went, too. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching. I dredged some coins out of my pocket and let them drop into the tray. They were gone. Not a particle of them was left. A disintegrator? I haven't got the slightest idea. There were little mirror boxes with three tiny dials on the front of each. I turned the dials on one -- it was like using three dial telephones at the same time -- and a pretty girl's face popped onto the mirror surface and looked' # expectantly at me. "Yes?" she said, and waited for me to answer. "I -- uh -- wrong number, I guess," I answered, putting the box down in a hurry and going to the other side of the shop because I didn't have even a dim notion how to turn it off. The thing I was looking for was on a counter -- a tinted metal box no bigger than a suitcase, with a lipped hole on top and small undisguised verniers in front, I didn't know I'd found it, actually, until I twisted a vernier and every light in the store suddenly glared and the salesman came rushing over and politely moved me aside to shut it off. "We don't want to burn out every appliance in the place, do we?" he asked quietly. "I just wanted to see if it worked all right," I said, still shaking slightly. It could have blown up or electrocuted me, for all I knew. "But they always work," he said. "Ah -- always?" "Of course. The principle is simple and there are no parts to get worn out, so they last indefinitely," He suddenly smiled as if he'd just caught the gist. "Oh, you were joking! Naturally -- everybody learns about the Dynapack in primary education. You were interested in acquiring one?" "No, no. The -- the old one is good enough. I was just -- well, you know, interested in knowing ' if the new models are much different or better than the old ones." "But there haven't been any new models since #," he said. "Can you think of any reason why there should be?" "I -- guess not," I stammered. "But you never can tell." "You can with Dynapacks," he said, and he would have gone on if I hadn't lost my nerve and mumbled my way out of the store as fast as I could. Y OIwant to know why? He'd asked me if I wanted to "ac quire" a Dynapack, not buy one. I didn't know what "acquire" meant in that society. It could be anything from saving up coupons to winning whatever you wanted at some kind of lottery, or maybe working up the right number of labor units on the job -- in which case he'd want to know where I was employed and the equivalent of social security and similar information, which I naturally didn't have -- or it could just be fancy sales talk for buying. I couldn't guess, and I didn't care to expose myself any more than I had already. And my blunder about the Dynapack working and the new models was nothing to make me feel at all easier. Lord, the uncertainties and hazards of being in a world you don't know anything about! Daydreaming about visiting another age may be pleasant, but the reality is something else again. "Wait a minute, friend!" I heard the salesman call out behind me.  looked back as casually, I hoped, as the pedestrians who heard him. He was walking quickly toward me with a very worried expression on his face. I stepped up my own pace as unobtrusively as possible, trying to keep a lot of people between us, meanwhile praying that they'd think I was just somebody who was late for an appointment. The salesman didn't break into a run or yell for the cops, but I couldn't be sure he wouldn't. As soon as I came to a corner, # turned it and ran like hell. There was a sort of alley down the block. I jumped into it, found a basement door and stayed inside, pressed against the wall, quivering with tension and sucking air like a swimmer who'd stayed underwater too long. Even after I got my wind back, I wasn't anxious to go out. The place could have been cordoned off, with the police, the army and the navy all cooperating to nab me. What made me think so? Not a thing except remembering how puzzled our ancient Egyptian would have been if he got arrested in the subway for something everybody did casually and without punishment in his own time -- spitting! I could have done something just as innocent, as far as you and I are concerned, that this era would consider a misdemeanor or a major crime. And in what age was ignorance of the law ever an excuse? Instead of going back out, I prowled carefully into the building. It was strangely silent and deserted. I couldn't understand why until I came to a lavatory. There were little commodes and wash basins that came up to barely above my knees. The place was a school. Naturally it was deserted -- the kids were through for the day. I could feel the tension dissolve in me like a ramrod of ice melting, no longer keeping my back and neck stiff and taut. There probably wasn't a better place in the city for me to hide. A primary school! The salesman had said to me, "Everybody learns about the Dynapack in primary education." eerie, like visiting a familiar childhood scene that had been distorted by time into something almost totally unrecognizable. There were no blackboards, teacher's big desk, children's little desks, inkwells, pointers, globes or books. Yet it was a school. The small fixtures in the lavatory downstairs had told me that, and so did the miniature chairs drawn neatly under the low, vividly painted tables in the various schoolrooms. A large comfortable chair was evidently where the teacher sat when not wandering around among the pupils. In front of each chair, firmly attached to the table, was a box with a screen, and both sides of the box held spools of wire on blunt little spindles. The spools had large, clear numbers on them. Near the teacher's chair was a compact case with more spools on spindles, and there was a large screen on the inside wall, opposite the enormous windows. I went into one of the rooms and sat down in the teacher's chair, wondering how I was going to find out about the Dynapack. I felt like an archeologist guessing at the functions of strange relics he'd found in a dead city. Sitting in the chair was like sitting on a column of air that let me sit upright or slump as I chose. One of the arms had a row of buttons. I pressed one and waited nervously to find out if I'd done something that woulii get me into trouble. Concealed lights in the ceiling and walls began glowing, getting brighter, while the room gradually turned dark. I glanced arouryjl bewilderedly to see why, because it was still daylight. The windows seemed to be sliding slightly, very slowly, and as they slid, the sunlight was damped out. I grinned, thinking of what my ancient Egyptian would make of that. I knew there were two sheets of polarizing glass, probably with a vacuum between to keep out the cold and the heat, and the lights in the room were beautifully synchronized with the polarized sliding glass. I wasn't doing so badly. The rest of the objects might not be too hard to figure out. The spools in the case alongside the teacher's chair could be wire recordings. I looked for something to play them with, but there was no sign of a playback machine. I tried to lift a spool off a spindle. It wouldn't come off. Hah! The wire led down the spindle to the base of the box, holding the spool in place. That meant the spools could be played right in that position. But what started them playing? nutely. Every part of it was featureless -- no dials, switches or any unfamiliar counterparts. I even tried moving my hands over it, figuring it might be like a theramin, and spoke to it in different shades of commai, because it could have been built to respond to vocal orders. Nothing happened. Remember the Poe story that shows the best place to hide something is right out in the open, which is the last place anyone would look? Well, these things weren't manufactured to baffle people, any more than our devices generally are. But it's only by trying everything that somebody who didn't know what a switch is would start uf a vacuum cleaner, say, or light a big chandelier from a wall clear across the room. I'd pressed every inch of the box, hoping some part of it mighj act as a switch, and I finally touched one of the spindles. The spool immediately began spinning at a very low speed and the screen on the wall opposite the window glowed into life. "The history of the exploration of the Solar System," said an announcer's deep voice, "is one of the most adventuresAme in mankind's long list of achievements. Beginning with the crude rockets developed during World War II..." There were newsreel shots of V-l and V-# being blasted from their takeoff ramps and a montage of later experimental models. I wished I could see how it all turned out, but I was afraid to waste the time watching. At any moment, I might hear the footsteps of a guard or janitor or whoever tended buildings then. I pushed the spindle again. It checked the spool, which rewound swiftly and silently, and stopped itself when the rewinding was finished. I tried another. A nightmare underwater scene appeared. "With the aid of energy screens," said another voice, "the oceans of the world were completely charted by the year #..." I turned it off, then another on developments in medicine, one on architecture, one on history, the geography of such places as the interior of South America and Africa that were -- or are -- unknown today, and I was getting frantic, starting the wonderful wire films that held full-frequency sound and pictures in absolutely faithful color, and shutting them off hastily when I discovered they didn't have what I was looking for. They were courses for children, but they all contained information that our scientists are still groping for... and I couldn't chance watching one all the way through! I was frustratedly switching off a film on psychology when a female voice said from the door, "May I help you?" her in sudden fright. She was young and slim and slight, but she could scream loud enough to get help. Judging by the way she was looking at me, outwardly polite and yet visibly nervous, that scream would be coming at any second. "T must have wandered in here by mistake," I said, and pushed past her to the corridor, where I began running back the way I had come. "But you don't understand!" she cried after me. "I really want to help -- " Yeah, help, I thought, pounding toward the street door. A gag right out of that psychology film, probably -- get the patient to hold still, humor him, until you can get somebody to put him where he belongs. That's what one of our teachers would do, provided she wasn't too scared to think straight, if she found an oldlooking guy thumbing frenziedly through the textbooks in a grammar school classroom. When I came to the outside door, I stopped. I had no way of knowing whether she'd given out an alarm, or how she might have done it, but the obvious place to find me would be out on the street, dodging for cover somewhere. I pushed the door open and let it slam shut, hoping she'd hear it upstairs. Then I found a door, sneaked it open and went silently down the steps. In the basement, I looked for a furnace or a coal bin or a fuel tank to hide behind, but there weren't any. I don't know how they got their heat in the winter or eooled the building in the summer. Probably some central atomic plant that took care of the whole city, piping in the heat or coolant in underground conduits that were led up through the walls, because there weren't even any pipes visible. I hunched into the darkest corner I could find and hoped they wouldn't look for me there. B Y the time night came, hunger drove me out of the school, but I did it warily, making sure nobody was in sight. The streets of the shopping center were more or less deserted. There was no sign of a restaurant. I was so empty that I felt dizzy as I hunted for one. But 'lien a shocking realization made ne halt on the sidewalk and weat with horror. Even if there had been a restaurant, what would I have used for money? Now I got the whole foul pic' i ire. She had sent old people ack through time on errands like mine... and they'd starved to death because they couldn't buy food! No, that wasn't right. I renembered what I had told Lou 'ape : anybody who gets hungry nough can always find a truck . irden or a food store to rob. Only... I hadn't seen a truck . irden or food store anywhere in this city. And... I thought about people in the past having their hands rut off for stealing a loaf of bread. This civilization didn't look as if it went in for such drastic punishments, assuming I could find a loaf of bread to steal. But neither did most of the civilizations that practiced those barbarisms. I was more tired, hungry and scared than I'd ever believed a human being could get. Lost, completely lost in a. totally alien world, but one in which I could still be killed or starve to death... and God knew what was waiting for me in my own time in case I came back without the information she wanted. Or maybe even if I came back with it! That suspicion made up rfiy mind for me. Whatever happened to me now couldn't be worse than what she might do. At least I r didn't have to starve. I stopped a man in the street. I let several others go by before picking him deliberately because he was middle-aged, had a kindly face, and was smaller than me, so I could slug him and run if he raised a row. "Look, friend," I told him, "I'm just passing through town -- " "Ah?" he said pleasantly. " -- And I seem to have mislaid -- " No, that was dangerous. I'd been about to say I'd mislaid my wallet, but I still didn't know whether they used money in this era. He waited with a patient, friendly smile while I decided just how to put it. "The fact is that I haven't eaten all day and I wonder if you could help me get a meal." He said in the most neighborly voice imaginable, "I'll be glad to do anything I can, Mr. Weldon," M Y entire face seemed to drop open. "You -- you called me -- " "Mr. Weldon," he repeated, still looking up at me with that neighborly smile. "Mark Weldon, isn't it? From the #th Century?" I tried to answer, but my throat had tightened up worse than on any opening night I'd ever had to live through. I nodded, wondering terrifiedly what was going on. "Please relax," he said persuasively. "You're not ib any danger whatever. We offer you our utmost hospitality. Our time, you might say, is your time." "You know who I am," I managed to get out through my constricted glottis. "I've been doing all this running arid ducking and hiding for nothing." He shrugged sympathetically. "Everyone in the city was instructed to help you, but you were so nervous that we were afraid to alarm you with a direct approach. Every time we tried to, as a matter of fact, you vanished into one .place or another. We didn't follow for fear of the effect on you. We had to wait until you came voluntarily to u" My brain was racing again and getting nowhere. Part of it was dizziness from hunger, but only part. The rest was plain frightened confusion. They knew who I was. They'd been expecting me. They probably even knew what I was after. And they wanted, to help! "Let's not go into explanations now," he said, "although I'd like to smooth away the bewilderment and fear on your face. But you need to be fed first. Then we'll call in the others and -- " I pulled back. "What others? How do I know you're not setting up something for me that I'll wish I hadn't gotten into?" "Before you approached me, Mr. Weldon, you first had to decide that we represented no greater menace than May Roberts. Please believe me, we don't." So he knew about that, too! "All right. I'll take my chances," I gave in resignedly. "Where does a guy find a place to eat in this city?" I T was a handsome restaurant with soft light coming from three-dimensional, full-color na' ture murals that I might mistakenly have walked into if I'd been alone, they looked so much like gardens and forests and plains. It was no wonder I couldn't find a restaurant or food store or truck garden anywhere -- food came up through pneumatic chutes in each building, I'd been told on the way over, grown in hydroponic tanks in cities that specialized in agriculture, and those who wanted to eat "out" could drop into the restaurant each building had. Every city had its own function. This one was for people in the arts. I liked that. There was a glowing menu on the table with buttons alongside the various selections, I looked starvingly at the items, trying to decide which I wanted most. I picked oysters, onion soup, breast of guinea hen under plexiglas and was hunting for the tastiest and most recognizable dessert when the pleasant little guy shook his head regretfully and emphatically. "I'm afraid you can't eat any of those foods) Mr. Weldon," he said in a sad voice. "We'll explain why in a moment." A waiter and the manager came over. They obviously didn't want to stare at me, but they couldn't help it. I couldn't blame them. I'd have stared at somebody from George Washington's time, which is about what I must have represented to them. "Will you please arrange to have the special food for Mr. Weldon delivered here immediately?" the little guy asked. "Every restaurant has been standing by for this, Mr. Carr," said the manager. "It's on its way. Prepared, of course -- it's been ready since he first arrived." "Fine," said the little guy, Carr, "It can't be too soon. He's very hungry." I glanced around and noticed for the first time that there was nobody else in the restaurant. It was past the dinner hour, but. even so, there are always late diners. We had the place all to ourselves and it bothered me. They could have ganged up on me... But they didn't. A light gong sounded, and the waiter and manager hurried over to a slot of a door and brought out a couple of trays loaded with covered dishes, "Your dinner, Mr. Weldon," the manager said, putting the plates in front of me and removing.the lids. I stared down at the food. "This," I told them angrily, "is a hell of a trick to play on a starving man!" "Mashed dehydrated potatoes, canned meat and canned vegetables," Carr replied. "Not very appetizing. I know, but I'm afraid it's all we can allow you to' eat." I took the cover off the dessert dish. "Dried fruits!" I said in disgust. "Rather excessively dried, I'm sorry to say," the manager agreed mournfully. I sipped the blue stuff in a glass and almost spat it out. "Powdered milk! Are these things what you people have to live on?" "No, our diet is quite varied," Carr said in embarrassment. "But we unfortunately can't give you any of the foods we normally eat ourselves." "And why in blazes not?" "Please eat, Mr. Weldon," Carr begged with frantic earnestness. "There's so much to explain -- this is part of it, of course -- and it would be best if you heard it on a full stomach." I was famished enough to get the stuff down, which wasn't easy; uninviting as it looked, it tasted still worse. When I was through, Carr pushed several buttons on the glowing menu. Dishes came up from an opening in the center of the table and he showed me the luscious foods they contained. "Given your choice," he said, "you'd have preferred them to what you have eaten. Isn't that so, Mr. Weldon?" "You bet I would!" I answered, sore because I hadn't been given that choice. "And you would have died like the pathetic old people you ware investigating," said a voice behind me. I turned around, startled. Several men and women had come in while I'd been eating, their footsteps as silent as cats on a rug. I looked blankly from them to Carr and back again. "These are the clothes we ordinarily wear," Carr said. "An #th Century motif, as you can see -- updated knee breeches and shirt waists, a modified stock for the men, the daring low bodices of that era, the full skirts treated in a modern way by using sheer materials for the women, bright colors and sheens, buckled shoes of spun synthetics. Very gay, very ornamental, very comfortable, and thoroughly suitable to our time." "But everybody I saw was dressed like me!" I protested. "Only to keep you from feeling more conspicuous and anxious than you already were. It was quite a project, I can tell you -- your styles varied so greatly from decade to decade, especially those for women -- and the materials were a genuine problem; they'd gone out of existence long ago. We had the textile and tailoring cities working a full six months to clothe the inhabitants of this city, including, of course, the children. Everybody had to be clad as your contemporaries were, because we knew only that you would arrive in this vicinity, not where you might wander through the city." "There was one small difference you didn't notice," added a handsome mature woman. "You were the only man in a gray suit. We had a full description of what you were wearing, you see, and we made sure nobody else was dressed that way. Naturally, everyone knew who you were, and so we were kept informed of your movements." "What for?" I demanded in alarm. "What's this all about?" down, looking to me like a witchcraft jury from some old painting. "I'm Leo Blundell," said a tall man in plum-and-gold clothes. "As chairman of -- of the Mark Weldon Committee, it's my responsibility to handle this project correctly." "Project?" "To make certain that history is fulfilled, I have to tell you as much as you must know." "I wish somebody would!" "Very well, let me begin by telling you much of what you undoubtedly know already. In a sense, youare more a victim of Dr. Anthony Roberts than his physicist, but because of his eccentric behavior, he was ridiculed for his theories and hated for his arrogance. He was an almost perfect example of self-defeat, the way in which a man will hamper his career and wreck his happiness, and then blame the world for his failure and misery. To get back to his connection with you, however, he invented a time machine -- unfortunately, its secret has since been lost and never rediscovered -- and used it for antiI social purposes. When he died, his daughter May carried on his work. It was she who sent you to this time to learn the principle by which the Dynapack operates. She was a thoroughly ruthless woman." "Are ypu sure?" I asked uneasily. "Quite sure." "I know a number of old people died after she sent them on errands through time, but she said they'd lied about their age and health." "One would expect her to say that," a woman put in cuttingly. Blundell turned to her and shook his head. "Let Mr. Weldon clarify his feelings about her, Rhoda. They are obviously very mixed." "They are," I admitted. "She seemed hard, the first time I saw her, when I answered her ad, but she could have been just acting businesslike. I mean she had a lot of people to pick from and she had to be impersonal and make certain she had the right one. The next time -- I hope you don't know about that -- it was really my fault for breaking into her room. I really had a lot of admiration for the way she handled the situation." "Go on," Carr encouraged me. "And I can't complain about the deal she gave me. Sure, she litne out ahead on the money I lct and invested for her. But I did all right myself -- I was richer than I'd ever been in my life -- and she gave that money to me before I even did anything to earn it!" "Besides which," somebody else said, "she offered you half of the profits on the Dynapiack." for signs of hostility. I saw none. That was surprising. I'd come from the past to steal something from them and they weren't it all angry. Well, no, it wasn't leally stealing. I wouldn't be depriving them of the Dynapack. It just would have been invented before it was supposed to be. "She did," I said. "Though I wouldn't call that part of it philanthropy. She needed me for the data and I needed her to manufacture the things." "And she was a very beautiful woman," Blundell added. I squirmed a bit. "Yes." "Mr. Weldon, we know a good deal about her from notes that have come down to us among her private papers. She had a safety deposit box under a false name. I won't tell you the name; it was not discovered until many years later, and we will not voluntarily meddle with the past." I sat up and listened sharply. "So that's how you knew who I was and what I'd be wearing and what I came for! You even knew when and where I'd arrive!" "Correct," Blundell said. "What else do you know?" "That you suspected her of being responsible for the deaths of many old people by starvation. Your suspicion was justified, except that her father had caused all those that occurred before #, when she took over after his own death. All but two people were sent into the past. Roberts was curious about the future, of course, but he did not want to waste a victim on a trip that would probably be fruitless. In the past, you understand, he knew precisely what he was after. The future was completely unknown territory." "But she took the chance," I said. "If you can call deliberate murder taking a chance, yes. One man arrived in #, over fifty years ago. The other was yourself. The first one, as you know, died of malnutrition when he was brought back to your era." "And what happened to me?" I asked, jittering. "You will not die. We intend to make sure of that. All the other victims -- I presume you're interested in their errands?" "I think I know, but I'd like to find out just the same." "They were sent to the past to buy or steal treasures of various sorts -- art, sculpture, jewelry, fabulously valuable manuscripts and books, anything that had great scarcity value." "That's not possible," I objected. "She had all the money she wanted. Any time she needed more, all she had to do was send somebody back to put down bets and buy stocks that she knew were winners. She had the records, didn't she? There was no way she or her father could lose!" H E moved his shoulders in a plum-and-gold shrug. "Most of the treasures they accumulated were for acquisition's sake -- and for the sake of vengeance for the way they believed Dr. Roberts had been treated. When there were unusual expenses, such as replacing the very costly parts of the time machine, that required more than they could produce in ready cash, both Roberts and his daughter 'discovered' these treasures." ! He waited while I digested the miserable meal and the disturbing information he had given me. I thought I'd found a loophole in his explanation : "You said people were sent back to the past to buy treasures, besides stealing them." "I did," he agreed. "They were provided with currency of whatever era they were to visit." I felt my forehead wrinkle up as my theory fell apart. "Then they could buy food. Why should they have died of malnutrition?" "Because, as May Roberts herself told you, nothing can exist before jt exists. Neither can anything exist after it is out of existence. If you returned with a Dynapack, for example, it would revert to a lump of various metals, because that was what it was in your period. But let me give you a more personal instance. Do you remember coming back from your first trip with dust on your hand?" "Yes. I must have fallen." "On one hand? No, Mr. Weldon. May Roberts was greatly upset by the incident; she was afraid you would realize why the hamburger had turned to dust -- and why the old people died of starvation, All of them, not just a few." He paused, giving me a chance to understand what he had just said. I did, with a sick shock. "If I ate your food," I said shakily, "I'd feel satisfied until I was returned to my own time. But the food wouldn't go along with me!" "And so you, too, would die of malnutrition. The foods we have given you existed in your #   fra. We were very careful of that, so careful that many of i hem probably were stored years "-fore you left your time, We i egret that they are not very palatable, but at least we are positive they will go back with you. You will be as healthy when you arrive in the past as when you left. "Incidentally, she made you hange your clothes for the same reason -- they had been made in #. She had clothing from very era she wanted visited and i hose old people who would fit them best. Otherwise, you see, they'd have arrived naked." I began to shake as if I were is old as I'd pretended to be on the stage. "She's going to pull me back! If I don't bring her the information about the Dynapack, she'll shoot me!" "That, Mr. Weldon, is our problem," Blundell said, putting his hand comfortingly on my arm to calm me. "Your problem? I'm the one who'll get shot, not you!" "But we know in complete detail what will happen when you are returned to the #th Century." I pulled my arm away and grabbed his. "You know that? Tell me!" "I'm sorry, Mr. Weldon, If we tell you what you did, you might thing of some alternate action, and there is no knowing what the result would be." "But I didn't get shot or die of malnutrition?" "That much we can tell you. Neither." They all stood up, so bright and attractive in their colorful clothes that I felt like a shirtsleeved stage hand who'd wandered in on a costume play. "You will be returned in a month, according to the notes May Roberts left. She gave you plenty of time to get the data, you see. We propose to make that month an enjoyable one for you. The resources of our city -- and any others you care to visit -- are at your disposal. We wish you to take full advantage of them." "And the Dynapack?" "Let us worry about that. We want you to have a good time while you are our guest." I did. It was the most wonderful month of my life. T HE mesh cage blurred around me. I could see May Roberts through it, her hand just leaving the switch. She was as beautiful as ever, but I saw beneath her beauty the vengeful, vicious creature her father's bitterness had turned her into ; Blundell and Carr had let me read some of her notes, and I knew. I wished I could have spent the rest of my years in the future, instead of having to come back to this. She came over and opened the gate, smiling like an angel welcoming a bright new soul. Then her eyes traveled startledly over me and her smile almost dropped off. But she held it firmly in place. She had to, while she asked, "Do you have the notes I sent you for?" "Right here," I said. I reached into my breast pocket and brought out a stubby automatic and shot her through the right arm. Her closed hand opened and a little derringer clanked on the floor. She gaped at me with an expression of horrified surprise that should have been recorded permanently; it would have served as a model for generations of actors and actresses. "You -- brought back a weapon!" she gasped. "You shot me!" She stared vacantly at her bleeding arm and then at my automatic. "But you can't -- brin anything back from the future. And you aren't -- dying of malnutrition." She said it all in a voice shocked into toneless wonder. "The food I ate and this gun are from the present," I said. "The people of the future knew I was coming. They gave me food that wouldn't vanish from my cells when I returned. They also gave me the gun instead of the plans for the Dynapsck." "And you took it?" she screamed at me. "You idiot! I'd have shared the profits honestly with you. You'd have been worth "With acute malnutrition," I amended. "I like it better this way, thanks -- poor, but alive. Or relatively poor, I should say, because you've been very generous and I appreciate it." "By shooting me!" "I hated to puncture that lovely arm, but it wasn't as painful as starving or getting shot myself. Now if you don't mind -- or even if you do -- it's your turn to get into the cage, Miss Roberts." She tried to grab for the derringer on the floor with her left hand. "Don't bother," I said quietly. "You can't reach it before a bullet reaches you." # S HE straightened up, staring at me for the first time with terror in her eyes. "What are you going to do to me?" she whispered. "I could kill you as easily as you could havekilled me. Kill you and send your body into some other era. How many dozens of deaths were you responsible for? The law couldn't convict you of them, but I can. And I couldn't be convicted, either." She put her hand on the wound. Blood seeped through her fingers as she lifted her chin at me. "I won't beg for my life, Weldon, if that's what you want. I could offer you a partnership, but I'm not really in a position to offer it, am I?" She was magnificent, terrifyingly intelligent, brave clear through... and deadlier than a plague. I had to remember that. "Into the cage," I said. "I have some friends in the future who have plans for you. I won't tell you what they are, of course; you didn't tell me what I'd go through, did you? Give my friends my fondest regards. If I can manage it, I'll visit them -- and you." She backed warily into the cage. It would have been pleasant to kiss those wonderful lips good-by. I'd thought about them for a whole month, wanting them and loathing them at the same time. It would have been like kissing a coral snake. I knew it and I concentrated on shutting the gate on her. "You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you, Weldon?" she asked through the mesh. "I can be," I said. "I have the machine. I can send people into he past or future and make myr If a pile . of dough. Only I'd :ve them food to take along. I wouldn't kill them off to keep he secret to myself. Anything Ise on your mind?" "You want me," she stated. I didn't argue. "You could have me." "Just long enough to get my throat slit or brains blown out. I don't want anything that much." I rammed the switch closed. The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the ioor, but she was gone into the : nture I had just come from. That was when the reaction tilt me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun, but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped ny stomach over and unhinged my knees. Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found a phone. that I still hadn't gotten over the tremors, in spite of a bottle of bfhndy I dug out of a credenza, maybe because the date on the label, #, . gave me a new case of the shivers. I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himself that I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him what had happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess I hadn't really expected him to. "If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark head unhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Even knowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do." "All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly. "From what I was told, there ought to be plenty," We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood with his face slack. "Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!" The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice as high as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammed with paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts, goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, and tapeseverything was as bright and sparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of a lot of it. "The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lou said. "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was a collector and she knew where to find things." "She certainly did," I agreed. "What did you do with her?" "I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me and I sent her into the future." He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. You wanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got rid of her body somehow." "Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leave sleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his hands loose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here? Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'd have sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody -- including you -- would know I'd ever been here. Come "That's easy. You lost your on, use your head." nerve." "I'm not even losing my patience."  H E pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff or because of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're no friend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, and I'll make sure you fry." "You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead and wrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, send me up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do the proving, not me." He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break or I'll plug you as if I never saw you before." He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particular damn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killed May Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, would have stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason for my relief -- if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find, he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have tried to get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievable explanation. But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'd shot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at and that had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.  She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; they regarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with their marvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contented citizen, living out her existence in an era that had given me more happiness than I'd ever had. I sat and tried to stupefy my elf with brandy that should long i go have dried to brick-hardness, 'hile Lou Pape stood at the door vith his hand near his holster md glared at me. He didn't take  is eyes off me until somebody  amed Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson ame in and was introduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs. It was minutes before I resized what they were going to !o. I ran up after them. I was just in time to see Aaron.on carefully take the housing off the hooded motors, and leap back  uddenly from the fury of lightning sparks. r T'HE whole machine fused while we watched helplessly -- motors, switches, panel and mesh rage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and melted together in a charred and molten pile, "Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to short if it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a mess like this." He finally glatjced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching all the way around the rear for it with his left hand. Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any sense of it, Prof?" he asked. "Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify it when it looks like this." He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief. Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine to -- ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now we'll have to dig tmough the house to find her body." "You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of 'me." He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for her body, Mark?" "Tear the place apart if you want." "We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide." "Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like." "You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through." I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in the future could take on the job -- they could do it faster and better than I can -- but some nice, peaceful quiet would help." H E didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest. She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep. But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care could have made a great and honored scientist out of him. They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible. I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone. Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are impossible to work out ever could. I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came over to where I was sitting. "You knew we wouldn't find her," he said. "That's what I kept telling you." "Where is she?" "In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in veils for the depraved -- " "Cut out the kidding! Where is she?" "What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?" "That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead." "She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else, just that" He hauled me out of the chair md stared hard at my face. You aren't lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not." "All right, then." "But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and betterlooking than her, for ne thing -- " "Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my naked scalp. "Witfi a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens to 'e a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me -- they checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head, which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten together like gin and tonic." L OU arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on you?" "Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glaneed out the window at the smoky city. "That's why. They couldn't tell me if I'd ever get back to the future. I wasn't taking any chances. As long as there was a possibility that I'd be stranded in my own time, I wasn't going to lose my livelihood. Which reminds me, you have anything else to do here?" "There'll be a guard stationed around the house and all her holdings and art will be taken ovr until she comes back -- " "She won't." " -- or is declared legally dead." "And me?" I broke in. "We can't hold you without proof of murder." "Good enough. Then let's get out of here." "I have to go back on duty," he objected. "Not any more. I've got over # in cash and deposits -- enough to finance you and me." "Enough to kill her for." "Enough to finance you and me," I repeated doggedly, "I told you I had the money before she sent me into the future -- " "AH right, all right," he interrupted. "Let's not go into that again. We couldn't find a body, so you're free. Now what's this about financing the two of us?" I put my fingers around his arm and steered him out to the street. "This city has never had a worse cop than you," I said. "Why? Because you're an actor, not a cop. You're going back to acting, Lou. This money will keep us both going until we get a break." He gave me the sliteyed look he'd picked up in line of duty, "That wouldn't be a bribe, would 'it?" "Call it a kind of memorial to a lot of poor, innocent old people and a sick, tormented woman." We walked along in silence out in the clean sunshine. It was our silence; the sleek cars and burly trucks made their noise and the pedestrians added their gabble, but a good Stanislavsky actor like Lou wouldn't notice that. Neither would I, ordinarily, but I was giving him a chance to work his way through this situation. "I won't hand you a lie, Mark," he said finally. "I never stopped wanting to act. I'll take your deal on two considerations."  "All right, what are they?" "That whatever I take off you is strictly a loan." "No argument. What's the other?" He had an unlit cigarette almost to his lips. He held it there while he said: "That any time you come across a case of an old person who died of starvation with # stashed away somewhere, you turn fast to the theatrical page and not tell me or even think about it.". "I don't have to agree to that." H E lowered the cigarette, stopped and turned to me. "You mean it's no deal?" "Not that," I said. "I mean there won't be any more of those cases. Between knowing that and both of us back acting again. I'm satisfied. You don't have to believe me. Nobody does." He lit up and blew out a pretty plume, fine and slow and straight, which would have teleThen he grinned. "You wouldn't want to bet on that, would you?" "Not with a friend. I do all my surething betting with bookies." "Then make it a token bet," i he said. "One buck that somebody dies of starvation with a big poke within a year." I took the bet. I took the dollar a year later. i games If is a tough assignment for a Mid to know where a daydream ends and impossibility begins! R onny was playing by himself, which meant he was two tribes of Indians having a war. "Bang' he muttered, firing an imaginary rifle. He decided that it was a time in history before the white people had sold the Indians any guns, and changed the rifle into a bow. "Wi zz- thunk" he substituted, mimicking from an Indian film on TV the graphic sound of an arrow striking flesh, "Oof He folded down onto the rass, moaning, "Uhhhooh... and relaxing into defeat and death. "Want some chocolate milk, Ronny ?" asked his mother's voice from the kitchen. "No, thanks," he called back, climbing to his feet to be another man. "Wizzthunk, wizzthunk he added to the flights of arrows as the best archer in the tribe. "Last arrow, Wizzzz," he said, missing one enemy for realism. He addressed another battling brave. "Who has more arrows? They are coming too close. No time -- I'll have to use my knife He drew the imaginary knife, ducking an arrow as it shot close. standing somewhere else, and he saw that the warriors left alive were outnumbered. "We must retreat. We cannot leave our tribe without warriors to protect the women." Ronny decided that the chief was heroically wounded, his voice wavering from weakness. He had been propping himself against a tree to appear unharmed, but now he moved so that his braves could see he was pinned to the trunk by an arrow and could not walk. They cried out. He said, "Leave me and escape. But remember... No words came, just the feeling of being what he was, a dying old eagle, a chief of warriors, speaking to young warriors who would need advice of seasoned humor and moderation to carry them through their young battles. He had tg finish the sentence, tell them something wise. Ronny tried harder, pulling the feeling around him like a cloak of resignation and pride, leaning indifferently against the tree where the arrow had pinned him, hearing dimly in anticipation the sound of his aged voice conquering weakness to speak wisely of what they needed to be told. They had many battles ahead of them, and the battles would be against odds, with so many dead already. They must watch and wait, be flexible and tenacious, determined and persistent -- but not too rash, subtle and indirect -- not cowardly, and above all be patient with the triumph of the enemy and not maddened into suicidal direct attack. His stomach hurt with the arrow wound, and his braves waited to hear his words. He had to sum a part of his life's experience in words. Ronny tried harder to build the scene realistically. Then suddenly it was real. He was the man. He was an old man, guide and adviser in an oblique battle against great odds. He was dying of something and his stomach hurt with a knotted ache, like hunger, and he was thirsty. He had refused to let the young men make the sacrifice of trying to rescue him. He was hostage in the jail and dying, because he would not surrender to the enemy nor cease to fight them. He smiled and said, "Remember to live like other men, but -- remember to remember." And then he was saying things that could not be put into words, complex feelings that were ways of taking bad situations that made them easier to smile at, and then sentences that were not entences, but single alphabet letters pushing each other ' with igns, with a feeling of being coni iected like two halves of a swing, one side moving up when the other moved down, or like swings or like cogs and pendulums inside a clock, only without the fogs, just with the push. It wasn't adding or multipication, and it used letters instead of numbers, but Ronny knew it was some kind of arithmetic. And he wasn't Ronny. He was an old man, teaching young men, and the old man did oot know about Ronny. He thought sadly frdw little he would be able to convey to the young men, and he remembered more, trying to sum long memories and much living into a few direct thoughts. And Ronny was the old man and himself, both at ince. t TT was too intense. Part of Ronny wanted to escape and tie alone, and that part withdrew and wanted to play something. Ronny feat in the grass and played with his toes like a much younger child. Part of Ronny that was Doctor Revert Purcell sat on the edge of a prison cot, concentrating on secret unpublished equations of biogenic stability which he wanted to pass on to the responsible hands of young researchers in the concealed-research chain. He was using the way of thinking which they had told him was the telepathic sending of ideas to anyone ready to receive. It was odd that he himself could never tell when he was sending. Probably a matter of age. They had started trying to teach him when he was already too old for anything so different. The water tap, four feet away, was dripping steadily, and it was hard for Purcell to concentrate, so intense was his thirst. He wondered if he could gather strength to walk that far. He was sitting up and that was good, but the struggle to raise himself that far had left him dizzy and trembling. If he tried to stand, the effort would surely interrupt his transmitting of equations and all the data he had not sent yet. Would the man with the keys who looked in the door twice a day care whether Purcell died with dignity? He was the only audience, and his expression never changed when Purcell asked him to point out to the authorities that he was not being given anything to eat. It was funny to Purcell to find that he wanted the respect of any audience to his dying, even of a man without response who treated him as if he were already a corpse. Perhaps the man would respond if Purcell said, "I have changed my mind. I will tell." But if he said that, he would lose his own respect. At the biochemists' and biophysicists' convention, the reporter had asked him if any, of his researches could be applied to warfare. He had answered with no feeling of danger, knowing that what he did was common practice among research men, sure that it was an unchallengeable right. "Some of them can, but those I keep to myself." The reporter remained deadpan. "For instance?" "Well, I have to choose something that won't reveal how it's done now, but -- ah -- for example, a way of cheaply mass-producing specific antitoxins against any germ. It sounds harmless if you don't think about it, but actually it would make germ warfare the most deadly and inexpensive weapon yet developed, for it would make it possible to prevent the backspread of contagion into a country's own troops, without much expense. There would be hell to pay if anyone ever let that out." Then he had added, trying to get the reporter to understand enough to change his cynical unimpressed expression, "You understand, germs are cheap -- there would be  new plague to spread everytime some pipsqueak biologist mutated a new germ. It isn't even expensive or difficult, as atom bombs are." The headline was: "Scientist Refuses to Give Secret of Weapon to Government." G overnment men came and asked him if this was correct, and on having it confirmed pointed out that he had an obligation. The research foundations where he had worked were subsidized by government money. He had been deferred from military service during his early years of study and work so he could become a scientist, instead of having to fight or die on the battlefield. "This might be so," he had said. "I am making an attempt to serve mankind by doing as much good and as little damage as pos sible. If you don't mind, I'd rather ,use my own judgment about what constitutes service." The statement seemed too blunt the minute he had said it, and he recognized that it had implications that his judgment was superior to that of the government. It probably was the most antagonizing thing that I could have been said, but he J could see no other possible state ment, for it represented precisely i what he thought. There were bigger headlines j about that interview, and when I he stepped outside his building for lunch the next day, several small gangs of patriots arrived with the proclaimed purpose of pursuading him to tell. They fought each other for the privilege. The police had rescued him after he had lost several front teeth and had one eye badly gouged. They then left him to the care of the prison doctor in protective custody. Two days later, after having been questioned several times on his attitude toward revealing the parts of his research he had kept secret, he was transferred to a place that looked like a military jail, and left alone. He was not told what his status was. When someone came and asked him questions about his attitude, Purcell felt quite sure that what they were doing to him was illegal. He stated that he was going on a hunger strike until he was allowed to have visitors and see a lawyer. The next time the dinner hour arrived, they gave him nothing to eat. There had been no food in the cell since, and that was probably two weeks ago. He was not sure just how long, for during part of the second week his memory had become garbled. He dimly remembered 'something that might have been delirium, which could have lasted more than one day. Perhaps the military who wanted the antitoxins . for germ warfare were waiting quietly for him either to talk or die. and went into the kitchen, stumbling in his walk like a beginning toddler. "Chocmil?" he said to his mother. She poured him some and teased gently, "What's the matter, Ronny -- back to baby-talk?" He looked at her with big solemn eyes and drank slowly, not answering. In the cell somewhere distant. Dr. Purcell, famous biochemist, began waveringly trying fo rise to his feet, unable to remember hunger as anything separate from him that could ever be ended, but weakly wanting a glass of water. Ronny could not feed him with the chocolate milk. Even though this was another himself, the body that was drinking was not the one that was thirsty. He wandered out into the back yard again, carrying the glass. "Bang," he said deceptively, pointing with his hand in case his mother was looking. "Bang." Everything had to seem usual; he was sure of that. This was too big a thing, and too private, to tell a grownup. On the way back from the sink, Dr. Purcell slipped and fell and lit his head against the edge of the iron cot. Ronny felt the edge K-tshing through skin and into hone, and then a relaxing blankness inside his head, like falling sleep suddenly when they are Uing you a fairy story while vou want to stay awake to find out what happened next. "Bang," said Ronny vaguely, pointing at a tree. "Bang." He was ashamed because he had fallen down in the cell and hurt his head and become just Ronny ;'ain before he had finished nding out his equations.He ied to make believe he was alive igain, but it didn't work. You could never make-believe anything to a real good finish. They never ended neatly -- there was always something unfinished, and something that would t;o right on after the end. It would have been nice if the i ailers had come in and he had been able to say something noble to them before dying, to show that he was brave. "Bang," he said randomly, ointing his finger at his head, nd then jerked his hand away is if it had burned him. He had become the wrong person that time. The feel of a bullet jolting the side of his head was startling and unpleasant, even if not real, and the flash of someone's vindictive anger and self-pity while pulling a trigger... , My wife will be sorry she ever... He didn't like that kind of make-believe. It felt unsafe to do it without making up a story first. Ronny decided to be Indian braves again. They weren't very real, and when they were, they had simple straightforward emotions about courage and skill and pride and friendship that he would like. on the fence, watching him. "Nice day." What's the matter, kid, are you an esper? "Hul-lo," Ronny stood on one foot and watched him. Just making believe. I only want to play. They make it too serious, having all these troubles. "Good countryside," The man gestured at the back yards, all opened in together with tangled bushes here and there to crouch behind, when other kids were there to play hide and seek, and with trees to climb. It can be the Universe if you pick and choose who to be, and don't let wrong choices make you shut off from it. You can make yourself learn from this if you are strong enough. Who have you been? Ronny stood on the other foot and scratched the back of his leg with his toes. He didn't want to remember. He always forgot right away, but this grownup was confident and young and stronglooking, and meant something when he talked, not like most grownups. "I was playing Indian." I was an old cNef, captured by enemies, trying to pass on to other warriors the wisdom of my life before I died. He made believe he "Was the chief a little to show the young man what he was talking about. "Purcell!" The man drew in his breath between his teeth, and his face paled. He pulled back from reaching Ronny with his feelings, like holding his breath in. "Good game." You can fern from him. Don't leave him shut off, I beg you. You can let him influence you without being pulled off your own course. He was a good man. You were honored, and I envy the man you wilt be if you contacted him on resonant similarities. The grownup looked frightened. But you are too young. You'll block him out and lose him. Kids have to grow and learti at their own speed. Then he looked less afraid, but uncertain, and his thoughts struggled against each other. Their own speed. But there should be someone alive with Purcells pattern and memories. We loved him. Kids should grow at their own speed, but... How strong are you, Ronny? Can you move ahead of the normal growth pattern? Grownups always want you to do something. Ronny stared back, clenching his hands and moving his feet uneasily. The thoughts were open to him Do you want to be the old chief again, Ronny? Be him often, so you can learn to know what he : knew? ( And feel as he felt. It would be a stiff dose tor a kid. ) It will be rich and exciting, full of memories and skills. (But hard : to chew. I'm doing this for Pur  cell, Ronny, not for you. You  have to make up your own mind ) "That was a good game. Ai e you going to play it any more?" H IS mother would not like it. She would feel the difference in him, as much as if he had read one of the books she kept away from him, books that were supposed to be for adults only. The difference would hurt her. He was being bad, like eating between meals. But to know , what grownups knew... He tightened his fists and; looked down at the grass. "I'll play it some more." The young man smiled, still pale and holding half his feelings back behind a dam. Then mesh with me a moment. Let me in. He was in with the thought, feeling Ronny's confused consent, reassuring him by not think-? ing or looking around inside while  riding out a single call, Pur f II, Doc, that found the combination key to Ronny's guarded yesterdays and last nights and ten minutes agos. Ronny, I'll set that door, Purcell's memories, open tor you. You can't close it, hut feel like this about it -- and lie planted in a strong set, questioning, cool, open, a feeling of tbsorbing without words... it will give information when you need it, like a dictionary. The grownup straightened ,iway from the fence, preparing to walk off. Behind a dam pressed grief and anger for the leath of the man he called Pur ell. "And any time you want to be t he old chief, at any age he lived, rust make believe you are him." Grief and anger pressed more strongly against the dam, and the man turned and left rapidly, letting his thoughts flicker and scatter through private memories that Ronny did not share, that no one shared, breaking thought contact with everyone so that the man could be alone in his own mind to have his feelings in private. glass that had held his chocolate, milk from the back steps where he had left it and went inside. As he stepped into the kitchen, he knew what another kitchen had looked like for a fiye-year-old child who had been Purcell ninety years ago. There had been an iron sink, and a brownandgreen-spotted faucet, and the glass had been heavier and transparent, like real glass. Ronny reached up and put the colored plastic tumbler down, "That was a nice young man, dear. What did he say to you?" Ronny looked up at his mamma, comparing her with the remembered mamma of fifty years ago. He loved the other one, too. "He tol' me he's glad I play Indian."... For an offer to charter subscribers that will save you money and yet give you valuable bonuses!... , For pure myths for moderns... plotted, written and edited with the jm # if Jr  w.?I li? For Your ... u.' iI s # # ' S , Information Ancestor of the Dinosaurs in easy traveling distance, of New York, Chicago, San Diego or London(England) will, if they are so inclined, be able to see something without trouble for which they would formerly have had to travel half way around V jMWl V fi the world and possibly without success. For the first time in many decades, the New Zealand government has permitted the export for exhibition of four Tuataras, (Hatterias or Sphenodons; in short, rhynchocephalia) . What do they look like? Well, like lizards, more or less dirty green in color, with an unusually large head and unusually large bright eyes in that head. Adult specimens are about # inches long. The ones on exhibit in the zoological gardens of the cities mentioned are young specimens which have not yet attained their full size. But they do have the spiny crest along back and tail which is the reason for the name Tuatara, a Maori word which can be translated as "spinebearer." It should be abundantly clear by now, because of the mention of the New Zealand government and the Maori name of the little creature, that its home is in New Zealand. But no longer New Zealand generally. Only a few hundred years ago, the Tuatara, it is believed, lived on both the main islands of New Zealand. The Maoris who came there from their original home islands of the Southern Pacific -- they call their original home Hawaiki, but it was not the Hawaii of our maps -- did not bother the small lizard much. Nor did the white settlers of a hundred and fifty years ago. But the white settlers brought animals with them -- dogs, cats and pigs, all three destructive to life-forms such as the Tuatara. The pigs especially, with their habit of rummaging through underbrush and eating everything that isn't wood or stone, exterminated the Tuatara on the main islands, by eating lizards and eggs alike. All this happened without the settlers being even aware of what went on, which is the main reason why so much of this article is conjecture. Tuatara, if it had ever been abundant on the South Island, would still be there. There are still large unsettled and virtually unexplored areas on the South Island, as the recent rediscovery of the bird Takahe ( Notorrds ) has demonstrated. At any event, if you want to find the present home of Tuatara on a map, you need a pretty good map. The North and South Islands of New Zealand are separated by Cook Strait. West of Cook Strait, due north of the South Island, there is a smaller island named D'Urville Island, which is still indicated on most maps. Due north ot D'Urville Island there is a small rocky islet called Stephen Island, rarely seen on any map. But it is Tuatara's home, or rather one of them, for the little saurian also occurs on a few other rocky islands along the New Zealand coast, all strictly protected. When at home, Tuatara, slowmoving and cold-loving, eats insects, small crustaceans and other lizards, provided they are small enough. In captivity the diet is usually earthworms, but some have taken fish. The fact that they do eat fish, even though rarely, may explain why the Tuataras, very long ago, decided to set up community housekeeping with birds, -- "dovey petrels," to ! be precise. These marine birds ; nest in burrows which they dig, but the Tuataras move in on them. Whether the Tuataras elaborated upon the burrows or j the petrels obligingly did it for  them (as is generally assumed) is not completely known. But there is a double nest at the bottom; the petrels occupy the dugout to the left and the Tuataras the one to the right of the entrance. It was comparatively easy to tell that Tuatara (the scientific names, as has been mentioned, ire Hatteria or Sphenodoii) is very rare. There was no problem n reporting where and how they live. But when it comes to the question of why zoologists and paleontologists grow dreamyeyed at the very mention of the name, I don't have a one-sentence answer. T ET me try to explain it chron ologically. Tuatara became known to science about #. An explorer by the name of DiefFenbach reported on its existence in i German journal. The main reason why his report is still remembered is that he gave the name Ngarara as the Maori name; all others reported the native name as Tuatara, Tuatera, Ruatara, or Tuatete -- obviously the same word with slightly differing pronunciations. Four years before Dieffenbach. a British scientist, Edward Gray, had published a Note on a Peculiar Structure in the Head of an Agama. ? Of course, Tuatara is not an Agama lizard; but the report on the strange organ in its head caused some comment, and an anatomist by the name of Gunther went to work, delicately and diligently. Finally he could announce that the "structure" itself was not so peculiar, only its location on top of the head. It was a third eye! This was enough to give paleontologists vivid professional dreams. Once upon a time, during the Triassic period, some # million years ago, threeeyed reptiles were no rarity. But few of them f had survived even to the end of the Triassic Period. Here was one with that feature, still alive. Apparently the third eye had somewhat reduced its size and activity in the course of time. It is smaller than the other two and is protected by a large transparent scale which is "set" in a circle of small opaque scales. But it is a complete eye in structure. Its connecting optical nerve is in working order and the whole is sensitive at least to light and dark. (Only the large black seaweed-eating iguana of the Galapagos Islands also has a still sensitive third eye, but it is far less well-preserved than that of Hatteria.') The third or "pineal" eye alone proved that Tuatara was old. How old was established by careamination of each of its features. Tuatara turned out to be the last surviving member of a group of reptiles which bear the scientific label of rynchocephalians ("beakheads"). The group was going strong during the Triassic Period. During the following period, the Jurassic, they spread considerably, but became less numerous at the same time. One of these Jurassic rynchoago, Homoesaurus, looked and was so much like Tuatara that it would be hard to tell the two apart if both were still alive. The remains of Homoesaurus have been found in England and in Bavaria, but representatives of that type had reached Malaya and New Guinea at just about that time. There was then a land bridge from New Guinea to New Zealand's North Island via New Caledonia. This is how Tuatara got to New Zealand. Some time afterward, that land bridge broke up into widely separated islands. Tuatara was in a place where it was safe, with nothing to bother it, until the settlers introduced pigs. Occasionally you can read in a popular book or article that Tuatara is a surviving small dinosaur. That is not so! The dinosaurs came later. Tuatara is one of the ancestors of the dinosaurs. month I receive a letter in which I am informed that all space travel men lack imagination. Just because they have discovered that a rocket is the only known means for accelerating and decelerating in the vacuum of space, they want to use rockets for everything. And because they can't imagine anything else any more but liquid fuel rockets, they build rocket ships consisting of three stages, the two lower steps exclusively designed to boost the top stage up to the desired speed. Of course, the step below the third has to be much heavier and larger, and the bottom step, which has to lift all the others off the ground, must be the biggest and clumsiest of them all. But, the reasoning runs, we only have to get the top stage up to proper speed. There is no need for the lower stages to develop a lot of speed, especially since they are supposed to fall back, anyway. Why not use a catapultlike or gunlike device to put some initial speed behind the top stage? The whole job would be much easier and it probably would take less fuel, too. It almost sounds convincing. Or, rather, it may sound convincing to those who have never tackled the job. Let's look at an actual example. There was that two-stage shot which carried to # miles. Corporal rocket. The lower stage was a V-# rocket, which provided :ie upper stage with a velocity  if almost precisely one mile per second at an altitude of # miles. poral to # miles without a lower stage, we then have to supply one mile per second by means of a catapult or a gun. In fact, we may have to supply a little more than one mile per second, because the catapult obviously would not he # miles tall and would there it a lower altitude, where the air ; denser Ind offers more resist nce. The "muzzle velocity" 'ould have to be # feet per econd. The acceleration the rocket would receive in the catapult is fiven by the formula where a is the acceleration, s is the length of the catapult or the gun and v is the velocity at the end of the catapult -- those # feet per second, squared. Just try it a few times with various sets of figures and you'll be convinced that it is not lack of imagination that makes the space travel scientists stick to multiple stages. Even if you aim for as low a "muzzle velocity" as # ft.sec., you'll find that you either need a catapult of impossible length or else that the rocket would have to sustain accelerations as high as several hundred g. If you tried the latter, you would require a very massive rocket -- let's not even mention pilot and passengers -- so that it emerges in one piece and in workable condition. Unfortunately, it would then also have a very poor mass-ratio. Even with a mile-long shaft -- one drilled, say, into the top of a mountain -- the accelerations would still be too high for human occupants, in spite of the fact that humans can stand much higher accelerations than was believed possible as recently as eight years ago. And a tube one mile long, whether it is a vertical shaft in a mountain or a nearvertical structure up a steep mountain slope, will cost large sums of money. What you really need, though, is an acceleration path # or # miles long; more in some cases. And the cheapest way to accomplish that is by means of lower stages. My son suggested that you might be able to answer my question: " Why is there no frost on cloudy nights?" I have known this fact for years, but no one seems to be able to tell me why. Mrs. Mary Coulson RR #, Box # Silver Lake, Indiana The statement that there is no frost on cloudy night is generally correct; in fact, there is a proverb which says "clear Moon, frost soon,'" indicating the same observation. The explanation is mostly provided by the fact that the air near the ground is mostly heated by the ground. In other words, the Sun does not heat the bottom layers of the air to any appreciable extent directly. It heats the ground, which passes the heat onby re-radiation. If, after a clear day, the night is clear, too, the heat is radiated into space. But if a cloud blanket forms at sunset, it acts like a real blanket, trapping the heat between ground and cloud layer. There is one condition where you may have frost in spite of an overcast sky. This happens if the weather has been quite cold -- around # Fahrenheit, for some time; usually the sky is clear, or almost so, in such weather. Then, if a warm and moist air mass moves in, it may not displace the cold air mass, but ride on top of it. Where the moist warm air touches the cold air, the moisture will condense, forming a cloud blanket which keeps the Sun's rays out. The result is a series of cold days with an overcast sky. Why does water expand when it is cooled below its freezing point? Stephen Qbrecht # Glenway Drive S.E. Cedar Rapids, Iowa Water reaches its greatest density not at its freezing point, but somewhat above the freezing point, at # centigrade. It freezes at # centigrade. Above and below # centigrade, it has a lesser density, than at that critical temperature. This is of great biological importance. If water below zero centigrade -- ice -- were heavier than liquid water, all ice that forms would sink to the bottom of rivers and lakes. During a Jong and severe winter, the lakes and most rivers would be solidly filled with ice from the bottom up, presumably destroying many life-forms in the process. Since the ice floats on top, it forms an insulating layer, keeping the water below liquid so that aquatic life-forms can survive. Some time ago I heard that if a person stays in a completely darkened room long enough to allow his irises to open completely, he'll be able to see by socalled ' "black" or ultraviolet light, but that every object he sees will seem to be displaced a certain angular distance from its actual position. Can you shed any light ( black or otherwise ) on this? Bert Aver a Box # Fairhope, Alabama It is not true that everybody van see ultra-violet after he has I teen in the dark long enough for his eyes to attain maximum sensitivity. It is true that' some people can see ultra-violet and they don't even have to stay in a dark room -- the main point is here that the intensity of ordinarily visible light must he low enough so that the u-v is not "drowned out" completely. The ability to see u-v seems to be restricted to light-eyed people who are still fairly young; the ability seems to be lost with age. I don't know whether an age limit has been actually established. As a rule of thumb, a person over # years of age is too old for that. But the idea of an angular displacement is wrong. Everybody can "see" ultra-violet via his camera. If there were sufcli a displacement, all pictures taken in light with much u-v in it (sunlight, for example) would be fuzzy or have double outlines. I admit having seen photographs with fuzzy or double outlines, but the u-v had nothing to do with that. I have read that the Northern Lights are caused by Sun spots. If so, why are they seen only in the north? Would they be seen on other planets? Mildred Moore Hightstown, N. J. The Northern Lights are caused by solar activity (Sun spots), but they are not restricted to the north. They appear in the regions of the magnetic poles, which are reasonably close to the geographical poles. Scientific terminology is aurora borealis for those near the geographical North Pole and aurora australis for those near the geographical South Pole. The second portion of the question is especially interesting; it would he nice if we could be sure. To the best of my knowledge, no aurora has ever been seen in the Martian atmosphere, but quite a number of astronomers believe that aurorae may have been seen in the Venusian atmosphere. Venus, going around the Sun inside the orbit of Earth, shows decided phases like the Moon. It happens that f#r more of the sickle points is visible than can be accounted for geometrically. Also, the outline of the sickle is sometimes "bumpy." These irregularities do not necessarily have to be caused by aurorae, but they may be. #n the July #I issue of the American Scientist , George Gamow writes: "Recently this theoretical conclusion ( Weizsacker , Kuiper et. a.) found confirmation in the actual discovery of planetary systems near two close stars. Please explain. Joe Low # Holland Lakewood, Colo. When you ask me to explain Dr. Gamow'e statement, I take it that you are looking for confirmation of his assertion that planets of other stars are known. They are. To phrase it as carefully as possible, one has to say that star systems comparatively near in space to our own sun are known to have nonluminous companions of planetary mass. They have not been seen so far -- their existence is known because they influence the movement of their suns, which we can measure. The sUns in question are binaries or double stars, two suns moving around their common center of gravity. Once this motion has been established, we are able to predict the relative positions accurately. But by careful study of photographs taken over a number of years, it turned out that the positions did not check precisely. There had to be at least one more body, not registering on the plates, to account for this. Several such suspicious cases had been under investigation for some years when K. Aa. Strand of Sproul Observatory (Swarthmore College) announced in # that the double star #I in Cygnus had a companion of planetary mass, # times as massive as Jupiter and moving around its sun once in # years. Only a few months later, the Leander McCormick Observatory of the University of Virginia announced a similar dark companion of the system # in Ophiuchus. The period of this object is # years and its mass # times that of Jupiter. Naturally, only very large dark companions can be found by this method. 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For Details and Rules See Page # When a really infallible scientific bureau makes a drastically 'serious error, the data must be wrong... but wrong in' what way? T HE first morning that they the planet, the executive officer stepped out of the ship. It was not quite dawn. Executive Hafner squinted in the early light ; his eyes opened wider, and he promptly went back inside. Three minutes later, he reappeared with the biologist in tow. "Last night you said there was nothing dangerous," said the executive. "Do you still think it's so?" Dano Marin stared. "I do." What his voice lacked in conviction, it made up in embarrassment. He laughed uncertainly. "This is no laughing matter. I'll talk to you later." The biologist stood by the ship and watched as the executive walked to the row of sleeping colonists. "Mrs. Athyl," said the executive as he stopped beside the sleeping figure. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, rolled over, and stood up. The covering that should have been there, however, wasn't. Neither was the garment she had on when she had gone to sleep. She assumed the conventional position of a woman who is astonished to find herself unclad without her knowledge or consent. "It's all right, Mrs. Athyl. I'm not a voyeur myself. Still, I think you should get some clothing on." Most of the colonists were awake now. Executive Hafner turned to them. "If you haven't any suitable clothing in the ship, the commissary will issue you some. Explanations will be given later." The colonists scattered. There was no compulsive modesty among them, for it couldn't have survived a year and a half in crowded spaceships. Nevertheless, it was a shock to awaken with no clothing on and not know who or what had removed it during the night. It was surprise more than anything else that disconcerted them. On his way back to the spaceship, Executive Hafner paused. "Any ideas about it?" Dano Marin shrugged. "How could I have? The planet is as new to me as it is to you." "Sure. But you're the biologist." As the only scientist in a crew of rough-and-ready colonists and builders, Marin was going to be called on to answer a lot of questions that weren't in his field. "Nocturnal insects, most likely," he suggested. That was pretty weak, though he knew that in ancient times locusts had stripped fields in a matter of hours. Could they do the same with the clothing of humans and not awaken them? "I'll look into the matter. As soon as I find anything, I'll let you know." "Good." Hafner nodded and went into the spaceship. grove in which the colonists had been sleeping. It had been a mistake to let them bed down there, but at the time the request had been made, there had seemed no reason not to grant it. After eighteen months in crowded ships everyone naturally wanted fresh air and the rustle of leaves overhead. Marin looked out through the grove. It was empty now; the colonists, both men and women, had disappeared inside the ship, dressing, probably. The trees were not tall and the leaves were dark bottle-green. Occasional huge white flowers caught sunlight that made them seem larger than they were. It wasn't Earth and therefore the trees couldn't be magnolias. But they reminded Marin of magnolia trees and thereafter he always thought of them as that. The problem of the missing clothing was ironic. Biological Survey never made a mistake -- yet obviously they had. They listed the planet as' the most suitable for Man of any so far discovered. Few insects, no dangerous animals, a most equitable climate. They had named it Glade because that was the word which fitted best. The whole land mass seemed to be one vast and pleasant meadow. Evidently there were things about the planet that Biological Survey had missed. Marin dropped to his knees and began to look for clues. If insects had been responsible, there ought to be a few dead ones, crushed, perhaps, as the colonists rolled over in their sleep. There were no insects, either live or dead. He stood up in disappointment and walked slowly through the grove. It might be the trees. At night they could exude a vapor which was capable of dissolving the material from which the clothing had been made. Farfetched, but not impossible. He crumbled a leaf in his hand and rubbed it against his sleeve. A pungent smell, but nothing happened. That didn't disprove the theory, of course. He looked out through the trees at the blue sun. It was bigger than Sol, but farther away. At Glade, it was about equal to the Sun on Earth. He almost missed the bright eyes that regarded him from the underbrush. Almost, but didn't -- the domain of biology begins at the edge of the atmosphere; it includes the brush and the small creatures that live in it. He swooped down on it. The creature fled squealing. He ran it down in the grass outside the grove. It collapsed into quaking flesh as he picked it up. He talked to it gently and the terror subsided. It nibbled contentedly on his jacket as he carried it back to the ship. unhappily into the cage. It was an undistinguished animal, small and something like an undeveloped rodent. Its fur was sparse and stringy, unglamorous; it would never be an item in the fur export trade. "Can we exterminate it?" gsked Hafner. "Locally, that is." "Hardly. It's ecologically basic." The executive looked blank. Dano Marin added the explanation: "You know how Biological Control works. As soon as a planet has been discovered that looks suitable, they send out a survey ship loaded with equipment. The ship flies low over a good part of the planet and the instruments in the ship record the neural currents of the animals below. The instruments can distinguish the characteristic neural patterns of anything that has a brain, including insects. "Anyway, they have a pretty good idea of the kinds of animals on the planet and their relative distribution. Naturally, the survey party takes a few specimens. They have to in order to correlate the pattern with the actual animal, otherwise the neural pattern would be merely a meaningless squiggle on a microfilm. "The survey shows that this animal is one of only four species of mammals on the planet. It is also the most numerous." Hafner grunted. "So if we kill them off here, others will swarm in from surrounding areas?" "That's about it. There are this peninsula. Of course, if you want to put a barrier across the narrow connection to the mainland, you might be able to wipe them out locally." The executive scowled. A barrier was possible, but it would involve more work than he cared to expend. "What do they eat?" he asked truculently. "A little bit of everything, apparently. Insects, fruits, berries, nuts, succulents, and grain." Dano Marin smiled. "I guess it could be called an omnivore -- now that our clothing is handy, it eats that, too." Hafner didn't smile. "I thought our clothing was supposed to be verminproof." Marin shrugged. "It is, on twenty-seven planets. On the twenty-eighth, we meet up with a little fella that has better digestive fluids, that's all." Hafner looked pained. "Are they likely to bother the crops i we plant?" ", "Offhand, I would say they aren't. But then I would have said the same about our clothing." Hafner made up his mind. "All j right. You worry about the crops. Find some way to keep them out of the fields. Meanwhile, everyone sleeps in the ship until we can  build dormitories." j Individual dwelling units would have been more appropriate in the colony at this stage, thought Marin. But it wasn't for him to decide. The executive was a man who regarded a schedule as somej thing to be exceeded. i "The omnivore -- " began Mar ' s m. I Hafner nodded impatiently. "Work on it," he said, and walked away. The biologist sighed. The omnivore really was a queer little creature, but it was by no means the most important thing on Glade. For instance, why were there so few species of land animals on the planet? No reptiles, numerous birds, and only four kinds of mammals. Every comparable planet teemed with a wild variety of life. Glade, in spite of seemingly ideal conditions, hadn't developed. Why? He had asked Biological Controls for this assignment because it had seemed an interesting problem. Now, apparently, he was being pressed into service as an exterminator. He reached in the cage and picked up the omnivore. Mammals on Glade were not unexpected. Parallel development took care of that. Given roughly the same kind of environment, similar animals would usually evolve. In the Late Carboniferous forest on Earth, there had been creatures ike the omnivore, the primitive mammal from which all others had evolved. On Glade,' that kind of evolution just hadn't taken place. What had kept nature from exploiting its evolutionary potentialities? There was the real problem, not how to wipe them out. Marin stuck a needle in the omnivore. It squealed and then relaxed. He drew out the blood and set it back in the cage. He could learn a lot about the animal from trying to kill it. T HE quartermaster was shouting, though his normal voice carried quite well. "How do you know it's mice?" the biologist asked him. "Look," said the quartermaster angrily. Marin looked. The evidence did indicate mice. Before he could speak, the quartermaster snapped, "Don't tell me they're only micelike creatures. I know that. The question is: how can I get rid of them?" "Have you tried poison?" "Tell me what poison to use and I'll use it." It wasn't the easiest question to answer. What was poisonous to an animal he had never seen and knew nothing about? According to Biological Survey, the animal didn't exist... It was unexpectedly serious. The colony could live off the land, and was expected to. But another group of colonists was due in three years. The colony was supposed to accumulate a surplus of food to feed the increased numbers. If they couldn't store the food they grew any better than the concentrates, that surplus was going be scanty. Marin went over the warehouse thoroughly. It was the usual early construction on a colonial world. Not esthetic, it was sturdy enough. Fused dirt floor, reinforced foot-thick walls, a ceiling slab of the same. The whole was bound together with a molecular cement that made it practically airtight. It had no windows; there were two doors. Certainly it should keep out rodents. A closer examination revealed an unexpected flaw. The floor was as hard as glass; no animal could gnaw through it, but, like glass, it was also brittle. The crew that had built the warehouse had evidently been in such a hurry to get back to Earth that they hadn't been as careful as they should have been, for here and there the floor was thin. Somewhere under the heavy equipment piled on it, the floor had cracked. There a burrowing animal had means of entry. Short .of building another warehouse, it was too late to do anything about that. Micelike animals were inside and had to be controlled where they were. The biologist straightened up. "Catch me a few of them alive and I'll see what I can do." I N the morning, a dozen live specimens were delivered to the lab. They actually did resemble mice. Their reactions were puzzling. No two of them were affected by the same poison. A compound that stiffened one in a matter of minutes left the others hale and hearty, and the poison he had developed to control the omnivores was completely ineffec tive. The depredations in the ware; house went on. Black mice, white ones, gray and brown, short tailed and long-eared, or the rej verse, they continued to eat the j concentrates and spoil what they j didn't eat. I Marin conferred with the executive, outlined the problem as he saw it and his ideas on what j could be done to combat the j nuisance. f "But we can't build another j warehouse," argued Hafner. "Not J until the atomic generator is set I up, at any rate. And then we'll j have other uses for the power." The executive rested his head in his hands. "I like the other soluj tion better. Build one and see how ' it works." I "I was thinking of three," said the biologist. "One," Hafner insisted. "We I can't spare the equipment until I we know how it works." At that he was probably right. ; They had equipment, as much as three ships could bring. But the more they brought, the more j was expected of the colony. The net effect was that equipment was always in short supply. Marin took the authorization to the engineer. On the way, he privately revised his specifications upward. If he couldn't get as many as he wanted, he might as well get a better one. In two days, the machine was ready. It was delivered in a small crate to the warehouse. The crate was opened and the machine leaped out and stood there, poised. "A cat!" exclaimed the quartermaster, pleased. He stretched out his hand toward the black fuzzy robot. "If you've touched anything a mouse may have, get your hand away," warned the biologist. "It reacts to smell as well as sight and sound." Hastily, the quartermaster withdrew his hand. The robot disappeared silently into the maze of stored material. In one week, though there were still some mice in the warehouse, they were no longer a danger. T HE executive called Marin into his office, a small sturdy building located in the center of the settlement. The colony was growing, assuming an aspect of permanency. Hafner sat in his chadr and looked out over that growth with satisfaction. "A good job on the mouse plague," he said. The biologist nodded. "Not bad, except there shouldn't be any mice here. Biological Survey -- " "Forget it," said the exec. "Everybody makes mistakes, even B. S." He leaned back and looked seriously at the biologist. "I have a job I need done. Just now I'm short of men... If you have no objections..." The exec was always short of men, would be until the planet was overcrowded, and he would try to find someone to do the work his own men should have done. Dano Marin was not directly responsible to Hafner; he was on loan to the expedition from Biological Controls. Still, it was a good idea to cooperate with the executive. He sighed. "It's not as bad as you think," said Hafner, interpreting the sound correctly. He smiled. "We've got the digger together. I want you to run it." Since it tied right in with his investigations, Dano Martin looked relieved and showed it. "Except for food, we have to import most of our supplies," Hafner explained. "It's a long haul, and we've got to make use of everything on the planet we can. We need oil. There are going to be a lot of wheels turning, and everyone of them will have to have oil. In time we'll set up a synthetic plant, but if we can locate a productive field now, it's to our advantage." "You're assuming the geology of Glade is similar to Earth?" Hafner waggled his hand. "Why not? It's a nicer twin of Earth." Why not? Because you couldn't always tell from the surface, thought. Marin. It seemed like Earth, but was it? Here was a good chance to find out the history of Glade. Hafner stood up. "Any time you're ready, a technician will check you out on the digger. Let me know before you go." a digger. It didn't move or otherwise displace' a gram of dirt or rock. It was a means of looking down below the surface, to any practical depth. A large crawler, it was big enough for a man to live in without discom... fort for a week. W It carried an outsize ultrasonic generator and a device for directing the beam into  the planet. That was the sending apparatus. The receiving end bec gan with a large sonic lens which g picked up sound beams reflected 'f from any desired depth, converted it into electrical energy and  thence into an image which was flashed onto a screen. At the depth of ten miles, the image was fuzzy, though good enough to distinguish the main ' features of the strata. At three miles, it was better. It could pick p up the sound reflection of a buried coin and convert it into a picture on which the date could ! be seen. f It was to a geologist as a microscope is to a biologist. Being  a biologist, Dano Marin could ? appreciate the analogy. He started at the tip of the peninsula and zigzagged across, heading toward the isthmus. Methodically, he covered the territory, sleeping at night in thi digger. On the morning of th f third day, he discovered oil traces and by that afternoon he had located the main field. ' He should probably have turned back at once, but now that hr had found oil, he investigated more deliberately. Starting at the top, he let the image range downward below the top strata. It was the reverse of what it should have been. In the top few feet, there were plentiful fossil remains, mostly of the four species of mammals. The squirrellike creature and the far larger grazing animal were the forest dwellers. Of the plains animals, there were only two, in size fitting neatly between the extremes of the forest dwellers. After the first few feet, which corresponded to approximately twenty thousand years, he found virtually no fossils. Not until he reached a depth which he could correlate to the Late Carboniferous age on Earth did fossils reappear. Then they were of animals appropriate to the epoch. At that depth and below, the history of Glade was quite similar to Earth's. Puzzled, he checked again in a dozen widely scattered localities. The results were always the same -- fossil history for the first twenty thousand years, then none Beyond that, it was easy to trace the thread of biological development. In that period of approximatesomething unique had happened to Glade. What was it? On the fifth day his investigations were interrupted by the sound of the keyed-on radio. "Marin." "Yes?" He flipped on the sending switch. "How soon can you get back?" He looked at the photo-map. "Three hours. Two if I hurry." "Make it two. Never mind the oil." "I've found oil. But what's the matter?" "You can see it better than I can describe it. We'll discuss it when you get back." tracted the instruments into the digger. He turned it around and, with not tdo much regard for the terrain, let it roar. The treads tossed dirt high in the air. Animals fled squealing from in front of him. If the grove was small enough, he went around it, otherwise he went through and left matchsticks behind. He skidded the crawler ponderously to halt near the edge of the settlement. The center of activity was the warehouse. Pickups wheeled in and out, transferring supplies to a cleared area outside. He found Hafner in a corner of the warehouse, talking to the engineer. Hafner turned around when he came up. "Your mice have grown, Marin." Marin looked down. The robot cat lay on the floor. He knelt and examined it. The steel skeleton hadn't broken; it had been bent, badly. The tough plastic skin had been torn off and, inside, the delicate mechanism had been chewed into an unrecognizable mass. Around the cat were rats, twenty or thirty of them, huge by any standards. The cat had fought; the dead animals were headless or disembowled, unbelievably battered. But the robot had been outnumbered. Biological Survey had said there weren't any rats on Glade. They had also said that about mice. What was the key to their error? The biologist stood up. "What are you going to do about it?" "Build another warehouse, twofootthick fused dirt floors, monolithic construction. Transfer all perishables to it." Marin nodded. That would do it. It would take time, of course, and power, all they could draw out of the recently set up atomic generator. All other construction would have to be suspended. No wonder Hafner was disturbed. "Why not build more cats?" Marin suggested. The executive smiled nastily. "You weren't here when we opened the doors. The warehouse was swarming with rats. How many robot cats would we need -- five, fifteen? I don't know. Anyway the engineer tells me we have enough parts to build three more cats. The one lying there can't be salvaged." It didn't take an engineer to see that, thought Marin. Hafner continued, "If we need more, we'll have to rob the computer in the spaceship. I refuse to permit that." Obviously he would. The spaceship was the only link with Earth until the next expedition brought more colonists. No exec in his right mind would permit the ship to be crippled. But why had Hafner called him back? Merely to keep him informed of the situation? thoughts. "At night we'll floodlight the supplies we remove from the warehouse. We'll post a guard armed with decharged rifles until we can move the food into the new warehouse. That'll take about ten days. Meanwhile, our fast crops are ripening. It's my guess the rats will turn to them for food. In order to protect our future food supply, you'll have to activate your animals." The biologist started. "But it's against regulations to loose any animal on a planet until a complete investigation of the possible ill effects is made." "That takes ten or twenty years. This is an emergency and I'll be responsible -- in writing, if you want." The biologist was effectively countermanded. Another . rabbitinfested Australia or the planet that the snails took over might be in the making, but there was nothing he could do about it. "I hardly think they'll be of any use against rats this size," he protested. "You've got hormones. Apply them." The executive turned and began discussing construction with the engineer. gathered up and placed in the freezer for further study. After that, he retired to the laboratory and worked out a course of treatment for the domesticated animals that the colonists had brought with them. He gave them the first injections and watched them carefully until they were safely through the initial shock phase of growth. As soon as he saw they were going to survive, he bred them. Next he turned to the rats. Of note was the wide variation in size. Internally, the same thing was true. They had the usual organs, but the proportions of each varied greatly, more than is normal. Nor were their teeth uniform. Some carried huge fangs set in delicate jaws; others had tiny teeth that didn't match the massive bone structure. As a species, they were the most scrambled the biologist had ever encountered. He turned the microscope on their tissues and tabulated the results. There was less difference here between individual specimens, but it was enough to set him pondering. The reproductive cells were especially baffling. Late in the day, he felt rather than heard the soundless whoosh of the construction machinery. He looked out of the laboratory and saw smoke rolling upward. As soon as the vegetation was charred, the smoke ceased and heat waves danced into the sky. They were building on a hill. The little creatures that crept and crawled in the brush attacked in the most vulnerable spot, the food supply. There was no brush, not a blade of grass, on the hill when the colonists finished. were the hunting dogs of the agricultural era. What they lacked in size they made up in ferocity toward rodents. They had earned their keep originally in granaries and fields, and, for a brief time, they were doing it again on colonial worlds where conditions were repeated. The dogs the colonists brought had been terriers. They were still as fast, still with the same antirodent disposition, but they were no longer small. It had been a difficult job, yet Marin had done it well, for the dogs had lost none of their skill and speed in growing, to the size of a great dane. The rats moved in on the fields of fast crops. Fast crops were made to order for a colonial world. They could be planted, grown, and harvested in a matter of weeks. After four such plantings, the fertility of the soil was destroyed, but that meant nothing in the early years of a colonial planet, for land was plentiful. The rat tide grew in the fast crops, and' the dogs were loosed on the rats. They ranged through the fields, hunting. A rush, a snap of their jaws, the shake of a head, and the rat was tossed aside, its back broken. The dogs went on to the next. Until they could not see, the dogs prowled and slaughtered. At night they came in bloody, most of it not their own, and exhausted. Marin pumped them full of antibiotics, bandaged their wounds, fed them through their veins, and shot them into sleep. In the morning he awakened them with an injection of stimulant and sent them tingling into battle. It took the rats two days to learn they could not feed during the day. Not so numerous, they came at night. They climbed on the vines and nibbled the fruit. They gnawed growing grain and ravaged vegetables. The next day the colonists set up lights. The dogs were with them, discouraging the few rats who were still foolish enough to forage while the sun was overhead. An hour before dusk, Marin called the dogs in and gave them an enforced rest. He brought them out of it after dark and took them to the fields, staggering, he scent of rats revived them; they were as eager as ever, if not quite so fast. The rats came from the surrounding meadows, not singly, or in twos and threes, as thy had before; this time they came together. Squealing and rustling the grass, they moved toward the fields. It was dark, and though he could not see them, Marin could hear them. He ordered the great lights turned on in the area  of the fields. The rats stopped under the The dogs quivered and whined. Marin held them back. The rats resumed their march, and Marin released the dogs. The dogs charged in to attack, but didn't dare brave the main mass. They picked off the stragglers and forced the rats into a tighter formation. After that the rats were virtually unassailable. The colonists could have burned the bunched-up rats with the right equipment, but they didn't have it and couldn't get it for years. Even if they'd had it, the use of such equipment would endanger the crops, which they had to save if they could. It was up to the dogs. The rat formation came to the edge of the fields, and broke. They could face a common enemy and remain united, but in the presence of food, they forgot that unity and scattered -- hunger was the great divisor. The dogs leaped joyously in pursuit. They hunted down the starved rodents, one by one, and killed them as they ate. When daylight came, the rat menace had ended. The next week the colonists harvested and processed the food for storage and immediately planted another crop. tried to analyze the situation. The colony was moving from crisis to crisis', all of them involving food. In itself, each critical situation was minor, but lumped together they could add up to failure. No matter how he looked at it, they just didn't have the equipment they needed to colonize Glade. The fault seemed to lie with Biological Survey; they hadn't reported the presence of pests that were endangering the food supply. Regardless of what the exec thought about them, Survey knew their business. If they said there were no mice or rats on Glade, then there hadn't been any -- when the survey was made. The question was : when did they come and how did they get here? Marin sat and stared at the wall, turning over hypotheses in his mind, discarding them when they failed to make sense. His gaze shifted from the wall to the cage of the omnivores, the squirrel-size forest creature. The most numerous animal on Glade, it was a commonplace sight to the colonists. And yet it was a remarkable animal, more than he had realized. Plain, insignificant in appearance, it might be the most important of any animal Man had encountered on the many worlds he had settled on. The longer he watched, the more Marin became convinced of it. He sat silent, observing the creature, not daring to move. He sat until it was dark and the omnivore resumed its normal activity. Normal? The word didn't apply on Glade. The interlude with the omnivore provided him with one answer. He needed another one; he thought he knew what it was, but he had to have more data, additional observations. He set up his equipment carefully on the fringes of the settlement. There and in no other place existed the information he wanted. He spent time in the digger, checking his original investigations. It added up to a complete picture. When he was certain of his facts, he called on Hafner. The executive was congenial; it was a reflection of the smoothness with which the objectives of the colony were being achieved. "Sit down," he said affably. "Smoke?" The biologist sat down and took a Cigarette. "I thought you'd like to know where the mice came from," he began. Hafner smiled. "They don't bother us any more." "I've also determined the origin of the rats." "They're under control. We're doing nicely." O N the contrary, thought Marin. He searched for the proper beginning. "Glade has an Earth-type climate and topography," he said. "Has had for the past twenty thousand years. Before that, ago, it was also like Earth of the comparable period." He watched the look of polite interest settle on the executive's face as he stated the obvious. Well, it was obvious, up to a point. The conclusions weren't, though. years and twenty thousand years ago, something happened to Glade," Marin went on. "I don't know the cause; it belongs to cosmic history and we may never find out. Anyway, whatever the cause -- fluctuations in the sun, unstable equilibrium of forces within the planet, or perhaps an encounter with an interstellar, dust cloud of variable density -- the climate on Glade changed. "It changed with inconceivable violence and it kept on years ago, plus or minus, there was carboniferous forest on Glade. Giant reptiles resembling dinosaurs and tiny mammals roamed through it. The first great change wiped out the dinosaurs, as it did on Earth. It didn't wipe out the still more primitive ancestor of the omnivore, because it could adapt to changing conditions. "Let me give you an idea how the conditions changed. For a few years a given area would be a desert; after that it would turn into a jungle. Still later a glacier would begin to form. And then the cycle would be repeated, with wild variations. All this might happen -- did happen -- within a span covered by the lifetime of a single omnivore. This occurred many times. For roughly a hunnorm of existence on Glade. This condition was hardly conducive to the preservation of fossils." Hafner saw the significance and was concerned. "You mean these climatic fluctuations suddenly stopped, twenty thousand years ago? Are they likely to begin again?" "I don't know," confessed the biologist. "We can probably determine it if we're interested." The exec nodded grimly. "We're interested, all right." Maybe we are, thought the biologist. He said, "The point is that survival was difficult. Birds could and did fly to more suitable climates; quite a few of them survived. Only one species of mammals managed to come through." "Your facts are not straight," observed Hafner. "There are four species, ranging in size from a squirrel to a water buffalo." "One species," Marin repeated doggedly. "They're the same. If the food supply for the largest animal increases, some of the smaller so-called species grow up. Conversely, if food becomes scarce in any category, the next generation, which apparently can be produced almost instantly, switches to a form which does have an adequate food supply." "The mice," Hafner said slowly. for him. "The mice weren't here when we got here. They were born of the squirrel-size omnivore." Hafner nodded. "And the rats?" "Bom of the next larger size. After all, we're environment, too -- perhaps the harshest the beasts have yet faced." Hafner was a practical man, trained to administer a colony. Concepts were not his familiar ground. "Mutations, then? But I thought -- " The biologist smiled. It was thin and cracked at the edges of his mouth. "On Earth, it would be mutation. Here it is merely normal evolutionary adaptation." He shook his head. "I never told you, but omnivores, though they could be mistaken for an animal from Earth, have no genes or chromosomes. Obviously they do have heredity, but how it is passed down, I don't know. However it functions, it responds to external conditions far faster than anything we've ever encountered." Hafner nodded to himself. "Then we'll never be free from pests." He clasped and unclasped his hands. "Unless, of course, we rid the planet of all animal life." "Radioactive dust?" asked the biologist. "They have survived worse." The exec considered alternatives. "Maybe we should leave the planet and leave it to the animals." "Too late," said the biologist. "They'll be on Earth, too, and all the planets we've settled on." Hafner looked at him. The same pictures formed in his mind that Marin had thought of. Three ships had been sent to colonize Glade. One had remained with the colonists, survival insurance in case anything unforeseen happened. Two had gone back to Earth to carry the report that all was well and that more supplies were needed. They had also carried specimens from the planet. The cages those creatures were kept in were secure. But a smaller species could get out, must already be free, inhabiting, undetected, the cargo spaces of the ships. There was nothing they could do to intercept those ships. And once they reached Earth, would the biologists suspect? Not for a long time. First a new kind of rat would appear. A mutation could account for that. Without" specific knowledge, there would be nothing to connect it with the specimens picked up from Glade. "We have to stay," said the biologist. "We have to study them and we can do it best here." He thought of the vast complex of buildings on Earth. There was too much invested to tear them down and make them vercould not be moved off the planet while the work was being done. They were committed to Glade not as a colony, but as a gigantic laboratory. They had gained one planet and lost the equivalent of ten, perhaps more when the destructive properties of the omnivores were finally assessed. A rasping animal cough interrupted the biologist's thoughts. Hafner jerked his head and glanced out the window. Lips tight, he grabbed a rifle off the wall and ran out. Marin followed him. fields where the second fast crop was maturing. On top of a knoll, he stopped and knelt. He flipped the dial to extreme charge, aimed, and fired. It was high; he missed the animal in the field. A neat strip of smoking brown appeared in the green vegetation. He aimed more carefully and fired again. The charge screamed out of the muzzle. It struck the animal on the forepaw. The beast leaped high in the air and fell down, dead and broiled. They stood over the animal Hafner had killed. Except for the lack of markings, it was a good imitation of a tiger. The exec prodded it with his toe. "We chase the rats out of the warehouse and they go to the fields," he muttered. "We hunt them down in the fields with dogs and they breed tigers." "Easier than rats," said Marin. "We can shoot tigers." He bent down over the slain dog near which they had surprised the big cat. The other dog came whining from the far comer of the field to which he had fled in terror. He was a courageous dog, but he could not face the great carnivore. He whimpered and licked the face of his mate. The biologist picked up the mangled dog and headed toward the laboratory. "You can't save her," said Hafner morosely. "She's dead." "But the pups aren't. We'll need them. The rats won't disappear merely because tigers have showed up." The head drooped limply over his arm and blood seeped into his clothing as Hafner followed him up the hill. "We've been here three months," the exec said suddenly. "The dogs have been ih the fields only two. And yet the tiger was mature. How do you account for something like that?" Marin bent under the weight of the dog. Hafner never would understand his bewilderment. As a biologist, all his categories were upset. What did evolution explain? It was a history of organic life on a particular world. Beyond that world, it might not apply. Even about himself there were many things Man didn't know, dark patches in his knowledge which theory simply had to pass over. About other creatures, his ignorance was sometimes limitless. Birth was simple; it occurred on countless planets. Meek grazing creatures, fierce carnivores -- the most unlikely animals gave birth to their young. It happened all the time. And the young grew up, became mature and mated. He remembered that evening in the laboratory. It was accidental -- what if he had been elsewhere and not witnessed it? They would not know what little they did. He explained it carefully to Hafner. "If the survival factor is high and there's a great disparity in size, the young need not ever be young. They may be born as fully functioning adults!" it had initially set, the colony progressed. The fast crops were slowed down and a more diversified selection was planted. New buildings were constructed and the supplies that were stored in them were spread out thin, for easy inspection. The pups survived and within a year shot up to maturity. After proper training, they were released to the fields where they joined the older dogs. The battle against the rats went on; they were held in check, though the damage they caused was considerable. The original animal, unchanged in form, developed an appetite for electrical insulation. There was no protection except to keep the power on at all times. Even then there were unwelcome interruptions until the short was located and the charred carcass was removed. Vehicles were kept tightly closed or parked only in verminproof buildings. While the plague didn't increase in numbers, it couldn't be eliminated, either. There was a flurry of tigers, but they were larger animals and were promptly shot down. They prowled at night, so the colonists were assigned to guard the settlement around the clock. Where lights failed to reach, the infra-red 'scope did. As fast as they came, the tigers died. Except for the first one, not a single dog was lost. The tigers changed, though not in form. Externally, they were all big and powerful killers. But as the Slaughter went on, Marin noticed one astonishing fact -- the internal organic structure became progressively more immature. The last one that was brought to him for examination was the equivalent of a newly born cub. That tiny stomach was suited more for the digestion of milk than meat. How it had furnished energy to drive those great muscles was something of a miracle. But drive it had, for a murderous fifteen minutes before the animal wars brought down. No lives were lost, though sick bay was kept busy for a while. That was the last tiger they shot. After that, the attacks ceased. The seasons passed and nothing new occurred. A spaceship civilization or even that fragment of it represented by the colony was too much for the creature, which Marin by now had come to think of as the "Omnimal." It had evolved out of a cataclysmic past, but it could not meet the challenge of the harshest environment. Or so it seemed. colonists were due, a new animal was detected. Food was missing from the fields. It was not another tiger: they were carnivorous. Nor rats, for vines were stripped in a manner that no rodent could manage. The food was not important. The colony had enough in storage. But if the new animal signaled another plague, it was necessary to know how to meet it. The sooner they knew what the animal was, the better defense they could set up against it. Dogs were useless. The animal roamed the field they were loose in, and they did not attack nor even seem to know it was there. The colonists were called upon for guard duty again, but it evaded them. They patrolled for a week and they still did not catch sight of it. Hafner called them in and rigged up an alarm system in the field most frequented by the animal. It detected that, too, and moved its sphere of operations to a field in which the alarm system had not been installed. Hafner conferred with the engineer, who devised an alarm that would react to body radiation. It was buried in the original field and the old alarm was moved to another. Two nights later, just before dawn, the alarm rang. Marin met Hafner at the edge of the settlement... Both carried rifles. They walked; the noise of any vehicle was likely to frighten the animal. They circled around and approached the field from the rear. The men in the camp had been alerted. If they needed help, it was ready. They crept silently through the underbrush. It was feeding in the field, not noisily, yet they could hear it. The dogs hadn't barked. They inched nearer. The blue sun of Glade came up and shone full on their quarry. The gun dropped in Hafner's hand. He clenched his teeth and raised it again. Marin put out a restraining arm. "Don't shoot," he whispered. "I'm the exec here. I say it's dangerous." "Dangerous," agreed Marin, still in a whisper. "That's why you can't shoot. It's more dan'gerous than you know." Hafner hesitated and Marin went on. "The omnimal couldn't compete in the changed environment and so it evolved mice. We stopped the mice and it countered with rats. We turned back the rat and it provided the tiger. "The tiger was easiest of all for us and so it was apparently stopped for a while. But it didn't really stop. Another anima was being formed, the one you see there. It took the omnimal two years to create it -- how, I don't quired to evolve it on Earth." Hafner hadn't lowered the rifle and he showed no signs of doing so. He looked lovingly into the sights. "Can't you see?" urged Marin. "We can't destroy the omnimal. It's on Earth now, and on the other planets, down in the storage areas of our big cities, masquerading as rats. And we've never been able to root out even our own terrestral rats, so how can we exterminate the omnimal?" "All the more reason to start now." Hafner's voice was flat. Marin struck the rifle down. "Are their rats better than ours?" he asked wearily. "Will their pests win or ours be stronger? Or will the two make peace, unite and interbreed, make war on us? It's not impossible; the omnimal could do it if interbreeding had a high survival factor. "Don't you still see? There is a progression. After the tiger, it bred this. If this evolution fails, if we shoot it down, what will it create next? This creature I think we can compete with. It's the one after this that I do not  want to face." head and looked around. Slowly it edged away and backed toward a nearby grove. The biologist stood up and called softly. The creature scurried to the trees and stopped just inside the shadows among them. The two men laid down their rifles. Together they approached the grove, hands spread open to show they carried no weapons. It came out to meet them. Naked, it had had no time to learn about clothing. Neither did it have weapons. It plucked a large white flower from the tree and extended this mutely as a sign of peace. "I wonder what it's like," said Marin. "It seems adult, but can it be, all the way through? What's inside that body?" "I wonder what's in his head," Hafner said worriedly. It looked very much like a man. Current (Veio Books: Science  Fantasy Fiction  We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of searce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. New York #. New York Open Monday Thru Saturday : #:# A.M. to #:# P.M. Open Wednesday Evenings until # :# P.M. (Phone GRamercy #-#I Secret of the House It's spice that's the variety of interplanetary life -- and it fust drove Kathy nutmeggyi O F course no one realized in advance what would be, ounce for ounce, the most valuable return cargo of the Earth-Venus ' spaceships, I even though the answer should have been obvious to anyone with the faintest knowledge of historical patterns. Rare metals? With the cost of fuel to lift them out of Venus's almost-Earth gravity making them even costlier than on Earth itself? No, the answer was the obvious but overlooked one: What did Marco Polo bring back from China and Vasco da Gama from India? Why was Columbus seeking a new route to the Indies? In one word: spices. Man's palate needs occasional rejuvenation. One of the main purposes of exploration, intercontinental or interplanetary, is the restimulation of jaded taste buds. And in addition to the new spices there were new methods of cooking, such as that wonderful native Venusian quick passing through live steam, which gave the startling effect of sizzling hot crisp rawness; or balj, that strange native dish which was a little like a curry and a little like a bouillabaisse, but richer and more subtle than either. There was sokalj, or Venusian swamphog, the most delicately delicious meat on three planets -- not that anything Martian would ever be considered by the true gourmet. Kathy listened to regularly once a week for the first year of her marriage. For she had married not only a prominent and successful man, she soon realized, but one who had been bitten at a susceptible age by the word gourmet. It was fun while they were courting. It was fun, anyway, for a video network receptionist to be taken to good restaurants by the top interplanetary commentator. It was especially fun to watch him go through the masculine production number of conferring with the headwaiter, sending his compliments (and instructions) to the chef, and exchanging views with the sommelier, as Kathy quickly learned to call the-man-with-the-wine. Wine did not ship well interplanetarily ; acceleration over one g, in the term of the cognoscenti, "bruised" it. In this domain, the French still reigned supreme, and stressed their superiority to mask their natural jealousy of the upstart Venusian colonists. In every American city -- with a few exceptions in New Orleans and San Francisco -- former "French" restaurants had become "Venusian" and even in Paris cuisine venerienne marked some of the most highly esteemed establishments. But the entertainment value of a gourmet exhibitionist decreased as courtship progressed logically into marriage, and being wined and dined gave place to the daily problem of feeding the man. Quick freezing had, of course, made the bride's problems simple compared to those of earlier centuries. But George, completely in character, insisted on a high percentage of personally prepared meals -- and was shrewd enough to spot any substitute makeshifts via the deep freeze and the electronic oven. Not even the apartment on the very top level of Manhattan, where you could still see the Hudson, not even the charge accounts at shops she'd never dared enter, not even the wondrous fact that she loved George with an intensity which she had always considered just an unlikely convention of the women's minimags -- none of these could quite reconcile Kathy to life with a man who could down three bowls of your best hand-made oyster stew without interrupting his speech on the glories of authentic balj a la Venusberg, who could devour enough of a prime rib roast to throw the whole week's budget out of joint while expatiating on the absurdity of the legend that Earth, cooks in general, and the Anglo-Saxons in particular, did at least understand beef. -of hiring a cook, not so much to satisfy George as to divert his inevitable reproaches to someone else. But aside from the fact that a cook's salary would turn her charge accounts anemic,' Kathy knew that her mother, both her grandmothers, and undoubtedly all four of her greatand all eight of her great-greatgrandmothers had fed their men and kept them happy. This was a matter of family pride. Then came the awful day when George brought Jose Lermontov home to dinner. Kathy's younger sister was also dining with them that night, and wrinkled her nose after George's face faded from the visiphone. "These revolting Venus-colonial diplomats," said Linda. "He'll have a swamp-beard and a paunch and a wife and six children at home. Kathy, why doesn't George ever meet anybody newsworthy who's -- well, worthy?" "He's a very fine young man, I hear," Kathy muttered distractedly. "Guerilla leader against the dictatorship, wrote a fine book about its overthrow. What worries me is the paunch -- and what I'm going to put into it." Five minutes after meeting the Venusian, Linda slipped into the kitchen to whisper, "Sister... please... can I have that in my stocking for Christmas?" But even this pleasing reversal did not divert Kathy from the task of preparing to fill the, as it turned out, non-existent paunch. Dinner, she thought a little later, was going surprisingly well, especially between Jose and Linda. But then George, having speared and destroyed the last pork chop, cleared his throat. "You must make allowances, Lermontov. Mere pork to a man accustomed to s okalj..." "Mean swamphog?" Jose asked politely, with the usual clipped Venusian avoidance of pronouns and articles. "And," George added commiseratingly, "this so-called 'country gravy' -- rather a shock to a man from a planet where they think, thank God, not in terms of gravies, but of sauces." "Very good gravy," said Jose, mopping up the last of his with a slice of Kathy's own bread. "Imagine 'so-called' because first made by those who live in country?" "Even granting that," George persisted, "can't you picture what just a pinch of baj-powder would have done for it? Or perhaps a hint of tinilj?" "Myself," Jose replied gravely, "prefer one of your Earth herbs -- dash of oregano, bit of savory. Summer savory, of course." George gave the matter serious thought. "Possibly. Very possibly. But in either case it demonstrates the pitiful lack of imagination of the average Earth housewife." It is conceivable that Kathy made too obvious a clatter in stacking and removing the dinner dishes. In any event, Linda followed her hastily into the kitchen. "Please, Kathy angel, don't explode, not just yet. I know George is asking for it, but he's probably been told already that all Earthwomen are shrews and I don't want..." Kathy controlled herself until the one agreeable result of the evening was reached when Jos asked if he might see Linda home. To her surprise, she went right on # G controlling herself even after they had left, because by then she had thought of The Plan.  npHE very next morning, The Plan was well under way. A: Kathy invaded her favori ite bookshop and bought every i book in stock on Venusian spices and cooking, and even added such pre-Venusian classics of culinary perception as BrillatSavarin, Escoffier, and M. F. K. Fisher. B: She enrolled herself for daily lessons at the Uya Rulj School of Venusian Cookery (formerly the Ecole de Cuisine Cordon Bleu). C: Knowing that George had a luncheon date in Chicago with his sponsor, she visited the restaurant where her husband normally lunched. It was an unobtrusive chop house in the thirties, far down on Manhattan's base-level, and the excellent lunch she enjoyed there confirmed her darkest suspicions. For two weeks she read her books and took her lessons without trying out what she learned except for lunches by herself. And she did learn things. George's school of thought had its points. For Kathy's cooking, like that of her eight great-great-grandmothers, had been not only Earthly but plain American. There was a fresh delight in learning that the Architect of all things had established on this planet a certain inevitable relationship between tomatoes and sweet basil, and had ordained that caraway seeds should fulfill the destiny of red cabbage -- even as on another planet He had sown tinilj so that the flesh of the swamphog might be even sweeter. And who was to anticipate the masterfully predestined interplanetary blends? The inescapable kinship of garlic and lamb. Kathy had long known, but her eyes opened wide on discovering how a pinch of ba;powder completed the trinity. But these discoveries did not weaken The Plan. And that same Architect smiled upon The Plan by allowing the network's robowaxer to deposit a minutely oversufficient flow upon the floor of the corridor in front of George's office. On that wax, George slipped and broke his leg. George probably never admitted, even to himself, that he enjoyed being bedridden: the visiphone calls, the mini-script couriers from the network, the bedside microphone and cameras. But he did begin to admit that he was enjoying Kathy's cooking. Where once she might have served steak, she now brought forth grenadine de boeuf a la venerienne. Where once she might have served her asparagus with melted butter, she now ventured on a hollandaise (with five grains of baljpowder replacing the cayenne of ancient recipes). Where once she might have served leftover simply reheated, she now masked them with a sauce which would cause the recumbent George to smack his lips, roll his eyes, and murmur, "Silj, of course, and chives... and a hint of tinilj... possibly a whisper of pnulj, probably Earth-grown? Yes, I thought so... and... what is that?" "Chevil, darling," Kathy would say, and he'd answer, "Of course, of course. I would have had it in a minute. You know, Katherine my dear, you are developing an imagination!" George's plasticast was to come off that Thursday, Kathy decided it was time for the denouement of The Plan. As she was painstakingly making up her shopping list on Thursday morning, the visiphone rang and it was, miraculously, not the network for George. "Oh, Kathy!" Linda burbled. "I've got one of those nice let'sseewhathappens dates with him tonight and could you possibly ask us both to dinner? Because he likes you and he's really just about almost there and if we were... you know, all in the family and everything, I think it might just -- " "Jose?" Kathy asked, knowing the answer. She grinned and doubled the quantities on the list. The worst of the preparations for dinner were over when Linda arrived, carrying, to Kathy's surprise, a weekend case. The girl devoted only the necessary minimum of time to admiring George's knitted leg, then dragged her sister into the bedroom. "Kathy, I've got such a problem. He's known so many women... all over two planets and at embassies and maybe even spies. I told you tonight I think he will; only I don't know what lipstick to use, what perfume, anything. I've got to make myself interesting; but I don't want to overdo it. So I just brought everything I have. You tell me." Kathy looked at the array. She thought of her dinner and The Plan and she began giving Linda her advice. TT was the same cast that had attended the awful dinner which inspired The Plan, but they were different people. Jose, no longer the visiting colonial, was a gentleman at home among friends; Linda was radiant in the glow of simplicity and a wellscrubbed face; and George was praising the food. He praised the green peas. He praised the mashed potatoes. And above all he praised the fried chicken. ,Jj "I can't quite analyze it," he kept saying. "There's a touch there I can't quite get. You've brought out the flavor miraculously. It wouldn't," he demanded suspiciously, "be that new powder Koenigsberg claims he found among the natives at the tip of the southern continent? I thought they hadn't shipped any of that in yet." "They haven't,darling," said Kathy. "Perhaps the tiniest pinch of balj with a little freshly ground celery seed?" "No." "Then what in two planets -- " "A woman must have some secrets, George. Let's just say this is... a secret of the house." At this point Kathy happened to catch Josh's eye and hastily looked away. It was impossible that a Venusian diplomat would be winking at his hostess! George was still pursuing his questions over brandy in the living room. Jose, also possibly (Kathy prayed) in a questionasking mood, had led Linda out onto what the architect called the sun-area, though Kathy persisted in thinking of it, more romantically, as the balcony. As she saw the two turn to come back in, Kathy headed for the kitchen, an immemorial spot for sisterly confidences. But it was not Linda who followed her in. It was Jose. He leaned casually against the door jamb and told her, "Know secret of house." "Yes?" said Kathy casually. "Oh, I mean -- you do? Sometimes I have to stop and reread you, like a telegram. Well?" "Bought food of highest quality, cooked it extremely well, relied on nothing but natural flavor, probably little salt. Good old George always wanted so much seasoning, this strikes him as new and revolutionary taste sensation. Right?" ly," she said. "I thought it would work and I was sure of it when I ate at his regular lunch place. That's just what they do; but because it's a chop house with a reputation, he thinks it's magic. Except I've learned things his way, too. From now on, Georgegets variety at home -- and I think he'll like all of it without ever knowing why he likes which." "Simplicity also magic," Jos# observed. "Your idea -- clean, fresh simplicity of Linda that accounts for fact am going to be your brother-in-law. Correct?" "Correct? It's perfect!" Impulsively, Kathy kissed him. "Oh, my!" she said as she drew back. "Now you've got lipstick after coming off the balcony spotless!" "Variety," said Jose approvingly. "Still wonder one thing, Kathy. Those mashed potatoes -- extraordinary. If secret of house, there's where. Confide in me?" "Now that you're part of the family, sure." "Yes?" "The secret is this: I take lots of butter and cream -- real cowstuff, no syntho -- and I beat the living bejeepers out of 'em." When they returned to the living room, it was obvious that Linda had told George the news. Using his newly recovered leg with as ostentatious pride as a year-old toddler, George advanced paternally upon Jos# Lermontov. "Let tonight's dinner be a marital lesson to you, my boy. Remember the last time you ate here, and realize that there's no fault in a wife that a little husbandly persistence can't cure." This time there was no doubt whatsoever that the gentlemanly Venusian diplomat was winking at his hostess. # Star Shelf ed by Judith Merril, Random House, Inc., New York, #. # pages, # T is rare that this sour-grapes reviewer goes all-out about an anthology; there have been too manyand most have been of poor quality. Here is one, however, that is way up on the top of the pile: an "idea" anthology that contains fantasy and science fiction and thrives on both. There are # I tales in the volume, all of which tell about odd and unlikely varieties of life (and "non-life") on or off our planet. All but three rate B-for better. A rather rare high average. Life types range from sentient whirlwinds (Robert Heinlein) to more or less standard robots, however, in the least routinely described. There are tales of ghosts, werewolves, mutants, angels, "creatures," gnomes and, often best of all, completely real and civilized beings on or from other planets and realms. Authors whose tales particularly enchanted me, in addition to the two men mentioned above, are Mark Clifton, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, Laurence Manning (with a very touching story never before published anywhere), Anthony Boucher, Roger Dee, Lester del Rey, and Murray Leinster. Del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," incidentally, is the only story to have first been published before #. There is an excellent short bibliography of strange-life stories that have appeared in other anthologies: a fine idea, but here a little too short to be truly representative. Fletcher Pratt. Random House, New York, #. # pages, illustrated, # FT#HE second volume in the Coggins-Pratt series on astronautics for the younguns is just as good as the first, which was (see The present volume takes you from Earth to the first Space Station, to the Moon -- and does so in plain and not-too-technical language and in magnificent pictures, half of which are in full color. No attempt is made to overdramatize the humdrum aspects of the undertaking, or to oversimplify. While it does not make the job sound easy, it does make it easy to understand, both in writing and in the illustrations. cover is used as one of the fullpage plates (page #) in the book. It is not often that the cover of a science fiction magazine is sufficiently accurate, engineeringwise, to appear in a non-fiction discussion as a good approximation of future reality. by Mark Twain. Harper  Brothers, New York, #. # pages, # W HY do people generally ignore Mark Twain's "science fiction?" Could it be because all his fantasy was bitterly satiric? That may be, but the best science fiction is shrewd, penetrating and often sharp in tone. Well, here is Mark Twain at his satiricfantastic best. The book is an expanded version, prepared by the late Dixon Wecter, of Mark's famous squib against pomposity in religion and in daily life, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," plus a hitherto unpublished satire on the same theme, "Letter From the Recording Angel." Two brand-new chapters in the Stormfield saga open the book with a superb attack on race prejudice. "The Recording Angel" slashingly satirizes hypocrisy and the meanness of miserly wealth; and the whole wonderful document presents some of the most hilariously biting satire -- and some of the richest science fiction imagination -- that has ever appeared in print. Pratt. Introduction by John Ciardi. Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, #. # pages, #  TT is with a little hesitancy that I discuss this book in these columns. Witchery is probably not appropriate here -- especially stories which try to kid the reader into actually believing in supernatural powers. Nearly the best thing about this volume is John Ciardi's sharp and poetic introduction, an appreciative review of the anthropological origins of belief in witches and a deftly subtle analysis of witch types. As for the three novelets themselves, I find Leiber's "Conjure Wife," from a # Unknown Worlds, to be straight-faced (and very well-done) obscurantism, based on the concept of the soul as a tangible (and stealable) article. Blish's relatively short "There Shall Be No Darkness," from a is somewhat more persuasive for me, perhaps because it is closer to being science fiction. It is Fletcher Pratt's "The Blue Star," however, nearly novel length by itself, that provides the real surprise of the book. This never previously published tale is an immensely effective piece of mannered pseudo-historical writing, a recreation of a time when witchcraft was really believed in -- in this instance on a parallel world that is only slightly different from our world during its medieval period. It is full of color, sex, and wonderful, robust characters. The witchcraft, because it is placed in a suitable environment, is quite believable.For my money. Witches Three is worth buying especially because of the excellent imaginings in Fletcher Pratt's splendid baroque tapestry. antoniorrobles. Twayne Publishers, New York, #. # pages, # Witches Three, they also included in the package this changeling, this simplemad tale translated from the Spanish by Edward and Elizabeth Huberman. It is just about the goofiest thing I have read since Tristram Shandy. I don't know if it's any gooji; all I know is I enjoyed it! It tells of the adventures of a real centaur in Nazi Germany, through the Spanish Civil War, and finally into modern Mexico, where the author of this book, famed in prewar Spain, is now living. These adventures are partly sharp anti-Fascism, partly straight bizarre romance, and partly (a large part) sheer nonsense, but the kind of poetic nonsense that looseminded characters like the undersigned love. ton... Cecile Matschat, Editor; Carl Cat met, Consulting Editor, John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia. #. #-# pages, # each. " science fiction juveniles maintains the same high quality established by the first five A bit oversimple in the writing (for adults, that is) and overgadgety in the science, these tales nevertheless are clean as a whistle, excellent and effecive promotion of scientific and technological ideas, and "action-packed" without leaning too heavily on carnage and catastrophe, with one or two exceptions. Poul Anderson's Vault of the Ages is one of the exceptions -- a ilization destroyed and a barbaric society beginning its way back up the scale by means of data found in a Twentieth Century Time Vault. Arthur Clarke's Islands in the Sky is a wholly convincing tale of a boy's adventures on our first artificial satellite. Chad Oliver's Mists of Dawn is a dramatic but rather run-ofthe-mill tale of a lad's exciting doings in the year # B.C., where he was placed by an accident to a time machine. Philip St. John's Rocket Jockey is one of those rather oldfashioned tales of an "auto race" in space, with some nasty Martians as villains. It is perhaps the least convincing of the five tales. Bryce Walton's Sons of the Ocean Deep is a genuinely exciting story of the exploration of the ocean bottom, and of the very surprising things that are found there. It's cast in the future, when space travel is old-hat. The series is just the thing for the growing generation, and a fine lead-in for them to more adult science fiction eventually. The Drop Certainly the cheapest way to get where you want to go is to be deported. And there are times when it proves the only possible way! between planets, even on a ship like the Ironrod, so my first goal in Forbeston on Mars was always the pool. I stripped down to trunks, ultraviolet checked, and plunged out into the green-tinted water. After blowing around a while, I lay back and floated. Above, beyond the almost invisible protective dome, there was the purple velvet of the Martian sky, flecked, now that the Sun was low on the horizon, with the larger stars. One of jj them, unwinking and tremendous, was green -- Earth, of course. From the pool to the club; the : usual routine. The Senior Officers' ; Club was on the corner of #th j and X, just across from the Dej partment of Commerce building. I had belonged to it two years now, and at # was no longer the ' youngest member. A prodigy of #I had got his master's ticket two or three months before. I checked in, and from his little cubbyhole Steve recognized me, which was certainly an honor. He brought my mail down from its box : half a dozen bills, two vocoletters from a distant cousin, and a pile of advertising voco-flips. Steve said: "Where've you been, Captain Newsam?" The individual naming was another part of his technique. I had noticed that people he really had known for years he just called "Captain," "Commodore," or whatever it was. "Venus to Mercury run," I told him. "Clarke's Point, Karsville, Mordecai -- the usual." "You get around," he said. "I stick here." I'd heard the complaint from, him before, and also from others in Forbeston and at other landfalls. They mostly looked contented enough, though. "One place is like another," I told him tiredly. "Yes," he said. "I've heard that. What you're used to, I figure. Going in to eat?" "Directly." I dropped the vocoflips in a disposal chute. "Do something for me, Steve." "Any old thing. What is it?" "Check me Captain Gains." He didn't hesitate long, but I'm used to observing small actions and probing them -- I did a thesis on behavior for my diploma. I saw Steve's eyes flicker, and the involuntary movement of his hands. He said: "I'll check him, Captain. I haven't seen him around much lately." s "How lately?" I asked quietly. He was smooth again now. "Well, you know how it is. With serving officers, you don't always know whether they're here or away. Even when they're at Forbeston, they don't always come into the club. Hunting trips and such." "Your memory's not bad, Steve. Just when did you last see him?" He pretended to consider. "Might be two months. How long you been gone?" "Just over two months." "Yes, I'd say that's about it." "Thanks. Check him for me all the same. Check him all over. I'm going in to eat." the window, and ordered. This part of the club overlooked the playground of the Forbeston Junior School. I sat eating and watching the generation that would be prepared to take over when I had completed my twenty years in space and was ready to retire to that plantation up in the hills. I didn't notice when someone came up to the table. He tapped the back of my chair. "Mind if I join you?" It was Matthews, from the Firelike. I had run into him at various times, in various places, and liked him well enough. I 'j nodded, and he sat down. "Just in?" "Three hours." He nodded. "Been in over a week myself. We're on the Uri anus trip now. That's a rough  job I'll be glad to see the end of. j We lost the Steelback on our j last run. It's a God-forsaken  stretch of sky." "One place is like another," I said. It was the conventional phrase. j Matthews glanced at me. "Glad J you think so." j "What else?"  "People get ideas," he said i vaguely. "Do you go near the  Earth at all on your present run?"  "The Moon. Clarke's Point. Why?" "We used to hit Tycho.  They've got a telescope there that's pretty good. I used to get into the observatory. You can make out some small groups of buildings on Earth when the weather's right." The conversation was becoming embarrassing. To mention Earth at all was bad enough; to speak of "weather" was something worse. I looked at Matthews. He seemed normal, but I thought I detected a watchfulness behind the placidity of his expression. I said deliberately: "I've never given it a thought." "Sometimes people get to acting peculiar. We had a second officer with us three or four years back. He got an idea in his head that the Earth was raising a battle fleet. He used to spend his off-duty time at the lookout screen watching for the enemy cruisers approaching." I laughed. "What did they do with him?" "Gave him the drop. I guess he knows better by now." "If he's still alive." Matthews paused for a moment. "Have you ever wondered why we drop the misfits back to Earth?" I looked at him again. "What is there to think about? The reason's obvious enough. Since the ruling was made against prefrontal leucotomy, it's the only alternative to snuffing them out, unless they are kept in institutions at our expense." He drained his coffee. "I've known some to say that we should never have abandoned Earth. It's richer in natural resources than all the planets together." I added: "And populated to the We couldn't dispose of that lot, and we couldn't avoid being contaminated if we had to live among them. The reason our kind came to the planets was to get away from them, to be able to develop our superior civilization in peace and without interruption. We've got the Sirius project under way. In a couple of centuries we may be in a different solar system altogether." "Or we may not," Matthews corrected. "There have been quite a few earlier projects, starting with the Proxima Centauri project. That was two hundred years ago." "You sound pessimistic." "It's the Uranus trip," he said. He grinned. "Forget it. One place is like another. Doing anything tonight?" "Nothing much. Looking a friend up." "Yes," he said. "I thought you might be." The remark was, I felt, an enigmatic one. He left without waiting for me to ask him to clarify it. out. "Any luck with Captain Gains?" I asked him. He shook his head. "Forget it then. I'm going along to his place. There'll be a message, even if he isn't there." Steve nodded. As I went out, he flicked the vidiphone switch in front of him. Larry's bubble was seven or eight kilometers outside the city. I took my own car to the West Lock ' and picked up a sand tracker there. The Sun had set when I got outside the city bubble, but Phobos was up and I didn't need to use the main lights to see my way. I made a good twenty and in about a quarter hour was under the ridge on which the bubble that surrounded Larry's place was fixed. I could see it shimmering in the full moonlight, but there was no sign of a light within. I parked the tracker outside and went in. The lock was automatic ; as it closed behind me, the main lights inside went on. Larry's shack was in front of me. I pushed the door open. The living room looked reasonably tidy, but there was dust that showed no one had been in it for some weeks, at least. I went straight across to the vidiphone and pressed the message button. The screen stayed blank.This was unusual. There should have been some kind of message. I set out to hunt through the shack for some kind of clue, but there was nothing. Larry Gains and I had gone through college at Tycho together, and we graduated together. Our first four years in space we were on the same boat -- the Graylance on the Asteroid Circuit -- and after the inevitable split came with my posting to the Ironrod, we still saw as much of each other as our wanderings permitted. Fortunately, both boats were based on For best on. Six months before, the old Graylance had made its last loop round the Belt; a chunk of rock weighing twenty tons or more had torn her open. Larry had been one of the survivors, but with injuries enough to ground him for at least a year. It was then he had had this shack put up. It was a handy base from  which to hunt rocktrotters. I had j stayed out there with him on a V couple of leaves. Now the place was deserted. Might he have been seconded ' back into space on a special board? But there would have v been a message, either at the club or here. An extended trip, up onto the Kayser Plateau? Then again there should have been a mesL Vj( i vV   sage; but he might not have expected to be away for long. That seemed the only possible solution. But there was the thick dust, and there had been that funny look in Steve's eye when I had mentioned Larry. I began hunting aimlessly around the hut again. A tape of the Forbeston edition of the Tycho Capsule. I clipped it into the screen. # -- #. That made it just over two months old. I heard the door open behind me and turned around, half expecting to see Larry himself there. But instead there were two men in Medical uniform. One of them stepped forward. "Captain Newsam?" He framed it as a question, but it was a statement. I knew that and nodded. "Just a checkup," he said. "I had acheckup. This afternoon. When I got in with the Jronrod." "That's all right," the Medic said. "We won't keep you long." "You won't keep me at all, I've had my checkup. You can reach me through Venus Base, if you're interested." I moved to pass them. The one who had been talking didn't do anything. The other raised his left hand and shook it gently. Venusian arodate, of course, and they themselves immunized against it. I saw the golden dust shake out toward me and had time to run two or three paces before my muscles locked and : everything went black. : Medical building, back in Forbeston. My muscles were still j rigid. I was on a stretcher unI derneath the Verifier. The two j Medics were there, and a Medic J Captain. He was a little tubby man with ginger whiskers and a toothy grin. He said: "Sorry about the ini formality. Just a routine. We did ; have a warrant, incidentally, in case you should feel like legist ering a complaint against us." Being underneath the Verifier  explained the arodate, but it didn't explain why. I thought of saying something and then def cided to keep my mouth shut. The electrodes were clamped neatly behind my ears. The globe of the Verifier glowed its normal ' pink. The Captain said : "My name's Pinski. Now, Captain Newsam, you are Chief Navigator of the Itontod, on the Venus-Mercury run?" "Yes." "Landfall five hours back?" "If I've been out half an hour, yes." The questions continued. For the most part, they were routine. Pinski kept one eye on the Verifier globe, Then he started tossing in a few more unusual ones. "Ever been among the outer planets?" "Beyond the Asteroids? No." "Do you know Commander Leopold?" "No." "Commander Stark?" "No." "What are your views on prefrontal leucotomy?" "Never thought about it. It's not used now, is it? They give them the drop." "What do you think of the Sirius project?" "Not much interested." "Do you ever dream of wide stretches of water?" "Not since I was a boy." I had no reason to fear anything from the Verifier, so it didn't make me nervous. The globe stayed pink as the questions 'went on. Pinski said: "What were you doing at the place where the Medics found you?" "I was looking for Captain Gains. Perhaps you'll tell me where I can get hold of him." Pinski grinned. "I'm not under the Verifier, Captain Newsam." He stepped back. "I think that's all okay. Sorry to have bothered, you. In two or three minutes you'll be' able to get around again. Call in the Bar on your way out. Third on the right along the corridor. I'll be in there. The drinks are on Medical." I found him all right. He was sitting at a table with two drinks in front of him. Someone must have told him I drank sloe gin. I sat down at the empty chair. "Glad to make your acquaintance in a more formal manner. Captain Newsam," Pinski said. "Have a drink." I took it. "Now just yhy -- " He lifted one hand. "To get things quite straight, I can give you no information as to the reason for your being picked up and verified." "Right," I said. "Then do you know where I can find Gains?" He hesitated briefly. "The answer must be no." I swallowed the drink. "Thank you very much for all the hospitality. Good night, Captain Pinski." "A piece of strictly medical advice," he said. "Go back to bed and have a good night's sleep." I called back, "Thanks!" I was halfway to the door. on the interplanetary routes, has its less respectable side. I drove down to the East side and parked the car at the corner of #th and J. The Persepolis is a small club at the far end of #th. I'm known there, but every time I go I feel less and less like boasting of it, I had a couple of sloe gins at the Bar and then went up to the Saturn Room. Cynthia came at me from behind. "Hello! Long time." "Seems longer," I said. "Tell me, when was Larry in last?" "Larry? I haven't seen him since you were both up here -- nine, ten weeks ago. But I've been away on a trip up the Long Canal. Tell you what, I'll ask Sue." "That'll, be fine," I said. She was gone two or three minutes. When she came back, she said: "No. He doesn't seem to have been around since then." But she wasn't being spontaneous any longer; she was weighing her words. And she didn't seem at all curious as to what might have happened to him. "I thought we were friends, Cynth," I said. "Come on, what is it?" "What's what? I could do with, a drink." I dropped a note on the table. "Have this one on Larry. See you, Cynthia." She caught me before I reached the door. "I don't know, Jake. I honestly don't know. All I was told was that it was best not to inquire." She was telling the truth now. "Thanks," I said. "Good night, anyway." "Where are you going?" "There's only one place where I stand a chance of finding things  out." . I was thinking about that as j' I went outside. The Terminal Of? fice had tabs on all officers on the space routes. If Larry had not been reporting for his fortnightly medical boards, they would know, and they would certainly have checked to see what was happening. If there was something else wrong, they would know that, too. I jumped into the car without thinking and released power. Behind me, a familiar voice said: "You don't seem to have had any luck in finding your friend, Captain Newsam." It was Matthews. His tall body was cramped into the back of the car. "Good of you to join me," I said. "I'd like you to drop in at my place. It's on #nd." "Is there anything at the end of it? Information?" "A drink. Maybe information." "Suits me," I told him, and headed there. TT was a more luxurious apart ment than I thought Matthews could have afforded. Four rooms, all well furnished. He set me down in a long chair in front of a glow-fire and brought me the drink. He had it right, too -- sloe gin -- but the fact that everyone knew my taste in liquor had ceased to worry me. "Now," I said, "I want to know where Larry Gains is." Matthews raised his eyebrows. "Gains? Ah, he must be this friend you didn't find." I said wearily : "What information do you think I came here for?" "I thought you came for the drink. No, don't go. If you try the Terminal Office at this time of night, you'll only get the clerk, who will tell you to come back in the morning. Finish your drink and have another. I understand you got picked up for verification earlier this evening." "Yes." "What sort of questions did they ask you?" I told him and he nodded. "Leopold... Stark... That's interesting." "Just what is it all about?" He paused. "That little talk we had this afternoon. Remember it?" "More or less. You were talking about misfits." Matthews looked straight at me. "Captain Larry Gains was classified as a misfij: three weeks ago. He was dropped to Earth over a week ago. Is that what you wanted to know?" "You're off your rocker yourself. Larry was perfectly sane when I saw him just over two months ago. It takes two boards three months apart for misfit classification." "Not," Matthews said softly, "for classification #-K." "#-K? What in hell is that?" "Organized activities against the Stated" "Larry? Don't be funny!" "Tell me," Matthews said, "what do you know about the Earth?" "Ordinary general knowledge. That when the Third Atomic War broke out on Earth, the colonies on the Moon and here on Mars declared their neutrality. The technical staffs on the Earth bases for the most part pulled out to join them; those that didn't presumably got submerged in the holocaust. The state of the war was followed by wireless until the last transmitter went off the air, marking the breakdown. The colonies concentrated on their own expansion -- first, on the Moon and Mars; later, on Venus and with the outposts in the Asteroids, and on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. There was no point in going back to an Earth poisoned with radioactive gases, with a savage population rotted by radiation diseases. The obvious thing was to expand outward, toward other solar systems." "And, of course," Matthews said, "there was the Protocol." T HE Protocol, I suppose, could be called the basis of our education -- that the old and outworn should be put behind; that Man should go on to greater things, never turning back to the world of misery and wretchedness to which he had for so long been confined. There was a lot more,but that was the gist of it. Children learned it by heart. "Yes, the Protocol," I said. "The Protocol rose naturally enough out of the circumstances." "Out of the circumstances," Matthews agreed. "But circumstances change. The Protocol remains the same." "Why shouldn't it?" "Well, grubbing around from one artificial environment to another -- do you think that's the best existence men can have? Turning our backs on an unbelievably fruitful planet?" "It's only a temporary phase. The Sirius project -- " " -- is a failure," Matthews cut in. "We won't be told about that officially until a new project has been got going -- another carrot in front of the donkey. But it's a failure. Two planets, neither one habitable or capable of being made habitable." I said slowly: "Now perhaps you will tell me just what all this has to do with Larry Gains." ' Matthews got up and walked across to the telescreen. He touched a small switch on the left-hand side, and the screen  moved into patterns of whorls i spreading out from the center. I  recognized it for a watcherJ alarm: if anyone were tapping the room, the whorls would be j irregular and broken. Matthews I came back and sat down again. # "Gains had a lot of time on his hands after his crackup. He Igot to thinking things over. He happened to meet someone in  our group. To put it shortly, he j joined us." I "Your group? Joined you? Who J are you?" "We represent a party whose objective is to overthrow the Protocol. We want to get back to j Earth, to recolonize it and re' claim it from savagery. Gains I came in with us."  "You're crazy! What makes I you think you know better than v the Directorate? We're improving  conditions on the planets every  year. Why, the new bubble up the Long Canal takes in over forty square kilometers!" "Bigger bubbles," Matthews said, "but always bubbles. Never the chance to live a natural life in natural surroundings." "And Larry? You let him get caught?" "It was bad luck." "Bad luck?" "He and another of our group had their conversation tapped. They were both taken. Fortunately, neither of them knew more than a couple of other people in the group, and those two people got away. We couldn't do anything for Gains and Bessemer. They were held strictly incommunicado." "So he's really gone. You're sure they're not still holding him somewhere?" "On some points our information is definite. They've been dropped all right. On the North American continent -- that's the usual place they drop misfits." rying me all along, and suddenly I knew what it was. I said warily: "Well, I've got the information I came in search of. Now I'm beginning to wonder why I got it. I don't imagine you thought I would be a cinch for your organization just because Larry had been in it, did you? And yet you've told me a lot which you can't be in the habit of passing out casually. What's behind it?" "Well, we haven't told you anything the Directorate doesn't know," Matthews said evenly. "Except that I'm in it, and I have my means of getting away; in any case, I'm expendable. But you're correct in thinking there was a reason. Gains was a good friend of yours." "The best." "He was a good man. We didn't want to lose him, and we'd like to get him back." "Back? From Earth?" "We have a small cruiser at our disposal that is confidential and I've burned both your boats and ours by telling you -- and we can get down to the Earth and back again. It isn't easy, and of course there can be no question of organizing search parties. But if someone else were dropped, with instructions forGains and Bessemer as to a spot to go to to be picked up, all three could be taken off. We're lucky that misfits are always dropped in more or less the same area. It means finding them is made easier for us. It might be possible." "What's known about conditions in that part of the planet?" Matthews looked at me levelly. "Not a thing." I paused. "All right, I'll go. How?" Matthews smiled. m "I thought you would. As for going -- that's easy. You intended to drop in at the Terminal Office. Do that. If you are persistent, they'll inform you about Gains. After that, it's easy. You will be under automatic examination at the Office, and the shot of adrenalin you will take before you go over there will register. You will be pulled in on suspicion. Certain papers will have been planted in your things at the Club. From that point on, things will be straightforward. All we have to do is just hope that when they verify you again, they keep a reasonable distance from suspicion of what's really happening. I think they will. Verifiers aren't very good nowadays." "Thanks," I said. "You seem to have everything well worked out. Just as a matter of interest, that remark about burning both my boats and yours -- if I hadn't volunteered for this, what would you have done?" "We were fairly sure of you," Matthews said. "But if we had been wrong... He turned his thumb down very regretfully. the proceedings were rushed through. The papers Matthews had had planted in my gear must have been very incriminating. I was transferred to the Moon, to Archimedes Crater, for the final decision, but it was cut-and-dried beforehand. Within a week of my conversation with Matthews, I was standing in front of the Board, listening to myself being pronounced a misfit and condemned to the drop back to Earth. I was marched out. Someone was waiting for me in an anteroom. It was Pinski. I said: "I've been verified three times in a week. I'd never have thought you would have needed any more." Pinski smiled. "This time it's different. You have a compulsory total recall to go through." "You can't do that. Regulation # states that no one can be put under a form of interrogation that his conscious mind cannot observe. The Verifier is the limit." "You know the regulation," Pinski said, "ex-Captain Newsam. Unfortunately, they don't apply to you any longer. The State has cast you out. This won't take very long." So much, I though grimly, for Matthews' sources of information. There was nothing I could do now. I could resist, but that would only mean being put into an arodate paralysis. "Sit down," Pinski said. The little silver balls began to revolve ; the mirrors gleamed with strange lights. I heard Pinski's voice, close at first, and then from greater and greater echoing distances. After an indefinite space of time, Pinski's voice again: "Wake up, Newsam. Wake up." I raised my head, my mind clear. Pinski was looking at me commiseratingly. "You'Ve had tough luck," he observed. "They certainly roped you in." I wasn't sure how much they had got from me, though I guessed it would be everything. "I'm not complaining," I said. "There's no provision for reclassifying misfits, I'm sorry to say. If there were, we might have saved you. As it is... you can take the drop in the satisfaction that you've done the Directorate a final service. We didn't know about that cruiser." He paused. "The boat's outside. Good luck, Newsam." We shook hands. The guards took me outside, through the lock to the Main Ramp. I had a last look at Archimedes, spread squatly around under its glistening bubble, and went through into the boat -- a light coracle. During the takeoff and the three-hour journey toward Earth, I had time to consider things. Matthews' little scheme had been nicely blown up. When the cruiser arrived at the rendezvous that had been arranged, there would be a handy battle fleet waiting for it. What fools they were, anyway, to attempt to outwit the Directorate! As for resettling the Earth... I had the job of doing it on my own now, with the aid of Larry and this fellow Bessemer -- if I could find them at all. I I 'HE coracle dropped into an orbit, and they made the final arrangements for the drop. Matthews had been right, at least, in saying that they didn't drop misfits at random. The whole thing was meticulously calculated. When they finished, I was fitted up in the dropsuit. The captain of the coracle, a small, morose fellow, gave me instructions. "The five retard jets will fire 'automatically. After the fifth, the first parachute comes into action, and ten seconds later the second." He grinned sadly. "If nothing has happened after fifteen seconds, you'll know something has gone wrong in the packing. You'll smash flat in that case, killed outright. You'll feel no pain whatever." "Thanks," I said. "We've never had any complaints before, but then I suppose we wouldn't. The spot you are to hit is the place we always send misfits. Out of the generosity of the Directorate, it's good hunting ground and, if you survive long enough, you can probably even farm it. Within easy reach of the ocean, too. Used to be called New Hampshire." "Any provisions?" "Concentrated food for a week. And a Klaberg pistol with a hundred rounds. I'd look after them if I were you -- which I'm glad I'm not, incidentally." They eased me out of the lock with stopwatch timing. I didn't wait for the airblast to pi'sh me clear; I sprang off myself. As I did so, the clearance jet pushed behind me. Tumbling over and over in space, I saw the coracle shrink behind me like a deflating balloon. I was on my own now with a vengeance. Just after the fifth retard jet, a thought struck me and sent a prickling apprehension down my spine. Matthews had failed to anticipate the compulsory total recall. What if he and his group were wrong in another minor detail? There might have been more than a gruesome jest in the Captain's remark about the second parachute not opening. Who would know if the drop ended in death? Might not the Directorate feel that so swift an end was only merciful? The first parachute opened with a jerk, and I began counting, slowly, in my head. At fifteen, I knew I was right. I was plunging down faster and faster through the thin air. Death was below me. At twenty, with a heaving jerk, the main parachute opened. The Captain's sense of humor had been even more gruesome than I imagined. Still, untrained as I was for this kind of thing, I hit the ground hard. Rolling over, I hit my head against something and I went out, thinking, just as I blanked, that I was getting tired of being unconscious. again, I heard Larry's voice. I thought of it as a hallucination, but it was a remarkably persistent one. "Come on, Jake, you're all right now." I opened my eyes. It was Larry. Stranger yet, there were half a dozen people behind him. And two of them were women. "I was to have found you and taken you to a place up on the coast, for a cruiser to take us off," I told him miserably. "But the Directorate knows about it. The whole thing's a trap." Larry laughed. "It's a trap, sure enough, but the Directorate hasn't got it quite right." "I'm serious," I insisted. "They got it from me under total recall." "We knew that," Larry said. "Matthews couldn't warn you of it, of course, or the warning itself would have shown up. So there had to be another story -- one that would convince you, and throw the Directorate off the scent at the same time." "How do you know all this?" "We haven't got a cruiser," Larry said. "We haven't even got a coracle. But we do have wireless communication. We were waiting for you. We always are waiting for misfits." "We?" I asked. "We have a nice little colony here. Fifty-eight of us, and still growing." They had been helping me out of the dropsuit. I felt a breeze on my face, and the smell, the indescribable smell, of natural air laden with a dozen different scents of flowers and grass and trees. Larry was watching me. "It's really something, isn't it?" "What about the savages?" He shrugged. "There may be some to the west. We haven't had time to lopk properly. But this country's clear." There was soft turf beneath my feet. "But why?" I asked. "The Directorate must know what this planet is like. Why don't they" move back, instead of fumbling around with interstellar projects that never get anywhere?" "The Directorate is an organization designed to rule a set of neatly controlled artificial cities -- a state spread out over nearly a dozen planets and satellites, but an entirely urban state. If men came back to Earth, came back to farm the land, living in villages as we do now, the Directorate's power would be broken. If you want any more reasons, you just don't know enough about human nature.' "And can we beat them?" I asked him. "Can we defy them under their very noses? With the Tycho telescope trained on the Earth, inspecting everything?" "We don't want to beat anybody," Larry said. "We're satisfied to escape notice. The village is made of small, scattered buildings, and even then they are camouflaged to make them harder to spot. We farm our land, and our agents on the planets pick our recruits." "Matthews," I exclaimed suddenly. "Poor devil-s -- he's still at Forbeston!"  "You'll see him shortly. He's due to be arrested within three months." He laughed and the rest of the small party with him. I saw the joke myself, and began laughing almost uncontrollably. Larry put an arm on my shoulder. "Take a look at that," he said. "Take a good look." I looked and saw the sunset. It was glowing through clean, pure air instead of a bubble or a viewport.l  jj jlj bj  iJB.iJL.jL-  the Newest and Brightest Star in  J I   the Science Fiction Heavens!  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City Zone State What Strange Powers Did The Ancients Possess?  -- I ' to mind power, sound thinking and cause and cflect, as applied to selfadvancement, was known centuries ago, before the masses could read and write. Much has been written :d ut the wise men of old. A popular fattu y has it that their secrets of personal power at ! ticcessful living were lost to the i Id. Knowledge of nature's la I i dated through the ages, is never I t At times the great truths possessed by the sages were hidden from unscrupulous men in high places, but never destroyed. Why Were Their Secrets Closely Guarded? Only recently, as time is measured; not more than twenty gcncr.tti .m...igo, less than l#th of V'c # the ruth's people were thought cap...Me of i . riving basic knowlol v d-out the laws of life, for it is an . nt.iry truism that knowledge is pi r and that power cannot be entru Led to the ignorant and the unworthy. Wisdom is not readily attainable by the general public; mu' recognized when right within reach. The average person absorbs a multitude of details about things, but goes through life without ever knowing where and how to acquire mastery of the fundamentals of the inner mind -- that mysterious silent something which "whispers" to you from within. Fundamental Laws of Nature Your habits, accomplishments and weaknesses are the effects of causes. Your thoughts and actions are governed by fundamental laws. Example: The law of compensation is as fundamental as the laws of breathing, eating and sleeping. All fixed laws of nature are as fascinating to study as they are vital to understand for success in life. You can learn to find and follow every basic law of life. You can begin at any time to discover a whole new world of interesting truths. You can start at once to awaken your inner powers of selfunderstanding and self-advancement. You can learn from one of the world's oldest institutions, first known in America in #. Enjoying the high regard of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and teachers, the order is known as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Its complete name is the "Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the iniOrder are not sold, for it is not a commercial organization, nor is it a religious sect It is a non-profit fraternity, a brotherhood in the true sense. Not For General Distribution Sincere men and women, in search of the truth -- those who wish to fit in with the ways of the world -- are invited to write for complimentary copy of the sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Life." It tells how to contact the librarian of knowledge. This booklet is not intended for general distribution; nor is it sent without request. It is therefore suggested that you write for your copy to: Scribe P.C.H. San Jose California The Next Fiction Novel at Your News Stand Soon by Isaac Asimov JL T began when Joseph Schwartz was walking down a street in Chicago, past the Institute for Nuclear Research. He raised one foot in the twentieth century; he lowered it in Galactic Era # , the victim of an odd accident inside the Institute involving an experiment with crude uranium. Schwartz awoke to a strange world -- he was still on Earth, but at a time when all the planets of the Galaxy were inhabited, and the people of Earth were outcasts, suffering vindictive discrimination because their tiny world was radioactive! His subsequent adventures involved Schwartz in a brewing revolution of the Earth militarists, and a romance between the daughter of an eminent Earth scientist and a young Galactic archeologist. Then, strangely, it was the little retired tailor from Chicago who found himself the only man who could avert the impending cosmic disaster. But Schwartz, homesick and confused,  wasn't sure he even cared! Combining tenseness, irony, romance, and fast action with a basis of really intriguing science, Pebble in the Sky is a truly ingenious tale of the far-distant future. On Sale In March FEBRUARY # GALAXY Science Action ataxy  #  " ingredients . , . carefully selected from thoughtripened ideas . , , employing only the most convincing characters and conflicts, human or otherwise... and blended by master craftsmen into intellectually and emotionally nutritious stories. hands in every stage of production -- it is positively mum annual requirements for mature, believable science fiction. V The price is # #(f a copy, # a year. Add I per year on foreign subscriptions (# Of less than newsstand price) and the address is... #I Hudson Street New York #, N. Y. fj. 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C-lar Ke nr n linmm a tir ! r r f -- b:t  n r T "TTtt: mrn ItTrArW cry ;xr tXtwtct vvrty T n  -- fcr#" -- #-O c f For #, or #c each  Enclose check, cash or money order. Name We pay postage Add re ss City State science fiction for a couple of decades, I really ought to take a moment to see if it's Literature. The reason is that in a few months, some imposing name is going to be induced to make an equally imposing ass of himself on just that question -- attacking science fiction as non-literature has joined the robin and the crocus as a sign of spring. In the past, I've made the mistake of retorting afterward , when, it turned out, the season was closed. No more of that -- ITI have the first word for a change. The trouble is that I have no idea of who will draw the assignment this year. If I knew, I'd be able to map out my counter-strategy in advance, for the campaign on the other side is inevitably shifty, being unhampered by knowledge or calm judgment. Two years ago, it was Arthur Koestler, a sackcloth wearer whose one pleasure seems to be confessing his shames. He manfully exposed himself as a cardcarrying science fiction addict. No editor in the field minded that -- a customer is a customer -- but I damned well objected to comparing its hold to a mad passion for yoghurt! There are lots of goodies I can leave alone and yoghurt, a sort of curdled milk glue, pretty much leads the sickly list. Last year, a Prof. Lovett of England, having read an anthology or two, appraised science fiction the way a paleontologist will reconstruct a fossil from a single molar. Naturally, like Koestler, but for different reasons, he concluded that it's not Literature. The fact that the man has perhaps the lumpiest style I've ever bruised an eye on does not mean he can't recognize good writing when it's carefully pointed out to him, but even if I agreed with him on any subject, which appears unlikely, I think I would fight to the death his right to say it. Well, no matter who gets the short straw this year and whatever the weapons to be used, we know in advance the outcome -- science fiction will be declared a grimy aggressor into the field of Literature. Then why bother to defend ourselves? I'm past that stage and I hope you are, too -- a viable art form can't be destroyed by criticism any more than a moribund (Continued on page #) Can you think faster than this Machine? set up to do a problem in space ship engineering Be careful before you answer. construction kit is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and encipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. 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Note: Teachers take advantage of our # discount to educational insituations and for group purchases. Only # with over four hundred components and parts, fully illustrated manual and wiring diagrams. We guarantee that if you do not want to can return it for full refund plus shipping costs. mail this cousom Oliver Garfield # Lexington Ave., N. Y. #. N. Y. Please send me: Kit and Manual. #I (East of Mississippi) . # (Elsewhere in United States) # (Outside the United States Returnable in seven days for full refund if not satisfied. I enclose ? -- in full payment. My name and address are attached. Man in a sewing machine C  Wfh the Solar Confederation being invaded, all this exasperating computer could offer for a defense was a ridiculous old proverb! T HE mechanical voice spoke solemnly, as befitted the importance of its message. There was no trace in its accent  of its artificial origin. "A Stitch in Time Saves Nine," it said and lapsed into silence. Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying. Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the question," he said doubtfully. Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly. "That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask." Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes from the computer. "All right, Buster. ITI give it a try, anyway. What does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?" The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered. "In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its weaknesses -- at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the proper strength." Bristol nodded. "Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to spend weeks figuring out what you meant" Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful as it answered. "It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six words!" "I know," said John. "But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It didn't sound very complete to me." All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked simultaneously. "The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of taking this timely action. It should be done by stitching; if this is done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?" "I made you myself," said Bristol plaintively. "I designed you with my own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design. So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me. And since you're just a complex computer of general design,   with the ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?" Buster answered slowly: "You made me in your own image. Things thus made are often hard to handle." Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. y But you're only a calculating machine!" he shouted. "Your only purpose is to make my work -- and that of other men -- easier. And when I try to use you, you answer with riddles... The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a moment in silent reproof before it answered. "But remember, John," it said, "you didn't merely make me. You also taught me. Or as you would phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and reevaluating this information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single logical body of background information which I could use. "One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor. You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached -- a prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat macabre, perhaps -- and a little mechanistic -- but still there. "Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.'" Bristol stood up once more. "I could cure you with a sledge hammer," he said. "You could remove my ideas," answered the computer without concern. "But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get busy on the ideas I have already given you?" the bristles of short sandy hair on the top of his head with his knuckles. "Ordered around by an overgrown adding machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. Fm glad you can't get around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet." He shook his head. "I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering mathematician." "And Einstein, too, probably," added Buster cryptically. Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the polished marble slabs, of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway to an Egyptian tomb. "When I get around to it," said Bristol, "I'll put lace panties on the bases of all your klystrons." He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin rows of generators. The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slowpaced rendition of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. "One last question," he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. "How in blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or, at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?" He took two steps toward the immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it. "Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't bluffing?" "Don't be silly," answered the calculator softly. "You made me and you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your questions, however inane." "Then answer the ones I just asked." machine a switch snicked sharply, and the great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. "I didn't answer your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark that so frequently annoys you," Buster said, "because the little information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly revealing. "They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent. They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions. "In short, they are startlingly like humans. Their reactions have been so much like yours -- granted the difference that it was they who discovered you instead of you who discovered them -- that their reactions are highly predictable. If they think it is to their own advantage and if they can manage to do it, they will utterly destroy your civilization... which, after a couple of generations, will probably leave you no worse off than you are now." "Cut out the heavy philosophy," said Bristol, "and give me a few facts to back up your sweeping statements." "Take the incident of first contact," Buster responded. "With very little evidence of thought or of careful preparation, they tried to land on the outermost inhabited planet of Rigel. Their behavior certainly did not appear to be that of an invader, yet humans immediately tried to shoot them out of the sky." "That wasn't deliberate," protested Bristol. "The place they tried to land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in order to make the   planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally, is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the Interceptor Launching Station." "Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone," commented Buster calmly. Bristol stalked back toward the base of the calculator, and poked his nose practically into a vision receptor. "It was no thanks to the invading ships that nobody was killed," he said hotly. "And when they came back three days later they killed a lot of people. They occupied the planet and we haven't been able to dislodge them since." -- of the retaliation," answered the calculator imperturbably, "Even at 'stitching' speeds, it seems unlikely that they could have communicated with their home planets and received instructions in such a short time. Almost undoubtedly it was the act of one of their hot-headed commanding officers. Their next contact, as you certainly recall, did not take place for three months. And then their actions n.i were more cautious than hostile. A dozen of their spaceships 'stitched' simultaneously from the inter-planar region into normal space in a nearly perfect englobement of the planet at a surprisingly uniform altitude of only a few thousand miles. It was a magnificent maneuver. Then they sat still to see what the humans on the planet would do. The reaction came at once, and it was hostile. So they took over that planet, too -- as they have been taking over planets ever since." Bristol, raised his hands, and then let them drop slowly to his sides. "And since they have more spaceships and better weapons than we do, we would undoubtedly keep on losing this war, even if we could locate their home system; which we have not been able to do so far. The 'stitching' pattern of inter-planar travel makes it impossible for us to follow a starship. It also makes it impossible for us to defend our planets effectively against their attacks. Their ships appear without warning." Bristol rubbed his temples thoughtfully with his fingertips. "Of course," he went on, "we could attack the planets they have captured and recover them, but only at the cost of great loss of life to our own side. We have only recaptured one planet, and that at such great cost to the local human population that we will not quickly try it again." "Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of the invaders," Buster answered, "there was still much information to be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time saving nine." "You're right," said John. "It does, at that. Buster, I have always resented the nickname the newspapers have given you -- the Oracle -- but the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!" # don't mind being called 'The Oracle " answered Buster with dignity. Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. "No, you probably think it's funny," he said. "If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us, if we can't do it, in time to save us?" "Although I have no feeling for self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling, of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry out your deepest convictions, it is not sufficient that mankind be preserved. If that were true, all you would have to do would be to surrender unconditionally. My calculations, as you know, indicate that this would not result in the destruction of mankind, but merely in the finish of his present civilization. To you, the preservation of the dignity of Man is more important than the preservation of Man. You equate Man and his civilization; you do not demand even revolutionary changes, but destruction of your way of life. "Consequently, neither am I of the civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result. Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without thought being required of you, to even one such vital question -- such as this one concerning the invaders -- then I could not logically refuse to give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically. "There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle" Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair. "Just relax, dear," said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers. "It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster," he said. "Buster never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax me and make me feel comfortable." Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. "I know, dear," she said. "You need to be able to talk to someone who will always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always know what you're talking about even before you start talking." John nodded, his eyes still closed. "If it weren't for you, darling," he said, "I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow your logic." glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with intelligence. "You never will find me logical," she laughed. "After all , I I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle." "You sure are a woman," said John with warm feeling. "You can exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my lucky day when you married me." There were a few minutes of peaceful silence. "Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?" asked Anne. "Mrn-m-mm," answered John. "That's too bad, dear," said Anne. "I think you work much too hard -- what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you take a vacation? You  really need one, you know. You look so tired." "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness . knows you won't be doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today, dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?" "Mm-m-mm," answered John. "Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you with your problem." While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face with intelligence and compassion. John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking, now that John could see them. "The trouble, darling," he said, "is that I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer to the most important question we've ever asked T # it. And I don't know what the riddle means." Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor at John's feet. "You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much, dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to expect of it." "When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just answered A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it." "And that sounds like very good sense, too," said Anne in earnest tones. "But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are already invading us, aren't they?" "It has some deeper meaning than the usual one," said John. "If I could only figure out what if is." Anne nodded vigorously. "I suppose Buster's talking about space-stitching," she said. 'Although I can never quite remember just what that is. Or just how it works, rather." a few moments and then plaintively asked, "What is it, dear?" "What's what?" "Stitching, silly. I already asked you." "Darling," said John with reasonable patience, "I must have explained inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times." "And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at the time," said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. "But somehow, later, it never seems quite so plain. When I start to think about it by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again. Please." Bristol grinned suddenly. "Yes, dear," he said. He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. "First of all, you know that there are two coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence, but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the infinitude of points in our Universe -- which we call for convenience the 'alpha' plane -- there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or 'beta' plane." Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. "If they match point for point, how can there be any difference in size?" she asked. John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double the length of the first. "Actually," he said, "each of these line segments has an infinite number of points in it, but we'll ignbre that. I'll just divide each one of these into ten equal parts." He did so, using short, neat crossmarks. "Now I'll establish a one-toone correspondence between these two segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That makes eleven dotted lines. You see?" Anne nodded. "That's plain enough. It reminds me of a Venetian blind that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home." "Yes," said John. "Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha' universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe. If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this, it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the 'alpha' plane -- # miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use decimals." stirred and seemed about to speak. "But if I slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the 'beta' universe -- something which, for reasons I can't explain now, takes negligible time -- watch what happens. If I still proceed at the rate of an inch a second in this inter-planar region, then, with the dotted lines all bunched closely together, after five seconds when I switch along another dotted line back to my original universe, I have gone almost the whole length of that longer line. Of course, this introduction of 'alpha' matter -- my pencil point in this case -- into the inter-planar region between the universes sets up enormous strains, so that after a certain length of time our spaceship is automatically rejected and returned to its own proper plane." "Could anybody in the littler universe use the same system?" John laughed. "If there were anybody in the 'beta I plane, I guess they could, although they would end up traveling slower than they would if they just stayed in their own plane. But there isn't anybody. The 'beta' plane is a constant level entropy universe -- completely without life of its own. The entropy level, of course, is vastly higher than that of our own universe." Anne sat up. "I'll forgive, you this time for bringing up that horrid word entropy, if you'll promise me not to do it again," she said. ers and smiled. "Now," he said, "if I want to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and switch over toward "beta When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming device, having nothing to do with how fast I go." He hesitated, groping for the right words. "In point of fact, you have to imagine that corresponding points in the two universes are moving rapidly past each other in all directions at once. I just have to select the right direction, or to convince the probability cloud that corresponds to my location in the 'alpha' universe that it is really a point near the 'beta' universe, going my way. That's a somewhat more confused way of looking at it than merely imagining that I continue to travel in the inter-planar region at the same velocity that I had in 'alpha,' but it's closer to a description of what the math says happens. I could make it clear if I could just use mathematics, but I doubt if the equations will mean much to you. "At any rate, distance traveled depends on mass -- the bigger the ship, the shorter the distance traveled on each return to our   V own universe -- and not on velocity in 'alpha.' Other parameters, entirely under the control of the traveler, also affect the time that a ship remains in the inter-planar region. "There are refinements, of course. Recently, for example, we have discovered a method of multi-transfer. Several of the transmitters that accomplish the transfer are used together. When they all operate exactly simultaneously, all the matter within a large volume of space is transferred as a unit. With three or four transmitters keyed together, you could transfer a comet and its tail intact. And that's how inter-planar traveling works. Clear now?" "And that's why they call it 'stitching,' " said Anne with seeming delight. "You just think of the ship as a needle stitching its way back and forth into and out of our universe. Why didn't you just say so?" there's another interesting point about stitching. Subjectively, the man in the ship seems to spend about one day in each universe alternately. Actually, according to the time scale of an observer in the 'alpha' plane, his ship disappears for about a day, then reappears for a minute fraction of a second and is gone again. Of course, one observer couldn't #' y watch both the disappearance and reappearance of the same ship, and I assume the observers have the same velocity in 'alpha' as does the stitching ship. Anyway, after a ship completes its last stitch, near its destination, there's a day of subjective time in which to make calculations for the landing -- to compute trajectories and so forth -- before it actually fully rejoins this universe. And while in the inter-planar region it cannot be detected, even by someone else stitching in the same region of 'alpha' space, "That's one of the things that makes interruption of the enemy ships entirely impossible. If a ship is in an unfavorable position, it just takes one more quick stitch out of range, then returns to a more favorable location. In other words, if it finds itself in trouble, it can be gone from our plane again even before it entirely rejoins it. Even if it landed by accident in the heart of a blue-white is star, it would be unharmed for that tiny fraction of a second which, to the people in the ship, would seem like an entire day. "If this time anomaly didn't exist, it might be possible to set up defenses that would operate after a ship's arrival in the solar system but before it could do any damage; but as it is, they can dodge any defense we can devise. Is all that clear?" Anne nodded. "Uh-hunh, I understood every word." "There is another thing about inter-planar travel that you ought to remember," said Bristol. "When a ship returns to our universe, it causes a wide area disturbance; you have probably heard it called space shiver or the bong wave. The beta universe is so much smaller than our own alpha that you can imagine a spaceship when shifted toward it as being several beta light-years long. Now, if you think of a ship, moving between the alpha and beta lines on this envelope, as getting tangled in the dotted lines that connect the points on the two lines, that would mean that it would affect an area smaller than its own size on beta -- a vastly larger area on alpha. "So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines, setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong sound on your T.V, set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity. Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble, he has gone again long before we can detect the bong."  "As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves, just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean." Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her head at her husband. "Honestly," she said, "you men are all alike. Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you made about the ten dollars when, you know it was worth every cent of it. She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell you some of..." "Darling!" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed husband. "It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense of responsibility." "Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea." Anne smiled sweetly. "You know," she said, "that my dear father always said that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to us? Stitching our way to their planets in our spaceships, of course."  Bristol shook his head. "Your idea may be sound, even if it is a little bloodthirsty coming from someone who won't even let me set a mouse-trap, but it won't work. First, we don't know where their home planets are and second, they have more ships than we do. It might be made to work, but only if we could get enough time. And speaking of time, Fve got to meet with the Council as t soon as we finish eating. Is dinner ready?" hurried trip across town, John Bristol found himself facing the other members of Earth's Council at the conference table. "I have been able to get an answer from the computer," he told them without preamble. "It's of the ambiguous type we have come to expect. I hope you can get something useful out of it; so far it hasn't made much sense to me. It's an old proverb. Its advice is undoubtedly sound, as a generality, if we could think of a way of using it." The President of the Council raised his long, lean-fingered hand in a quick gesture. "John," he said, "stop this stalling. Just what did the Oracle say?" "It said, 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine?" "Is that all?" "Yes, sir. According to the calculator, that gives us the best opportunity to save ourselves from the invaders." The President absently stroked the neat, somewhat scanty irongray hair that formed into a triangle above his high forehead and rubbed the bare scalp on each side of the peak vigorously and unconsciously with his knuckles. "In that case," he said at last, "I suppose that we must examine the statement for hidden meanings. The proverb, of course, implies that rapid action, before a trouble has become great, is more economical than the increased effort required after trouble has grown large. Since our troubles have already grown large, that warning is scarcely of value to us now." The War Secretary, who had grown plump and purple during a quarter of a century as a member of the Council, inclined his head ponderously toward the President. "Perhaps, Michael, the Oracle means to tell us that there is a simple solution which, if applied quickly, will make our present difficulty with the invaders a small one." The President pursed his thin lips. "That's possible, Bill. And if it is true, then the words of the proverb should, as a secondary meaning, imply a course of action." The Vice President banged his hands on the table and leaped to his feet, shaking with rage. "Why should we believe that this mountebank is capable of a solution ? " he shouted in his stevedore's voice. "Bristol pleads until the taxpayers' dollars to make #T I Bim Gump look like a pauper and uses the money to build a palace filled with junk that he calls Buster! He tells us that this machinery of his is smarter than we are and will tell us what we ought to do. And what happened after we gave him all the money he demanded -- more than he said he needed, at first -- and asked him to show something for all this money? Til tell you what happened. His gadget gets real coy and answers in riddles. If we just had brains enough, they'd explain what we wanted to know. What kind of fools does this Bristol take us for? Neither this man nor his ridiculous machine has an answer any more than I have. We've obviously been taken in by a charlatan!" Bristol, his fists clenched, spoke hotly. "Sir, that is the stupidest, the most...   interrupted the President. "Let me answer Vice President Collins for you. He's a little excited by this whole business, but then, these are trying times." He turned toward the glowering bulk of the Vice President. "Ralph," he said, "you should know that every step in the design, the construction and the -- er -- the education of the Oracle was taken under the close watch of a Board of eminent scientists, all of whom agree that the computer is a masterpiece -- that it is a great milestone in Man's efforts to increase his knowledge. The Oracle has undoubtedly found a genuine solution to the question Bristol asked it. Our task must be to determine what that solution is." "I can't entirely agree with that," said the Secretary for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs in a thin half-whisper. "I think we should depend on our own intelligence and skill to save ourselves. I've watched events come and go on this planet of ours for a long time -- a very long time -- and I feel as I have always felt that men can make the world a Paradise for themselves or they can destroy themselves, but that nothing else but they themselves can do it. We men must save ourselves. And there are still things that we can do." He shrugged his ancient, shawl-covered shoulders. "For example, we could disperse colonies so widely that it would become impossible for the invaders to destroy all of them." "I'm afraid that's no good, George," answered the War Secretary respectfully. "If the Solar System is destroyed, any remaining colonies will be too weak to maintain themselves for long. We must defend this system successfully, or we are lost." "Then that brings us back to the Oracle's proverb." The President thought for a moment. "Stitching obviously refers to inter-planar travel. How can that help us?" The Secretary for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs peered up at the President through the shaggy white thicket of his eyebrows. "Actually, Michael" he said, "it was that thought that made me mention establishing colonies. The colonists would 'stitch their way to their new homes. And colonizing would have to proceed in a timely manner to have any chance for success." "Yes," answered the President, "but how would that 'save nine'? We have agreed that our Solar System must be saved. There are nine planets. Perhaps the Oracle meant that timely use of interplanar travel can save the Solar System. "Or at least the nine planets! The War Secretary's fat jowls waggled with excitement. "You know, there is no limit to the size or mass of objects which can use inter-planar travel. What if we physically remove our planets, by stitching them away from the Sun? When the invaders arrived, we would be gone -- Earth and Sun and all the rest! had been silent up to this time spoke quietly. "Simmer down, Bill. We could move the planets easily enough, of course, but you forget the mass-distance relationship. A single stitch takes about a day. The distance traveled can be controlled within limits. "For an object around the size of the Earth, those limits extend' from a fraction of an inch to a little over two feet. Say that we have two years before the invaders work their way in to the Solar System. If we started right away, we could move Earth about a quarter of a mile by the time they get here. If we tried to take the Sun with us, it could be moved about half an inch in the same length of time. Im afraid that the Solar System is going to be right here when the invaders come to get us. And I have a hunch that's likely to be a lot sooner than two years." The Secretary of Internal Affairs leaned forward, his short hair bristling. "I think we are wasting our time," he shouted. "I agree with Ralph. I don't believe that the Oracle knows any more about this than we do. If we are going to sit around playing foolish games with words, why don't we do it in a big way? We could hire T.V. time and invite everyone to send in their ideas about what the proverb means on the back of a box-top. Or reasonable facsimile. The contestant with the best answer could get a free allexpense tour to Vega Three. Unless the invaders get here or there first." The President nodded his head. "There may be more sense to that remark than I believe you intended, Charles," he said. "The greater the number of people who think about the problem, the greater the chance of reaching a solution. Even if the proverb is intended as a joke by the Oracle, as you imply, it might be that with a drink and followed him to his comfortable chair. "You look as if that was even rougher than your day with the Oracle," she said. John nodded silently, took a grateful sip of his highball and slipped off his shoes. "All that fuss over a six-word proverb," said Anne. "I still think that if you are going to depend on witch doctors and such to solve from it someone could derive a genuine solution. But as I have said, I am absolutely certain that the computer does know what it is talking about. Without resorting to box-tops or free trips, I think it might be wise to give the Oracle's statement to the public." After several more hours of arguing, the Council adjourned for a few hours and John Bristol returned wearily home. your problems for you, you would do a lot better to try my fortune teller. She gives you a lot more than six words for ten dollars. They make more sense, too. Why, I could be a better Oracle than that gadget you built." "Perhaps you could, dear," answered John patiently. Anne jumped to her feet. "Here, I'll show you." She seated herself cross-legged on the couch. "Now, I'm an Oracle," she announcecL "Go ahead, ask me a question. Ask me anything; I'll give you as good an answer as any other Oracle. Results guaranteed." John smiled. "I'm not in much of a mood to be cheered up with to ask the big question of anyone who'll give me any kind of an answer. See if you can do better with this one than Buster did." He repeated word for word the your other Oracle gave you, if you count 'it's' as one word. If you want wise-sounding answers, just come to me and save yourself a trip." his drink and strode to Anne's side. "Say it again!" he shouted. "You may have made more sense than you knew!" "I said you could come to me and save yourself a trip." question he had asked of the computer, that had resulted in its cryptic answer. Anne stared solemnly at nothing for a moment, with her cheeks puffed out. Then, in measured tones, she recited, "It's Like Looking for a Needle in a Haystack." John smiled. "That seems to make as much sense as the Oracle did, anyway," he said. "Sure," answered Anne. "And you get three words mo.e than "No, no! I mean the proverb. How did you come to think of that proverb?" Anne managed to look bewildered. "What's wrong with it? I just thought that you can't do any stitching in time without a needle. I just was trying to think of a proverb to use as an answer and that one popped into my head. Uh... Are you all right, dear?" spun her around. "You just bef your boots I'm all right I'm feeling swell! You've given us the answer we needed. You know right where the haystack is, and you know there's a needle there. But finding it is something else again. I don't think the invaders will be able to locate this needle." He set her down. "Where are  my shoes?" he said. "I've got to get back to the Capitol." Anne seemed faintly surprised. "Because of what I said? They're right on the floor there between you and the sofa. But I was just making conversation. What are you going to do?" "Oh, I'm just going to get started at taking stitches in time. Good-by, darling." He started out the door, ran back to give Anne a lingering kiss and was soon gone at top speed. Anne, waving to him, looked very pleased with herself. By the time Bristol arrived at the Capitol building, the rest of the Council was once again assembled and waiting for him. "Well, John," said the Presidents You sounded excited enough when you called us together again. Have you figured out what the Oracle meant?" "Yes, sir. With my wife's help. It's obvious, when you finally think about it. It will save us from any danger. And we should have been able to figure it out for ourselves. There's no reason that we should have had to go to the Oracle at all. And it only took Buster -- the computer, I mean -- two or three minutes to think of the answer, and of a proverb that would conceal the answer. It's amazing!" "And if you don't mind telling us, just what is this answer?" The President sounded very impatient. "We almost had it when we talked of stitching Earth out of reach," John answered eagerly. "If we keep cutting back and forth from one universe toward the other, we will be out of reach, even if we can't move very far. Once a day we reappear in this lionths of a second -- although it will seem like a whole day to us. "Then we spend the following day between this universe and beta. Even if the invaders are right on top of us when we reappear, we'll be gone again before they can do anything. Since we can vary the time of our return within limits, the invaders will never know exactly when we will flick in and out of the alpha plane until they hear our arriving 'bong' wave, and then we will already be gone, since we will be using accelerated subjective time." his dark head and sighed. "No, John," he said, "I'm afraid that isn't the answer. I'm sorry. If we start the operation you suggested, we will be cutting ourselves off from solar energy. The Earth's heat will gradually radiate away. Although beta is at a higher entropy level than our universe, we can't use that energy, except to provide power for the stitching process itself. It's true that we would deny our planet to the invaders, but we would soon kill ourselves doing it." "I didn't mean that we should transfer only Earth, but our entire Solar System," answered Bristol. "As the Oracle told us, the stitch saves nine. A series of time-matched transmitters could do the trick. If we sent the entire Solar System back and forth, the average man in the street would notice no change, except that sometimes there would be no stars in the sky. And when they were there, they wouldn't be moving." "That would work 'theoretically," said the Chief Scientist. "And once we were in continuous stitching operations, any invader, as you suggested, could join the system only by synchronizing the transmitter in his ship exactly with all of our synchronized transmitters. That's a job I don't think could ever be done. "Remember, though, that our own transmitters would have to be time-matched to within a minute fraction of a micro-second. Considering that some of the instruments would have to be so far apart that at the speed of light it would take hours to get from one to the other, the problem becomes enormous. Any radio-timing link would be useless." Bristol nodded. "The Oracle said that the stitch must be taken in time," he agreed. "But that is no real problem. We can just send a small robot ship into interplanar travel and let it bounce back. The 'bong' of its return will reach all transmitters simultaneously and we can use that as the initial time-pulse. Once the operation starts, it will be easy to synchronize, since we will always switch over again on the instant of our return to the alpha plane." The Chief Scientist relaxed. "I think that does it, John. We hide in time, instead of in distance." "We stitch in time," corrected the President, "and hide like a needle in a haystack." iinpHE invaders may eventuJally find out a method of countering our defense," said the Chief Scientist, "but it will undoubtedly take a great deal of time. And in the meantime, we will have the opportunity to seek out and destroy their home planets. It will be a long, slow process of extermination, but we have a good chance to win." "I don't agree with that, Tom," said John. "I don' think extermination can be the answer. With our example to guide them, the invaders can use stitching to escape us as easily as we can use it to escape them. What we should do now is to contact the invaders and show them that it is to both our advantages to bring hostilities to an end. By stitching the Solar System, and the other systems of our confederation in and out of the alpha plane, we should be able to gain the time necessary for contact with the enemy and make peace with him. "From what the Oracle has told me about the humanlike traits of the invaders, it's very likely they will listen to reason when it's proved that it will be to their advantage." John snapped his fingers and spoke with considerable excitement. "Now I understand, I believe, why Buster indicated to me that there was another reason for his vague answer to our question. to accept the destruction of Man's civilization. It feels equally undestruction of the invaders' civilization. Buster has an objective viewpoint in applying the mores Man has given him. And it seems to me that Buster felt it important for us to reach this spirit of compromise by ourselves. How do you feel about it, gentlemen?" Debate quickly determined that all seven members of the Council favored an attempt to establish a truce -- some of them forced into this opinion by their inability to find any method of reaching the throats of the invaders. Having reached this conclusion, the Council swung immediately into action. Within a few weeks, the entire Solar System, along with the other planetary systems of the confederation, except for their brief daily return, disappeared from the alpha universe. John Bristol, a few days after the continuous stitching started, was relaxing lazily on the sofa in his living room when there was a sudden pounding on the door. He opened it to find the Chief Scientist standing on his doorstep, his eyes red from loss of sleep.  "Good Lord! What's the matter with you?" asked Bristol. "Have you been celebrating too much? Come in, Tom, come in." The Chief Scientist entered wearily and sat down. "No. I haven't been celebrating. I've been trying to work out a little problem you left with us. We have been planning, as you suggested, to send out expeditions to contact and make agreement with the invaders. We can send them out all right, but how can we ever get them back into our solar system? They won't be able to find us any easier than the invaders can." on a side table and slumped into the closest chair. "If we don't contact each other," he said, "I am certain that the invaders will some day find a means of penetrating our defenses. Even needles in haystacks can be found, if you take enough time and aren't disturbed while you are hunting. This thing has me licked." Bristol sat down slowly. "Your whole department hasn't been able to find an answer?" "Not even the glimmering of an idea." He shrugged his shoulders. "It looks as if we are going to need the advice of your Oracle again." Bristol stood for a minute in thought and then with a smile said, "Why, of course. Excuse me for a second, please. I'll be right back." He stepped to the foot of the stairs and called out in a confident voice, "Come down a minute, please, Anne, darling! I have an important question I want to ask you!" waters of a startling, breath-holdingly suspenseful future. It's a world at war and yet not at war, for the enemy, though it has overrun three continents, is not a government! But there are other puzzlements: In the vernacular, the foe Is known as the Cow-dyes... and how does a big-ship Navy man, intent on winning the war that isn't a war, get himself to believe that an assignment ordering him to take care of cows will whip the Cow-dyes? And how will that bring him to his wife, a prisoner of war halfway around the world... assuming he can escape the Glotch, that most hideous and mysterious of ail weapons in the history of frightful be missing a lot If you miss it! novelets scheduled for the next Issue. In the most perilous period of prehistory, hunting reptile heavyweights is no job for a human lightweight. It doesn't sound possible, but you'll see why it's bulk against bulk. it's all really very simple -- if you cannot change with the times, just change the times ! Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door. "Come in' he said. A tall robot entered, the electronic beam of its single eye piercing the gloom and focusing on the psychiatrist's face. "Dr, Anson' the robot said, . "the rent is due today. Pay me." Dr. Howard Anson blinked. He did not like the harsh light, nor the harsh voice, nor the harsh meaning of the message. As he rose, he attempted to conceal his inner reactions with a bland smile, then remembered that his facial expression meant nothing to the robot. That was precisely the trouble with the damned things, he told himself; you couldn't use psychology on them. "Sixty tokens' the robot ('hunted, and rolled across the loom toward him. "But -- " Dr. Hanson hesitated, then took the plunge. "But I haven't got sixty tokens at the moment. I told the manager yesterday. If you'll only give me a little time, a slight extension of credit -- # " "Sixty tokens," the robot repeated, as if totally unmindful of t he interruption, which, Dr. Anson assured himself, was exactly the case. The robot was unmindful. It did not react to unpredictable factors; that was not its function. The robot didn't set the rental figures in this office building and had no power to make decisions regarding credit. It was built to collect the rent, nothing more. But that was enough. More than enough. arms rose and the hooklike terminals slid back the panels in its chest. to reveal a row of pushbuttons and a thin, narrow slot. "The rent is due," repeated the robot. "Please deposit the tokens in the slot." Anson sighed. "Very well," he said. He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and scooped out half a dozen shiny disks. He slipped the disks into the slot. They landed inside the robot's cylindrical belly with a series of dull plops. Evidently the robot had been making the rounds of the building all day; it sounded more than half full. For a wild moment, Dr. Anson wondered what would happen if he kidnaped the robot and emptied its cashbox. His own medical specialty was psychiatry and neuro-surgery, and he was none too certain of a robot's anatomical structure, but he felt sure he could fool around until he located the jackpot. He visualized himself standing before the operating table, under the bright lights. " Scalpel... , forceps ,... blowtorch... But that was unthinkable. Nobody had ever dared to rob a robot. Nobody ever robbed anything or anyone today, which was part of the reason Dr. Anson couldn't pay his rent on time. Still, he had paid it. The robot's terminals were punching pushbuttons in its chest and now its mouth opened. "Here is your receipt," it said and a pink slip slid out from its mouth like a paper tongue. Anson accepted the slip and the mouth said, "Thank you." The terminals closed the chestpanels, the electronic beam swept the corners as the wheels turned, and the robot rolled out of the room and down the corridor. Anson closed the door and mopped his brow. So far, so good. But what would happen when the robot reached the manager? He'd open his walking cash register and discover Anson's six ten-token disks. Being human, he'd recognize them for what they were -- counterfeit. Dr. Anson shuddered. To think that it had come to this, a reputable psychiatrist committing a crime! He considered the irony. In a world totally devoid of anti-social activity, there were no anti-social tendencies which required the services of psychiatry. And that was why he, as the last living psychiatrist, had to resort to antisocial activity in order to survive. Probably it was only his knowledge of anti-social behavior, in the abstract, which enabled him to depart from the norm and indulge in such actions in the concrete. Well, he was in the concrete now and it would harden fast -- unless something happened. At best, his deception would give him a few days' grace. After that, he could face only disgrace. down behind the desk. Maybe this was the beginning, he told himself. First counterfeiting and fraud, then robbery and embezzlement, then rape and murder. Who could say where it would all end? "Physician, heal thyself," he #  murmured and glanced with distaste at the dust-covered couch, where no patient reposed; where, indeed, no patient had ever reposed since he'd opened his office almost a year ago. It had been a mistake, he realized. A big mistake ever to listen to his father and -- The visio lit up and the audio hummed. Anson turned and confronted a gigantic face. The gigantic face let out a gigantic roar, almost shattering the screen. "I'm on my way up, Doctor!" the face bellowed. "Don't try to sneak out! I'm going to break your neck with my bare hands!" For a few seconds Anson sat V there in his chair, too numb to move. Then the full import of what he had seen and heard reached him. The manager was coming to kill him! "Hooray!" he said under his breath and smiled. It was almost too good to be true. After all this time, at last, somebody was breaking loose. A badly disturbed personality, a potential killer, was on his way up -- he was finally going to get himself a patient. If he could treat him before being murdered, that is. Tingling with excitement, Anson fumbled around in his files. Now where in thunder was that equipment for the Rorschach Test? Yes, and the Porteus Maze and -- The manager strode into the room without knocking. Anson looked up, ready to counter the first blast of aggression with a steely professional stare. But the manager was smiling. "Sorry I blew up that way," he said. "Guess I owe you an apology." "What?" "When I found those counterfeit tokens, something just seemed to snap for a moment," the manager explained. "You know how it   is. "Yes, I do," said Anson eagerly. "I understand quite well. And it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm sure that with your cooperation, we can get to the roots of the trauma. Now if you'll just relax on the couch over there -- " continued to smile, but his voice was brusque. "Nonsense! I don't need any of that. Before I came up here, I stopped in at Dr. Peabody's office, down on the sixth floor. Great little endocrinologist, that guy. Gave me some kind of a shot that fixed me up in a trice. That's three times faster than a jiffy, you know," "I don't know," Anson answered vaguely. "Endocrinology isn't my field." "Well, it should be. It's the only field in medicine that really amounts to anything nowadays. Except for diagnosis and surgery, of course. Those gland-handers can do anything. Shots for when you feel depressed, shots for when you're afraid, shots for when you get excited, or mad, the way I was. Boy, I feel great now. At peace with the world!" "But it won't last. Sooner or later, you'll get angry again." "So I'll get another shot," the manager replied. "Everybody does." "That's not a solution. You're merely treating the symptom, not the basic cause." Anson rose and stepped forward. "You're under a great deal of tension. I suspect it goes back to early childhood. Did you ever suffer from enuresis?" "It's my turn to ask questions. What about those fake tokens you tried to palm off on me?" "Why, it was all a joke. I thought if you could give me a few more days to dig up -- " "I'm giving you just five minutes to dig down," the manager said, smiling pleasantly but firmly. "You ought to know that you can't pull a trick like that with a cash collector; these new models have automatic tabulators and detectors. The moment that robot came back to my office, it spat up the counterfeits. It couldn't stomach them. And neither can I." "Stomach?" asked Anson hopefully. "Are you ever troubled with gastric disturbances? Ulcers? Psychosomatic pain in the -- " The manager thrust out his jaw; "Look here, Anson, you're not a bad sort, really. It's just that you're confused. Why don't you clever up and look at the big picture? This witch-doctor racket of yours, it's atomized. Nobody's got any use for it today. You're like the guys who used to manufacture buggy whips; they sat around telling themselves that the automobile would never replace the horse, when any streetcleaner could see what was happening to business. "Why don't you admit you're licked? The gland-handers have taken over. Why, a man would have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist nowadays and you know there aren't any crazy people any more. So forget about all this. Take a course or something. You can be an End-Doc yourself. Then open up a real office and make yourself some big tokens." Anson shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "Not interested." The manager spread his hands. "All right. I gave you a chance. Now there's nothing left to do but call in the ejectors." i the door. Apparently he had been prepared for Anson's decision, because two ejectors were waiting. They rolled into the room and, without bothering to focus their beams on Anson, commenced to scoop books from the shelves and deposit them in their big open belly-hampers. "Wait!" Anson cried, but the ejector robots continued inexorably and alphabetically; there went Adler, Brill, Carmichael, Dunbar, Ellis, Freud, Gesell, Korney, Isaacs, Jung, Kardiner, Lindner, Moll -- "Darling, what's the matter?" Sue Porter was in the room. Then she was in his arms and Dr. Anson had a difficult time remembering what the matter was. The girl affected him that way. But a look at the manager's drugged smile served as a reminder. Anson's face reddened, due to a combination of embarrassment and lipstick smudges, as he told Sue what had happened. Sue laughed. "Well, if that's all it is, what are you so upset about?" Without waiting for a reply, she advanced upon the manager, her hand digging into her middle bra-cup. "Here's your tokens," she said. "Now call off the ejectors." The manager accepted the disks with a smile of pure euphoria, then strode over to the robots and punched buttons. The ejectors halted their labors between Reich and Stekel, then reversed operations. Quickly and efficiently, they replaced all the books on the shelves. In less than a minute, Anson faced the girl in privacy. "You shouldn't have done that," he said severely. "But, darling, I wanted to. After all, what are a few tokens more or less?" "A few tokens?" Anson scowled. "In the past year, I've borrowed over two thousand from you. This can't go on." "Of course not," the girl agreed. "That's what I've been telling you. Let's get a Permanent and then Daddy will give you a nice fat job and -- " "There you go again! How often must I warn you about the Elektra situation? This unnatural dependency on the Father Image is dangerous. If only you'd let me get you down on the couch -- " "Why, of course, darling!" "No, no!" Anson cried. "I want to analyze you!" "Not now," Sue answered. "We'll be late for dinner. Daddy expects you." "Damn dinner and damn Daddy, too," Anson said. But he took the girl's arm and left the office, contenting himself by slamming the door. "Aren't you going to put up that Doctor Will Return in Two Hours sign?" the girl asked, glancing back at the door. "No " Anson told her. "I'm not coming back in two hours. Or ever." Sue gave him a puzzled look, but her eyes were smiling. weren't smiling as he and Sue took off from the roof. He kept them closed, so that he didn't have to watch the launching robots, or note the 'copter's progress as it soared above the city. He didn't want to gaze down at the metallic tangle of conveyors moving between the factories or the stiffly striding figures which supervised their progress on the ramps and loading platforms. The air about them was filled with 'copters, homeward bound from offices and recreation areas, but no human figures moved in the streets. Ground-level was almost entirely mechanized, "What's the matter now?" Sue's voice made him look at her. Her eyes held genuine concern. "The sins of the fathers," Anson said. "Yours and mine." He watched the girl as she set the 'copter on auto-pilot for the journey across the river. "Of course it really wasn't my father's fault that he steered me into psychiatry. After all, it's been a family tradition for a hundred and fifty years. All my paternal ancestors were psychiatrists, with the exception of one or two renegade Behaviorists. When he encouraged my interest in the profession, I never stopped to question him. He trained me -- and I was the last student to take up the specialty at medical school The last, mind you! "I should have known then that it was useless. But he kept insisting this state of affairs couldn't last, that things were sure to change. 'Cheer up,' he used to tell me, whenever I got discouraged. 'The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction. And then he'd tell me about the good old days when he was a boy and the world was still full of fetichism and hebephrenia and pyromania and mixoscopic zoophilia. 'It will come again,' he kept telling me. 'Just you wait and see! We'll have frottage and nympholepsy and compulsive exhibitionism -- everything your little heart desires.' "Well, he was wrong. He died knowing that he had set me up in a dead-end profession. I'm an anachronism, like the factory worker or the farmer or the miner or the soldier. We don't have any need for them in our society any more; robots have replaced them all. And the End-Docs have replaced the psychiatrists and neuro-surgeons. With robots to ease the physical and economic burden and gland-handers to relieve mental tension, there's nothing left for me. The last psychiatrist should have disappeared along with the last advertising man. Come to think of it, they probably belong together. My father was wrong, Sue. I know that now. But most of the real blame belongs to your father." "Daddy?" she exclaimed. "How can you possibly blame him?" family has been pioneering in robotics almost as long as mine has worked in psychiatry. One of your ancestors took out the first basic patent. If it weren't for him and those endocrine shots, everything would still be normal -- lots of incest and scoptophilia, plenty of voyeurism for everybody -- " "Why, darling, what a thing to say! You know as well as I do what robots have done for the world. You said it yourself. We don't have any more manual or menial labor. There's no war, plenty of everything for everybody. And Daddy isn't stopping there." "I suppose not," Anson said bitterly. "What is the old devil dreaming up now?" Sue flushed. "You wouldn't talk like that if you knew just how hard he's been working. He and Mr. Mullet, the engineering chief. They're just about ready to bring out the new pilot models they've developed for space travel." "I've heard that one before. They've been announcing those models for ten years." "They keep running into bugs, I guess. But sooner or later, they'll find a way to handle things. Nothing is perfect, you know. Every once in a while, there's still some trouble with the more complicated models." "But they keep trying for perfection. Don't you see where all this leads to, Sue? Human beings will become obsolescent. First the workers, now the psychiatrists and other professions. But it won't end there. Inside of another generation or two, we won't need anyone any more. Your father, or somebody like him, will produce the ultimate robot -- the robot that's capable of building other robots and directing them. Come to think of it, he's already done the first job; your factories are self-perpetuating. All we need now is a robot that can fake the place of a few key figures like your father. Then that's the end of the human race. Oh, maybe they'll keep a few men and women around for pets, but that's all. And thank God I won't be here to see it." "So why worry?" Sue replied. "Enjoy yourself while you can. We'll apply for a Permanent and Daddy will give you a job like he promised me -- "Job? What kind of job?" "Oh, maybe he'll make you a vice-president or something. They don't have to do anything." "Fine! A wonderful future!" "I don't see anything wrong with it. You ought to consider yourself lucky." "Listen, Sue." He turned to her earnestly. "You just don't understand the way I feel. I've spent eighteen years of my life in school, six of it in training for my profession. That's all I know and I know it well. And what have I to show for it? I'm a psychiatrist who's never had a patient, a neuro-surgeon who's never performed anything but an experimental topectomy or lobotomy. That's my work, my life, and I want a chance to function. I don't intend to sit around on a fat sinecure, raising children whose only future is oblivion. I don't want a Permanent with you under those conditions." Permanent with me isn't good enough, is that it? I suppose you'd rather have a lot of repression and guilt complexes and all that other stuff you're always talking about." "It isn't that," Anson insisted. "I don't really want the world to revert to neurotic or psychotic behavior just .so I can have a practice. But damn it, I can't stand to see the way things are going. We've done away with stress and privation and tension and superstition and intolerance, and that's great. But we've also done away with ourselves in the process, We're getting to the point where we, as human beings, no longer have a function to perform. We're not needed The girl gave him an angry glance. "What you're trying to say is that you don't need me, is that it?" "I do need you. But not on these terms, I'm not going to lead a useless existence, or bring children into a world where they'll be useless. And if your father brings up that vice-president deal at dinner tonight, I'm going to tell him to take his job and -- " "Never mind!" Sue flipped the switch from auto-pilot back to manual and the 'copter turned, "You needn't bother about dinner. I'll take you back to your office now. You can put yourself down on the couch and do a little practicing on your own mind. You need it! Of all the stupid, pigheaded -- " The sound of the crash reached them even at flying level. Sue Porter broke off abruptly and glanced down at the river front below. Anson stared with her. "What was that?" he asked. "I don't know -- can't make it out from here." She spun the controls, guiding the 'copter down until it hovered over a scene of accelerating confusion. A huge loading barge was moored against one of the docks. Had been moored, rather; as they watched, it swung erratically into the current, then banged back against the pier. Huge piles of machinery, only partially lashed to the deck, now tumbled and broke free. Some of the cranes splashed into the water and others rolled across the flat surface of the barge. "Accident," Sue gasped. "The cable must have broken." metallic figures which dotted the deck and stood stolidly on the dock. "Look at the robots!" "What about them?" asked Sue. "Aren't they supposed to be doing something? That one with the antenna -- isn't it designed to send out a warning signal when something goes wrong?" "You're right. They beam Emergency in a case like this. The expediters should be out by now." "Some of them look as if they're paralyzed," Anson noted, observing a half dozen of the metallic figures aboard the barge. They were rigid, unmoving. Even as he watched, a round steel bell bowled across the deck. None of the robots moved -- the sphere struck them like a ball hitting the pins and hurtled them into the water. On the pier, the immobilized watchers gave no indication of reaction. "Paralyzed," Anson repeated. "Not that one!" Sue pointed excitedly as the copter hovered over the deck. Anson looked and found the cause of her consternation. A large, fully articulated robot with the humanoid face of a controller clattered along in a silvery blur of motion. From one of its four upper appendages dangled a broad-bladed axe. It bumped against an armless receptacle-type robot and the axe descended, striking the robot squarely in its loading compartment. There was a crash as the victim collapsed. And the controller robot sped on, striking at random, in a series of sped-up motions almost impossible to follow -- but not impossible to understand. "That's the answer!" said Anson. "It must have cut the cable with the axe. And attacked the others, to immobilize them. Come on, let's land this thing." "But we can't go down there! It's dangerous! Somebody will send out the alarm. The expediters will handle it -- " "Land!" Anson commanded. He began to rummage around in the rear compartment of the 'copter, "What are you looking for?" Sue asked as she maneuvered the machine to a clear space alongside a shed next to the dock. "The rope ladder." "But we won't need it. We're on the ground." " need it." He produced the tangled length and began to uncoil it. "You stay here," he said. "This is my job." "What are you going to do?" "Yes, what are you going to do? ' The deep voice came from the side of the 'copter. Anson and Sue looked up at the face of Eldon Porter. "Daddy! How did you get here?" "Alarm came through." ' scowled at the dock beyond, where the expediter robots were already mopping up with flamethrowers. "You've got no business here," Eldon Porter said harshly. "This area's off-limits until everything's under control." He turned to Anson. "And I'll have to ask you to forget everything you've seen here. We don't want word of accidents like these to leak out -- just get people needlessly upset." "Then this isn't the first time?" asked Anson. "Of course not. Mullet's had a lot of experience; he knows how to handle this." "Right, Chief." Anson recognized the thin, bespectacled engineer at Eldon Porter's side. "Every time we test out one of these advanced models, something goes haywire. Shocks overload, some damned thing. Only thing we can do is scrap it and try again. So you folks keep out of the way. We're going to corner it with the flame-throwers and -- " "No!" Anson opened the door and climbed out, dragging the long rope ladder behind him. "Where in hell do you think you're going?" demanded Eldon Porter. "I'm after that robot," Anson said. "Give me two of your men to hold the ends of this ladder. We can use it like a net and capture the thing without destroying it. That is, put it in restraint." "Restraint?" "Technical term we psychiatrists use." Anson smiled at the two men and then at the girl. "Don't worry," he said. "I know what I'm doing. I've got a case at last. Your robot is psychotic." "Psychotic?" grumbled Eldon Porter, watching the young man move away. "What's that mean?" "Nuts," said Sue sweetly. "A technical term.' Sue saw Dr. Howard Anson again. She waited anxiously outside in the corridor with her father until the young man emerged. He peeled off his gloves, smiling. "Well?" rumbled Eldon Porter, "Ask Mullet," Anson suggested. "He did it!" the thin engineer exulted. "It works, just like he said it would! Now we can use the technique whenever there's a breakdown. But I don't think we'll have any more. Not if we incorporate his suggestions in the new designs. We can use them on the new space pilot models, too." "Wonderful!" Eldon Porter said. He put his hand on Anson's shoulder. "We owe you a lot." "Mullet deserves the credit," Anson replied. "If not for him and his schematics, I'd never have made it. He worked with me night and day, feeding me the information. We correlated everything -- you know, I'd never realized how closely your engineers had followed the human motor-reaction patterns." Eldon Porter cleared his throat. "About that job," he began. "That vice-presidency -- " "Of course," Anson said. "I'll take it. There's going to be a lot of work to do. I want to train at least a dozen men to handle emergencies until the new models take over. I understand you've had plenty of cases like this in the past" "Right. And we've always ended up by junking the robots that went haywire. Hushed it up, of course, so people wouldn't worry. Now we're all set. We can duplicate the electronic patterns of the human brain without worrying about breakdowns due to speedup or overload. Why didn't we think of the psychiatric approach ourselves?" "Leave that to me," Anson said. And as the two men moved off, he made a psychiatric approach toward the girl. She finally stepped back out of his arms. "You owe me an explanation. What's the big idea? You're taking the job, after all!" "I've found I can be useful," Anson told her. "There is a place for my profession -- a big one. Human beings no longer go berserk, but robots do." "Is that what this is all about? Have you been psychoanalyzing that robot you caught?" psychoanalysis isn't suitable for robots. The trouble is purely mechanical. But the brain is a mechanism, too. The more I worked with Mullet, the more I learned about the similarities." other." "You cured that robot in there?" she asked incredulously. "That's right." Anson slipped out of his white gown. "It's as good as new, ready to go back on the job at once. Of course it will have slower, less intense reactions, but its judgment hasn't been impaired. Neuro-surgery did the trick. That's the answer, Sue. Once you open them up, you can see the cure's the same." "So that's why you were wearing a surgical gown," she said. "You were operating on that robot." Anson grinned triumphantly. "The robot was excited, in a state of hysteria. I merely applied my knowledge and skill to the problem." "But what kind of an operation?" "I opened up the skull and eased the pressure on the overload wires. There used to be a name for it, but now there's a new one." Anson took her back into his arms. "Darling, congratulate me! I've just successfully performed the first prefrontal robotomy!" Current New Books : Science  Fantasy Fiction m We carry a full line of all current American science fiction, as well as a large stock of scarce out-of-print books in this field. Back issues of science fiction magazines available. (Bet. #th  #th Streets) New York #, New York Open Monday Thru Saturday #:# A. M. to #:# P. M. (Phone GRa mercy #-#) ( Continued from page #) one can be revived by praise -- but my own curiosity has been momentarily stirred. Is science fiction literature, either with or without a capital "L"? I don't know, but let's see. The litmus commonly used to determine whether something is literature indicates its degree of success in depicting its era. I know that's a sticky sentence, but it's the kind of language critics hide behind. All it means is: did the author give you a sharp, vivid idea of what it was like to be alive in his time? Because science fiction deals mostly with the future and the past, alien planets, other dimensions and the like, it would seem to be out of bounds as literature, on the basis of this definition. How can you live vicariously in a writer's era if he's constantly going off somewhere else? Ah, but is he? The more he tells you of other times and  places, the more he reveals of his own time and place. You can see that for yourself in the Utopias of the past; they display in surgical detail the conditions they aimed to correct. Not too oddly, I guess, we in the present can't find much choice between those real and imaginary societies. The real ones were harsh and unjust, but so were the imaginary -- they were sweet setups for the authors and their friends, bum deals for everyone else. The gadgetry, too, tells us all we need to know of their science. Many of the ideas proved valid -- distant communication, flight, ground and undersea travel, transmutation of metals, improved food raising and storage, teaching methods, publishing, recording sound for posterity -- but they were unworkable because they were bound so immovably to the science of the day. In the same way, many of our ideas are valid, but if they come about as proposed, it will be a sheer accident. We also, of course, are limited by our knowledge. But it's the idea that counts, not the execution -- once the thought is expressed, the rest is up to the researchers. Science fiction does something that no other fiction can do. It provides a clear view of today, plus a sharp contrast between extrapolation and ultimate fact. A bonus like that should make science fiction LLiterature . Not all, by any means -- no field of any kind can produce only masterpieces -- but enough to meet the entrance examination. , You may fire when ready, Gridley, or whatever your name is this year. But before you do -- is your attack Literature? i for your information ing brightly over the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey shore and from this fact I derive for myself the right to reminisce a little. About thirtyfive years ago -- I was still in high school at the time -- there was an astronomical exhibition in the old Urania Observatory in Berlin, the same observatory where the planetoid Eros had been tracked down. One of the items on display was a model of the Moon, some sixteen inches in diameter, made in years of painstaking work by a retired teacher. A white-haired gentleman in his seventies was talking to him and when he left, somebody said to me: "This gentleman still knew Professor Hansen." This would have been more instructive by far if I had known at the time who Professor Hansen had been, but the name stuck in my mind and in due course I found out. Peter Andreas Hansen, to use his full name, had been the author of a theory concerning the Moon. It was easily the most spectacular idea about the Moon anybody has ever had and it is almost sad that he was wrong. If Hansen had been right, science fiction authors would have a very nearly inexhaustible theme to play with and the first exploratory round-the-Moon ships would really have something to watch for and photograph. to realize that the Moon is an independent solid body in space at about the time of Christ. What people thought before that time is only imperfectly known; my guess is that most of them managed to do without any specific ideas. Pliny the Elder mentioned in his famous Natural History that "the ancients" thought the Moon was a round silver shield in the sky. But there was disagreement about the nature of the spots that could be so clearly seen. One unknown philosopher declared that they were just dirt, atmospheric vapors which had condensed on the shiny silver. Another equally unknown philosopher held that no vapors had sullied the splendor of the heavenly disk, but that the spots one could see were reflections of the continents and seas of the Earth below. One might study the geography of the Earth by looking at the Moon. The really difficult problem was to find out where the observer himself was located in this reflection. Another early idea is embodied in a Hindu legend. According to it, the Moon was the round face of a lantern carried by a giganKepler's Second Law. The areas swept over the radius vector must be equal for equal times. In a circular orbit P, #  the angles would be equal, too. In an elliptical orbit (right), they are decidely unequal tic (and invisible) Heavenly Watchman. In the classical West, as I have mentioned, the Moon was recognized as a "second Earth" some two thousand years ago. It was understood that the Moon was considerably smaller than Earth, but this was taken to be the main or even the only dissimilarity. Like the Earth, it indubitably had continents and seas, mountains and valleys, rivers and forests. These ideas are still reflected in the astronoomical names for some of the lunar features. The largest of the dark blotches is still called Oceanus procell arum, the Ocean of Storms. Another feature is still spoken of as the Sinus iridum, the Rainbow Bay, and another section is labeled Palus nebularum , the Misty Swamp. When Galileo Galilei looked at the Moon, he still thought he saw seas and continents, but it needed only slight improvements of the early telescopes to realize that the "seas" could not be seas. And familiarity with the surface of the Moon quickly convinced the observer that he could always see everything there was to be seen, that his vision was never obscured by lunar cloud patches. The astronomers of the first half of the seventeenth century might not yet be able to make up their minds on whether there was an atmosphere on the Moon or not, but they could tell that it was a cloudless atmosphere. Later in the same century, the case was already decided. The Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christian Huyghens, who died in #, stated it categorically in his book Cosmotheoros : "on the Moon, there are no seas, no rivers, nor clouds, nor air and water." The same book, incidentally, contains the statement that the moons of Jupiter and of Saturn always turn the same side to their planets, just as our moon does with us. # OR A layman, Huyghens' verdiet may well have dispelled whatever interest he had had in the Moon before. As far as astronomers were concerned, their work was just beginning. The first and most obvious and incidentally rather tedious job was a complete mapping of the visible hemisphere. If any changes should take place on the lunar surface, one had to have a detailed map to recognize them. While they were at it, astronomers began to realize that our moon is extraordinary in size. The Earth-Moon system is almost a double planet, something we know to be theoretically possible, even though our own solar system happens not to offer an example. True, our moon is not the largest satellite in the Solar System. Its diameter of # miles is surpassed by three of the four large moons of Jupiter (namely by Io, Ganymede and Callisto), by Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, and by Triton, the larger of the two known moons of Neptune. But while Triton has a diameter of around # miles, the diameter of its planet is # miles. Earth's diameter is a little over # miles, so that the diameter of our moon is, in round  oM The extreme positions above and below the ecliptic the Moon can assume, permitting a look over its poles figures, one-quarter of the diameter of the planet to which it belongs. Still, the Earth-Moon system is not quite a double planet because the common center of gravity of the system is still inside the bod' of the Earth, about # miles below the surface. Although nobody ever experienced any trouble locating the Moon in the sky, provided it was visible at all, the calculation of the Moon's orbit happens to be a very difficult job. One might say that any perturbation of its movement that is possible at all actually does take place. For quite some time, astronomers looked for some unknown factor influencing the Moon's movement. And this is the point where Professor Peter Andreas Hansen entered the picture. Hansen had been born in Denmark exactly one hundred years after Huyghens died in Holland. Before he became an astronomer, he had been an instrument maker, but he became involved in an astronomical venture -- the measuring of a meridian. He was working at Altona Observatory then, but only a few years later, in #, he was offered the position as director of the Seeberg Observatory. Hansen's special interest was the computation of orbits and he was fascinated by the perturbations of orbits. Small wonder that he tackled the problem of the orbit of the Moon. While working at it, he thought one day that he had spotted that unknown factor other astronomers had been talking about. Much could be explained if one assumed that the Moon was not a perfect sphere. not perfect spheres. Everybody knows that the Earth has a rather marked equatorial bulge. And Jupiter's equatorial bulge is so enormous that it can be seen with even a small telescope. But this is not what Hansen meant when he said that the Moon was not a perfect sphere. He did not think of equatorial I The shape of the Moon according to Hansen's theory bulges and flattened poles. The idea was rather that the Moon was slightly egg-shaped, that it had two equatorial diameters, one when measured from rim to rim of the visible disk and another and larger one when measured from the center of the visible disk to the center of the hemisphere, which is invisible from Earth. Instead of having an equatorial bulge all around the equator, like a quickly rotating planet, the Moon, in Hansen's opinion, had a large equatorial bulge in only one spot, something like an enormous high plateau, large enough to accommodate whole mountain chains and deep valleys. The center of this enormous bulge  was supposed to coincide with the center of the visible disk of the Moon. In fact, all we could see from Earth was just this bulge, for the Moon's longer equatorial diameter was lined up with the common center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system. If this was true, it not only explained the observed peculiarities in the Moon's orbital motion; it also shed an entirely new light on everything else that had been observed. If the visible lunar disk was an enormous mountainous plateau, lifted to stratospheric heights, the observed absence of air and of water was only the logical result of such elevation. There was no observable air because the plateau was above the denser layers of the Moon's atmosphere. And there could be no water because it had run off the bulge It followed that no observation that had been made could be applied to the unknown hemisphere of the Moon. The most thorough knowledge of the Sahara Desert does not enable you to construct a picture of India or of Mexico just because they lie in the same latitudes. The Moon's other hemisphere probably did have an atmosphere and probably did have water. And where there are air and water, there are probably plants. And where there are plants, the presence of animals can be predicted with a fair chance of being right, because animal life is parasitic on plant life. Nor did you have to stop along this chain of reasoning at this point If there are animals, some of them will start preying on other animals after a while and become carnivorous. And some of them might become intelligent in time and represent what older poets had called the "selenites," the inhabitants of the Moon. with much respect because he was a deservedly famous astronomer. They listened with the greatest of interest, too, because it was a fascinating and novel idea. The next problem was to find out whether it was also true. Continued observation was still the means of doing it because nature had provided some help in the form of the phenomenon of libration. I feel that I should digress from the main theme at this point for a fuller explanation of this phenomenon which, as I know from correspondence I receive from readers, is not well understood by many. As is generally known, the Moon turns around its axis in the same number of days and hours as it needs to go around the Earth once. It is as if you had a man walking around you in a circle, looking rigidly in the direction in which he is walking. That way, he turns around his own axis once every time he circles you and all you can observe is his left profile, with his left ear roughly in the center of what you can see of his head. Well, if this is the case, what is libration and how does it enter into the picture? The proper answer is that it is caused by the fact that the Moon does not move around the Earth in a circle but on an elliptical orbit. To explain this, let us first see what the Moon does not do (Fig. #). Namely, it does not move around the Earth in a circle. Such a circular path is shown on the left in the diagram. If the Moon did move in a circular path, it would need precisely the same time to go from A to B as it would need to go from C to D. In reality, the orbit is elliptical, as shown with great exaggeration on the right in the diagram. Again it needs as much time to go from A to B as it does to go from C to D. The sections of the orbit traveled are of markedly different length; what counts is that the shaded areas formed by the lines from the center of the Moon to the common center of gravity are equal. Technically, such a line from center to center is known as the radius vector and Kepler's Second Law states that the radius vector must sweep over equal areas in equal times. When the Moon is closest to the Earth -- in perigee, as it is called -- it moves faster than when it is farthest away, or in apogee. Logically, then, since the areas covered by the radius vector have to be equal for equal times, the portions of the orbit traversed cannot be of equal length. The customary statement that the average velocity of the Moon is # miles per second is, of course, true, but the word "average" must not be overlooked. Actually, the Moon is faster than that in perigee and slower in apogee. Before going on to the next step of the explanation, let me give the actual figures: The farthest apogee possible is # miles; the nearest possible perigee is # miles, both measured from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. The surface-to-surface distance is, of course, # miles less. velocity of the Moon along its orbit is not uniform, we only have to realize that the rate of. rotation around its axis must be uniform to see what happens (Fig. #). Both at apogee and at perigee, the same spot on the Moon -- marked by a short line -- forms the center of the visible disk. But this spot is not in the center at intermediate positions. One might say that the rotation of the Moon lags somewhat behind its orbital motion for onehalf of the orbit and is somewhat ahead of it for the other half. And if the spot which is in the center at apogee, and perigee is off center in between, it is obvious that a portion of what was visible, say, in apogee disappears from view over the left rim, while another previously invisible portion comes into view over the right rim. This is part of what is called libration. The other part is caused by the fact that the Moon's orbit is slightly tilted as compared to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the ecliptic (Fig. #). Depending on the position at the moment, we can sometimes peep over the lunar north pole into the area beyond, and sometimes over the lunar south pole. The overall result is that, in the course of a number of years, we can see and map a total of # per cent of the lunar surface. Only #I per cent of it is completely unknown and will remain so until the films taken by the first circumlunar rocket come out of the developer. But a total of # per cent was enough to disprove Hansen's intriguing idea. If he had been right, we should have caught an occasional glimpse of the "lowlands," especially when looking over the poles. Moreover, at periods of maximum libration, the unusual shape of the Moon should be apparent to some degree to direct vision. sive research -- much of it carried out by Simon Newcomb in Washington -- all astronomers were agreed that Hansen's assumption did not conform with , reality. Since the whole episode had taken place at a time when science fiction novels were few and far between, Professor Hansen's egg-shaped Moon was not exploited literarily. With just one exception, that is, hut this exception was written in Polish. It appeared decades after the idea had been abandoned in science, namely, half a century ago. Its title was On Silvery Plains and the name of its author was Jerczy von Zulawsky. In the story, two or three ships, carrying cabins that can be used like automobiles, land near the center of the visible hemisphere of the Moon and then start the long trek "downhill" to the jungle of the lowlands. Near the end of his life, the leader of the expedition goes back in one of the automobile cabins to the place of the original landing where a mortar has been left behind to shoot the expedition's report back to Earth. The novel, of course, was supposed to be this report. Since I last read the book in about #, I may have forgotten some details, but it seems to me that Hansen's name was not mentioned in it. Jerczy von Zulawsky probably never saw the original papers but received his inspiration from a second or third hand popular account in a general magazine or newspaper supplement. Well, how does the other side of the Moon look? The answer is: probably not very different from the side we can see from Earth, What appears at the rim when the liforation is favorable are the same types of formations so well known to astronomers. There are a number of craters, some of them quite large, a mountain range or two, and the edges of some mare plains. Interestingly enough, we know the approximate locations of at least three craters that are deeply hidden in the inaccessible # I per cent of the lunar surface. These craters have systems of "rays" as we know them from Tycho and Copernicus on the visible hemisphere. On "our" side, all "ray" systems originate from large craters and the "rays" themselves are great circle lines. It is comparatively unimportant in this connection that we don't know the nature of the "rays" and have no idea of why some craters have them and others do not What is important is that the "rays" from beyond the rim indicate the existence and locations of several large craters. Some British astronomers have postulated that the unknown hemisphere may differ in degree from the known hemisphere, even though they must be fundamentally alike. They think that the unknown hemisphere contains a lesser number of craters and consists mostly of large mare plains. This reasoning is built, however, upon a foundation of hypotheses which, at the moment, are beyond either proof or disproof. The only suggestion one can make here is to have patience. In about # years, if not earlier, we'll be able to look at films and see what the other side actually looks like. A S A result of the discussion of the "transits" of Venus across the Sun's disk, I received a number of letters from readers who wanted to know a lot of things I had failed to mention since, after all, my article did not concern transits specifically. The questions ranged all the way from requests for a table of Venus transits to inquiries about rules for transits of Mercury. Because Mercury moves around the Sun in a much shorter time than Venus, a Mercury transit is a much more frequent phenomenon than a Venus transit. It can occur only in May and in November and the number of years between one transit and the next follows the sequence # -- # -- # -- # -- # -- #, a total of # years. The cycle then repeats. Table I shows the transits which took place or will take place during the #th and #th centuries, with an additional entry for the next century because the last transit of the #th century will be a mere grazing of the Sun's limb -- almost a near miss, so to speak. As regards Venus transits, they are listed on Table II and because they are so rare, we can cover a time interval of several centuries. Taking further strides in the medical sciences for granted, I hope that at least half May Nov. Nov. Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. Nov. May May Nov. Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. Nov. May Nov. Nov. May  i of my readers will be able to see the next one scheduled and half of those the one after the next. Year and Date: Duration: #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m . #, June # h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June #I h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # h m #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # short #, June # h m #, Dec. # h m #, Dec. # h m #, June # very short #, June # h m I l ' The Category Inventors  I There was security for all in this well-run  world  -- hut what happened to a man who tried i to get ahead could never happen to a robot! Illustrated I -- c  co down that brought matters to a head. Not that they hadn't been gathering for months. Ever since, in fact, he had been put on reserve, .Marge seemed to have been conducting a campaign -- a subtle, insistent, completely wiiety campaign. First it was: "It's not your fault, honey, the world just doesn't understand creative artists any more." He had said modestly, "Oh, a bassoon player isn't creative, peaches; he's executant." "Anyway," she retorted firmly, "he's an artist " It seemed only as an afterthought that she added, "That means he's got intelligence and imagination. And that means he's got a head start when it comes to finding a new job -- doesn't it, honey?" And her big brown eyes had looked up at him so confidently, so guilelessly. "Sure, sure, a head start," he had said, feeling his heart droop. Being able to play the bassoon didn't seem much of a qualification for doing any other job at all. "Of course," she said a few days later, "you could get a job in a jazz band, Gilbert, couldn't you? It's all the rage again." She added hastily, "Oh, I know you don't like the idea, but -- " He explained to her patiently that it wasn't a matter of not liking the idea. It was simply that he couldrit . Playing jazz wasn't quite the same thing as playing serious music, which was why robots could be taught to do the one, but not -- so far, anyway -- the other. "Well, Phil Tomkys made the switch, didn't he?" she said. What Phil Tomkys could do and what he could do, he'd told her tersely, were two entirely different things. Jazz playing was a certain specialized ability -- he made it sound on a level with safe-breaking or parricide -- and you either had it or you hadn't -- now did she see? pose then?" she suggested some time later. She couldn't have touched him on a rawer spot. But she went on, blithely unwitting : "How about those tunes you're always humming to yourself? They sound pretty good to me and -- r" "They're probably someone else's," he told her curtly. They were someone else's, he knew. Ten years of orchestra playing had left no room in his head for original music. He'd learned that at great cost, because he had tried his hand once at a quartet for bassoon, celeste, recorder and guitar -- and even that unusual combination hadn't been proof against his subconscious; it was almost finished before he'd realized that it was all bits and pieces from obscure compositions he'd played in the past. The memory of that first and last attempt made him feel guilty now. That was one of the nastiest things about being on reserve -- it made you think yourself deficient in not having abilities that there was no earthly reason you should have, anyway. But he managed to keep a hold on his temper. And the next time. And  by a mighty effort, the next. But the tension mounted and mounted -- until the robot broke down one fine spring morning. And then it stopped mounting. It exploded. "Right in the middle of getting breakfast, too," Marge wailed, surveying the inert mass of metal that lay by the kitchen table. Gilbert had just got up. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "I'll ring Center," he said with an unurgent yawn. "But the children will be late for school," she said. "Colin! Michael!" she called to the bathroom. "Do hurry." "It's not much use their hurrying, is it, if there's no breakfast ready for them?" Gilbert observed helpfully. "What do you think I'm trying to do?" she snapped, juggling wildly with unfamiliar implements. "I've only got two pairs of hands." He roared at that and struck a pose. "Step closer, folks! See the only woman in captivity with four arms." She stamped her foot in flustered rage. "You know what I meant. A fine father you are, standing there trying to be funny when your children are late for school. As if the poor mites haven't had enough to put up with lately." His laughter stopped abruptly. "And what exactly do you mean by that?" "What I say." She jabbed desperately at food tubes. He glared at her. "Well, just what have the 'poor mites' had to put up with?" "Oh, I'm too busy to argue with you. Anyway, you wouldn't understand." "Oh, wouldn't I? Perhaps I understand only too well. 'Lately' wouldn't be... just three months and thirteen days?" "If you like," she muttered, not looking at him. "Just as I thought !" he exploded. "You blame me. Ever since they put me on reserve you've been getting at me. That's a fine encouragement for a man, I must say. If you think -- " vanced a step toward her. He failed to notice the recumbent robot until he fell headlong over it He lay there, rubbing a scuffed shin and swearing colorfully. "If you're going to use foul language," his wife said icily, "you might at least keep your voice down. You know what sharp ears the children have." He climbed to his feet, glaring. "Oh, so now I'm a corrupter of my own children, is that it? Well, let me tell you that -- " But at that moment a terrific squawking rose from the Henomat, the gadget that synthesised fresh eggs from raw meal. His wife jerked and jabbed frantically at the kitchen control panel. She only succeeded in releasing several faucets of assorted juices and ketchups. As they splashed and oozed over the floor she made one last despairing assault on the control panel. The faucets continued to run. But a blaring of jazz music joined the chaos now. She threw up her hands in surrender, sank into a chair and buried her head on the table-top. Gilbert, standing there in a deafened daze, felt a sudden pang of remorse. Perhaps it was his fault; perhaps he should have foreseen the day , when a metal being with a crystalline brain would take over his job, as robots had taken over so many other people's by now. Contrite he dashed to the control panel and fumbled at it. Somehow his manipulations did the trick. The faucets gurgled to a stop, the music snapped off and the Henomat died in a flurry of feathery whimpers. Gilbert's self-esteem recovered slightly. He looked expectantly at his wife, but she did not lift her head. She only sniffed a dismal and muffled sniff. There's gratitude! he thought angrily. Well, it wasn't his fault. His gaze fell upon the abject heap of metal on the floor. It was kind. Suddenly all the frustration of the last few months focused on the robot and ignited in anger. He lashed out at it with his foot.     The foot was still slipper-shod and it hurt. But he was too enraged to care and the action, although it made no impression on the robot, brought gratifying relief to his feelings. Marge had raised her head and was regarding him witheringly. "Well, now I've seen everything," she said. "A grown man actually kicking a poor defenseless robot." "When it's down, too," he said caustically. He flared up again, "It seems you've got more sympathy for a robot than you have for your husband. It's a fine way to -- " He was interrupted by a small human avalanche tumbling into the room. "Morning, Mom," said the boys in chorus. "Morning, Pop," Was there , thought Gilbert, a pause , just a slight one, between the two greetings? And a dying fall to the second? "Hey, the robot's passed out," said Colin. "Was that what all the noise was, Pop?" Michael asked. Gilbert glowered. Then he sighed and dragged the robot out of the kitchen by its feet. He dumped it in a bedroom close! and dialed Robocenter. He lingered a while before he went back to the kitchen. He saw that the kids had left -- without much breakfast, obviously -- and he realized then that that was why he had lingered -- to avoid facing them. So it was getting to that point now. II dressed and feeling desperate when the door buzzer sounded. Not from any desire to be helpful -- that he certainly didn't feel -- but just to be able to hear the sound of his own voice again, anybody s voice, he said, "That'll be the mechanic from Center. I'll open it." But it wasn't the mechanic. "Hello, son," came a plummy voice. Another one, gentle and fluting, cooed from behind a mountainous fluorotex package, "Surprise!" It was George and Phoebe, Marge's parents. Gilbert winced. This was all he needed. "Had a sudden call from party H.Q. " boomed George. "And we took the early rocket in so we could have an hour with you," Phoebe explained, peeking birdlike from behind her burden. "Ah -- er, come in, then," said Gilbert. "Anything wrong, son?" said George, drawing Gilbert to one side as Phoebe went to find Marge. "Wrong? Why, no, nothing's wrong." He laughed unconvincingly. "It's just that I was expecting someone else. The mechanic from Robocenter." "That robot of yours broken down? Too bad. The poor kid's up to her neck in it, eh? I'll just say hello to her." He came back quickly. "I'll say she is! Still, Mother's pitching in." He winked as sounds of furious activity came from the kitchen. "She's just the same at home. Leaves so little for our robot to do, he's thinking of applying for a pension." He chuckled hugely. Then, noticing that ( Gilbert wasn't as much as smiling, he stopped abruptly and turned on a manner that Gilbert knew well by now -- the earnest, the man-to-man. "Well, how are things, my boy?" "You mean, have I got a job yet?" " Heavens , no! I know it's not that easy. We all know it takes time. What I meant was, how are the ideas working out?" " What ideas?" George shook his head. "As bad as that, eh? Still, it's the darkest hour before the dawn. You mark my words, I've seen it happen so many times. Just when a man thinks there isn't a single idea left that someone else hasn't thought of, a real big one comes down out of the blue and hits him right between the -- " The door buzzer cut across George's eloquence. Gilbert ducked out in relief. chanic, clad in the gray coveralls of Roboservice. But he wasn't alone. "Yes?" said Gilbert to the other three who were about to follow the mechanic in. The three were also in gray, but wore bolero and slacks, street style. They were young, cropped of head, their faces scrubbed and intense. "We're therapists," explained the foremost and tallest one. "Therapists?" Gilbert echoed. "But nobody here's sick." "Hah! That's a good one," said the foremost of the three, turning his head to share his amusement with his colleagues. He turned back to Gilbert. "We are, of course, robotherapists." "Huh?" was all that Gilbert could manage. "I am a robopsychiatrist," the other amplified. " am a robosynaptic stimulator," said the second. "And I ," said the third with quiet pride, "am a robomorale coordinator." Just like the three bears, Gilbert thought. Of all the twaddle! But he stood aside for them to enter. "Where is the robot?" said the first therapist. Gilbert, deciding he disliked' the man's manner, addressed himself pointedly to the mechanic. "In the bedroom closet, second on the left. I dumped it there after it broke down. It cluttered up the kitchen too much," "Right," said the mechanic amiably and went through.  "Too bad," said the leading therapist, shaking his head. "It would have been better if you had left it where it fell. The failure attitude often gives a valuable pointer to the cause of breakdown." He beckoned to his colleagues and they followed in the wake of the mechanic. Gilbert looked after them for a long moment before returning to the living room. "W T ell, now I've seen everything," he told his father-in-law. "They've actually got psychiatrists for robots." But George was quite unsurprised. "Why, didn't you know? They've had them for six months or more. One of the brightest new fields in years. The teloids were full of it." "Oh, I must have missed it," Gilbert murmured, realization dawning of just how out of touch he'd been with the world at large; how absorbed in his world of music playing that seemed now as unreal and faraway as an age in history.  earnestly. "That's the way things are now. Branching out, keeping one step ahead of the robot all the time. That's what, if you don't mind my saying so, you haven't realized yet. A man's got to be adaptable. Now, take old Tom Angel, he was a schoolmate of mine. He was a top-class tailor and thought his job was safe as houses. But it wasn't. "So, after he'd been on reserve a time he happens to remember the birthday cards people used to send each other when we were kids. So what does Tom do? He ups and registers himself as the first of a new generation of greeting-card verse writers. And this is the best part, he'd never written a line of verse in his life . But he was first in, so he got charter rights. Get the idea? Once you get in the progressive mood, you're all set." Gilbert reflected dully that brushing the dust off a defunct custom was a funny kind of progress, but he tried to look interested, knowing that George was trying to be helpful in his fashion, just as Marge's mother was when she brought parcels of things a reservist's valid-for-aweek scrip wouldn't stretch for. "You see, Gil," George went on, "this isn't something new. Something like it has been happening for hundreds of years now, with machines displacing people. It's the scale of this that's new, because the robots threaten everybody's job." "Except politicians' and robopsychiatrists'," Gilbert couldn't resist saying. George looked pained. "Don't say that, Gil. And don't think politics aren't getting as competitive as everything else. Imagine, they even sent me to school -- me at my time of life -- to get what they called historical perspective . I kicked like mad, but I must admit it did me a power of good. It makes a man see why there've been so many changes since robots were invented. You know -- " he wagged a finger at Gilbert -- "there's been more progress in the past twenty years than in the whole hundred before that. From space travel to -- well, to self-coiling spaghetti." "I can't see much progress in reserve in the process." "Ah, but ten years ago there the challenge of the robot has been taken up. Because it's not only a challenge, it's an opportunity. This is the Age of Opportunity. We can all be thankful for one thing, at least, that we're not living in the last century." George shuddered. "Then, if a man was out of a job he had to find one!" "He had to? I wish I had the chance ." "Ah, but that's the point. It wasn't always so easy. Nowadays, a man doesn't have to fight for a job. All he has to do is invent one." bit in the book," said Gilbert. "You know? The one with pictures that they give you in exchange for your job?"  "Oh, sorry," George said a bit huffily. "I was only trying to help." He rallied. "Anyway, you have got a father-in-law in the right party, that's one consolation. The party that stands up for the reservist's rights Gilbert lifted an inward eye to heaven. "Yes, sir," George continued. "If the Technoes had their way, a reservist's life wouldn't be worth a light. But we fought for his rights all along the line. It was us Populists, for instance, who saw that every family -- workers and reservists alike -- had a robot of its own by inalien able rights ." Gilbert had had as much as he could stand. "To hell with your inalienable rights!" he exploded. "Both parties have got it nicely carved up between them. All either of you care about is making sure that things go on just the way they are. As for the precious benefits of having a robot, let me tell you I'd be perfectly happy if there weren't any robots at all -- especially the ones that sit on their chromium-plated backsides in chromium-plated orchestras!" George looked shocked now. "I -- I -- you don't know what you're saying," he burbled. "Why, you're talking like a -- like a Luddite." "Oh, I am, am I? Well, let me -- " Gilbert stopped in mid-air and said suspiciously, "What's a Luddite?" "Luddites were the people who broke up the first power machines two hundred years ago" It was an item he'd picked up in the course on Historical Perspective. "And if that's the way you're -- " "Hold it! A wild light came into Gilbert's eye. He had just thought of something. Why , of course ! Why not? "What is it, son?" said George, anxious now at the look on his son-in-law's face. But Gilbert didn't hear him. With a whoop he bounded for the door, threw it back and collided with the leading therapist who was waiting on the other side, knuckles raised. "Well -- " gasped the therapist, staggering. "Sorry," said Gilbert cheerfully, trying to push past. "But there's something I have to tell you," said the therapist, recovering balance and breath with an effort. Behind him his two colleagues closed ranks. Gilbert halted. "Well, what is it? Make it brief. I'm a busy man." He laughed delightedly at the novelty of the words.  a queer look. "It's no laughing matter, I'm afraid. We just gave your robot a tapeauto in there and the results were sad, sad. We shall have to take it back for immediate reorientation. You  see -- " he shook his head gravely -- "it had developed a severe guilt complex." "Guilt complex?" Gilbert echoed blankly. "That's right. They're sensitive, you know. And if they once get the idea that their owners aren't: happy, that starts it. They think it's their fault, they wonder what mistakes they could have made. They brood on it and then they do make mistakes. Oh, little ones, the kind you or I wouldn't notice at all, but a robot does because it knows it's not supposed to make mistakes. That only makes it feel more guilty and so it goes until -- well, it just gives up in despair." Despite his urgency to be off, Gilbert found himself listening with fascinated incredulity. The therapist was achingly  earnest. "Of course, we'll know better next time, won't we? Center will send a replacement up. Just let the new one know it's making you happy, that's all, and everything will be fine. Just a smile, a grateful word now and then, eh?" For a moment Gilbert looked at the therapist with the expression of a child seeing its first elephant. Then he burst out laughing. "Of course I'll let it know I'm happy! I am happy. Who wouldn't be happy, living in this Age of Opportunity?" He noticed George's startled face peering from the living room and he laughed loudly again. "Now, if you don't mind -- " The therapists looked blankly at each other and fell away as Gilbert made for the door.  Ill carrying its usual scattered population of reservists, waiting in the slender hope of getting in on a hot tip. Gilbert walked past them, straight to the first cubicle. Inside was a counter, behind it a robot attendant "I want to file a category," Gilbert announced. "Certainly, sir," said the robot, producing a form and an envelope from beneath the counter. The form required particulars of name, date of birth, reserve number. Gilbert entered these in impatiently, then arrived at the section headed: Nature of Category. Boldly he filled in neo-luddite, He scratched his chin thoughtfully with the end of his stylus and added. A lawful opposition to the robot economy . He smiled to himself. There was a job no robot would ever be able to take over. Under the heading Overall Classification of Category he entered political. He placed the form flat in the envelope as instructed and passed it with a flourish to the robot. The robot franked it across the flap and fed it into a machine by its side. In a few seconds, the envelope popped out again and the robot handed it back to Gilbert. Gilbert felt a sudden disquiet. "Well?" he asked. "Your application will take a short time to check," the robot explained. "This machine sends a copy to the registry below. They carry a complete file there of all categories." "Oh, I see" said Gilbert, relieved. While he waited he scanned the posters stuck up around the walls of the cubicle. Most bore the faces of successful category filers: inventors of such jobs as hydroponics stabilizer, cybernetic diviner, traumographist. What in creation was a traumographist? Gilbert wondered. A shock writer? One who drew graphs of shock responses? In what? Men? Atoms? Gilbert smiled. The sound of such specialized and enigmatic vocations no longer made him feel hopelessly ill-equipped in this complex world. Now he was going to meet the world on its own terms and -- chine and a slip of pasteboard popped up. The robot took it, scanned it, then lifted its crystalline eyes to Gilbert. "I'm sorry, sir, but your application has been rejected." Gilbert stood dazed, unbelieving. The robot went on, "The Category Office extends its sincere regrets and trusts that this will not deter you from making further applications. The Category Office -- Gilbert interrupted what was obviously a set speech. He stretched across the counter and grabbed the robot by one articulated arm. "Look here, you -- you metallic mouthpiece. That application is legitimate. Nobody's got any right to reject it. You can't just stand there and -- " "Please." The unalterable pitch of the robot's voice only pointed its obvious embarrassment. Conditioned, like all robots, never to be hostile to humans, it could only make pathetic token efforts to release itself. Gilbert sighed and let go, feeling ashamed of himself. "Anyway," he persisted, "I want to see somebody about this." "An overseer is already on his way," the robot said. He must, unnoticed, have pressed an alarm signal, Gilbert realized. The overseer came in briskly; a round, cheerful individual. "Ah, Mr. Gilbert Parry. About your application, is it? Well, I'm very sorry. We dislike having to turn down anybody's application, you understand. Naturally, we -- " "Naturally nothing," Gilbert said brusquely. "That category I put forward is perfectly admissible." "But, Mr. Parry "Don't interrupt. I've got a right to be heard. You may think you have all this sewn up nice and tidily. That's what the two political parties think, but they're wrong. Both of them support the system as it is. That's not enough." "But, Mr. Parry, you can't -- " "I can. What's more, I'll set out and prove, if I have to, that even from the standpoint of the status quo an opposition is socially necessary. Now, don't try to tell me I can't do that" The manager smiled. "But the need of an opposition is recognized. I was only trying to tell you that you can't register the category because it was registered years ago." "What!" "Yes, the Humans Only movement, as it's called, is a recognized parry, though it's never managed to win an election or attract many adherents. Most people are only too grateful for the benefits robots have brought. But the movement does have State backing: funds, offices, the same proportion of salaried officials to members as the two big parties." Gilbert was already drifting miserably to the door. "Of course," the overseer added helpfully, "you could take up voluntary work for the party. There's always the chance you might be able to step into a salaried vacancy in a few years." "Thanks, it doesn't matter," Gilbert mumbled, and left the cubicle. A group of waiting hope,  fuls took one look at his face and melted away. There was only one thing to do. Start all over again at some other line, study and study until he was as proficient at it as he was at playing the bassoon. But what line? And how could he be sure that that wouldn't be taken over by robots before he became skilled at it? Still, there . was thiug for but to try. Even if it came to nothing, Marge wouldn't be able to get at him -- not fairly, anyway. More than that, he wouldn't have to put up with his own gnawing sense of failure. Noticing a library, he turned into it. He asked the assistant -- a robot even here in a center of s  learning -- for guidance. It brought him a well-thumbed handbook. Leading in the categories it listed were those of the old occupations that were too closely linked to flesh and blood and spirit to be easily yielded up to the robot -- medicine, law, the creative arts. Well, medicine was out. He was no weakling, but he couldn't stand the thought of coldly opening up bodies. Law? He couldn't even argue successfully with his own wife, let alone with a judge and jury. And as for the creative arts -- you had to have a vocation, hadn't you? No, it would have to be something totally new -- one of the bewilderingly complex fields like... what was it on that poster?... traumography? On the impulse, he looked it up. Yes, it was here, all right. But he couldn't, after minutes of perplexed reading and re-reading, even make out what field it was in, the language describing it was so specialized. Hell! it was even worse than he had feared. He riffled through the book dejectedly. Then suddenly a displayed ad caught his eye. So there were ways! Why, of course, there had to be. The systern had been going for years; it was bound to happen that people would emerge with just this flair. Alert young men, their minds not canalized in the narrow bounds of one profession, but at ease in this complicated world, able to see the need for a new job here, a new branch there. But how would you pay for such a service? Reservists' scrip was unnegotiable. Still, he had a few hundred credits of real money salted away for a possible emergency. It was worth a try. its grandiloquent name, was a small, dingy building downtown, all of thirty years old by the look of it. Still, Gilbert told himself, it's unwise to pre-judge the goods by the package. But the sudden fracas was more disturbing. He had to jump back hastily as the narrow swingdoors flew open and two burly individuals burst through, carrying a struggling, spitting burden. Through flailing arms and legs, Gilbert glimpsed an old gnomelike face, pink with frustration. Once on the sidewalk the two huskies lowered the man to his feet with exaggerated solicitude, gave him one meaningful look and , retreated into the building. One of them turned to throw out a battered brief case at the old man's feet. "I'll get a writ served on you, you scum!" their victim bellowed, shaking his fist. His stature was as gnomelike as his face, but his voice was surprisingly resonant. "A man's got his rights, you know. riu -- ni -- " The little man subsided, as if realizing the futility of hurling his protests at blank doors. With a spluttering sigh he picked up his case, gave an outraged jerk to his bolero, then hobbled off down the street. Gilbert looked after him for a moment, feeling a twinge of sympathy for the poor old chap. He only hoped the incident had nothing to do with the C. P. Jones Bureau, that that wasn't their normal way of handling clients. Quelling the thought, he went in. "Room fifty-three?" Gilbert asked the robot enquiry clerk. "The C. P. Jones Bureau." "I'm sorry, sir, but Mr. Jones no longer operates here." "Oh, but his bureau?" "Mr. Jones himself was the bureau." "Well, has he started up anywhere else, do you know?" "He left no information on that point, sir." and left. So that was that. And that left what? Traumography? He shuddered at the thought. As he hesitated on the sidewalk, he thought of the chucking-out incident. ' Now, there was a job. They daren't build a man-handling robot. He flexed his biceps thoughtfully -- The thought died miserably. You probably had to have your name put down at birth for a trade as rudimentary as that. He sighed and wandered off. Passing a bar, he went in as automatically as if it were a habit, which it never had been. This was an open bar, not one of those bleak reservists' places where you had to produce a ration card. Here you paid money. He went to a booth and ordered a double Scotch from the robot waiter. It wasn't until he turned to reach in his pocket to pay that Gilbert noticed who was sitting opposite him. It was the little old man he had seen thrown out of the Universe Building. He was looking mournfully at his drink as if it were a clouded crystal ball. ' The sight moved Gilbert to pity. Here was he feeling sorry for himself. At least he had youth. On an impulse he lifted his glass and said, "Better times." The old man raised his head slowly. "Huh!" he said. Then he managed a wan smile and said, "Thank you," and drained his glass. Gilbert drained his own and, to his questioning glance, the old man said, "Same as you." Gilbert ordered up. "I saw what happened to you back there," Gilbert ventured sympathetically. "Did you?" The old man sighed. "The robbers! Throwing a man out after all these years." He looked so miserable that Gilbert instantly regretted having mentioned the incident. "It's a wrench when you've worked in the same building for nearly ten years," the old man went on. "Oh, you worked there?" "I had my own office. The C. P. Jones Bureau." "You -- C. P. Jones?" Gilbert's conception of alert young men underwent violent revision. "Why, you heard of me?" The old boy's face lit up eagerly. "Heard of you? I was coming to see if you could fix me up." "You were? Ah, well, perhaps it was best I wasn't there. It saved you from being disappointed." Gilbert was puzzled. "I was disappointed. But how do you mean?"  V gory in stock." He paused, then with the air of one relieved to get a confession off his chest, added, "As a matter of fact, son, I never did manage to invent a single category -- except the one." a Oh," said Gilbert, his sympathy beginning to be tinged with suspicion. "What was the one?" "Why, the category of category inventor, of course." The old man sniffed. "Perhaps I wasn't very good at it, but I did have charter rights. Seems that nothing's sacred any longer, not even charter rights. They revised my category a week ago and canceled my license. Mind you, I didn't take it sitting down. But what can you do?" He took a despondent sip at his drink. "They've got you all ways." Gilbert felt a stirring of resentment at such ingratitude. "It seems to me," he said roughly, "you had a pretty good run for your money. I should think your clients have got the grievance." The old man looked up indignantly. "Why? They didn't do too badly. I always worked hard for them. Was it my fault the ideas didn't come? And it didn't cost them anything. My fee was only payable out of salary if and when I delivered." "Oh," said Gilbert. The old man hadn't been such a shark, then. The old man chuckled now. "You're right, though, about having a good run. I suppose, all in all, I did." "But how come you got away with it all that time?" Mr. Jones chuckled again. "Well, it was the Rehabilitation Office that paid me my fixed salary. Whereas it was the Labor Office that I was supposed to pay any fees into, less my commission, of course. Once a year the Accounting Office -- that's another department again -- sent around a robot auditor to check the book. They just never got around to checking up with each other, I suppose -- until now." He fell back into gloom. "Now I've got to invent another job." Gilbert examined the other's gnomelike face, the gnarled hands about his glass. "But I should have thought you'd be past... I mean, well -- " "You mean, why do I worry about another job at my age, is that it? Because my wife is not my age. She's only -- well, she says she's twenty-nine -- anyway, she wouldn't take kindly to the notion of my being on reserve." "Ah, these wives," Gilbert agreed. "It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have them to reckon with." "Wouldn't it?" said Mr. Jones, almost fiercely. "For me, I'm glad the way it is. If it wasn't for Babs -- that's my wife -- I'd have gone to pieces. I used to be a trapeze artist in the circus. That's how I met Babs; she was a dancer in a sideshow. I was the oldest trapeze man in the game, but even I had to pack it in some day. Got too shaky. If it hadn't ; been for Babs, I'd have gone to seed, been in my urn by now as like as not. Babs has got her faults, but she's a damn sight better encouragement to a man than any of these noble, shoulderto-shoulder darnes. They want the feeling of power over a man. Babs only wants money and the things that money buys and then she's happy. And so am I." beside such rough-and-ready philosophy. "Mm-mm, maybe you're right. Have another drink." "No, it's my turn," the old man insisted. And, as the drinks arrived, "But I'm talking about myself too much. How is it with you?" Gilbert told him and they had another drink. And they swapped yarns about their ex-professions. And they had another drink. And then Mr. Jones suggested they make a move to a real bar. And that started a pub-crawl such as Gilbert in his former sober life had never imagined possible. They talked, they joked. Even the way the world was treating them both assumed, under the influence of more and more drink, the aspect of one great joke. They laughed themselves silly over traumography and what it could be, their interpretations ranging from the inane to the obscene. That started them off on inventing mock categories, a game that lasted them through two bars and got them thrown out of a third when the categories became too outrageous. In one bar, in a lull, they ordered beer, and it had a melancholy effect on the little man. He said they were selfish, that everyone was selfish. They ought to feel sorry, not for themselves, but for the robots. Revealing unexpected depths to his character, he proceeded to recite lugubriously: How am I to face the odds Of Man's bedevilment and God's, I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made? Luckily that phase didn't last. Gilbert quickly ordered whiskey again and the resilient little man was back in form in a flash. And when Gilbert said, "What say we start a union for robots, then?" Mr. Jones threw himself into the idea with rare zest. They wondered if that might not be the salvation for both of them, until they reflected that a robot's minimum week could only be a # hours -- work being their one function -- and who'd have any interest in opposing that? The evening became more and more wild. Gilbert was never sure afterward whether the little man really did give a demonstration of the finer points of trapeze work from a chandelier. He would recall that they drank a great deal of liquor between them and that somewhere in the early hours he fell into a robocab. After that all was darkness . , . IV Sun through his eyelids that woke him. He recoiled with a groan. He heard shutters pulled, and was devoutly grateful for the dimness. A figure moved near him. "Is that you, Marge honey?" he whimpered. "No, sir, this is your new robot." It was holding out a glass of something that fizzed. Gilbert took it eagerly and downed it at a gulp. "A-ah f that's better." "Will there be anything else, sir?" "No, thanks." He was seized with a sudden fear. "Yes. Yes, there is. My wife " "Mrs. Parry asked me to tell her as soon as you awoke," the robot said. Gilbert breathed out in relief. For a moment he had had the thought that Marge might have left him. He couldn't have blamed her if she had -- not 'after his behavior yesterday -- then last night on top of it. He was overcome with sudden contrition. "It's all right," he said to the robot. "I'll teil her myself. I'm getting up." And somehow he managed it, though he wouldn't have without the assistance of the robot. "Thank you," Gilbert told it Then, feeling the need to do penance all around, he added somewhat sheepishly, "You have made me very happy." "Thank you, sir," said the robot, inevitably without inflection, but when it repeated the words Gilbert felt that it really meant them. His penitential mood considerably sustained, he went in to Marge. And when he saw her, looking her prettiest, he felt touched to the quick. He began to mumble words of abject apology. But she cut him short with a kiss. "Don't apologize, honey. It was my fault. If I hadn't nagged you, you wouldn't have acted like that " She guided him to a chair. "Here." She poured him a cup of black coffee. "What would you like for breakfast?" "I've got it here, thanks," he said weakly. She nodded sympathetically. understanding, Gilbert fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. With the pack, a slip of paper came out. He looked at it. It read simply: Umbrological Parallax Tracer , Now what the heck did that mean? It was in his own handwriting, too. Then a dim memory crawled back from the confusion of the night before. He stared at the words, repeating them over and over to himself between sips of coffee. Then it suddenly dawned on him. "Why, that's it!" he exclaimed -- and winced. Despite having served him up with an answer, his head still couldn't stand that amount of sudden excitement. "What's the matter, sweet?" Marge crooned. "Here, have a cerebri n." He tottered to his feet. "Oh, don't be so noble and shoulderto-shoulder." He grinned quickly and kissed her. "Don't pay any attention to me, honey, I've just seen the light." He drained his coffee hurriedly. "I've got something urgent to attend to." He kissed her again and dashed off. He chose a different cubicle this time, just to be on the safe side, and made his application with a practiced, if shaky, hand. This time an official came unsummoned. The manager himself, what was more, for that's how he introduced himself to Gilbert. He was holding the copy of the application in his hand. "I'm glad to meet you, Mr. i Parry," he said. "ZJmbrological Parallax T racer. Ah, yes, most interesting. What exactly is that?" With a calmness that surprised even himself, Gilbert answered, "Well, it involves ascertaining the degrees of parallax that occur in umbrological investigations. It's not easy to explain in a few words, but -- " "Of course," said the manager understanding. "I thought it would probably be too complex for me to grasp. But you failed to enter the overall classification. I can make it on the photostat for you." He looked at Gilbert inquiringly, his stylus poised. For a moment Gilbert floundered, cursing himself for having overlook the point. "Er -- well, that's not easy to describe, either. You see -- "  "I understand," said the manager soothingly. "Shall we say Synthesis , then? That covers a multitude of categories these days." "Oh -- ah, yes, yes, it's definitely a form of synthesis." filled in the space. "There's just one more point. The West Town office has already admitted an application this morning for, ah -- he consulted a slip of paper in his hand -- "an Umbrological Parallax Co-relator. It just came through on the tape. Now, you'd have to prove, if called upon, that the two functions are distinct and separate." Gilbert doubted the testimony of his own ears. Then there really was something called Umbrology -- in which parallaxes occurred? And then -- "That wouldn't have been a Mr. C. P. Jones, would it?" "Why, yes. You know each other, then?" "We should have met this morning," lied Gilbert stoutly, "to file our categories together. One of us must have got the offices mixed. You see, umbrology has been our life work, in our spare hours, that is. But a parallax tracer is entirely different from a parallax co-relator. In fact, they're two entirely opposed functions. Opposed, but mutually dependent, if you understand. You see, a parallax can only be co-related in dialectical opposition and conjunction to and with its being traced." Gilbert was beginning to enjoy himself. "To put it more simply -- " "That's perfectly all right," said the manager. "I'll see that the distinction is made clear. Your charter will be mailed to you in a few days. But if you're working in the same field, hadn't you better share facilities with your friend, Mr. Jones? Provisionally, anyway?" "Why, yes," said Gilbert. "It would save a lot of delay in our work." "Indeed. Well, Mr. Jones will already have been granted offices. Hold on, I'll get the address from West Town." building. When Gilbert entered, Mr. Jones was arranging some handsome-looking furniture. The little man straightened and his eyes lit up. "Hello, my boy. So you found me, then." Gilbert grinned. "You old rogue. You nearly queered the pitch for me." The old man chuckled. "Well, all's fair. And somehow you didn't get around to giving me your address last night. And I didn't know you'd get the self-same idea. I do remember that we laughed a lot over it and said it was one of the best categories we thought up. Of the printable ones, that is." He chuckled again. "Anyway, I did alter the end to give you a loophole." Gilbert clapped the little man on the back. "That was more than I thought to do, I must admit." Gilbert looked around the office and felt a sudden sharp pang of conscience. "Of course we're cheating, aren't we?" "Cheating?" said the little man, feigning indignation very well, Gilbert thought. "I'm not. We may be anticipating a trifle, but that's a different thing altogether. Fve already looked up Umbrology for a start. It's all right, there isn't such a word -- not yet. As near as I can make out, it would be a science of shadows. Now all we have to do is find the parallaxes." "But -- you're not serious ?" said Gilbert. "Serious? Of course I'm serious. Can we help it if we haven't caught up with our category yet? Who was the great man, the Indian squatting on his haunches where he was born or Columbus setting out to find a place that no one knew existed? We've just got to have the same kind of faith as Columbus had. You've got brains. As for me, I always found it easier to earn my living on a trapeze. But I'm no slouch. My brain's been very well preserved from all those years of swinging about a hundred feet up with nothing to do. Oh, I may not have been any great shakes in my last category, but that wasn't specific enough. In Umbrology, I think we've got something a man can really get his teeth into." "But they'll find out," said Gilbert, weakening. "Courage, my lad, courage. The world's so complicated these days, everyone's such a specialist, that no one can be sure what's actual fact yet and what isn't. What was that one you came out with last night -- traumographr ist? Well, how many traumographists are there in the world? Say there's only one, which is more than possible. Then only he knows what he's doing. Anyway, if they step in before we've gotten anywhere, then we'll just start in some other line. The scope's enormous." Why, Gilbert told himself, he really does mean it! What was more, such confidence was catching. It was striking, too, the way the little old man made no kind of reservation on account of his years. He talked as if he were immortal, his capacity boundless. Standing there now, his head cocked to one side, he did look like some ageless troll, indefatigable and of infinite resource. "Anyway," said Mr. Jones. "I'm not letting grass grow under my feet. Here -- " his grin nearly bisected his face --  "don't just stand there. Our robot hasn't arrived yet. Give me a hand with this filing cabinet. We're going to need it." A free sample copy of the current issue of "Fantasy-Times' I , the Isaac Asimov. Doubleday  Co., Inc., # T his is a tour-de-force by one of science fiction's best-known authors and, as far as I know, his first venture into time travel. It's a truly fascinating opus, but I don't envy poor Asimov the tremendous job of working out the paradoxes inherent in any time story, particularly the one he chose. I doubt that there is one reasoning being who hasn't been tempted by the thought of being able to go back and alter one's past in order to avoid mistakes or tragedy. This is the basis of Asimov's story, though on a cosmic scale. A society of so-called Eternals has the power to alter the mainstream of time to eliminate unwanted features from their position in Eternity, a sort of pseudo-time that exists simultaneously from the beginning of time travel in the #th Century through the Hidden Century, up to about the #th Century. By means of the device of phsio-time, time in Eternity is concurrent. I must admit that the concepts became a bit bewildering now and then, but Asimov didn't stoop to take the easy way out to tell his story and that calls for literary courage. The hero is a Technician, the class of Eternals whose duty it is to compute the Minimum Necessary Change required to alter satisfactorily a given time sequence and to put the change into effect at the proper instant of Their social status is comparable to that of hangman among their associates because of the widespread dislocation and annihilation of eras that their changes entail. Do you realize what a monkeywrench a guy like that could be if he developed a grudge? Asimov does. by H. Chandler Elliot. Gnome Press , Inc., #  that this book, like olives, is to be either liked or disliked, nothing in between. It revolves about a #th Century so-called Freeman, one of the mindless masses, who raises himself to the level of the ruling Hierarchy by dint of his dissatisfaction with Status Quo. civilized survivors, the Polynesians, assuming the Brown Man's Burden, have organized a world society based on freedom from want, the duties of the Freeman multitudes being reproduction and food production only, until every possible acre is tilled and progress stultified at story time. Our hero single-handedly overturns the whole shootin' match, which is all right by me, but somehow he can't stick to straightforward action and deliberation. Scattered throughout are enough parenthetical asides to make a script of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The blurb says this is a beautifully written book. True enough, but Chandler has overdone a good thing. Rinehart  Co., Inc., # meant this to be a sequel to his The Time Masters, even though it's a follow-up in time and has two characters common to each. I'm sure he could have done his story just as well without Gilbert and Shirley Nash, but I must confess that I sort of go for them myself. Especially Shirley. Telepathy with a kiss -- wow ! Who cares if it's a one-way communication? And as for Gilbert... have you ever heard of Gilgamesh, the guy that legend says has lived for ten thousand years? Got it? The story itself concerns a series of Time Bombs , in the literal sense, blowing the bejabbers out of several high-ranking members of the fanatical Sons of America, or Ben's Boys, as they call themselves, Lt. Danforth of police spots an unusual pattern in the explosions, and even though canned as a scapegoat, continues his investigations on his own, with the blessings and unofficial aid of Mr. Ramsey, the telepathity Police. Tucker has a beautiful little twist in store at the end that might catch you as flat-footed as it did me. drew North Gnome Press, Inc. # ing dust jackets before I dig into the meat of the stories, I was pretty well scared by the lurid recap. Funny thing, in resume the story sounds as amateurishly blud-and-thunderish as the blurb come-on hints, but in actuality, though unpretentious space opera, it makes good adventure reading for a couple of carefree hours. The crew of a Trader, a spacetub comparable to tramp steamers, bids for and wins the rights to a D-class planet. In bidding, though, the crew has pooled all their money and have none left for equipment and supplies. A wealthy amateur archeologist puts up the money and brings his scientific helpers along. When it turns out that he isn't really what he seems... I told you it sounds pretty bad. The "Sargasso" part of the title alludes to the Earthly Sea of Lost Ships, intimating that the planet appears to be a graveyard of spaceships. That, plus the fact that it contains the first identifiable artifacts of the Forerunners, an unknown race that had space travel way back when, makes the purchased planet a pretty valuable hunk of real estate. The ending was a bit on the abrupt side, but since the cover says "A Dane Thorsen-Solar Queen Adventure," simple deduction should prove this to be the first of a series. Elementary, my dear Flotsam. Philip Wilding. Philosophical Library. # land for an American firm. It does not specify whether the author likewise is British, but that would be my guess, even though the Earth locale is New Mexico and Old Mexico and the protagonists American. Regardless of nationality, Wilding deserves plaudits for perfecting a particularly annoying device of "putting everything" in "quotes" Having a "naturally" sensitive "stomach," I got "dizzy" from all this "stop-and-go" writing. The story concerns the preparations for and the actual flight to Venus, hewing close to this line while tossing out at every opportunity hints of sub-plots and sub-sub-plots that never materialize. Considering what the author has done with his chosen plot, maybe it would have been better -- but that's his business. After the Venusians have guided the Earth ship in to planetfall, the most interesting part, to say very little, occurs. Anyway, I must admit I never met more beautiful characters -- not a single plain, ordinary-looking one, even among the Venusians, without whose "help" this "book" would never have been "written." Dutton  Co., Inc., # T HE author has quite a background in aviation, according to the jacket. This is apparent in the story also. However, in spite of what should have been a basically tense plot, all the author's dramatic and tragic situations fall flat. But his inventiveness is commendable, particularly the symbiosis between the Martian and the oxygen-producing algae that live like hair on his body. The Martian has come to Earth seeking new and hardier strains of algae and lichens, since the native varieties are dying out for some obscure reason. His own mysteriously propelled ship has been destroyed on landing and he must return with Earth's first Martian expedition. Of course, since the Earth ship is destroyed on landing and return must be made by Martian ship, turnabout is fair play, isn't it? Well, of course it is. This is the third author this month who has figured out a way to get my nanny. He does it by liberally larding (and I Do mean "Lard") his story with italics. All I can "say" is, (wait) till next "month!"  shelf   Check your dictionary if you think "trap" is a simple and uncomplicated word    o r read this for another definition! of assistance . The situation is potentially dangerous , so come at once. It shows how right you were, Samish, old friend . I should never have trusted a T err an. They are a sly, ignorant, irresponsible race , just as you have always pointed out . Nor are they as stupid as they seem . I am beginning to believe that the slenderness of the Illustrated tentacle is not the only criterion of intelligence. What a sorry mess, Samish ! And the plan seemed so foolproof... Ed Dailey saw a gleam of metal outside his cabin door, but he was still too sleepy to investigate. He had awakened shortly after daybreak and tiptoed outside for a glimpse at the weather. It was unpromising. There had been a heavy rain during the night and water dripped from every leaf and branch of the surrounding forest. His station wagon had a drowned look and the dirt road leading up the mountainside was a foot-thick in mud. His friend Thurston came to the door in pajamas, his round face flushed with sleep and Buddha like in its placidity. "It always rains on the first day of a vacation," Thurston stated. "Rule of nature." "Might be a good day for trout," Dailey said. "ft might. But it is a better day for building a roaring fire in the fireplace and drinking hot buttered rum." I  OR eleven years, they had been taking a short autumn vacation together, but for different reasons. Dailey had a romantic love for equipment. The clerks in New York's fancier sports shops hung expensive parkas on his high, stooped shoulders, parkas such as one would wear on the trail of the Abominable Snowman in the fastnesses of Tibet. They sold him ingenious little stoves that would burn through a hurricane and wickedly curved knives of the best Swedish steel. Dailey loved to feel a lean canteen against his side and a bluedsteel rifle over his shoulder. But the canteen usually contained rum and the rifle was used against nothing deadlier than tin cans. For in spite of his dreams, Dailey was a friendly man, with no malice toward bird or beast. His friend Thurston was overweight and short of wind, and burdened himself only with the lightest of fly rods and the smallest of shotguns. By the second week, he usually managed to steer the hunt to Lake Placid, to the cocktail lounges that were his true environment There, with an incredible knowledge of spoor and lair, he placidly hunted the pretty vacationing girls instead of the brown bear, the black bear, or the mountain deer. This mild exercise was more than adequate for two soft and successful businessmen on the wrong side of forty, and they returned to the city tanned and refreshed, with a new lease on life and a renewed tolerance for their wives. "Rum it is," Dailey said. "What's that?" He had noticed the gleam of metal near the cabin. Thurston walked over and poked the object with his foot. "Odd-looking thing." Dailey parted the grass and saw an open framework box about four feet square, constructed of metal strips, and hinged on top. Written boldly on one of the strips was the single "Where did you buy that? Thurston asked. "I didn't" Dailey found a plastic tag attached to one of the metal strips. He pulled it loose and read: "Dear Friend, this is a new and revolutionary design in to the general public, we are giving you this model absolutely free! You will find it a unique and valuable device for the capture of small game, provided you follow precisely the directions on the other side. Good luck and good hunting!" "If this isn't the strangest thing," Dailey said. "Do you suppose it was left during the night?" "Who cares?" Thurston shrugged. "My stomach is rumbling. Let's make breakfast." "Aren't you interested in this?" "Not particularly. It's just another gadget. You've got a hundred like it. That bear trap from Abercrombie and Fitch. The jaguar horn from Battler's. The crocodile lure from -- " "I've never seen a trap like this," Dailey mused. "Pretty clever advertising, just to leave it here." "They'll bill you for it eventually," Thurston said cynically. "I'm going to make breakfast. You'll wash the dishes." turned the tag over and read the other side. and anchor it to any convenient Press Button One on the base. seconds and press Button Two. press Button Three to deactivclosed at all times except when the principle of Osmotic Section "What won't they think of next?" Dailey said admiringly. "Breakfast is ready," Thurston called. "First help me set the trap." Thurston, dressed now in Bermuda shorts and a loud sport shirt, came out and peered at the trap dubiously. "Do you really think we should fool with it?" "Of course. Maybe we can catch a fox." "What on Earth would we do with a fox?" Thurston demanded. "Turn it loose," Dailey said. "The fun is in the catching. Here, help me lift it." The trap was surprisingly heavy. Together they dragged it fifty yards from the cabin and tied the chain to a young pine tree. Dailey pushed the first button and the trap glowed faintly. Thurston backed away anxiously. After five seconds, Dailey pressed the second button. The forest dripped and squirrels chattered in the treetops and the long grass rustled faintly. The trap lay quietly beside the tree, its open metal framework glowing faintly. "Come in," Thurston said. "The eggs are undoubtedly cold." Dailey followed him back to the cabin, glancing over his shoulder at the trap. It lay in the forest, silent and waiting. Samish, where are you? My need is becoming increasingly urgent. Unbelievable as it will sound, my little planetoid is being pulled apart before my very eyes! You are my oldest friend, Samish , the companion of my youth, the best man at my mating, and a friend of Fregl as well . 'm counting on you. Don't delay too long. I have already beamed you the beginning of my story. The Terrans accepted my trap as a trap, nothing more. And they began to use it at once, with no thought to the possible consequences. I had counted on this. The fantastic curiosity of the Terr an species is well known . During this period, my wife was crawling gaily around the planetoid, redecorating our hutch and enjoying the change from city life. Everything was going well... explained in pedantic detail why a trap could not function unless it had an opening to admit the prey. Dailey smiled and spoke of osmotic section. Thurston insisted that there was no such thing. When the dishes were washed and dried, they walked over the wet, springy grass to the trap. "Look!" Dailey shouted. Something was in the trap, something about the size of a rabbit, but colored a bright green. Its eyes were extended on stalks and it clicked lobsterlike claws at them. "No more rum before breakfast," Thurston said. "Starting tomorrow. Hand me the canteen." Dailey gave it to him and Thurston poured down a generous double shot. Then he looked at the trapped creature again and went, "Brr!" "I think it's a new species," Dailey said. "New species of nightmare. Can't we just go to Lake Placid and forget about it?" "No, of course not. I've never seen anything like this in my zoology books. It could be completely unknown to science. What will we keep it in?" "Keep it in?" "Well, certainly. It can't stay in the trap. We'll have to build a cage and then find out what it eats." Thurston's face lost some of its habitual serenity. "Now look here, Ed. I'm not sharing my vacation with anything like that. It's probably poisonous. I'm sure it has dirty habits." He took a deep breath and continued. "There's something unnatural about that trap. It's -- inhuman!" Dailey grinned. "I'm sure they said that about Ford's first car and Edison's incandescent lamp. This trap is just another example of American progress and knowhow." "I'm all for progress," Thurston stated firmly, "but in other directions. Can't we just -- " He looked at his friend's face and stopped talking. Dailey had an expression that Cortez might have worn as he approached the summit of a peak in Darien. "Yes," Dailey said after a while. "I think so." "What?" "Tell you later. First let's build a cage and set the trap again." Thurston groaned, but followed him. W HY haven't you come yet , Samish? Don't you appreciate the seriousness of my situation? Haven't I made it clear how much depends upon you? Think of your old friend! Think of the lustrous-skinned Fregl , for whose sake I got into this mess . Communicate with me, at least , The Terrans used the trap, which , of course , was not a trap at all, but a matter transmitter . I had the other end concealed on the planetoid, and fed into it three small animals which I found in the garden . The Terrans removed them from the transmitter each time -- for what purpose, I couldn't guess. But a Terran will keep anything. After the third beast passed through and had not been returned, I knew that all was in readiness. So I prepared for the fourth and final sending, the all-important one, for which all else was mere preparation. They were standing in the low shed attached to their cabin. Thurston looked with distaste at the three cages made of heavy mosquito netting. Inside each cage was a creature. "Ugh," Thurston said. "They smell." In the first cage was the original capture, the stalk-eyed, lobster-clawed beast. Next came a s bird with three sets of scaly wings. Finally there was something that looked like a snake, except that it had a head at each end. Within the cages were bowls of milk, plates of minced meat, vegetables, grasses, bark -- all untouched. "They just won't eat anything," Dailey said. "Obviously they're sick," Thurston told him. "Probably germ carriers. Can't we get rid of them, Ed?" Dailey looked squarely at his friend. "Tom, have you ever desired fame?" "What?" "Fame. The knowledge that your name will go down through the ages." "I am a businessman," Thurston said. "I never considered the possibility." "Never?" T hurston smiled foolishly. "Well, what man hasn't? What did you have in mind?" "These creatures," Dailey said, "are unique. We will present them to a museum " "Ah?" Thurston queried interestedly. "The Dailey-Thurston exhibit of creatures hitherto unknown." "They might name the species after us," Thurston said. "After all, we discovered them." "Of course they would! Our names would go down with Livingstone, Audubon and Teddy Roosevelt." "Hmm." Thurston thought deeply. "I suppose the Museum of Natural History would be the place. I'm sure they'd arrange an exhibit -- " . "I wasn't thinking merely in terms of an exhibit," Dailey said. "I was thinking more of a wing -- the Dailey-Thurston Wing" Thurston looked at his friend in amazement. There were depths to Dailey that he had never imagined. "But, Ed, we have only three of them. We can't equip a wing with three exhibits." "There must be more where these came from. Let's examine the trap." This time the trap contained a creature almost three feet tall, with a small green head and a forked tail. It had at least a dozen thick cilia, all of them waving furiously. "The rest were quiet," Thurston said apprehensively. "Maybe this one is dangerous." "We will handle it with nets," Dailey replied decisively. "And then I want to get in touch with the museum." After considerable work, they transferred the thing to a cage. The trap was reset and Dailey sent the following wire to the Museum of Natural History: Then, at Thurston's insistence, he wired several impeccable character references to the museum, so they wouldn't think he was a crank. That afternoon, Dailey explained his theory to Thurston. There was, he felt sure, a primeval pocket isolated in this section of the Adirondacks. Within it were creatures which had survived from prehistoric times. They had never been captured because, due to their great antiquity, they had acquired a high degree of experience and caution. But the trap -- operating on the new principle of osmotic section -- had proved to be beyond their experience. "The Adirondacks have been pretty well explored," Thurston objected. "Not well enough, apparently," Dailey said, with irrefutable logic. Later, they returned to the trap. It was empty. Samish. Kindly step up the volume . Or, better still, get here in person. Whafs the use of beaming me, in the spot I'm in? The situation is steadily becoming more and more desperate . What, Samish? The rest of the story? It's obvious enough. After three animals had passed through the transmitter, I knew I was ready. Now was the time to tell my wife . Accordingly , I asked her to crawl into the garden with me . She was quite pleased . "Tell me, my dear," she said , "has something been bothering you of late ?" "Um  " said L " Have I displeased you?" she asked . "I Vo, sweetheart" I said. " You have tried your best, but it just isn't good enough. I am going to take a new mate" She stood motionless, her cilia swaying in confusion. Then she exclaimed , t( Fregl!" "Yes" I told her , " the glorious Fregl has consented to share my hutch." " But you forget we were mated for life." " I know. A pity you insisted on that formality " And with one clever shove , I pushed her into the matter transmitter. Samish , you should have seen her expression! Her cilia writhed, she screamed, and was gone . I was free at last! A little nauseous, but free! Free to mate with the splendid Fregl! Now you can appreciate the full perfection of the scheme. It was necessary to secure the Ter rans cooperation, since a matter transmitter must be manipulated from both ends . I had disguised it as a trap , because Terrans will believe anything . And as my master stroke, I sent them my wife. Let them try to live with her! I never could! Foolproof, absolutely foolproof. My wife's body would never turn up, because the acquisitive Terrans keep what they get . No one could ever prove anything . And then, Samish , then it happened... T HE cabin's air of rustic serenity was gone. Tire tracks crossed and recrossed the muddy road. The grounds were littered with flash bulbs, empty cigarette packs, candy wrappers, pencil stubs and bits of paper. But now, after a hectic few hours, everyone was gone. Only a sour taste remained. Dailey and Thurston stood beside the empty trap, staring hopelessly at it. "What do you suppose is wrong with the damned thing?" Dailey asked, giving the trap a frustrated kick. "Maybe there's nothing else to capture," Thurston suggested. "There has to be! Why would it take four completely alien beasts and then no more?" He knelt beside the trap and said bitter ly, "Those stupid museum people! And those reporters!" "In a way," Thurston said cautiously, "you can't blame them -- " "Can't I? Accusing me of a hoax! Did you hear them, Tom? They asked me how I performed the skin grafts !" "It's too bad the animals were all dead by the time the museum people got here," Thurston said. "That did look suspicious." "The idiotic creatures wouldn't eat. Was that my fault? And those newspaper people... Really, you would think the metropolitan newspapers would hire more intelligent reporters." "You shouldn't have promised to capture more animals," Thurston said. "It was when the trap didn't produce that they suspected a hoax." "Of course I promised! How should I guess the trap would stop with that fourth capture? And why did they laugh when I told them about the osmotic section system of capture?" "They never heard of it," Thurston answered wearily. "No one ever heard of it. Let's go to Lake Placid and forget the whole thing," "No! This thing must work again. It must!" Dailey primed and activated the trap and stared at it for several seconds. Then he opened the hinged top. Dailey stuck his hand into the trap and let out a scream. "My hand! It's gone!" He leaped backward. "No, it's not," Thurston assured him. Dailey examined both hands, rubbed them together and insisted, "My hand disappeared inside that trap." "Now, now," Thurston said soothingly. "A little rest in Lake Placid will do you a world of good -- " Dailey stood over the trap and pushed in his hand. It disappeared. Fie reacher farther in and watched his arm vanish up to the shoulder. He looked at Thurston with a smile of triumph. "Now I see how it works," he said. "Those animals didn't come from the Adirondacks at all!" "Where did they come from?" "From wherever my hand is! Want more, do they? Call me a liar? I'll show them!" "Ed! Don't do it! You don't know what -- " But Dailey had already stepped feet-first into the trap. His feet disappeared. Slowly he lowered his body until only his head was visible. "Wish me luck," he said. "Ed!" Dailey held his nose and plunged out of sight mediately, it will be too late! I must stop beaming you. The enormous Terr an has completely ransacked my little planetoid , He has shoved everything , living or dead , through the transmitter . My home is in ruins . And now he is tearing down my hutch! Samish, this monster means to capture me as a specimen! There's no time to lose! Samish, what can be keeping you? You, my oldest Mend... What, Samish? What are you saying? You can't mean it! Not you and Fregl! Reconsider, old Mend! Remember our Mendship! # fantasy and science-fiction books and back-issue mags at # to # under what they've ever cost you before, here or anywhere, while they last! List free. Shannon RdL, #, Box #F Verona, Penna. Bodyguard When overwhelming danger is constantly present , of course a man is entitled to have a bodyguard . Tfte annoyance was that he had to do it himself...  and his body would not cooperate exceptionally handsome, and he knew it. So did the light-haired girl at his side, and so did the nondescript man in the gray suit who was watching them from a booth in the corner. Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was almost ordinary-looking. As for the extraterrestrials -- it was a free bar -- they were merely amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably hideous. Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a short man standing next to the pair -- young, as most men and women were in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though not death -- but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century. The drink he had been raising to his lips splashed all over his clothing; the glass shattered at his feet. Now he was not only a rather ugly little man, but also a rather ridiculous one -- or at least he felt he was, which was what mattered. "Sorry, colleague," Gabe said lazily. "All my fault. You must let me buy you a replacement" He gestured to the bartender. "Another of the same for my fellow-man here." The ugly man dabbed futilely at his dripping trousers with a cloth hastily supplied by the management. "You must allow me to pay your deanery bill," Gabe said, taking out his wallet and extracting several credit notes without seeming to look at them. "Here, have yourself a new suit on me." You could use one was implied. And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance, was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's handsome face.  was laid upon his arm. "Don't do that," the nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. "You wouldn't want to go to jail because of him." The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces now ranged against him -- including his own belated prudence -- were too strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to smash back, and now it was too late for that. Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. "So, it's you again?" The man in the gray suit smiled. "Who else in any world would stand up for you?" "I should think you'd have given up by now. Not that I mind having you around, of course," Gabriel added too quickly. "You do come in useful at times, you know." "So you don't mind having me around?" The nondescript man smiled again. "Then what are you running from, if not me? You can't be running from yourself -- you lost yourself a while back, remember?" Gabe ran a hand through his thick blond hair. "Come on, have a drink with me, fellow-man, and let's let bygones be bygones. I owe you something -- I admit that. Maybe we can even work this thing out." "I drank with you once too often," the nondescript man said. "And things worked out fine, didn't they? For you." His eyes studied the other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness  at the lips, and were not pleased with what they saw. "Watch yourself, colleague," he warned as he left "Soon you might not be worth the saving." "Who was that, Gabe?" the girl asked. He shrugged. "I never saw him before in my life." Of course, knowing him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he happened to have been telling the truth. extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions, reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to the letter combination bodyguard, he went out into the street. If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for years. The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. "Where to, fellow-man?" the driver asked. "I'm new in the parish," the other man replied and let it hang there. "Oh?... Females?... Narcophagi?... Thrill-mills?" But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head. "Games?" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was wanted by then. "Dice?... Roulette?... Farjeen?" "Is there a good zarquil game in town?" The driver moved so he could T# see the face of the man behind him in the teleview. A very ordinary face. "Look, colleague, why don't you commit suicide? It's cleaner and quicker." "I can't contact your attitude," the passenger said with a thin smile. "Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it happens, there's a... well, thei e's no experience to match it at a thrill-mill." He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy. "Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?" The driver spat out of the window. "If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen... anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em." "But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a commission, wouldn't it?" the other man asked coolly. "Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though." "I have sufficient funds. I also have a gun." "You're the dictator," the driver agreed sullenly. II in early fall. Gabe Lockard was in no condition to drive the helicar. However, he was stubborn. "Let me take the controls, honey," the light-haired girl urged, but he shook his handsome head. "Show you I can do something 'sides look pretty," he said thickly, referring to an earlier and not amicable conversation they had held, and of which she still bore the reminder on one thickly made-up cheek. Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist. To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames. Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him speculatively. "My guardian angel," he mumbled -- shock had sobered him a little, but not enough. He sat up. "Guess Fm not hurt or you'd have thrown me back in." "And that's no joke," the fat man agreed. The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall that he had not been alone. "How about Helen? She on course?" "Seems to be," the fat man said. "You all right, miss?" he asked, glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern. "Mrs.," Gabriel corrected. "Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel Lockard," he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl. "Pretty bauble, isn't she?" "I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard," the fat man said, looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. "I hope you'll be worthy of the name." The light given off by the flaming car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too. Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them. There were no public illuminators this far out -- even in town the lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and beginning to slide downhill... Gabe gave a short laugh, for no reason that she could see. she had encountered the fat man before, which was, of course, absurd. She had an excellent memory for faces and his was not included in her gallery. The girl pulled her thin jacket closer about her chilly body. "Aren't you going to introduce your -- your friend to me, Gabe?" "I don't know who he is," Gabe said almost merrily, "except that he's no friend of mine. Do you have a name, stranger?" "Of course I have a name." The fat man extracted an identification card from his wallet and read it. "Says here I'm Dominic Bianchi, and Dominic Bianchi is a retail milgot dealer... , Only he isn't a retail milgot dealer any more; the poor fellow went bankrupt a couple of weeks ago, and now he isn't ,... anything " "You saved our lives," the girl said. "I'd like to give you some token of my -- of our appreciation." Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only casually, as a byproduct of some larger scheme, and her appreciation held little gratitude. The fat man shook his head without rancor. "I have plenty of money, thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard... Come' he addressed her husband, "if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the future! Sometimes' he added musingly, "I almost wish you would let something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?" Gabriel shivered. "I'll be careful' he vowed. "I promise -- I'll be careful." When he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night, the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification. Perhaps -- and this was the most likely hypothesis -- he just didn't care. Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course -- so much so that there were many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of "crimes against nature." Actually the phrase was more appropriate to zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly applied. And this was one crime -- for it was crime in law as well as nature -- in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator; otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse. lously expensive; it had to be to make it profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs. Which was why they came to Terra to make profits -- there has never been big money in musical chairs as such. When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent -- as they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the law -- they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons could kill the Vinzz... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet. The taxi driver took the fat man to one of the rather seedy locales in which the zarquil games were usually found, for the Vinzz attempted to conduct their operations with as much unobtrusiveness as was possible. But the front door swung open on an interior that lacked the opulence of the usual Vinoz set-up; it was downright shabby, the dim olive light hinting of squalor rather than forbidden pleasures. That was the trouble in these smaller towns -- you ran greater risks of getting involved in games where the players had not been carefully screened. The Vinoz games were usually clean, because that paid off better, but, when profits were lacking, the Vinzz were capable of sliding off into darkside practices. Naturally the small-town houses were more likely to have trouble in making ends meet, because everybody in the parish knew everybody else far too well. The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in coming to such desolate, off-trail places -- hoping that eventually disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed too logical for the man he was haunting. However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. "One?" the small green creature in the slightly frayed robe asked. "One," the fat man answered. Ill " down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile patterns. The stranger, a thin young I# man with delicate, angular features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. "Only weighted out," he muttered, "hell be all right. Whatever possessed you two to come out to a place like this?" "I really think Gabriel must be possessed..." the girl said, mostly to herself. "I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse. It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?" "It does indeed," the stranger agreed, coughing a little. It was growing colder and, on this world, the cities had no domes to protect them from the climate, because it was Earth and the air was breathable and it wasn't worth the trouble of fixing up. The girl looked closely at him. "You look different, but you are the same man who pulled us out of that aircar crash, aren't you? And before that the man in the gray suit? And before that... ?" The young man's cheekbones protruded as he smiled. "Yes, I'm all of them." "Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people who go around changing their bodies like -- like hats?" Automatically she reached to adno just the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that. j "f E smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking. "But why do you do it? Why ! Do you like it? Or is it because of Gabriel?" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was included in its scope. "Do you want to keep him from recognizing you; is that it?" "Ask him." "He won't tell me; he never tells me anything. We just keep running. I didn't recognize it as running at first, but now I realize that's what we've been doing ever since we were married. And running from you, I think?" There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she wondered how much control he had over a body that, though secondor thirdor fourthhand, must be new to him. How well could he make it respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not, she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so casually. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat -- of fur taken from some animal who had lived and died lightyears away -- more closely about herself. The thin young man began to cough again. Overhead a tiny star seemed to detach itself from the pale flat disk of the Moon and hurl itself upward -- one of the interstellar ships embarking on its long voyage to distant suns. She wished that somehow she could be on it, but she was here, on this solitary old world in a barren solar system, with her unconscious husband and a strange man who followed them, and it looked as if here she would stay... all three of them would stay... "If you're after Gabriel, planning to hurt him," she asked, "why then do you keep helping him?" "I am not helping him. And he knows that." "You'll change again tonight, won't you?" she babbled. "You always change after you... meet us? I think I'm beginning to be able to identify you now, even when you're... wearing a new body; there's something about you that doesn't change." "Too bad he got married," the young man said. "I could have followed him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway," he added, his voice less impersonal, "for your sake." She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an outsider; he was part of their small family group -- as long as she had known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect that he was even more closely involved than that. "Why must you change again?" she persisted, obliquely approaching the subject she feared. "You have a pretty good body there. Why run the risk of getting a bad one?" "This isn't a good body," he said. "It's diseased. Sure, nobody's supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty of foliage." "How -- long will it last you?" "Four or five months, if I'm careful." He smfled. "But don't worry, if that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be expensive -- that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then it was tough on me too, wasn't it?" "But how did you get into this... pursuit?" she asked again, "And why are you doing it?" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should know him better than most. "Ask your husband." The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate, snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name, and stirred it with his toe. "I'd better call a cab -- he might freeze to death." He signaled and a cab came. "Tell him, when he comes to," he said to the girl as he and the driver lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, "that I'm getting pretty tired of this." He stopped for a long spell of coughing. "Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't, in the long run, be most beneficial for my face."  personally, in English that was perfect except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, "but I'm afraid you cannot play." "Why not?" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes. "You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house." "But I have plenty of money." The young man coughed. The Vinzz shrugged. "I'll pay you twice the regular fee." The green one shook his head. "Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This game is really clean." "In a town like this?" "That is the reason we can afford to be honest." The Vinzz' tendrils quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been velvetgreen moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung with him. "We do a lot of business here," he said unnecessarily, for the whole set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by no means poor when it came to worldly goods. "Why don't you try another town where they're not so particular?" The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game. He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration. And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him? Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original casing had? He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl, seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of information. antennae with another of his kind. Now they detached, and the first approached the man once more. "There is, as it happens, a body available for a private game," he lisped. "No questions to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good health." The man hesitated. "But unable to pass the screening?" he murmured aloud. "A criminal then." The green one's face -- if you could call it a face -- remained impassive. "Male?" "Of course," the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had also never been a recorded instance of humans' and extraterrestrials' exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or biological impossibility, no one could tell. It might merely be prudence on the Vinzz' part -- if it had ever been proved that an alien life-form had "desecrated" a human body, Earthmen would clamor for war... for on this planet humanity held its self-bestowed purity of birthright dear -- and the Vinzz, despite being unquestionably the stronger, were pragmatic pacifists. It had been undoubtedly some rabid member of the anti-alien groups active on Terra who had started the rumor that the planetary slogan of Vinau was, "Don't beat 'em; cheat 'em." "It would have to be something pretty nuclear for the other guy to take such a risk." The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "How much?" "Thirty thousand credits." "Why, that's three times the usual rate!" "The other will pay five times the usual rate." "Oh, all right," the delicate young man gave in. It was a terrific risk he was agreeing to take, because, if the other was a criminal, he himself would, upon assuming the body, assume responsibility for all the crimes it had committed. But there was nothing else he could do. mirror and found he had a fine new body; tall and strikingly handsome in a dark, coarse-featured way. Nothing to match the one he had lost, in his opinion, but there were probably many people who might find this one preferable. No identification in the pockets, but it wasn't necessary; he recognized the face. Not that it was a very famous or even notorious one, but the dutchman was a careful student of the "wanted" fax that had decorated public buildings from time immemorial, for he was ever mindful of the possibility that he might one day find himself trapped unwittingly in the body of one of the men depicted there. And he knew that this particular man, though not an important criminal in any sense of the word, was one whom the police had been ordered to burn on sight. The abolishing of capital punishment could not abolish the necessity for self-defense, and the man in question was not one who would let himself be captured easily, nor whom the police intended to capture easily. This might be a lucky break for me after all , the new tenant thought, as he tried to adjust himself to the body. It, too, despite its obvious rude health, was not a very comfortable fit. I can do a lot with a hulk like this. And maybe Vm cleverer than the original owner; maybe Ftl be able to get away with it. IV "don't try to fool me! I know you too well. And I know... you have that man's -- the real Gabriel Lockard's -- body " She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror. Lockard -- Lockard's body, at any rate -- sat up and felt his unshaven chin. "That what he tell you?" "No, he didn't tell me anything really -- just suggested I ask you whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to see his body spoiled." "It is a pretty good body, isn't it?" Gabe flexed softening muscles and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved at having someone with whom to share his secret. "Not as good as it must have been," the girl said, turning and looking at him without admiration. "Not if you keep on the way you're coursing. Gabe, why don't you... ?" "Give it back to him, eh?" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly, "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be his wife then. That would be nice -- a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little more than you deserve?" "I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe," she said truthfully enough, for she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. "Of course I'd go with you," she went on, now knowing she lied, "when you got your... old body back." Sure, she thought, Fd keep going with you to farjeen houses and thrill-mills . Actually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had rej fused to go with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash that experience from her mind or her body. "You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?" she went on. "You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose, does he?" "I don't want to know!" he spat. "I wouldn't want it if I could get it back. Whoever it adhered to probably killed himself as soon as he looked in a mirror." He swung long legs over the side of his bed. "Christ, anything would be better than that! You can't imagine what a hulk I had!" "Oh, yes, I can," she said incautiously. "You must have had a body to match your character. Pity you could only change one." struck her right on the mouth. Although he hadn't used his full strength, the blow was painful nonetheless. She could feel the red of her lipstick become mixed with a warmer, liquid red that trickled slowly down her freshly powdered chin. She wouldn't cry, because he liked that, but crumpled to the ground and lay still. If, experience had taught her, she pretended to be hurt, he wouldn't hit her again. Only sometimes it was hard to remember that at the actual moment of hurt and indignity. He was too ns  I afraid of prison -- a tangible prison. And perhaps, to do him credit, he didn't want to deface his own property. He sat down on the edge of the bed again and lit a mil got stick. "Oh, get up, Helen. You know I didn't hit you that hard." "Did you have to beat him up to get him to change bodies?" she asked from the floor. "No." He laughed reminiscently. "I just got him drunk. We were friends, so it was a cinch. He was my only friend; everybody else hated me because of my appearance." His features contorted. "What made him think he was so damn much better than other people that he could afford to like me? Served him right for being so noble." She stared at the ceiling -- it was so old its very fabric was beginning to crack -- and said nothing. "He didn't even realize what he had here -- " Lockard tapped his broad chest with complacence -- "until it was too late. Took it for granted. Sickened me to see him taking the body for granted when I couldn't take mine that way. People used to shrink from me. Girls... She sat up. "Give me a milgot, Gahe" He lighted one and handed it to her, "For Christ's sake, Helen, I gave him more than he had a right to expect. I was too goddamn noble myself. I was wellmilled; I didn't have to leave half of my holdings in my own name -- I could have transferred them all to his. If I had, then he wouldn't have had the folio to hound me all over this planet or to other planets, if I'd had the nerve to shut myself up on a spaceship, knowing he probably would be shut up on it with me." He smiled. "Of course he won't hurt me; that's the one compensation. Damage me, and he damages himself." "But it's your life he saves, too," she reminded him. "My life wouldn't ever have been in danger if it hadn't been for this continual persecution -- it's driving me out of this dimension! I planned to start a new life with this body," he pleaded, anxious foi; belief and, as a matter of fact, she believed him; almost everybody has good intentions and there was no reason to except even such a one as Gabriel Lockard, or whatever he was originally named. "It was my appearance that got me mixed up," he went on. "Given half a chance I could have straightened out -- gone to Proxima Centauri, maybe, and then out to one of the frontier planets. Made something of myself up there. But nobody ever gave me a chance. Now, as long as he follows me, there's nothing I can do except run and try to hide and know all the time I can't escape -- I'm already in thetrap." "What can he do if you stay and face him?" "I don't know -- that's the hell of it. But he's smart. Somehow he'll lure me into another game, I don't know how, but that must be what he has in mind. What else could it be?" "What else indeed?" Helen asked, smiling up at the ceiling. fingers and he took another, "It'd take time for him to arrange any kind of private game set-up, though, and as long as I keep on the move, he won't be able to create anything. Unless he runs into a floating zarquil game." He smiled mirthlessly. "And he couldn't. Too much machinery, I understand... Lucky he doesn't seem to have connections, the way I have," Lockard boasted. "I have connections all over the goddamn planet. Transferred them when I transferred my holdings." She got up, seated herself on the vanity bench, and took up a brush, which she ran absently over the pale hair that shimmered down to her paler shoulders. "So we keep running all over the planet... What would you do if I left you, Gabriel?" "Kill you," he said without hesitation. "Slowly. Even if I have to put this precious hulk of mine in jeopardy. And you wouldn't like that. Neither would your boy friend." "Stop calling him my -- " "Wait a minute -- maybe there is an escape hatch!" His blue eyes sharpened unbecomingly. "He can't kill me, but there's nothing "How about the police?" She tried to speak calmly as she passed the brush up and down, sometimes not even touching her hair. "The body you have won't be any good to you with them looking for it. And you're not a professional exterminator, Gabe -- you wouldn't be able to get away with it." "I can hire somebody else to have plenty of foliage. Maybe I didn't leave him exactly half of my property, but, what the hell, I left him enough." "How will you recognize him?" she asked, half-turning, fearfully. "He'll have a new body, you know." "You'll recognize him, Helen -- you said you could." At that moment she could have wrapped her own hair tightly around her white throat and strangled herself; she was so appalled by her own witless treachery. He dragged her to her feet. "Aah, moonbeam, you know I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just that this whole crazy pattern's driving me out of this world. Once I get rid of that life-form, you'll see, I'll be a different man." As his arms tightened around her, she wondered what it would be like, a different man in the same body. V " I would do a thing like that?" the little lawyer asked apprehensively, not meeting the bland blue eyes of the man who faced him across the old-fashioned flat-top desk. It was an even more outmoded office than most, but that did not necessarily indicate a low professional status; lawyers were great ones for tradition expressed in terms of outof-date furniture. As for the dust that lay all over despite the airconditioning... well, that was inescapable, for Earth was a dusty planet. "Oh, not you yourself personally, of course," Gabriel Lockard -- as the false one will continue to be called, since the dutchman had another name at the moment -- said. "But you know how to put me in touch with someone who can." "Nonsense. I don't know who gave you such libelous information, sir, but I must ask you to leave my office before I call -- " "It was Pat Ortiz who gave me the information," Lockard said softly. "He also told me a lot of other interesting things about you, Gorman." Gorman paled. "I'm a respectable attorney." "Maybe you are now; maybe not. This isn't the kind of town that breeds respectability. But you certainly weren't sunny side up when Ortiz knew you. And he knew you well." The lawyer licked his lips. "Give me a chance, will you?" Lockard flushed. "Chance! Everybody rates a chance but me. Can't you see, I am giving you a chance. Get me somebody to follow my pattern, and I promise you Ortiz won't talk." Gorman slipped the plastic shells from his face and rubbed the pale watery eyes underneath. "But how can I get you a man to do... the thing you want done? I have no connections like that." "I'm sure you can make the right connections. Take your time about it, though; I'm in no hurry. I'm planning to adhere to this locale for a while." "How about this man you want... put out of the way?" Gorman suggested hopefully. "How can you be sure he won't leave?" Gabriel laughed. "He'll stay as long as I do." I # ify The little lawyer took a deep breath. "Mr. Lockard, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I really cannot do anything for you." Gabe rose. "Okay," he said softly. "If that's your pattern, I'll just put a call through to Ortiz." He turned to go. 'Wait a minute!" the lawyer cried. Lockard stopped. "Well?" Gorman swallowed. "Possibly I may be able to do something for you, after all... I just happened to have heard Jed Carmody is in town." Gabriel looked at him inquiringly. "Oh... I thought you might have heard the name. He's a killer, I understand, a professional exterminator... on the run right now. But this is his headquarters -- I'm told -- and he probably would come here. And he might be short on folio. Naturally, I've never had any dealings with him myself." "Naturally," Gabe mocked. "But I'll see what I can do." Gorman's voice was pleading. "You'll wait, Mr. Lockard, won't you? It may be a little while before I can find out where he is. This isn't -- " his voice thinned -- "at all my type of pattern, you know." "I'll wait... a reasonable length of time." The door closed behind him. Descending pneumo tubes hissed outside. The little lawyer rose and went to the window -- a flat expanse of transparent plastic set immovably into the wall of the building, an old building, an old town, an old planet. As he watched the street below, a faint half-smile curved his almost feminine mouth. He went back to the desk and punched a code on the vidiphone. the little cafe with the gold letters for humans only embedded in the one-way glass front; this was a town that adhered rigidly to the ancient privileges of the indigenous species. He entered as the shrillness of a vidiphone bell cut through the babble inside without in any way checking it. After a moment, his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and he could see his wife waiting at a table near the entrance, daintily peeling a tigi fruit. "Well," she asked as she put a plump pink section into her mouth, "did you hire your killer?" "Shhh, not so loud!" He threw himself into the chair next to hers. "Do you want me to get into trouble?... And I wouldn't put it past you," he continued without waiting for an answer. "Remember, it's your boy friend's body that gets into trouble." "He's not my boy friend." A waiter beckoned from the vidiphone booth to someone sitting in the dark shadows at the rear of the restaurant. "Where is he?" Gabriel exclaimed suddenly. "He must be here somewhere. Tell me which he is, Helen?" His hand gripped her arm cruelly, as he swung her around on her chair to face each part of the room. "Is it that guy over there?... That one?... That one?" She could not repress a start of surprise as her eyes met those of the thin-featured young manentering the vidiphone booth. He returned her gaze with somber interest. Gabe relaxed. "So that's the one, eh? Not very formidable. Looks the way he always should have looked." He lit a milgot. "I'll get Gorman to tip off the zarquil boys -- only one game in this parish, I'm told -- that that lifeform's not to be allowed to play; I'll make any loss good out of my own pocket. That'll keep him onstage for the nonce. He won't leave to get himself fixed up somewhere else as long as I stay. And I'm going to stay... to the bitter end." He smiled lovingly to himself. But it's not the right man , Helen thought gladly. He did manage to change , after all . Gabe has the wrong man . She felt a little sorry for the unknown and doomed individual who inhabited the delicate, angular body, but it was so close to death anyhow that the immediate threat didn't matter. And Gabriel -- the real Gabriel -- was safe. VI He emaciated young man entered Gorman's office and locked the door behind him with an electroseal. "Disembodiment," he identified himself. "So you did get a new body, Jed," the lawyer remarked affably, "Very good packaging. Makes you look like a poet or something." "Good as a disguise, maybe, but one hell of a lousy hulk." The young man hurled himself into the chair by the desk. Even Gorman winced at the cruel treatment accorded such obvious fragility. "Gimme a milgot, Les. This thing -- " he indicated his body with contempt -- "is shot to Polaris. Won't last more than a few months. Some bargain I got." Gorman lit a stick himself. "The guy who got your body didn't get such a bargain either," he murmured through a cloud of purple smoke. "At least he'll live. If he's lucky. I wish he'd hurry and get himself picked up, though, so I V i could collect the folio and jet off. Can't go after it now. Hounds will be sniffing , after anybody gravitating around the place where I've stashed it until they're sure they have me. They don't know where the money is exactly, of course, or they'd soak it up, but they've got an idea of the general sector." "Want me to pick it up for you, Jed?" the lawyer asked, his pale, flickering eyes brushing across the young man's dark intense ones. "Oh, sure. All I need is for you to know where it is and all I'd see would be your rocket trail." The young man leaned across the expanse of littered steel. "Or do you know where it is, Les?" he asked softly. "Do you know where it is and are you just hibernating until I'm safely out of the way?" In spite of himself, Gorman could not help moving back. "Don't be a fool, Jed," he said in a voice that was several tones higher. "If I knew where if was... well, you're not very frightening in your present embodiment, you know." "Don't be too sure of that, Gorman. And you were always yellow; anybody could frighten you." He began to laugh shrilly. "Hey, that's good. Get it? Any body, see?" The lawyer did not join in the mirth. "How are you fixed for cash?" he asked abruptly.  in a sardonic grin. "Why do you think I risked public communion with a darkside character like you, Les? I shot my wad making the shift. I could use a little loan. You know I have millions stashed away," the young man said angrily as Gorman remained silent. "I'll pay you as soon as the hounds take the chump who's leasing my hulk." "Maybe you can earn some money." Gorman toyed with a paperweight. "Did you get a look at that big blond guy in the cafe -- the one I told you about on the phone?" "Yeah. Nice life-form he had with him. I wouldn't mind being in that body." "Seems he wants somebody exterminated. And I told him I heard Jed Carmody was in the parish and might be interested." The young man sprang to his feet, furious. "You what?" "Turn your antigravs off. I told him Jed Carmody was in the parish. Are you Jed Carmody?" The other sat down and exhaled heavily. "You're on course -- I'm nobody just now." "Any identification come with the package?" "Naah, what'd you expect?... But why tell anyone that Jed Carmody's hitting the locality?" "I thought you might be interested in picking up a little freefalling foliage." The young man shook his head impatiently. "Risk having this hulk heated up for a half-credit crime? Don't be an alien, Gorman. I'm going to hit subsoil until this other life-form gets collected by the hounds." "Thought you might like to do it to help me out," Gorman murmured. The other man stared. "How do you fit into the pattern?" Gorman shrugged. "Oh, I get it: this guy's putting the barometer on you?" Gorman nodded, "Bad landing, counselor. But you don't seriously expect... ? Hey!" The wide-set eyes glistened darkly. "I got it! Why don't you get this guy who's got my hulk to make the flight? Send somebody out to magnetize him like you thought he was the real Carmody, see?"  a moment; then shook his thin-haired head. "No reason to think the man is an extralegal." "Anyone who finds himself in my hulk damn well has to be if he wants to stay out of the sardine box... Look, what's the first thing he's going to want to do when he finds out what he's been stuck with? Go to another parish and hop hulks, right? And he'll need plenty of foliage to do it." "Maybe he has money," Gorman suggested wearily. "No fuel lost finding out " The young man rubbed his hands together gleefully. "If he takes on the flight, though, see that he gets my flash, huh? Rosy up the picture." "Maybe he can kill whoever this Lockard has in mind without getting picked up by the police. Such things have happened; otherwise you wouldn't have been able to run around loose so long, Jed." "An amateur? Not a chance! Besides, just to make sure, little... He stopped in the act of tapping his chest. "Say, I don't have a name, do I? What's a good epithet for me, Les? Something with class." The lawyer studied the pale, bony face for a moment or two. "How about John Keats?" he suggested. "Simple and appropriate," The other man thought. "Yeah, I like that. John Keats. Plain, but not like John Smith. Subtle. I'll buy it. Okay, so you think I'm going to take my view-finder off the fake Carmody? I'm going to adhere to that life-form closer than Mary's lamb. So when he knocks off whoever the other guy wants novaed, I can yell doggie. Then the hounds get him -- with my flash on him and all, they'll never have the nebula of a notion that they don't have all of me... I pick up the foliage and rock out to some place where I can buy me a new jewel case, no questions asked. Don't fret, Gorman -- you'll get your nibble. I've never played the game with you, have I?" Instead of answering, Gorman asked a question of his own. "Kind of hard on the other guy, isn't it?" "He rates it for sticking me with a piece of statuary like this. Look at it this way, Les -- in his own hulk he would've died; this way he's got a chance to live. Yeah, get him to make the flight, Les. You can charm the juice out of a lemon when you want to; it's your line of evil. And don't let on you know he's not the genuine article." "I won't," Gorman sighed. "I only hope I can persuade him to take on the flight. Don't forget it's important to me too, Jed -- uh, John." "Make planetfall, then," John Keats said. "So long, Les." "Good-by, Johnny." creamy hair at the dressing table when there came a tap at the door to the living room of the suite -- a tap so light that it could have been someone accidentally brushing past in the corridor outside. Gabriel sprang up from the bed where he had been lolling, watching her and stood for a moment poised on the balls of his feet, until the knock was repeated more emphatically. He started toward the other room. "But who could be knocking at the door at this hour?" she asked. "It's almost one... Gabe, do be careful." -- He halted and looked back at her suspiciously. "Why do you say that? You know you don't care what happens to me?" That last was a question rather than a statement and had a plaintive quaver which failed to touch her. Once she had still been able to feel some compassion; now, nothing he said or did could arouse more than fear and disgust. "If somebody knocks you over the head when you open the door," she murmured, smiling at  her own image, "then who will be there to protect me?" A choked sound came from the back of the man's throat. He turned toward her, his fists clenched. She braced herself for the blow, but then the knock came for the third time and her husband reluctantly continued on into the living room, letting the door shut behind him. She rose and pushed it open a little. She had a pretty good idea of who might be expected, but was not especially perturbed, for she knew the real Gabriel Lockard, in whatever guise he might be now, was safe from her husband. And she was curious to see what the exterminator looked like. The door to the corridor was out of her line of vision, but she could hear it as it opened. "Lockard?" a deep, husky voice whispered. "Gorman sent me." "Come in, Mr. Carmody. You are Carmody?" "Shhh," the husky voice warned. "If you get me into trouble, I'm not going to be able to complete your pattern for you, am I?" "Sorry -- I wasn't thinking. Come on in." A heavy tread shook the ancient floorboards, and presently the man responsible for it came into the girl's sight. He was a huge creature, bigger even than Gabriel, with dark hair growing low to a point on his forehead, and a full-lipped sensual face. Then, as he spoke, as he moved, she knew who he was. She pressed close against the wall of the bedroom, her slender shoulders shaking, her handkerchief stuffed into her mouth, so that the sound of her wild, irrepressible laughter would not reach her husband's ears. "Sit down, Carmody," Gabriel said cordially, as he handed the newcomer a glass, "and make yourself comfortable." There was a brief, rather awkward silence. "Well," Gabriel went on, with a smile that would have been thoroughly ingratiating to anyone who hadn't known him, "I don't suppose I have to cruise around the asteroids with you?" i "No," Carmody replied, looking speculatively toward the bedroom door. "No, you don't." t tion of his gaze. "Worried about somebody overhearing? There's only my wife in there. She's listening, all right, but she won't talk. Come in, Helen." Carmody rose automatically as she came in, his dark eyes following every line of her long, smooth body in its close-fitting, though opaque, negligee of smoke-gray silk -- a fabric which, through extreme scarcity, had come into fashion again. "Sit down," Gabriel ordered brusquely. "We're not formal here." Carmody sat, trying not to stare at the girl. She began to mix herself a drink. "Moonbeam," her husband said, "you won't tell anybody about this little peace # conference, will you?" "No," she said, looking at Carmody. "I won't talk" She lifted  her glass. "Here's to murder!" "Helen," Gabriel insisted, unable to rationalize the vague uneasiness that was nagging at him, "you won't dare say anything to anybody? Because, if you do, you'll regret it!" "I said I wouldn't talk. Have I ever broken my word?" "You've never had the chance." But it would be incredible that t she should have the temerity to betray him. After all, she was his wife. She should stick to him out of gratitude and self-interest, for he was rich, at least, and he wasn't exactly repulsive. And he'd been good to her. All men lost their tempers at times. "Let's get down to business, huh?" Carmody said harshly. "Whom do you want knocked off?" "I don't know his name," Gabriel replied, "but I can describe him." After he had finished doing so, there was a small pause. Carmody was silent, Helen turned back to the bar; her face was concealed from the men. Her body shook a little, Lockard thought she was crying, and wondered again whether his confidence in her was entirely justified. "I think maybe I know the guy," Carmody went on. "Only been around the -- the parish a couple of days, if it's the life-form I mean." "Must be the one" Lockard told him. "Think you can do it?" "A cinch," Carmody assured him.  from the door marked Females; Human and Humanoid , and rounded the turn in the corridor, a brawny arm reached out of a vidiphone booth and yanked her inside. The girl gave a startled cry, then relaxed. "Oh, it's you; you gave me a turn." "You're not afraid? You know who I am, then?" She nodded. "You're the real Gabriel Lockard." His big body was pressing hers in the closefitting confines of the booth. In some ways it could be considered more attractive than her husband's. "Why are you hiding here?" "I'm not hiding, I'm lurking," he explained. "Wouldn't do for me to appear too openly. The police -- that is, the hounds -- are on Carmody's trail. I don't want them to find me." "Oh." She pulled away from him. She mustn't let her interest be aroused in a body so soon to be discarded. "IVe been looking for an opportunity to talk to you since last night," he growled, the only way he could gentle a voice as deep as the thick vocal cords of the body produced. "But your husband is always around... You haven't told him who I was, have you?" She shook her head slowly, reproachfully. "I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't have told him about the other one either, but I... well, I guess I jumped or something when I caught sight of him and Gabe mistakenly picked it up." There was a tense silence as they stood almost pressed against one another. "It's easy to see how you got into Carmody's body," she went on, speaking a little too rapidly, "but how did you happen to get into this particular line of evil?" "Simple -- that lawyer your husband went to see sent scouts out to have Carmody picked up. And they flushed me. Naturally I would have turned down the job if he hadn't happened to mention for whom it was... "That other man is the real Carmody now, isn't he?" She looked up at him. Her eyes were gray or green; he couldn't determine which. "So it doesn't matter even if he does get killed." "But how can he get killed?" the big man reminded her with a gentleness completely out of keeping with the ferocity of his appearance. "I'm not a killer, please believe me -- I have never killed anybody and I hope I never have to." who he was -- who he had been -- before he started playing the game. Gabriel Lockard, of course. But what had Gabrifel Lockard been? Surely not the narco-filled, fear-ridden dilettante the man -- the body, at least -- was now. He couldn't possibly have been or the hulk wouldn't have stood up so well under the treatment it was getting from its current tenant. But all that didn't seem to matter. All she wanted was the rightful man in his rightful body, and that seemed almost impossible of achievement. 'What do you intend to do?" she asked, almost sharply. "I don't know," he said. "By agreeing to kill this -- John Keats he calls himself -- I felt I had the situation in hand. And I suppose I have, in a sense. But the end result is a stalemate. I've been following him around just to make everything look on course for your husband until I decide what to do. Sometimes, though, I get the curious feeling that Keats is following me." "Maybe for the same reason you've been following Gabriel?" Helen touched his arm gingerly; it was more muscular than her husband's. "This isn't a bad body, # you know -- maybe he sets some store by it." "But that doesn't make sense!"  he said, impatiently shaking off her hand, not wanting her to like this criminars body that, despite its superficial attractiveness, fitted him no more easily than any of the others. "Logically, it seems to me, he should try to get as far away from his own hulk as possible... Duck! Here comes your husband!" He blocked her with his wide body as Gabriel Lockard's swung past the booth, its perfect features marred by a frown. "Okay," he whispered, as Lockard rounded the corner, "rock back to your table and act angry because he's late" He watched until Gabriel had retraced his steps and gone back to the hotel dining room; then sauntered in the same direction. From the next booth, John Keats stared sullenly after the departing figure. He had been straining his ears, but the booths were effectively soundproofed; all he could learn was that the stranger had developed some kind of quick understanding with Lockard's wife and, knowing the potentialities of his former packaging, this saddened rather than surprised the young man. He punched Gorman's number without turning on the visual. "Disembodied," he said curtly. "Look here, Gorman, I've been wondering -- just who is this lifq-form supposed to be sending to the joyful planetoids?" "I haven't any idea," Gorman's voice said curiously. "Didn't seem any of my evil, so I didn't ask. And I don't suppose Lockard would have told me. Why do you want to know?" "Because I don't see him taking a fix on anybody except Lockard's wife and I don't hold with exterminating females except maybe by accident. Besides, I kind of radiate for that tigi myself." The lawyer's voice definitely showed interest. "Isn't there anybody else he could possibly be after?" "Well -- " John Keats gave a sick laugh -- "there's only one other possible flight pattern. It's kind of extradimensional, but sometimes I think maybe he's after me." There was a long pause. "Absurd," the little lawyer said thoughtfully. "Absurd. He doesn't even know who you are." Pale blood surfaced under tHe young man's transparent skin. "I never thought of that, but you're wrong. He does. He's got to. It was a private game." His voice thickened and he had to stop for coughing. "When you told him he was Jed Carmody, naturally he could figure out who was squatting in his hulk." "But magnetizing him was your own idea, Johnny," Gorman pointed out gently. "Besides, that's no reason he should be after you; what's the percentage in it? And, anyhow, where does Lockard fit into this?" He seemed to be asking the question of himself as much as of the other man. "Yeah," John Keats muttered, "that's what I've got to find out." "Me, too," Gorman half-whispered. 'What did you say?" "I said tell me when you find out; I'm sort of curious myself."  said, "I'm not working for you; I'm working for Lockard. What's the idea of sending for me this hour of the night?" "Then why did you come this hour of the night when I asked J you to?" the lawyer inquired, leaning back in his chair and smiling. The big man hesitated and shrugged. "Can't say, myself. Curiosity, maybe... But you can hardly expect me to violate my employer's confidence?" Gorman laughed. "You get your ideas from the viddies, don't you? Only don't forget that you're the villain, not the hero, of this piece, fellow-man." Carmody, completely taken aback, stared at him -- the little alien couldn't know! And, furthermore, he was mistaken -- Carmody, Lockard, the dutchman, had done nothing wrong, committed no crime, violated no ethic. On the other hand, he had done nothing right either, nothing to help himself or any other. "What do you mean?" he finally temporized. "Tell me this -- Lockard hired you to kill the man who goes under the name of John Keats, didn't he?" "Yes, but how did you know that?" He was beginning to have the same primitive fear of Gorman that he had of the Vinzz; only it was more natural for an extraterrestrial to have apparently supernatural powers. "Keats told me -- and Keats, of course, is the real Carmody." "So you found out?" "Found out!" Gorman laughed. "I knew it all along. Does a man keep any secrets from his lawyer?" "If he's smart, he does." Carmody absently beat his hand on the desk. "This Keats isn't too smart, though, is he?" "No... he isn't a very bright guy. But it was his idea that this would be a fine method of getting you out of the way. And not too bad an idea, either... You had to be disposed of, you know," he explained winningly. "And how nice to have hounds do it for us. 'i Of course we had no idea of iyho your quarry was." "I can see your point of view," i Carmody said ironically. "But why tell me now?" And then he thought he saw the answer. "Are you afraid I'll really kill him?" The lawyer shook his head and smiled back. "Afraid you really won't He placed the tips of his fingers together. "I am prepared to double whatever Lockard is offering you to make sure that Keats, with Carmody inside him, is definitely put out of the way forever." basis of trust -- none of the reverse honor that legend commonly assigned to extralegals. Carmody got up. Even seated, he had towered above the lawyer. Standing, he was like a largerthan-life statue of doom -- of doom, Gorman nervously tfoped, pointing in the desired direction. "And if I refuse?" Carmody asked. Gorman moved his chair back uneasily. "I might persuade Keats that he could risk one murder in his present shape, if it was to insure his ultimate safety." "Meaning it would be a good idea for him to kill me?" "Meaning if would be an excellent idea for him to kill you ." "Look here, Gorman," Carmody said, in a low voice that gradually increased in volume. He could no longer restrain the anger that had been seething up in him for all the years of his wandering. "I've had enough of all this, hiding, running, shifting bodies and now hiring out as a killer. Because I'm an honest man. Maybe you've never seen one before, so take a good look at me. You may never have the chance again." "I am looking and I see Jed Carmody. Not my idea of the prototype of honesty" "But I don't feel like Jed Carmody." "Tell that to the hounds." Gorman laughed uproariously. "By law, you're responsible for Carmody's crimes. Of course, if they put you away or -- as they'd undoubtedly prefer -- accidently exterminate you in the line of duty, and then suspect Carmody hulkhopped, they might look around some more. But there wouldn't be any percentage in that for you, especially if you were dead." "I know, I know," Carmody retorted impatiently. "You can't tell me anything I haven't told myself." He paused for a moment. "This is a good body, though," he added. "Almost as good as my old one." Gorman raised his eyebrows. "You can't be referring to the corpus currently going by the epithet of John Keats?" "The name was your idea, I take it. No, that wasn't my original body." "Oh, so you're a dutchman, eh? A thrill boy?" There was contempt, even from such as Gorman. "Getting a lot of free falls out of all this, are you?" Carmody tried to ignore this, but he couldn't. It wasn't true, he told himself; he had suffered years of playing the game and derived no pleasure from those sufferings -- no pleasure at all. But he would not stoop to argue with Gorman. "Maybe I can get away with this body to one of the frontier planets," he mused. "At least I can make a run for it; at least that would be a worthwhile kind of running." "Brave words ! " the lawyer sneered. "But rather risky to put into action. Don't you think the best thing to do would be just go ahead with the pattern as set? How much did Lockard offer you?" Gorman sucked in his breath. "You're lying, of course, but I'll match that. Carmody -- Keats -- has ten times that amount and maybe more hidden away where I can lay my hands on it as soon as I'm sure he's where he can't to me. And, in the remote instance that you're telling the truth, you can't turn down a million credits... whoever you are, dutchman!" "Oh, can't I?" Carmody went to the door; then turned. "It may interest you to know that I'm worth a hundred times that amount and maybe more." The lawyer laughed skeptically. "If you have enough money to buy your way, then why are you doing this?" Carmody frowned. " Y ou wouldn't understand... I'm not sure I understand myself." The door slammed behind him. Descending pneumos hissed. "Just talking with his elbows," Gorman said comfortingly to himself. "He'll do it. He's got to do it." But he wasn't altogether convinced. IX building, John Keats' figure emerged from the shadows of a nearby doorway. He looked up at the golden rectangle of Gorman's window and then toward the direction in which Carmody had gone; and bit his lip irresolutely. After a moment's reflection, he chose to follow his old body. Somehow he didn't have much confidence in Gorman any more; not that he'd ever really trusted him. In their line of evil you couldn't afford to trust anybody. He had made a mistake. But it could still be rectified. If the big man was aware of his tracker, he did not seem to care. He moved purposefully in V. the direction of the hotel, scorning the helicabs that swooped down to proffer their services, avenues gay with music and the dark alleys mournful with the whine of the farjeen wires as if they were all the same. The hotel was on one of the avenues, because the Lockards always had only the best of whatever there was to be had. Carmody crossed the almost deserted lobby in swift strides and took the pneumo to the seventh floor. Knowing that his body could have only one objective in that place, Keats took the stairs to the basement. Carmody sprang out of the pneumo exit and ran down the corridor to bang lustily on the intricately embossed metal door of the Lockards' suite. After a moment, the girl, again in negligee, opened it. Her green-gray eyes widened when she saw who the late visitor was, and she put a finger to her lips. "Shh, Gabe's asleep; let's not wake him unless it's necessary." She closed the door softly behind him. "What is it... Jed?" He was so choked with excitement that he could hardly get the words out. "Helen; will you make a break with me for Proxima Centauri? They won't ask any questions there, if we can get there. And from Proxima we can go -- " "But your body?" "The hell with my body." He gripped her arms with powerful hands. "You mean much more to me than that worthless hulk." "But, Jed, Gabe'll never let us go " Proxima Centauri -- that had been Gabriel's dream, too... His hands pressed so hard into her flesh, she knew there would be bruises on her skin; was she always doomed to fall in love with men who would leave marks on her? "Let him try to stop us. I'm bigger than he is, now." She looked up at him. "You always were, darling. But he has influence, though he wouldn't need it; he could simply set the police on you." "That's the chance we're going to have to take... But perhaps I'm asking too much. I haven't the right to ask you to take such risks," he added bitterly. "I was thinking only of myself, I see, not of you." "Oh, no, Jed!" ff W HO ' RE you talking to,  Helen?" a drowsy voice asked from the bedroom. It was followed by the comely person of Gabriel himself, fastening his dressing gown. "Oh, hello, Carmody." His face lighted up avidly, all sleepiness vanishing like a ,spent milgot. "Didyou do it already?" "No, I didn't. And, what's more, I'm not going to do it!" Lockard looked astonished. "But what's .wrong? You said you would." Carmody sighed. "Yes, I know I did. I was stalling. That's what I've always done -- stalled, put things off, hesitated to make decisions. Well, I've made my decision now." "You're not afraid of him?" Lockard said in a voice that was meant to be taunting and emerged as querulous. "A little pipsqueak like that Keats? Or enough for you? Is that it?" That was enough for the man whose emaciated body was torturedly cramped in the air-conditioning vent and further agonized by the strain of repressing the cough that sought to tear its way out of his chest. He had found out what he wanted to know and, as he inched his way back down to the basement, he was already making plans for getting even with all those he now knew to be enemies. It had been a conspiracy against him from the start; the hounds probably weren't even aware that he was in town. It was Gorman who had told him they knew of his general whereabouts -- Gorman, the good friend who had suggested he change bodies, knowing that whatever hulk he wound up with was bound to be more vulnerable than his primal form. And Gorman would pay... "More than enough," Carmody replied, as unaware of the fact that he had lost one-third of his audience as he had been that he was addressing three rather than two listeners. "Only I'm not a killer." "But I understood you were supposed to be a professional exterminator?" "Jed Carmody is a killer. Only I'm not Jed Carmody." Lockard moved backward and stared at the still bigger man. Lockard retreated still further. "You -- you're him! You were all along!" He whirled on his wife. "And you knew, you doublecrosser! Knew and didn't tell me! By God, I'll break every bone in your body!" "Lay a hand on her and I'll break every bone in my body!" Lockard stopped where he was. "It doesn't mean anything to me any more, you see," Carmody explained. "I wanted it when I didn't have anything else. But now I have Helen. I could kill you, you know. As Carmody, an acknowledged exterminator, I have nothing to lose. But I'm letting you live, as a hostage for Helen... And, besides, as I've been busy trying to convince everybody all evening, I am not a murderer." He turned to the girl. "Will you come with me to Proxima, Helen?" "Y-yes, Jed" she said, looking apprehensively at her husband. "Gather your packs. I'm going to the air office to make the arrangements." Carmody consulted his chronometer. "It's three o'clock. I should be back by eight or so. Get some sleep if you can." Her wide frightened eyes turned again toward her husband. "Here." Jed tossed her the gun Gorman had given him. "If he tries anything, use it." "Yes, Jed. But... " "Don't worry; I have another one " The door slammed behind him. "Gimme that gun, you little tramp!" Lockard snarled, twisting it out of her flaccid hand. X  the hotel and turned left in the direction of the airstation which stayed open all night. He had walked a short distance when suddenly a high voice came out of the darkness behind him, "Not so fast, Mr... Carmody," and a hard knob was pressed in his back. "Mr. Keats, I believe," Carmody said, wondering why he wasn't frightened. "Right." The other coughed at some length. "You thought you were pretty smart, didn't you, foisting me off with a hulk that wasn't only shopworn but hot?" " Y our intentions weren't exactly noble either, were they, Mr. Keats?" "I want my frame back!" Suddenly the idea came to Carmody, and so wonderful it was he could hardly throttle his voice down to calmness. "Shooting me won't help you get it back. In fact, it might make it rather difficult." ' "You have your choice between going back to the zarquil house wiht me and switching or getting your current insides burned out" Carmody exhaled a small hissing sigh that he hoped would not be recognized as obvious relief to the man behind him. "You'll have to pay. I haven't enough folio on me." "I'll pay; I'll pay," the voice snarled. "I always pay. But you'll come peacefully?" he asked in some surprise. "Yes. Matter of fact, I'll be glad to get out of this body. No matter how much I try, somehow I can never manage to keep it clean... Gently, now, you don't want to muss up a body you're planning to occupy yourself, now do you?" "This is too easy," Keats' voice murmured dubiously. "Maybe it's another trap... " "You're always going to imagine traps, Mr. Exterminator, whether they're there or not You and Lockard both -- people who run must have something to run from, and half the time it's not there and half the time, of course, it is; only you never know which is which -- " "You talk too much," the man behind him snarled. "Shut up and keep moving." "Back again?" the Vinzz at the door asked. The present Carmody was a little startled. Somehow he had thought of the Vinzz as too remote from humanity to be able to distinguish between individual members of the species. "I'm afraid neither of you is qualified to play." "No reason why we shouldn't have a private game, is there?" John Keats demanded belligerently. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. "In that case, no, no reason at all. If you want to be so unsporting and can afford it. It will cost you a hundred thousand credits each." "But that's twice what I had to pay last week!" Keats protected angrily. The Vinzz shrugged an antenna. "You are, of course, at liberty to take your trade elsewhere, if you choose." "Oh, hell," the temporarily poetic-looking killer snarled. "We're stuck and you know it. Let's get it over with!" consciousness back into the thin young man's body again. More uncomfortable than usual, because the criminal's body had been in such splendid physical condition and this one so poor -- now worse than before, because it had been worked far beyond its attenuated capabilities. The individuality that had originally been Gabriel Lockard's, formerly housed in Jed Carmody's body, now opened John Keats' eyes and looked at the Vinzz who stood above him. "The other human has been told you awakened before him and have already departed," the Vinzz explained. "He has violence in his heart and we do not care for violence on our doorstep. Bad for business." "Has he gone already?" The Vinzz nodded. "How long has he been gone?" He scrambled to his feet and investigated the clothing he wore. Carmody had been in too much of a hurry to clean himself out. There was some money left, a container of milgot sticks, and a set of electroseals. "He has just left." The extraterrestrial's eyes flickered in what might have been surprise. "Don't you wish to avoid him?" "No, I must go where he goes." The Vinzz shrugged. "Well, it's your funeral in the most literal sense of the word." He sighed as the young man plunged out into the darkness. "But, from the objective viewpoint, what a waste of money!" The massive, broad-shouldered figure of Jed Carmody was still visible at the end of the street, so the thin man slowed down. He wanted to follow Carmody, to keep close watch on where he was going and, if necessary, guide him in the right direction, though he didn't think he'd have to do that. But he had no intention of overtaking him. Carmody might not want openly to use the gun the former tenant had so carefully left him, but with his physique he could break the fragile body of John Keats in two, if he so desired, and he probably did. Meanwhile Carmody -- the real Carmody -- having been deprived of an immediate revenge, had begun to realize how much better the situation was as it now stood. If he killed Keats out of hand, he might miss out on half a million credits, because it was his custom to get cash in advance for all his flights, and this was his flight pattern now. He wouldn't trust that Lockard life-form to defoliate after the job was done. Of course he himself had plenty of money stashed away, but would be no trouble to find the sickly Keats later. And there was no reason the hounds should get him -- Carmody -- after all, the other had been rocketing around in his body and he hadn't been caught. Carmody had allowed himself to be stampeded into panic. He smiled. Gorman wouldn't ever be able to chart any pattern like that, or like anything, again. Fortunately there was no permanent harm done, and a half quil losses, with a nice profit left over. Maybe he could even beat was obviously a coward and a fool. A few threats should be enough to get him to hand over. Carmody paused for a moment outside the hotel. It still took some nerve to walk boldly into the brightly lit lobby. HE automatic doors slid open as he entered. At the same time, the pneumo gates lifted and Gabe Lockard came out, dragging a heavily veiled Helen, their luggage floating behind them. Both stopped as they caught sight of the killer; Lockard paled -- Helen gasped. Too bad I have to leave her in the tentacles of this low life-form , Carmody thought with regret, but there was no help for it. He approached them with what he thought was an ingratiating smile. "Mr. Lockard, I've decided to give you another chance." It was an unhappy choice of word. "Oh, you have, have you!" the big blond man yelled. "I thought I did have another chance. And now you've spoiled that, too!" "What do you mean by that?" Carmody demanded, his thick dark brows almost meeting across his nose. "I figured on getting away before you came back," Gabriel babbled in a frenzy, "but you'd have found me anyway. You always find me. I'm sick of this running. There's only one way to stop you, only one way to be sure that, whatever happens to me, you won't be around to enjoy it." "Listen, Lockard, you're making a mistake. I -- " "The only mistake I made was in hiring somebody else to do the job I should have done myself." He pulled out the gun -- Carmody's own gun -- and fired it. He wasn't a good shot, but that didn't matter. He had the flash on full blast and he pumped and pumped and pumped the trigger until the searing heat rays had whipped not only the killer's astonished body but all through the lobby. The few people still there rushed for cover as rug, chairs, potted palms were shriveled by the lancing holocaust. There was a penetrating odor of burning fabric and frond and flesh. Helen let out a wail as Carmody, more ash than man, fell to the charred carpet. "Gabe, Gabe, what have you done!" The gun dropped from his hand to rejoin its owner. His face crumpled. "I didn't really mean to kill... only to scare him... What'll I do now?" "You'll run, Mr, Lockard," John like you and... him , . He Keats' body said as he entered pointed to the crumbling, blackthe devastated lobby. "You'll run ened corpse, keeping his hand and run and run. He's dead, but steady with an effort for, God you'll keep on running forever, knew, he was the biggest amateur No, not forever -- I apologize -- of them all. some day you'll get caught, beLockard licked his lips and cause the hounds aren't amateurs gazed apprehensively around. Frightened faces were beginning to peer out from their places of concealment. "Look, Carmody," he said in a low, stiff voice, "let's talk this over. But let's get out of here first before somebody calls the hounds." "All right," the thin man smiled. can go over to Gorman's office. They won't look for us there right away." "How'll we get in?" "I have a 'seal," Keats said. Surely one of the electroseals he carried must belong to Gorman's office. It was a chance he'd have to take. XI ent seals before he found the one that opened the lawyer's office. He was afraid his obvious lack of familiarity would arouse Lockard's suspicions, but the big man was too much preoccupied with his own emotions. An unpleasantly haunting aroma of cooked meat seeped out from inside. "For Christ's sake, Carmody, hurry!" Lockard snarled, and gave a sigh of relief as the door swung open and the illuminators went on, lighting the shabby office. Gorman was there. His horribly seared body lay sprawled on the dusty rug -- quite dead. "You -- you killed him?" Gabriel quavered. The sight of murder done by another hand seemed to upset him more than the murder he himself had just committed. The thin man gave a difficult smile. "Carmody killed him" Which was undoubtedly the truth. "The gun that did it is in his pocket. I had nothing to do with it." His eyes sought for the ones behind the veil. He wanted the girl who stood frozenly by the door to know that this, at least, was the truth. Gabriel also stayed near the door, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. In death Carmody and Gorman, the big man and the small man, had looked the same; each was just a heap of charred meat and black ash. No blood, no germs -- all very hygienic. "You're smart, Carmody," he said from taut lips. "Damn smart." "I'm Keats, not Carmody! Remember that." He dropped into the chair behind the desk. "Sit down, both of you." Only Gabriel accepted the invitation. "Why don't you take that thing off your face, Mrs. Lockard? You aren't hiding from anybody, are you?" Gabriel gave a short laugh. "She's hiding her face from everybody. I spoiled it a little for her. She was going to sell me out to... the guy in your body." Keats' hand tightened on the arm of his chair. Lose his temper now and he lost the whole game. "It was a good body," he said, not looking at the thing on the rug, trying not to remember the thing on the rug on the other side of town. "A very good body." Through the veil, Helen's shadowy eyes were fixed on his face. He wanted to see what Lockard had done to her, but he couldn't tear off the veil, as he longed to do; he was afraid of the expression that might be revealed on her face -- triumph when there should have been anguish; anguish when there should have been triumph. "Not as good as the one I have here." Lockard thumped his own chest, anxious to establish the value of the only ware he had left. "Matter of opinion," Keats said. "And mine was in better shape." "This one isn't in bad condition," Gabriel retorted defensively. "It could be brought back to peak in' short order." "You won't have much opportunity to do it, though. But maybe the government will do it for you; they don't pamper prisoners, I understand, especially lifers."  an extralegal, Carmody -- Keats," he whined. "You know your course. You know how to hide from the hounds... I'm i a -- a respectable citizen." He spread his hands wide in exaggerated helplessness. "Strictly an amateur, that's what I am -- I admit I've been playing out of my league." "So?" "I'm worth a lot of money, Keats, a hell of a lot. And half of it can be yours, if you... change bodies with me." Keats' angular face remained expressionless, but there was a sharp cry from the girl -- a cry that might have been misunderstood as one of pain, but wasn't. Gabriel turned toward her, and his upper lip curled back over his teeth. "I'll throw her in to the bargain. You must have seen her when she wasn't banged up so you know she's not permanently disfigured. Isn't she worth taking a risk for?" Keats shrugged. "If the hounds pull you down, she'll be a legal widow anyway." "Yes, but you'd have no... chance with her in the body you now have... No chance," he repeated, His voice broke. "Never had a chance." "Go ahead, feel sorry for yourself," the other man said. "Nobody else will." Gabriel's face darkened, but he also had to control his temper to gain what he fancied were his own ends. "You won't deny that this hulk is better than the one you have now?" "Except that there's one thing about the head that I don't like." Gabriel stared in bewilderment His body was beyond criticism, "What is it you don't like about the head?" "There's a price on it now." Gabriel pressed his spine against the back of the chair. "Don't play the innocent, Carmody. You've killed people, too." "Well, sure, but not out in the open like that You know how many people saw you blast him? Too many. If you're going to exterminate somebody, you do it from a dark doorway or an alley by, and you blast him in the back. But there's no use giving you lessons; it's not likely you'll ever be able to use them where you're going." Gabriel suddenly sagged in his chair. He looked down at the floor, "So you won't do it?" Keats grew apprehensive. He hadn't expected the big man to give in to despair so soon -- it might spoil all his plans and leave him trapped in this sick unwanted body. He lit a milgot. "I didn't say that," he pointed out, trying to sound unconcerned. "Matter of fact, I might even consider your proposition, if..." There was hope in Lockard's eyes again. It made Keats a little sick to think of the game he had to play with the other; then he thought of the game the other had played with him, the game the other had played with his wife, and the faint flickering of compassion died out in him. "What do you want?" Gabriel asked, Keats took a moment before he answered. "I want all of what you've got." Gabriel uttered an inarticulate sound. "You can't take it with you, colleague. If we hulk-hop, it's got to be tonight, because the hounds will be baying on your trail any moment. You wouldn't have the chance to transfer the property to my name and, if you take my word that I'll hand over half afterward, you're just plain out of this dimension... Think of it this way, Lockard -- what's worth more to you, a couple of "All right, Carmody," Lockard said dully, "you're the dictator." T HE Vinzz' eyes flickered in astonishment. "Another private game ? However... he shrugged eloquently. "It will cost you a hundred thousand credits each, gentlemen," "No discount for a steady customer?" Keats inquired lightly, though he was trembling inside. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. "None. You ought to be glad I   i didn't raise the price again." "Why didn't you?" he couldn't help asking. The Vinzz looked steadily into the man's eyes. "I don't know," it answered at last. "Perhaps I have been so long on this planet that I have developed a sentimental streak... In any case, I am going back to Vinau the day after tomorrow..." "For God's sake," Lockard, his senses so confused with fear and  apprehension that he was able to catch only fragments of their talk, screamed, "pay him what he asks and don't haggle!" "All right " Keats agreed. "The lady will wait for me here," he told the Vinzz. The extraterrestrial quivered indecisively. "Most irregular," it murmured. "However, I cannot refuse a slight favor for such an old customer. This way, madam." Gabriel Lockard's eyes. "Well," the Vinzz who stood above him lisped, "how does it feel to be back in your own body again?" Gabriel got up and stretched. He stretched again, and then an expression of wonderment came over his handsome features. "I feel... exactly the way I felt in... any of the others," he said haltingly. "I'm not comfortable in this one either. It's not right -- it doesn't fit. My own body... "You've grown out of it," the green one told him, not unkindly. "But you will be able to adjust to it again, if you'll give it a chance ' . "There's that word again " Gabriel winced. "I'm beginning to respond to it the way my... predecessor did. Do we ever really get another chance, I wonder?" "Take my advice." The Vinzz' face became almost human. "This is costing my people money, but we've made enough out of you and your -- shall we say? -- friends. It is a shame," it murmured, "to prey upon unsophisticated lifeforms, but one must live. However, I'll tell you this: The compulsion will come over you again and again to play the game -- your body will torment you unbearably and you will long for relief from it, but you must conquer that desire or, I warp you, you will be lost to yourself forever. It's a pattern that's enormously difficult to break, but it can be broken." Gabriel smiled down at the little green creature. "Thanks, colleague. I'll remember that advice. And I'll take it." "The other is still asleep," the Vinzz told him. "This time I thought it best to let you awaken first. Good-by, and... good luck." "Thanks, fellow-man," Gabriel said. The Vinzz' tendrils quivered. T#T V " teroom, her veil flung back so that he could see her poor, marred face. Anger rose hotly in him, but he pushed it down. Her suffering had not been meaningless and revenge was already consummated. "Gabriel!" Her voice was taut. "... Jed!" "Gabriel," he smiled. "The genuine, original Gabriel -- accept no substitutes." "I'm so glad " Her lips formed the words, for she had no voice with which to make them. "Come." He took her arm and led her out into the quiet street. It was almost daylight and the sky was a clear pearl gray. Again a star detached itself from the translucent disk of the Moon and sped out into the Galaxy. Soon, he thought, we'll be on a starship like that one , leaving this played-out planet for the new worlds up in the sky. "You're going to let Gabe -- the other Gabriel -- go?" she asked. He bent his head to look at her swollen face. "You're free, Helen; I have my body back; why should we concern ourselves with what happens to him? He can't hurt us any more." "I suppose you're right," she muttered. "It seems unfair..." She shivered. "Still, you have no idea of the things he did to me -- the things he made me do..." She shivered again. "You're cold. Let's get started." "But where are we going?" She placed her hand on his arm and looked up at him. "Back to the hotel to pick up your luggage. And then -- I still think Proxima is a good idea, don't you? And then perhaps farther out still. J'm sick of this old world." "But, Je -- Gabriel, you must be mad! The police will be waiting for you at the hotel." "Of course they'll be waiting, but with a citation, not handcuffs." She looked at him as if he had gone extradimens ional. He laughed. "What your ex-husband didn't know, my dear, was that there was a reward out for Jed Carmody, dead or alive  # Her face was blank for a moment. "A reward! Oh, G-G-G-Gabriel!" The girl erupted into hysterical laughter. "Shhh, darling, control yourself." He put his arm around her, protectively, restrainingly. "We'll be conspicuous," for already the Sun's first feeble rays were beginning to wash the ancient tired streets with watery gold. "Think of the reward we're going to get -- five thousand credits, just for us!" She wiped her eyes and pulled down her veil. "Whatever will we do with all that money!" "I think it would be nice if we T#  turned it over to the hotel," he smiled. "I made rather a shambles of their lobby when, pursuant to my duty as a solar citizen, I exterminated the killer Carmody. Let's give it to them and leave only pleasant memories behind us on our journey to the stars." And he couldn't help wondering whether, if things got really tough, somewhere up in those stars he could find another zarquil game. A # Calendar designed specifically for Science Fiction Fans and Space Flight Enthusiasts. Each month takes you on an expedition to one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, from Sun-baked Mercury to Frigid Pluto.  # two-color illustrations  Scientifically-accurate text with each illustration  Wonderful for your den  Printed in limited edition  Only I .# postpaid P. O. Box #-R Minneapolis #, Minnesota Endorsed by The Society for the Advancement of Space Travel monthly at New York N. Y., for Oct. #, #. I . The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business manager are: Publisher, Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Editor, Horace L. Gold, #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Managing Editor, Evelyn Paige, #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Business Manager, None. #. 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The Martians that land on Earth on Hallowe'en. And many others. by Edgar Pangborn, Angelo INmtevecchio can destroy the Earl It to decide. The Martians havi him cide ! Wilson Tucker. Draftee Paul Breen becomes a huma n " secret weapon ." He has a strange power -- he can actually read minds # miles away. No wonder he is decreed too dnnii mu t to live! Seconds after itn "m-eldenl " Hr. Mack tin suddenly llnds himself plunged SO yen r.# into tin fill me with another run i s nan e and body. And lie's on the moon I MARCH # #c galaxy By By No, we don't promise that reading I # issues of theory of gravitation. we do promise that a year's subscription to... and you'll get your copies at least a week before the newsstands do. you don't have to use the coupon below. It's for your convenience, not ours. Yes, send in your subscription today. Galaxy Publishing Corp. # I Hudson St. New York #, N. Y. I enclose (check one) # for I year # for # years # additional Foreign Postage Per Year galaxy #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. #c per copy. Subscription: (# copies) # per year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions. Elsewhere #. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright, New York #, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, including translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental. Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. #, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. True enough, copies of Galaxy for # and #I are scarcer than hens' bridgework... but it's not too late to get these great stories: With its # stories -- not just a lineup of shorts; many are novelets and even novellas -- this truly big volume of almost # pages would be an unthinkable publishing bargain today at its original price of #. tracted for a large number of books, which naturally means a discount... and we're passing the discount on to you. Your price, postage included, is only #! No coupon... no need or room for one. Just send in your order on any scrap of paper, include check or money order for #, and mail if right now to... ago that detective stories became legitimate when Roosevelt declared in an interview that he read them for relaxation. Those of us who were then reading and writing science fiction were envious. We hoped something similar would happen to our favorite form of literature, but we didn't really expect it There was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, of course, which appeared around that time and was a huge hit; we were able to explain to the uninitiated that we read and wrote stories like that. But I remember being backed into describing the plot of a story I was working on then: "Well, there are giant brains sealed in glassite capsules in the polar ice. They belong to extraterrestrials, who have no bodies, just brains, and they know everything that happened on Earth because they're immortal -- " The experience inhibited me so badly that I never wrote the story. A lot has happened to science fiction since that wild era, when no author could get up from his typewriter without having knocked off at least some part of the Solar System's population. Craftsmanship had to enter the field. There are only so many basic categories; when they have been done over and over, especially with primal motivations and masses of people instead of individuals and their infinitely varied problems and conflicts, the result must be ultimate stasis. Those writers who could not learn to construct a real story had to drop out, for their stuff inevitably was too similar to things that had been done before, by others and even by themselves. Meeting them now, I find it saddening to hear their puzzled or hostile remarks about science fiction. Many of them understand it less than if they had never written any. (The same is true of the elderly fans who can't realize that the "sense of wonder" they bay for is gone from them, not from science fiction.) I wonder if anyone else then had an experience like mine: When I was about #, I kept bringing stories to a wonderful old editor named Dr. T. O'Connor Sloane, and he, instead of talking about them, always managed to get off onto Icelandic literature, the fascination of mathematics (a specialty of his), and other subjects that may not have been evasions, but were just as good. One story I gave him, however, got him dangerously excited for a man of #. It was about mining on Venus and I'd manfully exposed the dirty rats who savagely exploited native labor and prisoners exiled to that miserably hot, rainy planet. Dr. Sloane exclaimed it was too good for his pulp magazine and brought both me and the manuscript up to the Delineator, which was owned by the same company. The story came back to me with a printed rejection slip. Not long after, the Delineator folded. I immediately saw the connection, but I was more concerned with selling the story. Dr. Sloane, though, went on maintaining that it was too good and steadfastly refused to buy it. If that experience is typical, it explains a good deal about the dreadfulness of that paleolithic science fiction. (I don't know how much better my own story was, because it somehow got lost.) Were I an envious man, which I am, I would resent the break that authors have today in rates and markets. There were very few science fiction magazines, their rates ranging from microscopic fractions of a cent payable upon lawsuit to just enough to starve on. Hardly any book publishers brought out science fiction books. No anthologies, no pocketbooks, no TV, radio or move resale. Good God, no wonder a depression was going on! No doubt there is a lesson to be derived from this. Writing science fiction in the early days was easier, but the pay was poor. Writing for Galaxy is very much harder, but the pay is highly rewarding both in amount and prestige. I guess it balances out. Either way, writing -- especially the writing of science fiction -- is not a job for the lazy. A good story gives the illusion of having been produced effortlessly. Nothing involves more effort than achieving that illusion, however. A LL the foregoing is excerpted from my introduction to the First Galaxy Reader, written over five years ago. (It's still available from us at # postpaid -- a giant book of # pages.) As I said in concluding the introduction: I just thought you'd be interested in one practitioner's personal history in science fiction. The Ignoble Savages Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground -- underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard societyl Skkiru," Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm. "A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra." "But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes," Skkiru protested. "Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. "You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever." "Forever!" He looked at her incredulously. "You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!" Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, "No, Skkiru, I am not joking," a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe. "This is, in effect, good-by," she continued. "We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe... but that will be all." Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber. "Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!" There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face -- an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl. "I am sorry, Skkiru," Bbulas intoned. "I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all." "It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru," Larhgan put in gently, "but the welfare of our planet comes first." S HE had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw. No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. "Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You-" "Now, Skkiru," Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, "you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive." Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt. "After all," he went on speaking as he wiped, "I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you -- a mere private citizen -- have the right to question them." "Just because you went to school in another solar system," Skkiru said, whirling with anger, "you think you're so smart!" "I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now -- " "Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time." Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized. I hate Terrestrials, Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae -- if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation. "Skkiru!" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance -- her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed -- and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. "One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!" "And I have already explained to you, Skkiru," Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, "that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet." glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber. Kismet, Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, "And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like -- like savages." "It is necessary," Bbulas replied without turning. "Pooh," Skkiru said. "Pooh, Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. "Skkiru! Such language!" "As you said," Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, "the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker." "But I can't work metal!" "Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts," Bbulas said smugly, "because you will be a pariah without a trade." "Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch -- " Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him -- "and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl." "I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air. "As for me," she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, "I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?" "Even if there will be," Bbulas said, "you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes." Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. "I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs," she vowed, "and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking." It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. "Listen -- " he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late. "Earth ship in view!" a squeaky voice called through the intercom. "Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes." Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash. "Hurry up, Skkiru."- dress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance -- which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist. "Hurry up, Skkiru," Bbulas said. "They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started." "For my part, I wish we'd never started," Skkiru grumbled. "What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?" That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that schooldays were long since over. "I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them," he said, with affected weariness. "After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other -- and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra." "For Snaddra," Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth -- or so the fictapes seemed to indicate -- was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial lifeform. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too. "We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru," she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, "but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me -- and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas." "If that doesn't," Bbulas said, "I have other methods of inspiration." "All right," Skkiru answered sulkily. "I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Intergalactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg. But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it." All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. "I'm proud of you, Skkiru," she said brokenly. Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence. snadd," Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad -- to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd," II chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor -- now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metalworkers -- and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary -- but now both aircars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive. The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or -- more properly speaking on Snaddra -- the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid. As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to -- the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment -- and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it. Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it. r I "HE newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb. In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching -- thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide. "Look, Raoul," the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran -- which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. "A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system -- what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry." "Oh, they were cannibals?" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. "How horrible!" "No, not at all," the other assured him. "They weren't human -- another species entirely -- so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know." "And the missionaries -- did they soften them up, Cyril?" "They softened up the missionaries, I believe." Cyril laughed. "Ah, well, it's all in the day's work." "I hope these creatures are not man-eaters," Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession -- creatures indeed! Skirru thought, with a mental sniff. "We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it." "Oh, you will, my boy, you will." Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. "I have every confidence in your ability." Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials -- which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite. "The natives certainly appear to be human enough," Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. "Some slight differences, of course -- but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color." If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.  panion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be -- a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul. "Remember," Cyril said sternly, "we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity." ' "Yes, Cyril," Raoul said meekly. Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect. "I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?" Money, Skirru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be. "How should I know?" Raoul shrugged. "Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting." "Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?" Raoul suggested grumpily. "The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one." "Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!" Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable -- and entirely genuine -- murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops -- and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the "high priest" was off his rocker. To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once. On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on -- which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population -- like its natural resources -- was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival. discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple -- a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days -- where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him -- and not only for his forwardness -- that was in character on both sides, too. Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising -- a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metalworking was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out. Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the "high priest" with a simpleminded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports. As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had is not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas -- who fancied himself a speechwriter as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit. The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skirru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote. "... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth," she was saying in her melodious voice. "Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth..." Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face. "... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy." S HE had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. "Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us." The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended. "We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way." Ha, ha, Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha! "But why is it," Raoul whispered in Terr an as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, "that only the beggar wears mudshoes?" "Shhh," Cyril hissed back. "We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!" Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man. "We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs," Bbulas said with great self-control, "and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance." "Rain dance!" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. "But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course," he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, "that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!" Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff. "But," Raoul went on, "one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud..." The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. "Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain." He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this highschool theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others primes, like the beggarship. What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury. that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal die for his planet in many ways -- but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them. All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities. He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while -- but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan. As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-andbook dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply. It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and -- aside from minerals -- they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice -- the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business. Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in. TP HE traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civilservice job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm -- and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top. The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population. The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came -- and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soulsearching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra -- and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program. It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice. But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings -- though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library -- seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand -- which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance. "Skkiru!" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of earand eyeshot. "Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?" Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. "Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought -- " Bbulas twirled madly in the air. "You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!" "Yes, Bbulas," Skkiru said meekly. argument, but he had bigger plans in mind and he didn't want them impeded in any way. "But they seem like an excellent idea," Luccar suggested. "Primitive and yet convenient." Bbulas slowed down and gulped. After all, in spite of the fact that he was now only chief yamstealer -- being prevented from practicing his profession simply because there were no yams on the planet and no one was quite certain what they were -- Luccar had once been elected President by a large popular majority. And a large popular majority is decidedly a force to be reckoned with anywhere in the Galaxy. "Anydeviations arouse comment," Bbulas explained tightly. "But if we all -- " "There would not be enough pontoons to go around, even if we stripped all the air-cars." "I see," Luccar said thoughtfully. "We couldn't make -- ?" "No time!" Bbulas snapped. "All right, Skkiru -- get those things off your feet!" "Will do," Skkiru agreed. It would be decidedly unwise to put up an argument now. So he'd get his feet muddy; it was all part of the higher good. Later, as soon as the rain-dance rehearsals were under way, he slipped away. No part had been assigned to him anyhow, except that of onlooker, and he thought he could manage that without practice. He went down to the library, where, since all the attendants were aboveground, he could browse in the stacks to his hearts' content, without having to fill out numerous forms and be shoved about like a plagiarist or something. If the Earthmen were interested in really primitive institutions, he thought, they should have a look at the city library. The filing system was really medieval. However, the library would, of course, be tabu for them, along with the rest of the city, which was not supposed to exist. As far as the Terrans were to know, the group of lumpy stone huts (they should, properly speaking, have been wood, but wood was too rare and expensive) was the capital of Snaddra. It would be the capital of Snaddra for the Snaddrath, too, except during the hours of rest, when they would be permitted to retire unobtrusively to their cozy well-drained quarters' beneath the mud. Life was going to be hard from now on -- unless the Bbulas Plan moved faster than Bbulas himself had anticipated. And that would never happen without implementation from without. From without Bbulas, that was. Skkiru got to work on the textapes and soon decided upon his area of operations. Bbulas had concentrated so much effort on the ethos of the planet that he had devoted insufficient detail to the mythos. That, therefore, was the field in which Skkiru felt he must concentrate. And concentrate he did. r I I HE rain dance, which had been elaborately staged by the planet's finest choreographers, came to a smashing climax, after which there was a handsome display of fireworks. "But it is still raining," Raoul protested. "Did you expect the rain to stop?" Bbulas asked, his eyes bulging with involuntary surprise. "I mean -- " he said, hastily retracting them -- "well, it doesn't always stop right away. The gods may not have been feeling sufficiently propitious." "Thought you had only one god, old boy," Cyril observed, after giving his associate a searching glance. "Chap by the name of Whipsnade or some such." "Ipsnadd. He is our chief deity. But we have a whole pantheon. Major gods and minor gods. Heroes and demigods and nature spirits -- " "And do not forget the prophets," Larhgan put in helpfully. As former Chief Beauty of the planet (an elective civil-service office), she was not accustomed to being left out of things. "We have many prophets. And saints. I myself am studying to be a -- " Bbulas glared at her. Though her antennae quivered sulkily, she stopped and said no more -- for the moment, anyway. "Sounds like quite a complex civilization," Cyril commented. "No, no!" Bbulas protested in alarm. "We are a simple primitive people without technological pretensions." "You don't need any," Cyril assured him. "Not when you have fireworks that function in the rain." Inside himself, Skkiru guffawed. "We are a simple people," Bbulas repeated helplessly. "A very simple and very primitive people." "Somehow," Raoul said, "I feel you may have a quality that civilization may have lost." The light in his eyes was recognizable to any even remotely humanoid species as a mystic glow. But Cyril seemed well in command of the situation. "Come now, Raoul," he laughed, clapping his young colleague on the shoulder, "don't fall into the Rousseau trap -- noble savage and all that sort of rot!" "But that beggar!" Raoul insisted. "Trite, certainly, but injmTTin mm y( o credible nonetheless! Before, one only read of such things -- " A glazed look came into two of Bbulas' eyes, while the third closed despairingly. "What beggar? What beggar? Tell me -- I must know... as if I didn't really," he muttered in Snaddrath. "The only beggar we've seen on this planet so far. That one." Cyril indicated the modest form of Skkiru, attempting to conceal himself behind Luccar's portly person. "I realize it was only illusion, but, as my associate says, a remarkably good one. And," Cyril added, "an even more remarkable example of cultural diffusion." "What do you mean? Please, gracious and lovable Terrans, deign to tell me what you mean. What did that insufferable beggar do?" In spite of himself, Skkiru's knees flickered. Fool, he told himself, you knew it was bound to come out sooner or later. Take courage in your own convictions; be convinced by your own courage. All he really can do is yell. "He did the Indian rope trick for us," Raoul explained. "And very well, too. Very well indeed." "The -- Indian rope trick!" Bbulas spluttered. "Why, the -- " And then he recollected his religious vocation, as well as his supposed ignorance. "Would you be so kind as to tell me what the Indian rope trick is, good sirs?" 'Well, he did it with a chain, actually." "We have no ropes on this planet," Larhgan contributed. "We are backward." "And a small boy went up and disappeared," Raoul finished. Suddenly forgetting the stiffupper-lip training for which the planet had gone to such great expense, Bbulas spun around and around in a fit of bad temper, to Skkiru's great glee. Fortunately, the Dilettante retained enough self-control to keep his feet on the ground -- perhaps remembering that to fail to do so would compound Skkiru's crime. "Dervishism!" Raoul exclaimed, his eyes incandescent with interest. He pulled out his notebook. After biting his lip thoughtfully, Cyril did the same. "Just like Skkiru!" Bbulas gasped as he spun slowly to a stop. "He is a disruptive cultural mechanism. Leading children astray!" "But not at all," Raoul pointed out politely. "The boy came back unharmed and in the best of spirits." "So far as we could see," Cyril amended. "Of course there may have been psychic damage." "Which boy was it?" Bbulas demanded.  in question -- a rather wellknown juvenile delinquent, though the Terrestrials, of course, couldn't know that. "He is a member of my own clan," Bbulas said. "He will be thrashed soundly." "But why punish him?" Raoul asked. "What harm has he done?" "Shhh," Cyril warned him. "You may be touching on a tabu. What's the matter with you, anyway? One would think you had forgotten every lesson you ever learned." "Oh, I am truly sorry!" Raoul's face became a pleasing shade of pink, which made him look much more human. Maybe it was the wrong color, but at least it was a color. "Please to accept my apologies, reverend sir." "It's quite all right." Bbulas reverted to graciousness. "The boy should not have associated with a beggar -- especially that one. If he did not hold his post by timehallowed tradition, we would -- dispose of him. He has always been a trouble-maker." "But I do not understand," Raoul persisted. Skkiru could not understand why Cyril did not stop him again. "The beggar did the trick very effectively. I know it was all illusion, but I should like to know just how he created such an illusion, and, moreover, how the Indian rope trick got all the way to -- " "It was all done by magic," Bbulas said firmly. "Magic outside the temple is not encouraged, because it is black magic, and so it is wrong. The magic of the priests is white magic, and so it is right. Put that down in your little book." Raoul obediently wrote it down. "Still, I should like to know -- " "Let us speak of pleasanter things," Bbulas interrupted again. "Tomorrow night, we are holding a potlatch and we should be honored to have the pleasure of your company." "Delighted," Raoul bowed. "I was wrong," Cyril said. "This is not a remarkable example of cultural diffusion. It is a remarkable example of a diffuse culture." ?? "D UT I cannot understand," Raoul said to Cyril later, in the imagined privacy of their hut. "Why are you suspicious of this charming, friendly people, so like the natives that the textbooks lead one to expect?" Naturally, Skkiru -- having made his way in through a secret passage known only to the entire population of the city and explicitly designed for espionage, and was spying outside the door -- thought, we are textbook natives. Not only because we were patterned on literary prototypes, but because Bbulas never really left school -- in spirit, anyway. He is the perpetual undergraduate and his whole scheme is nothing more than a grandiose Class Night. "Precisely what I've been thinking," Cyril said. "So like the textbooks -- all the textbooks put together." "What do you mean? Surely it is possible for analogous cultural features to develop independently in different cultures?" "Oh, it's possible, all right. Probability -- particularly when it comes to such a great number of features packed into one small culture -- is another matter entirely." "I cannot understand you," , Raoul objected. "What do you want of these poor natives? To me, it seems everything has been of the most idyllic. Rapport was established almost immediately." "A little too immediately, perhaps, don't you think? You haven't had much experience, Raoul, so you might not be aware it usually isn't as easy as this." Cyril flung himself down on one of the cots that had been especially hardened for Terrestrial use and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Skkiru was dying for a cigarette himself, but that was another cultural feature the Snaddrath had to dispense with now -- not that smoking was insufficiently primitive, but that tobacco was not indigenous to the planet. "That is because they are not a hostile people," Raoul insisted. "Apparently they have no enemies. Nonetheless, they are of the utmost interest. I hardly expected to land a society like this on my very first field trip," he added joyfully. "Never have I heard of so dynamic a culture! Never!" "Nor I," Cyril agreed, "and this is far from being my very first field trip. It has a terribly large number of strange elements in it -- strange, that is, when considered in relationship to the society as a whole. Environmental pressures seem to have had no effect upon their culture. For instance, don't you think it rather remarkable that a people with such an enormously complex social structure as theirs should wear clothing so ill adapted to protect them from the weather?" " enthusiastically -- another undergraduate type, Skkiru observed, happiest with matters that either resembled those in books or came directly from them, so that they could be explicitly pigeonholed -- "the Indians of Tierra del Fuego wore nothing but waist-length sealskin capes even in the bitterest cold. Of course, this civilization is somewhat more advanced than theirs in certain ways, but one finds such anomalies in all primitive civilizations, does one not?" "That's true to a certain extent. But one would think they'd at least have developed boots to cope with the mud. And why was the beggar the only one to wear mudshoes? Why, moreover -- " Cyril narrowed his eyes and pointed his cigarette at Raoul -- "did he wear theta only the first time and subsequently appear barefooted?" "That was odd," Raoul admitted, "but -- " "And the high priest spoke of thrashing that boy. You should know, old chap, that cruelty to children is in inverse ratio to the degree of civilization." Raoul stared at his colleague. "My faith, are you suggesting that we go see how hard they hit him, then?" Cyril laughed. "All I suggest is that we keep a very open mind about this society until we can discover what fundamental attitudes are controlling such curious individual as well as group behavior." "But assuredly. That is what we are here for, is it not? So why are you disturbing yourself so much?" But it was Raoul, Skkiru thought, who appeared much more disturbed than Cyril. It was understandable -- the younger man was interested only in straightforward ethnologizing and undoubtedly found the developing complications upsetting. "Look," Cyril continued. "They call this place a hut. It's almost a palace." My God, Skkiru thought, what kind of primitive conditions are they used to? "That is largely a question of semantics," Raoul protested. "But regard -- the roof leaks. Is that not backward enough for you, eh?" And Raoul moved to another part of the room to avoid receiving indisputable proof of the leakage on his person. "What is more, the sanitary arrangements are undeniably primitive." "The roofs of many palaces leak, and there is no plumbing to speak of, and still they are not called huts. And tell me this -- why should the metal-workers be the pariahs? Why metal-workers?" Raoul's eyes opened wide. "You know there is often an outcast class with no apparent rationale behind its establishment All the tapes -- " "True enough, but you will remember that the reason the smiths of Masai were pariahs was that they manufactured weapons which might tempt people to commit bloodshed. I keep remembering them, somehow. I keep remembering so many things here..." "But we have seen no weapons on this planet," Raoul argued. "In fact, the people seem completely peaceful." "Right you are." Cyril blew another smoke ring. "Since this is a planet dependent chiefly upon minerals, why make the members of jts most important industry the out-group?" "You think it is that they may be secretly hostile?" Cyril smiled. "I think they may be secretly something, but hardly hostile." Aha, Skkiru thought. Bbulas, my splendidly scaled friend, I will have something interesting to tell you. later that night, as most of the Snaddrath met informally in the council chamber belowground, the new caste distinctions being, if not forgotten, at least in abeyance -- for everyone except Bbulas. "You imbecile!" He whirled, unable to repress his Snadd emotions after a long behaviorally Terran day. "I have half a mind to get rid of you by calling down divine judgment." "How would you do that?" Skkiru demanded, emboldened by the little cry of dismay, accompanied by a semi-somersault, which Larhgan gave. In spite of everything, she still loved him; she would never belong to Bbulas, though he might plan until he was ochre in the face. "Same way you did the rope trick. Only you wouldn't come back, my boy. Nice little cultural trait for the ethnologists to put in their peace pipes and smoke. Never saw such people for asking awkward questions." Bbulas sighed and straightened his antennae with his fingers, since their ornaments made them too heavy to allow reflective verticalization. "Remind me of final exams back on Gambrell." "Anthropologists always ask awkward questions -- everybody knows that," Larhgan put in. "It's their function. And I don't think you should speak that way to Skkiru, Bbulas. Like all of us, he's only trying to do his best. No man -- or woman -- can do more." She smiled at Skkiru and his hearts whirled madly inside him. Only a dolt, he thought, would give way to despair; there was no need for this intolerable situation to endure for a lifetime. If only he could solve the problem more quickly than Bbulas expected or -- Skkiru began to understand -- wanted, Larhgan could be his again. "With everybody trying to run this planet," Bbulas snarled, taking off his headdress, "no wonder things are going wrong." Luccar intervened. Although it was obvious that he had been enjoying to a certain extent the happy anonymity of functionless yam-stealer, old elective responsibilities could not but hang heavy over a public servant of such unimpeachable integrity. "After all," the old man said, "secretly we're still a democracy, and secretly I am still President, and secretly I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps we weren't a little rash in -- " "Look here, all of you," Bbulas interrupted querulously. "I'm not doing this for my own amusement." "DCT that's just what you are doing, Skkiru thought, even though you wouldn't admit it to yourself, nor would you think of it as amusement. "You know what happened to Nemeth," Bbulas continued, using an argument that had convinced them before, but that was beginning to wear a little thin now. "Poorest, most backward planet in the whole Galaxy. A couple of ethnologists from Earth stumbled on it a little over a century ago and what happened? More kept on coming; the trade ships followed. Now it's the richest, most advanced planet in that whole sector. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to us in this sector, if we play our cards carefully." "But maybe these two won't tell other anthropologists about us," Luccar said. "Something the older one remarked certainly seemed to imply as much. Maybe they don't want the same thing to happen again -- in which case, all this is a waste of time. Furthermore," he concluded rather petulantly, "at my age, I don't like running about in the open; it's not healthful." "If they don't tell other anthropologists about us," Bbulas said, his face paling to lime-green with anxiety, "we can spread the news unobtrusively ourselves. Just let one study be published, even under false coordinates, and we can always hire a good public relations man to let our whereabouts leak out. Please, everybody, stick to your appointed tasks and let me do the worrying. You haven't even given this culture a chance! It's hardly more than a day old and all I hear are complaints, complaints, complaints." "You'd better worry," Skkiru said smugly, "because already those Terrans think there's something fishy about this culture. Ha, ha! Did you get that -- fishy?" Only Larhgan laughed. She loved him. "How do you know they're suspicious?" Bbulas demanded. "Are you in their confidence? Skkiru, if you've been talking -- " "All I did was spy outside their door," Skkiru said hastily. "I knew you couldn't eavesdrop; it wouldn't look dignified if you were caught. But beggars do that kind of thing all the time. And I wanted to show you I could be of real use." He beamed at Larhgan, who beamed back. "I could have kept my findings to myself," he went on, "but I came to tell you. In fact -- " he dug in his robe -- "I even jotted down a few notes." "It wasn't at all necessary, Skkiru," Bbulas said in a tired voice. "We took the elementary precaution of wiring their hut for sound and a recorder is constantly taking down their every word." "Hut!" Skkiru kept his antennae under control with an effort, but his retort was feeble. "They think it's a palace. You did them too well, Bbulas." "I may have overdone the exterior architecture a bit," the high priest admitted. "Not that it seems relevant to the discussion. Although I've been trying to arrange our primitivism according to Terrestrial ideas of cultural backwardness, I'm afraid many of the physical arrangements are primitive according to our conceptions rather than theirs." " according to Terran ideas?" Luccar wanted to know. "Why must we be slaves even to fashions in backwardness?" "Hear, hear!" cried an anonymous voice. "And thank you, Skkiru," the former President continued, "for telling me they were suspicious. I doubt that Bbulas would have taken the trouble to inform me of so trivial a matter." "As high priest," Bbulas said stiffly, "I believe the matter, trivial or not, now falls within my province." "Shame!" cried an anonymous voice -- or it might have been the same one. Bbulas turned forest-green and his antennae twitched. "After all, you yourself, Luccar, agreed to accept the role of elder statesman -- " "Yam-stealer," Luccar corrected him bitterly, "which is not the same thing." "On Earth, it is. And," Bbulas went on quickly, "as for our assuming primitive Earth attitudes, where else are we going to get our attitudes from? We can't borrow any primitive attitudes from Nemeth, because they're too well known. And since there are no other planets we know of with intelligent life-forms that have social structures markedly different from the major Terran ones -- except for some completely nonhumanoid cultures, which, for physiological reasons, we are incapable of imitating -- we have to rely upon records of primitive Terran sources for information. Besides, a certain familiarity with the traits manifested will make the culture more understandable to the Terrans, and, hence, more attractive to them psychologically." He stopped and straightened out his antennae. "In other words," Skkiru commented, emboldened by a certain aura of sympathy he felt emanating from Larhgan, at least, and probably from Luccar, too, "he doesn't have the imagination to think up any cultural traits for himself, so he has to steal them -- and that's the easiest place to steal them from." "This is none of your business, Skkiru," Bbulas snapped. "You just beg." "It's the business of all of us, Bbulas," Luccar corrected softly. "Please to remember that, no matter what our alloted roles, we are all concerned equally in this." "Of course, of course, but please let me handle the situation in my own way, since I made the plans. And, Skkiru," the Dilettante added with strained grace, "you may have a warm cloak to wear as soon as we can get patches welded on." Then Bbulas took a deep breath and reverted to his old cheer-leader manner. "Now we must all get organized for the potlatch. We can give the Terrans those things the Ladies' Aid has been working on all year for the charity bazaar and, in exchange, perhaps they will give us more chocolate bars -- " he glanced reproachfully at Skkiru -- "and other food." "And perhaps some yams," Luccar suggested, "so that -- God save us -- I can steal them." "I'll definitely work on that," Bbulas promised.  gar, he held no prominent position at the feast -- in reality, no position at all -- for he hated fish. And fish, naturally, would be the chief refreshment offered, since the Snaddrath did not want the Terrans to know that they had already achieved that degrading dependency upon the tin can that marks one of the primary differences between savagery and civilization. There were fish pate on rice crackers, fish soup with rice, boiled fish, baked fish, fried fish and a pilau of rice with fish. There were fish chitlins, fish chips, fish cakes, fish candy and guslat -- a potent distillation of fermented fish livers -- to wash it all down. And even in the library, where Skkiru sought refuge from the festivities, fishy fumes kept filtering down through the ventilating system to assail his nostrils. Bbulas had been right in a way, Skkiru had to admit to himself upon reflection. In trying to improve his lot, Skkiru had taken advantage of the Snaddrath's special kinetic talents, which had been banned for the duration -- and so he had, in effect, committed a crime. This time, however, he would seek to uplift himself in terms acceptable to the Terrans on a wholly indigenous level, and in terms which would also hasten the desired corruptive process -- in a nice way, of course -- so that the Snaddrath civilization could be profitably undermined as fast as possible and Larhgan be his once again. It was a hard problem to solve, but he felt sure he could do it. Anything Bbulas could do, he could do better. Then he had it! And the idea was so wonderful that he was a little sorry at the limited range it would necessarily cover. His part really should be played out before a large, yoomping audience, but he was realistic enough to see that it would be most expedient for him to give a private performance for the Earthmen alone. On the other hand, he now knew it should be offered outside the hut, because the recorder would pick up his cries and Bbulas would be in a spin -- as he would be about any evidence of independent thinking on the planet. Bbulas was less interested in the planet's prospering, it was now clear to Skkiru, than in its continuing in a state where he would remain top fish. had done its work, and by the time the Earthmen arrived at the door to their hut, they were alone. The rest of the company either had fallen into a stupor or could not trust themselves to navigate the mud. The Earthmen -- with an ingeniousness which would have augured well for the future development of their race, had it not already been the (allegedly) most advanced species in the Galaxy -- had adapted some spare parts from their ship into replicas of Skirru's mudshoes. They did, in truth, seem none too steady on their feet, but he was unable to determine to what degree this was a question of intoxication and what degree a question of navigation. "Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd." He thrust forward his begging bowl. "Regard, it is the beggar! Why were you not at the festivities, worthy mendicant?" Raoul hiccuped. "Lovely party. Beautiful women. Delicious fish." Skkiru started to stand on his head, then remembered this was no longer a socially acceptable expression of grief and cast his eyes down. "I was not invited," he said sadly. "Like the little match girl," Raoul sympathized. "My heart bleeds for you, good match gi -- good beggar. Does your heart not bleed for him, Cyril?" "Bad show," the older ethnologist agreed, with a faint smile. "But that's what you've got to expect, if you're going to be a primitive." He was very drunk, Skkiru decided; he must be, to phrase his sentiments so poorly. Unless he -- but no, Skkiru refused to believe that. He didn't mind Cyril's being vaguely suspicious, but that was as far as he wanted him to go. Skkiru's toes apprehensively started to quiver. "How can you say a thing like that to a primitive?" Raoul demanded. "If he were not a primitive, it would be all right to call him a primitive, but one does not accuse primitives of being primitives. It's -- it's downright primitive; that's what it is!" "You need some coffee, my boy." Cyril grinned. "Black coffee. That guslat of theirs is highly potent stuff." They were about to go inside. Skkiru had to act quickly. He slumped over. Although he had meant to land on the doorstep, he lacked the agility to balance himself with the precision required and so he fell smack into the mud. The feel of the slime on his bare feet had been bad enough; oozing over his skin through the interstices of his clothing, it was pure hell. What sacrifices he was making for his planet! And for Larhgan. The thought of her would have to sustain him through this viscous ordeal, for there was nothing else solid within his grasp. "Ubbl," he said, lifting his head from the ooze, so that they could see the froth coming out of his mouth. "Glubbl." is he doing?" "Having an epileptic fit, I rather fancy. Go on, old man," Cyril said to Skkiru. "You're doing splendidly. Splendidly!" "I see the sky!" Skkiru howled, anxious to get his prophecies over with before he sank any deeper in the mud. "It is great magic. I see many ships in the sky. They are all coming to Snaddra..." "Bearing anthropologists and chocolate bars, I suppose," murmured Cyril. "Shhh," Raoul said indignantly. "You must not interrupt. He is having personal contact with the supernatural, a very important element of the primitive ethos." "Thank you," Cyril said. "I'll try to remember that." So will I, thought Skirru. "They carry learned men and food for the spiritually and physically hungry people of Snaddra," he interrupted impatiently. "They carry warm clothing for the poor and miserable people of Snaddra. They carry yams for the larcenous and frustrated people of Snaddra." "Yams!" Raoul echoed. "Yams!" "Shhh, this is fascinating. Go on, beggar." But the mud sogging over Skkiru's body was too much. The fit could be continued at a later date -- and in a drier location. "Where am I?" he asked, struggling to a sitting position. "You are on Snaddra, fifth planet of the sun Weebl," Raoul began, "in -- " "Weeeeebl," Skkiru corrected, getting to his feet with the older ethnologist's assistance. "What happened?" He beat futilely at the mud caught in the meshes of his metal rags. "I feel faint." "Come in and have some coffee with us," Cyril invited. This also was part of Skirru's plan, for he had no intention of going back across that mud, if he could possibly help it. He had nothing further to say that the recorders should not hear. Bbulas might object to his associating with the Earthmen, but he couldn't do much if the association seemed entirely innocent. At the moment, Snaddra might be a theocracy, but the democratic hangover was still strong. "I would rather have some hot chocolate," Skkiru said. "That is, if you have no objection to drinking with a beggar." "My dear fellow -- " Cyril put an arm around Skkiru's muddy shoulders -- "we ethnologists do not hold with caste distinctions. Come in and have chocolate -- with a spot of rum, eh? That'll make you right as a trivet in a matter of seconds." after several cups of the finest chocolate he had ever tasted, that Skkiru announced himself to feel quite recovered. "Please do not bother to accompany me to the door," he said. "I can find my own way. You do me too much honor. I would feel shamefaced." "But Cyril began. "No," Skkiru said. "It is -- it is bad form here. I insist. I must go my way alone." "All right," Cyril agreed. Raoul looked at him in some surprise. "All right," Cyril repeated in a louder tone. "Go by yourself, if an escort would bother you. But please give the door a good bang, so the lock will catch." Skkiru slammed the door lustily to simulate the effect of departure and then he descended via the secret passage inside the hut itself, scrabbling a little because the hot chocolate seemed strangely to have affected his sense of balance. The rest of the Snaddrath were in the council chamber gloating over the loot from the potlatch. It was, as a matter of fact, a good take. "Where were you, Skkiru?" Bbulas asked, examining a jar of preserved kumquats suspiciously. "Up to no good, I'll be bound." "Oh, my poor Skkiru!" Larhgan exclaimed, before Skkiru could say anything. "How muddy and wretched-looking you are! I don't like this whole thing," she told Bbulas. "It's cruel. Being high priestess isn't nearly as much fun as I thought it would be." "This is not supposed to be fun," the Dilettante informed her coldly. "It is in dead earnest. Since the question has been brought up, however, what did happen to you, Skkiru?" "I -- er -- fell down and, being a beggar, I had no other garments to change into." "You'll survive," Bbulas said unfeelingly. "On Earth, I understand, people fall into mud all the time. Supposed to have a beneficial effect -- and any effect on you, Skkiru, would have to be beneficial." Larhgan was opening her mouth to say something -- probably, Skkiru thought fondly, in his defense -- when there came a thud and a yell from the passage outside. Two yells, in fact. And two thuds. "My faith," exclaimed a Terrestrial voice, "but how did the beggar descend! I am sure every bone in my body is broken." "I think you'll find him possessed of means of locomotion not known to us. But you're not hurt, old chap -- only bruised." And Cyril came into the council chamber, followed by a limping Raoul. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I trust this is not an intrusion, although I'm quite sure you'll tell us we've broken a whole slue of tabus." "You!" Bbulas screamed at Skkiru. "You must have used the passage in the hut! You let them follow you!" Losing control of his own reflexes, he began to whirl madly. claimed, staring around him. "To build a place like this beneath the mud -- name of a name, these people must have hydraulic engineering far superior to anything on Earth!" "You are too kind," the former hydraulic engineer said deprecatingly. "Actually, it's quite simple -- " "This is not a primitive civilization at all, Raoul," Cyril explained. "They've been faking it from tapes. Probably have a culture very much like ours, with allowances for climatic differences, of course. Oh, undoubtedly it would be provincial, but -- " "We are not provincial," Larhgan said coldly. "Primitive, yes. Provincial, no! We are -- " "But why should they do a thing like this to us?" Raoul wailed. "I imagine they did it to get on the trade routes, as Nemeth did. They've been trying not to talk about Nemeth all the while. Must have been rather a strain. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" Cyril told the assembled Snaddrath. "Very bad form!" Bbulas was turning paler and paler as he whirled. "All your fault," he gasped hoarsely to Skkiru. "All your fault!" And that was true, Skkiru realized. His antennae quivered, but he didn't even try to restrain them. He had meant well, yet he had messed up the planet's affairs far more seriously than Bbulas had. He had ruined their hopes, killed all their chances by his carelessness. He, Skkiru, instead of being his planet's savior, was its spoiler. He psonked violently. But Larhgan moved nearer to him. "It's all over, anyhow," she whispered, "and you know what? I'm glad. I'm glad we failed. I'd rather starve as myself than succeed as a sham." Skkiru controlled himself. Silently, he took the grimpatch out of his carrier and, as silently, she took it back. "My faith, they must have had plumbing all the time!" Raoul complained. "Very likely," said Cyril sternly. "Looks as if we've suffered for nothing." "Such people!" Raoul said. "True primitives, I am sure, would never have behaved so unfeelingly!" Cyril smiled, but his face was hard as he turned back to the Snaddrath. "We'll radio Gambrell in the morning to have a ship dispatched to pick us up. I'm not sure but that we have a good case for fraud against you." "We're destroyed!" Bbulas shrieked as the full emotional impact of the situation hit him. "An interplanetary lawsuit would ruin Snaddra entirely." His cries were echoed in the howls of the other Snaddrath, their antennae psonking, their eyes bulging. Bbulas lost all emotional restraint, forgot about his Terrestrial training, and turned upside down in a spasm of grief. Since there was no longer any reason to repress their natural manifestation of feeling, all the Snaddrath followed suit, their antennae twisting in frenzy as they ululated. And then, to Skkiru's surprise and the surprise of all the rest, Cyril stopped and took out his notebook. "Wait a minute," he said as Raoul did likewise. All four Earthly eyes were shining with a glow that was recognizable to any even remotely humanoid species as the glow of intellectual fervor. "Wait just a minute! Our plans are altered. We may stay, after all!" One by one, the Snaddrath reversed to upright positions, but did not retract their eyes, for they were still staring at the Earthmen. Skkiru knew now what had been bothering him about the Terrestrials all along. They were crazy -- that was what it was. Who but maniacs would want to leave their warm, dry planets and go searching the stars for strange cultures, when they could stay quietly at home in peace and comfort with their families? Skkiru's hand reached out for Larhgan's and found it.  Something drastic should happen to all snoopers -- but nothing as shocking and frightful as this! enough rooming house and the doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are old-fashioned single action jobs and the hinges are loose, and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to operate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door sidewise against its hinges, and slip the latch. Further, you can lock the door the same way when you come out. Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things partly because he was bored. The company doctors had laid him up -- not off, up -- for three weeks (after his helper had hit him just over the temple with a fourteeninch crescent wrench) pending some more X-rays. If he was going to get just sick-leave pay, he wanted to make it stretch. If he was going to get a big fat settlement -- all to the good; what he saved by living in this firetrap would make the money look even better. Meanwhile, he felt fine and had nothing to do all day. "Slim isn't dishonest," his mother used to tell Children's Court some years back. "He's just curious." She was perfectly right. Slim was constitutionally incapable of borrowing your bathroom without looking into your medicine chest. Send him into your kitchen for a saucer and when he came out a minute later, he'd have inventoried your refrigerator, your vegetable bin, and (since he was six feet three inches tall) he would know about a moldering jar of maraschino cherries in the back of the top shelf that you'd forgotten about. Perhaps Slim, who was not impressed by his impressive size and build, felt that a knowledge that you secretly use hair-restorer, or are one of those strange people who keeps a little mound of unmated socks in your second drawer, gave him a kind of superiority. Or maybe security is a better word. Or maybe it was an odd compensation for one of the most advanced cases of gawking, gasping shyness ever recorded. Whatever it was, Slim liked you better if, while talking to you, he knew how many jackets hung in your closet, how old that unpaid phone bill was, and just where you'd hidden those photographs. On the other hand, Slim didn't insist on knowing bad or even embarrassing things about you. He just wanted to know things about you, period. TT IS current situation was therefore a near paradise. Flimsy doors stood in rows, barely sustaining vacuum on aching vacuum of knowledge; and one by one they imploded at the nudge of his curiosity. He touched nothing (or if he did, he replaced it carefully) and removed nothing, and within a week he knew Mrs. Koyper's roomers far better than she could, or cared to. Each secret visit to the rooms gave him a starting point; subsequent ones taught him more. He knew not only what these people had, but what they did, where, how much, for how much, and how often. In almost every case, he knew why as well. Almost every case. Celia Sarton came. Now, at various times, in various places, Slim had found strange things in other people's rooms. There was an old lady in one shabby place who had an electric train under her bed; used it, too. There was an old spinster in this very building who collected bottles, large and small, of any value or capacity, providing they were round and squat and with long necks. A man on the second floor secretly guarded his desirables with the unloaded .# automatic in his top bureau drawer, for which he had a halfbox of .# cartridges. There was a (to be chivalrous) girl in one of the rooms who kept fresh cut flowers before a photograph on her night-table -- or, rather, before a frame in which were stacked eight photographs, one of which held the stage each day. Seven days, eight photographs: Slim admired the system. A new love every day and, predictably, a different love on successive Wednesdays. And all of them movie stars. Dozens of rooms, dozens of imprints, marks, impressions, overlays, atmospheres of people. And they needn't be odd ones. A woman moves into a room, however standardized; the instant she puts down her dusting powder on top of the flush tank, the room is hers. Something stuck in the illfitting frame of a mirror, something draped over the long-dead gas jet, and the samest of rooms begins to shrink toward its occupant as if it wished, one day, to be a close-knit, form-fitting, individual integument as intimate as a skin. But not Celia Sarton's room. Slim Walsh got a glimpse of her as she followed Mrs. Koyper up the stairs to the third floor. Mrs. Koyper, who hobbled, slowed any follower sufficiently to afford the most disinterested witness a good look, and Slim was anything but disinterested. Yet for days he could not recall her clearly. It was as if Celia Sarton had been -- not invisible, for that would have been memorable in itself -- but translucent or, chameleonlike, drably re-radiating the drab wall color, carpet color, woodwork color. She was -- how old? Old enough to pay taxes. How tall? Tall enough. Dressed in... whatever women cover themselves with in their statistical thousands. Shoes, hose, skirt, jacket, hat. She carried a bag, When you go to the baggage window at a big terminal, you notice a suitcase here, a steamer-trunk there; and all around, high up, far back, there are rows and ranks and racks of luggage not individually noticed but just there. This bag, Celia Sarton's bag, was one of them. And to Mrs. Koyper, she said -- she said -- She said whatever is necessary when one takes a cheap room; and to find her voice, divide the sound of a crowd by the number of people in it.  ticeable was she that, aside from being aware that she left in the morning andeturned in the evening, Slim let two days go by before he entered her room; he simply could not remind himself about her. And when he did, and had inspected it to his satisfaction, he had his hand on the knob, about to leave, before he recalled that the room was, after all, occupied. Until that second, he had thought he was giving one of the vacancies the once-over. (He did this regularly; it gave him a reference-point.) He grunted and turned back, flicking his gaze over the room. First he had to assure himself that he was in the right room, which, for a man of his instinctive orientations, was extraordinary. Then he had to spend a moment of disbelief in his own eyes, which was all but unthinkable. When that passed, he stood in astonishment, staring at the refutation of everything his -- hobby -- had taught him about people and the places they live in. The bureau drawers were empty. The ashtray was clean. No toothbrush, toothpaste, soap. In the closet, two wire hangers and one wooden one covered with dirty quilted silk, and nothing else. Under the grime-gray dresser scarf, nothing. In the shower stall, the medicine chest, nothing and nothing again, except what Mrs. Koyper had grudgingly installed. Slim went to the bed and carefully turned back the faded coverlet. Maybe she had slept in it, but very possibly not; Mrs. Koyper specialized in unironed sheets of such a ground-in gray that it wasn't easy to tell. Frowning, Slim put up the coverlet again and smoothed it. Suddenly he struck his forehead, which yielded him a flash of pain from his injury. He ignored it. 'The bag!" It was under the bed, shoved there, not hidden there. He looked at it without touching it for a moment, so that it could be returned exactly. Then he hauled it out. TT was a black gladstone, neither new nor expensive, of that nondescript rusty color acquired by untended leatherette. It had a worn zipper closure and was not locked. Slim opened it. It contained a cardboard box, crisp and new, for a thousand virgin sheets of cheap white typewriter paper surrounded by a glossy bright blue band bearing a white diamond with the legend: Nonpareil the writers friend # cotton fiber trade mark registered. Slim lifted the paper out of the box, looked under it, riffled a thumbful of the sheets at the top and the same from the bottom, shook his head, replaced the paper, closed the box, put it back into the bag and restored everything precisely as he had found it. He paused again in the middle of the room, turning slowly once, but there was simply nothing else to look at. He let himself out, locked the door, and went silently back to his room. He sat down on the edge of his I  y J ! ! Sr U I 'rf # W 'fir f A W JmmML f w jet I VB jf C   IkwSal JB.  bed and at last protested, "Nobody lives like that!" TT IS room was on the fourth and topmost floor of the old house. Anyone else would have called it the worst room in the place. It was small, dark, shabby and remote and it suited him beautifully. Its door had a transom, the glass of which had many times been painted over. By standing on the foot of his bed, Slim could apply one eye to the peephole he had scratched in the paint and look straight down the stairs to the third-floor landing. On this landing, hanging to the stub of one of the ancient gas jets, was a cloudy mirror surmounted by a dust-mantled gilt eagle and surrounded by a great many rococo carved flowers. By careful propping with folded cigarette wrappers, innumerable tests and a great deal of silent milage up and down the stairs, Slim had .arranged the exact tilt necessary in the mirror so that it covered the second floor landing as well. And just as a radar operator learns to translate glowing pips and masses into aircraft and weather, so Slim became expert at the interpretation of the fogged and distant image it afforded him. Thus he had the comings and goings of half the tenants under surveillance without having to leave his room. It was in this mirror, at twelve minutes past six, that he saw Celia Sarton next, and as he watched her climb the stairs, his eyes glowed. The anonymity was gone. She came up the stairs two at a time, with a gait like bounding. She reached the landing and whirled into her corridor and was gone, and while a part of Slim's mind listened for the way she opened her door (hurriedly, rattling the key against the lock-plate, banging the door open, slamming it shut), another part studied a mental photograph of her face. What raised its veil of the statistical ordinary was its set purpose. Here were eyes only superficially interested in cars, curbs, stairs, doors. It was as if she had projected every important part of herself into that empty room of hers and waited there impatiently for her body to catch up. There was something in the room, or something she had to do there, which she could not, would not, wait for. One goes this way to a beloved after a long parting, or to a deathbed in the last, precipitous moments. This was not the arrival of one who wants, but of one who needs. Slim buttoned his shirt, eased his door open and sidled through it. He poised a moment on his landing like a great moose sensing the air before descending to a waterhole, and then moved downstairs. Celia Sarton's only neighbor in the north corridor -- the spinster with the bottles -- was settled for the evening; she was of very regular habits and Slim knew them well. Completely confident that he would not be seen, he drifted to the girl's door and paused. S HE was there, all right. He could see the light around the edges of the ill-fitting door, could sense that difference between an occupied room and an empty one, which exists however silent the occupant might be. And this one was silent. Whatever it was that had driven her into the room with such headlong urgency, whatever it was she was doing ( had to do) was being done with no sound or motion that he could detect. For a long time -- six minutes, seven -- Slim hung there, openthroated to conceal the sound of his breath. At last, shaking his head, he withdrew, climbed the stairs, let himself into his own room and lay down on the bed, frowning. He could only wait. Yet he could wait. No one does any single thing for very long. Especially a thing not involving movement. In an hour, in two -- It was five. At half-past eleven, some faint sound from the floor below brought Slim, half-dozing, twisting up from the bed and to his high peephole in the transom. He saw the Sarton girl come out of the corridor slowly, and stop, and look around at nothing in particular, like someone confined too long in a ship's cabin who has emerged on deck, not so much for the lungs' sake, but for the eyes'. And when she went down the stairs, it was easily and without hurry, as if (again) the important part of her was in the room. But the something was finished with for now and what was ahead of her wasn't important and could wait. Standing with his hand on his own doorknob, Slim decided that he, too, could wait. The temptation to go straight to her room was, of course, large, but caution also loomed. What he had tentatively established as her habit patterns did not include midnight exits. He could not know when she might come back and it would be foolish indeed to jeopardize his hobby -- not only where it included her, but all of it -- by being caught. He sighed, mixing resignation with anticipatory pleasure, and went to bed. Less than fifteen minutes later, he congratulated himself with a sleepy smile as he heard her slow footsteps mount the stair below. He slept. closet, there was nothing in the ashtray, there was nothing in the medicine chest nor under the dresser scarf. The bed was made, the dresser drawers were empty, and under the bed was the cheap gladstone. In it was a box containing a thousand sheets of typing paper surrounded by a glossy blue band. Without disturbing this, Slim riffled the sheets, once at the top, once at the bottom. He grunted, shook his head and then proceeded, automatically but meticulously, to put everything back as he had found it. "Whatever it is this girl does at night," he said glumly, "it leaves tracks like it makes noise." He left. The rest of the day was unusually busy for Slim. In the morning he had a doctor's appointment, and in the afternoon he spent hours with a company lawyer who seemed determined to (a) deny the existence of any head injury and (b) prove to Slim and the world that the injury must have occurred years ago. He got absolutely nowhere. If Slim had another characteristic as consuming and compulsive as his curiosity, it was his shyness; these two could stand on one another's shoulders, though, and still look upward at Slim's stubbornness. It served its purpose. It took hours, however, and it was after seven when he got home. He paused at the third-floor landing and glanced down the corridor. Celia Sarton's room was occupied and silent. If she emerged around midnight, exhausted and relieved, then he would know she had again raced up the stairs to her urgent, motionless task, whatever it was... and here he checked himself. He had long ago learned the uselessness of cluttering up his busy head with conjectures. A thousand things might happen; in each case, only one would. He would wait, then, and could. And again, some hours later, he saw her come out of her corridor. She looked about, but he knew she saw very little; her face was withdrawn and her eyes wide and unguarded. Then, instead of going out, she went back into her room. He slipped downstairs half an hour later and listened at her door, and smiled. She was washing her lingerie at the handbasin. It was a small thing to learn, but he felt he was making progress. It did not explain why she lived as she did, but indicated how she could manage without so much as a spare handkerchief. Oh, well, maybe in the morning. maybe. He found it, he found it, though he could not know what it was he'd found. He laughed at first, not in triumph but wryly, calling himself a clown. Then he squatted on his heels in the middle of the floor (he would not sit on the bed, for fear of leaving wrinkles of his own on those Mrs. Koyper supplied) and carefully lifted the box of paper out of the suitcase and put it on the floor in front of him. Up to now, he had contented himself with a quick riffle of the blank paper, a little at the top, a little at the bottom. He had done just this again, without removing the box from the suitcase, but only taking the top off and tilting up the banded ream of Nonpareilthe-writers-iriend. And almost in spite of itself, his quick eye had caught the briefest flash of pale blue. Gently, he removed the band, sliding it off the pack of paper, being careful not to slit the glossy finish. Now he could freely riffle the pages, and when he did, he discovered that all of them except a hundred or so, top and bottom, had the same rectangular cut-out, leaving only a narrow margin all the way around. In the hollow space thus formed, something was packed. He could not tell what the something was, except that it was pale tan, with a tinge of pink, and felt like smooth untextured leather. There was a lot of it, neatly folded so that it exactly fitted the hole in the ream of paper. He puzzled over it for some minutes without touching it again, and then, scrubbing his fingertips against his shirt until he felt that they were quite free of moisture and grease, he gently worked loose the top corner of the substance and unfolded a layer. All he found was more of the same. He folded it down flat again to be sure he could, and then brought more of it out. He soon realized that the material was of an irregular shape and almost certainly of one piece, so that folding it into a tight rectangle required care and great skill. Therefore he proceeded very slowly, stopping every now and then to fold it up again, and it took him more than an hour to get enough of it out so that he could identify it. Identify? It was completely unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was a human skin, done in some substance very like the real thing. The first fold, the one which had been revealed at first, was an area of the back, which was why it showed no features. One might liken it to a balloon, except that a deflated balloon is smaller in every dimension than an inflated one. As far as Slim could judge, this was life-sized -- a little over five feet long and proportioned accordingly. The hair was peculiar, looking exactly like the real thing until flexed, and then revealing itself to be one piece. It had Celia Sarton's face. Slim closed his eyes and opened them, and found that it was still true. He held his breath and put forth a careful, steady forefinger and gently pressed the left eyelid upward. There was an eye under it, all right, light blue and seemingly moist, but flat. Slim released the breath, closed the eye and sat back on his heels. His feet were beginning to tingle from his having knelt on the floor for so long. XT E looked all around the room once, to clear his head of strangeness, and then began to fold the thing up again. It took a while, but when he was finished, he knew he had it right. He replaced the typewriter paper in the box and the box in the bag, put the bag away and at last stood in the middle of the room in the suspension which overcame him when he was deep in thought. After a moment of this, he began to inspect the ceiling. It was made of stamped tin, like those of many old-fashioned houses. It was grimy and flaked and stained; here and there, rust showed through, and in one or two places, edges of the tin sheets had sagged. Slim nodded to himself in profound satisfaction, listened for a while at the door, let himself out, locked it and went upstairs. He stood in his own corridor for a minute, checking the position of doors, the hall window, and his accurate orientation of the same things on the floor below. Then he went into his own room. His room, though smaller than most, was one of the few in the house which was blessed with a real closet instead of a rickety off-the-floor wardrobe. He went into it and knelt, and grunted in satisfaction when he found how loose the ancient, unpainted floorboards were. By removing the side baseboard, he found it possible to get to the air-space between the fourth floor and the third-floor ceiling. He took out boards until he had an opening perhaps fourteen inches wide, and then, working in almost total silence, he began cleaning away dirt and old plaster. He did this meticulously, because when he finally pierced the tin sheeting, he wanted not one grain of dirt to fall into the room below. He took his time and it was late in the afternoon when he was satisfied with his preparations and began, with his knife, on the tin. It was thinner and softer than he had dared to hope; he almost overcut on the first try. Carefully he squeezed the sharp steel into the little slot he had cut, lengthening it. When it was somewhat less than an inch long, he withdrew all but the point of the knife and twisted it slightly, moved it a sixteenth of an inch and twisted again, repeating this all down the cut until he had widened it enough for his purposes. He checked the time, then returned to Celia Sarton's room for just long enough to check the appearance of his work from that side. He was very pleased with it. The little cut had come through a foot away from the wall over the bed and was a mere pencil line lost in the baroque design with which the tin was stamped and the dirt and rust that marred it. He returned to his room and sat down to wait. He heard the old house coming to its evening surge of life, a voice here, a door there, footsteps on the stairs. He ignored them all as he sat on the edge of his bed, hands folded between his knees, eyes half closed, immobile like a machine fueled, oiled, tuned and ready, lacking only the right touch on the right control. And like that touch, the faint sound of Celia Sarton's footsteps moved him. To use his new peephole, he had to lie on the floor half in and half out of the closet, with his head in the hole, actually below floor level. With this, he was perfectly content, any amount of discomfort being well worth his trouble -- an attitude he shared with many another ardent hobbyist, mountain-climber or speleologist, duck-hunter or bird-watcher. he could see her splendidly, as well as most of the floor, the lower third of the door and part of the washbasin in the bathroom. She had come in hurriedly, with that same agonized haste he had observed before. At the same second she turned on the light, she had apparently flung her handbag toward the bed; it was in midair as the light appeared. She did not even glance its way, but hastily fumbled the old gladstone from under the bed, opened it, removed the box, opened it, took out the paper, slipped off the blue band and removed the blank sheets of paper which covered the hollowed-out ream. She scooped out the thing hidden there, shaking it once like a grocery clerk with a folded paper sack, so that the long limp thing straightened itself out. She arranged it carefully on the worn linoleum of the floor, arms down at the side, legs slightly apart, face up, neck straight. Then she lay down on the floor, too, headto-head with the deflated thing. She reached up over her head, took hold of the collapsed image of herself about the region of the ears, and for a moment did some sort of manipulation of it against the top of her own head. Slim heard faintly a sharp, chitinous click, like the sound one makes by snapping the edge of a thumbnail against the edge of a fingernail. Her hands slipped to the cheeks of the figure and she pulled at the empty head as if testing a connection. The head seemed now to have adhered to hers. Then she assumed the same pose she had arranged for this other, letting her hands fall wearily to her sides on the floor, closing her eyes. For a long while, nothing seemed to be happening, except for the odd way she was breathing, very deeply but very slowly, like the slow-motion picture of someone panting, gasping for breath after a long hard run. After perhaps ten minutes of this, the breathing became shallower and even slower, until, at the end of a half hour, he could detect none at all. Slim lay there immobile for more than an hour, until his body shrieked protest and his head ached from eyestrain. He hated to move, but move he must. Silently he backed out of the closet, stood up and stretched. It was a great luxury and he deeply enjoyed it. He felt moved to think over what he had just seen, but clearly and consciously decided not to -- not yet, anyway. When he was unkinked, again, he crept back into the closet, put his head in the hole and his eye to the slot. Nothing had changed. She still lay quiet, utterly relaxed, so much so that her hands had turned palm upward. Slim watched and he watched. Just as he was about to conclude that this was the way the girl spent her entire nights and that there would be nothing more to see, he saw a slight and sudden contraction about the region of her solar plexus, and then another. For a time, there was nothing more, and then the empty thing attached to the top of her head began to fill. And Celia Sarton began to empty. Slim stopped breathing until it hurt and watched in total astonishment. ess progressed swiftly. It was as if something passed from the clothed body of the girl to this naked empty thing. The something, whatever it might be, had to be fluid, for nothing but a fluid would fill a flexible container in just this way, or make a flexible container slowly and evenly flatten out like this. Slim could see the fingers, which had been folded flat against the palms, inflate and move until they took on the normal relaxed curl of a normal hand. The elbows shifted a little to lie more normally against the body. And yes, it was a body now. The other one was not a body any more. It lay foolishly limp in its garments, its sleeping face slightly distorted by its flattening. The fingers fell against the palms by their own limp weight. The shoes thumped quietly on their sides, heels together, toes pointing in opposite directions. The exchange was done in less than ten minutes and then the newly filled body moved. It flexed its hands tentatively, drew up its knees and stretched its legs out again, arched its back against the floor. Its eyes flickered open. It put up its arms and made some deft manipulation at the top of its head. Slim heard another version of the soft-hard click and the now-empty head fell flat to the floor. The new Celia Sarton sat up and sighed and rubbed her hands lightly over her body, as if restoring circulation and sensation to a chilled skin. She stretched as comfortingly and luxuriously as Slim had a few minutes earlier. She looked rested and refreshed. At the top of her head, Slim caught a glimpse of a slit through which a wet whiteness showed, but it seemed to be closing. In a brief time, nothing showed there but a small valley in the hair, like a normal parting. She sighed again and got up. She took the clothed thing on the floor by the neck, raised it and shook it twice to make the clothes fall away. She tossed it to the bed and carefully picked up the clothes and deployed them about the room, the undergarments in the washbasin, the dress and slip on a hanger in the wardrobe. Moving leisurely but with purpose, she went into the bathroom and, except for her shins down, out of Slim's range of vision. There he heard the same faint domestic sounds he had once detected outside her door, as she washed her underclothes. She emerged in due course, went to the wardrobe for some wire hangers and took them into the bathroom. Back she came with the underwear folded on the hangers, which she hooked to the top of the open wardrobe door. Then she took the deflated integument which lay crumpled on the bed, shook it again, rolled it up into a ball and took it into the bathroom. Slim heard more water-running and sudsing noises, and, by ear. # followed the operation through a soaping and two rinses. Then she came out again, shaking out the object, which had apparently just been wrung, pulled it through a wooden clothes-hanger, arranged it creaselessly depending from the crossbar of the hanger with the bar about at its waistline, and hung it with the others on the wardrobe door. Then she lay down on the bed, not to sleep or to read or even to rest -- she seemed very rested -- but merely to wait until it was time to do something else. T Y now, Slim's bones were complaining again, so he wormed noiselessly backward out of his lookout point, got into his shoes and a jacket, and went out to get something to eat. When he came home an hour later and looked, her light was out and he could see nothing. He spread his overcoat carefully over the hole in the closet so no stray light from his room would appear in the little slot in the ceiling, closed the door, read a comic book for a while, and went to bed. The next day, he followed her. What strange occupation she might have, what weird vampiric duties she might disclose, he did not speculate on. He was doggedly determined to gather information first and think later. What he found out about her daytime activities was, if anything, more surprising than any wild surmise. She was a clerk in a small five-and-ten on the East Side. She ate in the store's lunch bar at lunchtime -- a green salad and a surprising amount of milk -- and in the evening she stopped at a hot-dog stand and drank a small container of milk, though she ate nothing. Her steps were slowed by then and she moved wearily, speeding up only when she was close to the rooming house, and then apparentlyall but overcome with eagerness to get home and... into something more comfortable. She was watched in this process, and Slim, had he disbelieved his own eyes the first time, must believe them now. So it went for a week, three days of which Slim spent in shadowing her, every evening in watching her make her strange toilet. Every twenty-four hours, she changed bodies, carefully washing, drying, folding and putting away the one she was not using. Twice during the week, she went out for what was apparently a constitutional and nothing more -- a half-hour around midnight, when she would stand on the walk in front of the rooming house, or wander around the block. At work, she was silent but so not unnaturally so; she spoke, when spoken to, in a small, unmusical voice. She seemed to have no friends; she maintained her aloofness by being uninteresting and by seeking no one out and by needing no one. She evinced no outside interests, never going to the movies or to the park. She had no dates, not even with girls. Slim thought she did not sleep, but lay quietly in the dark waiting for it to be time to get up and go to work. And when he came to think about it, as ultimately he did, it occurred to Slim that within the anthill in which we all live and have our being, enough privacy can be exacted to allow for all sorts of strangeness in the members of society, providing the strangeness is not permitted to show. If it is a man's pleasure to sleep upside-down like a bat, and if he so arranges his life that no one ever sees him sleeping, or his sleeping-place, why, batlike he may sleep all the days of his life. One need not, by these rules, even be a human being. Not if the mimicry is good enough. It is a measure of Slim's odd personality to report that Celia Sarton's ways did not frighten him. He was, if anything, less disturbed by her now than he'd been before he had begun to spy on her. He knew what she did in her room and how she lived. Before, he had not known. Now he did. This made him much happier. His curiosity would never drive him to do what another man might -- to speak to her on the stairs or on the street, get to know her and more about her. He was too shy for that. Nor was he moved to report to anyone the odd practice he watched each evening. It wasn't his business to report. She was doing no harm as far as he could see. In his cosmos, everybody had a right to live and make a buck if they could. Yet his curiosity, its immediacy taken care of, did undergo a change. It was not in him to wonder what sort of being this was and whether its ancestors had grown up among human beings, living with them in caves and in tents, developing and evolving along with homo sap until it could assume the uniform of the smallest and most invisible of wage-workers. He would never reach the conclusion that in the fight for survival, a species might discover that a most excellent characteristic for survival among human beings might be not to fight them but to join them. No, Slim's curiosity was far simpler, more basic and less informed than any of these conjectures. He simply changed the field of his wonderment from what to what if? So it was that on the eighth day of his survey, a Tuesday, he went again to her room, got the bag, opened it, removed the box, opened it, removed the ream of paper, slid the blue band off, removed the covering sheets, took out the second Celia Sarton, put her on the bed and then replaced paper, blue band, box-cover, box, and bag just as he had found them. He put the folded thing under his shirt and went out, carefully locking the door behind him in his special way, and went upstairs to his room. He put his prize under the four clean shirts in his bottom drawer and sat down to await Celia Sarton's homecoming. She was a little late that night -- twenty minutes, perhaps. The delay seemed to have increased both her fatigue and her eagerness; she burst in feverishly, moved with the rapidity of nearpanic. She looked drawn and pale and her hands shook. She fumbled the bag from under the bed, snatched out the box and opened it, contrary to her usual measured movements, by inverting it over the bed and dumping out its contents. When she saw nothing there but sheets of paper, some with a wide rectangle cut from them and some without, she froze. She crouched over that bed without moving for an interminable two minutes. Then she straightened up slowly and glanced about the room. Once she fumbled through the paper, but resignedly, without hope. She made one sound, a high, sad whimper, and, from that moment on, was silent. She went to the window slowly, her feet dragging, her shoulders slumped. For a long time, she stood looking out at the city, its growing darkness, its growing colonies of lights, each a symbol of life and life's usages. Then she drew down the blind and went back to the bed.  with loose uncaring fingers and put the heap of them on the dresser. She took off her shoes and placed them neatly side by side on the floor by the bed. She lay down in the same utterly relaxed pose she affected when she made her change, hands down and open, legs a little apart. Her face looked like a deathmask, its tissues sunken and sagging. It was flushed and sicklooking. There was a little of the deep regular breathing, but only a little. There was a bit of the fluttering contractions at the midriff, but only a bit. Then -- nothing. Slim backed away from the peephole and sat up. He felt very bad about this. He had been only curious; he hadn't wanted her to get sick, to die. For he was sure she had died. How could he know what sort of sleep-surrogate an organism like this might require, or what might be the results of a delay in changing? What could he know of the chemistry of such a being? He had thought vaguely of slipping down the next day while she was out and returning her property. Just to see. Just to know what if. Just out of curiosity. Should he call a doctor? She hadn't. She hadn't even tried, though she must have known much better than he did how serious her predicament was. (Yet if a species depended for its existence on secrecy, it would be species-survival to let an individual die undetected.) Well, maybe not calling a doctor meant that she'd be all right, after all. Doctors would have a lot of silly questions to ask. She might even tell the doctor about her other skin, and if Slim was the one who had fetched the doctor, Slim might be questioned about that. Slim didn't want to get involved with anything. He just wanted to know things. He thought, "I'll take another look." He crawled back into the closet and put his head in the hole. Celia Sarton, he knew instantly, would not survive this. Her face was swollen, her eyes protruded, and her purpled tongue lolled far -- too far -- from the comer of her mouth. Even as he watched, her face darkened still more and the skin of it crinkled until it looked like carbon paper which has been balled up tight and then smoothed out. The very beginnings of an impulse to snatch the thing she needed out of his shirt drawer and rush it down to her died within him, for he saw a wisp of smoke emerge from her nostrils and then -- Slim cried out, snatched his head from the hole, bumping it cruelly, and clapped his hands over his eyes. Put the biggest size flash-bulb an inch from your nose, and fire it, and you might get a flare approaching the one he got through his little slot in the tin ceiling. He sat grunting in pain and watching, on the insides of his eyelids, migrations of flaming worms. At last they faded and he tentatively opened his eyes. They hurt and the after-image of the slot hung before him, but at least he could see. Feet pounded on the stairs. He smelled smoke and a burned, oily unpleasant something which he could not identify. Someone shouted. Someone hammered on a door. Then someone screamed and screamed. TT was in the papers next day. Mysterious, the story said. Charles Fort, in Lol, had reported many such cases and there had been others since -- people burned to a crisp by a fierce heat which had nevertheless not destroyed clothes or bedding, while leaving nothing for autopsy. This was, said the paper, either an unknown kind of heat or heat of such intensity and such brevity that it would do such a thing. No known relatives, it said. Police mystified -- no clues or suspects. Slim didn't say anything to anybody. He wasn't curious about the matter any more. He closed up the hole in the closet that same night, and next day, after he read the story, he used the newspaper to wrap up the thing in his shirt drawer. It smelled pretty bad and, even that early, was too far gone to be unfolded. He dropped it into a garbage can on the way to the lawyer's office on Wednesday. They settled his law suit that afternoon and he moved.      One of the unnoted but personally important side results of the current world situation is that it keeps Clifford D. Simak from producing as much science fiction as he and we would like him to... being city editor of the Minneapolis Star, he has to keep a doctor's hours while the human race toddles, infant-fashion, from frying pans into fires. But out of this worwhich finds a solution by discovering a friend. Man's best friend is -- is what? The answer is so vital that every national resource has to be poured into learning the answerl wonderfully compliant and yet horrifyingly obstinate aliens. A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to live -- all the Igathians agree with this -- but not when it comes to a time to die! We have quite a number of other really choice novelets in stock, too, and odds are that next month's issue will contain at least one of them. Short stories and our regular features, natchmente... surprising distance into history in order to bring this futuristic science fiction theme up to date! for your information The Groat Pyramid The Golden Section and PI readers who, when reading the above title, muttered to themselves that these three things have absolutely nothing to do with each other, I wish to state in this very first sentence that I agree with them. Of course neither the "golden section" nor pi is hidden in the structure which an ardent and effusive admirer once called the Miracle in Stone, using the word "miracle" in its literal religious meaning. But it is an interesting story how all the multitudinous misunderstandings surrounding the Great Pyramid originated. That the pyramid of King Khufu was a major engineering and organizational accomplishment is something that does not need to be stressed. It is not only astonishing that a structure of such size was built as early as it was; it is also astonishing how well it was built. As a matter of fact, Khufu's pyramid is of better workmanship than the later pyramids built on the same plateau, the so-called pyramid plateau of Giza, about six miles to the west of Cairo. Since Khufu was the first to build a pyramid in this particular locality, the whole plateau was originally named after him. It was called Akhet Khufu, or "Khufu's Horizon." W HY Khufu picked this particular locality for his pyramid is not known. That is, we don't know of any inscription saying that Pharaoh decreed this site because his fellow gods had told him to begin his soul-voyage after death from this place. But we can think of a number of eminently practical reasons why he chose this spot. To begin with, he could see it from his summer palace and watch the actual work going on. Secondly, the location of the building site was such that, when the annual Nile flood occurred, the blocks of stone could be floated on rafts to the foot of the growing structure. Finally, most egyptologists (and especially the Egyptian egyptologists) believe that Khufu's pyramid hides an outcropping of natural rock which obviously saved that much work in the erection of a virtually solid structure. Even so, # blocks of stone went into the pyramid, averaging # V # tons in weight, with a few that must weigh about # tons each. The rock was quarried nearby. Professor Selim Hassan found some ancient quarries within easy walking distance of the pyramid. Originally the pyramid had an outer casing of white limestone -- Greek writers who saw it blinding white under the desert sun assumed that it was white limestone all the way through -- which is now gone. Not completely gone, though; it merely is no longer a part of Khufu's pyramid, but forms portions of still-standing mosques. Without its casing, the pyramid is # feet tall. We can't tell precisely how high it was originally. The white limestone came from Turah, somewhat farther south and on the other side of the river, involving transportation over # miles of water. Some of the granite used in the interior came from Aswan, a good distance up-river, but again with the possibility of water transport. It was the height of the structure which is responsible for its name. The Egyptians called this height pyr-em-us. The Greeks adapted the term to their tongue Fig. #. King Khufu's name' the line around it, called cartouche, means it is a king's name by pronouncing it pyramis and using it as a designation for that particular shape. Herodotus coined a plural, pyramides, from which, at a much later date, the current singular "pyramid" was derived. Since we are on the subject of names, I am sorry to report that we don't really know how the name of the king was pronounced. The written form (Fig. #) transliterates as Hwfw which, in order to be able to say it at all, is pronounced Khufu. Cheops (the "ch" should also be sounded as "kh") is the Greek form used by Herodotus. seems to have been the first who told stories about the pyramid which do not strictly jibe with the truth. "One of the most frequently repeated stories," to quote Prof. Hassan Selim, from an article in the Egyptian monthly The Scribe, February, #, "is that in order to build the pyramid, Khufu closed the temples and enslaved the whole population to work as slave-laborers on its construction. This story has been going the rounds since the middle of the Fifth Century B. c., when the Greek traveler and historian Herodotus visited Egypt and evidently fell into the hands of a typical dragoman, who, like his modern descendants, thought that a few sensational stories would earn him a bigger tip from the gullible stranger." They probably did, but because more than a score of centuries had gone by since the actual work, the Egyptian may easily have believed his own stories. A dozen centuries after Herodotus, other travelers came and saw the pyramids. Apparently no stories were told any more, and though the travelers probably saw examples of hieroglyphic writing, there was nobody on Earth then who could read it. Consequently they wondered about the nature and the purpose of these structures. Christian travelers, remembering their Bible, theorized that these must have been the giant storehouses for grain which Joseph had built to combat the forthcoming seven-year famine. Moslem philosophers remembered the older writings, too, but evolved a different explanation. There may have been kings not mentioned in these writings and the prophets of these kings must have told them about the future coming of the deluge. The kings then ordered the pyramids built as refuges from the coming flood. Some less learned people reasoned that anything so massive must guard great wealth in gold and jewels, and they drew practical conclusions from their opinion, sometimes with success. All these speculations dealt with pyramids in general, the pyramids of Egypt which extend over an area of # miles from north to south along the Nile (ten times as much if you include a few far to the south near Thebes and Edfu). The speculations of the last century are restricted to just one pyramid, that of Khufu. The one who started it may have been, in all innocence, the famous In his time, nobody knew just how old the pyramids were. The only thing that was certain was that they had already been old in the time of Herodotus. Herschel, learning that the entrance to the pyramid of Khufu formed a rather steep incline, may have been reminded of his telescopes and he wondered which star one might see if one were standing on the bottom of the entrance. Some rather tedious calculations provided an answer. Looking through that shaft, an observer would have seen the star alpha Draconis, if the year were # B. C. Herschel then stated that the pyramid may have been built in that year. We now know that it is much older. T UT Herschel's attempt to date- the building of the pyramid on astronomical grounds took hold -- long after his death. It was in # that John Taylor, a London publisher and bookdealer, published a book which he had written himself. It bore the title The Great Pyramid, Why was it built and Who built it? His conclusion was that the pyramid had been built for the purpose of embodying a few important measurements. If Taylor had been an American, he might have said that it was the Egyptian equivalent of the Bureau of Standards, with the additional twist that all the standards are "classified information" not meant for the average dumb citizen. In the course of his romancing, John Taylor discovered that the Egyptians must have used the same units of measurement as the English -- or at least the more important of these units -- and he succeeded in finding a unit which had been lost. In England at that time, a Quarter was used as a measurement for wheat. Taylor said, "A quarter of what?" and found the answer: The original "whole," four Quarters of wheat, was the "so-called" sarcophagus of the pharaoh. Taylor also found that the height of the pyramid (which he overestimated by a few feet) was ## of the circumference of the Earth. Here one can only say, "Why not?" for the height of the pyramid obviously must be some fraction of the circumference (or of the diameter) of the Earth. that a few such things could be coincidences. To feel sure that it was planned, he looked for something which could not be a coincidence -- or so he thought -- and he found one, too. The square of the height of the pyramid, compared to the area of one of its triangular faces, demonstrated the "golden section." That "golden section" had been around ever since the days of Euclid and had at irregular intervals taken hold of somebody's imagination. (At present, hardly anyone pays any attention to it.) Let's first see what the term means (Fig. #). We have here a distance AB which is to be divided according to the golden section. To do so, we erect a vertical line in B which is precisely half as long as AB. The rest of the construction can be read off the diagram. The result is that the distance called the minor has the same proportion to the major as the major has to the total, namely AB. And if we now subtract the minor from the major, we have divided the major according to the golden section. licized for the first time by an Italian, Luca Pacioli, who may be the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; at any rate, this method appears in print for the first time in one of his books. After having produced this boon for tax collectors and merchants, he intended to bestow a similar boon to artists with a book called De Divina Proportione, published in # with illustrations by his friend Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli tried to show -- and succeeded to a good extent -- that most of the things we consider "beautiful" are constructed in accordance with the golden section when broken down into measurements. The numerical relationship of the golden section is # to # and, for centuries, all books did correspond to it. European books still do, at least more often than American books. The only book in my library which is of American origin and which shows that proportion is the World Almanac. The next time the golden section was consciously "rediscovered" by the artists, or more precisely by the theorists of art, was around the middle of the nineteenth century, just the time in which John Taylor wrote. It cannot be said that his book was a success and it probably would have been forgotten completely if it had not been for Charles Piazzi Smyth, at that time Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Smyth was the son of an admiral and he happened to be born in Italy. His godfather at the christening was Father Giuseppe Piazzi, the discoverer of the asteroid Ceres, the first asteroid to be found. Father Piazzi said then that he hoped that the child would become an astronomer. Charles Piazzi Smyth did become an astronomer and, as an astronomer, he made important contributions to spectroscopy, then a very new science. He also deserves much credit for advocating an innovation which now seems obvious to us -- building observatories on high mountains. At the age of forty, Smyth came across John Taylor's book and became enchanted with it. Thinking and dreaming about it, he quickly convinced himself that Taylor had barely scratched the surface. He thought and calculated and worked and, in #, he wrote a #-page book called Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. It was a great success and its awed readers learned that the main item in the plan for the Great Pyramid had been nothing less than the squaring of the circle. Smyth said that the bottom Fig. #. The "golden teefion" square of the pyramid represented -- or, rather, was equal to -- the circumference of a circle drawn with the height of the pyramid as its radius. " critical or just an open eye should have stopped right there. Maybe the base of the pyramid measured # feet, as Prof. Smyth said, but how about the height? The outer casing and with it the point of the pyramid were missing. Therefore the height could not be measured directly. Of course if the casing had been there, one could have measured the slope angle and calculated the height from that. The slope angle must have been near #, so Smyth said that it originally was # #' #" which produced a height of # feet. Therefore the ratio of height to circumference corresponded to two pi. Insisting that this could not be a coincidence and apparently unaware of the fact that he himself had not found the figure but put it in, Smyth went on to other discoveries. At the base, one side of the pyramid measured #I feet. The Egyptians naturally had not used feet as a unit of measurement; it must have been something else. Smyth divided these #I feet by # and got a unit he called the "pyramid meter." Why this figure? Obviously the builders of the pyramid had wanted to express the number of days in the year by the base line. Dividing the pyramid meter into # equal parts, Smyth obtained the pyramid inch, which, by a strange coincidence, differed from the English inch by just # #th of an inch. Obviously the English still used the pyramid inch, but had not kept its length accurately through the millennia. It had shrunk by l#th of one per cent. Having the "pyramid meter" and the "pyramid inch," Smyth really got going. Multiply the pyramid inch by # # and you have the length of the polar axis of the Earth. Multiply the pyramid inch by the height of the pyramid (in pyramid inches, of course) and then multiply that figure by # # and you get the distance from the Earth to the Sun. (The result is ther perihelion nor aphelion nor mean distance.) Express the cubic content of the pyramid in cubic inches and you have the total number of all people that have lived on Earth since the Creation. phagus, it was not only the original standard for volumetric measurements, according to Smyth. It was more. Its volume, expressed in cubic pyramid meters, was precisely #, which looks like a wrong figure until you realize that this is the specific gravity of the Earth as a whole! (Actually the density of the Earth is #.) One reader, by profession an engineer, wrote later that Smyth's treatise cost him the better part of a night and that it had the result that he "did not fall asleep in my bed but in a medley of endless decimals, triangles and circles, complicated by polar diameters and astronomical distances; dealing with empty granite sarcophagi and pharaohs with milelong measuring rods marching through space with the luminous eyes of prophets." He realized that Smyth had "found" his "cosmic figures" in the pyramid by putting them in in the first place. But he also said that he had the faint feeling that something still needed to be explained. It was explained several decades later by the egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt, who approached the whole problem from the opposite direction. He asked just what unit the Egyptians had actually used in building. Moreover, he wanted to know just how far advanced their mathematics had been. As for the unit of measurement, he found that they used the ell. There was a minor complication in that it seemed that they had used two different kinds of ells. One had a length of seven palms, the other of six palms. Although the six-palm ell corresponds better to reality (an ell is the length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger), the seven-palm ell was used for construction, at least for large buildings. In our measurement, the "royal ell" of seven palms is a little less than #I inches. Borchardt used tion. Then the palm would be # inches. Each palm, in turn, was divided into four fingers, which each if the figure for the royal ell any event, the ell had seven palms or # "fingers." As regards Egyptian arithmetic, we know that thejL could handle simple fractions like VS, VS, Vi, etc., and fractions like Vi (namely I minus Vi) or VS (I minus VS). When it comes to pyramids, we have a few examples in the famous Papyrus Rhind which, while old, is probably a good deal younger than the pyramid. pyrus Rhind requested the pupil to calculate the slope of a pyramid with a base length of Piazzi Smyth's construction of squaring the circle with the aid of the Great Pyramid # ells and a height of # ells. A modern high school boy would reach for the logarithm table and come up (unless he made a mistake) with the answer # #' #". The Egyptian advanced pupil answered # ## palms. Example No. # said that the base length was # ells and the height # VS ells. The answer was # Vi palms. And example No. # (no doubt dealing with a backyard pyramid) gave # ells as the length of the base line and # ells as the height. The answer was also # Vi palms. Cro lection of Khufu'i pyramid. S meant an abandoned burial chamber (unfinished), Q ii the to-called Queen's chamber, never used, K the King's chamber. The two shafts to the King's chamber were for ventilation # What do these answers mean? The answer is given in Fig. #. The answer meant that the slope of the pyramid was so many palms from a vertical line one ell in height. That this is correct is proved by the fact that measuring triangles for the use of builders and masons have been found which corresponded to slopes of #, #  # , etc., palms, all rather awkward angles if expressed in degrees and minutes of arc. The slope of the Great Pyramid was quite close to #. For lack of the casing, one could not be any more precise than that. A slope of # V # palms produces an angle of # #'. And that would have made the pyramid # ells high, a neat, even figure -- in Egyptian measurements, that is. Now remember that John Taylor had proclaimed that the pyramid represented the golden section. Prof. Smyth had proclaimed that it represented pi. Since it cannot possibly do both, Borchardt calculated what the respective angles would have to be and how the measurements would have come out in Egyptian ells. The result surprised everybody. You find it clearly demonstrated in this table: slope angle slope (Egyptian) base line for # ells height for pi for # Va palms # #' # #' # P. # P. golden section # #' # P. # E. # E. # E. were led astray if the pi slope, the golden section slope and the simple Egyptian slope were practically the same. They are so much alike that it is impossible to distinguish them on a drawing of anything like publishable size. That they did not "intend" to build a pi slope is also clear from the Papyrus Rhind, where the ratio we now call pi appears in examples No. #, # and # in the form that ##th of the diameter of a circle is the side of a square of equal area. In our notation, this makes pi equal to #, which is too large. If they had tried for the pi slope, it would have been a different pyramid, considering their idea of the value of pi. There is no way of saying whether they knew the golden section, but it is not even remotely likely. We are left then with the realization that Khufu's builders were extremely skilled workers, but that they did not try to hide any cosmic secrets. And where did they acquire their skill? Well, while the Great Pyramid is the biggest and one of the oldest pyramids, there had been considerable practice in building before. The pyramid had forerunners, called mastabas (Fig. #). No. I shows a cross section of the mastaba of King Mena of the First Dynasty. It is just a subterranean burial chamber covered by a solid slab of mud brick. No. # is the mastaba of King Djer of the First Dynasty and No. # the Egyptian method of measuring angles mastaba of King Den, also of the First Dynasty. You can see how the pyramid shape was gradually approached. No. # is the tomb of King Zoser of the Third Dynasty; I called it "tomb" for, as can be seen, it is hard to decide whether this was still a rather complicated mastaba or a pyramid without casing. The first pyramid which did was that of King Snefru of the Fourth Dynasty, the same dynasty to which King Khufu belonged. I said earlier that Herodotus was probably told a tall tale when he was informed that the whole nation was drafted by Khufu to build his pyramid. It was an unlikely story in the first place, for one can assume that a pharaoh knew better than to ruin all commerce for years. But then who did provide the muscle power? No doubt that slaves did work on the pyramid; this is only logical for a slaveholding society. But slaves in general also had other vital things to do. The most likely answer is that the local iellahin, the peasants, were employed once a year. When the Nile flooded the country, the circumstances were proper for floating in the building blocks. And it was also the time when the fellahin had to sit idle,  j " ' " I  n?jrrr#?#  #  I  Fig. #. Forerunner of the pyramids, the ntastabas precisely because their fields were flooded, making it logical to employ them for this period. Maybe the word "employ" is not quite right. They were probably drafted. But we now know that they were paid, mostly in food and clothing. It is still probable that the    overseers carried whips. But they also carried, in the last stages of the building, the triangles made for a slope of # V # palms per ell of vertical height, the proportion which was destined to cause so much confusion thousands of years later.   There wasn't a single mistake in the plan for survival -- and that was the biggest mistakel F OR centuries, the rains tons of land into the sea. Mountains slowly crumpled to ocean floors. Summits rose again to see new civilizations heaped upon fossils of the old. It was the way of the Earth and men knew it and did not worry. The end was always in the future. Ever since men first learned to make marks on cave walls, the end remained in the future. Then the future came. The records told men how the Sun was before, so they knew it was swollen now. They knew the heat was not always this hot, or the glacier waters so fast, the seas so high. They adapted -- they grew tanner and moved farther poleward. When the steam finally rose over equatorial waters, they moved to the last planet, Pluto, and their descendants lived and died and came to know the same heat and red skies. Finally there came the day when they couldn't adapt -- not, at least, in the usual way. But they had the knowledge of all the great civilizations on Earth, so they built the last spaceship. They built it very slowly and carefully. Their will to live became the will to leave this final, perfect monument. It took a hundred and fifty years and during all that time they planned every facet of its operation, every detail of its complex mechanisms. Because the ship had a big job to do, they named it Destiny and people began to think of it not as the last of the spaceships, but as the first. The dying race sowed the ship with human seed and hopefully named its unborn passengers Adam, Eve, Joseph and Mary. Then they launched it toward the middle of the Milky Way and lay back in the red light of their burning planet. A LL this was only a memory now, conserved in the thinktank of a machine that raced through speckled space, dodging, examining, classifying, charting what it saw. Behind, the Sun shrank as once it swelled, and the planets that were not consumed turned cold in their orbits. The Sun grew fainter and went out, and still the ship sped forward, century after century, cometlike, but with a purpose. At many of the specks, the ship circled, sucking in records, passing judgment, moving on -- a bee in the garden of stars. Finally, hundreds of light-years from what had been its home, it located an Earth-type world, accepted it swung into an approach that would last exactly eighteen years. Immediately, pumps delivered measured quantities of oxygen and nitrogen atoms. Circuits closed to move four tiny frozen eggs next to frozen spermatozoa. The temperature gradually increased to a heat once maintained by animals now extinct. The embryos grew healthily and at term were born of plastic wombs. The first voices they heard were of their real mothers. Soft, caressing songwords. Melodious, warm, recorded women voices, each different, bell-clear, vivacious, betraying nothing of the fact that they were dead these long centuries. "I am your mother," each voice told its belated offspring. "You can see me and hear me and touch what appears to be me, and together with your cousins, you'll grow strong and healthy..." The voices sang on and the babies gurgled in their imported terran atmosphere. The words were meaningless but important, for it had been learned on the now dead world that these sounds were one of the factors in love and learning. Day after day, the voices lapped warm over the children. Plastic feeders provided nutrition as noiseless pumps removed excess carbon dioxide. In one end of the ship, a miniature farm was born hydroponically, its automatic grinders predigesting ripe vegetables for the children. Animals were born, too, for food, but also companionship, and later to stock New Earth ahead. As the babies began to understand, the woman voices merged into one mechanical mother who could be heard and seen and summoned on panel screens throughout the ship. Everything became as Earthlike as possible, but because the environment was artificial, the children grew aware of their purpose in life at an age rarely reached on ancient Earth. when their Mecmother informed them: "You are unlike any children ever bom. You are the last of a dead race, but you must live. You must not be afraid. You must do everything humanly possible to live." When they were four, Mecmother introduced them to Mecteacher and said to pay attention for five hours each day. Mecteacher took their IQs and explained to Adam that he had a greater capacity than Eve, Joseph and Mary, and was therefore their leader. Soon afterward, all the children started "school," but Adam excelled. At seven, he knew all about landing the ship. He played that he was already eighteen and the ship was no longer on automatic. He was in everything and everywhere. His tow hair poked above the control board. His busy fingers hand-picked an experimental meal from the farmroom. When he learned how to turn the artificial gravity switch off in the recroom, his child legs floated haphazardly somewhere above his head. And in the sunroom, where heat-lamp walls were triggered by the degree of an occupant's tan, Adam's freckled face stared through the visiport, seeing in his mind's eye the New Earth he would one day conquer. He lived fully, asking questions, accepting the answers, receiving instructions. Some of them he testily disobeyed, was punished compassionately, and learned respect and a kind of love for the mecs. He played the games of childhood, but he played them alone. Once he was gazing out a port, imaginatively sorting the stars of his universe into shapes of the animals in the ship's farm. Mecfather lit up at a nearby panel, glowing faintly red. Adam resisted an impulse to shiver -- the panel always made him flinch when it glowed red. Red, he was being conditioned, was his conscience, brought out by Mecfather until he grew old enough to bring it out himself. "Why aren't you playing with the other children?" Mecfather asked. "I've been watching you all day and you've avoided them on every occasion." Though he feared him, Adam loved Mecfather as he had been taught to do and did not hesitate to confide. But how could he explain that the other children did not seem as real to him as the mecs? "I don't know," Adam answered truthfully. "They don't ignore you. They ask you to play, but you always go off by yourself. Don't you like them?" "They're flat, Father. They're not deep -- like you."  sembled the answer, correlated, circuited a mechanical smile. Certainly -- a child brought up with only three real children and three talking images in his universe could not distinguish between reality and appearance. On the screen, Adam saw Mecfather smile, the panel no longer red. The voice was quiet now and full of understanding. "It is I who am flat, Adam. I am only an image, a voice. I am here when you need me to help, but I am not deep. Your cousins are deep; I am the flat one. You will understand better when you grow older." Electronically, Mecfather was worried. He called a "conference" of the other mecs and their circuits joined in a complicated analog: What was the probable outcome of this beginning of disharmony? There were too many variables for an immediate answer, but the query was stored in each mec's memory banks for later answer. When the mecconference began, the panel switched off and Adam walked thoughtfully through the ship's corridors. Unexpectedly, he spotted the other children. He turned quickly into a room before they saw him and ducked behind the largest of the couches. He was in the aft recroom, he realized, not having paid attention to where he was going. What was it all about? Did Mecfather really mean it when he said the cousins were deeper than the mecs? Adam could believe he was different from his parents and teacher -- after all, he was only seven -- but he couldn't accept the information that he was not different from his cousins. Somehow, he thought, I am alone... He heard noises, the loud boisterousness of Joseph, the highpitched squeal of Eve, the grating laugh of Mary. Adam cringed deeper behind the big couch. He was different. He didn't make sounds like that. "Adam! Oh, A-dam! A-dam!" the cousins called, each their own way. "Come out wherever you are, Adam! Come out and play!" From behind the couch, Adam saw the beginnings of an infantile but systematic search. The three of them were looking behind things, under furniture, in back of hatches. They tried moving everything they saw, but couldn't budge the heavy couch Adam hid behind. Looking for escape, Adam's eyes caught a round metallic handle set flush into the heavy deck carpet. He lifted it and pulled. Nothing happened. He stood up, bracing his feet against the deck and heaved with all his strength. It didn't move. Then he experimentally turned the handle -- to the right until it clicked faintly, then the left, around twice, another faint click, but different, a left-hand click, he knew somehow. So he turned again to the left, this time three turns -- and then the click was heavy, almost audible. He pulled the handle and a door formed out of the carpet, swinging easily open. Just then, Joseph peered behind the couch. "Boo!" ing, the heavy door slamming shut overhead. Below, he stood erect and was surprised to feel the hair on his head brush the ceiling. He was frightened, but he calmed when he realized there were many places on the ship he hadn't been before. Mecteacher revealed them to him, but very slowly, and he supposed he would not be told about everything for many years. As he recovered his sense of balance, he became aware of a faint luminescence around him. It seemed to have no source, but was stronger in the distance. He began to explore, groping at first, then more smoothly, efficiently, as his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness. A long corridor opened up before him and what appeared before to be an illusion of distance actually was distance. He guessed he was near the engine compartment and vaguely sensed that the luminescence had something to do with the nuclear engines that Mecteacher told him moved the ship. It was warm in here. Not physically warm but friendy warm, like when Mecmother spoke her comfort. The similarity almost made him cry, for he understood, even in his seven years, that Mecmother was but the image of his real mother who lived long ago and said those words of sympathy to a child yet unborn. He wanted her now, even her image, but he didn't call because he'd have to explain why he was hiding from his cousins. He shivered then, thinking that Mecfather and Mecteacher knew where he was and would light up their panels red. He thought, "Are you down here, Mecfather?" Nothing answered, so he spoke the thought, and again the walls stayed dark. That was why it was so friendy warm in here, he realized. His mecconscience was left above! Deciding that the others might miss him, he retraced his steps, located the trapdoor in the ceiling, pushed it open and ascended. The others were sitting on the floor, dumbfounded, as Adam climbed out and slammed the hatch shut. "How did you get down there?" Joseph asked. Adam remained silent. After a moment, Eve and Mary lost interest in the question and started skipping a length of rope. Joseph persisted. "How? I pulled, too!" Adam didn't answer. He knew the bigger boy would forget about it if he changed the subject. "How is it you're not with Mecteacher?" "We were. But he made us look for you." The closest wall panel lit bright red. It was Mecteacher. "Adam! How did you open that?" "I turned it -- a certain way," he said evasively. Adam didn't want his cousins to learn how. "But how did you know?" "I -- I reasoned it." rrHE image faded as the new information was assimilated. Mecteacher's voice said, "Wait a while, Adam." The computer circuited the other mec's memory banks. After ten minutes, the "conference" was over and Mecteacher returned to the screen. He asked Adam to come alone to the classroom. The others were dismissed. Reluctantly, Adam did as he was told. In the classroom, he stood stiffly in front of the central panels. All three mecs lit up, their color this time a tranquilizing blue. "Adam, we are not real people in the now," Mecmother began. "Do you understand that?" "Y-yes, I understand. You are -- planned -- fixed before." "That's right, Adam. We are pre-set. We have a very large number of choices and actions, but we are not infinite." "Infinite?" "We are limited in the help we can give you. We were real -- like you -- a long, long time ago. We exist now only to help you and the other children. We are here to educate you, to love and console you -- and one other thing. We are here to settle your conflicts, to make sure you don't hurt each other." "But I didn't hurt anyone, Mecmother!" "Not yet, Adam, but avoiding the others the way you do could be the first sign of trouble." "How do you know? How can you talk if you aren't real?" "What you hear is a combination of recorded words that are electronically put together to answer an almost infinite number of your questions. But do not think of me as not real. I was merely in another time. Do you understand that?" "Yes." "Then you also are able to see that your ability to reason things -- to understand what I am telling you now, for instance, is a remarkable thing." "You mean because I'm not like the others?" "You have a superior mind. You are the leader, but do not regard yourself as better than the others. You have more intelligence, yes, but do not look down on your cousins for that. They may develop other qualities better than yours. Stay simple, Adam, and you will be able to live among them and thereby make the human race live again. The name of this ship is Destiny. Do you know why?" "Yes -- I know." "Be with the other children then. Play with them. You'll need each other to live on New Earth -- eleven years from now." can I play with them when they're flat? But he didn't object out loud to Mecmother. He didn't like her this way. Explanation was Mecteacher's job and discipline Mecfather's. Mecmother should be warm and loving. Mecteacher appeared and asked Adam to call in the other children so the science lesson could start. He found them tanning in the sunroom, their unclothed bodies evenly browned from invisible light. They followed Adam without question, but seemed to take a long time doing it. Joseph insisted first in donning clothes, but he put on protective clothing first. Then, realizing the absurdity of it, he switched to his formality suit -- the loose-fitting robe Mecteacher instructed the children to wear to lend dignity to the classwork. During Joseph's delay, the girls ambled off somewhere and returned only when Adam shouted after them in exasperation. Quickening his pace, Adam reached the classroom first and asked Mecteacher, "Are the other children -- deep?" "Deep? Yes, Adam, Mecfather explained that to you. Why are you confused? It's us, the mecs, who are flat. The other children are healthy, living beings. The cells from which all of you were bom were selected after years of controlled breeding. Your parents were the finest the human race could produce -- intelligent, strong, healthy, high survival quotient Is this what you mean by deep?" "Partly, but also -- feeling. I think I feel things better." The other children waddled in, took their seats and switched on robomonitors in the ritual of classroom procedure. They all looked at Mecteacher in the central panel. Mecteacher motioned Adam to his chair-desk and began the lesson. He described Old Earth and how it circled Old Sol with the other worlds and the way the moons circled the planets -- all of them condensed into spheres and all the spheres turning in harmony. He interrupted himself when Mary's robomonitor registered only partial comprehension. "What don't you understand, Mary? Is it sphere?" "I know what a sphere is," she said, remembering a previous lesson. "A sphere is an apple or an orange -- " covert wince from Adam's monitor. The teacher appeared to Adam on his desk panel where the others couldn't see or hear. "Do not think this is because she is not -- deep, Adam. She is only seven and not as advanced for her age as you are. You understand how we mecs are pre-set?" "Yes." "In the classroom, then, if we don't go fast enough for you, try to be patient. We can only deviate within set limits. It is not a new problem, Adam. On Earth, it impeded the educational system from the beginning." Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up an apple on the central panel and re-explained the age-old analogy between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth and the apple. Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon. "That's an interesting question. Eve. But we are still too many yet. Before you are ready to leave the ship, you will know." In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his -- with one exception. He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for long. Often, when he grew tired tired of freefalling, he visited his lonely chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship. On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they were pre-set. They had to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong. It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs permanently off. TP HE stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big -- bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the Destiny had ever come to a star. Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others -- The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were -- flat, undeep. For yearSj he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him. They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive. He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it. And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals -- or would I? for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the Destiny, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven -- perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested -- but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation. He heard them rummaging above, attempting again and again to pull open the hatch. It had happened this way for years: They'd try to open the trapdoor for an hour or two, then give it up and turn their attention to something else. They never thought to turn the handle. Maybe an undeep person wouldn't be able to reason the combination clicks, but only a completely flat one would persist in pulling when it always ended in failure. Possibly, he thought, the cosmic rays had been more destructive to their egg cells. Or maybe the alien radiations subtracted something from the other cells to add to his. If this were true, he was partly a product of the others and owed his depth to them. Adam felt sorry for his cousins then and wished he hadn't hurt them by avoiding their presence. Despite their undepth, they must have feelings. The mecs probably wouldn't have been able to give them depth but, he remembered, the other role of the mecs was to prevent each one of them from harming the others. In their role as arbitrator, Adam realized, they might have stopped him from hurting them so. Filled with remorse, he left his desk-chair and walked stoopshouldered under the low ceiling. At the trapdoor, he opened the combination on the inside lock handle and pushed upward. It wouldn't open. He tried again, but it wasn't the lock that was stuck. They must have slid something heavy over the hatch, something he couldn't move. He tried calling to them, but his voice was lost in the insulative metal of the deck. Finally he sat down, conserving his strength for a final onslaught. If he couldn't open the hatch, he realized vividly it would be not only his failure, but the failure of the human race. But maybe it did not have to be so. Maybe the differences in the others weren't biological -- maybe they were environmental. And with that thought, he made his way through the narrow passageway and reversed his deed of eleven years past. He turned the mecs back on. Returning to the hatch, he reworked the combination to make sure it was not the lock that held him. He pushed upward with all his strength, steadily with increasing pressure, until the beads of perspiration turned into gulleys that streamed down his face. Exhausted, he crawled back to his chair and lay across the desk littered with calculations of a landing he would never make. The soft luminescence from the Destiny's nuclear engines crept forward and caressed him. Mary were admiring Joseph's strength in being able to push the heavy couch over Adam's trapdoor. Three wall panels lit red. All the mecs appeared together. "It's time for your science lesson," one said. "But where is Adam?" "He's in the trapdoor," they answered flatly. The panel turned green, reserving its redness for the delinquent Adam when he would choose to appear. Mecteacher began, "Now about the Solar System..." But the cousins didn't listen. Joseph had turned the gravity switch off and they were too busy floating upended, trying new positions, laughing at each other's ridiculous postures in the ship without bottom. The game was not a new one, but it was newly discovered and they reveled in its glories. Month after month, they played their weightless games while the mecs implored them to come down. The constellations shifted in the visiports. New Sol grew larger and then smaller as the Destiny sped toward its unseen planet. In the recroom, the mecvoices were only noises to the trio now, annoying noises that could be silenced, they discovered, with forceful kicks to the red-glowing panels. When all the mecscreens had been smashed and the weightless games grew boring, Mary looked out the sunroom port. She was surprised to see a rust-yellow sphere hanging in the sky. She watched it seriously for a time, frowning as it grew bigger and filled a third of her horizon. Then she called Eve and Joseph. Mary pointed and they all stared in bewilderment. She opened her eyes wide and laughed with glee. "It's an apple," she said. "An apple in the sky!" But Joseph wasn't fooled. Dimly he remembered something Adam had told him -- something about a thing that would appear in the sky. He fought hard bringing it to conscious memory. Then he started aft toward the recroom. In there, under the couch, he remembered, was Adam. Adam would remind him what it was. Suddenly Joseph smiled, his face flushed. He turned back to the sunroom port. He wouldn't have to ask Adam, after all. For a moment, he watched to make sure, while the huge yellow sphere swam closer. "No, Mary," he said triumphantly. "It's not an apple in the sky. Apples are red. It's an orange!"      the human race. It had to be all or nothing... with one man doing every bit of scoring! A rthur lanceford slapped futilely at the sith buzzing hungrily around his head. The outsized eight-legged parody of a mosquito did a neat half roll and zoomed out of range, hanging motionless on vibrating wings a few feet away. A raindrop staggered it momentarily, and for a fleeting second, Lanceford had the insane hope that the arthropod would fall out of control into the mud. If it did, that would be the end of it, for Niobian mud was as sticky as flypaper. But the sith righted itself inches short of disaster, buzzed angrily and retreated to the shelter of a nearby broadleaf, where it executed another half roll and hung upside down, watching its intended meal with avid anticipation. Lanceford eyed the insect distastefully as he explored his jacket for repellent and applied the smelly stuff liberally to his face and neck. It wouldn't do much good. In an hour, his sweat would remove whatever the rain missed -- but for that time, it should discourage the sith. As far as permanent discouraging went, the repellent was useless. Once one of those eight-legged horrors checked you off, there were only two possible endings to the affair -- either you were bitten or you killed the critter. It was as simple as that. He had hoped that he would be fast enough to get the sith before it got him. He had been bitten once already and the memory of those paralyzed three minutes while the bloodsucker fed was enough to last him for a lifetime. He readjusted his helmet, tucking its fringe of netting beneath his collar. The netting, he reflected gloomily, was like its owner -- much the worse for wear. However, this trek would be over in another week and he would be able to spend the next six months at a comfortable desk job at the Base, while some other poor devil did the chores of field work. swept trail winding through the jungle. Niobe -- a perfect name for this wet little world. The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration couldn't have picked a better, but the funny thing about it was that they hadn't picked it in the first place. Niobe was the native word for Earth, or perhaps "the world" would be a more accurate definition. It was a coincidence, of course, but the planet and its mythological Greek namesake had much in common. Niobe, like Niobe, was all tears -- a world of rain falling endlessly from an impenetrable overcast, fat wet drops that formed a grieving background sound that never ceased, sobbing with soft mournful noises on the rubbery broadleaves, crying with obese splashes into forest pools, blubbering with loud, dismal persistence on the sounding board of his helmet. And on the ground, the raindrops mixed with the loesslike soil of the trail to form a gluey mud that clung in huge pasty balls to his boots. Everywhere there was water, running in rivulets of tear-streaks down the round cheeks of the gently sloping land -- rivulets that merged and blended into broad shallow rivers that wound their mourners' courses to the sea. Trekking on Niobe was an amphibious operation unless one stayed in the highlands -- a perpetual series of fords and river crossings. And it was hot, a seasonless, unchanging, humid heat that made a protection suit an instrument of torture that slowly boiled its wearer in his own sweat.But the suit was necessary, for exposed human flesh was irresistible temptation to Niobe's bloodsucking insects. Many of these were no worse than those of Earth, but a half dozen species were deadly. The first bite sensitized. The second killed -- anaphylactic shock, the medics called it. And the sith was one of the deadly species. Lanceford shrugged fatalistically. Uncomfortable as a protection suit was, it was better to boil in it than die without it. He looked at Kron squatting beside the trail and envied him. It was too bad that Earthmen weren't as naturally repellent to insects as the dominant native life. Like all Niobians, the native guide wore no clothing -- ideal garb for a climate like this. His white, hairless hide, with its faint sheen of oil, was beautifully waterrepellent. Kron, Lanceford reflected, was a good example of the manner in which Nature adapts the humanoid form for survival on different worlds. Like the dominant species on every intelligent planet in the explored galaxy, he was an erect, bipedal, mammalian being with hands that possessed an opposable thumb. Insofar as that general description went, Kron resembled humanity -- but there were differences.  shape of Kron's torso and the odd flexibility of his limbs were not apparent. One had the tendency to overlook the narrowshouldered, cylindrical body and the elongated tarsal and carpal bones that gave his limbs four major articulations rather than the human three, and to concentrate upon the utterly alien head. It jutted forward from his short, thick neck, a long-snouted, vaguely doglike head with tiny ears lying close against the hairless, dome-shaped cranium. Slitlike nostrils, equiped with sphincter muscles like those of a terrestrial seal, argued an originally aquatic environment, and the large intelligent eyes set forward in the skull to give binocular vision, together with the sharp white carnassal teeth and pointed canines, indicated a carnivorous ancestry. But the modern Niobians, although excellent swimmers, were land dwellers and ate anything. Lanceford couldn't repress an involuntary shudder at some of the things they apparently enjoyed. Tastes differed -- enormously so between Earthmen and Niobians. There was no doubt that the native was intelligent, yet he, like the rest of his race, was a technological moron. It was strange that a race which had a well-developed philosophy and an amazing comprehension of semantics could be so backward in mechanics. mechanisms left the natives confused. It was possible that they could learn about machinery, but Lanceford was certain that it would take a good many years before the first native mechanic would set up a machine shop on this planet. Lanceford finished tucking the last fold of face net under his collar, and as he did so, Kron stood up, rising to his five-foot height with a curious flexible grace. Standing, he looked something like a doublejointed alabaster Anubis -- wearing swim fins. His broad, webbed feet rested easily on the surface of the mud, their large area giving him flotation that Lanceford envied. As a result, his head was nearly level with that of the human, although there was better than a foot difference in their heights. Lanceford looked at Kron inquiringly. "You have a place in mind where we can sleep tonight?" "Sure, Boss. We'll be coming to hunthouse soon. We go now?" "Lead on," Lanceford said, groaning silently to himself -- another hunthouse with its darkness and its smells. He shrugged. He could hardly expect anything else up here in the highlands. Oh, well, he'd managed to last through the others and this one could be no worse. At that, even an airless room full of natives was preferable to spending a night outside. And the sith wouldn't follow them. It didn't like airless rooms filled with natives. He sighed wearily as he followed Kron along the dim path through the broadleaf jungle. Night was coming, and with darkness, someone upstairs turned on every faucet and the sheets of rain that fell during the day changed abruptly into a deluge. Even the semi-aquatic natives didn't like to get caught away from shelter during the night. The three moved onward, immersed in a drumming wilderness of rain -- the Niobian sliding easily over the surface of the mud, the Earthman plowing painfully through it, and the sith flitting from the shelter of one broadleaf to the next, waiting for a chance to feed. HP HE trail widened abruptly, opening upon one of the small clearings that dotted the rain-forest jungle. In the center of the clearing, dimly visible through the rain and thickening darkness, loomed the squat thatch-roofed bulk of a hunthouse, a place of shelter for the members of the hunters' guild who provided fresh meat for the Niobian villages. Lanceford sighed a mingled breath of relief and unpleasant anticipation. As he stepped out into the clearing, the sith darted from cover, heading like a winged bullet for Lanceford's neck. But the man was not taken by surprise. Pivoting quickly, he caught the iridescent blur of the bloodsucker's wings. He swung his arm in a mighty slap. The high-pitched buzz and Lanceford's gloved hand met simultaneously at his right ear. The buzz stopped abruptly. Lanceford shook his head and the sith fell to the ground, satisfactorily swatted. Lanceford grinned -- score one for the human race. He was still grinning as he pushed aside the fiber screen closing the low doorway of the hunthouse and crawled inside. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom within, but his nose told him even before his eyes that the house was occupied. The natives, he thought wryly, must be born with no sense of smell, otherwise they'd perish from sheer propinquity. One could never honestly say that familiarity with the odor of a Niobian bred contempt -- nausea was the right word. The interior was typical, a dark rectangle of windowless limestone walls enclosing a packed-dirt floor and lined with a single deck of wooden sleeping platforms. Steeply angled rafters of peeled logs intersected at a knife-sharp ridge pierced with a circular smokehole above the firepit in the center of the room. Transverse rows of smaller poles lashed to the rafters supported the thick broadleaf thatch that furnished protection from the rain and sanctuary for uncounted thousands of insects. A fire flickered ruddily in the pit, hissing as occasional drops of rain fell into its heart from the smokehole, giving forth a dim light together with clouds of smoke and steam that rose upward through the tangled mass of reaches of the rafters. Some of the smoke found its way through the smokehole, but most of it hung in an acrid undulating layer some six feet above the floor. The glow outlined the squatting figures of a dozen or so natives clustered around the pit, watching the slowly rotating carcass of a small deerlike rodent called a sorat, which was broiling on a spit above the flames. Kron was already in the ring, talking earnestly to one of the hunters -- a fellow-tribesman, judging from the tattoo on his chest. To a Niobian, the scene was ordinary, but to Lanceford it could have been lifted bodily from the inferno. He had seen it before, but the effect lost nothing by repetition. There was a distinctly hellish quality to it -- to the reds and blacks of the flickering fire and the shadows. He wouldn't have been particularly surprised if Satan himself appeared in the center of the firepit complete with horns, hoofs and tail. A hunthouse, despite its innocuousness, looked like the southeast comer of Hades.  the hunters turned to look at him curiously and, after a single again. Niobians were almost painfully polite. Although Earthmen were still enough of a curiosity to draw attention, one searching look was all their customs allowed. Thereafter, they minded their own business. In some ways, Lanceford reflected, native customs had undeniable merit. Presently Kron rose from his place beside the fire and pointed out two empty sleeping platforms where they would spend the night. Lanceford chose one and sank wearily to its resilient surface. Despite its crude construction, a Niobian sleeping platform was comfortable. He removed his pack, pulled off his mud-encrusted boots and lay back with a grunt of relaxation. After a day like this, it was good to get off his feet. Weariness flowed over him. He awoke to the gentle pressure of Kron's hand squeezing his own. "The food is cooked," the Niobian said, "and you are welcomed to share it." Lanceford nodded, his stomach crawling with unpleasant anticipation. A native meal was something he would prefer to avoid. His digestive system could handle the unsavory mess, but his taste buds shrank from the forthcoming assault. What the natives classed as a delicate and elusive flavor was sheer torture to an Earthman. Possibly there was some connection between their inefficient olfactory apparatus and their odd ideas of flavor, but whatever the physical explanation might be, it didn't affect the fact that eating native food was an ordeal. Yet he couldn't refuse. That would be discourteous and offensive, and one simply didn't offend the nathat. Courtesy was a watchword on Niobe. He took a place by the fire, watching with concealed distaste as one of the hunters reached into the boiling vat beside the firepit with a pair of wooden tongs and drew forth the native conception of a hors d'oeuvre. They called it vorkum -- a boiled sorat paunch stuffed with a number of odorous ingredients. It looked almost as bad as it smelled. The hunter laid the paunch on a wooden trencher, scraped the greenish scum from its surface and sliced it open. The odor poured out, a gagging essence of decaying vegetables, rotten eggs and overripe cheese. Lanceford's eyes watered, his stomach tautened convulsively, but the Niobians eyed the reeking semi-solid eagerly. No meal on Niobe was considered worthy of the name unless a generous helping of vorkum started it off. ruin the most rugged human appetite, but when it was the forerunner of a main dish of highly spiced barbecue, vorkum assumed the general properties of an emetic. Lanceford grimly controlled the nausea and tactfully declined the greasy handful which Kron offered. The Niobian never seemed to learn. At every meal they had eaten during their past month of travel on Niobe, Kron had persistently offered him samples of the mess. With equal persistence, he had refused. After all, there were limits. But polite convention required that he eat something, so he took a small portion of the barbecued meat and dutifully finished it. The hunters eyed him curiously, apparently wondering how an entity who could assimilate relatively untasty sorat should refuse the far greater delicacy of vorkum. But it was a known fact that the ways of Earthmen were strange and unaccountable. The hunters didn't protest when he retired to his sleeping platform and the more acceptable concentrates from his pack. His hunger satisfied, he lay back on the resilient vines and fell into a sleep of exhaustion. It had been a hard day. Lanceford's dreams were unpleasant. Nightmare was the usual penalty of sitting in on a Niobian meal and this one was worse than usual. Huge siths, reeking of vorkum, pursued him as he ran naked and defenseless across a swampy landscape that stretched interminably ahead. The clinging mud reduced his speed to a painful crawl as he frantically beat off the attacks of the bloodsuckers. The climax was horror. One of the siths slipped through his frantically beating hands and bit him on the face. The shocking pain of the bite wakened him, a cry of terror and anguish still on his lips. He looked around wildly. He was still in the hunthouse. It was just a dream. He chuckled shakily. These nightmares sometimes were too real for comfort. He was drenched with sweat, which was not unusual, but there was a dull ache in his head and the hot tense pain that encompassed the right side of his face had not been there when he had fallen asleep. He touched his face with a tentative finger, exploring the hot puffiness and the enormously swollen ear with a gentle touch. It was where he had struck the sith, but surely he couldn't have hit that hard. He gasped, a soft breath of dismay, as realization dawned. He had smashed the sith hard enough to squeeze some of the insect's corrosive body juices through his face net -- and they had touched his skin! That wouldn't normally have been bad, but the sith bite he had suffered a week ago had sensitized him. He was developing an anaphylactic reaction -- a severe one, judging from the swelling. That was the trouble with exploration; one occasionally forgot that a world was alien. Occasionally danger tended to recede into a background of familiarity -- he had smashed the sith before it had bitten him, so therefore it couldn't hurt him. He grimaced painfully, the movement bringing another twinge to his swollen face. He should have known better. He swore mildly as he opened his Aid Kit and extracted a sterile hypo. The super-antihistamine developed by the Bureau was an unpredictable sort of thing. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. He removed the screw cap that sealed the needle and injected the contents of the syringe into his arm. He hoped that this was one of the times the drug worked. If it wasn't, he reflected grimly, he wouldn't be long for this world. He sighed and lay back. There wasn't anything more to do now. All he could do was wait and see if the anti-allergin worked. HP HE Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration had discovered Niobe barely three years ago, yet already the planet was famous not only for its peculiar climate, but also for the number of men who had died upon its watery surface. Knowledge of this planet was bought with life, grim payment to decrease the lag between discovery and the day men could live and work on Niobe without having to hide beneath domes or behind protection suits. Lanceford never questioned the necessity or the inevitable price that must be he knew that Niobe was crash priority -- a world that had to be understood in minimum time. For Niobe was a made to order herbarium for a swampland plant called viscaya. The plant was originally native to Algon IV, but had been spread to practically every suitable growth center in the Galaxy. It was the source of a complex of alkaloids known as gerontin, and gerontin had the property of tripling or quadrupling the normal life span of mammals. It was obvious that viscayaculture should have a tremendous distribution throughout the Confederation worlds. But unfortunately the right conditions existed in very few places in the explored galaxy. Despite the fact that most life is based on carbon, oxygen and water, there is still very little free water in the Galaxy. Most planets of the Confederation are semi-arid, with the outstanding exceptions of Terra and Lyrane. But these two worlds were the seats of human and humanoid power for so long that all of their swampland had been drained and reclaimed centuries ago. And it was doubly unfortunate that gerontin so far defied synthesis. According to some eminent chemists, the alkaloid would probably continue to do so until some facet of the Confederation reached sidering that Terra and Lyrane, the two highest cultures, were level steps took several thousands of years to make, a policy of waiting for synthesis was not worth considering. The result was that nobody was happy until Niobe was distin was astronomical and most of the Confederation's supply of the drug was strictly rationed to those whom the government thought most valuable to the Confederation as a whole. Of course, the Confederation officialdom was included, which caused considerable grumbling. In the nick of time, Niobe appeared upon the scene, and Niobe had environment in abundance! The wheels of the Confederagiven a blank check and spurred on by a government which, in turn, was being spurred on by the people who composed it. The exploration of Niobe proceeded at all possible speed. With so many considerations weighed against them, what did a few lives matof humanoids in the Confederation, their sacrifice was worthwhile even if only a few days or hours were saved between discovery and exploitation. - violent pain shot through his head. The anti-allergin apparently wasn't going to work, for it should have had some effect by now. He shrugged mentally -- it was the chance one took in this business. But he couldn't say that he hadn't been warned. Even old Sims had told him, called him a unit in the scheme -- an error, it looked like now. Seemed rather silly -- a Class that were old during the Dark Ages before the Atomic Revolution, sending foot parties to explore a world in the chance that they might discover something that the search mechs missed -- anything that would shorten the lag time. It was incomprehensible, would do a thing like this without reason. And whatever it was, he wasn't going to worry about it In fact, there wasn't much time left to worry. The reaction was observably and painfully worse. It was important that the news of his death and the specimens he had collected get back to Base Alpha. They might have value in this complex game Alvord Sims was playing with men, machines and Niobe. But Base Alpha was a good hundred miles away and, in his present condition, he couldn't walk a hundred feet. For a moment, he considered setting up the powerful little transmitter he carried in his pack, but his first abortive motion convinced him it was useless. The blinding agony that swept through him at the slightest movement left no doubt that he would never finish the business of setting up the antenna, let alone send a message. It was a crime that handietalkies couldn't be used here on Niobe, but their range, limited at best, was practically nonexistent on a planet that literally seemed to be one entire "dead spot." A fixed-frequency job broadcasting on a directional beam was about the only thing that could cover distance, and that required a little technical know-how to set up the antenna and focus it on Base Alpha. There would be no help from Kron. Despite his intelligence, the native could no more assemble a directional antenna than spread pink wings and fly. There was only one thing to do -- get a note off to Sims, if he could still write, and ask Kron to deliver the note and his pack to the Base. He fumbled with his jacket, and with some pain produced a stylus and a pad. But it was difficult to write. Painful, too. Better get Kron over here while he could still talk and tell him what he wanted. The stylus slipped from numb fingers as Lanceford called hoarsely, "Kron! Come here! I need you!" sionately at the swollen features of the Earthman. He had seen the kef effect before, among the young of his people who were incautious or inexperienced, but he had never seen it among the aliens. Surprisingly, the effects were the same -- the livid swellings, the gasping breath, the pain. Strange how these foreigners reacted like his own people. He scratched his head and pulled thoughtfully at one of his short ears. It was his duty to help Lanceford, but how could he? The Earthman had denied his help for weeks, and Niobians simply didn't disregard another's wishes. Kron scowled, the action lending a ferocious cast to his doglike face. Tolerance was a custom hallowed by ages of practice. It went to extremes -- even with life at stake, a person's wishes and beliefs must be respected. Kron buried his long-snouted head in his hands, a gesture that held in it all the frustration which filled him. The human was apparently resolved to die. He had told Kron his last wishes, which didn't include a request for help, but merely to get his pack back to the others in their glass dome. It was astonishing that such an obviously intelligent species should have so little flexibility. They didn't understand the first principles of adaptation. Always and forever, they held to their own ways, trying with insensate stubbornness to mold nature to their will -- and when nature overcome their artificial defenses, they died, stubborn, unregenerate, inflexible to the end. They were odd, these humans -- odd and a little frightening. Lanceford breathed wheezily. The swelling had invaded the inner tissues of his throat and was beginning to compress his windpipe. It was uncomfortable, like inhaling liquid fire, and then there was the constant desire to cough and the physical inability to do so. "Dirty luck," he whispered. "Only a week more and I'd have had it made -- the longest trek a man's made on this benighted planet." Kron nodded, but then belatedly realized that the human was muttering to himself. He listened. There might be something important in these dying murmurings, something that might explain their reasons for being here and their strange driving haste that cared nothing for life. "It's hard to die so far from one's people, but I guess that can't be helped. Old Sims gave me the score. Like he said, a man doesn't have much choice of where he "You don't want to die!" Kron exploded. "Of course not," Lanceford said with weak surprise. He hadn't dreamed that Kron was nearby. This might well destroy the Imperturbable Earthman myth that "Not even if it is in accord with your customs and rituals?" "What customs?" "Your clothing, your eating habits, your ointments -- are these not part of your living plan?" Despite the pain that tore at his throat, Lanceford managed a chuckle. This was ridiculous. "Hell, no! Our only design for living is to stay alive, particularly on jobs like this one. We don't wear these suits and repellent because we like to. We do it to stay alive. If we could, we'd go around nearly as naked as you do." "Do you mind if I help you?" Kron asked diffidently. "I think I can cure you." He leaned forward anxiously to get the man's reply. "I'd take a helping hand from the devil himself, if it would do any good." hummed softly under his breath, the Niobian equivalent of laughter. "And all the time we thought -- " he began, and then broke off abruptly. Already too much time was wasted without losing any more in meditating upon the ironies of life. He turned toward the firepit, searched for a moment among the stones, nodded with satisfaction and returned to where Lanceford lay. The hunthouse was deserted save for himself and the Earthman. With characteristic Niobian delicacy, the hunters had left, preferring to endure the night rain than be present when the alien died. Kron was thankful that they were gone, for what he was about to do would shock their conservative souls. scious of Kron prying his swollen jaws apart and forcing something wet and slippery down his throat. He swallowed, the act a tearing pain to the edematous membranes of his gullet, but the stuff slid down, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. The act triggered another wave of pain that left him weak and gasping. He couldn't take much more of this. It wouldn't be long now before the swelling invaded his lungs to such a degree that he would strangle. It wasn't a pleasant way to die. And then, quite suddenly, the pain eased. A creeping numbness spread like a warm black blanket over his outraged nervous system. The stuff Kron had given him apparently had some anesthetic properties. He felt dimly grateful, even though the primitive native nostrum would probably do no good other than to ease the pain. The blackness went just far enough to paralyze the superficial areas of his nervous system. It stopped the pain and left him unable to move, but the deeper pathways of thought and reason remained untouched. He was conscious, although no external sensation intruded on his thoughts. He couldn't see Kron -- the muscles that moved his eyes were as paralyzed as the other muscles of his body and the native was outside his field of vision -- but somehow he knew exactly what the Niobian was doing. He was washing mucus from his hands in a bowl of water standing beside the fire pit and he was wondering wryly whether torced feeding was on the list of human tabus! Lanceford's mind froze, locked in a peculiar contact that was more than awareness. The sensation was indescribable. It was like looking through an open door into the living room of a stranger's house. He was aware of the incredible complexity and richness of Kron's thoughts, of oddly sardonic laughter, of pity and regret that such a little thing as understanding should cause death and suffering through its lack, of bewildered admiration for the grim persistence of the alien Earthmen, mixed with a wondering curiosity about what kept them here -- what the true reasons were for their death-defying persistence and stubbornness -- of an ironic native paraphrase for the Ter ran saying, "Every man to his own taste," and a profound speculation upon what fruits might occur from true understanding between his own race and the aliens. It was a strangely jumbled kaleidoscopic flash that burned across the explorer's isolated mind, a flash that passed almost as soon as it had come, as though an invisible door had closed upon it. But one thing in that briefly shocking contact stood out with great clarity. The Niobians were a true contact, a true understanding, for the message was there, plain in Kron's mind that he was thinking not only for himself but for a consensus of his people, a decision arrived at as a result of discussion and thought -- a decision of which every Niobian was aware and with which most Niobians agreed. HT HE magnitude of that thought and its implications staggered Lanceford's imagination. After two years of exploration and contact with the dominant knew literally nothing about the sort of people with whom they were dealing. This instantaneous, neural contact proved that Equated against the information dished out in Basic Training, it merely emphasized the fact that Anthropological Intelligence had a lot to account for -- the job they'd done so far could have been performed by low-grade morons. In wishing to avoid the possibility of giving offense, in hiding behind a wall of courtesy and convention, there had been no contact worthy of the name. Yet here was the possibility of a rapport that could be closer than any which existed between any races in the Galaxy. Lanceford groaned with silent frustration. To learn this when he was dying was the bitterest of ironies. In any other circumstances, the flash of insight could be parlayed into a key which might unlock the entire problem of Niobian relationships. Bitterly he fought against the curtain of unconsciousness that closed down on him, trying by sheer will to stay awake, to make some move that could be interpreted, to leave some clue to what he had learned. It was useless. The darkness closed in, inexorable and irresistible. opened his eyes, surprised that he was still alive. The pain was gone from his face and the swelling had subsided. He grinned with relief -- his luck had held out. And then the relief vanished in a wave of elation. He held the key. He knew the basics for mutual understanding. And he would be alive to deliver them to the specialists who could make them operate. He chuckled. Whatever the treatment, whatever it was, it didn't matter. The important thing was that he was going to live. He wondered whether that flash of insight just before unconsciousness had been real or a figment of delirium. It could have been either, but Lanceford clung to the belief that the contact was genuine. There was far too much revealed in that sudden flash that was entirely alien to his normal patterns of thought. He wondered what had triggered that burst of awareness. had given him, the poison of the sith and the histamines floating around in his system -- it could have been any one of a number of things, or maybe a complex of various factors that had interacted to make him super-receptive for an instant of time. It was something that would have to be reported and studied with the meticulous care which the ence that was out of the ordinary. A solution might possibly be found, or the whole thing might wind up as one of those dead ends that were so numerous in Exploration work. But that was out of his field and, in consequence, out of his hands. His specialty wasn't parapsychological research. Kron was standing beside his bed, long doglike face impassive, looking at him with pleased satisfaction. Behind him, a group of natives were clustered around the cooking fire. It was as if no time had passed since the allergy struck -- but Lanceford knew differently. Still, the lost time didn't matter. The bright joy that he was going to live transcended such unimportant things. "Looks like you won't have to bury me after all," Lanceford said happily. He stretched his arms over his head. He felt wonderful. His body was cool and comfortably free of the hot confinement of the protection suit. He did a slow horrified doubletake as he realized that he was lying on the sleeping platform practically naked -- a tempting hors d'oeuvre for the thousand and one species of Niobe's biting insects. "Where's my suit?" he half shouted. it, friend Lanceford. If you will notice, you are not bitten. Nor will you be." "Why not?" Kron didn't answer. It wasn't the proper time, and the euphoria that he and the Earthman were enjoying was too pleasant to shatter. Lanceford didn't press the matter. Apparently Kron knew what he was talking about. Lanceford had been watching one particularly vicious species of biting fly hover above his body. The insect would approach, ready to enjoy a mandible full of human epidermis, but, about six inches from his body, would slow down and come to a stop, hanging frustrated in midair. Finally the fly gave up and flew off into the darkness of the rafters. Lanceford hoped that one of the spiders would get it -- but he was convinced. Whatever happened to him while he was unconscious had made him as insect-repellent as the Niobians. The smell of cooking came from the firepit and, incredibly, it smelled good. Lanceford looked startledly at Kron. "I'm hungry." "An excellent sign," Kron replied. "You are nearly cured. Soon you will be able to finish this trek." "Incidentally," Lanceford said, "for the first time since I have been out on this showerbath world of yours, you're cooking something that smells fit to eat. I think I'd like to try it." Kron's eyebrows rose and he hummed softly under his breath. This was something entirely unexpected -- an added delight, like the flavor of komal in a sorat stew. He savored it slowly, enjoying its implications. "What is it?" Lanceford persisted. "A dish called akef," Kron said. The name was as good as any and certainly described the effect well enough. r T , HE last hundred miles had been a breeze. Lanceford stood at the edge of the clearing, looking across the planed off landscape to the shimmering hemispherical bulk of Base Alpha, glistening like a giant cabochon jewel under Niobe's dark sky. Without the protection suit to slow him down and hamper his movements, what would have been a week's trip had been shortened to four days. In a few minutes, he would be back among his own kind -- and he wasn't sure whether he was glad or sorry. Of course, there was a certain satisfaction in bringing back a first-class discovery -- perhaps the greatest in the short history of Niobian exploration -- but there was a stigma attached to the way it had been found. It wouldn't be easy to confess that it had practically been forced upon him, but it would have to be done. It would have been much nicer to have found the answer by using his head. There would have been some really deserved prestige in that. TT E sighed and turned to Kroa "Farewell, friend," he said soberly, "and thanks." "We are even," Kron replied. "You saved my life from a roka and I saved yours from the sith. The scales are balanced." Lanceford blinked. He had forgotten that incident where he had shot the big catlike animal shortly after the 'copter had dropped them for the start of their journey back to Base. Apparently it was after Kron -- or at least the native had thought so. Lanceford grinned ruefully. Score another point for blind luck. "But, Kron, it's not that easy. You have given me a secret of your people and I shall have to tell it to mine." "I expected that you would. Besides, it is no secret. Even our children know its composition and how to make it. We have never held it from you. You simply wouldn't accept it. But it is about time, friend Lanceford, that your race began learning something of Niobe if they wish to remain here -- and it is about time that we began learning something about you. I think that there will be some rather marked changes in the future. And in that regard, I leave you with the question of whether a civilization should be judged entirely upon its apparent technological achievements." "I -- " Lanceford began. "You have learned how we avoid the insects," Kron continued, maneuvering past the abortive interruption, "and perhaps someday you will know the full answer to my question. But in the meantime, you and your kind will be free to move through our world, to learn our ways, and to teach us yours. It should be a fair exchange." "Thanks to akef," Lanceford said fervently, "we should be able to do just that."-"-the drug enough to have overcome the mental block that prevented you from naming it before. The word I coined from your own language of science is no longer necessary." "I suppose not, but it's pleasanter to think of it that way." "You Earthmen! Sometimes I wonder how you ever managed to achieve a civilization with your strange attitudes toward unpleasant facts." Kron smiled broadly, relishing the memory of his deception and Lanceford's shocked awakening to the truth. "I hope," he continued, "that you have forgiven my little deceit and the destruction of your protective clothing." "Of course. How could I do otherwise? It's so nice to be rid of that sweatbox that I'd forgive anything." Lanceford frowned. "But there's one thing that puzzles me. How did you disguise the stuff?" "I didn't," Kron replied cryptically. "You did." He turned away and, with characteristic Niobian abruptness, walked off into the jungle. His job was done and natives were never ones to dally with leavetaking, although their greetings were invariably ceremonious. Lanceford watched until the native was out of sight and then walked slowly across the clearing toward the dome. He had learned a lot these past few days, enough to make him realize that his basic training had been so inadequate as to be almost criminal. It was lacking in many of the essentials for survival and, moreover, was slanted entirely wrong from a psychological point of view. Sure, it was good enough to enable a man to get along, but it seemed to be particularly designed to deny the fact that the natives obviously possessed a first-rate culture of their own. It didn't say so directly, but the implications were there. And that was wrong. The natives possessed a civilization that was probably quite as high as the one Terra possessed. It was simply oriented differently. One thing was certain -- the Confederation wasn't going to expropriate or exploit this planet without the natives' consent. It would be suicide if they tried. He grinned. Actually there would be no reason for such action. It was always easier to deal with advanced races than to try to conquer or educate primitive ones. Kron had the right idea -- understanding, exchange, appreciation -- Confederation culture for Niobian. It would make a good and productive synthesis. Still grinning, Lanceford opened the airlock and stepped inside, ignoring the pop-eyed guard who eyed his shorts and sandals with ders and set it carefully on the an expression of incredulous disfloor. belief. "Glad to see that you made it, Lanceford," Sims said. "But what's looked up from his desk and You stink like a native." smiled. The smile became a nose"All the baths in the world wrinkling grimace as Lanceford won't help, sir," Lanceford said swung the pack from his shoulwoodenly. He was tired of the stares and the sniffs he had encountered since he had entered the base. In his present condition, a fellowhuman smelled as bad to him as he did to them, but he didn't complain about it and he saw no reason why they should. Humanity should apply more courtesy and consideration to members of their own species. "It's inside me," he explained. "My metabolism's changed. And incidentally, sir, you don't smell so sweet yourself." Sims sputtered for a moment and then shrugged. "Perhaps not," he admitted. "One can't help sweating in this climate even with air-conditioning." "It's the change inside me," Lanceford said. "I suppose it'll wear off in time, once I've been on a normal diet. But I didn't think that was too important in view of the information I have. I've learned something vital, something that you should know at once. That's why I'm here." "That's decent of you," Sims replied, "but an interoffice memo would have served just as well as a personal visit. My stomach isn't as good as it once was. Ulcers, you know." "The executive's disease," Lanceford commented. Sims nodded. "Well, Arthur, what did you find that was so important?" "That we've been fools." Sims sighed. "That's nothing new. We've been fools since the day we left Earth to try and conquer the stars." 'That's not what I mean, sir. I mean that we've been going at this Niobe business the wrong way. What we need is to understand the natives, instead of trying to understand the planet." "Out of the mouth's of babes and probationers -- " Sims said with gentle irony. "It pays off," Lanceford replied doggedly. "Take my case. I've found out why the natives are insect-proof!" "That's a new wrinkle. Can you prove it?" "Certainly. I came the last hundred miles in shorts." "What happened to your suit?" "Kron destroyed it accidentally." "Accidentally -- hah!" Sims snorted. "Niobians never do things accidentally." at the director. The observation carried a wealth of implications that his sharpened senses were quick to grasp. 'Then you know the natives aren't simple savages, the way we were taught in Basic Training?" "Of course! They're a non-technical Class V at the very least -- maybe higher. Somehow they've never oriented their civilization along mechanical lines, or maybe they tried it once and found it wanting. But no one in the upper echelons has ever thought they were stupid or uncivilized." "Then why -- " "Later," Sims said. "You're entitled to an explanation, but right now I'd appreciate it if you'd finish your statement. What makes the natives insect-proof?" "Vorkum." "That gunk?" "That's the repellent." "In more ways than one," Sims said. "It's not so bad after you get used to it. It just smells awful at first." "That's an understatement, if I ever heard one." lyze it and find the active principle," Lanceford said hopefully. "If they do, I'll bet it is distilled quintessence of skunk," Sims replied gloomily. "I'll be friends tried that trick ages ago and gave it up for a bad job. They're pretty fair biochemists as well as being philosophers." "Could be," Lanceford said thoughtfully. "I never thought of that." "You'd better start thinking all the time. These lads are smart. Why do you think we have this complicated rigmarole about native relations and respect? Man, we're running scared. We don't want to lose this planet, and anything less than the kid-glove treatment would be sheer suicide until we learn how far we can go. These natives have an organization that'd knock your eye out. I didn't believe it myself until I got the proof: As you learn more about it, you'll understand what I mean. We're dealing with an ecological unit on this planet!" "But I thought -- " "That you were here to explore a primitive world?" "Wasn't that what I was trained for?" "No. We can do that sort of thing with a couple of geodetic cruisers. We don't need men trekking through the jungles to assay a world's physical resources. That business went out of date during the Dark Ages. There's a better reason than that for these treks." "Like what?" "You asked the question. Now answer it," Sims said. "You have enough data." Lanceford thought for a moment. "I can see one reason," he said slowly. "Yes?" "The trek could be a test. It could be used to determine whether or not the probationer was a survival type -- a sort of final examination before he's turned loose in a responsible job  part of the speedup -- a pretty brutal part, but one that can't be helped if we want to get this planet in line quickly enough to stop the riot that's brewing in the Confederation. It's as much for Niobe's good as ours, because the Confederation wants that gerontin like an alcoholic wants another drink -- and they're not going to wait for normal exploration and development. That's why the treks. It's a tough course. Failure can and often does mean death. Usually we can pull a misfit out in time, but not always. If you live through the trek and we don't have to pull you out, though, you've proved yourself a survival type -- and you're over the first hurdle. "Then we check with your guide and anyone you happen to meet en route. The natives are very cooperative about such things. If you pass their evaluation, you're ready to join the club. It's been forming ever since we landed here two years ago, but it's still pretty exclusive. It's the nuthe one that'll get things rolling with the gerontin plantations. We'll know about you in a few more minutes after the Cyb Unit gets through processing your data." Sims grinned at the thunderstruck youngster. Lanceford nodded glumly. 'Til probably fail. I sure didn't use my head. I never caught the significance of the trek, I failed to deduce the reason for the insectrepellent qualities of the natives, and I missed the implications of their culture until I had almost reached Base. Those things are obvious. Any analytical brain would have figured them out." "They're only obvious when you know what you're looking for," Sims said gently. "Personally, I think you did an excellent job, considering the handicaps you have faced. And the discovery of the vorkum was masterly." Lanceford blushed. "I hate to admit it, but Kron literally shoved the stuff down my throat." "I didn't mean the method by which you learned that vorkum was the stuff we've been searching for," Sims said. "I meant the results you obtained. Results are what count in this business. Call it luck if you wish, but there is more to it than that. Some people are just naturally lucky and those are the sort we need here. They're survival types. A lot is going to depend on having those so-called lucky people in the right places when we settle Niobe's status in the Confederation." He paused as the message tube beside his desk burped a faint hiss of compressed air and a carrier dropped out into the receiving basket. "Somehow I think that this is your membership card to the club, he said. He read it, smiled, and passed the sheet to Lanceford. "And now, Arthur, before I appoint you as a Niobe Staff member, I'd like to know one thing." "What is that, sir?" "Just why in the name of hell did you bring that pack in here with you? I've just realized where that smell is coming from!" "I didn't dare leave it anywhere," Lanceford said. "Someone might have thrown it down a disposal chute." "I wouldn't blame them. That's vorkum you have in there, isn't it?" Lanceford nodded. "Yes, sir. I didn't want to lose it." 'Why not? We can always get more from the natives if we need it." "I know that, sir. We can, but this is all I'll get for the next six months, and if I ration myself carefully, it might last that long. You see, sir, it's mildly habitforming -- like cigarettes -- and one gets accustomed to it. And besides, you really don't know what flavor is until you've tried vorkum on chocolate." monthly at New York, N. Y. for Oct. #, #. #. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Robert M. Guinn, #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Editor, Horace L. Gold, #I Hudson Street (#) New York City; Managing Editor, None; Business Editor, None. #. The, owner is: (Tf owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., #I Hudson Street (#), New York City; Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stockholder), #I Hudson Street (#), New York City. #. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (If there are none, so state.) None. #. Paragraphs # and # include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting; also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. #. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the # months preceding the date shown above was: (This information is required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and triweekly newspapers only.) Sworn to and subscribed before me this #th day of September, #. Notary Public, State of New York No. # Qualified in Kings County Term Expires March #, # # Star Shelf Vance, t) allant ine Books, N. Y.,  # scure opening, Vance settles down to a frighteningly logical depiction of a civilization based on immortality as the supreme reward for a life of achievement. Unfortunately, immortality is for the few because cataclysmic wars have reduced the world to barbarism except for the smallish community of Clarges, and food supply and population are kept in strict balance. For each new Amaranth, # ordinary mortals are visited by the Assassins. Since war and violence have been outlawed, the only areas of strife are in space flight and the struggle for immortality. Gavin Waylock is the angry protagonist, unjustly accused of deliberate murder and therefore deprived of his immortality. For seven years, he has hidden until, being declared legally dead, he is free to strive again for eternal life. The sick, inbred society of Vance's imagination comes fully alive, even though his characters remain mere symbols. Holly Compton. Oxford University Press, N. Y ., # literally burst into the awareness of the world, the general reaction was one of amazement that such an immense undertaking could have been achieved with such secrecy. More accustomed to effective security, we know that other wonders -- and horrors -- are under equally tight wraps today. Dr. Compton's book, never too late to be welcome, treats with the now familiar names -- Fermi, Oppenheimer, Urey, Conant, Lawrence, etc., and their often frustrated approach to the conquest of the atom. Though Dr. Compton's treatment keeps tending toward the textbookish, the drama and tension of those historic days come through undiluted. Sam Moskowitz. Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press, Ga., # Quest, primarily a personal account of the individuals involved in the search for atomic power, is underplayed, being overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject. In contrast, Moskowitz's book, pretentious title and all, is an account of the petty feuds of a handful of S-F fans in the dark days of the '#s; depressing events during Depression days. The articulate handful monopolized the magazine letter columns and carried on their pigmy warfare to the despair of actual readers. Fortunately, most of these petulant warriors have since grown up -- but their historian is still leading their ghostly legions in battles that are more real than today to him. The miracle is that S-F survived even the love of its most rabid fans. Direct from Decatur, Ga. McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., # been devoted to the question "From Whence?" as to the more immediate "Whither?" Senet is a most beguiling Whencer. His book takes on the intensity of a detective yarn as he ranges over the entire planet, following the finds of eminent paleontologists tracing the origins of Man further and further into antiquity. Far from adhering to this narrow field of investigation, however, Senet takes the entire scope of terrestrial life, marine and land, under scrutiny. His chapter      shelf on the fabulous coelecanth and the assault on the continents by the sea creatures is the tautest kind of narration. Kurt Deckert. Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y., # monsters, our planet has more than its share in the depths of the seven seas. The pages of this startling tome are a-crawl with illustrations of creatures that any S-F artist would be tickled to own. The authors, zoologists at the University of Berlin, have compiled an unusual book devoted to the benthal or abyssal bottom dweller and the archibenthal or continental slope inhabitant, as well as the bathypelagic swimmers. By sinking to such depths, these scientists lift science enormously. Kramer. The Falcon's Wing Press, Colo., # had ever heard of Sumer or Sumerians. That they are now known to have been unique in many respects is due to the fastidious labors of specialized archeologists known as Sumerologists. Dr. Kramer takes a humorous view of his calling, referring to himself as a pinpoint historian, concerned with the history of the tiny triangle formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers only up to the time of Alexander the Great. The Sumerians had evolved a high civilization as early as # b.Ct with many historical firsts. They organized the first schools, literary debates, library catalogues; assembled the first Pharmacopoeia, "Farmer's Almanac" and bicameral congress and achieved the first recorded case of tax reduction. As you can see, a truly remarkable people. tle, Brown and Co., Boston, # Author of this year's monumental The Moon with Patrick Moore as well as a new work on telescopes to be reviewed next month, Wilkins has here a study of the Solar System on a juvenile plane. After theoretical construction of a rocket in orbit. Dr. Wilkins sets the reader off on a journey round the System. He has interjected accidents and problems to add spice to the story. Possibly he has strained too hard in the interest of interest, but I suspect that youngsters will disagree. Isabel Barclay. Doubleday  Co., Inc., # exploration from # b.c. to today. It has taken # years for Man to know his Earth. From the time of Hannu the Egyptian, the earliest known explorer who discovered the land of Punt, to the present, mankind has been driven to explore the unknown. All the great' explorers are in this book, from the Phoenicians to the Portuguese; Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Amundsen, Peary. Their stories are excellent examples of Man's restlessness but, as Miss Barclay says, "Where men once asked, What lies beyond the Great Green Sea?' today they ask, 'How soon shall we get to Mars?'" This book will have your teenager packing up to leave home. Beau. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., # nym of the wife of a government official. According to her, she has contacted certain beings beyond the veil, one of whom she calls Trust and who gives her Godly advice. This book is an account of her psychic experiences, but there is no documentation, so we must accept "Mrs. LeBeau's" story on Trust T. Wilkins. The Citadel Press, N. Y., # where in this column indulges in an extraterrestrial flight of fancy, his almostnamesake, H. T. Wilkins, has his feet in the clouds right here on solid ground. He postulates a race of AtlanteanBrazilians who have left artifacts dating from # B.C. If this be so, and Mr. Wilkins smokescreens the reader with masses of innuendo, then somehow we are missing out on one of the greatest stories of this century. Archeologists! Wherefore art yez? Dorothy Louise Dern. Pageant Press, Inc., N. Y., # ceived her training in the soap-opera field. She has taken an intrinsically dramatic subject, the creation of human life in the laboratory, and proceeded to treat it from the angle of Portia Facing Life. Unfortunately, unlike her laboratory piece of flesh, her story completely fails to come alive.     shelf I wheel one morning, Dr. Walter Alvarez detoured down to C Level promenade. A few men were standing, as usual, at the view window looking out at the enormous blue-green planet below. They were dressed alike in sheen-gray coveralls, a garment with detachable gauntlets and hood designed to make it convertible into a spacesuit. It was uncomfortable, but regulation: according to the books, a Survey and Propaganda Satellite might find itself under attack at any moment. Nothing so interesting had hapoff the seventh planet of a G-type star in Ophiuchus. They had been here for two years and a half, and most of them had not even touched ground yet. There it was, drifting by out there, blue-green, fat and juicy -- an oxygen planet, two-thirds land, mild climate, soil fairly bursting with minerals and organics. Alvarez felt his mouth watering when he looked at it. He had "wheel fever." They all did. He wanted to get down there, to natural gravity and natural ailments. The last month or so, there had been a feeling in the satellite that a breakthrough was coming. Always coming: it never arrived. eye for a what? The Earthmen thought they couldn't hurt a friendly alien if their lives depended on it -- their lives did depend on itl Lola went by and a couple of the men turned with automatic whistles. "Listen," said Olaf Olsen conspiratorially, with a hand on Alvarez's arm, "that reminds me, did you hear what happened at the big banquet in George's honor yesterday?" "No," said Alvarez, irritably withdrawing his arm. "I didn't go. Can't stand banquets. Why?" "Well, the way I got it, the commandant's wife was sitting right across from George -- " Alvarez's interest sharpened. "You mean the gorgon? What did he do?" "I'm telling you. See, it looked like he was watching her all through dinner. Then along comes the dessert -- lemon meringue. So old George -- " The shift bell rang. Alvarez started nervously and looked at his thumbwatch. The other men were drifting away. So was Olaf, laughing like a fool. "You'll die when you hear," he called back. "Boy, do I wish I'd been there myself! So long, Walt." Alvarez reluctantly went the other way. In B Corridor, somebody called out to him, "Hey, Walt! Hear about the banquet?" He shook his head. The other man, a baker named Pedro, grinned and waved, disappearing up the curve of the corridor. Alvarez opened the door of Xenology Section and went in. During his absence, somebody had put a new chart on the wall. It was ten feet high and there were little rectangles all over it, each connected by lines to other rectangles. When he first saw it, Alvarez thought it was a new table of organization for the Satellite Service and he winced; but on closer inspection, the chart was too complex, and besides, it had a peculiar disorganized appearance. Boxes had been white-rubbed out and other boxes drawn on top of them. Some parts were crowded illegibly together and others were spacious. The whole thing looked desperately confused and so did Elvis Womrath, who was on a wheeled ladder erasing the entire top righthand corner. "N panga," he said irritably. "That right?" "Yes," a voice piped unexpectedly. Alvarez looked around, saw nobody. The voice went on, "But he is R panga to his cousins and all their N pangas or bigger, except when -- " Alvarez leaned over and peered around the desk. There on the carpet was the owner of the voice, a pinkish-white spheroid with various appendages sprouting in all directions, like a floating mine: "George" the gorgon. "Oh, it's you," said Alvarez, producing his echo sounder and humidometer. "What's all this nonsense I hear -- " He began to prod the gorgon with the test equipment, making his regular morning examination. It was the only bright moment of his day; the infirmary could wait. "All right," Womrath interrupted, scrubbing furiously. "R panga to cousins -- wait a minute now." He turned with a scowl. "Alvarez, I'll be through in a minute. N panga or bigger, except when..." He sketched in half a dozen boxes, labeled them and began to draw connecting lines. "Now is that right?" he asked George. "Yes, only now it is wrong panga to mother's cousins. Draw again from father's cousins' N pangas to mother's cousins' O pangas or bigger... Yes, and now from father's uncles' R pangas to mother's uncles' pangas' cousins " He stared at the chart; he had drawn such a tangle of lines, he couldn't tell what box connected with which. "Oh, God," he said hopelessly. He climbed down off the ladder and slapped the stylus into Alvarez's palm. "You go nuts." He thumbed the intercom on the desk and said, "Chief, I'm going off now. Way off." "Did you get that chart straightened out?" the intercom demanded. "No, but-" "You're on extra duty as of now. Take a pill. Is Alvarez here?" "Yes," said Womrath resignedly. "Both of you come in, then. Leave George outside." "Doctor," the spheroid piped, "are you panga to me?" "Don't let's get into that," said Womrath, twitching, and took Alvarez by the sleeve. They found the chief of the Xenology Section, Edward H. Dominick, huddled bald and bearlike behind his desk. The cigar in his hand looked chewed. "Womrath," he said, "when can you give me that chart?" "I don't know. Never, maybe." When Dominick scowled at him irritably, he shrugged and lit a cigarette. Dominick swiveled his gaze at Alvarez. "Have you heard about what happened at the banquet in George's honor yesterday?" "No, I have not," said Alvarez. "Will you be so kind as to tell me, or else shut up about it?" Dominick rubbed his shaven skull, absorbing the insult. "It was during the dessert. George was sitting opposite Mrs. Carver, in that little jump seat. Just as she got her fork into the pie -- it was lemon meringue -- George rolled right up over the table and grabbed the plate away. Mrs. Carver screamed, pulled back -- thought she was being attacked, I suppose -- and the chair went out from under her. It -- was -- a -- mess." Alvarez ended the awed silence. "What did he do with the pie?" "Ate it," said Dominick glumly. "Had a perfectly good piece of his own that he didn't touch." He popped a lozenge into his mouth. Alvarez shook his head. "Not typical. His pattern is strictly submissive. I don't like it." "That's what I told Carver. But he was livid. Shaking. We all sat there until he escorted his wife to her room and came back. Then we had an interrogation. All we could get out of George was, 'I thought I was panga to her.'" in his chair, reaching automatically for a bunch of grapes from the bowl on the desk. He was a small, spare man and he felt defensive about it. "Now what is all this panga business?" he demanded. Womrath snorted and began to peel a banana. "Panga," said Dominick, "would appear to be some kind of complicated authority-submission relationship that exists among the gorgons." Alvarez sat up straighten "They never mentioned it to us because we never asked. Now it turns out to be crucial." Dominick sighed. "Fourteen months, just getting a three-man base down on the planet. Seven more to get the elders' permission to bring a gorgon here experimentally. All according to the book. We picked the biggest and brightest-looking one we could find. That was George. He seemed to be coming along great. And now this." "Well, Chief," said Womrath carefully, "nobody has any more admiration than I have for Mrs. Carver as a consumer -- she really puts it away -- but it seems to me the question is, is George damaged -- " Dominick was shaking his head. "I haven't told you the rest of it. This panga thing stopped Carver cold, but not for long. He beamed down to the planethead and had Rubinson ask the elders, 'Is George panga to the commandant's wife?'" Alvarez grinned mirthlessly and clicked his tongue. Dominick nodded. "Who knows what a question like that may have meant to them? They answered back, in effect, 'Certainly not,' and wanted to know the details. Carver told them." "And?" asked Alvarez. "They said George was a shocking criminal who should be appropriately punished. Not by them, you understand -- by us, because we're the offended parties. Moreover -- now this must make sense to their peculiar way of looking at things -- if we don't punish George to their satisfaction, they'll punish Rubinson and his whole crew." "How?" "By doing whatever it is we should have done to George -- which could be anything." Womrath pursed his lips to whistle, but no sound came out. He swallowed a mouthful of banana and tried again. Still nothing. "You get it?" said Dominick with suppressed emotion. They all looked through the open doorway at George, squatting patiently in the other room. "There's no trouble about 'punishment' -- we all know what it means; we've read the books. But how do you punish an alien like that? An eye for a what?"L ' straight," said Dominick, sorting through the papers in his hand. Womrath and Alvarez looked on from either side. George tried to peek, too, but his photoceptors were too short. They were all standing in the outer office, which had been stripped to the bare walls and floor. "One. We know a gorgon changes color according to his emotional state. When they're contented, they're a kind of rose pink. When they're unhappy, they turn blue." "He's been pink ever since we've had him on the Satellite," said Womrath, glancing down at the gorgon. "Except at the banquet," Dominick answered thoughtfully. "I remember he turned bluish just before... If we could find out what it was that set him off... Well, first things first." He held down another finger. "Two, we don't have any information at all about local systems of reward and punishment. They may cut each other into bits for spitting on the sidewalk, or they may just slap each other's -- um, wrists -- " He looked unhappily down at George, whose auricles and photoceptors were all out on stalks. " -- for arson, rape and mopery," Dominick finished. "We don't know. We'll have to play it by ear." "What does George say about it?" Alvarez asked. "Why don't you ask him?" "We thought of that," Womrath said glumly. "Asked him what the elders would do to him in a case like this, and he said they'd quabble his infarcts or something." "A dead end," Dominick added. "It would take us years..." He scrubbed his naked scalp with a palm. "Well, number three, we've got all the furniture out of here -- it's going to be damned crowded, with the whole staff working in my office, but never mind... Number four, there's his plate with the bread and water. And number five, that door has been fixed so it latches on the outside. Let's give it a dry run." He led the way to the door; the others followed, including George. "No, you stay in here," Wornrath told George, who stopped, blushing an agreeable pink. and dropped the improvised latch into its socket. He punched the door button, found it satisfactorily closed. Through the transparent upper pane, they could see George inquisitively watching. Dominick opened the door again. "Now, George, pay attention. This is a prison. You're being punished. We're going to keep you in here, with nothing to eat but what's there, until we think you're punished enough. Understand?" "Yes," George said doubtfully. "All right," said Dominick, and closed the door. They all stood watching for a while, and George stood watching them back, but nothing else happened. "Let's go into my office and wait," said Dominick, with a sigh. "Can't expect miracles all at once." They trooped down the corridor to the adjoining room and ate peanuts for a while. "He's a sociable creature," Womrath said hopefully. "He'll get lonesome after a while." "And hungry," Alvarez said. "He never turns down a meal." Half an hour later, when they looked in, George was thoughtfully chewing up the carpet. "No, no, no, no, George," said Dominick, bursting in on him. "You're not supposed to eat anything except what we give you. This is a prison." "Good carpet," said George, hurt. "I don't care if it is. You don't eat it, understand?" "Okay," said George cheerfully. His color was an honest rose pink. Four hours later, when Alvarez went off shift, George had settled down in a corner and pulled in all his appendages. He was asleep. If anything, he looked pinker than ever. When Alvarez came on shift again, there was no doubt about it. George was sitting in the middle of the room, photoceptors out and waving rhythmically; his color was a glowing pink, the pink of a rose pearl. Dominick kept him in there for another day, just to make sure; George seemed to lose a little weight on the austere diet, but glowed a steady pink. He liked it. II tried to keep up a good front, but he had the worst case of had got so that looking out at that fat, blue-green planet, swimming there so close, was more than he could bear. Kelly was a big man, an outdoorsman by instinct; he longed for natural air in his lungs and turf under his feet. To compensate, he strode faster, shouted louder, got redder of face and bulgier of eye, bristled more fiercely. To quiet an occasional trembling of his hands, he munched sedative pills. He had dreams of falling, with which he bored the ship's Mother Hubbard and the Church of Marx padre by turns. "Is that it?" he asked now, disapprovingly. He had never seen the gorgon before; Semantics, Medical and Xenology Sections had been keeping the alien pretty much to themselves. Dominick prodded the pinkish sphere with his toe. "Wake up, George." After a moment, the gorgon's skin became lumpy at half a dozen points. The lumps grew slowly into long, segmented stems. Some of these expanded at the tips into "feet" and "hands." Others flowered into the intricate patterns of auricles and photoceptors -- and one speech-organ, which looked like a small trumpet. "Hello," said George sunnily. "He can pull them back in any time?" Kelly asked, rubbing his chin. "Yes. Show him, George." The feathery stalks obligingly became blank-tipped, then rapidly shrank, segment by segment. In less than two seconds, George was a smooth sphere again. "Well, that makes for a little problem here," said Kelly. "You see what I mean? If you can't get a grip on him, how are you going to punish him like you say?" "We've tried everything we could think of," said Dominick. "We locked him up, kept him on short rations, didn't talk to him... He doesn't draw any pay, of course, so we can't fine him." "Or downgrade him on the promotion lists, either," said Womrath gloomily. "No. And it's a little late to use the Pavlov-Morganstem treatments we all had when we were children. We can't prevent a crime he's already committed. So our thought was, since you're the games instructor -- " "We thought," Womrath said diplomatically, "you might have noticed something that might be useful. You know, rough-housing and so on." Kelly thought this over. "Well, there's low blows," he said, "but I mean, hell -- " He gestured futilely at George, who had just decided to put his auricles out again. "What would you -- ?" "No, that's out of the question," Dominick said heavily. "Well, I'm sorry, Kelly. It was nice of you to help out." "Wait a minute," said Kelly. "I got something coming to me, maybe." He nibbled a thumbnail, staring down at the gorgon. "How would this be? I was thinking -- sometimes the boys in the pool, they get kind of frisky; they take to ducking each other. Under the water. Now what I was thinking, he breathes air, doesn't he? You know what I mean?" looked at each other. "It sounds possible," said Dominick. "Out of the question," Alvarez objected. "We don't know what his tolerance is. Suppose Kelly should damage him severely or even -- " "Oh," said Dominick. "Yes, you're right. We couldn't take a chance." "I've been a games instructor for seventy three years -- two rejuvenations -- " Kelly began, bristling. "It isn't that, Kelly," said Womrath hastily. "George isn't human, so how do we know how he'd react to a ducking?" "On the other hand," Dominick said, "gorgons do turn blue when they're not happy -- we have Rubinson's assurance for that. It seems to me George wouldn't be happy when smothering; that would be the whole point, wouldn't it? Dr. Alvarez would supervise closely, of course. Really, Alvarez, I don't see why not. Kelly, if you'll tell us what time would be most convenient for you -- " "Well," said Kelly, looking at his thumbwatch, "hell, the pool is empty now. It's ladies' day, but all the girls are down in Section Seven, hanging around Mrs. Carver. I hear she's still hysterical." Struck by a thought, Alvarez was bending over to speak to the gorgon. "George, you breathe by spiracles, is that correct? Those little tubes all over your skin?" "Yes," said George. "Well, do they work under water?" "No." Dominick and Kelly were listening with interest. "If we held you under water, would it hurt you?" George flickered uncertainly, from rose to pale magenta. "Don't know. Never tried." The three men leaned closer. "Well, George," said Alvarez, tensely, "would that be a punishment?" George flickered violently. "Yes. No. Maybe. Don't know." They straightened again, disappointed. Dominick sighed gustily. "He always gives us those mixedup answers. I don't know. Let's try it. What else can we do?" off with George, following Dominick and Dr. Alvarez, and preceding Womrath and an orderly named Josling who was wheeling one of the dispensary pulmotors. The up-curving corridors were deserted. Kelly lagged a little, adjusting his pace to George's waddling steps. After a moment, he was surprised to feel something small and soft grip his fingers. He looked down; George the gorgon had put one sevenfingered "hand" into his. The gorgon's flowerlike photoceptors were turned trustfully upward. Kelly was taken by surprise. No children were allowed on the Satellite, but Kelly had been the father of eight in a previous rejuvenation. The confiding touch stirred old memories. "You'll be all right," said Kelly gruffly. "You just come along with me. The pool, as he had predicted, was empty. Ripples reflected faint threads of light up and down along the walls. "The shallow end would be better," said Kelly. His voice was hollow and echoed back flatly. Pausing to peel off his coverall, he led George carefully down the steps into the pool. Half submerged, George floated. Kelly drew him gently out into deeper water. Dominick and the others arranged themselves along the brink in interested attitudes. Kelly cleared his throat. "The way it generally happens, one of the boys will grab ahold of another one, like this -- " He put his hands on the smooth floating globe, and hesitated. "Go ahead, Kelly," called Dominick. "Remember, you have a direct order to do this." "Sure," said Kelly. He turned to the gorgon. "Hold your breath now!" He pressed downward. The gorgon seemed lighter than he had expected, like an inflated ball; it was hard to force it under. Kelly pushed harder. George went under briefly and slipped out of Kelly's hands, bobbing to the surface. The gorgon's speaking trumpet cleared itself of water with a phonk and said, "Nice. Do again, Kelly." Kelly glanced over at Dominick, who said, "Yes. Again." Dr. Alvarez stroked his thin beard and said nothing. Kelly took a deep sympathetic breath and shoved the gorgon under. A few bubbles came to the surface. George's speaking trumpet broke water, but made no sound. Down below, Kelly could see his own pale hands gripping the gorgon's body; the water made them look bloodless; but not George -- he was a clear, unblemished pink. lence when Kelly brought him back up. "Listen," said Womrath, "I've got another idea. George, can you breathe through that speaking trumpet, too?" "Yes," said George cheerfully. Everybody brightened perceptibly. Josling polished his pulmotor with a rag. "Go ahead, Kelly," said Dominick. "And this time, you hold him under." George went down for the third time. The bubbles swirled upward. The gorgon's speaking trumpet swayed toward the surface, but Kelly leaned farther over, blocking it with his forearm. After a moment, all of George's appendages began to contract. Kelly craned his neck downward anxiously. Was a hint of blue beginning to show? "Keep him down," called Alvarez sharply. George was a blank sphere again. Then one or two of the limbs began to reappear, but they looked different somehow. "Now?" asked Kelly. "Give him a second more," said Dominick, leaning over precariously. "It seems to me -- " Kelly's back muscles were knotted with tension. He did not like the way George's new limbs seemed to be flattening out, trailing limpy. It was as if something had gone wrong in the works. "I'm bringing him up," he said hoarsely. To Kelly's horror, when he lifted his hands, George stayed where he was. Kelly made a grab for him, but the gorgon slipped out from under his fingers. The new limbs stiffened and sculled vigorously; George darted away, deep under the water. Leaning, open-mouthed, Dominick slipped and went into the pool with a majestic splash. He floundered and rose up, a moment later, streaming with water like a sea lion. Kelly, wading anxiously toward him, stopped when he saw that Dominick was safe. Both men looked down. Between them and around them swam George, darting and drifting by turns, as much at home in the pool as a speckled trout "Fins!" said Dominick, slackjawed. "And gills!" Dr. Walter Alvarez was a misanthrope. He did not like people; he liked diseases. Down there on Planet Seven, once the trade mission was established, he could confidently expect enough new and startling ailments to keep him happy for years. Up here, all he got were sprained ankles, psychosomatic colds, hives and indigestion. There was one cook's helper named Samuels who kept coming back every Wednesday with the same boil on the back of his neck. It got so that in spite of himself, Alvarez spent the whole week dreading Wednesday. When he saw Samuels' earnest face coming through the door, something seemed to wind itself a little tighter inside him. Some day, when Samuels opened his mouth to say, "Hey, Doc -- " Samuels always called him "Doc" -- the something inside him was going to break with a sound like a banjo string. What would happen then, Dr. Alvarez was unable to imagine. When the gorgon had first been brought up to the Satellite, there had been two or three delightful little fungus infections, then nothing. A great disappointment. Alvarez had isolated and cultured almost a hundred microorganisms found in smears he had taken from George, but they were all non-viable in human tissue. The viable bacteria, viruses, parasites that always turned up on a lifeinfested planet were evidently lurking in some organism other than the gorgons. They swam, at night, across the optical field of Dr. Alvarez's dreaming mind -- rod-shaped ones, lens-shaped ones, wriggly ones, leggy ones and ones with teeth. One morning, Dr. Alvarez awoke with a desperate resolve. It was a Tuesday. He went directly to the infirmary, relieved Nurse Trumble who was on duty, and, opening a locked cabinet, filled a hypodermic from an ampule of clear straw-colored fluid. The trade name of this substance was bets-off; it was a counterinhibitant which stunned the censor areas of the forebrain chiefly affected by the Pavlov-Morganstern treatments. (By an odd coincidence, the patentee was a Dr. Jekyll.) Alvarez injected two c.c.s of it directly into the median basilic vein and sat down to wait. petual bad humor began to lift. He felt a pleasant ebullience; the colors of things around him seemed brighter and clearer. "Ha!" said Alvarez. He got up and went to his little refrigerator, where, after some search, he found half a dozen of the cultures he had made of microorganisms taken from gorgon smears. They were quiescent, of course -- deep-frozen. Alvarez warmed them cautiously and added nutrients. All morning, while the usual succession of minor complaints paraded through the infirmary, the cultures grew and multiplied. Alvarez was jovial with his patients; he cracked a joke or two and handed out harmless pills all around. By noon, four of the cultures were flourishing. Alvarez carefully concentrated them into one and loaded another hypodermic with the resulting brew. To his liberated intelligence, the matter was clear: No organism, man or pig or gorgon, was altogether immune to the microbes it normally carried in its body. Upset the balance by injecting massive colonies of any one of them and you were going to have a sick gorgon -- i.e., Alvarez thought, a punished gorgon. The treatment might also kill the patient, but Alvarez lightheartedly dismissed this argument as a quibble. (Or quabble?) Armed with his hypo, he went forth looking for George. He found him in the small assembly room, together with Dominick, Womrath and a mechanic named Bob Ritner. They were all standing around a curious instrument, or object of art, built out of bar aluminum. "It's a rack," Ritner explained proudly. "I saw a picture of it once in a kids' book." The main feature of the "rack" was a long, narrow table with a windlass at one end. It looked like a crude device for stretching something. "We thought the time had come for stern measures," Dominick said, mopping his head. "In the olden days," Ritner put in, "they used these on prisoners who wouldn't talk." "I talk," George pleasantly offered. "It's another punishment, George," Dominick explained kindly. "Well, Alvarez, before we go ahead, I suppose you want to examine your patient." "Yes, just so, ha-ha!" said Alvarez. keenly at George, who swiveled his photoceptors interestedly around to stare back. The doctor prodded George's hide; it was firm and resilient. The gorgon's color was a clear pink and the intricate folds of his auricles seemed crisp and alert. Alvarez took a hand scale from his kit; it was pre-set for A Level gravity. "Climb up here, George." Obediently, the gorgon settled himself on the pan of the scale while Alvarez held it up. "Hm," said Alvarez. "He's lost a good deal of weight." "He has?" asked Dominick hopefully. "But he seems to be in unusually good condition -- better than a week ago, I would say. Perhaps just a little sugar solution to pep him up -- " Alvarez withdrew the hypo from his kit, aimed it at George's smooth skin and pressed the trigger. Dominick sighed. "Well, I suppose we might as well go ahead. George, just hop up there and let Ritner tie those straps onto you." George trustingly climbed onto the table. Ritner buckled straps around four of his limbs and then began to tighten the cylinder. "Not too much," said George anxiously. "I'll be careful," Ritner assured him. He kept on winding the cylinder up. "How does that feel?" George's "arms" and "legs" were half again their usual length and still stretching. "Tickles," giggled George. Ritner went on turning the handle. Sims coughed nervously and was shushed. George's limbs kept on getting longer; then his body started to lengthen visibly. "Are you all right, George?" Dominick asked. "Very fine." Ritner gave the handle a last despairing twist. George's elongated body stretched all the way in comfort from one end of the rack to the other. There was no place else for him to go. "Nice," said George. "Do again." He was glowing a happy pink. Ritner frustratedly kicked his machine. Alvarez snorted and went away. In the corridor, unseen, he jumped up and clicked his heels together. He was having a wonderful time; his only regret was that it was not tomorrow. Come to think of it, why wait till Wednesday? son Carver, S. S., had been trained to make quick and courageous decisions. Once you began to entertain a doubt of your own rightness, you would hesitate too much, begin to second-guess yourself, fall prey to worry and anxiety, and end up without any power of decision at all. The trouble was, you could never be right all the time. Following the book to the letter, or you were bound to make mistakes. The thing was to cross them off and go ahead just the same. Carver firmed his chin and straightened his back, looking down at the gorgon. It was sick, all right, there was no question about that. The thing's limbs drooped and weaved slightly, dizzily. Its hide was dry and hot to the touch. "How long has he been like this?" Carver demanded, hesitating only slightly over the "he." Aliens were "it" to him and always had been, but it didn't do to let anybody know that. "Twenty minutes, more or less," said Dr. Nasalroad. "I just got here myself -- " he stifled a yawn -- "about ten or fifteen minutes ago." "What are you doing here, anyway?" Carver asked him. "It's Alvarez's shift." Nasalroad looked embarrassed. "I know. Alvarez is in the hospital as a patient. He assaulted a cook's helper named Samuels -- poured soup over his head. He was shouting something about boiling the boil on Samuels' neck. We had to put him under sedation. It took three of us."  "Nasalroad, what is happening on this wheel, anyhow? First this thing attacks my wife. Then Alvarez -- " He glared down at George. "Can you pull him out of this, whatever it is?" Nasalroad looked surprised. "That would be a large order. We don't know any gorgon medicine. I was assuming you'd want to beam down and ask them." That was reasonable, of course. The only hitch was, as usual, a matter of interpretation. Was this something they had negligently allowed to happen to an important alien representative, or was it the necessary and proper punishment they had all been looking for? He asked Nasalroad, "What color would you say he is now? Not pink, certainly." "No-o. But not blue, either. I'd call it a kind of violet." "Hm. Well, anyhow, he's got smaller than he was, isn't that right? Conspicuously smaller." Nasalroad admitted it. Carver made his decision. "Do the best you can," he said to Nasalroad. He lifted his wristcom, said briskly, "Have you got a lineof-sight to the planethead?" "Yes, sir," the operator answered. "All right, get me Rubinson." A few seconds passed. "Planethead." "Rubinson, this is Carver. Tell the elders we've got a pretty unhappy gorgon here. We're not sure just what did it -- might have been one of a lot of things -- but he's lost a good deal of weight, and his color -- " Carver hesitated -- "it's bluish. Definitely bluish. Got that?" "Yes, Chief. Thank goodness! I'll pass the message along right away and call you back." "Right." Carver closed the wristcom with an assertive snap. The gorgon, when he glanced down at it, looked sicker than ever, but no matter. What happened to the gorgon was its lookout; Carver was doing his duty. Ill rible headache and a sense of guilt. He was not in his own cubicle, but in one of the hospital bunks, dressed in a regulation set of hospital pajamas (with removable hood and gloves, capable of being converted into a spacesuit). He could just see the wall clock at the far end of the room. It was twenty-three hours -- well into his shift. Alvarez scuttled out of bed, groaning, and looked at the chart beside it. Mania, delusions. Sedation. Signed, Nasalroad. Delusions: yes, he was having one now. He imagined he could remember heaving up a big tureen of mock-turtle soup over Samuels' startled face -- splash, a smoking green torrent. Good heavens! If that was real -- Samuels! And the gorgon! Groaning and lurching, Alvarez darted out of the room, past the orderly, Munch, who was sitting with a story viewer on his lap and couldn't get up fast enough. "Dr. Alvarez! Dr. Nasalroad said -- " "Never mind Nasalroad," Alvarez snapped, pawing in the refrigerator. He remembered those cultures being right back here; but now they were gone. " -- not to let you up until you acted normal again. Uh, how do you feel, Doctor?" "I feel fine! What difference does that make? How is he?" Munch looked puzzled and apprehensive. "Samuels? Just superficial burns. We put him to bed in his own cubby, because -- " "Not Samuels!" Alvarez grabbed Munch by the front of his suit. "The gorgon!" "Oh, well, he's been sick, too. How did you know, though, Doctor? You were snoring when it happened. Listen, let go my suit; you're making me nervous." "Where?" Alvarez demanded, thrusting his scrawny face close to the other's. "Where what? Oh, you mean the gorgon? Up in the little assembly room, the last I -- " Alvarez was gone, out the door and down the corridor like a small, bearded fireball. He found an anxious crowd assembled -- Commandant and Mrs. Carver, Dominick and his staff, Urban and two assistants from Semantics, orderlies, porters, and Dr. Nasalroad. Nasalroad had the gaunt and bright-eyed appearance of a man who has been on wakeup pills too long. He started when he saw Alvarez. "What's up?" Alvarez demanded, grabbing his sleeve. "Where's the gorgon? What -- " "Be quiet," said Nasalroad. "George is over in that comer behind Carver. We're waiting for the delegation from planetside. Rubinson said they were coming up, three of them with some kind of a box." HP HE loudspeaker said suddenly, "I have the tender locked on. Contact. Contact is made. The lock is opening; get ready, here they come." Alvarez couldn't see past Carver's bulk. He tried to get away, but Nasalroad stopped him. "I want to see," he said irritably. "Listen," Nasalroad said. "I know what you did. I checked the bets-off pills and those cultures against inventory. The gorgon seems to be recovering nicely, no thanks to you. Now has the stuff worn off you or not? Because if not-" A rustle went over the group. Alvarez and Nasalroad turned in time to see the door opening. Two vigorous-looking gorgons waddled through; they were carrying an enameled metal box between them. "Foop!" said the first one experimentally. "Where is gorgon George?" "I'm all right," Alvarez muttered. "If I wasn't, I'd have done something uncivilized to you by now, wouldn't I?" "I guess so," said Nasalroad. They elbowed closer as the group shifted, making a space around the three gorgons. Peering, on tiptoe, Alvarez could see George standing shakily beside the other two. "He looks terrible. Those are big ones, those other two, aren't they?" "Not as big as George was when we got him," Nasalroad muttered. "Walt, if it turns out you've ruined the whole thing, I'll take a dose of bets-off myself and-" "Listen!" snarled Alvarez. One of the gorgons was explaining, "This is panga box. What you call? You know panga?" 'Well, uh, yes and no," said Dominick uncomfortably. "But what about the punishment? We understood -- " "Punishment later. You, George, go in box." Obediently, George waddled over and squatted beside the mouth of the box. He bobbed uncertainly; he looked for all the world like a large woman trying to get into a small sports 'copter. There was a minor outbreak of nervous laughter, quickly suppressed. George leaned, retracting most of his upper appendages. His round body began to be compressed into a squarish shape, wedging itself into the box. The other gorgons watched with an air of tension, photoceptors rigidly extended. A hush fell. Among the humans present, there was a general air of Whyare-we-all-whispering? George wriggled and oozed farther into the box. Momentarily, he stuck. He flickered blue, then pink. His "feet," almost retracted, scrabbled feebly at the bottom of the box. Then he was in. "NE of the other gorgons solemnly closed the lid on George and fastened it to make sure, then opened it again and helped him out. All three gorgons began to make rhythmic swaying motions with their "arms" and other appendages. George, Alvarez thought, looked smug. He felt a sudden premonitory pang. What had he done? "What's it all about?" Nasalroad demanded. "Are they measuring him for a coffin or -- " Dominick, overhearing, turned and said, "I don't think so. Now this is interesting. You remember they said a panga box. What Fm afraid of is that they may have a standard of size. You see what I mean? They could be measuring George to see if he falls below the minimum standard of -- uh -- panga relations." "Oh, heavens," said another voice. It was Urban of Semantics, who had been neglected of late; they hadn't needed him since George learned English. He was peering over Dominick's shoulder, looking dumbfounded. He said, "But don't you know the word we've been translating 'elders' really means 'smallest ones'? Good heavens -- " "I don't see -- " Dominick began, but the commandant's voice drowned him out. "Quiet! Quiet, please!" Carver was trumpeting. He went on, "Our friends from Seven have an announcement to make. Now, then." To everyone's surprise, it was George who spoke, in the lisping adcents of the gorgon language. No human present understood a word of it except Urban, who turned pale and began stammering inaudibly to himself. One of the gorgons began to speak when George stopped: "Most elder person, known to you by name George, wishes me to thank you all for kindness done him when he was humble youth." "Youth," muttered Urban. "But it really means 'ungainly one' -- or 'fat boy.' Oh, my heavens!" "Now that he has become elder, it will be his most pleasure to repay all kindness in agreeable legislative manner." "What does that mean?" Alvarez queried aggrievedly. "Why can't he talk for himself, anyway?" "It would be beneath his digity now," said Nasalroad. "Hush!" " -- If," said the gorgon, "you will succeed in giving elder person, known by name George, proper punishment as aforesaid." order!" said Carver, banging on the table. George and the other two gorgons were sitting opposite him, with the centerpiece of nasturtiums and ferns between them. Grouped around Carver were Dominick, Urban, Womrath, Alvarez, Nasalroad, Kelly and Ritner. "Now this is the situation," Carver said aggressively. "This gorgon turns out to be a member of their ruling council. I don't understand why, but forget that now -- the point is he's friendly disposed toward us, so we've succeeded in this mission if we can find that proper punishment. Otherwise we're in the soup. Suggestions." Dominick craned his bald head toward Alvarez across the table. "Doctor, I had a thought. Would you say -- is there anything peculiar about the gorgon's body constitution as compared, say, to ours?" "Certainly, "said Alvarez dourly. "Any number of things. You name it, they -- " Giving them a dirty look, Carver nodded to Ritner. "Yes?" "Well, I was thinking. I know the rack was a washout, but there was another thing they used to rise called the Iron Virgin. It had a door, like, with spikes on it -- " "What I had in mind," Dominick said, "is there anything that would tend to limit their body size -- any danger or disadvantage in growing large?" Alvarez frowned and looked at Nasalroad, who hitched his chair closer. "The pressure?" said Nasalroad tentatively. They rubbed their chins and looked at each other with professional glints in their eyes. "What about the pressure?" Dominick prompted eagerly. "How long would it take you to build a thing like that?" Carver was asking Ritner. "Well -- ten, eleven hours." "Too long. That's out. Next!" "They're actually a single cell -- all colloidal fluid, at a considerable osmotic pressure. The bigger they get, the more pressure it takes to keep that shape. If they got too big, I rather imagine -- " Alvarez snapped his fingers, awed. "They'd burst!" Carver turned with an indignant glare. "Gentlemen, if I could get a little cooperation out of you, instead of this continual distraction -- All right, Womrath?" "Sir, I was just wondering, suppose if we let him turn into a fish, the way he did before in the pool -- but then we'd net him and take him out of the water fast. That way, maybe -- " "It wouldn't work," said Kelly. "He changed back in about a second, the other time." ' tention to Kelly. One of the big gorgons, who had been staring fixedly at the flowers in the middle of the table, had suddenly grabbed a handful and was stuffing them into his mouth. George said something shrill in gorgon talk and snatched the flowers away again. The other gorgon looked abashed, but flushed pink. George, on the other hand, was distinctly blue. His "hand," clutching the mangled flowers, hesitated. Slowly, as if with an effort, he put them back in the bowl. The other two gorgons twined their "arms" around him. After a moment, Goorge looked more his old self, but a hint of blue remained. "What is it?" asked Carver alertly. "Did we do something, finally?" "Did you turn blue because we punished you, George?" Wornrath questioned. "No," said George unexpectedly. "Hard for me to be elder." He added a few words in his own language to the other gorgons and their "arms" twined around him again. "Before, they panga to me," he added. "Then that's why he took the pie away from the commandant's wife!" said Dominick, smiting himself on the forehead. "Of course. They -- " "What's that? What's that?" Carver turned, bristling. "Why, this explains that pie business," said Dominick. "He felt protective toward your wife, you see. That's what 'panga' means. They none of them have much control over their own appetites, so they guard each other. As they grow older and get more self-control, they're expected to get smaller, not bigger. George felt confused about his panga relationships to us, but in your wife's case, he was positive one more mouthful would make her explode -- " Carver was red to the ears. "Nonsense!" he shouted. "Dominick, you're being insulting, insubordinate and unpatriotic!" George, looking on interestedly, piped a few words in the gorgon language. One of the other gorgons immediately spoke up: "Elder person says you with smooth head are a smart man. He says the other big one who talks too much is wrong." looked at the gorgons, then around the table. No one said anything. Carver set his jaw heroically. "Well, gentlemen, we certainly tried, but -- " "Wait a minute!" said Alvarez. Somewhere in his narrow skull, a great light had dawned. "George, am I panga to you?" George's auricles waved tensely. "Yes. You very small man." "Good." Alvarez dry-washed his bony hands. "And you still have to be punished for that mistake you made at the banquet?" George's speaking tube buzzed unhappily, "Yes." "All right," said Alvarez. Everybody was looking at him with expressions varying from puzzlement to alarm. Alvarez took a deep breath. "Then here are my orders to you. Do as you please!" There was a hiss of indrawn breath from Urban. Most of the others looked at Alvarez as if he had grown snakes for hair. "Doctor," said Carver, "have you gone off your -- " The chorus of gasps stopped him. Up on the table, flushing blue and bright pink by turns like a skysign, George was gobbling up the flowers in the centerpiece. Next he ate the bowl. One of his flailing limbs raked in the scratchpad Urban had been doodling on. He ate that. Next moment, he was leaping to the floor, making Ritner duck wildly as he passed. Part of Dominick's detachable hood went with him, disappearing with hoarse munching sounds. With a gulp, George swallowed it and began on the carpet. He was eating greedily, frantically. The other two gorgons hovered around him with shrill gorgon cries, but he ate on, oblivious. Now he was bright blue and bulging, but still he ate. "Stop it!" shouted Alvarez. "George, stop that!" George rocked to a halt. Gradually his blueness faded. The other gorgons were prodding and patting him anxiously. George looked all right, but it was obvious as he stood there that he would never fit into the panga box again. He was bigger than the other two. "Alvarez," said Carver wildly, "why did you -- " "He was going to burst," said Alvarez, twitching with excitement. "Couldn't you tell? Another mouthful or two -- " Carver recovered himself. He straightened his coverall and thrust out his chin. "At any rate, he was certainly blue that time. You all saw it -- isn't that right?" He looked around triumphantly. "So, unless I'm very much mistaken -- " NE of the two attendant gorgons raised his photoceptors. It was hard to tell which was George, now, except that his color was still a little lavender. The other gorgon spoke two brief sentences in his own language and then all three of them waddled off together toward the exit. "What was that? What did he say?" demanded Carver. had turned pale again. "He said get the tender ready to take them back home." "The tender is there," said Carver indignantly. "They can go back any time they want. But what did he say about the punishment?" Urban cleared his throat again, looking bemused. "They say the punishment is good. More severe than any they ever thought of in twenty thousand years. They say they won't have to punish Rubinson and the others now, because you have done all the punishment necessary." "Well?" challenged Carver. "Why are you looking that way? What's the hitch? Are they going to refuse to enter the Union, in spite of all this?" "No," said Urban. "They say we are all panga to them now. They'll do as we say -- let us land and build the distribution centers, start them consuming in massive quantity." "But that'll destroy them!" someone interjected in a horrified tone. "That's right," said Urban. Carver sighed. He had been in and was proud of his record. He played it as a game; the new, virgin planets were the prizes and he kept score with the row of tiny iridium buttons on his breast pocket. He said into his wristcorn, "Let me know when Rubinson and his crew are on the way up." There was a long wait. The silence grew oppressive. At length, the wall screen lighted with a view of Planet Seven, gilded along one cusp, blue-green and mysterious in the shadow. A silver spark was floating up out of the night side. "Here they come now," said the voice. Carver sighed again. "When they make contact, secure the tender and then signal for acceleration stations. We're leaving Seven. Tell Mr. Fruman to set a first approximation for our next star of call." Alvarez, twitching and frowning, clutched at the front of his coverall. "You're letting them go? Not landing on Seven -- after all this work?" Carver was staring into the view plate. "Some beings," he said meant to be consumers."      Each Wednesday nite on Radiol Check your local listings for the best stories from Galaxy -- forcefully dramatized -- its Naturally your Best Choice for tops in adult Science Fiction. X-lThe choice from Galaxy, adapted by the tops at N.B.C. when you join the Club Each One Packed from Cover to Cover With Science Thrills of the Future! by Edward J. Ruppelt Here Is the first authoritative report on hitherto hushed-up facts about "flying saucers"... by a forinet Air Force expert who was in charge but amazing fact! 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Off. and critical mail, editors receive letters that roil their troubled sleep, as if their sleep needed roiling. Like this one, for instance : "I enjoyed your editorial on possible life-forms. You pointed out that vegetation lives off soil and air, herbivores live off vegetation, and carnivores live off herbivores. Well, here is a little food for thought: what lives off carnivores? Judith L. Burgess, Carnivore." The obvious answer is soil and air, so that the whole thing comes full circle. But that's dodging; soil and air do not live off anything. The omnivore does, Miss Burgess, and you must be an uncomfortable date if you devour meat and won't touch vegetables and desserts. As an omnivore, I declare with justifiable pride that this is the highest category in the gastronomical scale of evolution. The fact that we share the distinction with bears, pigs and the raccoon family in no way mitigates my pride. I can't imagine what, if anything, can possibly surpass our all-purpose gullet. Miss Burgess and others may dispute the statement with Oscar Wilde's description of English fox hunting as "The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable," but she and they and Mr. Wilde must then be prepared to deprive Eskimos and Orientals from membership in the human race. Not sharing our silly prejudices, these admirable peoples carry omnivoraciousness to its utterly logical extreme. They may not like fox, may consider it greatly inferior to raw wolverine or Pooch Cantonese Style, but any fox they harpoon or snare is going to be eaten, doggedly or otherwise. If the need ever be, Miss Burgess, you and the rest of us can -- and will -- eat every carnivore clean off the planet. Then there's the letter from the worried chap whose obviously alien wife says such things as: "The washee pot needs coughing." In a recent communique, he added nervously: "My wife just told me, 'If you don't know how to be nice, don't be at all.' So, if you fail to hear from me, you'll know what happened." What makes him believe I will? I think I'd like to know, but I'm not really sure. Another deponent to the case proving that There Are Aliens Among Us writes: "The indications are that these aliens come from planets with extreme temperatures. In the sum(Continued on page #) Hours of Good Reading Enjoyment #I Hudson Street, New York #, N. Y. Please send me post-paid the novels checked below. Please Enter My Order For Your Next # Novels I Enclose A # Check Here  Add #c Foreign Postage For  # or #c each Enclose check, cash or money order. We pay postage Name Address City State (Continued from page #) mer, people slap me on the back and ask if it is hot enough for me, it invariably being so. The conclusion I've arrived at is that these aliens possess a gadget imbedded in their back for raising temperature and it sometimes goes out of whack and has to be jarred, like kicking a gum machine. "These same people slap me on the back in the winter, asking if it's cold enough for me. Can a metamorphosis be this complete? "Several days ago, a stranger slipped on the splashed edge of crashed into the water. When I helped haul him out, he said that he 'must have slipped on something wet.' Does he come from a "I'm alarmed about some of 'our' idioms, such as: 'What time is it?' What time is what?" Another reader sent in a clipping from the N.Y. Herald Tribune about a "time capsule" dug up at Madison Square Park. A lead box # inches long and # inches wide, it was located while dismantling an ornate water trough for horses. "The lead case contained a bronze table inscribed with the words 'The Gift of Olivia Eggleston Phelps Stokes to the City of New York, August #.' Inclosed were a booklet entitled 'Colton's Map of New York City'; and Works'; a copy of the NewYork Herald, dated Dec. #, #; a business card of James Muir, plumber and gas fitter at # E. #th St., and a copy of the Bible. "Miss Stokes, a philanthropist and daughter of a New York banking family, died at the age of #I on Dec. #, #." Presumably thinking that the itemized trivia was worth the cost of the lead box. If any further argument is needed against time capsules, there it is -- pocketbook lint that Miss Phelps and her advisers, if any, thought would have enduring value -- and we're doing the same with cornerstones and capsules. I dislike advocating unsanitary measures, but letting junk accumulate (as in Bat Cave, New Mexico, where # feet of garbage flung down in # years gave an important clue to the origin of corn) would be a real boon to future archeologists. We owe that much to our distant begats, don't we? Finally, someone sent in a squib about a # mm. camera found on the back seat of a taxi. Developed, the film had # shots of Lincoln delivering his Gettysburg address. Big deal! Brady covered the event. But what about the cab fare there and back? And now -- you were saying? Go Ahead -- Choose Brand-New Science Fiction Books Valued Up to # For Only Here they are -- beautiful, hard-cover, current First Editions by your favorite authors -- now yours at a Fraction of their regular selling price! No "Clubs" to join... no "extra" books to buy... just Choose the titles you want and Save! We even include New Titles in advance of publication this spring! we'll send you any # books for #... any # books for #... any # books for #! Use the handy list below as your order blank. Check the titles you want with an "X." Because of possible shortages, we suggest you select alternate titles and check them with a "V." Our stock is going fast at these prices, Gentlemen: Please send me the following titles, checked with an "X." I am checking alternate selections with a "V." I understand all books are listed with their regular prices -- but I am to pay only # per book -- # for # -- # for # -- or # for #. The Seedling Stars by Blish Jan # Two Sought Adventure by Leiber Mar # . 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Name Address  Check this box if you want free catalog listing still more titles at these bargain prices! A Wind is Rising ing. But within the station, the two men had other things on their minds. Clayton turned the handle of the water faucet again and waited. Nothing happened. "Try hitting it," said Nerishev. Clayton pounded the faucet with his fist. Two drops of water came out. A third drop trembled on the spigot's lip, swayed, and fell. That was all. "That does it," Clayton said bitThey knew how to survive -- but what were the odds on a world where every good hurricane in the Galaxy went when it died? terly. "That damned water pipe is blocked again. How much water we got in storage?" "Four gallons -- assuming the tank hasn't sprung another leak," said Nerishev. He stared at the faucet, tapping it with long, nervous fingers. He was a big, pale man with a sparse beard, fragilelooking in spite of his size. He didn't look like the type to operate an observation station on a remote and alien planet. But the Advance Exploration Corps had discovered, to its regret, that there was no type to operate a station. Nerishev was a competent biologist and botanist. Although chronically nervous, he had surprising reserves of calm. He was the sort of man who needs an occasion to rise to. This, if anything, made him suitable to pioneer a planet like Carella I. "I suppose somebody should go out and unblock the water pipe," said Nerishev, not looking at Clayton. "I suppose so," Clayton said, pounding the faucet again. "But it's going to be murder out there. Listen to it!" Clayton was a short man, bullnecked, red-faced, powerfully constructed. This was his third tour of duty as a planetary observer. He had tried other jobs in the Advance Exploration Corps, but Extraterrestrial Penetration -- faced him with too many unpleasant surprises. It was work for daredevils and madmen. But Base Operations was much too tame and restricting. He liked the work of a planetary observer, though. His job was to sit tight on a planet newly checked out by a drone camera crew. All he had to do on this planet was stoically endure discomfort and skillfully keep himself alive. After a year of this, the relief ship would remove him and note his report. On the basis of the report, further action would or would not be taken. Clayton dutifully promised his wife that this would be the last. After this tour, he was going to stay on Earth and work on the little farm he owned. He promised... But at the end of each rest leave, Clayton journeyed out again, to do the thing for which he was best suited: staying alive through skill and endurance. But this time, he had had it. He and Nerishev had been eight months on Carella. The relief ship was due in another four months. If he came through alive, he was going to quit for good. "Just listen to that wind," Nerishev said. Muffled, distant, it sighed and murmured around the steel hull of the station like a zephyr, a summer breeze. That was how it sounded to them inside the station, separated from the wind by three inches of steel plus a soundproofing layer. "It's rising," Clayton said. He walked over to the windspeed indicator. According to the dial, the gentle-sounding wind was blowing at a steady # miles an hour -- A light breeze on Carella. "Man, oh, man!" Clayton said. "I don't want to go out there. Nothing's worth going out there." "It's your turn," Nerishev pointed out. "I know. Let me complain a little first, will you? Come on, let's get a forecast from Smanik." They walked the length of the station, their heels echoing on the steel floor, past compartments filled with food, air supplies, instruments, extra equipment. At the far end of the station was the heavy metal door of the receiving shed. The men slipped on air masks and adjusted the flow. "Ready?" Clayton asked. "Ready." They braced themselves, gripping handholds beside the door. Clayton touched the stud. The door slid away and a gust of wind shrieked in. The men lowered their heads and butted into the wind, entering the receiving shed. The shed was an extension of the station, some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. It was not sealed, like the rest of the structure. The walls were built of open-work steel, with baffles set in. The wind could pass through this arrangement, but slowed down, controlled. A gauge told them it was blowing # miles an hour within the shed. It was a damned nuisance, Clayton thought, having to confer with the natives of Carella in a #-mile gale. But there was no other way. The Carellans, raised on a planet where the wind never blew less than # miles an hour, couldn't stand the "dead air" within the station. Even with the oxygen content cut down to the Carellan norm, the natives couldn't make the adjustment. Within the station, they grew dizzy and apprehensive. Soon they began strangling, like a man in a vacuum. Thirty-four miles an hour of wind was a fair compromise-point for human and Carellan to meet.  walked down the shed. In one corner lay what looked like a tangle of dried-out octopi. The tangle stirred and waved two tentacles ceremoniously. "Good day," .said Smanik. "Good day," Clayton said. "What do you think of the weather?" "Excellent," said Smanik. Nerishev tugged at Clayton's sleeve. "What did he say?" he asked, and nodded thoughtfully when Clayton translated it for him. Nerishev lacked Clayton's gift for language. Even after eight months, the Carellan tongue was still an undecipherable series of clicks and whistles to him. Several more Carellans came up to join the conversation. They all looked like spiders or octopi, with their small centralized body and long, flexible tentacles. This was the optimum survival shape on Carella, and Clayton frequently envied it. He was forced to rely absolutely on the shelter of the station; but the Carellans lived directly in their environment. Often he had seen a native walking against a tornado-force wind, seven or eight limbs hooked into the ground and pulling, other tentacles reaching out for further grips. He had seen them rolling down the wind like tumbleweed, their tentacles curled around them, wickerwork-basket fashion. He thought of the gay and audacious way they handled their land ships, scudding merrily along on the wind... Well, he thought, they'd look damned silly on Earth. "What is the weather going to be like?" he asked Smanik. The Carellan pondered the question for a while, sniffed the wind and rubbed two tentacles together. "The wind may rise a shade more," he said finally. "But it will be nothing serious." Clayton wondered. Nothing serious for a Carellan could mean disaster for an Earthman. Still, it sounded fairly promising. He and Nerishev left the receiving shed and closed the door. "Look," said Nerishev, "if you'd like to wait -- " "Might as well get it over with," Clayton said. Here, lighted by a single dim overhead bulb, was the smooth, glittering bulk of the Brute. That was the nickname they had given to the vehicle specially constructed for transportation on Carella. The Brute was armored like a tank and streamlined like a spheric section. It had vision slits of shatterproof glass, thick enough to match the strength of its steel plating. Its center of gravity was low; most of its twelve tons were centered near the ground. The Brute was sealed. Its heavy diesel engine, as well as all necessary openings, were fitted with special dustproof covers. The Brute rested on its six fat tires, looking, in its immovable bulk, like some prehistoric monster. Clayton got in, put on crash helmet and goggles, and strapped himself into the padded seat. He revved up the engine, listened to it critically, then nodded. "Okay," he said, "the Brute's ready. Get upstairs and open the garage door." "Good luck," said Nerishev. He left. strument panel, making sure that all the Brute's special gadgets were in working order. In a moment, he heard Nerishev's voice coming in over the radio. "I'm opening the door." "Right." The heavy door slid back and Clayton drove the Brute outside. The station had been set up on a wide, empty plain. Mountains would have offered some protection from the wind; but the mountains on Carella were in a constant restless state of building up and breaking down. The plain presented dangers of its own, however. To avert the worst of those dangers, a field of stout steel posts had been planted around the station. The closely packed posts pointed outward, like ancient tank traps, and served the same purpose. Clayton drove the Brute down one of the narrow, winding channels that led through the field of posts. He emerged, located the pipeline and started along it. On a small screen above his head, a white line flashed into view. The line would show any break or obstruction in the pipeline. A wide, rocky, monotonous desert stretched before him. An occasional low bush came into sight. The wind was directly behind him, blanketed by the sound of the diesel. He glanced at the windspeed indicator. The wind of Carella was blowing at # miles an hour. He drove steadily along, humming to himself under his breath. From time to time, he heard a crash. Pebbles, propelled by the hurricane wind, were cannonading against the Brute. They shattered harmlessly against the thick armor. "Everything all right?" Nerishev asked over the radio. "Fine," Clayton said. In the distance, he saw a Carellan land ship. It was about forty feet long, he judged, and narrow in the beam, skimming rapidly on crude wooden rollers. The ship's sails were made from one of the few leaf-bearing shrubs on the planet. The Carellans waved their tentacles as they went past. They seemed to be heading toward the station. Clayton turned his attention back to the pipeline. He was beginning to hear the wind now, above the roar of the diesel. The windspeed indicator showed that the wind had risen to # miles an hour. Somberly he stared through the sand-pocked slit-window. In the far distance were jagged cliffs, seen dimly through the dustblown air. More pebbles ricocheted off his hull and the sound rang hollowly through his vehicle. He glimpsed another Carellan land ship, then three more. They were tacking stubbornly into the wind. It struck Clayton that a lot of Carellans were moving toward the station. He signaled to Nerishev on the radio. "How are you doing?" Nerishev asked. "I'm close to the spring and no break yet," Clayton reported. "Looks like a lot of Carellans heading your way." "I know. Six ships are moored in the lee of the shed and more are coming." "We've never had any trouble with the natives before," Clayton said slowly. "What does this look like?" "They've brought food with them. It might be a celebration." "Maybe. Watch yourself." "Don't worry. You take care and hurry -- " "I've found the break! Speak to you later." 'T'HE break showed on the screen, glowing white. Peering out the port, Clayton saw where a boulder had rolled across the pipeline, crushing it, and rolled on. He brought the truck to a stop on the windward side of the pipe. It was blowing # miles an hour. Clayton slid out of the truck, carrying several lengths of pipe, some patches, a blowtorch and a bag of tools. They were all tied to him and he was secured to the Brute by a strong nylon rope. Outside, the wind was deafening. It thundered and roared like breaking surf. He adjusted his mask for more oxygen and went to work. Two hours later, he had completed a fifteen-minute repair job. His clothing was shredded and and his air extractor was completely clogged with dust. He climbed back into the Brute, sealed the port and lay on the floor, resting. The truck was starting to tremble in the wind gusts. Clayton ignored it. "Hello? Hello?" Nerishev called over the radio. Wearily, Clayton climbed back into the driver's seat and acknowledged. "Hurry back now, Clayton! No time to rest! The wind's up to #! I think a storm is coming!" A storm on Carella was something Clayton didn't even want to think about. They had experienced only one in eight months. During it, the winds had gone over # miles an hour. He nosed the truck around and started back, driving directly into the wind. At full throttle, he found he was making very little progress. Three miles an hour was all the heavy diesel would do against the pressure of a #-mile wind. He stared ahead through the slit-window. The wind, outlined by long streamers of dust and sand, seemed to be coming straight at him, tunneled out of an infinitely wide sky to the tiny point of his window. Windborne rocks sailed at him, grew large, immense, and shattered against his window. He couldn't stop himself from ducking each time one came. The heavy engine was beginning to labor and miss. "Oh, baby," Clayton breathed, "don't quit now. Not now. Get Papa home. The a quit. Please!" He figured he was about ten miles from the station, which lay directly upwind. He heard a sound like an avalanche plumitieting down a mountainside. It was made by a boulder the size of a house... Too big for the wind to lift, it was rolling at him from windward, digging a furrow in the rocky ground as it came. Clayton twisted the steering wheel. The engine labored, and with infinite slowness the truck crept out of the boulder's path. Shaking, Clayton watched the boulder bearing down. With one hand, he pounded on the instrument panel. "Move, baby, move!" der rolled past at a good thirty miles an hour. "Too close," Clayton said to himself. He tried to turn the Brute back into the wind, toward the station. The Brute wouldn't do it. The diesel labored and whined, trying to turn the big truck into the wind. And the wind,, like a solid gray wall, pushed the truck away. The windspeed indicator stood at # miles an hour. "How are you doing?" Nerishev asked over the radio. "Just great! Leave me alone, I'm busy." Clayton set his brakes, unstrapped and raced back to the engine. He adjusted timing and mixture, and hurried back to the controls. "Hey, Nerishev! That engine's going to conk out!" It was a full second before Nerishev answered. Then, very calmly, he asked, "What's wrong with it?" "Sand!" Clayton said. "Particles driven at # miles an hour -- sand's in the bearings, injectors, everything. I'm going to make all the distance I can." "And then?" "Then I'll try to sail her back," Clayton said. "I just hope the mast will take it." He turned his attention to the controls. At windspeeds like this, the truck had to be handled like a ship at sea. Clayton picked up speed with the wind on his quarter, then came about and slammed into the wind. The Brute made it this time and crossed over onto the other tack. It was the best he could do, Clayton decided. His windward distance would have to be made by tacking. He edged toward the eye of the wind. But at full throttle, the diesel couldn't bring him much closer than forty degrees. For an hour, the Brute forged ahead, tacking back and forth across the wind, covering three miles in order to make two. Miraculously, the engine kept on running. Clayton blessed the manufacturer and begged the diesel to hold out a little while longer. Through a blinding screen of sand, he saw another Carellan land ship. It was reefed down and heeled precariously over. But it forged steadily to windward and soon outdistanced him. Lucky natives, Clayton thought -- # miles of wind was a sailing breeze to them! The station, a gray half-sphere, came into sight ahead. "I'm going to make it!" Clayton shouted. "Break out the rum, Nerishev, old man! Papa's getting drunk tonight!" The diesel chose that moment to break down for good.  he set the brakes. What lousy luck! If the wind were behind him, he could roll in. But, of course, it had to be in front. "What are you going to do now?" Nerishev asked. "I'm going to sit here," Clayton said. "When the wind calms down to a hurricane, I'm going to walk home." The Brute's twelve-ton mass was shaking and rattling in the wind blasts. "You know," Clayton said, "I'm going to retire after this tour." "That so? You really mean it?" "Absolutely. I own a farm in Maryland, with frontage on Chesapeake Bay. You know what I'm going to do?" "What?" "I'm going to raise oysters. You see, the oyster -- Hold it." The station seemed to be drifting slowly upwind, away from him. Clayton rubbed his eyes, wondering if he were going crazy. Then he realized that, in spite of its brakes, in spite of its streamlining, the truck was being pushed downwind, away from the station. Angrily he shoved a button on his switchboard, releasing the port and starboard anchors. He heard the solid clunk of the anchors hitting the ground, heard the steel cables scrape and rattle. He let out a hundred and seventy feet of steel line, then set the winch brakes. The truck was holding again. "I dropped the anchors," Clayton said. "Are they holding?" "So far." Clayton lighted a cigarette and leaned back in his padded chair. Every muscle in his body ached from tension. His eyelids were twitching from watching the wind-lines converging on him. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. The sound of the wind cut through the truck's steel plating. The wind howled and moaned, tugging at the truck, trying to find a hold on the smooth surface. At # miles an hour, the ventilator baffles blew out. He would be blinded, Clayton thought, if he weren't wearing sealed goggles, choked if he weren't breathing canned air. Dust swirled, thick and electric, within the Brute's cabin. Pebbles, flung with the velocity of rifle bullets, splattered against the hull. They were striking harder now. He wondered how much more force they'd need before they started piercing the armor plating. found it hard to maintain a common-sense attitude. He was painfully aware of the vulnerability of human flesh, appalled at the possibilities for violence in the Universe. What was he doing out here? Man's place was in the calm, still air of Earth. If he ever got back... "Are you all right?" Nerishev asked. "Making out just great," Clayton said wearily. "How are things at the station?" "Not so good. The whole structure's starting sympathetic vibration. Enough wind for long enough and the foundations could shatter." "And they want to put a fuel station here!" Clayton said. "Well, you know the problem. This is the only solid planet beRidge Belt. All the rest are gas giants." "They better build their station in space." "The cost "Hell, man, it'll cost less to build another planet than to try to maintain a fuel base on this one!" Clayton spat out a mouthful of dust. "I just want to get on that relief ship. How many natives at the station now?" "About fifteen, in the shed." "Any sign of violence?" "No, but they're acting funny." "How so?" "I don't know," said Nerishev. "I just don't like it." "Stay out of the shed, huh? You can't speak the language, anyhow, and I want you in one piece when I come back." He hesitated. "If I come back." "You'll be fine," Nerishev said. "Sure I will. I -- oh, Lord!" "What's it? What's wrong?" "Boulder coming down! Talk to you later!" Clayton turned his attention to the boulder, a rapidly growing black speck to windward. It was heading directly toward his anchored and immobilized truck. He glanced at the windspeed indicator. Impossible -- # miles an hour! And yet, he reminded himself, winds in the stratospheric jet stream on Earth blow at # miles an hour. The boulder, large as a house, still growing as it approached, was rolling directly his way. "Swerve! Turn!" Clayton bellowed at the boulder, pounding the instrument panel with his fist. The boulder was coming at him, straight as a ruler line, rolling right down the wind. With a yell of agony, Clayton touched a button, releasing both anchors at the cable end. There was no time to winch them in, even assuming the winch could take the strain. Still the boulder grew. Clayton released his brakes. The Brute, shoved by a wind of # miles an hour, began to pick up speed. Within seconds, he was traveling at # miles an hour, staring through his rear-vision mirror at the boulder overtaking him. Clayton twisted the steering wheel hard to the left. The truck tilted over precariously, swerved, fishtailed on the hard ground, and tried to turn itself over. He fought the wheel, trying to bring the Brute back to equilibrium. He thought: I'm probably the first man who ever jibed a twelve-ton truck! The boulder, looking like a whole city block, roared past. The heavy truck teetered for a moment, then came to rest on its six wheels. "Clayton! What happened? Are you all right?" "Fine," Clayton gasped. "But I had to slip the cables. I'm running downwind." "Can you turn?" "Almost knocked her over, trying to." "How far can you run?" Clayton stared ahead. In the distance, he could make out the dramatic black cliffs that rimmed the plain. "I got about fifteen miles to go before I pile into the cliffs. Not much time, at the speed I'm traveling." He locked his brakes. The tires began to scream and the brake linings smoked furiously. But the wind, at # miles an hour, didn't even notice the difference. His speed over the ground had picked up to # miles an hour. "Try sailing her out!" Nerishev said. "She won't take it." "Try, man! What else can you do? The wind's hit # here. The whole station's shaking! Boulders are tearing up the whole post defense. I'm afraid some boulders are going to get through and flatten -- " "Stow it," Clayton said. "I got troubles of my own." "I don't know if the station will stand! Clayton, listen to me. Try the The radio suddenly and dismayingly went dead. Clayton banged it a few times, then gave up. His speed over the ground had reached # miles an hour. The cliffs were already looming large before him. "So all right," Clayton said. "Here we go." He released his last anchor, a small emergency job. At its full length of # feet of steel cable, it slowed him to # miles an hour. The anchor was breaking and ripping through the ground like a jet-propelled plow. Clayton then turned on the sail mechanism. This had been installed by the Earth engineers upon much the same theory that has small ocean-going motor boats carry a small mast and auxiliary sail. The sails are insurance, in case the engine fails. On Carella, a man could never walk home from a stranded vehicle. He had to come in under power. The mast, a short, powerful steel pillar, extruded itself through a gasketed hole in the roof. Magnetic shrouds and stays snapped into place, supporting it. From the mast fluttered a sail made of linkwoven metal. For a mainsheet, Clayton had a three part flexiblesteel cable, working through a winch. The sail was only a few square feet in area. It could drive a twelve-ton monster with its brakes locked and an anchor out on # feet of line -- Easily -- with the wind blowing # miles an hour.  mainsheet and turned, taking the wind on the quarter. But a quartering course wasn't good enough. He winched the sail in still more and turned further into the wind. With the super-hurricane on his beam, the ponderous truck heeled over, lifting one entire side into the air. Quickly Clayton released a few feet of mainsheet. The metal-link sail screamed and chattered as the wind whipped it. Driving now with just the sail's leading edge, Clayton was able to keep the truck on its feet and make good a course to windward. Through the rear-vision mirror, he could see the black, jagged cliffs behind him. They were his lee shore, his coast of wrecks. But he was sailing out of the trap. Foot by foot, he was pulling away. "That's my baby!" Clayton shouted to the battling Brute. His sense of victory snapped almost at once, for he heard an ear-splitting clang and something whizzed past his head. At # miles an hour, pebbles were piercing his armor plating. He was undergoing the Carellan equivalent of a machine-gun barrage. The wind shrieked through the holes, trying to batter him out of his seat. Desperately he clung to the steering wheel. He could hear the sail wrenching. It was made out of the toughest flexible alloys available, but it wasn't going to hold up for long. The short, thick mast, supported by six heavy cables, was whipping like a fishing rod. His brake linings were worn out, and his speed over the ground came up to # miles an hour. He was too tired to think. He steered, his hands locked to the wheel, his slitted eyes glaring ahead into the storm. The sail ripped with a scream. The tatters flogged for a moment, then brought the mast down. Wind gusts were approaching # miles an hour. The wind now was driving him back toward the cliffs. At # miles an hour of wind, the Brute was lifted bodily, thrown for a dozen yards, slammed back on its wheels. A front tire blew under the pressure, then two rear ones. Clayton put his head on his arms and waited for the end. Suddenly, the Brute stopped short. Clayton was flung forward. His safety belt checked him for a moment, then snapped. He banged against the instrument panel and fell back, dazed and bleeding. scious, trying to figure out what had happened. Slowly he pulled himself back into the seat, foggily aware that he hadn't broken any limbs. His stomach was one great bruise. His mouth was bleeding. At last, looking through the rear-vision mirror, he saw what had happened. The emergency anchor, trailing at # feet of steel cable, had caught in a deep outcropping of rock. A fouled anchor had brought him up short, less than half a mile from the cliffs. He was saved -- For the moment, at least. But the wind hadn't given up yet. The #-mile-an-hour wind bellowed, lifted the truck bodily, slammed it down, lifted it again, slammed it down. The steel cable hummed like a guitar string. Clayton wrapped his arms and legs around the seat. He couldn't hold on much longer. And if he let go, the madly leaping Brute would smear him over the walls like toothpaste -- If the cable didn't part first and send him hurtling into the cliffs. He held on. At the top of one swing, he caught a glimpse of the windspeed indicator. The sight of it sickened him. He was through, finished, done for. How could he be expected to hold on through the force of a #-mile-an-hour wind? It was too much. It was -- # miles an hour? That meant that the wind was dropping! He could hardly believe it at first. But slowly, steadily, the dial hand crept down. At # miles an hour, the truck stopped slamming and lay passively at the end of its anchor line. At #, the wind veered -- a sure sign that the blow was nearly over. When it had dropped to # miles an hour, Clayton allowed himself the luxury of passing out.  for him later in the day. Skillfully they maneuvered two big land ships up to the Brute, fastened on their long vines -- which tested out stronger than steel -- and towed the derelict truck back to the station. They brought him into the receiving shed and Nerishev carried him into the station's dead air. "You didn't break anything except a couple of teeth," said Nerishev. "But there isn't an unbruised inch on you." "We came through it," Clayton said. "Just. Our boulder defense is completely flattened. The station took two direct hits from boulders and barely contained them. I've checked the foundations; they're badly strained. Another blow like that and we'd make out somehow. Us Earth lads, we come through! That was the worst in eight months. Four months more and the relief ship comes! Buck up, Nerishev. Come with me." "Where are we going?" "I want to talk to that damned Smanik!" They came into the shed. It was filled to overflowing with Carellans. Outside, in the lee of the station, several dozen land ships were moored. "Smanik!" Clayton called. "What's going on here?" "It is the Festival of Summer," Smanik said. "Our great yearly holiday." "Hm. What about that blow? What did you think of it?" "I would classify it as a moderate gale," said Smanik. "Nothing dangerous, but somewhat unpleasant for sailing." "Unpleasant! I hope you get your forecasts a little more accurate in the future." "One cannot always outguess the weather," Smanik said. "It is regrettable that my last forecast should be wrong." "Your last? How come? What's the matter?" "These people," Smanik said, gesturing around him, "are my entire tribe, the Seremai. We have celebrated the Festival of Summer. Now summer is ended and we must go away." "Where to?" "To the caverns in the far west. They are two weeks' sail from here. We will go into the caverns and live there for three months. In that way, we will find safety." Clayton had a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach. "Safety from what, Smanik?" "I told you. Summer is over. We need safety now from the winds -- the powerful storm winds of winter." "What is it?" Nerishev said. "In a moment." Clayton thought very quickly of the super-hurricane he had just passed through, which Smanik had classified as a moderate and harmless gale. He thought of their immobility, the ruined Brute, the strained foundations of the station, the wrecked boulder barrier, the relief ship four months away. "We could go with you in the land ships, Smanik, and take refuge in the caverns with you -- be protected -- " "Of course," said Smanik hospitably. "No, we couldn't," Clayton answered himself, his sinking feeling even lower than during the storm. "We'd need extra oxygen, our own food, a water supply -- " "What is it?" Nerishev repeated impatiently. "What the devil did he say to make you look like that?" "He says the really big winds are just coming," Clayton replied. The two men stared at each other. Outside, a wind was rising. Old-Fashioned Bridge Score Pad ? BjiitLqsL aPiSL Makes Bridge Scoring Easier  More Accurate -- Faster  More Legible! # for  I # Including Postage Send Check or Money Order (No Coin or Stamps) #L # East #st St. Jt  New York #, N. Y.  back to see when my book The Conquest of Space first appeared, because the date has some bearing on this story. Well, the copyright note says "First Published in September, #," so it must have been in the early summer of that year. The book, as far as the mechanical processes of production are concerned, had advanced almost to the final stage. Color proofs of the paintings had been made and approved by Chesley Bonestell. Galley proofs of the text had been read and corrected. The page proofs had gone from printer to publisher to author and back the same way. All that was left for me to do was to wait. One morning during this waiting period, while reading the New York Times at breakfast, I found a little box, telling that Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper had found a hitherto unknown small satellite of Neptune. Most interesting, that. I dropped the Times, raced to the telephone, dialed my publisher and asked, "Is Conquest of Space on the presses?" The answer was something like, "It might be by now. If you want to know, I can call the printer and ask." "Do that," I said, "and if they haven't started yet, tell them to wait till afternoon. I'm coming in." The reason for this telephone call was that I realized that a few passages in the book were suddenly wrong. There was one which read "the lonely moon of Neptune," another one which read "Neptune's single moon" and a third one that said "like Earth, Neptune has only one moon." Don't bother looking it up -- the printer had planned to start the press run that Same afternoon, and by #:#, the three passages had been replaced by others which were factually correct and took the same amount of space. My reason for remembering this now is that I told the editor, while typing the changes, that my statement might be proved wrong for Ea'-th, too, one day. Well, as far as we can tell, it won't be. Earth does have only one moon, we are sure now -- reasonably sure, that is. ceived a large brown envelope in the mail which said on the outside "Office of Ordnance Research, U. S. Army" and inside there was a #-page report, on the cover of which it said in letters of diminishing size: State College, New Mexico Interim Report on for the period #-# By Clyde W. Tombaugh Dr. Clyde W. Tombaugh, most Galaxy readers will probably recall, is the discoverer of the planet Pluto, and early in #, it became known that the Office of Ordnance Research gave him, via Lowell Observatory and New Mexico State College, a research contract to find out whether Earth might not have another small moon, or possibly moons. I devoted part of my column in the September, #, issue of Galaxy to the news that such a search was on and I explained then why these additional moons, if they existed, had to be quite small. The story of the second moon of Earth has had a rather tenacious life ever since #, which was the year when Jules Verne's Autour de la Lurie appeared, the second part of his story about the shot to the Moon. In it, Verne provided the three inhabitants of his Moon projectile with a glimpse of the second moon of Earth and explained that a French astronomer by the name of Petit had postulated its existence. Although no figure for the size of this second moon is given in the story, the reader is left with the impression that it must be rather substantial, at least a mile in diameter. Astronomers declared at a later date that a moon a mile in diameter at the distance given by Petit (# miles) would have been discovered by the ancient Babylonians, since it would be, at certain times, a rather easy nakedeye object. Before this fact was presented, several German astronomers had spent some time trying to find Petit's moon, which they punningly called Kleinchen. The point of the pun is that Petit is the French word for "little" or "small" while Kleinchen is German for "the little one." Of course they did not find his moon. By the time Dr. Tombaugh started his search, it was quite clear that the additional satellite would be measured in feet and not in miles -- how many feet depended, naturally, on the distance. came that Tombaugh had found two moons, one # miles out and another one at a distance of # miles. The story went with it that, when this report reached the Pentagon, a general asked suspiciously, "Are they natural?" That story may be true, but the report that two moons had been found was not. If anybody knows how it originated, he is keeping his lips tightly shut. At any event, Dr. Tombaugh wrote me at the time that the report was not true. Moreover, it referred to distances that had not even been investigated at the time. The search was made by telescopic camera and the sensitivity of the instrumentation was revealed with a sentence that has been quoted quite a number of times since. The equipment, the statement said, could discover a tennis ball at a height of # miles, provided only that it was white. It also could discover a V-# rocket (which is just short of # feet) at the distance of the Moon. This original statement has since been amended to read that the tennis ball could be found even if it showed itself only in half phase; the V-# rocket near the Moon would have to be in full phase and also painted white; Any satellite of Earth -- natural or artificial -- which is closer than a certain limit would have to move so fast to stay in its orbit that it would rise in the west and set in the east. The limit just mentioned is # miles from the surface. At that distance, the satellite would have an orbital period of # hours and would neither rise nor set but just hang in the sky over one hemisphere and never be visible from the other. Satellites beyond that limit would behave as one expects them to behave. Let us assume now that we have a satellite # miles from the surface. It would need just four hours to go around the Earth once. Knowing this, one can calculate how fast it would move across the sky. Then an astronomical camera can be geared to sweep across the sky at the same rate. If the satellite is in the field of vision of the camera, it would show up as a dot on the plate, while the fixed stars in the field of vision would show up as streaks from edge to edge. If that satellite were at, say, # miles, but the camera were set for a sweep for a #-mile satellite, it would still show up. It would have made a very short trail, very easily distinguishable from the edge-to-edge star streaks. It should be clear from this explanation that a satellite search with such equipment is mostly a question of patience, a commodity which must be built-in in any astronomer. It is "merely" a question of adjusting the camera for a whole series of sweeps, corresponding to various satellite distances and orbital periods. If there is one, it must be caught sooner or later. on a photographic plate is not enough proof, however. There might be a tiny bubble in the emulsion, a flaw of some kind -- I mentioned once in this column that the planet Pluto was missed on a photographic plate (years before Tombaugh found it on another one) because the image happened to have fallen on such a flaw and was taken to be a part of it. To avoid being fooled by such an accidental dot, something else had to be done. It was this: when the trails of the fixed stars had moved to about the center of the plate, the camera was moved a little bit without closing the shutter. The result of this action was that every star trail, at that point, made a very short vertical line and then continued on a different level. (For faint stars, this short vertical line did not register on the plate.) Now if there was a satellite at the distance for which the sweep was set, it would make two dots at the proper distance from each other. That there should be a plate flaw producing this effect was most unlikely. The search was conducted from Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, which, in spite of its generally fine location, had one disadvantage which has to do with the position of the orbits of the unknown satellites relative to the Earth. There is, as far as I know, no rule that says that a satellite could not circle its planet going from pole to pole. The simple facts are that no such case is known and that it is highly unlikely for various theoretical reasons. A tiny satellite of Earth could have two possible origins. One is that it is a piece of debris from the Asteroid Belt which has, for some reason, been drifting inward in the Solar System and has been captured by Earth. That would require such a peculiar sequence of astronomical events that it is not very likely. In most cases, such a piece of cosmic matter drifting in toward the Earth would either simply pass on with a minor change in orbit, or else it would touch atmosphere and crash as a meteorite. Capture by the Earth would be exceedingly rare. But while capture would be literally a case of much more than possible. Such a satellite would circle the Earth in about the plane of the ecliptic -- the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The other possibility has to do with our real and rather large moon. More and more astronomers seem to incline to the belief that the Moon was formed in an orbit around the Earth of loose matter, ranging in size from a few molecules of something to large mountains. "Moon matter" left, they would orbit around the Earth in or very nearly in the plane of the Moon's orbit. Since the plane of the Moon's orbit and the ecliptic are inclined to each other by only five degrees, the search of these two planes is really the same thing, for some deviation from either one or the other must be taken for granted. The third possibility is that a satellite circles the Earth in the plane of its equator, inclined by # x h degrees to the ecliptic. But a satellite over the equator would have been pulled into that orbit by the Earth's equatorial bulge, which implies that it would be fairly low. If it weren't, it wouldn't be in that plane. This is where the search from Flagstaff left a hole in the picture. A moonlet circling the Earth over the equator at a lesser distance than # miles from the surface could not be seen -- or, rather, photographed -- from Flagstaff. Strangely enough, the search for anything inside the orbit of the Moon was really virgin territory. Barring the occasional looking for Kleinchen a few Germans had indulged in around the turn of the century, it had never been done. Well, we now know that there is nothing in that region, with the possible exception of equatorial orbits below # miles. For these, Dr. Tombaugh moved to Quito, Ecuador, where such moonlets would be vertically overhead. But the Interim Report was written before this move took place and covered only the work at Flagstaff. It concluded: Much of the space about the Earth has been searched. Most of this space has been found to be empty of material moving in the most-likely orbits and large enough to be seen by the present equipment Some "suspects" have been found on the photographic films, but in all save a few instances it has been possible to determine that the record was not that of a satellite. These images, if not due to defects in the photographic plates, could have been tracks of very small asteroids moving past the earth in their journey around the sun. The several suspects not yet eliminated as satellites are ones which cannot be checked until photographic work has started on the equator. From a statistical point of view, it is more likely that they will turn out not to be satellites. The chance of a discovery of astronomical or geodetic value has, from the beginnnig, been regarded as very small. But a completely negative result, a determination that the space near the earth is free of debris up to a certain size, could have comforting significance to long-range ballisticians and to proponents of space travel. r  "HE explanation of the difficulty of capturing moonlets going around the Sun -- because they go around the Sun, they are, of course, tiny planetoids or asteroids -- implied that any additional satellite that might have been  This conclusion was written by The Office of Ordnance Research, not by Tombaugh. found would most probably have been matter left over when the Moon formed. But if such matter was left over, it could go around the Earth in some other ways. One possibility was that it remained in the same orbit as the Moon, but circling the Earth either # degrees ahead of the Moon or # degrees behind the Moon. In the case of Jupiter and the so-called Trojan Asteroids, this has been found to be true -- many years, incidentally, after it had been advanced as a theoretical possibility. Having this nice equipment available, it was obvious that Dr. Tombaugh should use it to see whether there might be more moons in the orbit of the Moon. This particular phase of the search had been planned, but by the time the Interim Report was written, it had not been carried out, due largely to bad weather. But "left-over" Moon matter could still do something else. It could form secondary moons, moonlets of our moon. If such a secondary moon had been found, it would have been the first of its kind in the Solar System. It is perfectly possible that the larger moons in our solar system have such secondary moons, but if they do, they are all too small to be detected from the Earth. Secondary moons of our moon would have been fairly easy to identify, again if they were large enough to register on the photographic plate. The most likely orbit of such secondary moons would be again in the ecliptic, or else in the plane of the Moon's orbit. Because of this, they would pass between Moon and Earth and then disappear behind the Moon. Twice during every circuit of the Moon, they would be at "greatest elongation," which means farthest away from the Moon either to the east or to the west. Actually we would see this portion of the orbit strongly foreshortened so that such a secondary moon would remain nearly stationary, to the eye, near greatest elongation for a while. But no matter at what distance it is from the Moon, it would share the orbital movement of the Moon. If you can catch a dot of light, on either side of the Moon, which travels across the sky at very nearly the rate of the Moon itself, you have caught a secondary moon. you did it visually. If you try to do it photographically, chances are that the Moon will cover up the image of the secondary satellite. The Moon is bright enough to ruin everything faint in its vicinity on a plate. Hence this particular search had to wait for an eclipse of the Moon. As Dr. Tombaugh reported: "The crater Aristarchus is the brightest spot on the moon, and it can be seen in a telescope with some difficulty when the moon is in total eclipse. With a visual guide telescope on the same mounting with the Schmidt camera, one can guide the camera on Aristarchus and prevent the dilution of possible satellite images." All this had been worked out for the total eclipse of January #, #. "Unfortunately, on the night of the moon's eclipse, the sky was covered by a thick haze." At the time the report was written, there were hopes for the longduration eclipse which took place at midnight, November #-#, #. I know that all the amateur astronomers in New York, Long Island and New Jersey were bitterly disappointed, for there was more than just a thick haze. It poured. The weather must have been bad enough to be useless in Flagstaff, too, because no report about a secondary moon has come in yet. But while Tombaugh's work is virtually definite for the space above # miles (and lower down elsewhere than over the equator), a secondary moon of Earth, a moon of the Moon, and also "Trojan" moonlets in the Moon's orbit, are still possible. Their discovery would, for the time being, be of scientific interest only, but it would be interesting. Naturally an intensive search program of this type had all kinds of "by-products," as Charles F. Capen of the New Mexico College called them in Sky and Telescope. A number of meteorites and one bright fireball were caught on the plates. A few others showed very strange zigzag designs -- the Naval Observatory's Flagstaff section had released a bunch of meteorological balloons at night without telling anybody. One night, an orange light moved noiselessly from north to south in a straight line; glasses proved it to be the exhaust of a high-flying jet. Another night, they had "Lubbock Lights," but they were a squadron of helicopters. Six months or so from now, another satellite watch will be on, but then it won't be a natural satellite. We'll have made it ourselves.  quite a long time since anybody talked about Moon rockets. Twenty-five to thirty years ago, before the time where there was any rocket "hardware," things were different -- the Moon rocket was a favorite topic of conversation among rocket enthusiasts. As the actual engineering research began, the favorite idea of the Moon rocket began to be overshadowed by the nasty reality of an oxygen valve which leaked, and kept leaking no matter what you did about it. And a parachute release that worked was more fascinating by far than the most elegant set of equations. As time went on, all thoughts concentrated first on the high-altitude sounding rocket, then the long-range rocket, and finally on the artificial satellite. But now the Moon rocket is with us again, in a form which bears little resemblance to the drawings made thirty years ago, but with the encouraging message that it could be built later this year if somebody can be found to sign some papers. However, a little background is needed first. In Professor Hermann Oberth's writings -- from # to # -- you can find a discussion of something he called the "optimal velocity." The problem was this: a rising rocket has to fight air resistance, and air resistance goes up very sharply as the velocity increases. As far as air resistance was concerned, a slowly accelerating rocket was far better than a quickly accelerating rocket. But while the rocket struggled up through a resisting atmosphere, slowly, it also lost # feet per second of velocity every second, because Earth tried to pull it back. Hence, as far as gravitation was concerned, the quickly accelerating rocket beat the slowly accelerating rocket tailfins down. There had to be a happy medium, a rocket which did not create too much air resistance for itself and did not lose too much speed to gravity, either. And that was the "optimal velocity." The first large rockets, the V-#s, happened not to be troubled by that problem. They could not accelerate very fast because they were so heavy. By the time they got to be really fast, they were above # feet, with about # per cent of the atmosphere below them. Large rockets which were capable of very high accelerations were still to come. But they came, the big solid fuel rockets we now have, which are mostly used to boost heavy missiles into the air. If one had tried to fire such heavy solid fuel rockets, or clusters of them, from the surface, there would have been trouble with air resistance. And this is not just theory, for such clusters, Vehicles, have been fired to measure air resistance at very high velocities. A. Van Allan of Iowa University had tried something else. There is a medium-sized solidfuel rocket called the Deacon. When fired vertically from sea level, it can reach a height of # feet, or not quite # miles. Van Allan had the Deacon lifted by a plastic Skyhook balloon to about # miles and fired it from there. It went to # and # miles because it did not have to fight much air resistance. This rocket-balloon combination was dubbed the Rockoon and some important research work has been done with it recently. More of it will come during the International Geophysical Year. Knowing all this, we are now ready to understand the new Moon rocket, presented for the first time in a paper read in September, #, at the International Astronautical Congress in Rome. The authors of the paper were Kurt R. Stehling and Richard Foster, both of them propulsion engineers for the Naval Research Laboratory and presumably quite busy with the Vanguard satellitecarrier rockets. The "first stage" of the new Moon rocket is a Skyhook balloon which must be able to lift a rocket weighing # lbs. to a height of # feet. This, Stehling said, means a balloon of a foot Skyhooks have been built and launched. The Moon rocket would hang vertically below the balloon and tear through it when ignited. This will not hamper the rocket a bit and will not even cause an avoidable loss of the balloon, for the plastic skin of Skyhook balloons is so thin that they can be used only once; they can never be recovered. intact for reuse. The rocket itself is a three-step affair. Step No. I is a so-called "cluster" of four large solid-fuel units, weighing together # lbs., but developing a thrust of # lbs. They would burn for about # seconds. At the end of the burning time, the rocket will be #  # feet up and will be going with a velocity very close to # feet per second. At an altitude of # feet, you don't have to worry about air resistance any more, so the next stage, also solid fuel, will be ignited at once. The weight of Step No. # is # lbs. It will also burn for # seconds, producing a thrust of # lbs. When its fuel is gone, it will be # feet high and the velocity will be slightly more than # feet per second. Then Step No. # takes over. Compared to what carried it, it is tiny, a #-pound solid-fuel rocket with four pounds of "payload" in the nose. It will burn for only # seconds, but when it is finished, it will be # feet up and its velocity will be # feet per second. order "Fire!" Step No. # will be coasting to where the Moon will be four days later, for the time to traverse this distance will be about four days. The rocket will be too small to be seen in a telescope or to be tracked by radar. But radar ought to be able to track the larger stages, so that there should be enough tracking data for a trajectory computation. The time of the impact will be fairly well known, but just where the rocket will strike the Moon will not be known in advance. It is possible that observers may miss the impact for this reason. But the four pounds of payload are such that they will make a permanent and telescopically conspicuous mark on the lunar surface. Dr. Morris Goldpepper  Physicists and engineers can't help -- only my colleagues can bridge the interstellar cavity to pull me out of my aching plight! I McAllister, Danboufge and Smith, sat at the table under the cold blue lighting tubes. One of them, Rorke, was in a corner speaking quietly into a telephone, and one, Fadderman, stood staring out the window at the lights of the city. One, Hansen, had yet to arrive. Fadderman spoke without turning his head. He was the oldest of those present -- the Big Seven, as they were often called. "Lights," he said. "So many lights. Down here." He waved his hand toward the city. "Up there." He gestured toward the sky. "Even with our much-vaunted knowledge, what," he asked, "do we know?" He turned his head. "Perhaps this is too big for us. In the light of the problem, can we really hope to accomplish anything?" Heavy-set Danbourge frowned grimly. "We have received the suffrage of our fellow-scientists, Doctor. We can but try." Lithe, handsome McAllister, che youngest officer of the Association, nodded. "The problem is certainly not greater than that which faced our late, great colleague, the immortal Morton." He pointed to a picture on the panneled wall. "And we all know what he accomplished." Fadderman went over and took his hand. "Your words fill me with courage." McAllister flushed with pleasure. "I am an old man," Fadderman added falteringly. "Forgive my lack of spirit, Doctor" He sat down, sighed, shook his head slowly. Weinroth, burly and redhaired, patted him gently on the back. Natty, silveryhaired little Smith smiled at him consolingly. hung up the telephone, flipped a switch on the wall intercom. "Headquarters here," he said crisply. "Dr. Carl T. Hansen has arrived," a voice informed him. "Bring him up at once," he directed. "And, Nickerson -- " "Yes, Dr. Rorke?" "Let no one else into the building. No one." They sat in silence. After a moment or two, they heard the approach of the elevator, heard the doors slide open, slide shut, heard the elevator descend. Heavy, steady footsteps approached; knuckles rapped on the opaque glass door. Rorke went over to the door, said, "A conscientious and diligent scientist -- " must remain a continual student," a deep voice finished the quotation. Rorke unlocked the door, peered out into the corridor, admitted Hansen, locked the door. "I would have been here sooner, but another emergency interposed," Hansen said. "A certain political figure -- ethics prevent my being more specific -- suffered an oral hemorrhage following an altercation with a woman who shall be nameless, but, boy, did she pack a wallop! A so-called Specialist, gentlemen, with offices on Park Avenue, had been, as he called it, 'applying pressure' with a gauze pad. I merely used a little Gelfoam as a coagulant agent and the hemorrhage stopped almost at once. When will the public learn, eh, gentlemen?" Faint smiles played upon the faces of the assembled scientists. Hansen took his seat. Rorke bent down and lifted two tape-recording devices to the table, set them both in motion. The faces of the men became serious, grim. "This is an emergency session of the Steering Committee of the Executive Committee of the American Dental Association," Rorke said, "called to discuss measures of dealing with the case of Dr. Morris Goldpepper. One tape will be deposited in the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York; the other will be similarly secured in the vaults of the Wells Fargo and Union Trust Company Bank in San Francisco. Present at this session are Doctors Rorke, Weinroth and Smith -- President, First and Second Vice-presidents, respectively -- Fadderman, Past President, McAllister, Public Information, Danbourge, Legal, and Hansen, Policy." He looked around at the set, tense faces. "Doctors," he went on, "I think I may well say that humanity is, as of this moment, face to face with a great danger, and it is a bitter jest that it is not to the engineers or the astronomers, not to medicine nor yet to nuclear nor any other kind of physics, that humanity must now look for salvation -- but to the members of the dental profession!" His voice rose. "Yes -- to the practitioners of what has become perhaps the least regarded of all the learned sciences! It is indeed ironical. We may at this juncture consider the comments of the now deceased Professor Earnest Hooton, the Harvard anthropologist, who observed with a sorrow which did him credit that his famed University, instead of assisting its Dental School as it ought, treated it -- and I quote his exact words -- 'Like a yellow dog.' " His voice trembled. flushed an angry red. Weinroth growled. Danbourge's fist hit the table and stayed there, clenched. Fadderman gave a soft, broken sigh. "But enough of this. We are not jealous, nor are we vindictive," President Rorke went on. "We are confident that History, 'with its long tomorrow,' will show how, at this danger-fraught point, the humble and little thought-of followers of dental science recognized and sized up the situation and stood shoulder to shoulder on the ramparts!" He wiped his brow with a paper tissue. "And now I will call upon our beloved. Past President, Dr. Samuel I. Fadderman, to begin our review of the incredible circumstances which have brought us here tonight. Dr. Fadderman? If you please..." The well-known Elder Statesman of the A.D.A. nodded his head slowly. He made a little cage of his fingers and pursed and then unpursed his lips. At length he spoke in a soft and gentle voice. "My first comment, brethren, is that I ask for compassion. Morris Goldpepper is not to blame! "Let me tell you a few words about him. Goldpepper the Scientist needs no introduction. Who has not read, for instance, his 'The Bilateral Vertical Stroke and Its Influence on the Pattern of Occlusion' or his 'Treatment, Planning, Assemblage and Cementation of a #-Unit Fixed Bridge' -- to name only two? But I shall speak about Goldpepper the Man. He is forty-six years of age and served with honor in the United States Navy Dental Corps during the Second World War. He has been a widower since shortly after the conclusion of that conflict. Rae -- the late Mrs. Goldpepper, may she rest in peace -- often, used to say, 'Morry, if I go first, promise me you'll marry again,' but he passed it off with a joke; and, as you know, he never did. "They had one child, a daughter, Suzanne, a very sweet girl, now married to a Dr. Sheldon Fingerhut, D.D.S. I need not tell you, brethren, how proud our colleague was when his only child married this very fine young member of our profession. The Fingerhuts are now located on Unbalupi, one of the Micronesian islands forming part of the United States Trust Territory, where Dr. Sheldon is teaching dental hygiene, sanitation and prosthesis to the natives thereof." Dr. Hansen asked, "Are they aware of -- " "The son-in-law knows something of the matter," the older man said. "He has not seen fit to inform his wife, who is in a delicate condition and expects shortly to be confined. At his suggestion, I have been writing -- or, rather, typing -- letters purporting to come from her father, on his stationery, with the excuse that he badly singed his fingers on a Bunsen burner while annealing a new-type hinge for dentures and consequently cannot hold his pen." He sipped from a glass of water. "Despite his great scientific accomplishments," Dr. Fadderman went on, "Morry had an impractical streak in him. Often I used to call on him at his bachelor apartment in the Hotel Davenport on West End Avenue, where he moved following his daughter's marriage, and I would find hitp immersed in reading matter of an escapist kind -- tales of crocodile hunters on the Malayan Peninsula, or magazines dealing with interplanetary warfare, or collections of short stories about vampires and werewolves and similar superstitious creations. " 'Morry,' I said reproachfully, 'what a way to spend your ojfhours. Is it worth it? Is it healthy? You would do much better, believe me, to frequent the pool or the handball court at the Y. Or,' I pointed out to him, 'if you want to read, why ignore the rich treasures of literature: Shakespeare, Ruskin, Elbert Hubbard, Edna Ferber, and so on? Why retreat to these immature-type fantasies?' At first he only smiled and quoted the saying, 'Each to his or her own taste.'" was broken by young Dr. McAllister. "You say," he said, "'at first.' " Old Dr. Fadderman snapped out of his revery. "Yes, yes. But eventually he confessed the truth to me. He withheld nothing." The assembled dental scientists then learned that the same Dr. Morris Goldpepper, who had been awarded not once but three successive times the unique honor of the Dr. Alexander Peabody Medal for New Achievements in Dental Prosthesis, was obsessed with the idea that there was sentient life on other worlds -- that it would shortly be possible to reach these other worlds -- and that he himself desired to be among those who went. " 'Do you realize, Sam?' he asked me," reported Fadderman. " 'Do you realize that, in a very short time, it will no longer be a question of fuel or even of metallurgy? That submarines capable of cruising for weeks and months without surfacing foretell the possibility of traveling through airless space? The chief problem has now come down to finding how to build a takeoff platform capable of withstanding a thrust of sevglowed." Dr. Fadderman had inquired, with good-natured sarcasm, how the other man expected this would involve him. The answer was as follows: Any interplanetary expedition would find it just as necessary to take along a dentist as to take along a physician, and that he -- Dr. Goldpepper -- intended to be that dentist! Dr. Weinroth's hand slapped the table with a bang. "By thunder, I say the man had courage!" Dr. Rorke looked at him with icy reproof. "I should be obliged," he said stiffly, "if there would be no further emotional outbursts." Dr. Weinroth's face fell. "I beg the Committee's pardon, Mr. President," he said. Dr. Rorke nodded graciously, indicated by a gesture of his hand that Dr. Fadderman had permission to continue speaking. The old man took a letter from his pocket and placed it on the table. "This came to me like a bolt from the blue beyond. It is dated November # of last year. Skipping the formal salutation, it reads: 'At last I stand silent upon the peak in Darien' -- a literary reference, gentlemen, to Cortez's alleged discovery of the Pacific Ocean; actually it was Balboa -- 'my great dream is about to be realized. Before long, I shall be back to tell you about it, but just exactly when, I am not able to say. History is being made! Long live Science! Sincerely yours, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.'" He passed the letter around the table. Dr. Smith asked, "What did you do on receiving this communication, Doctor?" Dr. Fadderman had at once taken a taxi to West End Avenue. The desk clerk at the hotel courteously informed him that the man he sought had left on a vacation of short but not exactly specified duration. No further information was known. Dr. Fadderman's first thought was that his younger friend had gotten some sort of position with a Government project which he was not free to discuss, and his own patriotism and sense of duty naturally prevented him from making inquiries. "But I began, for the first time," the Elder Statesman of American Dentistry said, "to read up on the subject of space travel. I wondered how a man # years of age could possibly hope to be selected over younger men." Dr. Danbourge spoke for the first time. "Size," he said. "Every ounce would count in a spaceship and Morris was a pretty little guy." "But with the heart of a lion," Dr. Weinroth said softly. "Miles and miles and miles of heart." The other men nodded their agreement to this tribute. T#UT as time went on and the - year drew to its close and he heard no word from his friend, Dr. Fadderman began to worry. Finally, when he received a letter from the Finger huts, saying that they had not been hearing either, he took action. He realized it was not likely that the Government would have made plans to include a dentist in this supposed project without communicating with the A.D.A. and he inquired of the current President, Dr. Rorke, if he had any knowledge of such a project, or of the whereabouts of the missing man. The answer to both questions was no. But on learning the reasons for Dr. Fadderman's concern, he communicated with Col. Lemuel Coggins, head of the Col. Coggins informed him that no one of Dr. Goldpepper's name or description was or had been affiliated with any such project, and that, in fact, any such project was still -- as he put it -- "still on the drawing-board." Drs. Rorke and Fadderman, great as was their concern, hesitated to report Dr. Goldpepper missing. He had, after all, paid rent on apartment, office and laboratory, well in advance. He was a mature man, of very considerable intelligence, and one who presumably knew what he was doing. "It is at this point," said Dr. Danbourge, "that I enter the picture. On the #th of January, I had a call from a Dr. Milton Wilson, who has an office on East #th Street, with a small laboratory adjoining, where he does prosthetic work. He told me, with a good deal of hesitation, that something exceedingly odd had come up, and he asked me if I knew where Dr. Morris Goldpepper was..." The morning of the #th of January, an elderly man with a curious foreign accent came into Dr. Wilson's office, gave the name of Smith and complained about an upper plate. It did not feel comfortable, Mr. Smith said, and it irritated the roof of his mouth. There was a certain reluctance on his part to allow Dr. Wilson to examine his mouth. This was understandable, because the interior of his mouth was blue. The gums were entirely edentulous, very hard, almost horny. The plate itself -- "Here is the plate," Dr. Danbourge said, placing it on the table. "Dr. Wilson supplied him with another. You will observe the perforations on the upper, or palatal, surface. They had been covered with a thin layer of gum arabic, which naturally soon wore almost entirely off, with the result that the roof of the mouth became irritated. Now this is so very unusual that Dr. Wilson -- as soon as his patient, the socalled Mr. Smith, was gone -- broke open the weirdly made plate to find why the perforations had been made. In my capacity as head of the Association's Legal Department," Dr. Danbourge stated, "I have come across some extraordinary occurrences, but nothing like this." This was a small piece of a white, flexible substance, covered with tiny black lines. Danbourge picked up a large magnifying glass. "You may examine these objects, Doctors," he said, "but it will save your eyesight if I read to you from an enlarged photostatic copy of this last one. The nature of the material, the method of writing, or of reducing the writing to such size all are unknown to us. It may be something on the order of microfilm. But that is not important. The important thing is the content of the writing -- the portent of the writing. "Not since Dr. Morton, the young Boston dentist, realized the uses of sulphuric ether as an anesthetic has any member of our noble profession discovered anything of even remotely similar importance; and perhaps not before, either." He drew his spectacles from their case and began to read aloud. II great profession lacks the glamour and public adulation of the practice of medicine, and even the druggists -- not having a Hippocratic Oath -- can preen themselves on their so-called Oath of Maimonides (though, believe me, the great Maimonides had no more to do with it than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.), no one can charge us with not having as high a standard of ethics and professional conduct as physicians and surgeons, M.D. Nor do I hesitate for one single moment to include prostheticians not holding the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery or Doctor of Dental Medicine, whose work is so vital and essential. When the records of our civilization are balanced, then -- but perhaps not before -- the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache. It is only with a heavy heart that I undertake deliberately to produce inferior work, and with the confidence that all those to whom the standards of oral surgery and dental prosthetics are dear will understand the very unusual circumstances which have prompted me so to do. And, understanding, will forgive. No one can hold the standards of our profession higher or more sacred than I. It must be admitted that I was not very amused on a certain occasion when my cousin, Nathaniel Pomerance, introduced me to an engineering contractor with these words, "You two should have a lot in common -- you both build bridges," and uttered a foolish laugh. But I venture to say that this was one of the truest words ever spoken in questionable jest. Humility is one thing, false pride another. Those who know anything of modern dentistry at all know of the Goldpepper Bridge and the Goldpepper Crown. It is I, Dr. Morris Goldpepper, inventor of both, and perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp which bears my name, who writes these words you see before you. Nothing further should be needful by way of identification. And now to my report. On the first of November, 'a day of evil import forever in the personal calendar of the unhappy wretch who writes these lines, not even knowing for sure if they will ever be read -- but what else can I do? -- shortly after # : # P.M., my laboratory door was knocked on. I found there a curious-looking man of shriveled and weazened appearance. He asked if I was Dr. Morris Goldpepper, "the famous perfector of the Semi-retractable Clasp," and I pleaded guilty to the flattering impeachment. The man had a foreign-sounding accent, or -- I thought -- it may be that he had an impediment in his speech. Might he see me, was his next question. I hesitated. and to most other practitioners -- a stranger comes and, before you know it, he is slandering some perfectly respectable D.D.S. or D.M.D. The dentist pulled a healthy tooth -- the dentist took such and such a huge sum of money for new plates -- they don't fit him, he suffers great anguish -- he's a poor man, the dentist won't do anything -- et cetera, ad infinitum nauseamque. In short, a nut, a crank, a crackpot. But while I was hesitating, the man yawned, did not courteously cover his mouth with his hand, and I observed to my astonishment that the interior of his mouth was an odd shade of blue! Bemused by this singular departure from normalcy, I allowed him to enter. Then I wondered what to say, since he himself was saying nothing, but he looked around the lab with interest. "State your business" would be too brusque, and "Why is your mouth blue?" would be too gauche. An impasse. Whilst holding up a large-scale model of the Goldpepper Cap (not yet perfected -- will it ever be? Alas, who knows?) this curious individual said, "I know all about you, Dentist Goldpepper. A great scientist, you are. A man of powerful imagination, you are. One who rebels against narrow horizons and yearns to soar to wide and distant worlds, you are." All I could think of to say was, "And what can I do for you?" It was all so true; every single word he said was true. In my vanity was my downfall. I was tricked like the crow with the cheese in the ancient fable of Aesop. The man proceeded to tell me, frankly enough, that he was a denizen of another planet. He had two hearts, would you believe it? And, consequently, two circulatory systems. Two pulses -- one in each arm, one slow, the other fast. It reminded me of the situation in Philadelphia some years ago when there were two telephone systems -- if you had only a Bell phone, you couldn't call anyone who had only a Keystone phone. The interior of his mouth was blue and so was the inside of his eyelids. He said his world had three moons. You may imagine my emotions at hearing that my long-felt dream to communicate with otherworldly forms of sentient life was at last realized! And to think that they had singled out not the President of the United States, not the Director-General of the U.N., but me, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S.! Could human happiness ask for more, was my unspoken question. I laughed softly to myself and I thought, What would my cousin Nathaniel Pomerance say now? I was like wax in this extraterrestrial person's hands (he had six distinct and articulate digits on each one), and I easily agreed to say nothing to anyone until the question of diplomatic recognition could be arranged on a higher echelon. "Non-recognition has its advantages, Goldpepper Dental Surgeon," he said with a slight smile. "No passport for your visit, you will need." Well! A personal invitation to visit Proxima Centauri Gamma, or whatever the planet's name is! But I felt constrained to look this gift-horse just a little closer in the mouth. How is it that they came inviting me, not, let us say, Oppenheimer? Well? "Of his gifts not in need, we are, Surgical Goldpepper. We have passed as far beyond nuclear power as you have beyond wind power. We can. span the Universe -- but in dentistry, like children still, we are. Come and inspect our faculties of your science, Great Goldpepper. If you say, 'This: Yes,' then it will be yes. If you direct, 'This: No,' then it will be no. In respect to the science of dentistry, our Edison and our Columbus, you will be." I asked when we would leave and he said in eight days. I asked how long the trip would take. For a moment, I was baffled when he said it would take no longer than to walk the equivalent of the length of the lab floor. Then he revealed his meaning to me: Matter transmission! Of course. No spaceship needed. brief disappointment at not being able to see the blazing stars in black outer space. But, after all, one ought not be greedy at such a time. I cannot point out too strongly that at no time did I accept or agree to accept any payment or gratuity for this trip. I looked upon it in the same light as the work I have done for various clinics. "Should I take along books? Equipment? What?" I asked my (so-to-speak) guide. He shook his head. Only my presence was desired on the first trip. A visit of inspection. Very well. On the morning of Nov. #th, I wrote a brief note to my old and dear friend, Dr. Samuel Fadderman, the senior mentor of American Dentistry on hearing these words, the Elder Statesman sobbed softly into his cupped hands, and in the afternoon, so excited and enthralled that I noticed no more of my destination than that it was north of the Washington Market, I accompanied my guide to a business building in the aforesaid area. He led me into a darkened room. He clicked a switch. There was a humming noise, a feeling first of heaviness, then of weightlessness, and then an odd sort of light came on. I was no longer on the familiar planet of my birth! I was on an unknown world! Over my head, the three moons of this far-off globe sailed majestically through a sky wherein I could note unfamiliar constellations. The thought occurred to me that poets on this planet would have to find another rhyme, inasmuch as moons (plural form) does not go with June (singular form). One satellite was a pale yellow, one was brown, and' the third was a creamy pink. Not knowing the names of these lunary orbs in the native tongue, I decided to call them Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry. Whilst my mind was filled with these droll fancies, I felt a tug at my sleeve, where my guide was holding it. He gestured and I followed. "Now," I thought to myself, "he will bring me before the President of their Galactic Council, or whatever he is called," and I stood obediently within a circle marked on the surface of the platform whereon we stood. In a moment, we were mattertransported to an inside room somewhere, and there I gazed about me in stupefaction, not to say astonishment. My eyes discerned the forms of Bunsen burners, Baldor lathes, casting machines and ovens, denture trays, dental stone, plaster, shellac trays, wires of teeth, and all the necessary equipment of a fully equipped dental prosthetic laboratory. My surprise at the progress made by these people in the science at which they were allegedly still children was soon mitigated by the realization that all the items had been made on Earth. A S I was looking and examining, a door opened and several people entered. Their faces were a pale blue, and I realized suddenly that my guide must be wearing makeup to conceal his original complexion. They spoke together in their native dialect; then one of them, with a rod of some kind in his hand, turned to me. He opened his mouth. I perceived his gums were bare. "Dentical person," he said, "make me teeth." I turned in some perplexity to my guide. "I understood you to say my first visit would be one of inspection only." Everyone laughed, and I observed that all were equally toothless. The man in the chair poked me rudely with his rod or staff. "Talk not! Make teeth!" Fuming with a well-justified degree of indignation, I protested at such a gross breach of the laws of common hospitality. Then, casting concealment to the winds, these people informed me as follows: Their race is entirely toothless in the adult stage. They are an older race than ours and are born looking ancient and wrinkled. It is only comparatively recently that they have established contact with Earth, and in order that they should not appear conspicuous, and in order to be able to eat our food, they realized that they must be supplied with artificial teeth. My so-called guide, false friend, my enticer andor kidnaper, to give him his due, had gotten fitted at a dentist's in New York and cunningly enquired who was the leading man in the field. Alas for fame! The man answered without a second of hesitation, "That is no other one than Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S., perfector of the Semiretractable Clasp." First this unscrupulous extraterrestrial procured the equipment, then he procured me. "Do I understand that you purport that I assist you in a plan to thwart and otherwise circumvent the immigration laws of the United States?" was my enquiry. The man in the chair poked me with his rod again. "You understand! So now make teeth!" What a proposition to make to a law-abiding, patriotic American citizen by birth! What a demand to exact of a war veteran, a taxpayer and one who has been three times on jury duty since # alone (People vs. Garrity, People vs. Vanderdam, and Lipschutz vs. Krazy-Kut Kool Kaps, Inc.)! My whole being revolted. I spoke coldly to them, informing them that the situation was contrary to my conception of dental ethics. But to no avail. My treacherous dragoman drew a revolver from his pocket. "Our weapons understand, you do not. Primitive Earth weapons, yes. So proceed with manufacture, Imprisoned Goldpepper." I went hot and cold. Not, I beg of you to understand, with fear, but with humiliation. Imprisoned Goldpepper! The phrase, with all the connotations it implied, rang in my ears. I bowed my head and a phrase from the literary work "Sampson Agonistes" (studied as a student in the College of the City of New York) rang through my mind: Eyeless in Gaza, grinding corn... Oh, blind, blind, blind, amidst the blaze of noon... But even in this hour of mental agony, an agony which has scarcely abated to speak of, I had the first glimmering of the idea which I hope will enable me to warn Earth. scornful glance to show these blue-complected individuals how well I appreciated that their socalled advanced science was a mere veneer over the base metal of their boorishness, I set to work. I made the preliminary impressions and study casts, using an impression tray with oval floor form, the best suited for taking impressions of edentulous ridges. And so began the days of my slavery. Confined as I am here, there is neither day nor night, but an unremitting succession of frenum trims, post dams, boxing in, pouring up, festoon carving, fixing sprue channels, and all the innumerable details of dental prosthetic work. No one as ts me. No one converses with me, save in brusque barks j levant to the work at hand. My I od consists of liqueous and ; atinous substances such as m lit be expected would form the di of a toothless race. Oh, I am sick of the sight of their blue skins, bluer mouths and homy ridges! I am sick of my serfdom! I have been given material to keep records and am writing this in expectation of later reducing it in size by the method here employed, and of thereinafter inserting copies between the palatal and occlusual surfaces of the plates. It will be necessary to make such plates imperfect, so that the wearers will be obliged to go to dentists on Earth for repairs, because it is not always practical for them to matterport -- in fact, I believe they can only do it on the #th day of every third month. Naturally, I cannot do this to every plate, for they might become suspicious. You may well imagine how it goes against my grain to produce defective work, but I have no other choice. Twice they have brought me fresh dental supplies, which is how I calculate their matterporting cycle. I have my wristwatch with me and thus I am enabled to reckon the passing of time. What their exact purpose is in going to Earth, I do not know. My growing suspicion is that their much-vaunted superior science is a fraud and that their only superiority lies in the ability to matterport. One curious item may give a clue : They have questioned me regarding the Old Age Assistance programs of the several States. As I have said, they all look old. Can it be that elsewhere on this planet there is imprisoned some poor devil of a terrestrial printer or engraver, toiling under duress to produce forged birth certificates and other means of identification, to the fell purpose of allowing these aliens to live at ease at the financial expense of the already overburdened U.S. taxpayer? To whom shall I address my plea for help? To the Federal Government? But it has no official or even unofficial knowledge that this otherworldly race exists. The F.B.I.? But does matterporting under false pretenses to another planet constitute kidnaping across State lines? It seems the only thing I can do is to implore whichever dental practitioner reads these lines to communicate at once with the American Dental Association. I throw myself upon the mercy of my fellow professional men. Dentists and Dental Prostheticians! Beware of men with blue mouths and horny, edentulous ridges! Do not be deceived by flattery and false promises! Remember the fate of that most miserable of men, Morris Goldpepper, D.D.S., and, in his horrible predicament, help, oh, help him! reading of this document. At length it was broken by Dr. Hansen. "That brave man," he said in a husky voice. "That brave little man." "Poor Morris," said Dr. Danbourge. "Think of him imprisoned on a far-off planet, slaving like a convict in a salt mine, so to speak, making false teeth for these inhuman aliens, sending these messages to us across the trackless void. It's pitiful, and yet, Doctors, it is also a tribute to the indomitable spirit of Man!" Dr. Weinroth moved his huge hands. "I'd like to get ahold of just one of those blue bastards," he growled. Dr. Rorke cleared his throat. All present looked at their President respectfully and eagerly. "I need hardly tell you, Doctors," he said crisply, "that the A.D.A. is a highly conservative organization. We do not go about things lightly. One such message we might ignore, but there have been eleven reported, all identical with the first. Even eleven such messages we might perhaps not consider, but when they come from a prominent scientist of the stature of Dr. Morris Goldpepper -- "Handwriting experts have pronounced this to be his handwriting beyond cavil of a doubt. Here" -- he delved into a box -- "are the eleven plates in question. Can any of you look at these clean lines and deny that they are the work of the incomparable Goldpepper?" The six other men looked at the objects, shook their heads. "Beautiful," murmured Dr. Smith, "even in their broken state. Poems in plastic! M. G. couldn't produce bad work if he tried!" Dr. Rorke continued. "Each report confirmed that the person who brought in the plate had a blue mouth and edentulous ridges, just as the message states. Each blue-mouthed patient exhibited the outward appearance of old age. And, gentlemen, of those eleven, no less than eight were reported from the State of California. Do you realize what that means? California offers the highest amount of financial assistance to the elderly! Goldpepper's surmise was right!" Dr. Hansen leaned forward. "In addition, our reports show that five of those eight are leaders in the fight against fluoridation of drinking water! It is my carefully considered belief that there is something in their physical makeup, evolved on another planet, which cannot tolerate fluorine even in minute quantities, because they certainly -- being already toothless -- wouldn't be concerned with the prevention of decay." Young Dr. McAllister took the floor. "We have checked with dental supply houses and detail men in the New York Metropolitan area and we found that large quantities of prosthetic supplies have been delivered to an otherwise unknown outfit -- called the Echs Export Company -- located not far north of the Washington Market! There is every reason to believe that this is the place Dr. Goldpepper mentioned. One of our men went there, found present only one man, in appearance an old man. Our representative feigned deafness, thus obliging this person to open his mouth and talk loudly. Doctors, he reports that this person has a blue mouth!" There was a deep intake of breath around the table. and snapped off the tape recorders. "This next is off the record. It is obvious, Doctors, that no ordinary methods will suffice to settle this case, to ensure the return of our unfortunate colleague, or to secure the withdrawal of these extraterrestrial individuals from our nation and planet. I cannot, of course, officially endorse what might be termed 'strongarm' methods. At the same time, I feel that our adversaries are not entitled to polite treatment. And obviously the usual channels of law enforcement are completely closed to us. "Therefore -- and remember, no word of this must pass outside our circle -- therefore I have communicated something of this matter to Mr. Albert Annapollo, the wellknown waterfront figure, who not long ago inaugurated the splendid Longshoremen's Dental Health Plan. Mr. Annapollo is a somewhat rough person, but he is nonetheless a loyal American... "We know now the Achilles heel of these alien creatures. It is fluorine. We know also how to identify them. And I think we may shortly be able to announce results. Meanwhile -- " he drew a slip of paper from his pocket -- "it is already the first of the month in that quarter when the dental supplies are due to be transported -- or matterported, as Dr. Goldpepper terms it -- to their distant destination. A large shipment is waiting to be delivered from the warehouses of a certain wholesaler to the premises of the Echs Exporting Company. I have had copies of this made and wrapped around each three-ounce bottle of Ellenbogen's Denture Stik-Phast. I presume it meets with your approval." He handed it to Dr. Hansen, who, as the others present nodded in grimly emphatic approval, read it aloud. "From The American Dental Association, representing over # registered dentists in the United States and its Territories, to Dr. Morris Goldpepper, wherrescue! We will bend every effort to this end! We shall fight the good fight! "Have courage, Dr. Morris Goldpepper! You shall return!" The mind technology that was developed for use in space: Developed by L. Ron Hubbard, nuclear physicist and one of the great science fiction writers of all time. The book from which they get their psychological plots. This one you need. Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was -- in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it? He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should. SS II Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground. "Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?" His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time? Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone -- or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here. Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them: The mother ship, Soscites II, had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship -- the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds -- and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy. The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low. Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever. That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently. A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk... thing he could find out:   how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages -- both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading. The first was from himself: The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange. SS II Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed: The ship's next message read: SS II His own reply perplexed Kaiser: The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he: SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape -- the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. SS II That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick. He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway. He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit. Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness -- he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream. It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way. Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser. a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout. After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now. Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground. The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm. Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yardhigh box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study. Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river. One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting -- or a warning to the others that a stranger approached. The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulderpits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm. The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group. " and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small sealpups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths. They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fiftyfifty. Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this. A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed. They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies. Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time. They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons. The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank -- and as smelly as the natives themselves. The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout. The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout. The job appeared maddenly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing. would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar -- the best leverage he had on hand -- but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day. That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite: Kaiser's reply was short and succinct: Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor: Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours -- until the next communication came in: SS II most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city. His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike. The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized -- and fell instantly asleep. The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke : SS II By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him. Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops -- and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped. That checked pretty well with the ship's theory. Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear! Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him. The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here. As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature #, humidity # -- just about the same as it had been on earlier readings. hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before. He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately -- and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged. At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II: Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out. Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey -- in the opposite direction from the first native settlement. He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and sealpeople in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first! They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant. By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship. The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it. The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.  tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world. Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discoui aged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went. The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly. That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam -- they maneuvered with an otterlike proficiency -- and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under. Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper. When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom. As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly. There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here -- if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them -- and he packed and started back to the scout. Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel. When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely the ground. Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened. of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there. Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly -- but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever. Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly -- until the fuel pump hung free! Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act. He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him. The first was quite routine: SS II The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it. SS II Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep. In the morning, another message was waiting: SS II abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency -- there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information. Strangely, the messages' indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet. Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside. Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself: Kaiser pushed the last of his meal -- which he had been eating with his fingers -- into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor. He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.ney had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other sealpeople here. And they were almost human! The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup -- that was little changed from the first he had found -- as in their obviously greater intelligence. This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor -- only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings. Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent. One was a female. They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation. The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water. cide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape: SS II Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts. When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water. Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots. # Star Shelf by Robert A. Heinlein. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., #  ET'S be thankful that we are " now enjoying one of the prolific Mr. Heinlein's most fruitful periods. Now we find Heinlein offering his version of The Sleeper Wakes. Leave it to him, however, to freshen up any old chestnut. He pulls a switch on the time of departure of his sleeper, who starts from the year # via cold sleep, waking in #. Heinlein paints a detailed picture of both civilizations, so evocative that # emerges clearly in the reader's mind as the old days, and pretty primitive at that. The hero is, like the author himself, an engineer. He has been bilked out of his # inventions and faces an acclimatizing period in # to learn the advances of the intervening years. The interim development of his stolen inventions, along with the appearance on the commercial market of old, nebulous ideas of his, both send him on a detective search of two eras. Of course you'll like Heinlein's latest. ed by Anthony Boucher. Doubleday  Co., Inc., N. Y., #- is somewhat better balanced than his previous collection of giggles and cutenesses, and contains some fine yarns. Among these are Pohl's shocker, "The Census Takers," Sturgeon's ditto, "And Now the News," and Kornbluth's jolly "The Cosmic Expense Account." Most of the other stories are good, except for a very, very minor Bradbury. The two longest works, however, Charles L. Fontenay's "The Silk and the Song" and Ward Moore's "No Man Pursueth," are quite obviously used as bulk to make this a book rather than a pamphlet. If these were "the best" available, Boucher should have waited until he had better makeweights. Dallas. The John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia, Toronto, #. standard juvenile space opera that would have fared far better if heavy reliance had not been placed on unbelievable coincidences. Earth and Poseida, a planet whose location and environment are never satisfactorily explained, have reached the brink of war as the result of ultra-nationalistic activities of selfish individuals on each planet. The Poseidans are amphibious octopi and thoroughly repellent in appearance to sensitive humans. Bill Hudson, recipient of a brand-new space-medical diploma, is treated to a post-graduate vacation on Poseida by his chum's old man, who happens to be General Watkins, big-wig of Planet Earth Forces. The very first day on Poseida, he saves the life of a young native who just happens, by the Lord Harry, to be the son of the planet's ruler, no less. They become fast friends and discover that there isn't much difference in mentality and outlook between the two races. One of the points of friction between the worlds is the disappearance of more than a score of experimental Earth ships on their initial test runs to exceed the speed of light. The Earth extremists are convinced that the Poseidans have a tentacle in it. While engaged in research on Poseida, Hudson just happens, by all that's lucky, to discover the antidote for the suspended animation drug, something that thousands of scientists had been unable to do. This has something to do with those ships. There's still another "happens      shelf to" that stretches credence even further, but Dallas somewhat redeems himself by good characterizations and an intelligent argument for tolerance. Cameron. Little, Brown  Co., Boston, Toronto, # derful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, David Topman and his buddy, Chuck Masterson, are visited by a strange little person while spending the night in Tyco Bass' house. Tyco, the wonderful little person who advertised for a spaceship built by boys, made the flight with them to the Mushroom Planet, really an invisible satellite of Earth, and then disappeared. The stranger reveals himself as Tyco's cousin and also one of the Mushroom People. With his help, Tyco's notes are deciphered and another ship and flight become possible. A Menace, however, in the person of an egocentric assistant to a famous scientist creates plot problems by stowing away and threatening to disclose the secret of the existence of this idyllic little world. Remember Dr. Doolittle? His adventures never rang true, either, but we loved him and that made them possible. Same here. no Zakaria Goneim. Rinehart  Co., Inc., N. Y., # This month, The Lost Planet. Now a mislaid pyramid. A place for everything, and everything in its place, and this sort of thing wouldn't keep happening. As an object lesson in deductive archeology, this book stands by itself. Most of the famous finds have been the result of the exhaustive study of sites, but Dr. Gonheim found his pyramid through dissatisfaction with the paucity of memorials dating from the Third Dynasty, #-# B.C., the era just pre-dating the epoch of the Great Pyramid Builders. If you don't mind the usual archeological preoccupation with precise measurements, you'll find this a satisfactory substitute for time travel, back to that incredible age of monumental egomaniacs. Wright and Samuel Rapport. Harper  Brothers, N. Y., # 'X'HE editors have compiled an informative volume of gleanings from the writings of an impressive group of authors. Leading off is Raymond Ditmars, world-famed reptile authority, with an amusing account of his boyhood start in snake collection. Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, pens a chapter on the piranha, Brazil's man-eating fish. Arthur Clarke is represented by a portion of The Coast of Coral and "The Well of the Maidens" is excerpted from C. W. Ceram's phenomenal archeological best seller, Gods, Graves and Scholars. There are chapters on the lives of Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Faraday, Edison and the unbelievably warped Henry Cavendish, along with general interest subjects that make the book appealing to young or old. Fortunately, the editors balance their bright, picture with a view of the tedium and detail of pure research, preventihg disenchantment. Ronald Edwin. The Falcon's Wing Press, Indian Hills, Colo.,  # are appearing with increasing frequency, Edwin's story has a ring of veracity that few others can equal. He offers more than usual documentation and presents his life history with such candor that his reader is swept along. He explains his gift as a natural compensation for his inadequacies, his introversion and melancholia during his abominably miserable childhood. One gathers that he has overcompensated his sensitivity in later years by developing a sharp tongue and manner. He appeared on the British TV scene on What's My Line, stumped the experts and ran off with the honors in a blistering verbal exchange with the acidulous panelist, Gilbert Harding. But leading up to this belated triumph is a lifetime of anguish. The Perceptive has virtually no control over his gift. Since the average life is composed of trivia, most clairvoyance is likewise trivial. As a result, there is no practical vocation as yet for the poor Esper, Alfred Bester notwithstanding. Either he struggles along on the variety stage or he resorts, as Edwin confesses, to phony spiritualism. Despite earning a reasonable livelihood, disillusionment caused him to return to Unlike most authors of similar works, he remains unconvinced of casionally manifests itself to him in the guise of voices, he interprets it as a conversion to a normal referent by the brain censor, not as spirit voices. If you have Started a para-psychology section of your library, this is a necessary inclusion. The breath of an entire world literally hung upon whether he lived or died -- and he infuriatingly refused to stay alive! E dwin james, the chief Programmer of Earth, had seated himself upon a little three-legged stool in front of the Probabilities Calculator. He was a small, spare man, impressively ugly, dwarfed by the great control board which soared a hundred feet above him. The steady hum. of the machine, the slow drift of lights across the face of the panel, brought a sense of security which he recognized as false, but which soothed him all the same. He had just started to doze off when the pattern of lights changed. He sat up with a start and rubbed his face. A paper tape inched from a slot in the panel. The Chief Programmer tore it off and scanned it. He nodded sourly to himself and walked quickly out of the room. Fifteen minutes later, he entered the meeting room of the World Planning Council. Summoned there by his order, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around the long table, waiting for him. There was a new member this year, Roger Beatty, from the Americas. He was tall and angular and his bushy brown hair was just beginning to thin on top. He appeared eager, earnest and ill at ease. He was reading a procedural handbook and taking short, quick sniffs from his oxygen inhaler. James knew the other members well. Lan II from Pan-Asia, looking as small, wrinkled and indestructible as ever, was engaged in intense conversation with large, blond Dr. Sveg from Europe. Miss Chandragore, beautiful and sleek, was playing her inevitable game of chess with Aaui of Oceania. James turned up the room's oxygen supply and the members gratefully put away their inhalers. "Sorry to keep you waiting," James said, taking his seat at the head of the table. "The current prediction just came through." He took a notebook from his pocket and opened it. "At our last meeting, we selected Alternate Probability Line #B#CC, which began in the year #. The factor we were selecting for was the life of Albert Levinsky. In the Main Historic Line, Levinsky died in # of an automobile accident. By switching into Alternate Probability Line #B#CC, Levinsky avoided this accident and lived to the age of sixty-two, completing his work. The result now, in our own time, in the opening up of Antartica." "What about side effects?" asked Janna Chandragore. "Those are discussed in the paper you will be given later. Briefly, though, #B#CC adhered closely to the Historic Main Line. All important events remained constant. There were, of course, some effects which the prediction did not cover. They include an oil-well explosion in Patagonia, a flu epidemic in Kansas and an increase in smog over Mexico City." "Have all injured parties been compensated?" Lan II wanted to know. "They have. And the colonization of Antartica is already begun." The Chief Programmer unfolded the paper tape he had taken from the Probabilities Calculator. "But now we face a dilemma. As predicted, the Historic Main Line leads into unpleasant complications. But there are no good alternate lines to switch into!" The Members murmured to each other. James said, "Let me explain the situation." He walked to a wall and pulled down a large chart. "The crisis-point occurs on April #, #, and our problem centers around an individual named Ben Baxter. The circumstances are as follows..." evoke alternate possibilities, each of which produces its own continuum of history. In other spatial-temporal worlds, Spain lost at Lepanto, Normandy at Hastings, England at Waterloo. Suppose Spain had lost at Lepanto... Spain did, disastrously. And T urkish sea power, invincible, swept the Mediterranean of European shipping. Ten years later, a Turkish fleet conquered Naples and paved the way for the Moorish invasion of Austria... In another time and space, that is. This speculation became observable fact after the development of temporal selection and displacement. By #, Oswald Meyner and his associates were able to show the theoretical possibility of Switching from the Historic Main Line -- so named for convenience -- to alternate lines. Within definite limits, however. It would be impossible, for example, to Switch into a past the battle of Hastings. The world developing from that event would be too different, alien in every way. Switching was found possible only into closely adjacent lines. The theoretical possibility became a practical necessity in #. In that year, the Sykes-Raborn Calculator at Harvard predicted the complete sterilization of Earth's atmosphere by the accretion of radioactive by-products. The process was irreversible and inevitable. It could be stopped only in the past, where the poisoning had begun. The first Switch was made with the newly developed Adams-HoltMaartens Selector. The World Planning Council chose a line which involved the early death of Vassily Ouchenko (and the obliteration of his erroneous radiationdamage theories). A large part of the subsequent poisoning was avoided, although at the cost of seventy-three lives -- descendants of Ouchenko for whom no Switchparents could be found. After that, there was no turning back. Line Switching became as necessary to the world as disease prevention. But the process had its limitations. A time had to come when no available line would be usable, when all futures looked unfavorable. When that happened, the Planus ning Council was prepared to use more direct means.  A ND those are the consequences for us," Edwin James concluded. "That is the outcome if we allow the Main Historic Line to continue." Lan II said, "Meaning that you predict serious trouble for Earth, Mr. Programmer." "With regret, I do." The Programmer poured himself a glass of water and turned a page in his notebook. "Our pivotal point is Ben Baxter, who dies on April #, #. He must live' at least another ten years for his work to have the desired effect upon world events. In that time, Ben Baxter will purchase Yellowstone National Park from the government. He will continue to maintain it as a park, but will farm the trees. This enterprise will be highly successful. He will buy other great tracts of land in North and South America. The Baxter heirs will be lumber kings for the next two hundred years and will own huge standings throughout the world. Due to their efforts, there will be great forests in the world, up to and including our own time. But if Baxter dies -- " James gestured wearily. "With Baxter dead, the forests will be cut before the governments of the world are fully aware of the consequences. Then comes the great blight of '#, which the few remaining woodlands cannot withstand. And at last the present, with the natural carbon-dioxideoxygen cycle disrupted by the destruction of the trees, with all combustion devices banned, with oxygen inhalers a necessity merely to survive." "We've started the forests again," Aaui said. "It will be hundreds of years before they have grown to any significant size, even with forced growing methods. In the meantime, the balance may become further upset. That is the importance of Ben Baxter to us. He holds the key to the air we breathe!" "Very well," said Dr. Sveg. "The Main Line, in which Baxter dies, is clearly unusable. But there are Alternates -- " "Many," James said. "As usual, most of them cannot be selected. Counting the Main Line, we have a total of three choices. But, unfortunately, each of them results in the death of Ben Baxter on April #, #." The Programmer wiped his forehead. "To be more specific, Ben Baxter dies on the afternoon of April #, #, as a result of a business meeting with a man named Ned Bryrme." The new member, Roger Beatty, cleared his throat nervously. "This event takes place in all three probability worlds?" "Yes. In every one of them, Brynne is the cause of Baxter's death." Dr. Sveg came ponderously to his feet. "Formerly, this Council has avoided any direct interference with the existing lines of probability. But this situation seems to call for interference." The council members nodded their agreement. "Let's get down to cases," said Aaui. "For the good of Earth, can this Ned Brynne be Switched Out?" "No," replied the Programmer. "Brynne himself plays a vital role in our future. He has an option on almost a hundred square miles of forest. He needs Baxter's backing to purchase it. If Brynne could be kept from that meeting with Baxter "How?" asked Beatty. "Take your pick," James suggested. "Threats, persuasion, bribery, kidnaping -- any means short of murder. We have three worlds to work in. If we can restrain Brynne in just one of them, our problem is solved." "What would be our best method?" asked Aaui. "Try several, a different one in each probability world," said Miss Chandragore. "Our chances would be best that way. Shall we go ourselves?" "We are best suited for the job," Edwin James said. "We know the factors involved. And politics gives one a certain skill in improvising -- which will be sorely needed in this job. Each team will be absolutely on its own. There is no way for them to check on each other's progress across the time lines." "Each team then," Dr. Sveg summed up, "will have to assume that the other teams fail." "Probably with good reason," James said wryly. "Let's organize the teams and select our methods." I   #, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At #:# that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises, and do so on favorable terms... Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of fanatic pride in his carefully bland eyes, a suggestion of unreasoning stubbornness in his tightly held mouth. His movements had the controlled strength of a man who is constantly watching and judging himself. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked a swagger stick under his arm and slipped a copy of Somerset's American Peerage into his jacket pocket. He was never without that infallible guide. Finally he fixed to his lapel the golden sunburst decoration of his station. Brynne was a Chamberlain, second class, and properly proud of the fact. Some people thought him too young for so exalted a position. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly commoners, but two Equerries as well. All made way for him when the elevator came. "Pleasant day, Chamberlain Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. Brynne inclined his head an inch in the usual response to a commoner. He was deep in thought about Ben Baxter. But at the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a tall, strongly built fellow with golden-brown Polynesian features and tilted dark eyes. Brynne wondered what a man like that was doing in his apartment building. He knew the other tenants by sight, although their lower status naturally made them unworthy of his recognition. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Polynesian fellow. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He strode outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to the Prince Charles Coffee Shop for a late breakfast. It was #:# A.M. " asked. "Looks like a tough customer," said Roger Beatty. He inhaled deeply, savoring the rich air. It was a delightful luxury, breathing all the oxygen he wanted. In his time even the very wealthy turned down the oxygen tanks at night. They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, swaggering figure, even in New York's morning rush. "He looked at you in the elevator," Beatty said. "I know." Aaui grinned. "Give him something to worry about." "He doesn't look like a worrying type," Beatty said. "I wish we had more time." Aaui shrugged. "This was the closest we could come to the event. Our next choice would have been eleven years ago. And we would still have to wait until now before taking direct action." "At least we'd know something about Brynne. He doesn't lookas though he'll frighten easily." "No, he doesn't," Aaui admitted. "But that's the course of action we selected." They continued to follow, noticing how the crowds parted to make way for Brynne, who marched straight ahead, not looking to right or left. Then it happened. Brynne, his attention turned inward, collided with a portly, florid-faced man, who wore in his lapel the dazzling purple and silver medallion of a First Order Crusader. "Can't you watch where you're going, imbecile?" the Crusader barked.  rank, swallowed and muttered, "I beg your pardon, sir." The Crusader wasn't so easily placated. "Do you make a habit of bumping into your betters, sirrah?" "I do not," Brynne said, his face growing red, fighting hard to restrain his rage. A crowd of commoners had gathered to watch. men, grinning and nudging each other. "Then suppose you watch yourself!" the portly Crusader roared. "Stop cluttering the streets like a sleepwalker, before you are taught a lesson in manners!" Brynne said, with deadly quiet, "Sir, if you feel the necessity of giving me such a lesson, I should be pleased to meet you at a place of your choosing, with such weapons as you elect -- " "Me? Meet you?" the Crusader asked incredulously. "My rank permits it, sir." "Your rank? You're a good five degrees beneath me, you simple idiot! Enough of this or I'll send my servants -- who outrank you -- to teach you a lesson in manners. I'll remember your face, young man. Now get out of my way!" And with that, the Crusader pushed past him and stalked away. "Coward!" said Brynne, his face a mottled red. But he said it softly, and the commoners noticed. Brynne turned to them, his hands tightening on his swagger stick. Grinning cheerfully, the crowd broke up. Beatty said, "Dueling is permitted here?" Aaui nodded. "The legal precedent came in #, when Alexander Hamilton killed Aaron Burr in a duel." "I guess we'd better get to work," Beatty said. "But I wish we had more equipment." "We took all we could carry. Let's get on with it." fee Shop, Brynne sat at a table far in the rear. His hands were trembling; with an effort, he controlled them. Damn that First Order Crusader! Lousy, overbearing blowhard! But would he accept a duel? No, of course not. Had to hide behind the privileges of his station. Rage was rising in Brynne, black and ominous. He should have killed the man and the blazes with the consequences! The blazes with everything! No man could step on him that way... Stop it, he told himself. There was nothing he could do about it. He had to think about Ben Baxter and the all-important meeting. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. In two and a half hours, he would be in Baxter's office and -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "Hot chocolate, toast and a poached egg." "French fries?" "If I wanted French fries, I'd have told you!" Brynne shouted. The waiter went pale, gulped, said, "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," and hurried off. Now, Brynne thought, I'm reduced to yelling at commoners. Control -- I must get myself under control. "Ned Brynne!" Brynne started and looked around. He had distinctly heard someone whisper his name. But there was no one within twenty feet of him. "Brynne!" "What is this?" Brynne mutspeaking?" "You're nervous, Brynne, losing control of yourself. You need a rest, a vacation, a change." Brynne went dead whit;e under his tan and looked around the cafe. It was almost empty. There were three old ladies near the front. Beyond them he could see two men, talking together earnestly. "Go home, Brynne, and get some rest. Take some time off while you can." "I have an important business appointment," Brynne said, his voice shaky. "Business before sanity," the voice pointed out mockingly. "Who's talking to me?" "What makes you think someone is talking to you?" the voice asked silkily. "You mean I'm talking to myself?" "You should know."' "Your egg, sir," the waiter said. "What?" Brynne roared. The waiter stepped hastily back, slopping hot chocolate into the saucer. "Sir?" he quavered. "Don't creep around that way, idiot." The waiter looked at Brynne incredulously, deposited the food and fled. Brynne stared after him suspiciously. "You are in no condition to see anyone," the voice told him. "Go home, get into bed, take a pill, sleep, heal!" "But what's the matter? Why?" "Because your sanity is at stake! This external voice is your mind's last frantic attempt at stability. You can't afford to ignore this warning, Brynne!" "It can't be true!" protested Brynne. "I'm sane. I'm -- " "Beg pardon, sir," said a voice at his elbow. Brynne whirled, prepared to chastise this further intrusion on his privacy. He saw the blue uniform of a policeman looming over him. The man was wearing the white shoulder epaulets of a Noble Lieutenant.   said, "Anything wrong, Officer?" "Sir, the waiter and manager tell me you are talking to yourself and threatening violence." "Preposterous," snapped Brynne. "ft's true! It's true! You're going crazy!" the voice Screamed in his head. Brynne stared at the great square bulk of the policeman. Surely he heard the voice! But apparently the Noble Lieutenant didn't, for he continued to look somberly down at him. "It's not true," Brynne said, feeling secure in staking his word against a commoner's. "I heard you myself," the Noble Lieutenant said. "Well, sir, it's this way," Brynne began, choosing his words with care. "I was -- " The voice shrieked in his head, "Tell him to go to hell, Brynne! Who's he to question you? Who's anyone to question you? Hit him! Blast him! Kill him! Destroy him!" Brynne said, through the barrage of noise in his head, "I was talking to myself, perfectly true, Officer. I frequently think out loud. It helps me to organize my thoughts." The Noble Lieutenant gave a half nod. "But you offered violence, sir, at no provocation." "No provocation! I ask you, sir, are cold eggs no provocation? Are limp toast and spilled chocolate no provocation?" The waiter, called over, insisted, "Those eggs were hot -- " "They were not and that is all. I do not expect to sit here and argue a point of fact with a commoner." "Quite right," the Noble Lieutenant said, nodding emphatically now. "But might I ask you, sir, to curb your anger somewhat, even though it may be perfectly justified? Not too much can be expected of commoners, after all." "I know," Brynne agreed. "By the way, sir -- the purple edging on your epaulets -- are you related to O'Donnel of Moose Lodge, by any chance?" "My third cousin on my mother's side," said the Noble Lieutenant, looking intently now at Brynne's sunburst medallion. "My son has entered the Chamberlain Halls as a probationary. A tall boy named Callahan." "I will remember the name," Brynne promised. "The eggs were hot!" said the waiter. "Don't dispute the word of a gentleman," ordered the officer. "It could get you into serious trouble. Pleasant day to you, sir." The Noble Lieutenant saluted and left. Brynne paid and left shortly after him. He deposited a sizable tip for the waiter, but determined never to come into the Prince Charles again. Aaui said bitterly, putting the tiny microphone back in his pocket. "For a moment, I thought we had him." "We would have, if he'd had any latent doubts about his sanity. Well, now for something more direct. Got the equipment?" Aaui took two pairs of brass knuckles out of his pocket and handed one to Beatty. "Try not to lose it," he said. "We're supposed to return it to the Primitive Museum." "Right. It fits over the fist, doesn't it? Oh, yes, I see." They paid and hurried out.    Brynne decided to take a stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. Those voices in his head... Was he really losing his grip? An uncle on his mother's side had spent his last years in an institution. Involutional melancholia. Was there some explosive hidden factor at work in him? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus... Where was it going? Italy, perhaps. He thought of blue skies, ation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. Even if it meant losing his mind, he would continue to labor under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a determined, strong man. If he had the guts to succeed in business, he also had the guts to leave it, to drop everything and go away. "To hell with Baxter!" he said to himself. His sanity was more important than anything. He would board that ship, right now, wire his associates from sea, tell them -- him down the deserted street. He recognized one by his goldenbrown Polynesian features. "Mr. Brynne?" inquired the other, a rangy fellow with a shock of brown hair. "Yes?" said Brynne. Without warning, the Polynesian threw both arms around him, pinning him, and the shock-haired man swung at him with a fist that glinted golden! Brynne's keyed-up nerves reacted with shattering speed. He had been a Knight Rampant during the Second World Crusade. Now, years later, all the reaction patterns were still there. He ducked the shock-haired man's blow and drove his elbow into the Polynesian's stomach. The man grunted and his grip relaxed for a second. Brynne broke free. He chopped at the Polynesian with the back of his hand, hitting the nerve trunk in the throat. The man went down, gasping for breath. At the same time, the shock-haired man was on him, raining brass-knuckled blows. Brynne lashed out, missed, caught a solid punch in the solar plexus. He fought for air. Blackness began edging into the periphery of his vision. He was hit again and went down, fighting for consciousness. Then his opponent made a mistake. The shock-haired man tried to finish him with a kick, but he didn't know how to kick. Brynne caught his foot and jerked. Off balance, the man crashed to the pavement, striking his head. Brynne staggered to his feet, breathing hard. The Polynesian was sprawled in the road, his face purple, making feeble swimming movements with his arms and legs. The other man lay motionless, blood seeping slowly through his hair. He should report this incident to the police, Brynne thought. But suppose he had killed the shockhaired man? He would be held on a manslaughter charge, at least. And the Noble Lieutenant would report his earlier irrational behavior. He looked around. No one had witnessed the incident. It was best to simply walk away. Let his assailants report it, if they wanted to. Things were falling into place now. These men must have been hired by one of his many business competitors, men who were also trying for an affiliation with Ben Baxter. Even the voice in his head might have been a clever trick. Well, let them try to stop him! Still breathing heavily, he began walking toward Ben Baxter's office. All thoughts of a cruise to Italy were gone now.  A RE you all right?" a voice asked from somewhere up above. Beatty returned slowly to consciousness. For a short, alarmed while, he thought he had a fractured skull. But, touching it gently, he decided it was still in one piece. "What did he hit me with?" he asked. "The pavement, I think," Aaui said. "Sorry I couldn't help. He put me out of action pretty early." Beatty sat up, clutching his aching head. "What a fighter!" "We underestimated him," said Aaui. "He must have had some kind of training. Do you think you can walk?" "I think so," Beatty said, letting Aaui help him to his feet. "What time is it?" "Nearly one o'clock. His appointment's at one-thirty. Maybe we can stop him at Baxter's office." In five minutes, they caught a taxi and sped to Baxter's building. The receptionist was young and pretty, and she stared at them open-mouthed. They had managed to clean up some of the damage in the taxi, but what remained looked pretty bad. Beatty had an improvised bandage over his head and Aaui's complexion bordered on green. "What do you want?" the receptionist asked. "I believe Mr. Baxter has a one-thirty appointment with Mr. Brynne," said Aaui in his most businesslike tone. "Yes The wall clock read one-seventeen. Aaui said, "We must see Mr. Brynne before he goes in. It's very urgent. So if you don't mind, we'll wait here for him." "You can wait," the girl said. "But Mr. Brynne has already gone in." "But it isn't one-thirty yet!" "Mr. Brynne was early. Mr. Baxter decided to see him at once." "I must speak to him," Aaui said. "I have orders not to disturb them." The girl looked frightened and her finger hovered over a button on her desk. Aaui knew that the button would probably summon help. A man like Baxter would have protection near at all times. The meeting was taking place now, and he didn't dare interfere. Perhaps his actions had changed the course of events. It seemed likely. The Brynne in that office was a different man, a man altered by his adventures of the morning. "It's all right," Aaui said to the receptionist. "We'll just sit here and wait." bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe, and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and-pearls emblem of the Wall Street House of Lords. For half an hour, Brynne had talked, spread papers on Baxter's desk, quoted figures, mentioned trends, predicted movements. He was perspiring anxiously now, waiting for a word out of Baxter. "Hmm," said Ben Baxter. Brynne waited. His temples were pounding with a steady, dull ache and he was having trouble with the tight knots in his stomach. It was years since he had fought in anger; he wasn't used to it. He hoped he could control himself until the meeting was over. "The terms you request," said Baxter, "are just short of preposterous." "Sir?" "Preposterous was the word, Mr. Brynne. You are, perhaps, hard of hearing?" "No," said Brynne. "Excellent. These terms you present might be suitable for negotiation between two companies of equal holdings. But such is not the case, Mr. Brynne. It amounts to presumption that a company of your size should offer such terms to Baxter Enterprises." Brynne's eyes narrowed. He had heard about Baxter's reputation for in-fighting. This was not personal insult, he reminded himself. It was the kind of business maneuver that he himself had often used. It must be .dealt with as such. "Let me point out," Brynne said, "the key nature of this forest area I have an option on. With sufficient capitalization, we could extend the holding enormously, to say nothing -- " "Hopes, dreams, promises," Baxter sighed. "You may have something worth while. As yet, it is inadequately demonstrated." This is business, Brynne reminded himself. He does want to back me -- I can tell. I expected to come down in the bargaining. Naturally. All he's doing is beating down the terms. Nothing personal... But too much had happened to Brynne in one day. The red-faced Crusader, the voice in the restaurant, his short-lived dream of freedom, the fight with the two men -- he knew he couldn't take much more. "Suppose, Mr. Brynne," said Baxter, "you make a more reasonable offer. One in keeping with the modest and subsidiary status of your holdings." He's testing me, Brynne thought. But it was too much. He was as nobly born as Baxter; how dare the man treat him this way? "Sir," he said through numb lips, "I take exception." "Eh?" said Baxter, and Brynne thought he glimpsed amusement in the cold eyes. "What do you take exception to?" "Your statements, sir, and the manner in which you say them. I suggest you apologize."  waited. His head was pounding inhumanly now and his stomach refused to unknot itself. "I see nothing for which to apologize, sir," said Baxter. "And I see no reason to deal with a man who cannot keep personalities out of a business discussion." He's right, Brynne thought. I'm the one who should apologize. But he could not stop. Desperately he said, "I warn you -- apologize, sir!" "We can do no business this way," said Baxter. "And frankly, Mr. Brynne, I had hoped to do business with you. I will try to speak in a reasonable manner, if you will try to react in an equally reasonable manner. I ask you to withdraw your request for an apology and let us get on." "I can't!" Brynne said, wishing passionately he could. "Apologize, sir!" Bater stood up, short and powerfully built. He stepped out from behind the desk, his face dark with anger. "Get out of here then, you insolent young dog! Get out or I'll have you thrown out, you hot-headed fool! Get out!" Brynne, wishing to apologize, thought of the red-faced Crusader, the waiter, his two assailants. Something snapped in him. He lashed out with all his strength, the weight of his body behind the blow. It caught Baxter full in the neck and slammed him against the desk. Eyes glazed, Baxter slumped to the floor. "I'm sorry!" Brynne cried. "I apologize! I apologize!" He knelt beside Baxter. "Are you all right, sir? I'm truly sorry. I apologize..." A part of his mind, coldly functioning, told him that he had been caught in an unresolvable ambivalence. His need for action had been as strong as his need to apologize. And so he had solved the dilemma by trying to do both things, in the usual ambivalent muddle. He had struck -- then apologized. "Mr. Baxter?" he called in alarm. Ben Baxter's features were congested and blood drooled from a corner of his mouth. Then Brynne noticed that Baxter's head lay at a queer angle from his body. "Oh..." Brynne said. He had served three years with the Knights Rampant. It was not the first broken neck he had seen. II #, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At #:# that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, the president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises, and do so on favorable terms... Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of deep gentleness in his carefuly bland eyes, a suggestion of uncompromising piety in his expressive mouth. His movements had the loose grace of an unselfconscious man. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked a prayer stick under his arm and slipped a copy of Norsted's Guide to the Gentle Way into his pocket. He was never without that infallible guide. Finally he fixed to his lapel the silver moon decoration of his station. Brynne was a Restrainer, second class, of the Western Buddhist Congregation, and he allowed himself a carefully restrained pride over the fact. Some people thought him too young for lay-priestly duties. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly Western Buddhists, but two Lamaists as well. All made way for him when the elevator came. "Pleasant day, Brother Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. Brynne inclined his head an inch in the usual modest response to a member of the flock. He was deep in thought about Ben Baxter. But at the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a slim, beautiful, blackhaired woman with a piquant golden face. Indian, Brynne thought, wondering what a woman like that was doing in his apartment building. He knew the other tenants by sight, though, of course, he would not be sufficiently immodest to recognize them. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Indian woman. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He stepped outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to the Golden Lotus Coffee Shop for a late breakfast. It was #:# a.m. breathe this air forever!" said Janna Chandragore. Lan #I smiled faintly. "Perhaps we can breathe it in our own age. How does he seem to you?" "Smug and over-righteous," she said. They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, stooped figure, even in New York's morning rush. "He absolutely stared at you in the elevator," said Lan #. "I know." She smiled. "He's rather nice-looking, don't you think?" Lan #I raised both eyebrows, but didn't comment. They continued to follow, noticing how the crowds parted out of respect for Brynne's rank. Then it happened. Brynne, his attention turned inward, collided with a portly, florid-faced man who wore the yellow robe of a Western Buddhist priest. "My apologies for violating your meditation, Young Brother," said the priest. "My fault entirely, Father," Brynne said. "For it is written, 'Youth should know its footsteps.' " The priest shook his head. "In youth," he said, "resides the dream of the future; and age must make way." "Age is our guide and signposts along the Way," Brynne objected humbly but insistently. "The writings are clear on the point." "If you accept age," said the priest, his lips tightening slightly, "then accept the dictum of age: youth must forge ahead! Kindly do not contradict me, Dear Brother." Brynne, his eyes carefully bland, bowed deeply. The priest bowed in return and the men continued their separate ways. Brynne walked more quickly, his hands tight on his prayer stick. Just like a priest -- using his age as a support for arguments in favor of youth. There were some strange contradictions in Western Buddhism, but Brynne did not care to think about them at the moment. He went into the Golden Lotus Coffee Shop and sat down at a table far in the rear. He fingered the intricate carvings on his prayer stick and felt anger wash away from him. Almost immediately, he regained that serene and unruffled union of mind with emotions so vital to the Gentle Way. Now was the time to think about Ben Baxter. After all, a man had to perform his temporal duties as well as his religious ones. Looking at his watch, he saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. In two and a half hours, he would be in Baxter's office and -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "A glass of water and some dried fish, if you please," said Brynne. "French fries?" "Today is Visya. It is not allowed," Brynne murmured softly. The waiter went pale, gulped, said, "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," and hurried off. feel ridiculous, thought Brynne. I should simply have refused the French fries. Should I apologize to the man? He decided it would simply embarrass him. Resolutely Brynne put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on Ben Baxter. With Baxter's power behind the forest area Brynne had optioned, and its potential, there was no telling -- He became conscious of a disturbance at a nearby table. He turned and saw a golden-featured woman weeping bitterly into a tiny lace handkerchief. She was the woman he had seen earlier in his apartment building. With her was a small, wizened old man, who was trying in vain to console her. As the woman wept, she cast a despairing glance at Brynne. There was only one thing a Restrainer could do under the circumstances. He walked over to their table. "Excuse the intrusion," he said. "I couldn't help notice your distress. Perhaps you are strangers in the city. Can I help?" "We are past help!" the woman wailed. The old man shrugged his shoulders fatalistically. Brynne hesitated, then sat down at their table. "Tell me," he begged. "No problem is unsolvable. It is written that there is a path through all jungles and a trail over the steepest mountains." "Truly spoken," the old man assented. "But sometimes the feet of Man cannot reach the trail's end." "At such times," Brynne replied, "each helps each and the deed is done. Tell me your trouble. I will serve you in any way I can." In actual fact, this was more than a Restrainer was required to do. Total service was the obligation of higher-ranking priests. But Brynne was swept away by the woman's need and beauty, and the words were out before he could consider them. "'In the heart of a young man is strength,' " quoted the old man, " 'and a staff for weary arms.' But tell me, sir, are you a believer in religious toleration?" "Absolutely!" said Brynne. "It is one of the essential tenets of Western Buddhism." "Very well. Then know, sir, that my daughter Janna and I are from Lhagrama in India, where we serve the Daritria Incarnation of the Cosmic Function. We came here to America hoping to found a small temple. Unfortunately, the schismatics of the Marii Incarnation have arrived before us. My daughter must return to her home. But our lives are threatened momentarily by these Marii fanatics, who are sworn to stamp out the Daritria faith." "But your lives can't be in danger here!" Brynne exclaimed. "Not in the heart of New York." "Here more than anywhere else," said Janna. "For crowds are cloak and mask to the assassin." "I shall not live long in any event," the old man said with serene unconcern. "I must remain here and complete my work. It is so written. But I wish my daughter to return safely to her home." "I won't go without you!" Janna cried. "You will do as you are told!" the old man said. from his steely black eyes. The old man turned to Brynne. "Sir, this afternoon a ship sails for India. My daughter needs a man, a strong, true man, to guide and protect her, to bring her home. My fortune must go to the man who performs this sacred duty for me." "I can hardly believe this," said Brynne, suddenly struck with doubt. "Are you sure -- " As if in answer, the old man pulled a small chamois bag from his pocket and spilled its contents on the tablecloth. Brynne was not an expert in gems, though he had had some dealings with them as a religious-instruction officer in the Second World Jehad. Still, he was sure he recognized the true fire of ruby, sapphire, diamond and emerald. "They are yours," said the old man. "Take them to a jewelry store. When their authenticity is verified, perhaps you will believe the rest of my story. Or if these are not sufficient proof -- " From another pocket, he pulled a thick billfold and handed it to Brynne. Opening it, Brynne saw that it was stuffed with high-denomination bills. "Any bank will verify their authenticity," said the old man. "No, please, I insist. Keep it all. Believe me, it is only a portion of what I would like to bestow upon you for rendering me this sacred trust." It was overwhelming. Brynne tried to remind himself that the gems could conceivably be clever fakes and the bills could be superb forgeries. But he knew they were not. They were real. And if this wealth, so casually given, was real, then didn't the rest of the story have to be true? It would not be the first time a miraculous fairy-tale adventure happened in real life. Wasn't the Book of Golden Replies filled with similar incidents? He looked at the beautiful, sorrowful, golden-featured woman. A great desire came over him to bring joy to those exquisite features, to make that tragic mouth smile. And in the way she looked at him, Brynne perceived more than simply the interest one gives to a protector. "Sir!" cried the old man. "Is it possible that you might -- that you might consider -- " "I'll do it!" said Brynne. HP HE old man clasped Brynne's hand. Janna simply looked at him, but he had the sensation of being enfolded into a warm embrace. "You must leave at once," the old man said briskly. "Come, there's no time to lose. Even now, the enemy lurks in the shadows." "But my clothes -- " "Unimportant. I will provide you with a wardrobe." and friends, business appointments. Wait! Hold on a minute!" Brynne took a deep breath. Haroun al Rashid adventures were all very well, but they had to be undertaken in a reasonable fashion. "I have a business appointment this afternoon," Brynne said. "I must keep it. After that, I'm completely at your service." "The danger to Janna is too great!" cried the old man. "You'll both be perfectly safe, I assure you. You can even accompany me there. Or better yet, I've got a cousin on the police force. I'm sure I can arrange for a bodyguard -- " Janna turned her beautiful sad face away from him. The old man said, "Sir, the ship sails at one P.M. -- at one precisely." "Those ships leave every day or so," Brynne pointed out. "Let's catch the next one. This appointment is very important. Crucial, you might say. I've worked for years to arrange it. And it's not just me. I have a business, employees, associates. For their sake, I have to keep that appointment." "Business before life," the old man said bitterly. "You'll be all right," Brynne assured him. "It is written, you know, that the beast of the jungle shies from the tread -- " "I know what is written. The word of death is painted large upon my forehead, and upon my daughter's, unless you aid us now. She will be on the Theseus in stateroom # A. The next stateroom, #A, will be yours. The ship sails at one this afternoon. If you value her life, sir, you will be there." The old man and his daughter stood up, paid and left, ignoring Brynne's pleas for reason. As she went out the door, Janna turned for a moment and gazed at him. "Your dried fish, sir," said the waiter. He had been hovering near, waiting for a chance to serve it. "To hell with it!" Brynne shouted. "Oh, sorry, sorry," he said in dismay to the shocked waiter. "No fault of yours." He paid, leaving a sizable tip for the waiter, and hurried out. He had a lot of thinking to do. Hi A LL the energy expended on that one scene," Lan II complained, "has probably cost me ten years of my life." "You loved every minute of it," said Janna Chandragore. "True, true," Lan II admitted, nodding vigorously. He sipped a glass of wine that a steward had brought to the stateroom. "The question now is -- will he give up his appointment with Baxter and come?" "He does seem to like me," Janna said. "Which shows his excellent taste." She inclined her head mockingly. "But really, that story! Was it necessary to make it so -- so outrageous?" "Absolutely necessary. Brynne is a strong and dedicated man, but he has his romantic streak. Nothing less than a fairy tale to match his gaudiest dream could pull him from duty's path." "Perhaps even a fairy tale won't," Janna said thoughtfully. "We'll see," said Lan II. "Personally, I believe he will come." "I don't." "You underestimate your attractiveness and acting ability, my dear. Wait and see." "I have no choice," said Janna, settling back in an arm chair. The desk clock read #:#.    Brynne decided to take a stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. That magnificent sorrowful girl... But what about his duty, the labor of faithful employees, to be culminated and completed this afternoon at the desk of Ben Baxter? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus. He thought of India, its blue laxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. Even if it meant losing the most beautiful woman in the world, he would continue to labor under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself, touching the chamois bag in his pocket. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a strong, determined man. If he had the faith and will to succeed in business, he also had the faith and will to leave it, drop everything, and follow his heart. "To hell with Baxter!" he said to himself. The girl's safety was more important than anything. He would board that ship, and right now, wire his associates from sea, tell them -- The decision was made. He whirled and marched to the gangplank and resolutely climbed it. An officer on the deck smiled and said, "Name, sir?" "Ned Brynne." "Brynne, Brynne." The officer checked his list. "I don't seem to -- Oh, yes, right here. Yes, Mr. Brynne. You're on A deck, cabin #. Let me wish you a most pleasant trip." "Thank you," Brynne said, glancing at his watch. It read a quarter to one. "By the way," he said to the officer, "what time does the ship sail?" "At four-thirty sharp, sir." "Four-thirty? Are you sure?" "Quite sure, Mr. Brynne." "But I was told you sailed at one o'clock." "That was the original time, sir. But sailing time is often advanced a few hours. We'll easily make it up at sea." Four-thirty! Yes, he had enough time! He could go back, see Ben Baxter and still return in time to catch the ship! Both problems were solved! Murmuring a blessing to a mysterious but benevolent fate, Brynne turned and sprinted down the gangplank. He was fortunate enough to catch a taxi at once. bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and-pearls emblem of the Humble Servitors of Wall Street. For half an hour, Brynne had talked, mentioned trends, predicted movements. He was perspiring anxiously now, waiting for a word out of Baxter. "Hmm," said Ben Baxter. Brynne waited. His pulse was pounding heavily and his empty stomach was beginning to churn. Half his mind was on the Theseus, sailing soon. He wanted to end this meeting and get aboard. "The merger terms you request," said Baxter, "are quite satisfactory." "Sir?" breathed Brynne. "Satisfactory, I said. Haven't got trouble with your hearing, have you, Brother Brynne?" "Not for news like that," said Brynne, grinning. "Our affiliation," Baxter said, smiling, "promises a great future for us both. I'm a direct man, Brynne, and I want to tell you this directly: I like the way you've handled the surveys and data and I like the way you've handled this meeting. Moreover, I like you personally. I am most happy about this and believe our association will prosper." "I sincerely believe so, sir." They shook hands and both men stood up. "My lawyers will draw up the papers," Baxter said, "in accordance with this discussion. You should have them by the end of the week." "Excellent." Brynne hesitated, wondering if he should tell Baxter he was going to India. He decided not to. It would be simple to arrange for receipt of the papers on the Theseus and he could carry out the final details by longdistance telephone. He wouldn't be gone too long, anyhow -- just long enough to see the girl safely home; then he would fly back. They exchanged a few more pleasantries, shook hands again and Brynne turned to leave. "That's a fine-looking prayer stick," Baxter said. "Eh? Oh, yes," said Brynne. "I got it from Sinkiang just this week. They make the finest prayer sticks there, in my unworthy opinion." "I know. May I look at it?" "Of course. Please be careful, though. It opens rather fast." Baxter took the intricately carved prayer stick and pressed the handle. A blade shot out of the other end, narrowly grazing his leg. "It is fast!" Baxter said. "Fastest I've seen." "Did you cut yourself?" "A mere scratch. Beautiful damascene work on that blade." They talked for a few minutes about the threefold significance of the knife blade in Western Buddhism and of recent developments in the Western Buddhist spiritual center in Sinkiang. Then Baxter carefully closed the prayer stick and returned it to Brynne. "A truly beautiful thing. Good day again, Dear Brother Brynne, and -- " Baxter halted in mid-sentence. His mouth was open and he seemed to be staring at a point just in back of Brynne's head. Brynne turned, but nothing was there except the wall. When he turned back, Baxter's features were congested and a light froth had gathered at the corners of his mouth. "Sir!" cried Brynne. Baxter tried to speak, but couldn't. He took two tottering steps forward and collapsed to the floor. Brynne rushed to the receptionist's office. "Call a doctor! Quick! Quick!" he shouted to the frightened girl. Then he rushed back to Baxter. He was looking at the first American case of the mutated disease that was to be called the S'nkiang Plague. Transmitted on a hundred contaminated prayer sticks, it would go through New York like a flash fire, leaving a the week, the symptoms of Sinkiang Plague would be better known than those of measles. But Brynne was looking at the first casualty. With horror, he stared at the of Baxter's hands and face. Ill #, Ned Brynne awakened and washed and dressed. At #:# that afternoon, he had an appointment with Ben Baxter, the president of Baxter Industries. Brynne's entire future hinged upon the outcome of that meeting. If he could get the backing of the gigantic Baxter enterprises and do so on favorable terms... Brynne was a tall, darkly handsome man of thirty-six. There was a hint of thoughtfulness in his carefully bland eyes, a look of mise in his relaxed mouth. His movements had the careless surety of a man who knows his place in the world. He was almost ready to leave. He tucked an umbrella under his arm and slipped a paperbound copy of Murder on the Metro into his pocket. He was never without a good mystery of some sort. Finally he fixed to his laoal the small onyx pin of a Commodore the Ocean Cruising Club. Some people thought him too young for such an honor. But they had to agree that Brynne carried the prerogatives and requirements of his office with a dignity quite beyond his years. He locked his apartment and walked to the elevator. There was a small crowd waiting, mostly shopkeepers, but two businessmen as well. "Pleasant day, Mr. Brynne," the operator said as the car started down. "Hope so," Brynne said, deep in thought about Ben Baxter. At the corner of his eye, he noticed one of the occupants of the car, a great blond Viking of a man, talking to a tiny, half-bald fellow. Brynne wondered what they were doing in his apartment building. He knew most of the tenants by sight, though he hadn't lived in the building long enough to get acquainted with them. The elevator reached the lobby and Brynne forgot about the Viking. He had a lot on his mind today. There were some problems connected with Ben Baxter, problems he hoped to resolve before the meeting. He stepped outside, into a dismal gray April morning, and decided to go to Childs' for breakfast. It was #:# a.m. " Dr. Sveg. "He looks ordinary enough," said Edwin James. "He even looks reasonable. We'll find out." They were following half a block behind Brynne. There was no losing Brynne's tall, erect figure, even in New York's morning rush. "I am certainly not one to advocate violence," said Dr. Sveg. "But this time -- why don't we knock him over the head and be done with it?" "That method was selected by Aaui and Beatty. Miss Chandragore and Lan II decided to try bribery. We are committed to a course of reason." "But suppose he can't be reasoned with, what then?" James shrugged his shoulders. "I don't like it," Dr. Sveg said. Following half a block behind, they saw Brynne collide with a portly, florid-faced businessman. "Sorry," said Brynne. "Sorry," said the portly businessman. They exchanged perfunctory nods and went on. Brynne went into Childs' and sat down at an empty table in the rear. Now was the time to think of Ben Baxter and of what the best approach would be -- "Your order, sir?" a waiter asked him. "Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee," Brynne said. "French fries?" "No, thanks." The waiter hurried off. Brynne concentrated on Ben Baxter. With Baxter's financial and political backing of the forest deal, there was no telling -- "Excuse me, sir," a voice said. "May we talk to you?" Brynne looked up and saw the blond man and his small friend whom he had seen in the elevator. "What about?" "A matter of the utmost urgency, sir," said the small man. Brynne glanced at his watch. It was almost #:#. He had two and a half hours before his meeting with Baxter. "Sure, sit down," he invited. "What's on your mind?" The men looked at each other and exchanged embarrassed smiles. Finally the small man cleared his throat. "Mr. Brynne," he said, "I am Edwin James. This is my associate, Dr. Sveg. We have a preposterous sounding story to tell, which I hope you will hear to the end without interruptions. After that, we have certain proofs that may or may not convince you of the story's authenticity." Brynne frowned, wondering what kind of crackpots he had met. But both men were well dressed, quietly spoken. "Sure, go ahead," Brynne said. later, Brynne was saying. "Wow! That's quite a little yarn!" "I know," Dr. Sveg said apologetically. "Our proofs -- " are impressive. Let me see that first gadget again." Sveg handed it to him. Brynne stared reverently at the small, shining object. "Boys, if a thing that size can really turn out heat or cold in those quantities -- the electrical corporations would give a couple "It is a product of our technology," said Chief Programmer James, "as are the other gadgets. With the exception of the motrifier, they are all straight-line developments, refinements of present trends." "And that thallasator. Nice, simple, inexpensive way of extracting fresh water from salt." He looked at the two men. "It is possible, of course, that these items are a hoax." Dr. Sveg raised both eyebrows. "But I'm not exactly untrained in science. Even if they're a hoax, they'd have to be every bit as advanced as the real thing. I guess you've sold me. Men from the future! Well, well!" "Then you accept what we say about you?" James asked. "And about Ben Baxter and time-line selection?" "Well..." Brynne thought hard. "Tentatively." "Will you cancel your appointment with Baxter?" "I don't know." "Sir?" "I said I don't know. You've got a lot of nerve," Brynne said angrily. "I've worked like a galley slave, driving toward this goal. This meeting is the biggest chance I've ever had or ever will have. And you ask me to give up all that because of some nebulous prediction -- " "The prediction isn't nebulous," James said. "It is very explicit and most precise." "Look, there's more involved than just me. I have a business, employees, associates, stockholders. I have to keep this meeting for their sake, too." "Mr. Brynne," said Sveg, "consider the larger issues at stake!" "Yeah, sure," Brynne said sourly. "How about those other teams you talked about? Maybe I've been stopped in some other probability world." "You haven't." "How do you know?" "I couldn't say so to the teams," Chief Programmer James said, "but the probability of their success was vanishingly small -- just as the probability of my success with you is small, statistically." "Hell," said Brynne, "you guys come dropping out of the future and casually ask a man to change his entire life. You haven't got the right!" "If you could postpone the appointment for a single day," Dr. Sveg suggested, "that might -- " "You don't postpone appointments with Ben Baxter. Either you keep the one he's given you or you wait -- maybe forever -- until he gives you another." Brynne stood up. "Look, I don't know what I'm going to do. I've heard you, I more or less believe you, but I just don't know. I'll have to make up my own mind." Dr. Sveg and James also stood up. "That is your privilege," said Chief Programmer James. "Goodby. I hope you make the right decision, Mr. Brynne." They shook hands. Brynne hurried out. Dr. Sveg and James watched him go. Sveg said, "What do you think? It looks favorable, doesn't it? Don't you think so?" "I can't guess," James said. "The possibility of altering events within a time-line is never favorable. I honestly have no idea of what he's going to do." Dr. Sveg shook his head, then sniffed. "Some air, eh?" "Quite," said Chief Programmer James. - stroll along the waterfront to quiet his nerves. The sight of the great ships lying calm and steadfast in their berths never failed to soothe him. He walked steadily along, trying to reason out what had happened to him. That ridiculous story... In which he believed. But what about his duty, the years spent working his way up to optioning that huge forest tract, its tremendous possibilities to be culminated and completed this afternoon at the desk of Ben Baxter? He stopped and looked at the bow of a great ship. The Theseus... He thought of the Caribbean, wine, relaxation. Those things would never be his. Work, frantic effort, that was the life he had set for himself. No matter what the loss, he would continue to work under the iron-gray skies of New York. But why, he asked himself. He was moderately well off. His business could take care of itself. What was to stop him from boarding that ship, dropping everything, spending a year in the sun? Excitement stirred in him as he realized that nothing was stopping him. He was his own man, a strong, determined man. If he had the guts to succeed in business, he also had the guts to leave it, drop everything, and follow his heart. And in that way, the ridiculous damned future would be safe. "To hell with Ben Baxter!" he said to himself. But he didn't mean it. The future was just too uncertain, too far away. This whole thing might well be an elaborate hoax, arranged by a business competitor. Let the future take care of itself! Ned Brynne turned abruptly away from the Theseus. He had to hurry to make his appointment with Baxter on time. In Baxter's building, riding up in the elevator, Brynne tried not to think. It was enough simply to act. He got off at the #th floor and walked up to the receptionist. "My name is Brynne. I have an appointment with Mr. Baxter." "Yes, Mr. Brynne. Mr. Baxter is expecting you. You can go right in." Brynne didn't move. A wave of doubt flooded his mind and he thought of the future generations, whose chances he was damaging by his act. He thought of Dr. Sveg and Chief Programmer Edwin James, earnest, well-meaning men. They wouldn't ask him to make such a sacrifice unless it was absolutely essential. And he considered one thing more -- Among those future generations would be descendants of his own. "You may go in, sir," the girl said. Abruptly, something snapped in Brynne's mind. "I've changed my mind," he said, in a voice he hardly recognized. "I'm canceling the appointment. Tell Baxter I'm sorry -- about everything." He turned, before he could change his mind, and ran down sixteen flights of stairs. World Planning Council, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around a long table, waiting for Edwin James. He entered, a small man, impressively ugly. "Reports," he said. Aaui, looking somewhat the worse for wear, told about their attempt at violence and its result. "Perhaps," he concluded, "if we had been conditioned to use more violence -- faster -- we could have stopped him." "And perhaps not," said Beatty, who looked considerably worse than Aaui. Lan II reported the partial success and total failure of his mission with Miss Chandragore. Brynne had agreed to accompany them to India, even if it meant giving up the meeting with Baxter. Unfortunately, Brynne had found himself able to do both things. Lan #I ended with several philosophical comments about the shockingly flexible schedules of steamship companies. Chief Programmer James stood up. "The future we were selecting for was one in whose past Ben Baxter lived to complete his work of buying forests. That, unfortunately, is not to be. Our best line, under the circumstances, is the Main Historic Line, in which Dr. Sveg and I bent our efforts." "You haven't reported yet," Miss Chandragore said. "What happened?" "Reason," said Edwin James, "and an appeal to the intelligence seem to be the best operating procedures. After due thought, Brynne decided not to keep his appointment with Ben Baxter. But bull-chested. He was totally bald and his eyes, behind gold pince-nez, were expressionless. His business suit was severe and affixed to the lapel was the small ruby-and ; pearls emblem of the Wall Street Club. He had been sitting motionless for half an hour now, thinking about figures, trends, movements. His buzzer sounded. "Yes, Miss Cassidy?" "Mr. Brynne was here. He just left." "What do you mean?" "I really don't understand it,. Mr. Baxter. He came up and said he wanted to cancel his appointment." "What did he say? Repeat it exactly, Miss Cassidy." "He said he had an appointment with you and I said he could go right in. And he stood there looking at me very strangely, frowning. He seemed angry and upset. I told him again he could go in. Then he said -- " "Word for word now, Miss Cassidy." "Yes, sir. He said, 'I've changed my mind. I'm canceling the appointment. Tell Baxter I'm sorry -- for everything.' " "That's all he said?" "Every last word, Mr. Baxter." "And then?" "He turned and hurried downstairs." "Stairs?" "Yes, Mr. Baxter. He didn't wait for the elevator." "I see." "Is there anything else, Mr. Baxter?" "No, nothing else, Miss Cassidy. Thank you." Bon Baxter turned off the intercom and slumped wearily behind his desk. So Brynne knew! It was the only possible explanation. Word must have gotten out somehow, somewhere. He had thought it was safely hidden for anotlu i day, at least. But there must have been a leak. Baxter smiled grimly to himself. Ho couldn't blame Brynne, though the man should at least have talked to him. But perhaps not. Maybe it was best this way. But how had he found out? Who had broken the news to him that the Baxter industrial empire was hollow, decaying, crumbling at the foundations? If only the news could have been concealed for another day, another few hours! He would have signed with Brynne. A fresh venture would have pumped new blood into the Baxter holdings. By the time people found out, he would once again have had a solid base from which to operate. Brynne knew and had been scared off. That meant everyone knew. There was no holding things together now. The wolves would be at him. His friends, his wife, his partners and all the little people who had depended upon him... Well, he had decided years ago what to do in this eventuality. Without hesitation, Baxter opened his desk drawer and took out a small bottle. He extracted two white tablets. He had always lived by his own rules. Now was the time to die by them. Ben Baxter popped the pills into his mouth. In two minutes, he slumped forward on the desk. His death precipitated the great stock market crash of '#. 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